Produced by Dagny, and Bonnie Sala

THE MAGIC SKIN

By Honore De Balzac

Translated by Ellen Marriage

       To Monsieur Savary, Member of Le Academie des Sciences.

      [omitted: a drawing representing the serpentine
      path made by the tip of a stick when flourished.]

                            STERNE--Tristram Shandy, ch. cccxxii.

THE MAGIC SKIN

I. THE TALISMAN

Towards the end of the month of October 1829 a young man entered the
Palais-Royal just as the gaming-houses opened, agreeably to the law
which protects a passion by its very nature easily excisable. He mounted
the staircase of one of the gambling hells distinguished by the number
36, without too much deliberation.

"Your hat, sir, if you please?" a thin, querulous voice called out. A
little old man, crouching in the darkness behind a railing, suddenly
rose and exhibited his features, carved after a mean design.

As you enter a gaming-house the law despoils you of your hat at the
outset. Is it by way of a parable, a divine revelation? Or by exacting
some pledge or other, is not an infernal compact implied? Is it done to
compel you to preserve a respectful demeanor towards those who are about
to gain money of you? Or must the detective, who squats in our social
sewers, know the name of your hatter, or your own, if you happen to have
written it on the lining inside? Or, after all, is the measurement of
your skull required for the compilation of statistics as to the cerebral
capacity of gamblers? The executive is absolutely silent on this point.
But be sure of this, that though you have scarcely taken a step towards
the tables, your hat no more belongs to you now than you belong to
yourself. Play possesses you, your fortune, your cap, your cane, your
cloak.

As you go out, it will be made clear to you, by a savage irony, that
Play has yet spared you something, since your property is returned. For
all that, if you bring a new hat with you, you will have to pay for the
knowledge that a special costume is needed for a gambler.

The evident astonishment with which the young man took a numbered tally
in exchange for his hat, which was fortunately somewhat rubbed at the
brim, showed clearly enough that his mind was yet untainted; and the
little old man, who had wallowed from his youth up in the furious
pleasures of a gambler's life, cast a dull, indifferent glance over
him, in which a philosopher might have seen wretchedness lying in the
hospital, the vagrant lives of ruined folk, inquests on numberless
suicides, life-long penal servitude and transportations to Guazacoalco.

His pallid, lengthy visage appeared like a haggard embodiment of the
passion reduced to its simplest terms. There were traces of past anguish
in its wrinkles. He supported life on the glutinous soups at Darcet's,
and gambled away his meagre earnings day by day. Like some old hackney
which takes no heed of the strokes of the whip, nothing could move him
now. The stifled groans of ruined players, as they passed out, their
mute imprecations, their stupefied faces, found him impassive. He was
the spirit of Play incarnate. If the young man had noticed this sorry
Cerberus, perhaps he would have said, "There is only a pack of cards in
that heart of his."

The stranger did not heed this warning writ in flesh and blood, put
here, no doubt, by Providence, who has set loathing on the threshold of
all evil haunts. He walked boldly into the saloon, where the rattle of
coin brought his senses under the dazzling spell of an agony of greed.
Most likely he had been drawn thither by that most convincing of Jean
Jacques' eloquent periods, which expresses, I think, this melancholy
thought, "Yes, I can imagine that a man may take to gambling when he
sees only his last shilling between him and death."

There is an illusion about a gambling saloon at night as vulgar as that
of a bloodthirsty drama, and just as effective. The rooms are filled
with players and onlookers, with poverty-stricken age, which drags
itself thither in search of stimulation, with excited faces, and revels
that began in wine, to end shortly in the Seine. The passion is there
in full measure, but the great number of the actors prevents you from
seeing the gambling-demon face to face. The evening is a harmony or
chorus in which all take part, to which each instrument in the orchestra
contributes his share. You would see there plenty of respectable people
who have come in search of diversion, for which they pay as they pay for
the pleasures of the theatre, or of gluttony, or they come hither as
to some garret where they cheapen poignant regrets for three months to
come.

