The Girl With the Golden Eyes (3 page)

But now let us approach the grand, airy, gilded drawing-rooms, the mansions with gardens, the world of the rich and idle of private means. Here the faces are pallid, eaten away by vanity. Here there is nothing real. Doesn’t the search for pleasure imply finding boredom? People in high society early on exhausted their true nature. Concerned only with creating joy for themselves, they quickly abused their senses, just as the common laborer abuses strong drink. Pleasure is like certain medicinal substances: To obtain the same effects, you have to keep increasing the dose, and death or mental exhaustion is inherent in the latter. All the lower classes lurk near the rich and keep an eye out for current tastes in order to exploit them and turn them into vices. How can one resist the clever seductions that are hatched in this country? Thus Paris has its
theriakis
, its own sort of opium-eaters—for them, gambling, gastrolatry, or the courtesan are their opium. So in these people you will see tastes but not passions—just romantic fantasies and timid affairs. Here impotence reigns; here there are no more ideas, the motive-force is lost in the playacting of the boudoir, in feminine antics. There are forty-year-old greenhorns, sixteen-year-old scholars. In Paris the rich encounter wit ready-made, pre-digested science, and opinions already formulated, which excuse them from having to have wit,
science, or opinion. In this world, senselessness is as common as weakness and licentiousness. Here you become greedy for time by dint of losing it. Do not look for affection here any more than for ideas. Embraces mask profound indifference, politeness masks continuous scorn. Here the other is never loved. Shallow witticisms, hosts of indiscretions, much gossip, all blanketed by commonplaces—such is the substance of their language. But these unhappy “beautiful people” boast they don’t get together in order to speak and create maxims in the manner of La Rochefoucauld; as if the eighteenth century had never discovered that happy medium between the too-full and absolute emptiness. If a few intelligent men make use of a subtle, deft witticism, it isn’t understood. Soon they grow tired of giving without receiving, so they stay home and let idiots reign in their place. This hollow life, this constant waiting for a pleasure that doesn’t come, this permanent boredom, this inanity of spirit, heart, and brain, this weariness of the great Parisian rout is reproduced in their features, and produces these cardboard faces, these premature wrinkles, this physiognomy of the rich where impotence scowls, where gold is reflected, and from which intelligence has fled.

This view of the moral Paris proves that the physical Paris could not be any different from the
way it is. This tiara-clad city is a queen who, ever pregnant, has the usual irresistibly violent desires. Paris is the earth’s head, an intelligence bursting with genius and leading human civilization, a great man, a continuously creative artist, a politician with second sight who must have a well-developed cerebrum, with all the vices of a great man, the fantasies of an artist, and the plainness of politics. Its physiognomy implies the germination of good and evil, struggle and victory; the moral battle of 1789 whose trumpets are still resounding throughout all the corners of the world, and also the defeat of 1814. Thus this city could not possibly be any more moral, or more cordial, or cleaner than the engine boiler of those magnificent pyroscaphs, the steamboats you admire cleaving the waves! Isn’t Paris a sublime vessel freighted with intelligence? Yes, the city’s coat of arms is one of those prophecies that fate sometimes allows itself. The City of Paris has its great mast of bronze, sculpted from victories, with Napoleon as its look-out. The carvel indeed pitches and rolls in the waves, but it travels the world, fires shells at it from the hundred mouths of its galleries, plows through the seas of science, scuds through them at full sail, shouts from the peak of its topsails in the voice of its scholars and artists: “Forward, onward! Follow me!” It carries an immense crew that loves to deck it out with fresh
streamers. Cabin boys and street urchins laugh in the rigging; its ballast is the ponderous bourgeoisie, laborers and common tars; in its cabins, the happy passengers; elegant midshipmen smoke their cigars, leaning on the rails. Then on the upper deck, its soldiers, driven by exploration or ambition, will land on every shore, and, while spreading their lively luster, strive for a glory that is pleasure, or love affairs that need gold.

