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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Magic Skin, by Honore de Balzac
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Magic Skin
+
+Author: Honore de Balzac
+
+Translator: Ellen Marriage
+
+Release Date: May, 1998  [Etext #1307]
+Posting Date: February 22, 2010
+Last Updated: November 22, 2016
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE MAGIC SKIN ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Dagny, and Bonnie Sala
+
+
+
+
+
+THE MAGIC SKIN
+
+
+By Honore De Balzac
+
+
+Translated by Ellen Marriage
+
+
+
+       To Monsieur Savary, Member of Le Academie des Sciences.
+
+
+
+      [omitted: a drawing representing the serpentine
+      path made by the tip of a stick when flourished.]
+
+                            STERNE--Tristram Shandy, ch. cccxxii.
+
+
+
+
+
+THE MAGIC SKIN
+
+
+
+
+I. THE TALISMAN
+
+
+Towards the end of the month of October 1829 a young man entered the
+Palais-Royal just as the gaming-houses opened, agreeably to the law
+which protects a passion by its very nature easily excisable. He mounted
+the staircase of one of the gambling hells distinguished by the number
+36, without too much deliberation.
+
+“Your hat, sir, if you please?” a thin, querulous voice called out. A
+little old man, crouching in the darkness behind a railing, suddenly
+rose and exhibited his features, carved after a mean design.
+
+As you enter a gaming-house the law despoils you of your hat at the
+outset. Is it by way of a parable, a divine revelation? Or by exacting
+some pledge or other, is not an infernal compact implied? Is it done to
+compel you to preserve a respectful demeanor towards those who are about
+to gain money of you? Or must the detective, who squats in our social
+sewers, know the name of your hatter, or your own, if you happen to have
+written it on the lining inside? Or, after all, is the measurement of
+your skull required for the compilation of statistics as to the cerebral
+capacity of gamblers? The executive is absolutely silent on this point.
+But be sure of this, that though you have scarcely taken a step towards
+the tables, your hat no more belongs to you now than you belong to
+yourself. Play possesses you, your fortune, your cap, your cane, your
+cloak.
+
+As you go out, it will be made clear to you, by a savage irony, that
+Play has yet spared you something, since your property is returned. For
+all that, if you bring a new hat with you, you will have to pay for the
+knowledge that a special costume is needed for a gambler.
+
+The evident astonishment with which the young man took a numbered tally
+in exchange for his hat, which was fortunately somewhat rubbed at the
+brim, showed clearly enough that his mind was yet untainted; and the
+little old man, who had wallowed from his youth up in the furious
+pleasures of a gambler’s life, cast a dull, indifferent glance over
+him, in which a philosopher might have seen wretchedness lying in the
+hospital, the vagrant lives of ruined folk, inquests on numberless
+suicides, life-long penal servitude and transportations to Guazacoalco.
+
+His pallid, lengthy visage appeared like a haggard embodiment of the
+passion reduced to its simplest terms. There were traces of past anguish
+in its wrinkles. He supported life on the glutinous soups at Darcet’s,
+and gambled away his meagre earnings day by day. Like some old hackney
+which takes no heed of the strokes of the whip, nothing could move him
+now. The stifled groans of ruined players, as they passed out, their
+mute imprecations, their stupefied faces, found him impassive. He was
+the spirit of Play incarnate. If the young man had noticed this sorry
+Cerberus, perhaps he would have said, “There is only a pack of cards in
+that heart of his.”
+
+The stranger did not heed this warning writ in flesh and blood, put
+here, no doubt, by Providence, who has set loathing on the threshold of
+all evil haunts. He walked boldly into the saloon, where the rattle of
+coin brought his senses under the dazzling spell of an agony of greed.
+Most likely he had been drawn thither by that most convincing of Jean
+Jacques’ eloquent periods, which expresses, I think, this melancholy
+thought, “Yes, I can imagine that a man may take to gambling when he
+sees only his last shilling between him and death.”
+
+There is an illusion about a gambling saloon at night as vulgar as that
+of a bloodthirsty drama, and just as effective. The rooms are filled
+with players and onlookers, with poverty-stricken age, which drags
+itself thither in search of stimulation, with excited faces, and revels
+that began in wine, to end shortly in the Seine. The passion is there
+in full measure, but the great number of the actors prevents you from
+seeing the gambling-demon face to face. The evening is a harmony or
+chorus in which all take part, to which each instrument in the orchestra
+contributes his share. You would see there plenty of respectable people
+who have come in search of diversion, for which they pay as they pay for
+the pleasures of the theatre, or of gluttony, or they come hither as
+to some garret where they cheapen poignant regrets for three months to
+come.
+
+Do you understand all the force and frenzy in a soul which impatiently
+waits for the opening of a gambling hell? Between the daylight gambler
+and the player at night there is the same difference that lies between
+a careless husband and the lover swooning under his lady’s window. Only
+with morning comes the real throb of the passion and the craving in
+its stark horror. Then you can admire the real gambler, who has neither
+eaten, slept, thought, nor lived, he has so smarted under the scourge
+of his martingale, so suffered on the rack of his desire for a coup of
+_trente-et-quarante_. At that accursed hour you encounter eyes whose
+calmness terrifies you, faces that fascinate, glances that seem as if
+they had power to turn the cards over and consume them. The grandest
+hours of a gambling saloon are not the opening ones. If Spain has
+bull-fights, and Rome once had her gladiators, Paris waxes proud of her
+Palais-Royal, where the inevitable _roulettes_ cause blood to flow in
+streams, and the public can have the pleasure of watching without fear
+of their feet slipping in it.
+
+Take a quiet peep at the arena. How bare it looks! The paper on the
+walls is greasy to the height of your head, there is nothing to bring
+one reviving thought. There is not so much as a nail for the convenience
+of suicides. The floor is worn and dirty. An oblong table stands in the
+middle of the room, the tablecloth is worn by the friction of gold,
+but the straw-bottomed chairs about it indicate an odd indifference to
+luxury in the men who will lose their lives here in the quest of the
+fortune that is to put luxury within their reach.
+
+This contradiction in humanity is seen wherever the soul reacts
+powerfully upon itself. The gallant would clothe his mistress in silks,
+would deck her out in soft Eastern fabrics, though he and she must lie
+on a truckle-bed. The ambitious dreamer sees himself at the summit of
+power, while he slavishly prostrates himself in the mire. The tradesman
+stagnates in his damp, unhealthy shop, while he builds a great mansion
+for his son to inherit prematurely, only to be ejected from it by law
+proceedings at his own brother’s instance.
+
+After all, is there a less pleasing thing in the world than a house of
+pleasure? Singular question! Man is always at strife with himself. His
+present woes give the lie to his hopes; yet he looks to a future which
+is not his, to indemnify him for these present sufferings; setting upon
+all his actions the seal of inconsequence and of the weakness of his
+nature. We have nothing here below in full measure but misfortune.
+
+There were several gamblers in the room already when the young man
+entered. Three bald-headed seniors were lounging round the green table.
+Imperturbable as diplomatists, those plaster-cast faces of theirs
+betokened blunted sensibilities, and hearts which had long forgotten
+how to throb, even when a woman’s dowry was the stake. A young Italian,
+olive-hued and dark-haired, sat at one end, with his elbows on the
+table, seeming to listen to the presentiments of luck that dictate a
+gambler’s “Yes” or “No.” The glow of fire and gold was on that southern
+face. Some seven or eight onlookers stood by way of an audience,
+awaiting a drama composed of the strokes of chance, the faces of the
+actors, the circulation of coin, and the motion of the croupier’s rake,
+much as a silent, motionless crowd watches the headsman in the Place de
+Greve. A tall, thin man, in a threadbare coat, held a card in one hand,
+and a pin in the other, to mark the numbers of Red or Black. He seemed
+a modern Tantalus, with all the pleasures of his epoch at his lips, a
+hoardless miser drawing in imaginary gains, a sane species of lunatic
+who consoles himself in his misery by chimerical dreams, a man who
+touches peril and vice as a young priest handles the unconsecrated wafer
+in the white mass.
+
+One or two experts at the game, shrewd speculators, had placed
+themselves opposite the bank, like old convicts who have lost all fear
+of the hulks; they meant to try two or three coups, and then to depart
+at once with the expected gains, on which they lived. Two elderly
+waiters dawdled about with their arms folded, looking from time to time
+into the garden from the windows, as if to show their insignificant
+faces as a sign to passers-by.
+
+The croupier and banker threw a ghastly and withering glance at the
+punters, and cried, in a sharp voice, “Make your game!” as the young man
+came in. The silence seemed to grow deeper as all heads turned curiously
+towards the new arrival. Who would have thought it? The jaded elders,
+the fossilized waiters, the onlookers, the fanatical Italian himself,
+felt an indefinable dread at sight of the stranger. Is he not wretched
+indeed who can excite pity here? Must he not be very helpless to receive
+sympathy, ghastly in appearance to raise a shudder in these places,
+where pain utters no cry, where wretchedness looks gay, and despair is
+decorous? Such thoughts as these produced a new emotion in these torpid
+hearts as the young man entered. Were not executioners known to shed
+tears over the fair-haired, girlish heads that had to fall at the
+bidding of the Revolution?
+
+The gamblers saw at a glance a dreadful mystery in the novice’s face.
+His young features were stamped with a melancholy grace, his looks told
+of unsuccess and many blighted hopes. The dull apathy of the suicide
+had made his forehead so deadly pale, a bitter smile carved faint lines
+about the corners of his mouth, and there was an abandonment about him
+that was painful to see. Some sort of demon sparkled in the depths of
+his eye, which drooped, wearied perhaps with pleasure. Could it have
+been dissipation that had set its foul mark on the proud face, once pure
+and bright, and now brought low? Any doctor seeing the yellow circles
+about his eyelids, and the color in his cheeks, would have set them
+down to some affection of the heart or lungs, while poets would have
+attributed them to the havoc brought by the search for knowledge and to
+night-vigils by the student’s lamp.
+
+But a complaint more fatal than any disease, a disease more merciless
+than genius or study, had drawn this young face, and had wrung a heart
+which dissipation, study, and sickness had scarcely disturbed. When
+a notorious criminal is taken to the convict’s prison, the prisoners
+welcome him respectfully, and these evil spirits in human shape,
+experienced in torments, bowed before an unheard-of anguish. By the
+depth of the wound which met their eyes, they recognized a prince among
+them, by the majesty of his unspoken irony, by the refined wretchedness
+of his garb. The frock-coat that he wore was well cut, but his cravat
+was on terms so intimate with his waistcoat that no one could suspect
+him of underlinen. His hands, shapely as a woman’s were not perfectly
+clean; for two days past indeed he had ceased to wear gloves. If the
+very croupier and the waiters shuddered, it was because some traces
+of the spell of innocence yet hung about his meagre, delicately-shaped
+form, and his scanty fair hair in its natural curls.
+
+He looked only about twenty-five years of age, and any trace of vice
+in his face seemed to be there by accident. A young constitution still
+resisted the inroads of lubricity. Darkness and light, annihilation and
+existence, seemed to struggle in him, with effects of mingled beauty
+and terror. There he stood like some erring angel that has lost his
+radiance; and these emeritus-professors of vice and shame were ready to
+bid the novice depart, even as some toothless crone might be seized with
+pity for a beautiful girl who offers herself up to infamy.
+
+The young man went straight up to the table, and, as he stood
+there, flung down a piece of gold which he held in his hand, without
+deliberation. It rolled on to the Black; then, as strong natures can,
+he looked calmly, if anxiously, at the croupier, as if he held useless
+subterfuges in scorn.
+
+The interest this coup awakened was so great that the old gamesters laid
+nothing upon it; only the Italian, inspired by a gambler’s enthusiasm,
+smiled suddenly at some thought, and punted his heap of coin against the
+stranger’s stake.
+
+The banker forgot to pronounce the phrases that use and wont have
+reduced to an inarticulate cry--“Make your game.... The game is made....
+Bets are closed.” The croupier spread out the cards, and seemed to wish
+luck to the newcomer, indifferent as he was to the losses or gains of
+those who took part in these sombre pleasures. Every bystander thought
+he saw a drama, the closing scene of a noble life, in the fortunes of
+that bit of gold; and eagerly fixed his eyes on the prophetic cards; but
+however closely they watched the young man, they could discover not the
+least sign of feeling on his cool but restless face.
+
+“Even! red wins,” said the croupier officially. A dumb sort of rattle
+came from the Italian’s throat when he saw the folded notes that
+the banker showered upon him, one after another. The young man only
+understood his calamity when the croupiers’s rake was extended to sweep
+away his last napoleon. The ivory touched the coin with a little click,
+as it swept it with the speed of an arrow into the heap of gold before
+the bank. The stranger turned pale at the lips, and softly shut his
+eyes, but he unclosed them again at once, and the red color returned
+as he affected the airs of an Englishman, to whom life can offer no
+new sensation, and disappeared without the glance full of entreaty for
+compassion that a desperate gamester will often give the bystanders. How
+much can happen in a second’s space; how many things depend on a throw
+of the die!
+
+“That was his last cartridge, of course,” said the croupier, smiling
+after a moment’s silence, during which he picked up the coin between his
+finger and thumb and held it up.
+
+“He is a cracked brain that will go and drown himself,” said a
+frequenter of the place. He looked round about at the other players, who
+all knew each other.
+
+“Bah!” said a waiter, as he took a pinch of snuff.
+
+“If we had but followed _his_ example,” said an old gamester to the
+others, as he pointed out the Italian.
+
+Everybody looked at the lucky player, whose hands shook as he counted
+his bank-notes.
+
+“A voice seemed to whisper to me,” he said. “The luck is sure to go
+against that young man’s despair.”
+
+“He is a new hand,” said the banker, “or he would have divided his money
+into three parts to give himself more chance.”
+
+The young man went out without asking for his hat; but the old
+watch-dog, who had noted its shabby condition, returned it to him
+without a word. The gambler mechanically gave up the tally, and went
+downstairs whistling _Di tanti Palpiti_ so feebly, that he himself
+scarcely heard the delicious notes.
+
+He found himself immediately under the arcades of the Palais-Royal,
+reached the Rue Saint Honore, took the direction of the Tuileries, and
+crossed the gardens with an undecided step. He walked as if he were in
+some desert, elbowed by men whom he did not see, hearing through all the
+voices of the crowd one voice alone--the voice of Death. He was lost in
+the thoughts that benumbed him at last, like the criminals who used
+to be taken in carts from the Palais de Justice to the Place de Greve,
+where the scaffold awaited them reddened with all the blood spilt here
+since 1793.
+
+There is something great and terrible about suicide. Most people’s
+downfalls are not dangerous; they are like children who have not far to
+fall, and cannot injure themselves; but when a great nature is dashed
+down, he is bound to fall from a height. He must have been raised almost
+to the skies; he has caught glimpses of some heaven beyond his reach.
+Vehement must the storms be which compel a soul to seek for peace from
+the trigger of a pistol.
+
+How much young power starves and pines away in a garret for want of a
+friend, for lack of a woman’s consolation, in the midst of millions of
+fellow-creatures, in the presence of a listless crowd that is burdened
+by its wealth! When one remembers all this, suicide looms large. Between
+a self-sought death and the abundant hopes whose voices call a young man
+to Paris, God only knows what may intervene; what contending ideas have
+striven within the soul; what poems have been set aside; what moans and
+what despair have been repressed; what abortive masterpieces and vain
+endeavors! Every suicide is an awful poem of sorrow. Where will you find
+a work of genius floating above the seas of literature that can compare
+with this paragraph:
+
+  “Yesterday, at four o’clock, a young woman threw herself into the
+  Seine from the Pont des Arts.”
+
+Dramas and romances pale before this concise Parisian phrase; so must
+even that old frontispiece, _The Lamentations of the glorious king of
+Kaernavan, put in prison by his children_, the sole remaining fragment
+of a lost work that drew tears from Sterne at the bare perusal--the same
+Sterne who deserted his own wife and family.
+
+The stranger was beset with such thoughts as these, which passed in
+fragments through his mind, like tattered flags fluttering above the
+combat. If he set aside for a moment the burdens of consciousness and of
+memory, to watch the flower heads gently swayed by the breeze among the
+green thickets, a revulsion came over him, life struggled against
+the oppressive thought of suicide, and his eyes rose to the sky: gray
+clouds, melancholy gusts of the wind, the stormy atmosphere, all decreed
+that he should die.
+
+He bent his way toward the Pont Royal, musing over the last fancies of
+others who had gone before him. He smiled to himself as he remembered
+that Lord Castlereagh had satisfied the humblest of our needs before
+he cut his throat, and that the academician Auger had sought for his
+snuff-box as he went to his death. He analyzed these extravagances,
+and even examined himself; for as he stood aside against the parapet
+to allow a porter to pass, his coat had been whitened somewhat by the
+contact, and he carefully brushed the dust from his sleeve, to his own
+surprise. He reached the middle of the arch, and looked forebodingly at
+the water.
+
+“Wretched weather for drowning yourself,” said a ragged old woman, who
+grinned at him; “isn’t the Seine cold and dirty?”
+
+His answer was a ready smile, which showed the frenzied nature of his
+courage; then he shivered all at once as he saw at a distance, by the
+door of the Tuileries, a shed with an inscription above it in letters
+twelve inches high: THE ROYAL HUMANE SOCIETY’S APPARATUS.
+
+A vision of M. Dacheux rose before him, equipped by his philanthropy,
+calling out and setting in motion the too efficacious oars which break
+the heads of drowning men, if unluckily they should rise to the surface;
+he saw a curious crowd collecting, running for a doctor, preparing
+fumigations, he read the maundering paragraph in the papers, put between
+notes on a festivity and on the smiles of a ballet-dancer; he heard
+the francs counted down by the prefect of police to the watermen. As a
+corpse, he was worth fifteen francs; but now while he lived he was only
+a man of talent without patrons, without friends, without a mattress
+to lie on, or any one to speak a word for him--a perfect social cipher,
+useless to a State which gave itself no trouble about him.
+
+A death in broad daylight seemed degrading to him; he made up his mind
+to die at night so as to bequeath an unrecognizable corpse to a world
+which had disregarded the greatness of life. He began his wanderings
+again, turning towards the Quai Voltaire, imitating the lagging gait of
+an idler seeking to kill time. As he came down the steps at the end of
+the bridge, his notice was attracted by the second-hand books displayed
+on the parapet, and he was on the point of bargaining for some. He
+smiled, thrust his hands philosophically into his pockets, and fell to
+strolling on again with a proud disdain in his manner, when he heard to
+his surprise some coin rattling fantastically in his pocket.
+
+A smile of hope lit his face, and slid from his lips over his features,
+over his brow, and brought a joyful light to his eyes and his dark
+cheeks. It was a spark of happiness like one of the red dots that flit
+over the remains of a burnt scrap of paper; but as it is with the black
+ashes, so it was with his face, it became dull again when the stranger
+quickly drew out his hand and perceived three pennies. “Ah, kind
+gentleman! _carita_, _carita_; for the love of St. Catherine! only a
+halfpenny to buy some bread!”
+
+A little chimney sweeper, with puffed cheeks, all black with soot, and
+clad in tatters, held out his hand to beg for the man’s last pence.
+
+Two paces from the little Savoyard stood an old _pauvre honteux_, sickly
+and feeble, in wretched garments of ragged druggeting, who asked in a
+thick, muffled voice:
+
+“Anything you like to give, monsieur; I will pray to God for you...”
+
+But the young man turned his eyes on him, and the old beggar stopped
+without another word, discerning in that mournful face an abandonment of
+wretchedness more bitter than his own.
+
+“_La carita_! _la carita_!”
+
+The stranger threw the coins to the old man and the child, left the
+footway, and turned towards the houses; the harrowing sight of the Seine
+fretted him beyond endurance.
+
+“May God lengthen your days!” cried the two beggars.
+
+As he reached the shop window of a print-seller, this man on the brink
+of death met a young woman alighting from a showy carriage. He looked in
+delight at her prettiness, at the pale face appropriately framed by the
+satin of her fashionable bonnet. Her slender form and graceful movements
+entranced him. Her skirt had been slightly raised as she stepped to the
+pavement, disclosing a daintily fitting white stocking over the delicate
+outlines beneath. The young lady went into the shop, purchased albums
+and sets of lithographs; giving several gold coins for them, which
+glittered and rang upon the counter. The young man, seemingly occupied
+with the prints in the window, fixed upon the fair stranger a gaze as
+eager as man can give, to receive in exchange an indifferent glance,
+such as lights by accident on a passer-by. For him it was a leave-taking
+of love and of woman; but his final and strenuous questioning glance was
+neither understood nor felt by the slight-natured woman there; her color
+did not rise, her eyes did not droop. What was it to her? one more piece
+of adulation, yet another sigh only prompted the delightful thought at
+night, “I looked rather well to-day.”
+
+The young man quickly turned to another picture, and only left it when
+she returned to her carriage. The horses started off, the final vision
+of luxury and refinement went under an eclipse, just as that life of his
+would soon do also. Slowly and sadly he followed the line of the shops,
+listlessly examining the specimens on view. When the shops came to an
+end, he reviewed the Louvre, the Institute, the towers of Notre Dame, of
+the Palais, the Pont des Arts; all these public monuments seemed to have
+taken their tone from the heavy gray sky.
+
+Fitful gleams of light gave a foreboding look to Paris; like a pretty
+woman, the city has mysterious fits of ugliness or beauty. So the outer
+world seemed to be in a plot to steep this man about to die in a painful
+trance. A prey to the maleficent power which acts relaxingly upon us
+by the fluid circulating through our nerves, his whole frame seemed
+gradually to experience a dissolving process. He felt the anguish of
+these throes passing through him in waves, and the houses and the crowd
+seemed to surge to and fro in a mist before his eyes. He tried to escape
+the agitation wrought in his mind by the revulsions of his physical
+nature, and went toward the shop of a dealer in antiquities, thinking to
+give a treat to his senses, and to spend the interval till nightfall in
+bargaining over curiosities.
+
+He sought, one might say, to regain courage and to find a stimulant,
+like a criminal who doubts his power to reach the scaffold. The
+consciousness of approaching death gave him, for the time being, the
+intrepidity of a duchess with a couple of lovers, so that he entered the
+place with an abstracted look, while his lips displayed a set smile like
+a drunkard’s. Had not life, or rather had not death, intoxicated him?
+Dizziness soon overcame him again. Things appeared to him in strange
+colors, or as making slight movements; his irregular pulse was no
+doubt the cause; the blood that sometimes rushed like a burning torrent
+through his veins, and sometimes lay torpid and stagnant as tepid water.
+He merely asked leave to see if the shop contained any curiosities which
+he required.
+
+A plump-faced young shopman with red hair, in an otter-skin cap, left
+an old peasant woman in charge of the shop--a sort of feminine Caliban,
+employed in cleaning a stove made marvelous by Bernard Palissy’s work.
+This youth remarked carelessly:
+
+“Look round, _monsieur_! We have nothing very remarkable here
+downstairs; but if I may trouble you to go up to the first floor, I will
+show you some very fine mummies from Cairo, some inlaid pottery, and
+some carved ebony--_genuine Renaissance_ work, just come in, and of
+perfect beauty.”
+
+In the stranger’s fearful position this cicerone’s prattle and shopman’s
+empty talk seemed like the petty vexations by which narrow minds destroy
+a man of genius. But as he must even go through with it, he appeared
+to listen to his guide, answering him by gestures or monosyllables; but
+imperceptibly he arrogated the privilege of saying nothing, and gave
+himself up without hindrance to his closing meditations, which were
+appalling. He had a poet’s temperament, his mind had entered by chance
+on a vast field; and he must see perforce the dry bones of twenty future
+worlds.
+
+At a first glance the place presented a confused picture in which every
+achievement, human and divine, was mingled. Crocodiles, monkeys, and
+serpents stuffed with straw grinned at glass from church windows,
+seemed to wish to bite sculptured heads, to chase lacquered work, or to
+scramble up chandeliers. A Sevres vase, bearing Napoleon’s portrait
+by Mme. Jacotot, stood beside a sphinx dedicated to Sesostris. The
+beginnings of the world and the events of yesterday were mingled
+with grotesque cheerfulness. A kitchen jack leaned against a pyx, a
+republican sabre on a mediaeval hackbut. Mme. du Barry, with a star
+above her head, naked, and surrounded by a cloud, seemed to look
+longingly out of Latour’s pastel at an Indian chibook, while she tried
+to guess the purpose of the spiral curves that wound towards her.
+Instruments of death, poniards, curious pistols, and disguised weapons
+had been flung down pell-mell among the paraphernalia of daily life;
+porcelain tureens, Dresden plates, translucent cups from china, old
+salt-cellars, comfit-boxes belonging to feudal times. A carved ivory
+ship sped full sail on the back of a motionless tortoise.
+
+The Emperor Augustus remained unmoved and imperial with an air-pump
+thrust into one eye. Portraits of French sheriffs and Dutch
+burgomasters, phlegmatic now as when in life, looked down pallid and
+unconcerned on the chaos of past ages below them.
+
+Every land of earth seemed to have contributed some stray fragment of
+its learning, some example of its art. Nothing seemed lacking to this
+philosophical kitchen-midden, from a redskin’s calumet, a green and
+golden slipper from the seraglio, a Moorish yataghan, a Tartar idol, to
+the soldier’s tobacco pouch, to the priest’s ciborium, and the plumes
+that once adorned a throne. This extraordinary combination was rendered
+yet more bizarre by the accidents of lighting, by a multitude of
+confused reflections of various hues, by the sharp contrast of blacks
+and whites. Broken cries seemed to reach the ear, unfinished dramas
+seized upon the imagination, smothered lights caught the eye. A thin
+coating of inevitable dust covered all the multitudinous corners and
+convolutions of these objects of various shapes which gave highly
+picturesque effects.
+
+First of all, the stranger compared the three galleries which
+civilization, cults, divinities, masterpieces, dominions, carousals,
+sanity, and madness had filled to repletion, to a mirror with numerous
+facets, each depicting a world. After this first hazy idea he would fain
+have selected his pleasures; but by dint of using his eyes, thinking and
+musing, a fever began to possess him, caused perhaps by the gnawing pain
+of hunger. The spectacle of so much existence, individual or national,
+to which these pledges bore witness, ended by numbing his senses--the
+purpose with which he entered the shop was fulfilled. He had left the
+real behind, and had climbed gradually up to an ideal world; he had
+attained to the enchanted palace of ecstasy, whence the universe
+appeared to him by fragments and in shapes of flame, as once the future
+blazed out before the eyes of St. John in Patmos.
+
+A crowd of sorrowing faces, beneficent and appalling, dark and luminous,
+far and near, gathered in numbers, in myriads, in whole generations.
+Egypt, rigid and mysterious, arose from her sands in the form of a mummy
+swathed in black bandages; then the Pharaohs swallowed up nations, that
+they might build themselves a tomb; and he beheld Moses and the Hebrews
+and the desert, and a solemn antique world. Fresh and joyous, a marble
+statue spoke to him from a twisted column of the pleasure-loving myths
+of Greece and Ionia. Ah! who would not have smiled with him to see,
+against the earthen red background, the brown-faced maiden dancing with
+gleeful reverence before the god Priapus, wrought in the fine clay of an
+Etruscan vase? The Latin queen caressed her chimera.
+
+The whims of Imperial Rome were there in life, the bath was disclosed,
+the toilette of a languid Julia, dreaming, waiting for her Tibullus.
+Strong with the might of Arabic spells, the head of Cicero evoked
+memories of a free Rome, and unrolled before him the scrolls of Titus
+Livius. The young man beheld _Senatus Populusque Romanus_; consuls,
+lictors, togas with purple fringes; the fighting in the Forum, the angry
+people, passed in review before him like the cloudy faces of a dream.
+
+Then Christian Rome predominated in his vision. A painter had laid
+heaven open; he beheld the Virgin Mary wrapped in a golden cloud among
+the angels, shining more brightly than the sun, receiving the prayers of
+sufferers, on whom this second Eve Regenerate smiles pityingly. At the
+touch of a mosaic, made of various lavas from Vesuvius and Etna, his
+fancy fled to the hot tawny south of Italy. He was present at Borgia’s
+orgies, he roved among the Abruzzi, sought for Italian love intrigues,
+grew ardent over pale faces and dark, almond-shaped eyes. He shivered
+over midnight adventures, cut short by the cool thrust of a jealous
+blade, as he saw a mediaeval dagger with a hilt wrought like lace, and
+spots of rust like splashes of blood upon it.
+
+India and its religions took the shape of the idol with his peaked cap
+of fantastic form, with little bells, clad in silk and gold. Close by,
+a mat, as pretty as the bayadere who once lay upon it, still gave out
+a faint scent of sandal wood. His fancy was stirred by a goggle-eyed
+Chinese monster, with mouth awry and twisted limbs, the invention of
+a people who, grown weary of the monotony of beauty, found an
+indescribable pleasure in an infinite variety of ugliness. A salt-cellar
+from Benvenuto Cellini’s workshop carried him back to the Renaissance
+at its height, to the time when there was no restraint on art or morals,
+when torture was the sport of sovereigns; and from their councils,
+churchmen with courtesans’ arms about them issued decrees of chastity
+for simple priests.
+
+On a cameo he saw the conquests of Alexander, the massacres of Pizarro
+in a matchbox, and religious wars disorderly, fanatical, and cruel, in
+the shadows of a helmet. Joyous pictures of chivalry were called up by
+a suit of Milanese armor, brightly polished and richly wrought; a
+paladin’s eyes seemed to sparkle yet under the visor.
+
+This sea of inventions, fashions, furniture, works of art and fiascos,
+made for him a poem without end. Shapes and colors and projects
+all lived again for him, but his mind received no clear and perfect
+conception. It was the poet’s task to complete the sketches of the
+great master, who had scornfully mingled on his palette the hues of the
+numberless vicissitudes of human life. When the world at large at last
+released him, when he had pondered over many lands, many epochs, and
+various empires, the young man came back to the life of the individual.
+He impersonated fresh characters, and turned his mind to details,
+rejecting the life of nations as a burden too overwhelming for a single
+soul.
+
+Yonder was a sleeping child modeled in wax, a relic of Ruysch’s
+collection, an enchanting creation which brought back the happiness of
+his own childhood. The cotton garment of a Tahitian maid next fascinated
+him; he beheld the primitive life of nature, the real modesty of naked
+chastity, the joys of an idleness natural to mankind, a peaceful fate
+by a slow river of sweet water under a plantain tree that bears its
+pleasant manna without the toil of man. Then all at once he became a
+corsair, investing himself with the terrible poetry that Lara has given
+to the part: the thought came at the sight of the mother-of-pearl tints
+of a myriad sea-shells, and grew as he saw madrepores redolent of the
+sea-weeds and the storms of the Atlantic.
+
+The sea was forgotten again at a distant view of exquisite miniatures;
+he admired a precious missal in manuscript, adorned with arabesques in
+gold and blue. Thoughts of peaceful life swayed him; he devoted himself
+afresh to study and research, longing for the easy life of the monk,
+devoid alike of cares and pleasures; and from the depths of his cell
+he looked out upon the meadows, woods, and vineyards of his convent.
+Pausing before some work of Teniers, he took for his own the helmet
+of the soldier or the poverty of the artisan; he wished to wear a
+smoke-begrimed cap with these Flemings, to drink their beer and join
+their game at cards, and smiled upon the comely plumpness of a peasant
+woman. He shivered at a snowstorm by Mieris; he seemed to take part in
+Salvator Rosa’s battle-piece; he ran his fingers over a tomahawk
+form Illinois, and felt his own hair rise as he touched a Cherokee
+scalping-knife. He marveled over the rebec that he set in the hands of
+some lady of the land, drank in the musical notes of her ballad, and in
+the twilight by the gothic arch above the hearth he told his love in a
+gloom so deep that he could not read his answer in her eyes.
+
+He caught at all delights, at all sorrows; grasped at existence in every
+form; and endowed the phantoms conjured up from that inert and plastic
+material so liberally with his own life and feelings, that the sound of
+his own footsteps reached him as if from another world, or as the hum of
+Paris reaches the towers of Notre Dame.
+
+He ascended the inner staircase which led to the first floor, with its
+votive shields, panoplies, carved shrines, and figures on the wall at
+every step. Haunted by the strangest shapes, by marvelous creations
+belonging to the borderland betwixt life and death, he walked as if
+under the spell of a dream. His own existence became a matter of doubt
+to him; he was neither wholly alive nor dead, like the curious objects
+about him. The light began to fade as he reached the show-rooms, but
+the treasures of gold and silver heaped up there scarcely seemed to need
+illumination from without. The most extravagant whims of prodigals, who
+have run through millions to perish in garrets, had left their traces
+here in this vast bazar of human follies. Here, beside a writing desk,
+made at the cost of 100,000 francs, and sold for a hundred pence, lay a
+lock with a secret worth a king’s ransom. The human race was revealed
+in all the grandeur of its wretchedness; in all the splendor of its
+infinite littleness. An ebony table that an artist might worship,
+carved after Jean Goujon’s designs, in years of toil, had been purchased
+perhaps at the price of firewood. Precious caskets, and things that
+fairy hands might have fashioned, lay there in heaps like rubbish.
+
+“You must have the worth of millions here!” cried the young man as he
+entered the last of an immense suite of rooms, all decorated and gilt by
+eighteenth century artists.
+
+“Thousands of millions, you might say,” said the florid shopman; “but
+you have seen nothing as yet. Go up to the third floor, and you shall
+see!”
+
+The stranger followed his guide to a fourth gallery, where one by one
+there passed before his wearied eyes several pictures by Poussin, a
+magnificent statue by Michael Angelo, enchanting landscapes by Claude
+Lorraine, a Gerard Dow (like a stray page from Sterne), Rembrandts,
+Murillos, and pictures by Velasquez, as dark and full of color as a poem
+of Byron’s; then came classic bas-reliefs, finely-cut agates, wonderful
+cameos! Works of art upon works of art, till the craftsman’s skill
+palled on the mind, masterpiece after masterpiece till art itself became
+hateful at last and enthusiasm died. He came upon a Madonna by Raphael,
+but he was tired of Raphael; a figure by Correggio never received the
+glance it demanded of him. A priceless vase of antique porphyry carved
+round about with pictures of the most grotesquely wanton of Roman
+divinities, the pride of some Corinna, scarcely drew a smile from him.
+
+The ruins of fifteen hundred vanished years oppressed him; he sickened
+under all this human thought; felt bored by all this luxury and art. He
+struggled in vain against the constantly renewed fantastic shapes that
+sprang up from under his feet, like children of some sportive demon.
+
+Are not fearful poisons set up in the soul by a swift concentration of
+all her energies, her enjoyments, or ideas; as modern chemistry, in its
+caprice, repeats the action of creation by some gas or other? Do not
+many men perish under the shock of the sudden expansion of some moral
+acid within them?
+
+“What is there in that box?” he inquired, as he reached a large
+closet--final triumph of human skill, originality, wealth, and splendor,
+in which there hung a large, square mahogany coffer, suspended from a
+nail by a silver chain.
+
+“Ah, _monsieur_ keeps the key of it,” said the stout assistant
+mysteriously. “If you wish to see the portrait, I will gladly venture to
+tell him.”
+
+“Venture!” said the young man; “then is your master a prince?”
+
+“I don’t know what he is,” the other answered. Equally astonished, each
+looked for a moment at the other. Then construing the stranger’s silence
+as an order, the apprentice left him alone in the closet.
+
+Have you never launched into the immensity of time and space as you read
+the geological writings of Cuvier? Carried by his fancy, have you hung
+as if suspended by a magician’s wand over the illimitable abyss of the
+past? When the fossil bones of animals belonging to civilizations before
+the Flood are turned up in bed after bed and layer upon layer of the
+quarries of Montmartre or among the schists of the Ural range, the
+soul receives with dismay a glimpse of millions of peoples forgotten
+by feeble human memory and unrecognized by permanent divine tradition,
+peoples whose ashes cover our globe with two feet of earth that yields
+bread to us and flowers.
+
+Is not Cuvier the great poet of our era? Byron has given admirable
+expression to certain moral conflicts, but our immortal naturalist has
+reconstructed past worlds from a few bleached bones; has rebuilt cities,
+like Cadmus, with monsters’ teeth; has animated forests with all the
+secrets of zoology gleaned from a piece of coal; has discovered a giant
+population from the footprints of a mammoth. These forms stand erect,
+grow large, and fill regions commensurate with their giant size. He
+treats figures like a poet; a naught set beside a seven by him produces
+awe.
+
+He can call up nothingness before you without the phrases of a
+charlatan. He searches a lump of gypsum, finds an impression in it, says
+to you, “Behold!” All at once marble takes an animal shape, the dead
+come to life, the history of the world is laid open before you. After
+countless dynasties of giant creatures, races of fish and clans of
+mollusks, the race of man appears at last as the degenerate copy of a
+splendid model, which the Creator has perchance destroyed. Emboldened
+by his gaze into the past, this petty race, children of yesterday,
+can overstep chaos, can raise a psalm without end, and outline for
+themselves the story of the Universe in an Apocalypse that reveals the
+past. After the tremendous resurrection that took place at the voice
+of this man, the little drop in the nameless Infinite, common to all
+spheres, that is ours to use, and that we call Time, seems to us a
+pitiable moment of life. We ask ourselves the purpose of our triumphs,
+our hatreds, our loves, overwhelmed as we are by the destruction of so
+many past universes, and whether it is worth while to accept the pain of
+life in order that hereafter we may become an intangible speck. Then we
+remain as if dead, completely torn away from the present till the _valet
+de chambre_ comes in and says, “_Madame la comtesse_ answers that she is
+expecting _monsieur_.”
+
+All the wonders which had brought the known world before the young man’s
+mind wrought in his soul much the same feeling of dejection that besets
+the philosopher investigating unknown creatures. He longed more than
+ever for death as he flung himself back in a curule chair and let his
+eyes wander across the illusions composing a panorama of the past.
+The pictures seemed to light up, the Virgin’s heads smiled on him, the
+statues seemed alive. Everything danced and swayed around him, with a
+motion due to the gloom and the tormenting fever that racked his brain;
+each monstrosity grimaced at him, while the portraits on the canvas
+closed their eyes for a little relief. Every shape seemed to tremble
+and start, and to leave its place gravely or flippantly, gracefully or
+awkwardly, according to its fashion, character, and surroundings.
+
+A mysterious Sabbath began, rivaling the fantastic scenes witnessed
+by Faust upon the Brocken. But these optical illusions, produced by
+weariness, overstrained eyesight, or the accidents of twilight, could
+not alarm the stranger. The terrors of life had no power over a soul
+grown familiar with the terrors of death. He even gave himself up, half
+amused by its bizarre eccentricities, to the influence of this moral
+galvanism; its phenomena, closely connected with his last thoughts,
+assured him that he was still alive. The silence about him was so deep
+that he embarked once more in dreams that grew gradually darker and
+darker as if by magic, as the light slowly faded. A last struggling ray
+from the sun lit up rosy answering lights. He raised his head and saw a
+skeleton dimly visible, with its skull bent doubtfully to one side, as
+if to say, “The dead will none of thee as yet.”
+
+He passed his hand over his forehead to shake off the drowsiness, and
+felt a cold breath of air as an unknown furry something swept past his
+cheeks. He shivered. A muffled clatter of the windows followed; it was
+a bat, he fancied, that had given him this chilly sepulchral caress. He
+could yet dimly see for a moment the shapes that surrounded him, by the
+vague light in the west; then all these inanimate objects were blotted
+out in uniform darkness. Night and the hour of death had suddenly come.
+Thenceforward, for a while, he lost consciousness of the things about
+him; he was either buried in deep meditation or sleep overcame him,
+brought on by weariness or by the stress of those many thoughts that
+lacerated his heart.
+
+Suddenly he thought that an awful voice called him by name; it was like
+some feverish nightmare, when at a step the dreamer falls headlong over
+into an abyss, and he trembled. He closed his eyes, dazzled by bright
+rays from a red circle of light that shone out from the shadows. In the
+midst of the circle stood a little old man who turned the light of the
+lamp upon him, yet he had not heard him enter, nor move, nor speak.
+There was something magical about the apparition. The boldest man,
+awakened in such a sort, would have felt alarmed at the sight of this
+figure, which might have issued from some sarcophagus hard by.
+
+A curiously youthful look in the unmoving eyes of the spectre forbade
+the idea of anything supernatural; but for all that, in the brief space
+between his dreaming and waking life, the young man’s judgment remained
+philosophically suspended, as Descartes advises. He was, in spite
+of himself, under the influence of an unaccountable hallucination, a
+mystery that our pride rejects, and that our imperfect science vainly
+tries to resolve.
+
+Imagine a short old man, thin and spare, in a long black velvet gown
+girded round him by a thick silk cord. His long white hair escaped on
+either side of his face from under a black velvet cap which closely
+fitted his head and made a formal setting for his countenance. His
+gown enveloped his body like a winding sheet, so that all that was left
+visible was a narrow bleached human face. But for the wasted arm, thin
+as a draper’s wand, which held aloft the lamp that cast all its light
+upon him, the face would have seemed to hang in mid air. A gray pointed
+beard concealed the chin of this fantastical appearance, and gave him
+the look of one of those Jewish types which serve artists as models
+for Moses. His lips were so thin and colorless that it needed a close
+inspection to find the lines of his mouth at all in the pallid face. His
+great wrinkled brow and hollow bloodless cheeks, the inexorably stern
+expression of his small green eyes that no longer possessed eyebrows
+or lashes, might have convinced the stranger that Gerard Dow’s “Money
+Changer” had come down from his frame. The craftiness of an inquisitor,
+revealed in those curving wrinkles and creases that wound about his
+temples, indicated a profound knowledge of life. There was no deceiving
+this man, who seemed to possess a power of detecting the secrets of the
+wariest heart.
+
+The wisdom and the moral codes of every people seemed gathered up in his
+passive face, just as all the productions of the globe had been heaped
+up in his dusty showrooms. He seemed to possess the tranquil luminous
+vision of some god before whom all things are open, or the haughty power
+of a man who knows all things.
+
+With two strokes of the brush a painter could have so altered the
+expression of this face, that what had been a serene representation
+of the Eternal Father should change to the sneering mask of a
+Mephistopheles; for though sovereign power was revealed by the forehead,
+mocking folds lurked about the mouth. He must have sacrificed all the
+joys of earth, as he had crushed all human sorrows beneath his potent
+will. The man at the brink of death shivered at the thought of the life
+led by this spirit, so solitary and remote from our world; joyless,
+since he had no one illusion left; painless, because pleasure had ceased
+to exist for him. There he stood, motionless and serene as a star in a
+bright mist. His lamp lit up the obscure closet, just as his green eyes,
+with their quiet malevolence, seemed to shed a light on the moral world.
+
+This was the strange spectacle that startled the young man’s returning
+sight, as he shook off the dreamy fancies and thoughts of death that
+had lulled him. An instant of dismay, a momentary return to belief
+in nursery tales, may be forgiven him, seeing that his senses were
+obscured. Much thought had wearied his mind, and his nerves were
+exhausted with the strain of the tremendous drama within him, and by the
+scenes that had heaped on him all the horrid pleasures that a piece of
+opium can produce.
+
+But this apparition had appeared in Paris, on the Quai Voltaire, and in
+the nineteenth century; the time and place made sorcery impossible.
+The idol of French scepticism had died in the house just opposite,
+the disciple of Gay-Lussac and Arago, who had held the charlatanism of
+intellect in contempt. And yet the stranger submitted himself to the
+influence of an imaginative spell, as all of us do at times, when we
+wish to escape from an inevitable certainty, or to tempt the power of
+Providence. So some mysterious apprehension of a strange force made him
+tremble before the old man with the lamp. All of us have been stirred in
+the same way by the sight of Napoleon, or of some other great man, made
+illustrious by his genius or by fame.
+
+“You wish to see Raphael’s portrait of Jesus Christ, monsieur?” the old
+man asked politely. There was something metallic in the clear, sharp
+ring of his voice.
+
+He set the lamp upon a broken column, so that all its light might fall
+on the brown case.
+
+At the sacred names of Christ and Raphael the young man showed some
+curiosity. The merchant, who no doubt looked for this, pressed a spring,
+and suddenly the mahogany panel slid noiselessly back in its groove, and
+discovered the canvas to the stranger’s admiring gaze. At sight of this
+deathless creation, he forgot his fancies in the show-rooms and the
+freaks of his dreams, and became himself again. The old man became a
+being of flesh and blood, very much alive, with nothing chimerical about
+him, and took up his existence at once upon solid earth.
+
+The sympathy and love, and the gentle serenity in the divine face,
+exerted an instant sway over the younger spectator. Some influence
+falling from heaven bade cease the burning torment that consumed the
+marrow of his bones. The head of the Saviour of mankind seemed to issue
+from among the shadows represented by a dark background; an aureole of
+light shone out brightly from his hair; an impassioned belief seemed to
+glow through him, and to thrill every feature. The word of life had just
+been uttered by those red lips, the sacred sounds seemed to linger still
+in the air; the spectator besought the silence for those captivating
+parables, hearkened for them in the future, and had to turn to the
+teachings of the past. The untroubled peace of the divine eyes, the
+comfort of sorrowing souls, seemed an interpretation of the Evangel.
+The sweet triumphant smile revealed the secret of the Catholic religion,
+which sums up all things in the precept, “Love one another.” This
+picture breathed the spirit of prayer, enjoined forgiveness, overcame
+self, caused sleeping powers of good to waken. For this work of
+Raphael’s had the imperious charm of music; you were brought under the
+spell of memories of the past; his triumph was so absolute that the
+artist was forgotten. The witchery of the lamplight heightened the
+wonder; the head seemed at times to flicker in the distance, enveloped
+in cloud.
+
+“I covered the surface of that picture with gold pieces,” said the
+merchant carelessly.
+
+“And now for death!” cried the young man, awakened from his musings. His
+last thought had recalled his fate to him, as it led him imperceptibly
+back from the forlorn hopes to which he had clung.
+
+“Ah, ha! then my suspicions were well founded!” said the other, and his
+hands held the young man’s wrists in a grip like that of a vice.
+
+The younger man smiled wearily at his mistake, and said gently:
+
+“You, sir, have nothing to fear; it is not your life, but my own that
+is in question.... But why should I hide a harmless fraud?” he went on,
+after a look at the anxious old man. “I came to see your treasures to
+while away the time till night should come and I could drown myself
+decently. Who would grudge this last pleasure to a poet and a man of
+science?”
+
+While he spoke, the jealous merchant watched the haggard face of his
+pretended customer with keen eyes. Perhaps the mournful tones of his
+voice reassured him, or he also read the dark signs of fate in the faded
+features that had made the gamblers shudder; he released his hands, but,
+with a touch of caution, due to the experience of some hundred years at
+least, he stretched his arm out to a sideboard as if to steady himself,
+took up a little dagger, and said:
+
+“Have you been a supernumerary clerk of the Treasury for three years
+without receiving any perquisites?”
+
+The stranger could scarcely suppress a smile as he shook his head.
+
+“Perhaps your father has expressed his regret for your birth a little
+too sharply? Or have you disgraced yourself?”
+
+“If I meant to be disgraced, I should live.”
+
+“You have been hissed perhaps at the Funambules? Or you have had to
+compose couplets to pay for your mistress’ funeral? Do you want to be
+cured of the gold fever? Or to be quit of the spleen? For what blunder
+is your life forfeit?”
+
+“You must not look among the common motives that impel suicides for the
+reason of my death. To spare myself the task of disclosing my unheard-of
+sufferings, for which language has no name, I will tell you this--that
+I am in the deepest, most humiliating, and most cruel trouble, and,” he
+went on in proud tones that harmonized ill with the words just uttered,
+“I have no wish to beg for either help or sympathy.”
+
+“Eh! eh!”
+
+The two syllables which the old man pronounced resembled the sound of a
+rattle. Then he went on thus:
+
+“Without compelling you to entreat me, without making you blush for
+it, and without giving you so much as a French centime, a para from the
+Levant, a German heller, a Russian kopeck, a Scottish farthing, a single
+obolus or sestertius from the ancient world, or one piastre from the
+new, without offering you anything whatever in gold, silver, or copper,
+notes or drafts, I will make you richer, more powerful, and of more
+consequence than a constitutional king.”
+
+The young man thought that the older was in his dotage, and waited in
+bewilderment without venturing to reply.
+
+“Turn round,” said the merchant, suddenly catching up the lamp in order
+to light up the opposite wall; “look at that leathern skin,” he went on.
+
+The young man rose abruptly, and showed some surprise at the sight of a
+piece of shagreen which hung on the wall behind his chair. It was only
+about the size of a fox’s skin, but it seemed to fill the deep shadows
+of the place with such brilliant rays that it looked like a small comet,
+an appearance at first sight inexplicable. The young sceptic went up
+to this so-called talisman, which was to rescue him from all points of
+view, and he soon found out the cause of its singular brilliancy. The
+dark grain of the leather had been so carefully burnished and polished,
+the striped markings of the graining were so sharp and clear, that every
+particle of the surface of the bit of Oriental leather was in itself a
+focus which concentrated the light, and reflected it vividly.
+
+He accounted for this phenomenon categorically to the old man, who only
+smiled meaningly by way of answer. His superior smile led the young
+scientific man to fancy that he himself had been deceived by some
+imposture. He had no wish to carry one more puzzle to his grave, and
+hastily turned the skin over, like some child eager to find out the
+mysteries of a new toy.
+
+“Ah,” he cried, “here is the mark of the seal which they call in the
+East the Signet of Solomon.”
+
+“So you know that, then?” asked the merchant. His peculiar method of
+laughter, two or three quick breathings through the nostrils, said more
+than any words however eloquent.
+
+“Is there anybody in the world simple enough to believe in that idle
+fancy?” said the young man, nettled by the spitefulness of the silent
+chuckle. “Don’t you know,” he continued, “that the superstitions of the
+East have perpetuated the mystical form and the counterfeit characters
+of the symbol, which represents a mythical dominion? I have no more
+laid myself open to a charge of credulity in this case, than if I had
+mentioned sphinxes or griffins, whose existence mythology in a manner
+admits.”
+
+“As you are an Orientalist,” replied the other, “perhaps you can read
+that sentence.”
+
+He held the lamp close to the talisman, which the young man held towards
+him, and pointed out some characters inlaid in the surface of the
+wonderful skin, as if they had grown on the animal to which it once
+belonged.
+
+“I must admit,” said the stranger, “that I have no idea how the letters
+could be engraved so deeply on the skin of a wild ass.” And he turned
+quickly to the tables strewn with curiosities and seemed to look for
+something.
+
+“What is it that you want?” asked the old man.
+
+“Something that will cut the leather, so that I can see whether the
+letters are printed or inlaid.”
+
+The old man held out his stiletto. The stranger took it and tried to cut
+the skin above the lettering; but when he had removed a thin shaving of
+leather from them, the characters still appeared below, so clear and so
+exactly like the surface impression, that for a moment he was not sure
+that he had cut anything away after all.
+
+“The craftsmen of the Levant have secrets known only to themselves,”
+ he said, half in vexation, as he eyed the characters of this Oriental
+sentence.
+
+“Yes,” said the old man, “it is better to attribute it to man’s agency
+than to God’s.”
+
+The mysterious words were thus arranged:
+
+     [Drawing of apparently Sanskrit characters omitted]
+
+Or, as it runs in English:
+
+     POSSESSING ME THOU SHALT POSSESS ALL THINGS.
+     BUT THY LIFE IS MINE, FOR GOD HAS SO WILLED IT.
+     WISH, AND THY WISHES SHALL BE FULFILLED;
+     BUT MEASURE THY DESIRES, ACCORDING
+     TO THE LIFE THAT IS IN THEE.
+     THIS IS THY LIFE,
+     WITH EACH WISH I MUST SHRINK
+     EVEN AS THY OWN DAYS.
+     WILT THOU HAVE ME?  TAKE ME.
+     GOD WILL HEARKEN UNTO THEE.
+     SO BE IT!
+
+“So you read Sanskrit fluently,” said the old man. “You have been in
+Persia perhaps, or in Bengal?”
+
+“No, sir,” said the stranger, as he felt the emblematical skin
+curiously. It was almost as rigid as a sheet of metal.
+
+The old merchant set the lamp back again upon the column, giving
+the other a look as he did so. “He has given up the notion of dying
+already,” the glance said with phlegmatic irony.
+
+“Is it a jest, or is it an enigma?” asked the younger man.
+
+The other shook his head and said soberly:
+
+“I don’t know how to answer you. I have offered this talisman with its
+terrible powers to men with more energy in them than you seem to me to
+have; but though they laughed at the questionable power it might exert
+over their futures, not one of them was ready to venture to conclude the
+fateful contract proposed by an unknown force. I am of their opinion, I
+have doubted and refrained, and----”
+
+“Have you never even tried its power?” interrupted the young stranger.
+
+“Tried it!” exclaimed the old man. “Suppose that you were on the column
+in the Place Vendome, would you try flinging yourself into space? Is it
+possible to stay the course of life? Has a man ever been known to die
+by halves? Before you came here, you had made up your mind to kill
+yourself, but all at once a mystery fills your mind, and you think no
+more about death. You child! Does not any one day of your life afford
+mysteries more absorbing? Listen to me. I saw the licentious days of
+Regency. I was like you, then, in poverty; I have begged my bread; but
+for all that, I am now a centenarian with a couple of years to spare,
+and a millionaire to boot. Misery was the making of me, ignorance has
+made me learned. I will tell you in a few words the great secret of
+human life. By two instinctive processes man exhausts the springs of
+life within him. Two verbs cover all the forms which these two causes of
+death may take--To Will and To have your Will. Between these two limits
+of human activity the wise have discovered an intermediate formula, to
+which I owe my good fortune and long life. To Will consumes us, and To
+have our Will destroys us, but To Know steeps our feeble organisms
+in perpetual calm. In me Thought has destroyed Will, so that Power is
+relegated to the ordinary functions of my economy. In a word, it is not
+in the heart which can be broken, or in the senses that become deadened,
+but it is in the brain that cannot waste away and survives everything
+else, that I have set my life. Moderation has kept mind and body
+unruffled. Yet, I have seen the whole world. I have learned all
+languages, lived after every manner. I have lent a Chinaman money,
+taking his father’s corpse as a pledge, slept in an Arab’s tent on the
+security of his bare word, signed contracts in every capital of Europe,
+and left my gold without hesitation in savage wigwams. I have attained
+everything, because I have known how to despise all things.
+
+“My one ambition has been to see. Is not Sight in a manner Insight?
+And to have knowledge or insight, is not that to have instinctive
+possession? To be able to discover the very substance of fact and to
+unite its essence to our essence? Of material possession what abides
+with you but an idea? Think, then, how glorious must be the life of a
+man who can stamp all realities upon his thought, place the springs of
+happiness within himself, and draw thence uncounted pleasures in idea,
+unspoiled by earthly stains. Thought is a key to all treasures; the
+miser’s gains are ours without his cares. Thus I have soared above this
+world, where my enjoyments have been intellectual joys. I have reveled
+in the contemplation of seas, peoples, forests, and mountains! I have
+seen all things, calmly, and without weariness; I have set my desires
+on nothing; I have waited in expectation of everything. I have walked
+to and fro in the world as in a garden round about my own dwelling.
+Troubles, loves, ambitions, losses, and sorrows, as men call them,
+are for me ideas, which I transmute into waking dreams; I express and
+transpose instead of feeling them; instead of permitting them to prey
+upon my life, I dramatize and expand them; I divert myself with them as
+if they were romances which I could read by the power of vision within
+me. As I have never overtaxed my constitution, I still enjoy robust
+health; and as my mind is endowed with all the force that I have not
+wasted, this head of mine is even better furnished than my galleries.
+The true millions lie here,” he said, striking his forehead. “I spend
+delicious days in communings with the past; I summon before me whole
+countries, places, extents of sea, the fair faces of history. In my
+imaginary seraglio I have all the women that I have never possessed.
+Your wars and revolutions come up before me for judgment. What is a
+feverish fugitive admiration for some more or less brightly colored
+piece of flesh and blood; some more or less rounded human form; what
+are all the disasters that wait on your erratic whims, compared with
+the magnificent power of conjuring up the whole world within your soul,
+compared with the immeasurable joys of movement, unstrangled by the
+cords of time, unclogged by the fetters of space; the joys of beholding
+all things, of comprehending all things, of leaning over the parapet of
+the world to question the other spheres, to hearken to the voice of God?
+There,” he burst out, vehemently, “there are To Will and To have your
+Will, both together,” he pointed to the bit of shagreen; “there are your
+social ideas, your immoderate desires, your excesses, your pleasures
+that end in death, your sorrows that quicken the pace of life, for pain
+is perhaps but a violent pleasure. Who could determine the point where
+pleasure becomes pain, where pain is still a pleasure? Is not the utmost
+brightness of the ideal world soothing to us, while the lightest shadows
+of the physical world annoy? Is not knowledge the secret of wisdom? And
+what is folly but a riotous expenditure of Will or Power?”
+
+“Very good then, a life of riotous excess for me!” said the stranger,
+pouncing upon the piece of shagreen.
+
+“Young man, beware!” cried the other with incredible vehemence.
+
+“I had resolved my existence into thought and study,” the stranger
+replied; “and yet they have not even supported me. I am not to be gulled
+by a sermon worthy of Swedenborg, nor by your Oriental amulet, nor yet
+by your charitable endeavors to keep me in a world wherein existence is
+no longer possible for me.... Let me see now,” he added, clutching the
+talisman convulsively, as he looked at the old man, “I wish for a
+royal banquet, a carouse worthy of this century, which, it is said, has
+brought everything to perfection! Let me have young boon companions,
+witty, unwarped by prejudice, merry to the verge of madness! Let one
+wine succeed another, each more biting and perfumed than the last, and
+strong enough to bring about three days of delirium! Passionate women’s
+forms should grace that night! I would be borne away to unknown regions
+beyond the confines of this world, by the car and four-winged steed of
+a frantic and uproarious orgy. Let us ascend to the skies, or plunge
+ourselves in the mire. I do not know if one soars or sinks at such
+moments, and I do not care! Next, I bid this enigmatical power
+to concentrate all delights for me in one single joy. Yes, I must
+comprehend every pleasure of earth and heaven in the final embrace that
+is to kill me. Therefore, after the wine, I wish to hold high festival
+to Priapus, with songs that might rouse the dead, and kisses without
+end; the sound of them should pass like the crackling of flame through
+Paris, should revive the heat of youth and passion in husband and wife,
+even in hearts of seventy years.”
+
+A laugh burst from the little old man. It rang in the young man’s ears
+like an echo from hell; and tyrannously cut him short. He said no more.
+
+“Do you imagine that my floors are going to open suddenly, so that
+luxuriously-appointed tables may rise through them, and guests from
+another world? No, no, young madcap. You have entered into the compact
+now, and there is an end of it. Henceforward, your wishes will be
+accurately fulfilled, but at the expense of your life. The compass of
+your days, visible in that skin, will contract according to the strength
+and number of your desires, from the least to the most extravagant. The
+Brahmin from whom I had this skin once explained to me that it would
+bring about a mysterious connection between the fortunes and wishes of
+its possessor. Your first wish is a vulgar one, which I could fulfil,
+but I leave that to the issues of your new existence. After all, you
+were wishing to die; very well, your suicide is only put off for a
+time.”
+
+The stranger was surprised and irritated that this peculiar old man
+persisted in not taking him seriously. A half philanthropic intention
+peeped so clearly forth from his last jesting observation, that he
+exclaimed:
+
+“I shall soon see, sir, if any change comes over my fortunes in the time
+it will take to cross the width of the quay. But I should like us to be
+quits for such a momentous service; that is, if you are not laughing
+at an unlucky wretch, so I wish that you may fall in love with an
+opera-dancer. You would understand the pleasures of intemperance then,
+and might perhaps grow lavish of the wealth that you have husbanded so
+philosophically.”
+
+He went out without heeding the old man’s heavy sigh, went back through
+the galleries and down the staircase, followed by the stout assistant
+who vainly tried to light his passage; he fled with the haste of a
+robber caught in the act. Blinded by a kind of delirium, he did not even
+notice the unexpected flexibility of the piece of shagreen, which coiled
+itself up, pliant as a glove in his excited fingers, till it would go
+into the pocket of his coat, where he mechanically thrust it. As he
+rushed out of the door into the street, he ran up against three young
+men who were passing arm-in-arm.
+
+“Brute!”
+
+“Idiot!”
+
+Such were the gratifying expressions exchanged between them.
+
+“Why, it is Raphael!”
+
+“Good! we were looking for you.”
+
+“What! it is you, then?”
+
+These three friendly exclamations quickly followed the insults, as the
+light of a street lamp, flickering in the wind, fell upon the astonished
+faces of the group.
+
+“My dear fellow, you must come with us!” said the young man that Raphael
+had all but knocked down.
+
+“What is all this about?”
+
+“Come along, and I will tell you the history of it as we go.”
+
+By fair means or foul, Raphael must go along with his friends towards
+the Pont des Arts; they surrounded him, and linked him by the arm among
+their merry band.
+
+“We have been after you for about a week,” the speaker went on. “At your
+respectable hotel _de Saint Quentin_, where, by the way, the sign with
+the alternate black and red letters cannot be removed, and hangs out
+just as it did in the time of Jean Jacques, that Leonarda of yours told
+us that you were off into the country. For all that, we certainly did
+not look like duns, creditors, sheriff’s officers, or the like. But no
+matter! Rastignac had seen you the evening before at the Bouffons; we
+took courage again, and made it a point of honor to find out whether
+you were roosting in a tree in the Champs-Elysees, or in one of those
+philanthropic abodes where the beggars sleep on a twopenny rope, or if,
+more luckily, you were bivouacking in some boudoir or other. We could
+not find you anywhere. Your name was not in the jailers’ registers
+at the St. Pelagie nor at La Force! Government departments, cafes,
+libraries, lists of prefects’ names, newspaper offices, restaurants,
+greenrooms--to cut it short, every lurking place in Paris, good or bad,
+has been explored in the most expert manner. We bewailed the loss of a
+man endowed with such genius, that one might look to find him at Court
+or in the common jails. We talked of canonizing you as a hero of July,
+and, upon my word, we regretted you!”
+
+As he spoke, the friends were crossing the Pont des Arts. Without
+listening to them, Raphael looked at the Seine, at the clamoring waves
+that reflected the lights of Paris. Above that river, in which but
+now he had thought to fling himself, the old man’s prediction had been
+fulfilled, the hour of his death had been already put back by fate.
+
+“We really regretted you,” said his friend, still pursuing his theme.
+“It was a question of a plan in which we included you as a superior
+person, that is to say, somebody who can put himself above other people.
+The constitutional thimble-rig is carried on to-day, dear boy, more
+seriously than ever. The infamous monarchy, displaced by the heroism of
+the people, was a sort of drab, you could laugh and revel with her; but
+La Patrie is a shrewish and virtuous wife, and willy-nilly you must take
+her prescribed endearments. Then besides, as you know, authority passed
+over from the Tuileries to the journalists, at the time when the Budget
+changed its quarters and went from the Faubourg Saint-Germain to the
+Chaussee de Antin. But this you may not know perhaps. The Government,
+that is, the aristocracy of lawyers and bankers who represent the
+country to-day, just as the priests used to do in the time of the
+monarchy, has felt the necessity of mystifying the worthy people of
+France with a few new words and old ideas, like philosophers of
+every school, and all strong intellects ever since time began. So now
+Royalist-national ideas must be inculcated, by proving to us that it
+is far better to pay twelve million francs, thirty-three centimes to
+La Patrie, represented by Messieurs Such-and-Such, than to pay eleven
+hundred million francs, nine centimes to a king who used to say _I_
+instead of _we_. In a word, a journal, with two or three hundred
+thousand francs, good, at the back of it, has just been started, with a
+view to making an opposition paper to content the discontented, without
+prejudice to the national government of the citizen-king. We scoff
+at liberty as at despotism now, and at religion or incredulity quite
+impartially. And since, for us, ‘our country’ means a capital where
+ideas circulate and are sold at so much a line, a succulent dinner every
+day, and the play at frequent intervals, where profligate women swarm,
+where suppers last on into the next day, and light loves are hired by
+the hour like cabs; and since Paris will always be the most adorable of
+all countries, the country of joy, liberty, wit, pretty women, _mauvais
+sujets_, and good wine; where the truncheon of authority never makes
+itself disagreeably felt, because one is so close to those who wield
+it,--we, therefore, sectaries of the god Mephistopheles, have engaged to
+whitewash the public mind, to give fresh costumes to the actors, to put
+a new plank or two in the government booth, to doctor doctrinaires,
+and warm up old Republicans, to touch up the Bonapartists a bit, and
+revictual the Centre; provided that we are allowed to laugh _in petto_
+at both kings and peoples, to think one thing in the morning and another
+at night, and to lead a merry life _a la_ Panurge, or to recline upon
+soft cushions, _more orientali_.
+
+“The sceptre of this burlesque and macaronic kingdom,” he went on, “we
+have reserved for you; so we are taking you straightway to a dinner
+given by the founder of the said newspaper, a retired banker, who, at a
+loss to know what to do with his money, is going to buy some brains
+with it. You will be welcomed as a brother, we shall hail you as king
+of these free lances who will undertake anything; whose perspicacity
+discovers the intentions of Austria, England, or Russia before either
+Russia, Austria or England have formed any. Yes, we will invest you with
+the sovereignty of those puissant intellects which give to the world its
+Mirabeaus, Talleyrands, Pitts, and Metternichs--all the clever Crispins
+who treat the destinies of a kingdom as gamblers’ stakes, just as
+ordinary men play dominoes for _kirschenwasser_. We have given you out
+to be the most undaunted champion who ever wrestled in a drinking-bout
+at close quarters with the monster called Carousal, whom all bold
+spirits wish to try a fall with; we have gone so far as to say that
+you have never yet been worsted. I hope you will not make liars of us.
+Taillefer, our amphitryon, has undertaken to surpass the circumscribed
+saturnalias of the petty modern Lucullus. He is rich enough to infuse
+pomp into trifles, and style and charm into dissipation... Are you
+listening, Raphael?” asked the orator, interrupting himself.
+
+“Yes,” answered the young man, less surprised by the accomplishment
+of his wishes than by the natural manner in which the events had come
+about.
+
+He could not bring himself to believe in magic, but he marveled at the
+accidents of human fate.
+
+“Yes, you say, just as if you were thinking of your grandfather’s
+demise,” remarked one of his neighbors.
+
+“Ah!” cried Raphael, “I was thinking, my friends, that we are in a fair
+way to become very great scoundrels,” and there was an ingenuousness in
+his tones that set these writers, the hope of young France, in a roar.
+“So far our blasphemies have been uttered over our cups; we have passed
+our judgments on life while drunk, and taken men and affairs in an
+after-dinner frame of mind. We were innocent of action; we were bold in
+words. But now we are to be branded with the hot iron of politics;
+we are going to enter the convict’s prison and to drop our illusions.
+Although one has no belief left, except in the devil, one may regret
+the paradise of one’s youth and the age of innocence, when we devoutly
+offered the tip of our tongue to some good priest for the consecrated
+wafer of the sacrament. Ah, my good friends, our first peccadilloes gave
+us so much pleasure because the consequent remorse set them off and lent
+a keen relish to them; but nowadays----”
+
+“Oh! now,” said the first speaker, “there is still left----”
+
+“What?” asked another.
+
+“Crime----”
+
+“There is a word as high as the gallows and deeper than the Seine,” said
+Raphael.
+
+“Oh, you don’t understand me; I mean political crime. Since this
+morning, a conspirator’s life is the only one I covet. I don’t know that
+the fancy will last over to-morrow, but to-night at least my gorge rises
+at the anaemic life of our civilization and its railroad evenness. I am
+seized with a passion for the miseries of retreat from Moscow, for the
+excitements of the Red Corsair, or for a smuggler’s life. I should like
+to go to Botany Bay, as we have no Chartreaux left us here in France;
+it is a sort of infirmary reserved for little Lord Byrons who, having
+crumpled up their lives like a serviette after dinner, have nothing left
+to do but to set their country ablaze, blow their own brains out, plot
+for a republic or clamor for a war----”
+
+“Emile,” Raphael’s neighbor called eagerly to the speaker, “on my honor,
+but for the revolution of July I would have taken orders, and gone off
+down into the country somewhere to lead the life of an animal, and----”
+
+“And you would have read your breviary through every day.”
+
+“Yes.”
+
+“You are a coxcomb!”
+
+“Why, we read the newspapers as it is!”
+
+“Not bad that, for a journalist! But hold your tongue, we are going
+through a crowd of subscribers. Journalism, look you, is the religion of
+modern society, and has even gone a little further.”
+
+“What do you mean?”
+
+“Its pontiffs are not obliged to believe in it any more than the people
+are.”
+
+Chatting thus, like good fellows who have known their _De Viris
+illustribus_ for years past, they reached a mansion in the Rue Joubert.
+
+Emile was a journalist who had acquired more reputation by dint of
+doing nothing than others had derived from their achievements. A bold,
+caustic, and powerful critic, he possessed all the qualities that his
+defects permitted. An outspoken giber, he made numberless epigrams on
+a friend to his face; but would defend him, if absent, with courage
+and loyalty. He laughed at everything, even at his own career. Always
+impecunious, he yet lived, like all men of his calibre, plunged in
+unspeakable indolence. He would fling some word containing volumes
+in the teeth of folk who could not put a syllable of sense into their
+books. He lavished promises that he never fulfilled; he made a pillow of
+his luck and reputation, on which he slept, and ran the risk of waking
+up to old age in a workhouse. A steadfast friend to the gallows foot,
+a cynical swaggerer with a child’s simplicity, a worker only from
+necessity or caprice.
+
+“In the language of Maitre Alcofribas, we are about to make a famous
+_troncon de chiere lie_,” he remarked to Raphael as he pointed out the
+flower-stands that made a perfumed forest of the staircase.
+
+“I like a vestibule to be well warmed and richly carpeted,” Raphael
+said. “Luxury in the peristyle is not common in France. I feel as if
+life had begun anew here.”
+
+“And up above we are going to drink and make merry once more, my dear
+Raphael. Ah! yes,” he went on, “and I hope we are going to come off
+conquerors, too, and walk over everybody else’s head.”
+
+As he spoke, he jestingly pointed to the guests. They were entering
+a large room which shone with gilding and lights, and there all the
+younger men of note in Paris welcomed them. Here was one who had just
+revealed fresh powers, his first picture vied with the glories of
+Imperial art. There, another, who but yesterday had launched forth a
+volume, an acrid book filled with a sort of literary arrogance, which
+opened up new ways to the modern school. A sculptor, not far away, with
+vigorous power visible in his rough features, was chatting with one of
+those unenthusiastic scoffers who can either see excellence anywhere or
+nowhere, as it happens. Here, the cleverest of our caricaturists,
+with mischievous eyes and bitter tongue, lay in wait for epigrams to
+translate into pencil strokes; there, stood the young and audacious
+writer, who distilled the quintessence of political ideas better than
+any other man, or compressed the work of some prolific writer as he held
+him up to ridicule; he was talking with the poet whose works would
+have eclipsed all the writings of the time if his ability had been as
+strenuous as his hatreds. Both were trying not to say the truth while
+they kept clear of lies, as they exchanged flattering speeches. A famous
+musician administered soothing consolation in a rallying fashion, to
+a young politician who had just fallen quite unhurt, from his rostrum.
+Young writers who lacked style stood beside other young writers who
+lacked ideas, and authors of poetical prose by prosaic poets.
+
+At the sight of all these incomplete beings, a simple Saint Simonian,
+ingenuous enough to believe in his own doctrine, charitably paired them
+off, designing, no doubt, to convert them into monks of his order. A
+few men of science mingled in the conversation, like nitrogen in the
+atmosphere, and several _vaudevillistes_ shed rays like the sparking
+diamonds that give neither light nor heat. A few paradox-mongers,
+laughing up their sleeves at any folk who embraced their likes or
+dislikes in men or affairs, had already begun a two-edged policy,
+conspiring against all systems, without committing themselves to any
+side. Then there was the self-appointed critic who admires nothing, and
+will blow his nose in the middle of a _cavatina_ at the Bouffons, who
+applauds before any one else begins, and contradicts every one who says
+what he himself was about to say; he was there giving out the sayings
+of wittier men for his own. Of all the assembled guests, a future lay
+before some five; ten or so should acquire a fleeting renown; as for the
+rest, like all mediocrities, they might apply to themselves the famous
+falsehood of Louis XVIII., Union and oblivion.
+
+The anxious jocularity of a man who is expending two thousand crowns sat
+on their host. His eyes turned impatiently towards the door from time to
+time, seeking one of his guests who kept him waiting. Very soon a stout
+little person appeared, who was greeted by a complimentary murmur;
+it was the notary who had invented the newspaper that very morning.
+A valet-de-chambre in black opened the doors of a vast dining-room,
+whither every one went without ceremony, and took his place at an
+enormous table.
+
+Raphael took a last look round the room before he left it. His wish had
+been realized to the full. The rooms were adorned with silk and gold.
+Countless wax tapers set in handsome candelabra lit up the slightest
+details of gilded friezes, the delicate bronze sculpture, and the
+splendid colors of the furniture. The sweet scent of rare flowers, set
+in stands tastefully made of bamboo, filled the air. Everything, even
+the curtains, was pervaded by elegance without pretension, and there was
+a certain imaginative charm about it all which acted like a spell on the
+mind of a needy man.
+
+“An income of a hundred thousand livres a year is a very nice beginning
+of the catechism, and a wonderful assistance to putting morality into
+our actions,” he said, sighing. “Truly my sort of virtue can scarcely
+go afoot, and vice means, to my thinking, a garret, a threadbare coat, a
+gray hat in winter time, and sums owing to the porter.... I should like
+to live in the lap of luxury a year, or six months, no matter! And then
+afterwards, die. I should have known, exhausted, and consumed a thousand
+lives, at any rate.”
+
+“Why, you are taking the tone of a stockbroker in good luck,” said
+Emile, who overheard him. “Pooh! your riches would be a burden to you as
+soon as you found that they would spoil your chances of coming out above
+the rest of us. Hasn’t the artist always kept the balance true between
+the poverty of riches and the riches of poverty? And isn’t struggle a
+necessity to some of us? Look out for your digestion, and only look,”
+ he added, with a mock-heroic gesture, “at the majestic, thrice holy, and
+edifying appearance of this amiable capitalist’s dining-room. That man
+has in reality only made his money for our benefit. Isn’t he a kind of
+sponge of the polyp order, overlooked by naturalists, which should be
+carefully squeezed before he is left for his heirs to feed upon? There
+is style, isn’t there, about those bas-reliefs that adorn the walls? And
+the lustres, and the pictures, what luxury well carried out! If one may
+believe those who envy him, or who know, or think they know, the origins
+of his life, then this man got rid of a German and some others--his best
+friend for one, and the mother of that friend, during the Revolution.
+Could you house crimes under the venerable Taillefer’s silvering locks?
+He looks to me a very worthy man. Only see how the silver sparkles, and
+is every glittering ray like a stab of a dagger to him?... Let us go in,
+one might as well believe in Mahomet. If common report speak truth, here
+are thirty men of talent, and good fellows too, prepared to dine off the
+flesh and blood of a whole family;... and here are we ourselves, a pair
+of youngsters full of open-hearted enthusiasm, and we shall be partakers
+in his guilt. I have a mind to ask our capitalist whether he is a
+respectable character....”
+
+“No, not now,” cried Raphael, “but when he is dead drunk, we shall have
+had our dinner then.”
+
+The two friends sat down laughing. First of all, by a glance more rapid
+than a word, each paid his tribute of admiration to the splendid general
+effect of the long table, white as a bank of freshly-fallen snow, with
+its symmetrical line of covers, crowned with their pale golden rolls of
+bread. Rainbow colors gleamed in the starry rays of light reflected by
+the glass; the lights of the tapers crossed and recrossed each other
+indefinitely; the dishes covered with their silver domes whetted both
+appetite and curiosity.
+
+Few words were spoken. Neighbors exchanged glances as the Maderia
+circulated. Then the first course appeared in all its glory; it would
+have done honor to the late Cambaceres, Brillat-Savarin would have
+celebrated it. The wines of Bordeaux and Burgundy, white and red, were
+royally lavished. This first part of the banquet might been compared in
+every way to a rendering of some classical tragedy. The second act grew
+a trifle noisier. Every guest had had a fair amount to drink, and had
+tried various crus at this pleasure, so that as the remains of the
+magnificent first course were removed, tumultuous discussions began;
+a pale brow here and there began to flush, sundry noses took a purpler
+hue, faces lit up, and eyes sparkled.
+
+While intoxication was only dawning, the conversation did not overstep
+the bounds of civility; but banter and bon mots slipped by degrees from
+every tongue; and then slander began to rear its little snake’s heard,
+and spoke in dulcet tones; a few shrewd ones here and there gave heed to
+it, hoping to keep their heads. So the second course found their minds
+somewhat heated. Every one ate as he spoke, spoke while he ate, and
+drank without heeding the quantity of the liquor, the wine was so
+biting, the bouquet so fragrant, the example around so infectious.
+Taillefer made a point of stimulating his guests, and plied them with
+the formidable wines of the Rhone, with fierce Tokay, and heady old
+Roussillon.
+
+The champagne, impatiently expected and lavishly poured out, was a
+scourge of fiery sparks to these men; released like post-horses from
+some mail-coach by a relay; they let their spirits gallop away into the
+wilds of argument to which no one listened, began to tell stories which
+had no auditors, and repeatedly asked questions to which no answer was
+made. Only the loud voice of wassail could be heard, a voice made up
+of a hundred confused clamors, which rose and grew like a crescendo of
+Rossini’s. Insidious toasts, swagger, and challenges followed.
+
+Each renounced any pride in his own intellectual capacity, in order to
+vindicate that of hogsheads, casks, and vats; and each made noise enough
+for two. A time came when the footmen smiled, while their masters all
+talked at once. A philosopher would have been interested, doubtless, by
+the singularity of the thoughts expressed, a politician would have been
+amazed by the incongruity of the methods discussed in the melee of words
+or doubtfully luminous paradoxes, where truths, grotesquely caparisoned,
+met in conflict across the uproar of brawling judgments, of arbitrary
+decisions and folly, much as bullets, shells, and grapeshot are hurled
+across a battlefield.
+
+It was at once a volume and a picture. Every philosophy, religion, and
+moral code differing so greatly in every latitude, every government,
+every great achievement of the human intellect, fell before a scythe as
+long as Time’s own; and you might have found it hard to decide whether
+it was wielded by Gravity intoxicated, or by Inebriation grown sober and
+clear-sighted. Borne away by a kind of tempest, their minds, like the
+sea raging against the cliffs, seemed ready to shake the laws which
+confine the ebb and flow of civilization; unconsciously fulfilling the
+will of God, who has suffered evil and good to abide in nature, and
+reserved the secret of their continual strife to Himself. A frantic
+travesty of debate ensued, a Walpurgis-revel of intellects. Between the
+dreary jests of these children of the Revolution over the inauguration
+of a newspaper, and the talk of the joyous gossips at Gargantua’s
+birth, stretched the gulf that divides the nineteenth century from the
+sixteenth. Laughingly they had begun the work of destruction, and our
+journalists laughed amid the ruins.
+
+“What is the name of that young man over there?” said the notary,
+indicating Raphael. “I thought I heard some one call him Valentin.”
+
+“What stuff is this?” said Emile, laughing; “plain Valentin, say you?
+Raphael DE Valentin, if you please. We bear an eagle or, on a field
+sable, with a silver crown, beak and claws gules, and a fine motto:
+NON CECIDIT ANIMUS. We are no foundling child, but a descendant of the
+Emperor Valens, of the stock of the Valentinois, founders of the cities
+of Valence in France, and Valencia in Spain, rightful heirs to the
+Empire of the East. If we suffer Mahmoud on the throne of Byzantium, it
+is out of pure condescension, and for lack of funds and soldiers.”
+
+With a fork flourished above Raphael’s head, Emile outlined a crown upon
+it. The notary bethought himself a moment, but soon fell to drinking
+again, with a gesture peculiar to himself; it was quite impossible,
+it seemed to say to secure in his clientele the cities of Valence and
+Byzantium, the Emperor Valens, Mahmoud, and the house of Valentinois.
+
+“Should not the destruction of those ant-hills, Babylon, Tyre, Carthage,
+and Venice, each crushed beneath the foot of a passing giant, serve as
+a warning to man, vouchsafed by some mocking power?” said Claude Vignon,
+who must play the Bossuet, as a sort of purchased slave, at the rate of
+fivepence a line.
+
+“Perhaps Moses, Sylla, Louis XI., Richelieu, Robespierre, and Napoleon
+were but the same man who crosses our civilizations now and again, like
+a comet across the sky,” said a disciple of Ballanche.
+
+“Why try to fathom the designs of Providence?” said Canalis, maker of
+ballads.
+
+“Come, now,” said the man who set up for a critic, “there is nothing
+more elastic in the world than your Providence.”
+
+“Well, sir, Louis XIV. sacrificed more lives over digging the
+foundations of the Maintenon’s aqueducts, than the Convention expended
+in order to assess the taxes justly, to make one law for everybody, and
+one nation of France, and to establish the rule of equal inheritance,”
+ said Massol, whom the lack of a syllable before his name had made a
+Republican.
+
+“Are you going to leave our heads on our shoulders?” asked Moreau (of
+the Oise), a substantial farmer. “You, sir, who took blood for wine just
+now?”
+
+“Where is the use? Aren’t the principles of social order worth some
+sacrifices, sir?”
+
+“Hi! Bixiou! What’s-his-name, the Republican, considers a landowner’s
+head a sacrifice!” said a young man to his neighbor.
+
+“Men and events count for nothing,” said the Republican, following out
+his theory in spite of hiccoughs; “in politics, as in philosophy, there
+are only principles and ideas.”
+
+“What an abomination! Then you would ruthlessly put your friends to
+death for a shibboleth?”
+
+“Eh, sir! the man who feels compunction is your thorough scoundrel, for
+he has some notion of virtue; while Peter the Great and the Duke of Alva
+were embodied systems, and the pirate Monbard an organization.”
+
+“But can’t society rid itself of your systems and organizations?” said
+Canalis.
+
+“Oh, granted!” cried the Republican.
+
+“That stupid Republic of yours makes me feel queasy. We sha’n’t be able
+to carve a capon in peace, because we shall find the agrarian law inside
+it.”
+
+“Ah, my little Brutus, stuffed with truffles, your principles are all
+right enough. But you are like my valet, the rogue is so frightfully
+possessed with a mania for property that if I left him to clean my
+clothes after his fashion, he would soon clean me out.”
+
+“Crass idiots!” replied the Republican, “you are for setting a nation
+straight with toothpicks. To your way of thinking, justice is more
+dangerous than thieves.”
+
+“Oh, dear!” cried the attorney Deroches.
+
+“Aren’t they a bore with their politics!” said the notary Cardot. “Shut
+up. That’s enough of it. There is no knowledge nor virtue worth shedding
+a drop of blood for. If Truth were brought into liquidation, we might
+find her insolvent.”
+
+“It would be much less trouble, no doubt, to amuse ourselves with evil,
+rather than dispute about good. Moreover, I would give all the speeches
+made for forty years past at the Tribune for a trout, for one of
+Perrault’s tales or Charlet’s sketches.”
+
+“Quite right!... Hand me the asparagus. Because, after all, liberty
+begets anarchy, anarchy leads to despotism, and despotism back again
+to liberty. Millions have died without securing a triumph for any one
+system. Is not that the vicious circle in which the whole moral world
+revolves? Man believes that he has reached perfection, when in fact he
+has but rearranged matters.”
+
+“Oh! oh!” cried Cursy, the _vaudevilliste_; “in that case, gentlemen,
+here’s to Charles X., the father of liberty.”
+
+“Why not?” asked Emile. “When law becomes despotic, morals are relaxed,
+and vice versa.
+
+“Let us drink to the imbecility of authority, which gives us such an
+authority over imbeciles!” said the good banker.
+
+“Napoleon left us glory, at any rate, my good friend!” exclaimed a naval
+officer who had never left Brest.
+
+“Glory is a poor bargain; you buy it dear, and it will not keep.
+Does not the egotism of the great take the form of glory, just as for
+nobodies it is their own well-being?”
+
+“You are very fortunate, sir----”
+
+“The first inventor of ditches must have been a weakling, for society
+is only useful to the puny. The savage and the philosopher, at either
+extreme of the moral scale, hold property in equal horror.”
+
+“All very fine!” said Cardot; “but if there were no property, there
+would be no documents to draw up.”
+
+“These green peas are excessively delicious!”
+
+“And the _cure_ was found dead in his bed in the morning....”
+
+“Who is talking about death? Pray don’t trifle, I have an uncle.”
+
+“Could you bear his loss with resignation?”
+
+“No question.”
+
+“Gentlemen, listen to me! _How to kill an uncle_. Silence! (Cries of
+“Hush! hush!”) In the first place, take an uncle, large and stout,
+seventy years old at least, they are the best uncles. (Sensation.) Get
+him to eat a pate de foie gras, any pretext will do.”
+
+“Ah, but my uncle is a thin, tall man, and very niggardly and
+abstemious.”
+
+“That sort of uncle is a monster; he misappropriates existence.”
+
+“Then,” the speaker on uncles went on, “tell him, while he is digesting
+it, that his banker has failed.”
+
+“How if he bears up?”
+
+“Let loose a pretty girl on him.”
+
+“And if----?” asked the other, with a shake of the head.
+
+“Then he wouldn’t be an uncle--an uncle is a gay dog by nature.”
+
+“Malibran has lost two notes in her voice.”
+
+“No, sir, she has not.”
+
+“Yes, sir, she has.”
+
+“Oh, ho! No and yes, is not that the sum-up of all religious, political,
+or literary dissertations? Man is a clown dancing on the edge of an
+abyss.”
+
+“You would make out that I am a fool.”
+
+“On the contrary, you cannot make me out.”
+
+“Education, there’s a pretty piece of tomfoolery. M. Heineffettermach
+estimates the number of printed volumes at more than a thousand
+millions; and a man cannot read more than a hundred and fifty thousand
+in his lifetime. So, just tell me what that word _education_ means. For
+some it consists in knowing the name of Alexander’s horse, of the dog
+Berecillo, of the Seigneur d’Accords, and in ignorance of the man to
+whom we owe the discovery of rafting and the manufacture of porcelain.
+For others it is the knowledge how to burn a will and live respected, be
+looked up to and popular, instead of stealing a watch with half-a-dozen
+aggravating circumstances, after a previous conviction, and so
+perishing, hated and dishonored, in the Place de Greve.”
+
+“Will Nathan’s work live?”
+
+“He has very clever collaborators, sir.”
+
+“Or Canalis?”
+
+“He is a great man; let us say no more about him.”
+
+“You are all drunk!”
+
+“The consequence of a Constitution is the immediate stultification of
+intellects. Art, science, public works, everything, is consumed by a
+horribly egoistic feeling, the leprosy of the time. Three hundred of
+your bourgeoisie, set down on benches, will only think of planting
+poplars. Tyranny does great things lawlessly, while Liberty will
+scarcely trouble herself to do petty ones lawfully.”
+
+“Your reciprocal instruction will turn out counters in human flesh,”
+ broke in an Absolutist. “All individuality will disappear in a people
+brought to a dead level by education.”
+
+“For all that, is not the aim of society to secure happiness to each
+member of it?” asked the Saint-Simonian.
+
+“If you had an income of fifty thousand livres, you would not think much
+about the people. If you are smitten with a tender passion for the race,
+go to Madagascar; there you will find a nice little nation all ready to
+Saint-Simonize, classify, and cork up in your phials, but here every one
+fits into his niche like a peg in a hole. A porter is a porter, and a
+blockhead is a fool, without a college of fathers to promote them to
+those positions.”
+
+“You are a Carlist.”
+
+“And why not? Despotism pleases me; it implies a certain contempt for
+the human race. I have no animosity against kings, they are so amusing.
+Is it nothing to sit enthroned in a room, at a distance of thirty
+million leagues from the sun?”
+
+“Let us once more take a broad view of civilization,” said the man of
+learning who, for the benefit of the inattentive sculptor, had opened a
+discussion on primitive society and autochthonous races. “The vigor of a
+nation in its origin was in a way physical, unitary, and crude; then as
+aggregations increased, government advanced by a decomposition of the
+primitive rule, more or less skilfully managed. For example, in remote
+ages national strength lay in theocracy, the priest held both sword and
+censer; a little later there were two priests, the pontiff and the king.
+To-day our society, the latest word of civilization, has distributed
+power according to the number of combinations, and we come to the forces
+called business, thought, money, and eloquence. Authority thus divided
+is steadily approaching a social dissolution, with interest as its one
+opposing barrier. We depend no longer on either religion or physical
+force, but upon intellect. Can a book replace the sword? Can discussion
+be a substitute for action? That is the question.”
+
+“Intellect has made an end of everything,” cried the Carlist. “Come now!
+Absolute freedom has brought about national suicides; their triumph left
+them as listless as an English millionaire.”
+
+“Won’t you tell us something new? You have made fun of authority of all
+sorts to-day, which is every bit as vulgar as denying the existence of
+God. So you have no belief left, and the century is like an old Sultan
+worn out by debauchery! Your Byron, in short, sings of crime and its
+emotions in a final despair of poetry.”
+
+“Don’t you know,” replied Bianchon, quite drunk by this time, “that
+a dose of phosphorus more or less makes the man of genius or the
+scoundrel, a clever man or an idiot, a virtuous person or a criminal?”
+
+“Can any one treat of virtue thus?” cried Cursy. “Virtue, the subject of
+every drama at the theatre, the denoument of every play, the foundation
+of every court of law....”
+
+“Be quiet, you ass. You are an Achilles for virtue, without his heel,”
+ said Bixiou.
+
+“Some drink!”
+
+“What will you bet that I will drink a bottle of champagne like a flash,
+at one pull?”
+
+“What a flash of wit!”
+
+“Drunk as lords,” muttered a young man gravely, trying to give some wine
+to his waistcoat.
+
+“Yes, sir; real government is the art of ruling by public opinion.”
+
+“Opinion? That is the most vicious jade of all. According to you
+moralists and politicians, the laws you set up are always to go before
+those of nature, and opinion before conscience. You are right and wrong
+both. Suppose society bestows down pillows on us, that benefit is made
+up for by the gout; and justice is likewise tempered by red-tape, and
+colds accompany cashmere shawls.”
+
+“Wretch!” Emile broke in upon the misanthrope, “how can you slander
+civilization here at table, up to the eyes in wines and exquisite
+dishes? Eat away at that roebuck with the gilded horns and feet, and do
+not carp at your mother...”
+
+“Is it any fault of mine if Catholicism puts a million deities in a sack
+of flour, that Republics will end in a Napoleon, that monarchy dwells
+between the assassination of Henry IV. and the trial of Louis XVI., and
+Liberalism produces Lafayettes?”
+
+“Didn’t you embrace him in July?”
+
+“No.”
+
+“Then hold your tongue, you sceptic.”
+
+“Sceptics are the most conscientious of men.”
+
+“They have no conscience.”
+
+“What are you saying? They have two apiece at least!”
+
+“So you want to discount heaven, a thoroughly commercial notion. Ancient
+religions were but the unchecked development of physical pleasure, but
+we have developed a soul and expectations; some advance has been made.”
+
+“What can you expect, my friends, of a century filled with politics
+to repletion?” asked Nathan. “What befell _The History of the King of
+Bohemia and his Seven Castles_, a most entrancing conception?...”
+
+“I say,” the would-be critic cried down the whole length of the table.
+“The phrases might have been drawn at hap-hazard from a hat, ‘twas a
+work written ‘down to Charenton.’”
+
+“You are a fool!”
+
+“And you are a rogue!”
+
+“Oh! oh!”
+
+“Ah! ah!”
+
+“They are going to fight.”
+
+“No, they aren’t.”
+
+“You will find me to-morrow, sir.”
+
+“This very moment,” Nathan answered.
+
+“Come, come, you pair of fire-eaters!”
+
+“You are another!” said the prime mover in the quarrel.
+
+“Ah, I can’t stand upright, perhaps?” asked the pugnacious Nathan,
+straightening himself up like a stag-beetle about to fly.
+
+He stared stupidly round the table, then, completely exhausted by the
+effort, sank back into his chair, and mutely hung his head.
+
+“Would it not have been nice,” the critic said to his neighbor, “to
+fight about a book I have neither read nor seen?”
+
+“Emile, look out for your coat; your neighbor is growing pale,” said
+Bixiou.
+
+“Kant? Yet another ball flung out for fools to sport with, sir!
+Materialism and spiritualism are a fine pair of battledores with which
+charlatans in long gowns keep a shuttlecock a-going. Suppose that God
+is everywhere, as Spinoza says, or that all things proceed from God, as
+says St. Paul... the nincompoops, the door shuts or opens, but isn’t the
+movement the same? Does the fowl come from the egg, or the egg from the
+fowl?... Just hand me some duck... and there, you have all science.”
+
+“Simpleton!” cried the man of science, “your problem is settled by
+fact!”
+
+“What fact?”
+
+“Professors’ chairs were not made for philosophy, but philosophy for the
+professors’ chairs. Put on a pair of spectacles and read the budget.”
+
+“Thieves!”
+
+“Nincompoops!”
+
+“Knaves!”
+
+“Gulls!”
+
+“Where but in Paris will you find such a ready and rapid exchange of
+thought?” cried Bixiou in a deep, bass voice.
+
+“Bixiou! Act a classical farce for us! Come now.”
+
+“Would you like me to depict the nineteenth century?”
+
+“Silence.”
+
+“Pay attention.”
+
+“Clap a muffle on your trumpets.”
+
+“Shut up, you Turk!”
+
+“Give him some wine, and let that fellow keep quiet.”
+
+“Now, then, Bixiou!”
+
+The artist buttoned his black coat to the collar, put on yellow gloves,
+and began to burlesque the _Revue des Deux Mondes_ by acting a squinting
+old lady; but the uproar drowned his voice, and no one heard a word of
+the satire. Still, if he did not catch the spirit of the century, he
+represented the _Revue_ at any rate, for his own intentions were not
+very clear to him.
+
+Dessert was served as if by magic. A huge epergne of gilded bronze
+from Thomire’s studio overshadowed the table. Tall statuettes, which a
+celebrated artist had endued with ideal beauty according to conventional
+European notions, sustained and carried pyramids of strawberries, pines,
+fresh dates, golden grapes, clear-skinned peaches, oranges brought
+from Setubal by steamer, pomegranates, Chinese fruit; in short, all
+the surprises of luxury, miracles of confectionery, the most tempting
+dainties, and choicest delicacies. The coloring of this epicurean work
+of art was enhanced by the splendors of porcelain, by sparkling outlines
+of gold, by the chasing of the vases. Poussin’s landscapes, copied
+on Sevres ware, were crowned with graceful fringes of moss, green,
+translucent, and fragile as ocean weeds.
+
+The revenue of a German prince would not have defrayed the cost of this
+arrogant display. Silver and mother-of-pearl, gold and crystal, were
+lavished afresh in new forms; but scarcely a vague idea of this almost
+Oriental fairyland penetrated eyes now heavy with wine, or crossed the
+delirium of intoxication. The fire and fragrance of the wines acted like
+potent philters and magical fumes, producing a kind of mirage in the
+brain, binding feet, and weighing down hands. The clamor increased.
+Words were no longer distinct, glasses flew in pieces, senseless peals
+of laughter broke out. Cursy snatched up a horn and struck up a flourish
+on it. It acted like a signal given by the devil. Yells, hisses, songs,
+cries, and groans went up from the maddened crew. You might have smiled
+to see men, light-hearted by nature, grow tragical as Crebillon’s
+dramas, and pensive as a sailor in a coach. Hard-headed men blabbed
+secrets to the inquisitive, who were long past heeding them. Saturnine
+faces were wreathed in smiles worthy of a pirouetting dancer. Claude
+Vignon shuffled about like a bear in a cage. Intimate friends began to
+fight.
+
+Animal likenesses, so curiously traced by physiologists in human faces,
+came out in gestures and behavior. A book lay open for a Bichat if he
+had repaired thither fasting and collected. The master of the house,
+knowing his condition, did not dare stir, but encouraged his guests’
+extravangances with a fixed grimacing smile, meant to be hospitable and
+appropriate. His large face, turning from blue and red to a purple shade
+terrible to see, partook of the general commotion by movements like the
+heaving and pitching of a brig.
+
+“Now, did you murder them?” Emile asked him.
+
+“Capital punishment is going to be abolished, they say, in favor of
+the Revolution of July,” answered Taillefer, raising his eyebrows with
+drunken sagacity.
+
+“Don’t they rise up before you in dreams at times?” Raphael persisted.
+
+“There’s a statute of limitations,” said the murderer-Croesus.
+
+“And on his tombstone,” Emile began, with a sardonic laugh, “the
+stonemason will carve ‘Passer-by, accord a tear, in memory of one that’s
+here!’ Oh,” he continued, “I would cheerfully pay a hundred sous to
+any mathematician who would prove the existence of hell to me by an
+algebraical equation.”
+
+He flung up a coin and cried:
+
+“Heads for the existence of God!”
+
+“Don’t look!” Raphael cried, pouncing upon it. “Who knows? Suspense is
+so pleasant.”
+
+“Unluckily,” Emile said, with burlesque melancholy, “I can see no
+halting-place between the unbeliever’s arithmetic and the papal _Pater
+noster_. Pshaw! let us drink. _Trinq_ was, I believe, the oracular
+answer of the _dive bouteille_ and the final conclusion of Pantagruel.”
+
+“We owe our arts and monuments to the _Pater noster_, and our knowledge,
+too, perhaps; and a still greater benefit--modern government--whereby a
+vast and teeming society is wondrously represented by some five hundred
+intellects. It neutralizes opposing forces and gives free play to
+_Civilization_, that Titan queen who has succeeded the ancient terrible
+figure of the _King_, that sham Providence, reared by man between
+himself and heaven. In the face of such achievements, atheism seems like
+a barren skeleton. What do you say?”
+
+“I am thinking of the seas of blood shed by Catholicism.” Emile replied,
+quite unimpressed. “It has drained our hearts and veins dry to make a
+mimic deluge. No matter! Every man who thinks must range himself beneath
+the banner of Christ, for He alone has consummated the triumph of spirit
+over matter; He alone has revealed to us, like a poet, an intermediate
+world that separates us from the Deity.”
+
+“Believest thou?” asked Raphael with an unaccountable drunken smile.
+“Very good; we must not commit ourselves; so we will drink the
+celebrated toast, _Diis ignotis_!”
+
+And they drained the chalice filled up with science, carbonic acid gas,
+perfumes, poetry, and incredulity.
+
+“If the gentlemen will go to the drawing-room, coffee is ready for
+them,” said the major-domo.
+
+There was scarcely one of those present whose mind was not floundering
+by this time in the delights of chaos, where every spark of intelligence
+is quenched, and the body, set free from its tyranny, gives itself up
+to the frenetic joys of liberty. Some who had arrived at the apogee of
+intoxication were dejected, as they painfully tried to arrest a single
+thought which might assure them of their own existence; others, deep in
+the heavy morasses of indigestion, denied the possibility of movement.
+The noisy and the silent were oddly assorted.
+
+For all that, when new joys were announced to them by the stentorian
+tones of the servant, who spoke on his master’s behalf, they all rose,
+leaning upon, dragging or carrying one another. But on the threshold
+of the room the entire crew paused for a moment, motionless, as if
+fascinated. The intemperate pleasures of the banquet seemed to fade away
+at this titillating spectacle, prepared by their amphitryon to appeal to
+the most sensual of their instincts.
+
+Beneath the shining wax-lights in a golden chandelier, round about a
+table inlaid with gilded metal, a group of women, whose eyes shone
+like diamonds, suddenly met the stupefied stare of the revelers. Their
+toilettes were splendid, but less magnificent than their beauty, which
+eclipsed the other marvels of this palace. A light shone from their
+eyes, bewitching as those of sirens, more brilliant and ardent than the
+blaze that streamed down upon the snowy marble, the delicately carved
+surfaces of bronze, and lit up the satin sheen of the tapestry. The
+contrasts of their attitudes and the slight movements of their heads,
+each differing in character and nature of attraction, set the heart
+afire. It was like a thicket, where blossoms mingled with rubies,
+sapphires, and coral; a combination of gossamer scarves that flickered
+like beacon-lights; of black ribbons about snowy throats; of gorgeous
+turbans and demurely enticing apparel. It was a seraglio that appealed
+to every eye, and fulfilled every fancy. Each form posed to admiration
+was scarcely concealed by the folds of cashmere, and half hidden, half
+revealed by transparent gauze and diaphanous silk. The little slender
+feet were eloquent, though the fresh red lips uttered no sound.
+
+Demure and fragile-looking girls, pictures of maidenly innocence, with
+a semblance of conventional unction about their heads, were there like
+apparitions that a breath might dissipate. Aristocratic beauties with
+haughty glances, languid, flexible, slender, and complaisant, bent their
+heads as though there were royal protectors still in the market. An
+English-woman seemed like a spirit of melancholy--some coy, pale,
+shadowy form among Ossian’s mists, or a type of remorse flying from
+crime. The Parisienne was not wanting in all her beauty that consists
+in an indescribable charm; armed with her irresistible weakness, vain of
+her costume and her wit, pliant and hard, a heartless, passionless siren
+that yet can create factitious treasures of passion and counterfeit
+emotion.
+
+Italians shone in the throng, serene and self-possessed in their bliss;
+handsome Normans, with splendid figures; women of the south, with black
+hair and well-shaped eyes. Lebel might have summoned together all the
+fair women of Versailles, who since morning had perfected all their
+wiles, and now came like a troupe of Oriental women, bidden by the slave
+merchant to be ready to set out at dawn. They stood disconcerted and
+confused about the table, huddled together in a murmuring group
+like bees in a hive. The combination of timid embarrassment with
+coquettishness and a sort of expostulation was the result either of
+calculated effect or a spontaneous modesty. Perhaps a sentiment of which
+women are never utterly divested prescribed to them the cloak of modesty
+to heighten and enhance the charms of wantonness. So the venerable
+Taillefer’s designs seemed on the point of collapse, for these unbridled
+natures were subdued from the very first by the majesty with which woman
+is invested. There was a murmur of admiration, which vibrated like a
+soft musical note. Wine had not taken love for traveling companion;
+instead of a violent tumult of passions, the guests thus taken by
+surprise, in a moment of weakness, gave themselves up to luxurious
+raptures of delight.
+
+Artists obeyed the voice of poetry which constrains them, and studied
+with pleasure the different delicate tints of these chosen examples of
+beauty. Sobered by a thought perhaps due to some emanation from a
+bubble of carbonic acid in the champagne, a philosopher shuddered at the
+misfortunes which had brought these women, once perhaps worthy of the
+truest devotion, to this. Each one doubtless could have unfolded a cruel
+tragedy. Infernal tortures followed in the train of most of them, and
+they drew after them faithless men, broken vows, and pleasures atoned
+for in wretchedness. Polite advances were made by the guests, and
+conversations began, as varied in character as the speakers. They broke
+up into groups. It might have been a fashionable drawing-room where
+ladies and young girls offer after dinner the assistance that coffee,
+liqueurs, and sugar afford to diners who are struggling in the toils
+of a perverse digestion. But in a little while laughter broke out,
+the murmur grew, and voices were raised. The saturnalia, subdued for a
+moment, threatened at times to renew itself. The alternations of sound
+and silence bore a distant resemblance to a symphony of Beethoven’s.
+
+The two friends, seated on a silken divan, were first approached by
+a tall, well-proportioned girl of stately bearing; her features were
+irregular, but her face was striking and vehement in expression, and
+impressed the mind by the vigor of its contrasts. Her dark hair fell
+in luxuriant curls, with which some hand seemed to have played havoc
+already, for the locks fell lightly over the splendid shoulders that
+thus attracted attention. The long brown curls half hid her queenly
+throat, though where the light fell upon it, the delicacy of its fine
+outlines was revealed. Her warm and vivid coloring was set off by the
+dead white of her complexion. Bold and ardent glances came from under
+the long eyelashes; the damp, red, half-open lips challenged a kiss. Her
+frame was strong but compliant; with a bust and arms strongly developed,
+as in figures drawn by the Caracci, she yet seemed active and elastic,
+with a panther’s strength and suppleness, and in the same way the
+energetic grace of her figure suggested fierce pleasures.
+
+But though she might romp perhaps and laugh, there was something
+terrible in her eyes and her smile. Like a pythoness possessed by the
+demon, she inspired awe rather than pleasure. All changes, one after
+another, flashed like lightning over every mobile feature of her face.
+She might captivate a jaded fancy, but a young man would have feared
+her. She was like some colossal statue fallen from the height of a Greek
+temple, so grand when seen afar, too roughly hewn to be seen anear.
+And yet, in spite of all, her terrible beauty could have stimulated
+exhaustion; her voice might charm the deaf; her glances might put life
+into the bones of the dead; and therefore Emile was vaguely reminded of
+one of Shakespeare’s tragedies--a wonderful maze, in which joy
+groans, and there is something wild even about love, and the magic of
+forgiveness and the warmth of happiness succeed to cruel storms of rage.
+She was a siren that can both kiss and devour; laugh like a devil, or
+weep as angels can. She could concentrate in one instant all a woman’s
+powers of attraction in a single effort (the sighs of melancholy and
+the charms of maiden’s shyness alone excepted), then in a moment rise
+in fury like a nation in revolt, and tear herself, her passion, and her
+lover, in pieces.
+
+Dressed in red velvet, she trampled under her reckless feet the stray
+flowers fallen from other heads, and held out a salver to the two
+friends, with careless hands. The white arms stood out in bold relief
+against the velvet. Proud of her beauty; proud (who knows?) of her
+corruption, she stood like a queen of pleasure, like an incarnation of
+enjoyment; the enjoyment that comes of squandering the accumulations of
+three generations; that scoffs at its progenitors, and makes merry over
+a corpse; that will dissolve pearls and wreck thrones, turn old men into
+boys, and make young men prematurely old; enjoyment only possible to
+giants weary of their power, tormented by reflection, or for whom strife
+has become a plaything.
+
+“What is your name?” asked Raphael.
+
+“Aquilina.”
+
+“Out of _Venice Preserved_!” exclaimed Emile.
+
+“Yes,” she answered. “Just as a pope takes a new name when he is exalted
+above all other men, I, too, took another name when I raised myself
+above women’s level.”
+
+“Then have you, like your patron saint, a terrible and noble lover, a
+conspirator, who would die for you?” cried Emile eagerly--this gleam of
+poetry had aroused his interest.
+
+“Once I had,” she answered. “But I had a rival too in La Guillotine. I
+have worn something red about me ever since, lest any happiness should
+carry me away.”
+
+“Oh, if you are going to get her on to the story of those four lads
+of La Rochelle, she will never get to the end of it. That’s enough,
+Aquilina. As if every woman could not bewail some lover or other, though
+not every one has the luck to lose him on the scaffold, as you have
+done. I would a great deal sooner see a lover of mine in a trench at the
+back of Clamart than in a rival’s arms.”
+
+All this in the gentlest and most melodious accents, and pronounced by
+the prettiest, gentlest, and most innocent-looking little person that
+a fairy wand ever drew from an enchanted eggshell. She had come
+up noiselessly, and they became aware of a slender, dainty figure,
+charmingly timid blue eyes, and white transparent brows. No ingenue
+among the naiads, a truant from her river spring, could have been shyer,
+whiter, more ingenuous than this young girl, seemingly about sixteen
+years old, ignorant of evil and of the storms of life, and fresh from
+some church in which she must have prayed the angels to call her to
+heaven before the time. Only in Paris are such natures as this to be
+found, concealing depths of depravity behind a fair mask, and the most
+artificial vices beneath a brow as young and fair as an opening flower.
+
+At first the angelic promise of those soft lineaments misled the
+friends. Raphael and Emile took the coffee which she poured into the
+cups brought by Aquilina, and began to talk with her. In the eyes of the
+two poets she soon became transformed into some sombre allegory, of
+I know not what aspect of human life. She opposed to the vigorous
+and ardent expression of her commanding acquaintance a revelation
+of heartless corruption and voluptuous cruelty. Heedless enough to
+perpetrate a crime, hardy enough to feel no misgivings; a pitiless demon
+that wrings larger and kinder natures with torments that it is incapable
+of knowing, that simpers over a traffic in love, sheds tears over a
+victim’s funeral, and beams with joy over the reading of the will.
+A poet might have admired the magnificent Aquilina; but the winning
+Euphrasia must be repulsive to every one--the first was the soul of sin;
+the second, sin without a soul in it.
+
+“I should dearly like to know,” Emile remarked to this pleasing being,
+“if you ever reflect upon your future?”
+
+“My future!” she answered with a laugh. “What do you mean by my future?
+Why should I think about something that does not exist as yet? I never
+look before or behind. Isn’t one day at a time more than I can concern
+myself with as it is? And besides, the future, as we know, means the
+hospital.”
+
+“How can you forsee a future in the hospital, and make no effort to
+avert it?”
+
+“What is there so alarming about the hospital?” asked the terrific
+Aquilina. “When we are neither wives nor mothers, when old age draws
+black stockings over our limbs, sets wrinkles on our brows, withers up
+the woman in us, and darkens the light in our lover’s eyes, what could
+we need when that comes to pass? You would look on us then as mere
+human clay; we with our habiliments shall be for you like so much
+mud--worthless, lifeless, crumbling to pieces, going about with the
+rustle of dead leaves. Rags or the daintiest finery will be as one to us
+then; the ambergris of the boudoir will breathe an odor of death and dry
+bones; and suppose there is a heart there in that mud, not one of you
+but would make mock of it, not so much as a memory will you spare to
+us. Is not our existence precisely the same whether we live in a fine
+mansion with lap-dogs to tend, or sort rags in a workhouse? Does it make
+much difference whether we shall hide our gray heads beneath lace or a
+handkerchief striped with blue and red; whether we sweep a crossing with
+a birch broom, or the steps of the Tuileries with satins; whether we sit
+beside a gilded hearth, or cower over the ashes in a red earthen pot;
+whether we go to the Opera or look on in the Place de Greve?”
+
+“_Aquilina mia_, you have never shown more sense than in this depressing
+fit of yours,” Euphrasia remarked. “Yes, cashmere, _point d’Alencon_,
+perfumes, gold, silks, luxury, everything that sparkles, everything
+pleasant, belongs to youth alone. Time alone may show us our folly, but
+good fortune will acquit us. You are laughing at me,” she went on, with
+a malicious glance at the friends; “but am I not right? I would sooner
+die of pleasure than of illness. I am not afflicted with a mania for
+perpetuity, nor have I a great veneration for human nature, such as God
+has made it. Give me millions, and I would squander them; I should not
+keep one centime for the year to come. Live to be charming and have
+power, that is the decree of my every heartbeat. Society sanctions my
+life; does it not pay for my extravagances? Why does Providence pay me
+every morning my income, which I spend every evening? Why are hospitals
+built for us? And Providence did not put good and evil on either hand
+for us to select what tires and pains us. I should be very foolish if I
+did not amuse myself.”
+
+“And how about others?” asked Emile.
+
+“Others? Oh, well, they must manage for themselves. I prefer laughing
+at their woes to weeping over my own. I defy any man to give me the
+slightest uneasiness.”
+
+“What have you suffered to make you think like this?” asked Raphael.
+
+“I myself have been forsaken for an inheritance,” she said, striking an
+attitude that displayed all her charms; “and yet I had worked night and
+day to keep my lover! I am not to be gulled by any smile or vow, and I
+have set myself to make one long entertainment of my life.”
+
+“But does not happiness come from the soul within?” cried Raphael.
+
+“It may be so,” Aquilina answered; “but is it nothing to be conscious of
+admiration and flattery; to triumph over other women, even over the most
+virtuous, humiliating them before our beauty and our splendor? Not only
+so; one day of our life is worth ten years of a bourgeoise existence,
+and so it is all summed up.”
+
+“Is not a woman hateful without virtue?” Emile said to Raphael.
+
+Euphrasia’s glance was like a viper’s, as she said, with an irony in her
+voice that cannot be rendered:
+
+“Virtue! we leave that to deformity and to ugly women. What would the
+poor things be without it?”
+
+“Hush, be quiet,” Emile broke in. “Don’t talk about something you have
+never known.”
+
+“That I have never known!” Euphrasia answered. “You give yourself for
+life to some person you abominate; you must bring up children who will
+neglect you, who wound your very heart, and you must say, ‘Thank you!’
+for it; and these are the virtues you prescribe to woman. And that is
+not enough. By way of requiting her self-denial, you must come and
+add to her sorrows by trying to lead her astray; and though you are
+rebuffed, she is compromised. A nice life! How far better to keep one’s
+freedom, to follow one’s inclinations in love, and die young!”
+
+“Have you no fear of the price to be paid some day for all this?”
+
+“Even then,” she said, “instead of mingling pleasures and troubles, my
+life will consist of two separate parts--a youth of happiness is secure,
+and there may come a hazy, uncertain old age, during which I can suffer
+at my leisure.”
+
+“She has never loved,” came in the deep tones of Aquilina’s voice. “She
+never went a hundred leagues to drink in one look and a denial with
+untold raptures. She has not hung her own life on a thread, nor tried
+to stab more than one man to save her sovereign lord, her king, her
+divinity.... Love, for her, meant a fascinating colonel.”
+
+“Here she is with her La Rochelle,” Euphrasia made answer. “Love comes
+like the wind, no one knows whence. And, for that matter, if one of
+those brutes had once fallen in love with you, you would hold sensible
+men in horror.”
+
+“Brutes are put out of the question by the Code,” said the tall,
+sarcastic Aquilina.
+
+“I thought you had more kindness for the army,” laughed Euphrasia.
+
+“How happy they are in their power of dethroning their reason in this
+way,” Raphael exclaimed.
+
+“Happy?” asked Aquilina, with dreadful look, and a smile full of pity
+and terror. “Ah, you do not know what it is to be condemned to a life of
+pleasure, with your dead hidden in your heart....”
+
+A moment’s consideration of the rooms was like a foretaste of Milton’s
+Pandemonium. The faces of those still capable of drinking wore a hideous
+blue tint, from burning draughts of punch. Mad dances were kept up with
+wild energy; excited laughter and outcries broke out like the explosion
+of fireworks. The boudoir and a small adjoining room were strewn like
+a battlefield with the insensible and incapable. Wine, pleasure,
+and dispute had heated the atmosphere. Wine and love, delirium and
+unconsciousness possessed them, and were written upon all faces, upon
+the furniture; were expressed by the surrounding disorder, and brought
+light films over the vision of those assembled, so that the air seemed
+full of intoxicating vapor. A glittering dust arose, as in the luminous
+paths made by a ray of sunlight, the most bizarre forms flitted through
+it, grotesque struggles were seen athwart it. Groups of interlaced
+figures blended with the white marbles, the noble masterpieces of
+sculpture that adorned the rooms.
+
+Though the two friends yet preserved a sort of fallacious clearness
+in their ideas and voices, a feeble appearance and faint thrill of
+animation, it was yet almost impossible to distinguish what was real
+among the fantastic absurdities before them, or what foundation there
+was for the impossible pictures that passed unceasingly before their
+weary eyes. The strangest phenomena of dreams beset them, the lowering
+heavens, the fervid sweetness caught by faces in our visions, and
+unheard-of agility under a load of chains,--all these so vividly, that
+they took the pranks of the orgy about them for the freaks of some
+nightmare in which all movement is silent, and cries never reach
+the ear. The valet de chambre succeeded just then, after some little
+difficulty, in drawing his master into the ante-chamber to whisper to
+him:
+
+“The neighbors are all at their windows, complaining of the racket,
+sir.”
+
+“If noise alarms them, why don’t they lay down straw before their
+doors?” was Taillefer’s rejoinder.
+
+Raphael’s sudden burst of laughter was so unseasonable and abrupt, that
+his friend demanded the reason of his unseemly hilarity.
+
+“You will hardly understand me,” he replied. “In the first place, I must
+admit that you stopped me on the Quai Voltaire just as I was about to
+throw myself into the Seine, and you would like to know, no doubt, my
+motives for dying. And when I proceed to tell you that by an almost
+miraculous chance the most poetic memorials of the material world had
+but just then been summed up for me as a symbolical interpretation of
+human wisdom; whilst at this minute the remains of all the intellectual
+treasures ravaged by us at table are comprised in these two women, the
+living and authentic types of folly, would you be any the wiser? Our
+profound apathy towards men and things supplied the half-tones in a
+crudely contrasted picture of two theories of life so diametrically
+opposed. If you were not drunk, you might perhaps catch a gleam of
+philosophy in this.”
+
+“And if you had not both feet on that fascinating Aquilina, whose
+heavy breathing suggests an analogy with the sounds of a storm about
+to burst,” replied Emile, absently engaged in the harmless amusement of
+winding and unwinding Euphrasia’s hair, “you would be ashamed of your
+inebriated garrulity. Both your systems can be packed in a phrase, and
+reduced to a single idea. The mere routine of living brings a stupid
+kind of wisdom with it, by blunting our intelligence with work; and on
+the other hand, a life passed in the limbo of the abstract or in the
+abysses of the moral world, produces a sort of wisdom run mad. The
+conditions may be summed up in brief; we may extinguish emotion, and so
+live to old age, or we may choose to die young as martyrs to contending
+passions. And yet this decree is at variance with the temperaments with
+which we were endowed by the bitter jester who modeled all creatures.”
+
+“Idiot!” Raphael burst in. “Go on epitomizing yourself after that
+fashion, and you will fill volumes. If I attempted to formulate those
+two ideas clearly, I might as well say that man is corrupted by the
+exercise of his wits, and purified by ignorance. You are calling the
+whole fabric of society to account. But whether we live with the wise
+or perish with the fool, isn’t the result the same sooner or later? And
+have not the prime constituents of the quintessence of both systems been
+before expressed in a couple of words--_Carymary_, _Carymara_.”
+
+“You make me doubt the existence of a God, for your stupidity is greater
+than His power,” said Emile. “Our beloved Rabelais summed it all up in
+a shorter word than your ‘_Carymary_, _Carymara_’; from his _Peut-etre_
+Montaigne derived his own _Que sais-je_? After all, this last word of
+moral science is scarcely more than the cry of Pyrrhus set betwixt good
+and evil, or Buridan’s ass between the two measures of oats. But let
+this everlasting question alone, resolved to-day by a ‘Yes’ and a ‘No.’
+What experience did you look to find by a jump into the Seine? Were you
+jealous of the hydraulic machine on the Pont Notre Dame?”
+
+“Ah, if you but knew my history!”
+
+“Pooh,” said Emile; “I did not think you could be so commonplace; that
+remark is hackneyed. Don’t you know that every one of us claims to have
+suffered as no other ever did?”
+
+“Ah!” Raphael sighed.
+
+“What a mountebank art thou with thy ‘Ah’! Look here, now. Does some
+disease of the mind or body, by contracting your muscles, bring back
+of a morning the wild horses that tear you in pieces at night, as with
+Damiens once upon a time? Were you driven to sup off your own dog in a
+garret, uncooked and without salt? Have your children ever cried, ‘I am
+hungry’? Have you sold your mistress’ hair to hazard the money at play?
+Have you ever drawn a sham bill of exchange on a fictitious uncle at a
+sham address, and feared lest you should not be in time to take it up?
+Come now, I am attending! If you were going to drown yourself for some
+woman, or by way of a protest, or out of sheer dulness, I disown you.
+Make your confession, and no lies! I don’t at all want a historical
+memoir. And, above all things, be as concise as your clouded intellect
+permits; I am as critical as a professor, and as sleepy as a woman at
+her vespers.”
+
+“You silly fool!” said Raphael. “When has not suffering been keener for
+a more susceptible nature? Some day when science has attained to a pitch
+that enables us to study the natural history of hearts, when they
+are named and classified in genera, sub-genera, and families; into
+crustaceae, fossils, saurians, infusoria, or whatever it is,--then, my
+dear fellow, it will be ascertained that there are natures as tender
+and fragile as flowers, that are broken by the slight bruises that some
+stony hearts do not even feel----”
+
+“For pity’s sake, spare me thy exordium,” said Emile, as, half
+plaintive, half amused, he took Raphael’s hand.
+
+
+
+
+II. A WOMAN WITHOUT A HEART
+
+
+After a moment’s silence, Raphael said with a careless gesture:
+
+“Perhaps it is an effect of the fumes of punch--I really cannot
+tell--this clearness of mind that enables me to comprise my whole
+life in a single picture, where figures and hues, lights, shades, and
+half-tones are faithfully rendered. I should not have been so surprised
+at this poetical play of imagination if it were not accompanied with
+a sort of scorn for my past joys and sorrows. Seen from afar, my life
+appears to contract by some mental process. That long, slow agony of ten
+years’ duration can be brought to memory to-day in some few phrases,
+in which pain is resolved into a mere idea, and pleasure becomes
+a philosophical reflection. Instead of feeling things, I weigh and
+consider them----”
+
+“You are as tiresome as the explanation of an amendment,” cried Emile.
+
+“Very likely,” said Raphael submissively. “I spare you the first
+seventeen years of my life for fear of abusing a listener’s patience.
+Till that time, like you and thousands of others, I had lived my life
+at school or the lycee, with its imaginary troubles and genuine
+happinesses, which are so pleasant to look back upon. Our jaded palates
+still crave for that Lenten fare, so long as we have not tried it
+afresh. It was a pleasant life, with the tasks that we thought so
+contemptible, but which taught us application for all that....”
+
+“Let the drama begin,” said Emile, half-plaintively, half-comically.
+
+“When I left school,” Raphael went on, with a gesture that claimed the
+right of speaking, “my father submitted me to a strict discipline; he
+installed me in a room near his own study, and I had to rise at five in
+the morning and be in bed by nine at night. He meant me to take my law
+studies seriously. I attended the Schools, and read with an advocate
+as well, but my lectures and work were so narrowly circumscribed by the
+laws of time and space, and my father required such a strict account of
+my doings, at dinner, that...”
+
+“What is this to me?” asked Emile.
+
+“The devil take you!” said Raphael. “How are you to enter into my
+feelings if I do not relate the facts that insensibly shaped my
+character, made me timid, and prolonged the period of youthful
+simplicity? In this manner I cowered under as strict a despotism as a
+monarch’s till I came of age. To depict the tedium of my life, it will
+be perhaps enough to portray my father to you. He was tall, thin, and
+slight, with a hatchet face, and pale complexion; a man of few words,
+fidgety as an old maid, exacting as a senior clerk. His paternal
+solicitude hovered over my merriment and gleeful thoughts, and seemed to
+cover them with a leaden pall. Any effusive demonstration on my part was
+received by him as a childish absurdity. I was far more afraid of him
+than I had been of any of our masters at school.
+
+“I seem to see him before me at this moment. In his chestnut-brown
+frock-coat he looked like a red herring wrapped up in the cover of a
+pamphlet, and he held himself as erect as an Easter candle. But I was
+fond of my father, and at heart he was right enough. Perhaps we never
+hate severity when it has its source in greatness of character and pure
+morals, and is skilfully tempered with kindness. My father, it is true,
+never left me a moment to myself, and only when I was twenty years
+old gave me so much as ten francs of my own, ten knavish prodigals
+of francs, such a hoard as I had long vainly desired, which set me
+a-dreaming of unutterable felicity; yet, for all that he sought to
+procure relaxations for me. When he had promised me a treat beforehand,
+he would take me to Les Boufoons, or to a concert or ball, where I hoped
+to find a mistress.... A mistress! that meant independence. But bashful
+and timid as I was, knowing nobody, and ignorant of the dialect of
+drawing-rooms, I always came back as awkward as ever, and swelling with
+unsatisfied desires, to be put in harness like a troop horse next day
+by my father, and to return with morning to my advocate, the Palais de
+Justice, and the law. To have swerved from the straight course which my
+father had mapped out for me, would have drawn down his wrath upon me;
+at my first delinquency, he threatened to ship me off as a cabin-boy
+to the Antilles. A dreadful shiver ran through me if I had ventured to
+spend a couple of hours in some pleasure party.
+
+“Imagine the most wandering imagination and passionate temperament, the
+tenderest soul and most artistic nature, dwelling continually in the
+presence of the most flint-hearted, atrabilious, and frigid man on
+earth; think of me as a young girl married to a skeleton, and you will
+understand the life whose curious scenes can only be a hearsay tale to
+you; the plans for running away that perished at the sight of my father,
+the despair soothed by slumber, the dark broodings charmed away by
+music. I breathed my sorrows forth in melodies. Beethoven or Mozart
+would keep my confidences sacred. Nowadays, I smile at recollections of
+the scruples which burdened my conscience at that epoch of innocence and
+virtue.
+
+“If I set foot in a restaurant, I gave myself up for lost; my fancy
+led me to look on a cafe as a disreputable haunt, where men lost their
+characters and embarrassed their fortunes; as for engaging in play, I
+had not the money to risk. Oh, if I needed to send you to sleep, I would
+tell you about one of the most frightful pleasures of my life, one of
+those pleasures with fangs that bury themselves in the heart as the
+branding-iron enters the convict’s shoulder. I was at a ball at the
+house of the Duc de Navarreins, my father’s cousin. But to make
+my position the more perfectly clear, you must know that I wore a
+threadbare coat, ill-fitting shoes, a tie fit for a stableman, and a
+soiled pair of gloves. I shrank into a corner to eat ices and watch
+the pretty faces at my leisure. My father noticed me. Actuated by
+some motive that I did not fathom, so dumfounded was I by this act of
+confidence, he handed me his keys and purse to keep. Ten paces away some
+men were gambling. I heard the rattling of gold; I was twenty years old;
+I longed to be steeped for one whole day in the follies of my time of
+life. It was a license of the imagination that would find a parallel
+neither in the freaks of courtesans, nor in the dreams of young girls.
+For a year past I had beheld myself well dressed, in a carriage, with
+a pretty woman by my side, playing the great lord, dining at Very’s,
+deciding not to go back home till the morrow; but was prepared for my
+father with a plot more intricate than the Marriage of Figaro, which
+he could not possibly have unraveled. All this bliss would cost, I
+estimated, fifty crowns. Was it not the artless idea of playing truant
+that still had charms for me?
+
+“I went into a small adjoining room, and when alone counted my father’s
+money with smarting eyes and trembling fingers--a hundred crowns! The
+joys of my escapade rose before me at the thought of the amount; joys
+that flitted about me like Macbeth’s witches round their caldron;
+joys how alluring! how thrilling! how delicious! I became a deliberate
+rascal. I heeded neither my tingling ears nor the violent beating of my
+heart, but took out two twenty-franc pieces that I seem to see yet. The
+dates had been erased, and Bonaparte’s head simpered upon them. After I
+had put back the purse in my pocket, I returned to the gaming-table with
+the two pieces of gold in the palms of my damp hands, prowling about
+the players like a sparrow-hawk round a coop of chickens. Tormented by
+inexpressible terror, I flung a sudden clairvoyant glance round me, and
+feeling quite sure that I was seen by none of my acquaintance, betted on
+a stout, jovial little man, heaping upon his head more prayers and
+vows than are put up during two or three storms at sea. Then, with an
+intuitive scoundrelism, or Machiavelism, surprising in one of my age, I
+went and stood in the door, and looked about me in the rooms, though
+I saw nothing; for both mind and eyes hovered about that fateful green
+cloth.
+
+“That evening fixes the date of a first observation of a physiological
+kind; to it I owe a kind of insight into certain mysteries of our double
+nature that I have since been enabled to penetrate. I had my back turned
+on the table where my future felicity lay at stake, a felicity but so
+much the more intense that it was criminal. Between me and the players
+stood a wall of onlookers some five feet deep, who were chatting; the
+murmur of voices drowned the clinking of gold, which mingled in
+the sounds sent up by this orchestra; yet, despite all obstacles, I
+distinctly heard the words of the two players by a gift accorded to the
+passions, which enables them to annihilate time and space. I saw the
+points they made; I knew which of the two turned up the king as well as
+if I had actually seen the cards; at a distance of ten paces, in short,
+the fortunes of play blanched my face.
+
+“My father suddenly went by, and then I knew what the Scripture meant by
+‘The Spirit of God passed before his face.’ I had won. I slipped through
+the crowd of men who had gathered about the players with the quickness
+of an eel escaping through a broken mesh in a net. My nerves thrilled
+with joy instead of anguish. I felt like some criminal on the way to
+torture released by a chance meeting with the king. It happened that a
+man with a decoration found himself short by forty francs. Uneasy eyes
+suspected me; I turned pale, and drops of perspiration stood on my
+forehead, I was well punished, I thought, for having robbed my father.
+Then the kind little stout man said, in a voice like an angel’s surely,
+‘All these gentlemen have paid their stakes,’ and put down the forty
+francs himself. I raised my head in triumph upon the players. After I
+had returned the money I had taken from it to my father’s purse, I left
+my winnings with that honest and worthy gentleman, who continued to win.
+As soon as I found myself possessed of a hundred and sixty francs, I
+wrapped them up in my handkerchief, so that they could neither move or
+rattle on the way back; and I played no more.
+
+“‘What were you doing at the card-table?’ said my father as we stepped
+into the carriage.
+
+“‘I was looking on,’ I answered, trembling.
+
+“‘But it would have been nothing out of the common if you had been
+prompted by self-love to put some money down on the table. In the eyes
+of men of the world you are quite old enough to assume the right to
+commit such follies. So I should have pardoned you, Raphael, if you had
+made use of my purse.....’
+
+“I did not answer. When we reached home, I returned the keys and money
+to my father. As he entered his study, he emptied out his purse on the
+mantelpiece, counted the money, and turned to me with a kindly look,
+saying with more or less long and significant pauses between each
+phrase:
+
+“‘My boy, you are very nearly twenty now. I am satisfied with you. You
+ought to have an allowance, if only to teach you how to lay it out, and
+to gain some acquaintance with everyday business. Henceforward I shall
+let you have a hundred francs each month. Here is your first quarter’s
+income for this year,’ he added, fingering a pile of gold, as if to make
+sure that the amount was correct. ‘Do what you please with it.’
+
+“I confess that I was ready to fling myself at his feet, to tell him
+that I was a thief, a scoundrel, and, worse than all, a liar! But a
+feeling of shame held me back. I went up to him for an embrace, but he
+gently pushed me away.
+
+“‘You are a man now, _my child_,’ he said. ‘What I have just done was a
+very proper and simple thing, for which there is no need to thank me. If
+I have any claim to your gratitude, Raphael,’ he went on, in a kind but
+dignified way, ‘it is because I have preserved your youth from the evils
+that destroy young men in Paris. We will be two friends henceforth. In
+a year’s time you will be a doctor of law. Not without some hardship and
+privations you have acquired the sound knowledge and the love of, and
+application to, work that is indispensable to public men. You must
+learn to know me, Raphael. I do not want to make either an advocate or
+a notary of you, but a statesman, who shall be the pride of our poor
+house.... Good-night,’ he added.
+
+“From that day my father took me fully into confidence. I was an only
+son; and ten years before, I had lost my mother. In time past my father,
+the head of a historic family remembered even now in Auvergne, had come
+to Paris to fight against his evil star, dissatisfied at the prospect
+of tilling the soil, with his useless sword by his side. He was endowed
+with the shrewdness that gives the men of the south of France a certain
+ascendency when energy goes with it. Almost unaided, he made a position
+for himself near the fountain of power. The revolution brought a reverse
+of fortune, but he had managed to marry an heiress of good family, and,
+in the time of the Empire, appeared to be on the point of restoring to
+our house its ancient splendor.
+
+“The Restoration, while it brought back considerable property to my
+mother, was my father’s ruin. He had formerly purchased several estates
+abroad, conferred by the Emperor on his generals; and now for ten years
+he struggled with liquidators, diplomatists, and Prussian and Bavarian
+courts of law, over the disputed possession of these unfortunate
+endowments. My father plunged me into the intricate labyrinths of law
+proceedings on which our future depended. We might be compelled to
+return the rents, as well as the proceeds arising from sales of timber
+made during the years 1814 to 1817; in that case my mother’s property
+would have barely saved our credit. So it fell out that the day on which
+my father in a fashion emancipated me, brought me under a most galling
+yoke. I entered on a conflict like a battlefield; I must work day and
+night; seek interviews with statesmen, surprise their convictions, try
+to interest them in our affairs, and gain them over, with their wives
+and servants, and their very dogs; and all this abominable business had
+to take the form of pretty speeches and polite attentions. Then I knew
+the mortifications that had left their blighting traces on my father’s
+face. For about a year I led outwardly the life of a man of the world,
+but enormous labors lay beneath the surface of gadding about, and eager
+efforts to attach myself to influential kinsmen, or to people likely
+to be useful to us. My relaxations were lawsuits, and memorials still
+furnished the staple of my conversation. Hitherto my life had been
+blameless, from the sheer impossibility of indulging the desires of
+youth; but now I became my own master, and in dread of involving us both
+in ruin by some piece of negligence, I did not dare to allow myself any
+pleasure or expenditure.
+
+“While we are young, and before the world has rubbed off the delicate
+bloom from our sentiments, the freshness of our impressions, the noble
+purity of conscience which will never allow us to palter with evil,
+the sense of duty is very strong within us, the voice of honor clamors
+within us, and we are open and straightforward. At that time I was all
+these things. I wished to justify my father’s confidence in me. But
+lately I would have stolen a paltry sum from him, with secret delight;
+but now that I shared the burden of his affairs, of his name and of his
+house, I would secretly have given up my fortune and my hopes for
+him, as I was sacrificing my pleasures, and even have been glad of the
+sacrifice! So when M. de Villele exhumed, for our special benefit, an
+imperial decree concerning forfeitures, and had ruined us, I authorized
+the sale of my property, only retaining an island in the middle of
+the Loire where my mother was buried. Perhaps arguments and evasions,
+philosophical, philanthropic, and political considerations would not
+fail me now, to hinder the perpetration of what my solicitor termed
+a ‘folly’; but at one-and-twenty, I repeat, we are all aglow with
+generosity and affection. The tears that stood in my father’s eyes were
+to me the most splendid of fortunes, and the thought of those tears has
+often soothed my sorrow. Ten months after he had paid his creditors, my
+father died of grief; I was his idol, and he had ruined me! The thought
+killed him. Towards the end of the autumn of 1826, at the age of
+twenty-two, I was the sole mourner at his graveside--the grave of my
+father and my earliest friend. Not many young men have found themselves
+alone with their thoughts as they followed a hearse, or have seen
+themselves lost in crowded Paris, and without money or prospects.
+Orphans rescued by public charity have at any rate the future of the
+battlefield before them, and find a shelter in some institution and a
+father in the government or in the _procureur du roi_. I had nothing.
+
+“Three months later, an agent made over to me eleven hundred and twelve
+francs, the net proceeds of the winding up of my father’s affairs. Our
+creditors had driven us to sell our furniture. From my childhood I had
+been used to set a high value on the articles of luxury about us, and
+I could not help showing my astonishment at the sight of this meagre
+balance.
+
+“‘Oh, rococo, all of it!’ said the auctioneer. A terrible word that fell
+like a blight on the sacred memories of my childhood, and dispelled my
+earliest illusions, the dearest of all. My entire fortune was comprised
+in this ‘account rendered,’ my future lay in a linen bag with eleven
+hundred and twelve francs in it, human society stood before me in the
+person of an auctioneer’s clerk, who kept his hat on while he spoke.
+Jonathan, an old servant who was much attached to me, and whom my mother
+had formerly pensioned with an annuity of four hundred francs, spoke to
+me as I was leaving the house that I had so often gaily left for a drive
+in my childhood.
+
+“‘Be very economical, Monsieur Raphael!’
+
+“The good fellow was crying.
+
+“Such were the events, dear Emile, that ruled my destinies, moulded my
+character, and set me, while still young, in an utterly false social
+position,” said Raphael after a pause. “Family ties, weak ones, it is
+true, bound me to a few wealthy houses, but my own pride would have kept
+me aloof from them if contempt and indifference had not shut their
+doors on me in the first place. I was related to people who were very
+influential, and who lavished their patronage on strangers; but I found
+neither relations nor patrons in them. Continually circumscribed in my
+affections, they recoiled upon me. Unreserved and simple by nature, I
+must have appeared frigid and sophisticated. My father’s discipline had
+destroyed all confidence in myself. I was shy and awkward; I could not
+believe that my opinion carried any weight whatever; I took no pleasure
+in myself; I thought myself ugly, and was ashamed to meet my own
+eyes. In spite of the inward voice that must be the stay of a man with
+anything in him, in all his struggles, the voice that cries, ‘Courage!
+Go forward!’ in spite of sudden revelations of my own strength in my
+solitude; in spite of the hopes that thrilled me as I compared new
+works, that the public admired so much, with the schemes that hovered in
+my brain,--in spite of all this, I had a childish mistrust of myself.
+
+“An overweening ambition preyed upon me; I believed that I was meant for
+great things, and yet I felt myself to be nothing. I had need of other
+men, and I was friendless. I found I must make my way in the world,
+where I was quite alone, and bashful, rather than afraid.
+
+“All through the year in which, by my father’s wish, I threw myself into
+the whirlpool of fashionable society, I came away with an inexperienced
+heart, and fresh in mind. Like every grown child, I sighed in secret for
+a love affair. I met, among young men of my own age, a set of swaggerers
+who held their heads high, and talked about trifles as they seated
+themselves without a tremor beside women who inspired awe in me. They
+chattered nonsense, sucked the heads of their canes, gave themselves
+affected airs, appropriated the fairest women, and laid, or pretended
+that they had laid their heads on every pillow. Pleasure, seemingly, was
+at their beck and call; they looked on the most virtuous and prudish as
+an easy prey, ready to surrender at a word, at the slightest impudent
+gesture or insolent look. I declare, on my soul and conscience, that the
+attainment of power, or of a great name in literature, seemed to me an
+easier victory than a success with some young, witty, and gracious lady
+of high degree.
+
+“So I found the tumult of my heart, my feelings, and my creeds all at
+variance with the axioms of society. I had plenty of audacity in my
+character, but none in my manner. Later, I found out that women did
+not like to be implored. I have from afar adored many a one to whom I
+devoted a soul proof against all tests, a heart to break, energy that
+shrank from no sacrifice and from no torture; _they_ accepted fools
+whom I would not have engaged as hall porters. How often, mute and
+motionless, have I not admired the lady of my dreams, swaying in the
+dance; given up my life in thought to one eternal caress, expressed all
+my hopes in a look, and laid before her, in my rapture, a young man’s
+love, which should outstrip all fables. At some moments I was ready to
+barter my whole life for one single night. Well, as I could never find a
+listener for my impassioned proposals, eyes to rest my own upon, a heart
+made for my heart, I lived on in all the sufferings of impotent
+force that consumes itself; lacking either opportunity or courage or
+experience. I despaired, maybe, of making myself understood, or I feared
+to be understood but too well; and yet the storm within me was ready to
+burst at every chance courteous look. In spite of my readiness to take
+the semblance of interest in look or word for a tenderer solicitude,
+I dared neither to speak nor to be silent seasonably. My words grew
+insignificant, and my silence stupid, by sheer stress of emotion. I was
+too ingenuous, no doubt, for that artificial life, led by candle-light,
+where every thought is expressed in conventional phrases, or by words
+that fashion dictates; and not only so, I had not learned how to employ
+speech that says nothing, and silence that says a great deal. In short,
+I concealed the fires that consumed me, and with such a soul as women
+wish to find, with all the elevation of soul that they long for, and
+a mettle that fools plume themselves upon, all women have been cruelly
+treacherous to me.
+
+“So in my simplicity I admired the heroes of this set when they bragged
+about their conquests, and never suspected them of lying. No doubt it
+was a mistake to wish for a love that springs for a word’s sake; to
+expect to find in the heart of a vain, frivolous woman, greedy for
+luxury and intoxicated with vanity, the great sea of passion that surged
+tempestuously in my own breast. Oh! to feel that you were born to love,
+to make some woman’s happiness, and yet to find not one, not even a
+noble and courageous Marceline, not so much as an old Marquise! Oh!
+to carry a treasure in your wallet, and not find even some child, or
+inquisitive young girl, to admire it! In my despair I often wished to
+kill myself.”
+
+“Finely tragical to-night!” cried Emile.
+
+“Let me pass sentence on my life,” Raphael answered. “If your friendship
+is not strong enough to bear with my elegy, if you cannot put up with
+half an hour’s tedium for my sake, go to sleep! But, then, never ask
+again for the reason of suicide that hangs over me, that comes nearer
+and calls to me, that I bow myself before. If you are to judge a man,
+you must know his secret thoughts, sorrows, and feelings; to know
+merely the outward events of a man’s life would only serve to make a
+chronological table--a fool’s notion of history.”
+
+Emile was so much struck with the bitter tones in which these words were
+spoken, that he began to pay close attention to Raphael, whom he watched
+with a bewildered expression.
+
+“Now,” continued the speaker, “all these things that befell me appear in
+a new light. The sequence of events that I once thought so unfortunate
+created the splendid powers of which, later, I became so proud. If I may
+believe you, I possess the power of readily expressing my thoughts, and
+I could take a forward place in the great field of knowledge; and is not
+this the result of scientific curiosity, of excessive application, and
+a love of reading which possessed me from the age of seven till my entry
+on life? The very neglect in which I was left, and the consequent habits
+of self-repression and self-concentration; did not these things teach me
+how to consider and reflect? Nothing in me was squandered in obedience
+to the exactions of the world, which humble the proudest soul and
+reduce it to a mere husk; and was it not this very fact that refined the
+emotional part of my nature till it became the perfected instrument of
+a loftier purpose than passionate desires? I remember watching the women
+who mistook me with all the insight of contemned love.
+
+“I can see now that my natural sincerity must have been displeasing to
+them; women, perhaps, even require a little hypocrisy. And I, who in
+the same hour’s space am alternately a man and a child, frivolous and
+thoughtful, free from bias and brimful of superstition, and oftentimes
+myself as much a woman as any of them; how should they do otherwise than
+take my simplicity for cynicism, my innocent candor for impudence? They
+found my knowledge tiresome; my feminine languor, weakness. I was held
+to be listless and incapable of love or of steady purpose; a too active
+imagination, that curse of poets, was no doubt the cause. My silence was
+idiotic; and as I daresay I alarmed them by my efforts to please, women
+one and all have condemned me. With tears and mortification, I bowed
+before the decision of the world; but my distress was not barren. I
+determined to revenge myself on society; I would dominate the feminine
+intellect, and so have the feminine soul at my mercy; all eyes should
+be fixed upon me, when the servant at the door announced my name. I had
+determined from my childhood that I would be a great man; I said with
+Andre Chenier, as I struck my forehead, ‘There is something underneath
+that!’ I felt, I believed, the thought within me that I must express,
+the system I must establish, the knowledge I must interpret.
+
+“Let me pour out my follies, dear Emile; to-day I am barely twenty-six
+years old, certain of dying unrecognized, and I have never been the
+lover of the woman I dreamed of possessing. Have we not all of us, more
+or less, believed in the reality of a thing because we wished it? I
+would never have a young man for my friend who did not place himself in
+dreams upon a pedestal, weave crowns for his head, and have complaisant
+mistresses. I myself would often be a general, nay, emperor; I have been
+a Byron, and then a nobody. After this sport on these pinnacles of human
+achievement, I became aware that all the difficulties and steeps of life
+were yet to face. My exuberant self-esteem came to my aid; I had that
+intense belief in my destiny, which perhaps amounts to genius in those
+who will not permit themselves to be distracted by contact with the
+world, as sheep that leave their wool on the briars of every thicket
+they pass by. I meant to cover myself with glory, and to work in silence
+for the mistress I hoped to have one day. Women for me were resumed into
+a single type, and this woman I looked to meet in the first that met
+my eyes; but in each and all I saw a queen, and as queens must make the
+first advances to their lovers, they must draw near to me--to me, so
+sickly, shy, and poor. For her, who should take pity on me, my heart
+held in store such gratitude over and beyond love, that I had worshiped
+her her whole life long. Later, my observations have taught me bitter
+truths.
+
+“In this way, dear Emile, I ran the risk of remaining companionless for
+good. The incomprehensible bent of women’s minds appears to lead them to
+see nothing but the weak points in a clever man, and the strong points
+of a fool. They feel the liveliest sympathy with the fool’s good
+qualities, which perpetually flatter their own defects; while they
+find the man of talent hardly agreeable enough to compensate for his
+shortcomings. All capacity is a sort of intermittent fever, and no woman
+is anxious to share in its discomforts only; they look to find in their
+lovers the wherewithal to gratify their own vanity. It is themselves
+that they love in us! But the artist, poor and proud, along with his
+endowment of creative power, is furnished with an aggressive egotism!
+Everything about him is involved in I know not what whirlpool of his
+ideas, and even his mistress must gyrate along with them. How is a
+woman, spoilt with praise, to believe in the love of a man like that?
+Will she go to seek him out? That sort of lover has not the leisure to
+sit beside a sofa and give himself up to the sentimental simperings
+that women are so fond of, and on which the false and unfeeling pride
+themselves. He cannot spare the time from his work, and how can he
+afford to humble himself and go a-masquerading! I was ready to give my
+life once and for all, but I could not degrade it in detail. Besides,
+there is something indescribably paltry in a stockbroker’s tactics, who
+runs on errands for some insipid affected woman; all this disgusts an
+artist. Love in the abstract is not enough for a great man in poverty;
+he has need of its utmost devotion. The frivolous creatures who spend
+their lives in trying on cashmeres, or make themselves into clothes-pegs
+to hang the fashions from, exact the devotion which is not theirs to
+give; for them, love means the pleasure of ruling and not of obeying.
+She who is really a wife, one in heart, flesh, and bone, must follow
+wherever he leads, in whom her life, her strength, her pride, and
+happiness are centered. Ambitious men need those Oriental women
+whose whole thought is given to the study of their requirements; for
+unhappiness means for them the incompatibility of their means with their
+desires. But I, who took myself for a man of genius, must needs feel
+attracted by these very she-coxcombs. So, as I cherished ideas so
+different from those generally received; as I wished to scale the
+heavens without a ladder, was possessed of wealth that could not
+circulate, and of knowledge so wide and so imperfectly arranged and
+digested that it overtaxed my memory; as I had neither relations nor
+friends in the midst of this lonely and ghastly desert, a desert of
+paving stones, full of animation, life, and thought, wherein every one
+is worse than inimical, indifferent to wit; I made a very natural if
+foolish resolve, which required such unknown impossibilities, that my
+spirits rose. It was as if I had laid a wager with myself, for I was at
+once the player and the cards.
+
+“This was my plan. The eleven hundred francs must keep life in me for
+three years--the time I allowed myself in which to bring to light a
+work which should draw attention to me, and make me either a name or a
+fortune. I exulted at the thought of living on bread and milk, like
+a hermit in the Thebaid, while I plunged into the world of books and
+ideas, and so reached a lofty sphere beyond the tumult of Paris, a
+sphere of silent labor where I would entomb myself like a chrysalis to
+await a brilliant and splendid new birth. I imperiled my life in order
+to live. By reducing my requirements to real needs and the barest
+necessaries, I found that three hundred and sixty-five francs sufficed
+for a year of penury; and, in fact, I managed to exist on that slender
+sum, so long as I submitted to my own claustral discipline.”
+
+“Impossible!” cried Emile.
+
+“I lived for nearly three years in that way,” Raphael answered, with
+a kind of pride. “Let us reckon it out. Three sous for bread, two for
+milk, and three for cold meat, kept me from dying of hunger, and my
+mind in a state of peculiar lucidity. I have observed, as you know, the
+wonderful effects produced by diet upon the imagination. My lodgings
+cost me three sous daily; I burnt three sous more in oil at night; I did
+my own housework, and wore flannel shirts so as to reduce the laundress’
+bill to two sous per day. The money I spent yearly in coal, if divided
+up, never cost more than two sous for each day. I had three years’
+supply of clothing, and I only dressed when going out to some library
+or public lecture. These expenses, all told, only amounted to eighteen
+sous, so two were left over for emergencies. I cannot recollect, during
+that long period of toil, either crossing the Pont des Arts, or paying
+for water; I went out to fetch it every morning from the fountain in
+the Place Saint Michel, at the corner of the Rue de Gres. Oh, I wore my
+poverty proudly. A man urged on towards a fair future walks through life
+like an innocent person to his death; he feels no shame about it.
+
+“I would not think of illness. Like Aquilina, I faced the hospital
+without terror. I had not a moment’s doubt of my health, and besides,
+the poor can only take to their beds to die. I cut my own hair till
+the day when an angel of love and kindness... But I do not want to
+anticipate the state of things that I shall reach later. You must simply
+know that I lived with one grand thought for a mistress, a dream, an
+illusion which deceives us all more or less at first. To-day I laugh at
+myself, at that self, holy perhaps and heroic, which is now no more. I
+have since had a closer view of society and the world, of our manners
+and customs, and seen the dangers of my innocent credulity and the
+superfluous nature of my fervent toil. Stores of that sort are quite
+useless to aspirants for fame. Light should be the baggage of seekers
+after fortune!
+
+“Ambitious men spend their youth in rendering themselves worthy of
+patronage; it is their great mistake. While the foolish creatures are
+laying in stores of knowledge and energy, so that they shall not sink
+under the weight of responsible posts that recede from them, schemers
+come and go who are wealthy in words and destitute in ideas, astonish
+the ignorant, and creep into the confidence of those who have a little
+knowledge. While the first kind study, the second march ahead; the one
+sort is modest, and the other impudent; the man of genius is silent
+about his own merits, but these schemers make a flourish of theirs, and
+they are bound to get on. It is so strongly to the interest of men in
+office to believe in ready-made capacity, and in brazen-faced merit,
+that it is downright childish of the learned to expect material rewards.
+I do not seek to paraphrase the commonplace moral, the song of songs
+that obscure genius is for ever singing; I want to come, in a logical
+manner, by the reason of the frequent successes of mediocrity. Alas!
+study shows us such a mother’s kindness that it would be a sin perhaps
+to ask any other reward of her than the pure and delightful pleasures
+with which she sustains her children.
+
+“Often I remember soaking my bread in milk, as I sat by the window to
+take the fresh air; while my eyes wandered over a view of roofs--brown,
+gray, or red, slated or tiled, and covered with yellow or green mosses.
+At first the prospect may have seemed monotonous, but I very soon found
+peculiar beauties in it. Sometimes at night, streams of light through
+half-closed shutters would light up and color the dark abysses of this
+strange landscape. Sometimes the feeble lights of the street lamps sent
+up yellow gleams through the fog, and in each street dimly outlined the
+undulations of a crowd of roofs, like billows in a motionless sea.
+Very occasionally, too, a face appeared in this gloomy waste; above
+the flowers in some skyey garden I caught a glimpse of an old woman’s
+crooked angular profile as she watered her nasturtiums; or, in a crazy
+attic window, a young girl, fancying herself quite alone as she dressed
+herself--a view of nothing more than a fair forehead and long tresses
+held above her by a pretty white arm.
+
+“I liked to see the short-lived plant-life in the gutters--poor weeds
+that a storm soon washed away. I studied the mosses, with their colors
+revived by showers, or transformed by the sun into a brown velvet
+that fitfully caught the light. Such things as these formed my
+recreations--the passing poetic moods of daylight, the melancholy mists,
+sudden gleams of sunlight, the silence and the magic of night, the
+mysteries of dawn, the smoke wreaths from each chimney; every chance
+event, in fact, in my curious world became familiar to me. I came to
+love this prison of my own choosing. This level Parisian prairie
+of roofs, beneath which lay populous abysses, suited my humor, and
+harmonized with my thoughts.
+
+“Sudden descents into the world from the divine height of scientific
+meditation are very exhausting; and, besides, I had apprehended
+perfectly the bare life of the cloister. When I made up my mind to
+carry out this new plan of life, I looked for quarters in the most
+out-of-the-way parts of Paris. One evening, as I returned home to the
+Rue des Cordiers from the Place de l’Estrapade, I saw a girl of fourteen
+playing with a battledore at the corner of the Rue de Cluny, her winsome
+ways and laughter amused the neighbors. September was not yet over; it
+was warm and fine, so that women sat chatting before their doors as if
+it were a fete-day in some country town. At first I watched the charming
+expression of the girl’s face and her graceful attitudes, her pose fit
+for a painter. It was a pretty sight. I looked about me, seeking to
+understand this blithe simplicity in the midst of Paris, and saw that
+the street was a blind alley and but little frequented. I remembered
+that Jean Jacques had once lived here, and looked up the Hotel
+Saint-Quentin. Its dilapidated condition awakened hopes of a cheap
+lodging, and I determined to enter.
+
+“I found myself in a room with a low ceiling; the candles, in
+classic-looking copper candle-sticks, were set in a row under each key.
+The predominating cleanliness of the room made a striking contrast to
+the usual state of such places. This one was as neat as a bit of genre;
+there was a charming trimness about the blue coverlet, the cooking pots
+and furniture. The mistress of the house rose and came to me. She seemed
+to be about forty years of age; sorrows had left their traces on her
+features, and weeping had dimmed her eyes. I deferentially mentioned the
+amount I could pay; it seemed to cause her no surprise; she sought out
+a key from the row, went up to the attics with me, and showed me a room
+that looked out on the neighboring roofs and courts; long poles with
+linen drying on them hung out of the window.
+
+“Nothing could be uglier than this garret, awaiting its scholar, with
+its dingy yellow walls and odor of poverty. The roofing fell in a steep
+slope, and the sky was visible through chinks in the tiles. There was
+room for a bed, a table, and a few chairs, and beneath the highest point
+of the roof my piano could stand. Not being rich enough to furnish this
+cage (that might have been one of the _Piombi_ of Venice), the poor
+woman had never been able to let it; and as I had saved from the recent
+sale the furniture that was in a fashion peculiarly mine, I very soon
+came to terms with my landlady, and moved in on the following day.
+
+“For three years I lived in this airy sepulchre, and worked unflaggingly
+day and night; and so great was the pleasure that study seemed to me the
+fairest theme and the happiest solution of life. The tranquillity and
+peace that a scholar needs is something as sweet and exhilarating as
+love. Unspeakable joys are showered on us by the exertion of our
+mental faculties; the quest of ideas, and the tranquil contemplation
+of knowledge; delights indescribable, because purely intellectual and
+impalpable to our senses. So we are obliged to use material terms to
+express the mysteries of the soul. The pleasure of striking out in some
+lonely lake of clear water, with forests, rocks, and flowers around, and
+the soft stirring of the warm breeze,--all this would give, to those who
+knew them not, a very faint idea of the exultation with which my soul
+bathed itself in the beams of an unknown light, hearkened to the awful
+and uncertain voice of inspiration, as vision upon vision poured from
+some unknown source through my throbbing brain.
+
+“No earthly pleasure can compare with the divine delight of watching
+the dawn of an idea in the space of abstractions as it rises like the
+morning sun; an idea that, better still, attains gradually like a child
+to puberty and man’s estate. Study lends a kind of enchantment to all
+our surroundings. The wretched desk covered with brown leather at which
+I wrote, my piano, bed, and armchair, the odd wall-paper and furniture
+seemed to have for me a kind of life in them, and to be humble friends
+of mine and mute partakers of my destiny. How often have I confided my
+soul to them in a glance! A warped bit of beading often met my eyes,
+and suggested new developments,--a striking proof of my system, or a
+felicitous word by which to render my all but inexpressible thought. By
+sheer contemplation of the things about me I discerned an expression and
+a character in each. If the setting sun happened to steal in through my
+narrow window, they would take new colors, fade or shine, grow dull or
+gay, and always amaze me with some new effect. These trifling incidents
+of a solitary life, which escape those preoccupied with outward affairs,
+make the solace of prisoners. And what was I but the captive of an
+idea, imprisoned in my system, but sustained also by the prospect of a
+brilliant future? At each obstacle that I overcame, I seemed to kiss the
+soft hands of a woman with a fair face, a wealthy, well-dressed woman,
+who should some day say softly, while she caressed my hair:
+
+“‘Poor Angel, how thou hast suffered!’
+
+“I had undertaken two great works--one a comedy that in a very short
+time must bring me wealth and fame, and an entry into those circles
+whither I wished to return, to exercise the royal privileges of a man
+of genius. You all saw nothing in that masterpiece but the blunder of a
+young man fresh from college, a babyish fiasco. Your jokes clipped the
+wings of a throng of illusions, which have never stirred since within
+me. You, dear Emile, alone brought soothing to the deep wounds that
+others had made in my heart. You alone will admire my ‘Theory of the
+Will.’ I devoted most of my time to that long work, for which I studied
+Oriental languages, physiology and anatomy. If I do not deceive myself,
+my labors will complete the task begun by Mesmer, Lavater, Gall, and
+Bichat, and open up new paths in science.
+
+“There ends that fair life of mine, the daily sacrifice, the
+unrecognized silkworm’s toil, that is, perhaps, its own sole recompense.
+Since attaining years of discretion, until the day when I finished my
+‘Theory,’ I observed, learned, wrote, and read unintermittingly; my
+life was one long imposition, as schoolboys say. Though by nature
+effeminately attached to Oriental indolence, sensual in tastes, and a
+wooer of dreams, I worked incessantly, and refused to taste any of the
+enjoyments of Parisian life. Though a glutton, I became abstemious; and
+loving exercise and sea voyages as I did, and haunted by the wish to
+visit many countries, still child enough to play at ducks and drakes
+with pebbles over a pond, I led a sedentary life with a pen in my
+fingers. I liked talking, but I went to sit and mutely listen to
+professors who gave public lectures at the _Bibliotheque_ or the Museum.
+I slept upon my solitary pallet like a Benedictine brother, though woman
+was my one chimera, a chimera that fled from me as I wooed it! In short,
+my life has been a cruel contradiction, a perpetual cheat. After that,
+judge a man!
+
+“Sometimes my natural propensities broke out like a fire long smothered.
+I was debarred from the women whose society I desired, stripped of
+everything and lodged in an artist’s garret, and by a sort of mirage or
+calenture I was surrounded by captivating mistresses. I drove through
+the streets of Paris, lolling on the soft cushions of a fine equipage.
+I plunged into dissipation, into corroding vice, I desired and possessed
+everything, for fasting had made me light-headed like the tempted Saint
+Anthony. Slumber, happily, would put an end at last to these devastating
+trances; and on the morrow science would beckon me, smiling, and I was
+faithful to her. I imagine that women reputed virtuous, must often fall
+a prey to these insane tempests of desire and passion, which rise in us
+in spite of ourselves. Such dreams have a charm of their own; they are
+something akin to evening gossip round the winter fire, when one sets
+out for some voyage in China. But what becomes of virtue during these
+delicious excursions, when fancy overleaps all difficulties?
+
+“During the first ten months of seclusion I led the life of poverty and
+solitude that I have described to you; I used to steal out unobserved
+every morning to buy my own provisions for the day; I tidied my room; I
+was at once master and servant, and played the Diogenes with incredible
+spirit. But afterwards, while my hostess and her daughter watched my
+ways and behavior, scrutinized my appearance and divined my poverty,
+there could not but be some bonds between us; perhaps because they were
+themselves so very poor. Pauline, the charming child, whose latent
+and unconscious grace had, in a manner, brought me there, did me many
+services that I could not well refuse. All women fallen on evil days
+are sisters; they speak a common language; they have the same
+generosity--the generosity that possesses nothing, and so is lavish of
+its affection, of its time, and of its very self.
+
+“Imperceptibly Pauline took me under her protection, and would do
+things for me. No kind of objection was made by her mother, whom I even
+surprised mending my linen; she blushed for the charitable occupation.
+In spite of myself, they took charge of me, and I accepted their
+services.
+
+“In order to understand the peculiar condition of my mind, my
+preoccupation with work must be remembered, the tyranny of ideas, and
+the instinctive repugnance that a man who leads an intellectual life
+must ever feel for the material details of existence. Could I well
+repulse the delicate attentions of Pauline, who would noiselessly bring
+me my frugal repast, when she noticed that I had taken nothing for seven
+or eight hours? She had the tact of a woman and the inventiveness of a
+child; she would smile as she made sign to me that I must not see her.
+Ariel glided under my roof in the form of a sylph who foresaw every want
+of mine.
+
+“One evening Pauline told me her story with touching simplicity. Her
+father had been a major in the horse grenadiers of the Imperial Guard.
+He had been taken prisoner by the Cossacks, at the passage of Beresina;
+and when Napoleon later on proposed an exchange, the Russian authorities
+made search for him in Siberia in vain; he had escaped with a view of
+reaching India, and since then Mme. Gaudin, my landlady, could hear no
+news of her husband. Then came the disasters of 1814 and 1815; and, left
+alone and without resource, she had decided to let furnished lodgings in
+order to keep herself and her daughter.
+
+“She always hoped to see her husband again. Her greatest trouble was
+about her daughter’s education; the Princess Borghese was her Pauline’s
+godmother; and Pauline must not be unworthy of the fair future promised
+by her imperial protectress. When Mme. Gaudin confided to me this heavy
+trouble that preyed upon her, she said, with sharp pain in her voice,
+‘I would give up the property and the scrap of paper that makes Gaudin
+a baron of the empire, and all our rights to the endowment of Wistchnau,
+if only Pauline could be brought up at Saint-Denis?’ Her words struck
+me; now I could show my gratitude for the kindnesses expended on me
+by the two women; all at once the idea of offering to finish Pauline’s
+education occurred to me; and the offer was made and accepted in the
+most perfect simplicity. In this way I came to have some hours of
+recreation. Pauline had natural aptitude; she learned so quickly, that
+she soon surpassed me at the piano. As she became accustomed to think
+aloud in my presence, she unfolded all the sweet refinements of a heart
+that was opening itself out to life, as some flower-cup opens slowly to
+the sun. She listened to me, pleased and thoughtful, letting her dark
+velvet eyes rest upon me with a half smile in them; she repeated her
+lessons in soft and gentle tones, and showed childish glee when I was
+satisfied with her. Her mother grew more and more anxious every day to
+shield the young girl from every danger (for all the beauty promised in
+early life was developing in the crescent moon), and was glad to see her
+spend whole days indoors in study. My piano was the only one she could
+use, and while I was out she practised on it. When I came home, Pauline
+would be in my room, in her shabby dress, but her slightest movement
+revealed her slender figure in its attractive grace, in spite of the
+coarse materials that she wore. As with the heroine of the fable of
+‘_Peau-d’Ane_,’ a dainty foot peeped out of the clumsy shoes. But all
+her wealth of girlish beauty was as lost upon me. I had laid commands
+upon myself to see a sister only in Pauline. I dreaded lest I should
+betray her mother’s faith in me. I admired the lovely girl as if she had
+been a picture, or as the portrait of a dead mistress; she was at once
+my child and my statue. For me, another Pygmalion, the maiden with the
+hues of life and the living voice was to become a form of inanimate
+marble. I was very strict with her, but the more I made her feel my
+pedagogue’s severity, the more gentle and submissive she grew.
+
+“If a generous feeling strengthened me in my reserve and self-restraint,
+prudent considerations were not lacking beside. Integrity of purpose
+cannot, I think, fail to accompany integrity in money matters. To my
+mind, to become insolvent or to betray a woman is the same sort of
+thing. If you love a young girl, or allow yourself to be beloved by
+her, a contract is implied, and its conditions should be thoroughly
+understood. We are free to break with the woman who sells herself, but
+not with the young girl who has given herself to us and does not know
+the extent of her sacrifice. I must have married Pauline, and that would
+have been madness. Would it not have given over that sweet girlish heart
+to terrible misfortunes? My poverty made its selfish voice heard, and
+set an iron barrier between that gentle nature and mine. Besides, I
+am ashamed to say, that I cannot imagine love in the midst of poverty.
+Perhaps this is a vitiation due to that malady of mankind called
+civilization; but a woman in squalid poverty would exert no fascination
+over me, were she attractive as Homer’s Galatea, the fair Helen.
+
+“Ah, _vive l’amour_! But let it be in silk and cashmere, surrounded with
+the luxury which so marvelously embellishes it; for is it not perhaps
+itself a luxury? I enjoy making havoc with an elaborate erection of
+scented hair; I like to crush flowers, to disarrange and crease a smart
+toilette at will. A bizarre attraction lies for me in burning eyes that
+blaze through a lace veil, like flame through cannon smoke. My way of
+love would be to mount by a silken ladder, in the silence of a winter
+night. And what bliss to reach, all powdered with snow, a perfumed
+room, with hangings of painted silk, to find a woman there, who likewise
+shakes away the snow from her; for what other name can be found for the
+white muslin wrappings that vaguely define her, like some angel form
+issuing from a cloud! And then I wish for furtive joys, for the security
+of audacity. I want to see once more that woman of mystery, but let it
+be in the throng, dazzling, unapproachable, adored on all sides, dressed
+in laces and ablaze with diamonds, laying her commands upon every one;
+so exalted above us, that she inspires awe, and none dares to pay his
+homage to her.
+
+“She gives me a stolen glance, amid her court, a look that exposes the
+unreality of all this; that resigns for me the world and all men in
+it! Truly I have scorned myself for a passion for a few yards of lace,
+velvet, and fine lawn, and the hairdresser’s feats of skill; a love of
+wax-lights, a carriage and a title, a heraldic coronet painted on window
+panes, or engraved by a jeweler; in short, a liking for all that is
+adventitious and least woman in woman. I have scorned and reasoned with
+myself, but all in vain.
+
+“A woman of rank with her subtle smile, her high-born air, and
+self-esteem captivates me. The barriers she erects between herself and
+the world awaken my vanity, a good half of love. There would be more
+relish for me in bliss that all others envied. If my mistress does
+nothing that other women do, and neither lives nor conducts herself like
+them, wears a cloak that they cannot attain, breathes a perfume of her
+own, then she seems to rise far above me. The further she rises from
+earth, even in the earthlier aspects of love, the fairer she becomes for
+me.
+
+“Luckily for me we have had no queen in France these twenty years, for I
+should have fallen in love with her. A woman must be wealthy to
+acquire the manners of a princess. What place had Pauline among these
+far-fetched imaginings? Could she bring me the love that is death, that
+brings every faculty into play, the nights that are paid for by life? We
+hardly die, I think, for an insignificant girl who gives herself to us;
+and I could never extinguish these feelings and poet’s dreams within
+me. I was born for an inaccessible love, and fortune has overtopped my
+desire.
+
+“How often have I set satin shoes on Pauline’s tiny feet, confined her
+form, slender as a young poplar, in a robe of gauze, and thrown a loose
+scarf about her as I saw her tread the carpets in her mansion and led
+her out to her splendid carriage! In such guise I should have adored
+her. I endowed her with all the pride she lacked, stripped her of her
+virtues, her natural simple charm, and frank smile, in order to plunge
+her heart in our Styx of depravity that makes invulnerable, load her
+with our crimes, make of her the fantastical doll of our drawing-rooms,
+the frail being who lies about in the morning and comes to life again
+at night with the dawn of tapers. Pauline was fresh-hearted and
+affectionate--I would have had her cold and formal.
+
+“In the last days of my frantic folly, memory brought Pauline before me,
+as it brings the scenes of our childhood, and made me pause to muse over
+past delicious moments that softened my heart. I sometimes saw her,
+the adorable girl who sat quietly sewing at my table, wrapped in her
+meditations; the faint light from my window fell upon her and was
+reflected back in silvery rays from her thick black hair; sometimes I
+heard her young laughter, or the rich tones of her voice singing some
+canzonet that she composed without effort. And often my Pauline seemed
+to grow greater, as music flowed from her, and her face bore a striking
+resemblance to the noble one that Carlo Dolci chose for the type of
+Italy. My cruel memory brought her back athwart the dissipations of my
+existence, like a remorse, or a symbol of purity. But let us leave the
+poor child to her own fate. Whatever her troubles may have been, at any
+rate I protected her from a menacing tempest--I did not drag her down
+into my hell.
+
+“Until last winter I led the uneventful studious life of which I have
+given you some faint picture. In the earliest days of December 1829,
+I came across Rastignac, who, in spite of the shabby condition of my
+wardrobe, linked his arm in mine, and inquired into my affairs with a
+quite brotherly interest. Caught by his engaging manner, I gave him a
+brief account of my life and hopes; he began to laugh, and treated me as
+a mixture of a man of genius and a fool. His Gascon accent and knowledge
+of the world, the easy life his clever management procured for him, all
+produced an irresistible effect upon me. I should die an unrecognized
+failure in a hospital, Rastignac said, and be buried in a pauper’s
+grave. He talked of charlatanism. Every man of genius was a charlatan,
+he plainly showed me in that pleasant way of his that makes him so
+fascinating. He insisted that I must be out of my senses, and would be
+my own death, if I lived on alone in the Rue des Cordiers. According to
+him, I ought to go into society, to accustom people to the sound of my
+name, and to rid myself of the simple title of ‘monsieur’ which sits but
+ill on a great man in his lifetime.
+
+“‘Those who know no better,’ he cried, ‘call this sort of business
+_scheming_, and moral people condemn it for a “dissipated life.” We need
+not stop to look at what people think, but see the results. You work,
+you say? Very good, but nothing will ever come of that. Now, I am ready
+for anything and fit for nothing. As lazy as a lobster? Very likely, but
+I succeed everywhere. I go out into society, I push myself forward, the
+others make way before me; I brag and am believed; I incur debts which
+somebody else pays! Dissipation, dear boy, is a methodical policy. The
+life of a man who deliberately runs through his fortune often becomes
+a business speculation; his friends, his pleasures, patrons, and
+acquaintances are his capital. Suppose a merchant runs a risk of a
+million, for twenty years he can neither sleep, eat, nor amuse himself,
+he is brooding over his million, it makes him run about all over
+Europe; he worries himself, goes to the devil in every way that man has
+invented. Then comes a liquidation, such as I have seen myself, which
+very often leaves him penniless and without a reputation or a friend.
+The spendthrift, on the other hand, takes life as a serious game and
+sees his horses run. He loses his capital, perhaps, but he stands
+a chance of being nominated Receiver-General, of making a wealthy
+marriage, or of an appointment of attache to a minister or ambassador;
+and he has his friends left and his name, and he never wants money. He
+knows the standing of everybody, and uses every one for his own benefit.
+Is this logical, or am I a madman after all? Haven’t you there all the
+moral of the comedy that goes on every day in this world?... Your work
+is completed’ he went on after a pause; ‘you are immensely clever! Well,
+you have only arrived at my starting-point. Now, you had better look
+after its success yourself; it is the surest way. You will make allies
+in every clique, and secure applause beforehand. I mean to go halves in
+your glory myself; I shall be the jeweler who set the diamonds in
+your crown. Come here to-morrow evening, by way of a beginning. I will
+introduce you to a house where all Paris goes, all OUR Paris, that
+is--the Paris of exquisites, millionaires, celebrities, all the folk
+who talk gold like Chrysostom. When they have taken up a book, that book
+becomes the fashion; and if it is something really good for once, they
+will have declared it to be a work of genius without knowing it. If
+you have any sense, my dear fellow, you will ensure the success of your
+“Theory,” by a better understanding of the theory of success. To-morrow
+evening you shall go to see that queen of the moment--the beautiful
+Countess Foedora....’
+
+“‘I have never heard of her....’
+
+“‘You Hottentot!’ laughed Rastignac; ‘you do not know Foedora? A great
+match with an income of nearly eighty thousand livres, who has taken
+a fancy to nobody, or else no one has taken a fancy to her. A sort of
+feminine enigma, a half Russian Parisienne, or a half Parisian Russian.
+All the romantic productions that never get published are brought out at
+her house; she is the handsomest woman in Paris, and the most gracious!
+You are not even a Hottentot; you are something between the Hottentot
+and the beast.... Good-bye till to-morrow.’
+
+“He swung round on his heel and made off without waiting for my
+answer. It never occurred to him that a reasoning being could refuse an
+introduction to Foedora. How can the fascination of a name be explained?
+FOEDORA haunted me like some evil thought, with which you seek to come
+to terms. A voice said in me, ‘You are going to see Foedora!’ In vain
+I reasoned with that voice, saying that it lied to me; all my arguments
+were defeated by the name ‘Foedora.’ Was not the name, and even the
+woman herself, the symbol of all my desires, and the object of my life?
+
+“The name called up recollections of the conventional glitter of the
+world, the upper world of Paris with its brilliant fetes and the tinsel
+of its vanities. The woman brought before me all the problems of passion
+on which my mind continually ran. Perhaps it was neither the woman nor
+the name, but my own propensities, that sprang up within me and tempted
+me afresh. Here was the Countess Foedora, rich and loveless, proof
+against the temptations of Paris; was not this woman the very
+incarnation of my hopes and visions? I fashioned her for myself, drew
+her in fancy, and dreamed of her. I could not sleep that night; I became
+her lover; I overbrimmed a few hours with a whole lifetime--a lover’s
+lifetime; the experience of its prolific delights burned me.
+
+“The next day I could not bear the tortures of delay; I borrowed a
+novel, and spent the whole day over it, so that I could not possibly
+think nor keep account of the time till night. Foedora’s name echoed
+through me even as I read, but only as a distant sound; though it
+could be heard, it was not troublesome. Fortunately, I owned a fairly
+creditable black coat and a white waistcoat; of all my fortune there
+now remained abut thirty francs, which I had distributed about among
+my clothes and in my drawers, so as to erect between my whims and
+the spending of a five-franc piece a thorny barrier of search, and an
+adventurous peregrination round my room. While I as dressing, I dived
+about for my money in an ocean of papers. This scarcity of specie will
+give you some idea of the value of that squandered upon gloves and
+cab-hire; a month’s bread disappeared at one fell swoop. Alas! money is
+always forthcoming for our caprices; we only grudge the cost of
+things that are useful or necessary. We recklessly fling gold to an
+opera-dancer, and haggle with a tradesman whose hungry family must wait
+for the settlement of our bill. How many men are there that wear a coat
+that cost a hundred francs, and carry a diamond in the head of their
+cane, and dine for twenty-five SOUS for all that! It seems as though we
+could never pay enough for the pleasures of vanity.
+
+“Rastignac, punctual to his appointment, smiled at the transformation,
+and joked about it. On the way he gave me benevolent advice as to
+my conduct with the countess; he described her as mean, vain, and
+suspicious; but though mean, she was ostentatious, her vanity was
+transparent, and her mistrust good-humored.
+
+“‘You know I am pledged,’ he said, ‘and what I should lose, too, if I
+tried a change in love. So my observation of Foedora has been quite cool
+and disinterested, and my remarks must have some truth in them. I was
+looking to your future when I thought of introducing you to her; so mind
+very carefully what I am about to say. She has a terrible memory. She is
+clever enough to drive a diplomatist wild; she would know it at once if
+he spoke the truth. Between ourselves, I fancy that her marriage was
+not recognized by the Emperor, for the Russian ambassador began to smile
+when I spoke of her; he does not receive her either, and only bows very
+coolly if he meets her in the Bois. For all that, she is in Madame de
+Serizy’s set, and visits Mesdames de Nucingen and de Restaud. There
+is no cloud over her here in France; the Duchesse de Carigliano, the
+most-strait-laced marechale in the whole Bonapartist coterie, often goes
+to spend the summer with her at her country house. Plenty of young fops,
+sons of peers of France, have offered her a title in exchange for her
+fortune, and she has politely declined them all. Her susceptibilities,
+maybe, are not to be touched by anything less than a count. Aren’t you a
+marquis? Go ahead if you fancy her. This is what you may call receiving
+your instructions.’
+
+“His raillery made me think that Rastignac wished to joke and excite my
+curiosity, so that I was in a paroxysm of my extemporized passion by the
+time that we stopped before a peristyle full of flowers. My heart beat
+and my color rose as we went up the great carpeted staircase, and I
+noticed about me all the studied refinements of English comfort; I
+was infatuatedly bourgeois; I forgot my origin and all my personal and
+family pride. Alas! I had but just left a garret, after three years
+of poverty, and I could not just then set the treasures there acquired
+above such trifles as these. Nor could I rightly estimate the worth of
+the vast intellectual capital which turns to riches at the moment when
+opportunity comes within our reach, opportunity that does not overwhelm,
+because study has prepared us for the struggles of public life.
+
+“I found a woman of about twenty-two years of age; she was of average
+height, was dressed in white, and held a feather fire-screen in
+her hand; a group of men stood around her. She rose at the sight
+of Rastignac, and came towards us with a gracious smile and a
+musically-uttered compliment, prepared no doubt beforehand, for me. Our
+friend had spoken of me as a rising man, and his clever way of making
+the most of me had procured me this flattering reception. I was confused
+by the attention that every one paid to me; but Rastignac had luckily
+mentioned my modesty. I was brought in contact with scholars, men
+of letters, ex-ministers, and peers of France. The conversation,
+interrupted a while by my coming, was resumed. I took courage, feeling
+that I had a reputation to maintain, and without abusing my privilege,
+I spoke when it fell to me to speak, trying to state the questions at
+issue in words more or less profound, witty or trenchant, and I made a
+certain sensation. Rastignac was a prophet for the thousandth time in
+his life. As soon as the gathering was large enough to restore freedom
+to individuals, he took my arm, and we went round the rooms.
+
+“‘Don’t look as if you were too much struck by the princess,’ he said,
+‘or she will guess your object in coming to visit her.’
+
+“The rooms were furnished in excellent taste. Each apartment had a
+character of its own, as in wealthy English houses; and the silken
+hangings, the style of the furniture, and the ornaments, even the
+most trifling, were all subordinated to the original idea. In a gothic
+boudoir the doors were concealed by tapestried curtains, and the
+paneling by hangings; the clock and the pattern of the carpet were made
+to harmonize with the gothic surroundings. The ceiling, with its carved
+cross-beams of brown wood, was full of charm and originality; the panels
+were beautifully wrought; nothing disturbed the general harmony of
+the scheme of decoration, not even the windows with their rich colored
+glass. I was surprised by the extensive knowledge of decoration that
+some artist had brought to bear on a little modern room, it was so
+pleasant and fresh, and not heavy, but subdued with its dead gold hues.
+It had all the vague sentiment of a German ballad; it was a retreat fit
+for some romance of 1827, perfumed by the exotic flowers set in their
+stands. Another apartment in the suite was a gilded reproduction of the
+Louis Quatorze period, with modern paintings on the walls in odd but
+pleasant contrast.
+
+“‘You would not be so badly lodged,’ was Rastignac’s slightly sarcastic
+comment. ‘It is captivating, isn’t it?’ he added, smiling as he sat
+down. Then suddenly he rose, and led me by the hand into a bedroom,
+where the softened light fell upon the bed under its canopy of muslin
+and white watered silk--a couch for a young fairy betrothed to one of
+the genii.
+
+“‘Isn’t it wantonly bad taste, insolent and unbounded coquetry,’ he
+said, lowering his voice, ‘that allows us to see this throne of love?
+She gives herself to no one, and anybody may leave his card here. If I
+were not committed, I should like to see her at my feet all tears and
+submission.’
+
+“‘Are you so certain of her virtue?’
+
+“‘The boldest and even the cleverest adventurers among us, acknowledge
+themselves defeated, and continue to be her lovers and devoted friends.
+Isn’t that woman a puzzle?’
+
+“His words seemed to intoxicate me; I had jealous fears already of the
+past. I leapt for joy, and hurried back to the countess, whom I had seen
+in the gothic boudoir. She stopped me by a smile, made me sit beside
+her, and talked about my work, seeming to take the greatest interest in
+it, and all the more when I set forth my theories amusingly, instead of
+adopting the formal language of a professor for their explanation. It
+seemed to divert her to be told that the human will was a material force
+like steam; that in the moral world nothing could resist its power if
+a man taught himself to concentrate it, to economize it, and to project
+continually its fluid mass in given directions upon other souls. Such
+a man, I said, could modify all things relatively to man, even the
+peremptory laws of nature. The questions Foedora raised showed a certain
+keenness of intellect. I took a pleasure in deciding some of them in her
+favor, in order to flatter her; then I confuted her feminine reasoning
+with a word, and roused her curiosity by drawing her attention to an
+everyday matter--to sleep, a thing so apparently commonplace, that in
+reality is an insoluble problem for science. The countess sat in silence
+for a moment when I told her that our ideas were complete organic
+beings, existing in an invisible world, and influencing our destinies;
+and for witnesses I cited the opinions of Descartes, Diderot, and
+Napoleon, who had directed, and still directed, all the currents of the
+age.
+
+“So I had the honor of amusing this woman; who asked me to come to see
+her when she left me; giving me _les grande entrees_, in the language
+of the court. Whether it was by dint of substituting polite formulas for
+genuine expressions of feeling, a commendable habit of mine, or because
+Foedora hailed in me a coming celebrity, an addition to her learned
+menagerie; for some reason I thought that I had pleased her. I called
+all my previous physiological studies and knowledge of woman to my aid,
+and minutely scrutinized this singular person and her ways all evening.
+I concealed myself in the embrasure of a window, and sought to discover
+her thoughts from her bearing. I studied the tactics of the mistress of
+the house, as she came and went, sat and chatted, beckoned to this one
+or that, asked questions, listened to the answers, as she leaned against
+the frame of the door; I detected a languid charm in her movements,
+a grace in the flutterings of her dress, remarked the nature of the
+feelings she so powerfully excited, and became very incredulous as to
+her virtue. If Foedora would none of love to-day, she had had strong
+passions at some time; past experience of pleasure showed itself in the
+attitudes she chose in conversation, in her coquettish way of leaning
+against the panel behind her; she seemed scarcely able to stand alone,
+and yet ready for flight from too bold a glance. There was a kind of
+eloquence about her lightly folded arms, which, even for benevolent
+eyes, breathed sentiment. Her fresh red lips sharply contrasted with her
+brilliantly pale complexion. Her brown hair brought out all the golden
+color in her eyes, in which blue streaks mingled as in Florentine
+marble; their expression seemed to increase the significance of her
+words. A studied grace lay in the charms of her bodice. Perhaps a rival
+might have found the lines of the thick eyebrows, which almost met, a
+little hard; or found a fault in the almost invisible down that covered
+her features. I saw the signs of passion everywhere, written on those
+Italian eyelids, on the splendid shoulders worthy of the Venus of Milo,
+on her features, in the darker shade of down above a somewhat thick
+under-lip. She was not merely a woman, but a romance. The whole
+blended harmony of lines, the feminine luxuriance of her frame, and its
+passionate promise, were subdued by a constant inexplicable reserve
+and modesty at variance with everything else about her. It needed an
+observation as keen as my own to detect such signs as these in her
+character. To explain myself more clearly; there were two women in
+Foedora, divided perhaps by the line between head and body: the one,
+the head alone, seemed to be susceptible, and the other phlegmatic.
+She prepared her glance before she looked at you, something unspeakably
+mysterious, some inward convulsion seemed revealed by her glittering
+eyes.
+
+“So, to be brief, either my imperfect moral science had left me a good
+deal to learn in the moral world, or a lofty soul dwelt in the countess,
+lent to her face those charms that fascinated and subdued us, and gave
+her an ascendency only the more complete because it comprehended a
+sympathy of desire.
+
+“I went away completely enraptured with this woman, dazzled by the
+luxury around her, gratified in every faculty of my soul--noble and
+base, good and evil. When I felt myself so excited, eager, and elated,
+I thought I understood the attraction that drew thither those artists,
+diplomatists, men in office, those stock-jobbers encased in triple
+brass. They came, no doubt, to find in her society the delirious emotion
+that now thrilled through every fibre in me, throbbing through my brain,
+setting the blood a-tingle in every vein, fretting even the tiniest
+nerve. And she had given herself to none, so as to keep them all. A
+woman is a coquette so long as she knows not love.
+
+“‘Well,’ I said to Rastignac, ‘they married her, or sold her perhaps,
+to some old man, and recollections of her first marriage have caused her
+aversion for love.’
+
+“I walked home from the Faubourg St. Honore, where Foedora lived.
+Almost all the breadth of Paris lies between her mansion and the Rue des
+Cordiers, but the distance seemed short, in spite of the cold. And I was
+to lay siege to Foedora’s heart, in winter, and a bitter winter, with
+only thirty francs in my possession, and such a distance as that lay
+between us! Only a poor man knows what such a passion costs in cab-hire,
+gloves, linen, tailor’s bills, and the like. If the Platonic stage lasts
+a little too long, the affair grows ruinous. As a matter of fact, there
+is many a Lauzun among students of law, who finds it impossible to
+approach a ladylove living on a first floor. And I, sickly, thin, poorly
+dressed, wan and pale as any artist convalescent after a work, how could
+I compete with other young men, curled, handsome, smart, outcravatting
+Croatia; wealthy men, equipped with tilburys, and armed with assurance?
+
+“‘Bah, death or Foedora!’ I cried, as I went round by a bridge; ‘my
+fortune lies in Foedora.’
+
+“That gothic boudoir and Louis Quatorze salon came before my eyes. I saw
+the countess again in her white dress with its large graceful sleeves,
+and all the fascinations of her form and movements. These pictures of
+Foedora and her luxurious surroundings haunted me even in my bare, cold
+garret, when at last I reached it, as disheveled as any naturalist’s
+wig. The contrast suggested evil counsel; in such a way crimes are
+conceived. I cursed my honest, self-respecting poverty, my garret where
+such teeming fancies had stirred within me. I trembled with fury, I
+reproached God, the devil, social conditions, my own father, the whole
+universe, indeed, with my fate and my misfortunes. I went hungry to bed,
+muttering ludicrous imprecations, but fully determined to win Foedora.
+Her heart was my last ticket in the lottery, my fortune depended upon
+it.
+
+“I spare you the history of my earlier visits, to reach the drama
+the sooner. In my efforts to appeal to her, I essayed to engage her
+intellect and her vanity on my side; in order to secure her love, I gave
+her any quantity of reasons for increasing her self-esteem; I never left
+her in a state of indifference; women like emotions at any cost, I gave
+them to her in plenty; I would rather have had her angry with me than
+indifferent.
+
+“At first, urged by a strong will and a desire for her love, I assumed
+a little authority, but my own feelings grew stronger and mastered me; I
+relapsed into truth, I lost my head, and fell desperately in love.
+
+“I am not very sure what we mean by the word love in our poetry and our
+talk; but I know that I have never found in all the ready rhetorical
+phrases of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, in whose room perhaps I was lodging;
+nor among the feeble inventions of two centuries of our literature, nor
+in any picture that Italy has produced, a representation of the feelings
+that expanded all at once in my double nature. The view of the lake of
+Bienne, some music of Rossini’s, the Madonna of Murillo’s now in
+the possession of General Soult, Lescombat’s letters, a few sayings
+scattered through collections of anecdotes; but most of all the prayers
+of religious ecstatics, and passages in our _fabliaux_,--these things
+alone have power to carry me back to the divine heights of my first
+love.
+
+“Nothing expressed in human language, no thought reproducible in color,
+marble, sound, or articulate speech, could ever render the force, the
+truth, the completeness, the suddenness with which love awoke in me.
+To speak of art, is to speak of illusion. Love passes through endless
+transformations before it passes for ever into our existence and makes
+it glow with its own color of flame. The process is imperceptible, and
+baffles the artist’s analysis. Its moans and complaints are tedious to
+an uninterested spectator. One would need to be very much in love
+to share the furious transports of Lovelace, as one reads _Clarissa
+Harlowe_. Love is like some fresh spring, that leaves its cresses,
+its gravel bed and flowers to become first a stream and then a river,
+changing its aspect and its nature as it flows to plunge itself in some
+boundless ocean, where restricted natures only find monotony, but where
+great souls are engulfed in endless contemplation.
+
+“How can I dare to describe the hues of fleeting emotions, the nothings
+beyond all price, the spoken accents that beggar language, the looks
+that hold more than all the wealth of poetry? Not one of the mysterious
+scenes that draw us insensibly nearer and nearer to a woman, but has
+depths in it which can swallow up all the poetry that ever was written.
+How can the inner life and mystery that stirs in our souls penetrate
+through our glozes, when we have not even words to describe the visible
+and outward mysteries of beauty? What enchantment steeped me for how
+many hours in unspeakable rapture, filled with the sight of Her! What
+made me happy? I know not. That face of hers overflowed with light at
+such times; it seemed in some way to glow with it; the outlines of her
+face, with the scarcely perceptible down on its delicate surface, shone
+with a beauty belonging to the far distant horizon that melts into the
+sunlight. The light of day seemed to caress her as she mingled in
+it; rather it seemed that the light of her eyes was brighter than the
+daylight itself; or some shadow passing over that fair face made a kind
+of change there, altering its hues and its expression. Some thought
+would often seem to glow on her white brows; her eyes appeared to
+dilate, and her eyelids trembled; a smile rippled over her features;
+the living coral of her lips grew full of meaning as they closed and
+unclosed; an indistinguishable something in her hair made brown shadows
+on her fair temples; in each new phase Foedora spoke. Every slight
+variation in her beauty made a new pleasure for my eyes, disclosed
+charms my heart had never known before; I tried to read a separate
+emotion or a hope in every change that passed over her face. This mute
+converse passed between soul and soul, like sound and answering echo;
+and the short-lived delights then showered upon me have left indelible
+impressions behind. Her voice would cause a frenzy in me that I could
+hardly understand. I could have copied the example of some prince of
+Lorraine, and held a live coal in the hollow of my hand, if her fingers
+passed caressingly through my hair the while. I felt no longer mere
+admiration and desire: I was under the spell; I had met my destiny. When
+back again under my own roof, I still vaguely saw Foedora in her own
+home, and had some indefinable share in her life; if she felt ill, I
+suffered too. The next day I used to say to her:
+
+“‘You were not well yesterday.’
+
+“How often has she not stood before me, called by the power of ecstasy,
+in the silence of the night! Sometimes she would break in upon me like
+a ray of light, make me drop my pen, and put science and study to flight
+in grief and alarm, as she compelled my admiration by the alluring pose
+I had seen but a short time before. Sometimes I went to seek her in the
+spirit world, and would bow down to her as to a hope, entreating her to
+let me hear the silver sounds of her voice, and I would wake at length
+in tears.
+
+“Once, when she had promised to go to the theatre with me, she took it
+suddenly into her head to refuse to go out, and begged me to leave her
+alone. I was in such despair over the perversity which cost me a day’s
+work, and (if I must confess it) my last shilling as well, that I went
+alone where she was to have been, desiring to see the play she had
+wished to see. I had scarcely seated myself when an electric shock went
+through me. A voice told me, ‘She is here!’ I looked round, and saw the
+countess hidden in the shadow at the back of her box in the first
+tier. My look did not waver; my eyes saw her at once with incredible
+clearness; my soul hovered about her life like an insect above its
+flower. How had my senses received this warning? There is something
+in these inward tremors that shallow people find astonishing, but the
+phenomena of our inner consciousness are produced as simple as those of
+external vision; so I was not surprised, but much vexed. My studies of
+our mental faculties, so little understood, helped me at any rate to
+find in my own excitement some living proofs of my theories. There
+was something exceedingly odd in this combination of lover and man of
+science, of downright idolatry of a woman with the love of knowledge.
+The causes of the lover’s despair were highly interesting to the man of
+science; and the exultant lover, on the other hand, put science far away
+from him in his joy. Foedora saw me, and grew grave: I annoyed her.
+I went to her box during the first interval, and finding her alone,
+I stayed there. Although we had not spoken of love, I foresaw an
+explanation. I had not told her my secret, still there was a kind of
+understanding between us. She used to tell me her plans for amusement,
+and on the previous evening had asked with friendly eagerness if I meant
+to call the next day. After any witticism of hers, she would give me
+an inquiring glance, as if she had sought to please me alone by it. She
+would soothe me if I was vexed; and if she pouted, I had in some sort
+a right to ask an explanation. Before she would pardon any blunder,
+she would keep me a suppliant for long. All these things that we so
+relished, were so many lovers’ quarrels. What arch grace she threw into
+it all! and what happiness it was to me!
+
+“But now we stood before each other as strangers, with the close
+relation between us both suspended. The countess was glacial: a
+presentiment of trouble filled me.
+
+“‘Will you come home with me?’ she said, when the play was over.
+
+“There had been a sudden change in the weather, and sleet was falling
+in showers as we went out. Foedora’s carriage was unable to reach the
+doorway of the theatre. At the sight of a well-dressed woman about to
+cross the street, a commissionaire held an umbrella above us, and stood
+waiting at the carriage-door for his tip. I would have given ten years
+of life just then for a couple of halfpence, but I had not a penny. All
+the man in me and all my vainest susceptibilities were wrung with an
+infernal pain. The words, ‘I haven’t a penny about me, my good fellow!’
+came from me in the hard voice of thwarted passion; and yet I was that
+man’s brother in misfortune, as I knew too well; and once I had so
+lightly paid away seven hundred thousand francs! The footman pushed the
+man aside, and the horses sprang forward. As we returned, Foedora, in
+real or feigned abstraction, answered all my questions curtly and by
+monosyllables. I said no more; it was a hateful moment. When we reached
+her house, we seated ourselves by the hearth, and when the servant had
+stirred the fire and left us alone, the countess turned to me with an
+inexplicable expression, and spoke. Her manner was almost solemn.
+
+“‘Since my return to France, more than one young man, tempted by my
+money, has made proposals to me which would have satisfied my pride. I
+have come across men, too, whose attachment was so deep and sincere that
+they might have married me even if they had found me the penniless girl
+I used to be. Besides these, Monsieur de Valentin, you must know that
+new titles and newly-acquired wealth have been also offered to me, and
+that I have never received again any of those who were so ill-advised as
+to mention love to me. If my regard for you was but slight, I would not
+give you this warning, which is dictated by friendship rather than
+by pride. A woman lays herself open to a rebuff of some kind, if she
+imagines herself to be loved, and declines, before it is uttered, to
+listen to language which in its nature implies a compliment. I am well
+acquainted with the parts played by Arsinoe and Araminta, and with the
+sort of answer I might look for under such circumstances; but I hope
+to-day that I shall not find myself misconstrued by a man of no ordinary
+character, because I have frankly spoken my mind.’
+
+“She spoke with the cool self-possession of some attorney or solicitor
+explaining the nature of a contract or the conduct of a lawsuit to a
+client. There was not the least sign of feeling in the clear soft tones
+of her voice. Her steady face and dignified bearing seemed to me now
+full of diplomatic reserve and coldness. She had planned this scene, no
+doubt, and carefully chosen her words beforehand. Oh, my friend, there
+are women who take pleasure in piercing hearts, and deliberately plunge
+the dagger back again into the wound; such women as these cannot but
+be worshiped, for such women either love or would fain be loved. A day
+comes when they make amends for all the pain they gave us; they repay
+us for the pangs, the keenness of which they recognize, in joys a
+hundred-fold, even as God, they tell us, recompenses our good works.
+Does not their perversity spring from the strength of their feelings?
+But to be so tortured by a woman, who slaughters you with indifference!
+was not the suffering hideous?
+
+“Foedora did not know it, but in that minute she trampled all my hopes
+beneath her feet; she maimed my life and she blighted my future with the
+cool indifference and unconscious barbarity of an inquisitive child who
+plucks its wings from a butterfly.
+
+“‘Later on,’ resumed Foedora, ‘you will learn, I hope, the stability of
+the affection that I keep for my friends. You will always find that I
+have devotion and kindness for them. I would give my life to serve my
+friends; but you could only despise me, if I allowed them to make love
+to me without return. That is enough. You are the only man to whom I
+have spoken such words as these last.’
+
+“At first I could not speak, or master the tempest that arose within me;
+but I soon repressed my emotions in the depths of my soul, and began to
+smile.
+
+“‘If I own that I love you,’ I said, ‘you will banish me at once; if
+I plead guilty to indifference, you will make me suffer for it. Women,
+magistrates, and priests never quite lay the gown aside. Silence is
+non-committal; be pleased then, madame, to approve my silence. You must
+have feared, in some degree, to lose me, or I should not have received
+this friendly admonition; and with that thought my pride ought to be
+satisfied. Let us banish all personal considerations. You are perhaps
+the only woman with whom I could discuss rationally a resolution so
+contrary to the laws of nature. Considered with regard to your species,
+you are a prodigy. Now let us investigate, in good faith, the causes of
+this psychological anomaly. Does there exist in you, as in many women,
+a certain pride in self, a love of your own loveliness, a refinement of
+egoism which makes you shudder at the idea of belonging to another;
+is it the thought of resigning your own will and submitting to a
+superiority, though only of convention, which displeases you? You
+would seem to me a thousand times fairer for it. Can love formerly have
+brought you suffering? You probably set some value on your dainty
+figure and graceful appearance, and may perhaps wish to avoid the
+disfigurements of maternity. Is not this one of your strongest reasons
+for refusing a too importunate love? Some natural defect perhaps makes
+you insusceptible in spite of yourself? Do not be angry; my study, my
+inquiry is absolutely dispassionate. Some are born blind, and nature may
+easily have formed women who in like manner are blind, deaf, and dumb to
+love. You are really an interesting subject for medical investigation.
+You do not know your value. You feel perhaps a very legitimate distaste
+for mankind; in that I quite concur--to me they all seem ugly and
+detestable. And you are right,’ I added, feeling my heart swell within
+me; ‘how can you do otherwise than despise us? There is not a man living
+who is worthy of you.’
+
+“I will not repeat all the biting words with which I ridiculed her. In
+vain; my bitterest sarcasms and keenest irony never made her wince nor
+elicited a sign of vexation. She heard me, with the customary smile
+upon her lips and in her eyes, the smile that she wore as a part of her
+clothing, and that never varied for friends, for mere acquaintances, or
+for strangers.
+
+“‘Isn’t it very nice of me to allow you to dissect me like this?’ she
+said at last, as I came to a temporary standstill, and looked at her
+in silence. ‘You see,’ she went on, laughing, ‘that I have no foolish
+over-sensitiveness about my friendship. Many a woman would shut her door
+on you by way of punishing you for your impertinence.’
+
+“‘You could banish me without needing to give me the reasons for your
+harshness.’ As I spoke I felt that I could kill her if she dismissed me.
+
+“‘You are mad,’ she said, smiling still.
+
+“‘Did you never think,’ I went on, ‘of the effects of passionate love? A
+desperate man has often murdered his mistress.’
+
+“‘It is better to die than to live in misery,’ she said coolly. ‘Such
+a man as that would run through his wife’s money, desert her, and leave
+her at last in utter wretchedness.’
+
+“This calm calculation dumfounded me. The gulf between us was made
+plain; we could never understand each other.
+
+“‘Good-bye,’ I said proudly.
+
+“‘Good-bye, till to-morrow,’ she answered, with a little friendly bow.
+
+“For a moment’s space I hurled at her in a glance all the love I must
+forego; she stood there with than banal smile of hers, the detestable
+chill smile of a marble statue, with none of the warmth in it that it
+seemed to express. Can you form any idea, my friend, of the pain that
+overcame me on the way home through rain and snow, across a league of
+icy-sheeted quays, without a hope left? Oh, to think that she not only
+had not guessed my poverty, but believed me to be as wealthy as she was,
+and likewise borne as softly over the rough ways of life! What failure
+and deceit! It was no mere question of money now, but of the fate of all
+that lay within me.
+
+“I went at haphazard, going over the words of our strange conversation
+with myself. I got so thoroughly lost in my reflections that I ended by
+doubts as to the actual value of words and ideas. But I loved her
+all the same; I loved this woman with the untouched heart that might
+surrender at any moment--a woman who daily disappointed the expectations
+of the previous evening, by appearing as a new mistress on the morrow.
+
+“As I passed under the gateway of the Institute, a fevered thrill ran
+through me. I remembered that I was fasting, and that I had not a penny.
+To complete the measure of my misfortune, my hat was spoiled by the
+rain. How was I to appear in the drawing-room of a woman of fashion with
+an unpresentable hat? I had always cursed the inane and stupid custom
+that compels us to exhibit the lining of our hats, and to keep them
+always in our hands, but with anxious care I had so far kept mine in a
+precarious state of efficiency. It had been neither strikingly new, nor
+utterly shabby, neither napless nor over-glossy, and might have passed
+for the hat of a frugally given owner, but its artificially prolonged
+existence had now reached the final stage, it was crumpled, forlorn, and
+completely ruined, a downright rag, a fitting emblem of its master. My
+painfully preserved elegance must collapse for want of thirty sous.
+
+“What unrecognized sacrifices I had made in the past three months for
+Foedora! How often I had given the price of a week’s sustenance to see
+her for a moment! To leave my work and go without food was the least of
+it! I must traverse the streets of Paris without getting splashed, run
+to escape showers, and reach her rooms at last, as neat and spruce as
+any of the coxcombs about her. For a poet and a distracted wooer the
+difficulties of this task were endless. My happiness, the course of my
+love, might be affected by a speck of mud upon my only white waistcoat!
+Oh, to miss the sight of her because I was wet through and bedraggled,
+and had not so much as five sous to give to a shoeblack for removing the
+least little spot of mud from my boot! The petty pangs of these nameless
+torments, which an irritable man finds so great, only strengthened my
+passion.
+
+“The unfortunate must make sacrifices which they may not mention to
+women who lead refined and luxurious lives. Such women see things
+through a prism that gilds all men and their surroundings. Egoism leads
+them to take cheerful views, and fashion makes them cruel; they do
+not wish to reflect, lest they lose their happiness, and the absorbing
+nature of their pleasures absolves their indifference to the misfortunes
+of others. A penny never means millions to them; millions, on the
+contrary, seem a mere trifle. Perhaps love must plead his cause by great
+sacrifices, but a veil must be lightly drawn across them, they must go
+down into silence. So when wealthy men pour out their devotion,
+their fortunes, and their lives, they gain somewhat by these commonly
+entertained opinions, an additional lustre hangs about their lovers’
+follies; their silence is eloquent; there is a grace about the drawn
+veil; but my terrible distress bound me over to suffer fearfully or ever
+I might speak of my love or of dying for her sake.
+
+“Was it a sacrifice after all? Was I not richly rewarded by the joy I
+took in sacrificing everything to her? There was no commonest event of
+my daily life to which the countess had not given importance, had not
+overfilled with happiness. I had been hitherto careless of my clothes,
+now I respected my coat as if it had been a second self. I should not
+have hesitated between bodily harm and a tear in that garment. You must
+enter wholly into my circumstances to understand the stormy thoughts,
+the gathering frenzy, that shook me as I went, and which, perhaps, were
+increased by my walk. I gloated in an infernal fashion which I cannot
+describe over the absolute completeness of my wretchedness. I would
+have drawn from it an augury of my future, but there is no limit to the
+possibilities of misfortune. The door of my lodging-house stood ajar.
+A light streamed from the heart-shaped opening cut in the shutters.
+Pauline and her mother were sitting up for me and talking. I heard my
+name spoken, and listened.
+
+“‘Raphael is much nicer-looking than the student in number seven,’ said
+Pauline; ‘his fair hair is such a pretty color. Don’t you think there is
+something in his voice, too, I don’t know what it is, that gives you a
+sort of a thrill? And, then, though he may be a little proud, he is very
+kind, and he has such fine manners; I am sure that all the ladies must
+be quite wild about him.’
+
+“‘You might be fond of him yourself, to hear you talk,’ was Madame
+Gaudin’s comment.
+
+“‘He is just as dear to me as a brother,’ she laughed. ‘I should be
+finely ungrateful if I felt no friendship for him. Didn’t he teach me
+music and drawing and grammar, and everything I know in fact? You don’t
+much notice how I get on, dear mother; but I shall know enough, in a
+while, to give lessons myself, and then we can keep a servant.’
+
+“I stole away softly, made some noise outside, and went into their room
+to take the lamp, that Pauline tried to light for me. The dear child had
+just poured soothing balm into my wounds. Her outspoken admiration had
+given me fresh courage. I so needed to believe in myself and to come
+by a just estimate of my advantages. This revival of hope in me perhaps
+colored my surroundings. Perhaps also I had never before really looked
+at the picture that so often met my eyes, of the two women in their
+room; it was a scene such as Flemish painters have reproduced so
+faithfully for us, that I admired in its delightful reality. The mother,
+with the kind smile upon her lips, sat knitting stockings by the dying
+fire; Pauline was painting hand-screens, her brushes and paints, strewn
+over the tiny table, made bright spots of color for the eye to dwell
+on. When she had left her seat and stood lighting my lamp, one must
+have been under the yoke of a terrible passion indeed, not to admire her
+faintly flushed transparent hands, the girlish charm of her attitude,
+the ideal grace of her head, as the lamplight fell full on her pale
+face. Night and silence added to the charms of this industrious vigil
+and peaceful interior. The light-heartedness that sustained such
+continuous toil could only spring from devout submission and the lofty
+feelings that it brings.
+
+“There was an indescribable harmony between them and their possessions.
+The splendor of Foedora’s home did not satisfy; it called out all my
+worst instincts; something in this lowly poverty and unfeigned goodness
+revived me. It may have been that luxury abased me in my own eyes,
+while here my self-respect was restored to me, as I sought to extend the
+protection that a man is so eager to make felt, over these two women,
+who in the bare simplicity of the existence in their brown room seemed
+to live wholly in the feelings of their hearts. As I came up to Pauline,
+she looked at me in an almost motherly way; her hands shook a little as
+she held the lamp, so that the light fell on me and cried:
+
+“‘_Dieu_! how pale you are! and you are wet through! My mother will try
+to wipe you dry. Monsieur Raphael,’ she went on, after a little pause,
+‘you are so very fond of milk, and to-night we happen to have some
+cream. Here, will you not take some?’
+
+“She pounced like a kitten, on a china bowl full of milk. She did it so
+quickly, and put it before me so prettily, that I hesitated.
+
+“‘You are going to refuse me?’ she said, and her tones changed.
+
+“The pride in each felt for the other’s pride. It was Pauline’s poverty
+that seemed to humiliate her, and to reproach me with my want of
+consideration, and I melted at once and accepted the cream that might
+have been meant for her morning’s breakfast. The poor child tried not to
+show her joy, but her eyes sparkled.
+
+“‘I needed it badly,’ I said as I sat down. (An anxious look passed over
+her face.) ‘Do you remember that passage, Pauline, where Bossuet tells
+how God gave more abundant reward for a cup of cold water than for a
+victory?’
+
+“‘Yes,’ she said, her heart beating like some wild bird’s in a child’s
+hands.
+
+“‘Well, as we shall part very soon, now,’ I went on in an unsteady
+voice, ‘you must let me show my gratitude to you and to your mother for
+all the care you have taken of me.’
+
+“‘Oh, don’t let us cast accounts,’ she said laughing. But her laughter
+covered an agitation that gave me pain. I went on without appearing to
+hear her words:
+
+“‘My piano is one of Erard’s best instruments; and you must take it.
+Pray accept it without hesitation; I really could not take it with me on
+the journey I am about to make.’
+
+“Perhaps the melancholy tones in which I spoke enlightened the two
+women, for they seemed to understand, and eyed me with curiosity and
+alarm. Here was the affection that I had looked for in the glacial
+regions of the great world, true affection, unostentatious but tender,
+and possibly lasting.
+
+“‘Don’t take it to heart so,’ the mother said; ‘stay on here. My husband
+is on his way towards us even now,’ she went on. ‘I looked into the
+Gospel of St. John this evening while Pauline hung our door-key in a
+Bible from her fingers. The key turned; that means that Gaudin is in
+health and doing well. Pauline began again for you and for the young man
+in number seven--it turned for you, but not for him. We are all going to
+be rich. Gaudin will come back a millionaire. I dreamed once that I saw
+him in a ship full of serpents; luckily the water was rough, and that
+means gold or precious stones from over-sea.’
+
+“The silly, friendly words were like the crooning lullaby with which a
+mother soothes her sick child; they in a manner calmed me. There was a
+pleasant heartiness in the worthy woman’s looks and tones, which, if
+it could not remove trouble, at any rate soothed and quieted it, and
+deadened the pain. Pauline, keener-sighted than her mother, studied me
+uneasily; her quick eyes seemed to read my life and my future. I thanked
+the mother and daughter by an inclination of the head, and hurried away;
+I was afraid I should break down.
+
+“I found myself alone under my roof, and laid myself down in my misery.
+My unhappy imagination suggested numberless baseless projects, and
+prescribed impossible resolutions. When a man is struggling in the wreck
+of his fortunes, he is not quite without resources, but I was engulfed.
+Ah, my dear fellow, we are too ready to blame the wretched. Let us be
+less harsh on the results of the most powerful of all social solvents.
+Where poverty is absolute there exist no such things as shame or crime,
+or virtue or intelligence. I knew not what to do; I was as defenceless
+as a maiden on her knees before a beast of prey. A penniless man who
+has no ties to bind him is master of himself at any rate, but a luckless
+wretch who is in love no longer belongs to himself, and may not take his
+own life. Love makes us almost sacred in our own eyes; it is the life
+of another that we revere within us; then and so it begins for us the
+cruelest trouble of all--the misery with a hope in it, a hope for which
+we must even bear our torments. I thought I would go to Rastignac on the
+morrow to confide Foedora’s strange resolution to him, and with that I
+slept.
+
+“‘Ah, ha!’ cried Rastignac, as he saw me enter his lodging at nine
+o’clock in the morning. ‘I know what brings you here. Foedora has
+dismissed you. Some kind souls, who were jealous of your ascendency over
+the countess, gave out that you were going to be married. Heaven only
+knows what follies your rivals have equipped you with, and what slanders
+have been directed at you.’
+
+“‘That explains everything!’ I exclaimed. I remembered all my
+presumptuous speeches, and gave the countess credit for no little
+magnanimity. It pleased me to think that I was a miscreant who had not
+been punished nearly enough, and I saw nothing in her indulgence but the
+long-suffering charity of love.
+
+“‘Not quite so fast,’ urged the prudent Gascon; ‘Foedora has all the
+sagacity natural to a profoundly selfish woman; perhaps she may have
+taken your measure while you still coveted only her money and her
+splendor; in spite of all your care, she could have read you through and
+through. She can dissemble far too well to let any dissimulation pass
+undetected. I fear,’ he went on, ‘that I have brought you into a
+bad way. In spite of her cleverness and her tact, she seems to me a
+domineering sort of person, like every woman who can only feel pleasure
+through her brain. Happiness for her lies entirely in a comfortable life
+and in social pleasures; her sentiment is only assumed; she will make
+you miserable; you will be her head footman.’
+
+“He spoke to the deaf. I broke in upon him, disclosing, with an
+affectation of light-heartedness, the state of my finances.
+
+“‘Yesterday evening,’ he rejoined, ‘luck ran against me, and that
+carried off all my available cash. But for that trivial mishap, I would
+gladly have shared my purse with you. But let us go and breakfast at the
+restaurant; perhaps there is good counsel in oysters.’
+
+“He dressed, and had his tilbury brought round. We went to the Cafe
+de Paris like a couple of millionaires, armed with all the audacious
+impertinence of the speculator whose capital is imaginary. That devil
+of a Gascon quite disconcerted me by the coolness of his manners and his
+absolute self-possession. While we were taking coffee after an excellent
+and well-ordered repast, a young dandy entered, who did not escape
+Rastignac. He had been nodding here and there among the crowd to this or
+that young man, distinguished both by personal attractions and elegant
+attire, and now he said to me:
+
+“‘Here’s your man,’ as he beckoned to this gentleman with a wonderful
+cravat, who seemed to be looking for a table that suited his ideas.
+
+“‘That rogue has been decorated for bringing out books that he doesn’t
+understand a word of,’ whispered Rastignac; ‘he is a chemist, a
+historian, a novelist, and a political writer; he has gone halves,
+thirds, or quarters in the authorship of I don’t know how many plays,
+and he is as ignorant as Dom Miguel’s mule. He is not a man so much as
+a name, a label that the public is familiar with. So he would do well to
+avoid shops inscribed with the motto, “_Ici l’on peut ecrire soi-meme_.”
+ He is acute enough to deceive an entire congress of diplomatists. In
+a couple of words, he is a moral half-caste, not quite a fraud, nor
+entirely genuine. But, hush! he has succeeded already; nobody asks
+anything further, and every one calls him an illustrious man.’
+
+“‘Well, my esteemed and excellent friend, and how may Your Intelligence
+be?’ So Rastignac addressed the stranger as he sat down at a neighboring
+table.
+
+“‘Neither well nor ill; I am overwhelmed with work. I have all the
+necessary materials for some very curious historical memoirs in my
+hands, and I cannot find any one to whom I can ascribe them. It worries
+me, for I shall have to be quick about it. Memoirs are falling out of
+fashion.’
+
+“‘What are the memoirs--contemporaneous, ancient, or memoirs of the
+court, or what?’
+
+“‘They relate to the Necklace affair.’
+
+“‘Now, isn’t that a coincidence?’ said Rastignac, turning to me and
+laughing. He looked again to the literary speculation, and said,
+indicating me:
+
+“‘This is M. de Valentin, one of my friends, whom I must introduce to
+you as one of our future literary celebrities. He had formerly an aunt,
+a marquise, much in favor once at court, and for about two years he has
+been writing a Royalist history of the Revolution.’
+
+“Then, bending over this singular man of business, he went on:
+
+“‘He is a man of talent, and a simpleton that will do your memoirs for
+you, in his aunt’s name, for a hundred crowns a volume.’
+
+“‘It’s a bargain,’ said the other, adjusting his cravat. ‘Waiter, my
+oysters.’
+
+“‘Yes, but you must give me twenty-five louis as commission, and you
+will pay him in advance for each volume,’ said Rastignac.
+
+“‘No, no. He shall only have fifty crowns on account, and then I shall
+be sure of having my manuscript punctually.’
+
+“Rastignac repeated this business conversation to me in low tones; and
+then, without giving me any voice in the matter, he replied:
+
+“‘We agree to your proposal. When can we call upon you to arrange the
+affair?’
+
+“‘Oh, well! Come and dine here to-morrow at seven o’clock.’
+
+“We rose. Rastignac flung some money to the waiter, put the bill in his
+pocket, and we went out. I was quite stupified by the flippancy and ease
+with which he had sold my venerable aunt, la Marquise de Montbauron.
+
+“‘I would sooner take ship for the Brazils, and give the Indians lessons
+in algebra, though I don’t know a word of it, than tarnish my family
+name.’
+
+“Rastignac burst out laughing.
+
+“‘How dense you are! Take the fifty crowns in the first instance, and
+write the memoirs. When you have finished them, you will decline to
+publish them in your aunt’s name, imbecile! Madame de Montbauron, with
+her hooped petticoat, her rank and beauty, rouge and slippers, and her
+death upon the scaffold, is worth a great deal more than six hundred
+francs. And then, if the trade will not give your aunt her due, some old
+adventurer, or some shady countess or other, will be found to put her
+name to the memoirs.’
+
+“‘Oh,’ I groaned; ‘why did I quit the blameless life in my garret? This
+world has aspects that are very vilely dishonorable.’
+
+“‘Yes,’ said Rastignac, ‘that is all very poetical, but this is a matter
+of business. What a child you are! Now, listen to me. As to your work,
+the public will decide upon it; and as for my literary middle-man,
+hasn’t he devoted eight years of his life to obtaining a footing in the
+book-trade, and paid heavily for his experience? You divide the money
+and the labor of the book with him very unequally, but isn’t yours the
+better part? Twenty-five louis means as much to you as a thousand francs
+does to him. Come, you can write historical memoirs, a work of art
+such as never was, since Diderot once wrote six sermons for a hundred
+crowns!’
+
+“‘After all,’ I said, in agitation, ‘I cannot choose but do it. So,
+my dear friend, my thanks are due to you. I shall be quite rich with
+twenty-five louis.’
+
+“‘Richer than you think,’ he laughed. ‘If I have my commission from
+Finot in this matter, it goes to you, can’t you see? Now let us go to
+the Bois de Boulogne,’ he said; ‘we shall see your countess there, and
+I will show you the pretty little widow that I am to marry--a charming
+woman, an Alsacienne, rather plump. She reads Kant, Schiller, Jean Paul,
+and a host of lachrymose books. She has a mania for continually asking
+my opinion, and I have to look as if I entered into all this German
+sensibility, and to know a pack of ballads--drugs, all of them, that
+my doctor absolutely prohibits. As yet I have not been able to wean her
+from her literary enthusiasms; she sheds torrents of tears as she reads
+Goethe, and I have to weep a little myself to please her, for she has an
+income of fifty thousand livres, my dear boy, and the prettiest little
+hand and foot in the world. Oh, if she would only say _mon ange_
+and _brouiller_ instead of _mon anche_ and _prouiller_, she would be
+perfection!’
+
+“We saw the countess, radiant amid the splendors of her equipage. The
+coquette bowed very graciously to us both, and the smile she gave me
+seemed to me to be divine and full of love. I was very happy; I fancied
+myself beloved; I had money, a wealth of love in my heart, and my
+troubles were over. I was light-hearted, blithe, and content. I found
+my friend’s lady-love charming. Earth and air and heaven--all
+nature--seemed to reflect Foedora’s smile for me.
+
+“As we returned through the Champs-Elysees, we paid a visit
+to Rastignac’s hatter and tailor. Thanks to the ‘Necklace,’ my
+insignificant peace-footing was to end, and I made formidable
+preparations for a campaign. Henceforward I need not shrink from a
+contest with the spruce and fashionable young men who made Foedora’s
+circle. I went home, locked myself in, and stood by my dormer window,
+outwardly calm enough, but in reality I bade a last good-bye to the
+roofs without. I began to live in the future, rehearsed my life drama,
+and discounted love and its happiness. Ah, how stormy life can grow
+to be within the four walls of a garret! The soul within us is like a
+fairy; she turns straw into diamonds for us; and for us, at a touch of
+her wand, enchanted palaces arise, as flowers in the meadows spring up
+towards the sun.
+
+“Towards noon, next day, Pauline knocked gently at my door, and brought
+me--who could guess it?--a note from Foedora. The countess asked me to
+take her to the Luxembourg, and to go thence to see with her the Museum
+and Jardin des Plantes.
+
+“‘The man is waiting for an answer,’ said Pauline, after quietly waiting
+for a moment.
+
+“I hastily scrawled my acknowledgements, and Pauline took the note. I
+changed my dress. When my toilette was ended, and I looked at myself
+with some complaisance, an icy shiver ran through me as I thought:
+
+“‘Will Foedora walk or drive? Will it rain or shine?--No matter,
+though,’ I said to myself; ‘whichever it is, can one ever reckon with
+feminine caprice? She will have no money about her, and will want
+to give a dozen francs to some little Savoyard because his rags are
+picturesque.’
+
+“I had not a brass farthing, and should have no money till the evening
+came. How dearly a poet pays for the intellectual prowess that method
+and toil have brought him, at such crises of our youth! Innumerable
+painfully vivid thoughts pierced me like barbs. I looked out of my
+window; the weather was very unsettled. If things fell out badly, I
+might easily hire a cab for the day; but would not the fear lie on me
+every moment that I might not meet Finot in the evening? I felt too weak
+to endure such fears in the midst of my felicity. Though I felt sure
+that I should find nothing, I began a grand search through my room;
+I looked for imaginary coins in the recesses of my mattress; I hunted
+about everywhere--I even shook out my old boots. A nervous fever seized
+me; I looked with wild eyes at the furniture when I had ransacked it
+all. Will you understand, I wonder, the excitement that possessed
+me when, plunged deep in the listlessness of despair, I opened my
+writing-table drawer, and found a fair and splendid ten-franc piece
+that shone like a rising star, new and sparkling, and slily hiding in
+a cranny between two boards? I did not try to account for its previous
+reserve and the cruelty of which it had been guilty in thus lying
+hidden; I kissed it for a friend faithful in adversity, and hailed it
+with a cry that found an echo, and made me turn sharply, to find Pauline
+with a face grown white.
+
+“‘I thought,’ she faltered, ‘that you had hurt yourself! The man who
+brought the letter----’ (she broke off as if something smothered her
+voice). ‘But mother has paid him,’ she added, and flitted away like a
+wayward, capricious child. Poor little one! I wanted her to share in
+my happiness. I seemed to have all the happiness in the world within
+me just then; and I would fain have returned to the unhappy, all that I
+felt as if I had stolen from them.
+
+“The intuitive perception of adversity is sound for the most part; the
+countess had sent away her carriage. One of those freaks that pretty
+women can scarcely explain to themselves had determined her to go on
+foot, by way of the boulevards, to the Jardin des Plantes.
+
+“‘It will rain,’ I told her, and it pleased her to contradict me.
+
+“As it fell out, the weather was fine while we went through the
+Luxembourg; when we came out, some drops fell from a great cloud, whose
+progress I had watched uneasily, and we took a cab. At the Museum I was
+about to dismiss the vehicle, and Foedora (what agonies!) asked me not
+to do so. But it was like a dream in broad daylight for me, to chat
+with her, to wander in the Jardin des Plantes, to stray down the shady
+alleys, to feel her hand upon my arm; the secret transports repressed
+in me were reduced, no doubt, to a fixed and foolish smile upon my
+lips; there was something unreal about it all. Yet in all her movements,
+however alluring, whether we stood or whether we walked, there was
+nothing either tender or lover-like. When I tried to share in a measure
+the action of movement prompted by her life, I became aware of a check,
+or of something strange in her that I cannot explain, or an inner
+activity concealed in her nature. There is no suavity about the
+movements of women who have no soul in them. Our wills were opposed,
+and we did not keep step together. Words are wanting to describe this
+outward dissonance between two beings; we are not accustomed to read
+a thought in a movement. We instinctively feel this phenomenon of our
+nature, but it cannot be expressed.
+
+“I did not dissect my sensations during those violent seizures of
+passion,” Raphael went on, after a moment of silence, as if he were
+replying to an objection raised by himself. “I did not analyze my
+pleasures nor count my heartbeats then, as a miser scrutinizes and
+weighs his gold pieces. No; experience sheds its melancholy light over
+the events of the past to-day, and memory brings these pictures back,
+as the sea-waves in fair weather cast up fragment after fragment of the
+debris of a wrecked vessel upon the strand.
+
+“‘It is in your power to render me a rather important service,’ said the
+countess, looking at me in an embarrassed way. ‘After confiding in you
+my aversion to lovers, I feel myself more at liberty to entreat your
+good offices in the name of friendship. Will there not be very much more
+merit in obliging me to-day?’ she asked, laughing.
+
+“I looked at her in anguish. Her manner was coaxing, but in no wise
+affectionate; she felt nothing for me; she seemed to be playing a part,
+and I thought her a consummate actress. Then all at once my hopes awoke
+once more, at a single look and word. Yet if reviving love expressed
+itself in my eyes, she bore its light without any change in the
+clearness of her own; they seemed, like a tiger’s eyes, to have a sheet
+of metal behind them. I used to hate her in such moments.
+
+“‘The influence of the Duc de Navarreins would be very useful to me,
+with an all-powerful person in Russia,’ she went on, persuasion in every
+modulation of her voice, ‘whose intervention I need in order to have
+justice done me in a matter that concerns both my fortune and my
+position in the world, that is to say, the recognition of my marriage
+by the Emperor. Is not the Duc de Navarreins a cousin of yours? A letter
+from him would settle everything.’
+
+“‘I am yours,’ I answered; ‘command me.’
+
+“‘You are very nice,’ she said, pressing my hand. ‘Come and have dinner
+with me, and I will tell you everything, as if you were my confessor.’
+
+“So this discreet, suspicious woman, who had never been heard to speak a
+word about her affairs to any one, was going to consult me.
+
+“‘Oh, how dear to me is this silence that you have imposed on me!’ I
+cried; ‘but I would rather have had some sharper ordeal still.’ And
+she smiled upon the intoxication in my eyes; she did not reject my
+admiration in any way; surely she loved me!
+
+“Fortunately, my purse held just enough to satisfy her cab-man. The day
+spent in her house, alone with her, was delicious; it was the first time
+that I had seen her in this way. Hitherto we had always been kept apart
+by the presence of others, and by her formal politeness and reserved
+manners, even during her magnificent dinners; but now it was as if I
+lived beneath her own roof--I had her all to myself, so to speak. My
+wandering fancy broke down barriers, arranged the events of life to my
+liking, and steeped me in happiness and love. I seemed to myself her
+husband, I liked to watch her busied with little details; it was a
+pleasure to me even to see her take off her bonnet and shawl. She left
+me alone for a little, and came back, charming, with her hair newly
+arranged; and this dainty change of toilette had been made for me!
+
+“During the dinner she lavished attention upon me, and put charm without
+end into those numberless trifles to all seeming, that make up half of
+our existence nevertheless. As we sat together before a crackling
+fire, on silken cushions surrounded by the most desirable creations
+of Oriental luxury; as I saw this woman whose famous beauty made every
+heart beat, so close to me; an unapproachable woman who was talking and
+bringing all her powers of coquetry to bear upon me; then my blissful
+pleasure rose almost to the point of suffering. To my vexation, I
+recollected the important business to be concluded; I determined to go
+to keep the appointment made for me for this evening.
+
+“‘So soon?’ she said, seeing me take my hat.
+
+“She loved me, then! or I thought so at least, from the bland tones in
+which those two words were uttered. I would then have bartered a couple
+of years of life for every hour she chose to grant to me, and so prolong
+my ecstasy. My happiness was increased by the extent of the money I
+sacrificed. It was midnight before she dismissed me. But on the morrow,
+for all that, my heroism cost me a good many remorseful pangs; I was
+afraid the affair of the Memoirs, now of such importance for me, might
+have fallen through, and rushed off to Rastignac. We found the nominal
+author of my future labors just getting up.
+
+“Finot read over a brief agreement to me, in which nothing whatever was
+said about my aunt, and when it had been signed he paid me down fifty
+crowns, and the three of us breakfasted together. I had only thirty
+francs left over, when I had paid for my new hat, for sixty tickets at
+thirty sous each, and settled my debts; but for some days to come the
+difficulties of living were removed. If I had but listened to Rastignac,
+I might have had abundance by frankly adopting the ‘English system.’ He
+really wanted to establish my credit by setting me to raise loans, on
+the theory that borrowing is the basis of credit. To hear him talk, the
+future was the largest and most secure kind of capital in the world.
+My future luck was hypothecated for the benefit of my creditors, and he
+gave my custom to his tailor, an artist, and a young man’s tailor, who
+was to leave me in peace until I married.
+
+“The monastic life of study that I had led for three years past ended
+on this day. I frequented Foedora’s house very diligently, and tried to
+outshine the heroes or the swaggerers to be found in her circle. When
+I believed that I had left poverty for ever behind me, I regained my
+freedom of mind, humiliated my rivals, and was looked upon as a very
+attractive, dazzling, and irresistible sort of man. But acute folk used
+to say with regard to me, ‘A fellow as clever as that will keep all his
+enthusiasms in his brain,’ and charitably extolled my faculties at
+the expense of my feelings. ‘Isn’t he lucky, not to be in love!’ they
+exclaimed. ‘If he were, could he be so light-hearted and animated?’ Yet
+in Foedora’s presence I was as dull as love could make me. When I was
+alone with her, I had not a word to say, or if I did speak, I renounced
+love; and I affected gaiety but ill, like a courtier who has a bitter
+mortification to hide. I tried in every way to make myself indispensable
+in her life, and necessary to her vanity and to her comfort; I was a
+plaything at her pleasure, a slave always at her side. And when I had
+frittered away the day in this way, I went back to my work at night,
+securing merely two or three hours’ sleep in the early morning.
+
+“But I had not, like Rastignac, the ‘English system’ at my finger-ends,
+and I very soon saw myself without a penny. I fell at once into that
+precarious way of life which industriously hides cold and miserable
+depths beneath an elusive surface of luxury; I was a coxcomb without
+conquests, a penniless fop, a nameless gallant. The old sufferings were
+renewed, but less sharply; no doubt I was growing used to the painful
+crisis. Very often my sole diet consisted of the scanty provision of
+cakes and tea that is offered in drawing-rooms, or one of the countess’
+great dinners must sustain me for two whole days. I used all my time,
+and exerted every effort and all my powers of observation, to penetrate
+the impenetrable character of Foedora. Alternate hope and despair had
+swayed my opinions; for me she was sometimes the tenderest, sometimes
+the most unfeeling of women. But these transitions from joy to sadness
+became unendurable; I sought to end the horrible conflict within me by
+extinguishing love. By the light of warning gleams my soul sometimes
+recognized the gulfs that lay between us. The countess confirmed all my
+fears; I had never yet detected any tear in her eyes; an affecting scene
+in a play left her smiling and unmoved. All her instincts were selfish;
+she could not divine another’s joy or sorrow. She had made a fool of me,
+in fact!
+
+“I had rejoiced over a sacrifice to make for her, and almost humiliated
+myself in seeking out my kinsman, the Duc de Navarreins, a selfish man
+who was ashamed of my poverty, and had injured me too deeply not to hate
+me. He received me with the polite coldness that makes every word and
+gesture seem an insult; he looked so ill at ease that I pitied him. I
+blushed for this pettiness amid grandeur, and penuriousness surrounded
+by luxury. He began to talk to me of his heavy losses in the three per
+cents, and then I told him the object of my visit. The change in his
+manners, hitherto glacial, which now gradually, became affectionate,
+disgusted me.
+
+“Well, he called upon the countess, and completely eclipsed me with her.
+
+“On him Foedora exercised spells and witcheries unheard of; she drew him
+into her power, and arranged her whole mysterious business with him; I
+was left out, I heard not a word of it; she had made a tool of me! She
+did not seem to be aware of my existence while my cousin was present;
+she received me less cordially perhaps than when I was first presented
+to her. One evening she chose to mortify me before the duke by a look, a
+gesture, that it is useless to try to express in words. I went away with
+tears in my eyes, planning terrible and outrageous schemes of vengeance
+without end.
+
+“I often used to go with her to the theatre. Love utterly absorbed me
+as I sat beside her; as I looked at her I used to give myself up to the
+pleasure of listening to the music, putting all my soul into the double
+joy of love and of hearing every emotion of my heart translated into
+musical cadences. It was my passion that filled the air and the stage,
+that was triumphant everywhere but with my mistress. Then I would take
+Foedora’s hand. I used to scan her features and her eyes, imploring of
+them some indication that one blended feeling possessed us both, seeking
+for the sudden harmony awakened by the power of music, which makes
+our souls vibrate in unison; but her hand was passive, her eyes said
+nothing.
+
+“When the fire that burned in me glowed too fiercely from the face
+I turned upon her, she met it with that studied smile of hers, the
+conventional expression that sits on the lips of every portrait in every
+exhibition. She was not listening to the music. The divine pages of
+Rossini, Cimarosa, or Zingarelli called up no emotion, gave no voice to
+any poetry in her life; her soul was a desert.
+
+“Foedora presented herself as a drama before a drama. Her lorgnette
+traveled restlessly over the boxes; she was restless too beneath the
+apparent calm; fashion tyrannized over her; her box, her bonnet, her
+carriage, her own personality absorbed her entirely. My merciless
+knowledge thoroughly tore away all my illusions. If good breeding
+consists in self-forgetfulness and consideration for others, in
+constantly showing gentleness in voice and bearing, in pleasing others,
+and in making them content in themselves, all traces of her plebeian
+origin were not yet obliterated in Foedora, in spite of her cleverness.
+Her self-forgetfulness was a sham, her manners were not innate but
+painfully acquired, her politeness was rather subservient. And yet for
+those she singled out, her honeyed words expressed natural kindness, her
+pretentious exaggeration was exalted enthusiasm. I alone had scrutinized
+her grimacings, and stripped away the thin rind that sufficed to conceal
+her real nature from the world; her trickery no longer deceived me; I
+had sounded the depths of that feline nature. I blushed for her when
+some donkey or other flattered and complimented her. And yet I loved her
+through it all! I hoped that her snows would melt with the warmth of a
+poet’s love. If I could only have made her feel all the greatness that
+lies in devotion, then I should have seen her perfected, she would have
+been an angel. I loved her as a man, a lover, and an artist; if it had
+been necessary not to love her so that I might win her, some cool-headed
+coxcomb, some self-possessed calculator would perhaps have had an
+advantage over me. She was so vain and sophisticated, that the language
+of vanity would appeal to her; she would have allowed herself to be
+taken in the toils of an intrigue; a hard, cold nature would have gained
+a complete ascendency over her. Keen grief had pierced me to my very
+soul, as she unconsciously revealed her absolute love of self. I seemed
+to see her as she one day would be, alone in the world, with no one to
+whom she could stretch her hand, with no friendly eyes for her own
+to meet and rest upon. I was bold enough to set this before her one
+evening; I painted in vivid colors her lonely, sad, deserted old age.
+Her comment on this prospect of so terrible a revenge of thwarted nature
+was horrible.
+
+“‘I shall always have money,’ she said; ‘and with money we can always
+inspire such sentiments as are necessary for our comfort in those about
+us.’
+
+“I went away confounded by the arguments of luxury, by the reasoning
+of this woman of the world in which she lived; and blamed myself for
+my infatuated idolatry. I myself had not loved Pauline because she
+was poor; and had not the wealthy Foedora a right to repulse Raphael?
+Conscience is our unerring judge until we finally stifle it. A specious
+voice said within me, ‘Foedora is neither attracted to nor repulses any
+one; she has her liberty, but once upon a time she sold herself to the
+Russian count, her husband or her lover, for gold. But temptation is
+certain to enter into her life. Wait till that moment comes!’ She lived
+remote from humanity, in a sphere apart, in a hell or a heaven of
+her own; she was neither frail nor virtuous. This feminine enigma in
+embroideries and cashmeres had brought into play every emotion of the
+human heart in me--pride, ambition, love, curiosity.
+
+“There was a craze just then for praising a play at a little Boulevard
+theatre, prompted perhaps by a wish to appear original that besets us
+all, or due to some freak of fashion. The countess showed some signs of
+a wish to see the floured face of the actor who had so delighted several
+people of taste, and I obtained the honor of taking her to a first
+presentation of some wretched farce or other. A box scarcely cost five
+francs, but I had not a brass farthing. I was but half-way through
+the volume of Memoirs; I dared not beg for assistance of Finot, and
+Rastignac, my providence, was away. These constant perplexities were the
+bane of my life.
+
+“We had once come out of the theatre when it was raining heavily,
+Foedora had called a cab for me before I could escape from her show
+of concern; she would not admit any of my excuses--my liking for wet
+weather, and my wish to go to the gaming-table. She did not read my
+poverty in my embarrassed attitude, or in my forced jests. My eyes would
+redden, but she did not understand a look. A young man’s life is at the
+mercy of the strangest whims! At every revolution of the wheels during
+the journey, thoughts that burned stirred in my heart. I tried to pull
+up a plank from the bottom of the vehicle, hoping to slip through the
+hole into the street; but finding insuperable obstacles, I burst into a
+fit of laughter, and then sat stupefied in calm dejection, like a man in
+a pillory. When I reached my lodging, Pauline broke in through my first
+stammering words with:
+
+“‘If you haven’t any money----?’
+
+“Ah, the music of Rossini was as nothing compared with those words. But
+to return to the performance at the Funambules.
+
+“I thought of pawning the circlet of gold round my mother’s portrait
+in order to escort the countess. Although the pawnbroker loomed in
+my thoughts as one of the doors of a convict’s prison, I would rather
+myself have carried my bed thither than have begged for alms. There is
+something so painful in the expression of a man who asks money of you!
+There are loans that mulct us of our self-respect, just as some rebuffs
+from a friend’s lips sweep away our last illusion.
+
+“Pauline was working; her mother had gone to bed. I flung a stealthy
+glance over the bed; the curtains were drawn back a little; Madame
+Gaudin was in a deep sleep, I thought, when I saw her quiet, sallow
+profile outlined against the pillow.
+
+“‘You are in trouble?’ Pauline said, dipping her brush into the
+coloring.
+
+“‘It is in your power to do me a great service, my dear child,’ I
+answered.
+
+“The gladness in her eyes frightened me.
+
+“‘Is it possible that she loves me?’ I thought. ‘Pauline,’ I began.
+I went and sat near to her, so as to study her. My tones had been so
+searching that she read my thought; her eyes fell, and I scrutinized
+her face. It was so pure and frank that I fancied I could see as clearly
+into her heart as into my own.
+
+“‘Do you love me?’ I asked.
+
+“‘A little,--passionately--not a bit!’ she cried.
+
+“Then she did not love me. Her jesting tones, and a little gleeful
+movement that escaped her, expressed nothing beyond a girlish, blithe
+goodwill. I told her about my distress and the predicament in which I
+found myself, and asked her to help me.
+
+“‘You do not wish to go to the pawnbroker’s yourself, M. Raphael,’ she
+answered, ‘and yet you would send me!’
+
+“I blushed in confusion at the child’s reasoning. She took my hand in
+hers as if she wanted to compensate for this home-truth by her light
+touch upon it.
+
+“‘Oh, I would willingly go,’ she said, ‘but it is not necessary. I found
+two five-franc pieces at the back of the piano, that had slipped without
+your knowledge between the frame and the keyboard, and I laid them on
+your table.’
+
+“‘You will soon be coming into some money, M. Raphael,’ said the kind
+mother, showing her face between the curtains, ‘and I can easily lend
+you a few crowns meanwhile.’
+
+“‘Oh, Pauline!’ I cried, as I pressed her hand, ‘how I wish that I were
+rich!’
+
+“‘Bah! why should you?’ she said petulantly. Her hand shook in mine with
+the throbbing of her pulse; she snatched it away, and looked at both of
+mine.
+
+“‘You will marry a rich wife,’ she said, ‘but she will give you a great
+deal of trouble. Ah, _Dieu_! she will be your death,--I am sure of it.’
+
+“In her exclamation there was something like belief in her mother’s
+absurd superstitions.
+
+“‘You are very credulous, Pauline!’
+
+“‘The woman whom you will love is going to kill you--there is no doubt
+of it,’ she said, looking at me with alarm.
+
+“She took up her brush again and dipped it in the color; her great
+agitation was evident; she looked at me no longer. I was ready to give
+credence just then to superstitious fancies; no man is utterly wretched
+so long as he is superstitious; a belief of that kind is often in
+reality a hope.
+
+“I found that those two magnificent five-franc pieces were lying, in
+fact, upon my table when I reached my room. During the first confused
+thoughts of early slumber, I tried to audit my accounts so as to explain
+this unhoped-for windfall; but I lost myself in useless calculations,
+and slept. Just as I was leaving my room to engage a box the next
+morning, Pauline came to see me.
+
+“‘Perhaps your ten francs is not enough,’ said the amiable, kind-hearted
+girl; ‘my mother told me to offer you this money. Take it, please, take
+it!’
+
+“She laid three crowns upon the table, and tried to escape, but I would
+not let her go. Admiration dried the tears that sprang to my eyes.
+
+“‘You are an angel, Pauline,’ I said. ‘It is not the loan that touches
+me so much as the delicacy with which it is offered. I used to wish for
+a rich wife, a fashionable woman of rank; and now, alas! I would
+rather possess millions, and find some girl, as poor as you are, with
+a generous nature like your own; and I would renounce a fatal passion
+which will kill me. Perhaps what you told me will come true.’
+
+“‘That is enough,’ she said, and fled away; the fresh trills of her
+birdlike voice rang up the staircase.
+
+“‘She is very happy in not yet knowing love,’ I said to myself, thinking
+of the torments I had endured for many months past.
+
+“Pauline’s fifteen francs were invaluable to me. Foedora, thinking of
+the stifling odor of the crowded place where we were to spend several
+hours, was sorry that she had not brought a bouquet; I went in search of
+flowers for her, as I had laid already my life and my fate at her feet.
+With a pleasure in which compunction mingled, I gave her a bouquet. I
+learned from its price the extravagance of superficial gallantry in
+the world. But very soon she complained of the heavy scent of a Mexican
+jessamine. The interior of the theatre, the bare bench on which she
+was to sit, filled her with intolerable disgust; she upbraided me for
+bringing her there. Although she sat beside me, she wished to go, and
+she went. I had spent sleepless nights, and squandered two months of
+my life for her, and I could not please her. Never had that tormenting
+spirit been more unfeeling or more fascinating.
+
+“I sat beside her in the cramped back seat of the vehicle; all the way I
+could feel her breath on me and the contact of her perfumed glove; I
+saw distinctly all her exceeding beauty; I inhaled a vague scent of
+orris-root; so wholly a woman she was, with no touch of womanhood. Just
+then a sudden gleam of light lit up the depths of this mysterious life
+for me. I thought all at once of a book just published by a poet,
+a genuine conception of the artist, in the shape of the statue of
+Polycletus.
+
+“I seemed to see that monstrous creation, at one time an officer,
+breaking in a spirited horse; at another, a girl, who gives herself up
+to her toilette and breaks her lovers’ hearts; or again, a false lover
+driving a timid and gentle maid to despair. Unable to analyze Foedora
+by any other process, I told her this fanciful story; but no hint of
+her resemblance to this poetry of the impossible crossed her--it simply
+diverted her; she was like a child over a story from the _Arabian
+Nights_.
+
+“‘Foedora must be shielded by some talisman,’ I thought to myself as
+I went back, ‘or she could not resist the love of a man of my age, the
+infectious fever of that splendid malady of the soul. Is Foedora, like
+Lady Delacour, a prey to a cancer? Her life is certainly an unnatural
+one.’
+
+“I shuddered at the thought. Then I decided on a plan, at once the
+wildest and the most rational that lover ever dreamed of. I would study
+this woman from a physical point of view, as I had already studied her
+intellectually, and to this end I made up my mind to spend a night in
+her room without her knowledge. This project preyed upon me as a thirst
+for revenge gnaws at the heart of a Corsican monk. This is how I carried
+it out. On the days when Foedora received, her rooms were far too
+crowded for the hall-porter to keep the balance even between goers and
+comers; I could remain in the house, I felt sure, without causing a
+scandal in it, and I waited the countess’ coming soiree with impatience.
+As I dressed I put a little English penknife into my waistcoat pocket,
+instead of a poniard. That literary implement, if found upon me, could
+awaken no suspicion, but I knew not whither my romantic resolution might
+lead, and I wished to be prepared.
+
+“As soon as the rooms began to fill, I entered the bedroom and examined
+the arrangements. The inner and outer shutters were closed; this was
+a good beginning; and as the waiting-maid might come to draw back the
+curtains that hung over the windows, I pulled them together. I was
+running great risks in venturing to manoeuvre beforehand in this way,
+but I had accepted the situation, and had deliberately reckoned with its
+dangers.
+
+“About midnight I hid myself in the embrasure of the window. I tried to
+scramble on to a ledge of the wainscoting, hanging on by the fastening
+of the shutters with my back against the wall, in such a position that
+my feet could not be visible. When I had carefully considered my points
+of support, and the space between me and the curtains, I had become
+sufficiently acquainted with all the difficulties of my position to
+stay in it without fear of detection if undisturbed by cramp, coughs,
+or sneezings. To avoid useless fatigue, I remained standing until the
+critical moment, when I must hang suspended like a spider in its web.
+The white-watered silk and muslin of the curtains spread before me in
+great pleats like organ-pipes. With my penknife I cut loopholes in them,
+through which I could see.
+
+“I heard vague murmurs from the salons, the laughter and the louder
+tones of the speakers. The smothered commotion and vague uproar lessened
+by slow degrees. One man and another came for his hat from the countess’
+chest of drawers, close to where I stood. I shivered, if the curtains
+were disturbed, at the thought of the mischances consequent on the
+confused and hasty investigations made by the men in a hurry to depart,
+who were rummaging everywhere. When I experienced no misfortunes of this
+kind, I augured well of my enterprise. An old wooer of Foedora’s came
+for the last hat; he thought himself quite alone, looked at the bed,
+and heaved a great sigh, accompanied by some inaudible exclamation, into
+which he threw sufficient energy. In the boudoir close by, the countess,
+finding only some five or six intimate acquaintances about her, proposed
+tea. The scandals for which existing society has reserved the little
+faculty of belief that it retains, mingled with epigrams and trenchant
+witticisms, and the clatter of cups and spoons. Rastignac drew roars of
+laughter by merciless sarcasms at the expense of my rivals.
+
+“‘M. de Rastignac is a man with whom it is better not to quarrel,’ said
+the countess, laughing.
+
+“‘I am quite of that opinion,’ was his candid reply. ‘I have always
+been right about my aversions--and my friendships as well,’ he added.
+‘Perhaps my enemies are quite as useful to me as my friends. I have made
+a particular study of modern phraseology, and of the natural craft
+that is used in all attack or defence. Official eloquence is one of our
+perfect social products.
+
+“‘One of your friends is not clever, so you speak of his integrity and
+his candor. Another’s work is heavy; you introduce it as a piece of
+conscientious labor; and if the book is ill written, you extol the ideas
+it contains. Such an one is treacherous and fickle, slips through
+your fingers every moment; bah! he is attractive, bewitching, he is
+delightful! Suppose they are enemies, you fling every one, dead or
+alive, in their teeth. You reverse your phraseology for their benefit,
+and you are as keen in detecting their faults as you were before adroit
+in bringing out the virtues of your friends. This way of using the
+mental lorgnette is the secret of conversation nowadays, and the whole
+art of the complete courtier. If you neglect it, you might as well go
+out as an unarmed knight-banneret to fight against men in armor. And I
+make use of it, and even abuse it at times. So we are respected--I and
+my friends; and, moreover, my sword is quite as sharp as my tongue.’
+
+“One of Foedora’s most fervid worshipers, whose presumption was
+notorious, and who even made it contribute to his success, took up the
+glove thrown down so scornfully by Rastignac. He began an unmeasured
+eulogy of me, my performances, and my character. Rastignac had
+overlooked this method of detraction. His sarcastic encomiums misled
+the countess, who sacrificed without mercy; she betrayed my secrets, and
+derided my pretensions and my hopes, to divert her friends.
+
+“‘There is a future before him,’ said Rastignac. ‘Some day he may be in
+a position to take a cruel revenge; his talents are at least equal to
+his courage; and I should consider those who attack him very rash, for
+he has a good memory----’
+
+“‘And writes Memoirs,’ put in the countess, who seemed to object to the
+deep silence that prevailed.
+
+“‘Memoirs of a sham countess, madame,’ replied Rastignac. ‘Another sort
+of courage is needed to write that sort of thing.’
+
+“‘I give him credit for plenty of courage,’ she answered; ‘he is
+faithful to me.’
+
+“I was greatly tempted to show myself suddenly among the railers, like
+the shade of Banquo in Macbeth. I should have lost a mistress, but I
+had a friend! But love inspired me all at once, with one of those
+treacherous and fallacious subtleties that it can use to soothe all our
+pangs.
+
+“If Foedora loved me, I thought, she would be sure to disguise her
+feelings by some mocking jest. How often the heart protests against a
+lie on the lips!
+
+“Well, very soon my audacious rival, left alone with the countess, rose
+to go.
+
+“‘What! already?’ asked she in a coaxing voice that set my heart
+beating. ‘Will you not give me a few more minutes? Have you nothing more
+to say to me? will you never sacrifice any of your pleasures for me?’
+
+“He went away.
+
+“‘Ah!’ she yawned; ‘how very tiresome they all are!’
+
+“She pulled a cord energetically till the sound of a bell rang through
+the place; then, humming a few notes of _Pria che spunti_, the countess
+entered her room. No one had ever heard her sing; her muteness had
+called forth the wildest explanations. She had promised her first lover,
+so it was said, who had been held captive by her talent, and whose
+jealousy over her stretched beyond his grave, that she would never allow
+others to experience a happiness that he wished to be his and his alone.
+
+“I exerted every power of my soul to catch the sounds. Higher and higher
+rose the notes; Foedora’s life seemed to dilate within her; her throat
+poured forth all its richest tones; something well-nigh divine entered
+into the melody. There was a bright purity and clearness of tone in the
+countess’ voice, a thrilling harmony which reached the heart and stirred
+its pulses. Musicians are seldom unemotional; a woman who could sing
+like that must know how to love indeed. Her beautiful voice made one
+more puzzle in a woman mysterious enough before. I beheld her then, as
+plainly as I see you at this moment. She seemed to listen to herself, to
+experience a secret rapture of her own; she felt, as it were, an ecstasy
+like that of love.
+
+“She stood before the hearth during the execution of the principal theme
+of the _rondo_; and when she ceased her face changed. She looked tired;
+her features seemed to alter. She had laid the mask aside; her part as
+an actress was over. Yet the faded look that came over her beautiful
+face, a result either of this performance or of the evening’s fatigues,
+had its charms, too.
+
+“‘This is her real self,’ I thought.
+
+“She set her foot on a bronze bar of the fender as if to warm it, took
+off her gloves, and drew over her head the gold chain from which her
+bejeweled scent-bottle hung. It gave me a quite indescribable pleasure
+to watch the feline grace of every movement; the supple grace a cat
+displays as it adjusts its toilette in the sun. She looked at herself
+in the mirror and said aloud ill-humoredly--‘I did not look well this
+evening, my complexion is going with alarming rapidity; perhaps I
+ought to keep earlier hours, and give up this life of dissipation. Does
+Justine mean to trifle with me?’ She rang again; her maid hurried in.
+Where she had been I cannot tell; she came in by a secret staircase.
+I was anxious to make a study of her. I had lodged accusations, in
+my romantic imaginings, against this invisible waiting-woman, a tall,
+well-made brunette.
+
+“‘Did madame ring?’
+
+“‘Yes, twice,’ answered Foedora; ‘are you really growing deaf nowadays?’
+
+“‘I was preparing madame’s milk of almonds.’
+
+“Justine knelt down before her, unlaced her sandals and drew them off,
+while her mistress lay carelessly back on her cushioned armchair beside
+the fire, yawned, and scratched her head. Every movement was perfectly
+natural; there was nothing whatever to indicate the secret sufferings or
+emotions with which I had credited her.
+
+“‘George must be in love!’ she remarked. ‘I shall dismiss him. He has
+drawn the curtains again to-night. What does he mean by it?’
+
+“All the blood in my veins rushed to my heart at this observation, but
+no more was said about curtains.
+
+“‘Life is very empty,’ the countess went on. ‘Ah! be careful not to
+scratch me as you did yesterday. Just look here, I still have the marks
+of your nails about me,’ and she held out a silken knee. She thrust her
+bare feet into velvet slippers bound with swan’s-down, and unfastened
+her dress, while Justine prepared to comb her hair.
+
+“‘You ought to marry, madame, and have children.’
+
+“‘Children!’ she cried; ‘it wants no more than that to finish me at
+once; and a husband! What man is there to whom I could----? Was my hair
+well arranged to-night?’
+
+“‘Not particularly.’
+
+“‘You are a fool!’
+
+“‘That way of crimping your hair too much is the least becoming way
+possible for you. Large, smooth curls suit you a great deal better.’
+
+“‘Really?’
+
+“‘Yes, really, madame; that wavy style only looks nice in fair hair.’
+
+“‘Marriage? never, never! Marriage is a commercial arrangement, for
+which I was never made.’
+
+“What a disheartening scene for a lover! Here was a lonely woman,
+without friends or kin, without the religion of love, without faith in
+any affection. Yet however slightly she might feel the need to pour
+out her heart, a craving that every human being feels, it could only
+be satisfied by gossiping with her maid, by trivial and indifferent
+talk.... I grieved for her.
+
+“Justine unlaced her. I watched her carefully when she was at last
+unveiled. Her maidenly form, in its rose-tinged whiteness, was visible
+through her shift in the taper light, as dazzling as some silver statue
+behind its gauze covering. No, there was no defect that need shrink from
+the stolen glances of love. Alas, a fair form will overcome the stoutest
+resolutions!
+
+“The maid lighted the taper in the alabaster sconce that hung before
+the bed, while her mistress sat thoughtful and silent before the fire.
+Justine went for a warming-pan, turned down the bed, and helped to lay
+her mistress in it; then, after some further time spent in punctiliously
+rendering various services that showed how seriously Foedora respected
+herself, her maid left her. The countess turned to and fro several
+times, and sighed; she was ill at ease; faint, just perceptible sounds,
+like sighs of impatience, escaped from her lips. She reached out a hand
+to the table, and took a flask from it, from which she shook four or
+five drops of some brown liquid into some milk before taking it; again
+there followed some painful sighs, and the exclamation, ‘_Mon Dieu_!’
+
+“The cry, and the tone in which it was uttered, wrung my heart. By
+degrees she lay motionless. This frightened me; but very soon I heard
+a sleeper’s heavy, regular breathing. I drew the rustling silk curtains
+apart, left my post, went to the foot of the bed, and gazed at her with
+feelings that I cannot define. She was so enchanting as she lay like a
+child, with her arm above her head; but the sweetness of the fair,
+quiet visage, surrounded by the lace, only irritated me. I had not been
+prepared for the torture to which I was compelled to submit.
+
+“‘_Mon Dieu_!’ that scrap of a thought which I understood not, but must
+even take as my sole light, had suddenly modified my opinion of Foedora.
+Trite or profoundly significant, frivolous or of deep import, the words
+might be construed as expressive of either pleasure or pain, of physical
+or of mental suffering. Was it a prayer or a malediction, a forecast or
+a memory, a fear or a regret? A whole life lay in that utterance, a life
+of wealth or of penury; perhaps it contained a crime!
+
+“The mystery that lurked beneath this fair semblance of womanhood grew
+afresh; there were so many ways of explaining Foedora, that she became
+inexplicable. A sort of language seemed to flow from between her lips.
+I put thoughts and feelings into the accidents of her breathing, whether
+weak or regular, gentle, or labored. I shared her dreams; I would
+fain have divined her secrets by reading them through her slumber. I
+hesitated among contradictory opinions and decisions without number.
+I could not deny my heart to the woman I saw before me, with the calm,
+pure beauty in her face. I resolved to make one more effort. If I told
+her the story of my life, my love, my sacrifices, might I not awaken
+pity in her or draw a tear from her who never wept?
+
+“As I set all my hopes on this last experiment, the sounds in the
+streets showed that day was at hand. For a moment’s space I pictured
+Foedora waking to find herself in my arms. I could have stolen softly
+to her side and slipped them about her in a close embrace. Resolved
+to resist the cruel tyranny of this thought, I hurried into the salon,
+heedless of any sounds I might make; but, luckily, I came upon a secret
+door leading to a little staircase. As I expected, the key was in the
+lock; I slammed the door, went boldly out into the court, and gained
+the street in three bounds, without looking round to see whether I was
+observed.
+
+“A dramatist was to read a comedy at the countess’ house in two days’
+time; I went thither, intending to outstay the others, so as to make a
+rather singular request to her; I meant to ask her to keep the following
+evening for me alone, and to deny herself to other comers; but when I
+found myself alone with her, my courage failed. Every tick of the clock
+alarmed me. It wanted only a quarter of an hour of midnight.
+
+“‘If I do not speak,’ I thought to myself, ‘I must smash my head against
+the corner of the mantelpiece.’
+
+“I gave myself three minutes’ grace; the three minutes went by, and
+I did not smash my head upon the marble; my heart grew heavy, like a
+sponge with water.
+
+“‘You are exceedingly amusing,’ said she.
+
+“‘Ah, madame, if you could but understand me!’ I answered.
+
+“‘What is the matter with you?’ she asked. ‘You are turning pale.’
+
+“‘I am hesitating to ask a favor of you.’
+
+“Her gesture revived my courage. I asked her to make the appointment
+with me.
+
+“‘Willingly,’ she answered’ ‘but why will you not speak to me now?’
+
+“‘To be candid with you, I ought to explain the full scope of your
+promise: I want to spend this evening by your side, as if we were
+brother and sister. Have no fear; I am aware of your antipathies; you
+must have divined me sufficiently to feel sure that I should wish you
+to do nothing that could be displeasing to you; presumption, moreover,
+would not thus approach you. You have been a friend to me, you have
+shown me kindness and great indulgence; know, therefore, that to-morrow
+I must bid you farewell.--Do not take back your word,’ I exclaimed,
+seeing her about to speak, and I went away.
+
+“At eight o’clock one evening towards the end of May, Foedora and I were
+alone together in her gothic boudoir. I feared no longer; I was secure
+of happiness. My mistress should be mine, or I would seek a refuge in
+death. I had condemned my faint-hearted love, and a man who acknowledges
+his weakness is strong indeed.
+
+“The countess, in her blue cashmere gown, was reclining on a sofa, with
+her feet on a cushion. She wore an Oriental turban such as painters
+assign to early Hebrews; its strangeness added an indescribable
+coquettish grace to her attractions. A transitory charm seemed to have
+laid its spell on her face; it might have furnished the argument that
+at every instant we become new and unparalleled beings, without any
+resemblance to the _us_ of the future or of the past. I had never yet
+seen her so radiant.
+
+“‘Do you know that you have piqued my curiosity?’ she said, laughing.
+
+“‘I will not disappoint it,’ I said quietly, as I seated myself near
+to her and took the hand that she surrendered to me. ‘You have a very
+beautiful voice!’
+
+“‘You have never heard me sing!’ she exclaimed, starting involuntarily
+with surprise.
+
+“‘I will prove that it is quite otherwise, whenever it is necessary. Is
+your delightful singing still to remain a mystery? Have no fear, I do
+not wish to penetrate it.’
+
+“We spent about an hour in familiar talk. While I adopted the attitude
+and manner of a man to whom Foedora must refuse nothing, I showed her
+all a lover’s deference. Acting in this way, I received a favor--I was
+allowed to kiss her hand. She daintily drew off the glove, and my whole
+soul was dissolved and poured forth in that kiss. I was steeped in the
+bliss of an illusion in which I tried to believe.
+
+“Foedora lent herself most unexpectedly to my caress and my flatteries.
+Do not accuse me of faint-heartedness; if I had gone a step beyond these
+fraternal compliments, the claws would have been out of the sheath and
+into me. We remained perfectly silent for nearly ten minutes. I was
+admiring her, investing her with the charms she had not. She was mine
+just then, and mine only,--this enchanting being was mine, as was
+permissible, in my imagination; my longing wrapped her round and
+held her close; in my soul I wedded her. The countess was subdued and
+fascinated by my magnetic influence. Ever since I have regretted that
+this subjugation was not absolute; but just then I yearned for her soul,
+her heart alone, and for nothing else. I longed for an ideal and perfect
+happiness, a fair illusion that cannot last for very long. At last I
+spoke, feeling that the last hours of my frenzy were at hand.
+
+“‘Hear me, madame. I love you, and you know it; I have said so a hundred
+times; you must have understood me. I would not take upon me the airs
+of a coxcomb, nor would I flatter you, nor urge myself upon you like a
+fool; I would not owe your love to such arts as these! so I have been
+misunderstood. What sufferings have I not endured for your sake! For
+these, however, you were not to blame; but in a few minutes you shall
+decide for yourself. There are two kinds of poverty, madame. One kind
+openly walks the street in rags, an unconscious imitator of Diogenes,
+on a scanty diet, reducing life to its simplest terms; he is happier,
+maybe, than the rich; he has fewer cares at any rate, and accepts such
+portions of the world as stronger spirits refuse. Then there is poverty
+in splendor, a Spanish pauper, concealing the life of a beggar by his
+title, his bravery, and his pride; poverty that wears a white waistcoat
+and yellow kid gloves, a beggar with a carriage, whose whole career will
+be wrecked for lack of a halfpenny. Poverty of the first kind belongs to
+the populace; the second kind is that of blacklegs, of kings, and of men
+of talent. I am neither a man of the people, nor a king, nor a swindler;
+possibly I have no talent either, I am an exception. With the name I
+bear I must die sooner than beg. Set your mind at rest, madame,’ I
+said; ‘to-day I have abundance, I possess sufficient of the clay for my
+needs’; for the hard look passed over her face which we wear whenever a
+well-dressed beggar takes us by surprise. ‘Do you remember the day
+when you wished to go to the Gymnase without me, never believing that I
+should be there?’ I went on.
+
+“She nodded.
+
+“‘I had laid out my last five-franc piece that I might see you
+there.--Do you recollect our walk in the Jardin des Plantes? The hire of
+your cab took everything I had.’
+
+“I told her about my sacrifices, and described the life I led; heated
+not with wine, as I am to-day, but by the generous enthusiasm of my
+heart, my passion overflowed in burning words; I have forgotten how the
+feelings within me blazed forth; neither memory nor skill of mine
+could possibly reproduce it. It was no colorless chronicle of blighted
+affections; my love was strengthened by fair hopes; and such words came
+to me, by love’s inspiration, that each had power to set forth a whole
+life--like echoes of the cries of a soul in torment. In such tones the
+last prayers ascend from dying men on the battlefield. I stopped, for
+she was weeping. _Grand Dieu_! I had reaped an actor’s reward, the
+success of a counterfeit passion displayed at the cost of five francs
+paid at the theatre door. I had drawn tears from her.
+
+“‘If I had known----’ she said.
+
+“‘Do not finish the sentence,’ I broke in. ‘Even now I love you well
+enough to murder you----’
+
+“She reached for the bell-pull. I burst into a roar of laughter.
+
+“‘Do not call any one,’ I said. ‘I shall leave you to finish your life
+in peace. It would be a blundering kind of hatred that would murder you!
+You need not fear violence of any kind; I have spent a whole night at
+the foot of your bed without----’
+
+“‘Monsieur----’ she said, blushing; but after that first impulse of
+modesty that even the most hardened women must surely own, she flung a
+scornful glance at me, and said:
+
+“‘You must have been very cold.’
+
+“‘Do you think that I set such value on your beauty, madame,’ I
+answered, guessing the thoughts that moved her. ‘Your beautiful face is
+for me a promise of a soul yet more beautiful. Madame, those to whom
+a woman is merely a woman can always purchase odalisques fit for the
+seraglio, and achieve their happiness at a small cost. But I aspired
+to something higher; I wanted the life of close communion of heart
+and heart with you that have no heart. I know that now. If you were to
+belong to another, I could kill him. And yet, no; for you would love
+him, and his death might hurt you perhaps. What agony this is!’ I cried.
+
+“‘If it is any comfort to you,’ she retorted cheerfully, ‘I can assure
+you that I shall never belong to any one----’
+
+“‘So you offer an affront to God Himself,’ I interrupted; ‘and you
+will be punished for it. Some day you will lie upon your sofa suffering
+unheard-of ills, unable to endure the light or the slightest sound,
+condemned to live as it were in the tomb. Then, when you seek the causes
+of those lingering and avenging torments, you will remember the woes
+that you distributed so lavishly upon your way. You have sown curses,
+and hatred will be your reward. We are the real judges, the executioners
+of a justice that reigns here below, which overrules the justice of man
+and the laws of God.’
+
+“‘No doubt it is very culpable in me not to love you,’ she said,
+laughing. ‘Am I to blame? No. I do not love you; you are a man, that is
+sufficient. I am happy by myself; why should I give up my way of living,
+a selfish way, if you will, for the caprices of a master? Marriage is a
+sacrament by virtue of which each imparts nothing but vexations to the
+other. Children, moreover, worry me. Did I not faithfully warn you about
+my nature? Why are you not satisfied to have my friendship? I wish I
+could make you amends for all the troubles I have caused you, through
+not guessing the value of your poor five-franc pieces. I appreciate the
+extent of your sacrifices; but your devotion and delicate tact can be
+repaid by love alone, and I care so little for you, that this scene has
+a disagreeable effect upon me.’
+
+“‘I am fully aware of my absurdity,’ I said, unable to restrain my
+tears. ‘Pardon me,’ I went on, ‘it was a delight to hear those cruel
+words you have just uttered, so well I love you. O, if I could testify
+my love with every drop of blood in me!’
+
+“‘Men always repeat these classic formulas to us, more or less
+effectively,’ she answered, still smiling. ‘But it appears very
+difficult to die at our feet, for I see corpses of that kind about
+everywhere. It is twelve o’clock. Allow me to go to bed.’
+
+“‘And in two hours’ time you will cry to yourself, _Ah, mon Dieu_!’
+
+“‘Like the day before yesterday! Yes,’ she said, ‘I was thinking of my
+stockbroker; I had forgotten to tell him to convert my five per cent
+stock into threes, and the three per cents had fallen during the day.’
+
+“I looked at her, and my eyes glittered with anger. Sometimes a
+crime may be a whole romance; I understood that just then. She was so
+accustomed, no doubt, to the most impassioned declarations of this kind,
+that my words and my tears were forgotten already.
+
+“‘Would you marry a peer of France?’ I demanded abruptly.
+
+“‘If he were a duke, I might.’
+
+“I seized my hat and made her a bow.
+
+“‘Permit me to accompany you to the door,’ she said, cutting irony in
+her tones, in the poise of her head, and in her gesture.
+
+“‘Madame----’
+
+“‘Monsieur?’
+
+“‘I shall never see you again.’
+
+“‘I hope not,’ and she insolently inclined her head.
+
+“‘You wish to be a duchess?’ I cried, excited by a sort of madness that
+her insolence roused in me. ‘You are wild for honors and titles? Well,
+only let me love you; bid my pen write and my voice speak for you alone;
+be the inmost soul of my life, my guiding star! Then, only accept me
+for your husband as a minister, a peer of France, a duke. I will make of
+myself whatever you would have me be!’
+
+“‘You made good use of the time you spent with the advocate,’ she said
+smiling. ‘There is a fervency about your pleadings.’
+
+“‘The present is yours,’ I cried, ‘but the future is mine! I only lose a
+woman; you are losing a name and a family. Time is big with my revenge;
+time will spoil your beauty, and yours will be a solitary death; and
+glory waits for me!’
+
+“‘Thanks for your peroration!’ she said, repressing a yawn; the wish
+that she might never see me again was expressed in her whole bearing.
+
+“That remark silenced me. I flung at her a glance full of hatred, and
+hurried away.
+
+“Foedora must be forgotten; I must cure myself of my infatuation, and
+betake myself once more to my lonely studies, or die. So I set myself
+tremendous tasks; I determined to complete my labors. For fifteen days I
+never left my garret, spending whole nights in pallid thought. I worked
+with difficulty, and by fits and starts, despite my courage and the
+stimulation of despair. The music had fled. I could not exorcise the
+brilliant mocking image of Foedora. Something morbid brooded over
+every thought, a vague longing as dreadful as remorse. I imitated the
+anchorites of the Thebaid. If I did not pray as they did, I lived a life
+in the desert like theirs, hewing out my ideas as they were wont to hew
+their rocks. I could at need have girdled my waist with spikes, that
+physical suffering might quell mental anguish.
+
+“One evening Pauline found her way into my room.
+
+“‘You are killing yourself,’ she said imploringly; ‘you should go out
+and see your friends----’
+
+“‘Pauline, you were a true prophet; Foedora is killing me, I want to
+die. My life is intolerable.’
+
+“‘Is there only one woman in the world?’ she asked, smiling. ‘Why make
+yourself so miserable in so short a life?’
+
+“I looked at Pauline in bewilderment. She left me before I noticed her
+departure; the sound of her words had reached me, but not their
+sense. Very soon I had to take my Memoirs in manuscript to my
+literary-contractor. I was so absorbed by my passion, that I could not
+remember how I had managed to live without money; I only knew that the
+four hundred and fifty francs due to me would pay my debts. So I went
+to receive my salary, and met Rastignac, who thought me changed and
+thinner.
+
+“‘What hospital have you been discharged from?’ he asked.
+
+“‘That woman is killing me,’ I answered; ‘I can neither despise her nor
+forget her.’
+
+“‘You had much better kill her, then perhaps you would think no more of
+her,’ he said, laughing.
+
+“‘I have often thought of it,’ I replied; ‘but though sometimes the
+thought of a crime revives my spirits, of violence and murder, either or
+both, I am really incapable of carrying out the design. The countess is
+an admirable monster who would crave for pardon, and not every man is an
+Othello.’
+
+“‘She is like every woman who is beyond our reach,’ Rastignac
+interrupted.
+
+“‘I am mad,’ I cried; ‘I can feel the madness raging at times in my
+brain. My ideas are like shadows; they flit before me, and I cannot
+grasp them. Death would be preferable to this life, and I have carefully
+considered the best way of putting an end to the struggle. I am not
+thinking of the living Foedora in the Faubourg Saint Honore, but of my
+Foedora here,’ and I tapped my forehead. ‘What to you say to opium?’
+
+“‘Pshaw! horrid agonies,’ said Rastignac.
+
+“‘Or charcoal fumes?’
+
+“‘A low dodge.’
+
+“‘Or the Seine?’
+
+“‘The drag-nets, and the Morgue too, are filthy.’
+
+“‘A pistol-shot?’
+
+“‘And if you miscalculate, you disfigure yourself for life. Listen to
+me,’ he went on, ‘like all young men, I have pondered over suicide.
+Which of us hasn’t killed himself two or three times before he is
+thirty? I find there is no better course than to use existence as a
+means of pleasure. Go in for thorough dissipation, and your passion or
+you will perish in it. Intemperance, my dear fellow, commands all forms
+of death. Does she not wield the thunderbolt of apoplexy? Apoplexy is
+a pistol-shot that does not miscalculate. Orgies are lavish in all
+physical pleasures; is not that the small change for opium? And the riot
+that makes us drink to excess bears a challenge to mortal combat with
+wine. That butt of Malmsey of the Duke of Clarence’s must have had a
+pleasanter flavor than Seine mud. When we sink gloriously under the
+table, is not that a periodical death by drowning on a small scale? If
+we are picked up by the police and stretched out on those chilly benches
+of theirs at the police-station, do we not enjoy all the pleasures of
+the Morgue? For though we are not blue and green, muddy and swollen
+corpses, on the other hand we have the consciousness of the climax.
+
+“‘Ah,’ he went on, ‘this protracted suicide has nothing in common with
+the bankrupt grocer’s demise. Tradespeople have brought the river into
+disrepute; they fling themselves in to soften their creditors’ hearts.
+In your place I should endeavor to die gracefully; and if you wish
+to invent a novel way of doing it, by struggling with life after this
+manner, I will be your second. I am disappointed and sick of everything.
+The Alsacienne, whom it was proposed that I should marry, had six toes
+on her left foot; I cannot possibly live with a woman who has six toes!
+It would get about to a certainty, and then I should be ridiculous.
+Her income was only eighteen thousand francs; her fortune diminished
+in quantity as her toes increased. The devil take it; if we begin an
+outrageous sort of life, we may come on some bit of luck, perhaps!’
+
+“Rastignac’s eloquence carried me away. The attractions of the plan
+shone too temptingly, hopes were kindled, the poetical aspects of the
+matter appealed to a poet.
+
+“‘How about money?’ I said.
+
+“‘Haven’t you four hundred and fifty francs?’
+
+“‘Yes, but debts to my landlady and the tailor----’
+
+“‘You would pay your tailor? You will never be anything whatever, not so
+much as a minister.’
+
+“‘But what can one do with twenty louis?’
+
+“‘Go to the gaming-table.’
+
+“I shuddered.
+
+“‘You are going to launch out into what I call systematic dissipation,’
+said he, noticing my scruples, ‘and yet you are afraid of a green
+table-cloth.’
+
+“‘Listen to me,’ I answered. ‘I promised my father never to set foot in
+a gaming-house. Not only is that a sacred promise, but I still feel an
+unconquerable disgust whenever I pass a gambling-hell; take the money
+and go without me. While our fortune is at stake, I will set my own
+affairs straight, and then I will go to your lodgings and wait for you.’
+
+“That was the way I went to perdition. A young man has only to come
+across a woman who will not love him, or a woman who loves him too well,
+and his whole life becomes a chaos. Prosperity swallows up our energy
+just as adversity obscures our virtues. Back once more in my Hotel de
+Saint-Quentin, I gazed about me a long while in the garret where I had
+led my scholar’s temperate life, a life which would perhaps have been
+a long and honorable one, and that I ought not to have quitted for
+the fevered existence which had urged me to the brink of a precipice.
+Pauline surprised me in this dejected attitude.
+
+“‘Why, what is the matter with you?’ she asked.
+
+“I rose and quietly counted out the money owing to her mother, and added
+to it sufficient to pay for six months’ rent in advance. She watched me
+in some alarm.
+
+“‘I am going to leave you, dear Pauline.’
+
+“‘I knew it!’ she exclaimed.
+
+“‘Listen, my child. I have not given up the idea of coming back. Keep
+my room for me for six months. If I do not return by the fifteenth of
+November, you will come into possession of my things. This sealed packet
+of manuscript is the fair copy of my great work on “The Will,”’ I went
+on, pointing to a package. ‘Will you deposit it in the King’s Library?
+And you may do as you wish with everything that is left here.’
+
+“Her look weighed heavily on my heart; Pauline was an embodiment of
+conscience there before me.
+
+“‘I shall have no more lessons,’ she said, pointing to the piano.
+
+“I did not answer that.
+
+“‘Will you write to me?’
+
+“‘Good-bye, Pauline.’
+
+“I gently drew her towards me, and set a kiss on that innocent fair brow
+of hers, like snow that has not yet touched the earth--a father’s or a
+brother’s kiss. She fled. I would not see Madame Gaudin, hung my key in
+its wonted place, and departed. I was almost at the end of the Rue de
+Cluny when I heard a woman’s light footstep behind me.
+
+“‘I have embroidered this purse for you,’ Pauline said; ‘will you refuse
+even that?’
+
+“By the light of the street lamp I thought I saw tears in Pauline’s
+eyes, and I groaned. Moved perhaps by a common impulse, we parted in
+haste like people who fear the contagion of the plague.
+
+“As I waited with dignified calmness for Rastignac’s return, his room
+seemed a grotesque interpretation of the sort of life I was about to
+enter upon. The clock on the chimney-piece was surmounted by a Venus
+resting on her tortoise; a half-smoked cigar lay in her arms. Costly
+furniture of various kinds--love tokens, very likely--was scattered
+about. Old shoes lay on a luxurious sofa. The comfortable armchair into
+which I had thrown myself bore as many scars as a veteran; the arms were
+gnashed, the back was overlaid with a thick, stale deposit of pomade and
+hair-oil from the heads of all his visitors. Splendor and squalor were
+oddly mingled, on the walls, the bed, and everywhere. You might have
+thought of a Neapolitan palace and the groups of lazzaroni about it. It
+was the room of a gambler or a mauvais sujet, where the luxury exists
+for one individual, who leads the life of the senses and does not
+trouble himself over inconsistencies.
+
+“There was a certain imaginative element about the picture it presented.
+Life was suddenly revealed there in its rags and spangles as
+the incomplete thing it really is, of course, but so vividly and
+picturesquely; it was like a den where a brigand has heaped up all the
+plunder in which he delights. Some pages were missing from a copy of
+Byron’s poems: they had gone to light a fire of a few sticks for this
+young person, who played for stakes of a thousand francs, and had not
+a faggot; he kept a tilbury, and had not a whole shirt to his back. Any
+day a countess or an actress or a run of luck at ecarte might set him up
+with an outfit worthy of a king. A candle had been stuck into the green
+bronze sheath of a vestaholder; a woman’s portrait lay yonder, torn out
+of its carved gold setting. How was it possible that a young man, whose
+nature craved excitement, could renounce a life so attractive by reason
+of its contradictions; a life that afforded all the delights of war in
+the midst of peace? I was growing drowsy when Rastignac kicked the door
+open and shouted:
+
+“‘Victory! Now we can take our time about dying.’
+
+“He held out his hat filled with gold to me, and put it down on the
+table; then we pranced round it like a pair of cannibals about to eat a
+victim; we stamped, and danced, and yelled, and sang; we gave each other
+blows fit to kill an elephant, at sight of all the pleasures of the
+world contained in that hat.
+
+“‘Twenty-seven thousand francs,’ said Rastignac, adding a few bank-notes
+to the pile of gold. ‘That would be enough for other folk to live upon;
+will it be sufficient for us to die on? Yes! we will breathe our last in
+a bath of gold--hurrah!’ and we capered afresh.
+
+“We divided the windfall. We began with double-napoleons, and came down
+to the smaller coins, one by one. ‘This for you, this for me,’ we kept
+saying, distilling our joy drop by drop.
+
+“‘We won’t go to sleep,’ cried Rastignac. ‘Joseph! some punch!’
+
+“He threw gold to his faithful attendant.
+
+“‘There is your share,’ he said; ‘go and bury yourself if you can.’
+
+“Next day I went to Lesage and chose my furniture, took the rooms that
+you know in the Rue Taitbout, and left the decoration to one of the best
+upholsterers. I bought horses. I plunged into a vortex of pleasures, at
+once hollow and real. I went in for play, gaining and losing
+enormous sums, but only at friends’ houses and in ballrooms; never in
+gaming-houses, for which I still retained the holy horror of my early
+days. Without meaning it, I made some friends, either through quarrels
+or owing to the easy confidence established among those who are going
+to the bad together; nothing, possibly, makes us cling to one another so
+tightly as our evil propensities.
+
+“I made several ventures in literature, which were flatteringly
+received. Great men who followed the profession of letters, having
+nothing to fear from me, belauded me, not so much on account of my
+merits as to cast a slur on those of their rivals.
+
+“I became a ‘free-liver,’ to make use of the picturesque expression
+appropriated by the language of excess. I made it a point of honor not
+to be long about dying, and that my zeal and prowess should eclipse
+those displayed by all others in the jolliest company. I was always
+spruce and carefully dressed. I had some reputation for cleverness.
+There was no sign about me of the fearful way of living which makes a
+man into a mere disgusting apparatus, a funnel, a pampered beast.
+
+“Very soon Debauch rose before me in all the majesty of its horror, and
+I grasped all that it meant. Those prudent, steady-going characters who
+are laying down wine in bottles for their heirs, can barely conceive,
+it is true, of so wide a theory of life, nor appreciate its normal
+condition; but when will you instill poetry into the provincial
+intellect? Opium and tea, with all their delights, are merely drugs to
+folk of that calibre.
+
+“Is not the imperfect sybarite to be met with even in Paris itself, that
+intellectual metropolis? Unfit to endure the fatigues of pleasure, this
+sort of person, after a drinking bout, is very much like those worthy
+bourgeois who fall foul of music after hearing a new opera by Rossini.
+Does he not renounce these courses in the same frame of mind that leads
+an abstemious man to forswear Ruffec pates, because the first one,
+forsooth, gave him the indigestion?
+
+“Debauch is as surely an art as poetry, and is not for craven spirits.
+To penetrate its mysteries and appreciate its charms, conscientious
+application is required; and as with every path of knowledge, the way is
+thorny and forbidding at the outset. The great pleasures of humanity are
+hedged about with formidable obstacles; not its single enjoyments, but
+enjoyment as a system, a system which establishes seldom experienced
+sensations and makes them habitual, which concentrates and multiplies
+them for us, creating a dramatic life within our life, and imperatively
+demanding a prompt and enormous expenditure of vitality. War, Power,
+Art, like Debauch, are all forms of demoralization, equally remote from
+the faculties of humanity, equally profound, and all are alike difficult
+of access. But when man has once stormed the heights of these grand
+mysteries, does he not walk in another world? Are not generals,
+ministers, and artists carried, more or less, towards destruction by
+the need of violent distractions in an existence so remote from ordinary
+life as theirs?
+
+“War, after all, is the Excess of bloodshed, as the Excess of
+self-interest produces Politics. Excesses of every sort are brothers.
+These social enormities possess the attraction of the abyss; they draw
+towards themselves as St. Helena beckoned Napoleon; we are fascinated,
+our heads swim, we wish to sound their depths though we cannot
+account for the wish. Perhaps the thought of Infinity dwells in these
+precipices, perhaps they contain some colossal flattery for the soul of
+man; for is he not, then, wholly absorbed in himself?
+
+“The wearied artist needs a complete contrast to his paradise of
+imaginings and of studious hours; he either craves, like God, the
+seventh day of rest, or with Satan, the pleasures of hell; so that
+his senses may have free play in opposition to the employment of his
+faculties. Byron could never have taken for his relaxation to the
+independent gentleman’s delights of boston and gossip, for he was a
+poet, and so must needs pit Greece against Mahmoud.
+
+“In war, is not man an angel of extirpation, a sort of executioner on
+a gigantic scale? Must not the spell be strong indeed that makes us
+undergo such horrid sufferings so hostile to our weak frames, sufferings
+that encircle every strong passion with a hedge of thorns? The tobacco
+smoker is seized with convulsions, and goes through a kind of agony
+consequent upon his excesses; but has he not borne a part in delightful
+festivals in realms unknown? Has Europe ever ceased from wars? She
+has never given herself time to wipe the stains from her feet that are
+steeped in blood to the ankle. Mankind at large is carried away by fits
+of intoxication, as nature has its accessions of love.
+
+“For men in private life, for a vegetating Mirabeau dreaming of storms
+in a time of calm, Excess comprises all things; it perpetually embraces
+the whole sum of life; it is something better still--it is a duel with
+an antagonist of unknown power, a monster, terrible at first sight, that
+must be seized by the horns, a labor that cannot be imagined.
+
+“Suppose that nature has endowed you with a feeble stomach or one of
+limited capacity; you acquire a mastery over it and improve it; you
+learn to carry your liquor; you grow accustomed to being drunk; you pass
+whole nights without sleep; at last you acquire the constitution of a
+colonel of cuirassiers; and in this way you create yourself afresh, as
+if to fly in the face of Providence.
+
+“A man transformed after this sort is like a neophyte who has at last
+become a veteran, has accustomed his mind to shot and shell and his legs
+to lengthy marches. When the monster’s hold on him is still uncertain,
+and it is not yet known which will have the better of it, they roll over
+and over, alternately victor and vanquished, in a world where everything
+is wonderful, where every ache of the soul is laid to sleep, where only
+the shadows of ideas are revived.
+
+“This furious struggle has already become a necessity for us. The
+prodigal has struck a bargain for all the enjoyments with which life
+teems abundantly, at the price of his own death, like the mythical
+persons in legends who sold themselves to the devil for the power of
+doing evil. For them, instead of flowing quietly on in its monotonous
+course in the depths of some counting-house or study, life is poured out
+in a boiling torrent.
+
+“Excess is, in short, for the body what the mystic’s ecstasy is for
+the soul. Intoxication steeps you in fantastic imaginings every whit as
+strange as those of ecstatics. You know hours as full of rapture as a
+young girl’s dreams; you travel without fatigue; you chat pleasantly
+with your friends; words come to you with a whole life in each, and
+fresh pleasures without regrets; poems are set forth for you in a few
+brief phrases. The coarse animal satisfaction, in which science has
+tried to find a soul, is followed by the enchanted drowsiness that men
+sigh for under the burden of consciousness. Is it not because they all
+feel the need of absolute repose? Because Excess is a sort of toll that
+genius pays to pain?
+
+“Look at all great men; nature made them pleasure-loving or base, every
+one. Some mocking or jealous power corrupted them in either soul or
+body, so as to make all their powers futile, and their efforts of no
+avail.
+
+“All men and all things appear before you in the guise you choose,
+in those hours when wine has sway. You are lord of all creation; you
+transform it at your pleasure. And throughout this unceasing delirium,
+Play may pour, at your will, its molten lead into your veins.
+
+“Some day you will fall into the monster’s power. Then you will have, as
+I had, a frenzied awakening, with impotence sitting by your pillow. Are
+you an old soldier? Phthisis attacks you. A diplomatist? An aneurism
+hangs death in your heart by a thread. It will perhaps be consumption
+that will cry out to me, ‘Let us be going!’ as to Raphael of Urbino, in
+old time, killed by an excess of love.
+
+“In this way I have existed. I was launched into the world too early or
+too late. My energy would have been dangerous there, no doubt, if I had
+not have squandered it in such ways as these. Was not the world rid of
+an Alexander, by the cup of Hercules, at the close of a drinking bout?
+
+“There are some, the sport of Destiny, who must either have heaven or
+hell, the hospice of St. Bernard or riotous excess. Only just now
+I lacked the heart to moralize about those two,” and he pointed to
+Euphrasia and Aquilina. “They are types of my own personal history,
+images of my life! I could scarcely reproach them; they stood before me
+like judges.
+
+“In the midst of this drama that I was enacting, and while my
+distracting disorder was at its height, two crises supervened; each
+brought me keen and abundant pangs. The first came a few days after I
+had flung myself, like Sardanapalus, on my pyre. I met Foedora under the
+peristyle of the Bouffons. We both were waiting for our carriages.
+
+“‘Ah! so you are living yet?’
+
+“That was the meaning of her smile, and probably of the spiteful words
+she murmured in the ear of her cicisbeo, telling him my history no
+doubt, rating mine as a common love affair. She was deceived, yet she
+was applauding her perspicacity. Oh, that I should be dying for her,
+must still adore her, always see her through my potations, see her still
+when I was overcome with wine, or in the arms of courtesans; and know
+that I was a target for her scornful jests! Oh, that I should be unable
+to tear the love of her out of my breast and to fling it at her feet!
+
+“Well, I quickly exhausted my funds, but owing to those three years
+of discipline, I enjoyed the most robust health, and on the day that I
+found myself without a penny I felt remarkably well. In order to carry
+on the process of dying, I signed bills at short dates, and the day came
+when they must be met. Painful excitements! but how they quicken the
+pulses of youth! I was not prematurely aged; I was young yet, and full
+of vigor and life.
+
+“At my first debt all my virtues came to life; slowly and despairingly
+they seemed to pace towards me; but I could compound with them--they
+were like aged aunts that begin with a scolding and end by bestowing
+tears and money upon you.
+
+“Imagination was less yielding; I saw my name bandied about through
+every city in Europe. ‘One’s name is oneself’ says Eusebe Salverte.
+After these excursions I returned to the room I had never quitted, like
+a doppelganger in a German tale, and came to myself with a start.
+
+“I used to see with indifference a banker’s messenger going on his
+errands through the streets of Paris, like a commercial Nemesis, wearing
+his master’s livery--a gray coat and a silver badge; but now I hated the
+species in advance. One of them came one morning to ask me to meet some
+eleven bills that I had scrawled my name upon. My signature was worth
+three thousand francs! Taking me altogether, I myself was not worth
+that amount. Sheriff’s deputies rose up before me, turning their callous
+faces upon my despair, as the hangman regards the criminal to whom he
+says, ‘It has just struck half-past three.’ I was in the power of their
+clerks; they could scribble my name, drag it through the mire, and jeer
+at it. I was a defaulter. Has a debtor any right to himself? Could
+not other men call me to account for my way of living? Why had I eaten
+puddings _a la chipolata_? Why had I iced my wine? Why had I slept, or
+walked, or thought, or amused myself when I had not paid them?
+
+“At any moment, in the middle of a poem, during some train of thought,
+or while I was gaily breakfasting in the pleasant company of my friends,
+I might look to see a gentleman enter in a coat of chestnut-brown, with
+a shabby hat in his hand. This gentleman’s appearance would signify my
+debt, the bill I had drawn; the spectre would compel me to leave the
+table to speak to him, blight my spirits, despoil me of my cheerfulness,
+of my mistress, of all I possessed, down to my very bedstead.
+
+“Remorse itself is more easily endured. Remorse does not drive us into
+the street nor into the prison of Sainte-Pelagie; it does not force
+us into the detestable sink of vice. Remorse only brings us to the
+scaffold, where the executioner invests us with a certain dignity; as we
+pay the extreme penalty, everybody believes in our innocence; but people
+will not credit a penniless prodigal with a single virtue.
+
+“My debts had other incarnations. There is the kind that goes about on
+two feet, in a green cloth coat, and blue spectacles, carrying umbrellas
+of various hues; you come face to face with him at the corner of
+some street, in the midst of your mirth. These have the detestable
+prerogative of saying, ‘M. de Valentin owes me something, and does
+not pay. I have a hold on him. He had better not show me any offensive
+airs!’ You must bow to your creditors, and moreover bow politely. ‘When
+are you going to pay me?’ say they. And you must lie, and beg money of
+another man, and cringe to a fool seated on his strong-box, and receive
+sour looks in return from these horse-leeches; a blow would be less
+hateful; you must put up with their crass ignorance and calculating
+morality. A debt is a feat of the imaginative that they cannot
+appreciate. A borrower is often carried away and over-mastered by
+generous impulses; nothing great, nothing magnanimous can move or
+dominate those who live for money, and recognize nothing but money. I
+myself held money in abhorrence.
+
+“Or a bill may undergo a final transformation into some meritorious
+old man with a family dependent upon him. My creditor might be a living
+picture for Greuze, a paralytic with his children round him, a soldier’s
+widow, holding out beseeching hands to me. Terrible creditors are
+these with whom we are forced to sympathize, and when their claims are
+satisfied we owe them a further debt of assistance.
+
+“The night before the bills fell due, I lay down with the false calm of
+those who sleep before their approaching execution, or with a duel in
+prospect, rocked as they are by delusive hopes. But when I woke, when
+I was cool and collected, when I found myself imprisoned in a banker’s
+portfolio, and floundering in statements covered with red ink--then my
+debts sprang up everywhere, like grasshoppers, before my eyes. There
+were my debts, my clock, my armchairs; my debts were inlaid in the very
+furniture which I liked best to use. These gentle inanimate slaves were
+to fall prey to the harpies of the Chatelet, were to be carried off by
+the broker’s men, and brutally thrown on the market. Ah, my property was
+a part of myself!
+
+“The sound of the door-bell rang through my heart; while it seemed to
+strike at me, where kings should be struck at--in the head. Mine was a
+martyrdom, without heaven for its reward. For a magnanimous nature, debt
+is a hell, and a hell, moreover, with sheriff’s officers and brokers in
+it. An undischarged debt is something mean and sordid; it is a beginning
+of knavery; it is something worse, it is a lie; it prepares the way for
+crime, and brings together the planks for the scaffold. My bills
+were protested. Three days afterwards I met them, and this is how it
+happened.
+
+“A speculator came, offering to buy the island in the Loire belonging
+to me, where my mother lay buried. I closed with him. When I went to
+his solicitor to sign the deeds, I felt a cavern-like chill in the dark
+office that made me shudder; it was the same cold dampness that had laid
+hold upon me at the brink of my father’s grave. I looked upon this as
+an evil omen. I seemed to see the shade of my mother, and to hear her
+voice. What power was it that made my own name ring vaguely in my ears,
+in spite of the clamor of bells?
+
+“The money paid down for my island, when all my debts were discharged,
+left me in possession of two thousand francs. I could now have returned
+to the scholar’s tranquil life, it is true; I could have gone back to
+my garret after having gained an experience of life, with my head filled
+with the results of extensive observation, and with a certain sort of
+reputation attaching to me. But Foedora’s hold upon her victim was not
+relaxed. We often met. I compelled her admirers to sound my name in her
+ears, by dint of astonishing them with my cleverness and success, with
+my horses and equipages. It all found her impassive and uninterested; so
+did an ugly phrase of Rastignac’s, ‘He is killing himself for you.’
+
+“I charged the world at large with my revenge, but I was not happy.
+While I was fathoming the miry depths of life, I only recognized the
+more keenly at all times the happiness of reciprocal affection; it was
+a shadow that I followed through all that befell me in my extravagance,
+and in my wildest moments. It was my misfortune to be deceived in my
+fairest beliefs, to be punished by ingratitude for benefiting others,
+and to receive uncounted pleasures as the reward of my errors--a
+sinister doctrine, but a true one for the prodigal!
+
+“The contagious leprosy of Foedora’s vanity had taken hold of me at
+last. I probed my soul, and found it cankered and rotten. I bore the
+marks of the devil’s claw upon my forehead. It was impossible to me
+thenceforward to do without the incessant agitation of a life fraught
+with danger at every moment, or to dispense with the execrable
+refinements of luxury. If I had possessed millions, I should still have
+gambled, reveled, and racketed about. I wished never to be alone with
+myself, and I must have false friends and courtesans, wine and good
+cheer to distract me. The ties that attach a man to family life had been
+permanently broken for me. I had become a galley-slave of pleasure,
+and must accomplish my destiny of suicide. During the last days of my
+prosperity, I spent every night in the most incredible excesses; but
+every morning death cast me back upon life again. I would have taken
+a conflagration with as little concern as any man with a life annuity.
+However, I at last found myself alone with a twenty-franc piece; I
+bethought me then of Rastignac’s luck----
+
+“Eh, eh!----” Raphael exclaimed, interrupting himself, as he remembered
+the talisman and drew it from his pocket. Perhaps he was wearied by the
+long day’s strain, and had no more strength left wherewith to pilot his
+head through the seas of wine and punch; or perhaps, exasperated by this
+symbol of his own existence, the torrent of his own eloquence gradually
+overwhelmed him. Raphael became excited and elated and like one
+completely deprived of reason.
+
+“The devil take death!” he shouted, brandishing the skin; “I mean to
+live! I am rich, I have every virtue; nothing will withstand me. Who
+would not be generous, when everything is in his power? Aha! Aha! I
+wished for two hundred thousand livres a year, and I shall have them.
+Bow down before me, all of you, wallowing on the carpets like swine in
+the mire! You all belong to me--a precious property truly! I am rich; I
+could buy you all, even the deputy snoring over there. Scum of society,
+give me your benediction! I am the Pope.”
+
+Raphael’s vociferations had been hitherto drowned by a thorough-bass
+of snores, but now they became suddenly audible. Most of the sleepers
+started up with a cry, saw the cause of the disturbance on his feet,
+tottering uncertainly, and cursed him in concert for a drunken brawler.
+
+“Silence!” shouted Raphael. “Back to your kennels, you dogs! Emile, I
+have riches, I will give you Havana cigars!”
+
+“I am listening,” the poet replied. “Death or Foedora! On with you! That
+silky Foedora deceived you. Women are all daughters of Eve. There is
+nothing dramatic about that rigmarole of yours.”
+
+“Ah, but you were sleeping, slyboots.”
+
+“No--‘Death or Foedora!’--I have it!”
+
+“Wake up!” Raphael shouted, beating Emile with the piece of shagreen as
+if he meant to draw electric fluid out of it.
+
+“_Tonnerre_!” said Emile, springing up and flinging his arms round
+Raphael; “my friend, remember the sort of women you are with.”
+
+“I am a millionaire!”
+
+“If you are not a millionaire, you are most certainly drunk.”
+
+“Drunk with power. I can kill you!--Silence! I am Nero! I am
+Nebuchadnezzar!”
+
+“But, Raphael, we are in queer company, and you ought to keep quiet for
+the sake of your own dignity.”
+
+“My life has been silent too long. I mean to have my revenge now on the
+world at large. I will not amuse myself by squandering paltry five-franc
+pieces; I will reproduce and sum up my epoch by absorbing human
+lives, human minds, and human souls. There are the treasures of
+pestilence--that is no paltry kind of wealth, is it? I will wrestle with
+fevers--yellow, blue, or green--with whole armies, with gibbets. I can
+possess Foedora--Yet no, I do not want Foedora; she is a disease; I am
+dying of Foedora. I want to forget Foedora.”
+
+“If you keep on calling out like this, I shall take you into the
+dining-room.”
+
+“Do you see this skin? It is Solomon’s will. Solomon belongs to me--a
+little varlet of a king! Arabia is mine, Arabia Petraea to boot; and the
+universe, and you too, if I choose. If I choose--Ah! be careful. I can
+buy up all our journalist’s shop; you shall be my valet. You shall be
+my valet, you shall manage my newspaper. Valet! _valet_, that is to say,
+free from aches and pains, because he has no brains.”
+
+At the word, Emile carried Raphael off into the dining-room.
+
+“All right,” he remarked; “yes, my friend, I am your valet. But you
+are about to be editor-in-chief of a newspaper; so be quiet, and behave
+properly, for my sake. Have you no regard for me?”
+
+“Regard for you! You shall have Havana cigars, with this bit of
+shagreen: always with this skin, this supreme bit of shagreen. It is
+a cure for corns, and efficacious remedy. Do you suffer? I will remove
+them.”
+
+“Never have I known you so senseless----”
+
+“Senseless, my friend? Not at all. This skin contracts whenever I form a
+wish--‘tis a paradox. There is a Brahmin underneath it! The Brahmin must
+be a droll fellow, for our desires, look you, are bound to expand----”
+
+“Yes, yes----”
+
+“I tell you----”
+
+“Yes, yes, very true, I am quite of your opinion--our desires
+expand----”
+
+“The skin, I tell you.”
+
+“Yes.”
+
+“You don’t believe me. I know you, my friend; you are as full of lies as
+a new-made king.”
+
+“How can you expect me to follow your drunken maunderings?”
+
+“I will bet you I can prove it. Let us measure it----”
+
+“Goodness! he will never get off to sleep,” exclaimed Emile, as he
+watched Raphael rummaging busily in the dining-room.
+
+Thanks to the peculiar clearness with which external objects are
+sometimes projected on an inebriated brain, in sharp contrast to its own
+obscure imaginings, Valentin found an inkstand and a table-napkin, with
+the quickness of a monkey, repeating all the time:
+
+“Let us measure it! Let us measure it!”
+
+“All right,” said Emile; “let us measure it!”
+
+The two friends spread out the table-napkin and laid the Magic Skin upon
+it. As Emile’s hand appeared to be steadier than Raphael’s, he drew a
+line with pen and ink round the talisman, while his friend said:
+
+“I wished for an income of two hundred thousand livres, didn’t I? Well,
+when that comes, you will observe a mighty diminution of my chagrin.”
+
+“Yes--now go to sleep. Shall I make you comfortable on that sofa? Now
+then, are you all right?”
+
+“Yes, my nursling of the press. You shall amuse me; you shall drive
+the flies away from me. The friend of adversity should be the friend of
+prosperity. So I will give you some Hava--na--cig----”
+
+“Come, now, sleep. Sleep off your gold, you millionaire!”
+
+“You! sleep off your paragraphs! Good-night! Say good-night to
+Nebuchadnezzar!--Love! Wine! France!--glory and tr--treas----”
+
+Very soon the snorings of the two friends were added to the music with
+which the rooms resounded--an ineffectual concert! The lights went out
+one by one, their crystal sconces cracking in the final flare. Night
+threw dark shadows over this prolonged revelry, in which Raphael’s
+narrative had been a second orgy of speech, of words without ideas, of
+ideas for which words had often been lacking.
+
+Towards noon, next day, the fair Aquilina bestirred herself. She yawned
+wearily. She had slept with her head upon a painted velvet footstool,
+and her cheeks were mottled over by contact with the surface. Her
+movement awoke Euphrasia, who suddenly sprang up with a hoarse cry; her
+pretty face, that had been so fresh and fair in the evening, was sallow
+now and pallid; she looked like a candidate for the hospital. The rest
+awoke also by degrees, with portentous groanings, to feel themselves
+over in every stiffened limb, and to experience the infinite varieties
+of weariness that weighed upon them.
+
+A servant came in to throw back the shutters and open the windows.
+There they all stood, brought back to consciousness by the warm rays
+of sunlight that shone upon the sleepers’ heads. Their movements during
+slumber had disordered the elaborately arranged hair and toilettes of
+the women. They presented a ghastly spectacle in the bright daylight.
+Their hair fell ungracefully about them; their eyes, lately so
+brilliant, were heavy and dim; the expression of their faces was
+entirely changed. The sickly hues, which daylight brings out so
+strongly, were frightful. An olive tint had crept over the lymphatic
+faces, so fair and soft when in repose; the dainty red lips were
+grown pale and dry, and bore tokens of the degradation of excess. Each
+disowned his mistress of the night before; the women looked wan and
+discolored, like flowers trampled under foot by a passing procession.
+
+The men who scorned them looked even more horrible. Those human faces
+would have made you shudder. The hollow eyes with the dark circles round
+them seemed to see nothing; they were dull with wine and stupefied with
+heavy slumbers that had been exhausting rather than refreshing. There
+was an indescribable ferocious and stolid bestiality about these haggard
+faces, where bare physical appetite appeared shorn of all the poetical
+illusion with which the intellect invests it. Even these fearless
+champions, accustomed to measure themselves with excess, were struck
+with horror at this awakening of vice, stripped of its disguises, at
+being confronted thus with sin, the skeleton in rags, lifeless and
+hollow, bereft of the sophistries of the intellect and the enchantments
+of luxury. Artists and courtesans scrutinized in silence and with
+haggard glances the surrounding disorder, the rooms where everything had
+been laid waste, at the havoc wrought by heated passions.
+
+Demoniac laughter broke out when Taillefer, catching the smothered
+murmurs of his guests, tried to greet them with a grin. His darkly
+flushed, perspiring countenance loomed upon this pandemonium, like the
+image of a crime that knows no remorse (see _L’Auberge rouge_). The
+picture was complete. A picture of a foul life in the midst of luxury, a
+hideous mixture of the pomp and squalor of humanity; an awakening after
+the frenzy of Debauch has crushed and squeezed all the fruits of life in
+her strong hands, till nothing but unsightly refuse is left to her, and
+lies in which she believes no longer. You might have thought of Death
+gloating over a family stricken with the plague.
+
+The sweet scents and dazzling lights, the mirth and the excitement
+were all no more; disgust with its nauseous sensations and searching
+philosophy was there instead. The sun shone in like truth, the pure
+outer air was like virtue; in contrast with the heated atmosphere, heavy
+with the fumes of the previous night of revelry.
+
+Accustomed as they were to their life, many of the girls thought of
+other days and other wakings; pure and innocent days when they looked
+out and saw the roses and honeysuckle about the casement, and the fresh
+countryside without enraptured by the glad music of the skylark; while
+earth lay in mists, lighted by the dawn, and in all the glittering
+radiance of dew. Others imagined the family breakfast, the father and
+children round the table, the innocent laughter, the unspeakable charm
+that pervaded it all, the simple hearts and their meal as simple.
+
+An artist mused upon his quiet studio, on his statue in its severe
+beauty, and the graceful model who was waiting for him. A young man
+recollected a lawsuit on which the fortunes of a family hung, and an
+important transaction that needed his presence. The scholar regretted
+his study and that noble work that called for him. Emile appeared just
+then as smiling, blooming, and fresh as the smartest assistant in a
+fashionable shop.
+
+“You are all as ugly as bailiffs. You won’t be fit for anything to-day,
+so this day is lost, and I vote for breakfast.”
+
+At this Taillefer went out to give some orders. The women went languidly
+up to the mirrors to set their toilettes in order. Each one shook
+herself. The wilder sort lectured the steadier ones. The courtesans made
+fun of those who looked unable to continue the boisterous festivity;
+but these wan forms revived all at once, stood in groups, and talked
+and smiled. Some servants quickly and adroitly set the furniture and
+everything else in its place, and a magnificent breakfast was got ready.
+
+The guests hurried into the dining-room. Everything there bore indelible
+marks of yesterday’s excess, it is true, but there were at any rate some
+traces of ordinary, rational existence, such traces as may be found in a
+sick man’s dying struggles. And so the revelry was laid away and buried,
+like carnival of a Shrove Tuesday, by masks wearied out with dancing,
+drunk with drunkenness, and quite ready to be persuaded of the pleasures
+of lassitude, lest they should be forced to admit their exhaustion.
+
+As soon as these bold spirits surrounded the capitalist’s
+breakfast-table, Cardot appeared. He had left the rest to make a night
+of it after the dinner, and finished the evening after his own fashion
+in the retirement of domestic life. Just now a sweet smile wandered over
+his features. He seemed to have a presentiment that there would be some
+inheritance to sample and divide, involving inventories and engrossing;
+an inheritance rich in fees and deeds to draw up, and something as juicy
+as the trembling fillet of beef in which their host had just plunged his
+knife.
+
+“Oh, ho! we are to have breakfast in the presence of a notary,” cried
+Cursy.
+
+“You have come here just at the right time,” said the banker, indicating
+the breakfast; “you can jot down the numbers, and initial off all the
+dishes.”
+
+“There is no will to make here, but contracts of marriage there may be,
+perhaps,” said the scholar, who had made a satisfactory arrangement for
+the first time in twelve months.
+
+“Oh! Oh!”
+
+“Ah! Ah!”
+
+“One moment,” cried Cardot, fairly deafened by a chorus of wretched
+jokes. “I came here on serious business. I am bringing six millions for
+one of you.” (Dead silence.) “Monsieur,” he went on, turning to Raphael,
+who at the moment was unceremoniously wiping his eyes on a corner of the
+table-napkin, “was not your mother a Mlle. O’Flaharty?”
+
+“Yes,” said Raphael mechanically enough; “Barbara Marie.”
+
+“Have you your certificate of birth about you,” Cardot went on, “and
+Mme. de Valentin’s as well?”
+
+“I believe so.”
+
+“Very well then, monsieur; you are the sole heir of Major O’Flaharty,
+who died in August 1828 at Calcutta.”
+
+“An _incalcuttable_ fortune,” said the critic.
+
+“The Major having bequeathed several amounts to public institutions in
+his will, the French Government sent in a claim for the remainder to
+the East India Company,” the notary continued. “The estate is clear and
+ready to be transferred at this moment. I have been looking in vain for
+the heirs and assigns of Mlle. Barbara Marie O’Flaharty for a fortnight
+past, when yesterday at dinner----”
+
+Just then Raphael suddenly staggered to his feet; he looked like a man
+who has just received a blow. Acclamation took the form of silence, for
+stifled envy had been the first feeling in every breast, and all eyes
+devoured him like flames. Then a murmur rose, and grew like the voice of
+a discontented audience, or the first mutterings of a riot, as everybody
+made some comment on this news of great wealth brought by the notary.
+
+This abrupt subservience of fate brought Raphael thoroughly to his
+senses. He immediately spread out the table-napkin with which he had
+lately taken the measure of the piece of shagreen. He heeded nothing as
+he laid the talisman upon it, and shuddered involuntarily at the sight
+of a slight difference between the present size of the skin and the
+outline traced upon the linen.
+
+“Why, what is the matter with him?” Taillefer cried. “He comes by his
+fortune very cheaply.”