Do you understand all the force and frenzy in a soul which impatiently
waits for the opening of a gambling hell? Between the daylight gambler
and the player at night there is the same difference that lies between
a careless husband and the lover swooning under his lady's window. Only
with morning comes the real throb of the passion and the craving in
its stark horror. Then you can admire the real gambler, who has neither
eaten, slept, thought, nor lived, he has so smarted under the scourge
of his martingale, so suffered on the rack of his desire for a coup of
_trente-et-quarante_. At that accursed hour you encounter eyes whose
calmness terrifies you, faces that fascinate, glances that seem as if
they had power to turn the cards over and consume them. The grandest
hours of a gambling saloon are not the opening ones. If Spain has
bull-fights, and Rome once had her gladiators, Paris waxes proud of her
Palais-Royal, where the inevitable _roulettes_ cause blood to flow in
streams, and the public can have the pleasure of watching without fear
of their feet slipping in it.

Take a quiet peep at the arena. How bare it looks! The paper on the
walls is greasy to the height of your head, there is nothing to bring
one reviving thought. There is not so much as a nail for the convenience
of suicides. The floor is worn and dirty. An oblong table stands in the
middle of the room, the tablecloth is worn by the friction of gold,
but the straw-bottomed chairs about it indicate an odd indifference to
luxury in the men who will lose their lives here in the quest of the
fortune that is to put luxury within their reach.

This contradiction in humanity is seen wherever the soul reacts
powerfully upon itself. The gallant would clothe his mistress in silks,
would deck her out in soft Eastern fabrics, though he and she must lie
on a truckle-bed. The ambitious dreamer sees himself at the summit of
power, while he slavishly prostrates himself in the mire. The tradesman
stagnates in his damp, unhealthy shop, while he builds a great mansion
for his son to inherit prematurely, only to be ejected from it by law
proceedings at his own brother's instance.

After all, is there a less pleasing thing in the world than a house of
pleasure? Singular question! Man is always at strife with himself. His
present woes give the lie to his hopes; yet he looks to a future which
is not his, to indemnify him for these present sufferings; setting upon
all his actions the seal of inconsequence and of the weakness of his
nature. We have nothing here below in full measure but misfortune.

There were several gamblers in the room already when the young man
entered. Three bald-headed seniors were lounging round the green table.
Imperturbable as diplomatists, those plaster-cast faces of theirs
betokened blunted sensibilities, and hearts which had long forgotten
how to throb, even when a woman's dowry was the stake. A young Italian,
olive-hued and dark-haired, sat at one end, with his elbows on the
table, seeming to listen to the presentiments of luck that dictate a
gambler's "Yes" or "No." The glow of fire and gold was on that southern
face. Some seven or eight onlookers stood by way of an audience,
awaiting a drama composed of the strokes of chance, the faces of the
actors, the circulation of coin, and the motion of the croupier's rake,
much as a silent, motionless crowd watches the headsman in the Place de
Greve. A tall, thin man, in a threadbare coat, held a card in one hand,
and a pin in the other, to mark the numbers of Red or Black. He seemed
a modern Tantalus, with all the pleasures of his epoch at his lips, a
hoardless miser drawing in imaginary gains, a sane species of lunatic
who consoles himself in his misery by chimerical dreams, a man who
touches peril and vice as a young priest handles the unconsecrated wafer
in the white mass.

One or two experts at the game, shrewd speculators, had placed
themselves opposite the bank, like old convicts who have lost all fear
of the hulks; they meant to try two or three coups, and then to depart
at once with the expected gains, on which they lived. Two elderly
waiters dawdled about with their arms folded, looking from time to time
into the garden from the windows, as if to show their insignificant
faces as a sign to passers-by.

The croupier and banker threw a ghastly and withering glance at the
punters, and cried, in a sharp voice, "Make your game!" as the young man
came in. The silence seemed to grow deeper as all heads turned curiously
towards the new arrival. Who would have thought it? The jaded elders,
the fossilized waiters, the onlookers, the fanatical Italian himself,
felt an indefinable dread at sight of the stranger. Is he not wretched
indeed who can excite pity here? Must he not be very helpless to receive
sympathy, ghastly in appearance to raise a shudder in these places,
where pain utters no cry, where wretchedness looks gay, and despair is
decorous? Such thoughts as these produced a new emotion in these torpid
hearts as the young man entered. Were not executioners known to shed
tears over the fair-haired, girlish heads that had to fall at the
bidding of the Revolution?

