Euphrasie began to smile. The mocker was a young man with fair hair, bright blue eyes, slim, sporting a moustache and wearing a short frock-coat, his hat at a jaunty angle, quick-witted, the epitome of the Romantic type.
‘How many old men’, Raphael said to himself, ‘crown with foolishness a life of probity, work, virtue? This man has one foot in the grave and still has a love-life.’
‘Monsieur,’ cried Valentin, stopping the antique dealer and giving Euphrasie a complicit look, ‘do you not remember the strict maxims of your philosophy?’
‘Oh,’ replied the antique seller in a voice that was already croaky, ‘I am now happy as a young man. I am leading my life back to front. There is a whole lifetime in an hour of love.’
At that moment the spectators heard the interval bell and left the foyer to go back to their seats. The old man and Raphael separated. Entering his box, the Marquis caught sight of Foedora, seated immediately opposite him on the other side of the auditorium.
The Countess, having no doubt arrived a short while before, had thrown back her shawl, uncovering her throat, and was making the little indescribable gestures of a coquette who is busy posing. All eyes were upon her. A young peer of France was with her, and she was extending her hand for the opera glasses she had asked him to hold. By her gesture, by the manner in which she looked at this new escort, Raphael guessed at the tyranny to which his successor was subjected. No doubt under her spell, as he himself had once been, duped like him, like him with the strength of a true love fighting against this cold and calculating woman, he must be suffering the torments which Valentin had happily now escaped.
An inexpressible delight lit up Foedora’s face when, having surveyed all the boxes with her eyeglass, and made a swift assessment of all the dresses, she knew that she outshone in her attire and her beauty the prettiest and most elegant women in Paris. She started to laugh, to show off the whiteness of her teeth, tossed her beflowered head so that people would admire her, her eyes travelling from box to box, making fun of the gauche way a toque was placed on the forehead of a Russian princess, or of an ugly hat worn by a banker’s daughter.
Suddenly she grew pale as she met the steady gaze of Raphael; her rejected lover withered her with a look of the utmost contempt. While none of her banished lovers had underrated her power, Valentin was the only one now safe from her seductive charms. A power challenged with impunity is on the verge of downfall. This maxim is engraved more deeply on the heart of a woman than upon the heads of monarchs.
So Foedora could see the demise of her prestige and attractiveness in Raphael’s gaze. Something he had said the day before at the Opéra had already gone the rounds in the Parisian salons. His mot, so cutting, had inflicted an incurable wound on the Countess. In France we know how to cauterize a wound but we don’t yet know of any remedy for the hurt caused by a word. Just as all the women were looking by turns at the Marquis and the Countess, Foedora would willingly have buried him in an oubliette of some Bastille, for despite her talent for hiding her feelings, her rivals guessed how she suffered. And even her ultimate consolation was denied her: those delightful words: ‘I am the fairest of them all’—the eternal phrase that calmed all the anxieties of her vanity—was no longer true.
At the opening of the second act a woman came to sit next to Raphael, in a box which had been free until then. From the entire stalls rose a murmur of admiration. That sea of human faces rose in agitation and all eyes fixed on the unknown woman. The uproar made by young and old went on for such a long time that as the curtain rose the musicians of the orchestra turned round before they started playing, to ask for silence. But then they too joined in and swelled the general hubbub of applause. Animated conversations started up in every box. All the women had armed themselves with their opera glasses, and the old men, rejuvenated, were polishing their monocles with the leather of their gloves. The enthusiasm subsided gradually, the songs rang out from the stage, and order was restored. The cultured audience, ashamed of having yielded to a natural emotion, again took on the aristocratic coolness of polite manners. The rich wish to be surprised at nothing, in a beautiful work of art they must at once discover the flaw which will dispense them from expressing admiration for it, admiration being a vulgar sentiment.
Some men, however, remained transfixed, not listening to the music, but entranced in frank delight as they gazed at Raphael’s neighbour. Valentin caught sight of the ignoble, florid face of Taillefer next to Aquilina in a ground-floor box, grinning broadly at him. Then he saw Émile standing in the stalls, who seemed to be saying to him: ‘Just take a look at that beautiful creature sitting next to you!’ Rastignac, sitting next to Madame de Nucingen and her daughter,* was twisting his gloves, like a man in despair at being chained there, unable to get anywhere near the divine stranger.