+
+“_Soutiens-le Chatillon_!” said Bixiou to Emile. “The joy will kill
+him.”
+
+A ghastly white hue overspread every line of the wan features of the
+heir-at-law. His face was drawn, every outline grew haggard; the hollows
+in his livid countenance grew deeper, and his eyes were fixed and
+staring. He was facing Death.
+
+The opulent banker, surrounded by faded women, and faces with satiety
+written on them, the enjoyment that had reached the pitch of agony, was
+a living illustration of his own life.
+
+Raphael looked thrice at the talisman, which lay passively within the
+merciless outlines on the table-napkin; he tried not to believe it,
+but his incredulity vanished utterly before the light of an inner
+presentiment. The whole world was his; he could have all things, but the
+will to possess them was utterly extinct. Like a traveler in the midst
+of the desert, with but a little water left to quench his thirst, he
+must measure his life by the draughts he took of it. He saw what every
+desire of his must cost him in the days of his life. He believed in the
+powers of the Magic Skin at last, he listened to every breath he drew;
+he felt ill already; he asked himself:
+
+“Am I not consumptive? Did not my mother die of a lung complaint?”
+
+“Aha, Raphael! what fun you will have! What will you give me?” asked
+Aquilina.
+
+“Here’s to the death of his uncle, Major O’Flaharty! There is a man for
+you.”
+
+“He will be a peer of France.”
+
+“Pooh! what is a peer of France since July?” said the amateur critic.
+
+“Are you going to take a box at the Bouffons?”
+
+“You are going to treat us all, I hope?” put in Bixiou.
+
+“A man of his sort will be sure to do things in style,” said Emile.
+
+The hurrah set up by the jovial assembly rang in Valentin’s ears, but he
+could not grasp the sense of a single word. Vague thoughts crossed him
+of the Breton peasant’s life of mechanical labor, without a wish of any
+kind; he pictured him burdened with a family, tilling the soil, living
+on buckwheat meal, drinking cider out of a pitcher, believing in the
+Virgin and the King, taking the sacrament at Easter, dancing of a Sunday
+on the green sward, and understanding never a word of the rector’s
+sermon. The actual scene that lay before him, the gilded furniture, the
+courtesans, the feast itself, and the surrounding splendors, seemed to
+catch him by the throat and made him cough.
+
+“Do you wish for some asparagus?” the banker cried.
+
+“_I wish for nothing_!” thundered Raphael.
+
+“Bravo!” Taillefer exclaimed; “you understand your position; a
+fortune confers the privilege of being impertinent. You are one of us.
+Gentlemen, let us drink to the might of gold! M. Valentin here, six
+times a millionaire, has become a power. He is a king, like all the
+rich; everything is at his disposal, everything lies under his feet.
+From this time forth the axiom that ‘all Frenchmen are alike in the eyes
+of the law,’ is for him a fib at the head of the Constitutional Charter.
+He is not going to obey the law--the law is going to obey him. There are
+neither scaffolds nor executioners for millionaires.”
+
+“Yes, there are,” said Raphael; “they are their own executioners.”
+
+“Here is another victim of prejudices!” cried the banker.
+
+“Let us drink!” Raphael said, putting the talisman into his pocket.
+
+“What are you doing?” said Emile, checking his movement. “Gentlemen,” he
+added, addressing the company, who were rather taken aback by Raphael’s
+behavior, “you must know that our friend Valentin here--what am I
+saying?--I mean my Lord Marquis de Valentin--is in the possession of
+a secret for obtaining wealth. His wishes are fulfilled as soon as he
+knows them. He will make us all rich together, or he is a flunkey, and
+devoid of all decent feeling.”
+
+“Oh, Raphael dear, I should like a set of pearl ornaments!” Euphrasia
+exclaimed.
+
+“If he has any gratitude in him, he will give me a couple of carriages
+with fast steppers,” said Aquilina.
+
+“Wish for a hundred thousand a year for me!”
+
+“Indian shawls!”
+
+“Pay my debts!”
+
+“Send an apoplexy to my uncle, the old stick!”
+
+“Ten thousand a year in the funds, and I’ll cry quits with you,
+Raphael!”
+
+“Deeds of gift and no mistake,” was the notary’s comment.
+
+“He ought, at least, to rid me of the gout!”
+
+“Lower the funds!” shouted the banker.
+
+These phrases flew about like the last discharge of rockets at the end
+of a display of fireworks; and were uttered, perhaps, more in earnest
+than in jest.
+
+“My good friend,” Emile said solemnly, “I shall be quite satisfied with
+an income of two hundred thousand livres. Please to set about it at
+once.”
+
+“Do you not know the cost, Emile?” asked Raphael.
+
+“A nice excuse!” the poet cried; “ought we not to sacrifice ourselves
+for our friends?”
+
+“I have almost a mind to wish that you all were dead,” Valentin made
+answer, with a dark, inscrutable look at his boon companions.
+
+“Dying people are frightfully cruel,” said Emile, laughing. “You are
+rich now,” he went on gravely; “very well, I will give you two months at
+most before you grow vilely selfish. You are so dense already that
+you cannot understand a joke. You have only to go a little further to
+believe in your Magic Skin.”
+
+Raphael kept silent, fearing the banter of the company; but he drank
+immoderately, trying to drown in intoxication the recollection of his
+fatal power.
+
+
+
+
+III. THE AGONY
+
+In the early days of December an old man of some seventy years of age
+pursued his way along the Rue de Varenne, in spite of the falling rain.
+He peered up at the door of each house, trying to discover the address
+of the Marquis Raphael de Valentin, in a simple, childlike fashion,
+and with the abstracted look peculiar to philosophers. His face plainly
+showed traces of a struggle between a heavy mortification and an
+authoritative nature; his long, gray hair hung in disorder about a face
+like a piece of parchment shriveling in the fire. If a painter had come
+upon this curious character, he would, no doubt, have transferred him
+to his sketchbook on his return, a thin, bony figure, clad in black, and
+have inscribed beneath it: “Classical poet in search of a rhyme.”
+ When he had identified the number that had been given to him, this
+reincarnation of Rollin knocked meekly at the door of a splendid
+mansion.
+
+“Is Monsieur Raphael in?” the worthy man inquired of the Swiss in
+livery.
+
+“My Lord the Marquis sees nobody,” said the servant, swallowing a huge
+morsel that he had just dipped in a large bowl of coffee.
+
+“There is his carriage,” said the elderly stranger, pointing to a fine
+equipage that stood under the wooden canopy that sheltered the steps
+before the house, in place of a striped linen awning. “He is going out;
+I will wait for him.”
+
+“Then you might wait here till to-morrow morning, old boy,” said the
+Swiss. “A carriage is always waiting for monsieur. Please to go away. If
+I were to let any stranger come into the house without orders, I should
+lose an income of six hundred francs.”
+
+A tall old man, in a costume not unlike that of a subordinate in the
+Civil Service, came out of the vestibule and hurried part of the
+way down the steps, while he made a survey of the astonished elderly
+applicant for admission.
+
+“What is more, here is M. Jonathan,” the Swiss remarked; “speak to him.”
+
+Fellow-feeling of some kind, or curiosity, brought the two old men
+together in a central space in the great entrance-court. A few blades of
+grass were growing in the crevices of the pavement; a terrible silence
+reigned in that great house. The sight of Jonathan’s face would have
+made you long to understand the mystery that brooded over it, and that
+was announced by the smallest trifles about the melancholy place.
+
+When Raphael inherited his uncle’s vast estate, his first care had been
+to seek out the old and devoted servitor of whose affection he knew that
+he was secure. Jonathan had wept tears of joy at the sight of his young
+master, of whom he thought he had taken a final farewell; and when the
+marquis exalted him to the high office of steward, his happiness could
+not be surpassed. So old Jonathan became an intermediary power between
+Raphael and the world at large. He was the absolute disposer of his
+master’s fortune, the blind instrument of an unknown will, and a sixth
+sense, as it were, by which the emotions of life were communicated to
+Raphael.
+
+“I should like to speak with M. Raphael, sir,” said the elderly person
+to Jonathan, as he climbed up the steps some way, into a shelter from
+the rain.
+
+“To speak with my Lord the Marquis?” the steward cried. “He scarcely
+speaks even to me, his foster-father!”
+
+“But I am likewise his foster-father,” said the old man. “If your wife
+was his foster-mother, I fed him myself with the milk of the Muses. He
+is my nursling, my child, carus alumnus! I formed his mind, cultivated
+his understanding, developed his genius, and, I venture to say it, to
+my own honor and glory. Is he not one of the most remarkable men of our
+epoch? He was one of my pupils in two lower forms, and in rhetoric. I am
+his professor.”
+
+“Ah, sir, then you are M. Porriquet?”
+
+“Exactly, sir, but----”
+
+“Hush! hush!” Jonathan called to two underlings, whose voices broke the
+monastic silence that shrouded the house.
+
+“But is the Marquis ill, sir?” the professor continued.
+
+“My dear sir,” Jonathan replied, “Heaven only knows what is the matter
+with my master. You see, there are not a couple of houses like ours
+anywhere in Paris. Do you understand? Not two houses. Faith, that
+there are not. My Lord the Marquis had this hotel purchased for him; it
+formerly belonged to a duke and a peer of France; then he spent three
+hundred thousand francs over furnishing it. That’s a good deal, you
+know, three hundred thousand francs! But every room in the house is a
+perfect wonder. ‘Good,’ said I to myself when I saw this magnificence;
+‘it is just like it used to be in the time of my lord, his late
+grandfather; and the young marquis is going to entertain all Paris
+and the Court!’ Nothing of the kind! My lord refused to see any one
+whatever. ‘Tis a funny life that he leads, M. Porriquet, you understand.
+An _inconciliable_ life. He rises every day at the same time. I am the
+only person, you see, that may enter his room. I open all the shutters
+at seven o’clock, summer or winter. It is all arranged very oddly. As I
+come in I say to him:
+
+“‘You must get up and dress, my Lord Marquis.’
+
+“Then he rises and dresses himself. I have to give him his
+dressing-gown, and it is always after the same pattern, and of the same
+material. I am obliged to replace it when it can be used no longer,
+simply to save him the trouble of asking for a new one. A queer fancy!
+As a matter of fact, he has a thousand francs to spend every day, and
+he does as he pleases, the dear child. And besides, I am so fond of him
+that if he gave me a box on the ear on one side, I should hold out the
+other to him! The most difficult things he will tell me to do, and yet I
+do them, you know! He gives me a lot of trifles to attend to, that I
+am well set to work! He reads the newspapers, doesn’t he? Well, my
+instructions are to put them always in the same place, on the same
+table. I always go at the same hour and shave him myself; and don’t I
+tremble! The cook would forfeit the annuity of a thousand crowns that
+he is to come into after my lord’s death, if breakfast is not served
+_inconciliably_ at ten o’clock precisely. The menus are drawn up for the
+whole year round, day after day. My Lord the Marquis has not a thing
+to wish for. He has strawberries whenever there are any, and he has the
+earliest mackerel to be had in Paris. The programme is printed every
+morning. He knows his dinner by rote. In the next place, he dresses
+himself at the same hour, in the same clothes, the same linen, that
+I always put on the same chair, you understand? I have to see that he
+always has the same cloth; and if it should happen that his coat came
+to grief (a mere supposition), I should have to replace it by another
+without saying a word about it to him. If it is fine, I go in and say to
+my master:
+
+“‘You ought to go out, sir.’
+
+“He says Yes, or No. If he has a notion that he will go out, he doesn’t
+wait for his horses; they are always ready harnessed; the coachman stops
+there _inconciliably_, whip in hand, just as you see him out there.
+In the evening, after dinner, my master goes one day to the Opera, the
+other to the Ital----no, he hasn’t yet gone to the Italiens, though,
+for I could not find a box for him until yesterday. Then he comes in at
+eleven o’clock precisely, to go to bed. At any time in the day when
+he has nothing to do, he reads--he is always reading, you see--it is a
+notion he has. My instructions are to read the _Journal de la Librairie_
+before he sees it, and to buy new books, so that he finds them on his
+chimney-piece on the very day that they are published. I have orders to
+go into his room every hour or so, to look after the fire and everything
+else, and to see that he wants nothing. He gave me a little book, sir,
+to learn off by heart, with all my duties written in it--a regular
+catechism! In summer I have to keep a cool and even temperature with
+blocks of ice and at all seasons to put fresh flowers all about. He is
+rich! He has a thousand francs to spend every day; he can indulge his
+fancies! And he hadn’t even necessaries for so long, poor child! He
+doesn’t annoy anybody; he is as good as gold; he never opens his mouth,
+for instance; the house and garden are absolutely silent. In short, my
+master has not a single wish left; everything comes in the twinkling
+of an eye, if he raises his hand, and _instanter_. Quite right, too.
+If servants are not looked after, everything falls into confusion. You
+would never believe the lengths he goes about things. His rooms are
+all--what do you call it?--er--er--_en suite_. Very well; just suppose,
+now, that he opens his room door or the door of his study; presto! all
+the other doors fly open of themselves by a patent contrivance; and then
+he can go from one end of the house to the other and not find a single
+door shut; which is all very nice and pleasant and convenient for us
+great folk! But, on my word, it cost us a lot of money! And, after all,
+M. Porriquet, he said to me at last:
+
+“‘Jonathan, you will look after me as if I were a baby in long clothes,’
+Yes, sir, ‘long clothes!’ those were his very words. ‘You will think of
+all my requirements for me.’ I am the master, so to speak, and he is
+the servant, you understand? The reason of it? Ah, my word, that is just
+what nobody on earth knows but himself and God Almighty. It is quite
+_inconciliable_!”
+
+“He is writing a poem!” exclaimed the old professor.
+
+“You think he is writing a poem, sir? It’s a very absorbing affair,
+then! But, you know, I don’t think he is. He often tells me that he
+wants to live like a _vergetation_; he wants to _vergetate_. Only
+yesterday he was looking at a tulip while he was dressing, and he said
+to me:
+
+“‘There is my own life--I am _vergetating_, my poor Jonathan.’ Now, some
+of them insist that that is monomania. It is _inconciliable_!”
+
+“All this makes it very clear to me, Jonathan,” the professor answered,
+with a magisterial solemnity that greatly impressed the old servant,
+“that your master is absorbed in a great work. He is deep in
+vast meditations, and has no wish to be distracted by the petty
+preoccupations of ordinary life. A man of genius forgets everything
+among his intellectual labors. One day the famous Newton----”
+
+“Newton?--oh, ah! I don’t know the name,” said Jonathan.
+
+“Newton, a great geometrician,” Porriquet went on, “once sat for
+twenty-four hours leaning his elbow on the table; when he emerged from
+his musings, he was a day out in his reckoning, just as if he had been
+sleeping. I will go to see him, dear lad; I may perhaps be of some use
+to him.”
+
+“Not for a moment!” Jonathan cried. “Not though you were King of
+France--I mean the real old one. You could not go in unless you forced
+the doors open and walked over my body. But I will go and tell him you
+are here, M. Porriquet, and I will put it to him like this, ‘Ought he
+to come up?’ And he will say Yes or No. I never say, ‘Do you wish?’
+or ‘Will you?’ or ‘Do you want?’ Those words are scratched out of the
+dictionary. He let out at me once with a ‘Do you want to kill me?’ he
+was so very angry.”
+
+Jonathan left the old schoolmaster in the vestibule, signing to him to
+come no further, and soon returned with a favorable answer. He led the
+old gentleman through one magnificent room after another, where every
+door stood open. At last Porriquet beheld his pupil at some distance
+seated beside the fire.
+
+Raphael was reading the paper. He sat in an armchair wrapped in a
+dressing-gown with some large pattern on it. The intense melancholy that
+preyed upon him could be discerned in his languid posture and feeble
+frame; it was depicted on his brow and white face; he looked like some
+plant bleached by darkness. There was a kind of effeminate grace about
+him; the fancies peculiar to wealthy invalids were also noticeable. His
+hands were soft and white, like a pretty woman’s; he wore his fair hair,
+now grown scanty, curled about his temples with a refinement of vanity.
+
+The Greek cap that he wore was pulled to one side by the weight of its
+tassel; too heavy for the light material of which it was made. He
+had let the paper-knife fall at his feet, a malachite blade with gold
+mounting, which he had used to cut the leaves of the book. The amber
+mouthpiece of a magnificent Indian hookah lay on his knee; the enameled
+coils lay like a serpent in the room, but he had forgotten to draw out
+its fresh perfume. And yet there was a complete contradiction between
+the general feebleness of his young frame and the blue eyes, where all
+his vitality seemed to dwell; an extraordinary intelligence seemed to
+look out from them and to grasp everything at once.
+
+That expression was painful to see. Some would have read despair in
+it, and others some inner conflict terrible as remorse. It was the
+inscrutable glance of helplessness that must perforce consign its
+desires to the depths of its own heart; or of a miser enjoying in
+imagination all the pleasures that his money could procure for him,
+while he declines to lessen his hoard; the look of a bound Prometheus,
+of the fallen Napoleon of 1815, when he learned at the Elysee the
+strategical blunder that his enemies had made, and asked for twenty-four
+hours of command in vain; or rather it was the same look that Raphael
+had turned upon the Seine, or upon his last piece of gold at the
+gaming-table only a few months ago.
+
+He was submitting his intelligence and his will to the homely
+common-sense of an old peasant whom fifty years of domestic service had
+scarcely civilized. He had given up all the rights of life in order to
+live; he had despoiled his soul of all the romance that lies in a wish;
+and almost rejoiced at thus becoming a sort of automaton. The better to
+struggle with the cruel power that he had challenged, he had followed
+Origen’s example, and had maimed and chastened his imagination.
+
+The day after he had seen the diminution of the Magic Skin, at his
+sudden accession of wealth, he happened to be at his notary’s house. A
+well-known physician had told them quite seriously, at dessert, how
+a Swiss attacked by consumption had cured himself. The man had never
+spoken a word for ten years, and had compelled himself to draw six
+breaths only, every minute, in the close atmosphere of a cow-house,
+adhering all the time to a regimen of exceedingly light diet. “I will be
+like that man,” thought Raphael to himself. He wanted life at any price,
+and so he led the life of a machine in the midst of all the luxury
+around him.
+
+The old professor confronted this youthful corpse and shuddered; there
+seemed something unnatural about the meagre, enfeebled frame. In the
+Marquis, with his eager eyes and careworn forehead, he could hardly
+recognize the fresh-cheeked and rosy pupil with the active limbs,
+whom he remembered. If the worthy classicist, sage critic, and general
+preserver of the traditions of correct taste had read Byron, he would
+have thought that he had come on a Manfred when he looked to find Childe
+Harold.
+
+“Good day, pere Porriquet,” said Raphael, pressing the old
+schoolmaster’s frozen fingers in his own damp ones; “how are you?”
+
+“I am very well,” replied the other, alarmed by the touch of that
+feverish hand. “But how about you?”
+
+“Oh, I am hoping to keep myself in health.”
+
+“You are engaged in some great work, no doubt?”
+
+“No,” Raphael answered. “Exegi monumemtum, pere Porriquet; I have
+contributed an important page to science, and have now bidden her
+farewell for ever. I scarcely know where my manuscript is.”
+
+“The style is no doubt correct?” queried the schoolmaster. “You, I hope,
+would never have adopted the barbarous language of the new school, which
+fancies it has worked such wonders by discovering Ronsard!”
+
+“My work treats of physiology pure and simple.”
+
+“Oh, then, there is no more to be said,” the schoolmaster answered.
+“Grammar must yield to the exigencies of discovery. Nevertheless, young
+man, a lucid and harmonious style--the diction of Massillon, of M. de
+Buffon, of the great Racine--a classical style, in short, can never
+spoil anything----But, my friend,” the schoolmaster interrupted
+himself, “I was forgetting the object of my visit, which concerns my own
+interests.”
+
+Too late Raphael recalled to mind the verbose eloquence and elegant
+circumlocutions which in a long professorial career had grown habitual
+to his old tutor, and almost regretted that he had admitted him; but
+just as he was about to wish to see him safely outside, he promptly
+suppressed his secret desire with a stealthy glance at the Magic Skin.
+It hung there before him, fastened down upon some white material,
+surrounded by a red line accurately traced about its prophetic outlines.
+Since that fatal carouse, Raphael had stifled every least whim, and
+had lived so as not to cause the slightest movement in the terrible
+talisman. The Magic Skin was like a tiger with which he must live
+without exciting its ferocity. He bore patiently, therefore, with the
+old schoolmaster’s prolixity.
+
+Porriquet spent an hour in telling him about the persecutions directed
+against him ever since the Revolution of July. The worthy man, having
+a liking for strong governments, had expressed the patriotic wish that
+grocers should be left to their counters, statesmen to the management of
+public business, advocates to the Palais de Justice, and peers of France
+to the Luxembourg; but one of the popularity-seeking ministers of the
+Citizen King had ousted him from his chair, on an accusation of Carlism,
+and the old man now found himself without pension or post, and with no
+bread to eat. As he played the part of guardian angel to a poor nephew,
+for whose schooling at Saint Sulpice he was paying, he came less on his
+own account than for his adopted child’s sake, to entreat his former
+pupil’s interest with the new minister. He did not ask to be reinstated,
+but only for a position at the head of some provincial school.
+
+QRaphael had fallen a victim to unconquerable drowsiness by the time
+that the worthy man’s monotonous voice ceased to sound in his ears.
+Civility had compelled him to look at the pale and unmoving eyes of
+the deliberate and tedious old narrator, till he himself had reached
+stupefaction, magnetized in an inexplicable way by the power of inertia.
+
+“Well, my dear pere Porriquet,” he said, not very certain what the
+question was to which he was replying, “but I can do nothing for you,
+nothing at all. _I wish very heartily_ that you may succeed----”
+
+All at once, without seeing the change wrought on the old man’s sallow
+and wrinkled brow by these conventional phrases, full of indifference
+and selfishness, Raphael sprang to his feet like a startled roebuck.
+He saw a thin white line between the black piece of hide and the red
+tracing about it, and gave a cry so fearful that the poor professor was
+frightened by it.
+
+“Old fool! Go!” he cried. “You will be appointed as headmaster! Couldn’t
+you have asked me for an annuity of a thousand crowns rather than a
+murderous wish? Your visit would have cost me nothing. There are a
+hundred thousand situations to be had in France, but I have only
+one life. A man’s life is worth more than all the situations in the
+world.--Jonathan!”
+
+Jonathan appeared.
+
+“This is your doing, double-distilled idiot! What made you suggest
+that I should see M. Porriquet?” and he pointed to the old man, who was
+petrified with fright. “Did I put myself in your hands for you to tear
+me in pieces? You have just shortened my life by ten years! Another
+blunder of this kind, and you will lay me where I have laid my father.
+Would I not far rather have possessed the beautiful Foedora? And I have
+obliged that old hulk instead--that rag of humanity! I had money enough
+for him. And, moreover, if all the Porriquets in the world were dying of
+hunger, what is that to me?”
+
+Raphael’s face was white with anger; a slight froth marked his trembling
+lips; there was a savage gleam in his eyes. The two elders shook with
+terror in his presence like two children at the sight of a snake. The
+young man fell back in his armchair, a kind of reaction took place in
+him, the tears flowed fast from his angry eyes.
+
+“Oh, my life!” he cried, “that fair life of mine. Never to know a kindly
+thought again, to love no more; nothing is left to me!”
+
+He turned to the professor and went on in a gentle voice--“The harm
+is done, my old friend. Your services have been well repaid; and my
+misfortune has at any rate contributed to the welfare of a good and
+worthy man.”
+
+His tones betrayed so much feeling that the almost unintelligible
+words drew tears from the two old men, such tears as are shed over some
+pathetic song in a foreign tongue.
+
+“He is epileptic,” muttered Porriquet.
+
+“I understand your kind intentions, my friend,” Raphael answered
+gently. “You would make excuses for me. Ill-health cannot be helped, but
+ingratitude is a grievous fault. Leave me now,” he added. “To-morrow or
+the next day, or possibly to-night, you will receive your appointment;
+Resistance has triumphed over Motion. Farewell.”
+
+The old schoolmaster went away, full of keen apprehension as to
+Valentin’s sanity. A thrill of horror ran through him; there had been
+something supernatural, he thought, in the scene he had passed through.
+He could hardly believe his own impressions, and questioned them like
+one awakened from a painful dream.
+
+“Now attend to me, Jonathan,” said the young man to his old servant.
+“Try to understand the charge confided to you.”
+
+“Yes, my Lord Marquis.”
+
+“I am as a man outlawed from humanity.”
+
+“Yes, my Lord Marquis.”
+
+“All the pleasures of life disport themselves round my bed of death,
+and dance about me like fair women; but if I beckon to them, I must die.
+Death always confronts me. You must be the barrier between the world and
+me.”
+
+“Yes, my Lord Marquis,” said the old servant, wiping the drops of
+perspiration from his wrinkled forehead. “But if you don’t wish to
+see pretty women, how will you manage at the Italiens this evening? An
+English family is returning to London, and I have taken their box for
+the rest of the season, and it is in a splendid position--superb; in the
+first row.”
+
+Raphael, deep in his own deep musings, paid no attention to him.
+
+“Do you see that splendid equipage, a brougham painted a dark brown
+color, but with the arms of an ancient and noble family shining from
+the panels? As it rolls past, all the shop-girls admire it, and look
+longingly at the yellow satin lining, the rugs from la Savonnerie,
+the daintiness and freshness of every detail, the silken cushions and
+tightly-fitting glass windows. Two liveried footmen are mounted behind
+this aristocratic carriage; and within, a head lies back among
+the silken cushions, the feverish face and hollow eyes of Raphael,
+melancholy and sad. Emblem of the doom of wealth! He flies across Paris
+like a rocket, and reaches the peristyle of the Theatre Favart. The
+passers-by make way for him; the two footmen help him to alight, an
+envious crowd looking on the while.”
+
+“What has that fellow done to be so rich?” asks a poor law-student, who
+cannot listen to the magical music of Rossini for lack of a five-franc
+piece.
+
+Raphael walked slowly along the gangway; he expected no enjoyment from
+these pleasures he had once coveted so eagerly. In the interval before
+the second act of Semiramide he walked up and down in the lobby, and
+along the corridors, leaving his box, which he had not yet entered, to
+look after itself. The instinct of property was dead within him already.
+Like all invalids, he thought of nothing but his own sufferings. He was
+leaning against the chimney-piece in the greenroom. A group had gathered
+about it of dandies, young and old, of ministers, of peers without
+peerages, and peerages without peers, for so the Revolution of July had
+ordered matters. Among a host of adventurers and journalists, in fact,
+Raphael beheld a strange, unearthly figure a few paces away among
+the crowd. He went towards this grotesque object to see it better,
+half-closing his eyes with exceeding superciliousness.
+
+“What a wonderful bit of painting!” he said to himself. The stranger’s
+hair and eyebrows and a Mazarin tuft on the chin had been dyed black,
+but the result was a spurious, glossy, purple tint that varied its hues
+according to the light; the hair had been too white, no doubt, to
+take the preparation. Anxiety and cunning were depicted in the narrow,
+insignificant face, with its wrinkles incrusted by thick layers of red
+and white paint. This red enamel, lacking on some portions of his face,
+strongly brought out his natural feebleness and livid hues. It was
+impossible not to smile at this visage with the protuberant forehead
+and pointed chin, a face not unlike those grotesque wooden figures that
+German herdsmen carve in their spare moments.
+
+An attentive observer looking from Raphael to this elderly Adonis would
+have remarked a young man’s eyes set in a mask of age, in the case of
+the Marquis, and in the other case the dim eyes of age peering forth
+from behind a mask of youth. Valentin tried to recollect when and
+where he had seen this little old man before. He was thin, fastidiously
+cravatted, booted and spurred like one-and-twenty; he crossed his arms
+and clinked his spurs as if he possessed all the wanton energy of
+youth. He seemed to move about without constraint or difficulty. He
+had carefully buttoned up his fashionable coat, which disguised his
+powerful, elderly frame, and gave him the appearance of an antiquated
+coxcomb who still follows the fashions.
+
+For Raphael this animated puppet possessed all the interest of an
+apparition. He gazed at it as if it had been some smoke-begrimed
+Rembrandt, recently restored and newly framed. This idea found him a
+clue to the truth among his confused recollections; he recognized the
+dealer in antiquities, the man to whom he owed his calamities!
+
+A noiseless laugh broke just then from the fantastical personage,
+straightening the line of his lips that stretched across a row of
+artificial teeth. That laugh brought out, for Raphael’s heated fancy, a
+strong resemblance between the man before him and the type of head
+that painters have assigned to Goethe’s Mephistopheles. A crowd
+of superstitious thoughts entered Raphael’s sceptical mind; he
+was convinced of the powers of the devil and of all the sorcerer’s
+enchantments embodied in mediaeval tradition, and since worked up by
+poets. Shrinking in horror from the destiny of Faust, he prayed for the
+protection of Heaven with all the ardent faith of a dying man in God and
+the Virgin. A clear, bright radiance seemed to give him a glimpse of
+the heaven of Michael Angelo or of Raphael of Urbino: a venerable
+white-bearded man, a beautiful woman seated in an aureole above the
+clouds and winged cherub heads. Now he had grasped and received the
+meaning of those imaginative, almost human creations; they seemed to
+explain what had happened to him, to leave him yet one hope.
+
+But when the greenroom of the Italiens returned upon his sight he
+beheld, not the Virgin, but a very handsome young person. The execrable
+Euphrasia, in all the splendor of her toilette, with its orient pearls,
+had come thither, impatient for her ardent, elderly admirer. She was
+insolently exhibiting herself with her defiant face and glittering
+eyes to an envious crowd of stockbrokers, a visible testimony to the
+inexhaustible wealth that the old dealer permitted her to squander.
+
+Raphael recollected the mocking wish with which he had accepted the old
+man’s luckless gift, and tasted all the sweets of revenge when he beheld
+the spectacle of sublime wisdom fallen to such a depth as this,
+wisdom for which such humiliation had seemed a thing impossible. The
+centenarian greeted Euphrasia with a ghastly smile, receiving her
+honeyed words in reply. He offered her his emaciated arm, and went
+twice or thrice round the greenroom with her; the envious glances and
+compliments with which the crowd received his mistress delighted him; he
+did not see the scornful smiles, nor hear the caustic comments to which
+he gave rise.
+
+“In what cemetery did this young ghoul unearth that corpse of hers?”
+ asked a dandy of the Romantic faction.
+
+Euphrasia began to smile. The speaker was a slender, fair-haired youth,
+with bright blue eyes, and a moustache. His short dress coat, hat tilted
+over one ear, and sharp tongue, all denoted the species.
+
+“How many old men,” said Raphael to himself, “bring an upright,
+virtuous, and hard-working life to a close in folly! His feet are cold
+already, and he is making love.”
+
+“Well, sir,” exclaimed Valentin, stopping the merchant’s progress, while
+he stared hard at Euphrasia, “have you quite forgotten the stringent
+maxims of your philosophy?”
+
+“Ah, I am as happy now as a young man,” said the other, in a cracked
+voice. “I used to look at existence from a wrong standpoint. One hour of
+love has a whole life in it.”
+
+The playgoers heard the bell ring, and left the greenroom to take their
+places again. Raphael and the old merchant separated. As he entered
+his box, the Marquis saw Foedora sitting exactly opposite to him on the
+other side of the theatre. The Countess had probably only just come, for
+she was just flinging off her scarf to leave her throat uncovered, and
+was occupied with going through all the indescribable manoeuvres of a
+coquette arranging herself. All eyes were turned upon her. A young peer
+of France had come with her; she asked him for the lorgnette she had
+given him to carry. Raphael knew the despotism to which his successor
+had resigned himself, in her gestures, and in the way she treated her
+companion. He was also under the spell no doubt, another dupe beating
+with all the might of a real affection against the woman’s cold
+calculations, enduring all the tortures from which Valentin had luckily
+freed himself.
+
+Foedora’s face lighted up with indescribable joy. After directing her
+lorgnette upon every box in turn, to make a rapid survey of all the
+dresses, she was conscious that by her toilette and her beauty she had
+eclipsed the loveliest and best-dressed women in Paris. She laughed
+to show her white teeth; her head with its wreath of flowers was never
+still, in her quest of admiration. Her glances went from one box to
+another, as she diverted herself with the awkward way in which a Russian
+princess wore her bonnet, or over the utter failure of a bonnet with
+which a banker’s daughter had disfigured herself.
+
+All at once she met Raphael’s steady gaze and turned pale, aghast at the
+intolerable contempt in her rejected lover’s eyes. Not one of her exiled
+suitors had failed to own her power over them; Valentin alone was proof
+against her attractions. A power that can be defied with impunity is
+drawing to its end. This axiom is as deeply engraved on the heart of
+woman as in the minds of kings. In Raphael, therefore, Foedora saw the
+deathblow of her influence and her ability to please. An epigram of his,
+made at the Opera the day before, was already known in the salons of
+Paris. The biting edge of that terrible speech had already given the
+Countess an incurable wound. We know how to cauterize a wound, but we
+know of no treatment as yet for the stab of a phrase. As every other
+woman in the house looked by turns at her and at the Marquis, Foedora
+would have consigned them all to the oubliettes of some Bastille; for in
+spite of her capacity for dissimulation, her discomfiture was discerned
+by her rivals. Her unfailing consolation had slipped from her at last.
+The delicious thought, “I am the most beautiful,” the thought that at
+all times had soothed every mortification, had turned into a lie.
+
+At the opening of the second act a woman took up her position not very
+far from Raphael, in a box that had been empty hitherto. A murmur of
+admiration went up from the whole house. In that sea of human faces
+there was a movement of every living wave; all eyes were turned upon the
+stranger lady. The applause of young and old was so prolonged, that when
+the orchestra began, the musicians turned to the audience to request
+silence, and then they themselves joined in the plaudits and swelled the
+confusion. Excited talk began in every box, every woman equipped herself
+with an opera glass, elderly men grew young again, and polished the
+glasses of their lorgnettes with their gloves. The enthusiasm subsided
+by degrees, the stage echoed with the voices of the singers, and order
+reigned as before. The aristocratic section, ashamed of having yielded
+to a spontaneous feeling, again assumed their wonted politely frigid
+manner. The well-to-do dislike to be astonished at anything; at the
+first sight of a beautiful thing it becomes their duty to discover the
+defect in it which absolves them from admiring it,--the feeling of all
+ordinary minds. Yet a few still remained motionless and heedless of the
+music, artlessly absorbed in the delight of watching Raphael’s neighbor.
+
+Valentin noticed Taillefer’s mean, obnoxious countenance by Aquilina’s
+side in a lower box, and received an approving smirk from him. Then he
+saw Emile, who seemed to say from where he stood in the orchestra, “Just
+look at that lovely creature there, close beside you!” Lastly, he saw
+Rastignac, with Mme. de Nucingen and her daughter, twisting his gloves
+like a man in despair, because he was tethered to his place, and could
+not leave it to go any nearer to the unknown fair divinity.
+
+Raphael’s life depended upon a covenant that he had made with himself,
+and had hitherto kept sacred. He would give no special heed to any
+woman whatever; and the better to guard against temptation, he used
+a cunningly contrived opera-glass which destroyed the harmony of the
+fairest features by hideous distortions. He had not recovered from the
+terror that had seized on him in the morning when, at a mere expression
+of civility, the Magic Skin had contracted so abruptly. So Raphael was
+determined not to turn his face in the direction of his neighbor. He sat
+imperturbable as a duchess with his back against the corner of the box,
+thereby shutting out half of his neighbor’s view of the stage, appearing
+to disregard her, and even to be unaware that a pretty woman sat there
+just behind him.
+
+His neighbor copied Valentin’s position exactly; she leaned her elbow
+on the edge of her box and turned her face in three-quarter profile upon
+the singers on the stage, as if she were sitting to a painter. These
+two people looked like two estranged lovers still sulking, still turning
+their backs upon each other, who will go into each other’s arms at the
+first tender word.
+
+Now and again his neighbor’s ostrich feathers or her hair came in
+contact with Raphael’s head, giving him a pleasurable thrill, against
+which he sternly fought. In a little while he felt the touch of the
+soft frill of lace that went round her dress; he could hear the gracious
+sounds of the folds of her dress itself, light rustling noises full of
+enchantment; he could even feel her movements as she breathed; with the
+gentle stir thus imparted to her form and to her draperies, it seemed
+to Raphael that all her being was suddenly communicated to him in
+an electric spark. The lace and tulle that caressed him imparted
+the delicious warmth of her bare, white shoulders. By a freak in
+the ordering of things, these two creatures, kept apart by social
+conventions, with the abysses of death between them, breathed together
+and perhaps thought of one another. Finally, the subtle perfume of aloes
+completed the work of Raphael’s intoxication. Opposition heated his
+imagination, and his fancy, become the wilder for the limits imposed
+upon it, sketched a woman for him in outlines of fire. He turned
+abruptly, the stranger made a similar movement, startled no doubt at
+being brought in contact with a stranger; and they remained face to
+face, each with the same thought.
+
+“Pauline!”
+
+“M. Raphael!”
+
+Each surveyed the other, both of them petrified with astonishment.
+Raphael noticed Pauline’s daintily simple costume. A woman’s experienced
+eyes would have discerned and admired the outlines beneath the modest
+gauze folds of her bodice and the lily whiteness of her throat. And
+then her more than mortal clearness of soul, her maidenly modesty, her
+graceful bearing, all were unchanged. Her sleeve was quivering with
+agitation, for the beating of her heart was shaking her whole frame.
+
+“Come to the Hotel de Saint-Quentin to-morrow for your papers,” she
+said. “I will be there at noon. Be punctual.”
+
+She rose hastily, and disappeared. Raphael thought of following Pauline,
+feared to compromise her, and stayed. He looked at Foedora; she seemed
+to him positively ugly. Unable to understand a single phrase of the
+music, and feeling stifled in the theatre, he went out, and returned
+home with a full heart.
+
+“Jonathan,” he said to the old servant, as soon as he lay in bed,
+“give me half a drop of laudanum on a piece of sugar, and don’t wake me
+to-morrow till twenty minutes to twelve.”
+
+“I want Pauline to love me!” he cried next morning, looking at the
+talisman the while in unspeakable anguish.
+
+The skin did not move in the least; it seemed to have lost its power to
+shrink; doubtless it could not fulfil a wish fulfilled already.
+
+“Ah!” exclaimed Raphael, feeling as if a mantle of lead had fallen away,
+which he had worn ever since the day when the talisman had been given to
+him; “so you are playing me false, you are not obeying me, the pact is
+broken! I am free; I shall live. Then was it all a wretched joke?” But
+he did not dare to believe in his own thought as he uttered it.
+
+He dressed himself as simply as had formerly been his wont, and set out
+on foot for his old lodging, trying to go back in fancy to the happy
+days when he abandoned himself without peril to vehement desires, the
+days when he had not yet condemned all human enjoyment. As he walked
+he beheld Pauline--not the Pauline of the Hotel Saint-Quentin, but the
+Pauline of last evening. Here was the accomplished mistress he had so
+often dreamed of, the intelligent young girl with the loving nature and
+artistic temperament, who understood poets, who understood poetry, and
+lived in luxurious surroundings. Here, in short, was Foedora,
+gifted with a great soul; or Pauline become a countess, and twice a
+millionaire, as Foedora had been. When he reached the worn threshold,
+and stood upon the broken step at the door, where in the old days he had
+had so many desperate thoughts, an old woman came out of the room within
+and spoke to him.
+
+“You are M. Raphael de Valentin, are you not?”
+
+“Yes, good mother,” he replied.
+
+“You know your old room then,” she replied; “you are expected up there.”
+
+“Does Mme. Gaudin still own the house?” Raphael asked.
+
+“Oh no, sir. Mme. Gaudin is a baroness now. She lives in a fine house
+of her own on the other side of the river. Her husband has come back.
+My goodness, he brought back thousands and thousands. They say she could
+buy up all the Quartier Saint-Jacques if she liked. She gave me her
+basement room for nothing, and the remainder of her lease. Ah, she’s
+a kind woman all the same; she is no more proud to-day than she was
+yesterday.”
+
+Raphael hurried up the staircase to his garret; as he reached the last
+few steps he heard the sounds of a piano. Pauline was there, simply
+dressed in a cotton gown, but the way that it was made, like the gloves,
+hat, and shawl that she had thrown carelessly upon the bed, revealed a
+change of fortune.
+
+“Ah, there you are!” cried Pauline, turning her head, and rising with
+unconcealed delight.
+
+Raphael went to sit beside her, flushed, confused, and happy; he looked
+at her in silence.
+
+“Why did you leave us then?” she asked, dropping her eyes as the flush
+deepened on his face. “What became of you?”
+
+“Ah, I have been very miserable, Pauline; I am very miserable still.”
+
+“Alas!” she said, filled with pitying tenderness. “I guessed your fate
+yesterday when I saw you so well dressed, and apparently so wealthy; but
+in reality? Eh, M. Raphael, is it as it always used to be with you?”
+
+Valentin could not restrain the tears that sprang to his eyes.
+
+“Pauline,” he exclaimed, “I----”
+
+He went no further, love sparkled in his eyes, and his emotion
+overflowed his face.
+
+“Oh, he loves me! he loves me!” cried Pauline.
+
+Raphael felt himself unable to say one word; he bent his head. The young
+girl took his hand at this; she pressed it as she said, half sobbing and
+half laughing:--
+
+“Rich, rich, happy and rich! Your Pauline is rich. But I? Oh, I ought
+to be very poor to-day. I have said, times without number, that I would
+give all the wealth upon this earth for those words, ‘He loves me!’ O
+my Raphael! I have millions. You like luxury, you will be glad; but you
+must love me and my heart besides, for there is so much love for you
+in my heart. You don’t know? My father has come back. I am a wealthy
+heiress. Both he and my mother leave me completely free to decide my own
+fate. I am free--do you understand?”
+
+Seized with a kind of frenzy, Raphael grasped Pauline’s hands and kissed
+them eagerly and vehemently, with an almost convulsive caress. Pauline
+drew her hands away, laid them on Raphael’s shoulders, and drew him
+towards her. They understood one another--in that close embrace, in
+the unalloyed and sacred fervor of that one kiss without an
+afterthought--the first kiss by which two souls take possession of each
+other.
+
+“Ah, I will not leave you any more,” said Pauline, falling back in her
+chair. “I do not know how I come to be so bold!” she added, blushing.
+
+“Bold, my Pauline? Do not fear it. It is love, love true and deep and
+everlasting like my own, is it not?”
+
+“Speak!” she cried. “Go on speaking, so long your lips have been dumb
+for me.”
+
+“Then you have loved me all along?”
+
+“Loved you? _Mon Dieu_! How often I have wept here, setting your room
+straight, and grieving for your poverty and my own. I would have sold
+myself to the evil one to spare you one vexation! You are MY Raphael
+to-day, really my own Raphael, with that handsome head of yours, and
+your heart is mine too; yes, that above all, your heart--O wealth
+inexhaustible! Well, where was I?” she went on after a pause. “Oh yes!
+We have three, four, or five millions, I believe. If I were poor, I
+should perhaps desire to bear your name, to be acknowledged as your
+wife; but as it is, I would give up the whole world for you, I would
+be your servant still, now and always. Why, Raphael, if I give you my
+fortune, my heart, myself to-day, I do no more than I did that day when
+I put a certain five-franc piece in the drawer there,” and she pointed
+to the table. “Oh, how your exultation hurt me then!”
+
+“Oh, why are you rich?” Raphael cried; “why is there no vanity in you? I
+can do nothing for you.”
+
+He wrung his hands in despair and happiness and love.
+
+“When you are the Marquise de Valentin, I know that the title and the
+fortune for thee, heavenly soul, will not be worth----”
+
+“One hair of your head,” she cried.
+
+“I have millions too. But what is wealth to either of us now? There is
+my life--ah, that I can offer, take it.”
+
+“Your love, Raphael, your love is all the world to me. Are your thoughts
+of me? I am the happiest of the happy!”
+
+“Can any one overhear us?” asked Raphael.
+
+“Nobody,” she replied, and a mischievous gesture escaped her.
+
+“Come, then!” cried Valentin, holding out his arms.
+
+She sprang upon his knees and clasped her arms about his neck.
+
+“Kiss me!” she cried, “after all the pain you have given me; to blot out
+the memory of the grief that your joys have caused me; and for the sake
+of the nights that I spent in painting hand-screens----”
+
+“Those hand-screens of yours?”
+
+“Now that we are rich, my darling, I can tell you all about it. Poor
+boy! how easy it is to delude a clever man! Could you have had white
+waistcoats and clean shirts twice a week for three francs every month to
+the laundress? Why, you used to drink twice as much milk as your money
+would have paid for. I deceived you all round--over firing, oil, and
+even money. O Raphael mine, don’t have me for your wife, I am far too
+cunning!” she said laughing.
+
+“But how did you manage?”
+
+“I used to work till two o’clock in the morning; I gave my mother half
+the money made by my screens, and the other half went to you.”
+
+They looked at one another for a moment, both bewildered by love and
+gladness.
+
+“Some day we shall have to pay for this happiness by some terrible
+sorrow,” cried Raphael.
+
+“Perhaps you are married?” said Pauline. “Oh, I will not give you up to
+any other woman.”
+
+“I am free, my beloved.”
+
+“Free!” she repeated. “Free, and mine!”
+
+She slipped down upon her knees, clasped her hands, and looked at
+Raphael in an enthusiasm of devotion.
+
+“I am afraid I shall go mad. How handsome you are!” she went on, passing
+her fingers through her lover’s fair hair. “How stupid your Countess
+Foedora is! How pleased I was yesterday with the homage they all paid to
+me! SHE has never been applauded. Dear, when I felt your arm against my
+back, I heard a vague voice within me that cried, ‘He is there!’ and I
+turned round and saw you. I fled, for I longed so to throw my arms about
+you before them all.”
+
+“How happy you are--you can speak!” Raphael exclaimed. “My heart is
+overwhelmed; I would weep, but I cannot. Do not draw your hand away.
+I could stay here looking at you like this for the rest of my life, I
+think; happy and content.”
+
+“O my love, say that once more!”
+
+“Ah, what are words?” answered Valentin, letting a hot tear fall on
+Pauline’s hands. “Some time I will try to tell you of my love; just now
+I can only feel it.”
+
+“You,” she said, “with your lofty soul and your great genius, with that
+heart of yours that I know so well; are you really mine, as I am yours?”
+
+“For ever and ever, my sweet creature,” said Raphael in an uncertain
+voice. “You shall be my wife, my protecting angel. My griefs have always
+been dispelled by your presence, and my courage revived; that angelic
+smile now on your lips has purified me, so to speak. A new life seems
+about to begin for me. The cruel past and my wretched follies are hardly
+more to me than evil dreams. At your side I breathe an atmosphere of
+happiness, and I am pure. Be with me always,” he added, pressing her
+solemnly to his beating heart.
+
+“Death may come when it will,” said Pauline in ecstasy; “I have lived!”
+
+Happy he who shall divine their joy, for he must have experienced it.
+
+“I wish that no one might enter this dear garret again, my Raphael,”
+ said Pauline, after two hours of silence.
+
+“We must have the door walled up, put bars across the window, and buy
+the house,” the Marquis answered.
+
+“Yes, we will,” she said. Then a moment later she added: “Our search for
+your manuscripts has been a little lost sight of,” and they both laughed
+like children.
+
+“Pshaw! I don’t care a jot for the whole circle of the sciences,”
+ Raphael answered.
+
+“Ah, sir, and how about glory?”
+
+“I glory in you alone.”
+
+“You used to be very miserable as you made these little scratches and
+scrawls,” she said, turning the papers over.
+
+“My Pauline----”
+
+“Oh yes, I am your Pauline--and what then?”
+
+“Where are you living now?”
+
+“In the Rue Saint Lazare. And you?”
+
+“In the Rue de Varenne.”
+
+“What a long way apart we shall be until----” She stopped, and looked at
+her lover with a mischievous and coquettish expression.
+
+“But at the most we need only be separated for a fortnight,” Raphael
+answered.
+
+“Really! we are to be married in a fortnight?” and she jumped for joy
+like a child.
+
+“I am an unnatural daughter!” she went on. “I give no more thought to my
+father or my mother, or to anything in the world. Poor love, you don’t
+know that my father is very ill? He returned from the Indies in very
+bad health. He nearly died at Havre, where we went to find him. Good
+heavens!” she cried, looking at her watch; “it is three o’clock already!
+I ought to be back again when he wakes at four. I am mistress of the
+house at home; my mother does everything that I wish, and my father
+worships me; but I will not abuse their kindness, that would be wrong.
+My poor father! He would have me go to the Italiens yesterday. You will
+come to see him to-morrow, will you not?”
+
+“Will Madame la Marquise de Valentin honor me by taking my arm?”
+
+“I am going to take the key of this room away with me,” she said. “Isn’t
+our treasure-house a palace?”
+
+“One more kiss, Pauline.”
+
+“A thousand, _mon Dieu_!” she said, looking at Raphael. “Will it always
+be like this? I feel as if I were dreaming.”
+
+They went slowly down the stairs together, step for step, with arms
+closely linked, trembling both of them beneath their load of joy. Each
+pressing close to the other’s side, like a pair of doves, they reached
+the Place de la Sorbonne, where Pauline’s carriage was waiting.
+
+“I want to go home with you,” she said. “I want to see your own room and
+your study, and to sit at the table where you work. It will be like old
+times,” she said, blushing.
+
+She spoke to the servant. “Joseph, before returning home I am going to
+the Rue de Varenne. It is a quarter-past three now, and I must be back
+by four o’clock. George must hurry the horses.” And so in a few moments
+the lovers came to Valentin’s abode.
+
+“How glad I am to have seen all this for myself!” Pauline cried,
+creasing the silken bed-curtains in Raphael’s room between her fingers.
+“As I go to sleep, I shall be here in thought. I shall imagine your dear
+head on the pillow there. Raphael, tell me, did no one advise you about
+the furniture of your hotel?”
+
+“No one whatever.”
+
+“Really? It was not a woman who----”
+
+“Pauline!”
+
+“Oh, I know I am fearfully jealous. You have good taste. I will have a
+bed like yours to-morrow.”
+
+Quite beside himself with happiness, Raphael caught Pauline in his arms.
+
+“Oh, my father!” she said; “my father----”
+
+“I will take you back to him,” cried Valentin, “for I want to be away
+from you as little as possible.”
+
+“How loving you are! I did not venture to suggest it----”
+
+“Are you not my life?”
+
+It would be tedious to set down accurately the charming prattle of the
+lovers, for tones and looks and gestures that cannot be rendered alone
+gave it significance. Valentin went back with Pauline to her own door,
+and returned with as much happiness in his heart as mortal man can know.
+
+When he was seated in his armchair beside the fire, thinking over the
+sudden and complete way in which his wishes had been fulfilled, a cold
+shiver went through him, as if the blade of a dagger had been plunged
+into his breast--he thought of the Magic Skin, and saw that it had
+shrunk a little. He uttered the most tremendous of French oaths, without
+any of the Jesuitical reservations made by the Abbess of Andouillettes,
+leant his head against the back of the chair, and sat motionless, fixing
+his unseeing eyes upon the bracket of the curtain pole.
+
+“Good God!” he cried; “every wish! Every desire of mine! Poor
+Pauline!----”
+
+He took a pair of compasses and measured the extent of existence that
+the morning had cost him.
+
+“I have scarcely enough for two months!” he said.
+
+A cold sweat broke out over him; moved by an ungovernable spasm of rage,
+he seized the Magic Skin, exclaiming:
+
+“I am a perfect fool!”
+
+He rushed out of the house and across the garden, and flung the talisman
+down a well.
+
+“_Vogue la galere_,” cried he. “The devil take all this nonsense.”
+
+So Raphael gave himself up to the happiness of being beloved, and led
+with Pauline the life of heart and heart. Difficulties which it would
+be somewhat tedious to describe had delayed their marriage, which was to
+take place early in March. Each was sure of the other; their affection
+had been tried, and happiness had taught them how strong it was. Never
+has love made two souls, two natures, so absolutely one. The more they
+came to know of each other, the more they loved. On either side there
+was the same hesitating delicacy, the same transports of joy such as
+angels know; there were no clouds in their heaven; the will of either
+was the other’s law.
+
+Wealthy as they both were, they had not a caprice which they could not
+gratify, and for that reason had no caprices. A refined taste, a feeling
+for beauty and poetry, was instinct in the soul of the bride; her
+lover’s smile was more to her than all the pearls of Ormuz. She
+disdained feminine finery; a muslin dress and flowers formed her most
+elaborate toilette.
+
+Pauline and Raphael shunned every one else, for solitude was abundantly
+beautiful to them. The idlers at the Opera, or at the Italiens, saw this
+charming and unconventional pair evening after evening. Some gossip
+went the round of the salons at first, but the harmless lovers were
+soon forgotten in the course of events which took place in Paris; their
+marriage was announced at length to excuse them in the eyes of the
+prudish; and as it happened, their servants did not babble; so their
+bliss did not draw down upon them any very severe punishment.
+
+One morning towards the end of February, at the time when the
+brightening days bring a belief in the nearness of the joys of spring,
+Pauline and Raphael were breakfasting together in a small conservatory,
+a kind of drawing-room filled with flowers, on a level with the garden.
+The mild rays of the pale winter sunlight, breaking through the thicket
+of exotic plants, warmed the air somewhat. The vivid contrast made by
+the varieties of foliage, the colors of the masses of flowering shrubs,
+the freaks of light and shadow, gladdened the eyes. While all the rest
+of Paris still sought warmth from its melancholy hearth, these two were
+laughing in a bower of camellias, lilacs, and blossoming heath. Their
+happy faces rose above lilies of the valley, narcissus blooms, and
+Bengal roses. A mat of plaited African grass, variegated like a carpet,
+lay beneath their feet in this luxurious conservatory. The walls,
+covered with a green linen material, bore no traces of damp. The
+surfaces of the rustic wooden furniture shone with cleanliness. A
+kitten, attracted by the odor of milk, had established itself upon the
+table; it allowed Pauline to bedabble it in coffee; she was playing
+merrily with it, taking away the cream that she had just allowed the
+kitten to sniff at, so as to exercise its patience, and keep up the
+contest. She burst out laughing at every antic, and by the comical
+remarks she constantly made, she hindered Raphael from perusing the
+paper; he had dropped it a dozen times already. This morning picture
+seemed to overflow with inexpressible gladness, like everything that is
+natural and genuine.
+
+Raphael, still pretending to read his paper, furtively watched Pauline
+with the cat--his Pauline, in the dressing-gown that hung carelessly
+about her; his Pauline, with her hair loose on her shoulders, with a
+tiny, white, blue-veined foot peeping out of a velvet slipper. It was
+pleasant to see her in this negligent dress; she was delightful as some
+fanciful picture by Westall; half-girl, half-woman, as she seemed to
+be, or perhaps more of a girl than a woman, there was no alloy in
+the happiness she enjoyed, and of love she knew as yet only its first
+ecstasy. When Raphael, absorbed in happy musing, had forgotten the
+existence of the newspaper, Pauline flew upon it, crumpled it up into
+a ball, and threw it out into the garden; the kitten sprang after the
+rotating object, which spun round and round, as politics are wont to do.
+This childish scene recalled Raphael to himself. He would have gone on
+reading, and felt for the sheet he no longer possessed. Joyous laughter
+rang out like the song of a bird, one peal leading to another.
+
+“I am quite jealous of the paper,” she said, as she wiped away the tears
+that her childlike merriment had brought into her eyes. “Now, is it not
+a heinous offence,” she went on, as she became a woman all at once, “to
+read Russian proclamations in my presence, and to attend to the prosings
+of the Emperor Nicholas rather than to looks and words of love!”
+
+“I was not reading, my dear angel; I was looking at you.”
+
+Just then the gravel walk outside the conservatory rang with the sound
+of the gardener’s heavily nailed boots.
+
+“I beg your pardon, my Lord Marquis--and yours, too, madame--if I am
+intruding, but I have brought you a curiosity the like of which I never
+set eyes on. Drawing a bucket of water just now, with due respect, I
+got out this strange salt-water plant. Here it is. It must be thoroughly
+used to water, anyhow, for it isn’t saturated or even damp at all. It is
+as dry as a piece of wood, and has not swelled a bit. As my Lord Marquis
+certainly knows a great deal more about things than I do, I thought I
+ought to bring it, and that it would interest him.”
+
+Therewith the gardener showed Raphael the inexorable piece of skin;
+there were barely six square inches of it left.
+
+“Thanks, Vaniere,” Raphael said. “The thing is very curious.”
+
+“What is the matter with you, my angel; you are growing quite white!”
+ Pauline cried.
+
+“You can go, Vaniere.”
+
+“Your voice frightens me,” the girl went on; “it is so strangely
+altered. What is it? How are you feeling? Where is the pain? You are in
+pain!--Jonathan! here! call a doctor!” she cried.
+
+“Hush, my Pauline,” Raphael answered, as he regained composure. “Let us
+get up and go. Some flower here has a scent that is too much for me. It
+is that verbena, perhaps.”
+
+Pauline flew upon the innocent plant, seized it by the stalk, and flung
+it out into the garden; then, with all the might of the love between
+them, she clasped Raphael in a close embrace, and with languishing
+coquetry raised her red lips to his for a kiss.
+
+“Dear angel,” she cried, “when I saw you turn so white, I understood
+that I could not live on without you; your life is my life too. Lay your
+hand on my back, Raphael mine; I feel a chill like death. The feeling
+of cold is there yet. Your lips are burning. How is your hand?--Cold as
+ice,” she added.
+
+“Mad girl!” exclaimed Raphael.
+
+“Why that tear? Let me drink it.”
+
+“O Pauline, Pauline, you love me far too much!”
+
+“There is something very extraordinary going on in your mind, Raphael!
+Do not dissimulate. I shall very soon find out your secret. Give that to
+me,” she went on, taking the Magic Skin.
+
+“You are my executioner!” the young man exclaimed, glancing in horror at
+the talisman.
+
+“How changed your voice is!” cried Pauline, as she dropped the fatal
+symbol of destiny.
+
+“Do you love me?” he asked.
+
+“Do I love you? Is there any doubt?”
+
+“Then, leave me, go away!”
+
+The poor child went.
+
+“So!” cried Raphael, when he was alone. “In an enlightened age, when we
+have found out that diamonds are a crystallized form of charcoal, at
+a time when everything is made clear, when the police would hale a new
+Messiah before the magistrates, and submit his miracles to the Academie
+des Sciences--in an epoch when we no longer believe in anything but a
+notary’s signature--that I, forsooth, should believe in a sort of _Mene,
+Tekel, Upharsin_! No, by Heaven, I will not believe that the Supreme
+Being would take pleasure in torturing a harmless creature.--Let us see
+the learned about it.”
+
+Between the Halle des Vins, with its extensive assembly of barrels, and
+the Salpetriere, that extensive seminary of drunkenness, lies a small
+pond, which Raphael soon reached. All sorts of ducks of rare varieties
+were there disporting themselves; their colored markings shone in the
+sun like the glass in cathedral windows. Every kind of duck in the
+world was represented, quacking, dabbling, and moving about--a kind
+of parliament of ducks assembled against its will, but luckily without
+either charter or political principles, living in complete immunity from
+sportsmen, under the eyes of any naturalist that chanced to see them.
+
+“That is M. Lavrille,” said one of the keepers to Raphael, who had asked
+for that high priest of zoology.
+
+The Marquis saw a short man buried in profound reflections, caused by
+the appearance of a pair of ducks. The man of science was middle-aged;
+he had a pleasant face, made pleasanter still by a kindly expression,
+but an absorption in scientific ideas engrossed his whole person. His
+peruke was strangely turned up, by being constantly raised to scratch
+his head; so that a line of white hair was left plainly visible, a
+witness to an enthusiasm for investigation, which, like every other
+strong passion, so withdraws us from mundane considerations, that we
+lose all consciousness of the “I” within us. Raphael, the student and
+man of science, looked respectfully at the naturalist, who devoted his
+nights to enlarging the limits of human knowledge, and whose very errors
+reflected glory upon France; but a she-coxcomb would have laughed,
+no doubt, at the break of continuity between the breeches and striped
+waistcoat worn by the man of learning; the interval, moreover, was
+modestly filled by a shirt which had been considerably creased, for
+he stooped and raised himself by turns, as his zoological observations
+required.
+
+After the first interchange of civilities, Raphael thought it necessary
+to pay M. Lavrille a banal compliment upon his ducks.
+
+“Oh, we are well off for ducks,” the naturalist replied. “The genus,
+moreover, as you doubtless know, is the most prolific in the order
+of palmipeds. It begins with the swan and ends with the zin-zin duck,
+comprising in all one hundred and thirty-seven very distinct varieties,
+each having its own name, habits, country, and character, and every one
+no more like another than a white man is like a negro. Really, sir,
+when we dine off a duck, we have no notion for the most part of the vast
+extent----”
+
+He interrupted himself as he saw a small pretty duck come up to the
+surface of the pond.
+
+“There you see the cravatted swan, a poor native of Canada; he has come
+a very long way to show us his brown and gray plumage and his little
+black cravat! Look, he is preening himself. That one is the famous eider
+duck that provides the down, the eider-down under which our fine ladies
+sleep; isn’t it pretty? Who would not admire the little pinkish white
+breast and the green beak? I have just been a witness, sir,” he went on,
+“to a marriage that I had long despaired of bringing about; they have
+paired rather auspiciously, and I shall await the results very eagerly.
+This will be a hundred and thirty-eighth species, I flatter myself, to
+which, perhaps, my name will be given. That is the newly matched pair,”
+ he said, pointing out two of the ducks; “one of them is a laughing goose
+(_anas albifrons_), and the other the great whistling duck, Buffon’s
+_anas ruffina_. I have hesitated a long while between the whistling
+duck, the duck with white eyebrows, and the shoveler duck (_anas
+clypeata_). Stay, that is the shoveler--that fat, brownish black rascal,
+with the greenish neck and that coquettish iridescence on it. But the
+whistling duck was a crested one, sir, and you will understand that I
+deliberated no longer. We only lack the variegated black-capped duck
+now. These gentlemen here, unanimously claim that that variety of
+duck is only a repetition of the curve-beaked teal, but for my own
+part,”--and the gesture he made was worth seeing. It expressed at once
+the modesty and pride of a man of science; the pride full of obstinacy,
+and the modesty well tempered with assurance.
+
+“I don’t think it is,” he added. “You see, my dear sir, that we are not
+amusing ourselves here. I am engaged at this moment upon a monograph on
+the genus duck. But I am at your disposal.”
+
+While they went towards a rather pleasant house in the Rue du Buffon,
+Raphael submitted the skin to M. Lavrille’s inspection.
+
+“I know the product,” said the man of science, when he had turned his
+magnifying glass upon the talisman. “It used to be used for covering
+boxes. The shagreen is very old. They prefer to use skate’s skin
+nowadays for making sheaths. This, as you are doubtless aware, is the
+hide of the _raja sephen_, a Red Sea fish.”
+
+“But this, sir, since you are so exceedingly good----”
+
+“This,” the man of science interrupted, as he resumed, “this is quite
+another thing; between these two shagreens, sir, there is a difference
+just as wide as between sea and land, or fish and flesh. The fish’s skin
+is harder, however, than the skin of the land animal. This,” he said, as
+he indicated the talisman, “is, as you doubtless know, one of the most
+curious of zoological products.”
+
+“But to proceed----” said Raphael.
+
+“This,” replied the man of science, as he flung himself down into his
+armchair, “is an ass’ skin, sir.”
+
+“Yes, I know,” said the young man.
+
+“A very rare variety of ass found in Persia,” the naturalist continued,
+“the onager of the ancients, equus asinus, the _koulan_ of the Tartars;
+Pallas went out there to observe it, and has made it known to science,
+for as a matter of fact the animal for a long time was believed to be
+mythical. It is mentioned, as you know, in Holy Scripture; Moses forbade
+that it should be coupled with its own species, and the onager is yet
+more famous for the prostitutions of which it was the object, and which
+are often mentioned by the prophets of the Bible. Pallas, as you know
+doubtless, states in his _Act. Petrop._ tome II., that these bizarre
+excesses are still devoutly believed in among the Persians and the
+Nogais as a sovereign remedy for lumbago and sciatic gout. We poor
+Parisians scarcely believe that. The Museum has no example of the
+onager.
+
+“What a magnificent animal!” he continued. “It is full of mystery;
+its eyes are provided with a sort of burnished covering, to which the
+Orientals attribute the powers of fascination; it has a glossier and
+finer coat than our handsomest horses possess, striped with more or less
+tawny bands, very much like the zebra’s hide. There is something pliant
+and silky about its hair, which is sleek to the touch. Its powers of
+sight vie in precision and accuracy with those of man; it is rather
+larger than our largest domestic donkeys, and is possessed of
+extraordinary courage. If it is surprised by any chance, it defends
+itself against the most dangerous wild beasts with remarkable success;
+the rapidity of its movements can only be compared with the flight of
+birds; an onager, sir, would run the best Arab or Persian horses to
+death. According to the father of the conscientious Doctor Niebuhr,
+whose recent loss we are deploring, as you doubtless know, the ordinary
+average pace of one of these wonderful creatures would be seven thousand
+geometric feet per hour. Our own degenerate race of donkeys can give no
+idea of the ass in his pride and independence. He is active and spirited
+in his demeanor; he is cunning and sagacious; there is grace about the
+outlines of his head; every movement is full of attractive charm. In
+the East he is the king of beasts. Turkish and Persian superstition even
+credits him with a mysterious origin; and when stories of the prowess
+attributed to him are told in Thibet or in Tartary, the speakers mingle
+Solomon’s name with that of this noble animal. A tame onager, in short,
+is worth an enormous amount; it is well-nigh impossible to catch them
+among the mountains, where they leap like roebucks, and seem as if they
+could fly like birds. Our myth of the winged horse, our Pegasus, had its
+origin doubtless in these countries, where the shepherds could see the
+onager springing from one rock to another. In Persia they breed asses
+for the saddle, a cross between a tamed onager and a she-ass, and they
+paint them red, following immemorial tradition. Perhaps it was this
+custom that gave rise to our own proverb, ‘Surely as a red donkey.’ At
+some period when natural history was much neglected in France, I think a
+traveler must have brought over one of these strange beasts that endures
+servitude with such impatience. Hence the adage. The skin that you
+have laid before me is the skin of an onager. Opinions differ as to the
+origin of the name. Some claim that _Chagri_ is a Turkish word; others
+insist that _Chagri_ must be the name of the place where this animal
+product underwent the chemical process of preparation so clearly
+described by Pallas, to which the peculiar graining that we admire is
+due; Martellens has written to me saying that _Chaagri_ is a river----”
+
+“I thank you, sir, for the information that you have given me; it would
+furnish an admirable footnote for some Dom Calmet or other, if such
+erudite hermits yet exist; but I have had the honor of pointing out to
+you that this scrap was in the first instance quite as large as that
+map,” said Raphael, indicating an open atlas to Lavrille; “but it has
+shrunk visibly in three months’ time----”
+
+“Quite so,” said the man of science. “I understand. The remains of any
+substance primarily organic are naturally subject to a process of
+decay. It is quite easy to understand, and its progress depends upon
+atmospherical conditions. Even metals contract and expand appreciably,
+for engineers have remarked somewhat considerable interstices between
+great blocks of stone originally clamped together with iron bars. The
+field of science is boundless, but human life is very short, so that we
+do not claim to be acquainted with all the phenomena of nature.”
+
+“Pardon the question that I am about to ask you, sir,” Raphael began,
+half embarrassed, “but are you quite sure that this piece of skin is
+subject to the ordinary laws of zoology, and that it can be stretched?”
+
+“Certainly----oh, bother!----” muttered M. Lavrille, trying to stretch
+the talisman. “But if you, sir, will go to see Planchette,” he added,
+“the celebrated professor of mechanics, he will certainly discover some
+method of acting upon this skin, of softening and expanding it.”
+
+“Ah, sir, you are the preserver of my life,” and Raphael took leave of
+the learned naturalist and hurried off to Planchette, leaving the worthy
+Lavrille in his study, all among the bottles and dried plants that
+filled it up.
+
+Quite unconsciously Raphael brought away with him from this visit,
+all of science that man can grasp, a terminology to wit. Lavrille, the
+worthy man, was very much like Sancho Panza giving to Don Quixote the
+history of the goats; he was entertaining himself by making out a list
+of animals and ticking them off. Even now that his life was nearing its
+end, he was scarcely acquainted with a mere fraction of the countless
+numbers of the great tribes that God has scattered, for some unknown
+end, throughout the ocean of worlds.
+
+Raphael was well pleased. “I shall keep my ass well in hand,” cried he.
+Sterne had said before his day, “Let us take care of our ass, if we wish
+to live to old age.” But it is such a fantastic brute!
+
+Planchette was a tall, thin man, a poet of a surety, lost in one
+continual thought, and always employed in gazing into the bottomless
+abyss of Motion. Commonplace minds accuse these lofty intellects of
+madness; they form a misinterpreted race apart that lives in a wonderful
+carelessness of luxuries or other people’s notions. They will spend
+whole days at a stretch, smoking a cigar that has gone out, and enter
+a drawing-room with the buttons on their garments not in every case
+formally wedded to the button-holes. Some day or other, after a long
+time spent in measuring space, or in accumulating Xs under Aa-Gg, they
+succeed in analyzing some natural law, and resolve it into its elemental
+principles, and all on a sudden the crowd gapes at a new machine; or it
+is a handcart perhaps that overwhelms us with astonishment by the apt
+simplicity of its construction. The modest man of science smiles at
+his admirers, and remarks, “What is that invention of mine? Nothing
+whatever. Man cannot create a force; he can but direct it; and science
+consists in learning from nature.”
+
+The mechanician was standing bolt upright, planted on both feet, like
+some victim dropped straight from the gibbet, when Raphael broke in upon
+him. He was intently watching an agate ball that rolled over a sun-dial,
+and awaited its final settlement. The worthy man had received neither
+pension nor decoration; he had not known how to make the right use of
+his ability for calculation. He was happy in his life spent on the watch
+for a discovery; he had no thought either of reputation, of the outer
+world, nor even of himself, and led the life of science for the sake of
+science.
+
+“It is inexplicable,” he exclaimed. “Ah, your servant, sir,” he went on,
+becoming aware of Raphael’s existence. “How is your mother? You must go
+and see my wife.”
+
+“And I also could have lived thus,” thought Raphael, as he recalled the
+learned man from his meditations by asking of him how to produce any
+effect on the talisman, which he placed before him.
+
+“Although my credulity must amuse you, sir,” so the Marquis ended, “I
+will conceal nothing from you. That skin seems to me to be endowed with
+an insuperable power of resistance.”
+
+“People of fashion, sir, always treat science rather superciliously,”
+ said Planchette. “They all talk to us pretty much as the _incroyable_
+did when he brought some ladies to see Lalande just after an eclipse,
+and remarked, ‘Be so good as to begin it over again!’ What effect do you
+want to produce? The object of the science of mechanics is either the
+application or the neutralization of the laws of motion. As for motion
+pure and simple, I tell you humbly, that we cannot possibly define it.
+That disposed of, unvarying phenomena have been observed which accompany
+the actions of solids and fluids. If we set up the conditions by
+which these phenomena are brought to pass, we can transport bodies or
+communicate locomotive power to them at a predetermined rate of speed.
+We can project them, divide them up in a few or an infinite number of
+pieces, accordingly as we break them or grind them to powder; we can
+twist bodies or make them rotate, modify, compress, expand, or extend
+them. The whole science, sir, rests upon a single fact.
+
+“You see this ball,” he went on; “here it lies upon this slab. Now,
+it is over there. What name shall we give to what has taken place,
+so natural from a physical point of view, so amazing from a moral?
+Movement, locomotion, changing of place? What prodigious vanity lurks
+underneath the words. Does a name solve the difficulty? Yet it is the
+whole of our science for all that. Our machines either make direct use
+of this agency, this fact, or they convert it. This trifling phenomenon,
+applied to large masses, would send Paris flying. We can increase speed
+by an expenditure of force, and augment the force by an increase of
+speed. But what are speed and force? Our science is as powerless to tell
+us that as to create motion. Any movement whatever is an immense power,
+and man does not create power of any kind. Everything is movement,
+thought itself is a movement, upon movement nature is based. Death is a
+movement whose limitations are little known. If God is eternal, be
+sure that He moves perpetually; perhaps God is movement. That is
+why movement, like God is inexplicable, unfathomable, unlimited,
+incomprehensible, intangible. Who has ever touched, comprehended, or
+measured movement? We feel its effects without seeing it; we can even
+deny them as we can deny the existence of a God. Where is it? Where
+is it not? Whence comes it? What is its source? What is its end? It
+surrounds us, it intrudes upon us, and yet escapes us. It is evident as
+a fact, obscure as an abstraction; it is at once effect and cause. It
+requires space, even as we, and what is space? Movement alone recalls
+it to us; without movement, space is but an empty meaningless word.
+Like space, like creation, like the infinite, movement is an insoluble
+problem which confounds human reason; man will never conceive it,
+whatever else he may be permitted to conceive.
+
+“Between each point in space occupied in succession by that ball,”
+ continued the man of science, “there is an abyss confronting human
+reason, an abyss into which Pascal fell. In order to produce any
+effect upon an unknown substance, we ought first of all to study that
+substance; to know whether, in accordance with its nature, it will be
+broken by the force of a blow, or whether it will withstand it; if it
+breaks in pieces, and you have no wish to split it up, we shall not
+achieve the end proposed. If you want to compress it, a uniform impulse
+must be communicated to all the particles of the substance, so as to
+diminish the interval that separates them in an equal degree. If you
+wish to expand it, we should try to bring a uniform eccentric force to
+bear on every molecule; for unless we conform accurately to this law,
+we shall have breaches in continuity. The modes of motion, sir, are
+infinite, and no limit exists to combinations of movement. Upon what
+effect have you determined?”
+
+“I want any kind of pressure that is strong enough to expand the skin
+indefinitely,” began Raphael, quite of out patience.
+
+“Substance is finite,” the mathematician put in, “and therefore will not
+admit of indefinite expansion, but pressure will necessarily increase
+the extent of surface at the expense of the thickness, which will be
+diminished until the point is reached when the material gives out----”
+
+“Bring about that result, sir,” Raphael cried, “and you will have earned
+millions.”
+
+“Then I should rob you of your money,” replied the other, phlegmatic as
+a Dutchman. “I am going to show you, in a word or two, that a machine
+can be made that is fit to crush Providence itself in pieces like a fly.
+It would reduce a man to the conditions of a piece of waste paper; a
+man--boots and spurs, hat and cravat, trinkets and gold, and all----”
+
+“What a fearful machine!”
+
+“Instead of flinging their brats into the water, the Chinese ought
+to make them useful in this way,” the man of science went on, without
+reflecting on the regard man has for his progeny.
+
+Quite absorbed by his idea, Planchette took an empty flower-pot, with a
+hole in the bottom, and put it on the surface of the dial, then he
+went to look for a little clay in a corner of the garden. Raphael stood
+spellbound, like a child to whom his nurse is telling some wonderful
+story. Planchette put the clay down upon the slab, drew a pruning-knife
+from his pocket, cut two branches from an elder tree, and began to
+clean them of pith by blowing through them, as if Raphael had not been
+present.
+
+“There are the rudiments of the apparatus,” he said. Then he connected
+one of the wooden pipes with the bottom of the flower-pot by way of
+a clay joint, in such a way that the mouth of the elder stem was just
+under the hole of the flower-pot; you might have compared it to a big
+tobacco-pipe. He spread a bed of clay over the surface of the slab, in a
+shovel-shaped mass, set down the flower-pot at the wider end of it, and
+laid the pipe of the elder stem along the portion which represented the
+handle of the shovel. Next he put a lump of clay at the end of the elder
+stem and therein planted the other pipe, in an upright position, forming
+a second elbow which connected it with the first horizontal pipe in such
+a manner that the air, or any given fluid in circulation, could flow
+through this improvised piece of mechanism from the mouth of the
+vertical tube, along the intermediate passages, and so into the large
+empty flower-pot.
+
+“This apparatus, sir,” he said to Raphael, with all the gravity of an
+academician pronouncing his initiatory discourse, “is one of the great
+Pascal’s grandest claims upon our admiration.”
+
+“I don’t understand.”
+
+The man of science smiled. He went up to a fruit-tree and took down a
+little phial in which the druggist had sent him some liquid for catching
+ants; he broke off the bottom and made a funnel of the top, carefully
+fitting it to the mouth of the vertical hollowed stem that he had set in
+the clay, and at the opposite end to the great reservoir, represented
+by the flower-pot. Next, by means of a watering-pot, he poured in
+sufficient water to rise to the same level in the large vessel and in
+the tiny circular funnel at the end of the elder stem.
+
+Raphael was thinking of his piece of skin.
+
+“Water is considered to-day, sir, to be an incompressible body,” said
+the mechanician; “never lose sight of that fundamental principle; still
+it can be compressed, though only so very slightly that we should regard
+its faculty for contracting as a zero. You see the amount of surface
+presented by the water at the brim of the flower-pot?”
+
+“Yes, sir.”
+
+“Very good; now suppose that that surface is a thousand times larger
+than the orifice of the elder stem through which I poured the liquid.
+Here, I am taking the funnel away----”
+
+“Granted.”
+
+“Well, then, if by any method whatever I increase the volume of that
+quantity of water by pouring in yet more through the mouth of the little
+tube; the water thus compelled to flow downwards would rise in the
+reservoir, represented by the flower-pot, until it reached the same
+level at either end.”
+
+“That is quite clear,” cried Raphael.
+
+“But there is this difference,” the other went on. “Suppose that the
+thin column of water poured into the little vertical tube there exerts
+a force equal, say, to a pound weight, for instance, its action will
+be punctually communicated to the great body of the liquid, and will be
+transmitted to every part of the surface represented by the water in the
+flower-pot so that at the surface there will be a thousand columns of
+water, every one pressing upwards as if they were impelled by a force
+equal to that which compels the liquid to descend in the vertical tube;
+and of necessity they reproduce here,” said Planchette, indicating to
+Raphael the top of the flower-pot, “the force introduced over there, a
+thousand-fold,” and the man of science pointed out to the marquis the
+upright wooden pipe set in the clay.
+
+“That is quite simple,” said Raphael.
+
+Planchette smiled again.
+
+“In other words,” he went on, with the mathematician’s natural stubborn
+propensity for logic, “in order to resist the force of the incoming
+water, it would be necessary to exert, upon every part of the large
+surface, a force equal to that brought into action in the vertical
+column, but with this difference--if the column of liquid is a foot in
+height, the thousand little columns of the wide surface will only have a
+very slight elevating power.
+
+“Now,” said Planchette, as he gave a fillip to his bits of stick,
+“let us replace this funny little apparatus by steel tubes of suitable
+strength and dimensions; and if you cover the liquid surface of the
+reservoir with a strong sliding plate of metal, and if to this metal
+plate you oppose another, solid enough and strong enough to resist any
+test; if, furthermore, you give me the power of continually adding water
+to the volume of liquid contents by means of the little vertical tube,
+the object fixed between the two solid metal plates must of necessity
+yield to the tremendous crushing force which indefinitely compresses it.
+The method of continually pouring in water through a little tube, like
+the manner of communicating force through the volume of the liquid to a
+small metal plate, is an absurdly primitive mechanical device. A brace
+of pistons and a few valves would do it all. Do you perceive, my dear
+sir,” he said taking Valentin by the arm, “there is scarcely a substance
+in existence that would not be compelled to dilate when fixed in between
+these two indefinitely resisting surfaces?”
+
+“What! the author of the _Lettres provinciales_ invented it?” Raphael
+exclaimed.
+
+“He and no other, sir. The science of mechanics knows no simpler nor
+more beautiful contrivance. The opposite principle, the capacity of
+expansion possessed by water, has brought the steam-engine into
+being. But water will only expand up to a certain point, while its
+incompressibility, being a force in a manner negative, is, of necessity,
+infinite.”
+
+“If this skin is expanded,” said Raphael, “I promise you to erect a
+colossal statue to Blaise Pascal; to found a prize of a hundred thousand
+francs to be offered every ten years for the solution of the grandest
+problem of mechanical science effected during the interval; to find
+dowries for all your cousins and second cousins, and finally to build an
+asylum on purpose for impoverished or insane mathematicians.”
+
+“That would be exceedingly useful,” Planchette replied. “We will go to
+Spieghalter to-morrow, sir,” he continued, with the serenity of a man
+living on a plane wholly intellectual. “That distinguished mechanic has
+just completed, after my own designs, an improved mechanical arrangement
+by which a child could get a thousand trusses of hay inside his cap.”
+
+“Then good-bye till to-morrow.”
+
+“Till to-morrow, sir.”
+
+“Talk of mechanics!” cried Raphael; “isn’t it the greatest of the
+sciences? The other fellow with his onagers, classifications, ducks, and
+species, and his phials full of bottled monstrosities, is at best only
+fit for a billiard-marker in a saloon.”
+
+The next morning Raphael went off in great spirits to find Planchette,
+and together they set out for the Rue de la Sante--auspicious
+appellation! Arrived at Spieghalter’s, the young man found himself in a
+vast foundry; his eyes lighted upon a multitude of glowing and roaring
+furnaces. There was a storm of sparks, a deluge of nails, an ocean
+of pistons, vices, levers, valves, girders, files, and nuts; a sea of
+melted metal, baulks of timber and bar-steel. Iron filings filled your
+throat. There was iron in the atmosphere; the men were covered with it;
+everything reeked of iron. The iron seemed to be a living organism; it
+became a fluid, moved, and seemed to shape itself intelligently after
+every fashion, to obey the worker’s every caprice. Through the uproar
+made by the bellows, the crescendo of the falling hammers, and the
+shrill sounds of the lathes that drew groans from the steel, Raphael
+passed into a large, clean, and airy place where he was able to inspect
+at his leisure the great press that Planchette had told him about. He
+admired the cast-iron beams, as one might call them, and the twin bars
+of steel coupled together with indestructible bolts.
+
+“If you were to give seven rapid turns to that crank,” said Spieghalter,
+pointing out a beam of polished steel, “you would make a steel bar spurt
+out in thousands of jets, that would get into your legs like needles.”
+
+“The deuce!” exclaimed Raphael.
+
+Planchette himself slipped the piece of skin between the metal plates
+of the all-powerful press; and, brimful of the certainty of a scientific
+conviction, he worked the crank energetically.
+
+“Lie flat, all of you; we are dead men!” thundered Spieghalter, as he
+himself fell prone on the floor.
+
+A hideous shrieking sound rang through the workshops. The water in
+the machine had broken the chamber, and now spouted out in a jet of
+incalculable force; luckily it went in the direction of an old furnace,
+which was overthrown, enveloped and carried away by a waterspout.
+
+“Ha!” remarked Planchette serenely, “the piece of skin is as safe and
+sound as my eye. There was a flaw in your reservoir somewhere, or a
+crevice in the large tube----”
+
+“No, no; I know my reservoir. The devil is in your contrivance, sir; you
+can take it away,” and the German pounced upon a smith’s hammer, flung
+the skin down on an anvil, and, with all the strength that rage gives,
+dealt the talisman the most formidable blow that had ever resounded
+through his workshops.
+
+“There is not so much as a mark on it!” said Planchette, stroking the
+perverse bit of skin.
+
+The workmen hurried in. The foreman took the skin and buried it in the
+glowing coal of a forge, while, in a semi-circle round the fire, they
+all awaited the action of a huge pair of bellows. Raphael, Spieghalter,
+and Professor Planchette stood in the midst of the grimy expectant
+crowd. Raphael, looking round on faces dusted over with iron filings,
+white eyes, greasy blackened clothing, and hairy chests, could have
+fancied himself transported into the wild nocturnal world of German
+ballad poetry. After the skin had been in the fire for ten minutes, the
+foreman pulled it out with a pair of pincers.
+
+“Hand it over to me,” said Raphael.
+
+The foreman held it out by way of a joke. The Marquis readily handled
+it; it was cool and flexible between his fingers. An exclamation of
+alarm went up; the workmen fled in terror. Valentin was left alone with
+Planchette in the empty workshop.
+
+“There is certainly something infernal in the thing!” cried Raphael,
+in desperation. “Is no human power able to give me one more day of
+existence?”
+
+“I made a mistake, sir,” said the mathematician, with a penitent
+expression; “we ought to have subjected that peculiar skin to the action
+of a rolling machine. Where could my eyes have been when I suggested
+compression!”
+
+“It was I that asked for it,” Raphael answered.
+
+The mathematician heaved a sigh of relief, like a culprit acquitted by a
+dozen jurors. Still, the strange problem afforded by the skin interested
+him; he meditated a moment, and then remarked:
+
+“This unknown material ought to be treated chemically by re-agents. Let
+us call on Japhet--perhaps the chemist may have better luck than the
+mechanic.”
+
+Valentin urged his horse into a rapid trot, hoping to find the chemist,
+the celebrated Japhet, in his laboratory.
+
+“Well, old friend,” Planchette began, seeing Japhet in his armchair,
+examining a precipitate; “how goes chemistry?”
+
+“Gone to sleep. Nothing new at all. The Academie, however, has
+recognized the existence of salicine, but salicine, asparagine,
+vauqueline, and digitaline are not really discoveries----”
+
+“Since you cannot invent substances,” said Raphael, “you are obliged to
+fall back on inventing names.”
+
+“Most emphatically true, young man.”
+
+“Here,” said Planchette, addressing the chemist, “try to analyze this
+composition; if you can extract any element whatever from it, I christen
+it diaboline beforehand, for we have just smashed a hydraulic press in
+trying to compress it.”
+
+“Let’s see! let’s have a look at it!” cried the delighted chemist; “it
+may, perhaps, be a fresh element.”
+
+“It is simply a piece of the skin of an ass, sir,” said Raphael.
+
+“Sir!” said the illustrious chemist sternly.
+
+“I am not joking,” the Marquis answered, laying the piece of skin before
+him.
+
+Baron Japhet applied the nervous fibres of his tongue to the skin; he
+had skill in thus detecting salts, acids, alkalis, and gases. After
+several experiments, he remarked:
+
+“No taste whatever! Come, we will give it a little fluoric acid to
+drink.”
+
+Subjected to the influence of this ready solvent of animal tissue, the
+skin underwent no change whatsoever.
+
+“It is not shagreen at all!” the chemist cried. “We will treat this
+unknown mystery as a mineral, and try its mettle by dropping it in a
+crucible where I have at this moment some red potash.”
+
+Japhet went out, and returned almost immediately.
+
+“Allow me to cut away a bit of this strange substance, sir,” he said to
+Raphael; “it is so extraordinary----”
+
+“A bit!” exclaimed Raphael; “not so much as a hair’s-breadth. You may
+try, though,” he added, half banteringly, half sadly.
+
+The chemist broke a razor in his desire to cut the skin; he tried to
+break it by a powerful electric shock; next he submitted it to the
+influence of a galvanic battery; but all the thunderbolts his science
+wotted of fell harmless on the dreadful talisman.
+
+It was seven o’clock in the evening. Planchette, Japhet, and Raphael,
+unaware of the flight of time, were awaiting the outcome of a final
+experiment. The Magic Skin emerged triumphant from a formidable
+encounter in which it had been engaged with a considerable quantity of
+chloride of nitrogen.
+
+“It is all over with me,” Raphael wailed. “It is the finger of God! I
+shall die!----” and he left the two amazed scientific men.
+
+“We must be very careful not to talk about this affair at the Academie;
+our colleagues there would laugh at us,” Planchette remarked to the
+chemist, after a long pause, in which they looked at each other without
+daring to communicate their thoughts. The learned pair looked like
+two Christians who had issued from their tombs to find no God in the
+heavens. Science had been powerless; acids, so much clear water; red
+potash had been discredited; the galvanic battery and electric shock had
+been a couple of playthings.
+
+“A hydraulic press broken like a biscuit!” commented Planchette.
+
+“I believe in the devil,” said the Baron Japhet, after a moment’s
+silence.
+
+“And I in God,” replied Planchette.
+
+Each spoke in character. The universe for a mechanician is a machine
+that requires an operator; for chemistry--that fiendish employment of
+decomposing all things--the world is a gas endowed with the power of
+movement.
+
+“We cannot deny the fact,” the chemist replied.
+
+“Pshaw! those gentlemen the doctrinaires have invented a nebulous
+aphorism for our consolation--Stupid as a fact.”
+
+“Your aphorism,” said the chemist, “seems to me as a fact very stupid.”
+
+They began to laugh, and went off to dine like folk for whom a miracle
+is nothing more than a phenomenon.
+
+Valentin reached his own house shivering with rage and consumed with
+anger. He had no more faith in anything. Conflicting thoughts shifted
+and surged to and fro in his brain, as is the case with every man
+brought face to face with an inconceivable fact. He had readily
+believed in some hidden flaw in Spieghalter’s apparatus; he had not been
+surprised by the incompetence and failure of science and of fire;
+but the flexibility of the skin as he handled it, taken with its
+stubbornness when all means of destruction that man possesses had
+been brought to bear upon it in vain--these things terrified him. The
+incontrovertible fact made him dizzy.
+
+“I am mad,” he muttered. “I have had no food since the morning, and yet
+I am neither hungry nor thirsty, and there is a fire in my breast that
+burns me.”
+
+He put back the skin in the frame where it had been enclosed but lately,
+drew a line in red ink about the actual configuration of the talisman,
+and seated himself in his armchair.
+
+“Eight o’clock already!” he exclaimed. “To-day has gone like a dream.”
+
+He leaned his elbow on the arm of the chair, propped his head with
+his left hand, and so remained, lost in secret dark reflections and
+consuming thoughts that men condemned to die bear away with them.
+
+“O Pauline!” he cried. “Poor child! there are gulfs that love can never
+traverse, despite the strength of his wings.”
+
+Just then he very distinctly heard a smothered sigh, and knew by one
+of the most tender privileges of passionate love that it was Pauline’s
+breathing.
+
+“That is my death warrant,” he said to himself. “If she were there, I
+should wish to die in her arms.”
+
+A burst of gleeful and hearty laughter made him turn his face towards
+the bed; he saw Pauline’s face through the transparent curtains, smiling
+like a child for gladness over a successful piece of mischief. Her
+pretty hair fell over her shoulders in countless curls; she looked like
+a Bengal rose upon a pile of white roses.
+
+“I cajoled Jonathan,” said she. “Doesn’t the bed belong to me, to me who
+am your wife? Don’t scold me, darling; I only wanted to surprise you, to
+sleep beside you. Forgive me for my freak.”
+
+She sprang out of bed like a kitten, showed herself gleaming in her lawn
+raiment, and sat down on Raphael’s knee.
+
+“Love, what gulf were you talking about?” she said, with an anxious
+expression apparent upon her face.
+
+“Death.”
+
+“You hurt me,” she answered. “There are some thoughts upon which we,
+poor women that we are, cannot dwell; they are death to us. Is it
+strength of love in us, or lack of courage? I cannot tell. Death does
+not frighten me,” she began again, laughingly. “To die with you, both
+together, to-morrow morning, in one last embrace, would be joy. It seems
+to me that even then I should have lived more than a hundred years.
+What does the number of days matter if we have spent a whole lifetime of
+peace and love in one night, in one hour?”
+
+“You are right; Heaven is speaking through that pretty mouth of yours.
+Grant that I may kiss you, and let us die,” said Raphael.
+
+“Then let us die,” she said, laughing.
+
+Towards nine o’clock in the morning the daylight streamed through the
+chinks of the window shutters. Obscured somewhat by the muslin curtains,
+it yet sufficed to show clearly the rich colors of the carpet, the silks
+and furniture of the room, where the two lovers were lying asleep. The
+gilding sparkled here and there. A ray of sunshine fell and faded upon
+the soft down quilt that the freaks of live had thrown to the ground.
+The outlines of Pauline’s dress, hanging from a cheval glass, appeared
+like a shadowy ghost. Her dainty shoes had been left at a distance from
+the bed. A nightingale came to perch upon the sill; its trills repeated
+over again, and the sounds of its wings suddenly shaken out for flight,
+awoke Raphael.
+
+“For me to die,” he said, following out a thought begun in his dream,
+“my organization, the mechanism of flesh and bone, that is quickened
+by the will in me, and makes of me an individual MAN, must display some
+perceptible disease. Doctors ought to understand the symptoms of any
+attack on vitality, and could tell me whether I am sick or sound.”
+
+He gazed at his sleeping wife. She had stretched her head out to him,
+expressing in this way even while she slept the anxious tenderness of
+love. Pauline seemed to look at him as she lay with her face turned
+towards him in an attitude as full of grace as a young child’s, with her
+pretty, half-opened mouth held out towards him, as she drew her light,
+even breath. Her little pearly teeth seemed to heighten the redness of
+the fresh lips with the smile hovering over them. The red glow in her
+complexion was brighter, and its whiteness was, so to speak, whiter
+still just then than in the most impassioned moments of the waking day.
+In her unconstrained grace, as she lay, so full of believing trust,
+the adorable attractions of childhood were added to the enchantments of
+love.
+
+Even the most unaffected women still obey certain social conventions,
+which restrain the free expansion of the soul within them during their
+waking hours; but slumber seems to give them back the spontaneity of
+life which makes infancy lovely. Pauline blushed for nothing; she was
+like one of those beloved and heavenly beings, in whom reason has not
+yet put motives into their actions and mystery into their glances.
+Her profile stood out in sharp relief against the fine cambric of the
+pillows; there was a certain sprightliness about her loose hair in
+confusion, mingled with the deep lace ruffles; but she was sleeping in
+happiness, her long lashes were tightly pressed against her cheeks, as
+if to secure her eyes from too strong a light, or to aid an effort of
+her soul to recollect and to hold fast a bliss that had been perfect but
+fleeting. Her tiny pink and white ear, framed by a lock of her hair and
+outlined by a wrapping of Mechlin lace, would have made an artist, a
+painter, an old man, wildly in love, and would perhaps have restored a
+madman to his senses.
+
+Is it not an ineffable bliss to behold the woman that you love,
+sleeping, smiling in a peaceful dream beneath your protection, loving
+you even in dreams, even at the point where the individual seems to
+cease to exist, offering to you yet the mute lips that speak to you in
+slumber of the latest kiss? Is it not indescribable happiness to see
+a trusting woman, half-clad, but wrapped round in her love as by a
+cloak--modesty in the midst of dishevelment--to see admiringly her
+scattered clothing, the silken stocking hastily put off to please you
+last evening, the unclasped girdle that implies a boundless faith in
+you. A whole romance lies there in that girdle; the woman that it
+used to protect exists no longer; she is yours, she has become _you_;
+henceforward any betrayal of her is a blow dealt at yourself.
+
+In this softened mood Raphael’s eyes wandered over the room, now filled
+with memories and love, and where the very daylight seemed to take
+delightful hues. Then he turned his gaze at last upon the outlines of
+the woman’s form, upon youth and purity, and love that even now had no
+thought that was not for him alone, above all things, and longed to live
+for ever. As his eyes fell upon Pauline, her own opened at once as if a
+ray of sunlight had lighted on them.
+
+“Good-morning,” she said, smiling. “How handsome you are, bad man!”
+
+The grace of love and youth, of silence and dawn, shone in their faces,
+making a divine picture, with the fleeting spell over it all that
+belongs only to the earliest days of passion, just as simplicity and
+artlessness are the peculiar possession of childhood. Alas! love’s
+springtide joys, like our own youthful laughter, must even take flight,
+and live for us no longer save in memory; either for our despair, or
+to shed some soothing fragrance over us, according to the bent of our
+inmost thoughts.
+
+“What made me wake you?” said Raphael. “It was so great a pleasure to
+watch you sleeping that it brought tears to my eyes.”
+
+“And to mine, too,” she answered. “I cried in the night while I watched
+you sleeping, but not with happiness. Raphael, dear, pray listen to me.
+Your breathing is labored while you sleep, and something rattles in
+your chest that frightens me. You have a little dry cough when you are
+asleep, exactly like my father’s, who is dying of phthisis. In those
+sounds from your lungs I recognized some of the peculiar symptoms of
+that complaint. Then you are feverish; I know you are; your hand was
+moist and burning----Darling, you are young,” she added with a shudder,
+“and you could still get over it if unfortunately----But, no,” she cried
+cheerfully, “there is no ‘unfortunately,’ the disease is contagious, so
+the doctors say.”
+
+She flung both arms about Raphael, drawing in his breath through one of
+those kisses in which the soul reaches its end.
+
+“I do not wish to live to old age,” she said. “Let us both die young,
+and go to heaven while flowers fill our hands.”
+
+“We always make such designs as those when we are well and strong,”
+ Raphael replied, burying his hands in Pauline’s hair. But even then a
+horrible fit of coughing came on, one of those deep ominous coughs
+that seem to come from the depths of the tomb, a cough that leaves the
+sufferer ghastly pale, trembling, and perspiring; with aching sides and
+quivering nerves, with a feeling of weariness pervading the very marrow
+of the spine, and unspeakable languor in every vein. Raphael slowly laid
+himself down, pale, exhausted, and overcome, like a man who has spent
+all the strength in him over one final effort. Pauline’s eyes, grown
+large with terror, were fixed upon him; she lay quite motionless, pale,
+and silent.
+
+“Let us commit no more follies, my angel,” she said, trying not to let
+Raphael see the dreadful forebodings that disturbed her. She covered her
+face with her hands, for she saw Death before her--the hideous skeleton.
+Raphael’s face had grown as pale and livid as any skull unearthed from
+a churchyard to assist the studies of some scientific man. Pauline
+remembered the exclamation that had escaped from Valentin the previous
+evening, and to herself she said:
+
+“Yes, there are gulfs that love can never cross, and therein love must
+bury itself.”
+
+On a March morning, some days after this wretched scene, Raphael found
+himself seated in an armchair, placed in the window in the full light
+of day. Four doctors stood round him, each in turn trying his pulse,
+feeling him over, and questioning him with apparent interest. The
+invalid sought to guess their thoughts, putting a construction on every
+movement they made, and on the slightest contractions of their brows.
+His last hope lay in this consultation. This court of appeal was about
+to pronounce its decision--life or death.
+
+Valentin had summoned the oracles of modern medicine, so that he might
+have the last word of science. Thanks to his wealth and title, there
+stood before him three embodied theories; human knowledge fluctuated
+round the three points. Three of the doctors brought among them the
+complete circle of medical philosophy; they represented the points of
+conflict round which the battle raged, between Spiritualism, Analysis,
+and goodness knows what in the way of mocking eclecticism.
+
+The fourth doctor was Horace Bianchon, a man of science with a future
+before him, the most distinguished man of the new school in medicine, a
+discreet and unassuming representative of a studious generation that
+is preparing to receive the inheritance of fifty years of experience
+treasured up by the Ecole de Paris, a generation that perhaps will erect
+the monument for the building of which the centuries behind us have
+collected the different materials. As a personal friend of the Marquis
+and of Rastignac, he had been in attendance on the former for some
+days past, and was helping him to answer the inquiries of the three
+professors, occasionally insisting somewhat upon those symptoms which,
+in his opinion, pointed to pulmonary disease.
+
+“You have been living at a great pace, leading a dissipated life, no
+doubt, and you have devoted yourself largely to intellectual work?”
+ queried one of the three celebrated authorities, addressing Raphael. He
+was a square-headed man, with a large frame and energetic organization,
+which seemed to mark him out as superior to his two rivals.
+
+“I made up my mind to kill myself with debauchery, after spending three
+years over an extensive work, with which perhaps you may some day occupy
+yourselves,” Raphael replied.
+
+The great doctor shook his head, and so displayed his satisfaction. “I
+was sure of it,” he seemed to say to himself. He was the illustrious
+Brisset, the successor of Cabanis and Bichat, head of the Organic
+School, a doctor popular with believers in material and positive
+science, who see in man a complete individual, subject solely to the
+laws of his own particular organization; and who consider that his
+normal condition and abnormal states of disease can both be traced to
+obvious causes.
+
+After this reply, Brisset looked, without speaking, at a middle-sized
+person, whose darkly flushed countenance and glowing eyes seemed to
+belong to some antique satyr; and who, leaning his back against the
+corner of the embrasure, was studying Raphael, without saying a word.
+Doctor Cameristus, a man of creeds and enthusiasms, the head of the
+“Vitalists,” a romantic champion of the esoteric doctrines of Van
+Helmont, discerned a lofty informing principle in human life, a
+mysterious and inexplicable phenomenon which mocks at the scalpel,
+deceives the surgeon, eludes the drugs of the pharmacopoeia, the
+formulae of algebra, the demonstrations of anatomy, and derides all
+our efforts; a sort of invisible, intangible flame, which, obeying some
+divinely appointed law, will often linger on in a body in our opinion
+devoted to death, while it takes flight from an organization well fitted
+for prolonged existence.
+
+A bitter smile hovered upon the lips of the third doctor, Maugredie, a
+man of acknowledged ability, but a Pyrrhonist and a scoffer, with the
+scalpel for his one article of faith. He would consider, as a concession
+to Brisset, that a man who, as a matter of fact, was perfectly well was
+dead, and recognize with Cameristus that a man might be living on after
+his apparent demise. He found something sensible in every theory, and
+embraced none of them, claiming that the best of all systems of medicine
+was to have none at all, and to stick to facts. This Panurge of the
+Clinical Schools, the king of observers, the great investigator, a great
+sceptic, the man of desperate expedients, was scrutinizing the Magic
+Skin.
+
+“I should very much like to be a witness of the coincidence of its
+retrenchment with your wish,” he said to the Marquis.
+
+“Where is the use?” cried Brisset.
+
+“Where is the use?” echoed Cameristus.
+
+“Ah, you are both of the same mind,” replied Maugredie.
+
+“The contraction is perfectly simple,” Brisset went on.
+
+“It is supernatural,” remarked Cameristus.
+
+“In short,” Maugredie made answer, with affected solemnity, and handing
+the piece of skin to Raphael as he spoke, “the shriveling faculty of the
+skin is a fact inexplicable, and yet quite natural, which, ever since
+the world began, has been the despair of medicine and of pretty women.”
+
+All Valentin’s observation could discover no trace of a feeling for his
+troubles in any of the three doctors. The three received every answer
+in silence, scanned him unconcernedly, and interrogated him
+unsympathetically. Politeness did not conceal their indifference;
+whether deliberation or certainty was the cause, their words at any
+rate came so seldom and so languidly, that at times Raphael thought
+that their attention was wandering. From time to time Brisset, the
+sole speaker, remarked, “Good! just so!” as Bianchon pointed out the
+existence of each desperate symptom. Cameristus seemed to be deep in
+meditation; Maugredie looked like a comic author, studying two queer
+characters with a view to reproducing them faithfully upon the stage.
+There was deep, unconcealed distress, and grave compassion in Horace
+Bianchon’s face. He had been a doctor for too short a time to be
+untouched by suffering and unmoved by a deathbed; he had not learned to
+keep back the sympathetic tears that obscure a man’s clear vision
+and prevent him from seizing like the general of an army, upon the
+auspicious moment for victory, in utter disregard of the groans of dying
+men.
+
+After spending about half an hour over taking in some sort the measure
+of the patient and the complaint, much as a tailor measures a young man
+for a coat when he orders his wedding outfit, the authorities uttered
+several commonplaces, and even talked of politics. Then they decided to
+go into Raphael’s study to exchange their ideas and frame their verdict.
+
+“May I not be present during the discussion, gentlemen?” Valentin had
+asked them, but Brisset and Maugredie protested against this, and, in
+spite of their patient’s entreaties, declined altogether to deliberate
+in his presence.
+
+Raphael gave way before their custom, thinking that he could slip into
+a passage adjoining, whence he could easily overhear the medical
+conference in which the three professors were about to engage.
+
+“Permit me, gentlemen,” said Brisset, as they entered, “to give you my
+own opinion at once. I neither wish to force it upon you nor to have it
+discussed. In the first place, it is unbiased, concise, and based on
+an exact similarity that exists between one of my own patients and the
+subject that we have been called in to examine; and, moreover, I am
+expected at my hospital. The importance of the case that demands my
+presence there will excuse me for speaking the first word. The subject
+with which we are concerned has been exhausted in an equal degree by
+intellectual labors--what did he set about, Horace?” he asked of the
+young doctor.
+
+“A ‘Theory of the Will,’”
+
+“The devil! but that’s a big subject. He is exhausted, I say, by too
+much brain-work, by irregular courses, and by the repeated use of too
+powerful stimulants. Violent exertion of body and mind has demoralized
+the whole system. It is easy, gentlemen, to recognize in the symptoms
+of the face and body generally intense irritation of the stomach, an
+affection of the great sympathetic nerve, acute sensibility of the
+epigastric region, and contraction of the right and left hypochondriac.
+You have noticed, too, the large size and prominence of the liver. M.
+Bianchon has, besides, constantly watched the patient, and he tells us
+that digestion is troublesome and difficult. Strictly speaking, there is
+no stomach left, and so the man has disappeared. The brain is atrophied
+because the man digests no longer. The progressive deterioration wrought
+in the epigastric region, the seat of vitality, has vitiated the whole
+system. Thence, by continuous fevered vibrations, the disorder has
+reached the brain by means of the nervous plexus, hence the excessive
+irritation in that organ. There is monomania. The patient is burdened
+with a fixed idea. That piece of skin really contracts, to his way of
+thinking; very likely it always has been as we have seen it; but whether
+it contracts or no, that thing is for him just like the fly that some
+Grand Vizier or other had on his nose. If you put leeches at once on the
+epigastrium, and reduce the irritation in that part, which is the very
+seat of man’s life, and if you diet the patient, the monomania will
+leave him. I will say no more to Dr. Bianchon; he should be able to
+grasp the whole treatment as well as the details. There may be, perhaps,
+some complication of the disease--the bronchial tubes, possibly, may be
+also inflamed; but I believe that treatment for the intestinal organs is
+very much more important and necessary, and more urgently required than
+for the lungs. Persistent study of abstract matters, and certain violent
+passions, have induced serious disorders in that vital mechanism.
+However, we are in time to set these conditions right. Nothing is too
+seriously affected. You will easily get your friend round again,” he
+remarked to Bianchon.
+
+“Our learned colleague is taking the effect for the cause,” Cameristus
+replied. “Yes, the changes that he has observed so keenly certainly
+exist in the patient; but it is not the stomach that, by degrees, has
+set up nervous action in the system, and so affected the brain, like a
+hole in a window pane spreading cracks round about it. It took a blow
+of some kind to make a hole in the window; who gave the blow? Do we
+know that? Have we investigated the patient’s case sufficiently? Are we
+acquainted with all the events of his life?
+
+“The vital principle, gentlemen,” he continued, “the Archeus of Van
+Helmont, is affected in his case--the very essence and centre of life is
+attacked. The divine spark, the transitory intelligence which holds the
+organism together, which is the source of the will, the inspiration of
+life, has ceased to regulate the daily phenomena of the mechanism and
+the functions of every organ; thence arise all the complications which
+my learned colleague has so thoroughly appreciated. The epigastric
+region does not affect the brain but the brain affects the epigastric
+region. No,” he went on, vigorously slapping his chest, “no, I am not
+a stomach in the form of a man. No, everything does not lie there. I do
+not feel that I have the courage to say that if the epigastric region is
+in good order, everything else is in a like condition----
+
+“We cannot trace,” he went on more mildly, “to one physical cause the
+serious disturbances that supervene in this or that subject which has
+been dangerously attacked, nor submit them to a uniform treatment.
+No one man is like another. We have each peculiar organs, differently
+affected, diversely nourished, adapted to perform different functions,
+and to induce a condition necessary to the accomplishment of an order
+of things which is unknown to us. The sublime will has so wrought that
+a little portion of the great All is set within us to sustain the
+phenomena of living; in every man it formulates itself distinctly,
+making each, to all appearance, a separate individual, yet in one point
+co-existent with the infinite cause. So we ought to make a separate
+study of each subject, discover all about it, find out in what its life
+consists, and wherein its power lies. From the softness of a wet sponge
+to the hardness of pumice-stone there are infinite fine degrees of
+difference. Man is just like that. Between the sponge-like organizations
+of the lymphatic and the vigorous iron muscles of such men as are
+destined for a long life, what a margin for errors for the single
+inflexible system of a lowering treatment to commit; a system that
+reduces the capacities of the human frame, which you always conclude
+have been over-excited. Let us look for the origin of the disease in the
+mental and not in the physical viscera. A doctor is an inspired being,
+endowed by God with a special gift--the power to read the secrets of
+vitality; just as the prophet has received the eyes that foresee the
+future, the poet his faculty of evoking nature, and the musician the
+power of arranging sounds in an harmonious order that is possibly a copy
+of an ideal harmony on high.”
+
+“There is his everlasting system of medicine, arbitrary, monarchical,
+and pious,” muttered Brisset.
+
+“Gentlemen,” Maugredie broke in hastily, to distract attention from
+Brisset’s comment, “don’t let us lose sight of the patient.”
+
+“What is the good of science?” Raphael moaned. “Here is my recovery
+halting between a string of beads and a rosary of leeches, between
+Dupuytren’s bistoury and Prince Hohenlohe’s prayer. There is Maugredie
+suspending his judgment on the line that divides facts from words, mind
+from matter. Man’s ‘it is,’ and ‘it is not,’ is always on my track;
+it is the _Carymary Carymara_ of Rabelais for evermore: my disorder is
+spiritual, _Carymary_, or material, _Carymara_. Shall I live? They have
+no idea. Planchette was more straightforward with me, at any rate, when
+he said, ‘I do not know.’”
+
+Just then Valentin heard Maugredie’s voice.
+
+“The patient suffers from monomania; very good, I am quite of that
+opinion,” he said, “but he has two hundred thousand a year; monomaniacs
+of that kind are very uncommon. As for knowing whether his epigastric
+region has affected his brain, or his brain his epigastric region, we
+shall find that out, perhaps, whenever he dies. But to resume. There
+is no disputing the fact that he is ill; some sort of treatment he must
+have. Let us leave theories alone, and put leeches on him, to counteract
+the nervous and intestinal irritation, as to the existence of which we
+all agree; and let us send him to drink the waters, in that way we shall
+act on both systems at once. If there really is tubercular disease, we
+can hardly expect to save his life; so that----”
+
+Raphael abruptly left the passage, and went back to his armchair. The
+four doctors very soon came out of the study; Horace was the spokesman.
+
+“These gentlemen,” he told him, “have unanimously agreed that leeches
+must be applied to the stomach at once, and that both physical and
+moral treatment are imperatively needed. In the first place, a carefully
+prescribed rule of diet, so as to soothe the internal irritation”--here
+Brisset signified his approval; “and in the second, a hygienic regimen,
+to set your general condition right. We all, therefore, recommend you
+to go to take the waters in Aix in Savoy; or, if you like it better, at
+Mont Dore in Auvergne; the air and the situation are both pleasanter in
+Savoy than in the Cantal, but you will consult your own taste.”
+
+Here it was Cameristus who nodded assent.
+
+“These gentlemen,” Bianchon continued, “having recognized a slight
+affection of the respiratory organs, are agreed as to the utility of
+the previous course of treatment that I have prescribed. They think
+that there will be no difficulty about restoring you to health, and that
+everything depends upon a wise and alternate employment of these various
+means. And----”
+
+“And that is the cause of the milk in the cocoanut,” said Raphael,
+with a smile, as he led Horace into his study to pay the fees for this
+useless consultation.
+
+“Their conclusions are logical,” the young doctor replied. “Cameristus
+feels, Brisset examines, Maugredie doubts. Has not man a soul, a body,
+and an intelligence? One of these three elemental constituents always
+influences us more or less strongly; there will always be the personal
+element in human science. Believe me, Raphael, we effect no cures; we
+only assist them. Another system--the use of mild remedies while Nature
+exerts her powers--lies between the extremes of theory of Brisset and
+Cameristus, but one ought to have known the patient for some ten years
+or so to obtain a good result on these lines. Negation lies at the
+back of all medicine, as in every other science. So endeavor to live
+wholesomely; try a trip to Savoy; the best course is, and always will
+be, to trust to Nature.”
+
+It was a month later, on a fine summer-like evening, that several
+people, who were taking the waters at Aix, returned from the promenade
+and met together in the salons of the Club. Raphael remained alone by a
+window for a long time. His back was turned upon the gathering, and he
+himself was deep in those involuntary musings in which thoughts arise in
+succession and fade away, shaping themselves indistinctly, passing over
+us like thin, almost colorless clouds. Melancholy is sweet to us then,
+and delight is shadowy, for the soul is half asleep. Valentin gave
+himself up to this life of sensations; he was steeping himself in the
+warm, soft twilight, enjoying the pure air with the scent of the
+hills in it, happy in that he felt no pain, and had tranquilized his
+threatening Magic Skin at last. It grew cooler as the red glow of the
+sunset faded on the mountain peaks; he shut the window and left his
+place.
+
+“Will you be so kind as not to close the windows, sir?” said an old
+lady; “we are being stifled----”
+
+The peculiarly sharp and jarring tones in which the phrase was uttered
+grated on Raphael’s ears; it fell on them like an indiscreet remark let
+slip by some man in whose friendship we would fain believe, a word which
+reveals unsuspected depths of selfishness and destroys some pleasing
+sentimental illusion of ours. The Marquis glanced, with the cool
+inscrutable expression of a diplomatist, at the old lady, called a
+servant, and, when he came, curtly bade him:
+
+“Open that window.”
+
+Great surprise was clearly expressed on all faces at the words. The
+whole roomful began to whisper to each other, and turned their eyes upon
+the invalid, as though he had given some serious offence. Raphael, who
+had never quite managed to rid himself of the bashfulness of his early
+youth, felt a momentary confusion; then he shook off his torpor, exerted
+his faculties, and asked himself the meaning of this strange scene.
+
+A sudden and rapid impulse quickened his brain; the past weeks appeared
+before him in a clear and definite vision; the reasons for the feelings
+he inspired in others stood out for him in relief, like the veins of
+some corpse which a naturalist, by some cunningly contrived injection,
+has colored so as to show their least ramifications.
+
+He discerned himself in this fleeting picture; he followed out his
+own life in it, thought by thought, day after day. He saw himself, not
+without astonishment, an absent gloomy figure in the midst of these
+lively folk, always musing over his own fate, always absorbed by his own
+sufferings, seemingly impatient of the most harmless chat. He saw how
+he had shunned the ephemeral intimacies that travelers are so ready to
+establish--no doubt because they feel sure of never meeting each other
+again--and how he had taken little heed of those about him. He saw
+himself like the rocks without, unmoved by the caresses or the stormy
+surgings of the waves.
+
+Then, by a gift of insight seldom accorded, he read the thoughts of all
+those about him. The light of a candle revealed the sardonic profile
+and yellow cranium of an old man; he remembered now that he had won from
+him, and had never proposed that the other should have his revenge; a
+little further on he saw a pretty woman, whose lively advances he
+had met with frigid coolness; there was not a face there that did not
+reproach him with some wrong done, inexplicably to all appearance, but
+the real offence in every case lay in some mortification, some invisible
+hurt dealt to self-love. He had unintentionally jarred on all the small
+susceptibilities of the circle round about him.
+
+His guests on various occasions, and those to whom he had lent his
+horses, had taken offence at his luxurious ways; their ungraciousness
+had been a surprise to him; he had spared them further humiliations of
+that kind, and they had considered that he looked down upon them, and
+had accused him of haughtiness ever since. He could read their inmost
+thoughts as he fathomed their natures in this way. Society with its
+polish and varnish grew loathsome to him. He was envied and hated for
+his wealth and superior ability; his reserve baffled the inquisitive;
+his humility seemed like haughtiness to these petty superficial natures.
+He guessed the secret unpardonable crime which he had committed against
+them; he had overstepped the limits of the jurisdiction of their
+mediocrity. He had resisted their inquisitorial tyranny; he could
+dispense with their society; and all of them, therefore, had
+instinctively combined to make him feel their power, and to take revenge
+upon this incipient royalty by submitting him to a kind of ostracism,
+and so teaching him that they in their turn could do without him.
+
+Pity came over him, first of all, at this aspect of mankind, but very
+soon he shuddered at the thought of the power that came thus, at will,
+and flung aside for him the veil of flesh under which the moral nature
+is hidden away. He closed his eyes, so as to see no more. A black
+curtain was drawn all at once over this unlucky phantom show of truth;
+but still he found himself in the terrible loneliness that surrounds
+every power and dominion. Just then a violent fit of coughing seized
+him. Far from receiving one single word--indifferent, and meaningless,
+it is true, but still containing, among well-bred people brought
+together by chance, at least some pretence of civil commiseration--he
+now heard hostile ejaculations and muttered complaints. Society there
+assembled disdained any pantomime on his account, perhaps because he had
+gauged its real nature too well.
+
+“His complaint is contagious.”
+
+“The president of the Club ought to forbid him to enter the salon.”
+
+“It is contrary to all rules and regulations to cough in that way!”
+
+“When a man is as ill as that, he ought not to come to take the
+waters----”
+
+“He will drive me away from the place.”
+
+Raphael rose and walked about the rooms to screen himself from their
+unanimous execrations. He thought to find a shelter, and went up to a
+young pretty lady who sat doing nothing, minded to address some pretty
+speeches to her; but as he came towards her, she turned her back upon
+him, and pretended to be watching the dancers. Raphael feared lest he
+might have made use of the talisman already that evening; and feeling
+that he had neither the wish nor the courage to break into the
+conversation, he left the salon and took refuge in the billiard-room.
+No one there greeted him, nobody spoke to him, no one sent so much as
+a friendly glance in his direction. His turn of mind, naturally
+meditative, had discovered instinctively the general grounds and
+reasons for the aversion he inspired. This little world was obeying,
+unconsciously perhaps, the sovereign law which rules over polite
+society; its inexorable nature was becoming apparent in its entirety
+to Raphael’s eyes. A glance into the past showed it to him, as a type
+completely realized in Foedora.
+
+He would no more meet with sympathy here for his bodily ills than he had
+received it at her hands for the distress in his heart. The fashionable
+world expels every suffering creature from its midst, just as the body
+of a man in robust health rejects any germ of disease. The world holds
+suffering and misfortune in abhorrence; it dreads them like the plague;
+it never hesitates between vice and trouble, for vice is a luxury.
+Ill-fortune may possess a majesty of its own, but society can belittle
+it and make it ridiculous by an epigram. Society draws caricatures, and
+in this way flings in the teeth of fallen kings the affronts which it
+fancies it has received from them; society, like the Roman youth at the
+circus, never shows mercy to the fallen gladiator; mockery and money are
+its vital necessities. “Death to the weak!” That is the oath taken by
+this kind of Equestrian order, instituted in their midst by all the
+nations of the world; everywhere it makes for the elevation of the
+rich, and its motto is deeply graven in hearts that wealth has turned to
+stone, or that have been reared in aristocratic prejudices.
+
+Assemble a collection of school-boys together. That will give you a
+society in miniature, a miniature which represents life more truly,
+because it is so frank and artless; and in it you will always find poor
+isolated beings, relegated to some place in the general estimations
+between pity and contempt, on account of their weakness and suffering.
+To these the Evangel promises heaven hereafter. Go lower yet in the
+scale of organized creation. If some bird among its fellows in the
+courtyard sickens, the others fall upon it with their beaks, pluck
+out its feathers, and kill it. The whole world, in accordance with its
+character of egotism, brings all its severity to bear upon wretchedness
+that has the hardihood to spoil its festivities, and to trouble its
+joys.
+
+Any sufferer in mind or body, any helpless or poor man, is a pariah. He
+had better remain in his solitude; if he crosses the boundary-line, he
+will find winter everywhere; he will find freezing cold in other men’s
+looks, manners, words, and hearts; and lucky indeed is he if he does not
+receive an insult where he expected that sympathy would be expended upon
+him. Let the dying keep to their bed of neglect, and age sit lonely
+by its fireside. Portionless maids, freeze and burn in your solitary
+attics. If the world tolerates misery of any kind, it is to turn it to
+account for its own purposes, to make some use of it, saddle and bridle
+it, put a bit in its mouth, ride it about, and get some fun out of it.
+
+Crotchety spinsters, ladies’ companions, put a cheerful face upon it,
+endure the humors of your so-called benefactress, carry her lapdogs for
+her; you have an English poodle for your rival, and you must seek to
+understand the moods of your patroness, and amuse her, and--keep silence
+about yourselves. As for you, unblushing parasite, uncrowned king
+of unliveried servants, leave your real character at home, let your
+digestion keep pace with your host’s laugh when he laughs, mingle your
+tears with his, and find his epigrams amusing; if you want to relieve
+your mind about him, wait till he is ruined. That is the way the world
+shows its respect for the unfortunate; it persecutes them, or slays them
+in the dust.
+
+Such thoughts as these welled up in Raphael’s heart with the suddenness
+of poetic inspiration. He looked around him, and felt the influence of
+the forbidding gloom that society breathes out in order to rid itself of
+the unfortunate; it nipped his soul more effectually than the east wind
+grips the body in December. He locked his arms over his chest, set his
+back against the wall, and fell into a deep melancholy. He mused upon
+the meagre happiness that this depressing way of living can give. What
+did it amount to? Amusement with no pleasure in it, gaiety without
+gladness, joyless festivity, fevered dreams empty of all delight,
+firewood or ashes on the hearth without a spark of flame in them. When
+he raised his head, he found himself alone, all the billiard players had
+gone.
+
+“I have only to let them know my power to make them worship my coughing
+fits,” he said to himself, and wrapped himself against the world in the
+cloak of his contempt.
+
+Next day the resident doctor came to call upon him, and took an anxious
+interest in his health. Raphael felt a thrill of joy at the friendly
+words addressed to him. The doctor’s face, to his thinking, wore an
+expression that was kind and pleasant; the pale curls of his wig seemed
+redolent of philanthropy; the square cut of his coat, the loose folds
+of his trousers, his big Quaker-like shoes, everything about him down
+to the powder shaken from his queue and dusted in a circle upon his
+slightly stooping shoulders, revealed an apostolic nature, and spoke of
+Christian charity and of the self-sacrifice of a man, who, out of sheer
+devotion to his patients, had compelled himself to learn to play whist
+and tric-trac so well that he never lost money to any of them.
+
+“My Lord Marquis,” said he, after a long talk with Raphael, “I can
+dispel your uneasiness beyond all doubt. I know your constitution well
+enough by this time to assure you that the doctors in Paris, whose great
+abilities I know, are mistaken as to the nature of your complaint.
+You can live as long as Methuselah, my Lord Marquis, accidents only
+excepted. Your lungs are as sound as a blacksmith’s bellows, your
+stomach would put an ostrich to the blush; but if you persist in living
+at high altitude, you are running the risk of a prompt interment in
+consecrated soil. A few words, my Lord Marquis, will make my meaning
+clear to you.
+
+“Chemistry,” he began, “has shown us that man’s breathing is a real
+process of combustion, and the intensity of its action varies according
+to the abundance or scarcity of the phlogistic element stored up by
+the organism of each individual. In your case, the phlogistic, or
+inflammatory element is abundant; if you will permit me to put it so,
+you generate superfluous oxygen, possessing as you do the inflammatory
+temperament of a man destined to experience strong emotions. While
+you breath the keen, pure air that stimulates life in men of lymphatic
+constitution, you are accelerating an expenditure of vitality already
+too rapid. One of the conditions for existence for you is the heavier
+atmosphere of the plains and valleys. Yes, the vital air for a man
+consumed by his genius lies in the fertile pasture-lands of Germany, at
+Toplitz or Baden-Baden. If England is not obnoxious to you, its misty
+climate would reduce your fever; but the situation of our baths, a
+thousand feet above the level of the Mediterranean, is dangerous for
+you. That is my opinion at least,” he said, with a deprecatory gesture,
+“and I give it in opposition to our interests, for, if you act upon it,
+we shall unfortunately lose you.”
+
+But for these closing words of his, the affable doctor’s seeming
+good-nature would have completely won Raphael over; but he was too
+profoundly observant not to understand the meaning of the tone, the
+look and gesture that accompanied that mild sarcasm, not to see that
+the little man had been sent on this errand, no doubt, by a flock of his
+rejoicing patients. The florid-looking idlers, tedious old women, nomad
+English people, and fine ladies who had given their husbands the slip,
+and were escorted hither by their lovers--one and all were in a plot to
+drive away a wretched, feeble creature to die, who seemed unable to hold
+out against a daily renewed persecution! Raphael accepted the challenge,
+he foresaw some amusement to be derived from their manoeuvres.
+
+“As you would be grieved at losing me,” said he to the doctor, “I will
+endeavor to avail myself of your good advice without leaving the place.
+I will set about having a house built to-morrow, and the atmosphere
+within it shall be regulated by your instructions.”
+
+The doctor understood the sarcastic smile that lurked about Raphael’s
+mouth, and took his leave without finding another word to say.
+
+The Lake of Bourget lies seven hundred feet above the Mediterranean, in
+a great hollow among the jagged peaks of the hills; it sparkles there,
+the bluest drop of water in the world. From the summit of the Cat’s
+Tooth the lake below looks like a stray turquoise. This lovely sheet of
+water is about twenty-seven miles round, and in some places is nearly
+five hundred feet deep.
+
+Under the cloudless sky, in your boat in the midst of the great expanse
+of water, with only the sound of the oars in your ears, only the
+vague outline of the hills on the horizon before you; you admire the
+glittering snows of the French Maurienne; you pass, now by masses of
+granite clad in the velvet of green turf or in low-growing shrubs, now
+by pleasant sloping meadows; there is always a wilderness on the one
+hand and fertile lands on the other, and both harmonies and dissonances
+compose a scene for you where everything is at once small and vast,
+and you feel yourself to be a poor onlooker at a great banquet.
+The configuration of the mountains brings about misleading optical
+conditions and illusions of perspective; a pine-tree a hundred feet in
+height looks to be a mere weed; wide valleys look as narrow as meadow
+paths. The lake is the only one where the confidences of heart and heart
+can be exchanged. There one can live; there one can meditate. Nowhere on
+earth will you find a closer understanding between the water, the
+sky, the mountains, and the fields. There is a balm there for all the
+agitations of life. The place keeps the secrets of sorrow to itself, the
+sorrow that grows less beneath its soothing influence; and to love, it
+gives a grave and meditative cast, deepening passion and purifying it.
+A kiss there becomes something great. But beyond all other things it is
+the lake for memories; it aids them by lending to them the hues of its
+own waves; it is a mirror in which everything is reflected. Only here,
+with this lovely landscape all around him, could Raphael endure the
+burden laid upon him; here he could remain as a languid dreamer, without
+a wish of his own.
+
+He went out upon the lake after the doctor’s visit, and was landed at a
+lonely point on the pleasant slope where the village of Saint-Innocent
+is situated. The view from this promontory, as one may call it,
+comprises the heights of Bugey with the Rhone flowing at their foot,
+and the end of the lake; but Raphael liked to look at the opposite
+shore from thence, at the melancholy looking Abbey of Haute-Combe, the
+burying-place of the Sardinian kings, who lie prostrate there before the
+hills, like pilgrims come at last to their journey’s end. The silence of
+the landscape was broken by the even rhythm of the strokes of the oar;
+it seemed to find a voice for the place, in monotonous cadences like the
+chanting of monks. The Marquis was surprised to find visitors to this
+usually lonely part of the lake; and as he mused, he watched the people
+seated in the boat, and recognized in the stern the elderly lady who had
+spoken so harshly to him the evening before.
+
+No one took any notice of Raphael as the boat passed, except the elderly
+lady’s companion, a poor old maid of noble family, who bowed to him,
+and whom it seemed to him that he saw for the first time. A few seconds
+later he had already forgotten the visitors, who had rapidly disappeared
+behind the promontory, when he heard the fluttering of a dress and the
+sound of light footsteps not far from him. He turned about and saw the
+companion; and, guessing from her embarrassed manner that she wished to
+speak with him, he walked towards her.
+
+She was somewhere about thirty-six years of age, thin and tall, reserved
+and prim, and, like all old maids, seemed puzzled to know which way to
+look, an expression no longer in keeping with her measured, springless,
+and hesitating steps. She was both young and old at the same time, and,
+by a certain dignity in her carriage, showed the high value which she
+set upon her charms and perfections. In addition, her movements were
+all demure and discreet, like those of women who are accustomed to take
+great care of themselves, no doubt because they desire not to be cheated
+of love, their destined end.
+
+“Your life is in danger, sir; do not come to the Club again!” she said,
+stepping back a pace or two from Raphael, as if her reputation had
+already been compromised.
+
+“But, mademoiselle,” said Raphael, smiling, “please explain yourself
+more clearly, since you have condescended so far----”
+
+“Ah,” she answered, “unless I had had a very strong motive, I should
+never have run the risk of offending the countess, for if she ever came
+to know that I had warned you----”
+
+“And who would tell her, mademoiselle?” cried Raphael.
+
+“True,” the old maid answered. She looked at him, quaking like an owl
+out in the sunlight. “But think of yourself,” she went on; “several
+young men, who want to drive you away from the baths, have agreed to
+pick a quarrel with you, and to force you into a duel.”
+
+The elderly lady’s voice sounded in the distance.
+
+“Mademoiselle,” began the Marquis, “my gratitude----” But his
+protectress had fled already; she had heard the voice of her mistress
+squeaking afresh among the rocks.
+
+“Poor girl! unhappiness always understands and helps the unhappy,”
+ Raphael thought, and sat himself down at the foot of a tree.
+
+The key of every science is, beyond cavil, the mark of interrogation; we
+owe most of our greatest discoveries to a _Why_? and all the wisdom in
+the world, perhaps, consists in asking _Wherefore_? in every connection.
+But, on the other hand, this acquired prescience is the ruin of our
+illusions.
+
+So Valentin, having taken the old maid’s kindly action for the text of
+his wandering thoughts, without the deliberate promptings of philosophy,
+must find it full of gall and wormwood.
+
+“It is not at all extraordinary that a gentlewoman’s gentlewoman should
+take a fancy to me,” said he to himself. “I am twenty-seven years old,
+and I have a title and an income of two hundred thousand a year. But
+that her mistress, who hates water like a rabid cat--for it would be
+hard to give the palm to either in that matter--that her mistress should
+have brought her here in a boat! Is not that very strange and wonderful?
+Those two women came into Savoy to sleep like marmots; they ask if day
+has dawned at noon; and to think that they could get up this morning
+before eight o’clock, to take their chances in running after me!”
+
+Very soon the old maid and her elderly innocence became, in his eyes, a
+fresh manifestation of that artificial, malicious little world. It was a
+paltry device, a clumsy artifice, a piece of priest’s or woman’s craft.
+Was the duel a myth, or did they merely want to frighten him? But
+these petty creatures, impudent and teasing as flies, had succeeded in
+wounding his vanity, in rousing his pride, and exciting his curiosity.
+Unwilling to become their dupe, or to be taken for a coward, and even
+diverted perhaps by the little drama, he went to the Club that very
+evening.
+
+He stood leaning against the marble chimney-piece, and stayed there
+quietly in the middle of the principal saloon, doing his best to give no
+one any advantage over him; but he scrutinized the faces about him, and
+gave a certain vague offence to those assembled, by his inspection. Like
+a dog aware of his strength, he awaited the contest on his own ground,
+without necessary barking. Towards the end of the evening he strolled
+into the cardroom, walking between the door and another that opened into
+the billiard-room, throwing a glance from time to time over a group of
+young men that had gathered there. He heard his name mentioned after a
+turn or two. Although they lowered their voices, Raphael easily guessed
+that he had become the topic of their debate, and he ended by catching a
+phrase or two spoken aloud.
+
+“You?”
+
+“Yes, I.”
+
+“I dare you to do it!”
+
+“Let us make a bet on it!”
+
+“Oh, he will do it.”
+
+Just as Valentin, curious to learn the matter of the wager, came up
+to pay closer attention to what they were saying, a tall, strong,
+good-looking young fellow, who, however, possessed the impertinent stare
+peculiar to people who have material force at their back, came out of
+the billiard-room.
+
+“I am deputed, sir,” he said coolly addressing the Marquis, “to make you
+aware of something which you do not seem to know; your face and person
+generally are a source of annoyance to every one here, and to me in
+particular. You have too much politeness not to sacrifice yourself to
+the public good, and I beg that you will not show yourself in the Club
+again.”
+
+“This sort of joke has been perpetrated before, sir, in garrison towns
+at the time of the Empire; but nowadays it is exceedingly bad form,”
+ said Raphael drily.
+
+“I am not joking,” the young man answered; “and I repeat it: your health
+will be considerably the worse for a stay here; the heat and light, the
+air of the saloon, and the company are all bad for your complaint.”
+
+“Where did you study medicine?” Raphael inquired.
+
+“I took my bachelor’s degree on Lepage’s shooting-ground in Paris, and
+was made a doctor at Cerizier’s, the king of foils.”
+
+“There is one last degree left for you to take,” said Valentin; “study
+the ordinary rules of politeness, and you will be a perfect gentlemen.”
+
+The young men all came out of the billiard-room just then, some disposed
+to laugh, some silent. The attention of other players was drawn to the
+matter; they left their cards to watch a quarrel that rejoiced their
+instincts. Raphael, alone among this hostile crowd, did his best to keep
+cool, and not to put himself in any way in the wrong; but his adversary
+having ventured a sarcasm containing an insult couched in unusually keen
+language, he replied gravely:
+
+“We cannot box men’s ears, sir, in these days, but I am at a loss for
+any word by which to stigmatize such cowardly behavior as yours.”
+
+“That’s enough, that’s enough. You can come to an explanation
+to-morrow,” several young men exclaimed, interposing between the two
+champions.
+
+Raphael left the room in the character of aggressor, after he had
+accepted a proposal to meet near the Chateau de Bordeau, in a little
+sloping meadow, not very far from the newly made road, by which the man
+who came off victorious could reach Lyons. Raphael must now either take
+to his bed or leave the baths. The visitors had gained their point. At
+eight o’clock next morning his antagonist, followed by two seconds and a
+surgeon, arrived first on the ground.
+
+“We shall do very nicely here; glorious weather for a duel!” he cried
+gaily, looking at the blue vault of sky above, at the waters of the
+lake, and the rocks, without a single melancholy presentiment or doubt
+of the issue. “If I wing him,” he went on, “I shall send him to bed for
+a month; eh, doctor?”
+
+“At the very least,” the surgeon replied; “but let that willow twig
+alone, or you will weary your wrist, and then you will not fire
+steadily. You might kill your man instead of wounding him.”
+
+The noise of a carriage was heard approaching.
+
+“Here he is,” said the seconds, who soon descried a caleche coming along
+the road; it was drawn by four horses, and there were two postilions.
+
+“What a queer proceeding!” said Valentin’s antagonist; “here he comes
+post-haste to be shot.”
+
+The slightest incident about a duel, as about a stake at cards, makes an
+impression on the minds of those deeply concerned in the results of the
+affair; so the young man awaited the arrival of the carriage with a
+kind of uneasiness. It stopped in the road; old Jonathan laboriously
+descended from it, in the first place, to assist Raphael to alight;
+he supported him with his feeble arms, and showed him all the minute
+attentions that a lover lavishes upon his mistress. Both became lost to
+sight in the footpath that lay between the highroad and the field where
+the duel was to take place; they were walking slowly, and did not appear
+again for some time after. The four onlookers at this strange spectacle
+felt deeply moved by the sight of Valentin as he leaned on his servant’s
+arm; he was wasted and pale; he limped as if he had the gout, went with
+his head bowed down, and said not a word. You might have taken them
+for a couple of old men, one broken with years, the other worn out with
+thought; the elder bore his age visibly written in his white hair, the
+younger was of no age.
+
+“I have not slept all night, sir;” so Raphael greeted his antagonist.
+
+The icy tone and terrible glance that went with the words made the real
+aggressor shudder; he know that he was in the wrong, and felt in secret
+ashamed of his behavior. There was something strange in Raphael’s
+bearing, tone, and gesture; the Marquis stopped, and every one else was
+likewise silent. The uneasy and constrained feeling grew to a height.
+
+“There is yet time,” he went on, “to offer me some slight apology;
+and offer it you must, or you will die sir! You rely even now on your
+dexterity, and do not shrink from an encounter in which you believe all
+the advantage to be upon your side. Very good, sir; I am generous, I am
+letting you know my superiority beforehand. I possess a terrible power.
+I have only to wish to do so, and I can neutralize your skill, dim your
+eyesight, make your hand and pulse unsteady, and even kill you outright.
+I have no wish to be compelled to exercise my power; the use of it costs
+me too dear. You would not be the only one to die. So if you refuse to
+apologize to me, not matter what your experience in murder, your ball
+will go into the waterfall there, and mine will speed straight to your
+heart though I do not aim it at you.”
+
+Confused voices interrupted Raphael at this point. All the time that he
+was speaking, the Marquis had kept his intolerably keen gaze fixed upon
+his antagonist; now he drew himself up and showed an impassive face,
+like that of a dangerous madman.
+
+“Make him hold his tongue,” the young man had said to one of his
+seconds; “that voice of his is tearing the heart out of me.”
+
+“Say no more, sir; it is quite useless,” cried the seconds and the
+surgeon, addressing Raphael.
+
+“Gentlemen, I am fulfilling a duty. Has this young gentleman any final
+arrangements to make?”
+
+“That is enough; that will do.”
+
+The Marquis remained standing steadily, never for a moment losing sight
+of his antagonist; and the latter seemed, like a bird before a snake, to
+be overwhelmed by a well-nigh magical power. He was compelled to endure
+that homicidal gaze; he met and shunned it incessantly.
+
+“I am thirsty; give me some water----” he said again to the second.
+
+“Are you nervous?”
+
+“Yes,” he answered. “There is a fascination about that man’s glowing
+eyes.”
+
+“Will you apologize?”
+
+“It is too late now.”
+
+The two antagonists were placed at fifteen paces’ distance from each
+other. Each of them had a brace of pistols at hand, and, according to
+the programme prescribed for them, each was to fire twice when and how
+he pleased, but after the signal had been given by the seconds.
+
+“What are you doing, Charles?” exclaimed the young man who acted as
+second to Raphael’s antagonist; “you are putting in the ball before the
+powder!”
+
+“I am a dead man,” he muttered, by way of answer; “you have put me
+facing the sun----”
+
+“The sun lies behind you,” said Valentin sternly and solemnly, while he
+coolly loaded his pistol without heeding the fact that the signal had
+been given, or that his antagonist was carefully taking aim.
+
+There was something so appalling in this supernatural unconcern, that it
+affected even the two postilions, brought thither by a cruel curiosity.
+Raphael was either trying his power or playing with it, for he talked
+to Jonathan, and looked towards him as he received his adversary’s
+fire. Charles’ bullet broke a branch of willow, and ricocheted over the
+surface of the water; Raphael fired at random, and shot his antagonist
+through the heart. He did not heed the young man as he dropped; he
+hurriedly sought the Magic Skin to see what another man’s life had cost
+him. The talisman was no larger than a small oak-leaf.
+
+“What are you gaping at, you postilions over there? Let us be off,” said
+the Marquis.
+
+That same evening he crossed the French border, immediately set out for
+Auvergne, and reached the springs of Mont Dore. As he traveled, there
+surged up in his heart, all at once, one of those thoughts that come
+to us as a ray of sunlight pierces through the thick mists in some dark
+valley--a sad enlightenment, a pitiless sagacity that lights up the
+accomplished fact for us, that lays our errors bare, and leaves
+us without excuse in our own eyes. It suddenly struck him that the
+possession of power, no matter how enormous, did not bring with it the
+knowledge how to use it. The sceptre is a plaything for a child, an axe
+for a Richelieu, and for a Napoleon a lever by which to move the world.
+Power leaves us just as it finds us; only great natures grow greater
+by its means. Raphael had had everything in his power, and he had done
+nothing.
+
+At the springs of Mont Dore he came again in contact with a little world
+of people, who invariably shunned him with the eager haste that animals
+display when they scent afar off one of their own species lying dead,
+and flee away. The dislike was mutual. His late adventure had given him
+a deep distaste for society; his first care, consequently, was to find
+a lodging at some distance from the neighborhood of the springs.
+Instinctively he felt within him the need of close contact with nature,
+of natural emotions, and of the vegetative life into which we sink so
+gladly among the fields.
+
+The day after he arrived he climbed the Pic de Sancy, not without
+difficulty, and visited the higher valleys, the skyey nooks,
+undiscovered lakes, and peasants’ huts about Mont Dore, a country whose
+stern and wild features are now beginning to tempt the brushes of our
+artists, for sometimes wonderfully fresh and charming views are to be
+found there, affording a strong contrast to the frowning brows of those
+lonely hills.
+
+Barely a league from the village Raphael discovered a nook where nature
+seemed to have taken a pleasure in hiding away all her treasures like
+some glad and mischievous child. At the first sight of this unspoiled
+and picturesque retreat, he determined to take up his abode in it.
+There, life must needs be peaceful, natural, and fruitful, like the life
+of a plant.
+
+Imagine for yourself an inverted cone of granite hollowed out on a large
+scale, a sort of basin with its sides divided up by queer winding paths.
+On one side lay level stretches with no growth upon them, a bluish
+uniform surface, over which the rays of the sun fell as upon a mirror;
+on the other lay cliffs split open by fissures and frowning ravines;
+great blocks of lava hung suspended from them, while the action of rain
+slowly prepared their impending fall; a few stunted trees tormented
+by the wind, often crowned their summits; and here and there in some
+sheltered angle of their ramparts a clump of chestnut-trees grew tall as
+cedars, or some cavern in the yellowish rocks showed the dark entrance
+into its depths, set about by flowers and brambles, decked by a little
+strip of green turf.
+
+At the bottom of this cup, which perhaps had been the crater of an
+old-world volcano, lay a pool of water as pure and bright as a diamond.
+Granite boulders lay around the deep basin, and willows, mountain-ash
+trees, yellow-flag lilies, and numberless aromatic plants bloomed about
+it, in a realm of meadow as fresh as an English bowling-green. The fine
+soft grass was watered by the streams that trickled through the fissures
+in the cliffs; the soil was continually enriched by the deposits of loam
+which storms washed down from the heights above. The pool might be
+some three acres in extent; its shape was irregular, and the edges were
+scalloped like the hem of a dress; the meadow might be an acre or two
+acres in extent. The cliffs and the water approached and receded from
+each other; here and there, there was scarcely width enough for the cows
+to pass between them.
+
+After a certain height the plant life ceased. Aloft in air the granite
+took upon itself the most fantastic shapes, and assumed those misty
+tints that give to high mountains a dim resemblance to clouds in the
+sky. The bare, bleak cliffs, with the fearful rents in their sides,
+pictures of wild and barren desolation, contrasted strongly with the
+pretty view of the valley; and so strange were the shapes they assumed,
+that one of the cliffs had been called “The Capuchin,” because it was so
+like a monk. Sometimes these sharp-pointed peaks, these mighty masses
+of rock, and airy caverns were lighted up one by one, according to the
+direction of the sun or the caprices of the atmosphere; they caught
+gleams of gold, dyed themselves in purple; took a tint of glowing
+rose-color, or turned dull and gray. Upon the heights a drama of color
+was always to be seen, a play of ever-shifting iridescent hues like
+those on a pigeon’s breast.
+
+Oftentimes at sunrise or at sunset a ray of bright sunlight would
+penetrate between two sheer surfaces of lava, that might have been split
+apart by a hatchet, to the very depths of that pleasant little garden,
+where it would play in the waters of the pool, like a beam of golden
+light which gleams through the chinks of a shutter into a room in Spain,
+that has been carefully darkened for a siesta. When the sun rose above
+the old crater that some antediluvian revolution had filled with water,
+its rocky sides took warmer tones, the extinct volcano glowed again, and
+its sudden heat quickened the sprouting seeds and vegetation, gave color
+to the flowers, and ripened the fruits of this forgotten corner of the
+earth.
+
+As Raphael reached it, he noticed several cows grazing in the
+pasture-land; and when he had taken a few steps towards the water, he
+saw a little house built of granite and roofed with shingle in the spot
+where the meadowland was at its widest. The roof of this little cottage
+harmonized with everything about it; for it had long been overgrown with
+ivy, moss, and flowers of no recent date. A thin smoke, that did not
+scare the birds away, went up from the dilapidated chimney. There was a
+great bench at the door between two huge honey-suckle bushes, that were
+pink with blossom and full of scent. The walls could scarcely be seen
+for branches of vine and sprays of rose and jessamine that interlaced
+and grew entirely as chance and their own will bade them; for the
+inmates of the cottage seemed to pay no attention to the growth which
+adorned their house, and to take no care of it, leaving to it the fresh
+capricious charm of nature.
+
+Some clothes spread out on the gooseberry bushes were drying in the
+sun. A cat was sitting on a machine for stripping hemp; beneath it lay a
+newly scoured brass caldron, among a quantity of potato-parings. On
+the other side of the house Raphael saw a sort of barricade of dead
+thorn-bushes, meant no doubt to keep the poultry from scratching up
+the vegetables and pot-herbs. It seemed like the end of the earth. The
+dwelling was like some bird’s-nest ingeniously set in a cranny of the
+rocks, a clever and at the same time a careless bit of workmanship. A
+simple and kindly nature lay round about it; its rusticity was genuine,
+but there was a charm like that of poetry in it; for it grew and throve
+at a thousand miles’ distance from our elaborate and conventional
+poetry. It was like none of our conceptions; it was a spontaneous
+growth, a masterpiece due to chance.
+
+As Raphael reached the place, the sunlight fell across it from right to
+left, bringing out all the colors of its plants and trees; the yellowish
+or gray bases of the crags, the different shades of the green leaves,
+the masses of flowers, pink, blue, or white, the climbing plants
+with their bell-like blossoms, and the shot velvet of the mosses, the
+purple-tinted blooms of the heather,--everything was either brought
+into relief or made fairer yet by the enchantment of the light or by the
+contrasting shadows; and this was the case most of all with the sheet of
+water, wherein the house, the trees, the granite peaks, and the sky were
+all faithfully reflected. Everything had a radiance of its own in this
+delightful picture, from the sparkling mica-stone to the bleached tuft
+of grass hidden away in the soft shadows; the spotted cow with its
+glossy hide, the delicate water-plants that hung down over the pool like
+fringes in a nook where blue or emerald colored insects were buzzing
+about, the roots of trees like a sand-besprinkled shock of hair above
+grotesque faces in the flinty rock surface,--all these things made a
+harmony for the eye.
+
+The odor of the tepid water; the scent of the flowers, and the breath of
+the caverns which filled the lonely place gave Raphael a sensation that
+was almost enjoyment. Silence reigned in majesty over these woods, which
+possibly are unknown to the tax-collector; but the barking of a couple
+of dogs broke the stillness all at once; the cows turned their heads
+towards the entrance of the valley, showing their moist noses to
+Raphael, stared stupidly at him, and then fell to browsing again. A
+goat and her kid, that seemed to hang on the side of the crags in some
+magical fashion, capered and leapt to a slab of granite near to Raphael,
+and stayed there a moment, as if to seek to know who he was. The yapping
+of the dogs brought out a plump child, who stood agape, and next came a
+white-haired old man of middle height. Both of these two beings were in
+keeping with the surroundings, the air, the flowers, and the dwelling.
+Health appeared to overflow in this fertile region; old age and
+childhood thrived there. There seemed to be, about all these types of
+existence, the freedom and carelessness of the life of primitive times,
+a happiness of use and wont that gave the lie to our philosophical
+platitudes, and wrought a cure of all its swelling passions in the
+heart.
+
+The old man belonged to the type of model dear to the masculine brush
+of Schnetz. The countless wrinkles upon his brown face looked as if
+they would be hard to the touch; the straight nose, the prominent
+cheek-bones, streaked with red veins like a vine-leaf in autumn, the
+angular features, all were characteristics of strength, even where
+strength existed no longer. The hard hands, now that they toiled no
+longer, had preserved their scanty white hair, his bearing was that of
+an absolutely free man; it suggested the thought that, had he been
+an Italian, he would have perhaps turned brigand, for the love of the
+liberty so dear to him. The child was a regular mountaineer, with the
+black eyes that can face the sun without flinching, a deeply
+tanned complexion, and rough brown hair. His movements were like a
+bird’s--swift, decided, and unconstrained; his clothing was ragged; the
+white, fair skin showed through the rents in his garments. There they
+both stood in silence, side by side, both obeying the same impulse; in
+both faces were clear tokens of an absolutely identical and idle life.
+The old man had adopted the child’s amusements, and the child had fallen
+in with the old man’s humor; there was a sort of tacit agreement between
+two kinds of feebleness, between failing powers well-nigh spent and
+powers just about to unfold themselves.
+
+Very soon a woman who seemed to be about thirty years old appeared on
+the threshold of the door, spinning as she came. She was an Auvergnate,
+a high-colored, comfortable-looking, straightforward sort of person,
+with white teeth; her cap and dress, the face, full figure, and general
+appearance, were of the Auvergne peasant stamp. So was her dialect; she
+was a thorough embodiment of her district; its hardworking ways, its
+thrift, ignorance, and heartiness all met in her.
+
+She greeted Raphael, and they began to talk. The dogs quieted down;
+the old man went and sat on a bench in the sun; the child followed his
+mother about wherever she went, listening without saying a word, and
+staring at the stranger.
+
+“You are not afraid to live here, good woman?”
+
+“What should we be afraid of, sir? When we bolt the door, who ever could
+get inside? Oh, no, we aren’t afraid at all. And besides,” she said,
+as she brought the Marquis into the principal room in the house, “what
+should thieves come to take from us here?”
+
+She designated the room as she spoke; the smoke-blackened walls, with
+some brilliant pictures in blue, red, and green, an “End of Credit,” a
+Crucifixion, and the “Grenadiers of the Imperial Guard” for their
+sole ornament; the furniture here and there, the old wooden four-post
+bedstead, the table with crooked legs, a few stools, the chest that
+held the bread, the flitch that hung from the ceiling, a jar of salt, a
+stove, and on the mantleshelf a few discolored yellow plaster figures.
+As he went out again Raphael noticed a man half-way up the crags,
+leaning on a hoe, and watching the house with interest.
+
+“That’s my man, sir,” said the Auvergnate, unconsciously smiling in
+peasant fashion; “he is at work up there.”
+
+“And that old man is your father?”
+
+“Asking your pardon, sir, he is my man’s grandfather. Such as you see
+him, he is a hundred and two, and yet quite lately he walked over to
+Clermont with our little chap! Oh, he has been a strong man in his time;
+but he does nothing now but sleep and eat and drink. He amuses himself
+with the little fellow. Sometimes the child trails him up the hillsides,
+and he will just go up there along with him.”
+
+Valentin made up his mind immediately. He would live between this child
+and old man, breathe the same air; eat their bread, drink the same
+water, sleep with them, make the blood in his veins like theirs. It was
+a dying man’s fancy. For him the prime model, after which the customary
+existence of the individual should be shaped, the real formula for the
+life of a human being, the only true and possible life, the life-ideal,
+was to become one of the oysters adhering to this rock, to save
+his shell a day or two longer by paralyzing the power of death. One
+profoundly selfish thought took possession of him, and the whole
+universe was swallowed up and lost in it. For him the universe existed
+no longer; the whole world had come to be within himself. For the sick,
+the world begins at their pillow and ends at the foot of the bed; and
+this countryside was Raphael’s sick-bed.
+
+Who has not, at some time or other in his life, watched the comings
+and goings of an ant, slipped straws into a yellow slug’s one
+breathing-hole, studied the vagaries of a slender dragon-fly, pondered
+admiringly over the countless veins in an oak-leaf, that bring the
+colors of a rose window in some Gothic cathedral into contrast with the
+reddish background? Who has not looked long in delight at the effects
+of sun and rain on a roof of brown tiles, at the dewdrops, or at the
+variously shaped petals of the flower-cups? Who has not sunk into these
+idle, absorbing meditations on things without, that have no conscious
+end, yet lead to some definite thought at last. Who, in short, has not
+led a lazy life, the life of childhood, the life of the savage without
+his labor? This life without a care or a wish Raphael led for some days’
+space. He felt a distinct improvement in his condition, a wonderful
+sense of ease, that quieted his apprehensions and soothed his
+sufferings.
+
+He would climb the crags, and then find a seat high up on some peak
+whence he could see a vast expanse of distant country at a glance, and
+he would spend whole days in this way, like a plant in the sun, or a
+hare in its form. And at last, growing familiar with the appearances
+of the plant-life about him, and of the changes in the sky, he minutely
+noted the progress of everything working around him in the water, on the
+earth, or in the air. He tried to share the secret impulses of nature,
+sought by passive obedience to become a part of it, and to lie within
+the conservative and despotic jurisdiction that regulates instinctive
+existence. He no longer wished to steer his own course.
+
+Just as criminals in olden times were safe from the pursuit of justice,
+if they took refuge under the shadow of the altar, so Raphael made an
+effort to slip into the sanctuary of life. He succeeded in becoming an
+integral part of the great and mighty fruit-producing organization; he
+had adapted himself to the inclemency of the air, and had dwelt in every
+cave among the rocks. He had learned the ways and habits of growth of
+every plant, had studied the laws of the watercourses and their beds,
+and had come to know the animals; he was at last so perfectly at
+one with this teeming earth, that he had in some sort discerned its
+mysteries and caught the spirit of it.
+
+The infinitely varied forms of every natural kingdom were, to his
+thinking, only developments of one and the same substance, different
+combinations brought about by the same impulse, endless emanations from
+a measureless Being which was acting, thinking, moving, and growing, and
+in harmony with which he longed to grow, to move, to think, and act.
+He had fancifully blended his life with the life of the crags; he had
+deliberately planted himself there. During the earliest days of
+his sojourn in these pleasant surroundings, Valentin tasted all the
+pleasures of childhood again, thanks to the strange hallucination of
+apparent convalescence, which is not unlike the pauses of delirium
+that nature mercifully provides for those in pain. He went about making
+trifling discoveries, setting to work on endless things, and finishing
+none of them; the evening’s plans were quite forgotten in the morning;
+he had no cares, he was happy; he thought himself saved.
+
+One morning he had lain in bed till noon, deep in the dreams between
+sleep and waking, which give to realities a fantastic appearance, and
+make the wildest fancies seem solid facts; while he was still uncertain
+that he was not dreaming yet, he suddenly heard his hostess giving a
+report of his health to Jonathan, for the first time. Jonathan came
+to inquire after him daily, and the Auvergnate, thinking no doubt
+that Valentin was still asleep, had not lowered the tones of a voice
+developed in mountain air.
+
+“No better and no worse,” she said. “He coughed all last night again fit
+to kill himself. Poor gentleman, he coughs and spits till it is piteous.
+My husband and I often wonder to each other where he gets the strength
+from to cough like that. It goes to your heart. What a cursed complaint
+it is! He has no strength at all. I am always afraid I shall find him
+dead in his bed some morning. He is every bit as pale as a waxen Christ.
+_Dame_! I watch him while he dresses; his poor body is as thin as a
+nail. And he does not feel well now; but no matter. It’s all the same;
+he wears himself out with running about as if he had health and to
+spare. All the same, he is very brave, for he never complains at all.
+But really he would be better under the earth than on it, for he is
+enduring the agonies of Christ. I don’t wish that myself, sir; it is
+quite in our interests; but even if he didn’t pay us what he does, I
+should be just as fond of him; it is not our own interest that is our
+motive.
+
+“Ah, _mon Dieu_!” she continued, “Parisians are the people for these
+dogs’ diseases. Where did he catch it, now? Poor young man! And he is so
+sure that he is going to get well! That fever just gnaws him, you know;
+it eats him away; it will be the death of him. He has no notion whatever
+of that; he does not know it, sir; he sees nothing----You mustn’t cry
+about him, M. Jonathan; you must remember that he will be happy, and
+will not suffer any more. You ought to make a neuvaine for him; I have
+seen wonderful cures come of the nine days’ prayer, and I would gladly
+pay for a wax taper to save such a gentle creature, so good he is, a
+paschal lamb----”
+
+As Raphael’s voice had grown too weak to allow him to make himself
+heard, he was compelled to listen to this horrible loquacity. His
+irritation, however, drove him out of bed at length, and he appeared
+upon the threshold.
+
+“Old scoundrel!” he shouted to Jonathan; “do you mean to put me to
+death?”
+
+The peasant woman took him for a ghost, and fled.
+
+“I forbid you to have any anxiety whatever about my health,” Raphael
+went on.
+
+“Yes, my Lord Marquis,” said the old servant, wiping away his tears.
+
+“And for the future you had very much better not come here without my
+orders.”
+
+Jonathan meant to be obedient, but in the look full of pity and
+devotion that he gave the Marquis before he went, Raphael read his own
+death-warrant. Utterly disheartened, brought all at once to a sense of
+his real position, Valentin sat down on the threshold, locked his arms
+across his chest, and bowed his head. Jonathan turned to his master in
+alarm, with “My Lord----”
+
+“Go away, go away,” cried the invalid.
+
+In the hours of the next morning, Raphael climbed the crags, and sat
+down in a mossy cleft in the rocks, whence he could see the narrow path
+along which the water for the dwelling was carried. At the base of the
+hill he saw Jonathan in conversation with the Auvergnate. Some malicious
+power interpreted for him all the woman’s forebodings, and filled the
+breeze and the silence with her ominous words. Thrilled with horror, he
+took refuge among the highest summits of the mountains, and stayed
+there till the evening; but yet he could not drive away the gloomy
+presentiments awakened within him in such an unfortunate manner by a
+cruel solicitude on his account.
+
+The Auvergne peasant herself suddenly appeared before him like a shadow
+in the dusk; a perverse freak of the poet within him found a vague
+resemblance between her black and white striped petticoat and the bony
+frame of a spectre.
+
+“The damp is falling now, sir,” said she. “If you stop out there, you
+will go off just like rotten fruit. You must come in. It isn’t healthy
+to breathe the damp, and you have taken nothing since the morning,
+besides.”
+
+“_Tonnerre de Dieu_! old witch,” he cried; “let me live after my own
+fashion, I tell you, or I shall be off altogether. It is quite bad
+enough to dig my grave every morning; you might let it alone in the
+evenings at least----”
+
+“Your grave, sir! I dig your grave!--and where may your grave be? I want
+to see you as old as father there, and not in your grave by any
+manner of means. The grave! that comes soon enough for us all; in the
+grave----”
+
+“That is enough,” said Raphael.
+
+“Take my arm, sir.”
+
+“No.”
+
+The feeling of pity in others is very difficult for a man to bear, and
+it is hardest of all when the pity is deserved. Hatred is a tonic--it
+quickens life and stimulates revenge; but pity is death to us--it makes
+our weakness weaker still. It is as if distress simpered ingratiatingly
+at us; contempt lurks in the tenderness, or tenderness in an affront.
+In the centenarian Raphael saw triumphant pity, a wondering pity in the
+child’s eyes, an officious pity in the woman, and in her husband a pity
+that had an interested motive; but no matter how the sentiment declared
+itself, death was always its import.
+
+A poet makes a poem of everything; it is tragical or joyful, as things
+happen to strike his imagination; his lofty soul rejects all half-tones;
+he always prefers vivid and decided colors. In Raphael’s soul this
+compassion produced a terrible poem of mourning and melancholy. When
+he had wished to live in close contact with nature, he had of course
+forgotten how freely natural emotions are expressed. He would think
+himself quite alone under a tree, whilst he struggled with an obstinate
+coughing fit, a terrible combat from which he never issued victorious
+without utter exhaustion afterwards; and then he would meet the clear,
+bright eyes of the little boy, who occupied the post of sentinel, like
+a savage in a bent of grass; the eyes scrutinized him with a childish
+wonder, in which there was as much amusement as pleasure, and an
+indescribable mixture of indifference and interest. The awful _Brother,
+you must die_, of the Trappists seemed constantly legible in the eyes
+of the peasants with whom Raphael was living; he scarcely knew which
+he dreaded most, their unfettered talk or their silence; their presence
+became torture.
+
+One morning he saw two men in black prowling about in his neighborhood,
+who furtively studied him and took observations. They made as though
+they had come there for a stroll, and asked him a few indifferent
+questions, to which he returned short answers. He recognized them both.
+One was the _cure_ and the other the doctor at the springs; Jonathan had
+no doubt sent them, or the people in the house had called them in, or
+the scent of an approaching death had drawn them thither. He beheld his
+own funeral, heard the chanting of the priests, and counted the tall wax
+candles; and all that lovely fertile nature around him, in whose lap
+he had thought to find life once more, he saw no longer, save through a
+veil of crape. Everything that but lately had spoken of length of days
+to him, now prophesied a speedy end. He set out the next day for Paris,
+not before he had been inundated with cordial wishes, which the people
+of the house uttered in melancholy and wistful tones for his benefit.
+
+He traveled through the night, and awoke as they passed through one of
+the pleasant valleys of the Bourbonnais. View after view swam before his
+gaze, and passed rapidly away like the vague pictures of a dream.
+Cruel nature spread herself out before his eyes with tantalizing grace.
+Sometimes the Allier, a liquid shining ribbon, meandered through the
+distant fertile landscape; then followed the steeples of hamlets, hiding
+modestly in the depths of a ravine with its yellow cliffs; sometimes,
+after the monotony of vineyards, the watermills of a little valley would
+be suddenly seen; and everywhere there were pleasant chateaux, hillside
+villages, roads with their fringes of queenly poplars; and the Loire
+itself, at last, with its wide sheets of water sparkling like diamonds
+amid its golden sands. Attractions everywhere, without end! This nature,
+all astir with a life and gladness like that of childhood, scarcely able
+to contain the impulses and sap of June, possessed a fatal attraction
+for the darkened gaze of the invalid. He drew the blinds of his carriage
+windows, and betook himself again to slumber.
+
+Towards evening, after they had passed Cesne, he was awakened by lively
+music, and found himself confronted with a village fair. The horses
+were changed near the marketplace. Whilst the postilions were engaged
+in making the transfer, he saw the people dancing merrily, pretty and
+attractive girls with flowers about them, excited youths, and finally
+the jolly wine-flushed countenances of old peasants. Children prattled,
+old women laughed and chatted; everything spoke in one voice, and there
+was a holiday gaiety about everything, down to their clothing and the
+tables that were set out. A cheerful expression pervaded the square and
+the church, the roofs and windows; even the very doorways of the village
+seemed likewise to be in holiday trim.
+
+Raphael could not repress an angry exclamation, nor yet a wish to
+silence the fiddles, annihilate the stir and bustle, stop the clamor,
+and disperse the ill-timed festival; like a dying man, he felt unable
+to endure the slightest sound, and he entered his carriage much annoyed.
+When he looked out upon the square from the window, he saw that all the
+happiness was scared away; the peasant women were in flight, and the
+benches were deserted. Only a blind musician, on the scaffolding of the
+orchestra, went on playing a shrill tune on his clarionet. That piping
+of his, without dancers to it, and the solitary old man himself, in the
+shadow of the lime-tree, with his curmudgeon’s face, scanty hair, and
+ragged clothing, was like a fantastic picture of Raphael’s wish. The
+heavy rain was pouring in torrents; it was one of those thunderstorms
+that June brings about so rapidly, to cease as suddenly. The thing was
+so natural, that, when Raphael had looked out and seen some pale clouds
+driven over by a gust of wind, he did not think of looking at the piece
+of skin. He lay back again in the corner of his carriage, which was very
+soon rolling upon its way.
+
+The next day found him back in his home again, in his own room, beside
+his own fireside. He had had a large fire lighted; he felt cold.
+Jonathan brought him some letters; they were all from Pauline. He opened
+the first one without any eagerness, and unfolded it as if it had
+been the gray-paper form of application for taxes made by the revenue
+collector. He read the first sentence:
+
+“Gone! This really is a flight, my Raphael. How is it? No one can tell
+me where you are. And who should know if not I?”
+
+He did not wish to learn any more. He calmly took up the letters
+and threw them in the fire, watching with dull and lifeless eyes the
+perfumed paper as it was twisted, shriveled, bent, and devoured by the
+capricious flames. Fragments that fell among the ashes allowed him to
+see the beginning of a sentence, or a half-burnt thought or word; he
+took a pleasure in deciphering them--a sort of mechanical amusement.
+
+“Sitting at your door--expected--Caprice--I obey--Rivals--I, never!--thy
+Pauline--love--no more of Pauline?--If you had wished to leave me for
+ever, you would not have deserted me--Love eternal--To die----”
+
+The words caused him a sort of remorse; he seized the tongs, and rescued
+a last fragment of the letter from the flames.
+
+“I have murmured,” so Pauline wrote, “but I have never complained, my
+Raphael! If you have left me so far behind you, it was doubtless because
+you wished to hide some heavy grief from me. Perhaps you will kill me
+one of these days, but you are too good to torture me. So do not go away
+from me like this. There! I can bear the worst of torment, if only I
+am at your side. Any grief that you could cause me would not be grief.
+There is far more love in my heart for you than I have ever yet shown
+you. I can endure anything, except this weeping far away from you, this
+ignorance of your----”
+
+Raphael laid the scorched scrap on the mantelpiece, then all at once he
+flung it into the fire. The bit of paper was too clearly a symbol of his
+own love and luckless existence.
+
+“Go and find M. Bianchon,” he told Jonathan.
+
+Horace came and found Raphael in bed.
+
+“Can you prescribe a draught for me--some mild opiate which will always
+keep me in a somnolent condition, a draught that will not be injurious
+although taken constantly.”
+
+“Nothing is easier,” the young doctor replied; “but you will have to
+keep on your feet for a few hours daily, at any rate, so as to take your
+food.”
+
+“A few hours!” Raphael broke in; “no, no! I only wish to be out of bed
+for an hour at most.”
+
+“What is your object?” inquired Bianchon.
+
+“To sleep; for so one keeps alive, at any rate,” the patient answered.
+“Let no one come in, not even Mlle. Pauline de Wistchnau!” he added to
+Jonathan, as the doctor was writing out his prescription.
+
+“Well, M. Horace, is there any hope?” the old servant asked, going as
+far as the flight of steps before the door, with the young doctor.
+
+“He may live for some time yet, or he may die to-night. The chances of
+life and death are evenly balanced in his case. I can’t understand it
+at all,” said the doctor, with a doubtful gesture. “His mind ought to be
+diverted.”
+
+“Diverted! Ah, sir, you don’t know him! He killed a man the other day
+without a word!--Nothing can divert him!”
+
+For some days Raphael lay plunged in the torpor of this artificial
+sleep. Thanks to the material power that opium exerts over the
+immaterial part of us, this man with the powerful and active imagination
+reduced himself to the level of those sluggish forms of animal life that
+lurk in the depths of forests, and take the form of vegetable refuse,
+never stirring from their place to catch their easy prey. He had
+darkened the very sun in heaven; the daylight never entered his room.
+About eight o’clock in the evening he would leave his bed, with no very
+clear consciousness of his own existence; he would satisfy the claims
+of hunger and return to bed immediately. One dull blighted hour after
+another only brought confused pictures and appearances before him, and
+lights and shadows against a background of darkness. He lay buried in
+deep silence; movement and intelligence were completely annihilated for
+him. He woke later than usual one evening, and found that his dinner was
+not ready. He rang for Jonathan.
+
+“You can go,” he said. “I have made you rich; you shall be happy in
+your old age; but I will not let you muddle away my life any longer.
+Miserable wretch! I am hungry--where is my dinner? How is it?--Answer
+me!”
+
+A satisfied smile stole over Jonathan’s face. He took a candle that
+lit up the great dark rooms of the mansion with its flickering light;
+brought his master, who had again become an automaton, into a great
+gallery, and flung a door suddenly open. Raphael was all at once dazzled
+by a flood of light and amazed by an unheard-of scene.
+
+His chandeliers had been filled with wax-lights; the rarest flowers
+from his conservatory were carefully arranged about the room; the table
+sparkled with silver, gold, crystal, and porcelain; a royal banquet was
+spread--the odors of the tempting dishes tickled the nervous fibres of
+the palate. There sat his friends; he saw them among beautiful women in
+full evening dress, with bare necks and shoulders, with flowers in their
+hair; fair women of every type, with sparkling eyes, attractively and
+fancifully arrayed. One had adopted an Irish jacket, which displayed
+the alluring outlines of her form; one wore the “basquina” of Andalusia,
+with its wanton grace; here was a half-clad Dian the huntress, there the
+costume of Mlle. de la Valliere, amorous and coy; and all of them alike
+were given up to the intoxication of the moment.
+
+As Raphael’s death-pale face showed itself in the doorway, a sudden
+outcry broke out, as vehement as the blaze of this improvised banquet.
+The voices, perfumes, and lights, the exquisite beauty of the women,
+produced their effect upon his senses, and awakened his desires.
+Delightful music, from unseen players in the next room, drowned the
+excited tumult in a torrent of harmony--the whole strange vision was
+complete.
+
+Raphael felt a caressing pressure on is own hand, a woman’s white,
+youthful arms were stretched out to grasp him, and the hand was
+Aquilina’s. He knew now that this scene was not a fantastic illusion
+like the fleeting pictures of his disordered dreams; he uttered a
+dreadful cry, slammed the door, and dealt his heartbroken old servant a
+blow in the face.
+
+“Monster!” he cried, “so you have sworn to kill me!” and trembling at
+the risks he had just now run, he summoned all his energies, reached his
+room, took a powerful sleeping draught, and went to bed.
+
+“The devil!” cried Jonathan, recovering himself. “And M. Bianchon most
+certainly told me to divert his mind.”
+
+It was close upon midnight. By that time, owing to one of those physical
+caprices that are the marvel and the despair of science, Raphael, in his
+slumber, became radiant with beauty. A bright color glowed on his pale
+cheeks. There was an almost girlish grace about the forehead in which
+his genius was revealed. Life seemed to bloom on the quiet face that lay
+there at rest. His sleep was sound; a light, even breath was drawn in
+between red lips; he was smiling--he had passed no doubt through the
+gate of dreams into a noble life. Was he a centenarian now? Did his
+grandchildren come to wish him length of days? Or, on a rustic bench set
+in the sun and under the trees, was he scanning, like the prophet on the
+mountain heights, a promised land, a far-off time of blessing.
+
+“Here you are!”
+
+The words, uttered in silver tones, dispelled the shadowy faces of his
+dreams. He saw Pauline, in the lamplight, sitting upon the bed; Pauline
+grown fairer yet through sorrow and separation. Raphael remained
+bewildered by the sight of her face, white as the petals of some water
+flower, and the shadow of her long, dark hair about it seemed to make it
+whiter still. Her tears had left a gleaming trace upon her cheeks, and
+hung there yet, ready to fall at the least movement. She looked like an
+angel fallen from the skies, or a spirit that a breath might waft away,
+as she sat there all in white, with her head bowed, scarcely creasing
+the quilt beneath her weight.
+
+“Ah, I have forgotten everything!” she cried, as Raphael opened his
+eyes. “I have no voice left except to tell you, ‘I am yours.’ There is
+nothing in my heart but love. Angel of my life, you have never been so
+beautiful before! Your eyes are blazing---- But come, I can guess it
+all. You have been in search of health without me; you were afraid of
+me---- well----”
+
+“Go! go! leave me,” Raphael muttered at last. “Why do you not go? If you
+stay, I shall die. Do you want to see me die?”
+
+“Die?” she echoed. “Can you die without me? Die? But you are young; and
+I love you! Die?” she asked, in a deep, hollow voice. She seized his
+hands with a frenzied movement. “Cold!” she wailed. “Is it all an
+illusion?”
+
+Raphael drew the little bit of skin from under his pillow; it was as
+tiny and as fragile as a periwinkle petal. He showed it to her.
+
+“Pauline!” he said, “fair image of my fair life, let us say good-bye?”
+
+“Good-bye?” she echoed, looking surprised.
+
+“Yes. This is a talisman that grants me all my wishes, and that
+represents my span of life. See here, this is all that remains of it. If
+you look at me any longer, I shall die----”
+
+The young girl thought that Valentin had grown lightheaded; she took the
+talisman and went to fetch the lamp. By its tremulous light which she
+shed over Raphael and the talisman, she scanned her lover’s face and the
+last morsel of the magic skin. As Pauline stood there, in all the beauty
+of love and terror, Raphael was no longer able to control his thoughts;
+memories of tender scenes, and of passionate and fevered joys,
+overwhelmed the soul that had so long lain dormant within him, and
+kindled a fire not quite extinct.
+
+“Pauline! Pauline! Come to me----”
+
+A dreadful cry came from the girl’s throat, her eyes dilated with
+horror, her eyebrows were distorted and drawn apart by an unspeakable
+anguish; she read in Raphael’s eyes the vehement desire in which she had
+once exulted, but as it grew she felt a light movement in her hand, and
+the skin contracted. She did not stop to think; she fled into the next
+room, and locked the door.
+
+“Pauline! Pauline!” cried the dying man, as he rushed after her; “I love
+you, I adore you, I want you, Pauline! I wish to die in your arms!”
+
+With unnatural strength, the last effort of ebbing life, he broke down
+the door, and saw his mistress writhing upon a sofa. Pauline had vainly
+tried to pierce her heart, and now thought to find a rapid death by
+strangling herself with her shawl.
+
+“If I die, he will live,” she said, trying to tighten the knot that she
+had made.
+
+In her struggle with death her hair hung loose, her shoulders were bare,
+her clothing was disordered, her eyes were bathed in tears, her face
+was flushed and drawn with the horror of despair; yet as her exceeding
+beauty met Raphael’s intoxicated eyes, his delirium grew. He sprang
+towards her like a bird of prey, tore away the shawl, and tried to take
+her in his arms.
+
+The dying man sought for words to express the wish that was consuming
+his strength; but no sounds would come except the choking death-rattle
+in his chest. Each breath he drew sounded hollower than the last, and
+seemed to come from his very entrails. At the last moment, no longer
+able to utter a sound, he set his teeth in Pauline’s breast. Jonathan
+appeared, terrified by the cries he had heard, and tried to tear away
+the dead body from the grasp of the girl who was crouching with it in a
+corner.
+
+“What do you want?” she asked. “He is mine, I have killed him. Did I not
+foresee how it would be?”
+
+
+
+EPILOGUE
+
+“And what became of Pauline?”
+
+“Pauline? Ah! Do you sometimes spend a pleasant winter evening by your
+own fireside, and give yourself up luxuriously to memories of love or
+youth, while you watch the glow of the fire where the logs of oak are
+burning? Here, the fire outlines a sort of chessboard in red squares,
+there it has a sheen like velvet; little blue flames start up and
+flicker and play about in the glowing depths of the brasier. A
+mysterious artist comes and adapts that flame to his own ends; by
+a secret of his own he draws a visionary face in the midst of those
+flaming violet and crimson hues, a face with unimaginable delicate
+outlines, a fleeting apparition which no chance will ever bring back
+again. It is a woman’s face, her hair is blown back by the wind, her
+features speak of a rapture of delight; she breathes fire in the midst
+of the fire. She smiles, she dies, you will never see her any more.
+Farewell, flower of the flame! Farewell, essence incomplete and
+unforeseen, come too early or too late to make the spark of some
+glorious diamond.”
+
+“But, Pauline?”
+
+“You do not see, then? I will begin again. Make way! make way! She
+comes, she is here, the queen of illusions, a woman fleeting as a kiss,
+a woman bright as lightning, issuing in a blaze like lightning from the
+sky, a being uncreated, of spirit and love alone. She has wrapped her
+shadowy form in flame, or perhaps the flame betokens that she exists
+but for a moment. The pure outlines of her shape tell you that she
+comes from heaven. Is she not radiant as an angel? Can you not hear the
+beating of her wings in space? She sinks down beside you more lightly
+than a bird, and you are entranced by her awful eyes; there is a magical
+power in her light breathing that draws your lips to hers; she flies and
+you follow; you feel the earth beneath you no longer. If you could but
+once touch that form of snow with your eager, deluded hands, once twine
+the golden hair round your fingers, place one kiss on those shining
+eyes! There is an intoxicating vapor around, and the spell of a siren
+music is upon you. Every nerve in you is quivering; you are filled with
+pain and longing. O joy for which there is no name! You have touched the
+woman’s lips, and you are awakened at once by a horrible pang. Oh! ah!
+yes, you have struck your head against the corner of the bedpost, you
+have been clasping its brown mahogany sides, and chilly gilt ornaments;
+embracing a piece of metal, a brazen Cupid.”
+
+“But how about Pauline, sir?”
+
+“What, again? Listen. One lovely morning at Tours a young man, who held
+the hand of a pretty woman in his, went on board the _Ville d’Angers_.
+Thus united they both looked and wondered long at a white form that rose
+elusively out of the mists above the broad waters of the Loire, like
+some child of the sun and the river, or some freak of air and cloud.
+This translucent form was a sylph or a naiad by turns; she hovered in
+the air like a word that haunts the memory, which seeks in vain to grasp
+it; she glided among the islands, she nodded her head here and there
+among the tall poplar trees; then she grew to a giant’s height; she
+shook out the countless folds of her drapery to the light; she shot
+light from the aureole that the sun had litten about her face; she
+hovered above the slopes of the hills and their little hamlets, and
+seemed to bar the passage of the boat before the Chateau d’Usse. You
+might have thought that _La dame des belles cousines_ sought to protect
+her country from modern intrusion.”
+
+“Well, well, I understand. So it went with Pauline. But how about
+Foedora?”
+
+“Oh! Foedora, you are sure to meet with her! She was at the Bouffons
+last night, and she will go to the Opera this evening, and if you like
+to take it so, she is Society.”
+
+
+
+
+ADDENDUM
+
+The following personages appear in other stories of the Human Comedy.
+
+     Aquilina
+       Melmoth Reconciled
+
+     Bianchon, Horace
+       Father Goriot
+       The Atheist’s Mass
+       Cesar Birotteau
+       The Commission in Lunacy
+       Lost Illusions
+       A Distinguished Provincial at Paris
+       A Bachelor’s Establishment
+       The Secrets of a Princess
+       The Government Clerks
+       Pierrette
+       A Study of Woman
+       Scenes from a Courtesan’s Life
+       Honorine
+       The Seamy Side of History
+       A Second Home
+       A Prince of Bohemia
+       Letters of Two Brides
+       The Muse of the Department
+       The Imaginary Mistress
+       The Middle Classes
+       Cousin Betty
+       The Country Parson
+     In addition, M. Bianchon narrated the following:
+       Another Study of Woman
+       La Grande Breteche
+
+     Canalis, Constant-Cyr-Melchior, Baron de
+       Letters of Two Brides
+       A Distinguished Provincial at Paris
+       Modeste Mignon
+       Another Study of Woman
+       A Start in Life
+       Beatrix
+       The Unconscious Humorists
+       The Member for Arcis
+
+     Dudley, Lady Arabella
+       The Lily of the Valley
+       The Ball at Sceaux
+       The Secrets of a Princess
+       A Daughter of Eve
+       Letters of Two Brides
+
+     Euphrasia
+       Melmoth Reconciled
+
+     Joseph
+       A Study of Woman
+
+     Massol
+       Scenes from a Courtesan’s Life
+       A Daughter of Eve
+       Cousin Betty
+       The Unconscious Humorists
+
+     Navarreins, Duc de
+       A Bachelor’s Establishment
+       Colonel Chabert
+       The Muse of the Department
+       The Thirteen
+       Jealousies of a Country Town
+       The Peasantry
+       Scenes from a Courtesan’s Life
+       The Country Parson
+       The Gondreville Mystery
+       The Secrets of a Princess
+       Cousin Betty
+
+     Rastignac, Eugene de
+       Father Goriot
+       A Distinguished Provincial at Paris
+       Scenes from a Courtesan’s Life
+       The Ball at Sceaux
+       The Interdiction
+       A Study of Woman
+       Another Study of Woman
+       The Secrets of a Princess
+       A Daughter of Eve
+       The Gondreville Mystery
+       The Firm of Nucingen
+       Cousin Betty
+       The Member for Arcis
+       The Unconscious Humorists
+
+     Taillefer, Jean-Frederic
+       The Firm of Nucingen
+       Father Goriot
+       The Red Inn
+
+
+
+
+
+
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+   "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd" >
+
+<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" lang="en">
+  <head>
+    <title>
+      The Magic Skin, by Honore de Balzac
+    </title>
+    <style type="text/css" xml:space="preserve">
+
+    body { margin:5%; background:#faebd0; text-align:justify}
+    P { text-indent: 1em; margin-top: .25em; margin-bottom: .25em; }
+    H1,H2,H3,H4,H5,H6 { text-align: center; margin-left: 15%; margin-right: 15%; }
+    hr  { width: 50%; text-align: center;}
+    .foot { margin-left: 20%; margin-right: 20%; text-align: justify; text-indent: -3em; font-size: 90%; }
+    blockquote {font-size: 97%; font-style: italic; margin-left: 10%; margin-right: 10%;}
+    .mynote    {background-color: #DDE; color: #000; padding: .5em; margin-left: 10%; margin-right: 10%; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 95%;}
+    .toc       { margin-left: 10%; margin-bottom: .75em;}
+    .toc2      { margin-left: 20%;}
+    div.fig    { display:block; margin:0 auto; text-align:center; }
+    div.middle { margin-left: 20%; margin-right: 20%; text-align: justify; }
+    .figleft   {float: left; margin-left: 0%; margin-right: 1%;}
+    .figright  {float: right; margin-right: 0%; margin-left: 1%;}
+    .pagenum   {display:inline; font-size: 70%; font-style:normal;
+               margin: 0; padding: 0; position: absolute; right: 1%;
+               text-align: right;}
+    pre        { font-style: italic; font-size: 90%; margin-left: 10%;}
+
+</style>
+  </head>
+  <body>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Magic Skin, by Honore de Balzac
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Magic Skin
+
+Author: Honore de Balzac
+
+Translator: Ellen Marriage
+
+Release Date: February 22, 2010 [EBook #1307]
+Last Updated: November 22, 2016
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE MAGIC SKIN ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Dagny, Bonnie Sala, and David Widger
+
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <h1>
+      THE MAGIC SKIN
+    </h1>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      By Honore De Balzac
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      Translated by Ellen Marriage
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+       To Monsieur Savary, Member of Le Academie des Sciences.
+</pre>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+      [omitted: a drawing representing the serpentine
+      path made by the tip of a stick when flourished.]
+
+                            STERNE&mdash;Tristram Shandy, ch. cccxxii.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      Contents
+    </h3>
+    <h3>
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0001"> <b>THE MAGIC SKIN</b> </a>
+    </h3>
+    <h3>
+    </h3>
+    <table summary="" style="margin-right: auto; margin-left: auto">
+      <tr>
+        <td>
+          <p class="toc">
+            <a href="#link2H_4_0002"> I. THE TALISMAN </a>
+          </p>
+          <p class="toc">
+            <a href="#link2H_4_0003"> II. A WOMAN WITHOUT A HEART </a>
+          </p>
+          <p class="toc">
+            <a href="#link2H_4_0004"> III. THE AGONY </a>
+          </p>
+        </td>
+      </tr>
+    </table>
+    <h3>
+      <a href="#link2H_EPIL"> EPILOGUE </a><br /><br /> <a href="#link2H_4_0006">
+      ADDENDUM </a>
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <a name="link2H_4_0001" id="link2H_4_0001">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <h1>
+      THE MAGIC SKIN
+    </h1>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0002" id="link2H_4_0002">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      I. THE TALISMAN
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Towards the end of the month of October 1829 a young man entered the
+      Palais-Royal just as the gaming-houses opened, agreeably to the law which
+      protects a passion by its very nature easily excisable. He mounted the
+      staircase of one of the gambling hells distinguished by the number 36,
+      without too much deliberation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Your hat, sir, if you please?&rdquo; a thin, querulous voice called out. A
+      little old man, crouching in the darkness behind a railing, suddenly rose
+      and exhibited his features, carved after a mean design.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As you enter a gaming-house the law despoils you of your hat at the
+      outset. Is it by way of a parable, a divine revelation? Or by exacting
+      some pledge or other, is not an infernal compact implied? Is it done to
+      compel you to preserve a respectful demeanor towards those who are about
+      to gain money of you? Or must the detective, who squats in our social
+      sewers, know the name of your hatter, or your own, if you happen to have
+      written it on the lining inside? Or, after all, is the measurement of your
+      skull required for the compilation of statistics as to the cerebral
+      capacity of gamblers? The executive is absolutely silent on this point.
+      But be sure of this, that though you have scarcely taken a step towards
+      the tables, your hat no more belongs to you now than you belong to
+      yourself. Play possesses you, your fortune, your cap, your cane, your
+      cloak.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As you go out, it will be made clear to you, by a savage irony, that Play
+      has yet spared you something, since your property is returned. For all
+      that, if you bring a new hat with you, you will have to pay for the
+      knowledge that a special costume is needed for a gambler.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The evident astonishment with which the young man took a numbered tally in
+      exchange for his hat, which was fortunately somewhat rubbed at the brim,
+      showed clearly enough that his mind was yet untainted; and the little old
+      man, who had wallowed from his youth up in the furious pleasures of a
+      gambler&rsquo;s life, cast a dull, indifferent glance over him, in which a
+      philosopher might have seen wretchedness lying in the hospital, the
+      vagrant lives of ruined folk, inquests on numberless suicides, life-long
+      penal servitude and transportations to Guazacoalco.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His pallid, lengthy visage appeared like a haggard embodiment of the
+      passion reduced to its simplest terms. There were traces of past anguish
+      in its wrinkles. He supported life on the glutinous soups at Darcet&rsquo;s, and
+      gambled away his meagre earnings day by day. Like some old hackney which
+      takes no heed of the strokes of the whip, nothing could move him now. The
+      stifled groans of ruined players, as they passed out, their mute
+      imprecations, their stupefied faces, found him impassive. He was the
+      spirit of Play incarnate. If the young man had noticed this sorry
+      Cerberus, perhaps he would have said, &ldquo;There is only a pack of cards in
+      that heart of his.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The stranger did not heed this warning writ in flesh and blood, put here,
+      no doubt, by Providence, who has set loathing on the threshold of all evil
+      haunts. He walked boldly into the saloon, where the rattle of coin brought
+      his senses under the dazzling spell of an agony of greed. Most likely he
+      had been drawn thither by that most convincing of Jean Jacques&rsquo; eloquent
+      periods, which expresses, I think, this melancholy thought, &ldquo;Yes, I can
+      imagine that a man may take to gambling when he sees only his last
+      shilling between him and death.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      There is an illusion about a gambling saloon at night as vulgar as that of
+      a bloodthirsty drama, and just as effective. The rooms are filled with
+      players and onlookers, with poverty-stricken age, which drags itself
+      thither in search of stimulation, with excited faces, and revels that
+      began in wine, to end shortly in the Seine. The passion is there in full
+      measure, but the great number of the actors prevents you from seeing the
+      gambling-demon face to face. The evening is a harmony or chorus in which
+      all take part, to which each instrument in the orchestra contributes his
+      share. You would see there plenty of respectable people who have come in
+      search of diversion, for which they pay as they pay for the pleasures of
+      the theatre, or of gluttony, or they come hither as to some garret where
+      they cheapen poignant regrets for three months to come.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Do you understand all the force and frenzy in a soul which impatiently
+      waits for the opening of a gambling hell? Between the daylight gambler and
+      the player at night there is the same difference that lies between a
+      careless husband and the lover swooning under his lady&rsquo;s window. Only with
+      morning comes the real throb of the passion and the craving in its stark
+      horror. Then you can admire the real gambler, who has neither eaten,
+      slept, thought, nor lived, he has so smarted under the scourge of his
+      martingale, so suffered on the rack of his desire for a coup of <i>trente-et-quarante</i>.
+      At that accursed hour you encounter eyes whose calmness terrifies you,
+      faces that fascinate, glances that seem as if they had power to turn the
+      cards over and consume them. The grandest hours of a gambling saloon are
+      not the opening ones. If Spain has bull-fights, and Rome once had her
+      gladiators, Paris waxes proud of her Palais-Royal, where the inevitable <i>roulettes</i>
+      cause blood to flow in streams, and the public can have the pleasure of
+      watching without fear of their feet slipping in it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Take a quiet peep at the arena. How bare it looks! The paper on the walls
+      is greasy to the height of your head, there is nothing to bring one
+      reviving thought. There is not so much as a nail for the convenience of
+      suicides. The floor is worn and dirty. An oblong table stands in the
+      middle of the room, the tablecloth is worn by the friction of gold, but
+      the straw-bottomed chairs about it indicate an odd indifference to luxury
+      in the men who will lose their lives here in the quest of the fortune that
+      is to put luxury within their reach.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This contradiction in humanity is seen wherever the soul reacts powerfully
+      upon itself. The gallant would clothe his mistress in silks, would deck
+      her out in soft Eastern fabrics, though he and she must lie on a
+      truckle-bed. The ambitious dreamer sees himself at the summit of power,
+      while he slavishly prostrates himself in the mire. The tradesman stagnates
+      in his damp, unhealthy shop, while he builds a great mansion for his son
+      to inherit prematurely, only to be ejected from it by law proceedings at
+      his own brother&rsquo;s instance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After all, is there a less pleasing thing in the world than a house of
+      pleasure? Singular question! Man is always at strife with himself. His
+      present woes give the lie to his hopes; yet he looks to a future which is
+      not his, to indemnify him for these present sufferings; setting upon all
+      his actions the seal of inconsequence and of the weakness of his nature.
+      We have nothing here below in full measure but misfortune.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There were several gamblers in the room already when the young man
+      entered. Three bald-headed seniors were lounging round the green table.
+      Imperturbable as diplomatists, those plaster-cast faces of theirs
+      betokened blunted sensibilities, and hearts which had long forgotten how
+      to throb, even when a woman&rsquo;s dowry was the stake. A young Italian,
+      olive-hued and dark-haired, sat at one end, with his elbows on the table,
+      seeming to listen to the presentiments of luck that dictate a gambler&rsquo;s
+      &ldquo;Yes&rdquo; or &ldquo;No.&rdquo; The glow of fire and gold was on that southern face. Some
+      seven or eight onlookers stood by way of an audience, awaiting a drama
+      composed of the strokes of chance, the faces of the actors, the
+      circulation of coin, and the motion of the croupier&rsquo;s rake, much as a
+      silent, motionless crowd watches the headsman in the Place de Greve. A
+      tall, thin man, in a threadbare coat, held a card in one hand, and a pin
+      in the other, to mark the numbers of Red or Black. He seemed a modern
+      Tantalus, with all the pleasures of his epoch at his lips, a hoardless
+      miser drawing in imaginary gains, a sane species of lunatic who consoles
+      himself in his misery by chimerical dreams, a man who touches peril and
+      vice as a young priest handles the unconsecrated wafer in the white mass.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One or two experts at the game, shrewd speculators, had placed themselves
+      opposite the bank, like old convicts who have lost all fear of the hulks;
+      they meant to try two or three coups, and then to depart at once with the
+      expected gains, on which they lived. Two elderly waiters dawdled about
+      with their arms folded, looking from time to time into the garden from the
+      windows, as if to show their insignificant faces as a sign to passers-by.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The croupier and banker threw a ghastly and withering glance at the
+      punters, and cried, in a sharp voice, &ldquo;Make your game!&rdquo; as the young man
+      came in. The silence seemed to grow deeper as all heads turned curiously
+      towards the new arrival. Who would have thought it? The jaded elders, the
+      fossilized waiters, the onlookers, the fanatical Italian himself, felt an
+      indefinable dread at sight of the stranger. Is he not wretched indeed who
+      can excite pity here? Must he not be very helpless to receive sympathy,
+      ghastly in appearance to raise a shudder in these places, where pain
+      utters no cry, where wretchedness looks gay, and despair is decorous? Such
+      thoughts as these produced a new emotion in these torpid hearts as the
+      young man entered. Were not executioners known to shed tears over the
+      fair-haired, girlish heads that had to fall at the bidding of the
+      Revolution?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The gamblers saw at a glance a dreadful mystery in the novice&rsquo;s face. His
+      young features were stamped with a melancholy grace, his looks told of
+      unsuccess and many blighted hopes. The dull apathy of the suicide had made
+      his forehead so deadly pale, a bitter smile carved faint lines about the
+      corners of his mouth, and there was an abandonment about him that was
+      painful to see. Some sort of demon sparkled in the depths of his eye,
+      which drooped, wearied perhaps with pleasure. Could it have been
+      dissipation that had set its foul mark on the proud face, once pure and
+      bright, and now brought low? Any doctor seeing the yellow circles about
+      his eyelids, and the color in his cheeks, would have set them down to some
+      affection of the heart or lungs, while poets would have attributed them to
+      the havoc brought by the search for knowledge and to night-vigils by the
+      student&rsquo;s lamp.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But a complaint more fatal than any disease, a disease more merciless than
+      genius or study, had drawn this young face, and had wrung a heart which
+      dissipation, study, and sickness had scarcely disturbed. When a notorious
+      criminal is taken to the convict&rsquo;s prison, the prisoners welcome him
+      respectfully, and these evil spirits in human shape, experienced in
+      torments, bowed before an unheard-of anguish. By the depth of the wound
+      which met their eyes, they recognized a prince among them, by the majesty
+      of his unspoken irony, by the refined wretchedness of his garb. The
+      frock-coat that he wore was well cut, but his cravat was on terms so
+      intimate with his waistcoat that no one could suspect him of underlinen.
+      His hands, shapely as a woman&rsquo;s were not perfectly clean; for two days
+      past indeed he had ceased to wear gloves. If the very croupier and the
+      waiters shuddered, it was because some traces of the spell of innocence
+      yet hung about his meagre, delicately-shaped form, and his scanty fair
+      hair in its natural curls.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He looked only about twenty-five years of age, and any trace of vice in
+      his face seemed to be there by accident. A young constitution still
+      resisted the inroads of lubricity. Darkness and light, annihilation and
+      existence, seemed to struggle in him, with effects of mingled beauty and
+      terror. There he stood like some erring angel that has lost his radiance;
+      and these emeritus-professors of vice and shame were ready to bid the
+      novice depart, even as some toothless crone might be seized with pity for
+      a beautiful girl who offers herself up to infamy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The young man went straight up to the table, and, as he stood there, flung
+      down a piece of gold which he held in his hand, without deliberation. It
+      rolled on to the Black; then, as strong natures can, he looked calmly, if
+      anxiously, at the croupier, as if he held useless subterfuges in scorn.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The interest this coup awakened was so great that the old gamesters laid
+      nothing upon it; only the Italian, inspired by a gambler&rsquo;s enthusiasm,
+      smiled suddenly at some thought, and punted his heap of coin against the
+      stranger&rsquo;s stake.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The banker forgot to pronounce the phrases that use and wont have reduced
+      to an inarticulate cry&mdash;&ldquo;Make your game.... The game is made.... Bets
+      are closed.&rdquo; The croupier spread out the cards, and seemed to wish luck to
+      the newcomer, indifferent as he was to the losses or gains of those who
+      took part in these sombre pleasures. Every bystander thought he saw a
+      drama, the closing scene of a noble life, in the fortunes of that bit of
+      gold; and eagerly fixed his eyes on the prophetic cards; but however
+      closely they watched the young man, they could discover not the least sign
+      of feeling on his cool but restless face.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Even! red wins,&rdquo; said the croupier officially. A dumb sort of rattle came
+      from the Italian&rsquo;s throat when he saw the folded notes that the banker
+      showered upon him, one after another. The young man only understood his
+      calamity when the croupiers&rsquo;s rake was extended to sweep away his last
+      napoleon. The ivory touched the coin with a little click, as it swept it
+      with the speed of an arrow into the heap of gold before the bank. The
+      stranger turned pale at the lips, and softly shut his eyes, but he
+      unclosed them again at once, and the red color returned as he affected the
+      airs of an Englishman, to whom life can offer no new sensation, and
+      disappeared without the glance full of entreaty for compassion that a
+      desperate gamester will often give the bystanders. How much can happen in
+      a second&rsquo;s space; how many things depend on a throw of the die!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That was his last cartridge, of course,&rdquo; said the croupier, smiling after
+      a moment&rsquo;s silence, during which he picked up the coin between his finger
+      and thumb and held it up.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He is a cracked brain that will go and drown himself,&rdquo; said a frequenter
+      of the place. He looked round about at the other players, who all knew
+      each other.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Bah!&rdquo; said a waiter, as he took a pinch of snuff.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If we had but followed <i>his</i> example,&rdquo; said an old gamester to the
+      others, as he pointed out the Italian.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Everybody looked at the lucky player, whose hands shook as he counted his
+      bank-notes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A voice seemed to whisper to me,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;The luck is sure to go
+      against that young man&rsquo;s despair.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He is a new hand,&rdquo; said the banker, &ldquo;or he would have divided his money
+      into three parts to give himself more chance.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The young man went out without asking for his hat; but the old watch-dog,
+      who had noted its shabby condition, returned it to him without a word. The
+      gambler mechanically gave up the tally, and went downstairs whistling <i>Di
+      tanti Palpiti</i> so feebly, that he himself scarcely heard the delicious
+      notes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He found himself immediately under the arcades of the Palais-Royal,
+      reached the Rue Saint Honore, took the direction of the Tuileries, and
+      crossed the gardens with an undecided step. He walked as if he were in
+      some desert, elbowed by men whom he did not see, hearing through all the
+      voices of the crowd one voice alone&mdash;the voice of Death. He was lost
+      in the thoughts that benumbed him at last, like the criminals who used to
+      be taken in carts from the Palais de Justice to the Place de Greve, where
+      the scaffold awaited them reddened with all the blood spilt here since
+      1793.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There is something great and terrible about suicide. Most people&rsquo;s
+      downfalls are not dangerous; they are like children who have not far to
+      fall, and cannot injure themselves; but when a great nature is dashed
+      down, he is bound to fall from a height. He must have been raised almost
+      to the skies; he has caught glimpses of some heaven beyond his reach.
+      Vehement must the storms be which compel a soul to seek for peace from the
+      trigger of a pistol.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      How much young power starves and pines away in a garret for want of a
+      friend, for lack of a woman&rsquo;s consolation, in the midst of millions of
+      fellow-creatures, in the presence of a listless crowd that is burdened by
+      its wealth! When one remembers all this, suicide looms large. Between a
+      self-sought death and the abundant hopes whose voices call a young man to
+      Paris, God only knows what may intervene; what contending ideas have
+      striven within the soul; what poems have been set aside; what moans and
+      what despair have been repressed; what abortive masterpieces and vain
+      endeavors! Every suicide is an awful poem of sorrow. Where will you find a
+      work of genius floating above the seas of literature that can compare with
+      this paragraph:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+  &ldquo;Yesterday, at four o&rsquo;clock, a young woman threw herself into the
+  Seine from the Pont des Arts.&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      Dramas and romances pale before this concise Parisian phrase; so must even
+      that old frontispiece, <i>The Lamentations of the glorious king of
+      Kaernavan, put in prison by his children</i>, the sole remaining fragment
+      of a lost work that drew tears from Sterne at the bare perusal&mdash;the
+      same Sterne who deserted his own wife and family.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The stranger was beset with such thoughts as these, which passed in
+      fragments through his mind, like tattered flags fluttering above the
+      combat. If he set aside for a moment the burdens of consciousness and of
+      memory, to watch the flower heads gently swayed by the breeze among the
+      green thickets, a revulsion came over him, life struggled against the
+      oppressive thought of suicide, and his eyes rose to the sky: gray clouds,
+      melancholy gusts of the wind, the stormy atmosphere, all decreed that he
+      should die.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He bent his way toward the Pont Royal, musing over the last fancies of
+      others who had gone before him. He smiled to himself as he remembered that
+      Lord Castlereagh had satisfied the humblest of our needs before he cut his
+      throat, and that the academician Auger had sought for his snuff-box as he
+      went to his death. He analyzed these extravagances, and even examined
+      himself; for as he stood aside against the parapet to allow a porter to
+      pass, his coat had been whitened somewhat by the contact, and he carefully
+      brushed the dust from his sleeve, to his own surprise. He reached the
+      middle of the arch, and looked forebodingly at the water.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Wretched weather for drowning yourself,&rdquo; said a ragged old woman, who
+      grinned at him; &ldquo;isn&rsquo;t the Seine cold and dirty?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      His answer was a ready smile, which showed the frenzied nature of his
+      courage; then he shivered all at once as he saw at a distance, by the door
+      of the Tuileries, a shed with an inscription above it in letters twelve
+      inches high: THE ROYAL HUMANE SOCIETY&rsquo;S APPARATUS.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A vision of M. Dacheux rose before him, equipped by his philanthropy,
+      calling out and setting in motion the too efficacious oars which break the
+      heads of drowning men, if unluckily they should rise to the surface; he
+      saw a curious crowd collecting, running for a doctor, preparing
+      fumigations, he read the maundering paragraph in the papers, put between
+      notes on a festivity and on the smiles of a ballet-dancer; he heard the
+      francs counted down by the prefect of police to the watermen. As a corpse,
+      he was worth fifteen francs; but now while he lived he was only a man of
+      talent without patrons, without friends, without a mattress to lie on, or
+      any one to speak a word for him&mdash;a perfect social cipher, useless to
+      a State which gave itself no trouble about him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A death in broad daylight seemed degrading to him; he made up his mind to
+      die at night so as to bequeath an unrecognizable corpse to a world which
+      had disregarded the greatness of life. He began his wanderings again,
+      turning towards the Quai Voltaire, imitating the lagging gait of an idler
+      seeking to kill time. As he came down the steps at the end of the bridge,
+      his notice was attracted by the second-hand books displayed on the
+      parapet, and he was on the point of bargaining for some. He smiled, thrust
+      his hands philosophically into his pockets, and fell to strolling on again
+      with a proud disdain in his manner, when he heard to his surprise some
+      coin rattling fantastically in his pocket.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A smile of hope lit his face, and slid from his lips over his features,
+      over his brow, and brought a joyful light to his eyes and his dark cheeks.
+      It was a spark of happiness like one of the red dots that flit over the
+      remains of a burnt scrap of paper; but as it is with the black ashes, so
+      it was with his face, it became dull again when the stranger quickly drew
+      out his hand and perceived three pennies. &ldquo;Ah, kind gentleman! <i>carita</i>,
+      <i>carita</i>; for the love of St. Catherine! only a halfpenny to buy some
+      bread!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      A little chimney sweeper, with puffed cheeks, all black with soot, and
+      clad in tatters, held out his hand to beg for the man&rsquo;s last pence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Two paces from the little Savoyard stood an old <i>pauvre honteux</i>,
+      sickly and feeble, in wretched garments of ragged druggeting, who asked in
+      a thick, muffled voice:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Anything you like to give, monsieur; I will pray to God for you...&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      But the young man turned his eyes on him, and the old beggar stopped
+      without another word, discerning in that mournful face an abandonment of
+      wretchedness more bitter than his own.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;<i>La carita</i>! <i>la carita</i>!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The stranger threw the coins to the old man and the child, left the
+      footway, and turned towards the houses; the harrowing sight of the Seine
+      fretted him beyond endurance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;May God lengthen your days!&rdquo; cried the two beggars.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As he reached the shop window of a print-seller, this man on the brink of
+      death met a young woman alighting from a showy carriage. He looked in
+      delight at her prettiness, at the pale face appropriately framed by the
+      satin of her fashionable bonnet. Her slender form and graceful movements
+      entranced him. Her skirt had been slightly raised as she stepped to the
+      pavement, disclosing a daintily fitting white stocking over the delicate
+      outlines beneath. The young lady went into the shop, purchased albums and
+      sets of lithographs; giving several gold coins for them, which glittered
+      and rang upon the counter. The young man, seemingly occupied with the
+      prints in the window, fixed upon the fair stranger a gaze as eager as man
+      can give, to receive in exchange an indifferent glance, such as lights by
+      accident on a passer-by. For him it was a leave-taking of love and of
+      woman; but his final and strenuous questioning glance was neither
+      understood nor felt by the slight-natured woman there; her color did not
+      rise, her eyes did not droop. What was it to her? one more piece of
+      adulation, yet another sigh only prompted the delightful thought at night,
+      &ldquo;I looked rather well to-day.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The young man quickly turned to another picture, and only left it when she
+      returned to her carriage. The horses started off, the final vision of
+      luxury and refinement went under an eclipse, just as that life of his
+      would soon do also. Slowly and sadly he followed the line of the shops,
+      listlessly examining the specimens on view. When the shops came to an end,
+      he reviewed the Louvre, the Institute, the towers of Notre Dame, of the
+      Palais, the Pont des Arts; all these public monuments seemed to have taken
+      their tone from the heavy gray sky.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Fitful gleams of light gave a foreboding look to Paris; like a pretty
+      woman, the city has mysterious fits of ugliness or beauty. So the outer
+      world seemed to be in a plot to steep this man about to die in a painful
+      trance. A prey to the maleficent power which acts relaxingly upon us by
+      the fluid circulating through our nerves, his whole frame seemed gradually
+      to experience a dissolving process. He felt the anguish of these throes
+      passing through him in waves, and the houses and the crowd seemed to surge
+      to and fro in a mist before his eyes. He tried to escape the agitation
+      wrought in his mind by the revulsions of his physical nature, and went
+      toward the shop of a dealer in antiquities, thinking to give a treat to
+      his senses, and to spend the interval till nightfall in bargaining over
+      curiosities.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He sought, one might say, to regain courage and to find a stimulant, like
+      a criminal who doubts his power to reach the scaffold. The consciousness
+      of approaching death gave him, for the time being, the intrepidity of a
+      duchess with a couple of lovers, so that he entered the place with an
+      abstracted look, while his lips displayed a set smile like a drunkard&rsquo;s.
+      Had not life, or rather had not death, intoxicated him? Dizziness soon
+      overcame him again. Things appeared to him in strange colors, or as making
+      slight movements; his irregular pulse was no doubt the cause; the blood
+      that sometimes rushed like a burning torrent through his veins, and
+      sometimes lay torpid and stagnant as tepid water. He merely asked leave to
+      see if the shop contained any curiosities which he required.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A plump-faced young shopman with red hair, in an otter-skin cap, left an
+      old peasant woman in charge of the shop&mdash;a sort of feminine Caliban,
+      employed in cleaning a stove made marvelous by Bernard Palissy&rsquo;s work.
+      This youth remarked carelessly:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Look round, <i>monsieur</i>! We have nothing very remarkable here
+      downstairs; but if I may trouble you to go up to the first floor, I will
+      show you some very fine mummies from Cairo, some inlaid pottery, and some
+      carved ebony&mdash;<i>genuine Renaissance</i> work, just come in, and of
+      perfect beauty.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      In the stranger&rsquo;s fearful position this cicerone&rsquo;s prattle and shopman&rsquo;s
+      empty talk seemed like the petty vexations by which narrow minds destroy a
+      man of genius. But as he must even go through with it, he appeared to
+      listen to his guide, answering him by gestures or monosyllables; but
+      imperceptibly he arrogated the privilege of saying nothing, and gave
+      himself up without hindrance to his closing meditations, which were
+      appalling. He had a poet&rsquo;s temperament, his mind had entered by chance on
+      a vast field; and he must see perforce the dry bones of twenty future
+      worlds.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At a first glance the place presented a confused picture in which every
+      achievement, human and divine, was mingled. Crocodiles, monkeys, and
+      serpents stuffed with straw grinned at glass from church windows, seemed
+      to wish to bite sculptured heads, to chase lacquered work, or to scramble
+      up chandeliers. A Sevres vase, bearing Napoleon&rsquo;s portrait by Mme.
+      Jacotot, stood beside a sphinx dedicated to Sesostris. The beginnings of
+      the world and the events of yesterday were mingled with grotesque
+      cheerfulness. A kitchen jack leaned against a pyx, a republican sabre on a
+      mediaeval hackbut. Mme. du Barry, with a star above her head, naked, and
+      surrounded by a cloud, seemed to look longingly out of Latour&rsquo;s pastel at
+      an Indian chibook, while she tried to guess the purpose of the spiral
+      curves that wound towards her. Instruments of death, poniards, curious
+      pistols, and disguised weapons had been flung down pell-mell among the
+      paraphernalia of daily life; porcelain tureens, Dresden plates,
+      translucent cups from china, old salt-cellars, comfit-boxes belonging to
+      feudal times. A carved ivory ship sped full sail on the back of a
+      motionless tortoise.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Emperor Augustus remained unmoved and imperial with an air-pump thrust
+      into one eye. Portraits of French sheriffs and Dutch burgomasters,
+      phlegmatic now as when in life, looked down pallid and unconcerned on the
+      chaos of past ages below them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Every land of earth seemed to have contributed some stray fragment of its
+      learning, some example of its art. Nothing seemed lacking to this
+      philosophical kitchen-midden, from a redskin&rsquo;s calumet, a green and golden
+      slipper from the seraglio, a Moorish yataghan, a Tartar idol, to the
+      soldier&rsquo;s tobacco pouch, to the priest&rsquo;s ciborium, and the plumes that
+      once adorned a throne. This extraordinary combination was rendered yet
+      more bizarre by the accidents of lighting, by a multitude of confused
+      reflections of various hues, by the sharp contrast of blacks and whites.
+      Broken cries seemed to reach the ear, unfinished dramas seized upon the
+      imagination, smothered lights caught the eye. A thin coating of inevitable
+      dust covered all the multitudinous corners and convolutions of these
+      objects of various shapes which gave highly picturesque effects.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      First of all, the stranger compared the three galleries which
+      civilization, cults, divinities, masterpieces, dominions, carousals,
+      sanity, and madness had filled to repletion, to a mirror with numerous
+      facets, each depicting a world. After this first hazy idea he would fain
+      have selected his pleasures; but by dint of using his eyes, thinking and
+      musing, a fever began to possess him, caused perhaps by the gnawing pain
+      of hunger. The spectacle of so much existence, individual or national, to
+      which these pledges bore witness, ended by numbing his senses&mdash;the
+      purpose with which he entered the shop was fulfilled. He had left the real
+      behind, and had climbed gradually up to an ideal world; he had attained to
+      the enchanted palace of ecstasy, whence the universe appeared to him by
+      fragments and in shapes of flame, as once the future blazed out before the
+      eyes of St. John in Patmos.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A crowd of sorrowing faces, beneficent and appalling, dark and luminous,
+      far and near, gathered in numbers, in myriads, in whole generations.
+      Egypt, rigid and mysterious, arose from her sands in the form of a mummy
+      swathed in black bandages; then the Pharaohs swallowed up nations, that
+      they might build themselves a tomb; and he beheld Moses and the Hebrews
+      and the desert, and a solemn antique world. Fresh and joyous, a marble
+      statue spoke to him from a twisted column of the pleasure-loving myths of
+      Greece and Ionia. Ah! who would not have smiled with him to see, against
+      the earthen red background, the brown-faced maiden dancing with gleeful
+      reverence before the god Priapus, wrought in the fine clay of an Etruscan
+      vase? The Latin queen caressed her chimera.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The whims of Imperial Rome were there in life, the bath was disclosed, the
+      toilette of a languid Julia, dreaming, waiting for her Tibullus. Strong
+      with the might of Arabic spells, the head of Cicero evoked memories of a
+      free Rome, and unrolled before him the scrolls of Titus Livius. The young
+      man beheld <i>Senatus Populusque Romanus</i>; consuls, lictors, togas with
+      purple fringes; the fighting in the Forum, the angry people, passed in
+      review before him like the cloudy faces of a dream.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then Christian Rome predominated in his vision. A painter had laid heaven
+      open; he beheld the Virgin Mary wrapped in a golden cloud among the
+      angels, shining more brightly than the sun, receiving the prayers of
+      sufferers, on whom this second Eve Regenerate smiles pityingly. At the
+      touch of a mosaic, made of various lavas from Vesuvius and Etna, his fancy
+      fled to the hot tawny south of Italy. He was present at Borgia&rsquo;s orgies,
+      he roved among the Abruzzi, sought for Italian love intrigues, grew ardent
+      over pale faces and dark, almond-shaped eyes. He shivered over midnight
+      adventures, cut short by the cool thrust of a jealous blade, as he saw a
+      mediaeval dagger with a hilt wrought like lace, and spots of rust like
+      splashes of blood upon it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      India and its religions took the shape of the idol with his peaked cap of
+      fantastic form, with little bells, clad in silk and gold. Close by, a mat,
+      as pretty as the bayadere who once lay upon it, still gave out a faint
+      scent of sandal wood. His fancy was stirred by a goggle-eyed Chinese
+      monster, with mouth awry and twisted limbs, the invention of a people who,
+      grown weary of the monotony of beauty, found an indescribable pleasure in
+      an infinite variety of ugliness. A salt-cellar from Benvenuto Cellini&rsquo;s
+      workshop carried him back to the Renaissance at its height, to the time
+      when there was no restraint on art or morals, when torture was the sport
+      of sovereigns; and from their councils, churchmen with courtesans&rsquo; arms
+      about them issued decrees of chastity for simple priests.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On a cameo he saw the conquests of Alexander, the massacres of Pizarro in
+      a matchbox, and religious wars disorderly, fanatical, and cruel, in the
+      shadows of a helmet. Joyous pictures of chivalry were called up by a suit
+      of Milanese armor, brightly polished and richly wrought; a paladin&rsquo;s eyes
+      seemed to sparkle yet under the visor.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This sea of inventions, fashions, furniture, works of art and fiascos,
+      made for him a poem without end. Shapes and colors and projects all lived
+      again for him, but his mind received no clear and perfect conception. It
+      was the poet&rsquo;s task to complete the sketches of the great master, who had
+      scornfully mingled on his palette the hues of the numberless vicissitudes
+      of human life. When the world at large at last released him, when he had
+      pondered over many lands, many epochs, and various empires, the young man
+      came back to the life of the individual. He impersonated fresh characters,
+      and turned his mind to details, rejecting the life of nations as a burden
+      too overwhelming for a single soul.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Yonder was a sleeping child modeled in wax, a relic of Ruysch&rsquo;s
+      collection, an enchanting creation which brought back the happiness of his
+      own childhood. The cotton garment of a Tahitian maid next fascinated him;
+      he beheld the primitive life of nature, the real modesty of naked
+      chastity, the joys of an idleness natural to mankind, a peaceful fate by a
+      slow river of sweet water under a plantain tree that bears its pleasant
+      manna without the toil of man. Then all at once he became a corsair,
+      investing himself with the terrible poetry that Lara has given to the
+      part: the thought came at the sight of the mother-of-pearl tints of a
+      myriad sea-shells, and grew as he saw madrepores redolent of the sea-weeds
+      and the storms of the Atlantic.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The sea was forgotten again at a distant view of exquisite miniatures; he
+      admired a precious missal in manuscript, adorned with arabesques in gold
+      and blue. Thoughts of peaceful life swayed him; he devoted himself afresh
+      to study and research, longing for the easy life of the monk, devoid alike
+      of cares and pleasures; and from the depths of his cell he looked out upon
+      the meadows, woods, and vineyards of his convent. Pausing before some work
+      of Teniers, he took for his own the helmet of the soldier or the poverty
+      of the artisan; he wished to wear a smoke-begrimed cap with these
+      Flemings, to drink their beer and join their game at cards, and smiled
+      upon the comely plumpness of a peasant woman. He shivered at a snowstorm
+      by Mieris; he seemed to take part in Salvator Rosa&rsquo;s battle-piece; he ran
+      his fingers over a tomahawk form Illinois, and felt his own hair rise as
+      he touched a Cherokee scalping-knife. He marveled over the rebec that he
+      set in the hands of some lady of the land, drank in the musical notes of
+      her ballad, and in the twilight by the gothic arch above the hearth he
+      told his love in a gloom so deep that he could not read his answer in her
+      eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He caught at all delights, at all sorrows; grasped at existence in every
+      form; and endowed the phantoms conjured up from that inert and plastic
+      material so liberally with his own life and feelings, that the sound of
+      his own footsteps reached him as if from another world, or as the hum of
+      Paris reaches the towers of Notre Dame.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He ascended the inner staircase which led to the first floor, with its
+      votive shields, panoplies, carved shrines, and figures on the wall at
+      every step. Haunted by the strangest shapes, by marvelous creations
+      belonging to the borderland betwixt life and death, he walked as if under
+      the spell of a dream. His own existence became a matter of doubt to him;
+      he was neither wholly alive nor dead, like the curious objects about him.
+      The light began to fade as he reached the show-rooms, but the treasures of
+      gold and silver heaped up there scarcely seemed to need illumination from
+      without. The most extravagant whims of prodigals, who have run through
+      millions to perish in garrets, had left their traces here in this vast
+      bazar of human follies. Here, beside a writing desk, made at the cost of
+      100,000 francs, and sold for a hundred pence, lay a lock with a secret
+      worth a king&rsquo;s ransom. The human race was revealed in all the grandeur of
+      its wretchedness; in all the splendor of its infinite littleness. An ebony
+      table that an artist might worship, carved after Jean Goujon&rsquo;s designs, in
+      years of toil, had been purchased perhaps at the price of firewood.
+      Precious caskets, and things that fairy hands might have fashioned, lay
+      there in heaps like rubbish.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You must have the worth of millions here!&rdquo; cried the young man as he
+      entered the last of an immense suite of rooms, all decorated and gilt by
+      eighteenth century artists.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Thousands of millions, you might say,&rdquo; said the florid shopman; &ldquo;but you
+      have seen nothing as yet. Go up to the third floor, and you shall see!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The stranger followed his guide to a fourth gallery, where one by one
+      there passed before his wearied eyes several pictures by Poussin, a
+      magnificent statue by Michael Angelo, enchanting landscapes by Claude
+      Lorraine, a Gerard Dow (like a stray page from Sterne), Rembrandts,
+      Murillos, and pictures by Velasquez, as dark and full of color as a poem
+      of Byron&rsquo;s; then came classic bas-reliefs, finely-cut agates, wonderful
+      cameos! Works of art upon works of art, till the craftsman&rsquo;s skill palled
+      on the mind, masterpiece after masterpiece till art itself became hateful
+      at last and enthusiasm died. He came upon a Madonna by Raphael, but he was
+      tired of Raphael; a figure by Correggio never received the glance it
+      demanded of him. A priceless vase of antique porphyry carved round about
+      with pictures of the most grotesquely wanton of Roman divinities, the
+      pride of some Corinna, scarcely drew a smile from him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The ruins of fifteen hundred vanished years oppressed him; he sickened
+      under all this human thought; felt bored by all this luxury and art. He
+      struggled in vain against the constantly renewed fantastic shapes that
+      sprang up from under his feet, like children of some sportive demon.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Are not fearful poisons set up in the soul by a swift concentration of all
+      her energies, her enjoyments, or ideas; as modern chemistry, in its
+      caprice, repeats the action of creation by some gas or other? Do not many
+      men perish under the shock of the sudden expansion of some moral acid
+      within them?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What is there in that box?&rdquo; he inquired, as he reached a large closet&mdash;final
+      triumph of human skill, originality, wealth, and splendor, in which there
+      hung a large, square mahogany coffer, suspended from a nail by a silver
+      chain.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah, <i>monsieur</i> keeps the key of it,&rdquo; said the stout assistant
+      mysteriously. &ldquo;If you wish to see the portrait, I will gladly venture to
+      tell him.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Venture!&rdquo; said the young man; &ldquo;then is your master a prince?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don&rsquo;t know what he is,&rdquo; the other answered. Equally astonished, each
+      looked for a moment at the other. Then construing the stranger&rsquo;s silence
+      as an order, the apprentice left him alone in the closet.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Have you never launched into the immensity of time and space as you read
+      the geological writings of Cuvier? Carried by his fancy, have you hung as
+      if suspended by a magician&rsquo;s wand over the illimitable abyss of the past?
+      When the fossil bones of animals belonging to civilizations before the
+      Flood are turned up in bed after bed and layer upon layer of the quarries
+      of Montmartre or among the schists of the Ural range, the soul receives
+      with dismay a glimpse of millions of peoples forgotten by feeble human
+      memory and unrecognized by permanent divine tradition, peoples whose ashes
+      cover our globe with two feet of earth that yields bread to us and
+      flowers.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Is not Cuvier the great poet of our era? Byron has given admirable
+      expression to certain moral conflicts, but our immortal naturalist has
+      reconstructed past worlds from a few bleached bones; has rebuilt cities,
+      like Cadmus, with monsters&rsquo; teeth; has animated forests with all the
+      secrets of zoology gleaned from a piece of coal; has discovered a giant
+      population from the footprints of a mammoth. These forms stand erect, grow
+      large, and fill regions commensurate with their giant size. He treats
+      figures like a poet; a naught set beside a seven by him produces awe.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He can call up nothingness before you without the phrases of a charlatan.
+      He searches a lump of gypsum, finds an impression in it, says to you,
+      &ldquo;Behold!&rdquo; All at once marble takes an animal shape, the dead come to life,
+      the history of the world is laid open before you. After countless
+      dynasties of giant creatures, races of fish and clans of mollusks, the
+      race of man appears at last as the degenerate copy of a splendid model,
+      which the Creator has perchance destroyed. Emboldened by his gaze into the
+      past, this petty race, children of yesterday, can overstep chaos, can
+      raise a psalm without end, and outline for themselves the story of the
+      Universe in an Apocalypse that reveals the past. After the tremendous
+      resurrection that took place at the voice of this man, the little drop in
+      the nameless Infinite, common to all spheres, that is ours to use, and
+      that we call Time, seems to us a pitiable moment of life. We ask ourselves
+      the purpose of our triumphs, our hatreds, our loves, overwhelmed as we are
+      by the destruction of so many past universes, and whether it is worth
+      while to accept the pain of life in order that hereafter we may become an
+      intangible speck. Then we remain as if dead, completely torn away from the
+      present till the <i>valet de chambre</i> comes in and says, &ldquo;<i>Madame la
+      comtesse</i> answers that she is expecting <i>monsieur</i>.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      All the wonders which had brought the known world before the young man&rsquo;s
+      mind wrought in his soul much the same feeling of dejection that besets
+      the philosopher investigating unknown creatures. He longed more than ever
+      for death as he flung himself back in a curule chair and let his eyes
+      wander across the illusions composing a panorama of the past. The pictures
+      seemed to light up, the Virgin&rsquo;s heads smiled on him, the statues seemed
+      alive. Everything danced and swayed around him, with a motion due to the
+      gloom and the tormenting fever that racked his brain; each monstrosity
+      grimaced at him, while the portraits on the canvas closed their eyes for a
+      little relief. Every shape seemed to tremble and start, and to leave its
+      place gravely or flippantly, gracefully or awkwardly, according to its
+      fashion, character, and surroundings.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A mysterious Sabbath began, rivaling the fantastic scenes witnessed by
+      Faust upon the Brocken. But these optical illusions, produced by
+      weariness, overstrained eyesight, or the accidents of twilight, could not
+      alarm the stranger. The terrors of life had no power over a soul grown
+      familiar with the terrors of death. He even gave himself up, half amused
+      by its bizarre eccentricities, to the influence of this moral galvanism;
+      its phenomena, closely connected with his last thoughts, assured him that
+      he was still alive. The silence about him was so deep that he embarked
+      once more in dreams that grew gradually darker and darker as if by magic,
+      as the light slowly faded. A last struggling ray from the sun lit up rosy
+      answering lights. He raised his head and saw a skeleton dimly visible,
+      with its skull bent doubtfully to one side, as if to say, &ldquo;The dead will
+      none of thee as yet.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He passed his hand over his forehead to shake off the drowsiness, and felt
+      a cold breath of air as an unknown furry something swept past his cheeks.
+      He shivered. A muffled clatter of the windows followed; it was a bat, he
+      fancied, that had given him this chilly sepulchral caress. He could yet
+      dimly see for a moment the shapes that surrounded him, by the vague light
+      in the west; then all these inanimate objects were blotted out in uniform
+      darkness. Night and the hour of death had suddenly come. Thenceforward,
+      for a while, he lost consciousness of the things about him; he was either
+      buried in deep meditation or sleep overcame him, brought on by weariness
+      or by the stress of those many thoughts that lacerated his heart.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Suddenly he thought that an awful voice called him by name; it was like
+      some feverish nightmare, when at a step the dreamer falls headlong over
+      into an abyss, and he trembled. He closed his eyes, dazzled by bright rays
+      from a red circle of light that shone out from the shadows. In the midst
+      of the circle stood a little old man who turned the light of the lamp upon
+      him, yet he had not heard him enter, nor move, nor speak. There was
+      something magical about the apparition. The boldest man, awakened in such
+      a sort, would have felt alarmed at the sight of this figure, which might
+      have issued from some sarcophagus hard by.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A curiously youthful look in the unmoving eyes of the spectre forbade the
+      idea of anything supernatural; but for all that, in the brief space
+      between his dreaming and waking life, the young man&rsquo;s judgment remained
+      philosophically suspended, as Descartes advises. He was, in spite of
+      himself, under the influence of an unaccountable hallucination, a mystery
+      that our pride rejects, and that our imperfect science vainly tries to
+      resolve.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Imagine a short old man, thin and spare, in a long black velvet gown
+      girded round him by a thick silk cord. His long white hair escaped on
+      either side of his face from under a black velvet cap which closely fitted
+      his head and made a formal setting for his countenance. His gown enveloped
+      his body like a winding sheet, so that all that was left visible was a
+      narrow bleached human face. But for the wasted arm, thin as a draper&rsquo;s
+      wand, which held aloft the lamp that cast all its light upon him, the face
+      would have seemed to hang in mid air. A gray pointed beard concealed the
+      chin of this fantastical appearance, and gave him the look of one of those
+      Jewish types which serve artists as models for Moses. His lips were so
+      thin and colorless that it needed a close inspection to find the lines of
+      his mouth at all in the pallid face. His great wrinkled brow and hollow
+      bloodless cheeks, the inexorably stern expression of his small green eyes
+      that no longer possessed eyebrows or lashes, might have convinced the
+      stranger that Gerard Dow&rsquo;s &ldquo;Money Changer&rdquo; had come down from his frame.
+      The craftiness of an inquisitor, revealed in those curving wrinkles and
+      creases that wound about his temples, indicated a profound knowledge of
+      life. There was no deceiving this man, who seemed to possess a power of
+      detecting the secrets of the wariest heart.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The wisdom and the moral codes of every people seemed gathered up in his
+      passive face, just as all the productions of the globe had been heaped up
+      in his dusty showrooms. He seemed to possess the tranquil luminous vision
+      of some god before whom all things are open, or the haughty power of a man
+      who knows all things.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      With two strokes of the brush a painter could have so altered the
+      expression of this face, that what had been a serene representation of the
+      Eternal Father should change to the sneering mask of a Mephistopheles; for
+      though sovereign power was revealed by the forehead, mocking folds lurked
+      about the mouth. He must have sacrificed all the joys of earth, as he had
+      crushed all human sorrows beneath his potent will. The man at the brink of
+      death shivered at the thought of the life led by this spirit, so solitary
+      and remote from our world; joyless, since he had no one illusion left;
+      painless, because pleasure had ceased to exist for him. There he stood,
+      motionless and serene as a star in a bright mist. His lamp lit up the
+      obscure closet, just as his green eyes, with their quiet malevolence,
+      seemed to shed a light on the moral world.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This was the strange spectacle that startled the young man&rsquo;s returning
+      sight, as he shook off the dreamy fancies and thoughts of death that had
+      lulled him. An instant of dismay, a momentary return to belief in nursery
+      tales, may be forgiven him, seeing that his senses were obscured. Much
+      thought had wearied his mind, and his nerves were exhausted with the
+      strain of the tremendous drama within him, and by the scenes that had
+      heaped on him all the horrid pleasures that a piece of opium can produce.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But this apparition had appeared in Paris, on the Quai Voltaire, and in
+      the nineteenth century; the time and place made sorcery impossible. The
+      idol of French scepticism had died in the house just opposite, the
+      disciple of Gay-Lussac and Arago, who had held the charlatanism of
+      intellect in contempt. And yet the stranger submitted himself to the
+      influence of an imaginative spell, as all of us do at times, when we wish
+      to escape from an inevitable certainty, or to tempt the power of
+      Providence. So some mysterious apprehension of a strange force made him
+      tremble before the old man with the lamp. All of us have been stirred in
+      the same way by the sight of Napoleon, or of some other great man, made
+      illustrious by his genius or by fame.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You wish to see Raphael&rsquo;s portrait of Jesus Christ, monsieur?&rdquo; the old
+      man asked politely. There was something metallic in the clear, sharp ring
+      of his voice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He set the lamp upon a broken column, so that all its light might fall on
+      the brown case.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At the sacred names of Christ and Raphael the young man showed some
+      curiosity. The merchant, who no doubt looked for this, pressed a spring,
+      and suddenly the mahogany panel slid noiselessly back in its groove, and
+      discovered the canvas to the stranger&rsquo;s admiring gaze. At sight of this
+      deathless creation, he forgot his fancies in the show-rooms and the freaks
+      of his dreams, and became himself again. The old man became a being of
+      flesh and blood, very much alive, with nothing chimerical about him, and
+      took up his existence at once upon solid earth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The sympathy and love, and the gentle serenity in the divine face, exerted
+      an instant sway over the younger spectator. Some influence falling from
+      heaven bade cease the burning torment that consumed the marrow of his
+      bones. The head of the Saviour of mankind seemed to issue from among the
+      shadows represented by a dark background; an aureole of light shone out
+      brightly from his hair; an impassioned belief seemed to glow through him,
+      and to thrill every feature. The word of life had just been uttered by
+      those red lips, the sacred sounds seemed to linger still in the air; the
+      spectator besought the silence for those captivating parables, hearkened
+      for them in the future, and had to turn to the teachings of the past. The
+      untroubled peace of the divine eyes, the comfort of sorrowing souls,
+      seemed an interpretation of the Evangel. The sweet triumphant smile
+      revealed the secret of the Catholic religion, which sums up all things in
+      the precept, &ldquo;Love one another.&rdquo; This picture breathed the spirit of
+      prayer, enjoined forgiveness, overcame self, caused sleeping powers of
+      good to waken. For this work of Raphael&rsquo;s had the imperious charm of
+      music; you were brought under the spell of memories of the past; his
+      triumph was so absolute that the artist was forgotten. The witchery of the
+      lamplight heightened the wonder; the head seemed at times to flicker in
+      the distance, enveloped in cloud.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I covered the surface of that picture with gold pieces,&rdquo; said the
+      merchant carelessly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And now for death!&rdquo; cried the young man, awakened from his musings. His
+      last thought had recalled his fate to him, as it led him imperceptibly
+      back from the forlorn hopes to which he had clung.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah, ha! then my suspicions were well founded!&rdquo; said the other, and his
+      hands held the young man&rsquo;s wrists in a grip like that of a vice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The younger man smiled wearily at his mistake, and said gently:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You, sir, have nothing to fear; it is not your life, but my own that is
+      in question.... But why should I hide a harmless fraud?&rdquo; he went on, after
+      a look at the anxious old man. &ldquo;I came to see your treasures to while away
+      the time till night should come and I could drown myself decently. Who
+      would grudge this last pleasure to a poet and a man of science?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      While he spoke, the jealous merchant watched the haggard face of his
+      pretended customer with keen eyes. Perhaps the mournful tones of his voice
+      reassured him, or he also read the dark signs of fate in the faded
+      features that had made the gamblers shudder; he released his hands, but,
+      with a touch of caution, due to the experience of some hundred years at
+      least, he stretched his arm out to a sideboard as if to steady himself,
+      took up a little dagger, and said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Have you been a supernumerary clerk of the Treasury for three years
+      without receiving any perquisites?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The stranger could scarcely suppress a smile as he shook his head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Perhaps your father has expressed his regret for your birth a little too
+      sharply? Or have you disgraced yourself?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If I meant to be disgraced, I should live.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You have been hissed perhaps at the Funambules? Or you have had to
+      compose couplets to pay for your mistress&rsquo; funeral? Do you want to be
+      cured of the gold fever? Or to be quit of the spleen? For what blunder is
+      your life forfeit?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You must not look among the common motives that impel suicides for the
+      reason of my death. To spare myself the task of disclosing my unheard-of
+      sufferings, for which language has no name, I will tell you this&mdash;that
+      I am in the deepest, most humiliating, and most cruel trouble, and,&rdquo; he
+      went on in proud tones that harmonized ill with the words just uttered, &ldquo;I
+      have no wish to beg for either help or sympathy.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Eh! eh!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The two syllables which the old man pronounced resembled the sound of a
+      rattle. Then he went on thus:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Without compelling you to entreat me, without making you blush for it,
+      and without giving you so much as a French centime, a para from the
+      Levant, a German heller, a Russian kopeck, a Scottish farthing, a single
+      obolus or sestertius from the ancient world, or one piastre from the new,
+      without offering you anything whatever in gold, silver, or copper, notes
+      or drafts, I will make you richer, more powerful, and of more consequence
+      than a constitutional king.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The young man thought that the older was in his dotage, and waited in
+      bewilderment without venturing to reply.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Turn round,&rdquo; said the merchant, suddenly catching up the lamp in order to
+      light up the opposite wall; &ldquo;look at that leathern skin,&rdquo; he went on.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The young man rose abruptly, and showed some surprise at the sight of a
+      piece of shagreen which hung on the wall behind his chair. It was only
+      about the size of a fox&rsquo;s skin, but it seemed to fill the deep shadows of
+      the place with such brilliant rays that it looked like a small comet, an
+      appearance at first sight inexplicable. The young sceptic went up to this
+      so-called talisman, which was to rescue him from all points of view, and
+      he soon found out the cause of its singular brilliancy. The dark grain of
+      the leather had been so carefully burnished and polished, the striped
+      markings of the graining were so sharp and clear, that every particle of
+      the surface of the bit of Oriental leather was in itself a focus which
+      concentrated the light, and reflected it vividly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He accounted for this phenomenon categorically to the old man, who only
+      smiled meaningly by way of answer. His superior smile led the young
+      scientific man to fancy that he himself had been deceived by some
+      imposture. He had no wish to carry one more puzzle to his grave, and
+      hastily turned the skin over, like some child eager to find out the
+      mysteries of a new toy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah,&rdquo; he cried, &ldquo;here is the mark of the seal which they call in the East
+      the Signet of Solomon.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;So you know that, then?&rdquo; asked the merchant. His peculiar method of
+      laughter, two or three quick breathings through the nostrils, said more
+      than any words however eloquent.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Is there anybody in the world simple enough to believe in that idle
+      fancy?&rdquo; said the young man, nettled by the spitefulness of the silent
+      chuckle. &ldquo;Don&rsquo;t you know,&rdquo; he continued, &ldquo;that the superstitions of the
+      East have perpetuated the mystical form and the counterfeit characters of
+      the symbol, which represents a mythical dominion? I have no more laid
+      myself open to a charge of credulity in this case, than if I had mentioned
+      sphinxes or griffins, whose existence mythology in a manner admits.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;As you are an Orientalist,&rdquo; replied the other, &ldquo;perhaps you can read that
+      sentence.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He held the lamp close to the talisman, which the young man held towards
+      him, and pointed out some characters inlaid in the surface of the
+      wonderful skin, as if they had grown on the animal to which it once
+      belonged.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I must admit,&rdquo; said the stranger, &ldquo;that I have no idea how the letters
+      could be engraved so deeply on the skin of a wild ass.&rdquo; And he turned
+      quickly to the tables strewn with curiosities and seemed to look for
+      something.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What is it that you want?&rdquo; asked the old man.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Something that will cut the leather, so that I can see whether the
+      letters are printed or inlaid.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The old man held out his stiletto. The stranger took it and tried to cut
+      the skin above the lettering; but when he had removed a thin shaving of
+      leather from them, the characters still appeared below, so clear and so
+      exactly like the surface impression, that for a moment he was not sure
+      that he had cut anything away after all.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The craftsmen of the Levant have secrets known only to themselves,&rdquo; he
+      said, half in vexation, as he eyed the characters of this Oriental
+      sentence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; said the old man, &ldquo;it is better to attribute it to man&rsquo;s agency
+      than to God&rsquo;s.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The mysterious words were thus arranged:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     [Drawing of apparently Sanskrit characters omitted]
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      Or, as it runs in English:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     POSSESSING ME THOU SHALT POSSESS ALL THINGS.
+     BUT THY LIFE IS MINE, FOR GOD HAS SO WILLED IT.
+     WISH, AND THY WISHES SHALL BE FULFILLED;
+     BUT MEASURE THY DESIRES, ACCORDING
+     TO THE LIFE THAT IS IN THEE.
+     THIS IS THY LIFE,
+     WITH EACH WISH I MUST SHRINK
+     EVEN AS THY OWN DAYS.
+     WILT THOU HAVE ME?  TAKE ME.
+     GOD WILL HEARKEN UNTO THEE.
+     SO BE IT!
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;So you read Sanskrit fluently,&rdquo; said the old man. &ldquo;You have been in
+      Persia perhaps, or in Bengal?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, sir,&rdquo; said the stranger, as he felt the emblematical skin curiously.
+      It was almost as rigid as a sheet of metal.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The old merchant set the lamp back again upon the column, giving the other
+      a look as he did so. &ldquo;He has given up the notion of dying already,&rdquo; the
+      glance said with phlegmatic irony.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Is it a jest, or is it an enigma?&rdquo; asked the younger man.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The other shook his head and said soberly:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don&rsquo;t know how to answer you. I have offered this talisman with its
+      terrible powers to men with more energy in them than you seem to me to
+      have; but though they laughed at the questionable power it might exert
+      over their futures, not one of them was ready to venture to conclude the
+      fateful contract proposed by an unknown force. I am of their opinion, I
+      have doubted and refrained, and&mdash;&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Have you never even tried its power?&rdquo; interrupted the young stranger.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Tried it!&rdquo; exclaimed the old man. &ldquo;Suppose that you were on the column in
+      the Place Vendome, would you try flinging yourself into space? Is it
+      possible to stay the course of life? Has a man ever been known to die by
+      halves? Before you came here, you had made up your mind to kill yourself,
+      but all at once a mystery fills your mind, and you think no more about
+      death. You child! Does not any one day of your life afford mysteries more
+      absorbing? Listen to me. I saw the licentious days of Regency. I was like
+      you, then, in poverty; I have begged my bread; but for all that, I am now
+      a centenarian with a couple of years to spare, and a millionaire to boot.
+      Misery was the making of me, ignorance has made me learned. I will tell
+      you in a few words the great secret of human life. By two instinctive
+      processes man exhausts the springs of life within him. Two verbs cover all
+      the forms which these two causes of death may take&mdash;To Will and To
+      have your Will. Between these two limits of human activity the wise have
+      discovered an intermediate formula, to which I owe my good fortune and
+      long life. To Will consumes us, and To have our Will destroys us, but To
+      Know steeps our feeble organisms in perpetual calm. In me Thought has
+      destroyed Will, so that Power is relegated to the ordinary functions of my
+      economy. In a word, it is not in the heart which can be broken, or in the
+      senses that become deadened, but it is in the brain that cannot waste away
+      and survives everything else, that I have set my life. Moderation has kept
+      mind and body unruffled. Yet, I have seen the whole world. I have learned
+      all languages, lived after every manner. I have lent a Chinaman money,
+      taking his father&rsquo;s corpse as a pledge, slept in an Arab&rsquo;s tent on the
+      security of his bare word, signed contracts in every capital of Europe,
+      and left my gold without hesitation in savage wigwams. I have attained
+      everything, because I have known how to despise all things.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My one ambition has been to see. Is not Sight in a manner Insight? And to
+      have knowledge or insight, is not that to have instinctive possession? To
+      be able to discover the very substance of fact and to unite its essence to
+      our essence? Of material possession what abides with you but an idea?
+      Think, then, how glorious must be the life of a man who can stamp all
+      realities upon his thought, place the springs of happiness within himself,
+      and draw thence uncounted pleasures in idea, unspoiled by earthly stains.
+      Thought is a key to all treasures; the miser&rsquo;s gains are ours without his
+      cares. Thus I have soared above this world, where my enjoyments have been
+      intellectual joys. I have reveled in the contemplation of seas, peoples,
+      forests, and mountains! I have seen all things, calmly, and without
+      weariness; I have set my desires on nothing; I have waited in expectation
+      of everything. I have walked to and fro in the world as in a garden round
+      about my own dwelling. Troubles, loves, ambitions, losses, and sorrows, as
+      men call them, are for me ideas, which I transmute into waking dreams; I
+      express and transpose instead of feeling them; instead of permitting them
+      to prey upon my life, I dramatize and expand them; I divert myself with
+      them as if they were romances which I could read by the power of vision
+      within me. As I have never overtaxed my constitution, I still enjoy robust
+      health; and as my mind is endowed with all the force that I have not
+      wasted, this head of mine is even better furnished than my galleries. The
+      true millions lie here,&rdquo; he said, striking his forehead. &ldquo;I spend
+      delicious days in communings with the past; I summon before me whole
+      countries, places, extents of sea, the fair faces of history. In my
+      imaginary seraglio I have all the women that I have never possessed. Your
+      wars and revolutions come up before me for judgment. What is a feverish
+      fugitive admiration for some more or less brightly colored piece of flesh
+      and blood; some more or less rounded human form; what are all the
+      disasters that wait on your erratic whims, compared with the magnificent
+      power of conjuring up the whole world within your soul, compared with the
+      immeasurable joys of movement, unstrangled by the cords of time, unclogged
+      by the fetters of space; the joys of beholding all things, of
+      comprehending all things, of leaning over the parapet of the world to
+      question the other spheres, to hearken to the voice of God? There,&rdquo; he
+      burst out, vehemently, &ldquo;there are To Will and To have your Will, both
+      together,&rdquo; he pointed to the bit of shagreen; &ldquo;there are your social
+      ideas, your immoderate desires, your excesses, your pleasures that end in
+      death, your sorrows that quicken the pace of life, for pain is perhaps but
+      a violent pleasure. Who could determine the point where pleasure becomes
+      pain, where pain is still a pleasure? Is not the utmost brightness of the
+      ideal world soothing to us, while the lightest shadows of the physical
+      world annoy? Is not knowledge the secret of wisdom? And what is folly but
+      a riotous expenditure of Will or Power?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Very good then, a life of riotous excess for me!&rdquo; said the stranger,
+      pouncing upon the piece of shagreen.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Young man, beware!&rdquo; cried the other with incredible vehemence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I had resolved my existence into thought and study,&rdquo; the stranger
+      replied; &ldquo;and yet they have not even supported me. I am not to be gulled
+      by a sermon worthy of Swedenborg, nor by your Oriental amulet, nor yet by
+      your charitable endeavors to keep me in a world wherein existence is no
+      longer possible for me.... Let me see now,&rdquo; he added, clutching the
+      talisman convulsively, as he looked at the old man, &ldquo;I wish for a royal
+      banquet, a carouse worthy of this century, which, it is said, has brought
+      everything to perfection! Let me have young boon companions, witty,
+      unwarped by prejudice, merry to the verge of madness! Let one wine succeed
+      another, each more biting and perfumed than the last, and strong enough to
+      bring about three days of delirium! Passionate women&rsquo;s forms should grace
+      that night! I would be borne away to unknown regions beyond the confines
+      of this world, by the car and four-winged steed of a frantic and
+      uproarious orgy. Let us ascend to the skies, or plunge ourselves in the
+      mire. I do not know if one soars or sinks at such moments, and I do not
+      care! Next, I bid this enigmatical power to concentrate all delights for
+      me in one single joy. Yes, I must comprehend every pleasure of earth and
+      heaven in the final embrace that is to kill me. Therefore, after the wine,
+      I wish to hold high festival to Priapus, with songs that might rouse the
+      dead, and kisses without end; the sound of them should pass like the
+      crackling of flame through Paris, should revive the heat of youth and
+      passion in husband and wife, even in hearts of seventy years.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      A laugh burst from the little old man. It rang in the young man&rsquo;s ears
+      like an echo from hell; and tyrannously cut him short. He said no more.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you imagine that my floors are going to open suddenly, so that
+      luxuriously-appointed tables may rise through them, and guests from
+      another world? No, no, young madcap. You have entered into the compact
+      now, and there is an end of it. Henceforward, your wishes will be
+      accurately fulfilled, but at the expense of your life. The compass of your
+      days, visible in that skin, will contract according to the strength and
+      number of your desires, from the least to the most extravagant. The
+      Brahmin from whom I had this skin once explained to me that it would bring
+      about a mysterious connection between the fortunes and wishes of its
+      possessor. Your first wish is a vulgar one, which I could fulfil, but I
+      leave that to the issues of your new existence. After all, you were
+      wishing to die; very well, your suicide is only put off for a time.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The stranger was surprised and irritated that this peculiar old man
+      persisted in not taking him seriously. A half philanthropic intention
+      peeped so clearly forth from his last jesting observation, that he
+      exclaimed:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I shall soon see, sir, if any change comes over my fortunes in the time
+      it will take to cross the width of the quay. But I should like us to be
+      quits for such a momentous service; that is, if you are not laughing at an
+      unlucky wretch, so I wish that you may fall in love with an opera-dancer.
+      You would understand the pleasures of intemperance then, and might perhaps
+      grow lavish of the wealth that you have husbanded so philosophically.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He went out without heeding the old man&rsquo;s heavy sigh, went back through
+      the galleries and down the staircase, followed by the stout assistant who
+      vainly tried to light his passage; he fled with the haste of a robber
+      caught in the act. Blinded by a kind of delirium, he did not even notice
+      the unexpected flexibility of the piece of shagreen, which coiled itself
+      up, pliant as a glove in his excited fingers, till it would go into the
+      pocket of his coat, where he mechanically thrust it. As he rushed out of
+      the door into the street, he ran up against three young men who were
+      passing arm-in-arm.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Brute!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Idiot!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Such were the gratifying expressions exchanged between them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why, it is Raphael!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Good! we were looking for you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What! it is you, then?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      These three friendly exclamations quickly followed the insults, as the
+      light of a street lamp, flickering in the wind, fell upon the astonished
+      faces of the group.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My dear fellow, you must come with us!&rdquo; said the young man that Raphael
+      had all but knocked down.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What is all this about?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Come along, and I will tell you the history of it as we go.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      By fair means or foul, Raphael must go along with his friends towards the
+      Pont des Arts; they surrounded him, and linked him by the arm among their
+      merry band.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We have been after you for about a week,&rdquo; the speaker went on. &ldquo;At your
+      respectable hotel <i>de Saint Quentin</i>, where, by the way, the sign
+      with the alternate black and red letters cannot be removed, and hangs out
+      just as it did in the time of Jean Jacques, that Leonarda of yours told us
+      that you were off into the country. For all that, we certainly did not
+      look like duns, creditors, sheriff&rsquo;s officers, or the like. But no matter!
+      Rastignac had seen you the evening before at the Bouffons; we took courage
+      again, and made it a point of honor to find out whether you were roosting
+      in a tree in the Champs-Elysees, or in one of those philanthropic abodes
+      where the beggars sleep on a twopenny rope, or if, more luckily, you were
+      bivouacking in some boudoir or other. We could not find you anywhere. Your
+      name was not in the jailers&rsquo; registers at the St. Pelagie nor at La Force!
+      Government departments, cafes, libraries, lists of prefects&rsquo; names,
+      newspaper offices, restaurants, greenrooms&mdash;to cut it short, every
+      lurking place in Paris, good or bad, has been explored in the most expert
+      manner. We bewailed the loss of a man endowed with such genius, that one
+      might look to find him at Court or in the common jails. We talked of
+      canonizing you as a hero of July, and, upon my word, we regretted you!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      As he spoke, the friends were crossing the Pont des Arts. Without
+      listening to them, Raphael looked at the Seine, at the clamoring waves
+      that reflected the lights of Paris. Above that river, in which but now he
+      had thought to fling himself, the old man&rsquo;s prediction had been fulfilled,
+      the hour of his death had been already put back by fate.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We really regretted you,&rdquo; said his friend, still pursuing his theme. &ldquo;It
+      was a question of a plan in which we included you as a superior person,
+      that is to say, somebody who can put himself above other people. The
+      constitutional thimble-rig is carried on to-day, dear boy, more seriously
+      than ever. The infamous monarchy, displaced by the heroism of the people,
+      was a sort of drab, you could laugh and revel with her; but La Patrie is a
+      shrewish and virtuous wife, and willy-nilly you must take her prescribed
+      endearments. Then besides, as you know, authority passed over from the
+      Tuileries to the journalists, at the time when the Budget changed its
+      quarters and went from the Faubourg Saint-Germain to the Chaussee de
+      Antin. But this you may not know perhaps. The Government, that is, the
+      aristocracy of lawyers and bankers who represent the country to-day, just
+      as the priests used to do in the time of the monarchy, has felt the
+      necessity of mystifying the worthy people of France with a few new words
+      and old ideas, like philosophers of every school, and all strong
+      intellects ever since time began. So now Royalist-national ideas must be
+      inculcated, by proving to us that it is far better to pay twelve million
+      francs, thirty-three centimes to La Patrie, represented by Messieurs
+      Such-and-Such, than to pay eleven hundred million francs, nine centimes to
+      a king who used to say <i>I</i> instead of <i>we</i>. In a word, a
+      journal, with two or three hundred thousand francs, good, at the back of
+      it, has just been started, with a view to making an opposition paper to
+      content the discontented, without prejudice to the national government of
+      the citizen-king. We scoff at liberty as at despotism now, and at religion
+      or incredulity quite impartially. And since, for us, &lsquo;our country&rsquo; means a
+      capital where ideas circulate and are sold at so much a line, a succulent
+      dinner every day, and the play at frequent intervals, where profligate
+      women swarm, where suppers last on into the next day, and light loves are
+      hired by the hour like cabs; and since Paris will always be the most
+      adorable of all countries, the country of joy, liberty, wit, pretty women,
+      <i>mauvais sujets</i>, and good wine; where the truncheon of authority
+      never makes itself disagreeably felt, because one is so close to those who
+      wield it,&mdash;we, therefore, sectaries of the god Mephistopheles, have
+      engaged to whitewash the public mind, to give fresh costumes to the
+      actors, to put a new plank or two in the government booth, to doctor
+      doctrinaires, and warm up old Republicans, to touch up the Bonapartists a
+      bit, and revictual the Centre; provided that we are allowed to laugh <i>in
+      petto</i> at both kings and peoples, to think one thing in the morning and
+      another at night, and to lead a merry life <i>a la</i> Panurge, or to
+      recline upon soft cushions, <i>more orientali</i>.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The sceptre of this burlesque and macaronic kingdom,&rdquo; he went on, &ldquo;we
+      have reserved for you; so we are taking you straightway to a dinner given
+      by the founder of the said newspaper, a retired banker, who, at a loss to
+      know what to do with his money, is going to buy some brains with it. You
+      will be welcomed as a brother, we shall hail you as king of these free
+      lances who will undertake anything; whose perspicacity discovers the
+      intentions of Austria, England, or Russia before either Russia, Austria or
+      England have formed any. Yes, we will invest you with the sovereignty of
+      those puissant intellects which give to the world its Mirabeaus,
+      Talleyrands, Pitts, and Metternichs&mdash;all the clever Crispins who
+      treat the destinies of a kingdom as gamblers&rsquo; stakes, just as ordinary men
+      play dominoes for <i>kirschenwasser</i>. We have given you out to be the
+      most undaunted champion who ever wrestled in a drinking-bout at close
+      quarters with the monster called Carousal, whom all bold spirits wish to
+      try a fall with; we have gone so far as to say that you have never yet
+      been worsted. I hope you will not make liars of us. Taillefer, our
+      amphitryon, has undertaken to surpass the circumscribed saturnalias of the
+      petty modern Lucullus. He is rich enough to infuse pomp into trifles, and
+      style and charm into dissipation... Are you listening, Raphael?&rdquo; asked the
+      orator, interrupting himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; answered the young man, less surprised by the accomplishment of his
+      wishes than by the natural manner in which the events had come about.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He could not bring himself to believe in magic, but he marveled at the
+      accidents of human fate.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, you say, just as if you were thinking of your grandfather&rsquo;s demise,&rdquo;
+       remarked one of his neighbors.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah!&rdquo; cried Raphael, &ldquo;I was thinking, my friends, that we are in a fair
+      way to become very great scoundrels,&rdquo; and there was an ingenuousness in
+      his tones that set these writers, the hope of young France, in a roar. &ldquo;So
+      far our blasphemies have been uttered over our cups; we have passed our
+      judgments on life while drunk, and taken men and affairs in an
+      after-dinner frame of mind. We were innocent of action; we were bold in
+      words. But now we are to be branded with the hot iron of politics; we are
+      going to enter the convict&rsquo;s prison and to drop our illusions. Although
+      one has no belief left, except in the devil, one may regret the paradise
+      of one&rsquo;s youth and the age of innocence, when we devoutly offered the tip
+      of our tongue to some good priest for the consecrated wafer of the
+      sacrament. Ah, my good friends, our first peccadilloes gave us so much
+      pleasure because the consequent remorse set them off and lent a keen
+      relish to them; but nowadays&mdash;&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh! now,&rdquo; said the first speaker, &ldquo;there is still left&mdash;&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What?&rdquo; asked another.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Crime&mdash;&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There is a word as high as the gallows and deeper than the Seine,&rdquo; said
+      Raphael.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, you don&rsquo;t understand me; I mean political crime. Since this morning,
+      a conspirator&rsquo;s life is the only one I covet. I don&rsquo;t know that the fancy
+      will last over to-morrow, but to-night at least my gorge rises at the
+      anaemic life of our civilization and its railroad evenness. I am seized
+      with a passion for the miseries of retreat from Moscow, for the
+      excitements of the Red Corsair, or for a smuggler&rsquo;s life. I should like to
+      go to Botany Bay, as we have no Chartreaux left us here in France; it is a
+      sort of infirmary reserved for little Lord Byrons who, having crumpled up
+      their lives like a serviette after dinner, have nothing left to do but to
+      set their country ablaze, blow their own brains out, plot for a republic
+      or clamor for a war&mdash;&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Emile,&rdquo; Raphael&rsquo;s neighbor called eagerly to the speaker, &ldquo;on my honor,
+      but for the revolution of July I would have taken orders, and gone off
+      down into the country somewhere to lead the life of an animal, and&mdash;&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And you would have read your breviary through every day.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You are a coxcomb!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why, we read the newspapers as it is!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not bad that, for a journalist! But hold your tongue, we are going
+      through a crowd of subscribers. Journalism, look you, is the religion of
+      modern society, and has even gone a little further.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What do you mean?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Its pontiffs are not obliged to believe in it any more than the people
+      are.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Chatting thus, like good fellows who have known their <i>De Viris
+      illustribus</i> for years past, they reached a mansion in the Rue Joubert.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Emile was a journalist who had acquired more reputation by dint of doing
+      nothing than others had derived from their achievements. A bold, caustic,
+      and powerful critic, he possessed all the qualities that his defects
+      permitted. An outspoken giber, he made numberless epigrams on a friend to
+      his face; but would defend him, if absent, with courage and loyalty. He
+      laughed at everything, even at his own career. Always impecunious, he yet
+      lived, like all men of his calibre, plunged in unspeakable indolence. He
+      would fling some word containing volumes in the teeth of folk who could
+      not put a syllable of sense into their books. He lavished promises that he
+      never fulfilled; he made a pillow of his luck and reputation, on which he
+      slept, and ran the risk of waking up to old age in a workhouse. A
+      steadfast friend to the gallows foot, a cynical swaggerer with a child&rsquo;s
+      simplicity, a worker only from necessity or caprice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;In the language of Maitre Alcofribas, we are about to make a famous <i>troncon
+      de chiere lie</i>,&rdquo; he remarked to Raphael as he pointed out the
+      flower-stands that made a perfumed forest of the staircase.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I like a vestibule to be well warmed and richly carpeted,&rdquo; Raphael said.
+      &ldquo;Luxury in the peristyle is not common in France. I feel as if life had
+      begun anew here.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And up above we are going to drink and make merry once more, my dear
+      Raphael. Ah! yes,&rdquo; he went on, &ldquo;and I hope we are going to come off
+      conquerors, too, and walk over everybody else&rsquo;s head.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      As he spoke, he jestingly pointed to the guests. They were entering a
+      large room which shone with gilding and lights, and there all the younger
+      men of note in Paris welcomed them. Here was one who had just revealed
+      fresh powers, his first picture vied with the glories of Imperial art.
+      There, another, who but yesterday had launched forth a volume, an acrid
+      book filled with a sort of literary arrogance, which opened up new ways to
+      the modern school. A sculptor, not far away, with vigorous power visible
+      in his rough features, was chatting with one of those unenthusiastic
+      scoffers who can either see excellence anywhere or nowhere, as it happens.
+      Here, the cleverest of our caricaturists, with mischievous eyes and bitter
+      tongue, lay in wait for epigrams to translate into pencil strokes; there,
+      stood the young and audacious writer, who distilled the quintessence of
+      political ideas better than any other man, or compressed the work of some
+      prolific writer as he held him up to ridicule; he was talking with the
+      poet whose works would have eclipsed all the writings of the time if his
+      ability had been as strenuous as his hatreds. Both were trying not to say
+      the truth while they kept clear of lies, as they exchanged flattering
+      speeches. A famous musician administered soothing consolation in a
+      rallying fashion, to a young politician who had just fallen quite unhurt,
+      from his rostrum. Young writers who lacked style stood beside other young
+      writers who lacked ideas, and authors of poetical prose by prosaic poets.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At the sight of all these incomplete beings, a simple Saint Simonian,
+      ingenuous enough to believe in his own doctrine, charitably paired them
+      off, designing, no doubt, to convert them into monks of his order. A few
+      men of science mingled in the conversation, like nitrogen in the
+      atmosphere, and several <i>vaudevillistes</i> shed rays like the sparking
+      diamonds that give neither light nor heat. A few paradox-mongers, laughing
+      up their sleeves at any folk who embraced their likes or dislikes in men
+      or affairs, had already begun a two-edged policy, conspiring against all
+      systems, without committing themselves to any side. Then there was the
+      self-appointed critic who admires nothing, and will blow his nose in the
+      middle of a <i>cavatina</i> at the Bouffons, who applauds before any one
+      else begins, and contradicts every one who says what he himself was about
+      to say; he was there giving out the sayings of wittier men for his own. Of
+      all the assembled guests, a future lay before some five; ten or so should
+      acquire a fleeting renown; as for the rest, like all mediocrities, they
+      might apply to themselves the famous falsehood of Louis XVIII., Union and
+      oblivion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The anxious jocularity of a man who is expending two thousand crowns sat
+      on their host. His eyes turned impatiently towards the door from time to
+      time, seeking one of his guests who kept him waiting. Very soon a stout
+      little person appeared, who was greeted by a complimentary murmur; it was
+      the notary who had invented the newspaper that very morning. A
+      valet-de-chambre in black opened the doors of a vast dining-room, whither
+      every one went without ceremony, and took his place at an enormous table.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Raphael took a last look round the room before he left it. His wish had
+      been realized to the full. The rooms were adorned with silk and gold.
+      Countless wax tapers set in handsome candelabra lit up the slightest
+      details of gilded friezes, the delicate bronze sculpture, and the splendid
+      colors of the furniture. The sweet scent of rare flowers, set in stands
+      tastefully made of bamboo, filled the air. Everything, even the curtains,
+      was pervaded by elegance without pretension, and there was a certain
+      imaginative charm about it all which acted like a spell on the mind of a
+      needy man.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;An income of a hundred thousand livres a year is a very nice beginning of
+      the catechism, and a wonderful assistance to putting morality into our
+      actions,&rdquo; he said, sighing. &ldquo;Truly my sort of virtue can scarcely go
+      afoot, and vice means, to my thinking, a garret, a threadbare coat, a gray
+      hat in winter time, and sums owing to the porter.... I should like to live
+      in the lap of luxury a year, or six months, no matter! And then
+      afterwards, die. I should have known, exhausted, and consumed a thousand
+      lives, at any rate.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why, you are taking the tone of a stockbroker in good luck,&rdquo; said Emile,
+      who overheard him. &ldquo;Pooh! your riches would be a burden to you as soon as
+      you found that they would spoil your chances of coming out above the rest
+      of us. Hasn&rsquo;t the artist always kept the balance true between the poverty
+      of riches and the riches of poverty? And isn&rsquo;t struggle a necessity to
+      some of us? Look out for your digestion, and only look,&rdquo; he added, with a
+      mock-heroic gesture, &ldquo;at the majestic, thrice holy, and edifying
+      appearance of this amiable capitalist&rsquo;s dining-room. That man has in
+      reality only made his money for our benefit. Isn&rsquo;t he a kind of sponge of
+      the polyp order, overlooked by naturalists, which should be carefully
+      squeezed before he is left for his heirs to feed upon? There is style,
+      isn&rsquo;t there, about those bas-reliefs that adorn the walls? And the
+      lustres, and the pictures, what luxury well carried out! If one may
+      believe those who envy him, or who know, or think they know, the origins
+      of his life, then this man got rid of a German and some others&mdash;his
+      best friend for one, and the mother of that friend, during the Revolution.
+      Could you house crimes under the venerable Taillefer&rsquo;s silvering locks? He
+      looks to me a very worthy man. Only see how the silver sparkles, and is
+      every glittering ray like a stab of a dagger to him?... Let us go in, one
+      might as well believe in Mahomet. If common report speak truth, here are
+      thirty men of talent, and good fellows too, prepared to dine off the flesh
+      and blood of a whole family;... and here are we ourselves, a pair of
+      youngsters full of open-hearted enthusiasm, and we shall be partakers in
+      his guilt. I have a mind to ask our capitalist whether he is a respectable
+      character....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, not now,&rdquo; cried Raphael, &ldquo;but when he is dead drunk, we shall have
+      had our dinner then.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The two friends sat down laughing. First of all, by a glance more rapid
+      than a word, each paid his tribute of admiration to the splendid general
+      effect of the long table, white as a bank of freshly-fallen snow, with its
+      symmetrical line of covers, crowned with their pale golden rolls of bread.
+      Rainbow colors gleamed in the starry rays of light reflected by the glass;
+      the lights of the tapers crossed and recrossed each other indefinitely;
+      the dishes covered with their silver domes whetted both appetite and
+      curiosity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Few words were spoken. Neighbors exchanged glances as the Maderia
+      circulated. Then the first course appeared in all its glory; it would have
+      done honor to the late Cambaceres, Brillat-Savarin would have celebrated
+      it. The wines of Bordeaux and Burgundy, white and red, were royally
+      lavished. This first part of the banquet might been compared in every way
+      to a rendering of some classical tragedy. The second act grew a trifle
+      noisier. Every guest had had a fair amount to drink, and had tried various
+      crus at this pleasure, so that as the remains of the magnificent first
+      course were removed, tumultuous discussions began; a pale brow here and
+      there began to flush, sundry noses took a purpler hue, faces lit up, and
+      eyes sparkled.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      While intoxication was only dawning, the conversation did not overstep the
+      bounds of civility; but banter and bon mots slipped by degrees from every
+      tongue; and then slander began to rear its little snake&rsquo;s heard, and spoke
+      in dulcet tones; a few shrewd ones here and there gave heed to it, hoping
+      to keep their heads. So the second course found their minds somewhat
+      heated. Every one ate as he spoke, spoke while he ate, and drank without
+      heeding the quantity of the liquor, the wine was so biting, the bouquet so
+      fragrant, the example around so infectious. Taillefer made a point of
+      stimulating his guests, and plied them with the formidable wines of the
+      Rhone, with fierce Tokay, and heady old Roussillon.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The champagne, impatiently expected and lavishly poured out, was a scourge
+      of fiery sparks to these men; released like post-horses from some
+      mail-coach by a relay; they let their spirits gallop away into the wilds
+      of argument to which no one listened, began to tell stories which had no
+      auditors, and repeatedly asked questions to which no answer was made. Only
+      the loud voice of wassail could be heard, a voice made up of a hundred
+      confused clamors, which rose and grew like a crescendo of Rossini&rsquo;s.
+      Insidious toasts, swagger, and challenges followed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Each renounced any pride in his own intellectual capacity, in order to
+      vindicate that of hogsheads, casks, and vats; and each made noise enough
+      for two. A time came when the footmen smiled, while their masters all
+      talked at once. A philosopher would have been interested, doubtless, by
+      the singularity of the thoughts expressed, a politician would have been
+      amazed by the incongruity of the methods discussed in the melee of words
+      or doubtfully luminous paradoxes, where truths, grotesquely caparisoned,
+      met in conflict across the uproar of brawling judgments, of arbitrary
+      decisions and folly, much as bullets, shells, and grapeshot are hurled
+      across a battlefield.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was at once a volume and a picture. Every philosophy, religion, and
+      moral code differing so greatly in every latitude, every government, every
+      great achievement of the human intellect, fell before a scythe as long as
+      Time&rsquo;s own; and you might have found it hard to decide whether it was
+      wielded by Gravity intoxicated, or by Inebriation grown sober and
+      clear-sighted. Borne away by a kind of tempest, their minds, like the sea
+      raging against the cliffs, seemed ready to shake the laws which confine
+      the ebb and flow of civilization; unconsciously fulfilling the will of
+      God, who has suffered evil and good to abide in nature, and reserved the
+      secret of their continual strife to Himself. A frantic travesty of debate
+      ensued, a Walpurgis-revel of intellects. Between the dreary jests of these
+      children of the Revolution over the inauguration of a newspaper, and the
+      talk of the joyous gossips at Gargantua&rsquo;s birth, stretched the gulf that
+      divides the nineteenth century from the sixteenth. Laughingly they had
+      begun the work of destruction, and our journalists laughed amid the ruins.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What is the name of that young man over there?&rdquo; said the notary,
+      indicating Raphael. &ldquo;I thought I heard some one call him Valentin.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What stuff is this?&rdquo; said Emile, laughing; &ldquo;plain Valentin, say you?
+      Raphael DE Valentin, if you please. We bear an eagle or, on a field sable,
+      with a silver crown, beak and claws gules, and a fine motto: NON CECIDIT
+      ANIMUS. We are no foundling child, but a descendant of the Emperor Valens,
+      of the stock of the Valentinois, founders of the cities of Valence in
+      France, and Valencia in Spain, rightful heirs to the Empire of the East.
+      If we suffer Mahmoud on the throne of Byzantium, it is out of pure
+      condescension, and for lack of funds and soldiers.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      With a fork flourished above Raphael&rsquo;s head, Emile outlined a crown upon
+      it. The notary bethought himself a moment, but soon fell to drinking
+      again, with a gesture peculiar to himself; it was quite impossible, it
+      seemed to say to secure in his clientele the cities of Valence and
+      Byzantium, the Emperor Valens, Mahmoud, and the house of Valentinois.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Should not the destruction of those ant-hills, Babylon, Tyre, Carthage,
+      and Venice, each crushed beneath the foot of a passing giant, serve as a
+      warning to man, vouchsafed by some mocking power?&rdquo; said Claude Vignon, who
+      must play the Bossuet, as a sort of purchased slave, at the rate of
+      fivepence a line.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Perhaps Moses, Sylla, Louis XI., Richelieu, Robespierre, and Napoleon
+      were but the same man who crosses our civilizations now and again, like a
+      comet across the sky,&rdquo; said a disciple of Ballanche.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why try to fathom the designs of Providence?&rdquo; said Canalis, maker of
+      ballads.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Come, now,&rdquo; said the man who set up for a critic, &ldquo;there is nothing more
+      elastic in the world than your Providence.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, sir, Louis XIV. sacrificed more lives over digging the foundations
+      of the Maintenon&rsquo;s aqueducts, than the Convention expended in order to
+      assess the taxes justly, to make one law for everybody, and one nation of
+      France, and to establish the rule of equal inheritance,&rdquo; said Massol, whom
+      the lack of a syllable before his name had made a Republican.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Are you going to leave our heads on our shoulders?&rdquo; asked Moreau (of the
+      Oise), a substantial farmer. &ldquo;You, sir, who took blood for wine just now?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Where is the use? Aren&rsquo;t the principles of social order worth some
+      sacrifices, sir?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Hi! Bixiou! What&rsquo;s-his-name, the Republican, considers a landowner&rsquo;s head
+      a sacrifice!&rdquo; said a young man to his neighbor.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Men and events count for nothing,&rdquo; said the Republican, following out his
+      theory in spite of hiccoughs; &ldquo;in politics, as in philosophy, there are
+      only principles and ideas.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What an abomination! Then you would ruthlessly put your friends to death
+      for a shibboleth?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Eh, sir! the man who feels compunction is your thorough scoundrel, for he
+      has some notion of virtue; while Peter the Great and the Duke of Alva were
+      embodied systems, and the pirate Monbard an organization.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But can&rsquo;t society rid itself of your systems and organizations?&rdquo; said
+      Canalis.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, granted!&rdquo; cried the Republican.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That stupid Republic of yours makes me feel queasy. We sha&rsquo;n&rsquo;t be able to
+      carve a capon in peace, because we shall find the agrarian law inside it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah, my little Brutus, stuffed with truffles, your principles are all
+      right enough. But you are like my valet, the rogue is so frightfully
+      possessed with a mania for property that if I left him to clean my clothes
+      after his fashion, he would soon clean me out.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Crass idiots!&rdquo; replied the Republican, &ldquo;you are for setting a nation
+      straight with toothpicks. To your way of thinking, justice is more
+      dangerous than thieves.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, dear!&rdquo; cried the attorney Deroches.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Aren&rsquo;t they a bore with their politics!&rdquo; said the notary Cardot. &ldquo;Shut
+      up. That&rsquo;s enough of it. There is no knowledge nor virtue worth shedding a
+      drop of blood for. If Truth were brought into liquidation, we might find
+      her insolvent.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It would be much less trouble, no doubt, to amuse ourselves with evil,
+      rather than dispute about good. Moreover, I would give all the speeches
+      made for forty years past at the Tribune for a trout, for one of
+      Perrault&rsquo;s tales or Charlet&rsquo;s sketches.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Quite right!... Hand me the asparagus. Because, after all, liberty begets
+      anarchy, anarchy leads to despotism, and despotism back again to liberty.
+      Millions have died without securing a triumph for any one system. Is not
+      that the vicious circle in which the whole moral world revolves? Man
+      believes that he has reached perfection, when in fact he has but
+      rearranged matters.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh! oh!&rdquo; cried Cursy, the <i>vaudevilliste</i>; &ldquo;in that case, gentlemen,
+      here&rsquo;s to Charles X., the father of liberty.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why not?&rdquo; asked Emile. &ldquo;When law becomes despotic, morals are relaxed,
+      and vice versa.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Let us drink to the imbecility of authority, which gives us such an
+      authority over imbeciles!&rdquo; said the good banker.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Napoleon left us glory, at any rate, my good friend!&rdquo; exclaimed a naval
+      officer who had never left Brest.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Glory is a poor bargain; you buy it dear, and it will not keep. Does not
+      the egotism of the great take the form of glory, just as for nobodies it
+      is their own well-being?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You are very fortunate, sir&mdash;&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The first inventor of ditches must have been a weakling, for society is
+      only useful to the puny. The savage and the philosopher, at either extreme
+      of the moral scale, hold property in equal horror.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;All very fine!&rdquo; said Cardot; &ldquo;but if there were no property, there would
+      be no documents to draw up.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;These green peas are excessively delicious!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And the <i>cure</i> was found dead in his bed in the morning....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Who is talking about death? Pray don&rsquo;t trifle, I have an uncle.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Could you bear his loss with resignation?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No question.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Gentlemen, listen to me! <i>How to kill an uncle</i>. Silence! (Cries of
+      &ldquo;Hush! hush!&rdquo;) In the first place, take an uncle, large and stout, seventy
+      years old at least, they are the best uncles. (Sensation.) Get him to eat
+      a pate de foie gras, any pretext will do.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah, but my uncle is a thin, tall man, and very niggardly and abstemious.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That sort of uncle is a monster; he misappropriates existence.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then,&rdquo; the speaker on uncles went on, &ldquo;tell him, while he is digesting
+      it, that his banker has failed.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How if he bears up?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Let loose a pretty girl on him.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And if&mdash;&mdash;?&rdquo; asked the other, with a shake of the head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then he wouldn&rsquo;t be an uncle&mdash;an uncle is a gay dog by nature.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Malibran has lost two notes in her voice.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, sir, she has not.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, sir, she has.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, ho! No and yes, is not that the sum-up of all religious, political,
+      or literary dissertations? Man is a clown dancing on the edge of an
+      abyss.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You would make out that I am a fool.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;On the contrary, you cannot make me out.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Education, there&rsquo;s a pretty piece of tomfoolery. M. Heineffettermach
+      estimates the number of printed volumes at more than a thousand millions;
+      and a man cannot read more than a hundred and fifty thousand in his
+      lifetime. So, just tell me what that word <i>education</i> means. For some
+      it consists in knowing the name of Alexander&rsquo;s horse, of the dog
+      Berecillo, of the Seigneur d&rsquo;Accords, and in ignorance of the man to whom
+      we owe the discovery of rafting and the manufacture of porcelain. For
+      others it is the knowledge how to burn a will and live respected, be
+      looked up to and popular, instead of stealing a watch with half-a-dozen
+      aggravating circumstances, after a previous conviction, and so perishing,
+      hated and dishonored, in the Place de Greve.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Will Nathan&rsquo;s work live?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He has very clever collaborators, sir.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Or Canalis?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He is a great man; let us say no more about him.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You are all drunk!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The consequence of a Constitution is the immediate stultification of
+      intellects. Art, science, public works, everything, is consumed by a
+      horribly egoistic feeling, the leprosy of the time. Three hundred of your
+      bourgeoisie, set down on benches, will only think of planting poplars.
+      Tyranny does great things lawlessly, while Liberty will scarcely trouble
+      herself to do petty ones lawfully.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Your reciprocal instruction will turn out counters in human flesh,&rdquo; broke
+      in an Absolutist. &ldquo;All individuality will disappear in a people brought to
+      a dead level by education.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;For all that, is not the aim of society to secure happiness to each
+      member of it?&rdquo; asked the Saint-Simonian.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If you had an income of fifty thousand livres, you would not think much
+      about the people. If you are smitten with a tender passion for the race,
+      go to Madagascar; there you will find a nice little nation all ready to
+      Saint-Simonize, classify, and cork up in your phials, but here every one
+      fits into his niche like a peg in a hole. A porter is a porter, and a
+      blockhead is a fool, without a college of fathers to promote them to those
+      positions.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You are a Carlist.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And why not? Despotism pleases me; it implies a certain contempt for the
+      human race. I have no animosity against kings, they are so amusing. Is it
+      nothing to sit enthroned in a room, at a distance of thirty million
+      leagues from the sun?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Let us once more take a broad view of civilization,&rdquo; said the man of
+      learning who, for the benefit of the inattentive sculptor, had opened a
+      discussion on primitive society and autochthonous races. &ldquo;The vigor of a
+      nation in its origin was in a way physical, unitary, and crude; then as
+      aggregations increased, government advanced by a decomposition of the
+      primitive rule, more or less skilfully managed. For example, in remote
+      ages national strength lay in theocracy, the priest held both sword and
+      censer; a little later there were two priests, the pontiff and the king.
+      To-day our society, the latest word of civilization, has distributed power
+      according to the number of combinations, and we come to the forces called
+      business, thought, money, and eloquence. Authority thus divided is
+      steadily approaching a social dissolution, with interest as its one
+      opposing barrier. We depend no longer on either religion or physical
+      force, but upon intellect. Can a book replace the sword? Can discussion be
+      a substitute for action? That is the question.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Intellect has made an end of everything,&rdquo; cried the Carlist. &ldquo;Come now!
+      Absolute freedom has brought about national suicides; their triumph left
+      them as listless as an English millionaire.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Won&rsquo;t you tell us something new? You have made fun of authority of all
+      sorts to-day, which is every bit as vulgar as denying the existence of
+      God. So you have no belief left, and the century is like an old Sultan
+      worn out by debauchery! Your Byron, in short, sings of crime and its
+      emotions in a final despair of poetry.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Don&rsquo;t you know,&rdquo; replied Bianchon, quite drunk by this time, &ldquo;that a dose
+      of phosphorus more or less makes the man of genius or the scoundrel, a
+      clever man or an idiot, a virtuous person or a criminal?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Can any one treat of virtue thus?&rdquo; cried Cursy. &ldquo;Virtue, the subject of
+      every drama at the theatre, the denoument of every play, the foundation of
+      every court of law....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Be quiet, you ass. You are an Achilles for virtue, without his heel,&rdquo;
+       said Bixiou.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Some drink!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What will you bet that I will drink a bottle of champagne like a flash,
+      at one pull?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What a flash of wit!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Drunk as lords,&rdquo; muttered a young man gravely, trying to give some wine
+      to his waistcoat.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, sir; real government is the art of ruling by public opinion.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Opinion? That is the most vicious jade of all. According to you moralists
+      and politicians, the laws you set up are always to go before those of
+      nature, and opinion before conscience. You are right and wrong both.
+      Suppose society bestows down pillows on us, that benefit is made up for by
+      the gout; and justice is likewise tempered by red-tape, and colds
+      accompany cashmere shawls.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Wretch!&rdquo; Emile broke in upon the misanthrope, &ldquo;how can you slander
+      civilization here at table, up to the eyes in wines and exquisite dishes?
+      Eat away at that roebuck with the gilded horns and feet, and do not carp
+      at your mother...&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Is it any fault of mine if Catholicism puts a million deities in a sack
+      of flour, that Republics will end in a Napoleon, that monarchy dwells
+      between the assassination of Henry IV. and the trial of Louis XVI., and
+      Liberalism produces Lafayettes?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Didn&rsquo;t you embrace him in July?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then hold your tongue, you sceptic.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Sceptics are the most conscientious of men.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;They have no conscience.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What are you saying? They have two apiece at least!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;So you want to discount heaven, a thoroughly commercial notion. Ancient
+      religions were but the unchecked development of physical pleasure, but we
+      have developed a soul and expectations; some advance has been made.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What can you expect, my friends, of a century filled with politics to
+      repletion?&rdquo; asked Nathan. &ldquo;What befell <i>The History of the King of
+      Bohemia and his Seven Castles</i>, a most entrancing conception?...&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I say,&rdquo; the would-be critic cried down the whole length of the table.
+      &ldquo;The phrases might have been drawn at hap-hazard from a hat, &lsquo;twas a work
+      written &lsquo;down to Charenton.&rsquo;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You are a fool!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And you are a rogue!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh! oh!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah! ah!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;They are going to fight.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, they aren&rsquo;t.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You will find me to-morrow, sir.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This very moment,&rdquo; Nathan answered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Come, come, you pair of fire-eaters!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You are another!&rdquo; said the prime mover in the quarrel.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah, I can&rsquo;t stand upright, perhaps?&rdquo; asked the pugnacious Nathan,
+      straightening himself up like a stag-beetle about to fly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He stared stupidly round the table, then, completely exhausted by the
+      effort, sank back into his chair, and mutely hung his head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Would it not have been nice,&rdquo; the critic said to his neighbor, &ldquo;to fight
+      about a book I have neither read nor seen?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Emile, look out for your coat; your neighbor is growing pale,&rdquo; said
+      Bixiou.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Kant? Yet another ball flung out for fools to sport with, sir!
+      Materialism and spiritualism are a fine pair of battledores with which
+      charlatans in long gowns keep a shuttlecock a-going. Suppose that God is
+      everywhere, as Spinoza says, or that all things proceed from God, as says
+      St. Paul... the nincompoops, the door shuts or opens, but isn&rsquo;t the
+      movement the same? Does the fowl come from the egg, or the egg from the
+      fowl?... Just hand me some duck... and there, you have all science.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Simpleton!&rdquo; cried the man of science, &ldquo;your problem is settled by fact!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What fact?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Professors&rsquo; chairs were not made for philosophy, but philosophy for the
+      professors&rsquo; chairs. Put on a pair of spectacles and read the budget.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Thieves!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nincompoops!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Knaves!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Gulls!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Where but in Paris will you find such a ready and rapid exchange of
+      thought?&rdquo; cried Bixiou in a deep, bass voice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Bixiou! Act a classical farce for us! Come now.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Would you like me to depict the nineteenth century?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Silence.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Pay attention.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Clap a muffle on your trumpets.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Shut up, you Turk!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Give him some wine, and let that fellow keep quiet.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Now, then, Bixiou!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The artist buttoned his black coat to the collar, put on yellow gloves,
+      and began to burlesque the <i>Revue des Deux Mondes</i> by acting a
+      squinting old lady; but the uproar drowned his voice, and no one heard a
+      word of the satire. Still, if he did not catch the spirit of the century,
+      he represented the <i>Revue</i> at any rate, for his own intentions were
+      not very clear to him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Dessert was served as if by magic. A huge epergne of gilded bronze from
+      Thomire&rsquo;s studio overshadowed the table. Tall statuettes, which a
+      celebrated artist had endued with ideal beauty according to conventional
+      European notions, sustained and carried pyramids of strawberries, pines,
+      fresh dates, golden grapes, clear-skinned peaches, oranges brought from
+      Setubal by steamer, pomegranates, Chinese fruit; in short, all the
+      surprises of luxury, miracles of confectionery, the most tempting
+      dainties, and choicest delicacies. The coloring of this epicurean work of
+      art was enhanced by the splendors of porcelain, by sparkling outlines of
+      gold, by the chasing of the vases. Poussin&rsquo;s landscapes, copied on Sevres
+      ware, were crowned with graceful fringes of moss, green, translucent, and
+      fragile as ocean weeds.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The revenue of a German prince would not have defrayed the cost of this
+      arrogant display. Silver and mother-of-pearl, gold and crystal, were
+      lavished afresh in new forms; but scarcely a vague idea of this almost
+      Oriental fairyland penetrated eyes now heavy with wine, or crossed the
+      delirium of intoxication. The fire and fragrance of the wines acted like
+      potent philters and magical fumes, producing a kind of mirage in the
+      brain, binding feet, and weighing down hands. The clamor increased. Words
+      were no longer distinct, glasses flew in pieces, senseless peals of
+      laughter broke out. Cursy snatched up a horn and struck up a flourish on
+      it. It acted like a signal given by the devil. Yells, hisses, songs,
+      cries, and groans went up from the maddened crew. You might have smiled to
+      see men, light-hearted by nature, grow tragical as Crebillon&rsquo;s dramas, and
+      pensive as a sailor in a coach. Hard-headed men blabbed secrets to the
+      inquisitive, who were long past heeding them. Saturnine faces were
+      wreathed in smiles worthy of a pirouetting dancer. Claude Vignon shuffled
+      about like a bear in a cage. Intimate friends began to fight.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Animal likenesses, so curiously traced by physiologists in human faces,
+      came out in gestures and behavior. A book lay open for a Bichat if he had
+      repaired thither fasting and collected. The master of the house, knowing
+      his condition, did not dare stir, but encouraged his guests&rsquo; 
+      extravangances with a fixed grimacing smile, meant to be hospitable and
+      appropriate. His large face, turning from blue and red to a purple shade
+      terrible to see, partook of the general commotion by movements like the
+      heaving and pitching of a brig.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Now, did you murder them?&rdquo; Emile asked him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Capital punishment is going to be abolished, they say, in favor of the
+      Revolution of July,&rdquo; answered Taillefer, raising his eyebrows with drunken
+      sagacity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Don&rsquo;t they rise up before you in dreams at times?&rdquo; Raphael persisted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There&rsquo;s a statute of limitations,&rdquo; said the murderer-Croesus.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And on his tombstone,&rdquo; Emile began, with a sardonic laugh, &ldquo;the
+      stonemason will carve &lsquo;Passer-by, accord a tear, in memory of one that&rsquo;s
+      here!&rsquo; Oh,&rdquo; he continued, &ldquo;I would cheerfully pay a hundred sous to any
+      mathematician who would prove the existence of hell to me by an
+      algebraical equation.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He flung up a coin and cried:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Heads for the existence of God!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Don&rsquo;t look!&rdquo; Raphael cried, pouncing upon it. &ldquo;Who knows? Suspense is so
+      pleasant.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Unluckily,&rdquo; Emile said, with burlesque melancholy, &ldquo;I can see no
+      halting-place between the unbeliever&rsquo;s arithmetic and the papal <i>Pater
+      noster</i>. Pshaw! let us drink. <i>Trinq</i> was, I believe, the oracular
+      answer of the <i>dive bouteille</i> and the final conclusion of
+      Pantagruel.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We owe our arts and monuments to the <i>Pater noster</i>, and our
+      knowledge, too, perhaps; and a still greater benefit&mdash;modern
+      government&mdash;whereby a vast and teeming society is wondrously
+      represented by some five hundred intellects. It neutralizes opposing
+      forces and gives free play to <i>Civilization</i>, that Titan queen who
+      has succeeded the ancient terrible figure of the <i>King</i>, that sham
+      Providence, reared by man between himself and heaven. In the face of such
+      achievements, atheism seems like a barren skeleton. What do you say?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am thinking of the seas of blood shed by Catholicism.&rdquo; Emile replied,
+      quite unimpressed. &ldquo;It has drained our hearts and veins dry to make a
+      mimic deluge. No matter! Every man who thinks must range himself beneath
+      the banner of Christ, for He alone has consummated the triumph of spirit
+      over matter; He alone has revealed to us, like a poet, an intermediate
+      world that separates us from the Deity.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Believest thou?&rdquo; asked Raphael with an unaccountable drunken smile. &ldquo;Very
+      good; we must not commit ourselves; so we will drink the celebrated toast,
+      <i>Diis ignotis</i>!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And they drained the chalice filled up with science, carbonic acid gas,
+      perfumes, poetry, and incredulity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If the gentlemen will go to the drawing-room, coffee is ready for them,&rdquo;
+       said the major-domo.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was scarcely one of those present whose mind was not floundering by
+      this time in the delights of chaos, where every spark of intelligence is
+      quenched, and the body, set free from its tyranny, gives itself up to the
+      frenetic joys of liberty. Some who had arrived at the apogee of
+      intoxication were dejected, as they painfully tried to arrest a single
+      thought which might assure them of their own existence; others, deep in
+      the heavy morasses of indigestion, denied the possibility of movement. The
+      noisy and the silent were oddly assorted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For all that, when new joys were announced to them by the stentorian tones
+      of the servant, who spoke on his master&rsquo;s behalf, they all rose, leaning
+      upon, dragging or carrying one another. But on the threshold of the room
+      the entire crew paused for a moment, motionless, as if fascinated. The
+      intemperate pleasures of the banquet seemed to fade away at this
+      titillating spectacle, prepared by their amphitryon to appeal to the most
+      sensual of their instincts.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Beneath the shining wax-lights in a golden chandelier, round about a table
+      inlaid with gilded metal, a group of women, whose eyes shone like
+      diamonds, suddenly met the stupefied stare of the revelers. Their
+      toilettes were splendid, but less magnificent than their beauty, which
+      eclipsed the other marvels of this palace. A light shone from their eyes,
+      bewitching as those of sirens, more brilliant and ardent than the blaze
+      that streamed down upon the snowy marble, the delicately carved surfaces
+      of bronze, and lit up the satin sheen of the tapestry. The contrasts of
+      their attitudes and the slight movements of their heads, each differing in
+      character and nature of attraction, set the heart afire. It was like a
+      thicket, where blossoms mingled with rubies, sapphires, and coral; a
+      combination of gossamer scarves that flickered like beacon-lights; of
+      black ribbons about snowy throats; of gorgeous turbans and demurely
+      enticing apparel. It was a seraglio that appealed to every eye, and
+      fulfilled every fancy. Each form posed to admiration was scarcely
+      concealed by the folds of cashmere, and half hidden, half revealed by
+      transparent gauze and diaphanous silk. The little slender feet were
+      eloquent, though the fresh red lips uttered no sound.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Demure and fragile-looking girls, pictures of maidenly innocence, with a
+      semblance of conventional unction about their heads, were there like
+      apparitions that a breath might dissipate. Aristocratic beauties with
+      haughty glances, languid, flexible, slender, and complaisant, bent their
+      heads as though there were royal protectors still in the market. An
+      English-woman seemed like a spirit of melancholy&mdash;some coy, pale,
+      shadowy form among Ossian&rsquo;s mists, or a type of remorse flying from crime.
+      The Parisienne was not wanting in all her beauty that consists in an
+      indescribable charm; armed with her irresistible weakness, vain of her
+      costume and her wit, pliant and hard, a heartless, passionless siren that
+      yet can create factitious treasures of passion and counterfeit emotion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Italians shone in the throng, serene and self-possessed in their bliss;
+      handsome Normans, with splendid figures; women of the south, with black
+      hair and well-shaped eyes. Lebel might have summoned together all the fair
+      women of Versailles, who since morning had perfected all their wiles, and
+      now came like a troupe of Oriental women, bidden by the slave merchant to
+      be ready to set out at dawn. They stood disconcerted and confused about
+      the table, huddled together in a murmuring group like bees in a hive. The
+      combination of timid embarrassment with coquettishness and a sort of
+      expostulation was the result either of calculated effect or a spontaneous
+      modesty. Perhaps a sentiment of which women are never utterly divested
+      prescribed to them the cloak of modesty to heighten and enhance the charms
+      of wantonness. So the venerable Taillefer&rsquo;s designs seemed on the point of
+      collapse, for these unbridled natures were subdued from the very first by
+      the majesty with which woman is invested. There was a murmur of
+      admiration, which vibrated like a soft musical note. Wine had not taken
+      love for traveling companion; instead of a violent tumult of passions, the
+      guests thus taken by surprise, in a moment of weakness, gave themselves up
+      to luxurious raptures of delight.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Artists obeyed the voice of poetry which constrains them, and studied with
+      pleasure the different delicate tints of these chosen examples of beauty.
+      Sobered by a thought perhaps due to some emanation from a bubble of
+      carbonic acid in the champagne, a philosopher shuddered at the misfortunes
+      which had brought these women, once perhaps worthy of the truest devotion,
+      to this. Each one doubtless could have unfolded a cruel tragedy. Infernal
+      tortures followed in the train of most of them, and they drew after them
+      faithless men, broken vows, and pleasures atoned for in wretchedness.
+      Polite advances were made by the guests, and conversations began, as
+      varied in character as the speakers. They broke up into groups. It might
+      have been a fashionable drawing-room where ladies and young girls offer
+      after dinner the assistance that coffee, liqueurs, and sugar afford to
+      diners who are struggling in the toils of a perverse digestion. But in a
+      little while laughter broke out, the murmur grew, and voices were raised.
+      The saturnalia, subdued for a moment, threatened at times to renew itself.
+      The alternations of sound and silence bore a distant resemblance to a
+      symphony of Beethoven&rsquo;s.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The two friends, seated on a silken divan, were first approached by a
+      tall, well-proportioned girl of stately bearing; her features were
+      irregular, but her face was striking and vehement in expression, and
+      impressed the mind by the vigor of its contrasts. Her dark hair fell in
+      luxuriant curls, with which some hand seemed to have played havoc already,
+      for the locks fell lightly over the splendid shoulders that thus attracted
+      attention. The long brown curls half hid her queenly throat, though where
+      the light fell upon it, the delicacy of its fine outlines was revealed.
+      Her warm and vivid coloring was set off by the dead white of her
+      complexion. Bold and ardent glances came from under the long eyelashes;
+      the damp, red, half-open lips challenged a kiss. Her frame was strong but
+      compliant; with a bust and arms strongly developed, as in figures drawn by
+      the Caracci, she yet seemed active and elastic, with a panther&rsquo;s strength
+      and suppleness, and in the same way the energetic grace of her figure
+      suggested fierce pleasures.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But though she might romp perhaps and laugh, there was something terrible
+      in her eyes and her smile. Like a pythoness possessed by the demon, she
+      inspired awe rather than pleasure. All changes, one after another, flashed
+      like lightning over every mobile feature of her face. She might captivate
+      a jaded fancy, but a young man would have feared her. She was like some
+      colossal statue fallen from the height of a Greek temple, so grand when
+      seen afar, too roughly hewn to be seen anear. And yet, in spite of all,
+      her terrible beauty could have stimulated exhaustion; her voice might
+      charm the deaf; her glances might put life into the bones of the dead; and
+      therefore Emile was vaguely reminded of one of Shakespeare&rsquo;s tragedies&mdash;a
+      wonderful maze, in which joy groans, and there is something wild even
+      about love, and the magic of forgiveness and the warmth of happiness
+      succeed to cruel storms of rage. She was a siren that can both kiss and
+      devour; laugh like a devil, or weep as angels can. She could concentrate
+      in one instant all a woman&rsquo;s powers of attraction in a single effort (the
+      sighs of melancholy and the charms of maiden&rsquo;s shyness alone excepted),
+      then in a moment rise in fury like a nation in revolt, and tear herself,
+      her passion, and her lover, in pieces.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Dressed in red velvet, she trampled under her reckless feet the stray
+      flowers fallen from other heads, and held out a salver to the two friends,
+      with careless hands. The white arms stood out in bold relief against the
+      velvet. Proud of her beauty; proud (who knows?) of her corruption, she
+      stood like a queen of pleasure, like an incarnation of enjoyment; the
+      enjoyment that comes of squandering the accumulations of three
+      generations; that scoffs at its progenitors, and makes merry over a
+      corpse; that will dissolve pearls and wreck thrones, turn old men into
+      boys, and make young men prematurely old; enjoyment only possible to
+      giants weary of their power, tormented by reflection, or for whom strife
+      has become a plaything.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What is your name?&rdquo; asked Raphael.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Aquilina.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Out of <i>Venice Preserved</i>!&rdquo; exclaimed Emile.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; she answered. &ldquo;Just as a pope takes a new name when he is exalted
+      above all other men, I, too, took another name when I raised myself above
+      women&rsquo;s level.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then have you, like your patron saint, a terrible and noble lover, a
+      conspirator, who would die for you?&rdquo; cried Emile eagerly&mdash;this gleam
+      of poetry had aroused his interest.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Once I had,&rdquo; she answered. &ldquo;But I had a rival too in La Guillotine. I
+      have worn something red about me ever since, lest any happiness should
+      carry me away.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, if you are going to get her on to the story of those four lads of La
+      Rochelle, she will never get to the end of it. That&rsquo;s enough, Aquilina. As
+      if every woman could not bewail some lover or other, though not every one
+      has the luck to lose him on the scaffold, as you have done. I would a
+      great deal sooner see a lover of mine in a trench at the back of Clamart
+      than in a rival&rsquo;s arms.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      All this in the gentlest and most melodious accents, and pronounced by the
+      prettiest, gentlest, and most innocent-looking little person that a fairy
+      wand ever drew from an enchanted eggshell. She had come up noiselessly,
+      and they became aware of a slender, dainty figure, charmingly timid blue
+      eyes, and white transparent brows. No ingenue among the naiads, a truant
+      from her river spring, could have been shyer, whiter, more ingenuous than
+      this young girl, seemingly about sixteen years old, ignorant of evil and
+      of the storms of life, and fresh from some church in which she must have
+      prayed the angels to call her to heaven before the time. Only in Paris are
+      such natures as this to be found, concealing depths of depravity behind a
+      fair mask, and the most artificial vices beneath a brow as young and fair
+      as an opening flower.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At first the angelic promise of those soft lineaments misled the friends.
+      Raphael and Emile took the coffee which she poured into the cups brought
+      by Aquilina, and began to talk with her. In the eyes of the two poets she
+      soon became transformed into some sombre allegory, of I know not what
+      aspect of human life. She opposed to the vigorous and ardent expression of
+      her commanding acquaintance a revelation of heartless corruption and
+      voluptuous cruelty. Heedless enough to perpetrate a crime, hardy enough to
+      feel no misgivings; a pitiless demon that wrings larger and kinder natures
+      with torments that it is incapable of knowing, that simpers over a traffic
+      in love, sheds tears over a victim&rsquo;s funeral, and beams with joy over the
+      reading of the will. A poet might have admired the magnificent Aquilina;
+      but the winning Euphrasia must be repulsive to every one&mdash;the first
+      was the soul of sin; the second, sin without a soul in it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I should dearly like to know,&rdquo; Emile remarked to this pleasing being, &ldquo;if
+      you ever reflect upon your future?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My future!&rdquo; she answered with a laugh. &ldquo;What do you mean by my future?
+      Why should I think about something that does not exist as yet? I never
+      look before or behind. Isn&rsquo;t one day at a time more than I can concern
+      myself with as it is? And besides, the future, as we know, means the
+      hospital.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How can you forsee a future in the hospital, and make no effort to avert
+      it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What is there so alarming about the hospital?&rdquo; asked the terrific
+      Aquilina. &ldquo;When we are neither wives nor mothers, when old age draws black
+      stockings over our limbs, sets wrinkles on our brows, withers up the woman
+      in us, and darkens the light in our lover&rsquo;s eyes, what could we need when
+      that comes to pass? You would look on us then as mere human clay; we with
+      our habiliments shall be for you like so much mud&mdash;worthless,
+      lifeless, crumbling to pieces, going about with the rustle of dead leaves.
+      Rags or the daintiest finery will be as one to us then; the ambergris of
+      the boudoir will breathe an odor of death and dry bones; and suppose there
+      is a heart there in that mud, not one of you but would make mock of it,
+      not so much as a memory will you spare to us. Is not our existence
+      precisely the same whether we live in a fine mansion with lap-dogs to
+      tend, or sort rags in a workhouse? Does it make much difference whether we
+      shall hide our gray heads beneath lace or a handkerchief striped with blue
+      and red; whether we sweep a crossing with a birch broom, or the steps of
+      the Tuileries with satins; whether we sit beside a gilded hearth, or cower
+      over the ashes in a red earthen pot; whether we go to the Opera or look on
+      in the Place de Greve?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;<i>Aquilina mia</i>, you have never shown more sense than in this
+      depressing fit of yours,&rdquo; Euphrasia remarked. &ldquo;Yes, cashmere, <i>point
+      d&rsquo;Alencon</i>, perfumes, gold, silks, luxury, everything that sparkles,
+      everything pleasant, belongs to youth alone. Time alone may show us our
+      folly, but good fortune will acquit us. You are laughing at me,&rdquo; she went
+      on, with a malicious glance at the friends; &ldquo;but am I not right? I would
+      sooner die of pleasure than of illness. I am not afflicted with a mania
+      for perpetuity, nor have I a great veneration for human nature, such as
+      God has made it. Give me millions, and I would squander them; I should not
+      keep one centime for the year to come. Live to be charming and have power,
+      that is the decree of my every heartbeat. Society sanctions my life; does
+      it not pay for my extravagances? Why does Providence pay me every morning
+      my income, which I spend every evening? Why are hospitals built for us?
+      And Providence did not put good and evil on either hand for us to select
+      what tires and pains us. I should be very foolish if I did not amuse
+      myself.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And how about others?&rdquo; asked Emile.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Others? Oh, well, they must manage for themselves. I prefer laughing at
+      their woes to weeping over my own. I defy any man to give me the slightest
+      uneasiness.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What have you suffered to make you think like this?&rdquo; asked Raphael.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I myself have been forsaken for an inheritance,&rdquo; she said, striking an
+      attitude that displayed all her charms; &ldquo;and yet I had worked night and
+      day to keep my lover! I am not to be gulled by any smile or vow, and I
+      have set myself to make one long entertainment of my life.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But does not happiness come from the soul within?&rdquo; cried Raphael.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It may be so,&rdquo; Aquilina answered; &ldquo;but is it nothing to be conscious of
+      admiration and flattery; to triumph over other women, even over the most
+      virtuous, humiliating them before our beauty and our splendor? Not only
+      so; one day of our life is worth ten years of a bourgeoise existence, and
+      so it is all summed up.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Is not a woman hateful without virtue?&rdquo; Emile said to Raphael.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Euphrasia&rsquo;s glance was like a viper&rsquo;s, as she said, with an irony in her
+      voice that cannot be rendered:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Virtue! we leave that to deformity and to ugly women. What would the poor
+      things be without it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Hush, be quiet,&rdquo; Emile broke in. &ldquo;Don&rsquo;t talk about something you have
+      never known.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That I have never known!&rdquo; Euphrasia answered. &ldquo;You give yourself for life
+      to some person you abominate; you must bring up children who will neglect
+      you, who wound your very heart, and you must say, &lsquo;Thank you!&rsquo; for it; and
+      these are the virtues you prescribe to woman. And that is not enough. By
+      way of requiting her self-denial, you must come and add to her sorrows by
+      trying to lead her astray; and though you are rebuffed, she is
+      compromised. A nice life! How far better to keep one&rsquo;s freedom, to follow
+      one&rsquo;s inclinations in love, and die young!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Have you no fear of the price to be paid some day for all this?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Even then,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;instead of mingling pleasures and troubles, my
+      life will consist of two separate parts&mdash;a youth of happiness is
+      secure, and there may come a hazy, uncertain old age, during which I can
+      suffer at my leisure.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She has never loved,&rdquo; came in the deep tones of Aquilina&rsquo;s voice. &ldquo;She
+      never went a hundred leagues to drink in one look and a denial with untold
+      raptures. She has not hung her own life on a thread, nor tried to stab
+      more than one man to save her sovereign lord, her king, her divinity....
+      Love, for her, meant a fascinating colonel.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Here she is with her La Rochelle,&rdquo; Euphrasia made answer. &ldquo;Love comes
+      like the wind, no one knows whence. And, for that matter, if one of those
+      brutes had once fallen in love with you, you would hold sensible men in
+      horror.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Brutes are put out of the question by the Code,&rdquo; said the tall, sarcastic
+      Aquilina.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I thought you had more kindness for the army,&rdquo; laughed Euphrasia.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How happy they are in their power of dethroning their reason in this
+      way,&rdquo; Raphael exclaimed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Happy?&rdquo; asked Aquilina, with dreadful look, and a smile full of pity and
+      terror. &ldquo;Ah, you do not know what it is to be condemned to a life of
+      pleasure, with your dead hidden in your heart....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      A moment&rsquo;s consideration of the rooms was like a foretaste of Milton&rsquo;s
+      Pandemonium. The faces of those still capable of drinking wore a hideous
+      blue tint, from burning draughts of punch. Mad dances were kept up with
+      wild energy; excited laughter and outcries broke out like the explosion of
+      fireworks. The boudoir and a small adjoining room were strewn like a
+      battlefield with the insensible and incapable. Wine, pleasure, and dispute
+      had heated the atmosphere. Wine and love, delirium and unconsciousness
+      possessed them, and were written upon all faces, upon the furniture; were
+      expressed by the surrounding disorder, and brought light films over the
+      vision of those assembled, so that the air seemed full of intoxicating
+      vapor. A glittering dust arose, as in the luminous paths made by a ray of
+      sunlight, the most bizarre forms flitted through it, grotesque struggles
+      were seen athwart it. Groups of interlaced figures blended with the white
+      marbles, the noble masterpieces of sculpture that adorned the rooms.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Though the two friends yet preserved a sort of fallacious clearness in
+      their ideas and voices, a feeble appearance and faint thrill of animation,
+      it was yet almost impossible to distinguish what was real among the
+      fantastic absurdities before them, or what foundation there was for the
+      impossible pictures that passed unceasingly before their weary eyes. The
+      strangest phenomena of dreams beset them, the lowering heavens, the fervid
+      sweetness caught by faces in our visions, and unheard-of agility under a
+      load of chains,&mdash;all these so vividly, that they took the pranks of
+      the orgy about them for the freaks of some nightmare in which all movement
+      is silent, and cries never reach the ear. The valet de chambre succeeded
+      just then, after some little difficulty, in drawing his master into the
+      ante-chamber to whisper to him:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The neighbors are all at their windows, complaining of the racket, sir.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If noise alarms them, why don&rsquo;t they lay down straw before their doors?&rdquo;
+       was Taillefer&rsquo;s rejoinder.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Raphael&rsquo;s sudden burst of laughter was so unseasonable and abrupt, that
+      his friend demanded the reason of his unseemly hilarity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You will hardly understand me,&rdquo; he replied. &ldquo;In the first place, I must
+      admit that you stopped me on the Quai Voltaire just as I was about to
+      throw myself into the Seine, and you would like to know, no doubt, my
+      motives for dying. And when I proceed to tell you that by an almost
+      miraculous chance the most poetic memorials of the material world had but
+      just then been summed up for me as a symbolical interpretation of human
+      wisdom; whilst at this minute the remains of all the intellectual
+      treasures ravaged by us at table are comprised in these two women, the
+      living and authentic types of folly, would you be any the wiser? Our
+      profound apathy towards men and things supplied the half-tones in a
+      crudely contrasted picture of two theories of life so diametrically
+      opposed. If you were not drunk, you might perhaps catch a gleam of
+      philosophy in this.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And if you had not both feet on that fascinating Aquilina, whose heavy
+      breathing suggests an analogy with the sounds of a storm about to burst,&rdquo;
+       replied Emile, absently engaged in the harmless amusement of winding and
+      unwinding Euphrasia&rsquo;s hair, &ldquo;you would be ashamed of your inebriated
+      garrulity. Both your systems can be packed in a phrase, and reduced to a
+      single idea. The mere routine of living brings a stupid kind of wisdom
+      with it, by blunting our intelligence with work; and on the other hand, a
+      life passed in the limbo of the abstract or in the abysses of the moral
+      world, produces a sort of wisdom run mad. The conditions may be summed up
+      in brief; we may extinguish emotion, and so live to old age, or we may
+      choose to die young as martyrs to contending passions. And yet this decree
+      is at variance with the temperaments with which we were endowed by the
+      bitter jester who modeled all creatures.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Idiot!&rdquo; Raphael burst in. &ldquo;Go on epitomizing yourself after that fashion,
+      and you will fill volumes. If I attempted to formulate those two ideas
+      clearly, I might as well say that man is corrupted by the exercise of his
+      wits, and purified by ignorance. You are calling the whole fabric of
+      society to account. But whether we live with the wise or perish with the
+      fool, isn&rsquo;t the result the same sooner or later? And have not the prime
+      constituents of the quintessence of both systems been before expressed in
+      a couple of words&mdash;<i>Carymary</i>, <i>Carymara</i>.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You make me doubt the existence of a God, for your stupidity is greater
+      than His power,&rdquo; said Emile. &ldquo;Our beloved Rabelais summed it all up in a
+      shorter word than your &lsquo;<i>Carymary</i>, <i>Carymara</i>&rsquo;; from his <i>Peut-etre</i>
+      Montaigne derived his own <i>Que sais-je</i>? After all, this last word of
+      moral science is scarcely more than the cry of Pyrrhus set betwixt good
+      and evil, or Buridan&rsquo;s ass between the two measures of oats. But let this
+      everlasting question alone, resolved to-day by a &lsquo;Yes&rsquo; and a &lsquo;No.&rsquo; What
+      experience did you look to find by a jump into the Seine? Were you jealous
+      of the hydraulic machine on the Pont Notre Dame?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah, if you but knew my history!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Pooh,&rdquo; said Emile; &ldquo;I did not think you could be so commonplace; that
+      remark is hackneyed. Don&rsquo;t you know that every one of us claims to have
+      suffered as no other ever did?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah!&rdquo; Raphael sighed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What a mountebank art thou with thy &lsquo;Ah&rsquo;! Look here, now. Does some
+      disease of the mind or body, by contracting your muscles, bring back of a
+      morning the wild horses that tear you in pieces at night, as with Damiens
+      once upon a time? Were you driven to sup off your own dog in a garret,
+      uncooked and without salt? Have your children ever cried, &lsquo;I am hungry&rsquo;?