Hence the fierce impulses of the proletariat, hence the depraved interests that crush the lower and middle classes, hence the cruelties of the artist’s thoughts, and the excesses of pleasure constantly sought by the upper class—all these explain the normal ugliness of Parisian physiognomy. Only in the Orient does the human race offer a magnificent countenance; but it is a result of the constant calm affected by those profound philosophers with their long pipes, little legs, and boxy torsos, who scorn movement and loathe it; whereas in Paris, the Petty, the Average, and the Great all run, jump, and caper about, whipped by the pitiless goddess, Need: need for money, fame, or fun. A fresh, restful, gracious, truly young face is the most extraordinary of exceptions here: It is rarely encountered. If you see such a one, it must either belong to a young and fervent curate, or to some good abbé in his forties, with a triple chin; or to a young individual of pure
habits, such as might be bred in certain middle-class families; to a twenty-year-old mother, still full of illusions, breastfeeding her firstborn; to a green youngster newly arrived from the provinces, and confided to the care of a pious dowager who keeps him penniless; or perhaps to some shop boy, who goes to bed at midnight, tired out from folding or unfolding calico, and who gets up at seven in the morning to arrange the window display; or, often, to a man of science or poetry, who lives monastically in harmony with a sublime idea, who remains sober, patient, and chaste; or to some idiot, pleased with himself, feeding on stupidity, bursting with health, always smiling at himself; or to the happy and flaccid species of idlers, the only people truly happy in Paris, who every hour sample its shifting poesies.

Nonetheless, there is in Paris a company of privileged beings who profit from this extravagant movement of inventions, interests, business, arts, and gold. These beings are women. Although they too have a thousand secret causes that here, more than elsewhere, erode their physiognomy, one can find, in feminine society, little happy tribes who live in the oriental manner, and can preserve their beauty; but these women rarely show themselves on foot in the streets; they remain hidden, like rare plants that unfurl their petals only at certain times, and that constitute veritable exotic exceptions.

Yet Paris is essentially a land of contrasts. If true sentiments are rare here, one can also find, here as well as elsewhere, noble friendships, unbounded devotion. On this battlefield of interests and passions, just as in the midst of those societies on the march where egoism triumphs, where everyone is forced to defend himself alone, and that we call “armies,” it seems that when feelings show themselves at all they have to be full-blown, and achieve nobility through contrast. So it is with faces. In Paris, sometimes, in the high aristocracy, a few ravishing faces of young men can be seen here and there, flowers of exceptional education and extraordinary manners. To the youthful beauty of English blood they join the firmness of southern traits, French wit, purity of form. The fire in their eyes, a delicious redness in their lips, the lustrous black of their fine hair, a fair complexion, the distinguished features of their face make them into beautiful human blossoms, magnificent to view above the mass of other dull, aged, crooked, grimacing physiognomies. Admire these young men with that greedy pleasure men take in looking at a pretty, decent, gracious individual, adorned with all the virginities with which our imagination likes to embellish the perfect girl.

If this glance swiftly directed at the population of Paris has made you realize the rarity of a face
like Raphael, and the passionate admiration it must inspire there at first sight, the main purpose of our story will be justified.
Quod erat demonstrandum
, what there was to demonstrate has been shown, if we be allowed to apply scholarly phrases to the science of manners.

Now on one of those fine spring mornings—when the leaves are not yet green though they have unfurled, when the sun is beginning to make the roofs blaze and the sky is blue, when the Parisians emerge from their dens, come buzzing along on the boulevards, flow like a many-colored serpent along the Rue de la Paix towards the Tuileries to hail the nuptial rites that the countryside is celebrating once again—on one of those joyous days, then, a young man, handsome as the day itself, tastefully dressed, easy in his manners, and (we’ll tell the secret) a love child, natural child of Lord Dudley and the famous Marquise de Vordac, was strolling down the wide lane of the Tuileries. This Adonis, named Henri de Marsay, was born in France, where Lord Dudley had come to marry off the young lady, already Henri’s mother, to an old gentleman named M. de Marsay. This faded, almost extinct butterfly recognized the child as his own, in exchange for the usufruct of an income of 100,000 francs permanently granted his putative son; an extravagance that didn’t cost Lord Dudley much: French bonds were
then worth about seventeen francs fifty. The old gentleman died without having known his wife. Mme. de Marsay then married the Marquis de Vordac; but even before she became a marquise, she had not been all that concerned with her child or with Lord Dudley. To begin with, the war declared between France and England had separated the two lovers, and, in any case, fidelity was not and scarcely ever will be the fashion in Paris. And then the success of the elegant, pretty, universally adored woman drowned any maternal sentiment in the Parisian. Lord Dudley was no more concerned with his progeny than the mother was. The prompt infidelity of an ardently beloved young woman might perhaps have given him a sort of aversion for anything that came from her. Moreover, it might also be that fathers love only the children with whom they have become well acquainted; this is a social belief of the highest importance for a family’s peace of mind, one that every bachelor should maintain, proving that paternity is only a sentiment raised in a hothouse by woman, customs, and laws.

