The Girl With the Golden Eyes (8 page)

In order to understand de Marsay’s behavior at the end of this story, it must be explained how his soul had expanded at an age when most young men’s shrank from getting mixed up with women
or having too much to do with them. His soul had grown through a combination of secret circumstances that endowed him with an immense unknown power. This young man held a scepter in his hand that was more powerful than that of modern kings, almost all of them restrained by laws in even their slightest wishes. De Marsay wielded the autocratic power of the Oriental despot. But this power, so stupidly put into practice in Asia by coarse men, was increased tenfold by European intelligence and by French wit—the liveliest, keenest of all instruments of the mind. Henri could do whatever he liked in the interest of his pleasures and his vanities. This invisible action on the social world had clothed him in a real but secret majesty, discreet, folded in on itself. He had about himself, not the opinion that Louis XIV would have had, but what the proudest of Caliphs, of Pharaohs, of Xerxes who believe they belong to the divine race, had about themselves, when they imitated God by veiling themselves from their subjects, under the pretext that their gaze caused death. Thus, without having any remorse at being both judge and plaintiff, de Marsay coldly condemned to death the man or woman who had seriously offended him. Although often pronounced almost offhandedly, the sentence was irrevocable. A mere foible became a catastrophe, like lightning striking some happy Parisian girl in
her fiacre, instead of killing the old coachman who is bringing her to a tryst. Thus the bitter, profound pleasantry that marked the conversation of this young man generally caused fear in others; no one felt a desire to challenge him. Women intensely love those who call themselves “pashas,” who seem as if they’re accompanied by lions and executioners, and who walk clothed in terror. These men have an ensuing confidence of action, a certainty of power, a pride of look, a leonine awareness that for women embody the type of strength they all dream of. De Marsay was such a man.

Joyous at that instant with his future, he became once again young and vibrant, and thought only of love as he went to bed. He dreamed of the Girl with the Golden Eyes, as passionate young men dream: monstrous images, elusive peculiarities, full of light, which reveal invisible worlds, but always in an incomplete way, for the interposing veil changes optic conditions. The next day and the day after that, he disappeared without anyone knowing where he had gone. His power belonged to him only on certain conditions, and fortunately for him, during these two days, he was a simple soldier in the service of the demon whose talismanic existence he possessed. But at the agreed-upon time, that night, on the boulevard, he waited for the carriage, which wasn’t late in coming. The mulatto approached Henri to tell him,
in French, a phrase he seemed to have learned by heart: “If you want to come, she told me, you have to agree to have your eyes blindfolded.”

And Christemio showed him a scarf of white silk.

“No!” Henri said, whose omnipotence suddenly rebelled.

And he wanted to climb in. The mulatto gave a sign; the carriage started off.

“Yes!” de Marsay cried, furious at losing a happiness that had been promised him. Moreover, he saw the impossibility of arguing with a slave whose obedience was blind as an executioner’s. And why should it be on this passive instrument that his anger should fall?

The mulatto whistled; the carriage returned. Henri quickly climbed in. Already some curious onlookers were stupidly gathering on the boulevard. Henri was strong, he wanted to trick the mulatto. When the carriage left at a fast trot, he grabbed his hands, trying to get control of him so as, by overcoming his guard, to be able to keep the exercise of his faculties so he could know where he was going. Vain attempt. The mulatto’s eyes gleamed in the shadows. The man uttered furious cries, got free, threw de Marsay down with an iron hand, and nailed him, so to speak, to the floor of the carriage. Then, with his free hand, he drew out a triangular dagger, and whistled. The coachman heard the
whistle, and stopped. Henri, weaponless, was forced to give in; he offered his head for the blindfold. This gesture of submission appeased Christemio, who tied his eyes with a respect and care that testified to a kind of veneration for the body of the man his idol loved. But, before taking this precaution, he had defiantly put his dagger away in his side pocket, and buttoned himself up to his chin.

“He would have killed me, that Chinaman!” de Marsay said to himself.