+      Have you sold your mistress&rsquo; hair to hazard the money at play? Have you
+      ever drawn a sham bill of exchange on a fictitious uncle at a sham
+      address, and feared lest you should not be in time to take it up? Come
+      now, I am attending! If you were going to drown yourself for some woman,
+      or by way of a protest, or out of sheer dulness, I disown you. Make your
+      confession, and no lies! I don&rsquo;t at all want a historical memoir. And,
+      above all things, be as concise as your clouded intellect permits; I am as
+      critical as a professor, and as sleepy as a woman at her vespers.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You silly fool!&rdquo; said Raphael. &ldquo;When has not suffering been keener for a
+      more susceptible nature? Some day when science has attained to a pitch
+      that enables us to study the natural history of hearts, when they are
+      named and classified in genera, sub-genera, and families; into crustaceae,
+      fossils, saurians, infusoria, or whatever it is,&mdash;then, my dear
+      fellow, it will be ascertained that there are natures as tender and
+      fragile as flowers, that are broken by the slight bruises that some stony
+      hearts do not even feel&mdash;&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;For pity&rsquo;s sake, spare me thy exordium,&rdquo; said Emile, as, half plaintive,
+      half amused, he took Raphael&rsquo;s hand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0003" id="link2H_4_0003">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      II. A WOMAN WITHOUT A HEART
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      After a moment&rsquo;s silence, Raphael said with a careless gesture:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Perhaps it is an effect of the fumes of punch&mdash;I really cannot tell&mdash;this
+      clearness of mind that enables me to comprise my whole life in a single
+      picture, where figures and hues, lights, shades, and half-tones are
+      faithfully rendered. I should not have been so surprised at this poetical
+      play of imagination if it were not accompanied with a sort of scorn for my
+      past joys and sorrows. Seen from afar, my life appears to contract by some
+      mental process. That long, slow agony of ten years&rsquo; duration can be
+      brought to memory to-day in some few phrases, in which pain is resolved
+      into a mere idea, and pleasure becomes a philosophical reflection. Instead
+      of feeling things, I weigh and consider them&mdash;&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You are as tiresome as the explanation of an amendment,&rdquo; cried Emile.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Very likely,&rdquo; said Raphael submissively. &ldquo;I spare you the first seventeen
+      years of my life for fear of abusing a listener&rsquo;s patience. Till that
+      time, like you and thousands of others, I had lived my life at school or
+      the lycee, with its imaginary troubles and genuine happinesses, which are
+      so pleasant to look back upon. Our jaded palates still crave for that
+      Lenten fare, so long as we have not tried it afresh. It was a pleasant
+      life, with the tasks that we thought so contemptible, but which taught us
+      application for all that....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Let the drama begin,&rdquo; said Emile, half-plaintively, half-comically.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;When I left school,&rdquo; Raphael went on, with a gesture that claimed the
+      right of speaking, &ldquo;my father submitted me to a strict discipline; he
+      installed me in a room near his own study, and I had to rise at five in
+      the morning and be in bed by nine at night. He meant me to take my law
+      studies seriously. I attended the Schools, and read with an advocate as
+      well, but my lectures and work were so narrowly circumscribed by the laws
+      of time and space, and my father required such a strict account of my
+      doings, at dinner, that...&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What is this to me?&rdquo; asked Emile.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The devil take you!&rdquo; said Raphael. &ldquo;How are you to enter into my feelings
+      if I do not relate the facts that insensibly shaped my character, made me
+      timid, and prolonged the period of youthful simplicity? In this manner I
+      cowered under as strict a despotism as a monarch&rsquo;s till I came of age. To
+      depict the tedium of my life, it will be perhaps enough to portray my
+      father to you. He was tall, thin, and slight, with a hatchet face, and
+      pale complexion; a man of few words, fidgety as an old maid, exacting as a
+      senior clerk. His paternal solicitude hovered over my merriment and
+      gleeful thoughts, and seemed to cover them with a leaden pall. Any
+      effusive demonstration on my part was received by him as a childish
+      absurdity. I was far more afraid of him than I had been of any of our
+      masters at school.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I seem to see him before me at this moment. In his chestnut-brown
+      frock-coat he looked like a red herring wrapped up in the cover of a
+      pamphlet, and he held himself as erect as an Easter candle. But I was fond
+      of my father, and at heart he was right enough. Perhaps we never hate
+      severity when it has its source in greatness of character and pure morals,
+      and is skilfully tempered with kindness. My father, it is true, never left
+      me a moment to myself, and only when I was twenty years old gave me so
+      much as ten francs of my own, ten knavish prodigals of francs, such a
+      hoard as I had long vainly desired, which set me a-dreaming of unutterable
+      felicity; yet, for all that he sought to procure relaxations for me. When
+      he had promised me a treat beforehand, he would take me to Les Boufoons,
+      or to a concert or ball, where I hoped to find a mistress.... A mistress!
+      that meant independence. But bashful and timid as I was, knowing nobody,
+      and ignorant of the dialect of drawing-rooms, I always came back as
+      awkward as ever, and swelling with unsatisfied desires, to be put in
+      harness like a troop horse next day by my father, and to return with
+      morning to my advocate, the Palais de Justice, and the law. To have
+      swerved from the straight course which my father had mapped out for me,
+      would have drawn down his wrath upon me; at my first delinquency, he
+      threatened to ship me off as a cabin-boy to the Antilles. A dreadful
+      shiver ran through me if I had ventured to spend a couple of hours in some
+      pleasure party.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Imagine the most wandering imagination and passionate temperament, the
+      tenderest soul and most artistic nature, dwelling continually in the
+      presence of the most flint-hearted, atrabilious, and frigid man on earth;
+      think of me as a young girl married to a skeleton, and you will understand
+      the life whose curious scenes can only be a hearsay tale to you; the plans
+      for running away that perished at the sight of my father, the despair
+      soothed by slumber, the dark broodings charmed away by music. I breathed
+      my sorrows forth in melodies. Beethoven or Mozart would keep my
+      confidences sacred. Nowadays, I smile at recollections of the scruples
+      which burdened my conscience at that epoch of innocence and virtue.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If I set foot in a restaurant, I gave myself up for lost; my fancy led me
+      to look on a cafe as a disreputable haunt, where men lost their characters
+      and embarrassed their fortunes; as for engaging in play, I had not the
+      money to risk. Oh, if I needed to send you to sleep, I would tell you
+      about one of the most frightful pleasures of my life, one of those
+      pleasures with fangs that bury themselves in the heart as the
+      branding-iron enters the convict&rsquo;s shoulder. I was at a ball at the house
+      of the Duc de Navarreins, my father&rsquo;s cousin. But to make my position the
+      more perfectly clear, you must know that I wore a threadbare coat,
+      ill-fitting shoes, a tie fit for a stableman, and a soiled pair of gloves.
+      I shrank into a corner to eat ices and watch the pretty faces at my
+      leisure. My father noticed me. Actuated by some motive that I did not
+      fathom, so dumfounded was I by this act of confidence, he handed me his
+      keys and purse to keep. Ten paces away some men were gambling. I heard the
+      rattling of gold; I was twenty years old; I longed to be steeped for one
+      whole day in the follies of my time of life. It was a license of the
+      imagination that would find a parallel neither in the freaks of
+      courtesans, nor in the dreams of young girls. For a year past I had beheld
+      myself well dressed, in a carriage, with a pretty woman by my side,
+      playing the great lord, dining at Very&rsquo;s, deciding not to go back home
+      till the morrow; but was prepared for my father with a plot more intricate
+      than the Marriage of Figaro, which he could not possibly have unraveled.
+      All this bliss would cost, I estimated, fifty crowns. Was it not the
+      artless idea of playing truant that still had charms for me?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I went into a small adjoining room, and when alone counted my father&rsquo;s
+      money with smarting eyes and trembling fingers&mdash;a hundred crowns! The
+      joys of my escapade rose before me at the thought of the amount; joys that
+      flitted about me like Macbeth&rsquo;s witches round their caldron; joys how
+      alluring! how thrilling! how delicious! I became a deliberate rascal. I
+      heeded neither my tingling ears nor the violent beating of my heart, but
+      took out two twenty-franc pieces that I seem to see yet. The dates had
+      been erased, and Bonaparte&rsquo;s head simpered upon them. After I had put back
+      the purse in my pocket, I returned to the gaming-table with the two pieces
+      of gold in the palms of my damp hands, prowling about the players like a
+      sparrow-hawk round a coop of chickens. Tormented by inexpressible terror,
+      I flung a sudden clairvoyant glance round me, and feeling quite sure that
+      I was seen by none of my acquaintance, betted on a stout, jovial little
+      man, heaping upon his head more prayers and vows than are put up during
+      two or three storms at sea. Then, with an intuitive scoundrelism, or
+      Machiavelism, surprising in one of my age, I went and stood in the door,
+      and looked about me in the rooms, though I saw nothing; for both mind and
+      eyes hovered about that fateful green cloth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That evening fixes the date of a first observation of a physiological
+      kind; to it I owe a kind of insight into certain mysteries of our double
+      nature that I have since been enabled to penetrate. I had my back turned
+      on the table where my future felicity lay at stake, a felicity but so much
+      the more intense that it was criminal. Between me and the players stood a
+      wall of onlookers some five feet deep, who were chatting; the murmur of
+      voices drowned the clinking of gold, which mingled in the sounds sent up
+      by this orchestra; yet, despite all obstacles, I distinctly heard the
+      words of the two players by a gift accorded to the passions, which enables
+      them to annihilate time and space. I saw the points they made; I knew
+      which of the two turned up the king as well as if I had actually seen the
+      cards; at a distance of ten paces, in short, the fortunes of play blanched
+      my face.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My father suddenly went by, and then I knew what the Scripture meant by
+      &lsquo;The Spirit of God passed before his face.&rsquo; I had won. I slipped through
+      the crowd of men who had gathered about the players with the quickness of
+      an eel escaping through a broken mesh in a net. My nerves thrilled with
+      joy instead of anguish. I felt like some criminal on the way to torture
+      released by a chance meeting with the king. It happened that a man with a
+      decoration found himself short by forty francs. Uneasy eyes suspected me;
+      I turned pale, and drops of perspiration stood on my forehead, I was well
+      punished, I thought, for having robbed my father. Then the kind little
+      stout man said, in a voice like an angel&rsquo;s surely, &lsquo;All these gentlemen
+      have paid their stakes,&rsquo; and put down the forty francs himself. I raised
+      my head in triumph upon the players. After I had returned the money I had
+      taken from it to my father&rsquo;s purse, I left my winnings with that honest
+      and worthy gentleman, who continued to win. As soon as I found myself
+      possessed of a hundred and sixty francs, I wrapped them up in my
+      handkerchief, so that they could neither move or rattle on the way back;
+      and I played no more.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;What were you doing at the card-table?&rsquo; said my father as we stepped
+      into the carriage.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;I was looking on,&rsquo; I answered, trembling.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;But it would have been nothing out of the common if you had been
+      prompted by self-love to put some money down on the table. In the eyes of
+      men of the world you are quite old enough to assume the right to commit
+      such follies. So I should have pardoned you, Raphael, if you had made use
+      of my purse.....&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I did not answer. When we reached home, I returned the keys and money to
+      my father. As he entered his study, he emptied out his purse on the
+      mantelpiece, counted the money, and turned to me with a kindly look,
+      saying with more or less long and significant pauses between each phrase:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;My boy, you are very nearly twenty now. I am satisfied with you. You
+      ought to have an allowance, if only to teach you how to lay it out, and to
+      gain some acquaintance with everyday business. Henceforward I shall let
+      you have a hundred francs each month. Here is your first quarter&rsquo;s income
+      for this year,&rsquo; he added, fingering a pile of gold, as if to make sure
+      that the amount was correct. &lsquo;Do what you please with it.&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I confess that I was ready to fling myself at his feet, to tell him that
+      I was a thief, a scoundrel, and, worse than all, a liar! But a feeling of
+      shame held me back. I went up to him for an embrace, but he gently pushed
+      me away.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;You are a man now, <i>my child</i>,&rsquo; he said. &lsquo;What I have just done was
+      a very proper and simple thing, for which there is no need to thank me. If
+      I have any claim to your gratitude, Raphael,&rsquo; he went on, in a kind but
+      dignified way, &lsquo;it is because I have preserved your youth from the evils
+      that destroy young men in Paris. We will be two friends henceforth. In a
+      year&rsquo;s time you will be a doctor of law. Not without some hardship and
+      privations you have acquired the sound knowledge and the love of, and
+      application to, work that is indispensable to public men. You must learn
+      to know me, Raphael. I do not want to make either an advocate or a notary
+      of you, but a statesman, who shall be the pride of our poor house....
+      Good-night,&rsquo; he added.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;From that day my father took me fully into confidence. I was an only son;
+      and ten years before, I had lost my mother. In time past my father, the
+      head of a historic family remembered even now in Auvergne, had come to
+      Paris to fight against his evil star, dissatisfied at the prospect of
+      tilling the soil, with his useless sword by his side. He was endowed with
+      the shrewdness that gives the men of the south of France a certain
+      ascendency when energy goes with it. Almost unaided, he made a position
+      for himself near the fountain of power. The revolution brought a reverse
+      of fortune, but he had managed to marry an heiress of good family, and, in
+      the time of the Empire, appeared to be on the point of restoring to our
+      house its ancient splendor.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The Restoration, while it brought back considerable property to my
+      mother, was my father&rsquo;s ruin. He had formerly purchased several estates
+      abroad, conferred by the Emperor on his generals; and now for ten years he
+      struggled with liquidators, diplomatists, and Prussian and Bavarian courts
+      of law, over the disputed possession of these unfortunate endowments. My
+      father plunged me into the intricate labyrinths of law proceedings on
+      which our future depended. We might be compelled to return the rents, as
+      well as the proceeds arising from sales of timber made during the years
+      1814 to 1817; in that case my mother&rsquo;s property would have barely saved
+      our credit. So it fell out that the day on which my father in a fashion
+      emancipated me, brought me under a most galling yoke. I entered on a
+      conflict like a battlefield; I must work day and night; seek interviews
+      with statesmen, surprise their convictions, try to interest them in our
+      affairs, and gain them over, with their wives and servants, and their very
+      dogs; and all this abominable business had to take the form of pretty
+      speeches and polite attentions. Then I knew the mortifications that had
+      left their blighting traces on my father&rsquo;s face. For about a year I led
+      outwardly the life of a man of the world, but enormous labors lay beneath
+      the surface of gadding about, and eager efforts to attach myself to
+      influential kinsmen, or to people likely to be useful to us. My
+      relaxations were lawsuits, and memorials still furnished the staple of my
+      conversation. Hitherto my life had been blameless, from the sheer
+      impossibility of indulging the desires of youth; but now I became my own
+      master, and in dread of involving us both in ruin by some piece of
+      negligence, I did not dare to allow myself any pleasure or expenditure.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;While we are young, and before the world has rubbed off the delicate
+      bloom from our sentiments, the freshness of our impressions, the noble
+      purity of conscience which will never allow us to palter with evil, the
+      sense of duty is very strong within us, the voice of honor clamors within
+      us, and we are open and straightforward. At that time I was all these
+      things. I wished to justify my father&rsquo;s confidence in me. But lately I
+      would have stolen a paltry sum from him, with secret delight; but now that
+      I shared the burden of his affairs, of his name and of his house, I would
+      secretly have given up my fortune and my hopes for him, as I was
+      sacrificing my pleasures, and even have been glad of the sacrifice! So
+      when M. de Villele exhumed, for our special benefit, an imperial decree
+      concerning forfeitures, and had ruined us, I authorized the sale of my
+      property, only retaining an island in the middle of the Loire where my
+      mother was buried. Perhaps arguments and evasions, philosophical,
+      philanthropic, and political considerations would not fail me now, to
+      hinder the perpetration of what my solicitor termed a &lsquo;folly&rsquo;; but at
+      one-and-twenty, I repeat, we are all aglow with generosity and affection.
+      The tears that stood in my father&rsquo;s eyes were to me the most splendid of
+      fortunes, and the thought of those tears has often soothed my sorrow. Ten
+      months after he had paid his creditors, my father died of grief; I was his
+      idol, and he had ruined me! The thought killed him. Towards the end of the
+      autumn of 1826, at the age of twenty-two, I was the sole mourner at his
+      graveside&mdash;the grave of my father and my earliest friend. Not many
+      young men have found themselves alone with their thoughts as they followed
+      a hearse, or have seen themselves lost in crowded Paris, and without money
+      or prospects. Orphans rescued by public charity have at any rate the
+      future of the battlefield before them, and find a shelter in some
+      institution and a father in the government or in the <i>procureur du roi</i>.
+      I had nothing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Three months later, an agent made over to me eleven hundred and twelve
+      francs, the net proceeds of the winding up of my father&rsquo;s affairs. Our
+      creditors had driven us to sell our furniture. From my childhood I had
+      been used to set a high value on the articles of luxury about us, and I
+      could not help showing my astonishment at the sight of this meagre
+      balance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;Oh, rococo, all of it!&rsquo; said the auctioneer. A terrible word that fell
+      like a blight on the sacred memories of my childhood, and dispelled my
+      earliest illusions, the dearest of all. My entire fortune was comprised in
+      this &lsquo;account rendered,&rsquo; my future lay in a linen bag with eleven hundred
+      and twelve francs in it, human society stood before me in the person of an
+      auctioneer&rsquo;s clerk, who kept his hat on while he spoke. Jonathan, an old
+      servant who was much attached to me, and whom my mother had formerly
+      pensioned with an annuity of four hundred francs, spoke to me as I was
+      leaving the house that I had so often gaily left for a drive in my
+      childhood.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;Be very economical, Monsieur Raphael!&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The good fellow was crying.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Such were the events, dear Emile, that ruled my destinies, moulded my
+      character, and set me, while still young, in an utterly false social
+      position,&rdquo; said Raphael after a pause. &ldquo;Family ties, weak ones, it is
+      true, bound me to a few wealthy houses, but my own pride would have kept
+      me aloof from them if contempt and indifference had not shut their doors
+      on me in the first place. I was related to people who were very
+      influential, and who lavished their patronage on strangers; but I found
+      neither relations nor patrons in them. Continually circumscribed in my
+      affections, they recoiled upon me. Unreserved and simple by nature, I must
+      have appeared frigid and sophisticated. My father&rsquo;s discipline had
+      destroyed all confidence in myself. I was shy and awkward; I could not
+      believe that my opinion carried any weight whatever; I took no pleasure in
+      myself; I thought myself ugly, and was ashamed to meet my own eyes. In
+      spite of the inward voice that must be the stay of a man with anything in
+      him, in all his struggles, the voice that cries, &lsquo;Courage! Go forward!&rsquo; in
+      spite of sudden revelations of my own strength in my solitude; in spite of
+      the hopes that thrilled me as I compared new works, that the public
+      admired so much, with the schemes that hovered in my brain,&mdash;in spite
+      of all this, I had a childish mistrust of myself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;An overweening ambition preyed upon me; I believed that I was meant for
+      great things, and yet I felt myself to be nothing. I had need of other
+      men, and I was friendless. I found I must make my way in the world, where
+      I was quite alone, and bashful, rather than afraid.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;All through the year in which, by my father&rsquo;s wish, I threw myself into
+      the whirlpool of fashionable society, I came away with an inexperienced
+      heart, and fresh in mind. Like every grown child, I sighed in secret for a
+      love affair. I met, among young men of my own age, a set of swaggerers who
+      held their heads high, and talked about trifles as they seated themselves
+      without a tremor beside women who inspired awe in me. They chattered
+      nonsense, sucked the heads of their canes, gave themselves affected airs,
+      appropriated the fairest women, and laid, or pretended that they had laid
+      their heads on every pillow. Pleasure, seemingly, was at their beck and
+      call; they looked on the most virtuous and prudish as an easy prey, ready
+      to surrender at a word, at the slightest impudent gesture or insolent
+      look. I declare, on my soul and conscience, that the attainment of power,
+      or of a great name in literature, seemed to me an easier victory than a
+      success with some young, witty, and gracious lady of high degree.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;So I found the tumult of my heart, my feelings, and my creeds all at
+      variance with the axioms of society. I had plenty of audacity in my
+      character, but none in my manner. Later, I found out that women did not
+      like to be implored. I have from afar adored many a one to whom I devoted
+      a soul proof against all tests, a heart to break, energy that shrank from
+      no sacrifice and from no torture; <i>they</i> accepted fools whom I would
+      not have engaged as hall porters. How often, mute and motionless, have I
+      not admired the lady of my dreams, swaying in the dance; given up my life
+      in thought to one eternal caress, expressed all my hopes in a look, and
+      laid before her, in my rapture, a young man&rsquo;s love, which should outstrip
+      all fables. At some moments I was ready to barter my whole life for one
+      single night. Well, as I could never find a listener for my impassioned
+      proposals, eyes to rest my own upon, a heart made for my heart, I lived on
+      in all the sufferings of impotent force that consumes itself; lacking
+      either opportunity or courage or experience. I despaired, maybe, of making
+      myself understood, or I feared to be understood but too well; and yet the
+      storm within me was ready to burst at every chance courteous look. In
+      spite of my readiness to take the semblance of interest in look or word
+      for a tenderer solicitude, I dared neither to speak nor to be silent
+      seasonably. My words grew insignificant, and my silence stupid, by sheer
+      stress of emotion. I was too ingenuous, no doubt, for that artificial
+      life, led by candle-light, where every thought is expressed in
+      conventional phrases, or by words that fashion dictates; and not only so,
+      I had not learned how to employ speech that says nothing, and silence that
+      says a great deal. In short, I concealed the fires that consumed me, and
+      with such a soul as women wish to find, with all the elevation of soul
+      that they long for, and a mettle that fools plume themselves upon, all
+      women have been cruelly treacherous to me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;So in my simplicity I admired the heroes of this set when they bragged
+      about their conquests, and never suspected them of lying. No doubt it was
+      a mistake to wish for a love that springs for a word&rsquo;s sake; to expect to
+      find in the heart of a vain, frivolous woman, greedy for luxury and
+      intoxicated with vanity, the great sea of passion that surged
+      tempestuously in my own breast. Oh! to feel that you were born to love, to
+      make some woman&rsquo;s happiness, and yet to find not one, not even a noble and
+      courageous Marceline, not so much as an old Marquise! Oh! to carry a
+      treasure in your wallet, and not find even some child, or inquisitive
+      young girl, to admire it! In my despair I often wished to kill myself.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Finely tragical to-night!&rdquo; cried Emile.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Let me pass sentence on my life,&rdquo; Raphael answered. &ldquo;If your friendship
+      is not strong enough to bear with my elegy, if you cannot put up with half
+      an hour&rsquo;s tedium for my sake, go to sleep! But, then, never ask again for
+      the reason of suicide that hangs over me, that comes nearer and calls to
+      me, that I bow myself before. If you are to judge a man, you must know his
+      secret thoughts, sorrows, and feelings; to know merely the outward events
+      of a man&rsquo;s life would only serve to make a chronological table&mdash;a
+      fool&rsquo;s notion of history.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Emile was so much struck with the bitter tones in which these words were
+      spoken, that he began to pay close attention to Raphael, whom he watched
+      with a bewildered expression.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Now,&rdquo; continued the speaker, &ldquo;all these things that befell me appear in a
+      new light. The sequence of events that I once thought so unfortunate
+      created the splendid powers of which, later, I became so proud. If I may
+      believe you, I possess the power of readily expressing my thoughts, and I
+      could take a forward place in the great field of knowledge; and is not
+      this the result of scientific curiosity, of excessive application, and a
+      love of reading which possessed me from the age of seven till my entry on
+      life? The very neglect in which I was left, and the consequent habits of
+      self-repression and self-concentration; did not these things teach me how
+      to consider and reflect? Nothing in me was squandered in obedience to the
+      exactions of the world, which humble the proudest soul and reduce it to a
+      mere husk; and was it not this very fact that refined the emotional part
+      of my nature till it became the perfected instrument of a loftier purpose
+      than passionate desires? I remember watching the women who mistook me with
+      all the insight of contemned love.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I can see now that my natural sincerity must have been displeasing to
+      them; women, perhaps, even require a little hypocrisy. And I, who in the
+      same hour&rsquo;s space am alternately a man and a child, frivolous and
+      thoughtful, free from bias and brimful of superstition, and oftentimes
+      myself as much a woman as any of them; how should they do otherwise than
+      take my simplicity for cynicism, my innocent candor for impudence? They
+      found my knowledge tiresome; my feminine languor, weakness. I was held to
+      be listless and incapable of love or of steady purpose; a too active
+      imagination, that curse of poets, was no doubt the cause. My silence was
+      idiotic; and as I daresay I alarmed them by my efforts to please, women
+      one and all have condemned me. With tears and mortification, I bowed
+      before the decision of the world; but my distress was not barren. I
+      determined to revenge myself on society; I would dominate the feminine
+      intellect, and so have the feminine soul at my mercy; all eyes should be
+      fixed upon me, when the servant at the door announced my name. I had
+      determined from my childhood that I would be a great man; I said with
+      Andre Chenier, as I struck my forehead, &lsquo;There is something underneath
+      that!&rsquo; I felt, I believed, the thought within me that I must express, the
+      system I must establish, the knowledge I must interpret.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Let me pour out my follies, dear Emile; to-day I am barely twenty-six
+      years old, certain of dying unrecognized, and I have never been the lover
+      of the woman I dreamed of possessing. Have we not all of us, more or less,
+      believed in the reality of a thing because we wished it? I would never
+      have a young man for my friend who did not place himself in dreams upon a
+      pedestal, weave crowns for his head, and have complaisant mistresses. I
+      myself would often be a general, nay, emperor; I have been a Byron, and
+      then a nobody. After this sport on these pinnacles of human achievement, I
+      became aware that all the difficulties and steeps of life were yet to
+      face. My exuberant self-esteem came to my aid; I had that intense belief
+      in my destiny, which perhaps amounts to genius in those who will not
+      permit themselves to be distracted by contact with the world, as sheep
+      that leave their wool on the briars of every thicket they pass by. I meant
+      to cover myself with glory, and to work in silence for the mistress I
+      hoped to have one day. Women for me were resumed into a single type, and
+      this woman I looked to meet in the first that met my eyes; but in each and
+      all I saw a queen, and as queens must make the first advances to their
+      lovers, they must draw near to me&mdash;to me, so sickly, shy, and poor.
+      For her, who should take pity on me, my heart held in store such gratitude
+      over and beyond love, that I had worshiped her her whole life long. Later,
+      my observations have taught me bitter truths.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;In this way, dear Emile, I ran the risk of remaining companionless for
+      good. The incomprehensible bent of women&rsquo;s minds appears to lead them to
+      see nothing but the weak points in a clever man, and the strong points of
+      a fool. They feel the liveliest sympathy with the fool&rsquo;s good qualities,
+      which perpetually flatter their own defects; while they find the man of
+      talent hardly agreeable enough to compensate for his shortcomings. All
+      capacity is a sort of intermittent fever, and no woman is anxious to share
+      in its discomforts only; they look to find in their lovers the wherewithal
+      to gratify their own vanity. It is themselves that they love in us! But
+      the artist, poor and proud, along with his endowment of creative power, is
+      furnished with an aggressive egotism! Everything about him is involved in
+      I know not what whirlpool of his ideas, and even his mistress must gyrate
+      along with them. How is a woman, spoilt with praise, to believe in the
+      love of a man like that? Will she go to seek him out? That sort of lover
+      has not the leisure to sit beside a sofa and give himself up to the
+      sentimental simperings that women are so fond of, and on which the false
+      and unfeeling pride themselves. He cannot spare the time from his work,
+      and how can he afford to humble himself and go a-masquerading! I was ready
+      to give my life once and for all, but I could not degrade it in detail.
+      Besides, there is something indescribably paltry in a stockbroker&rsquo;s
+      tactics, who runs on errands for some insipid affected woman; all this
+      disgusts an artist. Love in the abstract is not enough for a great man in
+      poverty; he has need of its utmost devotion. The frivolous creatures who
+      spend their lives in trying on cashmeres, or make themselves into
+      clothes-pegs to hang the fashions from, exact the devotion which is not
+      theirs to give; for them, love means the pleasure of ruling and not of
+      obeying. She who is really a wife, one in heart, flesh, and bone, must
+      follow wherever he leads, in whom her life, her strength, her pride, and
+      happiness are centered. Ambitious men need those Oriental women whose
+      whole thought is given to the study of their requirements; for unhappiness
+      means for them the incompatibility of their means with their desires. But
+      I, who took myself for a man of genius, must needs feel attracted by these
+      very she-coxcombs. So, as I cherished ideas so different from those
+      generally received; as I wished to scale the heavens without a ladder, was
+      possessed of wealth that could not circulate, and of knowledge so wide and
+      so imperfectly arranged and digested that it overtaxed my memory; as I had
+      neither relations nor friends in the midst of this lonely and ghastly
+      desert, a desert of paving stones, full of animation, life, and thought,
+      wherein every one is worse than inimical, indifferent to wit; I made a
+      very natural if foolish resolve, which required such unknown
+      impossibilities, that my spirits rose. It was as if I had laid a wager
+      with myself, for I was at once the player and the cards.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This was my plan. The eleven hundred francs must keep life in me for
+      three years&mdash;the time I allowed myself in which to bring to light a
+      work which should draw attention to me, and make me either a name or a
+      fortune. I exulted at the thought of living on bread and milk, like a
+      hermit in the Thebaid, while I plunged into the world of books and ideas,
+      and so reached a lofty sphere beyond the tumult of Paris, a sphere of
+      silent labor where I would entomb myself like a chrysalis to await a
+      brilliant and splendid new birth. I imperiled my life in order to live. By
+      reducing my requirements to real needs and the barest necessaries, I found
+      that three hundred and sixty-five francs sufficed for a year of penury;
+      and, in fact, I managed to exist on that slender sum, so long as I
+      submitted to my own claustral discipline.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Impossible!&rdquo; cried Emile.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I lived for nearly three years in that way,&rdquo; Raphael answered, with a
+      kind of pride. &ldquo;Let us reckon it out. Three sous for bread, two for milk,
+      and three for cold meat, kept me from dying of hunger, and my mind in a
+      state of peculiar lucidity. I have observed, as you know, the wonderful
+      effects produced by diet upon the imagination. My lodgings cost me three
+      sous daily; I burnt three sous more in oil at night; I did my own
+      housework, and wore flannel shirts so as to reduce the laundress&rsquo; bill to
+      two sous per day. The money I spent yearly in coal, if divided up, never
+      cost more than two sous for each day. I had three years&rsquo; supply of
+      clothing, and I only dressed when going out to some library or public
+      lecture. These expenses, all told, only amounted to eighteen sous, so two
+      were left over for emergencies. I cannot recollect, during that long
+      period of toil, either crossing the Pont des Arts, or paying for water; I
+      went out to fetch it every morning from the fountain in the Place Saint
+      Michel, at the corner of the Rue de Gres. Oh, I wore my poverty proudly. A
+      man urged on towards a fair future walks through life like an innocent
+      person to his death; he feels no shame about it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I would not think of illness. Like Aquilina, I faced the hospital without
+      terror. I had not a moment&rsquo;s doubt of my health, and besides, the poor can
+      only take to their beds to die. I cut my own hair till the day when an
+      angel of love and kindness... But I do not want to anticipate the state of
+      things that I shall reach later. You must simply know that I lived with
+      one grand thought for a mistress, a dream, an illusion which deceives us
+      all more or less at first. To-day I laugh at myself, at that self, holy
+      perhaps and heroic, which is now no more. I have since had a closer view
+      of society and the world, of our manners and customs, and seen the dangers
+      of my innocent credulity and the superfluous nature of my fervent toil.
+      Stores of that sort are quite useless to aspirants for fame. Light should
+      be the baggage of seekers after fortune!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ambitious men spend their youth in rendering themselves worthy of
+      patronage; it is their great mistake. While the foolish creatures are
+      laying in stores of knowledge and energy, so that they shall not sink
+      under the weight of responsible posts that recede from them, schemers come
+      and go who are wealthy in words and destitute in ideas, astonish the
+      ignorant, and creep into the confidence of those who have a little
+      knowledge. While the first kind study, the second march ahead; the one
+      sort is modest, and the other impudent; the man of genius is silent about
+      his own merits, but these schemers make a flourish of theirs, and they are
+      bound to get on. It is so strongly to the interest of men in office to
+      believe in ready-made capacity, and in brazen-faced merit, that it is
+      downright childish of the learned to expect material rewards. I do not
+      seek to paraphrase the commonplace moral, the song of songs that obscure
+      genius is for ever singing; I want to come, in a logical manner, by the
+      reason of the frequent successes of mediocrity. Alas! study shows us such
+      a mother&rsquo;s kindness that it would be a sin perhaps to ask any other reward
+      of her than the pure and delightful pleasures with which she sustains her
+      children.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Often I remember soaking my bread in milk, as I sat by the window to take
+      the fresh air; while my eyes wandered over a view of roofs&mdash;brown,
+      gray, or red, slated or tiled, and covered with yellow or green mosses. At
+      first the prospect may have seemed monotonous, but I very soon found
+      peculiar beauties in it. Sometimes at night, streams of light through
+      half-closed shutters would light up and color the dark abysses of this
+      strange landscape. Sometimes the feeble lights of the street lamps sent up
+      yellow gleams through the fog, and in each street dimly outlined the
+      undulations of a crowd of roofs, like billows in a motionless sea. Very
+      occasionally, too, a face appeared in this gloomy waste; above the flowers
+      in some skyey garden I caught a glimpse of an old woman&rsquo;s crooked angular
+      profile as she watered her nasturtiums; or, in a crazy attic window, a
+      young girl, fancying herself quite alone as she dressed herself&mdash;a
+      view of nothing more than a fair forehead and long tresses held above her
+      by a pretty white arm.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I liked to see the short-lived plant-life in the gutters&mdash;poor weeds
+      that a storm soon washed away. I studied the mosses, with their colors
+      revived by showers, or transformed by the sun into a brown velvet that
+      fitfully caught the light. Such things as these formed my recreations&mdash;the
+      passing poetic moods of daylight, the melancholy mists, sudden gleams of
+      sunlight, the silence and the magic of night, the mysteries of dawn, the
+      smoke wreaths from each chimney; every chance event, in fact, in my
+      curious world became familiar to me. I came to love this prison of my own
+      choosing. This level Parisian prairie of roofs, beneath which lay populous
+      abysses, suited my humor, and harmonized with my thoughts.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Sudden descents into the world from the divine height of scientific
+      meditation are very exhausting; and, besides, I had apprehended perfectly
+      the bare life of the cloister. When I made up my mind to carry out this
+      new plan of life, I looked for quarters in the most out-of-the-way parts
+      of Paris. One evening, as I returned home to the Rue des Cordiers from the
+      Place de l&rsquo;Estrapade, I saw a girl of fourteen playing with a battledore
+      at the corner of the Rue de Cluny, her winsome ways and laughter amused
+      the neighbors. September was not yet over; it was warm and fine, so that
+      women sat chatting before their doors as if it were a fete-day in some
+      country town. At first I watched the charming expression of the girl&rsquo;s
+      face and her graceful attitudes, her pose fit for a painter. It was a
+      pretty sight. I looked about me, seeking to understand this blithe
+      simplicity in the midst of Paris, and saw that the street was a blind
+      alley and but little frequented. I remembered that Jean Jacques had once
+      lived here, and looked up the Hotel Saint-Quentin. Its dilapidated
+      condition awakened hopes of a cheap lodging, and I determined to enter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I found myself in a room with a low ceiling; the candles, in
+      classic-looking copper candle-sticks, were set in a row under each key.
+      The predominating cleanliness of the room made a striking contrast to the
+      usual state of such places. This one was as neat as a bit of genre; there
+      was a charming trimness about the blue coverlet, the cooking pots and
+      furniture. The mistress of the house rose and came to me. She seemed to be
+      about forty years of age; sorrows had left their traces on her features,
+      and weeping had dimmed her eyes. I deferentially mentioned the amount I
+      could pay; it seemed to cause her no surprise; she sought out a key from
+      the row, went up to the attics with me, and showed me a room that looked
+      out on the neighboring roofs and courts; long poles with linen drying on
+      them hung out of the window.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nothing could be uglier than this garret, awaiting its scholar, with its
+      dingy yellow walls and odor of poverty. The roofing fell in a steep slope,
+      and the sky was visible through chinks in the tiles. There was room for a
+      bed, a table, and a few chairs, and beneath the highest point of the roof
+      my piano could stand. Not being rich enough to furnish this cage (that
+      might have been one of the <i>Piombi</i> of Venice), the poor woman had
+      never been able to let it; and as I had saved from the recent sale the
+      furniture that was in a fashion peculiarly mine, I very soon came to terms
+      with my landlady, and moved in on the following day.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;For three years I lived in this airy sepulchre, and worked unflaggingly
+      day and night; and so great was the pleasure that study seemed to me the
+      fairest theme and the happiest solution of life. The tranquillity and
+      peace that a scholar needs is something as sweet and exhilarating as love.
+      Unspeakable joys are showered on us by the exertion of our mental
+      faculties; the quest of ideas, and the tranquil contemplation of
+      knowledge; delights indescribable, because purely intellectual and
+      impalpable to our senses. So we are obliged to use material terms to
+      express the mysteries of the soul. The pleasure of striking out in some
+      lonely lake of clear water, with forests, rocks, and flowers around, and
+      the soft stirring of the warm breeze,&mdash;all this would give, to those
+      who knew them not, a very faint idea of the exultation with which my soul
+      bathed itself in the beams of an unknown light, hearkened to the awful and
+      uncertain voice of inspiration, as vision upon vision poured from some
+      unknown source through my throbbing brain.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No earthly pleasure can compare with the divine delight of watching the
+      dawn of an idea in the space of abstractions as it rises like the morning
+      sun; an idea that, better still, attains gradually like a child to puberty
+      and man&rsquo;s estate. Study lends a kind of enchantment to all our
+      surroundings. The wretched desk covered with brown leather at which I
+      wrote, my piano, bed, and armchair, the odd wall-paper and furniture
+      seemed to have for me a kind of life in them, and to be humble friends of
+      mine and mute partakers of my destiny. How often have I confided my soul
+      to them in a glance! A warped bit of beading often met my eyes, and
+      suggested new developments,&mdash;a striking proof of my system, or a
+      felicitous word by which to render my all but inexpressible thought. By
+      sheer contemplation of the things about me I discerned an expression and a
+      character in each. If the setting sun happened to steal in through my
+      narrow window, they would take new colors, fade or shine, grow dull or
+      gay, and always amaze me with some new effect. These trifling incidents of
+      a solitary life, which escape those preoccupied with outward affairs, make
+      the solace of prisoners. And what was I but the captive of an idea,
+      imprisoned in my system, but sustained also by the prospect of a brilliant
+      future? At each obstacle that I overcame, I seemed to kiss the soft hands
+      of a woman with a fair face, a wealthy, well-dressed woman, who should
+      some day say softly, while she caressed my hair:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;Poor Angel, how thou hast suffered!&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I had undertaken two great works&mdash;one a comedy that in a very short
+      time must bring me wealth and fame, and an entry into those circles
+      whither I wished to return, to exercise the royal privileges of a man of
+      genius. You all saw nothing in that masterpiece but the blunder of a young
+      man fresh from college, a babyish fiasco. Your jokes clipped the wings of
+      a throng of illusions, which have never stirred since within me. You, dear
+      Emile, alone brought soothing to the deep wounds that others had made in
+      my heart. You alone will admire my &lsquo;Theory of the Will.&rsquo; I devoted most of
+      my time to that long work, for which I studied Oriental languages,
+      physiology and anatomy. If I do not deceive myself, my labors will
+      complete the task begun by Mesmer, Lavater, Gall, and Bichat, and open up
+      new paths in science.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There ends that fair life of mine, the daily sacrifice, the unrecognized
+      silkworm&rsquo;s toil, that is, perhaps, its own sole recompense. Since
+      attaining years of discretion, until the day when I finished my &lsquo;Theory,&rsquo; 
+      I observed, learned, wrote, and read unintermittingly; my life was one
+      long imposition, as schoolboys say. Though by nature effeminately attached
+      to Oriental indolence, sensual in tastes, and a wooer of dreams, I worked
+      incessantly, and refused to taste any of the enjoyments of Parisian life.
+      Though a glutton, I became abstemious; and loving exercise and sea voyages
+      as I did, and haunted by the wish to visit many countries, still child
+      enough to play at ducks and drakes with pebbles over a pond, I led a
+      sedentary life with a pen in my fingers. I liked talking, but I went to
+      sit and mutely listen to professors who gave public lectures at the <i>Bibliotheque</i>
+      or the Museum. I slept upon my solitary pallet like a Benedictine brother,
+      though woman was my one chimera, a chimera that fled from me as I wooed
+      it! In short, my life has been a cruel contradiction, a perpetual cheat.
+      After that, judge a man!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Sometimes my natural propensities broke out like a fire long smothered. I
+      was debarred from the women whose society I desired, stripped of
+      everything and lodged in an artist&rsquo;s garret, and by a sort of mirage or
+      calenture I was surrounded by captivating mistresses. I drove through the
+      streets of Paris, lolling on the soft cushions of a fine equipage. I
+      plunged into dissipation, into corroding vice, I desired and possessed
+      everything, for fasting had made me light-headed like the tempted Saint
+      Anthony. Slumber, happily, would put an end at last to these devastating
+      trances; and on the morrow science would beckon me, smiling, and I was
+      faithful to her. I imagine that women reputed virtuous, must often fall a
+      prey to these insane tempests of desire and passion, which rise in us in
+      spite of ourselves. Such dreams have a charm of their own; they are
+      something akin to evening gossip round the winter fire, when one sets out
+      for some voyage in China. But what becomes of virtue during these
+      delicious excursions, when fancy overleaps all difficulties?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;During the first ten months of seclusion I led the life of poverty and
+      solitude that I have described to you; I used to steal out unobserved
+      every morning to buy my own provisions for the day; I tidied my room; I
+      was at once master and servant, and played the Diogenes with incredible
+      spirit. But afterwards, while my hostess and her daughter watched my ways
+      and behavior, scrutinized my appearance and divined my poverty, there
+      could not but be some bonds between us; perhaps because they were
+      themselves so very poor. Pauline, the charming child, whose latent and
+      unconscious grace had, in a manner, brought me there, did me many services
+      that I could not well refuse. All women fallen on evil days are sisters;
+      they speak a common language; they have the same generosity&mdash;the
+      generosity that possesses nothing, and so is lavish of its affection, of
+      its time, and of its very self.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Imperceptibly Pauline took me under her protection, and would do things
+      for me. No kind of objection was made by her mother, whom I even surprised
+      mending my linen; she blushed for the charitable occupation. In spite of
+      myself, they took charge of me, and I accepted their services.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;In order to understand the peculiar condition of my mind, my
+      preoccupation with work must be remembered, the tyranny of ideas, and the
+      instinctive repugnance that a man who leads an intellectual life must ever
+      feel for the material details of existence. Could I well repulse the
+      delicate attentions of Pauline, who would noiselessly bring me my frugal
+      repast, when she noticed that I had taken nothing for seven or eight
+      hours? She had the tact of a woman and the inventiveness of a child; she
+      would smile as she made sign to me that I must not see her. Ariel glided
+      under my roof in the form of a sylph who foresaw every want of mine.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;One evening Pauline told me her story with touching simplicity. Her
+      father had been a major in the horse grenadiers of the Imperial Guard. He
+      had been taken prisoner by the Cossacks, at the passage of Beresina; and
+      when Napoleon later on proposed an exchange, the Russian authorities made
+      search for him in Siberia in vain; he had escaped with a view of reaching
+      India, and since then Mme. Gaudin, my landlady, could hear no news of her
+      husband. Then came the disasters of 1814 and 1815; and, left alone and
+      without resource, she had decided to let furnished lodgings in order to
+      keep herself and her daughter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She always hoped to see her husband again. Her greatest trouble was about
+      her daughter&rsquo;s education; the Princess Borghese was her Pauline&rsquo;s
+      godmother; and Pauline must not be unworthy of the fair future promised by
+      her imperial protectress. When Mme. Gaudin confided to me this heavy
+      trouble that preyed upon her, she said, with sharp pain in her voice, &lsquo;I
+      would give up the property and the scrap of paper that makes Gaudin a
+      baron of the empire, and all our rights to the endowment of Wistchnau, if
+      only Pauline could be brought up at Saint-Denis?&rsquo; Her words struck me; now
+      I could show my gratitude for the kindnesses expended on me by the two
+      women; all at once the idea of offering to finish Pauline&rsquo;s education
+      occurred to me; and the offer was made and accepted in the most perfect
+      simplicity. In this way I came to have some hours of recreation. Pauline
+      had natural aptitude; she learned so quickly, that she soon surpassed me
+      at the piano. As she became accustomed to think aloud in my presence, she
+      unfolded all the sweet refinements of a heart that was opening itself out
+      to life, as some flower-cup opens slowly to the sun. She listened to me,
+      pleased and thoughtful, letting her dark velvet eyes rest upon me with a
+      half smile in them; she repeated her lessons in soft and gentle tones, and
+      showed childish glee when I was satisfied with her. Her mother grew more
+      and more anxious every day to shield the young girl from every danger (for
+      all the beauty promised in early life was developing in the crescent
+      moon), and was glad to see her spend whole days indoors in study. My piano
+      was the only one she could use, and while I was out she practised on it.
+      When I came home, Pauline would be in my room, in her shabby dress, but
+      her slightest movement revealed her slender figure in its attractive
+      grace, in spite of the coarse materials that she wore. As with the heroine
+      of the fable of &lsquo;<i>Peau-d&rsquo;Ane</i>,&rsquo; a dainty foot peeped out of the
+      clumsy shoes. But all her wealth of girlish beauty was as lost upon me. I
+      had laid commands upon myself to see a sister only in Pauline. I dreaded
+      lest I should betray her mother&rsquo;s faith in me. I admired the lovely girl
+      as if she had been a picture, or as the portrait of a dead mistress; she
+      was at once my child and my statue. For me, another Pygmalion, the maiden
+      with the hues of life and the living voice was to become a form of
+      inanimate marble. I was very strict with her, but the more I made her feel
+      my pedagogue&rsquo;s severity, the more gentle and submissive she grew.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If a generous feeling strengthened me in my reserve and self-restraint,
+      prudent considerations were not lacking beside. Integrity of purpose
+      cannot, I think, fail to accompany integrity in money matters. To my mind,
+      to become insolvent or to betray a woman is the same sort of thing. If you
+      love a young girl, or allow yourself to be beloved by her, a contract is
+      implied, and its conditions should be thoroughly understood. We are free
+      to break with the woman who sells herself, but not with the young girl who
+      has given herself to us and does not know the extent of her sacrifice. I
+      must have married Pauline, and that would have been madness. Would it not
+      have given over that sweet girlish heart to terrible misfortunes? My
+      poverty made its selfish voice heard, and set an iron barrier between that
+      gentle nature and mine. Besides, I am ashamed to say, that I cannot
+      imagine love in the midst of poverty. Perhaps this is a vitiation due to
+      that malady of mankind called civilization; but a woman in squalid poverty
+      would exert no fascination over me, were she attractive as Homer&rsquo;s
+      Galatea, the fair Helen.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah, <i>vive l&rsquo;amour</i>! But let it be in silk and cashmere, surrounded
+      with the luxury which so marvelously embellishes it; for is it not perhaps
+      itself a luxury? I enjoy making havoc with an elaborate erection of
+      scented hair; I like to crush flowers, to disarrange and crease a smart
+      toilette at will. A bizarre attraction lies for me in burning eyes that
+      blaze through a lace veil, like flame through cannon smoke. My way of love
+      would be to mount by a silken ladder, in the silence of a winter night.
+      And what bliss to reach, all powdered with snow, a perfumed room, with
+      hangings of painted silk, to find a woman there, who likewise shakes away
+      the snow from her; for what other name can be found for the white muslin
+      wrappings that vaguely define her, like some angel form issuing from a
+      cloud! And then I wish for furtive joys, for the security of audacity. I
+      want to see once more that woman of mystery, but let it be in the throng,
+      dazzling, unapproachable, adored on all sides, dressed in laces and ablaze
+      with diamonds, laying her commands upon every one; so exalted above us,
+      that she inspires awe, and none dares to pay his homage to her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She gives me a stolen glance, amid her court, a look that exposes the
+      unreality of all this; that resigns for me the world and all men in it!
+      Truly I have scorned myself for a passion for a few yards of lace, velvet,
+      and fine lawn, and the hairdresser&rsquo;s feats of skill; a love of wax-lights,
+      a carriage and a title, a heraldic coronet painted on window panes, or
+      engraved by a jeweler; in short, a liking for all that is adventitious and
+      least woman in woman. I have scorned and reasoned with myself, but all in
+      vain.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A woman of rank with her subtle smile, her high-born air, and self-esteem
+      captivates me. The barriers she erects between herself and the world
+      awaken my vanity, a good half of love. There would be more relish for me
+      in bliss that all others envied. If my mistress does nothing that other
+      women do, and neither lives nor conducts herself like them, wears a cloak
+      that they cannot attain, breathes a perfume of her own, then she seems to
+      rise far above me. The further she rises from earth, even in the earthlier
+      aspects of love, the fairer she becomes for me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Luckily for me we have had no queen in France these twenty years, for I
+      should have fallen in love with her. A woman must be wealthy to acquire
+      the manners of a princess. What place had Pauline among these far-fetched
+      imaginings? Could she bring me the love that is death, that brings every
+      faculty into play, the nights that are paid for by life? We hardly die, I
+      think, for an insignificant girl who gives herself to us; and I could
+      never extinguish these feelings and poet&rsquo;s dreams within me. I was born
+      for an inaccessible love, and fortune has overtopped my desire.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How often have I set satin shoes on Pauline&rsquo;s tiny feet, confined her
+      form, slender as a young poplar, in a robe of gauze, and thrown a loose
+      scarf about her as I saw her tread the carpets in her mansion and led her
+      out to her splendid carriage! In such guise I should have adored her. I
+      endowed her with all the pride she lacked, stripped her of her virtues,
+      her natural simple charm, and frank smile, in order to plunge her heart in
+      our Styx of depravity that makes invulnerable, load her with our crimes,
+      make of her the fantastical doll of our drawing-rooms, the frail being who
+      lies about in the morning and comes to life again at night with the dawn
+      of tapers. Pauline was fresh-hearted and affectionate&mdash;I would have
+      had her cold and formal.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;In the last days of my frantic folly, memory brought Pauline before me,
+      as it brings the scenes of our childhood, and made me pause to muse over
+      past delicious moments that softened my heart. I sometimes saw her, the
+      adorable girl who sat quietly sewing at my table, wrapped in her
+      meditations; the faint light from my window fell upon her and was
+      reflected back in silvery rays from her thick black hair; sometimes I
+      heard her young laughter, or the rich tones of her voice singing some
+      canzonet that she composed without effort. And often my Pauline seemed to
+      grow greater, as music flowed from her, and her face bore a striking
+      resemblance to the noble one that Carlo Dolci chose for the type of Italy.
+      My cruel memory brought her back athwart the dissipations of my existence,
+      like a remorse, or a symbol of purity. But let us leave the poor child to
+      her own fate. Whatever her troubles may have been, at any rate I protected
+      her from a menacing tempest&mdash;I did not drag her down into my hell.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Until last winter I led the uneventful studious life of which I have
+      given you some faint picture. In the earliest days of December 1829, I
+      came across Rastignac, who, in spite of the shabby condition of my
+      wardrobe, linked his arm in mine, and inquired into my affairs with a
+      quite brotherly interest. Caught by his engaging manner, I gave him a
+      brief account of my life and hopes; he began to laugh, and treated me as a
+      mixture of a man of genius and a fool. His Gascon accent and knowledge of
+      the world, the easy life his clever management procured for him, all
+      produced an irresistible effect upon me. I should die an unrecognized
+      failure in a hospital, Rastignac said, and be buried in a pauper&rsquo;s grave.
+      He talked of charlatanism. Every man of genius was a charlatan, he plainly
+      showed me in that pleasant way of his that makes him so fascinating. He
+      insisted that I must be out of my senses, and would be my own death, if I
+      lived on alone in the Rue des Cordiers. According to him, I ought to go
+      into society, to accustom people to the sound of my name, and to rid
+      myself of the simple title of &lsquo;monsieur&rsquo; which sits but ill on a great man
+      in his lifetime.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;Those who know no better,&rsquo; he cried, &lsquo;call this sort of business <i>scheming</i>,
+      and moral people condemn it for a &ldquo;dissipated life.&rdquo; We need not stop to
+      look at what people think, but see the results. You work, you say? Very
+      good, but nothing will ever come of that. Now, I am ready for anything and
+      fit for nothing. As lazy as a lobster? Very likely, but I succeed
+      everywhere. I go out into society, I push myself forward, the others make
+      way before me; I brag and am believed; I incur debts which somebody else
+      pays! Dissipation, dear boy, is a methodical policy. The life of a man who
+      deliberately runs through his fortune often becomes a business
+      speculation; his friends, his pleasures, patrons, and acquaintances are
+      his capital. Suppose a merchant runs a risk of a million, for twenty years
+      he can neither sleep, eat, nor amuse himself, he is brooding over his
+      million, it makes him run about all over Europe; he worries himself, goes
+      to the devil in every way that man has invented. Then comes a liquidation,
+      such as I have seen myself, which very often leaves him penniless and
+      without a reputation or a friend. The spendthrift, on the other hand,
+      takes life as a serious game and sees his horses run. He loses his
+      capital, perhaps, but he stands a chance of being nominated
+      Receiver-General, of making a wealthy marriage, or of an appointment of
+      attache to a minister or ambassador; and he has his friends left and his
+      name, and he never wants money. He knows the standing of everybody, and
+      uses every one for his own benefit. Is this logical, or am I a madman
+      after all? Haven&rsquo;t you there all the moral of the comedy that goes on
+      every day in this world?... Your work is completed&rsquo; he went on after a
+      pause; &lsquo;you are immensely clever! Well, you have only arrived at my
+      starting-point. Now, you had better look after its success yourself; it is
+      the surest way. You will make allies in every clique, and secure applause
+      beforehand. I mean to go halves in your glory myself; I shall be the
+      jeweler who set the diamonds in your crown. Come here to-morrow evening,
+      by way of a beginning. I will introduce you to a house where all Paris
+      goes, all OUR Paris, that is&mdash;the Paris of exquisites, millionaires,
+      celebrities, all the folk who talk gold like Chrysostom. When they have
+      taken up a book, that book becomes the fashion; and if it is something
+      really good for once, they will have declared it to be a work of genius
+      without knowing it. If you have any sense, my dear fellow, you will ensure
+      the success of your &ldquo;Theory,&rdquo; by a better understanding of the theory of
+      success. To-morrow evening you shall go to see that queen of the moment&mdash;the
+      beautiful Countess Foedora....&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;I have never heard of her....&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;You Hottentot!&rsquo; laughed Rastignac; &lsquo;you do not know Foedora? A great
+      match with an income of nearly eighty thousand livres, who has taken a
+      fancy to nobody, or else no one has taken a fancy to her. A sort of
+      feminine enigma, a half Russian Parisienne, or a half Parisian Russian.
+      All the romantic productions that never get published are brought out at
+      her house; she is the handsomest woman in Paris, and the most gracious!
+      You are not even a Hottentot; you are something between the Hottentot and
+      the beast.... Good-bye till to-morrow.&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He swung round on his heel and made off without waiting for my answer. It
+      never occurred to him that a reasoning being could refuse an introduction
+      to Foedora. How can the fascination of a name be explained? FOEDORA
+      haunted me like some evil thought, with which you seek to come to terms. A
+      voice said in me, &lsquo;You are going to see Foedora!&rsquo; In vain I reasoned with
+      that voice, saying that it lied to me; all my arguments were defeated by
+      the name &lsquo;Foedora.&rsquo; Was not the name, and even the woman herself, the
+      symbol of all my desires, and the object of my life?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The name called up recollections of the conventional glitter of the
+      world, the upper world of Paris with its brilliant fetes and the tinsel of
+      its vanities. The woman brought before me all the problems of passion on
+      which my mind continually ran. Perhaps it was neither the woman nor the
+      name, but my own propensities, that sprang up within me and tempted me
+      afresh. Here was the Countess Foedora, rich and loveless, proof against
+      the temptations of Paris; was not this woman the very incarnation of my
+      hopes and visions? I fashioned her for myself, drew her in fancy, and
+      dreamed of her. I could not sleep that night; I became her lover; I
+      overbrimmed a few hours with a whole lifetime&mdash;a lover&rsquo;s lifetime;
+      the experience of its prolific delights burned me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The next day I could not bear the tortures of delay; I borrowed a novel,
+      and spent the whole day over it, so that I could not possibly think nor
+      keep account of the time till night. Foedora&rsquo;s name echoed through me even
+      as I read, but only as a distant sound; though it could be heard, it was
+      not troublesome. Fortunately, I owned a fairly creditable black coat and a
+      white waistcoat; of all my fortune there now remained abut thirty francs,
+      which I had distributed about among my clothes and in my drawers, so as to
+      erect between my whims and the spending of a five-franc piece a thorny
+      barrier of search, and an adventurous peregrination round my room. While I
+      as dressing, I dived about for my money in an ocean of papers. This
+      scarcity of specie will give you some idea of the value of that squandered
+      upon gloves and cab-hire; a month&rsquo;s bread disappeared at one fell swoop.
+      Alas! money is always forthcoming for our caprices; we only grudge the
+      cost of things that are useful or necessary. We recklessly fling gold to
+      an opera-dancer, and haggle with a tradesman whose hungry family must wait
+      for the settlement of our bill. How many men are there that wear a coat
+      that cost a hundred francs, and carry a diamond in the head of their cane,
+      and dine for twenty-five SOUS for all that! It seems as though we could
+      never pay enough for the pleasures of vanity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Rastignac, punctual to his appointment, smiled at the transformation, and
+      joked about it. On the way he gave me benevolent advice as to my conduct
+      with the countess; he described her as mean, vain, and suspicious; but
+      though mean, she was ostentatious, her vanity was transparent, and her
+      mistrust good-humored.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;You know I am pledged,&rsquo; he said, &lsquo;and what I should lose, too, if I
+      tried a change in love. So my observation of Foedora has been quite cool
+      and disinterested, and my remarks must have some truth in them. I was
+      looking to your future when I thought of introducing you to her; so mind
+      very carefully what I am about to say. She has a terrible memory. She is
+      clever enough to drive a diplomatist wild; she would know it at once if he
+      spoke the truth. Between ourselves, I fancy that her marriage was not
+      recognized by the Emperor, for the Russian ambassador began to smile when
+      I spoke of her; he does not receive her either, and only bows very coolly
+      if he meets her in the Bois. For all that, she is in Madame de Serizy&rsquo;s
+      set, and visits Mesdames de Nucingen and de Restaud. There is no cloud
+      over her here in France; the Duchesse de Carigliano, the most-strait-laced
+      marechale in the whole Bonapartist coterie, often goes to spend the summer
+      with her at her country house. Plenty of young fops, sons of peers of
+      France, have offered her a title in exchange for her fortune, and she has
+      politely declined them all. Her susceptibilities, maybe, are not to be
+      touched by anything less than a count. Aren&rsquo;t you a marquis? Go ahead if
+      you fancy her. This is what you may call receiving your instructions.&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;His raillery made me think that Rastignac wished to joke and excite my
+      curiosity, so that I was in a paroxysm of my extemporized passion by the
+      time that we stopped before a peristyle full of flowers. My heart beat and
+      my color rose as we went up the great carpeted staircase, and I noticed
+      about me all the studied refinements of English comfort; I was
+      infatuatedly bourgeois; I forgot my origin and all my personal and family
+      pride. Alas! I had but just left a garret, after three years of poverty,
+      and I could not just then set the treasures there acquired above such
+      trifles as these. Nor could I rightly estimate the worth of the vast
+      intellectual capital which turns to riches at the moment when opportunity
+      comes within our reach, opportunity that does not overwhelm, because study
+      has prepared us for the struggles of public life.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I found a woman of about twenty-two years of age; she was of average
+      height, was dressed in white, and held a feather fire-screen in her hand;
+      a group of men stood around her. She rose at the sight of Rastignac, and
+      came towards us with a gracious smile and a musically-uttered compliment,
+      prepared no doubt beforehand, for me. Our friend had spoken of me as a
+      rising man, and his clever way of making the most of me had procured me
+      this flattering reception. I was confused by the attention that every one
+      paid to me; but Rastignac had luckily mentioned my modesty. I was brought
+      in contact with scholars, men of letters, ex-ministers, and peers of
+      France. The conversation, interrupted a while by my coming, was resumed. I
+      took courage, feeling that I had a reputation to maintain, and without
+      abusing my privilege, I spoke when it fell to me to speak, trying to state
+      the questions at issue in words more or less profound, witty or trenchant,
+      and I made a certain sensation. Rastignac was a prophet for the thousandth
+      time in his life. As soon as the gathering was large enough to restore
+      freedom to individuals, he took my arm, and we went round the rooms.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;Don&rsquo;t look as if you were too much struck by the princess,&rsquo; he said, &lsquo;or
+      she will guess your object in coming to visit her.&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The rooms were furnished in excellent taste. Each apartment had a
+      character of its own, as in wealthy English houses; and the silken
+      hangings, the style of the furniture, and the ornaments, even the most
+      trifling, were all subordinated to the original idea. In a gothic boudoir
+      the doors were concealed by tapestried curtains, and the paneling by
+      hangings; the clock and the pattern of the carpet were made to harmonize
+      with the gothic surroundings. The ceiling, with its carved cross-beams of
+      brown wood, was full of charm and originality; the panels were beautifully
+      wrought; nothing disturbed the general harmony of the scheme of
+      decoration, not even the windows with their rich colored glass. I was
+      surprised by the extensive knowledge of decoration that some artist had
+      brought to bear on a little modern room, it was so pleasant and fresh, and
+      not heavy, but subdued with its dead gold hues. It had all the vague
+      sentiment of a German ballad; it was a retreat fit for some romance of
+      1827, perfumed by the exotic flowers set in their stands. Another
+      apartment in the suite was a gilded reproduction of the Louis Quatorze
+      period, with modern paintings on the walls in odd but pleasant contrast.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;You would not be so badly lodged,&rsquo; was Rastignac&rsquo;s slightly sarcastic
+      comment. &lsquo;It is captivating, isn&rsquo;t it?&rsquo; he added, smiling as he sat down.
+      Then suddenly he rose, and led me by the hand into a bedroom, where the
+      softened light fell upon the bed under its canopy of muslin and white
+      watered silk&mdash;a couch for a young fairy betrothed to one of the
+      genii.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;Isn&rsquo;t it wantonly bad taste, insolent and unbounded coquetry,&rsquo; he said,
+      lowering his voice, &lsquo;that allows us to see this throne of love? She gives
+      herself to no one, and anybody may leave his card here. If I were not
+      committed, I should like to see her at my feet all tears and submission.&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;Are you so certain of her virtue?&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;The boldest and even the cleverest adventurers among us, acknowledge
+      themselves defeated, and continue to be her lovers and devoted friends.
+      Isn&rsquo;t that woman a puzzle?&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;His words seemed to intoxicate me; I had jealous fears already of the
+      past. I leapt for joy, and hurried back to the countess, whom I had seen
+      in the gothic boudoir. She stopped me by a smile, made me sit beside her,
+      and talked about my work, seeming to take the greatest interest in it, and
+      all the more when I set forth my theories amusingly, instead of adopting
+      the formal language of a professor for their explanation. It seemed to
+      divert her to be told that the human will was a material force like steam;
+      that in the moral world nothing could resist its power if a man taught
+      himself to concentrate it, to economize it, and to project continually its
+      fluid mass in given directions upon other souls. Such a man, I said, could
+      modify all things relatively to man, even the peremptory laws of nature.
+      The questions Foedora raised showed a certain keenness of intellect. I
+      took a pleasure in deciding some of them in her favor, in order to flatter
+      her; then I confuted her feminine reasoning with a word, and roused her
+      curiosity by drawing her attention to an everyday matter&mdash;to sleep, a
+      thing so apparently commonplace, that in reality is an insoluble problem
+      for science. The countess sat in silence for a moment when I told her that
+      our ideas were complete organic beings, existing in an invisible world,
+      and influencing our destinies; and for witnesses I cited the opinions of
+      Descartes, Diderot, and Napoleon, who had directed, and still directed,
+      all the currents of the age.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;So I had the honor of amusing this woman; who asked me to come to see her
+      when she left me; giving me <i>les grande entrees</i>, in the language of
+      the court. Whether it was by dint of substituting polite formulas for
+      genuine expressions of feeling, a commendable habit of mine, or because
+      Foedora hailed in me a coming celebrity, an addition to her learned
+      menagerie; for some reason I thought that I had pleased her. I called all
+      my previous physiological studies and knowledge of woman to my aid, and
+      minutely scrutinized this singular person and her ways all evening. I
+      concealed myself in the embrasure of a window, and sought to discover her
+      thoughts from her bearing. I studied the tactics of the mistress of the
+      house, as she came and went, sat and chatted, beckoned to this one or
+      that, asked questions, listened to the answers, as she leaned against the
+      frame of the door; I detected a languid charm in her movements, a grace in
+      the flutterings of her dress, remarked the nature of the feelings she so
+      powerfully excited, and became very incredulous as to her virtue. If
+      Foedora would none of love to-day, she had had strong passions at some
+      time; past experience of pleasure showed itself in the attitudes she chose
+      in conversation, in her coquettish way of leaning against the panel behind
+      her; she seemed scarcely able to stand alone, and yet ready for flight
+      from too bold a glance. There was a kind of eloquence about her lightly
+      folded arms, which, even for benevolent eyes, breathed sentiment. Her
+      fresh red lips sharply contrasted with her brilliantly pale complexion.
+      Her brown hair brought out all the golden color in her eyes, in which blue
+      streaks mingled as in Florentine marble; their expression seemed to
+      increase the significance of her words. A studied grace lay in the charms
+      of her bodice. Perhaps a rival might have found the lines of the thick
+      eyebrows, which almost met, a little hard; or found a fault in the almost
+      invisible down that covered her features. I saw the signs of passion
+      everywhere, written on those Italian eyelids, on the splendid shoulders
+      worthy of the Venus of Milo, on her features, in the darker shade of down
+      above a somewhat thick under-lip. She was not merely a woman, but a
+      romance. The whole blended harmony of lines, the feminine luxuriance of
+      her frame, and its passionate promise, were subdued by a constant
+      inexplicable reserve and modesty at variance with everything else about
+      her. It needed an observation as keen as my own to detect such signs as
+      these in her character. To explain myself more clearly; there were two
+      women in Foedora, divided perhaps by the line between head and body: the
+      one, the head alone, seemed to be susceptible, and the other phlegmatic.
+      She prepared her glance before she looked at you, something unspeakably
+      mysterious, some inward convulsion seemed revealed by her glittering eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;So, to be brief, either my imperfect moral science had left me a good
+      deal to learn in the moral world, or a lofty soul dwelt in the countess,
+      lent to her face those charms that fascinated and subdued us, and gave her
+      an ascendency only the more complete because it comprehended a sympathy of
+      desire.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I went away completely enraptured with this woman, dazzled by the luxury
+      around her, gratified in every faculty of my soul&mdash;noble and base,
+      good and evil. When I felt myself so excited, eager, and elated, I thought
+      I understood the attraction that drew thither those artists, diplomatists,
+      men in office, those stock-jobbers encased in triple brass. They came, no
+      doubt, to find in her society the delirious emotion that now thrilled
+      through every fibre in me, throbbing through my brain, setting the blood
+      a-tingle in every vein, fretting even the tiniest nerve. And she had given
+      herself to none, so as to keep them all. A woman is a coquette so long as
+      she knows not love.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;Well,&rsquo; I said to Rastignac, &lsquo;they married her, or sold her perhaps, to
+      some old man, and recollections of her first marriage have caused her
+      aversion for love.&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I walked home from the Faubourg St. Honore, where Foedora lived. Almost
+      all the breadth of Paris lies between her mansion and the Rue des
+      Cordiers, but the distance seemed short, in spite of the cold. And I was
+      to lay siege to Foedora&rsquo;s heart, in winter, and a bitter winter, with only
+      thirty francs in my possession, and such a distance as that lay between
+      us! Only a poor man knows what such a passion costs in cab-hire, gloves,
+      linen, tailor&rsquo;s bills, and the like. If the Platonic stage lasts a little
+      too long, the affair grows ruinous. As a matter of fact, there is many a
+      Lauzun among students of law, who finds it impossible to approach a
+      ladylove living on a first floor. And I, sickly, thin, poorly dressed, wan
+      and pale as any artist convalescent after a work, how could I compete with
+      other young men, curled, handsome, smart, outcravatting Croatia; wealthy
+      men, equipped with tilburys, and armed with assurance?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;Bah, death or Foedora!&rsquo; I cried, as I went round by a bridge; &lsquo;my
+      fortune lies in Foedora.&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That gothic boudoir and Louis Quatorze salon came before my eyes. I saw
+      the countess again in her white dress with its large graceful sleeves, and
+      all the fascinations of her form and movements. These pictures of Foedora
+      and her luxurious surroundings haunted me even in my bare, cold garret,
+      when at last I reached it, as disheveled as any naturalist&rsquo;s wig. The
+      contrast suggested evil counsel; in such a way crimes are conceived. I
+      cursed my honest, self-respecting poverty, my garret where such teeming
+      fancies had stirred within me. I trembled with fury, I reproached God, the
+      devil, social conditions, my own father, the whole universe, indeed, with
+      my fate and my misfortunes. I went hungry to bed, muttering ludicrous
+      imprecations, but fully determined to win Foedora. Her heart was my last
+      ticket in the lottery, my fortune depended upon it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I spare you the history of my earlier visits, to reach the drama the
+      sooner. In my efforts to appeal to her, I essayed to engage her intellect
+      and her vanity on my side; in order to secure her love, I gave her any
+      quantity of reasons for increasing her self-esteem; I never left her in a
+      state of indifference; women like emotions at any cost, I gave them to her
+      in plenty; I would rather have had her angry with me than indifferent.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;At first, urged by a strong will and a desire for her love, I assumed a
+      little authority, but my own feelings grew stronger and mastered me; I
+      relapsed into truth, I lost my head, and fell desperately in love.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am not very sure what we mean by the word love in our poetry and our
+      talk; but I know that I have never found in all the ready rhetorical
+      phrases of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, in whose room perhaps I was lodging; nor
+      among the feeble inventions of two centuries of our literature, nor in any
+      picture that Italy has produced, a representation of the feelings that
+      expanded all at once in my double nature. The view of the lake of Bienne,
+      some music of Rossini&rsquo;s, the Madonna of Murillo&rsquo;s now in the possession of
+      General Soult, Lescombat&rsquo;s letters, a few sayings scattered through
+      collections of anecdotes; but most of all the prayers of religious
+      ecstatics, and passages in our <i>fabliaux</i>,&mdash;these things alone
+      have power to carry me back to the divine heights of my first love.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nothing expressed in human language, no thought reproducible in color,
+      marble, sound, or articulate speech, could ever render the force, the
+      truth, the completeness, the suddenness with which love awoke in me. To
+      speak of art, is to speak of illusion. Love passes through endless
+      transformations before it passes for ever into our existence and makes it
+      glow with its own color of flame. The process is imperceptible, and
+      baffles the artist&rsquo;s analysis. Its moans and complaints are tedious to an
+      uninterested spectator. One would need to be very much in love to share
+      the furious transports of Lovelace, as one reads <i>Clarissa Harlowe</i>.
+      Love is like some fresh spring, that leaves its cresses, its gravel bed
+      and flowers to become first a stream and then a river, changing its aspect
+      and its nature as it flows to plunge itself in some boundless ocean, where
+      restricted natures only find monotony, but where great souls are engulfed
+      in endless contemplation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How can I dare to describe the hues of fleeting emotions, the nothings
+      beyond all price, the spoken accents that beggar language, the looks that
+      hold more than all the wealth of poetry? Not one of the mysterious scenes
+      that draw us insensibly nearer and nearer to a woman, but has depths in it
+      which can swallow up all the poetry that ever was written. How can the
+      inner life and mystery that stirs in our souls penetrate through our
+      glozes, when we have not even words to describe the visible and outward
+      mysteries of beauty? What enchantment steeped me for how many hours in
+      unspeakable rapture, filled with the sight of Her! What made me happy? I
+      know not. That face of hers overflowed with light at such times; it seemed
+      in some way to glow with it; the outlines of her face, with the scarcely
+      perceptible down on its delicate surface, shone with a beauty belonging to
+      the far distant horizon that melts into the sunlight. The light of day
+      seemed to caress her as she mingled in it; rather it seemed that the light
+      of her eyes was brighter than the daylight itself; or some shadow passing
+      over that fair face made a kind of change there, altering its hues and its
+      expression. Some thought would often seem to glow on her white brows; her
+      eyes appeared to dilate, and her eyelids trembled; a smile rippled over
+      her features; the living coral of her lips grew full of meaning as they
+      closed and unclosed; an indistinguishable something in her hair made brown
+      shadows on her fair temples; in each new phase Foedora spoke. Every slight
+      variation in her beauty made a new pleasure for my eyes, disclosed charms
+      my heart had never known before; I tried to read a separate emotion or a
+      hope in every change that passed over her face. This mute converse passed
+      between soul and soul, like sound and answering echo; and the short-lived
+      delights then showered upon me have left indelible impressions behind. Her
+      voice would cause a frenzy in me that I could hardly understand. I could
+      have copied the example of some prince of Lorraine, and held a live coal
+      in the hollow of my hand, if her fingers passed caressingly through my
+      hair the while. I felt no longer mere admiration and desire: I was under
+      the spell; I had met my destiny. When back again under my own roof, I
+      still vaguely saw Foedora in her own home, and had some indefinable share
+      in her life; if she felt ill, I suffered too. The next day I used to say
+      to her:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;You were not well yesterday.&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How often has she not stood before me, called by the power of ecstasy, in
+      the silence of the night! Sometimes she would break in upon me like a ray
+      of light, make me drop my pen, and put science and study to flight in
+      grief and alarm, as she compelled my admiration by the alluring pose I had
+      seen but a short time before. Sometimes I went to seek her in the spirit
+      world, and would bow down to her as to a hope, entreating her to let me
+      hear the silver sounds of her voice, and I would wake at length in tears.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Once, when she had promised to go to the theatre with me, she took it
+      suddenly into her head to refuse to go out, and begged me to leave her
+      alone. I was in such despair over the perversity which cost me a day&rsquo;s
+      work, and (if I must confess it) my last shilling as well, that I went
+      alone where she was to have been, desiring to see the play she had wished
+      to see. I had scarcely seated myself when an electric shock went through
+      me. A voice told me, &lsquo;She is here!&rsquo; I looked round, and saw the countess
+      hidden in the shadow at the back of her box in the first tier. My look did
+      not waver; my eyes saw her at once with incredible clearness; my soul
+      hovered about her life like an insect above its flower. How had my senses
+      received this warning? There is something in these inward tremors that
+      shallow people find astonishing, but the phenomena of our inner
+      consciousness are produced as simple as those of external vision; so I was
+      not surprised, but much vexed. My studies of our mental faculties, so
+      little understood, helped me at any rate to find in my own excitement some
+      living proofs of my theories. There was something exceedingly odd in this
+      combination of lover and man of science, of downright idolatry of a woman
+      with the love of knowledge. The causes of the lover&rsquo;s despair were highly
+      interesting to the man of science; and the exultant lover, on the other
+      hand, put science far away from him in his joy. Foedora saw me, and grew
+      grave: I annoyed her. I went to her box during the first interval, and
+      finding her alone, I stayed there. Although we had not spoken of love, I
+      foresaw an explanation. I had not told her my secret, still there was a
+      kind of understanding between us. She used to tell me her plans for
+      amusement, and on the previous evening had asked with friendly eagerness
+      if I meant to call the next day. After any witticism of hers, she would
+      give me an inquiring glance, as if she had sought to please me alone by
+      it. She would soothe me if I was vexed; and if she pouted, I had in some
+      sort a right to ask an explanation. Before she would pardon any blunder,
+      she would keep me a suppliant for long. All these things that we so
+      relished, were so many lovers&rsquo; quarrels. What arch grace she threw into it
+      all! and what happiness it was to me!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But now we stood before each other as strangers, with the close relation
+      between us both suspended. The countess was glacial: a presentiment of
+      trouble filled me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;Will you come home with me?&rsquo; she said, when the play was over.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There had been a sudden change in the weather, and sleet was falling in
+      showers as we went out. Foedora&rsquo;s carriage was unable to reach the doorway
+      of the theatre. At the sight of a well-dressed woman about to cross the
+      street, a commissionaire held an umbrella above us, and stood waiting at
+      the carriage-door for his tip. I would have given ten years of life just
+      then for a couple of halfpence, but I had not a penny. All the man in me
+      and all my vainest susceptibilities were wrung with an infernal pain. The
+      words, &lsquo;I haven&rsquo;t a penny about me, my good fellow!&rsquo; came from me in the
+      hard voice of thwarted passion; and yet I was that man&rsquo;s brother in
+      misfortune, as I knew too well; and once I had so lightly paid away seven
+      hundred thousand francs! The footman pushed the man aside, and the horses
+      sprang forward. As we returned, Foedora, in real or feigned abstraction,
+      answered all my questions curtly and by monosyllables. I said no more; it
+      was a hateful moment. When we reached her house, we seated ourselves by
+      the hearth, and when the servant had stirred the fire and left us alone,
+      the countess turned to me with an inexplicable expression, and spoke. Her
+      manner was almost solemn.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;Since my return to France, more than one young man, tempted by my money,
+      has made proposals to me which would have satisfied my pride. I have come
+      across men, too, whose attachment was so deep and sincere that they might
+      have married me even if they had found me the penniless girl I used to be.
+      Besides these, Monsieur de Valentin, you must know that new titles and
+      newly-acquired wealth have been also offered to me, and that I have never
+      received again any of those who were so ill-advised as to mention love to
+      me. If my regard for you was but slight, I would not give you this
+      warning, which is dictated by friendship rather than by pride. A woman
+      lays herself open to a rebuff of some kind, if she imagines herself to be
+      loved, and declines, before it is uttered, to listen to language which in
+      its nature implies a compliment. I am well acquainted with the parts
+      played by Arsinoe and Araminta, and with the sort of answer I might look
+      for under such circumstances; but I hope to-day that I shall not find
+      myself misconstrued by a man of no ordinary character, because I have
+      frankly spoken my mind.&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She spoke with the cool self-possession of some attorney or solicitor
+      explaining the nature of a contract or the conduct of a lawsuit to a
+      client. There was not the least sign of feeling in the clear soft tones of
+      her voice. Her steady face and dignified bearing seemed to me now full of
+      diplomatic reserve and coldness. She had planned this scene, no doubt, and
+      carefully chosen her words beforehand. Oh, my friend, there are women who
+      take pleasure in piercing hearts, and deliberately plunge the dagger back
+      again into the wound; such women as these cannot but be worshiped, for
+      such women either love or would fain be loved. A day comes when they make
+      amends for all the pain they gave us; they repay us for the pangs, the
+      keenness of which they recognize, in joys a hundred-fold, even as God,
+      they tell us, recompenses our good works. Does not their perversity spring
+      from the strength of their feelings? But to be so tortured by a woman, who
+      slaughters you with indifference! was not the suffering hideous?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Foedora did not know it, but in that minute she trampled all my hopes
+      beneath her feet; she maimed my life and she blighted my future with the
+      cool indifference and unconscious barbarity of an inquisitive child who
+      plucks its wings from a butterfly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;Later on,&rsquo; resumed Foedora, &lsquo;you will learn, I hope, the stability of
+      the affection that I keep for my friends. You will always find that I have
+      devotion and kindness for them. I would give my life to serve my friends;
+      but you could only despise me, if I allowed them to make love to me
+      without return. That is enough. You are the only man to whom I have spoken
+      such words as these last.&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;At first I could not speak, or master the tempest that arose within me;
+      but I soon repressed my emotions in the depths of my soul, and began to
+      smile.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;If I own that I love you,&rsquo; I said, &lsquo;you will banish me at once; if I
+      plead guilty to indifference, you will make me suffer for it. Women,
+      magistrates, and priests never quite lay the gown aside. Silence is
+      non-committal; be pleased then, madame, to approve my silence. You must
+      have feared, in some degree, to lose me, or I should not have received
+      this friendly admonition; and with that thought my pride ought to be
+      satisfied. Let us banish all personal considerations. You are perhaps the
+      only woman with whom I could discuss rationally a resolution so contrary
+      to the laws of nature. Considered with regard to your species, you are a
+      prodigy. Now let us investigate, in good faith, the causes of this
+      psychological anomaly. Does there exist in you, as in many women, a
+      certain pride in self, a love of your own loveliness, a refinement of
+      egoism which makes you shudder at the idea of belonging to another; is it
+      the thought of resigning your own will and submitting to a superiority,
+      though only of convention, which displeases you? You would seem to me a
+      thousand times fairer for it. Can love formerly have brought you
+      suffering? You probably set some value on your dainty figure and graceful
+      appearance, and may perhaps wish to avoid the disfigurements of maternity.
+      Is not this one of your strongest reasons for refusing a too importunate
+      love? Some natural defect perhaps makes you insusceptible in spite of
+      yourself? Do not be angry; my study, my inquiry is absolutely
+      dispassionate. Some are born blind, and nature may easily have formed
+      women who in like manner are blind, deaf, and dumb to love. You are really
+      an interesting subject for medical investigation. You do not know your
+      value. You feel perhaps a very legitimate distaste for mankind; in that I
+      quite concur&mdash;to me they all seem ugly and detestable. And you are
+      right,&rsquo; I added, feeling my heart swell within me; &lsquo;how can you do
+      otherwise than despise us? There is not a man living who is worthy of
+      you.&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I will not repeat all the biting words with which I ridiculed her. In
+      vain; my bitterest sarcasms and keenest irony never made her wince nor
+      elicited a sign of vexation. She heard me, with the customary smile upon
+      her lips and in her eyes, the smile that she wore as a part of her
+      clothing, and that never varied for friends, for mere acquaintances, or
+      for strangers.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;Isn&rsquo;t it very nice of me to allow you to dissect me like this?&rsquo; she said
+      at last, as I came to a temporary standstill, and looked at her in
+      silence. &lsquo;You see,&rsquo; she went on, laughing, &lsquo;that I have no foolish
+      over-sensitiveness about my friendship. Many a woman would shut her door
+      on you by way of punishing you for your impertinence.&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;You could banish me without needing to give me the reasons for your
+      harshness.&rsquo; As I spoke I felt that I could kill her if she dismissed me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;You are mad,&rsquo; she said, smiling still.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;Did you never think,&rsquo; I went on, &lsquo;of the effects of passionate love? A
+      desperate man has often murdered his mistress.&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;It is better to die than to live in misery,&rsquo; she said coolly. &lsquo;Such a
+      man as that would run through his wife&rsquo;s money, desert her, and leave her
+      at last in utter wretchedness.&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This calm calculation dumfounded me. The gulf between us was made plain;
+      we could never understand each other.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;Good-bye,&rsquo; I said proudly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;Good-bye, till to-morrow,&rsquo; she answered, with a little friendly bow.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;For a moment&rsquo;s space I hurled at her in a glance all the love I must
+      forego; she stood there with than banal smile of hers, the detestable
+      chill smile of a marble statue, with none of the warmth in it that it
+      seemed to express. Can you form any idea, my friend, of the pain that
+      overcame me on the way home through rain and snow, across a league of
+      icy-sheeted quays, without a hope left? Oh, to think that she not only had
+      not guessed my poverty, but believed me to be as wealthy as she was, and
+      likewise borne as softly over the rough ways of life! What failure and
+      deceit! It was no mere question of money now, but of the fate of all that
+      lay within me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I went at haphazard, going over the words of our strange conversation
+      with myself. I got so thoroughly lost in my reflections that I ended by
+      doubts as to the actual value of words and ideas. But I loved her all the
+      same; I loved this woman with the untouched heart that might surrender at
+      any moment&mdash;a woman who daily disappointed the expectations of the
+      previous evening, by appearing as a new mistress on the morrow.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;As I passed under the gateway of the Institute, a fevered thrill ran
+      through me. I remembered that I was fasting, and that I had not a penny.
+      To complete the measure of my misfortune, my hat was spoiled by the rain.
+      How was I to appear in the drawing-room of a woman of fashion with an
+      unpresentable hat? I had always cursed the inane and stupid custom that
+      compels us to exhibit the lining of our hats, and to keep them always in
+      our hands, but with anxious care I had so far kept mine in a precarious
+      state of efficiency. It had been neither strikingly new, nor utterly
+      shabby, neither napless nor over-glossy, and might have passed for the hat
+      of a frugally given owner, but its artificially prolonged existence had
+      now reached the final stage, it was crumpled, forlorn, and completely
+      ruined, a downright rag, a fitting emblem of its master. My painfully
+      preserved elegance must collapse for want of thirty sous.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What unrecognized sacrifices I had made in the past three months for
+      Foedora! How often I had given the price of a week&rsquo;s sustenance to see her
+      for a moment! To leave my work and go without food was the least of it! I
+      must traverse the streets of Paris without getting splashed, run to escape
+      showers, and reach her rooms at last, as neat and spruce as any of the
+      coxcombs about her. For a poet and a distracted wooer the difficulties of
+      this task were endless. My happiness, the course of my love, might be
+      affected by a speck of mud upon my only white waistcoat! Oh, to miss the
+      sight of her because I was wet through and bedraggled, and had not so much
+      as five sous to give to a shoeblack for removing the least little spot of
+      mud from my boot! The petty pangs of these nameless torments, which an
+      irritable man finds so great, only strengthened my passion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The unfortunate must make sacrifices which they may not mention to women
+      who lead refined and luxurious lives. Such women see things through a
+      prism that gilds all men and their surroundings. Egoism leads them to take
+      cheerful views, and fashion makes them cruel; they do not wish to reflect,
+      lest they lose their happiness, and the absorbing nature of their
+      pleasures absolves their indifference to the misfortunes of others. A
+      penny never means millions to them; millions, on the contrary, seem a mere
+      trifle. Perhaps love must plead his cause by great sacrifices, but a veil
+      must be lightly drawn across them, they must go down into silence. So when
+      wealthy men pour out their devotion, their fortunes, and their lives, they
+      gain somewhat by these commonly entertained opinions, an additional lustre
+      hangs about their lovers&rsquo; follies; their silence is eloquent; there is a
+      grace about the drawn veil; but my terrible distress bound me over to
+      suffer fearfully or ever I might speak of my love or of dying for her
+      sake.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Was it a sacrifice after all? Was I not richly rewarded by the joy I took
+      in sacrificing everything to her? There was no commonest event of my daily
+      life to which the countess had not given importance, had not overfilled
+      with happiness. I had been hitherto careless of my clothes, now I
+      respected my coat as if it had been a second self. I should not have
+      hesitated between bodily harm and a tear in that garment. You must enter
+      wholly into my circumstances to understand the stormy thoughts, the
+      gathering frenzy, that shook me as I went, and which, perhaps, were
+      increased by my walk. I gloated in an infernal fashion which I cannot
+      describe over the absolute completeness of my wretchedness. I would have
+      drawn from it an augury of my future, but there is no limit to the
+      possibilities of misfortune. The door of my lodging-house stood ajar. A
+      light streamed from the heart-shaped opening cut in the shutters. Pauline
+      and her mother were sitting up for me and talking. I heard my name spoken,
+      and listened.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;Raphael is much nicer-looking than the student in number seven,&rsquo; said
+      Pauline; &lsquo;his fair hair is such a pretty color. Don&rsquo;t you think there is
+      something in his voice, too, I don&rsquo;t know what it is, that gives you a
+      sort of a thrill? And, then, though he may be a little proud, he is very
+      kind, and he has such fine manners; I am sure that all the ladies must be
+      quite wild about him.&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;You might be fond of him yourself, to hear you talk,&rsquo; was Madame
+      Gaudin&rsquo;s comment.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;He is just as dear to me as a brother,&rsquo; she laughed. &lsquo;I should be finely
+      ungrateful if I felt no friendship for him. Didn&rsquo;t he teach me music and
+      drawing and grammar, and everything I know in fact? You don&rsquo;t much notice
+      how I get on, dear mother; but I shall know enough, in a while, to give
+      lessons myself, and then we can keep a servant.&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I stole away softly, made some noise outside, and went into their room to
+      take the lamp, that Pauline tried to light for me. The dear child had just
+      poured soothing balm into my wounds. Her outspoken admiration had given me
+      fresh courage. I so needed to believe in myself and to come by a just
+      estimate of my advantages. This revival of hope in me perhaps colored my
+      surroundings. Perhaps also I had never before really looked at the picture
+      that so often met my eyes, of the two women in their room; it was a scene
+      such as Flemish painters have reproduced so faithfully for us, that I
+      admired in its delightful reality. The mother, with the kind smile upon
+      her lips, sat knitting stockings by the dying fire; Pauline was painting
+      hand-screens, her brushes and paints, strewn over the tiny table, made
+      bright spots of color for the eye to dwell on. When she had left her seat
+      and stood lighting my lamp, one must have been under the yoke of a
+      terrible passion indeed, not to admire her faintly flushed transparent
+      hands, the girlish charm of her attitude, the ideal grace of her head, as
+      the lamplight fell full on her pale face. Night and silence added to the
+      charms of this industrious vigil and peaceful interior. The
+      light-heartedness that sustained such continuous toil could only spring
+      from devout submission and the lofty feelings that it brings.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There was an indescribable harmony between them and their possessions.
+      The splendor of Foedora&rsquo;s home did not satisfy; it called out all my worst
+      instincts; something in this lowly poverty and unfeigned goodness revived
+      me. It may have been that luxury abased me in my own eyes, while here my
+      self-respect was restored to me, as I sought to extend the protection that
+      a man is so eager to make felt, over these two women, who in the bare
+      simplicity of the existence in their brown room seemed to live wholly in
+      the feelings of their hearts. As I came up to Pauline, she looked at me in
+      an almost motherly way; her hands shook a little as she held the lamp, so
+      that the light fell on me and cried:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;<i>Dieu</i>! how pale you are! and you are wet through! My mother will
+      try to wipe you dry. Monsieur Raphael,&rsquo; she went on, after a little pause,
+      &lsquo;you are so very fond of milk, and to-night we happen to have some cream.
+      Here, will you not take some?&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She pounced like a kitten, on a china bowl full of milk. She did it so
+      quickly, and put it before me so prettily, that I hesitated.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;You are going to refuse me?&rsquo; she said, and her tones changed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The pride in each felt for the other&rsquo;s pride. It was Pauline&rsquo;s poverty
+      that seemed to humiliate her, and to reproach me with my want of
+      consideration, and I melted at once and accepted the cream that might have
+      been meant for her morning&rsquo;s breakfast. The poor child tried not to show
+      her joy, but her eyes sparkled.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;I needed it badly,&rsquo; I said as I sat down. (An anxious look passed over
+      her face.) &lsquo;Do you remember that passage, Pauline, where Bossuet tells how
+      God gave more abundant reward for a cup of cold water than for a victory?&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;Yes,&rsquo; she said, her heart beating like some wild bird&rsquo;s in a child&rsquo;s
+      hands.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;Well, as we shall part very soon, now,&rsquo; I went on in an unsteady voice,
+      &lsquo;you must let me show my gratitude to you and to your mother for all the
+      care you have taken of me.&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;Oh, don&rsquo;t let us cast accounts,&rsquo; she said laughing. But her laughter
+      covered an agitation that gave me pain. I went on without appearing to
+      hear her words:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;My piano is one of Erard&rsquo;s best instruments; and you must take it. Pray
+      accept it without hesitation; I really could not take it with me on the
+      journey I am about to make.&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Perhaps the melancholy tones in which I spoke enlightened the two women,
+      for they seemed to understand, and eyed me with curiosity and alarm. Here
+      was the affection that I had looked for in the glacial regions of the
+      great world, true affection, unostentatious but tender, and possibly
+      lasting.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;Don&rsquo;t take it to heart so,&rsquo; the mother said; &lsquo;stay on here. My husband
+      is on his way towards us even now,&rsquo; she went on. &lsquo;I looked into the Gospel
+      of St. John this evening while Pauline hung our door-key in a Bible from
+      her fingers. The key turned; that means that Gaudin is in health and doing
+      well. Pauline began again for you and for the young man in number seven&mdash;it
+      turned for you, but not for him. We are all going to be rich. Gaudin will
+      come back a millionaire. I dreamed once that I saw him in a ship full of
+      serpents; luckily the water was rough, and that means gold or precious
+      stones from over-sea.&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The silly, friendly words were like the crooning lullaby with which a
+      mother soothes her sick child; they in a manner calmed me. There was a
+      pleasant heartiness in the worthy woman&rsquo;s looks and tones, which, if it
+      could not remove trouble, at any rate soothed and quieted it, and deadened
+      the pain. Pauline, keener-sighted than her mother, studied me uneasily;
+      her quick eyes seemed to read my life and my future. I thanked the mother
+      and daughter by an inclination of the head, and hurried away; I was afraid
+      I should break down.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I found myself alone under my roof, and laid myself down in my misery. My
+      unhappy imagination suggested numberless baseless projects, and prescribed
+      impossible resolutions. When a man is struggling in the wreck of his
+      fortunes, he is not quite without resources, but I was engulfed. Ah, my
+      dear fellow, we are too ready to blame the wretched. Let us be less harsh
+      on the results of the most powerful of all social solvents. Where poverty
+      is absolute there exist no such things as shame or crime, or virtue or
+      intelligence. I knew not what to do; I was as defenceless as a maiden on
+      her knees before a beast of prey. A penniless man who has no ties to bind
+      him is master of himself at any rate, but a luckless wretch who is in love
+      no longer belongs to himself, and may not take his own life. Love makes us
+      almost sacred in our own eyes; it is the life of another that we revere
+      within us; then and so it begins for us the cruelest trouble of all&mdash;the
+      misery with a hope in it, a hope for which we must even bear our torments.
+      I thought I would go to Rastignac on the morrow to confide Foedora&rsquo;s
+      strange resolution to him, and with that I slept.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;Ah, ha!&rsquo; cried Rastignac, as he saw me enter his lodging at nine o&rsquo;clock
+      in the morning. &lsquo;I know what brings you here. Foedora has dismissed you.
+      Some kind souls, who were jealous of your ascendency over the countess,
+      gave out that you were going to be married. Heaven only knows what follies
+      your rivals have equipped you with, and what slanders have been directed
+      at you.&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;That explains everything!&rsquo; I exclaimed. I remembered all my presumptuous
+      speeches, and gave the countess credit for no little magnanimity. It
+      pleased me to think that I was a miscreant who had not been punished
+      nearly enough, and I saw nothing in her indulgence but the long-suffering
+      charity of love.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;Not quite so fast,&rsquo; urged the prudent Gascon; &lsquo;Foedora has all the
+      sagacity natural to a profoundly selfish woman; perhaps she may have taken
+      your measure while you still coveted only her money and her splendor; in
+      spite of all your care, she could have read you through and through. She
+      can dissemble far too well to let any dissimulation pass undetected. I
+      fear,&rsquo; he went on, &lsquo;that I have brought you into a bad way. In spite of
+      her cleverness and her tact, she seems to me a domineering sort of person,
+      like every woman who can only feel pleasure through her brain. Happiness
+      for her lies entirely in a comfortable life and in social pleasures; her
+      sentiment is only assumed; she will make you miserable; you will be her
+      head footman.&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He spoke to the deaf. I broke in upon him, disclosing, with an
+      affectation of light-heartedness, the state of my finances.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;Yesterday evening,&rsquo; he rejoined, &lsquo;luck ran against me, and that carried
+      off all my available cash. But for that trivial mishap, I would gladly
+      have shared my purse with you. But let us go and breakfast at the
+      restaurant; perhaps there is good counsel in oysters.&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He dressed, and had his tilbury brought round. We went to the Cafe de
+      Paris like a couple of millionaires, armed with all the audacious
+      impertinence of the speculator whose capital is imaginary. That devil of a
+      Gascon quite disconcerted me by the coolness of his manners and his
+      absolute self-possession. While we were taking coffee after an excellent
+      and well-ordered repast, a young dandy entered, who did not escape
+      Rastignac. He had been nodding here and there among the crowd to this or
+      that young man, distinguished both by personal attractions and elegant
+      attire, and now he said to me:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;Here&rsquo;s your man,&rsquo; as he beckoned to this gentleman with a wonderful
+      cravat, who seemed to be looking for a table that suited his ideas.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;That rogue has been decorated for bringing out books that he doesn&rsquo;t
+      understand a word of,&rsquo; whispered Rastignac; &lsquo;he is a chemist, a historian,
+      a novelist, and a political writer; he has gone halves, thirds, or
+      quarters in the authorship of I don&rsquo;t know how many plays, and he is as
+      ignorant as Dom Miguel&rsquo;s mule. He is not a man so much as a name, a label
+      that the public is familiar with. So he would do well to avoid shops
+      inscribed with the motto, &ldquo;<i>Ici l&rsquo;on peut ecrire soi-meme</i>.&rdquo; He is
+      acute enough to deceive an entire congress of diplomatists. In a couple of
+      words, he is a moral half-caste, not quite a fraud, nor entirely genuine.
+      But, hush! he has succeeded already; nobody asks anything further, and
+      every one calls him an illustrious man.&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;Well, my esteemed and excellent friend, and how may Your Intelligence
+      be?&rsquo; So Rastignac addressed the stranger as he sat down at a neighboring
+      table.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;Neither well nor ill; I am overwhelmed with work. I have all the
+      necessary materials for some very curious historical memoirs in my hands,
+      and I cannot find any one to whom I can ascribe them. It worries me, for I
+      shall have to be quick about it. Memoirs are falling out of fashion.&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;What are the memoirs&mdash;contemporaneous, ancient, or memoirs of the
+      court, or what?&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;They relate to the Necklace affair.&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;Now, isn&rsquo;t that a coincidence?&rsquo; said Rastignac, turning to me and
+      laughing. He looked again to the literary speculation, and said,
+      indicating me:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;This is M. de Valentin, one of my friends, whom I must introduce to you
+      as one of our future literary celebrities. He had formerly an aunt, a
+      marquise, much in favor once at court, and for about two years he has been
+      writing a Royalist history of the Revolution.&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then, bending over this singular man of business, he went on:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;He is a man of talent, and a simpleton that will do your memoirs for
+      you, in his aunt&rsquo;s name, for a hundred crowns a volume.&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;It&rsquo;s a bargain,&rsquo; said the other, adjusting his cravat. &lsquo;Waiter, my
+      oysters.&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;Yes, but you must give me twenty-five louis as commission, and you will
+      pay him in advance for each volume,&rsquo; said Rastignac.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;No, no. He shall only have fifty crowns on account, and then I shall be
+      sure of having my manuscript punctually.&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Rastignac repeated this business conversation to me in low tones; and
+      then, without giving me any voice in the matter, he replied:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;We agree to your proposal. When can we call upon you to arrange the
+      affair?&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;Oh, well! Come and dine here to-morrow at seven o&rsquo;clock.&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We rose. Rastignac flung some money to the waiter, put the bill in his
+      pocket, and we went out. I was quite stupified by the flippancy and ease
+      with which he had sold my venerable aunt, la Marquise de Montbauron.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;I would sooner take ship for the Brazils, and give the Indians lessons
+      in algebra, though I don&rsquo;t know a word of it, than tarnish my family
+      name.&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Rastignac burst out laughing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;How dense you are! Take the fifty crowns in the first instance, and
+      write the memoirs. When you have finished them, you will decline to
+      publish them in your aunt&rsquo;s name, imbecile! Madame de Montbauron, with her
+      hooped petticoat, her rank and beauty, rouge and slippers, and her death
+      upon the scaffold, is worth a great deal more than six hundred francs. And
+      then, if the trade will not give your aunt her due, some old adventurer,
+      or some shady countess or other, will be found to put her name to the
+      memoirs.&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;Oh,&rsquo; I groaned; &lsquo;why did I quit the blameless life in my garret? This
+      world has aspects that are very vilely dishonorable.&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;Yes,&rsquo; said Rastignac, &lsquo;that is all very poetical, but this is a matter
+      of business. What a child you are! Now, listen to me. As to your work, the
+      public will decide upon it; and as for my literary middle-man, hasn&rsquo;t he
+      devoted eight years of his life to obtaining a footing in the book-trade,
+      and paid heavily for his experience? You divide the money and the labor of
+      the book with him very unequally, but isn&rsquo;t yours the better part?
+      Twenty-five louis means as much to you as a thousand francs does to him.
+      Come, you can write historical memoirs, a work of art such as never was,
+      since Diderot once wrote six sermons for a hundred crowns!&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;After all,&rsquo; I said, in agitation, &lsquo;I cannot choose but do it. So, my
+      dear friend, my thanks are due to you. I shall be quite rich with
+      twenty-five louis.&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;Richer than you think,&rsquo; he laughed. &lsquo;If I have my commission from Finot
+      in this matter, it goes to you, can&rsquo;t you see? Now let us go to the Bois
+      de Boulogne,&rsquo; he said; &lsquo;we shall see your countess there, and I will show
+      you the pretty little widow that I am to marry&mdash;a charming woman, an
+      Alsacienne, rather plump. She reads Kant, Schiller, Jean Paul, and a host
+      of lachrymose books. She has a mania for continually asking my opinion,
+      and I have to look as if I entered into all this German sensibility, and
+      to know a pack of ballads&mdash;drugs, all of them, that my doctor
+      absolutely prohibits. As yet I have not been able to wean her from her
+      literary enthusiasms; she sheds torrents of tears as she reads Goethe, and
+      I have to weep a little myself to please her, for she has an income of
+      fifty thousand livres, my dear boy, and the prettiest little hand and foot
+      in the world. Oh, if she would only say <i>mon ange</i> and <i>brouiller</i>
+      instead of <i>mon anche</i> and <i>prouiller</i>, she would be
+      perfection!&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We saw the countess, radiant amid the splendors of her equipage. The
+      coquette bowed very graciously to us both, and the smile she gave me
+      seemed to me to be divine and full of love. I was very happy; I fancied
+      myself beloved; I had money, a wealth of love in my heart, and my troubles
+      were over. I was light-hearted, blithe, and content. I found my friend&rsquo;s
+      lady-love charming. Earth and air and heaven&mdash;all nature&mdash;seemed
+      to reflect Foedora&rsquo;s smile for me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;As we returned through the Champs-Elysees, we paid a visit to Rastignac&rsquo;s
+      hatter and tailor. Thanks to the &lsquo;Necklace,&rsquo; my insignificant
+      peace-footing was to end, and I made formidable preparations for a
+      campaign. Henceforward I need not shrink from a contest with the spruce
+      and fashionable young men who made Foedora&rsquo;s circle. I went home, locked
+      myself in, and stood by my dormer window, outwardly calm enough, but in
+      reality I bade a last good-bye to the roofs without. I began to live in
+      the future, rehearsed my life drama, and discounted love and its
+      happiness. Ah, how stormy life can grow to be within the four walls of a
+      garret! The soul within us is like a fairy; she turns straw into diamonds
+      for us; and for us, at a touch of her wand, enchanted palaces arise, as
+      flowers in the meadows spring up towards the sun.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Towards noon, next day, Pauline knocked gently at my door, and brought me&mdash;who
+      could guess it?&mdash;a note from Foedora. The countess asked me to take
+      her to the Luxembourg, and to go thence to see with her the Museum and
+      Jardin des Plantes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;The man is waiting for an answer,&rsquo; said Pauline, after quietly waiting
+      for a moment.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I hastily scrawled my acknowledgements, and Pauline took the note. I
+      changed my dress. When my toilette was ended, and I looked at myself with
+      some complaisance, an icy shiver ran through me as I thought:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;Will Foedora walk or drive? Will it rain or shine?&mdash;No matter,
+      though,&rsquo; I said to myself; &lsquo;whichever it is, can one ever reckon with
+      feminine caprice? She will have no money about her, and will want to give
+      a dozen francs to some little Savoyard because his rags are picturesque.&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I had not a brass farthing, and should have no money till the evening
+      came. How dearly a poet pays for the intellectual prowess that method and
+      toil have brought him, at such crises of our youth! Innumerable painfully
+      vivid thoughts pierced me like barbs. I looked out of my window; the
+      weather was very unsettled. If things fell out badly, I might easily hire
+      a cab for the day; but would not the fear lie on me every moment that I
+      might not meet Finot in the evening? I felt too weak to endure such fears
+      in the midst of my felicity. Though I felt sure that I should find
+      nothing, I began a grand search through my room; I looked for imaginary
+      coins in the recesses of my mattress; I hunted about everywhere&mdash;I
+      even shook out my old boots. A nervous fever seized me; I looked with wild
+      eyes at the furniture when I had ransacked it all. Will you understand, I
+      wonder, the excitement that possessed me when, plunged deep in the
+      listlessness of despair, I opened my writing-table drawer, and found a
+      fair and splendid ten-franc piece that shone like a rising star, new and
+      sparkling, and slily hiding in a cranny between two boards? I did not try
+      to account for its previous reserve and the cruelty of which it had been
+      guilty in thus lying hidden; I kissed it for a friend faithful in
+      adversity, and hailed it with a cry that found an echo, and made me turn
+      sharply, to find Pauline with a face grown white.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;I thought,&rsquo; she faltered, &lsquo;that you had hurt yourself! The man who
+      brought the letter&mdash;&mdash;&rsquo; (she broke off as if something smothered
+      her voice). &lsquo;But mother has paid him,&rsquo; she added, and flitted away like a
+      wayward, capricious child. Poor little one! I wanted her to share in my
+      happiness. I seemed to have all the happiness in the world within me just
+      then; and I would fain have returned to the unhappy, all that I felt as if
+      I had stolen from them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The intuitive perception of adversity is sound for the most part; the
+      countess had sent away her carriage. One of those freaks that pretty women
+      can scarcely explain to themselves had determined her to go on foot, by
+      way of the boulevards, to the Jardin des Plantes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;It will rain,&rsquo; I told her, and it pleased her to contradict me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;As it fell out, the weather was fine while we went through the
+      Luxembourg; when we came out, some drops fell from a great cloud, whose
+      progress I had watched uneasily, and we took a cab. At the Museum I was
+      about to dismiss the vehicle, and Foedora (what agonies!) asked me not to
+      do so. But it was like a dream in broad daylight for me, to chat with her,
+      to wander in the Jardin des Plantes, to stray down the shady alleys, to
+      feel her hand upon my arm; the secret transports repressed in me were
+      reduced, no doubt, to a fixed and foolish smile upon my lips; there was
+      something unreal about it all. Yet in all her movements, however alluring,
+      whether we stood or whether we walked, there was nothing either tender or
+      lover-like. When I tried to share in a measure the action of movement
+      prompted by her life, I became aware of a check, or of something strange
+      in her that I cannot explain, or an inner activity concealed in her
+      nature. There is no suavity about the movements of women who have no soul
+      in them. Our wills were opposed, and we did not keep step together. Words
+      are wanting to describe this outward dissonance between two beings; we are
+      not accustomed to read a thought in a movement. We instinctively feel this
+      phenomenon of our nature, but it cannot be expressed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I did not dissect my sensations during those violent seizures of
+      passion,&rdquo; Raphael went on, after a moment of silence, as if he were
+      replying to an objection raised by himself. &ldquo;I did not analyze my
+      pleasures nor count my heartbeats then, as a miser scrutinizes and weighs
+      his gold pieces. No; experience sheds its melancholy light over the events
+      of the past to-day, and memory brings these pictures back, as the
+      sea-waves in fair weather cast up fragment after fragment of the debris of
+      a wrecked vessel upon the strand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;It is in your power to render me a rather important service,&rsquo; said the
+      countess, looking at me in an embarrassed way. &lsquo;After confiding in you my
+      aversion to lovers, I feel myself more at liberty to entreat your good
+      offices in the name of friendship. Will there not be very much more merit
+      in obliging me to-day?&rsquo; she asked, laughing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I looked at her in anguish. Her manner was coaxing, but in no wise
+      affectionate; she felt nothing for me; she seemed to be playing a part,
+      and I thought her a consummate actress. Then all at once my hopes awoke
+      once more, at a single look and word. Yet if reviving love expressed
+      itself in my eyes, she bore its light without any change in the clearness
+      of her own; they seemed, like a tiger&rsquo;s eyes, to have a sheet of metal
+      behind them. I used to hate her in such moments.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;The influence of the Duc de Navarreins would be very useful to me, with
+      an all-powerful person in Russia,&rsquo; she went on, persuasion in every
+      modulation of her voice, &lsquo;whose intervention I need in order to have
+      justice done me in a matter that concerns both my fortune and my position
+      in the world, that is to say, the recognition of my marriage by the
+      Emperor. Is not the Duc de Navarreins a cousin of yours? A letter from him
+      would settle everything.&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;I am yours,&rsquo; I answered; &lsquo;command me.&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;You are very nice,&rsquo; she said, pressing my hand. &lsquo;Come and have dinner
+      with me, and I will tell you everything, as if you were my confessor.&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;So this discreet, suspicious woman, who had never been heard to speak a
+      word about her affairs to any one, was going to consult me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;Oh, how dear to me is this silence that you have imposed on me!&rsquo; I
+      cried; &lsquo;but I would rather have had some sharper ordeal still.&rsquo; And she
+      smiled upon the intoxication in my eyes; she did not reject my admiration
+      in any way; surely she loved me!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Fortunately, my purse held just enough to satisfy her cab-man. The day
+      spent in her house, alone with her, was delicious; it was the first time
+      that I had seen her in this way. Hitherto we had always been kept apart by
+      the presence of others, and by her formal politeness and reserved manners,
+      even during her magnificent dinners; but now it was as if I lived beneath
+      her own roof&mdash;I had her all to myself, so to speak. My wandering
+      fancy broke down barriers, arranged the events of life to my liking, and
+      steeped me in happiness and love. I seemed to myself her husband, I liked
+      to watch her busied with little details; it was a pleasure to me even to
+      see her take off her bonnet and shawl. She left me alone for a little, and
+      came back, charming, with her hair newly arranged; and this dainty change
+      of toilette had been made for me!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;During the dinner she lavished attention upon me, and put charm without
+      end into those numberless trifles to all seeming, that make up half of our
+      existence nevertheless. As we sat together before a crackling fire, on
+      silken cushions surrounded by the most desirable creations of Oriental
+      luxury; as I saw this woman whose famous beauty made every heart beat, so
+      close to me; an unapproachable woman who was talking and bringing all her
+      powers of coquetry to bear upon me; then my blissful pleasure rose almost
+      to the point of suffering. To my vexation, I recollected the important
+      business to be concluded; I determined to go to keep the appointment made
+      for me for this evening.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;So soon?&rsquo; she said, seeing me take my hat.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She loved me, then! or I thought so at least, from the bland tones in
+      which those two words were uttered. I would then have bartered a couple of
+      years of life for every hour she chose to grant to me, and so prolong my
+      ecstasy. My happiness was increased by the extent of the money I
+      sacrificed. It was midnight before she dismissed me. But on the morrow,
+      for all that, my heroism cost me a good many remorseful pangs; I was
+      afraid the affair of the Memoirs, now of such importance for me, might
+      have fallen through, and rushed off to Rastignac. We found the nominal
+      author of my future labors just getting up.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Finot read over a brief agreement to me, in which nothing whatever was
+      said about my aunt, and when it had been signed he paid me down fifty
+      crowns, and the three of us breakfasted together. I had only thirty francs
+      left over, when I had paid for my new hat, for sixty tickets at thirty
+      sous each, and settled my debts; but for some days to come the
+      difficulties of living were removed. If I had but listened to Rastignac, I
+      might have had abundance by frankly adopting the &lsquo;English system.&rsquo; He
+      really wanted to establish my credit by setting me to raise loans, on the
+      theory that borrowing is the basis of credit. To hear him talk, the future
+      was the largest and most secure kind of capital in the world. My future
+      luck was hypothecated for the benefit of my creditors, and he gave my
+      custom to his tailor, an artist, and a young man&rsquo;s tailor, who was to
+      leave me in peace until I married.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The monastic life of study that I had led for three years past ended on
+      this day. I frequented Foedora&rsquo;s house very diligently, and tried to
+      outshine the heroes or the swaggerers to be found in her circle. When I
+      believed that I had left poverty for ever behind me, I regained my freedom
+      of mind, humiliated my rivals, and was looked upon as a very attractive,
+      dazzling, and irresistible sort of man. But acute folk used to say with
+      regard to me, &lsquo;A fellow as clever as that will keep all his enthusiasms in
+      his brain,&rsquo; and charitably extolled my faculties at the expense of my
+      feelings. &lsquo;Isn&rsquo;t he lucky, not to be in love!&rsquo; they exclaimed. &lsquo;If he
+      were, could he be so light-hearted and animated?&rsquo; Yet in Foedora&rsquo;s
+      presence I was as dull as love could make me. When I was alone with her, I
+      had not a word to say, or if I did speak, I renounced love; and I affected
+      gaiety but ill, like a courtier who has a bitter mortification to hide. I
+      tried in every way to make myself indispensable in her life, and necessary
+      to her vanity and to her comfort; I was a plaything at her pleasure, a
+      slave always at her side. And when I had frittered away the day in this
+      way, I went back to my work at night, securing merely two or three hours&rsquo; 
+      sleep in the early morning.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But I had not, like Rastignac, the &lsquo;English system&rsquo; at my finger-ends,
+      and I very soon saw myself without a penny. I fell at once into that
+      precarious way of life which industriously hides cold and miserable depths
+      beneath an elusive surface of luxury; I was a coxcomb without conquests, a
+      penniless fop, a nameless gallant. The old sufferings were renewed, but
+      less sharply; no doubt I was growing used to the painful crisis. Very
+      often my sole diet consisted of the scanty provision of cakes and tea that
+      is offered in drawing-rooms, or one of the countess&rsquo; great dinners must
+      sustain me for two whole days. I used all my time, and exerted every
+      effort and all my powers of observation, to penetrate the impenetrable
+      character of Foedora. Alternate hope and despair had swayed my opinions;
+      for me she was sometimes the tenderest, sometimes the most unfeeling of
+      women. But these transitions from joy to sadness became unendurable; I
+      sought to end the horrible conflict within me by extinguishing love. By
+      the light of warning gleams my soul sometimes recognized the gulfs that
+      lay between us. The countess confirmed all my fears; I had never yet
+      detected any tear in her eyes; an affecting scene in a play left her
+      smiling and unmoved. All her instincts were selfish; she could not divine
+      another&rsquo;s joy or sorrow. She had made a fool of me, in fact!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I had rejoiced over a sacrifice to make for her, and almost humiliated
+      myself in seeking out my kinsman, the Duc de Navarreins, a selfish man who
+      was ashamed of my poverty, and had injured me too deeply not to hate me.
+      He received me with the polite coldness that makes every word and gesture
+      seem an insult; he looked so ill at ease that I pitied him. I blushed for
+      this pettiness amid grandeur, and penuriousness surrounded by luxury. He
+      began to talk to me of his heavy losses in the three per cents, and then I
+      told him the object of my visit. The change in his manners, hitherto
+      glacial, which now gradually, became affectionate, disgusted me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, he called upon the countess, and completely eclipsed me with her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;On him Foedora exercised spells and witcheries unheard of; she drew him
+      into her power, and arranged her whole mysterious business with him; I was
+      left out, I heard not a word of it; she had made a tool of me! She did not
+      seem to be aware of my existence while my cousin was present; she received
+      me less cordially perhaps than when I was first presented to her. One
+      evening she chose to mortify me before the duke by a look, a gesture, that
+      it is useless to try to express in words. I went away with tears in my
+      eyes, planning terrible and outrageous schemes of vengeance without end.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I often used to go with her to the theatre. Love utterly absorbed me as I
+      sat beside her; as I looked at her I used to give myself up to the
+      pleasure of listening to the music, putting all my soul into the double
+      joy of love and of hearing every emotion of my heart translated into
+      musical cadences. It was my passion that filled the air and the stage,
+      that was triumphant everywhere but with my mistress. Then I would take
+      Foedora&rsquo;s hand. I used to scan her features and her eyes, imploring of
+      them some indication that one blended feeling possessed us both, seeking
+      for the sudden harmony awakened by the power of music, which makes our
+      souls vibrate in unison; but her hand was passive, her eyes said nothing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;When the fire that burned in me glowed too fiercely from the face I
+      turned upon her, she met it with that studied smile of hers, the
+      conventional expression that sits on the lips of every portrait in every
+      exhibition. She was not listening to the music. The divine pages of
+      Rossini, Cimarosa, or Zingarelli called up no emotion, gave no voice to
+      any poetry in her life; her soul was a desert.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Foedora presented herself as a drama before a drama. Her lorgnette
+      traveled restlessly over the boxes; she was restless too beneath the
+      apparent calm; fashion tyrannized over her; her box, her bonnet, her
+      carriage, her own personality absorbed her entirely. My merciless
+      knowledge thoroughly tore away all my illusions. If good breeding consists
+      in self-forgetfulness and consideration for others, in constantly showing
+      gentleness in voice and bearing, in pleasing others, and in making them
+      content in themselves, all traces of her plebeian origin were not yet
+      obliterated in Foedora, in spite of her cleverness. Her self-forgetfulness
+      was a sham, her manners were not innate but painfully acquired, her
+      politeness was rather subservient. And yet for those she singled out, her
+      honeyed words expressed natural kindness, her pretentious exaggeration was
+      exalted enthusiasm. I alone had scrutinized her grimacings, and stripped
+      away the thin rind that sufficed to conceal her real nature from the
+      world; her trickery no longer deceived me; I had sounded the depths of
+      that feline nature. I blushed for her when some donkey or other flattered
+      and complimented her. And yet I loved her through it all! I hoped that her
+      snows would melt with the warmth of a poet&rsquo;s love. If I could only have
+      made her feel all the greatness that lies in devotion, then I should have
+      seen her perfected, she would have been an angel. I loved her as a man, a
+      lover, and an artist; if it had been necessary not to love her so that I
+      might win her, some cool-headed coxcomb, some self-possessed calculator
+      would perhaps have had an advantage over me. She was so vain and
+      sophisticated, that the language of vanity would appeal to her; she would
+      have allowed herself to be taken in the toils of an intrigue; a hard, cold
+      nature would have gained a complete ascendency over her. Keen grief had
+      pierced me to my very soul, as she unconsciously revealed her absolute
+      love of self. I seemed to see her as she one day would be, alone in the
+      world, with no one to whom she could stretch her hand, with no friendly
+      eyes for her own to meet and rest upon. I was bold enough to set this
+      before her one evening; I painted in vivid colors her lonely, sad,
+      deserted old age. Her comment on this prospect of so terrible a revenge of
+      thwarted nature was horrible.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;I shall always have money,&rsquo; she said; &lsquo;and with money we can always
+      inspire such sentiments as are necessary for our comfort in those about
+      us.&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I went away confounded by the arguments of luxury, by the reasoning of
+      this woman of the world in which she lived; and blamed myself for my
+      infatuated idolatry. I myself had not loved Pauline because she was poor;
+      and had not the wealthy Foedora a right to repulse Raphael? Conscience is
+      our unerring judge until we finally stifle it. A specious voice said
+      within me, &lsquo;Foedora is neither attracted to nor repulses any one; she has
+      her liberty, but once upon a time she sold herself to the Russian count,
+      her husband or her lover, for gold. But temptation is certain to enter
+      into her life. Wait till that moment comes!&rsquo; She lived remote from
+      humanity, in a sphere apart, in a hell or a heaven of her own; she was
+      neither frail nor virtuous. This feminine enigma in embroideries and
+      cashmeres had brought into play every emotion of the human heart in me&mdash;pride,
+      ambition, love, curiosity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There was a craze just then for praising a play at a little Boulevard
+      theatre, prompted perhaps by a wish to appear original that besets us all,
+      or due to some freak of fashion. The countess showed some signs of a wish
+      to see the floured face of the actor who had so delighted several people
+      of taste, and I obtained the honor of taking her to a first presentation
+      of some wretched farce or other. A box scarcely cost five francs, but I
+      had not a brass farthing. I was but half-way through the volume of
+      Memoirs; I dared not beg for assistance of Finot, and Rastignac, my
+      providence, was away. These constant perplexities were the bane of my
+      life.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We had once come out of the theatre when it was raining heavily, Foedora
+      had called a cab for me before I could escape from her show of concern;
+      she would not admit any of my excuses&mdash;my liking for wet weather, and
+      my wish to go to the gaming-table. She did not read my poverty in my
+      embarrassed attitude, or in my forced jests. My eyes would redden, but she
+      did not understand a look. A young man&rsquo;s life is at the mercy of the
+      strangest whims! At every revolution of the wheels during the journey,
+      thoughts that burned stirred in my heart. I tried to pull up a plank from
+      the bottom of the vehicle, hoping to slip through the hole into the
+      street; but finding insuperable obstacles, I burst into a fit of laughter,
+      and then sat stupefied in calm dejection, like a man in a pillory. When I
+      reached my lodging, Pauline broke in through my first stammering words
+      with:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;If you haven&rsquo;t any money&mdash;&mdash;?&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah, the music of Rossini was as nothing compared with those words. But to
+      return to the performance at the Funambules.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I thought of pawning the circlet of gold round my mother&rsquo;s portrait in
+      order to escort the countess. Although the pawnbroker loomed in my
+      thoughts as one of the doors of a convict&rsquo;s prison, I would rather myself
+      have carried my bed thither than have begged for alms. There is something
+      so painful in the expression of a man who asks money of you! There are
+      loans that mulct us of our self-respect, just as some rebuffs from a
+      friend&rsquo;s lips sweep away our last illusion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Pauline was working; her mother had gone to bed. I flung a stealthy
+      glance over the bed; the curtains were drawn back a little; Madame Gaudin
+      was in a deep sleep, I thought, when I saw her quiet, sallow profile
+      outlined against the pillow.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;You are in trouble?&rsquo; Pauline said, dipping her brush into the coloring.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;It is in your power to do me a great service, my dear child,&rsquo; I
+      answered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The gladness in her eyes frightened me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;Is it possible that she loves me?&rsquo; I thought. &lsquo;Pauline,&rsquo; I began. I went
+      and sat near to her, so as to study her. My tones had been so searching
+      that she read my thought; her eyes fell, and I scrutinized her face. It
+      was so pure and frank that I fancied I could see as clearly into her heart
+      as into my own.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;Do you love me?&rsquo; I asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;A little,&mdash;passionately&mdash;not a bit!&rsquo; she cried.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then she did not love me. Her jesting tones, and a little gleeful
+      movement that escaped her, expressed nothing beyond a girlish, blithe
+      goodwill. I told her about my distress and the predicament in which I
+      found myself, and asked her to help me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;You do not wish to go to the pawnbroker&rsquo;s yourself, M. Raphael,&rsquo; she
+      answered, &lsquo;and yet you would send me!&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I blushed in confusion at the child&rsquo;s reasoning. She took my hand in hers
+      as if she wanted to compensate for this home-truth by her light touch upon
+      it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;Oh, I would willingly go,&rsquo; she said, &lsquo;but it is not necessary. I found
+      two five-franc pieces at the back of the piano, that had slipped without
+      your knowledge between the frame and the keyboard, and I laid them on your
+      table.&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;You will soon be coming into some money, M. Raphael,&rsquo; said the kind
+      mother, showing her face between the curtains, &lsquo;and I can easily lend you
+      a few crowns meanwhile.&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;Oh, Pauline!&rsquo; I cried, as I pressed her hand, &lsquo;how I wish that I were
+      rich!&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;Bah! why should you?&rsquo; she said petulantly. Her hand shook in mine with
+      the throbbing of her pulse; she snatched it away, and looked at both of
+      mine.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;You will marry a rich wife,&rsquo; she said, &lsquo;but she will give you a great
+      deal of trouble. Ah, <i>Dieu</i>! she will be your death,&mdash;I am sure
+      of it.&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;In her exclamation there was something like belief in her mother&rsquo;s absurd
+      superstitions.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;You are very credulous, Pauline!&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;The woman whom you will love is going to kill you&mdash;there is no
+      doubt of it,&rsquo; she said, looking at me with alarm.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She took up her brush again and dipped it in the color; her great
+      agitation was evident; she looked at me no longer. I was ready to give
+      credence just then to superstitious fancies; no man is utterly wretched so
+      long as he is superstitious; a belief of that kind is often in reality a
+      hope.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I found that those two magnificent five-franc pieces were lying, in fact,
+      upon my table when I reached my room. During the first confused thoughts
+      of early slumber, I tried to audit my accounts so as to explain this
+      unhoped-for windfall; but I lost myself in useless calculations, and
+      slept. Just as I was leaving my room to engage a box the next morning,
+      Pauline came to see me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;Perhaps your ten francs is not enough,&rsquo; said the amiable, kind-hearted
+      girl; &lsquo;my mother told me to offer you this money. Take it, please, take
+      it!&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She laid three crowns upon the table, and tried to escape, but I would
+      not let her go. Admiration dried the tears that sprang to my eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;You are an angel, Pauline,&rsquo; I said. &lsquo;It is not the loan that touches me
+      so much as the delicacy with which it is offered. I used to wish for a
+      rich wife, a fashionable woman of rank; and now, alas! I would rather
+      possess millions, and find some girl, as poor as you are, with a generous
+      nature like your own; and I would renounce a fatal passion which will kill
+      me. Perhaps what you told me will come true.&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;That is enough,&rsquo; she said, and fled away; the fresh trills of her
+      birdlike voice rang up the staircase.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;She is very happy in not yet knowing love,&rsquo; I said to myself, thinking
+      of the torments I had endured for many months past.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Pauline&rsquo;s fifteen francs were invaluable to me. Foedora, thinking of the
+      stifling odor of the crowded place where we were to spend several hours,
+      was sorry that she had not brought a bouquet; I went in search of flowers
+      for her, as I had laid already my life and my fate at her feet. With a
+      pleasure in which compunction mingled, I gave her a bouquet. I learned
+      from its price the extravagance of superficial gallantry in the world. But
+      very soon she complained of the heavy scent of a Mexican jessamine. The
+      interior of the theatre, the bare bench on which she was to sit, filled
+      her with intolerable disgust; she upbraided me for bringing her there.
+      Although she sat beside me, she wished to go, and she went. I had spent
+      sleepless nights, and squandered two months of my life for her, and I
+      could not please her. Never had that tormenting spirit been more unfeeling
+      or more fascinating.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I sat beside her in the cramped back seat of the vehicle; all the way I
+      could feel her breath on me and the contact of her perfumed glove; I saw
+      distinctly all her exceeding beauty; I inhaled a vague scent of
+      orris-root; so wholly a woman she was, with no touch of womanhood. Just
+      then a sudden gleam of light lit up the depths of this mysterious life for
+      me. I thought all at once of a book just published by a poet, a genuine
+      conception of the artist, in the shape of the statue of Polycletus.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I seemed to see that monstrous creation, at one time an officer, breaking
+      in a spirited horse; at another, a girl, who gives herself up to her
+      toilette and breaks her lovers&rsquo; hearts; or again, a false lover driving a
+      timid and gentle maid to despair. Unable to analyze Foedora by any other
+      process, I told her this fanciful story; but no hint of her resemblance to
+      this poetry of the impossible crossed her&mdash;it simply diverted her;
+      she was like a child over a story from the <i>Arabian Nights</i>.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;Foedora must be shielded by some talisman,&rsquo; I thought to myself as I
+      went back, &lsquo;or she could not resist the love of a man of my age, the
+      infectious fever of that splendid malady of the soul. Is Foedora, like
+      Lady Delacour, a prey to a cancer? Her life is certainly an unnatural
+      one.&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I shuddered at the thought. Then I decided on a plan, at once the wildest
+      and the most rational that lover ever dreamed of. I would study this woman
+      from a physical point of view, as I had already studied her
+      intellectually, and to this end I made up my mind to spend a night in her
+      room without her knowledge. This project preyed upon me as a thirst for
+      revenge gnaws at the heart of a Corsican monk. This is how I carried it
+      out. On the days when Foedora received, her rooms were far too crowded for
+      the hall-porter to keep the balance even between goers and comers; I could
+      remain in the house, I felt sure, without causing a scandal in it, and I
+      waited the countess&rsquo; coming soiree with impatience. As I dressed I put a
+      little English penknife into my waistcoat pocket, instead of a poniard.
+      That literary implement, if found upon me, could awaken no suspicion, but
+      I knew not whither my romantic resolution might lead, and I wished to be
+      prepared.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;As soon as the rooms began to fill, I entered the bedroom and examined
+      the arrangements. The inner and outer shutters were closed; this was a
+      good beginning; and as the waiting-maid might come to draw back the
+      curtains that hung over the windows, I pulled them together. I was running
+      great risks in venturing to manoeuvre beforehand in this way, but I had
+      accepted the situation, and had deliberately reckoned with its dangers.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;About midnight I hid myself in the embrasure of the window. I tried to
+      scramble on to a ledge of the wainscoting, hanging on by the fastening of
+      the shutters with my back against the wall, in such a position that my
+      feet could not be visible. When I had carefully considered my points of
+      support, and the space between me and the curtains, I had become
+      sufficiently acquainted with all the difficulties of my position to stay
+      in it without fear of detection if undisturbed by cramp, coughs, or
+      sneezings. To avoid useless fatigue, I remained standing until the
+      critical moment, when I must hang suspended like a spider in its web. The
+      white-watered silk and muslin of the curtains spread before me in great
+      pleats like organ-pipes. With my penknife I cut loopholes in them, through
+      which I could see.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I heard vague murmurs from the salons, the laughter and the louder tones
+      of the speakers. The smothered commotion and vague uproar lessened by slow
+      degrees. One man and another came for his hat from the countess&rsquo; chest of
+      drawers, close to where I stood. I shivered, if the curtains were
+      disturbed, at the thought of the mischances consequent on the confused and
+      hasty investigations made by the men in a hurry to depart, who were
+      rummaging everywhere. When I experienced no misfortunes of this kind, I
+      augured well of my enterprise. An old wooer of Foedora&rsquo;s came for the last
+      hat; he thought himself quite alone, looked at the bed, and heaved a great
+      sigh, accompanied by some inaudible exclamation, into which he threw
+      sufficient energy. In the boudoir close by, the countess, finding only
+      some five or six intimate acquaintances about her, proposed tea. The
+      scandals for which existing society has reserved the little faculty of
+      belief that it retains, mingled with epigrams and trenchant witticisms,
+      and the clatter of cups and spoons. Rastignac drew roars of laughter by
+      merciless sarcasms at the expense of my rivals.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;M. de Rastignac is a man with whom it is better not to quarrel,&rsquo; said
+      the countess, laughing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;I am quite of that opinion,&rsquo; was his candid reply. &lsquo;I have always been
+      right about my aversions&mdash;and my friendships as well,&rsquo; he added.
+      &lsquo;Perhaps my enemies are quite as useful to me as my friends. I have made a
+      particular study of modern phraseology, and of the natural craft that is
+      used in all attack or defence. Official eloquence is one of our perfect
+      social products.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;One of your friends is not clever, so you speak of his integrity and his
+      candor. Another&rsquo;s work is heavy; you introduce it as a piece of
+      conscientious labor; and if the book is ill written, you extol the ideas
+      it contains. Such an one is treacherous and fickle, slips through your
+      fingers every moment; bah! he is attractive, bewitching, he is delightful!
+      Suppose they are enemies, you fling every one, dead or alive, in their
+      teeth. You reverse your phraseology for their benefit, and you are as keen
+      in detecting their faults as you were before adroit in bringing out the
+      virtues of your friends. This way of using the mental lorgnette is the
+      secret of conversation nowadays, and the whole art of the complete
+      courtier. If you neglect it, you might as well go out as an unarmed
+      knight-banneret to fight against men in armor. And I make use of it, and
+      even abuse it at times. So we are respected&mdash;I and my friends; and,
+      moreover, my sword is quite as sharp as my tongue.&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;One of Foedora&rsquo;s most fervid worshipers, whose presumption was notorious,
+      and who even made it contribute to his success, took up the glove thrown
+      down so scornfully by Rastignac. He began an unmeasured eulogy of me, my
+      performances, and my character. Rastignac had overlooked this method of
+      detraction. His sarcastic encomiums misled the countess, who sacrificed
+      without mercy; she betrayed my secrets, and derided my pretensions and my
+      hopes, to divert her friends.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;There is a future before him,&rsquo; said Rastignac. &lsquo;Some day he may be in a
+      position to take a cruel revenge; his talents are at least equal to his
+      courage; and I should consider those who attack him very rash, for he has
+      a good memory&mdash;&mdash;&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;And writes Memoirs,&rsquo; put in the countess, who seemed to object to the
+      deep silence that prevailed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;Memoirs of a sham countess, madame,&rsquo; replied Rastignac. &lsquo;Another sort of
+      courage is needed to write that sort of thing.&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;I give him credit for plenty of courage,&rsquo; she answered; &lsquo;he is faithful
+      to me.&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I was greatly tempted to show myself suddenly among the railers, like the
+      shade of Banquo in Macbeth. I should have lost a mistress, but I had a
+      friend! But love inspired me all at once, with one of those treacherous
+      and fallacious subtleties that it can use to soothe all our pangs.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If Foedora loved me, I thought, she would be sure to disguise her
+      feelings by some mocking jest. How often the heart protests against a lie
+      on the lips!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, very soon my audacious rival, left alone with the countess, rose to
+      go.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;What! already?&rsquo; asked she in a coaxing voice that set my heart beating.
+      &lsquo;Will you not give me a few more minutes? Have you nothing more to say to
+      me? will you never sacrifice any of your pleasures for me?&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He went away.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;Ah!&rsquo; she yawned; &lsquo;how very tiresome they all are!&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She pulled a cord energetically till the sound of a bell rang through the
+      place; then, humming a few notes of <i>Pria che spunti</i>, the countess
+      entered her room. No one had ever heard her sing; her muteness had called
+      forth the wildest explanations. She had promised her first lover, so it
+      was said, who had been held captive by her talent, and whose jealousy over
+      her stretched beyond his grave, that she would never allow others to
+      experience a happiness that he wished to be his and his alone.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I exerted every power of my soul to catch the sounds. Higher and higher
+      rose the notes; Foedora&rsquo;s life seemed to dilate within her; her throat
+      poured forth all its richest tones; something well-nigh divine entered
+      into the melody. There was a bright purity and clearness of tone in the
+      countess&rsquo; voice, a thrilling harmony which reached the heart and stirred
+      its pulses. Musicians are seldom unemotional; a woman who could sing like
+      that must know how to love indeed. Her beautiful voice made one more
+      puzzle in a woman mysterious enough before. I beheld her then, as plainly
+      as I see you at this moment. She seemed to listen to herself, to
+      experience a secret rapture of her own; she felt, as it were, an ecstasy
+      like that of love.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She stood before the hearth during the execution of the principal theme
+      of the <i>rondo</i>; and when she ceased her face changed. She looked
+      tired; her features seemed to alter. She had laid the mask aside; her part
+      as an actress was over. Yet the faded look that came over her beautiful
+      face, a result either of this performance or of the evening&rsquo;s fatigues,
+      had its charms, too.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;This is her real self,&rsquo; I thought.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She set her foot on a bronze bar of the fender as if to warm it, took off
+      her gloves, and drew over her head the gold chain from which her bejeweled
+      scent-bottle hung. It gave me a quite indescribable pleasure to watch the
+      feline grace of every movement; the supple grace a cat displays as it
+      adjusts its toilette in the sun. She looked at herself in the mirror and
+      said aloud ill-humoredly&mdash;&lsquo;I did not look well this evening, my
+      complexion is going with alarming rapidity; perhaps I ought to keep
+      earlier hours, and give up this life of dissipation. Does Justine mean to
+      trifle with me?&rsquo; She rang again; her maid hurried in. Where she had been I
+      cannot tell; she came in by a secret staircase. I was anxious to make a
+      study of her. I had lodged accusations, in my romantic imaginings, against
+      this invisible waiting-woman, a tall, well-made brunette.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;Did madame ring?&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;Yes, twice,&rsquo; answered Foedora; &lsquo;are you really growing deaf nowadays?&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;I was preparing madame&rsquo;s milk of almonds.&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Justine knelt down before her, unlaced her sandals and drew them off,
+      while her mistress lay carelessly back on her cushioned armchair beside
+      the fire, yawned, and scratched her head. Every movement was perfectly
+      natural; there was nothing whatever to indicate the secret sufferings or
+      emotions with which I had credited her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;George must be in love!&rsquo; she remarked. &lsquo;I shall dismiss him. He has
+      drawn the curtains again to-night. What does he mean by it?&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;All the blood in my veins rushed to my heart at this observation, but no
+      more was said about curtains.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;Life is very empty,&rsquo; the countess went on. &lsquo;Ah! be careful not to
+      scratch me as you did yesterday. Just look here, I still have the marks of
+      your nails about me,&rsquo; and she held out a silken knee. She thrust her bare
+      feet into velvet slippers bound with swan&rsquo;s-down, and unfastened her
+      dress, while Justine prepared to comb her hair.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;You ought to marry, madame, and have children.&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;Children!&rsquo; she cried; &lsquo;it wants no more than that to finish me at once;
+      and a husband! What man is there to whom I could&mdash;&mdash;? Was my
+      hair well arranged to-night?&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;Not particularly.&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;You are a fool!&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;That way of crimping your hair too much is the least becoming way
+      possible for you. Large, smooth curls suit you a great deal better.&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;Really?&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;Yes, really, madame; that wavy style only looks nice in fair hair.&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;Marriage? never, never! Marriage is a commercial arrangement, for which
+      I was never made.&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What a disheartening scene for a lover! Here was a lonely woman, without
+      friends or kin, without the religion of love, without faith in any
+      affection. Yet however slightly she might feel the need to pour out her
+      heart, a craving that every human being feels, it could only be satisfied
+      by gossiping with her maid, by trivial and indifferent talk.... I grieved
+      for her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Justine unlaced her. I watched her carefully when she was at last
+      unveiled. Her maidenly form, in its rose-tinged whiteness, was visible
+      through her shift in the taper light, as dazzling as some silver statue
+      behind its gauze covering. No, there was no defect that need shrink from
+      the stolen glances of love. Alas, a fair form will overcome the stoutest
+      resolutions!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The maid lighted the taper in the alabaster sconce that hung before the
+      bed, while her mistress sat thoughtful and silent before the fire. Justine
+      went for a warming-pan, turned down the bed, and helped to lay her
+      mistress in it; then, after some further time spent in punctiliously
+      rendering various services that showed how seriously Foedora respected
+      herself, her maid left her. The countess turned to and fro several times,
+      and sighed; she was ill at ease; faint, just perceptible sounds, like
+      sighs of impatience, escaped from her lips. She reached out a hand to the
+      table, and took a flask from it, from which she shook four or five drops
+      of some brown liquid into some milk before taking it; again there followed
+      some painful sighs, and the exclamation, &lsquo;<i>Mon Dieu</i>!&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The cry, and the tone in which it was uttered, wrung my heart. By degrees
+      she lay motionless. This frightened me; but very soon I heard a sleeper&rsquo;s
+      heavy, regular breathing. I drew the rustling silk curtains apart, left my
+      post, went to the foot of the bed, and gazed at her with feelings that I
+      cannot define. She was so enchanting as she lay like a child, with her arm
+      above her head; but the sweetness of the fair, quiet visage, surrounded by
+      the lace, only irritated me. I had not been prepared for the torture to
+      which I was compelled to submit.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;<i>Mon Dieu</i>!&rsquo; that scrap of a thought which I understood not, but
+      must even take as my sole light, had suddenly modified my opinion of
+      Foedora. Trite or profoundly significant, frivolous or of deep import, the
+      words might be construed as expressive of either pleasure or pain, of
+      physical or of mental suffering. Was it a prayer or a malediction, a
+      forecast or a memory, a fear or a regret? A whole life lay in that
+      utterance, a life of wealth or of penury; perhaps it contained a crime!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The mystery that lurked beneath this fair semblance of womanhood grew
+      afresh; there were so many ways of explaining Foedora, that she became
+      inexplicable. A sort of language seemed to flow from between her lips. I
+      put thoughts and feelings into the accidents of her breathing, whether
+      weak or regular, gentle, or labored. I shared her dreams; I would fain
+      have divined her secrets by reading them through her slumber. I hesitated
+      among contradictory opinions and decisions without number. I could not
+      deny my heart to the woman I saw before me, with the calm, pure beauty in
+      her face. I resolved to make one more effort. If I told her the story of
+      my life, my love, my sacrifices, might I not awaken pity in her or draw a
+      tear from her who never wept?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;As I set all my hopes on this last experiment, the sounds in the streets
+      showed that day was at hand. For a moment&rsquo;s space I pictured Foedora
+      waking to find herself in my arms. I could have stolen softly to her side
+      and slipped them about her in a close embrace. Resolved to resist the
+      cruel tyranny of this thought, I hurried into the salon, heedless of any
+      sounds I might make; but, luckily, I came upon a secret door leading to a
+      little staircase. As I expected, the key was in the lock; I slammed the
+      door, went boldly out into the court, and gained the street in three
+      bounds, without looking round to see whether I was observed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A dramatist was to read a comedy at the countess&rsquo; house in two days&rsquo; 
+      time; I went thither, intending to outstay the others, so as to make a
+      rather singular request to her; I meant to ask her to keep the following
+      evening for me alone, and to deny herself to other comers; but when I
+      found myself alone with her, my courage failed. Every tick of the clock
+      alarmed me. It wanted only a quarter of an hour of midnight.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;If I do not speak,&rsquo; I thought to myself, &lsquo;I must smash my head against
+      the corner of the mantelpiece.&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I gave myself three minutes&rsquo; grace; the three minutes went by, and I did
+      not smash my head upon the marble; my heart grew heavy, like a sponge with
+      water.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;You are exceedingly amusing,&rsquo; said she.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;Ah, madame, if you could but understand me!&rsquo; I answered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;What is the matter with you?&rsquo; she asked. &lsquo;You are turning pale.&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;I am hesitating to ask a favor of you.&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Her gesture revived my courage. I asked her to make the appointment with
+      me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;Willingly,&rsquo; she answered&rsquo; &lsquo;but why will you not speak to me now?&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;To be candid with you, I ought to explain the full scope of your
+      promise: I want to spend this evening by your side, as if we were brother
+      and sister. Have no fear; I am aware of your antipathies; you must have
+      divined me sufficiently to feel sure that I should wish you to do nothing
+      that could be displeasing to you; presumption, moreover, would not thus
+      approach you. You have been a friend to me, you have shown me kindness and
+      great indulgence; know, therefore, that to-morrow I must bid you farewell.&mdash;Do
+      not take back your word,&rsquo; I exclaimed, seeing her about to speak, and I
+      went away.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;At eight o&rsquo;clock one evening towards the end of May, Foedora and I were
+      alone together in her gothic boudoir. I feared no longer; I was secure of
+      happiness. My mistress should be mine, or I would seek a refuge in death.
+      I had condemned my faint-hearted love, and a man who acknowledges his
+      weakness is strong indeed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The countess, in her blue cashmere gown, was reclining on a sofa, with
+      her feet on a cushion. She wore an Oriental turban such as painters assign
+      to early Hebrews; its strangeness added an indescribable coquettish grace
+      to her attractions. A transitory charm seemed to have laid its spell on
+      her face; it might have furnished the argument that at every instant we
+      become new and unparalleled beings, without any resemblance to the <i>us</i>
+      of the future or of the past. I had never yet seen her so radiant.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;Do you know that you have piqued my curiosity?&rsquo; she said, laughing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;I will not disappoint it,&rsquo; I said quietly, as I seated myself near to
+      her and took the hand that she surrendered to me. &lsquo;You have a very
+      beautiful voice!&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;You have never heard me sing!&rsquo; she exclaimed, starting involuntarily
+      with surprise.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;I will prove that it is quite otherwise, whenever it is necessary. Is
+      your delightful singing still to remain a mystery? Have no fear, I do not
+      wish to penetrate it.&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We spent about an hour in familiar talk. While I adopted the attitude and
+      manner of a man to whom Foedora must refuse nothing, I showed her all a
+      lover&rsquo;s deference. Acting in this way, I received a favor&mdash;I was
+      allowed to kiss her hand. She daintily drew off the glove, and my whole
+      soul was dissolved and poured forth in that kiss. I was steeped in the
+      bliss of an illusion in which I tried to believe.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Foedora lent herself most unexpectedly to my caress and my flatteries. Do
+      not accuse me of faint-heartedness; if I had gone a step beyond these
+      fraternal compliments, the claws would have been out of the sheath and
+      into me. We remained perfectly silent for nearly ten minutes. I was
+      admiring her, investing her with the charms she had not. She was mine just
+      then, and mine only,&mdash;this enchanting being was mine, as was
+      permissible, in my imagination; my longing wrapped her round and held her
+      close; in my soul I wedded her. The countess was subdued and fascinated by
+      my magnetic influence. Ever since I have regretted that this subjugation
+      was not absolute; but just then I yearned for her soul, her heart alone,
+      and for nothing else. I longed for an ideal and perfect happiness, a fair
+      illusion that cannot last for very long. At last I spoke, feeling that the
+      last hours of my frenzy were at hand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;Hear me, madame. I love you, and you know it; I have said so a hundred
+      times; you must have understood me. I would not take upon me the airs of a
+      coxcomb, nor would I flatter you, nor urge myself upon you like a fool; I
+      would not owe your love to such arts as these! so I have been
+      misunderstood. What sufferings have I not endured for your sake! For
+      these, however, you were not to blame; but in a few minutes you shall
+      decide for yourself. There are two kinds of poverty, madame. One kind
+      openly walks the street in rags, an unconscious imitator of Diogenes, on a
+      scanty diet, reducing life to its simplest terms; he is happier, maybe,
+      than the rich; he has fewer cares at any rate, and accepts such portions
+      of the world as stronger spirits refuse. Then there is poverty in
+      splendor, a Spanish pauper, concealing the life of a beggar by his title,
+      his bravery, and his pride; poverty that wears a white waistcoat and
+      yellow kid gloves, a beggar with a carriage, whose whole career will be
+      wrecked for lack of a halfpenny. Poverty of the first kind belongs to the
+      populace; the second kind is that of blacklegs, of kings, and of men of
+      talent. I am neither a man of the people, nor a king, nor a swindler;
+      possibly I have no talent either, I am an exception. With the name I bear
+      I must die sooner than beg. Set your mind at rest, madame,&rsquo; I said;
+      &lsquo;to-day I have abundance, I possess sufficient of the clay for my needs&rsquo;;
+      for the hard look passed over her face which we wear whenever a
+      well-dressed beggar takes us by surprise. &lsquo;Do you remember the day when
+      you wished to go to the Gymnase without me, never believing that I should
+      be there?&rsquo; I went on.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She nodded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;I had laid out my last five-franc piece that I might see you there.&mdash;Do
+      you recollect our walk in the Jardin des Plantes? The hire of your cab
+      took everything I had.&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I told her about my sacrifices, and described the life I led; heated not
+      with wine, as I am to-day, but by the generous enthusiasm of my heart, my
+      passion overflowed in burning words; I have forgotten how the feelings
+      within me blazed forth; neither memory nor skill of mine could possibly
+      reproduce it. It was no colorless chronicle of blighted affections; my
+      love was strengthened by fair hopes; and such words came to me, by love&rsquo;s
+      inspiration, that each had power to set forth a whole life&mdash;like
+      echoes of the cries of a soul in torment. In such tones the last prayers
+      ascend from dying men on the battlefield. I stopped, for she was weeping.
+      <i>Grand Dieu</i>! I had reaped an actor&rsquo;s reward, the success of a
+      counterfeit passion displayed at the cost of five francs paid at the
+      theatre door. I had drawn tears from her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;If I had known&mdash;&mdash;&rsquo; she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;Do not finish the sentence,&rsquo; I broke in. &lsquo;Even now I love you well
+      enough to murder you&mdash;&mdash;&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She reached for the bell-pull. I burst into a roar of laughter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;Do not call any one,&rsquo; I said. &lsquo;I shall leave you to finish your life in
+      peace. It would be a blundering kind of hatred that would murder you! You
+      need not fear violence of any kind; I have spent a whole night at the foot
+      of your bed without&mdash;&mdash;&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;Monsieur&mdash;&mdash;&rsquo; she said, blushing; but after that first impulse
+      of modesty that even the most hardened women must surely own, she flung a
+      scornful glance at me, and said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;You must have been very cold.&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;Do you think that I set such value on your beauty, madame,&rsquo; I answered,
+      guessing the thoughts that moved her. &lsquo;Your beautiful face is for me a
+      promise of a soul yet more beautiful. Madame, those to whom a woman is
+      merely a woman can always purchase odalisques fit for the seraglio, and
+      achieve their happiness at a small cost. But I aspired to something
+      higher; I wanted the life of close communion of heart and heart with you
+      that have no heart. I know that now. If you were to belong to another, I
+      could kill him. And yet, no; for you would love him, and his death might
+      hurt you perhaps. What agony this is!&rsquo; I cried.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;If it is any comfort to you,&rsquo; she retorted cheerfully, &lsquo;I can assure you
+      that I shall never belong to any one&mdash;&mdash;&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;So you offer an affront to God Himself,&rsquo; I interrupted; &lsquo;and you will be
+      punished for it. Some day you will lie upon your sofa suffering unheard-of
+      ills, unable to endure the light or the slightest sound, condemned to live
+      as it were in the tomb. Then, when you seek the causes of those lingering
+      and avenging torments, you will remember the woes that you distributed so
+      lavishly upon your way. You have sown curses, and hatred will be your
+      reward. We are the real judges, the executioners of a justice that reigns
+      here below, which overrules the justice of man and the laws of God.&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;No doubt it is very culpable in me not to love you,&rsquo; she said, laughing.
+      &lsquo;Am I to blame? No. I do not love you; you are a man, that is sufficient.
+      I am happy by myself; why should I give up my way of living, a selfish
+      way, if you will, for the caprices of a master? Marriage is a sacrament by
+      virtue of which each imparts nothing but vexations to the other. Children,
+      moreover, worry me. Did I not faithfully warn you about my nature? Why are
+      you not satisfied to have my friendship? I wish I could make you amends
+      for all the troubles I have caused you, through not guessing the value of
+      your poor five-franc pieces. I appreciate the extent of your sacrifices;
+      but your devotion and delicate tact can be repaid by love alone, and I
+      care so little for you, that this scene has a disagreeable effect upon
+      me.&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;I am fully aware of my absurdity,&rsquo; I said, unable to restrain my tears.
+      &lsquo;Pardon me,&rsquo; I went on, &lsquo;it was a delight to hear those cruel words you
+      have just uttered, so well I love you. O, if I could testify my love with
+      every drop of blood in me!&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;Men always repeat these classic formulas to us, more or less
+      effectively,&rsquo; she answered, still smiling. &lsquo;But it appears very difficult
+      to die at our feet, for I see corpses of that kind about everywhere. It is
+      twelve o&rsquo;clock. Allow me to go to bed.&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;And in two hours&rsquo; time you will cry to yourself, <i>Ah, mon Dieu</i>!&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;Like the day before yesterday! Yes,&rsquo; she said, &lsquo;I was thinking of my
+      stockbroker; I had forgotten to tell him to convert my five per cent stock
+      into threes, and the three per cents had fallen during the day.&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I looked at her, and my eyes glittered with anger. Sometimes a crime may
+      be a whole romance; I understood that just then. She was so accustomed, no
+      doubt, to the most impassioned declarations of this kind, that my words
+      and my tears were forgotten already.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;Would you marry a peer of France?&rsquo; I demanded abruptly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;If he were a duke, I might.&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I seized my hat and made her a bow.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;Permit me to accompany you to the door,&rsquo; she said, cutting irony in her
+      tones, in the poise of her head, and in her gesture.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;Madame&mdash;&mdash;&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;Monsieur?&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;I shall never see you again.&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;I hope not,&rsquo; and she insolently inclined her head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;You wish to be a duchess?&rsquo; I cried, excited by a sort of madness that
+      her insolence roused in me. &lsquo;You are wild for honors and titles? Well,
+      only let me love you; bid my pen write and my voice speak for you alone;
+      be the inmost soul of my life, my guiding star! Then, only accept me for
+      your husband as a minister, a peer of France, a duke. I will make of
+      myself whatever you would have me be!&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;You made good use of the time you spent with the advocate,&rsquo; she said
+      smiling. &lsquo;There is a fervency about your pleadings.&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;The present is yours,&rsquo; I cried, &lsquo;but the future is mine! I only lose a
+      woman; you are losing a name and a family. Time is big with my revenge;
+      time will spoil your beauty, and yours will be a solitary death; and glory
+      waits for me!&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;Thanks for your peroration!&rsquo; she said, repressing a yawn; the wish that
+      she might never see me again was expressed in her whole bearing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That remark silenced me. I flung at her a glance full of hatred, and
+      hurried away.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Foedora must be forgotten; I must cure myself of my infatuation, and
+      betake myself once more to my lonely studies, or die. So I set myself
+      tremendous tasks; I determined to complete my labors. For fifteen days I
+      never left my garret, spending whole nights in pallid thought. I worked
+      with difficulty, and by fits and starts, despite my courage and the
+      stimulation of despair. The music had fled. I could not exorcise the
+      brilliant mocking image of Foedora. Something morbid brooded over every
+      thought, a vague longing as dreadful as remorse. I imitated the anchorites
+      of the Thebaid. If I did not pray as they did, I lived a life in the
+      desert like theirs, hewing out my ideas as they were wont to hew their
+      rocks. I could at need have girdled my waist with spikes, that physical
+      suffering might quell mental anguish.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;One evening Pauline found her way into my room.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;You are killing yourself,&rsquo; she said imploringly; &lsquo;you should go out and
+      see your friends&mdash;&mdash;&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;Pauline, you were a true prophet; Foedora is killing me, I want to die.
+      My life is intolerable.&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;Is there only one woman in the world?&rsquo; she asked, smiling. &lsquo;Why make
+      yourself so miserable in so short a life?&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I looked at Pauline in bewilderment. She left me before I noticed her
+      departure; the sound of her words had reached me, but not their sense.
+      Very soon I had to take my Memoirs in manuscript to my
+      literary-contractor. I was so absorbed by my passion, that I could not
+      remember how I had managed to live without money; I only knew that the
+      four hundred and fifty francs due to me would pay my debts. So I went to
+      receive my salary, and met Rastignac, who thought me changed and thinner.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;What hospital have you been discharged from?&rsquo; he asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;That woman is killing me,&rsquo; I answered; &lsquo;I can neither despise her nor
+      forget her.&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;You had much better kill her, then perhaps you would think no more of
+      her,&rsquo; he said, laughing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;I have often thought of it,&rsquo; I replied; &lsquo;but though sometimes the
+      thought of a crime revives my spirits, of violence and murder, either or
+      both, I am really incapable of carrying out the design. The countess is an
+      admirable monster who would crave for pardon, and not every man is an
+      Othello.&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;She is like every woman who is beyond our reach,&rsquo; Rastignac interrupted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;I am mad,&rsquo; I cried; &lsquo;I can feel the madness raging at times in my brain.
+      My ideas are like shadows; they flit before me, and I cannot grasp them.
+      Death would be preferable to this life, and I have carefully considered
+      the best way of putting an end to the struggle. I am not thinking of the
+      living Foedora in the Faubourg Saint Honore, but of my Foedora here,&rsquo; and
+      I tapped my forehead. &lsquo;What to you say to opium?&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;Pshaw! horrid agonies,&rsquo; said Rastignac.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;Or charcoal fumes?&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;A low dodge.&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;Or the Seine?&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;The drag-nets, and the Morgue too, are filthy.&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;A pistol-shot?&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;And if you miscalculate, you disfigure yourself for life. Listen to me,&rsquo; 
+      he went on, &lsquo;like all young men, I have pondered over suicide. Which of us
+      hasn&rsquo;t killed himself two or three times before he is thirty? I find there
+      is no better course than to use existence as a means of pleasure. Go in
+      for thorough dissipation, and your passion or you will perish in it.
+      Intemperance, my dear fellow, commands all forms of death. Does she not
+      wield the thunderbolt of apoplexy? Apoplexy is a pistol-shot that does not
+      miscalculate. Orgies are lavish in all physical pleasures; is not that the
+      small change for opium? And the riot that makes us drink to excess bears a
+      challenge to mortal combat with wine. That butt of Malmsey of the Duke of
+      Clarence&rsquo;s must have had a pleasanter flavor than Seine mud. When we sink
+      gloriously under the table, is not that a periodical death by drowning on
+      a small scale? If we are picked up by the police and stretched out on
+      those chilly benches of theirs at the police-station, do we not enjoy all
+      the pleasures of the Morgue? For though we are not blue and green, muddy
+      and swollen corpses, on the other hand we have the consciousness of the
+      climax.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;Ah,&rsquo; he went on, &lsquo;this protracted suicide has nothing in common with the
+      bankrupt grocer&rsquo;s demise. Tradespeople have brought the river into
+      disrepute; they fling themselves in to soften their creditors&rsquo; hearts. In
+      your place I should endeavor to die gracefully; and if you wish to invent
+      a novel way of doing it, by struggling with life after this manner, I will
+      be your second. I am disappointed and sick of everything. The Alsacienne,
+      whom it was proposed that I should marry, had six toes on her left foot; I
+      cannot possibly live with a woman who has six toes! It would get about to
+      a certainty, and then I should be ridiculous. Her income was only eighteen
+      thousand francs; her fortune diminished in quantity as her toes increased.
+      The devil take it; if we begin an outrageous sort of life, we may come on
+      some bit of luck, perhaps!&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Rastignac&rsquo;s eloquence carried me away. The attractions of the plan shone
+      too temptingly, hopes were kindled, the poetical aspects of the matter
+      appealed to a poet.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;How about money?&rsquo; I said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;Haven&rsquo;t you four hundred and fifty francs?&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;Yes, but debts to my landlady and the tailor&mdash;&mdash;&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;You would pay your tailor? You will never be anything whatever, not so
+      much as a minister.&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;But what can one do with twenty louis?&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;Go to the gaming-table.&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I shuddered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;You are going to launch out into what I call systematic dissipation,&rsquo; 
+      said he, noticing my scruples, &lsquo;and yet you are afraid of a green
+      table-cloth.&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;Listen to me,&rsquo; I answered. &lsquo;I promised my father never to set foot in a
+      gaming-house. Not only is that a sacred promise, but I still feel an
+      unconquerable disgust whenever I pass a gambling-hell; take the money and
+      go without me. While our fortune is at stake, I will set my own affairs
+      straight, and then I will go to your lodgings and wait for you.&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That was the way I went to perdition. A young man has only to come across
+      a woman who will not love him, or a woman who loves him too well, and his
+      whole life becomes a chaos. Prosperity swallows up our energy just as
+      adversity obscures our virtues. Back once more in my Hotel de
+      Saint-Quentin, I gazed about me a long while in the garret where I had led
+      my scholar&rsquo;s temperate life, a life which would perhaps have been a long
+      and honorable one, and that I ought not to have quitted for the fevered
+      existence which had urged me to the brink of a precipice. Pauline
+      surprised me in this dejected attitude.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;Why, what is the matter with you?&rsquo; she asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I rose and quietly counted out the money owing to her mother, and added
+      to it sufficient to pay for six months&rsquo; rent in advance. She watched me in
+      some alarm.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;I am going to leave you, dear Pauline.&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;I knew it!&rsquo; she exclaimed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;Listen, my child. I have not given up the idea of coming back. Keep my
+      room for me for six months. If I do not return by the fifteenth of
+      November, you will come into possession of my things. This sealed packet
+      of manuscript is the fair copy of my great work on &ldquo;The Will,&rdquo;&rsquo; I went on,
+      pointing to a package. &lsquo;Will you deposit it in the King&rsquo;s Library? And you
+      may do as you wish with everything that is left here.&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Her look weighed heavily on my heart; Pauline was an embodiment of
+      conscience there before me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;I shall have no more lessons,&rsquo; she said, pointing to the piano.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I did not answer that.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;Will you write to me?&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;Good-bye, Pauline.&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I gently drew her towards me, and set a kiss on that innocent fair brow
+      of hers, like snow that has not yet touched the earth&mdash;a father&rsquo;s or
+      a brother&rsquo;s kiss. She fled. I would not see Madame Gaudin, hung my key in
+      its wonted place, and departed. I was almost at the end of the Rue de
+      Cluny when I heard a woman&rsquo;s light footstep behind me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;I have embroidered this purse for you,&rsquo; Pauline said; &lsquo;will you refuse
+      even that?&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;By the light of the street lamp I thought I saw tears in Pauline&rsquo;s eyes,
+      and I groaned. Moved perhaps by a common impulse, we parted in haste like
+      people who fear the contagion of the plague.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;As I waited with dignified calmness for Rastignac&rsquo;s return, his room
+      seemed a grotesque interpretation of the sort of life I was about to enter
+      upon. The clock on the chimney-piece was surmounted by a Venus resting on
+      her tortoise; a half-smoked cigar lay in her arms. Costly furniture of
+      various kinds&mdash;love tokens, very likely&mdash;was scattered about.
+      Old shoes lay on a luxurious sofa. The comfortable armchair into which I
+      had thrown myself bore as many scars as a veteran; the arms were gnashed,
+      the back was overlaid with a thick, stale deposit of pomade and hair-oil
+      from the heads of all his visitors. Splendor and squalor were oddly
+      mingled, on the walls, the bed, and everywhere. You might have thought of
+      a Neapolitan palace and the groups of lazzaroni about it. It was the room
+      of a gambler or a mauvais sujet, where the luxury exists for one
+      individual, who leads the life of the senses and does not trouble himself
+      over inconsistencies.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There was a certain imaginative element about the picture it presented.
+      Life was suddenly revealed there in its rags and spangles as the
+      incomplete thing it really is, of course, but so vividly and
+      picturesquely; it was like a den where a brigand has heaped up all the
+      plunder in which he delights. Some pages were missing from a copy of
+      Byron&rsquo;s poems: they had gone to light a fire of a few sticks for this
+      young person, who played for stakes of a thousand francs, and had not a
+      faggot; he kept a tilbury, and had not a whole shirt to his back. Any day
+      a countess or an actress or a run of luck at ecarte might set him up with
+      an outfit worthy of a king. A candle had been stuck into the green bronze
+      sheath of a vestaholder; a woman&rsquo;s portrait lay yonder, torn out of its
+      carved gold setting. How was it possible that a young man, whose nature
+      craved excitement, could renounce a life so attractive by reason of its
+      contradictions; a life that afforded all the delights of war in the midst
+      of peace? I was growing drowsy when Rastignac kicked the door open and
+      shouted:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;Victory! Now we can take our time about dying.&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He held out his hat filled with gold to me, and put it down on the table;
+      then we pranced round it like a pair of cannibals about to eat a victim;
+      we stamped, and danced, and yelled, and sang; we gave each other blows fit
+      to kill an elephant, at sight of all the pleasures of the world contained
+      in that hat.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;Twenty-seven thousand francs,&rsquo; said Rastignac, adding a few bank-notes
+      to the pile of gold. &lsquo;That would be enough for other folk to live upon;
+      will it be sufficient for us to die on? Yes! we will breathe our last in a
+      bath of gold&mdash;hurrah!&rsquo; and we capered afresh.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We divided the windfall. We began with double-napoleons, and came down to
+      the smaller coins, one by one. &lsquo;This for you, this for me,&rsquo; we kept
+      saying, distilling our joy drop by drop.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;We won&rsquo;t go to sleep,&rsquo; cried Rastignac. &lsquo;Joseph! some punch!&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He threw gold to his faithful attendant.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;There is your share,&rsquo; he said; &lsquo;go and bury yourself if you can.&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Next day I went to Lesage and chose my furniture, took the rooms that you
+      know in the Rue Taitbout, and left the decoration to one of the best
+      upholsterers. I bought horses. I plunged into a vortex of pleasures, at
+      once hollow and real. I went in for play, gaining and losing enormous
+      sums, but only at friends&rsquo; houses and in ballrooms; never in
+      gaming-houses, for which I still retained the holy horror of my early
+      days. Without meaning it, I made some friends, either through quarrels or
+      owing to the easy confidence established among those who are going to the
+      bad together; nothing, possibly, makes us cling to one another so tightly
+      as our evil propensities.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I made several ventures in literature, which were flatteringly received.
+      Great men who followed the profession of letters, having nothing to fear
+      from me, belauded me, not so much on account of my merits as to cast a
+      slur on those of their rivals.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I became a &lsquo;free-liver,&rsquo; to make use of the picturesque expression
+      appropriated by the language of excess. I made it a point of honor not to
+      be long about dying, and that my zeal and prowess should eclipse those
+      displayed by all others in the jolliest company. I was always spruce and
+      carefully dressed. I had some reputation for cleverness. There was no sign
+      about me of the fearful way of living which makes a man into a mere
+      disgusting apparatus, a funnel, a pampered beast.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Very soon Debauch rose before me in all the majesty of its horror, and I
+      grasped all that it meant. Those prudent, steady-going characters who are
+      laying down wine in bottles for their heirs, can barely conceive, it is
+      true, of so wide a theory of life, nor appreciate its normal condition;
+      but when will you instill poetry into the provincial intellect? Opium and
+      tea, with all their delights, are merely drugs to folk of that calibre.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Is not the imperfect sybarite to be met with even in Paris itself, that
+      intellectual metropolis? Unfit to endure the fatigues of pleasure, this
+      sort of person, after a drinking bout, is very much like those worthy
+      bourgeois who fall foul of music after hearing a new opera by Rossini.
+      Does he not renounce these courses in the same frame of mind that leads an
+      abstemious man to forswear Ruffec pates, because the first one, forsooth,
+      gave him the indigestion?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Debauch is as surely an art as poetry, and is not for craven spirits. To
+      penetrate its mysteries and appreciate its charms, conscientious
+      application is required; and as with every path of knowledge, the way is
+      thorny and forbidding at the outset. The great pleasures of humanity are
+      hedged about with formidable obstacles; not its single enjoyments, but
+      enjoyment as a system, a system which establishes seldom experienced
+      sensations and makes them habitual, which concentrates and multiplies them
+      for us, creating a dramatic life within our life, and imperatively
+      demanding a prompt and enormous expenditure of vitality. War, Power, Art,
+      like Debauch, are all forms of demoralization, equally remote from the
+      faculties of humanity, equally profound, and all are alike difficult of
+      access. But when man has once stormed the heights of these grand
+      mysteries, does he not walk in another world? Are not generals, ministers,
+      and artists carried, more or less, towards destruction by the need of
+      violent distractions in an existence so remote from ordinary life as
+      theirs?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;War, after all, is the Excess of bloodshed, as the Excess of
+      self-interest produces Politics. Excesses of every sort are brothers.
+      These social enormities possess the attraction of the abyss; they draw
+      towards themselves as St. Helena beckoned Napoleon; we are fascinated, our
+      heads swim, we wish to sound their depths though we cannot account for the
+      wish. Perhaps the thought of Infinity dwells in these precipices, perhaps
+      they contain some colossal flattery for the soul of man; for is he not,
+      then, wholly absorbed in himself?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The wearied artist needs a complete contrast to his paradise of
+      imaginings and of studious hours; he either craves, like God, the seventh
+      day of rest, or with Satan, the pleasures of hell; so that his senses may
+      have free play in opposition to the employment of his faculties. Byron
+      could never have taken for his relaxation to the independent gentleman&rsquo;s
+      delights of boston and gossip, for he was a poet, and so must needs pit
+      Greece against Mahmoud.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;In war, is not man an angel of extirpation, a sort of executioner on a
+      gigantic scale? Must not the spell be strong indeed that makes us undergo
+      such horrid sufferings so hostile to our weak frames, sufferings that
+      encircle every strong passion with a hedge of thorns? The tobacco smoker
+      is seized with convulsions, and goes through a kind of agony consequent
+      upon his excesses; but has he not borne a part in delightful festivals in
+      realms unknown? Has Europe ever ceased from wars? She has never given
+      herself time to wipe the stains from her feet that are steeped in blood to
+      the ankle. Mankind at large is carried away by fits of intoxication, as
+      nature has its accessions of love.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;For men in private life, for a vegetating Mirabeau dreaming of storms in
+      a time of calm, Excess comprises all things; it perpetually embraces the
+      whole sum of life; it is something better still&mdash;it is a duel with an
+      antagonist of unknown power, a monster, terrible at first sight, that must
+      be seized by the horns, a labor that cannot be imagined.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Suppose that nature has endowed you with a feeble stomach or one of
+      limited capacity; you acquire a mastery over it and improve it; you learn
+      to carry your liquor; you grow accustomed to being drunk; you pass whole
+      nights without sleep; at last you acquire the constitution of a colonel of
+      cuirassiers; and in this way you create yourself afresh, as if to fly in
+      the face of Providence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A man transformed after this sort is like a neophyte who has at last
+      become a veteran, has accustomed his mind to shot and shell and his legs
+      to lengthy marches. When the monster&rsquo;s hold on him is still uncertain, and
+      it is not yet known which will have the better of it, they roll over and
+      over, alternately victor and vanquished, in a world where everything is
+      wonderful, where every ache of the soul is laid to sleep, where only the
+      shadows of ideas are revived.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This furious struggle has already become a necessity for us. The prodigal
+      has struck a bargain for all the enjoyments with which life teems
+      abundantly, at the price of his own death, like the mythical persons in
+      legends who sold themselves to the devil for the power of doing evil. For
+      them, instead of flowing quietly on in its monotonous course in the depths
+      of some counting-house or study, life is poured out in a boiling torrent.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Excess is, in short, for the body what the mystic&rsquo;s ecstasy is for the
+      soul. Intoxication steeps you in fantastic imaginings every whit as
+      strange as those of ecstatics. You know hours as full of rapture as a
+      young girl&rsquo;s dreams; you travel without fatigue; you chat pleasantly with
+      your friends; words come to you with a whole life in each, and fresh
+      pleasures without regrets; poems are set forth for you in a few brief
+      phrases. The coarse animal satisfaction, in which science has tried to
+      find a soul, is followed by the enchanted drowsiness that men sigh for
+      under the burden of consciousness. Is it not because they all feel the
+      need of absolute repose? Because Excess is a sort of toll that genius pays
+      to pain?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Look at all great men; nature made them pleasure-loving or base, every
+      one. Some mocking or jealous power corrupted them in either soul or body,
+      so as to make all their powers futile, and their efforts of no avail.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;All men and all things appear before you in the guise you choose, in
+      those hours when wine has sway. You are lord of all creation; you
+      transform it at your pleasure. And throughout this unceasing delirium,
+      Play may pour, at your will, its molten lead into your veins.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Some day you will fall into the monster&rsquo;s power. Then you will have, as I
+      had, a frenzied awakening, with impotence sitting by your pillow. Are you
+      an old soldier? Phthisis attacks you. A diplomatist? An aneurism hangs
+      death in your heart by a thread. It will perhaps be consumption that will
+      cry out to me, &lsquo;Let us be going!&rsquo; as to Raphael of Urbino, in old time,
+      killed by an excess of love.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;In this way I have existed. I was launched into the world too early or
+      too late. My energy would have been dangerous there, no doubt, if I had
+      not have squandered it in such ways as these. Was not the world rid of an
+      Alexander, by the cup of Hercules, at the close of a drinking bout?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There are some, the sport of Destiny, who must either have heaven or
+      hell, the hospice of St. Bernard or riotous excess. Only just now I lacked
+      the heart to moralize about those two,&rdquo; and he pointed to Euphrasia and
+      Aquilina. &ldquo;They are types of my own personal history, images of my life! I
+      could scarcely reproach them; they stood before me like judges.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;In the midst of this drama that I was enacting, and while my distracting
+      disorder was at its height, two crises supervened; each brought me keen
+      and abundant pangs. The first came a few days after I had flung myself,
+      like Sardanapalus, on my pyre. I met Foedora under the peristyle of the
+      Bouffons. We both were waiting for our carriages.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;Ah! so you are living yet?&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That was the meaning of her smile, and probably of the spiteful words she
+      murmured in the ear of her cicisbeo, telling him my history no doubt,
+      rating mine as a common love affair. She was deceived, yet she was
+      applauding her perspicacity. Oh, that I should be dying for her, must
+      still adore her, always see her through my potations, see her still when I
+      was overcome with wine, or in the arms of courtesans; and know that I was
+      a target for her scornful jests! Oh, that I should be unable to tear the
+      love of her out of my breast and to fling it at her feet!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, I quickly exhausted my funds, but owing to those three years of
+      discipline, I enjoyed the most robust health, and on the day that I found
+      myself without a penny I felt remarkably well. In order to carry on the
+      process of dying, I signed bills at short dates, and the day came when
+      they must be met. Painful excitements! but how they quicken the pulses of
+      youth! I was not prematurely aged; I was young yet, and full of vigor and
+      life.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;At my first debt all my virtues came to life; slowly and despairingly
+      they seemed to pace towards me; but I could compound with them&mdash;they
+      were like aged aunts that begin with a scolding and end by bestowing tears
+      and money upon you.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Imagination was less yielding; I saw my name bandied about through every
+      city in Europe. &lsquo;One&rsquo;s name is oneself&rsquo; says Eusebe Salverte. After these
+      excursions I returned to the room I had never quitted, like a doppelganger
+      in a German tale, and came to myself with a start.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I used to see with indifference a banker&rsquo;s messenger going on his errands
+      through the streets of Paris, like a commercial Nemesis, wearing his
+      master&rsquo;s livery&mdash;a gray coat and a silver badge; but now I hated the
+      species in advance. One of them came one morning to ask me to meet some
+      eleven bills that I had scrawled my name upon. My signature was worth
+      three thousand francs! Taking me altogether, I myself was not worth that
+      amount. Sheriff&rsquo;s deputies rose up before me, turning their callous faces
+      upon my despair, as the hangman regards the criminal to whom he says, &lsquo;It
+      has just struck half-past three.&rsquo; I was in the power of their clerks; they
+      could scribble my name, drag it through the mire, and jeer at it. I was a
+      defaulter. Has a debtor any right to himself? Could not other men call me
+      to account for my way of living? Why had I eaten puddings <i>a la
+      chipolata</i>? Why had I iced my wine? Why had I slept, or walked, or
+      thought, or amused myself when I had not paid them?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;At any moment, in the middle of a poem, during some train of thought, or
+      while I was gaily breakfasting in the pleasant company of my friends, I
+      might look to see a gentleman enter in a coat of chestnut-brown, with a
+      shabby hat in his hand. This gentleman&rsquo;s appearance would signify my debt,
+      the bill I had drawn; the spectre would compel me to leave the table to
+      speak to him, blight my spirits, despoil me of my cheerfulness, of my
+      mistress, of all I possessed, down to my very bedstead.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Remorse itself is more easily endured. Remorse does not drive us into the
+      street nor into the prison of Sainte-Pelagie; it does not force us into
+      the detestable sink of vice. Remorse only brings us to the scaffold, where
+      the executioner invests us with a certain dignity; as we pay the extreme
+      penalty, everybody believes in our innocence; but people will not credit a
+      penniless prodigal with a single virtue.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My debts had other incarnations. There is the kind that goes about on two
+      feet, in a green cloth coat, and blue spectacles, carrying umbrellas of
+      various hues; you come face to face with him at the corner of some street,
+      in the midst of your mirth. These have the detestable prerogative of
+      saying, &lsquo;M. de Valentin owes me something, and does not pay. I have a hold
+      on him. He had better not show me any offensive airs!&rsquo; You must bow to
+      your creditors, and moreover bow politely. &lsquo;When are you going to pay me?&rsquo; 
+      say they. And you must lie, and beg money of another man, and cringe to a
+      fool seated on his strong-box, and receive sour looks in return from these
+      horse-leeches; a blow would be less hateful; you must put up with their
+      crass ignorance and calculating morality. A debt is a feat of the
+      imaginative that they cannot appreciate. A borrower is often carried away
+      and over-mastered by generous impulses; nothing great, nothing magnanimous
+      can move or dominate those who live for money, and recognize nothing but
+      money. I myself held money in abhorrence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Or a bill may undergo a final transformation into some meritorious old
+      man with a family dependent upon him. My creditor might be a living
+      picture for Greuze, a paralytic with his children round him, a soldier&rsquo;s
+      widow, holding out beseeching hands to me. Terrible creditors are these
+      with whom we are forced to sympathize, and when their claims are satisfied
+      we owe them a further debt of assistance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The night before the bills fell due, I lay down with the false calm of
+      those who sleep before their approaching execution, or with a duel in
+      prospect, rocked as they are by delusive hopes. But when I woke, when I
+      was cool and collected, when I found myself imprisoned in a banker&rsquo;s
+      portfolio, and floundering in statements covered with red ink&mdash;then
+      my debts sprang up everywhere, like grasshoppers, before my eyes. There
+      were my debts, my clock, my armchairs; my debts were inlaid in the very
+      furniture which I liked best to use. These gentle inanimate slaves were to
+      fall prey to the harpies of the Chatelet, were to be carried off by the
+      broker&rsquo;s men, and brutally thrown on the market. Ah, my property was a
+      part of myself!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The sound of the door-bell rang through my heart; while it seemed to
+      strike at me, where kings should be struck at&mdash;in the head. Mine was
+      a martyrdom, without heaven for its reward. For a magnanimous nature, debt
+      is a hell, and a hell, moreover, with sheriff&rsquo;s officers and brokers in
+      it. An undischarged debt is something mean and sordid; it is a beginning
+      of knavery; it is something worse, it is a lie; it prepares the way for
+      crime, and brings together the planks for the scaffold. My bills were
+      protested. Three days afterwards I met them, and this is how it happened.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A speculator came, offering to buy the island in the Loire belonging to
+      me, where my mother lay buried. I closed with him. When I went to his
+      solicitor to sign the deeds, I felt a cavern-like chill in the dark office
+      that made me shudder; it was the same cold dampness that had laid hold
+      upon me at the brink of my father&rsquo;s grave. I looked upon this as an evil
+      omen. I seemed to see the shade of my mother, and to hear her voice. What
+      power was it that made my own name ring vaguely in my ears, in spite of
+      the clamor of bells?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The money paid down for my island, when all my debts were discharged,
+      left me in possession of two thousand francs. I could now have returned to
+      the scholar&rsquo;s tranquil life, it is true; I could have gone back to my
+      garret after having gained an experience of life, with my head filled with
+      the results of extensive observation, and with a certain sort of
+      reputation attaching to me. But Foedora&rsquo;s hold upon her victim was not
+      relaxed. We often met. I compelled her admirers to sound my name in her
+      ears, by dint of astonishing them with my cleverness and success, with my
+      horses and equipages. It all found her impassive and uninterested; so did
+      an ugly phrase of Rastignac&rsquo;s, &lsquo;He is killing himself for you.&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I charged the world at large with my revenge, but I was not happy. While
+      I was fathoming the miry depths of life, I only recognized the more keenly
+      at all times the happiness of reciprocal affection; it was a shadow that I
+      followed through all that befell me in my extravagance, and in my wildest
+      moments. It was my misfortune to be deceived in my fairest beliefs, to be
+      punished by ingratitude for benefiting others, and to receive uncounted
+      pleasures as the reward of my errors&mdash;a sinister doctrine, but a true
+      one for the prodigal!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The contagious leprosy of Foedora&rsquo;s vanity had taken hold of me at last.
+      I probed my soul, and found it cankered and rotten. I bore the marks of
+      the devil&rsquo;s claw upon my forehead. It was impossible to me thenceforward
+      to do without the incessant agitation of a life fraught with danger at
+      every moment, or to dispense with the execrable refinements of luxury. If
+      I had possessed millions, I should still have gambled, reveled, and
+      racketed about. I wished never to be alone with myself, and I must have
+      false friends and courtesans, wine and good cheer to distract me. The ties
+      that attach a man to family life had been permanently broken for me. I had
+      become a galley-slave of pleasure, and must accomplish my destiny of
+      suicide. During the last days of my prosperity, I spent every night in the
+      most incredible excesses; but every morning death cast me back upon life
+      again. I would have taken a conflagration with as little concern as any
+      man with a life annuity. However, I at last found myself alone with a
+      twenty-franc piece; I bethought me then of Rastignac&rsquo;s luck&mdash;&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Eh, eh!&mdash;&mdash;&rdquo; Raphael exclaimed, interrupting himself, as he
+      remembered the talisman and drew it from his pocket. Perhaps he was
+      wearied by the long day&rsquo;s strain, and had no more strength left wherewith
+      to pilot his head through the seas of wine and punch; or perhaps,
+      exasperated by this symbol of his own existence, the torrent of his own
+      eloquence gradually overwhelmed him. Raphael became excited and elated and
+      like one completely deprived of reason.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The devil take death!&rdquo; he shouted, brandishing the skin; &ldquo;I mean to live!
+      I am rich, I have every virtue; nothing will withstand me. Who would not
+      be generous, when everything is in his power? Aha! Aha! I wished for two
+      hundred thousand livres a year, and I shall have them. Bow down before me,
+      all of you, wallowing on the carpets like swine in the mire! You all
+      belong to me&mdash;a precious property truly! I am rich; I could buy you
+      all, even the deputy snoring over there. Scum of society, give me your
+      benediction! I am the Pope.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Raphael&rsquo;s vociferations had been hitherto drowned by a thorough-bass of
+      snores, but now they became suddenly audible. Most of the sleepers started
+      up with a cry, saw the cause of the disturbance on his feet, tottering
+      uncertainly, and cursed him in concert for a drunken brawler.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Silence!&rdquo; shouted Raphael. &ldquo;Back to your kennels, you dogs! Emile, I have
+      riches, I will give you Havana cigars!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am listening,&rdquo; the poet replied. &ldquo;Death or Foedora! On with you! That
+      silky Foedora deceived you. Women are all daughters of Eve. There is
+      nothing dramatic about that rigmarole of yours.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah, but you were sleeping, slyboots.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No&mdash;&lsquo;Death or Foedora!&rsquo;&mdash;I have it!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Wake up!&rdquo; Raphael shouted, beating Emile with the piece of shagreen as if
+      he meant to draw electric fluid out of it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;<i>Tonnerre</i>!&rdquo; said Emile, springing up and flinging his arms round
+      Raphael; &ldquo;my friend, remember the sort of women you are with.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am a millionaire!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If you are not a millionaire, you are most certainly drunk.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Drunk with power. I can kill you!&mdash;Silence! I am Nero! I am
+      Nebuchadnezzar!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But, Raphael, we are in queer company, and you ought to keep quiet for
+      the sake of your own dignity.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My life has been silent too long. I mean to have my revenge now on the
+      world at large. I will not amuse myself by squandering paltry five-franc
+      pieces; I will reproduce and sum up my epoch by absorbing human lives,
+      human minds, and human souls. There are the treasures of pestilence&mdash;that
+      is no paltry kind of wealth, is it? I will wrestle with fevers&mdash;yellow,
+      blue, or green&mdash;with whole armies, with gibbets. I can possess
+      Foedora&mdash;Yet no, I do not want Foedora; she is a disease; I am dying
+      of Foedora. I want to forget Foedora.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If you keep on calling out like this, I shall take you into the
+      dining-room.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you see this skin? It is Solomon&rsquo;s will. Solomon belongs to me&mdash;a
+      little varlet of a king! Arabia is mine, Arabia Petraea to boot; and the
+      universe, and you too, if I choose. If I choose&mdash;Ah! be careful. I
+      can buy up all our journalist&rsquo;s shop; you shall be my valet. You shall be
+      my valet, you shall manage my newspaper. Valet! <i>valet</i>, that is to
+      say, free from aches and pains, because he has no brains.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      At the word, Emile carried Raphael off into the dining-room.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;All right,&rdquo; he remarked; &ldquo;yes, my friend, I am your valet. But you are
+      about to be editor-in-chief of a newspaper; so be quiet, and behave
+      properly, for my sake. Have you no regard for me?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Regard for you! You shall have Havana cigars, with this bit of shagreen:
+      always with this skin, this supreme bit of shagreen. It is a cure for
+      corns, and efficacious remedy. Do you suffer? I will remove them.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Never have I known you so senseless&mdash;&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Senseless, my friend? Not at all. This skin contracts whenever I form a
+      wish&mdash;&lsquo;tis a paradox. There is a Brahmin underneath it! The Brahmin
+      must be a droll fellow, for our desires, look you, are bound to expand&mdash;&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, yes&mdash;&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I tell you&mdash;&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, yes, very true, I am quite of your opinion&mdash;our desires expand&mdash;&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The skin, I tell you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You don&rsquo;t believe me. I know you, my friend; you are as full of lies as a
+      new-made king.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How can you expect me to follow your drunken maunderings?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I will bet you I can prove it. Let us measure it&mdash;&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Goodness! he will never get off to sleep,&rdquo; exclaimed Emile, as he watched
+      Raphael rummaging busily in the dining-room.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Thanks to the peculiar clearness with which external objects are sometimes
+      projected on an inebriated brain, in sharp contrast to its own obscure
+      imaginings, Valentin found an inkstand and a table-napkin, with the
+      quickness of a monkey, repeating all the time:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Let us measure it! Let us measure it!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;All right,&rdquo; said Emile; &ldquo;let us measure it!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The two friends spread out the table-napkin and laid the Magic Skin upon
+      it. As Emile&rsquo;s hand appeared to be steadier than Raphael&rsquo;s, he drew a line
+      with pen and ink round the talisman, while his friend said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I wished for an income of two hundred thousand livres, didn&rsquo;t I? Well,
+      when that comes, you will observe a mighty diminution of my chagrin.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes&mdash;now go to sleep. Shall I make you comfortable on that sofa? Now
+      then, are you all right?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, my nursling of the press. You shall amuse me; you shall drive the
+      flies away from me. The friend of adversity should be the friend of
+      prosperity. So I will give you some Hava&mdash;na&mdash;cig&mdash;&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Come, now, sleep. Sleep off your gold, you millionaire!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You! sleep off your paragraphs! Good-night! Say good-night to
+      Nebuchadnezzar!&mdash;Love! Wine! France!&mdash;glory and tr&mdash;treas&mdash;&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Very soon the snorings of the two friends were added to the music with
+      which the rooms resounded&mdash;an ineffectual concert! The lights went
+      out one by one, their crystal sconces cracking in the final flare. Night
+      threw dark shadows over this prolonged revelry, in which Raphael&rsquo;s
+      narrative had been a second orgy of speech, of words without ideas, of
+      ideas for which words had often been lacking.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Towards noon, next day, the fair Aquilina bestirred herself. She yawned
+      wearily. She had slept with her head upon a painted velvet footstool, and
+      her cheeks were mottled over by contact with the surface. Her movement
+      awoke Euphrasia, who suddenly sprang up with a hoarse cry; her pretty
+      face, that had been so fresh and fair in the evening, was sallow now and
+      pallid; she looked like a candidate for the hospital. The rest awoke also
+      by degrees, with portentous groanings, to feel themselves over in every
+      stiffened limb, and to experience the infinite varieties of weariness that
+      weighed upon them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A servant came in to throw back the shutters and open the windows. There
+      they all stood, brought back to consciousness by the warm rays of sunlight
+      that shone upon the sleepers&rsquo; heads. Their movements during slumber had
+      disordered the elaborately arranged hair and toilettes of the women. They
+      presented a ghastly spectacle in the bright daylight. Their hair fell
+      ungracefully about them; their eyes, lately so brilliant, were heavy and
+      dim; the expression of their faces was entirely changed. The sickly hues,
+      which daylight brings out so strongly, were frightful. An olive tint had
+      crept over the lymphatic faces, so fair and soft when in repose; the
+      dainty red lips were grown pale and dry, and bore tokens of the
+      degradation of excess. Each disowned his mistress of the night before; the
+      women looked wan and discolored, like flowers trampled under foot by a
+      passing procession.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The men who scorned them looked even more horrible. Those human faces
+      would have made you shudder. The hollow eyes with the dark circles round
+      them seemed to see nothing; they were dull with wine and stupefied with
+      heavy slumbers that had been exhausting rather than refreshing. There was
+      an indescribable ferocious and stolid bestiality about these haggard
+      faces, where bare physical appetite appeared shorn of all the poetical
+      illusion with which the intellect invests it. Even these fearless
+      champions, accustomed to measure themselves with excess, were struck with
+      horror at this awakening of vice, stripped of its disguises, at being
+      confronted thus with sin, the skeleton in rags, lifeless and hollow,
+      bereft of the sophistries of the intellect and the enchantments of luxury.
+      Artists and courtesans scrutinized in silence and with haggard glances the
+      surrounding disorder, the rooms where everything had been laid waste, at
+      the havoc wrought by heated passions.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Demoniac laughter broke out when Taillefer, catching the smothered murmurs
+      of his guests, tried to greet them with a grin. His darkly flushed,
+      perspiring countenance loomed upon this pandemonium, like the image of a
+      crime that knows no remorse (see <i>L&rsquo;Auberge rouge</i>). The picture was
+      complete. A picture of a foul life in the midst of luxury, a hideous
+      mixture of the pomp and squalor of humanity; an awakening after the frenzy
+      of Debauch has crushed and squeezed all the fruits of life in her strong
+      hands, till nothing but unsightly refuse is left to her, and lies in which
+      she believes no longer. You might have thought of Death gloating over a
+      family stricken with the plague.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The sweet scents and dazzling lights, the mirth and the excitement were
+      all no more; disgust with its nauseous sensations and searching philosophy
+      was there instead. The sun shone in like truth, the pure outer air was
+      like virtue; in contrast with the heated atmosphere, heavy with the fumes
+      of the previous night of revelry.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Accustomed as they were to their life, many of the girls thought of other
+      days and other wakings; pure and innocent days when they looked out and
+      saw the roses and honeysuckle about the casement, and the fresh
+      countryside without enraptured by the glad music of the skylark; while
+      earth lay in mists, lighted by the dawn, and in all the glittering
+      radiance of dew. Others imagined the family breakfast, the father and
+      children round the table, the innocent laughter, the unspeakable charm
+      that pervaded it all, the simple hearts and their meal as simple.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      An artist mused upon his quiet studio, on his statue in its severe beauty,
+      and the graceful model who was waiting for him. A young man recollected a
+      lawsuit on which the fortunes of a family hung, and an important
+      transaction that needed his presence. The scholar regretted his study and
+      that noble work that called for him. Emile appeared just then as smiling,
+      blooming, and fresh as the smartest assistant in a fashionable shop.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You are all as ugly as bailiffs. You won&rsquo;t be fit for anything to-day, so
+      this day is lost, and I vote for breakfast.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      At this Taillefer went out to give some orders. The women went languidly
+      up to the mirrors to set their toilettes in order. Each one shook herself.
+      The wilder sort lectured the steadier ones. The courtesans made fun of
+      those who looked unable to continue the boisterous festivity; but these
+      wan forms revived all at once, stood in groups, and talked and smiled.
+      Some servants quickly and adroitly set the furniture and everything else
+      in its place, and a magnificent breakfast was got ready.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The guests hurried into the dining-room. Everything there bore indelible
+      marks of yesterday&rsquo;s excess, it is true, but there were at any rate some
+      traces of ordinary, rational existence, such traces as may be found in a
+      sick man&rsquo;s dying struggles. And so the revelry was laid away and buried,
+      like carnival of a Shrove Tuesday, by masks wearied out with dancing,
+      drunk with drunkenness, and quite ready to be persuaded of the pleasures
+      of lassitude, lest they should be forced to admit their exhaustion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As soon as these bold spirits surrounded the capitalist&rsquo;s breakfast-table,
+      Cardot appeared. He had left the rest to make a night of it after the
+      dinner, and finished the evening after his own fashion in the retirement
+      of domestic life. Just now a sweet smile wandered over his features. He
+      seemed to have a presentiment that there would be some inheritance to
+      sample and divide, involving inventories and engrossing; an inheritance
+      rich in fees and deeds to draw up, and something as juicy as the trembling
+      fillet of beef in which their host had just plunged his knife.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, ho! we are to have breakfast in the presence of a notary,&rdquo; cried
+      Cursy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You have come here just at the right time,&rdquo; said the banker, indicating
+      the breakfast; &ldquo;you can jot down the numbers, and initial off all the
+      dishes.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There is no will to make here, but contracts of marriage there may be,
+      perhaps,&rdquo; said the scholar, who had made a satisfactory arrangement for
+      the first time in twelve months.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh! Oh!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah! Ah!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;One moment,&rdquo; cried Cardot, fairly deafened by a chorus of wretched jokes.
+      &ldquo;I came here on serious business. I am bringing six millions for one of
+      you.&rdquo; (Dead silence.) &ldquo;Monsieur,&rdquo; he went on, turning to Raphael, who at
+      the moment was unceremoniously wiping his eyes on a corner of the
+      table-napkin, &ldquo;was not your mother a Mlle. O&rsquo;Flaharty?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; said Raphael mechanically enough; &ldquo;Barbara Marie.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Have you your certificate of birth about you,&rdquo; Cardot went on, &ldquo;and Mme.
+      de Valentin&rsquo;s as well?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I believe so.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Very well then, monsieur; you are the sole heir of Major O&rsquo;Flaharty, who
+      died in August 1828 at Calcutta.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;An <i>incalcuttable</i> fortune,&rdquo; said the critic.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The Major having bequeathed several amounts to public institutions in his
+      will, the French Government sent in a claim for the remainder to the East
+      India Company,&rdquo; the notary continued. &ldquo;The estate is clear and ready to be
+      transferred at this moment. I have been looking in vain for the heirs and
+      assigns of Mlle. Barbara Marie O&rsquo;Flaharty for a fortnight past, when
+      yesterday at dinner&mdash;&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Just then Raphael suddenly staggered to his feet; he looked like a man who
+      has just received a blow. Acclamation took the form of silence, for
+      stifled envy had been the first feeling in every breast, and all eyes
+      devoured him like flames. Then a murmur rose, and grew like the voice of a
+      discontented audience, or the first mutterings of a riot, as everybody
+      made some comment on this news of great wealth brought by the notary.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This abrupt subservience of fate brought Raphael thoroughly to his senses.
+      He immediately spread out the table-napkin with which he had lately taken
+      the measure of the piece of shagreen. He heeded nothing as he laid the
+      talisman upon it, and shuddered involuntarily at the sight of a slight
+      difference between the present size of the skin and the outline traced
+      upon the linen.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why, what is the matter with him?&rdquo; Taillefer cried. &ldquo;He comes by his
+      fortune very cheaply.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;<i>Soutiens-le Chatillon</i>!&rdquo; said Bixiou to Emile. &ldquo;The joy will kill
+      him.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      A ghastly white hue overspread every line of the wan features of the
+      heir-at-law. His face was drawn, every outline grew haggard; the hollows
+      in his livid countenance grew deeper, and his eyes were fixed and staring.
+      He was facing Death.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The opulent banker, surrounded by faded women, and faces with satiety
+      written on them, the enjoyment that had reached the pitch of agony, was a
+      living illustration of his own life.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Raphael looked thrice at the talisman, which lay passively within the
+      merciless outlines on the table-napkin; he tried not to believe it, but
+      his incredulity vanished utterly before the light of an inner
+      presentiment. The whole world was his; he could have all things, but the
+      will to possess them was utterly extinct. Like a traveler in the midst of
+      the desert, with but a little water left to quench his thirst, he must
+      measure his life by the draughts he took of it. He saw what every desire
+      of his must cost him in the days of his life. He believed in the powers of
+      the Magic Skin at last, he listened to every breath he drew; he felt ill
+      already; he asked himself:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Am I not consumptive? Did not my mother die of a lung complaint?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Aha, Raphael! what fun you will have! What will you give me?&rdquo; asked
+      Aquilina.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Here&rsquo;s to the death of his uncle, Major O&rsquo;Flaharty! There is a man for
+      you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He will be a peer of France.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Pooh! what is a peer of France since July?&rdquo; said the amateur critic.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Are you going to take a box at the Bouffons?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You are going to treat us all, I hope?&rdquo; put in Bixiou.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A man of his sort will be sure to do things in style,&rdquo; said Emile.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The hurrah set up by the jovial assembly rang in Valentin&rsquo;s ears, but he
+      could not grasp the sense of a single word. Vague thoughts crossed him of
+      the Breton peasant&rsquo;s life of mechanical labor, without a wish of any kind;
+      he pictured him burdened with a family, tilling the soil, living on
+      buckwheat meal, drinking cider out of a pitcher, believing in the Virgin
+      and the King, taking the sacrament at Easter, dancing of a Sunday on the
+      green sward, and understanding never a word of the rector&rsquo;s sermon. The
+      actual scene that lay before him, the gilded furniture, the courtesans,
+      the feast itself, and the surrounding splendors, seemed to catch him by
+      the throat and made him cough.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you wish for some asparagus?&rdquo; the banker cried.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;<i>I wish for nothing</i>!&rdquo; thundered Raphael.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Bravo!&rdquo; Taillefer exclaimed; &ldquo;you understand your position; a fortune
+      confers the privilege of being impertinent. You are one of us. Gentlemen,
+      let us drink to the might of gold! M. Valentin here, six times a
+      millionaire, has become a power. He is a king, like all the rich;
+      everything is at his disposal, everything lies under his feet. From this
+      time forth the axiom that &lsquo;all Frenchmen are alike in the eyes of the
+      law,&rsquo; is for him a fib at the head of the Constitutional Charter. He is
+      not going to obey the law&mdash;the law is going to obey him. There are
+      neither scaffolds nor executioners for millionaires.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, there are,&rdquo; said Raphael; &ldquo;they are their own executioners.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Here is another victim of prejudices!&rdquo; cried the banker.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Let us drink!&rdquo; Raphael said, putting the talisman into his pocket.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What are you doing?&rdquo; said Emile, checking his movement. &ldquo;Gentlemen,&rdquo; he
+      added, addressing the company, who were rather taken aback by Raphael&rsquo;s
+      behavior, &ldquo;you must know that our friend Valentin here&mdash;what am I
+      saying?&mdash;I mean my Lord Marquis de Valentin&mdash;is in the
+      possession of a secret for obtaining wealth. His wishes are fulfilled as
+      soon as he knows them. He will make us all rich together, or he is a
+      flunkey, and devoid of all decent feeling.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, Raphael dear, I should like a set of pearl ornaments!&rdquo; Euphrasia
+      exclaimed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If he has any gratitude in him, he will give me a couple of carriages
+      with fast steppers,&rdquo; said Aquilina.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Wish for a hundred thousand a year for me!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Indian shawls!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Pay my debts!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Send an apoplexy to my uncle, the old stick!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ten thousand a year in the funds, and I&rsquo;ll cry quits with you, Raphael!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Deeds of gift and no mistake,&rdquo; was the notary&rsquo;s comment.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He ought, at least, to rid me of the gout!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Lower the funds!&rdquo; shouted the banker.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      These phrases flew about like the last discharge of rockets at the end of
+      a display of fireworks; and were uttered, perhaps, more in earnest than in
+      jest.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My good friend,&rdquo; Emile said solemnly, &ldquo;I shall be quite satisfied with an
+      income of two hundred thousand livres. Please to set about it at once.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you not know the cost, Emile?&rdquo; asked Raphael.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A nice excuse!&rdquo; the poet cried; &ldquo;ought we not to sacrifice ourselves for
+      our friends?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have almost a mind to wish that you all were dead,&rdquo; Valentin made
+      answer, with a dark, inscrutable look at his boon companions.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Dying people are frightfully cruel,&rdquo; said Emile, laughing. &ldquo;You are rich
+      now,&rdquo; he went on gravely; &ldquo;very well, I will give you two months at most
+      before you grow vilely selfish. You are so dense already that you cannot
+      understand a joke. You have only to go a little further to believe in your
+      Magic Skin.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Raphael kept silent, fearing the banter of the company; but he drank
+      immoderately, trying to drown in intoxication the recollection of his
+      fatal power.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0004" id="link2H_4_0004">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      III. THE AGONY
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      In the early days of December an old man of some seventy years of age
+      pursued his way along the Rue de Varenne, in spite of the falling rain. He
+      peered up at the door of each house, trying to discover the address of the
+      Marquis Raphael de Valentin, in a simple, childlike fashion, and with the
+      abstracted look peculiar to philosophers. His face plainly showed traces
+      of a struggle between a heavy mortification and an authoritative nature;
+      his long, gray hair hung in disorder about a face like a piece of
+      parchment shriveling in the fire. If a painter had come upon this curious
+      character, he would, no doubt, have transferred him to his sketchbook on
+      his return, a thin, bony figure, clad in black, and have inscribed beneath
+      it: &ldquo;Classical poet in search of a rhyme.&rdquo; When he had identified the
+      number that had been given to him, this reincarnation of Rollin knocked
+      meekly at the door of a splendid mansion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Is Monsieur Raphael in?&rdquo; the worthy man inquired of the Swiss in livery.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My Lord the Marquis sees nobody,&rdquo; said the servant, swallowing a huge
+      morsel that he had just dipped in a large bowl of coffee.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There is his carriage,&rdquo; said the elderly stranger, pointing to a fine
+      equipage that stood under the wooden canopy that sheltered the steps
+      before the house, in place of a striped linen awning. &ldquo;He is going out; I
+      will wait for him.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then you might wait here till to-morrow morning, old boy,&rdquo; said the
+      Swiss. &ldquo;A carriage is always waiting for monsieur. Please to go away. If I
+      were to let any stranger come into the house without orders, I should lose
+      an income of six hundred francs.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      A tall old man, in a costume not unlike that of a subordinate in the Civil
+      Service, came out of the vestibule and hurried part of the way down the
+      steps, while he made a survey of the astonished elderly applicant for
+      admission.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What is more, here is M. Jonathan,&rdquo; the Swiss remarked; &ldquo;speak to him.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Fellow-feeling of some kind, or curiosity, brought the two old men
+      together in a central space in the great entrance-court. A few blades of
+      grass were growing in the crevices of the pavement; a terrible silence
+      reigned in that great house. The sight of Jonathan&rsquo;s face would have made
+      you long to understand the mystery that brooded over it, and that was
+      announced by the smallest trifles about the melancholy place.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When Raphael inherited his uncle&rsquo;s vast estate, his first care had been to
+      seek out the old and devoted servitor of whose affection he knew that he
+      was secure. Jonathan had wept tears of joy at the sight of his young
+      master, of whom he thought he had taken a final farewell; and when the
+      marquis exalted him to the high office of steward, his happiness could not
+      be surpassed. So old Jonathan became an intermediary power between Raphael
+      and the world at large. He was the absolute disposer of his master&rsquo;s
+      fortune, the blind instrument of an unknown will, and a sixth sense, as it
+      were, by which the emotions of life were communicated to Raphael.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I should like to speak with M. Raphael, sir,&rdquo; said the elderly person to
+      Jonathan, as he climbed up the steps some way, into a shelter from the
+      rain.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;To speak with my Lord the Marquis?&rdquo; the steward cried. &ldquo;He scarcely
+      speaks even to me, his foster-father!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But I am likewise his foster-father,&rdquo; said the old man. &ldquo;If your wife was
+      his foster-mother, I fed him myself with the milk of the Muses. He is my
+      nursling, my child, carus alumnus! I formed his mind, cultivated his
+      understanding, developed his genius, and, I venture to say it, to my own
+      honor and glory. Is he not one of the most remarkable men of our epoch? He
+      was one of my pupils in two lower forms, and in rhetoric. I am his
+      professor.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah, sir, then you are M. Porriquet?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Exactly, sir, but&mdash;&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Hush! hush!&rdquo; Jonathan called to two underlings, whose voices broke the
+      monastic silence that shrouded the house.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But is the Marquis ill, sir?&rdquo; the professor continued.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My dear sir,&rdquo; Jonathan replied, &ldquo;Heaven only knows what is the matter
+      with my master. You see, there are not a couple of houses like ours
+      anywhere in Paris. Do you understand? Not two houses. Faith, that there
+      are not. My Lord the Marquis had this hotel purchased for him; it formerly
+      belonged to a duke and a peer of France; then he spent three hundred
+      thousand francs over furnishing it. That&rsquo;s a good deal, you know, three
+      hundred thousand francs! But every room in the house is a perfect wonder.
+      &lsquo;Good,&rsquo; said I to myself when I saw this magnificence; &lsquo;it is just like it
+      used to be in the time of my lord, his late grandfather; and the young
+      marquis is going to entertain all Paris and the Court!&rsquo; Nothing of the
+      kind! My lord refused to see any one whatever. &lsquo;Tis a funny life that he
+      leads, M. Porriquet, you understand. An <i>inconciliable</i> life. He
+      rises every day at the same time. I am the only person, you see, that may
+      enter his room. I open all the shutters at seven o&rsquo;clock, summer or
+      winter. It is all arranged very oddly. As I come in I say to him:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;You must get up and dress, my Lord Marquis.&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then he rises and dresses himself. I have to give him his dressing-gown,
+      and it is always after the same pattern, and of the same material. I am
+      obliged to replace it when it can be used no longer, simply to save him
+      the trouble of asking for a new one. A queer fancy! As a matter of fact,
+      he has a thousand francs to spend every day, and he does as he pleases,
+      the dear child. And besides, I am so fond of him that if he gave me a box
+      on the ear on one side, I should hold out the other to him! The most
+      difficult things he will tell me to do, and yet I do them, you know! He
+      gives me a lot of trifles to attend to, that I am well set to work! He
+      reads the newspapers, doesn&rsquo;t he? Well, my instructions are to put them
+      always in the same place, on the same table. I always go at the same hour
+      and shave him myself; and don&rsquo;t I tremble! The cook would forfeit the
+      annuity of a thousand crowns that he is to come into after my lord&rsquo;s
+      death, if breakfast is not served <i>inconciliably</i> at ten o&rsquo;clock
+      precisely. The menus are drawn up for the whole year round, day after day.
+      My Lord the Marquis has not a thing to wish for. He has strawberries
+      whenever there are any, and he has the earliest mackerel to be had in
+      Paris. The programme is printed every morning. He knows his dinner by
+      rote. In the next place, he dresses himself at the same hour, in the same
+      clothes, the same linen, that I always put on the same chair, you
+      understand? I have to see that he always has the same cloth; and if it
+      should happen that his coat came to grief (a mere supposition), I should
+      have to replace it by another without saying a word about it to him. If it
+      is fine, I go in and say to my master:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;You ought to go out, sir.&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He says Yes, or No. If he has a notion that he will go out, he doesn&rsquo;t
+      wait for his horses; they are always ready harnessed; the coachman stops
+      there <i>inconciliably</i>, whip in hand, just as you see him out there.
+      In the evening, after dinner, my master goes one day to the Opera, the
+      other to the Ital&mdash;&mdash;no, he hasn&rsquo;t yet gone to the Italiens,
+      though, for I could not find a box for him until yesterday. Then he comes
+      in at eleven o&rsquo;clock precisely, to go to bed. At any time in the day when
+      he has nothing to do, he reads&mdash;he is always reading, you see&mdash;it
+      is a notion he has. My instructions are to read the <i>Journal de la
+      Librairie</i> before he sees it, and to buy new books, so that he finds
+      them on his chimney-piece on the very day that they are published. I have
+      orders to go into his room every hour or so, to look after the fire and
+      everything else, and to see that he wants nothing. He gave me a little
+      book, sir, to learn off by heart, with all my duties written in it&mdash;a
+      regular catechism! In summer I have to keep a cool and even temperature
+      with blocks of ice and at all seasons to put fresh flowers all about. He
+      is rich! He has a thousand francs to spend every day; he can indulge his
+      fancies! And he hadn&rsquo;t even necessaries for so long, poor child! He
+      doesn&rsquo;t annoy anybody; he is as good as gold; he never opens his mouth,
+      for instance; the house and garden are absolutely silent. In short, my
+      master has not a single wish left; everything comes in the twinkling of an
+      eye, if he raises his hand, and <i>instanter</i>. Quite right, too. If
+      servants are not looked after, everything falls into confusion. You would
+      never believe the lengths he goes about things. His rooms are all&mdash;what
+      do you call it?&mdash;er&mdash;er&mdash;<i>en suite</i>. Very well; just
+      suppose, now, that he opens his room door or the door of his study;
+      presto! all the other doors fly open of themselves by a patent
+      contrivance; and then he can go from one end of the house to the other and
+      not find a single door shut; which is all very nice and pleasant and
+      convenient for us great folk! But, on my word, it cost us a lot of money!
+      And, after all, M. Porriquet, he said to me at last:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;Jonathan, you will look after me as if I were a baby in long clothes,&rsquo; 
+      Yes, sir, &lsquo;long clothes!&rsquo; those were his very words. &lsquo;You will think of
+      all my requirements for me.&rsquo; I am the master, so to speak, and he is the
+      servant, you understand? The reason of it? Ah, my word, that is just what
+      nobody on earth knows but himself and God Almighty. It is quite <i>inconciliable</i>!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He is writing a poem!&rdquo; exclaimed the old professor.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You think he is writing a poem, sir? It&rsquo;s a very absorbing affair, then!
+      But, you know, I don&rsquo;t think he is. He often tells me that he wants to
+      live like a <i>vergetation</i>; he wants to <i>vergetate</i>. Only
+      yesterday he was looking at a tulip while he was dressing, and he said to
+      me:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;There is my own life&mdash;I am <i>vergetating</i>, my poor Jonathan.&rsquo; 
+      Now, some of them insist that that is monomania. It is <i>inconciliable</i>!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;All this makes it very clear to me, Jonathan,&rdquo; the professor answered,
+      with a magisterial solemnity that greatly impressed the old servant, &ldquo;that
+      your master is absorbed in a great work. He is deep in vast meditations,
+      and has no wish to be distracted by the petty preoccupations of ordinary
+      life. A man of genius forgets everything among his intellectual labors.
+      One day the famous Newton&mdash;&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Newton?&mdash;oh, ah! I don&rsquo;t know the name,&rdquo; said Jonathan.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Newton, a great geometrician,&rdquo; Porriquet went on, &ldquo;once sat for
+      twenty-four hours leaning his elbow on the table; when he emerged from his
+      musings, he was a day out in his reckoning, just as if he had been
+      sleeping. I will go to see him, dear lad; I may perhaps be of some use to
+      him.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not for a moment!&rdquo; Jonathan cried. &ldquo;Not though you were King of France&mdash;I
+      mean the real old one. You could not go in unless you forced the doors
+      open and walked over my body. But I will go and tell him you are here, M.
+      Porriquet, and I will put it to him like this, &lsquo;Ought he to come up?&rsquo; And
+      he will say Yes or No. I never say, &lsquo;Do you wish?&rsquo; or &lsquo;Will you?&rsquo; or &lsquo;Do
+      you want?&rsquo; Those words are scratched out of the dictionary. He let out at
+      me once with a &lsquo;Do you want to kill me?&rsquo; he was so very angry.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Jonathan left the old schoolmaster in the vestibule, signing to him to
+      come no further, and soon returned with a favorable answer. He led the old
+      gentleman through one magnificent room after another, where every door
+      stood open. At last Porriquet beheld his pupil at some distance seated
+      beside the fire.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Raphael was reading the paper. He sat in an armchair wrapped in a
+      dressing-gown with some large pattern on it. The intense melancholy that
+      preyed upon him could be discerned in his languid posture and feeble
+      frame; it was depicted on his brow and white face; he looked like some
+      plant bleached by darkness. There was a kind of effeminate grace about
+      him; the fancies peculiar to wealthy invalids were also noticeable. His
+      hands were soft and white, like a pretty woman&rsquo;s; he wore his fair hair,
+      now grown scanty, curled about his temples with a refinement of vanity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Greek cap that he wore was pulled to one side by the weight of its
+      tassel; too heavy for the light material of which it was made. He had let
+      the paper-knife fall at his feet, a malachite blade with gold mounting,
+      which he had used to cut the leaves of the book. The amber mouthpiece of a
+      magnificent Indian hookah lay on his knee; the enameled coils lay like a
+      serpent in the room, but he had forgotten to draw out its fresh perfume.
+      And yet there was a complete contradiction between the general feebleness
+      of his young frame and the blue eyes, where all his vitality seemed to
+      dwell; an extraordinary intelligence seemed to look out from them and to
+      grasp everything at once.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That expression was painful to see. Some would have read despair in it,
+      and others some inner conflict terrible as remorse. It was the inscrutable
+      glance of helplessness that must perforce consign its desires to the
+      depths of its own heart; or of a miser enjoying in imagination all the
+      pleasures that his money could procure for him, while he declines to
+      lessen his hoard; the look of a bound Prometheus, of the fallen Napoleon
+      of 1815, when he learned at the Elysee the strategical blunder that his
+      enemies had made, and asked for twenty-four hours of command in vain; or
+      rather it was the same look that Raphael had turned upon the Seine, or
+      upon his last piece of gold at the gaming-table only a few months ago.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was submitting his intelligence and his will to the homely common-sense
+      of an old peasant whom fifty years of domestic service had scarcely
+      civilized. He had given up all the rights of life in order to live; he had
+      despoiled his soul of all the romance that lies in a wish; and almost
+      rejoiced at thus becoming a sort of automaton. The better to struggle with
+      the cruel power that he had challenged, he had followed Origen&rsquo;s example,
+      and had maimed and chastened his imagination.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The day after he had seen the diminution of the Magic Skin, at his sudden
+      accession of wealth, he happened to be at his notary&rsquo;s house. A well-known
+      physician had told them quite seriously, at dessert, how a Swiss attacked
+      by consumption had cured himself. The man had never spoken a word for ten
+      years, and had compelled himself to draw six breaths only, every minute,
+      in the close atmosphere of a cow-house, adhering all the time to a regimen
+      of exceedingly light diet. &ldquo;I will be like that man,&rdquo; thought Raphael to
+      himself. He wanted life at any price, and so he led the life of a machine
+      in the midst of all the luxury around him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The old professor confronted this youthful corpse and shuddered; there
+      seemed something unnatural about the meagre, enfeebled frame. In the
+      Marquis, with his eager eyes and careworn forehead, he could hardly
+      recognize the fresh-cheeked and rosy pupil with the active limbs, whom he
+      remembered. If the worthy classicist, sage critic, and general preserver
+      of the traditions of correct taste had read Byron, he would have thought
+      that he had come on a Manfred when he looked to find Childe Harold.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Good day, pere Porriquet,&rdquo; said Raphael, pressing the old schoolmaster&rsquo;s
+      frozen fingers in his own damp ones; &ldquo;how are you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am very well,&rdquo; replied the other, alarmed by the touch of that feverish
+      hand. &ldquo;But how about you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, I am hoping to keep myself in health.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You are engaged in some great work, no doubt?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No,&rdquo; Raphael answered. &ldquo;Exegi monumemtum, pere Porriquet; I have
+      contributed an important page to science, and have now bidden her farewell
+      for ever. I scarcely know where my manuscript is.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The style is no doubt correct?&rdquo; queried the schoolmaster. &ldquo;You, I hope,
+      would never have adopted the barbarous language of the new school, which
+      fancies it has worked such wonders by discovering Ronsard!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My work treats of physiology pure and simple.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, then, there is no more to be said,&rdquo; the schoolmaster answered.
+      &ldquo;Grammar must yield to the exigencies of discovery. Nevertheless, young
+      man, a lucid and harmonious style&mdash;the diction of Massillon, of M. de
+      Buffon, of the great Racine&mdash;a classical style, in short, can never
+      spoil anything&mdash;&mdash;But, my friend,&rdquo; the schoolmaster interrupted
+      himself, &ldquo;I was forgetting the object of my visit, which concerns my own
+      interests.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Too late Raphael recalled to mind the verbose eloquence and elegant
+      circumlocutions which in a long professorial career had grown habitual to
+      his old tutor, and almost regretted that he had admitted him; but just as
+      he was about to wish to see him safely outside, he promptly suppressed his
+      secret desire with a stealthy glance at the Magic Skin. It hung there
+      before him, fastened down upon some white material, surrounded by a red
+      line accurately traced about its prophetic outlines. Since that fatal
+      carouse, Raphael had stifled every least whim, and had lived so as not to
+      cause the slightest movement in the terrible talisman. The Magic Skin was
+      like a tiger with which he must live without exciting its ferocity. He
+      bore patiently, therefore, with the old schoolmaster&rsquo;s prolixity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Porriquet spent an hour in telling him about the persecutions directed
+      against him ever since the Revolution of July. The worthy man, having a
+      liking for strong governments, had expressed the patriotic wish that
+      grocers should be left to their counters, statesmen to the management of
+      public business, advocates to the Palais de Justice, and peers of France
+      to the Luxembourg; but one of the popularity-seeking ministers of the
+      Citizen King had ousted him from his chair, on an accusation of Carlism,
+      and the old man now found himself without pension or post, and with no
+      bread to eat. As he played the part of guardian angel to a poor nephew,
+      for whose schooling at Saint Sulpice he was paying, he came less on his
+      own account than for his adopted child&rsquo;s sake, to entreat his former
+      pupil&rsquo;s interest with the new minister. He did not ask to be reinstated,
+      but only for a position at the head of some provincial school.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      QRaphael had fallen a victim to unconquerable drowsiness by the time that
+      the worthy man&rsquo;s monotonous voice ceased to sound in his ears. Civility
+      had compelled him to look at the pale and unmoving eyes of the deliberate
+      and tedious old narrator, till he himself had reached stupefaction,
+      magnetized in an inexplicable way by the power of inertia.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, my dear pere Porriquet,&rdquo; he said, not very certain what the
+      question was to which he was replying, &ldquo;but I can do nothing for you,
+      nothing at all. <i>I wish very heartily</i> that you may succeed&mdash;&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      All at once, without seeing the change wrought on the old man&rsquo;s sallow and
+      wrinkled brow by these conventional phrases, full of indifference and
+      selfishness, Raphael sprang to his feet like a startled roebuck. He saw a
+      thin white line between the black piece of hide and the red tracing about
+      it, and gave a cry so fearful that the poor professor was frightened by
+      it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Old fool! Go!&rdquo; he cried. &ldquo;You will be appointed as headmaster! Couldn&rsquo;t
+      you have asked me for an annuity of a thousand crowns rather than a
+      murderous wish? Your visit would have cost me nothing. There are a hundred
+      thousand situations to be had in France, but I have only one life. A man&rsquo;s
+      life is worth more than all the situations in the world.&mdash;Jonathan!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Jonathan appeared.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This is your doing, double-distilled idiot! What made you suggest that I
+      should see M. Porriquet?&rdquo; and he pointed to the old man, who was petrified
+      with fright. &ldquo;Did I put myself in your hands for you to tear me in pieces?
+      You have just shortened my life by ten years! Another blunder of this
+      kind, and you will lay me where I have laid my father. Would I not far
+      rather have possessed the beautiful Foedora? And I have obliged that old
+      hulk instead&mdash;that rag of humanity! I had money enough for him. And,
+      moreover, if all the Porriquets in the world were dying of hunger, what is
+      that to me?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Raphael&rsquo;s face was white with anger; a slight froth marked his trembling
+      lips; there was a savage gleam in his eyes. The two elders shook with
+      terror in his presence like two children at the sight of a snake. The
+      young man fell back in his armchair, a kind of reaction took place in him,
+      the tears flowed fast from his angry eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, my life!&rdquo; he cried, &ldquo;that fair life of mine. Never to know a kindly
+      thought again, to love no more; nothing is left to me!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He turned to the professor and went on in a gentle voice&mdash;&ldquo;The harm
+      is done, my old friend. Your services have been well repaid; and my
+      misfortune has at any rate contributed to the welfare of a good and worthy
+      man.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      His tones betrayed so much feeling that the almost unintelligible words
+      drew tears from the two old men, such tears as are shed over some pathetic
+      song in a foreign tongue.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He is epileptic,&rdquo; muttered Porriquet.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I understand your kind intentions, my friend,&rdquo; Raphael answered gently.
+      &ldquo;You would make excuses for me. Ill-health cannot be helped, but
+      ingratitude is a grievous fault. Leave me now,&rdquo; he added. &ldquo;To-morrow or
+      the next day, or possibly to-night, you will receive your appointment;
+      Resistance has triumphed over Motion. Farewell.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The old schoolmaster went away, full of keen apprehension as to Valentin&rsquo;s
+      sanity. A thrill of horror ran through him; there had been something
+      supernatural, he thought, in the scene he had passed through. He could
+      hardly believe his own impressions, and questioned them like one awakened
+      from a painful dream.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Now attend to me, Jonathan,&rdquo; said the young man to his old servant. &ldquo;Try
+      to understand the charge confided to you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, my Lord Marquis.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am as a man outlawed from humanity.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, my Lord Marquis.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;All the pleasures of life disport themselves round my bed of death, and
+      dance about me like fair women; but if I beckon to them, I must die. Death
+      always confronts me. You must be the barrier between the world and me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, my Lord Marquis,&rdquo; said the old servant, wiping the drops of
+      perspiration from his wrinkled forehead. &ldquo;But if you don&rsquo;t wish to see
+      pretty women, how will you manage at the Italiens this evening? An English
+      family is returning to London, and I have taken their box for the rest of
+      the season, and it is in a splendid position&mdash;superb; in the first
+      row.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Raphael, deep in his own deep musings, paid no attention to him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you see that splendid equipage, a brougham painted a dark brown color,
+      but with the arms of an ancient and noble family shining from the panels?
+      As it rolls past, all the shop-girls admire it, and look longingly at the
+      yellow satin lining, the rugs from la Savonnerie, the daintiness and
+      freshness of every detail, the silken cushions and tightly-fitting glass
+      windows. Two liveried footmen are mounted behind this aristocratic
+      carriage; and within, a head lies back among the silken cushions, the
+      feverish face and hollow eyes of Raphael, melancholy and sad. Emblem of
+      the doom of wealth! He flies across Paris like a rocket, and reaches the
+      peristyle of the Theatre Favart. The passers-by make way for him; the two
+      footmen help him to alight, an envious crowd looking on the while.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What has that fellow done to be so rich?&rdquo; asks a poor law-student, who
+      cannot listen to the magical music of Rossini for lack of a five-franc
+      piece.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Raphael walked slowly along the gangway; he expected no enjoyment from
+      these pleasures he had once coveted so eagerly. In the interval before the
+      second act of Semiramide he walked up and down in the lobby, and along the
+      corridors, leaving his box, which he had not yet entered, to look after
+      itself. The instinct of property was dead within him already. Like all
+      invalids, he thought of nothing but his own sufferings. He was leaning
+      against the chimney-piece in the greenroom. A group had gathered about it
+      of dandies, young and old, of ministers, of peers without peerages, and
+      peerages without peers, for so the Revolution of July had ordered matters.
+      Among a host of adventurers and journalists, in fact, Raphael beheld a
+      strange, unearthly figure a few paces away among the crowd. He went
+      towards this grotesque object to see it better, half-closing his eyes with
+      exceeding superciliousness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What a wonderful bit of painting!&rdquo; he said to himself. The stranger&rsquo;s
+      hair and eyebrows and a Mazarin tuft on the chin had been dyed black, but
+      the result was a spurious, glossy, purple tint that varied its hues
+      according to the light; the hair had been too white, no doubt, to take the
+      preparation. Anxiety and cunning were depicted in the narrow,
+      insignificant face, with its wrinkles incrusted by thick layers of red and
+      white paint. This red enamel, lacking on some portions of his face,
+      strongly brought out his natural feebleness and livid hues. It was
+      impossible not to smile at this visage with the protuberant forehead and
+      pointed chin, a face not unlike those grotesque wooden figures that German
+      herdsmen carve in their spare moments.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      An attentive observer looking from Raphael to this elderly Adonis would
+      have remarked a young man&rsquo;s eyes set in a mask of age, in the case of the
+      Marquis, and in the other case the dim eyes of age peering forth from
+      behind a mask of youth. Valentin tried to recollect when and where he had
+      seen this little old man before. He was thin, fastidiously cravatted,
+      booted and spurred like one-and-twenty; he crossed his arms and clinked
+      his spurs as if he possessed all the wanton energy of youth. He seemed to
+      move about without constraint or difficulty. He had carefully buttoned up
+      his fashionable coat, which disguised his powerful, elderly frame, and
+      gave him the appearance of an antiquated coxcomb who still follows the
+      fashions.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For Raphael this animated puppet possessed all the interest of an
+      apparition. He gazed at it as if it had been some smoke-begrimed
+      Rembrandt, recently restored and newly framed. This idea found him a clue
+      to the truth among his confused recollections; he recognized the dealer in
+      antiquities, the man to whom he owed his calamities!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A noiseless laugh broke just then from the fantastical personage,
+      straightening the line of his lips that stretched across a row of
+      artificial teeth. That laugh brought out, for Raphael&rsquo;s heated fancy, a
+      strong resemblance between the man before him and the type of head that
+      painters have assigned to Goethe&rsquo;s Mephistopheles. A crowd of
+      superstitious thoughts entered Raphael&rsquo;s sceptical mind; he was convinced
+      of the powers of the devil and of all the sorcerer&rsquo;s enchantments embodied
+      in mediaeval tradition, and since worked up by poets. Shrinking in horror
+      from the destiny of Faust, he prayed for the protection of Heaven with all
+      the ardent faith of a dying man in God and the Virgin. A clear, bright
+      radiance seemed to give him a glimpse of the heaven of Michael Angelo or
+      of Raphael of Urbino: a venerable white-bearded man, a beautiful woman
+      seated in an aureole above the clouds and winged cherub heads. Now he had
+      grasped and received the meaning of those imaginative, almost human
+      creations; they seemed to explain what had happened to him, to leave him
+      yet one hope.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But when the greenroom of the Italiens returned upon his sight he beheld,
+      not the Virgin, but a very handsome young person. The execrable Euphrasia,
+      in all the splendor of her toilette, with its orient pearls, had come
+      thither, impatient for her ardent, elderly admirer. She was insolently
+      exhibiting herself with her defiant face and glittering eyes to an envious
+      crowd of stockbrokers, a visible testimony to the inexhaustible wealth
+      that the old dealer permitted her to squander.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Raphael recollected the mocking wish with which he had accepted the old
+      man&rsquo;s luckless gift, and tasted all the sweets of revenge when he beheld
+      the spectacle of sublime wisdom fallen to such a depth as this, wisdom for
+      which such humiliation had seemed a thing impossible. The centenarian
+      greeted Euphrasia with a ghastly smile, receiving her honeyed words in
+      reply. He offered her his emaciated arm, and went twice or thrice round
+      the greenroom with her; the envious glances and compliments with which the
+      crowd received his mistress delighted him; he did not see the scornful
+      smiles, nor hear the caustic comments to which he gave rise.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;In what cemetery did this young ghoul unearth that corpse of hers?&rdquo; asked
+      a dandy of the Romantic faction.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Euphrasia began to smile. The speaker was a slender, fair-haired youth,
+      with bright blue eyes, and a moustache. His short dress coat, hat tilted
+      over one ear, and sharp tongue, all denoted the species.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How many old men,&rdquo; said Raphael to himself, &ldquo;bring an upright, virtuous,
+      and hard-working life to a close in folly! His feet are cold already, and
+      he is making love.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, sir,&rdquo; exclaimed Valentin, stopping the merchant&rsquo;s progress, while
+      he stared hard at Euphrasia, &ldquo;have you quite forgotten the stringent
+      maxims of your philosophy?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah, I am as happy now as a young man,&rdquo; said the other, in a cracked
+      voice. &ldquo;I used to look at existence from a wrong standpoint. One hour of
+      love has a whole life in it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The playgoers heard the bell ring, and left the greenroom to take their
+      places again. Raphael and the old merchant separated. As he entered his
+      box, the Marquis saw Foedora sitting exactly opposite to him on the other
+      side of the theatre. The Countess had probably only just come, for she was
+      just flinging off her scarf to leave her throat uncovered, and was
+      occupied with going through all the indescribable manoeuvres of a coquette
+      arranging herself. All eyes were turned upon her. A young peer of France
+      had come with her; she asked him for the lorgnette she had given him to
+      carry. Raphael knew the despotism to which his successor had resigned
+      himself, in her gestures, and in the way she treated her companion. He was
+      also under the spell no doubt, another dupe beating with all the might of
+      a real affection against the woman&rsquo;s cold calculations, enduring all the
+      tortures from which Valentin had luckily freed himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Foedora&rsquo;s face lighted up with indescribable joy. After directing her
+      lorgnette upon every box in turn, to make a rapid survey of all the
+      dresses, she was conscious that by her toilette and her beauty she had
+      eclipsed the loveliest and best-dressed women in Paris. She laughed to
+      show her white teeth; her head with its wreath of flowers was never still,
+      in her quest of admiration. Her glances went from one box to another, as
+      she diverted herself with the awkward way in which a Russian princess wore
+      her bonnet, or over the utter failure of a bonnet with which a banker&rsquo;s
+      daughter had disfigured herself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      All at once she met Raphael&rsquo;s steady gaze and turned pale, aghast at the
+      intolerable contempt in her rejected lover&rsquo;s eyes. Not one of her exiled
+      suitors had failed to own her power over them; Valentin alone was proof
+      against her attractions. A power that can be defied with impunity is
+      drawing to its end. This axiom is as deeply engraved on the heart of woman
+      as in the minds of kings. In Raphael, therefore, Foedora saw the deathblow
+      of her influence and her ability to please. An epigram of his, made at the
+      Opera the day before, was already known in the salons of Paris. The biting
+      edge of that terrible speech had already given the Countess an incurable
+      wound. We know how to cauterize a wound, but we know of no treatment as
+      yet for the stab of a phrase. As every other woman in the house looked by
+      turns at her and at the Marquis, Foedora would have consigned them all to
+      the oubliettes of some Bastille; for in spite of her capacity for
+      dissimulation, her discomfiture was discerned by her rivals. Her unfailing
+      consolation had slipped from her at last. The delicious thought, &ldquo;I am the
+      most beautiful,&rdquo; the thought that at all times had soothed every
+      mortification, had turned into a lie.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At the opening of the second act a woman took up her position not very far
+      from Raphael, in a box that had been empty hitherto. A murmur of
+      admiration went up from the whole house. In that sea of human faces there
+      was a movement of every living wave; all eyes were turned upon the
+      stranger lady. The applause of young and old was so prolonged, that when
+      the orchestra began, the musicians turned to the audience to request
+      silence, and then they themselves joined in the plaudits and swelled the
+      confusion. Excited talk began in every box, every woman equipped herself
+      with an opera glass, elderly men grew young again, and polished the
+      glasses of their lorgnettes with their gloves. The enthusiasm subsided by
+      degrees, the stage echoed with the voices of the singers, and order
+      reigned as before. The aristocratic section, ashamed of having yielded to
+      a spontaneous feeling, again assumed their wonted politely frigid manner.
+      The well-to-do dislike to be astonished at anything; at the first sight of
+      a beautiful thing it becomes their duty to discover the defect in it which
+      absolves them from admiring it,&mdash;the feeling of all ordinary minds.
+      Yet a few still remained motionless and heedless of the music, artlessly
+      absorbed in the delight of watching Raphael&rsquo;s neighbor.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Valentin noticed Taillefer&rsquo;s mean, obnoxious countenance by Aquilina&rsquo;s
+      side in a lower box, and received an approving smirk from him. Then he saw
+      Emile, who seemed to say from where he stood in the orchestra, &ldquo;Just look
+      at that lovely creature there, close beside you!&rdquo; Lastly, he saw
+      Rastignac, with Mme. de Nucingen and her daughter, twisting his gloves
+      like a man in despair, because he was tethered to his place, and could not
+      leave it to go any nearer to the unknown fair divinity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Raphael&rsquo;s life depended upon a covenant that he had made with himself, and
+      had hitherto kept sacred. He would give no special heed to any woman
+      whatever; and the better to guard against temptation, he used a cunningly
+      contrived opera-glass which destroyed the harmony of the fairest features
+      by hideous distortions. He had not recovered from the terror that had
+      seized on him in the morning when, at a mere expression of civility, the
+      Magic Skin had contracted so abruptly. So Raphael was determined not to
+      turn his face in the direction of his neighbor. He sat imperturbable as a
+      duchess with his back against the corner of the box, thereby shutting out
+      half of his neighbor&rsquo;s view of the stage, appearing to disregard her, and
+      even to be unaware that a pretty woman sat there just behind him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His neighbor copied Valentin&rsquo;s position exactly; she leaned her elbow on
+      the edge of her box and turned her face in three-quarter profile upon the
+      singers on the stage, as if she were sitting to a painter. These two
+      people looked like two estranged lovers still sulking, still turning their
+      backs upon each other, who will go into each other&rsquo;s arms at the first
+      tender word.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now and again his neighbor&rsquo;s ostrich feathers or her hair came in contact
+      with Raphael&rsquo;s head, giving him a pleasurable thrill, against which he
+      sternly fought. In a little while he felt the touch of the soft frill of
+      lace that went round her dress; he could hear the gracious sounds of the
+      folds of her dress itself, light rustling noises full of enchantment; he
+      could even feel her movements as she breathed; with the gentle stir thus
+      imparted to her form and to her draperies, it seemed to Raphael that all
+      her being was suddenly communicated to him in an electric spark. The lace
+      and tulle that caressed him imparted the delicious warmth of her bare,
+      white shoulders. By a freak in the ordering of things, these two
+      creatures, kept apart by social conventions, with the abysses of death
+      between them, breathed together and perhaps thought of one another.
+      Finally, the subtle perfume of aloes completed the work of Raphael&rsquo;s
+      intoxication. Opposition heated his imagination, and his fancy, become the
+      wilder for the limits imposed upon it, sketched a woman for him in
+      outlines of fire. He turned abruptly, the stranger made a similar
+      movement, startled no doubt at being brought in contact with a stranger;
+      and they remained face to face, each with the same thought.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Pauline!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;M. Raphael!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Each surveyed the other, both of them petrified with astonishment. Raphael
+      noticed Pauline&rsquo;s daintily simple costume. A woman&rsquo;s experienced eyes
+      would have discerned and admired the outlines beneath the modest gauze
+      folds of her bodice and the lily whiteness of her throat. And then her
+      more than mortal clearness of soul, her maidenly modesty, her graceful
+      bearing, all were unchanged. Her sleeve was quivering with agitation, for
+      the beating of her heart was shaking her whole frame.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Come to the Hotel de Saint-Quentin to-morrow for your papers,&rdquo; she said.
+      &ldquo;I will be there at noon. Be punctual.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She rose hastily, and disappeared. Raphael thought of following Pauline,
+      feared to compromise her, and stayed. He looked at Foedora; she seemed to
+      him positively ugly. Unable to understand a single phrase of the music,
+      and feeling stifled in the theatre, he went out, and returned home with a
+      full heart.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Jonathan,&rdquo; he said to the old servant, as soon as he lay in bed, &ldquo;give me
+      half a drop of laudanum on a piece of sugar, and don&rsquo;t wake me to-morrow
+      till twenty minutes to twelve.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I want Pauline to love me!&rdquo; he cried next morning, looking at the
+      talisman the while in unspeakable anguish.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The skin did not move in the least; it seemed to have lost its power to
+      shrink; doubtless it could not fulfil a wish fulfilled already.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah!&rdquo; exclaimed Raphael, feeling as if a mantle of lead had fallen away,
+      which he had worn ever since the day when the talisman had been given to
+      him; &ldquo;so you are playing me false, you are not obeying me, the pact is
+      broken! I am free; I shall live. Then was it all a wretched joke?&rdquo; But he
+      did not dare to believe in his own thought as he uttered it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He dressed himself as simply as had formerly been his wont, and set out on
+      foot for his old lodging, trying to go back in fancy to the happy days
+      when he abandoned himself without peril to vehement desires, the days when
+      he had not yet condemned all human enjoyment. As he walked he beheld
+      Pauline&mdash;not the Pauline of the Hotel Saint-Quentin, but the Pauline
+      of last evening. Here was the accomplished mistress he had so often
+      dreamed of, the intelligent young girl with the loving nature and artistic
+      temperament, who understood poets, who understood poetry, and lived in
+      luxurious surroundings. Here, in short, was Foedora, gifted with a great
+      soul; or Pauline become a countess, and twice a millionaire, as Foedora
+      had been. When he reached the worn threshold, and stood upon the broken
+      step at the door, where in the old days he had had so many desperate
+      thoughts, an old woman came out of the room within and spoke to him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You are M. Raphael de Valentin, are you not?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, good mother,&rdquo; he replied.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You know your old room then,&rdquo; she replied; &ldquo;you are expected up there.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Does Mme. Gaudin still own the house?&rdquo; Raphael asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh no, sir. Mme. Gaudin is a baroness now. She lives in a fine house of
+      her own on the other side of the river. Her husband has come back. My
+      goodness, he brought back thousands and thousands. They say she could buy
+      up all the Quartier Saint-Jacques if she liked. She gave me her basement
+      room for nothing, and the remainder of her lease. Ah, she&rsquo;s a kind woman
+      all the same; she is no more proud to-day than she was yesterday.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Raphael hurried up the staircase to his garret; as he reached the last few
+      steps he heard the sounds of a piano. Pauline was there, simply dressed in
+      a cotton gown, but the way that it was made, like the gloves, hat, and
+      shawl that she had thrown carelessly upon the bed, revealed a change of
+      fortune.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah, there you are!&rdquo; cried Pauline, turning her head, and rising with
+      unconcealed delight.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Raphael went to sit beside her, flushed, confused, and happy; he looked at
+      her in silence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why did you leave us then?&rdquo; she asked, dropping her eyes as the flush
+      deepened on his face. &ldquo;What became of you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah, I have been very miserable, Pauline; I am very miserable still.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Alas!&rdquo; she said, filled with pitying tenderness. &ldquo;I guessed your fate
+      yesterday when I saw you so well dressed, and apparently so wealthy; but
+      in reality? Eh, M. Raphael, is it as it always used to be with you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Valentin could not restrain the tears that sprang to his eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Pauline,&rdquo; he exclaimed, &ldquo;I&mdash;&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He went no further, love sparkled in his eyes, and his emotion overflowed
+      his face.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, he loves me! he loves me!&rdquo; cried Pauline.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Raphael felt himself unable to say one word; he bent his head. The young
+      girl took his hand at this; she pressed it as she said, half sobbing and
+      half laughing:&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Rich, rich, happy and rich! Your Pauline is rich. But I? Oh, I ought to
+      be very poor to-day. I have said, times without number, that I would give
+      all the wealth upon this earth for those words, &lsquo;He loves me!&rsquo; O my
+      Raphael! I have millions. You like luxury, you will be glad; but you must
+      love me and my heart besides, for there is so much love for you in my
+      heart. You don&rsquo;t know? My father has come back. I am a wealthy heiress.
+      Both he and my mother leave me completely free to decide my own fate. I am
+      free&mdash;do you understand?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Seized with a kind of frenzy, Raphael grasped Pauline&rsquo;s hands and kissed
+      them eagerly and vehemently, with an almost convulsive caress. Pauline
+      drew her hands away, laid them on Raphael&rsquo;s shoulders, and drew him
+      towards her. They understood one another&mdash;in that close embrace, in
+      the unalloyed and sacred fervor of that one kiss without an afterthought&mdash;the
+      first kiss by which two souls take possession of each other.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah, I will not leave you any more,&rdquo; said Pauline, falling back in her
+      chair. &ldquo;I do not know how I come to be so bold!&rdquo; she added, blushing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Bold, my Pauline? Do not fear it. It is love, love true and deep and
+      everlasting like my own, is it not?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Speak!&rdquo; she cried. &ldquo;Go on speaking, so long your lips have been dumb for
+      me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then you have loved me all along?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Loved you? <i>Mon Dieu</i>! How often I have wept here, setting your room
+      straight, and grieving for your poverty and my own. I would have sold
+      myself to the evil one to spare you one vexation! You are MY Raphael
+      to-day, really my own Raphael, with that handsome head of yours, and your
+      heart is mine too; yes, that above all, your heart&mdash;O wealth
+      inexhaustible! Well, where was I?&rdquo; she went on after a pause. &ldquo;Oh yes! We
+      have three, four, or five millions, I believe. If I were poor, I should
+      perhaps desire to bear your name, to be acknowledged as your wife; but as
+      it is, I would give up the whole world for you, I would be your servant
+      still, now and always. Why, Raphael, if I give you my fortune, my heart,
+      myself to-day, I do no more than I did that day when I put a certain
+      five-franc piece in the drawer there,&rdquo; and she pointed to the table. &ldquo;Oh,
+      how your exultation hurt me then!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, why are you rich?&rdquo; Raphael cried; &ldquo;why is there no vanity in you? I
+      can do nothing for you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He wrung his hands in despair and happiness and love.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;When you are the Marquise de Valentin, I know that the title and the
+      fortune for thee, heavenly soul, will not be worth&mdash;&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;One hair of your head,&rdquo; she cried.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have millions too. But what is wealth to either of us now? There is my
+      life&mdash;ah, that I can offer, take it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Your love, Raphael, your love is all the world to me. Are your thoughts
+      of me? I am the happiest of the happy!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Can any one overhear us?&rdquo; asked Raphael.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nobody,&rdquo; she replied, and a mischievous gesture escaped her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Come, then!&rdquo; cried Valentin, holding out his arms.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She sprang upon his knees and clasped her arms about his neck.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Kiss me!&rdquo; she cried, &ldquo;after all the pain you have given me; to blot out
+      the memory of the grief that your joys have caused me; and for the sake of
+      the nights that I spent in painting hand-screens&mdash;&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Those hand-screens of yours?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Now that we are rich, my darling, I can tell you all about it. Poor boy!
+      how easy it is to delude a clever man! Could you have had white waistcoats
+      and clean shirts twice a week for three francs every month to the
+      laundress? Why, you used to drink twice as much milk as your money would
+      have paid for. I deceived you all round&mdash;over firing, oil, and even
+      money. O Raphael mine, don&rsquo;t have me for your wife, I am far too cunning!&rdquo;
+       she said laughing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But how did you manage?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I used to work till two o&rsquo;clock in the morning; I gave my mother half the
+      money made by my screens, and the other half went to you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      They looked at one another for a moment, both bewildered by love and
+      gladness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Some day we shall have to pay for this happiness by some terrible
+      sorrow,&rdquo; cried Raphael.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Perhaps you are married?&rdquo; said Pauline. &ldquo;Oh, I will not give you up to
+      any other woman.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am free, my beloved.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Free!&rdquo; she repeated. &ldquo;Free, and mine!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She slipped down upon her knees, clasped her hands, and looked at Raphael
+      in an enthusiasm of devotion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am afraid I shall go mad. How handsome you are!&rdquo; she went on, passing
+      her fingers through her lover&rsquo;s fair hair. &ldquo;How stupid your Countess
+      Foedora is! How pleased I was yesterday with the homage they all paid to
+      me! SHE has never been applauded. Dear, when I felt your arm against my
+      back, I heard a vague voice within me that cried, &lsquo;He is there!&rsquo; and I
+      turned round and saw you. I fled, for I longed so to throw my arms about
+      you before them all.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How happy you are&mdash;you can speak!&rdquo; Raphael exclaimed. &ldquo;My heart is
+      overwhelmed; I would weep, but I cannot. Do not draw your hand away. I
+      could stay here looking at you like this for the rest of my life, I think;
+      happy and content.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;O my love, say that once more!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah, what are words?&rdquo; answered Valentin, letting a hot tear fall on
+      Pauline&rsquo;s hands. &ldquo;Some time I will try to tell you of my love; just now I
+      can only feel it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;with your lofty soul and your great genius, with that
+      heart of yours that I know so well; are you really mine, as I am yours?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;For ever and ever, my sweet creature,&rdquo; said Raphael in an uncertain
+      voice. &ldquo;You shall be my wife, my protecting angel. My griefs have always
+      been dispelled by your presence, and my courage revived; that angelic
+      smile now on your lips has purified me, so to speak. A new life seems
+      about to begin for me. The cruel past and my wretched follies are hardly
+      more to me than evil dreams. At your side I breathe an atmosphere of
+      happiness, and I am pure. Be with me always,&rdquo; he added, pressing her
+      solemnly to his beating heart.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Death may come when it will,&rdquo; said Pauline in ecstasy; &ldquo;I have lived!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Happy he who shall divine their joy, for he must have experienced it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I wish that no one might enter this dear garret again, my Raphael,&rdquo; said
+      Pauline, after two hours of silence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We must have the door walled up, put bars across the window, and buy the
+      house,&rdquo; the Marquis answered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, we will,&rdquo; she said. Then a moment later she added: &ldquo;Our search for
+      your manuscripts has been a little lost sight of,&rdquo; and they both laughed
+      like children.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Pshaw! I don&rsquo;t care a jot for the whole circle of the sciences,&rdquo; Raphael
+      answered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah, sir, and how about glory?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I glory in you alone.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You used to be very miserable as you made these little scratches and
+      scrawls,&rdquo; she said, turning the papers over.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My Pauline&mdash;&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh yes, I am your Pauline&mdash;and what then?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Where are you living now?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;In the Rue Saint Lazare. And you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;In the Rue de Varenne.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What a long way apart we shall be until&mdash;&mdash;&rdquo; She stopped, and
+      looked at her lover with a mischievous and coquettish expression.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But at the most we need only be separated for a fortnight,&rdquo; Raphael
+      answered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Really! we are to be married in a fortnight?&rdquo; and she jumped for joy like
+      a child.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am an unnatural daughter!&rdquo; she went on. &ldquo;I give no more thought to my
+      father or my mother, or to anything in the world. Poor love, you don&rsquo;t
+      know that my father is very ill? He returned from the Indies in very bad
+      health. He nearly died at Havre, where we went to find him. Good heavens!&rdquo;
+       she cried, looking at her watch; &ldquo;it is three o&rsquo;clock already! I ought to
+      be back again when he wakes at four. I am mistress of the house at home;
+      my mother does everything that I wish, and my father worships me; but I
+      will not abuse their kindness, that would be wrong. My poor father! He
+      would have me go to the Italiens yesterday. You will come to see him
+      to-morrow, will you not?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Will Madame la Marquise de Valentin honor me by taking my arm?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am going to take the key of this room away with me,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;Isn&rsquo;t
+      our treasure-house a palace?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;One more kiss, Pauline.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A thousand, <i>mon Dieu</i>!&rdquo; she said, looking at Raphael. &ldquo;Will it
+      always be like this? I feel as if I were dreaming.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      They went slowly down the stairs together, step for step, with arms
+      closely linked, trembling both of them beneath their load of joy. Each
+      pressing close to the other&rsquo;s side, like a pair of doves, they reached the
+      Place de la Sorbonne, where Pauline&rsquo;s carriage was waiting.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I want to go home with you,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;I want to see your own room and
+      your study, and to sit at the table where you work. It will be like old
+      times,&rdquo; she said, blushing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She spoke to the servant. &ldquo;Joseph, before returning home I am going to the
+      Rue de Varenne. It is a quarter-past three now, and I must be back by four
+      o&rsquo;clock. George must hurry the horses.&rdquo; And so in a few moments the lovers
+      came to Valentin&rsquo;s abode.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How glad I am to have seen all this for myself!&rdquo; Pauline cried, creasing
+      the silken bed-curtains in Raphael&rsquo;s room between her fingers. &ldquo;As I go to
+      sleep, I shall be here in thought. I shall imagine your dear head on the
+      pillow there. Raphael, tell me, did no one advise you about the furniture
+      of your hotel?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No one whatever.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Really? It was not a woman who&mdash;&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Pauline!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, I know I am fearfully jealous. You have good taste. I will have a bed
+      like yours to-morrow.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Quite beside himself with happiness, Raphael caught Pauline in his arms.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, my father!&rdquo; she said; &ldquo;my father&mdash;&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I will take you back to him,&rdquo; cried Valentin, &ldquo;for I want to be away from
+      you as little as possible.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How loving you are! I did not venture to suggest it&mdash;&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Are you not my life?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It would be tedious to set down accurately the charming prattle of the
+      lovers, for tones and looks and gestures that cannot be rendered alone
+      gave it significance. Valentin went back with Pauline to her own door, and
+      returned with as much happiness in his heart as mortal man can know.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When he was seated in his armchair beside the fire, thinking over the
+      sudden and complete way in which his wishes had been fulfilled, a cold
+      shiver went through him, as if the blade of a dagger had been plunged into
+      his breast&mdash;he thought of the Magic Skin, and saw that it had shrunk
+      a little. He uttered the most tremendous of French oaths, without any of
+      the Jesuitical reservations made by the Abbess of Andouillettes, leant his
+      head against the back of the chair, and sat motionless, fixing his
+      unseeing eyes upon the bracket of the curtain pole.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Good God!&rdquo; he cried; &ldquo;every wish! Every desire of mine! Poor Pauline!&mdash;&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He took a pair of compasses and measured the extent of existence that the
+      morning had cost him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have scarcely enough for two months!&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A cold sweat broke out over him; moved by an ungovernable spasm of rage,
+      he seized the Magic Skin, exclaiming:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am a perfect fool!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He rushed out of the house and across the garden, and flung the talisman
+      down a well.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;<i>Vogue la galere</i>,&rdquo; cried he. &ldquo;The devil take all this nonsense.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      So Raphael gave himself up to the happiness of being beloved, and led with
+      Pauline the life of heart and heart. Difficulties which it would be
+      somewhat tedious to describe had delayed their marriage, which was to take
+      place early in March. Each was sure of the other; their affection had been
+      tried, and happiness had taught them how strong it was. Never has love
+      made two souls, two natures, so absolutely one. The more they came to know
+      of each other, the more they loved. On either side there was the same
+      hesitating delicacy, the same transports of joy such as angels know; there
+      were no clouds in their heaven; the will of either was the other&rsquo;s law.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Wealthy as they both were, they had not a caprice which they could not
+      gratify, and for that reason had no caprices. A refined taste, a feeling
+      for beauty and poetry, was instinct in the soul of the bride; her lover&rsquo;s
+      smile was more to her than all the pearls of Ormuz. She disdained feminine
+      finery; a muslin dress and flowers formed her most elaborate toilette.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Pauline and Raphael shunned every one else, for solitude was abundantly
+      beautiful to them. The idlers at the Opera, or at the Italiens, saw this
+      charming and unconventional pair evening after evening. Some gossip went
+      the round of the salons at first, but the harmless lovers were soon
+      forgotten in the course of events which took place in Paris; their
+      marriage was announced at length to excuse them in the eyes of the
+      prudish; and as it happened, their servants did not babble; so their bliss
+      did not draw down upon them any very severe punishment.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One morning towards the end of February, at the time when the brightening
+      days bring a belief in the nearness of the joys of spring, Pauline and
+      Raphael were breakfasting together in a small conservatory, a kind of
+      drawing-room filled with flowers, on a level with the garden. The mild
+      rays of the pale winter sunlight, breaking through the thicket of exotic
+      plants, warmed the air somewhat. The vivid contrast made by the varieties
+      of foliage, the colors of the masses of flowering shrubs, the freaks of
+      light and shadow, gladdened the eyes. While all the rest of Paris still
+      sought warmth from its melancholy hearth, these two were laughing in a
+      bower of camellias, lilacs, and blossoming heath. Their happy faces rose
+      above lilies of the valley, narcissus blooms, and Bengal roses. A mat of
+      plaited African grass, variegated like a carpet, lay beneath their feet in
+      this luxurious conservatory. The walls, covered with a green linen
+      material, bore no traces of damp. The surfaces of the rustic wooden
+      furniture shone with cleanliness. A kitten, attracted by the odor of milk,
+      had established itself upon the table; it allowed Pauline to bedabble it
+      in coffee; she was playing merrily with it, taking away the cream that she
+      had just allowed the kitten to sniff at, so as to exercise its patience,
+      and keep up the contest. She burst out laughing at every antic, and by the
+      comical remarks she constantly made, she hindered Raphael from perusing
+      the paper; he had dropped it a dozen times already. This morning picture
+      seemed to overflow with inexpressible gladness, like everything that is
+      natural and genuine.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Raphael, still pretending to read his paper, furtively watched Pauline
+      with the cat&mdash;his Pauline, in the dressing-gown that hung carelessly
+      about her; his Pauline, with her hair loose on her shoulders, with a tiny,
+      white, blue-veined foot peeping out of a velvet slipper. It was pleasant
+      to see her in this negligent dress; she was delightful as some fanciful
+      picture by Westall; half-girl, half-woman, as she seemed to be, or perhaps
+      more of a girl than a woman, there was no alloy in the happiness she
+      enjoyed, and of love she knew as yet only its first ecstasy. When Raphael,
+      absorbed in happy musing, had forgotten the existence of the newspaper,
+      Pauline flew upon it, crumpled it up into a ball, and threw it out into
+      the garden; the kitten sprang after the rotating object, which spun round
+      and round, as politics are wont to do. This childish scene recalled
+      Raphael to himself. He would have gone on reading, and felt for the sheet
+      he no longer possessed. Joyous laughter rang out like the song of a bird,
+      one peal leading to another.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am quite jealous of the paper,&rdquo; she said, as she wiped away the tears
+      that her childlike merriment had brought into her eyes. &ldquo;Now, is it not a
+      heinous offence,&rdquo; she went on, as she became a woman all at once, &ldquo;to read
+      Russian proclamations in my presence, and to attend to the prosings of the
+      Emperor Nicholas rather than to looks and words of love!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I was not reading, my dear angel; I was looking at you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Just then the gravel walk outside the conservatory rang with the sound of
+      the gardener&rsquo;s heavily nailed boots.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I beg your pardon, my Lord Marquis&mdash;and yours, too, madame&mdash;if
+      I am intruding, but I have brought you a curiosity the like of which I
+      never set eyes on. Drawing a bucket of water just now, with due respect, I
+      got out this strange salt-water plant. Here it is. It must be thoroughly
+      used to water, anyhow, for it isn&rsquo;t saturated or even damp at all. It is
+      as dry as a piece of wood, and has not swelled a bit. As my Lord Marquis
+      certainly knows a great deal more about things than I do, I thought I
+      ought to bring it, and that it would interest him.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Therewith the gardener showed Raphael the inexorable piece of skin; there
+      were barely six square inches of it left.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Thanks, Vaniere,&rdquo; Raphael said. &ldquo;The thing is very curious.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What is the matter with you, my angel; you are growing quite white!&rdquo;
+       Pauline cried.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You can go, Vaniere.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Your voice frightens me,&rdquo; the girl went on; &ldquo;it is so strangely altered.
+      What is it? How are you feeling? Where is the pain? You are in pain!&mdash;Jonathan!
+      here! call a doctor!&rdquo; she cried.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Hush, my Pauline,&rdquo; Raphael answered, as he regained composure. &ldquo;Let us
+      get up and go. Some flower here has a scent that is too much for me. It is
+      that verbena, perhaps.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Pauline flew upon the innocent plant, seized it by the stalk, and flung it
+      out into the garden; then, with all the might of the love between them,
+      she clasped Raphael in a close embrace, and with languishing coquetry
+      raised her red lips to his for a kiss.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Dear angel,&rdquo; she cried, &ldquo;when I saw you turn so white, I understood that
+      I could not live on without you; your life is my life too. Lay your hand
+      on my back, Raphael mine; I feel a chill like death. The feeling of cold
+      is there yet. Your lips are burning. How is your hand?&mdash;Cold as ice,&rdquo;
+       she added.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Mad girl!&rdquo; exclaimed Raphael.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why that tear? Let me drink it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;O Pauline, Pauline, you love me far too much!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There is something very extraordinary going on in your mind, Raphael! Do
+      not dissimulate. I shall very soon find out your secret. Give that to me,&rdquo;
+       she went on, taking the Magic Skin.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You are my executioner!&rdquo; the young man exclaimed, glancing in horror at
+      the talisman.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How changed your voice is!&rdquo; cried Pauline, as she dropped the fatal
+      symbol of destiny.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you love me?&rdquo; he asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do I love you? Is there any doubt?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then, leave me, go away!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The poor child went.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;So!&rdquo; cried Raphael, when he was alone. &ldquo;In an enlightened age, when we
+      have found out that diamonds are a crystallized form of charcoal, at a
+      time when everything is made clear, when the police would hale a new
+      Messiah before the magistrates, and submit his miracles to the Academie
+      des Sciences&mdash;in an epoch when we no longer believe in anything but a
+      notary&rsquo;s signature&mdash;that I, forsooth, should believe in a sort of <i>Mene,
+      Tekel, Upharsin</i>! No, by Heaven, I will not believe that the Supreme
+      Being would take pleasure in torturing a harmless creature.&mdash;Let us
+      see the learned about it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Between the Halle des Vins, with its extensive assembly of barrels, and
+      the Salpetriere, that extensive seminary of drunkenness, lies a small
+      pond, which Raphael soon reached. All sorts of ducks of rare varieties
+      were there disporting themselves; their colored markings shone in the sun
+      like the glass in cathedral windows. Every kind of duck in the world was
+      represented, quacking, dabbling, and moving about&mdash;a kind of
+      parliament of ducks assembled against its will, but luckily without either
+      charter or political principles, living in complete immunity from
+      sportsmen, under the eyes of any naturalist that chanced to see them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That is M. Lavrille,&rdquo; said one of the keepers to Raphael, who had asked
+      for that high priest of zoology.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Marquis saw a short man buried in profound reflections, caused by the
+      appearance of a pair of ducks. The man of science was middle-aged; he had
+      a pleasant face, made pleasanter still by a kindly expression, but an
+      absorption in scientific ideas engrossed his whole person. His peruke was
+      strangely turned up, by being constantly raised to scratch his head; so
+      that a line of white hair was left plainly visible, a witness to an
+      enthusiasm for investigation, which, like every other strong passion, so
+      withdraws us from mundane considerations, that we lose all consciousness
+      of the &ldquo;I&rdquo; within us. Raphael, the student and man of science, looked
+      respectfully at the naturalist, who devoted his nights to enlarging the
+      limits of human knowledge, and whose very errors reflected glory upon
+      France; but a she-coxcomb would have laughed, no doubt, at the break of
+      continuity between the breeches and striped waistcoat worn by the man of
+      learning; the interval, moreover, was modestly filled by a shirt which had
+      been considerably creased, for he stooped and raised himself by turns, as
+      his zoological observations required.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After the first interchange of civilities, Raphael thought it necessary to
+      pay M. Lavrille a banal compliment upon his ducks.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, we are well off for ducks,&rdquo; the naturalist replied. &ldquo;The genus,
+      moreover, as you doubtless know, is the most prolific in the order of
+      palmipeds. It begins with the swan and ends with the zin-zin duck,
+      comprising in all one hundred and thirty-seven very distinct varieties,
+      each having its own name, habits, country, and character, and every one no
+      more like another than a white man is like a negro. Really, sir, when we
+      dine off a duck, we have no notion for the most part of the vast extent&mdash;&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He interrupted himself as he saw a small pretty duck come up to the
+      surface of the pond.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There you see the cravatted swan, a poor native of Canada; he has come a
+      very long way to show us his brown and gray plumage and his little black
+      cravat! Look, he is preening himself. That one is the famous eider duck
+      that provides the down, the eider-down under which our fine ladies sleep;
+      isn&rsquo;t it pretty? Who would not admire the little pinkish white breast and
+      the green beak? I have just been a witness, sir,&rdquo; he went on, &ldquo;to a
+      marriage that I had long despaired of bringing about; they have paired
+      rather auspiciously, and I shall await the results very eagerly. This will
+      be a hundred and thirty-eighth species, I flatter myself, to which,
+      perhaps, my name will be given. That is the newly matched pair,&rdquo; he said,
+      pointing out two of the ducks; &ldquo;one of them is a laughing goose (<i>anas
+      albifrons</i>), and the other the great whistling duck, Buffon&rsquo;s <i>anas
+      ruffina</i>. I have hesitated a long while between the whistling duck, the
+      duck with white eyebrows, and the shoveler duck (<i>anas clypeata</i>).
+      Stay, that is the shoveler&mdash;that fat, brownish black rascal, with the
+      greenish neck and that coquettish iridescence on it. But the whistling
+      duck was a crested one, sir, and you will understand that I deliberated no
+      longer. We only lack the variegated black-capped duck now. These gentlemen
+      here, unanimously claim that that variety of duck is only a repetition of
+      the curve-beaked teal, but for my own part,&rdquo;&mdash;and the gesture he made
+      was worth seeing. It expressed at once the modesty and pride of a man of
+      science; the pride full of obstinacy, and the modesty well tempered with
+      assurance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don&rsquo;t think it is,&rdquo; he added. &ldquo;You see, my dear sir, that we are not
+      amusing ourselves here. I am engaged at this moment upon a monograph on
+      the genus duck. But I am at your disposal.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      While they went towards a rather pleasant house in the Rue du Buffon,
+      Raphael submitted the skin to M. Lavrille&rsquo;s inspection.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I know the product,&rdquo; said the man of science, when he had turned his
+      magnifying glass upon the talisman. &ldquo;It used to be used for covering
+      boxes. The shagreen is very old. They prefer to use skate&rsquo;s skin nowadays
+      for making sheaths. This, as you are doubtless aware, is the hide of the
+      <i>raja sephen</i>, a Red Sea fish.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But this, sir, since you are so exceedingly good&mdash;&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This,&rdquo; the man of science interrupted, as he resumed, &ldquo;this is quite
+      another thing; between these two shagreens, sir, there is a difference
+      just as wide as between sea and land, or fish and flesh. The fish&rsquo;s skin
+      is harder, however, than the skin of the land animal. This,&rdquo; he said, as
+      he indicated the talisman, &ldquo;is, as you doubtless know, one of the most
+      curious of zoological products.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But to proceed&mdash;&mdash;&rdquo; said Raphael.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This,&rdquo; replied the man of science, as he flung himself down into his
+      armchair, &ldquo;is an ass&rsquo; skin, sir.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, I know,&rdquo; said the young man.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A very rare variety of ass found in Persia,&rdquo; the naturalist continued,
+      &ldquo;the onager of the ancients, equus asinus, the <i>koulan</i> of the
+      Tartars; Pallas went out there to observe it, and has made it known to
+      science, for as a matter of fact the animal for a long time was believed
+      to be mythical. It is mentioned, as you know, in Holy Scripture; Moses
+      forbade that it should be coupled with its own species, and the onager is
+      yet more famous for the prostitutions of which it was the object, and
+      which are often mentioned by the prophets of the Bible. Pallas, as you
+      know doubtless, states in his <i>Act. Petrop.</i> tome II., that these
+      bizarre excesses are still devoutly believed in among the Persians and the
+      Nogais as a sovereign remedy for lumbago and sciatic gout. We poor
+      Parisians scarcely believe that. The Museum has no example of the onager.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What a magnificent animal!&rdquo; he continued. &ldquo;It is full of mystery; its
+      eyes are provided with a sort of burnished covering, to which the
+      Orientals attribute the powers of fascination; it has a glossier and finer
+      coat than our handsomest horses possess, striped with more or less tawny
+      bands, very much like the zebra&rsquo;s hide. There is something pliant and
+      silky about its hair, which is sleek to the touch. Its powers of sight vie
+      in precision and accuracy with those of man; it is rather larger than our
+      largest domestic donkeys, and is possessed of extraordinary courage. If it
+      is surprised by any chance, it defends itself against the most dangerous
+      wild beasts with remarkable success; the rapidity of its movements can
+      only be compared with the flight of birds; an onager, sir, would run the
+      best Arab or Persian horses to death. According to the father of the
+      conscientious Doctor Niebuhr, whose recent loss we are deploring, as you
+      doubtless know, the ordinary average pace of one of these wonderful
+      creatures would be seven thousand geometric feet per hour. Our own
+      degenerate race of donkeys can give no idea of the ass in his pride and
+      independence. He is active and spirited in his demeanor; he is cunning and
+      sagacious; there is grace about the outlines of his head; every movement
+      is full of attractive charm. In the East he is the king of beasts. Turkish
+      and Persian superstition even credits him with a mysterious origin; and
+      when stories of the prowess attributed to him are told in Thibet or in
+      Tartary, the speakers mingle Solomon&rsquo;s name with that of this noble
+      animal. A tame onager, in short, is worth an enormous amount; it is
+      well-nigh impossible to catch them among the mountains, where they leap
+      like roebucks, and seem as if they could fly like birds. Our myth of the
+      winged horse, our Pegasus, had its origin doubtless in these countries,
+      where the shepherds could see the onager springing from one rock to
+      another. In Persia they breed asses for the saddle, a cross between a
+      tamed onager and a she-ass, and they paint them red, following immemorial
+      tradition. Perhaps it was this custom that gave rise to our own proverb,
+      &lsquo;Surely as a red donkey.&rsquo; At some period when natural history was much
+      neglected in France, I think a traveler must have brought over one of
+      these strange beasts that endures servitude with such impatience. Hence
+      the adage. The skin that you have laid before me is the skin of an onager.
+      Opinions differ as to the origin of the name. Some claim that <i>Chagri</i>
+      is a Turkish word; others insist that <i>Chagri</i> must be the name of
+      the place where this animal product underwent the chemical process of
+      preparation so clearly described by Pallas, to which the peculiar graining
+      that we admire is due; Martellens has written to me saying that <i>Chaagri</i>
+      is a river&mdash;&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I thank you, sir, for the information that you have given me; it would
+      furnish an admirable footnote for some Dom Calmet or other, if such
+      erudite hermits yet exist; but I have had the honor of pointing out to you
+      that this scrap was in the first instance quite as large as that map,&rdquo;
+       said Raphael, indicating an open atlas to Lavrille; &ldquo;but it has shrunk
+      visibly in three months&rsquo; time&mdash;&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Quite so,&rdquo; said the man of science. &ldquo;I understand. The remains of any
+      substance primarily organic are naturally subject to a process of decay.
+      It is quite easy to understand, and its progress depends upon
+      atmospherical conditions. Even metals contract and expand appreciably, for
+      engineers have remarked somewhat considerable interstices between great
+      blocks of stone originally clamped together with iron bars. The field of
+      science is boundless, but human life is very short, so that we do not
+      claim to be acquainted with all the phenomena of nature.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Pardon the question that I am about to ask you, sir,&rdquo; Raphael began, half
+      embarrassed, &ldquo;but are you quite sure that this piece of skin is subject to
+      the ordinary laws of zoology, and that it can be stretched?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Certainly&mdash;&mdash;oh, bother!&mdash;&mdash;&rdquo; muttered M. Lavrille,
+      trying to stretch the talisman. &ldquo;But if you, sir, will go to see
+      Planchette,&rdquo; he added, &ldquo;the celebrated professor of mechanics, he will
+      certainly discover some method of acting upon this skin, of softening and
+      expanding it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah, sir, you are the preserver of my life,&rdquo; and Raphael took leave of the
+      learned naturalist and hurried off to Planchette, leaving the worthy
+      Lavrille in his study, all among the bottles and dried plants that filled
+      it up.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Quite unconsciously Raphael brought away with him from this visit, all of
+      science that man can grasp, a terminology to wit. Lavrille, the worthy
+      man, was very much like Sancho Panza giving to Don Quixote the history of
+      the goats; he was entertaining himself by making out a list of animals and
+      ticking them off. Even now that his life was nearing its end, he was
+      scarcely acquainted with a mere fraction of the countless numbers of the
+      great tribes that God has scattered, for some unknown end, throughout the
+      ocean of worlds.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Raphael was well pleased. &ldquo;I shall keep my ass well in hand,&rdquo; cried he.
+      Sterne had said before his day, &ldquo;Let us take care of our ass, if we wish
+      to live to old age.&rdquo; But it is such a fantastic brute!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Planchette was a tall, thin man, a poet of a surety, lost in one continual
+      thought, and always employed in gazing into the bottomless abyss of
+      Motion. Commonplace minds accuse these lofty intellects of madness; they
+      form a misinterpreted race apart that lives in a wonderful carelessness of
+      luxuries or other people&rsquo;s notions. They will spend whole days at a
+      stretch, smoking a cigar that has gone out, and enter a drawing-room with
+      the buttons on their garments not in every case formally wedded to the
+      button-holes. Some day or other, after a long time spent in measuring
+      space, or in accumulating Xs under Aa-Gg, they succeed in analyzing some
+      natural law, and resolve it into its elemental principles, and all on a
+      sudden the crowd gapes at a new machine; or it is a handcart perhaps that
+      overwhelms us with astonishment by the apt simplicity of its construction.
+      The modest man of science smiles at his admirers, and remarks, &ldquo;What is
+      that invention of mine? Nothing whatever. Man cannot create a force; he
+      can but direct it; and science consists in learning from nature.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The mechanician was standing bolt upright, planted on both feet, like some
+      victim dropped straight from the gibbet, when Raphael broke in upon him.
+      He was intently watching an agate ball that rolled over a sun-dial, and
+      awaited its final settlement. The worthy man had received neither pension
+      nor decoration; he had not known how to make the right use of his ability
+      for calculation. He was happy in his life spent on the watch for a
+      discovery; he had no thought either of reputation, of the outer world, nor
+      even of himself, and led the life of science for the sake of science.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is inexplicable,&rdquo; he exclaimed. &ldquo;Ah, your servant, sir,&rdquo; he went on,
+      becoming aware of Raphael&rsquo;s existence. &ldquo;How is your mother? You must go
+      and see my wife.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And I also could have lived thus,&rdquo; thought Raphael, as he recalled the
+      learned man from his meditations by asking of him how to produce any
+      effect on the talisman, which he placed before him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Although my credulity must amuse you, sir,&rdquo; so the Marquis ended, &ldquo;I will
+      conceal nothing from you. That skin seems to me to be endowed with an
+      insuperable power of resistance.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;People of fashion, sir, always treat science rather superciliously,&rdquo; said
+      Planchette. &ldquo;They all talk to us pretty much as the <i>incroyable</i> did
+      when he brought some ladies to see Lalande just after an eclipse, and
+      remarked, &lsquo;Be so good as to begin it over again!&rsquo; What effect do you want
+      to produce? The object of the science of mechanics is either the
+      application or the neutralization of the laws of motion. As for motion
+      pure and simple, I tell you humbly, that we cannot possibly define it.
+      That disposed of, unvarying phenomena have been observed which accompany
+      the actions of solids and fluids. If we set up the conditions by which
+      these phenomena are brought to pass, we can transport bodies or
+      communicate locomotive power to them at a predetermined rate of speed. We
+      can project them, divide them up in a few or an infinite number of pieces,
+      accordingly as we break them or grind them to powder; we can twist bodies
+      or make them rotate, modify, compress, expand, or extend them. The whole
+      science, sir, rests upon a single fact.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You see this ball,&rdquo; he went on; &ldquo;here it lies upon this slab. Now, it is
+      over there. What name shall we give to what has taken place, so natural
+      from a physical point of view, so amazing from a moral? Movement,
+      locomotion, changing of place? What prodigious vanity lurks underneath the
+      words. Does a name solve the difficulty? Yet it is the whole of our
+      science for all that. Our machines either make direct use of this agency,
+      this fact, or they convert it. This trifling phenomenon, applied to large
+      masses, would send Paris flying. We can increase speed by an expenditure
+      of force, and augment the force by an increase of speed. But what are
+      speed and force? Our science is as powerless to tell us that as to create
+      motion. Any movement whatever is an immense power, and man does not create
+      power of any kind. Everything is movement, thought itself is a movement,
+      upon movement nature is based. Death is a movement whose limitations are
+      little known. If God is eternal, be sure that He moves perpetually;
+      perhaps God is movement. That is why movement, like God is inexplicable,
+      unfathomable, unlimited, incomprehensible, intangible. Who has ever
+      touched, comprehended, or measured movement? We feel its effects without
+      seeing it; we can even deny them as we can deny the existence of a God.
+      Where is it? Where is it not? Whence comes it? What is its source? What is
+      its end? It surrounds us, it intrudes upon us, and yet escapes us. It is
+      evident as a fact, obscure as an abstraction; it is at once effect and
+      cause. It requires space, even as we, and what is space? Movement alone
+      recalls it to us; without movement, space is but an empty meaningless
+      word. Like space, like creation, like the infinite, movement is an
+      insoluble problem which confounds human reason; man will never conceive
+      it, whatever else he may be permitted to conceive.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Between each point in space occupied in succession by that ball,&rdquo;
+       continued the man of science, &ldquo;there is an abyss confronting human reason,
+      an abyss into which Pascal fell. In order to produce any effect upon an
+      unknown substance, we ought first of all to study that substance; to know
+      whether, in accordance with its nature, it will be broken by the force of
+      a blow, or whether it will withstand it; if it breaks in pieces, and you
+      have no wish to split it up, we shall not achieve the end proposed. If you
+      want to compress it, a uniform impulse must be communicated to all the
+      particles of the substance, so as to diminish the interval that separates
+      them in an equal degree. If you wish to expand it, we should try to bring
+      a uniform eccentric force to bear on every molecule; for unless we conform
+      accurately to this law, we shall have breaches in continuity. The modes of
+      motion, sir, are infinite, and no limit exists to combinations of
+      movement. Upon what effect have you determined?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I want any kind of pressure that is strong enough to expand the skin
+      indefinitely,&rdquo; began Raphael, quite of out patience.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Substance is finite,&rdquo; the mathematician put in, &ldquo;and therefore will not
+      admit of indefinite expansion, but pressure will necessarily increase the
+      extent of surface at the expense of the thickness, which will be
+      diminished until the point is reached when the material gives out&mdash;&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Bring about that result, sir,&rdquo; Raphael cried, &ldquo;and you will have earned
+      millions.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then I should rob you of your money,&rdquo; replied the other, phlegmatic as a
+      Dutchman. &ldquo;I am going to show you, in a word or two, that a machine can be
+      made that is fit to crush Providence itself in pieces like a fly. It would
+      reduce a man to the conditions of a piece of waste paper; a man&mdash;boots
+      and spurs, hat and cravat, trinkets and gold, and all&mdash;&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What a fearful machine!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Instead of flinging their brats into the water, the Chinese ought to make
+      them useful in this way,&rdquo; the man of science went on, without reflecting
+      on the regard man has for his progeny.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Quite absorbed by his idea, Planchette took an empty flower-pot, with a
+      hole in the bottom, and put it on the surface of the dial, then he went to
+      look for a little clay in a corner of the garden. Raphael stood
+      spellbound, like a child to whom his nurse is telling some wonderful
+      story. Planchette put the clay down upon the slab, drew a pruning-knife
+      from his pocket, cut two branches from an elder tree, and began to clean
+      them of pith by blowing through them, as if Raphael had not been present.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There are the rudiments of the apparatus,&rdquo; he said. Then he connected one
+      of the wooden pipes with the bottom of the flower-pot by way of a clay
+      joint, in such a way that the mouth of the elder stem was just under the
+      hole of the flower-pot; you might have compared it to a big tobacco-pipe.
+      He spread a bed of clay over the surface of the slab, in a shovel-shaped
+      mass, set down the flower-pot at the wider end of it, and laid the pipe of
+      the elder stem along the portion which represented the handle of the
+      shovel. Next he put a lump of clay at the end of the elder stem and
+      therein planted the other pipe, in an upright position, forming a second
+      elbow which connected it with the first horizontal pipe in such a manner
+      that the air, or any given fluid in circulation, could flow through this
+      improvised piece of mechanism from the mouth of the vertical tube, along
+      the intermediate passages, and so into the large empty flower-pot.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This apparatus, sir,&rdquo; he said to Raphael, with all the gravity of an
+      academician pronouncing his initiatory discourse, &ldquo;is one of the great
+      Pascal&rsquo;s grandest claims upon our admiration.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don&rsquo;t understand.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The man of science smiled. He went up to a fruit-tree and took down a
+      little phial in which the druggist had sent him some liquid for catching
+      ants; he broke off the bottom and made a funnel of the top, carefully
+      fitting it to the mouth of the vertical hollowed stem that he had set in
+      the clay, and at the opposite end to the great reservoir, represented by
+      the flower-pot. Next, by means of a watering-pot, he poured in sufficient
+      water to rise to the same level in the large vessel and in the tiny
+      circular funnel at the end of the elder stem.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Raphael was thinking of his piece of skin.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Water is considered to-day, sir, to be an incompressible body,&rdquo; said the
+      mechanician; &ldquo;never lose sight of that fundamental principle; still it can
+      be compressed, though only so very slightly that we should regard its
+      faculty for contracting as a zero. You see the amount of surface presented
+      by the water at the brim of the flower-pot?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, sir.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Very good; now suppose that that surface is a thousand times larger than
+      the orifice of the elder stem through which I poured the liquid. Here, I
+      am taking the funnel away&mdash;&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Granted.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, then, if by any method whatever I increase the volume of that
+      quantity of water by pouring in yet more through the mouth of the little
+      tube; the water thus compelled to flow downwards would rise in the
+      reservoir, represented by the flower-pot, until it reached the same level
+      at either end.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That is quite clear,&rdquo; cried Raphael.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But there is this difference,&rdquo; the other went on. &ldquo;Suppose that the thin
+      column of water poured into the little vertical tube there exerts a force
+      equal, say, to a pound weight, for instance, its action will be punctually
+      communicated to the great body of the liquid, and will be transmitted to
+      every part of the surface represented by the water in the flower-pot so
+      that at the surface there will be a thousand columns of water, every one
+      pressing upwards as if they were impelled by a force equal to that which
+      compels the liquid to descend in the vertical tube; and of necessity they
+      reproduce here,&rdquo; said Planchette, indicating to Raphael the top of the
+      flower-pot, &ldquo;the force introduced over there, a thousand-fold,&rdquo; and the
+      man of science pointed out to the marquis the upright wooden pipe set in
+      the clay.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That is quite simple,&rdquo; said Raphael.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Planchette smiled again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;In other words,&rdquo; he went on, with the mathematician&rsquo;s natural stubborn
+      propensity for logic, &ldquo;in order to resist the force of the incoming water,
+      it would be necessary to exert, upon every part of the large surface, a
+      force equal to that brought into action in the vertical column, but with
+      this difference&mdash;if the column of liquid is a foot in height, the
+      thousand little columns of the wide surface will only have a very slight
+      elevating power.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Now,&rdquo; said Planchette, as he gave a fillip to his bits of stick, &ldquo;let us
+      replace this funny little apparatus by steel tubes of suitable strength
+      and dimensions; and if you cover the liquid surface of the reservoir with
+      a strong sliding plate of metal, and if to this metal plate you oppose
+      another, solid enough and strong enough to resist any test; if,
+      furthermore, you give me the power of continually adding water to the
+      volume of liquid contents by means of the little vertical tube, the object
+      fixed between the two solid metal plates must of necessity yield to the
+      tremendous crushing force which indefinitely compresses it. The method of
+      continually pouring in water through a little tube, like the manner of
+      communicating force through the volume of the liquid to a small metal
+      plate, is an absurdly primitive mechanical device. A brace of pistons and
+      a few valves would do it all. Do you perceive, my dear sir,&rdquo; he said
+      taking Valentin by the arm, &ldquo;there is scarcely a substance in existence
+      that would not be compelled to dilate when fixed in between these two
+      indefinitely resisting surfaces?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What! the author of the <i>Lettres provinciales</i> invented it?&rdquo; Raphael
+      exclaimed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He and no other, sir. The science of mechanics knows no simpler nor more
+      beautiful contrivance. The opposite principle, the capacity of expansion
+      possessed by water, has brought the steam-engine into being. But water
+      will only expand up to a certain point, while its incompressibility, being
+      a force in a manner negative, is, of necessity, infinite.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If this skin is expanded,&rdquo; said Raphael, &ldquo;I promise you to erect a
+      colossal statue to Blaise Pascal; to found a prize of a hundred thousand
+      francs to be offered every ten years for the solution of the grandest
+      problem of mechanical science effected during the interval; to find
+      dowries for all your cousins and second cousins, and finally to build an
+      asylum on purpose for impoverished or insane mathematicians.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That would be exceedingly useful,&rdquo; Planchette replied. &ldquo;We will go to
+      Spieghalter to-morrow, sir,&rdquo; he continued, with the serenity of a man
+      living on a plane wholly intellectual. &ldquo;That distinguished mechanic has
+      just completed, after my own designs, an improved mechanical arrangement
+      by which a child could get a thousand trusses of hay inside his cap.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then good-bye till to-morrow.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Till to-morrow, sir.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Talk of mechanics!&rdquo; cried Raphael; &ldquo;isn&rsquo;t it the greatest of the
+      sciences? The other fellow with his onagers, classifications, ducks, and
+      species, and his phials full of bottled monstrosities, is at best only fit
+      for a billiard-marker in a saloon.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The next morning Raphael went off in great spirits to find Planchette, and
+      together they set out for the Rue de la Sante&mdash;auspicious
+      appellation! Arrived at Spieghalter&rsquo;s, the young man found himself in a
+      vast foundry; his eyes lighted upon a multitude of glowing and roaring
+      furnaces. There was a storm of sparks, a deluge of nails, an ocean of
+      pistons, vices, levers, valves, girders, files, and nuts; a sea of melted
+      metal, baulks of timber and bar-steel. Iron filings filled your throat.
+      There was iron in the atmosphere; the men were covered with it; everything
+      reeked of iron. The iron seemed to be a living organism; it became a
+      fluid, moved, and seemed to shape itself intelligently after every
+      fashion, to obey the worker&rsquo;s every caprice. Through the uproar made by
+      the bellows, the crescendo of the falling hammers, and the shrill sounds
+      of the lathes that drew groans from the steel, Raphael passed into a
+      large, clean, and airy place where he was able to inspect at his leisure
+      the great press that Planchette had told him about. He admired the
+      cast-iron beams, as one might call them, and the twin bars of steel
+      coupled together with indestructible bolts.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If you were to give seven rapid turns to that crank,&rdquo; said Spieghalter,
+      pointing out a beam of polished steel, &ldquo;you would make a steel bar spurt
+      out in thousands of jets, that would get into your legs like needles.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The deuce!&rdquo; exclaimed Raphael.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Planchette himself slipped the piece of skin between the metal plates of
+      the all-powerful press; and, brimful of the certainty of a scientific
+      conviction, he worked the crank energetically.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Lie flat, all of you; we are dead men!&rdquo; thundered Spieghalter, as he
+      himself fell prone on the floor.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A hideous shrieking sound rang through the workshops. The water in the
+      machine had broken the chamber, and now spouted out in a jet of
+      incalculable force; luckily it went in the direction of an old furnace,
+      which was overthrown, enveloped and carried away by a waterspout.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ha!&rdquo; remarked Planchette serenely, &ldquo;the piece of skin is as safe and
+      sound as my eye. There was a flaw in your reservoir somewhere, or a
+      crevice in the large tube&mdash;&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, no; I know my reservoir. The devil is in your contrivance, sir; you
+      can take it away,&rdquo; and the German pounced upon a smith&rsquo;s hammer, flung the
+      skin down on an anvil, and, with all the strength that rage gives, dealt
+      the talisman the most formidable blow that had ever resounded through his
+      workshops.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There is not so much as a mark on it!&rdquo; said Planchette, stroking the
+      perverse bit of skin.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The workmen hurried in. The foreman took the skin and buried it in the
+      glowing coal of a forge, while, in a semi-circle round the fire, they all
+      awaited the action of a huge pair of bellows. Raphael, Spieghalter, and
+      Professor Planchette stood in the midst of the grimy expectant crowd.
+      Raphael, looking round on faces dusted over with iron filings, white eyes,
+      greasy blackened clothing, and hairy chests, could have fancied himself
+      transported into the wild nocturnal world of German ballad poetry. After
+      the skin had been in the fire for ten minutes, the foreman pulled it out
+      with a pair of pincers.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Hand it over to me,&rdquo; said Raphael.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The foreman held it out by way of a joke. The Marquis readily handled it;
+      it was cool and flexible between his fingers. An exclamation of alarm went
+      up; the workmen fled in terror. Valentin was left alone with Planchette in
+      the empty workshop.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There is certainly something infernal in the thing!&rdquo; cried Raphael, in
+      desperation. &ldquo;Is no human power able to give me one more day of
+      existence?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I made a mistake, sir,&rdquo; said the mathematician, with a penitent
+      expression; &ldquo;we ought to have subjected that peculiar skin to the action
+      of a rolling machine. Where could my eyes have been when I suggested
+      compression!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It was I that asked for it,&rdquo; Raphael answered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The mathematician heaved a sigh of relief, like a culprit acquitted by a
+      dozen jurors. Still, the strange problem afforded by the skin interested
+      him; he meditated a moment, and then remarked:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This unknown material ought to be treated chemically by re-agents. Let us
+      call on Japhet&mdash;perhaps the chemist may have better luck than the
+      mechanic.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Valentin urged his horse into a rapid trot, hoping to find the chemist,
+      the celebrated Japhet, in his laboratory.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, old friend,&rdquo; Planchette began, seeing Japhet in his armchair,
+      examining a precipitate; &ldquo;how goes chemistry?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Gone to sleep. Nothing new at all. The Academie, however, has recognized
+      the existence of salicine, but salicine, asparagine, vauqueline, and
+      digitaline are not really discoveries&mdash;&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Since you cannot invent substances,&rdquo; said Raphael, &ldquo;you are obliged to
+      fall back on inventing names.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Most emphatically true, young man.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Here,&rdquo; said Planchette, addressing the chemist, &ldquo;try to analyze this
+      composition; if you can extract any element whatever from it, I christen
+      it diaboline beforehand, for we have just smashed a hydraulic press in
+      trying to compress it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Let&rsquo;s see! let&rsquo;s have a look at it!&rdquo; cried the delighted chemist; &ldquo;it
+      may, perhaps, be a fresh element.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is simply a piece of the skin of an ass, sir,&rdquo; said Raphael.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Sir!&rdquo; said the illustrious chemist sternly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am not joking,&rdquo; the Marquis answered, laying the piece of skin before
+      him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Baron Japhet applied the nervous fibres of his tongue to the skin; he had
+      skill in thus detecting salts, acids, alkalis, and gases. After several
+      experiments, he remarked:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No taste whatever! Come, we will give it a little fluoric acid to drink.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Subjected to the influence of this ready solvent of animal tissue, the
+      skin underwent no change whatsoever.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is not shagreen at all!&rdquo; the chemist cried. &ldquo;We will treat this
+      unknown mystery as a mineral, and try its mettle by dropping it in a
+      crucible where I have at this moment some red potash.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Japhet went out, and returned almost immediately.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Allow me to cut away a bit of this strange substance, sir,&rdquo; he said to
+      Raphael; &ldquo;it is so extraordinary&mdash;&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A bit!&rdquo; exclaimed Raphael; &ldquo;not so much as a hair&rsquo;s-breadth. You may try,
+      though,&rdquo; he added, half banteringly, half sadly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The chemist broke a razor in his desire to cut the skin; he tried to break
+      it by a powerful electric shock; next he submitted it to the influence of
+      a galvanic battery; but all the thunderbolts his science wotted of fell
+      harmless on the dreadful talisman.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was seven o&rsquo;clock in the evening. Planchette, Japhet, and Raphael,
+      unaware of the flight of time, were awaiting the outcome of a final
+      experiment. The Magic Skin emerged triumphant from a formidable encounter
+      in which it had been engaged with a considerable quantity of chloride of
+      nitrogen.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is all over with me,&rdquo; Raphael wailed. &ldquo;It is the finger of God! I
+      shall die!&mdash;&mdash;&rdquo; and he left the two amazed scientific men.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We must be very careful not to talk about this affair at the Academie;
+      our colleagues there would laugh at us,&rdquo; Planchette remarked to the
+      chemist, after a long pause, in which they looked at each other without
+      daring to communicate their thoughts. The learned pair looked like two
+      Christians who had issued from their tombs to find no God in the heavens.
+      Science had been powerless; acids, so much clear water; red potash had
+      been discredited; the galvanic battery and electric shock had been a
+      couple of playthings.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A hydraulic press broken like a biscuit!&rdquo; commented Planchette.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I believe in the devil,&rdquo; said the Baron Japhet, after a moment&rsquo;s silence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And I in God,&rdquo; replied Planchette.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Each spoke in character. The universe for a mechanician is a machine that
+      requires an operator; for chemistry&mdash;that fiendish employment of
+      decomposing all things&mdash;the world is a gas endowed with the power of
+      movement.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We cannot deny the fact,&rdquo; the chemist replied.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Pshaw! those gentlemen the doctrinaires have invented a nebulous aphorism
+      for our consolation&mdash;Stupid as a fact.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Your aphorism,&rdquo; said the chemist, &ldquo;seems to me as a fact very stupid.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      They began to laugh, and went off to dine like folk for whom a miracle is
+      nothing more than a phenomenon.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Valentin reached his own house shivering with rage and consumed with
+      anger. He had no more faith in anything. Conflicting thoughts shifted and
+      surged to and fro in his brain, as is the case with every man brought face
+      to face with an inconceivable fact. He had readily believed in some hidden
+      flaw in Spieghalter&rsquo;s apparatus; he had not been surprised by the
+      incompetence and failure of science and of fire; but the flexibility of
+      the skin as he handled it, taken with its stubbornness when all means of
+      destruction that man possesses had been brought to bear upon it in vain&mdash;these
+      things terrified him. The incontrovertible fact made him dizzy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am mad,&rdquo; he muttered. &ldquo;I have had no food since the morning, and yet I
+      am neither hungry nor thirsty, and there is a fire in my breast that burns
+      me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He put back the skin in the frame where it had been enclosed but lately,
+      drew a line in red ink about the actual configuration of the talisman, and
+      seated himself in his armchair.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Eight o&rsquo;clock already!&rdquo; he exclaimed. &ldquo;To-day has gone like a dream.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He leaned his elbow on the arm of the chair, propped his head with his
+      left hand, and so remained, lost in secret dark reflections and consuming
+      thoughts that men condemned to die bear away with them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;O Pauline!&rdquo; he cried. &ldquo;Poor child! there are gulfs that love can never
+      traverse, despite the strength of his wings.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Just then he very distinctly heard a smothered sigh, and knew by one of
+      the most tender privileges of passionate love that it was Pauline&rsquo;s
+      breathing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That is my death warrant,&rdquo; he said to himself. &ldquo;If she were there, I
+      should wish to die in her arms.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      A burst of gleeful and hearty laughter made him turn his face towards the
+      bed; he saw Pauline&rsquo;s face through the transparent curtains, smiling like
+      a child for gladness over a successful piece of mischief. Her pretty hair
+      fell over her shoulders in countless curls; she looked like a Bengal rose
+      upon a pile of white roses.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I cajoled Jonathan,&rdquo; said she. &ldquo;Doesn&rsquo;t the bed belong to me, to me who
+      am your wife? Don&rsquo;t scold me, darling; I only wanted to surprise you, to
+      sleep beside you. Forgive me for my freak.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She sprang out of bed like a kitten, showed herself gleaming in her lawn
+      raiment, and sat down on Raphael&rsquo;s knee.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Love, what gulf were you talking about?&rdquo; she said, with an anxious
+      expression apparent upon her face.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Death.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You hurt me,&rdquo; she answered. &ldquo;There are some thoughts upon which we, poor
+      women that we are, cannot dwell; they are death to us. Is it strength of
+      love in us, or lack of courage? I cannot tell. Death does not frighten
+      me,&rdquo; she began again, laughingly. &ldquo;To die with you, both together,
+      to-morrow morning, in one last embrace, would be joy. It seems to me that
+      even then I should have lived more than a hundred years. What does the
+      number of days matter if we have spent a whole lifetime of peace and love
+      in one night, in one hour?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You are right; Heaven is speaking through that pretty mouth of yours.
+      Grant that I may kiss you, and let us die,&rdquo; said Raphael.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then let us die,&rdquo; she said, laughing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Towards nine o&rsquo;clock in the morning the daylight streamed through the
+      chinks of the window shutters. Obscured somewhat by the muslin curtains,
+      it yet sufficed to show clearly the rich colors of the carpet, the silks
+      and furniture of the room, where the two lovers were lying asleep. The
+      gilding sparkled here and there. A ray of sunshine fell and faded upon the
+      soft down quilt that the freaks of live had thrown to the ground. The
+      outlines of Pauline&rsquo;s dress, hanging from a cheval glass, appeared like a
+      shadowy ghost. Her dainty shoes had been left at a distance from the bed.
+      A nightingale came to perch upon the sill; its trills repeated over again,
+      and the sounds of its wings suddenly shaken out for flight, awoke Raphael.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;For me to die,&rdquo; he said, following out a thought begun in his dream, &ldquo;my
+      organization, the mechanism of flesh and bone, that is quickened by the
+      will in me, and makes of me an individual MAN, must display some
+      perceptible disease. Doctors ought to understand the symptoms of any
+      attack on vitality, and could tell me whether I am sick or sound.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He gazed at his sleeping wife. She had stretched her head out to him,
+      expressing in this way even while she slept the anxious tenderness of
+      love. Pauline seemed to look at him as she lay with her face turned
+      towards him in an attitude as full of grace as a young child&rsquo;s, with her
+      pretty, half-opened mouth held out towards him, as she drew her light,
+      even breath. Her little pearly teeth seemed to heighten the redness of the
+      fresh lips with the smile hovering over them. The red glow in her
+      complexion was brighter, and its whiteness was, so to speak, whiter still
+      just then than in the most impassioned moments of the waking day. In her
+      unconstrained grace, as she lay, so full of believing trust, the adorable
+      attractions of childhood were added to the enchantments of love.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Even the most unaffected women still obey certain social conventions,
+      which restrain the free expansion of the soul within them during their
+      waking hours; but slumber seems to give them back the spontaneity of life
+      which makes infancy lovely. Pauline blushed for nothing; she was like one
+      of those beloved and heavenly beings, in whom reason has not yet put
+      motives into their actions and mystery into their glances. Her profile
+      stood out in sharp relief against the fine cambric of the pillows; there
+      was a certain sprightliness about her loose hair in confusion, mingled
+      with the deep lace ruffles; but she was sleeping in happiness, her long
+      lashes were tightly pressed against her cheeks, as if to secure her eyes
+      from too strong a light, or to aid an effort of her soul to recollect and
+      to hold fast a bliss that had been perfect but fleeting. Her tiny pink and
+      white ear, framed by a lock of her hair and outlined by a wrapping of
+      Mechlin lace, would have made an artist, a painter, an old man, wildly in
+      love, and would perhaps have restored a madman to his senses.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Is it not an ineffable bliss to behold the woman that you love, sleeping,
+      smiling in a peaceful dream beneath your protection, loving you even in
+      dreams, even at the point where the individual seems to cease to exist,
+      offering to you yet the mute lips that speak to you in slumber of the
+      latest kiss? Is it not indescribable happiness to see a trusting woman,
+      half-clad, but wrapped round in her love as by a cloak&mdash;modesty in
+      the midst of dishevelment&mdash;to see admiringly her scattered clothing,
+      the silken stocking hastily put off to please you last evening, the
+      unclasped girdle that implies a boundless faith in you. A whole romance
+      lies there in that girdle; the woman that it used to protect exists no
+      longer; she is yours, she has become <i>you</i>; henceforward any betrayal
+      of her is a blow dealt at yourself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In this softened mood Raphael&rsquo;s eyes wandered over the room, now filled
+      with memories and love, and where the very daylight seemed to take
+      delightful hues. Then he turned his gaze at last upon the outlines of the
+      woman&rsquo;s form, upon youth and purity, and love that even now had no thought
+      that was not for him alone, above all things, and longed to live for ever.
+      As his eyes fell upon Pauline, her own opened at once as if a ray of
+      sunlight had lighted on them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Good-morning,&rdquo; she said, smiling. &ldquo;How handsome you are, bad man!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The grace of love and youth, of silence and dawn, shone in their faces,
+      making a divine picture, with the fleeting spell over it all that belongs
+      only to the earliest days of passion, just as simplicity and artlessness
+      are the peculiar possession of childhood. Alas! love&rsquo;s springtide joys,
+      like our own youthful laughter, must even take flight, and live for us no
+      longer save in memory; either for our despair, or to shed some soothing
+      fragrance over us, according to the bent of our inmost thoughts.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What made me wake you?&rdquo; said Raphael. &ldquo;It was so great a pleasure to
+      watch you sleeping that it brought tears to my eyes.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And to mine, too,&rdquo; she answered. &ldquo;I cried in the night while I watched
+      you sleeping, but not with happiness. Raphael, dear, pray listen to me.
+      Your breathing is labored while you sleep, and something rattles in your
+      chest that frightens me. You have a little dry cough when you are asleep,
+      exactly like my father&rsquo;s, who is dying of phthisis. In those sounds from
+      your lungs I recognized some of the peculiar symptoms of that complaint.
+      Then you are feverish; I know you are; your hand was moist and burning&mdash;&mdash;Darling,
+      you are young,&rdquo; she added with a shudder, &ldquo;and you could still get over it
+      if unfortunately&mdash;&mdash;But, no,&rdquo; she cried cheerfully, &ldquo;there is no
+      &lsquo;unfortunately,&rsquo; the disease is contagious, so the doctors say.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She flung both arms about Raphael, drawing in his breath through one of
+      those kisses in which the soul reaches its end.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I do not wish to live to old age,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;Let us both die young, and
+      go to heaven while flowers fill our hands.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We always make such designs as those when we are well and strong,&rdquo;
+       Raphael replied, burying his hands in Pauline&rsquo;s hair. But even then a
+      horrible fit of coughing came on, one of those deep ominous coughs that
+      seem to come from the depths of the tomb, a cough that leaves the sufferer
+      ghastly pale, trembling, and perspiring; with aching sides and quivering
+      nerves, with a feeling of weariness pervading the very marrow of the
+      spine, and unspeakable languor in every vein. Raphael slowly laid himself
+      down, pale, exhausted, and overcome, like a man who has spent all the
+      strength in him over one final effort. Pauline&rsquo;s eyes, grown large with
+      terror, were fixed upon him; she lay quite motionless, pale, and silent.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Let us commit no more follies, my angel,&rdquo; she said, trying not to let
+      Raphael see the dreadful forebodings that disturbed her. She covered her
+      face with her hands, for she saw Death before her&mdash;the hideous
+      skeleton. Raphael&rsquo;s face had grown as pale and livid as any skull
+      unearthed from a churchyard to assist the studies of some scientific man.
+      Pauline remembered the exclamation that had escaped from Valentin the
+      previous evening, and to herself she said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, there are gulfs that love can never cross, and therein love must
+      bury itself.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      On a March morning, some days after this wretched scene, Raphael found
+      himself seated in an armchair, placed in the window in the full light of
+      day. Four doctors stood round him, each in turn trying his pulse, feeling
+      him over, and questioning him with apparent interest. The invalid sought
+      to guess their thoughts, putting a construction on every movement they
+      made, and on the slightest contractions of their brows. His last hope lay
+      in this consultation. This court of appeal was about to pronounce its
+      decision&mdash;life or death.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Valentin had summoned the oracles of modern medicine, so that he might
+      have the last word of science. Thanks to his wealth and title, there stood
+      before him three embodied theories; human knowledge fluctuated round the
+      three points. Three of the doctors brought among them the complete circle
+      of medical philosophy; they represented the points of conflict round which
+      the battle raged, between Spiritualism, Analysis, and goodness knows what
+      in the way of mocking eclecticism.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The fourth doctor was Horace Bianchon, a man of science with a future
+      before him, the most distinguished man of the new school in medicine, a
+      discreet and unassuming representative of a studious generation that is
+      preparing to receive the inheritance of fifty years of experience
+      treasured up by the Ecole de Paris, a generation that perhaps will erect
+      the monument for the building of which the centuries behind us have
+      collected the different materials. As a personal friend of the Marquis and
+      of Rastignac, he had been in attendance on the former for some days past,
+      and was helping him to answer the inquiries of the three professors,
+      occasionally insisting somewhat upon those symptoms which, in his opinion,
+      pointed to pulmonary disease.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You have been living at a great pace, leading a dissipated life, no
+      doubt, and you have devoted yourself largely to intellectual work?&rdquo;
+       queried one of the three celebrated authorities, addressing Raphael. He
+      was a square-headed man, with a large frame and energetic organization,
+      which seemed to mark him out as superior to his two rivals.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I made up my mind to kill myself with debauchery, after spending three
+      years over an extensive work, with which perhaps you may some day occupy
+      yourselves,&rdquo; Raphael replied.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The great doctor shook his head, and so displayed his satisfaction. &ldquo;I was
+      sure of it,&rdquo; he seemed to say to himself. He was the illustrious Brisset,
+      the successor of Cabanis and Bichat, head of the Organic School, a doctor
+      popular with believers in material and positive science, who see in man a
+      complete individual, subject solely to the laws of his own particular
+      organization; and who consider that his normal condition and abnormal
+      states of disease can both be traced to obvious causes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After this reply, Brisset looked, without speaking, at a middle-sized
+      person, whose darkly flushed countenance and glowing eyes seemed to belong
+      to some antique satyr; and who, leaning his back against the corner of the
+      embrasure, was studying Raphael, without saying a word. Doctor Cameristus,
+      a man of creeds and enthusiasms, the head of the &ldquo;Vitalists,&rdquo; a romantic
+      champion of the esoteric doctrines of Van Helmont, discerned a lofty
+      informing principle in human life, a mysterious and inexplicable
+      phenomenon which mocks at the scalpel, deceives the surgeon, eludes the
+      drugs of the pharmacopoeia, the formulae of algebra, the demonstrations of
+      anatomy, and derides all our efforts; a sort of invisible, intangible
+      flame, which, obeying some divinely appointed law, will often linger on in
+      a body in our opinion devoted to death, while it takes flight from an
+      organization well fitted for prolonged existence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A bitter smile hovered upon the lips of the third doctor, Maugredie, a man
+      of acknowledged ability, but a Pyrrhonist and a scoffer, with the scalpel
+      for his one article of faith. He would consider, as a concession to
+      Brisset, that a man who, as a matter of fact, was perfectly well was dead,
+      and recognize with Cameristus that a man might be living on after his
+      apparent demise. He found something sensible in every theory, and embraced
+      none of them, claiming that the best of all systems of medicine was to
+      have none at all, and to stick to facts. This Panurge of the Clinical
+      Schools, the king of observers, the great investigator, a great sceptic,
+      the man of desperate expedients, was scrutinizing the Magic Skin.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I should very much like to be a witness of the coincidence of its
+      retrenchment with your wish,&rdquo; he said to the Marquis.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Where is the use?&rdquo; cried Brisset.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Where is the use?&rdquo; echoed Cameristus.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah, you are both of the same mind,&rdquo; replied Maugredie.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The contraction is perfectly simple,&rdquo; Brisset went on.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is supernatural,&rdquo; remarked Cameristus.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;In short,&rdquo; Maugredie made answer, with affected solemnity, and handing
+      the piece of skin to Raphael as he spoke, &ldquo;the shriveling faculty of the
+      skin is a fact inexplicable, and yet quite natural, which, ever since the
+      world began, has been the despair of medicine and of pretty women.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      All Valentin&rsquo;s observation could discover no trace of a feeling for his
+      troubles in any of the three doctors. The three received every answer in
+      silence, scanned him unconcernedly, and interrogated him
+      unsympathetically. Politeness did not conceal their indifference; whether
+      deliberation or certainty was the cause, their words at any rate came so
+      seldom and so languidly, that at times Raphael thought that their
+      attention was wandering. From time to time Brisset, the sole speaker,
+      remarked, &ldquo;Good! just so!&rdquo; as Bianchon pointed out the existence of each
+      desperate symptom. Cameristus seemed to be deep in meditation; Maugredie
+      looked like a comic author, studying two queer characters with a view to
+      reproducing them faithfully upon the stage. There was deep, unconcealed
+      distress, and grave compassion in Horace Bianchon&rsquo;s face. He had been a
+      doctor for too short a time to be untouched by suffering and unmoved by a
+      deathbed; he had not learned to keep back the sympathetic tears that
+      obscure a man&rsquo;s clear vision and prevent him from seizing like the general
+      of an army, upon the auspicious moment for victory, in utter disregard of
+      the groans of dying men.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After spending about half an hour over taking in some sort the measure of
+      the patient and the complaint, much as a tailor measures a young man for a
+      coat when he orders his wedding outfit, the authorities uttered several
+      commonplaces, and even talked of politics. Then they decided to go into
+      Raphael&rsquo;s study to exchange their ideas and frame their verdict.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;May I not be present during the discussion, gentlemen?&rdquo; Valentin had
+      asked them, but Brisset and Maugredie protested against this, and, in
+      spite of their patient&rsquo;s entreaties, declined altogether to deliberate in
+      his presence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Raphael gave way before their custom, thinking that he could slip into a
+      passage adjoining, whence he could easily overhear the medical conference
+      in which the three professors were about to engage.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Permit me, gentlemen,&rdquo; said Brisset, as they entered, &ldquo;to give you my own
+      opinion at once. I neither wish to force it upon you nor to have it
+      discussed. In the first place, it is unbiased, concise, and based on an
+      exact similarity that exists between one of my own patients and the
+      subject that we have been called in to examine; and, moreover, I am
+      expected at my hospital. The importance of the case that demands my
+      presence there will excuse me for speaking the first word. The subject
+      with which we are concerned has been exhausted in an equal degree by
+      intellectual labors&mdash;what did he set about, Horace?&rdquo; he asked of the
+      young doctor.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A &lsquo;Theory of the Will,&rsquo;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The devil! but that&rsquo;s a big subject. He is exhausted, I say, by too much
+      brain-work, by irregular courses, and by the repeated use of too powerful
+      stimulants. Violent exertion of body and mind has demoralized the whole
+      system. It is easy, gentlemen, to recognize in the symptoms of the face
+      and body generally intense irritation of the stomach, an affection of the
+      great sympathetic nerve, acute sensibility of the epigastric region, and
+      contraction of the right and left hypochondriac. You have noticed, too,
+      the large size and prominence of the liver. M. Bianchon has, besides,
+      constantly watched the patient, and he tells us that digestion is
+      troublesome and difficult. Strictly speaking, there is no stomach left,
+      and so the man has disappeared. The brain is atrophied because the man
+      digests no longer. The progressive deterioration wrought in the epigastric
+      region, the seat of vitality, has vitiated the whole system. Thence, by
+      continuous fevered vibrations, the disorder has reached the brain by means
+      of the nervous plexus, hence the excessive irritation in that organ. There
+      is monomania. The patient is burdened with a fixed idea. That piece of
+      skin really contracts, to his way of thinking; very likely it always has
+      been as we have seen it; but whether it contracts or no, that thing is for
+      him just like the fly that some Grand Vizier or other had on his nose. If
+      you put leeches at once on the epigastrium, and reduce the irritation in
+      that part, which is the very seat of man&rsquo;s life, and if you diet the
+      patient, the monomania will leave him. I will say no more to Dr. Bianchon;
+      he should be able to grasp the whole treatment as well as the details.