The gamblers saw at a glance a dreadful mystery in the novice's face.
His young features were stamped with a melancholy grace, his looks told
of unsuccess and many blighted hopes. The dull apathy of the suicide
had made his forehead so deadly pale, a bitter smile carved faint lines
about the corners of his mouth, and there was an abandonment about him
that was painful to see. Some sort of demon sparkled in the depths of
his eye, which drooped, wearied perhaps with pleasure. Could it have
been dissipation that had set its foul mark on the proud face, once pure
and bright, and now brought low? Any doctor seeing the yellow circles
about his eyelids, and the color in his cheeks, would have set them
down to some affection of the heart or lungs, while poets would have
attributed them to the havoc brought by the search for knowledge and to
night-vigils by the student's lamp.

But a complaint more fatal than any disease, a disease more merciless
than genius or study, had drawn this young face, and had wrung a heart
which dissipation, study, and sickness had scarcely disturbed. When
a notorious criminal is taken to the convict's prison, the prisoners
welcome him respectfully, and these evil spirits in human shape,
experienced in torments, bowed before an unheard-of anguish. By the
depth of the wound which met their eyes, they recognized a prince among
them, by the majesty of his unspoken irony, by the refined wretchedness
of his garb. The frock-coat that he wore was well cut, but his cravat
was on terms so intimate with his waistcoat that no one could suspect
him of underlinen. His hands, shapely as a woman's were not perfectly
clean; for two days past indeed he had ceased to wear gloves. If the
very croupier and the waiters shuddered, it was because some traces
of the spell of innocence yet hung about his meagre, delicately-shaped
form, and his scanty fair hair in its natural curls.

He looked only about twenty-five years of age, and any trace of vice
in his face seemed to be there by accident. A young constitution still
resisted the inroads of lubricity. Darkness and light, annihilation and
existence, seemed to struggle in him, with effects of mingled beauty
and terror. There he stood like some erring angel that has lost his
radiance; and these emeritus-professors of vice and shame were ready to
bid the novice depart, even as some toothless crone might be seized with
pity for a beautiful girl who offers herself up to infamy.

The young man went straight up to the table, and, as he stood
there, flung down a piece of gold which he held in his hand, without
deliberation. It rolled on to the Black; then, as strong natures can,
he looked calmly, if anxiously, at the croupier, as if he held useless
subterfuges in scorn.

The interest this coup awakened was so great that the old gamesters laid
nothing upon it; only the Italian, inspired by a gambler's enthusiasm,
smiled suddenly at some thought, and punted his heap of coin against the
stranger's stake.

The banker forgot to pronounce the phrases that use and wont have
reduced to an inarticulate cry--"Make your game.... The game is made....
Bets are closed." The croupier spread out the cards, and seemed to wish
luck to the newcomer, indifferent as he was to the losses or gains of
those who took part in these sombre pleasures. Every bystander thought
he saw a drama, the closing scene of a noble life, in the fortunes of
that bit of gold; and eagerly fixed his eyes on the prophetic cards; but
however closely they watched the young man, they could discover not the
least sign of feeling on his cool but restless face.

"Even! red wins," said the croupier officially. A dumb sort of rattle
came from the Italian's throat when he saw the folded notes that
the banker showered upon him, one after another. The young man only
understood his calamity when the croupiers's rake was extended to sweep
away his last napoleon. The ivory touched the coin with a little click,
as it swept it with the speed of an arrow into the heap of gold before
the bank. The stranger turned pale at the lips, and softly shut his
eyes, but he unclosed them again at once, and the red color returned
as he affected the airs of an Englishman, to whom life can offer no
new sensation, and disappeared without the glance full of entreaty for
compassion that a desperate gamester will often give the bystanders. How
much can happen in a second's space; how many things depend on a throw
of the die!

