The Girl With the Golden Eyes (6 page)

“We’ll have to play a close game,” Henri told himself.

“Well, then,” Paul de Manerville said to him as he came in, “where are we now? I’ve come to lunch with you.”

“Fine,” Henri said. “You won’t be shocked if I complete my toilette in front of you?”

“What a funny thought!”

“We’re borrowing so many things from the English nowadays that we might turn into hypocrites and prudes just like them,” Henri said.

Laurent had brought so many implements to his master, so many different articles, and such pretty ones, that Paul couldn’t prevent himself from exclaiming: “What, is your toilette going to take two hours?”

“Not at all,” Henri said, “two and a half hours.”

“Well, since we’re alone and we say anything we like to each other, explain to me why such a superior man as yourself—for you are superior—affects this exaggerated vanity, which must not be natural in you. Why spend two and a half hours grooming yourself, when it’s enough to take a fifteen-minute bath, run a comb through your hair, and get dressed? Come now, tell me your system.”

“I’d have to like you a lot, you fat oaf, to confide such high thoughts to you,” the young man said, who at that moment was having his feet scrubbed with a soft brush lathered with English soap.

“But I’ve vowed the most sincere attachment to you,” Paul de Manerville replied, “and I like you so much that I think you’re even better than I am!”

“You must have noticed, if you’re still capable of observing a moral fact, that women like vain men,” de Marsay continued, responding to Paul’s declaration with a meaningful glance. “Do you know why women like vain men? My friend, conceited men are the only men who take care of themselves. Now, doesn’t taking excessive care of yourself imply that you’re looking after the good of the other person in yourself? The man who doesn’t belong to himself is precisely the man women are fond of. Love is essentially a thief. I’m not talking about that excess of cleanliness they’re crazy about. Have you ever found a woman who was passionately in love with a slovenly person, even one who was a remarkable man? If ever such a thing occurred, we’d have to attribute it to the whims of a pregnant woman, those weird ideas that come into her head and are told to everyone without a second thought. On the contrary, I have seen remarkable people quite simply dropped because of their negligence. A vain man who takes care of his appearance is one who takes care of a foolish thing, mere trifles. And what is woman? A mere trifle, an ensemble of foolish things. With two words spoken into the air, can’t we make her work for four hours? She is certain the
vain man will take care of her, since he doesn’t think about big things. She will never play second fiddle to fame, ambition, politics, art, those big public girls who she thinks of as her rivals. Further, vain men have the courage to cover themselves with ridicule to please a woman, and her heart is full of consideration for a man who is made ridiculous by love. Finally, a conceited man can only be conceited if he has some reason to be so. Women are the ones who give us this rank. The conceited man is the colonel of love, he has affairs, he has his regiment of women to command! My dear friend! In Paris, everything is known, and a man cannot be conceited here
gratis
. You who have only one woman and who may have reason to have only one, if you tried to seem full of yourself, you’d not only become ridiculous, you’d be dead. You’d become a walking caricature, one of those men inevitably condemned to do one single thing. You would signify
foolishness
the way M. de Lafayette signifies America; M. de Talleyrand, diplomacy; Désaugiers, song; M. de Ségur, romance. If they depart from their specialty, everyone stops believing in the value of what they do. That’s what we’re like in France, always supremely unfair! M. de Talleyrand might be a great financier, M. de Lafayette a tyrant, and Désaugiers an administrator. You could have forty women the following year, but publicly they
wouldn’t credit you with even one. Thus conceit, my friend Paul, is the sign of an unquestionable power acquired over the female population. A man loved by many women passes for having superior qualities; and then he can have whomever he likes, the wretch! But do you think it’s nothing to have the right to come into a salon, survey everyone there from over your cravat or through a monocle, and be able to scorn the most superior man there if he’s wearing an outdated waistcoat? Laurent, you’re hurting me! After lunch, Paul, we’ll go to the Tuileries to see the adorable Girl with the Golden Eyes.”

When, after an excellent meal, the two young men had paced up and down the Feuillants terrace and the wide lane in the Tuileries, they didn’t meet the sublime Paquita Valdès anywhere, on whose account fifty of the most elegant young men in Paris were there, all perfumed with musk, wearing cravats, boots, spurs, using their riding crops, walking, talking, laughing, telling everyone to go to the devil.

“Bullseye!” Henri said, “the most excellent idea in the world has just come to me. This girl gets letters from London, so we have to buy or bribe the mailman, open a letter, read it of course, then slip a little
billet doux
into it, and seal it back up. The old tyrant,
crudel tiranno
, must know the person who writes the letters that come from London, and doesn’t distrust them.”

The next day, de Marsay came again to stroll in the sun on the Feuillants terrace, and saw Paquita Valdès there: Already passion had made her grow even more beautiful to him. He completely lost his head over those eyes whose rays seemed to have the nature of the sun’s, and whose ardor epitomized that of her perfect body, seat of voluptuous delight. De Marsay was burning to brush against the dress of this seductive girl when they met in their walk; but his attempts were always in vain. When he had passed the duenna and Paquita in order to be able to be next to the Girl with the Golden Eyes when they turned back, Paquita, no less impatient, quickly came forward, and de Marsay felt his hand pressed by her in a way that was both so quick and so passionately significant that he thought he had received the shock of an electric spark. In an instant all the emotions of his youth welled up in his heart. When the two lovers looked at each other, Paquita seemed ashamed; she lowered her eyes so as not to see Henri’s again, but her gaze slipped down to look at the feet and figure of the one whom women before the revolution used to call ‘their conqueror.’

“I will definitely have this woman as my mistress,” Henri said to himself.

