XCV. Le père et la fille.
XCV
The Father and the Daughter.
We saw, in the previous chapter, Madame Danglars come to announce officially to Madame de Villefort the impending marriage of Mademoiselle Eugénie Danglars with Monsieur Andrea Cavalcanti.
This official announcement, which indicated or seemed to indicate a resolution taken by all those interested in this great affair, had nevertheless been preceded by a scene for which we owe our readers an account.
We therefore beg them to step back and transport themselves, on the very morning of that day of great catastrophes, into that finely gilded salon we have already made known to them, and which was the pride of its owner, Baron Danglars.
In this salon, indeed, toward ten o'clock in the morning, the baron himself had been pacing for some minutes, thoughtful and visibly anxious, looking toward every door and stopping at every sound.
When his store of patience was exhausted, he called the valet.
“Étienne,” he said, “see why Mademoiselle Eugénie asked me to wait for her in the salon, and find out why she is keeping me waiting so long.”
This outburst of ill humor spent, the baron regained some composure.
In fact, Mademoiselle Danglars, after waking, had requested an audience with her father, and had designated the gilded salon as the place for that audience. The strangeness of this step, and its official character especially, had not a little surprised the banker, who had immediately complied with his daughter’s wish by going to the salon first.
Étienne soon returned from his errand.
“Mademoiselle’s maid,” he said, “told me that mademoiselle was finishing her toilette and would not be long in coming.”
Danglars made a sign with his head indicating that he was satisfied. Danglars, before the world and even before his servants, affected the good-natured and weak father: this was one face of the role he had imposed upon himself in the popular comedy he was playing; it was a countenance he had adopted and which seemed to him to suit, as it suited the straight profiles of the masks of fathers in ancient theater to have the right lip curled and smiling, while the left side had the lip lowered and whimpering.
Let us hasten to say that, in private, the curled and smiling lip dropped to the level of the lowered and whimpering lip; so that, for the most part, the good-natured man disappeared to make way for the brutal husband and the absolute father.
“Why the devil does this madwoman who wants to speak to me, as she claims, not simply come to my study,” muttered Danglars, “and why does she want to speak to me here?”
He was turning this troubling thought over in his brain for the twentieth time, when the door opened and Eugénie appeared, dressed in a black satin gown embroidered with matte flowers of the same color, her hair dressed, and gloved as if she were about to take her seat in her armchair at the Théâtre-Italien.
“Well, Eugénie, what is it then?” cried the father. “And why the solemn salon, when one is so comfortable in my private study?
“You are perfectly right, sir,” replied Eugénie, motioning to her father that he might sit, “and you have just posed there two questions that summarize in advance the whole conversation we are about to have. I shall therefore answer both, and against the laws of habit, the second first, as being the less complex. I chose the salon, sir, as the meeting place, in order to avoid the unpleasant impressions and influences of a banker’s study. Those account books, gilded though they be, those drawers locked like fortress gates, those masses of banknotes come from who knows where, and those quantities of letters coming from England, Holland, Spain, the Indies, China and Peru, act in general strangely upon a father’s mind and make him forget that there is in the world an interest greater and more sacred than that of social position and the opinion of his clients. I have therefore chosen this salon where you see, smiling and happy, in their magnificent frames, your portrait, mine, my mother’s, and all sorts of pastoral landscapes and touching shepherd scenes. I place great trust in the power of outward impressions. Perhaps, with you especially, this is an error; but what would you have? I should not be an artist if a few illusions did not remain to me.”
“Very well,” answered Monsieur Danglars, who had listened to the tirade with imperturbable coolness, but without understanding a word of it, absorbed as he was, like every man full of ulterior motives, in seeking the thread of his own idea within his interlocutor’s ideas.
“There, then, the second point is cleared up or nearly so,” said Eugénie, without the least unease and with that wholly masculine assurance which characterized her gesture and her speech, “and you seem satisfied with the explanation. Now let us return to the first. You asked me why I had solicited this audience; I shall tell you in two words: here is the thing, sir: I do not wish to marry Monsieur le Comte Andrea Cavalcanti.”
Danglars bounded in his armchair, and, from the jolt, raised his eyes and arms to heaven at once.