The carriage quickly started up again. One resource remained for a young man who knew Paris as well as Henri knew it. To learn where he was going, it was enough for him to concentrate and count, by the number of gutters they crossed, the streets they passed on the boulevards, as long as the carriage continued to go straight ahead. He could thus recognize along which side street the carriage would head, whether towards the Seine, or towards the hills of Montmartre, and guess the name or position of the street where his guide would stop. But the violent emotion that his struggle had caused him, the fury at his compromised dignity, the ideas of revenge he dwelt on, the suppositions suggested to him by the meticulous care this mysterious girl was taking to bring him to her—all this prevented him from having that blind man’s
attention necessary to the concentration of his intelligence and to the perfect hindsight of memory. The journey lasted half an hour. When the carriage stopped, it was no longer on a paved road. The mulatto and the coachman took Henri bodily round the waist, lifted him up, put him on a kind of stretcher, and carried him through a garden whose flowers and particular odor of the trees and greenery Henri could smell. The silence that reigned there was so profound that he could make out the sound a few drops of water made as they fell from wet leaves. The two men carried him into a stairway, made him stand up, then led him through several rooms, guiding him by the hands, and left him in a room whose atmosphere was perfumed, and whose thick rug he could feel beneath his feet. A woman’s hand pushed him onto a divan and untied his blindfold. Henri saw Paquita in front of him, but Paquita in her glory as a voluptuous woman.

One half of the boudoir in which Henri found himself described a softly gracious circular outline, which contrasted with the other part perfectly square, in the middle of which gleamed a mantelpiece of white marble and gold. He had entered by a side door concealed beneath a rich tapestry curtain, which faced a window. The horseshoe part of the chamber was adorned with a real Turkish divan, that is to say a mattress placed on the ground,
but a mattress deep as a bed, a divan fifty feet around, in white cashmere, adorned by black and poppy-red silk tassels arranged in diamond patterns. The back of this immense bed rose several inches above the many cushions that enriched it even more by their tasteful charm. This boudoir was hung with a red fabric overlaid by the sheerest Indian chiffon, fluted like a Corinthian column, its folds alternately hollow and full, ending at both top and bottom in a poppy red band of cloth on which black arabesques were outlined. Beneath the sheer muslin, the red cloth showed as pink, an amorous color that was repeated by the curtains on the window, made of Indian chiffon lined with pink taffeta, and adorned with poppy-red fringes mixed with black. Six silver gilt sconces, each supporting two candles, were attached to the wall-hangings at equal distances to illumine the divan. The ceiling, in the center of which hung a burnished silver chandelier, gleamed white, and the cornice was gilt. The rug was like a shawl from the Orient; it represented the pictures and recalled the poems of Persia, where the hands of slaves had labored on it. All the furniture was covered in white cashmere, enhanced by black and poppy-red accents. The clock, the candelabra, everything was white marble and gold. The solitary table had a cashmere shawl as covering. Elegant flower arrangements contained
all kinds of roses, along with white or red flowers. The slightest detail seemed in fact to have been the object of the most loving attention. Never was richness more coquettishly veiled to become elegance, to express grace, to inspire voluptuousness. Here everything would have warmed the heart of even the coldest being. The way the hangings shimmered, their color always changing according to the direction of your gaze, becoming either completely white, or completely pink, harmonized with the effects of the light infused in the diaphanous folds of chiffon, producing a misty appearance. The soul has some sort of attachment to white; love is pleased by red; and gold flatters the passions, and has the power to realize their fantasies. Thus whatever vague and mysterious qualities there are in man, all his unexplained affinities, were caressed through their involuntary resemblances. There was a concert of colors in this perfect harmony to which the soul responded with voluptuous, indecisive, floating ideas.

It was in the midst of this hazy atmosphere charged with exquisite perfumes that Paquita, wearing a white dressing gown, her feet bare, orange blossoms in her black hair, appeared kneeling before Henri, adoring him like the god of this temple he had deigned to visit. Although de Marsay was accustomed to seeing the affectations of Parisian
luxury, he was surprised at the appearance of this shell, so like the one from which Venus was born. Either because of the contrast between the darkness from which he had emerged and the light flooding his soul, or from a quick comparison between this scene and that of the first meeting, he experienced one of those delicate sensations that true poetry produces. When he caught sight, in the middle of this sanctum appearing from a fairy’s wand, of that masterpiece of creation, this girl, whose warmly suffused complexion, whose soft skin lightly gilded by the reflections of red and by the effusion of some unknown vapor of love, glowed as if she were reflecting the beams of lights and colors, then all his anger, his desires for revenge, his wounded vanity, fell away from him. Like an eagle swooping down on his prey, he seized her round the waist, seated her on his lap, and with an inexpressible drunkenness felt the voluptuous pressure of this girl whose charms, so generously developed, gently enveloped him.