"That was his last cartridge, of course," said the croupier, smiling
after a moment's silence, during which he picked up the coin between his
finger and thumb and held it up.

"He is a cracked brain that will go and drown himself," said a
frequenter of the place. He looked round about at the other players, who
all knew each other.

"Bah!" said a waiter, as he took a pinch of snuff.

"If we had but followed _his_ example," said an old gamester to the
others, as he pointed out the Italian.

Everybody looked at the lucky player, whose hands shook as he counted
his bank-notes.

"A voice seemed to whisper to me," he said. "The luck is sure to go
against that young man's despair."

"He is a new hand," said the banker, "or he would have divided his money
into three parts to give himself more chance."

The young man went out without asking for his hat; but the old
watch-dog, who had noted its shabby condition, returned it to him
without a word. The gambler mechanically gave up the tally, and went
downstairs whistling _Di tanti Palpiti_ so feebly, that he himself
scarcely heard the delicious notes.

He found himself immediately under the arcades of the Palais-Royal,
reached the Rue Saint Honore, took the direction of the Tuileries, and
crossed the gardens with an undecided step. He walked as if he were in
some desert, elbowed by men whom he did not see, hearing through all the
voices of the crowd one voice alone--the voice of Death. He was lost in
the thoughts that benumbed him at last, like the criminals who used
to be taken in carts from the Palais de Justice to the Place de Greve,
where the scaffold awaited them reddened with all the blood spilt here
since 1793.

There is something great and terrible about suicide. Most people's
downfalls are not dangerous; they are like children who have not far to
fall, and cannot injure themselves; but when a great nature is dashed
down, he is bound to fall from a height. He must have been raised almost
to the skies; he has caught glimpses of some heaven beyond his reach.
Vehement must the storms be which compel a soul to seek for peace from
the trigger of a pistol.

How much young power starves and pines away in a garret for want of a
friend, for lack of a woman's consolation, in the midst of millions of
fellow-creatures, in the presence of a listless crowd that is burdened
by its wealth! When one remembers all this, suicide looms large. Between
a self-sought death and the abundant hopes whose voices call a young man
to Paris, God only knows what may intervene; what contending ideas have
striven within the soul; what poems have been set aside; what moans and
what despair have been repressed; what abortive masterpieces and vain
endeavors! Every suicide is an awful poem of sorrow. Where will you find
a work of genius floating above the seas of literature that can compare
with this paragraph:

  "Yesterday, at four o'clock, a young woman threw herself into the
  Seine from the Pont des Arts."

Dramas and romances pale before this concise Parisian phrase; so must
even that old frontispiece, _The Lamentations of the glorious king of
Kaernavan, put in prison by his children_, the sole remaining fragment
of a lost work that drew tears from Sterne at the bare perusal--the same
Sterne who deserted his own wife and family.

The stranger was beset with such thoughts as these, which passed in
fragments through his mind, like tattered flags fluttering above the
combat. If he set aside for a moment the burdens of consciousness and of
memory, to watch the flower heads gently swayed by the breeze among the
green thickets, a revulsion came over him, life struggled against
the oppressive thought of suicide, and his eyes rose to the sky: gray
clouds, melancholy gusts of the wind, the stormy atmosphere, all decreed
that he should die.

He bent his way toward the Pont Royal, musing over the last fancies of
others who had gone before him. He smiled to himself as he remembered
that Lord Castlereagh had satisfied the humblest of our needs before
he cut his throat, and that the academician Auger had sought for his
snuff-box as he went to his death. He analyzed these extravagances,
and even examined himself; for as he stood aside against the parapet
to allow a porter to pass, his coat had been whitened somewhat by the
contact, and he carefully brushed the dust from his sleeve, to his own
surprise. He reached the middle of the arch, and looked forebodingly at
the water.

"Wretched weather for drowning yourself," said a ragged old woman, who
grinned at him; "isn't the Seine cold and dirty?"

