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

own.
    The Spanish girl took advantage of this moment of astonishment to succumb to that ecstasy of infinite adoration that seizes a woman’s heart when she truly loves someone, and when she finds herself in the presence of a vainly desired idol. Her eyes were full of joy and happiness, and gleams of light came from them. She was under his spell, and was intoxicated by a long dreamed-of bliss, without fear. She seemed wonderfully beautiful then to Henri, so that all this phantasmagoria of tattered cloth, decay, frayed red draperies, green mats before the armchairs, worn red tile floor—all this distressed, diseased luxury—immediately disappeared. The drawing room was lit up; he could see the terrible, motionless harpy, silent on her red sofa, only through a cloud. Her yellow eyes betrayed the servile emotions aroused by misfortune or caused by a vice under whose slavery one has fallen, as if under a tyrant who exhausts you beneath the flagellations of his despotism. Her eyes had the cold brilliance of the eyes of a caged tiger aware of its powerlessness, who finds it is forced to devour its own destructive desires.
    “Who is this woman?” Henri asked Paquita.
    But Paquita didn’t reply. She made a sign that she didn’t understand French, and asked Henri if he spoke English. De Marsay repeated his question in English.
    “She is the only woman I can trust, even though she has already sold me,” Paquita said calmly. “My dear Adolphe, she is my mother, a slave bought in Georgia for her rare beauty, hardly any of which remains today. She speaks nothing but her mother tongue.”
    The attitude of this woman, and her wish to divine what was going on between her daughter and Henri from their movements, were suddenly explained to the young man, and put him more at ease.
    “Paquita,” he said to her, “we won’t ever be free, then?”
    “Never!” she said sadly. “Even now we don’t have many days left us.”
    She lowered her eyes, looked at her hand, and with her right hand counted the fingers on her left hand, thus displaying the most beautiful hands Henri had ever seen.
    “One, two, three …”
    She counted up to twelve.
    “Yes,” she said, “we have twelve days left.”
    “And then?”
    “Then,” she said, remaining as self-absorbed as a frail woman before the executioner’s axe, as if killed beforehand by a fear that stripped her of that magnificent energy that nature seemed to have granted only to increase sensual delights and convert the coarsest pleasures into endless poetry. “Then,” she repeated. Her eyes became fixed; she seemed to contemplate a distant, threatening object. “I don’t know,” she said.
    “This girl is mad,” Henri said to himself, and thereupon fell into a strange reverie.
    Paquita seemed to him preoccupied by something other than himself; she was like a woman under the influence of both remorse and passion. Maybe she had another love in her heart that she alternately forgot and remembered. In an instant, Henri was assailed by a thousand contradictory thoughts. This girl became a mystery to him; but, contemplating her with the expert attention of the world-weary, a man starved for new sensual pleasures, like that Oriental monarch who asked for a new pleasure to be created for him—a horrible thirst to which great souls are prey—Henri recognized in Paquita the richest combination nature has ever created for love. The presumed workings of this mechanism, with its soul set aside, would have frightened any other man but de Marsay; but he was fascinated by this wealth of promised pleasures, by this constantvariety in happiness, every man’s dream, and also what every woman in love strives for. He was driven wild by the infinite made palpable, and transported into the creature’s most excessive delights. He saw all that in this girl more clearly than he had ever yet seen it, for she complacently let herself be observed, glad to be admired. De Marsay’s admiration became a