“Good heavens, yes, sir,” continued Eugénie, still as calm. “You are astonished, I see it well, for since this whole little affair has been underway, I have shown not the slightest opposition, certain as I always am, when the moment comes, to oppose frankly, to those who did not consult me and to things that displease me, a frank and absolute will. Yet this time that tranquility, that passivity, as the philosophers say, came from another source; it came from the fact that, a submissive and devoted daughter… (a slight smile traced itself upon the young girl’s crimson lips), I was trying obedience.”
“Well?” asked Danglars.
“Well, sir,” resumed Eugénie, “I tried to the utmost of my strength, and now that the moment has arrived, despite all the efforts I have made upon myself, I feel incapable of obeying.”
“But finally,” said Danglars, who, a secondary mind, seemed at first quite stunned by the weight of this pitiless logic, whose composure betrayed so much premeditation and force of will, “the reason for this refusal, Eugénie, the reason?”
“The reason,” replied the young girl, “oh! my God, it is not that the man is uglier, or more foolish, or more disagreeable than another, no; Monsieur Andrea Cavalcanti may even pass, to those who look at men by face and figure, for being of a rather fine model; it is not either because my heart is less touched by him than by any other: this would be a schoolgirl’s reason which I regard as quite beneath me; I love absolutely no one, sir, you know it well, do you not? I do not therefore see why, without absolute necessity, I should go and encumber my life with an eternal companion. Did not the sage say somewhere: ‘Nothing in excess’; and elsewhere: ‘Carry all with yourself’? I was even taught these two aphorisms in Latin and Greek: the one is, I believe, from Phaedrus, and the other from Bias. Well, my dear father, in the shipwreck of life, for life is an eternal shipwreck of our hopes, I throw my useless baggage into the sea, that is all, and I remain with my will, disposed to live perfectly alone and consequently perfectly free.”
“Unhappy one! unhappy one!” murmured Danglars, turning pale, for he knew by long experience the solidity of the obstacle he encountered so suddenly.
“Unhappy,” resumed Eugénie, “unhappy, you say, sir? But not at all, in truth, and the exclamation seems to me quite theatrical and affected. Happy, on the contrary, for I ask you, what do I lack? The world finds me beautiful, which is something for being favorably received. I love favorable receptions, I: they brighten faces, and those around me seem to me still less ugly. I am endowed with some wit and a certain relative sensibility which permits me to draw from general existence, to bring into my own, what I find good there, as the monkey does when he cracks the green nut to draw out what it contains. I am rich, for you have one of the fine fortunes of France, for I am your only daughter, and you are not stingy to the degree that the fathers of the Porte-Saint-Martin and the Gaîté are, who disinherit their daughters because they will not give them grandchildren. Besides, the provident law has taken from you the right to disinherit me, at least entirely, just as it has taken from you the power to compel me to marry this or that gentleman. Thus, beautiful, witty, adorned with some talent as they say in comic operas, and rich! but that is happiness, sir! Why then do you call me unhappy?”
Danglars, seeing his daughter smiling and proud to the point of insolence, could not repress a movement of brutality which betrayed itself in a burst of voice, but that was the only one. Under his daughter’s questioning gaze, face to face with that black brow, furrowed by interrogation, he turned prudently and calmed himself at once, tamed by the iron hand of circumspection.
“Indeed, my daughter,” he answered with a smile, “you are all that you boast of being, save one thing, my daughter; I will not too abruptly tell you which: I prefer to let you guess it.”
Eugénie looked at Danglars, much surprised that one of the jewels of the crown of pride she had just so superbly set upon her head was being disputed.
“My daughter,” continued the banker, “you have perfectly explained to me what were the sentiments presiding over the resolutions of a daughter like you when she has decided that she will not marry. Now it is for me to tell you what are the motives of a father like me when he has decided that his daughter shall marry.”
Eugénie inclined her head, not as a submissive daughter who listens, but as an adversary ready to debate, who waits.