His answer was a ready smile, which showed the frenzied nature of his
courage; then he shivered all at once as he saw at a distance, by the
door of the Tuileries, a shed with an inscription above it in letters
twelve inches high: THE ROYAL HUMANE SOCIETY'S APPARATUS.

A vision of M. Dacheux rose before him, equipped by his philanthropy,
calling out and setting in motion the too efficacious oars which break
the heads of drowning men, if unluckily they should rise to the surface;
he saw a curious crowd collecting, running for a doctor, preparing
fumigations, he read the maundering paragraph in the papers, put between
notes on a festivity and on the smiles of a ballet-dancer; he heard
the francs counted down by the prefect of police to the watermen. As a
corpse, he was worth fifteen francs; but now while he lived he was only
a man of talent without patrons, without friends, without a mattress
to lie on, or any one to speak a word for him--a perfect social cipher,
useless to a State which gave itself no trouble about him.

A death in broad daylight seemed degrading to him; he made up his mind
to die at night so as to bequeath an unrecognizable corpse to a world
which had disregarded the greatness of life. He began his wanderings
again, turning towards the Quai Voltaire, imitating the lagging gait of
an idler seeking to kill time. As he came down the steps at the end of
the bridge, his notice was attracted by the second-hand books displayed
on the parapet, and he was on the point of bargaining for some. He
smiled, thrust his hands philosophically into his pockets, and fell to
strolling on again with a proud disdain in his manner, when he heard to
his surprise some coin rattling fantastically in his pocket.

A smile of hope lit his face, and slid from his lips over his features,
over his brow, and brought a joyful light to his eyes and his dark
cheeks. It was a spark of happiness like one of the red dots that flit
over the remains of a burnt scrap of paper; but as it is with the black
ashes, so it was with his face, it became dull again when the stranger
quickly drew out his hand and perceived three pennies. "Ah, kind
gentleman! _carita_, _carita_; for the love of St. Catherine! only a
halfpenny to buy some bread!"

A little chimney sweeper, with puffed cheeks, all black with soot, and
clad in tatters, held out his hand to beg for the man's last pence.

Two paces from the little Savoyard stood an old _pauvre honteux_, sickly
and feeble, in wretched garments of ragged druggeting, who asked in a
thick, muffled voice:

"Anything you like to give, monsieur; I will pray to God for you..."

But the young man turned his eyes on him, and the old beggar stopped
without another word, discerning in that mournful face an abandonment of
wretchedness more bitter than his own.

"_La carita_! _la carita_!"

The stranger threw the coins to the old man and the child, left the
footway, and turned towards the houses; the harrowing sight of the Seine
fretted him beyond endurance.

"May God lengthen your days!" cried the two beggars.

As he reached the shop window of a print-seller, this man on the brink
of death met a young woman alighting from a showy carriage. He looked in
delight at her prettiness, at the pale face appropriately framed by the
satin of her fashionable bonnet. Her slender form and graceful movements
entranced him. Her skirt had been slightly raised as she stepped to the
pavement, disclosing a daintily fitting white stocking over the delicate
outlines beneath. The young lady went into the shop, purchased albums
and sets of lithographs; giving several gold coins for them, which
glittered and rang upon the counter. The young man, seemingly occupied
with the prints in the window, fixed upon the fair stranger a gaze as
eager as man can give, to receive in exchange an indifferent glance,
such as lights by accident on a passer-by. For him it was a leave-taking
of love and of woman; but his final and strenuous questioning glance was
neither understood nor felt by the slight-natured woman there; her color
did not rise, her eyes did not droop. What was it to her? one more piece
of adulation, yet another sigh only prompted the delightful thought at
night, "I looked rather well to-day."

The young man quickly turned to another picture, and only left it when
she returned to her carriage. The horses started off, the final vision
of luxury and refinement went under an eclipse, just as that life of his
would soon do also. Slowly and sadly he followed the line of the shops,
listlessly examining the specimens on view. When the shops came to an
end, he reviewed the Louvre, the Institute, the towers of Notre Dame, of
the Palais, the Pont des Arts; all these public monuments seemed to have
taken their tone from the heavy gray sky.