+      There may be, perhaps, some complication of the disease&mdash;the
+      bronchial tubes, possibly, may be also inflamed; but I believe that
+      treatment for the intestinal organs is very much more important and
+      necessary, and more urgently required than for the lungs. Persistent study
+      of abstract matters, and certain violent passions, have induced serious
+      disorders in that vital mechanism. However, we are in time to set these
+      conditions right. Nothing is too seriously affected. You will easily get
+      your friend round again,&rdquo; he remarked to Bianchon.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Our learned colleague is taking the effect for the cause,&rdquo; Cameristus
+      replied. &ldquo;Yes, the changes that he has observed so keenly certainly exist
+      in the patient; but it is not the stomach that, by degrees, has set up
+      nervous action in the system, and so affected the brain, like a hole in a
+      window pane spreading cracks round about it. It took a blow of some kind
+      to make a hole in the window; who gave the blow? Do we know that? Have we
+      investigated the patient&rsquo;s case sufficiently? Are we acquainted with all
+      the events of his life?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The vital principle, gentlemen,&rdquo; he continued, &ldquo;the Archeus of Van
+      Helmont, is affected in his case&mdash;the very essence and centre of life
+      is attacked. The divine spark, the transitory intelligence which holds the
+      organism together, which is the source of the will, the inspiration of
+      life, has ceased to regulate the daily phenomena of the mechanism and the
+      functions of every organ; thence arise all the complications which my
+      learned colleague has so thoroughly appreciated. The epigastric region
+      does not affect the brain but the brain affects the epigastric region.
+      No,&rdquo; he went on, vigorously slapping his chest, &ldquo;no, I am not a stomach in
+      the form of a man. No, everything does not lie there. I do not feel that I
+      have the courage to say that if the epigastric region is in good order,
+      everything else is in a like condition&mdash;&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We cannot trace,&rdquo; he went on more mildly, &ldquo;to one physical cause the
+      serious disturbances that supervene in this or that subject which has been
+      dangerously attacked, nor submit them to a uniform treatment. No one man
+      is like another. We have each peculiar organs, differently affected,
+      diversely nourished, adapted to perform different functions, and to induce
+      a condition necessary to the accomplishment of an order of things which is
+      unknown to us. The sublime will has so wrought that a little portion of
+      the great All is set within us to sustain the phenomena of living; in
+      every man it formulates itself distinctly, making each, to all appearance,
+      a separate individual, yet in one point co-existent with the infinite
+      cause. So we ought to make a separate study of each subject, discover all
+      about it, find out in what its life consists, and wherein its power lies.
+      From the softness of a wet sponge to the hardness of pumice-stone there
+      are infinite fine degrees of difference. Man is just like that. Between
+      the sponge-like organizations of the lymphatic and the vigorous iron
+      muscles of such men as are destined for a long life, what a margin for
+      errors for the single inflexible system of a lowering treatment to commit;
+      a system that reduces the capacities of the human frame, which you always
+      conclude have been over-excited. Let us look for the origin of the disease
+      in the mental and not in the physical viscera. A doctor is an inspired
+      being, endowed by God with a special gift&mdash;the power to read the
+      secrets of vitality; just as the prophet has received the eyes that
+      foresee the future, the poet his faculty of evoking nature, and the
+      musician the power of arranging sounds in an harmonious order that is
+      possibly a copy of an ideal harmony on high.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There is his everlasting system of medicine, arbitrary, monarchical, and
+      pious,&rdquo; muttered Brisset.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Gentlemen,&rdquo; Maugredie broke in hastily, to distract attention from
+      Brisset&rsquo;s comment, &ldquo;don&rsquo;t let us lose sight of the patient.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What is the good of science?&rdquo; Raphael moaned. &ldquo;Here is my recovery
+      halting between a string of beads and a rosary of leeches, between
+      Dupuytren&rsquo;s bistoury and Prince Hohenlohe&rsquo;s prayer. There is Maugredie
+      suspending his judgment on the line that divides facts from words, mind
+      from matter. Man&rsquo;s &lsquo;it is,&rsquo; and &lsquo;it is not,&rsquo; is always on my track; it is
+      the <i>Carymary Carymara</i> of Rabelais for evermore: my disorder is
+      spiritual, <i>Carymary</i>, or material, <i>Carymara</i>. Shall I live?
+      They have no idea. Planchette was more straightforward with me, at any
+      rate, when he said, &lsquo;I do not know.&rsquo;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Just then Valentin heard Maugredie&rsquo;s voice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The patient suffers from monomania; very good, I am quite of that
+      opinion,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;but he has two hundred thousand a year; monomaniacs of
+      that kind are very uncommon. As for knowing whether his epigastric region
+      has affected his brain, or his brain his epigastric region, we shall find
+      that out, perhaps, whenever he dies. But to resume. There is no disputing
+      the fact that he is ill; some sort of treatment he must have. Let us leave
+      theories alone, and put leeches on him, to counteract the nervous and
+      intestinal irritation, as to the existence of which we all agree; and let
+      us send him to drink the waters, in that way we shall act on both systems
+      at once. If there really is tubercular disease, we can hardly expect to
+      save his life; so that&mdash;&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Raphael abruptly left the passage, and went back to his armchair. The four
+      doctors very soon came out of the study; Horace was the spokesman.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;These gentlemen,&rdquo; he told him, &ldquo;have unanimously agreed that leeches must
+      be applied to the stomach at once, and that both physical and moral
+      treatment are imperatively needed. In the first place, a carefully
+      prescribed rule of diet, so as to soothe the internal irritation&rdquo;&mdash;here
+      Brisset signified his approval; &ldquo;and in the second, a hygienic regimen, to
+      set your general condition right. We all, therefore, recommend you to go
+      to take the waters in Aix in Savoy; or, if you like it better, at Mont
+      Dore in Auvergne; the air and the situation are both pleasanter in Savoy
+      than in the Cantal, but you will consult your own taste.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Here it was Cameristus who nodded assent.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;These gentlemen,&rdquo; Bianchon continued, &ldquo;having recognized a slight
+      affection of the respiratory organs, are agreed as to the utility of the
+      previous course of treatment that I have prescribed. They think that there
+      will be no difficulty about restoring you to health, and that everything
+      depends upon a wise and alternate employment of these various means. And&mdash;&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And that is the cause of the milk in the cocoanut,&rdquo; said Raphael, with a
+      smile, as he led Horace into his study to pay the fees for this useless
+      consultation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Their conclusions are logical,&rdquo; the young doctor replied. &ldquo;Cameristus
+      feels, Brisset examines, Maugredie doubts. Has not man a soul, a body, and
+      an intelligence? One of these three elemental constituents always
+      influences us more or less strongly; there will always be the personal
+      element in human science. Believe me, Raphael, we effect no cures; we only
+      assist them. Another system&mdash;the use of mild remedies while Nature
+      exerts her powers&mdash;lies between the extremes of theory of Brisset and
+      Cameristus, but one ought to have known the patient for some ten years or
+      so to obtain a good result on these lines. Negation lies at the back of
+      all medicine, as in every other science. So endeavor to live wholesomely;
+      try a trip to Savoy; the best course is, and always will be, to trust to
+      Nature.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It was a month later, on a fine summer-like evening, that several people,
+      who were taking the waters at Aix, returned from the promenade and met
+      together in the salons of the Club. Raphael remained alone by a window for
+      a long time. His back was turned upon the gathering, and he himself was
+      deep in those involuntary musings in which thoughts arise in succession
+      and fade away, shaping themselves indistinctly, passing over us like thin,
+      almost colorless clouds. Melancholy is sweet to us then, and delight is
+      shadowy, for the soul is half asleep. Valentin gave himself up to this
+      life of sensations; he was steeping himself in the warm, soft twilight,
+      enjoying the pure air with the scent of the hills in it, happy in that he
+      felt no pain, and had tranquilized his threatening Magic Skin at last. It
+      grew cooler as the red glow of the sunset faded on the mountain peaks; he
+      shut the window and left his place.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Will you be so kind as not to close the windows, sir?&rdquo; said an old lady;
+      &ldquo;we are being stifled&mdash;&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The peculiarly sharp and jarring tones in which the phrase was uttered
+      grated on Raphael&rsquo;s ears; it fell on them like an indiscreet remark let
+      slip by some man in whose friendship we would fain believe, a word which
+      reveals unsuspected depths of selfishness and destroys some pleasing
+      sentimental illusion of ours. The Marquis glanced, with the cool
+      inscrutable expression of a diplomatist, at the old lady, called a
+      servant, and, when he came, curtly bade him:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Open that window.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Great surprise was clearly expressed on all faces at the words. The whole
+      roomful began to whisper to each other, and turned their eyes upon the
+      invalid, as though he had given some serious offence. Raphael, who had
+      never quite managed to rid himself of the bashfulness of his early youth,
+      felt a momentary confusion; then he shook off his torpor, exerted his
+      faculties, and asked himself the meaning of this strange scene.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A sudden and rapid impulse quickened his brain; the past weeks appeared
+      before him in a clear and definite vision; the reasons for the feelings he
+      inspired in others stood out for him in relief, like the veins of some
+      corpse which a naturalist, by some cunningly contrived injection, has
+      colored so as to show their least ramifications.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He discerned himself in this fleeting picture; he followed out his own
+      life in it, thought by thought, day after day. He saw himself, not without
+      astonishment, an absent gloomy figure in the midst of these lively folk,
+      always musing over his own fate, always absorbed by his own sufferings,
+      seemingly impatient of the most harmless chat. He saw how he had shunned
+      the ephemeral intimacies that travelers are so ready to establish&mdash;no
+      doubt because they feel sure of never meeting each other again&mdash;and
+      how he had taken little heed of those about him. He saw himself like the
+      rocks without, unmoved by the caresses or the stormy surgings of the
+      waves.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then, by a gift of insight seldom accorded, he read the thoughts of all
+      those about him. The light of a candle revealed the sardonic profile and
+      yellow cranium of an old man; he remembered now that he had won from him,
+      and had never proposed that the other should have his revenge; a little
+      further on he saw a pretty woman, whose lively advances he had met with
+      frigid coolness; there was not a face there that did not reproach him with
+      some wrong done, inexplicably to all appearance, but the real offence in
+      every case lay in some mortification, some invisible hurt dealt to
+      self-love. He had unintentionally jarred on all the small susceptibilities
+      of the circle round about him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His guests on various occasions, and those to whom he had lent his horses,
+      had taken offence at his luxurious ways; their ungraciousness had been a
+      surprise to him; he had spared them further humiliations of that kind, and
+      they had considered that he looked down upon them, and had accused him of
+      haughtiness ever since. He could read their inmost thoughts as he fathomed
+      their natures in this way. Society with its polish and varnish grew
+      loathsome to him. He was envied and hated for his wealth and superior
+      ability; his reserve baffled the inquisitive; his humility seemed like
+      haughtiness to these petty superficial natures. He guessed the secret
+      unpardonable crime which he had committed against them; he had overstepped
+      the limits of the jurisdiction of their mediocrity. He had resisted their
+      inquisitorial tyranny; he could dispense with their society; and all of
+      them, therefore, had instinctively combined to make him feel their power,
+      and to take revenge upon this incipient royalty by submitting him to a
+      kind of ostracism, and so teaching him that they in their turn could do
+      without him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Pity came over him, first of all, at this aspect of mankind, but very soon
+      he shuddered at the thought of the power that came thus, at will, and
+      flung aside for him the veil of flesh under which the moral nature is
+      hidden away. He closed his eyes, so as to see no more. A black curtain was
+      drawn all at once over this unlucky phantom show of truth; but still he
+      found himself in the terrible loneliness that surrounds every power and
+      dominion. Just then a violent fit of coughing seized him. Far from
+      receiving one single word&mdash;indifferent, and meaningless, it is true,
+      but still containing, among well-bred people brought together by chance,
+      at least some pretence of civil commiseration&mdash;he now heard hostile
+      ejaculations and muttered complaints. Society there assembled disdained
+      any pantomime on his account, perhaps because he had gauged its real
+      nature too well.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;His complaint is contagious.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The president of the Club ought to forbid him to enter the salon.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is contrary to all rules and regulations to cough in that way!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;When a man is as ill as that, he ought not to come to take the waters&mdash;&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He will drive me away from the place.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Raphael rose and walked about the rooms to screen himself from their
+      unanimous execrations. He thought to find a shelter, and went up to a
+      young pretty lady who sat doing nothing, minded to address some pretty
+      speeches to her; but as he came towards her, she turned her back upon him,
+      and pretended to be watching the dancers. Raphael feared lest he might
+      have made use of the talisman already that evening; and feeling that he
+      had neither the wish nor the courage to break into the conversation, he
+      left the salon and took refuge in the billiard-room. No one there greeted
+      him, nobody spoke to him, no one sent so much as a friendly glance in his
+      direction. His turn of mind, naturally meditative, had discovered
+      instinctively the general grounds and reasons for the aversion he
+      inspired. This little world was obeying, unconsciously perhaps, the
+      sovereign law which rules over polite society; its inexorable nature was
+      becoming apparent in its entirety to Raphael&rsquo;s eyes. A glance into the
+      past showed it to him, as a type completely realized in Foedora.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He would no more meet with sympathy here for his bodily ills than he had
+      received it at her hands for the distress in his heart. The fashionable
+      world expels every suffering creature from its midst, just as the body of
+      a man in robust health rejects any germ of disease. The world holds
+      suffering and misfortune in abhorrence; it dreads them like the plague; it
+      never hesitates between vice and trouble, for vice is a luxury.
+      Ill-fortune may possess a majesty of its own, but society can belittle it
+      and make it ridiculous by an epigram. Society draws caricatures, and in
+      this way flings in the teeth of fallen kings the affronts which it fancies
+      it has received from them; society, like the Roman youth at the circus,
+      never shows mercy to the fallen gladiator; mockery and money are its vital
+      necessities. &ldquo;Death to the weak!&rdquo; That is the oath taken by this kind of
+      Equestrian order, instituted in their midst by all the nations of the
+      world; everywhere it makes for the elevation of the rich, and its motto is
+      deeply graven in hearts that wealth has turned to stone, or that have been
+      reared in aristocratic prejudices.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Assemble a collection of school-boys together. That will give you a
+      society in miniature, a miniature which represents life more truly,
+      because it is so frank and artless; and in it you will always find poor
+      isolated beings, relegated to some place in the general estimations
+      between pity and contempt, on account of their weakness and suffering. To
+      these the Evangel promises heaven hereafter. Go lower yet in the scale of
+      organized creation. If some bird among its fellows in the courtyard
+      sickens, the others fall upon it with their beaks, pluck out its feathers,
+      and kill it. The whole world, in accordance with its character of egotism,
+      brings all its severity to bear upon wretchedness that has the hardihood
+      to spoil its festivities, and to trouble its joys.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Any sufferer in mind or body, any helpless or poor man, is a pariah. He
+      had better remain in his solitude; if he crosses the boundary-line, he
+      will find winter everywhere; he will find freezing cold in other men&rsquo;s
+      looks, manners, words, and hearts; and lucky indeed is he if he does not
+      receive an insult where he expected that sympathy would be expended upon
+      him. Let the dying keep to their bed of neglect, and age sit lonely by its
+      fireside. Portionless maids, freeze and burn in your solitary attics. If
+      the world tolerates misery of any kind, it is to turn it to account for
+      its own purposes, to make some use of it, saddle and bridle it, put a bit
+      in its mouth, ride it about, and get some fun out of it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Crotchety spinsters, ladies&rsquo; companions, put a cheerful face upon it,
+      endure the humors of your so-called benefactress, carry her lapdogs for
+      her; you have an English poodle for your rival, and you must seek to
+      understand the moods of your patroness, and amuse her, and&mdash;keep
+      silence about yourselves. As for you, unblushing parasite, uncrowned king
+      of unliveried servants, leave your real character at home, let your
+      digestion keep pace with your host&rsquo;s laugh when he laughs, mingle your
+      tears with his, and find his epigrams amusing; if you want to relieve your
+      mind about him, wait till he is ruined. That is the way the world shows
+      its respect for the unfortunate; it persecutes them, or slays them in the
+      dust.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Such thoughts as these welled up in Raphael&rsquo;s heart with the suddenness of
+      poetic inspiration. He looked around him, and felt the influence of the
+      forbidding gloom that society breathes out in order to rid itself of the
+      unfortunate; it nipped his soul more effectually than the east wind grips
+      the body in December. He locked his arms over his chest, set his back
+      against the wall, and fell into a deep melancholy. He mused upon the
+      meagre happiness that this depressing way of living can give. What did it
+      amount to? Amusement with no pleasure in it, gaiety without gladness,
+      joyless festivity, fevered dreams empty of all delight, firewood or ashes
+      on the hearth without a spark of flame in them. When he raised his head,
+      he found himself alone, all the billiard players had gone.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have only to let them know my power to make them worship my coughing
+      fits,&rdquo; he said to himself, and wrapped himself against the world in the
+      cloak of his contempt.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Next day the resident doctor came to call upon him, and took an anxious
+      interest in his health. Raphael felt a thrill of joy at the friendly words
+      addressed to him. The doctor&rsquo;s face, to his thinking, wore an expression
+      that was kind and pleasant; the pale curls of his wig seemed redolent of
+      philanthropy; the square cut of his coat, the loose folds of his trousers,
+      his big Quaker-like shoes, everything about him down to the powder shaken
+      from his queue and dusted in a circle upon his slightly stooping
+      shoulders, revealed an apostolic nature, and spoke of Christian charity
+      and of the self-sacrifice of a man, who, out of sheer devotion to his
+      patients, had compelled himself to learn to play whist and tric-trac so
+      well that he never lost money to any of them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My Lord Marquis,&rdquo; said he, after a long talk with Raphael, &ldquo;I can dispel
+      your uneasiness beyond all doubt. I know your constitution well enough by
+      this time to assure you that the doctors in Paris, whose great abilities I
+      know, are mistaken as to the nature of your complaint. You can live as
+      long as Methuselah, my Lord Marquis, accidents only excepted. Your lungs
+      are as sound as a blacksmith&rsquo;s bellows, your stomach would put an ostrich
+      to the blush; but if you persist in living at high altitude, you are
+      running the risk of a prompt interment in consecrated soil. A few words,
+      my Lord Marquis, will make my meaning clear to you.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Chemistry,&rdquo; he began, &ldquo;has shown us that man&rsquo;s breathing is a real
+      process of combustion, and the intensity of its action varies according to
+      the abundance or scarcity of the phlogistic element stored up by the
+      organism of each individual. In your case, the phlogistic, or inflammatory
+      element is abundant; if you will permit me to put it so, you generate
+      superfluous oxygen, possessing as you do the inflammatory temperament of a
+      man destined to experience strong emotions. While you breath the keen,
+      pure air that stimulates life in men of lymphatic constitution, you are
+      accelerating an expenditure of vitality already too rapid. One of the
+      conditions for existence for you is the heavier atmosphere of the plains
+      and valleys. Yes, the vital air for a man consumed by his genius lies in
+      the fertile pasture-lands of Germany, at Toplitz or Baden-Baden. If
+      England is not obnoxious to you, its misty climate would reduce your
+      fever; but the situation of our baths, a thousand feet above the level of
+      the Mediterranean, is dangerous for you. That is my opinion at least,&rdquo; he
+      said, with a deprecatory gesture, &ldquo;and I give it in opposition to our
+      interests, for, if you act upon it, we shall unfortunately lose you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      But for these closing words of his, the affable doctor&rsquo;s seeming
+      good-nature would have completely won Raphael over; but he was too
+      profoundly observant not to understand the meaning of the tone, the look
+      and gesture that accompanied that mild sarcasm, not to see that the little
+      man had been sent on this errand, no doubt, by a flock of his rejoicing
+      patients. The florid-looking idlers, tedious old women, nomad English
+      people, and fine ladies who had given their husbands the slip, and were
+      escorted hither by their lovers&mdash;one and all were in a plot to drive
+      away a wretched, feeble creature to die, who seemed unable to hold out
+      against a daily renewed persecution! Raphael accepted the challenge, he
+      foresaw some amusement to be derived from their manoeuvres.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;As you would be grieved at losing me,&rdquo; said he to the doctor, &ldquo;I will
+      endeavor to avail myself of your good advice without leaving the place. I
+      will set about having a house built to-morrow, and the atmosphere within
+      it shall be regulated by your instructions.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The doctor understood the sarcastic smile that lurked about Raphael&rsquo;s
+      mouth, and took his leave without finding another word to say.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Lake of Bourget lies seven hundred feet above the Mediterranean, in a
+      great hollow among the jagged peaks of the hills; it sparkles there, the
+      bluest drop of water in the world. From the summit of the Cat&rsquo;s Tooth the
+      lake below looks like a stray turquoise. This lovely sheet of water is
+      about twenty-seven miles round, and in some places is nearly five hundred
+      feet deep.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Under the cloudless sky, in your boat in the midst of the great expanse of
+      water, with only the sound of the oars in your ears, only the vague
+      outline of the hills on the horizon before you; you admire the glittering
+      snows of the French Maurienne; you pass, now by masses of granite clad in
+      the velvet of green turf or in low-growing shrubs, now by pleasant sloping
+      meadows; there is always a wilderness on the one hand and fertile lands on
+      the other, and both harmonies and dissonances compose a scene for you
+      where everything is at once small and vast, and you feel yourself to be a
+      poor onlooker at a great banquet. The configuration of the mountains
+      brings about misleading optical conditions and illusions of perspective; a
+      pine-tree a hundred feet in height looks to be a mere weed; wide valleys
+      look as narrow as meadow paths. The lake is the only one where the
+      confidences of heart and heart can be exchanged. There one can live; there
+      one can meditate. Nowhere on earth will you find a closer understanding
+      between the water, the sky, the mountains, and the fields. There is a balm
+      there for all the agitations of life. The place keeps the secrets of
+      sorrow to itself, the sorrow that grows less beneath its soothing
+      influence; and to love, it gives a grave and meditative cast, deepening
+      passion and purifying it. A kiss there becomes something great. But beyond
+      all other things it is the lake for memories; it aids them by lending to
+      them the hues of its own waves; it is a mirror in which everything is
+      reflected. Only here, with this lovely landscape all around him, could
+      Raphael endure the burden laid upon him; here he could remain as a languid
+      dreamer, without a wish of his own.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He went out upon the lake after the doctor&rsquo;s visit, and was landed at a
+      lonely point on the pleasant slope where the village of Saint-Innocent is
+      situated. The view from this promontory, as one may call it, comprises the
+      heights of Bugey with the Rhone flowing at their foot, and the end of the
+      lake; but Raphael liked to look at the opposite shore from thence, at the
+      melancholy looking Abbey of Haute-Combe, the burying-place of the
+      Sardinian kings, who lie prostrate there before the hills, like pilgrims
+      come at last to their journey&rsquo;s end. The silence of the landscape was
+      broken by the even rhythm of the strokes of the oar; it seemed to find a
+      voice for the place, in monotonous cadences like the chanting of monks.
+      The Marquis was surprised to find visitors to this usually lonely part of
+      the lake; and as he mused, he watched the people seated in the boat, and
+      recognized in the stern the elderly lady who had spoken so harshly to him
+      the evening before.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      No one took any notice of Raphael as the boat passed, except the elderly
+      lady&rsquo;s companion, a poor old maid of noble family, who bowed to him, and
+      whom it seemed to him that he saw for the first time. A few seconds later
+      he had already forgotten the visitors, who had rapidly disappeared behind
+      the promontory, when he heard the fluttering of a dress and the sound of
+      light footsteps not far from him. He turned about and saw the companion;
+      and, guessing from her embarrassed manner that she wished to speak with
+      him, he walked towards her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She was somewhere about thirty-six years of age, thin and tall, reserved
+      and prim, and, like all old maids, seemed puzzled to know which way to
+      look, an expression no longer in keeping with her measured, springless,
+      and hesitating steps. She was both young and old at the same time, and, by
+      a certain dignity in her carriage, showed the high value which she set
+      upon her charms and perfections. In addition, her movements were all
+      demure and discreet, like those of women who are accustomed to take great
+      care of themselves, no doubt because they desire not to be cheated of
+      love, their destined end.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Your life is in danger, sir; do not come to the Club again!&rdquo; she said,
+      stepping back a pace or two from Raphael, as if her reputation had already
+      been compromised.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But, mademoiselle,&rdquo; said Raphael, smiling, &ldquo;please explain yourself more
+      clearly, since you have condescended so far&mdash;&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah,&rdquo; she answered, &ldquo;unless I had had a very strong motive, I should never
+      have run the risk of offending the countess, for if she ever came to know
+      that I had warned you&mdash;&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And who would tell her, mademoiselle?&rdquo; cried Raphael.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;True,&rdquo; the old maid answered. She looked at him, quaking like an owl out
+      in the sunlight. &ldquo;But think of yourself,&rdquo; she went on; &ldquo;several young men,
+      who want to drive you away from the baths, have agreed to pick a quarrel
+      with you, and to force you into a duel.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The elderly lady&rsquo;s voice sounded in the distance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Mademoiselle,&rdquo; began the Marquis, &ldquo;my gratitude&mdash;&mdash;&rdquo; But his
+      protectress had fled already; she had heard the voice of her mistress
+      squeaking afresh among the rocks.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Poor girl! unhappiness always understands and helps the unhappy,&rdquo; Raphael
+      thought, and sat himself down at the foot of a tree.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The key of every science is, beyond cavil, the mark of interrogation; we
+      owe most of our greatest discoveries to a <i>Why</i>? and all the wisdom
+      in the world, perhaps, consists in asking <i>Wherefore</i>? in every
+      connection. But, on the other hand, this acquired prescience is the ruin
+      of our illusions.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So Valentin, having taken the old maid&rsquo;s kindly action for the text of his
+      wandering thoughts, without the deliberate promptings of philosophy, must
+      find it full of gall and wormwood.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is not at all extraordinary that a gentlewoman&rsquo;s gentlewoman should
+      take a fancy to me,&rdquo; said he to himself. &ldquo;I am twenty-seven years old, and
+      I have a title and an income of two hundred thousand a year. But that her
+      mistress, who hates water like a rabid cat&mdash;for it would be hard to
+      give the palm to either in that matter&mdash;that her mistress should have
+      brought her here in a boat! Is not that very strange and wonderful? Those
+      two women came into Savoy to sleep like marmots; they ask if day has
+      dawned at noon; and to think that they could get up this morning before
+      eight o&rsquo;clock, to take their chances in running after me!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Very soon the old maid and her elderly innocence became, in his eyes, a
+      fresh manifestation of that artificial, malicious little world. It was a
+      paltry device, a clumsy artifice, a piece of priest&rsquo;s or woman&rsquo;s craft.
+      Was the duel a myth, or did they merely want to frighten him? But these
+      petty creatures, impudent and teasing as flies, had succeeded in wounding
+      his vanity, in rousing his pride, and exciting his curiosity. Unwilling to
+      become their dupe, or to be taken for a coward, and even diverted perhaps
+      by the little drama, he went to the Club that very evening.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He stood leaning against the marble chimney-piece, and stayed there
+      quietly in the middle of the principal saloon, doing his best to give no
+      one any advantage over him; but he scrutinized the faces about him, and
+      gave a certain vague offence to those assembled, by his inspection. Like a
+      dog aware of his strength, he awaited the contest on his own ground,
+      without necessary barking. Towards the end of the evening he strolled into
+      the cardroom, walking between the door and another that opened into the
+      billiard-room, throwing a glance from time to time over a group of young
+      men that had gathered there. He heard his name mentioned after a turn or
+      two. Although they lowered their voices, Raphael easily guessed that he
+      had become the topic of their debate, and he ended by catching a phrase or
+      two spoken aloud.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, I.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I dare you to do it!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Let us make a bet on it!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, he will do it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Just as Valentin, curious to learn the matter of the wager, came up to pay
+      closer attention to what they were saying, a tall, strong, good-looking
+      young fellow, who, however, possessed the impertinent stare peculiar to
+      people who have material force at their back, came out of the
+      billiard-room.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am deputed, sir,&rdquo; he said coolly addressing the Marquis, &ldquo;to make you
+      aware of something which you do not seem to know; your face and person
+      generally are a source of annoyance to every one here, and to me in
+      particular. You have too much politeness not to sacrifice yourself to the
+      public good, and I beg that you will not show yourself in the Club again.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This sort of joke has been perpetrated before, sir, in garrison towns at
+      the time of the Empire; but nowadays it is exceedingly bad form,&rdquo; said
+      Raphael drily.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am not joking,&rdquo; the young man answered; &ldquo;and I repeat it: your health
+      will be considerably the worse for a stay here; the heat and light, the
+      air of the saloon, and the company are all bad for your complaint.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Where did you study medicine?&rdquo; Raphael inquired.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I took my bachelor&rsquo;s degree on Lepage&rsquo;s shooting-ground in Paris, and was
+      made a doctor at Cerizier&rsquo;s, the king of foils.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There is one last degree left for you to take,&rdquo; said Valentin; &ldquo;study the
+      ordinary rules of politeness, and you will be a perfect gentlemen.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The young men all came out of the billiard-room just then, some disposed
+      to laugh, some silent. The attention of other players was drawn to the
+      matter; they left their cards to watch a quarrel that rejoiced their
+      instincts. Raphael, alone among this hostile crowd, did his best to keep
+      cool, and not to put himself in any way in the wrong; but his adversary
+      having ventured a sarcasm containing an insult couched in unusually keen
+      language, he replied gravely:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We cannot box men&rsquo;s ears, sir, in these days, but I am at a loss for any
+      word by which to stigmatize such cowardly behavior as yours.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That&rsquo;s enough, that&rsquo;s enough. You can come to an explanation to-morrow,&rdquo;
+       several young men exclaimed, interposing between the two champions.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Raphael left the room in the character of aggressor, after he had accepted
+      a proposal to meet near the Chateau de Bordeau, in a little sloping
+      meadow, not very far from the newly made road, by which the man who came
+      off victorious could reach Lyons. Raphael must now either take to his bed
+      or leave the baths. The visitors had gained their point. At eight o&rsquo;clock
+      next morning his antagonist, followed by two seconds and a surgeon,
+      arrived first on the ground.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We shall do very nicely here; glorious weather for a duel!&rdquo; he cried
+      gaily, looking at the blue vault of sky above, at the waters of the lake,
+      and the rocks, without a single melancholy presentiment or doubt of the
+      issue. &ldquo;If I wing him,&rdquo; he went on, &ldquo;I shall send him to bed for a month;
+      eh, doctor?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;At the very least,&rdquo; the surgeon replied; &ldquo;but let that willow twig alone,
+      or you will weary your wrist, and then you will not fire steadily. You
+      might kill your man instead of wounding him.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The noise of a carriage was heard approaching.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Here he is,&rdquo; said the seconds, who soon descried a caleche coming along
+      the road; it was drawn by four horses, and there were two postilions.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What a queer proceeding!&rdquo; said Valentin&rsquo;s antagonist; &ldquo;here he comes
+      post-haste to be shot.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The slightest incident about a duel, as about a stake at cards, makes an
+      impression on the minds of those deeply concerned in the results of the
+      affair; so the young man awaited the arrival of the carriage with a kind
+      of uneasiness. It stopped in the road; old Jonathan laboriously descended
+      from it, in the first place, to assist Raphael to alight; he supported him
+      with his feeble arms, and showed him all the minute attentions that a
+      lover lavishes upon his mistress. Both became lost to sight in the
+      footpath that lay between the highroad and the field where the duel was to
+      take place; they were walking slowly, and did not appear again for some
+      time after. The four onlookers at this strange spectacle felt deeply moved
+      by the sight of Valentin as he leaned on his servant&rsquo;s arm; he was wasted
+      and pale; he limped as if he had the gout, went with his head bowed down,
+      and said not a word. You might have taken them for a couple of old men,
+      one broken with years, the other worn out with thought; the elder bore his
+      age visibly written in his white hair, the younger was of no age.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have not slept all night, sir;&rdquo; so Raphael greeted his antagonist.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The icy tone and terrible glance that went with the words made the real
+      aggressor shudder; he know that he was in the wrong, and felt in secret
+      ashamed of his behavior. There was something strange in Raphael&rsquo;s bearing,
+      tone, and gesture; the Marquis stopped, and every one else was likewise
+      silent. The uneasy and constrained feeling grew to a height.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There is yet time,&rdquo; he went on, &ldquo;to offer me some slight apology; and
+      offer it you must, or you will die sir! You rely even now on your
+      dexterity, and do not shrink from an encounter in which you believe all
+      the advantage to be upon your side. Very good, sir; I am generous, I am
+      letting you know my superiority beforehand. I possess a terrible power. I
+      have only to wish to do so, and I can neutralize your skill, dim your
+      eyesight, make your hand and pulse unsteady, and even kill you outright. I
+      have no wish to be compelled to exercise my power; the use of it costs me
+      too dear. You would not be the only one to die. So if you refuse to
+      apologize to me, not matter what your experience in murder, your ball will
+      go into the waterfall there, and mine will speed straight to your heart
+      though I do not aim it at you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Confused voices interrupted Raphael at this point. All the time that he
+      was speaking, the Marquis had kept his intolerably keen gaze fixed upon
+      his antagonist; now he drew himself up and showed an impassive face, like
+      that of a dangerous madman.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Make him hold his tongue,&rdquo; the young man had said to one of his seconds;
+      &ldquo;that voice of his is tearing the heart out of me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Say no more, sir; it is quite useless,&rdquo; cried the seconds and the
+      surgeon, addressing Raphael.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Gentlemen, I am fulfilling a duty. Has this young gentleman any final
+      arrangements to make?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That is enough; that will do.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The Marquis remained standing steadily, never for a moment losing sight of
+      his antagonist; and the latter seemed, like a bird before a snake, to be
+      overwhelmed by a well-nigh magical power. He was compelled to endure that
+      homicidal gaze; he met and shunned it incessantly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am thirsty; give me some water&mdash;&mdash;&rdquo; he said again to the
+      second.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Are you nervous?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; he answered. &ldquo;There is a fascination about that man&rsquo;s glowing
+      eyes.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Will you apologize?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is too late now.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The two antagonists were placed at fifteen paces&rsquo; distance from each
+      other. Each of them had a brace of pistols at hand, and, according to the
+      programme prescribed for them, each was to fire twice when and how he
+      pleased, but after the signal had been given by the seconds.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What are you doing, Charles?&rdquo; exclaimed the young man who acted as second
+      to Raphael&rsquo;s antagonist; &ldquo;you are putting in the ball before the powder!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am a dead man,&rdquo; he muttered, by way of answer; &ldquo;you have put me facing
+      the sun&mdash;&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The sun lies behind you,&rdquo; said Valentin sternly and solemnly, while he
+      coolly loaded his pistol without heeding the fact that the signal had been
+      given, or that his antagonist was carefully taking aim.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was something so appalling in this supernatural unconcern, that it
+      affected even the two postilions, brought thither by a cruel curiosity.
+      Raphael was either trying his power or playing with it, for he talked to
+      Jonathan, and looked towards him as he received his adversary&rsquo;s fire.
+      Charles&rsquo; bullet broke a branch of willow, and ricocheted over the surface
+      of the water; Raphael fired at random, and shot his antagonist through the
+      heart. He did not heed the young man as he dropped; he hurriedly sought
+      the Magic Skin to see what another man&rsquo;s life had cost him. The talisman
+      was no larger than a small oak-leaf.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What are you gaping at, you postilions over there? Let us be off,&rdquo; said
+      the Marquis.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That same evening he crossed the French border, immediately set out for
+      Auvergne, and reached the springs of Mont Dore. As he traveled, there
+      surged up in his heart, all at once, one of those thoughts that come to us
+      as a ray of sunlight pierces through the thick mists in some dark valley&mdash;a
+      sad enlightenment, a pitiless sagacity that lights up the accomplished
+      fact for us, that lays our errors bare, and leaves us without excuse in
+      our own eyes. It suddenly struck him that the possession of power, no
+      matter how enormous, did not bring with it the knowledge how to use it.
+      The sceptre is a plaything for a child, an axe for a Richelieu, and for a
+      Napoleon a lever by which to move the world. Power leaves us just as it
+      finds us; only great natures grow greater by its means. Raphael had had
+      everything in his power, and he had done nothing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At the springs of Mont Dore he came again in contact with a little world
+      of people, who invariably shunned him with the eager haste that animals
+      display when they scent afar off one of their own species lying dead, and
+      flee away. The dislike was mutual. His late adventure had given him a deep
+      distaste for society; his first care, consequently, was to find a lodging
+      at some distance from the neighborhood of the springs. Instinctively he
+      felt within him the need of close contact with nature, of natural
+      emotions, and of the vegetative life into which we sink so gladly among
+      the fields.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The day after he arrived he climbed the Pic de Sancy, not without
+      difficulty, and visited the higher valleys, the skyey nooks, undiscovered
+      lakes, and peasants&rsquo; huts about Mont Dore, a country whose stern and wild
+      features are now beginning to tempt the brushes of our artists, for
+      sometimes wonderfully fresh and charming views are to be found there,
+      affording a strong contrast to the frowning brows of those lonely hills.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Barely a league from the village Raphael discovered a nook where nature
+      seemed to have taken a pleasure in hiding away all her treasures like some
+      glad and mischievous child. At the first sight of this unspoiled and
+      picturesque retreat, he determined to take up his abode in it. There, life
+      must needs be peaceful, natural, and fruitful, like the life of a plant.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Imagine for yourself an inverted cone of granite hollowed out on a large
+      scale, a sort of basin with its sides divided up by queer winding paths.
+      On one side lay level stretches with no growth upon them, a bluish uniform
+      surface, over which the rays of the sun fell as upon a mirror; on the
+      other lay cliffs split open by fissures and frowning ravines; great blocks
+      of lava hung suspended from them, while the action of rain slowly prepared
+      their impending fall; a few stunted trees tormented by the wind, often
+      crowned their summits; and here and there in some sheltered angle of their
+      ramparts a clump of chestnut-trees grew tall as cedars, or some cavern in
+      the yellowish rocks showed the dark entrance into its depths, set about by
+      flowers and brambles, decked by a little strip of green turf.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At the bottom of this cup, which perhaps had been the crater of an
+      old-world volcano, lay a pool of water as pure and bright as a diamond.
+      Granite boulders lay around the deep basin, and willows, mountain-ash
+      trees, yellow-flag lilies, and numberless aromatic plants bloomed about
+      it, in a realm of meadow as fresh as an English bowling-green. The fine
+      soft grass was watered by the streams that trickled through the fissures
+      in the cliffs; the soil was continually enriched by the deposits of loam
+      which storms washed down from the heights above. The pool might be some
+      three acres in extent; its shape was irregular, and the edges were
+      scalloped like the hem of a dress; the meadow might be an acre or two
+      acres in extent. The cliffs and the water approached and receded from each
+      other; here and there, there was scarcely width enough for the cows to
+      pass between them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After a certain height the plant life ceased. Aloft in air the granite
+      took upon itself the most fantastic shapes, and assumed those misty tints
+      that give to high mountains a dim resemblance to clouds in the sky. The
+      bare, bleak cliffs, with the fearful rents in their sides, pictures of
+      wild and barren desolation, contrasted strongly with the pretty view of
+      the valley; and so strange were the shapes they assumed, that one of the
+      cliffs had been called &ldquo;The Capuchin,&rdquo; because it was so like a monk.
+      Sometimes these sharp-pointed peaks, these mighty masses of rock, and airy
+      caverns were lighted up one by one, according to the direction of the sun
+      or the caprices of the atmosphere; they caught gleams of gold, dyed
+      themselves in purple; took a tint of glowing rose-color, or turned dull
+      and gray. Upon the heights a drama of color was always to be seen, a play
+      of ever-shifting iridescent hues like those on a pigeon&rsquo;s breast.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Oftentimes at sunrise or at sunset a ray of bright sunlight would
+      penetrate between two sheer surfaces of lava, that might have been split
+      apart by a hatchet, to the very depths of that pleasant little garden,
+      where it would play in the waters of the pool, like a beam of golden light
+      which gleams through the chinks of a shutter into a room in Spain, that
+      has been carefully darkened for a siesta. When the sun rose above the old
+      crater that some antediluvian revolution had filled with water, its rocky
+      sides took warmer tones, the extinct volcano glowed again, and its sudden
+      heat quickened the sprouting seeds and vegetation, gave color to the
+      flowers, and ripened the fruits of this forgotten corner of the earth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As Raphael reached it, he noticed several cows grazing in the
+      pasture-land; and when he had taken a few steps towards the water, he saw
+      a little house built of granite and roofed with shingle in the spot where
+      the meadowland was at its widest. The roof of this little cottage
+      harmonized with everything about it; for it had long been overgrown with
+      ivy, moss, and flowers of no recent date. A thin smoke, that did not scare
+      the birds away, went up from the dilapidated chimney. There was a great
+      bench at the door between two huge honey-suckle bushes, that were pink
+      with blossom and full of scent. The walls could scarcely be seen for
+      branches of vine and sprays of rose and jessamine that interlaced and grew
+      entirely as chance and their own will bade them; for the inmates of the
+      cottage seemed to pay no attention to the growth which adorned their
+      house, and to take no care of it, leaving to it the fresh capricious charm
+      of nature.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Some clothes spread out on the gooseberry bushes were drying in the sun. A
+      cat was sitting on a machine for stripping hemp; beneath it lay a newly
+      scoured brass caldron, among a quantity of potato-parings. On the other
+      side of the house Raphael saw a sort of barricade of dead thorn-bushes,
+      meant no doubt to keep the poultry from scratching up the vegetables and
+      pot-herbs. It seemed like the end of the earth. The dwelling was like some
+      bird&rsquo;s-nest ingeniously set in a cranny of the rocks, a clever and at the
+      same time a careless bit of workmanship. A simple and kindly nature lay
+      round about it; its rusticity was genuine, but there was a charm like that
+      of poetry in it; for it grew and throve at a thousand miles&rsquo; distance from
+      our elaborate and conventional poetry. It was like none of our
+      conceptions; it was a spontaneous growth, a masterpiece due to chance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As Raphael reached the place, the sunlight fell across it from right to
+      left, bringing out all the colors of its plants and trees; the yellowish
+      or gray bases of the crags, the different shades of the green leaves, the
+      masses of flowers, pink, blue, or white, the climbing plants with their
+      bell-like blossoms, and the shot velvet of the mosses, the purple-tinted
+      blooms of the heather,&mdash;everything was either brought into relief or
+      made fairer yet by the enchantment of the light or by the contrasting
+      shadows; and this was the case most of all with the sheet of water,
+      wherein the house, the trees, the granite peaks, and the sky were all
+      faithfully reflected. Everything had a radiance of its own in this
+      delightful picture, from the sparkling mica-stone to the bleached tuft of
+      grass hidden away in the soft shadows; the spotted cow with its glossy
+      hide, the delicate water-plants that hung down over the pool like fringes
+      in a nook where blue or emerald colored insects were buzzing about, the
+      roots of trees like a sand-besprinkled shock of hair above grotesque faces
+      in the flinty rock surface,&mdash;all these things made a harmony for the
+      eye.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The odor of the tepid water; the scent of the flowers, and the breath of
+      the caverns which filled the lonely place gave Raphael a sensation that
+      was almost enjoyment. Silence reigned in majesty over these woods, which
+      possibly are unknown to the tax-collector; but the barking of a couple of
+      dogs broke the stillness all at once; the cows turned their heads towards
+      the entrance of the valley, showing their moist noses to Raphael, stared
+      stupidly at him, and then fell to browsing again. A goat and her kid, that
+      seemed to hang on the side of the crags in some magical fashion, capered
+      and leapt to a slab of granite near to Raphael, and stayed there a moment,
+      as if to seek to know who he was. The yapping of the dogs brought out a
+      plump child, who stood agape, and next came a white-haired old man of
+      middle height. Both of these two beings were in keeping with the
+      surroundings, the air, the flowers, and the dwelling. Health appeared to
+      overflow in this fertile region; old age and childhood thrived there.
+      There seemed to be, about all these types of existence, the freedom and
+      carelessness of the life of primitive times, a happiness of use and wont
+      that gave the lie to our philosophical platitudes, and wrought a cure of
+      all its swelling passions in the heart.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The old man belonged to the type of model dear to the masculine brush of
+      Schnetz. The countless wrinkles upon his brown face looked as if they
+      would be hard to the touch; the straight nose, the prominent cheek-bones,
+      streaked with red veins like a vine-leaf in autumn, the angular features,
+      all were characteristics of strength, even where strength existed no
+      longer. The hard hands, now that they toiled no longer, had preserved
+      their scanty white hair, his bearing was that of an absolutely free man;
+      it suggested the thought that, had he been an Italian, he would have
+      perhaps turned brigand, for the love of the liberty so dear to him. The
+      child was a regular mountaineer, with the black eyes that can face the sun
+      without flinching, a deeply tanned complexion, and rough brown hair. His
+      movements were like a bird&rsquo;s&mdash;swift, decided, and unconstrained; his
+      clothing was ragged; the white, fair skin showed through the rents in his
+      garments. There they both stood in silence, side by side, both obeying the
+      same impulse; in both faces were clear tokens of an absolutely identical
+      and idle life. The old man had adopted the child&rsquo;s amusements, and the
+      child had fallen in with the old man&rsquo;s humor; there was a sort of tacit
+      agreement between two kinds of feebleness, between failing powers
+      well-nigh spent and powers just about to unfold themselves.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Very soon a woman who seemed to be about thirty years old appeared on the
+      threshold of the door, spinning as she came. She was an Auvergnate, a
+      high-colored, comfortable-looking, straightforward sort of person, with
+      white teeth; her cap and dress, the face, full figure, and general
+      appearance, were of the Auvergne peasant stamp. So was her dialect; she
+      was a thorough embodiment of her district; its hardworking ways, its
+      thrift, ignorance, and heartiness all met in her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She greeted Raphael, and they began to talk. The dogs quieted down; the
+      old man went and sat on a bench in the sun; the child followed his mother
+      about wherever she went, listening without saying a word, and staring at
+      the stranger.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You are not afraid to live here, good woman?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What should we be afraid of, sir? When we bolt the door, who ever could
+      get inside? Oh, no, we aren&rsquo;t afraid at all. And besides,&rdquo; she said, as
+      she brought the Marquis into the principal room in the house, &ldquo;what should
+      thieves come to take from us here?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She designated the room as she spoke; the smoke-blackened walls, with some
+      brilliant pictures in blue, red, and green, an &ldquo;End of Credit,&rdquo; a
+      Crucifixion, and the &ldquo;Grenadiers of the Imperial Guard&rdquo; for their sole
+      ornament; the furniture here and there, the old wooden four-post bedstead,
+      the table with crooked legs, a few stools, the chest that held the bread,
+      the flitch that hung from the ceiling, a jar of salt, a stove, and on the
+      mantleshelf a few discolored yellow plaster figures. As he went out again
+      Raphael noticed a man half-way up the crags, leaning on a hoe, and
+      watching the house with interest.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That&rsquo;s my man, sir,&rdquo; said the Auvergnate, unconsciously smiling in
+      peasant fashion; &ldquo;he is at work up there.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And that old man is your father?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Asking your pardon, sir, he is my man&rsquo;s grandfather. Such as you see him,
+      he is a hundred and two, and yet quite lately he walked over to Clermont
+      with our little chap! Oh, he has been a strong man in his time; but he
+      does nothing now but sleep and eat and drink. He amuses himself with the
+      little fellow. Sometimes the child trails him up the hillsides, and he
+      will just go up there along with him.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Valentin made up his mind immediately. He would live between this child
+      and old man, breathe the same air; eat their bread, drink the same water,
+      sleep with them, make the blood in his veins like theirs. It was a dying
+      man&rsquo;s fancy. For him the prime model, after which the customary existence
+      of the individual should be shaped, the real formula for the life of a
+      human being, the only true and possible life, the life-ideal, was to
+      become one of the oysters adhering to this rock, to save his shell a day
+      or two longer by paralyzing the power of death. One profoundly selfish
+      thought took possession of him, and the whole universe was swallowed up
+      and lost in it. For him the universe existed no longer; the whole world
+      had come to be within himself. For the sick, the world begins at their
+      pillow and ends at the foot of the bed; and this countryside was Raphael&rsquo;s
+      sick-bed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Who has not, at some time or other in his life, watched the comings and
+      goings of an ant, slipped straws into a yellow slug&rsquo;s one breathing-hole,
+      studied the vagaries of a slender dragon-fly, pondered admiringly over the
+      countless veins in an oak-leaf, that bring the colors of a rose window in
+      some Gothic cathedral into contrast with the reddish background? Who has
+      not looked long in delight at the effects of sun and rain on a roof of
+      brown tiles, at the dewdrops, or at the variously shaped petals of the
+      flower-cups? Who has not sunk into these idle, absorbing meditations on
+      things without, that have no conscious end, yet lead to some definite
+      thought at last. Who, in short, has not led a lazy life, the life of
+      childhood, the life of the savage without his labor? This life without a
+      care or a wish Raphael led for some days&rsquo; space. He felt a distinct
+      improvement in his condition, a wonderful sense of ease, that quieted his
+      apprehensions and soothed his sufferings.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He would climb the crags, and then find a seat high up on some peak whence
+      he could see a vast expanse of distant country at a glance, and he would
+      spend whole days in this way, like a plant in the sun, or a hare in its
+      form. And at last, growing familiar with the appearances of the plant-life
+      about him, and of the changes in the sky, he minutely noted the progress
+      of everything working around him in the water, on the earth, or in the
+      air. He tried to share the secret impulses of nature, sought by passive
+      obedience to become a part of it, and to lie within the conservative and
+      despotic jurisdiction that regulates instinctive existence. He no longer
+      wished to steer his own course.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Just as criminals in olden times were safe from the pursuit of justice, if
+      they took refuge under the shadow of the altar, so Raphael made an effort
+      to slip into the sanctuary of life. He succeeded in becoming an integral
+      part of the great and mighty fruit-producing organization; he had adapted
+      himself to the inclemency of the air, and had dwelt in every cave among
+      the rocks. He had learned the ways and habits of growth of every plant,
+      had studied the laws of the watercourses and their beds, and had come to
+      know the animals; he was at last so perfectly at one with this teeming
+      earth, that he had in some sort discerned its mysteries and caught the
+      spirit of it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The infinitely varied forms of every natural kingdom were, to his
+      thinking, only developments of one and the same substance, different
+      combinations brought about by the same impulse, endless emanations from a
+      measureless Being which was acting, thinking, moving, and growing, and in
+      harmony with which he longed to grow, to move, to think, and act. He had
+      fancifully blended his life with the life of the crags; he had
+      deliberately planted himself there. During the earliest days of his
+      sojourn in these pleasant surroundings, Valentin tasted all the pleasures
+      of childhood again, thanks to the strange hallucination of apparent
+      convalescence, which is not unlike the pauses of delirium that nature
+      mercifully provides for those in pain. He went about making trifling
+      discoveries, setting to work on endless things, and finishing none of
+      them; the evening&rsquo;s plans were quite forgotten in the morning; he had no
+      cares, he was happy; he thought himself saved.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One morning he had lain in bed till noon, deep in the dreams between sleep
+      and waking, which give to realities a fantastic appearance, and make the
+      wildest fancies seem solid facts; while he was still uncertain that he was
+      not dreaming yet, he suddenly heard his hostess giving a report of his
+      health to Jonathan, for the first time. Jonathan came to inquire after him
+      daily, and the Auvergnate, thinking no doubt that Valentin was still
+      asleep, had not lowered the tones of a voice developed in mountain air.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No better and no worse,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;He coughed all last night again fit
+      to kill himself. Poor gentleman, he coughs and spits till it is piteous.
+      My husband and I often wonder to each other where he gets the strength
+      from to cough like that. It goes to your heart. What a cursed complaint it
+      is! He has no strength at all. I am always afraid I shall find him dead in
+      his bed some morning. He is every bit as pale as a waxen Christ. <i>Dame</i>!
+      I watch him while he dresses; his poor body is as thin as a nail. And he
+      does not feel well now; but no matter. It&rsquo;s all the same; he wears himself
+      out with running about as if he had health and to spare. All the same, he
+      is very brave, for he never complains at all. But really he would be
+      better under the earth than on it, for he is enduring the agonies of
+      Christ. I don&rsquo;t wish that myself, sir; it is quite in our interests; but
+      even if he didn&rsquo;t pay us what he does, I should be just as fond of him; it
+      is not our own interest that is our motive.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah, <i>mon Dieu</i>!&rdquo; she continued, &ldquo;Parisians are the people for these
+      dogs&rsquo; diseases. Where did he catch it, now? Poor young man! And he is so
+      sure that he is going to get well! That fever just gnaws him, you know; it
+      eats him away; it will be the death of him. He has no notion whatever of
+      that; he does not know it, sir; he sees nothing&mdash;&mdash;You mustn&rsquo;t
+      cry about him, M. Jonathan; you must remember that he will be happy, and
+      will not suffer any more. You ought to make a neuvaine for him; I have
+      seen wonderful cures come of the nine days&rsquo; prayer, and I would gladly pay
+      for a wax taper to save such a gentle creature, so good he is, a paschal
+      lamb&mdash;&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      As Raphael&rsquo;s voice had grown too weak to allow him to make himself heard,
+      he was compelled to listen to this horrible loquacity. His irritation,
+      however, drove him out of bed at length, and he appeared upon the
+      threshold.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Old scoundrel!&rdquo; he shouted to Jonathan; &ldquo;do you mean to put me to death?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The peasant woman took him for a ghost, and fled.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I forbid you to have any anxiety whatever about my health,&rdquo; Raphael went
+      on.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, my Lord Marquis,&rdquo; said the old servant, wiping away his tears.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And for the future you had very much better not come here without my
+      orders.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Jonathan meant to be obedient, but in the look full of pity and devotion
+      that he gave the Marquis before he went, Raphael read his own
+      death-warrant. Utterly disheartened, brought all at once to a sense of his
+      real position, Valentin sat down on the threshold, locked his arms across
+      his chest, and bowed his head. Jonathan turned to his master in alarm,
+      with &ldquo;My Lord&mdash;&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Go away, go away,&rdquo; cried the invalid.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the hours of the next morning, Raphael climbed the crags, and sat down
+      in a mossy cleft in the rocks, whence he could see the narrow path along
+      which the water for the dwelling was carried. At the base of the hill he
+      saw Jonathan in conversation with the Auvergnate. Some malicious power
+      interpreted for him all the woman&rsquo;s forebodings, and filled the breeze and
+      the silence with her ominous words. Thrilled with horror, he took refuge
+      among the highest summits of the mountains, and stayed there till the
+      evening; but yet he could not drive away the gloomy presentiments awakened
+      within him in such an unfortunate manner by a cruel solicitude on his
+      account.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Auvergne peasant herself suddenly appeared before him like a shadow in
+      the dusk; a perverse freak of the poet within him found a vague
+      resemblance between her black and white striped petticoat and the bony
+      frame of a spectre.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The damp is falling now, sir,&rdquo; said she. &ldquo;If you stop out there, you will
+      go off just like rotten fruit. You must come in. It isn&rsquo;t healthy to
+      breathe the damp, and you have taken nothing since the morning, besides.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;<i>Tonnerre de Dieu</i>! old witch,&rdquo; he cried; &ldquo;let me live after my own
+      fashion, I tell you, or I shall be off altogether. It is quite bad enough
+      to dig my grave every morning; you might let it alone in the evenings at
+      least&mdash;&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Your grave, sir! I dig your grave!&mdash;and where may your grave be? I
+      want to see you as old as father there, and not in your grave by any
+      manner of means. The grave! that comes soon enough for us all; in the
+      grave&mdash;&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That is enough,&rdquo; said Raphael.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Take my arm, sir.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The feeling of pity in others is very difficult for a man to bear, and it
+      is hardest of all when the pity is deserved. Hatred is a tonic&mdash;it
+      quickens life and stimulates revenge; but pity is death to us&mdash;it
+      makes our weakness weaker still. It is as if distress simpered
+      ingratiatingly at us; contempt lurks in the tenderness, or tenderness in
+      an affront. In the centenarian Raphael saw triumphant pity, a wondering
+      pity in the child&rsquo;s eyes, an officious pity in the woman, and in her
+      husband a pity that had an interested motive; but no matter how the
+      sentiment declared itself, death was always its import.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A poet makes a poem of everything; it is tragical or joyful, as things
+      happen to strike his imagination; his lofty soul rejects all half-tones;
+      he always prefers vivid and decided colors. In Raphael&rsquo;s soul this
+      compassion produced a terrible poem of mourning and melancholy. When he
+      had wished to live in close contact with nature, he had of course
+      forgotten how freely natural emotions are expressed. He would think
+      himself quite alone under a tree, whilst he struggled with an obstinate
+      coughing fit, a terrible combat from which he never issued victorious
+      without utter exhaustion afterwards; and then he would meet the clear,
+      bright eyes of the little boy, who occupied the post of sentinel, like a
+      savage in a bent of grass; the eyes scrutinized him with a childish
+      wonder, in which there was as much amusement as pleasure, and an
+      indescribable mixture of indifference and interest. The awful <i>Brother,
+      you must die</i>, of the Trappists seemed constantly legible in the eyes
+      of the peasants with whom Raphael was living; he scarcely knew which he
+      dreaded most, their unfettered talk or their silence; their presence
+      became torture.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One morning he saw two men in black prowling about in his neighborhood,
+      who furtively studied him and took observations. They made as though they
+      had come there for a stroll, and asked him a few indifferent questions, to
+      which he returned short answers. He recognized them both. One was the <i>cure</i>
+      and the other the doctor at the springs; Jonathan had no doubt sent them,
+      or the people in the house had called them in, or the scent of an
+      approaching death had drawn them thither. He beheld his own funeral, heard
+      the chanting of the priests, and counted the tall wax candles; and all
+      that lovely fertile nature around him, in whose lap he had thought to find
+      life once more, he saw no longer, save through a veil of crape. Everything
+      that but lately had spoken of length of days to him, now prophesied a
+      speedy end. He set out the next day for Paris, not before he had been
+      inundated with cordial wishes, which the people of the house uttered in
+      melancholy and wistful tones for his benefit.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He traveled through the night, and awoke as they passed through one of the
+      pleasant valleys of the Bourbonnais. View after view swam before his gaze,
+      and passed rapidly away like the vague pictures of a dream. Cruel nature
+      spread herself out before his eyes with tantalizing grace. Sometimes the
+      Allier, a liquid shining ribbon, meandered through the distant fertile
+      landscape; then followed the steeples of hamlets, hiding modestly in the
+      depths of a ravine with its yellow cliffs; sometimes, after the monotony
+      of vineyards, the watermills of a little valley would be suddenly seen;
+      and everywhere there were pleasant chateaux, hillside villages, roads with
+      their fringes of queenly poplars; and the Loire itself, at last, with its
+      wide sheets of water sparkling like diamonds amid its golden sands.
+      Attractions everywhere, without end! This nature, all astir with a life
+      and gladness like that of childhood, scarcely able to contain the impulses
+      and sap of June, possessed a fatal attraction for the darkened gaze of the
+      invalid. He drew the blinds of his carriage windows, and betook himself
+      again to slumber.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Towards evening, after they had passed Cesne, he was awakened by lively
+      music, and found himself confronted with a village fair. The horses were
+      changed near the marketplace. Whilst the postilions were engaged in making
+      the transfer, he saw the people dancing merrily, pretty and attractive
+      girls with flowers about them, excited youths, and finally the jolly
+      wine-flushed countenances of old peasants. Children prattled, old women
+      laughed and chatted; everything spoke in one voice, and there was a
+      holiday gaiety about everything, down to their clothing and the tables
+      that were set out. A cheerful expression pervaded the square and the
+      church, the roofs and windows; even the very doorways of the village
+      seemed likewise to be in holiday trim.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Raphael could not repress an angry exclamation, nor yet a wish to silence
+      the fiddles, annihilate the stir and bustle, stop the clamor, and disperse
+      the ill-timed festival; like a dying man, he felt unable to endure the
+      slightest sound, and he entered his carriage much annoyed. When he looked
+      out upon the square from the window, he saw that all the happiness was
+      scared away; the peasant women were in flight, and the benches were
+      deserted. Only a blind musician, on the scaffolding of the orchestra, went
+      on playing a shrill tune on his clarionet. That piping of his, without
+      dancers to it, and the solitary old man himself, in the shadow of the
+      lime-tree, with his curmudgeon&rsquo;s face, scanty hair, and ragged clothing,
+      was like a fantastic picture of Raphael&rsquo;s wish. The heavy rain was pouring
+      in torrents; it was one of those thunderstorms that June brings about so
+      rapidly, to cease as suddenly. The thing was so natural, that, when
+      Raphael had looked out and seen some pale clouds driven over by a gust of
+      wind, he did not think of looking at the piece of skin. He lay back again
+      in the corner of his carriage, which was very soon rolling upon its way.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The next day found him back in his home again, in his own room, beside his
+      own fireside. He had had a large fire lighted; he felt cold. Jonathan
+      brought him some letters; they were all from Pauline. He opened the first
+      one without any eagerness, and unfolded it as if it had been the
+      gray-paper form of application for taxes made by the revenue collector. He
+      read the first sentence:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Gone! This really is a flight, my Raphael. How is it? No one can tell me
+      where you are. And who should know if not I?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He did not wish to learn any more. He calmly took up the letters and threw
+      them in the fire, watching with dull and lifeless eyes the perfumed paper
+      as it was twisted, shriveled, bent, and devoured by the capricious flames.
+      Fragments that fell among the ashes allowed him to see the beginning of a
+      sentence, or a half-burnt thought or word; he took a pleasure in
+      deciphering them&mdash;a sort of mechanical amusement.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Sitting at your door&mdash;expected&mdash;Caprice&mdash;I obey&mdash;Rivals&mdash;I,
+      never!&mdash;thy Pauline&mdash;love&mdash;no more of Pauline?&mdash;If you
+      had wished to leave me for ever, you would not have deserted me&mdash;Love
+      eternal&mdash;To die&mdash;&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The words caused him a sort of remorse; he seized the tongs, and rescued a
+      last fragment of the letter from the flames.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have murmured,&rdquo; so Pauline wrote, &ldquo;but I have never complained, my
+      Raphael! If you have left me so far behind you, it was doubtless because
+      you wished to hide some heavy grief from me. Perhaps you will kill me one
+      of these days, but you are too good to torture me. So do not go away from
+      me like this. There! I can bear the worst of torment, if only I am at your
+      side. Any grief that you could cause me would not be grief. There is far
+      more love in my heart for you than I have ever yet shown you. I can endure
+      anything, except this weeping far away from you, this ignorance of your&mdash;&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Raphael laid the scorched scrap on the mantelpiece, then all at once he
+      flung it into the fire. The bit of paper was too clearly a symbol of his
+      own love and luckless existence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Go and find M. Bianchon,&rdquo; he told Jonathan.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Horace came and found Raphael in bed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Can you prescribe a draught for me&mdash;some mild opiate which will
+      always keep me in a somnolent condition, a draught that will not be
+      injurious although taken constantly.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nothing is easier,&rdquo; the young doctor replied; &ldquo;but you will have to keep
+      on your feet for a few hours daily, at any rate, so as to take your food.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A few hours!&rdquo; Raphael broke in; &ldquo;no, no! I only wish to be out of bed for
+      an hour at most.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What is your object?&rdquo; inquired Bianchon.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;To sleep; for so one keeps alive, at any rate,&rdquo; the patient answered.
+      &ldquo;Let no one come in, not even Mlle. Pauline de Wistchnau!&rdquo; he added to
+      Jonathan, as the doctor was writing out his prescription.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, M. Horace, is there any hope?&rdquo; the old servant asked, going as far
+      as the flight of steps before the door, with the young doctor.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He may live for some time yet, or he may die to-night. The chances of
+      life and death are evenly balanced in his case. I can&rsquo;t understand it at
+      all,&rdquo; said the doctor, with a doubtful gesture. &ldquo;His mind ought to be
+      diverted.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Diverted! Ah, sir, you don&rsquo;t know him! He killed a man the other day
+      without a word!&mdash;Nothing can divert him!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      For some days Raphael lay plunged in the torpor of this artificial sleep.
+      Thanks to the material power that opium exerts over the immaterial part of
+      us, this man with the powerful and active imagination reduced himself to
+      the level of those sluggish forms of animal life that lurk in the depths
+      of forests, and take the form of vegetable refuse, never stirring from
+      their place to catch their easy prey. He had darkened the very sun in
+      heaven; the daylight never entered his room. About eight o&rsquo;clock in the
+      evening he would leave his bed, with no very clear consciousness of his
+      own existence; he would satisfy the claims of hunger and return to bed
+      immediately. One dull blighted hour after another only brought confused
+      pictures and appearances before him, and lights and shadows against a
+      background of darkness. He lay buried in deep silence; movement and
+      intelligence were completely annihilated for him. He woke later than usual
+      one evening, and found that his dinner was not ready. He rang for
+      Jonathan.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You can go,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;I have made you rich; you shall be happy in your
+      old age; but I will not let you muddle away my life any longer. Miserable
+      wretch! I am hungry&mdash;where is my dinner? How is it?&mdash;Answer me!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      A satisfied smile stole over Jonathan&rsquo;s face. He took a candle that lit up
+      the great dark rooms of the mansion with its flickering light; brought his
+      master, who had again become an automaton, into a great gallery, and flung
+      a door suddenly open. Raphael was all at once dazzled by a flood of light
+      and amazed by an unheard-of scene.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His chandeliers had been filled with wax-lights; the rarest flowers from
+      his conservatory were carefully arranged about the room; the table
+      sparkled with silver, gold, crystal, and porcelain; a royal banquet was
+      spread&mdash;the odors of the tempting dishes tickled the nervous fibres
+      of the palate. There sat his friends; he saw them among beautiful women in
+      full evening dress, with bare necks and shoulders, with flowers in their
+      hair; fair women of every type, with sparkling eyes, attractively and
+      fancifully arrayed. One had adopted an Irish jacket, which displayed the
+      alluring outlines of her form; one wore the &ldquo;basquina&rdquo; of Andalusia, with
+      its wanton grace; here was a half-clad Dian the huntress, there the
+      costume of Mlle. de la Valliere, amorous and coy; and all of them alike
+      were given up to the intoxication of the moment.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As Raphael&rsquo;s death-pale face showed itself in the doorway, a sudden outcry
+      broke out, as vehement as the blaze of this improvised banquet. The
+      voices, perfumes, and lights, the exquisite beauty of the women, produced
+      their effect upon his senses, and awakened his desires. Delightful music,
+      from unseen players in the next room, drowned the excited tumult in a
+      torrent of harmony&mdash;the whole strange vision was complete.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Raphael felt a caressing pressure on is own hand, a woman&rsquo;s white,
+      youthful arms were stretched out to grasp him, and the hand was
+      Aquilina&rsquo;s. He knew now that this scene was not a fantastic illusion like
+      the fleeting pictures of his disordered dreams; he uttered a dreadful cry,
+      slammed the door, and dealt his heartbroken old servant a blow in the
+      face.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Monster!&rdquo; he cried, &ldquo;so you have sworn to kill me!&rdquo; and trembling at the
+      risks he had just now run, he summoned all his energies, reached his room,
+      took a powerful sleeping draught, and went to bed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The devil!&rdquo; cried Jonathan, recovering himself. &ldquo;And M. Bianchon most
+      certainly told me to divert his mind.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It was close upon midnight. By that time, owing to one of those physical
+      caprices that are the marvel and the despair of science, Raphael, in his
+      slumber, became radiant with beauty. A bright color glowed on his pale
+      cheeks. There was an almost girlish grace about the forehead in which his
+      genius was revealed. Life seemed to bloom on the quiet face that lay there
+      at rest. His sleep was sound; a light, even breath was drawn in between
+      red lips; he was smiling&mdash;he had passed no doubt through the gate of
+      dreams into a noble life. Was he a centenarian now? Did his grandchildren
+      come to wish him length of days? Or, on a rustic bench set in the sun and
+      under the trees, was he scanning, like the prophet on the mountain
+      heights, a promised land, a far-off time of blessing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Here you are!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The words, uttered in silver tones, dispelled the shadowy faces of his
+      dreams. He saw Pauline, in the lamplight, sitting upon the bed; Pauline
+      grown fairer yet through sorrow and separation. Raphael remained
+      bewildered by the sight of her face, white as the petals of some water
+      flower, and the shadow of her long, dark hair about it seemed to make it
+      whiter still. Her tears had left a gleaming trace upon her cheeks, and
+      hung there yet, ready to fall at the least movement. She looked like an
+      angel fallen from the skies, or a spirit that a breath might waft away, as
+      she sat there all in white, with her head bowed, scarcely creasing the
+      quilt beneath her weight.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah, I have forgotten everything!&rdquo; she cried, as Raphael opened his eyes.
+      &ldquo;I have no voice left except to tell you, &lsquo;I am yours.&rsquo; There is nothing
+      in my heart but love. Angel of my life, you have never been so beautiful
+      before! Your eyes are blazing&mdash;&mdash; But come, I can guess it all.
+      You have been in search of health without me; you were afraid of me&mdash;&mdash;
+      well&mdash;&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Go! go! leave me,&rdquo; Raphael muttered at last. &ldquo;Why do you not go? If you
+      stay, I shall die. Do you want to see me die?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Die?&rdquo; she echoed. &ldquo;Can you die without me? Die? But you are young; and I
+      love you! Die?&rdquo; she asked, in a deep, hollow voice. She seized his hands
+      with a frenzied movement. &ldquo;Cold!&rdquo; she wailed. &ldquo;Is it all an illusion?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Raphael drew the little bit of skin from under his pillow; it was as tiny
+      and as fragile as a periwinkle petal. He showed it to her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Pauline!&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;fair image of my fair life, let us say good-bye?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Good-bye?&rdquo; she echoed, looking surprised.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes. This is a talisman that grants me all my wishes, and that represents
+      my span of life. See here, this is all that remains of it. If you look at
+      me any longer, I shall die&mdash;&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The young girl thought that Valentin had grown lightheaded; she took the
+      talisman and went to fetch the lamp. By its tremulous light which she shed
+      over Raphael and the talisman, she scanned her lover&rsquo;s face and the last
+      morsel of the magic skin. As Pauline stood there, in all the beauty of
+      love and terror, Raphael was no longer able to control his thoughts;
+      memories of tender scenes, and of passionate and fevered joys, overwhelmed
+      the soul that had so long lain dormant within him, and kindled a fire not
+      quite extinct.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Pauline! Pauline! Come to me&mdash;&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      A dreadful cry came from the girl&rsquo;s throat, her eyes dilated with horror,
+      her eyebrows were distorted and drawn apart by an unspeakable anguish; she
+      read in Raphael&rsquo;s eyes the vehement desire in which she had once exulted,
+      but as it grew she felt a light movement in her hand, and the skin
+      contracted. She did not stop to think; she fled into the next room, and
+      locked the door.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Pauline! Pauline!&rdquo; cried the dying man, as he rushed after her; &ldquo;I love
+      you, I adore you, I want you, Pauline! I wish to die in your arms!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      With unnatural strength, the last effort of ebbing life, he broke down the
+      door, and saw his mistress writhing upon a sofa. Pauline had vainly tried
+      to pierce her heart, and now thought to find a rapid death by strangling
+      herself with her shawl.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If I die, he will live,&rdquo; she said, trying to tighten the knot that she
+      had made.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In her struggle with death her hair hung loose, her shoulders were bare,
+      her clothing was disordered, her eyes were bathed in tears, her face was
+      flushed and drawn with the horror of despair; yet as her exceeding beauty
+      met Raphael&rsquo;s intoxicated eyes, his delirium grew. He sprang towards her
+      like a bird of prey, tore away the shawl, and tried to take her in his
+      arms.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The dying man sought for words to express the wish that was consuming his
+      strength; but no sounds would come except the choking death-rattle in his
+      chest. Each breath he drew sounded hollower than the last, and seemed to
+      come from his very entrails. At the last moment, no longer able to utter a
+      sound, he set his teeth in Pauline&rsquo;s breast. Jonathan appeared, terrified
+      by the cries he had heard, and tried to tear away the dead body from the
+      grasp of the girl who was crouching with it in a corner.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What do you want?&rdquo; she asked. &ldquo;He is mine, I have killed him. Did I not
+      foresee how it would be?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_EPIL" id="link2H_EPIL">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      EPILOGUE
+    </h2>
+    <h3>
+      &ldquo;And what became of Pauline?&rdquo;
+     </h3>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Pauline? Ah! Do you sometimes spend a pleasant winter evening by your own
+      fireside, and give yourself up luxuriously to memories of love or youth,
+      while you watch the glow of the fire where the logs of oak are burning?
+      Here, the fire outlines a sort of chessboard in red squares, there it has
+      a sheen like velvet; little blue flames start up and flicker and play
+      about in the glowing depths of the brasier. A mysterious artist comes and
+      adapts that flame to his own ends; by a secret of his own he draws a
+      visionary face in the midst of those flaming violet and crimson hues, a
+      face with unimaginable delicate outlines, a fleeting apparition which no
+      chance will ever bring back again. It is a woman&rsquo;s face, her hair is blown
+      back by the wind, her features speak of a rapture of delight; she breathes
+      fire in the midst of the fire. She smiles, she dies, you will never see
+      her any more. Farewell, flower of the flame! Farewell, essence incomplete
+      and unforeseen, come too early or too late to make the spark of some
+      glorious diamond.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But, Pauline?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You do not see, then? I will begin again. Make way! make way! She comes,
+      she is here, the queen of illusions, a woman fleeting as a kiss, a woman
+      bright as lightning, issuing in a blaze like lightning from the sky, a
+      being uncreated, of spirit and love alone. She has wrapped her shadowy
+      form in flame, or perhaps the flame betokens that she exists but for a
+      moment. The pure outlines of her shape tell you that she comes from
+      heaven. Is she not radiant as an angel? Can you not hear the beating of
+      her wings in space? She sinks down beside you more lightly than a bird,
+      and you are entranced by her awful eyes; there is a magical power in her
+      light breathing that draws your lips to hers; she flies and you follow;
+      you feel the earth beneath you no longer. If you could but once touch that
+      form of snow with your eager, deluded hands, once twine the golden hair
+      round your fingers, place one kiss on those shining eyes! There is an
+      intoxicating vapor around, and the spell of a siren music is upon you.
+      Every nerve in you is quivering; you are filled with pain and longing. O
+      joy for which there is no name! You have touched the woman&rsquo;s lips, and you
+      are awakened at once by a horrible pang. Oh! ah! yes, you have struck your
+      head against the corner of the bedpost, you have been clasping its brown
+      mahogany sides, and chilly gilt ornaments; embracing a piece of metal, a
+      brazen Cupid.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But how about Pauline, sir?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What, again? Listen. One lovely morning at Tours a young man, who held
+      the hand of a pretty woman in his, went on board the <i>Ville d&rsquo;Angers</i>.
+      Thus united they both looked and wondered long at a white form that rose
+      elusively out of the mists above the broad waters of the Loire, like some
+      child of the sun and the river, or some freak of air and cloud. This
+      translucent form was a sylph or a naiad by turns; she hovered in the air
+      like a word that haunts the memory, which seeks in vain to grasp it; she
+      glided among the islands, she nodded her head here and there among the
+      tall poplar trees; then she grew to a giant&rsquo;s height; she shook out the
+      countless folds of her drapery to the light; she shot light from the
+      aureole that the sun had litten about her face; she hovered above the
+      slopes of the hills and their little hamlets, and seemed to bar the
+      passage of the boat before the Chateau d&rsquo;Usse. You might have thought that
+      <i>La dame des belles cousines</i> sought to protect her country from
+      modern intrusion.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, well, I understand. So it went with Pauline. But how about
+      Foedora?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh! Foedora, you are sure to meet with her! She was at the Bouffons last
+      night, and she will go to the Opera this evening, and if you like to take
+      it so, she is Society.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0006" id="link2H_4_0006">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      ADDENDUM
+    </h2>
+    <h3>
+      The following personages appear in other stories of the Human Comedy.
+    </h3>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     Aquilina
+       Melmoth Reconciled
+
+     Bianchon, Horace
+       Father Goriot
+       The Atheist&rsquo;s Mass
+       Cesar Birotteau
+       The Commission in Lunacy
+       Lost Illusions
+       A Distinguished Provincial at Paris
+       A Bachelor&rsquo;s Establishment
+       The Secrets of a Princess
+       The Government Clerks
+       Pierrette
+       A Study of Woman
+       Scenes from a Courtesan&rsquo;s Life
+       Honorine
+       The Seamy Side of History
+       A Second Home
+       A Prince of Bohemia
+       Letters of Two Brides
+       The Muse of the Department
+       The Imaginary Mistress
+       The Middle Classes
+       Cousin Betty
+       The Country Parson
+     In addition, M. Bianchon narrated the following:
+       Another Study of Woman
+       La Grande Breteche
+
+     Canalis, Constant-Cyr-Melchior, Baron de
+       Letters of Two Brides
+       A Distinguished Provincial at Paris
+       Modeste Mignon
+       Another Study of Woman
+       A Start in Life
+       Beatrix
+       The Unconscious Humorists
+       The Member for Arcis
+
+     Dudley, Lady Arabella
+       The Lily of the Valley
+       The Ball at Sceaux
+       The Secrets of a Princess
+       A Daughter of Eve
+       Letters of Two Brides
+
+     Euphrasia
+       Melmoth Reconciled
+
+     Joseph
+       A Study of Woman
+
+     Massol
+       Scenes from a Courtesan&rsquo;s Life
+       A Daughter of Eve
+       Cousin Betty
+       The Unconscious Humorists
+
+     Navarreins, Duc de
+       A Bachelor&rsquo;s Establishment
+       Colonel Chabert
+       The Muse of the Department
+       The Thirteen
+       Jealousies of a Country Town
+       The Peasantry
+       Scenes from a Courtesan&rsquo;s Life
+       The Country Parson
+       The Gondreville Mystery
+       The Secrets of a Princess
+       Cousin Betty
+
+     Rastignac, Eugene de
+       Father Goriot
+       A Distinguished Provincial at Paris
+       Scenes from a Courtesan&rsquo;s Life
+       The Ball at Sceaux
+       The Interdiction
+       A Study of Woman
+       Another Study of Woman
+       The Secrets of a Princess
+       A Daughter of Eve
+       The Gondreville Mystery
+       The Firm of Nucingen
+       Cousin Betty
+       The Member for Arcis
+       The Unconscious Humorists
+
+     Taillefer, Jean-Frederic
+       The Firm of Nucingen
+       Father Goriot
+       The Red Inn
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Magic Skin, by Honore de Balzac
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+</pre>
+  </body>
+</html>
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Magic Skin, by Honore de Balzac
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Magic Skin
+
+Author: Honore de Balzac
+
+Translator: Ellen Marriage
+
+Release Date: May, 1998  [Etext #1307]
+Posting Date: February 22, 2010
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE MAGIC SKIN ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Dagny, and Bonnie Sala
+
+
+
+
+
+THE MAGIC SKIN
+
+
+By Honore De Balzac
+
+
+Translated by Ellen Marriage
+
+
+
+       To Monsieur Savary, Member of Le Academie des Sciences.
+
+
+
+      [omitted: a drawing representing the serpentine
+      path made by the tip of a stick when flourished.]
+
+                            STERNE--Tristram Shandy, ch. cccxxii.
+
+
+
+
+
+THE MAGIC SKIN
+
+
+
+
+I. THE TALISMAN
+
+
+Towards the end of the month of October 1829 a young man entered the
+Palais-Royal just as the gaming-houses opened, agreeably to the law
+which protects a passion by its very nature easily excisable. He mounted
+the staircase of one of the gambling hells distinguished by the number
+36, without too much deliberation.
+
+"Your hat, sir, if you please?" a thin, querulous voice called out. A
+little old man, crouching in the darkness behind a railing, suddenly
+rose and exhibited his features, carved after a mean design.
+
+As you enter a gaming-house the law despoils you of your hat at the
+outset. Is it by way of a parable, a divine revelation? Or by exacting
+some pledge or other, is not an infernal compact implied? Is it done to
+compel you to preserve a respectful demeanor towards those who are about
+to gain money of you? Or must the detective, who squats in our social
+sewers, know the name of your hatter, or your own, if you happen to have
+written it on the lining inside? Or, after all, is the measurement of
+your skull required for the compilation of statistics as to the cerebral
+capacity of gamblers? The executive is absolutely silent on this point.
+But be sure of this, that though you have scarcely taken a step towards
+the tables, your hat no more belongs to you now than you belong to
+yourself. Play possesses you, your fortune, your cap, your cane, your
+cloak.
+
+As you go out, it will be made clear to you, by a savage irony, that
+Play has yet spared you something, since your property is returned. For
+all that, if you bring a new hat with you, you will have to pay for the
+knowledge that a special costume is needed for a gambler.
+
+The evident astonishment with which the young man took a numbered tally
+in exchange for his hat, which was fortunately somewhat rubbed at the
+brim, showed clearly enough that his mind was yet untainted; and the
+little old man, who had wallowed from his youth up in the furious
+pleasures of a gambler's life, cast a dull, indifferent glance over
+him, in which a philosopher might have seen wretchedness lying in the
+hospital, the vagrant lives of ruined folk, inquests on numberless
+suicides, life-long penal servitude and transportations to Guazacoalco.
+
+His pallid, lengthy visage appeared like a haggard embodiment of the
+passion reduced to its simplest terms. There were traces of past anguish
+in its wrinkles. He supported life on the glutinous soups at Darcet's,
+and gambled away his meagre earnings day by day. Like some old hackney
+which takes no heed of the strokes of the whip, nothing could move him
+now. The stifled groans of ruined players, as they passed out, their
+mute imprecations, their stupefied faces, found him impassive. He was
+the spirit of Play incarnate. If the young man had noticed this sorry
+Cerberus, perhaps he would have said, "There is only a pack of cards in
+that heart of his."
+
+The stranger did not heed this warning writ in flesh and blood, put
+here, no doubt, by Providence, who has set loathing on the threshold of
+all evil haunts. He walked boldly into the saloon, where the rattle of
+coin brought his senses under the dazzling spell of an agony of greed.
+Most likely he had been drawn thither by that most convincing of Jean
+Jacques' eloquent periods, which expresses, I think, this melancholy
+thought, "Yes, I can imagine that a man may take to gambling when he
+sees only his last shilling between him and death."
+
+There is an illusion about a gambling saloon at night as vulgar as that
+of a bloodthirsty drama, and just as effective. The rooms are filled
+with players and onlookers, with poverty-stricken age, which drags
+itself thither in search of stimulation, with excited faces, and revels
+that began in wine, to end shortly in the Seine. The passion is there
+in full measure, but the great number of the actors prevents you from
+seeing the gambling-demon face to face. The evening is a harmony or
+chorus in which all take part, to which each instrument in the orchestra
+contributes his share. You would see there plenty of respectable people
+who have come in search of diversion, for which they pay as they pay for
+the pleasures of the theatre, or of gluttony, or they come hither as
+to some garret where they cheapen poignant regrets for three months to
+come.
+
+Do you understand all the force and frenzy in a soul which impatiently
+waits for the opening of a gambling hell? Between the daylight gambler
+and the player at night there is the same difference that lies between
+a careless husband and the lover swooning under his lady's window. Only
+with morning comes the real throb of the passion and the craving in
+its stark horror. Then you can admire the real gambler, who has neither
+eaten, slept, thought, nor lived, he has so smarted under the scourge
+of his martingale, so suffered on the rack of his desire for a coup of
+_trente-et-quarante_. At that accursed hour you encounter eyes whose
+calmness terrifies you, faces that fascinate, glances that seem as if
+they had power to turn the cards over and consume them. The grandest
+hours of a gambling saloon are not the opening ones. If Spain has
+bull-fights, and Rome once had her gladiators, Paris waxes proud of her
+Palais-Royal, where the inevitable _roulettes_ cause blood to flow in
+streams, and the public can have the pleasure of watching without fear
+of their feet slipping in it.
+
+Take a quiet peep at the arena. How bare it looks! The paper on the
+walls is greasy to the height of your head, there is nothing to bring
+one reviving thought. There is not so much as a nail for the convenience
+of suicides. The floor is worn and dirty. An oblong table stands in the
+middle of the room, the tablecloth is worn by the friction of gold,
+but the straw-bottomed chairs about it indicate an odd indifference to
+luxury in the men who will lose their lives here in the quest of the
+fortune that is to put luxury within their reach.
+
+This contradiction in humanity is seen wherever the soul reacts
+powerfully upon itself. The gallant would clothe his mistress in silks,
+would deck her out in soft Eastern fabrics, though he and she must lie
+on a truckle-bed. The ambitious dreamer sees himself at the summit of
+power, while he slavishly prostrates himself in the mire. The tradesman
+stagnates in his damp, unhealthy shop, while he builds a great mansion
+for his son to inherit prematurely, only to be ejected from it by law
+proceedings at his own brother's instance.
+
+After all, is there a less pleasing thing in the world than a house of
+pleasure? Singular question! Man is always at strife with himself. His
+present woes give the lie to his hopes; yet he looks to a future which
+is not his, to indemnify him for these present sufferings; setting upon
+all his actions the seal of inconsequence and of the weakness of his
+nature. We have nothing here below in full measure but misfortune.
+
+There were several gamblers in the room already when the young man
+entered. Three bald-headed seniors were lounging round the green table.
+Imperturbable as diplomatists, those plaster-cast faces of theirs
+betokened blunted sensibilities, and hearts which had long forgotten
+how to throb, even when a woman's dowry was the stake. A young Italian,
+olive-hued and dark-haired, sat at one end, with his elbows on the
+table, seeming to listen to the presentiments of luck that dictate a
+gambler's "Yes" or "No." The glow of fire and gold was on that southern
+face. Some seven or eight onlookers stood by way of an audience,
+awaiting a drama composed of the strokes of chance, the faces of the
+actors, the circulation of coin, and the motion of the croupier's rake,
+much as a silent, motionless crowd watches the headsman in the Place de
+Greve. A tall, thin man, in a threadbare coat, held a card in one hand,
+and a pin in the other, to mark the numbers of Red or Black. He seemed
+a modern Tantalus, with all the pleasures of his epoch at his lips, a
+hoardless miser drawing in imaginary gains, a sane species of lunatic
+who consoles himself in his misery by chimerical dreams, a man who
+touches peril and vice as a young priest handles the unconsecrated wafer
+in the white mass.
+
+One or two experts at the game, shrewd speculators, had placed
+themselves opposite the bank, like old convicts who have lost all fear
+of the hulks; they meant to try two or three coups, and then to depart
+at once with the expected gains, on which they lived. Two elderly
+waiters dawdled about with their arms folded, looking from time to time
+into the garden from the windows, as if to show their insignificant
+faces as a sign to passers-by.
+
+The croupier and banker threw a ghastly and withering glance at the
+punters, and cried, in a sharp voice, "Make your game!" as the young man
+came in. The silence seemed to grow deeper as all heads turned curiously
+towards the new arrival. Who would have thought it? The jaded elders,
+the fossilized waiters, the onlookers, the fanatical Italian himself,
+felt an indefinable dread at sight of the stranger. Is he not wretched
+indeed who can excite pity here? Must he not be very helpless to receive
+sympathy, ghastly in appearance to raise a shudder in these places,
+where pain utters no cry, where wretchedness looks gay, and despair is
+decorous? Such thoughts as these produced a new emotion in these torpid
+hearts as the young man entered. Were not executioners known to shed
+tears over the fair-haired, girlish heads that had to fall at the
+bidding of the Revolution?
+
+The gamblers saw at a glance a dreadful mystery in the novice's face.
+His young features were stamped with a melancholy grace, his looks told
+of unsuccess and many blighted hopes. The dull apathy of the suicide
+had made his forehead so deadly pale, a bitter smile carved faint lines
+about the corners of his mouth, and there was an abandonment about him
+that was painful to see. Some sort of demon sparkled in the depths of
+his eye, which drooped, wearied perhaps with pleasure. Could it have
+been dissipation that had set its foul mark on the proud face, once pure
+and bright, and now brought low? Any doctor seeing the yellow circles
+about his eyelids, and the color in his cheeks, would have set them
+down to some affection of the heart or lungs, while poets would have
+attributed them to the havoc brought by the search for knowledge and to
+night-vigils by the student's lamp.
+
+But a complaint more fatal than any disease, a disease more merciless
+than genius or study, had drawn this young face, and had wrung a heart
+which dissipation, study, and sickness had scarcely disturbed. When
+a notorious criminal is taken to the convict's prison, the prisoners
+welcome him respectfully, and these evil spirits in human shape,
+experienced in torments, bowed before an unheard-of anguish. By the
+depth of the wound which met their eyes, they recognized a prince among
+them, by the majesty of his unspoken irony, by the refined wretchedness
+of his garb. The frock-coat that he wore was well cut, but his cravat
+was on terms so intimate with his waistcoat that no one could suspect
+him of underlinen. His hands, shapely as a woman's were not perfectly
+clean; for two days past indeed he had ceased to wear gloves. If the
+very croupier and the waiters shuddered, it was because some traces
+of the spell of innocence yet hung about his meagre, delicately-shaped
+form, and his scanty fair hair in its natural curls.
+
+He looked only about twenty-five years of age, and any trace of vice
+in his face seemed to be there by accident. A young constitution still
+resisted the inroads of lubricity. Darkness and light, annihilation and
+existence, seemed to struggle in him, with effects of mingled beauty
+and terror. There he stood like some erring angel that has lost his
+radiance; and these emeritus-professors of vice and shame were ready to
+bid the novice depart, even as some toothless crone might be seized with
+pity for a beautiful girl who offers herself up to infamy.
+
+The young man went straight up to the table, and, as he stood
+there, flung down a piece of gold which he held in his hand, without
+deliberation. It rolled on to the Black; then, as strong natures can,
+he looked calmly, if anxiously, at the croupier, as if he held useless
+subterfuges in scorn.
+
+The interest this coup awakened was so great that the old gamesters laid
+nothing upon it; only the Italian, inspired by a gambler's enthusiasm,
+smiled suddenly at some thought, and punted his heap of coin against the
+stranger's stake.
+
+The banker forgot to pronounce the phrases that use and wont have
+reduced to an inarticulate cry--"Make your game.... The game is made....
+Bets are closed." The croupier spread out the cards, and seemed to wish
+luck to the newcomer, indifferent as he was to the losses or gains of
+those who took part in these sombre pleasures. Every bystander thought
+he saw a drama, the closing scene of a noble life, in the fortunes of
+that bit of gold; and eagerly fixed his eyes on the prophetic cards; but
+however closely they watched the young man, they could discover not the
+least sign of feeling on his cool but restless face.
+
+"Even! red wins," said the croupier officially. A dumb sort of rattle
+came from the Italian's throat when he saw the folded notes that
+the banker showered upon him, one after another. The young man only
+understood his calamity when the croupiers's rake was extended to sweep
+away his last napoleon. The ivory touched the coin with a little click,
+as it swept it with the speed of an arrow into the heap of gold before
+the bank. The stranger turned pale at the lips, and softly shut his
+eyes, but he unclosed them again at once, and the red color returned
+as he affected the airs of an Englishman, to whom life can offer no
+new sensation, and disappeared without the glance full of entreaty for
+compassion that a desperate gamester will often give the bystanders. How
+much can happen in a second's space; how many things depend on a throw
+of the die!
+
+"That was his last cartridge, of course," said the croupier, smiling
+after a moment's silence, during which he picked up the coin between his
+finger and thumb and held it up.
+
+"He is a cracked brain that will go and drown himself," said a
+frequenter of the place. He looked round about at the other players, who
+all knew each other.
+
+"Bah!" said a waiter, as he took a pinch of snuff.
+
+"If we had but followed _his_ example," said an old gamester to the
+others, as he pointed out the Italian.
+
+Everybody looked at the lucky player, whose hands shook as he counted
+his bank-notes.
+
+"A voice seemed to whisper to me," he said. "The luck is sure to go
+against that young man's despair."
+
+"He is a new hand," said the banker, "or he would have divided his money
+into three parts to give himself more chance."
+
+The young man went out without asking for his hat; but the old
+watch-dog, who had noted its shabby condition, returned it to him
+without a word. The gambler mechanically gave up the tally, and went
+downstairs whistling _Di tanti Palpiti_ so feebly, that he himself
+scarcely heard the delicious notes.
+
+He found himself immediately under the arcades of the Palais-Royal,
+reached the Rue Saint Honore, took the direction of the Tuileries, and
+crossed the gardens with an undecided step. He walked as if he were in
+some desert, elbowed by men whom he did not see, hearing through all the
+voices of the crowd one voice alone--the voice of Death. He was lost in
+the thoughts that benumbed him at last, like the criminals who used
+to be taken in carts from the Palais de Justice to the Place de Greve,
+where the scaffold awaited them reddened with all the blood spilt here
+since 1793.
+
+There is something great and terrible about suicide. Most people's
+downfalls are not dangerous; they are like children who have not far to
+fall, and cannot injure themselves; but when a great nature is dashed
+down, he is bound to fall from a height. He must have been raised almost
+to the skies; he has caught glimpses of some heaven beyond his reach.
+Vehement must the storms be which compel a soul to seek for peace from
+the trigger of a pistol.
+
+How much young power starves and pines away in a garret for want of a
+friend, for lack of a woman's consolation, in the midst of millions of
+fellow-creatures, in the presence of a listless crowd that is burdened
+by its wealth! When one remembers all this, suicide looms large. Between
+a self-sought death and the abundant hopes whose voices call a young man
+to Paris, God only knows what may intervene; what contending ideas have
+striven within the soul; what poems have been set aside; what moans and
+what despair have been repressed; what abortive masterpieces and vain
+endeavors! Every suicide is an awful poem of sorrow. Where will you find
+a work of genius floating above the seas of literature that can compare
+with this paragraph:
+
+  "Yesterday, at four o'clock, a young woman threw herself into the
+  Seine from the Pont des Arts."
+
+Dramas and romances pale before this concise Parisian phrase; so must
+even that old frontispiece, _The Lamentations of the glorious king of
+Kaernavan, put in prison by his children_, the sole remaining fragment
+of a lost work that drew tears from Sterne at the bare perusal--the same
+Sterne who deserted his own wife and family.
+
+The stranger was beset with such thoughts as these, which passed in
+fragments through his mind, like tattered flags fluttering above the
+combat. If he set aside for a moment the burdens of consciousness and of
+memory, to watch the flower heads gently swayed by the breeze among the
+green thickets, a revulsion came over him, life struggled against
+the oppressive thought of suicide, and his eyes rose to the sky: gray
+clouds, melancholy gusts of the wind, the stormy atmosphere, all decreed
+that he should die.
+
+He bent his way toward the Pont Royal, musing over the last fancies of
+others who had gone before him. He smiled to himself as he remembered
+that Lord Castlereagh had satisfied the humblest of our needs before
+he cut his throat, and that the academician Auger had sought for his
+snuff-box as he went to his death. He analyzed these extravagances,
+and even examined himself; for as he stood aside against the parapet
+to allow a porter to pass, his coat had been whitened somewhat by the
+contact, and he carefully brushed the dust from his sleeve, to his own
+surprise. He reached the middle of the arch, and looked forebodingly at
+the water.
+
+"Wretched weather for drowning yourself," said a ragged old woman, who
+grinned at him; "isn't the Seine cold and dirty?"
+
+His answer was a ready smile, which showed the frenzied nature of his
+courage; then he shivered all at once as he saw at a distance, by the
+door of the Tuileries, a shed with an inscription above it in letters
+twelve inches high: THE ROYAL HUMANE SOCIETY'S APPARATUS.
+
+A vision of M. Dacheux rose before him, equipped by his philanthropy,
+calling out and setting in motion the too efficacious oars which break
+the heads of drowning men, if unluckily they should rise to the surface;
+he saw a curious crowd collecting, running for a doctor, preparing
+fumigations, he read the maundering paragraph in the papers, put between
+notes on a festivity and on the smiles of a ballet-dancer; he heard
+the francs counted down by the prefect of police to the watermen. As a
+corpse, he was worth fifteen francs; but now while he lived he was only
+a man of talent without patrons, without friends, without a mattress
+to lie on, or any one to speak a word for him--a perfect social cipher,
+useless to a State which gave itself no trouble about him.
+
+A death in broad daylight seemed degrading to him; he made up his mind
+to die at night so as to bequeath an unrecognizable corpse to a world
+which had disregarded the greatness of life. He began his wanderings
+again, turning towards the Quai Voltaire, imitating the lagging gait of
+an idler seeking to kill time. As he came down the steps at the end of
+the bridge, his notice was attracted by the second-hand books displayed
+on the parapet, and he was on the point of bargaining for some. He
+smiled, thrust his hands philosophically into his pockets, and fell to
+strolling on again with a proud disdain in his manner, when he heard to
+his surprise some coin rattling fantastically in his pocket.
+
+A smile of hope lit his face, and slid from his lips over his features,
+over his brow, and brought a joyful light to his eyes and his dark
+cheeks. It was a spark of happiness like one of the red dots that flit
+over the remains of a burnt scrap of paper; but as it is with the black
+ashes, so it was with his face, it became dull again when the stranger
+quickly drew out his hand and perceived three pennies. "Ah, kind
+gentleman! _carita_, _carita_; for the love of St. Catherine! only a
+halfpenny to buy some bread!"
+
+A little chimney sweeper, with puffed cheeks, all black with soot, and
+clad in tatters, held out his hand to beg for the man's last pence.
+
+Two paces from the little Savoyard stood an old _pauvre honteux_, sickly
+and feeble, in wretched garments of ragged druggeting, who asked in a
+thick, muffled voice:
+
+"Anything you like to give, monsieur; I will pray to God for you..."
+
+But the young man turned his eyes on him, and the old beggar stopped
+without another word, discerning in that mournful face an abandonment of
+wretchedness more bitter than his own.
+
+"_La carita_! _la carita_!"
+
+The stranger threw the coins to the old man and the child, left the
+footway, and turned towards the houses; the harrowing sight of the Seine
+fretted him beyond endurance.
+
+"May God lengthen your days!" cried the two beggars.
+
+As he reached the shop window of a print-seller, this man on the brink
+of death met a young woman alighting from a showy carriage. He looked in
+delight at her prettiness, at the pale face appropriately framed by the
+satin of her fashionable bonnet. Her slender form and graceful movements
+entranced him. Her skirt had been slightly raised as she stepped to the
+pavement, disclosing a daintily fitting white stocking over the delicate
+outlines beneath. The young lady went into the shop, purchased albums
+and sets of lithographs; giving several gold coins for them, which
+glittered and rang upon the counter. The young man, seemingly occupied
+with the prints in the window, fixed upon the fair stranger a gaze as
+eager as man can give, to receive in exchange an indifferent glance,
+such as lights by accident on a passer-by. For him it was a leave-taking
+of love and of woman; but his final and strenuous questioning glance was
+neither understood nor felt by the slight-natured woman there; her color
+did not rise, her eyes did not droop. What was it to her? one more piece
+of adulation, yet another sigh only prompted the delightful thought at
+night, "I looked rather well to-day."
+
+The young man quickly turned to another picture, and only left it when
+she returned to her carriage. The horses started off, the final vision
+of luxury and refinement went under an eclipse, just as that life of his
+would soon do also. Slowly and sadly he followed the line of the shops,
+listlessly examining the specimens on view. When the shops came to an
+end, he reviewed the Louvre, the Institute, the towers of Notre Dame, of
+the Palais, the Pont des Arts; all these public monuments seemed to have
+taken their tone from the heavy gray sky.
+
+Fitful gleams of light gave a foreboding look to Paris; like a pretty
+woman, the city has mysterious fits of ugliness or beauty. So the outer
+world seemed to be in a plot to steep this man about to die in a painful
+trance. A prey to the maleficent power which acts relaxingly upon us
+by the fluid circulating through our nerves, his whole frame seemed
+gradually to experience a dissolving process. He felt the anguish of
+these throes passing through him in waves, and the houses and the crowd
+seemed to surge to and fro in a mist before his eyes. He tried to escape
+the agitation wrought in his mind by the revulsions of his physical
+nature, and went toward the shop of a dealer in antiquities, thinking to
+give a treat to his senses, and to spend the interval till nightfall in
+bargaining over curiosities.
+
+He sought, one might say, to regain courage and to find a stimulant,
+like a criminal who doubts his power to reach the scaffold. The
+consciousness of approaching death gave him, for the time being, the
+intrepidity of a duchess with a couple of lovers, so that he entered the
+place with an abstracted look, while his lips displayed a set smile like
+a drunkard's. Had not life, or rather had not death, intoxicated him?
+Dizziness soon overcame him again. Things appeared to him in strange
+colors, or as making slight movements; his irregular pulse was no
+doubt the cause; the blood that sometimes rushed like a burning torrent
+through his veins, and sometimes lay torpid and stagnant as tepid water.
+He merely asked leave to see if the shop contained any curiosities which
+he required.
+
+A plump-faced young shopman with red hair, in an otter-skin cap, left
+an old peasant woman in charge of the shop--a sort of feminine Caliban,
+employed in cleaning a stove made marvelous by Bernard Palissy's work.
+This youth remarked carelessly:
+
+"Look round, _monsieur_! We have nothing very remarkable here
+downstairs; but if I may trouble you to go up to the first floor, I will
+show you some very fine mummies from Cairo, some inlaid pottery, and
+some carved ebony--_genuine Renaissance_ work, just come in, and of
+perfect beauty."
+
+In the stranger's fearful position this cicerone's prattle and shopman's
+empty talk seemed like the petty vexations by which narrow minds destroy
+a man of genius. But as he must even go through with it, he appeared
+to listen to his guide, answering him by gestures or monosyllables; but
+imperceptibly he arrogated the privilege of saying nothing, and gave
+himself up without hindrance to his closing meditations, which were
+appalling. He had a poet's temperament, his mind had entered by chance
+on a vast field; and he must see perforce the dry bones of twenty future
+worlds.
+
+At a first glance the place presented a confused picture in which every
+achievement, human and divine, was mingled. Crocodiles, monkeys, and
+serpents stuffed with straw grinned at glass from church windows,
+seemed to wish to bite sculptured heads, to chase lacquered work, or to
+scramble up chandeliers. A Sevres vase, bearing Napoleon's portrait
+by Mme. Jacotot, stood beside a sphinx dedicated to Sesostris. The
+beginnings of the world and the events of yesterday were mingled
+with grotesque cheerfulness. A kitchen jack leaned against a pyx, a
+republican sabre on a mediaeval hackbut. Mme. du Barry, with a star
+above her head, naked, and surrounded by a cloud, seemed to look
+longingly out of Latour's pastel at an Indian chibook, while she tried
+to guess the purpose of the spiral curves that wound towards her.
+Instruments of death, poniards, curious pistols, and disguised weapons
+had been flung down pell-mell among the paraphernalia of daily life;
+porcelain tureens, Dresden plates, translucent cups from china, old
+salt-cellars, comfit-boxes belonging to feudal times. A carved ivory
+ship sped full sail on the back of a motionless tortoise.
+
+The Emperor Augustus remained unmoved and imperial with an air-pump
+thrust into one eye. Portraits of French sheriffs and Dutch
+burgomasters, phlegmatic now as when in life, looked down pallid and
+unconcerned on the chaos of past ages below them.
+
+Every land of earth seemed to have contributed some stray fragment of
+its learning, some example of its art. Nothing seemed lacking to this
+philosophical kitchen-midden, from a redskin's calumet, a green and
+golden slipper from the seraglio, a Moorish yataghan, a Tartar idol, to
+the soldier's tobacco pouch, to the priest's ciborium, and the plumes
+that once adorned a throne. This extraordinary combination was rendered
+yet more bizarre by the accidents of lighting, by a multitude of
+confused reflections of various hues, by the sharp contrast of blacks
+and whites. Broken cries seemed to reach the ear, unfinished dramas
+seized upon the imagination, smothered lights caught the eye. A thin
+coating of inevitable dust covered all the multitudinous corners and
+convolutions of these objects of various shapes which gave highly
+picturesque effects.
+
+First of all, the stranger compared the three galleries which
+civilization, cults, divinities, masterpieces, dominions, carousals,
+sanity, and madness had filled to repletion, to a mirror with numerous
+facets, each depicting a world. After this first hazy idea he would fain
+have selected his pleasures; but by dint of using his eyes, thinking and
+musing, a fever began to possess him, caused perhaps by the gnawing pain
+of hunger. The spectacle of so much existence, individual or national,
+to which these pledges bore witness, ended by numbing his senses--the
+purpose with which he entered the shop was fulfilled. He had left the
+real behind, and had climbed gradually up to an ideal world; he had
+attained to the enchanted palace of ecstasy, whence the universe
+appeared to him by fragments and in shapes of flame, as once the future
+blazed out before the eyes of St. John in Patmos.
+
+A crowd of sorrowing faces, beneficent and appalling, dark and luminous,
+far and near, gathered in numbers, in myriads, in whole generations.
+Egypt, rigid and mysterious, arose from her sands in the form of a mummy
+swathed in black bandages; then the Pharaohs swallowed up nations, that
+they might build themselves a tomb; and he beheld Moses and the Hebrews
+and the desert, and a solemn antique world. Fresh and joyous, a marble
+statue spoke to him from a twisted column of the pleasure-loving myths
+of Greece and Ionia. Ah! who would not have smiled with him to see,
+against the earthen red background, the brown-faced maiden dancing with
+gleeful reverence before the god Priapus, wrought in the fine clay of an
+Etruscan vase? The Latin queen caressed her chimera.
+
+The whims of Imperial Rome were there in life, the bath was disclosed,
+the toilette of a languid Julia, dreaming, waiting for her Tibullus.
+Strong with the might of Arabic spells, the head of Cicero evoked
+memories of a free Rome, and unrolled before him the scrolls of Titus
+Livius. The young man beheld _Senatus Populusque Romanus_; consuls,
+lictors, togas with purple fringes; the fighting in the Forum, the angry
+people, passed in review before him like the cloudy faces of a dream.
+
+Then Christian Rome predominated in his vision. A painter had laid
+heaven open; he beheld the Virgin Mary wrapped in a golden cloud among
+the angels, shining more brightly than the sun, receiving the prayers of
+sufferers, on whom this second Eve Regenerate smiles pityingly. At the
+touch of a mosaic, made of various lavas from Vesuvius and Etna, his
+fancy fled to the hot tawny south of Italy. He was present at Borgia's
+orgies, he roved among the Abruzzi, sought for Italian love intrigues,
+grew ardent over pale faces and dark, almond-shaped eyes. He shivered
+over midnight adventures, cut short by the cool thrust of a jealous
+blade, as he saw a mediaeval dagger with a hilt wrought like lace, and
+spots of rust like splashes of blood upon it.
+
+India and its religions took the shape of the idol with his peaked cap
+of fantastic form, with little bells, clad in silk and gold. Close by,
+a mat, as pretty as the bayadere who once lay upon it, still gave out
+a faint scent of sandal wood. His fancy was stirred by a goggle-eyed
+Chinese monster, with mouth awry and twisted limbs, the invention of
+a people who, grown weary of the monotony of beauty, found an
+indescribable pleasure in an infinite variety of ugliness. A salt-cellar
+from Benvenuto Cellini's workshop carried him back to the Renaissance
+at its height, to the time when there was no restraint on art or morals,
+when torture was the sport of sovereigns; and from their councils,
+churchmen with courtesans' arms about them issued decrees of chastity
+for simple priests.
+
+On a cameo he saw the conquests of Alexander, the massacres of Pizarro
+in a matchbox, and religious wars disorderly, fanatical, and cruel, in
+the shadows of a helmet. Joyous pictures of chivalry were called up by
+a suit of Milanese armor, brightly polished and richly wrought; a
+paladin's eyes seemed to sparkle yet under the visor.
+
+This sea of inventions, fashions, furniture, works of art and fiascos,
+made for him a poem without end. Shapes and colors and projects
+all lived again for him, but his mind received no clear and perfect
+conception. It was the poet's task to complete the sketches of the
+great master, who had scornfully mingled on his palette the hues of the
+numberless vicissitudes of human life. When the world at large at last
+released him, when he had pondered over many lands, many epochs, and
+various empires, the young man came back to the life of the individual.
+He impersonated fresh characters, and turned his mind to details,
+rejecting the life of nations as a burden too overwhelming for a single
+soul.
+
+Yonder was a sleeping child modeled in wax, a relic of Ruysch's
+collection, an enchanting creation which brought back the happiness of
+his own childhood. The cotton garment of a Tahitian maid next fascinated
+him; he beheld the primitive life of nature, the real modesty of naked
+chastity, the joys of an idleness natural to mankind, a peaceful fate
+by a slow river of sweet water under a plantain tree that bears its
+pleasant manna without the toil of man. Then all at once he became a
+corsair, investing himself with the terrible poetry that Lara has given
+to the part: the thought came at the sight of the mother-of-pearl tints
+of a myriad sea-shells, and grew as he saw madrepores redolent of the
+sea-weeds and the storms of the Atlantic.
+
+The sea was forgotten again at a distant view of exquisite miniatures;
+he admired a precious missal in manuscript, adorned with arabesques in
+gold and blue. Thoughts of peaceful life swayed him; he devoted himself
+afresh to study and research, longing for the easy life of the monk,
+devoid alike of cares and pleasures; and from the depths of his cell
+he looked out upon the meadows, woods, and vineyards of his convent.
+Pausing before some work of Teniers, he took for his own the helmet
+of the soldier or the poverty of the artisan; he wished to wear a
+smoke-begrimed cap with these Flemings, to drink their beer and join
+their game at cards, and smiled upon the comely plumpness of a peasant
+woman. He shivered at a snowstorm by Mieris; he seemed to take part in
+Salvator Rosa's battle-piece; he ran his fingers over a tomahawk
+form Illinois, and felt his own hair rise as he touched a Cherokee
+scalping-knife. He marveled over the rebec that he set in the hands of
+some lady of the land, drank in the musical notes of her ballad, and in
+the twilight by the gothic arch above the hearth he told his love in a
+gloom so deep that he could not read his answer in her eyes.
+
+He caught at all delights, at all sorrows; grasped at existence in every
+form; and endowed the phantoms conjured up from that inert and plastic
+material so liberally with his own life and feelings, that the sound of
+his own footsteps reached him as if from another world, or as the hum of
+Paris reaches the towers of Notre Dame.
+
+He ascended the inner staircase which led to the first floor, with its
+votive shields, panoplies, carved shrines, and figures on the wall at
+every step. Haunted by the strangest shapes, by marvelous creations
+belonging to the borderland betwixt life and death, he walked as if
+under the spell of a dream. His own existence became a matter of doubt
+to him; he was neither wholly alive nor dead, like the curious objects
+about him. The light began to fade as he reached the show-rooms, but
+the treasures of gold and silver heaped up there scarcely seemed to need
+illumination from without. The most extravagant whims of prodigals, who
+have run through millions to perish in garrets, had left their traces
+here in this vast bazar of human follies. Here, beside a writing desk,
+made at the cost of 100,000 francs, and sold for a hundred pence, lay a
+lock with a secret worth a king's ransom. The human race was revealed
+in all the grandeur of its wretchedness; in all the splendor of its
+infinite littleness. An ebony table that an artist might worship,
+carved after Jean Goujon's designs, in years of toil, had been purchased
+perhaps at the price of firewood. Precious caskets, and things that
+fairy hands might have fashioned, lay there in heaps like rubbish.
+
+"You must have the worth of millions here!" cried the young man as he
+entered the last of an immense suite of rooms, all decorated and gilt by
+eighteenth century artists.
+
+"Thousands of millions, you might say," said the florid shopman; "but
+you have seen nothing as yet. Go up to the third floor, and you shall
+see!"
+
+The stranger followed his guide to a fourth gallery, where one by one
+there passed before his wearied eyes several pictures by Poussin, a
+magnificent statue by Michael Angelo, enchanting landscapes by Claude
+Lorraine, a Gerard Dow (like a stray page from Sterne), Rembrandts,
+Murillos, and pictures by Velasquez, as dark and full of color as a poem
+of Byron's; then came classic bas-reliefs, finely-cut agates, wonderful
+cameos! Works of art upon works of art, till the craftsman's skill
+palled on the mind, masterpiece after masterpiece till art itself became
+hateful at last and enthusiasm died. He came upon a Madonna by Raphael,
+but he was tired of Raphael; a figure by Correggio never received the
+glance it demanded of him. A priceless vase of antique porphyry carved
+round about with pictures of the most grotesquely wanton of Roman
+divinities, the pride of some Corinna, scarcely drew a smile from him.
+
+The ruins of fifteen hundred vanished years oppressed him; he sickened
+under all this human thought; felt bored by all this luxury and art. He
+struggled in vain against the constantly renewed fantastic shapes that
+sprang up from under his feet, like children of some sportive demon.
+
+Are not fearful poisons set up in the soul by a swift concentration of
+all her energies, her enjoyments, or ideas; as modern chemistry, in its
+caprice, repeats the action of creation by some gas or other? Do not
+many men perish under the shock of the sudden expansion of some moral
+acid within them?
+
+"What is there in that box?" he inquired, as he reached a large
+closet--final triumph of human skill, originality, wealth, and splendor,
+in which there hung a large, square mahogany coffer, suspended from a
+nail by a silver chain.
+
+"Ah, _monsieur_ keeps the key of it," said the stout assistant
+mysteriously. "If you wish to see the portrait, I will gladly venture to
+tell him."
+
+"Venture!" said the young man; "then is your master a prince?"
+
+"I don't know what he is," the other answered. Equally astonished, each
+looked for a moment at the other. Then construing the stranger's silence
+as an order, the apprentice left him alone in the closet.
+
+Have you never launched into the immensity of time and space as you read
+the geological writings of Cuvier? Carried by his fancy, have you hung
+as if suspended by a magician's wand over the illimitable abyss of the
+past? When the fossil bones of animals belonging to civilizations before
+the Flood are turned up in bed after bed and layer upon layer of the
+quarries of Montmartre or among the schists of the Ural range, the
+soul receives with dismay a glimpse of millions of peoples forgotten
+by feeble human memory and unrecognized by permanent divine tradition,
+peoples whose ashes cover our globe with two feet of earth that yields
+bread to us and flowers.
+
+Is not Cuvier the great poet of our era? Byron has given admirable
+expression to certain moral conflicts, but our immortal naturalist has
+reconstructed past worlds from a few bleached bones; has rebuilt cities,
+like Cadmus, with monsters' teeth; has animated forests with all the
+secrets of zoology gleaned from a piece of coal; has discovered a giant
+population from the footprints of a mammoth. These forms stand erect,
+grow large, and fill regions commensurate with their giant size. He
+treats figures like a poet; a naught set beside a seven by him produces
+awe.
+
+He can call up nothingness before you without the phrases of a
+charlatan. He searches a lump of gypsum, finds an impression in it, says
+to you, "Behold!" All at once marble takes an animal shape, the dead
+come to life, the history of the world is laid open before you. After
+countless dynasties of giant creatures, races of fish and clans of
+mollusks, the race of man appears at last as the degenerate copy of a
+splendid model, which the Creator has perchance destroyed. Emboldened
+by his gaze into the past, this petty race, children of yesterday,
+can overstep chaos, can raise a psalm without end, and outline for
+themselves the story of the Universe in an Apocalypse that reveals the
+past. After the tremendous resurrection that took place at the voice
+of this man, the little drop in the nameless Infinite, common to all
+spheres, that is ours to use, and that we call Time, seems to us a
+pitiable moment of life. We ask ourselves the purpose of our triumphs,
+our hatreds, our loves, overwhelmed as we are by the destruction of so
+many past universes, and whether it is worth while to accept the pain of
+life in order that hereafter we may become an intangible speck. Then we
+remain as if dead, completely torn away from the present till the _valet
+de chambre_ comes in and says, "_Madame la comtesse_ answers that she is
+expecting _monsieur_."
+
+All the wonders which had brought the known world before the young man's
+mind wrought in his soul much the same feeling of dejection that besets
+the philosopher investigating unknown creatures. He longed more than
+ever for death as he flung himself back in a curule chair and let his
+eyes wander across the illusions composing a panorama of the past.
+The pictures seemed to light up, the Virgin's heads smiled on him, the
+statues seemed alive. Everything danced and swayed around him, with a
+motion due to the gloom and the tormenting fever that racked his brain;
+each monstrosity grimaced at him, while the portraits on the canvas
+closed their eyes for a little relief. Every shape seemed to tremble
+and start, and to leave its place gravely or flippantly, gracefully or
+awkwardly, according to its fashion, character, and surroundings.
+
+A mysterious Sabbath began, rivaling the fantastic scenes witnessed
+by Faust upon the Brocken. But these optical illusions, produced by
+weariness, overstrained eyesight, or the accidents of twilight, could
+not alarm the stranger. The terrors of life had no power over a soul
+grown familiar with the terrors of death. He even gave himself up, half
+amused by its bizarre eccentricities, to the influence of this moral
+galvanism; its phenomena, closely connected with his last thoughts,
+assured him that he was still alive. The silence about him was so deep
+that he embarked once more in dreams that grew gradually darker and
+darker as if by magic, as the light slowly faded. A last struggling ray
+from the sun lit up rosy answering lights. He raised his head and saw a
+skeleton dimly visible, with its skull bent doubtfully to one side, as
+if to say, "The dead will none of thee as yet."
+
+He passed his hand over his forehead to shake off the drowsiness, and
+felt a cold breath of air as an unknown furry something swept past his
+cheeks. He shivered. A muffled clatter of the windows followed; it was
+a bat, he fancied, that had given him this chilly sepulchral caress. He
+could yet dimly see for a moment the shapes that surrounded him, by the
+vague light in the west; then all these inanimate objects were blotted
+out in uniform darkness. Night and the hour of death had suddenly come.
+Thenceforward, for a while, he lost consciousness of the things about
+him; he was either buried in deep meditation or sleep overcame him,
+brought on by weariness or by the stress of those many thoughts that
+lacerated his heart.
+
+Suddenly he thought that an awful voice called him by name; it was like
+some feverish nightmare, when at a step the dreamer falls headlong over
+into an abyss, and he trembled. He closed his eyes, dazzled by bright
+rays from a red circle of light that shone out from the shadows. In the
+midst of the circle stood a little old man who turned the light of the
+lamp upon him, yet he had not heard him enter, nor move, nor speak.
+There was something magical about the apparition. The boldest man,
+awakened in such a sort, would have felt alarmed at the sight of this
+figure, which might have issued from some sarcophagus hard by.
+
+A curiously youthful look in the unmoving eyes of the spectre forbade
+the idea of anything supernatural; but for all that, in the brief space
+between his dreaming and waking life, the young man's judgment remained
+philosophically suspended, as Descartes advises. He was, in spite
+of himself, under the influence of an unaccountable hallucination, a
+mystery that our pride rejects, and that our imperfect science vainly
+tries to resolve.
+
+Imagine a short old man, thin and spare, in a long black velvet gown
+girded round him by a thick silk cord. His long white hair escaped on
+either side of his face from under a black velvet cap which closely
+fitted his head and made a formal setting for his countenance. His
+gown enveloped his body like a winding sheet, so that all that was left
+visible was a narrow bleached human face. But for the wasted arm, thin
+as a draper's wand, which held aloft the lamp that cast all its light
+upon him, the face would have seemed to hang in mid air. A gray pointed
+beard concealed the chin of this fantastical appearance, and gave him
+the look of one of those Jewish types which serve artists as models
+for Moses. His lips were so thin and colorless that it needed a close
+inspection to find the lines of his mouth at all in the pallid face. His
+great wrinkled brow and hollow bloodless cheeks, the inexorably stern
+expression of his small green eyes that no longer possessed eyebrows
+or lashes, might have convinced the stranger that Gerard Dow's "Money
+Changer" had come down from his frame. The craftiness of an inquisitor,
+revealed in those curving wrinkles and creases that wound about his
+temples, indicated a profound knowledge of life. There was no deceiving
+this man, who seemed to possess a power of detecting the secrets of the
+wariest heart.
+
+The wisdom and the moral codes of every people seemed gathered up in his
+passive face, just as all the productions of the globe had been heaped
+up in his dusty showrooms. He seemed to possess the tranquil luminous
+vision of some god before whom all things are open, or the haughty power
+of a man who knows all things.
+
+With two strokes of the brush a painter could have so altered the
+expression of this face, that what had been a serene representation
+of the Eternal Father should change to the sneering mask of a
+Mephistopheles; for though sovereign power was revealed by the forehead,
+mocking folds lurked about the mouth. He must have sacrificed all the
+joys of earth, as he had crushed all human sorrows beneath his potent
+will. The man at the brink of death shivered at the thought of the life
+led by this spirit, so solitary and remote from our world; joyless,
+since he had no one illusion left; painless, because pleasure had ceased
+to exist for him. There he stood, motionless and serene as a star in a
+bright mist. His lamp lit up the obscure closet, just as his green eyes,
+with their quiet malevolence, seemed to shed a light on the moral world.
+
+This was the strange spectacle that startled the young man's returning
+sight, as he shook off the dreamy fancies and thoughts of death that
+had lulled him. An instant of dismay, a momentary return to belief
+in nursery tales, may be forgiven him, seeing that his senses were
+obscured. Much thought had wearied his mind, and his nerves were
+exhausted with the strain of the tremendous drama within him, and by the
+scenes that had heaped on him all the horrid pleasures that a piece of
+opium can produce.
+
+But this apparition had appeared in Paris, on the Quai Voltaire, and in
+the nineteenth century; the time and place made sorcery impossible.
+The idol of French scepticism had died in the house just opposite,
+the disciple of Gay-Lussac and Arago, who had held the charlatanism of
+intellect in contempt. And yet the stranger submitted himself to the
+influence of an imaginative spell, as all of us do at times, when we
+wish to escape from an inevitable certainty, or to tempt the power of
+Providence. So some mysterious apprehension of a strange force made him
+tremble before the old man with the lamp. All of us have been stirred in
+the same way by the sight of Napoleon, or of some other great man, made
+illustrious by his genius or by fame.
+
+"You wish to see Raphael's portrait of Jesus Christ, monsieur?" the old
+man asked politely. There was something metallic in the clear, sharp
+ring of his voice.
+
+He set the lamp upon a broken column, so that all its light might fall
+on the brown case.
+
+At the sacred names of Christ and Raphael the young man showed some
+curiosity. The merchant, who no doubt looked for this, pressed a spring,
+and suddenly the mahogany panel slid noiselessly back in its groove, and
+discovered the canvas to the stranger's admiring gaze. At sight of this
+deathless creation, he forgot his fancies in the show-rooms and the
+freaks of his dreams, and became himself again. The old man became a
+being of flesh and blood, very much alive, with nothing chimerical about
+him, and took up his existence at once upon solid earth.
+
+The sympathy and love, and the gentle serenity in the divine face,
+exerted an instant sway over the younger spectator. Some influence
+falling from heaven bade cease the burning torment that consumed the
+marrow of his bones. The head of the Saviour of mankind seemed to issue
+from among the shadows represented by a dark background; an aureole of
+light shone out brightly from his hair; an impassioned belief seemed to
+glow through him, and to thrill every feature. The word of life had just
+been uttered by those red lips, the sacred sounds seemed to linger still
+in the air; the spectator besought the silence for those captivating
+parables, hearkened for them in the future, and had to turn to the
+teachings of the past. The untroubled peace of the divine eyes, the
+comfort of sorrowing souls, seemed an interpretation of the Evangel.
+The sweet triumphant smile revealed the secret of the Catholic religion,
+which sums up all things in the precept, "Love one another." This
+picture breathed the spirit of prayer, enjoined forgiveness, overcame
+self, caused sleeping powers of good to waken. For this work of
+Raphael's had the imperious charm of music; you were brought under the
+spell of memories of the past; his triumph was so absolute that the
+artist was forgotten. The witchery of the lamplight heightened the
+wonder; the head seemed at times to flicker in the distance, enveloped
+in cloud.
+
+"I covered the surface of that picture with gold pieces," said the
+merchant carelessly.
+
+"And now for death!" cried the young man, awakened from his musings. His
+last thought had recalled his fate to him, as it led him imperceptibly
+back from the forlorn hopes to which he had clung.
+
+"Ah, ha! then my suspicions were well founded!" said the other, and his
+hands held the young man's wrists in a grip like that of a vice.
+
+The younger man smiled wearily at his mistake, and said gently:
+
+"You, sir, have nothing to fear; it is not your life, but my own that
+is in question.... But why should I hide a harmless fraud?" he went on,
+after a look at the anxious old man. "I came to see your treasures to
+while away the time till night should come and I could drown myself
+decently. Who would grudge this last pleasure to a poet and a man of
+science?"
+
+While he spoke, the jealous merchant watched the haggard face of his
+pretended customer with keen eyes. Perhaps the mournful tones of his
+voice reassured him, or he also read the dark signs of fate in the faded
+features that had made the gamblers shudder; he released his hands, but,
+with a touch of caution, due to the experience of some hundred years at
+least, he stretched his arm out to a sideboard as if to steady himself,
+took up a little dagger, and said:
+
+"Have you been a supernumerary clerk of the Treasury for three years
+without receiving any perquisites?"
+
+The stranger could scarcely suppress a smile as he shook his head.
+
+"Perhaps your father has expressed his regret for your birth a little
+too sharply? Or have you disgraced yourself?"
+
+"If I meant to be disgraced, I should live."
+
+"You have been hissed perhaps at the Funambules? Or you have had to
+compose couplets to pay for your mistress' funeral? Do you want to be
+cured of the gold fever? Or to be quit of the spleen? For what blunder
+is your life forfeit?"
+
+"You must not look among the common motives that impel suicides for the
+reason of my death. To spare myself the task of disclosing my unheard-of
+sufferings, for which language has no name, I will tell you this--that
+I am in the deepest, most humiliating, and most cruel trouble, and," he
+went on in proud tones that harmonized ill with the words just uttered,
+"I have no wish to beg for either help or sympathy."
+
+"Eh! eh!"
+
+The two syllables which the old man pronounced resembled the sound of a
+rattle. Then he went on thus:
+
+"Without compelling you to entreat me, without making you blush for
+it, and without giving you so much as a French centime, a para from the
+Levant, a German heller, a Russian kopeck, a Scottish farthing, a single
+obolus or sestertius from the ancient world, or one piastre from the
+new, without offering you anything whatever in gold, silver, or copper,
+notes or drafts, I will make you richer, more powerful, and of more
+consequence than a constitutional king."
+
+The young man thought that the older was in his dotage, and waited in
+bewilderment without venturing to reply.
+
+"Turn round," said the merchant, suddenly catching up the lamp in order
+to light up the opposite wall; "look at that leathern skin," he went on.
+
+The young man rose abruptly, and showed some surprise at the sight of a
+piece of shagreen which hung on the wall behind his chair. It was only
+about the size of a fox's skin, but it seemed to fill the deep shadows
+of the place with such brilliant rays that it looked like a small comet,
+an appearance at first sight inexplicable. The young sceptic went up
+to this so-called talisman, which was to rescue him from all points of
+view, and he soon found out the cause of its singular brilliancy. The
+dark grain of the leather had been so carefully burnished and polished,
+the striped markings of the graining were so sharp and clear, that every
+particle of the surface of the bit of Oriental leather was in itself a
+focus which concentrated the light, and reflected it vividly.
+
+He accounted for this phenomenon categorically to the old man, who only
+smiled meaningly by way of answer. His superior smile led the young
+scientific man to fancy that he himself had been deceived by some
+imposture. He had no wish to carry one more puzzle to his grave, and
+hastily turned the skin over, like some child eager to find out the
+mysteries of a new toy.
+
+"Ah," he cried, "here is the mark of the seal which they call in the
+East the Signet of Solomon."
+
+"So you know that, then?" asked the merchant. His peculiar method of
+laughter, two or three quick breathings through the nostrils, said more
+than any words however eloquent.
+
+"Is there anybody in the world simple enough to believe in that idle
+fancy?" said the young man, nettled by the spitefulness of the silent
+chuckle. "Don't you know," he continued, "that the superstitions of the
+East have perpetuated the mystical form and the counterfeit characters
+of the symbol, which represents a mythical dominion? I have no more
+laid myself open to a charge of credulity in this case, than if I had
+mentioned sphinxes or griffins, whose existence mythology in a manner
+admits."
+
+"As you are an Orientalist," replied the other, "perhaps you can read
+that sentence."
+
+He held the lamp close to the talisman, which the young man held towards
+him, and pointed out some characters inlaid in the surface of the
+wonderful skin, as if they had grown on the animal to which it once
+belonged.
+
+"I must admit," said the stranger, "that I have no idea how the letters
+could be engraved so deeply on the skin of a wild ass." And he turned
+quickly to the tables strewn with curiosities and seemed to look for
+something.
+
+"What is it that you want?" asked the old man.
+
+"Something that will cut the leather, so that I can see whether the
+letters are printed or inlaid."
+
+The old man held out his stiletto. The stranger took it and tried to cut
+the skin above the lettering; but when he had removed a thin shaving of
+leather from them, the characters still appeared below, so clear and so
+exactly like the surface impression, that for a moment he was not sure
+that he had cut anything away after all.
+
+"The craftsmen of the Levant have secrets known only to themselves,"
+he said, half in vexation, as he eyed the characters of this Oriental
+sentence.
+
+"Yes," said the old man, "it is better to attribute it to man's agency
+than to God's."
+
+The mysterious words were thus arranged:
+
+     [Drawing of apparently Sanskrit characters omitted]
+
+Or, as it runs in English:
+
+     POSSESSING ME THOU SHALT POSSESS ALL THINGS.
+     BUT THY LIFE IS MINE, FOR GOD HAS SO WILLED IT.
+     WISH, AND THY WISHES SHALL BE FULFILLED;
+     BUT MEASURE THY DESIRES, ACCORDING
+     TO THE LIFE THAT IS IN THEE.
+     THIS IS THY LIFE,
+     WITH EACH WISH I MUST SHRINK
+     EVEN AS THY OWN DAYS.
+     WILT THOU HAVE ME?  TAKE ME.
+     GOD WILL HEARKEN UNTO THEE.
+     SO BE IT!
+
+"So you read Sanskrit fluently," said the old man. "You have been in
+Persia perhaps, or in Bengal?"
+
+"No, sir," said the stranger, as he felt the emblematical skin
+curiously. It was almost as rigid as a sheet of metal.
+
+The old merchant set the lamp back again upon the column, giving
+the other a look as he did so. "He has given up the notion of dying
+already," the glance said with phlegmatic irony.
+
+"Is it a jest, or is it an enigma?" asked the younger man.
+
+The other shook his head and said soberly:
+
+"I don't know how to answer you. I have offered this talisman with its
+terrible powers to men with more energy in them than you seem to me to
+have; but though they laughed at the questionable power it might exert
+over their futures, not one of them was ready to venture to conclude the
+fateful contract proposed by an unknown force. I am of their opinion, I
+have doubted and refrained, and----"
+
+"Have you never even tried its power?" interrupted the young stranger.
+
+"Tried it!" exclaimed the old man. "Suppose that you were on the column
+in the Place Vendome, would you try flinging yourself into space? Is it
+possible to stay the course of life? Has a man ever been known to die
+by halves? Before you came here, you had made up your mind to kill
+yourself, but all at once a mystery fills your mind, and you think no
+more about death. You child! Does not any one day of your life afford
+mysteries more absorbing? Listen to me. I saw the licentious days of
+Regency. I was like you, then, in poverty; I have begged my bread; but
+for all that, I am now a centenarian with a couple of years to spare,
+and a millionaire to boot. Misery was the making of me, ignorance has
+made me learned. I will tell you in a few words the great secret of
+human life. By two instinctive processes man exhausts the springs of
+life within him. Two verbs cover all the forms which these two causes of
+death may take--To Will and To have your Will. Between these two limits
+of human activity the wise have discovered an intermediate formula, to
+which I owe my good fortune and long life. To Will consumes us, and To
+have our Will destroys us, but To Know steeps our feeble organisms
+in perpetual calm. In me Thought has destroyed Will, so that Power is
+relegated to the ordinary functions of my economy. In a word, it is not
+in the heart which can be broken, or in the senses that become deadened,
+but it is in the brain that cannot waste away and survives everything
+else, that I have set my life. Moderation has kept mind and body
+unruffled. Yet, I have seen the whole world. I have learned all
+languages, lived after every manner. I have lent a Chinaman money,
+taking his father's corpse as a pledge, slept in an Arab's tent on the
+security of his bare word, signed contracts in every capital of Europe,
+and left my gold without hesitation in savage wigwams. I have attained
+everything, because I have known how to despise all things.
+
+"My one ambition has been to see. Is not Sight in a manner Insight?
+And to have knowledge or insight, is not that to have instinctive
+possession? To be able to discover the very substance of fact and to
+unite its essence to our essence? Of material possession what abides
+with you but an idea? Think, then, how glorious must be the life of a
+man who can stamp all realities upon his thought, place the springs of
+happiness within himself, and draw thence uncounted pleasures in idea,
+unspoiled by earthly stains. Thought is a key to all treasures; the
+miser's gains are ours without his cares. Thus I have soared above this
+world, where my enjoyments have been intellectual joys. I have reveled
+in the contemplation of seas, peoples, forests, and mountains! I have
+seen all things, calmly, and without weariness; I have set my desires
+on nothing; I have waited in expectation of everything. I have walked
+to and fro in the world as in a garden round about my own dwelling.
+Troubles, loves, ambitions, losses, and sorrows, as men call them,
+are for me ideas, which I transmute into waking dreams; I express and
+transpose instead of feeling them; instead of permitting them to prey
+upon my life, I dramatize and expand them; I divert myself with them as
+if they were romances which I could read by the power of vision within
+me. As I have never overtaxed my constitution, I still enjoy robust
+health; and as my mind is endowed with all the force that I have not
+wasted, this head of mine is even better furnished than my galleries.
+The true millions lie here," he said, striking his forehead. "I spend
+delicious days in communings with the past; I summon before me whole
+countries, places, extents of sea, the fair faces of history. In my
+imaginary seraglio I have all the women that I have never possessed.
+Your wars and revolutions come up before me for judgment. What is a
+feverish fugitive admiration for some more or less brightly colored
+piece of flesh and blood; some more or less rounded human form; what
+are all the disasters that wait on your erratic whims, compared with
+the magnificent power of conjuring up the whole world within your soul,
+compared with the immeasurable joys of movement, unstrangled by the
+cords of time, unclogged by the fetters of space; the joys of beholding
+all things, of comprehending all things, of leaning over the parapet of
+the world to question the other spheres, to hearken to the voice of God?
+There," he burst out, vehemently, "there are To Will and To have your
+Will, both together," he pointed to the bit of shagreen; "there are your
+social ideas, your immoderate desires, your excesses, your pleasures
+that end in death, your sorrows that quicken the pace of life, for pain
+is perhaps but a violent pleasure. Who could determine the point where
+pleasure becomes pain, where pain is still a pleasure? Is not the utmost
+brightness of the ideal world soothing to us, while the lightest shadows
+of the physical world annoy? Is not knowledge the secret of wisdom? And
+what is folly but a riotous expenditure of Will or Power?"
+
+"Very good then, a life of riotous excess for me!" said the stranger,
+pouncing upon the piece of shagreen.
+
+"Young man, beware!" cried the other with incredible vehemence.
+
+"I had resolved my existence into thought and study," the stranger
+replied; "and yet they have not even supported me. I am not to be gulled
+by a sermon worthy of Swedenborg, nor by your Oriental amulet, nor yet
+by your charitable endeavors to keep me in a world wherein existence is
+no longer possible for me.... Let me see now," he added, clutching the
+talisman convulsively, as he looked at the old man, "I wish for a
+royal banquet, a carouse worthy of this century, which, it is said, has
+brought everything to perfection! Let me have young boon companions,
+witty, unwarped by prejudice, merry to the verge of madness! Let one
+wine succeed another, each more biting and perfumed than the last, and
+strong enough to bring about three days of delirium! Passionate women's
+forms should grace that night! I would be borne away to unknown regions
+beyond the confines of this world, by the car and four-winged steed of
+a frantic and uproarious orgy. Let us ascend to the skies, or plunge
+ourselves in the mire. I do not know if one soars or sinks at such
+moments, and I do not care! Next, I bid this enigmatical power
+to concentrate all delights for me in one single joy. Yes, I must
+comprehend every pleasure of earth and heaven in the final embrace that
+is to kill me. Therefore, after the wine, I wish to hold high festival
+to Priapus, with songs that might rouse the dead, and kisses without
+end; the sound of them should pass like the crackling of flame through
+Paris, should revive the heat of youth and passion in husband and wife,
+even in hearts of seventy years."
+
+A laugh burst from the little old man. It rang in the young man's ears
+like an echo from hell; and tyrannously cut him short. He said no more.
+
+"Do you imagine that my floors are going to open suddenly, so that
+luxuriously-appointed tables may rise through them, and guests from
+another world? No, no, young madcap. You have entered into the compact
+now, and there is an end of it. Henceforward, your wishes will be
+accurately fulfilled, but at the expense of your life. The compass of
+your days, visible in that skin, will contract according to the strength
+and number of your desires, from the least to the most extravagant. The
+Brahmin from whom I had this skin once explained to me that it would
+bring about a mysterious connection between the fortunes and wishes of
+its possessor. Your first wish is a vulgar one, which I could fulfil,
+but I leave that to the issues of your new existence. After all, you
+were wishing to die; very well, your suicide is only put off for a
+time."
+
+The stranger was surprised and irritated that this peculiar old man
+persisted in not taking him seriously. A half philanthropic intention
+peeped so clearly forth from his last jesting observation, that he
+exclaimed:
+
+"I shall soon see, sir, if any change comes over my fortunes in the time
+it will take to cross the width of the quay. But I should like us to be
+quits for such a momentous service; that is, if you are not laughing
+at an unlucky wretch, so I wish that you may fall in love with an
+opera-dancer. You would understand the pleasures of intemperance then,
+and might perhaps grow lavish of the wealth that you have husbanded so
+philosophically."
+
+He went out without heeding the old man's heavy sigh, went back through
+the galleries and down the staircase, followed by the stout assistant
+who vainly tried to light his passage; he fled with the haste of a
+robber caught in the act. Blinded by a kind of delirium, he did not even
+notice the unexpected flexibility of the piece of shagreen, which coiled
+itself up, pliant as a glove in his excited fingers, till it would go
+into the pocket of his coat, where he mechanically thrust it. As he
+rushed out of the door into the street, he ran up against three young
+men who were passing arm-in-arm.
+
+"Brute!"
+
+"Idiot!"
+
+Such were the gratifying expressions exchanged between them.
+
+"Why, it is Raphael!"
+
+"Good! we were looking for you."
+
+"What! it is you, then?"
+
+These three friendly exclamations quickly followed the insults, as the
+light of a street lamp, flickering in the wind, fell upon the astonished
+faces of the group.
+
+"My dear fellow, you must come with us!" said the young man that Raphael
+had all but knocked down.
+
+"What is all this about?"
+
+"Come along, and I will tell you the history of it as we go."
+
+By fair means or foul, Raphael must go along with his friends towards
+the Pont des Arts; they surrounded him, and linked him by the arm among
+their merry band.
+
+"We have been after you for about a week," the speaker went on. "At your
+respectable hotel _de Saint Quentin_, where, by the way, the sign with
+the alternate black and red letters cannot be removed, and hangs out
+just as it did in the time of Jean Jacques, that Leonarda of yours told
+us that you were off into the country. For all that, we certainly did
+not look like duns, creditors, sheriff's officers, or the like. But no
+matter! Rastignac had seen you the evening before at the Bouffons; we
+took courage again, and made it a point of honor to find out whether
+you were roosting in a tree in the Champs-Elysees, or in one of those
+philanthropic abodes where the beggars sleep on a twopenny rope, or if,
+more luckily, you were bivouacking in some boudoir or other. We could
+not find you anywhere. Your name was not in the jailers' registers
+at the St. Pelagie nor at La Force! Government departments, cafes,
+libraries, lists of prefects' names, newspaper offices, restaurants,
+greenrooms--to cut it short, every lurking place in Paris, good or bad,
+has been explored in the most expert manner. We bewailed the loss of a
+man endowed with such genius, that one might look to find him at Court
+or in the common jails. We talked of canonizing you as a hero of July,
+and, upon my word, we regretted you!"
+
+As he spoke, the friends were crossing the Pont des Arts. Without
+listening to them, Raphael looked at the Seine, at the clamoring waves
+that reflected the lights of Paris. Above that river, in which but
+now he had thought to fling himself, the old man's prediction had been
+fulfilled, the hour of his death had been already put back by fate.
+
+"We really regretted you," said his friend, still pursuing his theme.
+"It was a question of a plan in which we included you as a superior
+person, that is to say, somebody who can put himself above other people.
+The constitutional thimble-rig is carried on to-day, dear boy, more
+seriously than ever. The infamous monarchy, displaced by the heroism of
+the people, was a sort of drab, you could laugh and revel with her; but
+La Patrie is a shrewish and virtuous wife, and willy-nilly you must take
+her prescribed endearments. Then besides, as you know, authority passed
+over from the Tuileries to the journalists, at the time when the Budget
+changed its quarters and went from the Faubourg Saint-Germain to the
+Chaussee de Antin. But this you may not know perhaps. The Government,
+that is, the aristocracy of lawyers and bankers who represent the
+country to-day, just as the priests used to do in the time of the
+monarchy, has felt the necessity of mystifying the worthy people of
+France with a few new words and old ideas, like philosophers of
+every school, and all strong intellects ever since time began. So now
+Royalist-national ideas must be inculcated, by proving to us that it
+is far better to pay twelve million francs, thirty-three centimes to
+La Patrie, represented by Messieurs Such-and-Such, than to pay eleven
+hundred million francs, nine centimes to a king who used to say _I_
+instead of _we_. In a word, a journal, with two or three hundred
+thousand francs, good, at the back of it, has just been started, with a
+view to making an opposition paper to content the discontented, without
+prejudice to the national government of the citizen-king. We scoff
+at liberty as at despotism now, and at religion or incredulity quite
+impartially. And since, for us, 'our country' means a capital where
+ideas circulate and are sold at so much a line, a succulent dinner every
+day, and the play at frequent intervals, where profligate women swarm,
+where suppers last on into the next day, and light loves are hired by
+the hour like cabs; and since Paris will always be the most adorable of
+all countries, the country of joy, liberty, wit, pretty women, _mauvais
+sujets_, and good wine; where the truncheon of authority never makes
+itself disagreeably felt, because one is so close to those who wield
+it,--we, therefore, sectaries of the god Mephistopheles, have engaged to
+whitewash the public mind, to give fresh costumes to the actors, to put
+a new plank or two in the government booth, to doctor doctrinaires,
+and warm up old Republicans, to touch up the Bonapartists a bit, and
+revictual the Centre; provided that we are allowed to laugh _in petto_
+at both kings and peoples, to think one thing in the morning and another
+at night, and to lead a merry life _a la_ Panurge, or to recline upon
+soft cushions, _more orientali_.
+
+"The sceptre of this burlesque and macaronic kingdom," he went on, "we
+have reserved for you; so we are taking you straightway to a dinner
+given by the founder of the said newspaper, a retired banker, who, at a
+loss to know what to do with his money, is going to buy some brains
+with it. You will be welcomed as a brother, we shall hail you as king
+of these free lances who will undertake anything; whose perspicacity
+discovers the intentions of Austria, England, or Russia before either
+Russia, Austria or England have formed any. Yes, we will invest you with
+the sovereignty of those puissant intellects which give to the world its
+Mirabeaus, Talleyrands, Pitts, and Metternichs--all the clever Crispins
+who treat the destinies of a kingdom as gamblers' stakes, just as
+ordinary men play dominoes for _kirschenwasser_. We have given you out
+to be the most undaunted champion who ever wrestled in a drinking-bout
+at close quarters with the monster called Carousal, whom all bold
+spirits wish to try a fall with; we have gone so far as to say that
+you have never yet been worsted. I hope you will not make liars of us.
+Taillefer, our amphitryon, has undertaken to surpass the circumscribed
+saturnalias of the petty modern Lucullus. He is rich enough to infuse
+pomp into trifles, and style and charm into dissipation... Are you
+listening, Raphael?" asked the orator, interrupting himself.
+
+"Yes," answered the young man, less surprised by the accomplishment
+of his wishes than by the natural manner in which the events had come
+about.
+
+He could not bring himself to believe in magic, but he marveled at the
+accidents of human fate.
+
+"Yes, you say, just as if you were thinking of your grandfather's
+demise," remarked one of his neighbors.
+
+"Ah!" cried Raphael, "I was thinking, my friends, that we are in a fair
+way to become very great scoundrels," and there was an ingenuousness in
+his tones that set these writers, the hope of young France, in a roar.
+"So far our blasphemies have been uttered over our cups; we have passed
+our judgments on life while drunk, and taken men and affairs in an
+after-dinner frame of mind. We were innocent of action; we were bold in
+words. But now we are to be branded with the hot iron of politics;
+we are going to enter the convict's prison and to drop our illusions.
+Although one has no belief left, except in the devil, one may regret
+the paradise of one's youth and the age of innocence, when we devoutly
+offered the tip of our tongue to some good priest for the consecrated
+wafer of the sacrament. Ah, my good friends, our first peccadilloes gave
+us so much pleasure because the consequent remorse set them off and lent
+a keen relish to them; but nowadays----"
+
+"Oh! now," said the first speaker, "there is still left----"
+
+"What?" asked another.
+
+"Crime----"
+
+"There is a word as high as the gallows and deeper than the Seine," said
+Raphael.
+
+"Oh, you don't understand me; I mean political crime. Since this
+morning, a conspirator's life is the only one I covet. I don't know that
+the fancy will last over to-morrow, but to-night at least my gorge rises
+at the anaemic life of our civilization and its railroad evenness. I am
+seized with a passion for the miseries of retreat from Moscow, for the
+excitements of the Red Corsair, or for a smuggler's life. I should like
+to go to Botany Bay, as we have no Chartreaux left us here in France;
+it is a sort of infirmary reserved for little Lord Byrons who, having
+crumpled up their lives like a serviette after dinner, have nothing left
+to do but to set their country ablaze, blow their own brains out, plot
+for a republic or clamor for a war----"
+
+"Emile," Raphael's neighbor called eagerly to the speaker, "on my honor,
+but for the revolution of July I would have taken orders, and gone off
+down into the country somewhere to lead the life of an animal, and----"
+
+"And you would have read your breviary through every day."
+
+"Yes."
+
+"You are a coxcomb!"
+
+"Why, we read the newspapers as it is!"
+
+"Not bad that, for a journalist! But hold your tongue, we are going
+through a crowd of subscribers. Journalism, look you, is the religion of
+modern society, and has even gone a little further."
+
+"What do you mean?"
+
+"Its pontiffs are not obliged to believe in it any more than the people
+are."
+
+Chatting thus, like good fellows who have known their _De Viris
+illustribus_ for years past, they reached a mansion in the Rue Joubert.
+
+Emile was a journalist who had acquired more reputation by dint of
+doing nothing than others had derived from their achievements. A bold,
+caustic, and powerful critic, he possessed all the qualities that his
+defects permitted. An outspoken giber, he made numberless epigrams on
+a friend to his face; but would defend him, if absent, with courage
+and loyalty. He laughed at everything, even at his own career. Always
+impecunious, he yet lived, like all men of his calibre, plunged in
+unspeakable indolence. He would fling some word containing volumes
+in the teeth of folk who could not put a syllable of sense into their
+books. He lavished promises that he never fulfilled; he made a pillow of
+his luck and reputation, on which he slept, and ran the risk of waking
+up to old age in a workhouse. A steadfast friend to the gallows foot,
+a cynical swaggerer with a child's simplicity, a worker only from
+necessity or caprice.
+
+"In the language of Maitre Alcofribas, we are about to make a famous
+_troncon de chiere lie_," he remarked to Raphael as he pointed out the
+flower-stands that made a perfumed forest of the staircase.
+
+"I like a vestibule to be well warmed and richly carpeted," Raphael
+said. "Luxury in the peristyle is not common in France. I feel as if
+life had begun anew here."
+
+"And up above we are going to drink and make merry once more, my dear
+Raphael. Ah! yes," he went on, "and I hope we are going to come off
+conquerors, too, and walk over everybody else's head."
+
+As he spoke, he jestingly pointed to the guests. They were entering
+a large room which shone with gilding and lights, and there all the
+younger men of note in Paris welcomed them. Here was one who had just
+revealed fresh powers, his first picture vied with the glories of
+Imperial art. There, another, who but yesterday had launched forth a
+volume, an acrid book filled with a sort of literary arrogance, which
+opened up new ways to the modern school. A sculptor, not far away, with
+vigorous power visible in his rough features, was chatting with one of
+those unenthusiastic scoffers who can either see excellence anywhere or
+nowhere, as it happens. Here, the cleverest of our caricaturists,
+with mischievous eyes and bitter tongue, lay in wait for epigrams to
+translate into pencil strokes; there, stood the young and audacious
+writer, who distilled the quintessence of political ideas better than
+any other man, or compressed the work of some prolific writer as he held
+him up to ridicule; he was talking with the poet whose works would
+have eclipsed all the writings of the time if his ability had been as
+strenuous as his hatreds. Both were trying not to say the truth while
+they kept clear of lies, as they exchanged flattering speeches. A famous
+musician administered soothing consolation in a rallying fashion, to
+a young politician who had just fallen quite unhurt, from his rostrum.
+Young writers who lacked style stood beside other young writers who
+lacked ideas, and authors of poetical prose by prosaic poets.
+
+At the sight of all these incomplete beings, a simple Saint Simonian,
+ingenuous enough to believe in his own doctrine, charitably paired them
+off, designing, no doubt, to convert them into monks of his order. A
+few men of science mingled in the conversation, like nitrogen in the
+atmosphere, and several _vaudevillistes_ shed rays like the sparking
+diamonds that give neither light nor heat. A few paradox-mongers,
+laughing up their sleeves at any folk who embraced their likes or
+dislikes in men or affairs, had already begun a two-edged policy,
+conspiring against all systems, without committing themselves to any
+side. Then there was the self-appointed critic who admires nothing, and
+will blow his nose in the middle of a _cavatina_ at the Bouffons, who
+applauds before any one else begins, and contradicts every one who says
+what he himself was about to say; he was there giving out the sayings
+of wittier men for his own. Of all the assembled guests, a future lay
+before some five; ten or so should acquire a fleeting renown; as for the
+rest, like all mediocrities, they might apply to themselves the famous
+falsehood of Louis XVIII., Union and oblivion.
+
+The anxious jocularity of a man who is expending two thousand crowns sat
+on their host. His eyes turned impatiently towards the door from time to
+time, seeking one of his guests who kept him waiting. Very soon a stout
+little person appeared, who was greeted by a complimentary murmur;
+it was the notary who had invented the newspaper that very morning.
+A valet-de-chambre in black opened the doors of a vast dining-room,
+whither every one went without ceremony, and took his place at an
+enormous table.
+
+Raphael took a last look round the room before he left it. His wish had
+been realized to the full. The rooms were adorned with silk and gold.
+Countless wax tapers set in handsome candelabra lit up the slightest
+details of gilded friezes, the delicate bronze sculpture, and the
+splendid colors of the furniture. The sweet scent of rare flowers, set
+in stands tastefully made of bamboo, filled the air. Everything, even
+the curtains, was pervaded by elegance without pretension, and there was
+a certain imaginative charm about it all which acted like a spell on the
+mind of a needy man.
+
+"An income of a hundred thousand livres a year is a very nice beginning
+of the catechism, and a wonderful assistance to putting morality into
+our actions," he said, sighing. "Truly my sort of virtue can scarcely
+go afoot, and vice means, to my thinking, a garret, a threadbare coat, a
+gray hat in winter time, and sums owing to the porter.... I should like
+to live in the lap of luxury a year, or six months, no matter! And then
+afterwards, die. I should have known, exhausted, and consumed a thousand
+lives, at any rate."
+
+"Why, you are taking the tone of a stockbroker in good luck," said
+Emile, who overheard him. "Pooh! your riches would be a burden to you as
+soon as you found that they would spoil your chances of coming out above
+the rest of us. Hasn't the artist always kept the balance true between
+the poverty of riches and the riches of poverty? And isn't struggle a
+necessity to some of us? Look out for your digestion, and only look,"
+he added, with a mock-heroic gesture, "at the majestic, thrice holy, and
+edifying appearance of this amiable capitalist's dining-room. That man
+has in reality only made his money for our benefit. Isn't he a kind of
+sponge of the polyp order, overlooked by naturalists, which should be
+carefully squeezed before he is left for his heirs to feed upon? There
+is style, isn't there, about those bas-reliefs that adorn the walls? And
+the lustres, and the pictures, what luxury well carried out! If one may
+believe those who envy him, or who know, or think they know, the origins
+of his life, then this man got rid of a German and some others--his best
+friend for one, and the mother of that friend, during the Revolution.
+Could you house crimes under the venerable Taillefer's silvering locks?
+He looks to me a very worthy man. Only see how the silver sparkles, and
+is every glittering ray like a stab of a dagger to him?... Let us go in,
+one might as well believe in Mahomet. If common report speak truth, here
+are thirty men of talent, and good fellows too, prepared to dine off the
+flesh and blood of a whole family;... and here are we ourselves, a pair
+of youngsters full of open-hearted enthusiasm, and we shall be partakers
+in his guilt. I have a mind to ask our capitalist whether he is a
+respectable character...."
+
+"No, not now," cried Raphael, "but when he is dead drunk, we shall have
+had our dinner then."
+
+The two friends sat down laughing. First of all, by a glance more rapid
+than a word, each paid his tribute of admiration to the splendid general
+effect of the long table, white as a bank of freshly-fallen snow, with
+its symmetrical line of covers, crowned with their pale golden rolls of
+bread. Rainbow colors gleamed in the starry rays of light reflected by
+the glass; the lights of the tapers crossed and recrossed each other
+indefinitely; the dishes covered with their silver domes whetted both
+appetite and curiosity.
+
+Few words were spoken. Neighbors exchanged glances as the Maderia
+circulated. Then the first course appeared in all its glory; it would
+have done honor to the late Cambaceres, Brillat-Savarin would have
+celebrated it. The wines of Bordeaux and Burgundy, white and red, were
+royally lavished. This first part of the banquet might been compared in
+every way to a rendering of some classical tragedy. The second act grew
+a trifle noisier. Every guest had had a fair amount to drink, and had
+tried various crus at this pleasure, so that as the remains of the
+magnificent first course were removed, tumultuous discussions began;
+a pale brow here and there began to flush, sundry noses took a purpler
+hue, faces lit up, and eyes sparkled.
+
+While intoxication was only dawning, the conversation did not overstep
+the bounds of civility; but banter and bon mots slipped by degrees from
+every tongue; and then slander began to rear its little snake's heard,
+and spoke in dulcet tones; a few shrewd ones here and there gave heed to
+it, hoping to keep their heads. So the second course found their minds
+somewhat heated. Every one ate as he spoke, spoke while he ate, and
+drank without heeding the quantity of the liquor, the wine was so
+biting, the bouquet so fragrant, the example around so infectious.
+Taillefer made a point of stimulating his guests, and plied them with
+the formidable wines of the Rhone, with fierce Tokay, and heady old
+Roussillon.
+
+The champagne, impatiently expected and lavishly poured out, was a
+scourge of fiery sparks to these men; released like post-horses from
+some mail-coach by a relay; they let their spirits gallop away into the
+wilds of argument to which no one listened, began to tell stories which
+had no auditors, and repeatedly asked questions to which no answer was
+made. Only the loud voice of wassail could be heard, a voice made up
+of a hundred confused clamors, which rose and grew like a crescendo of
+Rossini's. Insidious toasts, swagger, and challenges followed.
+
+Each renounced any pride in his own intellectual capacity, in order to
+vindicate that of hogsheads, casks, and vats; and each made noise enough
+for two. A time came when the footmen smiled, while their masters all
+talked at once. A philosopher would have been interested, doubtless, by
+the singularity of the thoughts expressed, a politician would have been
+amazed by the incongruity of the methods discussed in the melee of words
+or doubtfully luminous paradoxes, where truths, grotesquely caparisoned,
+met in conflict across the uproar of brawling judgments, of arbitrary
+decisions and folly, much as bullets, shells, and grapeshot are hurled
+across a battlefield.
+
+It was at once a volume and a picture. Every philosophy, religion, and
+moral code differing so greatly in every latitude, every government,
+every great achievement of the human intellect, fell before a scythe as
+long as Time's own; and you might have found it hard to decide whether
+it was wielded by Gravity intoxicated, or by Inebriation grown sober and
+clear-sighted. Borne away by a kind of tempest, their minds, like the
+sea raging against the cliffs, seemed ready to shake the laws which
+confine the ebb and flow of civilization; unconsciously fulfilling the
+will of God, who has suffered evil and good to abide in nature, and
+reserved the secret of their continual strife to Himself. A frantic
+travesty of debate ensued, a Walpurgis-revel of intellects. Between the
+dreary jests of these children of the Revolution over the inauguration
+of a newspaper, and the talk of the joyous gossips at Gargantua's
+birth, stretched the gulf that divides the nineteenth century from the
+sixteenth. Laughingly they had begun the work of destruction, and our
+journalists laughed amid the ruins.
+
+"What is the name of that young man over there?" said the notary,
+indicating Raphael. "I thought I heard some one call him Valentin."
+
+"What stuff is this?" said Emile, laughing; "plain Valentin, say you?
+Raphael DE Valentin, if you please. We bear an eagle or, on a field
+sable, with a silver crown, beak and claws gules, and a fine motto:
+NON CECIDIT ANIMUS. We are no foundling child, but a descendant of the
+Emperor Valens, of the stock of the Valentinois, founders of the cities
+of Valence in France, and Valencia in Spain, rightful heirs to the
+Empire of the East. If we suffer Mahmoud on the throne of Byzantium, it
+is out of pure condescension, and for lack of funds and soldiers."
+
+With a fork flourished above Raphael's head, Emile outlined a crown upon
+it. The notary bethought himself a moment, but soon fell to drinking
+again, with a gesture peculiar to himself; it was quite impossible,
+it seemed to say to secure in his clientele the cities of Valence and
+Byzantium, the Emperor Valens, Mahmoud, and the house of Valentinois.
+
+"Should not the destruction of those ant-hills, Babylon, Tyre, Carthage,
+and Venice, each crushed beneath the foot of a passing giant, serve as
+a warning to man, vouchsafed by some mocking power?" said Claude Vignon,
+who must play the Bossuet, as a sort of purchased slave, at the rate of
+fivepence a line.
+
+"Perhaps Moses, Sylla, Louis XI., Richelieu, Robespierre, and Napoleon
+were but the same man who crosses our civilizations now and again, like
+a comet across the sky," said a disciple of Ballanche.
+
+"Why try to fathom the designs of Providence?" said Canalis, maker of
+ballads.
+
+"Come, now," said the man who set up for a critic, "there is nothing
+more elastic in the world than your Providence."
+
+"Well, sir, Louis XIV. sacrificed more lives over digging the
+foundations of the Maintenon's aqueducts, than the Convention expended
+in order to assess the taxes justly, to make one law for everybody, and
+one nation of France, and to establish the rule of equal inheritance,"
+said Massol, whom the lack of a syllable before his name had made a
+Republican.
+
+"Are you going to leave our heads on our shoulders?" asked Moreau (of
+the Oise), a substantial farmer. "You, sir, who took blood for wine just
+now?"
+
+"Where is the use? Aren't the principles of social order worth some
+sacrifices, sir?"
+
+"Hi! Bixiou! What's-his-name, the Republican, considers a landowner's
+head a sacrifice!" said a young man to his neighbor.
+
+"Men and events count for nothing," said the Republican, following out
+his theory in spite of hiccoughs; "in politics, as in philosophy, there
+are only principles and ideas."
+
+"What an abomination! Then you would ruthlessly put your friends to
+death for a shibboleth?"
+
+"Eh, sir! the man who feels compunction is your thorough scoundrel, for
+he has some notion of virtue; while Peter the Great and the Duke of Alva
+were embodied systems, and the pirate Monbard an organization."
+
+"But can't society rid itself of your systems and organizations?" said
+Canalis.
+
+"Oh, granted!" cried the Republican.
+
+"That stupid Republic of yours makes me feel queasy. We sha'n't be able
+to carve a capon in peace, because we shall find the agrarian law inside
+it."
+
+"Ah, my little Brutus, stuffed with truffles, your principles are all
+right enough. But you are like my valet, the rogue is so frightfully
+possessed with a mania for property that if I left him to clean my
+clothes after his fashion, he would soon clean me out."
+
+"Crass idiots!" replied the Republican, "you are for setting a nation
+straight with toothpicks. To your way of thinking, justice is more
+dangerous than thieves."
+
+"Oh, dear!" cried the attorney Deroches.
+
+"Aren't they a bore with their politics!" said the notary Cardot. "Shut
+up. That's enough of it. There is no knowledge nor virtue worth shedding
+a drop of blood for. If Truth were brought into liquidation, we might
+find her insolvent."
+
+"It would be much less trouble, no doubt, to amuse ourselves with evil,
+rather than dispute about good. Moreover, I would give all the speeches
+made for forty years past at the Tribune for a trout, for one of
+Perrault's tales or Charlet's sketches."
+
+"Quite right!... Hand me the asparagus. Because, after all, liberty
+begets anarchy, anarchy leads to despotism, and despotism back again
+to liberty. Millions have died without securing a triumph for any one
+system. Is not that the vicious circle in which the whole moral world
+revolves? Man believes that he has reached perfection, when in fact he
+has but rearranged matters."
+
+"Oh! oh!" cried Cursy, the _vaudevilliste_; "in that case, gentlemen,
+here's to Charles X., the father of liberty."
+
+"Why not?" asked Emile. "When law becomes despotic, morals are relaxed,
+and vice versa.
+
+"Let us drink to the imbecility of authority, which gives us such an
+authority over imbeciles!" said the good banker.
+
+"Napoleon left us glory, at any rate, my good friend!" exclaimed a naval
+officer who had never left Brest.
+
+"Glory is a poor bargain; you buy it dear, and it will not keep.
+Does not the egotism of the great take the form of glory, just as for
+nobodies it is their own well-being?"
+
+"You are very fortunate, sir----"
+
+"The first inventor of ditches must have been a weakling, for society
+is only useful to the puny. The savage and the philosopher, at either
+extreme of the moral scale, hold property in equal horror."
+
+"All very fine!" said Cardot; "but if there were no property, there
+would be no documents to draw up."
+
+"These green peas are excessively delicious!"
+
+"And the _cure_ was found dead in his bed in the morning...."
+
+"Who is talking about death? Pray don't trifle, I have an uncle."
+
+"Could you bear his loss with resignation?"
+
+"No question."
+
+"Gentlemen, listen to me! _How to kill an uncle_. Silence! (Cries of
+"Hush! hush!") In the first place, take an uncle, large and stout,
+seventy years old at least, they are the best uncles. (Sensation.) Get
+him to eat a pate de foie gras, any pretext will do."
+
+"Ah, but my uncle is a thin, tall man, and very niggardly and
+abstemious."
+
+"That sort of uncle is a monster; he misappropriates existence."
+
+"Then," the speaker on uncles went on, "tell him, while he is digesting
+it, that his banker has failed."
+
+"How if he bears up?"
+
+"Let loose a pretty girl on him."
+
+"And if----?" asked the other, with a shake of the head.
+
+"Then he wouldn't be an uncle--an uncle is a gay dog by nature."
+
+"Malibran has lost two notes in her voice."
+
+"No, sir, she has not."
+
+"Yes, sir, she has."
+
+"Oh, ho! No and yes, is not that the sum-up of all religious, political,
+or literary dissertations? Man is a clown dancing on the edge of an
+abyss."
+
+"You would make out that I am a fool."
+
+"On the contrary, you cannot make me out."
+
+"Education, there's a pretty piece of tomfoolery. M. Heineffettermach
+estimates the number of printed volumes at more than a thousand
+millions; and a man cannot read more than a hundred and fifty thousand
+in his lifetime. So, just tell me what that word _education_ means. For
+some it consists in knowing the name of Alexander's horse, of the dog
+Berecillo, of the Seigneur d'Accords, and in ignorance of the man to
+whom we owe the discovery of rafting and the manufacture of porcelain.
+For others it is the knowledge how to burn a will and live respected, be
+looked up to and popular, instead of stealing a watch with half-a-dozen
+aggravating circumstances, after a previous conviction, and so
+perishing, hated and dishonored, in the Place de Greve."
+
+"Will Nathan's work live?"
+
+"He has very clever collaborators, sir."
+
+"Or Canalis?"
+
+"He is a great man; let us say no more about him."
+
+"You are all drunk!"
+
+"The consequence of a Constitution is the immediate stultification of
+intellects. Art, science, public works, everything, is consumed by a
+horribly egoistic feeling, the leprosy of the time. Three hundred of
+your bourgeoisie, set down on benches, will only think of planting
+poplars. Tyranny does great things lawlessly, while Liberty will
+scarcely trouble herself to do petty ones lawfully."
+
+"Your reciprocal instruction will turn out counters in human flesh,"
+broke in an Absolutist. "All individuality will disappear in a people
+brought to a dead level by education."
+
+"For all that, is not the aim of society to secure happiness to each
+member of it?" asked the Saint-Simonian.
+
+"If you had an income of fifty thousand livres, you would not think much
+about the people. If you are smitten with a tender passion for the race,
+go to Madagascar; there you will find a nice little nation all ready to
+Saint-Simonize, classify, and cork up in your phials, but here every one
+fits into his niche like a peg in a hole. A porter is a porter, and a
+blockhead is a fool, without a college of fathers to promote them to
+those positions."
+
+"You are a Carlist."
+
+"And why not? Despotism pleases me; it implies a certain contempt for
+the human race. I have no animosity against kings, they are so amusing.
+Is it nothing to sit enthroned in a room, at a distance of thirty
+million leagues from the sun?"
+
+"Let us once more take a broad view of civilization," said the man of
+learning who, for the benefit of the inattentive sculptor, had opened a
+discussion on primitive society and autochthonous races. "The vigor of a
+nation in its origin was in a way physical, unitary, and crude; then as
+aggregations increased, government advanced by a decomposition of the
+primitive rule, more or less skilfully managed. For example, in remote
+ages national strength lay in theocracy, the priest held both sword and
+censer; a little later there were two priests, the pontiff and the king.
+To-day our society, the latest word of civilization, has distributed
+power according to the number of combinations, and we come to the forces
+called business, thought, money, and eloquence. Authority thus divided
+is steadily approaching a social dissolution, with interest as its one
+opposing barrier. We depend no longer on either religion or physical
+force, but upon intellect. Can a book replace the sword? Can discussion
+be a substitute for action? That is the question."
+
+"Intellect has made an end of everything," cried the Carlist. "Come now!
+Absolute freedom has brought about national suicides; their triumph left
+them as listless as an English millionaire."
+
+"Won't you tell us something new? You have made fun of authority of all
+sorts to-day, which is every bit as vulgar as denying the existence of
+God. So you have no belief left, and the century is like an old Sultan
+worn out by debauchery! Your Byron, in short, sings of crime and its
+emotions in a final despair of poetry."
+
+"Don't you know," replied Bianchon, quite drunk by this time, "that
+a dose of phosphorus more or less makes the man of genius or the
+scoundrel, a clever man or an idiot, a virtuous person or a criminal?"
+
+"Can any one treat of virtue thus?" cried Cursy. "Virtue, the subject of
+every drama at the theatre, the denoument of every play, the foundation
+of every court of law...."
+
+"Be quiet, you ass. You are an Achilles for virtue, without his heel,"
+said Bixiou.
+
+"Some drink!"
+
+"What will you bet that I will drink a bottle of champagne like a flash,
+at one pull?"
+
+"What a flash of wit!"
+
+"Drunk as lords," muttered a young man gravely, trying to give some wine
+to his waistcoat.
+
+"Yes, sir; real government is the art of ruling by public opinion."
+
+"Opinion? That is the most vicious jade of all. According to you
+moralists and politicians, the laws you set up are always to go before
+those of nature, and opinion before conscience. You are right and wrong
+both. Suppose society bestows down pillows on us, that benefit is made
+up for by the gout; and justice is likewise tempered by red-tape, and
+colds accompany cashmere shawls."
+
+"Wretch!" Emile broke in upon the misanthrope, "how can you slander
+civilization here at table, up to the eyes in wines and exquisite
+dishes? Eat away at that roebuck with the gilded horns and feet, and do
+not carp at your mother..."
+
+"Is it any fault of mine if Catholicism puts a million deities in a sack
+of flour, that Republics will end in a Napoleon, that monarchy dwells
+between the assassination of Henry IV. and the trial of Louis XVI., and
+Liberalism produces Lafayettes?"
+
+"Didn't you embrace him in July?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Then hold your tongue, you sceptic."
+
+"Sceptics are the most conscientious of men."
+
+"They have no conscience."
+
+"What are you saying? They have two apiece at least!"
+
+"So you want to discount heaven, a thoroughly commercial notion. Ancient
+religions were but the unchecked development of physical pleasure, but
+we have developed a soul and expectations; some advance has been made."
+
+"What can you expect, my friends, of a century filled with politics
+to repletion?" asked Nathan. "What befell _The History of the King of
+Bohemia and his Seven Castles_, a most entrancing conception?..."
+
+"I say," the would-be critic cried down the whole length of the table.
+"The phrases might have been drawn at hap-hazard from a hat, 'twas a
+work written 'down to Charenton.'"
+
+"You are a fool!"
+
+"And you are a rogue!"
+
+"Oh! oh!"
+
+"Ah! ah!"
+
+"They are going to fight."
+
+"No, they aren't."
+
+"You will find me to-morrow, sir."
+
+"This very moment," Nathan answered.
+
+"Come, come, you pair of fire-eaters!"
+
+"You are another!" said the prime mover in the quarrel.
+
+"Ah, I can't stand upright, perhaps?" asked the pugnacious Nathan,
+straightening himself up like a stag-beetle about to fly.
+
+He stared stupidly round the table, then, completely exhausted by the
+effort, sank back into his chair, and mutely hung his head.
+
+"Would it not have been nice," the critic said to his neighbor, "to
+fight about a book I have neither read nor seen?"
+
+"Emile, look out for your coat; your neighbor is growing pale," said
+Bixiou.
+
+"Kant? Yet another ball flung out for fools to sport with, sir!
+Materialism and spiritualism are a fine pair of battledores with which
+charlatans in long gowns keep a shuttlecock a-going. Suppose that God
+is everywhere, as Spinoza says, or that all things proceed from God, as
+says St. Paul... the nincompoops, the door shuts or opens, but isn't the
+movement the same? Does the fowl come from the egg, or the egg from the
+fowl?... Just hand me some duck... and there, you have all science."
+
+"Simpleton!" cried the man of science, "your problem is settled by
+fact!"
+
+"What fact?"
+
+"Professors' chairs were not made for philosophy, but philosophy for the
+professors' chairs. Put on a pair of spectacles and read the budget."
+
+"Thieves!"
+
+"Nincompoops!"
+
+"Knaves!"
+
+"Gulls!"
+
+"Where but in Paris will you find such a ready and rapid exchange of
+thought?" cried Bixiou in a deep, bass voice.
+
+"Bixiou! Act a classical farce for us! Come now."
+
+"Would you like me to depict the nineteenth century?"
+
+"Silence."
+
+"Pay attention."
+
+"Clap a muffle on your trumpets."
+
+"Shut up, you Turk!"
+
+"Give him some wine, and let that fellow keep quiet."
+
+"Now, then, Bixiou!"
+
+The artist buttoned his black coat to the collar, put on yellow gloves,
+and began to burlesque the _Revue des Deux Mondes_ by acting a squinting
+old lady; but the uproar drowned his voice, and no one heard a word of
+the satire. Still, if he did not catch the spirit of the century, he
+represented the _Revue_ at any rate, for his own intentions were not
+very clear to him.
+
+Dessert was served as if by magic. A huge epergne of gilded bronze
+from Thomire's studio overshadowed the table. Tall statuettes, which a
+celebrated artist had endued with ideal beauty according to conventional
+European notions, sustained and carried pyramids of strawberries, pines,
+fresh dates, golden grapes, clear-skinned peaches, oranges brought
+from Setubal by steamer, pomegranates, Chinese fruit; in short, all
+the surprises of luxury, miracles of confectionery, the most tempting
+dainties, and choicest delicacies. The coloring of this epicurean work
+of art was enhanced by the splendors of porcelain, by sparkling outlines
+of gold, by the chasing of the vases. Poussin's landscapes, copied
+on Sevres ware, were crowned with graceful fringes of moss, green,
+translucent, and fragile as ocean weeds.
+
+The revenue of a German prince would not have defrayed the cost of this
+arrogant display. Silver and mother-of-pearl, gold and crystal, were
+lavished afresh in new forms; but scarcely a vague idea of this almost
+Oriental fairyland penetrated eyes now heavy with wine, or crossed the
+delirium of intoxication. The fire and fragrance of the wines acted like
+potent philters and magical fumes, producing a kind of mirage in the
+brain, binding feet, and weighing down hands. The clamor increased.
+Words were no longer distinct, glasses flew in pieces, senseless peals
+of laughter broke out. Cursy snatched up a horn and struck up a flourish
+on it. It acted like a signal given by the devil. Yells, hisses, songs,
+cries, and groans went up from the maddened crew. You might have smiled
+to see men, light-hearted by nature, grow tragical as Crebillon's
+dramas, and pensive as a sailor in a coach. Hard-headed men blabbed
+secrets to the inquisitive, who were long past heeding them. Saturnine
+faces were wreathed in smiles worthy of a pirouetting dancer. Claude
+Vignon shuffled about like a bear in a cage. Intimate friends began to
+fight.
+
+Animal likenesses, so curiously traced by physiologists in human faces,
+came out in gestures and behavior. A book lay open for a Bichat if he
+had repaired thither fasting and collected. The master of the house,
+knowing his condition, did not dare stir, but encouraged his guests'
+extravangances with a fixed grimacing smile, meant to be hospitable and
+appropriate. His large face, turning from blue and red to a purple shade
+terrible to see, partook of the general commotion by movements like the
+heaving and pitching of a brig.
+
+"Now, did you murder them?" Emile asked him.
+
+"Capital punishment is going to be abolished, they say, in favor of
+the Revolution of July," answered Taillefer, raising his eyebrows with
+drunken sagacity.
+
+"Don't they rise up before you in dreams at times?" Raphael persisted.
+
+"There's a statute of limitations," said the murderer-Croesus.
+
+"And on his tombstone," Emile began, with a sardonic laugh, "the
+stonemason will carve 'Passer-by, accord a tear, in memory of one that's
+here!' Oh," he continued, "I would cheerfully pay a hundred sous to
+any mathematician who would prove the existence of hell to me by an
+algebraical equation."
+
+He flung up a coin and cried:
+
+"Heads for the existence of God!"
+
+"Don't look!" Raphael cried, pouncing upon it. "Who knows? Suspense is
+so pleasant."
+
+"Unluckily," Emile said, with burlesque melancholy, "I can see no
+halting-place between the unbeliever's arithmetic and the papal _Pater
+noster_. Pshaw! let us drink. _Trinq_ was, I believe, the oracular
+answer of the _dive bouteille_ and the final conclusion of Pantagruel."
+
+"We owe our arts and monuments to the _Pater noster_, and our knowledge,
+too, perhaps; and a still greater benefit--modern government--whereby a
+vast and teeming society is wondrously represented by some five hundred
+intellects. It neutralizes opposing forces and gives free play to
+_Civilization_, that Titan queen who has succeeded the ancient terrible
+figure of the _King_, that sham Providence, reared by man between
+himself and heaven. In the face of such achievements, atheism seems like
+a barren skeleton. What do you say?"
+
+"I am thinking of the seas of blood shed by Catholicism." Emile replied,
+quite unimpressed. "It has drained our hearts and veins dry to make a
+mimic deluge. No matter! Every man who thinks must range himself beneath
+the banner of Christ, for He alone has consummated the triumph of spirit
+over matter; He alone has revealed to us, like a poet, an intermediate
+world that separates us from the Deity."
+
+"Believest thou?" asked Raphael with an unaccountable drunken smile.
+"Very good; we must not commit ourselves; so we will drink the
+celebrated toast, _Diis ignotis_!"
+
+And they drained the chalice filled up with science, carbonic acid gas,
+perfumes, poetry, and incredulity.
+
+"If the gentlemen will go to the drawing-room, coffee is ready for
+them," said the major-domo.
+
+There was scarcely one of those present whose mind was not floundering
+by this time in the delights of chaos, where every spark of intelligence
+is quenched, and the body, set free from its tyranny, gives itself up
+to the frenetic joys of liberty. Some who had arrived at the apogee of
+intoxication were dejected, as they painfully tried to arrest a single
+thought which might assure them of their own existence; others, deep in
+the heavy morasses of indigestion, denied the possibility of movement.
+The noisy and the silent were oddly assorted.
+
+For all that, when new joys were announced to them by the stentorian
+tones of the servant, who spoke on his master's behalf, they all rose,
+leaning upon, dragging or carrying one another. But on the threshold
+of the room the entire crew paused for a moment, motionless, as if
+fascinated. The intemperate pleasures of the banquet seemed to fade away
+at this titillating spectacle, prepared by their amphitryon to appeal to
+the most sensual of their instincts.
+
+Beneath the shining wax-lights in a golden chandelier, round about a
+table inlaid with gilded metal, a group of women, whose eyes shone
+like diamonds, suddenly met the stupefied stare of the revelers. Their
+toilettes were splendid, but less magnificent than their beauty, which
+eclipsed the other marvels of this palace. A light shone from their
+eyes, bewitching as those of sirens, more brilliant and ardent than the
+blaze that streamed down upon the snowy marble, the delicately carved
+surfaces of bronze, and lit up the satin sheen of the tapestry. The
+contrasts of their attitudes and the slight movements of their heads,
+each differing in character and nature of attraction, set the heart
+afire. It was like a thicket, where blossoms mingled with rubies,
+sapphires, and coral; a combination of gossamer scarves that flickered
+like beacon-lights; of black ribbons about snowy throats; of gorgeous
+turbans and demurely enticing apparel. It was a seraglio that appealed
+to every eye, and fulfilled every fancy. Each form posed to admiration
+was scarcely concealed by the folds of cashmere, and half hidden, half
+revealed by transparent gauze and diaphanous silk. The little slender
+feet were eloquent, though the fresh red lips uttered no sound.
+
+Demure and fragile-looking girls, pictures of maidenly innocence, with
+a semblance of conventional unction about their heads, were there like
+apparitions that a breath might dissipate. Aristocratic beauties with
+haughty glances, languid, flexible, slender, and complaisant, bent their
+heads as though there were royal protectors still in the market. An
+English-woman seemed like a spirit of melancholy--some coy, pale,
+shadowy form among Ossian's mists, or a type of remorse flying from
+crime. The Parisienne was not wanting in all her beauty that consists
+in an indescribable charm; armed with her irresistible weakness, vain of
+her costume and her wit, pliant and hard, a heartless, passionless siren
+that yet can create factitious treasures of passion and counterfeit
+emotion.
+
+Italians shone in the throng, serene and self-possessed in their bliss;
+handsome Normans, with splendid figures; women of the south, with black
+hair and well-shaped eyes. Lebel might have summoned together all the
+fair women of Versailles, who since morning had perfected all their
+wiles, and now came like a troupe of Oriental women, bidden by the slave
+merchant to be ready to set out at dawn. They stood disconcerted and
+confused about the table, huddled together in a murmuring group
+like bees in a hive. The combination of timid embarrassment with
+coquettishness and a sort of expostulation was the result either of
+calculated effect or a spontaneous modesty. Perhaps a sentiment of which
+women are never utterly divested prescribed to them the cloak of modesty
+to heighten and enhance the charms of wantonness. So the venerable
+Taillefer's designs seemed on the point of collapse, for these unbridled
+natures were subdued from the very first by the majesty with which woman
+is invested. There was a murmur of admiration, which vibrated like a
+soft musical note. Wine had not taken love for traveling companion;
+instead of a violent tumult of passions, the guests thus taken by
+surprise, in a moment of weakness, gave themselves up to luxurious
+raptures of delight.
+
+Artists obeyed the voice of poetry which constrains them, and studied
+with pleasure the different delicate tints of these chosen examples of
+beauty. Sobered by a thought perhaps due to some emanation from a
+bubble of carbonic acid in the champagne, a philosopher shuddered at the
+misfortunes which had brought these women, once perhaps worthy of the
+truest devotion, to this. Each one doubtless could have unfolded a cruel
+tragedy. Infernal tortures followed in the train of most of them, and
+they drew after them faithless men, broken vows, and pleasures atoned
+for in wretchedness. Polite advances were made by the guests, and
+conversations began, as varied in character as the speakers. They broke
+up into groups. It might have been a fashionable drawing-room where
+ladies and young girls offer after dinner the assistance that coffee,
+liqueurs, and sugar afford to diners who are struggling in the toils
+of a perverse digestion. But in a little while laughter broke out,
+the murmur grew, and voices were raised. The saturnalia, subdued for a
+moment, threatened at times to renew itself. The alternations of sound
+and silence bore a distant resemblance to a symphony of Beethoven's.
+
+The two friends, seated on a silken divan, were first approached by
+a tall, well-proportioned girl of stately bearing; her features were
+irregular, but her face was striking and vehement in expression, and
+impressed the mind by the vigor of its contrasts. Her dark hair fell
+in luxuriant curls, with which some hand seemed to have played havoc
+already, for the locks fell lightly over the splendid shoulders that
+thus attracted attention. The long brown curls half hid her queenly
+throat, though where the light fell upon it, the delicacy of its fine
+outlines was revealed. Her warm and vivid coloring was set off by the
+dead white of her complexion. Bold and ardent glances came from under
+the long eyelashes; the damp, red, half-open lips challenged a kiss. Her
+frame was strong but compliant; with a bust and arms strongly developed,
+as in figures drawn by the Caracci, she yet seemed active and elastic,
+with a panther's strength and suppleness, and in the same way the
+energetic grace of her figure suggested fierce pleasures.
+
+But though she might romp perhaps and laugh, there was something
+terrible in her eyes and her smile. Like a pythoness possessed by the
+demon, she inspired awe rather than pleasure. All changes, one after
+another, flashed like lightning over every mobile feature of her face.
+She might captivate a jaded fancy, but a young man would have feared
+her. She was like some colossal statue fallen from the height of a Greek
+temple, so grand when seen afar, too roughly hewn to be seen anear.
+And yet, in spite of all, her terrible beauty could have stimulated
+exhaustion; her voice might charm the deaf; her glances might put life
+into the bones of the dead; and therefore Emile was vaguely reminded of
+one of Shakespeare's tragedies--a wonderful maze, in which joy
+groans, and there is something wild even about love, and the magic of
+forgiveness and the warmth of happiness succeed to cruel storms of rage.
+She was a siren that can both kiss and devour; laugh like a devil, or
+weep as angels can. She could concentrate in one instant all a woman's
+powers of attraction in a single effort (the sighs of melancholy and
+the charms of maiden's shyness alone excepted), then in a moment rise
+in fury like a nation in revolt, and tear herself, her passion, and her
+lover, in pieces.
+
+Dressed in red velvet, she trampled under her reckless feet the stray
+flowers fallen from other heads, and held out a salver to the two
+friends, with careless hands. The white arms stood out in bold relief
+against the velvet. Proud of her beauty; proud (who knows?) of her
+corruption, she stood like a queen of pleasure, like an incarnation of
+enjoyment; the enjoyment that comes of squandering the accumulations of
+three generations; that scoffs at its progenitors, and makes merry over
+a corpse; that will dissolve pearls and wreck thrones, turn old men into
+boys, and make young men prematurely old; enjoyment only possible to
+giants weary of their power, tormented by reflection, or for whom strife
+has become a plaything.
+
+"What is your name?" asked Raphael.
+
+"Aquilina."
+
+"Out of _Venice Preserved_!" exclaimed Emile.
+
+"Yes," she answered. "Just as a pope takes a new name when he is exalted
+above all other men, I, too, took another name when I raised myself
+above women's level."
+
+"Then have you, like your patron saint, a terrible and noble lover, a
+conspirator, who would die for you?" cried Emile eagerly--this gleam of
+poetry had aroused his interest.
+
+"Once I had," she answered. "But I had a rival too in La Guillotine. I
+have worn something red about me ever since, lest any happiness should
+carry me away."
+
+"Oh, if you are going to get her on to the story of those four lads
+of La Rochelle, she will never get to the end of it. That's enough,
+Aquilina. As if every woman could not bewail some lover or other, though
+not every one has the luck to lose him on the scaffold, as you have
+done. I would a great deal sooner see a lover of mine in a trench at the
+back of Clamart than in a rival's arms."
+
+All this in the gentlest and most melodious accents, and pronounced by
+the prettiest, gentlest, and most innocent-looking little person that
+a fairy wand ever drew from an enchanted eggshell. She had come
+up noiselessly, and they became aware of a slender, dainty figure,
+charmingly timid blue eyes, and white transparent brows. No ingenue
+among the naiads, a truant from her river spring, could have been shyer,
+whiter, more ingenuous than this young girl, seemingly about sixteen
+years old, ignorant of evil and of the storms of life, and fresh from
+some church in which she must have prayed the angels to call her to
+heaven before the time. Only in Paris are such natures as this to be
+found, concealing depths of depravity behind a fair mask, and the most
+artificial vices beneath a brow as young and fair as an opening flower.
+
+At first the angelic promise of those soft lineaments misled the
+friends. Raphael and Emile took the coffee which she poured into the
+cups brought by Aquilina, and began to talk with her. In the eyes of the
+two poets she soon became transformed into some sombre allegory, of
+I know not what aspect of human life. She opposed to the vigorous
+and ardent expression of her commanding acquaintance a revelation
+of heartless corruption and voluptuous cruelty. Heedless enough to
+perpetrate a crime, hardy enough to feel no misgivings; a pitiless demon
+that wrings larger and kinder natures with torments that it is incapable
+of knowing, that simpers over a traffic in love, sheds tears over a
+victim's funeral, and beams with joy over the reading of the will.
+A poet might have admired the magnificent Aquilina; but the winning
+Euphrasia must be repulsive to every one--the first was the soul of sin;
+the second, sin without a soul in it.
+
+"I should dearly like to know," Emile remarked to this pleasing being,
+"if you ever reflect upon your future?"
+
+"My future!" she answered with a laugh. "What do you mean by my future?
+Why should I think about something that does not exist as yet? I never
+look before or behind. Isn't one day at a time more than I can concern
+myself with as it is? And besides, the future, as we know, means the
+hospital."
+
+"How can you forsee a future in the hospital, and make no effort to
+avert it?"
+
+"What is there so alarming about the hospital?" asked the terrific
+Aquilina. "When we are neither wives nor mothers, when old age draws
+black stockings over our limbs, sets wrinkles on our brows, withers up
+the woman in us, and darkens the light in our lover's eyes, what could
+we need when that comes to pass? You would look on us then as mere
+human clay; we with our habiliments shall be for you like so much
+mud--worthless, lifeless, crumbling to pieces, going about with the
+rustle of dead leaves. Rags or the daintiest finery will be as one to us
+then; the ambergris of the boudoir will breathe an odor of death and dry
+bones; and suppose there is a heart there in that mud, not one of you
+but would make mock of it, not so much as a memory will you spare to
+us. Is not our existence precisely the same whether we live in a fine
+mansion with lap-dogs to tend, or sort rags in a workhouse? Does it make
+much difference whether we shall hide our gray heads beneath lace or a
+handkerchief striped with blue and red; whether we sweep a crossing with
+a birch broom, or the steps of the Tuileries with satins; whether we sit
+beside a gilded hearth, or cower over the ashes in a red earthen pot;
+whether we go to the Opera or look on in the Place de Greve?"
+
+"_Aquilina mia_, you have never shown more sense than in this depressing
+fit of yours," Euphrasia remarked. "Yes, cashmere, _point d'Alencon_,
+perfumes, gold, silks, luxury, everything that sparkles, everything
+pleasant, belongs to youth alone. Time alone may show us our folly, but
+good fortune will acquit us. You are laughing at me," she went on, with
+a malicious glance at the friends; "but am I not right? I would sooner
+die of pleasure than of illness. I am not afflicted with a mania for
+perpetuity, nor have I a great veneration for human nature, such as God
+has made it. Give me millions, and I would squander them; I should not
+keep one centime for the year to come. Live to be charming and have
+power, that is the decree of my every heartbeat. Society sanctions my
+life; does it not pay for my extravagances? Why does Providence pay me
+every morning my income, which I spend every evening? Why are hospitals
+built for us? And Providence did not put good and evil on either hand
+for us to select what tires and pains us. I should be very foolish if I
+did not amuse myself."
+
+"And how about others?" asked Emile.
+
+"Others? Oh, well, they must manage for themselves. I prefer laughing
+at their woes to weeping over my own. I defy any man to give me the
+slightest uneasiness."
+
+"What have you suffered to make you think like this?" asked Raphael.
+
+"I myself have been forsaken for an inheritance," she said, striking an
+attitude that displayed all her charms; "and yet I had worked night and
+day to keep my lover! I am not to be gulled by any smile or vow, and I
+have set myself to make one long entertainment of my life."
+
+"But does not happiness come from the soul within?" cried Raphael.
+
+"It may be so," Aquilina answered; "but is it nothing to be conscious of
+admiration and flattery; to triumph over other women, even over the most
+virtuous, humiliating them before our beauty and our splendor? Not only
+so; one day of our life is worth ten years of a bourgeoise existence,
+and so it is all summed up."
+
+"Is not a woman hateful without virtue?" Emile said to Raphael.
+
+Euphrasia's glance was like a viper's, as she said, with an irony in her
+voice that cannot be rendered:
+
+"Virtue! we leave that to deformity and to ugly women. What would the
+poor things be without it?"
+
+"Hush, be quiet," Emile broke in. "Don't talk about something you have
+never known."
+
+"That I have never known!" Euphrasia answered. "You give yourself for
+life to some person you abominate; you must bring up children who will
+neglect you, who wound your very heart, and you must say, 'Thank you!'
+for it; and these are the virtues you prescribe to woman. And that is
+not enough. By way of requiting her self-denial, you must come and
+add to her sorrows by trying to lead her astray; and though you are
+rebuffed, she is compromised. A nice life! How far better to keep one's
+freedom, to follow one's inclinations in love, and die young!"
+
+"Have you no fear of the price to be paid some day for all this?"
+
+"Even then," she said, "instead of mingling pleasures and troubles, my
+life will consist of two separate parts--a youth of happiness is secure,
+and there may come a hazy, uncertain old age, during which I can suffer
+at my leisure."
+
+"She has never loved," came in the deep tones of Aquilina's voice. "She
+never went a hundred leagues to drink in one look and a denial with
+untold raptures. She has not hung her own life on a thread, nor tried
+to stab more than one man to save her sovereign lord, her king, her
+divinity.... Love, for her, meant a fascinating colonel."
+
+"Here she is with her La Rochelle," Euphrasia made answer. "Love comes
+like the wind, no one knows whence. And, for that matter, if one of
+those brutes had once fallen in love with you, you would hold sensible
+men in horror."
+
+"Brutes are put out of the question by the Code," said the tall,
+sarcastic Aquilina.
+
+"I thought you had more kindness for the army," laughed Euphrasia.
+
+"How happy they are in their power of dethroning their reason in this
+way," Raphael exclaimed.
+
+"Happy?" asked Aquilina, with dreadful look, and a smile full of pity
+and terror. "Ah, you do not know what it is to be condemned to a life of
+pleasure, with your dead hidden in your heart...."
+
+A moment's consideration of the rooms was like a foretaste of Milton's
+Pandemonium. The faces of those still capable of drinking wore a hideous
+blue tint, from burning draughts of punch. Mad dances were kept up with
+wild energy; excited laughter and outcries broke out like the explosion
+of fireworks. The boudoir and a small adjoining room were strewn like
+a battlefield with the insensible and incapable. Wine, pleasure,
+and dispute had heated the atmosphere. Wine and love, delirium and
+unconsciousness possessed them, and were written upon all faces, upon
+the furniture; were expressed by the surrounding disorder, and brought
+light films over the vision of those assembled, so that the air seemed
+full of intoxicating vapor. A glittering dust arose, as in the luminous
+paths made by a ray of sunlight, the most bizarre forms flitted through
+it, grotesque struggles were seen athwart it. Groups of interlaced
+figures blended with the white marbles, the noble masterpieces of
+sculpture that adorned the rooms.
+
+Though the two friends yet preserved a sort of fallacious clearness
+in their ideas and voices, a feeble appearance and faint thrill of
+animation, it was yet almost impossible to distinguish what was real
+among the fantastic absurdities before them, or what foundation there
+was for the impossible pictures that passed unceasingly before their
+weary eyes. The strangest phenomena of dreams beset them, the lowering
+heavens, the fervid sweetness caught by faces in our visions, and
+unheard-of agility under a load of chains,--all these so vividly, that
+they took the pranks of the orgy about them for the freaks of some
+nightmare in which all movement is silent, and cries never reach
+the ear. The valet de chambre succeeded just then, after some little
+difficulty, in drawing his master into the ante-chamber to whisper to
+him:
+
+"The neighbors are all at their windows, complaining of the racket,
+sir."
+
+"If noise alarms them, why don't they lay down straw before their
+doors?" was Taillefer's rejoinder.
+
+Raphael's sudden burst of laughter was so unseasonable and abrupt, that
+his friend demanded the reason of his unseemly hilarity.
+
+"You will hardly understand me," he replied. "In the first place, I must
+admit that you stopped me on the Quai Voltaire just as I was about to
+throw myself into the Seine, and you would like to know, no doubt, my
+motives for dying. And when I proceed to tell you that by an almost
+miraculous chance the most poetic memorials of the material world had
+but just then been summed up for me as a symbolical interpretation of
+human wisdom; whilst at this minute the remains of all the intellectual
+treasures ravaged by us at table are comprised in these two women, the
+living and authentic types of folly, would you be any the wiser? Our
+profound apathy towards men and things supplied the half-tones in a
+crudely contrasted picture of two theories of life so diametrically
+opposed. If you were not drunk, you might perhaps catch a gleam of
+philosophy in this."
+
+"And if you had not both feet on that fascinating Aquilina, whose
+heavy breathing suggests an analogy with the sounds of a storm about
+to burst," replied Emile, absently engaged in the harmless amusement of
+winding and unwinding Euphrasia's hair, "you would be ashamed of your
+inebriated garrulity. Both your systems can be packed in a phrase, and
+reduced to a single idea. The mere routine of living brings a stupid
+kind of wisdom with it, by blunting our intelligence with work; and on
+the other hand, a life passed in the limbo of the abstract or in the
+abysses of the moral world, produces a sort of wisdom run mad. The
+conditions may be summed up in brief; we may extinguish emotion, and so
+live to old age, or we may choose to die young as martyrs to contending
+passions. And yet this decree is at variance with the temperaments with
+which we were endowed by the bitter jester who modeled all creatures."
+
+"Idiot!" Raphael burst in. "Go on epitomizing yourself after that
+fashion, and you will fill volumes. If I attempted to formulate those
+two ideas clearly, I might as well say that man is corrupted by the
+exercise of his wits, and purified by ignorance. You are calling the
+whole fabric of society to account. But whether we live with the wise
+or perish with the fool, isn't the result the same sooner or later? And
+have not the prime constituents of the quintessence of both systems been
+before expressed in a couple of words--_Carymary_, _Carymara_."
+
+"You make me doubt the existence of a God, for your stupidity is greater
+than His power," said Emile. "Our beloved Rabelais summed it all up in
+a shorter word than your '_Carymary_, _Carymara_'; from his _Peut-etre_
+Montaigne derived his own _Que sais-je_? After all, this last word of
+moral science is scarcely more than the cry of Pyrrhus set betwixt good
+and evil, or Buridan's ass between the two measures of oats. But let
+this everlasting question alone, resolved to-day by a 'Yes' and a 'No.'
+What experience did you look to find by a jump into the Seine? Were you
+jealous of the hydraulic machine on the Pont Notre Dame?"
+
+"Ah, if you but knew my history!"
+
+"Pooh," said Emile; "I did not think you could be so commonplace; that
+remark is hackneyed. Don't you know that every one of us claims to have
+suffered as no other ever did?"
+
+"Ah!" Raphael sighed.
+
+"What a mountebank art thou with thy 'Ah'! Look here, now. Does some
+disease of the mind or body, by contracting your muscles, bring back
+of a morning the wild horses that tear you in pieces at night, as with
+Damiens once upon a time? Were you driven to sup off your own dog in a
+garret, uncooked and without salt? Have your children ever cried, 'I am
+hungry'? Have you sold your mistress' hair to hazard the money at play?
+Have you ever drawn a sham bill of exchange on a fictitious uncle at a
+sham address, and feared lest you should not be in time to take it up?
+Come now, I am attending! If you were going to drown yourself for some
+woman, or by way of a protest, or out of sheer dulness, I disown you.
+Make your confession, and no lies! I don't at all want a historical
+memoir. And, above all things, be as concise as your clouded intellect
+permits; I am as critical as a professor, and as sleepy as a woman at
+her vespers."
+
+"You silly fool!" said Raphael. "When has not suffering been keener for
+a more susceptible nature? Some day when science has attained to a pitch
+that enables us to study the natural history of hearts, when they
+are named and classified in genera, sub-genera, and families; into
+crustaceae, fossils, saurians, infusoria, or whatever it is,--then, my
+dear fellow, it will be ascertained that there are natures as tender
+and fragile as flowers, that are broken by the slight bruises that some
+stony hearts do not even feel----"
+
+"For pity's sake, spare me thy exordium," said Emile, as, half
+plaintive, half amused, he took Raphael's hand.
+
+
+
+
+II. A WOMAN WITHOUT A HEART
+
+
+After a moment's silence, Raphael said with a careless gesture:
+
+"Perhaps it is an effect of the fumes of punch--I really cannot
+tell--this clearness of mind that enables me to comprise my whole
+life in a single picture, where figures and hues, lights, shades, and
+half-tones are faithfully rendered. I should not have been so surprised
+at this poetical play of imagination if it were not accompanied with
+a sort of scorn for my past joys and sorrows. Seen from afar, my life
+appears to contract by some mental process. That long, slow agony of ten
+years' duration can be brought to memory to-day in some few phrases,
+in which pain is resolved into a mere idea, and pleasure becomes
+a philosophical reflection. Instead of feeling things, I weigh and
+consider them----"
+
+"You are as tiresome as the explanation of an amendment," cried Emile.
+
+"Very likely," said Raphael submissively. "I spare you the first
+seventeen years of my life for fear of abusing a listener's patience.
+Till that time, like you and thousands of others, I had lived my life
+at school or the lycee, with its imaginary troubles and genuine
+happinesses, which are so pleasant to look back upon. Our jaded palates
+still crave for that Lenten fare, so long as we have not tried it
+afresh. It was a pleasant life, with the tasks that we thought so
+contemptible, but which taught us application for all that...."
+
+"Let the drama begin," said Emile, half-plaintively, half-comically.
+
+"When I left school," Raphael went on, with a gesture that claimed the
+right of speaking, "my father submitted me to a strict discipline; he
+installed me in a room near his own study, and I had to rise at five in
+the morning and be in bed by nine at night. He meant me to take my law
+studies seriously. I attended the Schools, and read with an advocate
+as well, but my lectures and work were so narrowly circumscribed by the
+laws of time and space, and my father required such a strict account of
+my doings, at dinner, that..."
+
+"What is this to me?" asked Emile.
+
+"The devil take you!" said Raphael. "How are you to enter into my
+feelings if I do not relate the facts that insensibly shaped my
+character, made me timid, and prolonged the period of youthful
+simplicity? In this manner I cowered under as strict a despotism as a
+monarch's till I came of age. To depict the tedium of my life, it will
+be perhaps enough to portray my father to you. He was tall, thin, and
+slight, with a hatchet face, and pale complexion; a man of few words,
+fidgety as an old maid, exacting as a senior clerk. His paternal
+solicitude hovered over my merriment and gleeful thoughts, and seemed to
+cover them with a leaden pall. Any effusive demonstration on my part was
+received by him as a childish absurdity. I was far more afraid of him
+than I had been of any of our masters at school.
+
+"I seem to see him before me at this moment. In his chestnut-brown
+frock-coat he looked like a red herring wrapped up in the cover of a
+pamphlet, and he held himself as erect as an Easter candle. But I was
+fond of my father, and at heart he was right enough. Perhaps we never
+hate severity when it has its source in greatness of character and pure
+morals, and is skilfully tempered with kindness. My father, it is true,
+never left me a moment to myself, and only when I was twenty years
+old gave me so much as ten francs of my own, ten knavish prodigals
+of francs, such a hoard as I had long vainly desired, which set me
+a-dreaming of unutterable felicity; yet, for all that he sought to
+procure relaxations for me. When he had promised me a treat beforehand,
+he would take me to Les Boufoons, or to a concert or ball, where I hoped
+to find a mistress.... A mistress! that meant independence. But bashful
+and timid as I was, knowing nobody, and ignorant of the dialect of
+drawing-rooms, I always came back as awkward as ever, and swelling with
+unsatisfied desires, to be put in harness like a troop horse next day
+by my father, and to return with morning to my advocate, the Palais de
+Justice, and the law. To have swerved from the straight course which my
+father had mapped out for me, would have drawn down his wrath upon me;
+at my first delinquency, he threatened to ship me off as a cabin-boy
+to the Antilles. A dreadful shiver ran through me if I had ventured to
+spend a couple of hours in some pleasure party.
+
+"Imagine the most wandering imagination and passionate temperament, the
+tenderest soul and most artistic nature, dwelling continually in the
+presence of the most flint-hearted, atrabilious, and frigid man on
+earth; think of me as a young girl married to a skeleton, and you will
+understand the life whose curious scenes can only be a hearsay tale to
+you; the plans for running away that perished at the sight of my father,
+the despair soothed by slumber, the dark broodings charmed away by
+music. I breathed my sorrows forth in melodies. Beethoven or Mozart
+would keep my confidences sacred. Nowadays, I smile at recollections of
+the scruples which burdened my conscience at that epoch of innocence and
+virtue.
+
+"If I set foot in a restaurant, I gave myself up for lost; my fancy
+led me to look on a cafe as a disreputable haunt, where men lost their
+characters and embarrassed their fortunes; as for engaging in play, I
+had not the money to risk. Oh, if I needed to send you to sleep, I would
+tell you about one of the most frightful pleasures of my life, one of
+those pleasures with fangs that bury themselves in the heart as the
+branding-iron enters the convict's shoulder. I was at a ball at the
+house of the Duc de Navarreins, my father's cousin. But to make
+my position the more perfectly clear, you must know that I wore a
+threadbare coat, ill-fitting shoes, a tie fit for a stableman, and a
+soiled pair of gloves. I shrank into a corner to eat ices and watch
+the pretty faces at my leisure. My father noticed me. Actuated by
+some motive that I did not fathom, so dumfounded was I by this act of
+confidence, he handed me his keys and purse to keep. Ten paces away some
+men were gambling. I heard the rattling of gold; I was twenty years old;
+I longed to be steeped for one whole day in the follies of my time of
+life. It was a license of the imagination that would find a parallel
+neither in the freaks of courtesans, nor in the dreams of young girls.
+For a year past I had beheld myself well dressed, in a carriage, with
+a pretty woman by my side, playing the great lord, dining at Very's,
+deciding not to go back home till the morrow; but was prepared for my
+father with a plot more intricate than the Marriage of Figaro, which
+he could not possibly have unraveled. All this bliss would cost, I
+estimated, fifty crowns. Was it not the artless idea of playing truant
+that still had charms for me?
+
+"I went into a small adjoining room, and when alone counted my father's
+money with smarting eyes and trembling fingers--a hundred crowns! The
+joys of my escapade rose before me at the thought of the amount; joys
+that flitted about me like Macbeth's witches round their caldron;
+joys how alluring! how thrilling! how delicious! I became a deliberate
+rascal. I heeded neither my tingling ears nor the violent beating of my
+heart, but took out two twenty-franc pieces that I seem to see yet. The
+dates had been erased, and Bonaparte's head simpered upon them. After I
+had put back the purse in my pocket, I returned to the gaming-table with
+the two pieces of gold in the palms of my damp hands, prowling about
+the players like a sparrow-hawk round a coop of chickens. Tormented by
+inexpressible terror, I flung a sudden clairvoyant glance round me, and
+feeling quite sure that I was seen by none of my acquaintance, betted on
+a stout, jovial little man, heaping upon his head more prayers and
+vows than are put up during two or three storms at sea. Then, with an
+intuitive scoundrelism, or Machiavelism, surprising in one of my age, I
+went and stood in the door, and looked about me in the rooms, though
+I saw nothing; for both mind and eyes hovered about that fateful green
+cloth.
+
+"That evening fixes the date of a first observation of a physiological
+kind; to it I owe a kind of insight into certain mysteries of our double
+nature that I have since been enabled to penetrate. I had my back turned
+on the table where my future felicity lay at stake, a felicity but so
+much the more intense that it was criminal. Between me and the players
+stood a wall of onlookers some five feet deep, who were chatting; the
+murmur of voices drowned the clinking of gold, which mingled in
+the sounds sent up by this orchestra; yet, despite all obstacles, I
+distinctly heard the words of the two players by a gift accorded to the
+passions, which enables them to annihilate time and space. I saw the
+points they made; I knew which of the two turned up the king as well as
+if I had actually seen the cards; at a distance of ten paces, in short,
+the fortunes of play blanched my face.
+
+"My father suddenly went by, and then I knew what the Scripture meant by
+'The Spirit of God passed before his face.' I had won. I slipped through
+the crowd of men who had gathered about the players with the quickness
+of an eel escaping through a broken mesh in a net. My nerves thrilled
+with joy instead of anguish. I felt like some criminal on the way to
+torture released by a chance meeting with the king. It happened that a
+man with a decoration found himself short by forty francs. Uneasy eyes
+suspected me; I turned pale, and drops of perspiration stood on my
+forehead, I was well punished, I thought, for having robbed my father.
+Then the kind little stout man said, in a voice like an angel's surely,
+'All these gentlemen have paid their stakes,' and put down the forty
+francs himself. I raised my head in triumph upon the players. After I
+had returned the money I had taken from it to my father's purse, I left
+my winnings with that honest and worthy gentleman, who continued to win.
+As soon as I found myself possessed of a hundred and sixty francs, I
+wrapped them up in my handkerchief, so that they could neither move or
+rattle on the way back; and I played no more.
+
+"'What were you doing at the card-table?' said my father as we stepped
+into the carriage.
+
+"'I was looking on,' I answered, trembling.
+
+"'But it would have been nothing out of the common if you had been
+prompted by self-love to put some money down on the table. In the eyes
+of men of the world you are quite old enough to assume the right to
+commit such follies. So I should have pardoned you, Raphael, if you had
+made use of my purse.....'
+
+"I did not answer. When we reached home, I returned the keys and money
+to my father. As he entered his study, he emptied out his purse on the
+mantelpiece, counted the money, and turned to me with a kindly look,
+saying with more or less long and significant pauses between each
+phrase:
+
+"'My boy, you are very nearly twenty now. I am satisfied with you. You
+ought to have an allowance, if only to teach you how to lay it out, and
+to gain some acquaintance with everyday business. Henceforward I shall
+let you have a hundred francs each month. Here is your first quarter's
+income for this year,' he added, fingering a pile of gold, as if to make
+sure that the amount was correct. 'Do what you please with it.'
+
+"I confess that I was ready to fling myself at his feet, to tell him
+that I was a thief, a scoundrel, and, worse than all, a liar! But a
+feeling of shame held me back. I went up to him for an embrace, but he
+gently pushed me away.
+
+"'You are a man now, _my child_,' he said. 'What I have just done was a
+very proper and simple thing, for which there is no need to thank me. If
+I have any claim to your gratitude, Raphael,' he went on, in a kind but
+dignified way, 'it is because I have preserved your youth from the evils
+that destroy young men in Paris. We will be two friends henceforth. In
+a year's time you will be a doctor of law. Not without some hardship and
+privations you have acquired the sound knowledge and the love of, and
+application to, work that is indispensable to public men. You must
+learn to know me, Raphael. I do not want to make either an advocate or
+a notary of you, but a statesman, who shall be the pride of our poor
+house.... Good-night,' he added.
+
+"From that day my father took me fully into confidence. I was an only
+son; and ten years before, I had lost my mother. In time past my father,
+the head of a historic family remembered even now in Auvergne, had come
+to Paris to fight against his evil star, dissatisfied at the prospect
+of tilling the soil, with his useless sword by his side. He was endowed
+with the shrewdness that gives the men of the south of France a certain
+ascendency when energy goes with it. Almost unaided, he made a position
+for himself near the fountain of power. The revolution brought a reverse
+of fortune, but he had managed to marry an heiress of good family, and,
+in the time of the Empire, appeared to be on the point of restoring to
+our house its ancient splendor.
+
+"The Restoration, while it brought back considerable property to my
+mother, was my father's ruin. He had formerly purchased several estates
+abroad, conferred by the Emperor on his generals; and now for ten years
+he struggled with liquidators, diplomatists, and Prussian and Bavarian
+courts of law, over the disputed possession of these unfortunate
+endowments. My father plunged me into the intricate labyrinths of law
+proceedings on which our future depended. We might be compelled to
+return the rents, as well as the proceeds arising from sales of timber
+made during the years 1814 to 1817; in that case my mother's property
+would have barely saved our credit. So it fell out that the day on which
+my father in a fashion emancipated me, brought me under a most galling
+yoke. I entered on a conflict like a battlefield; I must work day and
+night; seek interviews with statesmen, surprise their convictions, try
+to interest them in our affairs, and gain them over, with their wives
+and servants, and their very dogs; and all this abominable business had
+to take the form of pretty speeches and polite attentions. Then I knew
+the mortifications that had left their blighting traces on my father's
+face. For about a year I led outwardly the life of a man of the world,
+but enormous labors lay beneath the surface of gadding about, and eager
+efforts to attach myself to influential kinsmen, or to people likely
+to be useful to us. My relaxations were lawsuits, and memorials still
+furnished the staple of my conversation. Hitherto my life had been
+blameless, from the sheer impossibility of indulging the desires of
+youth; but now I became my own master, and in dread of involving us both
+in ruin by some piece of negligence, I did not dare to allow myself any
+pleasure or expenditure.
+
+"While we are young, and before the world has rubbed off the delicate
+bloom from our sentiments, the freshness of our impressions, the noble
+purity of conscience which will never allow us to palter with evil,
+the sense of duty is very strong within us, the voice of honor clamors
+within us, and we are open and straightforward. At that time I was all
+these things. I wished to justify my father's confidence in me. But
+lately I would have stolen a paltry sum from him, with secret delight;
+but now that I shared the burden of his affairs, of his name and of his
+house, I would secretly have given up my fortune and my hopes for
+him, as I was sacrificing my pleasures, and even have been glad of the
+sacrifice! So when M. de Villele exhumed, for our special benefit, an
+imperial decree concerning forfeitures, and had ruined us, I authorized
+the sale of my property, only retaining an island in the middle of
+the Loire where my mother was buried. Perhaps arguments and evasions,
+philosophical, philanthropic, and political considerations would not
+fail me now, to hinder the perpetration of what my solicitor termed
+a 'folly'; but at one-and-twenty, I repeat, we are all aglow with
+generosity and affection. The tears that stood in my father's eyes were
+to me the most splendid of fortunes, and the thought of those tears has
+often soothed my sorrow. Ten months after he had paid his creditors, my
+father died of grief; I was his idol, and he had ruined me! The thought
+killed him. Towards the end of the autumn of 1826, at the age of
+twenty-two, I was the sole mourner at his graveside--the grave of my
+father and my earliest friend. Not many young men have found themselves
+alone with their thoughts as they followed a hearse, or have seen
+themselves lost in crowded Paris, and without money or prospects.
+Orphans rescued by public charity have at any rate the future of the
+battlefield before them, and find a shelter in some institution and a
+father in the government or in the _procureur du roi_. I had nothing.
+
+"Three months later, an agent made over to me eleven hundred and twelve
+francs, the net proceeds of the winding up of my father's affairs. Our
+creditors had driven us to sell our furniture. From my childhood I had
+been used to set a high value on the articles of luxury about us, and
+I could not help showing my astonishment at the sight of this meagre
+balance.
+
+"'Oh, rococo, all of it!' said the auctioneer. A terrible word that fell
+like a blight on the sacred memories of my childhood, and dispelled my
+earliest illusions, the dearest of all. My entire fortune was comprised
+in this 'account rendered,' my future lay in a linen bag with eleven
+hundred and twelve francs in it, human society stood before me in the
+person of an auctioneer's clerk, who kept his hat on while he spoke.
+Jonathan, an old servant who was much attached to me, and whom my mother
+had formerly pensioned with an annuity of four hundred francs, spoke to
+me as I was leaving the house that I had so often gaily left for a drive
+in my childhood.
+
+"'Be very economical, Monsieur Raphael!'
+
+"The good fellow was crying.
+
+"Such were the events, dear Emile, that ruled my destinies, moulded my
+character, and set me, while still young, in an utterly false social
+position," said Raphael after a pause. "Family ties, weak ones, it is
+true, bound me to a few wealthy houses, but my own pride would have kept
+me aloof from them if contempt and indifference had not shut their
+doors on me in the first place. I was related to people who were very
+influential, and who lavished their patronage on strangers; but I found
+neither relations nor patrons in them. Continually circumscribed in my
+affections, they recoiled upon me. Unreserved and simple by nature, I
+must have appeared frigid and sophisticated. My father's discipline had
+destroyed all confidence in myself. I was shy and awkward; I could not
+believe that my opinion carried any weight whatever; I took no pleasure
+in myself; I thought myself ugly, and was ashamed to meet my own
+eyes. In spite of the inward voice that must be the stay of a man with
+anything in him, in all his struggles, the voice that cries, 'Courage!
+Go forward!' in spite of sudden revelations of my own strength in my
+solitude; in spite of the hopes that thrilled me as I compared new
+works, that the public admired so much, with the schemes that hovered in
+my brain,--in spite of all this, I had a childish mistrust of myself.
+
+"An overweening ambition preyed upon me; I believed that I was meant for
+great things, and yet I felt myself to be nothing. I had need of other
+men, and I was friendless. I found I must make my way in the world,
+where I was quite alone, and bashful, rather than afraid.
+
+"All through the year in which, by my father's wish, I threw myself into
+the whirlpool of fashionable society, I came away with an inexperienced
+heart, and fresh in mind. Like every grown child, I sighed in secret for
+a love affair. I met, among young men of my own age, a set of swaggerers
+who held their heads high, and talked about trifles as they seated
+themselves without a tremor beside women who inspired awe in me. They
+chattered nonsense, sucked the heads of their canes, gave themselves
+affected airs, appropriated the fairest women, and laid, or pretended
+that they had laid their heads on every pillow. Pleasure, seemingly, was
+at their beck and call; they looked on the most virtuous and prudish as
+an easy prey, ready to surrender at a word, at the slightest impudent
+gesture or insolent look. I declare, on my soul and conscience, that the
+attainment of power, or of a great name in literature, seemed to me an
+easier victory than a success with some young, witty, and gracious lady
+of high degree.
+
+"So I found the tumult of my heart, my feelings, and my creeds all at
+variance with the axioms of society. I had plenty of audacity in my
+character, but none in my manner. Later, I found out that women did
+not like to be implored. I have from afar adored many a one to whom I
+devoted a soul proof against all tests, a heart to break, energy that
+shrank from no sacrifice and from no torture; _they_ accepted fools
+whom I would not have engaged as hall porters. How often, mute and
+motionless, have I not admired the lady of my dreams, swaying in the
+dance; given up my life in thought to one eternal caress, expressed all
+my hopes in a look, and laid before her, in my rapture, a young man's
+love, which should outstrip all fables. At some moments I was ready to
+barter my whole life for one single night. Well, as I could never find a
+listener for my impassioned proposals, eyes to rest my own upon, a heart
+made for my heart, I lived on in all the sufferings of impotent
+force that consumes itself; lacking either opportunity or courage or
+experience. I despaired, maybe, of making myself understood, or I feared
+to be understood but too well; and yet the storm within me was ready to
+burst at every chance courteous look. In spite of my readiness to take
+the semblance of interest in look or word for a tenderer solicitude,
+I dared neither to speak nor to be silent seasonably. My words grew
+insignificant, and my silence stupid, by sheer stress of emotion. I was
+too ingenuous, no doubt, for that artificial life, led by candle-light,
+where every thought is expressed in conventional phrases, or by words
+that fashion dictates; and not only so, I had not learned how to employ
+speech that says nothing, and silence that says a great deal. In short,
+I concealed the fires that consumed me, and with such a soul as women
+wish to find, with all the elevation of soul that they long for, and
+a mettle that fools plume themselves upon, all women have been cruelly
+treacherous to me.
+
+"So in my simplicity I admired the heroes of this set when they bragged
+about their conquests, and never suspected them of lying. No doubt it
+was a mistake to wish for a love that springs for a word's sake; to
+expect to find in the heart of a vain, frivolous woman, greedy for
+luxury and intoxicated with vanity, the great sea of passion that surged
+tempestuously in my own breast. Oh! to feel that you were born to love,
+to make some woman's happiness, and yet to find not one, not even a
+noble and courageous Marceline, not so much as an old Marquise! Oh!
+to carry a treasure in your wallet, and not find even some child, or
+inquisitive young girl, to admire it! In my despair I often wished to
+kill myself."
+
+"Finely tragical to-night!" cried Emile.
+
+"Let me pass sentence on my life," Raphael answered. "If your friendship
+is not strong enough to bear with my elegy, if you cannot put up with
+half an hour's tedium for my sake, go to sleep! But, then, never ask
+again for the reason of suicide that hangs over me, that comes nearer
+and calls to me, that I bow myself before. If you are to judge a man,
+you must know his secret thoughts, sorrows, and feelings; to know
+merely the outward events of a man's life would only serve to make a
+chronological table--a fool's notion of history."
+
+Emile was so much struck with the bitter tones in which these words were
+spoken, that he began to pay close attention to Raphael, whom he watched
+with a bewildered expression.
+
+"Now," continued the speaker, "all these things that befell me appear in
+a new light. The sequence of events that I once thought so unfortunate
+created the splendid powers of which, later, I became so proud. If I may
+believe you, I possess the power of readily expressing my thoughts, and
+I could take a forward place in the great field of knowledge; and is not
+this the result of scientific curiosity, of excessive application, and
+a love of reading which possessed me from the age of seven till my entry
+on life? The very neglect in which I was left, and the consequent habits
+of self-repression and self-concentration; did not these things teach me
+how to consider and reflect? Nothing in me was squandered in obedience
+to the exactions of the world, which humble the proudest soul and
+reduce it to a mere husk; and was it not this very fact that refined the
+emotional part of my nature till it became the perfected instrument of
+a loftier purpose than passionate desires? I remember watching the women
+who mistook me with all the insight of contemned love.
+
+"I can see now that my natural sincerity must have been displeasing to
+them; women, perhaps, even require a little hypocrisy. And I, who in
+the same hour's space am alternately a man and a child, frivolous and
+thoughtful, free from bias and brimful of superstition, and oftentimes
+myself as much a woman as any of them; how should they do otherwise than
+take my simplicity for cynicism, my innocent candor for impudence? They
+found my knowledge tiresome; my feminine languor, weakness. I was held
+to be listless and incapable of love or of steady purpose; a too active
+imagination, that curse of poets, was no doubt the cause. My silence was
+idiotic; and as I daresay I alarmed them by my efforts to please, women
+one and all have condemned me. With tears and mortification, I bowed
+before the decision of the world; but my distress was not barren. I
+determined to revenge myself on society; I would dominate the feminine
+intellect, and so have the feminine soul at my mercy; all eyes should
+be fixed upon me, when the servant at the door announced my name. I had
+determined from my childhood that I would be a great man; I said with
+Andre Chenier, as I struck my forehead, 'There is something underneath
+that!' I felt, I believed, the thought within me that I must express,
+the system I must establish, the knowledge I must interpret.
+
+"Let me pour out my follies, dear Emile; to-day I am barely twenty-six
+years old, certain of dying unrecognized, and I have never been the
+lover of the woman I dreamed of possessing. Have we not all of us, more
+or less, believed in the reality of a thing because we wished it? I
+would never have a young man for my friend who did not place himself in
+dreams upon a pedestal, weave crowns for his head, and have complaisant
+mistresses. I myself would often be a general, nay, emperor; I have been
+a Byron, and then a nobody. After this sport on these pinnacles of human
+achievement, I became aware that all the difficulties and steeps of life
+were yet to face. My exuberant self-esteem came to my aid; I had that
+intense belief in my destiny, which perhaps amounts to genius in those
+who will not permit themselves to be distracted by contact with the
+world, as sheep that leave their wool on the briars of every thicket
+they pass by. I meant to cover myself with glory, and to work in silence
+for the mistress I hoped to have one day. Women for me were resumed into
+a single type, and this woman I looked to meet in the first that met
+my eyes; but in each and all I saw a queen, and as queens must make the
+first advances to their lovers, they must draw near to me--to me, so
+sickly, shy, and poor. For her, who should take pity on me, my heart
+held in store such gratitude over and beyond love, that I had worshiped
+her her whole life long. Later, my observations have taught me bitter
+truths.
+
+"In this way, dear Emile, I ran the risk of remaining companionless for
+good. The incomprehensible bent of women's minds appears to lead them to
+see nothing but the weak points in a clever man, and the strong points
+of a fool. They feel the liveliest sympathy with the fool's good
+qualities, which perpetually flatter their own defects; while they
+find the man of talent hardly agreeable enough to compensate for his
+shortcomings. All capacity is a sort of intermittent fever, and no woman
+is anxious to share in its discomforts only; they look to find in their
+lovers the wherewithal to gratify their own vanity. It is themselves
+that they love in us! But the artist, poor and proud, along with his
+endowment of creative power, is furnished with an aggressive egotism!
+Everything about him is involved in I know not what whirlpool of his
+ideas, and even his mistress must gyrate along with them. How is a
+woman, spoilt with praise, to believe in the love of a man like that?
+Will she go to seek him out? That sort of lover has not the leisure to
+sit beside a sofa and give himself up to the sentimental simperings
+that women are so fond of, and on which the false and unfeeling pride
+themselves. He cannot spare the time from his work, and how can he
+afford to humble himself and go a-masquerading! I was ready to give my
+life once and for all, but I could not degrade it in detail. Besides,
+there is something indescribably paltry in a stockbroker's tactics, who
+runs on errands for some insipid affected woman; all this disgusts an
+artist. Love in the abstract is not enough for a great man in poverty;
+he has need of its utmost devotion. The frivolous creatures who spend
+their lives in trying on cashmeres, or make themselves into clothes-pegs
+to hang the fashions from, exact the devotion which is not theirs to
+give; for them, love means the pleasure of ruling and not of obeying.
+She who is really a wife, one in heart, flesh, and bone, must follow
+wherever he leads, in whom her life, her strength, her pride, and
+happiness are centered. Ambitious men need those Oriental women
+whose whole thought is given to the study of their requirements; for
+unhappiness means for them the incompatibility of their means with their
+desires. But I, who took myself for a man of genius, must needs feel
+attracted by these very she-coxcombs. So, as I cherished ideas so
+different from those generally received; as I wished to scale the
+heavens without a ladder, was possessed of wealth that could not
+circulate, and of knowledge so wide and so imperfectly arranged and
+digested that it overtaxed my memory; as I had neither relations nor
+friends in the midst of this lonely and ghastly desert, a desert of
+paving stones, full of animation, life, and thought, wherein every one
+is worse than inimical, indifferent to wit; I made a very natural if
+foolish resolve, which required such unknown impossibilities, that my
+spirits rose. It was as if I had laid a wager with myself, for I was at
+once the player and the cards.
+
+"This was my plan. The eleven hundred francs must keep life in me for
+three years--the time I allowed myself in which to bring to light a
+work which should draw attention to me, and make me either a name or a
+fortune. I exulted at the thought of living on bread and milk, like
+a hermit in the Thebaid, while I plunged into the world of books and
+ideas, and so reached a lofty sphere beyond the tumult of Paris, a
+sphere of silent labor where I would entomb myself like a chrysalis to
+await a brilliant and splendid new birth. I imperiled my life in order
+to live. By reducing my requirements to real needs and the barest
+necessaries, I found that three hundred and sixty-five francs sufficed
+for a year of penury; and, in fact, I managed to exist on that slender
+sum, so long as I submitted to my own claustral discipline."
+
+"Impossible!" cried Emile.
+
+"I lived for nearly three years in that way," Raphael answered, with
+a kind of pride. "Let us reckon it out. Three sous for bread, two for
+milk, and three for cold meat, kept me from dying of hunger, and my
+mind in a state of peculiar lucidity. I have observed, as you know, the
+wonderful effects produced by diet upon the imagination. My lodgings
+cost me three sous daily; I burnt three sous more in oil at night; I did
+my own housework, and wore flannel shirts so as to reduce the laundress'
+bill to two sous per day. The money I spent yearly in coal, if divided
+up, never cost more than two sous for each day. I had three years'
+supply of clothing, and I only dressed when going out to some library
+or public lecture. These expenses, all told, only amounted to eighteen
+sous, so two were left over for emergencies. I cannot recollect, during
+that long period of toil, either crossing the Pont des Arts, or paying
+for water; I went out to fetch it every morning from the fountain in
+the Place Saint Michel, at the corner of the Rue de Gres. Oh, I wore my
+poverty proudly. A man urged on towards a fair future walks through life
+like an innocent person to his death; he feels no shame about it.
+
+"I would not think of illness. Like Aquilina, I faced the hospital
+without terror. I had not a moment's doubt of my health, and besides,
+the poor can only take to their beds to die. I cut my own hair till
+the day when an angel of love and kindness... But I do not want to
+anticipate the state of things that I shall reach later. You must simply
+know that I lived with one grand thought for a mistress, a dream, an
+illusion which deceives us all more or less at first. To-day I laugh at
+myself, at that self, holy perhaps and heroic, which is now no more. I
+have since had a closer view of society and the world, of our manners
+and customs, and seen the dangers of my innocent credulity and the
+superfluous nature of my fervent toil. Stores of that sort are quite
+useless to aspirants for fame. Light should be the baggage of seekers
+after fortune!
+
+"Ambitious men spend their youth in rendering themselves worthy of
+patronage; it is their great mistake. While the foolish creatures are
+laying in stores of knowledge and energy, so that they shall not sink
+under the weight of responsible posts that recede from them, schemers
+come and go who are wealthy in words and destitute in ideas, astonish
+the ignorant, and creep into the confidence of those who have a little
+knowledge. While the first kind study, the second march ahead; the one
+sort is modest, and the other impudent; the man of genius is silent
+about his own merits, but these schemers make a flourish of theirs, and
+they are bound to get on. It is so strongly to the interest of men in
+office to believe in ready-made capacity, and in brazen-faced merit,
+that it is downright childish of the learned to expect material rewards.
+I do not seek to paraphrase the commonplace moral, the song of songs
+that obscure genius is for ever singing; I want to come, in a logical
+manner, by the reason of the frequent successes of mediocrity. Alas!
+study shows us such a mother's kindness that it would be a sin perhaps
+to ask any other reward of her than the pure and delightful pleasures
+with which she sustains her children.
+
+"Often I remember soaking my bread in milk, as I sat by the window to
+take the fresh air; while my eyes wandered over a view of roofs--brown,
+gray, or red, slated or tiled, and covered with yellow or green mosses.
+At first the prospect may have seemed monotonous, but I very soon found
+peculiar beauties in it. Sometimes at night, streams of light through
+half-closed shutters would light up and color the dark abysses of this
+strange landscape. Sometimes the feeble lights of the street lamps sent
+up yellow gleams through the fog, and in each street dimly outlined the
+undulations of a crowd of roofs, like billows in a motionless sea.
+Very occasionally, too, a face appeared in this gloomy waste; above
+the flowers in some skyey garden I caught a glimpse of an old woman's
+crooked angular profile as she watered her nasturtiums; or, in a crazy
+attic window, a young girl, fancying herself quite alone as she dressed
+herself--a view of nothing more than a fair forehead and long tresses
+held above her by a pretty white arm.
+
+"I liked to see the short-lived plant-life in the gutters--poor weeds
+that a storm soon washed away. I studied the mosses, with their colors
+revived by showers, or transformed by the sun into a brown velvet
+that fitfully caught the light. Such things as these formed my
+recreations--the passing poetic moods of daylight, the melancholy mists,
+sudden gleams of sunlight, the silence and the magic of night, the
+mysteries of dawn, the smoke wreaths from each chimney; every chance
+event, in fact, in my curious world became familiar to me. I came to
+love this prison of my own choosing. This level Parisian prairie
+of roofs, beneath which lay populous abysses, suited my humor, and
+harmonized with my thoughts.
+
+"Sudden descents into the world from the divine height of scientific
+meditation are very exhausting; and, besides, I had apprehended
+perfectly the bare life of the cloister. When I made up my mind to
+carry out this new plan of life, I looked for quarters in the most
+out-of-the-way parts of Paris. One evening, as I returned home to the
+Rue des Cordiers from the Place de l'Estrapade, I saw a girl of fourteen
+playing with a battledore at the corner of the Rue de Cluny, her winsome
+ways and laughter amused the neighbors. September was not yet over; it
+was warm and fine, so that women sat chatting before their doors as if
+it were a fete-day in some country town. At first I watched the charming
+expression of the girl's face and her graceful attitudes, her pose fit
+for a painter. It was a pretty sight. I looked about me, seeking to
+understand this blithe simplicity in the midst of Paris, and saw that
+the street was a blind alley and but little frequented. I remembered
+that Jean Jacques had once lived here, and looked up the Hotel
+Saint-Quentin. Its dilapidated condition awakened hopes of a cheap
+lodging, and I determined to enter.
+
+"I found myself in a room with a low ceiling; the candles, in
+classic-looking copper candle-sticks, were set in a row under each key.
+The predominating cleanliness of the room made a striking contrast to
+the usual state of such places. This one was as neat as a bit of genre;
+there was a charming trimness about the blue coverlet, the cooking pots
+and furniture. The mistress of the house rose and came to me. She seemed
+to be about forty years of age; sorrows had left their traces on her
+features, and weeping had dimmed her eyes. I deferentially mentioned the
+amount I could pay; it seemed to cause her no surprise; she sought out
+a key from the row, went up to the attics with me, and showed me a room
+that looked out on the neighboring roofs and courts; long poles with
+linen drying on them hung out of the window.
+
+"Nothing could be uglier than this garret, awaiting its scholar, with
+its dingy yellow walls and odor of poverty. The roofing fell in a steep
+slope, and the sky was visible through chinks in the tiles. There was
+room for a bed, a table, and a few chairs, and beneath the highest point
+of the roof my piano could stand. Not being rich enough to furnish this
+cage (that might have been one of the _Piombi_ of Venice), the poor
+woman had never been able to let it; and as I had saved from the recent
+sale the furniture that was in a fashion peculiarly mine, I very soon
+came to terms with my landlady, and moved in on the following day.
+
+"For three years I lived in this airy sepulchre, and worked unflaggingly
+day and night; and so great was the pleasure that study seemed to me the
+fairest theme and the happiest solution of life. The tranquillity and
+peace that a scholar needs is something as sweet and exhilarating as
+love. Unspeakable joys are showered on us by the exertion of our
+mental faculties; the quest of ideas, and the tranquil contemplation
+of knowledge; delights indescribable, because purely intellectual and
+impalpable to our senses. So we are obliged to use material terms to
+express the mysteries of the soul. The pleasure of striking out in some
+lonely lake of clear water, with forests, rocks, and flowers around, and
+the soft stirring of the warm breeze,--all this would give, to those who
+knew them not, a very faint idea of the exultation with which my soul
+bathed itself in the beams of an unknown light, hearkened to the awful
+and uncertain voice of inspiration, as vision upon vision poured from
+some unknown source through my throbbing brain.
+
+"No earthly pleasure can compare with the divine delight of watching
+the dawn of an idea in the space of abstractions as it rises like the
+morning sun; an idea that, better still, attains gradually like a child
+to puberty and man's estate. Study lends a kind of enchantment to all
+our surroundings. The wretched desk covered with brown leather at which
+I wrote, my piano, bed, and armchair, the odd wall-paper and furniture
+seemed to have for me a kind of life in them, and to be humble friends
+of mine and mute partakers of my destiny. How often have I confided my
+soul to them in a glance! A warped bit of beading often met my eyes,
+and suggested new developments,--a striking proof of my system, or a
+felicitous word by which to render my all but inexpressible thought. By
+sheer contemplation of the things about me I discerned an expression and
+a character in each. If the setting sun happened to steal in through my
+narrow window, they would take new colors, fade or shine, grow dull or
+gay, and always amaze me with some new effect. These trifling incidents
+of a solitary life, which escape those preoccupied with outward affairs,
+make the solace of prisoners. And what was I but the captive of an
+idea, imprisoned in my system, but sustained also by the prospect of a
+brilliant future? At each obstacle that I overcame, I seemed to kiss the
+soft hands of a woman with a fair face, a wealthy, well-dressed woman,
+who should some day say softly, while she caressed my hair:
+
+"'Poor Angel, how thou hast suffered!'
+
+"I had undertaken two great works--one a comedy that in a very short
+time must bring me wealth and fame, and an entry into those circles
+whither I wished to return, to exercise the royal privileges of a man
+of genius. You all saw nothing in that masterpiece but the blunder of a
+young man fresh from college, a babyish fiasco. Your jokes clipped the
+wings of a throng of illusions, which have never stirred since within
+me. You, dear Emile, alone brought soothing to the deep wounds that
+others had made in my heart. You alone will admire my 'Theory of the
+Will.' I devoted most of my time to that long work, for which I studied
+Oriental languages, physiology and anatomy. If I do not deceive myself,
+my labors will complete the task begun by Mesmer, Lavater, Gall, and
+Bichat, and open up new paths in science.
+
+"There ends that fair life of mine, the daily sacrifice, the
+unrecognized silkworm's toil, that is, perhaps, its own sole recompense.
+Since attaining years of discretion, until the day when I finished my
+'Theory,' I observed, learned, wrote, and read unintermittingly; my
+life was one long imposition, as schoolboys say. Though by nature
+effeminately attached to Oriental indolence, sensual in tastes, and a
+wooer of dreams, I worked incessantly, and refused to taste any of the
+enjoyments of Parisian life. Though a glutton, I became abstemious; and
+loving exercise and sea voyages as I did, and haunted by the wish to
+visit many countries, still child enough to play at ducks and drakes
+with pebbles over a pond, I led a sedentary life with a pen in my
+fingers. I liked talking, but I went to sit and mutely listen to
+professors who gave public lectures at the _Bibliotheque_ or the Museum.
+I slept upon my solitary pallet like a Benedictine brother, though woman
+was my one chimera, a chimera that fled from me as I wooed it! In short,
+my life has been a cruel contradiction, a perpetual cheat. After that,
+judge a man!
+
+"Sometimes my natural propensities broke out like a fire long smothered.
+I was debarred from the women whose society I desired, stripped of
+everything and lodged in an artist's garret, and by a sort of mirage or
+calenture I was surrounded by captivating mistresses. I drove through
+the streets of Paris, lolling on the soft cushions of a fine equipage.
+I plunged into dissipation, into corroding vice, I desired and possessed
+everything, for fasting had made me light-headed like the tempted Saint
+Anthony. Slumber, happily, would put an end at last to these devastating
+trances; and on the morrow science would beckon me, smiling, and I was
+faithful to her. I imagine that women reputed virtuous, must often fall
+a prey to these insane tempests of desire and passion, which rise in us
+in spite of ourselves. Such dreams have a charm of their own; they are
+something akin to evening gossip round the winter fire, when one sets
+out for some voyage in China. But what becomes of virtue during these
+delicious excursions, when fancy overleaps all difficulties?
+
+"During the first ten months of seclusion I led the life of poverty and
+solitude that I have described to you; I used to steal out unobserved
+every morning to buy my own provisions for the day; I tidied my room; I
+was at once master and servant, and played the Diogenes with incredible
+spirit. But afterwards, while my hostess and her daughter watched my
+ways and behavior, scrutinized my appearance and divined my poverty,
+there could not but be some bonds between us; perhaps because they were
+themselves so very poor. Pauline, the charming child, whose latent
+and unconscious grace had, in a manner, brought me there, did me many
+services that I could not well refuse. All women fallen on evil days
+are sisters; they speak a common language; they have the same
+generosity--the generosity that possesses nothing, and so is lavish of
+its affection, of its time, and of its very self.
+
+"Imperceptibly Pauline took me under her protection, and would do
+things for me. No kind of objection was made by her mother, whom I even
+surprised mending my linen; she blushed for the charitable occupation.
+In spite of myself, they took charge of me, and I accepted their
+services.
+
+"In order to understand the peculiar condition of my mind, my
+preoccupation with work must be remembered, the tyranny of ideas, and
+the instinctive repugnance that a man who leads an intellectual life
+must ever feel for the material details of existence. Could I well
+repulse the delicate attentions of Pauline, who would noiselessly bring
+me my frugal repast, when she noticed that I had taken nothing for seven
+or eight hours? She had the tact of a woman and the inventiveness of a
+child; she would smile as she made sign to me that I must not see her.
+Ariel glided under my roof in the form of a sylph who foresaw every want
+of mine.
+
+"One evening Pauline told me her story with touching simplicity. Her
+father had been a major in the horse grenadiers of the Imperial Guard.
+He had been taken prisoner by the Cossacks, at the passage of Beresina;
+and when Napoleon later on proposed an exchange, the Russian authorities
+made search for him in Siberia in vain; he had escaped with a view of
+reaching India, and since then Mme. Gaudin, my landlady, could hear no
+news of her husband. Then came the disasters of 1814 and 1815; and, left
+alone and without resource, she had decided to let furnished lodgings in
+order to keep herself and her daughter.
+
+"She always hoped to see her husband again. Her greatest trouble was
+about her daughter's education; the Princess Borghese was her Pauline's
+godmother; and Pauline must not be unworthy of the fair future promised
+by her imperial protectress. When Mme. Gaudin confided to me this heavy
+trouble that preyed upon her, she said, with sharp pain in her voice,
+'I would give up the property and the scrap of paper that makes Gaudin
+a baron of the empire, and all our rights to the endowment of Wistchnau,
+if only Pauline could be brought up at Saint-Denis?' Her words struck
+me; now I could show my gratitude for the kindnesses expended on me
+by the two women; all at once the idea of offering to finish Pauline's
+education occurred to me; and the offer was made and accepted in the
+most perfect simplicity. In this way I came to have some hours of
+recreation. Pauline had natural aptitude; she learned so quickly, that
+she soon surpassed me at the piano. As she became accustomed to think
+aloud in my presence, she unfolded all the sweet refinements of a heart
+that was opening itself out to life, as some flower-cup opens slowly to
+the sun. She listened to me, pleased and thoughtful, letting her dark
+velvet eyes rest upon me with a half smile in them; she repeated her
+lessons in soft and gentle tones, and showed childish glee when I was
+satisfied with her. Her mother grew more and more anxious every day to
+shield the young girl from every danger (for all the beauty promised in
+early life was developing in the crescent moon), and was glad to see her
+spend whole days indoors in study. My piano was the only one she could
+use, and while I was out she practised on it. When I came home, Pauline
+would be in my room, in her shabby dress, but her slightest movement
+revealed her slender figure in its attractive grace, in spite of the
+coarse materials that she wore. As with the heroine of the fable of
+'_Peau-d'Ane_,' a dainty foot peeped out of the clumsy shoes. But all
+her wealth of girlish beauty was as lost upon me. I had laid commands
+upon myself to see a sister only in Pauline. I dreaded lest I should
+betray her mother's faith in me. I admired the lovely girl as if she had
+been a picture, or as the portrait of a dead mistress; she was at once
+my child and my statue. For me, another Pygmalion, the maiden with the
+hues of life and the living voice was to become a form of inanimate
+marble. I was very strict with her, but the more I made her feel my
+pedagogue's severity, the more gentle and submissive she grew.
+
+"If a generous feeling strengthened me in my reserve and self-restraint,
+prudent considerations were not lacking beside. Integrity of purpose
+cannot, I think, fail to accompany integrity in money matters. To my
+mind, to become insolvent or to betray a woman is the same sort of
+thing. If you love a young girl, or allow yourself to be beloved by
+her, a contract is implied, and its conditions should be thoroughly
+understood. We are free to break with the woman who sells herself, but
+not with the young girl who has given herself to us and does not know
+the extent of her sacrifice. I must have married Pauline, and that would
+have been madness. Would it not have given over that sweet girlish heart
+to terrible misfortunes? My poverty made its selfish voice heard, and
+set an iron barrier between that gentle nature and mine. Besides, I
+am ashamed to say, that I cannot imagine love in the midst of poverty.
+Perhaps this is a vitiation due to that malady of mankind called
+civilization; but a woman in squalid poverty would exert no fascination
+over me, were she attractive as Homer's Galatea, the fair Helen.
+
+"Ah, _vive l'amour_! But let it be in silk and cashmere, surrounded with
+the luxury which so marvelously embellishes it; for is it not perhaps
+itself a luxury? I enjoy making havoc with an elaborate erection of
+scented hair; I like to crush flowers, to disarrange and crease a smart
+toilette at will. A bizarre attraction lies for me in burning eyes that
+blaze through a lace veil, like flame through cannon smoke. My way of
+love would be to mount by a silken ladder, in the silence of a winter
+night. And what bliss to reach, all powdered with snow, a perfumed
+room, with hangings of painted silk, to find a woman there, who likewise
+shakes away the snow from her; for what other name can be found for the
+white muslin wrappings that vaguely define her, like some angel form
+issuing from a cloud! And then I wish for furtive joys, for the security
+of audacity. I want to see once more that woman of mystery, but let it
+be in the throng, dazzling, unapproachable, adored on all sides, dressed
+in laces and ablaze with diamonds, laying her commands upon every one;
+so exalted above us, that she inspires awe, and none dares to pay his
+homage to her.
+
+"She gives me a stolen glance, amid her court, a look that exposes the
+unreality of all this; that resigns for me the world and all men in
+it! Truly I have scorned myself for a passion for a few yards of lace,
+velvet, and fine lawn, and the hairdresser's feats of skill; a love of
+wax-lights, a carriage and a title, a heraldic coronet painted on window
+panes, or engraved by a jeweler; in short, a liking for all that is
+adventitious and least woman in woman. I have scorned and reasoned with
+myself, but all in vain.
+
+"A woman of rank with her subtle smile, her high-born air, and
+self-esteem captivates me. The barriers she erects between herself and
+the world awaken my vanity, a good half of love. There would be more
+relish for me in bliss that all others envied. If my mistress does
+nothing that other women do, and neither lives nor conducts herself like
+them, wears a cloak that they cannot attain, breathes a perfume of her
+own, then she seems to rise far above me. The further she rises from
+earth, even in the earthlier aspects of love, the fairer she becomes for
+me.
+
+"Luckily for me we have had no queen in France these twenty years, for I
+should have fallen in love with her. A woman must be wealthy to
+acquire the manners of a princess. What place had Pauline among these
+far-fetched imaginings? Could she bring me the love that is death, that
+brings every faculty into play, the nights that are paid for by life? We
+hardly die, I think, for an insignificant girl who gives herself to us;
+and I could never extinguish these feelings and poet's dreams within
+me. I was born for an inaccessible love, and fortune has overtopped my
+desire.
+
+"How often have I set satin shoes on Pauline's tiny feet, confined her
+form, slender as a young poplar, in a robe of gauze, and thrown a loose
+scarf about her as I saw her tread the carpets in her mansion and led
+her out to her splendid carriage! In such guise I should have adored
+her. I endowed her with all the pride she lacked, stripped her of her
+virtues, her natural simple charm, and frank smile, in order to plunge
+her heart in our Styx of depravity that makes invulnerable, load her
+with our crimes, make of her the fantastical doll of our drawing-rooms,
+the frail being who lies about in the morning and comes to life again
+at night with the dawn of tapers. Pauline was fresh-hearted and
+affectionate--I would have had her cold and formal.
+
+"In the last days of my frantic folly, memory brought Pauline before me,
+as it brings the scenes of our childhood, and made me pause to muse over
+past delicious moments that softened my heart. I sometimes saw her,
+the adorable girl who sat quietly sewing at my table, wrapped in her
+meditations; the faint light from my window fell upon her and was
+reflected back in silvery rays from her thick black hair; sometimes I
+heard her young laughter, or the rich tones of her voice singing some
+canzonet that she composed without effort. And often my Pauline seemed
+to grow greater, as music flowed from her, and her face bore a striking
+resemblance to the noble one that Carlo Dolci chose for the type of
+Italy. My cruel memory brought her back athwart the dissipations of my
+existence, like a remorse, or a symbol of purity. But let us leave the
+poor child to her own fate. Whatever her troubles may have been, at any
+rate I protected her from a menacing tempest--I did not drag her down
+into my hell.
+
+"Until last winter I led the uneventful studious life of which I have
+given you some faint picture. In the earliest days of December 1829,
+I came across Rastignac, who, in spite of the shabby condition of my
+wardrobe, linked his arm in mine, and inquired into my affairs with a
+quite brotherly interest. Caught by his engaging manner, I gave him a
+brief account of my life and hopes; he began to laugh, and treated me as
+a mixture of a man of genius and a fool. His Gascon accent and knowledge
+of the world, the easy life his clever management procured for him, all
+produced an irresistible effect upon me. I should die an unrecognized
+failure in a hospital, Rastignac said, and be buried in a pauper's
+grave. He talked of charlatanism. Every man of genius was a charlatan,
+he plainly showed me in that pleasant way of his that makes him so
+fascinating. He insisted that I must be out of my senses, and would be
+my own death, if I lived on alone in the Rue des Cordiers. According to
+him, I ought to go into society, to accustom people to the sound of my
+name, and to rid myself of the simple title of 'monsieur' which sits but
+ill on a great man in his lifetime.
+
+"'Those who know no better,' he cried, 'call this sort of business
+_scheming_, and moral people condemn it for a "dissipated life." We need
+not stop to look at what people think, but see the results. You work,
+you say? Very good, but nothing will ever come of that. Now, I am ready
+for anything and fit for nothing. As lazy as a lobster? Very likely, but
+I succeed everywhere. I go out into society, I push myself forward, the
+others make way before me; I brag and am believed; I incur debts which
+somebody else pays! Dissipation, dear boy, is a methodical policy. The
+life of a man who deliberately runs through his fortune often becomes
+a business speculation; his friends, his pleasures, patrons, and
+acquaintances are his capital. Suppose a merchant runs a risk of a
+million, for twenty years he can neither sleep, eat, nor amuse himself,
+he is brooding over his million, it makes him run about all over
+Europe; he worries himself, goes to the devil in every way that man has
+invented. Then comes a liquidation, such as I have seen myself, which
+very often leaves him penniless and without a reputation or a friend.
+The spendthrift, on the other hand, takes life as a serious game and
+sees his horses run. He loses his capital, perhaps, but he stands
+a chance of being nominated Receiver-General, of making a wealthy
+marriage, or of an appointment of attache to a minister or ambassador;
+and he has his friends left and his name, and he never wants money. He
+knows the standing of everybody, and uses every one for his own benefit.
+Is this logical, or am I a madman after all? Haven't you there all the
+moral of the comedy that goes on every day in this world?... Your work
+is completed' he went on after a pause; 'you are immensely clever! Well,
+you have only arrived at my starting-point. Now, you had better look
+after its success yourself; it is the surest way. You will make allies
+in every clique, and secure applause beforehand. I mean to go halves in
+your glory myself; I shall be the jeweler who set the diamonds in
+your crown. Come here to-morrow evening, by way of a beginning. I will
+introduce you to a house where all Paris goes, all OUR Paris, that
+is--the Paris of exquisites, millionaires, celebrities, all the folk
+who talk gold like Chrysostom. When they have taken up a book, that book
+becomes the fashion; and if it is something really good for once, they
+will have declared it to be a work of genius without knowing it. If
+you have any sense, my dear fellow, you will ensure the success of your
+"Theory," by a better understanding of the theory of success. To-morrow
+evening you shall go to see that queen of the moment--the beautiful
+Countess Foedora....'
+
+"'I have never heard of her....'
+
+"'You Hottentot!' laughed Rastignac; 'you do not know Foedora? A great
+match with an income of nearly eighty thousand livres, who has taken
+a fancy to nobody, or else no one has taken a fancy to her. A sort of
+feminine enigma, a half Russian Parisienne, or a half Parisian Russian.
+All the romantic productions that never get published are brought out at
+her house; she is the handsomest woman in Paris, and the most gracious!
+You are not even a Hottentot; you are something between the Hottentot
+and the beast.... Good-bye till to-morrow.'
+
+"He swung round on his heel and made off without waiting for my
+answer. It never occurred to him that a reasoning being could refuse an
+introduction to Foedora. How can the fascination of a name be explained?
+FOEDORA haunted me like some evil thought, with which you seek to come
+to terms. A voice said in me, 'You are going to see Foedora!' In vain
+I reasoned with that voice, saying that it lied to me; all my arguments
+were defeated by the name 'Foedora.' Was not the name, and even the
+woman herself, the symbol of all my desires, and the object of my life?
+
+"The name called up recollections of the conventional glitter of the
+world, the upper world of Paris with its brilliant fetes and the tinsel
+of its vanities. The woman brought before me all the problems of passion
+on which my mind continually ran. Perhaps it was neither the woman nor
+the name, but my own propensities, that sprang up within me and tempted
+me afresh. Here was the Countess Foedora, rich and loveless, proof
+against the temptations of Paris; was not this woman the very
+incarnation of my hopes and visions? I fashioned her for myself, drew
+her in fancy, and dreamed of her. I could not sleep that night; I became
+her lover; I overbrimmed a few hours with a whole lifetime--a lover's
+lifetime; the experience of its prolific delights burned me.
+
+"The next day I could not bear the tortures of delay; I borrowed a
+novel, and spent the whole day over it, so that I could not possibly
+think nor keep account of the time till night. Foedora's name echoed
+through me even as I read, but only as a distant sound; though it
+could be heard, it was not troublesome. Fortunately, I owned a fairly
+creditable black coat and a white waistcoat; of all my fortune there
+now remained abut thirty francs, which I had distributed about among
+my clothes and in my drawers, so as to erect between my whims and
+the spending of a five-franc piece a thorny barrier of search, and an
+adventurous peregrination round my room. While I as dressing, I dived
+about for my money in an ocean of papers. This scarcity of specie will
+give you some idea of the value of that squandered upon gloves and
+cab-hire; a month's bread disappeared at one fell swoop. Alas! money is
+always forthcoming for our caprices; we only grudge the cost of
+things that are useful or necessary. We recklessly fling gold to an
+opera-dancer, and haggle with a tradesman whose hungry family must wait
+for the settlement of our bill. How many men are there that wear a coat
+that cost a hundred francs, and carry a diamond in the head of their
+cane, and dine for twenty-five SOUS for all that! It seems as though we
+could never pay enough for the pleasures of vanity.
+
+"Rastignac, punctual to his appointment, smiled at the transformation,
+and joked about it. On the way he gave me benevolent advice as to
+my conduct with the countess; he described her as mean, vain, and
+suspicious; but though mean, she was ostentatious, her vanity was
+transparent, and her mistrust good-humored.
+
+"'You know I am pledged,' he said, 'and what I should lose, too, if I
+tried a change in love. So my observation of Foedora has been quite cool
+and disinterested, and my remarks must have some truth in them. I was
+looking to your future when I thought of introducing you to her; so mind
+very carefully what I am about to say. She has a terrible memory. She is
+clever enough to drive a diplomatist wild; she would know it at once if
+he spoke the truth. Between ourselves, I fancy that her marriage was
+not recognized by the Emperor, for the Russian ambassador began to smile
+when I spoke of her; he does not receive her either, and only bows very
+coolly if he meets her in the Bois. For all that, she is in Madame de
+Serizy's set, and visits Mesdames de Nucingen and de Restaud. There
+is no cloud over her here in France; the Duchesse de Carigliano, the
+most-strait-laced marechale in the whole Bonapartist coterie, often goes
+to spend the summer with her at her country house. Plenty of young fops,
+sons of peers of France, have offered her a title in exchange for her
+fortune, and she has politely declined them all. Her susceptibilities,
+maybe, are not to be touched by anything less than a count. Aren't you a
+marquis? Go ahead if you fancy her. This is what you may call receiving
+your instructions.'
+
+"His raillery made me think that Rastignac wished to joke and excite my
+curiosity, so that I was in a paroxysm of my extemporized passion by the
+time that we stopped before a peristyle full of flowers. My heart beat
+and my color rose as we went up the great carpeted staircase, and I
+noticed about me all the studied refinements of English comfort; I
+was infatuatedly bourgeois; I forgot my origin and all my personal and
+family pride. Alas! I had but just left a garret, after three years
+of poverty, and I could not just then set the treasures there acquired
+above such trifles as these. Nor could I rightly estimate the worth of
+the vast intellectual capital which turns to riches at the moment when
+opportunity comes within our reach, opportunity that does not overwhelm,
+because study has prepared us for the struggles of public life.
+
+"I found a woman of about twenty-two years of age; she was of average
+height, was dressed in white, and held a feather fire-screen in
+her hand; a group of men stood around her. She rose at the sight
+of Rastignac, and came towards us with a gracious smile and a
+musically-uttered compliment, prepared no doubt beforehand, for me. Our
+friend had spoken of me as a rising man, and his clever way of making
+the most of me had procured me this flattering reception. I was confused
+by the attention that every one paid to me; but Rastignac had luckily
+mentioned my modesty. I was brought in contact with scholars, men
+of letters, ex-ministers, and peers of France. The conversation,
+interrupted a while by my coming, was resumed. I took courage, feeling
+that I had a reputation to maintain, and without abusing my privilege,
+I spoke when it fell to me to speak, trying to state the questions at
+issue in words more or less profound, witty or trenchant, and I made a
+certain sensation. Rastignac was a prophet for the thousandth time in
+his life. As soon as the gathering was large enough to restore freedom
+to individuals, he took my arm, and we went round the rooms.
+
+"'Don't look as if you were too much struck by the princess,' he said,
+'or she will guess your object in coming to visit her.'
+
+"The rooms were furnished in excellent taste. Each apartment had a
+character of its own, as in wealthy English houses; and the silken
+hangings, the style of the furniture, and the ornaments, even the
+most trifling, were all subordinated to the original idea. In a gothic
+boudoir the doors were concealed by tapestried curtains, and the
+paneling by hangings; the clock and the pattern of the carpet were made
+to harmonize with the gothic surroundings. The ceiling, with its carved
+cross-beams of brown wood, was full of charm and originality; the panels
+were beautifully wrought; nothing disturbed the general harmony of
+the scheme of decoration, not even the windows with their rich colored
+glass. I was surprised by the extensive knowledge of decoration that
+some artist had brought to bear on a little modern room, it was so
+pleasant and fresh, and not heavy, but subdued with its dead gold hues.
+It had all the vague sentiment of a German ballad; it was a retreat fit
+for some romance of 1827, perfumed by the exotic flowers set in their
+stands. Another apartment in the suite was a gilded reproduction of the
+Louis Quatorze period, with modern paintings on the walls in odd but
+pleasant contrast.
+
+"'You would not be so badly lodged,' was Rastignac's slightly sarcastic
+comment. 'It is captivating, isn't it?' he added, smiling as he sat
+down. Then suddenly he rose, and led me by the hand into a bedroom,
+where the softened light fell upon the bed under its canopy of muslin
+and white watered silk--a couch for a young fairy betrothed to one of
+the genii.
+
+"'Isn't it wantonly bad taste, insolent and unbounded coquetry,' he
+said, lowering his voice, 'that allows us to see this throne of love?
+She gives herself to no one, and anybody may leave his card here. If I
+were not committed, I should like to see her at my feet all tears and
+submission.'
+
+"'Are you so certain of her virtue?'
+
+"'The boldest and even the cleverest adventurers among us, acknowledge
+themselves defeated, and continue to be her lovers and devoted friends.
+Isn't that woman a puzzle?'
+
+"His words seemed to intoxicate me; I had jealous fears already of the
+past. I leapt for joy, and hurried back to the countess, whom I had seen
+in the gothic boudoir. She stopped me by a smile, made me sit beside
+her, and talked about my work, seeming to take the greatest interest in
+it, and all the more when I set forth my theories amusingly, instead of
+adopting the formal language of a professor for their explanation. It
+seemed to divert her to be told that the human will was a material force
+like steam; that in the moral world nothing could resist its power if
+a man taught himself to concentrate it, to economize it, and to project
+continually its fluid mass in given directions upon other souls. Such
+a man, I said, could modify all things relatively to man, even the
+peremptory laws of nature. The questions Foedora raised showed a certain
+keenness of intellect. I took a pleasure in deciding some of them in her
+favor, in order to flatter her; then I confuted her feminine reasoning
+with a word, and roused her curiosity by drawing her attention to an
+everyday matter--to sleep, a thing so apparently commonplace, that in
+reality is an insoluble problem for science. The countess sat in silence
+for a moment when I told her that our ideas were complete organic
+beings, existing in an invisible world, and influencing our destinies;
+and for witnesses I cited the opinions of Descartes, Diderot, and
+Napoleon, who had directed, and still directed, all the currents of the
+age.
+
+"So I had the honor of amusing this woman; who asked me to come to see
+her when she left me; giving me _les grande entrees_, in the language
+of the court. Whether it was by dint of substituting polite formulas for
+genuine expressions of feeling, a commendable habit of mine, or because
+Foedora hailed in me a coming celebrity, an addition to her learned
+menagerie; for some reason I thought that I had pleased her. I called
+all my previous physiological studies and knowledge of woman to my aid,
+and minutely scrutinized this singular person and her ways all evening.
+I concealed myself in the embrasure of a window, and sought to discover
+her thoughts from her bearing. I studied the tactics of the mistress of
+the house, as she came and went, sat and chatted, beckoned to this one
+or that, asked questions, listened to the answers, as she leaned against
+the frame of the door; I detected a languid charm in her movements,
+a grace in the flutterings of her dress, remarked the nature of the
+feelings she so powerfully excited, and became very incredulous as to
+her virtue. If Foedora would none of love to-day, she had had strong
+passions at some time; past experience of pleasure showed itself in the
+attitudes she chose in conversation, in her coquettish way of leaning
+against the panel behind her; she seemed scarcely able to stand alone,
+and yet ready for flight from too bold a glance. There was a kind of
+eloquence about her lightly folded arms, which, even for benevolent
+eyes, breathed sentiment. Her fresh red lips sharply contrasted with her
+brilliantly pale complexion. Her brown hair brought out all the golden
+color in her eyes, in which blue streaks mingled as in Florentine
+marble; their expression seemed to increase the significance of her
+words. A studied grace lay in the charms of her bodice. Perhaps a rival
+might have found the lines of the thick eyebrows, which almost met, a
+little hard; or found a fault in the almost invisible down that covered
+her features. I saw the signs of passion everywhere, written on those
+Italian eyelids, on the splendid shoulders worthy of the Venus of Milo,
+on her features, in the darker shade of down above a somewhat thick
+under-lip. She was not merely a woman, but a romance. The whole
+blended harmony of lines, the feminine luxuriance of her frame, and its
+passionate promise, were subdued by a constant inexplicable reserve
+and modesty at variance with everything else about her. It needed an
+observation as keen as my own to detect such signs as these in her
+character. To explain myself more clearly; there were two women in
+Foedora, divided perhaps by the line between head and body: the one,
+the head alone, seemed to be susceptible, and the other phlegmatic.
+She prepared her glance before she looked at you, something unspeakably
+mysterious, some inward convulsion seemed revealed by her glittering
+eyes.
+
+"So, to be brief, either my imperfect moral science had left me a good
+deal to learn in the moral world, or a lofty soul dwelt in the countess,
+lent to her face those charms that fascinated and subdued us, and gave
+her an ascendency only the more complete because it comprehended a
+sympathy of desire.
+
+"I went away completely enraptured with this woman, dazzled by the
+luxury around her, gratified in every faculty of my soul--noble and
+base, good and evil. When I felt myself so excited, eager, and elated,
+I thought I understood the attraction that drew thither those artists,
+diplomatists, men in office, those stock-jobbers encased in triple
+brass. They came, no doubt, to find in her society the delirious emotion
+that now thrilled through every fibre in me, throbbing through my brain,
+setting the blood a-tingle in every vein, fretting even the tiniest
+nerve. And she had given herself to none, so as to keep them all. A
+woman is a coquette so long as she knows not love.
+
+"'Well,' I said to Rastignac, 'they married her, or sold her perhaps,
+to some old man, and recollections of her first marriage have caused her
+aversion for love.'
+
+"I walked home from the Faubourg St. Honore, where Foedora lived.
+Almost all the breadth of Paris lies between her mansion and the Rue des
+Cordiers, but the distance seemed short, in spite of the cold. And I was
+to lay siege to Foedora's heart, in winter, and a bitter winter, with
+only thirty francs in my possession, and such a distance as that lay
+between us! Only a poor man knows what such a passion costs in cab-hire,
+gloves, linen, tailor's bills, and the like. If the Platonic stage lasts
+a little too long, the affair grows ruinous. As a matter of fact, there
+is many a Lauzun among students of law, who finds it impossible to
+approach a ladylove living on a first floor. And I, sickly, thin, poorly
+dressed, wan and pale as any artist convalescent after a work, how could
+I compete with other young men, curled, handsome, smart, outcravatting
+Croatia; wealthy men, equipped with tilburys, and armed with assurance?
+
+"'Bah, death or Foedora!' I cried, as I went round by a bridge; 'my
+fortune lies in Foedora.'
+
+"That gothic boudoir and Louis Quatorze salon came before my eyes. I saw
+the countess again in her white dress with its large graceful sleeves,
+and all the fascinations of her form and movements. These pictures of
+Foedora and her luxurious surroundings haunted me even in my bare, cold
+garret, when at last I reached it, as disheveled as any naturalist's
+wig. The contrast suggested evil counsel; in such a way crimes are
+conceived. I cursed my honest, self-respecting poverty, my garret where
+such teeming fancies had stirred within me. I trembled with fury, I
+reproached God, the devil, social conditions, my own father, the whole
+universe, indeed, with my fate and my misfortunes. I went hungry to bed,
+muttering ludicrous imprecations, but fully determined to win Foedora.
+Her heart was my last ticket in the lottery, my fortune depended upon
+it.
+
+"I spare you the history of my earlier visits, to reach the drama
+the sooner. In my efforts to appeal to her, I essayed to engage her
+intellect and her vanity on my side; in order to secure her love, I gave
+her any quantity of reasons for increasing her self-esteem; I never left
+her in a state of indifference; women like emotions at any cost, I gave
+them to her in plenty; I would rather have had her angry with me than
+indifferent.
+
+"At first, urged by a strong will and a desire for her love, I assumed
+a little authority, but my own feelings grew stronger and mastered me; I
+relapsed into truth, I lost my head, and fell desperately in love.
+
+"I am not very sure what we mean by the word love in our poetry and our
+talk; but I know that I have never found in all the ready rhetorical
+phrases of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, in whose room perhaps I was lodging;
+nor among the feeble inventions of two centuries of our literature, nor
+in any picture that Italy has produced, a representation of the feelings
+that expanded all at once in my double nature. The view of the lake of
+Bienne, some music of Rossini's, the Madonna of Murillo's now in
+the possession of General Soult, Lescombat's letters, a few sayings
+scattered through collections of anecdotes; but most of all the prayers
+of religious ecstatics, and passages in our _fabliaux_,--these things
+alone have power to carry me back to the divine heights of my first
+love.
+
+"Nothing expressed in human language, no thought reproducible in color,
+marble, sound, or articulate speech, could ever render the force, the
+truth, the completeness, the suddenness with which love awoke in me.
+To speak of art, is to speak of illusion. Love passes through endless
+transformations before it passes for ever into our existence and makes
+it glow with its own color of flame. The process is imperceptible, and
+baffles the artist's analysis. Its moans and complaints are tedious to
+an uninterested spectator. One would need to be very much in love
+to share the furious transports of Lovelace, as one reads _Clarissa
+Harlowe_. Love is like some fresh spring, that leaves its cresses,
+its gravel bed and flowers to become first a stream and then a river,
+changing its aspect and its nature as it flows to plunge itself in some
+boundless ocean, where restricted natures only find monotony, but where
+great souls are engulfed in endless contemplation.
+
+"How can I dare to describe the hues of fleeting emotions, the nothings
+beyond all price, the spoken accents that beggar language, the looks
+that hold more than all the wealth of poetry? Not one of the mysterious
+scenes that draw us insensibly nearer and nearer to a woman, but has
+depths in it which can swallow up all the poetry that ever was written.
+How can the inner life and mystery that stirs in our souls penetrate
+through our glozes, when we have not even words to describe the visible
+and outward mysteries of beauty? What enchantment steeped me for how
+many hours in unspeakable rapture, filled with the sight of Her! What
+made me happy? I know not. That face of hers overflowed with light at
+such times; it seemed in some way to glow with it; the outlines of her
+face, with the scarcely perceptible down on its delicate surface, shone
+with a beauty belonging to the far distant horizon that melts into the
+sunlight. The light of day seemed to caress her as she mingled in
+it; rather it seemed that the light of her eyes was brighter than the
+daylight itself; or some shadow passing over that fair face made a kind
+of change there, altering its hues and its expression. Some thought
+would often seem to glow on her white brows; her eyes appeared to
+dilate, and her eyelids trembled; a smile rippled over her features;
+the living coral of her lips grew full of meaning as they closed and
+unclosed; an indistinguishable something in her hair made brown shadows
+on her fair temples; in each new phase Foedora spoke. Every slight
+variation in her beauty made a new pleasure for my eyes, disclosed
+charms my heart had never known before; I tried to read a separate
+emotion or a hope in every change that passed over her face. This mute
+converse passed between soul and soul, like sound and answering echo;
+and the short-lived delights then showered upon me have left indelible
+impressions behind. Her voice would cause a frenzy in me that I could
+hardly understand. I could have copied the example of some prince of
+Lorraine, and held a live coal in the hollow of my hand, if her fingers
+passed caressingly through my hair the while. I felt no longer mere
+admiration and desire: I was under the spell; I had met my destiny. When
+back again under my own roof, I still vaguely saw Foedora in her own
+home, and had some indefinable share in her life; if she felt ill, I
+suffered too. The next day I used to say to her:
+
+"'You were not well yesterday.'
+
+"How often has she not stood before me, called by the power of ecstasy,
+in the silence of the night! Sometimes she would break in upon me like
+a ray of light, make me drop my pen, and put science and study to flight
+in grief and alarm, as she compelled my admiration by the alluring pose
+I had seen but a short time before. Sometimes I went to seek her in the
+spirit world, and would bow down to her as to a hope, entreating her to
+let me hear the silver sounds of her voice, and I would wake at length
+in tears.
+
+"Once, when she had promised to go to the theatre with me, she took it
+suddenly into her head to refuse to go out, and begged me to leave her
+alone. I was in such despair over the perversity which cost me a day's
+work, and (if I must confess it) my last shilling as well, that I went
+alone where she was to have been, desiring to see the play she had
+wished to see. I had scarcely seated myself when an electric shock went
+through me. A voice told me, 'She is here!' I looked round, and saw the
+countess hidden in the shadow at the back of her box in the first
+tier. My look did not waver; my eyes saw her at once with incredible
+clearness; my soul hovered about her life like an insect above its
+flower. How had my senses received this warning? There is something
+in these inward tremors that shallow people find astonishing, but the
+phenomena of our inner consciousness are produced as simple as those of
+external vision; so I was not surprised, but much vexed. My studies of
+our mental faculties, so little understood, helped me at any rate to
+find in my own excitement some living proofs of my theories. There
+was something exceedingly odd in this combination of lover and man of
+science, of downright idolatry of a woman with the love of knowledge.
+The causes of the lover's despair were highly interesting to the man of
+science; and the exultant lover, on the other hand, put science far away
+from him in his joy. Foedora saw me, and grew grave: I annoyed her.
+I went to her box during the first interval, and finding her alone,
+I stayed there. Although we had not spoken of love, I foresaw an
+explanation. I had not told her my secret, still there was a kind of
+understanding between us. She used to tell me her plans for amusement,
+and on the previous evening had asked with friendly eagerness if I meant
+to call the next day. After any witticism of hers, she would give me
+an inquiring glance, as if she had sought to please me alone by it. She
+would soothe me if I was vexed; and if she pouted, I had in some sort
+a right to ask an explanation. Before she would pardon any blunder,
+she would keep me a suppliant for long. All these things that we so
+relished, were so many lovers' quarrels. What arch grace she threw into
+it all! and what happiness it was to me!
+
+"But now we stood before each other as strangers, with the close
+relation between us both suspended. The countess was glacial: a
+presentiment of trouble filled me.
+
+"'Will you come home with me?' she said, when the play was over.
+
+"There had been a sudden change in the weather, and sleet was falling
+in showers as we went out. Foedora's carriage was unable to reach the
+doorway of the theatre. At the sight of a well-dressed woman about to
+cross the street, a commissionaire held an umbrella above us, and stood
+waiting at the carriage-door for his tip. I would have given ten years
+of life just then for a couple of halfpence, but I had not a penny. All
+the man in me and all my vainest susceptibilities were wrung with an
+infernal pain. The words, 'I haven't a penny about me, my good fellow!'
+came from me in the hard voice of thwarted passion; and yet I was that
+man's brother in misfortune, as I knew too well; and once I had so
+lightly paid away seven hundred thousand francs! The footman pushed the
+man aside, and the horses sprang forward. As we returned, Foedora, in
+real or feigned abstraction, answered all my questions curtly and by
+monosyllables. I said no more; it was a hateful moment. When we reached
+her house, we seated ourselves by the hearth, and when the servant had
+stirred the fire and left us alone, the countess turned to me with an
+inexplicable expression, and spoke. Her manner was almost solemn.
+
+"'Since my return to France, more than one young man, tempted by my
+money, has made proposals to me which would have satisfied my pride. I
+have come across men, too, whose attachment was so deep and sincere that
+they might have married me even if they had found me the penniless girl
+I used to be. Besides these, Monsieur de Valentin, you must know that
+new titles and newly-acquired wealth have been also offered to me, and
+that I have never received again any of those who were so ill-advised as
+to mention love to me. If my regard for you was but slight, I would not
+give you this warning, which is dictated by friendship rather than
+by pride. A woman lays herself open to a rebuff of some kind, if she
+imagines herself to be loved, and declines, before it is uttered, to
+listen to language which in its nature implies a compliment. I am well
+acquainted with the parts played by Arsinoe and Araminta, and with the
+sort of answer I might look for under such circumstances; but I hope
+to-day that I shall not find myself misconstrued by a man of no ordinary
+character, because I have frankly spoken my mind.'
+
+"She spoke with the cool self-possession of some attorney or solicitor
+explaining the nature of a contract or the conduct of a lawsuit to a
+client. There was not the least sign of feeling in the clear soft tones
+of her voice. Her steady face and dignified bearing seemed to me now
+full of diplomatic reserve and coldness. She had planned this scene, no
+doubt, and carefully chosen her words beforehand. Oh, my friend, there
+are women who take pleasure in piercing hearts, and deliberately plunge
+the dagger back again into the wound; such women as these cannot but
+be worshiped, for such women either love or would fain be loved. A day
+comes when they make amends for all the pain they gave us; they repay
+us for the pangs, the keenness of which they recognize, in joys a
+hundred-fold, even as God, they tell us, recompenses our good works.
+Does not their perversity spring from the strength of their feelings?
+But to be so tortured by a woman, who slaughters you with indifference!
+was not the suffering hideous?
+
+"Foedora did not know it, but in that minute she trampled all my hopes
+beneath her feet; she maimed my life and she blighted my future with the
+cool indifference and unconscious barbarity of an inquisitive child who
+plucks its wings from a butterfly.
+
+"'Later on,' resumed Foedora, 'you will learn, I hope, the stability of
+the affection that I keep for my friends. You will always find that I
+have devotion and kindness for them. I would give my life to serve my
+friends; but you could only despise me, if I allowed them to make love
+to me without return. That is enough. You are the only man to whom I
+have spoken such words as these last.'
+
+"At first I could not speak, or master the tempest that arose within me;
+but I soon repressed my emotions in the depths of my soul, and began to
+smile.
+
+"'If I own that I love you,' I said, 'you will banish me at once; if
+I plead guilty to indifference, you will make me suffer for it. Women,
+magistrates, and priests never quite lay the gown aside. Silence is
+non-committal; be pleased then, madame, to approve my silence. You must
+have feared, in some degree, to lose me, or I should not have received
+this friendly admonition; and with that thought my pride ought to be
+satisfied. Let us banish all personal considerations. You are perhaps
+the only woman with whom I could discuss rationally a resolution so
+contrary to the laws of nature. Considered with regard to your species,
+you are a prodigy. Now let us investigate, in good faith, the causes of
+this psychological anomaly. Does there exist in you, as in many women,
+a certain pride in self, a love of your own loveliness, a refinement of
+egoism which makes you shudder at the idea of belonging to another;
+is it the thought of resigning your own will and submitting to a
+superiority, though only of convention, which displeases you? You
+would seem to me a thousand times fairer for it. Can love formerly have
+brought you suffering? You probably set some value on your dainty
+figure and graceful appearance, and may perhaps wish to avoid the
+disfigurements of maternity. Is not this one of your strongest reasons
+for refusing a too importunate love? Some natural defect perhaps makes
+you insusceptible in spite of yourself? Do not be angry; my study, my
+inquiry is absolutely dispassionate. Some are born blind, and nature may
+easily have formed women who in like manner are blind, deaf, and dumb to
+love. You are really an interesting subject for medical investigation.
+You do not know your value. You feel perhaps a very legitimate distaste
+for mankind; in that I quite concur--to me they all seem ugly and
+detestable. And you are right,' I added, feeling my heart swell within
+me; 'how can you do otherwise than despise us? There is not a man living
+who is worthy of you.'
+
+"I will not repeat all the biting words with which I ridiculed her. In
+vain; my bitterest sarcasms and keenest irony never made her wince nor
+elicited a sign of vexation. She heard me, with the customary smile
+upon her lips and in her eyes, the smile that she wore as a part of her
+clothing, and that never varied for friends, for mere acquaintances, or
+for strangers.
+
+"'Isn't it very nice of me to allow you to dissect me like this?' she
+said at last, as I came to a temporary standstill, and looked at her
+in silence. 'You see,' she went on, laughing, 'that I have no foolish
+over-sensitiveness about my friendship. Many a woman would shut her door
+on you by way of punishing you for your impertinence.'
+
+"'You could banish me without needing to give me the reasons for your
+harshness.' As I spoke I felt that I could kill her if she dismissed me.
+
+"'You are mad,' she said, smiling still.
+
+"'Did you never think,' I went on, 'of the effects of passionate love? A
+desperate man has often murdered his mistress.'
+
+"'It is better to die than to live in misery,' she said coolly. 'Such
+a man as that would run through his wife's money, desert her, and leave
+her at last in utter wretchedness.'
+
+"This calm calculation dumfounded me. The gulf between us was made
+plain; we could never understand each other.
+
+"'Good-bye,' I said proudly.
+
+"'Good-bye, till to-morrow,' she answered, with a little friendly bow.
+
+"For a moment's space I hurled at her in a glance all the love I must
+forego; she stood there with than banal smile of hers, the detestable
+chill smile of a marble statue, with none of the warmth in it that it
+seemed to express. Can you form any idea, my friend, of the pain that
+overcame me on the way home through rain and snow, across a league of
+icy-sheeted quays, without a hope left? Oh, to think that she not only
+had not guessed my poverty, but believed me to be as wealthy as she was,
+and likewise borne as softly over the rough ways of life! What failure
+and deceit! It was no mere question of money now, but of the fate of all
+that lay within me.
+
+"I went at haphazard, going over the words of our strange conversation
+with myself. I got so thoroughly lost in my reflections that I ended by
+doubts as to the actual value of words and ideas. But I loved her
+all the same; I loved this woman with the untouched heart that might
+surrender at any moment--a woman who daily disappointed the expectations
+of the previous evening, by appearing as a new mistress on the morrow.
+
+"As I passed under the gateway of the Institute, a fevered thrill ran
+through me. I remembered that I was fasting, and that I had not a penny.
+To complete the measure of my misfortune, my hat was spoiled by the
+rain. How was I to appear in the drawing-room of a woman of fashion with
+an unpresentable hat? I had always cursed the inane and stupid custom
+that compels us to exhibit the lining of our hats, and to keep them
+always in our hands, but with anxious care I had so far kept mine in a
+precarious state of efficiency. It had been neither strikingly new, nor
+utterly shabby, neither napless nor over-glossy, and might have passed
+for the hat of a frugally given owner, but its artificially prolonged
+existence had now reached the final stage, it was crumpled, forlorn, and
+completely ruined, a downright rag, a fitting emblem of its master. My
+painfully preserved elegance must collapse for want of thirty sous.
+
+"What unrecognized sacrifices I had made in the past three months for
+Foedora! How often I had given the price of a week's sustenance to see
+her for a moment! To leave my work and go without food was the least of
+it! I must traverse the streets of Paris without getting splashed, run
+to escape showers, and reach her rooms at last, as neat and spruce as
+any of the coxcombs about her. For a poet and a distracted wooer the
+difficulties of this task were endless. My happiness, the course of my
+love, might be affected by a speck of mud upon my only white waistcoat!
+Oh, to miss the sight of her because I was wet through and bedraggled,
+and had not so much as five sous to give to a shoeblack for removing the
+least little spot of mud from my boot! The petty pangs of these nameless
+torments, which an irritable man finds so great, only strengthened my
+passion.
+
+"The unfortunate must make sacrifices which they may not mention to
+women who lead refined and luxurious lives. Such women see things
+through a prism that gilds all men and their surroundings. Egoism leads
+them to take cheerful views, and fashion makes them cruel; they do
+not wish to reflect, lest they lose their happiness, and the absorbing
+nature of their pleasures absolves their indifference to the misfortunes
+of others. A penny never means millions to them; millions, on the
+contrary, seem a mere trifle. Perhaps love must plead his cause by great
+sacrifices, but a veil must be lightly drawn across them, they must go
+down into silence. So when wealthy men pour out their devotion,
+their fortunes, and their lives, they gain somewhat by these commonly
+entertained opinions, an additional lustre hangs about their lovers'
+follies; their silence is eloquent; there is a grace about the drawn
+veil; but my terrible distress bound me over to suffer fearfully or ever
+I might speak of my love or of dying for her sake.
+
+"Was it a sacrifice after all? Was I not richly rewarded by the joy I
+took in sacrificing everything to her? There was no commonest event of
+my daily life to which the countess had not given importance, had not
+overfilled with happiness. I had been hitherto careless of my clothes,
+now I respected my coat as if it had been a second self. I should not
+have hesitated between bodily harm and a tear in that garment. You must
+enter wholly into my circumstances to understand the stormy thoughts,
+the gathering frenzy, that shook me as I went, and which, perhaps, were
+increased by my walk. I gloated in an infernal fashion which I cannot
+describe over the absolute completeness of my wretchedness. I would
+have drawn from it an augury of my future, but there is no limit to the
+possibilities of misfortune. The door of my lodging-house stood ajar.
+A light streamed from the heart-shaped opening cut in the shutters.
+Pauline and her mother were sitting up for me and talking. I heard my
+name spoken, and listened.
+
+"'Raphael is much nicer-looking than the student in number seven,' said
+Pauline; 'his fair hair is such a pretty color. Don't you think there is
+something in his voice, too, I don't know what it is, that gives you a
+sort of a thrill? And, then, though he may be a little proud, he is very
+kind, and he has such fine manners; I am sure that all the ladies must
+be quite wild about him.'
+
+"'You might be fond of him yourself, to hear you talk,' was Madame
+Gaudin's comment.
+
+"'He is just as dear to me as a brother,' she laughed. 'I should be
+finely ungrateful if I felt no friendship for him. Didn't he teach me
+music and drawing and grammar, and everything I know in fact? You don't
+much notice how I get on, dear mother; but I shall know enough, in a
+while, to give lessons myself, and then we can keep a servant.'
+
+"I stole away softly, made some noise outside, and went into their room
+to take the lamp, that Pauline tried to light for me. The dear child had
+just poured soothing balm into my wounds. Her outspoken admiration had
+given me fresh courage. I so needed to believe in myself and to come
+by a just estimate of my advantages. This revival of hope in me perhaps
+colored my surroundings. Perhaps also I had never before really looked
+at the picture that so often met my eyes, of the two women in their
+room; it was a scene such as Flemish painters have reproduced so
+faithfully for us, that I admired in its delightful reality. The mother,
+with the kind smile upon her lips, sat knitting stockings by the dying
+fire; Pauline was painting hand-screens, her brushes and paints, strewn
+over the tiny table, made bright spots of color for the eye to dwell
+on. When she had left her seat and stood lighting my lamp, one must
+have been under the yoke of a terrible passion indeed, not to admire her
+faintly flushed transparent hands, the girlish charm of her attitude,
+the ideal grace of her head, as the lamplight fell full on her pale
+face. Night and silence added to the charms of this industrious vigil
+and peaceful interior. The light-heartedness that sustained such
+continuous toil could only spring from devout submission and the lofty
+feelings that it brings.
+
+"There was an indescribable harmony between them and their possessions.
+The splendor of Foedora's home did not satisfy; it called out all my
+worst instincts; something in this lowly poverty and unfeigned goodness
+revived me. It may have been that luxury abased me in my own eyes,
+while here my self-respect was restored to me, as I sought to extend the
+protection that a man is so eager to make felt, over these two women,
+who in the bare simplicity of the existence in their brown room seemed
+to live wholly in the feelings of their hearts. As I came up to Pauline,
+she looked at me in an almost motherly way; her hands shook a little as
+she held the lamp, so that the light fell on me and cried:
+
+"'_Dieu_! how pale you are! and you are wet through! My mother will try
+to wipe you dry. Monsieur Raphael,' she went on, after a little pause,
+'you are so very fond of milk, and to-night we happen to have some
+cream. Here, will you not take some?'
+
+"She pounced like a kitten, on a china bowl full of milk. She did it so
+quickly, and put it before me so prettily, that I hesitated.
+
+"'You are going to refuse me?' she said, and her tones changed.
+
+"The pride in each felt for the other's pride. It was Pauline's poverty
+that seemed to humiliate her, and to reproach me with my want of
+consideration, and I melted at once and accepted the cream that might
+have been meant for her morning's breakfast. The poor child tried not to
+show her joy, but her eyes sparkled.
+
+"'I needed it badly,' I said as I sat down. (An anxious look passed over
+her face.) 'Do you remember that passage, Pauline, where Bossuet tells
+how God gave more abundant reward for a cup of cold water than for a
+victory?'
+
+"'Yes,' she said, her heart beating like some wild bird's in a child's
+hands.
+
+"'Well, as we shall part very soon, now,' I went on in an unsteady
+voice, 'you must let me show my gratitude to you and to your mother for
+all the care you have taken of me.'
+
+"'Oh, don't let us cast accounts,' she said laughing. But her laughter
+covered an agitation that gave me pain. I went on without appearing to
+hear her words:
+
+"'My piano is one of Erard's best instruments; and you must take it.
+Pray accept it without hesitation; I really could not take it with me on
+the journey I am about to make.'
+
+"Perhaps the melancholy tones in which I spoke enlightened the two
+women, for they seemed to understand, and eyed me with curiosity and
+alarm. Here was the affection that I had looked for in the glacial
+regions of the great world, true affection, unostentatious but tender,
+and possibly lasting.
+
+"'Don't take it to heart so,' the mother said; 'stay on here. My husband
+is on his way towards us even now,' she went on. 'I looked into the
+Gospel of St. John this evening while Pauline hung our door-key in a
+Bible from her fingers. The key turned; that means that Gaudin is in
+health and doing well. Pauline began again for you and for the young man
+in number seven--it turned for you, but not for him. We are all going to
+be rich. Gaudin will come back a millionaire. I dreamed once that I saw
+him in a ship full of serpents; luckily the water was rough, and that
+means gold or precious stones from over-sea.'
+
+"The silly, friendly words were like the crooning lullaby with which a
+mother soothes her sick child; they in a manner calmed me. There was a
+pleasant heartiness in the worthy woman's looks and tones, which, if
+it could not remove trouble, at any rate soothed and quieted it, and
+deadened the pain. Pauline, keener-sighted than her mother, studied me
+uneasily; her quick eyes seemed to read my life and my future. I thanked
+the mother and daughter by an inclination of the head, and hurried away;
+I was afraid I should break down.
+
+"I found myself alone under my roof, and laid myself down in my misery.
+My unhappy imagination suggested numberless baseless projects, and
+prescribed impossible resolutions. When a man is struggling in the wreck
+of his fortunes, he is not quite without resources, but I was engulfed.
+Ah, my dear fellow, we are too ready to blame the wretched. Let us be
+less harsh on the results of the most powerful of all social solvents.
+Where poverty is absolute there exist no such things as shame or crime,
+or virtue or intelligence. I knew not what to do; I was as defenceless
+as a maiden on her knees before a beast of prey. A penniless man who
+has no ties to bind him is master of himself at any rate, but a luckless
+wretch who is in love no longer belongs to himself, and may not take his
+own life. Love makes us almost sacred in our own eyes; it is the life
+of another that we revere within us; then and so it begins for us the
+cruelest trouble of all--the misery with a hope in it, a hope for which
+we must even bear our torments. I thought I would go to Rastignac on the
+morrow to confide Foedora's strange resolution to him, and with that I
+slept.
+
+"'Ah, ha!' cried Rastignac, as he saw me enter his lodging at nine
+o'clock in the morning. 'I know what brings you here. Foedora has
+dismissed you. Some kind souls, who were jealous of your ascendency over
+the countess, gave out that you were going to be married. Heaven only
+knows what follies your rivals have equipped you with, and what slanders
+have been directed at you.'
+
+"'That explains everything!' I exclaimed. I remembered all my
+presumptuous speeches, and gave the countess credit for no little
+magnanimity. It pleased me to think that I was a miscreant who had not
+been punished nearly enough, and I saw nothing in her indulgence but the
+long-suffering charity of love.
+
+"'Not quite so fast,' urged the prudent Gascon; 'Foedora has all the
+sagacity natural to a profoundly selfish woman; perhaps she may have
+taken your measure while you still coveted only her money and her
+splendor; in spite of all your care, she could have read you through and
+through. She can dissemble far too well to let any dissimulation pass
+undetected. I fear,' he went on, 'that I have brought you into a
+bad way. In spite of her cleverness and her tact, she seems to me a
+domineering sort of person, like every woman who can only feel pleasure
+through her brain. Happiness for her lies entirely in a comfortable life
+and in social pleasures; her sentiment is only assumed; she will make
+you miserable; you will be her head footman.'
+
+"He spoke to the deaf. I broke in upon him, disclosing, with an
+affectation of light-heartedness, the state of my finances.
+
+"'Yesterday evening,' he rejoined, 'luck ran against me, and that
+carried off all my available cash. But for that trivial mishap, I would
+gladly have shared my purse with you. But let us go and breakfast at the
+restaurant; perhaps there is good counsel in oysters.'
+
+"He dressed, and had his tilbury brought round. We went to the Cafe
+de Paris like a couple of millionaires, armed with all the audacious
+impertinence of the speculator whose capital is imaginary. That devil
+of a Gascon quite disconcerted me by the coolness of his manners and his
+absolute self-possession. While we were taking coffee after an excellent
+and well-ordered repast, a young dandy entered, who did not escape
+Rastignac. He had been nodding here and there among the crowd to this or
+that young man, distinguished both by personal attractions and elegant
+attire, and now he said to me:
+
+"'Here's your man,' as he beckoned to this gentleman with a wonderful
+cravat, who seemed to be looking for a table that suited his ideas.
+
+"'That rogue has been decorated for bringing out books that he doesn't
+understand a word of,' whispered Rastignac; 'he is a chemist, a
+historian, a novelist, and a political writer; he has gone halves,
+thirds, or quarters in the authorship of I don't know how many plays,
+and he is as ignorant as Dom Miguel's mule. He is not a man so much as
+a name, a label that the public is familiar with. So he would do well to
+avoid shops inscribed with the motto, "_Ici l'on peut ecrire soi-meme_."
+He is acute enough to deceive an entire congress of diplomatists. In
+a couple of words, he is a moral half-caste, not quite a fraud, nor
+entirely genuine. But, hush! he has succeeded already; nobody asks
+anything further, and every one calls him an illustrious man.'
+
+"'Well, my esteemed and excellent friend, and how may Your Intelligence
+be?' So Rastignac addressed the stranger as he sat down at a neighboring
+table.
+
+"'Neither well nor ill; I am overwhelmed with work. I have all the
+necessary materials for some very curious historical memoirs in my
+hands, and I cannot find any one to whom I can ascribe them. It worries
+me, for I shall have to be quick about it. Memoirs are falling out of
+fashion.'
+
+"'What are the memoirs--contemporaneous, ancient, or memoirs of the
+court, or what?'
+
+"'They relate to the Necklace affair.'
+
+"'Now, isn't that a coincidence?' said Rastignac, turning to me and
+laughing. He looked again to the literary speculation, and said,
+indicating me:
+
+"'This is M. de Valentin, one of my friends, whom I must introduce to
+you as one of our future literary celebrities. He had formerly an aunt,
+a marquise, much in favor once at court, and for about two years he has
+been writing a Royalist history of the Revolution.'
+
+"Then, bending over this singular man of business, he went on:
+
+"'He is a man of talent, and a simpleton that will do your memoirs for
+you, in his aunt's name, for a hundred crowns a volume.'
+
+"'It's a bargain,' said the other, adjusting his cravat. 'Waiter, my
+oysters.'
+
+"'Yes, but you must give me twenty-five louis as commission, and you
+will pay him in advance for each volume,' said Rastignac.
+
+"'No, no. He shall only have fifty crowns on account, and then I shall
+be sure of having my manuscript punctually.'
+
+"Rastignac repeated this business conversation to me in low tones; and
+then, without giving me any voice in the matter, he replied:
+
+"'We agree to your proposal. When can we call upon you to arrange the
+affair?'
+
+"'Oh, well! Come and dine here to-morrow at seven o'clock.'
+
+"We rose. Rastignac flung some money to the waiter, put the bill in his
+pocket, and we went out. I was quite stupified by the flippancy and ease
+with which he had sold my venerable aunt, la Marquise de Montbauron.
+
+"'I would sooner take ship for the Brazils, and give the Indians lessons
+in algebra, though I don't know a word of it, than tarnish my family
+name.'
+
+"Rastignac burst out laughing.
+
+"'How dense you are! Take the fifty crowns in the first instance, and
+write the memoirs. When you have finished them, you will decline to
+publish them in your aunt's name, imbecile! Madame de Montbauron, with
+her hooped petticoat, her rank and beauty, rouge and slippers, and her
+death upon the scaffold, is worth a great deal more than six hundred
+francs. And then, if the trade will not give your aunt her due, some old
+adventurer, or some shady countess or other, will be found to put her
+name to the memoirs.'
+
+"'Oh,' I groaned; 'why did I quit the blameless life in my garret? This
+world has aspects that are very vilely dishonorable.'
+
+"'Yes,' said Rastignac, 'that is all very poetical, but this is a matter
+of business. What a child you are! Now, listen to me. As to your work,
+the public will decide upon it; and as for my literary middle-man,
+hasn't he devoted eight years of his life to obtaining a footing in the
+book-trade, and paid heavily for his experience? You divide the money
+and the labor of the book with him very unequally, but isn't yours the
+better part? Twenty-five louis means as much to you as a thousand francs
+does to him. Come, you can write historical memoirs, a work of art
+such as never was, since Diderot once wrote six sermons for a hundred
+crowns!'
+
+"'After all,' I said, in agitation, 'I cannot choose but do it. So,
+my dear friend, my thanks are due to you. I shall be quite rich with
+twenty-five louis.'
+
+"'Richer than you think,' he laughed. 'If I have my commission from
+Finot in this matter, it goes to you, can't you see? Now let us go to
+the Bois de Boulogne,' he said; 'we shall see your countess there, and
+I will show you the pretty little widow that I am to marry--a charming
+woman, an Alsacienne, rather plump. She reads Kant, Schiller, Jean Paul,
+and a host of lachrymose books. She has a mania for continually asking
+my opinion, and I have to look as if I entered into all this German
+sensibility, and to know a pack of ballads--drugs, all of them, that
+my doctor absolutely prohibits. As yet I have not been able to wean her
+from her literary enthusiasms; she sheds torrents of tears as she reads
+Goethe, and I have to weep a little myself to please her, for she has an
+income of fifty thousand livres, my dear boy, and the prettiest little
+hand and foot in the world. Oh, if she would only say _mon ange_
+and _brouiller_ instead of _mon anche_ and _prouiller_, she would be
+perfection!'
+
+"We saw the countess, radiant amid the splendors of her equipage. The
+coquette bowed very graciously to us both, and the smile she gave me
+seemed to me to be divine and full of love. I was very happy; I fancied
+myself beloved; I had money, a wealth of love in my heart, and my
+troubles were over. I was light-hearted, blithe, and content. I found
+my friend's lady-love charming. Earth and air and heaven--all
+nature--seemed to reflect Foedora's smile for me.
+
+"As we returned through the Champs-Elysees, we paid a visit
+to Rastignac's hatter and tailor. Thanks to the 'Necklace,' my
+insignificant peace-footing was to end, and I made formidable
+preparations for a campaign. Henceforward I need not shrink from a
+contest with the spruce and fashionable young men who made Foedora's
+circle. I went home, locked myself in, and stood by my dormer window,
+outwardly calm enough, but in reality I bade a last good-bye to the
+roofs without. I began to live in the future, rehearsed my life drama,
+and discounted love and its happiness. Ah, how stormy life can grow
+to be within the four walls of a garret! The soul within us is like a
+fairy; she turns straw into diamonds for us; and for us, at a touch of
+her wand, enchanted palaces arise, as flowers in the meadows spring up
+towards the sun.
+
+"Towards noon, next day, Pauline knocked gently at my door, and brought
+me--who could guess it?--a note from Foedora. The countess asked me to
+take her to the Luxembourg, and to go thence to see with her the Museum
+and Jardin des Plantes.
+
+"'The man is waiting for an answer,' said Pauline, after quietly waiting
+for a moment.
+
+"I hastily scrawled my acknowledgements, and Pauline took the note. I
+changed my dress. When my toilette was ended, and I looked at myself
+with some complaisance, an icy shiver ran through me as I thought:
+
+"'Will Foedora walk or drive? Will it rain or shine?--No matter,
+though,' I said to myself; 'whichever it is, can one ever reckon with
+feminine caprice? She will have no money about her, and will want
+to give a dozen francs to some little Savoyard because his rags are
+picturesque.'
+
+"I had not a brass farthing, and should have no money till the evening
+came. How dearly a poet pays for the intellectual prowess that method
+and toil have brought him, at such crises of our youth! Innumerable
+painfully vivid thoughts pierced me like barbs. I looked out of my
+window; the weather was very unsettled. If things fell out badly, I
+might easily hire a cab for the day; but would not the fear lie on me
+every moment that I might not meet Finot in the evening? I felt too weak
+to endure such fears in the midst of my felicity. Though I felt sure
+that I should find nothing, I began a grand search through my room;
+I looked for imaginary coins in the recesses of my mattress; I hunted
+about everywhere--I even shook out my old boots. A nervous fever seized
+me; I looked with wild eyes at the furniture when I had ransacked it
+all. Will you understand, I wonder, the excitement that possessed
+me when, plunged deep in the listlessness of despair, I opened my
+writing-table drawer, and found a fair and splendid ten-franc piece
+that shone like a rising star, new and sparkling, and slily hiding in
+a cranny between two boards? I did not try to account for its previous
+reserve and the cruelty of which it had been guilty in thus lying
+hidden; I kissed it for a friend faithful in adversity, and hailed it
+with a cry that found an echo, and made me turn sharply, to find Pauline
+with a face grown white.
+
+"'I thought,' she faltered, 'that you had hurt yourself! The man who
+brought the letter----' (she broke off as if something smothered her
+voice). 'But mother has paid him,' she added, and flitted away like a
+wayward, capricious child. Poor little one! I wanted her to share in
+my happiness. I seemed to have all the happiness in the world within
+me just then; and I would fain have returned to the unhappy, all that I
+felt as if I had stolen from them.
+
+"The intuitive perception of adversity is sound for the most part; the
+countess had sent away her carriage. One of those freaks that pretty
+women can scarcely explain to themselves had determined her to go on
+foot, by way of the boulevards, to the Jardin des Plantes.
+
+"'It will rain,' I told her, and it pleased her to contradict me.
+
+"As it fell out, the weather was fine while we went through the
+Luxembourg; when we came out, some drops fell from a great cloud, whose
+progress I had watched uneasily, and we took a cab. At the Museum I was
+about to dismiss the vehicle, and Foedora (what agonies!) asked me not
+to do so. But it was like a dream in broad daylight for me, to chat
+with her, to wander in the Jardin des Plantes, to stray down the shady
+alleys, to feel her hand upon my arm; the secret transports repressed
+in me were reduced, no doubt, to a fixed and foolish smile upon my
+lips; there was something unreal about it all. Yet in all her movements,
+however alluring, whether we stood or whether we walked, there was
+nothing either tender or lover-like. When I tried to share in a measure
+the action of movement prompted by her life, I became aware of a check,
+or of something strange in her that I cannot explain, or an inner
+activity concealed in her nature. There is no suavity about the
+movements of women who have no soul in them. Our wills were opposed,
+and we did not keep step together. Words are wanting to describe this
+outward dissonance between two beings; we are not accustomed to read
+a thought in a movement. We instinctively feel this phenomenon of our
+nature, but it cannot be expressed.
+
+"I did not dissect my sensations during those violent seizures of
+passion," Raphael went on, after a moment of silence, as if he were
+replying to an objection raised by himself. "I did not analyze my
+pleasures nor count my heartbeats then, as a miser scrutinizes and
+weighs his gold pieces. No; experience sheds its melancholy light over
+the events of the past to-day, and memory brings these pictures back,
+as the sea-waves in fair weather cast up fragment after fragment of the
+debris of a wrecked vessel upon the strand.
+
+"'It is in your power to render me a rather important service,' said the
+countess, looking at me in an embarrassed way. 'After confiding in you
+my aversion to lovers, I feel myself more at liberty to entreat your
+good offices in the name of friendship. Will there not be very much more
+merit in obliging me to-day?' she asked, laughing.
+
+"I looked at her in anguish. Her manner was coaxing, but in no wise
+affectionate; she felt nothing for me; she seemed to be playing a part,
+and I thought her a consummate actress. Then all at once my hopes awoke
+once more, at a single look and word. Yet if reviving love expressed
+itself in my eyes, she bore its light without any change in the
+clearness of her own; they seemed, like a tiger's eyes, to have a sheet
+of metal behind them. I used to hate her in such moments.
+
+"'The influence of the Duc de Navarreins would be very useful to me,
+with an all-powerful person in Russia,' she went on, persuasion in every
+modulation of her voice, 'whose intervention I need in order to have
+justice done me in a matter that concerns both my fortune and my
+position in the world, that is to say, the recognition of my marriage
+by the Emperor. Is not the Duc de Navarreins a cousin of yours? A letter
+from him would settle everything.'
+
+"'I am yours,' I answered; 'command me.'
+
+"'You are very nice,' she said, pressing my hand. 'Come and have dinner
+with me, and I will tell you everything, as if you were my confessor.'
+
+"So this discreet, suspicious woman, who had never been heard to speak a
+word about her affairs to any one, was going to consult me.
+
+"'Oh, how dear to me is this silence that you have imposed on me!' I
+cried; 'but I would rather have had some sharper ordeal still.' And
+she smiled upon the intoxication in my eyes; she did not reject my
+admiration in any way; surely she loved me!
+
+"Fortunately, my purse held just enough to satisfy her cab-man. The day
+spent in her house, alone with her, was delicious; it was the first time
+that I had seen her in this way. Hitherto we had always been kept apart
+by the presence of others, and by her formal politeness and reserved
+manners, even during her magnificent dinners; but now it was as if I
+lived beneath her own roof--I had her all to myself, so to speak. My
+wandering fancy broke down barriers, arranged the events of life to my
+liking, and steeped me in happiness and love. I seemed to myself her
+husband, I liked to watch her busied with little details; it was a
+pleasure to me even to see her take off her bonnet and shawl. She left
+me alone for a little, and came back, charming, with her hair newly
+arranged; and this dainty change of toilette had been made for me!
+
+"During the dinner she lavished attention upon me, and put charm without
+end into those numberless trifles to all seeming, that make up half of
+our existence nevertheless. As we sat together before a crackling
+fire, on silken cushions surrounded by the most desirable creations
+of Oriental luxury; as I saw this woman whose famous beauty made every
+heart beat, so close to me; an unapproachable woman who was talking and
+bringing all her powers of coquetry to bear upon me; then my blissful
+pleasure rose almost to the point of suffering. To my vexation, I
+recollected the important business to be concluded; I determined to go
+to keep the appointment made for me for this evening.
+
+"'So soon?' she said, seeing me take my hat.
+
+"She loved me, then! or I thought so at least, from the bland tones in
+which those two words were uttered. I would then have bartered a couple
+of years of life for every hour she chose to grant to me, and so prolong
+my ecstasy. My happiness was increased by the extent of the money I
+sacrificed. It was midnight before she dismissed me. But on the morrow,
+for all that, my heroism cost me a good many remorseful pangs; I was
+afraid the affair of the Memoirs, now of such importance for me, might
+have fallen through, and rushed off to Rastignac. We found the nominal
+author of my future labors just getting up.
