Read Online The Girl With the Golden Eyes by Honoré de Balzac, Charlotte Mandell - Free Book Online Page A

smoking hearth, whose fire was buried in ashes, a poorly dressed old woman was sitting, wearing one of those turbans that English women know how to devise when they reach a certain age, and which would meet with an infinite success in China, where the ideal beauty of artists is monstrosity. This salon, this old woman, this cold hearth, all this would have chilled his love, if Paquita herself had not been there, on a love seat, in a voluptuous dressing gown, free to aim her glances of gold and flame, free to show her curved foot, free with her luminous movements. This first interview was like all first encounters that passionate people grant each other: They have rapidly traveled long distances, and desire each other ardently, but they don’t know each other yet. It is impossible for there not to be some disharmony at first in this situation, bothersome only till the moment when their souls have found the same level. If desire makes a manbold and inclines him not to plan anything, so as not to seem feminine, the mistress, however extreme her love is, is terrified at finding herself so quickly reaching her goal, face to face with the necessity of giving herself, which for many women is like falling into an abyss and not knowing what they’ll find at the bottom. The involuntary coldness of this woman contrasts with her avowed passion, and necessarily reacts on even the most smitten lover. These ideas, which often float like vapors around souls, establish a kind of transient sickness there. In the sweet journey that two people undertake through the beautiful countries of love, this moment is like a moorland to cross, a moor without heather, humid and hot by turns, or full of burning sands, cut off by swamps, leading to joyous groves clothed in roses where love and its processions of pleasures unfurl onto carpets of fine greensward. Often a witty man finds himself endowed with an idiotic laugh that serves as his reply to everything; his mind is dulled beneath the glacial compression of his desires. It would not be impossible for two equally handsome, spiritual, and passionate beings to start out by saying the most idiotic commonplaces, until chance, a word, the trembling of a certain look, the communication of an electric spark, makes them come to the happy transition that leads them onto the flowery pathwhere you don’t walk, but where you glide along without ever descending. This state of the soul always comes from the very violence of the emotions. Two beings who love each other feebly experience nothing like it. The effect of this crisis can also be compared to the effect produced by the glare of an unclouded sky. At first glance nature seems to be covered with gauze, the azure of the firmament looks black, extreme light looks like darkness. In Henri, as well as in the Spanish girl, a similar violence was present; and that law of physics by virtue of which two identical forces cancel each other out when they meet could also be true in the moral realm. Furthermore, the embarrassment of this moment was notably increased by the presence of the old mummy.
    Love can be frightened or stimulated by anything. To it, everything has meaning, everything is a happy or foreboding omen. This decrepit woman was there as a possible outcome, and represented the horrid fish tail with which the geniuses of symbolism in Ancient Greece equipped the Chimeras and the Sirens, so seductive, so deceptive from the waist up, as all passions are in the beginning. Henri, though not a hardy spirit—that phrase is always mocking—but a man of extraordinary power, a man as great as you can be without belief, was struck by the totality of all these circumstances.Moreover the strongest men are naturally the most impressionable, and consequently the most superstitious, if you can still call “superstition” the prejudice of the first impulse, which no doubt is actually insight into the results of causes hidden from other eyes, but perceptible to their