Raphael’s life depended on a still-unbroken pact that he had made with himself. He had promised never again to look at any woman with interest, and in order to put himself out of reach of temptation he carried a lorgnette whose cunningly inserted microscopic glass destroyed the harmony of the most beautiful features, imparting to them a hideous aspect. Still prey to the terror which had seized him that morning, when, because of a simple polite remark, the talisman had so promptly shrunk, Raphael firmly resolved not to turn round to his neighbour. Sitting straight as a duchess, he turned his back to the corner of his box and blatantly hid half the view of the stage from the unknown woman, looking as if he scorned her, or did not even know that one so pretty was sitting behind him. His neighbour exactly imitated the posture of Valentin. She leaned her elbow on the edge of the box, her head in three-quarters profile, watching the singers as if she were posing for a painting.
These two people resembled two lovers who have quarrelled and are sulking, turning their backs on one another, but ready to kiss and make up at the first tender word uttered. Now and then a tiny feather, or a hair of the unknown woman itself, brushed softly against Raphael’s head and caused him a little thrill against which he struggled valiantly. Soon he felt the soft contact of the frills of lace which decorated the edge of her dress; the folds of the dress itself rustled invitingly, full of a soft, seductive femininity. Finally the faint movement the act of breathing made on the breast, on the back, on the clothes of this pretty woman, all her gentle living presence communicated itself to Raphael like an electric spark. The tulle and the lace faithfully transmitted to his shoulder the delicious warmth of that bare white back. By one of life’s accidents, these two creatures, split apart by circumstances, separated by the abyss of death, breathed as one, and perhaps were thinking the one of the other.
The penetrating perfume of sandalwood finally had its intoxicating effect on Raphael. Excited by an obstacle that was made to seem still more fantastic by being confined, his imagination rapidly traced in his head, like a streak of light, the image of a woman. He suddenly turned. No doubt shocked to find herself with a stranger, the unknown woman made a similar movement. Their faces, animated by the same thought, were transfixed.
‘Pauline!’
‘Monsieur Raphael!’
They looked at each other for a moment without speaking, as if turned to stone.
Raphael saw that Pauline was wearing a simple, well-chosen dress. Through the gauze which chastely covered her bodice, keen eyes could see her lily whiteness and guess at a figure that any woman would have admired. She still possessed her virginal modesty, her heavenly candour, her graceful attitude. Her quivering sleeve betrayed the trembling of her whole body and the beating of her heart.
‘Oh please come and see me tomorrow,’ she said. ‘Come to the Hotel Saint-Quentin to collect your papers. I’ll be there at midday. Don’t be late.’
She got up suddenly and disappeared. Raphael made as if to follow Pauline but he was afraid of compromising her, so he stayed, and, glancing towards Foedora, found her ugly. But not taking in one bar of the music, he felt stifled in the auditorium, and, with a full heart, he left and returned home
.
‘Jonathas,’ he said to his old servant, the moment he was in bed, ‘give me half a drop of laudanum on a sugarlump and tomorrow don’t wake me up until twenty to twelve.
‘I want to be loved by Pauline,’ he cried the next day, as he looked with unspeakable anguish at the talisman.
The skin did not move, it seemed to have lost its power to contract, no doubt because it could not gratify a wish which had already been fulfilled.
‘Oh,’ cried Raphael, feeling as though a leaden weight had been taken from his shoulders, a weight he had borne since the talisman had been given to him, ‘you are a liar, you do not do what I say, the pact is broken! I am free, I shall live! It was all a cruel joke.’
