An observer, and Rastignac instantly became an observer, could read the
whole history, the character and customs of caste, in the phrase, in the
tones of her voice, in her glance and bearing. He caught a glimpse of
the iron hand beneath the velvet glove--the personality, the egoism
beneath the manner, the wood beneath the varnish. In short, he heard
that unmistakable I THE KING that issues from the plumed canopy of
the throne, and finds its last echo under the crest of the simplest
gentleman.
Eugene had trusted too implicitly to the generosity of a woman; he
could not believe in her haughtiness. Like all the unfortunate, he had
subscribed, in all good faith, the generous compact which should bind
the benefactor to the recipient, and the first article in that bond,
between two large-hearted natures, is a perfect equality. The kindness
which knits two souls together is as rare, as divine, and as little
understood as the passion of love, for both love and kindness are the
lavish generosity of noble natures. Rastignac was set upon going to the
Duchesse de Carigliano’s ball, so he swallowed down this rebuff.
“Madame,” he faltered out, “I would not have come to trouble you about
a trifling matter; be so kind as to permit me to see you later, I can
wait.”
“Very well, come and dine with me,” she said, a little confused by
the harsh way in which she had spoken, for this lady was as genuinely
kind-hearted as she was high-born.
Eugene was touched by this sudden relenting, but none the less he said
to himself as he went away, “Crawl in the dust, put up with every kind
of treatment. What must the rest of the world be like when one of the
kindest of women forgets all her promises of befriending me in a moment,
and tosses me aside like an old shoe? So it is every one for himself? It
is true that her house is not a shop, and I have put myself in the wrong
by needing her help. You should cut your way through the world like a
cannon ball, as Vautrin said.”
But the student’s bitter thoughts were soon dissipated by the pleasure
which he promised himself in this dinner with the Vicomtesse. Fate
seemed to determine that the smallest accidents in his life should
combine to urge him into a career, which the terrible sphinx of the
Maison Vauquer had described as a field of battle where you must either
slay or be slain, and cheat to avoid being cheated. You leave your
conscience and your heart at the barriers, and wear a mask on entering
into this game of grim earnest, where, as in ancient Sparta, you must
snatch your prize without being detected if you would deserve the crown.
On his return he found the Vicomtesse gracious and kindly, as she had
always been to him. They went together to the dining-room, where the
Vicomte was waiting for his wife. In the time of the Restoration the
luxury of the table was carried, as is well known, to the highest
degree, and M. de Beauseant, like many jaded men of the world, had few
pleasures left but those of good cheer; in this matter, in fact, he was
a gourmand of the schools of Louis XVIII. and of the Duc d’Escars, and
luxury was supplemented by splendor. Eugene, dining for the first time
in a house where the traditions of grandeur had descended through many
generations, had never seen any spectacle like this that now met his
eyes. In the time of the Empire, balls had always ended with a supper,
because the officers who took part in them must be fortified for
immediate service, and even in Paris might be called upon to leave the
ballroom for the battlefield. This arrangement had gone out of fashion
under the Monarchy, and Eugene had so far only been asked to dances.
The self-possession which pre-eminently distinguished him in later life
already stood him in good stead, and he did not betray his amazement.
Yet as he saw for the first time the finely wrought silver plate, the
completeness of every detail, the sumptuous dinner, noiselessly served,
it was difficult for such an ardent imagination not to prefer this life
of studied and refined luxury to the hardships of the life which he had
chosen only that morning.
His thoughts went back for a moment to the lodging-house, and with a
feeling of profound loathing, he vowed to himself that at New Year he
would go; prompted at least as much by a desire to live among cleaner
surroundings as by a wish to shake off Vautrin, whose huge hand he
seemed to feel on his shoulder at that moment. When you consider the
numberless forms, clamorous or mute, that corruption takes in Paris,
common-sense begins to wonder what mental aberration prompted the State
to establish great colleges and schools there, and assemble young men in
the capital; how it is that pretty women are respected, or that the gold
coin displayed in the money-changer’s wooden saucers does not take to
itself wings in the twinkling of an eye; and when you come to think
further, how comparatively few cases of crime there are, and to count
up the misdemeanors committed by youth, is there not a certain amount of
respect due to these patient Tantaluses who wrestle with themselves and
nearly always come off victorious? The struggles of the poor student
in Paris, if skilfully drawn, would furnish a most dramatic picture of
modern civilization.
In vain Mme. de Beauseant looked at Eugene as if asking him to speak;
the student was tongue-tied in the Vicomte’s presence.
“Are you going to take me to the Italiens this evening?” the Vicomtesse
asked her husband.