+
+"Finot read over a brief agreement to me, in which nothing whatever was
+said about my aunt, and when it had been signed he paid me down fifty
+crowns, and the three of us breakfasted together. I had only thirty
+francs left over, when I had paid for my new hat, for sixty tickets at
+thirty sous each, and settled my debts; but for some days to come the
+difficulties of living were removed. If I had but listened to Rastignac,
+I might have had abundance by frankly adopting the 'English system.' He
+really wanted to establish my credit by setting me to raise loans, on
+the theory that borrowing is the basis of credit. To hear him talk, the
+future was the largest and most secure kind of capital in the world.
+My future luck was hypothecated for the benefit of my creditors, and he
+gave my custom to his tailor, an artist, and a young man's tailor, who
+was to leave me in peace until I married.
+
+"The monastic life of study that I had led for three years past ended
+on this day. I frequented Foedora's house very diligently, and tried to
+outshine the heroes or the swaggerers to be found in her circle. When
+I believed that I had left poverty for ever behind me, I regained my
+freedom of mind, humiliated my rivals, and was looked upon as a very
+attractive, dazzling, and irresistible sort of man. But acute folk used
+to say with regard to me, 'A fellow as clever as that will keep all his
+enthusiasms in his brain,' and charitably extolled my faculties at
+the expense of my feelings. 'Isn't he lucky, not to be in love!' they
+exclaimed. 'If he were, could he be so light-hearted and animated?' Yet
+in Foedora's presence I was as dull as love could make me. When I was
+alone with her, I had not a word to say, or if I did speak, I renounced
+love; and I affected gaiety but ill, like a courtier who has a bitter
+mortification to hide. I tried in every way to make myself indispensable
+in her life, and necessary to her vanity and to her comfort; I was a
+plaything at her pleasure, a slave always at her side. And when I had
+frittered away the day in this way, I went back to my work at night,
+securing merely two or three hours' sleep in the early morning.
+
+"But I had not, like Rastignac, the 'English system' at my finger-ends,
+and I very soon saw myself without a penny. I fell at once into that
+precarious way of life which industriously hides cold and miserable
+depths beneath an elusive surface of luxury; I was a coxcomb without
+conquests, a penniless fop, a nameless gallant. The old sufferings were
+renewed, but less sharply; no doubt I was growing used to the painful
+crisis. Very often my sole diet consisted of the scanty provision of
+cakes and tea that is offered in drawing-rooms, or one of the countess'
+great dinners must sustain me for two whole days. I used all my time,
+and exerted every effort and all my powers of observation, to penetrate
+the impenetrable character of Foedora. Alternate hope and despair had
+swayed my opinions; for me she was sometimes the tenderest, sometimes
+the most unfeeling of women. But these transitions from joy to sadness
+became unendurable; I sought to end the horrible conflict within me by
+extinguishing love. By the light of warning gleams my soul sometimes
+recognized the gulfs that lay between us. The countess confirmed all my
+fears; I had never yet detected any tear in her eyes; an affecting scene
+in a play left her smiling and unmoved. All her instincts were selfish;
+she could not divine another's joy or sorrow. She had made a fool of me,
+in fact!
+
+"I had rejoiced over a sacrifice to make for her, and almost humiliated
+myself in seeking out my kinsman, the Duc de Navarreins, a selfish man
+who was ashamed of my poverty, and had injured me too deeply not to hate
+me. He received me with the polite coldness that makes every word and
+gesture seem an insult; he looked so ill at ease that I pitied him. I
+blushed for this pettiness amid grandeur, and penuriousness surrounded
+by luxury. He began to talk to me of his heavy losses in the three per
+cents, and then I told him the object of my visit. The change in his
+manners, hitherto glacial, which now gradually, became affectionate,
+disgusted me.
+
+"Well, he called upon the countess, and completely eclipsed me with her.
+
+"On him Foedora exercised spells and witcheries unheard of; she drew him
+into her power, and arranged her whole mysterious business with him; I
+was left out, I heard not a word of it; she had made a tool of me! She
+did not seem to be aware of my existence while my cousin was present;
+she received me less cordially perhaps than when I was first presented
+to her. One evening she chose to mortify me before the duke by a look, a
+gesture, that it is useless to try to express in words. I went away with
+tears in my eyes, planning terrible and outrageous schemes of vengeance
+without end.
+
+"I often used to go with her to the theatre. Love utterly absorbed me
+as I sat beside her; as I looked at her I used to give myself up to the
+pleasure of listening to the music, putting all my soul into the double
+joy of love and of hearing every emotion of my heart translated into
+musical cadences. It was my passion that filled the air and the stage,
+that was triumphant everywhere but with my mistress. Then I would take
+Foedora's hand. I used to scan her features and her eyes, imploring of
+them some indication that one blended feeling possessed us both, seeking
+for the sudden harmony awakened by the power of music, which makes
+our souls vibrate in unison; but her hand was passive, her eyes said
+nothing.
+
+"When the fire that burned in me glowed too fiercely from the face
+I turned upon her, she met it with that studied smile of hers, the
+conventional expression that sits on the lips of every portrait in every
+exhibition. She was not listening to the music. The divine pages of
+Rossini, Cimarosa, or Zingarelli called up no emotion, gave no voice to
+any poetry in her life; her soul was a desert.
+
+"Foedora presented herself as a drama before a drama. Her lorgnette
+traveled restlessly over the boxes; she was restless too beneath the
+apparent calm; fashion tyrannized over her; her box, her bonnet, her
+carriage, her own personality absorbed her entirely. My merciless
+knowledge thoroughly tore away all my illusions. If good breeding
+consists in self-forgetfulness and consideration for others, in
+constantly showing gentleness in voice and bearing, in pleasing others,
+and in making them content in themselves, all traces of her plebeian
+origin were not yet obliterated in Foedora, in spite of her cleverness.
+Her self-forgetfulness was a sham, her manners were not innate but
+painfully acquired, her politeness was rather subservient. And yet for
+those she singled out, her honeyed words expressed natural kindness, her
+pretentious exaggeration was exalted enthusiasm. I alone had scrutinized
+her grimacings, and stripped away the thin rind that sufficed to conceal
+her real nature from the world; her trickery no longer deceived me; I
+had sounded the depths of that feline nature. I blushed for her when
+some donkey or other flattered and complimented her. And yet I loved her
+through it all! I hoped that her snows would melt with the warmth of a
+poet's love. If I could only have made her feel all the greatness that
+lies in devotion, then I should have seen her perfected, she would have
+been an angel. I loved her as a man, a lover, and an artist; if it had
+been necessary not to love her so that I might win her, some cool-headed
+coxcomb, some self-possessed calculator would perhaps have had an
+advantage over me. She was so vain and sophisticated, that the language
+of vanity would appeal to her; she would have allowed herself to be
+taken in the toils of an intrigue; a hard, cold nature would have gained
+a complete ascendency over her. Keen grief had pierced me to my very
+soul, as she unconsciously revealed her absolute love of self. I seemed
+to see her as she one day would be, alone in the world, with no one to
+whom she could stretch her hand, with no friendly eyes for her own
+to meet and rest upon. I was bold enough to set this before her one
+evening; I painted in vivid colors her lonely, sad, deserted old age.
+Her comment on this prospect of so terrible a revenge of thwarted nature
+was horrible.
+
+"'I shall always have money,' she said; 'and with money we can always
+inspire such sentiments as are necessary for our comfort in those about
+us.'
+
+"I went away confounded by the arguments of luxury, by the reasoning
+of this woman of the world in which she lived; and blamed myself for
+my infatuated idolatry. I myself had not loved Pauline because she
+was poor; and had not the wealthy Foedora a right to repulse Raphael?
+Conscience is our unerring judge until we finally stifle it. A specious
+voice said within me, 'Foedora is neither attracted to nor repulses any
+one; she has her liberty, but once upon a time she sold herself to the
+Russian count, her husband or her lover, for gold. But temptation is
+certain to enter into her life. Wait till that moment comes!' She lived
+remote from humanity, in a sphere apart, in a hell or a heaven of
+her own; she was neither frail nor virtuous. This feminine enigma in
+embroideries and cashmeres had brought into play every emotion of the
+human heart in me--pride, ambition, love, curiosity.
+
+"There was a craze just then for praising a play at a little Boulevard
+theatre, prompted perhaps by a wish to appear original that besets us
+all, or due to some freak of fashion. The countess showed some signs of
+a wish to see the floured face of the actor who had so delighted several
+people of taste, and I obtained the honor of taking her to a first
+presentation of some wretched farce or other. A box scarcely cost five
+francs, but I had not a brass farthing. I was but half-way through
+the volume of Memoirs; I dared not beg for assistance of Finot, and
+Rastignac, my providence, was away. These constant perplexities were the
+bane of my life.
+
+"We had once come out of the theatre when it was raining heavily,
+Foedora had called a cab for me before I could escape from her show
+of concern; she would not admit any of my excuses--my liking for wet
+weather, and my wish to go to the gaming-table. She did not read my
+poverty in my embarrassed attitude, or in my forced jests. My eyes would
+redden, but she did not understand a look. A young man's life is at the
+mercy of the strangest whims! At every revolution of the wheels during
+the journey, thoughts that burned stirred in my heart. I tried to pull
+up a plank from the bottom of the vehicle, hoping to slip through the
+hole into the street; but finding insuperable obstacles, I burst into a
+fit of laughter, and then sat stupefied in calm dejection, like a man in
+a pillory. When I reached my lodging, Pauline broke in through my first
+stammering words with:
+
+"'If you haven't any money----?'
+
+"Ah, the music of Rossini was as nothing compared with those words. But
+to return to the performance at the Funambules.
+
+"I thought of pawning the circlet of gold round my mother's portrait
+in order to escort the countess. Although the pawnbroker loomed in
+my thoughts as one of the doors of a convict's prison, I would rather
+myself have carried my bed thither than have begged for alms. There is
+something so painful in the expression of a man who asks money of you!
+There are loans that mulct us of our self-respect, just as some rebuffs
+from a friend's lips sweep away our last illusion.
+
+"Pauline was working; her mother had gone to bed. I flung a stealthy
+glance over the bed; the curtains were drawn back a little; Madame
+Gaudin was in a deep sleep, I thought, when I saw her quiet, sallow
+profile outlined against the pillow.
+
+"'You are in trouble?' Pauline said, dipping her brush into the
+coloring.
+
+"'It is in your power to do me a great service, my dear child,' I
+answered.
+
+"The gladness in her eyes frightened me.
+
+"'Is it possible that she loves me?' I thought. 'Pauline,' I began.
+I went and sat near to her, so as to study her. My tones had been so
+searching that she read my thought; her eyes fell, and I scrutinized
+her face. It was so pure and frank that I fancied I could see as clearly
+into her heart as into my own.
+
+"'Do you love me?' I asked.
+
+"'A little,--passionately--not a bit!' she cried.
+
+"Then she did not love me. Her jesting tones, and a little gleeful
+movement that escaped her, expressed nothing beyond a girlish, blithe
+goodwill. I told her about my distress and the predicament in which I
+found myself, and asked her to help me.
+
+"'You do not wish to go to the pawnbroker's yourself, M. Raphael,' she
+answered, 'and yet you would send me!'
+
+"I blushed in confusion at the child's reasoning. She took my hand in
+hers as if she wanted to compensate for this home-truth by her light
+touch upon it.
+
+"'Oh, I would willingly go,' she said, 'but it is not necessary. I found
+two five-franc pieces at the back of the piano, that had slipped without
+your knowledge between the frame and the keyboard, and I laid them on
+your table.'
+
+"'You will soon be coming into some money, M. Raphael,' said the kind
+mother, showing her face between the curtains, 'and I can easily lend
+you a few crowns meanwhile.'
+
+"'Oh, Pauline!' I cried, as I pressed her hand, 'how I wish that I were
+rich!'
+
+"'Bah! why should you?' she said petulantly. Her hand shook in mine with
+the throbbing of her pulse; she snatched it away, and looked at both of
+mine.
+
+"'You will marry a rich wife,' she said, 'but she will give you a great
+deal of trouble. Ah, _Dieu_! she will be your death,--I am sure of it.'
+
+"In her exclamation there was something like belief in her mother's
+absurd superstitions.
+
+"'You are very credulous, Pauline!'
+
+"'The woman whom you will love is going to kill you--there is no doubt
+of it,' she said, looking at me with alarm.
+
+"She took up her brush again and dipped it in the color; her great
+agitation was evident; she looked at me no longer. I was ready to give
+credence just then to superstitious fancies; no man is utterly wretched
+so long as he is superstitious; a belief of that kind is often in
+reality a hope.
+
+"I found that those two magnificent five-franc pieces were lying, in
+fact, upon my table when I reached my room. During the first confused
+thoughts of early slumber, I tried to audit my accounts so as to explain
+this unhoped-for windfall; but I lost myself in useless calculations,
+and slept. Just as I was leaving my room to engage a box the next
+morning, Pauline came to see me.
+
+"'Perhaps your ten francs is not enough,' said the amiable, kind-hearted
+girl; 'my mother told me to offer you this money. Take it, please, take
+it!'
+
+"She laid three crowns upon the table, and tried to escape, but I would
+not let her go. Admiration dried the tears that sprang to my eyes.
+
+"'You are an angel, Pauline,' I said. 'It is not the loan that touches
+me so much as the delicacy with which it is offered. I used to wish for
+a rich wife, a fashionable woman of rank; and now, alas! I would
+rather possess millions, and find some girl, as poor as you are, with
+a generous nature like your own; and I would renounce a fatal passion
+which will kill me. Perhaps what you told me will come true.'
+
+"'That is enough,' she said, and fled away; the fresh trills of her
+birdlike voice rang up the staircase.
+
+"'She is very happy in not yet knowing love,' I said to myself, thinking
+of the torments I had endured for many months past.
+
+"Pauline's fifteen francs were invaluable to me. Foedora, thinking of
+the stifling odor of the crowded place where we were to spend several
+hours, was sorry that she had not brought a bouquet; I went in search of
+flowers for her, as I had laid already my life and my fate at her feet.
+With a pleasure in which compunction mingled, I gave her a bouquet. I
+learned from its price the extravagance of superficial gallantry in
+the world. But very soon she complained of the heavy scent of a Mexican
+jessamine. The interior of the theatre, the bare bench on which she
+was to sit, filled her with intolerable disgust; she upbraided me for
+bringing her there. Although she sat beside me, she wished to go, and
+she went. I had spent sleepless nights, and squandered two months of
+my life for her, and I could not please her. Never had that tormenting
+spirit been more unfeeling or more fascinating.
+
+"I sat beside her in the cramped back seat of the vehicle; all the way I
+could feel her breath on me and the contact of her perfumed glove; I
+saw distinctly all her exceeding beauty; I inhaled a vague scent of
+orris-root; so wholly a woman she was, with no touch of womanhood. Just
+then a sudden gleam of light lit up the depths of this mysterious life
+for me. I thought all at once of a book just published by a poet,
+a genuine conception of the artist, in the shape of the statue of
+Polycletus.
+
+"I seemed to see that monstrous creation, at one time an officer,
+breaking in a spirited horse; at another, a girl, who gives herself up
+to her toilette and breaks her lovers' hearts; or again, a false lover
+driving a timid and gentle maid to despair. Unable to analyze Foedora
+by any other process, I told her this fanciful story; but no hint of
+her resemblance to this poetry of the impossible crossed her--it simply
+diverted her; she was like a child over a story from the _Arabian
+Nights_.
+
+"'Foedora must be shielded by some talisman,' I thought to myself as
+I went back, 'or she could not resist the love of a man of my age, the
+infectious fever of that splendid malady of the soul. Is Foedora, like
+Lady Delacour, a prey to a cancer? Her life is certainly an unnatural
+one.'
+
+"I shuddered at the thought. Then I decided on a plan, at once the
+wildest and the most rational that lover ever dreamed of. I would study
+this woman from a physical point of view, as I had already studied her
+intellectually, and to this end I made up my mind to spend a night in
+her room without her knowledge. This project preyed upon me as a thirst
+for revenge gnaws at the heart of a Corsican monk. This is how I carried
+it out. On the days when Foedora received, her rooms were far too
+crowded for the hall-porter to keep the balance even between goers and
+comers; I could remain in the house, I felt sure, without causing a
+scandal in it, and I waited the countess' coming soiree with impatience.
+As I dressed I put a little English penknife into my waistcoat pocket,
+instead of a poniard. That literary implement, if found upon me, could
+awaken no suspicion, but I knew not whither my romantic resolution might
+lead, and I wished to be prepared.
+
+"As soon as the rooms began to fill, I entered the bedroom and examined
+the arrangements. The inner and outer shutters were closed; this was
+a good beginning; and as the waiting-maid might come to draw back the
+curtains that hung over the windows, I pulled them together. I was
+running great risks in venturing to manoeuvre beforehand in this way,
+but I had accepted the situation, and had deliberately reckoned with its
+dangers.
+
+"About midnight I hid myself in the embrasure of the window. I tried to
+scramble on to a ledge of the wainscoting, hanging on by the fastening
+of the shutters with my back against the wall, in such a position that
+my feet could not be visible. When I had carefully considered my points
+of support, and the space between me and the curtains, I had become
+sufficiently acquainted with all the difficulties of my position to
+stay in it without fear of detection if undisturbed by cramp, coughs,
+or sneezings. To avoid useless fatigue, I remained standing until the
+critical moment, when I must hang suspended like a spider in its web.
+The white-watered silk and muslin of the curtains spread before me in
+great pleats like organ-pipes. With my penknife I cut loopholes in them,
+through which I could see.
+
+"I heard vague murmurs from the salons, the laughter and the louder
+tones of the speakers. The smothered commotion and vague uproar lessened
+by slow degrees. One man and another came for his hat from the countess'
+chest of drawers, close to where I stood. I shivered, if the curtains
+were disturbed, at the thought of the mischances consequent on the
+confused and hasty investigations made by the men in a hurry to depart,
+who were rummaging everywhere. When I experienced no misfortunes of this
+kind, I augured well of my enterprise. An old wooer of Foedora's came
+for the last hat; he thought himself quite alone, looked at the bed,
+and heaved a great sigh, accompanied by some inaudible exclamation, into
+which he threw sufficient energy. In the boudoir close by, the countess,
+finding only some five or six intimate acquaintances about her, proposed
+tea. The scandals for which existing society has reserved the little
+faculty of belief that it retains, mingled with epigrams and trenchant
+witticisms, and the clatter of cups and spoons. Rastignac drew roars of
+laughter by merciless sarcasms at the expense of my rivals.
+
+"'M. de Rastignac is a man with whom it is better not to quarrel,' said
+the countess, laughing.
+
+"'I am quite of that opinion,' was his candid reply. 'I have always
+been right about my aversions--and my friendships as well,' he added.
+'Perhaps my enemies are quite as useful to me as my friends. I have made
+a particular study of modern phraseology, and of the natural craft
+that is used in all attack or defence. Official eloquence is one of our
+perfect social products.
+
+"'One of your friends is not clever, so you speak of his integrity and
+his candor. Another's work is heavy; you introduce it as a piece of
+conscientious labor; and if the book is ill written, you extol the ideas
+it contains. Such an one is treacherous and fickle, slips through
+your fingers every moment; bah! he is attractive, bewitching, he is
+delightful! Suppose they are enemies, you fling every one, dead or
+alive, in their teeth. You reverse your phraseology for their benefit,
+and you are as keen in detecting their faults as you were before adroit
+in bringing out the virtues of your friends. This way of using the
+mental lorgnette is the secret of conversation nowadays, and the whole
+art of the complete courtier. If you neglect it, you might as well go
+out as an unarmed knight-banneret to fight against men in armor. And I
+make use of it, and even abuse it at times. So we are respected--I and
+my friends; and, moreover, my sword is quite as sharp as my tongue.'
+
+"One of Foedora's most fervid worshipers, whose presumption was
+notorious, and who even made it contribute to his success, took up the
+glove thrown down so scornfully by Rastignac. He began an unmeasured
+eulogy of me, my performances, and my character. Rastignac had
+overlooked this method of detraction. His sarcastic encomiums misled
+the countess, who sacrificed without mercy; she betrayed my secrets, and
+derided my pretensions and my hopes, to divert her friends.
+
+"'There is a future before him,' said Rastignac. 'Some day he may be in
+a position to take a cruel revenge; his talents are at least equal to
+his courage; and I should consider those who attack him very rash, for
+he has a good memory----'
+
+"'And writes Memoirs,' put in the countess, who seemed to object to the
+deep silence that prevailed.
+
+"'Memoirs of a sham countess, madame,' replied Rastignac. 'Another sort
+of courage is needed to write that sort of thing.'
+
+"'I give him credit for plenty of courage,' she answered; 'he is
+faithful to me.'
+
+"I was greatly tempted to show myself suddenly among the railers, like
+the shade of Banquo in Macbeth. I should have lost a mistress, but I
+had a friend! But love inspired me all at once, with one of those
+treacherous and fallacious subtleties that it can use to soothe all our
+pangs.
+
+"If Foedora loved me, I thought, she would be sure to disguise her
+feelings by some mocking jest. How often the heart protests against a
+lie on the lips!
+
+"Well, very soon my audacious rival, left alone with the countess, rose
+to go.
+
+"'What! already?' asked she in a coaxing voice that set my heart
+beating. 'Will you not give me a few more minutes? Have you nothing more
+to say to me? will you never sacrifice any of your pleasures for me?'
+
+"He went away.
+
+"'Ah!' she yawned; 'how very tiresome they all are!'
+
+"She pulled a cord energetically till the sound of a bell rang through
+the place; then, humming a few notes of _Pria che spunti_, the countess
+entered her room. No one had ever heard her sing; her muteness had
+called forth the wildest explanations. She had promised her first lover,
+so it was said, who had been held captive by her talent, and whose
+jealousy over her stretched beyond his grave, that she would never allow
+others to experience a happiness that he wished to be his and his alone.
+
+"I exerted every power of my soul to catch the sounds. Higher and higher
+rose the notes; Foedora's life seemed to dilate within her; her throat
+poured forth all its richest tones; something well-nigh divine entered
+into the melody. There was a bright purity and clearness of tone in the
+countess' voice, a thrilling harmony which reached the heart and stirred
+its pulses. Musicians are seldom unemotional; a woman who could sing
+like that must know how to love indeed. Her beautiful voice made one
+more puzzle in a woman mysterious enough before. I beheld her then, as
+plainly as I see you at this moment. She seemed to listen to herself, to
+experience a secret rapture of her own; she felt, as it were, an ecstasy
+like that of love.
+
+"She stood before the hearth during the execution of the principal theme
+of the _rondo_; and when she ceased her face changed. She looked tired;
+her features seemed to alter. She had laid the mask aside; her part as
+an actress was over. Yet the faded look that came over her beautiful
+face, a result either of this performance or of the evening's fatigues,
+had its charms, too.
+
+"'This is her real self,' I thought.
+
+"She set her foot on a bronze bar of the fender as if to warm it, took
+off her gloves, and drew over her head the gold chain from which her
+bejeweled scent-bottle hung. It gave me a quite indescribable pleasure
+to watch the feline grace of every movement; the supple grace a cat
+displays as it adjusts its toilette in the sun. She looked at herself
+in the mirror and said aloud ill-humoredly--'I did not look well this
+evening, my complexion is going with alarming rapidity; perhaps I
+ought to keep earlier hours, and give up this life of dissipation. Does
+Justine mean to trifle with me?' She rang again; her maid hurried in.
+Where she had been I cannot tell; she came in by a secret staircase.
+I was anxious to make a study of her. I had lodged accusations, in
+my romantic imaginings, against this invisible waiting-woman, a tall,
+well-made brunette.
+
+"'Did madame ring?'
+
+"'Yes, twice,' answered Foedora; 'are you really growing deaf nowadays?'
+
+"'I was preparing madame's milk of almonds.'
+
+"Justine knelt down before her, unlaced her sandals and drew them off,
+while her mistress lay carelessly back on her cushioned armchair beside
+the fire, yawned, and scratched her head. Every movement was perfectly
+natural; there was nothing whatever to indicate the secret sufferings or
+emotions with which I had credited her.
+
+"'George must be in love!' she remarked. 'I shall dismiss him. He has
+drawn the curtains again to-night. What does he mean by it?'
+
+"All the blood in my veins rushed to my heart at this observation, but
+no more was said about curtains.
+
+"'Life is very empty,' the countess went on. 'Ah! be careful not to
+scratch me as you did yesterday. Just look here, I still have the marks
+of your nails about me,' and she held out a silken knee. She thrust her
+bare feet into velvet slippers bound with swan's-down, and unfastened
+her dress, while Justine prepared to comb her hair.
+
+"'You ought to marry, madame, and have children.'
+
+"'Children!' she cried; 'it wants no more than that to finish me at
+once; and a husband! What man is there to whom I could----? Was my hair
+well arranged to-night?'
+
+"'Not particularly.'
+
+"'You are a fool!'
+
+"'That way of crimping your hair too much is the least becoming way
+possible for you. Large, smooth curls suit you a great deal better.'
+
+"'Really?'
+
+"'Yes, really, madame; that wavy style only looks nice in fair hair.'
+
+"'Marriage? never, never! Marriage is a commercial arrangement, for
+which I was never made.'
+
+"What a disheartening scene for a lover! Here was a lonely woman,
+without friends or kin, without the religion of love, without faith in
+any affection. Yet however slightly she might feel the need to pour
+out her heart, a craving that every human being feels, it could only
+be satisfied by gossiping with her maid, by trivial and indifferent
+talk.... I grieved for her.
+
+"Justine unlaced her. I watched her carefully when she was at last
+unveiled. Her maidenly form, in its rose-tinged whiteness, was visible
+through her shift in the taper light, as dazzling as some silver statue
+behind its gauze covering. No, there was no defect that need shrink from
+the stolen glances of love. Alas, a fair form will overcome the stoutest
+resolutions!
+
+"The maid lighted the taper in the alabaster sconce that hung before
+the bed, while her mistress sat thoughtful and silent before the fire.
+Justine went for a warming-pan, turned down the bed, and helped to lay
+her mistress in it; then, after some further time spent in punctiliously
+rendering various services that showed how seriously Foedora respected
+herself, her maid left her. The countess turned to and fro several
+times, and sighed; she was ill at ease; faint, just perceptible sounds,
+like sighs of impatience, escaped from her lips. She reached out a hand
+to the table, and took a flask from it, from which she shook four or
+five drops of some brown liquid into some milk before taking it; again
+there followed some painful sighs, and the exclamation, '_Mon Dieu_!'
+
+"The cry, and the tone in which it was uttered, wrung my heart. By
+degrees she lay motionless. This frightened me; but very soon I heard
+a sleeper's heavy, regular breathing. I drew the rustling silk curtains
+apart, left my post, went to the foot of the bed, and gazed at her with
+feelings that I cannot define. She was so enchanting as she lay like a
+child, with her arm above her head; but the sweetness of the fair,
+quiet visage, surrounded by the lace, only irritated me. I had not been
+prepared for the torture to which I was compelled to submit.
+
+"'_Mon Dieu_!' that scrap of a thought which I understood not, but must
+even take as my sole light, had suddenly modified my opinion of Foedora.
+Trite or profoundly significant, frivolous or of deep import, the words
+might be construed as expressive of either pleasure or pain, of physical
+or of mental suffering. Was it a prayer or a malediction, a forecast or
+a memory, a fear or a regret? A whole life lay in that utterance, a life
+of wealth or of penury; perhaps it contained a crime!
+
+"The mystery that lurked beneath this fair semblance of womanhood grew
+afresh; there were so many ways of explaining Foedora, that she became
+inexplicable. A sort of language seemed to flow from between her lips.
+I put thoughts and feelings into the accidents of her breathing, whether
+weak or regular, gentle, or labored. I shared her dreams; I would
+fain have divined her secrets by reading them through her slumber. I
+hesitated among contradictory opinions and decisions without number.
+I could not deny my heart to the woman I saw before me, with the calm,
+pure beauty in her face. I resolved to make one more effort. If I told
+her the story of my life, my love, my sacrifices, might I not awaken
+pity in her or draw a tear from her who never wept?
+
+"As I set all my hopes on this last experiment, the sounds in the
+streets showed that day was at hand. For a moment's space I pictured
+Foedora waking to find herself in my arms. I could have stolen softly
+to her side and slipped them about her in a close embrace. Resolved
+to resist the cruel tyranny of this thought, I hurried into the salon,
+heedless of any sounds I might make; but, luckily, I came upon a secret
+door leading to a little staircase. As I expected, the key was in the
+lock; I slammed the door, went boldly out into the court, and gained
+the street in three bounds, without looking round to see whether I was
+observed.
+
+"A dramatist was to read a comedy at the countess' house in two days'
+time; I went thither, intending to outstay the others, so as to make a
+rather singular request to her; I meant to ask her to keep the following
+evening for me alone, and to deny herself to other comers; but when I
+found myself alone with her, my courage failed. Every tick of the clock
+alarmed me. It wanted only a quarter of an hour of midnight.
+
+"'If I do not speak,' I thought to myself, 'I must smash my head against
+the corner of the mantelpiece.'
+
+"I gave myself three minutes' grace; the three minutes went by, and
+I did not smash my head upon the marble; my heart grew heavy, like a
+sponge with water.
+
+"'You are exceedingly amusing,' said she.
+
+"'Ah, madame, if you could but understand me!' I answered.
+
+"'What is the matter with you?' she asked. 'You are turning pale.'
+
+"'I am hesitating to ask a favor of you.'
+
+"Her gesture revived my courage. I asked her to make the appointment
+with me.
+
+"'Willingly,' she answered' 'but why will you not speak to me now?'
+
+"'To be candid with you, I ought to explain the full scope of your
+promise: I want to spend this evening by your side, as if we were
+brother and sister. Have no fear; I am aware of your antipathies; you
+must have divined me sufficiently to feel sure that I should wish you
+to do nothing that could be displeasing to you; presumption, moreover,
+would not thus approach you. You have been a friend to me, you have
+shown me kindness and great indulgence; know, therefore, that to-morrow
+I must bid you farewell.--Do not take back your word,' I exclaimed,
+seeing her about to speak, and I went away.
+
+"At eight o'clock one evening towards the end of May, Foedora and I were
+alone together in her gothic boudoir. I feared no longer; I was secure
+of happiness. My mistress should be mine, or I would seek a refuge in
+death. I had condemned my faint-hearted love, and a man who acknowledges
+his weakness is strong indeed.
+
+"The countess, in her blue cashmere gown, was reclining on a sofa, with
+her feet on a cushion. She wore an Oriental turban such as painters
+assign to early Hebrews; its strangeness added an indescribable
+coquettish grace to her attractions. A transitory charm seemed to have
+laid its spell on her face; it might have furnished the argument that
+at every instant we become new and unparalleled beings, without any
+resemblance to the _us_ of the future or of the past. I had never yet
+seen her so radiant.
+
+"'Do you know that you have piqued my curiosity?' she said, laughing.
+
+"'I will not disappoint it,' I said quietly, as I seated myself near
+to her and took the hand that she surrendered to me. 'You have a very
+beautiful voice!'
+
+"'You have never heard me sing!' she exclaimed, starting involuntarily
+with surprise.
+
+"'I will prove that it is quite otherwise, whenever it is necessary. Is
+your delightful singing still to remain a mystery? Have no fear, I do
+not wish to penetrate it.'
+
+"We spent about an hour in familiar talk. While I adopted the attitude
+and manner of a man to whom Foedora must refuse nothing, I showed her
+all a lover's deference. Acting in this way, I received a favor--I was
+allowed to kiss her hand. She daintily drew off the glove, and my whole
+soul was dissolved and poured forth in that kiss. I was steeped in the
+bliss of an illusion in which I tried to believe.
+
+"Foedora lent herself most unexpectedly to my caress and my flatteries.
+Do not accuse me of faint-heartedness; if I had gone a step beyond these
+fraternal compliments, the claws would have been out of the sheath and
+into me. We remained perfectly silent for nearly ten minutes. I was
+admiring her, investing her with the charms she had not. She was mine
+just then, and mine only,--this enchanting being was mine, as was
+permissible, in my imagination; my longing wrapped her round and
+held her close; in my soul I wedded her. The countess was subdued and
+fascinated by my magnetic influence. Ever since I have regretted that
+this subjugation was not absolute; but just then I yearned for her soul,
+her heart alone, and for nothing else. I longed for an ideal and perfect
+happiness, a fair illusion that cannot last for very long. At last I
+spoke, feeling that the last hours of my frenzy were at hand.
+
+"'Hear me, madame. I love you, and you know it; I have said so a hundred
+times; you must have understood me. I would not take upon me the airs
+of a coxcomb, nor would I flatter you, nor urge myself upon you like a
+fool; I would not owe your love to such arts as these! so I have been
+misunderstood. What sufferings have I not endured for your sake! For
+these, however, you were not to blame; but in a few minutes you shall
+decide for yourself. There are two kinds of poverty, madame. One kind
+openly walks the street in rags, an unconscious imitator of Diogenes,
+on a scanty diet, reducing life to its simplest terms; he is happier,
+maybe, than the rich; he has fewer cares at any rate, and accepts such
+portions of the world as stronger spirits refuse. Then there is poverty
+in splendor, a Spanish pauper, concealing the life of a beggar by his
+title, his bravery, and his pride; poverty that wears a white waistcoat
+and yellow kid gloves, a beggar with a carriage, whose whole career will
+be wrecked for lack of a halfpenny. Poverty of the first kind belongs to
+the populace; the second kind is that of blacklegs, of kings, and of men
+of talent. I am neither a man of the people, nor a king, nor a swindler;
+possibly I have no talent either, I am an exception. With the name I
+bear I must die sooner than beg. Set your mind at rest, madame,' I
+said; 'to-day I have abundance, I possess sufficient of the clay for my
+needs'; for the hard look passed over her face which we wear whenever a
+well-dressed beggar takes us by surprise. 'Do you remember the day
+when you wished to go to the Gymnase without me, never believing that I
+should be there?' I went on.
+
+"She nodded.
+
+"'I had laid out my last five-franc piece that I might see you
+there.--Do you recollect our walk in the Jardin des Plantes? The hire of
+your cab took everything I had.'
+
+"I told her about my sacrifices, and described the life I led; heated
+not with wine, as I am to-day, but by the generous enthusiasm of my
+heart, my passion overflowed in burning words; I have forgotten how the
+feelings within me blazed forth; neither memory nor skill of mine
+could possibly reproduce it. It was no colorless chronicle of blighted
+affections; my love was strengthened by fair hopes; and such words came
+to me, by love's inspiration, that each had power to set forth a whole
+life--like echoes of the cries of a soul in torment. In such tones the
+last prayers ascend from dying men on the battlefield. I stopped, for
+she was weeping. _Grand Dieu_! I had reaped an actor's reward, the
+success of a counterfeit passion displayed at the cost of five francs
+paid at the theatre door. I had drawn tears from her.
+
+"'If I had known----' she said.
+
+"'Do not finish the sentence,' I broke in. 'Even now I love you well
+enough to murder you----'
+
+"She reached for the bell-pull. I burst into a roar of laughter.
+
+"'Do not call any one,' I said. 'I shall leave you to finish your life
+in peace. It would be a blundering kind of hatred that would murder you!
+You need not fear violence of any kind; I have spent a whole night at
+the foot of your bed without----'
+
+"'Monsieur----' she said, blushing; but after that first impulse of
+modesty that even the most hardened women must surely own, she flung a
+scornful glance at me, and said:
+
+"'You must have been very cold.'
+
+"'Do you think that I set such value on your beauty, madame,' I
+answered, guessing the thoughts that moved her. 'Your beautiful face is
+for me a promise of a soul yet more beautiful. Madame, those to whom
+a woman is merely a woman can always purchase odalisques fit for the
+seraglio, and achieve their happiness at a small cost. But I aspired
+to something higher; I wanted the life of close communion of heart
+and heart with you that have no heart. I know that now. If you were to
+belong to another, I could kill him. And yet, no; for you would love
+him, and his death might hurt you perhaps. What agony this is!' I cried.
+
+"'If it is any comfort to you,' she retorted cheerfully, 'I can assure
+you that I shall never belong to any one----'
+
+"'So you offer an affront to God Himself,' I interrupted; 'and you
+will be punished for it. Some day you will lie upon your sofa suffering
+unheard-of ills, unable to endure the light or the slightest sound,
+condemned to live as it were in the tomb. Then, when you seek the causes
+of those lingering and avenging torments, you will remember the woes
+that you distributed so lavishly upon your way. You have sown curses,
+and hatred will be your reward. We are the real judges, the executioners
+of a justice that reigns here below, which overrules the justice of man
+and the laws of God.'
+
+"'No doubt it is very culpable in me not to love you,' she said,
+laughing. 'Am I to blame? No. I do not love you; you are a man, that is
+sufficient. I am happy by myself; why should I give up my way of living,
+a selfish way, if you will, for the caprices of a master? Marriage is a
+sacrament by virtue of which each imparts nothing but vexations to the
+other. Children, moreover, worry me. Did I not faithfully warn you about
+my nature? Why are you not satisfied to have my friendship? I wish I
+could make you amends for all the troubles I have caused you, through
+not guessing the value of your poor five-franc pieces. I appreciate the
+extent of your sacrifices; but your devotion and delicate tact can be
+repaid by love alone, and I care so little for you, that this scene has
+a disagreeable effect upon me.'
+
+"'I am fully aware of my absurdity,' I said, unable to restrain my
+tears. 'Pardon me,' I went on, 'it was a delight to hear those cruel
+words you have just uttered, so well I love you. O, if I could testify
+my love with every drop of blood in me!'
+
+"'Men always repeat these classic formulas to us, more or less
+effectively,' she answered, still smiling. 'But it appears very
+difficult to die at our feet, for I see corpses of that kind about
+everywhere. It is twelve o'clock. Allow me to go to bed.'
+
+"'And in two hours' time you will cry to yourself, _Ah, mon Dieu_!'
+
+"'Like the day before yesterday! Yes,' she said, 'I was thinking of my
+stockbroker; I had forgotten to tell him to convert my five per cent
+stock into threes, and the three per cents had fallen during the day.'
+
+"I looked at her, and my eyes glittered with anger. Sometimes a
+crime may be a whole romance; I understood that just then. She was so
+accustomed, no doubt, to the most impassioned declarations of this kind,
+that my words and my tears were forgotten already.
+
+"'Would you marry a peer of France?' I demanded abruptly.
+
+"'If he were a duke, I might.'
+
+"I seized my hat and made her a bow.
+
+"'Permit me to accompany you to the door,' she said, cutting irony in
+her tones, in the poise of her head, and in her gesture.
+
+"'Madame----'
+
+"'Monsieur?'
+
+"'I shall never see you again.'
+
+"'I hope not,' and she insolently inclined her head.
+
+"'You wish to be a duchess?' I cried, excited by a sort of madness that
+her insolence roused in me. 'You are wild for honors and titles? Well,
+only let me love you; bid my pen write and my voice speak for you alone;
+be the inmost soul of my life, my guiding star! Then, only accept me
+for your husband as a minister, a peer of France, a duke. I will make of
+myself whatever you would have me be!'
+
+"'You made good use of the time you spent with the advocate,' she said
+smiling. 'There is a fervency about your pleadings.'
+
+"'The present is yours,' I cried, 'but the future is mine! I only lose a
+woman; you are losing a name and a family. Time is big with my revenge;
+time will spoil your beauty, and yours will be a solitary death; and
+glory waits for me!'
+
+"'Thanks for your peroration!' she said, repressing a yawn; the wish
+that she might never see me again was expressed in her whole bearing.
+
+"That remark silenced me. I flung at her a glance full of hatred, and
+hurried away.
+
+"Foedora must be forgotten; I must cure myself of my infatuation, and
+betake myself once more to my lonely studies, or die. So I set myself
+tremendous tasks; I determined to complete my labors. For fifteen days I
+never left my garret, spending whole nights in pallid thought. I worked
+with difficulty, and by fits and starts, despite my courage and the
+stimulation of despair. The music had fled. I could not exorcise the
+brilliant mocking image of Foedora. Something morbid brooded over
+every thought, a vague longing as dreadful as remorse. I imitated the
+anchorites of the Thebaid. If I did not pray as they did, I lived a life
+in the desert like theirs, hewing out my ideas as they were wont to hew
+their rocks. I could at need have girdled my waist with spikes, that
+physical suffering might quell mental anguish.
+
+"One evening Pauline found her way into my room.
+
+"'You are killing yourself,' she said imploringly; 'you should go out
+and see your friends----'
+
+"'Pauline, you were a true prophet; Foedora is killing me, I want to
+die. My life is intolerable.'
+
+"'Is there only one woman in the world?' she asked, smiling. 'Why make
+yourself so miserable in so short a life?'
+
+"I looked at Pauline in bewilderment. She left me before I noticed her
+departure; the sound of her words had reached me, but not their
+sense. Very soon I had to take my Memoirs in manuscript to my
+literary-contractor. I was so absorbed by my passion, that I could not
+remember how I had managed to live without money; I only knew that the
+four hundred and fifty francs due to me would pay my debts. So I went
+to receive my salary, and met Rastignac, who thought me changed and
+thinner.
+
+"'What hospital have you been discharged from?' he asked.
+
+"'That woman is killing me,' I answered; 'I can neither despise her nor
+forget her.'
+
+"'You had much better kill her, then perhaps you would think no more of
+her,' he said, laughing.
+
+"'I have often thought of it,' I replied; 'but though sometimes the
+thought of a crime revives my spirits, of violence and murder, either or
+both, I am really incapable of carrying out the design. The countess is
+an admirable monster who would crave for pardon, and not every man is an
+Othello.'
+
+"'She is like every woman who is beyond our reach,' Rastignac
+interrupted.
+
+"'I am mad,' I cried; 'I can feel the madness raging at times in my
+brain. My ideas are like shadows; they flit before me, and I cannot
+grasp them. Death would be preferable to this life, and I have carefully
+considered the best way of putting an end to the struggle. I am not
+thinking of the living Foedora in the Faubourg Saint Honore, but of my
+Foedora here,' and I tapped my forehead. 'What to you say to opium?'
+
+"'Pshaw! horrid agonies,' said Rastignac.
+
+"'Or charcoal fumes?'
+
+"'A low dodge.'
+
+"'Or the Seine?'
+
+"'The drag-nets, and the Morgue too, are filthy.'
+
+"'A pistol-shot?'
+
+"'And if you miscalculate, you disfigure yourself for life. Listen to
+me,' he went on, 'like all young men, I have pondered over suicide.
+Which of us hasn't killed himself two or three times before he is
+thirty? I find there is no better course than to use existence as a
+means of pleasure. Go in for thorough dissipation, and your passion or
+you will perish in it. Intemperance, my dear fellow, commands all forms
+of death. Does she not wield the thunderbolt of apoplexy? Apoplexy is
+a pistol-shot that does not miscalculate. Orgies are lavish in all
+physical pleasures; is not that the small change for opium? And the riot
+that makes us drink to excess bears a challenge to mortal combat with
+wine. That butt of Malmsey of the Duke of Clarence's must have had a
+pleasanter flavor than Seine mud. When we sink gloriously under the
+table, is not that a periodical death by drowning on a small scale? If
+we are picked up by the police and stretched out on those chilly benches
+of theirs at the police-station, do we not enjoy all the pleasures of
+the Morgue? For though we are not blue and green, muddy and swollen
+corpses, on the other hand we have the consciousness of the climax.
+
+"'Ah,' he went on, 'this protracted suicide has nothing in common with
+the bankrupt grocer's demise. Tradespeople have brought the river into
+disrepute; they fling themselves in to soften their creditors' hearts.
+In your place I should endeavor to die gracefully; and if you wish
+to invent a novel way of doing it, by struggling with life after this
+manner, I will be your second. I am disappointed and sick of everything.
+The Alsacienne, whom it was proposed that I should marry, had six toes
+on her left foot; I cannot possibly live with a woman who has six toes!
+It would get about to a certainty, and then I should be ridiculous.
+Her income was only eighteen thousand francs; her fortune diminished
+in quantity as her toes increased. The devil take it; if we begin an
+outrageous sort of life, we may come on some bit of luck, perhaps!'
+
+"Rastignac's eloquence carried me away. The attractions of the plan
+shone too temptingly, hopes were kindled, the poetical aspects of the
+matter appealed to a poet.
+
+"'How about money?' I said.
+
+"'Haven't you four hundred and fifty francs?'
+
+"'Yes, but debts to my landlady and the tailor----'
+
+"'You would pay your tailor? You will never be anything whatever, not so
+much as a minister.'
+
+"'But what can one do with twenty louis?'
+
+"'Go to the gaming-table.'
+
+"I shuddered.
+
+"'You are going to launch out into what I call systematic dissipation,'
+said he, noticing my scruples, 'and yet you are afraid of a green
+table-cloth.'
+
+"'Listen to me,' I answered. 'I promised my father never to set foot in
+a gaming-house. Not only is that a sacred promise, but I still feel an
+unconquerable disgust whenever I pass a gambling-hell; take the money
+and go without me. While our fortune is at stake, I will set my own
+affairs straight, and then I will go to your lodgings and wait for you.'
+
+"That was the way I went to perdition. A young man has only to come
+across a woman who will not love him, or a woman who loves him too well,
+and his whole life becomes a chaos. Prosperity swallows up our energy
+just as adversity obscures our virtues. Back once more in my Hotel de
+Saint-Quentin, I gazed about me a long while in the garret where I had
+led my scholar's temperate life, a life which would perhaps have been
+a long and honorable one, and that I ought not to have quitted for
+the fevered existence which had urged me to the brink of a precipice.
+Pauline surprised me in this dejected attitude.
+
+"'Why, what is the matter with you?' she asked.
+
+"I rose and quietly counted out the money owing to her mother, and added
+to it sufficient to pay for six months' rent in advance. She watched me
+in some alarm.
+
+"'I am going to leave you, dear Pauline.'
+
+"'I knew it!' she exclaimed.
+
+"'Listen, my child. I have not given up the idea of coming back. Keep
+my room for me for six months. If I do not return by the fifteenth of
+November, you will come into possession of my things. This sealed packet
+of manuscript is the fair copy of my great work on "The Will,"' I went
+on, pointing to a package. 'Will you deposit it in the King's Library?
+And you may do as you wish with everything that is left here.'
+
+"Her look weighed heavily on my heart; Pauline was an embodiment of
+conscience there before me.
+
+"'I shall have no more lessons,' she said, pointing to the piano.
+
+"I did not answer that.
+
+"'Will you write to me?'
+
+"'Good-bye, Pauline.'
+
+"I gently drew her towards me, and set a kiss on that innocent fair brow
+of hers, like snow that has not yet touched the earth--a father's or a
+brother's kiss. She fled. I would not see Madame Gaudin, hung my key in
+its wonted place, and departed. I was almost at the end of the Rue de
+Cluny when I heard a woman's light footstep behind me.
+
+"'I have embroidered this purse for you,' Pauline said; 'will you refuse
+even that?'
+
+"By the light of the street lamp I thought I saw tears in Pauline's
+eyes, and I groaned. Moved perhaps by a common impulse, we parted in
+haste like people who fear the contagion of the plague.
+
+"As I waited with dignified calmness for Rastignac's return, his room
+seemed a grotesque interpretation of the sort of life I was about to
+enter upon. The clock on the chimney-piece was surmounted by a Venus
+resting on her tortoise; a half-smoked cigar lay in her arms. Costly
+furniture of various kinds--love tokens, very likely--was scattered
+about. Old shoes lay on a luxurious sofa. The comfortable armchair into
+which I had thrown myself bore as many scars as a veteran; the arms were
+gnashed, the back was overlaid with a thick, stale deposit of pomade and
+hair-oil from the heads of all his visitors. Splendor and squalor were
+oddly mingled, on the walls, the bed, and everywhere. You might have
+thought of a Neapolitan palace and the groups of lazzaroni about it. It
+was the room of a gambler or a mauvais sujet, where the luxury exists
+for one individual, who leads the life of the senses and does not
+trouble himself over inconsistencies.
+
+"There was a certain imaginative element about the picture it presented.
+Life was suddenly revealed there in its rags and spangles as
+the incomplete thing it really is, of course, but so vividly and
+picturesquely; it was like a den where a brigand has heaped up all the
+plunder in which he delights. Some pages were missing from a copy of
+Byron's poems: they had gone to light a fire of a few sticks for this
+young person, who played for stakes of a thousand francs, and had not
+a faggot; he kept a tilbury, and had not a whole shirt to his back. Any
+day a countess or an actress or a run of luck at ecarte might set him up
+with an outfit worthy of a king. A candle had been stuck into the green
+bronze sheath of a vestaholder; a woman's portrait lay yonder, torn out
+of its carved gold setting. How was it possible that a young man, whose
+nature craved excitement, could renounce a life so attractive by reason
+of its contradictions; a life that afforded all the delights of war in
+the midst of peace? I was growing drowsy when Rastignac kicked the door
+open and shouted:
+
+"'Victory! Now we can take our time about dying.'
+
+"He held out his hat filled with gold to me, and put it down on the
+table; then we pranced round it like a pair of cannibals about to eat a
+victim; we stamped, and danced, and yelled, and sang; we gave each other
+blows fit to kill an elephant, at sight of all the pleasures of the
+world contained in that hat.
+
+"'Twenty-seven thousand francs,' said Rastignac, adding a few bank-notes
+to the pile of gold. 'That would be enough for other folk to live upon;
+will it be sufficient for us to die on? Yes! we will breathe our last in
+a bath of gold--hurrah!' and we capered afresh.
+
+"We divided the windfall. We began with double-napoleons, and came down
+to the smaller coins, one by one. 'This for you, this for me,' we kept
+saying, distilling our joy drop by drop.
+
+"'We won't go to sleep,' cried Rastignac. 'Joseph! some punch!'
+
+"He threw gold to his faithful attendant.
+
+"'There is your share,' he said; 'go and bury yourself if you can.'
+
+"Next day I went to Lesage and chose my furniture, took the rooms that
+you know in the Rue Taitbout, and left the decoration to one of the best
+upholsterers. I bought horses. I plunged into a vortex of pleasures, at
+once hollow and real. I went in for play, gaining and losing
+enormous sums, but only at friends' houses and in ballrooms; never in
+gaming-houses, for which I still retained the holy horror of my early
+days. Without meaning it, I made some friends, either through quarrels
+or owing to the easy confidence established among those who are going
+to the bad together; nothing, possibly, makes us cling to one another so
+tightly as our evil propensities.
+
+"I made several ventures in literature, which were flatteringly
+received. Great men who followed the profession of letters, having
+nothing to fear from me, belauded me, not so much on account of my
+merits as to cast a slur on those of their rivals.
+
+"I became a 'free-liver,' to make use of the picturesque expression
+appropriated by the language of excess. I made it a point of honor not
+to be long about dying, and that my zeal and prowess should eclipse
+those displayed by all others in the jolliest company. I was always
+spruce and carefully dressed. I had some reputation for cleverness.
+There was no sign about me of the fearful way of living which makes a
+man into a mere disgusting apparatus, a funnel, a pampered beast.
+
+"Very soon Debauch rose before me in all the majesty of its horror, and
+I grasped all that it meant. Those prudent, steady-going characters who
+are laying down wine in bottles for their heirs, can barely conceive,
+it is true, of so wide a theory of life, nor appreciate its normal
+condition; but when will you instill poetry into the provincial
+intellect? Opium and tea, with all their delights, are merely drugs to
+folk of that calibre.
+
+"Is not the imperfect sybarite to be met with even in Paris itself, that
+intellectual metropolis? Unfit to endure the fatigues of pleasure, this
+sort of person, after a drinking bout, is very much like those worthy
+bourgeois who fall foul of music after hearing a new opera by Rossini.
+Does he not renounce these courses in the same frame of mind that leads
+an abstemious man to forswear Ruffec pates, because the first one,
+forsooth, gave him the indigestion?
+
+"Debauch is as surely an art as poetry, and is not for craven spirits.
+To penetrate its mysteries and appreciate its charms, conscientious
+application is required; and as with every path of knowledge, the way is
+thorny and forbidding at the outset. The great pleasures of humanity are
+hedged about with formidable obstacles; not its single enjoyments, but
+enjoyment as a system, a system which establishes seldom experienced
+sensations and makes them habitual, which concentrates and multiplies
+them for us, creating a dramatic life within our life, and imperatively
+demanding a prompt and enormous expenditure of vitality. War, Power,
+Art, like Debauch, are all forms of demoralization, equally remote from
+the faculties of humanity, equally profound, and all are alike difficult
+of access. But when man has once stormed the heights of these grand
+mysteries, does he not walk in another world? Are not generals,
+ministers, and artists carried, more or less, towards destruction by
+the need of violent distractions in an existence so remote from ordinary
+life as theirs?
+
+"War, after all, is the Excess of bloodshed, as the Excess of
+self-interest produces Politics. Excesses of every sort are brothers.
+These social enormities possess the attraction of the abyss; they draw
+towards themselves as St. Helena beckoned Napoleon; we are fascinated,
+our heads swim, we wish to sound their depths though we cannot
+account for the wish. Perhaps the thought of Infinity dwells in these
+precipices, perhaps they contain some colossal flattery for the soul of
+man; for is he not, then, wholly absorbed in himself?
+
+"The wearied artist needs a complete contrast to his paradise of
+imaginings and of studious hours; he either craves, like God, the
+seventh day of rest, or with Satan, the pleasures of hell; so that
+his senses may have free play in opposition to the employment of his
+faculties. Byron could never have taken for his relaxation to the
+independent gentleman's delights of boston and gossip, for he was a
+poet, and so must needs pit Greece against Mahmoud.
+
+"In war, is not man an angel of extirpation, a sort of executioner on
+a gigantic scale? Must not the spell be strong indeed that makes us
+undergo such horrid sufferings so hostile to our weak frames, sufferings
+that encircle every strong passion with a hedge of thorns? The tobacco
+smoker is seized with convulsions, and goes through a kind of agony
+consequent upon his excesses; but has he not borne a part in delightful
+festivals in realms unknown? Has Europe ever ceased from wars? She
+has never given herself time to wipe the stains from her feet that are
+steeped in blood to the ankle. Mankind at large is carried away by fits
+of intoxication, as nature has its accessions of love.
+
+"For men in private life, for a vegetating Mirabeau dreaming of storms
+in a time of calm, Excess comprises all things; it perpetually embraces
+the whole sum of life; it is something better still--it is a duel with
+an antagonist of unknown power, a monster, terrible at first sight, that
+must be seized by the horns, a labor that cannot be imagined.
+
+"Suppose that nature has endowed you with a feeble stomach or one of
+limited capacity; you acquire a mastery over it and improve it; you
+learn to carry your liquor; you grow accustomed to being drunk; you pass
+whole nights without sleep; at last you acquire the constitution of a
+colonel of cuirassiers; and in this way you create yourself afresh, as
+if to fly in the face of Providence.
+
+"A man transformed after this sort is like a neophyte who has at last
+become a veteran, has accustomed his mind to shot and shell and his legs
+to lengthy marches. When the monster's hold on him is still uncertain,
+and it is not yet known which will have the better of it, they roll over
+and over, alternately victor and vanquished, in a world where everything
+is wonderful, where every ache of the soul is laid to sleep, where only
+the shadows of ideas are revived.
+
+"This furious struggle has already become a necessity for us. The
+prodigal has struck a bargain for all the enjoyments with which life
+teems abundantly, at the price of his own death, like the mythical
+persons in legends who sold themselves to the devil for the power of
+doing evil. For them, instead of flowing quietly on in its monotonous
+course in the depths of some counting-house or study, life is poured out
+in a boiling torrent.
+
+"Excess is, in short, for the body what the mystic's ecstasy is for
+the soul. Intoxication steeps you in fantastic imaginings every whit as
+strange as those of ecstatics. You know hours as full of rapture as a
+young girl's dreams; you travel without fatigue; you chat pleasantly
+with your friends; words come to you with a whole life in each, and
+fresh pleasures without regrets; poems are set forth for you in a few
+brief phrases. The coarse animal satisfaction, in which science has
+tried to find a soul, is followed by the enchanted drowsiness that men
+sigh for under the burden of consciousness. Is it not because they all
+feel the need of absolute repose? Because Excess is a sort of toll that
+genius pays to pain?
+
+"Look at all great men; nature made them pleasure-loving or base, every
+one. Some mocking or jealous power corrupted them in either soul or
+body, so as to make all their powers futile, and their efforts of no
+avail.
+
+"All men and all things appear before you in the guise you choose,
+in those hours when wine has sway. You are lord of all creation; you
+transform it at your pleasure. And throughout this unceasing delirium,
+Play may pour, at your will, its molten lead into your veins.
+
+"Some day you will fall into the monster's power. Then you will have, as
+I had, a frenzied awakening, with impotence sitting by your pillow. Are
+you an old soldier? Phthisis attacks you. A diplomatist? An aneurism
+hangs death in your heart by a thread. It will perhaps be consumption
+that will cry out to me, 'Let us be going!' as to Raphael of Urbino, in
+old time, killed by an excess of love.
+
+"In this way I have existed. I was launched into the world too early or
+too late. My energy would have been dangerous there, no doubt, if I had
+not have squandered it in such ways as these. Was not the world rid of
+an Alexander, by the cup of Hercules, at the close of a drinking bout?
+
+"There are some, the sport of Destiny, who must either have heaven or
+hell, the hospice of St. Bernard or riotous excess. Only just now
+I lacked the heart to moralize about those two," and he pointed to
+Euphrasia and Aquilina. "They are types of my own personal history,
+images of my life! I could scarcely reproach them; they stood before me
+like judges.
+
+"In the midst of this drama that I was enacting, and while my
+distracting disorder was at its height, two crises supervened; each
+brought me keen and abundant pangs. The first came a few days after I
+had flung myself, like Sardanapalus, on my pyre. I met Foedora under the
+peristyle of the Bouffons. We both were waiting for our carriages.
+
+"'Ah! so you are living yet?'
+
+"That was the meaning of her smile, and probably of the spiteful words
+she murmured in the ear of her cicisbeo, telling him my history no
+doubt, rating mine as a common love affair. She was deceived, yet she
+was applauding her perspicacity. Oh, that I should be dying for her,
+must still adore her, always see her through my potations, see her still
+when I was overcome with wine, or in the arms of courtesans; and know
+that I was a target for her scornful jests! Oh, that I should be unable
+to tear the love of her out of my breast and to fling it at her feet!
+
+"Well, I quickly exhausted my funds, but owing to those three years
+of discipline, I enjoyed the most robust health, and on the day that I
+found myself without a penny I felt remarkably well. In order to carry
+on the process of dying, I signed bills at short dates, and the day came
+when they must be met. Painful excitements! but how they quicken the
+pulses of youth! I was not prematurely aged; I was young yet, and full
+of vigor and life.
+
+"At my first debt all my virtues came to life; slowly and despairingly
+they seemed to pace towards me; but I could compound with them--they
+were like aged aunts that begin with a scolding and end by bestowing
+tears and money upon you.
+
+"Imagination was less yielding; I saw my name bandied about through
+every city in Europe. 'One's name is oneself' says Eusebe Salverte.
+After these excursions I returned to the room I had never quitted, like
+a doppelganger in a German tale, and came to myself with a start.
+
+"I used to see with indifference a banker's messenger going on his
+errands through the streets of Paris, like a commercial Nemesis, wearing
+his master's livery--a gray coat and a silver badge; but now I hated the
+species in advance. One of them came one morning to ask me to meet some
+eleven bills that I had scrawled my name upon. My signature was worth
+three thousand francs! Taking me altogether, I myself was not worth
+that amount. Sheriff's deputies rose up before me, turning their callous
+faces upon my despair, as the hangman regards the criminal to whom he
+says, 'It has just struck half-past three.' I was in the power of their
+clerks; they could scribble my name, drag it through the mire, and jeer
+at it. I was a defaulter. Has a debtor any right to himself? Could
+not other men call me to account for my way of living? Why had I eaten
+puddings _a la chipolata_? Why had I iced my wine? Why had I slept, or
+walked, or thought, or amused myself when I had not paid them?
+
+"At any moment, in the middle of a poem, during some train of thought,
+or while I was gaily breakfasting in the pleasant company of my friends,
+I might look to see a gentleman enter in a coat of chestnut-brown, with
+a shabby hat in his hand. This gentleman's appearance would signify my
+debt, the bill I had drawn; the spectre would compel me to leave the
+table to speak to him, blight my spirits, despoil me of my cheerfulness,
+of my mistress, of all I possessed, down to my very bedstead.
+
+"Remorse itself is more easily endured. Remorse does not drive us into
+the street nor into the prison of Sainte-Pelagie; it does not force
+us into the detestable sink of vice. Remorse only brings us to the
+scaffold, where the executioner invests us with a certain dignity; as we
+pay the extreme penalty, everybody believes in our innocence; but people
+will not credit a penniless prodigal with a single virtue.
+
+"My debts had other incarnations. There is the kind that goes about on
+two feet, in a green cloth coat, and blue spectacles, carrying umbrellas
+of various hues; you come face to face with him at the corner of
+some street, in the midst of your mirth. These have the detestable
+prerogative of saying, 'M. de Valentin owes me something, and does
+not pay. I have a hold on him. He had better not show me any offensive
+airs!' You must bow to your creditors, and moreover bow politely. 'When
+are you going to pay me?' say they. And you must lie, and beg money of
+another man, and cringe to a fool seated on his strong-box, and receive
+sour looks in return from these horse-leeches; a blow would be less
+hateful; you must put up with their crass ignorance and calculating
+morality. A debt is a feat of the imaginative that they cannot
+appreciate. A borrower is often carried away and over-mastered by
+generous impulses; nothing great, nothing magnanimous can move or
+dominate those who live for money, and recognize nothing but money. I
+myself held money in abhorrence.
+
+"Or a bill may undergo a final transformation into some meritorious
+old man with a family dependent upon him. My creditor might be a living
+picture for Greuze, a paralytic with his children round him, a soldier's
+widow, holding out beseeching hands to me. Terrible creditors are
+these with whom we are forced to sympathize, and when their claims are
+satisfied we owe them a further debt of assistance.
+
+"The night before the bills fell due, I lay down with the false calm of
+those who sleep before their approaching execution, or with a duel in
+prospect, rocked as they are by delusive hopes. But when I woke, when
+I was cool and collected, when I found myself imprisoned in a banker's
+portfolio, and floundering in statements covered with red ink--then my
+debts sprang up everywhere, like grasshoppers, before my eyes. There
+were my debts, my clock, my armchairs; my debts were inlaid in the very
+furniture which I liked best to use. These gentle inanimate slaves were
+to fall prey to the harpies of the Chatelet, were to be carried off by
+the broker's men, and brutally thrown on the market. Ah, my property was
+a part of myself!
+
+"The sound of the door-bell rang through my heart; while it seemed to
+strike at me, where kings should be struck at--in the head. Mine was a
+martyrdom, without heaven for its reward. For a magnanimous nature, debt
+is a hell, and a hell, moreover, with sheriff's officers and brokers in
+it. An undischarged debt is something mean and sordid; it is a beginning
+of knavery; it is something worse, it is a lie; it prepares the way for
+crime, and brings together the planks for the scaffold. My bills
+were protested. Three days afterwards I met them, and this is how it
+happened.
+
+"A speculator came, offering to buy the island in the Loire belonging
+to me, where my mother lay buried. I closed with him. When I went to
+his solicitor to sign the deeds, I felt a cavern-like chill in the dark
+office that made me shudder; it was the same cold dampness that had laid
+hold upon me at the brink of my father's grave. I looked upon this as
+an evil omen. I seemed to see the shade of my mother, and to hear her
+voice. What power was it that made my own name ring vaguely in my ears,
+in spite of the clamor of bells?
+
+"The money paid down for my island, when all my debts were discharged,
+left me in possession of two thousand francs. I could now have returned
+to the scholar's tranquil life, it is true; I could have gone back to
+my garret after having gained an experience of life, with my head filled
+with the results of extensive observation, and with a certain sort of
+reputation attaching to me. But Foedora's hold upon her victim was not
+relaxed. We often met. I compelled her admirers to sound my name in her
+ears, by dint of astonishing them with my cleverness and success, with
+my horses and equipages. It all found her impassive and uninterested; so
+did an ugly phrase of Rastignac's, 'He is killing himself for you.'
+
+"I charged the world at large with my revenge, but I was not happy.
+While I was fathoming the miry depths of life, I only recognized the
+more keenly at all times the happiness of reciprocal affection; it was
+a shadow that I followed through all that befell me in my extravagance,
+and in my wildest moments. It was my misfortune to be deceived in my
+fairest beliefs, to be punished by ingratitude for benefiting others,
+and to receive uncounted pleasures as the reward of my errors--a
+sinister doctrine, but a true one for the prodigal!
+
+"The contagious leprosy of Foedora's vanity had taken hold of me at
+last. I probed my soul, and found it cankered and rotten. I bore the
+marks of the devil's claw upon my forehead. It was impossible to me
+thenceforward to do without the incessant agitation of a life fraught
+with danger at every moment, or to dispense with the execrable
+refinements of luxury. If I had possessed millions, I should still have
+gambled, reveled, and racketed about. I wished never to be alone with
+myself, and I must have false friends and courtesans, wine and good
+cheer to distract me. The ties that attach a man to family life had been
+permanently broken for me. I had become a galley-slave of pleasure,
+and must accomplish my destiny of suicide. During the last days of my
+prosperity, I spent every night in the most incredible excesses; but
+every morning death cast me back upon life again. I would have taken
+a conflagration with as little concern as any man with a life annuity.
+However, I at last found myself alone with a twenty-franc piece; I
+bethought me then of Rastignac's luck----
+
+"Eh, eh!----" Raphael exclaimed, interrupting himself, as he remembered
+the talisman and drew it from his pocket. Perhaps he was wearied by the
+long day's strain, and had no more strength left wherewith to pilot his
+head through the seas of wine and punch; or perhaps, exasperated by this
+symbol of his own existence, the torrent of his own eloquence gradually
+overwhelmed him. Raphael became excited and elated and like one
+completely deprived of reason.
+
+"The devil take death!" he shouted, brandishing the skin; "I mean to
+live! I am rich, I have every virtue; nothing will withstand me. Who
+would not be generous, when everything is in his power? Aha! Aha! I
+wished for two hundred thousand livres a year, and I shall have them.
+Bow down before me, all of you, wallowing on the carpets like swine in
+the mire! You all belong to me--a precious property truly! I am rich; I
+could buy you all, even the deputy snoring over there. Scum of society,
+give me your benediction! I am the Pope."
+
+Raphael's vociferations had been hitherto drowned by a thorough-bass
+of snores, but now they became suddenly audible. Most of the sleepers
+started up with a cry, saw the cause of the disturbance on his feet,
+tottering uncertainly, and cursed him in concert for a drunken brawler.
+
+"Silence!" shouted Raphael. "Back to your kennels, you dogs! Emile, I
+have riches, I will give you Havana cigars!"
+
+"I am listening," the poet replied. "Death or Foedora! On with you! That
+silky Foedora deceived you. Women are all daughters of Eve. There is
+nothing dramatic about that rigmarole of yours."
+
+"Ah, but you were sleeping, slyboots."
+
+"No--'Death or Foedora!'--I have it!"
+
+"Wake up!" Raphael shouted, beating Emile with the piece of shagreen as
+if he meant to draw electric fluid out of it.
+
+"_Tonnerre_!" said Emile, springing up and flinging his arms round
+Raphael; "my friend, remember the sort of women you are with."
+
+"I am a millionaire!"
+
+"If you are not a millionaire, you are most certainly drunk."
+
+"Drunk with power. I can kill you!--Silence! I am Nero! I am
+Nebuchadnezzar!"
+
+"But, Raphael, we are in queer company, and you ought to keep quiet for
+the sake of your own dignity."
+
+"My life has been silent too long. I mean to have my revenge now on the
+world at large. I will not amuse myself by squandering paltry five-franc
+pieces; I will reproduce and sum up my epoch by absorbing human
+lives, human minds, and human souls. There are the treasures of
+pestilence--that is no paltry kind of wealth, is it? I will wrestle with
+fevers--yellow, blue, or green--with whole armies, with gibbets. I can
+possess Foedora--Yet no, I do not want Foedora; she is a disease; I am
+dying of Foedora. I want to forget Foedora."
+
+"If you keep on calling out like this, I shall take you into the
+dining-room."
+
+"Do you see this skin? It is Solomon's will. Solomon belongs to me--a
+little varlet of a king! Arabia is mine, Arabia Petraea to boot; and the
+universe, and you too, if I choose. If I choose--Ah! be careful. I can
+buy up all our journalist's shop; you shall be my valet. You shall be
+my valet, you shall manage my newspaper. Valet! _valet_, that is to say,
+free from aches and pains, because he has no brains."
+
+At the word, Emile carried Raphael off into the dining-room.
+
+"All right," he remarked; "yes, my friend, I am your valet. But you
+are about to be editor-in-chief of a newspaper; so be quiet, and behave
+properly, for my sake. Have you no regard for me?"
+
+"Regard for you! You shall have Havana cigars, with this bit of
+shagreen: always with this skin, this supreme bit of shagreen. It is
+a cure for corns, and efficacious remedy. Do you suffer? I will remove
+them."
+
+"Never have I known you so senseless----"
+
+"Senseless, my friend? Not at all. This skin contracts whenever I form a
+wish--'tis a paradox. There is a Brahmin underneath it! The Brahmin must
+be a droll fellow, for our desires, look you, are bound to expand----"
+
+"Yes, yes----"
+
+"I tell you----"
+
+"Yes, yes, very true, I am quite of your opinion--our desires
+expand----"
+
+"The skin, I tell you."
+
+"Yes."
+
+"You don't believe me. I know you, my friend; you are as full of lies as
+a new-made king."
+
+"How can you expect me to follow your drunken maunderings?"
+
+"I will bet you I can prove it. Let us measure it----"
+
+"Goodness! he will never get off to sleep," exclaimed Emile, as he
+watched Raphael rummaging busily in the dining-room.
+
+Thanks to the peculiar clearness with which external objects are
+sometimes projected on an inebriated brain, in sharp contrast to its own
+obscure imaginings, Valentin found an inkstand and a table-napkin, with
+the quickness of a monkey, repeating all the time:
+
+"Let us measure it! Let us measure it!"
+
+"All right," said Emile; "let us measure it!"
+
+The two friends spread out the table-napkin and laid the Magic Skin upon
+it. As Emile's hand appeared to be steadier than Raphael's, he drew a
+line with pen and ink round the talisman, while his friend said:
+
+"I wished for an income of two hundred thousand livres, didn't I? Well,
+when that comes, you will observe a mighty diminution of my chagrin."
+
+"Yes--now go to sleep. Shall I make you comfortable on that sofa? Now
+then, are you all right?"
+
+"Yes, my nursling of the press. You shall amuse me; you shall drive
+the flies away from me. The friend of adversity should be the friend of
+prosperity. So I will give you some Hava--na--cig----"
+
+"Come, now, sleep. Sleep off your gold, you millionaire!"
+
+"You! sleep off your paragraphs! Good-night! Say good-night to
+Nebuchadnezzar!--Love! Wine! France!--glory and tr--treas----"
+
+Very soon the snorings of the two friends were added to the music with
+which the rooms resounded--an ineffectual concert! The lights went out
+one by one, their crystal sconces cracking in the final flare. Night
+threw dark shadows over this prolonged revelry, in which Raphael's
+narrative had been a second orgy of speech, of words without ideas, of
+ideas for which words had often been lacking.
+
+Towards noon, next day, the fair Aquilina bestirred herself. She yawned
+wearily. She had slept with her head upon a painted velvet footstool,
+and her cheeks were mottled over by contact with the surface. Her
+movement awoke Euphrasia, who suddenly sprang up with a hoarse cry; her
+pretty face, that had been so fresh and fair in the evening, was sallow
+now and pallid; she looked like a candidate for the hospital. The rest
+awoke also by degrees, with portentous groanings, to feel themselves
+over in every stiffened limb, and to experience the infinite varieties
+of weariness that weighed upon them.
+
+A servant came in to throw back the shutters and open the windows.
+There they all stood, brought back to consciousness by the warm rays
+of sunlight that shone upon the sleepers' heads. Their movements during
+slumber had disordered the elaborately arranged hair and toilettes of
+the women. They presented a ghastly spectacle in the bright daylight.
+Their hair fell ungracefully about them; their eyes, lately so
+brilliant, were heavy and dim; the expression of their faces was
+entirely changed. The sickly hues, which daylight brings out so
+strongly, were frightful. An olive tint had crept over the lymphatic
+faces, so fair and soft when in repose; the dainty red lips were
+grown pale and dry, and bore tokens of the degradation of excess. Each
+disowned his mistress of the night before; the women looked wan and
+discolored, like flowers trampled under foot by a passing procession.
+
+The men who scorned them looked even more horrible. Those human faces
+would have made you shudder. The hollow eyes with the dark circles round
+them seemed to see nothing; they were dull with wine and stupefied with
+heavy slumbers that had been exhausting rather than refreshing. There
+was an indescribable ferocious and stolid bestiality about these haggard
+faces, where bare physical appetite appeared shorn of all the poetical
+illusion with which the intellect invests it. Even these fearless
+champions, accustomed to measure themselves with excess, were struck
+with horror at this awakening of vice, stripped of its disguises, at
+being confronted thus with sin, the skeleton in rags, lifeless and
+hollow, bereft of the sophistries of the intellect and the enchantments
+of luxury. Artists and courtesans scrutinized in silence and with
+haggard glances the surrounding disorder, the rooms where everything had
+been laid waste, at the havoc wrought by heated passions.
+
+Demoniac laughter broke out when Taillefer, catching the smothered
+murmurs of his guests, tried to greet them with a grin. His darkly
+flushed, perspiring countenance loomed upon this pandemonium, like the
+image of a crime that knows no remorse (see _L'Auberge rouge_). The
+picture was complete. A picture of a foul life in the midst of luxury, a
+hideous mixture of the pomp and squalor of humanity; an awakening after
+the frenzy of Debauch has crushed and squeezed all the fruits of life in
+her strong hands, till nothing but unsightly refuse is left to her, and
+lies in which she believes no longer. You might have thought of Death
+gloating over a family stricken with the plague.
+
+The sweet scents and dazzling lights, the mirth and the excitement
+were all no more; disgust with its nauseous sensations and searching
+philosophy was there instead. The sun shone in like truth, the pure
+outer air was like virtue; in contrast with the heated atmosphere, heavy
+with the fumes of the previous night of revelry.
+
+Accustomed as they were to their life, many of the girls thought of
+other days and other wakings; pure and innocent days when they looked
+out and saw the roses and honeysuckle about the casement, and the fresh
+countryside without enraptured by the glad music of the skylark; while
+earth lay in mists, lighted by the dawn, and in all the glittering
+radiance of dew. Others imagined the family breakfast, the father and
+children round the table, the innocent laughter, the unspeakable charm
+that pervaded it all, the simple hearts and their meal as simple.
+
+An artist mused upon his quiet studio, on his statue in its severe
+beauty, and the graceful model who was waiting for him. A young man
+recollected a lawsuit on which the fortunes of a family hung, and an
+important transaction that needed his presence. The scholar regretted
+his study and that noble work that called for him. Emile appeared just
+then as smiling, blooming, and fresh as the smartest assistant in a
+fashionable shop.
+
+"You are all as ugly as bailiffs. You won't be fit for anything to-day,
+so this day is lost, and I vote for breakfast."
+
+At this Taillefer went out to give some orders. The women went languidly
+up to the mirrors to set their toilettes in order. Each one shook
+herself. The wilder sort lectured the steadier ones. The courtesans made
+fun of those who looked unable to continue the boisterous festivity;
+but these wan forms revived all at once, stood in groups, and talked
+and smiled. Some servants quickly and adroitly set the furniture and
+everything else in its place, and a magnificent breakfast was got ready.
+
+The guests hurried into the dining-room. Everything there bore indelible
+marks of yesterday's excess, it is true, but there were at any rate some
+traces of ordinary, rational existence, such traces as may be found in a
+sick man's dying struggles. And so the revelry was laid away and buried,
+like carnival of a Shrove Tuesday, by masks wearied out with dancing,
+drunk with drunkenness, and quite ready to be persuaded of the pleasures
+of lassitude, lest they should be forced to admit their exhaustion.
+
+As soon as these bold spirits surrounded the capitalist's
+breakfast-table, Cardot appeared. He had left the rest to make a night
+of it after the dinner, and finished the evening after his own fashion
+in the retirement of domestic life. Just now a sweet smile wandered over
+his features. He seemed to have a presentiment that there would be some
+inheritance to sample and divide, involving inventories and engrossing;
+an inheritance rich in fees and deeds to draw up, and something as juicy
+as the trembling fillet of beef in which their host had just plunged his
+knife.
+
+"Oh, ho! we are to have breakfast in the presence of a notary," cried
+Cursy.
+
+"You have come here just at the right time," said the banker, indicating
+the breakfast; "you can jot down the numbers, and initial off all the
+dishes."
+
+"There is no will to make here, but contracts of marriage there may be,
+perhaps," said the scholar, who had made a satisfactory arrangement for
+the first time in twelve months.
+
+"Oh! Oh!"
+
+"Ah! Ah!"
+
+"One moment," cried Cardot, fairly deafened by a chorus of wretched
+jokes. "I came here on serious business. I am bringing six millions for
+one of you." (Dead silence.) "Monsieur," he went on, turning to Raphael,
+who at the moment was unceremoniously wiping his eyes on a corner of the
+table-napkin, "was not your mother a Mlle. O'Flaharty?"
+
+"Yes," said Raphael mechanically enough; "Barbara Marie."
+
+"Have you your certificate of birth about you," Cardot went on, "and
+Mme. de Valentin's as well?"
+
+"I believe so."
+
+"Very well then, monsieur; you are the sole heir of Major O'Flaharty,
+who died in August 1828 at Calcutta."
+
+"An _incalcuttable_ fortune," said the critic.
+
+"The Major having bequeathed several amounts to public institutions in
+his will, the French Government sent in a claim for the remainder to
+the East India Company," the notary continued. "The estate is clear and
+ready to be transferred at this moment. I have been looking in vain for
+the heirs and assigns of Mlle. Barbara Marie O'Flaharty for a fortnight
+past, when yesterday at dinner----"
+
+Just then Raphael suddenly staggered to his feet; he looked like a man
+who has just received a blow. Acclamation took the form of silence, for
+stifled envy had been the first feeling in every breast, and all eyes
+devoured him like flames. Then a murmur rose, and grew like the voice of
+a discontented audience, or the first mutterings of a riot, as everybody
+made some comment on this news of great wealth brought by the notary.
+
+This abrupt subservience of fate brought Raphael thoroughly to his
+senses. He immediately spread out the table-napkin with which he had
+lately taken the measure of the piece of shagreen. He heeded nothing as
+he laid the talisman upon it, and shuddered involuntarily at the sight
+of a slight difference between the present size of the skin and the
+outline traced upon the linen.
+
+"Why, what is the matter with him?" Taillefer cried. "He comes by his
+fortune very cheaply."
+
+"_Soutiens-le Chatillon_!" said Bixiou to Emile. "The joy will kill
+him."
+
+A ghastly white hue overspread every line of the wan features of the
+heir-at-law. His face was drawn, every outline grew haggard; the hollows
+in his livid countenance grew deeper, and his eyes were fixed and
+staring. He was facing Death.
+
+The opulent banker, surrounded by faded women, and faces with satiety
+written on them, the enjoyment that had reached the pitch of agony, was
+a living illustration of his own life.
+
+Raphael looked thrice at the talisman, which lay passively within the
+merciless outlines on the table-napkin; he tried not to believe it,
+but his incredulity vanished utterly before the light of an inner
+presentiment. The whole world was his; he could have all things, but the
+will to possess them was utterly extinct. Like a traveler in the midst
+of the desert, with but a little water left to quench his thirst, he
+must measure his life by the draughts he took of it. He saw what every
+desire of his must cost him in the days of his life. He believed in the
+powers of the Magic Skin at last, he listened to every breath he drew;
+he felt ill already; he asked himself:
+
+"Am I not consumptive? Did not my mother die of a lung complaint?"
+
+"Aha, Raphael! what fun you will have! What will you give me?" asked
+Aquilina.
+
+"Here's to the death of his uncle, Major O'Flaharty! There is a man for
+you."
+
+"He will be a peer of France."
+
+"Pooh! what is a peer of France since July?" said the amateur critic.
+
+"Are you going to take a box at the Bouffons?"
+
+"You are going to treat us all, I hope?" put in Bixiou.
+
+"A man of his sort will be sure to do things in style," said Emile.
+
+The hurrah set up by the jovial assembly rang in Valentin's ears, but he
+could not grasp the sense of a single word. Vague thoughts crossed him
+of the Breton peasant's life of mechanical labor, without a wish of any
+kind; he pictured him burdened with a family, tilling the soil, living
+on buckwheat meal, drinking cider out of a pitcher, believing in the
+Virgin and the King, taking the sacrament at Easter, dancing of a Sunday
+on the green sward, and understanding never a word of the rector's
+sermon. The actual scene that lay before him, the gilded furniture, the
+courtesans, the feast itself, and the surrounding splendors, seemed to
+catch him by the throat and made him cough.
+
+"Do you wish for some asparagus?" the banker cried.
+
+"_I wish for nothing_!" thundered Raphael.
+
+"Bravo!" Taillefer exclaimed; "you understand your position; a
+fortune confers the privilege of being impertinent. You are one of us.
+Gentlemen, let us drink to the might of gold! M. Valentin here, six
+times a millionaire, has become a power. He is a king, like all the
+rich; everything is at his disposal, everything lies under his feet.
+From this time forth the axiom that 'all Frenchmen are alike in the eyes
+of the law,' is for him a fib at the head of the Constitutional Charter.
+He is not going to obey the law--the law is going to obey him. There are
+neither scaffolds nor executioners for millionaires."
+
+"Yes, there are," said Raphael; "they are their own executioners."
+
+"Here is another victim of prejudices!" cried the banker.
+
+"Let us drink!" Raphael said, putting the talisman into his pocket.
+
+"What are you doing?" said Emile, checking his movement. "Gentlemen," he
+added, addressing the company, who were rather taken aback by Raphael's
+behavior, "you must know that our friend Valentin here--what am I
+saying?--I mean my Lord Marquis de Valentin--is in the possession of
+a secret for obtaining wealth. His wishes are fulfilled as soon as he
+knows them. He will make us all rich together, or he is a flunkey, and
+devoid of all decent feeling."
+
+"Oh, Raphael dear, I should like a set of pearl ornaments!" Euphrasia
+exclaimed.
+
+"If he has any gratitude in him, he will give me a couple of carriages
+with fast steppers," said Aquilina.
+
+"Wish for a hundred thousand a year for me!"
+
+"Indian shawls!"
+
+"Pay my debts!"
+
+"Send an apoplexy to my uncle, the old stick!"
+
+"Ten thousand a year in the funds, and I'll cry quits with you,
+Raphael!"
+
+"Deeds of gift and no mistake," was the notary's comment.
+
+"He ought, at least, to rid me of the gout!"
+
+"Lower the funds!" shouted the banker.
+
+These phrases flew about like the last discharge of rockets at the end
+of a display of fireworks; and were uttered, perhaps, more in earnest
+than in jest.
+
+"My good friend," Emile said solemnly, "I shall be quite satisfied with
+an income of two hundred thousand livres. Please to set about it at
+once."
+
+"Do you not know the cost, Emile?" asked Raphael.
+
+"A nice excuse!" the poet cried; "ought we not to sacrifice ourselves
+for our friends?"
+
+"I have almost a mind to wish that you all were dead," Valentin made
+answer, with a dark, inscrutable look at his boon companions.
+
+"Dying people are frightfully cruel," said Emile, laughing. "You are
+rich now," he went on gravely; "very well, I will give you two months at
+most before you grow vilely selfish. You are so dense already that
+you cannot understand a joke. You have only to go a little further to
+believe in your Magic Skin."
+
+Raphael kept silent, fearing the banter of the company; but he drank
+immoderately, trying to drown in intoxication the recollection of his
+fatal power.
+
+
+
+
+III. THE AGONY
+
+In the early days of December an old man of some seventy years of age
+pursued his way along the Rue de Varenne, in spite of the falling rain.
+He peered up at the door of each house, trying to discover the address
+of the Marquis Raphael de Valentin, in a simple, childlike fashion,
+and with the abstracted look peculiar to philosophers. His face plainly
+showed traces of a struggle between a heavy mortification and an
+authoritative nature; his long, gray hair hung in disorder about a face
+like a piece of parchment shriveling in the fire. If a painter had come
+upon this curious character, he would, no doubt, have transferred him
+to his sketchbook on his return, a thin, bony figure, clad in black, and
+have inscribed beneath it: "Classical poet in search of a rhyme."
+When he had identified the number that had been given to him, this
+reincarnation of Rollin knocked meekly at the door of a splendid
+mansion.
+
+"Is Monsieur Raphael in?" the worthy man inquired of the Swiss in
+livery.
+
+"My Lord the Marquis sees nobody," said the servant, swallowing a huge
+morsel that he had just dipped in a large bowl of coffee.
+
+"There is his carriage," said the elderly stranger, pointing to a fine
+equipage that stood under the wooden canopy that sheltered the steps
+before the house, in place of a striped linen awning. "He is going out;
+I will wait for him."
+
+"Then you might wait here till to-morrow morning, old boy," said the
+Swiss. "A carriage is always waiting for monsieur. Please to go away. If
+I were to let any stranger come into the house without orders, I should
+lose an income of six hundred francs."
+
+A tall old man, in a costume not unlike that of a subordinate in the
+Civil Service, came out of the vestibule and hurried part of the
+way down the steps, while he made a survey of the astonished elderly
+applicant for admission.
+
+"What is more, here is M. Jonathan," the Swiss remarked; "speak to him."
+
+Fellow-feeling of some kind, or curiosity, brought the two old men
+together in a central space in the great entrance-court. A few blades of
+grass were growing in the crevices of the pavement; a terrible silence
+reigned in that great house. The sight of Jonathan's face would have
+made you long to understand the mystery that brooded over it, and that
+was announced by the smallest trifles about the melancholy place.
+
+When Raphael inherited his uncle's vast estate, his first care had been
+to seek out the old and devoted servitor of whose affection he knew that
+he was secure. Jonathan had wept tears of joy at the sight of his young
+master, of whom he thought he had taken a final farewell; and when the
+marquis exalted him to the high office of steward, his happiness could
+not be surpassed. So old Jonathan became an intermediary power between
+Raphael and the world at large. He was the absolute disposer of his
+master's fortune, the blind instrument of an unknown will, and a sixth
+sense, as it were, by which the emotions of life were communicated to
+Raphael.
+
+"I should like to speak with M. Raphael, sir," said the elderly person
+to Jonathan, as he climbed up the steps some way, into a shelter from
+the rain.
+
+"To speak with my Lord the Marquis?" the steward cried. "He scarcely
+speaks even to me, his foster-father!"
+
+"But I am likewise his foster-father," said the old man. "If your wife
+was his foster-mother, I fed him myself with the milk of the Muses. He
+is my nursling, my child, carus alumnus! I formed his mind, cultivated
+his understanding, developed his genius, and, I venture to say it, to
+my own honor and glory. Is he not one of the most remarkable men of our
+epoch? He was one of my pupils in two lower forms, and in rhetoric. I am
+his professor."
+
+"Ah, sir, then you are M. Porriquet?"
+
+"Exactly, sir, but----"
+
+"Hush! hush!" Jonathan called to two underlings, whose voices broke the
+monastic silence that shrouded the house.
+
+"But is the Marquis ill, sir?" the professor continued.
+
+"My dear sir," Jonathan replied, "Heaven only knows what is the matter
+with my master. You see, there are not a couple of houses like ours
+anywhere in Paris. Do you understand? Not two houses. Faith, that
+there are not. My Lord the Marquis had this hotel purchased for him; it
+formerly belonged to a duke and a peer of France; then he spent three
+hundred thousand francs over furnishing it. That's a good deal, you
+know, three hundred thousand francs! But every room in the house is a
+perfect wonder. 'Good,' said I to myself when I saw this magnificence;
+'it is just like it used to be in the time of my lord, his late
+grandfather; and the young marquis is going to entertain all Paris
+and the Court!' Nothing of the kind! My lord refused to see any one
+whatever. 'Tis a funny life that he leads, M. Porriquet, you understand.
+An _inconciliable_ life. He rises every day at the same time. I am the
+only person, you see, that may enter his room. I open all the shutters
+at seven o'clock, summer or winter. It is all arranged very oddly. As I
+come in I say to him:
+
+"'You must get up and dress, my Lord Marquis.'
+
+"Then he rises and dresses himself. I have to give him his
+dressing-gown, and it is always after the same pattern, and of the same
+material. I am obliged to replace it when it can be used no longer,
+simply to save him the trouble of asking for a new one. A queer fancy!
+As a matter of fact, he has a thousand francs to spend every day, and
+he does as he pleases, the dear child. And besides, I am so fond of him
+that if he gave me a box on the ear on one side, I should hold out the
+other to him! The most difficult things he will tell me to do, and yet I
+do them, you know! He gives me a lot of trifles to attend to, that I
+am well set to work! He reads the newspapers, doesn't he? Well, my
+instructions are to put them always in the same place, on the same
+table. I always go at the same hour and shave him myself; and don't I
+tremble! The cook would forfeit the annuity of a thousand crowns that
+he is to come into after my lord's death, if breakfast is not served
+_inconciliably_ at ten o'clock precisely. The menus are drawn up for the
+whole year round, day after day. My Lord the Marquis has not a thing
+to wish for. He has strawberries whenever there are any, and he has the
+earliest mackerel to be had in Paris. The programme is printed every
+morning. He knows his dinner by rote. In the next place, he dresses
+himself at the same hour, in the same clothes, the same linen, that
+I always put on the same chair, you understand? I have to see that he
+always has the same cloth; and if it should happen that his coat came
+to grief (a mere supposition), I should have to replace it by another
+without saying a word about it to him. If it is fine, I go in and say to
+my master:
+
+"'You ought to go out, sir.'
+
+"He says Yes, or No. If he has a notion that he will go out, he doesn't
+wait for his horses; they are always ready harnessed; the coachman stops
+there _inconciliably_, whip in hand, just as you see him out there.
+In the evening, after dinner, my master goes one day to the Opera, the
+other to the Ital----no, he hasn't yet gone to the Italiens, though,
+for I could not find a box for him until yesterday. Then he comes in at
+eleven o'clock precisely, to go to bed. At any time in the day when
+he has nothing to do, he reads--he is always reading, you see--it is a
+notion he has. My instructions are to read the _Journal de la Librairie_
+before he sees it, and to buy new books, so that he finds them on his
+chimney-piece on the very day that they are published. I have orders to
+go into his room every hour or so, to look after the fire and everything
+else, and to see that he wants nothing. He gave me a little book, sir,
+to learn off by heart, with all my duties written in it--a regular
+catechism! In summer I have to keep a cool and even temperature with
+blocks of ice and at all seasons to put fresh flowers all about. He is
+rich! He has a thousand francs to spend every day; he can indulge his
+fancies! And he hadn't even necessaries for so long, poor child! He
+doesn't annoy anybody; he is as good as gold; he never opens his mouth,
+for instance; the house and garden are absolutely silent. In short, my
+master has not a single wish left; everything comes in the twinkling
+of an eye, if he raises his hand, and _instanter_. Quite right, too.
+If servants are not looked after, everything falls into confusion. You
+would never believe the lengths he goes about things. His rooms are
+all--what do you call it?--er--er--_en suite_. Very well; just suppose,
+now, that he opens his room door or the door of his study; presto! all
+the other doors fly open of themselves by a patent contrivance; and then
+he can go from one end of the house to the other and not find a single
+door shut; which is all very nice and pleasant and convenient for us
+great folk! But, on my word, it cost us a lot of money! And, after all,
+M. Porriquet, he said to me at last:
+
+"'Jonathan, you will look after me as if I were a baby in long clothes,'
+Yes, sir, 'long clothes!' those were his very words. 'You will think of
+all my requirements for me.' I am the master, so to speak, and he is
+the servant, you understand? The reason of it? Ah, my word, that is just
+what nobody on earth knows but himself and God Almighty. It is quite
+_inconciliable_!"
+
+"He is writing a poem!" exclaimed the old professor.
+
+"You think he is writing a poem, sir? It's a very absorbing affair,
+then! But, you know, I don't think he is. He often tells me that he
+wants to live like a _vergetation_; he wants to _vergetate_. Only
+yesterday he was looking at a tulip while he was dressing, and he said
+to me:
+
+"'There is my own life--I am _vergetating_, my poor Jonathan.' Now, some
+of them insist that that is monomania. It is _inconciliable_!"
+
+"All this makes it very clear to me, Jonathan," the professor answered,
+with a magisterial solemnity that greatly impressed the old servant,
+"that your master is absorbed in a great work. He is deep in
+vast meditations, and has no wish to be distracted by the petty
+preoccupations of ordinary life. A man of genius forgets everything
+among his intellectual labors. One day the famous Newton----"
+
+"Newton?--oh, ah! I don't know the name," said Jonathan.
+
+"Newton, a great geometrician," Porriquet went on, "once sat for
+twenty-four hours leaning his elbow on the table; when he emerged from
+his musings, he was a day out in his reckoning, just as if he had been
+sleeping. I will go to see him, dear lad; I may perhaps be of some use
+to him."
+
+"Not for a moment!" Jonathan cried. "Not though you were King of
+France--I mean the real old one. You could not go in unless you forced
+the doors open and walked over my body. But I will go and tell him you
+are here, M. Porriquet, and I will put it to him like this, 'Ought he
+to come up?' And he will say Yes or No. I never say, 'Do you wish?'
+or 'Will you?' or 'Do you want?' Those words are scratched out of the
+dictionary. He let out at me once with a 'Do you want to kill me?' he
+was so very angry."
+
+Jonathan left the old schoolmaster in the vestibule, signing to him to
+come no further, and soon returned with a favorable answer. He led the
+old gentleman through one magnificent room after another, where every
+door stood open. At last Porriquet beheld his pupil at some distance
+seated beside the fire.
+
+Raphael was reading the paper. He sat in an armchair wrapped in a
+dressing-gown with some large pattern on it. The intense melancholy that
+preyed upon him could be discerned in his languid posture and feeble
+frame; it was depicted on his brow and white face; he looked like some
+plant bleached by darkness. There was a kind of effeminate grace about
+him; the fancies peculiar to wealthy invalids were also noticeable. His
+hands were soft and white, like a pretty woman's; he wore his fair hair,
+now grown scanty, curled about his temples with a refinement of vanity.
+
+The Greek cap that he wore was pulled to one side by the weight of its
+tassel; too heavy for the light material of which it was made. He
+had let the paper-knife fall at his feet, a malachite blade with gold
+mounting, which he had used to cut the leaves of the book. The amber
+mouthpiece of a magnificent Indian hookah lay on his knee; the enameled
+coils lay like a serpent in the room, but he had forgotten to draw out
+its fresh perfume. And yet there was a complete contradiction between
+the general feebleness of his young frame and the blue eyes, where all
+his vitality seemed to dwell; an extraordinary intelligence seemed to
+look out from them and to grasp everything at once.
+
+That expression was painful to see. Some would have read despair in
+it, and others some inner conflict terrible as remorse. It was the
+inscrutable glance of helplessness that must perforce consign its
+desires to the depths of its own heart; or of a miser enjoying in
+imagination all the pleasures that his money could procure for him,
+while he declines to lessen his hoard; the look of a bound Prometheus,
+of the fallen Napoleon of 1815, when he learned at the Elysee the
+strategical blunder that his enemies had made, and asked for twenty-four
+hours of command in vain; or rather it was the same look that Raphael
+had turned upon the Seine, or upon his last piece of gold at the
+gaming-table only a few months ago.
+
+He was submitting his intelligence and his will to the homely
+common-sense of an old peasant whom fifty years of domestic service had
+scarcely civilized. He had given up all the rights of life in order to
+live; he had despoiled his soul of all the romance that lies in a wish;
+and almost rejoiced at thus becoming a sort of automaton. The better to
+struggle with the cruel power that he had challenged, he had followed
+Origen's example, and had maimed and chastened his imagination.
+
+The day after he had seen the diminution of the Magic Skin, at his
+sudden accession of wealth, he happened to be at his notary's house. A
+well-known physician had told them quite seriously, at dessert, how
+a Swiss attacked by consumption had cured himself. The man had never
+spoken a word for ten years, and had compelled himself to draw six
+breaths only, every minute, in the close atmosphere of a cow-house,
+adhering all the time to a regimen of exceedingly light diet. "I will be
+like that man," thought Raphael to himself. He wanted life at any price,
+and so he led the life of a machine in the midst of all the luxury
+around him.
+
+The old professor confronted this youthful corpse and shuddered; there
+seemed something unnatural about the meagre, enfeebled frame. In the
+Marquis, with his eager eyes and careworn forehead, he could hardly
+recognize the fresh-cheeked and rosy pupil with the active limbs,
+whom he remembered. If the worthy classicist, sage critic, and general
+preserver of the traditions of correct taste had read Byron, he would
+have thought that he had come on a Manfred when he looked to find Childe
+Harold.
+
+"Good day, pere Porriquet," said Raphael, pressing the old
+schoolmaster's frozen fingers in his own damp ones; "how are you?"
+
+"I am very well," replied the other, alarmed by the touch of that
+feverish hand. "But how about you?"
+
+"Oh, I am hoping to keep myself in health."
+
+"You are engaged in some great work, no doubt?"
+
+"No," Raphael answered. "Exegi monumemtum, pere Porriquet; I have
+contributed an important page to science, and have now bidden her
+farewell for ever. I scarcely know where my manuscript is."
+
+"The style is no doubt correct?" queried the schoolmaster. "You, I hope,
+would never have adopted the barbarous language of the new school, which
+fancies it has worked such wonders by discovering Ronsard!"
+
+"My work treats of physiology pure and simple."
+
+"Oh, then, there is no more to be said," the schoolmaster answered.
+"Grammar must yield to the exigencies of discovery. Nevertheless, young
+man, a lucid and harmonious style--the diction of Massillon, of M. de
+Buffon, of the great Racine--a classical style, in short, can never
+spoil anything----But, my friend," the schoolmaster interrupted
+himself, "I was forgetting the object of my visit, which concerns my own
+interests."
+
+Too late Raphael recalled to mind the verbose eloquence and elegant
+circumlocutions which in a long professorial career had grown habitual
+to his old tutor, and almost regretted that he had admitted him; but
+just as he was about to wish to see him safely outside, he promptly
+suppressed his secret desire with a stealthy glance at the Magic Skin.
+It hung there before him, fastened down upon some white material,
+surrounded by a red line accurately traced about its prophetic outlines.
+Since that fatal carouse, Raphael had stifled every least whim, and
+had lived so as not to cause the slightest movement in the terrible
+talisman. The Magic Skin was like a tiger with which he must live
+without exciting its ferocity. He bore patiently, therefore, with the
+old schoolmaster's prolixity.
+
+Porriquet spent an hour in telling him about the persecutions directed
+against him ever since the Revolution of July. The worthy man, having
+a liking for strong governments, had expressed the patriotic wish that
+grocers should be left to their counters, statesmen to the management of
+public business, advocates to the Palais de Justice, and peers of France
+to the Luxembourg; but one of the popularity-seeking ministers of the
+Citizen King had ousted him from his chair, on an accusation of Carlism,
+and the old man now found himself without pension or post, and with no
+bread to eat. As he played the part of guardian angel to a poor nephew,
+for whose schooling at Saint Sulpice he was paying, he came less on his
+own account than for his adopted child's sake, to entreat his former
+pupil's interest with the new minister. He did not ask to be reinstated,
+but only for a position at the head of some provincial school.
+
+QRaphael had fallen a victim to unconquerable drowsiness by the time
+that the worthy man's monotonous voice ceased to sound in his ears.
+Civility had compelled him to look at the pale and unmoving eyes of
+the deliberate and tedious old narrator, till he himself had reached
+stupefaction, magnetized in an inexplicable way by the power of inertia.
+
+"Well, my dear pere Porriquet," he said, not very certain what the
+question was to which he was replying, "but I can do nothing for you,
+nothing at all. _I wish very heartily_ that you may succeed----"
+
+All at once, without seeing the change wrought on the old man's sallow
+and wrinkled brow by these conventional phrases, full of indifference
+and selfishness, Raphael sprang to his feet like a startled roebuck.
+He saw a thin white line between the black piece of hide and the red
+tracing about it, and gave a cry so fearful that the poor professor was
+frightened by it.
+
+"Old fool! Go!" he cried. "You will be appointed as headmaster! Couldn't
+you have asked me for an annuity of a thousand crowns rather than a
+murderous wish? Your visit would have cost me nothing. There are a
+hundred thousand situations to be had in France, but I have only
+one life. A man's life is worth more than all the situations in the
+world.--Jonathan!"
+
+Jonathan appeared.
+
+"This is your doing, double-distilled idiot! What made you suggest
+that I should see M. Porriquet?" and he pointed to the old man, who was
+petrified with fright. "Did I put myself in your hands for you to tear
+me in pieces? You have just shortened my life by ten years! Another
+blunder of this kind, and you will lay me where I have laid my father.
+Would I not far rather have possessed the beautiful Foedora? And I have
+obliged that old hulk instead--that rag of humanity! I had money enough
+for him. And, moreover, if all the Porriquets in the world were dying of
+hunger, what is that to me?"
+
+Raphael's face was white with anger; a slight froth marked his trembling
+lips; there was a savage gleam in his eyes. The two elders shook with
+terror in his presence like two children at the sight of a snake. The
+young man fell back in his armchair, a kind of reaction took place in
+him, the tears flowed fast from his angry eyes.
+
+"Oh, my life!" he cried, "that fair life of mine. Never to know a kindly
+thought again, to love no more; nothing is left to me!"
+
+He turned to the professor and went on in a gentle voice--"The harm
+is done, my old friend. Your services have been well repaid; and my
+misfortune has at any rate contributed to the welfare of a good and
+worthy man."
+
+His tones betrayed so much feeling that the almost unintelligible
+words drew tears from the two old men, such tears as are shed over some
+pathetic song in a foreign tongue.
+
+"He is epileptic," muttered Porriquet.
+
+"I understand your kind intentions, my friend," Raphael answered
+gently. "You would make excuses for me. Ill-health cannot be helped, but
+ingratitude is a grievous fault. Leave me now," he added. "To-morrow or
+the next day, or possibly to-night, you will receive your appointment;
+Resistance has triumphed over Motion. Farewell."
+
+The old schoolmaster went away, full of keen apprehension as to
+Valentin's sanity. A thrill of horror ran through him; there had been
+something supernatural, he thought, in the scene he had passed through.
+He could hardly believe his own impressions, and questioned them like
+one awakened from a painful dream.
+
+"Now attend to me, Jonathan," said the young man to his old servant.
+"Try to understand the charge confided to you."
+
+"Yes, my Lord Marquis."
+
+"I am as a man outlawed from humanity."
+
+"Yes, my Lord Marquis."
+
+"All the pleasures of life disport themselves round my bed of death,
+and dance about me like fair women; but if I beckon to them, I must die.
+Death always confronts me. You must be the barrier between the world and
+me."
+
+"Yes, my Lord Marquis," said the old servant, wiping the drops of
+perspiration from his wrinkled forehead. "But if you don't wish to
+see pretty women, how will you manage at the Italiens this evening? An
+English family is returning to London, and I have taken their box for
+the rest of the season, and it is in a splendid position--superb; in the
+first row."
+
+Raphael, deep in his own deep musings, paid no attention to him.
+
+"Do you see that splendid equipage, a brougham painted a dark brown
+color, but with the arms of an ancient and noble family shining from
+the panels? As it rolls past, all the shop-girls admire it, and look
+longingly at the yellow satin lining, the rugs from la Savonnerie,
+the daintiness and freshness of every detail, the silken cushions and
+tightly-fitting glass windows. Two liveried footmen are mounted behind
+this aristocratic carriage; and within, a head lies back among
+the silken cushions, the feverish face and hollow eyes of Raphael,
+melancholy and sad. Emblem of the doom of wealth! He flies across Paris
+like a rocket, and reaches the peristyle of the Theatre Favart. The
+passers-by make way for him; the two footmen help him to alight, an
+envious crowd looking on the while."
+
+"What has that fellow done to be so rich?" asks a poor law-student, who
+cannot listen to the magical music of Rossini for lack of a five-franc
+piece.
+
+Raphael walked slowly along the gangway; he expected no enjoyment from
+these pleasures he had once coveted so eagerly. In the interval before
+the second act of Semiramide he walked up and down in the lobby, and
+along the corridors, leaving his box, which he had not yet entered, to
+look after itself. The instinct of property was dead within him already.
+Like all invalids, he thought of nothing but his own sufferings. He was
+leaning against the chimney-piece in the greenroom. A group had gathered
+about it of dandies, young and old, of ministers, of peers without
+peerages, and peerages without peers, for so the Revolution of July had
+ordered matters. Among a host of adventurers and journalists, in fact,
+Raphael beheld a strange, unearthly figure a few paces away among
+the crowd. He went towards this grotesque object to see it better,
+half-closing his eyes with exceeding superciliousness.
+
+"What a wonderful bit of painting!" he said to himself. The stranger's
+hair and eyebrows and a Mazarin tuft on the chin had been dyed black,
+but the result was a spurious, glossy, purple tint that varied its hues
+according to the light; the hair had been too white, no doubt, to
+take the preparation. Anxiety and cunning were depicted in the narrow,
+insignificant face, with its wrinkles incrusted by thick layers of red
+and white paint. This red enamel, lacking on some portions of his face,
+strongly brought out his natural feebleness and livid hues. It was
+impossible not to smile at this visage with the protuberant forehead
+and pointed chin, a face not unlike those grotesque wooden figures that
+German herdsmen carve in their spare moments.
+
+An attentive observer looking from Raphael to this elderly Adonis would
+have remarked a young man's eyes set in a mask of age, in the case of
+the Marquis, and in the other case the dim eyes of age peering forth
+from behind a mask of youth. Valentin tried to recollect when and
+where he had seen this little old man before. He was thin, fastidiously
+cravatted, booted and spurred like one-and-twenty; he crossed his arms
+and clinked his spurs as if he possessed all the wanton energy of
+youth. He seemed to move about without constraint or difficulty. He
+had carefully buttoned up his fashionable coat, which disguised his
+powerful, elderly frame, and gave him the appearance of an antiquated
+coxcomb who still follows the fashions.
+
+For Raphael this animated puppet possessed all the interest of an
+apparition. He gazed at it as if it had been some smoke-begrimed
+Rembrandt, recently restored and newly framed. This idea found him a
+clue to the truth among his confused recollections; he recognized the
+dealer in antiquities, the man to whom he owed his calamities!
+
+A noiseless laugh broke just then from the fantastical personage,
+straightening the line of his lips that stretched across a row of
+artificial teeth. That laugh brought out, for Raphael's heated fancy, a
+strong resemblance between the man before him and the type of head
+that painters have assigned to Goethe's Mephistopheles. A crowd
+of superstitious thoughts entered Raphael's sceptical mind; he
+was convinced of the powers of the devil and of all the sorcerer's
+enchantments embodied in mediaeval tradition, and since worked up by
+poets. Shrinking in horror from the destiny of Faust, he prayed for the
+protection of Heaven with all the ardent faith of a dying man in God and
+the Virgin. A clear, bright radiance seemed to give him a glimpse of
+the heaven of Michael Angelo or of Raphael of Urbino: a venerable
+white-bearded man, a beautiful woman seated in an aureole above the
+clouds and winged cherub heads. Now he had grasped and received the
+meaning of those imaginative, almost human creations; they seemed to
+explain what had happened to him, to leave him yet one hope.
+
+But when the greenroom of the Italiens returned upon his sight he
+beheld, not the Virgin, but a very handsome young person. The execrable
+Euphrasia, in all the splendor of her toilette, with its orient pearls,
+had come thither, impatient for her ardent, elderly admirer. She was
+insolently exhibiting herself with her defiant face and glittering
+eyes to an envious crowd of stockbrokers, a visible testimony to the
+inexhaustible wealth that the old dealer permitted her to squander.
+
+Raphael recollected the mocking wish with which he had accepted the old
+man's luckless gift, and tasted all the sweets of revenge when he beheld
+the spectacle of sublime wisdom fallen to such a depth as this,
+wisdom for which such humiliation had seemed a thing impossible. The
+centenarian greeted Euphrasia with a ghastly smile, receiving her
+honeyed words in reply. He offered her his emaciated arm, and went
+twice or thrice round the greenroom with her; the envious glances and
+compliments with which the crowd received his mistress delighted him; he
+did not see the scornful smiles, nor hear the caustic comments to which
+he gave rise.
+
+"In what cemetery did this young ghoul unearth that corpse of hers?"
+asked a dandy of the Romantic faction.
+
+Euphrasia began to smile. The speaker was a slender, fair-haired youth,
+with bright blue eyes, and a moustache. His short dress coat, hat tilted
+over one ear, and sharp tongue, all denoted the species.
+
+"How many old men," said Raphael to himself, "bring an upright,
+virtuous, and hard-working life to a close in folly! His feet are cold
+already, and he is making love."
+
+"Well, sir," exclaimed Valentin, stopping the merchant's progress, while
+he stared hard at Euphrasia, "have you quite forgotten the stringent
+maxims of your philosophy?"
+
+"Ah, I am as happy now as a young man," said the other, in a cracked
+voice. "I used to look at existence from a wrong standpoint. One hour of
+love has a whole life in it."
+
+The playgoers heard the bell ring, and left the greenroom to take their
+places again. Raphael and the old merchant separated. As he entered
+his box, the Marquis saw Foedora sitting exactly opposite to him on the
+other side of the theatre. The Countess had probably only just come, for
+she was just flinging off her scarf to leave her throat uncovered, and
+was occupied with going through all the indescribable manoeuvres of a
+coquette arranging herself. All eyes were turned upon her. A young peer
+of France had come with her; she asked him for the lorgnette she had
+given him to carry. Raphael knew the despotism to which his successor
+had resigned himself, in her gestures, and in the way she treated her
+companion. He was also under the spell no doubt, another dupe beating
+with all the might of a real affection against the woman's cold
+calculations, enduring all the tortures from which Valentin had luckily
+freed himself.
+
+Foedora's face lighted up with indescribable joy. After directing her
+lorgnette upon every box in turn, to make a rapid survey of all the
+dresses, she was conscious that by her toilette and her beauty she had
+eclipsed the loveliest and best-dressed women in Paris. She laughed
+to show her white teeth; her head with its wreath of flowers was never
+still, in her quest of admiration. Her glances went from one box to
+another, as she diverted herself with the awkward way in which a Russian
+princess wore her bonnet, or over the utter failure of a bonnet with
+which a banker's daughter had disfigured herself.
+
+All at once she met Raphael's steady gaze and turned pale, aghast at the
+intolerable contempt in her rejected lover's eyes. Not one of her exiled
+suitors had failed to own her power over them; Valentin alone was proof
+against her attractions. A power that can be defied with impunity is
+drawing to its end. This axiom is as deeply engraved on the heart of
+woman as in the minds of kings. In Raphael, therefore, Foedora saw the
+deathblow of her influence and her ability to please. An epigram of his,
+made at the Opera the day before, was already known in the salons of
+Paris. The biting edge of that terrible speech had already given the
+Countess an incurable wound. We know how to cauterize a wound, but we
+know of no treatment as yet for the stab of a phrase. As every other
+woman in the house looked by turns at her and at the Marquis, Foedora
+would have consigned them all to the oubliettes of some Bastille; for in
+spite of her capacity for dissimulation, her discomfiture was discerned
+by her rivals. Her unfailing consolation had slipped from her at last.
+The delicious thought, "I am the most beautiful," the thought that at
+all times had soothed every mortification, had turned into a lie.
+
+At the opening of the second act a woman took up her position not very
+far from Raphael, in a box that had been empty hitherto. A murmur of
+admiration went up from the whole house. In that sea of human faces
+there was a movement of every living wave; all eyes were turned upon the
+stranger lady. The applause of young and old was so prolonged, that when
+the orchestra began, the musicians turned to the audience to request
+silence, and then they themselves joined in the plaudits and swelled the
+confusion. Excited talk began in every box, every woman equipped herself
+with an opera glass, elderly men grew young again, and polished the
+glasses of their lorgnettes with their gloves. The enthusiasm subsided
+by degrees, the stage echoed with the voices of the singers, and order
+reigned as before. The aristocratic section, ashamed of having yielded
+to a spontaneous feeling, again assumed their wonted politely frigid
+manner. The well-to-do dislike to be astonished at anything; at the
+first sight of a beautiful thing it becomes their duty to discover the
+defect in it which absolves them from admiring it,--the feeling of all
+ordinary minds. Yet a few still remained motionless and heedless of the
+music, artlessly absorbed in the delight of watching Raphael's neighbor.
+
+Valentin noticed Taillefer's mean, obnoxious countenance by Aquilina's
+side in a lower box, and received an approving smirk from him. Then he
+saw Emile, who seemed to say from where he stood in the orchestra, "Just
+look at that lovely creature there, close beside you!" Lastly, he saw
+Rastignac, with Mme. de Nucingen and her daughter, twisting his gloves
+like a man in despair, because he was tethered to his place, and could
+not leave it to go any nearer to the unknown fair divinity.
+
+Raphael's life depended upon a covenant that he had made with himself,
+and had hitherto kept sacred. He would give no special heed to any
+woman whatever; and the better to guard against temptation, he used
+a cunningly contrived opera-glass which destroyed the harmony of the
+fairest features by hideous distortions. He had not recovered from the
+terror that had seized on him in the morning when, at a mere expression
+of civility, the Magic Skin had contracted so abruptly. So Raphael was
+determined not to turn his face in the direction of his neighbor. He sat
+imperturbable as a duchess with his back against the corner of the box,
+thereby shutting out half of his neighbor's view of the stage, appearing
+to disregard her, and even to be unaware that a pretty woman sat there
+just behind him.
+
+His neighbor copied Valentin's position exactly; she leaned her elbow
+on the edge of her box and turned her face in three-quarter profile upon
+the singers on the stage, as if she were sitting to a painter. These
+two people looked like two estranged lovers still sulking, still turning
+their backs upon each other, who will go into each other's arms at the
+first tender word.
+
+Now and again his neighbor's ostrich feathers or her hair came in
+contact with Raphael's head, giving him a pleasurable thrill, against
+which he sternly fought. In a little while he felt the touch of the
+soft frill of lace that went round her dress; he could hear the gracious
+sounds of the folds of her dress itself, light rustling noises full of
+enchantment; he could even feel her movements as she breathed; with the
+gentle stir thus imparted to her form and to her draperies, it seemed
+to Raphael that all her being was suddenly communicated to him in
+an electric spark. The lace and tulle that caressed him imparted
+the delicious warmth of her bare, white shoulders. By a freak in
+the ordering of things, these two creatures, kept apart by social
+conventions, with the abysses of death between them, breathed together
+and perhaps thought of one another. Finally, the subtle perfume of aloes
+completed the work of Raphael's intoxication. Opposition heated his
+imagination, and his fancy, become the wilder for the limits imposed
+upon it, sketched a woman for him in outlines of fire. He turned
+abruptly, the stranger made a similar movement, startled no doubt at
+being brought in contact with a stranger; and they remained face to
+face, each with the same thought.
+
+"Pauline!"
+
+"M. Raphael!"
+
+Each surveyed the other, both of them petrified with astonishment.
+Raphael noticed Pauline's daintily simple costume. A woman's experienced
+eyes would have discerned and admired the outlines beneath the modest
+gauze folds of her bodice and the lily whiteness of her throat. And
+then her more than mortal clearness of soul, her maidenly modesty, her
+graceful bearing, all were unchanged. Her sleeve was quivering with
+agitation, for the beating of her heart was shaking her whole frame.
+
+"Come to the Hotel de Saint-Quentin to-morrow for your papers," she
+said. "I will be there at noon. Be punctual."
+
+She rose hastily, and disappeared. Raphael thought of following Pauline,
+feared to compromise her, and stayed. He looked at Foedora; she seemed
+to him positively ugly. Unable to understand a single phrase of the
+music, and feeling stifled in the theatre, he went out, and returned
+home with a full heart.
+
+"Jonathan," he said to the old servant, as soon as he lay in bed,
+"give me half a drop of laudanum on a piece of sugar, and don't wake me
+to-morrow till twenty minutes to twelve."
+
+"I want Pauline to love me!" he cried next morning, looking at the
+talisman the while in unspeakable anguish.
+
+The skin did not move in the least; it seemed to have lost its power to
+shrink; doubtless it could not fulfil a wish fulfilled already.
+
+"Ah!" exclaimed Raphael, feeling as if a mantle of lead had fallen away,
+which he had worn ever since the day when the talisman had been given to
+him; "so you are playing me false, you are not obeying me, the pact is
+broken! I am free; I shall live. Then was it all a wretched joke?" But
+he did not dare to believe in his own thought as he uttered it.
+
+He dressed himself as simply as had formerly been his wont, and set out
+on foot for his old lodging, trying to go back in fancy to the happy
+days when he abandoned himself without peril to vehement desires, the
+days when he had not yet condemned all human enjoyment. As he walked
+he beheld Pauline--not the Pauline of the Hotel Saint-Quentin, but the
+Pauline of last evening. Here was the accomplished mistress he had so
+often dreamed of, the intelligent young girl with the loving nature and
+artistic temperament, who understood poets, who understood poetry, and
+lived in luxurious surroundings. Here, in short, was Foedora,
+gifted with a great soul; or Pauline become a countess, and twice a
+millionaire, as Foedora had been. When he reached the worn threshold,
+and stood upon the broken step at the door, where in the old days he had
+had so many desperate thoughts, an old woman came out of the room within
+and spoke to him.
+
+"You are M. Raphael de Valentin, are you not?"
+
+"Yes, good mother," he replied.
+
+"You know your old room then," she replied; "you are expected up there."
+
+"Does Mme. Gaudin still own the house?" Raphael asked.
+
+"Oh no, sir. Mme. Gaudin is a baroness now. She lives in a fine house
+of her own on the other side of the river. Her husband has come back.
+My goodness, he brought back thousands and thousands. They say she could
+buy up all the Quartier Saint-Jacques if she liked. She gave me her
+basement room for nothing, and the remainder of her lease. Ah, she's
+a kind woman all the same; she is no more proud to-day than she was
+yesterday."
+
+Raphael hurried up the staircase to his garret; as he reached the last
+few steps he heard the sounds of a piano. Pauline was there, simply
+dressed in a cotton gown, but the way that it was made, like the gloves,
+hat, and shawl that she had thrown carelessly upon the bed, revealed a
+change of fortune.
+
+"Ah, there you are!" cried Pauline, turning her head, and rising with
+unconcealed delight.
+
+Raphael went to sit beside her, flushed, confused, and happy; he looked
+at her in silence.
+
+"Why did you leave us then?" she asked, dropping her eyes as the flush
+deepened on his face. "What became of you?"
+
+"Ah, I have been very miserable, Pauline; I am very miserable still."
+
+"Alas!" she said, filled with pitying tenderness. "I guessed your fate
+yesterday when I saw you so well dressed, and apparently so wealthy; but
+in reality? Eh, M. Raphael, is it as it always used to be with you?"
+
+Valentin could not restrain the tears that sprang to his eyes.
+
+"Pauline," he exclaimed, "I----"
+
+He went no further, love sparkled in his eyes, and his emotion
+overflowed his face.
+
+"Oh, he loves me! he loves me!" cried Pauline.
+
+Raphael felt himself unable to say one word; he bent his head. The young
+girl took his hand at this; she pressed it as she said, half sobbing and
+half laughing:--
+
+"Rich, rich, happy and rich! Your Pauline is rich. But I? Oh, I ought
+to be very poor to-day. I have said, times without number, that I would
+give all the wealth upon this earth for those words, 'He loves me!' O
+my Raphael! I have millions. You like luxury, you will be glad; but you
+must love me and my heart besides, for there is so much love for you
+in my heart. You don't know? My father has come back. I am a wealthy
+heiress. Both he and my mother leave me completely free to decide my own
+fate. I am free--do you understand?"
+
+Seized with a kind of frenzy, Raphael grasped Pauline's hands and kissed
+them eagerly and vehemently, with an almost convulsive caress. Pauline
+drew her hands away, laid them on Raphael's shoulders, and drew him
+towards her. They understood one another--in that close embrace, in
+the unalloyed and sacred fervor of that one kiss without an
+afterthought--the first kiss by which two souls take possession of each
+other.
+
+"Ah, I will not leave you any more," said Pauline, falling back in her
+chair. "I do not know how I come to be so bold!" she added, blushing.
+
+"Bold, my Pauline? Do not fear it. It is love, love true and deep and
+everlasting like my own, is it not?"
+
+"Speak!" she cried. "Go on speaking, so long your lips have been dumb
+for me."
+
+"Then you have loved me all along?"
+
+"Loved you? _Mon Dieu_! How often I have wept here, setting your room
+straight, and grieving for your poverty and my own. I would have sold
+myself to the evil one to spare you one vexation! You are MY Raphael
+to-day, really my own Raphael, with that handsome head of yours, and
+your heart is mine too; yes, that above all, your heart--O wealth
+inexhaustible! Well, where was I?" she went on after a pause. "Oh yes!
+We have three, four, or five millions, I believe. If I were poor, I
+should perhaps desire to bear your name, to be acknowledged as your
+wife; but as it is, I would give up the whole world for you, I would
+be your servant still, now and always. Why, Raphael, if I give you my
+fortune, my heart, myself to-day, I do no more than I did that day when
+I put a certain five-franc piece in the drawer there," and she pointed
+to the table. "Oh, how your exultation hurt me then!"
+
+"Oh, why are you rich?" Raphael cried; "why is there no vanity in you? I
+can do nothing for you."
+
+He wrung his hands in despair and happiness and love.
+
+"When you are the Marquise de Valentin, I know that the title and the
+fortune for thee, heavenly soul, will not be worth----"
+
+"One hair of your head," she cried.
+
+"I have millions too. But what is wealth to either of us now? There is
+my life--ah, that I can offer, take it."
+
+"Your love, Raphael, your love is all the world to me. Are your thoughts
+of me? I am the happiest of the happy!"
+
+"Can any one overhear us?" asked Raphael.
+
+"Nobody," she replied, and a mischievous gesture escaped her.
+
+"Come, then!" cried Valentin, holding out his arms.
+
+She sprang upon his knees and clasped her arms about his neck.
+
+"Kiss me!" she cried, "after all the pain you have given me; to blot out
+the memory of the grief that your joys have caused me; and for the sake
+of the nights that I spent in painting hand-screens----"
+
+"Those hand-screens of yours?"
+
+"Now that we are rich, my darling, I can tell you all about it. Poor
+boy! how easy it is to delude a clever man! Could you have had white
+waistcoats and clean shirts twice a week for three francs every month to
+the laundress? Why, you used to drink twice as much milk as your money
+would have paid for. I deceived you all round--over firing, oil, and
+even money. O Raphael mine, don't have me for your wife, I am far too
+cunning!" she said laughing.
+
+"But how did you manage?"
+
+"I used to work till two o'clock in the morning; I gave my mother half
+the money made by my screens, and the other half went to you."
+
+They looked at one another for a moment, both bewildered by love and
+gladness.
+
+"Some day we shall have to pay for this happiness by some terrible
+sorrow," cried Raphael.
+
+"Perhaps you are married?" said Pauline. "Oh, I will not give you up to
+any other woman."
+
+"I am free, my beloved."
+
+"Free!" she repeated. "Free, and mine!"
+
+She slipped down upon her knees, clasped her hands, and looked at
+Raphael in an enthusiasm of devotion.
+
+"I am afraid I shall go mad. How handsome you are!" she went on, passing
+her fingers through her lover's fair hair. "How stupid your Countess
+Foedora is! How pleased I was yesterday with the homage they all paid to
+me! SHE has never been applauded. Dear, when I felt your arm against my
+back, I heard a vague voice within me that cried, 'He is there!' and I
+turned round and saw you. I fled, for I longed so to throw my arms about
+you before them all."
+
+"How happy you are--you can speak!" Raphael exclaimed. "My heart is
+overwhelmed; I would weep, but I cannot. Do not draw your hand away.
+I could stay here looking at you like this for the rest of my life, I
+think; happy and content."
+
+"O my love, say that once more!"
+
+"Ah, what are words?" answered Valentin, letting a hot tear fall on
+Pauline's hands. "Some time I will try to tell you of my love; just now
+I can only feel it."
+
+"You," she said, "with your lofty soul and your great genius, with that
+heart of yours that I know so well; are you really mine, as I am yours?"
+
+"For ever and ever, my sweet creature," said Raphael in an uncertain
+voice. "You shall be my wife, my protecting angel. My griefs have always
+been dispelled by your presence, and my courage revived; that angelic
+smile now on your lips has purified me, so to speak. A new life seems
+about to begin for me. The cruel past and my wretched follies are hardly
+more to me than evil dreams. At your side I breathe an atmosphere of
+happiness, and I am pure. Be with me always," he added, pressing her
+solemnly to his beating heart.
+
+"Death may come when it will," said Pauline in ecstasy; "I have lived!"
+
+Happy he who shall divine their joy, for he must have experienced it.
+
+"I wish that no one might enter this dear garret again, my Raphael,"
+said Pauline, after two hours of silence.
+
+"We must have the door walled up, put bars across the window, and buy
+the house," the Marquis answered.
+
+"Yes, we will," she said. Then a moment later she added: "Our search for
+your manuscripts has been a little lost sight of," and they both laughed
+like children.
+
+"Pshaw! I don't care a jot for the whole circle of the sciences,"
+Raphael answered.
+
+"Ah, sir, and how about glory?"
+
+"I glory in you alone."
+
+"You used to be very miserable as you made these little scratches and
+scrawls," she said, turning the papers over.
+
+"My Pauline----"
+
+"Oh yes, I am your Pauline--and what then?"
+
+"Where are you living now?"
+
+"In the Rue Saint Lazare. And you?"
+
+"In the Rue de Varenne."
+
+"What a long way apart we shall be until----" She stopped, and looked at
+her lover with a mischievous and coquettish expression.
+
+"But at the most we need only be separated for a fortnight," Raphael
+answered.
+
+"Really! we are to be married in a fortnight?" and she jumped for joy
+like a child.
+
+"I am an unnatural daughter!" she went on. "I give no more thought to my
+father or my mother, or to anything in the world. Poor love, you don't
+know that my father is very ill? He returned from the Indies in very
+bad health. He nearly died at Havre, where we went to find him. Good
+heavens!" she cried, looking at her watch; "it is three o'clock already!
+I ought to be back again when he wakes at four. I am mistress of the
+house at home; my mother does everything that I wish, and my father
+worships me; but I will not abuse their kindness, that would be wrong.
+My poor father! He would have me go to the Italiens yesterday. You will
+come to see him to-morrow, will you not?"
+
+"Will Madame la Marquise de Valentin honor me by taking my arm?"
+
+"I am going to take the key of this room away with me," she said. "Isn't
+our treasure-house a palace?"
+
+"One more kiss, Pauline."
+
+"A thousand, _mon Dieu_!" she said, looking at Raphael. "Will it always
+be like this? I feel as if I were dreaming."
+
+They went slowly down the stairs together, step for step, with arms
+closely linked, trembling both of them beneath their load of joy. Each
+pressing close to the other's side, like a pair of doves, they reached
+the Place de la Sorbonne, where Pauline's carriage was waiting.
+
+"I want to go home with you," she said. "I want to see your own room and
+your study, and to sit at the table where you work. It will be like old
+times," she said, blushing.
+
+She spoke to the servant. "Joseph, before returning home I am going to
+the Rue de Varenne. It is a quarter-past three now, and I must be back
+by four o'clock. George must hurry the horses." And so in a few moments
+the lovers came to Valentin's abode.
+
+"How glad I am to have seen all this for myself!" Pauline cried,
+creasing the silken bed-curtains in Raphael's room between her fingers.
+"As I go to sleep, I shall be here in thought. I shall imagine your dear
+head on the pillow there. Raphael, tell me, did no one advise you about
+the furniture of your hotel?"
+
+"No one whatever."
+
+"Really? It was not a woman who----"
+
+"Pauline!"
+
+"Oh, I know I am fearfully jealous. You have good taste. I will have a
+bed like yours to-morrow."
+
+Quite beside himself with happiness, Raphael caught Pauline in his arms.
+
+"Oh, my father!" she said; "my father----"
+
+"I will take you back to him," cried Valentin, "for I want to be away
+from you as little as possible."
+
+"How loving you are! I did not venture to suggest it----"
+
+"Are you not my life?"
+
+It would be tedious to set down accurately the charming prattle of the
+lovers, for tones and looks and gestures that cannot be rendered alone
+gave it significance. Valentin went back with Pauline to her own door,
+and returned with as much happiness in his heart as mortal man can know.
+
+When he was seated in his armchair beside the fire, thinking over the
+sudden and complete way in which his wishes had been fulfilled, a cold
+shiver went through him, as if the blade of a dagger had been plunged
+into his breast--he thought of the Magic Skin, and saw that it had
+shrunk a little. He uttered the most tremendous of French oaths, without
+any of the Jesuitical reservations made by the Abbess of Andouillettes,
+leant his head against the back of the chair, and sat motionless, fixing
+his unseeing eyes upon the bracket of the curtain pole.
+
+"Good God!" he cried; "every wish! Every desire of mine! Poor
+Pauline!----"
+
+He took a pair of compasses and measured the extent of existence that
+the morning had cost him.
+
+"I have scarcely enough for two months!" he said.
+
+A cold sweat broke out over him; moved by an ungovernable spasm of rage,
+he seized the Magic Skin, exclaiming:
+
+"I am a perfect fool!"
+
+He rushed out of the house and across the garden, and flung the talisman
+down a well.
+
+"_Vogue la galere_," cried he. "The devil take all this nonsense."
+
+So Raphael gave himself up to the happiness of being beloved, and led
+with Pauline the life of heart and heart. Difficulties which it would
+be somewhat tedious to describe had delayed their marriage, which was to
+take place early in March. Each was sure of the other; their affection
+had been tried, and happiness had taught them how strong it was. Never
+has love made two souls, two natures, so absolutely one. The more they
+came to know of each other, the more they loved. On either side there
+was the same hesitating delicacy, the same transports of joy such as
+angels know; there were no clouds in their heaven; the will of either
+was the other's law.
+
+Wealthy as they both were, they had not a caprice which they could not
+gratify, and for that reason had no caprices. A refined taste, a feeling
+for beauty and poetry, was instinct in the soul of the bride; her
+lover's smile was more to her than all the pearls of Ormuz. She
+disdained feminine finery; a muslin dress and flowers formed her most
+elaborate toilette.
+
+Pauline and Raphael shunned every one else, for solitude was abundantly
+beautiful to them. The idlers at the Opera, or at the Italiens, saw this
+charming and unconventional pair evening after evening. Some gossip
+went the round of the salons at first, but the harmless lovers were
+soon forgotten in the course of events which took place in Paris; their
+marriage was announced at length to excuse them in the eyes of the
+prudish; and as it happened, their servants did not babble; so their
+bliss did not draw down upon them any very severe punishment.
+
+One morning towards the end of February, at the time when the
+brightening days bring a belief in the nearness of the joys of spring,
+Pauline and Raphael were breakfasting together in a small conservatory,
+a kind of drawing-room filled with flowers, on a level with the garden.
+The mild rays of the pale winter sunlight, breaking through the thicket
+of exotic plants, warmed the air somewhat. The vivid contrast made by
+the varieties of foliage, the colors of the masses of flowering shrubs,
+the freaks of light and shadow, gladdened the eyes. While all the rest
+of Paris still sought warmth from its melancholy hearth, these two were
+laughing in a bower of camellias, lilacs, and blossoming heath. Their
+happy faces rose above lilies of the valley, narcissus blooms, and
+Bengal roses. A mat of plaited African grass, variegated like a carpet,
+lay beneath their feet in this luxurious conservatory. The walls,
+covered with a green linen material, bore no traces of damp. The
+surfaces of the rustic wooden furniture shone with cleanliness. A
+kitten, attracted by the odor of milk, had established itself upon the
+table; it allowed Pauline to bedabble it in coffee; she was playing
+merrily with it, taking away the cream that she had just allowed the
+kitten to sniff at, so as to exercise its patience, and keep up the
+contest. She burst out laughing at every antic, and by the comical
+remarks she constantly made, she hindered Raphael from perusing the
+paper; he had dropped it a dozen times already. This morning picture
+seemed to overflow with inexpressible gladness, like everything that is
+natural and genuine.
+
+Raphael, still pretending to read his paper, furtively watched Pauline
+with the cat--his Pauline, in the dressing-gown that hung carelessly
+about her; his Pauline, with her hair loose on her shoulders, with a
+tiny, white, blue-veined foot peeping out of a velvet slipper. It was
+pleasant to see her in this negligent dress; she was delightful as some
+fanciful picture by Westall; half-girl, half-woman, as she seemed to
+be, or perhaps more of a girl than a woman, there was no alloy in
+the happiness she enjoyed, and of love she knew as yet only its first
+ecstasy. When Raphael, absorbed in happy musing, had forgotten the
+existence of the newspaper, Pauline flew upon it, crumpled it up into
+a ball, and threw it out into the garden; the kitten sprang after the
+rotating object, which spun round and round, as politics are wont to do.
+This childish scene recalled Raphael to himself. He would have gone on
+reading, and felt for the sheet he no longer possessed. Joyous laughter
+rang out like the song of a bird, one peal leading to another.
+
+"I am quite jealous of the paper," she said, as she wiped away the tears
+that her childlike merriment had brought into her eyes. "Now, is it not
+a heinous offence," she went on, as she became a woman all at once, "to
+read Russian proclamations in my presence, and to attend to the prosings
+of the Emperor Nicholas rather than to looks and words of love!"
+
+"I was not reading, my dear angel; I was looking at you."
+
+Just then the gravel walk outside the conservatory rang with the sound
+of the gardener's heavily nailed boots.
+
+"I beg your pardon, my Lord Marquis--and yours, too, madame--if I am
+intruding, but I have brought you a curiosity the like of which I never
+set eyes on. Drawing a bucket of water just now, with due respect, I
+got out this strange salt-water plant. Here it is. It must be thoroughly
+used to water, anyhow, for it isn't saturated or even damp at all. It is
+as dry as a piece of wood, and has not swelled a bit. As my Lord Marquis
+certainly knows a great deal more about things than I do, I thought I
+ought to bring it, and that it would interest him."
+
+Therewith the gardener showed Raphael the inexorable piece of skin;
+there were barely six square inches of it left.
+
+"Thanks, Vaniere," Raphael said. "The thing is very curious."
+
+"What is the matter with you, my angel; you are growing quite white!"
+Pauline cried.
+
+"You can go, Vaniere."
+
+"Your voice frightens me," the girl went on; "it is so strangely
+altered. What is it? How are you feeling? Where is the pain? You are in
+pain!--Jonathan! here! call a doctor!" she cried.
+
+"Hush, my Pauline," Raphael answered, as he regained composure. "Let us
+get up and go. Some flower here has a scent that is too much for me. It
+is that verbena, perhaps."
+
+Pauline flew upon the innocent plant, seized it by the stalk, and flung
+it out into the garden; then, with all the might of the love between
+them, she clasped Raphael in a close embrace, and with languishing
+coquetry raised her red lips to his for a kiss.
+
+"Dear angel," she cried, "when I saw you turn so white, I understood
+that I could not live on without you; your life is my life too. Lay your
+hand on my back, Raphael mine; I feel a chill like death. The feeling
+of cold is there yet. Your lips are burning. How is your hand?--Cold as
+ice," she added.
+
+"Mad girl!" exclaimed Raphael.
+
+"Why that tear? Let me drink it."
+
+"O Pauline, Pauline, you love me far too much!"
+
+"There is something very extraordinary going on in your mind, Raphael!
+Do not dissimulate. I shall very soon find out your secret. Give that to
+me," she went on, taking the Magic Skin.
+
+"You are my executioner!" the young man exclaimed, glancing in horror at
+the talisman.
+
+"How changed your voice is!" cried Pauline, as she dropped the fatal
+symbol of destiny.
+
+"Do you love me?" he asked.
+
+"Do I love you? Is there any doubt?"
+
+"Then, leave me, go away!"
+
+The poor child went.
+
+"So!" cried Raphael, when he was alone. "In an enlightened age, when we
+have found out that diamonds are a crystallized form of charcoal, at
+a time when everything is made clear, when the police would hale a new
+Messiah before the magistrates, and submit his miracles to the Academie
+des Sciences--in an epoch when we no longer believe in anything but a
+notary's signature--that I, forsooth, should believe in a sort of _Mene,
+Tekel, Upharsin_! No, by Heaven, I will not believe that the Supreme
+Being would take pleasure in torturing a harmless creature.--Let us see
+the learned about it."
+
+Between the Halle des Vins, with its extensive assembly of barrels, and
+the Salpetriere, that extensive seminary of drunkenness, lies a small
+pond, which Raphael soon reached. All sorts of ducks of rare varieties
+were there disporting themselves; their colored markings shone in the
+sun like the glass in cathedral windows. Every kind of duck in the
+world was represented, quacking, dabbling, and moving about--a kind
+of parliament of ducks assembled against its will, but luckily without
+either charter or political principles, living in complete immunity from
+sportsmen, under the eyes of any naturalist that chanced to see them.
+
+"That is M. Lavrille," said one of the keepers to Raphael, who had asked
+for that high priest of zoology.
+
+The Marquis saw a short man buried in profound reflections, caused by
+the appearance of a pair of ducks. The man of science was middle-aged;
+he had a pleasant face, made pleasanter still by a kindly expression,
+but an absorption in scientific ideas engrossed his whole person. His
+peruke was strangely turned up, by being constantly raised to scratch
+his head; so that a line of white hair was left plainly visible, a
+witness to an enthusiasm for investigation, which, like every other
+strong passion, so withdraws us from mundane considerations, that we
+lose all consciousness of the "I" within us. Raphael, the student and
+man of science, looked respectfully at the naturalist, who devoted his
+nights to enlarging the limits of human knowledge, and whose very errors
+reflected glory upon France; but a she-coxcomb would have laughed,
+no doubt, at the break of continuity between the breeches and striped
+waistcoat worn by the man of learning; the interval, moreover, was
+modestly filled by a shirt which had been considerably creased, for
+he stooped and raised himself by turns, as his zoological observations
+required.
+
+After the first interchange of civilities, Raphael thought it necessary
+to pay M. Lavrille a banal compliment upon his ducks.
+
+"Oh, we are well off for ducks," the naturalist replied. "The genus,
+moreover, as you doubtless know, is the most prolific in the order
+of palmipeds. It begins with the swan and ends with the zin-zin duck,
+comprising in all one hundred and thirty-seven very distinct varieties,
+each having its own name, habits, country, and character, and every one
+no more like another than a white man is like a negro. Really, sir,
+when we dine off a duck, we have no notion for the most part of the vast
+extent----"
+
+He interrupted himself as he saw a small pretty duck come up to the
+surface of the pond.
+
+"There you see the cravatted swan, a poor native of Canada; he has come
+a very long way to show us his brown and gray plumage and his little
+black cravat! Look, he is preening himself. That one is the famous eider
+duck that provides the down, the eider-down under which our fine ladies
+sleep; isn't it pretty? Who would not admire the little pinkish white
+breast and the green beak? I have just been a witness, sir," he went on,
+"to a marriage that I had long despaired of bringing about; they have
+paired rather auspiciously, and I shall await the results very eagerly.
+This will be a hundred and thirty-eighth species, I flatter myself, to
+which, perhaps, my name will be given. That is the newly matched pair,"
+he said, pointing out two of the ducks; "one of them is a laughing goose
+(_anas albifrons_), and the other the great whistling duck, Buffon's
+_anas ruffina_. I have hesitated a long while between the whistling
+duck, the duck with white eyebrows, and the shoveler duck (_anas
+clypeata_). Stay, that is the shoveler--that fat, brownish black rascal,
+with the greenish neck and that coquettish iridescence on it. But the
+whistling duck was a crested one, sir, and you will understand that I
+deliberated no longer. We only lack the variegated black-capped duck
+now. These gentlemen here, unanimously claim that that variety of
+duck is only a repetition of the curve-beaked teal, but for my own
+part,"--and the gesture he made was worth seeing. It expressed at once
+the modesty and pride of a man of science; the pride full of obstinacy,
+and the modesty well tempered with assurance.
+
+"I don't think it is," he added. "You see, my dear sir, that we are not
+amusing ourselves here. I am engaged at this moment upon a monograph on
+the genus duck. But I am at your disposal."
+
+While they went towards a rather pleasant house in the Rue du Buffon,
+Raphael submitted the skin to M. Lavrille's inspection.
+
+"I know the product," said the man of science, when he had turned his
+magnifying glass upon the talisman. "It used to be used for covering
+boxes. The shagreen is very old. They prefer to use skate's skin
+nowadays for making sheaths. This, as you are doubtless aware, is the
+hide of the _raja sephen_, a Red Sea fish."
+
+"But this, sir, since you are so exceedingly good----"
+
+"This," the man of science interrupted, as he resumed, "this is quite
+another thing; between these two shagreens, sir, there is a difference
+just as wide as between sea and land, or fish and flesh. The fish's skin
+is harder, however, than the skin of the land animal. This," he said, as
+he indicated the talisman, "is, as you doubtless know, one of the most
+curious of zoological products."
+
+"But to proceed----" said Raphael.
+
+"This," replied the man of science, as he flung himself down into his
+armchair, "is an ass' skin, sir."
+
+"Yes, I know," said the young man.
+
+"A very rare variety of ass found in Persia," the naturalist continued,
+"the onager of the ancients, equus asinus, the _koulan_ of the Tartars;
+Pallas went out there to observe it, and has made it known to science,
+for as a matter of fact the animal for a long time was believed to be
+mythical. It is mentioned, as you know, in Holy Scripture; Moses forbade
+that it should be coupled with its own species, and the onager is yet
+more famous for the prostitutions of which it was the object, and which
+are often mentioned by the prophets of the Bible. Pallas, as you know
+doubtless, states in his _Act. Petrop._ tome II., that these bizarre
+excesses are still devoutly believed in among the Persians and the
+Nogais as a sovereign remedy for lumbago and sciatic gout. We poor
+Parisians scarcely believe that. The Museum has no example of the
+onager.
+
+"What a magnificent animal!" he continued. "It is full of mystery;
+its eyes are provided with a sort of burnished covering, to which the
+Orientals attribute the powers of fascination; it has a glossier and
+finer coat than our handsomest horses possess, striped with more or less
+tawny bands, very much like the zebra's hide. There is something pliant
+and silky about its hair, which is sleek to the touch. Its powers of
+sight vie in precision and accuracy with those of man; it is rather
+larger than our largest domestic donkeys, and is possessed of
+extraordinary courage. If it is surprised by any chance, it defends
+itself against the most dangerous wild beasts with remarkable success;
+the rapidity of its movements can only be compared with the flight of
+birds; an onager, sir, would run the best Arab or Persian horses to
+death. According to the father of the conscientious Doctor Niebuhr,
+whose recent loss we are deploring, as you doubtless know, the ordinary
+average pace of one of these wonderful creatures would be seven thousand
+geometric feet per hour. Our own degenerate race of donkeys can give no
+idea of the ass in his pride and independence. He is active and spirited
+in his demeanor; he is cunning and sagacious; there is grace about the
+outlines of his head; every movement is full of attractive charm. In
+the East he is the king of beasts. Turkish and Persian superstition even
+credits him with a mysterious origin; and when stories of the prowess
+attributed to him are told in Thibet or in Tartary, the speakers mingle
+Solomon's name with that of this noble animal. A tame onager, in short,
+is worth an enormous amount; it is well-nigh impossible to catch them
+among the mountains, where they leap like roebucks, and seem as if they
+could fly like birds. Our myth of the winged horse, our Pegasus, had its
+origin doubtless in these countries, where the shepherds could see the
+onager springing from one rock to another. In Persia they breed asses
+for the saddle, a cross between a tamed onager and a she-ass, and they
+paint them red, following immemorial tradition. Perhaps it was this
+custom that gave rise to our own proverb, 'Surely as a red donkey.' At
+some period when natural history was much neglected in France, I think a
+traveler must have brought over one of these strange beasts that endures
+servitude with such impatience. Hence the adage. The skin that you
+have laid before me is the skin of an onager. Opinions differ as to the
+origin of the name. Some claim that _Chagri_ is a Turkish word; others
+insist that _Chagri_ must be the name of the place where this animal
+product underwent the chemical process of preparation so clearly
+described by Pallas, to which the peculiar graining that we admire is
+due; Martellens has written to me saying that _Chaagri_ is a river----"
+
+"I thank you, sir, for the information that you have given me; it would
+furnish an admirable footnote for some Dom Calmet or other, if such
+erudite hermits yet exist; but I have had the honor of pointing out to
+you that this scrap was in the first instance quite as large as that
+map," said Raphael, indicating an open atlas to Lavrille; "but it has
+shrunk visibly in three months' time----"
+
+"Quite so," said the man of science. "I understand. The remains of any
+substance primarily organic are naturally subject to a process of
+decay. It is quite easy to understand, and its progress depends upon
+atmospherical conditions. Even metals contract and expand appreciably,
+for engineers have remarked somewhat considerable interstices between
+great blocks of stone originally clamped together with iron bars. The
+field of science is boundless, but human life is very short, so that we
+do not claim to be acquainted with all the phenomena of nature."
+
+"Pardon the question that I am about to ask you, sir," Raphael began,
+half embarrassed, "but are you quite sure that this piece of skin is
+subject to the ordinary laws of zoology, and that it can be stretched?"
+
+"Certainly----oh, bother!----" muttered M. Lavrille, trying to stretch
+the talisman. "But if you, sir, will go to see Planchette," he added,
+"the celebrated professor of mechanics, he will certainly discover some
+method of acting upon this skin, of softening and expanding it."
+
+"Ah, sir, you are the preserver of my life," and Raphael took leave of
+the learned naturalist and hurried off to Planchette, leaving the worthy
+Lavrille in his study, all among the bottles and dried plants that
+filled it up.
+
+Quite unconsciously Raphael brought away with him from this visit,
+all of science that man can grasp, a terminology to wit. Lavrille, the
+worthy man, was very much like Sancho Panza giving to Don Quixote the
+history of the goats; he was entertaining himself by making out a list
+of animals and ticking them off. Even now that his life was nearing its
+end, he was scarcely acquainted with a mere fraction of the countless
+numbers of the great tribes that God has scattered, for some unknown
+end, throughout the ocean of worlds.
+
+Raphael was well pleased. "I shall keep my ass well in hand," cried he.
+Sterne had said before his day, "Let us take care of our ass, if we wish
+to live to old age." But it is such a fantastic brute!
+
+Planchette was a tall, thin man, a poet of a surety, lost in one
+continual thought, and always employed in gazing into the bottomless
+abyss of Motion. Commonplace minds accuse these lofty intellects of
+madness; they form a misinterpreted race apart that lives in a wonderful
+carelessness of luxuries or other people's notions. They will spend
+whole days at a stretch, smoking a cigar that has gone out, and enter
+a drawing-room with the buttons on their garments not in every case
+formally wedded to the button-holes. Some day or other, after a long
+time spent in measuring space, or in accumulating Xs under Aa-Gg, they
+succeed in analyzing some natural law, and resolve it into its elemental
+principles, and all on a sudden the crowd gapes at a new machine; or it
+is a handcart perhaps that overwhelms us with astonishment by the apt
+simplicity of its construction. The modest man of science smiles at
+his admirers, and remarks, "What is that invention of mine? Nothing
+whatever. Man cannot create a force; he can but direct it; and science
+consists in learning from nature."
+
+The mechanician was standing bolt upright, planted on both feet, like
+some victim dropped straight from the gibbet, when Raphael broke in upon
+him. He was intently watching an agate ball that rolled over a sun-dial,
+and awaited its final settlement. The worthy man had received neither
+pension nor decoration; he had not known how to make the right use of
+his ability for calculation. He was happy in his life spent on the watch
+for a discovery; he had no thought either of reputation, of the outer
+world, nor even of himself, and led the life of science for the sake of
+science.
+
+"It is inexplicable," he exclaimed. "Ah, your servant, sir," he went on,
+becoming aware of Raphael's existence. "How is your mother? You must go
+and see my wife."
+
+"And I also could have lived thus," thought Raphael, as he recalled the
+learned man from his meditations by asking of him how to produce any
+effect on the talisman, which he placed before him.
+
+"Although my credulity must amuse you, sir," so the Marquis ended, "I
+will conceal nothing from you. That skin seems to me to be endowed with
+an insuperable power of resistance."
+
+"People of fashion, sir, always treat science rather superciliously,"
+said Planchette. "They all talk to us pretty much as the _incroyable_
+did when he brought some ladies to see Lalande just after an eclipse,
+and remarked, 'Be so good as to begin it over again!' What effect do you
+want to produce? The object of the science of mechanics is either the
+application or the neutralization of the laws of motion. As for motion
+pure and simple, I tell you humbly, that we cannot possibly define it.
+That disposed of, unvarying phenomena have been observed which accompany
+the actions of solids and fluids. If we set up the conditions by
+which these phenomena are brought to pass, we can transport bodies or
+communicate locomotive power to them at a predetermined rate of speed.
+We can project them, divide them up in a few or an infinite number of
+pieces, accordingly as we break them or grind them to powder; we can
+twist bodies or make them rotate, modify, compress, expand, or extend
+them. The whole science, sir, rests upon a single fact.
+
+"You see this ball," he went on; "here it lies upon this slab. Now,
+it is over there. What name shall we give to what has taken place,
+so natural from a physical point of view, so amazing from a moral?
+Movement, locomotion, changing of place? What prodigious vanity lurks
+underneath the words. Does a name solve the difficulty? Yet it is the
+whole of our science for all that. Our machines either make direct use
+of this agency, this fact, or they convert it. This trifling phenomenon,
+applied to large masses, would send Paris flying. We can increase speed
+by an expenditure of force, and augment the force by an increase of
+speed. But what are speed and force? Our science is as powerless to tell
+us that as to create motion. Any movement whatever is an immense power,
+and man does not create power of any kind. Everything is movement,
+thought itself is a movement, upon movement nature is based. Death is a
+movement whose limitations are little known. If God is eternal, be
+sure that He moves perpetually; perhaps God is movement. That is
+why movement, like God is inexplicable, unfathomable, unlimited,
+incomprehensible, intangible. Who has ever touched, comprehended, or
+measured movement? We feel its effects without seeing it; we can even
+deny them as we can deny the existence of a God. Where is it? Where
+is it not? Whence comes it? What is its source? What is its end? It
+surrounds us, it intrudes upon us, and yet escapes us. It is evident as
+a fact, obscure as an abstraction; it is at once effect and cause. It
+requires space, even as we, and what is space? Movement alone recalls
+it to us; without movement, space is but an empty meaningless word.
+Like space, like creation, like the infinite, movement is an insoluble
+problem which confounds human reason; man will never conceive it,
+whatever else he may be permitted to conceive.
+
+"Between each point in space occupied in succession by that ball,"
+continued the man of science, "there is an abyss confronting human
+reason, an abyss into which Pascal fell. In order to produce any
+effect upon an unknown substance, we ought first of all to study that
+substance; to know whether, in accordance with its nature, it will be
+broken by the force of a blow, or whether it will withstand it; if it
+breaks in pieces, and you have no wish to split it up, we shall not
+achieve the end proposed. If you want to compress it, a uniform impulse
+must be communicated to all the particles of the substance, so as to
+diminish the interval that separates them in an equal degree. If you
+wish to expand it, we should try to bring a uniform eccentric force to
+bear on every molecule; for unless we conform accurately to this law,
+we shall have breaches in continuity. The modes of motion, sir, are
+infinite, and no limit exists to combinations of movement. Upon what
+effect have you determined?"
+
+"I want any kind of pressure that is strong enough to expand the skin
+indefinitely," began Raphael, quite of out patience.
+
+"Substance is finite," the mathematician put in, "and therefore will not
+admit of indefinite expansion, but pressure will necessarily increase
+the extent of surface at the expense of the thickness, which will be
+diminished until the point is reached when the material gives out----"
+
+"Bring about that result, sir," Raphael cried, "and you will have earned
+millions."
+
+"Then I should rob you of your money," replied the other, phlegmatic as
+a Dutchman. "I am going to show you, in a word or two, that a machine
+can be made that is fit to crush Providence itself in pieces like a fly.
+It would reduce a man to the conditions of a piece of waste paper; a
+man--boots and spurs, hat and cravat, trinkets and gold, and all----"
+
+"What a fearful machine!"
+
+"Instead of flinging their brats into the water, the Chinese ought
+to make them useful in this way," the man of science went on, without
+reflecting on the regard man has for his progeny.
+
+Quite absorbed by his idea, Planchette took an empty flower-pot, with a
+hole in the bottom, and put it on the surface of the dial, then he
+went to look for a little clay in a corner of the garden. Raphael stood
+spellbound, like a child to whom his nurse is telling some wonderful
+story. Planchette put the clay down upon the slab, drew a pruning-knife
+from his pocket, cut two branches from an elder tree, and began to
+clean them of pith by blowing through them, as if Raphael had not been
+present.
+
+"There are the rudiments of the apparatus," he said. Then he connected
+one of the wooden pipes with the bottom of the flower-pot by way of
+a clay joint, in such a way that the mouth of the elder stem was just
+under the hole of the flower-pot; you might have compared it to a big
+tobacco-pipe. He spread a bed of clay over the surface of the slab, in a
+shovel-shaped mass, set down the flower-pot at the wider end of it, and
+laid the pipe of the elder stem along the portion which represented the
+handle of the shovel. Next he put a lump of clay at the end of the elder
+stem and therein planted the other pipe, in an upright position, forming
+a second elbow which connected it with the first horizontal pipe in such
+a manner that the air, or any given fluid in circulation, could flow
+through this improvised piece of mechanism from the mouth of the
+vertical tube, along the intermediate passages, and so into the large
+empty flower-pot.
+
+"This apparatus, sir," he said to Raphael, with all the gravity of an
+academician pronouncing his initiatory discourse, "is one of the great
+Pascal's grandest claims upon our admiration."
+
+"I don't understand."
+
+The man of science smiled. He went up to a fruit-tree and took down a
+little phial in which the druggist had sent him some liquid for catching
+ants; he broke off the bottom and made a funnel of the top, carefully
+fitting it to the mouth of the vertical hollowed stem that he had set in
+the clay, and at the opposite end to the great reservoir, represented
+by the flower-pot. Next, by means of a watering-pot, he poured in
+sufficient water to rise to the same level in the large vessel and in
+the tiny circular funnel at the end of the elder stem.
+
+Raphael was thinking of his piece of skin.
+
+"Water is considered to-day, sir, to be an incompressible body," said
+the mechanician; "never lose sight of that fundamental principle; still
+it can be compressed, though only so very slightly that we should regard
+its faculty for contracting as a zero. You see the amount of surface
+presented by the water at the brim of the flower-pot?"
+
+"Yes, sir."
+
+"Very good; now suppose that that surface is a thousand times larger
+than the orifice of the elder stem through which I poured the liquid.
+Here, I am taking the funnel away----"
+
+"Granted."
+
+"Well, then, if by any method whatever I increase the volume of that
+quantity of water by pouring in yet more through the mouth of the little
+tube; the water thus compelled to flow downwards would rise in the
+reservoir, represented by the flower-pot, until it reached the same
+level at either end."
+
+"That is quite clear," cried Raphael.
+
+"But there is this difference," the other went on. "Suppose that the
+thin column of water poured into the little vertical tube there exerts
+a force equal, say, to a pound weight, for instance, its action will
+be punctually communicated to the great body of the liquid, and will be
+transmitted to every part of the surface represented by the water in the
+flower-pot so that at the surface there will be a thousand columns of
+water, every one pressing upwards as if they were impelled by a force
+equal to that which compels the liquid to descend in the vertical tube;
+and of necessity they reproduce here," said Planchette, indicating to
+Raphael the top of the flower-pot, "the force introduced over there, a
+thousand-fold," and the man of science pointed out to the marquis the
+upright wooden pipe set in the clay.
+
+"That is quite simple," said Raphael.
+
+Planchette smiled again.
+
+"In other words," he went on, with the mathematician's natural stubborn
+propensity for logic, "in order to resist the force of the incoming
+water, it would be necessary to exert, upon every part of the large
+surface, a force equal to that brought into action in the vertical
+column, but with this difference--if the column of liquid is a foot in
+height, the thousand little columns of the wide surface will only have a
+very slight elevating power.
+
+"Now," said Planchette, as he gave a fillip to his bits of stick,
+"let us replace this funny little apparatus by steel tubes of suitable
+strength and dimensions; and if you cover the liquid surface of the
+reservoir with a strong sliding plate of metal, and if to this metal
+plate you oppose another, solid enough and strong enough to resist any
+test; if, furthermore, you give me the power of continually adding water
+to the volume of liquid contents by means of the little vertical tube,
+the object fixed between the two solid metal plates must of necessity
+yield to the tremendous crushing force which indefinitely compresses it.
+The method of continually pouring in water through a little tube, like
+the manner of communicating force through the volume of the liquid to a
+small metal plate, is an absurdly primitive mechanical device. A brace
+of pistons and a few valves would do it all. Do you perceive, my dear
+sir," he said taking Valentin by the arm, "there is scarcely a substance
+in existence that would not be compelled to dilate when fixed in between
+these two indefinitely resisting surfaces?"
+
+"What! the author of the _Lettres provinciales_ invented it?" Raphael
+exclaimed.
+
+"He and no other, sir. The science of mechanics knows no simpler nor
+more beautiful contrivance. The opposite principle, the capacity of
+expansion possessed by water, has brought the steam-engine into
+being. But water will only expand up to a certain point, while its
+incompressibility, being a force in a manner negative, is, of necessity,
+infinite."
+
+"If this skin is expanded," said Raphael, "I promise you to erect a
+colossal statue to Blaise Pascal; to found a prize of a hundred thousand
+francs to be offered every ten years for the solution of the grandest
+problem of mechanical science effected during the interval; to find
+dowries for all your cousins and second cousins, and finally to build an
+asylum on purpose for impoverished or insane mathematicians."
+
+"That would be exceedingly useful," Planchette replied. "We will go to
+Spieghalter to-morrow, sir," he continued, with the serenity of a man
+living on a plane wholly intellectual. "That distinguished mechanic has
+just completed, after my own designs, an improved mechanical arrangement
+by which a child could get a thousand trusses of hay inside his cap."
+
+"Then good-bye till to-morrow."
+
+"Till to-morrow, sir."
+
+"Talk of mechanics!" cried Raphael; "isn't it the greatest of the
+sciences? The other fellow with his onagers, classifications, ducks, and
+species, and his phials full of bottled monstrosities, is at best only
+fit for a billiard-marker in a saloon."
+
+The next morning Raphael went off in great spirits to find Planchette,
+and together they set out for the Rue de la Sante--auspicious
+appellation! Arrived at Spieghalter's, the young man found himself in a
+vast foundry; his eyes lighted upon a multitude of glowing and roaring
+furnaces. There was a storm of sparks, a deluge of nails, an ocean
+of pistons, vices, levers, valves, girders, files, and nuts; a sea of
+melted metal, baulks of timber and bar-steel. Iron filings filled your
+throat. There was iron in the atmosphere; the men were covered with it;
+everything reeked of iron. The iron seemed to be a living organism; it
+became a fluid, moved, and seemed to shape itself intelligently after
+every fashion, to obey the worker's every caprice. Through the uproar
+made by the bellows, the crescendo of the falling hammers, and the
+shrill sounds of the lathes that drew groans from the steel, Raphael
+passed into a large, clean, and airy place where he was able to inspect
+at his leisure the great press that Planchette had told him about. He
+admired the cast-iron beams, as one might call them, and the twin bars
+of steel coupled together with indestructible bolts.
+
+"If you were to give seven rapid turns to that crank," said Spieghalter,
+pointing out a beam of polished steel, "you would make a steel bar spurt
+out in thousands of jets, that would get into your legs like needles."
+
+"The deuce!" exclaimed Raphael.
+
+Planchette himself slipped the piece of skin between the metal plates
+of the all-powerful press; and, brimful of the certainty of a scientific
+conviction, he worked the crank energetically.
+
+"Lie flat, all of you; we are dead men!" thundered Spieghalter, as he
+himself fell prone on the floor.
+
+A hideous shrieking sound rang through the workshops. The water in
+the machine had broken the chamber, and now spouted out in a jet of
+incalculable force; luckily it went in the direction of an old furnace,
+which was overthrown, enveloped and carried away by a waterspout.
+
+"Ha!" remarked Planchette serenely, "the piece of skin is as safe and
+sound as my eye. There was a flaw in your reservoir somewhere, or a
+crevice in the large tube----"
+
+"No, no; I know my reservoir. The devil is in your contrivance, sir; you
+can take it away," and the German pounced upon a smith's hammer, flung
+the skin down on an anvil, and, with all the strength that rage gives,
+dealt the talisman the most formidable blow that had ever resounded
+through his workshops.
+
+"There is not so much as a mark on it!" said Planchette, stroking the
+perverse bit of skin.
+
+The workmen hurried in. The foreman took the skin and buried it in the
+glowing coal of a forge, while, in a semi-circle round the fire, they
+all awaited the action of a huge pair of bellows. Raphael, Spieghalter,
+and Professor Planchette stood in the midst of the grimy expectant
+crowd. Raphael, looking round on faces dusted over with iron filings,
+white eyes, greasy blackened clothing, and hairy chests, could have
+fancied himself transported into the wild nocturnal world of German
+ballad poetry. After the skin had been in the fire for ten minutes, the
+foreman pulled it out with a pair of pincers.
+
+"Hand it over to me," said Raphael.
+
+The foreman held it out by way of a joke. The Marquis readily handled
+it; it was cool and flexible between his fingers. An exclamation of
+alarm went up; the workmen fled in terror. Valentin was left alone with
+Planchette in the empty workshop.
+
+"There is certainly something infernal in the thing!" cried Raphael,
+in desperation. "Is no human power able to give me one more day of
+existence?"
+
+"I made a mistake, sir," said the mathematician, with a penitent
+expression; "we ought to have subjected that peculiar skin to the action
+of a rolling machine. Where could my eyes have been when I suggested
+compression!"
+
+"It was I that asked for it," Raphael answered.
+
+The mathematician heaved a sigh of relief, like a culprit acquitted by a
+dozen jurors. Still, the strange problem afforded by the skin interested
+him; he meditated a moment, and then remarked:
+
+"This unknown material ought to be treated chemically by re-agents. Let
+us call on Japhet--perhaps the chemist may have better luck than the
+mechanic."
+
+Valentin urged his horse into a rapid trot, hoping to find the chemist,
+the celebrated Japhet, in his laboratory.
+
+"Well, old friend," Planchette began, seeing Japhet in his armchair,
+examining a precipitate; "how goes chemistry?"
+
+"Gone to sleep. Nothing new at all. The Academie, however, has
+recognized the existence of salicine, but salicine, asparagine,
+vauqueline, and digitaline are not really discoveries----"
+
+"Since you cannot invent substances," said Raphael, "you are obliged to
+fall back on inventing names."
+
+"Most emphatically true, young man."
+
+"Here," said Planchette, addressing the chemist, "try to analyze this
+composition; if you can extract any element whatever from it, I christen
+it diaboline beforehand, for we have just smashed a hydraulic press in
+trying to compress it."
+
+"Let's see! let's have a look at it!" cried the delighted chemist; "it
+may, perhaps, be a fresh element."
+
+"It is simply a piece of the skin of an ass, sir," said Raphael.
+
+"Sir!" said the illustrious chemist sternly.
+
+"I am not joking," the Marquis answered, laying the piece of skin before
+him.
+
+Baron Japhet applied the nervous fibres of his tongue to the skin; he
+had skill in thus detecting salts, acids, alkalis, and gases. After
+several experiments, he remarked:
+
+"No taste whatever! Come, we will give it a little fluoric acid to
+drink."
+
+Subjected to the influence of this ready solvent of animal tissue, the
+skin underwent no change whatsoever.
+
+"It is not shagreen at all!" the chemist cried. "We will treat this
+unknown mystery as a mineral, and try its mettle by dropping it in a
+crucible where I have at this moment some red potash."
+
+Japhet went out, and returned almost immediately.
+
+"Allow me to cut away a bit of this strange substance, sir," he said to
+Raphael; "it is so extraordinary----"
+
+"A bit!" exclaimed Raphael; "not so much as a hair's-breadth. You may
+try, though," he added, half banteringly, half sadly.
+
+The chemist broke a razor in his desire to cut the skin; he tried to
+break it by a powerful electric shock; next he submitted it to the
+influence of a galvanic battery; but all the thunderbolts his science
+wotted of fell harmless on the dreadful talisman.
+
+It was seven o'clock in the evening. Planchette, Japhet, and Raphael,
+unaware of the flight of time, were awaiting the outcome of a final
+experiment. The Magic Skin emerged triumphant from a formidable
+encounter in which it had been engaged with a considerable quantity of
+chloride of nitrogen.
+
+"It is all over with me," Raphael wailed. "It is the finger of God! I
+shall die!----" and he left the two amazed scientific men.
+
+"We must be very careful not to talk about this affair at the Academie;
+our colleagues there would laugh at us," Planchette remarked to the
+chemist, after a long pause, in which they looked at each other without
+daring to communicate their thoughts. The learned pair looked like
+two Christians who had issued from their tombs to find no God in the
+heavens. Science had been powerless; acids, so much clear water; red
+potash had been discredited; the galvanic battery and electric shock had
+been a couple of playthings.
+
+"A hydraulic press broken like a biscuit!" commented Planchette.
+
+"I believe in the devil," said the Baron Japhet, after a moment's
+silence.
+
+"And I in God," replied Planchette.
+
+Each spoke in character. The universe for a mechanician is a machine
+that requires an operator; for chemistry--that fiendish employment of
+decomposing all things--the world is a gas endowed with the power of
+movement.
+
+"We cannot deny the fact," the chemist replied.
+
+"Pshaw! those gentlemen the doctrinaires have invented a nebulous
+aphorism for our consolation--Stupid as a fact."
+
+"Your aphorism," said the chemist, "seems to me as a fact very stupid."
+
+They began to laugh, and went off to dine like folk for whom a miracle
+is nothing more than a phenomenon.
+
+Valentin reached his own house shivering with rage and consumed with
+anger. He had no more faith in anything. Conflicting thoughts shifted
+and surged to and fro in his brain, as is the case with every man
+brought face to face with an inconceivable fact. He had readily
+believed in some hidden flaw in Spieghalter's apparatus; he had not been
+surprised by the incompetence and failure of science and of fire;
+but the flexibility of the skin as he handled it, taken with its
+stubbornness when all means of destruction that man possesses had
+been brought to bear upon it in vain--these things terrified him. The
+incontrovertible fact made him dizzy.
+
+"I am mad," he muttered. "I have had no food since the morning, and yet
+I am neither hungry nor thirsty, and there is a fire in my breast that
+burns me."
+
+He put back the skin in the frame where it had been enclosed but lately,
+drew a line in red ink about the actual configuration of the talisman,
+and seated himself in his armchair.
+
+"Eight o'clock already!" he exclaimed. "To-day has gone like a dream."
+
+He leaned his elbow on the arm of the chair, propped his head with
+his left hand, and so remained, lost in secret dark reflections and
+consuming thoughts that men condemned to die bear away with them.
+
+"O Pauline!" he cried. "Poor child! there are gulfs that love can never
+traverse, despite the strength of his wings."
+
+Just then he very distinctly heard a smothered sigh, and knew by one
+of the most tender privileges of passionate love that it was Pauline's
+breathing.
+
+"That is my death warrant," he said to himself. "If she were there, I
+should wish to die in her arms."
+
+A burst of gleeful and hearty laughter made him turn his face towards
+the bed; he saw Pauline's face through the transparent curtains, smiling
+like a child for gladness over a successful piece of mischief. Her
+pretty hair fell over her shoulders in countless curls; she looked like
+a Bengal rose upon a pile of white roses.
+
+"I cajoled Jonathan," said she. "Doesn't the bed belong to me, to me who
+am your wife? Don't scold me, darling; I only wanted to surprise you, to
+sleep beside you. Forgive me for my freak."
+
+She sprang out of bed like a kitten, showed herself gleaming in her lawn
+raiment, and sat down on Raphael's knee.
+
+"Love, what gulf were you talking about?" she said, with an anxious
+expression apparent upon her face.
+
+"Death."
+
+"You hurt me," she answered. "There are some thoughts upon which we,
+poor women that we are, cannot dwell; they are death to us. Is it
+strength of love in us, or lack of courage? I cannot tell. Death does
+not frighten me," she began again, laughingly. "To die with you, both
+together, to-morrow morning, in one last embrace, would be joy. It seems
+to me that even then I should have lived more than a hundred years.
+What does the number of days matter if we have spent a whole lifetime of
+peace and love in one night, in one hour?"
+
+"You are right; Heaven is speaking through that pretty mouth of yours.
+Grant that I may kiss you, and let us die," said Raphael.
+
+"Then let us die," she said, laughing.
+
+Towards nine o'clock in the morning the daylight streamed through the
+chinks of the window shutters. Obscured somewhat by the muslin curtains,
+it yet sufficed to show clearly the rich colors of the carpet, the silks
+and furniture of the room, where the two lovers were lying asleep. The
+gilding sparkled here and there. A ray of sunshine fell and faded upon
+the soft down quilt that the freaks of live had thrown to the ground.
+The outlines of Pauline's dress, hanging from a cheval glass, appeared
+like a shadowy ghost. Her dainty shoes had been left at a distance from
+the bed. A nightingale came to perch upon the sill; its trills repeated
+over again, and the sounds of its wings suddenly shaken out for flight,
+awoke Raphael.
+
+"For me to die," he said, following out a thought begun in his dream,
+"my organization, the mechanism of flesh and bone, that is quickened
+by the will in me, and makes of me an individual MAN, must display some
+perceptible disease. Doctors ought to understand the symptoms of any
+attack on vitality, and could tell me whether I am sick or sound."
+
+He gazed at his sleeping wife. She had stretched her head out to him,
+expressing in this way even while she slept the anxious tenderness of
+love. Pauline seemed to look at him as she lay with her face turned
+towards him in an attitude as full of grace as a young child's, with her
+pretty, half-opened mouth held out towards him, as she drew her light,
+even breath. Her little pearly teeth seemed to heighten the redness of
+the fresh lips with the smile hovering over them. The red glow in her
+complexion was brighter, and its whiteness was, so to speak, whiter
+still just then than in the most impassioned moments of the waking day.
+In her unconstrained grace, as she lay, so full of believing trust,
+the adorable attractions of childhood were added to the enchantments of
+love.
+
+Even the most unaffected women still obey certain social conventions,
+which restrain the free expansion of the soul within them during their
+waking hours; but slumber seems to give them back the spontaneity of
+life which makes infancy lovely. Pauline blushed for nothing; she was
+like one of those beloved and heavenly beings, in whom reason has not
+yet put motives into their actions and mystery into their glances.
+Her profile stood out in sharp relief against the fine cambric of the
+pillows; there was a certain sprightliness about her loose hair in
+confusion, mingled with the deep lace ruffles; but she was sleeping in
+happiness, her long lashes were tightly pressed against her cheeks, as
+if to secure her eyes from too strong a light, or to aid an effort of
+her soul to recollect and to hold fast a bliss that had been perfect but
+fleeting. Her tiny pink and white ear, framed by a lock of her hair and
+outlined by a wrapping of Mechlin lace, would have made an artist, a
+painter, an old man, wildly in love, and would perhaps have restored a
+madman to his senses.
+
+Is it not an ineffable bliss to behold the woman that you love,
+sleeping, smiling in a peaceful dream beneath your protection, loving
+you even in dreams, even at the point where the individual seems to
+cease to exist, offering to you yet the mute lips that speak to you in
+slumber of the latest kiss? Is it not indescribable happiness to see
+a trusting woman, half-clad, but wrapped round in her love as by a
+cloak--modesty in the midst of dishevelment--to see admiringly her
+scattered clothing, the silken stocking hastily put off to please you
+last evening, the unclasped girdle that implies a boundless faith in
+you. A whole romance lies there in that girdle; the woman that it
+used to protect exists no longer; she is yours, she has become _you_;
+henceforward any betrayal of her is a blow dealt at yourself.
+
+In this softened mood Raphael's eyes wandered over the room, now filled
+with memories and love, and where the very daylight seemed to take
+delightful hues. Then he turned his gaze at last upon the outlines of
+the woman's form, upon youth and purity, and love that even now had no
+thought that was not for him alone, above all things, and longed to live
+for ever. As his eyes fell upon Pauline, her own opened at once as if a
+ray of sunlight had lighted on them.
+
+"Good-morning," she said, smiling. "How handsome you are, bad man!"
+
+The grace of love and youth, of silence and dawn, shone in their faces,
+making a divine picture, with the fleeting spell over it all that
+belongs only to the earliest days of passion, just as simplicity and
+artlessness are the peculiar possession of childhood. Alas! love's
+springtide joys, like our own youthful laughter, must even take flight,
+and live for us no longer save in memory; either for our despair, or
+to shed some soothing fragrance over us, according to the bent of our
+inmost thoughts.
+
+"What made me wake you?" said Raphael. "It was so great a pleasure to
+watch you sleeping that it brought tears to my eyes."
+
+"And to mine, too," she answered. "I cried in the night while I watched
+you sleeping, but not with happiness. Raphael, dear, pray listen to me.
+Your breathing is labored while you sleep, and something rattles in
+your chest that frightens me. You have a little dry cough when you are
+asleep, exactly like my father's, who is dying of phthisis. In those
+sounds from your lungs I recognized some of the peculiar symptoms of
+that complaint. Then you are feverish; I know you are; your hand was
+moist and burning----Darling, you are young," she added with a shudder,
+"and you could still get over it if unfortunately----But, no," she cried
+cheerfully, "there is no 'unfortunately,' the disease is contagious, so
+the doctors say."
+
+She flung both arms about Raphael, drawing in his breath through one of
+those kisses in which the soul reaches its end.
+
+"I do not wish to live to old age," she said. "Let us both die young,
+and go to heaven while flowers fill our hands."
+
+"We always make such designs as those when we are well and strong,"
+Raphael replied, burying his hands in Pauline's hair. But even then a
+horrible fit of coughing came on, one of those deep ominous coughs
+that seem to come from the depths of the tomb, a cough that leaves the
+sufferer ghastly pale, trembling, and perspiring; with aching sides and
+quivering nerves, with a feeling of weariness pervading the very marrow
+of the spine, and unspeakable languor in every vein. Raphael slowly laid
+himself down, pale, exhausted, and overcome, like a man who has spent
+all the strength in him over one final effort. Pauline's eyes, grown
+large with terror, were fixed upon him; she lay quite motionless, pale,
+and silent.
+
+"Let us commit no more follies, my angel," she said, trying not to let
+Raphael see the dreadful forebodings that disturbed her. She covered her
+face with her hands, for she saw Death before her--the hideous skeleton.
+Raphael's face had grown as pale and livid as any skull unearthed from
+a churchyard to assist the studies of some scientific man. Pauline
+remembered the exclamation that had escaped from Valentin the previous
+evening, and to herself she said:
+
+"Yes, there are gulfs that love can never cross, and therein love must
+bury itself."
+
+On a March morning, some days after this wretched scene, Raphael found
+himself seated in an armchair, placed in the window in the full light
+of day. Four doctors stood round him, each in turn trying his pulse,
+feeling him over, and questioning him with apparent interest. The
+invalid sought to guess their thoughts, putting a construction on every
+movement they made, and on the slightest contractions of their brows.
+His last hope lay in this consultation. This court of appeal was about
+to pronounce its decision--life or death.
+
+Valentin had summoned the oracles of modern medicine, so that he might
+have the last word of science. Thanks to his wealth and title, there
+stood before him three embodied theories; human knowledge fluctuated
+round the three points. Three of the doctors brought among them the
+complete circle of medical philosophy; they represented the points of
+conflict round which the battle raged, between Spiritualism, Analysis,
+and goodness knows what in the way of mocking eclecticism.
+
+The fourth doctor was Horace Bianchon, a man of science with a future
+before him, the most distinguished man of the new school in medicine, a
+discreet and unassuming representative of a studious generation that
+is preparing to receive the inheritance of fifty years of experience
+treasured up by the Ecole de Paris, a generation that perhaps will erect
+the monument for the building of which the centuries behind us have
+collected the different materials. As a personal friend of the Marquis
+and of Rastignac, he had been in attendance on the former for some
+days past, and was helping him to answer the inquiries of the three
+professors, occasionally insisting somewhat upon those symptoms which,
+in his opinion, pointed to pulmonary disease.
+
+"You have been living at a great pace, leading a dissipated life, no
+doubt, and you have devoted yourself largely to intellectual work?"
+queried one of the three celebrated authorities, addressing Raphael. He
+was a square-headed man, with a large frame and energetic organization,
+which seemed to mark him out as superior to his two rivals.
+
+"I made up my mind to kill myself with debauchery, after spending three
+years over an extensive work, with which perhaps you may some day occupy
+yourselves," Raphael replied.
+
+The great doctor shook his head, and so displayed his satisfaction. "I
+was sure of it," he seemed to say to himself. He was the illustrious
+Brisset, the successor of Cabanis and Bichat, head of the Organic
+School, a doctor popular with believers in material and positive
+science, who see in man a complete individual, subject solely to the
+laws of his own particular organization; and who consider that his
+normal condition and abnormal states of disease can both be traced to
+obvious causes.
+
+After this reply, Brisset looked, without speaking, at a middle-sized
+person, whose darkly flushed countenance and glowing eyes seemed to
+belong to some antique satyr; and who, leaning his back against the
+corner of the embrasure, was studying Raphael, without saying a word.
+Doctor Cameristus, a man of creeds and enthusiasms, the head of the
+"Vitalists," a romantic champion of the esoteric doctrines of Van
+Helmont, discerned a lofty informing principle in human life, a
+mysterious and inexplicable phenomenon which mocks at the scalpel,
+deceives the surgeon, eludes the drugs of the pharmacopoeia, the
+formulae of algebra, the demonstrations of anatomy, and derides all
+our efforts; a sort of invisible, intangible flame, which, obeying some
+divinely appointed law, will often linger on in a body in our opinion
+devoted to death, while it takes flight from an organization well fitted
+for prolonged existence.
+
+A bitter smile hovered upon the lips of the third doctor, Maugredie, a
+man of acknowledged ability, but a Pyrrhonist and a scoffer, with the
+scalpel for his one article of faith. He would consider, as a concession
+to Brisset, that a man who, as a matter of fact, was perfectly well was
+dead, and recognize with Cameristus that a man might be living on after
+his apparent demise. He found something sensible in every theory, and
+embraced none of them, claiming that the best of all systems of medicine
+was to have none at all, and to stick to facts. This Panurge of the
+Clinical Schools, the king of observers, the great investigator, a great
+sceptic, the man of desperate expedients, was scrutinizing the Magic
+Skin.
+
+"I should very much like to be a witness of the coincidence of its
+retrenchment with your wish," he said to the Marquis.
+
+"Where is the use?" cried Brisset.
+
+"Where is the use?" echoed Cameristus.
+
+"Ah, you are both of the same mind," replied Maugredie.
+
+"The contraction is perfectly simple," Brisset went on.
+
+"It is supernatural," remarked Cameristus.
+
+"In short," Maugredie made answer, with affected solemnity, and handing
+the piece of skin to Raphael as he spoke, "the shriveling faculty of the
+skin is a fact inexplicable, and yet quite natural, which, ever since
+the world began, has been the despair of medicine and of pretty women."
+
+All Valentin's observation could discover no trace of a feeling for his
+troubles in any of the three doctors. The three received every answer
+in silence, scanned him unconcernedly, and interrogated him
+unsympathetically. Politeness did not conceal their indifference;
+whether deliberation or certainty was the cause, their words at any
+rate came so seldom and so languidly, that at times Raphael thought
+that their attention was wandering. From time to time Brisset, the
+sole speaker, remarked, "Good! just so!" as Bianchon pointed out the
+existence of each desperate symptom. Cameristus seemed to be deep in
+meditation; Maugredie looked like a comic author, studying two queer
+characters with a view to reproducing them faithfully upon the stage.
+There was deep, unconcealed distress, and grave compassion in Horace
+Bianchon's face. He had been a doctor for too short a time to be
+untouched by suffering and unmoved by a deathbed; he had not learned to
+keep back the sympathetic tears that obscure a man's clear vision
+and prevent him from seizing like the general of an army, upon the
+auspicious moment for victory, in utter disregard of the groans of dying
+men.
+
+After spending about half an hour over taking in some sort the measure
+of the patient and the complaint, much as a tailor measures a young man
+for a coat when he orders his wedding outfit, the authorities uttered
+several commonplaces, and even talked of politics. Then they decided to
+go into Raphael's study to exchange their ideas and frame their verdict.
+
+"May I not be present during the discussion, gentlemen?" Valentin had
+asked them, but Brisset and Maugredie protested against this, and, in
+spite of their patient's entreaties, declined altogether to deliberate
+in his presence.
+
+Raphael gave way before their custom, thinking that he could slip into
+a passage adjoining, whence he could easily overhear the medical
+conference in which the three professors were about to engage.
+
+"Permit me, gentlemen," said Brisset, as they entered, "to give you my
+own opinion at once. I neither wish to force it upon you nor to have it
+discussed. In the first place, it is unbiased, concise, and based on
+an exact similarity that exists between one of my own patients and the
+subject that we have been called in to examine; and, moreover, I am
+expected at my hospital. The importance of the case that demands my
+presence there will excuse me for speaking the first word. The subject
+with which we are concerned has been exhausted in an equal degree by
+intellectual labors--what did he set about, Horace?" he asked of the
+young doctor.
+
+"A 'Theory of the Will,'"
+
+"The devil! but that's a big subject. He is exhausted, I say, by too
+much brain-work, by irregular courses, and by the repeated use of too
+powerful stimulants. Violent exertion of body and mind has demoralized
+the whole system. It is easy, gentlemen, to recognize in the symptoms
+of the face and body generally intense irritation of the stomach, an
+affection of the great sympathetic nerve, acute sensibility of the
+epigastric region, and contraction of the right and left hypochondriac.
+You have noticed, too, the large size and prominence of the liver. M.
+Bianchon has, besides, constantly watched the patient, and he tells us
+that digestion is troublesome and difficult. Strictly speaking, there is
+no stomach left, and so the man has disappeared. The brain is atrophied
+because the man digests no longer. The progressive deterioration wrought
+in the epigastric region, the seat of vitality, has vitiated the whole
+system. Thence, by continuous fevered vibrations, the disorder has
+reached the brain by means of the nervous plexus, hence the excessive
+irritation in that organ. There is monomania. The patient is burdened
+with a fixed idea. That piece of skin really contracts, to his way of
+thinking; very likely it always has been as we have seen it; but whether
+it contracts or no, that thing is for him just like the fly that some
+Grand Vizier or other had on his nose. If you put leeches at once on the
+epigastrium, and reduce the irritation in that part, which is the very
+seat of man's life, and if you diet the patient, the monomania will
+leave him. I will say no more to Dr. Bianchon; he should be able to
+grasp the whole treatment as well as the details. There may be, perhaps,
+some complication of the disease--the bronchial tubes, possibly, may be
+also inflamed; but I believe that treatment for the intestinal organs is
+very much more important and necessary, and more urgently required than
+for the lungs. Persistent study of abstract matters, and certain violent
+passions, have induced serious disorders in that vital mechanism.
+However, we are in time to set these conditions right. Nothing is too
+seriously affected. You will easily get your friend round again," he
+remarked to Bianchon.
+
+"Our learned colleague is taking the effect for the cause," Cameristus
+replied. "Yes, the changes that he has observed so keenly certainly
+exist in the patient; but it is not the stomach that, by degrees, has
+set up nervous action in the system, and so affected the brain, like a
+hole in a window pane spreading cracks round about it. It took a blow
+of some kind to make a hole in the window; who gave the blow? Do we
+know that? Have we investigated the patient's case sufficiently? Are we
+acquainted with all the events of his life?
+
+"The vital principle, gentlemen," he continued, "the Archeus of Van
+Helmont, is affected in his case--the very essence and centre of life is
+attacked. The divine spark, the transitory intelligence which holds the
+organism together, which is the source of the will, the inspiration of
+life, has ceased to regulate the daily phenomena of the mechanism and
+the functions of every organ; thence arise all the complications which
+my learned colleague has so thoroughly appreciated. The epigastric
+region does not affect the brain but the brain affects the epigastric
+region. No," he went on, vigorously slapping his chest, "no, I am not
+a stomach in the form of a man. No, everything does not lie there. I do
+not feel that I have the courage to say that if the epigastric region is
+in good order, everything else is in a like condition----
+
+"We cannot trace," he went on more mildly, "to one physical cause the
+serious disturbances that supervene in this or that subject which has
+been dangerously attacked, nor submit them to a uniform treatment.
+No one man is like another. We have each peculiar organs, differently
+affected, diversely nourished, adapted to perform different functions,
+and to induce a condition necessary to the accomplishment of an order
+of things which is unknown to us. The sublime will has so wrought that
+a little portion of the great All is set within us to sustain the
+phenomena of living; in every man it formulates itself distinctly,
+making each, to all appearance, a separate individual, yet in one point
+co-existent with the infinite cause. So we ought to make a separate
+study of each subject, discover all about it, find out in what its life
+consists, and wherein its power lies. From the softness of a wet sponge
+to the hardness of pumice-stone there are infinite fine degrees of
+difference. Man is just like that. Between the sponge-like organizations
+of the lymphatic and the vigorous iron muscles of such men as are
+destined for a long life, what a margin for errors for the single
+inflexible system of a lowering treatment to commit; a system that
+reduces the capacities of the human frame, which you always conclude
+have been over-excited. Let us look for the origin of the disease in the
+mental and not in the physical viscera. A doctor is an inspired being,
+endowed by God with a special gift--the power to read the secrets of
+vitality; just as the prophet has received the eyes that foresee the
+future, the poet his faculty of evoking nature, and the musician the
+power of arranging sounds in an harmonious order that is possibly a copy
+of an ideal harmony on high."
+
+"There is his everlasting system of medicine, arbitrary, monarchical,
+and pious," muttered Brisset.
+
+"Gentlemen," Maugredie broke in hastily, to distract attention from
+Brisset's comment, "don't let us lose sight of the patient."
+
+"What is the good of science?" Raphael moaned. "Here is my recovery
+halting between a string of beads and a rosary of leeches, between
+Dupuytren's bistoury and Prince Hohenlohe's prayer. There is Maugredie
+suspending his judgment on the line that divides facts from words, mind
+from matter. Man's 'it is,' and 'it is not,' is always on my track;
+it is the _Carymary Carymara_ of Rabelais for evermore: my disorder is
+spiritual, _Carymary_, or material, _Carymara_. Shall I live? They have
+no idea. Planchette was more straightforward with me, at any rate, when
+he said, 'I do not know.'"
+
+Just then Valentin heard Maugredie's voice.
+
+"The patient suffers from monomania; very good, I am quite of that
+opinion," he said, "but he has two hundred thousand a year; monomaniacs
+of that kind are very uncommon. As for knowing whether his epigastric
+region has affected his brain, or his brain his epigastric region, we
+shall find that out, perhaps, whenever he dies. But to resume. There
+is no disputing the fact that he is ill; some sort of treatment he must
+have. Let us leave theories alone, and put leeches on him, to counteract
+the nervous and intestinal irritation, as to the existence of which we
+all agree; and let us send him to drink the waters, in that way we shall
+act on both systems at once. If there really is tubercular disease, we
+can hardly expect to save his life; so that----"
+
+Raphael abruptly left the passage, and went back to his armchair. The
+four doctors very soon came out of the study; Horace was the spokesman.
+
+"These gentlemen," he told him, "have unanimously agreed that leeches
+must be applied to the stomach at once, and that both physical and
+moral treatment are imperatively needed. In the first place, a carefully
+prescribed rule of diet, so as to soothe the internal irritation"--here
+Brisset signified his approval; "and in the second, a hygienic regimen,
+to set your general condition right. We all, therefore, recommend you
+to go to take the waters in Aix in Savoy; or, if you like it better, at
+Mont Dore in Auvergne; the air and the situation are both pleasanter in
+Savoy than in the Cantal, but you will consult your own taste."
+
+Here it was Cameristus who nodded assent.
+
+"These gentlemen," Bianchon continued, "having recognized a slight
+affection of the respiratory organs, are agreed as to the utility of
+the previous course of treatment that I have prescribed. They think
+that there will be no difficulty about restoring you to health, and that
+everything depends upon a wise and alternate employment of these various
+means. And----"
+
+"And that is the cause of the milk in the cocoanut," said Raphael,
+with a smile, as he led Horace into his study to pay the fees for this
+useless consultation.
+
+"Their conclusions are logical," the young doctor replied. "Cameristus
+feels, Brisset examines, Maugredie doubts. Has not man a soul, a body,
+and an intelligence? One of these three elemental constituents always
+influences us more or less strongly; there will always be the personal
+element in human science. Believe me, Raphael, we effect no cures; we
+only assist them. Another system--the use of mild remedies while Nature
+exerts her powers--lies between the extremes of theory of Brisset and
+Cameristus, but one ought to have known the patient for some ten years
+or so to obtain a good result on these lines. Negation lies at the
+back of all medicine, as in every other science. So endeavor to live
+wholesomely; try a trip to Savoy; the best course is, and always will
+be, to trust to Nature."
+
+It was a month later, on a fine summer-like evening, that several
+people, who were taking the waters at Aix, returned from the promenade
+and met together in the salons of the Club. Raphael remained alone by a
+window for a long time. His back was turned upon the gathering, and he
+himself was deep in those involuntary musings in which thoughts arise in
+succession and fade away, shaping themselves indistinctly, passing over
+us like thin, almost colorless clouds. Melancholy is sweet to us then,
+and delight is shadowy, for the soul is half asleep. Valentin gave
+himself up to this life of sensations; he was steeping himself in the
+warm, soft twilight, enjoying the pure air with the scent of the
+hills in it, happy in that he felt no pain, and had tranquilized his
+threatening Magic Skin at last. It grew cooler as the red glow of the
+sunset faded on the mountain peaks; he shut the window and left his
+place.
+
+"Will you be so kind as not to close the windows, sir?" said an old
+lady; "we are being stifled----"
+
+The peculiarly sharp and jarring tones in which the phrase was uttered
+grated on Raphael's ears; it fell on them like an indiscreet remark let
+slip by some man in whose friendship we would fain believe, a word which
+reveals unsuspected depths of selfishness and destroys some pleasing
+sentimental illusion of ours. The Marquis glanced, with the cool
+inscrutable expression of a diplomatist, at the old lady, called a
+servant, and, when he came, curtly bade him:
+
+"Open that window."
+
+Great surprise was clearly expressed on all faces at the words. The
+whole roomful began to whisper to each other, and turned their eyes upon
+the invalid, as though he had given some serious offence. Raphael, who
+had never quite managed to rid himself of the bashfulness of his early
+youth, felt a momentary confusion; then he shook off his torpor, exerted
+his faculties, and asked himself the meaning of this strange scene.
+
+A sudden and rapid impulse quickened his brain; the past weeks appeared
+before him in a clear and definite vision; the reasons for the feelings
+he inspired in others stood out for him in relief, like the veins of
+some corpse which a naturalist, by some cunningly contrived injection,
+has colored so as to show their least ramifications.
+
+He discerned himself in this fleeting picture; he followed out his
+own life in it, thought by thought, day after day. He saw himself, not
+without astonishment, an absent gloomy figure in the midst of these
+lively folk, always musing over his own fate, always absorbed by his own
+sufferings, seemingly impatient of the most harmless chat. He saw how
+he had shunned the ephemeral intimacies that travelers are so ready to
+establish--no doubt because they feel sure of never meeting each other
+again--and how he had taken little heed of those about him. He saw
+himself like the rocks without, unmoved by the caresses or the stormy
+surgings of the waves.
+
+Then, by a gift of insight seldom accorded, he read the thoughts of all
+those about him. The light of a candle revealed the sardonic profile
+and yellow cranium of an old man; he remembered now that he had won from
+him, and had never proposed that the other should have his revenge; a
+little further on he saw a pretty woman, whose lively advances he
+had met with frigid coolness; there was not a face there that did not
+reproach him with some wrong done, inexplicably to all appearance, but
+the real offence in every case lay in some mortification, some invisible
+hurt dealt to self-love. He had unintentionally jarred on all the small
+susceptibilities of the circle round about him.
+
+His guests on various occasions, and those to whom he had lent his
+horses, had taken offence at his luxurious ways; their ungraciousness
+had been a surprise to him; he had spared them further humiliations of
+that kind, and they had considered that he looked down upon them, and
+had accused him of haughtiness ever since. He could read their inmost
+thoughts as he fathomed their natures in this way. Society with its
+polish and varnish grew loathsome to him. He was envied and hated for
+his wealth and superior ability; his reserve baffled the inquisitive;
+his humility seemed like haughtiness to these petty superficial natures.
+He guessed the secret unpardonable crime which he had committed against
+them; he had overstepped the limits of the jurisdiction of their
+mediocrity. He had resisted their inquisitorial tyranny; he could
+dispense with their society; and all of them, therefore, had
+instinctively combined to make him feel their power, and to take revenge
+upon this incipient royalty by submitting him to a kind of ostracism,
+and so teaching him that they in their turn could do without him.
+
+Pity came over him, first of all, at this aspect of mankind, but very
+soon he shuddered at the thought of the power that came thus, at will,
+and flung aside for him the veil of flesh under which the moral nature
+is hidden away. He closed his eyes, so as to see no more. A black
+curtain was drawn all at once over this unlucky phantom show of truth;
+but still he found himself in the terrible loneliness that surrounds
+every power and dominion. Just then a violent fit of coughing seized
+him. Far from receiving one single word--indifferent, and meaningless,
+it is true, but still containing, among well-bred people brought
+together by chance, at least some pretence of civil commiseration--he
+now heard hostile ejaculations and muttered complaints. Society there
+assembled disdained any pantomime on his account, perhaps because he had
+gauged its real nature too well.
+
+"His complaint is contagious."
+
+"The president of the Club ought to forbid him to enter the salon."
+
+"It is contrary to all rules and regulations to cough in that way!"
+
+"When a man is as ill as that, he ought not to come to take the
+waters----"
+
+"He will drive me away from the place."
+
+Raphael rose and walked about the rooms to screen himself from their
+unanimous execrations. He thought to find a shelter, and went up to a
+young pretty lady who sat doing nothing, minded to address some pretty
+speeches to her; but as he came towards her, she turned her back upon
+him, and pretended to be watching the dancers. Raphael feared lest he
+might have made use of the talisman already that evening; and feeling
+that he had neither the wish nor the courage to break into the
+conversation, he left the salon and took refuge in the billiard-room.
+No one there greeted him, nobody spoke to him, no one sent so much as
+a friendly glance in his direction. His turn of mind, naturally
+meditative, had discovered instinctively the general grounds and
+reasons for the aversion he inspired. This little world was obeying,
+unconsciously perhaps, the sovereign law which rules over polite
+society; its inexorable nature was becoming apparent in its entirety
+to Raphael's eyes. A glance into the past showed it to him, as a type
+completely realized in Foedora.
+
+He would no more meet with sympathy here for his bodily ills than he had
+received it at her hands for the distress in his heart. The fashionable
+world expels every suffering creature from its midst, just as the body
+of a man in robust health rejects any germ of disease. The world holds
+suffering and misfortune in abhorrence; it dreads them like the plague;
+it never hesitates between vice and trouble, for vice is a luxury.
+Ill-fortune may possess a majesty of its own, but society can belittle
+it and make it ridiculous by an epigram. Society draws caricatures, and
+in this way flings in the teeth of fallen kings the affronts which it
+fancies it has received from them; society, like the Roman youth at the
+circus, never shows mercy to the fallen gladiator; mockery and money are
+its vital necessities. "Death to the weak!" That is the oath taken by
+this kind of Equestrian order, instituted in their midst by all the
+nations of the world; everywhere it makes for the elevation of the
+rich, and its motto is deeply graven in hearts that wealth has turned to
+stone, or that have been reared in aristocratic prejudices.
+
+Assemble a collection of school-boys together. That will give you a
+society in miniature, a miniature which represents life more truly,
+because it is so frank and artless; and in it you will always find poor
+isolated beings, relegated to some place in the general estimations
+between pity and contempt, on account of their weakness and suffering.
+To these the Evangel promises heaven hereafter. Go lower yet in the
+scale of organized creation. If some bird among its fellows in the
+courtyard sickens, the others fall upon it with their beaks, pluck
+out its feathers, and kill it. The whole world, in accordance with its
+character of egotism, brings all its severity to bear upon wretchedness
+that has the hardihood to spoil its festivities, and to trouble its
+joys.
+
+Any sufferer in mind or body, any helpless or poor man, is a pariah. He
+had better remain in his solitude; if he crosses the boundary-line, he
+will find winter everywhere; he will find freezing cold in other men's
+looks, manners, words, and hearts; and lucky indeed is he if he does not
+receive an insult where he expected that sympathy would be expended upon
+him. Let the dying keep to their bed of neglect, and age sit lonely
+by its fireside. Portionless maids, freeze and burn in your solitary
+attics. If the world tolerates misery of any kind, it is to turn it to
+account for its own purposes, to make some use of it, saddle and bridle
+it, put a bit in its mouth, ride it about, and get some fun out of it.
+
+Crotchety spinsters, ladies' companions, put a cheerful face upon it,
+endure the humors of your so-called benefactress, carry her lapdogs for
+her; you have an English poodle for your rival, and you must seek to
+understand the moods of your patroness, and amuse her, and--keep silence
+about yourselves. As for you, unblushing parasite, uncrowned king
+of unliveried servants, leave your real character at home, let your
+digestion keep pace with your host's laugh when he laughs, mingle your
+tears with his, and find his epigrams amusing; if you want to relieve
+your mind about him, wait till he is ruined. That is the way the world
+shows its respect for the unfortunate; it persecutes them, or slays them
+in the dust.
+
+Such thoughts as these welled up in Raphael's heart with the suddenness
+of poetic inspiration. He looked around him, and felt the influence of
+the forbidding gloom that society breathes out in order to rid itself of
+the unfortunate; it nipped his soul more effectually than the east wind
+grips the body in December. He locked his arms over his chest, set his
+back against the wall, and fell into a deep melancholy. He mused upon
+the meagre happiness that this depressing way of living can give. What
+did it amount to? Amusement with no pleasure in it, gaiety without
+gladness, joyless festivity, fevered dreams empty of all delight,
+firewood or ashes on the hearth without a spark of flame in them. When
+he raised his head, he found himself alone, all the billiard players had
+gone.
+
+"I have only to let them know my power to make them worship my coughing
+fits," he said to himself, and wrapped himself against the world in the
+cloak of his contempt.
+
+Next day the resident doctor came to call upon him, and took an anxious
+interest in his health. Raphael felt a thrill of joy at the friendly
+words addressed to him. The doctor's face, to his thinking, wore an
+expression that was kind and pleasant; the pale curls of his wig seemed
+redolent of philanthropy; the square cut of his coat, the loose folds
+of his trousers, his big Quaker-like shoes, everything about him down
+to the powder shaken from his queue and dusted in a circle upon his
+slightly stooping shoulders, revealed an apostolic nature, and spoke of
+Christian charity and of the self-sacrifice of a man, who, out of sheer
+devotion to his patients, had compelled himself to learn to play whist
+and tric-trac so well that he never lost money to any of them.
+
+"My Lord Marquis," said he, after a long talk with Raphael, "I can
+dispel your uneasiness beyond all doubt. I know your constitution well
+enough by this time to assure you that the doctors in Paris, whose great
+abilities I know, are mistaken as to the nature of your complaint.
+You can live as long as Methuselah, my Lord Marquis, accidents only
+excepted. Your lungs are as sound as a blacksmith's bellows, your
+stomach would put an ostrich to the blush; but if you persist in living
+at high altitude, you are running the risk of a prompt interment in
+consecrated soil. A few words, my Lord Marquis, will make my meaning
+clear to you.
+
+"Chemistry," he began, "has shown us that man's breathing is a real
+process of combustion, and the intensity of its action varies according
+to the abundance or scarcity of the phlogistic element stored up by
+the organism of each individual. In your case, the phlogistic, or
+inflammatory element is abundant; if you will permit me to put it so,
+you generate superfluous oxygen, possessing as you do the inflammatory
+temperament of a man destined to experience strong emotions. While
+you breath the keen, pure air that stimulates life in men of lymphatic
+constitution, you are accelerating an expenditure of vitality already
+too rapid. One of the conditions for existence for you is the heavier
+atmosphere of the plains and valleys. Yes, the vital air for a man
+consumed by his genius lies in the fertile pasture-lands of Germany, at
+Toplitz or Baden-Baden. If England is not obnoxious to you, its misty
+climate would reduce your fever; but the situation of our baths, a
+thousand feet above the level of the Mediterranean, is dangerous for
+you. That is my opinion at least," he said, with a deprecatory gesture,
+"and I give it in opposition to our interests, for, if you act upon it,
+we shall unfortunately lose you."
+
+But for these closing words of his, the affable doctor's seeming
+good-nature would have completely won Raphael over; but he was too
+profoundly observant not to understand the meaning of the tone, the
+look and gesture that accompanied that mild sarcasm, not to see that
+the little man had been sent on this errand, no doubt, by a flock of his
+rejoicing patients. The florid-looking idlers, tedious old women, nomad
+English people, and fine ladies who had given their husbands the slip,
+and were escorted hither by their lovers--one and all were in a plot to
+drive away a wretched, feeble creature to die, who seemed unable to hold
+out against a daily renewed persecution! Raphael accepted the challenge,
+he foresaw some amusement to be derived from their manoeuvres.
+
+"As you would be grieved at losing me," said he to the doctor, "I will
+endeavor to avail myself of your good advice without leaving the place.
+I will set about having a house built to-morrow, and the atmosphere
+within it shall be regulated by your instructions."
+
+The doctor understood the sarcastic smile that lurked about Raphael's
+mouth, and took his leave without finding another word to say.
+
+The Lake of Bourget lies seven hundred feet above the Mediterranean, in
+a great hollow among the jagged peaks of the hills; it sparkles there,
+the bluest drop of water in the world. From the summit of the Cat's
+Tooth the lake below looks like a stray turquoise. This lovely sheet of
+water is about twenty-seven miles round, and in some places is nearly
+five hundred feet deep.
+
+Under the cloudless sky, in your boat in the midst of the great expanse
+of water, with only the sound of the oars in your ears, only the
+vague outline of the hills on the horizon before you; you admire the
+glittering snows of the French Maurienne; you pass, now by masses of
+granite clad in the velvet of green turf or in low-growing shrubs, now
+by pleasant sloping meadows; there is always a wilderness on the one
+hand and fertile lands on the other, and both harmonies and dissonances
+compose a scene for you where everything is at once small and vast,
+and you feel yourself to be a poor onlooker at a great banquet.
+The configuration of the mountains brings about misleading optical
+conditions and illusions of perspective; a pine-tree a hundred feet in
+height looks to be a mere weed; wide valleys look as narrow as meadow
+paths. The lake is the only one where the confidences of heart and heart
+can be exchanged. There one can live; there one can meditate. Nowhere on
+earth will you find a closer understanding between the water, the
+sky, the mountains, and the fields. There is a balm there for all the
+agitations of life. The place keeps the secrets of sorrow to itself, the
+sorrow that grows less beneath its soothing influence; and to love, it
+gives a grave and meditative cast, deepening passion and purifying it.
+A kiss there becomes something great. But beyond all other things it is
+the lake for memories; it aids them by lending to them the hues of its
+own waves; it is a mirror in which everything is reflected. Only here,
+with this lovely landscape all around him, could Raphael endure the
+burden laid upon him; here he could remain as a languid dreamer, without
+a wish of his own.
+
+He went out upon the lake after the doctor's visit, and was landed at a
+lonely point on the pleasant slope where the village of Saint-Innocent
+is situated. The view from this promontory, as one may call it,
+comprises the heights of Bugey with the Rhone flowing at their foot,
+and the end of the lake; but Raphael liked to look at the opposite
+shore from thence, at the melancholy looking Abbey of Haute-Combe, the
+burying-place of the Sardinian kings, who lie prostrate there before the
+hills, like pilgrims come at last to their journey's end. The silence of
+the landscape was broken by the even rhythm of the strokes of the oar;
+it seemed to find a voice for the place, in monotonous cadences like the
+chanting of monks. The Marquis was surprised to find visitors to this
+usually lonely part of the lake; and as he mused, he watched the people
+seated in the boat, and recognized in the stern the elderly lady who had
+spoken so harshly to him the evening before.
+
+No one took any notice of Raphael as the boat passed, except the elderly
+lady's companion, a poor old maid of noble family, who bowed to him,
+and whom it seemed to him that he saw for the first time. A few seconds
+later he had already forgotten the visitors, who had rapidly disappeared
+behind the promontory, when he heard the fluttering of a dress and the
+sound of light footsteps not far from him. He turned about and saw the
+companion; and, guessing from her embarrassed manner that she wished to
+speak with him, he walked towards her.
+
+She was somewhere about thirty-six years of age, thin and tall, reserved
+and prim, and, like all old maids, seemed puzzled to know which way to
+look, an expression no longer in keeping with her measured, springless,
+and hesitating steps. She was both young and old at the same time, and,
+by a certain dignity in her carriage, showed the high value which she
+set upon her charms and perfections. In addition, her movements were
+all demure and discreet, like those of women who are accustomed to take
+great care of themselves, no doubt because they desire not to be cheated
+of love, their destined end.
+
+"Your life is in danger, sir; do not come to the Club again!" she said,
+stepping back a pace or two from Raphael, as if her reputation had
+already been compromised.
+
+"But, mademoiselle," said Raphael, smiling, "please explain yourself
+more clearly, since you have condescended so far----"
+
+"Ah," she answered, "unless I had had a very strong motive, I should
+never have run the risk of offending the countess, for if she ever came
+to know that I had warned you----"
+
+"And who would tell her, mademoiselle?" cried Raphael.
+
+"True," the old maid answered. She looked at him, quaking like an owl
+out in the sunlight. "But think of yourself," she went on; "several
+young men, who want to drive you away from the baths, have agreed to
+pick a quarrel with you, and to force you into a duel."
+
+The elderly lady's voice sounded in the distance.
+
+"Mademoiselle," began the Marquis, "my gratitude----" But his
+protectress had fled already; she had heard the voice of her mistress
+squeaking afresh among the rocks.
+
+"Poor girl! unhappiness always understands and helps the unhappy,"
+Raphael thought, and sat himself down at the foot of a tree.
+
+The key of every science is, beyond cavil, the mark of interrogation; we
+owe most of our greatest discoveries to a _Why_? and all the wisdom in
+the world, perhaps, consists in asking _Wherefore_? in every connection.
+But, on the other hand, this acquired prescience is the ruin of our
+illusions.
+
+So Valentin, having taken the old maid's kindly action for the text of
+his wandering thoughts, without the deliberate promptings of philosophy,
+must find it full of gall and wormwood.
+
+"It is not at all extraordinary that a gentlewoman's gentlewoman should
+take a fancy to me," said he to himself. "I am twenty-seven years old,
+and I have a title and an income of two hundred thousand a year. But
+that her mistress, who hates water like a rabid cat--for it would be
+hard to give the palm to either in that matter--that her mistress should
+have brought her here in a boat! Is not that very strange and wonderful?
+Those two women came into Savoy to sleep like marmots; they ask if day
+has dawned at noon; and to think that they could get up this morning
+before eight o'clock, to take their chances in running after me!"
+
+Very soon the old maid and her elderly innocence became, in his eyes, a
+fresh manifestation of that artificial, malicious little world. It was a
+paltry device, a clumsy artifice, a piece of priest's or woman's craft.
+Was the duel a myth, or did they merely want to frighten him? But
+these petty creatures, impudent and teasing as flies, had succeeded in
+wounding his vanity, in rousing his pride, and exciting his curiosity.
+Unwilling to become their dupe, or to be taken for a coward, and even
+diverted perhaps by the little drama, he went to the Club that very
+evening.
+
+He stood leaning against the marble chimney-piece, and stayed there
+quietly in the middle of the principal saloon, doing his best to give no
+one any advantage over him; but he scrutinized the faces about him, and
+gave a certain vague offence to those assembled, by his inspection. Like
+a dog aware of his strength, he awaited the contest on his own ground,
+without necessary barking. Towards the end of the evening he strolled
+into the cardroom, walking between the door and another that opened into
+the billiard-room, throwing a glance from time to time over a group of
+young men that had gathered there. He heard his name mentioned after a
+turn or two. Although they lowered their voices, Raphael easily guessed
+that he had become the topic of their debate, and he ended by catching a
+phrase or two spoken aloud.
+
+"You?"
+
+"Yes, I."
+
+"I dare you to do it!"
+
+"Let us make a bet on it!"
+
+"Oh, he will do it."
+
+Just as Valentin, curious to learn the matter of the wager, came up
+to pay closer attention to what they were saying, a tall, strong,
+good-looking young fellow, who, however, possessed the impertinent stare
+peculiar to people who have material force at their back, came out of
+the billiard-room.
+
+"I am deputed, sir," he said coolly addressing the Marquis, "to make you
+aware of something which you do not seem to know; your face and person
+generally are a source of annoyance to every one here, and to me in
+particular. You have too much politeness not to sacrifice yourself to
+the public good, and I beg that you will not show yourself in the Club
+again."
+
+"This sort of joke has been perpetrated before, sir, in garrison towns
+at the time of the Empire; but nowadays it is exceedingly bad form,"
+said Raphael drily.
+
+"I am not joking," the young man answered; "and I repeat it: your health
+will be considerably the worse for a stay here; the heat and light, the
+air of the saloon, and the company are all bad for your complaint."
+
+"Where did you study medicine?" Raphael inquired.
+
+"I took my bachelor's degree on Lepage's shooting-ground in Paris, and
+was made a doctor at Cerizier's, the king of foils."
+
+"There is one last degree left for you to take," said Valentin; "study
+the ordinary rules of politeness, and you will be a perfect gentlemen."
+
+The young men all came out of the billiard-room just then, some disposed
+to laugh, some silent. The attention of other players was drawn to the
+matter; they left their cards to watch a quarrel that rejoiced their
+instincts. Raphael, alone among this hostile crowd, did his best to keep
+cool, and not to put himself in any way in the wrong; but his adversary
+having ventured a sarcasm containing an insult couched in unusually keen
+language, he replied gravely:
+
+"We cannot box men's ears, sir, in these days, but I am at a loss for
+any word by which to stigmatize such cowardly behavior as yours."
+
+"That's enough, that's enough. You can come to an explanation
+to-morrow," several young men exclaimed, interposing between the two
+champions.
+
+Raphael left the room in the character of aggressor, after he had
+accepted a proposal to meet near the Chateau de Bordeau, in a little
+sloping meadow, not very far from the newly made road, by which the man
+who came off victorious could reach Lyons. Raphael must now either take
+to his bed or leave the baths. The visitors had gained their point. At
+eight o'clock next morning his antagonist, followed by two seconds and a
+surgeon, arrived first on the ground.
+
+"We shall do very nicely here; glorious weather for a duel!" he cried
+gaily, looking at the blue vault of sky above, at the waters of the
+lake, and the rocks, without a single melancholy presentiment or doubt
+of the issue. "If I wing him," he went on, "I shall send him to bed for
+a month; eh, doctor?"
+
+"At the very least," the surgeon replied; "but let that willow twig
+alone, or you will weary your wrist, and then you will not fire
+steadily. You might kill your man instead of wounding him."
+
+The noise of a carriage was heard approaching.
+
+"Here he is," said the seconds, who soon descried a caleche coming along
+the road; it was drawn by four horses, and there were two postilions.
+
+"What a queer proceeding!" said Valentin's antagonist; "here he comes
+post-haste to be shot."
+
+The slightest incident about a duel, as about a stake at cards, makes an
+impression on the minds of those deeply concerned in the results of the
+affair; so the young man awaited the arrival of the carriage with a
+kind of uneasiness. It stopped in the road; old Jonathan laboriously
+descended from it, in the first place, to assist Raphael to alight;
+he supported him with his feeble arms, and showed him all the minute
+attentions that a lover lavishes upon his mistress. Both became lost to
+sight in the footpath that lay between the highroad and the field where
+the duel was to take place; they were walking slowly, and did not appear
+again for some time after. The four onlookers at this strange spectacle
+felt deeply moved by the sight of Valentin as he leaned on his servant's
+arm; he was wasted and pale; he limped as if he had the gout, went with
+his head bowed down, and said not a word. You might have taken them
+for a couple of old men, one broken with years, the other worn out with
+thought; the elder bore his age visibly written in his white hair, the
+younger was of no age.
+
+"I have not slept all night, sir;" so Raphael greeted his antagonist.
+
+The icy tone and terrible glance that went with the words made the real
+aggressor shudder; he know that he was in the wrong, and felt in secret
+ashamed of his behavior. There was something strange in Raphael's
+bearing, tone, and gesture; the Marquis stopped, and every one else was
+likewise silent. The uneasy and constrained feeling grew to a height.
+
+"There is yet time," he went on, "to offer me some slight apology;
+and offer it you must, or you will die sir! You rely even now on your
+dexterity, and do not shrink from an encounter in which you believe all
+the advantage to be upon your side. Very good, sir; I am generous, I am
+letting you know my superiority beforehand. I possess a terrible power.
+I have only to wish to do so, and I can neutralize your skill, dim your
+eyesight, make your hand and pulse unsteady, and even kill you outright.
+I have no wish to be compelled to exercise my power; the use of it costs
+me too dear. You would not be the only one to die. So if you refuse to
+apologize to me, not matter what your experience in murder, your ball
+will go into the waterfall there, and mine will speed straight to your
+heart though I do not aim it at you."
+
+Confused voices interrupted Raphael at this point. All the time that he
+was speaking, the Marquis had kept his intolerably keen gaze fixed upon
+his antagonist; now he drew himself up and showed an impassive face,
+like that of a dangerous madman.
+
+"Make him hold his tongue," the young man had said to one of his
+seconds; "that voice of his is tearing the heart out of me."
+
+"Say no more, sir; it is quite useless," cried the seconds and the
+surgeon, addressing Raphael.
+
+"Gentlemen, I am fulfilling a duty. Has this young gentleman any final
+arrangements to make?"
+
+"That is enough; that will do."
+
+The Marquis remained standing steadily, never for a moment losing sight
+of his antagonist; and the latter seemed, like a bird before a snake, to
+be overwhelmed by a well-nigh magical power. He was compelled to endure
+that homicidal gaze; he met and shunned it incessantly.
+
+"I am thirsty; give me some water----" he said again to the second.
+
+"Are you nervous?"
+
+"Yes," he answered. "There is a fascination about that man's glowing
+eyes."
+
+"Will you apologize?"
+
+"It is too late now."
+
+The two antagonists were placed at fifteen paces' distance from each
+other. Each of them had a brace of pistols at hand, and, according to
+the programme prescribed for them, each was to fire twice when and how
+he pleased, but after the signal had been given by the seconds.
+
+"What are you doing, Charles?" exclaimed the young man who acted as
+second to Raphael's antagonist; "you are putting in the ball before the
+powder!"
+
+"I am a dead man," he muttered, by way of answer; "you have put me
+facing the sun----"
+
+"The sun lies behind you," said Valentin sternly and solemnly, while he
+coolly loaded his pistol without heeding the fact that the signal had
+been given, or that his antagonist was carefully taking aim.
+
+There was something so appalling in this supernatural unconcern, that it
+affected even the two postilions, brought thither by a cruel curiosity.
+Raphael was either trying his power or playing with it, for he talked
+to Jonathan, and looked towards him as he received his adversary's
+fire. Charles' bullet broke a branch of willow, and ricocheted over the
+surface of the water; Raphael fired at random, and shot his antagonist
+through the heart. He did not heed the young man as he dropped; he
+hurriedly sought the Magic Skin to see what another man's life had cost
+him. The talisman was no larger than a small oak-leaf.
+
+"What are you gaping at, you postilions over there? Let us be off," said
+the Marquis.
+
+That same evening he crossed the French border, immediately set out for
+Auvergne, and reached the springs of Mont Dore. As he traveled, there
+surged up in his heart, all at once, one of those thoughts that come
+to us as a ray of sunlight pierces through the thick mists in some dark
+valley--a sad enlightenment, a pitiless sagacity that lights up the
+accomplished fact for us, that lays our errors bare, and leaves
+us without excuse in our own eyes. It suddenly struck him that the
+possession of power, no matter how enormous, did not bring with it the
+knowledge how to use it. The sceptre is a plaything for a child, an axe
+for a Richelieu, and for a Napoleon a lever by which to move the world.
+Power leaves us just as it finds us; only great natures grow greater
+by its means. Raphael had had everything in his power, and he had done
+nothing.
+
+At the springs of Mont Dore he came again in contact with a little world
+of people, who invariably shunned him with the eager haste that animals
+display when they scent afar off one of their own species lying dead,
+and flee away. The dislike was mutual. His late adventure had given him
+a deep distaste for society; his first care, consequently, was to find
+a lodging at some distance from the neighborhood of the springs.
+Instinctively he felt within him the need of close contact with nature,
+of natural emotions, and of the vegetative life into which we sink so
+gladly among the fields.
+
+The day after he arrived he climbed the Pic de Sancy, not without
+difficulty, and visited the higher valleys, the skyey nooks,
+undiscovered lakes, and peasants' huts about Mont Dore, a country whose
+stern and wild features are now beginning to tempt the brushes of our
+artists, for sometimes wonderfully fresh and charming views are to be
+found there, affording a strong contrast to the frowning brows of those
+lonely hills.
+
+Barely a league from the village Raphael discovered a nook where nature
+seemed to have taken a pleasure in hiding away all her treasures like
+some glad and mischievous child. At the first sight of this unspoiled
+and picturesque retreat, he determined to take up his abode in it.
+There, life must needs be peaceful, natural, and fruitful, like the life
+of a plant.
+
+Imagine for yourself an inverted cone of granite hollowed out on a large
+scale, a sort of basin with its sides divided up by queer winding paths.
+On one side lay level stretches with no growth upon them, a bluish
+uniform surface, over which the rays of the sun fell as upon a mirror;
+on the other lay cliffs split open by fissures and frowning ravines;
+great blocks of lava hung suspended from them, while the action of rain
+slowly prepared their impending fall; a few stunted trees tormented
+by the wind, often crowned their summits; and here and there in some
+sheltered angle of their ramparts a clump of chestnut-trees grew tall as
+cedars, or some cavern in the yellowish rocks showed the dark entrance
+into its depths, set about by flowers and brambles, decked by a little
+strip of green turf.
+
+At the bottom of this cup, which perhaps had been the crater of an
+old-world volcano, lay a pool of water as pure and bright as a diamond.
+Granite boulders lay around the deep basin, and willows, mountain-ash
+trees, yellow-flag lilies, and numberless aromatic plants bloomed about
+it, in a realm of meadow as fresh as an English bowling-green. The fine
+soft grass was watered by the streams that trickled through the fissures
+in the cliffs; the soil was continually enriched by the deposits of loam
+which storms washed down from the heights above. The pool might be
+some three acres in extent; its shape was irregular, and the edges were
+scalloped like the hem of a dress; the meadow might be an acre or two
+acres in extent. The cliffs and the water approached and receded from
+each other; here and there, there was scarcely width enough for the cows
+to pass between them.
+
+After a certain height the plant life ceased. Aloft in air the granite
+took upon itself the most fantastic shapes, and assumed those misty
+tints that give to high mountains a dim resemblance to clouds in the
+sky. The bare, bleak cliffs, with the fearful rents in their sides,
+pictures of wild and barren desolation, contrasted strongly with the
+pretty view of the valley; and so strange were the shapes they assumed,
+that one of the cliffs had been called "The Capuchin," because it was so
+like a monk. Sometimes these sharp-pointed peaks, these mighty masses
+of rock, and airy caverns were lighted up one by one, according to the
+direction of the sun or the caprices of the atmosphere; they caught
+gleams of gold, dyed themselves in purple; took a tint of glowing
+rose-color, or turned dull and gray. Upon the heights a drama of color
+was always to be seen, a play of ever-shifting iridescent hues like
+those on a pigeon's breast.
+
+Oftentimes at sunrise or at sunset a ray of bright sunlight would
+penetrate between two sheer surfaces of lava, that might have been split
+apart by a hatchet, to the very depths of that pleasant little garden,
+where it would play in the waters of the pool, like a beam of golden
+light which gleams through the chinks of a shutter into a room in Spain,
+that has been carefully darkened for a siesta. When the sun rose above
+the old crater that some antediluvian revolution had filled with water,
+its rocky sides took warmer tones, the extinct volcano glowed again, and
+its sudden heat quickened the sprouting seeds and vegetation, gave color
+to the flowers, and ripened the fruits of this forgotten corner of the
+earth.
+
+As Raphael reached it, he noticed several cows grazing in the
+pasture-land; and when he had taken a few steps towards the water, he
+saw a little house built of granite and roofed with shingle in the spot
+where the meadowland was at its widest. The roof of this little cottage
+harmonized with everything about it; for it had long been overgrown with
+ivy, moss, and flowers of no recent date. A thin smoke, that did not
+scare the birds away, went up from the dilapidated chimney. There was a
+great bench at the door between two huge honey-suckle bushes, that were
+pink with blossom and full of scent. The walls could scarcely be seen
+for branches of vine and sprays of rose and jessamine that interlaced
+and grew entirely as chance and their own will bade them; for the
+inmates of the cottage seemed to pay no attention to the growth which
+adorned their house, and to take no care of it, leaving to it the fresh
+capricious charm of nature.
+
+Some clothes spread out on the gooseberry bushes were drying in the
+sun. A cat was sitting on a machine for stripping hemp; beneath it lay a
+newly scoured brass caldron, among a quantity of potato-parings. On
+the other side of the house Raphael saw a sort of barricade of dead
+thorn-bushes, meant no doubt to keep the poultry from scratching up
+the vegetables and pot-herbs. It seemed like the end of the earth. The
+dwelling was like some bird's-nest ingeniously set in a cranny of the
+rocks, a clever and at the same time a careless bit of workmanship. A
+simple and kindly nature lay round about it; its rusticity was genuine,
+but there was a charm like that of poetry in it; for it grew and throve
+at a thousand miles' distance from our elaborate and conventional
+poetry. It was like none of our conceptions; it was a spontaneous
+growth, a masterpiece due to chance.
+
+As Raphael reached the place, the sunlight fell across it from right to
+left, bringing out all the colors of its plants and trees; the yellowish
+or gray bases of the crags, the different shades of the green leaves,
+the masses of flowers, pink, blue, or white, the climbing plants
+with their bell-like blossoms, and the shot velvet of the mosses, the
+purple-tinted blooms of the heather,--everything was either brought
+into relief or made fairer yet by the enchantment of the light or by the
+contrasting shadows; and this was the case most of all with the sheet of
+water, wherein the house, the trees, the granite peaks, and the sky were
+all faithfully reflected. Everything had a radiance of its own in this
+delightful picture, from the sparkling mica-stone to the bleached tuft
+of grass hidden away in the soft shadows; the spotted cow with its
+glossy hide, the delicate water-plants that hung down over the pool like
+fringes in a nook where blue or emerald colored insects were buzzing
+about, the roots of trees like a sand-besprinkled shock of hair above
+grotesque faces in the flinty rock surface,--all these things made a
+harmony for the eye.
+
+The odor of the tepid water; the scent of the flowers, and the breath of
+the caverns which filled the lonely place gave Raphael a sensation that
+was almost enjoyment. Silence reigned in majesty over these woods, which
+possibly are unknown to the tax-collector; but the barking of a couple
+of dogs broke the stillness all at once; the cows turned their heads
+towards the entrance of the valley, showing their moist noses to
+Raphael, stared stupidly at him, and then fell to browsing again. A
+goat and her kid, that seemed to hang on the side of the crags in some
+magical fashion, capered and leapt to a slab of granite near to Raphael,
+and stayed there a moment, as if to seek to know who he was. The yapping
+of the dogs brought out a plump child, who stood agape, and next came a
+white-haired old man of middle height. Both of these two beings were in
+keeping with the surroundings, the air, the flowers, and the dwelling.
+Health appeared to overflow in this fertile region; old age and
+childhood thrived there. There seemed to be, about all these types of
+existence, the freedom and carelessness of the life of primitive times,
+a happiness of use and wont that gave the lie to our philosophical
+platitudes, and wrought a cure of all its swelling passions in the
+heart.
+
+The old man belonged to the type of model dear to the masculine brush
+of Schnetz. The countless wrinkles upon his brown face looked as if
+they would be hard to the touch; the straight nose, the prominent
+cheek-bones, streaked with red veins like a vine-leaf in autumn, the
+angular features, all were characteristics of strength, even where
+strength existed no longer. The hard hands, now that they toiled no
+longer, had preserved their scanty white hair, his bearing was that of
+an absolutely free man; it suggested the thought that, had he been
+an Italian, he would have perhaps turned brigand, for the love of the
+liberty so dear to him. The child was a regular mountaineer, with the
+black eyes that can face the sun without flinching, a deeply
+tanned complexion, and rough brown hair. His movements were like a
+bird's--swift, decided, and unconstrained; his clothing was ragged; the
+white, fair skin showed through the rents in his garments. There they
+both stood in silence, side by side, both obeying the same impulse; in
+both faces were clear tokens of an absolutely identical and idle life.
+The old man had adopted the child's amusements, and the child had fallen
+in with the old man's humor; there was a sort of tacit agreement between
+two kinds of feebleness, between failing powers well-nigh spent and
+powers just about to unfold themselves.
+
+Very soon a woman who seemed to be about thirty years old appeared on
+the threshold of the door, spinning as she came. She was an Auvergnate,
+a high-colored, comfortable-looking, straightforward sort of person,
+with white teeth; her cap and dress, the face, full figure, and general
+appearance, were of the Auvergne peasant stamp. So was her dialect; she
+was a thorough embodiment of her district; its hardworking ways, its
+thrift, ignorance, and heartiness all met in her.
+
+She greeted Raphael, and they began to talk. The dogs quieted down;
+the old man went and sat on a bench in the sun; the child followed his
+mother about wherever she went, listening without saying a word, and
+staring at the stranger.
+
+"You are not afraid to live here, good woman?"
+
+"What should we be afraid of, sir? When we bolt the door, who ever could
+get inside? Oh, no, we aren't afraid at all. And besides," she said,
+as she brought the Marquis into the principal room in the house, "what
+should thieves come to take from us here?"
+
+She designated the room as she spoke; the smoke-blackened walls, with
+some brilliant pictures in blue, red, and green, an "End of Credit," a
+Crucifixion, and the "Grenadiers of the Imperial Guard" for their
+sole ornament; the furniture here and there, the old wooden four-post
+bedstead, the table with crooked legs, a few stools, the chest that
+held the bread, the flitch that hung from the ceiling, a jar of salt, a
+stove, and on the mantleshelf a few discolored yellow plaster figures.
+As he went out again Raphael noticed a man half-way up the crags,
+leaning on a hoe, and watching the house with interest.
+
+"That's my man, sir," said the Auvergnate, unconsciously smiling in
+peasant fashion; "he is at work up there."
+
+"And that old man is your father?"
+
+"Asking your pardon, sir, he is my man's grandfather. Such as you see
+him, he is a hundred and two, and yet quite lately he walked over to
+Clermont with our little chap! Oh, he has been a strong man in his time;
+but he does nothing now but sleep and eat and drink. He amuses himself
+with the little fellow. Sometimes the child trails him up the hillsides,
+and he will just go up there along with him."
+
+Valentin made up his mind immediately. He would live between this child
+and old man, breathe the same air; eat their bread, drink the same
+water, sleep with them, make the blood in his veins like theirs. It was
+a dying man's fancy. For him the prime model, after which the customary
+existence of the individual should be shaped, the real formula for the
+life of a human being, the only true and possible life, the life-ideal,
+was to become one of the oysters adhering to this rock, to save
+his shell a day or two longer by paralyzing the power of death. One
+profoundly selfish thought took possession of him, and the whole
+universe was swallowed up and lost in it. For him the universe existed
+no longer; the whole world had come to be within himself. For the sick,
+the world begins at their pillow and ends at the foot of the bed; and
+this countryside was Raphael's sick-bed.
+
+Who has not, at some time or other in his life, watched the comings
+and goings of an ant, slipped straws into a yellow slug's one
+breathing-hole, studied the vagaries of a slender dragon-fly, pondered
+admiringly over the countless veins in an oak-leaf, that bring the
+colors of a rose window in some Gothic cathedral into contrast with the
+reddish background? Who has not looked long in delight at the effects
+of sun and rain on a roof of brown tiles, at the dewdrops, or at the
+variously shaped petals of the flower-cups? Who has not sunk into these
+idle, absorbing meditations on things without, that have no conscious
+end, yet lead to some definite thought at last. Who, in short, has not
+led a lazy life, the life of childhood, the life of the savage without
+his labor? This life without a care or a wish Raphael led for some days'
+space. He felt a distinct improvement in his condition, a wonderful
+sense of ease, that quieted his apprehensions and soothed his
+sufferings.
+
+He would climb the crags, and then find a seat high up on some peak
+whence he could see a vast expanse of distant country at a glance, and
+he would spend whole days in this way, like a plant in the sun, or a
+hare in its form. And at last, growing familiar with the appearances
+of the plant-life about him, and of the changes in the sky, he minutely
+noted the progress of everything working around him in the water, on the
+earth, or in the air. He tried to share the secret impulses of nature,
+sought by passive obedience to become a part of it, and to lie within
+the conservative and despotic jurisdiction that regulates instinctive
+existence. He no longer wished to steer his own course.
+
+Just as criminals in olden times were safe from the pursuit of justice,
+if they took refuge under the shadow of the altar, so Raphael made an
+effort to slip into the sanctuary of life. He succeeded in becoming an
+integral part of the great and mighty fruit-producing organization; he
+had adapted himself to the inclemency of the air, and had dwelt in every
+cave among the rocks. He had learned the ways and habits of growth of
+every plant, had studied the laws of the watercourses and their beds,
+and had come to know the animals; he was at last so perfectly at
+one with this teeming earth, that he had in some sort discerned its
+mysteries and caught the spirit of it.
+
+The infinitely varied forms of every natural kingdom were, to his
+thinking, only developments of one and the same substance, different
+combinations brought about by the same impulse, endless emanations from
+a measureless Being which was acting, thinking, moving, and growing, and
+in harmony with which he longed to grow, to move, to think, and act.
+He had fancifully blended his life with the life of the crags; he had
+deliberately planted himself there. During the earliest days of
+his sojourn in these pleasant surroundings, Valentin tasted all the
+pleasures of childhood again, thanks to the strange hallucination of
+apparent convalescence, which is not unlike the pauses of delirium
+that nature mercifully provides for those in pain. He went about making
+trifling discoveries, setting to work on endless things, and finishing
+none of them; the evening's plans were quite forgotten in the morning;
+he had no cares, he was happy; he thought himself saved.
+
+One morning he had lain in bed till noon, deep in the dreams between
+sleep and waking, which give to realities a fantastic appearance, and
+make the wildest fancies seem solid facts; while he was still uncertain
+that he was not dreaming yet, he suddenly heard his hostess giving a
+report of his health to Jonathan, for the first time. Jonathan came
+to inquire after him daily, and the Auvergnate, thinking no doubt
+that Valentin was still asleep, had not lowered the tones of a voice
+developed in mountain air.
+
+"No better and no worse," she said. "He coughed all last night again fit
+to kill himself. Poor gentleman, he coughs and spits till it is piteous.
+My husband and I often wonder to each other where he gets the strength
+from to cough like that. It goes to your heart. What a cursed complaint
+it is! He has no strength at all. I am always afraid I shall find him
+dead in his bed some morning. He is every bit as pale as a waxen Christ.
+_Dame_! I watch him while he dresses; his poor body is as thin as a
+nail. And he does not feel well now; but no matter. It's all the same;
+he wears himself out with running about as if he had health and to
+spare. All the same, he is very brave, for he never complains at all.
+But really he would be better under the earth than on it, for he is
+enduring the agonies of Christ. I don't wish that myself, sir; it is
+quite in our interests; but even if he didn't pay us what he does, I
+should be just as fond of him; it is not our own interest that is our
+motive.
+
+"Ah, _mon Dieu_!" she continued, "Parisians are the people for these
+dogs' diseases. Where did he catch it, now? Poor young man! And he is so
+sure that he is going to get well! That fever just gnaws him, you know;
+it eats him away; it will be the death of him. He has no notion whatever
+of that; he does not know it, sir; he sees nothing----You mustn't cry
+about him, M. Jonathan; you must remember that he will be happy, and
+will not suffer any more. You ought to make a neuvaine for him; I have
+seen wonderful cures come of the nine days' prayer, and I would gladly
+pay for a wax taper to save such a gentle creature, so good he is, a
+paschal lamb----"
+
+As Raphael's voice had grown too weak to allow him to make himself
+heard, he was compelled to listen to this horrible loquacity. His
+irritation, however, drove him out of bed at length, and he appeared
+upon the threshold.
+
+"Old scoundrel!" he shouted to Jonathan; "do you mean to put me to
+death?"
+
+The peasant woman took him for a ghost, and fled.
+
+"I forbid you to have any anxiety whatever about my health," Raphael
+went on.
+
+"Yes, my Lord Marquis," said the old servant, wiping away his tears.
+
+"And for the future you had very much better not come here without my
+orders."
+
+Jonathan meant to be obedient, but in the look full of pity and
+devotion that he gave the Marquis before he went, Raphael read his own
+death-warrant. Utterly disheartened, brought all at once to a sense of
+his real position, Valentin sat down on the threshold, locked his arms
+across his chest, and bowed his head. Jonathan turned to his master in
+alarm, with "My Lord----"
+
+"Go away, go away," cried the invalid.
+
+In the hours of the next morning, Raphael climbed the crags, and sat
+down in a mossy cleft in the rocks, whence he could see the narrow path
+along which the water for the dwelling was carried. At the base of the
+hill he saw Jonathan in conversation with the Auvergnate. Some malicious
+power interpreted for him all the woman's forebodings, and filled the
+breeze and the silence with her ominous words. Thrilled with horror, he
+took refuge among the highest summits of the mountains, and stayed
+there till the evening; but yet he could not drive away the gloomy
+presentiments awakened within him in such an unfortunate manner by a
+cruel solicitude on his account.
+
+The Auvergne peasant herself suddenly appeared before him like a shadow
+in the dusk; a perverse freak of the poet within him found a vague
+resemblance between her black and white striped petticoat and the bony
+frame of a spectre.
+
+"The damp is falling now, sir," said she. "If you stop out there, you
+will go off just like rotten fruit. You must come in. It isn't healthy
+to breathe the damp, and you have taken nothing since the morning,
+besides."
+
+"_Tonnerre de Dieu_! old witch," he cried; "let me live after my own
+fashion, I tell you, or I shall be off altogether. It is quite bad
+enough to dig my grave every morning; you might let it alone in the
+evenings at least----"
+
+"Your grave, sir! I dig your grave!--and where may your grave be? I want
+to see you as old as father there, and not in your grave by any
+manner of means. The grave! that comes soon enough for us all; in the
+grave----"
+
+"That is enough," said Raphael.
+
+"Take my arm, sir."
+
+"No."
+
+The feeling of pity in others is very difficult for a man to bear, and
+it is hardest of all when the pity is deserved. Hatred is a tonic--it
+quickens life and stimulates revenge; but pity is death to us--it makes
+our weakness weaker still. It is as if distress simpered ingratiatingly
+at us; contempt lurks in the tenderness, or tenderness in an affront.
+In the centenarian Raphael saw triumphant pity, a wondering pity in the
+child's eyes, an officious pity in the woman, and in her husband a pity
+that had an interested motive; but no matter how the sentiment declared
+itself, death was always its import.
+
+A poet makes a poem of everything; it is tragical or joyful, as things
+happen to strike his imagination; his lofty soul rejects all half-tones;
+he always prefers vivid and decided colors. In Raphael's soul this
+compassion produced a terrible poem of mourning and melancholy. When
+he had wished to live in close contact with nature, he had of course
+forgotten how freely natural emotions are expressed. He would think
+himself quite alone under a tree, whilst he struggled with an obstinate
+coughing fit, a terrible combat from which he never issued victorious
+without utter exhaustion afterwards; and then he would meet the clear,
+bright eyes of the little boy, who occupied the post of sentinel, like
+a savage in a bent of grass; the eyes scrutinized him with a childish
+wonder, in which there was as much amusement as pleasure, and an
+indescribable mixture of indifference and interest. The awful _Brother,
+you must die_, of the Trappists seemed constantly legible in the eyes
+of the peasants with whom Raphael was living; he scarcely knew which
+he dreaded most, their unfettered talk or their silence; their presence
+became torture.
+
+One morning he saw two men in black prowling about in his neighborhood,
+who furtively studied him and took observations. They made as though
+they had come there for a stroll, and asked him a few indifferent
+questions, to which he returned short answers. He recognized them both.
+One was the _cure_ and the other the doctor at the springs; Jonathan had
+no doubt sent them, or the people in the house had called them in, or
+the scent of an approaching death had drawn them thither. He beheld his
+own funeral, heard the chanting of the priests, and counted the tall wax
+candles; and all that lovely fertile nature around him, in whose lap
+he had thought to find life once more, he saw no longer, save through a
+veil of crape. Everything that but lately had spoken of length of days
+to him, now prophesied a speedy end. He set out the next day for Paris,
+not before he had been inundated with cordial wishes, which the people
+of the house uttered in melancholy and wistful tones for his benefit.
+
+He traveled through the night, and awoke as they passed through one of
+the pleasant valleys of the Bourbonnais. View after view swam before his
+gaze, and passed rapidly away like the vague pictures of a dream.
+Cruel nature spread herself out before his eyes with tantalizing grace.
+Sometimes the Allier, a liquid shining ribbon, meandered through the
+distant fertile landscape; then followed the steeples of hamlets, hiding
+modestly in the depths of a ravine with its yellow cliffs; sometimes,
+after the monotony of vineyards, the watermills of a little valley would
+be suddenly seen; and everywhere there were pleasant chateaux, hillside
+villages, roads with their fringes of queenly poplars; and the Loire
+itself, at last, with its wide sheets of water sparkling like diamonds
+amid its golden sands. Attractions everywhere, without end! This nature,
+all astir with a life and gladness like that of childhood, scarcely able
+to contain the impulses and sap of June, possessed a fatal attraction
+for the darkened gaze of the invalid. He drew the blinds of his carriage
+windows, and betook himself again to slumber.
+
+Towards evening, after they had passed Cesne, he was awakened by lively
+music, and found himself confronted with a village fair. The horses
+were changed near the marketplace. Whilst the postilions were engaged
+in making the transfer, he saw the people dancing merrily, pretty and
+attractive girls with flowers about them, excited youths, and finally
+the jolly wine-flushed countenances of old peasants. Children prattled,
+old women laughed and chatted; everything spoke in one voice, and there
+was a holiday gaiety about everything, down to their clothing and the
+tables that were set out. A cheerful expression pervaded the square and
+the church, the roofs and windows; even the very doorways of the village
+seemed likewise to be in holiday trim.
+
+Raphael could not repress an angry exclamation, nor yet a wish to
+silence the fiddles, annihilate the stir and bustle, stop the clamor,
+and disperse the ill-timed festival; like a dying man, he felt unable
+to endure the slightest sound, and he entered his carriage much annoyed.
+When he looked out upon the square from the window, he saw that all the
+happiness was scared away; the peasant women were in flight, and the
+benches were deserted. Only a blind musician, on the scaffolding of the
+orchestra, went on playing a shrill tune on his clarionet. That piping
+of his, without dancers to it, and the solitary old man himself, in the
+shadow of the lime-tree, with his curmudgeon's face, scanty hair, and
+ragged clothing, was like a fantastic picture of Raphael's wish. The
+heavy rain was pouring in torrents; it was one of those thunderstorms
+that June brings about so rapidly, to cease as suddenly. The thing was
+so natural, that, when Raphael had looked out and seen some pale clouds
+driven over by a gust of wind, he did not think of looking at the piece
+of skin. He lay back again in the corner of his carriage, which was very
+soon rolling upon its way.
+
+The next day found him back in his home again, in his own room, beside
+his own fireside. He had had a large fire lighted; he felt cold.
+Jonathan brought him some letters; they were all from Pauline. He opened
+the first one without any eagerness, and unfolded it as if it had
+been the gray-paper form of application for taxes made by the revenue
+collector. He read the first sentence:
+
+"Gone! This really is a flight, my Raphael. How is it? No one can tell
+me where you are. And who should know if not I?"
+
+He did not wish to learn any more. He calmly took up the letters
+and threw them in the fire, watching with dull and lifeless eyes the
+perfumed paper as it was twisted, shriveled, bent, and devoured by the
+capricious flames. Fragments that fell among the ashes allowed him to
+see the beginning of a sentence, or a half-burnt thought or word; he
+took a pleasure in deciphering them--a sort of mechanical amusement.
+
+"Sitting at your door--expected--Caprice--I obey--Rivals--I, never!--thy
+Pauline--love--no more of Pauline?--If you had wished to leave me for
+ever, you would not have deserted me--Love eternal--To die----"
+
+The words caused him a sort of remorse; he seized the tongs, and rescued
+a last fragment of the letter from the flames.
+
+"I have murmured," so Pauline wrote, "but I have never complained, my
+Raphael! If you have left me so far behind you, it was doubtless because
+you wished to hide some heavy grief from me. Perhaps you will kill me
+one of these days, but you are too good to torture me. So do not go away
+from me like this. There! I can bear the worst of torment, if only I
+am at your side. Any grief that you could cause me would not be grief.
+There is far more love in my heart for you than I have ever yet shown
+you. I can endure anything, except this weeping far away from you, this
+ignorance of your----"
+
+Raphael laid the scorched scrap on the mantelpiece, then all at once he
+flung it into the fire. The bit of paper was too clearly a symbol of his
+own love and luckless existence.
+
+"Go and find M. Bianchon," he told Jonathan.
+
+Horace came and found Raphael in bed.
+
+"Can you prescribe a draught for me--some mild opiate which will always
+keep me in a somnolent condition, a draught that will not be injurious
+although taken constantly."
+
+"Nothing is easier," the young doctor replied; "but you will have to
+keep on your feet for a few hours daily, at any rate, so as to take your
+food."
+
+"A few hours!" Raphael broke in; "no, no! I only wish to be out of bed
+for an hour at most."
+
+"What is your object?" inquired Bianchon.
+
+"To sleep; for so one keeps alive, at any rate," the patient answered.
+"Let no one come in, not even Mlle. Pauline de Wistchnau!" he added to
+Jonathan, as the doctor was writing out his prescription.
+
+"Well, M. Horace, is there any hope?" the old servant asked, going as
+far as the flight of steps before the door, with the young doctor.
+
+"He may live for some time yet, or he may die to-night. The chances of
+life and death are evenly balanced in his case. I can't understand it
+at all," said the doctor, with a doubtful gesture. "His mind ought to be
+diverted."
+
+"Diverted! Ah, sir, you don't know him! He killed a man the other day
+without a word!--Nothing can divert him!"
+
+For some days Raphael lay plunged in the torpor of this artificial
+sleep. Thanks to the material power that opium exerts over the
+immaterial part of us, this man with the powerful and active imagination
+reduced himself to the level of those sluggish forms of animal life that
+lurk in the depths of forests, and take the form of vegetable refuse,
+never stirring from their place to catch their easy prey. He had
+darkened the very sun in heaven; the daylight never entered his room.
+About eight o'clock in the evening he would leave his bed, with no very
+clear consciousness of his own existence; he would satisfy the claims
+of hunger and return to bed immediately. One dull blighted hour after
+another only brought confused pictures and appearances before him, and
+lights and shadows against a background of darkness. He lay buried in
+deep silence; movement and intelligence were completely annihilated for
+him. He woke later than usual one evening, and found that his dinner was
+not ready. He rang for Jonathan.
+
+"You can go," he said. "I have made you rich; you shall be happy in
+your old age; but I will not let you muddle away my life any longer.
+Miserable wretch! I am hungry--where is my dinner? How is it?--Answer
+me!"
+
+A satisfied smile stole over Jonathan's face. He took a candle that
+lit up the great dark rooms of the mansion with its flickering light;
+brought his master, who had again become an automaton, into a great
+gallery, and flung a door suddenly open. Raphael was all at once dazzled
+by a flood of light and amazed by an unheard-of scene.
+
+His chandeliers had been filled with wax-lights; the rarest flowers
+from his conservatory were carefully arranged about the room; the table
+sparkled with silver, gold, crystal, and porcelain; a royal banquet was
+spread--the odors of the tempting dishes tickled the nervous fibres of
+the palate. There sat his friends; he saw them among beautiful women in
+full evening dress, with bare necks and shoulders, with flowers in their
+hair; fair women of every type, with sparkling eyes, attractively and
+fancifully arrayed. One had adopted an Irish jacket, which displayed
+the alluring outlines of her form; one wore the "basquina" of Andalusia,
+with its wanton grace; here was a half-clad Dian the huntress, there the
+costume of Mlle. de la Valliere, amorous and coy; and all of them alike
+were given up to the intoxication of the moment.
+
+As Raphael's death-pale face showed itself in the doorway, a sudden
+outcry broke out, as vehement as the blaze of this improvised banquet.
+The voices, perfumes, and lights, the exquisite beauty of the women,
+produced their effect upon his senses, and awakened his desires.
+Delightful music, from unseen players in the next room, drowned the
+excited tumult in a torrent of harmony--the whole strange vision was
+complete.
+
+Raphael felt a caressing pressure on is own hand, a woman's white,
+youthful arms were stretched out to grasp him, and the hand was
+Aquilina's. He knew now that this scene was not a fantastic illusion
+like the fleeting pictures of his disordered dreams; he uttered a
+dreadful cry, slammed the door, and dealt his heartbroken old servant a
+blow in the face.
+
+"Monster!" he cried, "so you have sworn to kill me!" and trembling at
+the risks he had just now run, he summoned all his energies, reached his
+room, took a powerful sleeping draught, and went to bed.
+
+"The devil!" cried Jonathan, recovering himself. "And M. Bianchon most
+certainly told me to divert his mind."
+
+It was close upon midnight. By that time, owing to one of those physical
+caprices that are the marvel and the despair of science, Raphael, in his
+slumber, became radiant with beauty. A bright color glowed on his pale
+cheeks. There was an almost girlish grace about the forehead in which
+his genius was revealed. Life seemed to bloom on the quiet face that lay
+there at rest. His sleep was sound; a light, even breath was drawn in
+between red lips; he was smiling--he had passed no doubt through the
+gate of dreams into a noble life. Was he a centenarian now? Did his
+grandchildren come to wish him length of days? Or, on a rustic bench set
+in the sun and under the trees, was he scanning, like the prophet on the
+mountain heights, a promised land, a far-off time of blessing.
+
+"Here you are!"
+
+The words, uttered in silver tones, dispelled the shadowy faces of his
+dreams. He saw Pauline, in the lamplight, sitting upon the bed; Pauline
+grown fairer yet through sorrow and separation. Raphael remained
+bewildered by the sight of her face, white as the petals of some water
+flower, and the shadow of her long, dark hair about it seemed to make it
+whiter still. Her tears had left a gleaming trace upon her cheeks, and
+hung there yet, ready to fall at the least movement. She looked like an
+angel fallen from the skies, or a spirit that a breath might waft away,
+as she sat there all in white, with her head bowed, scarcely creasing
+the quilt beneath her weight.
+
+"Ah, I have forgotten everything!" she cried, as Raphael opened his
+eyes. "I have no voice left except to tell you, 'I am yours.' There is
+nothing in my heart but love. Angel of my life, you have never been so
+beautiful before! Your eyes are blazing---- But come, I can guess it
+all. You have been in search of health without me; you were afraid of
+me---- well----"
+
+"Go! go! leave me," Raphael muttered at last. "Why do you not go? If you
+stay, I shall die. Do you want to see me die?"
+
+"Die?" she echoed. "Can you die without me? Die? But you are young; and
+I love you! Die?" she asked, in a deep, hollow voice. She seized his
+hands with a frenzied movement. "Cold!" she wailed. "Is it all an
+illusion?"
+
+Raphael drew the little bit of skin from under his pillow; it was as
+tiny and as fragile as a periwinkle petal. He showed it to her.
+
+"Pauline!" he said, "fair image of my fair life, let us say good-bye?"
+
+"Good-bye?" she echoed, looking surprised.
+
+"Yes. This is a talisman that grants me all my wishes, and that
+represents my span of life. See here, this is all that remains of it. If
+you look at me any longer, I shall die----"
+
+The young girl thought that Valentin had grown lightheaded; she took the
+talisman and went to fetch the lamp. By its tremulous light which she
+shed over Raphael and the talisman, she scanned her lover's face and the
+last morsel of the magic skin. As Pauline stood there, in all the beauty
+of love and terror, Raphael was no longer able to control his thoughts;
+memories of tender scenes, and of passionate and fevered joys,
+overwhelmed the soul that had so long lain dormant within him, and
+kindled a fire not quite extinct.
+
+"Pauline! Pauline! Come to me----"
+
+A dreadful cry came from the girl's throat, her eyes dilated with
+horror, her eyebrows were distorted and drawn apart by an unspeakable
+anguish; she read in Raphael's eyes the vehement desire in which she had
+once exulted, but as it grew she felt a light movement in her hand, and
+the skin contracted. She did not stop to think; she fled into the next
+room, and locked the door.
+
+"Pauline! Pauline!" cried the dying man, as he rushed after her; "I love
+you, I adore you, I want you, Pauline! I wish to die in your arms!"
+
+With unnatural strength, the last effort of ebbing life, he broke down
+the door, and saw his mistress writhing upon a sofa. Pauline had vainly
+tried to pierce her heart, and now thought to find a rapid death by
+strangling herself with her shawl.
+
+"If I die, he will live," she said, trying to tighten the knot that she
+had made.
+
+In her struggle with death her hair hung loose, her shoulders were bare,
+her clothing was disordered, her eyes were bathed in tears, her face
+was flushed and drawn with the horror of despair; yet as her exceeding
+beauty met Raphael's intoxicated eyes, his delirium grew. He sprang
+towards her like a bird of prey, tore away the shawl, and tried to take
+her in his arms.
+
+The dying man sought for words to express the wish that was consuming
+his strength; but no sounds would come except the choking death-rattle
+in his chest. Each breath he drew sounded hollower than the last, and
+seemed to come from his very entrails. At the last moment, no longer
+able to utter a sound, he set his teeth in Pauline's breast. Jonathan
+appeared, terrified by the cries he had heard, and tried to tear away
+the dead body from the grasp of the girl who was crouching with it in a
+corner.
+
+"What do you want?" she asked. "He is mine, I have killed him. Did I not
+foresee how it would be?"
+
+
+
+EPILOGUE
+
+"And what became of Pauline?"
+
+"Pauline? Ah! Do you sometimes spend a pleasant winter evening by your
+own fireside, and give yourself up luxuriously to memories of love or
+youth, while you watch the glow of the fire where the logs of oak are
+burning? Here, the fire outlines a sort of chessboard in red squares,
+there it has a sheen like velvet; little blue flames start up and
+flicker and play about in the glowing depths of the brasier. A
+mysterious artist comes and adapts that flame to his own ends; by
+a secret of his own he draws a visionary face in the midst of those
+flaming violet and crimson hues, a face with unimaginable delicate
+outlines, a fleeting apparition which no chance will ever bring back
+again. It is a woman's face, her hair is blown back by the wind, her
+features speak of a rapture of delight; she breathes fire in the midst
+of the fire. She smiles, she dies, you will never see her any more.
+Farewell, flower of the flame! Farewell, essence incomplete and
+unforeseen, come too early or too late to make the spark of some
+glorious diamond."
+
+"But, Pauline?"
+
+"You do not see, then? I will begin again. Make way! make way! She
+comes, she is here, the queen of illusions, a woman fleeting as a kiss,
+a woman bright as lightning, issuing in a blaze like lightning from the
+sky, a being uncreated, of spirit and love alone. She has wrapped her
+shadowy form in flame, or perhaps the flame betokens that she exists
+but for a moment. The pure outlines of her shape tell you that she
+comes from heaven. Is she not radiant as an angel? Can you not hear the
+beating of her wings in space? She sinks down beside you more lightly
+than a bird, and you are entranced by her awful eyes; there is a magical
+power in her light breathing that draws your lips to hers; she flies and
+you follow; you feel the earth beneath you no longer. If you could but
+once touch that form of snow with your eager, deluded hands, once twine
+the golden hair round your fingers, place one kiss on those shining
+eyes! There is an intoxicating vapor around, and the spell of a siren
+music is upon you. Every nerve in you is quivering; you are filled with
+pain and longing. O joy for which there is no name! You have touched the
+woman's lips, and you are awakened at once by a horrible pang. Oh! ah!
+yes, you have struck your head against the corner of the bedpost, you
+have been clasping its brown mahogany sides, and chilly gilt ornaments;
+embracing a piece of metal, a brazen Cupid."
+
+"But how about Pauline, sir?"
+
+"What, again? Listen. One lovely morning at Tours a young man, who held
+the hand of a pretty woman in his, went on board the _Ville d'Angers_.
+Thus united they both looked and wondered long at a white form that rose
+elusively out of the mists above the broad waters of the Loire, like
+some child of the sun and the river, or some freak of air and cloud.
+This translucent form was a sylph or a naiad by turns; she hovered in
+the air like a word that haunts the memory, which seeks in vain to grasp
+it; she glided among the islands, she nodded her head here and there
+among the tall poplar trees; then she grew to a giant's height; she
+shook out the countless folds of her drapery to the light; she shot
+light from the aureole that the sun had litten about her face; she
+hovered above the slopes of the hills and their little hamlets, and
+seemed to bar the passage of the boat before the Chateau d'Usse. You
+might have thought that _La dame des belles cousines_ sought to protect
+her country from modern intrusion."
+
+"Well, well, I understand. So it went with Pauline. But how about
+Foedora?"
+
+"Oh! Foedora, you are sure to meet with her! She was at the Bouffons
+last night, and she will go to the Opera this evening, and if you like
+to take it so, she is Society."
+
+
+
+
+ADDENDUM
+
+The following personages appear in other stories of the Human Comedy.
+
+     Aquilina
+       Melmoth Reconciled
+
+     Bianchon, Horace
+       Father Goriot
+       The Atheist's Mass
+       Cesar Birotteau
+       The Commission in Lunacy
+       Lost Illusions
+       A Distinguished Provincial at Paris
+       A Bachelor's Establishment
+       The Secrets of a Princess
+       The Government Clerks
+       Pierrette
+       A Study of Woman
+       Scenes from a Courtesan's Life
+       Honorine
+       The Seamy Side of History
+       A Second Home
+       A Prince of Bohemia
+       Letters of Two Brides
+       The Muse of the Department
+       The Imaginary Mistress
+       The Middle Classes
+       Cousin Betty
+       The Country Parson
+     In addition, M. Bianchon narrated the following:
+       Another Study of Woman
+       La Grande Breteche
+
+     Canalis, Constant-Cyr-Melchior, Baron de
+       Letters of Two Brides
+       A Distinguished Provincial at Paris
+       Modeste Mignon
+       Another Study of Woman
+       A Start in Life
+       Beatrix
+       The Unconscious Humorists
+       The Member for Arcis
+
+     Dudley, Lady Arabella
+       The Lily of the Valley
+       The Ball at Sceaux
+       The Secrets of a Princess
+       A Daughter of Eve
+       Letters of Two Brides
+
+     Euphrasia
+       Melmoth Reconciled
+
+     Joseph
+       A Study of Woman
+
+     Massol
+       Scenes from a Courtesan's Life
+       A Daughter of Eve
+       Cousin Betty
+       The Unconscious Humorists
+
+     Navarreins, Duc de
+       A Bachelor's Establishment
+       Colonel Chabert
+       The Muse of the Department
+       The Thirteen
+       Jealousies of a Country Town
+       The Peasantry
+       Scenes from a Courtesan's Life
+       The Country Parson
+       The Gondreville Mystery
+       The Secrets of a Princess
+       Cousin Betty
+
+     Rastignac, Eugene de
+       Father Goriot
+       A Distinguished Provincial at Paris
+       Scenes from a Courtesan's Life
+       The Ball at Sceaux
+       The Interdiction
+       A Study of Woman
+       Another Study of Woman
+       The Secrets of a Princess
+       A Daughter of Eve
+       The Gondreville Mystery
+       The Firm of Nucingen
+       Cousin Betty
+       The Member for Arcis
+       The Unconscious Humorists
+
+     Taillefer, Jean-Frederic
+       The Firm of Nucingen
+       Father Goriot
+       The Red Inn
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Magic Skin, by Honore de Balzac
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Magic Skin, by Honore de Balzac
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.net
+
+
+Title: The Magic Skin
+
+Author: Honore de Balzac
+
+Release Date: February 12, 2005 [EBook #1307]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE MAGIC SKIN ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Dagny; and Bonnie Sala
+
+
+
+
+
+                            THE MAGIC SKIN
+
+                                  BY
+
+                           HONORE DE BALZAC
+
+
+                            Translated by
+                            Ellen Marriage
+
+
+
+       To Monsieur Savary, Member of Le Academie des Sciences.
+
+
+
+     [omitted: a drawing representing the serpentine
+      path made by the tip of a stick when flourished.]
+                            STERNE--Tristram Shandy, ch. cccxxii.
+
+
+
+                                  I
+
+                            THE TALISMAN
+
+Towards the end of the month of October 1829 a young man entered the
+Palais-Royal just as the gaming-houses opened, agreeably to the law
+which protects a passion by its very nature easily excisable. He
+mounted the staircase of one of the gambling hells distinguished by
+the number 36, without too much deliberation.
+
+"Your hat, sir, if you please?" a thin, querulous voice called out. A
+little old man, crouching in the darkness behind a railing, suddenly
+rose and exhibited his features, carved after a mean design.
+
+As you enter a gaming-house the law despoils you of your hat at the
+outset. Is it by way of a parable, a divine revelation? Or by exacting
+some pledge or other, is not an infernal compact implied? Is it done
+to compel you to preserve a respectful demeanor towards those who are
+about to gain money of you? Or must the detective, who squats in our
+social sewers, know the name of your hatter, or your own, if you
+happen to have written it on the lining inside? Or, after all, is the
+measurement of your skull required for the compilation of statistics
+as to the cerebral capacity of gamblers? The executive is absolutely
+silent on this point. But be sure of this, that though you have
+scarcely taken a step towards the tables, your hat no more belongs to
+you now than you belong to yourself. Play possesses you, your fortune,
+your cap, your cane, your cloak.
+
+As you go out, it will be made clear to you, by a savage irony, that
+Play has yet spared you something, since your property is returned.
+For all that, if you bring a new hat with you, you will have to pay
+for the knowledge that a special costume is needed for a gambler.
+
+The evident astonishment with which the young man took a numbered
+tally in exchange for his hat, which was fortunately somewhat rubbed
+at the brim, showed clearly enough that his mind was yet untainted;
+and the little old man, who had wallowed from his youth up in the
+furious pleasures of a gambler's life, cast a dull, indifferent glance
+over him, in which a philosopher might have seen wretchedness lying in
+the hospital, the vagrant lives of ruined folk, inquests on numberless
+suicides, life-long penal servitude and transportations to
+Guazacoalco.
+
+His pallid, lengthy visage appeared like a haggard embodiment of the
+passion reduced to its simplest terms. There were traces of past
+anguish in its wrinkles. He supported life on the glutinous soups at
+Darcet's, and gambled away his meagre earnings day by day. Like some
+old hackney which takes no heed of the strokes of the whip, nothing
+could move him now. The stifled groans of ruined players, as they
+passed out, their mute imprecations, their stupefied faces, found him
+impassive. He was the spirit of Play incarnate. If the young man had
+noticed this sorry Cerberus, perhaps he would have said, "There is
+only a pack of cards in that heart of his."
+
+The stranger did not heed this warning writ in flesh and blood, put
+here, no doubt, by Providence, who has set loathing on the threshold
+of all evil haunts. He walked boldly into the saloon, where the rattle
+of coin brought his senses under the dazzling spell of an agony of
+greed. Most likely he had been drawn thither by that most convincing
+of Jean Jacques' eloquent periods, which expresses, I think, this
+melancholy thought, "Yes, I can imagine that a man may take to
+gambling when he sees only his last shilling between him and death."
+
+There is an illusion about a gambling saloon at night as vulgar as
+that of a bloodthirsty drama, and just as effective. The rooms are
+filled with players and onlookers, with poverty-stricken age, which
+drags itself thither in search of stimulation, with excited faces, and
+revels that began in wine, to end shortly in the Seine. The passion is
+there in full measure, but the great number of the actors prevents you
+from seeing the gambling-demon face to face. The evening is a harmony
+or chorus in which all take part, to which each instrument in the
+orchestra contributes his share. You would see there plenty of
+respectable people who have come in search of diversion, for which
+they pay as they pay for the pleasures of the theatre, or of gluttony,
+or they come hither as to some garret where they cheapen poignant
+regrets for three months to come.
+
+Do you understand all the force and frenzy in a soul which impatiently
+waits for the opening of a gambling hell? Between the daylight gambler
+and the player at night there is the same difference that lies between
+a careless husband and the lover swooning under his lady's window.
+Only with morning comes the real throb of the passion and the craving
+in its stark horror. Then you can admire the real gambler, who has
+neither eaten, slept, thought, nor lived, he has so smarted under the
+scourge of his martingale, so suffered on the rack of his desire for a
+coup of _trente-et-quarante_. At that accursed hour you encounter eyes
+whose calmness terrifies you, faces that fascinate, glances that seem
+as if they had power to turn the cards over and consume them. The
+grandest hours of a gambling saloon are not the opening ones. If Spain
+has bull-fights, and Rome once had her gladiators, Paris waxes proud
+of her Palais-Royal, where the inevitable _roulettes_ cause blood to
+flow in streams, and the public can have the pleasure of watching
+without fear of their feet slipping in it.
+
+Take a quiet peep at the arena. How bare it looks! The paper on the
+walls is greasy to the height of your head, there is nothing to bring
+one reviving thought. There is not so much as a nail for the
+convenience of suicides. The floor is worn and dirty. An oblong table
+stands in the middle of the room, the tablecloth is worn by the
+friction of gold, but the straw-bottomed chairs about it indicate an
+odd indifference to luxury in the men who will lose their lives here
+in the quest of the fortune that is to put luxury within their reach.
+
+This contradiction in humanity is seen wherever the soul reacts
+powerfully upon itself. The gallant would clothe his mistress in
+silks, would deck her out in soft Eastern fabrics, though he and she
+must lie on a truckle-bed. The ambitious dreamer sees himself at the
+summit of power, while he slavishly prostrates himself in the mire.
+The tradesman stagnates in his damp, unhealthy shop, while he builds a
+great mansion for his son to inherit prematurely, only to be ejected
+from it by law proceedings at his own brother's instance.
+
+After all, is there a less pleasing thing in the world than a house of
+pleasure? Singular question! Man is always at strife with himself. His
+present woes give the lie to his hopes; yet he looks to a future which
+is not his, to indemnify him for these present sufferings; setting
+upon all his actions the seal of inconsequence and of the weakness of
+his nature. We have nothing here below in full measure but misfortune.
+
+There were several gamblers in the room already when the young man
+entered. Three bald-headed seniors were lounging round the green
+table. Imperturbable as diplomatists, those plaster-cast faces of
+theirs betokened blunted sensibilities, and hearts which had long
+forgotten how to throb, even when a woman's dowry was the stake. A
+young Italian, olive-hued and dark-haired, sat at one end, with his
+elbows on the table, seeming to listen to the presentiments of luck
+that dictate a gambler's "Yes" or "No." The glow of fire and gold was
+on that southern face. Some seven or eight onlookers stood by way of
+an audience, awaiting a drama composed of the strokes of chance, the
+faces of the actors, the circulation of coin, and the motion of the
+croupier's rake, much as a silent, motionless crowd watches the
+headsman in the Place de Greve. A tall, thin man, in a threadbare
+coat, held a card in one hand, and a pin in the other, to mark the
+numbers of Red or Black. He seemed a modern Tantalus, with all the
+pleasures of his epoch at his lips, a hoardless miser drawing in
+imaginary gains, a sane species of lunatic who consoles himself in his
+misery by chimerical dreams, a man who touches peril and vice as a
+young priest handles the unconsecrated wafer in the white mass.
+
+One or two experts at the game, shrewd speculators, had placed
+themselves opposite the bank, like old convicts who have lost all fear
+of the hulks; they meant to try two or three coups, and then to depart
+at once with the expected gains, on which they lived. Two elderly
+waiters dawdled about with their arms folded, looking from time to
+time into the garden from the windows, as if to show their
+insignificant faces as a sign to passers-by.
+
+The croupier and banker threw a ghastly and withering glance at the
+punters, and cried, in a sharp voice, "Make your game!" as the young
+man came in. The silence seemed to grow deeper as all heads turned
+curiously towards the new arrival. Who would have thought it? The
+jaded elders, the fossilized waiters, the onlookers, the fanatical
+Italian himself, felt an indefinable dread at sight of the stranger.
+Is he not wretched indeed who can excite pity here? Must he not be
+very helpless to receive sympathy, ghastly in appearance to raise a
+shudder in these places, where pain utters no cry, where wretchedness
+looks gay, and despair is decorous? Such thoughts as these produced a
+new emotion in these torpid hearts as the young man entered. Were not
+executioners known to shed tears over the fair-haired, girlish heads
+that had to fall at the bidding of the Revolution?
+
+The gamblers saw at a glance a dreadful mystery in the novice's face.
+His young features were stamped with a melancholy grace, his looks
+told of unsuccess and many blighted hopes. The dull apathy of the
+suicide had made his forehead so deadly pale, a bitter smile carved
+faint lines about the corners of his mouth, and there was an
+abandonment about him that was painful to see. Some sort of demon
+sparkled in the depths of his eye, which drooped, wearied perhaps with
+pleasure. Could it have been dissipation that had set its foul mark on
+the proud face, once pure and bright, and now brought low? Any doctor
+seeing the yellow circles about his eyelids, and the color in his
+cheeks, would have set them down to some affection of the heart or
+lungs, while poets would have attributed them to the havoc brought by
+the search for knowledge and to night-vigils by the student's lamp.
+
+But a complaint more fatal than any disease, a disease more merciless
+than genius or study, had drawn this young face, and had wrung a heart
+which dissipation, study, and sickness had scarcely disturbed. When a
+notorious criminal is taken to the convict's prison, the prisoners
+welcome him respectfully, and these evil spirits in human shape,
+experienced in torments, bowed before an unheard-of anguish. By the
+depth of the wound which met their eyes, they recognized a prince
+among them, by the majesty of his unspoken irony, by the refined
+wretchedness of his garb. The frock-coat that he wore was well cut,
+but his cravat was on terms so intimate with his waistcoat that no one
+could suspect him of underlinen. His hands, shapely as a woman's were
+not perfectly clean; for two days past indeed he had ceased to wear
+gloves. If the very croupier and the waiters shuddered, it was because
+some traces of the spell of innocence yet hung about his meagre,
+delicately-shaped form, and his scanty fair hair in its natural curls.
+
+He looked only about twenty-five years of age, and any trace of vice
+in his face seemed to be there by accident. A young constitution still
+resisted the inroads of lubricity. Darkness and light, annihilation
+and existence, seemed to struggle in him, with effects of mingled
+beauty and terror. There he stood like some erring angel that has lost
+his radiance; and these emeritus-professors of vice and shame were
+ready to bid the novice depart, even as some toothless crone might be
+seized with pity for a beautiful girl who offers herself up to infamy.
+
+The young man went straight up to the table, and, as he stood there,
+flung down a piece of gold which he held in his hand, without
+deliberation. It rolled on to the Black; then, as strong natures can,
+he looked calmly, if anxiously, at the croupier, as if he held useless
+subterfuges in scorn.
+
+The interest this coup awakened was so great that the old gamesters
+laid nothing upon it; only the Italian, inspired by a gambler's
+enthusiasm, smiled suddenly at some thought, and punted his heap of
+coin against the stranger's stake.
+
+The banker forgot to pronounce the phrases that use and wont have
+reduced to an inarticulate cry--"Make your game. . . . The game is
+made. . . . Bets are closed." The croupier spread out the cards, and
+seemed to wish luck to the newcomer, indifferent as he was to the
+losses or gains of those who took part in these sombre pleasures.
+Every bystander thought he saw a drama, the closing scene of a noble
+life, in the fortunes of that bit of gold; and eagerly fixed his eyes
+on the prophetic cards; but however closely they watched the young
+man, they could discover not the least sign of feeling on his cool but
+restless face.
+
+"Even! red wins," said the croupier officially. A dumb sort of rattle
+came from the Italian's throat when he saw the folded notes that the
+banker showered upon him, one after another. The young man only
+understood his calamity when the croupiers's rake was extended to
+sweep away his last napoleon. The ivory touched the coin with a little
+click, as it swept it with the speed of an arrow into the heap of gold
+before the bank. The stranger turned pale at the lips, and softly shut
+his eyes, but he unclosed them again at once, and the red color
+returned as he affected the airs of an Englishman, to whom life can
+offer no new sensation, and disappeared without the glance full of
+entreaty for compassion that a desperate gamester will often give the
+bystanders. How much can happen in a second's space; how many things
+depend on a throw of the die!
+
+"That was his last cartridge, of course," said the croupier, smiling
+after a moment's silence, during which he picked up the coin between
+his finger and thumb and held it up.
+
+"He is a cracked brain that will go and drown himself," said a
+frequenter of the place. He looked round about at the other players,
+who all knew each other.
+
+"Bah!" said a waiter, as he took a pinch of snuff.
+
+"If we had but followed _his_ example," said an old gamester to the
+others, as he pointed out the Italian.
+
+Everybody looked at the lucky player, whose hands shook as he counted
+his bank-notes.
+
+"A voice seemed to whisper to me," he said. "The luck is sure to go
+against that young man's despair."
+
+"He is a new hand," said the banker, "or he would have divided his
+money into three parts to give himself more chance."
+
+The young man went out without asking for his hat; but the old
+watch-dog, who had noted its shabby condition, returned it to him
+without a word. The gambler mechanically gave up the tally, and went
+downstairs whistling _Di tanti Palpiti_ so feebly, that he himself
+scarcely heard the delicious notes.
+
+He found himself immediately under the arcades of the Palais-Royal,
+reached the Rue Saint Honore, took the direction of the Tuileries, and
+crossed the gardens with an undecided step. He walked as if he were in
+some desert, elbowed by men whom he did not see, hearing through all
+the voices of the crowd one voice alone--the voice of Death. He was
+lost in the thoughts that benumbed him at last, like the criminals who
+used to be taken in carts from the Palais de Justice to the Place de
+Greve, where the scaffold awaited them reddened with all the blood
+spilt here since 1793.
+
+There is something great and terrible about suicide. Most people's
+downfalls are not dangerous; they are like children who have not far
+to fall, and cannot injure themselves; but when a great nature is
+dashed down, he is bound to fall from a height. He must have been
+raised almost to the skies; he has caught glimpses of some heaven
+beyond his reach. Vehement must the storms be which compel a soul to
+seek for peace from the trigger of a pistol.
+
+How much young power starves and pines away in a garret for want of a
+friend, for lack of a woman's consolation, in the midst of millions of
+fellow-creatures, in the presence of a listless crowd that is burdened
+by its wealth! When one remembers all this, suicide looms large.
+Between a self-sought death and the abundant hopes whose voices call a
+young man to Paris, God only knows what may intervene; what contending
+ideas have striven within the soul; what poems have been set aside;
+what moans and what despair have been repressed; what abortive
+masterpieces and vain endeavors! Every suicide is an awful poem of
+sorrow. Where will you find a work of genius floating above the seas
+of literature that can compare with this paragraph:
+
+  "Yesterday, at four o'clock, a young woman threw herself into the
+  Seine from the Pont des Arts."
+
+Dramas and romances pale before this concise Parisian phrase; so must
+even that old frontispiece, _The Lamentations of the glorious king of
+Kaernavan, put in prison by his children_, the sole remaining fragment
+of a lost work that drew tears from Sterne at the bare perusal--the
+same Sterne who deserted his own wife and family.
+
+The stranger was beset with such thoughts as these, which passed in
+fragments through his mind, like tattered flags fluttering above the
+combat. If he set aside for a moment the burdens of consciousness and
+of memory, to watch the flower heads gently swayed by the breeze among
+the green thickets, a revulsion came over him, life struggled against
+the oppressive thought of suicide, and his eyes rose to the sky: gray
+clouds, melancholy gusts of the wind, the stormy atmosphere, all
+decreed that he should die.
+
+He bent his way toward the Pont Royal, musing over the last fancies of
+others who had gone before him. He smiled to himself as he remembered
+that Lord Castlereagh had satisfied the humblest of our needs before
+he cut his throat, and that the academician Auger had sought for his
+snuff-box as he went to his death. He analyzed these extravagances,
+and even examined himself; for as he stood aside against the parapet
+to allow a porter to pass, his coat had been whitened somewhat by the
+contact, and he carefully brushed the dust from his sleeve, to his own
+surprise. He reached the middle of the arch, and looked forebodingly
+at the water.
+
+"Wretched weather for drowning yourself," said a ragged old woman, who
+grinned at him; "isn't the Seine cold and dirty?"
+
+His answer was a ready smile, which showed the frenzied nature of his
+courage; then he shivered all at once as he saw at a distance, by the
+door of the Tuileries, a shed with an inscription above it in letters
+twelve inches high: THE ROYAL HUMANE SOCIETY'S APPARATUS.
+
+A vision of M. Dacheux rose before him, equipped by his philanthropy,
+calling out and setting in motion the too efficacious oars which break
+the heads of drowning men, if unluckily they should rise to the
+surface; he saw a curious crowd collecting, running for a doctor,
+preparing fumigations, he read the maundering paragraph in the papers,
+put between notes on a festivity and on the smiles of a ballet-dancer;
+he heard the francs counted down by the prefect of police to the
+watermen. As a corpse, he was worth fifteen francs; but now while he
+lived he was only a man of talent without patrons, without friends,
+without a mattress to lie on, or any one to speak a word for him--a
+perfect social cipher, useless to a State which gave itself no trouble
+about him.
+
+A death in broad daylight seemed degrading to him; he made up his mind
+to die at night so as to bequeath an unrecognizable corpse to a world
+which had disregarded the greatness of life. He began his wanderings
+again, turning towards the Quai Voltaire, imitating the lagging gait
+of an idler seeking to kill time. As he came down the steps at the end
+of the bridge, his notice was attracted by the second-hand books
+displayed on the parapet, and he was on the point of bargaining for
+some. He smiled, thrust his hands philosophically into his pockets,
+and fell to strolling on again with a proud disdain in his manner,
+when he heard to his surprise some coin rattling fantastically in his
+pocket.
+
+A smile of hope lit his face, and slid from his lips over his
+features, over his brow, and brought a joyful light to his eyes and
+his dark cheeks. It was a spark of happiness like one of the red dots
+that flit over the remains of a burnt scrap of paper; but as it is
+with the black ashes, so it was with his face, it became dull again
+when the stranger quickly drew out his hand and perceived three
+pennies. "Ah, kind gentleman! _carita_, _carita_; for the love of St.
+Catherine! only a halfpenny to buy some bread!"
+
+A little chimney sweeper, with puffed cheeks, all black with soot, and
+clad in tatters, held out his hand to beg for the man's last pence.
+
+Two paces from the little Savoyard stood an old _pauvre honteux_, sickly
+and feeble, in wretched garments of ragged druggeting, who asked in a
+thick, muffled voice:
+
+"Anything you like to give, monsieur; I will pray to God for
+you . . ."
+
+But the young man turned his eyes on him, and the old beggar stopped
+without another word, discerning in that mournful face an abandonment
+of wretchedness more bitter than his own.
+
+"_La carita_! _la carita_!"
+
+The stranger threw the coins to the old man and the child, left the
+footway, and turned towards the houses; the harrowing sight of the
+Seine fretted him beyond endurance.
+
+"May God lengthen your days!" cried the two beggars.
+
+As he reached the shop window of a print-seller, this man on the brink
+of death met a young woman alighting from a showy carriage. He looked
+in delight at her prettiness, at the pale face appropriately framed by
+the satin of her fashionable bonnet. Her slender form and graceful
+movements entranced him. Her skirt had been slightly raised as she
+stepped to the pavement, disclosing a daintily fitting white stocking
+over the delicate outlines beneath. The young lady went into the shop,
+purchased albums and sets of lithographs; giving several gold coins
+for them, which glittered and rang upon the counter. The young man,
+seemingly occupied with the prints in the window, fixed upon the fair
+stranger a gaze as eager as man can give, to receive in exchange an
+indifferent glance, such as lights by accident on a passer-by. For him
+it was a leave-taking of love and of woman; but his final and
+strenuous questioning glance was neither understood nor felt by the
+slight-natured woman there; her color did not rise, her eyes did not
+droop. What was it to her? one more piece of adulation, yet another
+sigh only prompted the delightful thought at night, "I looked rather
+well to-day."
+
+The young man quickly turned to another picture, and only left it when
+she returned to her carriage. The horses started off, the final vision
+of luxury and refinement went under an eclipse, just as that life of
+his would soon do also. Slowly and sadly he followed the line of the
+shops, listlessly examining the specimens on view. When the shops came
+to an end, he reviewed the Louvre, the Institute, the towers of Notre
+Dame, of the Palais, the Pont des Arts; all these public monuments
+seemed to have taken their tone from the heavy gray sky.
+
+Fitful gleams of light gave a foreboding look to Paris; like a pretty
+woman, the city has mysterious fits of ugliness or beauty. So the
+outer world seemed to be in a plot to steep this man about to die in a
+painful trance. A prey to the maleficent power which acts relaxingly
+upon us by the fluid circulating through our nerves, his whole frame
+seemed gradually to experience a dissolving process. He felt the
+anguish of these throes passing through him in waves, and the houses
+and the crowd seemed to surge to and fro in a mist before his eyes. He
+tried to escape the agitation wrought in his mind by the revulsions of
+his physical nature, and went toward the shop of a dealer in
+antiquities, thinking to give a treat to his senses, and to spend the
+interval till nightfall in bargaining over curiosities.
+
+He sought, one might say, to regain courage and to find a stimulant,
+like a criminal who doubts his power to reach the scaffold. The
+consciousness of approaching death gave him, for the time being, the
+intrepidity of a duchess with a couple of lovers, so that he entered
+the place with an abstracted look, while his lips displayed a set
+smile like a drunkard's. Had not life, or rather had not death,
+intoxicated him? Dizziness soon overcame him again. Things appeared to
+him in strange colors, or as making slight movements; his irregular
+pulse was no doubt the cause; the blood that sometimes rushed like a
+burning torrent through his veins, and sometimes lay torpid and
+stagnant as tepid water. He merely asked leave to see if the shop
+contained any curiosities which he required.
+
+A plump-faced young shopman with red hair, in an otter-skin cap, left
+an old peasant woman in charge of the shop--a sort of feminine
+Caliban, employed in cleaning a stove made marvelous by Bernard
+Palissy's work. This youth remarked carelessly:
+
+"Look round, _monsieur_! We have nothing very remarkable here
+downstairs; but if I may trouble you to go up to the first floor, I
+will show you some very fine mummies from Cairo, some inlaid pottery,
+and some carved ebony--_genuine Renaissance_ work, just come in, and
+of perfect beauty."
+
+In the stranger's fearful position this cicerone's prattle and
+shopman's empty talk seemed like the petty vexations by which narrow
+minds destroy a man of genius. But as he must even go through with it,
+he appeared to listen to his guide, answering him by gestures or
+monosyllables; but imperceptibly he arrogated the privilege of saying
+nothing, and gave himself up without hindrance to his closing
+meditations, which were appalling. He had a poet's temperament, his
+mind had entered by chance on a vast field; and he must see perforce
+the dry bones of twenty future worlds.
+
+At a first glance the place presented a confused picture in which
+every achievement, human and divine, was mingled. Crocodiles, monkeys,
+and serpents stuffed with straw grinned at glass from church windows,
+seemed to wish to bite sculptured heads, to chase lacquered work, or
+to scramble up chandeliers. A Sevres vase, bearing Napoleon's portrait
+by Mme. Jacotot, stood beside a sphinx dedicated to Sesostris. The
+beginnings of the world and the events of yesterday were mingled with
+grotesque cheerfulness. A kitchen jack leaned against a pyx, a
+republican sabre on a mediaeval hackbut. Mme. du Barry, with a star
+above her head, naked, and surrounded by a cloud, seemed to look
+longingly out of Latour's pastel at an Indian chibook, while she tried
+to guess the purpose of the spiral curves that wound towards her.
+Instruments of death, poniards, curious pistols, and disguised weapons
+had been flung down pell-mell among the paraphernalia of daily life;
+porcelain tureens, Dresden plates, translucent cups from china, old
+salt-cellars, comfit-boxes belonging to feudal times. A carved ivory
+ship sped full sail on the back of a motionless tortoise.
+
+The Emperor Augustus remained unmoved and imperial with an air-pump
+thrust into one eye. Portraits of French sheriffs and Dutch
+burgomasters, phlegmatic now as when in life, looked down pallid and
+unconcerned on the chaos of past ages below them.
+
+Every land of earth seemed to have contributed some stray fragment of
+its learning, some example of its art. Nothing seemed lacking to this
+philosophical kitchen-midden, from a redskin's calumet, a green and
+golden slipper from the seraglio, a Moorish yataghan, a Tartar idol,
+to the soldier's tobacco pouch, to the priest's ciborium, and the
+plumes that once adorned a throne. This extraordinary combination was
+rendered yet more bizarre by the accidents of lighting, by a multitude
+of confused reflections of various hues, by the sharp contrast of
+blacks and whites. Broken cries seemed to reach the ear, unfinished
+dramas seized upon the imagination, smothered lights caught the eye. A
+thin coating of inevitable dust covered all the multitudinous corners
+and convolutions of these objects of various shapes which gave highly
+picturesque effects.
+
+First of all, the stranger compared the three galleries which
+civilization, cults, divinities, masterpieces, dominions, carousals,
+sanity, and madness had filled to repletion, to a mirror with numerous
+facets, each depicting a world. After this first hazy idea he would
+fain have selected his pleasures; but by dint of using his eyes,
+thinking and musing, a fever began to possess him, caused perhaps by
+the gnawing pain of hunger. The spectacle of so much existence,
+individual or national, to which these pledges bore witness, ended by
+numbing his senses--the purpose with which he entered the shop was
+fulfilled. He had left the real behind, and had climbed gradually up
+to an ideal world; he had attained to the enchanted palace of ecstasy,
+whence the universe appeared to him by fragments and in shapes of
+flame, as once the future blazed out before the eyes of St. John in
+Patmos.
+
+A crowd of sorrowing faces, beneficent and appalling, dark and
+luminous, far and near, gathered in numbers, in myriads, in whole
+generations. Egypt, rigid and mysterious, arose from her sands in the
+form of a mummy swathed in black bandages; then the Pharaohs swallowed
+up nations, that they might build themselves a tomb; and he beheld
+Moses and the Hebrews and the desert, and a solemn antique world.
+Fresh and joyous, a marble statue spoke to him from a twisted column
+of the pleasure-loving myths of Greece and Ionia. Ah! who would not
+have smiled with him to see, against the earthen red background, the
+brown-faced maiden dancing with gleeful reverence before the god
+Priapus, wrought in the fine clay of an Etruscan vase? The Latin queen
+caressed her chimera.
+
+The whims of Imperial Rome were there in life, the bath was disclosed,
+the toilette of a languid Julia, dreaming, waiting for her Tibullus.
+Strong with the might of Arabic spells, the head of Cicero evoked
+memories of a free Rome, and unrolled before him the scrolls of Titus
+Livius. The young man beheld _Senatus Populusque Romanus_; consuls,
+lictors, togas with purple fringes; the fighting in the Forum, the
+angry people, passed in review before him like the cloudy faces of a
+dream.
+
+Then Christian Rome predominated in his vision. A painter had laid
+heaven open; he beheld the Virgin Mary wrapped in a golden cloud among
+the angels, shining more brightly than the sun, receiving the prayers
+of sufferers, on whom this second Eve Regenerate smiles pityingly. At
+the touch of a mosaic, made of various lavas from Vesuvius and Etna,
+his fancy fled to the hot tawny south of Italy. He was present at
+Borgia's orgies, he roved among the Abruzzi, sought for Italian love
+intrigues, grew ardent over pale faces and dark, almond-shaped eyes.
+He shivered over midnight adventures, cut short by the cool thrust of
+a jealous blade, as he saw a mediaeval dagger with a hilt wrought like
+lace, and spots of rust like splashes of blood upon it.
+
+India and its religions took the shape of the idol with his peaked cap
+of fantastic form, with little bells, clad in silk and gold. Close by,
+a mat, as pretty as the bayadere who once lay upon it, still gave out
+a faint scent of sandal wood. His fancy was stirred by a goggle-eyed
+Chinese monster, with mouth awry and twisted limbs, the invention of a
+people who, grown weary of the monotony of beauty, found an
+indescribable pleasure in an infinite variety of ugliness. A
+salt-cellar from Benvenuto Cellini's workshop carried him back to the
+Renaissance at its height, to the time when there was no restraint on
+art or morals, when torture was the sport of sovereigns; and from
+their councils, churchmen with courtesans' arms about them issued
+decrees of chastity for simple priests.
+
+On a cameo he saw the conquests of Alexander, the massacres of Pizarro
+in a matchbox, and religious wars disorderly, fanatical, and cruel, in
+the shadows of a helmet. Joyous pictures of chivalry were called up by
+a suit of Milanese armor, brightly polished and richly wrought; a
+paladin's eyes seemed to sparkle yet under the visor.
+
+This sea of inventions, fashions, furniture, works of art and fiascos,
+made for him a poem without end. Shapes and colors and projects all
+lived again for him, but his mind received no clear and perfect
+conception. It was the poet's task to complete the sketches of the
+great master, who had scornfully mingled on his palette the hues of
+the numberless vicissitudes of human life. When the world at large at
+last released him, when he had pondered over many lands, many epochs,
+and various empires, the young man came back to the life of the
+individual. He impersonated fresh characters, and turned his mind to
+details, rejecting the life of nations as a burden too overwhelming
+for a single soul.
+
+Yonder was a sleeping child modeled in wax, a relic of Ruysch's
+collection, an enchanting creation which brought back the happiness of
+his own childhood. The cotton garment of a Tahitian maid next
+fascinated him; he beheld the primitive life of nature, the real
+modesty of naked chastity, the joys of an idleness natural to mankind,
+a peaceful fate by a slow river of sweet water under a plantain tree
+that bears its pleasant manna without the toil of man. Then all at
+once he became a corsair, investing himself with the terrible poetry
+that Lara has given to the part: the thought came at the sight of the
+mother-of-pearl tints of a myriad sea-shells, and grew as he saw
+madrepores redolent of the sea-weeds and the storms of the Atlantic.
+
+The sea was forgotten again at a distant view of exquisite miniatures;
+he admired a precious missal in manuscript, adorned with arabesques in
+gold and blue. Thoughts of peaceful life swayed him; he devoted
+himself afresh to study and research, longing for the easy life of the
+monk, devoid alike of cares and pleasures; and from the depths of his
+cell he looked out upon the meadows, woods, and vineyards of his
+convent. Pausing before some work of Teniers, he took for his own the
+helmet of the soldier or the poverty of the artisan; he wished to wear
+a smoke-begrimed cap with these Flemings, to drink their beer and join
+their game at cards, and smiled upon the comely plumpness of a peasant
+woman. He shivered at a snowstorm by Mieris; he seemed to take part in
+Salvator Rosa's battle-piece; he ran his fingers over a tomahawk form
+Illinois, and felt his own hair rise as he touched a Cherokee
+scalping-knife. He marveled over the rebec that he set in the hands of
+some lady of the land, drank in the musical notes of her ballad, and
+in the twilight by the gothic arch above the hearth he told his love
+in a gloom so deep that he could not read his answer in her eyes.
+
+He caught at all delights, at all sorrows; grasped at existence in
+every form; and endowed the phantoms conjured up from that inert and
+plastic material so liberally with his own life and feelings, that the
+sound of his own footsteps reached him as if from another world, or as
+the hum of Paris reaches the towers of Notre Dame.
+
+He ascended the inner staircase which led to the first floor, with its
+votive shields, panoplies, carved shrines, and figures on the wall at
+every step. Haunted by the strangest shapes, by marvelous creations
+belonging to the borderland betwixt life and death, he walked as if
+under the spell of a dream. His own existence became a matter of doubt
+to him; he was neither wholly alive nor dead, like the curious objects
+about him. The light began to fade as he reached the show-rooms, but
+the treasures of gold and silver heaped up there scarcely seemed to
+need illumination from without. The most extravagant whims of
+prodigals, who have run through millions to perish in garrets, had
+left their traces here in this vast bazar of human follies. Here,
+beside a writing desk, made at the cost of 100,000 francs, and sold
+for a hundred pence, lay a lock with a secret worth a king's ransom.
+The human race was revealed in all the grandeur of its wretchedness;
+in all the splendor of its infinite littleness. An ebony table that an
+artist might worship, carved after Jean Goujon's designs, in years of
+toil, had been purchased perhaps at the price of firewood. Precious
+caskets, and things that fairy hands might have fashioned, lay there
+in heaps like rubbish.
+
+"You must have the worth of millions here!" cried the young man as he
+entered the last of an immense suite of rooms, all decorated and gilt
+by eighteenth century artists.
+
+"Thousands of millions, you might say," said the florid shopman; "but
+you have seen nothing as yet. Go up to the third floor, and you shall
+see!"
+
+The stranger followed his guide to a fourth gallery, where one by one
+there passed before his wearied eyes several pictures by Poussin, a
+magnificent statue by Michael Angelo, enchanting landscapes by Claude
+Lorraine, a Gerard Dow (like a stray page from Sterne), Rembrandts,
+Murillos, and pictures by Velasquez, as dark and full of color as a
+poem of Byron's; then came classic bas-reliefs, finely-cut agates,
+wonderful cameos! Works of art upon works of art, till the craftsman's
+skill palled on the mind, masterpiece after masterpiece till art
+itself became hateful at last and enthusiasm died. He came upon a
+Madonna by Raphael, but he was tired of Raphael; a figure by Correggio
+never received the glance it demanded of him. A priceless vase of
+antique porphyry carved round about with pictures of the most
+grotesquely wanton of Roman divinities, the pride of some Corinna,
+scarcely drew a smile from him.
+
+The ruins of fifteen hundred vanished years oppressed him; he sickened
+under all this human thought; felt bored by all this luxury and art.
+He struggled in vain against the constantly renewed fantastic shapes
+that sprang up from under his feet, like children of some sportive
+demon.
+
+Are not fearful poisons set up in the soul by a swift concentration of
+all her energies, her enjoyments, or ideas; as modern chemistry, in
+its caprice, repeats the action of creation by some gas or other? Do
+not many men perish under the shock of the sudden expansion of some
+moral acid within them?
+
+"What is there in that box?" he inquired, as he reached a large closet
+--final triumph of human skill, originality, wealth, and splendor, in
+which there hung a large, square mahogany coffer, suspended from a
+nail by a silver chain.
+
+"Ah, _monsieur_ keeps the key of it," said the stout assistant
+mysteriously. "If you wish to see the portrait, I will gladly venture
+to tell him."
+
+"Venture!" said the young man; "then is your master a prince?"
+
+"I don't know what he is," the other answered. Equally astonished,
+each looked for a moment at the other. Then construing the stranger's
+silence as an order, the apprentice left him alone in the closet.
+
+Have you never launched into the immensity of time and space as you
+read the geological writings of Cuvier? Carried by his fancy, have you
+hung as if suspended by a magician's wand over the illimitable abyss
+of the past? When the fossil bones of animals belonging to
+civilizations before the Flood are turned up in bed after bed and
+layer upon layer of the quarries of Montmartre or among the schists of
+the Ural range, the soul receives with dismay a glimpse of millions of
+peoples forgotten by feeble human memory and unrecognized by permanent
+divine tradition, peoples whose ashes cover our globe with two feet of
+earth that yields bread to us and flowers.
+
+Is not Cuvier the great poet of our era? Byron has given admirable
+expression to certain moral conflicts, but our immortal naturalist has
+reconstructed past worlds from a few bleached bones; has rebuilt
+cities, like Cadmus, with monsters' teeth; has animated forests with
+all the secrets of zoology gleaned from a piece of coal; has
+discovered a giant population from the footprints of a mammoth. These
+forms stand erect, grow large, and fill regions commensurate with
+their giant size. He treats figures like a poet; a naught set beside a
+seven by him produces awe.
+
+He can call up nothingness before you without the phrases of a
+charlatan. He searches a lump of gypsum, finds an impression in it,
+says to you, "Behold!" All at once marble takes an animal shape, the
+dead come to life, the history of the world is laid open before you.
+After countless dynasties of giant creatures, races of fish and clans
+of mollusks, the race of man appears at last as the degenerate copy of
+a splendid model, which the Creator has perchance destroyed.
+Emboldened by his gaze into the past, this petty race, children of
+yesterday, can overstep chaos, can raise a psalm without end, and
+outline for themselves the story of the Universe in an Apocalypse that
+reveals the past. After the tremendous resurrection that took place at
+the voice of this man, the little drop in the nameless Infinite,
+common to all spheres, that is ours to use, and that we call Time,
+seems to us a pitiable moment of life. We ask ourselves the purpose of
+our triumphs, our hatreds, our loves, overwhelmed as we are by the
+destruction of so many past universes, and whether it is worth while
+to accept the pain of life in order that hereafter we may become an
+intangible speck. Then we remain as if dead, completely torn away from
+the present till the _valet de chambre_ comes in and says, "_Madame la
+comtesse_ answers that she is expecting _monsieur_."
+
+All the wonders which had brought the known world before the young
+man's mind wrought in his soul much the same feeling of dejection that
+besets the philosopher investigating unknown creatures. He longed more
+than ever for death as he flung himself back in a curule chair and let
+his eyes wander across the illusions composing a panorama of the past.
+The pictures seemed to light up, the Virgin's heads smiled on him, the
+statues seemed alive. Everything danced and swayed around him, with a
+motion due to the gloom and the tormenting fever that racked his
+brain; each monstrosity grimaced at him, while the portraits on the
+canvas closed their eyes for a little relief. Every shape seemed to
+tremble and start, and to leave its place gravely or flippantly,
+gracefully or awkwardly, according to its fashion, character, and
+surroundings.
+
+A mysterious Sabbath began, rivaling the fantastic scenes witnessed by
+Faust upon the Brocken. But these optical illusions, produced by
+weariness, overstrained eyesight, or the accidents of twilight, could
+not alarm the stranger. The terrors of life had no power over a soul
+grown familiar with the terrors of death. He even gave himself up,
+half amused by its bizarre eccentricities, to the influence of this
+moral galvanism; its phenomena, closely connected with his last
+thoughts, assured him that he was still alive. The silence about him
+was so deep that he embarked once more in dreams that grew gradually
+darker and darker as if by magic, as the light slowly faded. A last
+struggling ray from the sun lit up rosy answering lights. He raised
+his head and saw a skeleton dimly visible, with its skull bent
+doubtfully to one side, as if to say, "The dead will none of thee as
+yet."
+
+He passed his hand over his forehead to shake off the drowsiness, and
+felt a cold breath of air as an unknown furry something swept past his
+cheeks. He shivered. A muffled clatter of the windows followed; it was
+a bat, he fancied, that had given him this chilly sepulchral caress.
+He could yet dimly see for a moment the shapes that surrounded him, by
+the vague light in the west; then all these inanimate objects were
+blotted out in uniform darkness. Night and the hour of death had
+suddenly come. Thenceforward, for a while, he lost consciousness of
+the things about him; he was either buried in deep meditation or sleep
+overcame him, brought on by weariness or by the stress of those many
+thoughts that lacerated his heart.
+
+Suddenly he thought that an awful voice called him by name; it was
+like some feverish nightmare, when at a step the dreamer falls
+headlong over into an abyss, and he trembled. He closed his eyes,
+dazzled by bright rays from a red circle of light that shone out from
+the shadows. In the midst of the circle stood a little old man who
+turned the light of the lamp upon him, yet he had not heard him enter,
+nor move, nor speak. There was something magical about the apparition.
+The boldest man, awakened in such a sort, would have felt alarmed at
+the sight of this figure, which might have issued from some
+sarcophagus hard by.
+
+A curiously youthful look in the unmoving eyes of the spectre forbade
+the idea of anything supernatural; but for all that, in the brief
+space between his dreaming and waking life, the young man's judgment
+remained philosophically suspended, as Descartes advises. He was, in
+spite of himself, under the influence of an unaccountable
+hallucination, a mystery that our pride rejects, and that our
+imperfect science vainly tries to resolve.
+
+Imagine a short old man, thin and spare, in a long black velvet gown
+girded round him by a thick silk cord. His long white hair escaped on
+either side of his face from under a black velvet cap which closely
+fitted his head and made a formal setting for his countenance. His
+gown enveloped his body like a winding sheet, so that all that was
+left visible was a narrow bleached human face. But for the wasted arm,
+thin as a draper's wand, which held aloft the lamp that cast all its
+light upon him, the face would have seemed to hang in mid air. A gray
+pointed beard concealed the chin of this fantastical appearance, and
+gave him the look of one of those Jewish types which serve artists as
+models for Moses. His lips were so thin and colorless that it needed a
+close inspection to find the lines of his mouth at all in the pallid
+face. His great wrinkled brow and hollow bloodless cheeks, the
+inexorably stern expression of his small green eyes that no longer
+possessed eyebrows or lashes, might have convinced the stranger that
+Gerard Dow's "Money Changer" had come down from his frame. The
+craftiness of an inquisitor, revealed in those curving wrinkles and
+creases that wound about his temples, indicated a profound knowledge
+of life. There was no deceiving this man, who seemed to possess a
+power of detecting the secrets of the wariest heart.
+
+The wisdom and the moral codes of every people seemed gathered up in
+his passive face, just as all the productions of the globe had been
+heaped up in his dusty showrooms. He seemed to possess the tranquil
+luminous vision of some god before whom all things are open, or the
+haughty power of a man who knows all things.
+
+With two strokes of the brush a painter could have so altered the
+expression of this face, that what had been a serene representation of
+the Eternal Father should change to the sneering mask of a
+Mephistopheles; for though sovereign power was revealed by the
+forehead, mocking folds lurked about the mouth. He must have
+sacrificed all the joys of earth, as he had crushed all human sorrows
+beneath his potent will. The man at the brink of death shivered at the
+thought of the life led by this spirit, so solitary and remote from
+our world; joyless, since he had no one illusion left; painless,
+because pleasure had ceased to exist for him. There he stood,
+motionless and serene as a star in a bright mist. His lamp lit up the
+obscure closet, just as his green eyes, with their quiet malevolence,
+seemed to shed a light on the moral world.
+
+This was the strange spectacle that startled the young man's returning
+sight, as he shook off the dreamy fancies and thoughts of death that
+had lulled him. An instant of dismay, a momentary return to belief in
+nursery tales, may be forgiven him, seeing that his senses were
+obscured. Much thought had wearied his mind, and his nerves were
+exhausted with the strain of the tremendous drama within him, and by
+the scenes that had heaped on him all the horrid pleasures that a
+piece of opium can produce.
+
+But this apparition had appeared in Paris, on the Quai Voltaire, and
+in the nineteenth century; the time and place made sorcery impossible.
+The idol of French scepticism had died in the house just opposite, the
+disciple of Gay-Lussac and Arago, who had held the charlatanism of
+intellect in contempt. And yet the stranger submitted himself to the
+influence of an imaginative spell, as all of us do at times, when we
+wish to escape from an inevitable certainty, or to tempt the power of
+Providence. So some mysterious apprehension of a strange force made
+him tremble before the old man with the lamp. All of us have been
+stirred in the same way by the sight of Napoleon, or of some other
+great man, made illustrious by his genius or by fame.
+
+"You wish to see Raphael's portrait of Jesus Christ, monsieur?" the
+old man asked politely. There was something metallic in the clear,
+sharp ring of his voice.
+
+He set the lamp upon a broken column, so that all its light might fall
+on the brown case.
+
+At the sacred names of Christ and Raphael the young man showed some
+curiosity. The merchant, who no doubt looked for this, pressed a
+spring, and suddenly the mahogany panel slid noiselessly back in its
+groove, and discovered the canvas to the stranger's admiring gaze. At
+sight of this deathless creation, he forgot his fancies in the
+show-rooms and the freaks of his dreams, and became himself again. The
+old man became a being of flesh and blood, very much alive, with
+nothing chimerical about him, and took up his existence at once upon
+solid earth.
+
+The sympathy and love, and the gentle serenity in the divine face,
+exerted an instant sway over the younger spectator. Some influence
+falling from heaven bade cease the burning torment that consumed the
+marrow of his bones. The head of the Saviour of mankind seemed to
+issue from among the shadows represented by a dark background; an
+aureole of light shone out brightly from his hair; an impassioned
+belief seemed to glow through him, and to thrill every feature. The
+word of life had just been uttered by those red lips, the sacred
+sounds seemed to linger still in the air; the spectator besought the
+silence for those captivating parables, hearkened for them in the
+future, and had to turn to the teachings of the past. The untroubled
+peace of the divine eyes, the comfort of sorrowing souls, seemed an
+interpretation of the Evangel. The sweet triumphant smile revealed the
+secret of the Catholic religion, which sums up all things in the
+precept, "Love one another." This picture breathed the spirit of
+prayer, enjoined forgiveness, overcame self, caused sleeping powers of
+good to waken. For this work of Raphael's had the imperious charm of
+music; you were brought under the spell of memories of the past; his
+triumph was so absolute that the artist was forgotten. The witchery of
+the lamplight heightened the wonder; the head seemed at times to
+flicker in the distance, enveloped in cloud.
+
+"I covered the surface of that picture with gold pieces," said the
+merchant carelessly.
+
+"And now for death!" cried the young man, awakened from his musings.
+His last thought had recalled his fate to him, as it led him
+imperceptibly back from the forlorn hopes to which he had clung.
+
+"Ah, ha! then my suspicions were well founded!" said the other, and
+his hands held the young man's wrists in a grip like that of a vice.
+
+The younger man smiled wearily at his mistake, and said gently:
+
+"You, sir, have nothing to fear; it is not your life, but my own that
+is in question. . . . But why should I hide a harmless fraud?" he went
+on, after a look at the anxious old man. "I came to see your treasures
+to while away the time till night should come and I could drown myself
+decently. Who would grudge this last pleasure to a poet and a man of
+science?"
+
+While he spoke, the jealous merchant watched the haggard face of his
+pretended customer with keen eyes. Perhaps the mournful tones of his
+voice reassured him, or he also read the dark signs of fate in the
+faded features that had made the gamblers shudder; he released his
+hands, but, with a touch of caution, due to the experience of some
+hundred years at least, he stretched his arm out to a sideboard as if
+to steady himself, took up a little dagger, and said:
+
+"Have you been a supernumerary clerk of the Treasury for three years
+without receiving any perquisites?"
+
+The stranger could scarcely suppress a smile as he shook his head.
+
+"Perhaps your father has expressed his regret for your birth a little
+too sharply? Or have you disgraced yourself?"
+
+"If I meant to be disgraced, I should live."
+
+"You have been hissed perhaps at the Funambules? Or you have had to
+compose couplets to pay for your mistress' funeral? Do you want to be
+cured of the gold fever? Or to be quit of the spleen? For what blunder
+is your life forfeit?"
+
+"You must not look among the common motives that impel suicides for
+the reason of my death. To spare myself the task of disclosing my
+unheard-of sufferings, for which language has no name, I will tell you
+this--that I am in the deepest, most humiliating, and most cruel
+trouble, and," he went on in proud tones that harmonized ill with the
+words just uttered, "I have no wish to beg for either help or
+sympathy."
+
+"Eh! eh!"
+
+The two syllables which the old man pronounced resembled the sound of
+a rattle. Then he went on thus:
+
+"Without compelling you to entreat me, without making you blush for
+it, and without giving you so much as a French centime, a para from
+the Levant, a German heller, a Russian kopeck, a Scottish farthing, a
+single obolus or sestertius from the ancient world, or one piastre
+from the new, without offering you anything whatever in gold, silver,
+or copper, notes or drafts, I will make you richer, more powerful, and
+of more consequence than a constitutional king."
+
+The young man thought that the older was in his dotage, and waited in
+bewilderment without venturing to reply.
+
+"Turn round," said the merchant, suddenly catching up the lamp in
+order to light up the opposite wall; "look at that leathern skin," he
+went on.