Fitful gleams of light gave a foreboding look to Paris; like a pretty
woman, the city has mysterious fits of ugliness or beauty. So the outer
world seemed to be in a plot to steep this man about to die in a painful
trance. A prey to the maleficent power which acts relaxingly upon us
by the fluid circulating through our nerves, his whole frame seemed
gradually to experience a dissolving process. He felt the anguish of
these throes passing through him in waves, and the houses and the crowd
seemed to surge to and fro in a mist before his eyes. He tried to escape
the agitation wrought in his mind by the revulsions of his physical
nature, and went toward the shop of a dealer in antiquities, thinking to
give a treat to his senses, and to spend the interval till nightfall in
bargaining over curiosities.

He sought, one might say, to regain courage and to find a stimulant,
like a criminal who doubts his power to reach the scaffold. The
consciousness of approaching death gave him, for the time being, the
intrepidity of a duchess with a couple of lovers, so that he entered the
place with an abstracted look, while his lips displayed a set smile like
a drunkard's. Had not life, or rather had not death, intoxicated him?
Dizziness soon overcame him again. Things appeared to him in strange
colors, or as making slight movements; his irregular pulse was no
doubt the cause; the blood that sometimes rushed like a burning torrent
through his veins, and sometimes lay torpid and stagnant as tepid water.
He merely asked leave to see if the shop contained any curiosities which
he required.

A plump-faced young shopman with red hair, in an otter-skin cap, left
an old peasant woman in charge of the shop--a sort of feminine Caliban,
employed in cleaning a stove made marvelous by Bernard Palissy's work.
This youth remarked carelessly:

"Look round, _monsieur_! We have nothing very remarkable here
downstairs; but if I may trouble you to go up to the first floor, I will
show you some very fine mummies from Cairo, some inlaid pottery, and
some carved ebony--_genuine Renaissance_ work, just come in, and of
perfect beauty."

In the stranger's fearful position this cicerone's prattle and shopman's
empty talk seemed like the petty vexations by which narrow minds destroy
a man of genius. But as he must even go through with it, he appeared
to listen to his guide, answering him by gestures or monosyllables; but
imperceptibly he arrogated the privilege of saying nothing, and gave
himself up without hindrance to his closing meditations, which were
appalling. He had a poet's temperament, his mind had entered by chance
on a vast field; and he must see perforce the dry bones of twenty future
worlds.

At a first glance the place presented a confused picture in which every
achievement, human and divine, was mingled. Crocodiles, monkeys, and
serpents stuffed with straw grinned at glass from church windows,
seemed to wish to bite sculptured heads, to chase lacquered work, or to
scramble up chandeliers. A Sevres vase, bearing Napoleon's portrait
by Mme. Jacotot, stood beside a sphinx dedicated to Sesostris. The
beginnings of the world and the events of yesterday were mingled
with grotesque cheerfulness. A kitchen jack leaned against a pyx, a
republican sabre on a mediaeval hackbut. Mme. du Barry, with a star
above her head, naked, and surrounded by a cloud, seemed to look
longingly out of Latour's pastel at an Indian chibook, while she tried
to guess the purpose of the spiral curves that wound towards her.
Instruments of death, poniards, curious pistols, and disguised weapons
had been flung down pell-mell among the paraphernalia of daily life;
porcelain tureens, Dresden plates, translucent cups from china, old
salt-cellars, comfit-boxes belonging to feudal times. A carved ivory
ship sped full sail on the back of a motionless tortoise.

The Emperor Augustus remained unmoved and imperial with an air-pump
thrust into one eye. Portraits of French sheriffs and Dutch
burgomasters, phlegmatic now as when in life, looked down pallid and
unconcerned on the chaos of past ages below them.