“You cannot doubt that I should obey you with pleasure,” he answered,
and there was a sarcastic tinge in his politeness which Eugene did not
detect, “but I ought to go to meet some one at the Varietes.”
“His mistress,” said she to herself.
“Then, is not Ajuda coming for you this evening?” inquired the Vicomte.
“No,” she answered, petulantly.
“Very well, then, if you really must have an arm, take that of M. de
Rastignac.”
The Vicomtess turned to Eugene with a smile.
“That would be a very compromising step for you,” she said.
“‘A Frenchman loves danger, because in danger there is glory,’ to quote
M. de Chateaubriand,” said Rastignac, with a bow.
A few moments later he was sitting beside Mme. de Beauseant in
a brougham, that whirled them through the streets of Paris to a
fashionable theatre. It seemed to him that some fairy magic had suddenly
transported him into a box facing the stage. All the lorgnettes of the
house were pointed at him as he entered, and at the Vicomtesse in her
charming toilette. He went from enchantment to enchantment.
“You must talk to me, you know,” said Mme. de Beauseant. “Ah! look!
There is Mme. de Nucingen in the third box from ours. Her sister and M.
de Trailles are on the other side.”
The Vicomtesse glanced as she spoke at the box where Mlle. de Rochefide
should have been; M. d’Ajuda was not there, and Mme. de Beauseant’s face
lighted up in a marvelous way.
“She is charming,” said Eugene, after looking at Mme. de Nucingen.
“She has white eyelashes.”
“Yes, but she has such a pretty slender figure!”
“Her hands are large.”
“Such beautiful eyes!”
“Her face is long.”
“Yes, but length gives distinction.”
“It is lucky for her that she has some distinction in her face. Just see
how she fidgets with her opera-glass! The Goriot blood shows itself in
every movement,” said the Vicomtesse, much to Eugene’s astonishment.
Indeed, Mme. de Beauseant seemed to be engaged in making a survey of
the house, and to be unconscious of Mme. Nucingen’s existence; but no
movement made by the latter was lost upon the Vicomtesse. The house was
full of the loveliest women in Paris, so that Delphine de Nucingen was
not a little flattered to receive the undivided attention of Mme. de
Beauseant’s young, handsome, and well-dressed cousin, who seemed to have
no eyes for any one else.
“If you look at her so persistently, you will make people talk, M. de
Rastignac. You will never succeed if you fling yourself at any one’s
head like that.”
“My dear cousin,” said Eugene, “you have protected me indeed so far,
and now if you would complete your work, I only ask of you a favor which
will cost you but little, and be of very great service to me. I have
lost my heart.”
“Already!”
“Yes.”
“And to that woman!”
“How could I aspire to find any one else to listen to me?” he asked,
with a keen glance at his cousin. “Her Grace the Duchesse de Carigliano
is a friend of the Duchesse de Berri,” he went on, after a pause; “you
are sure to see her, will you be so kind as to present me to her, and to
take me to her ball on Monday? I shall meet Mme. de Nucingen there, and
enter into my first skirmish.”
“Willingly,” she said. “If you have a liking for her already, your
affairs of the heart are like to prosper. That is de Marsay over there
in the Princesse Galathionne’s box. Mme. de Nucingen is racked with
jealousy. There is no better time for approaching a woman, especially
if she happens to be a banker’s wife. All those ladies of the
Chaussee-d’Antin love revenge.”
“Then, what would you do yourself in such a case?”
“I should suffer in silence.”
At this point the Marquis d’Ajuda appeared in Mme. de Beauseant’s box.
“I have made a muddle of my affairs to come to you,” he said, “and I am
telling you about it, so that it may not be a sacrifice.”
Eugene saw the glow of joy on the Vicomtesse’s face, and knew that this
was love, and learned the difference between love and the affectations
of Parisian coquetry. He admired his cousin, grew mute, and yielded his
place to M. d’Ajuda with a sigh.
“How noble, how sublime a woman is when she loves like that!” he said to
himself. “And _he_ could forsake her for a doll! Oh! how could any one
forsake her?”
There was a boy’s passionate indignation in his heart. He could have
flung himself at Mme. de Beauseant’s feet; he longed for the power of
the devil if he could snatch her away and hide her in his heart, as an
eagle snatches up some white yearling from the plains and bears it to
its eyrie. It was humiliating to him to think that in all this gallery
of fair pictures he had not one picture of his own. “To have a mistress
and an almost royal position is a sign of power,” he said to himself.
And he looked at Mme. de Nucingen as a man measures another who has
insulted him.
The Vicomtesse turned to him, and the expression of her eyes thanked him
a thousand times for his discretion. The first act came to an end just
then.