“My daughter,” continued Danglars, “when a father asks his daughter to take a husband, he always has some reason for desiring her marriage. Some are afflicted with the mania you spoke of just now, that is to say, of seeing themselves live again in their grandchildren. I have not that weakness; I begin by telling you so; the joys of family are nearly indifferent to me. I may confess this to a daughter I know to be philosophical enough to understand this indifference and not to make a crime of it.
“Very good,” said Eugénie; “let us speak plainly, sir, I like that.”
“Oh!” said Danglars, “you see that, without sharing, in general theory, your sympathy for frankness, I submit to it when I believe the circumstance invites me to. I shall therefore continue. I proposed a husband to you, not for you, for in truth I was not thinking of you in the least at that moment. You love frankness, there is some, I hope; but because I had need that you take this husband as soon as possible, for certain commercial combinations I am now establishing.
Eugénie made a movement.
“It is as I have the honor to tell you, my daughter, and you must not blame me for it, for it is you who force me to it; it is in spite of myself, you understand well, that I enter into these arithmetical explanations, with an artist like you, who fears to enter a banker’s study to receive there disagreeable and unpoetic impressions or sensations.
“But in that banker’s study, into which however you were good enough to come the day before yesterday to ask me for the thousand francs I allow you each month for your fancies, know, my dear miss, that one learns many things, to the use even of young persons who will not marry. One learns there, for example, and out of regard for your nervous susceptibility I shall teach it to you in this salon, one learns that a banker’s credit is his physical and moral life, that credit sustains a man as breath animates the body, and Monsieur de Monte-Cristo made me a speech on that once which I have never forgotten. One learns that as credit withdraws the body becomes a corpse and that this must happen in very little time to the banker who honors himself by being the father of a daughter so good a logician.”
But Eugénie, instead of bending, straightened under the blow.
“Ruined!” said she.
“You have found the exact expression, my daughter, the right expression,” said Danglars, digging his nails into his chest, while keeping upon his harsh face the smile of a man without heart, but not without wit; “ruined! that is it.”
“Ah!” said Eugénie.
“Yes, ruined! Well, there it is known then, that horror-filled secret, as the tragic poet says.
“Now, my daughter, learn from my own mouth how this misfortune may, through you, become less; I will not say for me, but for you.
“Oh!” cried Eugénie, “you are a poor physiognomist, sir, if you imagine it is for myself that I deplore the catastrophe you lay before me.
“I, ruined! and what is it to me? Do I not retain my talent? Can I not, like Pasta, like Malibran, like Grisi, make myself that which you would never have given me, whatever your fortune, a hundred or a hundred fifty thousand livres of income that I shall owe to none but myself, and which, instead of coming to me as came those poor twelve thousand francs you gave me with surly looks and words of reproach for my prodigality, will come accompanied by acclamations, bravos and flowers? And if I had not that talent of which your smile proves you doubt, should I not still retain that furious love of independence, which will always serve me in place of all treasures, and which dominates in me even to the instinct of self-preservation?
“No, it is not for myself that I grieve; I shall always know well how to get out of trouble, I; my books, my pencils, my piano, all things that cost little and that I shall always be able to procure, will always remain to me. You perhaps think I afflict myself for Madame Danglars; undeceive yourself again: either I am grossly mistaken, or my mother has taken all her precautions against the catastrophe that threatens you and which will pass without touching her; she has put herself out of reach, I hope, and it was not in watching over me that she could have been distracted from her preoccupations of fortune, for, thank God, she left me all my independence under the pretext that I loved my freedom.
“Oh no, sir, since my childhood I have seen too many things pass around me; I have understood them all too well, for misfortune to make more impression upon me than it deserves; since I have known myself, I have been loved by no one; so much the worse! that has led me quite naturally to love no one; so much the better! Now you have my confession of faith.”
“Then,” said Danglars, pale with a wrath which took not its source in offended paternal love; “then, mademoiselle, you persist in wishing to consummate my ruin?”
“Your ruin! I, said Eugénie, consummate your ruin! what do you mean? I do not understand.”
“So much the better, that leaves me a ray of hope; listen.”
“I listen,” said Eugénie, looking so fixedly at her father that he needed an effort not to lower his eyes beneath the powerful gaze of the young girl.