Of the two men, poor Henri de Marsay knew a father only in the one not forced to be one. Naturally M. de Marsay’s paternity was very incomplete. In the natural order of things, children have a father only at rare moments; and in this respect the gentleman imitated nature. The good man would
not have sold his name if he hadn’t had any vices. So he dined in dives without remorse and drank elsewhere the meager income the national treasury paid to men of private means. Then he handed the child over to an old sister, a maiden lady de Marsay, who took great care of him, and gave him, using the meager pension allotted by her brother, a private tutor, a priest without a penny or a stitch, who sized up the young man’s future and resolved, out of the 100,000 francs allowance, to pay himself for the cares he devoted to his pupil, of whom he became fond. This private tutor one day found he had by chance become a genuine priest, one of those ecclesiastics cut out to become a cardinal in France, or a Borgia fit for the papal tiara. In three years he taught the child what they would have taken ten years to teach him in school. Then this great man, who was named the Abbé de Maronis, completed his student’s education by having him study civilization in all its forms: He fed him from his own experience, hardly ever brought him into churches, which in those days were kept locked; sometimes took him backstage in theaters, more often to the homes of courtesans; he took apart human emotions piece by piece for him; taught him politics in the heart of salons, where it was cooking; he explicated for him the machinery of government, and tried, out of friendship for a fine neglected nature,
but one rich in hope, to serve as a virile replacement for the mother: Isn’t the Church the mother of orphans? His student responded well to so many attentions. This worthy man died a bishop in 1812, with the satisfaction of having left beneath heaven a child whose heart and mind were so well formed at sixteen years of age, that he could easily get the upper hand of a man of forty. Who would have expected to meet a heart of bronze, an unfeeling brain beneath so seductive an exterior, like those that the painters of old, those naïve artists, gave to the serpent in the earthly paradise? That was still not enough. The good purple devil had also introduced his favorite child to certain acquaintances in high Parisian society who would be the equivalent, in the young man’s hands, of another 100,000 in income. Finally, this priest, lecherous but political, unbelieving but knowledgeable, treacherous but likeable, weak in appearance but as vigorous of mind as he was of body, was so truly useful to his student, so indulgent towards his vices, such a good calculator of every kind of strength, so profound when some kind of human deduction had to be made, so fresh at table, at Frascati’s gaming rooms, at … I don’t know where else, that the grateful Henri de Marsay was now, by 1814, scarcely moved by anything but the sight of the portrait of his dear bishop, the only personal belonging this prelate
was able to bequeath to him. The bishop was an admirable example of the men whose genius will save the Catholic, Apostolic, and Roman church, which is at the moment compromised by the weakness of its recruits, and by the old age of its pontiffs; but so the Church wishes it. The continental war prevented the young de Marsay from meeting his true father, whose name it is doubtful he even knew. An abandoned child, he didn’t know Mme de Marsay either. Naturally he barely missed his putative father. As to Mlle. de Marsay, his only mother, he had a pretty little tomb raised to her in the Père Lachaise Cemetery when she died. Monseigneur de Maronis had guaranteed one of the best places in heaven to this old maid, so that, seeing her happy to die, Henri gave her egotistical tears and began to cry for himself. Seeing this suffering, the abbé dried the tears of his student, pointing out to him that the good lady took her snuff in such a disgusting way, and had become so ugly, so deaf, and so boring, that he should be grateful to death. The bishop had had his student set free in 1811. Then when the mother of M. de Marsay married again, the priest chose, in a family council, one of those honest brainless men picked out by him from the confessional, and charged him with administering the fortune whose income he did indeed apply to the needs of the community, but whose capital he wanted to preserve.