“Do you know Mme. de Nucingen well enough to present M. de Rastignac to
her?” she asked of the Marquis d’Ajuda.
“She will be delighted,” said the Marquis. The handsome Portuguese rose
as he spoke and took the student’s arm, and in another moment Eugene
found himself in Mme. de Nucingen’s box.
“Madame,” said the Marquis, “I have the honor of presenting to you the
Chevalier Eugene de Rastignac; he is a cousin of Mme. de Beauseant’s.
You have made so deep an impression upon him, that I thought I would
fill up the measure of his happiness by bringing him nearer to his
divinity.”
Words spoken half jestingly to cover their somewhat disrespectful
import; but such an implication, if carefully disguised, never gives
offence to a woman. Mme. de Nucingen smiled, and offered Eugene the
place which her husband had just left.
“I do not venture to suggest that you should stay with me, monsieur,”
she said. “Those who are so fortunate as to be in Mme. de Beauseant’s
company do not desire to leave it.”
“Madame,” Eugene said, lowering his voice, “I think that to please my
cousin I should remain with you. Before my lord Marquis came we were
speaking of you and of your exceedingly distinguished appearance,” he
added aloud.
M. d’Ajuda turned and left them.
“Are you really going to stay with me, monsieur?” asked the Baroness.
“Then we shall make each other’s acquaintance. Mme. de Restaud told me
about you, and has made me anxious to meet you.”
“She must be very insincere, then, for she has shut her door on me.”
“What?”
“Madame, I will tell you honestly the reason why; but I must crave your
indulgence before confiding such a secret to you. I am your father’s
neighbor; I had no idea that Mme. de Restaud was his daughter. I was
rash enough to mention his name; I meant no harm, but I annoyed your
sister and her husband very much. You cannot think how severely the
Duchesse de Langeais and my cousin blamed this apostasy on a daughter’s
part, as a piece of bad taste. I told them all about it, and they both
burst out laughing. Then Mme. de Beauseant made some comparison between
you and your sister, speaking in high terms of you, and saying how very
fond you were of my neighbor, M. Goriot. And, indeed, how could you help
loving him? He adores you so passionately that I am jealous already. We
talked about you this morning for two hours. So this evening I was quite
full of all that your father had told me, and while I was dining with my
cousin I said that you could not be as beautiful as affectionate. Mme.
de Beauseant meant to gratify such warm admiration, I think, when she
brought me here, telling me, in her gracious way, that I should see
you.”
“Then, even now, I owe you a debt of gratitude, monsieur,” said the
banker’s wife. “We shall be quite old friends in a little while.”
“Although a friendship with you could not be like an ordinary
friendship,” said Rastignac; “I should never wish to be your friend.”
Such stereotyped phrases as these, in the mouths of beginners, possess
an unfailing charm for women, and are insipid only when read coldly; for
a young man’s tone, glance and attitude give a surpassing eloquence to
the banal phrases. Mme. de Nucingen thought that Rastignac was adorable.
Then, woman-like, being at a loss how to reply to the student’s
outspoken admiration, she answered a previous remark.
“Yes, it is very wrong of my sister to treat our poor father as she
does,” she said; “he has been a Providence to us. It was not until M. de
Nucingen positively ordered me only to receive him in the mornings that
I yielded the point. But I have been unhappy about it for a long while;
I have shed many tears over it. This violence to my feelings, with my
husband’s brutal treatment, have been two causes of my unhappy married
life. There is certainly no woman in Paris whose lot seems more enviable
than mine, and yet, in reality, there is not one so much to be pitied.
You will think I must be out of my senses to talk to you like this; but
you know my father, and I cannot regard you as a stranger.”
“You will find no one,” said Eugene, “who longs as eagerly as I do to be
yours. What do all women seek? Happiness.” (He answered his own question
in low, vibrating tones.) “And if happiness for a woman means that she
is to be loved and adored, to have a friend to whom she can pour out her
wishes, her fancies, her sorrows and joys; to whom she can lay bare
her heart and soul, and all her fair defects and her gracious virtues,
without fear of a betrayal; believe me, the devotion and the warmth that
never fails can only be found in the heart of a young man who, at a bare
sign from you, would go to his death, who neither knows nor cares to
know anything as yet of the world, because you will be all the world to
him. I myself, you see (you will laugh at my simplicity), have just come
from a remote country district; I am quite new to this world of Paris; I
have only known true and loving hearts; and I made up my mind that here
I should find no love. Then I chanced to meet my cousin, and to see
my cousin’s heart from very near; I have divined the inexhaustible
treasures of passion, and, like Cherubino, I am the lover of all women,
until the day comes when I find _the_ woman to whom I may devote myself.