He hardly dared to believe in the words he had just uttered. He dressed in simple clothes, as he used to do in the old days, and decided to walk to his old lodgings, trying to relive in his imagination that blessed time before he had passed any judgement on human joys, when he had given himself up to the fury of his desires. He walked along, seeing not the Pauline of the Hotel Saint-Quentin but the Pauline of the day before, the ideal mistress he had so often dreamed of, an intelligent young girl, loving, artistic, understanding poets, poetry, and living in the lap of luxury. In a word, Foedora, but with a beautiful soul. Or, Pauline as a countess and twice a millionairess, as Foedora was. When he found himself on the worn step, on the broken flagstones where he had so many times been in the throes of despair, an old woman came out of the house and asked:
‘Are you not Monsieur Raphael de Valentin?’
‘I am, good lady.’
‘You will recognize your old lodgings,’ she went on. ‘You are expected.’
‘Is this lodging-house still kept by Madame Gaudin?’ he asked.
‘Oh no, Monsieur. Madame Gaudin is a baroness now. She lives in a fine house of her own on the other side of the river. Her husband came back. He brought back a pile of money, you know. They say she could buy the whole of the quarter of Saint-Jacques,* if she wanted. She has given me her lodging-house and the rest of her lease for free. Oh she’s such a good-hearted woman! And no more stuck-up today than she was yesterday.’
Raphael ascended the stairs to his attic room with a light step, and when he reached the top he heard the sound of a piano. Pauline was there, modestly dressed in light cotton. But the cut of the dress, the gloves, the hat, the shawl thrown casually over the bed, revealed her large fortune.
‘Ah, there you are,’ cried Pauline, turning her head and getting up with unconcealed delight.
Raphael came to sit shyly next to her, blushing, but happy. He looked at her in silence.
‘Why did you leave us?’ Pauline asked, with flushed cheeks, lowering her eyes. ‘What are you doing now?’
‘Oh Pauline, I have been, I still am, most wretched.’
‘There,’ she cried, very moved. ‘I guessed what had become of you when I saw you so well dressed and apparently so wealthy, but in reality, Monsieur Raphael, is it the same as it always was?’
Valentin could not keep back the tears. They welled up in his eyes and he cried, ‘Pauline … I…,’ He could not finish, but his eyes sparkled with love and his soul sat in his eyes.
‘Oh he loves me, he loves me,’ cried Pauline.
Raphael nodded, for he was not in a fit state to utter a single word. But at that gesture the girl took his hand, squeezed it, and said to him now laughing, now sobbing:
‘We’re rich, rich and happy! Your Pauline is rich … But I should be very poor today, for I have said a thousand times that I would give all the money in the world to hear you say those words “I love you”. Oh Raphael my love! I possess millions. You are fond of luxury, you can have everything you want. But you have to love me too, there is so much love for you in my heart. Have you not heard? My father has come back. I am a rich heiress. He and my mother let me choose my future entirely on my own. I am free, do you understand, I can do what I like.’
Overwhelmed with a sort of delirium, Raphael held Pauline’s hands and kissed them so passionately, so eagerly that his kiss was like a kind of convulsion. Pauline pulled her hands away, put them on Raphael’s shoulders, and caught hold of him. In complete harmony now, they held each other and, oblivious of all else, embraced with that sweet, sacred fervour which characterizes the first kiss, the one with which two souls take possession of one another.
‘Oh,’ cried Pauline as she fell onto her chair, ‘I will not leave you ever again.’ Then, with a blush, she added: ‘I don’t know how I can be so bold.’
‘Bold, Pauline, my love? Don’t be afraid. This is love, true, deep, eternal, like mine, isn’t it?’
‘Oh speak to me, speak, speak,’ she implored. ‘Your lips have been silent for too long.’
‘Did you love me all along?’
‘Dear God, did I love you! How many times have I wept while sweeping your room, bemoaning your poverty and my own! I should have sold myself to the devil to save you any worry. Today my Raphael, for you really are mine—mine that fine head, mine your heart. Oh yes, your heart, especially, that eternal treasure! Well now, where was I?’ she said after a pause. ‘Ah, I remember now. We have three, four, five millions, I think. If I were poor I should insist on bearing your name, on being called your wife. But now I wish I could sacrifice the whole world for you, I would like to be your servant again and for ever more. Do you know, Raphael, in offering you my heart, my person, my fortune, I should not be giving you anything more today than the day when I put there’, she said, pointing to the table drawer, ‘a certain five-franc coin. Oh how your delight hurt me then.’