“Come, Paquita!” he said in a low voice.

“Speak! Speak without fear,” she said to him. “This retreat was built for love. No sound can escape it, designed as it is with the aim of cherishing the accents and musical tones of the beloved’s voice. However loud our cries here, they cannot be heard beyond this enclosure. Someone could be
killed here, but his moans would be as vain as if he were in the middle of the Great Desert.”

“Who is it who has so well understood jealousy and its needs?”

“Never ask me about that,” she replied, undoing the young man’s cravat with an incredible tenderness, no doubt the better to see his neck.

“Yes, there is the neck I love so well!” she said. “Do you want to please me?”

This question, almost lascivious in its tone, raised de Marsay out of the reverie into which he had been plunged by the despotic reply with which Paquita had forbidden him any research into the unknown being who was floating like a shade above them.

“And what if I wanted to know who rules here?”

Paquita looked at him, trembling.

“It isn’t me, then,” he said, standing up and ridding himself of the girl, who fell head backwards. “I want to be the only one, wherever I am.”

“Just like! Just like!” the poor slave cried, prey to terror.

“Who do you take me for, then? Will you answer?”

Paquita slowly got up, her eyes full of tears, went over to one of the two ebony cupboards and took out a dagger, which she held out to Henri with a gesture of submission that would have softened a tiger.

“Give me a feast such as only people who love each other can give,” she said, “and then when I am asleep, kill me, for I cannot answer you.
Listen: I am bound like a poor animal to its stake; I am astonished that I’ve been able to throw a bridge over the abyss that separates us. Make me drunk, then kill me. Oh! No, no,” she said clasping her hands, “don’t kill me! I love life! Life is so beautiful to me! If I am a slave, I am a queen too. I could deceive you with words, tell you I love no one but you, prove it to you, take advantage of my momentary power to say to you: ‘Take me the way one tastes in passing the perfume of a flower in the garden of a king.’ Then, after using the clever eloquence of woman and the wings of pleasure, after quenching my thirst, I could have you thrown into a pit where no one would find you, one which was constructed to satisfy revenge without having to fear that of justice, a pit full of quicklime that would burn you and consume you without a morsel of your body ever being found. You would remain in my heart, mine forever.”

Henri looked at this girl without trembling, and his fearless gaze overwhelmed her with joy.

“No, I won’t do it! You haven’t fallen into a trap here, but into the heart of a woman who adores you, and I am the one who will be thrown into the pit.”

“All that seems immensely strange to me,” de Marsay said as he gazed at her. “But you seem a good girl to me, though one with a strange nature; you are, upon my word, a living riddle, the answer to which seems to me difficult to find indeed.”

Paquita understood none of what the young man was saying; she looked at him gently, opening eyes that could never be dull, so much voluptuousness was portrayed there.

“Listen, my love,” she said, returning to her first idea, “do you want to please me?”

“I will do whatever you like, and even some things that you don’t,” de Marsay replied laughing, resuming his usual conceited nonchalance and resolving to let himself be led by this affair without looking back or forward. And he might also have been counting on his power, and on the adroitness of a man favored by fortune, to dominate this girl a few hours later, and learn all her secrets.

“Well,” she said, “let me arrange you to my taste.”

“Make me look however you like, then,” Henri said.

Delighted, Paquita went over to one of the two wardrobes and took out a red velvet dress, in which she dressed de Marsay; then she put a woman’s hat on him and wrapped him in a shawl. As she gave herself up to these mad fancies, performed with a child’s innocence, she laughed convulsively, and looked like a bird beating her wings; but she saw nothing beyond the present.