+
+The young man rose abruptly, and showed some surprise at the sight of
+a piece of shagreen which hung on the wall behind his chair. It was
+only about the size of a fox's skin, but it seemed to fill the deep
+shadows of the place with such brilliant rays that it looked like a
+small comet, an appearance at first sight inexplicable. The young
+sceptic went up to this so-called talisman, which was to rescue him
+from all points of view, and he soon found out the cause of its
+singular brilliancy. The dark grain of the leather had been so
+carefully burnished and polished, the striped markings of the graining
+were so sharp and clear, that every particle of the surface of the bit
+of Oriental leather was in itself a focus which concentrated the
+light, and reflected it vividly.
+
+He accounted for this phenomenon categorically to the old man, who
+only smiled meaningly by way of answer. His superior smile led the
+young scientific man to fancy that he himself had been deceived by
+some imposture. He had no wish to carry one more puzzle to his grave,
+and hastily turned the skin over, like some child eager to find out
+the mysteries of a new toy.
+
+"Ah," he cried, "here is the mark of the seal which they call in the
+East the Signet of Solomon."
+
+"So you know that, then?" asked the merchant. His peculiar method of
+laughter, two or three quick breathings through the nostrils, said
+more than any words however eloquent.
+
+"Is there anybody in the world simple enough to believe in that idle
+fancy?" said the young man, nettled by the spitefulness of the silent
+chuckle. "Don't you know," he continued, "that the superstitions of
+the East have perpetuated the mystical form and the counterfeit
+characters of the symbol, which represents a mythical dominion? I have
+no more laid myself open to a charge of credulity in this case, than
+if I had mentioned sphinxes or griffins, whose existence mythology in
+a manner admits."
+
+"As you are an Orientalist," replied the other, "perhaps you can read
+that sentence."
+
+He held the lamp close to the talisman, which the young man held
+towards him, and pointed out some characters inlaid in the surface of
+the wonderful skin, as if they had grown on the animal to which it
+once belonged.
+
+"I must admit," said the stranger, "that I have no idea how the
+letters could be engraved so deeply on the skin of a wild ass." And he
+turned quickly to the tables strewn with curiosities and seemed to
+look for something.
+
+"What is it that you want?" asked the old man.
+
+"Something that will cut the leather, so that I can see whether the
+letters are printed or inlaid."
+
+The old man held out his stiletto. The stranger took it and tried to
+cut the skin above the lettering; but when he had removed a thin
+shaving of leather from them, the characters still appeared below, so
+clear and so exactly like the surface impression, that for a moment he
+was not sure that he had cut anything away after all.
+
+"The craftsmen of the Levant have secrets known only to themselves,"
+he said, half in vexation, as he eyed the characters of this Oriental
+sentence.
+
+"Yes," said the old man, "it is better to attribute it to man's agency
+than to God's."
+
+The mysterious words were thus arranged:
+
+     [Drawing of apparently Sanskrit characters omitted]
+
+Or, as it runs in English:
+
+     POSSESSING ME THOU SHALT POSSESS ALL THINGS.
+     BUT THY LIFE IS MINE, FOR GOD HAS SO WILLED IT.
+     WISH, AND THY WISHES SHALL BE FULFILLED;
+     BUT MEASURE THY DESIRES, ACCORDING
+     TO THE LIFE THAT IS IN THEE.
+     THIS IS THY LIFE,
+     WITH EACH WISH I MUST SHRINK
+     EVEN AS THY OWN DAYS.
+     WILT THOU HAVE ME?  TAKE ME.
+     GOD WILL HEARKEN UNTO THEE.
+     SO BE IT!
+
+"So you read Sanskrit fluently," said the old man. "You have been in
+Persia perhaps, or in Bengal?"
+
+"No, sir," said the stranger, as he felt the emblematical skin
+curiously. It was almost as rigid as a sheet of metal.
+
+The old merchant set the lamp back again upon the column, giving the
+other a look as he did so. "He has given up the notion of dying
+already," the glance said with phlegmatic irony.
+
+"Is it a jest, or is it an enigma?" asked the younger man.
+
+The other shook his head and said soberly:
+
+"I don't know how to answer you. I have offered this talisman with its
+terrible powers to men with more energy in them than you seem to me to
+have; but though they laughed at the questionable power it might exert
+over their futures, not one of them was ready to venture to conclude
+the fateful contract proposed by an unknown force. I am of their
+opinion, I have doubted and refrained, and----"
+
+"Have you never even tried its power?" interrupted the young stranger.
+
+"Tried it!" exclaimed the old man. "Suppose that you were on the
+column in the Place Vendome, would you try flinging yourself into
+space? Is it possible to stay the course of life? Has a man ever been
+known to die by halves? Before you came here, you had made up your
+mind to kill yourself, but all at once a mystery fills your mind, and
+you think no more about death. You child! Does not any one day of your
+life afford mysteries more absorbing? Listen to me. I saw the
+licentious days of Regency. I was like you, then, in poverty; I have
+begged my bread; but for all that, I am now a centenarian with a
+couple of years to spare, and a millionaire to boot. Misery was the
+making of me, ignorance has made me learned. I will tell you in a few
+words the great secret of human life. By two instinctive processes man
+exhausts the springs of life within him. Two verbs cover all the forms
+which these two causes of death may take--To Will and To have your
+Will. Between these two limits of human activity the wise have
+discovered an intermediate formula, to which I owe my good fortune and
+long life. To Will consumes us, and To have our Will destroys us, but
+To Know steeps our feeble organisms in perpetual calm. In me Thought
+has destroyed Will, so that Power is relegated to the ordinary
+functions of my economy. In a word, it is not in the heart which can
+be broken, or in the senses that become deadened, but it is in the
+brain that cannot waste away and survives everything else, that I have
+set my life. Moderation has kept mind and body unruffled. Yet, I have
+seen the whole world. I have learned all languages, lived after every
+manner. I have lent a Chinaman money, taking his father's corpse as a
+pledge, slept in an Arab's tent on the security of his bare word,
+signed contracts in every capital of Europe, and left my gold without
+hesitation in savage wigwams. I have attained everything, because I
+have known how to despise all things.
+
+"My one ambition has been to see. Is not Sight in a manner Insight?
+And to have knowledge or insight, is not that to have instinctive
+possession? To be able to discover the very substance of fact and to
+unite its essence to our essence? Of material possession what abides
+with you but an idea? Think, then, how glorious must be the life of a
+man who can stamp all realities upon his thought, place the springs of
+happiness within himself, and draw thence uncounted pleasures in idea,
+unspoiled by earthly stains. Thought is a key to all treasures; the
+miser's gains are ours without his cares. Thus I have soared above
+this world, where my enjoyments have been intellectual joys. I have
+reveled in the contemplation of seas, peoples, forests, and mountains!
+I have seen all things, calmly, and without weariness; I have set my
+desires on nothing; I have waited in expectation of everything. I have
+walked to and fro in the world as in a garden round about my own
+dwelling. Troubles, loves, ambitions, losses, and sorrows, as men call
+them, are for me ideas, which I transmute into waking dreams; I
+express and transpose instead of feeling them; instead of permitting
+them to prey upon my life, I dramatize and expand them; I divert
+myself with them as if they were romances which I could read by the
+power of vision within me. As I have never overtaxed my constitution,
+I still enjoy robust health; and as my mind is endowed with all the
+force that I have not wasted, this head of mine is even better
+furnished than my galleries. The true millions lie here," he said,
+striking his forehead. "I spend delicious days in communings with the
+past; I summon before me whole countries, places, extents of sea, the
+fair faces of history. In my imaginary seraglio I have all the women
+that I have never possessed. Your wars and revolutions come up before
+me for judgment. What is a feverish fugitive admiration for some more
+or less brightly colored piece of flesh and blood; some more or less
+rounded human form; what are all the disasters that wait on your
+erratic whims, compared with the magnificent power of conjuring up the
+whole world within your soul, compared with the immeasurable joys of
+movement, unstrangled by the cords of time, unclogged by the fetters
+of space; the joys of beholding all things, of comprehending all
+things, of leaning over the parapet of the world to question the other
+spheres, to hearken to the voice of God? There," he burst out,
+vehemently, "there are To Will and To have your Will, both together,"
+he pointed to the bit of shagreen; "there are your social ideas, your
+immoderate desires, your excesses, your pleasures that end in death,
+your sorrows that quicken the pace of life, for pain is perhaps but a
+violent pleasure. Who could determine the point where pleasure becomes
+pain, where pain is still a pleasure? Is not the utmost brightness of
+the ideal world soothing to us, while the lightest shadows of the
+physical world annoy? Is not knowledge the secret of wisdom? And what
+is folly but a riotous expenditure of Will or Power?"
+
+"Very good then, a life of riotous excess for me!" said the stranger,
+pouncing upon the piece of shagreen.
+
+"Young man, beware!" cried the other with incredible vehemence.
+
+"I had resolved my existence into thought and study," the stranger
+replied; "and yet they have not even supported me. I am not to be
+gulled by a sermon worthy of Swedenborg, nor by your Oriental amulet,
+nor yet by your charitable endeavors to keep me in a world wherein
+existence is no longer possible for me. . . . Let me see now," he
+added, clutching the talisman convulsively, as he looked at the old
+man, "I wish for a royal banquet, a carouse worthy of this century,
+which, it is said, has brought everything to perfection! Let me have
+young boon companions, witty, unwarped by prejudice, merry to the
+verge of madness! Let one wine succeed another, each more biting and
+perfumed than the last, and strong enough to bring about three days of
+delirium! Passionate women's forms should grace that night! I would be
+borne away to unknown regions beyond the confines of this world, by
+the car and four-winged steed of a frantic and uproarious orgy. Let us
+ascend to the skies, or plunge ourselves in the mire. I do not know if
+one soars or sinks at such moments, and I do not care! Next, I bid
+this enigmatical power to concentrate all delights for me in one
+single joy. Yes, I must comprehend every pleasure of earth and heaven
+in the final embrace that is to kill me. Therefore, after the wine, I
+wish to hold high festival to Priapus, with songs that might rouse the
+dead, and kisses without end; the sound of them should pass like the
+crackling of flame through Paris, should revive the heat of youth and
+passion in husband and wife, even in hearts of seventy years."
+
+A laugh burst from the little old man. It rang in the young man's ears
+like an echo from hell; and tyrannously cut him short. He said no
+more.
+
+"Do you imagine that my floors are going to open suddenly, so that
+luxuriously-appointed tables may rise through them, and guests from
+another world? No, no, young madcap. You have entered into the compact
+now, and there is an end of it. Henceforward, your wishes will be
+accurately fulfilled, but at the expense of your life. The compass of
+your days, visible in that skin, will contract according to the
+strength and number of your desires, from the least to the most
+extravagant. The Brahmin from whom I had this skin once explained to
+me that it would bring about a mysterious connection between the
+fortunes and wishes of its possessor. Your first wish is a vulgar one,
+which I could fulfil, but I leave that to the issues of your new
+existence. After all, you were wishing to die; very well, your suicide
+is only put off for a time."
+
+The stranger was surprised and irritated that this peculiar old man
+persisted in not taking him seriously. A half philanthropic intention
+peeped so clearly forth from his last jesting observation, that he
+exclaimed:
+
+"I shall soon see, sir, if any change comes over my fortunes in the
+time it will take to cross the width of the quay. But I should like us
+to be quits for such a momentous service; that is, if you are not
+laughing at an unlucky wretch, so I wish that you may fall in love
+with an opera-dancer. You would understand the pleasures of
+intemperance then, and might perhaps grow lavish of the wealth that
+you have husbanded so philosophically."
+
+He went out without heeding the old man's heavy sigh, went back
+through the galleries and down the staircase, followed by the stout
+assistant who vainly tried to light his passage; he fled with the
+haste of a robber caught in the act. Blinded by a kind of delirium, he
+did not even notice the unexpected flexibility of the piece of
+shagreen, which coiled itself up, pliant as a glove in his excited
+fingers, till it would go into the pocket of his coat, where he
+mechanically thrust it. As he rushed out of the door into the street,
+he ran up against three young men who were passing arm-in-arm.
+
+"Brute!"
+
+"Idiot!"
+
+Such were the gratifying expressions exchanged between them.
+
+"Why, it is Raphael!"
+
+"Good! we were looking for you."
+
+"What! it is you, then?"
+
+These three friendly exclamations quickly followed the insults, as the
+light of a street lamp, flickering in the wind, fell upon the
+astonished faces of the group.
+
+"My dear fellow, you must come with us!" said the young man that
+Raphael had all but knocked down.
+
+"What is all this about?"
+
+"Come along, and I will tell you the history of it as we go."
+
+By fair means or foul, Raphael must go along with his friends towards
+the Pont des Arts; they surrounded him, and linked him by the arm
+among their merry band.
+
+"We have been after you for about a week," the speaker went on. "At
+your respectable hotel _de Saint Quentin_, where, by the way, the sign
+with the alternate black and red letters cannot be removed, and hangs
+out just as it did in the time of Jean Jacques, that Leonarda of yours
+told us that you were off into the country. For all that, we certainly
+did not look like duns, creditors, sheriff's officers, or the like.
+But no matter! Rastignac had seen you the evening before at the
+Bouffons; we took courage again, and made it a point of honor to find
+out whether you were roosting in a tree in the Champs-Elysees, or in
+one of those philanthropic abodes where the beggars sleep on a
+twopenny rope, or if, more luckily, you were bivouacking in some
+boudoir or other. We could not find you anywhere. Your name was not in
+the jailers' registers at the St. Pelagie nor at La Force! Government
+departments, cafes, libraries, lists of prefects' names, newspaper
+offices, restaurants, greenrooms--to cut it short, every lurking place
+in Paris, good or bad, has been explored in the most expert manner. We
+bewailed the loss of a man endowed with such genius, that one might
+look to find him at Court or in the common jails. We talked of
+canonizing you as a hero of July, and, upon my word, we regretted
+you!"
+
+As he spoke, the friends were crossing the Pont des Arts. Without
+listening to them, Raphael looked at the Seine, at the clamoring waves
+that reflected the lights of Paris. Above that river, in which but now
+he had thought to fling himself, the old man's prediction had been
+fulfilled, the hour of his death had been already put back by fate.
+
+"We really regretted you," said his friend, still pursuing his theme.
+"It was a question of a plan in which we included you as a superior
+person, that is to say, somebody who can put himself above other
+people. The constitutional thimble-rig is carried on to-day, dear boy,
+more seriously than ever. The infamous monarchy, displaced by the
+heroism of the people, was a sort of drab, you could laugh and revel
+with her; but La Patrie is a shrewish and virtuous wife, and
+willy-nilly you must take her prescribed endearments. Then besides, as
+you know, authority passed over from the Tuileries to the journalists,
+at the time when the Budget changed its quarters and went from the
+Faubourg Saint-Germain to the Chaussee de Antin. But this you may not
+know perhaps. The Government, that is, the aristocracy of lawyers and
+bankers who represent the country to-day, just as the priests used to
+do in the time of the monarchy, has felt the necessity of mystifying
+the worthy people of France with a few new words and old ideas, like
+philosophers of every school, and all strong intellects ever since
+time began. So now Royalist-national ideas must be inculcated, by
+proving to us that it is far better to pay twelve million francs,
+thirty-three centimes to La Patrie, represented by Messieurs
+Such-and-Such, than to pay eleven hundred million francs, nine centimes
+to a king who used to say _I_ instead of _we_. In a word, a journal,
+with two or three hundred thousand francs, good, at the back of it, has
+just been started, with a view to making an opposition paper to content
+the discontented, without prejudice to the national government of the
+citizen-king. We scoff at liberty as at despotism now, and at religion
+or incredulity quite impartially. And since, for us, 'our country'
+means a capital where ideas circulate and are sold at so much a line,
+a succulent dinner every day, and the play at frequent intervals,
+where profligate women swarm, where suppers last on into the next day,
+and light loves are hired by the hour like cabs; and since Paris will
+always be the most adorable of all countries, the country of joy,
+liberty, wit, pretty women, _mauvais sujets_, and good wine; where the
+truncheon of authority never makes itself disagreeably felt, because
+one is so close to those who wield it,--we, therefore, sectaries of
+the god Mephistopheles, have engaged to whitewash the public mind, to
+give fresh costumes to the actors, to put a new plank or two in the
+government booth, to doctor doctrinaires, and warm up old Republicans,
+to touch up the Bonapartists a bit, and revictual the Centre; provided
+that we are allowed to laugh _in petto_ at both kings and peoples, to
+think one thing in the morning and another at night, and to lead a
+merry life _a la_ Panurge, or to recline upon soft cushions, _more
+orientali_.
+
+"The sceptre of this burlesque and macaronic kingdom," he went on, "we
+have reserved for you; so we are taking you straightway to a dinner
+given by the founder of the said newspaper, a retired banker, who, at
+a loss to know what to do with his money, is going to buy some brains
+with it. You will be welcomed as a brother, we shall hail you as king
+of these free lances who will undertake anything; whose perspicacity
+discovers the intentions of Austria, England, or Russia before either
+Russia, Austria or England have formed any. Yes, we will invest you
+with the sovereignty of those puissant intellects which give to the
+world its Mirabeaus, Talleyrands, Pitts, and Metternichs--all the
+clever Crispins who treat the destinies of a kingdom as gamblers'
+stakes, just as ordinary men play dominoes for _kirschenwasser_. We have
+given you out to be the most undaunted champion who ever wrestled in a
+drinking-bout at close quarters with the monster called Carousal, whom
+all bold spirits wish to try a fall with; we have gone so far as to
+say that you have never yet been worsted. I hope you will not make
+liars of us. Taillefer, our amphitryon, has undertaken to surpass the
+circumscribed saturnalias of the petty modern Lucullus. He is rich
+enough to infuse pomp into trifles, and style and charm into
+dissipation . . . Are you listening, Raphael?" asked the orator,
+interrupting himself.
+
+"Yes," answered the young man, less surprised by the accomplishment of
+his wishes than by the natural manner in which the events had come
+about.
+
+He could not bring himself to believe in magic, but he marveled at the
+accidents of human fate.
+
+"Yes, you say, just as if you were thinking of your grandfather's
+demise," remarked one of his neighbors.
+
+"Ah!" cried Raphael, "I was thinking, my friends, that we are in a
+fair way to become very great scoundrels," and there was an
+ingenuousness in his tones that set these writers, the hope of young
+France, in a roar. "So far our blasphemies have been uttered over our
+cups; we have passed our judgments on life while drunk, and taken men
+and affairs in an after-dinner frame of mind. We were innocent of
+action; we were bold in words. But now we are to be branded with the
+hot iron of politics; we are going to enter the convict's prison and
+to drop our illusions. Although one has no belief left, except in the
+devil, one may regret the paradise of one's youth and the age of
+innocence, when we devoutly offered the tip of our tongue to some good
+priest for the consecrated wafer of the sacrament. Ah, my good
+friends, our first peccadilloes gave us so much pleasure because the
+consequent remorse set them off and lent a keen relish to them; but
+nowadays----"
+
+"Oh! now," said the first speaker, "there is still left----"
+
+"What?" asked another.
+
+"Crime----"
+
+"There is a word as high as the gallows and deeper than the Seine,"
+said Raphael.
+
+"Oh, you don't understand me; I mean political crime. Since this
+morning, a conspirator's life is the only one I covet. I don't know
+that the fancy will last over to-morrow, but to-night at least my
+gorge rises at the anaemic life of our civilization and its railroad
+evenness. I am seized with a passion for the miseries of retreat from
+Moscow, for the excitements of the Red Corsair, or for a smuggler's
+life. I should like to go to Botany Bay, as we have no Chartreaux left
+us here in France; it is a sort of infirmary reserved for little Lord
+Byrons who, having crumpled up their lives like a serviette after
+dinner, have nothing left to do but to set their country ablaze, blow
+their own brains out, plot for a republic or clamor for a war----"
+
+"Emile," Raphael's neighbor called eagerly to the speaker, "on my
+honor, but for the revolution of July I would have taken orders, and
+gone off down into the country somewhere to lead the life of an
+animal, and----"
+
+"And you would have read your breviary through every day."
+
+"Yes."
+
+"You are a coxcomb!"
+
+"Why, we read the newspapers as it is!"
+
+"Not bad that, for a journalist! But hold your tongue, we are going
+through a crowd of subscribers. Journalism, look you, is the religion
+of modern society, and has even gone a little further."
+
+"What do you mean?"
+
+"Its pontiffs are not obliged to believe in it any more than the
+people are."
+
+Chatting thus, like good fellows who have known their _De Viris
+illustribus_ for years past, they reached a mansion in the Rue Joubert.
+
+Emile was a journalist who had acquired more reputation by dint of
+doing nothing than others had derived from their achievements. A bold,
+caustic, and powerful critic, he possessed all the qualities that his
+defects permitted. An outspoken giber, he made numberless epigrams on
+a friend to his face; but would defend him, if absent, with courage
+and loyalty. He laughed at everything, even at his own career. Always
+impecunious, he yet lived, like all men of his calibre, plunged in
+unspeakable indolence. He would fling some word containing volumes in
+the teeth of folk who could not put a syllable of sense into their
+books. He lavished promises that he never fulfilled; he made a pillow
+of his luck and reputation, on which he slept, and ran the risk of
+waking up to old age in a workhouse. A steadfast friend to the gallows
+foot, a cynical swaggerer with a child's simplicity, a worker only
+from necessity or caprice.
+
+"In the language of Maitre Alcofribas, we are about to make a famous
+_troncon de chiere lie_," he remarked to Raphael as he pointed out the
+flower-stands that made a perfumed forest of the staircase.
+
+"I like a vestibule to be well warmed and richly carpeted," Raphael
+said. "Luxury in the peristyle is not common in France. I feel as if
+life had begun anew here."
+
+"And up above we are going to drink and make merry once more, my dear
+Raphael. Ah! yes," he went on, "and I hope we are going to come off
+conquerors, too, and walk over everybody else's head."
+
+As he spoke, he jestingly pointed to the guests. They were entering a
+large room which shone with gilding and lights, and there all the
+younger men of note in Paris welcomed them. Here was one who had just
+revealed fresh powers, his first picture vied with the glories of
+Imperial art. There, another, who but yesterday had launched forth a
+volume, an acrid book filled with a sort of literary arrogance, which
+opened up new ways to the modern school. A sculptor, not far away,
+with vigorous power visible in his rough features, was chatting with
+one of those unenthusiastic scoffers who can either see excellence
+anywhere or nowhere, as it happens. Here, the cleverest of our
+caricaturists, with mischievous eyes and bitter tongue, lay in wait
+for epigrams to translate into pencil strokes; there, stood the young
+and audacious writer, who distilled the quintessence of political
+ideas better than any other man, or compressed the work of some
+prolific writer as he held him up to ridicule; he was talking with the
+poet whose works would have eclipsed all the writings of the time if
+his ability had been as strenuous as his hatreds. Both were trying not
+to say the truth while they kept clear of lies, as they exchanged
+flattering speeches. A famous musician administered soothing
+consolation in a rallying fashion, to a young politician who had just
+fallen quite unhurt, from his rostrum. Young writers who lacked style
+stood beside other young writers who lacked ideas, and authors of
+poetical prose by prosaic poets.
+
+At the sight of all these incomplete beings, a simple Saint Simonian,
+ingenuous enough to believe in his own doctrine, charitably paired
+them off, designing, no doubt, to convert them into monks of his
+order. A few men of science mingled in the conversation, like nitrogen
+in the atmosphere, and several _vaudevillistes_ shed rays like the
+sparking diamonds that give neither light nor heat. A few
+paradox-mongers, laughing up their sleeves at any folk who embraced
+their likes or dislikes in men or affairs, had already begun a
+two-edged policy, conspiring against all systems, without committing
+themselves to any side. Then there was the self-appointed critic who
+admires nothing, and will blow his nose in the middle of a _cavatina_ at
+the Bouffons, who applauds before any one else begins, and contradicts
+every one who says what he himself was about to say; he was there
+giving out the sayings of wittier men for his own. Of all the
+assembled guests, a future lay before some five; ten or so should
+acquire a fleeting renown; as for the rest, like all mediocrities,
+they might apply to themselves the famous falsehood of Louis XVIII.,
+Union and oblivion.
+
+The anxious jocularity of a man who is expending two thousand crowns
+sat on their host. His eyes turned impatiently towards the door from
+time to time, seeking one of his guests who kept him waiting. Very
+soon a stout little person appeared, who was greeted by a
+complimentary murmur; it was the notary who had invented the newspaper
+that very morning. A valet-de-chambre in black opened the doors of a
+vast dining-room, whither every one went without ceremony, and took
+his place at an enormous table.
+
+Raphael took a last look round the room before he left it. His wish
+had been realized to the full. The rooms were adorned with silk and
+gold. Countless wax tapers set in handsome candelabra lit up the
+slightest details of gilded friezes, the delicate bronze sculpture,
+and the splendid colors of the furniture. The sweet scent of rare
+flowers, set in stands tastefully made of bamboo, filled the air.
+Everything, even the curtains, was pervaded by elegance without
+pretension, and there was a certain imaginative charm about it all
+which acted like a spell on the mind of a needy man.
+
+"An income of a hundred thousand livres a year is a very nice
+beginning of the catechism, and a wonderful assistance to putting
+morality into our actions," he said, sighing. "Truly my sort of virtue
+can scarcely go afoot, and vice means, to my thinking, a garret, a
+threadbare coat, a gray hat in winter time, and sums owing to the
+porter. . . . I should like to live in the lap of luxury a year, or
+six months, no matter! And then afterwards, die. I should have known,
+exhausted, and consumed a thousand lives, at any rate."
+
+"Why, you are taking the tone of a stockbroker in good luck," said
+Emile, who overheard him. "Pooh! your riches would be a burden to you
+as soon as you found that they would spoil your chances of coming out
+above the rest of us. Hasn't the artist always kept the balance true
+between the poverty of riches and the riches of poverty? And isn't
+struggle a necessity to some of us? Look out for your digestion, and
+only look," he added, with a mock-heroic gesture, "at the majestic,
+thrice holy, and edifying appearance of this amiable capitalist's
+dining-room. That man has in reality only made his money for our
+benefit. Isn't he a kind of sponge of the polyp order, overlooked by
+naturalists, which should be carefully squeezed before he is left for
+his heirs to feed upon? There is style, isn't there, about those
+bas-reliefs that adorn the walls? And the lustres, and the pictures,
+what luxury well carried out! If one may believe those who envy him, or
+who know, or think they know, the origins of his life, then this man
+got rid of a German and some others--his best friend for one, and the
+mother of that friend, during the Revolution. Could you house crimes
+under the venerable Taillefer's silvering locks? He looks to me a very
+worthy man. Only see how the silver sparkles, and is every glittering
+ray like a stab of a dagger to him? . . . Let us go in, one might as
+well believe in Mahomet. If common report speak truth, here are thirty
+men of talent, and good fellows too, prepared to dine off the flesh
+and blood of a whole family; . . . and here are we ourselves, a pair
+of youngsters full of open-hearted enthusiasm, and we shall be
+partakers in his guilt. I have a mind to ask our capitalist whether he
+is a respectable character. . . ."
+
+"No, not now," cried Raphael, "but when he is dead drunk, we shall
+have had our dinner then."
+
+The two friends sat down laughing. First of all, by a glance more
+rapid than a word, each paid his tribute of admiration to the splendid
+general effect of the long table, white as a bank of freshly-fallen
+snow, with its symmetrical line of covers, crowned with their pale
+golden rolls of bread. Rainbow colors gleamed in the starry rays of
+light reflected by the glass; the lights of the tapers crossed and
+recrossed each other indefinitely; the dishes covered with their
+silver domes whetted both appetite and curiosity.
+
+Few words were spoken. Neighbors exchanged glances as the Maderia
+circulated. Then the first course appeared in all its glory; it would
+have done honor to the late Cambaceres, Brillat-Savarin would have
+celebrated it. The wines of Bordeaux and Burgundy, white and red, were
+royally lavished. This first part of the banquet might been compared
+in every way to a rendering of some classical tragedy. The second act
+grew a trifle noisier. Every guest had had a fair amount to drink, and
+had tried various crus at this pleasure, so that as the remains of the
+magnificent first course were removed, tumultuous discussions began; a
+pale brow here and there began to flush, sundry noses took a purpler
+hue, faces lit up, and eyes sparkled.
+
+While intoxication was only dawning, the conversation did not overstep
+the bounds of civility; but banter and bon mots slipped by degrees
+from every tongue; and then slander began to rear its little snake's
+heard, and spoke in dulcet tones; a few shrewd ones here and there
+gave heed to it, hoping to keep their heads. So the second course
+found their minds somewhat heated. Every one ate as he spoke, spoke
+while he ate, and drank without heeding the quantity of the liquor,
+the wine was so biting, the bouquet so fragrant, the example around so
+infectious. Taillefer made a point of stimulating his guests, and
+plied them with the formidable wines of the Rhone, with fierce Tokay,
+and heady old Roussillon.
+
+The champagne, impatiently expected and lavishly poured out, was a
+scourge of fiery sparks to these men; released like post-horses from
+some mail-coach by a relay; they let their spirits gallop away into
+the wilds of argument to which no one listened, began to tell stories
+which had no auditors, and repeatedly asked questions to which no
+answer was made. Only the loud voice of wassail could be heard, a
+voice made up of a hundred confused clamors, which rose and grew like
+a crescendo of Rossini's. Insidious toasts, swagger, and challenges
+followed.
+
+Each renounced any pride in his own intellectual capacity, in order to
+vindicate that of hogsheads, casks, and vats; and each made noise
+enough for two. A time came when the footmen smiled, while their
+masters all talked at once. A philosopher would have been interested,
+doubtless, by the singularity of the thoughts expressed, a politician
+would have been amazed by the incongruity of the methods discussed in
+the melee of words or doubtfully luminous paradoxes, where truths,
+grotesquely caparisoned, met in conflict across the uproar of brawling
+judgments, of arbitrary decisions and folly, much as bullets, shells,
+and grapeshot are hurled across a battlefield.
+
+It was at once a volume and a picture. Every philosophy, religion, and
+moral code differing so greatly in every latitude, every government,
+every great achievement of the human intellect, fell before a scythe
+as long as Time's own; and you might have found it hard to decide
+whether it was wielded by Gravity intoxicated, or by Inebriation grown
+sober and clear-sighted. Borne away by a kind of tempest, their minds,
+like the sea raging against the cliffs, seemed ready to shake the laws
+which confine the ebb and flow of civilization; unconsciously
+fulfilling the will of God, who has suffered evil and good to abide in
+nature, and reserved the secret of their continual strife to Himself.
+A frantic travesty of debate ensued, a Walpurgis-revel of intellects.
+Between the dreary jests of these children of the Revolution over the
+inauguration of a newspaper, and the talk of the joyous gossips at
+Gargantua's birth, stretched the gulf that divides the nineteenth
+century from the sixteenth. Laughingly they had begun the work of
+destruction, and our journalists laughed amid the ruins.
+
+"What is the name of that young man over there?" said the notary,
+indicating Raphael. "I thought I heard some one call him Valentin."
+
+"What stuff is this?" said Emile, laughing; "plain Valentin, say you?
+Raphael DE Valentin, if you please. We bear an eagle or, on a field
+sable, with a silver crown, beak and claws gules, and a fine motto:
+NON CECIDIT ANIMUS. We are no foundling child, but a descendant of the
+Emperor Valens, of the stock of the Valentinois, founders of the
+cities of Valence in France, and Valencia in Spain, rightful heirs to
+the Empire of the East. If we suffer Mahmoud on the throne of
+Byzantium, it is out of pure condescension, and for lack of funds and
+soldiers."
+
+With a fork flourished above Raphael's head, Emile outlined a crown
+upon it. The notary bethought himself a moment, but soon fell to
+drinking again, with a gesture peculiar to himself; it was quite
+impossible, it seemed to say to secure in his clientele the cities of
+Valence and Byzantium, the Emperor Valens, Mahmoud, and the house of
+Valentinois.
+
+"Should not the destruction of those ant-hills, Babylon, Tyre,
+Carthage, and Venice, each crushed beneath the foot of a passing
+giant, serve as a warning to man, vouchsafed by some mocking power?"
+said Claude Vignon, who must play the Bossuet, as a sort of purchased
+slave, at the rate of fivepence a line.
+
+"Perhaps Moses, Sylla, Louis XI., Richelieu, Robespierre, and Napoleon
+were but the same man who crosses our civilizations now and again,
+like a comet across the sky," said a disciple of Ballanche.
+
+"Why try to fathom the designs of Providence?" said Canalis, maker of
+ballads.
+
+"Come, now," said the man who set up for a critic, "there is nothing
+more elastic in the world than your Providence."
+
+"Well, sir, Louis XIV. sacrificed more lives over digging the
+foundations of the Maintenon's aqueducts, than the Convention expended
+in order to assess the taxes justly, to make one law for everybody,
+and one nation of France, and to establish the rule of equal
+inheritance," said Massol, whom the lack of a syllable before his name
+had made a Republican.
+
+"Are you going to leave our heads on our shoulders?" asked Moreau (of
+the Oise), a substantial farmer. "You, sir, who took blood for wine
+just now?"
+
+"Where is the use? Aren't the principles of social order worth some
+sacrifices, sir?"
+
+"Hi! Bixiou! What's-his-name, the Republican, considers a landowner's
+head a sacrifice!" said a young man to his neighbor.
+
+"Men and events count for nothing," said the Republican, following out
+his theory in spite of hiccoughs; "in politics, as in philosophy,
+there are only principles and ideas."
+
+"What an abomination! Then you would ruthlessly put your friends to
+death for a shibboleth?"
+
+"Eh, sir! the man who feels compunction is your thorough scoundrel,
+for he has some notion of virtue; while Peter the Great and the Duke
+of Alva were embodied systems, and the pirate Monbard an
+organization."
+
+"But can't society rid itself of your systems and organizations?" said
+Canalis.
+
+"Oh, granted!" cried the Republican.
+
+"That stupid Republic of yours makes me feel queasy. We sha'n't be
+able to carve a capon in peace, because we shall find the agrarian law
+inside it."
+
+"Ah, my little Brutus, stuffed with truffles, your principles are all
+right enough. But you are like my valet, the rogue is so frightfully
+possessed with a mania for property that if I left him to clean my
+clothes after his fashion, he would soon clean me out."
+
+"Crass idiots!" replied the Republican, "you are for setting a nation
+straight with toothpicks. To your way of thinking, justice is more
+dangerous than thieves."
+
+"Oh, dear!" cried the attorney Deroches.
+
+"Aren't they a bore with their politics!" said the notary Cardot.
+"Shut up. That's enough of it. There is no knowledge nor virtue worth
+shedding a drop of blood for. If Truth were brought into liquidation,
+we might find her insolvent."
+
+"It would be much less trouble, no doubt, to amuse ourselves with
+evil, rather than dispute about good. Moreover, I would give all the
+speeches made for forty years past at the Tribune for a trout, for one
+of Perrault's tales or Charlet's sketches."
+
+"Quite right! . . . Hand me the asparagus. Because, after all, liberty
+begets anarchy, anarchy leads to despotism, and despotism back again
+to liberty. Millions have died without securing a triumph for any one
+system. Is not that the vicious circle in which the whole moral world
+revolves? Man believes that he has reached perfection, when in fact he
+has but rearranged matters."
+
+"Oh! oh!" cried Cursy, the _vaudevilliste_; "in that case, gentlemen,
+here's to Charles X., the father of liberty."
+
+"Why not?" asked Emile. "When law becomes despotic, morals are
+relaxed, and vice versa.
+
+"Let us drink to the imbecility of authority, which gives us such an
+authority over imbeciles!" said the good banker.
+
+"Napoleon left us glory, at any rate, my good friend!" exclaimed a
+naval officer who had never left Brest.
+
+"Glory is a poor bargain; you buy it dear, and it will not keep. Does
+not the egotism of the great take the form of glory, just as for
+nobodies it is their own well-being?"
+
+"You are very fortunate, sir----"
+
+"The first inventor of ditches must have been a weakling, for society
+is only useful to the puny. The savage and the philosopher, at either
+extreme of the moral scale, hold property in equal horror."
+
+"All very fine!" said Cardot; "but if there were no property, there
+would be no documents to draw up."
+
+"These green peas are excessively delicious!"
+
+"And the _cure_ was found dead in his bed in the morning. . . ."
+
+"Who is talking about death? Pray don't trifle, I have an uncle."
+
+"Could you bear his loss with resignation?"
+
+"No question."
+
+"Gentlemen, listen to me! _How to kill an uncle_. Silence! (Cries of
+"Hush! hush!") In the first place, take an uncle, large and stout,
+seventy years old at least, they are the best uncles. (Sensation.) Get
+him to eat a pate de foie gras, any pretext will do."
+
+"Ah, but my uncle is a thin, tall man, and very niggardly and
+abstemious."
+
+"That sort of uncle is a monster; he misappropriates existence."
+
+"Then," the speaker on uncles went on, "tell him, while he is
+digesting it, that his banker has failed."
+
+"How if he bears up?"
+
+"Let loose a pretty girl on him."
+
+"And if----?" asked the other, with a shake of the head.
+
+"Then he wouldn't be an uncle--an uncle is a gay dog by nature."
+
+"Malibran has lost two notes in her voice."
+
+"No, sir, she has not."
+
+"Yes, sir, she has."
+
+"Oh, ho! No and yes, is not that the sum-up of all religious,
+political, or literary dissertations? Man is a clown dancing on the
+edge of an abyss."
+
+"You would make out that I am a fool."
+
+"On the contrary, you cannot make me out."
+
+"Education, there's a pretty piece of tomfoolery. M. Heineffettermach
+estimates the number of printed volumes at more than a thousand
+millions; and a man cannot read more than a hundred and fifty thousand
+in his lifetime. So, just tell me what that word _education_ means. For
+some it consists in knowing the name of Alexander's horse, of the dog
+Berecillo, of the Seigneur d'Accords, and in ignorance of the man to
+whom we owe the discovery of rafting and the manufacture of porcelain.
+For others it is the knowledge how to burn a will and live respected,
+be looked up to and popular, instead of stealing a watch with
+half-a-dozen aggravating circumstances, after a previous conviction,
+and so perishing, hated and dishonored, in the Place de Greve."
+
+"Will Nathan's work live?"
+
+"He has very clever collaborators, sir."
+
+"Or Canalis?"
+
+"He is a great man; let us say no more about him."
+
+"You are all drunk!"
+
+"The consequence of a Constitution is the immediate stultification of
+intellects. Art, science, public works, everything, is consumed by a
+horribly egoistic feeling, the leprosy of the time. Three hundred of
+your bourgeoisie, set down on benches, will only think of planting
+poplars. Tyranny does great things lawlessly, while Liberty will
+scarcely trouble herself to do petty ones lawfully."
+
+"Your reciprocal instruction will turn out counters in human flesh,"
+broke in an Absolutist. "All individuality will disappear in a people
+brought to a dead level by education."
+
+"For all that, is not the aim of society to secure happiness to each
+member of it?" asked the Saint-Simonian.
+
+"If you had an income of fifty thousand livres, you would not think
+much about the people. If you are smitten with a tender passion for
+the race, go to Madagascar; there you will find a nice little nation
+all ready to Saint-Simonize, classify, and cork up in your phials, but
+here every one fits into his niche like a peg in a hole. A porter is a
+porter, and a blockhead is a fool, without a college of fathers to
+promote them to those positions."
+
+"You are a Carlist."
+
+"And why not? Despotism pleases me; it implies a certain contempt for
+the human race. I have no animosity against kings, they are so
+amusing. Is it nothing to sit enthroned in a room, at a distance of
+thirty million leagues from the sun?"
+
+"Let us once more take a broad view of civilization," said the man of
+learning who, for the benefit of the inattentive sculptor, had opened
+a discussion on primitive society and autochthonous races. "The vigor
+of a nation in its origin was in a way physical, unitary, and crude;
+then as aggregations increased, government advanced by a decomposition
+of the primitive rule, more or less skilfully managed. For example, in
+remote ages national strength lay in theocracy, the priest held both
+sword and censer; a little later there were two priests, the pontiff
+and the king. To-day our society, the latest word of civilization, has
+distributed power according to the number of combinations, and we come
+to the forces called business, thought, money, and eloquence.
+Authority thus divided is steadily approaching a social dissolution,
+with interest as its one opposing barrier. We depend no longer on
+either religion or physical force, but upon intellect. Can a book
+replace the sword? Can discussion be a substitute for action? That is
+the question."
+
+"Intellect has made an end of everything," cried the Carlist. "Come
+now! Absolute freedom has brought about national suicides; their
+triumph left them as listless as an English millionaire."
+
+"Won't you tell us something new? You have made fun of authority of
+all sorts to-day, which is every bit as vulgar as denying the
+existence of God. So you have no belief left, and the century is like
+an old Sultan worn out by debauchery! Your Byron, in short, sings of
+crime and its emotions in a final despair of poetry."
+
+"Don't you know," replied Bianchon, quite drunk by this time, "that a
+dose of phosphorus more or less makes the man of genius or the
+scoundrel, a clever man or an idiot, a virtuous person or a criminal?"
+
+"Can any one treat of virtue thus?" cried Cursy. "Virtue, the subject
+of every drama at the theatre, the denoument of every play, the
+foundation of every court of law. . . ."
+
+"Be quiet, you ass. You are an Achilles for virtue, without his heel,"
+said Bixiou.
+
+"Some drink!"
+
+"What will you bet that I will drink a bottle of champagne like a
+flash, at one pull?"
+
+"What a flash of wit!"
+
+"Drunk as lords," muttered a young man gravely, trying to give some
+wine to his waistcoat.
+
+"Yes, sir; real government is the art of ruling by public opinion."
+
+"Opinion? That is the most vicious jade of all. According to you
+moralists and politicians, the laws you set up are always to go before
+those of nature, and opinion before conscience. You are right and
+wrong both. Suppose society bestows down pillows on us, that benefit
+is made up for by the gout; and justice is likewise tempered by
+red-tape, and colds accompany cashmere shawls."
+
+"Wretch!" Emile broke in upon the misanthrope, "how can you slander
+civilization here at table, up to the eyes in wines and exquisite
+dishes? Eat away at that roebuck with the gilded horns and feet, and
+do not carp at your mother. . ."
+
+"Is it any fault of mine if Catholicism puts a million deities in a
+sack of flour, that Republics will end in a Napoleon, that monarchy
+dwells between the assassination of Henry IV. and the trial of Louis
+XVI., and Liberalism produces Lafayettes?"
+
+"Didn't you embrace him in July?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Then hold your tongue, you sceptic."
+
+"Sceptics are the most conscientious of men."
+
+"They have no conscience."
+
+"What are you saying? They have two apiece at least!"
+
+"So you want to discount heaven, a thoroughly commercial notion.
+Ancient religions were but the unchecked development of physical
+pleasure, but we have developed a soul and expectations; some advance
+has been made."
+
+"What can you expect, my friends, of a century filled with politics to
+repletion?" asked Nathan. "What befell _The History of the King of
+Bohemia and his Seven Castles_, a most entrancing conception? . . ."
+
+"I say," the would-be critic cried down the whole length of the table.
+"The phrases might have been drawn at hap-hazard from a hat, 'twas a
+work written 'down to Charenton.'"
+
+"You are a fool!"
+
+"And you are a rogue!"
+
+"Oh! oh!"
+
+"Ah! ah!"
+
+"They are going to fight."
+
+"No, they aren't."
+
+"You will find me to-morrow, sir."
+
+"This very moment," Nathan answered.
+
+"Come, come, you pair of fire-eaters!"
+
+"You are another!" said the prime mover in the quarrel.
+
+"Ah, I can't stand upright, perhaps?" asked the pugnacious Nathan,
+straightening himself up like a stag-beetle about to fly.
+
+He stared stupidly round the table, then, completely exhausted by the
+effort, sank back into his chair, and mutely hung his head.
+
+"Would it not have been nice," the critic said to his neighbor, "to
+fight about a book I have neither read nor seen?"
+
+"Emile, look out for your coat; your neighbor is growing pale," said
+Bixiou.
+
+"Kant? Yet another ball flung out for fools to sport with, sir!
+Materialism and spiritualism are a fine pair of battledores with which
+charlatans in long gowns keep a shuttlecock a-going. Suppose that God
+is everywhere, as Spinoza says, or that all things proceed from God,
+as says St. Paul . . . the nincompoops, the door shuts or opens, but
+isn't the movement the same? Does the fowl come from the egg, or the
+egg from the fowl? . . . Just hand me some duck . . . and there, you
+have all science."
+
+"Simpleton!" cried the man of science, "your problem is settled by
+fact!"
+
+"What fact?"
+
+"Professors' chairs were not made for philosophy, but philosophy for
+the professors' chairs. Put on a pair of spectacles and read the
+budget."
+
+"Thieves!"
+
+"Nincompoops!"
+
+"Knaves!"
+
+"Gulls!"
+
+"Where but in Paris will you find such a ready and rapid exchange of
+thought?" cried Bixiou in a deep, bass voice.
+
+"Bixiou! Act a classical farce for us! Come now."
+
+"Would you like me to depict the nineteenth century?"
+
+"Silence."
+
+"Pay attention."
+
+"Clap a muffle on your trumpets."
+
+"Shut up, you Turk!"
+
+"Give him some wine, and let that fellow keep quiet."
+
+"Now, then, Bixiou!"
+
+The artist buttoned his black coat to the collar, put on yellow
+gloves, and began to burlesque the _Revue des Deux Mondes_ by acting a
+squinting old lady; but the uproar drowned his voice, and no one heard
+a word of the satire. Still, if he did not catch the spirit of the
+century, he represented the _Revue_ at any rate, for his own intentions
+were not very clear to him.
+
+Dessert was served as if by magic. A huge epergne of gilded bronze
+from Thomire's studio overshadowed the table. Tall statuettes, which a
+celebrated artist had endued with ideal beauty according to
+conventional European notions, sustained and carried pyramids of
+strawberries, pines, fresh dates, golden grapes, clear-skinned
+peaches, oranges brought from Setubal by steamer, pomegranates,
+Chinese fruit; in short, all the surprises of luxury, miracles of
+confectionery, the most tempting dainties, and choicest delicacies.
+The coloring of this epicurean work of art was enhanced by the
+splendors of porcelain, by sparkling outlines of gold, by the chasing
+of the vases. Poussin's landscapes, copied on Sevres ware, were
+crowned with graceful fringes of moss, green, translucent, and fragile
+as ocean weeds.
+
+The revenue of a German prince would not have defrayed the cost of
+this arrogant display. Silver and mother-of-pearl, gold and crystal,
+were lavished afresh in new forms; but scarcely a vague idea of this
+almost Oriental fairyland penetrated eyes now heavy with wine, or
+crossed the delirium of intoxication. The fire and fragrance of the
+wines acted like potent philters and magical fumes, producing a kind
+of mirage in the brain, binding feet, and weighing down hands. The
+clamor increased. Words were no longer distinct, glasses flew in
+pieces, senseless peals of laughter broke out. Cursy snatched up a
+horn and struck up a flourish on it. It acted like a signal given by
+the devil. Yells, hisses, songs, cries, and groans went up from the
+maddened crew. You might have smiled to see men, light-hearted by
+nature, grow tragical as Crebillon's dramas, and pensive as a sailor
+in a coach. Hard-headed men blabbed secrets to the inquisitive, who
+were long past heeding them. Saturnine faces were wreathed in smiles
+worthy of a pirouetting dancer. Claude Vignon shuffled about like a
+bear in a cage. Intimate friends began to fight.
+
+Animal likenesses, so curiously traced by physiologists in human
+faces, came out in gestures and behavior. A book lay open for a Bichat
+if he had repaired thither fasting and collected. The master of the
+house, knowing his condition, did not dare stir, but encouraged his
+guests' extravangances with a fixed grimacing smile, meant to be
+hospitable and appropriate. His large face, turning from blue and red
+to a purple shade terrible to see, partook of the general commotion by
+movements like the heaving and pitching of a brig.
+
+"Now, did you murder them?" Emile asked him.
+
+"Capital punishment is going to be abolished, they say, in favor of
+the Revolution of July," answered Taillefer, raising his eyebrows with
+drunken sagacity.
+
+"Don't they rise up before you in dreams at times?" Raphael persisted.
+
+"There's a statute of limitations," said the murderer-Croesus.
+
+"And on his tombstone," Emile began, with a sardonic laugh, "the
+stonemason will carve 'Passer-by, accord a tear, in memory of one
+that's here!' Oh," he continued, "I would cheerfully pay a hundred
+sous to any mathematician who would prove the existence of hell to me
+by an algebraical equation."
+
+He flung up a coin and cried:
+
+"Heads for the existence of God!"
+
+"Don't look!" Raphael cried, pouncing upon it. "Who knows? Suspense is
+so pleasant."
+
+"Unluckily," Emile said, with burlesque melancholy, "I can see no
+halting-place between the unbeliever's arithmetic and the papal _Pater
+noster_. Pshaw! let us drink. _Trinq_ was, I believe, the oracular answer
+of the _dive bouteille_ and the final conclusion of Pantagruel."
+
+"We owe our arts and monuments to the _Pater noster_, and our knowledge,
+too, perhaps; and a still greater benefit--modern government--whereby
+a vast and teeming society is wondrously represented by some five
+hundred intellects. It neutralizes opposing forces and gives free play
+to _Civilization_, that Titan queen who has succeeded the ancient
+terrible figure of the _King_, that sham Providence, reared by man
+between himself and heaven. In the face of such achievements, atheism
+seems like a barren skeleton. What do you say?"
+
+"I am thinking of the seas of blood shed by Catholicism." Emile
+replied, quite unimpressed. "It has drained our hearts and veins dry
+to make a mimic deluge. No matter! Every man who thinks must range
+himself beneath the banner of Christ, for He alone has consummated the
+triumph of spirit over matter; He alone has revealed to us, like a
+poet, an intermediate world that separates us from the Deity."
+
+"Believest thou?" asked Raphael with an unaccountable drunken smile.
+"Very good; we must not commit ourselves; so we will drink the
+celebrated toast, _Diis ignotis_!"
+
+And they drained the chalice filled up with science, carbonic acid
+gas, perfumes, poetry, and incredulity.
+
+"If the gentlemen will go to the drawing-room, coffee is ready for
+them," said the major-domo.
+
+There was scarcely one of those present whose mind was not floundering
+by this time in the delights of chaos, where every spark of
+intelligence is quenched, and the body, set free from its tyranny,
+gives itself up to the frenetic joys of liberty. Some who had arrived
+at the apogee of intoxication were dejected, as they painfully tried
+to arrest a single thought which might assure them of their own
+existence; others, deep in the heavy morasses of indigestion, denied
+the possibility of movement. The noisy and the silent were oddly
+assorted.
+
+For all that, when new joys were announced to them by the stentorian
+tones of the servant, who spoke on his master's behalf, they all rose,
+leaning upon, dragging or carrying one another. But on the threshold
+of the room the entire crew paused for a moment, motionless, as if
+fascinated. The intemperate pleasures of the banquet seemed to fade
+away at this titillating spectacle, prepared by their amphitryon to
+appeal to the most sensual of their instincts.
+
+Beneath the shining wax-lights in a golden chandelier, round about a
+table inlaid with gilded metal, a group of women, whose eyes shone
+like diamonds, suddenly met the stupefied stare of the revelers. Their
+toilettes were splendid, but less magnificent than their beauty, which
+eclipsed the other marvels of this palace. A light shone from their
+eyes, bewitching as those of sirens, more brilliant and ardent than
+the blaze that streamed down upon the snowy marble, the delicately
+carved surfaces of bronze, and lit up the satin sheen of the tapestry.
+The contrasts of their attitudes and the slight movements of their
+heads, each differing in character and nature of attraction, set the
+heart afire. It was like a thicket, where blossoms mingled with
+rubies, sapphires, and coral; a combination of gossamer scarves that
+flickered like beacon-lights; of black ribbons about snowy throats; of
+gorgeous turbans and demurely enticing apparel. It was a seraglio that
+appealed to every eye, and fulfilled every fancy. Each form posed to
+admiration was scarcely concealed by the folds of cashmere, and half
+hidden, half revealed by transparent gauze and diaphanous silk. The
+little slender feet were eloquent, though the fresh red lips uttered
+no sound.
+
+Demure and fragile-looking girls, pictures of maidenly innocence, with
+a semblance of conventional unction about their heads, were there like
+apparitions that a breath might dissipate. Aristocratic beauties with
+haughty glances, languid, flexible, slender, and complaisant, bent
+their heads as though there were royal protectors still in the market.
+An English-woman seemed like a spirit of melancholy--some coy, pale,
+shadowy form among Ossian's mists, or a type of remorse flying from
+crime. The Parisienne was not wanting in all her beauty that consists
+in an indescribable charm; armed with her irresistible weakness, vain
+of her costume and her wit, pliant and hard, a heartless, passionless
+siren that yet can create factitious treasures of passion and
+counterfeit emotion.
+
+Italians shone in the throng, serene and self-possessed in their
+bliss; handsome Normans, with splendid figures; women of the south,
+with black hair and well-shaped eyes. Lebel might have summoned
+together all the fair women of Versailles, who since morning had
+perfected all their wiles, and now came like a troupe of Oriental
+women, bidden by the slave merchant to be ready to set out at dawn.
+They stood disconcerted and confused about the table, huddled together
+in a murmuring group like bees in a hive. The combination of timid
+embarrassment with coquettishness and a sort of expostulation was the
+result either of calculated effect or a spontaneous modesty. Perhaps a
+sentiment of which women are never utterly divested prescribed to them
+the cloak of modesty to heighten and enhance the charms of wantonness.
+So the venerable Taillefer's designs seemed on the point of collapse,
+for these unbridled natures were subdued from the very first by the
+majesty with which woman is invested. There was a murmur of
+admiration, which vibrated like a soft musical note. Wine had not
+taken love for traveling companion; instead of a violent tumult of
+passions, the guests thus taken by surprise, in a moment of weakness,
+gave themselves up to luxurious raptures of delight.
+
+Artists obeyed the voice of poetry which constrains them, and studied
+with pleasure the different delicate tints of these chosen examples of
+beauty. Sobered by a thought perhaps due to some emanation from a
+bubble of carbonic acid in the champagne, a philosopher shuddered at
+the misfortunes which had brought these women, once perhaps worthy of
+the truest devotion, to this. Each one doubtless could have unfolded a
+cruel tragedy. Infernal tortures followed in the train of most of
+them, and they drew after them faithless men, broken vows, and
+pleasures atoned for in wretchedness. Polite advances were made by the
+guests, and conversations began, as varied in character as the
+speakers. They broke up into groups. It might have been a fashionable
+drawing-room where ladies and young girls offer after dinner the
+assistance that coffee, liqueurs, and sugar afford to diners who are
+struggling in the toils of a perverse digestion. But in a little while
+laughter broke out, the murmur grew, and voices were raised. The
+saturnalia, subdued for a moment, threatened at times to renew itself.
+The alternations of sound and silence bore a distant resemblance to a
+symphony of Beethoven's.
+
+The two friends, seated on a silken divan, were first approached by a
+tall, well-proportioned girl of stately bearing; her features were
+irregular, but her face was striking and vehement in expression, and
+impressed the mind by the vigor of its contrasts. Her dark hair fell
+in luxuriant curls, with which some hand seemed to have played havoc
+already, for the locks fell lightly over the splendid shoulders that
+thus attracted attention. The long brown curls half hid her queenly
+throat, though where the light fell upon it, the delicacy of its fine
+outlines was revealed. Her warm and vivid coloring was set off by the
+dead white of her complexion. Bold and ardent glances came from under
+the long eyelashes; the damp, red, half-open lips challenged a kiss.
+Her frame was strong but compliant; with a bust and arms strongly
+developed, as in figures drawn by the Caracci, she yet seemed active
+and elastic, with a panther's strength and suppleness, and in the same
+way the energetic grace of her figure suggested fierce pleasures.
+
+But though she might romp perhaps and laugh, there was something
+terrible in her eyes and her smile. Like a pythoness possessed by the
+demon, she inspired awe rather than pleasure. All changes, one after
+another, flashed like lightning over every mobile feature of her face.
+She might captivate a jaded fancy, but a young man would have feared
+her. She was like some colossal statue fallen from the height of a
+Greek temple, so grand when seen afar, too roughly hewn to be seen
+anear. And yet, in spite of all, her terrible beauty could have
+stimulated exhaustion; her voice might charm the deaf; her glances
+might put life into the bones of the dead; and therefore Emile was
+vaguely reminded of one of Shakespeare's tragedies--a wonderful maze,
+in which joy groans, and there is something wild even about love, and
+the magic of forgiveness and the warmth of happiness succeed to cruel
+storms of rage. She was a siren that can both kiss and devour; laugh
+like a devil, or weep as angels can. She could concentrate in one
+instant all a woman's powers of attraction in a single effort (the
+sighs of melancholy and the charms of maiden's shyness alone
+excepted), then in a moment rise in fury like a nation in revolt, and
+tear herself, her passion, and her lover, in pieces.
+
+Dressed in red velvet, she trampled under her reckless feet the stray
+flowers fallen from other heads, and held out a salver to the two
+friends, with careless hands. The white arms stood out in bold relief
+against the velvet. Proud of her beauty; proud (who knows?) of her
+corruption, she stood like a queen of pleasure, like an incarnation of
+enjoyment; the enjoyment that comes of squandering the accumulations
+of three generations; that scoffs at its progenitors, and makes merry
+over a corpse; that will dissolve pearls and wreck thrones, turn old
+men into boys, and make young men prematurely old; enjoyment only
+possible to giants weary of their power, tormented by reflection, or
+for whom strife has become a plaything.
+
+"What is your name?" asked Raphael.
+
+"Aquilina."
+
+"Out of _Venice Preserved_!" exclaimed Emile.
+
+"Yes," she answered. "Just as a pope takes a new name when he is
+exalted above all other men, I, too, took another name when I raised
+myself above women's level."
+
+"Then have you, like your patron saint, a terrible and noble lover, a
+conspirator, who would die for you?" cried Emile eagerly--this gleam
+of poetry had aroused his interest.
+
+"Once I had," she answered. "But I had a rival too in La Guillotine. I
+have worn something red about me ever since, lest any happiness should
+carry me away."
+
+"Oh, if you are going to get her on to the story of those four lads of
+La Rochelle, she will never get to the end of it. That's enough,
+Aquilina. As if every woman could not bewail some lover or other,
+though not every one has the luck to lose him on the scaffold, as you
+have done. I would a great deal sooner see a lover of mine in a trench
+at the back of Clamart than in a rival's arms."
+
+All this in the gentlest and most melodious accents, and pronounced by
+the prettiest, gentlest, and most innocent-looking little person that
+a fairy wand ever drew from an enchanted eggshell. She had come up
+noiselessly, and they became aware of a slender, dainty figure,
+charmingly timid blue eyes, and white transparent brows. No ingenue
+among the naiads, a truant from her river spring, could have been
+shyer, whiter, more ingenuous than this young girl, seemingly about
+sixteen years old, ignorant of evil and of the storms of life, and
+fresh from some church in which she must have prayed the angels to
+call her to heaven before the time. Only in Paris are such natures as
+this to be found, concealing depths of depravity behind a fair mask,
+and the most artificial vices beneath a brow as young and fair as an
+opening flower.
+
+At first the angelic promise of those soft lineaments misled the
+friends. Raphael and Emile took the coffee which she poured into the
+cups brought by Aquilina, and began to talk with her. In the eyes of
+the two poets she soon became transformed into some sombre allegory,
+of I know not what aspect of human life. She opposed to the vigorous
+and ardent expression of her commanding acquaintance a revelation of
+heartless corruption and voluptuous cruelty. Heedless enough to
+perpetrate a crime, hardy enough to feel no misgivings; a pitiless
+demon that wrings larger and kinder natures with torments that it is
+incapable of knowing, that simpers over a traffic in love, sheds tears
+over a victim's funeral, and beams with joy over the reading of the
+will. A poet might have admired the magnificent Aquilina; but the
+winning Euphrasia must be repulsive to every one--the first was the
+soul of sin; the second, sin without a soul in it.
+
+"I should dearly like to know," Emile remarked to this pleasing being,
+"if you ever reflect upon your future?"
+
+"My future!" she answered with a laugh. "What do you mean by my
+future? Why should I think about something that does not exist as yet?
+I never look before or behind. Isn't one day at a time more than I can
+concern myself with as it is? And besides, the future, as we know,
+means the hospital."
+
+"How can you forsee a future in the hospital, and make no effort to
+avert it?"
+
+"What is there so alarming about the hospital?" asked the terrific
+Aquilina. "When we are neither wives nor mothers, when old age draws
+black stockings over our limbs, sets wrinkles on our brows, withers up
+the woman in us, and darkens the light in our lover's eyes, what could
+we need when that comes to pass? You would look on us then as mere
+human clay; we with our habiliments shall be for you like so much mud
+--worthless, lifeless, crumbling to pieces, going about with the
+rustle of dead leaves. Rags or the daintiest finery will be as one to
+us then; the ambergris of the boudoir will breathe an odor of death
+and dry bones; and suppose there is a heart there in that mud, not one
+of you but would make mock of it, not so much as a memory will you
+spare to us. Is not our existence precisely the same whether we live
+in a fine mansion with lap-dogs to tend, or sort rags in a workhouse?
+Does it make much difference whether we shall hide our gray heads
+beneath lace or a handkerchief striped with blue and red; whether we
+sweep a crossing with a birch broom, or the steps of the Tuileries
+with satins; whether we sit beside a gilded hearth, or cower over the
+ashes in a red earthen pot; whether we go to the Opera or look on in
+the Place de Greve?"
+
+"_Aquilina mia_, you have never shown more sense than in this depressing
+fit of yours," Euphrasia remarked. "Yes, cashmere, _point d'Alencon_,
+perfumes, gold, silks, luxury, everything that sparkles, everything
+pleasant, belongs to youth alone. Time alone may show us our folly,
+but good fortune will acquit us. You are laughing at me," she went on,
+with a malicious glance at the friends; "but am I not right? I would
+sooner die of pleasure than of illness. I am not afflicted with a
+mania for perpetuity, nor have I a great veneration for human nature,
+such as God has made it. Give me millions, and I would squander them;
+I should not keep one centime for the year to come. Live to be
+charming and have power, that is the decree of my every heartbeat.
+Society sanctions my life; does it not pay for my extravagances? Why
+does Providence pay me every morning my income, which I spend every
+evening? Why are hospitals built for us? And Providence did not put
+good and evil on either hand for us to select what tires and pains us.
+I should be very foolish if I did not amuse myself."
+
+"And how about others?" asked Emile.
+
+"Others? Oh, well, they must manage for themselves. I prefer laughing
+at their woes to weeping over my own. I defy any man to give me the
+slightest uneasiness."
+
+"What have you suffered to make you think like this?" asked Raphael.
+
+"I myself have been forsaken for an inheritance," she said, striking
+an attitude that displayed all her charms; "and yet I had worked night
+and day to keep my lover! I am not to be gulled by any smile or vow,
+and I have set myself to make one long entertainment of my life."
+
+"But does not happiness come from the soul within?" cried Raphael.
+
+"It may be so," Aquilina answered; "but is it nothing to be conscious
+of admiration and flattery; to triumph over other women, even over the
+most virtuous, humiliating them before our beauty and our splendor?
+Not only so; one day of our life is worth ten years of a bourgeoise
+existence, and so it is all summed up."
+
+"Is not a woman hateful without virtue?" Emile said to Raphael.
+
+Euphrasia's glance was like a viper's, as she said, with an irony in
+her voice that cannot be rendered:
+
+"Virtue! we leave that to deformity and to ugly women. What would the
+poor things be without it?"
+
+"Hush, be quiet," Emile broke in. "Don't talk about something you have
+never known."
+
+"That I have never known!" Euphrasia answered. "You give yourself for
+life to some person you abominate; you must bring up children who will
+neglect you, who wound your very heart, and you must say, 'Thank you!'
+for it; and these are the virtues you prescribe to woman. And that is
+not enough. By way of requiting her self-denial, you must come and add
+to her sorrows by trying to lead her astray; and though you are
+rebuffed, she is compromised. A nice life! How far better to keep
+one's freedom, to follow one's inclinations in love, and die young!"
+
+"Have you no fear of the price to be paid some day for all this?"
+
+"Even then," she said, "instead of mingling pleasures and troubles, my
+life will consist of two separate parts--a youth of happiness is
+secure, and there may come a hazy, uncertain old age, during which I
+can suffer at my leisure."
+
+"She has never loved," came in the deep tones of Aquilina's voice.
+"She never went a hundred leagues to drink in one look and a denial
+with untold raptures. She has not hung her own life on a thread, nor
+tried to stab more than one man to save her sovereign lord, her king,
+her divinity. . . . Love, for her, meant a fascinating colonel."
+
+"Here she is with her La Rochelle," Euphrasia made answer. "Love comes
+like the wind, no one knows whence. And, for that matter, if one of
+those brutes had once fallen in love with you, you would hold sensible
+men in horror."
+
+"Brutes are put out of the question by the Code," said the tall,
+sarcastic Aquilina.
+
+"I thought you had more kindness for the army," laughed Euphrasia.
+
+"How happy they are in their power of dethroning their reason in this
+way," Raphael exclaimed.
+
+"Happy?" asked Aquilina, with dreadful look, and a smile full of pity
+and terror. "Ah, you do not know what it is to be condemned to a life
+of pleasure, with your dead hidden in your heart. . . ."
+
+A moment's consideration of the rooms was like a foretaste of Milton's
+Pandemonium. The faces of those still capable of drinking wore a
+hideous blue tint, from burning draughts of punch. Mad dances were
+kept up with wild energy; excited laughter and outcries broke out like
+the explosion of fireworks. The boudoir and a small adjoining room
+were strewn like a battlefield with the insensible and incapable.
+Wine, pleasure, and dispute had heated the atmosphere. Wine and love,
+delirium and unconsciousness possessed them, and were written upon all
+faces, upon the furniture; were expressed by the surrounding disorder,
+and brought light films over the vision of those assembled, so that
+the air seemed full of intoxicating vapor. A glittering dust arose, as
+in the luminous paths made by a ray of sunlight, the most bizarre
+forms flitted through it, grotesque struggles were seen athwart it.
+Groups of interlaced figures blended with the white marbles, the noble
+masterpieces of sculpture that adorned the rooms.
+
+Though the two friends yet preserved a sort of fallacious clearness in
+their ideas and voices, a feeble appearance and faint thrill of
+animation, it was yet almost impossible to distinguish what was real
+among the fantastic absurdities before them, or what foundation there
+was for the impossible pictures that passed unceasingly before their
+weary eyes. The strangest phenomena of dreams beset them, the lowering
+heavens, the fervid sweetness caught by faces in our visions, and
+unheard-of agility under a load of chains,--all these so vividly, that
+they took the pranks of the orgy about them for the freaks of some
+nightmare in which all movement is silent, and cries never reach the
+ear. The valet de chambre succeeded just then, after some little
+difficulty, in drawing his master into the ante-chamber to whisper to
+him:
+
+"The neighbors are all at their windows, complaining of the racket,
+sir."
+
+"If noise alarms them, why don't they lay down straw before their
+doors?" was Taillefer's rejoinder.
+
+Raphael's sudden burst of laughter was so unseasonable and abrupt,
+that his friend demanded the reason of his unseemly hilarity.
+
+"You will hardly understand me," he replied. "In the first place, I
+must admit that you stopped me on the Quai Voltaire just as I was
+about to throw myself into the Seine, and you would like to know, no
+doubt, my motives for dying. And when I proceed to tell you that by an
+almost miraculous chance the most poetic memorials of the material
+world had but just then been summed up for me as a symbolical
+interpretation of human wisdom; whilst at this minute the remains of
+all the intellectual treasures ravaged by us at table are comprised in
+these two women, the living and authentic types of folly, would you be
+any the wiser? Our profound apathy towards men and things supplied the
+half-tones in a crudely contrasted picture of two theories of life so
+diametrically opposed. If you were not drunk, you might perhaps catch
+a gleam of philosophy in this."
+
+"And if you had not both feet on that fascinating Aquilina, whose
+heavy breathing suggests an analogy with the sounds of a storm about
+to burst," replied Emile, absently engaged in the harmless amusement
+of winding and unwinding Euphrasia's hair, "you would be ashamed of
+your inebriated garrulity. Both your systems can be packed in a
+phrase, and reduced to a single idea. The mere routine of living
+brings a stupid kind of wisdom with it, by blunting our intelligence
+with work; and on the other hand, a life passed in the limbo of the
+abstract or in the abysses of the moral world, produces a sort of
+wisdom run mad. The conditions may be summed up in brief; we may
+extinguish emotion, and so live to old age, or we may choose to die
+young as martyrs to contending passions. And yet this decree is at
+variance with the temperaments with which we were endowed by the
+bitter jester who modeled all creatures."
+
+"Idiot!" Raphael burst in. "Go on epitomizing yourself after that
+fashion, and you will fill volumes. If I attempted to formulate those
+two ideas clearly, I might as well say that man is corrupted by the
+exercise of his wits, and purified by ignorance. You are calling the
+whole fabric of society to account. But whether we live with the wise
+or perish with the fool, isn't the result the same sooner or later?
+And have not the prime constituents of the quintessence of both
+systems been before expressed in a couple of words--_Carymary_,
+_Carymara_."
+
+"You make me doubt the existence of a God, for your stupidity is
+greater than His power," said Emile. "Our beloved Rabelais summed it
+all up in a shorter word than your '_Carymary_, _Carymara_'; from his
+_Peut-etre_ Montaigne derived his own _Que sais-je_? After all, this last
+word of moral science is scarcely more than the cry of Pyrrhus set
+betwixt good and evil, or Buridan's ass between the two measures of
+oats. But let this everlasting question alone, resolved to-day by a
+'Yes' and a 'No.' What experience did you look to find by a jump into
+the Seine? Were you jealous of the hydraulic machine on the Pont Notre
+Dame?"
+
+"Ah, if you but knew my history!"
+
+"Pooh," said Emile; "I did not think you could be so commonplace; that
+remark is hackneyed. Don't you know that every one of us claims to
+have suffered as no other ever did?"
+
+"Ah!" Raphael sighed.
+
+"What a mountebank art thou with thy 'Ah'! Look here, now. Does some
+disease of the mind or body, by contracting your muscles, bring back
+of a morning the wild horses that tear you in pieces at night, as with
+Damiens once upon a time? Were you driven to sup off your own dog in a
+garret, uncooked and without salt? Have your children ever cried, 'I
+am hungry'? Have you sold your mistress' hair to hazard the money at
+play? Have you ever drawn a sham bill of exchange on a fictitious
+uncle at a sham address, and feared lest you should not be in time to
+take it up? Come now, I am attending! If you were going to drown
+yourself for some woman, or by way of a protest, or out of sheer
+dulness, I disown you. Make your confession, and no lies! I don't at
+all want a historical memoir. And, above all things, be as concise as
+your clouded intellect permits; I am as critical as a professor, and
+as sleepy as a woman at her vespers."
+
+"You silly fool!" said Raphael. "When has not suffering been keener
+for a more susceptible nature? Some day when science has attained to a
+pitch that enables us to study the natural history of hearts, when
+they are named and classified in genera, sub-genera, and families;
+into crustaceae, fossils, saurians, infusoria, or whatever it is,
+--then, my dear fellow, it will be ascertained that there are natures
+as tender and fragile as flowers, that are broken by the slight bruises
+that some stony hearts do not even feel----"
+
+"For pity's sake, spare me thy exordium," said Emile, as, half
+plaintive, half amused, he took Raphael's hand.
+
+
+
+                                  II
+
+                      A WOMAN WITHOUT A HEART
+
+After a moment's silence, Raphael said with a careless gesture:
+
+"Perhaps it is an effect of the fumes of punch--I really cannot tell
+--this clearness of mind that enables me to comprise my whole life in a
+single picture, where figures and hues, lights, shades, and half-tones
+are faithfully rendered. I should not have been so surprised at this
+poetical play of imagination if it were not accompanied with a sort of
+scorn for my past joys and sorrows. Seen from afar, my life appears to
+contract by some mental process. That long, slow agony of ten years'
+duration can be brought to memory to-day in some few phrases, in which
+pain is resolved into a mere idea, and pleasure becomes a
+philosophical reflection. Instead of feeling things, I weigh and
+consider them----"
+
+"You are as tiresome as the explanation of an amendment," cried Emile.
+
+"Very likely," said Raphael submissively. "I spare you the first
+seventeen years of my life for fear of abusing a listener's patience.
+Till that time, like you and thousands of others, I had lived my life
+at school or the lycee, with its imaginary troubles and genuine
+happinesses, which are so pleasant to look back upon. Our jaded
+palates still crave for that Lenten fare, so long as we have not tried
+it afresh. It was a pleasant life, with the tasks that we thought so
+contemptible, but which taught us application for all that. . . ."
+
+"Let the drama begin," said Emile, half-plaintively, half-comically.
+
+"When I left school," Raphael went on, with a gesture that claimed the
+right of speaking, "my father submitted me to a strict discipline; he
+installed me in a room near his own study, and I had to rise at five
+in the morning and be in bed by nine at night. He meant me to take my
+law studies seriously. I attended the Schools, and read with an
+advocate as well, but my lectures and work were so narrowly
+circumscribed by the laws of time and space, and my father required
+such a strict account of my doings, at dinner, that . . ."
+
+"What is this to me?" asked Emile.
+
+"The devil take you!" said Raphael. "How are you to enter into my
+feelings if I do not relate the facts that insensibly shaped my
+character, made me timid, and prolonged the period of youthful
+simplicity? In this manner I cowered under as strict a despotism as a
+monarch's till I came of age. To depict the tedium of my life, it will
+be perhaps enough to portray my father to you. He was tall, thin, and
+slight, with a hatchet face, and pale complexion; a man of few words,
+fidgety as an old maid, exacting as a senior clerk. His paternal
+solicitude hovered over my merriment and gleeful thoughts, and seemed
+to cover them with a leaden pall. Any effusive demonstration on my
+part was received by him as a childish absurdity. I was far more
+afraid of him than I had been of any of our masters at school.
+
+"I seem to see him before me at this moment. In his chestnut-brown
+frock-coat he looked like a red herring wrapped up in the cover of a
+pamphlet, and he held himself as erect as an Easter candle. But I was
+fond of my father, and at heart he was right enough. Perhaps we never
+hate severity when it has its source in greatness of character and
+pure morals, and is skilfully tempered with kindness. My father, it is
+true, never left me a moment to myself, and only when I was twenty
+years old gave me so much as ten francs of my own, ten knavish
+prodigals of francs, such a hoard as I had long vainly desired, which
+set me a-dreaming of unutterable felicity; yet, for all that he sought
+to procure relaxations for me. When he had promised me a treat
+beforehand, he would take me to Les Boufoons, or to a concert or ball,
+where I hoped to find a mistress. . . . A mistress! that meant
+independence. But bashful and timid as I was, knowing nobody, and
+ignorant of the dialect of drawing-rooms, I always came back as
+awkward as ever, and swelling with unsatisfied desires, to be put in
+harness like a troop horse next day by my father, and to return with
+morning to my advocate, the Palais de Justice, and the law. To have
+swerved from the straight course which my father had mapped out for
+me, would have drawn down his wrath upon me; at my first delinquency,
+he threatened to ship me off as a cabin-boy to the Antilles. A
+dreadful shiver ran through me if I had ventured to spend a couple of
+hours in some pleasure party.
+
+"Imagine the most wandering imagination and passionate temperament,
+the tenderest soul and most artistic nature, dwelling continually in
+the presence of the most flint-hearted, atrabilious, and frigid man on
+earth; think of me as a young girl married to a skeleton, and you will
+understand the life whose curious scenes can only be a hearsay tale to
+you; the plans for running away that perished at the sight of my
+father, the despair soothed by slumber, the dark broodings charmed
+away by music. I breathed my sorrows forth in melodies. Beethoven or
+Mozart would keep my confidences sacred. Nowadays, I smile at
+recollections of the scruples which burdened my conscience at that
+epoch of innocence and virtue.
+
+"If I set foot in a restaurant, I gave myself up for lost; my fancy
+led me to look on a cafe as a disreputable haunt, where men lost their
+characters and embarrassed their fortunes; as for engaging in play, I
+had not the money to risk. Oh, if I needed to send you to sleep, I
+would tell you about one of the most frightful pleasures of my life,
+one of those pleasures with fangs that bury themselves in the heart as
+the branding-iron enters the convict's shoulder. I was at a ball at
+the house of the Duc de Navarreins, my father's cousin. But to make my
+position the more perfectly clear, you must know that I wore a
+threadbare coat, ill-fitting shoes, a tie fit for a stableman, and a
+soiled pair of gloves. I shrank into a corner to eat ices and watch
+the pretty faces at my leisure. My father noticed me. Actuated by some
+motive that I did not fathom, so dumfounded was I by this act of
+confidence, he handed me his keys and purse to keep. Ten paces away
+some men were gambling. I heard the rattling of gold; I was twenty
+years old; I longed to be steeped for one whole day in the follies of
+my time of life. It was a license of the imagination that would find a
+parallel neither in the freaks of courtesans, nor in the dreams of
+young girls. For a year past I had beheld myself well dressed, in a
+carriage, with a pretty woman by my side, playing the great lord,
+dining at Very's, deciding not to go back home till the morrow; but
+was prepared for my father with a plot more intricate than the
+Marriage of Figaro, which he could not possibly have unraveled. All
+this bliss would cost, I estimated, fifty crowns. Was it not the
+artless idea of playing truant that still had charms for me?
+
+"I went into a small adjoining room, and when alone counted my
+father's money with smarting eyes and trembling fingers--a hundred
+crowns! The joys of my escapade rose before me at the thought of the
+amount; joys that flitted about me like Macbeth's witches round their
+caldron; joys how alluring! how thrilling! how delicious! I became a
+deliberate rascal. I heeded neither my tingling ears nor the violent
+beating of my heart, but took out two twenty-franc pieces that I seem
+to see yet. The dates had been erased, and Bonaparte's head simpered
+upon them. After I had put back the purse in my pocket, I returned to
+the gaming-table with the two pieces of gold in the palms of my damp
+hands, prowling about the players like a sparrow-hawk round a coop of
+chickens. Tormented by inexpressible terror, I flung a sudden
+clairvoyant glance round me, and feeling quite sure that I was seen by
+none of my acquaintance, betted on a stout, jovial little man, heaping
+upon his head more prayers and vows than are put up during two or
+three storms at sea. Then, with an intuitive scoundrelism, or
+Machiavelism, surprising in one of my age, I went and stood in the
+door, and looked about me in the rooms, though I saw nothing; for both
+mind and eyes hovered about that fateful green cloth.
+
+"That evening fixes the date of a first observation of a physiological
+kind; to it I owe a kind of insight into certain mysteries of our
+double nature that I have since been enabled to penetrate. I had my
+back turned on the table where my future felicity lay at stake, a
+felicity but so much the more intense that it was criminal. Between me
+and the players stood a wall of onlookers some five feet deep, who
+were chatting; the murmur of voices drowned the clinking of gold,
+which mingled in the sounds sent up by this orchestra; yet, despite
+all obstacles, I distinctly heard the words of the two players by a
+gift accorded to the passions, which enables them to annihilate time
+and space. I saw the points they made; I knew which of the two turned
+up the king as well as if I had actually seen the cards; at a distance
+of ten paces, in short, the fortunes of play blanched my face.
+
+"My father suddenly went by, and then I knew what the Scripture meant
+by 'The Spirit of God passed before his face.' I had won. I slipped
+through the crowd of men who had gathered about the players with the
+quickness of an eel escaping through a broken mesh in a net. My nerves
+thrilled with joy instead of anguish. I felt like some criminal on the
+way to torture released by a chance meeting with the king. It happened
+that a man with a decoration found himself short by forty francs.
+Uneasy eyes suspected me; I turned pale, and drops of perspiration
+stood on my forehead, I was well punished, I thought, for having
+robbed my father. Then the kind little stout man said, in a voice like
+an angel's surely, 'All these gentlemen have paid their stakes,' and
+put down the forty francs himself. I raised my head in triumph upon
+the players. After I had returned the money I had taken from it to my
+father's purse, I left my winnings with that honest and worthy
+gentleman, who continued to win. As soon as I found myself possessed
+of a hundred and sixty francs, I wrapped them up in my handkerchief,
+so that they could neither move or rattle on the way back; and I
+played no more.
+
+"'What were you doing at the card-table?' said my father as we
+stepped into the carriage.
+
+"'I was looking on,' I answered, trembling.
+
+"'But it would have been nothing out of the common if you had been
+prompted by self-love to put some money down on the table. In the eyes
+of men of the world you are quite old enough to assume the right to
+commit such follies. So I should have pardoned you, Raphael, if you
+had made use of my purse. . . . .'
+
+"I did not answer. When we reached home, I returned the keys and money
+to my father. As he entered his study, he emptied out his purse on the
+mantelpiece, counted the money, and turned to me with a kindly look,
+saying with more or less long and significant pauses between each
+phrase:
+
+"'My boy, you are very nearly twenty now. I am satisfied with you.
+You ought to have an allowance, if only to teach you how to lay it
+out, and to gain some acquaintance with everyday business.
+Henceforward I shall let you have a hundred francs each month. Here is
+your first quarter's income for this year,' he added, fingering a pile
+of gold, as if to make sure that the amount was correct. 'Do what you
+please with it.'
+
+"I confess that I was ready to fling myself at his feet, to tell him
+that I was a thief, a scoundrel, and, worse than all, a liar! But a
+feeling of shame held me back. I went up to him for an embrace, but he
+gently pushed me away.
+
+"'You are a man now, _my child_,' he said. 'What I have just done was a
+very proper and simple thing, for which there is no need to thank me.
+If I have any claim to your gratitude, Raphael,' he went on, in a kind
+but dignified way, 'it is because I have preserved your youth from the
+evils that destroy young men in Paris. We will be two friends
+henceforth. In a year's time you will be a doctor of law. Not without
+some hardship and privations you have acquired the sound knowledge and
+the love of, and application to, work that is indispensable to public
+men. You must learn to know me, Raphael. I do not want to make either
+an advocate or a notary of you, but a statesman, who shall be the
+pride of our poor house. . . . Good-night,' he added.
+
+"From that day my father took me fully into confidence. I was an only
+son; and ten years before, I had lost my mother. In time past my
+father, the head of a historic family remembered even now in Auvergne,
+had come to Paris to fight against his evil star, dissatisfied at the
+prospect of tilling the soil, with his useless sword by his side. He
+was endowed with the shrewdness that gives the men of the south of
+France a certain ascendency when energy goes with it. Almost unaided,
+he made a position for himself near the fountain of power. The
+revolution brought a reverse of fortune, but he had managed to marry
+an heiress of good family, and, in the time of the Empire, appeared to
+be on the point of restoring to our house its ancient splendor.
+
+"The Restoration, while it brought back considerable property to my
+mother, was my father's ruin. He had formerly purchased several
+estates abroad, conferred by the Emperor on his generals; and now for
+ten years he struggled with liquidators, diplomatists, and Prussian
+and Bavarian courts of law, over the disputed possession of these
+unfortunate endowments. My father plunged me into the intricate
+labyrinths of law proceedings on which our future depended. We might
+be compelled to return the rents, as well as the proceeds arising from
+sales of timber made during the years 1814 to 1817; in that case my
+mother's property would have barely saved our credit. So it fell out
+that the day on which my father in a fashion emancipated me, brought
+me under a most galling yoke. I entered on a conflict like a
+battlefield; I must work day and night; seek interviews with
+statesmen, surprise their convictions, try to interest them in our
+affairs, and gain them over, with their wives and servants, and their
+very dogs; and all this abominable business had to take the form of
+pretty speeches and polite attentions. Then I knew the mortifications
+that had left their blighting traces on my father's face. For about a
+year I led outwardly the life of a man of the world, but enormous
+labors lay beneath the surface of gadding about, and eager efforts to
+attach myself to influential kinsmen, or to people likely to be useful
+to us. My relaxations were lawsuits, and memorials still furnished the
+staple of my conversation. Hitherto my life had been blameless, from
+the sheer impossibility of indulging the desires of youth; but now I
+became my own master, and in dread of involving us both in ruin by
+some piece of negligence, I did not dare to allow myself any pleasure
+or expenditure.
+
+"While we are young, and before the world has rubbed off the delicate
+bloom from our sentiments, the freshness of our impressions, the noble
+purity of conscience which will never allow us to palter with evil,
+the sense of duty is very strong within us, the voice of honor clamors
+within us, and we are open and straightforward. At that time I was all
+these things. I wished to justify my father's confidence in me. But
+lately I would have stolen a paltry sum from him, with secret delight;
+but now that I shared the burden of his affairs, of his name and of
+his house, I would secretly have given up my fortune and my hopes for
+him, as I was sacrificing my pleasures, and even have been glad of the
+sacrifice! So when M. de Villele exhumed, for our special benefit, an
+imperial decree concerning forfeitures, and had ruined us, I
+authorized the sale of my property, only retaining an island in the
+middle of the Loire where my mother was buried. Perhaps arguments and
+evasions, philosophical, philanthropic, and political considerations
+would not fail me now, to hinder the perpetration of what my solicitor
+termed a 'folly'; but at one-and-twenty, I repeat, we are all aglow
+with generosity and affection. The tears that stood in my father's
+eyes were to me the most splendid of fortunes, and the thought of
+those tears has often soothed my sorrow. Ten months after he had paid
+his creditors, my father died of grief; I was his idol, and he had
+ruined me! The thought killed him. Towards the end of the autumn of
+1826, at the age of twenty-two, I was the sole mourner at his
+graveside--the grave of my father and my earliest friend. Not many
+young men have found themselves alone with their thoughts as they
+followed a hearse, or have seen themselves lost in crowded Paris, and
+without money or prospects. Orphans rescued by public charity have at
+any rate the future of the battlefield before them, and find a shelter
+in some institution and a father in the government or in the _procureur
+du roi_. I had nothing.
+
+"Three months later, an agent made over to me eleven hundred and
+twelve francs, the net proceeds of the winding up of my father's
+affairs. Our creditors had driven us to sell our furniture. From my
+childhood I had been used to set a high value on the articles of
+luxury about us, and I could not help showing my astonishment at the
+sight of this meagre balance.
+
+"'Oh, rococo, all of it!' said the auctioneer. A terrible word that
+fell like a blight on the sacred memories of my childhood, and
+dispelled my earliest illusions, the dearest of all. My entire fortune
+was comprised in this 'account rendered,' my future lay in a linen bag
+with eleven hundred and twelve francs in it, human society stood
+before me in the person of an auctioneer's clerk, who kept his hat on
+while he spoke. Jonathan, an old servant who was much attached to me,
+and whom my mother had formerly pensioned with an annuity of four
+hundred francs, spoke to me as I was leaving the house that I had so
+often gaily left for a drive in my childhood.
+
+"'Be very economical, Monsieur Raphael!'
+
+"The good fellow was crying.
+
+"Such were the events, dear Emile, that ruled my destinies, moulded my
+character, and set me, while still young, in an utterly false social
+position," said Raphael after a pause. "Family ties, weak ones, it is
+true, bound me to a few wealthy houses, but my own pride would have
+kept me aloof from them if contempt and indifference had not shut
+their doors on me in the first place. I was related to people who were
+very influential, and who lavished their patronage on strangers; but I
+found neither relations nor patrons in them. Continually circumscribed
+in my affections, they recoiled upon me. Unreserved and simple by
+nature, I must have appeared frigid and sophisticated. My father's
+discipline had destroyed all confidence in myself. I was shy and
+awkward; I could not believe that my opinion carried any weight
+whatever; I took no pleasure in myself; I thought myself ugly, and was
+ashamed to meet my own eyes. In spite of the inward voice that must be
+the stay of a man with anything in him, in all his struggles, the
+voice that cries, 'Courage! Go forward!' in spite of sudden
+revelations of my own strength in my solitude; in spite of the hopes
+that thrilled me as I compared new works, that the public admired so
+much, with the schemes that hovered in my brain,--in spite of all
+this, I had a childish mistrust of myself.
+
+"An overweening ambition preyed upon me; I believed that I was meant
+for great things, and yet I felt myself to be nothing. I had need of
+other men, and I was friendless. I found I must make my way in the
+world, where I was quite alone, and bashful, rather than afraid.
+
+"All through the year in which, by my father's wish, I threw myself
+into the whirlpool of fashionable society, I came away with an
+inexperienced heart, and fresh in mind. Like every grown child, I
+sighed in secret for a love affair. I met, among young men of my own
+age, a set of swaggerers who held their heads high, and talked about
+trifles as they seated themselves without a tremor beside women who
+inspired awe in me. They chattered nonsense, sucked the heads of their
+canes, gave themselves affected airs, appropriated the fairest women,
+and laid, or pretended that they had laid their heads on every pillow.
+Pleasure, seemingly, was at their beck and call; they looked on the
+most virtuous and prudish as an easy prey, ready to surrender at a
+word, at the slightest impudent gesture or insolent look. I declare,
+on my soul and conscience, that the attainment of power, or of a great
+name in literature, seemed to me an easier victory than a success with
+some young, witty, and gracious lady of high degree.
+
+"So I found the tumult of my heart, my feelings, and my creeds all at
+variance with the axioms of society. I had plenty of audacity in my
+character, but none in my manner. Later, I found out that women did
+not like to be implored. I have from afar adored many a one to whom I
+devoted a soul proof against all tests, a heart to break, energy that
+shrank from no sacrifice and from no torture; _they_ accepted fools whom
+I would not have engaged as hall porters. How often, mute and
+motionless, have I not admired the lady of my dreams, swaying in the
+dance; given up my life in thought to one eternal caress, expressed
+all my hopes in a look, and laid before her, in my rapture, a young
+man's love, which should outstrip all fables. At some moments I was
+ready to barter my whole life for one single night. Well, as I could
+never find a listener for my impassioned proposals, eyes to rest my
+own upon, a heart made for my heart, I lived on in all the sufferings
+of impotent force that consumes itself; lacking either opportunity or
+courage or experience. I despaired, maybe, of making myself
+understood, or I feared to be understood but too well; and yet the
+storm within me was ready to burst at every chance courteous look. In
+spite of my readiness to take the semblance of interest in look or
+word for a tenderer solicitude, I dared neither to speak nor to be
+silent seasonably. My words grew insignificant, and my silence stupid,
+by sheer stress of emotion. I was too ingenuous, no doubt, for that
+artificial life, led by candle-light, where every thought is expressed
+in conventional phrases, or by words that fashion dictates; and not
+only so, I had not learned how to employ speech that says nothing, and
+silence that says a great deal. In short, I concealed the fires that
+consumed me, and with such a soul as women wish to find, with all the
+elevation of soul that they long for, and a mettle that fools plume
+themselves upon, all women have been cruelly treacherous to me.
+
+"So in my simplicity I admired the heroes of this set when they
+bragged about their conquests, and never suspected them of lying. No
+doubt it was a mistake to wish for a love that springs for a word's
+sake; to expect to find in the heart of a vain, frivolous woman,
+greedy for luxury and intoxicated with vanity, the great sea of
+passion that surged tempestuously in my own breast. Oh! to feel that
+you were born to love, to make some woman's happiness, and yet to find
+not one, not even a noble and courageous Marceline, not so much as an
+old Marquise! Oh! to carry a treasure in your wallet, and not find
+even some child, or inquisitive young girl, to admire it! In my
+despair I often wished to kill myself."
+
+"Finely tragical to-night!" cried Emile.
+
+"Let me pass sentence on my life," Raphael answered. "If your
+friendship is not strong enough to bear with my elegy, if you cannot
+put up with half an hour's tedium for my sake, go to sleep! But, then,
+never ask again for the reason of suicide that hangs over me, that
+comes nearer and calls to me, that I bow myself before. If you are to
+judge a man, you must know his secret thoughts, sorrows, and feelings;
+to know merely the outward events of a man's life would only serve to
+make a chronological table--a fool's notion of history."
+
+Emile was so much struck with the bitter tones in which these words
+were spoken, that he began to pay close attention to Raphael, whom he
+watched with a bewildered expression.
+
+"Now," continued the speaker, "all these things that befell me appear
+in a new light. The sequence of events that I once thought so
+unfortunate created the splendid powers of which, later, I became so
+proud. If I may believe you, I possess the power of readily expressing
+my thoughts, and I could take a forward place in the great field of
+knowledge; and is not this the result of scientific curiosity, of
+excessive application, and a love of reading which possessed me from
+the age of seven till my entry on life? The very neglect in which I
+was left, and the consequent habits of self-repression and
+self-concentration; did not these things teach me how to consider and
+reflect? Nothing in me was squandered in obedience to the exactions of
+the world, which humble the proudest soul and reduce it to a mere
+husk; and was it not this very fact that refined the emotional part of
+my nature till it became the perfected instrument of a loftier purpose
+than passionate desires? I remember watching the women who mistook me
+with all the insight of contemned love.
+
+"I can see now that my natural sincerity must have been displeasing to
+them; women, perhaps, even require a little hypocrisy. And I, who in
+the same hour's space am alternately a man and a child, frivolous and
+thoughtful, free from bias and brimful of superstition, and oftentimes
+myself as much a woman as any of them; how should they do otherwise
+than take my simplicity for cynicism, my innocent candor for
+impudence? They found my knowledge tiresome; my feminine languor,
+weakness. I was held to be listless and incapable of love or of steady
+purpose; a too active imagination, that curse of poets, was no doubt
+the cause. My silence was idiotic; and as I daresay I alarmed them by
+my efforts to please, women one and all have condemned me. With tears
+and mortification, I bowed before the decision of the world; but my
+distress was not barren. I determined to revenge myself on society; I
+would dominate the feminine intellect, and so have the feminine soul
+at my mercy; all eyes should be fixed upon me, when the servant at the
+door announced my name. I had determined from my childhood that I
+would be a great man; I said with Andre Chenier, as I struck my
+forehead, 'There is something underneath that!' I felt, I believed,
+the thought within me that I must express, the system I must
+establish, the knowledge I must interpret.
+
+"Let me pour out my follies, dear Emile; to-day I am barely twenty-six
+years old, certain of dying unrecognized, and I have never been the
+lover of the woman I dreamed of possessing. Have we not all of us,
+more or less, believed in the reality of a thing because we wished it?
+I would never have a young man for my friend who did not place himself
+in dreams upon a pedestal, weave crowns for his head, and have
+complaisant mistresses. I myself would often be a general, nay,
+emperor; I have been a Byron, and then a nobody. After this sport on
+these pinnacles of human achievement, I became aware that all the
+difficulties and steeps of life were yet to face. My exuberant
+self-esteem came to my aid; I had that intense belief in my destiny,
+which perhaps amounts to genius in those who will not permit themselves
+to be distracted by contact with the world, as sheep that leave their
+wool on the briars of every thicket they pass by. I meant to cover
+myself with glory, and to work in silence for the mistress I hoped to
+have one day. Women for me were resumed into a single type, and this
+woman I looked to meet in the first that met my eyes; but in each and
+all I saw a queen, and as queens must make the first advances to their
+lovers, they must draw near to me--to me, so sickly, shy, and poor.
+For her, who should take pity on me, my heart held in store such
+gratitude over and beyond love, that I had worshiped her her whole
+life long. Later, my observations have taught me bitter truths.
+
+"In this way, dear Emile, I ran the risk of remaining companionless
+for good. The incomprehensible bent of women's minds appears to lead
+them to see nothing but the weak points in a clever man, and the
+strong points of a fool. They feel the liveliest sympathy with the
+fool's good qualities, which perpetually flatter their own defects;
+while they find the man of talent hardly agreeable enough to
+compensate for his shortcomings. All capacity is a sort of
+intermittent fever, and no woman is anxious to share in its
+discomforts only; they look to find in their lovers the wherewithal to
+gratify their own vanity. It is themselves that they love in us! But
+the artist, poor and proud, along with his endowment of creative
+power, is furnished with an aggressive egotism! Everything about him
+is involved in I know not what whirlpool of his ideas, and even his
+mistress must gyrate along with them. How is a woman, spoilt with
+praise, to believe in the love of a man like that? Will she go to seek
+him out? That sort of lover has not the leisure to sit beside a sofa
+and give himself up to the sentimental simperings that women are so
+fond of, and on which the false and unfeeling pride themselves. He
+cannot spare the time from his work, and how can he afford to humble
+himself and go a-masquerading! I was ready to give my life once and
+for all, but I could not degrade it in detail. Besides, there is
+something indescribably paltry in a stockbroker's tactics, who runs on
+errands for some insipid affected woman; all this disgusts an artist.
+Love in the abstract is not enough for a great man in poverty; he has
+need of its utmost devotion. The frivolous creatures who spend their
+lives in trying on cashmeres, or make themselves into clothes-pegs to
+hang the fashions from, exact the devotion which is not theirs to
+give; for them, love means the pleasure of ruling and not of obeying.
+She who is really a wife, one in heart, flesh, and bone, must follow
+wherever he leads, in whom her life, her strength, her pride, and
+happiness are centered. Ambitious men need those Oriental women whose
+whole thought is given to the study of their requirements; for
+unhappiness means for them the incompatibility of their means with
+their desires. But I, who took myself for a man of genius, must needs
+feel attracted by these very she-coxcombs. So, as I cherished ideas so
+different from those generally received; as I wished to scale the
+heavens without a ladder, was possessed of wealth that could not
+circulate, and of knowledge so wide and so imperfectly arranged and
+digested that it overtaxed my memory; as I had neither relations nor
+friends in the midst of this lonely and ghastly desert, a desert of
+paving stones, full of animation, life, and thought, wherein every one
+is worse than inimical, indifferent to wit; I made a very natural if
+foolish resolve, which required such unknown impossibilities, that my
+spirits rose. It was as if I had laid a wager with myself, for I was
+at once the player and the cards.
+
+"This was my plan. The eleven hundred francs must keep life in me for
+three years--the time I allowed myself in which to bring to light a
+work which should draw attention to me, and make me either a name or a
+fortune. I exulted at the thought of living on bread and milk, like a
+hermit in the Thebaid, while I plunged into the world of books and
+ideas, and so reached a lofty sphere beyond the tumult of Paris, a
+sphere of silent labor where I would entomb myself like a chrysalis to
+await a brilliant and splendid new birth. I imperiled my life in order
+to live. By reducing my requirements to real needs and the barest
+necessaries, I found that three hundred and sixty-five francs sufficed
+for a year of penury; and, in fact, I managed to exist on that slender
+sum, so long as I submitted to my own claustral discipline."
+
+"Impossible!" cried Emile.
+
+"I lived for nearly three years in that way," Raphael answered, with a
+kind of pride. "Let us reckon it out. Three sous for bread, two for
+milk, and three for cold meat, kept me from dying of hunger, and my
+mind in a state of peculiar lucidity. I have observed, as you know,
+the wonderful effects produced by diet upon the imagination. My
+lodgings cost me three sous daily; I burnt three sous more in oil at
+night; I did my own housework, and wore flannel shirts so as to reduce
+the laundress' bill to two sous per day. The money I spent yearly in
+coal, if divided up, never cost more than two sous for each day. I had
+three years' supply of clothing, and I only dressed when going out to
+some library or public lecture. These expenses, all told, only
+amounted to eighteen sous, so two were left over for emergencies. I
+cannot recollect, during that long period of toil, either crossing the
+Pont des Arts, or paying for water; I went out to fetch it every
+morning from the fountain in the Place Saint Michel, at the corner of
+the Rue de Gres. Oh, I wore my poverty proudly. A man urged on towards
+a fair future walks through life like an innocent person to his death;
+he feels no shame about it.
+
+"I would not think of illness. Like Aquilina, I faced the hospital
+without terror. I had not a moment's doubt of my health, and besides,
+the poor can only take to their beds to die. I cut my own hair till
+the day when an angel of love and kindness . . . But I do not want to
+anticipate the state of things that I shall reach later. You must
+simply know that I lived with one grand thought for a mistress, a
+dream, an illusion which deceives us all more or less at first. To-day
+I laugh at myself, at that self, holy perhaps and heroic, which is now
+no more. I have since had a closer view of society and the world, of
+our manners and customs, and seen the dangers of my innocent credulity
+and the superfluous nature of my fervent toil. Stores of that sort are
+quite useless to aspirants for fame. Light should be the baggage of
+seekers after fortune!
+
+"Ambitious men spend their youth in rendering themselves worthy of
+patronage; it is their great mistake. While the foolish creatures are
+laying in stores of knowledge and energy, so that they shall not sink
+under the weight of responsible posts that recede from them, schemers
+come and go who are wealthy in words and destitute in ideas, astonish
+the ignorant, and creep into the confidence of those who have a little
+knowledge. While the first kind study, the second march ahead; the one
+sort is modest, and the other impudent; the man of genius is silent
+about his own merits, but these schemers make a flourish of theirs,
+and they are bound to get on. It is so strongly to the interest of men
+in office to believe in ready-made capacity, and in brazen-faced
+merit, that it is downright childish of the learned to expect material
+rewards. I do not seek to paraphrase the commonplace moral, the song
+of songs that obscure genius is for ever singing; I want to come, in a
+logical manner, by the reason of the frequent successes of mediocrity.
+Alas! study shows us such a mother's kindness that it would be a sin
+perhaps to ask any other reward of her than the pure and delightful
+pleasures with which she sustains her children.
+
+"Often I remember soaking my bread in milk, as I sat by the window to
+take the fresh air; while my eyes wandered over a view of roofs
+--brown, gray, or red, slated or tiled, and covered with yellow or
+green mosses. At first the prospect may have seemed monotonous, but I
+very soon found peculiar beauties in it. Sometimes at night, streams of
+light through half-closed shutters would light up and color the dark
+abysses of this strange landscape. Sometimes the feeble lights of the
+street lamps sent up yellow gleams through the fog, and in each street
+dimly outlined the undulations of a crowd of roofs, like billows in a
+motionless sea. Very occasionally, too, a face appeared in this gloomy
+waste; above the flowers in some skyey garden I caught a glimpse of an
+old woman's crooked angular profile as she watered her nasturtiums;
+or, in a crazy attic window, a young girl, fancying herself quite
+alone as she dressed herself--a view of nothing more than a fair
+forehead and long tresses held above her by a pretty white arm.
+
+"I liked to see the short-lived plant-life in the gutters--poor weeds
+that a storm soon washed away. I studied the mosses, with their colors
+revived by showers, or transformed by the sun into a brown velvet that
+fitfully caught the light. Such things as these formed my recreations
+--the passing poetic moods of daylight, the melancholy mists, sudden
+gleams of sunlight, the silence and the magic of night, the mysteries
+of dawn, the smoke wreaths from each chimney; every chance event, in
+fact, in my curious world became familiar to me. I came to love this
+prison of my own choosing. This level Parisian prairie of roofs,
+beneath which lay populous abysses, suited my humor, and harmonized
+with my thoughts.
+
+"Sudden descents into the world from the divine height of scientific
+meditation are very exhausting; and, besides, I had apprehended
+perfectly the bare life of the cloister. When I made up my mind to
+carry out this new plan of life, I looked for quarters in the most
+out-of-the-way parts of Paris. One evening, as I returned home to the
+Rue des Cordiers from the Place de l'Estrapade, I saw a girl of
+fourteen playing with a battledore at the corner of the Rue de Cluny,
+her winsome ways and laughter amused the neighbors. September was not
+yet over; it was warm and fine, so that women sat chatting before
+their doors as if it were a fete-day in some country town. At first I
+watched the charming expression of the girl's face and her graceful
+attitudes, her pose fit for a painter. It was a pretty sight. I looked
+about me, seeking to understand this blithe simplicity in the midst of
+Paris, and saw that the street was a blind alley and but little
+frequented. I remembered that Jean Jacques had once lived here, and
+looked up the Hotel Saint-Quentin. Its dilapidated condition awakened
+hopes of a cheap lodging, and I determined to enter.
+
+"I found myself in a room with a low ceiling; the candles, in
+classic-looking copper candle-sticks, were set in a row under each key.
+The predominating cleanliness of the room made a striking contrast to
+the usual state of such places. This one was as neat as a bit of genre;
+there was a charming trimness about the blue coverlet, the cooking
+pots and furniture. The mistress of the house rose and came to me. She
+seemed to be about forty years of age; sorrows had left their traces
+on her features, and weeping had dimmed her eyes. I deferentially
+mentioned the amount I could pay; it seemed to cause her no surprise;
+she sought out a key from the row, went up to the attics with me, and
+showed me a room that looked out on the neighboring roofs and courts;
+long poles with linen drying on them hung out of the window.
+
+"Nothing could be uglier than this garret, awaiting its scholar, with
+its dingy yellow walls and odor of poverty. The roofing fell in a
+steep slope, and the sky was visible through chinks in the tiles.
+There was room for a bed, a table, and a few chairs, and beneath the
+highest point of the roof my piano could stand. Not being rich enough
+to furnish this cage (that might have been one of the _Piombi_ of
+Venice), the poor woman had never been able to let it; and as I had
+saved from the recent sale the furniture that was in a fashion
+peculiarly mine, I very soon came to terms with my landlady, and moved
+in on the following day.
+
+"For three years I lived in this airy sepulchre, and worked
+unflaggingly day and night; and so great was the pleasure that study
+seemed to me the fairest theme and the happiest solution of life. The
+tranquillity and peace that a scholar needs is something as sweet and
+exhilarating as love. Unspeakable joys are showered on us by the
+exertion of our mental faculties; the quest of ideas, and the tranquil
+contemplation of knowledge; delights indescribable, because purely
+intellectual and impalpable to our senses. So we are obliged to use
+material terms to express the mysteries of the soul. The pleasure of
+striking out in some lonely lake of clear water, with forests, rocks,
+and flowers around, and the soft stirring of the warm breeze,--all
+this would give, to those who knew them not, a very faint idea of the
+exultation with which my soul bathed itself in the beams of an unknown
+light, hearkened to the awful and uncertain voice of inspiration, as
+vision upon vision poured from some unknown source through my
+throbbing brain.
+
+"No earthly pleasure can compare with the divine delight of watching
+the dawn of an idea in the space of abstractions as it rises like the
+morning sun; an idea that, better still, attains gradually like a
+child to puberty and man's estate. Study lends a kind of enchantment
+to all our surroundings. The wretched desk covered with brown leather
+at which I wrote, my piano, bed, and armchair, the odd wall-paper and
+furniture seemed to have for me a kind of life in them, and to be
+humble friends of mine and mute partakers of my destiny. How often
+have I confided my soul to them in a glance! A warped bit of beading
+often met my eyes, and suggested new developments,--a striking proof
+of my system, or a felicitous word by which to render my all but
+inexpressible thought. By sheer contemplation of the things about me I
+discerned an expression and a character in each. If the setting sun
+happened to steal in through my narrow window, they would take new
+colors, fade or shine, grow dull or gay, and always amaze me with some
+new effect. These trifling incidents of a solitary life, which escape
+those preoccupied with outward affairs, make the solace of prisoners.
+And what was I but the captive of an idea, imprisoned in my system,
+but sustained also by the prospect of a brilliant future? At each
+obstacle that I overcame, I seemed to kiss the soft hands of a woman
+with a fair face, a wealthy, well-dressed woman, who should some day
+say softly, while she caressed my hair:
+
+"'Poor Angel, how thou hast suffered!'
+
+"I had undertaken two great works--one a comedy that in a very short
+time must bring me wealth and fame, and an entry into those circles
+whither I wished to return, to exercise the royal privileges of a man
+of genius. You all saw nothing in that masterpiece but the blunder of
+a young man fresh from college, a babyish fiasco. Your jokes clipped
+the wings of a throng of illusions, which have never stirred since
+within me. You, dear Emile, alone brought soothing to the deep wounds
+that others had made in my heart. You alone will admire my 'Theory of
+the Will.' I devoted most of my time to that long work, for which I
+studied Oriental languages, physiology and anatomy. If I do not
+deceive myself, my labors will complete the task begun by Mesmer,
+Lavater, Gall, and Bichat, and open up new paths in science.
+
+"There ends that fair life of mine, the daily sacrifice, the
+unrecognized silkworm's toil, that is, perhaps, its own sole
+recompense. Since attaining years of discretion, until the day when I
+finished my 'Theory,' I observed, learned, wrote, and read
+unintermittingly; my life was one long imposition, as schoolboys say.
+Though by nature effeminately attached to Oriental indolence, sensual
+in tastes, and a wooer of dreams, I worked incessantly, and refused to
+taste any of the enjoyments of Parisian life. Though a glutton, I
+became abstemious; and loving exercise and sea voyages as I did, and
+haunted by the wish to visit many countries, still child enough to
+play at ducks and drakes with pebbles over a pond, I led a sedentary
+life with a pen in my fingers. I liked talking, but I went to sit and
+mutely listen to professors who gave public lectures at the
+_Bibliotheque_ or the Museum. I slept upon my solitary pallet like a
+Benedictine brother, though woman was my one chimera, a chimera that
+fled from me as I wooed it! In short, my life has been a cruel
+contradiction, a perpetual cheat. After that, judge a man!
+
+"Sometimes my natural propensities broke out like a fire long
+smothered. I was debarred from the women whose society I desired,
+stripped of everything and lodged in an artist's garret, and by a sort
+of mirage or calenture I was surrounded by captivating mistresses. I
+drove through the streets of Paris, lolling on the soft cushions of a
+fine equipage. I plunged into dissipation, into corroding vice, I
+desired and possessed everything, for fasting had made me light-headed
+like the tempted Saint Anthony. Slumber, happily, would put an end at
+last to these devastating trances; and on the morrow science would
+beckon me, smiling, and I was faithful to her. I imagine that women
+reputed virtuous, must often fall a prey to these insane tempests of
+desire and passion, which rise in us in spite of ourselves. Such
+dreams have a charm of their own; they are something akin to evening
+gossip round the winter fire, when one sets out for some voyage in
+China. But what becomes of virtue during these delicious excursions,
+when fancy overleaps all difficulties?
+
+"During the first ten months of seclusion I led the life of poverty
+and solitude that I have described to you; I used to steal out
+unobserved every morning to buy my own provisions for the day; I
+tidied my room; I was at once master and servant, and played the
+Diogenes with incredible spirit. But afterwards, while my hostess and
+her daughter watched my ways and behavior, scrutinized my appearance
+and divined my poverty, there could not but be some bonds between us;
+perhaps because they were themselves so very poor. Pauline, the
+charming child, whose latent and unconscious grace had, in a manner,
+brought me there, did me many services that I could not well refuse.
+All women fallen on evil days are sisters; they speak a common
+language; they have the same generosity--the generosity that possesses
+nothing, and so is lavish of its affection, of its time, and of its
+very self.
+
+"Imperceptibly Pauline took me under her protection, and would do
+things for me. No kind of objection was made by her mother, whom I
+even surprised mending my linen; she blushed for the charitable
+occupation. In spite of myself, they took charge of me, and I accepted
+their services.
+
+"In order to understand the peculiar condition of my mind, my
+preoccupation with work must be remembered, the tyranny of ideas, and
+the instinctive repugnance that a man who leads an intellectual life
+must ever feel for the material details of existence. Could I well
+repulse the delicate attentions of Pauline, who would noiselessly
+bring me my frugal repast, when she noticed that I had taken nothing
+for seven or eight hours? She had the tact of a woman and the
+inventiveness of a child; she would smile as she made sign to me that
+I must not see her. Ariel glided under my roof in the form of a sylph
+who foresaw every want of mine.
+
+"One evening Pauline told me her story with touching simplicity. Her
+father had been a major in the horse grenadiers of the Imperial Guard.
+He had been taken prisoner by the Cossacks, at the passage of
+Beresina; and when Napoleon later on proposed an exchange, the Russian
+authorities made search for him in Siberia in vain; he had escaped
+with a view of reaching India, and since then Mme. Gaudin, my
+landlady, could hear no news of her husband. Then came the disasters
+of 1814 and 1815; and, left alone and without resource, she had
+decided to let furnished lodgings in order to keep herself and her
+daughter.
+
+"She always hoped to see her husband again. Her greatest trouble was
+about her daughter's education; the Princess Borghese was her
+Pauline's godmother; and Pauline must not be unworthy of the fair
+future promised by her imperial protectress. When Mme. Gaudin confided
+to me this heavy trouble that preyed upon her, she said, with sharp
+pain in her voice, 'I would give up the property and the scrap of
+paper that makes Gaudin a baron of the empire, and all our rights to
+the endowment of Wistchnau, if only Pauline could be brought up at
+Saint-Denis?' Her words struck me; now I could show my gratitude for
+the kindnesses expended on me by the two women; all at once the idea
+of offering to finish Pauline's education occurred to me; and the
+offer was made and accepted in the most perfect simplicity. In this
+way I came to have some hours of recreation. Pauline had natural
+aptitude; she learned so quickly, that she soon surpassed me at the
+piano. As she became accustomed to think aloud in my presence, she
+unfolded all the sweet refinements of a heart that was opening itself
+out to life, as some flower-cup opens slowly to the sun. She listened
+to me, pleased and thoughtful, letting her dark velvet eyes rest upon
+me with a half smile in them; she repeated her lessons in soft and
+gentle tones, and showed childish glee when I was satisfied with her.
+Her mother grew more and more anxious every day to shield the young
+girl from every danger (for all the beauty promised in early life was
+developing in the crescent moon), and was glad to see her spend whole
+days indoors in study. My piano was the only one she could use, and
+while I was out she practised on it. When I came home, Pauline would
+be in my room, in her shabby dress, but her slightest movement
+revealed her slender figure in its attractive grace, in spite of the
+coarse materials that she wore. As with the heroine of the fable of
+'_Peau-d'Ane_,' a dainty foot peeped out of the clumsy shoes. But all
+her wealth of girlish beauty was as lost upon me. I had laid commands
+upon myself to see a sister only in Pauline. I dreaded lest I should
+betray her mother's faith in me. I admired the lovely girl as if she
+had been a picture, or as the portrait of a dead mistress; she was at
+once my child and my statue. For me, another Pygmalion, the maiden
+with the hues of life and the living voice was to become a form of
+inanimate marble. I was very strict with her, but the more I made her
+feel my pedagogue's severity, the more gentle and submissive she grew.
+
+"If a generous feeling strengthened me in my reserve and
+self-restraint, prudent considerations were not lacking beside.
+Integrity of purpose cannot, I think, fail to accompany integrity in
+money matters. To my mind, to become insolvent or to betray a woman is
+the same sort of thing. If you love a young girl, or allow yourself to
+be beloved by her, a contract is implied, and its conditions should be
+thoroughly understood. We are free to break with the woman who sells
+herself, but not with the young girl who has given herself to us and
+does not know the extent of her sacrifice. I must have married
+Pauline, and that would have been madness. Would it not have given
+over that sweet girlish heart to terrible misfortunes? My poverty made
+its selfish voice heard, and set an iron barrier between that gentle
+nature and mine. Besides, I am ashamed to say, that I cannot imagine
+love in the midst of poverty. Perhaps this is a vitiation due to that
+malady of mankind called civilization; but a woman in squalid poverty
+would exert no fascination over me, were she attractive as Homer's
+Galatea, the fair Helen.
+
+"Ah, _vive l'amour_! But let it be in silk and cashmere, surrounded with
+the luxury which so marvelously embellishes it; for is it not perhaps
+itself a luxury? I enjoy making havoc with an elaborate erection of
+scented hair; I like to crush flowers, to disarrange and crease a
+smart toilette at will. A bizarre attraction lies for me in burning
+eyes that blaze through a lace veil, like flame through cannon smoke.
+My way of love would be to mount by a silken ladder, in the silence of
+a winter night. And what bliss to reach, all powdered with snow, a
+perfumed room, with hangings of painted silk, to find a woman there,
+who likewise shakes away the snow from her; for what other name can be
+found for the white muslin wrappings that vaguely define her, like
+some angel form issuing from a cloud! And then I wish for furtive
+joys, for the security of audacity. I want to see once more that woman
+of mystery, but let it be in the throng, dazzling, unapproachable,
+adored on all sides, dressed in laces and ablaze with diamonds, laying
+her commands upon every one; so exalted above us, that she inspires
+awe, and none dares to pay his homage to her.
+
+"She gives me a stolen glance, amid her court, a look that exposes the
+unreality of all this; that resigns for me the world and all men in
+it! Truly I have scorned myself for a passion for a few yards of lace,
+velvet, and fine lawn, and the hairdresser's feats of skill; a love of
+wax-lights, a carriage and a title, a heraldic coronet painted on
+window panes, or engraved by a jeweler; in short, a liking for all
+that is adventitious and least woman in woman. I have scorned and
+reasoned with myself, but all in vain.
+
+"A woman of rank with her subtle smile, her high-born air, and
+self-esteem captivates me. The barriers she erects between herself
+and the world awaken my vanity, a good half of love. There would be
+more relish for me in bliss that all others envied. If my mistress
+does nothing that other women do, and neither lives nor conducts
+herself like them, wears a cloak that they cannot attain, breathes a
+perfume of her own, then she seems to rise far above me. The further
+she rises from earth, even in the earthlier aspects of love, the
+fairer she becomes for me.
+
+"Luckily for me we have had no queen in France these twenty years, for
+I should have fallen in love with her. A woman must be wealthy to
+acquire the manners of a princess. What place had Pauline among these
+far-fetched imaginings? Could she bring me the love that is death,
+that brings every faculty into play, the nights that are paid for by
+life? We hardly die, I think, for an insignificant girl who gives
+herself to us; and I could never extinguish these feelings and poet's
+dreams within me. I was born for an inaccessible love, and fortune has
+overtopped my desire.
+
+"How often have I set satin shoes on Pauline's tiny feet, confined her
+form, slender as a young poplar, in a robe of gauze, and thrown a
+loose scarf about her as I saw her tread the carpets in her mansion
+and led her out to her splendid carriage! In such guise I should have
+adored her. I endowed her with all the pride she lacked, stripped her
+of her virtues, her natural simple charm, and frank smile, in order to
+plunge her heart in our Styx of depravity that makes invulnerable,
+load her with our crimes, make of her the fantastical doll of our
+drawing-rooms, the frail being who lies about in the morning and comes
+to life again at night with the dawn of tapers. Pauline was
+fresh-hearted and affectionate--I would have had her cold and formal.
+
+"In the last days of my frantic folly, memory brought Pauline before
+me, as it brings the scenes of our childhood, and made me pause to
+muse over past delicious moments that softened my heart. I sometimes
+saw her, the adorable girl who sat quietly sewing at my table, wrapped
+in her meditations; the faint light from my window fell upon her and
+was reflected back in silvery rays from her thick black hair;
+sometimes I heard her young laughter, or the rich tones of her voice
+singing some canzonet that she composed without effort. And often my
+Pauline seemed to grow greater, as music flowed from her, and her face
+bore a striking resemblance to the noble one that Carlo Dolci chose
+for the type of Italy. My cruel memory brought her back athwart the
+dissipations of my existence, like a remorse, or a symbol of purity.
+But let us leave the poor child to her own fate. Whatever her troubles
+may have been, at any rate I protected her from a menacing tempest--I
+did not drag her down into my hell.
+
+"Until last winter I led the uneventful studious life of which I have
+given you some faint picture. In the earliest days of December 1829, I
+came across Rastignac, who, in spite of the shabby condition of my
+wardrobe, linked his arm in mine, and inquired into my affairs with a
+quite brotherly interest. Caught by his engaging manner, I gave him a
+brief account of my life and hopes; he began to laugh, and treated me
+as a mixture of a man of genius and a fool. His Gascon accent and
+knowledge of the world, the easy life his clever management procured
+for him, all produced an irresistible effect upon me. I should die an
+unrecognized failure in a hospital, Rastignac said, and be buried in a
+pauper's grave. He talked of charlatanism. Every man of genius was a
+charlatan, he plainly showed me in that pleasant way of his that makes
+him so fascinating. He insisted that I must be out of my senses, and
+would be my own death, if I lived on alone in the Rue des Cordiers.
+According to him, I ought to go into society, to accustom people to
+the sound of my name, and to rid myself of the simple title of
+'monsieur' which sits but ill on a great man in his lifetime.
+
+"'Those who know no better,' he cried, 'call this sort of business
+_scheming_, and moral people condemn it for a "dissipated life." We need
+not stop to look at what people think, but see the results. You work,
+you say? Very good, but nothing will ever come of that. Now, I am
+ready for anything and fit for nothing. As lazy as a lobster? Very
+likely, but I succeed everywhere. I go out into society, I push myself
+forward, the others make way before me; I brag and am believed; I
+incur debts which somebody else pays! Dissipation, dear boy, is a
+methodical policy. The life of a man who deliberately runs through his
+fortune often becomes a business speculation; his friends, his
+pleasures, patrons, and acquaintances are his capital. Suppose a
+merchant runs a risk of a million, for twenty years he can neither
+sleep, eat, nor amuse himself, he is brooding over his million, it
+makes him run about all over Europe; he worries himself, goes to the
+devil in every way that man has invented. Then comes a liquidation,
+such as I have seen myself, which very often leaves him penniless and
+without a reputation or a friend. The spendthrift, on the other hand,
+takes life as a serious game and sees his horses run. He loses his
+capital, perhaps, but he stands a chance of being nominated
+Receiver-General, of making a wealthy marriage, or of an appointment of
+attache to a minister or ambassador; and he has his friends left and
+his name, and he never wants money. He knows the standing of everybody,
+and uses every one for his own benefit. Is this logical, or am I a
+madman after all? Haven't you there all the moral of the comedy that
+goes on every day in this world? . . . Your work is completed' he went
+on after a pause; 'you are immensely clever! Well, you have only
+arrived at my starting-point. Now, you had better look after its
+success yourself; it is the surest way. You will make allies in every
+clique, and secure applause beforehand. I mean to go halves in your
+glory myself; I shall be the jeweler who set the diamonds in your
+crown. Come here to-morrow evening, by way of a beginning. I will
+introduce you to a house where all Paris goes, all OUR Paris, that is
+--the Paris of exquisites, millionaires, celebrities, all the folk who
+talk gold like Chrysostom. When they have taken up a book, that book
+becomes the fashion; and if it is something really good for once, they
+will have declared it to be a work of genius without knowing it. If you
+have any sense, my dear fellow, you will ensure the success of your
+"Theory," by a better understanding of the theory of success. To-morrow
+evening you shall go to see that queen of the moment--the beautiful
+Countess Foedora. . . .'
+
+"'I have never heard of her. . . .'
+
+"'You Hottentot!' laughed Rastignac; 'you do not know Foedora? A
+great match with an income of nearly eighty thousand livres, who has
+taken a fancy to nobody, or else no one has taken a fancy to her. A
+sort of feminine enigma, a half Russian Parisienne, or a half Parisian
+Russian. All the romantic productions that never get published are
+brought out at her house; she is the handsomest woman in Paris, and
+the most gracious! You are not even a Hottentot; you are something
+between the Hottentot and the beast. . . . Good-bye till to-morrow.'
+
+"He swung round on his heel and made off without waiting for my
+answer. It never occurred to him that a reasoning being could refuse
+an introduction to Foedora. How can the fascination of a name be
+explained? FOEDORA haunted me like some evil thought, with which you
+seek to come to terms. A voice said in me, 'You are going to see
+Foedora!' In vain I reasoned with that voice, saying that it lied to
+me; all my arguments were defeated by the name 'Foedora.' Was not the
+name, and even the woman herself, the symbol of all my desires, and
+the object of my life?
+
+"The name called up recollections of the conventional glitter of the
+world, the upper world of Paris with its brilliant fetes and the
+tinsel of its vanities. The woman brought before me all the problems
+of passion on which my mind continually ran. Perhaps it was neither
+the woman nor the name, but my own propensities, that sprang up within
+me and tempted me afresh. Here was the Countess Foedora, rich and
+loveless, proof against the temptations of Paris; was not this woman
+the very incarnation of my hopes and visions? I fashioned her for
+myself, drew her in fancy, and dreamed of her. I could not sleep that
+night; I became her lover; I overbrimmed a few hours with a whole
+lifetime--a lover's lifetime; the experience of its prolific delights
+burned me.
+
+"The next day I could not bear the tortures of delay; I borrowed a
+novel, and spent the whole day over it, so that I could not possibly
+think nor keep account of the time till night. Foedora's name echoed
+through me even as I read, but only as a distant sound; though it
+could be heard, it was not troublesome. Fortunately, I owned a fairly
+creditable black coat and a white waistcoat; of all my fortune there
+now remained abut thirty francs, which I had distributed about among
+my clothes and in my drawers, so as to erect between my whims and the
+spending of a five-franc piece a thorny barrier of search, and an
+adventurous peregrination round my room. While I as dressing, I dived
+about for my money in an ocean of papers. This scarcity of specie will
+give you some idea of the value of that squandered upon gloves and
+cab-hire; a month's bread disappeared at one fell swoop. Alas! money
+is always forthcoming for our caprices; we only grudge the cost of
+things that are useful or necessary. We recklessly fling gold to an
+opera-dancer, and haggle with a tradesman whose hungry family must
+wait for the settlement of our bill. How many men are there that wear
+a coat that cost a hundred francs, and carry a diamond in the head of
+their cane, and dine for twenty-five SOUS for all that! It seems as
+though we could never pay enough for the pleasures of vanity.
+
+"Rastignac, punctual to his appointment, smiled at the transformation,
+and joked about it. On the way he gave me benevolent advice as to my
+conduct with the countess; he described her as mean, vain, and
+suspicious; but though mean, she was ostentatious, her vanity was
+transparent, and her mistrust good-humored.
+
+"'You know I am pledged,' he said, 'and what I should lose, too, if I
+tried a change in love. So my observation of Foedora has been quite
+cool and disinterested, and my remarks must have some truth in them. I
+was looking to your future when I thought of introducing you to her;
+so mind very carefully what I am about to say. She has a terrible
+memory. She is clever enough to drive a diplomatist wild; she would
+know it at once if he spoke the truth. Between ourselves, I fancy that
+her marriage was not recognized by the Emperor, for the Russian
+ambassador began to smile when I spoke of her; he does not receive her
+either, and only bows very coolly if he meets her in the Bois. For all
+that, she is in Madame de Serizy's set, and visits Mesdames de
+Nucingen and de Restaud. There is no cloud over her here in France;
+the Duchesse de Carigliano, the most-strait-laced marechale in the
+whole Bonapartist coterie, often goes to spend the summer with her at
+her country house. Plenty of young fops, sons of peers of France, have
+offered her a title in exchange for her fortune, and she has politely
+declined them all. Her susceptibilities, maybe, are not to be touched
+by anything less than a count. Aren't you a marquis? Go ahead if you
+fancy her. This is what you may call receiving your instructions.'
+
+"His raillery made me think that Rastignac wished to joke and excite
+my curiosity, so that I was in a paroxysm of my extemporized passion
+by the time that we stopped before a peristyle full of flowers. My
+heart beat and my color rose as we went up the great carpeted
+staircase, and I noticed about me all the studied refinements of
+English comfort; I was infatuatedly bourgeois; I forgot my origin and
+all my personal and family pride. Alas! I had but just left a garret,
+after three years of poverty, and I could not just then set the
+treasures there acquired above such trifles as these. Nor could I
+rightly estimate the worth of the vast intellectual capital which
+turns to riches at the moment when opportunity comes within our reach,
+opportunity that does not overwhelm, because study has prepared us for
+the struggles of public life.
+
+"I found a woman of about twenty-two years of age; she was of average
+height, was dressed in white, and held a feather fire-screen in her
+hand; a group of men stood around her. She rose at the sight of
+Rastignac, and came towards us with a gracious smile and a
+musically-uttered compliment, prepared no doubt beforehand, for me. Our
+friend had spoken of me as a rising man, and his clever way of making
+the most of me had procured me this flattering reception. I was
+confused by the attention that every one paid to me; but Rastignac had
+luckily mentioned my modesty. I was brought in contact with scholars,
+men of letters, ex-ministers, and peers of France. The conversation,
+interrupted a while by my coming, was resumed. I took courage, feeling
+that I had a reputation to maintain, and without abusing my privilege,
+I spoke when it fell to me to speak, trying to state the questions at
+issue in words more or less profound, witty or trenchant, and I made a
+certain sensation. Rastignac was a prophet for the thousandth time in
+his life. As soon as the gathering was large enough to restore freedom
+to individuals, he took my arm, and we went round the rooms.
+
+"'Don't look as if you were too much struck by the princess,' he
+said, 'or she will guess your object in coming to visit her.'
+
+"The rooms were furnished in excellent taste. Each apartment had a
+character of its own, as in wealthy English houses; and the silken
+hangings, the style of the furniture, and the ornaments, even the most
+trifling, were all subordinated to the original idea. In a gothic
+boudoir the doors were concealed by tapestried curtains, and the
+paneling by hangings; the clock and the pattern of the carpet were
+made to harmonize with the gothic surroundings. The ceiling, with its
+carved cross-beams of brown wood, was full of charm and originality;
+the panels were beautifully wrought; nothing disturbed the general
+harmony of the scheme of decoration, not even the windows with their
+rich colored glass. I was surprised by the extensive knowledge of
+decoration that some artist had brought to bear on a little modern
+room, it was so pleasant and fresh, and not heavy, but subdued with
+its dead gold hues. It had all the vague sentiment of a German ballad;
+it was a retreat fit for some romance of 1827, perfumed by the exotic
+flowers set in their stands. Another apartment in the suite was a
+gilded reproduction of the Louis Quatorze period, with modern
+paintings on the walls in odd but pleasant contrast.
+
+"'You would not be so badly lodged,' was Rastignac's slightly
+sarcastic comment. 'It is captivating, isn't it?' he added, smiling as
+he sat down. Then suddenly he rose, and led me by the hand into a
+bedroom, where the softened light fell upon the bed under its canopy
+of muslin and white watered silk--a couch for a young fairy betrothed
+to one of the genii.
+
+"'Isn't it wantonly bad taste, insolent and unbounded coquetry,' he
+said, lowering his voice, 'that allows us to see this throne of love?
+She gives herself to no one, and anybody may leave his card here. If I
+were not committed, I should like to see her at my feet all tears and
+submission.'
+
+"'Are you so certain of her virtue?'
+
+"'The boldest and even the cleverest adventurers among us,
+acknowledge themselves defeated, and continue to be her lovers and
+devoted friends. Isn't that woman a puzzle?'
+
+"His words seemed to intoxicate me; I had jealous fears already of the
+past. I leapt for joy, and hurried back to the countess, whom I had
+seen in the gothic boudoir. She stopped me by a smile, made me sit
+beside her, and talked about my work, seeming to take the greatest
+interest in it, and all the more when I set forth my theories
+amusingly, instead of adopting the formal language of a professor for
+their explanation. It seemed to divert her to be told that the human
+will was a material force like steam; that in the moral world nothing
+could resist its power if a man taught himself to concentrate it, to
+economize it, and to project continually its fluid mass in given
+directions upon other souls. Such a man, I said, could modify all
+things relatively to man, even the peremptory laws of nature. The
+questions Foedora raised showed a certain keenness of intellect. I
+took a pleasure in deciding some of them in her favor, in order to
+flatter her; then I confuted her feminine reasoning with a word, and
+roused her curiosity by drawing her attention to an everyday matter
+--to sleep, a thing so apparently commonplace, that in reality is an
+insoluble problem for science. The countess sat in silence for a
+moment when I told her that our ideas were complete organic beings,
+existing in an invisible world, and influencing our destinies; and for
+witnesses I cited the opinions of Descartes, Diderot, and Napoleon,
+who had directed, and still directed, all the currents of the age.
+
+"So I had the honor of amusing this woman; who asked me to come to see
+her when she left me; giving me _les grande entrees_, in the language of
+the court. Whether it was by dint of substituting polite formulas for
+genuine expressions of feeling, a commendable habit of mine, or
+because Foedora hailed in me a coming celebrity, an addition to her
+learned menagerie; for some reason I thought that I had pleased her. I
+called all my previous physiological studies and knowledge of woman to
+my aid, and minutely scrutinized this singular person and her ways all
+evening. I concealed myself in the embrasure of a window, and sought
+to discover her thoughts from her bearing. I studied the tactics of
+the mistress of the house, as she came and went, sat and chatted,
+beckoned to this one or that, asked questions, listened to the
+answers, as she leaned against the frame of the door; I detected a
+languid charm in her movements, a grace in the flutterings of her
+dress, remarked the nature of the feelings she so powerfully excited,
+and became very incredulous as to her virtue. If Foedora would none of
+love to-day, she had had strong passions at some time; past experience
+of pleasure showed itself in the attitudes she chose in conversation,
+in her coquettish way of leaning against the panel behind her; she
+seemed scarcely able to stand alone, and yet ready for flight from too
+bold a glance. There was a kind of eloquence about her lightly folded
+arms, which, even for benevolent eyes, breathed sentiment. Her fresh
+red lips sharply contrasted with her brilliantly pale complexion. Her
+brown hair brought out all the golden color in her eyes, in which blue
+streaks mingled as in Florentine marble; their expression seemed to
+increase the significance of her words. A studied grace lay in the
+charms of her bodice. Perhaps a rival might have found the lines of
+the thick eyebrows, which almost met, a little hard; or found a fault
+in the almost invisible down that covered her features. I saw the
+signs of passion everywhere, written on those Italian eyelids, on the
+splendid shoulders worthy of the Venus of Milo, on her features, in
+the darker shade of down above a somewhat thick under-lip. She was not
+merely a woman, but a romance. The whole blended harmony of lines, the
+feminine luxuriance of her frame, and its passionate promise, were
+subdued by a constant inexplicable reserve and modesty at variance
+with everything else about her. It needed an observation as keen as my
+own to detect such signs as these in her character. To explain myself
+more clearly; there were two women in Foedora, divided perhaps by the
+line between head and body: the one, the head alone, seemed to be
+susceptible, and the other phlegmatic. She prepared her glance before
+she looked at you, something unspeakably mysterious, some inward
+convulsion seemed revealed by her glittering eyes.
+
+"So, to be brief, either my imperfect moral science had left me a good
+deal to learn in the moral world, or a lofty soul dwelt in the
+countess, lent to her face those charms that fascinated and subdued
+us, and gave her an ascendency only the more complete because it
+comprehended a sympathy of desire.
+
+"I went away completely enraptured with this woman, dazzled by the
+luxury around her, gratified in every faculty of my soul--noble and
+base, good and evil. When I felt myself so excited, eager, and elated,
+I thought I understood the attraction that drew thither those artists,
+diplomatists, men in office, those stock-jobbers encased in triple
+brass. They came, no doubt, to find in her society the delirious
+emotion that now thrilled through every fibre in me, throbbing through
+my brain, setting the blood a-tingle in every vein, fretting even the
+tiniest nerve. And she had given herself to none, so as to keep them
+all. A woman is a coquette so long as she knows not love.
+
+"'Well,' I said to Rastignac, 'they married her, or sold her perhaps,
+to some old man, and recollections of her first marriage have caused
+her aversion for love.'
+
+"I walked home from the Faubourg St. Honore, where Foedora lived.
+Almost all the breadth of Paris lies between her mansion and the Rue
+des Cordiers, but the distance seemed short, in spite of the cold. And
+I was to lay siege to Foedora's heart, in winter, and a bitter winter,
+with only thirty francs in my possession, and such a distance as that
+lay between us! Only a poor man knows what such a passion costs in
+cab-hire, gloves, linen, tailor's bills, and the like. If the Platonic
+stage lasts a little too long, the affair grows ruinous. As a matter
+of fact, there is many a Lauzun among students of law, who finds it
+impossible to approach a ladylove living on a first floor. And I,
+sickly, thin, poorly dressed, wan and pale as any artist convalescent
+after a work, how could I compete with other young men, curled,
+handsome, smart, outcravatting Croatia; wealthy men, equipped with
+tilburys, and armed with assurance?
+
+"'Bah, death or Foedora!' I cried, as I went round by a bridge; 'my
+fortune lies in Foedora.'
+
+"That gothic boudoir and Louis Quatorze salon came before my eyes. I
+saw the countess again in her white dress with its large graceful
+sleeves, and all the fascinations of her form and movements. These
+pictures of Foedora and her luxurious surroundings haunted me even in
+my bare, cold garret, when at last I reached it, as disheveled as any
+naturalist's wig. The contrast suggested evil counsel; in such a way
+crimes are conceived. I cursed my honest, self-respecting poverty, my
+garret where such teeming fancies had stirred within me. I trembled
+with fury, I reproached God, the devil, social conditions, my own
+father, the whole universe, indeed, with my fate and my misfortunes. I
+went hungry to bed, muttering ludicrous imprecations, but fully
+determined to win Foedora. Her heart was my last ticket in the
+lottery, my fortune depended upon it.
+
+"I spare you the history of my earlier visits, to reach the drama the
+sooner. In my efforts to appeal to her, I essayed to engage her
+intellect and her vanity on my side; in order to secure her love, I
+gave her any quantity of reasons for increasing her self-esteem; I
+never left her in a state of indifference; women like emotions at any
+cost, I gave them to her in plenty; I would rather have had her angry
+with me than indifferent.
+
+"At first, urged by a strong will and a desire for her love, I assumed
+a little authority, but my own feelings grew stronger and mastered me;
+I relapsed into truth, I lost my head, and fell desperately in love.
+
+"I am not very sure what we mean by the word love in our poetry and
+our talk; but I know that I have never found in all the ready
+rhetorical phrases of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, in whose room perhaps I
+was lodging; nor among the feeble inventions of two centuries of our
+literature, nor in any picture that Italy has produced, a
+representation of the feelings that expanded all at once in my double
+nature. The view of the lake of Bienne, some music of Rossini's, the
+Madonna of Murillo's now in the possession of General Soult,
+Lescombat's letters, a few sayings scattered through collections of
+anecdotes; but most of all the prayers of religious ecstatics, and
+passages in our _fabliaux_,--these things alone have power to carry me
+back to the divine heights of my first love.
+
+"Nothing expressed in human language, no thought reproducible in
+color, marble, sound, or articulate speech, could ever render the
+force, the truth, the completeness, the suddenness with which love
+awoke in me. To speak of art, is to speak of illusion. Love passes
+through endless transformations before it passes for ever into our
+existence and makes it glow with its own color of flame. The process
+is imperceptible, and baffles the artist's analysis. Its moans and
+complaints are tedious to an uninterested spectator. One would need to
+be very much in love to share the furious transports of Lovelace, as
+one reads _Clarissa Harlowe_. Love is like some fresh spring, that
+leaves its cresses, its gravel bed and flowers to become first a
+stream and then a river, changing its aspect and its nature as it
+flows to plunge itself in some boundless ocean, where restricted
+natures only find monotony, but where great souls are engulfed in
+endless contemplation.
+
+"How can I dare to describe the hues of fleeting emotions, the
+nothings beyond all price, the spoken accents that beggar language,
+the looks that hold more than all the wealth of poetry? Not one of the
+mysterious scenes that draw us insensibly nearer and nearer to a
+woman, but has depths in it which can swallow up all the poetry that
+ever was written. How can the inner life and mystery that stirs in our
+souls penetrate through our glozes, when we have not even words to
+describe the visible and outward mysteries of beauty? What enchantment
+steeped me for how many hours in unspeakable rapture, filled with the
+sight of Her! What made me happy? I know not. That face of hers
+overflowed with light at such times; it seemed in some way to glow
+with it; the outlines of her face, with the scarcely perceptible down
+on its delicate surface, shone with a beauty belonging to the far
+distant horizon that melts into the sunlight. The light of day seemed
+to caress her as she mingled in it; rather it seemed that the light of
+her eyes was brighter than the daylight itself; or some shadow passing
+over that fair face made a kind of change there, altering its hues and
+its expression. Some thought would often seem to glow on her white
+brows; her eyes appeared to dilate, and her eyelids trembled; a smile
+rippled over her features; the living coral of her lips grew full of
+meaning as they closed and unclosed; an indistinguishable something in
+her hair made brown shadows on her fair temples; in each new phase
+Foedora spoke. Every slight variation in her beauty made a new
+pleasure for my eyes, disclosed charms my heart had never known
+before; I tried to read a separate emotion or a hope in every change
+that passed over her face. This mute converse passed between soul and
+soul, like sound and answering echo; and the short-lived delights then
+showered upon me have left indelible impressions behind. Her voice
+would cause a frenzy in me that I could hardly understand. I could
+have copied the example of some prince of Lorraine, and held a live
+coal in the hollow of my hand, if her fingers passed caressingly
+through my hair the while. I felt no longer mere admiration and
+desire: I was under the spell; I had met my destiny. When back again
+under my own roof, I still vaguely saw Foedora in her own home, and
+had some indefinable share in her life; if she felt ill, I suffered
+too. The next day I used to say to her:
+
+"'You were not well yesterday.'
+
+"How often has she not stood before me, called by the power of
+ecstasy, in the silence of the night! Sometimes she would break in
+upon me like a ray of light, make me drop my pen, and put science and
+study to flight in grief and alarm, as she compelled my admiration by
+the alluring pose I had seen but a short time before. Sometimes I went
+to seek her in the spirit world, and would bow down to her as to a
+hope, entreating her to let me hear the silver sounds of her voice,
+and I would wake at length in tears.
+
+"Once, when she had promised to go to the theatre with me, she took it
+suddenly into her head to refuse to go out, and begged me to leave her
+alone. I was in such despair over the perversity which cost me a day's
+work, and (if I must confess it) my last shilling as well, that I went
+alone where she was to have been, desiring to see the play she had
+wished to see. I had scarcely seated myself when an electric shock
+went through me. A voice told me, 'She is here!' I looked round, and
+saw the countess hidden in the shadow at the back of her box in the
+first tier. My look did not waver; my eyes saw her at once with
+incredible clearness; my soul hovered about her life like an insect
+above its flower. How had my senses received this warning? There is
+something in these inward tremors that shallow people find
+astonishing, but the phenomena of our inner consciousness are produced
+as simple as those of external vision; so I was not surprised, but
+much vexed. My studies of our mental faculties, so little understood,
+helped me at any rate to find in my own excitement some living proofs
+of my theories. There was something exceedingly odd in this
+combination of lover and man of science, of downright idolatry of a
+woman with the love of knowledge. The causes of the lover's despair
+were highly interesting to the man of science; and the exultant lover,
+on the other hand, put science far away from him in his joy. Foedora
+saw me, and grew grave: I annoyed her. I went to her box during the
+first interval, and finding her alone, I stayed there. Although we had
+not spoken of love, I foresaw an explanation. I had not told her my
+secret, still there was a kind of understanding between us. She used
+to tell me her plans for amusement, and on the previous evening had
+asked with friendly eagerness if I meant to call the next day. After
+any witticism of hers, she would give me an inquiring glance, as if
+she had sought to please me alone by it. She would soothe me if I was
+vexed; and if she pouted, I had in some sort a right to ask an
+explanation. Before she would pardon any blunder, she would keep me a
+suppliant for long. All these things that we so relished, were so many
+lovers' quarrels. What arch grace she threw into it all! and what
+happiness it was to me!
+
+"But now we stood before each other as strangers, with the close
+relation between us both suspended. The countess was glacial: a
+presentiment of trouble filled me.
+
+"'Will you come home with me?' she said, when the play was over.
+
+"There had been a sudden change in the weather, and sleet was falling
+in showers as we went out. Foedora's carriage was unable to reach the
+doorway of the theatre. At the sight of a well-dressed woman about to
+cross the street, a commissionaire held an umbrella above us, and
+stood waiting at the carriage-door for his tip. I would have given ten
+years of life just then for a couple of halfpence, but I had not a
+penny. All the man in me and all my vainest susceptibilities were
+wrung with an infernal pain. The words, 'I haven't a penny about me,
+my good fellow!' came from me in the hard voice of thwarted passion;
+and yet I was that man's brother in misfortune, as I knew too well;
+and once I had so lightly paid away seven hundred thousand francs! The
+footman pushed the man aside, and the horses sprang forward. As we
+returned, Foedora, in real or feigned abstraction, answered all my
+questions curtly and by monosyllables. I said no more; it was a
+hateful moment. When we reached her house, we seated ourselves by the
+hearth, and when the servant had stirred the fire and left us alone,
+the countess turned to me with an inexplicable expression, and spoke.
+Her manner was almost solemn.
+
+"'Since my return to France, more than one young man, tempted by my
+money, has made proposals to me which would have satisfied my pride. I
+have come across men, too, whose attachment was so deep and sincere
+that they might have married me even if they had found me the
+penniless girl I used to be. Besides these, Monsieur de Valentin, you
+must know that new titles and newly-acquired wealth have been also
+offered to me, and that I have never received again any of those who
+were so ill-advised as to mention love to me. If my regard for you was
+but slight, I would not give you this warning, which is dictated by
+friendship rather than by pride. A woman lays herself open to a rebuff
+of some kind, if she imagines herself to be loved, and declines,
+before it is uttered, to listen to language which in its nature
+implies a compliment. I am well acquainted with the parts played by
+Arsinoe and Araminta, and with the sort of answer I might look for
+under such circumstances; but I hope to-day that I shall not find
+myself misconstrued by a man of no ordinary character, because I have
+frankly spoken my mind.'
+
+"She spoke with the cool self-possession of some attorney or solicitor
+explaining the nature of a contract or the conduct of a lawsuit to a
+client. There was not the least sign of feeling in the clear soft
+tones of her voice. Her steady face and dignified bearing seemed to me
+now full of diplomatic reserve and coldness. She had planned this
+scene, no doubt, and carefully chosen her words beforehand. Oh, my
+friend, there are women who take pleasure in piercing hearts, and
+deliberately plunge the dagger back again into the wound; such women
+as these cannot but be worshiped, for such women either love or would
+fain be loved. A day comes when they make amends for all the pain they
+gave us; they repay us for the pangs, the keenness of which they
+recognize, in joys a hundred-fold, even as God, they tell us,
+recompenses our good works. Does not their perversity spring from the
+strength of their feelings? But to be so tortured by a woman, who
+slaughters you with indifference! was not the suffering hideous?
+
+"Foedora did not know it, but in that minute she trampled all my hopes
+beneath her feet; she maimed my life and she blighted my future with
+the cool indifference and unconscious barbarity of an inquisitive
+child who plucks its wings from a butterfly.
+
+"'Later on,' resumed Foedora, 'you will learn, I hope, the stability
+of the affection that I keep for my friends. You will always find that
+I have devotion and kindness for them. I would give my life to serve
+my friends; but you could only despise me, if I allowed them to make
+love to me without return. That is enough. You are the only man to
+whom I have spoken such words as these last.'
+
+"At first I could not speak, or master the tempest that arose within
+me; but I soon repressed my emotions in the depths of my soul, and
+began to smile.
+
+"'If I own that I love you,' I said, 'you will banish me at once; if
+I plead guilty to indifference, you will make me suffer for it. Women,
+magistrates, and priests never quite lay the gown aside. Silence is
+non-committal; be pleased then, madame, to approve my silence. You
+must have feared, in some degree, to lose me, or I should not have
+received this friendly admonition; and with that thought my pride
+ought to be satisfied. Let us banish all personal considerations. You
+are perhaps the only woman with whom I could discuss rationally a
+resolution so contrary to the laws of nature. Considered with regard
+to your species, you are a prodigy. Now let us investigate, in good
+faith, the causes of this psychological anomaly. Does there exist in
+you, as in many women, a certain pride in self, a love of your own
+loveliness, a refinement of egoism which makes you shudder at the idea
+of belonging to another; is it the thought of resigning your own will
+and submitting to a superiority, though only of convention, which
+displeases you? You would seem to me a thousand times fairer for it.
+Can love formerly have brought you suffering? You probably set some
+value on your dainty figure and graceful appearance, and may perhaps
+wish to avoid the disfigurements of maternity. Is not this one of your
+strongest reasons for refusing a too importunate love? Some natural
+defect perhaps makes you insusceptible in spite of yourself? Do not be
+angry; my study, my inquiry is absolutely dispassionate. Some are born
+blind, and nature may easily have formed women who in like manner are
+blind, deaf, and dumb to love. You are really an interesting subject
+for medical investigation. You do not know your value. You feel
+perhaps a very legitimate distaste for mankind; in that I quite concur
+--to me they all seem ugly and detestable. And you are right,' I
+added, feeling my heart swell within me; 'how can you do otherwise
+than despise us? There is not a man living who is worthy of you.'
+
+"I will not repeat all the biting words with which I ridiculed her. In
+vain; my bitterest sarcasms and keenest irony never made her wince nor
+elicited a sign of vexation. She heard me, with the customary smile
+upon her lips and in her eyes, the smile that she wore as a part of
+her clothing, and that never varied for friends, for mere
+acquaintances, or for strangers.
+
+"'Isn't it very nice of me to allow you to dissect me like this?' she
+said at last, as I came to a temporary standstill, and looked at her
+in silence. 'You see,' she went on, laughing, 'that I have no foolish
+over-sensitiveness about my friendship. Many a woman would shut her
+door on you by way of punishing you for your impertinence.'
+
+"'You could banish me without needing to give me the reasons for your
+harshness.' As I spoke I felt that I could kill her if she dismissed
+me.
+
+"'You are mad,' she said, smiling still.
+
+"'Did you never think,' I went on, 'of the effects of passionate
+love? A desperate man has often murdered his mistress.'
+
+"'It is better to die than to live in misery,' she said coolly. 'Such
+a man as that would run through his wife's money, desert her, and
+leave her at last in utter wretchedness.'
+
+"This calm calculation dumfounded me. The gulf between us was made
+plain; we could never understand each other.
+
+"'Good-bye,' I said proudly.
+
+"'Good-bye, till to-morrow,' she answered, with a little friendly
+bow.
+
+"For a moment's space I hurled at her in a glance all the love I must
+forego; she stood there with than banal smile of hers, the detestable
+chill smile of a marble statue, with none of the warmth in it that it
+seemed to express. Can you form any idea, my friend, of the pain that
+overcame me on the way home through rain and snow, across a league of
+icy-sheeted quays, without a hope left? Oh, to think that she not only
+had not guessed my poverty, but believed me to be as wealthy as she
+was, and likewise borne as softly over the rough ways of life! What
+failure and deceit! It was no mere question of money now, but of the
+fate of all that lay within me.
+
+"I went at haphazard, going over the words of our strange conversation
+with myself. I got so thoroughly lost in my reflections that I ended
+by doubts as to the actual value of words and ideas. But I loved her
+all the same; I loved this woman with the untouched heart that might
+surrender at any moment--a woman who daily disappointed the
+expectations of the previous evening, by appearing as a new mistress
+on the morrow.
+
+"As I passed under the gateway of the Institute, a fevered thrill ran
+through me. I remembered that I was fasting, and that I had not a
+penny. To complete the measure of my misfortune, my hat was spoiled by
+the rain. How was I to appear in the drawing-room of a woman of
+fashion with an unpresentable hat? I had always cursed the inane and
+stupid custom that compels us to exhibit the lining of our hats, and
+to keep them always in our hands, but with anxious care I had so far
+kept mine in a precarious state of efficiency. It had been neither
+strikingly new, nor utterly shabby, neither napless nor over-glossy,
+and might have passed for the hat of a frugally given owner, but its
+artificially prolonged existence had now reached the final stage, it
+was crumpled, forlorn, and completely ruined, a downright rag, a
+fitting emblem of its master. My painfully preserved elegance must
+collapse for want of thirty sous.
+
+"What unrecognized sacrifices I had made in the past three months for
+Foedora! How often I had given the price of a week's sustenance to see
+her for a moment! To leave my work and go without food was the least
+of it! I must traverse the streets of Paris without getting splashed,
+run to escape showers, and reach her rooms at last, as neat and spruce
+as any of the coxcombs about her. For a poet and a distracted wooer
+the difficulties of this task were endless. My happiness, the course
+of my love, might be affected by a speck of mud upon my only white
+waistcoat! Oh, to miss the sight of her because I was wet through and
+bedraggled, and had not so much as five sous to give to a shoeblack
+for removing the least little spot of mud from my boot! The petty
+pangs of these nameless torments, which an irritable man finds so
+great, only strengthened my passion.
+
+"The unfortunate must make sacrifices which they may not mention to
+women who lead refined and luxurious lives. Such women see things
+through a prism that gilds all men and their surroundings. Egoism
+leads them to take cheerful views, and fashion makes them cruel; they
+do not wish to reflect, lest they lose their happiness, and the
+absorbing nature of their pleasures absolves their indifference to the
+misfortunes of others. A penny never means millions to them; millions,
+on the contrary, seem a mere trifle. Perhaps love must plead his cause
+by great sacrifices, but a veil must be lightly drawn across them,
+they must go down into silence. So when wealthy men pour out their
+devotion, their fortunes, and their lives, they gain somewhat by these
+commonly entertained opinions, an additional lustre hangs about their
+lovers' follies; their silence is eloquent; there is a grace about the
+drawn veil; but my terrible distress bound me over to suffer fearfully
+or ever I might speak of my love or of dying for her sake.
+
+"Was it a sacrifice after all? Was I not richly rewarded by the joy I
+took in sacrificing everything to her? There was no commonest event of
+my daily life to which the countess had not given importance, had not
+overfilled with happiness. I had been hitherto careless of my clothes,
+now I respected my coat as if it had been a second self. I should not
+have hesitated between bodily harm and a tear in that garment. You
+must enter wholly into my circumstances to understand the stormy
+thoughts, the gathering frenzy, that shook me as I went, and which,
+perhaps, were increased by my walk. I gloated in an infernal fashion
+which I cannot describe over the absolute completeness of my
+wretchedness. I would have drawn from it an augury of my future, but
+there is no limit to the possibilities of misfortune. The door of my
+lodging-house stood ajar. A light streamed from the heart-shaped
+opening cut in the shutters. Pauline and her mother were sitting up
+for me and talking. I heard my name spoken, and listened.
+
+"'Raphael is much nicer-looking than the student in number seven,'
+said Pauline; 'his fair hair is such a pretty color. Don't you think
+there is something in his voice, too, I don't know what it is, that
+gives you a sort of a thrill? And, then, though he may be a little
+proud, he is very kind, and he has such fine manners; I am sure that
+all the ladies must be quite wild about him.'
+
+"'You might be fond of him yourself, to hear you talk,' was Madame
+Gaudin's comment.
+
+"'He is just as dear to me as a brother,' she laughed. 'I should be
+finely ungrateful if I felt no friendship for him. Didn't he teach me
+music and drawing and grammar, and everything I know in fact? You
+don't much notice how I get on, dear mother; but I shall know enough,
+in a while, to give lessons myself, and then we can keep a servant.'
+
+"I stole away softly, made some noise outside, and went into their
+room to take the lamp, that Pauline tried to light for me. The dear
+child had just poured soothing balm into my wounds. Her outspoken
+admiration had given me fresh courage. I so needed to believe in
+myself and to come by a just estimate of my advantages. This revival
+of hope in me perhaps colored my surroundings. Perhaps also I had
+never before really looked at the picture that so often met my eyes,
+of the two women in their room; it was a scene such as Flemish
+painters have reproduced so faithfully for us, that I admired in its
+delightful reality. The mother, with the kind smile upon her lips,
+sat knitting stockings by the dying fire; Pauline was painting
+hand-screens, her brushes and paints, strewn over the tiny table,
+made bright spots of color for the eye to dwell on. When she had left
+her seat and stood lighting my lamp, one must have been under the
+yoke of a terrible passion indeed, not to admire her faintly flushed
+transparent hands, the girlish charm of her attitude, the ideal grace
+of her head, as the lamplight fell full on her pale face. Night and
+silence added to the charms of this industrious vigil and peaceful
+interior. The light-heartedness that sustained such continuous toil
+could only spring from devout submission and the lofty feelings that
+it brings.
+
+"There was an indescribable harmony between them and their
+possessions. The splendor of Foedora's home did not satisfy; it called
+out all my worst instincts; something in this lowly poverty and
+unfeigned goodness revived me. It may have been that luxury abased me
+in my own eyes, while here my self-respect was restored to me, as I
+sought to extend the protection that a man is so eager to make felt,
+over these two women, who in the bare simplicity of the existence in
+their brown room seemed to live wholly in the feelings of their
+hearts. As I came up to Pauline, she looked at me in an almost
+motherly way; her hands shook a little as she held the lamp, so that
+the light fell on me and cried:
+
+"'_Dieu_! how pale you are! and you are wet through! My mother will try
+to wipe you dry. Monsieur Raphael,' she went on, after a little pause,
+'you are so very fond of milk, and to-night we happen to have some
+cream. Here, will you not take some?'
+
+"She pounced like a kitten, on a china bowl full of milk. She did it
+so quickly, and put it before me so prettily, that I hesitated.
+
+"'You are going to refuse me?' she said, and her tones changed.
+
+"The pride in each felt for the other's pride. It was Pauline's
+poverty that seemed to humiliate her, and to reproach me with my want
+of consideration, and I melted at once and accepted the cream that
+might have been meant for her morning's breakfast. The poor child
+tried not to show her joy, but her eyes sparkled.
+
+"'I needed it badly,' I said as I sat down. (An anxious look passed
+over her face.) 'Do you remember that passage, Pauline, where Bossuet
+tells how God gave more abundant reward for a cup of cold water than
+for a victory?'
+
+"'Yes,' she said, her heart beating like some wild bird's in a
+child's hands.
+
+"'Well, as we shall part very soon, now,' I went on in an unsteady
+voice, 'you must let me show my gratitude to you and to your mother
+for all the care you have taken of me.'
+
+"'Oh, don't let us cast accounts,' she said laughing. But her
+laughter covered an agitation that gave me pain. I went on without
+appearing to hear her words:
+
+"'My piano is one of Erard's best instruments; and you must take it.
+Pray accept it without hesitation; I really could not take it with me
+on the journey I am about to make.'
+
+"Perhaps the melancholy tones in which I spoke enlightened the two
+women, for they seemed to understand, and eyed me with curiosity and
+alarm. Here was the affection that I had looked for in the glacial
+regions of the great world, true affection, unostentatious but tender,
+and possibly lasting.
+
+"'Don't take it to heart so,' the mother said; 'stay on here. My
+husband is on his way towards us even now,' she went on. 'I looked
+into the Gospel of St. John this evening while Pauline hung our
+door-key in a Bible from her fingers. The key turned; that means that
+Gaudin is in health and doing well. Pauline began again for you and
+for the young man in number seven--it turned for you, but not for him.
+We are all going to be rich. Gaudin will come back a millionaire. I
+dreamed once that I saw him in a ship full of serpents; luckily the
+water was rough, and that means gold or precious stones from
+over-sea.'
+
+"The silly, friendly words were like the crooning lullaby with which a
+mother soothes her sick child; they in a manner calmed me. There was a
+pleasant heartiness in the worthy woman's looks and tones, which, if
+it could not remove trouble, at any rate soothed and quieted it, and
+deadened the pain. Pauline, keener-sighted than her mother, studied me
+uneasily; her quick eyes seemed to read my life and my future. I
+thanked the mother and daughter by an inclination of the head, and
+hurried away; I was afraid I should break down.
+
+"I found myself alone under my roof, and laid myself down in my
+misery. My unhappy imagination suggested numberless baseless projects,
+and prescribed impossible resolutions. When a man is struggling in the
+wreck of his fortunes, he is not quite without resources, but I was
+engulfed. Ah, my dear fellow, we are too ready to blame the wretched.
+Let us be less harsh on the results of the most powerful of all social
+solvents. Where poverty is absolute there exist no such things as
+shame or crime, or virtue or intelligence. I knew not what to do; I
+was as defenceless as a maiden on her knees before a beast of prey. A
+penniless man who has no ties to bind him is master of himself at any
+rate, but a luckless wretch who is in love no longer belongs to
+himself, and may not take his own life. Love makes us almost sacred in
+our own eyes; it is the life of another that we revere within us; then
+and so it begins for us the cruelest trouble of all--the misery with a
+hope in it, a hope for which we must even bear our torments. I thought
+I would go to Rastignac on the morrow to confide Foedora's strange
+resolution to him, and with that I slept.
+
+"'Ah, ha!' cried Rastignac, as he saw me enter his lodging at nine
+o'clock in the morning. 'I know what brings you here. Foedora has
+dismissed you. Some kind souls, who were jealous of your ascendency
+over the countess, gave out that you were going to be married. Heaven
+only knows what follies your rivals have equipped you with, and what
+slanders have been directed at you.'
+
+"'That explains everything!' I exclaimed. I remembered all my
+presumptuous speeches, and gave the countess credit for no little
+magnanimity. It pleased me to think that I was a miscreant who had not
+been punished nearly enough, and I saw nothing in her indulgence but
+the long-suffering charity of love.
+
+"'Not quite so fast,' urged the prudent Gascon; 'Foedora has all the
+sagacity natural to a profoundly selfish woman; perhaps she may have
+taken your measure while you still coveted only her money and her
+splendor; in spite of all your care, she could have read you through
+and through. She can dissemble far too well to let any dissimulation
+pass undetected. I fear,' he went on, 'that I have brought you into a
+bad way. In spite of her cleverness and her tact, she seems to me a
+domineering sort of person, like every woman who can only feel
+pleasure through her brain. Happiness for her lies entirely in a
+comfortable life and in social pleasures; her sentiment is only
+assumed; she will make you miserable; you will be her head footman.'
+
+"He spoke to the deaf. I broke in upon him, disclosing, with an
+affectation of light-heartedness, the state of my finances.
+
+"'Yesterday evening,' he rejoined, 'luck ran against me, and that
+carried off all my available cash. But for that trivial mishap, I
+would gladly have shared my purse with you. But let us go and
+breakfast at the restaurant; perhaps there is good counsel in
+oysters.'
+
+"He dressed, and had his tilbury brought round. We went to the Cafe de
+Paris like a couple of millionaires, armed with all the audacious
+impertinence of the speculator whose capital is imaginary. That devil
+of a Gascon quite disconcerted me by the coolness of his manners and
+his absolute self-possession. While we were taking coffee after an
+excellent and well-ordered repast, a young dandy entered, who did not
+escape Rastignac. He had been nodding here and there among the crowd
+to this or that young man, distinguished both by personal attractions
+and elegant attire, and now he said to me:
+
+"'Here's your man,' as he beckoned to this gentleman with a wonderful
+cravat, who seemed to be looking for a table that suited his ideas.
+
+"'That rogue has been decorated for bringing out books that he
+doesn't understand a word of,' whispered Rastignac; 'he is a chemist,
+a historian, a novelist, and a political writer; he has gone halves,
+thirds, or quarters in the authorship of I don't know how many plays,
+and he is as ignorant as Dom Miguel's mule. He is not a man so much as
+a name, a label that the public is familiar with. So he would do well
+to avoid shops inscribed with the motto, "_Ici l'on peut ecrire
+soi-meme_." He is acute enough to deceive an entire congress of
+diplomatists. In a couple of words, he is a moral half-caste, not
+quite a fraud, nor entirely genuine. But, hush! he has succeeded
+already; nobody asks anything further, and every one calls him an
+illustrious man.'
+
+"'Well, my esteemed and excellent friend, and how may Your
+Intelligence be?' So Rastignac addressed the stranger as he sat down
+at a neighboring table.
+
+"'Neither well nor ill; I am overwhelmed with work. I have all the
+necessary materials for some very curious historical memoirs in my
+hands, and I cannot find any one to whom I can ascribe them. It
+worries me, for I shall have to be quick about it. Memoirs are falling
+out of fashion.'
+
+"'What are the memoirs--contemporaneous, ancient, or memoirs of the
+court, or what?'
+
+"'They relate to the Necklace affair.'
+
+"'Now, isn't that a coincidence?' said Rastignac, turning to me and
+laughing. He looked again to the literary speculation, and said,
+indicating me:
+
+"'This is M. de Valentin, one of my friends, whom I must introduce to
+you as one of our future literary celebrities. He had formerly an
+aunt, a marquise, much in favor once at court, and for about two years
+he has been writing a Royalist history of the Revolution.'
+
+"Then, bending over this singular man of business, he went on:
+
+"'He is a man of talent, and a simpleton that will do your memoirs
+for you, in his aunt's name, for a hundred crowns a volume.'
+
+"'It's a bargain,' said the other, adjusting his cravat. 'Waiter, my
+oysters.'
+
+"'Yes, but you must give me twenty-five louis as commission, and you
+will pay him in advance for each volume,' said Rastignac.
+
+"'No, no. He shall only have fifty crowns on account, and then I
+shall be sure of having my manuscript punctually.'
+
+"Rastignac repeated this business conversation to me in low tones; and
+then, without giving me any voice in the matter, he replied:
+
+"'We agree to your proposal. When can we call upon you to arrange the
+affair?'
+
+"'Oh, well! Come and dine here to-morrow at seven o'clock.'
+
+"We rose. Rastignac flung some money to the waiter, put the bill in
+his pocket, and we went out. I was quite stupified by the flippancy
+and ease with which he had sold my venerable aunt, la Marquise de
+Montbauron.
+
+"'I would sooner take ship for the Brazils, and give the Indians
+lessons in algebra, though I don't know a word of it, than tarnish my
+family name.'
+
+"Rastignac burst out laughing.
+
+"'How dense you are! Take the fifty crowns in the first instance, and
+write the memoirs. When you have finished them, you will decline to
+publish them in your aunt's name, imbecile! Madame de Montbauron, with
+her hooped petticoat, her rank and beauty, rouge and slippers, and her
+death upon the scaffold, is worth a great deal more than six hundred
+francs. And then, if the trade will not give your aunt her due, some
+old adventurer, or some shady countess or other, will be found to put
+her name to the memoirs.'
+
+"'Oh,' I groaned; 'why did I quit the blameless life in my garret?
+This world has aspects that are very vilely dishonorable.'
+
+"'Yes,' said Rastignac, 'that is all very poetical, but this is a
+matter of business. What a child you are! Now, listen to me. As to
+your work, the public will decide upon it; and as for my literary
+middle-man, hasn't he devoted eight years of his life to obtaining a
+footing in the book-trade, and paid heavily for his experience? You
+divide the money and the labor of the book with him very unequally,
+but isn't yours the better part? Twenty-five louis means as much to
+you as a thousand francs does to him. Come, you can write historical
+memoirs, a work of art such as never was, since Diderot once wrote six
+sermons for a hundred crowns!'
+
+"'After all,' I said, in agitation, 'I cannot choose but do it. So,
+my dear friend, my thanks are due to you. I shall be quite rich with
+twenty-five louis.'
+
+"'Richer than you think,' he laughed. 'If I have my commission from
+Finot in this matter, it goes to you, can't you see? Now let us go to
+the Bois de Boulogne,' he said; 'we shall see your countess there, and
+I will show you the pretty little widow that I am to marry--a charming
+woman, an Alsacienne, rather plump. She reads Kant, Schiller, Jean
+Paul, and a host of lachrymose books. She has a mania for continually
+asking my opinion, and I have to look as if I entered into all this
+German sensibility, and to know a pack of ballads--drugs, all of them,
+that my doctor absolutely prohibits. As yet I have not been able to
+wean her from her literary enthusiasms; she sheds torrents of tears as
+she reads Goethe, and I have to weep a little myself to please her,
+for she has an income of fifty thousand livres, my dear boy, and the
+prettiest little hand and foot in the world. Oh, if she would only say
+_mon ange_ and _brouiller_ instead of _mon anche_ and _prouiller_, she
+would be perfection!'
+
+"We saw the countess, radiant amid the splendors of her equipage. The
+coquette bowed very graciously to us both, and the smile she gave me
+seemed to me to be divine and full of love. I was very happy; I
+fancied myself beloved; I had money, a wealth of love in my heart, and
+my troubles were over. I was light-hearted, blithe, and content. I
+found my friend's lady-love charming. Earth and air and heaven--all
+nature--seemed to reflect Foedora's smile for me.
+
+"As we returned through the Champs-Elysees, we paid a visit to
+Rastignac's hatter and tailor. Thanks to the 'Necklace,' my
+insignificant peace-footing was to end, and I made formidable
+preparations for a campaign. Henceforward I need not shrink from a
+contest with the spruce and fashionable young men who made Foedora's
+circle. I went home, locked myself in, and stood by my dormer window,
+outwardly calm enough, but in reality I bade a last good-bye to the
+roofs without. I began to live in the future, rehearsed my life drama,
+and discounted love and its happiness. Ah, how stormy life can grow to
+be within the four walls of a garret! The soul within us is like a
+fairy; she turns straw into diamonds for us; and for us, at a touch of
+her wand, enchanted palaces arise, as flowers in the meadows spring up
+towards the sun.
+
+"Towards noon, next day, Pauline knocked gently at my door, and
+brought me--who could guess it?--a note from Foedora. The countess
+asked me to take her to the Luxembourg, and to go thence to see with
+her the Museum and Jardin des Plantes.
+
+"'The man is waiting for an answer,' said Pauline, after quietly
+waiting for a moment.
+
+"I hastily scrawled my acknowledgements, and Pauline took the note. I
+changed my dress. When my toilette was ended, and I looked at myself
+with some complaisance, an icy shiver ran through me as I thought:
+
+"'Will Foedora walk or drive? Will it rain or shine?--No matter,
+though,' I said to myself; 'whichever it is, can one ever reckon with
+feminine caprice? She will have no money about her, and will want to
+give a dozen francs to some little Savoyard because his rags are
+picturesque.'
+
+"I had not a brass farthing, and should have no money till the evening
+came. How dearly a poet pays for the intellectual prowess that method
+and toil have brought him, at such crises of our youth! Innumerable
+painfully vivid thoughts pierced me like barbs. I looked out of my
+window; the weather was very unsettled. If things fell out badly, I
+might easily hire a cab for the day; but would not the fear lie on me
+every moment that I might not meet Finot in the evening? I felt too
+weak to endure such fears in the midst of my felicity. Though I felt
+sure that I should find nothing, I began a grand search through my
+room; I looked for imaginary coins in the recesses of my mattress; I
+hunted about everywhere--I even shook out my old boots. A nervous
+fever seized me; I looked with wild eyes at the furniture when I had
+ransacked it all. Will you understand, I wonder, the excitement that
+possessed me when, plunged deep in the listlessness of despair, I
+opened my writing-table drawer, and found a fair and splendid
+ten-franc piece that shone like a rising star, new and sparkling, and
+slily hiding in a cranny between two boards? I did not try to account
+for its previous reserve and the cruelty of which it had been guilty
+in thus lying hidden; I kissed it for a friend faithful in adversity,
+and hailed it with a cry that found an echo, and made me turn sharply,
+to find Pauline with a face grown white.
+
+"'I thought,' she faltered, 'that you had hurt yourself! The man who
+brought the letter----' (she broke off as if something smothered her
+voice). 'But mother has paid him,' she added, and flitted away like a
+wayward, capricious child. Poor little one! I wanted her to share in
+my happiness. I seemed to have all the happiness in the world within
+me just then; and I would fain have returned to the unhappy, all that
+I felt as if I had stolen from them.
+
+"The intuitive perception of adversity is sound for the most part; the
+countess had sent away her carriage. One of those freaks that pretty
+women can scarcely explain to themselves had determined her to go on
+foot, by way of the boulevards, to the Jardin des Plantes.
+
+"'It will rain,' I told her, and it pleased her to contradict me.
+
+"As it fell out, the weather was fine while we went through the
+Luxembourg; when we came out, some drops fell from a great cloud,
+whose progress I had watched uneasily, and we took a cab. At the
+Museum I was about to dismiss the vehicle, and Foedora (what agonies!)
+asked me not to do so. But it was like a dream in broad daylight for
+me, to chat with her, to wander in the Jardin des Plantes, to stray
+down the shady alleys, to feel her hand upon my arm; the secret
+transports repressed in me were reduced, no doubt, to a fixed and
+foolish smile upon my lips; there was something unreal about it all.
+Yet in all her movements, however alluring, whether we stood or
+whether we walked, there was nothing either tender or lover-like. When
+I tried to share in a measure the action of movement prompted by her
+life, I became aware of a check, or of something strange in her that I
+cannot explain, or an inner activity concealed in her nature. There is
+no suavity about the movements of women who have no soul in them. Our
+wills were opposed, and we did not keep step together. Words are
+wanting to describe this outward dissonance between two beings; we are
+not accustomed to read a thought in a movement. We instinctively feel
+this phenomenon of our nature, but it cannot be expressed.
+
+"I did not dissect my sensations during those violent seizures of
+passion," Raphael went on, after a moment of silence, as if he were
+replying to an objection raised by himself. "I did not analyze my
+pleasures nor count my heartbeats then, as a miser scrutinizes and
+weighs his gold pieces. No; experience sheds its melancholy light over
+the events of the past to-day, and memory brings these pictures back,
+as the sea-waves in fair weather cast up fragment after fragment of
+the debris of a wrecked vessel upon the strand.
+
+"'It is in your power to render me a rather important service,' said
+the countess, looking at me in an embarrassed way. 'After confiding in
+you my aversion to lovers, I feel myself more at liberty to entreat
+your good offices in the name of friendship. Will there not be very
+much more merit in obliging me to-day?' she asked, laughing.
+
+"I looked at her in anguish. Her manner was coaxing, but in no wise
+affectionate; she felt nothing for me; she seemed to be playing a
+part, and I thought her a consummate actress. Then all at once my
+hopes awoke once more, at a single look and word. Yet if reviving love
+expressed itself in my eyes, she bore its light without any change in
+the clearness of her own; they seemed, like a tiger's eyes, to have a
+sheet of metal behind them. I used to hate her in such moments.
+
+"'The influence of the Duc de Navarreins would be very useful to me,
+with an all-powerful person in Russia,' she went on, persuasion in
+every modulation of her voice, 'whose intervention I need in order to
+have justice done me in a matter that concerns both my fortune and my
+position in the world, that is to say, the recognition of my marriage
+by the Emperor. Is not the Duc de Navarreins a cousin of yours? A
+letter from him would settle everything.'
+
+"'I am yours,' I answered; 'command me.'
+
+"'You are very nice,' she said, pressing my hand. 'Come and have
+dinner with me, and I will tell you everything, as if you were my
+confessor.'
+
+"So this discreet, suspicious woman, who had never been heard to speak
+a word about her affairs to any one, was going to consult me.
+
+"'Oh, how dear to me is this silence that you have imposed on me!' I
+cried; 'but I would rather have had some sharper ordeal still.' And
+she smiled upon the intoxication in my eyes; she did not reject my
+admiration in any way; surely she loved me!
+
+"Fortunately, my purse held just enough to satisfy her cab-man. The
+day spent in her house, alone with her, was delicious; it was the
+first time that I had seen her in this way. Hitherto we had always
+been kept apart by the presence of others, and by her formal
+politeness and reserved manners, even during her magnificent dinners;
+but now it was as if I lived beneath her own roof--I had her all to
+myself, so to speak. My wandering fancy broke down barriers, arranged
+the events of life to my liking, and steeped me in happiness and love.
+I seemed to myself her husband, I liked to watch her busied with
+little details; it was a pleasure to me even to see her take off her
+bonnet and shawl. She left me alone for a little, and came back,
+charming, with her hair newly arranged; and this dainty change of
+toilette had been made for me!
+
+"During the dinner she lavished attention upon me, and put charm
+without end into those numberless trifles to all seeming, that make up
+half of our existence nevertheless. As we sat together before a
+crackling fire, on silken cushions surrounded by the most desirable
+creations of Oriental luxury; as I saw this woman whose famous beauty
+made every heart beat, so close to me; an unapproachable woman who was
+talking and bringing all her powers of coquetry to bear upon me; then
+my blissful pleasure rose almost to the point of suffering. To my
+vexation, I recollected the important business to be concluded; I
+determined to go to keep the appointment made for me for this evening.
+
+"'So soon?' she said, seeing me take my hat.
+
+"She loved me, then! or I thought so at least, from the bland tones in
+which those two words were uttered. I would then have bartered a
+couple of years of life for every hour she chose to grant to me, and
+so prolong my ecstasy. My happiness was increased by the extent of the
+money I sacrificed. It was midnight before she dismissed me. But on
+the morrow, for all that, my heroism cost me a good many remorseful
+pangs; I was afraid the affair of the Memoirs, now of such importance
+for me, might have fallen through, and rushed off to Rastignac. We
+found the nominal author of my future labors just getting up.
+
+"Finot read over a brief agreement to me, in which nothing whatever
+was said about my aunt, and when it had been signed he paid me down
+fifty crowns, and the three of us breakfasted together. I had only
+thirty francs left over, when I had paid for my new hat, for sixty
+tickets at thirty sous each, and settled my debts; but for some days
+to come the difficulties of living were removed. If I had but listened
+to Rastignac, I might have had abundance by frankly adopting the
+'English system.' He really wanted to establish my credit by setting
+me to raise loans, on the theory that borrowing is the basis of
+credit. To hear him talk, the future was the largest and most secure
+kind of capital in the world. My future luck was hypothecated for the
+benefit of my creditors, and he gave my custom to his tailor, an
+artist, and a young man's tailor, who was to leave me in peace until I
+married.
+
+"The monastic life of study that I had led for three years past ended
+on this day. I frequented Foedora's house very diligently, and tried
+to outshine the heroes or the swaggerers to be found in her circle.
+When I believed that I had left poverty for ever behind me, I regained
+my freedom of mind, humiliated my rivals, and was looked upon as a
+very attractive, dazzling, and irresistible sort of man. But acute
+folk used to say with regard to me, 'A fellow as clever as that will
+keep all his enthusiasms in his brain,' and charitably extolled my
+faculties at the expense of my feelings. 'Isn't he lucky, not to be in
+love!' they exclaimed. 'If he were, could he be so light-hearted and
+animated?' Yet in Foedora's presence I was as dull as love could make
+me. When I was alone with her, I had not a word to say, or if I did
+speak, I renounced love; and I affected gaiety but ill, like a
+courtier who has a bitter mortification to hide. I tried in every way
+to make myself indispensable in her life, and necessary to her vanity
+and to her comfort; I was a plaything at her pleasure, a slave always
+at her side. And when I had frittered away the day in this way, I went
+back to my work at night, securing merely two or three hours' sleep in
+the early morning.
+
+"But I had not, like Rastignac, the 'English system' at my
+finger-ends, and I very soon saw myself without a penny. I fell at once
+into that precarious way of life which industriously hides cold and
+miserable depths beneath an elusive surface of luxury; I was a coxcomb
+without conquests, a penniless fop, a nameless gallant. The old
+sufferings were renewed, but less sharply; no doubt I was growing used
+to the painful crisis. Very often my sole diet consisted of the scanty
+provision of cakes and tea that is offered in drawing-rooms, or one of
+the countess' great dinners must sustain me for two whole days. I used
+all my time, and exerted every effort and all my powers of
+observation, to penetrate the impenetrable character of Foedora.
+Alternate hope and despair had swayed my opinions; for me she was
+sometimes the tenderest, sometimes the most unfeeling of women. But
+these transitions from joy to sadness became unendurable; I sought to
+end the horrible conflict within me by extinguishing love. By the
+light of warning gleams my soul sometimes recognized the gulfs that
+lay between us. The countess confirmed all my fears; I had never yet
+detected any tear in her eyes; an affecting scene in a play left her
+smiling and unmoved. All her instincts were selfish; she could not
+divine another's joy or sorrow. She had made a fool of me, in fact!
+
+"I had rejoiced over a sacrifice to make for her, and almost
+humiliated myself in seeking out my kinsman, the Duc de Navarreins, a
+selfish man who was ashamed of my poverty, and had injured me too
+deeply not to hate me. He received me with the polite coldness that
+makes every word and gesture seem an insult; he looked so ill at ease
+that I pitied him. I blushed for this pettiness amid grandeur, and
+penuriousness surrounded by luxury. He began to talk to me of his
+heavy losses in the three per cents, and then I told him the object of
+my visit. The change in his manners, hitherto glacial, which now
+gradually, became affectionate, disgusted me.
+
+"Well, he called upon the countess, and completely eclipsed me with
+her.
+
+"On him Foedora exercised spells and witcheries unheard of; she drew
+him into her power, and arranged her whole mysterious business with
+him; I was left out, I heard not a word of it; she had made a tool of
+me! She did not seem to be aware of my existence while my cousin was
+present; she received me less cordially perhaps than when I was first
+presented to her. One evening she chose to mortify me before the duke
+by a look, a gesture, that it is useless to try to express in words. I
+went away with tears in my eyes, planning terrible and outrageous
+schemes of vengeance without end.
+
+"I often used to go with her to the theatre. Love utterly absorbed me
+as I sat beside her; as I looked at her I used to give myself up to
+the pleasure of listening to the music, putting all my soul into the
+double joy of love and of hearing every emotion of my heart translated
+into musical cadences. It was my passion that filled the air and the
+stage, that was triumphant everywhere but with my mistress. Then I
+would take Foedora's hand. I used to scan her features and her eyes,
+imploring of them some indication that one blended feeling possessed
+us both, seeking for the sudden harmony awakened by the power of
+music, which makes our souls vibrate in unison; but her hand was
+passive, her eyes said nothing.
+
+"When the fire that burned in me glowed too fiercely from the face I
+turned upon her, she met it with that studied smile of hers, the
+conventional expression that sits on the lips of every portrait in
+every exhibition. She was not listening to the music. The divine pages
+of Rossini, Cimarosa, or Zingarelli called up no emotion, gave no
+voice to any poetry in her life; her soul was a desert.
+
+"Foedora presented herself as a drama before a drama. Her lorgnette
+traveled restlessly over the boxes; she was restless too beneath the
+apparent calm; fashion tyrannized over her; her box, her bonnet, her
+carriage, her own personality absorbed her entirely. My merciless
+knowledge thoroughly tore away all my illusions. If good breeding
+consists in self-forgetfulness and consideration for others, in
+constantly showing gentleness in voice and bearing, in pleasing
+others, and in making them content in themselves, all traces of her
+plebeian origin were not yet obliterated in Foedora, in spite of her
+cleverness. Her self-forgetfulness was a sham, her manners were not
+innate but painfully acquired, her politeness was rather subservient.
+And yet for those she singled out, her honeyed words expressed natural
+kindness, her pretentious exaggeration was exalted enthusiasm. I alone
+had scrutinized her grimacings, and stripped away the thin rind that
+sufficed to conceal her real nature from the world; her trickery no
+longer deceived me; I had sounded the depths of that feline nature. I
+blushed for her when some donkey or other flattered and complimented
+her. And yet I loved her through it all! I hoped that her snows would
+melt with the warmth of a poet's love. If I could only have made her
+feel all the greatness that lies in devotion, then I should have seen
+her perfected, she would have been an angel. I loved her as a man, a
+lover, and an artist; if it had been necessary not to love her so that
+I might win her, some cool-headed coxcomb, some self-possessed
+calculator would perhaps have had an advantage over me. She was so
+vain and sophisticated, that the language of vanity would appeal to
+her; she would have allowed herself to be taken in the toils of an
+intrigue; a hard, cold nature would have gained a complete ascendency
+over her. Keen grief had pierced me to my very soul, as she
+unconsciously revealed her absolute love of self. I seemed to see her
+as she one day would be, alone in the world, with no one to whom she
+could stretch her hand, with no friendly eyes for her own to meet and
+rest upon. I was bold enough to set this before her one evening; I
+painted in vivid colors her lonely, sad, deserted old age. Her comment
+on this prospect of so terrible a revenge of thwarted nature was
+horrible.
+
+"'I shall always have money,' she said; 'and with money we can always
+inspire such sentiments as are necessary for our comfort in those
+about us.'
+
+"I went away confounded by the arguments of luxury, by the reasoning
+of this woman of the world in which she lived; and blamed myself for
+my infatuated idolatry. I myself had not loved Pauline because she was
+poor; and had not the wealthy Foedora a right to repulse Raphael?
+Conscience is our unerring judge until we finally stifle it. A
+specious voice said within me, 'Foedora is neither attracted to nor
+repulses any one; she has her liberty, but once upon a time she sold
+herself to the Russian count, her husband or her lover, for gold. But
+temptation is certain to enter into her life. Wait till that moment
+comes!' She lived remote from humanity, in a sphere apart, in a hell
+or a heaven of her own; she was neither frail nor virtuous. This
+feminine enigma in embroideries and cashmeres had brought into play
+every emotion of the human heart in me--pride, ambition, love,
+curiosity.
+
+"There was a craze just then for praising a play at a little Boulevard
+theatre, prompted perhaps by a wish to appear original that besets us
+all, or due to some freak of fashion. The countess showed some signs
+of a wish to see the floured face of the actor who had so delighted
+several people of taste, and I obtained the honor of taking her to a
+first presentation of some wretched farce or other. A box scarcely
+cost five francs, but I had not a brass farthing. I was but half-way
+through the volume of Memoirs; I dared not beg for assistance of
+Finot, and Rastignac, my providence, was away. These constant
+perplexities were the bane of my life.
+
+"We had once come out of the theatre when it was raining heavily,
+Foedora had called a cab for me before I could escape from her show of
+concern; she would not admit any of my excuses--my liking for wet
+weather, and my wish to go to the gaming-table. She did not read my
+poverty in my embarrassed attitude, or in my forced jests. My eyes
+would redden, but she did not understand a look. A young man's life is
+at the mercy of the strangest whims! At every revolution of the wheels
+during the journey, thoughts that burned stirred in my heart. I tried
+to pull up a plank from the bottom of the vehicle, hoping to slip
+through the hole into the street; but finding insuperable obstacles, I
+burst into a fit of laughter, and then sat stupefied in calm
+dejection, like a man in a pillory. When I reached my lodging, Pauline
+broke in through my first stammering words with:
+
+"'If you haven't any money----?'
+
+"Ah, the music of Rossini was as nothing compared with those words.
+But to return to the performance at the Funambules.
+
+"I thought of pawning the circlet of gold round my mother's portrait
+in order to escort the countess. Although the pawnbroker loomed in my
+thoughts as one of the doors of a convict's prison, I would rather
+myself have carried my bed thither than have begged for alms. There is
+something so painful in the expression of a man who asks money of you!
+There are loans that mulct us of our self-respect, just as some
+rebuffs from a friend's lips sweep away our last illusion.
+
+"Pauline was working; her mother had gone to bed. I flung a stealthy
+glance over the bed; the curtains were drawn back a little; Madame
+Gaudin was in a deep sleep, I thought, when I saw her quiet, sallow
+profile outlined against the pillow.
+
+"'You are in trouble?' Pauline said, dipping her brush into the
+coloring.
+
+"'It is in your power to do me a great service, my dear child,' I
+answered.
+
+"The gladness in her eyes frightened me.
+
+"'Is it possible that she loves me?' I thought. 'Pauline,' I began. I
+went and sat near to her, so as to study her. My tones had been so
+searching that she read my thought; her eyes fell, and I scrutinized
+her face. It was so pure and frank that I fancied I could see as
+clearly into her heart as into my own.
+
+"'Do you love me?' I asked.
+
+"'A little,--passionately--not a bit!' she cried.
+
+"Then she did not love me. Her jesting tones, and a little gleeful
+movement that escaped her, expressed nothing beyond a girlish, blithe
+goodwill. I told her about my distress and the predicament in which I
+found myself, and asked her to help me.
+
+"'You do not wish to go to the pawnbroker's yourself, M. Raphael,'
+she answered, 'and yet you would send me!'
+
+"I blushed in confusion at the child's reasoning. She took my hand in
+hers as if she wanted to compensate for this home-truth by her light
+touch upon it.
+
+"'Oh, I would willingly go,' she said, 'but it is not necessary. I
+found two five-franc pieces at the back of the piano, that had slipped
+without your knowledge between the frame and the keyboard, and I laid
+them on your table.'
+
+"'You will soon be coming into some money, M. Raphael,' said the kind
+mother, showing her face between the curtains, 'and I can easily lend
+you a few crowns meanwhile.'
+
+"'Oh, Pauline!' I cried, as I pressed her hand, 'how I wish that I
+were rich!'
+
+"'Bah! why should you?' she said petulantly. Her hand shook in mine
+with the throbbing of her pulse; she snatched it away, and looked at
+both of mine.
+
+"'You will marry a rich wife,' she said, 'but she will give you a
+great deal of trouble. Ah, _Dieu_! she will be your death,--I am sure of
+it.'
+
+"In her exclamation there was something like belief in her mother's
+absurd superstitions.
+
+"'You are very credulous, Pauline!'
+
+"'The woman whom you will love is going to kill you--there is no
+doubt of it,' she said, looking at me with alarm.
+
+"She took up her brush again and dipped it in the color; her great
+agitation was evident; she looked at me no longer. I was ready to give
+credence just then to superstitious fancies; no man is utterly
+wretched so long as he is superstitious; a belief of that kind is
+often in reality a hope.
+
+"I found that those two magnificent five-franc pieces were lying, in
+fact, upon my table when I reached my room. During the first confused
+thoughts of early slumber, I tried to audit my accounts so as to
+explain this unhoped-for windfall; but I lost myself in useless
+calculations, and slept. Just as I was leaving my room to engage a box
+the next morning, Pauline came to see me.
+
+"'Perhaps your ten francs is not enough,' said the amiable,
+kind-hearted girl; 'my mother told me to offer you this money. Take
+it, please, take it!'
+
+"She laid three crowns upon the table, and tried to escape, but I
+would not let her go. Admiration dried the tears that sprang to my
+eyes.
+
+"'You are an angel, Pauline,' I said. 'It is not the loan that
+touches me so much as the delicacy with which it is offered. I used to
+wish for a rich wife, a fashionable woman of rank; and now, alas! I
+would rather possess millions, and find some girl, as poor as you are,
+with a generous nature like your own; and I would renounce a fatal
+passion which will kill me. Perhaps what you told me will come true.'
+
+"'That is enough,' she said, and fled away; the fresh trills of her
+birdlike voice rang up the staircase.
+
+"'She is very happy in not yet knowing love,' I said to myself,
+thinking of the torments I had endured for many months past.
+
+"Pauline's fifteen francs were invaluable to me. Foedora, thinking of
+the stifling odor of the crowded place where we were to spend several
+hours, was sorry that she had not brought a bouquet; I went in search
+of flowers for her, as I had laid already my life and my fate at her
+feet. With a pleasure in which compunction mingled, I gave her a
+bouquet. I learned from its price the extravagance of superficial
+gallantry in the world. But very soon she complained of the heavy
+scent of a Mexican jessamine. The interior of the theatre, the bare
+bench on which she was to sit, filled her with intolerable disgust;
+she upbraided me for bringing her there. Although she sat beside me,
+she wished to go, and she went. I had spent sleepless nights, and
+squandered two months of my life for her, and I could not please her.
+Never had that tormenting spirit been more unfeeling or more
+fascinating.
+
+"I sat beside her in the cramped back seat of the vehicle; all the way
+I could feel her breath on me and the contact of her perfumed glove; I
+saw distinctly all her exceeding beauty; I inhaled a vague scent of
+orris-root; so wholly a woman she was, with no touch of womanhood.
+Just then a sudden gleam of light lit up the depths of this mysterious
+life for me. I thought all at once of a book just published by a poet,
+a genuine conception of the artist, in the shape of the statue of
+Polycletus.
+
+"I seemed to see that monstrous creation, at one time an officer,
+breaking in a spirited horse; at another, a girl, who gives herself up
+to her toilette and breaks her lovers' hearts; or again, a false lover
+driving a timid and gentle maid to despair. Unable to analyze Foedora
+by any other process, I told her this fanciful story; but no hint of
+her resemblance to this poetry of the impossible crossed her--it
+simply diverted her; she was like a child over a story from the
+_Arabian Nights_.
+
+"'Foedora must be shielded by some talisman,' I thought to myself as
+I went back, 'or she could not resist the love of a man of my age, the
+infectious fever of that splendid malady of the soul. Is Foedora, like
+Lady Delacour, a prey to a cancer? Her life is certainly an unnatural
+one.'
+
+"I shuddered at the thought. Then I decided on a plan, at once the
+wildest and the most rational that lover ever dreamed of. I would
+study this woman from a physical point of view, as I had already
+studied her intellectually, and to this end I made up my mind to spend
+a night in her room without her knowledge. This project preyed upon me
+as a thirst for revenge gnaws at the heart of a Corsican monk. This is
+how I carried it out. On the days when Foedora received, her rooms
+were far too crowded for the hall-porter to keep the balance even
+between goers and comers; I could remain in the house, I felt sure,
+without causing a scandal in it, and I waited the countess' coming
+soiree with impatience. As I dressed I put a little English penknife
+into my waistcoat pocket, instead of a poniard. That literary
+implement, if found upon me, could awaken no suspicion, but I knew not
+whither my romantic resolution might lead, and I wished to be
+prepared.
+
+"As soon as the rooms began to fill, I entered the bedroom and
+examined the arrangements. The inner and outer shutters were closed;
+this was a good beginning; and as the waiting-maid might come to draw
+back the curtains that hung over the windows, I pulled them together.
+I was running great risks in venturing to manoeuvre beforehand in this
+way, but I had accepted the situation, and had deliberately reckoned
+with its dangers.
+
+"About midnight I hid myself in the embrasure of the window. I tried
+to scramble on to a ledge of the wainscoting, hanging on by the
+fastening of the shutters with my back against the wall, in such a
+position that my feet could not be visible. When I had carefully
+considered my points of support, and the space between me and the
+curtains, I had become sufficiently acquainted with all the
+difficulties of my position to stay in it without fear of detection if
+undisturbed by cramp, coughs, or sneezings. To avoid useless fatigue,
+I remained standing until the critical moment, when I must hang
+suspended like a spider in its web. The white-watered silk and muslin
+of the curtains spread before me in great pleats like organ-pipes.
+With my penknife I cut loopholes in them, through which I could see.
+
+"I heard vague murmurs from the salons, the laughter and the louder
+tones of the speakers. The smothered commotion and vague uproar
+lessened by slow degrees. One man and another came for his hat from
+the countess' chest of drawers, close to where I stood. I shivered, if
+the curtains were disturbed, at the thought of the mischances
+consequent on the confused and hasty investigations made by the men in
+a hurry to depart, who were rummaging everywhere. When I experienced
+no misfortunes of this kind, I augured well of my enterprise. An old
+wooer of Foedora's came for the last hat; he thought himself quite
+alone, looked at the bed, and heaved a great sigh, accompanied by some
+inaudible exclamation, into which he threw sufficient energy. In the
+boudoir close by, the countess, finding only some five or six intimate
+acquaintances about her, proposed tea. The scandals for which existing
+society has reserved the little faculty of belief that it retains,
+mingled with epigrams and trenchant witticisms, and the clatter of
+cups and spoons. Rastignac drew roars of laughter by merciless
+sarcasms at the expense of my rivals.
+
+"'M. de Rastignac is a man with whom it is better not to quarrel,'
+said the countess, laughing.
+
+"'I am quite of that opinion,' was his candid reply. 'I have always
+been right about my aversions--and my friendships as well,' he added.
+'Perhaps my enemies are quite as useful to me as my friends. I have
+made a particular study of modern phraseology, and of the natural
+craft that is used in all attack or defence. Official eloquence is one
+of our perfect social products.
+
+"'One of your friends is not clever, so you speak of his integrity
+and his candor. Another's work is heavy; you introduce it as a piece
+of conscientious labor; and if the book is ill written, you extol the
+ideas it contains. Such an one is treacherous and fickle, slips
+through your fingers every moment; bah! he is attractive, bewitching,
+he is delightful! Suppose they are enemies, you fling every one, dead
+or alive, in their teeth. You reverse your phraseology for their
+benefit, and you are as keen in detecting their faults as you were
+before adroit in bringing out the virtues of your friends. This way of
+using the mental lorgnette is the secret of conversation nowadays, and
+the whole art of the complete courtier. If you neglect it, you might
+as well go out as an unarmed knight-banneret to fight against men in
+armor. And I make use of it, and even abuse it at times. So we are
+respected--I and my friends; and, moreover, my sword is quite as sharp
+as my tongue.'
+
+"One of Foedora's most fervid worshipers, whose presumption was
+notorious, and who even made it contribute to his success, took up the
+glove thrown down so scornfully by Rastignac. He began an unmeasured
+eulogy of me, my performances, and my character. Rastignac had
+overlooked this method of detraction. His sarcastic encomiums misled
+the countess, who sacrificed without mercy; she betrayed my secrets,
+and derided my pretensions and my hopes, to divert her friends.
+
+"'There is a future before him,' said Rastignac. 'Some day he may be
+in a position to take a cruel revenge; his talents are at least equal
+to his courage; and I should consider those who attack him very rash,
+for he has a good memory----'
+
+"'And writes Memoirs,' put in the countess, who seemed to object to
+the deep silence that prevailed.
+
+"'Memoirs of a sham countess, madame,' replied Rastignac. 'Another
+sort of courage is needed to write that sort of thing.'
+
+"'I give him credit for plenty of courage,' she answered; 'he is
+faithful to me.'
+
+"I was greatly tempted to show myself suddenly among the railers, like
+the shade of Banquo in Macbeth. I should have lost a mistress, but I
+had a friend! But love inspired me all at once, with one of those
+treacherous and fallacious subtleties that it can use to soothe all
+our pangs.
+
+"If Foedora loved me, I thought, she would be sure to disguise her
+feelings by some mocking jest. How often the heart protests against a
+lie on the lips!
+
+"Well, very soon my audacious rival, left alone with the countess,
+rose to go.
+
+"'What! already?' asked she in a coaxing voice that set my heart
+beating. 'Will you not give me a few more minutes? Have you nothing
+more to say to me? will you never sacrifice any of your pleasures for
+me?'
+
+"He went away.
+
+"'Ah!' she yawned; 'how very tiresome they all are!'
+
+"She pulled a cord energetically till the sound of a bell rang through
+the place; then, humming a few notes of _Pria che spunti_, the countess
+entered her room. No one had ever heard her sing; her muteness had
+called forth the wildest explanations. She had promised her first
+lover, so it was said, who had been held captive by her talent, and
+whose jealousy over her stretched beyond his grave, that she would
+never allow others to experience a happiness that he wished to be his
+and his alone.
+
+"I exerted every power of my soul to catch the sounds. Higher and
+higher rose the notes; Foedora's life seemed to dilate within her; her
+throat poured forth all its richest tones; something well-nigh divine
+entered into the melody. There was a bright purity and clearness of
+tone in the countess' voice, a thrilling harmony which reached the
+heart and stirred its pulses. Musicians are seldom unemotional; a
+woman who could sing like that must know how to love indeed. Her
+beautiful voice made one more puzzle in a woman mysterious enough
+before. I beheld her then, as plainly as I see you at this moment. She
+seemed to listen to herself, to experience a secret rapture of her
+own; she felt, as it were, an ecstasy like that of love.
+
+"She stood before the hearth during the execution of the principal
+theme of the _rondo_; and when she ceased her face changed. She looked
+tired; her features seemed to alter. She had laid the mask aside; her
+part as an actress was over. Yet the faded look that came over her
+beautiful face, a result either of this performance or of the
+evening's fatigues, had its charms, too.
+
+"'This is her real self,' I thought.
+
+"She set her foot on a bronze bar of the fender as if to warm it, took
+off her gloves, and drew over her head the gold chain from which her
+bejeweled scent-bottle hung. It gave me a quite indescribable pleasure
+to watch the feline grace of every movement; the supple grace a cat
+displays as it adjusts its toilette in the sun. She looked at herself
+in the mirror and said aloud ill-humoredly--'I did not look well this
+evening, my complexion is going with alarming rapidity; perhaps I
+ought to keep earlier hours, and give up this life of dissipation.
+Does Justine mean to trifle with me?' She rang again; her maid hurried
+in. Where she had been I cannot tell; she came in by a secret
+staircase. I was anxious to make a study of her. I had lodged
+accusations, in my romantic imaginings, against this invisible
+waiting-woman, a tall, well-made brunette.
+
+"'Did madame ring?'
+
+"'Yes, twice,' answered Foedora; 'are you really growing deaf
+nowadays?'
+
+"'I was preparing madame's milk of almonds.'
+
+"Justine knelt down before her, unlaced her sandals and drew them off,
+while her mistress lay carelessly back on her cushioned armchair
+beside the fire, yawned, and scratched her head. Every movement was
+perfectly natural; there was nothing whatever to indicate the secret
+sufferings or emotions with which I had credited her.
+
+"'George must be in love!' she remarked. 'I shall dismiss him. He has
+drawn the curtains again to-night. What does he mean by it?'
+
+"All the blood in my veins rushed to my heart at this observation, but
+no more was said about curtains.
+
+"'Life is very empty,' the countess went on. 'Ah! be careful not to
+scratch me as you did yesterday. Just look here, I still have the
+marks of your nails about me,' and she held out a silken knee. She
+thrust her bare feet into velvet slippers bound with swan's-down, and
+unfastened her dress, while Justine prepared to comb her hair.
+
+"'You ought to marry, madame, and have children.'
+
+"'Children!' she cried; 'it wants no more than that to finish me at
+once; and a husband! What man is there to whom I could----? Was my
+hair well arranged to-night?'
+
+"'Not particularly.'
+
+"'You are a fool!'
+
+"'That way of crimping your hair too much is the least becoming way
+possible for you. Large, smooth curls suit you a great deal better.'
+
+"'Really?'
+
+"'Yes, really, madame; that wavy style only looks nice in fair hair.'
+
+"'Marriage? never, never! Marriage is a commercial arrangement, for
+which I was never made.'
+
+"What a disheartening scene for a lover! Here was a lonely woman,
+without friends or kin, without the religion of love, without faith in
+any affection. Yet however slightly she might feel the need to pour
+out her heart, a craving that every human being feels, it could only
+be satisfied by gossiping with her maid, by trivial and indifferent
+talk. . . . I grieved for her.
+
+"Justine unlaced her. I watched her carefully when she was at last
+unveiled. Her maidenly form, in its rose-tinged whiteness, was visible
+through her shift in the taper light, as dazzling as some silver
+statue behind its gauze covering. No, there was no defect that need
+shrink from the stolen glances of love. Alas, a fair form will
+overcome the stoutest resolutions!
+
+"The maid lighted the taper in the alabaster sconce that hung before
+the bed, while her mistress sat thoughtful and silent before the fire.
+Justine went for a warming-pan, turned down the bed, and helped to lay
+her mistress in it; then, after some further time spent in
+punctiliously rendering various services that showed how seriously
+Foedora respected herself, her maid left her. The countess turned to
+and fro several times, and sighed; she was ill at ease; faint, just
+perceptible sounds, like sighs of impatience, escaped from her lips.
+She reached out a hand to the table, and took a flask from it, from
+which she shook four or five drops of some brown liquid into some milk
+before taking it; again there followed some painful sighs, and the
+exclamation, '_Mon Dieu_!'
+
+"The cry, and the tone in which it was uttered, wrung my heart. By
+degrees she lay motionless. This frightened me; but very soon I heard
+a sleeper's heavy, regular breathing. I drew the rustling silk
+curtains apart, left my post, went to the foot of the bed, and gazed
+at her with feelings that I cannot define. She was so enchanting as
+she lay like a child, with her arm above her head; but the sweetness
+of the fair, quiet visage, surrounded by the lace, only irritated me.
+I had not been prepared for the torture to which I was compelled to
+submit.
+
+"'_Mon Dieu_!' that scrap of a thought which I understood not, but must
+even take as my sole light, had suddenly modified my opinion of
+Foedora. Trite or profoundly significant, frivolous or of deep import,
+the words might be construed as expressive of either pleasure or pain,
+of physical or of mental suffering. Was it a prayer or a malediction,
+a forecast or a memory, a fear or a regret? A whole life lay in that
+utterance, a life of wealth or of penury; perhaps it contained a
+crime!
+
+"The mystery that lurked beneath this fair semblance of womanhood grew
+afresh; there were so many ways of explaining Foedora, that she became
+inexplicable. A sort of language seemed to flow from between her lips.
+I put thoughts and feelings into the accidents of her breathing,
+whether weak or regular, gentle, or labored. I shared her dreams; I
+would fain have divined her secrets by reading them through her
+slumber. I hesitated among contradictory opinions and decisions
+without number. I could not deny my heart to the woman I saw before
+me, with the calm, pure beauty in her face. I resolved to make one
+more effort. If I told her the story of my life, my love, my
+sacrifices, might I not awaken pity in her or draw a tear from her who
+never wept?
+
+"As I set all my hopes on this last experiment, the sounds in the
+streets showed that day was at hand. For a moment's space I pictured
+Foedora waking to find herself in my arms. I could have stolen softly
+to her side and slipped them about her in a close embrace. Resolved to
+resist the cruel tyranny of this thought, I hurried into the salon,
+heedless of any sounds I might make; but, luckily, I came upon a
+secret door leading to a little staircase. As I expected, the key was
+in the lock; I slammed the door, went boldly out into the court, and
+gained the street in three bounds, without looking round to see
+whether I was observed.
+
+"A dramatist was to read a comedy at the countess' house in two days'
+time; I went thither, intending to outstay the others, so as to make a
+rather singular request to her; I meant to ask her to keep the
+following evening for me alone, and to deny herself to other comers;
+but when I found myself alone with her, my courage failed. Every tick
+of the clock alarmed me. It wanted only a quarter of an hour of
+midnight.
+
+"'If I do not speak,' I thought to myself, 'I must smash my head
+against the corner of the mantelpiece.'
+
+"I gave myself three minutes' grace; the three minutes went by, and I
+did not smash my head upon the marble; my heart grew heavy, like a
+sponge with water.
+
+"'You are exceedingly amusing,' said she.
+
+"'Ah, madame, if you could but understand me!' I answered.
+
+"'What is the matter with you?' she asked. 'You are turning pale.'
+
+"'I am hesitating to ask a favor of you.'
+
+"Her gesture revived my courage. I asked her to make the appointment
+with me.
+
+"'Willingly,' she answered' 'but why will you not speak to me now?'
+
+"'To be candid with you, I ought to explain the full scope of your
+promise: I want to spend this evening by your side, as if we were
+brother and sister. Have no fear; I am aware of your antipathies; you
+must have divined me sufficiently to feel sure that I should wish you
+to do nothing that could be displeasing to you; presumption, moreover,
+would not thus approach you. You have been a friend to me, you have
+shown me kindness and great indulgence; know, therefore, that
+to-morrow I must bid you farewell.--Do not take back your word,' I
+exclaimed, seeing her about to speak, and I went away.
+
+"At eight o'clock one evening towards the end of May, Foedora and I
+were alone together in her gothic boudoir. I feared no longer; I was
+secure of happiness. My mistress should be mine, or I would seek a
+refuge in death. I had condemned my faint-hearted love, and a man who
+acknowledges his weakness is strong indeed.
+
+"The countess, in her blue cashmere gown, was reclining on a sofa,
+with her feet on a cushion. She wore an Oriental turban such as
+painters assign to early Hebrews; its strangeness added an
+indescribable coquettish grace to her attractions. A transitory charm
+seemed to have laid its spell on her face; it might have furnished the
+argument that at every instant we become new and unparalleled beings,
+without any resemblance to the _us_ of the future or of the past. I had
+never yet seen her so radiant.
+
+"'Do you know that you have piqued my curiosity?' she said, laughing.
+
+"'I will not disappoint it,' I said quietly, as I seated myself near
+to her and took the hand that she surrendered to me. 'You have a very
+beautiful voice!'
+
+"'You have never heard me sing!' she exclaimed, starting
+involuntarily with surprise.
+
+"'I will prove that it is quite otherwise, whenever it is necessary.
+Is your delightful singing still to remain a mystery? Have no fear, I
+do not wish to penetrate it.'
+
+"We spent about an hour in familiar talk. While I adopted the attitude
+and manner of a man to whom Foedora must refuse nothing, I showed her
+all a lover's deference. Acting in this way, I received a favor--I was
+allowed to kiss her hand. She daintily drew off the glove, and my
+whole soul was dissolved and poured forth in that kiss. I was steeped
+in the bliss of an illusion in which I tried to believe.
+
+"Foedora lent herself most unexpectedly to my caress and my
+flatteries. Do not accuse me of faint-heartedness; if I had gone a
+step beyond these fraternal compliments, the claws would have been out
+of the sheath and into me. We remained perfectly silent for nearly ten
+minutes. I was admiring her, investing her with the charms she had
+not. She was mine just then, and mine only,--this enchanting being was
+mine, as was permissible, in my imagination; my longing wrapped her
+round and held her close; in my soul I wedded her. The countess was
+subdued and fascinated by my magnetic influence. Ever since I have
+regretted that this subjugation was not absolute; but just then I
+yearned for her soul, her heart alone, and for nothing else. I longed
+for an ideal and perfect happiness, a fair illusion that cannot last
+for very long. At last I spoke, feeling that the last hours of my
+frenzy were at hand.
+
+"'Hear me, madame. I love you, and you know it; I have said so a
+hundred times; you must have understood me. I would not take upon me
+the airs of a coxcomb, nor would I flatter you, nor urge myself upon
+you like a fool; I would not owe your love to such arts as these! so I
+have been misunderstood. What sufferings have I not endured for your
+sake! For these, however, you were not to blame; but in a few minutes
+you shall decide for yourself. There are two kinds of poverty, madame.
+One kind openly walks the street in rags, an unconscious imitator of
+Diogenes, on a scanty diet, reducing life to its simplest terms; he is
+happier, maybe, than the rich; he has fewer cares at any rate, and
+accepts such portions of the world as stronger spirits refuse. Then
+there is poverty in splendor, a Spanish pauper, concealing the life of
+a beggar by his title, his bravery, and his pride; poverty that wears
+a white waistcoat and yellow kid gloves, a beggar with a carriage,
+whose whole career will be wrecked for lack of a halfpenny. Poverty of
+the first kind belongs to the populace; the second kind is that of
+blacklegs, of kings, and of men of talent. I am neither a man of the
+people, nor a king, nor a swindler; possibly I have no talent either,
+I am an exception. With the name I bear I must die sooner than beg.
+Set your mind at rest, madame,' I said; 'to-day I have abundance, I
+possess sufficient of the clay for my needs'; for the hard look passed
+over her face which we wear whenever a well-dressed beggar takes us by
+surprise. 'Do you remember the day when you wished to go to the
+Gymnase without me, never believing that I should be there?' I went
+on.
+
+"She nodded.
+
+"'I had laid out my last five-franc piece that I might see you there.
+--Do you recollect our walk in the Jardin des Plantes? The hire of
+your cab took everything I had.'
+
+"I told her about my sacrifices, and described the life I led; heated
+not with wine, as I am to-day, but by the generous enthusiasm of my
+heart, my passion overflowed in burning words; I have forgotten how
+the feelings within me blazed forth; neither memory nor skill of mine
+could possibly reproduce it. It was no colorless chronicle of blighted
+affections; my love was strengthened by fair hopes; and such words
+came to me, by love's inspiration, that each had power to set forth a
+whole life--like echoes of the cries of a soul in torment. In such
+tones the last prayers ascend from dying men on the battlefield. I
+stopped, for she was weeping. _Grand Dieu_! I had reaped an actor's
+reward, the success of a counterfeit passion displayed at the cost of
+five francs paid at the theatre door. I had drawn tears from her.
+
+"'If I had known----' she said.
+
+"'Do not finish the sentence,' I broke in. 'Even now I love you well
+enough to murder you----'
+
+"She reached for the bell-pull. I burst into a roar of laughter.
+
+"'Do not call any one,' I said. 'I shall leave you to finish your
+life in peace. It would be a blundering kind of hatred that would
+murder you! You need not fear violence of any kind; I have spent a
+whole night at the foot of your bed without----'
+
+"'Monsieur----' she said, blushing; but after that first impulse of
+modesty that even the most hardened women must surely own, she flung a
+scornful glance at me, and said:
+
+"'You must have been very cold.'
+
+"'Do you think that I set such value on your beauty, madame,' I
+answered, guessing the thoughts that moved her. 'Your beautiful face
+is for me a promise of a soul yet more beautiful. Madame, those to
+whom a woman is merely a woman can always purchase odalisques fit for
+the seraglio, and achieve their happiness at a small cost. But I
+aspired to something higher; I wanted the life of close communion of
+heart and heart with you that have no heart. I know that now. If you
+were to belong to another, I could kill him. And yet, no; for you
+would love him, and his death might hurt you perhaps. What agony this
+is!' I cried.
+
+"'If it is any comfort to you,' she retorted cheerfully, 'I can
+assure you that I shall never belong to any one----'
+
+"'So you offer an affront to God Himself,' I interrupted; 'and you
+will be punished for it. Some day you will lie upon your sofa
+suffering unheard-of ills, unable to endure the light or the slightest
+sound, condemned to live as it were in the tomb. Then, when you seek
+the causes of those lingering and avenging torments, you will remember
+the woes that you distributed so lavishly upon your way. You have sown
+curses, and hatred will be your reward. We are the real judges, the
+executioners of a justice that reigns here below, which overrules the
+justice of man and the laws of God.'
+
+"'No doubt it is very culpable in me not to love you,' she said,
+laughing. 'Am I to blame? No. I do not love you; you are a man, that
+is sufficient. I am happy by myself; why should I give up my way of
+living, a selfish way, if you will, for the caprices of a master?
+Marriage is a sacrament by virtue of which each imparts nothing but
+vexations to the other. Children, moreover, worry me. Did I not
+faithfully warn you about my nature? Why are you not satisfied to have
+my friendship? I wish I could make you amends for all the troubles I
+have caused you, through not guessing the value of your poor
+five-franc pieces. I appreciate the extent of your sacrifices; but your
+devotion and delicate tact can be repaid by love alone, and I care so
+little for you, that this scene has a disagreeable effect upon me.'
+
+"'I am fully aware of my absurdity,' I said, unable to restrain my
+tears. 'Pardon me,' I went on, 'it was a delight to hear those cruel
+words you have just uttered, so well I love you. O, if I could testify
+my love with every drop of blood in me!'
+
+"'Men always repeat these classic formulas to us, more or less
+effectively,' she answered, still smiling. 'But it appears very
+difficult to die at our feet, for I see corpses of that kind about
+everywhere. It is twelve o'clock. Allow me to go to bed.'
+
+"'And in two hours' time you will cry to yourself, _Ah, mon Dieu_!'
+
+"'Like the day before yesterday! Yes,' she said, 'I was thinking of
+my stockbroker; I had forgotten to tell him to convert my five per
+cent stock into threes, and the three per cents had fallen during the
+day.'
+
+"I looked at her, and my eyes glittered with anger. Sometimes a crime
+may be a whole romance; I understood that just then. She was so
+accustomed, no doubt, to the most impassioned declarations of this
+kind, that my words and my tears were forgotten already.
+
+"'Would you marry a peer of France?' I demanded abruptly.
+
+"'If he were a duke, I might.'
+
+"I seized my hat and made her a bow.
+
+"'Permit me to accompany you to the door,' she said, cutting irony in
+her tones, in the poise of her head, and in her gesture.
+
+"'Madame----'
+
+"'Monsieur?'
+
+"'I shall never see you again.'
+
+"'I hope not,' and she insolently inclined her head.
+
+"'You wish to be a duchess?' I cried, excited by a sort of madness
+that her insolence roused in me. 'You are wild for honors and titles?
+Well, only let me love you; bid my pen write and my voice speak for
+you alone; be the inmost soul of my life, my guiding star! Then, only
+accept me for your husband as a minister, a peer of France, a duke. I
+will make of myself whatever you would have me be!'
+
+"'You made good use of the time you spent with the advocate,' she
+said smiling. 'There is a fervency about your pleadings.'
+
+"'The present is yours,' I cried, 'but the future is mine! I only
+lose a woman; you are losing a name and a family. Time is big with my
+revenge; time will spoil your beauty, and yours will be a solitary
+death; and glory waits for me!'
+
+"'Thanks for your peroration!' she said, repressing a yawn; the wish
+that she might never see me again was expressed in her whole bearing.
+
+"That remark silenced me. I flung at her a glance full of hatred, and
+hurried away.
+
+"Foedora must be forgotten; I must cure myself of my infatuation, and
+betake myself once more to my lonely studies, or die. So I set myself
+tremendous tasks; I determined to complete my labors. For fifteen days
+I never left my garret, spending whole nights in pallid thought. I
+worked with difficulty, and by fits and starts, despite my courage and
+the stimulation of despair. The music had fled. I could not exorcise
+the brilliant mocking image of Foedora. Something morbid brooded over
+every thought, a vague longing as dreadful as remorse. I imitated the
+anchorites of the Thebaid. If I did not pray as they did, I lived a
+life in the desert like theirs, hewing out my ideas as they were wont
+to hew their rocks. I could at need have girdled my waist with spikes,
+that physical suffering might quell mental anguish.
+
+"One evening Pauline found her way into my room.
+
+"'You are killing yourself,' she said imploringly; 'you should go out
+and see your friends----'
+
+"'Pauline, you were a true prophet; Foedora is killing me, I want to
+die. My life is intolerable.'
+
+"'Is there only one woman in the world?' she asked, smiling. 'Why
+make yourself so miserable in so short a life?'
+
+"I looked at Pauline in bewilderment. She left me before I noticed her
+departure; the sound of her words had reached me, but not their sense.
+Very soon I had to take my Memoirs in manuscript to my
+literary-contractor. I was so absorbed by my passion, that I could not
+remember how I had managed to live without money; I only knew that the
+four hundred and fifty francs due to me would pay my debts. So I went
+to receive my salary, and met Rastignac, who thought me changed and
+thinner.
+
+"'What hospital have you been discharged from?' he asked.
+
+"'That woman is killing me,' I answered; 'I can neither despise her
+nor forget her.'
+
+"'You had much better kill her, then perhaps you would think no more
+of her,' he said, laughing.
+
+"'I have often thought of it,' I replied; 'but though sometimes the
+thought of a crime revives my spirits, of violence and murder, either
+or both, I am really incapable of carrying out the design. The
+countess is an admirable monster who would crave for pardon, and not
+every man is an Othello.'
+
+"'She is like every woman who is beyond our reach,' Rastignac
+interrupted.
+
+"'I am mad,' I cried; 'I can feel the madness raging at times in my
+brain. My ideas are like shadows; they flit before me, and I cannot
+grasp them. Death would be preferable to this life, and I have
+carefully considered the best way of putting an end to the struggle. I
+am not thinking of the living Foedora in the Faubourg Saint Honore,
+but of my Foedora here,' and I tapped my forehead. 'What to you say to
+opium?'
+
+"'Pshaw! horrid agonies,' said Rastignac.
+
+"'Or charcoal fumes?'
+
+"'A low dodge.'
+
+"'Or the Seine?'
+
+"'The drag-nets, and the Morgue too, are filthy.'
+
+"'A pistol-shot?'
+
+"'And if you miscalculate, you disfigure yourself for life. Listen to
+me,' he went on, 'like all young men, I have pondered over suicide.
+Which of us hasn't killed himself two or three times before he is
+thirty? I find there is no better course than to use existence as a
+means of pleasure. Go in for thorough dissipation, and your passion or
+you will perish in it. Intemperance, my dear fellow, commands all
+forms of death. Does she not wield the thunderbolt of apoplexy?
+Apoplexy is a pistol-shot that does not miscalculate. Orgies are
+lavish in all physical pleasures; is not that the small change for
+opium? And the riot that makes us drink to excess bears a challenge to
+mortal combat with wine. That butt of Malmsey of the Duke of
+Clarence's must have had a pleasanter flavor than Seine mud. When we
+sink gloriously under the table, is not that a periodical death by
+drowning on a small scale? If we are picked up by the police and
+stretched out on those chilly benches of theirs at the police-station,
+do we not enjoy all the pleasures of the Morgue? For though we are not
+blue and green, muddy and swollen corpses, on the other hand we have
+the consciousness of the climax.
+
+"'Ah,' he went on, 'this protracted suicide has nothing in common
+with the bankrupt grocer's demise. Tradespeople have brought the river
+into disrepute; they fling themselves in to soften their creditors'
+hearts. In your place I should endeavor to die gracefully; and if you
+wish to invent a novel way of doing it, by struggling with life after
+this manner, I will be your second. I am disappointed and sick of
+everything. The Alsacienne, whom it was proposed that I should marry,
+had six toes on her left foot; I cannot possibly live with a woman who
+has six toes! It would get about to a certainty, and then I should be
+ridiculous. Her income was only eighteen thousand francs; her fortune
+diminished in quantity as her toes increased. The devil take it; if we
+begin an outrageous sort of life, we may come on some bit of luck,
+perhaps!'
+
+"Rastignac's eloquence carried me away. The attractions of the plan
+shone too temptingly, hopes were kindled, the poetical aspects of the
+matter appealed to a poet.
+
+"'How about money?' I said.
+
+"'Haven't you four hundred and fifty francs?'
+
+"'Yes, but debts to my landlady and the tailor----'
+
+"'You would pay your tailor? You will never be anything whatever, not
+so much as a minister.'
+
+"'But what can one do with twenty louis?'
+
+"'Go to the gaming-table.'
+
+"I shuddered.
+
+"'You are going to launch out into what I call systematic
+dissipation,' said he, noticing my scruples, 'and yet you are afraid
+of a green table-cloth.'
+
+"'Listen to me,' I answered. 'I promised my father never to set foot
+in a gaming-house. Not only is that a sacred promise, but I still feel
+an unconquerable disgust whenever I pass a gambling-hell; take the
+money and go without me. While our fortune is at stake, I will set my
+own affairs straight, and then I will go to your lodgings and wait for
+you.'
+
+"That was the way I went to perdition. A young man has only to come
+across a woman who will not love him, or a woman who loves him too
+well, and his whole life becomes a chaos. Prosperity swallows up our
+energy just as adversity obscures our virtues. Back once more in my
+Hotel de Saint-Quentin, I gazed about me a long while in the garret
+where I had led my scholar's temperate life, a life which would
+perhaps have been a long and honorable one, and that I ought not to
+have quitted for the fevered existence which had urged me to the brink
+of a precipice. Pauline surprised me in this dejected attitude.
+
+"'Why, what is the matter with you?' she asked.
+
+"I rose and quietly counted out the money owing to her mother, and
+added to it sufficient to pay for six months' rent in advance. She
+watched me in some alarm.
+
+"'I am going to leave you, dear Pauline.'
+
+"'I knew it!' she exclaimed.
+
+"'Listen, my child. I have not given up the idea of coming back. Keep
+my room for me for six months. If I do not return by the fifteenth of
+November, you will come into possession of my things. This sealed
+packet of manuscript is the fair copy of my great work on "The
+Will,"' I went on, pointing to a package. 'Will you deposit it in the
+King's Library? And you may do as you wish with everything that is
+left here.'
+
+"Her look weighed heavily on my heart; Pauline was an embodiment of
+conscience there before me.
+
+"'I shall have no more lessons,' she said, pointing to the piano.
+
+"I did not answer that.
+
+"'Will you write to me?'
+
+"'Good-bye, Pauline.'
+
+"I gently drew her towards me, and set a kiss on that innocent fair
+brow of hers, like snow that has not yet touched the earth--a father's
+or a brother's kiss. She fled. I would not see Madame Gaudin, hung my
+key in its wonted place, and departed. I was almost at the end of the
+Rue de Cluny when I heard a woman's light footstep behind me.
+
+"'I have embroidered this purse for you,' Pauline said; 'will you
+refuse even that?'
+
+"By the light of the street lamp I thought I saw tears in Pauline's
+eyes, and I groaned. Moved perhaps by a common impulse, we parted in
+haste like people who fear the contagion of the plague.
+
+"As I waited with dignified calmness for Rastignac's return, his room
+seemed a grotesque interpretation of the sort of life I was about to
+enter upon. The clock on the chimney-piece was surmounted by a Venus
+resting on her tortoise; a half-smoked cigar lay in her arms. Costly
+furniture of various kinds--love tokens, very likely--was scattered
+about. Old shoes lay on a luxurious sofa. The comfortable armchair
+into which I had thrown myself bore as many scars as a veteran; the
+arms were gnashed, the back was overlaid with a thick, stale deposit
+of pomade and hair-oil from the heads of all his visitors. Splendor
+and squalor were oddly mingled, on the walls, the bed, and everywhere.
+You might have thought of a Neapolitan palace and the groups of
+lazzaroni about it. It was the room of a gambler or a mauvais sujet,
+where the luxury exists for one individual, who leads the life of the
+senses and does not trouble himself over inconsistencies.
+
+"There was a certain imaginative element about the picture it
+presented. Life was suddenly revealed there in its rags and spangles
+as the incomplete thing it really is, of course, but so vividly and
+picturesquely; it was like a den where a brigand has heaped up all the
+plunder in which he delights. Some pages were missing from a copy of
+Byron's poems: they had gone to light a fire of a few sticks for this
+young person, who played for stakes of a thousand francs, and had not
+a faggot; he kept a tilbury, and had not a whole shirt to his back.
+Any day a countess or an actress or a run of luck at ecarte might set
+him up with an outfit worthy of a king. A candle had been stuck into
+the green bronze sheath of a vestaholder; a woman's portrait lay
+yonder, torn out of its carved gold setting. How was it possible that
+a young man, whose nature craved excitement, could renounce a life so
+attractive by reason of its contradictions; a life that afforded all
+the delights of war in the midst of peace? I was growing drowsy when
+Rastignac kicked the door open and shouted:
+
+"'Victory! Now we can take our time about dying.'
+
+"He held out his hat filled with gold to me, and put it down on the
+table; then we pranced round it like a pair of cannibals about to eat
+a victim; we stamped, and danced, and yelled, and sang; we gave each
+other blows fit to kill an elephant, at sight of all the pleasures of
+the world contained in that hat.
+
+"'Twenty-seven thousand francs,' said Rastignac, adding a few
+bank-notes to the pile of gold. 'That would be enough for other folk
+to live upon; will it be sufficient for us to die on? Yes! we will
+breathe our last in a bath of gold--hurrah!' and we capered afresh.
+
+"We divided the windfall. We began with double-napoleons, and came
+down to the smaller coins, one by one. 'This for you, this for me,' we
+kept saying, distilling our joy drop by drop.
+
+"'We won't go to sleep,' cried Rastignac. 'Joseph! some punch!'
+
+"He threw gold to his faithful attendant.
+
+"'There is your share,' he said; 'go and bury yourself if you can.'
+
+"Next day I went to Lesage and chose my furniture, took the rooms that
+you know in the Rue Taitbout, and left the decoration to one of the
+best upholsterers. I bought horses. I plunged into a vortex of
+pleasures, at once hollow and real. I went in for play, gaining and
+losing enormous sums, but only at friends' houses and in ballrooms;
+never in gaming-houses, for which I still retained the holy horror of
+my early days. Without meaning it, I made some friends, either through
+quarrels or owing to the easy confidence established among those who
+are going to the bad together; nothing, possibly, makes us cling to
+one another so tightly as our evil propensities.
+
+"I made several ventures in literature, which were flatteringly
+received. Great men who followed the profession of letters, having
+nothing to fear from me, belauded me, not so much on account of my
+merits as to cast a slur on those of their rivals.
+
+"I became a 'free-liver,' to make use of the picturesque expression
+appropriated by the language of excess. I made it a point of honor not
+to be long about dying, and that my zeal and prowess should eclipse
+those displayed by all others in the jolliest company. I was always
+spruce and carefully dressed. I had some reputation for cleverness.
+There was no sign about me of the fearful way of living which makes a
+man into a mere disgusting apparatus, a funnel, a pampered beast.
+
+"Very soon Debauch rose before me in all the majesty of its horror,
+and I grasped all that it meant. Those prudent, steady-going
+characters who are laying down wine in bottles for their heirs, can
+barely conceive, it is true, of so wide a theory of life, nor
+appreciate its normal condition; but when will you instill poetry into
+the provincial intellect? Opium and tea, with all their delights, are
+merely drugs to folk of that calibre.
+
+"Is not the imperfect sybarite to be met with even in Paris itself,
+that intellectual metropolis? Unfit to endure the fatigues of
+pleasure, this sort of person, after a drinking bout, is very much
+like those worthy bourgeois who fall foul of music after hearing a new
+opera by Rossini. Does he not renounce these courses in the same frame
+of mind that leads an abstemious man to forswear Ruffec pates, because
+the first one, forsooth, gave him the indigestion?
+
+"Debauch is as surely an art as poetry, and is not for craven spirits.
+To penetrate its mysteries and appreciate its charms, conscientious
+application is required; and as with every path of knowledge, the way
+is thorny and forbidding at the outset. The great pleasures of
+humanity are hedged about with formidable obstacles; not its single
+enjoyments, but enjoyment as a system, a system which establishes
+seldom experienced sensations and makes them habitual, which
+concentrates and multiplies them for us, creating a dramatic life
+within our life, and imperatively demanding a prompt and enormous
+expenditure of vitality.  War, Power, Art, like Debauch, are all forms
+of demoralization, equally remote from the faculties of humanity,
+equally profound, and all are alike difficult of access. But when man
+has once stormed the heights of these grand mysteries, does he not
+walk in another world? Are not generals, ministers, and artists
+carried, more or less, towards destruction by the need of violent
+distractions in an existence so remote from ordinary life as theirs?
+
+"War, after all, is the Excess of bloodshed, as the Excess of
+self-interest produces Politics. Excesses of every sort are brothers.
+These social enormities possess the attraction of the abyss; they draw
+towards themselves as St. Helena beckoned Napoleon; we are fascinated,
+our heads swim, we wish to sound their depths though we cannot account
+for the wish. Perhaps the thought of Infinity dwells in these
+precipices, perhaps they contain some colossal flattery for the soul
+of man; for is he not, then, wholly absorbed in himself?
+
+"The wearied artist needs a complete contrast to his paradise of
+imaginings and of studious hours; he either craves, like God, the
+seventh day of rest, or with Satan, the pleasures of hell; so that his
+senses may have free play in opposition to the employment of his
+faculties. Byron could never have taken for his relaxation to the
+independent gentleman's delights of boston and gossip, for he was a
+poet, and so must needs pit Greece against Mahmoud.
+
+"In war, is not man an angel of extirpation, a sort of executioner on
+a gigantic scale? Must not the spell be strong indeed that makes us
+undergo such horrid sufferings so hostile to our weak frames,
+sufferings that encircle every strong passion with a hedge of thorns?
+The tobacco smoker is seized with convulsions, and goes through a kind
+of agony consequent upon his excesses; but has he not borne a part in
+delightful festivals in realms unknown? Has Europe ever ceased from
+wars? She has never given herself time to wipe the stains from her
+feet that are steeped in blood to the ankle. Mankind at large is
+carried away by fits of intoxication, as nature has its accessions of
+love.
+
+"For men in private life, for a vegetating Mirabeau dreaming of storms
+in a time of calm, Excess comprises all things; it perpetually
+embraces the whole sum of life; it is something better still--it is a
+duel with an antagonist of unknown power, a monster, terrible at first
+sight, that must be seized by the horns, a labor that cannot be
+imagined.
+
+"Suppose that nature has endowed you with a feeble stomach or one of
+limited capacity; you acquire a mastery over it and improve it; you
+learn to carry your liquor; you grow accustomed to being drunk; you
+pass whole nights without sleep; at last you acquire the constitution
+of a colonel of cuirassiers; and in this way you create yourself
+afresh, as if to fly in the face of Providence.
+
+"A man transformed after this sort is like a neophyte who has at last
+become a veteran, has accustomed his mind to shot and shell and his
+legs to lengthy marches. When the monster's hold on him is still
+uncertain, and it is not yet known which will have the better of it,
+they roll over and over, alternately victor and vanquished, in a world
+where everything is wonderful, where every ache of the soul is laid to
+sleep, where only the shadows of ideas are revived.
+
+"This furious struggle has already become a necessity for us. The
+prodigal has struck a bargain for all the enjoyments with which life
+teems abundantly, at the price of his own death, like the mythical
+persons in legends who sold themselves to the devil for the power of
+doing evil. For them, instead of flowing quietly on in its monotonous
+course in the depths of some counting-house or study, life is poured
+out in a boiling torrent.
+
+"Excess is, in short, for the body what the mystic's ecstasy is for
+the soul. Intoxication steeps you in fantastic imaginings every whit
+as strange as those of ecstatics. You know hours as full of rapture as
+a young girl's dreams; you travel without fatigue; you chat pleasantly
+with your friends; words come to you with a whole life in each, and
+fresh pleasures without regrets; poems are set forth for you in a few
+brief phrases. The coarse animal satisfaction, in which science has
+tried to find a soul, is followed by the enchanted drowsiness that men
+sigh for under the burden of consciousness. Is it not because they all
+feel the need of absolute repose? Because Excess is a sort of toll
+that genius pays to pain?
+
+"Look at all great men; nature made them pleasure-loving or base,
+every one. Some mocking or jealous power corrupted them in either soul
+or body, so as to make all their powers futile, and their efforts of
+no avail.
+
+"All men and all things appear before you in the guise you choose, in
+those hours when wine has sway. You are lord of all creation; you
+transform it at your pleasure. And throughout this unceasing delirium,
+Play may pour, at your will, its molten lead into your veins.
+
+"Some day you will fall into the monster's power. Then you will have,
+as I had, a frenzied awakening, with impotence sitting by your pillow.
+Are you an old soldier? Phthisis attacks you. A diplomatist? An
+aneurism hangs death in your heart by a thread. It will perhaps be
+consumption that will cry out to me, 'Let us be going!' as to Raphael
+of Urbino, in old time, killed by an excess of love.
+
+"In this way I have existed. I was launched into the world too early
+or too late. My energy would have been dangerous there, no doubt, if I
+had not have squandered it in such ways as these. Was not the world
+rid of an Alexander, by the cup of Hercules, at the close of a
+drinking bout?
+
+"There are some, the sport of Destiny, who must either have heaven or
+hell, the hospice of St. Bernard or riotous excess. Only just now I
+lacked the heart to moralize about those two," and he pointed to
+Euphrasia and Aquilina. "They are types of my own personal history,
+images of my life! I could scarcely reproach them; they stood before
+me like judges.
+
+"In the midst of this drama that I was enacting, and while my
+distracting disorder was at its height, two crises supervened; each
+brought me keen and abundant pangs. The first came a few days after I
+had flung myself, like Sardanapalus, on my pyre. I met Foedora under
+the peristyle of the Bouffons. We both were waiting for our carriages.
+
+"'Ah! so you are living yet?'
+
+"That was the meaning of her smile, and probably of the spiteful words
+she murmured in the ear of her cicisbeo, telling him my history no
+doubt, rating mine as a common love affair. She was deceived, yet she
+was applauding her perspicacity. Oh, that I should be dying for her,
+must still adore her, always see her through my potations, see her
+still when I was overcome with wine, or in the arms of courtesans; and
+know that I was a target for her scornful jests! Oh, that I should be
+unable to tear the love of her out of my breast and to fling it at her
+feet!
+
+"Well, I quickly exhausted my funds, but owing to those three years of
+discipline, I enjoyed the most robust health, and on the day that I
+found myself without a penny I felt remarkably well. In order to carry
+on the process of dying, I signed bills at short dates, and the day
+came when they must be met. Painful excitements! but how they quicken
+the pulses of youth! I was not prematurely aged; I was young yet, and
+full of vigor and life.
+
+"At my first debt all my virtues came to life; slowly and despairingly
+they seemed to pace towards me; but I could compound with them--they
+were like aged aunts that begin with a scolding and end by bestowing
+tears and money upon you.
+
+"Imagination was less yielding; I saw my name bandied about through
+every city in Europe. 'One's name is oneself' says Eusebe Salverte.
+After these excursions I returned to the room I had never quitted,
+like a doppelganger in a German tale, and came to myself with a start.
+
+"I used to see with indifference a banker's messenger going on his
+errands through the streets of Paris, like a commercial Nemesis,
+wearing his master's livery--a gray coat and a silver badge; but now I
+hated the species in advance. One of them came one morning to ask me
+to meet some eleven bills that I had scrawled my name upon. My
+signature was worth three thousand francs! Taking me altogether, I
+myself was not worth that amount. Sheriff's deputies rose up before
+me, turning their callous faces upon my despair, as the hangman
+regards the criminal to whom he says, 'It has just struck half-past
+three.' I was in the power of their clerks; they could scribble my
+name, drag it through the mire, and jeer at it. I was a defaulter. Has
+a debtor any right to himself? Could not other men call me to account
+for my way of living? Why had I eaten puddings _a la chipolata_? Why had
+I iced my wine? Why had I slept, or walked, or thought, or amused
+myself when I had not paid them?
+
+"At any moment, in the middle of a poem, during some train of thought,
+or while I was gaily breakfasting in the pleasant company of my
+friends, I might look to see a gentleman enter in a coat of
+chestnut-brown, with a shabby hat in his hand. This gentleman's
+appearance would signify my debt, the bill I had drawn; the spectre
+would compel me to leave the table to speak to him, blight my spirits,
+despoil me of my cheerfulness, of my mistress, of all I possessed,
+down to my very bedstead.
+
+"Remorse itself is more easily endured. Remorse does not drive us into
+the street nor into the prison of Sainte-Pelagie; it does not force us
+into the detestable sink of vice. Remorse only brings us to the
+scaffold, where the executioner invests us with a certain dignity; as
+we pay the extreme penalty, everybody believes in our innocence; but
+people will not credit a penniless prodigal with a single virtue.
+
+"My debts had other incarnations. There is the kind that goes about on
+two feet, in a green cloth coat, and blue spectacles, carrying
+umbrellas of various hues; you come face to face with him at the
+corner of some street, in the midst of your mirth. These have the
+detestable prerogative of saying, 'M. de Valentin owes me something,
+and does not pay. I have a hold on him. He had better not show me any
+offensive airs!' You must bow to your creditors, and moreover bow
+politely. 'When are you going to pay me?' say they. And you must lie,
+and beg money of another man, and cringe to a fool seated on his
+strong-box, and receive sour looks in return from these horse-leeches;
+a blow would be less hateful; you must put up with their crass
+ignorance and calculating morality. A debt is a feat of the
+imaginative that they cannot appreciate. A borrower is often carried
+away and over-mastered by generous impulses; nothing great, nothing
+magnanimous can move or dominate those who live for money, and
+recognize nothing but money. I myself held money in abhorrence.
+
+"Or a bill may undergo a final transformation into some meritorious
+old man with a family dependent upon him. My creditor might be a
+living picture for Greuze, a paralytic with his children round him, a
+soldier's widow, holding out beseeching hands to me. Terrible
+creditors are these with whom we are forced to sympathize, and when
+their claims are satisfied we owe them a further debt of assistance.
+
+"The night before the bills fell due, I lay down with the false calm
+of those who sleep before their approaching execution, or with a duel
+in prospect, rocked as they are by delusive hopes. But when I woke,
+when I was cool and collected, when I found myself imprisoned in a
+banker's portfolio, and floundering in statements covered with red ink
+--then my debts sprang up everywhere, like grasshoppers, before my
+eyes. There were my debts, my clock, my armchairs; my debts were
+inlaid in the very furniture which I liked best to use. These gentle
+inanimate slaves were to fall prey to the harpies of the Chatelet,
+were to be carried off by the broker's men, and brutally thrown on the
+market. Ah, my property was a part of myself!
+
+"The sound of the door-bell rang through my heart; while it seemed to
+strike at me, where kings should be struck at--in the head. Mine was a
+martyrdom, without heaven for its reward. For a magnanimous nature,
+debt is a hell, and a hell, moreover, with sheriff's officers and
+brokers in it. An undischarged debt is something mean and sordid; it
+is a beginning of knavery; it is something worse, it is a lie; it
+prepares the way for crime, and brings together the planks for the
+scaffold. My bills were protested. Three days afterwards I met them,
+and this is how it happened.
+
+"A speculator came, offering to buy the island in the Loire belonging
+to me, where my mother lay buried. I closed with him. When I went to
+his solicitor to sign the deeds, I felt a cavern-like chill in the
+dark office that made me shudder; it was the same cold dampness that
+had laid hold upon me at the brink of my father's grave. I looked upon
+this as an evil omen. I seemed to see the shade of my mother, and to
+hear her voice. What power was it that made my own name ring vaguely
+in my ears, in spite of the clamor of bells?
+
+"The money paid down for my island, when all my debts were discharged,
+left me in possession of two thousand francs. I could now have
+returned to the scholar's tranquil life, it is true; I could have gone
+back to my garret after having gained an experience of life, with my
+head filled with the results of extensive observation, and with a
+certain sort of reputation attaching to me. But Foedora's hold upon
+her victim was not relaxed. We often met. I compelled her admirers to
+sound my name in her ears, by dint of astonishing them with my
+cleverness and success, with my horses and equipages. It all found her
+impassive and uninterested; so did an ugly phrase of Rastignac's, 'He
+is killing himself for you.'
+
+"I charged the world at large with my revenge, but I was not happy.
+While I was fathoming the miry depths of life, I only recognized the
+more keenly at all times the happiness of reciprocal affection; it was
+a shadow that I followed through all that befell me in my
+extravagance, and in my wildest moments. It was my misfortune to be
+deceived in my fairest beliefs, to be punished by ingratitude for
+benefiting others, and to receive uncounted pleasures as the reward of
+my errors--a sinister doctrine, but a true one for the prodigal!
+
+"The contagious leprosy of Foedora's vanity had taken hold of me at
+last. I probed my soul, and found it cankered and rotten. I bore the
+marks of the devil's claw upon my forehead. It was impossible to me
+thenceforward to do without the incessant agitation of a life fraught
+with danger at every moment, or to dispense with the execrable
+refinements of luxury. If I had possessed millions, I should still
+have gambled, reveled, and racketed about. I wished never to be alone
+with myself, and I must have false friends and courtesans, wine and
+good cheer to distract me. The ties that attach a man to family life
+had been permanently broken for me. I had become a galley-slave of
+pleasure, and must accomplish my destiny of suicide. During the last
+days of my prosperity, I spent every night in the most incredible
+excesses; but every morning death cast me back upon life again. I
+would have taken a conflagration with as little concern as any man
+with a life annuity. However, I at last found myself alone with a
+twenty-franc piece; I bethought me then of Rastignac's luck----
+
+"Eh, eh!----" Raphael exclaimed, interrupting himself, as he
+remembered the talisman and drew it from his pocket. Perhaps he was
+wearied by the long day's strain, and had no more strength left
+wherewith to pilot his head through the seas of wine and punch; or
+perhaps, exasperated by this symbol of his own existence, the torrent
+of his own eloquence gradually overwhelmed him. Raphael became excited
+and elated and like one completely deprived of reason.
+
+"The devil take death!" he shouted, brandishing the skin; "I mean to
+live! I am rich, I have every virtue; nothing will withstand me. Who
+would not be generous, when everything is in his power? Aha! Aha! I
+wished for two hundred thousand livres a year, and I shall have them.
+Bow down before me, all of you, wallowing on the carpets like swine in
+the mire! You all belong to me--a precious property truly! I am rich;
+I could buy you all, even the deputy snoring over there. Scum of
+society, give me your benediction! I am the Pope."
+
+Raphael's vociferations had been hitherto drowned by a thorough-bass
+of snores, but now they became suddenly audible. Most of the sleepers
+started up with a cry, saw the cause of the disturbance on his feet,
+tottering uncertainly, and cursed him in concert for a drunken
+brawler.
+
+"Silence!" shouted Raphael. "Back to your kennels, you dogs! Emile, I
+have riches, I will give you Havana cigars!"
+
+"I am listening," the poet replied. "Death or Foedora! On with you!
+That silky Foedora deceived you. Women are all daughters of Eve. There
+is nothing dramatic about that rigmarole of yours."
+
+"Ah, but you were sleeping, slyboots."
+
+"No--'Death or Foedora!'--I have it!"
+
+"Wake up!" Raphael shouted, beating Emile with the piece of shagreen
+as if he meant to draw electric fluid out of it.
+
+"_Tonnerre_!" said Emile, springing up and flinging his arms round
+Raphael; "my friend, remember the sort of women you are with."
+
+"I am a millionaire!"
+
+"If you are not a millionaire, you are most certainly drunk."
+
+"Drunk with power. I can kill you!--Silence! I am Nero! I am
+Nebuchadnezzar!"
+
+"But, Raphael, we are in queer company, and you ought to keep quiet
+for the sake of your own dignity."
+
+"My life has been silent too long. I mean to have my revenge now on
+the world at large. I will not amuse myself by squandering paltry
+five-franc pieces; I will reproduce and sum up my epoch by absorbing
+human lives, human minds, and human souls. There are the treasures of
+pestilence--that is no paltry kind of wealth, is it? I will wrestle
+with fevers--yellow, blue, or green--with whole armies, with gibbets.
+I can possess Foedora--Yet no, I do not want Foedora; she is a
+disease; I am dying of Foedora. I want to forget Foedora."
+
+"If you keep on calling out like this, I shall take you into the
+dining-room."
+
+"Do you see this skin? It is Solomon's will. Solomon belongs to me--a
+little varlet of a king! Arabia is mine, Arabia Petraea to boot; and
+the universe, and you too, if I choose. If I choose-- Ah! be careful.
+I can buy up all our journalist's shop; you shall be my valet. You
+shall be my valet, you shall manage my newspaper. Valet! _valet_, that
+is to say, free from aches and pains, because he has no brains."
+
+At the word, Emile carried Raphael off into the dining-room.
+
+"All right," he remarked; "yes, my friend, I am your valet. But you
+are about to be editor-in-chief of a newspaper; so be quiet, and
+behave properly, for my sake. Have you no regard for me?"
+
+"Regard for you! You shall have Havana cigars, with this bit of
+shagreen: always with this skin, this supreme bit of shagreen. It is a
+cure for corns, and efficacious remedy. Do you suffer? I will remove
+them."
+
+"Never have I known you so senseless----"
+
+"Senseless, my friend? Not at all. This skin contracts whenever I form
+a wish--'tis a paradox. There is a Brahmin underneath it! The Brahmin
+must be a droll fellow, for our desires, look you, are bound to
+expand----"
+
+"Yes, yes----"
+
+"I tell you----"
+
+"Yes, yes, very true, I am quite of your opinion--our desires
+expand----"
+
+"The skin, I tell you."
+
+"Yes."
+
+"You don't believe me. I know you, my friend; you are as full of lies
+as a new-made king."
+
+"How can you expect me to follow your drunken maunderings?"
+
+"I will bet you I can prove it. Let us measure it----"
+
+"Goodness! he will never get off to sleep," exclaimed Emile, as he
+watched Raphael rummaging busily in the dining-room.
+
+Thanks to the peculiar clearness with which external objects are
+sometimes projected on an inebriated brain, in sharp contrast to its
+own obscure imaginings, Valentin found an inkstand and a table-napkin,
+with the quickness of a monkey, repeating all the time:
+
+"Let us measure it! Let us measure it!"
+
+"All right," said Emile; "let us measure it!"
+
+The two friends spread out the table-napkin and laid the Magic Skin
+upon it. As Emile's hand appeared to be steadier than Raphael's, he
+drew a line with pen and ink round the talisman, while his friend
+said:
+
+"I wished for an income of two hundred thousand livres, didn't I?
+Well, when that comes, you will observe a mighty diminution of my
+chagrin."
+
+"Yes--now go to sleep. Shall I make you comfortable on that sofa? Now
+then, are you all right?"
+
+"Yes, my nursling of the press. You shall amuse me; you shall drive
+the flies away from me. The friend of adversity should be the friend
+of prosperity. So I will give you some Hava--na--cig----"
+
+"Come, now, sleep. Sleep off your gold, you millionaire!"
+
+"You! sleep off your paragraphs! Good-night! Say good-night to
+Nebuchadnezzar!--Love! Wine! France!--glory and tr--treas----"
+
+Very soon the snorings of the two friends were added to the music with
+which the rooms resounded--an ineffectual concert! The lights went out
+one by one, their crystal sconces cracking in the final flare. Night
+threw dark shadows over this prolonged revelry, in which Raphael's
+narrative had been a second orgy of speech, of words without ideas, of
+ideas for which words had often been lacking.
+
+Towards noon, next day, the fair Aquilina bestirred herself. She
+yawned wearily. She had slept with her head upon a painted velvet
+footstool, and her cheeks were mottled over by contact with the
+surface. Her movement awoke Euphrasia, who suddenly sprang up with a
+hoarse cry; her pretty face, that had been so fresh and fair in the
+evening, was sallow now and pallid; she looked like a candidate for
+the hospital. The rest awoke also by degrees, with portentous
+groanings, to feel themselves over in every stiffened limb, and to
+experience the infinite varieties of weariness that weighed upon them.
+
+A servant came in to throw back the shutters and open the windows.
+There they all stood, brought back to consciousness by the warm rays
+of sunlight that shone upon the sleepers' heads. Their movements
+during slumber had disordered the elaborately arranged hair and
+toilettes of the women. They presented a ghastly spectacle in the
+bright daylight. Their hair fell ungracefully about them; their eyes,
+lately so brilliant, were heavy and dim; the expression of their faces
+was entirely changed. The sickly hues, which daylight brings out so
+strongly, were frightful. An olive tint had crept over the lymphatic
+faces, so fair and soft when in repose; the dainty red lips were grown
+pale and dry, and bore tokens of the degradation of excess. Each
+disowned his mistress of the night before; the women looked wan and
+discolored, like flowers trampled under foot by a passing procession.
+
+The men who scorned them looked even more horrible. Those human faces
+would have made you shudder. The hollow eyes with the dark circles
+round them seemed to see nothing; they were dull with wine and
+stupefied with heavy slumbers that had been exhausting rather than
+refreshing. There was an indescribable ferocious and stolid bestiality
+about these haggard faces, where bare physical appetite appeared shorn
+of all the poetical illusion with which the intellect invests it. Even
+these fearless champions, accustomed to measure themselves with
+excess, were struck with horror at this awakening of vice, stripped of
+its disguises, at being confronted thus with sin, the skeleton in
+rags, lifeless and hollow, bereft of the sophistries of the intellect
+and the enchantments of luxury. Artists and courtesans scrutinized in
+silence and with haggard glances the surrounding disorder, the rooms
+where everything had been laid waste, at the havoc wrought by heated
+passions.
+
+Demoniac laughter broke out when Taillefer, catching the smothered
+murmurs of his guests, tried to greet them with a grin. His darkly
+flushed, perspiring countenance loomed upon this pandemonium, like the
+image of a crime that knows no remorse (see _L'Auberge rouge_). The
+picture was complete. A picture of a foul life in the midst of luxury,
+a hideous mixture of the pomp and squalor of humanity; an awakening
+after the frenzy of Debauch has crushed and squeezed all the fruits of
+life in her strong hands, till nothing but unsightly refuse is left to
+her, and lies in which she believes no longer. You might have thought
+of Death gloating over a family stricken with the plague.
+
+The sweet scents and dazzling lights, the mirth and the excitement
+were all no more; disgust with its nauseous sensations and searching
+philosophy was there instead. The sun shone in like truth, the pure
+outer air was like virtue; in contrast with the heated atmosphere,
+heavy with the fumes of the previous night of revelry.
+
+Accustomed as they were to their life, many of the girls thought of
+other days and other wakings; pure and innocent days when they looked
+out and saw the roses and honeysuckle about the casement, and the
+fresh countryside without enraptured by the glad music of the skylark;
+while earth lay in mists, lighted by the dawn, and in all the
+glittering radiance of dew. Others imagined the family breakfast, the
+father and children round the table, the innocent laughter, the
+unspeakable charm that pervaded it all, the simple hearts and their
+meal as simple.
+
+An artist mused upon his quiet studio, on his statue in its severe
+beauty, and the graceful model who was waiting for him. A young man
+recollected a lawsuit on which the fortunes of a family hung, and an
+important transaction that needed his presence. The scholar regretted
+his study and that noble work that called for him. Emile appeared just
+then as smiling, blooming, and fresh as the smartest assistant in a
+fashionable shop.
+
+"You are all as ugly as bailiffs. You won't be fit for anything
+to-day, so this day is lost, and I vote for breakfast."
+
+At this Taillefer went out to give some orders. The women went
+languidly up to the mirrors to set their toilettes in order. Each one
+shook herself. The wilder sort lectured the steadier ones. The
+courtesans made fun of those who looked unable to continue the
+boisterous festivity; but these wan forms revived all at once, stood
+in groups, and talked and smiled. Some servants quickly and adroitly
+set the furniture and everything else in its place, and a magnificent
+breakfast was got ready.
+
+The guests hurried into the dining-room. Everything there bore
+indelible marks of yesterday's excess, it is true, but there were at
+any rate some traces of ordinary, rational existence, such traces as
+may be found in a sick man's dying struggles. And so the revelry was
+laid away and buried, like carnival of a Shrove Tuesday, by masks
+wearied out with dancing, drunk with drunkenness, and quite ready to
+be persuaded of the pleasures of lassitude, lest they should be forced
+to admit their exhaustion.
+
+As soon as these bold spirits surrounded the capitalist's
+breakfast-table, Cardot appeared. He had left the rest to make a night
+of it after the dinner, and finished the evening after his own fashion
+in the retirement of domestic life. Just now a sweet smile wandered
+over his features. He seemed to have a presentiment that there would be
+some inheritance to sample and divide, involving inventories and
+engrossing; an inheritance rich in fees and deeds to draw up, and
+something as juicy as the trembling fillet of beef in which their host
+had just plunged his knife.
+
+"Oh, ho! we are to have breakfast in the presence of a notary," cried
+Cursy.
+
+"You have come here just at the right time," said the banker,
+indicating the breakfast; "you can jot down the numbers, and initial
+off all the dishes."
+
+"There is no will to make here, but contracts of marriage there may
+be, perhaps," said the scholar, who had made a satisfactory
+arrangement for the first time in twelve months.
+
+"Oh! Oh!"
+
+"Ah! Ah!"
+
+"One moment," cried Cardot, fairly deafened by a chorus of wretched
+jokes. "I came here on serious business. I am bringing six millions
+for one of you." (Dead silence.) "Monsieur," he went on, turning to
+Raphael, who at the moment was unceremoniously wiping his eyes on a
+corner of the table-napkin, "was not your mother a Mlle. O'Flaharty?"
+
+"Yes," said Raphael mechanically enough; "Barbara Marie."
+
+"Have you your certificate of birth about you," Cardot went on, "and
+Mme. de Valentin's as well?"
+
+"I believe so."
+
+"Very well then, monsieur; you are the sole heir of Major O'Flaharty,
+who died in August 1828 at Calcutta."
+
+"An _incalcuttable_ fortune," said the critic.
+
+"The Major having bequeathed several amounts to public institutions in
+his will, the French Government sent in a claim for the remainder to
+the East India Company," the notary continued. "The estate is clear
+and ready to be transferred at this moment. I have been looking in
+vain for the heirs and assigns of Mlle. Barbara Marie O'Flaharty for a
+fortnight past, when yesterday at dinner----"
+
+Just then Raphael suddenly staggered to his feet; he looked like a man
+who has just received a blow. Acclamation took the form of silence,
+for stifled envy had been the first feeling in every breast, and all
+eyes devoured him like flames. Then a murmur rose, and grew like the
+voice of a discontented audience, or the first mutterings of a riot,
+as everybody made some comment on this news of great wealth brought by
+the notary.
+
+This abrupt subservience of fate brought Raphael thoroughly to his
+senses. He immediately spread out the table-napkin with which he had
+lately taken the measure of the piece of shagreen. He heeded nothing
+as he laid the talisman upon it, and shuddered involuntarily at the
+sight of a slight difference between the present size of the skin and
+the outline traced upon the linen.
+
+"Why, what is the matter with him?' Taillefer cried. "He comes by his
+fortune very cheaply."
+
+"_Soutiens-le Chatillon_!" said Bixiou to Emile. "The joy will kill
+him."
+
+A ghastly white hue overspread every line of the wan features of the
+heir-at-law. His face was drawn, every outline grew haggard; the
+hollows in his livid countenance grew deeper, and his eyes were fixed
+and staring. He was facing Death.
+
+The opulent banker, surrounded by faded women, and faces with satiety
+written on them, the enjoyment that had reached the pitch of agony,
+was a living illustration of his own life.
+
+Raphael looked thrice at the talisman, which lay passively within the
+merciless outlines on the table-napkin; he tried not to believe it,
+but his incredulity vanished utterly before the light of an inner
+presentiment. The whole world was his; he could have all things, but
+the will to possess them was utterly extinct. Like a traveler in the
+midst of the desert, with but a little water left to quench his
+thirst, he must measure his life by the draughts he took of it. He saw
+what every desire of his must cost him in the days of his life. He
+believed in the powers of the Magic Skin at last, he listened to every
+breath he drew; he felt ill already; he asked himself:
+
+"Am I not consumptive? Did not my mother die of a lung complaint?"
+
+"Aha, Raphael! what fun you will have! What will you give me?" asked
+Aquilina.
+
+"Here's to the death of his uncle, Major O'Flaharty! There is a man
+for you."
+
+"He will be a peer of France."
+
+"Pooh! what is a peer of France since July?" said the amateur critic.
+
+"Are you going to take a box at the Bouffons?"
+
+"You are going to treat us all, I hope?" put in Bixiou.
+
+"A man of his sort will be sure to do things in style," said Emile.
+
+The hurrah set up by the jovial assembly rang in Valentin's ears, but
+he could not grasp the sense of a single word. Vague thoughts crossed
+him of the Breton peasant's life of mechanical labor, without a wish
+of any kind; he pictured him burdened with a family, tilling the soil,
+living on buckwheat meal, drinking cider out of a pitcher, believing
+in the Virgin and the King, taking the sacrament at Easter, dancing of
+a Sunday on the green sward, and understanding never a word of the
+rector's sermon. The actual scene that lay before him, the gilded
+furniture, the courtesans, the feast itself, and the surrounding
+splendors, seemed to catch him by the throat and made him cough.
+
+"Do you wish for some asparagus?" the banker cried.
+
+"_I wish for nothing_!" thundered Raphael.
+
+"Bravo!" Taillefer exclaimed; "you understand your position; a fortune
+confers the privilege of being impertinent. You are one of us.
+Gentlemen, let us drink to the might of gold! M. Valentin here, six
+times a millionaire, has become a power. He is a king, like all the
+rich; everything is at his disposal, everything lies under his feet.
+From this time forth the axiom that 'all Frenchmen are alike in the
+eyes of the law,' is for him a fib at the head of the Constitutional
+Charter. He is not going to obey the law--the law is going to obey
+him. There are neither scaffolds nor executioners for millionaires."
+
+"Yes, there are," said Raphael; "they are their own executioners."
+
+"Here is another victim of prejudices!" cried the banker.
+
+"Let us drink!" Raphael said, putting the talisman into his pocket.
+
+"What are you doing?" said Emile, checking his movement. "Gentlemen,"
+he added, addressing the company, who were rather taken aback by
+Raphael's behavior, "you must know that our friend Valentin here--what
+am I saying?--I mean my Lord Marquis de Valentin--is in the possession
+of a secret for obtaining wealth. His wishes are fulfilled as soon as
+he knows them. He will make us all rich together, or he is a flunkey,
+and devoid of all decent feeling."
+
+"Oh, Raphael dear, I should like a set of pearl ornaments!" Euphrasia
+exclaimed.
+
+"If he has any gratitude in him, he will give me a couple of carriages
+with fast steppers," said Aquilina.
+
+"Wish for a hundred thousand a year for me!"
+
+"Indian shawls!"
+
+"Pay my debts!"
+
+"Send an apoplexy to my uncle, the old stick!"
+
+"Ten thousand a year in the funds, and I'll cry quits with you,
+Raphael!"
+
+"Deeds of gift and no mistake," was the notary's comment.
+
+"He ought, at least, to rid me of the gout!"
+
+"Lower the funds!" shouted the banker.
+
+These phrases flew about like the last discharge of rockets at the end
+of a display of fireworks; and were uttered, perhaps, more in earnest
+than in jest.
+
+"My good friend," Emile said solemnly, "I shall be quite satisfied
+with an income of two hundred thousand livres. Please to set about it
+at once."
+
+"Do you not know the cost, Emile?" asked Raphael.
+
+"A nice excuse!" the poet cried; "ought we not to sacrifice ourselves
+for our friends?"
+
+"I have almost a mind to wish that you all were dead," Valentin made
+answer, with a dark, inscrutable look at his boon companions.
+
+"Dying people are frightfully cruel," said Emile, laughing. "You are
+rich now," he went on gravely; "very well, I will give you two months
+at most before you grow vilely selfish. You are so dense already that
+you cannot understand a joke. You have only to go a little further to
+believe in your Magic Skin."
+
+Raphael kept silent, fearing the banter of the company; but he drank
+immoderately, trying to drown in intoxication the recollection of his
+fatal power.
+
+
+
+                                 III
+
+                              THE AGONY
+
+In the early days of December an old man of some seventy years of age
+pursued his way along the Rue de Varenne, in spite of the falling
+rain. He peered up at the door of each house, trying to discover the
+address of the Marquis Raphael de Valentin, in a simple, childlike
+fashion, and with the abstracted look peculiar to philosophers. His
+face plainly showed traces of a struggle between a heavy mortification
+and an authoritative nature; his long, gray hair hung in disorder
+about a face like a piece of parchment shriveling in the fire. If a
+painter had come upon this curious character, he would, no doubt, have
+transferred him to his sketchbook on his return, a thin, bony figure,
+clad in black, and have inscribed beneath it: "Classical poet in
+search of a rhyme." When he had identified the number that had been
+given to him, this reincarnation of Rollin knocked meekly at the door
+of a splendid mansion.
+
+"Is Monsieur Raphael in?" the worthy man inquired of the Swiss in
+livery.
+
+"My Lord the Marquis sees nobody," said the servant, swallowing a huge
+morsel that he had just dipped in a large bowl of coffee.
+
+"There is his carriage," said the elderly stranger, pointing to a fine
+equipage that stood under the wooden canopy that sheltered the steps
+before the house, in place of a striped linen awning. "He is going
+out; I will wait for him."
+
+"Then you might wait here till to-morrow morning, old boy," said the
+Swiss. "A carriage is always waiting for monsieur. Please to go away.
+If I were to let any stranger come into the house without orders, I
+should lose an income of six hundred francs."
+
+A tall old man, in a costume not unlike that of a subordinate in the
+Civil Service, came out of the vestibule and hurried part of the way
+down the steps, while he made a survey of the astonished elderly
+applicant for admission.
+
+"What is more, here is M. Jonathan," the Swiss remarked; "speak to
+him."
+
+Fellow-feeling of some kind, or curiosity, brought the two old men
+together in a central space in the great entrance-court. A few blades
+of grass were growing in the crevices of the pavement; a terrible
+silence reigned in that great house. The sight of Jonathan's face
+would have made you long to understand the mystery that brooded over
+it, and that was announced by the smallest trifles about the
+melancholy place.
+
+When Raphael inherited his uncle's vast estate, his first care had
+been to seek out the old and devoted servitor of whose affection he
+knew that he was secure. Jonathan had wept tears of joy at the sight
+of his young master, of whom he thought he had taken a final farewell;
+and when the marquis exalted him to the high office of steward, his
+happiness could not be surpassed. So old Jonathan became an
+intermediary power between Raphael and the world at large. He was the
+absolute disposer of his master's fortune, the blind instrument of an
+unknown will, and a sixth sense, as it were, by which the emotions of
+life were communicated to Raphael.
+
+"I should like to speak with M. Raphael, sir," said the elderly person
+to Jonathan, as he climbed up the steps some way, into a shelter from
+the rain.
+
+"To speak with my Lord the Marquis?" the steward cried. "He scarcely
+speaks even to me, his foster-father!"
+
+"But I am likewise his foster-father," said the old man. "If your wife
+was his foster-mother, I fed him myself with the milk of the Muses. He
+is my nursling, my child, carus alumnus! I formed his mind, cultivated
+his understanding, developed his genius, and, I venture to say it, to
+my own honor and glory. Is he not one of the most remarkable men of
+our epoch? He was one of my pupils in two lower forms, and in
+rhetoric. I am his professor."
+
+"Ah, sir, then you are M. Porriquet?"
+
+"Exactly, sir, but----"
+
+"Hush! hush!" Jonathan called to two underlings, whose voices broke
+the monastic silence that shrouded the house.
+
+"But is the Marquis ill, sir?" the professor continued.
+
+"My dear sir," Jonathan replied, "Heaven only knows what is the matter
+with my master. You see, there are not a couple of houses like ours
+anywhere in Paris. Do you understand? Not two houses. Faith, that
+there are not. My Lord the Marquis had this hotel purchased for him;
+it formerly belonged to a duke and a peer of France; then he spent
+three hundred thousand francs over furnishing it. That's a good deal,
+you know, three hundred thousand francs! But every room in the house
+is a perfect wonder. 'Good,' said I to myself when I saw this
+magnificence; 'it is just like it used to be in the time of my lord,
+his late grandfather; and the young marquis is going to entertain all
+Paris and the Court!' Nothing of the kind! My lord refused to see any
+one whatever. 'Tis a funny life that he leads, M. Porriquet, you
+understand. An _inconciliable_ life. He rises every day at the same
+time. I am the only person, you see, that may enter his room. I open
+all the shutters at seven o'clock, summer or winter. It is all
+arranged very oddly. As I come in I say to him:
+
+"'You must get up and dress, my Lord Marquis.'
+
+"Then he rises and dresses himself. I have to give him his
+dressing-gown, and it is always after the same pattern, and of the
+same material. I am obliged to replace it when it can be used no
+longer, simply to save him the trouble of asking for a new one. A queer
+fancy! As a matter of fact, he has a thousand francs to spend every day,
+and he does as he pleases, the dear child. And besides, I am so fond of
+him that if he gave me a box on the ear on one side, I should hold out
+the other to him! The most difficult things he will tell me to do, and
+yet I do them, you know! He gives me a lot of trifles to attend to,
+that I am well set to work! He reads the newspapers, doesn't he? Well,
+my instructions are to put them always in the same place, on the same
+table. I always go at the same hour and shave him myself; and don't I
+tremble! The cook would forfeit the annuity of a thousand crowns that
+he is to come into after my lord's death, if breakfast is not served
+_inconciliably_ at ten o'clock precisely. The menus are drawn up for the
+whole year round, day after day. My Lord the Marquis has not a thing
+to wish for. He has strawberries whenever there are any, and he has
+the earliest mackerel to be had in Paris. The programme is printed
+every morning. He knows his dinner by rote. In the next place, he
+dresses himself at the same hour, in the same clothes, the same linen,
+that I always put on the same chair, you understand? I have to see
+that he always has the same cloth; and if it should happen that his
+coat came to grief (a mere supposition), I should have to replace it
+by another without saying a word about it to him. If it is fine, I go
+in and say to my master:
+
+"'You ought to go out, sir.'
+
+"He says Yes, or No. If he has a notion that he will go out, he
+doesn't wait for his horses; they are always ready harnessed; the
+coachman stops there _inconciliably_, whip in hand, just as you see him
+out there. In the evening, after dinner, my master goes one day to the
+Opera, the other to the Ital----no, he hasn't yet gone to the
+Italiens, though, for I could not find a box for him until yesterday.
+Then he comes in at eleven o'clock precisely, to go to bed. At any
+time in the day when he has nothing to do, he reads--he is always
+reading, you see--it is a notion he has. My instructions are to read
+the _Journal de la Librairie_ before he sees it, and to buy new books,
+so that he finds them on his chimney-piece on the very day that they
+are published. I have orders to go into his room every hour or so, to
+look after the fire and everything else, and to see that he wants
+nothing. He gave me a little book, sir, to learn off by heart, with
+all my duties written in it--a regular catechism! In summer I have to
+keep a cool and even temperature with blocks of ice and at all seasons
+to put fresh flowers all about. He is rich! He has a thousand francs
+to spend every day; he can indulge his fancies! And he hadn't even
+necessaries for so long, poor child! He doesn't annoy anybody; he is
+as good as gold; he never opens his mouth, for instance; the house and
+garden are absolutely silent. In short, my master has not a single
+wish left; everything comes in the twinkling of an eye, if he raises
+his hand, and _instanter_. Quite right, too. If servants are not
+looked after, everything falls into confusion. You would never believe
+the lengths he goes about things. His rooms are all--what do you call
+it?--er--er--_en suite_. Very well; just suppose, now, that he opens his
+room door or the door of his study; presto! all the other doors fly
+open of themselves by a patent contrivance; and then he can go from
+one end of the house to the other and not find a single door shut;
+which is all very nice and pleasant and convenient for us great folk!
+But, on my word, it cost us a lot of money! And, after all, M.
+Porriquet, he said to me at last:
+
+"'Jonathan, you will look after me as if I were a baby in long
+clothes,' Yes, sir, 'long clothes!' those were his very words. 'You
+will think of all my requirements for me.' I am the master, so to
+speak, and he is the servant, you understand? The reason of it? Ah, my
+word, that is just what nobody on earth knows but himself and God
+Almighty. It is quite _inconciliable_!"
+
+"He is writing a poem!" exclaimed the old professor.
+
+"You think he is writing a poem, sir? It's a very absorbing affair,
+then! But, you know, I don't think he is. He often tells me that he
+wants to live like a _vergetation_; he wants to _vergetate_. Only
+yesterday he was looking at a tulip while he was dressing, and he said
+to me:
+
+"'There is my own life--I am _vergetating_, my poor Jonathan.' Now,
+some of them insist that that is monomania. It is _inconciliable_!"
+
+"All this makes it very clear to me, Jonathan," the professor
+answered, with a magisterial solemnity that greatly impressed the old
+servant, "that your master is absorbed in a great work. He is deep in
+vast meditations, and has no wish to be distracted by the petty
+preoccupations of ordinary life. A man of genius forgets everything
+among his intellectual labors. One day the famous Newton----"
+
+"Newton?--oh, ah! I don't know the name," said Jonathan.
+
+"Newton, a great geometrician," Porriquet went on, "once sat for
+twenty-four hours leaning his elbow on the table; when he emerged from
+his musings, he was a day out in his reckoning, just as if he had been
+sleeping. I will go to see him, dear lad; I may perhaps be of some use
+to him."
+
+"Not for a moment!" Jonathan cried. "Not though you were King of
+France--I mean the real old one. You could not go in unless you forced
+the doors open and walked over my body. But I will go and tell him you
+are here, M. Porriquet, and I will put it to him like this, 'Ought he
+to come up?' And he will say Yes or No. I never say, 'Do you wish?' or
+'Will you?' or 'Do you want?' Those words are scratched out of the
+dictionary. He let out at me once with a 'Do you want to kill me?' he
+was so very angry."
+
+Jonathan left the old schoolmaster in the vestibule, signing to him to
+come no further, and soon returned with a favorable answer. He led the
+old gentleman through one magnificent room after another, where every
+door stood open. At last Porriquet beheld his pupil at some distance
+seated beside the fire.
+
+Raphael was reading the paper. He sat in an armchair wrapped in a
+dressing-gown with some large pattern on it. The intense melancholy
+that preyed upon him could be discerned in his languid posture and
+feeble frame; it was depicted on his brow and white face; he looked
+like some plant bleached by darkness. There was a kind of effeminate
+grace about him; the fancies peculiar to wealthy invalids were also
+noticeable. His hands were soft and white, like a pretty woman's; he
+wore his fair hair, now grown scanty, curled about his temples with a
+refinement of vanity.
+
+The Greek cap that he wore was pulled to one side by the weight of its
+tassel; too heavy for the light material of which it was made. He had
+let the paper-knife fall at his feet, a malachite blade with gold
+mounting, which he had used to cut the leaves of the book. The amber
+mouthpiece of a magnificent Indian hookah lay on his knee; the
+enameled coils lay like a serpent in the room, but he had forgotten to
+draw out its fresh perfume. And yet there was a complete contradiction
+between the general feebleness of his young frame and the blue eyes,
+where all his vitality seemed to dwell; an extraordinary intelligence
+seemed to look out from them and to grasp everything at once.
+
+That expression was painful to see. Some would have read despair in
+it, and others some inner conflict terrible as remorse. It was the
+inscrutable glance of helplessness that must perforce consign its
+desires to the depths of its own heart; or of a miser enjoying in
+imagination all the pleasures that his money could procure for him,
+while he declines to lessen his hoard; the look of a bound Prometheus,
+of the fallen Napoleon of 1815, when he learned at the Elysee the
+strategical blunder that his enemies had made, and asked for
+twenty-four hours of command in vain; or rather it was the same look
+that Raphael had turned upon the Seine, or upon his last piece of gold
+at the gaming-table only a few months ago.
+
+He was submitting his intelligence and his will to the homely
+common-sense of an old peasant whom fifty years of domestic service
+had scarcely civilized. He had given up all the rights of life in order
+to live; he had despoiled his soul of all the romance that lies in a
+wish; and almost rejoiced at thus becoming a sort of automaton. The
+better to struggle with the cruel power that he had challenged, he had
+followed Origen's example, and had maimed and chastened his
+imagination.
+
+The day after he had seen the diminution of the Magic Skin, at his
+sudden accession of wealth, he happened to be at his notary's house. A
+well-known physician had told them quite seriously, at dessert, how a
+Swiss attacked by consumption had cured himself. The man had never
+spoken a word for ten years, and had compelled himself to draw six
+breaths only, every minute, in the close atmosphere of a cow-house,
+adhering all the time to a regimen of exceedingly light diet. "I will
+be like that man," thought Raphael to himself. He wanted life at any
+price, and so he led the life of a machine in the midst of all the
+luxury around him.
+
+The old professor confronted this youthful corpse and shuddered; there
+seemed something unnatural about the meagre, enfeebled frame. In the
+Marquis, with his eager eyes and careworn forehead, he could hardly
+recognize the fresh-cheeked and rosy pupil with the active limbs, whom
+he remembered. If the worthy classicist, sage critic, and general
+preserver of the traditions of correct taste had read Byron, he would
+have thought that he had come on a Manfred when he looked to find
+Childe Harold.
+
+"Good day, pere Porriquet," said Raphael, pressing the old
+schoolmaster's frozen fingers in his own damp ones; "how are you?"
+
+"I am very well," replied the other, alarmed by the touch of that
+feverish hand. "But how about you?"
+
+"Oh, I am hoping to keep myself in health."
+
+"You are engaged in some great work, no doubt?"
+
+"No," Raphael answered. "Exegi monumemtum, pere Porriquet; I have
+contributed an important page to science, and have now bidden her
+farewell for ever. I scarcely know where my manuscript is."
+
+"The style is no doubt correct?" queried the schoolmaster. "You, I
+hope, would never have adopted the barbarous language of the new
+school, which fancies it has worked such wonders by discovering
+Ronsard!"
+
+"My work treats of physiology pure and simple."
+
+"Oh, then, there is no more to be said," the schoolmaster answered.
+"Grammar must yield to the exigencies of discovery. Nevertheless,
+young man, a lucid and harmonious style--the diction of Massillon, of
+M. de Buffon, of the great Racine--a classical style, in short, can
+never spoil anything----But, my friend," the schoolmaster interrupted
+himself, "I was forgetting the object of my visit, which concerns my
+own interests."
+
+Too late Raphael recalled to mind the verbose eloquence and elegant
+circumlocutions which in a long professorial career had grown habitual
+to his old tutor, and almost regretted that he had admitted him; but
+just as he was about to wish to see him safely outside, he promptly
+suppressed his secret desire with a stealthy glance at the Magic Skin.
+It hung there before him, fastened down upon some white material,
+surrounded by a red line accurately traced about its prophetic
+outlines. Since that fatal carouse, Raphael had stifled every least
+whim, and had lived so as not to cause the slightest movement in the
+terrible talisman. The Magic Skin was like a tiger with which he must
+live without exciting its ferocity. He bore patiently, therefore, with
+the old schoolmaster's prolixity.
+
+Porriquet spent an hour in telling him about the persecutions directed
+against him ever since the Revolution of July. The worthy man, having
+a liking for strong governments, had expressed the patriotic wish that
+grocers should be left to their counters, statesmen to the management
+of public business, advocates to the Palais de Justice, and peers of
+France to the Luxembourg; but one of the popularity-seeking ministers
+of the Citizen King had ousted him from his chair, on an accusation of
+Carlism, and the old man now found himself without pension or post,
+and with no bread to eat. As he played the part of guardian angel to a
+poor nephew, for whose schooling at Saint Sulpice he was paying, he
+came less on his own account than for his adopted child's sake, to
+entreat his former pupil's interest with the new minister. He did not
+ask to be reinstated, but only for a position at the head of some
+provincial school.
+
+QRaphael had fallen a victim to unconquerable drowsiness by the time
+that the worthy man's monotonous voice ceased to sound in his ears.
+Civility had compelled him to look at the pale and unmoving eyes of
+the deliberate and tedious old narrator, till he himself had reached
+stupefaction, magnetized in an inexplicable way by the power of
+inertia.
+
+"Well, my dear pere Porriquet," he said, not very certain what the
+question was to which he was replying, "but I can do nothing for you,
+nothing at all. _I wish very heartily_ that you may succeed----"
+
+All at once, without seeing the change wrought on the old man's sallow
+and wrinkled brow by these conventional phrases, full of indifference
+and selfishness, Raphael sprang to his feet like a startled roebuck.
+He saw a thin white line between the black piece of hide and the red
+tracing about it, and gave a cry so fearful that the poor professor
+was frightened by it.
+
+"Old fool! Go!" he cried. "You will be appointed as headmaster!
+Couldn't you have asked me for an annuity of a thousand crowns rather
+than a murderous wish? Your visit would have cost me nothing. There
+are a hundred thousand situations to be had in France, but I have only
+one life. A man's life is worth more than all the situations in the
+world.--Jonathan!"
+
+Jonathan appeared.
+
+"This is your doing, double-distilled idiot! What made you suggest
+that I should see M. Porriquet?" and he pointed to the old man, who
+was petrified with fright. "Did I put myself in your hands for you to
+tear me in pieces? You have just shortened my life by ten years!
+Another blunder of this kind, and you will lay me where I have laid my
+father. Would I not far rather have possessed the beautiful Foedora?
+And I have obliged that old hulk instead--that rag of humanity! I had
+money enough for him. And, moreover, if all the Porriquets in the
+world were dying of hunger, what is that to me?"
+
+Raphael's face was white with anger; a slight froth marked his
+trembling lips; there was a savage gleam in his eyes. The two elders
+shook with terror in his presence like two children at the sight of a
+snake. The young man fell back in his armchair, a kind of reaction
+took place in him, the tears flowed fast from his angry eyes.
+
+"Oh, my life!" he cried, "that fair life of mine. Never to know a
+kindly thought again, to love no more; nothing is left to me!"
+
+He turned to the professor and went on in a gentle voice--"The harm is
+done, my old friend. Your services have been well repaid; and my
+misfortune has at any rate contributed to the welfare of a good and
+worthy man."
+
+His tones betrayed so much feeling that the almost unintelligible
+words drew tears from the two old men, such tears as are shed over
+some pathetic song in a foreign tongue.
+
+"He is epileptic," muttered Porriquet.
+
+"I understand your kind intentions, my friend," Raphael answered
+gently. "You would make excuses for me. Ill-health cannot be helped,
+but ingratitude is a grievous fault. Leave me now," he added.
+"To-morrow or the next day, or possibly to-night, you will receive
+your appointment; Resistance has triumphed over Motion. Farewell."
+
+The old schoolmaster went away, full of keen apprehension as to
+Valentin's sanity. A thrill of horror ran through him; there had been
+something supernatural, he thought, in the scene he had passed
+through. He could hardly believe his own impressions, and questioned
+them like one awakened from a painful dream.
+
+"Now attend to me, Jonathan," said the young man to his old servant.
+"Try to understand the charge confided to you."
+
+"Yes, my Lord Marquis."
+
+"I am as a man outlawed from humanity."
+
+"Yes, my Lord Marquis."
+
+"All the pleasures of life disport themselves round my bed of death,
+and dance about me like fair women; but if I beckon to them, I must
+die. Death always confronts me. You must be the barrier between the
+world and me."
+
+"Yes, my Lord Marquis," said the old servant, wiping the drops of
+perspiration from his wrinkled forehead. "But if you don't wish to see
+pretty women, how will you manage at the Italiens this evening? An
+English family is returning to London, and I have taken their box for
+the rest of the season, and it is in a splendid position--superb; in
+the first row.
+
+Raphael, deep in his own deep musings, paid no attention to him.
+
+Do you see that splendid equipage, a brougham painted a dark brown
+color, but with the arms of an ancient and noble family shining from
+the panels? As it rolls past, all the shop-girls admire it, and look
+longingly at the yellow satin lining, the rugs from la Savonnerie, the
+daintiness and freshness of every detail, the silken cushions and
+tightly-fitting glass windows. Two liveried footmen are mounted behind
+this aristocratic carriage; and within, a head lies back among the
+silken cushions, the feverish face and hollow eyes of Raphael,
+melancholy and sad. Emblem of the doom of wealth! He flies across
+Paris like a rocket, and reaches the peristyle of the Theatre Favart.
+The passers-by make way for him; the two footmen help him to alight,
+an envious crowd looking on the while.
+
+"What has that fellow done to be so rich?" asks a poor law-student,
+who cannot listen to the magical music of Rossini for lack of a
+five-franc piece.
+
+Raphael walked slowly along the gangway; he expected no enjoyment from
+these pleasures he had once coveted so eagerly. In the interval before
+the second act of Semiramide he walked up and down in the lobby, and
+along the corridors, leaving his box, which he had not yet entered, to
+look after itself. The instinct of property was dead within him
+already. Like all invalids, he thought of nothing but his own
+sufferings. He was leaning against the chimney-piece in the greenroom.
+A group had gathered about it of dandies, young and old, of ministers,
+of peers without peerages, and peerages without peers, for so the
+Revolution of July had ordered matters. Among a host of adventurers
+and journalists, in fact, Raphael beheld a strange, unearthly figure a
+few paces away among the crowd. He went towards this grotesque object
+to see it better, half-closing his eyes with exceeding
+superciliousness.
+
+"What a wonderful bit of painting!" he said to himself. The stranger's
+hair and eyebrows and a Mazarin tuft on the chin had been dyed black,
+but the result was a spurious, glossy, purple tint that varied its
+hues according to the light; the hair had been too white, no doubt, to
+take the preparation. Anxiety and cunning were depicted in the narrow,
+insignificant face, with its wrinkles incrusted by thick layers of red
+and white paint. This red enamel, lacking on some portions of his
+face, strongly brought out his natural feebleness and livid hues. It
+was impossible not to smile at this visage with the protuberant
+forehead and pointed chin, a face not unlike those grotesque wooden
+figures that German herdsmen carve in their spare moments.
+
+An attentive observer looking from Raphael to this elderly Adonis
+would have remarked a young man's eyes set in a mask of age, in the
+case of the Marquis, and in the other case the dim eyes of age peering
+forth from behind a mask of youth. Valentin tried to recollect when
+and where he had seen this little old man before. He was thin,
+fastidiously cravatted, booted and spurred like one-and-twenty; he
+crossed his arms and clinked his spurs as if he possessed all the
+wanton energy of youth. He seemed to move about without constraint or
+difficulty. He had carefully buttoned up his fashionable coat, which
+disguised his powerful, elderly frame, and gave him the appearance of
+an antiquated coxcomb who still follows the fashions.
+
+For Raphael this animated puppet possessed all the interest of an
+apparition. He gazed at it as if it had been some smoke-begrimed
+Rembrandt, recently restored and newly framed. This idea found him a
+clue to the truth among his confused recollections; he recognized the
+dealer in antiquities, the man to whom he owed his calamities!
+
+A noiseless laugh broke just then from the fantastical personage,
+straightening the line of his lips that stretched across a row of
+artificial teeth. That laugh brought out, for Raphael's heated fancy,
+a strong resemblance between the man before him and the type of head
+that painters have assigned to Goethe's Mephistopheles. A crowd of
+superstitious thoughts entered Raphael's sceptical mind; he was
+convinced of the powers of the devil and of all the sorcerer's
+enchantments embodied in mediaeval tradition, and since worked up by
+poets. Shrinking in horror from the destiny of Faust, he prayed for
+the protection of Heaven with all the ardent faith of a dying man in
+God and the Virgin. A clear, bright radiance seemed to give him a
+glimpse of the heaven of Michael Angelo or of Raphael of Urbino: a
+venerable white-bearded man, a beautiful woman seated in an aureole
+above the clouds and winged cherub heads. Now he had grasped and
+received the meaning of those imaginative, almost human creations;
+they seemed to explain what had happened to him, to leave him yet one
+hope.
+
+But when the greenroom of the Italiens returned upon his sight he
+beheld, not the Virgin, but a very handsome young person. The
+execrable Euphrasia, in all the splendor of her toilette, with its
+orient pearls, had come thither, impatient for her ardent, elderly
+admirer. She was insolently exhibiting herself with her defiant face
+and glittering eyes to an envious crowd of stockbrokers, a visible
+testimony to the inexhaustible wealth that the old dealer permitted
+her to squander.
+
+Raphael recollected the mocking wish with which he had accepted the
+old man's luckless gift, and tasted all the sweets of revenge when he
+beheld the spectacle of sublime wisdom fallen to such a depth as this,
+wisdom for which such humiliation had seemed a thing impossible. The
+centenarian greeted Euphrasia with a ghastly smile, receiving her
+honeyed words in reply. He offered her his emaciated arm, and went
+twice or thrice round the greenroom with her; the envious glances and
+compliments with which the crowd received his mistress delighted him;
+he did not see the scornful smiles, nor hear the caustic comments to
+which he gave rise.
+
+"In what cemetery did this young ghoul unearth that corpse of hers?"
+asked a dandy of the Romantic faction.
+
+Euphrasia began to smile. The speaker was a slender, fair-haired
+youth, with bright blue eyes, and a moustache. His short dress coat,
+hat tilted over one ear, and sharp tongue, all denoted the species.
+
+"How many old men," said Raphael to himself, "bring an upright,
+virtuous, and hard-working life to a close in folly! His feet are cold
+already, and he is making love."
+
+"Well, sir," exclaimed Valentin, stopping the merchant's progress,
+while he stared hard at Euphrasia, "have you quite forgotten the
+stringent maxims of your philosophy?"
+
+"Ah, I am as happy now as a young man," said the other, in a cracked
+voice. "I used to look at existence from a wrong standpoint. One hour
+of love has a whole life in it."
+
+The playgoers heard the bell ring, and left the greenroom to take
+their places again. Raphael and the old merchant separated. As he
+entered his box, the Marquis saw Foedora sitting exactly opposite to
+him on the other side of the theatre. The Countess had probably only
+just come, for she was just flinging off her scarf to leave her throat
+uncovered, and was occupied with going through all the indescribable
+manoeuvres of a coquette arranging herself. All eyes were turned upon
+her. A young peer of France had come with her; she asked him for the
+lorgnette she had given him to carry. Raphael knew the despotism to
+which his successor had resigned himself, in her gestures, and in the
+way she treated her companion. He was also under the spell no doubt,
+another dupe beating with all the might of a real affection against
+the woman's cold calculations, enduring all the tortures from which
+Valentin had luckily freed himself.
+
+Foedora's face lighted up with indescribable joy. After directing her
+lorgnette upon every box in turn, to make a rapid survey of all the
+dresses, she was conscious that by her toilette and her beauty she had
+eclipsed the loveliest and best-dressed women in Paris. She laughed to
+show her white teeth; her head with its wreath of flowers was never
+still, in her quest of admiration. Her glances went from one box to
+another, as she diverted herself with the awkward way in which a
+Russian princess wore her bonnet, or over the utter failure of a
+bonnet with which a banker's daughter had disfigured herself.
+
+All at once she met Raphael's steady gaze and turned pale, aghast at
+the intolerable contempt in her rejected lover's eyes. Not one of her
+exiled suitors had failed to own her power over them; Valentin alone
+was proof against her attractions. A power that can be defied with
+impunity is drawing to its end. This axiom is as deeply engraved on
+the heart of woman as in the minds of kings. In Raphael, therefore,
+Foedora saw the deathblow of her influence and her ability to please.
+An epigram of his, made at the Opera the day before, was already known
+in the salons of Paris. The biting edge of that terrible speech had
+already given the Countess an incurable wound. We know how to
+cauterize a wound, but we know of no treatment as yet for the stab of
+a phrase. As every other woman in the house looked by turns at her and
+at the Marquis, Foedora would have consigned them all to the
+oubliettes of some Bastille; for in spite of her capacity for
+dissimulation, her discomfiture was discerned by her rivals. Her
+unfailing consolation had slipped from her at last. The delicious
+thought, "I am the most beautiful," the thought that at all times had
+soothed every mortification, had turned into a lie.
+
+At the opening of the second act a woman took up her position not very
+far from Raphael, in a box that had been empty hitherto. A murmur of
+admiration went up from the whole house. In that sea of human faces
+there was a movement of every living wave; all eyes were turned upon
+the stranger lady. The applause of young and old was so prolonged,
+that when the orchestra began, the musicians turned to the audience to
+request silence, and then they themselves joined in the plaudits and
+swelled the confusion. Excited talk began in every box, every woman
+equipped herself with an opera glass, elderly men grew young again,
+and polished the glasses of their lorgnettes with their gloves. The
+enthusiasm subsided by degrees, the stage echoed with the voices of
+the singers, and order reigned as before. The aristocratic section,
+ashamed of having yielded to a spontaneous feeling, again assumed
+their wonted politely frigid manner. The well-to-do dislike to be
+astonished at anything; at the first sight of a beautiful thing it
+becomes their duty to discover the defect in it which absolves them
+from admiring it,--the feeling of all ordinary minds. Yet a few still
+remained motionless and heedless of the music, artlessly absorbed in
+the delight of watching Raphael's neighbor.
+
+Valentin noticed Taillefer's mean, obnoxious countenance by Aquilina's
+side in a lower box, and received an approving smirk from him. Then he
+saw Emile, who seemed to say from where he stood in the orchestra,
+"Just look at that lovely creature there, close beside you!" Lastly,
+he saw Rastignac, with Mme. de Nucingen and her daughter, twisting his
+gloves like a man in despair, because he was tethered to his place,
+and could not leave it to go any nearer to the unknown fair divinity.
+
+Raphael's life depended upon a covenant that he had made with himself,
+and had hitherto kept sacred. He would give no special heed to any
+woman whatever; and the better to guard against temptation, he used a
+cunningly contrived opera-glass which destroyed the harmony of the
+fairest features by hideous distortions. He had not recovered from the
+terror that had seized on him in the morning when, at a mere
+expression of civility, the Magic Skin had contracted so abruptly. So
+Raphael was determined not to turn his face in the direction of his
+neighbor. He sat imperturbable as a duchess with his back against the
+corner of the box, thereby shutting out half of his neighbor's view of
+the stage, appearing to disregard her, and even to be unaware that a
+pretty woman sat there just behind him.
+
+His neighbor copied Valentin's position exactly; she leaned her elbow
+on the edge of her box and turned her face in three-quarter profile
+upon the singers on the stage, as if she were sitting to a painter.
+These two people looked like two estranged lovers still sulking, still
+turning their backs upon each other, who will go into each other's
+arms at the first tender word.
+
+Now and again his neighbor's ostrich feathers or her hair came in
+contact with Raphael's head, giving him a pleasurable thrill, against
+which he sternly fought. In a little while he felt the touch of the
+soft frill of lace that went round her dress; he could hear the
+gracious sounds of the folds of her dress itself, light rustling
+noises full of enchantment; he could even feel her movements as she
+breathed; with the gentle stir thus imparted to her form and to her
+draperies, it seemed to Raphael that all her being was suddenly
+communicated to him in an electric spark. The lace and tulle that
+caressed him imparted the delicious warmth of her bare, white
+shoulders. By a freak in the ordering of things, these two creatures,
+kept apart by social conventions, with the abysses of death between
+them, breathed together and perhaps thought of one another. Finally,
+the subtle perfume of aloes completed the work of Raphael's
+intoxication. Opposition heated his imagination, and his fancy, become
+the wilder for the limits imposed upon it, sketched a woman for him in
+outlines of fire. He turned abruptly, the stranger made a similar
+movement, startled no doubt at being brought in contact with a
+stranger; and they remained face to face, each with the same thought.
+
+"Pauline!"
+
+"M. Raphael!"
+
+Each surveyed the other, both of them petrified with astonishment.
+Raphael noticed Pauline's daintily simple costume. A woman's
+experienced eyes would have discerned and admired the outlines beneath
+the modest gauze folds of her bodice and the lily whiteness of her
+throat. And then her more than mortal clearness of soul, her maidenly
+modesty, her graceful bearing, all were unchanged. Her sleeve was
+quivering with agitation, for the beating of her heart was shaking her
+whole frame.
+
+"Come to the Hotel de Saint-Quentin to-morrow for your papers," she
+said. "I will be there at noon. Be punctual."
+
+She rose hastily, and disappeared. Raphael thought of following
+Pauline, feared to compromise her, and stayed. He looked at Foedora;
+she seemed to him positively ugly. Unable to understand a single
+phrase of the music, and feeling stifled in the theatre, he went out,
+and returned home with a full heart.
+
+"Jonathan," he said to the old servant, as soon as he lay in bed,
+"give me half a drop of laudanum on a piece of sugar, and don't wake
+me to-morrow till twenty minutes to twelve."
+
+"I want Pauline to love me!" he cried next morning, looking at the
+talisman the while in unspeakable anguish.
+
+The skin did not move in the least; it seemed to have lost its power
+to shrink; doubtless it could not fulfil a wish fulfilled already.
+
+"Ah!" exclaimed Raphael, feeling as if a mantle of lead had fallen
+away, which he had worn ever since the day when the talisman had been
+given to him; "so you are playing me false, you are not obeying me,
+the pact is broken! I am free; I shall live. Then was it all a
+wretched joke?" But he did not dare to believe in his own thought as
+he uttered it.
+
+He dressed himself as simply as had formerly been his wont, and set
+out on foot for his old lodging, trying to go back in fancy to the
+happy days when he abandoned himself without peril to vehement
+desires, the days when he had not yet condemned all human enjoyment.
+As he walked he beheld Pauline--not the Pauline of the Hotel
+Saint-Quentin, but the Pauline of last evening. Here was the
+accomplished mistress he had so often dreamed of, the intelligent
+young girl with the loving nature and artistic temperament, who
+understood poets, who understood poetry, and lived in luxurious
+surroundings. Here, in short, was Foedora, gifted with a great soul;
+or Pauline become a countess, and twice a millionaire, as Foedora
+had been. When he reached the worn threshold, and stood upon the
+broken step at the door, where in the old days he had had so many
+desperate thoughts, an old woman came out of the room within and
+spoke to him.
+
+"You are M. Raphael de Valentin, are you not?"
+
+"Yes, good mother," he replied.
+
+"You know your old room then," she replied; "you are expected up
+there."
+
+"Does Mme. Gaudin still own the house?" Raphael asked.
+
+"Oh no, sir. Mme. Gaudin is a baroness now. She lives in a fine house
+of her own on the other side of the river. Her husband has come back.
+My goodness, he brought back thousands and thousands. They say she
+could buy up all the Quartier Saint-Jacques if she liked. She gave me
+her basement room for nothing, and the remainder of her lease. Ah,
+she's a kind woman all the same; she is no more proud to-day than she
+was yesterday."
+
+Raphael hurried up the staircase to his garret; as he reached the last
+few steps he heard the sounds of a piano. Pauline was there, simply
+dressed in a cotton gown, but the way that it was made, like the
+gloves, hat, and shawl that she had thrown carelessly upon the bed,
+revealed a change of fortune.
+
+"Ah, there you are!" cried Pauline, turning her head, and rising with
+unconcealed delight.
+
+Raphael went to sit beside her, flushed, confused, and happy; he
+looked at her in silence.
+
+"Why did you leave us then?" she asked, dropping her eyes as the flush
+deepened on his face. "What became of you?"
+
+"Ah, I have been very miserable, Pauline; I am very miserable still."
+
+"Alas!" she said, filled with pitying tenderness. "I guessed your fate
+yesterday when I saw you so well dressed, and apparently so wealthy;
+but in reality? Eh, M. Raphael, is it as it always used to be with
+you?"
+
+Valentin could not restrain the tears that sprang to his eyes.
+
+"Pauline," he exclaimed, "I----"
+
+He went no further, love sparkled in his eyes, and his emotion
+overflowed his face.
+
+"Oh, he loves me! he loves me!" cried Pauline.
+
+Raphael felt himself unable to say one word; he bent his head. The
+young girl took his hand at this; she pressed it as she said, half
+sobbing and half laughing:--
+
+"Rich, rich, happy and rich! Your Pauline is rich. But I? Oh, I ought
+to be very poor to-day. I have said, times without number, that I
+would give all the wealth upon this earth for those words, 'He loves
+me!' O my Raphael! I have millions. You like luxury, you will be glad;
+but you must love me and my heart besides, for there is so much love
+for you in my heart. You don't know? My father has come back. I am a
+wealthy heiress. Both he and my mother leave me completely free to
+decide my own fate. I am free--do you understand?"
+
+Seized with a kind of frenzy, Raphael grasped Pauline's hands and
+kissed them eagerly and vehemently, with an almost convulsive caress.
+Pauline drew her hands away, laid them on Raphael's shoulders, and
+drew him towards her. They understood one another--in that close
+embrace, in the unalloyed and sacred fervor of that one kiss without
+an afterthought--the first kiss by which two souls take possession of
+each other.
+
+"Ah, I will not leave you any more," said Pauline, falling back in her
+chair. "I do not know how I come to be so bold!" she added, blushing.
+
+"Bold, my Pauline? Do not fear it. It is love, love true and deep and
+everlasting like my own, is it not?"
+
+"Speak!" she cried. "Go on speaking, so long your lips have been dumb
+for me."
+
+"Then you have loved me all along?"
+
+"Loved you? _Mon Dieu_! How often I have wept here, setting your room
+straight, and grieving for your poverty and my own. I would have sold
+myself to the evil one to spare you one vexation! You are MY Raphael
+to-day, really my own Raphael, with that handsome head of yours, and
+your heart is mine too; yes, that above all, your heart--O wealth
+inexhaustible! Well, where was I?" she went on after a pause. "Oh yes!
+We have three, four, or five millions, I believe. If I were poor, I
+should perhaps desire to bear your name, to be acknowledged as your
+wife; but as it is, I would give up the whole world for you, I would
+be your servant still, now and always. Why, Raphael, if I give you my
+fortune, my heart, myself to-day, I do no more than I did that day
+when I put a certain five-franc piece in the drawer there," and she
+pointed to the table. "Oh, how your exultation hurt me then!"
+
+"Oh, why are you rich?" Raphael cried; "why is there no vanity in you?
+I can do nothing for you."
+
+He wrung his hands in despair and happiness and love.
+
+"When you are the Marquise de Valentin, I know that the title and the
+fortune for thee, heavenly soul, will not be worth----"
+
+"One hair of your head," she cried.
+
+"I have millions too. But what is wealth to either of us now? There is
+my life--ah, that I can offer, take it."
+
+"Your love, Raphael, your love is all the world to me. Are your
+thoughts of me? I am the happiest of the happy!"
+
+"Can any one overhear us?" asked Raphael.
+
+"Nobody," she replied, and a mischievous gesture escaped her.
+
+"Come, then!" cried Valentin, holding out his arms.
+
+She sprang upon his knees and clasped her arms about his neck.
+
+"Kiss me!" she cried, "after all the pain you have given me; to blot
+out the memory of the grief that your joys have caused me; and for the
+sake of the nights that I spent in painting hand-screens----"
+
+"Those hand-screens of yours?"
+
+"Now that we are rich, my darling, I can tell you all about it. Poor
+boy! how easy it is to delude a clever man! Could you have had white
+waistcoats and clean shirts twice a week for three francs every month
+to the laundress? Why, you used to drink twice as much milk as your
+money would have paid for. I deceived you all round--over firing, oil,
+and even money. O Raphael mine, don't have me for your wife, I am far
+too cunning!" she said laughing.
+
+"But how did you manage?"
+
+"I used to work till two o'clock in the morning; I gave my mother half
+the money made by my screens, and the other half went to you."
+
+They looked at one another for a moment, both bewildered by love and
+gladness.
+
+"Some day we shall have to pay for this happiness by some terrible
+sorrow," cried Raphael.
+
+"Perhaps you are married?" said Pauline. "Oh, I will not give you up
+to any other woman."
+
+"I am free, my beloved."
+
+"Free!" she repeated. "Free, and mine!"
+
+She slipped down upon her knees, clasped her hands, and looked at
+Raphael in an enthusiasm of devotion.
+
+"I am afraid I shall go mad. How handsome you are!" she went on,
+passing her fingers through her lover's fair hair. "How stupid your
+Countess Foedora is! How pleased I was yesterday with the homage they
+all paid to me! SHE has never been applauded. Dear, when I felt your
+arm against my back, I heard a vague voice within me that cried, 'He
+is there!' and I turned round and saw you. I fled, for I longed so to
+throw my arms about you before them all."
+
+"How happy you are--you can speak!" Raphael exclaimed. "My heart is
+overwhelmed; I would weep, but I cannot. Do not draw your hand away. I
+could stay here looking at you like this for the rest of my life, I
+think; happy and content."
+
+"O my love, say that once more!"
+
+"Ah, what are words?" answered Valentin, letting a hot tear fall on
+Pauline's hands. "Some time I will try to tell you of my love; just
+now I can only feel it."
+
+"You," she said, "with your lofty soul and your great genius, with
+that heart of yours that I know so well; are you really mine, as I am
+yours?"
+
+"For ever and ever, my sweet creature," said Raphael in an uncertain
+voice. "You shall be my wife, my protecting angel. My griefs have
+always been dispelled by your presence, and my courage revived; that
+angelic smile now on your lips has purified me, so to speak. A new
+life seems about to begin for me. The cruel past and my wretched
+follies are hardly more to me than evil dreams. At your side I breathe
+an atmosphere of happiness, and I am pure. Be with me always," he
+added, pressing her solemnly to his beating heart.
+
+"Death may come when it will," said Pauline in ecstasy; "I have
+lived!"
+
+Happy he who shall divine their joy, for he must have experienced it.
+
+"I wish that no one might enter this dear garret again, my Raphael,"
+said Pauline, after two hours of silence.
+
+"We must have the door walled up, put bars across the window, and buy
+the house," the Marquis answered.
+
+"Yes, we will," she said. Then a moment later she added: "Our search
+for your manuscripts has been a little lost sight of," and they both
+laughed like children.
+
+"Pshaw! I don't care a jot for the whole circle of the sciences,"
+Raphael answered.
+
+"Ah, sir, and how about glory?"
+
+"I glory in you alone."
+
+"You used to be very miserable as you made these little scratches and
+scrawls," she said, turning the papers over.
+
+"My Pauline----"
+
+"Oh yes, I am your Pauline--and what then?"
+
+"Where are you living now?"
+
+"In the Rue Saint Lazare. And you?"
+
+"In the Rue de Varenne."
+
+"What a long way apart we shall be until----" She stopped, and looked
+at her lover with a mischievous and coquettish expression.
+
+"But at the most we need only be separated for a fortnight," Raphael
+answered.
+
+"Really! we are to be married in a fortnight?" and she jumped for joy
+like a child.
+
+"I am an unnatural daughter!" she went on. "I give no more thought to
+my father or my mother, or to anything in the world. Poor love, you
+don't know that my father is very ill? He returned from the Indies in
+very bad health. He nearly died at Havre, where we went to find him.
+Good heavens!" she cried, looking at her watch; "it is three o'clock
+already! I ought to be back again when he wakes at four. I am mistress
+of the house at home; my mother does everything that I wish, and my
+father worships me; but I will not abuse their kindness, that would be
+wrong. My poor father! He would have me go to the Italiens yesterday.
+You will come to see him to-morrow, will you not?"
+
+"Will Madame la Marquise de Valentin honor me by taking my arm?"
+
+"I am going to take the key of this room away with me," she said.
+"Isn't our treasure-house a palace?"
+
+"One more kiss, Pauline."
+
+"A thousand, _mon Dieu_!" she said, looking at Raphael. "Will it always
+be like this? I feel as if I were dreaming."
+
+They went slowly down the stairs together, step for step, with arms
+closely linked, trembling both of them beneath their load of joy. Each
+pressing close to the other's side, like a pair of doves, they reached
+the Place de la Sorbonne, where Pauline's carriage was waiting.
+
+"I want to go home with you," she said. "I want to see your own room
+and your study, and to sit at the table where you work. It will be
+like old times," she said, blushing.
+
+She spoke to the servant. "Joseph, before returning home I am going to
+the Rue de Varenne. It is a quarter-past three now, and I must be back
+by four o'clock. George must hurry the horses." And so in a few
+moments the lovers came to Valentin's abode.
+
+"How glad I am to have seen all this for myself!" Pauline cried,
+creasing the silken bed-curtains in Raphael's room between her
+fingers. "As I go to sleep, I shall be here in thought. I shall
+imagine your dear head on the pillow there. Raphael, tell me, did no
+one advise you about the furniture of your hotel?"
+
+"No one whatever."
+
+"Really? It was not a woman who----"
+
+"Pauline!"
+
+"Oh, I know I am fearfully jealous. You have good taste. I will have a
+bed like yours to-morrow."
+
+Quite beside himself with happiness, Raphael caught Pauline in his
+arms.
+
+"Oh, my father!" she said; "my father----"
+
+"I will take you back to him," cried Valentin, "for I want to be away
+from you as little as possible."
+
+"How loving you are! I did not venture to suggest it----"
+
+"Are you not my life?"
+
+It would be tedious to set down accurately the charming prattle of the
+lovers, for tones and looks and gestures that cannot be rendered alone
+gave it significance. Valentin went back with Pauline to her own door,
+and returned with as much happiness in his heart as mortal man can
+know.