“Monsieur Cavalcanti,” continued Danglars, “marries you, and, in marrying you, brings a dowry of three millions which he places with me.”
“Ah! very good,” said Eugénie with sovereign contempt, smoothing one glove over the other.
“You think I would cheat you of those three millions?” said Danglars; “not at all, those three millions are destined to produce at least ten. I have obtained with a banker, my colleague, the concession of a railway, the only industry which in our day presents those fabulous chances of immediate success that formerly Law applied for the good Parisians, those eternal gawkers of speculation, to a fantastic Mississippi. By my calculation one must possess a millionth of rail as one formerly possessed an acre of wild land on the banks of the Ohio. It is a mortgage investment, which is a progress, as you see, since one will have at least ten, fifteen, twenty, a hundred pounds of iron in exchange for one’s money. Well, within a week from now I must deposit on my account four millions! Those four millions, I tell you, will produce ten or twelve.”
“But during that visit I paid you the day before yesterday, sir, and of which you are good enough to remember, resumed Eugénie, I saw you cash, that is the term, is it not? five million five hundred thousand francs; you even showed me the thing in two drafts on the treasury, and you wondered that a paper of such great value did not dazzle my eyes as would a flash of lightning.”
“Yes, but those five million five hundred thousand are not mine and are only a proof of the confidence that is placed in me; my title of popular banker has won me the confidence of the hospitals, and the five million five hundred thousand are the hospitals’; at any other time I would not hesitate to make use of them, but today it is known what great losses I have sustained, and, as I told you, credit begins to withdraw from me. From one moment to another, the administration may reclaim the deposit, and if I have employed it for something else, I am forced to make a shameful bankruptcy. I do not despise bankruptcies, believe me, but bankruptcies that enrich and not those that ruin. Either you marry Monsieur Cavalcanti, that I touch the three millions of the dowry, or even that it be believed I am about to touch them, my credit firms up, and my fortune, which for a month or two has been engulfed in abysses dug under my steps by an inconceivable fatality, recovers. Do you understand me?”
“Perfectly; you put me in pawn for three millions, do you not?”
“The larger the sum, the more flattering it is; it gives you an idea of your worth.”
“Thank you. One last word, sir: do you promise me to make use, as long as you wish, of the amount of that dowry which Monsieur Cavalcanti is to bring, but not to touch the principal? This is not a matter of selfishness, it is a matter of delicacy. I am willing to serve to rebuild your fortune, but I will not be your accomplice in the ruin of others.”
“But since I tell you,” cried Danglars, “that with those three millions…”
“Do you believe you will get out of trouble, sir, without needing to touch those three millions?”
“I hope so, but always on condition that the marriage, by taking place, consolidates my credit.”
“Will you be able to pay Monsieur Cavalcanti the five hundred thousand francs you give me for my contract?”
“On returning from the mayor’s office, he will receive them.”
“Good!”
“How, good? What do you mean?”
“I mean that in asking me for my signature, do you not, you leave me absolutely free as to my person?”
“Absolutely.”
“Then, good; as I was telling you, sir, I am ready to marry Monsieur Cavalcanti.”
“But what are your plans?”
“Ah! that is my secret. Where would be my superiority over you if, having yours, I delivered mine to you?”
Danglars bit his lips.
“Thus,” he said, “you are ready to make the few official visits that are absolutely indispensable.”
“Yes,” answered Eugénie.
“And to sign the contract in three days?”
“Yes.”
“Then, in my turn, it is I who say to you: Good!”
And Danglars took his daughter’s hand and pressed it between his own. But, extraordinary thing, during that handclasp, the father dared not say: “Thank you, my child”; the daughter had not a smile for her father.
“The conference is finished?” asked Eugénie, rising.
Danglars made a sign with his head that he had nothing more to say.
Five minutes later, the piano resounded under the fingers of Mademoiselle d’Armilly, and Mademoiselle Danglars sang the curse of Brabantio upon Desdemona.
At the end of the piece, Étienne entered and announced to Eugénie that the horses were at the carriage and that the baroness awaited her to make her visits.
We have seen the two women call at Villefort’s, whence they departed to continue their rounds.
“Stories of the world, in your language.”