‘Why are you rich?’ cried Raphael. ‘Why don’t you have any worldly vanity? I can do nothing for you.’
He wrung his hands in happiness, despair, and love.
‘When you are Madame la Marquise de Valentin I know you, you heavenly creature, this title and fortune will not be worth …’
‘A single hair of your head,’ she cried.
‘I too have millions. But what is wealth now to us? Oh, I have my life to offer you, take it.’
‘Oh, your love, Raphael, your love is worth the world to me. Can it be that you are thinking of my good? Oh, I am the happiest of happy women.’
‘Someone will hear us,’ said Raphael.
‘Oh there’s nobody there,’ she cried, with a little pout.
‘Then come to me,’ cried Valentin, holding out his arms to her.
She jumped onto Raphael’s lap and clasped her arms around his neck.
‘Kiss me,’ she said, ‘to make up for all the worry you have caused me, to blot out the pain your dalliance has given me, for all those nights I spent painting my screens.’
‘Your screens!’
‘Since we are wealthy, my treasure, I can tell you everything. Poor boy! How easy it is to deceive clever men! Do you suppose you would have had white waistcoats and clean shirts twice a week for three francs of laundering a month? And you drank twice as much milk as you could buy with your money! I supplemented everything: fire, oil, and the money as well! Oh Raphael, don’t take me for your wife,’ she said, laughing, ‘I am much too deceitful!’
‘But—how did you do that?’
‘I worked till two in the morning,’ she replied, ‘and I gave my mother half what I got for my paintings, and you the rest.’
They gazed at one another, dumbstruck with joy and love.
‘Oh,’ cried Raphael, ‘no doubt one day we shall pay dearly for this happiness with some terrible sorrow.’*
‘Are you married?’ cried Pauline. ‘Oh I don’t want to give you up for any other woman.’
‘I am free, my darling.’
‘Free,’ she repeated. ‘Free! And mine!’
She sank to her knees, clasped her hands together, and looked at Raphael adoringly.
‘I’m afraid I shall go mad. How lovely you are,’ she continued, running a hand through her lover’s fair locks. ‘Your Countess Foedora is stupid! How pleased I was yesterday to see al
l those men looking at me. She has never been a focus of attention like that! Do you know, dearest, when my back touched your arm, I heard a little voice inside me saying: “He is there.” Then I turned round and saw you. Oh I had to run away, I felt like throwing my arms around you in front of everyone.’
‘You are lucky to be able to speak,’ cried Raphael. ‘My heart is bursting. I want to cry but cannot. Don’t take your hand away. I think I could stay like that for the rest of my life, looking at you, happy and contented.’
‘Oh say that again, my love!’
‘And what are words,’ Valentin continued, letting a hot tear fall on Pauline’s hand. Later I shall try and speak of my love, at this moment all I can do is feel it …’
‘Oh,’ she cried, ‘your beautiful soul, your wonderful genius, this heart I know so well, all is mine and I am all yours.’
‘For ever, my sweet girl,’ said Raphael in tones of deep emotion. ‘You will be my wife, my kindly spirit. Your presence has always dispelled my worries and refreshed my soul. At this instant your angelic smile has, so to speak, purified me. I believe I am starting a new life. The cruel past and my sad folly seem nothing more than a bad dream. I am pure when I am with you. I feel the air of happiness. Oh be there for ever for me,’ he added, pressing her chastely to his heaving breast.
‘Let death come when it will!’ cried Pauline in ecstasy. ‘I have lived!’
Blessed are those who can understand their joy, for they will have known it too.
‘Oh my Raphael,’ said Pauline after they had left off speaking for some hours, ‘I should want no one to come into this beloved little attic room from now on.’
‘We must block up the door, put bars on the window, and buy the house,’ said the Marquis.
‘That’s right,’ she replied. Then after a moment’s silence: ‘We forgot to look for your manuscripts, didn’t we?’
They began to laugh with a touching innocence.
‘Bah, what do I care about learning,’ cried Raphael.
The Wild Ass's Skin (Oxford World's Classics) Page 24