+
+When he was seated in his armchair beside the fire, thinking over the
+sudden and complete way in which his wishes had been fulfilled, a cold
+shiver went through him, as if the blade of a dagger had been plunged
+into his breast--he thought of the Magic Skin, and saw that it had
+shrunk a little. He uttered the most tremendous of French oaths,
+without any of the Jesuitical reservations made by the Abbess of
+Andouillettes, leant his head against the back of the chair, and sat
+motionless, fixing his unseeing eyes upon the bracket of the curtain
+pole.
+
+"Good God!" he cried; "every wish! Every desire of mine! Poor
+Pauline!----"
+
+He took a pair of compasses and measured the extent of existence that
+the morning had cost him.
+
+"I have scarcely enough for two months!" he said.
+
+A cold sweat broke out over him; moved by an ungovernable spasm of
+rage, he seized the Magic Skin, exclaiming:
+
+"I am a perfect fool!"
+
+He rushed out of the house and across the garden, and flung the
+talisman down a well.
+
+"_Vogue la galere_," cried he. "The devil take all this nonsense."
+
+So Raphael gave himself up to the happiness of being beloved, and led
+with Pauline the life of heart and heart. Difficulties which it would
+be somewhat tedious to describe had delayed their marriage, which was
+to take place early in March. Each was sure of the other; their
+affection had been tried, and happiness had taught them how strong it
+was. Never has love made two souls, two natures, so absolutely one.
+The more they came to know of each other, the more they loved. On
+either side there was the same hesitating delicacy, the same
+transports of joy such as angels know; there were no clouds in their
+heaven; the will of either was the other's law.
+
+Wealthy as they both were, they had not a caprice which they could not
+gratify, and for that reason had no caprices. A refined taste, a
+feeling for beauty and poetry, was instinct in the soul of the bride;
+her lover's smile was more to her than all the pearls of Ormuz. She
+disdained feminine finery; a muslin dress and flowers formed her most
+elaborate toilette.
+
+Pauline and Raphael shunned every one else, for solitude was
+abundantly beautiful to them. The idlers at the Opera, or at the
+Italiens, saw this charming and unconventional pair evening after
+evening. Some gossip went the round of the salons at first, but the
+harmless lovers were soon forgotten in the course of events which took
+place in Paris; their marriage was announced at length to excuse them
+in the eyes of the prudish; and as it happened, their servants did not
+babble; so their bliss did not draw down upon them any very severe
+punishment.
+
+One morning towards the end of February, at the time when the
+brightening days bring a belief in the nearness of the joys of spring,
+Pauline and Raphael were breakfasting together in a small
+conservatory, a kind of drawing-room filled with flowers, on a level
+with the garden. The mild rays of the pale winter sunlight, breaking
+through the thicket of exotic plants, warmed the air somewhat. The
+vivid contrast made by the varieties of foliage, the colors of the
+masses of flowering shrubs, the freaks of light and shadow, gladdened
+the eyes. While all the rest of Paris still sought warmth from its
+melancholy hearth, these two were laughing in a bower of camellias,
+lilacs, and blossoming heath. Their happy faces rose above lilies of
+the valley, narcissus blooms, and Bengal roses. A mat of plaited
+African grass, variegated like a carpet, lay beneath their feet in
+this luxurious conservatory. The walls, covered with a green linen
+material, bore no traces of damp. The surfaces of the rustic wooden
+furniture shone with cleanliness. A kitten, attracted by the odor of
+milk, had established itself upon the table; it allowed Pauline to
+bedabble it in coffee; she was playing merrily with it, taking away
+the cream that she had just allowed the kitten to sniff at, so as to
+exercise its patience, and keep up the contest. She burst out laughing
+at every antic, and by the comical remarks she constantly made, she
+hindered Raphael from perusing the paper; he had dropped it a dozen
+times already. This morning picture seemed to overflow with
+inexpressible gladness, like everything that is natural and genuine.
+
+Raphael, still pretending to read his paper, furtively watched Pauline
+with the cat--his Pauline, in the dressing-gown that hung carelessly
+about her; his Pauline, with her hair loose on her shoulders, with a
+tiny, white, blue-veined foot peeping out of a velvet slipper. It was
+pleasant to see her in this negligent dress; she was delightful as
+some fanciful picture by Westall; half-girl, half-woman, as she seemed
+to be, or perhaps more of a girl than a woman, there was no alloy in
+the happiness she enjoyed, and of love she knew as yet only its first
+ecstasy. When Raphael, absorbed in happy musing, had forgotten the
+existence of the newspaper, Pauline flew upon it, crumpled it up into
+a ball, and threw it out into the garden; the kitten sprang after the
+rotating object, which spun round and round, as politics are wont to
+do. This childish scene recalled Raphael to himself. He would have
+gone on reading, and felt for the sheet he no longer possessed. Joyous
+laughter rang out like the song of a bird, one peal leading to
+another.
+
+"I am quite jealous of the paper," she said, as she wiped away the
+tears that her childlike merriment had brought into her eyes. "Now, is
+it not a heinous offence," she went on, as she became a woman all at
+once, "to read Russian proclamations in my presence, and to attend to
+the prosings of the Emperor Nicholas rather than to looks and words of
+love!"
+
+"I was not reading, my dear angel; I was looking at you."
+
+Just then the gravel walk outside the conservatory rang with the sound
+of the gardener's heavily nailed boots.
+
+"I beg your pardon, my Lord Marquis--and yours, too, madame--if I am
+intruding, but I have brought you a curiosity the like of which I
+never set eyes on. Drawing a bucket of water just now, with due
+respect, I got out this strange salt-water plant. Here it is. It must
+be thoroughly used to water, anyhow, for it isn't saturated or even
+damp at all. It is as dry as a piece of wood, and has not swelled a
+bit. As my Lord Marquis certainly knows a great deal more about things
+than I do, I thought I ought to bring it, and that it would interest
+him."
+
+Therewith the gardener showed Raphael the inexorable piece of skin;
+there were barely six square inches of it left.
+
+"Thanks, Vaniere," Raphael said. "The thing is very curious."
+
+"What is the matter with you, my angel; you are growing quite white!"
+Pauline cried.
+
+"You can go, Vaniere."
+
+"Your voice frightens me," the girl went on; "it is so strangely
+altered. What is it? How are you feeling? Where is the pain? You are
+in pain!--Jonathan! here! call a doctor!" she cried.
+
+"Hush, my Pauline," Raphael answered, as he regained composure. "Let
+us get up and go. Some flower here has a scent that is too much for
+me. It is that verbena, perhaps."
+
+Pauline flew upon the innocent plant, seized it by the stalk, and
+flung it out into the garden; then, with all the might of the love
+between them, she clasped Raphael in a close embrace, and with
+languishing coquetry raised her red lips to his for a kiss.
+
+"Dear angel," she cried, "when I saw you turn so white, I understood
+that I could not live on without you; your life is my life too. Lay
+your hand on my back, Raphael mine; I feel a chill like death. The
+feeling of cold is there yet. Your lips are burning. How is your hand?
+--Cold as ice," she added.
+
+"Mad girl!" exclaimed Raphael.
+
+"Why that tear? Let me drink it."
+
+"O Pauline, Pauline, you love me far too much!"
+
+"There is something very extraordinary going on in your mind, Raphael!
+Do not dissimulate. I shall very soon find out your secret. Give that
+to me," she went on, taking the Magic Skin.
+
+"You are my executioner!" the young man exclaimed, glancing in horror
+at the talisman.
+
+"How changed your voice is!" cried Pauline, as she dropped the fatal
+symbol of destiny.
+
+"Do you love me?" he asked.
+
+"Do I love you? Is there any doubt?"
+
+"Then, leave me, go away!"
+
+The poor child went.
+
+"So!" cried Raphael, when he was alone. "In an enlightened age, when
+we have found out that diamonds are a crystallized form of charcoal,
+at a time when everything is made clear, when the police would hale a
+new Messiah before the magistrates, and submit his miracles to the
+Academie des Sciences--in an epoch when we no longer believe in
+anything but a notary's signature--that I, forsooth, should believe in
+a sort of _Mene, Tekel, Upharsin_! No, by Heaven, I will not believe
+that the Supreme Being would take pleasure in torturing a harmless
+creature.--Let us see the learned about it."
+
+Between the Halle des Vins, with its extensive assembly of barrels,
+and the Salpetriere, that extensive seminary of drunkenness, lies a
+small pond, which Raphael soon reached. All sorts of ducks of rare
+varieties were there disporting themselves; their colored markings
+shone in the sun like the glass in cathedral windows. Every kind of
+duck in the world was represented, quacking, dabbling, and moving
+about--a kind of parliament of ducks assembled against its will, but
+luckily without either charter or political principles, living in
+complete immunity from sportsmen, under the eyes of any naturalist
+that chanced to see them.
+
+"That is M. Lavrille," said one of the keepers to Raphael, who had
+asked for that high priest of zoology.
+
+The Marquis saw a short man buried in profound reflections, caused by
+the appearance of a pair of ducks. The man of science was middle-aged;
+he had a pleasant face, made pleasanter still by a kindly expression,
+but an absorption in scientific ideas engrossed his whole person. His
+peruke was strangely turned up, by being constantly raised to scratch
+his head; so that a line of white hair was left plainly visible, a
+witness to an enthusiasm for investigation, which, like every other
+strong passion, so withdraws us from mundane considerations, that we
+lose all consciousness of the "I" within us. Raphael, the student and
+man of science, looked respectfully at the naturalist, who devoted his
+nights to enlarging the limits of human knowledge, and whose very
+errors reflected glory upon France; but a she-coxcomb would have
+laughed, no doubt, at the break of continuity between the breeches and
+striped waistcoat worn by the man of learning; the interval, moreover,
+was modestly filled by a shirt which had been considerably creased,
+for he stooped and raised himself by turns, as his zoological
+observations required.
+
+After the first interchange of civilities, Raphael thought it
+necessary to pay M. Lavrille a banal compliment upon his ducks.
+
+"Oh, we are well off for ducks," the naturalist replied. "The genus,
+moreover, as you doubtless know, is the most prolific in the order of
+palmipeds. It begins with the swan and ends with the zin-zin duck,
+comprising in all one hundred and thirty-seven very distinct
+varieties, each having its own name, habits, country, and character,
+and every one no more like another than a white man is like a negro.
+Really, sir, when we dine off a duck, we have no notion for the most
+part of the vast extent----"
+
+He interrupted himself as he saw a small pretty duck come up to the
+surface of the pond.
+
+"There you see the cravatted swan, a poor native of Canada; he has
+come a very long way to show us his brown and gray plumage and his
+little black cravat! Look, he is preening himself. That one is the
+famous eider duck that provides the down, the eider-down under which
+our fine ladies sleep; isn't it pretty? Who would not admire the
+little pinkish white breast and the green beak? I have just been a
+witness, sir," he went on, "to a marriage that I had long despaired of
+bringing about; they have paired rather auspiciously, and I shall
+await the results very eagerly. This will be a hundred and
+thirty-eighth species, I flatter myself, to which, perhaps, my name
+will be given. That is the newly matched pair," he said, pointing out
+two of the ducks; "one of them is a laughing goose (_anas albifrons_),
+and the other the great whistling duck, Buffon's _anas ruffina_. I have
+hesitated a long while between the whistling duck, the duck with white
+eyebrows, and the shoveler duck (_anas clypeata_). Stay, that is the
+shoveler--that fat, brownish black rascal, with the greenish neck and
+that coquettish iridescence on it. But the whistling duck was a
+crested one, sir, and you will understand that I deliberated no
+longer. We only lack the variegated black-capped duck now. These
+gentlemen here, unanimously claim that that variety of duck is only a
+repetition of the curve-beaked teal, but for my own part,"--and the
+gesture he made was worth seeing. It expressed at once the modesty and
+pride of a man of science; the pride full of obstinacy, and the
+modesty well tempered with assurance.
+
+"I don't think it is," he added. "You see, my dear sir, that we are
+not amusing ourselves here. I am engaged at this moment upon a
+monograph on the genus duck. But I am at your disposal."
+
+While they went towards a rather pleasant house in the Rue du Buffon,
+Raphael submitted the skin to M. Lavrille's inspection.
+
+"I know the product," said the man of science, when he had turned his
+magnifying glass upon the talisman. "It used to be used for covering
+boxes. The shagreen is very old. They prefer to use skate's skin
+nowadays for making sheaths. This, as you are doubtless aware, is the
+hide of the _raja sephen_, a Red Sea fish."
+
+"But this, sir, since you are so exceedingly good----"
+
+"This," the man of science interrupted, as he resumed, "this is quite
+another thing; between these two shagreens, sir, there is a difference
+just as wide as between sea and land, or fish and flesh. The fish's
+skin is harder, however, than the skin of the land animal. This," he
+said, as he indicated the talisman, "is, as you doubtless know, one of
+the most curious of zoological products."
+
+"But to proceed----" said Raphael.
+
+"This," replied the man of science, as he flung himself down into his
+armchair, "is an ass' skin, sir."
+
+"Yes, I know," said the young man.
+
+"A very rare variety of ass found in Persia," the naturalist
+continued, "the onager of the ancients, equus asinus, the _koulan_ of
+the Tartars; Pallas went out there to observe it, and has made it
+known to science, for as a matter of fact the animal for a long time
+was believed to be mythical. It is mentioned, as you know, in Holy
+Scripture; Moses forbade that it should be coupled with its own
+species, and the onager is yet more famous for the prostitutions of
+which it was the object, and which are often mentioned by the prophets
+of the Bible. Pallas, as you know doubtless, states in his _Act.
+Petrop._ tome II., that these bizarre excesses are still devoutly
+believed in among the Persians and the Nogais as a sovereign remedy
+for lumbago and sciatic gout. We poor Parisians scarcely believe that.
+The Museum has no example of the onager.
+
+"What a magnificent animal!" he continued. "It is full of mystery; its
+eyes are provided with a sort of burnished covering, to which the
+Orientals attribute the powers of fascination; it has a glossier and
+finer coat than our handsomest horses possess, striped with more or
+less tawny bands, very much like the zebra's hide. There is something
+pliant and silky about its hair, which is sleek to the touch. Its
+powers of sight vie in precision and accuracy with those of man; it is
+rather larger than our largest domestic donkeys, and is possessed of
+extraordinary courage. If it is surprised by any chance, it defends
+itself against the most dangerous wild beasts with remarkable success;
+the rapidity of its movements can only be compared with the flight of
+birds; an onager, sir, would run the best Arab or Persian horses to
+death. According to the father of the conscientious Doctor Niebuhr,
+whose recent loss we are deploring, as you doubtless know, the
+ordinary average pace of one of these wonderful creatures would be
+seven thousand geometric feet per hour. Our own degenerate race of
+donkeys can give no idea of the ass in his pride and independence. He
+is active and spirited in his demeanor; he is cunning and sagacious;
+there is grace about the outlines of his head; every movement is full
+of attractive charm. In the East he is the king of beasts. Turkish and
+Persian superstition even credits him with a mysterious origin; and
+when stories of the prowess attributed to him are told in Thibet or in
+Tartary, the speakers mingle Solomon's name with that of this noble
+animal. A tame onager, in short, is worth an enormous amount; it is
+well-nigh impossible to catch them among the mountains, where they
+leap like roebucks, and seem as if they could fly like birds. Our myth
+of the winged horse, our Pegasus, had its origin doubtless in these
+countries, where the shepherds could see the onager springing from one
+rock to another. In Persia they breed asses for the saddle, a cross
+between a tamed onager and a she-ass, and they paint them red,
+following immemorial tradition. Perhaps it was this custom that gave
+rise to our own proverb, 'Surely as a red donkey.' At some period when
+natural history was much neglected in France, I think a traveler must
+have brought over one of these strange beasts that endures servitude
+with such impatience. Hence the adage. The skin that you have laid
+before me is the skin of an onager. Opinions differ as to the origin
+of the name. Some claim that _Chagri_ is a Turkish word; others insist
+that _Chagri_ must be the name of the place where this animal product
+underwent the chemical process of preparation so clearly described by
+Pallas, to which the peculiar graining that we admire is due;
+Martellens has written to me saying that _Chaagri_ is a river----"
+
+"I thank you, sir, for the information that you have given me; it
+would furnish an admirable footnote for some Dom Calmet or other, if
+such erudite hermits yet exist; but I have had the honor of pointing
+out to you that this scrap was in the first instance quite as large as
+that map," said Raphael, indicating an open atlas to Lavrille; "but it
+has shrunk visibly in three months' time----"
+
+"Quite so," said the man of science. "I understand. The remains of any
+substance primarily organic are naturally subject to a process of
+decay. It is quite easy to understand, and its progress depends upon
+atmospherical conditions. Even metals contract and expand appreciably,
+for engineers have remarked somewhat considerable interstices between
+great blocks of stone originally clamped together with iron bars. The
+field of science is boundless, but human life is very short, so that
+we do not claim to be acquainted with all the phenomena of nature."
+
+"Pardon the question that I am about to ask you, sir," Raphael began,
+half embarrassed, "but are you quite sure that this piece of skin is
+subject to the ordinary laws of zoology, and that it can be
+stretched?"
+
+"Certainly----oh, bother!----" muttered M. Lavrille, trying to stretch
+the talisman. "But if you, sir, will go to see Planchette," he added,
+"the celebrated professor of mechanics, he will certainly discover
+some method of acting upon this skin, of softening and expanding it."
+
+"Ah, sir, you are the preserver of my life," and Raphael took leave of
+the learned naturalist and hurried off to Planchette, leaving the
+worthy Lavrille in his study, all among the bottles and dried plants
+that filled it up.
+
+Quite unconsciously Raphael brought away with him from this visit, all
+of science that man can grasp, a terminology to wit. Lavrille, the
+worthy man, was very much like Sancho Panza giving to Don Quixote the
+history of the goats; he was entertaining himself by making out a list
+of animals and ticking them off. Even now that his life was nearing
+its end, he was scarcely acquainted with a mere fraction of the
+countless numbers of the great tribes that God has scattered, for some
+unknown end, throughout the ocean of worlds.
+
+Raphael was well pleased. "I shall keep my ass well in hand," cried
+he. Sterne had said before his day, "Let us take care of our ass, if
+we wish to live to old age." But it is such a fantastic brute!
+
+Planchette was a tall, thin man, a poet of a surety, lost in one
+continual thought, and always employed in gazing into the bottomless
+abyss of Motion. Commonplace minds accuse these lofty intellects of
+madness; they form a misinterpreted race apart that lives in a
+wonderful carelessness of luxuries or other people's notions. They
+will spend whole days at a stretch, smoking a cigar that has gone out,
+and enter a drawing-room with the buttons on their garments not in
+every case formally wedded to the button-holes. Some day or other,
+after a long time spent in measuring space, or in accumulating Xs
+under Aa-Gg, they succeed in analyzing some natural law, and resolve
+it into its elemental principles, and all on a sudden the crowd gapes
+at a new machine; or it is a handcart perhaps that overwhelms us with
+astonishment by the apt simplicity of its construction. The modest man
+of science smiles at his admirers, and remarks, "What is that
+invention of mine? Nothing whatever. Man cannot create a force; he can
+but direct it; and science consists in learning from nature."
+
+The mechanician was standing bolt upright, planted on both feet, like
+some victim dropped straight from the gibbet, when Raphael broke in
+upon him. He was intently watching an agate ball that rolled over a
+sun-dial, and awaited its final settlement. The worthy man had
+received neither pension nor decoration; he had not known how to make
+the right use of his ability for calculation. He was happy in his life
+spent on the watch for a discovery; he had no thought either of
+reputation, of the outer world, nor even of himself, and led the life
+of science for the sake of science.
+
+"It is inexplicable," he exclaimed. "Ah, your servant, sir," he went
+on, becoming aware of Raphael's existence. "How is your mother? You
+must go and see my wife."
+
+"And I also could have lived thus," thought Raphael, as he recalled
+the learned man from his meditations by asking of him how to produce
+any effect on the talisman, which he placed before him.
+
+"Although my credulity must amuse you, sir," so the Marquis ended, "I
+will conceal nothing from you. That skin seems to me to be endowed
+with an insuperable power of resistance."
+
+"People of fashion, sir, always treat science rather superciliously,"
+said Planchette. "They all talk to us pretty much as the _incroyable_
+did when he brought some ladies to see Lalande just after an eclipse,
+and remarked, 'Be so good as to begin it over again!' What effect do
+you want to produce? The object of the science of mechanics is either
+the application or the neutralization of the laws of motion. As for
+motion pure and simple, I tell you humbly, that we cannot possibly
+define it. That disposed of, unvarying phenomena have been observed
+which accompany the actions of solids and fluids. If we set up the
+conditions by which these phenomena are brought to pass, we can
+transport bodies or communicate locomotive power to them at a
+predetermined rate of speed. We can project them, divide them up in a
+few or an infinite number of pieces, accordingly as we break them or
+grind them to powder; we can twist bodies or make them rotate, modify,
+compress, expand, or extend them. The whole science, sir, rests upon a
+single fact.
+
+"You see this ball," he went on; "here it lies upon this slab. Now, it
+is over there. What name shall we give to what has taken place, so
+natural from a physical point of view, so amazing from a moral?
+Movement, locomotion, changing of place? What prodigious vanity lurks
+underneath the words. Does a name solve the difficulty? Yet it is the
+whole of our science for all that. Our machines either make direct use
+of this agency, this fact, or they convert it. This trifling
+phenomenon, applied to large masses, would send Paris flying. We can
+increase speed by an expenditure of force, and augment the force by an
+increase of speed. But what are speed and force? Our science is as
+powerless to tell us that as to create motion. Any movement whatever
+is an immense power, and man does not create power of any kind.
+Everything is movement, thought itself is a movement, upon movement
+nature is based. Death is a movement whose limitations are little
+known. If God is eternal, be sure that He moves perpetually; perhaps
+God is movement. That is why movement, like God is inexplicable,
+unfathomable, unlimited, incomprehensible, intangible. Who has ever
+touched, comprehended, or measured movement? We feel its effects
+without seeing it; we can even deny them as we can deny the existence
+of a God. Where is it? Where is it not? Whence comes it? What is its
+source? What is its end? It surrounds us, it intrudes upon us, and yet
+escapes us. It is evident as a fact, obscure as an abstraction; it is
+at once effect and cause. It requires space, even as we, and what is
+space? Movement alone recalls it to us; without movement, space is but
+an empty meaningless word. Like space, like creation, like the
+infinite, movement is an insoluble problem which confounds human
+reason; man will never conceive it, whatever else he may be permitted
+to conceive.
+
+"Between each point in space occupied in succession by that ball,"
+continued the man of science, "there is an abyss confronting human
+reason, an abyss into which Pascal fell. In order to produce any
+effect upon an unknown substance, we ought first of all to study that
+substance; to know whether, in accordance with its nature, it will be
+broken by the force of a blow, or whether it will withstand it; if it
+breaks in pieces, and you have no wish to split it up, we shall not
+achieve the end proposed. If you want to compress it, a uniform
+impulse must be communicated to all the particles of the substance, so
+as to diminish the interval that separates them in an equal degree. If
+you wish to expand it, we should try to bring a uniform eccentric
+force to bear on every molecule; for unless we conform accurately to
+this law, we shall have breaches in continuity. The modes of motion,
+sir, are infinite, and no limit exists to combinations of movement.
+Upon what effect have you determined?"
+
+"I want any kind of pressure that is strong enough to expand the skin
+indefinitely," began Raphael, quite of out patience.
+
+"Substance is finite," the mathematician put in, "and therefore will
+not admit of indefinite expansion, but pressure will necessarily
+increase the extent of surface at the expense of the thickness, which
+will be diminished until the point is reached when the material gives
+out----"
+
+"Bring about that result, sir," Raphael cried, "and you will have
+earned millions."
+
+"Then I should rob you of your money," replied the other, phlegmatic
+as a Dutchman. "I am going to show you, in a word or two, that a
+machine can be made that is fit to crush Providence itself in pieces
+like a fly. It would reduce a man to the conditions of a piece of
+waste paper; a man--boots and spurs, hat and cravat, trinkets and
+gold, and all----"
+
+"What a fearful machine!"
+
+"Instead of flinging their brats into the water, the Chinese ought to
+make them useful in this way," the man of science went on, without
+reflecting on the regard man has for his progeny.
+
+Quite absorbed by his idea, Planchette took an empty flower-pot, with
+a hole in the bottom, and put it on the surface of the dial, then he
+went to look for a little clay in a corner of the garden. Raphael
+stood spellbound, like a child to whom his nurse is telling some
+wonderful story. Planchette put the clay down upon the slab, drew a
+pruning-knife from his pocket, cut two branches from an elder tree,
+and began to clean them of pith by blowing through them, as if Raphael
+had not been present.
+
+"There are the rudiments of the apparatus," he said. Then he connected
+one of the wooden pipes with the bottom of the flower-pot by way of a
+clay joint, in such a way that the mouth of the elder stem was just
+under the hole of the flower-pot; you might have compared it to a big
+tobacco-pipe. He spread a bed of clay over the surface of the slab, in
+a shovel-shaped mass, set down the flower-pot at the wider end of it,
+and laid the pipe of the elder stem along the portion which
+represented the handle of the shovel. Next he put a lump of clay at
+the end of the elder stem and therein planted the other pipe, in an
+upright position, forming a second elbow which connected it with the
+first horizontal pipe in such a manner that the air, or any given
+fluid in circulation, could flow through this improvised piece of
+mechanism from the mouth of the vertical tube, along the intermediate
+passages, and so into the large empty flower-pot.
+
+"This apparatus, sir," he said to Raphael, with all the gravity of an
+academician pronouncing his initiatory discourse, "is one of the great
+Pascal's grandest claims upon our admiration."
+
+"I don't understand."
+
+The man of science smiled. He went up to a fruit-tree and took down a
+little phial in which the druggist had sent him some liquid for
+catching ants; he broke off the bottom and made a funnel of the top,
+carefully fitting it to the mouth of the vertical hollowed stem that
+he had set in the clay, and at the opposite end to the great
+reservoir, represented by the flower-pot. Next, by means of a
+watering-pot, he poured in sufficient water to rise to the same level
+in the large vessel and in the tiny circular funnel at the end of the
+elder stem.
+
+Raphael was thinking of his piece of skin.
+
+"Water is considered to-day, sir, to be an incompressible body," said
+the mechanician; "never lose sight of that fundamental principle;
+still it can be compressed, though only so very slightly that we
+should regard its faculty for contracting as a zero. You see the
+amount of surface presented by the water at the brim of the
+flower-pot?"
+
+"Yes, sir."
+
+"Very good; now suppose that that surface is a thousand times larger
+than the orifice of the elder stem through which I poured the liquid.
+Here, I am taking the funnel away----"
+
+"Granted."
+
+"Well, then, if by any method whatever I increase the volume of that
+quantity of water by pouring in yet more through the mouth of the
+little tube; the water thus compelled to flow downwards would rise in
+the reservoir, represented by the flower-pot, until it reached the
+same level at either end."
+
+"That is quite clear," cried Raphael.
+
+"But there is this difference," the other went on. "Suppose that the
+thin column of water poured into the little vertical tube there exerts
+a force equal, say, to a pound weight, for instance, its action will
+be punctually communicated to the great body of the liquid, and will
+be transmitted to every part of the surface represented by the water
+in the flower-pot so that at the surface there will be a thousand
+columns of water, every one pressing upwards as if they were impelled
+by a force equal to that which compels the liquid to descend in the
+vertical tube; and of necessity they reproduce here," said Planchette,
+indicating to Raphael the top of the flower-pot, "the force introduced
+over there, a thousand-fold," and the man of science pointed out to
+the marquis the upright wooden pipe set in the clay.
+
+"That is quite simple," said Raphael.
+
+Planchette smiled again.
+
+"In other words," he went on, with the mathematician's natural
+stubborn propensity for logic, "in order to resist the force of the
+incoming water, it would be necessary to exert, upon every part of the
+large surface, a force equal to that brought into action in the
+vertical column, but with this difference--if the column of liquid is
+a foot in height, the thousand little columns of the wide surface will
+only have a very slight elevating power.
+
+"Now," said Planchette, as he gave a fillip to his bits of stick, "let
+us replace this funny little apparatus by steel tubes of suitable
+strength and dimensions; and if you cover the liquid surface of the
+reservoir with a strong sliding plate of metal, and if to this metal
+plate you oppose another, solid enough and strong enough to resist any
+test; if, furthermore, you give me the power of continually adding
+water to the volume of liquid contents by means of the little vertical
+tube, the object fixed between the two solid metal plates must of
+necessity yield to the tremendous crushing force which indefinitely
+compresses it. The method of continually pouring in water through a
+little tube, like the manner of communicating force through the volume
+of the liquid to a small metal plate, is an absurdly primitive
+mechanical device. A brace of pistons and a few valves would do it
+all. Do you perceive, my dear sir," he said taking Valentin by the
+arm, "there is scarcely a substance in existence that would not be
+compelled to dilate when fixed in between these two indefinitely
+resisting surfaces?"
+
+"What! the author of the _Lettres provinciales_ invented it?" Raphael
+exclaimed.
+
+"He and no other, sir. The science of mechanics knows no simpler nor
+more beautiful contrivance. The opposite principle, the capacity of
+expansion possessed by water, has brought the steam-engine into being.
+But water will only expand up to a certain point, while its
+incompressibility, being a force in a manner negative, is, of
+necessity, infinite."
+
+"If this skin is expanded," said Raphael, "I promise you to erect a
+colossal statue to Blaise Pascal; to found a prize of a hundred
+thousand francs to be offered every ten years for the solution of the
+grandest problem of mechanical science effected during the interval;
+to find dowries for all your cousins and second cousins, and finally
+to build an asylum on purpose for impoverished or insane
+mathematicians."
+
+"That would be exceedingly useful," Planchette replied. "We will go to
+Spieghalter to-morrow, sir," he continued, with the serenity of a man
+living on a plane wholly intellectual. "That distinguished mechanic
+has just completed, after my own designs, an improved mechanical
+arrangement by which a child could get a thousand trusses of hay
+inside his cap."
+
+"Then good-bye till to-morrow."
+
+"Till to-morrow, sir."
+
+"Talk of mechanics!" cried Raphael; "isn't it the greatest of the
+sciences? The other fellow with his onagers, classifications, ducks,
+and species, and his phials full of bottled monstrosities, is at best
+only fit for a billiard-marker in a saloon."
+
+The next morning Raphael went off in great spirits to find Planchette,
+and together they set out for the Rue de la Sante--auspicious
+appellation! Arrived at Spieghalter's, the young man found himself in
+a vast foundry; his eyes lighted upon a multitude of glowing and
+roaring furnaces. There was a storm of sparks, a deluge of nails, an
+ocean of pistons, vices, levers, valves, girders, files, and nuts; a
+sea of melted metal, baulks of timber and bar-steel. Iron filings
+filled your throat. There was iron in the atmosphere; the men were
+covered with it; everything reeked of iron. The iron seemed to be a
+living organism; it became a fluid, moved, and seemed to shape itself
+intelligently after every fashion, to obey the worker's every caprice.
+Through the uproar made by the bellows, the crescendo of the falling
+hammers, and the shrill sounds of the lathes that drew groans from the
+steel, Raphael passed into a large, clean, and airy place where he was
+able to inspect at his leisure the great press that Planchette had
+told him about. He admired the cast-iron beams, as one might call
+them, and the twin bars of steel coupled together with indestructible
+bolts.
+
+"If you were to give seven rapid turns to that crank," said
+Spieghalter, pointing out a beam of polished steel, "you would make a
+steel bar spurt out in thousands of jets, that would get into your
+legs like needles."
+
+"The deuce!" exclaimed Raphael.
+
+Planchette himself slipped the piece of skin between the metal plates
+of the all-powerful press; and, brimful of the certainty of a
+scientific conviction, he worked the crank energetically.
+
+"Lie flat, all of you; we are dead men!" thundered Spieghalter, as he
+himself fell prone on the floor.
+
+A hideous shrieking sound rang through the workshops. The water in the
+machine had broken the chamber, and now spouted out in a jet of
+incalculable force; luckily it went in the direction of an old
+furnace, which was overthrown, enveloped and carried away by a
+waterspout.
+
+"Ha!" remarked Planchette serenely, "the piece of skin is as safe and
+sound as my eye. There was a flaw in your reservoir somewhere, or a
+crevice in the large tube----"
+
+"No, no; I know my reservoir. The devil is in your contrivance, sir;
+you can take it away," and the German pounced upon a smith's hammer,
+flung the skin down on an anvil, and, with all the strength that rage
+gives, dealt the talisman the most formidable blow that had ever
+resounded through his workshops.
+
+"There is not so much as a mark on it!" said Planchette, stroking the
+perverse bit of skin.
+
+The workmen hurried in. The foreman took the skin and buried it in the
+glowing coal of a forge, while, in a semi-circle round the fire, they
+all awaited the action of a huge pair of bellows. Raphael,
+Spieghalter, and Professor Planchette stood in the midst of the grimy
+expectant crowd. Raphael, looking round on faces dusted over with iron
+filings, white eyes, greasy blackened clothing, and hairy chests,
+could have fancied himself transported into the wild nocturnal world
+of German ballad poetry. After the skin had been in the fire for ten
+minutes, the foreman pulled it out with a pair of pincers.
+
+"Hand it over to me," said Raphael.
+
+The foreman held it out by way of a joke. The Marquis readily handled
+it; it was cool and flexible between his fingers. An exclamation of
+alarm went up; the workmen fled in terror. Valentin was left alone
+with Planchette in the empty workshop.
+
+"There is certainly something infernal in the thing!" cried Raphael,
+in desperation. "Is no human power able to give me one more day of
+existence?"
+
+"I made a mistake, sir," said the mathematician, with a penitent
+expression; "we ought to have subjected that peculiar skin to the
+action of a rolling machine. Where could my eyes have been when I
+suggested compression!"
+
+"It was I that asked for it," Raphael answered.
+
+The mathematician heaved a sigh of relief, like a culprit acquitted by
+a dozen jurors. Still, the strange problem afforded by the skin
+interested him; he meditated a moment, and then remarked:
+
+"This unknown material ought to be treated chemically by re-agents.
+Let us call on Japhet--perhaps the chemist may have better luck than
+the mechanic."
+
+Valentin urged his horse into a rapid trot, hoping to find the
+chemist, the celebrated Japhet, in his laboratory.
+
+"Well, old friend," Planchette began, seeing Japhet in his armchair,
+examining a precipitate; "how goes chemistry?"
+
+"Gone to sleep. Nothing new at all. The Academie, however, has
+recognized the existence of salicine, but salicine, asparagine,
+vauqueline, and digitaline are not really discoveries----"
+
+"Since you cannot invent substances," said Raphael, "you are obliged
+to fall back on inventing names."
+
+"Most emphatically true, young man."
+
+"Here," said Planchette, addressing the chemist, "try to analyze this
+composition; if you can extract any element whatever from it, I
+christen it diaboline beforehand, for we have just smashed a hydraulic
+press in trying to compress it."
+
+"Let's see! let's have a look at it!" cried the delighted chemist; "it
+may, perhaps, be a fresh element."
+
+"It is simply a piece of the skin of an ass, sir," said Raphael.
+
+"Sir!" said the illustrious chemist sternly.
+
+"I am not joking," the Marquis answered, laying the piece of skin
+before him.
+
+Baron Japhet applied the nervous fibres of his tongue to the skin; he
+had skill in thus detecting salts, acids, alkalis, and gases. After
+several experiments, he remarked:
+
+"No taste whatever! Come, we will give it a little fluoric acid to
+drink."
+
+Subjected to the influence of this ready solvent of animal tissue, the
+skin underwent no change whatsoever.
+
+"It is not shagreen at all!" the chemist cried. "We will treat this
+unknown mystery as a mineral, and try its mettle by dropping it in a
+crucible where I have at this moment some red potash."
+
+Japhet went out, and returned almost immediately.
+
+"Allow me to cut away a bit of this strange substance, sir," he said
+to Raphael; "it is so extraordinary----"
+
+"A bit!" exclaimed Raphael; "not so much as a hair's-breadth. You may
+try, though," he added, half banteringly, half sadly.
+
+The chemist broke a razor in his desire to cut the skin; he tried to
+break it by a powerful electric shock; next he submitted it to the
+influence of a galvanic battery; but all the thunderbolts his science
+wotted of fell harmless on the dreadful talisman.
+
+It was seven o'clock in the evening. Planchette, Japhet, and Raphael,
+unaware of the flight of time, were awaiting the outcome of a final
+experiment. The Magic Skin emerged triumphant from a formidable
+encounter in which it had been engaged with a considerable quantity of
+chloride of nitrogen.
+
+"It is all over with me," Raphael wailed. "It is the finger of God! I
+shall die!----" and he left the two amazed scientific men.
+
+"We must be very careful not to talk about this affair at the
+Academie; our colleagues there would laugh at us," Planchette remarked
+to the chemist, after a long pause, in which they looked at each other
+without daring to communicate their thoughts. The learned pair looked
+like two Christians who had issued from their tombs to find no God in
+the heavens. Science had been powerless; acids, so much clear water;
+red potash had been discredited; the galvanic battery and electric
+shock had been a couple of playthings.
+
+"A hydraulic press broken like a biscuit!" commented Planchette.
+
+"I believe in the devil," said the Baron Japhet, after a moment's
+silence.
+
+"And I in God," replied Planchette.
+
+Each spoke in character. The universe for a mechanician is a machine
+that requires an operator; for chemistry--that fiendish employment of
+decomposing all things--the world is a gas endowed with the power of
+movement.
+
+"We cannot deny the fact," the chemist replied.
+
+"Pshaw! those gentlemen the doctrinaires have invented a nebulous
+aphorism for our consolation--Stupid as a fact."
+
+"Your aphorism," said the chemist, "seems to me as a fact very
+stupid."
+
+They began to laugh, and went off to dine like folk for whom a miracle
+is nothing more than a phenomenon.
+
+Valentin reached his own house shivering with rage and consumed with
+anger. He had no more faith in anything. Conflicting thoughts shifted
+and surged to and fro in his brain, as is the case with every man
+brought face to face with an inconceivable fact. He had readily
+believed in some hidden flaw in Spieghalter's apparatus; he had not
+been surprised by the incompetence and failure of science and of fire;
+but the flexibility of the skin as he handled it, taken with its
+stubbornness when all means of destruction that man possesses had been
+brought to bear upon it in vain--these things terrified him. The
+incontrovertible fact made him dizzy.
+
+"I am mad," he muttered. "I have had no food since the morning, and
+yet I am neither hungry nor thirsty, and there is a fire in my breast
+that burns me."
+
+He put back the skin in the frame where it had been enclosed but
+lately, drew a line in red ink about the actual configuration of the
+talisman, and seated himself in his armchair.
+
+"Eight o'clock already!" he exclaimed. "To-day has gone like a dream."
+
+He leaned his elbow on the arm of the chair, propped his head with his
+left hand, and so remained, lost in secret dark reflections and
+consuming thoughts that men condemned to die bear away with them.
+
+"O Pauline!" he cried. "Poor child! there are gulfs that love can
+never traverse, despite the strength of his wings."
+
+Just then he very distinctly heard a smothered sigh, and knew by one
+of the most tender privileges of passionate love that it was Pauline's
+breathing.
+
+"That is my death warrant," he said to himself. "If she were there, I
+should wish to die in her arms."
+
+A burst of gleeful and hearty laughter made him turn his face towards
+the bed; he saw Pauline's face through the transparent curtains,
+smiling like a child for gladness over a successful piece of mischief.
+Her pretty hair fell over her shoulders in countless curls; she looked
+like a Bengal rose upon a pile of white roses.
+
+"I cajoled Jonathan," said she. "Doesn't the bed belong to me, to me
+who am your wife? Don't scold me, darling; I only wanted to surprise
+you, to sleep beside you. Forgive me for my freak."
+
+She sprang out of bed like a kitten, showed herself gleaming in her
+lawn raiment, and sat down on Raphael's knee.
+
+"Love, what gulf were you talking about?" she said, with an anxious
+expression apparent upon her face.
+
+"Death."
+
+"You hurt me," she answered. "There are some thoughts upon which we,
+poor women that we are, cannot dwell; they are death to us. Is it
+strength of love in us, or lack of courage? I cannot tell. Death does
+not frighten me," she began again, laughingly. "To die with you, both
+together, to-morrow morning, in one last embrace, would be joy. It
+seems to me that even then I should have lived more than a hundred
+years. What does the number of days matter if we have spent a whole
+lifetime of peace and love in one night, in one hour?"
+
+"You are right; Heaven is speaking through that pretty mouth of yours.
+Grant that I may kiss you, and let us die," said Raphael.
+
+"Then let us die," she said, laughing.
+
+Towards nine o'clock in the morning the daylight streamed through the
+chinks of the window shutters. Obscured somewhat by the muslin
+curtains, it yet sufficed to show clearly the rich colors of the
+carpet, the silks and furniture of the room, where the two lovers were
+lying asleep. The gilding sparkled here and there. A ray of sunshine
+fell and faded upon the soft down quilt that the freaks of live had
+thrown to the ground. The outlines of Pauline's dress, hanging from a
+cheval glass, appeared like a shadowy ghost. Her dainty shoes had been
+left at a distance from the bed. A nightingale came to perch upon the
+sill; its trills repeated over again, and the sounds of its wings
+suddenly shaken out for flight, awoke Raphael.
+
+"For me to die," he said, following out a thought begun in his dream,
+"my organization, the mechanism of flesh and bone, that is quickened
+by the will in me, and makes of me an individual MAN, must display
+some perceptible disease. Doctors ought to understand the symptoms of
+any attack on vitality, and could tell me whether I am sick or sound."
+
+He gazed at his sleeping wife. She had stretched her head out to him,
+expressing in this way even while she slept the anxious tenderness of
+love. Pauline seemed to look at him as she lay with her face turned
+towards him in an attitude as full of grace as a young child's, with
+her pretty, half-opened mouth held out towards him, as she drew her
+light, even breath. Her little pearly teeth seemed to heighten the
+redness of the fresh lips with the smile hovering over them. The red
+glow in her complexion was brighter, and its whiteness was, so to
+speak, whiter still just then than in the most impassioned moments of
+the waking day. In her unconstrained grace, as she lay, so full of
+believing trust, the adorable attractions of childhood were added to
+the enchantments of love.
+
+Even the most unaffected women still obey certain social conventions,
+which restrain the free expansion of the soul within them during their
+waking hours; but slumber seems to give them back the spontaneity of
+life which makes infancy lovely. Pauline blushed for nothing; she was
+like one of those beloved and heavenly beings, in whom reason has not
+yet put motives into their actions and mystery into their glances. Her
+profile stood out in sharp relief against the fine cambric of the
+pillows; there was a certain sprightliness about her loose hair in
+confusion, mingled with the deep lace ruffles; but she was sleeping in
+happiness, her long lashes were tightly pressed against her cheeks, as
+if to secure her eyes from too strong a light, or to aid an effort of
+her soul to recollect and to hold fast a bliss that had been perfect
+but fleeting. Her tiny pink and white ear, framed by a lock of her
+hair and outlined by a wrapping of Mechlin lace, would have made an
+artist, a painter, an old man, wildly in love, and would perhaps have
+restored a madman to his senses.
+
+Is it not an ineffable bliss to behold the woman that you love,
+sleeping, smiling in a peaceful dream beneath your protection, loving
+you even in dreams, even at the point where the individual seems to
+cease to exist, offering to you yet the mute lips that speak to you in
+slumber of the latest kiss? Is it not indescribable happiness to see a
+trusting woman, half-clad, but wrapped round in her love as by a cloak
+--modesty in the midst of dishevelment--to see admiringly her
+scattered clothing, the silken stocking hastily put off to please you
+last evening, the unclasped girdle that implies a boundless faith in
+you. A whole romance lies there in that girdle; the woman that it used
+to protect exists no longer; she is yours, she has become _you_;
+henceforward any betrayal of her is a blow dealt at yourself.
+
+In this softened mood Raphael's eyes wandered over the room, now
+filled with memories and love, and where the very daylight seemed to
+take delightful hues. Then he turned his gaze at last upon the
+outlines of the woman's form, upon youth and purity, and love that
+even now had no thought that was not for him alone, above all things,
+and longed to live for ever. As his eyes fell upon Pauline, her own
+opened at once as if a ray of sunlight had lighted on them.
+
+"Good-morning," she said, smiling. "How handsome you are, bad man!"
+
+The grace of love and youth, of silence and dawn, shone in their
+faces, making a divine picture, with the fleeting spell over it all
+that belongs only to the earliest days of passion, just as simplicity
+and artlessness are the peculiar possession of childhood. Alas! love's
+springtide joys, like our own youthful laughter, must even take
+flight, and live for us no longer save in memory; either for our
+despair, or to shed some soothing fragrance over us, according to the
+bent of our inmost thoughts.
+
+"What made me wake you?" said Raphael. "It was so great a pleasure to
+watch you sleeping that it brought tears to my eyes."
+
+"And to mine, too," she answered. "I cried in the night while I
+watched you sleeping, but not with happiness. Raphael, dear, pray
+listen to me. Your breathing is labored while you sleep, and something
+rattles in your chest that frightens me. You have a little dry cough
+when you are asleep, exactly like my father's, who is dying of
+phthisis. In those sounds from your lungs I recognized some of the
+peculiar symptoms of that complaint. Then you are feverish; I know you
+are; your hand was moist and burning----Darling, you are young," she
+added with a shudder, "and you could still get over it if
+unfortunately----But, no," she cried cheerfully, "there is no
+'unfortunately,' the disease is contagious, so the doctors say."
+
+She flung both arms about Raphael, drawing in his breath through one
+of those kisses in which the soul reaches its end.
+
+"I do not wish to live to old age," she said. "Let us both die young,
+and go to heaven while flowers fill our hands."
+
+"We always make such designs as those when we are well and strong,"
+Raphael replied, burying his hands in Pauline's hair. But even then a
+horrible fit of coughing came on, one of those deep ominous coughs
+that seem to come from the depths of the tomb, a cough that leaves the
+sufferer ghastly pale, trembling, and perspiring; with aching sides
+and quivering nerves, with a feeling of weariness pervading the very
+marrow of the spine, and unspeakable languor in every vein. Raphael
+slowly laid himself down, pale, exhausted, and overcome, like a man
+who has spent all the strength in him over one final effort. Pauline's
+eyes, grown large with terror, were fixed upon him; she lay quite
+motionless, pale, and silent.
+
+"Let us commit no more follies, my angel," she said, trying not to let
+Raphael see the dreadful forebodings that disturbed her. She covered
+her face with her hands, for she saw Death before her--the hideous
+skeleton. Raphael's face had grown as pale and livid as any skull
+unearthed from a churchyard to assist the studies of some scientific
+man. Pauline remembered the exclamation that had escaped from Valentin
+the previous evening, and to herself she said:
+
+"Yes, there are gulfs that love can never cross, and therein love must
+bury itself."
+
+On a March morning, some days after this wretched scene, Raphael found
+himself seated in an armchair, placed in the window in the full light
+of day. Four doctors stood round him, each in turn trying his pulse,
+feeling him over, and questioning him with apparent interest. The
+invalid sought to guess their thoughts, putting a construction on
+every movement they made, and on the slightest contractions of their
+brows. His last hope lay in this consultation. This court of appeal
+was about to pronounce its decision--life or death.
+
+Valentin had summoned the oracles of modern medicine, so that he might
+have the last word of science. Thanks to his wealth and title, there
+stood before him three embodied theories; human knowledge fluctuated
+round the three points. Three of the doctors brought among them the
+complete circle of medical philosophy; they represented the points of
+conflict round which the battle raged, between Spiritualism, Analysis,
+and goodness knows what in the way of mocking eclecticism.
+
+The fourth doctor was Horace Bianchon, a man of science with a future
+before him, the most distinguished man of the new school in medicine,
+a discreet and unassuming representative of a studious generation that
+is preparing to receive the inheritance of fifty years of experience
+treasured up by the Ecole de Paris, a generation that perhaps will
+erect the monument for the building of which the centuries behind us
+have collected the different materials. As a personal friend of the
+Marquis and of Rastignac, he had been in attendance on the former for
+some days past, and was helping him to answer the inquiries of the
+three professors, occasionally insisting somewhat upon those symptoms
+which, in his opinion, pointed to pulmonary disease.
+
+"You have been living at a great pace, leading a dissipated life, no
+doubt, and you have devoted yourself largely to intellectual work?"
+queried one of the three celebrated authorities, addressing Raphael.
+He was a square-headed man, with a large frame and energetic
+organization, which seemed to mark him out as superior to his two
+rivals.
+
+"I made up my mind to kill myself with debauchery, after spending
+three years over an extensive work, with which perhaps you may some
+day occupy yourselves," Raphael replied.
+
+The great doctor shook his head, and so displayed his satisfaction. "I
+was sure of it," he seemed to say to himself. He was the illustrious
+Brisset, the successor of Cabanis and Bichat, head of the Organic
+School, a doctor popular with believers in material and positive
+science, who see in man a complete individual, subject solely to the
+laws of his own particular organization; and who consider that his
+normal condition and abnormal states of disease can both be traced to
+obvious causes.
+
+After this reply, Brisset looked, without speaking, at a middle-sized
+person, whose darkly flushed countenance and glowing eyes seemed to
+belong to some antique satyr; and who, leaning his back against the
+corner of the embrasure, was studying Raphael, without saying a word.
+Doctor Cameristus, a man of creeds and enthusiasms, the head of the
+"Vitalists," a romantic champion of the esoteric doctrines of Van
+Helmont, discerned a lofty informing principle in human life, a
+mysterious and inexplicable phenomenon which mocks at the scalpel,
+deceives the surgeon, eludes the drugs of the pharmacopoeia, the
+formulae of algebra, the demonstrations of anatomy, and derides all
+our efforts; a sort of invisible, intangible flame, which, obeying
+some divinely appointed law, will often linger on in a body in our
+opinion devoted to death, while it takes flight from an organization
+well fitted for prolonged existence.
+
+A bitter smile hovered upon the lips of the third doctor, Maugredie, a
+man of acknowledged ability, but a Pyrrhonist and a scoffer, with the
+scalpel for his one article of faith. He would consider, as a
+concession to Brisset, that a man who, as a matter of fact, was
+perfectly well was dead, and recognize with Cameristus that a man
+might be living on after his apparent demise. He found something
+sensible in every theory, and embraced none of them, claiming that the
+best of all systems of medicine was to have none at all, and to stick
+to facts. This Panurge of the Clinical Schools, the king of observers,
+the great investigator, a great sceptic, the man of desperate
+expedients, was scrutinizing the Magic Skin.
+
+"I should very much like to be a witness of the coincidence of its
+retrenchment with your wish," he said to the Marquis.
+
+"Where is the use?" cried Brisset.
+
+"Where is the use?" echoed Cameristus.
+
+"Ah, you are both of the same mind," replied Maugredie.
+
+"The contraction is perfectly simple," Brisset went on.
+
+"It is supernatural," remarked Cameristus.
+
+"In short," Maugredie made answer, with affected solemnity, and
+handing the piece of skin to Raphael as he spoke, "the shriveling
+faculty of the skin is a fact inexplicable, and yet quite natural,
+which, ever since the world began, has been the despair of medicine
+and of pretty women."
+
+All Valentin's observation could discover no trace of a feeling for
+his troubles in any of the three doctors. The three received every
+answer in silence, scanned him unconcernedly, and interrogated him
+unsympathetically. Politeness did not conceal their indifference;
+whether deliberation or certainty was the cause, their words at any
+rate came so seldom and so languidly, that at times Raphael thought
+that their attention was wandering. From time to time Brisset, the
+sole speaker, remarked, "Good! just so!" as Bianchon pointed out the
+existence of each desperate symptom. Cameristus seemed to be deep in
+meditation; Maugredie looked like a comic author, studying two queer
+characters with a view to reproducing them faithfully upon the stage.
+There was deep, unconcealed distress, and grave compassion in Horace
+Bianchon's face. He had been a doctor for too short a time to be
+untouched by suffering and unmoved by a deathbed; he had not learned
+to keep back the sympathetic tears that obscure a man's clear vision
+and prevent him from seizing like the general of an army, upon the
+auspicious moment for victory, in utter disregard of the groans of
+dying men.
+
+After spending about half an hour over taking in some sort the measure
+of the patient and the complaint, much as a tailor measures a young
+man for a coat when he orders his wedding outfit, the authorities
+uttered several commonplaces, and even talked of politics. Then they
+decided to go into Raphael's study to exchange their ideas and frame
+their verdict.
+
+"May I not be present during the discussion, gentlemen?" Valentin had
+asked them, but Brisset and Maugredie protested against this, and, in
+spite of their patient's entreaties, declined altogether to deliberate
+in his presence.
+
+Raphael gave way before their custom, thinking that he could slip into
+a passage adjoining, whence he could easily overhear the medical
+conference in which the three professors were about to engage.
+
+"Permit me, gentlemen," said Brisset, as they entered, "to give you my
+own opinion at once. I neither wish to force it upon you nor to have
+it discussed. In the first place, it is unbiased, concise, and based
+on an exact similarity that exists between one of my own patients and
+the subject that we have been called in to examine; and, moreover, I
+am expected at my hospital. The importance of the case that demands my
+presence there will excuse me for speaking the first word. The subject
+with which we are concerned has been exhausted in an equal degree by
+intellectual labors--what did he set about, Horace?" he asked of the
+young doctor.
+
+"A 'Theory of the Will,'"
+
+"The devil! but that's a big subject. He is exhausted, I say, by too
+much brain-work, by irregular courses, and by the repeated use of too
+powerful stimulants. Violent exertion of body and mind has demoralized
+the whole system. It is easy, gentlemen, to recognize in the symptoms
+of the face and body generally intense irritation of the stomach, an
+affection of the great sympathetic nerve, acute sensibility of the
+epigastric region, and contraction of the right and left
+hypochondriac. You have noticed, too, the large size and prominence of
+the liver. M. Bianchon has, besides, constantly watched the patient,
+and he tells us that digestion is troublesome and difficult. Strictly
+speaking, there is no stomach left, and so the man has disappeared.
+The brain is atrophied because the man digests no longer. The
+progressive deterioration wrought in the epigastric region, the seat
+of vitality, has vitiated the whole system. Thence, by continuous
+fevered vibrations, the disorder has reached the brain by means of the
+nervous plexus, hence the excessive irritation in that organ. There is
+monomania. The patient is burdened with a fixed idea. That piece of
+skin really contracts, to his way of thinking; very likely it always
+has been as we have seen it; but whether it contracts or no, that
+thing is for him just like the fly that some Grand Vizier or other had
+on his nose. If you put leeches at once on the epigastrium, and reduce
+the irritation in that part, which is the very seat of man's life, and
+if you diet the patient, the monomania will leave him. I will say no
+more to Dr. Bianchon; he should be able to grasp the whole treatment
+as well as the details. There may be, perhaps, some complication of
+the disease--the bronchial tubes, possibly, may be also inflamed; but
+I believe that treatment for the intestinal organs is very much more
+important and necessary, and more urgently required than for the
+lungs. Persistent study of abstract matters, and certain violent
+passions, have induced serious disorders in that vital mechanism.
+However, we are in time to set these conditions right. Nothing is too
+seriously affected. You will easily get your friend round again," he
+remarked to Bianchon.
+
+"Our learned colleague is taking the effect for the cause," Cameristus
+replied. "Yes, the changes that he has observed so keenly certainly
+exist in the patient; but it is not the stomach that, by degrees, has
+set up nervous action in the system, and so affected the brain, like a
+hole in a window pane spreading cracks round about it. It took a blow
+of some kind to make a hole in the window; who gave the blow? Do we
+know that? Have we investigated the patient's case sufficiently? Are
+we acquainted with all the events of his life?
+
+"The vital principle, gentlemen," he continued, "the Archeus of Van
+Helmont, is affected in his case--the very essence and centre of life
+is attacked. The divine spark, the transitory intelligence which holds
+the organism together, which is the source of the will, the
+inspiration of life, has ceased to regulate the daily phenomena of the
+mechanism and the functions of every organ; thence arise all the
+complications which my learned colleague has so thoroughly
+appreciated. The epigastric region does not affect the brain but the
+brain affects the epigastric region. No," he went on, vigorously
+slapping his chest, "no, I am not a stomach in the form of a man. No,
+everything does not lie there. I do not feel that I have the courage
+to say that if the epigastric region is in good order, everything else
+is in a like condition----
+
+"We cannot trace," he went on more mildly, "to one physical cause the
+serious disturbances that supervene in this or that subject which has
+been dangerously attacked, nor submit them to a uniform treatment. No
+one man is like another. We have each peculiar organs, differently
+affected, diversely nourished, adapted to perform different functions,
+and to induce a condition necessary to the accomplishment of an order
+of things which is unknown to us. The sublime will has so wrought that
+a little portion of the great All is set within us to sustain the
+phenomena of living; in every man it formulates itself distinctly,
+making each, to all appearance, a separate individual, yet in one
+point co-existent with the infinite cause. So we ought to make a
+separate study of each subject, discover all about it, find out in
+what its life consists, and wherein its power lies. From the softness
+of a wet sponge to the hardness of pumice-stone there are infinite
+fine degrees of difference. Man is just like that. Between the
+sponge-like organizations of the lymphatic and the vigorous iron muscles
+of such men as are destined for a long life, what a margin for errors for
+the single inflexible system of a lowering treatment to commit; a
+system that reduces the capacities of the human frame, which you
+always conclude have been over-excited. Let us look for the origin of
+the disease in the mental and not in the physical viscera. A doctor is
+an inspired being, endowed by God with a special gift--the power to
+read the secrets of vitality; just as the prophet has received the
+eyes that foresee the future, the poet his faculty of evoking nature,
+and the musician the power of arranging sounds in an harmonious order
+that is possibly a copy of an ideal harmony on high."
+
+"There is his everlasting system of medicine, arbitrary, monarchical,
+and pious," muttered Brisset.
+
+"Gentlemen," Maugredie broke in hastily, to distract attention from
+Brisset's comment, "don't let us lose sight of the patient."
+
+"What is the good of science?" Raphael moaned. "Here is my recovery
+halting between a string of beads and a rosary of leeches, between
+Dupuytren's bistoury and Prince Hohenlohe's prayer. There is Maugredie
+suspending his judgment on the line that divides facts from words,
+mind from matter. Man's 'it is,' and 'it is not,' is always on my
+track; it is the _Carymary Carymara_ of Rabelais for evermore: my
+disorder is spiritual, _Carymary_, or material, _Carymara_. Shall I live?
+They have no idea. Planchette was more straightforward with me, at any
+rate, when he said, 'I do not know.'"
+
+Just then Valentin heard Maugredie's voice.
+
+"The patient suffers from monomania; very good, I am quite of that
+opinion," he said, "but he has two hundred thousand a year;
+monomaniacs of that kind are very uncommon. As for knowing whether his
+epigastric region has affected his brain, or his brain his epigastric
+region, we shall find that out, perhaps, whenever he dies. But to
+resume. There is no disputing the fact that he is ill; some sort of
+treatment he must have. Let us leave theories alone, and put leeches
+on him, to counteract the nervous and intestinal irritation, as to the
+existence of which we all agree; and let us send him to drink the
+waters, in that way we shall act on both systems at once. If there
+really is tubercular disease, we can hardly expect to save his life;
+so that----"
+
+Raphael abruptly left the passage, and went back to his armchair. The
+four doctors very soon came out of the study; Horace was the
+spokesman.
+
+"These gentlemen," he told him, "have unanimously agreed that leeches
+must be applied to the stomach at once, and that both physical and
+moral treatment are imperatively needed. In the first place, a
+carefully prescribed rule of diet, so as to soothe the internal
+irritation"--here Brisset signified his approval; "and in the second,
+a hygienic regimen, to set your general condition right. We all,
+therefore, recommend you to go to take the waters in Aix in Savoy; or,
+if you like it better, at Mont Dore in Auvergne; the air and the
+situation are both pleasanter in Savoy than in the Cantal, but you
+will consult your own taste."
+
+Here it was Cameristus who nodded assent.
+
+"These gentlemen," Bianchon continued, "having recognized a slight
+affection of the respiratory organs, are agreed as to the utility of
+the previous course of treatment that I have prescribed. They think
+that there will be no difficulty about restoring you to health, and
+that everything depends upon a wise and alternate employment of these
+various means. And----"
+
+"And that is the cause of the milk in the cocoanut," said Raphael,
+with a smile, as he led Horace into his study to pay the fees for this
+useless consultation.
+
+"Their conclusions are logical," the young doctor replied. "Cameristus
+feels, Brisset examines, Maugredie doubts. Has not man a soul, a body,
+and an intelligence? One of these three elemental constituents always
+influences us more or less strongly; there will always be the personal
+element in human science. Believe me, Raphael, we effect no cures; we
+only assist them. Another system--the use of mild remedies while
+Nature exerts her powers--lies between the extremes of theory of
+Brisset and Cameristus, but one ought to have known the patient for
+some ten years or so to obtain a good result on these lines. Negation
+lies at the back of all medicine, as in every other science. So
+endeavor to live wholesomely; try a trip to Savoy; the best course is,
+and always will be, to trust to Nature."
+
+It was a month later, on a fine summer-like evening, that several
+people, who were taking the waters at Aix, returned from the promenade
+and met together in the salons of the Club. Raphael remained alone by
+a window for a long time. His back was turned upon the gathering, and
+he himself was deep in those involuntary musings in which thoughts
+arise in succession and fade away, shaping themselves indistinctly,
+passing over us like thin, almost colorless clouds. Melancholy is
+sweet to us then, and delight is shadowy, for the soul is half asleep.
+Valentin gave himself up to this life of sensations; he was steeping
+himself in the warm, soft twilight, enjoying the pure air with the
+scent of the hills in it, happy in that he felt no pain, and had
+tranquilized his threatening Magic Skin at last. It grew cooler as the
+red glow of the sunset faded on the mountain peaks; he shut the window
+and left his place.
+
+"Will you be so kind as not to close the windows, sir?" said an old
+lady; "we are being stifled----"
+
+The peculiarly sharp and jarring tones in which the phrase was uttered
+grated on Raphael's ears; it fell on them like an indiscreet remark
+let slip by some man in whose friendship we would fain believe, a word
+which reveals unsuspected depths of selfishness and destroys some
+pleasing sentimental illusion of ours. The Marquis glanced, with the
+cool inscrutable expression of a diplomatist, at the old lady, called
+a servant, and, when he came, curtly bade him:
+
+"Open that window."
+
+Great surprise was clearly expressed on all faces at the words. The
+whole roomful began to whisper to each other, and turned their eyes
+upon the invalid, as though he had given some serious offence.
+Raphael, who had never quite managed to rid himself of the bashfulness
+of his early youth, felt a momentary confusion; then he shook off his
+torpor, exerted his faculties, and asked himself the meaning of this
+strange scene.
+
+A sudden and rapid impulse quickened his brain; the past weeks
+appeared before him in a clear and definite vision; the reasons for
+the feelings he inspired in others stood out for him in relief, like
+the veins of some corpse which a naturalist, by some cunningly
+contrived injection, has colored so as to show their least
+ramifications.
+
+He discerned himself in this fleeting picture; he followed out his own
+life in it, thought by thought, day after day. He saw himself, not
+without astonishment, an absent gloomy figure in the midst of these
+lively folk, always musing over his own fate, always absorbed by his
+own sufferings, seemingly impatient of the most harmless chat. He saw
+how he had shunned the ephemeral intimacies that travelers are so
+ready to establish--no doubt because they feel sure of never meeting
+each other again--and how he had taken little heed of those about him.
+He saw himself like the rocks without, unmoved by the caresses or the
+stormy surgings of the waves.
+
+Then, by a gift of insight seldom accorded, he read the thoughts of
+all those about him. The light of a candle revealed the sardonic
+profile and yellow cranium of an old man; he remembered now that he
+had won from him, and had never proposed that the other should have
+his revenge; a little further on he saw a pretty woman, whose lively
+advances he had met with frigid coolness; there was not a face there
+that did not reproach him with some wrong done, inexplicably to all
+appearance, but the real offence in every case lay in some
+mortification, some invisible hurt dealt to self-love. He had
+unintentionally jarred on all the small susceptibilities of the circle
+round about him.
+
+His guests on various occasions, and those to whom he had lent his
+horses, had taken offence at his luxurious ways; their ungraciousness
+had been a surprise to him; he had spared them further humiliations of
+that kind, and they had considered that he looked down upon them, and
+had accused him of haughtiness ever since. He could read their inmost
+thoughts as he fathomed their natures in this way. Society with its
+polish and varnish grew loathsome to him. He was envied and hated for
+his wealth and superior ability; his reserve baffled the inquisitive;
+his humility seemed like haughtiness to these petty superficial
+natures. He guessed the secret unpardonable crime which he had
+committed against them; he had overstepped the limits of the
+jurisdiction of their mediocrity. He had resisted their inquisitorial
+tyranny; he could dispense with their society; and all of them,
+therefore, had instinctively combined to make him feel their power,
+and to take revenge upon this incipient royalty by submitting him to a
+kind of ostracism, and so teaching him that they in their turn could
+do without him.
+
+Pity came over him, first of all, at this aspect of mankind, but very
+soon he shuddered at the thought of the power that came thus, at will,
+and flung aside for him the veil of flesh under which the moral nature
+is hidden away. He closed his eyes, so as to see no more. A black
+curtain was drawn all at once over this unlucky phantom show of truth;
+but still he found himself in the terrible loneliness that surrounds
+every power and dominion. Just then a violent fit of coughing seized
+him. Far from receiving one single word--indifferent, and meaningless,
+it is true, but still containing, among well-bred people brought
+together by chance, at least some pretence of civil commiseration--he
+now heard hostile ejaculations and muttered complaints. Society there
+assembled disdained any pantomime on his account, perhaps because he
+had gauged its real nature too well.
+
+"His complaint is contagious."
+
+"The president of the Club ought to forbid him to enter the salon."
+
+"It is contrary to all rules and regulations to cough in that way!"
+
+"When a man is as ill as that, he ought not to come to take the
+waters----"
+
+"He will drive me away from the place."
+
+Raphael rose and walked about the rooms to screen himself from their
+unanimous execrations. He thought to find a shelter, and went up to a
+young pretty lady who sat doing nothing, minded to address some pretty
+speeches to her; but as he came towards her, she turned her back upon
+him, and pretended to be watching the dancers. Raphael feared lest he
+might have made use of the talisman already that evening; and feeling
+that he had neither the wish nor the courage to break into the
+conversation, he left the salon and took refuge in the billiard-room.
+No one there greeted him, nobody spoke to him, no one sent so much as
+a friendly glance in his direction. His turn of mind, naturally
+meditative, had discovered instinctively the general grounds and
+reasons for the aversion he inspired. This little world was obeying,
+unconsciously perhaps, the sovereign law which rules over polite
+society; its inexorable nature was becoming apparent in its entirety
+to Raphael's eyes. A glance into the past showed it to him, as a type
+completely realized in Foedora.
+
+He would no more meet with sympathy here for his bodily ills than he
+had received it at her hands for the distress in his heart. The
+fashionable world expels every suffering creature from its midst, just
+as the body of a man in robust health rejects any germ of disease. The
+world holds suffering and misfortune in abhorrence; it dreads them
+like the plague; it never hesitates between vice and trouble, for vice
+is a luxury. Ill-fortune may possess a majesty of its own, but society
+can belittle it and make it ridiculous by an epigram. Society draws
+caricatures, and in this way flings in the teeth of fallen kings the
+affronts which it fancies it has received from them; society, like the
+Roman youth at the circus, never shows mercy to the fallen gladiator;
+mockery and money are its vital necessities. "Death to the weak!" That
+is the oath taken by this kind of Equestrian order, instituted in
+their midst by all the nations of the world; everywhere it makes for
+the elevation of the rich, and its motto is deeply graven in hearts
+that wealth has turned to stone, or that have been reared in
+aristocratic prejudices.
+
+Assemble a collection of school-boys together. That will give you a
+society in miniature, a miniature which represents life more truly,
+because it is so frank and artless; and in it you will always find
+poor isolated beings, relegated to some place in the general
+estimations between pity and contempt, on account of their weakness
+and suffering. To these the Evangel promises heaven hereafter. Go
+lower yet in the scale of organized creation. If some bird among its
+fellows in the courtyard sickens, the others fall upon it with their
+beaks, pluck out its feathers, and kill it. The whole world, in
+accordance with its character of egotism, brings all its severity to
+bear upon wretchedness that has the hardihood to spoil its
+festivities, and to trouble its joys.
+
+Any sufferer in mind or body, any helpless or poor man, is a pariah.
+He had better remain in his solitude; if he crosses the boundary-line,
+he will find winter everywhere; he will find freezing cold in other
+men's looks, manners, words, and hearts; and lucky indeed is he if he
+does not receive an insult where he expected that sympathy would be
+expended upon him. Let the dying keep to their bed of neglect, and age
+sit lonely by its fireside. Portionless maids, freeze and burn in your
+solitary attics. If the world tolerates misery of any kind, it is to
+turn it to account for its own purposes, to make some use of it,
+saddle and bridle it, put a bit in its mouth, ride it about, and get
+some fun out of it.
+
+Crotchety spinsters, ladies' companions, put a cheerful face upon it,
+endure the humors of your so-called benefactress, carry her lapdogs
+for her; you have an English poodle for your rival, and you must seek
+to understand the moods of your patroness, and amuse her, and--keep
+silence about yourselves. As for you, unblushing parasite, uncrowned
+king of unliveried servants, leave your real character at home, let
+your digestion keep pace with your host's laugh when he laughs, mingle
+your tears with his, and find his epigrams amusing; if you want to
+relieve your mind about him, wait till he is ruined. That is the way
+the world shows its respect for the unfortunate; it persecutes them,
+or slays them in the dust.
+
+Such thoughts as these welled up in Raphael's heart with the
+suddenness of poetic inspiration. He looked around him, and felt the
+influence of the forbidding gloom that society breathes out in order
+to rid itself of the unfortunate; it nipped his soul more effectually
+than the east wind grips the body in December. He locked his arms over
+his chest, set his back against the wall, and fell into a deep
+melancholy. He mused upon the meagre happiness that this depressing
+way of living can give. What did it amount to? Amusement with no
+pleasure in it, gaiety without gladness, joyless festivity, fevered
+dreams empty of all delight, firewood or ashes on the hearth without a
+spark of flame in them. When he raised his head, he found himself
+alone, all the billiard players had gone.
+
+"I have only to let them know my power to make them worship my
+coughing fits," he said to himself, and wrapped himself against the
+world in the cloak of his contempt.
+
+Next day the resident doctor came to call upon him, and took an
+anxious interest in his health. Raphael felt a thrill of joy at the
+friendly words addressed to him. The doctor's face, to his thinking,
+wore an expression that was kind and pleasant; the pale curls of his
+wig seemed redolent of philanthropy; the square cut of his coat, the
+loose folds of his trousers, his big Quaker-like shoes, everything
+about him down to the powder shaken from his queue and dusted in a
+circle upon his slightly stooping shoulders, revealed an apostolic
+nature, and spoke of Christian charity and of the self-sacrifice of a
+man, who, out of sheer devotion to his patients, had compelled himself
+to learn to play whist and tric-trac so well that he never lost money
+to any of them.
+
+"My Lord Marquis," said he, after a long talk with Raphael, "I can
+dispel your uneasiness beyond all doubt. I know your constitution well
+enough by this time to assure you that the doctors in Paris, whose
+great abilities I know, are mistaken as to the nature of your
+complaint. You can live as long as Methuselah, my Lord Marquis,
+accidents only excepted. Your lungs are as sound as a blacksmith's
+bellows, your stomach would put an ostrich to the blush; but if you
+persist in living at high altitude, you are running the risk of a
+prompt interment in consecrated soil. A few words, my Lord Marquis,
+will make my meaning clear to you.
+
+"Chemistry," he began, "has shown us that man's breathing is a real
+process of combustion, and the intensity of its action varies
+according to the abundance or scarcity of the phlogistic element
+stored up by the organism of each individual. In your case, the
+phlogistic, or inflammatory element is abundant; if you will permit me
+to put it so, you generate superfluous oxygen, possessing as you do
+the inflammatory temperament of a man destined to experience strong
+emotions. While you breath the keen, pure air that stimulates life in
+men of lymphatic constitution, you are accelerating an expenditure of
+vitality already too rapid. One of the conditions for existence for
+you is the heavier atmosphere of the plains and valleys. Yes, the
+vital air for a man consumed by his genius lies in the fertile
+pasture-lands of Germany, at Toplitz or Baden-Baden. If England is not
+obnoxious to you, its misty climate would reduce your fever; but the
+situation of our baths, a thousand feet above the level of the
+Mediterranean, is dangerous for you. That is my opinion at least," he
+said, with a deprecatory gesture, "and I give it in opposition to our
+interests, for, if you act upon it, we shall unfortunately lose you."
+
+But for these closing words of his, the affable doctor's seeming
+good-nature would have completely won Raphael over; but he was too
+profoundly observant not to understand the meaning of the tone, the
+look and gesture that accompanied that mild sarcasm, not to see that
+the little man had been sent on this errand, no doubt, by a flock of
+his rejoicing patients. The florid-looking idlers, tedious old women,
+nomad English people, and fine ladies who had given their husbands the
+slip, and were escorted hither by their lovers--one and all were in a
+plot to drive away a wretched, feeble creature to die, who seemed
+unable to hold out against a daily renewed persecution! Raphael
+accepted the challenge, he foresaw some amusement to be derived from
+their manoeuvres.
+
+"As you would be grieved at losing me," said he to the doctor, "I will
+endeavor to avail myself of your good advice without leaving the
+place. I will set about having a house built to-morrow, and the
+atmosphere within it shall be regulated by your instructions."
+
+The doctor understood the sarcastic smile that lurked about Raphael's
+mouth, and took his leave without finding another word to say.
+
+The Lake of Bourget lies seven hundred feet above the Mediterranean,
+in a great hollow among the jagged peaks of the hills; it sparkles
+there, the bluest drop of water in the world. From the summit of the
+Cat's Tooth the lake below looks like a stray turquoise. This lovely
+sheet of water is about twenty-seven miles round, and in some places
+is nearly five hundred feet deep.
+
+Under the cloudless sky, in your boat in the midst of the great
+expanse of water, with only the sound of the oars in your ears, only
+the vague outline of the hills on the horizon before you; you admire
+the glittering snows of the French Maurienne; you pass, now by masses
+of granite clad in the velvet of green turf or in low-growing shrubs,
+now by pleasant sloping meadows; there is always a wilderness on the
+one hand and fertile lands on the other, and both harmonies and
+dissonances compose a scene for you where everything is at once small
+and vast, and you feel yourself to be a poor onlooker at a great
+banquet. The configuration of the mountains brings about misleading
+optical conditions and illusions of perspective; a pine-tree a hundred
+feet in height looks to be a mere weed; wide valleys look as narrow as
+meadow paths. The lake is the only one where the confidences of heart
+and heart can be exchanged. There one can live; there one can
+meditate. Nowhere on earth will you find a closer understanding
+between the water, the sky, the mountains, and the fields. There is a
+balm there for all the agitations of life. The place keeps the secrets
+of sorrow to itself, the sorrow that grows less beneath its soothing
+influence; and to love, it gives a grave and meditative cast,
+deepening passion and purifying it. A kiss there becomes something
+great. But beyond all other things it is the lake for memories; it
+aids them by lending to them the hues of its own waves; it is a mirror
+in which everything is reflected. Only here, with this lovely
+landscape all around him, could Raphael endure the burden laid upon
+him; here he could remain as a languid dreamer, without a wish of his
+own.
+
+He went out upon the lake after the doctor's visit, and was landed
+at a lonely point on the pleasant slope where the village of
+Saint-Innocent is situated. The view from this promontory, as one may
+call it, comprises the heights of Bugey with the Rhone flowing at
+their foot, and the end of the lake; but Raphael liked to look at the
+opposite shore from thence, at the melancholy looking Abbey of
+Haute-Combe, the burying-place of the Sardinian kings, who lie
+prostrate there before the hills, like pilgrims come at last to their
+journey's end. The silence of the landscape was broken by the even
+rhythm of the strokes of the oar; it seemed to find a voice for the
+place, in monotonous cadences like the chanting of monks. The Marquis
+was surprised to find visitors to this usually lonely part of the
+lake; and as he mused, he watched the people seated in the boat, and
+recognized in the stern the elderly lady who had spoken so harshly to
+him the evening before.
+
+No one took any notice of Raphael as the boat passed, except the
+elderly lady's companion, a poor old maid of noble family, who bowed
+to him, and whom it seemed to him that he saw for the first time. A
+few seconds later he had already forgotten the visitors, who had
+rapidly disappeared behind the promontory, when he heard the
+fluttering of a dress and the sound of light footsteps not far from
+him. He turned about and saw the companion; and, guessing from her
+embarrassed manner that she wished to speak with him, he walked
+towards her.
+
+She was somewhere about thirty-six years of age, thin and tall,
+reserved and prim, and, like all old maids, seemed puzzled to know
+which way to look, an expression no longer in keeping with her
+measured, springless, and hesitating steps. She was both young and old
+at the same time, and, by a certain dignity in her carriage, showed
+the high value which she set upon her charms and perfections. In
+addition, her movements were all demure and discreet, like those of
+women who are accustomed to take great care of themselves, no doubt
+because they desire not to be cheated of love, their destined end.
+
+"Your life is in danger, sir; do not come to the Club again!" she
+said, stepping back a pace or two from Raphael, as if her reputation
+had already been compromised.
+
+"But, mademoiselle," said Raphael, smiling, "please explain yourself
+more clearly, since you have condescended so far----"
+
+"Ah," she answered, "unless I had had a very strong motive, I should
+never have run the risk of offending the countess, for if she ever
+came to know that I had warned you----"
+
+"And who would tell her, mademoiselle?" cried Raphael.
+
+"True," the old maid answered. She looked at him, quaking like an owl
+out in the sunlight. "But think of yourself," she went on; "several
+young men, who want to drive you away from the baths, have agreed to
+pick a quarrel with you, and to force you into a duel."
+
+The elderly lady's voice sounded in the distance.
+
+"Mademoiselle," began the Marquis, "my gratitude----" But his
+protectress had fled already; she had heard the voice of her mistress
+squeaking afresh among the rocks.
+
+"Poor girl! unhappiness always understands and helps the unhappy,"
+Raphael thought, and sat himself down at the foot of a tree.
+
+The key of every science is, beyond cavil, the mark of interrogation;
+we owe most of our greatest discoveries to a _Why_? and all the wisdom
+in the world, perhaps, consists in asking _Wherefore_? in every
+connection. But, on the other hand, this acquired prescience is the
+ruin of our illusions.
+
+So Valentin, having taken the old maid's kindly action for the text of
+his wandering thoughts, without the deliberate promptings of
+philosophy, must find it full of gall and wormwood.
+
+"It is not at all extraordinary that a gentlewoman's gentlewoman
+should take a fancy to me," said he to himself. "I am twenty-seven
+years old, and I have a title and an income of two hundred thousand a
+year. But that her mistress, who hates water like a rabid cat--for it
+would be hard to give the palm to either in that matter--that her
+mistress should have brought her here in a boat! Is not that very
+strange and wonderful? Those two women came into Savoy to sleep like
+marmots; they ask if day has dawned at noon; and to think that they
+could get up this morning before eight o'clock, to take their chances
+in running after me!"
+
+Very soon the old maid and her elderly innocence became, in his eyes,
+a fresh manifestation of that artificial, malicious little world. It
+was a paltry device, a clumsy artifice, a piece of priest's or woman's
+craft. Was the duel a myth, or did they merely want to frighten him?
+But these petty creatures, impudent and teasing as flies, had
+succeeded in wounding his vanity, in rousing his pride, and exciting
+his curiosity. Unwilling to become their dupe, or to be taken for a
+coward, and even diverted perhaps by the little drama, he went to the
+Club that very evening.
+
+He stood leaning against the marble chimney-piece, and stayed there
+quietly in the middle of the principal saloon, doing his best to give
+no one any advantage over him; but he scrutinized the faces about him,
+and gave a certain vague offence to those assembled, by his
+inspection. Like a dog aware of his strength, he awaited the contest
+on his own ground, without necessary barking. Towards the end of the
+evening he strolled into the cardroom, walking between the door and
+another that opened into the billiard-room, throwing a glance from
+time to time over a group of young men that had gathered there. He
+heard his name mentioned after a turn or two. Although they lowered
+their voices, Raphael easily guessed that he had become the topic of
+their debate, and he ended by catching a phrase or two spoken aloud.
+
+"You?"
+
+"Yes, I."
+
+"I dare you to do it!"
+
+"Let us make a bet on it!"
+
+"Oh, he will do it."
+
+Just as Valentin, curious to learn the matter of the wager, came up to
+pay closer attention to what they were saying, a tall, strong,
+good-looking young fellow, who, however, possessed the impertinent
+stare peculiar to people who have material force at their back, came
+out of the billiard-room.
+
+"I am deputed, sir," he said coolly addressing the Marquis, "to make
+you aware of something which you do not seem to know; your face and
+person generally are a source of annoyance to every one here, and to
+me in particular. You have too much politeness not to sacrifice
+yourself to the public good, and I beg that you will not show yourself
+in the Club again."
+
+"This sort of joke has been perpetrated before, sir, in garrison towns
+at the time of the Empire; but nowadays it is exceedingly bad form,"
+said Raphael drily.
+
+"I am not joking," the young man answered; "and I repeat it: your
+health will be considerably the worse for a stay here; the heat and
+light, the air of the saloon, and the company are all bad for your
+complaint."
+
+"Where did you study medicine?" Raphael inquired.
+
+"I took my bachelor's degree on Lepage's shooting-ground in Paris, and
+was made a doctor at Cerizier's, the king of foils."
+
+"There is one last degree left for you to take," said Valentin; "study
+the ordinary rules of politeness, and you will be a perfect
+gentlemen."
+
+The young men all came out of the billiard-room just then, some
+disposed to laugh, some silent. The attention of other players was
+drawn to the matter; they left their cards to watch a quarrel that
+rejoiced their instincts. Raphael, alone among this hostile crowd, did
+his best to keep cool, and not to put himself in any way in the wrong;
+but his adversary having ventured a sarcasm containing an insult
+couched in unusually keen language, he replied gravely:
+
+"We cannot box men's ears, sir, in these days, but I am at a loss for
+any word by which to stigmatize such cowardly behavior as yours."
+
+"That's enough, that's enough. You can come to an explanation
+to-morrow," several young men exclaimed, interposing between the two
+champions.
+
+Raphael left the room in the character of aggressor, after he had
+accepted a proposal to meet near the Chateau de Bordeau, in a little
+sloping meadow, not very far from the newly made road, by which the
+man who came off victorious could reach Lyons. Raphael must now either
+take to his bed or leave the baths. The visitors had gained their
+point. At eight o'clock next morning his antagonist, followed by two
+seconds and a surgeon, arrived first on the ground.
+
+"We shall do very nicely here; glorious weather for a duel!" he cried
+gaily, looking at the blue vault of sky above, at the waters of the
+lake, and the rocks, without a single melancholy presentiment or doubt
+of the issue. "If I wing him," he went on, "I shall send him to bed
+for a month; eh, doctor?"
+
+"At the very least," the surgeon replied; "but let that willow twig
+alone, or you will weary your wrist, and then you will not fire
+steadily. You might kill your man instead of wounding him."
+
+The noise of a carriage was heard approaching.
+
+"Here he is," said the seconds, who soon descried a caleche coming
+along the road; it was drawn by four horses, and there were two
+postilions.
+
+"What a queer proceeding!" said Valentin's antagonist; "here he comes
+post-haste to be shot."
+
+The slightest incident about a duel, as about a stake at cards, makes
+an impression on the minds of those deeply concerned in the results of
+the affair; so the young man awaited the arrival of the carriage with
+a kind of uneasiness. It stopped in the road; old Jonathan laboriously
+descended from it, in the first place, to assist Raphael to alight; he
+supported him with his feeble arms, and showed him all the minute
+attentions that a lover lavishes upon his mistress. Both became lost
+to sight in the footpath that lay between the highroad and the field
+where the duel was to take place; they were walking slowly, and did
+not appear again for some time after. The four onlookers at this
+strange spectacle felt deeply moved by the sight of Valentin as he
+leaned on his servant's arm; he was wasted and pale; he limped as if
+he had the gout, went with his head bowed down, and said not a word.
+You might have taken them for a couple of old men, one broken with
+years, the other worn out with thought; the elder bore his age visibly
+written in his white hair, the younger was of no age.
+
+"I have not slept all night, sir;" so Raphael greeted his antagonist.
+
+The icy tone and terrible glance that went with the words made the
+real aggressor shudder; he know that he was in the wrong, and felt in
+secret ashamed of his behavior. There was something strange in
+Raphael's bearing, tone, and gesture; the Marquis stopped, and every
+one else was likewise silent. The uneasy and constrained feeling grew
+to a height.
+
+"There is yet time," he went on, "to offer me some slight apology; and
+offer it you must, or you will die sir! You rely even now on your
+dexterity, and do not shrink from an encounter in which you believe
+all the advantage to be upon your side. Very good, sir; I am generous,
+I am letting you know my superiority beforehand. I possess a terrible
+power. I have only to wish to do so, and I can neutralize your skill,
+dim your eyesight, make your hand and pulse unsteady, and even kill
+you outright. I have no wish to be compelled to exercise my power; the
+use of it costs me too dear. You would not be the only one to die. So
+if you refuse to apologize to me, not matter what your experience in
+murder, your ball will go into the waterfall there, and mine will
+speed straight to your heart though I do not aim it at you."
+
+Confused voices interrupted Raphael at this point. All the time that
+he was speaking, the Marquis had kept his intolerably keen gaze fixed
+upon his antagonist; now he drew himself up and showed an impassive
+face, like that of a dangerous madman.
+
+"Make him hold his tongue," the young man had said to one of his
+seconds; "that voice of his is tearing the heart out of me."
+
+"Say no more, sir; it is quite useless," cried the seconds and the
+surgeon, addressing Raphael.
+
+"Gentlemen, I am fulfilling a duty. Has this young gentleman any final
+arrangements to make?"
+
+"That is enough; that will do."
+
+The Marquis remained standing steadily, never for a moment losing
+sight of his antagonist; and the latter seemed, like a bird before a
+snake, to be overwhelmed by a well-nigh magical power. He was
+compelled to endure that homicidal gaze; he met and shunned it
+incessantly.
+
+"I am thirsty; give me some water----" he said again to the second.
+
+"Are you nervous?"
+
+"Yes," he answered. "There is a fascination about that man's glowing
+eyes."
+
+"Will you apologize?"
+
+"It is too late now."
+
+The two antagonists were placed at fifteen paces' distance from each
+other. Each of them had a brace of pistols at hand, and, according to
+the programme prescribed for them, each was to fire twice when and how
+he pleased, but after the signal had been given by the seconds.
+
+"What are you doing, Charles?" exclaimed the young man who acted as
+second to Raphael's antagonist; "you are putting in the ball before
+the powder!"
+
+"I am a dead man," he muttered, by way of answer; "you have put me
+facing the sun----"
+
+"The sun lies behind you," said Valentin sternly and solemnly, while
+he coolly loaded his pistol without heeding the fact that the signal
+had been given, or that his antagonist was carefully taking aim.
+
+There was something so appalling in this supernatural unconcern, that
+it affected even the two postilions, brought thither by a cruel
+curiosity. Raphael was either trying his power or playing with it, for
+he talked to Jonathan, and looked towards him as he received his
+adversary's fire. Charles' bullet broke a branch of willow, and
+ricocheted over the surface of the water; Raphael fired at random, and
+shot his antagonist through the heart. He did not heed the young man
+as he dropped; he hurriedly sought the Magic Skin to see what another
+man's life had cost him. The talisman was no larger than a small
+oak-leaf.
+
+"What are you gaping at, you postilions over there? Let us be off,"
+said the Marquis.
+
+That same evening he crossed the French border, immediately set out
+for Auvergne, and reached the springs of Mont Dore. As he traveled,
+there surged up in his heart, all at once, one of those thoughts that
+come to us as a ray of sunlight pierces through the thick mists in
+some dark valley--a sad enlightenment, a pitiless sagacity that lights
+up the accomplished fact for us, that lays our errors bare, and leaves
+us without excuse in our own eyes. It suddenly struck him that the
+possession of power, no matter how enormous, did not bring with it the
+knowledge how to use it. The sceptre is a plaything for a child, an
+axe for a Richelieu, and for a Napoleon a lever by which to move the
+world. Power leaves us just as it finds us; only great natures grow
+greater by its means. Raphael had had everything in his power, and he
+had done nothing.
+
+At the springs of Mont Dore he came again in contact with a little
+world of people, who invariably shunned him with the eager haste that
+animals display when they scent afar off one of their own species
+lying dead, and flee away. The dislike was mutual. His late adventure
+had given him a deep distaste for society; his first care,
+consequently, was to find a lodging at some distance from the
+neighborhood of the springs. Instinctively he felt within him the need
+of close contact with nature, of natural emotions, and of the
+vegetative life into which we sink so gladly among the fields.
+
+The day after he arrived he climbed the Pic de Sancy, not without
+difficulty, and visited the higher valleys, the skyey nooks,
+undiscovered lakes, and peasants' huts about Mont Dore, a country
+whose stern and wild features are now beginning to tempt the brushes
+of our artists, for sometimes wonderfully fresh and charming views are
+to be found there, affording a strong contrast to the frowning brows
+of those lonely hills.
+
+Barely a league from the village Raphael discovered a nook where
+nature seemed to have taken a pleasure in hiding away all her
+treasures like some glad and mischievous child. At the first sight of
+this unspoiled and picturesque retreat, he determined to take up his
+abode in it. There, life must needs be peaceful, natural, and
+fruitful, like the life of a plant.
+
+Imagine for yourself an inverted cone of granite hollowed out on a
+large scale, a sort of basin with its sides divided up by queer
+winding paths. On one side lay level stretches with no growth upon
+them, a bluish uniform surface, over which the rays of the sun fell as
+upon a mirror; on the other lay cliffs split open by fissures and
+frowning ravines; great blocks of lava hung suspended from them, while
+the action of rain slowly prepared their impending fall; a few stunted
+trees tormented by the wind, often crowned their summits; and here and
+there in some sheltered angle of their ramparts a clump of
+chestnut-trees grew tall as cedars, or some cavern in the yellowish
+rocks showed the dark entrance into its depths, set about by flowers
+and brambles, decked by a little strip of green turf.
+
+At the bottom of this cup, which perhaps had been the crater of an
+old-world volcano, lay a pool of water as pure and bright as a
+diamond. Granite boulders lay around the deep basin, and willows,
+mountain-ash trees, yellow-flag lilies, and numberless aromatic plants
+bloomed about it, in a realm of meadow as fresh as an English
+bowling-green. The fine soft grass was watered by the streams that
+trickled through the fissures in the cliffs; the soil was continually
+enriched by the deposits of loam which storms washed down from the
+heights above. The pool might be some three acres in extent; its shape
+was irregular, and the edges were scalloped like the hem of a dress;
+the meadow might be an acre or two acres in extent. The cliffs and the
+water approached and receded from each other; here and there, there
+was scarcely width enough for the cows to pass between them.
+
+After a certain height the plant life ceased. Aloft in air the granite
+took upon itself the most fantastic shapes, and assumed those misty
+tints that give to high mountains a dim resemblance to clouds in the
+sky. The bare, bleak cliffs, with the fearful rents in their sides,
+pictures of wild and barren desolation, contrasted strongly with the
+pretty view of the valley; and so strange were the shapes they
+assumed, that one of the cliffs had been called "The Capuchin,"
+because it was so like a monk. Sometimes these sharp-pointed peaks,
+these mighty masses of rock, and airy caverns were lighted up one by
+one, according to the direction of the sun or the caprices of the
+atmosphere; they caught gleams of gold, dyed themselves in purple;
+took a tint of glowing rose-color, or turned dull and gray. Upon the
+heights a drama of color was always to be seen, a play of
+ever-shifting iridescent hues like those on a pigeon's breast.
+
+Oftentimes at sunrise or at sunset a ray of bright sunlight would
+penetrate between two sheer surfaces of lava, that might have been
+split apart by a hatchet, to the very depths of that pleasant little
+garden, where it would play in the waters of the pool, like a beam of
+golden light which gleams through the chinks of a shutter into a room
+in Spain, that has been carefully darkened for a siesta. When the sun
+rose above the old crater that some antediluvian revolution had filled
+with water, its rocky sides took warmer tones, the extinct volcano
+glowed again, and its sudden heat quickened the sprouting seeds and
+vegetation, gave color to the flowers, and ripened the fruits of this
+forgotten corner of the earth.
+
+As Raphael reached it, he noticed several cows grazing in the
+pasture-land; and when he had taken a few steps towards the water, he
+saw a little house built of granite and roofed with shingle in the
+spot where the meadowland was at its widest. The roof of this little
+cottage harmonized with everything about it; for it had long been
+overgrown with ivy, moss, and flowers of no recent date. A thin smoke,
+that did not scare the birds away, went up from the dilapidated
+chimney. There was a great bench at the door between two huge
+honey-suckle bushes, that were pink with blossom and full of scent.
+The walls could scarcely be seen for branches of vine and sprays of
+rose and jessamine that interlaced and grew entirely as chance and
+their own will bade them; for the inmates of the cottage seemed to pay
+no attention to the growth which adorned their house, and to take no
+care of it, leaving to it the fresh capricious charm of nature.
+
+Some clothes spread out on the gooseberry bushes were drying in the
+sun. A cat was sitting on a machine for stripping hemp; beneath it lay
+a newly scoured brass caldron, among a quantity of potato-parings. On
+the other side of the house Raphael saw a sort of barricade of dead
+thorn-bushes, meant no doubt to keep the poultry from scratching up
+the vegetables and pot-herbs. It seemed like the end of the earth. The
+dwelling was like some bird's-nest ingeniously set in a cranny of the
+rocks, a clever and at the same time a careless bit of workmanship. A
+simple and kindly nature lay round about it; its rusticity was
+genuine, but there was a charm like that of poetry in it; for it grew
+and throve at a thousand miles' distance from our elaborate and
+conventional poetry. It was like none of our conceptions; it was a
+spontaneous growth, a masterpiece due to chance.
+
+As Raphael reached the place, the sunlight fell across it from right
+to left, bringing out all the colors of its plants and trees; the
+yellowish or gray bases of the crags, the different shades of the
+green leaves, the masses of flowers, pink, blue, or white, the
+climbing plants with their bell-like blossoms, and the shot velvet of
+the mosses, the purple-tinted blooms of the heather,--everything was
+either brought into relief or made fairer yet by the enchantment of
+the light or by the contrasting shadows; and this was the case most of
+all with the sheet of water, wherein the house, the trees, the granite
+peaks, and the sky were all faithfully reflected. Everything had a
+radiance of its own in this delightful picture, from the sparkling
+mica-stone to the bleached tuft of grass hidden away in the soft
+shadows; the spotted cow with its glossy hide, the delicate
+water-plants that hung down over the pool like fringes in a nook where
+blue or emerald colored insects were buzzing about, the roots of trees
+like a sand-besprinkled shock of hair above grotesque faces in the
+flinty rock surface,--all these things made a harmony for the eye.
+
+The odor of the tepid water; the scent of the flowers, and the breath
+of the caverns which filled the lonely place gave Raphael a sensation
+that was almost enjoyment. Silence reigned in majesty over these
+woods, which possibly are unknown to the tax-collector; but the
+barking of a couple of dogs broke the stillness all at once; the cows
+turned their heads towards the entrance of the valley, showing their
+moist noses to Raphael, stared stupidly at him, and then fell to
+browsing again. A goat and her kid, that seemed to hang on the side of
+the crags in some magical fashion, capered and leapt to a slab of
+granite near to Raphael, and stayed there a moment, as if to seek to
+know who he was. The yapping of the dogs brought out a plump child,
+who stood agape, and next came a white-haired old man of middle
+height. Both of these two beings were in keeping with the
+surroundings, the air, the flowers, and the dwelling. Health appeared
+to overflow in this fertile region; old age and childhood thrived
+there. There seemed to be, about all these types of existence, the
+freedom and carelessness of the life of primitive times, a happiness
+of use and wont that gave the lie to our philosophical platitudes, and
+wrought a cure of all its swelling passions in the heart.
+
+The old man belonged to the type of model dear to the masculine brush
+of Schnetz. The countless wrinkles upon his brown face looked as if
+they would be hard to the touch; the straight nose, the prominent
+cheek-bones, streaked with red veins like a vine-leaf in autumn, the
+angular features, all were characteristics of strength, even where
+strength existed no longer. The hard hands, now that they toiled no
+longer, had preserved their scanty white hair, his bearing was that of
+an absolutely free man; it suggested the thought that, had he been an
+Italian, he would have perhaps turned brigand, for the love of the
+liberty so dear to him. The child was a regular mountaineer, with the
+black eyes that can face the sun without flinching, a deeply tanned
+complexion, and rough brown hair. His movements were like a bird's
+--swift, decided, and unconstrained; his clothing was ragged; the
+white, fair skin showed through the rents in his garments. There they
+both stood in silence, side by side, both obeying the same impulse; in
+both faces were clear tokens of an absolutely identical and idle life.
+The old man had adopted the child's amusements, and the child had
+fallen in with the old man's humor; there was a sort of tacit
+agreement between two kinds of feebleness, between failing powers
+well-nigh spent and powers just about to unfold themselves.
+
+Very soon a woman who seemed to be about thirty years old appeared on
+the threshold of the door, spinning as she came. She was an
+Auvergnate, a high-colored, comfortable-looking, straightforward sort
+of person, with white teeth; her cap and dress, the face, full figure,
+and general appearance, were of the Auvergne peasant stamp. So was her
+dialect; she was a thorough embodiment of her district; its
+hardworking ways, its thrift, ignorance, and heartiness all met in
+her.
+
+She greeted Raphael, and they began to talk. The dogs quieted down;
+the old man went and sat on a bench in the sun; the child followed his
+mother about wherever she went, listening without saying a word, and
+staring at the stranger.
+
+"You are not afraid to live here, good woman?"
+
+"What should we be afraid of, sir? When we bolt the door, who ever
+could get inside? Oh, no, we aren't afraid at all. And besides," she
+said, as she brought the Marquis into the principal room in the house,
+"what should thieves come to take from us here?"
+
+She designated the room as she spoke; the smoke-blackened walls, with
+some brilliant pictures in blue, red, and green, an "End of Credit," a
+Crucifixion, and the "Grenadiers of the Imperial Guard" for their sole
+ornament; the furniture here and there, the old wooden four-post
+bedstead, the table with crooked legs, a few stools, the chest that
+held the bread, the flitch that hung from the ceiling, a jar of salt,
+a stove, and on the mantleshelf a few discolored yellow plaster
+figures. As he went out again Raphael noticed a man half-way up the
+crags, leaning on a hoe, and watching the house with interest.
+
+"That's my man, sir," said the Auvergnate, unconsciously smiling in
+peasant fashion; "he is at work up there."
+
+"And that old man is your father?"
+
+"Asking your pardon, sir, he is my man's grandfather. Such as you see
+him, he is a hundred and two, and yet quite lately he walked over to
+Clermont with our little chap! Oh, he has been a strong man in his
+time; but he does nothing now but sleep and eat and drink. He amuses
+himself with the little fellow. Sometimes the child trails him up the
+hillsides, and he will just go up there along with him."
+
+Valentin made up his mind immediately. He would live between this
+child and old man, breathe the same air; eat their bread, drink the
+same water, sleep with them, make the blood in his veins like theirs.
+It was a dying man's fancy. For him the prime model, after which the
+customary existence of the individual should be shaped, the real
+formula for the life of a human being, the only true and possible
+life, the life-ideal, was to become one of the oysters adhering to
+this rock, to save his shell a day or two longer by paralyzing the
+power of death. One profoundly selfish thought took possession of him,
+and the whole universe was swallowed up and lost in it. For him the
+universe existed no longer; the whole world had come to be within
+himself. For the sick, the world begins at their pillow and ends at
+the foot of the bed; and this countryside was Raphael's sick-bed.
+
+Who has not, at some time or other in his life, watched the comings
+and goings of an ant, slipped straws into a yellow slug's one
+breathing-hole, studied the vagaries of a slender dragon-fly, pondered
+admiringly over the countless veins in an oak-leaf, that bring the
+colors of a rose window in some Gothic cathedral into contrast with
+the reddish background? Who has not looked long in delight at the
+effects of sun and rain on a roof of brown tiles, at the dewdrops, or
+at the variously shaped petals of the flower-cups? Who has not sunk
+into these idle, absorbing meditations on things without, that have no
+conscious end, yet lead to some definite thought at last. Who, in
+short, has not led a lazy life, the life of childhood, the life of the
+savage without his labor? This life without a care or a wish Raphael
+led for some days' space. He felt a distinct improvement in his
+condition, a wonderful sense of ease, that quieted his apprehensions
+and soothed his sufferings.
+
+He would climb the crags, and then find a seat high up on some peak
+whence he could see a vast expanse of distant country at a glance, and
+he would spend whole days in this way, like a plant in the sun, or a
+hare in its form. And at last, growing familiar with the appearances
+of the plant-life about him, and of the changes in the sky, he
+minutely noted the progress of everything working around him in the
+water, on the earth, or in the air. He tried to share the secret
+impulses of nature, sought by passive obedience to become a part of
+it, and to lie within the conservative and despotic jurisdiction that
+regulates instinctive existence. He no longer wished to steer his own
+course.
+
+Just as criminals in olden times were safe from the pursuit of
+justice, if they took refuge under the shadow of the altar, so Raphael
+made an effort to slip into the sanctuary of life. He succeeded in
+becoming an integral part of the great and mighty fruit-producing
+organization; he had adapted himself to the inclemency of the air, and
+had dwelt in every cave among the rocks. He had learned the ways and
+habits of growth of every plant, had studied the laws of the
+watercourses and their beds, and had come to know the animals; he was
+at last so perfectly at one with this teeming earth, that he had in
+some sort discerned its mysteries and caught the spirit of it.
+
+The infinitely varied forms of every natural kingdom were, to his
+thinking, only developments of one and the same substance, different
+combinations brought about by the same impulse, endless emanations
+from a measureless Being which was acting, thinking, moving, and
+growing, and in harmony with which he longed to grow, to move, to
+think, and act. He had fancifully blended his life with the life of
+the crags; he had deliberately planted himself there. During the
+earliest days of his sojourn in these pleasant surroundings, Valentin
+tasted all the pleasures of childhood again, thanks to the strange
+hallucination of apparent convalescence, which is not unlike the
+pauses of delirium that nature mercifully provides for those in pain.
+He went about making trifling discoveries, setting to work on endless
+things, and finishing none of them; the evening's plans were quite
+forgotten in the morning; he had no cares, he was happy; he thought
+himself saved.
+
+One morning he had lain in bed till noon, deep in the dreams between
+sleep and waking, which give to realities a fantastic appearance, and
+make the wildest fancies seem solid facts; while he was still
+uncertain that he was not dreaming yet, he suddenly heard his hostess
+giving a report of his health to Jonathan, for the first time.
+Jonathan came to inquire after him daily, and the Auvergnate, thinking
+no doubt that Valentin was still asleep, had not lowered the tones of
+a voice developed in mountain air.
+
+"No better and no worse," she said. "He coughed all last night again
+fit to kill himself. Poor gentleman, he coughs and spits till it is
+piteous. My husband and I often wonder to each other where he gets the
+strength from to cough like that. It goes to your heart. What a cursed
+complaint it is! He has no strength at all. I am always afraid I shall
+find him dead in his bed some morning. He is every bit as pale as a
+waxen Christ. _Dame_! I watch him while he dresses; his poor body is as
+thin as a nail. And he does not feel well now; but no matter. It's all
+the same; he wears himself out with running about as if he had health
+and to spare. All the same, he is very brave, for he never complains
+at all. But really he would be better under the earth than on it, for
+he is enduring the agonies of Christ. I don't wish that myself, sir;
+it is quite in our interests; but even if he didn't pay us what he
+does, I should be just as fond of him; it is not our own interest that
+is our motive.
+
+"Ah, _mon Dieu_!" she continued, "Parisians are the people for these
+dogs' diseases. Where did he catch it, now? Poor young man! And he is
+so sure that he is going to get well! That fever just gnaws him, you
+know; it eats him away; it will be the death of him. He has no notion
+whatever of that; he does not know it, sir; he sees nothing----You
+mustn't cry about him, M. Jonathan; you must remember that he will be
+happy, and will not suffer any more. You ought to make a neuvaine for
+him; I have seen wonderful cures come of the nine days' prayer, and I
+would gladly pay for a wax taper to save such a gentle creature, so
+good he is, a paschal lamb----"
+
+As Raphael's voice had grown too weak to allow him to make himself
+heard, he was compelled to listen to this horrible loquacity. His
+irritation, however, drove him out of bed at length, and he appeared
+upon the threshold.
+
+"Old scoundrel!" he shouted to Jonathan; "do you mean to put me to
+death?"
+
+The peasant woman took him for a ghost, and fled.
+
+"I forbid you to have any anxiety whatever about my health," Raphael
+went on.
+
+"Yes, my Lord Marquis," said the old servant, wiping away his tears.
+
+"And for the future you had very much better not come here without my
+orders."
+
+Jonathan meant to be obedient, but in the look full of pity and
+devotion that he gave the Marquis before he went, Raphael read his own
+death-warrant. Utterly disheartened, brought all at once to a sense of
+his real position, Valentin sat down on the threshold, locked his arms
+across his chest, and bowed his head. Jonathan turned to his master in
+alarm, with "My Lord----"
+
+"Go away, go away," cried the invalid.
+
+In the hours of the next morning, Raphael climbed the crags, and sat
+down in a mossy cleft in the rocks, whence he could see the narrow
+path along which the water for the dwelling was carried. At the base
+of the hill he saw Jonathan in conversation with the Auvergnate. Some
+malicious power interpreted for him all the woman's forebodings, and
+filled the breeze and the silence with her ominous words. Thrilled
+with horror, he took refuge among the highest summits of the
+mountains, and stayed there till the evening; but yet he could not
+drive away the gloomy presentiments awakened within him in such an
+unfortunate manner by a cruel solicitude on his account.
+
+The Auvergne peasant herself suddenly appeared before him like a
+shadow in the dusk; a perverse freak of the poet within him found a
+vague resemblance between her black and white striped petticoat and
+the bony frame of a spectre.
+
+"The damp is falling now, sir," said she. "If you stop out there, you
+will go off just like rotten fruit. You must come in. It isn't healthy
+to breathe the damp, and you have taken nothing since the morning,
+besides."
+
+"_Tonnerre de Dieu_! old witch," he cried; "let me live after my own
+fashion, I tell you, or I shall be off altogether. It is quite bad
+enough to dig my grave every morning; you might let it alone in the
+evenings at least----"
+
+"Your grave, sir! I dig your grave!--and where may your grave be? I
+want to see you as old as father there, and not in your grave by any
+manner of means. The grave! that comes soon enough for us all; in the
+grave----"
+
+"That is enough," said Raphael.
+
+"Take my arm, sir."
+
+"No."
+
+The feeling of pity in others is very difficult for a man to bear, and
+it is hardest of all when the pity is deserved. Hatred is a tonic--it
+quickens life and stimulates revenge; but pity is death to us--it
+makes our weakness weaker still. It is as if distress simpered
+ingratiatingly at us; contempt lurks in the tenderness, or tenderness
+in an affront. In the centenarian Raphael saw triumphant pity, a
+wondering pity in the child's eyes, an officious pity in the woman,
+and in her husband a pity that had an interested motive; but no matter
+how the sentiment declared itself, death was always its import.
+
+A poet makes a poem of everything; it is tragical or joyful, as things
+happen to strike his imagination; his lofty soul rejects all
+half-tones; he always prefers vivid and decided colors. In Raphael's
+soul this compassion produced a terrible poem of mourning and
+melancholy. When he had wished to live in close contact with nature, he
+had of course forgotten how freely natural emotions are expressed. He
+would think himself quite alone under a tree, whilst he struggled with
+an obstinate coughing fit, a terrible combat from which he never issued
+victorious without utter exhaustion afterwards; and then he would meet
+the clear, bright eyes of the little boy, who occupied the post of
+sentinel, like a savage in a bent of grass; the eyes scrutinized him
+with a childish wonder, in which there was as much amusement as
+pleasure, and an indescribable mixture of indifference and interest.
+The awful _Brother, you must die_, of the Trappists seemed constantly
+legible in the eyes of the peasants with whom Raphael was living; he
+scarcely knew which he dreaded most, their unfettered talk or their
+silence; their presence became torture.
+
+One morning he saw two men in black prowling about in his
+neighborhood, who furtively studied him and took observations. They
+made as though they had come there for a stroll, and asked him a few
+indifferent questions, to which he returned short answers. He
+recognized them both. One was the _cure_ and the other the doctor at the
+springs; Jonathan had no doubt sent them, or the people in the house
+had called them in, or the scent of an approaching death had drawn
+them thither. He beheld his own funeral, heard the chanting of the
+priests, and counted the tall wax candles; and all that lovely fertile
+nature around him, in whose lap he had thought to find life once more,
+he saw no longer, save through a veil of crape. Everything that but
+lately had spoken of length of days to him, now prophesied a speedy
+end. He set out the next day for Paris, not before he had been
+inundated with cordial wishes, which the people of the house uttered
+in melancholy and wistful tones for his benefit.
+
+He traveled through the night, and awoke as they passed through one of
+the pleasant valleys of the Bourbonnais. View after view swam before
+his gaze, and passed rapidly away like the vague pictures of a dream.
+Cruel nature spread herself out before his eyes with tantalizing
+grace. Sometimes the Allier, a liquid shining ribbon, meandered
+through the distant fertile landscape; then followed the steeples of
+hamlets, hiding modestly in the depths of a ravine with its yellow
+cliffs; sometimes, after the monotony of vineyards, the watermills of
+a little valley would be suddenly seen; and everywhere there were
+pleasant chateaux, hillside villages, roads with their fringes of
+queenly poplars; and the Loire itself, at last, with its wide sheets
+of water sparkling like diamonds amid its golden sands. Attractions
+everywhere, without end! This nature, all astir with a life and
+gladness like that of childhood, scarcely able to contain the impulses
+and sap of June, possessed a fatal attraction for the darkened gaze of
+the invalid. He drew the blinds of his carriage windows, and betook
+himself again to slumber.
+
+Towards evening, after they had passed Cesne, he was awakened by
+lively music, and found himself confronted with a village fair. The
+horses were changed near the marketplace. Whilst the postilions were
+engaged in making the transfer, he saw the people dancing merrily,
+pretty and attractive girls with flowers about them, excited youths,
+and finally the jolly wine-flushed countenances of old peasants.
+Children prattled, old women laughed and chatted; everything spoke in
+one voice, and there was a holiday gaiety about everything, down to
+their clothing and the tables that were set out. A cheerful expression
+pervaded the square and the church, the roofs and windows; even the
+very doorways of the village seemed likewise to be in holiday trim.
+
+Raphael could not repress an angry exclamation, nor yet a wish to
+silence the fiddles, annihilate the stir and bustle, stop the clamor,
+and disperse the ill-timed festival; like a dying man, he felt unable
+to endure the slightest sound, and he entered his carriage much
+annoyed. When he looked out upon the square from the window, he saw
+that all the happiness was scared away; the peasant women were in
+flight, and the benches were deserted. Only a blind musician, on the
+scaffolding of the orchestra, went on playing a shrill tune on his
+clarionet. That piping of his, without dancers to it, and the solitary
+old man himself, in the shadow of the lime-tree, with his curmudgeon's
+face, scanty hair, and ragged clothing, was like a fantastic picture
+of Raphael's wish. The heavy rain was pouring in torrents; it was one
+of those thunderstorms that June brings about so rapidly, to cease as
+suddenly. The thing was so natural, that, when Raphael had looked out
+and seen some pale clouds driven over by a gust of wind, he did not
+think of looking at the piece of skin. He lay back again in the corner
+of his carriage, which was very soon rolling upon its way.
+
+The next day found him back in his home again, in his own room, beside
+his own fireside. He had had a large fire lighted; he felt cold.
+Jonathan brought him some letters; they were all from Pauline. He
+opened the first one without any eagerness, and unfolded it as if it
+had been the gray-paper form of application for taxes made by the
+revenue collector. He read the first sentence:
+
+"Gone! This really is a flight, my Raphael. How is it? No one can tell
+me where you are. And who should know if not I?"
+
+He did not wish to learn any more. He calmly took up the letters and
+threw them in the fire, watching with dull and lifeless eyes the
+perfumed paper as it was twisted, shriveled, bent, and devoured by the
+capricious flames. Fragments that fell among the ashes allowed him to
+see the beginning of a sentence, or a half-burnt thought or word; he
+took a pleasure in deciphering them--a sort of mechanical amusement.
+
+"Sitting at your door--expected--Caprice--I obey--Rivals--I, never!
+--thy Pauline--love--no more of Pauline?--If you had wished to leave
+me for ever, you would not have deserted me--Love eternal--To die----"
+
+The words caused him a sort of remorse; he seized the tongs, and
+rescued a last fragment of the letter from the flames.
+
+"I have murmured," so Pauline wrote, "but I have never complained, my
+Raphael! If you have left me so far behind you, it was doubtless
+because you wished to hide some heavy grief from me. Perhaps you will
+kill me one of these days, but you are too good to torture me. So do
+not go away from me like this. There! I can bear the worst of torment,
+if only I am at your side. Any grief that you could cause me would not
+be grief. There is far more love in my heart for you than I have ever
+yet shown you. I can endure anything, except this weeping far away
+from you, this ignorance of your----"
+
+Raphael laid the scorched scrap on the mantelpiece, then all at once
+he flung it into the fire. The bit of paper was too clearly a symbol
+of his own love and luckless existence.
+
+"Go and find M. Bianchon," he told Jonathan.
+
+Horace came and found Raphael in bed.
+
+"Can you prescribe a draught for me--some mild opiate which will
+always keep me in a somnolent condition, a draught that will not be
+injurious although taken constantly."
+
+"Nothing is easier," the young doctor replied; "but you will have to
+keep on your feet for a few hours daily, at any rate, so as to take
+your food."
+
+"A few hours!" Raphael broke in; "no, no! I only wish to be out of bed
+for an hour at most."
+
+"What is your object?" inquired Bianchon.
+
+"To sleep; for so one keeps alive, at any rate," the patient answered.
+"Let no one come in, not even Mlle. Pauline de Wistchnau!" he added to
+Jonathan, as the doctor was writing out his prescription.
+
+"Well, M. Horace, is there any hope?" the old servant asked, going as
+far as the flight of steps before the door, with the young doctor.
+
+"He may live for some time yet, or he may die to-night. The chances of
+life and death are evenly balanced in his case. I can't understand it
+at all," said the doctor, with a doubtful gesture. "His mind ought to
+be diverted."
+
+"Diverted! Ah, sir, you don't know him! He killed a man the other day
+without a word!--Nothing can divert him!"
+
+For some days Raphael lay plunged in the torpor of this artificial
+sleep. Thanks to the material power that opium exerts over the
+immaterial part of us, this man with the powerful and active
+imagination reduced himself to the level of those sluggish forms of
+animal life that lurk in the depths of forests, and take the form of
+vegetable refuse, never stirring from their place to catch their easy
+prey. He had darkened the very sun in heaven; the daylight never
+entered his room. About eight o'clock in the evening he would leave
+his bed, with no very clear consciousness of his own existence; he
+would satisfy the claims of hunger and return to bed immediately. One
+dull blighted hour after another only brought confused pictures and
+appearances before him, and lights and shadows against a background of
+darkness. He lay buried in deep silence; movement and intelligence
+were completely annihilated for him. He woke later than usual one
+evening, and found that his dinner was not ready. He rang for
+Jonathan.
+
+"You can go," he said. "I have made you rich; you shall be happy in
+your old age; but I will not let you muddle away my life any longer.
+Miserable wretch! I am hungry--where is my dinner? How is it?--Answer
+me!"
+
+A satisfied smile stole over Jonathan's face. He took a candle that
+lit up the great dark rooms of the mansion with its flickering light;
+brought his master, who had again become an automaton, into a great
+gallery, and flung a door suddenly open. Raphael was all at once
+dazzled by a flood of light and amazed by an unheard-of scene.
+
+His chandeliers had been filled with wax-lights; the rarest flowers
+from his conservatory were carefully arranged about the room; the
+table sparkled with silver, gold, crystal, and porcelain; a royal
+banquet was spread--the odors of the tempting dishes tickled the
+nervous fibres of the palate. There sat his friends; he saw them among
+beautiful women in full evening dress, with bare necks and shoulders,
+with flowers in their hair; fair women of every type, with sparkling
+eyes, attractively and fancifully arrayed. One had adopted an Irish
+jacket, which displayed the alluring outlines of her form; one wore
+the "basquina" of Andalusia, with its wanton grace; here was a
+half-clad Dian the huntress, there the costume of Mlle. de la
+Valliere, amorous and coy; and all of them alike were given up to
+the intoxication of the moment.
+
+As Raphael's death-pale face showed itself in the doorway, a sudden
+outcry broke out, as vehement as the blaze of this improvised banquet.
+The voices, perfumes, and lights, the exquisite beauty of the women,
+produced their effect upon his senses, and awakened his desires.
+Delightful music, from unseen players in the next room, drowned the
+excited tumult in a torrent of harmony--the whole strange vision was
+complete.
+
+Raphael felt a caressing pressure on is own hand, a woman's white,
+youthful arms were stretched out to grasp him, and the hand was
+Aquilina's. He knew now that this scene was not a fantastic illusion
+like the fleeting pictures of his disordered dreams; he uttered a
+dreadful cry, slammed the door, and dealt his heartbroken old servant
+a blow in the face.
+
+"Monster!" he cried, "so you have sworn to kill me!" and trembling at
+the risks he had just now run, he summoned all his energies, reached
+his room, took a powerful sleeping draught, and went to bed.
+
+"The devil!" cried Jonathan, recovering himself. "And M. Bianchon most
+certainly told me to divert his mind."
+
+It was close upon midnight. By that time, owing to one of those
+physical caprices that are the marvel and the despair of science,
+Raphael, in his slumber, became radiant with beauty. A bright color
+glowed on his pale cheeks. There was an almost girlish grace about the
+forehead in which his genius was revealed. Life seemed to bloom on the
+quiet face that lay there at rest. His sleep was sound; a light, even
+breath was drawn in between red lips; he was smiling--he had passed no
+doubt through the gate of dreams into a noble life. Was he a
+centenarian now? Did his grandchildren come to wish him length of
+days? Or, on a rustic bench set in the sun and under the trees, was he
+scanning, like the prophet on the mountain heights, a promised land, a
+far-off time of blessing.
+
+"Here you are!"
+
+The words, uttered in silver tones, dispelled the shadowy faces of his
+dreams. He saw Pauline, in the lamplight, sitting upon the bed;
+Pauline grown fairer yet through sorrow and separation. Raphael
+remained bewildered by the sight of her face, white as the petals of
+some water flower, and the shadow of her long, dark hair about it
+seemed to make it whiter still. Her tears had left a gleaming trace
+upon her cheeks, and hung there yet, ready to fall at the least
+movement. She looked like an angel fallen from the skies, or a spirit
+that a breath might waft away, as she sat there all in white, with her
+head bowed, scarcely creasing the quilt beneath her weight.
+
+"Ah, I have forgotten everything!" she cried, as Raphael opened his
+eyes. "I have no voice left except to tell you, 'I am yours.' There is
+nothing in my heart but love. Angel of my life, you have never been so
+beautiful before! Your eyes are blazing---- But come, I can guess it
+all. You have been in search of health without me; you were afraid of
+me----well----"
+
+"Go! go! leave me," Raphael muttered at last. "Why do you not go? If
+you stay, I shall die. Do you want to see me die?"
+
+"Die?" she echoed. "Can you die without me? Die? But you are young;
+and I love you! Die?" she asked, in a deep, hollow voice. She seized
+his hands with a frenzied movement. "Cold!" she wailed. "Is it all an
+illusion?"
+
+Raphael drew the little bit of skin from under his pillow; it was as
+tiny and as fragile as a periwinkle petal. He showed it to her.
+
+"Pauline!" he said, "fair image of my fair life, let us say good-bye?"
+
+"Good-bye?" she echoed, looking surprised.
+
+"Yes. This is a talisman that grants me all my wishes, and that
+represents my span of life. See here, this is all that remains of it.
+If you look at me any longer, I shall die----"
+
+The young girl thought that Valentin had grown lightheaded; she took
+the talisman and went to fetch the lamp. By its tremulous light which
+she shed over Raphael and the talisman, she scanned her lover's face
+and the last morsel of the magic skin. As Pauline stood there, in all
+the beauty of love and terror, Raphael was no longer able to control
+his thoughts; memories of tender scenes, and of passionate and fevered
+joys, overwhelmed the soul that had so long lain dormant within him,
+and kindled a fire not quite extinct.
+
+"Pauline! Pauline! Come to me----"
+
+A dreadful cry came from the girl's throat, her eyes dilated with
+horror, her eyebrows were distorted and drawn apart by an unspeakable
+anguish; she read in Raphael's eyes the vehement desire in which she
+had once exulted, but as it grew she felt a light movement in her
+hand, and the skin contracted. She did not stop to think; she fled
+into the next room, and locked the door.
+
+"Pauline! Pauline!" cried the dying man, as he rushed after her; "I
+love you, I adore you, I want you, Pauline! I wish to die in your
+arms!"
+
+With unnatural strength, the last effort of ebbing life, he broke down
+the door, and saw his mistress writhing upon a sofa. Pauline had
+vainly tried to pierce her heart, and now thought to find a rapid
+death by strangling herself with her shawl.
+
+"If I die, he will live," she said, trying to tighten the knot that
+she had made.
+
+In her struggle with death her hair hung loose, her shoulders were
+bare, her clothing was disordered, her eyes were bathed in tears, her
+face was flushed and drawn with the horror of despair; yet as her
+exceeding beauty met Raphael's intoxicated eyes, his delirium grew. He
+sprang towards her like a bird of prey, tore away the shawl, and tried
+to take her in his arms.
+
+The dying man sought for words to express the wish that was consuming
+his strength; but no sounds would come except the choking death-rattle
+in his chest. Each breath he drew sounded hollower than the last, and
+seemed to come from his very entrails. At the last moment, no longer
+able to utter a sound, he set his teeth in Pauline's breast. Jonathan
+appeared, terrified by the cries he had heard, and tried to tear away
+the dead body from the grasp of the girl who was crouching with it in
+a corner.
+
+"What do you want?" she asked. "He is mine, I have killed him. Did I
+not foresee how it would be?"
+
+
+
+EPILOGUE
+
+"And what became of Pauline?"
+
+"Pauline? Ah! Do you sometimes spend a pleasant winter evening by your
+own fireside, and give yourself up luxuriously to memories of love or
+youth, while you watch the glow of the fire where the logs of oak are
+burning? Here, the fire outlines a sort of chessboard in red squares,
+there it has a sheen like velvet; little blue flames start up and
+flicker and play about in the glowing depths of the brasier. A
+mysterious artist comes and adapts that flame to his own ends; by a
+secret of his own he draws a visionary face in the midst of those
+flaming violet and crimson hues, a face with unimaginable delicate
+outlines, a fleeting apparition which no chance will ever bring back
+again. It is a woman's face, her hair is blown back by the wind, her
+features speak of a rapture of delight; she breathes fire in the midst
+of the fire. She smiles, she dies, you will never see her any more.
+Farewell, flower of the flame! Farewell, essence incomplete and
+unforeseen, come too early or too late to make the spark of some
+glorious diamond."
+
+"But, Pauline?"
+
+"You do not see, then? I will begin again. Make way! make way! She
+comes, she is here, the queen of illusions, a woman fleeting as a
+kiss, a woman bright as lightning, issuing in a blaze like lightning
+from the sky, a being uncreated, of spirit and love alone. She has
+wrapped her shadowy form in flame, or perhaps the flame betokens that
+she exists but for a moment. The pure outlines of her shape tell you
+that she comes from heaven. Is she not radiant as an angel? Can you
+not hear the beating of her wings in space? She sinks down beside you
+more lightly than a bird, and you are entranced by her awful eyes;
+there is a magical power in her light breathing that draws your lips
+to hers; she flies and you follow; you feel the earth beneath you no
+longer. If you could but once touch that form of snow with your eager,
+deluded hands, once twine the golden hair round your fingers, place
+one kiss on those shining eyes! There is an intoxicating vapor around,
+and the spell of a siren music is upon you. Every nerve in you is
+quivering; you are filled with pain and longing. O joy for which there
+is no name! You have touched the woman's lips, and you are awakened at
+once by a horrible pang. Oh! ah! yes, you have struck your head
+against the corner of the bedpost, you have been clasping its brown
+mahogany sides, and chilly gilt ornaments; embracing a piece of metal,
+a brazen Cupid."
+
+"But how about Pauline, sir?"
+
+"What, again? Listen. One lovely morning at Tours a young man, who
+held the hand of a pretty woman in his, went on board the _Ville
+d'Angers_. Thus united they both looked and wondered long at a white
+form that rose elusively out of the mists above the broad waters of
+the Loire, like some child of the sun and the river, or some freak of
+air and cloud. This translucent form was a sylph or a naiad by turns;
+she hovered in the air like a word that haunts the memory, which seeks
+in vain to grasp it; she glided among the islands, she nodded her head
+here and there among the tall poplar trees; then she grew to a giant's
+height; she shook out the countless folds of her drapery to the light;
+she shot light from the aureole that the sun had litten about her
+face; she hovered above the slopes of the hills and their little
+hamlets, and seemed to bar the passage of the boat before the Chateau
+d'Usse. You might have thought that _La dame des belles cousines_ sought
+to protect her country from modern intrusion."
+
+"Well, well, I understand. So it went with Pauline. But how about
+Foedora?"
+
+"Oh! Foedora, you are sure to meet with her! She was at the Bouffons
+last night, and she will go to the Opera this evening, and if you like
+to take it so, she is Society."
+
+
+
+ADDENDUM
+
+The following personages appear in other stories of the Human Comedy.
+
+Aquilina
+  Melmoth Reconciled
+
+Bianchon, Horace
+  Father Goriot
+  The Atheist's Mass
+  Cesar Birotteau
+  The Commission in Lunacy
+  Lost Illusions
+  A Distinguished Provincial at Paris
+  A Bachelor's Establishment
+  The Secrets of a Princess
+  The Government Clerks
+  Pierrette
+  A Study of Woman
+  Scenes from a Courtesan's Life
+  Honorine
+  The Seamy Side of History
+  A Second Home
+  A Prince of Bohemia
+  Letters of Two Brides
+  The Muse of the Department
+  The Imaginary Mistress
+  The Middle Classes
+  Cousin Betty
+  The Country Parson
+In addition, M. Bianchon narrated the following:
+  Another Study of Woman
+  La Grande Breteche
+
+Canalis, Constant-Cyr-Melchior, Baron de
+  Letters of Two Brides
+  A Distinguished Provincial at Paris
+  Modeste Mignon
+  Another Study of Woman
+  A Start in Life
+  Beatrix
+  The Unconscious Humorists
+  The Member for Arcis
+
+Dudley, Lady Arabella
+  The Lily of the Valley
+  The Ball at Sceaux
+  The Secrets of a Princess
+  A Daughter of Eve
+  Letters of Two Brides
+
+Euphrasia
+  Melmoth Reconciled
+
+Joseph
+  A Study of Woman
+
+Massol
+  Scenes from a Courtesan's Life
+  A Daughter of Eve
+  Cousin Betty
+  The Unconscious Humorists
+
+Navarreins, Duc de
+  A Bachelor's Establishment
+  Colonel Chabert
+  The Muse of the Department
+  The Thirteen
+  Jealousies of a Country Town
+  The Peasantry
+  Scenes from a Courtesan's Life
+  The Country Parson
+  The Gondreville Mystery
+  The Secrets of a Princess
+  Cousin Betty
+
+Rastignac, Eugene de
+  Father Goriot
+  A Distinguished Provincial at Paris
+  Scenes from a Courtesan's Life
+  The Ball at Sceaux
+  The Interdiction
+  A Study of Woman
+  Another Study of Woman
+  The Secrets of a Princess
+  A Daughter of Eve
+  The Gondreville Mystery
+  The Firm of Nucingen
+  Cousin Betty
+  The Member for Arcis
+  The Unconscious Humorists
+
+Taillefer, Jean-Frederic
+  The Firm of Nucingen
+  Father Goriot
+  The Red Inn
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Magic Skin, by Honore de Balzac
+
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diff --git a/old/old/20050212-1307.zip b/old/old/20050212-1307.zip
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@@ -0,0 +1,10557 @@
+Project Gutenberg's Etext of The Magic Skin, by Honore de Balzac
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+The Magic Skin
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+
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+
+
+
+Etext prepared by Dagny, dagnyj@hotmail.com
+and Bonnie Sala
+
+
+
+
+
+THE MAGIC SKIN
+BY
+HONORE DE BALZAC
+
+
+
+
+Translator
+Ellen Marriage
+
+
+
+To Monsieur Savary, Member of Le Academie des Sciences.
+
+
+
+[omitted: a drawing representing the serpentine
+path made by the tip of a stick when flourished.]
+STERNE--Tristram Shandy, ch. cccxxii.
+
+
+
+I
+
+THE TALISMAN
+
+Towards the end of the month of October 1829 a young man entered the
+Palais-Royal just as the gaming-houses opened, agreeably to the law
+which protects a passion by its very nature easily excisable. He
+mounted the staircase of one of the gambling hells distinguished by
+the number 36, without too much deliberation.
+
+"Your hat, sir, if you please?" a thin, querulous voice called out. A
+little old man, crouching in the darkness behind a railing, suddenly
+rose and exhibited his features, carved after a mean design.
+
+As you enter a gaming-house the law despoils you of your hat at the
+outset. Is it by way of a parable, a divine revelation? Or by exacting
+some pledge or other, is not an infernal compact implied? Is it done
+to compel you to preserve a respectful demeanor towards those who are
+about to gain money of you? Or must the detective, who squats in our
+social sewers, know the name of your hatter, or your own, if you
+happen to have written it on the lining inside? Or, after all, is the
+measurement of your skull required for the compilation of statistics
+as to the cerebral capacity of gamblers? The executive is absolutely
+silent on this point. But be sure of this, that though you have
+scarcely taken a step towards the tables, your hat no more belongs to
+you now than you belong to yourself. Play possesses you, your fortune,
+your cap, your cane, your cloak.
+
+As you go out, it will be made clear to you, by a savage irony, that
+Play has yet spared you something, since your property is returned.
+For all that, if you bring a new hat with you, you will have to pay
+for the knowledge that a special costume is needed for a gambler.
+
+The evident astonishment with which the young man took a numbered
+tally in exchange for his hat, which was fortunately somewhat rubbed
+at the brim, showed clearly enough that his mind was yet untainted;
+and the little old man, who had wallowed from his youth up in the
+furious pleasures of a gambler's life, cast a dull, indifferent glance
+over him, in which a philosopher might have seen wretchedness lying in
+the hospital, the vagrant lives of ruined folk, inquests on numberless
+suicides, life-long penal servitude and transportations to
+Guazacoalco.
+
+His pallid, lengthy visage appeared like a haggard embodiment of the
+passion reduced to its simplest terms. There were traces of past
+anguish in its wrinkles. He supported life on the glutinous soups at
+Darcet's, and gambled away his meagre earnings day by day. Like some
+old hackney which takes no heed of the strokes of the whip, nothing
+could move him now. The stifled groans of ruined players, as they
+passed out, their mute imprecations, their stupefied faces, found him
+impassive. He was the spirit of Play incarnate. If the young man had
+noticed this sorry Cerberus, perhaps he would have said, "There is
+only a pack of cards in that heart of his."
+
+The stranger did not heed this warning writ in flesh and blood, put
+here, no doubt, by Providence, who has set loathing on the threshold
+of all evil haunts. He walked boldly into the saloon, where the rattle
+of coin brought his senses under the dazzling spell of an agony of
+greed. Most likely he had been drawn thither by that most convincing
+of Jean Jacques' eloquent periods, which expresses, I think, this
+melancholy thought, "Yes, I can imagine that a man may take to
+gambling when he sees only his last shilling between him and death."
+
+There is an illusion about a gambling saloon at night as vulgar as
+that of a bloodthirsty drama, and just as effective. The rooms are
+filled with players and onlookers, with poverty-stricken age, which
+drags itself thither in search of stimulation, with excited faces, and
+revels that began in wine, to end shortly in the Seine. The passion is
+there in full measure, but the great number of the actors prevents you
+from seeing the gambling-demon face to face. The evening is a harmony
+or chorus in which all take part, to which each instrument in the
+orchestra contributes his share. You would see there plenty of
+respectable people who have come in search of diversion, for which
+they pay as they pay for the pleasures of the theatre, or of gluttony,
+or they come hither as to some garret where they cheapen poignant
+regrets for three months to come.
+
+Do you understand all the force and frenzy in a soul which impatiently
+waits for the opening of a gambling hell? Between the daylight gambler
+and the player at night there is the same difference that lies between
+a careless husband and the lover swooning under his lady's window.
+Only with morning comes the real throb of the passion and the craving
+in its stark horror. Then you can admire the real gambler, who has
+neither eaten, slept, thought, nor lived, he has so smarted under the
+scourge of his martingale, so suffered on the rack of his desire for a
+coup of trente-et-quarante. At that accursed hour you encounter eyes
+whose calmness terrifies you, faces that fascinate, glances that seem
+as if they had power to turn the cards over and consume them. The
+grandest hours of a gambling saloon are not the opening ones. If Spain
+has bull-fights, and Rome once had her gladiators, Paris waxes proud
+of her Palais-Royal, where the inevitable roulettes cause blood to
+flow in streams, and the public can have the pleasure of watching
+without fear of their feet slipping in it.
+
+Take a quiet peep at the arena. How bare it looks! The paper on the
+walls is greasy to the height of your head, there is nothing to bring
+one reviving thought. There is not so much as a nail for the
+convenience of suicides. The floor is worn and dirty. An oblong table
+stands in the middle of the room, the tablecloth is worn by the
+friction of gold, but the straw-bottomed chairs about it indicate an
+odd indifference to luxury in the men who will lose their lives here
+in the quest of the fortune that is to put luxury within their reach.
+
+This contradiction in humanity is seen wherever the soul reacts
+powerfully upon itself. The gallant would clothe his mistress in
+silks, would deck her out in soft Eastern fabrics, though he and she
+must lie on a truckle-bed. The ambitious dreamer sees himself at the
+summit of power, while he slavishly prostrates himself in the mire.
+The tradesman stagnates in his damp, unhealthy shop, while he builds a
+great mansion for his son to inherit prematurely, only to be ejected
+from it by law proceedings at his own brother's instance.
+
+After all, is there a less pleasing thing in the world than a house of
+pleasure? Singular question! Man is always at strife with himself. His
+present woes give the lie to his hopes; yet he looks to a future which
+is not his, to indemnify him for these present sufferings; setting
+upon all his actions the seal of inconsequence and of the weakness of
+his nature. We have nothing here below in full measure but misfortune.
+
+There were several gamblers in the room already when the young man
+entered. Three bald-headed seniors were lounging round the green
+table. Imperturbable as diplomatists, those plaster-cast faces of
+theirs betokened blunted sensibilities, and hearts which had long
+forgotten how to throb, even when a woman's dowry was the stake. A
+young Italian, olive-hued and dark-haired, sat at one end, with his
+elbows on the table, seeming to listen to the presentiments of luck
+that dictate a gambler's "Yes" or "No." The glow of fire and gold was
+on that southern face. Some seven or eight onlookers stood by way of
+an audience, awaiting a drama composed of the strokes of chance, the
+faces of the actors, the circulation of coin, and the motion of the
+croupier's rake, much as a silent, motionless crowd watches the
+headsman in the Place de Greve. A tall, thin man, in a threadbare
+coat, held a card in one hand, and a pin in the other, to mark the
+numbers of Red or Black. He seemed a modern Tantalus, with all the
+pleasures of his epoch at his lips, a hoardless miser drawing in
+imaginary gains, a sane species of lunatic who consoles himself in his
+misery by chimerical dreams, a man who touches peril and vice as a
+young priest handles the unconsecrated wafer in the white mass.
+
+One or two experts at the game, shrewd speculators, had placed
+themselves opposite the bank, like old convicts who have lost all fear
+of the hulks; they meant to try two or three coups, and then to depart
+at once with the expected gains, on which they lived. Two elderly
+waiters dawdled about with their arms folded, looking from time to
+time into the garden from the windows, as if to show their
+insignificant faces as a sign to passers-by.
+
+The croupier and banker threw a ghastly and withering glance at the
+punters, and cried, in a sharp voice, "Make your game!" as the young
+man came in. The silence seemed to grow deeper as all heads turned
+curiously towards the new arrival. Who would have thought it? The
+jaded elders, the fossilized waiters, the onlookers, the fanatical
+Italian himself, felt an indefinable dread at sight of the stranger.
+Is he not wretched indeed who can excite pity here? Must he not be
+very helpless to receive sympathy, ghastly in appearance to raise a
+shudder in these places, where pain utters no cry, where wretchedness
+looks gay, and despair is decorous? Such thoughts as these produced a
+new emotion in these torpid hearts as the young man entered. Were not
+executioners known to shed tears over the fair-haired, girlish heads
+that had to fall at the bidding of the Revolution?
+
+The gamblers saw at a glance a dreadful mystery in the novice's face.
+His young features were stamped with a melancholy grace, his looks
+told of unsuccess and many blighted hopes. The dull apathy of the
+suicide had made his forehead so deadly pale, a bitter smile carved
+faint lines about the corners of his mouth, and there was an
+abandonment about him that was painful to see. Some sort of demon
+sparkled in the depths of his eye, which drooped, wearied perhaps with
+pleasure. Could it have been dissipation that had set its foul mark on
+the proud face, once pure and bright, and now brought low? Any doctor
+seeing the yellow circles about his eyelids, and the color in his
+cheeks, would have set them down to some affection of the heart or
+lungs, while poets would have attributed them to the havoc brought by
+the search for knowledge and to night-vigils by the student's lamp.
+
+But a complaint more fatal than any disease, a disease more merciless
+than genius or study, had drawn this young face, and had wrung a heart
+which dissipation, study, and sickness had scarcely disturbed. When a
+notorious criminal is taken to the convict's prison, the prisoners
+welcome him respectfully, and these evil spirits in human shape,
+experienced in torments, bowed before an unheard-of anguish. By the
+depth of the wound which met their eyes, they recognized a prince
+among them, by the majesty of his unspoken irony, by the refined
+wretchedness of his garb. The frock-coat that he wore was well cut,
+but his cravat was on terms so intimate with his waistcoat that no one
+could suspect him of underlinen. His hands, shapely as a woman's were
+not perfectly clean; for two days past indeed he had ceased to wear
+gloves. If the very croupier and the waiters shuddered, it was because
+some traces of the spell of innocence yet hung about his meagre,
+delicately-shaped form, and his scanty fair hair in its natural curls.
+
+He looked only about twenty-five years of age, and any trace of vice
+in his face seemed to be there by accident. A young constitution still
+resisted the inroads of lubricity. Darkness and light, annihilation
+and existence, seemed to struggle in him, with effects of mingled
+beauty and terror. There he stood like some erring angel that has lost
+his radiance; and these emeritus-professors of vice and shame were
+ready to bid the novice depart, even as some toothless crone might be
+seized with pity for a beautiful girl who offers herself up to infamy.
+
+The young man went straight up to the table, and, as he stood there,
+flung down a piece of gold which he held in his hand, without
+deliberation. It rolled on to the Black; then, as strong natures can,
+he looked calmly, if anxiously, at the croupier, as if he held useless
+subterfuges in scorn.
+
+The interest this coup awakened was so great that the old gamesters
+laid nothing upon it; only the Italian, inspired by a gambler's
+enthusiasm, smiled suddenly at some thought, and punted his heap of
+coin against the stranger's stake.
+
+The banker forgot to pronounce the phrases that use and wont have
+reduced to an inarticulate cry--"Make your game. . . . The game is
+made. . . . Bets are closed." The croupier spread out the cards, and
+seemed to wish luck to the newcomer, indifferent as he was to the
+losses or gains of those who took part in these sombre pleasures.
+Every bystander thought he saw a drama, the closing scene of a noble
+life, in the fortunes of that bit of gold; and eagerly fixed his eyes
+on the prophetic cards; but however closely they watched the young
+man, they could discover not the least sign of feeling on his cool but
+restless face.
+
+"Even! red wins," said the croupier officially. A dumb sort of rattle
+came from the Italian's throat when he saw the folded notes that the
+banker showered upon him, one after another. The young man only
+understood his calamity when the croupiers's rake was extended to
+sweep away his last napoleon. The ivory touched the coin with a little
+click, as it swept it with the speed of an arrow into the heap of gold
+before the bank. The stranger turned pale at the lips, and softly shut
+his eyes, but he unclosed them again at once, and the red color
+returned as he affected the airs of an Englishman, to whom life can
+offer no new sensation, and disappeared without the glance full of
+entreaty for compassion that a desperate gamester will often give the
+bystanders. How much can happen in a second's space; how many things
+depend on a throw of the die!
+
+"That was his last cartridge, of course," said the croupier, smiling
+after a moment's silence, during which he picked up the coin between
+his finger and thumb and held it up.
+
+"He is a cracked brain that will go and drown himself," said a
+frequenter of the place. He looked round about at the other players,
+who all knew each other.
+
+"Bah!" said a waiter, as he took a pinch of snuff.
+
+"If we had but followed HIS example," said an old gamester to the
+others, as he pointed out the Italian.
+
+Everybody looked at the lucky player, whose hands shook as he counted
+his bank-notes.
+
+"A voice seemed to whisper to me," he said. "The luck is sure to go
+against that young man's despair."
+
+"He is a new hand," said the banker, "or he would have divided his
+money into three parts to give himself more chance."
+
+The young man went out without asking for his hat; but the old
+watch-dog, who had noted its shabby condition, returned it to him
+without a word. The gambler mechanically gave up the tally, and went
+downstairs whistling Di tanti Palpiti so feebly, that he himself
+scarcely heard the delicious notes.
+
+He found himself immediately under the arcades of the Palais-Royal,
+reached the Rue Saint Honore, took the direction of the Tuileries, and
+crossed the gardens with an undecided step. He walked as if he were in
+some desert, elbowed by men whom he did not see, hearing through all
+the voices of the crowd one voice alone--the voice of Death. He was
+lost in the thoughts that benumbed him at last, like the criminals who
+used to be taken in carts from the Palais de Justice to the Place de
+Greve, where the scaffold awaited them reddened with all the blood
+spilt here since 1793.
+
+There is something great and terrible about suicide. Most people's
+downfalls are not dangerous; they are like children who have not far
+to fall, and cannot injure themselves; but when a great nature is
+dashed down, he is bound to fall from a height. He must have been
+raised almost to the skies; he has caught glimpses of some heaven
+beyond his reach. Vehement must the storms be which compel a soul to
+seek for peace from the trigger of a pistol.
+
+How much young power starves and pines away in a garret for want of a
+friend, for lack of a woman's consolation, in the midst of millions of
+fellow-creatures, in the presence of a listless crowd that is burdened
+by its wealth! When one remembers all this, suicide looms large.
+Between a self-sought death and the abundant hopes whose voices call a
+young man to Paris, God only knows what may intervene; what contending
+ideas have striven within the soul; what poems have been set aside;
+what moans and what despair have been repressed; what abortive
+masterpieces and vain endeavors! Every suicide is an awful poem of
+sorrow. Where will you find a work of genius floating above the seas
+of literature that can compare with this paragraph:
+
+  "Yesterday, at four o'clock, a young woman threw herself into the
+  Seine from the Pont des Arts."
+
+Dramas and romances pale before this concise Parisian phrase; so must
+even that old frontispiece, The Lamentations of the glorious king of
+Kaernavan, put in prison by his children, the sole remaining fragment
+of a lost work that drew tears from Sterne at the bare perusal--the
+same Sterne who deserted his own wife and family.
+
+The stranger was beset with such thoughts as these, which passed in
+fragments through his mind, like tattered flags fluttering above the
+combat. If he set aside for a moment the burdens of consciousness and
+of memory, to watch the flower heads gently swayed by the breeze among
+the green thickets, a revulsion came over him, life struggled against
+the oppressive thought of suicide, and his eyes rose to the sky: gray
+clouds, melancholy gusts of the wind, the stormy atmosphere, all
+decreed that he should die.
+
+He bent his way toward the Pont Royal, musing over the last fancies of
+others who had gone before him. He smiled to himself as he remembered
+that Lord Castlereagh had satisfied the humblest of our needs before
+he cut his throat, and that the academician Auger had sought for his
+snuff-box as he went to his death. He analyzed these extravagances,
+and even examined himself; for as he stood aside against the parapet
+to allow a porter to pass, his coat had been whitened somewhat by the
+contact, and he carefully brushed the dust from his sleeve, to his own
+surprise. He reached the middle of the arch, and looked forebodingly
+at the water.
+
+"Wretched weather for drowning yourself," said a ragged old woman, who
+grinned at him; "isn't the Seine cold and dirty?"
+
+His answer was a ready smile, which showed the frenzied nature of his
+courage; then he shivered all at once as he saw at a distance, by the
+door of the Tuileries, a shed with an inscription above it in letters
+twelve inches high: THE ROYAL HUMANE SOCIETY'S APPARATUS.
+
+A vision of M. Dacheux rose before him, equipped by his philanthropy,
+calling out and setting in motion the too efficacious oars which break
+the heads of drowning men, if unluckily they should rise to the
+surface; he saw a curious crowd collecting, running for a doctor,
+preparing fumigations, he read the maundering paragraph in the papers,
+put between notes on a festivity and on the smiles of a ballet-dancer;
+he heard the francs counted down by the prefect of police to the
+watermen. As a corpse, he was worth fifteen francs; but now while he
+lived he was only a man of talent without patrons, without friends,
+without a mattress to lie on, or any one to speak a word for him--a
+perfect social cipher, useless to a State which gave itself no trouble
+about him.
+
+A death in broad daylight seemed degrading to him; he made up his mind
+to die at night so as to bequeath an unrecognizable corpse to a world
+which had disregarded the greatness of life. He began his wanderings
+again, turning towards the Quai Voltaire, imitating the lagging gait
+of an idler seeking to kill time. As he came down the steps at the end
+of the bridge, his notice was attracted by the second-hand books
+displayed on the parapet, and he was on the point of bargaining for
+some. He smiled, thrust his hands philosophically into his pockets,
+and fell to strolling on again with a proud disdain in his manner,
+when he heard to his surprise some coin rattling fantastically in his
+pocket.
+
+A smile of hope lit his face, and slid from his lips over his
+features, over his brow, and brought a joyful light to his eyes and
+his dark cheeks. It was a spark of happiness like one of the red dots
+that flit over the remains of a burnt scrap of paper; but as it is
+with the black ashes, so it was with his face, it became dull again
+when the stranger quickly drew out his hand and perceived three
+pennies. "Ah, kind gentleman! carita, carita; for the love of St.
+Catherine! only a halfpenny to buy some bread!"
+
+A little chimney sweeper, with puffed cheeks, all black with soot, and
+clad in tatters, held out his hand to beg for the man's last pence.
+
+Two paces from the little Savoyard stood an old pauvre honteux, sickly
+and feeble, in wretched garments of ragged druggeting, who asked in a
+thick, muffled voice:
+
+"Anything you like to give, monsieur; I will pray to God for
+you . . ."
+
+But the young man turned his eyes on him, and the old beggar stopped
+without another word, discerning in that mournful face an abandonment
+of wretchedness more bitter than his own.
+
+"La carita! la carita!"
+
+The stranger threw the coins to the old man and the child, left the
+footway, and turned towards the houses; the harrowing sight of the
+Seine fretted him beyond endurance.
+
+"May God lengthen your days!" cried the two beggars.
+
+As he reached the shop window of a print-seller, this man on the brink
+of death met a young woman alighting from a showy carriage. He looked
+in delight at her prettiness, at the pale face appropriately framed by
+the satin of her fashionable bonnet. Her slender form and graceful
+movements entranced him. Her skirt had been slightly raised as she
+stepped to the pavement, disclosing a daintily fitting white stocking
+over the delicate outlines beneath. The young lady went into the shop,
+purchased albums and sets of lithographs; giving several gold coins
+for them, which glittered and rang upon the counter. The young man,
+seemingly occupied with the prints in the window, fixed upon the fair
+stranger a gaze as eager as man can give, to receive in exchange an
+indifferent glance, such as lights by accident on a passer-by. For him
+it was a leave-taking of love and of woman; but his final and
+strenuous questioning glance was neither understood nor felt by the
+slight-natured woman there; her color did not rise, her eyes did not
+droop. What was it to her? one more piece of adulation, yet another
+sigh only prompted the delightful thought at night, "I looked rather
+well to-day."
+
+The young man quickly turned to another picture, and only left it when
+she returned to her carriage. The horses started off, the final vision
+of luxury and refinement went under an eclipse, just as that life of
+his would soon do also. Slowly and sadly he followed the line of the
+shops, listlessly examining the specimens on view. When the shops came
+to an end, he reviewed the Louvre, the Institute, the towers of Notre
+Dame, of the Palais, the Pont des Arts; all these public monuments
+seemed to have taken their tone from the heavy gray sky.
+
+Fitful gleams of light gave a foreboding look to Paris; like a pretty
+woman, the city has mysterious fits of ugliness or beauty. So the
+outer world seemed to be in a plot to steep this man about to die in a
+painful trance. A prey to the maleficent power which acts relaxingly
+upon us by the fluid circulating through our nerves, his whole frame
+seemed gradually to experience a dissolving process. He felt the
+anguish of these throes passing through him in waves, and the houses
+and the crowd seemed to surge to and fro in a mist before his eyes. He
+tried to escape the agitation wrought in his mind by the revulsions of
+his physical nature, and went toward the shop of a dealer in
+antiquities, thinking to give a treat to his senses, and to spend the
+interval till nightfall in bargaining over curiosities.
+
+He sought, one might say, to regain courage and to find a stimulant,
+like a criminal who doubts his power to reach the scaffold. The
+consciousness of approaching death gave him, for the time being, the
+intrepidity of a duchess with a couple of lovers, so that he entered
+the place with an abstracted look, while his lips displayed a set
+smile like a drunkard's. Had not life, or rather had not death,
+intoxicated him? Dizziness soon overcame him again. Things appeared to
+him in strange colors, or as making slight movements; his irregular
+pulse was no doubt the cause; the blood that sometimes rushed like a
+burning torrent through his veins, and sometimes lay torpid and
+stagnant as tepid water. He merely asked leave to see if the shop
+contained any curiosities which he required.
+
+A plump-faced young shopman with red hair, in an otter-skin cap, left
+an old peasant woman in charge of the shop--a sort of feminine
+Caliban, employed in cleaning a stove made marvelous by Bernard
+Palissy's work. This youth remarked carelessly:
+
+"Look round, monsieur! We have nothing very remarkable here
+downstairs; but if I may trouble you to go up to the first floor, I
+will show you some very fine mummies from Cairo, some inlaid pottery,
+and some carved ebony--genuine Renaissance work, just come in, and of
+perfect beauty."
+
+In the stranger's fearful position this cicerone's prattle and
+shopman's empty talk seemed like the petty vexations by which narrow
+minds destroy a man of genius. But as he must even go through with it,
+he appeared to listen to his guide, answering him by gestures or
+monosyllables; but imperceptibly he arrogated the privilege of saying
+nothing, and gave himself up without hindrance to his closing
+meditations, which were appalling. He had a poet's temperament, his
+mind had entered by chance on a vast field; and he must see perforce
+the dry bones of twenty future worlds.
+
+At a first glance the place presented a confused picture in which
+every achievement, human and divine, was mingled. Crocodiles, monkeys,
+and serpents stuffed with straw grinned at glass from church windows,
+seemed to wish to bite sculptured heads, to chase lacquered work, or
+to scramble up chandeliers. A Sevres vase, bearing Napoleon's portrait
+by Mme. Jacotot, stood beside a sphinx dedicated to Sesostris. The
+beginnings of the world and the events of yesterday were mingled with
+grotesque cheerfulness. A kitchen jack leaned against a pyx, a
+republican sabre on a mediaeval hackbut. Mme. du Barry, with a star
+above her head, naked, and surrounded by a cloud, seemed to look
+longingly out of Latour's pastel at an Indian chibook, while she tried
+to guess the purpose of the spiral curves that wound towards her.
+Instruments of death, poniards, curious pistols, and disguised weapons
+had been flung down pell-mell among the paraphernalia of daily life;
+porcelain tureens, Dresden plates, translucent cups from china, old
+salt-cellars, comfit-boxes belonging to feudal times. A carved ivory
+ship sped full sail on the back of a motionless tortoise.
+
+The Emperor Augustus remained unmoved and imperial with an air-pump
+thrust into one eye. Portraits of French sheriffs and Dutch
+burgomasters, phlegmatic now as when in life, looked down pallid and
+unconcerned on the chaos of past ages below them.
+
+Every land of earth seemed to have contributed some stray fragment of
+its learning, some example of its art. Nothing seemed lacking to this
+philosophical kitchen-midden, from a redskin's calumet, a green and
+golden slipper from the seraglio, a Moorish yataghan, a Tartar idol,
+to the soldier's tobacco pouch, to the priest's ciborium, and the
+plumes that once adorned a throne. This extraordinary combination was
+rendered yet more bizarre by the accidents of lighting, by a multitude
+of confused reflections of various hues, by the sharp contrast of
+blacks and whites. Broken cries seemed to reach the ear, unfinished
+dramas seized upon the imagination, smothered lights caught the eye. A
+thin coating of inevitable dust covered all the multitudinous corners
+and convolutions of these objects of various shapes which gave highly
+picturesque effects.
+
+First of all, the stranger compared the three galleries which
+civilization, cults, divinities, masterpieces, dominions, carousals,
+sanity, and madness had filled to repletion, to a mirror with numerous
+facets, each depicting a world. After this first hazy idea he would
+fain have selected his pleasures; but by dint of using his eyes,
+thinking and musing, a fever began to possess him, caused perhaps by
+the gnawing pain of hunger. The spectacle of so much existence,
+individual or national, to which these pledges bore witness, ended by
+numbing his senses--the purpose with which he entered the shop was
+fulfilled. He had left the real behind, and had climbed gradually up
+to an ideal world; he had attained to the enchanted palace of ecstasy,
+whence the universe appeared to him by fragments and in shapes of
+flame, as once the future blazed out before the eyes of St. John in
+Patmos.
+
+A crowd of sorrowing faces, beneficent and appalling, dark and
+luminous, far and near, gathered in numbers, in myriads, in whole
+generations. Egypt, rigid and mysterious, arose from her sands in the
+form of a mummy swathed in black bandages; then the Pharaohs swallowed
+up nations, that they might build themselves a tomb; and he beheld
+Moses and the Hebrews and the desert, and a solemn antique world.
+Fresh and joyous, a marble statue spoke to him from a twisted column
+of the pleasure-loving myths of Greece and Ionia. Ah! who would not
+have smiled with him to see, against the earthen red background, the
+brown-faced maiden dancing with gleeful reverence before the god
+Priapus, wrought in the fine clay of an Etruscan vase? The Latin queen
+caressed her chimera.
+
+The whims of Imperial Rome were there in life, the bath was disclosed,
+the toilette of a languid Julia, dreaming, waiting for her Tibullus.
+Strong with the might of Arabic spells, the head of Cicero evoked
+memories of a free Rome, and unrolled before him the scrolls of Titus
+Livius. The young man beheld Senatus Populusque Romanus; consuls,
+lictors, togas with purple fringes; the fighting in the Forum, the
+angry people, passed in review before him like the cloudy faces of a
+dream.
+
+Then Christian Rome predominated in his vision. A painter had laid
+heaven open; he beheld the Virgin Mary wrapped in a golden cloud among
+the angels, shining more brightly than the sun, receiving the prayers
+of sufferers, on whom this second Eve Regenerate smiles pityingly. At
+the touch of a mosaic, made of various lavas from Vesuvius and Etna,
+his fancy fled to the hot tawny south of Italy. He was present at
+Borgia's orgies, he roved among the Abruzzi, sought for Italian love
+intrigues, grew ardent over pale faces and dark, almond-shaped eyes.
+He shivered over midnight adventures, cut short by the cool thrust of
+a jealous blade, as he saw a mediaeval dagger with a hilt wrought like
+lace, and spots of rust like splashes of blood upon it.
+
+India and its religions took the shape of the idol with his peaked cap
+of fantastic form, with little bells, clad in silk and gold. Close by,
+a mat, as pretty as the bayadere who once lay upon it, still gave out
+a faint scent of sandal wood. His fancy was stirred by a goggle-eyed
+Chinese monster, with mouth awry and twisted limbs, the invention of a
+people who, grown weary of the monotony of beauty, found an
+indescribable pleasure in an infinite variety of ugliness. A salt-
+cellar from Benvenuto Cellini's workshop carried him back to the
+Renaissance at its height, to the time when there was no restraint on
+art or morals, when torture was the sport of sovereigns; and from
+their councils, churchmen with courtesans' arms about them issued
+decrees of chastity for simple priests.
+
+On a cameo he saw the conquests of Alexander, the massacres of Pizarro
+in a matchbox, and religious wars disorderly, fanatical, and cruel, in
+the shadows of a helmet. Joyous pictures of chivalry were called up by
+a suit of Milanese armor, brightly polished and richly wrought; a
+paladin's eyes seemed to sparkle yet under the visor.
+
+This sea of inventions, fashions, furniture, works of art and fiascos,
+made for him a poem without end. Shapes and colors and projects all
+lived again for him, but his mind received no clear and perfect
+conception. It was the poet's task to complete the sketches of the
+great master, who had scornfully mingled on his palette the hues of
+the numberless vicissitudes of human life. When the world at large at
+last released him, when he had pondered over many lands, many epochs,
+and various empires, the young man came back to the life of the
+individual. He impersonated fresh characters, and turned his mind to
+details, rejecting the life of nations as a burden too overwhelming
+for a single soul.
+
+Yonder was a sleeping child modeled in wax, a relic of Ruysch's
+collection, an enchanting creation which brought back the happiness of
+his own childhood. The cotton garment of a Tahitian maid next
+fascinated him; he beheld the primitive life of nature, the real
+modesty of naked chastity, the joys of an idleness natural to mankind,
+a peaceful fate by a slow river of sweet water under a plantain tree
+that bears its pleasant manna without the toil of man. Then all at
+once he became a corsair, investing himself with the terrible poetry
+that Lara has given to the part: the thought came at the sight of the
+mother-of-pearl tints of a myriad sea-shells, and grew as he saw
+madrepores redolent of the sea-weeds and the storms of the Atlantic.
+
+The sea was forgotten again at a distant view of exquisite miniatures;
+he admired a precious missal in manuscript, adorned with arabesques in
+gold and blue. Thoughts of peaceful life swayed him; he devoted
+himself afresh to study and research, longing for the easy life of the
+monk, devoid alike of cares and pleasures; and from the depths of his
+cell he looked out upon the meadows, woods, and vineyards of his
+convent. Pausing before some work of Teniers, he took for his own the
+helmet of the soldier or the poverty of the artisan; he wished to wear
+a smoke-begrimed cap with these Flemings, to drink their beer and join
+their game at cards, and smiled upon the comely plumpness of a peasant
+woman. He shivered at a snowstorm by Mieris; he seemed to take part in
+Salvator Rosa's battle-piece; he ran his fingers over a tomahawk form
+Illinois, and felt his own hair rise as he touched a Cherokee
+scalping-knife. He marveled over the rebec that he set in the hands of
+some lady of the land, drank in the musical notes of her ballad, and
+in the twilight by the gothic arch above the hearth he told his love
+in a gloom so deep that he could not read his answer in her eyes.
+
+He caught at all delights, at all sorrows; grasped at existence in
+every form; and endowed the phantoms conjured up from that inert and
+plastic material so liberally with his own life and feelings, that the
+sound of his own footsteps reached him as if from another world, or as
+the hum of Paris reaches the towers of Notre Dame.
+
+He ascended the inner staircase which led to the first floor, with its
+votive shields, panoplies, carved shrines, and figures on the wall at
+every step. Haunted by the strangest shapes, by marvelous creations
+belonging to the borderland betwixt life and death, he walked as if
+under the spell of a dream. His own existence became a matter of doubt
+to him; he was neither wholly alive nor dead, like the curious objects
+about him. The light began to fade as he reached the show-rooms, but
+the treasures of gold and silver heaped up there scarcely seemed to
+need illumination from without. The most extravagant whims of
+prodigals, who have run through millions to perish in garrets, had
+left their traces here in this vast bazar of human follies. Here,
+beside a writing desk, made at the cost of 100,000 francs, and sold
+for a hundred pence, lay a lock with a secret worth a king's ransom.
+The human race was revealed in all the grandeur of its wretchedness;
+in all the splendor of its infinite littleness. An ebony table that an
+artist might worship, carved after Jean Goujon's designs, in years of
+toil, had been purchased perhaps at the price of firewood. Precious
+caskets, and things that fairy hands might have fashioned, lay there
+in heaps like rubbish.
+
+"You must have the worth of millions here!" cried the young man as he
+entered the last of an immense suite of rooms, all decorated and gilt
+by eighteenth century artists.
+
+"Thousands of millions, you might say," said the florid shopman; "but
+you have seen nothing as yet. Go up to the third floor, and you shall
+see!"
+
+The stranger followed his guide to a fourth gallery, where one by one
+there passed before his wearied eyes several pictures by Poussin, a
+magnificent statue by Michael Angelo, enchanting landscapes by Claude
+Lorraine, a Gerard Dow (like a stray page from Sterne), Rembrandts,
+Murillos, and pictures by Velasquez, as dark and full of color as a
+poem of Byron's; then came classic bas-reliefs, finely-cut agates,
+wonderful cameos! Works of art upon works of art, till the craftsman's
+skill palled on the mind, masterpiece after masterpiece till art
+itself became hateful at last and enthusiasm died. He came upon a
+Madonna by Raphael, but he was tired of Raphael; a figure by Correggio
+never received the glance it demanded of him. A priceless vase of
+antique porphyry carved round about with pictures of the most
+grotesquely wanton of Roman divinities, the pride of some Corinna,
+scarcely drew a smile from him.
+
+The ruins of fifteen hundred vanished years oppressed him; he sickened
+under all this human thought; felt bored by all this luxury and art.
+He struggled in vain against the constantly renewed fantastic shapes
+that sprang up from under his feet, like children of some sportive
+demon.
+
+Are not fearful poisons set up in the soul by a swift concentration of
+all her energies, her enjoyments, or ideas; as modern chemistry, in
+its caprice, repeats the action of creation by some gas or other? Do
+not many men perish under the shock of the sudden expansion of some
+moral acid within them?
+
+"What is there in that box?" he inquired, as he reached a large closet
+--final triumph of human skill, originality, wealth, and splendor, in
+which there hung a large, square mahogany coffer, suspended from a
+nail by a silver chain.
+
+"Ah, monsieur keeps the key of it," said the stout assistant
+mysteriously. "If you wish to see the portrait, I will gladly venture
+to tell him."
+
+"Venture!" said the young man; "then is your master a prince?"
+
+"I don't know what he is," the other answered. Equally astonished,
+each looked for a moment at the other. Then construing the stranger's
+silence as an order, the apprentice left him alone in the closet.
+
+Have you never launched into the immensity of time and space as you
+read the geological writings of Cuvier? Carried by his fancy, have you
+hung as if suspended by a magician's wand over the illimitable abyss
+of the past? When the fossil bones of animals belonging to
+civilizations before the Flood are turned up in bed after bed and
+layer upon layer of the quarries of Montmartre or among the schists of
+the Ural range, the soul receives with dismay a glimpse of millions of
+peoples forgotten by feeble human memory and unrecognized by permanent
+divine tradition, peoples whose ashes cover our globe with two feet of
+earth that yields bread to us and flowers.
+
+Is not Cuvier the great poet of our era? Byron has given admirable
+expression to certain moral conflicts, but our immortal naturalist has
+reconstructed past worlds from a few bleached bones; has rebuilt
+cities, like Cadmus, with monsters' teeth; has animated forests with
+all the secrets of zoology gleaned from a piece of coal; has
+discovered a giant population from the footprints of a mammoth. These
+forms stand erect, grow large, and fill regions commensurate with
+their giant size. He treats figures like a poet; a naught set beside a
+seven by him produces awe.
+
+He can call up nothingness before you without the phrases of a
+charlatan. He searches a lump of gypsum, finds an impression in it,
+says to you, "Behold!" All at once marble takes an animal shape, the
+dead come to life, the history of the world is laid open before you.
+After countless dynasties of giant creatures, races of fish and clans
+of mollusks, the race of man appears at last as the degenerate copy of
+a splendid model, which the Creator has perchance destroyed.
+Emboldened by his gaze into the past, this petty race, children of
+yesterday, can overstep chaos, can raise a psalm without end, and
+outline for themselves the story of the Universe in an Apocalypse that
+reveals the past. After the tremendous resurrection that took place at
+the voice of this man, the little drop in the nameless Infinite,
+common to all spheres, that is ours to use, and that we call Time,
+seems to us a pitiable moment of life. We ask ourselves the purpose of
+our triumphs, our hatreds, our loves, overwhelmed as we are by the
+destruction of so many past universes, and whether it is worth while
+to accept the pain of life in order that hereafter we may become an
+intangible speck. Then we remain as if dead, completely torn away from
+the present till the valet de chambre comes in and says, "Madame la
+comtesse answers that she is expecting monsieur."
+
+All the wonders which had brought the known world before the young
+man's mind wrought in his soul much the same feeling of dejection that
+besets the philosopher investigating unknown creatures. He longed more
+than ever for death as he flung himself back in a curule chair and let
+his eyes wander across the illusions composing a panorama of the past.
+The pictures seemed to light up, the Virgin's heads smiled on him, the
+statues seemed alive. Everything danced and swayed around him, with a
+motion due to the gloom and the tormenting fever that racked his
+brain; each monstrosity grimaced at him, while the portraits on the
+canvas closed their eyes for a little relief. Every shape seemed to
+tremble and start, and to leave its place gravely or flippantly,
+gracefully or awkwardly, according to its fashion, character, and
+surroundings.
+
+A mysterious Sabbath began, rivaling the fantastic scenes witnessed by
+Faust upon the Brocken. But these optical illusions, produced by
+weariness, overstrained eyesight, or the accidents of twilight, could
+not alarm the stranger. The terrors of life had no power over a soul
+grown familiar with the terrors of death. He even gave himself up,
+half amused by its bizarre eccentricities, to the influence of this
+moral galvanism; its phenomena, closely connected with his last
+thoughts, assured him that he was still alive. The silence about him
+was so deep that he embarked once more in dreams that grew gradually
+darker and darker as if by magic, as the light slowly faded. A last
+struggling ray from the sun lit up rosy answering lights. He raised
+his head and saw a skeleton dimly visible, with its skull bent
+doubtfully to one side, as if to say, "The dead will none of thee as
+yet."
+
+He passed his hand over his forehead to shake off the drowsiness, and
+felt a cold breath of air as an unknown furry something swept past his
+cheeks. He shivered. A muffled clatter of the windows followed; it was
+a bat, he fancied, that had given him this chilly sepulchral caress.
+He could yet dimly see for a moment the shapes that surrounded him, by
+the vague light in the west; then all these inanimate objects were
+blotted out in uniform darkness. Night and the hour of death had
+suddenly come. Thenceforward, for a while, he lost consciousness of
+the things about him; he was either buried in deep meditation or sleep
+overcame him, brought on by weariness or by the stress of those many
+thoughts that lacerated his heart.
+
+Suddenly he thought that an awful voice called him by name; it was
+like some feverish nightmare, when at a step the dreamer falls
+headlong over into an abyss, and he trembled. He closed his eyes,
+dazzled by bright rays from a red circle of light that shone out from
+the shadows. In the midst of the circle stood a little old man who
+turned the light of the lamp upon him, yet he had not heard him enter,
+nor move, nor speak. There was something magical about the apparition.
+The boldest man, awakened in such a sort, would have felt alarmed at
+the sight of this figure, which might have issued from some
+sarcophagus hard by.
+
+A curiously youthful look in the unmoving eyes of the spectre forbade
+the idea of anything supernatural; but for all that, in the brief
+space between his dreaming and waking life, the young man's judgment
+remained philosophically suspended, as Descartes advises. He was, in
+spite of himself, under the influence of an unaccountable
+hallucination, a mystery that our pride rejects, and that our
+imperfect science vainly tries to resolve.
+
+Imagine a short old man, thin and spare, in a long black velvet gown
+girded round him by a thick silk cord. His long white hair escaped on
+either side of his face from under a black velvet cap which closely
+fitted his head and made a formal setting for his countenance. His
+gown enveloped his body like a winding sheet, so that all that was
+left visible was a narrow bleached human face. But for the wasted arm,
+thin as a draper's wand, which held aloft the lamp that cast all its
+light upon him, the face would have seemed to hang in mid air. A gray
+pointed beard concealed the chin of this fantastical appearance, and
+gave him the look of one of those Jewish types which serve artists as
+models for Moses. His lips were so thin and colorless that it needed a
+close inspection to find the lines of his mouth at all in the pallid
+face. His great wrinkled brow and hollow bloodless cheeks, the
+inexorably stern expression of his small green eyes that no longer
+possessed eyebrows or lashes, might have convinced the stranger that
+Gerard Dow's "Money Changer" had come down from his frame. The
+craftiness of an inquisitor, revealed in those curving wrinkles and
+creases that wound about his temples, indicated a profound knowledge
+of life. There was no deceiving this man, who seemed to possess a
+power of detecting the secrets of the wariest heart.
+
+The wisdom and the moral codes of every people seemed gathered up in
+his passive face, just as all the productions of the globe had been
+heaped up in his dusty showrooms. He seemed to possess the tranquil
+luminous vision of some god before whom all things are open, or the
+haughty power of a man who knows all things.
+
+With two strokes of the brush a painter could have so altered the
+expression of this face, that what had been a serene representation of
+the Eternal Father should change to the sneering mask of a
+Mephistopheles; for though sovereign power was revealed by the
+forehead, mocking folds lurked about the mouth. He must have
+sacrificed all the joys of earth, as he had crushed all human sorrows
+beneath his potent will. The man at the brink of death shivered at the
+thought of the life led by this spirit, so solitary and remote from
+our world; joyless, since he had no one illusion left; painless,
+because pleasure had ceased to exist for him. There he stood,
+motionless and serene as a star in a bright mist. His lamp lit up the
+obscure closet, just as his green eyes, with their quiet malevolence,
+seemed to shed a light on the moral world.
+
+This was the strange spectacle that startled the young man's returning
+sight, as he shook off the dreamy fancies and thoughts of death that
+had lulled him. An instant of dismay, a momentary return to belief in
+nursery tales, may be forgiven him, seeing that his senses were
+obscured. Much thought had wearied his mind, and his nerves were
+exhausted with the strain of the tremendous drama within him, and by
+the scenes that had heaped on him all the horrid pleasures that a
+piece of opium can produce.
+
+But this apparition had appeared in Paris, on the Quai Voltaire, and
+in the nineteenth century; the time and place made sorcery impossible.
+The idol of French scepticism had died in the house just opposite, the
+disciple of Gay-Lussac and Arago, who had held the charlatanism of
+intellect in contempt. And yet the stranger submitted himself to the
+influence of an imaginative spell, as all of us do at times, when we
+wish to escape from an inevitable certainty, or to tempt the power of
+Providence. So some mysterious apprehension of a strange force made
+him tremble before the old man with the lamp. All of us have been
+stirred in the same way by the sight of Napoleon, or of some other
+great man, made illustrious by his genius or by fame.
+
+"You wish to see Raphael's portrait of Jesus Christ, monsieur?" the
+old man asked politely. There was something metallic in the clear,
+sharp ring of his voice.
+
+He set the lamp upon a broken column, so that all its light might fall
+on the brown case.
+
+At the sacred names of Christ and Raphael the young man showed some
+curiosity. The merchant, who no doubt looked for this, pressed a
+spring, and suddenly the mahogany panel slid noiselessly back in its
+groove, and discovered the canvas to the stranger's admiring gaze. At
+sight of this deathless creation, he forgot his fancies in the show-
+rooms and the freaks of his dreams, and became himself again. The old
+man became a being of flesh and blood, very much alive, with nothing
+chimerical about him, and took up his existence at once upon solid
+earth.
+
+The sympathy and love, and the gentle serenity in the divine face,
+exerted an instant sway over the younger spectator. Some influence
+falling from heaven bade cease the burning torment that consumed the
+marrow of his bones. The head of the Saviour of mankind seemed to
+issue from among the shadows represented by a dark background; an
+aureole of light shone out brightly from his hair; an impassioned
+belief seemed to glow through him, and to thrill every feature. The
+word of life had just been uttered by those red lips, the sacred
+sounds seemed to linger still in the air; the spectator besought the
+silence for those captivating parables, hearkened for them in the
+future, and had to turn to the teachings of the past. The untroubled
+peace of the divine eyes, the comfort of sorrowing souls, seemed an
+interpretation of the Evangel. The sweet triumphant smile revealed the
+secret of the Catholic religion, which sums up all things in the
+precept, "Love one another." This picture breathed the spirit of
+prayer, enjoined forgiveness, overcame self, caused sleeping powers of
+good to waken. For this work of Raphael's had the imperious charm of
+music; you were brought under the spell of memories of the past; his
+triumph was so absolute that the artist was forgotten. The witchery of
+the lamplight heightened the wonder; the head seemed at times to
+flicker in the distance, enveloped in cloud.
+
+"I covered the surface of that picture with gold pieces," said the
+merchant carelessly.
+
+"And now for death!" cried the young man, awakened from his musings.
+His last thought had recalled his fate to him, as it led him
+imperceptibly back from the forlorn hopes to which he had clung.
+
+"Ah, ha! then my suspicions were well founded!" said the other, and
+his hands held the young man's wrists in a grip like that of a vice.
+
+The younger man smiled wearily at his mistake, and said gently:
+
+"You, sir, have nothing to fear; it is not your life, but my own that
+is in question. . . . But why should I hide a harmless fraud?" he went
+on, after a look at the anxious old man. "I came to see your treasures
+to while away the time till night should come and I could drown myself
+decently. Who would grudge this last pleasure to a poet and a man of
+science?"
+
+While he spoke, the jealous merchant watched the haggard face of his
+pretended customer with keen eyes. Perhaps the mournful tones of his
+voice reassured him, or he also read the dark signs of fate in the
+faded features that had made the gamblers shudder; he released his
+hands, but, with a touch of caution, due to the experience of some
+hundred years at least, he stretched his arm out to a sideboard as if
+to steady himself, took up a little dagger, and said:
+
+"Have you been a supernumerary clerk of the Treasury for three years
+without receiving any perquisites?"
+
+The stranger could scarcely suppress a smile as he shook his head.
+
+"Perhaps your father has expressed his regret for your birth a little
+too sharply? Or have you disgraced yourself?"
+
+"If I meant to be disgraced, I should live."
+
+"You have been hissed perhaps at the Funambules? Or you have had to
+compose couplets to pay for your mistress' funeral? Do you want to be
+cured of the gold fever? Or to be quit of the spleen? For what blunder
+is your life forfeit?"
+
+"You must not look among the common motives that impel suicides for
+the reason of my death. To spare myself the task of disclosing my
+unheard-of sufferings, for which language has no name, I will tell you
+this--that I am in the deepest, most humiliating, and most cruel
+trouble, and," he went on in proud tones that harmonized ill with the
+words just uttered, "I have no wish to beg for either help or
+sympathy."
+
+"Eh! eh!"
+
+The two syllables which the old man pronounced resembled the sound of
+a rattle. Then he went on thus:
+
+"Without compelling you to entreat me, without making you blush for
+it, and without giving you so much as a French centime, a para from
+the Levant, a German heller, a Russian kopeck, a Scottish farthing, a
+single obolus or sestertius from the ancient world, or one piastre
+from the new, without offering you anything whatever in gold, silver,
+or copper, notes or drafts, I will make you richer, more powerful, and
+of more consequence than a constitutional king."
+
+The young man thought that the older was in his dotage, and waited in
+bewilderment without venturing to reply.
+
+"Turn round," said the merchant, suddenly catching up the lamp in
+order to light up the opposite wall; "look at that leathern skin," he
+went on.
+
+The young man rose abruptly, and showed some surprise at the sight of
+a piece of shagreen which hung on the wall behind his chair. It was
+only about the size of a fox's skin, but it seemed to fill the deep
+shadows of the place with such brilliant rays that it looked like a
+small comet, an appearance at first sight inexplicable. The young
+sceptic went up to this so-called talisman, which was to rescue him
+from all points of view, and he soon found out the cause of its
+singular brilliancy. The dark grain of the leather had been so
+carefully burnished and polished, the striped markings of the graining
+were so sharp and clear, that every particle of the surface of the bit
+of Oriental leather was in itself a focus which concentrated the
+light, and reflected it vividly.
+
+He accounted for this phenomenon categorically to the old man, who
+only smiled meaningly by way of answer. His superior smile led the
+young scientific man to fancy that he himself had been deceived by
+some imposture. He had no wish to carry one more puzzle to his grave,
+and hastily turned the skin over, like some child eager to find out
+the mysteries of a new toy.
+
+"Ah," he cried, "here is the mark of the seal which they call in the
+East the Signet of Solomon."
+
+"So you know that, then?" asked the merchant. His peculiar method of
+laughter, two or three quick breathings through the nostrils, said
+more than any words however eloquent.
+
+"Is there anybody in the world simple enough to believe in that idle
+fancy?" said the young man, nettled by the spitefulness of the silent
+chuckle. "Don't you know," he continued, "that the superstitions of
+the East have perpetuated the mystical form and the counterfeit
+characters of the symbol, which represents a mythical dominion? I have
+no more laid myself open to a charge of credulity in this case, than
+if I had mentioned sphinxes or griffins, whose existence mythology in
+a manner admits."
+
+"As you are an Orientalist," replied the other, "perhaps you can read
+that sentence."
+
+He held the lamp close to the talisman, which the young man held
+towards him, and pointed out some characters inlaid in the surface of
+the wonderful skin, as if they had grown on the animal to which it
+once belonged.
+
+"I must admit," said the stranger, "that I have no idea how the
+letters could be engraved so deeply on the skin of a wild ass." And he
+turned quickly to the tables strewn with curiosities and seemed to
+look for something.
+
+"What is it that you want?" asked the old man.
+
+"Something that will cut the leather, so that I can see whether the
+letters are printed or inlaid."
+
+The old man held out his stiletto. The stranger took it and tried to
+cut the skin above the lettering; but when he had removed a thin
+shaving of leather from them, the characters still appeared below, so
+clear and so exactly like the surface impression, that for a moment he
+was not sure that he had cut anything away after all.
+
+"The craftsmen of the Levant have secrets known only to themselves,"
+he said, half in vexation, as he eyed the characters of this Oriental
+sentence.
+
+"Yes," said the old man, "it is better to attribute it to man's agency
+than to God's."
+
+The mysterious words were thus arranged:
+
+[Drawing of apparently Sanskrit characters omitted]
+
+Or, as it runs in English:
+
+POSSESSING ME THOU SHALT POSSESS ALL THINGS.
+BUT THY LIFE IS MINE, FOR GOD HAS SO WILLED IT.
+WISH, AND THY WISHES SHALL BE FULFILLED;
+BUT MEASURE THY DESIRES, ACCORDING
+TO THE LIFE THAT IS IN THEE.
+THIS IS THY LIFE,
+WITH EACH WISH I MUST SHRINK
+EVEN AS THY OWN DAYS.
+WILT THOU HAVE ME?  TAKE ME.
+GOD WILL HEARKEN UNTO THEE.
+SO BE IT!
+
+"So you read Sanskrit fluently," said the old man. "You have been in
+Persia perhaps, or in Bengal?"
+
+"No, sir," said the stranger, as he felt the emblematical skin
+curiously. It was almost as rigid as a sheet of metal.
+
+The old merchant set the lamp back again upon the column, giving the
+other a look as he did so. "He has given up the notion of dying
+already," the glance said with phlegmatic irony.
+
+"Is it a jest, or is it an enigma?" asked the younger man.
+
+The other shook his head and said soberly:
+
+"I don't know how to answer you. I have offered this talisman with its
+terrible powers to men with more energy in them than you seem to me to
+have; but though they laughed at the questionable power it might exert
+over their futures, not one of them was ready to venture to conclude
+the fateful contract proposed by an unknown force. I am of their
+opinion, I have doubted and refrained, and----"
+
+"Have you never even tried its power?" interrupted the young stranger.
+
+"Tried it!" exclaimed the old man. "Suppose that you were on the
+column in the Place Vendome, would you try flinging yourself into
+space? Is it possible to stay the course of life? Has a man ever been
+known to die by halves? Before you came here, you had made up your
+mind to kill yourself, but all at once a mystery fills your mind, and
+you think no more about death. You child! Does not any one day of your
+life afford mysteries more absorbing? Listen to me. I saw the
+licentious days of Regency. I was like you, then, in poverty; I have
+begged my bread; but for all that, I am now a centenarian with a
+couple of years to spare, and a millionaire to boot. Misery was the
+making of me, ignorance has made me learned. I will tell you in a few
+words the great secret of human life. By two instinctive processes man
+exhausts the springs of life within him. Two verbs cover all the forms
+which these two causes of death may take--To Will and To have your
+Will. Between these two limits of human activity the wise have
+discovered an intermediate formula, to which I owe my good fortune and
+long life. To Will consumes us, and To have our Will destroys us, but
+To Know steeps our feeble organisms in perpetual calm. In me Thought
+has destroyed Will, so that Power is relegated to the ordinary
+functions of my economy. In a word, it is not in the heart which can
+be broken, or in the senses that become deadened, but it is in the
+brain that cannot waste away and survives everything else, that I have
+set my life. Moderation has kept mind and body unruffled. Yet, I have
+seen the whole world. I have learned all languages, lived after every
+manner. I have lent a Chinaman money, taking his father's corpse as a
+pledge, slept in an Arab's tent on the security of his bare word,
+signed contracts in every capital of Europe, and left my gold without
+hesitation in savage wigwams. I have attained everything, because I
+have known how to despise all things.
+
+"My one ambition has been to see. Is not Sight in a manner Insight?
+And to have knowledge or insight, is not that to have instinctive
+possession? To be able to discover the very substance of fact and to
+unite its essence to our essence? Of material possession what abides
+with you but an idea? Think, then, how glorious must be the life of a
+man who can stamp all realities upon his thought, place the springs of
+happiness within himself, and draw thence uncounted pleasures in idea,
+unspoiled by earthly stains. Thought is a key to all treasures; the
+miser's gains are ours without his cares. Thus I have soared above
+this world, where my enjoyments have been intellectual joys. I have
+reveled in the contemplation of seas, peoples, forests, and mountains!
+I have seen all things, calmly, and without weariness; I have set my
+desires on nothing; I have waited in expectation of everything. I have
+walked to and fro in the world as in a garden round about my own
+dwelling. Troubles, loves, ambitions, losses, and sorrows, as men call
+them, are for me ideas, which I transmute into waking dreams; I
+express and transpose instead of feeling them; instead of permitting
+them to prey upon my life, I dramatize and expand them; I divert
+myself with them as if they were romances which I could read by the
+power of vision within me. As I have never overtaxed my constitution,
+I still enjoy robust health; and as my mind is endowed with all the
+force that I have not wasted, this head of mine is even better
+furnished than my galleries. The true millions lie here," he said,
+striking his forehead. "I spend delicious days in communings with the
+past; I summon before me whole countries, places, extents of sea, the
+fair faces of history. In my imaginary seraglio I have all the women
+that I have never possessed. Your wars and revolutions come up before
+me for judgment. What is a feverish fugitive admiration for some more
+or less brightly colored piece of flesh and blood; some more or less
+rounded human form; what are all the disasters that wait on your
+erratic whims, compared with the magnificent power of conjuring up the
+whole world within your soul, compared with the immeasurable joys of
+movement, unstrangled by the cords of time, unclogged by the fetters
+of space; the joys of beholding all things, of comprehending all
+things, of leaning over the parapet of the world to question the other
+spheres, to hearken to the voice of God? There," he burst out,
+vehemently, "there are To Will and To have your Will, both together,"
+he pointed to the bit of shagreen; "there are your social ideas, your
+immoderate desires, your excesses, your pleasures that end in death,
+your sorrows that quicken the pace of life, for pain is perhaps but a
+violent pleasure. Who could determine the point where pleasure becomes
+pain, where pain is still a pleasure? Is not the utmost brightness of
+the ideal world soothing to us, while the lightest shadows of the
+physical world annoy? Is not knowledge the secret of wisdom? And what
+is folly but a riotous expenditure of Will or Power?"
+
+"Very good then, a life of riotous excess for me!" said the stranger,
+pouncing upon the piece of shagreen.
+
+"Young man, beware!" cried the other with incredible vehemence.
+
+"I had resolved my existence into thought and study," the stranger
+replied; "and yet they have not even supported me. I am not to be
+gulled by a sermon worthy of Swedenborg, nor by your Oriental amulet,
+nor yet by your charitable endeavors to keep me in a world wherein
+existence is no longer possible for me. . . . Let me see now," he
+added, clutching the talisman convulsively, as he looked at the old
+man, "I wish for a royal banquet, a carouse worthy of this century,
+which, it is said, has brought everything to perfection! Let me have
+young boon companions, witty, unwarped by prejudice, merry to the
+verge of madness! Let one wine succeed another, each more biting and
+perfumed than the last, and strong enough to bring about three days of
+delirium! Passionate women's forms should grace that night! I would be
+borne away to unknown regions beyond the confines of this world, by
+the car and four-winged steed of a frantic and uproarious orgy. Let us
+ascend to the skies, or plunge ourselves in the mire. I do not know if
+one soars or sinks at such moments, and I do not care! Next, I bid
+this enigmatical power to concentrate all delights for me in one
+single joy. Yes, I must comprehend every pleasure of earth and heaven
+in the final embrace that is to kill me. Therefore, after the wine, I
+wish to hold high festival to Priapus, with songs that might rouse the
+dead, and kisses without end; the sound of them should pass like the
+crackling of flame through Paris, should revive the heat of youth and
+passion in husband and wife, even in hearts of seventy years."
+
+A laugh burst from the little old man. It rang in the young man's ears
+like an echo from hell; and tyrannously cut him short. He said no
+more.
+
+"Do you imagine that my floors are going to open suddenly, so that
+luxuriously-appointed tables may rise through them, and guests from
+another world? No, no, young madcap. You have entered into the compact
+now, and there is an end of it. Henceforward, your wishes will be
+accurately fulfilled, but at the expense of your life. The compass of
+your days, visible in that skin, will contract according to the
+strength and number of your desires, from the least to the most
+extravagant. The Brahmin from whom I had this skin once explained to
+me that it would bring about a mysterious connection between the
+fortunes and wishes of its possessor. Your first wish is a vulgar one,
+which I could fulfil, but I leave that to the issues of your new
+existence. After all, you were wishing to die; very well, your suicide
+is only put off for a time."
+
+The stranger was surprised and irritated that this peculiar old man
+persisted in not taking him seriously. A half philanthropic intention
+peeped so clearly forth from his last jesting observation, that he
+exclaimed:
+
+"I shall soon see, sir, if any change comes over my fortunes in the
+time it will take to cross the width of the quay. But I should like us
+to be quits for such a momentous service; that is, if you are not
+laughing at an unlucky wretch, so I wish that you may fall in love
+with an opera-dancer. You would understand the pleasures of
+intemperance then, and might perhaps grow lavish of the wealth that
+you have husbanded so philosophically."
+
+He went out without heeding the old man's heavy sigh, went back
+through the galleries and down the staircase, followed by the stout
+assistant who vainly tried to light his passage; he fled with the
+haste of a robber caught in the act. Blinded by a kind of delirium, he
+did not even notice the unexpected flexibility of the piece of
+shagreen, which coiled itself up, pliant as a glove in his excited
+fingers, till it would go into the pocket of his coat, where he
+mechanically thrust it. As he rushed out of the door into the street,
+he ran up against three young men who were passing arm-in-arm.
+
+"Brute!"
+
+"Idiot!"
+
+Such were the gratifying expressions exchanged between them.
+
+"Why, it is Raphael!"
+
+"Good! we were looking for you."
+
+"What! it is you, then?"
+
+These three friendly exclamations quickly followed the insults, as the
+light of a street lamp, flickering in the wind, fell upon the
+astonished faces of the group.
+
+"My dear fellow, you must come with us!" said the young man that
+Raphael had all but knocked down.
+
+"What is all this about?"
+
+"Come along, and I will tell you the history of it as we go."
+
+By fair means or foul, Raphael must go along with his friends towards
+the Pont des Arts; they surrounded him, and linked him by the arm
+among their merry band.
+
+"We have been after you for about a week," the speaker went on. "At
+your respectable hotel de Saint Quentin, where, by the way, the sign
+with the alternate black and red letters cannot be removed, and hangs
+out just as it did in the time of Jean Jacques, that Leonarda of yours
+told us that you were off into the country. For all that, we certainly
+did not look like duns, creditors, sheriff's officers, or the like.
+But no matter! Rastignac had seen you the evening before at the
+Bouffons; we took courage again, and made it a point of honor to find
+out whether you were roosting in a tree in the Champs-Elysees, or in
+one of those philanthropic abodes where the beggars sleep on a
+twopenny rope, or if, more luckily, you were bivouacking in some
+boudoir or other. We could not find you anywhere. Your name was not in
+the jailers' registers at the St. Pelagie nor at La Force! Government
+departments, cafes, libraries, lists of prefects' names, newspaper
+offices, restaurants, greenrooms--to cut it short, every lurking place
+in Paris, good or bad, has been explored in the most expert manner. We
+bewailed the loss of a man endowed with such genius, that one might
+look to find him at Court or in the common jails. We talked of
+canonizing you as a hero of July, and, upon my word, we regretted
+you!"
+
+As he spoke, the friends were crossing the Pont des Arts. Without
+listening to them, Raphael looked at the Seine, at the clamoring waves
+that reflected the lights of Paris. Above that river, in which but now
+he had thought to fling himself, the old man's prediction had been
+fulfilled, the hour of his death had been already put back by fate.
+
+"We really regretted you," said his friend, still pursuing his theme.
+"It was a question of a plan in which we included you as a superior
+person, that is to say, somebody who can put himself above other
+people. The constitutional thimble-rig is carried on to-day, dear boy,
+more seriously than ever. The infamous monarchy, displaced by the
+heroism of the people, was a sort of drab, you could laugh and revel
+with her; but La Patrie is a shrewish and virtuous wife, and willy-
+nilly you must take her prescribed endearments. Then besides, as you
+know, authority passed over from the Tuileries to the journalists, at
+the time when the Budget changed its quarters and went from the
+Faubourg Saint-Germain to the Chaussee de Antin. But this you may not
+know perhaps. The Government, that is, the aristocracy of lawyers and
+bankers who represent the country to-day, just as the priests used to
+do in the time of the monarchy, has felt the necessity of mystifying
+the worthy people of France with a few new words and old ideas, like
+philosophers of every school, and all strong intellects ever since
+time began. So now Royalist-national ideas must be inculcated, by
+proving to us that it is far better to pay twelve million francs,
+thirty-three centimes to La Patrie, represented by Messieurs Such-and-
+Such, than to pay eleven hundred million francs, nine centimes to a
+king who used to say _I_ instead of WE. In a word, a journal, with two
+or three hundred thousand francs, good, at the back of it, has just
+been started, with a view to making an opposition paper to content the
+discontented, without prejudice to the national government of the
+citizen-king. We scoff at liberty as at despotism now, and at religion
+or incredulity quite impartially. And since, for us, 'our country'
+means a capital where ideas circulate and are sold at so much a line,
+a succulent dinner every day, and the play at frequent intervals,
+where profligate women swarm, where suppers last on into the next day,
+and light loves are hired by the hour like cabs; and since Paris will
+always be the most adorable of all countries, the country of joy,
+liberty, wit, pretty women, mauvais sujets, and good wine; where the
+truncheon of authority never makes itself disagreeably felt, because
+one is so close to those who wield it,--we, therefore, sectaries of
+the god Mephistopheles, have engaged to whitewash the public mind, to
+give fresh costumes to the actors, to put a new plank or two in the
+government booth, to doctor doctrinaires, and warm up old Republicans,
+to touch up the Bonapartists a bit, and revictual the Centre; provided
+that we are allowed to laugh in petto at both kings and peoples, to
+think one thing in the morning and another at night, and to lead a
+merry life a la Panurge, or to recline upon soft cushions, more
+orientali.
+
+"The sceptre of this burlesque and macaronic kingdom," he went on, "we
+have reserved for you; so we are taking you straightway to a dinner
+given by the founder of the said newspaper, a retired banker, who, at
+a loss to know what to do with his money, is going to buy some brains
+with it. You will be welcomed as a brother, we shall hail you as king
+of these free lances who will undertake anything; whose perspicacity
+discovers the intentions of Austria, England, or Russia before either
+Russia, Austria or England have formed any. Yes, we will invest you
+with the sovereignty of those puissant intellects which give to the
+world its Mirabeaus, Talleyrands, Pitts, and Metternichs--all the
+clever Crispins who treat the destinies of a kingdom as gamblers'
+stakes, just as ordinary men play dominoes for Kirschenwasser. We have
+given you out to be the most undaunted champion who ever wrestled in a
+drinking-bout at close quarters with the monster called Carousal, whom
+all bold spirits wish to try a fall with; we have gone so far as to
+say that you have never yet been worsted. I hope you will not make
+liars of us. Taillefer, our amphitryon, has undertaken to surpass the
+circumscribed saturnalias of the petty modern Lucullus. He is rich
+enough to infuse pomp into trifles, and style and charm into
+dissipation . . . Are you listening, Raphael?" asked the orator,
+interrupting himself.
+
+"Yes," answered the young man, less surprised by the accomplishment of
+his wishes than by the natural manner in which the events had come
+about.
+
+He could not bring himself to believe in magic, but he marveled at the
+accidents of human fate.
+
+"Yes, you say, just as if you were thinking of your grandfather's
+demise," remarked one of his neighbors.
+
+"Ah!" cried Raphael, "I was thinking, my friends, that we are in a
+fair way to become very great scoundrels," and there was an
+ingenuousness in his tones that set these writers, the hope of young
+France, in a roar. "So far our blasphemies have been uttered over our
+cups; we have passed our judgments on life while drunk, and taken men
+and affairs in an after-dinner frame of mind. We were innocent of
+action; we were bold in words. But now we are to be branded with the
+hot iron of politics; we are going to enter the convict's prison and
+to drop our illusions. Although one has no belief left, except in the
+devil, one may regret the paradise of one's youth and the age of
+innocence, when we devoutly offered the tip of our tongue to some good
+priest for the consecrated wafer of the sacrament. Ah, my good
+friends, our first peccadilloes gave us so much pleasure because the
+consequent remorse set them off and lent a keen relish to them; but
+nowadays----"
+
+"Oh! now," said the first speaker, "there is still left----"
+
+"What?" asked another.
+
+"Crime----"
+
+"There is a word as high as the gallows and deeper than the Seine,"
+said Raphael.
+
+"Oh, you don't understand me; I mean political crime. Since this
+morning, a conspirator's life is the only one I covet. I don't know
+that the fancy will last over to-morrow, but to-night at least my
+gorge rises at the anaemic life of our civilization and its railroad
+evenness. I am seized with a passion for the miseries of retreat from
+Moscow, for the excitements of the Red Corsair, or for a smuggler's
+life. I should like to go to Botany Bay, as we have no Chartreaux left
+us here in France; it is a sort of infirmary reserved for little Lord
+Byrons who, having crumpled up their lives like a serviette after
+dinner, have nothing left to do but to set their country ablaze, blow
+their own brains out, plot for a republic or clamor for a war----"
+
+"Emile," Raphael's neighbor called eagerly to the speaker, "on my
+honor, but for the revolution of July I would have taken orders, and
+gone off down into the country somewhere to lead the life of an
+animal, and----"
+
+"And you would have read your breviary through every day."
+
+"Yes."
+
+"You are a coxcomb!"
+
+"Why, we read the newspapers as it is!"
+
+"Not bad that, for a journalist! But hold your tongue, we are going
+through a crowd of subscribers. Journalism, look you, is the religion
+of modern society, and has even gone a little further."
+
+"What do you mean?"
+
+"Its pontiffs are not obliged to believe in it any more than the
+people are."
+
+Chatting thus, like good fellows who have known their De Viris
+illustribus for years past, they reached a mansion in the Rue Joubert.
+
+Emile was a journalist who had acquired more reputation by dint of
+doing nothing than others had derived from their achievements. A bold,
+caustic, and powerful critic, he possessed all the qualities that his
+defects permitted. An outspoken giber, he made numberless epigrams on
+a friend to his face; but would defend him, if absent, with courage
+and loyalty. He laughed at everything, even at his own career. Always
+impecunious, he yet lived, like all men of his calibre, plunged in
+unspeakable indolence. He would fling some word containing volumes in
+the teeth of folk who could not put a syllable of sense into their
+books. He lavished promises that he never fulfilled; he made a pillow
+of his luck and reputation, on which he slept, and ran the risk of
+waking up to old age in a workhouse. A steadfast friend to the gallows
+foot, a cynical swaggerer with a child's simplicity, a worker only
+from necessity or caprice.
+
+"In the language of Maitre Alcofribas, we are about to make a famous
+troncon de chiere lie," he remarked to Raphael as he pointed out the
+flower-stands that made a perfumed forest of the staircase.
+
+"I like a vestibule to be well warmed and richly carpeted," Raphael
+said. "Luxury in the peristyle is not common in France. I feel as if
+life had begun anew here."
+
+"And up above we are going to drink and make merry once more, my dear
+Raphael. Ah! yes," he went on, "and I hope we are going to come off
+conquerors, too, and walk over everybody else's head."
+
+As he spoke, he jestingly pointed to the guests. They were entering a
+large room which shone with gilding and lights, and there all the
+younger men of note in Paris welcomed them. Here was one who had just
+revealed fresh powers, his first picture vied with the glories of
+Imperial art. There, another, who but yesterday had launched forth a
+volume, an acrid book filled with a sort of literary arrogance, which
+opened up new ways to the modern school. A sculptor, not far away,
+with vigorous power visible in his rough features, was chatting with
+one of those unenthusiastic scoffers who can either see excellence
+anywhere or nowhere, as it happens. Here, the cleverest of our
+caricaturists, with mischievous eyes and bitter tongue, lay in wait
+for epigrams to translate into pencil strokes; there, stood the young
+and audacious writer, who distilled the quintessence of political
+ideas better than any other man, or compressed the work of some
+prolific writer as he held him up to ridicule; he was talking with the
+poet whose works would have eclipsed all the writings of the time if
+his ability had been as strenuous as his hatreds. Both were trying not
+to say the truth while they kept clear of lies, as they exchanged
+flattering speeches. A famous musician administered soothing
+consolation in a rallying fashion, to a young politician who had just
+fallen quite unhurt, from his rostrum. Young writers who lacked style
+stood beside other young writers who lacked ideas, and authors of
+poetical prose by prosaic poets.
+
+At the sight of all these incomplete beings, a simple Saint Simonian,
+ingenuous enough to believe in his own doctrine, charitably paired
+them off, designing, no doubt, to convert them into monks of his
+order. A few men of science mingled in the conversation, like nitrogen
+in the atmosphere, and several vaudevillistes shed rays like the
+sparking diamonds that give neither light nor heat. A few paradox-
+mongers, laughing up their sleeves at any folk who embraced their
+likes or dislikes in men or affairs, had already begun a two-edged
+policy, conspiring against all systems, without committing themselves
+to any side. Then there was the self-appointed critic who admires
+nothing, and will blow his nose in the middle of a cavatina at the
+Bouffons, who applauds before any one else begins, and contradicts
+every one who says what he himself was about to say; he was there
+giving out the sayings of wittier men for his own. Of all the
+assembled guests, a future lay before some five; ten or so should
+acquire a fleeting renown; as for the rest, like all mediocrities,
+they might apply to themselves the famous falsehood of Louis XVIII.,
+Union and oblivion.
+
+The anxious jocularity of a man who is expending two thousand crowns
+sat on their host. His eyes turned impatiently towards the door from
+time to time, seeking one of his guests who kept him waiting. Very
+soon a stout little person appeared, who was greeted by a
+complimentary murmur; it was the notary who had invented the newspaper
+that very morning. A valet-de-chambre in black opened the doors of a
+vast dining-room, whither every one went without ceremony, and took
+his place at an enormous table.
+
+Raphael took a last look round the room before he left it. His wish
+had been realized to the full. The rooms were adorned with silk and
+gold. Countless wax tapers set in handsome candelabra lit up the
+slightest details of gilded friezes, the delicate bronze sculpture,
+and the splendid colors of the furniture. The sweet scent of rare
+flowers, set in stands tastefully made of bamboo, filled the air.
+Everything, even the curtains, was pervaded by elegance without
+pretension, and there was a certain imaginative charm about it all
+which acted like a spell on the mind of a needy man.
+
+"An income of a hundred thousand livres a year is a very nice
+beginning of the catechism, and a wonderful assistance to putting
+morality into our actions," he said, sighing. "Truly my sort of virtue
+can scarcely go afoot, and vice means, to my thinking, a garret, a
+threadbare coat, a gray hat in winter time, and sums owing to the
+porter. . . . I should like to live in the lap of luxury a year, or
+six months, no matter! And then afterwards, die. I should have known,
+exhausted, and consumed a thousand lives, at any rate."
+
+"Why, you are taking the tone of a stockbroker in good luck," said
+Emile, who overheard him. "Pooh! your riches would be a burden to you
+as soon as you found that they would spoil your chances of coming out
+above the rest of us. Hasn't the artist always kept the balance true
+between the poverty of riches and the riches of poverty? And isn't
+struggle a necessity to some of us? Look out for your digestion, and
+only look," he added, with a mock-heroic gesture, "at the majestic,
+thrice holy, and edifying appearance of this amiable capitalist's
+dining-room. That man has in reality only made his money for our
+benefit. Isn't he a kind of sponge of the polyp order, overlooked by
+naturalists, which should be carefully squeezed before he is left for
+his heirs to feed upon? There is style, isn't there, about those bas-
+reliefs that adorn the walls? And the lustres, and the pictures, what
+luxury well carried out! If one may believe those who envy him, or who
+know, or think they know, the origins of his life, then this man got
+rid of a German and some others--his best friend for one, and the
+mother of that friend, during the Revolution. Could you house crimes
+under the venerable Taillefer's silvering locks? He looks to me a very
+worthy man. Only see how the silver sparkles, and is every glittering
+ray like a stab of a dagger to him? . . . Let us go in, one might as
+well believe in Mahomet. If common report speak truth, here are thirty
+men of talent, and good fellows too, prepared to dine off the flesh
+and blood of a whole family; . . . and here are we ourselves, a pair
+of youngsters full of open-hearted enthusiasm, and we shall be
+partakers in his guilt. I have a mind to ask our capitalist whether he
+is a respectable character. . . ."
+
+"No, not now," cried Raphael, "but when he is dead drunk, we shall
+have had our dinner then."
+
+The two friends sat down laughing. First of all, by a glance more
+rapid than a word, each paid his tribute of admiration to the splendid
+general effect of the long table, white as a bank of freshly-fallen
+snow, with its symmetrical line of covers, crowned with their pale
+golden rolls of bread. Rainbow colors gleamed in the starry rays of
+light reflected by the glass; the lights of the tapers crossed and
+recrossed each other indefinitely; the dishes covered with their
+silver domes whetted both appetite and curiosity.
+
+Few words were spoken. Neighbors exchanged glances as the Maderia
+circulated. Then the first course appeared in all its glory; it would
+have done honor to the late Cambaceres, Brillat-Savarin would have
+celebrated it. The wines of Bordeaux and Burgundy, white and red, were
+royally lavished. This first part of the banquet might been compared
+in every way to a rendering of some classical tragedy. The second act
+grew a trifle noisier. Every guest had had a fair amount to drink, and
+had tried various crus at this pleasure, so that as the remains of the
+magnificent first course were removed, tumultuous discussions began; a
+pale brow here and there began to flush, sundry noses took a purpler
+hue, faces lit up, and eyes sparkled.
+
+While intoxication was only dawning, the conversation did not overstep
+the bounds of civility; but banter and bon mots slipped by degrees
+from every tongue; and then slander began to rear its little snake's
+heard, and spoke in dulcet tones; a few shrewd ones here and there
+gave heed to it, hoping to keep their heads. So the second course
+found their minds somewhat heated. Every one ate as he spoke, spoke
+while he ate, and drank without heeding the quantity of the liquor,
+the wine was so biting, the bouquet so fragrant, the example around so
+infectious. Taillefer made a point of stimulating his guests, and
+plied them with the formidable wines of the Rhone, with fierce Tokay,
+and heady old Roussillon.
+
+The champagne, impatiently expected and lavishly poured out, was a
+scourge of fiery sparks to these men; released like post-horses from
+some mail-coach by a relay; they let their spirits gallop away into
+the wilds of argument to which no one listened, began to tell stories
+which had no auditors, and repeatedly asked questions to which no
+answer was made. Only the loud voice of wassail could be heard, a
+voice made up of a hundred confused clamors, which rose and grew like
+a crescendo of Rossini's. Insidious toasts, swagger, and challenges
+followed.
+
+Each renounced any pride in his own intellectual capacity, in order to
+vindicate that of hogsheads, casks, and vats; and each made noise
+enough for two. A time came when the footmen smiled, while their
+masters all talked at once. A philosopher would have been interested,
+doubtless, by the singularity of the thoughts expressed, a politician
+would have been amazed by the incongruity of the methods discussed in
+the melee of words or doubtfully luminous paradoxes, where truths,
+grotesquely caparisoned, met in conflict across the uproar of brawling
+judgments, of arbitrary decisions and folly, much as bullets, shells,
+and grapeshot are hurled across a battlefield.
+
+It was at once a volume and a picture. Every philosophy, religion, and
+moral code differing so greatly in every latitude, every government,
+every great achievement of the human intellect, fell before a scythe
+as long as Time's own; and you might have found it hard to decide
+whether it was wielded by Gravity intoxicated, or by Inebriation grown
+sober and clear-sighted. Borne away by a kind of tempest, their minds,
+like the sea raging against the cliffs, seemed ready to shake the laws
+which confine the ebb and flow of civilization; unconsciously
+fulfilling the will of God, who has suffered evil and good to abide in
+nature, and reserved the secret of their continual strife to Himself.
+A frantic travesty of debate ensued, a Walpurgis-revel of intellects.
+Between the dreary jests of these children of the Revolution over the
+inauguration of a newspaper, and the talk of the joyous gossips at
+Gargantua's birth, stretched the gulf that divides the nineteenth
+century from the sixteenth. Laughingly they had begun the work of
+destruction, and our journalists laughed amid the ruins.
+
+"What is the name of that young man over there?" said the notary,
+indicating Raphael. "I thought I heard some one call him Valentin."
+
+"What stuff is this?" said Emile, laughing; "plain Valentin, say you?
+Raphael DE Valentin, if you please. We bear an eagle or, on a field
+sable, with a silver crown, beak and claws gules, and a fine motto:
+NON CECIDIT ANIMUS. We are no foundling child, but a descendant of the
+Emperor Valens, of the stock of the Valentinois, founders of the
+cities of Valence in France, and Valencia in Spain, rightful heirs to
+the Empire of the East. If we suffer Mahmoud on the throne of
+Byzantium, it is out of pure condescension, and for lack of funds and
+soldiers."
+
+With a fork flourished above Raphael's head, Emile outlined a crown
+upon it. The notary bethought himself a moment, but soon fell to
+drinking again, with a gesture peculiar to himself; it was quite
+impossible, it seemed to say to secure in his clientele the cities of
+Valence and Byzantium, the Emperor Valens, Mahmoud, and the house of
+Valentinois.
+
+"Should not the destruction of those ant-hills, Babylon, Tyre,
+Carthage, and Venice, each crushed beneath the foot of a passing
+giant, serve as a warning to man, vouchsafed by some mocking power?"
+said Claude Vignon, who must play the Bossuet, as a sort of purchased
+slave, at the rate of fivepence a line.
+
+"Perhaps Moses, Sylla, Louis XI., Richelieu, Robespierre, and Napoleon
+were but the same man who crosses our civilizations now and again,
+like a comet across the sky," said a disciple of Ballanche.
+
+"Why try to fathom the designs of Providence?" said Canalis, maker of
+ballads.
+
+"Come, now," said the man who set up for a critic, "there is nothing
+more elastic in the world than your Providence."
+
+"Well, sir, Louis XIV. sacrificed more lives over digging the
+foundations of the Maintenon's aqueducts, than the Convention expended
+in order to assess the taxes justly, to make one law for everybody,
+and one nation of France, and to establish the rule of equal
+inheritance," said Massol, whom the lack of a syllable before his name
+had made a Republican.
+
+"Are you going to leave our heads on our shoulders?" asked Moreau (of
+the Oise), a substantial farmer. "You, sir, who took blood for wine
+just now?"
+
+"Where is the use? Aren't the principles of social order worth some
+sacrifices, sir?"
+
+"Hi! Bixiou! What's-his-name, the Republican, considers a landowner's
+head a sacrifice!" said a young man to his neighbor.
+
+"Men and events count for nothing," said the Republican, following out
+his theory in spite of hiccoughs; "in politics, as in philosophy,
+there are only principles and ideas."
+
+"What an abomination! Then you would ruthlessly put your friends to
+death for a shibboleth?"
+
+"Eh, sir! the man who feels compunction is your thorough scoundrel,
+for he has some notion of virtue; while Peter the Great and the Duke
+of Alva were embodied systems, and the pirate Monbard an
+organization."
+
+"But can't society rid itself of your systems and organizations?" said
+Canalis.
+
+"Oh, granted!" cried the Republican.
+
+"That stupid Republic of yours makes me feel queasy. We sha'n't be
+able to carve a capon in peace, because we shall find the agrarian law
+inside it."
+
+"Ah, my little Brutus, stuffed with truffles, your principles are all
+right enough. But you are like my valet, the rogue is so frightfully
+possessed with a mania for property that if I left him to clean my
+clothes after his fashion, he would soon clean me out."
+
+"Crass idiots!" replied the Republican, "you are for setting a nation
+straight with toothpicks. To your way of thinking, justice is more
+dangerous than thieves."
+
+"Oh, dear!" cried the attorney Deroches.
+
+"Aren't they a bore with their politics!" said the notary Cardot.
+"Shut up. That's enough of it. There is no knowledge nor virtue worth
+shedding a drop of blood for. If Truth were brought into liquidation,
+we might find her insolvent."
+
+"It would be much less trouble, no doubt, to amuse ourselves with
+evil, rather than dispute about good. Moreover, I would give all the
+speeches made for forty years past at the Tribune for a trout, for one
+of Perrault's tales or Charlet's sketches."
+
+"Quite right! . . . Hand me the asparagus. Because, after all, liberty
+begets anarchy, anarchy leads to despotism, and despotism back again
+to liberty. Millions have died without securing a triumph for any one
+system. Is not that the vicious circle in which the whole moral world
+revolves? Man believes that he has reached perfection, when in fact he
+has but rearranged matters."
+
+"Oh! oh!" cried Cursy, the vaudevilliste; "in that case, gentlemen,
+here's to Charles X., the father of liberty."
+
+"Why not?" asked Emile. "When law becomes despotic, morals are
+relaxed, and vice versa.
+
+"Let us drink to the imbecility of authority, which gives us such an
+authority over imbeciles!" said the good banker.
+
+"Napoleon left us glory, at any rate, my good friend!" exclaimed a
+naval officer who had never left Brest.
+
+"Glory is a poor bargain; you buy it dear, and it will not keep. Does
+not the egotism of the great take the form of glory, just as for
+nobodies it is their own well-being?"
+
+"You are very fortunate, sir----"
+
+"The first inventor of ditches must have been a weakling, for society
+is only useful to the puny. The savage and the philosopher, at either
+extreme of the moral scale, hold property in equal horror."
+
+"All very fine!" said Cardot; "but if there were no property, there
+would be no documents to draw up."
+
+"These green peas are excessively delicious!"
+
+"And the cure was found dead in his bed in the morning. . . ."
+
+"Who is talking about death? Pray don't trifle, I have an uncle."
+
+"Could you bear his loss with resignation?"
+
+"No question."
+
+"Gentlemen, listen to me! HOW TO KILL AN UNCLE. Silence! (Cries of
+"Hush! hush!") In the first place, take an uncle, large and stout,
+seventy years old at least, they are the best uncles. (Sensation.) Get
+him to eat a pate de foie gras, any pretext will do."
+
+"Ah, but my uncle is a thin, tall man, and very niggardly and
+abstemious."
+
+"That sort of uncle is a monster; he misappropriates existence."
+
+"Then," the speaker on uncles went on, "tell him, while he is
+digesting it, that his banker has failed."
+
+"How if he bears up?"
+
+"Let loose a pretty girl on him."
+
+"And if----?" asked the other, with a shake of the head.
+
+"Then he wouldn't be an uncle--an uncle is a gay dog by nature."
+
+"Malibran has lost two notes in her voice."
+
+"No, sir, she has not."
+
+"Yes, sir, she has."
+
+"Oh, ho! No and yes, is not that the sum-up of all religious,
+political, or literary dissertations? Man is a clown dancing on the
+edge of an abyss."
+
+"You would make out that I am a fool."
+
+"On the contrary, you cannot make me out."
+
+"Education, there's a pretty piece of tomfoolery. M. Heineffettermach
+estimates the number of printed volumes at more than a thousand
+millions; and a man cannot read more than a hundred and fifty thousand
+in his lifetime. So, just tell me what that word education means. For
+some it consists in knowing the name of Alexander's horse, of the dog
+Berecillo, of the Seigneur d'Accords, and in ignorance of the man to
+whom we owe the discovery of rafting and the manufacture of porcelain.
+For others it is the knowledge how to burn a will and live respected,
+be looked up to and popular, instead of stealing a watch with half-a-
+dozen aggravating circumstances, after a previous conviction, and so
+perishing, hated and dishonored, in the Place de Greve."
+
+"Will Nathan's work live?"
+
+"He has very clever collaborators, sir."
+
+"Or Canalis?"
+
+"He is a great man; let us say no more about him."
+
+"You are all drunk!"
+
+"The consequence of a Constitution is the immediate stultification of
+intellects. Art, science, public works, everything, is consumed by a
+horribly egoistic feeling, the leprosy of the time. Three hundred of
+your bourgeoisie, set down on benches, will only think of planting
+poplars. Tyranny does great things lawlessly, while Liberty will
+scarcely trouble herself to do petty ones lawfully."
+
+"Your reciprocal instruction will turn out counters in human flesh,"
+broke in an Absolutist. "All individuality will disappear in a people
+brought to a dead level by education."
+
+"For all that, is not the aim of society to secure happiness to each
+member of it?" asked the Saint-Simonian.
+
+"If you had an income of fifty thousand livres, you would not think
+much about the people. If you are smitten with a tender passion for
+the race, go to Madagascar; there you will find a nice little nation
+all ready to Saint-Simonize, classify, and cork up in your phials, but
+here every one fits into his niche like a peg in a hole. A porter is a
+porter, and a blockhead is a fool, without a college of fathers to
+promote them to those positions."
+
+"You are a Carlist."
+
+"And why not? Despotism pleases me; it implies a certain contempt for
+the human race. I have no animosity against kings, they are so
+amusing. Is it nothing to sit enthroned in a room, at a distance of
+thirty million leagues from the sun?"
+
+"Let us once more take a broad view of civilization," said the man of
+learning who, for the benefit of the inattentive sculptor, had opened
+a discussion on primitive society and autochthonous races. "The vigor
+of a nation in its origin was in a way physical, unitary, and crude;
+then as aggregations increased, government advanced by a decomposition
+of the primitive rule, more or less skilfully managed. For example, in
+remote ages national strength lay in theocracy, the priest held both
+sword and censer; a little later there were two priests, the pontiff
+and the king. To-day our society, the latest word of civilization, has
+distributed power according to the number of combinations, and we come
+to the forces called business, thought, money, and eloquence.
+Authority thus divided is steadily approaching a social dissolution,
+with interest as its one opposing barrier. We depend no longer on
+either religion or physical force, but upon intellect. Can a book
+replace the sword? Can discussion be a substitute for action? That is
+the question."
+
+"Intellect has made an end of everything," cried the Carlist. "Come
+now! Absolute freedom has brought about national suicides; their
+triumph left them as listless as an English millionaire."
+
+"Won't you tell us something new? You have made fun of authority of
+all sorts to-day, which is every bit as vulgar as denying the
+existence of God. So you have no belief left, and the century is like
+an old Sultan worn out by debauchery! Your Byron, in short, sings of
+crime and its emotions in a final despair of poetry."
+
+"Don't you know," replied Bianchon, quite drunk by this time, "that a
+dose of phosphorus more or less makes the man of genius or the
+scoundrel, a clever man or an idiot, a virtuous person or a criminal?"
+
+"Can any one treat of virtue thus?" cried Cursy. "Virtue, the subject
+of every drama at the theatre, the denoument of every play, the
+foundation of every court of law. . . ."
+
+"Be quiet, you ass. You are an Achilles for virtue, without his heel,"
+said Bixiou.
+
+"Some drink!"
+
+"What will you bet that I will drink a bottle of champagne like a
+flash, at one pull?"
+
+"What a flash of wit!"
+
+"Drunk as lords," muttered a young man gravely, trying to give some
+wine to his waistcoat.
+
+"Yes, sir; real government is the art of ruling by public opinion."
+
+"Opinion? That is the most vicious jade of all. According to you
+moralists and politicians, the laws you set up are always to go before
+those of nature, and opinion before conscience. You are right and
+wrong both. Suppose society bestows down pillows on us, that benefit
+is made up for by the gout; and justice is likewise tempered by red-
+tape, and colds accompany cashmere shawls."
+
+"Wretch!" Emile broke in upon the misanthrope, "how can you slander
+civilization here at table, up to the eyes in wines and exquisite
+dishes? Eat away at that roebuck with the gilded horns and feet, and
+do not carp at your mother. . ."
+
+"Is it any fault of mine if Catholicism puts a million deities in a
+sack of flour, that Republics will end in a Napoleon, that monarchy
+dwells between the assassination of Henry IV. and the trial of Louis
+XVI., and Liberalism produces Lafayettes?"
+
+"Didn't you embrace him in July?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Then hold your tongue, you sceptic."
+
+"Sceptics are the most conscientious of men."
+
+"They have no conscience."
+
+"What are you saying? They have two apiece at least!"
+
+"So you want to discount heaven, a thoroughly commercial notion.
+Ancient religions were but the unchecked development of physical
+pleasure, but we have developed a soul and expectations; some advance
+has been made."
+
+"What can you expect, my friends, of a century filled with politics to
+repletion?" asked Nathan. "What befell The History of the King of
+Bohemia and his Seven Castles, a most entrancing conception? . . ."
+
+"I say," the would-be critic cried down the whole length of the table.
+"The phrases might have been drawn at hap-hazard from a hat, 'twas a
+work written 'down to Charenton.' "
+
+"You are a fool!"
+
+"And you are a rogue!"
+
+"Oh! oh!"
+
+"Ah! ah!"
+
+"They are going to fight."
+
+"No, they aren't."
+
+"You will find me to-morrow, sir."
+
+"This very moment," Nathan answered.
+
+"Come, come, you pair of fire-eaters!"
+
+"You are another!" said the prime mover in the quarrel.
+
+"Ah, I can't stand upright, perhaps?" asked the pugnacious Nathan,
+straightening himself up like a stag-beetle about to fly.
+
+He stared stupidly round the table, then, completely exhausted by the
+effort, sank back into his chair, and mutely hung his head.
+
+"Would it not have been nice," the critic said to his neighbor, "to
+fight about a book I have neither read nor seen?"
+
+"Emile, look out for your coat; your neighbor is growing pale," said
+Bixiou.
+
+"Kant? Yet another ball flung out for fools to sport with, sir!
+Materialism and spiritualism are a fine pair of battledores with which
+charlatans in long gowns keep a shuttlecock a-going. Suppose that God
+is everywhere, as Spinoza says, or that all things proceed from God,
+as says St. Paul . . . the nincompoops, the door shuts or opens, but
+isn't the movement the same? Does the fowl come from the egg, or the
+egg from the fowl? . . . Just hand me some duck . . . and there, you
+have all science."
+
+"Simpleton!" cried the man of science, "your problem is settled by
+fact!"
+
+"What fact?"
+
+"Professors' chairs were not made for philosophy, but philosophy for
+the professors' chairs. Put on a pair of spectacles and read the
+budget."
+
+"Thieves!"
+
+"Nincompoops!"
+
+"Knaves!"
+
+"Gulls!"
+
+"Where but in Paris will you find such a ready and rapid exchange of
+thought?" cried Bixiou in a deep, bass voice.
+
+"Bixiou! Act a classical farce for us! Come now."
+
+"Would you like me to depict the nineteenth century?"
+
+"Silence."
+
+"Pay attention."
+
+"Clap a muffle on your trumpets."
+
+"Shut up, you Turk!"
+
+"Give him some wine, and let that fellow keep quiet."
+
+"Now, then, Bixiou!"
+
+The artist buttoned his black coat to the collar, put on yellow
+gloves, and began to burlesque the Revue des Deux Mondes by acting a
+squinting old lady; but the uproar drowned his voice, and no one heard
+a word of the satire. Still, if he did not catch the spirit of the
+century, he represented the Revue at any rate, for his own intentions
+were not very clear to him.
+
+Dessert was served as if by magic. A huge epergne of gilded bronze
+from Thomire's studio overshadowed the table. Tall statuettes, which a
+celebrated artist had endued with ideal beauty according to
+conventional European notions, sustained and carried pyramids of
+strawberries, pines, fresh dates, golden grapes, clear-skinned
+peaches, oranges brought from Setubal by steamer, pomegranates,
+Chinese fruit; in short, all the surprises of luxury, miracles of
+confectionery, the most tempting dainties, and choicest delicacies.
+The coloring of this epicurean work of art was enhanced by the
+splendors of porcelain, by sparkling outlines of gold, by the chasing
+of the vases. Poussin's landscapes, copied on Sevres ware, were
+crowned with graceful fringes of moss, green, translucent, and fragile
+as ocean weeds.
+
+The revenue of a German prince would not have defrayed the cost of
+this arrogant display. Silver and mother-of-pearl, gold and crystal,
+were lavished afresh in new forms; but scarcely a vague idea of this
+almost Oriental fairyland penetrated eyes now heavy with wine, or
+crossed the delirium of intoxication. The fire and fragrance of the
+wines acted like potent philters and magical fumes, producing a kind
+of mirage in the brain, binding feet, and weighing down hands. The
+clamor increased. Words were no longer distinct, glasses flew in
+pieces, senseless peals of laughter broke out. Cursy snatched up a
+horn and struck up a flourish on it. It acted like a signal given by
+the devil. Yells, hisses, songs, cries, and groans went up from the
+maddened crew. You might have smiled to see men, light-hearted by
+nature, grow tragical as Crebillon's dramas, and pensive as a sailor
+in a coach. Hard-headed men blabbed secrets to the inquisitive, who
+were long past heeding them. Saturnine faces were wreathed in smiles
+worthy of a pirouetting dancer. Claude Vignon shuffled about like a
+bear in a cage. Intimate friends began to fight.
+
+Animal likenesses, so curiously traced by physiologists in human
+faces, came out in gestures and behavior. A book lay open for a Bichat
+if he had repaired thither fasting and collected. The master of the
+house, knowing his condition, did not dare stir, but encouraged his
+guests' extravangances with a fixed grimacing smile, meant to be
+hospitable and appropriate. His large face, turning from blue and red
+to a purple shade terrible to see, partook of the general commotion by
+movements like the heaving and pitching of a brig.
+
+"Now, did you murder them?" Emile asked him.
+
+"Capital punishment is going to be abolished, they say, in favor of
+the Revolution of July," answered Taillefer, raising his eyebrows with
+drunken sagacity.
+
+"Don't they rise up before you in dreams at times?" Raphael persisted.
+
+"There's a statute of limitations," said the murderer-Croesus.
+
+"And on his tombstone," Emile began, with a sardonic laugh, "the
+stonemason will carve 'Passer-by, accord a tear, in memory of one
+that's here!' Oh," he continued, "I would cheerfully pay a hundred
+sous to any mathematician who would prove the existence of hell to me
+by an algebraical equation."
+
+He flung up a coin and cried:
+
+"Heads for the existence of God!"
+
+"Don't look!" Raphael cried, pouncing upon it. "Who knows? Suspense is
+so pleasant."
+
+"Unluckily," Emile said, with burlesque melancholy, "I can see no
+halting-place between the unbeliever's arithmetic and the papal Pater
+noster. Pshaw! let us drink. Trinq was, I believe, the oracular answer
+of the dive bouteille and the final conclusion of Pantagruel."
+
+"We owe our arts and monuments to the Pater noster, and our knowledge,
+too, perhaps; and a still greater benefit--modern government--whereby
+a vast and teeming society is wondrously represented by some five
+hundred intellects. It neutralizes opposing forces and gives free play
+to CIVILIZATION, that Titan queen who has succeeded the ancient
+terrible figure of the KING, that sham Providence, reared by man
+between himself and heaven. In the face of such achievements, atheism
+seems like a barren skeleton. What do you say?"
+
+"I am thinking of the seas of blood shed by Catholicism." Emile
+replied, quite unimpressed. "It has drained our hearts and veins dry
+to make a mimic deluge. No matter! Every man who thinks must range
+himself beneath the banner of Christ, for He alone has consummated the
+triumph of spirit over matter; He alone has revealed to us, like a
+poet, an intermediate world that separates us from the Deity."
+
+"Believest thou?" asked Raphael with an unaccountable drunken smile.
+"Very good; we must not commit ourselves; so we will drink the
+celebrated toast, Diis ignotis!"
+
+And they drained the chalice filled up with science, carbonic acid
+gas, perfumes, poetry, and incredulity.
+
+"If the gentlemen will go to the drawing-room, coffee is ready for
+them," said the major-domo.
+
+There was scarcely one of those present whose mind was not floundering
+by this time in the delights of chaos, where every spark of
+intelligence is quenched, and the body, set free from its tyranny,
+gives itself up to the frenetic joys of liberty. Some who had arrived
+at the apogee of intoxication were dejected, as they painfully tried
+to arrest a single thought which might assure them of their own
+existence; others, deep in the heavy morasses of indigestion, denied
+the possibility of movement. The noisy and the silent were oddly
+assorted.
+
+For all that, when new joys were announced to them by the stentorian
+tones of the servant, who spoke on his master's behalf, they all rose,
+leaning upon, dragging or carrying one another. But on the threshold
+of the room the entire crew paused for a moment, motionless, as if
+fascinated. The intemperate pleasures of the banquet seemed to fade
+away at this titillating spectacle, prepared by their amphitryon to
+appeal to the most sensual of their instincts.
+
+Beneath the shining wax-lights in a golden chandelier, round about a
+table inlaid with gilded metal, a group of women, whose eyes shone
+like diamonds, suddenly met the stupefied stare of the revelers. Their
+toilettes were splendid, but less magnificent than their beauty, which
+eclipsed the other marvels of this palace. A light shone from their
+eyes, bewitching as those of sirens, more brilliant and ardent than
+the blaze that streamed down upon the snowy marble, the delicately
+carved surfaces of bronze, and lit up the satin sheen of the tapestry.
+The contrasts of their attitudes and the slight movements of their
+heads, each differing in character and nature of attraction, set the
+heart afire. It was like a thicket, where blossoms mingled with
+rubies, sapphires, and coral; a combination of gossamer scarves that
+flickered like beacon-lights; of black ribbons about snowy throats; of
+gorgeous turbans and demurely enticing apparel. It was a seraglio that
+appealed to every eye, and fulfilled every fancy. Each form posed to
+admiration was scarcely concealed by the folds of cashmere, and half
+hidden, half revealed by transparent gauze and diaphanous silk. The
+little slender feet were eloquent, though the fresh red lips uttered
+no sound.
+
+Demure and fragile-looking girls, pictures of maidenly innocence, with
+a semblance of conventional unction about their heads, were there like
+apparitions that a breath might dissipate. Aristocratic beauties with
+haughty glances, languid, flexible, slender, and complaisant, bent
+their heads as though there were royal protectors still in the market.
+An English-woman seemed like a spirit of melancholy--some coy, pale,
+shadowy form among Ossian's mists, or a type of remorse flying from
+crime. The Parisienne was not wanting in all her beauty that consists
+in an indescribable charm; armed with her irresistible weakness, vain
+of her costume and her wit, pliant and hard, a heartless, passionless
+siren that yet can create factitious treasures of passion and
+counterfeit emotion.
+
+Italians shone in the throng, serene and self-possessed in their
+bliss; handsome Normans, with splendid figures; women of the south,
+with black hair and well-shaped eyes. Lebel might have summoned
+together all the fair women of Versailles, who since morning had
+perfected all their wiles, and now came like a troupe of Oriental
+women, bidden by the slave merchant to be ready to set out at dawn.
+They stood disconcerted and confused about the table, huddled together
+in a murmuring group like bees in a hive. The combination of timid
+embarrassment with coquettishness and a sort of expostulation was the
+result either of calculated effect or a spontaneous modesty. Perhaps a
+sentiment of which women are never utterly divested prescribed to them
+the cloak of modesty to heighten and enhance the charms of wantonness.
+So the venerable Taillefer's designs seemed on the point of collapse,
+for these unbridled natures were subdued from the very first by the
+majesty with which woman is invested. There was a murmur of
+admiration, which vibrated like a soft musical note. Wine had not
+taken love for traveling companion; instead of a violent tumult of
+passions, the guests thus taken by surprise, in a moment of weakness,
+gave themselves up to luxurious raptures of delight.
+
+Artists obeyed the voice of poetry which constrains them, and studied
+with pleasure the different delicate tints of these chosen examples of
+beauty. Sobered by a thought perhaps due to some emanation from a
+bubble of carbonic acid in the champagne, a philosopher shuddered at
+the misfortunes which had brought these women, once perhaps worthy of
+the truest devotion, to this. Each one doubtless could have unfolded a
+cruel tragedy. Infernal tortures followed in the train of most of
+them, and they drew after them faithless men, broken vows, and
+pleasures atoned for in wretchedness. Polite advances were made by the
+guests, and conversations began, as varied in character as the
+speakers. They broke up into groups. It might have been a fashionable
+drawing-room where ladies and young girls offer after dinner the
+assistance that coffee, liqueurs, and sugar afford to diners who are
+struggling in the toils of a perverse digestion. But in a little while
+laughter broke out, the murmur grew, and voices were raised. The
+saturnalia, subdued for a moment, threatened at times to renew itself.
+The alternations of sound and silence bore a distant resemblance to a
+symphony of Beethoven's.
+
+The two friends, seated on a silken divan, were first approached by a
+tall, well-proportioned girl of stately bearing; her features were
+irregular, but her face was striking and vehement in expression, and
+impressed the mind by the vigor of its contrasts. Her dark hair fell
+in luxuriant curls, with which some hand seemed to have played havoc
+already, for the locks fell lightly over the splendid shoulders that
+thus attracted attention. The long brown curls half hid her queenly
+throat, though where the light fell upon it, the delicacy of its fine
+outlines was revealed. Her warm and vivid coloring was set off by the
+dead white of her complexion. Bold and ardent glances came from under
+the long eyelashes; the damp, red, half-open lips challenged a kiss.
+Her frame was strong but compliant; with a bust and arms strongly
+developed, as in figures drawn by the Caracci, she yet seemed active
+and elastic, with a panther's strength and suppleness, and in the same
+way the energetic grace of her figure suggested fierce pleasures.
+
+But though she might romp perhaps and laugh, there was something
+terrible in her eyes and her smile. Like a pythoness possessed by the
+demon, she inspired awe rather than pleasure. All changes, one after
+another, flashed like lightning over every mobile feature of her face.
+She might captivate a jaded fancy, but a young man would have feared
+her. She was like some colossal statue fallen from the height of a
+Greek temple, so grand when seen afar, too roughly hewn to be seen
+anear. And yet, in spite of all, her terrible beauty could have
+stimulated exhaustion; her voice might charm the deaf; her glances
+might put life into the bones of the dead; and therefore Emile was
+vaguely reminded of one of Shakespeare's tragedies--a wonderful maze,
+in which joy groans, and there is something wild even about love, and
+the magic of forgiveness and the warmth of happiness succeed to cruel
+storms of rage. She was a siren that can both kiss and devour; laugh
+like a devil, or weep as angels can. She could concentrate in one
+instant all a woman's powers of attraction in a single effort (the
+sighs of melancholy and the charms of maiden's shyness alone
+excepted), then in a moment rise in fury like a nation in revolt, and
+tear herself, her passion, and her lover, in pieces.
+
+Dressed in red velvet, she trampled under her reckless feet the stray
+flowers fallen from other heads, and held out a salver to the two
+friends, with careless hands. The white arms stood out in bold relief
+against the velvet. Proud of her beauty; proud (who knows?) of her
+corruption, she stood like a queen of pleasure, like an incarnation of
+enjoyment; the enjoyment that comes of squandering the accumulations
+of three generations; that scoffs at its progenitors, and makes merry
+over a corpse; that will dissolve pearls and wreck thrones, turn old
+men into boys, and make young men prematurely old; enjoyment only
+possible to giants weary of their power, tormented by reflection, or
+for whom strife has become a plaything.
+
+"What is your name?" asked Raphael.
+
+"Aquilina."
+
+"Out of Venice Preserved!" exclaimed Emile.
+
+"Yes," she answered. "Just as a pope takes a new name when he is
+exalted above all other men, I, too, took another name when I raised
+myself above women's level."
+
+"Then have you, like your patron saint, a terrible and noble lover, a
+conspirator, who would die for you?" cried Emile eagerly--this gleam
+of poetry had aroused his interest.
+
+"Once I had," she answered. "But I had a rival too in La Guillotine. I
+have worn something red about me ever since, lest any happiness should
+carry me away."
+
+"Oh, if you are going to get her on to the story of those four lads of
+La Rochelle, she will never get to the end of it. That's enough,
+Aquilina. As if every woman could not bewail some lover or other,
+though not every one has the luck to lose him on the scaffold, as you
+have done. I would a great deal sooner see a lover of mine in a trench
+at the back of Clamart than in a rival's arms."
+
+All this in the gentlest and most melodious accents, and pronounced by
+the prettiest, gentlest, and most innocent-looking little person that
+a fairy wand ever drew from an enchanted eggshell. She had come up
+noiselessly, and they became aware of a slender, dainty figure,
+charmingly timid blue eyes, and white transparent brows. No ingenue
+among the naiads, a truant from her river spring, could have been
+shyer, whiter, more ingenuous than this young girl, seemingly about
+sixteen years old, ignorant of evil and of the storms of life, and
+fresh from some church in which she must have prayed the angels to
+call her to heaven before the time. Only in Paris are such natures as
+this to be found, concealing depths of depravity behind a fair mask,
+and the most artificial vices beneath a brow as young and fair as an
+opening flower.
+
+At first the angelic promise of those soft lineaments misled the
+friends. Raphael and Emile took the coffee which she poured into the
+cups brought by Aquilina, and began to talk with her. In the eyes of
+the two poets she soon became transformed into some sombre allegory,
+of I know not what aspect of human life. She opposed to the vigorous
+and ardent expression of her commanding acquaintance a revelation of
+heartless corruption and voluptuous cruelty. Heedless enough to
+perpetrate a crime, hardy enough to feel no misgivings; a pitiless
+demon that wrings larger and kinder natures with torments that it is
+incapable of knowing, that simpers over a traffic in love, sheds tears
+over a victim's funeral, and beams with joy over the reading of the
+will. A poet might have admired the magnificent Aquilina; but the
+winning Euphrasia must be repulsive to every one--the first was the
+soul of sin; the second, sin without a soul in it.
+
+"I should dearly like to know," Emile remarked to this pleasing being,
+"if you ever reflect upon your future?"
+
+"My future!" she answered with a laugh. "What do you mean by my
+future? Why should I think about something that does not exist as yet?
+I never look before or behind. Isn't one day at a time more than I can
+concern myself with as it is? And besides, the future, as we know,
+means the hospital."
+
+"How can you forsee a future in the hospital, and make no effort to
+avert it?"
+
+"What is there so alarming about the hospital?" asked the terrific
+Aquilina. "When we are neither wives nor mothers, when old age draws
+black stockings over our limbs, sets wrinkles on our brows, withers up
+the woman in us, and darkens the light in our lover's eyes, what could
+we need when that comes to pass? You would look on us then as mere
+human clay; we with our habiliments shall be for you like so much mud
+--worthless, lifeless, crumbling to pieces, going about with the
+rustle of dead leaves. Rags or the daintiest finery will be as one to
+us then; the ambergris of the boudoir will breathe an odor of death
+and dry bones; and suppose there is a heart there in that mud, not one
+of you but would make mock of it, not so much as a memory will you
+spare to us. Is not our existence precisely the same whether we live
+in a fine mansion with lap-dogs to tend, or sort rags in a workhouse?
+Does it make much difference whether we shall hide our gray heads
+beneath lace or a handkerchief striped with blue and red; whether we
+sweep a crossing with a birch broom, or the steps of the Tuileries
+with satins; whether we sit beside a gilded hearth, or cower over the
+ashes in a red earthen pot; whether we go to the Opera or look on in
+the Place de Greve?"
+
+"Aquilina mia, you have never shown more sense than in this depressing
+fit of yours," Euphrasia remarked. "Yes, cashmere, point d'Alencon,
+perfumes, gold, silks, luxury, everything that sparkles, everything
+pleasant, belongs to youth alone. Time alone may show us our folly,
+but good fortune will acquit us. You are laughing at me," she went on,
+with a malicious glance at the friends; "but am I not right? I would
+sooner die of pleasure than of illness. I am not afflicted with a
+mania for perpetuity, nor have I a great veneration for human nature,
+such as God has made it. Give me millions, and I would squander them;
+I should not keep one centime for the year to come. Live to be
+charming and have power, that is the decree of my every heartbeat.
+Society sanctions my life; does it not pay for my extravagances? Why
+does Providence pay me every morning my income, which I spend every
+evening? Why are hospitals built for us? And Providence did not put
+good and evil on either hand for us to select what tires and pains us.
+I should be very foolish if I did not amuse myself."
+
+"And how about others?" asked Emile.
+
+"Others? Oh, well, they must manage for themselves. I prefer laughing
+at their woes to weeping over my own. I defy any man to give me the
+slightest uneasiness."
+
+"What have you suffered to make you think like this?" asked Raphael.
+
+"I myself have been forsaken for an inheritance," she said, striking
+an attitude that displayed all her charms; "and yet I had worked night
+and day to keep my lover! I am not to be gulled by any smile or vow,
+and I have set myself to make one long entertainment of my life."
+
+"But does not happiness come from the soul within?" cried Raphael.
+
+"It may be so," Aquilina answered; "but is it nothing to be conscious
+of admiration and flattery; to triumph over other women, even over the
+most virtuous, humiliating them before our beauty and our splendor?
+Not only so; one day of our life is worth ten years of a bourgeoise
+existence, and so it is all summed up."
+
+"Is not a woman hateful without virtue?" Emile said to Raphael.
+
+Euphrasia's glance was like a viper's, as she said, with an irony in
+her voice that cannot be rendered:
+
+"Virtue! we leave that to deformity and to ugly women. What would the
+poor things be without it?"
+
+"Hush, be quiet," Emile broke in. "Don't talk about something you have
+never known."
+
+"That I have never known!" Euphrasia answered. "You give yourself for
+life to some person you abominate; you must bring up children who will
+neglect you, who wound your very heart, and you must say, 'Thank you!'
+for it; and these are the virtues you prescribe to woman. And that is
+not enough. By way of requiting her self-denial, you must come and add
+to her sorrows by trying to lead her astray; and though you are
+rebuffed, she is compromised. A nice life! How far better to keep
+one's freedom, to follow one's inclinations in love, and die young!"
+
+"Have you no fear of the price to be paid some day for all this?"
+
+"Even then," she said, "instead of mingling pleasures and troubles, my
+life will consist of two separate parts--a youth of happiness is
+secure, and there may come a hazy, uncertain old age, during which I
+can suffer at my leisure."
+
+"She has never loved," came in the deep tones of Aquilina's voice.
+"She never went a hundred leagues to drink in one look and a denial
+with untold raptures. She has not hung her own life on a thread, nor
+tried to stab more than one man to save her sovereign lord, her king,
+her divinity. . . . Love, for her, meant a fascinating colonel."
+
+"Here she is with her La Rochelle," Euphrasia made answer. "Love comes
+like the wind, no one knows whence. And, for that matter, if one of
+those brutes had once fallen in love with you, you would hold sensible
+men in horror."
+
+"Brutes are put out of the question by the Code," said the tall,
+sarcastic Aquilina.
+
+"I thought you had more kindness for the army," laughed Euphrasia.
+
+"How happy they are in their power of dethroning their reason in this
+way," Raphael exclaimed.
+
+"Happy?" asked Aquilina, with dreadful look, and a smile full of pity
+and terror. "Ah, you do not know what it is to be condemned to a life
+of pleasure, with your dead hidden in your heart. . . ."
+
+A moment's consideration of the rooms was like a foretaste of Milton's
+Pandemonium. The faces of those still capable of drinking wore a
+hideous blue tint, from burning draughts of punch. Mad dances were
+kept up with wild energy; excited laughter and outcries broke out like
+the explosion of fireworks. The boudoir and a small adjoining room
+were strewn like a battlefield with the insensible and incapable.
+Wine, pleasure, and dispute had heated the atmosphere. Wine and love,
+delirium and unconsciousness possessed them, and were written upon all
+faces, upon the furniture; were expressed by the surrounding disorder,
+and brought light films over the vision of those assembled, so that
+the air seemed full of intoxicating vapor. A glittering dust arose, as
+in the luminous paths made by a ray of sunlight, the most bizarre
+forms flitted through it, grotesque struggles were seen athwart it.
+Groups of interlaced figures blended with the white marbles, the noble
+masterpieces of sculpture that adorned the rooms.
+
+Though the two friends yet preserved a sort of fallacious clearness in
+their ideas and voices, a feeble appearance and faint thrill of
+animation, it was yet almost impossible to distinguish what was real
+among the fantastic absurdities before them, or what foundation there
+was for the impossible pictures that passed unceasingly before their
+weary eyes. The strangest phenomena of dreams beset them, the lowering
+heavens, the fervid sweetness caught by faces in our visions, and
+unheard-of agility under a load of chains,--all these so vividly, that
+they took the pranks of the orgy about them for the freaks of some
+nightmare in which all movement is silent, and cries never reach the
+ear. The valet de chambre succeeded just then, after some little
+difficulty, in drawing his master into the ante-chamber to whisper to
+him:
+
+"The neighbors are all at their windows, complaining of the racket,
+sir."
+
+"If noise alarms them, why don't they lay down straw before their
+doors?" was Taillefer's rejoinder.
+
+Raphael's sudden burst of laughter was so unseasonable and abrupt,
+that his friend demanded the reason of his unseemly hilarity.
+
+"You will hardly understand me," he replied. "In the first place, I
+must admit that you stopped me on the Quai Voltaire just as I was
+about to throw myself into the Seine, and you would like to know, no
+doubt, my motives for dying. And when I proceed to tell you that by an
+almost miraculous chance the most poetic memorials of the material
+world had but just then been summed up for me as a symbolical
+interpretation of human wisdom; whilst at this minute the remains of
+all the intellectual treasures ravaged by us at table are comprised in
+these two women, the living and authentic types of folly, would you be
+any the wiser? Our profound apathy towards men and things supplied the
+half-tones in a crudely contrasted picture of two theories of life so
+diametrically opposed. If you were not drunk, you might perhaps catch
+a gleam of philosophy in this."
+
+"And if you had not both feet on that fascinating Aquilina, whose
+heavy breathing suggests an analogy with the sounds of a storm about
+to burst," replied Emile, absently engaged in the harmless amusement
+of winding and unwinding Euphrasia's hair, "you would be ashamed of
+your inebriated garrulity. Both your systems can be packed in a
+phrase, and reduced to a single idea. The mere routine of living
+brings a stupid kind of wisdom with it, by blunting our intelligence
+with work; and on the other hand, a life passed in the limbo of the
+abstract or in the abysses of the moral world, produces a sort of
+wisdom run mad. The conditions may be summed up in brief; we may
+extinguish emotion, and so live to old age, or we may choose to die
+young as martyrs to contending passions. And yet this decree is at
+variance with the temperaments with which we were endowed by the
+bitter jester who modeled all creatures."
+
+"Idiot!" Raphael burst in. "Go on epitomizing yourself after that
+fashion, and you will fill volumes. If I attempted to formulate those
+two ideas clearly, I might as well say that man is corrupted by the
+exercise of his wits, and purified by ignorance. You are calling the
+whole fabric of society to account. But whether we live with the wise
+or perish with the fool, isn't the result the same sooner or later?
+And have not the prime constituents of the quintessence of both
+systems been before expressed in a couple of words--Carymary,
+Carymara."
+
+"You make me doubt the existence of a God, for your stupidity is
+greater than His power," said Emile. "Our beloved Rabelais summed it
+all up in a shorter word than your 'Carymary, Carymara'; from his
+Peut-etre Montaigne derived his own Que sais-je? After all, this last
+word of moral science is scarcely more than the cry of Pyrrhus set
+betwixt good and evil, or Buridan's ass between the two measures of
+oats. But let this everlasting question alone, resolved to-day by a
+'Yes' and a 'No.' What experience did you look to find by a jump into
+the Seine? Were you jealous of the hydraulic machine on the Pont Notre
+Dame?"
+
+"Ah, if you but knew my history!"
+
+"Pooh," said Emile; "I did not think you could be so commonplace; that
+remark is hackneyed. Don't you know that every one of us claims to
+have suffered as no other ever did?"
+
+"Ah!" Raphael sighed.
+
+"What a mountebank art thou with thy 'Ah'! Look here, now. Does some
+disease of the mind or body, by contracting your muscles, bring back
+of a morning the wild horses that tear you in pieces at night, as with
+Damiens once upon a time? Were you driven to sup off your own dog in a
+garret, uncooked and without salt? Have your children ever cried, 'I
+am hungry'? Have you sold your mistress' hair to hazard the money at
+play? Have you ever drawn a sham bill of exchange on a fictitious
+uncle at a sham address, and feared lest you should not be in time to
+take it up? Come now, I am attending! If you were going to drown
+yourself for some woman, or by way of a protest, or out of sheer
+dulness, I disown you. Make your confession, and no lies! I don't at
+all want a historical memoir. And, above all things, be as concise as
+your clouded intellect permits; I am as critical as a professor, and
+as sleepy as a woman at her vespers."
+
+"You silly fool!" said Raphael. "When has not suffering been keener
+for a more susceptible nature? Some day when science has attained to a
+pitch that enables us to study the natural history of hearts, when
+they are named and classified in genera, sub-genera, and families;
+into crustaceae, fossils, saurians, infusoria, or whatever it is,--
+then, my dear fellow, it will be ascertained that there are natures as
+tender and fragile as flowers, that are broken by the slight bruises
+that some stony hearts do not even feel----"
+
+"For pity's sake, spare me thy exordium," said Emile, as, half
+plaintive, half amused, he took Raphael's hand.
+
+
+
+II
+
+A WOMAN WITHOUT A HEART
+
+After a moment's silence, Raphael said with a careless gesture:
+
+"Perhaps it is an effect of the fumes of punch--I really cannot tell--
+this clearness of mind that enables me to comprise my whole life in a
+single picture, where figures and hues, lights, shades, and half-tones
+are faithfully rendered. I should not have been so surprised at this
+poetical play of imagination if it were not accompanied with a sort of
+scorn for my past joys and sorrows. Seen from afar, my life appears to
+contract by some mental process. That long, slow agony of ten years'
+duration can be brought to memory to-day in some few phrases, in which
+pain is resolved into a mere idea, and pleasure becomes a
+philosophical reflection. Instead of feeling things, I weigh and
+consider them----"
+
+"You are as tiresome as the explanation of an amendment," cried Emile.
+
+"Very likely," said Raphael submissively. "I spare you the first
+seventeen years of my life for fear of abusing a listener's patience.
+Till that time, like you and thousands of others, I had lived my life
+at school or the lycee, with its imaginary troubles and genuine
+happinesses, which are so pleasant to look back upon. Our jaded
+palates still crave for that Lenten fare, so long as we have not tried
+it afresh. It was a pleasant life, with the tasks that we thought so
+contemptible, but which taught us application for all that. . . ."
+
+"Let the drama begin," said Emile, half-plaintively, half-comically.
+
+"When I left school," Raphael went on, with a gesture that claimed the
+right of speaking, "my father submitted me to a strict discipline; he
+installed me in a room near his own study, and I had to rise at five
+in the morning and be in bed by nine at night. He meant me to take my
+law studies seriously. I attended the Schools, and read with an
+advocate as well, but my lectures and work were so narrowly
+circumscribed by the laws of time and space, and my father required
+such a strict account of my doings, at dinner, that . . ."
+
+"What is this to me?" asked Emile.
+
+"The devil take you!" said Raphael. "How are you to enter into my
+feelings if I do not relate the facts that insensibly shaped my
+character, made me timid, and prolonged the period of youthful
+simplicity? In this manner I cowered under as strict a despotism as a
+monarch's till I came of age. To depict the tedium of my life, it will
+be perhaps enough to portray my father to you. He was tall, thin, and
+slight, with a hatchet face, and pale complexion; a man of few words,
+fidgety as an old maid, exacting as a senior clerk. His paternal
+solicitude hovered over my merriment and gleeful thoughts, and seemed
+to cover them with a leaden pall. Any effusive demonstration on my
+part was received by him as a childish absurdity. I was far more
+afraid of him than I had been of any of our masters at school.
+
+"I seem to see him before me at this moment. In his chestnut-brown
+frock-coat he looked like a red herring wrapped up in the cover of a
+pamphlet, and he held himself as erect as an Easter candle. But I was
+fond of my father, and at heart he was right enough. Perhaps we never
+hate severity when it has its source in greatness of character and
+pure morals, and is skilfully tempered with kindness. My father, it is
+true, never left me a moment to myself, and only when I was twenty
+years old gave me so much as ten francs of my own, ten knavish
+prodigals of francs, such a hoard as I had long vainly desired, which
+set me a-dreaming of unutterable felicity; yet, for all that he sought
+to procure relaxations for me. When he had promised me a treat
+beforehand, he would take me to Les Boufoons, or to a concert or ball,
+where I hoped to find a mistress. . . . A mistress! that meant
+independence. But bashful and timid as I was, knowing nobody, and
+ignorant of the dialect of drawing-rooms, I always came back as
+awkward as ever, and swelling with unsatisfied desires, to be put in
+harness like a troop horse next day by my father, and to return with
+morning to my advocate, the Palais de Justice, and the law. To have
+swerved from the straight course which my father had mapped out for
+me, would have drawn down his wrath upon me; at my first delinquency,
+he threatened to ship me off as a cabin-boy to the Antilles. A
+dreadful shiver ran through me if I had ventured to spend a couple of
+hours in some pleasure party.
+
+"Imagine the most wandering imagination and passionate temperament,
+the tenderest soul and most artistic nature, dwelling continually in
+the presence of the most flint-hearted, atrabilious, and frigid man on
+earth; think of me as a young girl married to a skeleton, and you will
+understand the life whose curious scenes can only be a hearsay tale to
+you; the plans for running away that perished at the sight of my
+father, the despair soothed by slumber, the dark broodings charmed
+away by music. I breathed my sorrows forth in melodies. Beethoven or
+Mozart would keep my confidences sacred. Nowadays, I smile at
+recollections of the scruples which burdened my conscience at that
+epoch of innocence and virtue.
+
+"If I set foot in a restaurant, I gave myself up for lost; my fancy
+led me to look on a cafe as a disreputable haunt, where men lost their
+characters and embarrassed their fortunes; as for engaging in play, I
+had not the money to risk. Oh, if I needed to send you to sleep, I
+would tell you about one of the most frightful pleasures of my life,
+one of those pleasures with fangs that bury themselves in the heart as
+the branding-iron enters the convict's shoulder. I was at a ball at
+the house of the Duc de Navarreins, my father's cousin. But to make my
+position the more perfectly clear, you must know that I wore a
+threadbare coat, ill-fitting shoes, a tie fit for a stableman, and a
+soiled pair of gloves. I shrank into a corner to eat ices and watch
+the pretty faces at my leisure. My father noticed me. Actuated by some
+motive that I did not fathom, so dumfounded was I by this act of
+confidence, he handed me his keys and purse to keep. Ten paces away
+some men were gambling. I heard the rattling of gold; I was twenty
+years old; I longed to be steeped for one whole day in the follies of
+my time of life. It was a license of the imagination that would find a
+parallel neither in the freaks of courtesans, nor in the dreams of
+young girls. For a year past I had beheld myself well dressed, in a
+carriage, with a pretty woman by my side, playing the great lord,
+dining at Very's, deciding not to go back home till the morrow; but
+was prepared for my father with a plot more intricate than the
+Marriage of Figaro, which he could not possibly have unraveled. All
+this bliss would cost, I estimated, fifty crowns. Was it not the
+artless idea of playing truant that still had charms for me?
+
+"I went into a small adjoining room, and when alone counted my
+father's money with smarting eyes and trembling fingers--a hundred
+crowns! The joys of my escapade rose before me at the thought of the
+amount; joys that flitted about me like Macbeth's witches round their
+caldron; joys how alluring! how thrilling! how delicious! I became a
+deliberate rascal. I heeded neither my tingling ears nor the violent
+beating of my heart, but took out two twenty-franc pieces that I seem
+to see yet. The dates had been erased, and Bonaparte's head simpered
+upon them. After I had put back the purse in my pocket, I returned to
+the gaming-table with the two pieces of gold in the palms of my damp
+hands, prowling about the players like a sparrow-hawk round a coop of
+chickens. Tormented by inexpressible terror, I flung a sudden
+clairvoyant glance round me, and feeling quite sure that I was seen by
+none of my acquaintance, betted on a stout, jovial little man, heaping
+upon his head more prayers and vows than are put up during two or
+three storms at sea. Then, with an intuitive scoundrelism, or
+Machiavelism, surprising in one of my age, I went and stood in the
+door, and looked about me in the rooms, though I saw nothing; for both
+mind and eyes hovered about that fateful green cloth.
+
+"That evening fixes the date of a first observation of a physiological
+kind; to it I owe a kind of insight into certain mysteries of our
+double nature that I have since been enabled to penetrate. I had my
+back turned on the table where my future felicity lay at stake, a
+felicity but so much the more intense that it was criminal. Between me
+and the players stood a wall of onlookers some five feet deep, who
+were chatting; the murmur of voices drowned the clinking of gold,
+which mingled in the sounds sent up by this orchestra; yet, despite
+all obstacles, I distinctly heard the words of the two players by a
+gift accorded to the passions, which enables them to annihilate time
+and space. I saw the points they made; I knew which of the two turned
+up the king as well as if I had actually seen the cards; at a distance
+of ten paces, in short, the fortunes of play blanched my face.
+
+"My father suddenly went by, and then I knew what the Scripture meant
+by 'The Spirit of God passed before his face.' I had won. I slipped
+through the crowd of men who had gathered about the players with the
+quickness of an eel escaping through a broken mesh in a net. My nerves
+thrilled with joy instead of anguish. I felt like some criminal on the
+way to torture released by a chance meeting with the king. It happened
+that a man with a decoration found himself short by forty francs.
+Uneasy eyes suspected me; I turned pale, and drops of perspiration
+stood on my forehead, I was well punished, I thought, for having
+robbed my father. Then the kind little stout man said, in a voice like
+an angel's surely, 'All these gentlemen have paid their stakes,' and
+put down the forty francs himself. I raised my head in triumph upon
+the players. After I had returned the money I had taken from it to my
+father's purse, I left my winnings with that honest and worthy
+gentleman, who continued to win. As soon as I found myself possessed
+of a hundred and sixty francs, I wrapped them up in my handkerchief,
+so that they could neither move or rattle on the way back; and I
+played no more.
+
+" 'What were you doing at the card-table?' said my father as we
+stepped into the carriage.
+
+" 'I was looking on,' I answered, trembling.
+
+" 'But it would have been nothing out of the common if you had been
+prompted by self-love to put some money down on the table. In the eyes
+of men of the world you are quite old enough to assume the right to
+commit such follies. So I should have pardoned you, Raphael, if you
+had made use of my purse. . . . .'
+
+"I did not answer. When we reached home, I returned the keys and money
+to my father. As he entered his study, he emptied out his purse on the
+mantelpiece, counted the money, and turned to me with a kindly look,
+saying with more or less long and significant pauses between each
+phrase:
+
+" 'My boy, you are very nearly twenty now. I am satisfied with you.
+You ought to have an allowance, if only to teach you how to lay it
+out, and to gain some acquaintance with everyday business.
+Henceforward I shall let you have a hundred francs each month. Here is
+your first quarter's income for this year,' he added, fingering a pile
+of gold, as if to make sure that the amount was correct. 'Do what you
+please with it.'
+
+"I confess that I was ready to fling myself at his feet, to tell him
+that I was a thief, a scoundrel, and, worse than all, a liar! But a
+feeling of shame held me back. I went up to him for an embrace, but he
+gently pushed me away.
+
+" 'You are a man now, MY CHILD,' he said. 'What I have just done was a
+very proper and simple thing, for which there is no need to thank me.
+If I have any claim to your gratitude, Raphael,' he went on, in a kind
+but dignified way, 'it is because I have preserved your youth from the
+evils that destroy young men in Paris. We will be two friends
+henceforth. In a year's time you will be a doctor of law. Not without
+some hardship and privations you have acquired the sound knowledge and
+the love of, and application to, work that is indispensable to public
+men. You must learn to know me, Raphael. I do not want to make either
+an advocate or a notary of you, but a statesman, who shall be the
+pride of our poor house. . . . Good-night,' he added.
+
+"From that day my father took me fully into confidence. I was an only
+son; and ten years before, I had lost my mother. In time past my
+father, the head of a historic family remembered even now in Auvergne,
+had come to Paris to fight against his evil star, dissatisfied at the
+prospect of tilling the soil, with his useless sword by his side. He
+was endowed with the shrewdness that gives the men of the south of
+France a certain ascendency when energy goes with it. Almost unaided,
+he made a position for himself near the fountain of power. The
+revolution brought a reverse of fortune, but he had managed to marry
+an heiress of good family, and, in the time of the Empire, appeared to
+be on the point of restoring to our house its ancient splendor.
+
+"The Restoration, while it brought back considerable property to my
+mother, was my father's ruin. He had formerly purchased several
+estates abroad, conferred by the Emperor on his generals; and now for
+ten years he struggled with liquidators, diplomatists, and Prussian
+and Bavarian courts of law, over the disputed possession of these
+unfortunate endowments. My father plunged me into the intricate
+labyrinths of law proceedings on which our future depended. We might
+be compelled to return the rents, as well as the proceeds arising from
+sales of timber made during the years 1814 to 1817; in that case my
+mother's property would have barely saved our credit. So it fell out
+that the day on which my father in a fashion emancipated me, brought
+me under a most galling yoke. I entered on a conflict like a
+battlefield; I must work day and night; seek interviews with
+statesmen, surprise their convictions, try to interest them in our
+affairs, and gain them over, with their wives and servants, and their
+very dogs; and all this abominable business had to take the form of
+pretty speeches and polite attentions. Then I knew the mortifications
+that had left their blighting traces on my father's face. For about a
+year I led outwardly the life of a man of the world, but enormous
+labors lay beneath the surface of gadding about, and eager efforts to
+attach myself to influential kinsmen, or to people likely to be useful
+to us. My relaxations were lawsuits, and memorials still furnished the
+staple of my conversation. Hitherto my life had been blameless, from
+the sheer impossibility of indulging the desires of youth; but now I
+became my own master, and in dread of involving us both in ruin by
+some piece of negligence, I did not dare to allow myself any pleasure
+or expenditure.
+
+"While we are young, and before the world has rubbed off the delicate
+bloom from our sentiments, the freshness of our impressions, the noble
+purity of conscience which will never allow us to palter with evil,
+the sense of duty is very strong within us, the voice of honor clamors
+within us, and we are open and straightforward. At that time I was all
+these things. I wished to justify my father's confidence in me. But
+lately I would have stolen a paltry sum from him, with secret delight;
+but now that I shared the burden of his affairs, of his name and of
+his house, I would secretly have given up my fortune and my hopes for
+him, as I was sacrificing my pleasures, and even have been glad of the
+sacrifice! So when M. de Villele exhumed, for our special benefit, an
+imperial decree concerning forfeitures, and had ruined us, I
+authorized the sale of my property, only retaining an island in the
+middle of the Loire where my mother was buried. Perhaps arguments and
+evasions, philosophical, philanthropic, and political considerations
+would not fail me now, to hinder the perpetration of what my solicitor
+termed a 'folly'; but at one-and-twenty, I repeat, we are all aglow
+with generosity and affection. The tears that stood in my father's
+eyes were to me the most splendid of fortunes, and the thought of
+those tears has often soothed my sorrow. Ten months after he had paid
+his creditors, my father died of grief; I was his idol, and he had
+ruined me! The thought killed him. Towards the end of the autumn of
+1826, at the age of twenty-two, I was the sole mourner at his
+graveside--the grave of my father and my earliest friend. Not many
+young men have found themselves alone with their thoughts as they
+followed a hearse, or have seen themselves lost in crowded Paris, and
+without money or prospects. Orphans rescued by public charity have at
+any rate the future of the battlefield before them, and find a shelter
+in some institution and a father in the government or in the procureur
+du roi. I had nothing.
+
+"Three months later, an agent made over to me eleven hundred and
+twelve francs, the net proceeds of the winding up of my father's
+affairs. Our creditors had driven us to sell our furniture. From my
+childhood I had been used to set a high value on the articles of
+luxury about us, and I could not help showing my astonishment at the
+sight of this meagre balance.
+
+" 'Oh, rococo, all of it!' said the auctioneer. A terrible word that
+fell like a blight on the sacred memories of my childhood, and
+dispelled my earliest illusions, the dearest of all. My entire fortune
+was comprised in this 'account rendered,' my future lay in a linen bag
+with eleven hundred and twelve francs in it, human society stood
+before me in the person of an auctioneer's clerk, who kept his hat on
+while he spoke. Jonathan, an old servant who was much attached to me,
+and whom my mother had formerly pensioned with an annuity of four
+hundred francs, spoke to me as I was leaving the house that I had so
+often gaily left for a drive in my childhood.
+
+" 'Be very economical, Monsieur Raphael!'
+
+"The good fellow was crying.
+
+"Such were the events, dear Emile, that ruled my destinies, moulded my
+character, and set me, while still young, in an utterly false social
+position," said Raphael after a pause. "Family ties, weak ones, it is
+true, bound me to a few wealthy houses, but my own pride would have
+kept me aloof from them if contempt and indifference had not shut
+their doors on me in the first place. I was related to people who were
+very influential, and who lavished their patronage on strangers; but I
+found neither relations nor patrons in them. Continually circumscribed
+in my affections, they recoiled upon me. Unreserved and simple by
+nature, I must have appeared frigid and sophisticated. My father's
+discipline had destroyed all confidence in myself. I was shy and
+awkward; I could not believe that my opinion carried any weight
+whatever; I took no pleasure in myself; I thought myself ugly, and was
+ashamed to meet my own eyes. In spite of the inward voice that must be
+the stay of a man with anything in him, in all his struggles, the
+voice that cries, 'Courage! Go forward!' in spite of sudden
+revelations of my own strength in my solitude; in spite of the hopes
+that thrilled me as I compared new works, that the public admired so
+much, with the schemes that hovered in my brain,--in spite of all
+this, I had a childish mistrust of myself.
+
+"An overweening ambition preyed upon me; I believed that I was meant
+for great things, and yet I felt myself to be nothing. I had need of
+other men, and I was friendless. I found I must make my way in the
+world, where I was quite alone, and bashful, rather than afraid.
+
+"All through the year in which, by my father's wish, I threw myself
+into the whirlpool of fashionable society, I came away with an
+inexperienced heart, and fresh in mind. Like every grown child, I
+sighed in secret for a love affair. I met, among young men of my own
+age, a set of swaggerers who held their heads high, and talked about
+trifles as they seated themselves without a tremor beside women who
+inspired awe in me. They chattered nonsense, sucked the heads of their
+canes, gave themselves affected airs, appropriated the fairest women,
+and laid, or pretended that they had laid their heads on every pillow.
+Pleasure, seemingly, was at their beck and call; they looked on the
+most virtuous and prudish as an easy prey, ready to surrender at a
+word, at the slightest impudent gesture or insolent look. I declare,
+on my soul and conscience, that the attainment of power, or of a great
+name in literature, seemed to me an easier victory than a success with
+some young, witty, and gracious lady of high degree.
+
+"So I found the tumult of my heart, my feelings, and my creeds all at
+variance with the axioms of society. I had plenty of audacity in my
+character, but none in my manner. Later, I found out that women did
+not like to be implored. I have from afar adored many a one to whom I
+devoted a soul proof against all tests, a heart to break, energy that
+shrank from no sacrifice and from no torture; THEY accepted fools whom
+I would not have engaged as hall porters. How often, mute and
+motionless, have I not admired the lady of my dreams, swaying in the
+dance; given up my life in thought to one eternal caress, expressed
+all my hopes in a look, and laid before her, in my rapture, a young
+man's love, which should outstrip all fables. At some moments I was
+ready to barter my whole life for one single night. Well, as I could
+never find a listener for my impassioned proposals, eyes to rest my
+own upon, a heart made for my heart, I lived on in all the sufferings
+of impotent force that consumes itself; lacking either opportunity or
+courage or experience. I despaired, maybe, of making myself
+understood, or I feared to be understood but too well; and yet the
+storm within me was ready to burst at every chance courteous look. In
+spite of my readiness to take the semblance of interest in look or
+word for a tenderer solicitude, I dared neither to speak nor to be
+silent seasonably. My words grew insignificant, and my silence stupid,
+by sheer stress of emotion. I was too ingenuous, no doubt, for that
+artificial life, led by candle-light, where every thought is expressed
+in conventional phrases, or by words that fashion dictates; and not
+only so, I had not learned how to employ speech that says nothing, and
+silence that says a great deal. In short, I concealed the fires that
+consumed me, and with such a soul as women wish to find, with all the
+elevation of soul that they long for, and a mettle that fools plume
+themselves upon, all women have been cruelly treacherous to me.
+
+"So in my simplicity I admired the heroes of this set when they
+bragged about their conquests, and never suspected them of lying. No
+doubt it was a mistake to wish for a love that springs for a word's
+sake; to expect to find in the heart of a vain, frivolous woman,
+greedy for luxury and intoxicated with vanity, the great sea of
+passion that surged tempestuously in my own breast. Oh! to feel that
+you were born to love, to make some woman's happiness, and yet to find
+not one, not even a noble and courageous Marceline, not so much as an
+old Marquise! Oh! to carry a treasure in your wallet, and not find
+even some child, or inquisitive young girl, to admire it! In my
+despair I often wished to kill myself."
+
+"Finely tragical to-night!" cried Emile.
+
+"Let me pass sentence on my life," Raphael answered. "If your
+friendship is not strong enough to bear with my elegy, if you cannot
+put up with half an hour's tedium for my sake, go to sleep! But, then,
+never ask again for the reason of suicide that hangs over me, that
+comes nearer and calls to me, that I bow myself before. If you are to
+judge a man, you must know his secret thoughts, sorrows, and feelings;
+to know merely the outward events of a man's life would only serve to
+make a chronological table--a fool's notion of history."
+
+Emile was so much struck with the bitter tones in which these words
+were spoken, that he began to pay close attention to Raphael, whom he
+watched with a bewildered expression.
+
+"Now," continued the speaker, "all these things that befell me appear
+in a new light. The sequence of events that I once thought so
+unfortunate created the splendid powers of which, later, I became so
+proud. If I may believe you, I possess the power of readily expressing
+my thoughts, and I could take a forward place in the great field of
+knowledge; and is not this the result of scientific curiosity, of
+excessive application, and a love of reading which possessed me from
+the age of seven till my entry on life? The very neglect in which I
+was left, and the consequent habits of self-repression and self-
+concentration; did not these things teach me how to consider and
+reflect? Nothing in me was squandered in obedience to the exactions of
+the world, which humble the proudest soul and reduce it to a mere
+husk; and was it not this very fact that refined the emotional part of
+my nature till it became the perfected instrument of a loftier purpose
+than passionate desires? I remember watching the women who mistook me
+with all the insight of contemned love.
+
+"I can see now that my natural sincerity must have been displeasing to
+them; women, perhaps, even require a little hypocrisy. And I, who in
+the same hour's space am alternately a man and a child, frivolous and
+thoughtful, free from bias and brimful of superstition, and oftentimes
+myself as much a woman as any of them; how should they do otherwise
+than take my simplicity for cynicism, my innocent candor for
+impudence? They found my knowledge tiresome; my feminine languor,
+weakness. I was held to be listless and incapable of love or of steady
+purpose; a too active imagination, that curse of poets, was no doubt
+the cause. My silence was idiotic; and as I daresay I alarmed them by
+my efforts to please, women one and all have condemned me. With tears
+and mortification, I bowed before the decision of the world; but my
+distress was not barren. I determined to revenge myself on society; I
+would dominate the feminine intellect, and so have the feminine soul
+at my mercy; all eyes should be fixed upon me, when the servant at the
+door announced my name. I had determined from my childhood that I
+would be a great man; I said with Andre Chenier, as I struck my
+forehead, 'There is something underneath that!' I felt, I believed,
+the thought within me that I must express, the system I must
+establish, the knowledge I must interpret.
+
+"Let me pour out my follies, dear Emile; to-day I am barely twenty-six
+years old, certain of dying unrecognized, and I have never been the
+lover of the woman I dreamed of possessing. Have we not all of us,
+more or less, believed in the reality of a thing because we wished it?
+I would never have a young man for my friend who did not place himself
+in dreams upon a pedestal, weave crowns for his head, and have
+complaisant mistresses. I myself would often be a general, nay,
+emperor; I have been a Byron, and then a nobody. After this sport on
+these pinnacles of human achievement, I became aware that all the
+difficulties and steeps of life were yet to face. My exuberant self-
+esteem came to my aid; I had that intense belief in my destiny, which
+perhaps amounts to genius in those who will not permit themselves to
+be distracted by contact with the world, as sheep that leave their
+wool on the briars of every thicket they pass by. I meant to cover
+myself with glory, and to work in silence for the mistress I hoped to
+have one day. Women for me were resumed into a single type, and this
+woman I looked to meet in the first that met my eyes; but in each and
+all I saw a queen, and as queens must make the first advances to their
+lovers, they must draw near to me--to me, so sickly, shy, and poor.
+For her, who should take pity on me, my heart held in store such
+gratitude over and beyond love, that I had worshiped her her whole
+life long. Later, my observations have taught me bitter truths.
+
+"In this way, dear Emile, I ran the risk of remaining companionless
+for good. The incomprehensible bent of women's minds appears to lead
+them to see nothing but the weak points in a clever man, and the
+strong points of a fool. They feel the liveliest sympathy with the
+fool's good qualities, which perpetually flatter their own defects;
+while they find the man of talent hardly agreeable enough to
+compensate for his shortcomings. All capacity is a sort of
+intermittent fever, and no woman is anxious to share in its
+discomforts only; they look to find in their lovers the wherewithal to
+gratify their own vanity. It is themselves that they love in us! But
+the artist, poor and proud, along with his endowment of creative
+power, is furnished with an aggressive egotism! Everything about him
+is involved in I know not what whirlpool of his ideas, and even his
+mistress must gyrate along with them. How is a woman, spoilt with
+praise, to believe in the love of a man like that? Will she go to seek
+him out? That sort of lover has not the leisure to sit beside a sofa
+and give himself up to the sentimental simperings that women are so
+fond of, and on which the false and unfeeling pride themselves. He
+cannot spare the time from his work, and how can he afford to humble
+himself and go a-masquerading! I was ready to give my life once and
+for all, but I could not degrade it in detail. Besides, there is
+something indescribably paltry in a stockbroker's tactics, who runs on
+errands for some insipid affected woman; all this disgusts an artist.
+Love in the abstract is not enough for a great man in poverty; he has
+need of its utmost devotion. The frivolous creatures who spend their
+lives in trying on cashmeres, or make themselves into clothes-pegs to
+hang the fashions from, exact the devotion which is not theirs to
+give; for them, love means the pleasure of ruling and not of obeying.
+She who is really a wife, one in heart, flesh, and bone, must follow
+wherever he leads, in whom her life, her strength, her pride, and
+happiness are centered. Ambitious men need those Oriental women whose
+whole thought is given to the study of their requirements; for
+unhappiness means for them the incompatibility of their means with
+their desires. But I, who took myself for a man of genius, must needs
+feel attracted by these very she-coxcombs. So, as I cherished ideas so
+different from those generally received; as I wished to scale the
+heavens without a ladder, was possessed of wealth that could not
+circulate, and of knowledge so wide and so imperfectly arranged and
+digested that it overtaxed my memory; as I had neither relations nor
+friends in the midst of this lonely and ghastly desert, a desert of
+paving stones, full of animation, life, and thought, wherein every one
+is worse than inimical, indifferent to wit; I made a very natural if
+foolish resolve, which required such unknown impossibilities, that my
+spirits rose. It was as if I had laid a wager with myself, for I was
+at once the player and the cards.
+
+"This was my plan. The eleven hundred francs must keep life in me for
+three years--the time I allowed myself in which to bring to light a
+work which should draw attention to me, and make me either a name or a
+fortune. I exulted at the thought of living on bread and milk, like a
+hermit in the Thebaid, while I plunged into the world of books and
+ideas, and so reached a lofty sphere beyond the tumult of Paris, a
+sphere of silent labor where I would entomb myself like a chrysalis to
+await a brilliant and splendid new birth. I imperiled my life in order
+to live. By reducing my requirements to real needs and the barest
+necessaries, I found that three hundred and sixty-five francs sufficed
+for a year of penury; and, in fact, I managed to exist on that slender
+sum, so long as I submitted to my own claustral discipline."
+
+"Impossible!" cried Emile.
+
+"I lived for nearly three years in that way," Raphael answered, with a
+kind of pride. "Let us reckon it out. Three sous for bread, two for
+milk, and three for cold meat, kept me from dying of hunger, and my
+mind in a state of peculiar lucidity. I have observed, as you know,
+the wonderful effects produced by diet upon the imagination. My
+lodgings cost me three sous daily; I burnt three sous more in oil at
+night; I did my own housework, and wore flannel shirts so as to reduce
+the laundress' bill to two sous per day. The money I spent yearly in
+coal, if divided up, never cost more than two sous for each day. I had
+three years' supply of clothing, and I only dressed when going out to
+some library or public lecture. These expenses, all told, only
+amounted to eighteen sous, so two were left over for emergencies. I
+cannot recollect, during that long period of toil, either crossing the
+Pont des Arts, or paying for water; I went out to fetch it every
+morning from the fountain in the Place Saint Michel, at the corner of
+the Rue de Gres. Oh, I wore my poverty proudly. A man urged on towards
+a fair future walks through life like an innocent person to his death;
+he feels no shame about it.
+
+"I would not think of illness. Like Aquilina, I faced the hospital
+without terror. I had not a moment's doubt of my health, and besides,
+the poor can only take to their beds to die. I cut my own hair till
+the day when an angel of love and kindness . . . But I do not want to
+anticipate the state of things that I shall reach later. You must
+simply know that I lived with one grand thought for a mistress, a
+dream, an illusion which deceives us all more or less at first. To-day
+I laugh at myself, at that self, holy perhaps and heroic, which is now
+no more. I have since had a closer view of society and the world, of
+our manners and customs, and seen the dangers of my innocent credulity
+and the superfluous nature of my fervent toil. Stores of that sort are
+quite useless to aspirants for fame. Light should be the baggage of
+seekers after fortune!
+
+"Ambitious men spend their youth in rendering themselves worthy of
+patronage; it is their great mistake. While the foolish creatures are
+laying in stores of knowledge and energy, so that they shall not sink
+under the weight of responsible posts that recede from them, schemers
+come and go who are wealthy in words and destitute in ideas, astonish
+the ignorant, and creep into the confidence of those who have a little
+knowledge. While the first kind study, the second march ahead; the one
+sort is modest, and the other impudent; the man of genius is silent
+about his own merits, but these schemers make a flourish of theirs,
+and they are bound to get on. It is so strongly to the interest of men
+in office to believe in ready-made capacity, and in brazen-faced
+merit, that it is downright childish of the learned to expect material
+rewards. I do not seek to paraphrase the commonplace moral, the song
+of songs that obscure genius is for ever singing; I want to come, in a
+logical manner, by the reason of the frequent successes of mediocrity.
+Alas! study shows us such a mother's kindness that it would be a sin
+perhaps to ask any other reward of her than the pure and delightful
+pleasures with which she sustains her children.
+
+"Often I remember soaking my bread in milk, as I sat by the window to
+take the fresh air; while my eyes wandered over a view of roofs--
+brown, gray, or red, slated or tiled, and covered with yellow or green
+mosses. At first the prospect may have seemed monotonous, but I very
+soon found peculiar beauties in it. Sometimes at night, streams of
+light through half-closed shutters would light up and color the dark
+abysses of this strange landscape. Sometimes the feeble lights of the
+street lamps sent up yellow gleams through the fog, and in each street
+dimly outlined the undulations of a crowd of roofs, like billows in a
+motionless sea. Very occasionally, too, a face appeared in this gloomy
+waste; above the flowers in some skyey garden I caught a glimpse of an
+old woman's crooked angular profile as she watered her nasturtiums;
+or, in a crazy attic window, a young girl, fancying herself quite
+alone as she dressed herself--a view of nothing more than a fair
+forehead and long tresses held above her by a pretty white arm.
+
+"I liked to see the short-lived plant-life in the gutters--poor weeds
+that a storm soon washed away. I studied the mosses, with their colors
+revived by showers, or transformed by the sun into a brown velvet that
+fitfully caught the light. Such things as these formed my recreations
+--the passing poetic moods of daylight, the melancholy mists, sudden
+gleams of sunlight, the silence and the magic of night, the mysteries
+of dawn, the smoke wreaths from each chimney; every chance event, in
+fact, in my curious world became familiar to me. I came to love this
+prison of my own choosing. This level Parisian prairie of roofs,
+beneath which lay populous abysses, suited my humor, and harmonized
+with my thoughts.
+
+"Sudden descents into the world from the divine height of scientific
+meditation are very exhausting; and, besides, I had apprehended
+perfectly the bare life of the cloister. When I made up my mind to
+carry out this new plan of life, I looked for quarters in the most
+out-of-the-way parts of Paris. One evening, as I returned home to the
+Rue des Cordiers from the Place de l'Estrapade, I saw a girl of
+fourteen playing with a battledore at the corner of the Rue de Cluny,
+her winsome ways and laughter amused the neighbors. September was not
+yet over; it was warm and fine, so that women sat chatting before
+their doors as if it were a fete-day in some country town. At first I
+watched the charming expression of the girl's face and her graceful
+attitudes, her pose fit for a painter. It was a pretty sight. I looked
+about me, seeking to understand this blithe simplicity in the midst of
+Paris, and saw that the street was a blind alley and but little
+frequented. I remembered that Jean Jacques had once lived here, and
+looked up the Hotel Saint-Quentin. Its dilapidated condition awakened
+hopes of a cheap lodging, and I determined to enter.
+
+"I found myself in a room with a low ceiling; the candles, in classic-
+looking copper candle-sticks, were set in a row under each key. The
+predominating cleanliness of the room made a striking contrast to the
+usual state of such places. This one was as neat as a bit of genre;
+there was a charming trimness about the blue coverlet, the cooking
+pots and furniture. The mistress of the house rose and came to me. She
+seemed to be about forty years of age; sorrows had left their traces
+on her features, and weeping had dimmed her eyes. I deferentially
+mentioned the amount I could pay; it seemed to cause her no surprise;
+she sought out a key from the row, went up to the attics with me, and
+showed me a room that looked out on the neighboring roofs and courts;
+long poles with linen drying on them hung out of the window.
+
+"Nothing could be uglier than this garret, awaiting its scholar, with
+its dingy yellow walls and odor of poverty. The roofing fell in a
+steep slope, and the sky was visible through chinks in the tiles.
+There was room for a bed, a table, and a few chairs, and beneath the
+highest point of the roof my piano could stand. Not being rich enough
+to furnish this cage (that might have been one of the Piombi of
+Venice), the poor woman had never been able to let it; and as I had
+saved from the recent sale the furniture that was in a fashion
+peculiarly mine, I very soon came to terms with my landlady, and moved
+in on the following day.
+
+"For three years I lived in this airy sepulchre, and worked
+unflaggingly day and night; and so great was the pleasure that study
+seemed to me the fairest theme and the happiest solution of life. The
+tranquillity and peace that a scholar needs is something as sweet and
+exhilarating as love. Unspeakable joys are showered on us by the
+exertion of our mental faculties; the quest of ideas, and the tranquil
+contemplation of knowledge; delights indescribable, because purely
+intellectual and impalpable to our senses. So we are obliged to use
+material terms to express the mysteries of the soul. The pleasure of
+striking out in some lonely lake of clear water, with forests, rocks,
+and flowers around, and the soft stirring of the warm breeze,--all
+this would give, to those who knew them not, a very faint idea of the
+exultation with which my soul bathed itself in the beams of an unknown
+light, hearkened to the awful and uncertain voice of inspiration, as
+vision upon vision poured from some unknown source through my
+throbbing brain.
+
+"No earthly pleasure can compare with the divine delight of watching
+the dawn of an idea in the space of abstractions as it rises like the
+morning sun; an idea that, better still, attains gradually like a
+child to puberty and man's estate. Study lends a kind of enchantment
+to all our surroundings. The wretched desk covered with brown leather
+at which I wrote, my piano, bed, and armchair, the odd wall-paper and
+furniture seemed to have for me a kind of life in them, and to be
+humble friends of mine and mute partakers of my destiny. How often
+have I confided my soul to them in a glance! A warped bit of beading
+often met my eyes, and suggested new developments,--a striking proof
+of my system, or a felicitous word by which to render my all but
+inexpressible thought. By sheer contemplation of the things about me I
+discerned an expression and a character in each. If the setting sun
+happened to steal in through my narrow window, they would take new
+colors, fade or shine, grow dull or gay, and always amaze me with some
+new effect. These trifling incidents of a solitary life, which escape
+those preoccupied with outward affairs, make the solace of prisoners.
+And what was I but the captive of an idea, imprisoned in my system,
+but sustained also by the prospect of a brilliant future? At each
+obstacle that I overcame, I seemed to kiss the soft hands of a woman
+with a fair face, a wealthy, well-dressed woman, who should some day
+say softly, while she caressed my hair:
+
+" 'Poor Angel, how thou hast suffered!'
+
+"I had undertaken two great works--one a comedy that in a very short
+time must bring me wealth and fame, and an entry into those circles
+whither I wished to return, to exercise the royal privileges of a man
+of genius. You all saw nothing in that masterpiece but the blunder of
+a young man fresh from college, a babyish fiasco. Your jokes clipped
+the wings of a throng of illusions, which have never stirred since
+within me. You, dear Emile, alone brought soothing to the deep wounds
+that others had made in my heart. You alone will admire my 'Theory of
+the Will.' I devoted most of my time to that long work, for which I
+studied Oriental languages, physiology and anatomy. If I do not
+deceive myself, my labors will complete the task begun by Mesmer,
+Lavater, Gall, and Bichat, and open up new paths in science.
+
+"There ends that fair life of mine, the daily sacrifice, the
+unrecognized silkworm's toil, that is, perhaps, its own sole
+recompense. Since attaining years of discretion, until the day when I
+finished my 'Theory,' I observed, learned, wrote, and read
+unintermittingly; my life was one long imposition, as schoolboys say.
+Though by nature effeminately attached to Oriental indolence, sensual
+in tastes, and a wooer of dreams, I worked incessantly, and refused to
+taste any of the enjoyments of Parisian life. Though a glutton, I
+became abstemious; and loving exercise and sea voyages as I did, and
+haunted by the wish to visit many countries, still child enough to
+play at ducks and drakes with pebbles over a pond, I led a sedentary
+life with a pen in my fingers. I liked talking, but I went to sit and
+mutely listen to professors who gave public lectures at the
+Bibliotheque or the Museum. I slept upon my solitary pallet like a
+Benedictine brother, though woman was my one chimera, a chimera that
+fled from me as I wooed it! In short, my life has been a cruel
+contradiction, a perpetual cheat. After that, judge a man!
+
+"Sometimes my natural propensities broke out like a fire long
+smothered. I was debarred from the women whose society I desired,
+stripped of everything and lodged in an artist's garret, and by a sort
+of mirage or calenture I was surrounded by captivating mistresses. I
+drove through the streets of Paris, lolling on the soft cushions of a
+fine equipage. I plunged into dissipation, into corroding vice, I
+desired and possessed everything, for fasting had made me light-headed
+like the tempted Saint Anthony. Slumber, happily, would put an end at
+last to these devastating trances; and on the morrow science would
+beckon me, smiling, and I was faithful to her. I imagine that women
+reputed virtuous, must often fall a prey to these insane tempests of
+desire and passion, which rise in us in spite of ourselves. Such
+dreams have a charm of their own; they are something akin to evening
+gossip round the winter fire, when one sets out for some voyage in
+China. But what becomes of virtue during these delicious excursions,
+when fancy overleaps all difficulties?
+
+"During the first ten months of seclusion I led the life of poverty
+and solitude that I have described to you; I used to steal out
+unobserved every morning to buy my own provisions for the day; I
+tidied my room; I was at once master and servant, and played the
+Diogenes with incredible spirit. But afterwards, while my hostess and
+her daughter watched my ways and behavior, scrutinized my appearance
+and divined my poverty, there could not but be some bonds between us;
+perhaps because they were themselves so very poor. Pauline, the
+charming child, whose latent and unconscious grace had, in a manner,
+brought me there, did me many services that I could not well refuse.
+All women fallen on evil days are sisters; they speak a common
+language; they have the same generosity--the generosity that possesses
+nothing, and so is lavish of its affection, of its time, and of its
+very self.
+
+"Imperceptibly Pauline took me under her protection, and would do
+things for me. No kind of objection was made by her mother, whom I
+even surprised mending my linen; she blushed for the charitable
+occupation. In spite of myself, they took charge of me, and I accepted
+their services.
+
+"In order to understand the peculiar condition of my mind, my
+preoccupation with work must be remembered, the tyranny of ideas, and
+the instinctive repugnance that a man who leads an intellectual life
+must ever feel for the material details of existence. Could I well
+repulse the delicate attentions of Pauline, who would noiselessly
+bring me my frugal repast, when she noticed that I had taken nothing
+for seven or eight hours? She had the tact of a woman and the
+inventiveness of a child; she would smile as she made sign to me that
+I must not see her. Ariel glided under my roof in the form of a sylph
+who foresaw every want of mine.
+
+"One evening Pauline told me her story with touching simplicity. Her
+father had been a major in the horse grenadiers of the Imperial Guard.
+He had been taken prisoner by the Cossacks, at the passage of
+Beresina; and when Napoleon later on proposed an exchange, the Russian
+authorities made search for him in Siberia in vain; he had escaped
+with a view of reaching India, and since then Mme. Gaudin, my
+landlady, could hear no news of her husband. Then came the disasters
+of 1814 and 1815; and, left alone and without resource, she had
+decided to let furnished lodgings in order to keep herself and her
+daughter.
+
+"She always hoped to see her husband again. Her greatest trouble was
+about her daughter's education; the Princess Borghese was her
+Pauline's godmother; and Pauline must not be unworthy of the fair
+future promised by her imperial protectress. When Mme. Gaudin confided
+to me this heavy trouble that preyed upon her, she said, with sharp
+pain in her voice, 'I would give up the property and the scrap of
+paper that makes Gaudin a baron of the empire, and all our rights to
+the endowment of Wistchnau, if only Pauline could be brought up at
+Saint-Denis?' Her words struck me; now I could show my gratitude for
+the kindnesses expended on me by the two women; all at once the idea
+of offering to finish Pauline's education occurred to me; and the
+offer was made and accepted in the most perfect simplicity. In this
+way I came to have some hours of recreation. Pauline had natural
+aptitude; she learned so quickly, that she soon surpassed me at the
+piano. As she became accustomed to think aloud in my presence, she
+unfolded all the sweet refinements of a heart that was opening itself
+out to life, as some flower-cup opens slowly to the sun. She listened
+to me, pleased and thoughtful, letting her dark velvet eyes rest upon
+me with a half smile in them; she repeated her lessons in soft and
+gentle tones, and showed childish glee when I was satisfied with her.
+Her mother grew more and more anxious every day to shield the young
+girl from every danger (for all the beauty promised in early life was
+developing in the crescent moon), and was glad to see her spend whole
+days indoors in study. My piano was the only one she could use, and
+while I was out she practised on it. When I came home, Pauline would
+be in my room, in her shabby dress, but her slightest movement
+revealed her slender figure in its attractive grace, in spite of the
+coarse materials that she wore. As with the heroine of the fable of
+'Peau-d'Ane,' a dainty foot peeped out of the clumsy shoes. But all
+her wealth of girlish beauty was as lost upon me. I had laid commands
+upon myself to see a sister only in Pauline. I dreaded lest I should
+betray her mother's faith in me. I admired the lovely girl as if she
+had been a picture, or as the portrait of a dead mistress; she was at
+once my child and my statue. For me, another Pygmalion, the maiden
+with the hues of life and the living voice was to become a form of
+inanimate marble. I was very strict with her, but the more I made her
+feel my pedagogue's severity, the more gentle and submissive she grew.
+
+"If a generous feeling strengthened me in my reserve and self-
+restraint, prudent considerations were not lacking beside. Integrity
+of purpose cannot, I think, fail to accompany integrity in money
+matters. To my mind, to become insolvent or to betray a woman is the
+same sort of thing. If you love a young girl, or allow yourself to be
+beloved by her, a contract is implied, and its conditions should be
+thoroughly understood. We are free to break with the woman who sells
+herself, but not with the young girl who has given herself to us and
+does not know the extent of her sacrifice. I must have married
+Pauline, and that would have been madness. Would it not have given
+over that sweet girlish heart to terrible misfortunes? My poverty made
+its selfish voice heard, and set an iron barrier between that gentle
+nature and mine. Besides, I am ashamed to say, that I cannot imagine
+love in the midst of poverty. Perhaps this is a vitiation due to that
+malady of mankind called civilization; but a woman in squalid poverty
+would exert no fascination over me, were she attractive as Homer's
+Galatea, the fair Helen.
+
+"Ah, vive l'amour! But let it be in silk and cashmere, surrounded with
+the luxury which so marvelously embellishes it; for is it not perhaps
+itself a luxury? I enjoy making havoc with an elaborate erection of
+scented hair; I like to crush flowers, to disarrange and crease a
+smart toilette at will. A bizarre attraction lies for me in burning
+eyes that blaze through a lace veil, like flame through cannon smoke.
+My way of love would be to mount by a silken ladder, in the silence of
+a winter night. And what bliss to reach, all powdered with snow, a
+perfumed room, with hangings of painted silk, to find a woman there,
+who likewise shakes away the snow from her; for what other name can be
+found for the white muslin wrappings that vaguely define her, like
+some angel form issuing from a cloud! And then I wish for furtive
+joys, for the security of audacity. I want to see once more that woman
+of mystery, but let it be in the throng, dazzling, unapproachable,
+adored on all sides, dressed in laces and ablaze with diamonds, laying
+her commands upon every one; so exalted above us, that she inspires
+awe, and none dares to pay his homage to her.
+
+"She gives me a stolen glance, amid her court, a look that exposes the
+unreality of all this; that resigns for me the world and all men in
+it! Truly I have scorned myself for a passion for a few yards of lace,
+velvet, and fine lawn, and the hairdresser's feats of skill; a love of
+wax-lights, a carriage and a title, a heraldic coronet painted on
+window panes, or engraved by a jeweler; in short, a liking for all
+that is adventitious and least woman in woman. I have scorned and
+reasoned with myself, but all in vain.
+
+"A woman of rank with her subtle smile, her high-born air, and self-
+esteem captivates me. The barriers she erects between herself and the
+world awaken my vanity, a good half of love. There would be more
+relish for me in bliss that all others envied. If my mistress does
+nothing that other women do, and neither lives nor conducts herself
+like them, wears a cloak that they cannot attain, breathes a perfume
+of her own, then she seems to rise far above me. The further she rises
+from earth, even in the earthlier aspects of love, the fairer she
+becomes for me.
+
+"Luckily for me we have had no queen in France these twenty years, for
+I should have fallen in love with her. A woman must be wealthy to
+acquire the manners of a princess. What place had Pauline among these
+far-fetched imaginings? Could she bring me the love that is death,
+that brings every faculty into play, the nights that are paid for by
+life? We hardly die, I think, for an insignificant girl who gives
+herself to us; and I could never extinguish these feelings and poet's
+dreams within me. I was born for an inaccessible love, and fortune has
+overtopped my desire.
+
+"How often have I set satin shoes on Pauline's tiny feet, confined her
+form, slender as a young poplar, in a robe of gauze, and thrown a
+loose scarf about her as I saw her tread the carpets in her mansion
+and led her out to her splendid carriage! In such guise I should have
+adored her. I endowed her with all the pride she lacked, stripped her
+of her virtues, her natural simple charm, and frank smile, in order to
+plunge her heart in our Styx of depravity that makes invulnerable,
+load her with our crimes, make of her the fantastical doll of our
+drawing-rooms, the frail being who lies about in the morning and comes
+to life again at night with the dawn of tapers. Pauline was fresh-
+hearted and affectionate--I would have had her cold and formal.
+
+"In the last days of my frantic folly, memory brought Pauline before
+me, as it brings the scenes of our childhood, and made me pause to
+muse over past delicious moments that softened my heart. I sometimes
+saw her, the adorable girl who sat quietly sewing at my table, wrapped
+in her meditations; the faint light from my window fell upon her and
+was reflected back in silvery rays from her thick black hair;
+sometimes I heard her young laughter, or the rich tones of her voice
+singing some canzonet that she composed without effort. And often my
+Pauline seemed to grow greater, as music flowed from her, and her face
+bore a striking resemblance to the noble one that Carlo Dolci chose
+for the type of Italy. My cruel memory brought her back athwart the
+dissipations of my existence, like a remorse, or a symbol of purity.
+But let us leave the poor child to her own fate. Whatever her troubles
+may have been, at any rate I protected her from a menacing tempest--I
+did not drag her down into my hell.
+
+"Until last winter I led the uneventful studious life of which I have
+given you some faint picture. In the earliest days of December 1829, I
+came across Rastignac, who, in spite of the shabby condition of my
+wardrobe, linked his arm in mine, and inquired into my affairs with a
+quite brotherly interest. Caught by his engaging manner, I gave him a
+brief account of my life and hopes; he began to laugh, and treated me
+as a mixture of a man of genius and a fool. His Gascon accent and
+knowledge of the world, the easy life his clever management procured
+for him, all produced an irresistible effect upon me. I should die an
+unrecognized failure in a hospital, Rastignac said, and be buried in a
+pauper's grave. He talked of charlatanism. Every man of genius was a
+charlatan, he plainly showed me in that pleasant way of his that makes
+him so fascinating. He insisted that I must be out of my senses, and
+would be my own death, if I lived on alone in the Rue des Cordiers.
+According to him, I ought to go into society, to accustom people to
+the sound of my name, and to rid myself of the simple title of
+'monsieur' which sits but ill on a great man in his lifetime.
+
+" 'Those who know no better,' he cried, 'call this sort of business
+SCHEMING, and moral people condemn it for a "dissipated life." We need
+not stop to look at what people think, but see the results. You work,
+you say? Very good, but nothing will ever come of that. Now, I am
+ready for anything and fit for nothing. As lazy as a lobster? Very
+likely, but I succeed everywhere. I go out into society, I push myself
+forward, the others make way before me; I brag and am believed; I
+incur debts which somebody else pays! Dissipation, dear boy, is a
+methodical policy. The life of a man who deliberately runs through his
+fortune often becomes a business speculation; his friends, his
+pleasures, patrons, and acquaintances are his capital. Suppose a
+merchant runs a risk of a million, for twenty years he can neither
+sleep, eat, nor amuse himself, he is brooding over his million, it
+makes him run about all over Europe; he worries himself, goes to the
+devil in every way that man has invented. Then comes a liquidation,
+such as I have seen myself, which very often leaves him penniless and
+without a reputation or a friend. The spendthrift, on the other hand,
+takes life as a serious game and sees his horses run. He loses his
+capital, perhaps, but he stands a chance of being nominated Receiver-
+General, of making a wealthy marriage, or of an appointment of attache
+to a minister or ambassador; and he has his friends left and his name,
+and he never wants money. He knows the standing of everybody, and uses
+every one for his own benefit. Is this logical, or am I a madman after
+all? Haven't you there all the moral of the comedy that goes on every
+day in this world? . . . Your work is completed' he went on after a
+pause; 'you are immensely clever! Well, you have only arrived at my
+starting-point. Now, you had better look after its success yourself;
+it is the surest way. You will make allies in every clique, and secure
+applause beforehand. I mean to go halves in your glory myself; I shall
+be the jeweler who set the diamonds in your crown. Come here to-morrow
+evening, by way of a beginning. I will introduce you to a house where
+all Paris goes, all OUR Paris, that is--the Paris of exquisites,
+millionaires, celebrities, all the folk who talk gold like Chrysostom.
+When they have taken up a book, that book becomes the fashion; and
+if it is something really good for once, they will have declared it
+to be a work of genius without knowing it. If you have any sense, my
+dear fellow, you will ensure the success of your "Theory," by a
+better understanding of the theory of success. To-morrow evening you
+shall go to see that queen of the moment--the beautiful Countess
+Foedora. . . .'
+
+" 'I have never heard of her. . . .'
+
+" 'You Hottentot!' laughed Rastignac; 'you do not know Foedora? A
+great match with an income of nearly eighty thousand livres, who has
+taken a fancy to nobody, or else no one has taken a fancy to her. A
+sort of feminine enigma, a half Russian Parisienne, or a half Parisian
+Russian. All the romantic productions that never get published are
+brought out at her house; she is the handsomest woman in Paris, and
+the most gracious! You are not even a Hottentot; you are something
+between the Hottentot and the beast. . . . Good-bye till to-morrow.'
+
+"He swung round on his heel and made off without waiting for my
+answer. It never occurred to him that a reasoning being could refuse
+an introduction to Foedora. How can the fascination of a name be
+explained? FOEDORA haunted me like some evil thought, with which you
+seek to come to terms. A voice said in me, 'You are going to see
+Foedora!' In vain I reasoned with that voice, saying that it lied to
+me; all my arguments were defeated by the name 'Foedora.' Was not the
+name, and even the woman herself, the symbol of all my desires, and
+the object of my life?
+
+"The name called up recollections of the conventional glitter of the
+world, the upper world of Paris with its brilliant fetes and the
+tinsel of its vanities. The woman brought before me all the problems
+of passion on which my mind continually ran. Perhaps it was neither
+the woman nor the name, but my own propensities, that sprang up within
+me and tempted me afresh. Here was the Countess Foedora, rich and
+loveless, proof against the temptations of Paris; was not this woman
+the very incarnation of my hopes and visions? I fashioned her for
+myself, drew her in fancy, and dreamed of her. I could not sleep that
+night; I became her lover; I overbrimmed a few hours with a whole
+lifetime--a lover's lifetime; the experience of its prolific delights
+burned me.
+
+"The next day I could not bear the tortures of delay; I borrowed a
+novel, and spent the whole day over it, so that I could not possibly
+think nor keep account of the time till night. Foedora's name echoed
+through me even as I read, but only as a distant sound; though it
+could be heard, it was not troublesome. Fortunately, I owned a fairly
+creditable black coat and a white waistcoat; of all my fortune there
+now remained abut thirty francs, which I had distributed about among
+my clothes and in my drawers, so as to erect between my whims and the
+spending of a five-franc piece a thorny barrier of search, and an
+adventurous peregrination round my room. While I as dressing, I dived
+about for my money in an ocean of papers. This scarcity of specie will
+give you some idea of the value of that squandered upon gloves and
+cab-hire; a month's bread disappeared at one fell swoop. Alas! money
+is always forthcoming for our caprices; we only grudge the cost of
+things that are useful or necessary. We recklessly fling gold to an
+opera-dancer, and haggle with a tradesman whose hungry family must
+wait for the settlement of our bill. How many men are there that wear
+a coat that cost a hundred francs, and carry a diamond in the head of
+their cane, and dine for twenty-five SOUS for all that! It seems as
+though we could never pay enough for the pleasures of vanity.
+
+"Rastignac, punctual to his appointment, smiled at the transformation,
+and joked about it. On the way he gave me benevolent advice as to my
+conduct with the countess; he described her as mean, vain, and
+suspicious; but though mean, she was ostentatious, her vanity was
+transparent, and her mistrust good-humored.
+
+" 'You know I am pledged,' he said, 'and what I should lose, too, if I
+tried a change in love. So my observation of Foedora has been quite
+cool and disinterested, and my remarks must have some truth in them. I
+was looking to your future when I thought of introducing you to her;
+so mind very carefully what I am about to say. She has a terrible
+memory. She is clever enough to drive a diplomatist wild; she would
+know it at once if he spoke the truth. Between ourselves, I fancy that
+her marriage was not recognized by the Emperor, for the Russian
+ambassador began to smile when I spoke of her; he does not receive her
+either, and only bows very coolly if he meets her in the Bois. For all
+that, she is in Madame de Serizy's set, and visits Mesdames de
+Nucingen and de Restaud. There is no cloud over her here in France;
+the Duchesse de Carigliano, the most-strait-laced marechale in the
+whole Bonapartist coterie, often goes to spend the summer with her at
+her country house. Plenty of young fops, sons of peers of France, have
+offered her a title in exchange for her fortune, and she has politely
+declined them all. Her susceptibilities, maybe, are not to be touched
+by anything less than a count. Aren't you a marquis? Go ahead if you
+fancy her. This is what you may call receiving your instructions.'
+
+"His raillery made me think that Rastignac wished to joke and excite
+my curiosity, so that I was in a paroxysm of my extemporized passion
+by the time that we stopped before a peristyle full of flowers. My
+heart beat and my color rose as we went up the great carpeted
+staircase, and I noticed about me all the studied refinements of
+English comfort; I was infatuatedly bourgeois; I forgot my origin and
+all my personal and family pride. Alas! I had but just left a garret,
+after three years of poverty, and I could not just then set the
+treasures there acquired above such trifles as these. Nor could I
+rightly estimate the worth of the vast intellectual capital which
+turns to riches at the moment when opportunity comes within our reach,
+opportunity that does not overwhelm, because study has prepared us for
+the struggles of public life.
+
+"I found a woman of about twenty-two years of age; she was of average
+height, was dressed in white, and held a feather fire-screen in her
+hand; a group of men stood around her. She rose at the sight of
+Rastignac, and came towards us with a gracious smile and a musically-
+uttered compliment, prepared no doubt beforehand, for me. Our friend
+had spoken of me as a rising man, and his clever way of making the
+most of me had procured me this flattering reception. I was confused
+by the attention that every one paid to me; but Rastignac had luckily
+mentioned my modesty. I was brought in contact with scholars, men of
+letters, ex-ministers, and peers of France. The conversation,
+interrupted a while by my coming, was resumed. I took courage, feeling
+that I had a reputation to maintain, and without abusing my privilege,
+I spoke when it fell to me to speak, trying to state the questions at
+issue in words more or less profound, witty or trenchant, and I made a
+certain sensation. Rastignac was a prophet for the thousandth time in
+his life. As soon as the gathering was large enough to restore freedom
+to individuals, he took my arm, and we went round the rooms.
+
+" 'Don't look as if you were too much struck by the princess,' he
+said, 'or she will guess your object in coming to visit her.'