Following her to the end of the terrace, on the edge of the Place Louis-XV, he saw the old
Marquis de San-Réal who was advancing, propped on the arm of his valet, walking with all the precaution of a gouty, doddering old man. Doña Concha, who mistrusted Henri, made Paquita go between her and the old man.

“Oh! You,” de Marsay said to himself, aiming a scornful look at the duenna, “if we can’t make you give in, with a little opium we’ll put you to sleep. We know our mythology, and the fable of Argus.”

Before she climbed into the carriage, the Girl with the Golden Eyes exchanged some glances with her lover about whose meaning there could be no doubt, and which delighted Henri; but the duenna caught one of them, and spoke some words brusquely to Paquita, who threw herself into the carriage with a despairing air. For some days Paquita didn’t come to the Tuileries. Laurent, who, by order of his master, went to keep watch by her mansion, learned from the neighbors that neither the two women nor the old Marquis had gone out since the day when the duenna had surprised a look between the young lady under her guard and Henri. The link that united the two lovers, so weak, was already broken, then.

A few days later, without anyone knowing how, de Marsay had succeeded at his plan: He had a seal and some wax that were completely similar to the seal and wax that sealed the letters sent from
London to Mlle. Valdès, paper similar to the kind the correspondent used, and all the utensils and blocking stamps necessary to put English and French stamps and postmarks on it. He had written the following letter, upon which he set all the marks of a letter sent from London.

“They actually believe that, the poor creatures!” de Marsay said to himself; “but they are right to. What would we think of a woman who wouldn’t let herself be seduced by a love letter accompanied by such convincing circumstances?”

This letter was delivered by Master Moinot, the mailman, the next day, around eight in the morning, to the concierge of the San-Réal mansion.

To get closer to the battlefield, de Marsay had come to lunch at Paul’s house, on the Rue de la Pépinière. At two o’clock, when the two friends were laughingly regaling each other with the discomfiture of a young man who had wanted to live elegantly without any well-established wealth, and as they were trying to think of a good end to the story, Henri’s coachman came looking for his master at Paul’s, and presented him with a mysterious individual who wanted urgently to speak with him. This character was a mulatto from whom Talma, the great actor, could certainly have drawn inspiration to play Othello, if he had met him. Never did an African face more eloquently express
grandeur in vengeance, rapidity of suspicion, promptitude in the execution of a thought, the strength of the Moor and his childish impulsiveness. His black eyes had the fixed look of the eyes of a bird of prey, and they were set, like a vulture’s, beneath a dusky membrane void of eyelashes. There was something menacing about his small, low forehead. Obviously this man was under the yoke of one single thought. The sinews of his arm didn’t belong to him. He was followed in by a man that any sort of consciousness, whether of those shivering in Greenland or those sweating in New England, would describe with this phrase:
He was an unhappy man
. With this phrase, anyone can imagine his appearance, can represent him for themselves according to the ideas particular to each country. But who can imagine his pale, wrinkled face, reddened at nose and ears, and his long beard? Who can see his yellowish whipcord cravat, his thick collar, his battered hat, his greenish frock coat, his pitiful trousers, his shriveled waistcoat, his fake gold tiepin, his muddy shoes, the laces of which had been mired in muck? Who will understand him in all the immensity of his present and past misery? Who? Only the Parisian. The unhappy man of Paris is the complete unhappy man, for he encounters enough joy to know just how unhappy he is. The mulatto seemed to be an executioner under Louis XI leading a man to be hanged.

“Who has fished up these two characters for us?” Henri asked.

“Good Lord! One of them really gives me the shivers,” Paul replied.

“You—the one who looks most Christian of you two—who are you?” Henri said, looking at the unhappy man.

The mulatto stayed with his eyes fixed on these two young men, like a man who heard nothing, but who was still trying to guess something from gestures and lip movements.

“I am a public letter-writer and an interpreter. I live by the Law Courts, and my name is Poincet.”

“Fine! And that one?” Henri said to Poincet, pointing at the mulatto.

“I don’t know; he only speaks a kind of Spanish dialect, and he brought me here to be able to communicate with you.”

The mulatto took out of his pocket the letter Henri had written to Paquita, and gave it to Henri, who threw it in the fire.

“Well, now something’s starting to take shape,” Henri said to himself. “Paul, leave us alone for a moment.”

“I translated this letter for him, the interpreter continued when they were alone. “When it was translated, he went somewhere, I don’t know where. Then he came back looking for me, to bring me here, promising me two louis.”

“What do you have to say to me, Chinaman?” Henri asked.

“I didn’t mention the Chinese part,” the interpreter said as he waited for the mulatto’s reply.

“He says, Monsieur,” the interpreter continued after listening to the unknown man, “that you have to be on Boulevard Montmartre, near the café, at 10:30 tomorrow night. You’ll see a carriage there, which you will climb into, saying to the one who will be ready to open the door the password
cortejo
—a Spanish word that means
lover,”
Poincet added, directing a congratulatory look at Henri.

“Very well!”

The mulatto wanted to give Poincet two louis; but de Marsay wouldn’t allow this and paid the interpreter himself; as he was paying him, the mulatto said something.

“What is he saying?”

“He is warning me,” the unhappy man replied, “that, if I commit one single indiscretion, he will strangle me. He looks kind enough, and he looks quite capable of doing so.”

“I’m sure he is,” Henri replied. “He would do just what he says.”

“He adds,” the interpreter continued, “that the person whose messenger he is begs you, for you and for her, to act with the greatest prudence, because the daggers raised over your heads would
fall into your hearts, and no human agency could save you from them.”