As soon as I saw you, as soon as I came into the theatre this evening, I
felt myself borne towards you as if by the current of a stream. I had so
often thought of you already, but I had never dreamed that you would be
so beautiful! Mme. de Beauseant told me that I must not look so much at
you. She does not know the charm of your red lips, your fair face, nor
see how soft your eyes are.... I also am beginning to talk nonsense; but
let me talk.”
Nothing pleases a woman better than to listen to such whispered words as
these; the most puritanical among them listens even when she ought not
to reply to them; and Rastignac, having once begun, continued to pour
out his story, dropping his voice, that she might lean and listen; and
Mme. de Nucingen, smiling, glanced from time to time at de Marsay, who
still sat in the Princesse Galathionne’s box.
Rastignac did not leave Mme. de Nucingen till her husband came to take
her home.
“Madame,” Eugene said, “I shall have the pleasure of calling upon you
before the Duchesse de Carigliano’s ball.”
“If Matame infites you to come,” said the Baron, a thickset Alsatian,
with indications of a sinister cunning in his full-moon countenance,
“you are quide sure of being well receifed.”
“My affairs seem to be in a promising way,” said Eugene to himself.--
“‘Can you love me?’ I asked her, and she did not resent it. “The bit is in
the horse’s mouth, and I have only to mount and ride;” and with that
he went to pay his respects to Mme. de Beauseant, who was leaving the
theatre on d’Ajuda’s arm.
The student did not know that the Baroness’ thoughts had been wandering;
that she was even then expecting a letter from de Marsay, one of those
letters that bring about a rupture that rends the soul; so, happy in his
delusion, Eugene went with the Vicomtesse to the peristyle, where people
were waiting till their carriages were announced.
“That cousin of yours is hardly recognizable for the same man,” said the
Portuguese laughingly to the Vicomtesse, when Eugene had taken leave of
them. “He will break the bank. He is as supple as an eel; he will go a
long way, of that I am sure. Who else could have picked out a woman for
him, as you did, just when she needed consolation?”
“But it is not certain that she does not still love the faithless
lover,” said Mme. de Beauseant.
The student meanwhile walked back from the Theatre-Italien to the Rue
Neuve-Sainte-Genevieve, making the most delightful plans as he went. He
had noticed how closely Mme. de Restaud had scrutinized him when he sat
beside Mme. de Nucingen, and inferred that the Countess’ doors would not
be closed in the future. Four important houses were now open to him--for
he meant to stand well with the Marechale; he had four supporters in the
inmost circle of society in Paris. Even now it was clear to him that,
once involved in this intricate social machinery, he must attach himself
to a spoke of the wheel that was to turn and raise his fortunes; he
would not examine himself too curiously as to the methods, but he was
certain of the end, and conscious of the power to gain and keep his
hold.
“If Mme. de Nucingen takes an interest in me, I will teach her how to
manage her husband. That husband of hers is a great speculator; he might
put me in the way of making a fortune by a single stroke.”
He did not say this bluntly in so many words; as yet, indeed, he was
not sufficient of a diplomatist to sum up a situation, to see its
possibilities at a glance, and calculate the chances in his favor. These
were nothing but hazy ideas that floated over his mental horizon; they
were less cynical than Vautrin’s notions; but if they had been tried in
the crucible of conscience, no very pure result would have issued from
the test. It is by a succession of such like transactions that men sink
at last to the level of the relaxed morality of this epoch, when there
have never been so few of those who square their courses with their
theories, so few of those noble characters who do not yield to
temptation, for whom the slightest deviation from the line of rectitude
is a crime. To these magnificent types of uncompromising Right we owe
two masterpieces--the Alceste of Moliere, and, in our own day, the
characters of Jeanie Deans and her father in Sir Walter Scott’s novel.
Perhaps a work which should chronicle the opposite course, which should
trace out all the devious courses through which a man of the world, a
man of ambitions, drags his conscience, just steering clear of crime
that he may gain his end and yet save appearances, such a chronicle
would be no less edifying and no less dramatic.
Rastignac went home. He was fascinated by Mme. de Nucingen; he seemed to
see her before him, slender and graceful as a swallow. He recalled the
intoxicating sweetness of her eyes, her fair hair, the delicate silken
tissue of the skin, beneath which it almost seemed to him that he could
see the blood coursing; the tones of her voice still exerted a spell
over him; he had forgotten nothing; his walk perhaps heated his
imagination by sending a glow of warmth through his veins. He knocked
unceremoniously at Goriot’s door.
“I have seen Mme. Delphine, neighbor,” said he.
“Where?”
“At the Italiens.”
“Did she enjoy it?.... Just come inside,” and the old man left his bed,
unlocked the door, and promptly returned again.