+
+"The rooms were furnished in excellent taste. Each apartment had a
+character of its own, as in wealthy English houses; and the silken
+hangings, the style of the furniture, and the ornaments, even the most
+trifling, were all subordinated to the original idea. In a gothic
+boudoir the doors were concealed by tapestried curtains, and the
+paneling by hangings; the clock and the pattern of the carpet were
+made to harmonize with the gothic surroundings. The ceiling, with its
+carved cross-beams of brown wood, was full of charm and originality;
+the panels were beautifully wrought; nothing disturbed the general
+harmony of the scheme of decoration, not even the windows with their
+rich colored glass. I was surprised by the extensive knowledge of
+decoration that some artist had brought to bear on a little modern
+room, it was so pleasant and fresh, and not heavy, but subdued with
+its dead gold hues. It had all the vague sentiment of a German ballad;
+it was a retreat fit for some romance of 1827, perfumed by the exotic
+flowers set in their stands. Another apartment in the suite was a
+gilded reproduction of the Louis Quatorze period, with modern
+paintings on the walls in odd but pleasant contrast.
+
+" 'You would not be so badly lodged,' was Rastignac's slightly
+sarcastic comment. 'It is captivating, isn't it?' he added, smiling as
+he sat down. Then suddenly he rose, and led me by the hand into a
+bedroom, where the softened light fell upon the bed under its canopy
+of muslin and white watered silk--a couch for a young fairy betrothed
+to one of the genii.
+
+" 'Isn't it wantonly bad taste, insolent and unbounded coquetry,' he
+said, lowering his voice, 'that allows us to see this throne of love?
+She gives herself to no one, and anybody may leave his card here. If I
+were not committed, I should like to see her at my feet all tears and
+submission.'
+
+" 'Are you so certain of her virtue?'
+
+" 'The boldest and even the cleverest adventurers among us,
+acknowledge themselves defeated, and continue to be her lovers and
+devoted friends. Isn't that woman a puzzle?'
+
+"His words seemed to intoxicate me; I had jealous fears already of the
+past. I leapt for joy, and hurried back to the countess, whom I had
+seen in the gothic boudoir. She stopped me by a smile, made me sit
+beside her, and talked about my work, seeming to take the greatest
+interest in it, and all the more when I set forth my theories
+amusingly, instead of adopting the formal language of a professor for
+their explanation. It seemed to divert her to be told that the human
+will was a material force like steam; that in the moral world nothing
+could resist its power if a man taught himself to concentrate it, to
+economize it, and to project continually its fluid mass in given
+directions upon other souls. Such a man, I said, could modify all
+things relatively to man, even the peremptory laws of nature. The
+questions Foedora raised showed a certain keenness of intellect. I
+took a pleasure in deciding some of them in her favor, in order to
+flatter her; then I confuted her feminine reasoning with a word, and
+roused her curiosity by drawing her attention to an everyday matter--
+to sleep, a thing so apparently commonplace, that in reality is an
+insoluble problem for science. The countess sat in silence for a
+moment when I told her that our ideas were complete organic beings,
+existing in an invisible world, and influencing our destinies; and for
+witnesses I cited the opinions of Descartes, Diderot, and Napoleon,
+who had directed, and still directed, all the currents of the age.
+
+"So I had the honor of amusing this woman; who asked me to come to see
+her when she left me; giving me les grande entrees, in the language of
+the court. Whether it was by dint of substituting polite formulas for
+genuine expressions of feeling, a commendable habit of mine, or
+because Foedora hailed in me a coming celebrity, an addition to her
+learned menagerie; for some reason I thought that I had pleased her. I
+called all my previous physiological studies and knowledge of woman to
+my aid, and minutely scrutinized this singular person and her ways all
+evening. I concealed myself in the embrasure of a window, and sought
+to discover her thoughts from her bearing. I studied the tactics of
+the mistress of the house, as she came and went, sat and chatted,
+beckoned to this one or that, asked questions, listened to the
+answers, as she leaned against the frame of the door; I detected a
+languid charm in her movements, a grace in the flutterings of her
+dress, remarked the nature of the feelings she so powerfully excited,
+and became very incredulous as to her virtue. If Foedora would none of
+love to-day, she had had strong passions at some time; past experience
+of pleasure showed itself in the attitudes she chose in conversation,
+in her coquettish way of leaning against the panel behind her; she
+seemed scarcely able to stand alone, and yet ready for flight from too
+bold a glance. There was a kind of eloquence about her lightly folded
+arms, which, even for benevolent eyes, breathed sentiment. Her fresh
+red lips sharply contrasted with her brilliantly pale complexion. Her
+brown hair brought out all the golden color in her eyes, in which blue
+streaks mingled as in Florentine marble; their expression seemed to
+increase the significance of her words. A studied grace lay in the
+charms of her bodice. Perhaps a rival might have found the lines of
+the thick eyebrows, which almost met, a little hard; or found a fault
+in the almost invisible down that covered her features. I saw the
+signs of passion everywhere, written on those Italian eyelids, on the
+splendid shoulders worthy of the Venus of Milo, on her features, in
+the darker shade of down above a somewhat thick under-lip. She was not
+merely a woman, but a romance. The whole blended harmony of lines, the
+feminine luxuriance of her frame, and its passionate promise, were
+subdued by a constant inexplicable reserve and modesty at variance
+with everything else about her. It needed an observation as keen as my
+own to detect such signs as these in her character. To explain myself
+more clearly; there were two women in Foedora, divided perhaps by the
+line between head and body: the one, the head alone, seemed to be
+susceptible, and the other phlegmatic. She prepared her glance before
+she looked at you, something unspeakably mysterious, some inward
+convulsion seemed revealed by her glittering eyes.
+
+"So, to be brief, either my imperfect moral science had left me a good
+deal to learn in the moral world, or a lofty soul dwelt in the
+countess, lent to her face those charms that fascinated and subdued
+us, and gave her an ascendency only the more complete because it
+comprehended a sympathy of desire.
+
+"I went away completely enraptured with this woman, dazzled by the
+luxury around her, gratified in every faculty of my soul--noble and
+base, good and evil. When I felt myself so excited, eager, and elated,
+I thought I understood the attraction that drew thither those artists,
+diplomatists, men in office, those stock-jobbers encased in triple
+brass. They came, no doubt, to find in her society the delirious
+emotion that now thrilled through every fibre in me, throbbing through
+my brain, setting the blood a-tingle in every vein, fretting even the
+tiniest nerve. And she had given herself to none, so as to keep them
+all. A woman is a coquette so long as she knows not love.
+
+" 'Well,' I said to Rastignac, 'they married her, or sold her perhaps,
+to some old man, and recollections of her first marriage have caused
+her aversion for love.'
+
+"I walked home from the Faubourg St. Honore, where Foedora lived.
+Almost all the breadth of Paris lies between her mansion and the Rue
+des Cordiers, but the distance seemed short, in spite of the cold. And
+I was to lay siege to Foedora's heart, in winter, and a bitter winter,
+with only thirty francs in my possession, and such a distance as that
+lay between us! Only a poor man knows what such a passion costs in
+cab-hire, gloves, linen, tailor's bills, and the like. If the Platonic
+stage lasts a little too long, the affair grows ruinous. As a matter
+of fact, there is many a Lauzun among students of law, who finds it
+impossible to approach a ladylove living on a first floor. And I,
+sickly, thin, poorly dressed, wan and pale as any artist convalescent
+after a work, how could I compete with other young men, curled,
+handsome, smart, outcravatting Croatia; wealthy men, equipped with
+tilburys, and armed with assurance?
+
+" 'Bah, death or Foedora!' I cried, as I went round by a bridge; 'my
+fortune lies in Foedora.'
+
+"That gothic boudoir and Louis Quatorze salon came before my eyes. I
+saw the countess again in her white dress with its large graceful
+sleeves, and all the fascinations of her form and movements. These
+pictures of Foedora and her luxurious surroundings haunted me even in
+my bare, cold garret, when at last I reached it, as disheveled as any
+naturalist's wig. The contrast suggested evil counsel; in such a way
+crimes are conceived. I cursed my honest, self-respecting poverty, my
+garret where such teeming fancies had stirred within me. I trembled
+with fury, I reproached God, the devil, social conditions, my own
+father, the whole universe, indeed, with my fate and my misfortunes. I
+went hungry to bed, muttering ludicrous imprecations, but fully
+determined to win Foedora. Her heart was my last ticket in the
+lottery, my fortune depended upon it.
+
+"I spare you the history of my earlier visits, to reach the drama the
+sooner. In my efforts to appeal to her, I essayed to engage her
+intellect and her vanity on my side; in order to secure her love, I
+gave her any quantity of reasons for increasing her self-esteem; I
+never left her in a state of indifference; women like emotions at any
+cost, I gave them to her in plenty; I would rather have had her angry
+with me than indifferent.
+
+"At first, urged by a strong will and a desire for her love, I assumed
+a little authority, but my own feelings grew stronger and mastered me;
+I relapsed into truth, I lost my head, and fell desperately in love.
+
+"I am not very sure what we mean by the word love in our poetry and
+our talk; but I know that I have never found in all the ready
+rhetorical phrases of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, in whose room perhaps I
+was lodging; nor among the feeble inventions of two centuries of our
+literature, nor in any picture that Italy has produced, a
+representation of the feelings that expanded all at once in my double
+nature. The view of the lake of Bienne, some music of Rossini's, the
+Madonna of Murillo's now in the possession of General Soult,
+Lescombat's letters, a few sayings scattered through collections of
+anecdotes; but most of all the prayers of religious ecstatics, and
+passages in our fabliaux,--these things alone have power to carry me
+back to the divine heights of my first love.
+
+"Nothing expressed in human language, no thought reproducible in
+color, marble, sound, or articulate speech, could ever render the
+force, the truth, the completeness, the suddenness with which love
+awoke in me. To speak of art, is to speak of illusion. Love passes
+through endless transformations before it passes for ever into our
+existence and makes it glow with its own color of flame. The process
+is imperceptible, and baffles the artist's analysis. Its moans and
+complaints are tedious to an uninterested spectator. One would need to
+be very much in love to share the furious transports of Lovelace, as
+one reads Clarissa Harlowe. Love is like some fresh spring, that
+leaves its cresses, its gravel bed and flowers to become first a
+stream and then a river, changing its aspect and its nature as it
+flows to plunge itself in some boundless ocean, where restricted
+natures only find monotony, but where great souls are engulfed in
+endless contemplation.
+
+"How can I dare to describe the hues of fleeting emotions, the
+nothings beyond all price, the spoken accents that beggar language,
+the looks that hold more than all the wealth of poetry? Not one of the
+mysterious scenes that draw us insensibly nearer and nearer to a
+woman, but has depths in it which can swallow up all the poetry that
+ever was written. How can the inner life and mystery that stirs in our
+souls penetrate through our glozes, when we have not even words to
+describe the visible and outward mysteries of beauty? What enchantment
+steeped me for how many hours in unspeakable rapture, filled with the
+sight of Her! What made me happy? I know not. That face of hers
+overflowed with light at such times; it seemed in some way to glow
+with it; the outlines of her face, with the scarcely perceptible down
+on its delicate surface, shone with a beauty belonging to the far
+distant horizon that melts into the sunlight. The light of day seemed
+to caress her as she mingled in it; rather it seemed that the light of
+her eyes was brighter than the daylight itself; or some shadow passing
+over that fair face made a kind of change there, altering its hues and
+its expression. Some thought would often seem to glow on her white
+brows; her eyes appeared to dilate, and her eyelids trembled; a smile
+rippled over her features; the living coral of her lips grew full of
+meaning as they closed and unclosed; an indistinguishable something in
+her hair made brown shadows on her fair temples; in each new phase
+Foedora spoke. Every slight variation in her beauty made a new
+pleasure for my eyes, disclosed charms my heart had never known
+before; I tried to read a separate emotion or a hope in every change
+that passed over her face. This mute converse passed between soul and
+soul, like sound and answering echo; and the short-lived delights then
+showered upon me have left indelible impressions behind. Her voice
+would cause a frenzy in me that I could hardly understand. I could
+have copied the example of some prince of Lorraine, and held a live
+coal in the hollow of my hand, if her fingers passed caressingly
+through my hair the while. I felt no longer mere admiration and
+desire: I was under the spell; I had met my destiny. When back again
+under my own roof, I still vaguely saw Foedora in her own home, and
+had some indefinable share in her life; if she felt ill, I suffered
+too. The next day I used to say to her:
+
+" 'You were not well yesterday.'
+
+"How often has she not stood before me, called by the power of
+ecstasy, in the silence of the night! Sometimes she would break in
+upon me like a ray of light, make me drop my pen, and put science and
+study to flight in grief and alarm, as she compelled my admiration by
+the alluring pose I had seen but a short time before. Sometimes I went
+to seek her in the spirit world, and would bow down to her as to a
+hope, entreating her to let me hear the silver sounds of her voice,
+and I would wake at length in tears.
+
+"Once, when she had promised to go to the theatre with me, she took it
+suddenly into her head to refuse to go out, and begged me to leave her
+alone. I was in such despair over the perversity which cost me a day's
+work, and (if I must confess it) my last shilling as well, that I went
+alone where she was to have been, desiring to see the play she had
+wished to see. I had scarcely seated myself when an electric shock
+went through me. A voice told me, 'She is here!' I looked round, and
+saw the countess hidden in the shadow at the back of her box in the
+first tier. My look did not waver; my eyes saw her at once with
+incredible clearness; my soul hovered about her life like an insect
+above its flower. How had my senses received this warning? There is
+something in these inward tremors that shallow people find
+astonishing, but the phenomena of our inner consciousness are produced
+as simple as those of external vision; so I was not surprised, but
+much vexed. My studies of our mental faculties, so little understood,
+helped me at any rate to find in my own excitement some living proofs
+of my theories. There was something exceedingly odd in this
+combination of lover and man of science, of downright idolatry of a
+woman with the love of knowledge. The causes of the lover's despair
+were highly interesting to the man of science; and the exultant lover,
+on the other hand, put science far away from him in his joy. Foedora
+saw me, and grew grave: I annoyed her. I went to her box during the
+first interval, and finding her alone, I stayed there. Although we had
+not spoken of love, I foresaw an explanation. I had not told her my
+secret, still there was a kind of understanding between us. She used
+to tell me her plans for amusement, and on the previous evening had
+asked with friendly eagerness if I meant to call the next day. After
+any witticism of hers, she would give me an inquiring glance, as if
+she had sought to please me alone by it. She would soothe me if I was
+vexed; and if she pouted, I had in some sort a right to ask an
+explanation. Before she would pardon any blunder, she would keep me a
+suppliant for long. All these things that we so relished, were so many
+lovers' quarrels. What arch grace she threw into it all! and what
+happiness it was to me!
+
+"But now we stood before each other as strangers, with the close
+relation between us both suspended. The countess was glacial: a
+presentiment of trouble filled me.
+
+" 'Will you come home with me?' she said, when the play was over.
+
+"There had been a sudden change in the weather, and sleet was falling
+in showers as we went out. Foedora's carriage was unable to reach the
+doorway of the theatre. At the sight of a well-dressed woman about to
+cross the street, a commissionaire held an umbrella above us, and
+stood waiting at the carriage-door for his tip. I would have given ten
+years of life just then for a couple of halfpence, but I had not a
+penny. All the man in me and all my vainest susceptibilities were
+wrung with an infernal pain. The words, 'I haven't a penny about me,
+my good fellow!' came from me in the hard voice of thwarted passion;
+and yet I was that man's brother in misfortune, as I knew too well;
+and once I had so lightly paid away seven hundred thousand francs! The
+footman pushed the man aside, and the horses sprang forward. As we
+returned, Foedora, in real or feigned abstraction, answered all my
+questions curtly and by monosyllables. I said no more; it was a
+hateful moment. When we reached her house, we seated ourselves by the
+hearth, and when the servant had stirred the fire and left us alone,
+the countess turned to me with an inexplicable expression, and spoke.
+Her manner was almost solemn.
+
+" 'Since my return to France, more than one young man, tempted by my
+money, has made proposals to me which would have satisfied my pride. I
+have come across men, too, whose attachment was so deep and sincere
+that they might have married me even if they had found me the
+penniless girl I used to be. Besides these, Monsieur de Valentin, you
+must know that new titles and newly-acquired wealth have been also
+offered to me, and that I have never received again any of those who
+were so ill-advised as to mention love to me. If my regard for you was
+but slight, I would not give you this warning, which is dictated by
+friendship rather than by pride. A woman lays herself open to a rebuff
+of some kind, if she imagines herself to be loved, and declines,
+before it is uttered, to listen to language which in its nature
+implies a compliment. I am well acquainted with the parts played by
+Arsinoe and Araminta, and with the sort of answer I might look for
+under such circumstances; but I hope to-day that I shall not find
+myself misconstrued by a man of no ordinary character, because I have
+frankly spoken my mind.'
+
+"She spoke with the cool self-possession of some attorney or solicitor
+explaining the nature of a contract or the conduct of a lawsuit to a
+client. There was not the least sign of feeling in the clear soft
+tones of her voice. Her steady face and dignified bearing seemed to me
+now full of diplomatic reserve and coldness. She had planned this
+scene, no doubt, and carefully chosen her words beforehand. Oh, my
+friend, there are women who take pleasure in piercing hearts, and
+deliberately plunge the dagger back again into the wound; such women
+as these cannot but be worshiped, for such women either love or would
+fain be loved. A day comes when they make amends for all the pain they
+gave us; they repay us for the pangs, the keenness of which they
+recognize, in joys a hundred-fold, even as God, they tell us,
+recompenses our good works. Does not their perversity spring from the
+strength of their feelings? But to be so tortured by a woman, who
+slaughters you with indifference! was not the suffering hideous?
+
+"Foedora did not know it, but in that minute she trampled all my hopes
+beneath her feet; she maimed my life and she blighted my future with
+the cool indifference and unconscious barbarity of an inquisitive
+child who plucks its wings from a butterfly.
+
+" 'Later on,' resumed Foedora, 'you will learn, I hope, the stability
+of the affection that I keep for my friends. You will always find that
+I have devotion and kindness for them. I would give my life to serve
+my friends; but you could only despise me, if I allowed them to make
+love to me without return. That is enough. You are the only man to
+whom I have spoken such words as these last.'
+
+"At first I could not speak, or master the tempest that arose within
+me; but I soon repressed my emotions in the depths of my soul, and
+began to smile.
+
+" 'If I own that I love you,' I said, 'you will banish me at once; if
+I plead guilty to indifference, you will make me suffer for it. Women,
+magistrates, and priests never quite lay the gown aside. Silence is
+non-committal; be pleased then, madame, to approve my silence. You
+must have feared, in some degree, to lose me, or I should not have
+received this friendly admonition; and with that thought my pride
+ought to be satisfied. Let us banish all personal considerations. You
+are perhaps the only woman with whom I could discuss rationally a
+resolution so contrary to the laws of nature. Considered with regard
+to your species, you are a prodigy. Now let us investigate, in good
+faith, the causes of this psychological anomaly. Does there exist in
+you, as in many women, a certain pride in self, a love of your own
+loveliness, a refinement of egoism which makes you shudder at the idea
+of belonging to another; is it the thought of resigning your own will
+and submitting to a superiority, though only of convention, which
+displeases you? You would seem to me a thousand times fairer for it.
+Can love formerly have brought you suffering? You probably set some
+value on your dainty figure and graceful appearance, and may perhaps
+wish to avoid the disfigurements of maternity. Is not this one of your
+strongest reasons for refusing a too importunate love? Some natural
+defect perhaps makes you insusceptible in spite of yourself? Do not be
+angry; my study, my inquiry is absolutely dispassionate. Some are born
+blind, and nature may easily have formed women who in like manner are
+blind, deaf, and dumb to love. You are really an interesting subject
+for medical investigation. You do not know your value. You feel
+perhaps a very legitimate distaste for mankind; in that I quite concur
+--to me they all seem ugly and detestable. And you are right,' I
+added, feeling my heart swell within me; 'how can you do otherwise
+than despise us? There is not a man living who is worthy of you.'
+
+"I will not repeat all the biting words with which I ridiculed her. In
+vain; my bitterest sarcasms and keenest irony never made her wince nor
+elicited a sign of vexation. She heard me, with the customary smile
+upon her lips and in her eyes, the smile that she wore as a part of
+her clothing, and that never varied for friends, for mere
+acquaintances, or for strangers.
+
+" 'Isn't it very nice of me to allow you to dissect me like this?' she
+said at last, as I came to a temporary standstill, and looked at her
+in silence. 'You see,' she went on, laughing, 'that I have no foolish
+over-sensitiveness about my friendship. Many a woman would shut her
+door on you by way of punishing you for your impertinence.'
+
+" 'You could banish me without needing to give me the reasons for your
+harshness.' As I spoke I felt that I could kill her if she dismissed
+me.
+
+" 'You are mad,' she said, smiling still.
+
+" 'Did you never think,' I went on, 'of the effects of passionate
+love? A desperate man has often murdered his mistress.'
+
+" 'It is better to die than to live in misery,' she said coolly. 'Such
+a man as that would run through his wife's money, desert her, and
+leave her at last in utter wretchedness.'
+
+"This calm calculation dumfounded me. The gulf between us was made
+plain; we could never understand each other.
+
+" 'Good-bye,' I said proudly.
+
+" 'Good-bye, till to-morrow,' she answered, with a little friendly
+bow.
+
+"For a moment's space I hurled at her in a glance all the love I must
+forego; she stood there with than banal smile of hers, the detestable
+chill smile of a marble statue, with none of the warmth in it that it
+seemed to express. Can you form any idea, my friend, of the pain that
+overcame me on the way home through rain and snow, across a league of
+icy-sheeted quays, without a hope left? Oh, to think that she not only
+had not guessed my poverty, but believed me to be as wealthy as she
+was, and likewise borne as softly over the rough ways of life! What
+failure and deceit! It was no mere question of money now, but of the
+fate of all that lay within me.
+
+"I went at haphazard, going over the words of our strange conversation
+with myself. I got so thoroughly lost in my reflections that I ended
+by doubts as to the actual value of words and ideas. But I loved her
+all the same; I loved this woman with the untouched heart that might
+surrender at any moment--a woman who daily disappointed the
+expectations of the previous evening, by appearing as a new mistress
+on the morrow.
+
+"As I passed under the gateway of the Institute, a fevered thrill ran
+through me. I remembered that I was fasting, and that I had not a
+penny. To complete the measure of my misfortune, my hat was spoiled by
+the rain. How was I to appear in the drawing-room of a woman of
+fashion with an unpresentable hat? I had always cursed the inane and
+stupid custom that compels us to exhibit the lining of our hats, and
+to keep them always in our hands, but with anxious care I had so far
+kept mine in a precarious state of efficiency. It had been neither
+strikingly new, nor utterly shabby, neither napless nor over-glossy,
+and might have passed for the hat of a frugally given owner, but its
+artificially prolonged existence had now reached the final stage, it
+was crumpled, forlorn, and completely ruined, a downright rag, a
+fitting emblem of its master. My painfully preserved elegance must
+collapse for want of thirty sous.
+
+"What unrecognized sacrifices I had made in the past three months for
+Foedora! How often I had given the price of a week's sustenance to see
+her for a moment! To leave my work and go without food was the least
+of it! I must traverse the streets of Paris without getting splashed,
+run to escape showers, and reach her rooms at last, as neat and spruce
+as any of the coxcombs about her. For a poet and a distracted wooer
+the difficulties of this task were endless. My happiness, the course
+of my love, might be affected by a speck of mud upon my only white
+waistcoat! Oh, to miss the sight of her because I was wet through and
+bedraggled, and had not so much as five sous to give to a shoeblack
+for removing the least little spot of mud from my boot! The petty
+pangs of these nameless torments, which an irritable man finds so
+great, only strengthened my passion.
+
+"The unfortunate must make sacrifices which they may not mention to
+women who lead refined and luxurious lives. Such women see things
+through a prism that gilds all men and their surroundings. Egoism
+leads them to take cheerful views, and fashion makes them cruel; they
+do not wish to reflect, lest they lose their happiness, and the
+absorbing nature of their pleasures absolves their indifference to the
+misfortunes of others. A penny never means millions to them; millions,
+on the contrary, seem a mere trifle. Perhaps love must plead his cause
+by great sacrifices, but a veil must be lightly drawn across them,
+they must go down into silence. So when wealthy men pour out their
+devotion, their fortunes, and their lives, they gain somewhat by these
+commonly entertained opinions, an additional lustre hangs about their
+lovers' follies; their silence is eloquent; there is a grace about the
+drawn veil; but my terrible distress bound me over to suffer fearfully
+or ever I might speak of my love or of dying for her sake.
+
+"Was it a sacrifice after all? Was I not richly rewarded by the joy I
+took in sacrificing everything to her? There was no commonest event of
+my daily life to which the countess had not given importance, had not
+overfilled with happiness. I had been hitherto careless of my clothes,
+now I respected my coat as if it had been a second self. I should not
+have hesitated between bodily harm and a tear in that garment. You
+must enter wholly into my circumstances to understand the stormy
+thoughts, the gathering frenzy, that shook me as I went, and which,
+perhaps, were increased by my walk. I gloated in an infernal fashion
+which I cannot describe over the absolute completeness of my
+wretchedness. I would have drawn from it an augury of my future, but
+there is no limit to the possibilities of misfortune. The door of my
+lodging-house stood ajar. A light streamed from the heart-shaped
+opening cut in the shutters. Pauline and her mother were sitting up
+for me and talking. I heard my name spoken, and listened.
+
+" 'Raphael is much nicer-looking than the student in number seven,'
+said Pauline; 'his fair hair is such a pretty color. Don't you think
+there is something in his voice, too, I don't know what it is, that
+gives you a sort of a thrill? And, then, though he may be a little
+proud, he is very kind, and he has such fine manners; I am sure that
+all the ladies must be quite wild about him.'
+
+" 'You might be fond of him yourself, to hear you talk,' was Madame
+Gaudin's comment.
+
+" 'He is just as dear to me as a brother,' she laughed. 'I should be
+finely ungrateful if I felt no friendship for him. Didn't he teach me
+music and drawing and grammar, and everything I know in fact? You
+don't much notice how I get on, dear mother; but I shall know enough,
+in a while, to give lessons myself, and then we can keep a servant.'
+
+"I stole away softly, made some noise outside, and went into their
+room to take the lamp, that Pauline tried to light for me. The dear
+child had just poured soothing balm into my wounds. Her outspoken
+admiration had given me fresh courage. I so needed to believe in
+myself and to come by a just estimate of my advantages. This revival
+of hope in me perhaps colored my surroundings. Perhaps also I had
+never before really looked at the picture that so often met my eyes,
+of the two women in their room; it was a scene such as Flemish
+painters have reproduced so faithfully for us, that I admired in its
+delightful reality. The mother, with the kind smile upon her lips, sat
+knitting stockings by the dying fire; Pauline was painting hand-
+screens, her brushes and paints, strewn over the tiny table, made
+bright spots of color for the eye to dwell on. When she had left her
+seat and stood lighting my lamp, one must have been under the yoke of
+a terrible passion indeed, not to admire her faintly flushed
+transparent hands, the girlish charm of her attitude, the ideal grace
+of her head, as the lamplight fell full on her pale face. Night and
+silence added to the charms of this industrious vigil and peaceful
+interior. The light-heartedness that sustained such continuous toil
+could only spring from devout submission and the lofty feelings that
+it brings.
+
+"There was an indescribable harmony between them and their
+possessions. The splendor of Foedora's home did not satisfy; it called
+out all my worst instincts; something in this lowly poverty and
+unfeigned goodness revived me. It may have been that luxury abased me
+in my own eyes, while here my self-respect was restored to me, as I
+sought to extend the protection that a man is so eager to make felt,
+over these two women, who in the bare simplicity of the existence in
+their brown room seemed to live wholly in the feelings of their
+hearts. As I came up to Pauline, she looked at me in an almost
+motherly way; her hands shook a little as she held the lamp, so that
+the light fell on me and cried:
+
+" 'Dieu! how pale you are! and you are wet through! My mother will try
+to wipe you dry. Monsieur Raphael,' she went on, after a little pause,
+'you are so very fond of milk, and to-night we happen to have some
+cream. Here, will you not take some?'
+
+"She pounced like a kitten, on a china bowl full of milk. She did it
+so quickly, and put it before me so prettily, that I hesitated.
+
+" 'You are going to refuse me?' she said, and her tones changed.
+
+"The pride in each felt for the other's pride. It was Pauline's
+poverty that seemed to humiliate her, and to reproach me with my want
+of consideration, and I melted at once and accepted the cream that
+might have been meant for her morning's breakfast. The poor child
+tried not to show her joy, but her eyes sparkled.
+
+" 'I needed it badly,' I said as I sat down. (An anxious look passed
+over her face.) 'Do you remember that passage, Pauline, where Bossuet
+tells how God gave more abundant reward for a cup of cold water than
+for a victory?'
+
+" 'Yes,' she said, her heart beating like some wild bird's in a
+child's hands.
+
+" 'Well, as we shall part very soon, now,' I went on in an unsteady
+voice, 'you must let me show my gratitude to you and to your mother
+for all the care you have taken of me.'
+
+" 'Oh, don't let us cast accounts,' she said laughing. But her
+laughter covered an agitation that gave me pain. I went on without
+appearing to hear her words:
+
+" 'My piano is one of Erard's best instruments; and you must take it.
+Pray accept it without hesitation; I really could not take it with me
+on the journey I am about to make.'
+
+"Perhaps the melancholy tones in which I spoke enlightened the two
+women, for they seemed to understand, and eyed me with curiosity and
+alarm. Here was the affection that I had looked for in the glacial
+regions of the great world, true affection, unostentatious but tender,
+and possibly lasting.
+
+" 'Don't take it to heart so,' the mother said; 'stay on here. My
+husband is on his way towards us even now,' she went on. 'I looked
+into the Gospel of St. John this evening while Pauline hung our door-
+key in a Bible from her fingers. The key turned; that means that
+Gaudin is in health and doing well. Pauline began again for you and
+for the young man in number seven--it turned for you, but not for him.
+We are all going to be rich. Gaudin will come back a millionaire. I
+dreamed once that I saw him in a ship full of serpents; luckily the
+water was rough, and that means gold or precious stones from over-
+sea.'
+
+"The silly, friendly words were like the crooning lullaby with which a
+mother soothes her sick child; they in a manner calmed me. There was a
+pleasant heartiness in the worthy woman's looks and tones, which, if
+it could not remove trouble, at any rate soothed and quieted it, and
+deadened the pain. Pauline, keener-sighted than her mother, studied me
+uneasily; her quick eyes seemed to read my life and my future. I
+thanked the mother and daughter by an inclination of the head, and
+hurried away; I was afraid I should break down.
+
+"I found myself alone under my roof, and laid myself down in my
+misery. My unhappy imagination suggested numberless baseless projects,
+and prescribed impossible resolutions. When a man is struggling in the
+wreck of his fortunes, he is not quite without resources, but I was
+engulfed. Ah, my dear fellow, we are too ready to blame the wretched.
+Let us be less harsh on the results of the most powerful of all social
+solvents. Where poverty is absolute there exist no such things as
+shame or crime, or virtue or intelligence. I knew not what to do; I
+was as defenceless as a maiden on her knees before a beast of prey. A
+penniless man who has no ties to bind him is master of himself at any
+rate, but a luckless wretch who is in love no longer belongs to
+himself, and may not take his own life. Love makes us almost sacred in
+our own eyes; it is the life of another that we revere within us; then
+and so it begins for us the cruelest trouble of all--the misery with a
+hope in it, a hope for which we must even bear our torments. I thought
+I would go to Rastignac on the morrow to confide Foedora's strange
+resolution to him, and with that I slept.
+
+" 'Ah, ha!' cried Rastignac, as he saw me enter his lodging at nine
+o'clock in the morning. 'I know what brings you here. Foedora has
+dismissed you. Some kind souls, who were jealous of your ascendency
+over the countess, gave out that you were going to be married. Heaven
+only knows what follies your rivals have equipped you with, and what
+slanders have been directed at you.'
+
+" 'That explains everything!' I exclaimed. I remembered all my
+presumptuous speeches, and gave the countess credit for no little
+magnanimity. It pleased me to think that I was a miscreant who had not
+been punished nearly enough, and I saw nothing in her indulgence but
+the long-suffering charity of love.
+
+" 'Not quite so fast,' urged the prudent Gascon; 'Foedora has all the
+sagacity natural to a profoundly selfish woman; perhaps she may have
+taken your measure while you still coveted only her money and her
+splendor; in spite of all your care, she could have read you through
+and through. She can dissemble far too well to let any dissimulation
+pass undetected. I fear,' he went on, 'that I have brought you into a
+bad way. In spite of her cleverness and her tact, she seems to me a
+domineering sort of person, like every woman who can only feel
+pleasure through her brain. Happiness for her lies entirely in a
+comfortable life and in social pleasures; her sentiment is only
+assumed; she will make you miserable; you will be her head footman.'
+
+"He spoke to the deaf. I broke in upon him, disclosing, with an
+affectation of light-heartedness, the state of my finances.
+
+" 'Yesterday evening,' he rejoined, 'luck ran against me, and that
+carried off all my available cash. But for that trivial mishap, I
+would gladly have shared my purse with you. But let us go and
+breakfast at the restaurant; perhaps there is good counsel in
+oysters.'
+
+"He dressed, and had his tilbury brought round. We went to the Cafe de
+Paris like a couple of millionaires, armed with all the audacious
+impertinence of the speculator whose capital is imaginary. That devil
+of a Gascon quite disconcerted me by the coolness of his manners and
+his absolute self-possession. While we were taking coffee after an
+excellent and well-ordered repast, a young dandy entered, who did not
+escape Rastignac. He had been nodding here and there among the crowd
+to this or that young man, distinguished both by personal attractions
+and elegant attire, and now he said to me:
+
+" 'Here's your man,' as he beckoned to this gentleman with a wonderful
+cravat, who seemed to be looking for a table that suited his ideas.
+
+" 'That rogue has been decorated for bringing out books that he
+doesn't understand a word of,' whispered Rastignac; 'he is a chemist,
+a historian, a novelist, and a political writer; he has gone halves,
+thirds, or quarters in the authorship of I don't know how many plays,
+and he is as ignorant as Dom Miguel's mule. He is not a man so much as
+a name, a label that the public is familiar with. So he would do well
+to avoid shops inscribed with the motto, "Ici l'on peut ecrire soi-
+meme." He is acute enough to deceive an entire congress of
+diplomatists. In a couple of words, he is a moral half-caste, not
+quite a fraud, nor entirely genuine. But, hush! he has succeeded
+already; nobody asks anything further, and every one calls him an
+illustrious man.'
+
+" 'Well, my esteemed and excellent friend, and how may Your
+Intelligence be?' So Rastignac addressed the stranger as he sat down
+at a neighboring table.
+
+" 'Neither well nor ill; I am overwhelmed with work. I have all the
+necessary materials for some very curious historical memoirs in my
+hands, and I cannot find any one to whom I can ascribe them. It
+worries me, for I shall have to be quick about it. Memoirs are falling
+out of fashion.'
+
+" 'What are the memoirs--contemporaneous, ancient, or memoirs of the
+court, or what?'
+
+" 'They relate to the Necklace affair.'
+
+" 'Now, isn't that a coincidence?' said Rastignac, turning to me and
+laughing. He looked again to the literary speculation, and said,
+indicating me:
+
+" 'This is M. de Valentin, one of my friends, whom I must introduce to
+you as one of our future literary celebrities. He had formerly an
+aunt, a marquise, much in favor once at court, and for about two years
+he has been writing a Royalist history of the Revolution.'
+
+"Then, bending over this singular man of business, he went on:
+
+" 'He is a man of talent, and a simpleton that will do your memoirs
+for you, in his aunt's name, for a hundred crowns a volume.'
+
+" 'It's a bargain,' said the other, adjusting his cravat. 'Waiter, my
+oysters.'
+
+" 'Yes, but you must give me twenty-five louis as commission, and you
+will pay him in advance for each volume,' said Rastignac.
+
+" 'No, no. He shall only have fifty crowns on account, and then I
+shall be sure of having my manuscript punctually.'
+
+"Rastignac repeated this business conversation to me in low tones; and
+then, without giving me any voice in the matter, he replied:
+
+" 'We agree to your proposal. When can we call upon you to arrange the
+affair?'
+
+" 'Oh, well! Come and dine here to-morrow at seven o'clock.'
+
+"We rose. Rastignac flung some money to the waiter, put the bill in
+his pocket, and we went out. I was quite stupified by the flippancy
+and ease with which he had sold my venerable aunt, la Marquise de
+Montbauron.
+
+" 'I would sooner take ship for the Brazils, and give the Indians
+lessons in algebra, though I don't know a word of it, than tarnish my
+family name.'
+
+"Rastignac burst out laughing.
+
+" 'How dense you are! Take the fifty crowns in the first instance, and
+write the memoirs. When you have finished them, you will decline to
+publish them in your aunt's name, imbecile! Madame de Montbauron, with
+her hooped petticoat, her rank and beauty, rouge and slippers, and her
+death upon the scaffold, is worth a great deal more than six hundred
+francs. And then, if the trade will not give your aunt her due, some
+old adventurer, or some shady countess or other, will be found to put
+her name to the memoirs.'
+
+" 'Oh,' I groaned; 'why did I quit the blameless life in my garret?
+This world has aspects that are very vilely dishonorable.'
+
+" 'Yes,' said Rastignac, 'that is all very poetical, but this is a
+matter of business. What a child you are! Now, listen to me. As to
+your work, the public will decide upon it; and as for my literary
+middle-man, hasn't he devoted eight years of his life to obtaining a
+footing in the book-trade, and paid heavily for his experience? You
+divide the money and the labor of the book with him very unequally,
+but isn't yours the better part? Twenty-five louis means as much to
+you as a thousand francs does to him. Come, you can write historical
+memoirs, a work of art such as never was, since Diderot once wrote six
+sermons for a hundred crowns!'
+
+" 'After all,' I said, in agitation, 'I cannot choose but do it. So,
+my dear friend, my thanks are due to you. I shall be quite rich with
+twenty-five louis.'
+
+" 'Richer than you think,' he laughed. 'If I have my commission from
+Finot in this matter, it goes to you, can't you see? Now let us go to
+the Bois de Boulogne,' he said; 'we shall see your countess there, and
+I will show you the pretty little widow that I am to marry--a charming
+woman, an Alsacienne, rather plump. She reads Kant, Schiller, Jean
+Paul, and a host of lachrymose books. She has a mania for continually
+asking my opinion, and I have to look as if I entered into all this
+German sensibility, and to know a pack of ballads--drugs, all of them,
+that my doctor absolutely prohibits. As yet I have not been able to
+wean her from her literary enthusiasms; she sheds torrents of tears as
+she reads Goethe, and I have to weep a little myself to please her,
+for she has an income of fifty thousand livres, my dear boy, and the
+prettiest little hand and foot in the world. Oh, if she would only say
+mon ange and brouiller instead of mon anche and prouiller, she would
+be perfection!'
+
+"We saw the countess, radiant amid the splendors of her equipage. The
+coquette bowed very graciously to us both, and the smile she gave me
+seemed to me to be divine and full of love. I was very happy; I
+fancied myself beloved; I had money, a wealth of love in my heart, and
+my troubles were over. I was light-hearted, blithe, and content. I
+found my friend's lady-love charming. Earth and air and heaven--all
+nature--seemed to reflect Foedora's smile for me.
+
+"As we returned through the Champs-Elysees, we paid a visit to
+Rastignac's hatter and tailor. Thanks to the 'Necklace,' my
+insignificant peace-footing was to end, and I made formidable
+preparations for a campaign. Henceforward I need not shrink from a
+contest with the spruce and fashionable young men who made Foedora's
+circle. I went home, locked myself in, and stood by my dormer window,
+outwardly calm enough, but in reality I bade a last good-bye to the
+roofs without. I began to live in the future, rehearsed my life drama,
+and discounted love and its happiness. Ah, how stormy life can grow to
+be within the four walls of a garret! The soul within us is like a
+fairy; she turns straw into diamonds for us; and for us, at a touch of
+her wand, enchanted palaces arise, as flowers in the meadows spring up
+towards the sun.
+
+"Towards noon, next day, Pauline knocked gently at my door, and
+brought me--who could guess it?--a note from Foedora. The countess
+asked me to take her to the Luxembourg, and to go thence to see with
+her the Museum and Jardin des Plantes.
+
+" 'The man is waiting for an answer,' said Pauline, after quietly
+waiting for a moment.
+
+"I hastily scrawled my acknowledgements, and Pauline took the note. I
+changed my dress. When my toilette was ended, and I looked at myself
+with some complaisance, an icy shiver ran through me as I thought:
+
+" 'Will Foedora walk or drive? Will it rain or shine?--No matter,
+though,' I said to myself; 'whichever it is, can one ever reckon with
+feminine caprice? She will have no money about her, and will want to
+give a dozen francs to some little Savoyard because his rags are
+picturesque.'
+
+"I had not a brass farthing, and should have no money till the evening
+came. How dearly a poet pays for the intellectual prowess that method
+and toil have brought him, at such crises of our youth! Innumerable
+painfully vivid thoughts pierced me like barbs. I looked out of my
+window; the weather was very unsettled. If things fell out badly, I
+might easily hire a cab for the day; but would not the fear lie on me
+every moment that I might not meet Finot in the evening? I felt too
+weak to endure such fears in the midst of my felicity. Though I felt
+sure that I should find nothing, I began a grand search through my
+room; I looked for imaginary coins in the recesses of my mattress; I
+hunted about everywhere--I even shook out my old boots. A nervous
+fever seized me; I looked with wild eyes at the furniture when I had
+ransacked it all. Will you understand, I wonder, the excitement that
+possessed me when, plunged deep in the listlessness of despair, I
+opened my writing-table drawer, and found a fair and splendid ten-
+franc piece that shone like a rising star, new and sparkling, and
+slily hiding in a cranny between two boards? I did not try to account
+for its previous reserve and the cruelty of which it had been guilty
+in thus lying hidden; I kissed it for a friend faithful in adversity,
+and hailed it with a cry that found an echo, and made me turn sharply,
+to find Pauline with a face grown white.
+
+" 'I thought,' she faltered, 'that you had hurt yourself! The man who
+brought the letter----' (she broke off as if something smothered her
+voice). 'But mother has paid him,' she added, and flitted away like a
+wayward, capricious child. Poor little one! I wanted her to share in
+my happiness. I seemed to have all the happiness in the world within
+me just then; and I would fain have returned to the unhappy, all that
+I felt as if I had stolen from them.
+
+"The intuitive perception of adversity is sound for the most part; the
+countess had sent away her carriage. One of those freaks that pretty
+women can scarcely explain to themselves had determined her to go on
+foot, by way of the boulevards, to the Jardin des Plantes.
+
+" 'It will rain,' I told her, and it pleased her to contradict me.
+
+"As it fell out, the weather was fine while we went through the
+Luxembourg; when we came out, some drops fell from a great cloud,
+whose progress I had watched uneasily, and we took a cab. At the
+Museum I was about to dismiss the vehicle, and Foedora (what agonies!)
+asked me not to do so. But it was like a dream in broad daylight for
+me, to chat with her, to wander in the Jardin des Plantes, to stray
+down the shady alleys, to feel her hand upon my arm; the secret
+transports repressed in me were reduced, no doubt, to a fixed and
+foolish smile upon my lips; there was something unreal about it all.
+Yet in all her movements, however alluring, whether we stood or
+whether we walked, there was nothing either tender or lover-like. When
+I tried to share in a measure the action of movement prompted by her
+life, I became aware of a check, or of something strange in her that I
+cannot explain, or an inner activity concealed in her nature. There is
+no suavity about the movements of women who have no soul in them. Our
+wills were opposed, and we did not keep step together. Words are
+wanting to describe this outward dissonance between two beings; we are
+not accustomed to read a thought in a movement. We instinctively feel
+this phenomenon of our nature, but it cannot be expressed.
+
+"I did not dissect my sensations during those violent seizures of
+passion," Raphael went on, after a moment of silence, as if he were
+replying to an objection raised by himself. "I did not analyze my
+pleasures nor count my heartbeats then, as a miser scrutinizes and
+weighs his gold pieces. No; experience sheds its melancholy light over
+the events of the past to-day, and memory brings these pictures back,
+as the sea-waves in fair weather cast up fragment after fragment of
+the debris of a wrecked vessel upon the strand.
+
+" 'It is in your power to render me a rather important service,' said
+the countess, looking at me in an embarrassed way. 'After confiding in
+you my aversion to lovers, I feel myself more at liberty to entreat
+your good offices in the name of friendship. Will there not be very
+much more merit in obliging me to-day?' she asked, laughing.
+
+"I looked at her in anguish. Her manner was coaxing, but in no wise
+affectionate; she felt nothing for me; she seemed to be playing a
+part, and I thought her a consummate actress. Then all at once my
+hopes awoke once more, at a single look and word. Yet if reviving love
+expressed itself in my eyes, she bore its light without any change in
+the clearness of her own; they seemed, like a tiger's eyes, to have a
+sheet of metal behind them. I used to hate her in such moments.
+
+" 'The influence of the Duc de Navarreins would be very useful to me,
+with an all-powerful person in Russia,' she went on, persuasion in
+every modulation of her voice, 'whose intervention I need in order to
+have justice done me in a matter that concerns both my fortune and my
+position in the world, that is to say, the recognition of my marriage
+by the Emperor. Is not the Duc de Navarreins a cousin of yours? A
+letter from him would settle everything.'
+
+" 'I am yours,' I answered; 'command me.'
+
+" 'You are very nice,' she said, pressing my hand. 'Come and have
+dinner with me, and I will tell you everything, as if you were my
+confessor.'
+
+"So this discreet, suspicious woman, who had never been heard to speak
+a word about her affairs to any one, was going to consult me.
+
+" 'Oh, how dear to me is this silence that you have imposed on me!' I
+cried; 'but I would rather have had some sharper ordeal still.' And
+she smiled upon the intoxication in my eyes; she did not reject my
+admiration in any way; surely she loved me!
+
+"Fortunately, my purse held just enough to satisfy her cab-man. The
+day spent in her house, alone with her, was delicious; it was the
+first time that I had seen her in this way. Hitherto we had always
+been kept apart by the presence of others, and by her formal
+politeness and reserved manners, even during her magnificent dinners;
+but now it was as if I lived beneath her own roof--I had her all to
+myself, so to speak. My wandering fancy broke down barriers, arranged
+the events of life to my liking, and steeped me in happiness and love.
+I seemed to myself her husband, I liked to watch her busied with
+little details; it was a pleasure to me even to see her take off her
+bonnet and shawl. She left me alone for a little, and came back,
+charming, with her hair newly arranged; and this dainty change of
+toilette had been made for me!
+
+"During the dinner she lavished attention upon me, and put charm
+without end into those numberless trifles to all seeming, that make up
+half of our existence nevertheless. As we sat together before a
+crackling fire, on silken cushions surrounded by the most desirable
+creations of Oriental luxury; as I saw this woman whose famous beauty
+made every heart beat, so close to me; an unapproachable woman who was
+talking and bringing all her powers of coquetry to bear upon me; then
+my blissful pleasure rose almost to the point of suffering. To my
+vexation, I recollected the important business to be concluded; I
+determined to go to keep the appointment made for me for this evening.
+
+" 'So soon?' she said, seeing me take my hat.
+
+"She loved me, then! or I thought so at least, from the bland tones in
+which those two words were uttered. I would then have bartered a
+couple of years of life for every hour she chose to grant to me, and
+so prolong my ecstasy. My happiness was increased by the extent of the
+money I sacrificed. It was midnight before she dismissed me. But on
+the morrow, for all that, my heroism cost me a good many remorseful
+pangs; I was afraid the affair of the Memoirs, now of such importance
+for me, might have fallen through, and rushed off to Rastignac. We
+found the nominal author of my future labors just getting up.
+
+"Finot read over a brief agreement to me, in which nothing whatever
+was said about my aunt, and when it had been signed he paid me down
+fifty crowns, and the three of us breakfasted together. I had only
+thirty francs left over, when I had paid for my new hat, for sixty
+tickets at thirty sous each, and settled my debts; but for some days
+to come the difficulties of living were removed. If I had but listened
+to Rastignac, I might have had abundance by frankly adopting the
+'English system.' He really wanted to establish my credit by setting
+me to raise loans, on the theory that borrowing is the basis of
+credit. To hear him talk, the future was the largest and most secure
+kind of capital in the world. My future luck was hypothecated for the
+benefit of my creditors, and he gave my custom to his tailor, an
+artist, and a young man's tailor, who was to leave me in peace until I
+married.
+
+"The monastic life of study that I had led for three years past ended
+on this day. I frequented Foedora's house very diligently, and tried
+to outshine the heroes or the swaggerers to be found in her circle.
+When I believed that I had left poverty for ever behind me, I regained
+my freedom of mind, humiliated my rivals, and was looked upon as a
+very attractive, dazzling, and irresistible sort of man. But acute
+folk used to say with regard to me, 'A fellow as clever as that will
+keep all his enthusiasms in his brain,' and charitably extolled my
+faculties at the expense of my feelings. 'Isn't he lucky, not to be in
+love!' they exclaimed. 'If he were, could he be so light-hearted and
+animated?' Yet in Foedora's presence I was as dull as love could make
+me. When I was alone with her, I had not a word to say, or if I did
+speak, I renounced love; and I affected gaiety but ill, like a
+courtier who has a bitter mortification to hide. I tried in every way
+to make myself indispensable in her life, and necessary to her vanity
+and to her comfort; I was a plaything at her pleasure, a slave always
+at her side. And when I had frittered away the day in this way, I went
+back to my work at night, securing merely two or three hours' sleep in
+the early morning.
+
+"But I had not, like Rastignac, the 'English system' at my finger-
+ends, and I very soon saw myself without a penny. I fell at once into
+that precarious way of life which industriously hides cold and
+miserable depths beneath an elusive surface of luxury; I was a coxcomb
+without conquests, a penniless fop, a nameless gallant. The old
+sufferings were renewed, but less sharply; no doubt I was growing used
+to the painful crisis. Very often my sole diet consisted of the scanty
+provision of cakes and tea that is offered in drawing-rooms, or one of
+the countess' great dinners must sustain me for two whole days. I used
+all my time, and exerted every effort and all my powers of
+observation, to penetrate the impenetrable character of Foedora.
+Alternate hope and despair had swayed my opinions; for me she was
+sometimes the tenderest, sometimes the most unfeeling of women. But
+these transitions from joy to sadness became unendurable; I sought to
+end the horrible conflict within me by extinguishing love. By the
+light of warning gleams my soul sometimes recognized the gulfs that
+lay between us. The countess confirmed all my fears; I had never yet
+detected any tear in her eyes; an affecting scene in a play left her
+smiling and unmoved. All her instincts were selfish; she could not
+divine another's joy or sorrow. She had made a fool of me, in fact!
+
+"I had rejoiced over a sacrifice to make for her, and almost
+humiliated myself in seeking out my kinsman, the Duc de Navarreins, a
+selfish man who was ashamed of my poverty, and had injured me too
+deeply not to hate me. He received me with the polite coldness that
+makes every word and gesture seem an insult; he looked so ill at ease
+that I pitied him. I blushed for this pettiness amid grandeur, and
+penuriousness surrounded by luxury. He began to talk to me of his
+heavy losses in the three per cents, and then I told him the object of
+my visit. The change in his manners, hitherto glacial, which now
+gradually, became affectionate, disgusted me.
+
+"Well, he called upon the countess, and completely eclipsed me with
+her.
+
+"On him Foedora exercised spells and witcheries unheard of; she drew
+him into her power, and arranged her whole mysterious business with
+him; I was left out, I heard not a word of it; she had made a tool of
+me! She did not seem to be aware of my existence while my cousin was
+present; she received me less cordially perhaps than when I was first
+presented to her. One evening she chose to mortify me before the duke
+by a look, a gesture, that it is useless to try to express in words. I
+went away with tears in my eyes, planning terrible and outrageous
+schemes of vengeance without end.
+
+"I often used to go with her to the theatre. Love utterly absorbed me
+as I sat beside her; as I looked at her I used to give myself up to
+the pleasure of listening to the music, putting all my soul into the
+double joy of love and of hearing every emotion of my heart translated
+into musical cadences. It was my passion that filled the air and the
+stage, that was triumphant everywhere but with my mistress. Then I
+would take Foedora's hand. I used to scan her features and her eyes,
+imploring of them some indication that one blended feeling possessed
+us both, seeking for the sudden harmony awakened by the power of
+music, which makes our souls vibrate in unison; but her hand was
+passive, her eyes said nothing.
+
+"When the fire that burned in me glowed too fiercely from the face I
+turned upon her, she met it with that studied smile of hers, the
+conventional expression that sits on the lips of every portrait in
+every exhibition. She was not listening to the music. The divine pages
+of Rossini, Cimarosa, or Zingarelli called up no emotion, gave no
+voice to any poetry in her life; her soul was a desert.
+
+"Foedora presented herself as a drama before a drama. Her lorgnette
+traveled restlessly over the boxes; she was restless too beneath the
+apparent calm; fashion tyrannized over her; her box, her bonnet, her
+carriage, her own personality absorbed her entirely. My merciless
+knowledge thoroughly tore away all my illusions. If good breeding
+consists in self-forgetfulness and consideration for others, in
+constantly showing gentleness in voice and bearing, in pleasing
+others, and in making them content in themselves, all traces of her
+plebeian origin were not yet obliterated in Foedora, in spite of her
+cleverness. Her self-forgetfulness was a sham, her manners were not
+innate but painfully acquired, her politeness was rather subservient.
+And yet for those she singled out, her honeyed words expressed natural
+kindness, her pretentious exaggeration was exalted enthusiasm. I alone
+had scrutinized her grimacings, and stripped away the thin rind that
+sufficed to conceal her real nature from the world; her trickery no
+longer deceived me; I had sounded the depths of that feline nature. I
+blushed for her when some donkey or other flattered and complimented
+her. And yet I loved her through it all! I hoped that her snows would
+melt with the warmth of a poet's love. If I could only have made her
+feel all the greatness that lies in devotion, then I should have seen
+her perfected, she would have been an angel. I loved her as a man, a
+lover, and an artist; if it had been necessary not to love her so that
+I might win her, some cool-headed coxcomb, some self-possessed
+calculator would perhaps have had an advantage over me. She was so
+vain and sophisticated, that the language of vanity would appeal to
+her; she would have allowed herself to be taken in the toils of an
+intrigue; a hard, cold nature would have gained a complete ascendency
+over her. Keen grief had pierced me to my very soul, as she
+unconsciously revealed her absolute love of self. I seemed to see her
+as she one day would be, alone in the world, with no one to whom she
+could stretch her hand, with no friendly eyes for her own to meet and
+rest upon. I was bold enough to set this before her one evening; I
+painted in vivid colors her lonely, sad, deserted old age. Her comment
+on this prospect of so terrible a revenge of thwarted nature was
+horrible.
+
+" 'I shall always have money,' she said; 'and with money we can always
+inspire such sentiments as are necessary for our comfort in those
+about us.'
+
+"I went away confounded by the arguments of luxury, by the reasoning
+of this woman of the world in which she lived; and blamed myself for
+my infatuated idolatry. I myself had not loved Pauline because she was
+poor; and had not the wealthy Foedora a right to repulse Raphael?
+Conscience is our unerring judge until we finally stifle it. A
+specious voice said within me, 'Foedora is neither attracted to nor
+repulses any one; she has her liberty, but once upon a time she sold
+herself to the Russian count, her husband or her lover, for gold. But
+temptation is certain to enter into her life. Wait till that moment
+comes!' She lived remote from humanity, in a sphere apart, in a hell
+or a heaven of her own; she was neither frail nor virtuous. This
+feminine enigma in embroideries and cashmeres had brought into play
+every emotion of the human heart in me--pride, ambition, love,
+curiosity.
+
+"There was a craze just then for praising a play at a little Boulevard
+theatre, prompted perhaps by a wish to appear original that besets us
+all, or due to some freak of fashion. The countess showed some signs
+of a wish to see the floured face of the actor who had so delighted
+several people of taste, and I obtained the honor of taking her to a
+first presentation of some wretched farce or other. A box scarcely
+cost five francs, but I had not a brass farthing. I was but half-way
+through the volume of Memoirs; I dared not beg for assistance of
+Finot, and Rastignac, my providence, was away. These constant
+perplexities were the bane of my life.
+
+"We had once come out of the theatre when it was raining heavily,
+Foedora had called a cab for me before I could escape from her show of
+concern; she would not admit any of my excuses--my liking for wet
+weather, and my wish to go to the gaming-table. She did not read my
+poverty in my embarrassed attitude, or in my forced jests. My eyes
+would redden, but she did not understand a look. A young man's life is
+at the mercy of the strangest whims! At every revolution of the wheels
+during the journey, thoughts that burned stirred in my heart. I tried
+to pull up a plank from the bottom of the vehicle, hoping to slip
+through the hole into the street; but finding insuperable obstacles, I
+burst into a fit of laughter, and then sat stupefied in calm
+dejection, like a man in a pillory. When I reached my lodging, Pauline
+broke in through my first stammering words with:
+
+" 'If you haven't any money----?'
+
+"Ah, the music of Rossini was as nothing compared with those words.
+But to return to the performance at the Funambules.
+
+"I thought of pawning the circlet of gold round my mother's portrait
+in order to escort the countess. Although the pawnbroker loomed in my
+thoughts as one of the doors of a convict's prison, I would rather
+myself have carried my bed thither than have begged for alms. There is
+something so painful in the expression of a man who asks money of you!
+There are loans that mulct us of our self-respect, just as some
+rebuffs from a friend's lips sweep away our last illusion.
+
+"Pauline was working; her mother had gone to bed. I flung a stealthy
+glance over the bed; the curtains were drawn back a little; Madame
+Gaudin was in a deep sleep, I thought, when I saw her quiet, sallow
+profile outlined against the pillow.
+
+" 'You are in trouble?' Pauline said, dipping her brush into the
+coloring.
+
+" 'It is in your power to do me a great service, my dear child,' I
+answered.
+
+"The gladness in her eyes frightened me.
+
+" 'Is it possible that she loves me?' I thought. 'Pauline,' I began. I
+went and sat near to her, so as to study her. My tones had been so
+searching that she read my thought; her eyes fell, and I scrutinized
+her face. It was so pure and frank that I fancied I could see as
+clearly into her heart as into my own.
+
+" 'Do you love me?' I asked.
+
+" 'A little,--passionately--not a bit!' she cried.
+
+"Then she did not love me. Her jesting tones, and a little gleeful
+movement that escaped her, expressed nothing beyond a girlish, blithe
+goodwill. I told her about my distress and the predicament in which I
+found myself, and asked her to help me.
+
+" 'You do not wish to go to the pawnbroker's yourself, M. Raphael,'
+she answered, 'and yet you would send me!'
+
+"I blushed in confusion at the child's reasoning. She took my hand in
+hers as if she wanted to compensate for this home-truth by her light
+touch upon it.
+
+" 'Oh, I would willingly go,' she said, 'but it is not necessary. I
+found two five-franc pieces at the back of the piano, that had slipped
+without your knowledge between the frame and the keyboard, and I laid
+them on your table.'
+
+" 'You will soon be coming into some money, M. Raphael,' said the kind
+mother, showing her face between the curtains, 'and I can easily lend
+you a few crowns meanwhile.'
+
+" 'Oh, Pauline!' I cried, as I pressed her hand, 'how I wish that I
+were rich!'
+
+" 'Bah! why should you?' she said petulantly. Her hand shook in mine
+with the throbbing of her pulse; she snatched it away, and looked at
+both of mine.
+
+" 'You will marry a rich wife,' she said, 'but she will give you a
+great deal of trouble. Ah, Dieu! she will be your death,--I am sure of
+it.'
+
+"In her exclamation there was something like belief in her mother's
+absurd superstitions.
+
+" 'You are very credulous, Pauline!'
+
+" 'The woman whom you will love is going to kill you--there is no
+doubt of it,' she said, looking at me with alarm.
+
+"She took up her brush again and dipped it in the color; her great
+agitation was evident; she looked at me no longer. I was ready to give
+credence just then to superstitious fancies; no man is utterly
+wretched so long as he is superstitious; a belief of that kind is
+often in reality a hope.
+
+"I found that those two magnificent five-franc pieces were lying, in
+fact, upon my table when I reached my room. During the first confused
+thoughts of early slumber, I tried to audit my accounts so as to
+explain this unhoped-for windfall; but I lost myself in useless
+calculations, and slept. Just as I was leaving my room to engage a box
+the next morning, Pauline came to see me.
+
+" 'Perhaps your ten francs is not enough,' said the amiable, kind-
+hearted girl; 'my mother told me to offer you this money. Take it,
+please, take it!'
+
+"She laid three crowns upon the table, and tried to escape, but I
+would not let her go. Admiration dried the tears that sprang to my
+eyes.
+
+" 'You are an angel, Pauline,' I said. 'It is not the loan that
+touches me so much as the delicacy with which it is offered. I used to
+wish for a rich wife, a fashionable woman of rank; and now, alas! I
+would rather possess millions, and find some girl, as poor as you are,
+with a generous nature like your own; and I would renounce a fatal
+passion which will kill me. Perhaps what you told me will come true.'
+
+" 'That is enough,' she said, and fled away; the fresh trills of her
+birdlike voice rang up the staircase.
+
+" 'She is very happy in not yet knowing love,' I said to myself,
+thinking of the torments I had endured for many months past.
+
+"Pauline's fifteen francs were invaluable to me. Foedora, thinking of
+the stifling odor of the crowded place where we were to spend several
+hours, was sorry that she had not brought a bouquet; I went in search
+of flowers for her, as I had laid already my life and my fate at her
+feet. With a pleasure in which compunction mingled, I gave her a
+bouquet. I learned from its price the extravagance of superficial
+gallantry in the world. But very soon she complained of the heavy
+scent of a Mexican jessamine. The interior of the theatre, the bare
+bench on which she was to sit, filled her with intolerable disgust;
+she upbraided me for bringing her there. Although she sat beside me,
+she wished to go, and she went. I had spent sleepless nights, and
+squandered two months of my life for her, and I could not please her.
+Never had that tormenting spirit been more unfeeling or more
+fascinating.
+
+"I sat beside her in the cramped back seat of the vehicle; all the way
+I could feel her breath on me and the contact of her perfumed glove; I
+saw distinctly all her exceeding beauty; I inhaled a vague scent of
+orris-root; so wholly a woman she was, with no touch of womanhood.
+Just then a sudden gleam of light lit up the depths of this mysterious
+life for me. I thought all at once of a book just published by a poet,
+a genuine conception of the artist, in the shape of the statue of
+Polycletus.
+
+"I seemed to see that monstrous creation, at one time an officer,
+breaking in a spirited horse; at another, a girl, who gives herself up
+to her toilette and breaks her lovers' hearts; or again, a false lover
+driving a timid and gentle maid to despair. Unable to analyze Foedora
+by any other process, I told her this fanciful story; but no hint of
+her resemblance to this poetry of the impossible crossed her--it
+simply diverted her; she was like a child over a story from the
+Arabian Nights.
+
+" 'Foedora must be shielded by some talisman,' I thought to myself as
+I went back, 'or she could not resist the love of a man of my age, the
+infectious fever of that splendid malady of the soul. Is Foedora, like
+Lady Delacour, a prey to a cancer? Her life is certainly an unnatural
+one.'
+
+"I shuddered at the thought. Then I decided on a plan, at once the
+wildest and the most rational that lover ever dreamed of. I would
+study this woman from a physical point of view, as I had already
+studied her intellectually, and to this end I made up my mind to spend
+a night in her room without her knowledge. This project preyed upon me
+as a thirst for revenge gnaws at the heart of a Corsican monk. This is
+how I carried it out. On the days when Foedora received, her rooms
+were far too crowded for the hall-porter to keep the balance even
+between goers and comers; I could remain in the house, I felt sure,
+without causing a scandal in it, and I waited the countess' coming
+soiree with impatience. As I dressed I put a little English penknife
+into my waistcoat pocket, instead of a poniard. That literary
+implement, if found upon me, could awaken no suspicion, but I knew not
+whither my romantic resolution might lead, and I wished to be
+prepared.
+
+"As soon as the rooms began to fill, I entered the bedroom and
+examined the arrangements. The inner and outer shutters were closed;
+this was a good beginning; and as the waiting-maid might come to draw
+back the curtains that hung over the windows, I pulled them together.
+I was running great risks in venturing to manoeuvre beforehand in this
+way, but I had accepted the situation, and had deliberately reckoned
+with its dangers.
+
+"About midnight I hid myself in the embrasure of the window. I tried
+to scramble on to a ledge of the wainscoting, hanging on by the
+fastening of the shutters with my back against the wall, in such a
+position that my feet could not be visible. When I had carefully
+considered my points of support, and the space between me and the
+curtains, I had become sufficiently acquainted with all the
+difficulties of my position to stay in it without fear of detection if
+undisturbed by cramp, coughs, or sneezings. To avoid useless fatigue,
+I remained standing until the critical moment, when I must hang
+suspended like a spider in its web. The white-watered silk and muslin
+of the curtains spread before me in great pleats like organ-pipes.
+With my penknife I cut loopholes in them, through which I could see.
+
+"I heard vague murmurs from the salons, the laughter and the louder
+tones of the speakers. The smothered commotion and vague uproar
+lessened by slow degrees. One man and another came for his hat from
+the countess' chest of drawers, close to where I stood. I shivered, if
+the curtains were disturbed, at the thought of the mischances
+consequent on the confused and hasty investigations made by the men in
+a hurry to depart, who were rummaging everywhere. When I experienced
+no misfortunes of this kind, I augured well of my enterprise. An old
+wooer of Foedora's came for the last hat; he thought himself quite
+alone, looked at the bed, and heaved a great sigh, accompanied by some
+inaudible exclamation, into which he threw sufficient energy. In the
+boudoir close by, the countess, finding only some five or six intimate
+acquaintances about her, proposed tea. The scandals for which existing
+society has reserved the little faculty of belief that it retains,
+mingled with epigrams and trenchant witticisms, and the clatter of
+cups and spoons. Rastignac drew roars of laughter by merciless
+sarcasms at the expense of my rivals.
+
+" 'M. de Rastignac is a man with whom it is better not to quarrel,'
+said the countess, laughing.
+
+" 'I am quite of that opinion,' was his candid reply. 'I have always
+been right about my aversions--and my friendships as well,' he added.
+'Perhaps my enemies are quite as useful to me as my friends. I have
+made a particular study of modern phraseology, and of the natural
+craft that is used in all attack or defence. Official eloquence is one
+of our perfect social products.
+
+" 'One of your friends is not clever, so you speak of his integrity
+and his candor. Another's work is heavy; you introduce it as a piece
+of conscientious labor; and if the book is ill written, you extol the
+ideas it contains. Such an one is treacherous and fickle, slips
+through your fingers every moment; bah! he is attractive, bewitching,
+he is delightful! Suppose they are enemies, you fling every one, dead
+or alive, in their teeth. You reverse your phraseology for their
+benefit, and you are as keen in detecting their faults as you were
+before adroit in bringing out the virtues of your friends. This way of
+using the mental lorgnette is the secret of conversation nowadays, and
+the whole art of the complete courtier. If you neglect it, you might
+as well go out as an unarmed knight-banneret to fight against men in
+armor. And I make use of it, and even abuse it at times. So we are
+respected--I and my friends; and, moreover, my sword is quite as sharp
+as my tongue.'
+
+"One of Foedora's most fervid worshipers, whose presumption was
+notorious, and who even made it contribute to his success, took up the
+glove thrown down so scornfully by Rastignac. He began an unmeasured
+eulogy of me, my performances, and my character. Rastignac had
+overlooked this method of detraction. His sarcastic encomiums misled
+the countess, who sacrificed without mercy; she betrayed my secrets,
+and derided my pretensions and my hopes, to divert her friends.
+
+" 'There is a future before him,' said Rastignac. 'Some day he may be
+in a position to take a cruel revenge; his talents are at least equal
+to his courage; and I should consider those who attack him very rash,
+for he has a good memory----'
+
+" 'And writes Memoirs,' put in the countess, who seemed to object to
+the deep silence that prevailed.
+
+" 'Memoirs of a sham countess, madame,' replied Rastignac. 'Another
+sort of courage is needed to write that sort of thing.'
+
+" 'I give him credit for plenty of courage,' she answered; 'he is
+faithful to me.'
+
+"I was greatly tempted to show myself suddenly among the railers, like
+the shade of Banquo in Macbeth. I should have lost a mistress, but I
+had a friend! But love inspired me all at once, with one of those
+treacherous and fallacious subtleties that it can use to soothe all
+our pangs.
+
+"If Foedora loved me, I thought, she would be sure to disguise her
+feelings by some mocking jest. How often the heart protests against a
+lie on the lips!
+
+"Well, very soon my audacious rival, left alone with the countess,
+rose to go.
+
+" 'What! already?' asked she in a coaxing voice that set my heart
+beating. 'Will you not give me a few more minutes? Have you nothing
+more to say to me? will you never sacrifice any of your pleasures for
+me?'
+
+"He went away.
+
+" 'Ah!' she yawned; 'how very tiresome they all are!'
+
+"She pulled a cord energetically till the sound of a bell rang through
+the place; then, humming a few notes of Pria che spunti, the countess
+entered her room. No one had ever heard her sing; her muteness had
+called forth the wildest explanations. She had promised her first
+lover, so it was said, who had been held captive by her talent, and
+whose jealousy over her stretched beyond his grave, that she would
+never allow others to experience a happiness that he wished to be his
+and his alone.
+
+"I exerted every power of my soul to catch the sounds. Higher and
+higher rose the notes; Foedora's life seemed to dilate within her; her
+throat poured forth all its richest tones; something well-nigh divine
+entered into the melody. There was a bright purity and clearness of
+tone in the countess' voice, a thrilling harmony which reached the
+heart and stirred its pulses. Musicians are seldom unemotional; a
+woman who could sing like that must know how to love indeed. Her
+beautiful voice made one more puzzle in a woman mysterious enough
+before. I beheld her then, as plainly as I see you at this moment. She
+seemed to listen to herself, to experience a secret rapture of her
+own; she felt, as it were, an ecstasy like that of love.
+
+"She stood before the hearth during the execution of the principal
+theme of the rondo; and when she ceased her face changed. She looked
+tired; her features seemed to alter. She had laid the mask aside; her
+part as an actress was over. Yet the faded look that came over her
+beautiful face, a result either of this performance or of the
+evening's fatigues, had its charms, too.
+
+" 'This is her real self,' I thought.
+
+"She set her foot on a bronze bar of the fender as if to warm it, took
+off her gloves, and drew over her head the gold chain from which her
+bejeweled scent-bottle hung. It gave me a quite indescribable pleasure
+to watch the feline grace of every movement; the supple grace a cat
+displays as it adjusts its toilette in the sun. She looked at herself
+in the mirror and said aloud ill-humoredly--'I did not look well this
+evening, my complexion is going with alarming rapidity; perhaps I
+ought to keep earlier hours, and give up this life of dissipation.
+Does Justine mean to trifle with me?' She rang again; her maid hurried
+in. Where she had been I cannot tell; she came in by a secret
+staircase. I was anxious to make a study of her. I had lodged
+accusations, in my romantic imaginings, against this invisible
+waiting-woman, a tall, well-made brunette.
+
+" 'Did madame ring?'
+
+" 'Yes, twice,' answered Foedora; 'are you really growing deaf
+nowadays?'
+
+" 'I was preparing madame's milk of almonds.'
+
+"Justine knelt down before her, unlaced her sandals and drew them off,
+while her mistress lay carelessly back on her cushioned armchair
+beside the fire, yawned, and scratched her head. Every movement was
+perfectly natural; there was nothing whatever to indicate the secret
+sufferings or emotions with which I had credited her.
+
+" 'George must be in love!' she remarked. 'I shall dismiss him. He has
+drawn the curtains again to-night. What does he mean by it?'
+
+"All the blood in my veins rushed to my heart at this observation, but
+no more was said about curtains.
+
+" 'Life is very empty,' the countess went on. 'Ah! be careful not to
+scratch me as you did yesterday. Just look here, I still have the
+marks of your nails about me,' and she held out a silken knee. She
+thrust her bare feet into velvet slippers bound with swan's-down, and
+unfastened her dress, while Justine prepared to comb her hair.
+
+" 'You ought to marry, madame, and have children.'
+
+" 'Children!' she cried; 'it wants no more than that to finish me at
+once; and a husband! What man is there to whom I could----? Was my
+hair well arranged to-night?'
+
+" 'Not particularly.'
+
+" 'You are a fool!'
+
+" 'That way of crimping your hair too much is the least becoming way
+possible for you. Large, smooth curls suit you a great deal better.'
+
+" 'Really?'
+
+" 'Yes, really, madame; that wavy style only looks nice in fair hair.'
+
+" 'Marriage? never, never! Marriage is a commercial arrangement, for
+which I was never made.'
+
+"What a disheartening scene for a lover! Here was a lonely woman,
+without friends or kin, without the religion of love, without faith in
+any affection. Yet however slightly she might feel the need to pour
+out her heart, a craving that every human being feels, it could only
+be satisfied by gossiping with her maid, by trivial and indifferent
+talk. . . . I grieved for her.
+
+"Justine unlaced her. I watched her carefully when she was at last
+unveiled. Her maidenly form, in its rose-tinged whiteness, was visible
+through her shift in the taper light, as dazzling as some silver
+statue behind its gauze covering. No, there was no defect that need
+shrink from the stolen glances of love. Alas, a fair form will
+overcome the stoutest resolutions!
+
+"The maid lighted the taper in the alabaster sconce that hung before
+the bed, while her mistress sat thoughtful and silent before the fire.
+Justine went for a warming-pan, turned down the bed, and helped to lay
+her mistress in it; then, after some further time spent in
+punctiliously rendering various services that showed how seriously
+Foedora respected herself, her maid left her. The countess turned to
+and fro several times, and sighed; she was ill at ease; faint, just
+perceptible sounds, like sighs of impatience, escaped from her lips.
+She reached out a hand to the table, and took a flask from it, from
+which she shook four or five drops of some brown liquid into some milk
+before taking it; again there followed some painful sighs, and the
+exclamation, 'MON DIEU!'
+
+"The cry, and the tone in which it was uttered, wrung my heart. By
+degrees she lay motionless. This frightened me; but very soon I heard
+a sleeper's heavy, regular breathing. I drew the rustling silk
+curtains apart, left my post, went to the foot of the bed, and gazed
+at her with feelings that I cannot define. She was so enchanting as
+she lay like a child, with her arm above her head; but the sweetness
+of the fair, quiet visage, surrounded by the lace, only irritated me.
+I had not been prepared for the torture to which I was compelled to
+submit.
+
+" 'Mon Dieu!' that scrap of a thought which I understood not, but must
+even take as my sole light, had suddenly modified my opinion of
+Foedora. Trite or profoundly significant, frivolous or of deep import,
+the words might be construed as expressive of either pleasure or pain,
+of physical or of mental suffering. Was it a prayer or a malediction,
+a forecast or a memory, a fear or a regret? A whole life lay in that
+utterance, a life of wealth or of penury; perhaps it contained a
+crime!
+
+"The mystery that lurked beneath this fair semblance of womanhood grew
+afresh; there were so many ways of explaining Foedora, that she became
+inexplicable. A sort of language seemed to flow from between her lips.
+I put thoughts and feelings into the accidents of her breathing,
+whether weak or regular, gentle, or labored. I shared her dreams; I
+would fain have divined her secrets by reading them through her
+slumber. I hesitated among contradictory opinions and decisions
+without number. I could not deny my heart to the woman I saw before
+me, with the calm, pure beauty in her face. I resolved to make one
+more effort. If I told her the story of my life, my love, my
+sacrifices, might I not awaken pity in her or draw a tear from her who
+never wept?
+
+"As I set all my hopes on this last experiment, the sounds in the
+streets showed that day was at hand. For a moment's space I pictured
+Foedora waking to find herself in my arms. I could have stolen softly
+to her side and slipped them about her in a close embrace. Resolved to
+resist the cruel tyranny of this thought, I hurried into the salon,
+heedless of any sounds I might make; but, luckily, I came upon a
+secret door leading to a little staircase. As I expected, the key was
+in the lock; I slammed the door, went boldly out into the court, and
+gained the street in three bounds, without looking round to see
+whether I was observed.
+
+"A dramatist was to read a comedy at the countess' house in two days'
+time; I went thither, intending to outstay the others, so as to make a
+rather singular request to her; I meant to ask her to keep the
+following evening for me alone, and to deny herself to other comers;
+but when I found myself alone with her, my courage failed. Every tick
+of the clock alarmed me. It wanted only a quarter of an hour of
+midnight.
+
+" 'If I do not speak,' I thought to myself, 'I must smash my head
+against the corner of the mantelpiece.'
+
+"I gave myself three minutes' grace; the three minutes went by, and I
+did not smash my head upon the marble; my heart grew heavy, like a
+sponge with water.
+
+" 'You are exceedingly amusing,' said she.
+
+" 'Ah, madame, if you could but understand me!' I answered.
+
+" 'What is the matter with you?' she asked. 'You are turning pale.'
+
+" 'I am hesitating to ask a favor of you.'
+
+"Her gesture revived my courage. I asked her to make the appointment
+with me.
+
+" 'Willingly,' she answered' 'but why will you not speak to me now?'
+
+" 'To be candid with you, I ought to explain the full scope of your
+promise: I want to spend this evening by your side, as if we were
+brother and sister. Have no fear; I am aware of your antipathies; you
+must have divined me sufficiently to feel sure that I should wish you
+to do nothing that could be displeasing to you; presumption, moreover,
+would not thus approach you. You have been a friend to me, you have
+shown me kindness and great indulgence; know, therefore, that
+to-morrow I must bid you farewell.--Do not take back your word,' I
+exclaimed, seeing her about to speak, and I went away.
+
+"At eight o'clock one evening towards the end of May, Foedora and I
+were alone together in her gothic boudoir. I feared no longer; I was
+secure of happiness. My mistress should be mine, or I would seek a
+refuge in death. I had condemned my faint-hearted love, and a man who
+acknowledges his weakness is strong indeed.
+
+"The countess, in her blue cashmere gown, was reclining on a sofa,
+with her feet on a cushion. She wore an Oriental turban such as
+painters assign to early Hebrews; its strangeness added an
+indescribable coquettish grace to her attractions. A transitory charm
+seemed to have laid its spell on her face; it might have furnished the
+argument that at every instant we become new and unparalleled beings,
+without any resemblance to the US of the future or of the past. I had
+never yet seen her so radiant.
+
+" 'Do you know that you have piqued my curiosity?' she said, laughing.
+
+" 'I will not disappoint it,' I said quietly, as I seated myself near
+to her and took the hand that she surrendered to me. 'You have a very
+beautiful voice!'
+
+" 'You have never heard me sing!' she exclaimed, starting
+involuntarily with surprise.
+
+" 'I will prove that it is quite otherwise, whenever it is necessary.
+Is your delightful singing still to remain a mystery? Have no fear, I
+do not wish to penetrate it.'
+
+"We spent about an hour in familiar talk. While I adopted the attitude
+and manner of a man to whom Foedora must refuse nothing, I showed her
+all a lover's deference. Acting in this way, I received a favor--I was
+allowed to kiss her hand. She daintily drew off the glove, and my
+whole soul was dissolved and poured forth in that kiss. I was steeped
+in the bliss of an illusion in which I tried to believe.
+
+"Foedora lent herself most unexpectedly to my caress and my
+flatteries. Do not accuse me of faint-heartedness; if I had gone a
+step beyond these fraternal compliments, the claws would have been out
+of the sheath and into me. We remained perfectly silent for nearly ten
+minutes. I was admiring her, investing her with the charms she had
+not. She was mine just then, and mine only,--this enchanting being was
+mine, as was permissible, in my imagination; my longing wrapped her
+round and held her close; in my soul I wedded her. The countess was
+subdued and fascinated by my magnetic influence. Ever since I have
+regretted that this subjugation was not absolute; but just then I
+yearned for her soul, her heart alone, and for nothing else. I longed
+for an ideal and perfect happiness, a fair illusion that cannot last
+for very long. At last I spoke, feeling that the last hours of my
+frenzy were at hand.
+
+" 'Hear me, madame. I love you, and you know it; I have said so a
+hundred times; you must have understood me. I would not take upon me
+the airs of a coxcomb, nor would I flatter you, nor urge myself upon
+you like a fool; I would not owe your love to such arts as these! so I
+have been misunderstood. What sufferings have I not endured for your
+sake! For these, however, you were not to blame; but in a few minutes
+you shall decide for yourself. There are two kinds of poverty, madame.
+One kind openly walks the street in rags, an unconscious imitator of
+Diogenes, on a scanty diet, reducing life to its simplest terms; he is
+happier, maybe, than the rich; he has fewer cares at any rate, and
+accepts such portions of the world as stronger spirits refuse. Then
+there is poverty in splendor, a Spanish pauper, concealing the life of
+a beggar by his title, his bravery, and his pride; poverty that wears
+a white waistcoat and yellow kid gloves, a beggar with a carriage,
+whose whole career will be wrecked for lack of a halfpenny. Poverty of
+the first kind belongs to the populace; the second kind is that of
+blacklegs, of kings, and of men of talent. I am neither a man of the
+people, nor a king, nor a swindler; possibly I have no talent either,
+I am an exception. With the name I bear I must die sooner than beg.
+Set your mind at rest, madame,' I said; 'to-day I have abundance, I
+possess sufficient of the clay for my needs'; for the hard look passed
+over her face which we wear whenever a well-dressed beggar takes us by
+surprise. 'Do you remember the day when you wished to go to the
+Gymnase without me, never believing that I should be there?' I went
+on.
+
+"She nodded.
+
+" 'I had laid out my last five-franc piece that I might see you there.
+--Do you recollect our walk in the Jardin des Plantes? The hire of
+your cab took everything I had.'
+
+"I told her about my sacrifices, and described the life I led; heated
+not with wine, as I am to-day, but by the generous enthusiasm of my
+heart, my passion overflowed in burning words; I have forgotten how
+the feelings within me blazed forth; neither memory nor skill of mine
+could possibly reproduce it. It was no colorless chronicle of blighted
+affections; my love was strengthened by fair hopes; and such words
+came to me, by love's inspiration, that each had power to set forth a
+whole life--like echoes of the cries of a soul in torment. In such
+tones the last prayers ascend from dying men on the battlefield. I
+stopped, for she was weeping. GRAND DIEU! I had reaped an actor's
+reward, the success of a counterfeit passion displayed at the cost of
+five francs paid at the theatre door. I had drawn tears from her.
+
+" 'If I had known----' she said.
+
+" 'Do not finish the sentence,' I broke in. 'Even now I love you well
+enough to murder you----'
+
+"She reached for the bell-pull. I burst into a roar of laughter.
+
+" 'Do not call any one,' I said. 'I shall leave you to finish your
+life in peace. It would be a blundering kind of hatred that would
+murder you! You need not fear violence of any kind; I have spent a
+whole night at the foot of your bed without----'
+
+" 'Monsieur----' she said, blushing; but after that first impulse of
+modesty that even the most hardened women must surely own, she flung a
+scornful glance at me, and said:
+
+" 'You must have been very cold.'
+
+" 'Do you think that I set such value on your beauty, madame,' I
+answered, guessing the thoughts that moved her. 'Your beautiful face
+is for me a promise of a soul yet more beautiful. Madame, those to
+whom a woman is merely a woman can always purchase odalisques fit for
+the seraglio, and achieve their happiness at a small cost. But I
+aspired to something higher; I wanted the life of close communion of
+heart and heart with you that have no heart. I know that now. If you
+were to belong to another, I could kill him. And yet, no; for you
+would love him, and his death might hurt you perhaps. What agony this
+is!' I cried.
+
+" 'If it is any comfort to you,' she retorted cheerfully, 'I can
+assure you that I shall never belong to any one----'
+
+" 'So you offer an affront to God Himself,' I interrupted; 'and you
+will be punished for it. Some day you will lie upon your sofa
+suffering unheard-of ills, unable to endure the light or the slightest
+sound, condemned to live as it were in the tomb. Then, when you seek
+the causes of those lingering and avenging torments, you will remember
+the woes that you distributed so lavishly upon your way. You have sown
+curses, and hatred will be your reward. We are the real judges, the
+executioners of a justice that reigns here below, which overrules the
+justice of man and the laws of God.'
+
+" 'No doubt it is very culpable in me not to love you,' she said,
+laughing. 'Am I to blame? No. I do not love you; you are a man, that
+is sufficient. I am happy by myself; why should I give up my way of
+living, a selfish way, if you will, for the caprices of a master?
+Marriage is a sacrament by virtue of which each imparts nothing but
+vexations to the other. Children, moreover, worry me. Did I not
+faithfully warn you about my nature? Why are you not satisfied to have
+my friendship? I wish I could make you amends for all the troubles I
+have caused you, through not guessing the value of your poor five-
+franc pieces. I appreciate the extent of your sacrifices; but your
+devotion and delicate tact can be repaid by love alone, and I care so
+little for you, that this scene has a disagreeable effect upon me.'
+
+" 'I am fully aware of my absurdity,' I said, unable to restrain my
+tears. 'Pardon me,' I went on, 'it was a delight to hear those cruel
+words you have just uttered, so well I love you. O, if I could testify
+my love with every drop of blood in me!'
+
+" 'Men always repeat these classic formulas to us, more or less
+effectively,' she answered, still smiling. 'But it appears very
+difficult to die at our feet, for I see corpses of that kind about
+everywhere. It is twelve o'clock. Allow me to go to bed.'
+
+" 'And in two hours' time you will cry to yourself, AH, MON DIEU!'
+
+" 'Like the day before yesterday! Yes,' she said, 'I was thinking of
+my stockbroker; I had forgotten to tell him to convert my five per
+cent stock into threes, and the three per cents had fallen during the
+day.'
+
+"I looked at her, and my eyes glittered with anger. Sometimes a crime
+may be a whole romance; I understood that just then. She was so
+accustomed, no doubt, to the most impassioned declarations of this
+kind, that my words and my tears were forgotten already.
+
+" 'Would you marry a peer of France?' I demanded abruptly.
+
+" 'If he were a duke, I might.'
+
+"I seized my hat and made her a bow.
+
+" 'Permit me to accompany you to the door,' she said, cutting irony in
+her tones, in the poise of her head, and in her gesture.
+
+" 'Madame----'
+
+" 'Monsieur?'
+
+" 'I shall never see you again.'
+
+" 'I hope not,' and she insolently inclined her head.
+
+" 'You wish to be a duchess?' I cried, excited by a sort of madness
+that her insolence roused in me. 'You are wild for honors and titles?
+Well, only let me love you; bid my pen write and my voice speak for
+you alone; be the inmost soul of my life, my guiding star! Then, only
+accept me for your husband as a minister, a peer of France, a duke. I
+will make of myself whatever you would have me be!'
+
+" 'You made good use of the time you spent with the advocate,' she
+said smiling. 'There is a fervency about your pleadings.'
+
+" 'The present is yours,' I cried, 'but the future is mine! I only
+lose a woman; you are losing a name and a family. Time is big with my
+revenge; time will spoil your beauty, and yours will be a solitary
+death; and glory waits for me!'
+
+" 'Thanks for your peroration!' she said, repressing a yawn; the wish
+that she might never see me again was expressed in her whole bearing.
+
+"That remark silenced me. I flung at her a glance full of hatred, and
+hurried away.
+
+"Foedora must be forgotten; I must cure myself of my infatuation, and
+betake myself once more to my lonely studies, or die. So I set myself
+tremendous tasks; I determined to complete my labors. For fifteen days
+I never left my garret, spending whole nights in pallid thought. I
+worked with difficulty, and by fits and starts, despite my courage and
+the stimulation of despair. The music had fled. I could not exorcise
+the brilliant mocking image of Foedora. Something morbid brooded over
+every thought, a vague longing as dreadful as remorse. I imitated the
+anchorites of the Thebaid. If I did not pray as they did, I lived a
+life in the desert like theirs, hewing out my ideas as they were wont
+to hew their rocks. I could at need have girdled my waist with spikes,
+that physical suffering might quell mental anguish.
+
+"One evening Pauline found her way into my room.
+
+" 'You are killing yourself,' she said imploringly; 'you should go out
+and see your friends----'
+
+" 'Pauline, you were a true prophet; Foedora is killing me, I want to
+die. My life is intolerable.'
+
+" 'Is there only one woman in the world?' she asked, smiling. 'Why
+make yourself so miserable in so short a life?'
+
+"I looked at Pauline in bewilderment. She left me before I noticed her
+departure; the sound of her words had reached me, but not their sense.
+Very soon I had to take my Memoirs in manuscript to my literary-
+contractor. I was so absorbed by my passion, that I could not remember
+how I had managed to live without money; I only knew that the four
+hundred and fifty francs due to me would pay my debts. So I went to
+receive my salary, and met Rastignac, who thought me changed and
+thinner.
+
+" 'What hospital have you been discharged from?' he asked.
+
+" 'That woman is killing me,' I answered; 'I can neither despise her
+nor forget her.'
+
+" 'You had much better kill her, then perhaps you would think no more
+of her,' he said, laughing.
+
+" 'I have often thought of it,' I replied; 'but though sometimes the
+thought of a crime revives my spirits, of violence and murder, either
+or both, I am really incapable of carrying out the design. The
+countess is an admirable monster who would crave for pardon, and not
+every man is an Othello.'
+
+" 'She is like every woman who is beyond our reach,' Rastignac
+interrupted.
+
+" 'I am mad,' I cried; 'I can feel the madness raging at times in my
+brain. My ideas are like shadows; they flit before me, and I cannot
+grasp them. Death would be preferable to this life, and I have
+carefully considered the best way of putting an end to the struggle. I
+am not thinking of the living Foedora in the Faubourg Saint Honore,
+but of my Foedora here,' and I tapped my forehead. 'What to you say to
+opium?'
+
+" 'Pshaw! horrid agonies,' said Rastignac.
+
+" 'Or charcoal fumes?'
+
+" 'A low dodge.'
+
+" 'Or the Seine?'
+
+" 'The drag-nets, and the Morgue too, are filthy.'
+
+" 'A pistol-shot?'
+
+" 'And if you miscalculate, you disfigure yourself for life. Listen to
+me,' he went on, 'like all young men, I have pondered over suicide.
+Which of us hasn't killed himself two or three times before he is
+thirty? I find there is no better course than to use existence as a
+means of pleasure. Go in for thorough dissipation, and your passion or
+you will perish in it. Intemperance, my dear fellow, commands all
+forms of death. Does she not wield the thunderbolt of apoplexy?
+Apoplexy is a pistol-shot that does not miscalculate. Orgies are
+lavish in all physical pleasures; is not that the small change for
+opium? And the riot that makes us drink to excess bears a challenge to
+mortal combat with wine. That butt of Malmsey of the Duke of
+Clarence's must have had a pleasanter flavor than Seine mud. When we
+sink gloriously under the table, is not that a periodical death by
+drowning on a small scale? If we are picked up by the police and
+stretched out on those chilly benches of theirs at the police-station,
+do we not enjoy all the pleasures of the Morgue? For though we are not
+blue and green, muddy and swollen corpses, on the other hand we have
+the consciousness of the climax.
+
+" 'Ah,' he went on, 'this protracted suicide has nothing in common
+with the bankrupt grocer's demise. Tradespeople have brought the river
+into disrepute; they fling themselves in to soften their creditors'
+hearts. In your place I should endeavor to die gracefully; and if you
+wish to invent a novel way of doing it, by struggling with life after
+this manner, I will be your second. I am disappointed and sick of
+everything. The Alsacienne, whom it was proposed that I should marry,
+had six toes on her left foot; I cannot possibly live with a woman who
+has six toes! It would get about to a certainty, and then I should be
+ridiculous. Her income was only eighteen thousand francs; her fortune
+diminished in quantity as her toes increased. The devil take it; if we
+begin an outrageous sort of life, we may come on some bit of luck,
+perhaps!'
+
+"Rastignac's eloquence carried me away. The attractions of the plan
+shone too temptingly, hopes were kindled, the poetical aspects of the
+matter appealed to a poet.
+
+" 'How about money?' I said.
+
+" 'Haven't you four hundred and fifty francs?'
+
+" 'Yes, but debts to my landlady and the tailor----'
+
+" 'You would pay your tailor? You will never be anything whatever, not
+so much as a minister.'
+
+" 'But what can one do with twenty louis?'
+
+" 'Go to the gaming-table.'
+
+"I shuddered.
+
+" 'You are going to launch out into what I call systematic
+dissipation,' said he, noticing my scruples, 'and yet you are afraid
+of a green table-cloth.'
+
+" 'Listen to me,' I answered. 'I promised my father never to set foot
+in a gaming-house. Not only is that a sacred promise, but I still feel
+an unconquerable disgust whenever I pass a gambling-hell; take the
+money and go without me. While our fortune is at stake, I will set my
+own affairs straight, and then I will go to your lodgings and wait for
+you.'
+
+"That was the way I went to perdition. A young man has only to come
+across a woman who will not love him, or a woman who loves him too
+well, and his whole life becomes a chaos. Prosperity swallows up our
+energy just as adversity obscures our virtues. Back once more in my
+Hotel de Saint-Quentin, I gazed about me a long while in the garret
+where I had led my scholar's temperate life, a life which would
+perhaps have been a long and honorable one, and that I ought not to
+have quitted for the fevered existence which had urged me to the brink
+of a precipice. Pauline surprised me in this dejected attitude.
+
+" 'Why, what is the matter with you?' she asked.
+
+"I rose and quietly counted out the money owing to her mother, and
+added to it sufficient to pay for six months' rent in advance. She
+watched me in some alarm.
+
+" 'I am going to leave you, dear Pauline.'
+
+" 'I knew it!' she exclaimed.
+
+" 'Listen, my child. I have not given up the idea of coming back. Keep
+my room for me for six months. If I do not return by the fifteenth of
+November, you will come into possession of my things. This sealed
+packet of manuscript is the fair copy of my great work on "The
+Will," ' I went on, pointing to a package. 'Will you deposit it in the
+King's Library? And you may do as you wish with everything that is
+left here.'
+
+"Her look weighed heavily on my heart; Pauline was an embodiment of
+conscience there before me.
+
+" 'I shall have no more lessons,' she said, pointing to the piano.
+
+"I did not answer that.
+
+" 'Will you write to me?'
+
+" 'Good-bye, Pauline.'
+
+"I gently drew her towards me, and set a kiss on that innocent fair
+brow of hers, like snow that has not yet touched the earth--a father's
+or a brother's kiss. She fled. I would not see Madame Gaudin, hung my
+key in its wonted place, and departed. I was almost at the end of the
+Rue de Cluny when I heard a woman's light footstep behind me.
+
+" 'I have embroidered this purse for you,' Pauline said; 'will you
+refuse even that?'
+
+"By the light of the street lamp I thought I saw tears in Pauline's
+eyes, and I groaned. Moved perhaps by a common impulse, we parted in
+haste like people who fear the contagion of the plague.
+
+"As I waited with dignified calmness for Rastignac's return, his room
+seemed a grotesque interpretation of the sort of life I was about to
+enter upon. The clock on the chimney-piece was surmounted by a Venus
+resting on her tortoise; a half-smoked cigar lay in her arms. Costly
+furniture of various kinds--love tokens, very likely--was scattered
+about. Old shoes lay on a luxurious sofa. The comfortable armchair
+into which I had thrown myself bore as many scars as a veteran; the
+arms were gnashed, the back was overlaid with a thick, stale deposit
+of pomade and hair-oil from the heads of all his visitors. Splendor
+and squalor were oddly mingled, on the walls, the bed, and everywhere.
+You might have thought of a Neapolitan palace and the groups of
+lazzaroni about it. It was the room of a gambler or a mauvais sujet,
+where the luxury exists for one individual, who leads the life of the
+senses and does not trouble himself over inconsistencies.
+
+"There was a certain imaginative element about the picture it
+presented. Life was suddenly revealed there in its rags and spangles
+as the incomplete thing it really is, of course, but so vividly and
+picturesquely; it was like a den where a brigand has heaped up all the
+plunder in which he delights. Some pages were missing from a copy of
+Byron's poems: they had gone to light a fire of a few sticks for this
+young person, who played for stakes of a thousand francs, and had not
+a faggot; he kept a tilbury, and had not a whole shirt to his back.
+Any day a countess or an actress or a run of luck at ecarte might set
+him up with an outfit worthy of a king. A candle had been stuck into
+the green bronze sheath of a vestaholder; a woman's portrait lay
+yonder, torn out of its carved gold setting. How was it possible that
+a young man, whose nature craved excitement, could renounce a life so
+attractive by reason of its contradictions; a life that afforded all
+the delights of war in the midst of peace? I was growing drowsy when
+Rastignac kicked the door open and shouted:
+
+" 'Victory! Now we can take our time about dying.'
+
+"He held out his hat filled with gold to me, and put it down on the
+table; then we pranced round it like a pair of cannibals about to eat
+a victim; we stamped, and danced, and yelled, and sang; we gave each
+other blows fit to kill an elephant, at sight of all the pleasures of
+the world contained in that hat.
+
+" 'Twenty-seven thousand francs,' said Rastignac, adding a few bank-
+notes to the pile of gold. 'That would be enough for other folk to
+live upon; will it be sufficient for us to die on? Yes! we will
+breathe our last in a bath of gold--hurrah!' and we capered afresh.
+
+"We divided the windfall. We began with double-napoleons, and came
+down to the smaller coins, one by one. 'This for you, this for me,' we
+kept saying, distilling our joy drop by drop.
+
+" 'We won't go to sleep,' cried Rastignac. 'Joseph! some punch!'
+
+"He threw gold to his faithful attendant.
+
+" 'There is your share,' he said; 'go and bury yourself if you can.'
+
+"Next day I went to Lesage and chose my furniture, took the rooms that
+you know in the Rue Taitbout, and left the decoration to one of the
+best upholsterers. I bought horses. I plunged into a vortex of
+pleasures, at once hollow and real. I went in for play, gaining and
+losing enormous sums, but only at friends' houses and in ballrooms;
+never in gaming-houses, for which I still retained the holy horror of
+my early days. Without meaning it, I made some friends, either through
+quarrels or owing to the easy confidence established among those who
+are going to the bad together; nothing, possibly, makes us cling to
+one another so tightly as our evil propensities.
+
+"I made several ventures in literature, which were flatteringly
+received. Great men who followed the profession of letters, having
+nothing to fear from me, belauded me, not so much on account of my
+merits as to cast a slur on those of their rivals.
+
+"I became a 'free-liver,' to make use of the picturesque expression
+appropriated by the language of excess. I made it a point of honor not
+to be long about dying, and that my zeal and prowess should eclipse
+those displayed by all others in the jolliest company. I was always
+spruce and carefully dressed. I had some reputation for cleverness.
+There was no sign about me of the fearful way of living which makes a
+man into a mere disgusting apparatus, a funnel, a pampered beast.
+
+"Very soon Debauch rose before me in all the majesty of its horror,
+and I grasped all that it meant. Those prudent, steady-going
+characters who are laying down wine in bottles for their heirs, can
+barely conceive, it is true, of so wide a theory of life, nor
+appreciate its normal condition; but when will you instill poetry into
+the provincial intellect? Opium and tea, with all their delights, are
+merely drugs to folk of that calibre.
+
+"Is not the imperfect sybarite to be met with even in Paris itself,
+that intellectual metropolis? Unfit to endure the fatigues of
+pleasure, this sort of person, after a drinking bout, is very much
+like those worthy bourgeois who fall foul of music after hearing a new
+opera by Rossini. Does he not renounce these courses in the same frame
+of mind that leads an abstemious man to forswear Ruffec pates, because
+the first one, forsooth, gave him the indigestion?
+
+"Debauch is as surely an art as poetry, and is not for craven spirits.
+To penetrate its mysteries and appreciate its charms, conscientious
+application is required; and as with every path of knowledge, the way
+is thorny and forbidding at the outset. The great pleasures of
+humanity are hedged about with formidable obstacles; not its single
+enjoyments, but enjoyment as a system, a system which establishes
+seldom experienced sensations and makes them habitual, which
+concentrates and multiplies them for us, creating a dramatic life
+within our life, and imperatively demanding a prompt and enormous
+expenditure of vitality.  War, Power, Art, like Debauch, are all forms
+of demoralization, equally remote from the faculties of humanity,
+equally profound, and all are alike difficult of access. But when man
+has once stormed the heights of these grand mysteries, does he not
+walk in another world? Are not generals, ministers, and artists
+carried, more or less, towards destruction by the need of violent
+distractions in an existence so remote from ordinary life as theirs?
+
+"War, after all, is the Excess of bloodshed, as the Excess of self-
+interest produces Politics. Excesses of every sort are brothers. These
+social enormities possess the attraction of the abyss; they draw
+towards themselves as St. Helena beckoned Napoleon; we are fascinated,
+our heads swim, we wish to sound their depths though we cannot account
+for the wish. Perhaps the thought of Infinity dwells in these
+precipices, perhaps they contain some colossal flattery for the soul
+of man; for is he not, then, wholly absorbed in himself?
+
+"The wearied artist needs a complete contrast to his paradise of
+imaginings and of studious hours; he either craves, like God, the
+seventh day of rest, or with Satan, the pleasures of hell; so that his
+senses may have free play in opposition to the employment of his
+faculties. Byron could never have taken for his relaxation to the
+independent gentleman's delights of boston and gossip, for he was a
+poet, and so must needs pit Greece against Mahmoud.
+
+"In war, is not man an angel of extirpation, a sort of executioner on
+a gigantic scale? Must not the spell be strong indeed that makes us
+undergo such horrid sufferings so hostile to our weak frames,
+sufferings that encircle every strong passion with a hedge of thorns?
+The tobacco smoker is seized with convulsions, and goes through a kind
+of agony consequent upon his excesses; but has he not borne a part in
+delightful festivals in realms unknown? Has Europe ever ceased from
+wars? She has never given herself time to wipe the stains from her
+feet that are steeped in blood to the ankle. Mankind at large is
+carried away by fits of intoxication, as nature has its accessions of
+love.
+
+"For men in private life, for a vegetating Mirabeau dreaming of storms
+in a time of calm, Excess comprises all things; it perpetually
+embraces the whole sum of life; it is something better still--it is a
+duel with an antagonist of unknown power, a monster, terrible at first
+sight, that must be seized by the horns, a labor that cannot be
+imagined.
+
+"Suppose that nature has endowed you with a feeble stomach or one of
+limited capacity; you acquire a mastery over it and improve it; you
+learn to carry your liquor; you grow accustomed to being drunk; you
+pass whole nights without sleep; at last you acquire the constitution
+of a colonel of cuirassiers; and in this way you create yourself
+afresh, as if to fly in the face of Providence.
+
+"A man transformed after this sort is like a neophyte who has at last
+become a veteran, has accustomed his mind to shot and shell and his
+legs to lengthy marches. When the monster's hold on him is still
+uncertain, and it is not yet known which will have the better of it,
+they roll over and over, alternately victor and vanquished, in a world
+where everything is wonderful, where every ache of the soul is laid to
+sleep, where only the shadows of ideas are revived.
+
+"This furious struggle has already become a necessity for us. The
+prodigal has struck a bargain for all the enjoyments with which life
+teems abundantly, at the price of his own death, like the mythical
+persons in legends who sold themselves to the devil for the power of
+doing evil. For them, instead of flowing quietly on in its monotonous
+course in the depths of some counting-house or study, life is poured
+out in a boiling torrent.
+
+"Excess is, in short, for the body what the mystic's ecstasy is for
+the soul. Intoxication steeps you in fantastic imaginings every whit
+as strange as those of ecstatics. You know hours as full of rapture as
+a young girl's dreams; you travel without fatigue; you chat pleasantly
+with your friends; words come to you with a whole life in each, and
+fresh pleasures without regrets; poems are set forth for you in a few
+brief phrases. The coarse animal satisfaction, in which science has
+tried to find a soul, is followed by the enchanted drowsiness that men
+sigh for under the burden of consciousness. Is it not because they all
+feel the need of absolute repose? Because Excess is a sort of toll
+that genius pays to pain?
+
+"Look at all great men; nature made them pleasure-loving or base,
+every one. Some mocking or jealous power corrupted them in either soul
+or body, so as to make all their powers futile, and their efforts of
+no avail.
+
+"All men and all things appear before you in the guise you choose, in
+those hours when wine has sway. You are lord of all creation; you
+transform it at your pleasure. And throughout this unceasing delirium,
+Play may pour, at your will, its molten lead into your veins.
+
+"Some day you will fall into the monster's power. Then you will have,
+as I had, a frenzied awakening, with impotence sitting by your pillow.
+Are you an old soldier? Phthisis attacks you. A diplomatist? An
+aneurism hangs death in your heart by a thread. It will perhaps be
+consumption that will cry out to me, 'Let us be going!' as to Raphael
+of Urbino, in old time, killed by an excess of love.
+
+"In this way I have existed. I was launched into the world too early
+or too late. My energy would have been dangerous there, no doubt, if I
+had not have squandered it in such ways as these. Was not the world
+rid of an Alexander, by the cup of Hercules, at the close of a
+drinking bout?
+
+"There are some, the sport of Destiny, who must either have heaven or
+hell, the hospice of St. Bernard or riotous excess. Only just now I
+lacked the heart to moralize about those two," and he pointed to
+Euphrasia and Aquilina. "They are types of my own personal history,
+images of my life! I could scarcely reproach them; they stood before
+me like judges.
+
+"In the midst of this drama that I was enacting, and while my
+distracting disorder was at its height, two crises supervened; each
+brought me keen and abundant pangs. The first came a few days after I
+had flung myself, like Sardanapalus, on my pyre. I met Foedora under
+the peristyle of the Bouffons. We both were waiting for our carriages.
+
+" 'Ah! so you are living yet?'
+
+"That was the meaning of her smile, and probably of the spiteful words
+she murmured in the ear of her cicisbeo, telling him my history no
+doubt, rating mine as a common love affair. She was deceived, yet she
+was applauding her perspicacity. Oh, that I should be dying for her,
+must still adore her, always see her through my potations, see her
+still when I was overcome with wine, or in the arms of courtesans; and
+know that I was a target for her scornful jests! Oh, that I should be
+unable to tear the love of her out of my breast and to fling it at her
+feet!
+
+"Well, I quickly exhausted my funds, but owing to those three years of
+discipline, I enjoyed the most robust health, and on the day that I
+found myself without a penny I felt remarkably well. In order to carry
+on the process of dying, I signed bills at short dates, and the day
+came when they must be met. Painful excitements! but how they quicken
+the pulses of youth! I was not prematurely aged; I was young yet, and
+full of vigor and life.
+
+"At my first debt all my virtues came to life; slowly and despairingly
+they seemed to pace towards me; but I could compound with them--they
+were like aged aunts that begin with a scolding and end by bestowing
+tears and money upon you.
+
+"Imagination was less yielding; I saw my name bandied about through
+every city in Europe. 'One's name is oneself' says Eusebe Salverte.
+After these excursions I returned to the room I had never quitted,
+like a doppelganger in a German tale, and came to myself with a start.
+
+"I used to see with indifference a banker's messenger going on his
+errands through the streets of Paris, like a commercial Nemesis,
+wearing his master's livery--a gray coat and a silver badge; but now I
+hated the species in advance. One of them came one morning to ask me
+to meet some eleven bills that I had scrawled my name upon. My
+signature was worth three thousand francs! Taking me altogether, I
+myself was not worth that amount. Sheriff's deputies rose up before
+me, turning their callous faces upon my despair, as the hangman
+regards the criminal to whom he says, 'It has just struck half-past
+three.' I was in the power of their clerks; they could scribble my
+name, drag it through the mire, and jeer at it. I was a defaulter. Has
+a debtor any right to himself? Could not other men call me to account
+for my way of living? Why had I eaten puddings a la chipolata? Why had
+I iced my wine? Why had I slept, or walked, or thought, or amused
+myself when I had not paid them?
+
+"At any moment, in the middle of a poem, during some train of thought,
+or while I was gaily breakfasting in the pleasant company of my
+friends, I might look to see a gentleman enter in a coat of chestnut-
+brown, with a shabby hat in his hand. This gentleman's appearance
+would signify my debt, the bill I had drawn; the spectre would compel
+me to leave the table to speak to him, blight my spirits, despoil me
+of my cheerfulness, of my mistress, of all I possessed, down to my
+very bedstead.
+
+"Remorse itself is more easily endured. Remorse does not drive us into
+the street nor into the prison of Sainte-Pelagie; it does not force us
+into the detestable sink of vice. Remorse only brings us to the
+scaffold, where the executioner invests us with a certain dignity; as
+we pay the extreme penalty, everybody believes in our innocence; but
+people will not credit a penniless prodigal with a single virtue.
+
+"My debts had other incarnations. There is the kind that goes about on
+two feet, in a green cloth coat, and blue spectacles, carrying
+umbrellas of various hues; you come face to face with him at the
+corner of some street, in the midst of your mirth. These have the
+detestable prerogative of saying, 'M. de Valentin owes me something,
+and does not pay. I have a hold on him. He had better not show me any
+offensive airs!' You must bow to your creditors, and moreover bow
+politely. 'When are you going to pay me?' say they. And you must lie,
+and beg money of another man, and cringe to a fool seated on his
+strong-box, and receive sour looks in return from these horse-leeches;
+a blow would be less hateful; you must put up with their crass
+ignorance and calculating morality. A debt is a feat of the
+imaginative that they cannot appreciate. A borrower is often carried
+away and over-mastered by generous impulses; nothing great, nothing
+magnanimous can move or dominate those who live for money, and
+recognize nothing but money. I myself held money in abhorrence.
+
+"Or a bill may undergo a final transformation into some meritorious
+old man with a family dependent upon him. My creditor might be a
+living picture for Greuze, a paralytic with his children round him, a
+soldier's widow, holding out beseeching hands to me. Terrible
+creditors are these with whom we are forced to sympathize, and when
+their claims are satisfied we owe them a further debt of assistance.
+
+"The night before the bills fell due, I lay down with the false calm
+of those who sleep before their approaching execution, or with a duel
+in prospect, rocked as they are by delusive hopes. But when I woke,
+when I was cool and collected, when I found myself imprisoned in a
+banker's portfolio, and floundering in statements covered with red ink
+--then my debts sprang up everywhere, like grasshoppers, before my
+eyes. There were my debts, my clock, my armchairs; my debts were
+inlaid in the very furniture which I liked best to use. These gentle
+inanimate slaves were to fall prey to the harpies of the Chatelet,
+were to be carried off by the broker's men, and brutally thrown on the
+market. Ah, my property was a part of myself!
+
+"The sound of the door-bell rang through my heart; while it seemed to
+strike at me, where kings should be struck at--in the head. Mine was a
+martyrdom, without heaven for its reward. For a magnanimous nature,
+debt is a hell, and a hell, moreover, with sheriff's officers and
+brokers in it. An undischarged debt is something mean and sordid; it
+is a beginning of knavery; it is something worse, it is a lie; it
+prepares the way for crime, and brings together the planks for the
+scaffold. My bills were protested. Three days afterwards I met them,
+and this is how it happened.
+
+"A speculator came, offering to buy the island in the Loire belonging
+to me, where my mother lay buried. I closed with him. When I went to
+his solicitor to sign the deeds, I felt a cavern-like chill in the
+dark office that made me shudder; it was the same cold dampness that
+had laid hold upon me at the brink of my father's grave. I looked upon
+this as an evil omen. I seemed to see the shade of my mother, and to
+hear her voice. What power was it that made my own name ring vaguely
+in my ears, in spite of the clamor of bells?
+
+"The money paid down for my island, when all my debts were discharged,
+left me in possession of two thousand francs. I could now have
+returned to the scholar's tranquil life, it is true; I could have gone
+back to my garret after having gained an experience of life, with my
+head filled with the results of extensive observation, and with a
+certain sort of reputation attaching to me. But Foedora's hold upon
+her victim was not relaxed. We often met. I compelled her admirers to
+sound my name in her ears, by dint of astonishing them with my
+cleverness and success, with my horses and equipages. It all found her
+impassive and uninterested; so did an ugly phrase of Rastignac's, 'He
+is killing himself for you.'
+
+"I charged the world at large with my revenge, but I was not happy.
+While I was fathoming the miry depths of life, I only recognized the
+more keenly at all times the happiness of reciprocal affection; it was
+a shadow that I followed through all that befell me in my
+extravagance, and in my wildest moments. It was my misfortune to be
+deceived in my fairest beliefs, to be punished by ingratitude for
+benefiting others, and to receive uncounted pleasures as the reward of
+my errors--a sinister doctrine, but a true one for the prodigal!
+
+"The contagious leprosy of Foedora's vanity had taken hold of me at
+last. I probed my soul, and found it cankered and rotten. I bore the
+marks of the devil's claw upon my forehead. It was impossible to me
+thenceforward to do without the incessant agitation of a life fraught
+with danger at every moment, or to dispense with the execrable
+refinements of luxury. If I had possessed millions, I should still
+have gambled, reveled, and racketed about. I wished never to be alone
+with myself, and I must have false friends and courtesans, wine and
+good cheer to distract me. The ties that attach a man to family life
+had been permanently broken for me. I had become a galley-slave of
+pleasure, and must accomplish my destiny of suicide. During the last
+days of my prosperity, I spent every night in the most incredible
+excesses; but every morning death cast me back upon life again. I
+would have taken a conflagration with as little concern as any man
+with a life annuity. However, I at last found myself alone with a
+twenty-franc piece; I bethought me then of Rastignac's luck----
+
+"Eh, eh!----" Raphael exclaimed, interrupting himself, as he
+remembered the talisman and drew it from his pocket. Perhaps he was
+wearied by the long day's strain, and had no more strength left
+wherewith to pilot his head through the seas of wine and punch; or
+perhaps, exasperated by this symbol of his own existence, the torrent
+of his own eloquence gradually overwhelmed him. Raphael became excited
+and elated and like one completely deprived of reason.
+
+"The devil take death!" he shouted, brandishing the skin; "I mean to
+live! I am rich, I have every virtue; nothing will withstand me. Who
+would not be generous, when everything is in his power? Aha! Aha! I
+wished for two hundred thousand livres a year, and I shall have them.
+Bow down before me, all of you, wallowing on the carpets like swine in
+the mire! You all belong to me--a precious property truly! I am rich;
+I could buy you all, even the deputy snoring over there. Scum of
+society, give me your benediction! I am the Pope."
+
+Raphael's vociferations had been hitherto drowned by a thorough-bass
+of snores, but now they became suddenly audible. Most of the sleepers
+started up with a cry, saw the cause of the disturbance on his feet,
+tottering uncertainly, and cursed him in concert for a drunken
+brawler.
+
+"Silence!" shouted Raphael. "Back to your kennels, you dogs! Emile, I
+have riches, I will give you Havana cigars!"
+
+"I am listening," the poet replied. "Death or Foedora! On with you!
+That silky Foedora deceived you. Women are all daughters of Eve. There
+is nothing dramatic about that rigmarole of yours."
+
+"Ah, but you were sleeping, slyboots."
+
+"No--'Death or Foedora!'--I have it!"
+
+"Wake up!" Raphael shouted, beating Emile with the piece of shagreen
+as if he meant to draw electric fluid out of it.
+
+"TONNERRE!" said Emile, springing up and flinging his arms round
+Raphael; "my friend, remember the sort of women you are with."
+
+"I am a millionaire!"
+
+"If you are not a millionaire, you are most certainly drunk."
+
+"Drunk with power. I can kill you!--Silence! I am Nero! I am
+Nebuchadnezzar!"
+
+"But, Raphael, we are in queer company, and you ought to keep quiet
+for the sake of your own dignity."
+
+"My life has been silent too long. I mean to have my revenge now on
+the world at large. I will not amuse myself by squandering paltry
+five-franc pieces; I will reproduce and sum up my epoch by absorbing
+human lives, human minds, and human souls. There are the treasures of
+pestilence--that is no paltry kind of wealth, is it? I will wrestle
+with fevers--yellow, blue, or green--with whole armies, with gibbets.
+I can possess Foedora--Yet no, I do not want Foedora; she is a
+disease; I am dying of Foedora. I want to forget Foedora."
+
+"If you keep on calling out like this, I shall take you into the
+dining-room."
+
+"Do you see this skin? It is Solomon's will. Solomon belongs to me--a
+little varlet of a king! Arabia is mine, Arabia Petraea to boot; and
+the universe, and you too, if I choose. If I choose-- Ah! be careful.
+I can buy up all our journalist's shop; you shall be my valet. You
+shall be my valet, you shall manage my newspaper. Valet! VALET, that
+is to say, free from aches and pains, because he has no brains."
+
+At the word, Emile carried Raphael off into the dining-room.
+
+"All right," he remarked; "yes, my friend, I am your valet. But you
+are about to be editor-in-chief of a newspaper; so be quiet, and
+behave properly, for my sake. Have you no regard for me?"
+
+"Regard for you! You shall have Havana cigars, with this bit of
+shagreen: always with this skin, this supreme bit of shagreen. It is a
+cure for corns, and efficacious remedy. Do you suffer? I will remove
+them."
+
+"Never have I known you so senseless----"
+
+"Senseless, my friend? Not at all. This skin contracts whenever I form
+a wish--'tis a paradox. There is a Brahmin underneath it! The Brahmin
+must be a droll fellow, for our desires, look you, are bound to
+expand----"
+
+"Yes, yes----"
+
+"I tell you----"
+
+"Yes, yes, very true, I am quite of your opinion--our desires
+expand----"
+
+"The skin, I tell you."
+
+"Yes."
+
+"You don't believe me. I know you, my friend; you are as full of lies
+as a new-made king."
+
+"How can you expect me to follow your drunken maunderings?"
+
+"I will bet you I can prove it. Let us measure it----"
+
+"Goodness! he will never get off to sleep," exclaimed Emile, as he
+watched Raphael rummaging busily in the dining-room.
+
+Thanks to the peculiar clearness with which external objects are
+sometimes projected on an inebriated brain, in sharp contrast to its
+own obscure imaginings, Valentin found an inkstand and a table-napkin,
+with the quickness of a monkey, repeating all the time:
+
+"Let us measure it! Let us measure it!"
+
+"All right," said Emile; "let us measure it!"
+
+The two friends spread out the table-napkin and laid the Magic Skin
+upon it. As Emile's hand appeared to be steadier than Raphael's, he
+drew a line with pen and ink round the talisman, while his friend
+said:
+
+"I wished for an income of two hundred thousand livres, didn't I?
+Well, when that comes, you will observe a mighty diminution of my
+chagrin."
+
+"Yes--now go to sleep. Shall I make you comfortable on that sofa? Now
+then, are you all right?"
+
+"Yes, my nursling of the press. You shall amuse me; you shall drive
+the flies away from me. The friend of adversity should be the friend
+of prosperity. So I will give you some Hava--na--cig----"
+
+"Come, now, sleep. Sleep off your gold, you millionaire!"
+
+"You! sleep off your paragraphs! Good-night! Say good-night to
+Nebuchadnezzar!--Love! Wine! France!--glory and tr--treas----"
+
+Very soon the snorings of the two friends were added to the music with
+which the rooms resounded--an ineffectual concert! The lights went out
+one by one, their crystal sconces cracking in the final flare. Night
+threw dark shadows over this prolonged revelry, in which Raphael's
+narrative had been a second orgy of speech, of words without ideas, of
+ideas for which words had often been lacking.
+
+Towards noon, next day, the fair Aquilina bestirred herself. She
+yawned wearily. She had slept with her head upon a painted velvet
+footstool, and her cheeks were mottled over by contact with the
+surface. Her movement awoke Euphrasia, who suddenly sprang up with a
+hoarse cry; her pretty face, that had been so fresh and fair in the
+evening, was sallow now and pallid; she looked like a candidate for
+the hospital. The rest awoke also by degrees, with portentous
+groanings, to feel themselves over in every stiffened limb, and to
+experience the infinite varieties of weariness that weighed upon them.
+
+A servant came in to throw back the shutters and open the windows.
+There they all stood, brought back to consciousness by the warm rays
+of sunlight that shone upon the sleepers' heads. Their movements
+during slumber had disordered the elaborately arranged hair and
+toilettes of the women. They presented a ghastly spectacle in the
+bright daylight. Their hair fell ungracefully about them; their eyes,
+lately so brilliant, were heavy and dim; the expression of their faces
+was entirely changed. The sickly hues, which daylight brings out so
+strongly, were frightful. An olive tint had crept over the lymphatic
+faces, so fair and soft when in repose; the dainty red lips were grown
+pale and dry, and bore tokens of the degradation of excess. Each
+disowned his mistress of the night before; the women looked wan and
+discolored, like flowers trampled under foot by a passing procession.
+
+The men who scorned them looked even more horrible. Those human faces
+would have made you shudder. The hollow eyes with the dark circles
+round them seemed to see nothing; they were dull with wine and
+stupefied with heavy slumbers that had been exhausting rather than
+refreshing. There was an indescribable ferocious and stolid bestiality
+about these haggard faces, where bare physical appetite appeared shorn
+of all the poetical illusion with which the intellect invests it. Even
+these fearless champions, accustomed to measure themselves with
+excess, were struck with horror at this awakening of vice, stripped of
+its disguises, at being confronted thus with sin, the skeleton in
+rags, lifeless and hollow, bereft of the sophistries of the intellect
+and the enchantments of luxury. Artists and courtesans scrutinized in
+silence and with haggard glances the surrounding disorder, the rooms
+where everything had been laid waste, at the havoc wrought by heated
+passions.
+
+Demoniac laughter broke out when Taillefer, catching the smothered
+murmurs of his guests, tried to greet them with a grin. His darkly
+flushed, perspiring countenance loomed upon this pandemonium, like the
+image of a crime that knows no remorse (see L'Auberge Rouge). The
+picture was complete. A picture of a foul life in the midst of luxury,
+a hideous mixture of the pomp and squalor of humanity; an awakening
+after the frenzy of Debauch has crushed and squeezed all the fruits of
+life in her strong hands, till nothing but unsightly refuse is left to
+her, and lies in which she believes no longer. You might have thought
+of Death gloating over a family stricken with the plague.
+
+The sweet scents and dazzling lights, the mirth and the excitement
+were all no more; disgust with its nauseous sensations and searching
+philosophy was there instead. The sun shone in like truth, the pure
+outer air was like virtue; in contrast with the heated atmosphere,
+heavy with the fumes of the previous night of revelry.
+
+Accustomed as they were to their life, many of the girls thought of
+other days and other wakings; pure and innocent days when they looked
+out and saw the roses and honeysuckle about the casement, and the
+fresh countryside without enraptured by the glad music of the skylark;
+while earth lay in mists, lighted by the dawn, and in all the
+glittering radiance of dew. Others imagined the family breakfast, the
+father and children round the table, the innocent laughter, the
+unspeakable charm that pervaded it all, the simple hearts and their
+meal as simple.
+
+An artist mused upon his quiet studio, on his statue in its severe
+beauty, and the graceful model who was waiting for him. A young man
+recollected a lawsuit on which the fortunes of a family hung, and an
+important transaction that needed his presence. The scholar regretted
+his study and that noble work that called for him. Emile appeared just
+then as smiling, blooming, and fresh as the smartest assistant in a
+fashionable shop.
+
+"You are all as ugly as bailiffs. You won't be fit for anything
+to-day, so this day is lost, and I vote for breakfast."
+
+At this Taillefer went out to give some orders. The women went
+languidly up to the mirrors to set their toilettes in order. Each one
+shook herself. The wilder sort lectured the steadier ones. The
+courtesans made fun of those who looked unable to continue the
+boisterous festivity; but these wan forms revived all at once, stood
+in groups, and talked and smiled. Some servants quickly and adroitly
+set the furniture and everything else in its place, and a magnificent
+breakfast was got ready.
+
+The guests hurried into the dining-room. Everything there bore
+indelible marks of yesterday's excess, it is true, but there were at
+any rate some traces of ordinary, rational existence, such traces as
+may be found in a sick man's dying struggles. And so the revelry was
+laid away and buried, like carnival of a Shrove Tuesday, by masks
+wearied out with dancing, drunk with drunkenness, and quite ready to
+be persuaded of the pleasures of lassitude, lest they should be forced
+to admit their exhaustion.
+
+As soon as these bold spirits surrounded the capitalist's breakfast-
+table, Cardot appeared. He had left the rest to make a night of it
+after the dinner, and finished the evening after his own fashion in
+the retirement of domestic life. Just now a sweet smile wandered over
+his features. He seemed to have a presentiment that there would be
+some inheritance to sample and divide, involving inventories and
+engrossing; an inheritance rich in fees and deeds to draw up, and
+something as juicy as the trembling fillet of beef in which their host
+had just plunged his knife.
+
+"Oh, ho! we are to have breakfast in the presence of a notary," cried
+Cursy.
+
+"You have come here just at the right time," said the banker,
+indicating the breakfast; "you can jot down the numbers, and initial
+off all the dishes."
+
+"There is no will to make here, but contracts of marriage there may
+be, perhaps," said the scholar, who had made a satisfactory
+arrangement for the first time in twelve months.
+
+"Oh! Oh!"
+
+"Ah! Ah!"
+
+"One moment," cried Cardot, fairly deafened by a chorus of wretched
+jokes. "I came here on serious business. I am bringing six millions
+for one of you." (Dead silence.) "Monsieur," he went on, turning to
+Raphael, who at the moment was unceremoniously wiping his eyes on a
+corner of the table-napkin, "was not your mother a Mlle. O'Flaharty?"
+
+"Yes," said Raphael mechanically enough; "Barbara Marie."
+
+"Have you your certificate of birth about you," Cardot went on, "and
+Mme. de Valentin's as well?"
+
+"I believe so."
+
+"Very well then, monsieur; you are the sole heir of Major O'Flaharty,
+who died in August 1828 at Calcutta."
+
+"An incalcuttable fortune," said the critic.
+
+"The Major having bequeathed several amounts to public institutions in
+his will, the French Government sent in a claim for the remainder to
+the East India Company," the notary continued. "The estate is clear
+and ready to be transferred at this moment. I have been looking in
+vain for the heirs and assigns of Mlle. Barbara Marie O'Flaharty for a
+fortnight past, when yesterday at dinner----"
+
+Just then Raphael suddenly staggered to his feet; he looked like a man
+who has just received a blow. Acclamation took the form of silence,
+for stifled envy had been the first feeling in every breast, and all
+eyes devoured him like flames. Then a murmur rose, and grew like the
+voice of a discontented audience, or the first mutterings of a riot,
+as everybody made some comment on this news of great wealth brought by
+the notary.
+
+This abrupt subservience of fate brought Raphael thoroughly to his
+senses. He immediately spread out the table-napkin with which he had
+lately taken the measure of the piece of shagreen. He heeded nothing
+as he laid the talisman upon it, and shuddered involuntarily at the
+sight of a slight difference between the present size of the skin and
+the outline traced upon the linen.
+
+"Why, what is the matter with him?' Taillefer cried. "He comes by his
+fortune very cheaply."
+
+"Soutiens-le Chatillon!" said Bixiou to Emile. "The joy will kill
+him."
+
+A ghastly white hue overspread every line of the wan features of the
+heir-at-law. His face was drawn, every outline grew haggard; the
+hollows in his livid countenance grew deeper, and his eyes were fixed
+and staring. He was facing Death.
+
+The opulent banker, surrounded by faded women, and faces with satiety
+written on them, the enjoyment that had reached the pitch of agony,
+was a living illustration of his own life.
+
+Raphael looked thrice at the talisman, which lay passively within the
+merciless outlines on the table-napkin; he tried not to believe it,
+but his incredulity vanished utterly before the light of an inner
+presentiment. The whole world was his; he could have all things, but
+the will to possess them was utterly extinct. Like a traveler in the
+midst of the desert, with but a little water left to quench his
+thirst, he must measure his life by the draughts he took of it. He saw
+what every desire of his must cost him in the days of his life. He
+believed in the powers of the Magic Skin at last, he listened to every
+breath he drew; he felt ill already; he asked himself:
+
+"Am I not consumptive? Did not my mother die of a lung complaint?"
+
+"Aha, Raphael! what fun you will have! What will you give me?" asked
+Aquilina.
+
+"Here's to the death of his uncle, Major O'Flaharty! There is a man
+for you."
+
+"He will be a peer of France."
+
+"Pooh! what is a peer of France since July?" said the amateur critic.
+
+"Are you going to take a box at the Bouffons?"
+
+"You are going to treat us all, I hope?" put in Bixiou.
+
+"A man of his sort will be sure to do things in style," said Emile.
+
+The hurrah set up by the jovial assembly rang in Valentin's ears, but
+he could not grasp the sense of a single word. Vague thoughts crossed
+him of the Breton peasant's life of mechanical labor, without a wish
+of any kind; he pictured him burdened with a family, tilling the soil,
+living on buckwheat meal, drinking cider out of a pitcher, believing
+in the Virgin and the King, taking the sacrament at Easter, dancing of
+a Sunday on the green sward, and understanding never a word of the
+rector's sermon. The actual scene that lay before him, the gilded
+furniture, the courtesans, the feast itself, and the surrounding
+splendors, seemed to catch him by the throat and made him cough.
+
+"Do you wish for some asparagus?" the banker cried.
+
+"I WISH FOR NOTHING!" thundered Raphael.
+
+"Bravo!" Taillefer exclaimed; "you understand your position; a fortune
+confers the privilege of being impertinent. You are one of us.
+Gentlemen, let us drink to the might of gold! M. Valentin here, six
+times a millionaire, has become a power. He is a king, like all the
+rich; everything is at his disposal, everything lies under his feet.
+From this time forth the axiom that 'all Frenchmen are alike in the
+eyes of the law,' is for him a fib at the head of the Constitutional
+Charter. He is not going to obey the law--the law is going to obey
+him. There are neither scaffolds nor executioners for millionaires."
+
+"Yes, there are," said Raphael; "they are their own executioners."
+
+"Here is another victim of prejudices!" cried the banker.
+
+"Let us drink!" Raphael said, putting the talisman into his pocket.
+
+"What are you doing?" said Emile, checking his movement. "Gentlemen,"
+he added, addressing the company, who were rather taken aback by
+Raphael's behavior, "you must know that our friend Valentin here--what
+am I saying?--I mean my Lord Marquis de Valentin--is in the possession
+of a secret for obtaining wealth. His wishes are fulfilled as soon as
+he knows them. He will make us all rich together, or he is a flunkey,
+and devoid of all decent feeling."
+
+"Oh, Raphael dear, I should like a set of pearl ornaments!" Euphrasia
+exclaimed.
+
+"If he has any gratitude in him, he will give me a couple of carriages
+with fast steppers," said Aquilina.
+
+"Wish for a hundred thousand a year for me!"
+
+"Indian shawls!"
+
+"Pay my debts!"
+
+"Send an apoplexy to my uncle, the old stick!"
+
+"Ten thousand a year in the funds, and I'll cry quits with you,
+Raphael!"
+
+"Deeds of gift and no mistake," was the notary's comment.
+
+"He ought, at least, to rid me of the gout!"
+
+"Lower the funds!" shouted the banker.
+
+These phrases flew about like the last discharge of rockets at the end
+of a display of fireworks; and were uttered, perhaps, more in earnest
+than in jest.
+
+"My good friend," Emile said solemnly, "I shall be quite satisfied
+with an income of two hundred thousand livres. Please to set about it
+at once."
+
+"Do you not know the cost, Emile?" asked Raphael.
+
+"A nice excuse!" the poet cried; "ought we not to sacrifice ourselves
+for our friends?"
+
+"I have almost a mind to wish that you all were dead," Valentin made
+answer, with a dark, inscrutable look at his boon companions.
+
+"Dying people are frightfully cruel," said Emile, laughing. "You are
+rich now," he went on gravely; "very well, I will give you two months
+at most before you grow vilely selfish. You are so dense already that
+you cannot understand a joke. You have only to go a little further to
+believe in your Magic Skin."
+
+Raphael kept silent, fearing the banter of the company; but he drank
+immoderately, trying to drown in intoxication the recollection of his
+fatal power.
+
+
+
+III
+
+THE AGONY
+
+In the early days of December an old man of some seventy years of age
+pursued his way along the Rue de Varenne, in spite of the falling
+rain. He peered up at the door of each house, trying to discover the
+address of the Marquis Raphael de Valentin, in a simple, childlike
+fashion, and with the abstracted look peculiar to philosophers. His
+face plainly showed traces of a struggle between a heavy mortification
+and an authoritative nature; his long, gray hair hung in disorder
+about a face like a piece of parchment shriveling in the fire. If a
+painter had come upon this curious character, he would, no doubt, have
+transferred him to his sketchbook on his return, a thin, bony figure,
+clad in black, and have inscribed beneath it: "Classical poet in
+search of a rhyme." When he had identified the number that had been
+given to him, this reincarnation of Rollin knocked meekly at the door
+of a splendid mansion.
+
+"Is Monsieur Raphael in?" the worthy man inquired of the Swiss in
+livery.
+
+"My Lord the Marquis sees nobody," said the servant, swallowing a huge
+morsel that he had just dipped in a large bowl of coffee.
+
+"There is his carriage," said the elderly stranger, pointing to a fine
+equipage that stood under the wooden canopy that sheltered the steps
+before the house, in place of a striped linen awning. "He is going
+out; I will wait for him."
+
+"Then you might wait here till to-morrow morning, old boy," said the
+Swiss. "A carriage is always waiting for monsieur. Please to go away.
+If I were to let any stranger come into the house without orders, I
+should lose an income of six hundred francs."
+
+A tall old man, in a costume not unlike that of a subordinate in the
+Civil Service, came out of the vestibule and hurried part of the way
+down the steps, while he made a survey of the astonished elderly
+applicant for admission.
+
+"What is more, here is M. Jonathan," the Swiss remarked; "speak to
+him."
+
+Fellow-feeling of some kind, or curiosity, brought the two old men
+together in a central space in the great entrance-court. A few blades
+of grass were growing in the crevices of the pavement; a terrible
+silence reigned in that great house. The sight of Jonathan's face
+would have made you long to understand the mystery that brooded over
+it, and that was announced by the smallest trifles about the
+melancholy place.
+
+When Raphael inherited his uncle's vast estate, his first care had
+been to seek out the old and devoted servitor of whose affection he
+knew that he was secure. Jonathan had wept tears of joy at the sight
+of his young master, of whom he thought he had taken a final farewell;
+and when the marquis exalted him to the high office of steward, his
+happiness could not be surpassed. So old Jonathan became an
+intermediary power between Raphael and the world at large. He was the
+absolute disposer of his master's fortune, the blind instrument of an
+unknown will, and a sixth sense, as it were, by which the emotions of
+life were communicated to Raphael.
+
+"I should like to speak with M. Raphael, sir," said the elderly person
+to Jonathan, as he climbed up the steps some way, into a shelter from
+the rain.
+
+"To speak with my Lord the Marquis?" the steward cried. "He scarcely
+speaks even to me, his foster-father!"
+
+"But I am likewise his foster-father," said the old man. "If your wife
+was his foster-mother, I fed him myself with the milk of the Muses. He
+is my nursling, my child, carus alumnus! I formed his mind, cultivated
+his understanding, developed his genius, and, I venture to say it, to
+my own honor and glory. Is he not one of the most remarkable men of
+our epoch? He was one of my pupils in two lower forms, and in
+rhetoric. I am his professor."
+
+"Ah, sir, then you are M. Porriquet?"
+
+"Exactly, sir, but----"
+
+"Hush! hush!" Jonathan called to two underlings, whose voices broke
+the monastic silence that shrouded the house.
+
+"But is the Marquis ill, sir?" the professor continued.
+
+"My dear sir," Jonathan replied, "Heaven only knows what is the matter
+with my master. You see, there are not a couple of houses like ours
+anywhere in Paris. Do you understand? Not two houses. Faith, that
+there are not. My Lord the Marquis had this hotel purchased for him;
+it formerly belonged to a duke and a peer of France; then he spent
+three hundred thousand francs over furnishing it. That's a good deal,
+you know, three hundred thousand francs! But every room in the house
+is a perfect wonder. 'Good,' said I to myself when I saw this
+magnificence; 'it is just like it used to be in the time of my lord,
+his late grandfather; and the young marquis is going to entertain all
+Paris and the Court!' Nothing of the kind! My lord refused to see any
+one whatever. 'Tis a funny life that he leads, M. Porriquet, you
+understand. An inconciliable life. He rises every day at the same
+time. I am the only person, you see, that may enter his room. I open
+all the shutters at seven o'clock, summer or winter. It is all
+arranged very oddly. As I come in I say to him:
+
+" 'You must get up and dress, my Lord Marquis.'
+
+"Then he rises and dresses himself. I have to give him his dressing-
+gown, and it is always after the same pattern, and of the same
+material. I am obliged to replace it when it can be used no longer,
+simply to save him the trouble of asking for a new one. A queer fancy!
+As a matter of fact, he has a thousand francs to spend every day, and
+he does as he pleases, the dear child. And besides, I am so fond of
+him that if he gave me a box on the ear on one side, I should hold out
+the other to him! The most difficult things he will tell me to do, and
+yet I do them, you know! He gives me a lot of trifles to attend to,
+that I am well set to work! He reads the newspapers, doesn't he? Well,
+my instructions are to put them always in the same place, on the same
+table. I always go at the same hour and shave him myself; and don't I
+tremble! The cook would forfeit the annuity of a thousand crowns that
+he is to come into after my lord's death, if breakfast is not served
+inconciliably at ten o'clock precisely. The menus are drawn up for the
+whole year round, day after day. My Lord the Marquis has not a thing
+to wish for. He has strawberries whenever there are any, and he has
+the earliest mackerel to be had in Paris. The programme is printed
+every morning. He knows his dinner by rote. In the next place, he
+dresses himself at the same hour, in the same clothes, the same linen,
+that I always put on the same chair, you understand? I have to see
+that he always has the same cloth; and if it should happen that his
+coat came to grief (a mere supposition), I should have to replace it
+by another without saying a word about it to him. If it is fine, I go
+in and say to my master:
+
+" 'You ought to go out, sir.'
+
+"He says Yes, or No. If he has a notion that he will go out, he
+doesn't wait for his horses; they are always ready harnessed; the
+coachman stops there inconciliably, whip in hand, just as you see him
+out there. In the evening, after dinner, my master goes one day to the
+Opera, the other to the Ital----no, he hasn't yet gone to the
+Italiens, though, for I could not find a box for him until yesterday.
+Then he comes in at eleven o'clock precisely, to go to bed. At any
+time in the day when he has nothing to do, he reads--he is always
+reading, you see--it is a notion he has. My instructions are to read
+the Journal de la Librairie before he sees it, and to buy new books,
+so that he finds them on his chimney-piece on the very day that they
+are published. I have orders to go into his room every hour or so, to
+look after the fire and everything else, and to see that he wants
+nothing. He gave me a little book, sir, to learn off by heart, with
+all my duties written in it--a regular catechism! In summer I have to
+keep a cool and even temperature with blocks of ice and at all seasons
+to put fresh flowers all about. He is rich! He has a thousand francs
+to spend every day; he can indulge his fancies! And he hadn't even
+necessaries for so long, poor child! He doesn't annoy anybody; he is
+as good as gold; he never opens his mouth, for instance; the house and
+garden are absolutely silent. In short, my master has not a single
+wish left; everything comes in the twinkling of an eye, if he raises
+his hand, and INSTANTER. Quite right, too. If servants are not looked
+after, everything falls into confusion. You would never believe the
+lengths he goes about things. His rooms are all--what do you call
+it?--er--er--en suite. Very well; just suppose, now, that he opens his
+room door or the door of his study; presto! all the other doors fly
+open of themselves by a patent contrivance; and then he can go from
+one end of the house to the other and not find a single door shut;
+which is all very nice and pleasant and convenient for us great folk!
+But, on my word, it cost us a lot of money! And, after all, M.
+Porriquet, he said to me at last:
+
+" 'Jonathan, you will look after me as if I were a baby in long
+clothes,' Yes, sir, 'long clothes!' those were his very words. 'You
+will think of all my requirements for me.' I am the master, so to
+speak, and he is the servant, you understand? The reason of it? Ah, my
+word, that is just what nobody on earth knows but himself and God
+Almighty. It is quite inconciliable!"
+
+"He is writing a poem!" exclaimed the old professor.
+
+"You think he is writing a poem, sir? It's a very absorbing affair,
+then! But, you know, I don't think he is. He wants to vergetate. Only
+yesterday he was looking at a tulip while he was dressing, and he said
+to me:
+
+" 'There is my own life--I am vergetating, my poor Jonathan.' Now,
+some of them insist that that is monomania. It is inconciliable!"
+
+"All this makes it very clear to me, Jonathan," the professor
+answered, with a magisterial solemnity that greatly impressed the old
+servant, "that your master is absorbed in a great work. He is deep in
+vast meditations, and has no wish to be distracted by the petty
+preoccupations of ordinary life. A man of genius forgets everything
+among his intellectual labors. One day the famous Newton----"
+
+"Newton?--oh, ah! I don't know the name," said Jonathan.
+
+"Newton, a great geometrician," Porriquet went on, "once sat for
+twenty-four hours leaning his elbow on the table; when he emerged from
+his musings, he was a day out in his reckoning, just as if he had been
+sleeping. I will go to see him, dear lad; I may perhaps be of some use
+to him."
+
+"Not for a moment!" Jonathan cried. "Not though you were King of
+France--I mean the real old one. You could not go in unless you forced
+the doors open and walked over my body. But I will go and tell him you
+are here, M. Porriquet, and I will put it to him like this, 'Ought he
+to come up?' And he will say Yes or No. I never say, 'Do you wish?' or
+'Will you?' or 'Do you want?' Those words are scratched out of the
+dictionary. He let out at me once with a 'Do you want to kill me?' he
+was so very angry."
+
+Jonathan left the old schoolmaster in the vestibule, signing to him to
+come no further, and soon returned with a favorable answer. He led the
+old gentleman through one magnificent room after another, where every
+door stood open. At last Porriquet beheld his pupil at some distance
+seated beside the fire.
+
+Raphael was reading the paper. He sat in an armchair wrapped in a
+dressing-gown with some large pattern on it. The intense melancholy
+that preyed upon him could be discerned in his languid posture and
+feeble frame; it was depicted on his brow and white face; he looked
+like some plant bleached by darkness. There was a kind of effeminate
+grace about him; the fancies peculiar to wealthy invalids were also
+noticeable. His hands were soft and white, like a pretty woman's; he
+wore his fair hair, now grown scanty, curled about his temples with a
+refinement of vanity.
+
+The Greek cap that he wore was pulled to one side by the weight of its
+tassel; too heavy for the light material of which it was made. He had
+let the paper-knife fall at his feet, a malachite blade with gold
+mounting, which he had used to cut the leaves of the book. The amber
+mouthpiece of a magnificent Indian hookah lay on his knee; the
+enameled coils lay like a serpent in the room, but he had forgotten to
+draw out its fresh perfume. And yet there was a complete contradiction
+between the general feebleness of his young frame and the blue eyes,
+where all his vitality seemed to dwell; an extraordinary intelligence
+seemed to look out from them and to grasp everything at once.
+
+That expression was painful to see. Some would have read despair in
+it, and others some inner conflict terrible as remorse. It was the
+inscrutable glance of helplessness that must perforce consign its
+desires to the depths of its own heart; or of a miser enjoying in
+imagination all the pleasures that his money could procure for him,
+while he declines to lessen his hoard; the look of a bound Prometheus,
+of the fallen Napoleon of 1815, when he learned at the Elysee the
+strategical blunder that his enemies had made, and asked for twenty-
+four hours of command in vain; or rather it was the same look that
+Raphael had turned upon the Seine, or upon his last piece of gold at
+the gaming-table only a few months ago.
+
+He was submitting his intelligence and his will to the homely common-
+sense of an old peasant whom fifty years of domestic service had
+scarcely civilized. He had given up all the rights of life in order to
+live; he had despoiled his soul of all the romance that lies in a
+wish; and almost rejoiced at thus becoming a sort of automaton. The
+better to struggle with the cruel power that he had challenged, he had
+followed Origen's example, and had maimed and chastened his
+imagination.
+
+The day after he had seen the diminution of the Magic Skin, at his
+sudden accession of wealth, he happened to be at his notary's house. A
+well-known physician had told them quite seriously, at dessert, how a
+Swiss attacked by consumption had cured himself. The man had never
+spoken a word for ten years, and had compelled himself to draw six
+breaths only, every minute, in the close atmosphere of a cow-house,
+adhering all the time to a regimen of exceedingly light diet. "I will
+be like that man," thought Raphael to himself. He wanted life at any
+price, and so he led the life of a machine in the midst of all the
+luxury around him.
+
+The old professor confronted this youthful corpse and shuddered; there
+seemed something unnatural about the meagre, enfeebled frame. In the
+Marquis, with his eager eyes and careworn forehead, he could hardly
+recognize the fresh-cheeked and rosy pupil with the active limbs, whom
+he remembered. If the worthy classicist, sage critic, and general
+preserver of the traditions of correct taste had read Byron, he would
+have thought that he had come on a Manfred when he looked to find
+Childe Harold.
+
+"Good day, pere Porriquet," said Raphael, pressing the old
+schoolmaster's frozen fingers in his own damp ones; "how are you?"
+
+"I am very well," replied the other, alarmed by the touch of that
+feverish hand. "But how about you?"
+
+"Oh, I am hoping to keep myself in health."
+
+"You are engaged in some great work, no doubt?"
+
+"No," Raphael answered. "Exegi monumemtum, pere Porriquet; I have
+contributed an important page to science, and have now bidden her
+farewell for ever. I scarcely know where my manuscript is."
+
+"The style is no doubt correct?" queried the schoolmaster. "You, I
+hope, would never have adopted the barbarous language of the new
+school, which fancies it has worked such wonders by discovering
+Ronsard!"
+
+"My work treats of physiology pure and simple."
+
+"Oh, then, there is no more to be said," the schoolmaster answered.
+"Grammar must yield to the exigencies of discovery. Nevertheless,
+young man, a lucid and harmonious style--the diction of Massillon, of
+M. de Buffon, of the great Racine--a classical style, in short, can
+never spoil anything----But, my friend," the schoolmaster interrupted
+himself, "I was forgetting the object of my visit, which concerns my
+own interests."
+
+Too late Raphael recalled to mind the verbose eloquence and elegant
+circumlocutions which in a long professorial career had grown habitual
+to his old tutor, and almost regretted that he had admitted him; but
+just as he was about to wish to see him safely outside, he promptly
+suppressed his secret desire with a stealthy glance at the Magic Skin.
+It hung there before him, fastened down upon some white material,
+surrounded by a red line accurately traced about its prophetic
+outlines. Since that fatal carouse, Raphael had stifled every least
+whim, and had lived so as not to cause the slightest movement in the
+terrible talisman. The Magic Skin was like a tiger with which he must
+live without exciting its ferocity. He bore patiently, therefore, with
+the old schoolmaster's prolixity.
+
+Porriquet spent an hour in telling him about the persecutions directed
+against him ever since the Revolution of July. The worthy man, having
+a liking for strong governments, had expressed the patriotic wish that
+grocers should be left to their counters, statesmen to the management
+of public business, advocates to the Palais de Justice, and peers of
+France to the Luxembourg; but one of the popularity-seeking ministers
+of the Citizen King had ousted him from his chair, on an accusation of
+Carlism, and the old man now found himself without pension or post,
+and with no bread to eat. As he played the part of guardian angel to a
+poor nephew, for whose schooling at Saint Sulpice he was paying, he
+came less on his own account than for his adopted child's sake, to
+entreat his former pupil's interest with the new minister. He did not
+ask to be reinstated, but only for a position at the head of some
+provincial school.
+
+QRaphael had fallen a victim to unconquerable drowsiness by the time
+that the worthy man's monotonous voice ceased to sound in his ears.
+Civility had compelled him to look at the pale and unmoving eyes of
+the deliberate and tedious old narrator, till he himself had reached
+stupefaction, magnetized in an inexplicable way by the power of
+inertia.
+
+"Well, my dear pere Porriquet," he said, not very certain what the
+question was to which he was replying, "but I can do nothing for you,
+nothing at all. I WISH VERY HEARTILY that you may succeed----"
+
+All at once, without seeing the change wrought on the old man's sallow
+and wrinkled brow by these conventional phrases, full of indifference
+and selfishness, Raphael sprang to his feet like a startled roebuck.
+He saw a thin white line between the black piece of hide and the red
+tracing about it, and gave a cry so fearful that the poor professor
+was frightened by it.
+
+"Old fool! Go!" he cried. "You will be appointed as headmaster!
+Couldn't you have asked me for an annuity of a thousand crowns rather
+than a murderous wish? Your visit would have cost me nothing. There
+are a hundred thousand situations to be had in France, but I have only
+one life. A man's life is worth more than all the situations in the
+world.--Jonathan!"
+
+Jonathan appeared.
+
+"This is your doing, double-distilled idiot! What made you suggest
+that I should see M. Porriquet?" and he pointed to the old man, who
+was petrified with fright. "Did I put myself in your hands for you to
+tear me in pieces? You have just shortened my life by ten years!
+Another blunder of this kind, and you will lay me where I have laid my
+father. Would I not far rather have possessed the beautiful Foedora?
+And I have obliged that old hulk instead--that rag of humanity! I had
+money enough for him. And, moreover, if all the Porriquets in the
+world were dying of hunger, what is that to me?"
+
+Raphael's face was white with anger; a slight froth marked his
+trembling lips; there was a savage gleam in his eyes. The two elders
+shook with terror in his presence like two children at the sight of a
+snake. The young man fell back in his armchair, a kind of reaction
+took place in him, the tears flowed fast from his angry eyes.
+
+"Oh, my life!" he cried, "that fair life of mine. Never to know a
+kindly thought again, to love no more; nothing is left to me!"
+
+He turned to the professor and went on in a gentle voice--"The harm is
+done, my old friend. Your services have been well repaid; and my
+misfortune has at any rate contributed to the welfare of a good and
+worthy man."
+
+His tones betrayed so much feeling that the almost unintelligible
+words drew tears from the two old men, such tears as are shed over
+some pathetic song in a foreign tongue.
+
+"He is epileptic," muttered Porriquet.
+
+"I understand your kind intentions, my friend," Raphael answered
+gently. "You would make excuses for me. Ill-health cannot be helped,
+but ingratitude is a grievous fault. Leave me now," he added. "To-
+morrow or the next day, or possibly to-night, you will receive your
+appointment; Resistance has triumphed over Motion. Farewell."
+
+The old schoolmaster went away, full of keen apprehension as to
+Valentin's sanity. A thrill of horror ran through him; there had been
+something supernatural, he thought, in the scene he had passed
+through. He could hardly believe his own impressions, and questioned
+them like one awakened from a painful dream.
+
+"Now attend to me, Jonathan," said the young man to his old servant.
+"Try to understand the charge confided to you."
+
+"Yes, my Lord Marquis."
+
+"I am as a man outlawed from humanity."
+
+"Yes, my Lord Marquis."
+
+"All the pleasures of life disport themselves round my bed of death,
+and dance about me like fair women; but if I beckon to them, I must
+die. Death always confronts me. You must be the barrier between the
+world and me."
+
+"Yes, my Lord Marquis," said the old servant, wiping the drops of
+perspiration from his wrinkled forehead. "But if you don't wish to see
+pretty women, how will you manage at the Italiens this evening? An
+English family is returning to London, and I have taken their box for
+the rest of the season, and it is in a splendid position--superb; in
+the first row.
+
+Raphael, deep in his own deep musings, paid no attention to him.
+
+Do you see that splendid equipage, a brougham painted a dark brown
+color, but with the arms of an ancient and noble family shining from
+the panels? As it rolls past, all the shop-girls admire it, and look
+longingly at the yellow satin lining, the rugs from la Savonnerie, the
+daintiness and freshness of every detail, the silken cushions and
+tightly-fitting glass windows. Two liveried footmen are mounted behind
+this aristocratic carriage; and within, a head lies back among the
+silken cushions, the feverish face and hollow eyes of Raphael,
+melancholy and sad. Emblem of the doom of wealth! He flies across
+Paris like a rocket, and reaches the peristyle of the Theatre Favart.
+The passers-by make way for him; the two footmen help him to alight,
+an envious crowd looking on the while.
+
+"What has that fellow done to be so rich?" asks a poor law-student,
+who cannot listen to the magical music of Rossini for lack of a five-
+franc piece.
+
+Raphael walked slowly along the gangway; he expected no enjoyment from
+these pleasures he had once coveted so eagerly. In the interval before
+the second act of Semiramide he walked up and down in the lobby, and
+along the corridors, leaving his box, which he had not yet entered, to
+look after itself. The instinct of property was dead within him
+already. Like all invalids, he thought of nothing but his own
+sufferings. He was leaning against the chimney-piece in the greenroom.
+A group had gathered about it of dandies, young and old, of ministers,
+of peers without peerages, and peerages without peers, for so the
+Revolution of July had ordered matters. Among a host of adventurers
+and journalists, in fact, Raphael beheld a strange, unearthly figure a
+few paces away among the crowd. He went towards this grotesque object
+to see it better, half-closing his eyes with exceeding
+superciliousness.
+
+"What a wonderful bit of painting!" he said to himself. The stranger's
+hair and eyebrows and a Mazarin tuft on the chin had been dyed black,
+but the result was a spurious, glossy, purple tint that varied its
+hues according to the light; the hair had been too white, no doubt, to
+take the preparation. Anxiety and cunning were depicted in the narrow,
+insignificant face, with its wrinkles incrusted by thick layers of red
+and white paint. This red enamel, lacking on some portions of his
+face, strongly brought out his natural feebleness and livid hues. It
+was impossible not to smile at this visage with the protuberant
+forehead and pointed chin, a face not unlike those grotesque wooden
+figures that German herdsmen carve in their spare moments.
+
+An attentive observer looking from Raphael to this elderly Adonis
+would have remarked a young man's eyes set in a mask of age, in the
+case of the Marquis, and in the other case the dim eyes of age peering
+forth from behind a mask of youth. Valentin tried to recollect when
+and where he had seen this little old man before. He was thin,
+fastidiously cravatted, booted and spurred like one-and-twenty; he
+crossed his arms and clinked his spurs as if he possessed all the
+wanton energy of youth. He seemed to move about without constraint or
+difficulty. He had carefully buttoned up his fashionable coat, which
+disguised his powerful, elderly frame, and gave him the appearance of
+an antiquated coxcomb who still follows the fashions.
+
+For Raphael this animated puppet possessed all the interest of an
+apparition. He gazed at it as if it had been some smoke-begrimed
+Rembrandt, recently restored and newly framed. This idea found him a
+clue to the truth among his confused recollections; he recognized the
+dealer in antiquities, the man to whom he owed his calamities!
+
+A noiseless laugh broke just then from the fantastical personage,
+straightening the line of his lips that stretched across a row of
+artificial teeth. That laugh brought out, for Raphael's heated fancy,
+a strong resemblance between the man before him and the type of head
+that painters have assigned to Goethe's Mephistopheles. A crowd of
+superstitious thoughts entered Raphael's sceptical mind; he was
+convinced of the powers of the devil and of all the sorcerer's
+enchantments embodied in mediaeval tradition, and since worked up by
+poets. Shrinking in horror from the destiny of Faust, he prayed for
+the protection of Heaven with all the ardent faith of a dying man in
+God and the Virgin. A clear, bright radiance seemed to give him a
+glimpse of the heaven of Michael Angelo or of Raphael of Urbino: a
+venerable white-bearded man, a beautiful woman seated in an aureole
+above the clouds and winged cherub heads. Now he had grasped and
+received the meaning of those imaginative, almost human creations;
+they seemed to explain what had happened to him, to leave him yet one
+hope.
+
+But when the greenroom of the Italiens returned upon his sight he
+beheld, not the Virgin, but a very handsome young person. The
+execrable Euphrasia, in all the splendor of her toilette, with its
+orient pearls, had come thither, impatient for her ardent, elderly
+admirer. She was insolently exhibiting herself with her defiant face
+and glittering eyes to an envious crowd of stockbrokers, a visible
+testimony to the inexhaustible wealth that the old dealer permitted
+her to squander.
+
+Raphael recollected the mocking wish with which he had accepted the
+old man's luckless gift, and tasted all the sweets of revenge when he
+beheld the spectacle of sublime wisdom fallen to such a depth as this,
+wisdom for which such humiliation had seemed a thing impossible. The
+centenarian greeted Euphrasia with a ghastly smile, receiving her
+honeyed words in reply. He offered her his emaciated arm, and went
+twice or thrice round the greenroom with her; the envious glances and
+compliments with which the crowd received his mistress delighted him;
+he did not see the scornful smiles, nor hear the caustic comments to
+which he gave rise.
+
+"In what cemetery did this young ghoul unearth that corpse of hers?"
+asked a dandy of the Romantic faction.
+
+Euphrasia began to smile. The speaker was a slender, fair-haired
+youth, with bright blue eyes, and a moustache. His short dress coat,
+hat tilted over one ear, and sharp tongue, all denoted the species.
+
+"How many old men," said Raphael to himself, "bring an upright,
+virtuous, and hard-working life to a close in folly! His feet are cold
+already, and he is making love."
+
+"Well, sir," exclaimed Valentin, stopping the merchant's progress,
+while he stared hard at Euphrasia, "have you quite forgotten the
+stringent maxims of your philosophy?"
+
+"Ah, I am as happy now as a young man," said the other, in a cracked
+voice. "I used to look at existence from a wrong standpoint. One hour
+of love has a whole life in it."
+
+The playgoers heard the bell ring, and left the greenroom to take
+their places again. Raphael and the old merchant separated. As he
+entered his box, the Marquis saw Foedora sitting exactly opposite to
+him on the other side of the theatre. The Countess had probably only
+just come, for she was just flinging off her scarf to leave her throat
+uncovered, and was occupied with going through all the indescribable
+manoeuvres of a coquette arranging herself. All eyes were turned upon
+her. A young peer of France had come with her; she asked him for the
+lorgnette she had given him to carry. Raphael knew the despotism to
+which his successor had resigned himself, in her gestures, and in the
+way she treated her companion. He was also under the spell no doubt,
+another dupe beating with all the might of a real affection against
+the woman's cold calculations, enduring all the tortures from which
+Valentin had luckily freed himself.
+
+Foedora's face lighted up with indescribable joy. After directing her
+lorgnette upon every box in turn, to make a rapid survey of all the
+dresses, she was conscious that by her toilette and her beauty she had
+eclipsed the loveliest and best-dressed women in Paris. She laughed to
+show her white teeth; her head with its wreath of flowers was never
+still, in her quest of admiration. Her glances went from one box to
+another, as she diverted herself with the awkward way in which a
+Russian princess wore her bonnet, or over the utter failure of a
+bonnet with which a banker's daughter had disfigured herself.
+
+All at once she met Raphael's steady gaze and turned pale, aghast at
+the intolerable contempt in her rejected lover's eyes. Not one of her
+exiled suitors had failed to own her power over them; Valentin alone
+was proof against her attractions. A power that can be defied with
+impunity is drawing to its end. This axiom is as deeply engraved on
+the heart of woman as in the minds of kings. In Raphael, therefore,
+Foedora saw the deathblow of her influence and her ability to please.
+An epigram of his, made at the Opera the day before, was already known
+in the salons of Paris. The biting edge of that terrible speech had
+already given the Countess an incurable wound. We know how to
+cauterize a wound, but we know of no treatment as yet for the stab of
+a phrase. As every other woman in the house looked by turns at her and
+at the Marquis, Foedora would have consigned them all to the
+oubliettes of some Bastille; for in spite of her capacity for
+dissimulation, her discomfiture was discerned by her rivals. Her
+unfailing consolation had slipped from her at last. The delicious
+thought, "I am the most beautiful," the thought that at all times had
+soothed every mortification, had turned into a lie.
+
+At the opening of the second act a woman took up her position not very
+far from Raphael, in a box that had been empty hitherto. A murmur of
+admiration went up from the whole house. In that sea of human faces
+there was a movement of every living wave; all eyes were turned upon
+the stranger lady. The applause of young and old was so prolonged,
+that when the orchestra began, the musicians turned to the audience to
+request silence, and then they themselves joined in the plaudits and
+swelled the confusion. Excited talk began in every box, every woman
+equipped herself with an opera glass, elderly men grew young again,
+and polished the glasses of their lorgnettes with their gloves. The
+enthusiasm subsided by degrees, the stage echoed with the voices of
+the singers, and order reigned as before. The aristocratic section,
+ashamed of having yielded to a spontaneous feeling, again assumed
+their wonted politely frigid manner. The well-to-do dislike to be
+astonished at anything; at the first sight of a beautiful thing it
+becomes their duty to discover the defect in it which absolves them
+from admiring it,--the feeling of all ordinary minds. Yet a few still
+remained motionless and heedless of the music, artlessly absorbed in
+the delight of watching Raphael's neighbor.
+
+Valentin noticed Taillefer's mean, obnoxious countenance by Aquilina's
+side in a lower box, and received an approving smirk from him. Then he
+saw Emile, who seemed to say from where he stood in the orchestra,
+"Just look at that lovely creature there, close beside you!" Lastly,
+he saw Rastignac, with Mme. de Nucingen and her daughter, twisting his
+gloves like a man in despair, because he was tethered to his place,
+and could not leave it to go any nearer to the unknown fair divinity.
+
+Raphael's life depended upon a covenant that he had made with himself,
+and had hitherto kept sacred. He would give no special heed to any
+woman whatever; and the better to guard against temptation, he used a
+cunningly contrived opera-glass which destroyed the harmony of the
+fairest features by hideous distortions. He had not recovered from the
+terror that had seized on him in the morning when, at a mere
+expression of civility, the Magic Skin had contracted so abruptly. So
+Raphael was determined not to turn his face in the direction of his
+neighbor. He sat imperturbable as a duchess with his back against the
+corner of the box, thereby shutting out half of his neighbor's view of
+the stage, appearing to disregard her, and even to be unaware that a
+pretty woman sat there just behind him.
+
+His neighbor copied Valentin's position exactly; she leaned her elbow
+on the edge of her box and turned her face in three-quarter profile
+upon the singers on the stage, as if she were sitting to a painter.
+These two people looked like two estranged lovers still sulking, still
+turning their backs upon each other, who will go into each other's
+arms at the first tender word.
+
+Now and again his neighbor's ostrich feathers or her hair came in
+contact with Raphael's head, giving him a pleasurable thrill, against
+which he sternly fought. In a little while he felt the touch of the
+soft frill of lace that went round her dress; he could hear the
+gracious sounds of the folds of her dress itself, light rustling
+noises full of enchantment; he could even feel her movements as she
+breathed; with the gentle stir thus imparted to her form and to her
+draperies, it seemed to Raphael that all her being was suddenly
+communicated to him in an electric spark. The lace and tulle that
+caressed him imparted the delicious warmth of her bare, white
+shoulders. By a freak in the ordering of things, these two creatures,
+kept apart by social conventions, with the abysses of death between
+them, breathed together and perhaps thought of one another. Finally,
+the subtle perfume of aloes completed the work of Raphael's
+intoxication. Opposition heated his imagination, and his fancy, become
+the wilder for the limits imposed upon it, sketched a woman for him in
+outlines of fire. He turned abruptly, the stranger made a similar
+movement, startled no doubt at being brought in contact with a
+stranger; and they remained face to face, each with the same thought.
+
+"Pauline!"
+
+"M. Raphael!"
+
+Each surveyed the other, both of them petrified with astonishment.
+Raphael noticed Pauline's daintily simple costume. A woman's
+experienced eyes would have discerned and admired the outlines beneath
+the modest gauze folds of her bodice and the lily whiteness of her
+throat. And then her more than mortal clearness of soul, her maidenly
+modesty, her graceful bearing, all were unchanged. Her sleeve was
+quivering with agitation, for the beating of her heart was shaking her
+whole frame.
+
+"Come to the Hotel de Saint-Quentin to-morrow for your papers," she
+said. "I will be there at noon. Be punctual."
+
+She rose hastily, and disappeared. Raphael thought of following
+Pauline, feared to compromise her, and stayed. He looked at Foedora;
+she seemed to him positively ugly. Unable to understand a single
+phrase of the music, and feeling stifled in the theatre, he went out,
+and returned home with a full heart.
+
+"Jonathan," he said to the old servant, as soon as he lay in bed,
+"give me half a drop of laudanum on a piece of sugar, and don't wake
+me to-morrow till twenty minutes to twelve."
+
+"I want Pauline to love me!" he cried next morning, looking at the
+talisman the while in unspeakable anguish.
+
+The skin did not move in the least; it seemed to have lost its power
+to shrink; doubtless it could not fulfil a wish fulfilled already.
+
+"Ah!" exclaimed Raphael, feeling as if a mantle of lead had fallen
+away, which he had worn ever since the day when the talisman had been
+given to him; "so you are playing me false, you are not obeying me,
+the pact is broken! I am free; I shall live. Then was it all a
+wretched joke?" But he did not dare to believe in his own thought as
+he uttered it.
+
+He dressed himself as simply as had formerly been his wont, and set
+out on foot for his old lodging, trying to go back in fancy to the
+happy days when he abandoned himself without peril to vehement
+desires, the days when he had not yet condemned all human enjoyment.
+As he walked he beheld Pauline--not the Pauline of the Hotel Saint-
+Quentin, but the Pauline of last evening. Here was the accomplished
+mistress he had so often dreamed of, the intelligent young girl with
+the loving nature and artistic temperament, who understood poets, who
+understood poetry, and lived in luxurious surroundings. Here, in
+short, was Foedora, gifted with a great soul; or Pauline become a
+countess, and twice a millionaire, as Foedora had been. When he
+reached the worn threshold, and stood upon the broken step at the
+door, where in the old days he had had so many desperate thoughts, an
+old woman came out of the room within and spoke to him.
+
+"You are M. Raphael de Valentin, are you not?"
+
+"Yes, good mother," he replied.
+
+"You know your old room then," she replied; "you are expected up
+there."
+
+"Does Mme. Gaudin still own the house?" Raphael asked.
+
+"Oh no, sir. Mme. Gaudin is a baroness now. She lives in a fine house
+of her own on the other side of the river. Her husband has come back.
+My goodness, he brought back thousands and thousands. They say she
+could buy up all the Quartier Saint-Jacques if she liked. She gave me
+her basement room for nothing, and the remainder of her lease. Ah,
+she's a kind woman all the same; she is no more proud to-day than she
+was yesterday."
+
+Raphael hurried up the staircase to his garret; as he reached the last
+few steps he heard the sounds of a piano. Pauline was there, simply
+dressed in a cotton gown, but the way that it was made, like the
+gloves, hat, and shawl that she had thrown carelessly upon the bed,
+revealed a change of fortune.
+
+"Ah, there you are!" cried Pauline, turning her head, and rising with
+unconcealed delight.
+
+Raphael went to sit beside her, flushed, confused, and happy; he
+looked at her in silence.
+
+"Why did you leave us then?" she asked, dropping her eyes as the flush
+deepened on his face. "What became of you?"
+
+"Ah, I have been very miserable, Pauline; I am very miserable still."
+
+"Alas!" she said, filled with pitying tenderness. "I guessed your fate
+yesterday when I saw you so well dressed, and apparently so wealthy;
+but in reality? Eh, M. Raphael, is it as it always used to be with
+you?"
+
+Valentin could not restrain the tears that sprang to his eyes.
+
+"Pauline," he exclaimed, "I----"
+
+He went no further, love sparkled in his eyes, and his emotion
+overflowed his face.
+
+"Oh, he loves me! he loves me!" cried Pauline.
+
+Raphael felt himself unable to say one word; he bent his head. The
+young girl took his hand at this; she pressed it as she said, half
+sobbing and half laughing:--
+
+"Rich, rich, happy and rich! Your Pauline is rich. But I? Oh, I ought
+to be very poor to-day. I have said, times without number, that I
+would give all the wealth upon this earth for those words, 'He loves
+me!' O my Raphael! I have millions. You like luxury, you will be glad;
+but you must love me and my heart besides, for there is so much love
+for you in my heart. You don't know? My father has come back. I am a
+wealthy heiress. Both he and my mother leave me completely free to
+decide my own fate. I am free--do you understand?"
+
+Seized with a kind of frenzy, Raphael grasped Pauline's hands and
+kissed them eagerly and vehemently, with an almost convulsive caress.
+Pauline drew her hands away, laid them on Raphael's shoulders, and
+drew him towards her. They understood one another--in that close
+embrace, in the unalloyed and sacred fervor of that one kiss without
+an afterthought--the first kiss by which two souls take possession of
+each other.
+
+"Ah, I will not leave you any more," said Pauline, falling back in her
+chair. "I do not know how I come to be so bold!" she added, blushing.
+
+"Bold, my Pauline? Do not fear it. It is love, love true and deep and
+everlasting like my own, is it not?"
+
+"Speak!" she cried. "Go on speaking, so long your lips have been dumb
+for me."
+
+"Then you have loved me all along?"
+
+"Loved you? MON DIEU! How often I have wept here, setting your room
+straight, and grieving for your poverty and my own. I would have sold
+myself to the evil one to spare you one vexation! You are MY Raphael
+to-day, really my own Raphael, with that handsome head of yours, and
+your heart is mine too; yes, that above all, your heart--O wealth
+inexhaustible! Well, where was I?" she went on after a pause. "Oh yes!
+We have three, four, or five millions, I believe. If I were poor, I
+should perhaps desire to bear your name, to be acknowledged as your
+wife; but as it is, I would give up the whole world for you, I would
+be your servant still, now and always. Why, Raphael, if I give you my
+fortune, my heart, myself to-day, I do no more than I did that day
+when I put a certain five-franc piece in the drawer there," and she
+pointed to the table. "Oh, how your exultation hurt me then!"
+
+"Oh, why are you rich?" Raphael cried; "why is there no vanity in you?
+I can do nothing for you."
+
+He wrung his hands in despair and happiness and love.
+
+"When you are the Marquise de Valentin, I know that the title and the
+fortune for thee, heavenly soul, will not be worth----"
+
+"One hair of your head," she cried.
+
+"I have millions too. But what is wealth to either of us now? There is
+my life--ah, that I can offer, take it."
+
+"Your love, Raphael, your love is all the world to me. Are your
+thoughts of me? I am the happiest of the happy!"
+
+"Can any one overhear us?" asked Raphael.
+
+"Nobody," she replied, and a mischievous gesture escaped her.
+
+"Come, then!" cried Valentin, holding out his arms.
+
+She sprang upon his knees and clasped her arms about his neck.
+
+"Kiss me!" she cried, "after all the pain you have given me; to blot
+out the memory of the grief that your joys have caused me; and for the
+sake of the nights that I spent in painting hand-screens----"
+
+"Those hand-screens of yours?"
+
+"Now that we are rich, my darling, I can tell you all about it. Poor
+boy! how easy it is to delude a clever man! Could you have had white
+waistcoats and clean shirts twice a week for three francs every month
+to the laundress? Why, you used to drink twice as much milk as your
+money would have paid for. I deceived you all round--over firing, oil,
+and even money. O Raphael mine, don't have me for your wife, I am far
+too cunning!" she said laughing.
+
+"But how did you manage?"
+
+"I used to work till two o'clock in the morning; I gave my mother half
+the money made by my screens, and the other half went to you."
+
+They looked at one another for a moment, both bewildered by love and
+gladness.
+
+"Some day we shall have to pay for this happiness by some terrible
+sorrow," cried Raphael.
+
+"Perhaps you are married?" said Pauline. "Oh, I will not give you up
+to any other woman."
+
+"I am free, my beloved."
+
+"Free!" she repeated. "Free, and mine!"
+
+She slipped down upon her knees, clasped her hands, and looked at
+Raphael in an enthusiasm of devotion.
+
+"I am afraid I shall go mad. How handsome you are!" she went on,
+passing her fingers through her lover's fair hair. "How stupid your
+Countess Foedora is! How pleased I was yesterday with the homage they
+all paid to me! SHE has never been applauded. Dear, when I felt your
+arm against my back, I heard a vague voice within me that cried, 'He
+is there!' and I turned round and saw you. I fled, for I longed so to
+throw my arms about you before them all."
+
+"How happy you are--you can speak!" Raphael exclaimed. "My heart is
+overwhelmed; I would weep, but I cannot. Do not draw your hand away. I
+could stay here looking at you like this for the rest of my life, I
+think; happy and content."
+
+"O my love, say that once more!"
+
+"Ah, what are words?" answered Valentin, letting a hot tear fall on
+Pauline's hands. "Some time I will try to tell you of my love; just
+now I can only feel it."
+
+"You," she said, "with your lofty soul and your great genius, with
+that heart of yours that I know so well; are you really mine, as I am
+yours?"
+
+"For ever and ever, my sweet creature," said Raphael in an uncertain
+voice. "You shall be my wife, my protecting angel. My griefs have
+always been dispelled by your presence, and my courage revived; that
+angelic smile now on your lips has purified me, so to speak. A new
+life seems about to begin for me. The cruel past and my wretched
+follies are hardly more to me than evil dreams. At your side I breathe
+an atmosphere of happiness, and I am pure. Be with me always," he
+added, pressing her solemnly to his beating heart.
+
+"Death may come when it will," said Pauline in ecstasy; "I have
+lived!"
+
+Happy he who shall divine their joy, for he must have experienced it.
+
+"I wish that no one might enter this dear garret again, my Raphael,"
+said Pauline, after two hours of silence.
+
+"We must have the door walled up, put bars across the window, and buy
+the house," the Marquis answered.
+
+"Yes, we will," she said. Then a moment later she added: "Our search
+for your manuscripts has been a little lost sight of," and they both
+laughed like children.
+
+"Pshaw! I don't care a jot for the whole circle of the sciences,"
+Raphael answered.
+
+"Ah, sir, and how about glory?"
+
+"I glory in you alone."
+
+"You used to be very miserable as you made these little scratches and
+scrawls," she said, turning the papers over.
+
+"My Pauline----"
+
+"Oh yes, I am your Pauline--and what then?"
+
+"Where are you living now?"
+
+"In the Rue Saint Lazare. And you?"
+
+"In the Rue de Varenne."
+
+"What a long way apart we shall be until----" She stopped, and looked
+at her lover with a mischievous and coquettish expression.
+
+"But at the most we need only be separated for a fortnight," Raphael
+answered.
+
+"Really! we are to be married in a fortnight?" and she jumped for joy
+like a child.
+
+"I am an unnatural daughter!" she went on. "I give no more thought to
+my father or my mother, or to anything in the world. Poor love, you
+don't know that my father is very ill? He returned from the Indies in
+very bad health. He nearly died at Havre, where we went to find him.
+Good heavens!" she cried, looking at her watch; "it is three o'clock
+already! I ought to be back again when he wakes at four. I am mistress
+of the house at home; my mother does everything that I wish, and my
+father worships me; but I will not abuse their kindness, that would be
+wrong. My poor father! He would have me go to the Italiens yesterday.
+You will come to see him to-morrow, will you not?"
+
+"Will Madame la Marquise de Valentin honor me by taking my arm?"
+
+"I am going to take the key of this room away with me," she said.
+"Isn't our treasure-house a palace?"
+
+"One more kiss, Pauline."
+
+"A thousand, MON DIEU!" she said, looking at Raphael. "Will it always
+be like this? I feel as if I were dreaming."
+
+They went slowly down the stairs together, step for step, with arms
+closely linked, trembling both of them beneath their load of joy. Each
+pressing close to the other's side, like a pair of doves, they reached
+the Place de la Sorbonne, where Pauline's carriage was waiting.
+
+"I want to go home with you," she said. "I want to see your own room
+and your study, and to sit at the table where you work. It will be
+like old times," she said, blushing.
+
+She spoke to the servant. "Joseph, before returning home I am going to
+the Rue de Varenne. It is a quarter-past three now, and I must be back
+by four o'clock. George must hurry the horses." And so in a few
+moments the lovers came to Valentin's abode.
+
+"How glad I am to have seen all this for myself!" Pauline cried,
+creasing the silken bed-curtains in Raphael's room between her
+fingers. "As I go to sleep, I shall be here in thought. I shall
+imagine your dear head on the pillow there. Raphael, tell me, did no
+one advise you about the furniture of your hotel?"
+
+"No one whatever."
+
+"Really? It was not a woman who----"
+
+"Pauline!"
+
+"Oh, I know I am fearfully jealous. You have good taste. I will have a
+bed like yours to-morrow."
+
+Quite beside himself with happiness, Raphael caught Pauline in his
+arms.
+
+"Oh, my father!" she said; "my father----"
+
+"I will take you back to him," cried Valentin, "for I want to be away
+from you as little as possible."
+
+"How loving you are! I did not venture to suggest it----"
+
+"Are you not my life?"
+
+It would be tedious to set down accurately the charming prattle of the
+lovers, for tones and looks and gestures that cannot be rendered alone
+gave it significance. Valentin went back with Pauline to her own door,
+and returned with as much happiness in his heart as mortal man can
+know.
+
+When he was seated in his armchair beside the fire, thinking over the
+sudden and complete way in which his wishes had been fulfilled, a cold
+shiver went through him, as if the blade of a dagger had been plunged
+into his breast--he thought of the Magic Skin, and saw that it had
+shrunk a little. He uttered the most tremendous of French oaths,
+without any of the Jesuitical reservations made by the Abbess of
+Andouillettes, leant his head against the back of the chair, and sat
+motionless, fixing his unseeing eyes upon the bracket of the curtain
+pole.
+
+"Good God!" he cried; "every wish! Every desire of mine! Poor
+Pauline!----"
+
+He took a pair of compasses and measured the extent of existence that
+the morning had cost him.
+
+"I have scarcely enough for two months!" he said.
+
+A cold sweat broke out over him; moved by an ungovernable spasm of
+rage, he seized the Magic Skin, exclaiming:
+
+"I am a perfect fool!"
+
+He rushed out of the house and across the garden, and flung the
+talisman down a well.
+
+"Vogue la galere," cried he. "The devil take all this nonsense."
+
+So Raphael gave himself up to the happiness of being beloved, and led
+with Pauline the life of heart and heart. Difficulties which it would
+be somewhat tedious to describe had delayed their marriage, which was
+to take place early in March. Each was sure of the other; their
+affection had been tried, and happiness had taught them how strong it
+was. Never has love made two souls, two natures, so absolutely one.
+The more they came to know of each other, the more they loved. On
+either side there was the same hesitating delicacy, the same
+transports of joy such as angels know; there were no clouds in their
+heaven; the will of either was the other's law.
+
+Wealthy as they both were, they had not a caprice which they could not
+gratify, and for that reason had no caprices. A refined taste, a
+feeling for beauty and poetry, was instinct in the soul of the bride;
+her lover's smile was more to her than all the pearls of Ormuz. She
+disdained feminine finery; a muslin dress and flowers formed her most
+elaborate toilette.
+
+Pauline and Raphael shunned every one else, for solitude was
+abundantly beautiful to them. The idlers at the Opera, or at the
+Italiens, saw this charming and unconventional pair evening after
+evening. Some gossip went the round of the salons at first, but the
+harmless lovers were soon forgotten in the course of events which took
+place in Paris; their marriage was announced at length to excuse them
+in the eyes of the prudish; and as it happened, their servants did not
+babble; so their bliss did not draw down upon them any very severe
+punishment.
+
+One morning towards the end of February, at the time when the
+brightening days bring a belief in the nearness of the joys of spring,
+Pauline and Raphael were breakfasting together in a small
+conservatory, a kind of drawing-room filled with flowers, on a level
+with the garden. The mild rays of the pale winter sunlight, breaking
+through the thicket of exotic plants, warmed the air somewhat. The
+vivid contrast made by the varieties of foliage, the colors of the
+masses of flowering shrubs, the freaks of light and shadow, gladdened
+the eyes. While all the rest of Paris still sought warmth from its
+melancholy hearth, these two were laughing in a bower of camellias,
+lilacs, and blossoming heath. Their happy faces rose above lilies of
+the valley, narcissus blooms, and Bengal roses. A mat of plaited
+African grass, variegated like a carpet, lay beneath their feet in
+this luxurious conservatory. The walls, covered with a green linen
+material, bore no traces of damp. The surfaces of the rustic wooden
+furniture shone with cleanliness. A kitten, attracted by the odor of
+milk, had established itself upon the table; it allowed Pauline to
+bedabble it in coffee; she was playing merrily with it, taking away
+the cream that she had just allowed the kitten to sniff at, so as to
+exercise its patience, and keep up the contest. She burst out laughing
+at every antic, and by the comical remarks she constantly made, she
+hindered Raphael from perusing the paper; he had dropped it a dozen
+times already. This morning picture seemed to overflow with
+inexpressible gladness, like everything that is natural and genuine.
+
+Raphael, still pretending to read his paper, furtively watched Pauline
+with the cat--his Pauline, in the dressing-gown that hung carelessly
+about her; his Pauline, with her hair loose on her shoulders, with a
+tiny, white, blue-veined foot peeping out of a velvet slipper. It was
+pleasant to see her in this negligent dress; she was delightful as
+some fanciful picture by Westall; half-girl, half-woman, as she seemed
+to be, or perhaps more of a girl than a woman, there was no alloy in
+the happiness she enjoyed, and of love she knew as yet only its first
+ecstasy. When Raphael, absorbed in happy musing, had forgotten the
+existence of the newspaper, Pauline flew upon it, crumpled it up into
+a ball, and threw it out into the garden; the kitten sprang after the
+rotating object, which spun round and round, as politics are wont to
+do. This childish scene recalled Raphael to himself. He would have
+gone on reading, and felt for the sheet he no longer possessed. Joyous
+laughter rang out like the song of a bird, one peal leading to
+another.
+
+"I am quite jealous of the paper," she said, as she wiped away the
+tears that her childlike merriment had brought into her eyes. "Now, is
+it not a heinous offence," she went on, as she became a woman all at
+once, "to read Russian proclamations in my presence, and to attend to
+the prosings of the Emperor Nicholas rather than to looks and words of
+love!"
+
+"I was not reading, my dear angel; I was looking at you."
+
+Just then the gravel walk outside the conservatory rang with the sound
+of the gardener's heavily nailed boots.
+
+"I beg your pardon, my Lord Marquis--and yours, too, madame--if I am
+intruding, but I have brought you a curiosity the like of which I
+never set eyes on. Drawing a bucket of water just now, with due
+respect, I got out this strange salt-water plant. Here it is. It must
+be thoroughly used to water, anyhow, for it isn't saturated or even
+damp at all. It is as dry as a piece of wood, and has not swelled a
+bit. As my Lord Marquis certainly knows a great deal more about things
+than I do, I thought I ought to bring it, and that it would interest
+him."
+
+Therewith the gardener showed Raphael the inexorable piece of skin;
+there were barely six square inches of it left.
+
+"Thanks, Vaniere," Raphael said. "The thing is very curious."
+
+"What is the matter with you, my angel; you are growing quite white!"
+Pauline cried.
+
+"You can go, Vaniere."
+
+"Your voice frightens me," the girl went on; "it is so strangely
+altered. What is it? How are you feeling? Where is the pain? You are
+in pain!--Jonathan! here! call a doctor!" she cried.
+
+"Hush, my Pauline," Raphael answered, as he regained composure. "Let
+us get up and go. Some flower here has a scent that is too much for
+me. It is that verbena, perhaps."
+
+Pauline flew upon the innocent plant, seized it by the stalk, and
+flung it out into the garden; then, with all the might of the love
+between them, she clasped Raphael in a close embrace, and with
+languishing coquetry raised her red lips to his for a kiss.
+
+"Dear angel," she cried, "when I saw you turn so white, I understood
+that I could not live on without you; your life is my life too. Lay
+your hand on my back, Raphael mine; I feel a chill like death. The
+feeling of cold is there yet. Your lips are burning. How is your hand?
+--Cold as ice," she added.
+
+"Mad girl!" exclaimed Raphael.
+
+"Why that tear? Let me drink it."
+
+"O Pauline, Pauline, you love me far too much!"
+
+"There is something very extraordinary going on in your mind, Raphael!
+Do not dissimulate. I shall very soon find out your secret. Give that
+to me," she went on, taking the Magic Skin.
+
+"You are my executioner!" the young man exclaimed, glancing in horror
+at the talisman.
+
+"How changed your voice is!" cried Pauline, as she dropped the fatal
+symbol of destiny.
+
+"Do you love me?" he asked.
+
+"Do I love you? Is there any doubt?"
+
+"Then, leave me, go away!"
+
+The poor child went.
+
+"So!" cried Raphael, when he was alone. "In an enlightened age, when
+we have found out that diamonds are a crystallized form of charcoal,
+at a time when everything is made clear, when the police would hale a
+new Messiah before the magistrates, and submit his miracles to the
+Academie des Sciences--in an epoch when we no longer believe in
+anything but a notary's signature--that I, forsooth, should believe in
+a sort of Mene, Tekel, Upharsin! No, by Heaven, I will not believe
+that the Supreme Being would take pleasure in torturing a harmless
+creature.--Let us see the learned about it."
+
+Between the Halle des Vins, with its extensive assembly of barrels,
+and the Salpetriere, that extensive seminary of drunkenness, lies a
+small pond, which Raphael soon reached. All sorts of ducks of rare
+varieties were there disporting themselves; their colored markings
+shone in the sun like the glass in cathedral windows. Every kind of
+duck in the world was represented, quacking, dabbling, and moving
+about--a kind of parliament of ducks assembled against its will, but
+luckily without either charter or political principles, living in
+complete immunity from sportsmen, under the eyes of any naturalist
+that chanced to see them.
+
+"That is M. Lavrille," said one of the keepers to Raphael, who had
+asked for that high priest of zoology.
+
+The Marquis saw a short man buried in profound reflections, caused by
+the appearance of a pair of ducks. The man of science was middle-aged;
+he had a pleasant face, made pleasanter still by a kindly expression,
+but an absorption in scientific ideas engrossed his whole person. His
+peruke was strangely turned up, by being constantly raised to scratch
+his head; so that a line of white hair was left plainly visible, a
+witness to an enthusiasm for investigation, which, like every other
+strong passion, so withdraws us from mundane considerations, that we
+lose all consciousness of the "I" within us. Raphael, the student and
+man of science, looked respectfully at the naturalist, who devoted his
+nights to enlarging the limits of human knowledge, and whose very
+errors reflected glory upon France; but a she-coxcomb would have
+laughed, no doubt, at the break of continuity between the breeches and
+striped waistcoat worn by the man of learning; the interval, moreover,
+was modestly filled by a shirt which had been considerably creased,
+for he stooped and raised himself by turns, as his zoological
+observations required.
+
+After the first interchange of civilities, Raphael thought it
+necessary to pay M. Lavrille a banal compliment upon his ducks.
+
+"Oh, we are well off for ducks," the naturalist replied. "The genus,
+moreover, as you doubtless know, is the most prolific in the order of
+palmipeds. It begins with the swan and ends with the zin-zin duck,
+comprising in all one hundred and thirty-seven very distinct
+varieties, each having its own name, habits, country, and character,
+and every one no more like another than a white man is like a negro.
+Really, sir, when we dine off a duck, we have no notion for the most
+part of the vast extent----"
+
+He interrupted himself as he saw a small pretty duck come up to the
+surface of the pond.
+
+"There you see the cravatted swan, a poor native of Canada; he has
+come a very long way to show us his brown and gray plumage and his
+little black cravat! Look, he is preening himself. That one is the
+famous eider duck that provides the down, the eider-down under which
+our fine ladies sleep; isn't it pretty? Who would not admire the
+little pinkish white breast and the green beak? I have just been a
+witness, sir," he went on, "to a marriage that I had long despaired of
+bringing about; they have paired rather auspiciously, and I shall
+await the results very eagerly. This will be a hundred and thirty-
+eighth species, I flatter myself, to which, perhaps, my name will be
+given. That is the newly matched pair," he said, pointing out two of
+the ducks; "one of them is a laughing goose (anas albifrons), and the
+other the great whistling duck, Buffon's anas ruffina. I have
+hesitated a long while between the whistling duck, the duck with white
+eyebrows, and the shoveler duck (anas clypeata). Stay, that is the
+shoveler--that fat, brownish black rascal, with the greenish neck and
+that coquettish iridescence on it. But the whistling duck was a
+crested one, sir, and you will understand that I deliberated no
+longer. We only lack the variegated black-capped duck now. These
+gentlemen here, unanimously claim that that variety of duck is only a
+repetition of the curve-beaked teal, but for my own part,"--and the
+gesture he made was worth seeing. It expressed at once the modesty and
+pride of a man of science; the pride full of obstinacy, and the
+modesty well tempered with assurance.
+
+"I don't think it is," he added. "You see, my dear sir, that we are
+not amusing ourselves here. I am engaged at this moment upon a
+monograph on the genus duck. But I am at your disposal."
+
+While they went towards a rather pleasant house in the Rue du Buffon,
+Raphael submitted the skin to M. Lavrille's inspection.
+
+"I know the product," said the man of science, when he had turned his
+magnifying glass upon the talisman. "It used to be used for covering
+boxes. The shagreen is very old. They prefer to use skate's skin
+nowadays for making sheaths. This, as you are doubtless aware, is the
+hide of the raja sephen, a Red Sea fish."
+
+"But this, sir, since you are so exceedingly good----"
+
+"This," the man of science interrupted, as he resumed, "this is quite
+another thing; between these two shagreens, sir, there is a difference
+just as wide as between sea and land, or fish and flesh. The fish's
+skin is harder, however, than the skin of the land animal. This," he
+said, as he indicated the talisman, "is, as you doubtless know, one of
+the most curious of zoological products."
+
+"But to proceed----" said Raphael.
+
+"This," replied the man of science, as he flung himself down into his
+armchair, "is an ass' skin, sir."
+
+"Yes, I know," said the young man.
+
+"A very rare variety of ass found in Persia," the naturalist
+continued, "the onager of the ancients, equus asinus, the koulan of
+the Tartars; Pallas went out there to observe it, and has made it
+known to science, for as a matter of fact the animal for a long time
+was believed to be mythical. It is mentioned, as you know, in Holy
+Scripture; Moses forbade that it should be coupled with its own
+species, and the onager is yet more famous for the prostitutions of
+which it was the object, and which are often mentioned by the prophets
+of the Bible. Pallas, as you know doubtless, states in his Act.
+Petrop. tome II., that these bizarre excesses are still devoutly
+believed in among the Persians and the Nogais as a sovereign remedy
+for lumbago and sciatic gout. We poor Parisians scarcely believe that.
+The Museum has no example of the onager.
+
+"What a magnificent animal!" he continued. "It is full of mystery; its
+eyes are provided with a sort of burnished covering, to which the
+Orientals attribute the powers of fascination; it has a glossier and
+finer coat than our handsomest horses possess, striped with more or
+less tawny bands, very much like the zebra's hide. There is something
+pliant and silky about its hair, which is sleek to the touch. Its
+powers of sight vie in precision and accuracy with those of man; it is
+rather larger than our largest domestic donkeys, and is possessed of
+extraordinary courage. If it is surprised by any chance, it defends
+itself against the most dangerous wild beasts with remarkable success;
+the rapidity of its movements can only be compared with the flight of
+birds; an onager, sir, would run the best Arab or Persian horses to
+death. According to the father of the conscientious Doctor Niebuhr,
+whose recent loss we are deploring, as you doubtless know, the
+ordinary average pace of one of these wonderful creatures would be
+seven thousand geometric feet per hour. Our own degenerate race of
+donkeys can give no idea of the ass in his pride and independence. He
+is active and spirited in his demeanor; he is cunning and sagacious;
+there is grace about the outlines of his head; every movement is full
+of attractive charm. In the East he is the king of beasts. Turkish and
+Persian superstition even credits him with a mysterious origin; and
+when stories of the prowess attributed to him are told in Thibet or in
+Tartary, the speakers mingle Solomon's name with that of this noble
+animal. A tame onager, in short, is worth an enormous amount; it is
+well-nigh impossible to catch them among the mountains, where they
+leap like roebucks, and seem as if they could fly like birds. Our myth
+of the winged horse, our Pegasus, had its origin doubtless in these
+countries, where the shepherds could see the onager springing from one
+rock to another. In Persia they breed asses for the saddle, a cross
+between a tamed onager and a she-ass, and they paint them red,
+following immemorial tradition. Perhaps it was this custom that gave
+rise to our own proverb, 'Surely as a red donkey.' At some period when
+natural history was much neglected in France, I think a traveler must
+have brought over one of these strange beasts that endures servitude
+with such impatience. Hence the adage. The skin that you have laid
+before me is the skin of an onager. Opinions differ as to the origin
+of the name. Some claim that Chagri is a Turkish word; others insist
+that Chagri must be the name of the place where this animal product
+underwent the chemical process of preparation so clearly described by
+Pallas, to which the peculiar graining that we admire is due;
+Martellens has written to me saying that Chaagri is a river----"
+
+"I thank you, sir, for the information that you have given me; it
+would furnish an admirable footnote for some Dom Calmet or other, if
+such erudite hermits yet exist; but I have had the honor of pointing
+out to you that this scrap was in the first instance quite as large as
+that map," said Raphael, indicating an open atlas to Lavrille; "but it
+has shrunk visibly in three months' time----"
+
+"Quite so," said the man of science. "I understand. The remains of any
+substance primarily organic are naturally subject to a process of
+decay. It is quite easy to understand, and its progress depends upon
+atmospherical conditions. Even metals contract and expand appreciably,
+for engineers have remarked somewhat considerable interstices between
+great blocks of stone originally clamped together with iron bars. The
+field of science is boundless, but human life is very short, so that
+we do not claim to be acquainted with all the phenomena of nature."
+
+"Pardon the question that I am about to ask you, sir," Raphael began,
+half embarrassed, "but are you quite sure that this piece of skin is
+subject to the ordinary laws of zoology, and that it can be
+stretched?"
+
+"Certainly----oh, bother!----" muttered M. Lavrille, trying to stretch
+the talisman. "But if you, sir, will go to see Planchette," he added,
+"the celebrated professor of mechanics, he will certainly discover
+some method of acting upon this skin, of softening and expanding it."
+
+"Ah, sir, you are the preserver of my life," and Raphael took leave of
+the learned naturalist and hurried off to Planchette, leaving the
+worthy Lavrille in his study, all among the bottles and dried plants
+that filled it up.
+
+Quite unconsciously Raphael brought away with him from this visit, all
+of science that man can grasp, a terminology to wit. Lavrille, the
+worthy man, was very much like Sancho Panza giving to Don Quixote the
+history of the goats; he was entertaining himself by making out a list
+of animals and ticking them off. Even now that his life was nearing
+its end, he was scarcely acquainted with a mere fraction of the
+countless numbers of the great tribes that God has scattered, for some
+unknown end, throughout the ocean of worlds.
+
+Raphael was well pleased. "I shall keep my ass well in hand," cried
+he. Sterne had said before his day, "Let us take care of our ass, if
+we wish to live to old age." But it is such a fantastic brute!
+
+Planchette was a tall, thin man, a poet of a surety, lost in one
+continual thought, and always employed in gazing into the bottomless
+abyss of Motion. Commonplace minds accuse these lofty intellects of
+madness; they form a misinterpreted race apart that lives in a
+wonderful carelessness of luxuries or other people's notions. They
+will spend whole days at a stretch, smoking a cigar that has gone out,
+and enter a drawing-room with the buttons on their garments not in
+every case formally wedded to the button-holes. Some day or other,
+after a long time spent in measuring space, or in accumulating Xs
+under Aa-Gg, they succeed in analyzing some natural law, and resolve
+it into its elemental principles, and all on a sudden the crowd gapes
+at a new machine; or it is a handcart perhaps that overwhelms us with
+astonishment by the apt simplicity of its construction. The modest man
+of science smiles at his admirers, and remarks, "What is that
+invention of mine? Nothing whatever. Man cannot create a force; he can
+but direct it; and science consists in learning from nature."
+
+The mechanician was standing bolt upright, planted on both feet, like
+some victim dropped straight from the gibbet, when Raphael broke in
+upon him. He was intently watching an agate ball that rolled over a
+sun-dial, and awaited its final settlement. The worthy man had
+received neither pension nor decoration; he had not known how to make
+the right use of his ability for calculation. He was happy in his life
+spent on the watch for a discovery; he had no thought either of
+reputation, of the outer world, nor even of himself, and led the life
+of science for the sake of science.
+
+"It is inexplicable," he exclaimed. "Ah, your servant, sir," he went
+on, becoming aware of Raphael's existence. "How is your mother? You
+must go and see my wife."
+
+"And I also could have lived thus," thought Raphael, as he recalled
+the learned man from his meditations by asking of him how to produce
+any effect on the talisman, which he placed before him.
+
+"Although my credulity must amuse you, sir," so the Marquis ended, "I
+will conceal nothing from you. That skin seems to me to be endowed
+with an insuperable power of resistance."
+
+"People of fashion, sir, always treat science rather superciliously,"
+said Planchette. "They all talk to us pretty much as the incroyable
+did when he brought some ladies to see Lalande just after an eclipse,
+and remarked, 'Be so good as to begin it over again!' What effect do
+you want to produce? The object of the science of mechanics is either
+the application or the neutralization of the laws of motion. As for
+motion pure and simple, I tell you humbly, that we cannot possibly
+define it. That disposed of, unvarying phenomena have been observed
+which accompany the actions of solids and fluids. If we set up the
+conditions by which these phenomena are brought to pass, we can
+transport bodies or communicate locomotive power to them at a
+predetermined rate of speed. We can project them, divide them up in a
+few or an infinite number of pieces, accordingly as we break them or
+grind them to powder; we can twist bodies or make them rotate, modify,
+compress, expand, or extend them. The whole science, sir, rests upon a
+single fact.
+
+"You see this ball," he went on; "here it lies upon this slab. Now, it
+is over there. What name shall we give to what has taken place, so
+natural from a physical point of view, so amazing from a moral?
+Movement, locomotion, changing of place? What prodigious vanity lurks
+underneath the words. Does a name solve the difficulty? Yet it is the
+whole of our science for all that. Our machines either make direct use
+of this agency, this fact, or they convert it. This trifling
+phenomenon, applied to large masses, would send Paris flying. We can
+increase speed by an expenditure of force, and augment the force by an
+increase of speed. But what are speed and force? Our science is as
+powerless to tell us that as to create motion. Any movement whatever
+is an immense power, and man does not create power of any kind.
+Everything is movement, thought itself is a movement, upon movement
+nature is based. Death is a movement whose limitations are little
+known. If God is eternal, be sure that He moves perpetually; perhaps
+God is movement. That is why movement, like God is inexplicable,
+unfathomable, unlimited, incomprehensible, intangible. Who has ever
+touched, comprehended, or measured movement? We feel its effects
+without seeing it; we can even deny them as we can deny the existence
+of a God. Where is it? Where is it not? Whence comes it? What is its
+source? What is its end? It surrounds us, it intrudes upon us, and yet
+escapes us. It is evident as a fact, obscure as an abstraction; it is
+at once effect and cause. It requires space, even as we, and what is
+space? Movement alone recalls it to us; without movement, space is but
+an empty meaningless word. Like space, like creation, like the
+infinite, movement is an insoluble problem which confounds human
+reason; man will never conceive it, whatever else he may be permitted
+to conceive.
+
+"Between each point in space occupied in succession by that ball,"
+continued the man of science, "there is an abyss confronting human
+reason, an abyss into which Pascal fell. In order to produce any
+effect upon an unknown substance, we ought first of all to study that
+substance; to know whether, in accordance with its nature, it will be
+broken by the force of a blow, or whether it will withstand it; if it
+breaks in pieces, and you have no wish to split it up, we shall not
+achieve the end proposed. If you want to compress it, a uniform
+impulse must be communicated to all the particles of the substance, so
+as to diminish the interval that separates them in an equal degree. If
+you wish to expand it, we should try to bring a uniform eccentric
+force to bear on every molecule; for unless we conform accurately to
+this law, we shall have breaches in continuity. The modes of motion,
+sir, are infinite, and no limit exists to combinations of movement.
+Upon what effect have you determined?"
+
+"I want any kind of pressure that is strong enough to expand the skin
+indefinitely," began Raphael, quite of out patience.
+
+"Substance is finite," the mathematician put in, "and therefore will
+not admit of indefinite expansion, but pressure will necessarily
+increase the extent of surface at the expense of the thickness, which
+will be diminished until the point is reached when the material gives
+out----"
+
+"Bring about that result, sir," Raphael cried, "and you will have
+earned millions."
+
+"Then I should rob you of your money," replied the other, phlegmatic
+as a Dutchman. "I am going to show you, in a word or two, that a
+machine can be made that is fit to crush Providence itself in pieces
+like a fly. It would reduce a man to the conditions of a piece of
+waste paper; a man--boots and spurs, hat and cravat, trinkets and
+gold, and all----"
+
+"What a fearful machine!"
+
+"Instead of flinging their brats into the water, the Chinese ought to
+make them useful in this way," the man of science went on, without
+reflecting on the regard man has for his progeny.
+
+Quite absorbed by his idea, Planchette took an empty flower-pot, with
+a hole in the bottom, and put it on the surface of the dial, then he
+went to look for a little clay in a corner of the garden. Raphael
+stood spellbound, like a child to whom his nurse is telling some
+wonderful story. Planchette put the clay down upon the slab, drew a
+pruning-knife from his pocket, cut two branches from an elder tree,
+and began to clean them of pith by blowing through them, as if Raphael
+had not been present.
+
+"There are the rudiments of the apparatus," he said. Then he connected
+one of the wooden pipes with the bottom of the flower-pot by way of a
+clay joint, in such a way that the mouth of the elder stem was just
+under the hole of the flower-pot; you might have compared it to a big
+tobacco-pipe. He spread a bed of clay over the surface of the slab, in
+a shovel-shaped mass, set down the flower-pot at the wider end of it,
+and laid the pipe of the elder stem along the portion which
+represented the handle of the shovel. Next he put a lump of clay at
+the end of the elder stem and therein planted the other pipe, in an
+upright position, forming a second elbow which connected it with the
+first horizontal pipe in such a manner that the air, or any given
+fluid in circulation, could flow through this improvised piece of
+mechanism from the mouth of the vertical tube, along the intermediate
+passages, and so into the large empty flower-pot.
+
+"This apparatus, sir," he said to Raphael, with all the gravity of an
+academician pronouncing his initiatory discourse, "is one of the great
+Pascal's grandest claims upon our admiration."
+
+"I don't understand."
+
+The man of science smiled. He went up to a fruit-tree and took down a
+little phial in which the druggist had sent him some liquid for
+catching ants; he broke off the bottom and made a funnel of the top,
+carefully fitting it to the mouth of the vertical hollowed stem that
+he had set in the clay, and at the opposite end to the great
+reservoir, represented by the flower-pot. Next, by means of a
+watering-pot, he poured in sufficient water to rise to the same level
+in the large vessel and in the tiny circular funnel at the end of the
+elder stem.
+
+Raphael was thinking of his piece of skin.
+
+"Water is considered to-day, sir, to be an incompressible body," said
+the mechanician; "never lose sight of that fundamental principle;
+still it can be compressed, though only so very slightly that we
+should regard its faculty for contracting as a zero. You see the
+amount of surface presented by the water at the brim of the flower-
+pot?"
+
+"Yes, sir."
+
+"Very good; now suppose that that surface is a thousand times larger
+than the orifice of the elder stem through which I poured the liquid.
+Here, I am taking the funnel away----"
+
+"Granted."
+
+"Well, then, if by any method whatever I increase the volume of that
+quantity of water by pouring in yet more through the mouth of the
+little tube; the water thus compelled to flow downwards would rise in
+the reservoir, represented by the flower-pot, until it reached the
+same level at either end."
+
+"That is quite clear," cried Raphael.
+
+"But there is this difference," the other went on. "Suppose that the
+thin column of water poured into the little vertical tube there exerts
+a force equal, say, to a pound weight, for instance, its action will
+be punctually communicated to the great body of the liquid, and will
+be transmitted to every part of the surface represented by the water
+in the flower-pot so that at the surface there will be a thousand
+columns of water, every one pressing upwards as if they were impelled
+by a force equal to that which compels the liquid to descend in the
+vertical tube; and of necessity they reproduce here," said Planchette,
+indicating to Raphael the top of the flower-pot, "the force introduced
+over there, a thousand-fold," and the man of science pointed out to
+the marquis the upright wooden pipe set in the clay.
+
+"That is quite simple," said Raphael.
+
+Planchette smiled again.
+
+"In other words," he went on, with the mathematician's natural
+stubborn propensity for logic, "in order to resist the force of the
+incoming water, it would be necessary to exert, upon every part of the
+large surface, a force equal to that brought into action in the
+vertical column, but with this difference--if the column of liquid is
+a foot in height, the thousand little columns of the wide surface will
+only have a very slight elevating power.
+
+"Now," said Planchette, as he gave a fillip to his bits of stick, "let
+us replace this funny little apparatus by steel tubes of suitable
+strength and dimensions; and if you cover the liquid surface of the
+reservoir with a strong sliding plate of metal, and if to this metal
+plate you oppose another, solid enough and strong enough to resist any
+test; if, furthermore, you give me the power of continually adding
+water to the volume of liquid contents by means of the little vertical
+tube, the object fixed between the two solid metal plates must of
+necessity yield to the tremendous crushing force which indefinitely
+compresses it. The method of continually pouring in water through a
+little tube, like the manner of communicating force through the volume
+of the liquid to a small metal plate, is an absurdly primitive
+mechanical device. A brace of pistons and a few valves would do it
+all. Do you perceive, my dear sir," he said taking Valentin by the
+arm, "there is scarcely a substance in existence that would not be
+compelled to dilate when fixed in between these two indefinitely
+resisting surfaces?"
+
+"What! the author of the Lettres provinciales invented it?" Raphael
+exclaimed.
+
+"He and no other, sir. The science of mechanics knows no simpler nor
+more beautiful contrivance. The opposite principle, the capacity of
+expansion possessed by water, has brought the steam-engine into being.
+But water will only expand up to a certain point, while its
+incompressibility, being a force in a manner negative, is, of
+necessity, infinite."
+
+"If this skin is expanded," said Raphael, "I promise you to erect a
+colossal statue to Blaise Pascal; to found a prize of a hundred
+thousand francs to be offered every ten years for the solution of the
+grandest problem of mechanical science effected during the interval;
+to find dowries for all your cousins and second cousins, and finally
+to build an asylum on purpose for impoverished or insane
+mathematicians."
+
+"That would be exceedingly useful," Planchette replied. "We will go to
+Spieghalter to-morrow, sir," he continued, with the serenity of a man
+living on a plane wholly intellectual. "That distinguished mechanic
+has just completed, after my own designs, an improved mechanical
+arrangement by which a child could get a thousand trusses of hay
+inside his cap."
+
+"Then good-bye till to-morrow."
+
+"Till to-morrow, sir."
+
+"Talk of mechanics!" cried Raphael; "isn't it the greatest of the
+sciences? The other fellow with his onagers, classifications, ducks,
+and species, and his phials full of bottled monstrosities, is at best
+only fit for a billiard-marker in a saloon."
+
+The next morning Raphael went off in great spirits to find Planchette,
+and together they set out for the Rue de la Sante--auspicious
+appellation! Arrived at Spieghalter's, the young man found himself in
+a vast foundry; his eyes lighted upon a multitude of glowing and
+roaring furnaces. There was a storm of sparks, a deluge of nails, an
+ocean of pistons, vices, levers, valves, girders, files, and nuts; a
+sea of melted metal, baulks of timber and bar-steel. Iron filings
+filled your throat. There was iron in the atmosphere; the men were
+covered with it; everything reeked of iron. The iron seemed to be a
+living organism; it became a fluid, moved, and seemed to shape itself
+intelligently after every fashion, to obey the worker's every caprice.
+Through the uproar made by the bellows, the crescendo of the falling
+hammers, and the shrill sounds of the lathes that drew groans from the
+steel, Raphael passed into a large, clean, and airy place where he was
+able to inspect at his leisure the great press that Planchette had
+told him about. He admired the cast-iron beams, as one might call
+them, and the twin bars of steel coupled together with indestructible
+bolts.
+
+"If you were to give seven rapid turns to that crank," said
+Spieghalter, pointing out a beam of polished steel, "you would make a
+steel bar spurt out in thousands of jets, that would get into your
+legs like needles."
+
+"The deuce!" exclaimed Raphael.
+
+Planchette himself slipped the piece of skin between the metal plates
+of the all-powerful press; and, brimful of the certainty of a
+scientific conviction, he worked the crank energetically.
+
+"Lie flat, all of you; we are dead men!" thundered Spieghalter, as he
+himself fell prone on the floor.
+
+A hideous shrieking sound rang through the workshops. The water in the
+machine had broken the chamber, and now spouted out in a jet of
+incalculable force; luckily it went in the direction of an old
+furnace, which was overthrown, enveloped and carried away by a
+waterspout.
+
+"Ha!" remarked Planchette serenely, "the piece of skin is as safe and
+sound as my eye. There was a flaw in your reservoir somewhere, or a
+crevice in the large tube----"
+
+"No, no; I know my reservoir. The devil is in your contrivance, sir;
+you can take it away," and the German pounced upon a smith's hammer,
+flung the skin down on an anvil, and, with all the strength that rage
+gives, dealt the talisman the most formidable blow that had ever
+resounded through his workshops.
+
+"There is not so much as a mark on it!" said Planchette, stroking the
+perverse bit of skin.
+
+The workmen hurried in. The foreman took the skin and buried it in the
+glowing coal of a forge, while, in a semi-circle round the fire, they
+all awaited the action of a huge pair of bellows. Raphael,
+Spieghalter, and Professor Planchette stood in the midst of the grimy
+expectant crowd. Raphael, looking round on faces dusted over with iron
+filings, white eyes, greasy blackened clothing, and hairy chests,
+could have fancied himself transported into the wild nocturnal world
+of German ballad poetry. After the skin had been in the fire for ten
+minutes, the foreman pulled it out with a pair of pincers.
+
+"Hand it over to me," said Raphael.
+
+The foreman held it out by way of a joke. The Marquis readily handled
+it; it was cool and flexible between his fingers. An exclamation of
+alarm went up; the workmen fled in terror. Valentin was left alone
+with Planchette in the empty workshop.
+
+"There is certainly something infernal in the thing!" cried Raphael,
+in desperation. "Is no human power able to give me one more day of
+existence?"
+
+"I made a mistake, sir," said the mathematician, with a penitent
+expression; "we ought to have subjected that peculiar skin to the
+action of a rolling machine. Where could my eyes have been when I
+suggested compression!"
+
+"It was I that asked for it," Raphael answered.
+
+The mathematician heaved a sigh of relief, like a culprit acquitted by
+a dozen jurors. Still, the strange problem afforded by the skin
+interested him; he meditated a moment, and then remarked:
+
+"This unknown material ought to be treated chemically by re-agents.
+Let us call on Japhet--perhaps the chemist may have better luck than
+the mechanic."
+
+Valentin urged his horse into a rapid trot, hoping to find the
+chemist, the celebrated Japhet, in his laboratory.
+
+"Well, old friend," Planchette began, seeing Japhet in his armchair,
+examining a precipitate; "how goes chemistry?"
+
+"Gone to sleep. Nothing new at all. The Academie, however, has
+recognized the existence of salicine, but salicine, asparagine,
+vauqueline, and digitaline are not really discoveries----"
+
+"Since you cannot invent substances," said Raphael, "you are obliged
+to fall back on inventing names."
+
+"Most emphatically true, young man."
+
+"Here," said Planchette, addressing the chemist, "try to analyze this
+composition; if you can extract any element whatever from it, I
+christen it diaboline beforehand, for we have just smashed a hydraulic
+press in trying to compress it."
+
+"Let's see! let's have a look at it!" cried the delighted chemist; "it
+may, perhaps, be a fresh element."
+
+"It is simply a piece of the skin of an ass, sir," said Raphael.
+
+"Sir!" said the illustrious chemist sternly.
+
+"I am not joking," the Marquis answered, laying the piece of skin
+before him.
+
+Baron Japhet applied the nervous fibres of his tongue to the skin; he
+had skill in thus detecting salts, acids, alkalis, and gases. After
+several experiments, he remarked:
+
+"No taste whatever! Come, we will give it a little fluoric acid to
+drink."
+
+Subjected to the influence of this ready solvent of animal tissue, the
+skin underwent no change whatsoever.
+
+"It is not shagreen at all!" the chemist cried. "We will treat this
+unknown mystery as a mineral, and try its mettle by dropping it in a
+crucible where I have at this moment some red potash."
+
+Japhet went out, and returned almost immediately.
+
+"Allow me to cut away a bit of this strange substance, sir," he said
+to Raphael; "it is so extraordinary----"
+
+"A bit!" exclaimed Raphael; "not so much as a hair's-breadth. You may
+try, though," he added, half banteringly, half sadly.
+
+The chemist broke a razor in his desire to cut the skin; he tried to
+break it by a powerful electric shock; next he submitted it to the
+influence of a galvanic battery; but all the thunderbolts his science
+wotted of fell harmless on the dreadful talisman.
+
+It was seven o'clock in the evening. Planchette, Japhet, and Raphael,
+unaware of the flight of time, were awaiting the outcome of a final
+experiment. The Magic Skin emerged triumphant from a formidable
+encounter in which it had been engaged with a considerable quantity of
+chloride of nitrogen.
+
+"It is all over with me," Raphael wailed. "It is the finger of God! I
+shall die!----" and he left the two amazed scientific men.
+
+"We must be very careful not to talk about this affair at the
+Academie; our colleagues there would laugh at us," Planchette remarked
+to the chemist, after a long pause, in which they looked at each other
+without daring to communicate their thoughts. The learned pair looked
+like two Christians who had issued from their tombs to find no God in
+the heavens. Science had been powerless; acids, so much clear water;
+red potash had been discredited; the galvanic battery and electric
+shock had been a couple of playthings.
+
+"A hydraulic press broken like a biscuit!" commented Planchette.
+
+"I believe in the devil," said the Baron Japhet, after a moment's
+silence.
+
+"And I in God," replied Planchette.
+
+Each spoke in character. The universe for a mechanician is a machine
+that requires an operator; for chemistry--that fiendish employment of
+decomposing all things--the world is a gas endowed with the power of
+movement.
+
+"We cannot deny the fact," the chemist replied.
+
+"Pshaw! those gentlemen the doctrinaires have invented a nebulous
+aphorism for our consolation--Stupid as a fact."
+
+"Your aphorism," said the chemist, "seems to me as a fact very
+stupid."
+
+They began to laugh, and went off to dine like folk for whom a miracle
+is nothing more than a phenomenon.
+
+Valentin reached his own house shivering with rage and consumed with
+anger. He had no more faith in anything. Conflicting thoughts shifted
+and surged to and fro in his brain, as is the case with every man
+brought face to face with an inconceivable fact. He had readily
+believed in some hidden flaw in Spieghalter's apparatus; he had not
+been surprised by the incompetence and failure of science and of fire;
+but the flexibility of the skin as he handled it, taken with its
+stubbornness when all means of destruction that man possesses had been
+brought to bear upon it in vain--these things terrified him. The
+incontrovertible fact made him dizzy.
+
+"I am mad," he muttered. "I have had no food since the morning, and
+yet I am neither hungry nor thirsty, and there is a fire in my breast
+that burns me."
+
+He put back the skin in the frame where it had been enclosed but
+lately, drew a line in red ink about the actual configuration of the
+talisman, and seated himself in his armchair.
+
+"Eight o'clock already!" he exclaimed. "To-day has gone like a dream."
+
+He leaned his elbow on the arm of the chair, propped his head with his
+left hand, and so remained, lost in secret dark reflections and
+consuming thoughts that men condemned to die bear away with them.
+
+"O Pauline!" he cried. "Poor child! there are gulfs that love can
+never traverse, despite the strength of his wings."
+
+Just then he very distinctly heard a smothered sigh, and knew by one
+of the most tender privileges of passionate love that it was Pauline's
+breathing.
+
+"That is my death warrant," he said to himself. "If she were there, I
+should wish to die in her arms."
+
+A burst of gleeful and hearty laughter made him turn his face towards
+the bed; he saw Pauline's face through the transparent curtains,
+smiling like a child for gladness over a successful piece of mischief.
+Her pretty hair fell over her shoulders in countless curls; she looked
+like a Bengal rose upon a pile of white roses.
+
+"I cajoled Jonathan," said she. "Doesn't the bed belong to me, to me
+who am your wife? Don't scold me, darling; I only wanted to surprise
+you, to sleep beside you. Forgive me for my freak."
+
+She sprang out of bed like a kitten, showed herself gleaming in her
+lawn raiment, and sat down on Raphael's knee.
+
+"Love, what gulf were you talking about?" she said, with an anxious
+expression apparent upon her face.
+
+"Death."
+
+"You hurt me," she answered. "There are some thoughts upon which we,
+poor women that we are, cannot dwell; they are death to us. Is it
+strength of love in us, or lack of courage? I cannot tell. Death does
+not frighten me," she began again, laughingly. "To die with you, both
+together, to-morrow morning, in one last embrace, would be joy. It
+seems to me that even then I should have lived more than a hundred
+years. What does the number of days matter if we have spent a whole
+lifetime of peace and love in one night, in one hour?"
+
+"You are right; Heaven is speaking through that pretty mouth of yours.
+Grant that I may kiss you, and let us die," said Raphael.
+
+"Then let us die," she said, laughing.
+
+Towards nine o'clock in the morning the daylight streamed through the
+chinks of the window shutters. Obscured somewhat by the muslin
+curtains, it yet sufficed to show clearly the rich colors of the
+carpet, the silks and furniture of the room, where the two lovers were
+lying asleep. The gilding sparkled here and there. A ray of sunshine
+fell and faded upon the soft down quilt that the freaks of live had
+thrown to the ground. The outlines of Pauline's dress, hanging from a
+cheval glass, appeared like a shadowy ghost. Her dainty shoes had been
+left at a distance from the bed. A nightingale came to perch upon the
+sill; its trills repeated over again, and the sounds of its wings
+suddenly shaken out for flight, awoke Raphael.
+
+"For me to die," he said, following out a thought begun in his dream,
+"my organization, the mechanism of flesh and bone, that is quickened
+by the will in me, and makes of me an individual MAN, must display
+some perceptible disease. Doctors ought to understand the symptoms of
+any attack on vitality, and could tell me whether I am sick or sound."
+
+He gazed at his sleeping wife. She had stretched her head out to him,
+expressing in this way even while she slept the anxious tenderness of
+love. Pauline seemed to look at him as she lay with her face turned
+towards him in an attitude as full of grace as a young child's, with
+her pretty, half-opened mouth held out towards him, as she drew her
+light, even breath. Her little pearly teeth seemed to heighten the
+redness of the fresh lips with the smile hovering over them. The red
+glow in her complexion was brighter, and its whiteness was, so to
+speak, whiter still just then than in the most impassioned moments of
+the waking day. In her unconstrained grace, as she lay, so full of
+believing trust, the adorable attractions of childhood were added to
+the enchantments of love.
+
+Even the most unaffected women still obey certain social conventions,
+which restrain the free expansion of the soul within them during their
+waking hours; but slumber seems to give them back the spontaneity of
+life which makes infancy lovely. Pauline blushed for nothing; she was
+like one of those beloved and heavenly beings, in whom reason has not
+yet put motives into their actions and mystery into their glances. Her
+profile stood out in sharp relief against the fine cambric of the
+pillows; there was a certain sprightliness about her loose hair in
+confusion, mingled with the deep lace ruffles; but she was sleeping in
+happiness, her long lashes were tightly pressed against her cheeks, as
+if to secure her eyes from too strong a light, or to aid an effort of
+her soul to recollect and to hold fast a bliss that had been perfect
+but fleeting. Her tiny pink and white ear, framed by a lock of her
+hair and outlined by a wrapping of Mechlin lace, would have made an
+artist, a painter, an old man, wildly in love, and would perhaps have
+restored a madman to his senses.
+
+Is it not an ineffable bliss to behold the woman that you love,
+sleeping, smiling in a peaceful dream beneath your protection, loving
+you even in dreams, even at the point where the individual seems to
+cease to exist, offering to you yet the mute lips that speak to you in
+slumber of the latest kiss? Is it not indescribable happiness to see a
+trusting woman, half-clad, but wrapped round in her love as by a cloak
+--modesty in the midst of dishevelment--to see admiringly her
+scattered clothing, the silken stocking hastily put off to please you
+last evening, the unclasped girdle that implies a boundless faith in
+you. A whole romance lies there in that girdle; the woman that it used
+to protect exists no longer; she is yours, she has become YOU;
+henceforward any betrayal of her is a blow dealt at yourself.
+
+In this softened mood Raphael's eyes wandered over the room, now
+filled with memories and love, and where the very daylight seemed to
+take delightful hues. Then he turned his gaze at last upon the
+outlines of the woman's form, upon youth and purity, and love that
+even now had no thought that was not for him alone, above all things,
+and longed to live for ever. As his eyes fell upon Pauline, her own
+opened at once as if a ray of sunlight had lighted on them.
+
+"Good-morning," she said, smiling. "How handsome you are, bad man!"
+
+The grace of love and youth, of silence and dawn, shone in their
+faces, making a divine picture, with the fleeting spell over it all
+that belongs only to the earliest days of passion, just as simplicity
+and artlessness are the peculiar possession of childhood. Alas! love's
+springtide joys, like our own youthful laughter, must even take
+flight, and live for us no longer save in memory; either for our
+despair, or to shed some soothing fragrance over us, according to the
+bent of our inmost thoughts.
+
+"What made me wake you?" said Raphael. "It was so great a pleasure to
+watch you sleeping that it brought tears to my eyes."
+
+"And to mine, too," she answered. "I cried in the night while I
+watched you sleeping, but not with happiness. Raphael, dear, pray
+listen to me. Your breathing is labored while you sleep, and something
+rattles in your chest that frightens me. You have a little dry cough
+when you are asleep, exactly like my father's, who is dying of
+phthisis. In those sounds from your lungs I recognized some of the
+peculiar symptoms of that complaint. Then you are feverish; I know you
+are; your hand was moist and burning----Darling, you are young," she
+added with a shudder, "and you could still get over it if
+unfortunately----But, no," she cried cheerfully, "there is no
+'unfortunately,' the disease is contagious, so the doctors say."
+
+She flung both arms about Raphael, drawing in his breath through one
+of those kisses in which the soul reaches its end.
+
+"I do not wish to live to old age," she said. "Let us both die young,
+and go to heaven while flowers fill our hands."
+
+"We always make such designs as those when we are well and strong,"
+Raphael replied, burying his hands in Pauline's hair. But even then a
+horrible fit of coughing came on, one of those deep ominous coughs
+that seem to come from the depths of the tomb, a cough that leaves the
+sufferer ghastly pale, trembling, and perspiring; with aching sides
+and quivering nerves, with a feeling of weariness pervading the very
+marrow of the spine, and unspeakable languor in every vein. Raphael
+slowly laid himself down, pale, exhausted, and overcome, like a man
+who has spent all the strength in him over one final effort. Pauline's
+eyes, grown large with terror, were fixed upon him; she lay quite
+motionless, pale, and silent.
+
+"Let us commit no more follies, my angel," she said, trying not to let
+Raphael see the dreadful forebodings that disturbed her. She covered
+her face with her hands, for she saw Death before her--the hideous
+skeleton. Raphael's face had grown as pale and livid as any skull
+unearthed from a churchyard to assist the studies of some scientific
+man. Pauline remembered the exclamation that had escaped from Valentin
+the previous evening, and to herself she said:
+
+"Yes, there are gulfs that love can never cross, and therein love must
+bury itself."
+
+On a March morning, some days after this wretched scene, Raphael found
+himself seated in an armchair, placed in the window in the full light
+of day. Four doctors stood round him, each in turn trying his pulse,
+feeling him over, and questioning him with apparent interest. The
+invalid sought to guess their thoughts, putting a construction on
+every movement they made, and on the slightest contractions of their
+brows. His last hope lay in this consultation. This court of appeal
+was about to pronounce its decision--life or death.
+
+Valentin had summoned the oracles of modern medicine, so that he might
+have the last word of science. Thanks to his wealth and title, there
+stood before him three embodied theories; human knowledge fluctuated
+round the three points. Three of the doctors brought among them the
+complete circle of medical philosophy; they represented the points of
+conflict round which the battle raged, between Spiritualism, Analysis,
+and goodness knows what in the way of mocking eclecticism.
+
+The fourth doctor was Horace Bianchon, a man of science with a future
+before him, the most distinguished man of the new school in medicine,
+a discreet and unassuming representative of a studious generation that
+is preparing to receive the inheritance of fifty years of experience
+treasured up by the Ecole de Paris, a generation that perhaps will
+erect the monument for the building of which the centuries behind us
+have collected the different materials. As a personal friend of the
+Marquis and of Rastignac, he had been in attendance on the former for
+some days past, and was helping him to answer the inquiries of the
+three professors, occasionally insisting somewhat upon those symptoms
+which, in his opinion, pointed to pulmonary disease.
+
+"You have been living at a great pace, leading a dissipated life, no
+doubt, and you have devoted yourself largely to intellectual work?"
+queried one of the three celebrated authorities, addressing Raphael.
+He was a square-headed man, with a large frame and energetic
+organization, which seemed to mark him out as superior to his two
+rivals.
+
+"I made up my mind to kill myself with debauchery, after spending
+three years over an extensive work, with which perhaps you may some
+day occupy yourselves," Raphael replied.
+
+The great doctor shook his head, and so displayed his satisfaction. "I
+was sure of it," he seemed to say to himself. He was the illustrious
+Brisset, the successor of Cabanis and Bichat, head of the Organic
+School, a doctor popular with believers in material and positive
+science, who see in man a complete individual, subject solely to the
+laws of his own particular organization; and who consider that his
+normal condition and abnormal states of disease can both be traced to
+obvious causes.
+
+After this reply, Brisset looked, without speaking, at a middle-sized
+person, whose darkly flushed countenance and glowing eyes seemed to
+belong to some antique satyr; and who, leaning his back against the
+corner of the embrasure, was studying Raphael, without saying a word.
+Doctor Cameristus, a man of creeds and enthusiasms, the head of the
+"Vitalists," a romantic champion of the esoteric doctrines of Van
+Helmont, discerned a lofty informing principle in human life, a
+mysterious and inexplicable phenomenon which mocks at the scalpel,
+deceives the surgeon, eludes the drugs of the pharmacopoeia, the
+formulae of algebra, the demonstrations of anatomy, and derides all
+our efforts; a sort of invisible, intangible flame, which, obeying
+some divinely appointed law, will often linger on in a body in our
+opinion devoted to death, while it takes flight from an organization
+well fitted for prolonged existence.
+
+A bitter smile hovered upon the lips of the third doctor, Maugredie, a
+man of acknowledged ability, but a Pyrrhonist and a scoffer, with the
+scalpel for his one article of faith. He would consider, as a
+concession to Brisset, that a man who, as a matter of fact, was
+perfectly well was dead, and recognize with Cameristus that a man
+might be living on after his apparent demise. He found something
+sensible in every theory, and embraced none of them, claiming that the
+best of all systems of medicine was to have none at all, and to stick
+to facts. This Panurge of the Clinical Schools, the king of observers,
+the great investigator, a great sceptic, the man of desperate
+expedients, was scrutinizing the Magic Skin.
+
+"I should very much like to be a witness of the coincidence of its
+retrenchment with your wish," he said to the Marquis.
+
+"Where is the use?" cried Brisset.
+
+"Where is the use?" echoed Cameristus.
+
+"Ah, you are both of the same mind," replied Maugredie.
+
+"The contraction is perfectly simple," Brisset went on.
+
+"It is supernatural," remarked Cameristus.
+
+"In short," Maugredie made answer, with affected solemnity, and
+handing the piece of skin to Raphael as he spoke, "the shriveling
+faculty of the skin is a fact inexplicable, and yet quite natural,
+which, ever since the world began, has been the despair of medicine
+and of pretty women."
+
+All Valentin's observation could discover no trace of a feeling for
+his troubles in any of the three doctors. The three received every
+answer in silence, scanned him unconcernedly, and interrogated him
+unsympathetically. Politeness did not conceal their indifference;
+whether deliberation or certainty was the cause, their words at any
+rate came so seldom and so languidly, that at times Raphael thought
+that their attention was wandering. From time to time Brisset, the
+sole speaker, remarked, "Good! just so!" as Bianchon pointed out the
+existence of each desperate symptom. Cameristus seemed to be deep in
+meditation; Maugredie looked like a comic author, studying two queer
+characters with a view to reproducing them faithfully upon the stage.
+There was deep, unconcealed distress, and grave compassion in Horace
+Bianchon's face. He had been a doctor for too short a time to be
+untouched by suffering and unmoved by a deathbed; he had not learned
+to keep back the sympathetic tears that obscure a man's clear vision
+and prevent him from seizing like the general of an army, upon the
+auspicious moment for victory, in utter disregard of the groans of
+dying men.
+
+After spending about half an hour over taking in some sort the measure
+of the patient and the complaint, much as a tailor measures a young
+man for a coat when he orders his wedding outfit, the authorities
+uttered several commonplaces, and even talked of politics. Then they
+decided to go into Raphael's study to exchange their ideas and frame
+their verdict.
+
+"May I not be present during the discussion, gentlemen?" Valentin had
+asked them, but Brisset and Maugredie protested against this, and, in
+spite of their patient's entreaties, declined altogether to deliberate
+in his presence.
+
+Raphael gave way before their custom, thinking that he could slip into
+a passage adjoining, whence he could easily overhear the medical
+conference in which the three professors were about to engage.
+
+"Permit me, gentlemen," said Brisset, as they entered, "to give you my
+own opinion at once. I neither wish to force it upon you nor to have
+it discussed. In the first place, it is unbiased, concise, and based
+on an exact similarity that exists between one of my own patients and
+the subject that we have been called in to examine; and, moreover, I
+am expected at my hospital. The importance of the case that demands my
+presence there will excuse me for speaking the first word. The subject
+with which we are concerned has been exhausted in an equal degree by
+intellectual labors--what did he set about, Horace?" he asked of the
+young doctor.
+
+"A 'Theory of the Will,' "
+
+"The devil! but that's a big subject. He is exhausted, I say, by too
+much brain-work, by irregular courses, and by the repeated use of too
+powerful stimulants. Violent exertion of body and mind has demoralized
+the whole system. It is easy, gentlemen, to recognize in the symptoms
+of the face and body generally intense irritation of the stomach, an
+affection of the great sympathetic nerve, acute sensibility of the
+epigastric region, and contraction of the right and left
+hypochondriac. You have noticed, too, the large size and prominence of
+the liver. M. Bianchon has, besides, constantly watched the patient,
+and he tells us that digestion is troublesome and difficult. Strictly
+speaking, there is no stomach left, and so the man has disappeared.
+The brain is atrophied because the man digests no longer. The
+progressive deterioration wrought in the epigastric region, the seat
+of vitality, has vitiated the whole system. Thence, by continuous
+fevered vibrations, the disorder has reached the brain by means of the
+nervous plexus, hence the excessive irritation in that organ. There is
+monomania. The patient is burdened with a fixed idea. That piece of
+skin really contracts, to his way of thinking; very likely it always
+has been as we have seen it; but whether it contracts or no, that
+thing is for him just like the fly that some Grand Vizier or other had
+on his nose. If you put leeches at once on the epigastrium, and reduce
+the irritation in that part, which is the very seat of man's life, and
+if you diet the patient, the monomania will leave him. I will say no
+more to Dr. Bianchon; he should be able to grasp the whole treatment
+as well as the details. There may be, perhaps, some complication of
+the disease--the bronchial tubes, possibly, may be also inflamed; but
+I believe that treatment for the intestinal organs is very much more
+important and necessary, and more urgently required than for the
+lungs. Persistent study of abstract matters, and certain violent
+passions, have induced serious disorders in that vital mechanism.
+However, we are in time to set these conditions right. Nothing is too
+seriously affected. You will easily get your friend round again," he
+remarked to Bianchon.
+
+"Our learned colleague is taking the effect for the cause," Cameristus
+replied. "Yes, the changes that he has observed so keenly certainly
+exist in the patient; but it is not the stomach that, by degrees, has
+set up nervous action in the system, and so affected the brain, like a
+hole in a window pane spreading cracks round about it. It took a blow
+of some kind to make a hole in the window; who gave the blow? Do we
+know that? Have we investigated the patient's case sufficiently? Are
+we acquainted with all the events of his life?
+
+"The vital principle, gentlemen," he continued, "the Archeus of Van
+Helmont, is affected in his case--the very essence and centre of life
+is attacked. The divine spark, the transitory intelligence which holds
+the organism together, which is the source of the will, the
+inspiration of life, has ceased to regulate the daily phenomena of the
+mechanism and the functions of every organ; thence arise all the
+complications which my learned colleague has so thoroughly
+appreciated. The epigastric region does not affect the brain but the
+brain affects the epigastric region. No," he went on, vigorously
+slapping his chest, "no, I am not a stomach in the form of a man. No,
+everything does not lie there. I do not feel that I have the courage
+to say that if the epigastric region is in good order, everything else
+is in a like condition----
+
+"We cannot trace," he went on more mildly, "to one physical cause the
+serious disturbances that supervene in this or that subject which has
+been dangerously attacked, nor submit them to a uniform treatment. No
+one man is like another. We have each peculiar organs, differently
+affected, diversely nourished, adapted to perform different functions,
+and to induce a condition necessary to the accomplishment of an order
+of things which is unknown to us. The sublime will has so wrought that
+a little portion of the great All is set within us to sustain the
+phenomena of living; in every man it formulates itself distinctly,
+making each, to all appearance, a separate individual, yet in one
+point co-existent with the infinite cause. So we ought to make a
+separate study of each subject, discover all about it, find out in
+what its life consists, and wherein its power lies. From the softness
+of a wet sponge to the hardness of pumice-stone there are infinite
+fine degrees of difference. Man is just like that. Between the sponge-
+like organizations of the lymphatic and the vigorous iron muscles of
+such men as are destined for a long life, what a margin for errors for
+the single inflexible system of a lowering treatment to commit; a
+system that reduces the capacities of the human frame, which you
+always conclude have been over-excited. Let us look for the origin of
+the disease in the mental and not in the physical viscera. A doctor is
+an inspired being, endowed by God with a special gift--the power to
+read the secrets of vitality; just as the prophet has received the
+eyes that foresee the future, the poet his faculty of evoking nature,
+and the musician the power of arranging sounds in an harmonious order
+that is possibly a copy of an ideal harmony on high."
+
+"There is his everlasting system of medicine, arbitrary, monarchical,
+and pious," muttered Brisset.
+
+"Gentlemen," Maugredie broke in hastily, to distract attention from
+Brisset's comment, "don't let us lose sight of the patient."
+
+"What is the good of science?" Raphael moaned. "Here is my recovery
+halting between a string of beads and a rosary of leeches, between
+Dupuytren's bistoury and Prince Hohenlohe's prayer. There is Maugredie
+suspending his judgment on the line that divides facts from words,
+mind from matter. Man's 'it is,' and 'it is not,' is always on my
+track; it is the Carymary Carymara of Rabelais for evermore: my
+disorder is spiritual, Carymary, or material, Carymara. Shall I live?
+They have no idea. Planchette was more straightforward with me, at any
+rate, when he said, 'I do not know.' "
+
+Just then Valentin heard Maugredie's voice.
+
+"The patient suffers from monomania; very good, I am quite of that
+opinion," he said, "but he has two hundred thousand a year;
+monomaniacs of that kind are very uncommon. As for knowing whether his
+epigastric region has affected his brain, or his brain his epigastric
+region, we shall find that out, perhaps, whenever he dies. But to
+resume. There is no disputing the fact that he is ill; some sort of
+treatment he must have. Let us leave theories alone, and put leeches
+on him, to counteract the nervous and intestinal irritation, as to the
+existence of which we all agree; and let us send him to drink the
+waters, in that way we shall act on both systems at once. If there
+really is tubercular disease, we can hardly expect to save his life;
+so that----"
+
+Raphael abruptly left the passage, and went back to his armchair. The
+four doctors very soon came out of the study; Horace was the
+spokesman.
+
+"These gentlemen," he told him, "have unanimously agreed that leeches
+must be applied to the stomach at once, and that both physical and
+moral treatment are imperatively needed. In the first place, a
+carefully prescribed rule of diet, so as to soothe the internal
+irritation"--here Brisset signified his approval; "and in the second,
+a hygienic regimen, to set your general condition right. We all,
+therefore, recommend you to go to take the waters in Aix in Savoy; or,
+if you like it better, at Mont Dore in Auvergne; the air and the
+situation are both pleasanter in Savoy than in the Cantal, but you
+will consult your own taste."
+
+Here it was Cameristus who nodded assent.
+
+"These gentlemen," Bianchon continued, "having recognized a slight
+affection of the respiratory organs, are agreed as to the utility of
+the previous course of treatment that I have prescribed. They think
+that there will be no difficulty about restoring you to health, and
+that everything depends upon a wise and alternate employment of these
+various means. And----"
+
+"And that is the cause of the milk in the cocoanut," said Raphael,
+with a smile, as he led Horace into his study to pay the fees for this
+useless consultation.
+
+"Their conclusions are logical," the young doctor replied. "Cameristus
+feels, Brisset examines, Maugredie doubts. Has not man a soul, a body,
+and an intelligence? One of these three elemental constituents always
+influences us more or less strongly; there will always be the personal
+element in human science. Believe me, Raphael, we effect no cures; we
+only assist them. Another system--the use of mild remedies while
+Nature exerts her powers--lies between the extremes of theory of
+Brisset and Cameristus, but one ought to have known the patient for
+some ten years or so to obtain a good result on these lines. Negation
+lies at the back of all medicine, as in every other science. So
+endeavor to live wholesomely; try a trip to Savoy; the best course is,
+and always will be, to trust to Nature."
+
+It was a month later, on a fine summer-like evening, that several
+people, who were taking the waters at Aix, returned from the promenade
+and met together in the salons of the Club. Raphael remained alone by
+a window for a long time. His back was turned upon the gathering, and
+he himself was deep in those involuntary musings in which thoughts
+arise in succession and fade away, shaping themselves indistinctly,
+passing over us like thin, almost colorless clouds. Melancholy is
+sweet to us then, and delight is shadowy, for the soul is half asleep.
+Valentin gave himself up to this life of sensations; he was steeping
+himself in the warm, soft twilight, enjoying the pure air with the
+scent of the hills in it, happy in that he felt no pain, and had
+tranquilized his threatening Magic Skin at last. It grew cooler as the
+red glow of the sunset faded on the mountain peaks; he shut the window
+and left his place.
+
+"Will you be so kind as not to close the windows, sir?" said an old
+lady; "we are being stifled----"
+
+The peculiarly sharp and jarring tones in which the phrase was uttered
+grated on Raphael's ears; it fell on them like an indiscreet remark
+let slip by some man in whose friendship we would fain believe, a word
+which reveals unsuspected depths of selfishness and destroys some
+pleasing sentimental illusion of ours. The Marquis glanced, with the
+cool inscrutable expression of a diplomatist, at the old lady, called
+a servant, and, when he came, curtly bade him:
+
+"Open that window."
+
+Great surprise was clearly expressed on all faces at the words. The
+whole roomful began to whisper to each other, and turned their eyes
+upon the invalid, as though he had given some serious offence.
+Raphael, who had never quite managed to rid himself of the bashfulness
+of his early youth, felt a momentary confusion; then he shook off his
+torpor, exerted his faculties, and asked himself the meaning of this
+strange scene.
+
+A sudden and rapid impulse quickened his brain; the past weeks
+appeared before him in a clear and definite vision; the reasons for
+the feelings he inspired in others stood out for him in relief, like
+the veins of some corpse which a naturalist, by some cunningly
+contrived injection, has colored so as to show their least
+ramifications.
+
+He discerned himself in this fleeting picture; he followed out his own
+life in it, thought by thought, day after day. He saw himself, not
+without astonishment, an absent gloomy figure in the midst of these
+lively folk, always musing over his own fate, always absorbed by his
+own sufferings, seemingly impatient of the most harmless chat. He saw
+how he had shunned the ephemeral intimacies that travelers are so
+ready to establish--no doubt because they feel sure of never meeting
+each other again--and how he had taken little heed of those about him.
+He saw himself like the rocks without, unmoved by the caresses or the
+stormy surgings of the waves.
+
+Then, by a gift of insight seldom accorded, he read the thoughts of
+all those about him. The light of a candle revealed the sardonic
+profile and yellow cranium of an old man; he remembered now that he
+had won from him, and had never proposed that the other should have
+his revenge; a little further on he saw a pretty woman, whose lively
+advances he had met with frigid coolness; there was not a face there
+that did not reproach him with some wrong done, inexplicably to all
+appearance, but the real offence in every case lay in some
+mortification, some invisible hurt dealt to self-love. He had
+unintentionally jarred on all the small susceptibilities of the circle
+round about him.
+
+His guests on various occasions, and those to whom he had lent his
+horses, had taken offence at his luxurious ways; their ungraciousness
+had been a surprise to him; he had spared them further humiliations of
+that kind, and they had considered that he looked down upon them, and
+had accused him of haughtiness ever since. He could read their inmost
+thoughts as he fathomed their natures in this way. Society with its
+polish and varnish grew loathsome to him. He was envied and hated for
+his wealth and superior ability; his reserve baffled the inquisitive;
+his humility seemed like haughtiness to these petty superficial
+natures. He guessed the secret unpardonable crime which he had
+committed against them; he had overstepped the limits of the
+jurisdiction of their mediocrity. He had resisted their inquisitorial
+tyranny; he could dispense with their society; and all of them,
+therefore, had instinctively combined to make him feel their power,
+and to take revenge upon this incipient royalty by submitting him to a
+kind of ostracism, and so teaching him that they in their turn could
+do without him.
+
+Pity came over him, first of all, at this aspect of mankind, but very
+soon he shuddered at the thought of the power that came thus, at will,
+and flung aside for him the veil of flesh under which the moral nature
+is hidden away. He closed his eyes, so as to see no more. A black
+curtain was drawn all at once over this unlucky phantom show of truth;
+but still he found himself in the terrible loneliness that surrounds
+every power and dominion. Just then a violent fit of coughing seized
+him. Far from receiving one single word--indifferent, and meaningless,
+it is true, but still containing, among well-bred people brought
+together by chance, at least some pretence of civil commiseration--he
+now heard hostile ejaculations and muttered complaints. Society there
+assembled disdained any pantomime on his account, perhaps because he
+had gauged its real nature too well.
+
+"His complaint is contagious."
+
+"The president of the Club ought to forbid him to enter the salon."
+
+"It is contrary to all rules and regulations to cough in that way!"
+
+"When a man is as ill as that, he ought not to come to take the
+waters----"
+
+"He will drive me away from the place."
+
+Raphael rose and walked about the rooms to screen himself from their
+unanimous execrations. He thought to find a shelter, and went up to a
+young pretty lady who sat doing nothing, minded to address some pretty
+speeches to her; but as he came towards her, she turned her back upon
+him, and pretended to be watching the dancers. Raphael feared lest he
+might have made use of the talisman already that evening; and feeling
+that he had neither the wish nor the courage to break into the
+conversation, he left the salon and took refuge in the billiard-room.
+No one there greeted him, nobody spoke to him, no one sent so much as
+a friendly glance in his direction. His turn of mind, naturally
+meditative, had discovered instinctively the general grounds and
+reasons for the aversion he inspired. This little world was obeying,
+unconsciously perhaps, the sovereign law which rules over polite
+society; its inexorable nature was becoming apparent in its entirety
+to Raphael's eyes. A glance into the past showed it to him, as a type
+completely realized in Foedora.
+
+He would no more meet with sympathy here for his bodily ills than he
+had received it at her hands for the distress in his heart. The
+fashionable world expels every suffering creature from its midst, just
+as the body of a man in robust health rejects any germ of disease. The
+world holds suffering and misfortune in abhorrence; it dreads them
+like the plague; it never hesitates between vice and trouble, for vice
+is a luxury. Ill-fortune may possess a majesty of its own, but society
+can belittle it and make it ridiculous by an epigram. Society draws
+caricatures, and in this way flings in the teeth of fallen kings the
+affronts which it fancies it has received from them; society, like the
+Roman youth at the circus, never shows mercy to the fallen gladiator;
+mockery and money are its vital necessities. "Death to the weak!" That
+is the oath taken by this kind of Equestrian order, instituted in
+their midst by all the nations of the world; everywhere it makes for
+the elevation of the rich, and its motto is deeply graven in hearts
+that wealth has turned to stone, or that have been reared in
+aristocratic prejudices.
+
+Assemble a collection of school-boys together. That will give you a
+society in miniature, a miniature which represents life more truly,
+because it is so frank and artless; and in it you will always find
+poor isolated beings, relegated to some place in the general
+estimations between pity and contempt, on account of their weakness
+and suffering. To these the Evangel promises heaven hereafter. Go
+lower yet in the scale of organized creation. If some bird among its
+fellows in the courtyard sickens, the others fall upon it with their
+beaks, pluck out its feathers, and kill it. The whole world, in
+accordance with its character of egotism, brings all its severity to
+bear upon wretchedness that has the hardihood to spoil its
+festivities, and to trouble its joys.
+
+Any sufferer in mind or body, any helpless or poor man, is a pariah.
+He had better remain in his solitude; if he crosses the boundary-line,
+he will find winter everywhere; he will find freezing cold in other
+men's looks, manners, words, and hearts; and lucky indeed is he if he
+does not receive an insult where he expected that sympathy would be
+expended upon him. Let the dying keep to their bed of neglect, and age
+sit lonely by its fireside. Portionless maids, freeze and burn in your
+solitary attics. If the world tolerates misery of any kind, it is to
+turn it to account for its own purposes, to make some use of it,
+saddle and bridle it, put a bit in its mouth, ride it about, and get
+some fun out of it.
+
+Crotchety spinsters, ladies' companions, put a cheerful face upon it,
+endure the humors of your so-called benefactress, carry her lapdogs
+for her; you have an English poodle for your rival, and you must seek
+to understand the moods of your patroness, and amuse her, and--keep
+silence about yourselves. As for you, unblushing parasite, uncrowned
+king of unliveried servants, leave your real character at home, let
+your digestion keep pace with your host's laugh when he laughs, mingle
+your tears with his, and find his epigrams amusing; if you want to
+relieve your mind about him, wait till he is ruined. That is the way
+the world shows its respect for the unfortunate; it persecutes them,
+or slays them in the dust.
+
+Such thoughts as these welled up in Raphael's heart with the
+suddenness of poetic inspiration. He looked around him, and felt the
+influence of the forbidding gloom that society breathes out in order
+to rid itself of the unfortunate; it nipped his soul more effectually
+than the east wind grips the body in December. He locked his arms over
+his chest, set his back against the wall, and fell into a deep
+melancholy. He mused upon the meagre happiness that this depressing
+way of living can give. What did it amount to? Amusement with no
+pleasure in it, gaiety without gladness, joyless festivity, fevered
+dreams empty of all delight, firewood or ashes on the hearth without a
+spark of flame in them. When he raised his head, he found himself
+alone, all the billiard players had gone.
+
+"I have only to let them know my power to make them worship my
+coughing fits," he said to himself, and wrapped himself against the
+world in the cloak of his contempt.
+
+Next day the resident doctor came to call upon him, and took an
+anxious interest in his health. Raphael felt a thrill of joy at the
+friendly words addressed to him. The doctor's face, to his thinking,
+wore an expression that was kind and pleasant; the pale curls of his
+wig seemed redolent of philanthropy; the square cut of his coat, the
+loose folds of his trousers, his big Quaker-like shoes, everything
+about him down to the powder shaken from his queue and dusted in a
+circle upon his slightly stooping shoulders, revealed an apostolic
+nature, and spoke of Christian charity and of the self-sacrifice of a
+man, who, out of sheer devotion to his patients, had compelled himself
+to learn to play whist and tric-trac so well that he never lost money
+to any of them.
+
+"My Lord Marquis," said he, after a long talk with Raphael, "I can
+dispel your uneasiness beyond all doubt. I know your constitution well
+enough by this time to assure you that the doctors in Paris, whose
+great abilities I know, are mistaken as to the nature of your
+complaint. You can live as long as Methuselah, my Lord Marquis,
+accidents only excepted. Your lungs are as sound as a blacksmith's
+bellows, your stomach would put an ostrich to the blush; but if you
+persist in living at high altitude, you are running the risk of a
+prompt interment in consecrated soil. A few words, my Lord Marquis,
+will make my meaning clear to you.
+
+"Chemistry," he began, "has shown us that man's breathing is a real
+process of combustion, and the intensity of its action varies
+according to the abundance or scarcity of the phlogistic element
+stored up by the organism of each individual. In your case, the
+phlogistic, or inflammatory element is abundant; if you will permit me
+to put it so, you generate superfluous oxygen, possessing as you do
+the inflammatory temperament of a man destined to experience strong
+emotions. While you breath the keen, pure air that stimulates life in
+men of lymphatic constitution, you are accelerating an expenditure of
+vitality already too rapid. One of the conditions for existence for
+you is the heavier atmosphere of the plains and valleys. Yes, the
+vital air for a man consumed by his genius lies in the fertile
+pasture-lands of Germany, at Toplitz or Baden-Baden. If England is not
+obnoxious to you, its misty climate would reduce your fever; but the
+situation of our baths, a thousand feet above the level of the
+Mediterranean, is dangerous for you. That is my opinion at least," he
+said, with a deprecatory gesture, "and I give it in opposition to our
+interests, for, if you act upon it, we shall unfortunately lose you."
+
+But for these closing words of his, the affable doctor's seeming good-
+nature would have completely won Raphael over; but he was too
+profoundly observant not to understand the meaning of the tone, the
+look and gesture that accompanied that mild sarcasm, not to see that
+the little man had been sent on this errand, no doubt, by a flock of
+his rejoicing patients. The florid-looking idlers, tedious old women,
+nomad English people, and fine ladies who had given their husbands the
+slip, and were escorted hither by their lovers--one and all were in a
+plot to drive away a wretched, feeble creature to die, who seemed
+unable to hold out against a daily renewed persecution! Raphael
+accepted the challenge, he foresaw some amusement to be derived from
+their manoeuvres.
+
+"As you would be grieved at losing me," said he to the doctor, "I will
+endeavor to avail myself of your good advice without leaving the
+place. I will set about having a house built to-morrow, and the
+atmosphere within it shall be regulated by your instructions."
+
+The doctor understood the sarcastic smile that lurked about Raphael's
+mouth, and took his leave without finding another word to say.
+
+The Lake of Bourget lies seven hundred feet above the Mediterranean,
+in a great hollow among the jagged peaks of the hills; it sparkles
+there, the bluest drop of water in the world. From the summit of the
+Cat's Tooth the lake below looks like a stray turquoise. This lovely
+sheet of water is about twenty-seven miles round, and in some places
+is nearly five hundred feet deep.
+
+Under the cloudless sky, in your boat in the midst of the great
+expanse of water, with only the sound of the oars in your ears, only
+the vague outline of the hills on the horizon before you; you admire
+the glittering snows of the French Maurienne; you pass, now by masses
+of granite clad in the velvet of green turf or in low-growing shrubs,
+now by pleasant sloping meadows; there is always a wilderness on the
+one hand and fertile lands on the other, and both harmonies and
+dissonances compose a scene for you where everything is at once small
+and vast, and you feel yourself to be a poor onlooker at a great
+banquet. The configuration of the mountains brings about misleading
+optical conditions and illusions of perspective; a pine-tree a hundred
+feet in height looks to be a mere weed; wide valleys look as narrow as
+meadow paths. The lake is the only one where the confidences of heart
+and heart can be exchanged. There one can live; there one can
+meditate. Nowhere on earth will you find a closer understanding
+between the water, the sky, the mountains, and the fields. There is a
+balm there for all the agitations of life. The place keeps the secrets
+of sorrow to itself, the sorrow that grows less beneath its soothing
+influence; and to love, it gives a grave and meditative cast,
+deepening passion and purifying it. A kiss there becomes something
+great. But beyond all other things it is the lake for memories; it
+aids them by lending to them the hues of its own waves; it is a mirror
+in which everything is reflected. Only here, with this lovely
+landscape all around him, could Raphael endure the burden laid upon
+him; here he could remain as a languid dreamer, without a wish of his
+own.
+
+He went out upon the lake after the doctor's visit, and was landed at
+a lonely point on the pleasant slope where the village of Saint-
+Innocent is situated. The view from this promontory, as one may call
+it, comprises the heights of Bugey with the Rhone flowing at their
+foot, and the end of the lake; but Raphael liked to look at the
+opposite shore from thence, at the melancholy looking Abbey of Haute-
+Combe, the burying-place of the Sardinian kings, who lie prostrate
+there before the hills, like pilgrims come at last to their journey's
+end. The silence of the landscape was broken by the even rhythm of the
+strokes of the oar; it seemed to find a voice for the place, in
+monotonous cadences like the chanting of monks. The Marquis was
+surprised to find visitors to this usually lonely part of the lake;
+and as he mused, he watched the people seated in the boat, and
+recognized in the stern the elderly lady who had spoken so harshly to
+him the evening before.
+
+No one took any notice of Raphael as the boat passed, except the
+elderly lady's companion, a poor old maid of noble family, who bowed
+to him, and whom it seemed to him that he saw for the first time. A
+few seconds later he had already forgotten the visitors, who had
+rapidly disappeared behind the promontory, when he heard the
+fluttering of a dress and the sound of light footsteps not far from
+him. He turned about and saw the companion; and, guessing from her
+embarrassed manner that she wished to speak with him, he walked
+towards her.
+
+She was somewhere about thirty-six years of age, thin and tall,
+reserved and prim, and, like all old maids, seemed puzzled to know
+which way to look, an expression no longer in keeping with her
+measured, springless, and hesitating steps. She was both young and old
+at the same time, and, by a certain dignity in her carriage, showed
+the high value which she set upon her charms and perfections. In
+addition, her movements were all demure and discreet, like those of
+women who are accustomed to take great care of themselves, no doubt
+because they desire not to be cheated of love, their destined end.
+
+"Your life is in danger, sir; do not come to the Club again!" she
+said, stepping back a pace or two from Raphael, as if her reputation
+had already been compromised.
+
+"But, mademoiselle," said Raphael, smiling, "please explain yourself
+more clearly, since you have condescended so far----"
+
+"Ah," she answered, "unless I had had a very strong motive, I should
+never have run the risk of offending the countess, for if she ever
+came to know that I had warned you----"
+
+"And who would tell her, mademoiselle?" cried Raphael.
+
+"True," the old maid answered. She looked at him, quaking like an owl
+out in the sunlight. "But think of yourself," she went on; "several
+young men, who want to drive you away from the baths, have agreed to
+pick a quarrel with you, and to force you into a duel."
+
+The elderly lady's voice sounded in the distance.
+
+"Mademoiselle," began the Marquis, "my gratitude----" But his
+protectress had fled already; she had heard the voice of her mistress
+squeaking afresh among the rocks.
+
+"Poor girl! unhappiness always understands and helps the unhappy,"
+Raphael thought, and sat himself down at the foot of a tree.
+
+The key of every science is, beyond cavil, the mark of interrogation;
+we owe most of our greatest discoveries to a WHY? and all the wisdom
+in the world, perhaps, consists in asking WHEREFORE? in every
+connection. But, on the other hand, this acquired prescience is the
+ruin of our illusions.
+
+So Valentin, having taken the old maid's kindly action for the text of
+his wandering thoughts, without the deliberate promptings of
+philosophy, must find it full of gall and wormwood.
+
+"It is not at all extraordinary that a gentlewoman's gentlewoman
+should take a fancy to me," said he to himself. "I am twenty-seven
+years old, and I have a title and an income of two hundred thousand a
+year. But that her mistress, who hates water like a rabid cat--for it
+would be hard to give the palm to either in that matter--that her
+mistress should have brought her here in a boat! Is not that very
+strange and wonderful? Those two women came into Savoy to sleep like
+marmots; they ask if day has dawned at noon; and to think that they
+could get up this morning before eight o'clock, to take their chances
+in running after me!"
+
+Very soon the old maid and her elderly innocence became, in his eyes,
+a fresh manifestation of that artificial, malicious little world. It
+was a paltry device, a clumsy artifice, a piece of priest's or woman's
+craft. Was the duel a myth, or did they merely want to frighten him?
+But these petty creatures, impudent and teasing as flies, had
+succeeded in wounding his vanity, in rousing his pride, and exciting
+his curiosity. Unwilling to become their dupe, or to be taken for a
+coward, and even diverted perhaps by the little drama, he went to the
+Club that very evening.
+
+He stood leaning against the marble chimney-piece, and stayed there
+quietly in the middle of the principal saloon, doing his best to give
+no one any advantage over him; but he scrutinized the faces about him,
+and gave a certain vague offence to those assembled, by his
+inspection. Like a dog aware of his strength, he awaited the contest
+on his own ground, without necessary barking. Towards the end of the
+evening he strolled into the cardroom, walking between the door and
+another that opened into the billiard-room, throwing a glance from
+time to time over a group of young men that had gathered there. He
+heard his name mentioned after a turn or two. Although they lowered
+their voices, Raphael easily guessed that he had become the topic of
+their debate, and he ended by catching a phrase or two spoken aloud.
+
+"You?"
+
+"Yes, I."
+
+"I dare you to do it!"
+
+"Let us make a bet on it!"
+
+"Oh, he will do it."
+
+Just as Valentin, curious to learn the matter of the wager, came up to
+pay closer attention to what they were saying, a tall, strong, good-
+looking young fellow, who, however, possessed the impertinent stare
+peculiar to people who have material force at their back, came out of
+the billiard-room.
+
+"I am deputed, sir," he said coolly addressing the Marquis, "to make
+you aware of something which you do not seem to know; your face and
+person generally are a source of annoyance to every one here, and to
+me in particular. You have too much politeness not to sacrifice
+yourself to the public good, and I beg that you will not show yourself
+in the Club again."
+
+"This sort of joke has been perpetrated before, sir, in garrison towns
+at the time of the Empire; but nowadays it is exceedingly bad form,"
+said Raphael drily.
+
+"I am not joking," the young man answered; "and I repeat it: your
+health will be considerably the worse for a stay here; the heat and
+light, the air of the saloon, and the company are all bad for your
+complaint."
+
+"Where did you study medicine?" Raphael inquired.
+
+"I took my bachelor's degree on Lepage's shooting-ground in Paris, and
+was made a doctor at Cerizier's, the king of foils."
+
+"There is one last degree left for you to take," said Valentin; "study
+the ordinary rules of politeness, and you will be a perfect
+gentlemen."
+
+The young men all came out of the billiard-room just then, some
+disposed to laugh, some silent. The attention of other players was
+drawn to the matter; they left their cards to watch a quarrel that
+rejoiced their instincts. Raphael, alone among this hostile crowd, did
+his best to keep cool, and not to put himself in any way in the wrong;
+but his adversary having ventured a sarcasm containing an insult
+couched in unusually keen language, he replied gravely:
+
+"We cannot box men's ears, sir, in these days, but I am at a loss for
+any word by which to stigmatize such cowardly behavior as yours."
+
+"That's enough, that's enough. You can come to an explanation to-
+morrow," several young men exclaimed, interposing between the two
+champions.
+
+Raphael left the room in the character of aggressor, after he had
+accepted a proposal to meet near the Chateau de Bordeau, in a little
+sloping meadow, not very far from the newly made road, by which the
+man who came off victorious could reach Lyons. Raphael must now either
+take to his bed or leave the baths. The visitors had gained their
+point. At eight o'clock next morning his antagonist, followed by two
+seconds and a surgeon, arrived first on the ground.
+
+"We shall do very nicely here; glorious weather for a duel!" he cried
+gaily, looking at the blue vault of sky above, at the waters of the
+lake, and the rocks, without a single melancholy presentiment or doubt
+of the issue. "If I wing him," he went on, "I shall send him to bed
+for a month; eh, doctor?"
+
+"At the very least," the surgeon replied; "but let that willow twig
+alone, or you will weary your wrist, and then you will not fire
+steadily. You might kill your man instead of wounding him."
+
+The noise of a carriage was heard approaching.
+
+"Here he is," said the seconds, who soon descried a caleche coming
+along the road; it was drawn by four horses, and there were two
+postilions.
+
+"What a queer proceeding!" said Valentin's antagonist; "here he comes
+post-haste to be shot."
+
+The slightest incident about a duel, as about a stake at cards, makes
+an impression on the minds of those deeply concerned in the results of
+the affair; so the young man awaited the arrival of the carriage with
+a kind of uneasiness. It stopped in the road; old Jonathan laboriously
+descended from it, in the first place, to assist Raphael to alight; he
+supported him with his feeble arms, and showed him all the minute
+attentions that a lover lavishes upon his mistress. Both became lost
+to sight in the footpath that lay between the highroad and the field
+where the duel was to take place; they were walking slowly, and did
+not appear again for some time after. The four onlookers at this
+strange spectacle felt deeply moved by the sight of Valentin as he
+leaned on his servant's arm; he was wasted and pale; he limped as if
+he had the gout, went with his head bowed down, and said not a word.
+You might have taken them for a couple of old men, one broken with
+years, the other worn out with thought; the elder bore his age visibly
+written in his white hair, the younger was of no age.
+
+"I have not slept all night, sir;" so Raphael greeted his antagonist.
+
+The icy tone and terrible glance that went with the words made the
+real aggressor shudder; he know that he was in the wrong, and felt in
+secret ashamed of his behavior. There was something strange in
+Raphael's bearing, tone, and gesture; the Marquis stopped, and every
+one else was likewise silent. The uneasy and constrained feeling grew
+to a height.
+
+"There is yet time," he went on, "to offer me some slight apology; and
+offer it you must, or you will die sir! You rely even now on your
+dexterity, and do not shrink from an encounter in which you believe
+all the advantage to be upon your side. Very good, sir; I am generous,
+I am letting you know my superiority beforehand. I possess a terrible
+power. I have only to wish to do so, and I can neutralize your skill,
+dim your eyesight, make your hand and pulse unsteady, and even kill
+you outright. I have no wish to be compelled to exercise my power; the
+use of it costs me too dear. You would not be the only one to die. So
+if you refuse to apologize to me, not matter what your experience in
+murder, your ball will go into the waterfall there, and mine will
+speed straight to your heart though I do not aim it at you."
+
+Confused voices interrupted Raphael at this point. All the time that
+he was speaking, the Marquis had kept his intolerably keen gaze fixed
+upon his antagonist; now he drew himself up and showed an impassive
+face, like that of a dangerous madman.
+
+"Make him hold his tongue," the young man had said to one of his
+seconds; "that voice of his is tearing the heart out of me."
+
+"Say no more, sir; it is quite useless," cried the seconds and the
+surgeon, addressing Raphael.
+
+"Gentlemen, I am fulfilling a duty. Has this young gentleman any final
+arrangements to make?"
+
+"That is enough; that will do."
+
+The Marquis remained standing steadily, never for a moment losing
+sight of his antagonist; and the latter seemed, like a bird before a
+snake, to be overwhelmed by a well-nigh magical power. He was
+compelled to endure that homicidal gaze; he met and shunned it
+incessantly.
+
+"I am thirsty; give me some water----" he said again to the second.
+
+"Are you nervous?"
+
+"Yes," he answered. "There is a fascination about that man's glowing
+eyes."
+
+"Will you apologize?"
+
+"It is too late now."
+
+The two antagonists were placed at fifteen paces' distance from each
+other. Each of them had a brace of pistols at hand, and, according to
+the programme prescribed for them, each was to fire twice when and how
+he pleased, but after the signal had been given by the seconds.
+
+"What are you doing, Charles?" exclaimed the young man who acted as
+second to Raphael's antagonist; "you are putting in the ball before
+the powder!"
+
+"I am a dead man," he muttered, by way of answer; "you have put me
+facing the sun----"
+
+"The sun lies behind you," said Valentin sternly and solemnly, while
+he coolly loaded his pistol without heeding the fact that the signal
+had been given, or that his antagonist was carefully taking aim.
+
+There was something so appalling in this supernatural unconcern, that
+it affected even the two postilions, brought thither by a cruel
+curiosity. Raphael was either trying his power or playing with it, for
+he talked to Jonathan, and looked towards him as he received his
+adversary's fire. Charles' bullet broke a branch of willow, and
+ricocheted over the surface of the water; Raphael fired at random, and
+shot his antagonist through the heart. He did not heed the young man
+as he dropped; he hurriedly sought the Magic Skin to see what another
+man's life had cost him. The talisman was no larger than a small oak-
+leaf.
+
+"What are you gaping at, you postilions over there? Let us be off,"
+said the Marquis.
+
+That same evening he crossed the French border, immediately set out
+for Auvergne, and reached the springs of Mont Dore. As he traveled,
+there surged up in his heart, all at once, one of those thoughts that
+come to us as a ray of sunlight pierces through the thick mists in
+some dark valley--a sad enlightenment, a pitiless sagacity that lights
+up the accomplished fact for us, that lays our errors bare, and leaves
+us without excuse in our own eyes. It suddenly struck him that the
+possession of power, no matter how enormous, did not bring with it the
+knowledge how to use it. The sceptre is a plaything for a child, an
+axe for a Richelieu, and for a Napoleon a lever by which to move the
+world. Power leaves us just as it finds us; only great natures grow
+greater by its means. Raphael had had everything in his power, and he
+had done nothing.
+
+At the springs of Mont Dore he came again in contact with a little
+world of people, who invariably shunned him with the eager haste that
+animals display when they scent afar off one of their own species
+lying dead, and flee away. The dislike was mutual. His late adventure
+had given him a deep distaste for society; his first care,
+consequently, was to find a lodging at some distance from the
+neighborhood of the springs. Instinctively he felt within him the need
+of close contact with nature, of natural emotions, and of the
+vegetative life into which we sink so gladly among the fields.
+
+The day after he arrived he climbed the Pic de Sancy, not without
+difficulty, and visited the higher valleys, the skyey nooks,
+undiscovered lakes, and peasants' huts about Mont Dore, a country
+whose stern and wild features are now beginning to tempt the brushes
+of our artists, for sometimes wonderfully fresh and charming views are
+to be found there, affording a strong contrast to the frowning brows
+of those lonely hills.
+
+Barely a league from the village Raphael discovered a nook where
+nature seemed to have taken a pleasure in hiding away all her
+treasures like some glad and mischievous child. At the first sight of
+this unspoiled and picturesque retreat, he determined to take up his
+abode in it. There, life must needs be peaceful, natural, and
+fruitful, like the life of a plant.
+
+Imagine for yourself an inverted cone of granite hollowed out on a
+large scale, a sort of basin with its sides divided up by queer
+winding paths. On one side lay level stretches with no growth upon
+them, a bluish uniform surface, over which the rays of the sun fell as
+upon a mirror; on the other lay cliffs split open by fissures and
+frowning ravines; great blocks of lava hung suspended from them, while
+the action of rain slowly prepared their impending fall; a few stunted
+trees tormented by the wind, often crowned their summits; and here and
+there in some sheltered angle of their ramparts a clump of chestnut-
+trees grew tall as cedars, or some cavern in the yellowish rocks
+showed the dark entrance into its depths, set about by flowers and
+brambles, decked by a little strip of green turf.
+
+At the bottom of this cup, which perhaps had been the crater of an
+old-world volcano, lay a pool of water as pure and bright as a
+diamond. Granite boulders lay around the deep basin, and willows,
+mountain-ash trees, yellow-flag lilies, and numberless aromatic plants
+bloomed about it, in a realm of meadow as fresh as an English bowling-
+green. The fine soft grass was watered by the streams that trickled
+through the fissures in the cliffs; the soil was continually enriched
+by the deposits of loam which storms washed down from the heights
+above. The pool might be some three acres in extent; its shape was
+irregular, and the edges were scalloped like the hem of a dress; the
+meadow might be an acre or two acres in extent. The cliffs and the
+water approached and receded from each other; here and there, there
+was scarcely width enough for the cows to pass between them.
+
+After a certain height the plant life ceased. Aloft in air the granite
+took upon itself the most fantastic shapes, and assumed those misty
+tints that give to high mountains a dim resemblance to clouds in the
+sky. The bare, bleak cliffs, with the fearful rents in their sides,
+pictures of wild and barren desolation, contrasted strongly with the
+pretty view of the valley; and so strange were the shapes they
+assumed, that one of the cliffs had been called "The Capuchin,"
+because it was so like a monk. Sometimes these sharp-pointed peaks,
+these mighty masses of rock, and airy caverns were lighted up one by
+one, according to the direction of the sun or the caprices of the
+atmosphere; they caught gleams of gold, dyed themselves in purple;
+took a tint of glowing rose-color, or turned dull and gray. Upon the
+heights a drama of color was always to be seen, a play of ever-
+shifting iridescent hues like those on a pigeon's breast.
+
+Oftentimes at sunrise or at sunset a ray of bright sunlight would
+penetrate between two sheer surfaces of lava, that might have been
+split apart by a hatchet, to the very depths of that pleasant little
+garden, where it would play in the waters of the pool, like a beam of
+golden light which gleams through the chinks of a shutter into a room
+in Spain, that has been carefully darkened for a siesta. When the sun
+rose above the old crater that some antediluvian revolution had filled
+with water, its rocky sides took warmer tones, the extinct volcano
+glowed again, and its sudden heat quickened the sprouting seeds and
+vegetation, gave color to the flowers, and ripened the fruits of this
+forgotten corner of the earth.
+
+As Raphael reached it, he noticed several cows grazing in the pasture-
+land; and when he had taken a few steps towards the water, he saw a
+little house built of granite and roofed with shingle in the spot
+where the meadowland was at its widest. The roof of this little
+cottage harmonized with everything about it; for it had long been
+overgrown with ivy, moss, and flowers of no recent date. A thin smoke,
+that did not scare the birds away, went up from the dilapidated
+chimney. There was a great bench at the door between two huge honey-
+suckle bushes, that were pink with blossom and full of scent. The
+walls could scarcely be seen for branches of vine and sprays of rose
+and jessamine that interlaced and grew entirely as chance and their
+own will bade them; for the inmates of the cottage seemed to pay no
+attention to the growth which adorned their house, and to take no care
+of it, leaving to it the fresh capricious charm of nature.
+
+Some clothes spread out on the gooseberry bushes were drying in the
+sun. A cat was sitting on a machine for stripping hemp; beneath it lay
+a newly scoured brass caldron, among a quantity of potato-parings. On
+the other side of the house Raphael saw a sort of barricade of dead
+thorn-bushes, meant no doubt to keep the poultry from scratching up
+the vegetables and pot-herbs. It seemed like the end of the earth. The
+dwelling was like some bird's-nest ingeniously set in a cranny of the
+rocks, a clever and at the same time a careless bit of workmanship. A
+simple and kindly nature lay round about it; its rusticity was
+genuine, but there was a charm like that of poetry in it; for it grew
+and throve at a thousand miles' distance from our elaborate and
+conventional poetry. It was like none of our conceptions; it was a
+spontaneous growth, a masterpiece due to chance.
+
+As Raphael reached the place, the sunlight fell across it from right
+to left, bringing out all the colors of its plants and trees; the
+yellowish or gray bases of the crags, the different shades of the
+green leaves, the masses of flowers, pink, blue, or white, the
+climbing plants with their bell-like blossoms, and the shot velvet of
+the mosses, the purple-tinted blooms of the heather,--everything was
+either brought into relief or made fairer yet by the enchantment of
+the light or by the contrasting shadows; and this was the case most of
+all with the sheet of water, wherein the house, the trees, the granite
+peaks, and the sky were all faithfully reflected. Everything had a
+radiance of its own in this delightful picture, from the sparkling
+mica-stone to the bleached tuft of grass hidden away in the soft
+shadows; the spotted cow with its glossy hide, the delicate water-
+plants that hung down over the pool like fringes in a nook where blue
+or emerald colored insects were buzzing about, the roots of trees like
+a sand-besprinkled shock of hair above grotesque faces in the flinty
+rock surface,--all these things made a harmony for the eye.
+
+The odor of the tepid water; the scent of the flowers, and the breath
+of the caverns which filled the lonely place gave Raphael a sensation
+that was almost enjoyment. Silence reigned in majesty over these
+woods, which possibly are unknown to the tax-collector; but the
+barking of a couple of dogs broke the stillness all at once; the cows
+turned their heads towards the entrance of the valley, showing their
+moist noses to Raphael, stared stupidly at him, and then fell to
+browsing again. A goat and her kid, that seemed to hang on the side of
+the crags in some magical fashion, capered and leapt to a slab of
+granite near to Raphael, and stayed there a moment, as if to seek to
+know who he was. The yapping of the dogs brought out a plump child,
+who stood agape, and next came a white-haired old man of middle
+height. Both of these two beings were in keeping with the
+surroundings, the air, the flowers, and the dwelling. Health appeared
+to overflow in this fertile region; old age and childhood thrived
+there. There seemed to be, about all these types of existence, the
+freedom and carelessness of the life of primitive times, a happiness
+of use and wont that gave the lie to our philosophical platitudes, and
+wrought a cure of all its swelling passions in the heart.
+
+The old man belonged to the type of model dear to the masculine brush
+of Schnetz. The countless wrinkles upon his brown face looked as if
+they would be hard to the touch; the straight nose, the prominent
+cheek-bones, streaked with red veins like a vine-leaf in autumn, the
+angular features, all were characteristics of strength, even where
+strength existed no longer. The hard hands, now that they toiled no
+longer, had preserved their scanty white hair, his bearing was that of
+an absolutely free man; it suggested the thought that, had he been an
+Italian, he would have perhaps turned brigand, for the love of the
+liberty so dear to him. The child was a regular mountaineer, with the
+black eyes that can face the sun without flinching, a deeply tanned
+complexion, and rough brown hair. His movements were like a bird's--
+swift, decided, and unconstrained; his clothing was ragged; the white,
+fair skin showed through the rents in his garments. There they both
+stood in silence, side by side, both obeying the same impulse; in both
+faces were clear tokens of an absolutely identical and idle life. The
+old man had adopted the child's amusements, and the child had fallen
+in with the old man's humor; there was a sort of tacit agreement
+between two kinds of feebleness, between failing powers well-nigh
+spent and powers just about to unfold themselves.
+
+Very soon a woman who seemed to be about thirty years old appeared on
+the threshold of the door, spinning as she came. She was an
+Auvergnate, a high-colored, comfortable-looking, straightforward sort
+of person, with white teeth; her cap and dress, the face, full figure,
+and general appearance, were of the Auvergne peasant stamp. So was her
+dialect; she was a thorough embodiment of her district; its
+hardworking ways, its thrift, ignorance, and heartiness all met in
+her.
+
+She greeted Raphael, and they began to talk. The dogs quieted down;
+the old man went and sat on a bench in the sun; the child followed his
+mother about wherever she went, listening without saying a word, and
+staring at the stranger.
+
+"You are not afraid to live here, good woman?"
+
+"What should we be afraid of, sir? When we bolt the door, who ever
+could get inside? Oh, no, we aren't afraid at all. And besides," she
+said, as she brought the Marquis into the principal room in the house,
+"what should thieves come to take from us here?"
+
+She designated the room as she spoke; the smoke-blackened walls, with
+some brilliant pictures in blue, red, and green, an "End of Credit," a
+Crucifixion, and the "Grenadiers of the Imperial Guard" for their sole
+ornament; the furniture here and there, the old wooden four-post
+bedstead, the table with crooked legs, a few stools, the chest that
+held the bread, the flitch that hung from the ceiling, a jar of salt,
+a stove, and on the mantleshelf a few discolored yellow plaster
+figures. As he went out again Raphael noticed a man half-way up the
+crags, leaning on a hoe, and watching the house with interest.
+
+"That's my man, sir," said the Auvergnate, unconsciously smiling in
+peasant fashion; "he is at work up there."
+
+"And that old man is your father?"
+
+"Asking your pardon, sir, he is my man's grandfather. Such as you see
+him, he is a hundred and two, and yet quite lately he walked over to
+Clermont with our little chap! Oh, he has been a strong man in his
+time; but he does nothing now but sleep and eat and drink. He amuses
+himself with the little fellow. Sometimes the child trails him up the
+hillsides, and he will just go up there along with him."
+
+Valentin made up his mind immediately. He would live between this
+child and old man, breathe the same air; eat their bread, drink the
+same water, sleep with them, make the blood in his veins like theirs.
+It was a dying man's fancy. For him the prime model, after which the
+customary existence of the individual should be shaped, the real
+formula for the life of a human being, the only true and possible
+life, the life-ideal, was to become one of the oysters adhering to
+this rock, to save his shell a day or two longer by paralyzing the
+power of death. One profoundly selfish thought took possession of him,
+and the whole universe was swallowed up and lost in it. For him the
+universe existed no longer; the whole world had come to be within
+himself. For the sick, the world begins at their pillow and ends at
+the foot of the bed; and this countryside was Raphael's sick-bed.
+
+Who has not, at some time or other in his life, watched the comings
+and goings of an ant, slipped straws into a yellow slug's one
+breathing-hole, studied the vagaries of a slender dragon-fly, pondered
+admiringly over the countless veins in an oak-leaf, that bring the
+colors of a rose window in some Gothic cathedral into contrast with
+the reddish background? Who has not looked long in delight at the
+effects of sun and rain on a roof of brown tiles, at the dewdrops, or
+at the variously shaped petals of the flower-cups? Who has not sunk
+into these idle, absorbing meditations on things without, that have no
+conscious end, yet lead to some definite thought at last. Who, in
+short, has not led a lazy life, the life of childhood, the life of the
+savage without his labor? This life without a care or a wish Raphael
+led for some days' space. He felt a distinct improvement in his
+condition, a wonderful sense of ease, that quieted his apprehensions
+and soothed his sufferings.
+
+He would climb the crags, and then find a seat high up on some peak
+whence he could see a vast expanse of distant country at a glance, and
+he would spend whole days in this way, like a plant in the sun, or a
+hare in its form. And at last, growing familiar with the appearances
+of the plant-life about him, and of the changes in the sky, he
+minutely noted the progress of everything working around him in the
+water, on the earth, or in the air. He tried to share the secret
+impulses of nature, sought by passive obedience to become a part of
+it, and to lie within the conservative and despotic jurisdiction that
+regulates instinctive existence. He no longer wished to steer his own
+course.
+
+Just as criminals in olden times were safe from the pursuit of
+justice, if they took refuge under the shadow of the altar, so Raphael
+made an effort to slip into the sanctuary of life. He succeeded in
+becoming an integral part of the great and mighty fruit-producing
+organization; he had adapted himself to the inclemency of the air, and
+had dwelt in every cave among the rocks. He had learned the ways and
+habits of growth of every plant, had studied the laws of the
+watercourses and their beds, and had come to know the animals; he was
+at last so perfectly at one with this teeming earth, that he had in
+some sort discerned its mysteries and caught the spirit of it.
+
+The infinitely varied forms of every natural kingdom were, to his
+thinking, only developments of one and the same substance, different
+combinations brought about by the same impulse, endless emanations
+from a measureless Being which was acting, thinking, moving, and
+growing, and in harmony with which he longed to grow, to move, to
+think, and act. He had fancifully blended his life with the life of
+the crags; he had deliberately planted himself there. During the
+earliest days of his sojourn in these pleasant surroundings, Valentin
+tasted all the pleasures of childhood again, thanks to the strange
+hallucination of apparent convalescence, which is not unlike the
+pauses of delirium that nature mercifully provides for those in pain.
+He went about making trifling discoveries, setting to work on endless
+things, and finishing none of them; the evening's plans were quite
+forgotten in the morning; he had no cares, he was happy; he thought
+himself saved.
+
+One morning he had lain in bed till noon, deep in the dreams between
+sleep and waking, which give to realities a fantastic appearance, and
+make the wildest fancies seem solid facts; while he was still
+uncertain that he was not dreaming yet, he suddenly heard his hostess
+giving a report of his health to Jonathan, for the first time.
+Jonathan came to inquire after him daily, and the Auvergnate, thinking
+no doubt that Valentin was still asleep, had not lowered the tones of
+a voice developed in mountain air.
+
+"No better and no worse," she said. "He coughed all last night again
+fit to kill himself. Poor gentleman, he coughs and spits till it is
+piteous. My husband and I often wonder to each other where he gets the
+strength from to cough like that. It goes to your heart. What a cursed
+complaint it is! He has no strength at all. I am always afraid I shall
+find him dead in his bed some morning. He is every bit as pale as a
+waxen Christ. DAME! I watch him while he dresses; his poor body is as
+thin as a nail. And he does not feel well now; but no matter. It's all
+the same; he wears himself out with running about as if he had health
+and to spare. All the same, he is very brave, for he never complains
+at all. But really he would be better under the earth than on it, for
+he is enduring the agonies of Christ. I don't wish that myself, sir;
+it is quite in our interests; but even if he didn't pay us what he
+does, I should be just as fond of him; it is not our own interest that
+is our motive.
+
+"Ah, mon Dieu!" she continued, "Parisians are the people for these
+dogs' diseases. Where did he catch it, now? Poor young man! And he is
+so sure that he is going to get well! That fever just gnaws him, you
+know; it eats him away; it will be the death of him. He has no notion
+whatever of that; he does not know it, sir; he sees nothing----You
+mustn't cry about him, M. Jonathan; you must remember that he will be
+happy, and will not suffer any more. You ought to make a neuvaine for
+him; I have seen wonderful cures come of the nine days' prayer, and I
+would gladly pay for a wax taper to save such a gentle creature, so
+good he is, a paschal lamb----"
+
+As Raphael's voice had grown too weak to allow him to make himself
+heard, he was compelled to listen to this horrible loquacity. His
+irritation, however, drove him out of bed at length, and he appeared
+upon the threshold.
+
+"Old scoundrel!" he shouted to Jonathan; "do you mean to put me to
+death?"
+
+The peasant woman took him for a ghost, and fled.
+
+"I forbid you to have any anxiety whatever about my health," Raphael
+went on.
+
+"Yes, my Lord Marquis," said the old servant, wiping away his tears.
+
+"And for the future you had very much better not come here without my
+orders."
+
+Jonathan meant to be obedient, but in the look full of pity and
+devotion that he gave the Marquis before he went, Raphael read his own
+death-warrant. Utterly disheartened, brought all at once to a sense of
+his real position, Valentin sat down on the threshold, locked his arms
+across his chest, and bowed his head. Jonathan turned to his master in
+alarm, with "My Lord----"
+
+"Go away, go away," cried the invalid.
+
+In the hours of the next morning, Raphael climbed the crags, and sat
+down in a mossy cleft in the rocks, whence he could see the narrow
+path along which the water for the dwelling was carried. At the base
+of the hill he saw Jonathan in conversation with the Auvergnate. Some
+malicious power interpreted for him all the woman's forebodings, and
+filled the breeze and the silence with her ominous words. Thrilled
+with horror, he took refuge among the highest summits of the
+mountains, and stayed there till the evening; but yet he could not
+drive away the gloomy presentiments awakened within him in such an
+unfortunate manner by a cruel solicitude on his account.
+
+The Auvergne peasant herself suddenly appeared before him like a
+shadow in the dusk; a perverse freak of the poet within him found a
+vague resemblance between her black and white striped petticoat and
+the bony frame of a spectre.
+
+"The damp is falling now, sir," said she. "If you stop out there, you
+will go off just like rotten fruit. You must come in. It isn't healthy
+to breathe the damp, and you have taken nothing since the morning,
+besides."
+
+"TONNERRE DE DIEU! old witch," he cried; "let me live after my own
+fashion, I tell you, or I shall be off altogether. It is quite bad
+enough to dig my grave every morning; you might let it alone in the
+evenings at least----"
+
+"Your grave, sir! I dig your grave!--and where may your grave be? I
+want to see you as old as father there, and not in your grave by any
+manner of means. The grave! that comes soon enough for us all; in the
+grave----"
+
+"That is enough," said Raphael.
+
+"Take my arm, sir."
+
+"No."
+
+The feeling of pity in others is very difficult for a man to bear, and
+it is hardest of all when the pity is deserved. Hatred is a tonic--it
+quickens life and stimulates revenge; but pity is death to us--it
+makes our weakness weaker still. It is as if distress simpered
+ingratiatingly at us; contempt lurks in the tenderness, or tenderness
+in an affront. In the centenarian Raphael saw triumphant pity, a
+wondering pity in the child's eyes, an officious pity in the woman,
+and in her husband a pity that had an interested motive; but no matter
+how the sentiment declared itself, death was always its import.
+
+A poet makes a poem of everything; it is tragical or joyful, as things
+happen to strike his imagination; his lofty soul rejects all half-
+tones; he always prefers vivid and decided colors. In Raphael's soul
+this compassion produced a terrible poem of mourning and melancholy.
+When he had wished to live in close contact with nature, he had of
+course forgotten how freely natural emotions are expressed. He would
+think himself quite alone under a tree, whilst he struggled with an
+obstinate coughing fit, a terrible combat from which he never issued
+victorious without utter exhaustion afterwards; and then he would meet
+the clear, bright eyes of the little boy, who occupied the post of
+sentinel, like a savage in a bent of grass; the eyes scrutinized him
+with a childish wonder, in which there was as much amusement as
+pleasure, and an indescribable mixture of indifference and interest.
+The awful BROTHER, YOU MUST DIE, of the Trappists seemed constantly
+legible in the eyes of the peasants with whom Raphael was living; he
+scarcely knew which he dreaded most, their unfettered talk or their
+silence; their presence became torture.
+
+One morning he saw two men in black prowling about in his
+neighborhood, who furtively studied him and took observations. They
+made as though they had come there for a stroll, and asked him a few
+indifferent questions, to which he returned short answers. He
+recognized them both. One was the cure and the other the doctor at the
+springs; Jonathan had no doubt sent them, or the people in the house
+had called them in, or the scent of an approaching death had drawn
+them thither. He beheld his own funeral, heard the chanting of the
+priests, and counted the tall wax candles; and all that lovely fertile
+nature around him, in whose lap he had thought to find life once more,
+he saw no longer, save through a veil of crape. Everything that but
+lately had spoken of length of days to him, now prophesied a speedy
+end. He set out the next day for Paris, not before he had been
+inundated with cordial wishes, which the people of the house uttered
+in melancholy and wistful tones for his benefit.
+
+He traveled through the night, and awoke as they passed through one of
+the pleasant valleys of the Bourbonnais. View after view swam before
+his gaze, and passed rapidly away like the vague pictures of a dream.
+Cruel nature spread herself out before his eyes with tantalizing
+grace. Sometimes the Allier, a liquid shining ribbon, meandered
+through the distant fertile landscape; then followed the steeples of
+hamlets, hiding modestly in the depths of a ravine with its yellow
+cliffs; sometimes, after the monotony of vineyards, the watermills of
+a little valley would be suddenly seen; and everywhere there were
+pleasant chateaux, hillside villages, roads with their fringes of
+queenly poplars; and the Loire itself, at last, with its wide sheets
+of water sparkling like diamonds amid its golden sands. Attractions
+everywhere, without end! This nature, all astir with a life and
+gladness like that of childhood, scarcely able to contain the impulses
+and sap of June, possessed a fatal attraction for the darkened gaze of
+the invalid. He drew the blinds of his carriage windows, and betook
+himself again to slumber.
+
+Towards evening, after they had passed Cesne, he was awakened by
+lively music, and found himself confronted with a village fair. The
+horses were changed near the marketplace. Whilst the postilions were
+engaged in making the transfer, he saw the people dancing merrily,
+pretty and attractive girls with flowers about them, excited youths,
+and finally the jolly wine-flushed countenances of old peasants.
+Children prattled, old women laughed and chatted; everything spoke in
+one voice, and there was a holiday gaiety about everything, down to
+their clothing and the tables that were set out. A cheerful expression
+pervaded the square and the church, the roofs and windows; even the
+very doorways of the village seemed likewise to be in holiday trim.
+
+Raphael could not repress an angry exclamation, nor yet a wish to
+silence the fiddles, annihilate the stir and bustle, stop the clamor,
+and disperse the ill-timed festival; like a dying man, he felt unable
+to endure the slightest sound, and he entered his carriage much
+annoyed. When he looked out upon the square from the window, he saw
+that all the happiness was scared away; the peasant women were in
+flight, and the benches were deserted. Only a blind musician, on the
+scaffolding of the orchestra, went on playing a shrill tune on his
+clarionet. That piping of his, without dancers to it, and the solitary
+old man himself, in the shadow of the lime-tree, with his curmudgeon's
+face, scanty hair, and ragged clothing, was like a fantastic picture
+of Raphael's wish. The heavy rain was pouring in torrents; it was one
+of those thunderstorms that June brings about so rapidly, to cease as
+suddenly. The thing was so natural, that, when Raphael had looked out
+and seen some pale clouds driven over by a gust of wind, he did not
+think of looking at the piece of skin. He lay back again in the corner
+of his carriage, which was very soon rolling upon its way.
+
+The next day found him back in his home again, in his own room, beside
+his own fireside. He had had a large fire lighted; he felt cold.
+Jonathan brought him some letters; they were all from Pauline. He
+opened the first one without any eagerness, and unfolded it as if it
+had been the gray-paper form of application for taxes made by the
+revenue collector. He read the first sentence:
+
+"Gone! This really is a flight, my Raphael. How is it? No one can tell
+me where you are. And who should know if not I?"
+
+He did not wish to learn any more. He calmly took up the letters and
+threw them in the fire, watching with dull and lifeless eyes the
+perfumed paper as it was twisted, shriveled, bent, and devoured by the
+capricious flames. Fragments that fell among the ashes allowed him to
+see the beginning of a sentence, or a half-burnt thought or word; he
+took a pleasure in deciphering them--a sort of mechanical amusement.
+
+"Sitting at your door--expected--Caprice--I obey--Rivals--I, never!--
+thy Pauline--love--no more of Pauline?--If you had wished to leave me
+for ever, you would not have deserted me--Love eternal--To die----"
+
+The words caused him a sort of remorse; he seized the tongs, and
+rescued a last fragment of the letter from the flames.
+
+"I have murmured," so Pauline wrote, "but I have never complained, my
+Raphael! If you have left me so far behind you, it was doubtless
+because you wished to hide some heavy grief from me. Perhaps you will
+kill me one of these days, but you are too good to torture me. So do
+not go away from me like this. There! I can bear the worst of torment,
+if only I am at your side. Any grief that you could cause me would not
+be grief. There is far more love in my heart for you than I have ever
+yet shown you. I can endure anything, except this weeping far away
+from you, this ignorance of your----"
+
+Raphael laid the scorched scrap on the mantelpiece, then all at once
+he flung it into the fire. The bit of paper was too clearly a symbol
+of his own love and luckless existence.
+
+"Go and find M. Bianchon," he told Jonathan.
+
+Horace came and found Raphael in bed.
+
+"Can you prescribe a draught for me--some mild opiate which will
+always keep me in a somnolent condition, a draught that will not be
+injurious although taken constantly."
+
+"Nothing is easier," the young doctor replied; "but you will have to
+keep on your feet for a few hours daily, at any rate, so as to take
+your food."
+
+"A few hours!" Raphael broke in; "no, no! I only wish to be out of bed
+for an hour at most."
+
+"What is your object?" inquired Bianchon.
+
+"To sleep; for so one keeps alive, at any rate," the patient answered.
+"Let no one come in, not even Mlle. Pauline de Wistchnau!" he added to
+Jonathan, as the doctor was writing out his prescription.
+
+"Well, M. Horace, is there any hope?" the old servant asked, going as
+far as the flight of steps before the door, with the young doctor.
+
+"He may live for some time yet, or he may die to-night. The chances of
+life and death are evenly balanced in his case. I can't understand it
+at all," said the doctor, with a doubtful gesture. "His mind ought to
+be diverted."
+
+"Diverted! Ah, sir, you don't know him! He killed a man the other day
+without a word!--Nothing can divert him!"
+
+For some days Raphael lay plunged in the torpor of this artificial
+sleep. Thanks to the material power that opium exerts over the
+immaterial part of us, this man with the powerful and active
+imagination reduced himself to the level of those sluggish forms of
+animal life that lurk in the depths of forests, and take the form of
+vegetable refuse, never stirring from their place to catch their easy
+prey. He had darkened the very sun in heaven; the daylight never
+entered his room. About eight o'clock in the evening he would leave
+his bed, with no very clear consciousness of his own existence; he
+would satisfy the claims of hunger and return to bed immediately. One
+dull blighted hour after another only brought confused pictures and
+appearances before him, and lights and shadows against a background of
+darkness. He lay buried in deep silence; movement and intelligence
+were completely annihilated for him. He woke later than usual one
+evening, and found that his dinner was not ready. He rang for
+Jonathan.
+
+"You can go," he said. "I have made you rich; you shall be happy in
+your old age; but I will not let you muddle away my life any longer.
+Miserable wretch! I am hungry--where is my dinner? How is it?--Answer
+me!"
+
+A satisfied smile stole over Jonathan's face. He took a candle that
+lit up the great dark rooms of the mansion with its flickering light;
+brought his master, who had again become an automaton, into a great
+gallery, and flung a door suddenly open. Raphael was all at once
+dazzled by a flood of light and amazed by an unheard-of scene.
+
+His chandeliers had been filled with wax-lights; the rarest flowers
+from his conservatory were carefully arranged about the room; the
+table sparkled with silver, gold, crystal, and porcelain; a royal
+banquet was spread--the odors of the tempting dishes tickled the
+nervous fibres of the palate. There sat his friends; he saw them among
+beautiful women in full evening dress, with bare necks and shoulders,
+with flowers in their hair; fair women of every type, with sparkling
+eyes, attractively and fancifully arrayed. One had adopted an Irish
+jacket, which displayed the alluring outlines of her form; one wore
+the "basquina" of Andalusia, with its wanton grace; here was a half-
+clad Dian the huntress, there the costume of Mlle. de la Valliere,
+amorous and coy; and all of them alike were given up to the
+intoxication of the moment.
+
+As Raphael's death-pale face showed itself in the doorway, a sudden
+outcry broke out, as vehement as the blaze of this improvised banquet.
+The voices, perfumes, and lights, the exquisite beauty of the women,
+produced their effect upon his senses, and awakened his desires.
+Delightful music, from unseen players in the next room, drowned the
+excited tumult in a torrent of harmony--the whole strange vision was
+complete.
+
+Raphael felt a caressing pressure on is own hand, a woman's white,
+youthful arms were stretched out to grasp him, and the hand was
+Aquilina's. He knew now that this scene was not a fantastic illusion
+like the fleeting pictures of his disordered dreams; he uttered a
+dreadful cry, slammed the door, and dealt his heartbroken old servant
+a blow in the face.
+
+"Monster!" he cried, "so you have sworn to kill me!" and trembling at
+the risks he had just now run, he summoned all his energies, reached
+his room, took a powerful sleeping draught, and went to bed.
+
+"The devil!" cried Jonathan, recovering himself. "And M. Bianchon most
+certainly told me to divert his mind."
+
+It was close upon midnight. By that time, owing to one of those
+physical caprices that are the marvel and the despair of science,
+Raphael, in his slumber, became radiant with beauty. A bright color
+glowed on his pale cheeks. There was an almost girlish grace about the
+forehead in which his genius was revealed. Life seemed to bloom on the
+quiet face that lay there at rest. His sleep was sound; a light, even
+breath was drawn in between red lips; he was smiling--he had passed no
+doubt through the gate of dreams into a noble life. Was he a
+centenarian now? Did his grandchildren come to wish him length of
+days? Or, on a rustic bench set in the sun and under the trees, was he
+scanning, like the prophet on the mountain heights, a promised land, a
+far-off time of blessing.
+
+"Here you are!"
+
+The words, uttered in silver tones, dispelled the shadowy faces of his
+dreams. He saw Pauline, in the lamplight, sitting upon the bed;
+Pauline grown fairer yet through sorrow and separation. Raphael
+remained bewildered by the sight of her face, white as the petals of
+some water flower, and the shadow of her long, dark hair about it
+seemed to make it whiter still. Her tears had left a gleaming trace
+upon her cheeks, and hung there yet, ready to fall at the least
+movement. She looked like an angel fallen from the skies, or a spirit
+that a breath might waft away, as she sat there all in white, with her
+head bowed, scarcely creasing the quilt beneath her weight.
+
+"Ah, I have forgotten everything!" she cried, as Raphael opened his
+eyes. "I have no voice left except to tell you, 'I am yours.' There is
+nothing in my heart but love. Angel of my life, you have never been so
+beautiful before! Your eyes are blazing---- But come, I can guess it
+all. You have been in search of health without me; you were afraid of
+me----well----"
+
+"Go! go! leave me," Raphael muttered at last. "Why do you not go? If
+you stay, I shall die. Do you want to see me die?"
+
+"Die?" she echoed. "Can you die without me? Die? But you are young;
+and I love you! Die?" she asked, in a deep, hollow voice. She seized
+his hands with a frenzied movement. "Cold!" she wailed. "Is it all an
+illusion?"
+
+Raphael drew the little bit of skin from under his pillow; it was as
+tiny and as fragile as a periwinkle petal. He showed it to her.
+
+"Pauline!" he said, "fair image of my fair life, let us say good-bye?"
+
+"Good-bye?" she echoed, looking surprised.
+
+"Yes. This is a talisman that grants me all my wishes, and that
+represents my span of life. See here, this is all that remains of it.
+If you look at me any longer, I shall die----"
+
+The young girl thought that Valentin had grown lightheaded; she took
+the talisman and went to fetch the lamp. By its tremulous light which
+she shed over Raphael and the talisman, she scanned her lover's face
+and the last morsel of the magic skin. As Pauline stood there, in all
+the beauty of love and terror, Raphael was no longer able to control
+his thoughts; memories of tender scenes, and of passionate and fevered
+joys, overwhelmed the soul that had so long lain dormant within him,
+and kindled a fire not quite extinct.
+
+"Pauline! Pauline! Come to me----"
+
+A dreadful cry came from the girl's throat, her eyes dilated with
+horror, her eyebrows were distorted and drawn apart by an unspeakable
+anguish; she read in Raphael's eyes the vehement desire in which she
+had once exulted, but as it grew she felt a light movement in her
+hand, and the skin contracted. She did not stop to think; she fled
+into the next room, and locked the door.
+
+"Pauline! Pauline!" cried the dying man, as he rushed after her; "I
+love you, I adore you, I want you, Pauline! I wish to die in your
+arms!"
+
+With unnatural strength, the last effort of ebbing life, he broke down
+the door, and saw his mistress writhing upon a sofa. Pauline had
+vainly tried to pierce her heart, and now thought to find a rapid
+death by strangling herself with her shawl.
+
+"If I die, he will live," she said, trying to tighten the knot that
+she had made.
+
+In her struggle with death her hair hung loose, her shoulders were
+bare, her clothing was disordered, her eyes were bathed in tears, her
+face was flushed and drawn with the horror of despair; yet as her
+exceeding beauty met Raphael's intoxicated eyes, his delirium grew. He
+sprang towards her like a bird of prey, tore away the shawl, and tried
+to take her in his arms.
+
+The dying man sought for words to express the wish that was consuming
+his strength; but no sounds would come except the choking death-rattle
+in his chest. Each breath he drew sounded hollower than the last, and
+seemed to come from his very entrails. At the last moment, no longer
+able to utter a sound, he set his teeth in Pauline's breast. Jonathan
+appeared, terrified by the cries he had heard, and tried to tear away
+the dead body from the grasp of the girl who was crouching with it in
+a corner.
+
+"What do you want?" she asked. "He is mine, I have killed him. Did I
+not foresee how it would be?"
+
+
+
+EPILOGUE
+
+"And what became of Pauline?"
+
+"Pauline? Ah! Do you sometimes spend a pleasant winter evening by your
+own fireside, and give yourself up luxuriously to memories of love or
+youth, while you watch the glow of the fire where the logs of oak are
+burning? Here, the fire outlines a sort of chessboard in red squares,
+there it has a sheen like velvet; little blue flames start up and
+flicker and play about in the glowing depths of the brasier. A
+mysterious artist comes and adapts that flame to his own ends; by a
+secret of his own he draws a visionary face in the midst of those
+flaming violet and crimson hues, a face with unimaginable delicate
+outlines, a fleeting apparition which no chance will ever bring back
+again. It is a woman's face, her hair is blown back by the wind, her
+features speak of a rapture of delight; she breathes fire in the midst
+of the fire. She smiles, she dies, you will never see her any more.
+Farewell, flower of the flame! Farewell, essence incomplete and
+unforeseen, come too early or too late to make the spark of some
+glorious diamond."
+
+"But, Pauline?"
+
+"You do not see, then? I will begin again. Make way! make way! She
+comes, she is here, the queen of illusions, a woman fleeting as a
+kiss, a woman bright as lightning, issuing in a blaze like lightning
+from the sky, a being uncreated, of spirit and love alone. She has
+wrapped her shadowy form in flame, or perhaps the flame betokens that
+she exists but for a moment. The pure outlines of her shape tell you
+that she comes from heaven. Is she not radiant as an angel? Can you
+not hear the beating of her wings in space? She sinks down beside you
+more lightly than a bird, and you are entranced by her awful eyes;
+there is a magical power in her light breathing that draws your lips
+to hers; she flies and you follow; you feel the earth beneath you no
+longer. If you could but once touch that form of snow with your eager,
+deluded hands, once twine the golden hair round your fingers, place
+one kiss on those shining eyes! There is an intoxicating vapor around,
+and the spell of a siren music is upon you. Every nerve in you is
+quivering; you are filled with pain and longing. O joy for which there
+is no name! You have touched the woman's lips, and you are awakened at
+once by a horrible pang. Oh! ah! yes, you have struck your head
+against the corner of the bedpost, you have been clasping its brown
+mahogany sides, and chilly gilt ornaments; embracing a piece of metal,
+a brazen Cupid."
+
+"But how about Pauline, sir?"
+
+"What, again? Listen. One lovely morning at Tours a young man, who
+held the hand of a pretty woman in his, went on board the Ville
+d'Angers. Thus united they both looked and wondered long at a white
+form that rose elusively out of the mists above the broad waters of
+the Loire, like some child of the sun and the river, or some freak of
+air and cloud. This translucent form was a sylph or a naiad by turns;
+she hovered in the air like a word that haunts the memory, which seeks
+in vain to grasp it; she glided among the islands, she nodded her head
+here and there among the tall poplar trees; then she grew to a giant's
+height; she shook out the countless folds of her drapery to the light;
+she shot light from the aureole that the sun had litten about her
+face; she hovered above the slopes of the hills and their little
+hamlets, and seemed to bar the passage of the boat before the Chateau
+d'Usse. You might have thought that La dame des belles cousines sought
+to protect her country from modern intrusion."
+
+"Well, well, I understand. So it went with Pauline. But how about
+Foedora?"
+
+"Oh! Foedora, you are sure to meet with her! She was at the Bouffons
+last night, and she will go to the Opera this evening, and if you like
+to take it so, she is Society."
+
+
+
+ADDENDUM
+
+The following personages appear in other stories of the Human Comedy.
+
+Aquilina
+  Melmoth Reconciled
+
+Bianchon, Horace
+  Father Goriot
+  The Atheist's Mass
+  Cesar Birotteau
+  The Commission in Lunacy
+  Lost Illusions
+  A Distinguished Provincial at Paris
+  A Bachelor's Establishment
+  The Secrets of a Princess
+  The Government Clerks
+  Pierrette
+  A Study of Woman
+  Scenes from a Courtesan's Life
+  Honorine
+  The Seamy Side of History
+  A Second Home
+  A Prince of Bohemia
+  Letters of Two Brides
+  The Muse of the Department
+  The Imaginary Mistress
+  The Middle Classes
+  Cousin Betty
+  The Country Parson
+In addition, M. Bianchon narrated the following:
+  Another Study of Woman
+  La Grande Breteche
+
+Canalis, Constant-Cyr-Melchior, Baron de
+  Letters of Two Brides
+  A Distinguished Provincial at Paris
+  Modeste Mignon
+  Another Study of Woman
+  A Start in Life
+  Beatrix
+  The Unconscious Humorists
+  The Member for Arcis
+
+Dudley, Lady Arabella
+  The Lily of the Valley
+  The Ball at Sceaux
+  The Secrets of a Princess
+  A Daughter of Eve
+  Letters of Two Brides
+
+Euphrasia
+  Melmoth Reconciled
+
+Joseph
+  A Study of Woman
+
+Massol
+  Scenes from a Courtesan's Life
+  A Daughter of Eve
+  Cousin Betty
+  The Unconscious Humorists
+
+Navarreins, Duc de
+  A Bachelor's Establishment
+  Colonel Chabert
+  The Muse of the Department
+  The Thirteen
+  Jealousies of a Country Town
+  The Peasantry
+  Scenes from a Courtesan's Life
+  The Country Parson
+  The Gondreville Mystery
+  The Secrets of a Princess
+  Cousin Betty
+
+Rastignac, Eugene de
+  Father Goriot
+  A Distinguished Provincial at Paris
+  Scenes from a Courtesan's Life
+  The Ball at Sceaux
+  The Interdiction
+  A Study of Woman
+  Another Study of Woman
+  The Secrets of a Princess
+  A Daughter of Eve
+  The Gondreville Mystery
+  The Firm of Nucingen
+  Cousin Betty
+  The Member for Arcis
+  The Unconscious Humorists
+
+Taillefer, Jean-Frederic
+  The Firm of Nucingen
+  Father Goriot
+  The Red Inn
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Etext of The Magic Skin, by Honore de Balzac
+
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