Every land of earth seemed to have contributed some stray fragment of
its learning, some example of its art. Nothing seemed lacking to this
philosophical kitchen-midden, from a redskin's calumet, a green and
golden slipper from the seraglio, a Moorish yataghan, a Tartar idol, to
the soldier's tobacco pouch, to the priest's ciborium, and the plumes
that once adorned a throne. This extraordinary combination was rendered
yet more bizarre by the accidents of lighting, by a multitude of
confused reflections of various hues, by the sharp contrast of blacks
and whites. Broken cries seemed to reach the ear, unfinished dramas
seized upon the imagination, smothered lights caught the eye. A thin
coating of inevitable dust covered all the multitudinous corners and
convolutions of these objects of various shapes which gave highly
picturesque effects.

First of all, the stranger compared the three galleries which
civilization, cults, divinities, masterpieces, dominions, carousals,
sanity, and madness had filled to repletion, to a mirror with numerous
facets, each depicting a world. After this first hazy idea he would fain
have selected his pleasures; but by dint of using his eyes, thinking and
musing, a fever began to possess him, caused perhaps by the gnawing pain
of hunger. The spectacle of so much existence, individual or national,
to which these pledges bore witness, ended by numbing his senses--the
purpose with which he entered the shop was fulfilled. He had left the
real behind, and had climbed gradually up to an ideal world; he had
attained to the enchanted palace of ecstasy, whence the universe
appeared to him by fragments and in shapes of flame, as once the future
blazed out before the eyes of St. John in Patmos.

A crowd of sorrowing faces, beneficent and appalling, dark and luminous,
far and near, gathered in numbers, in myriads, in whole generations.
Egypt, rigid and mysterious, arose from her sands in the form of a mummy
swathed in black bandages; then the Pharaohs swallowed up nations, that
they might build themselves a tomb; and he beheld Moses and the Hebrews
and the desert, and a solemn antique world. Fresh and joyous, a marble
statue spoke to him from a twisted column of the pleasure-loving myths
of Greece and Ionia. Ah! who would not have smiled with him to see,
against the earthen red background, the brown-faced maiden dancing with
gleeful reverence before the god Priapus, wrought in the fine clay of an
Etruscan vase? The Latin queen caressed her chimera.

The whims of Imperial Rome were there in life, the bath was disclosed,
the toilette of a languid Julia, dreaming, waiting for her Tibullus.
Strong with the might of Arabic spells, the head of Cicero evoked
memories of a free Rome, and unrolled before him the scrolls of Titus
Livius. The young man beheld _Senatus Populusque Romanus_; consuls,
lictors, togas with purple fringes; the fighting in the Forum, the angry
people, passed in review before him like the cloudy faces of a dream.

Then Christian Rome predominated in his vision. A painter had laid
heaven open; he beheld the Virgin Mary wrapped in a golden cloud among
the angels, shining more brightly than the sun, receiving the prayers of
sufferers, on whom this second Eve Regenerate smiles pityingly. At the
touch of a mosaic, made of various lavas from Vesuvius and Etna, his
fancy fled to the hot tawny south of Italy. He was present at Borgia's
orgies, he roved among the Abruzzi, sought for Italian love intrigues,
grew ardent over pale faces and dark, almond-shaped eyes. He shivered
over midnight adventures, cut short by the cool thrust of a jealous
blade, as he saw a mediaeval dagger with a hilt wrought like lace, and
spots of rust like splashes of blood upon it.

India and its religions took the shape of the idol with his peaked cap
of fantastic form, with little bells, clad in silk and gold. Close by,
a mat, as pretty as the bayadere who once lay upon it, still gave out
a faint scent of sandal wood. His fancy was stirred by a goggle-eyed
Chinese monster, with mouth awry and twisted limbs, the invention of
a people who, grown weary of the monotony of beauty, found an
indescribable pleasure in an infinite variety of ugliness. A salt-cellar
from Benvenuto Cellini's workshop carried him back to the Renaissance
at its height, to the time when there was no restraint on art or morals,
when torture was the sport of sovereigns; and from their councils,
churchmen with courtesans' arms about them issued decrees of chastity
for simple priests.

On a cameo he saw the conquests of Alexander, the massacres of Pizarro
in a matchbox, and religious wars disorderly, fanatical, and cruel, in
the shadows of a helmet. Joyous pictures of chivalry were called up by
a suit of Milanese armor, brightly polished and richly wrought; a
paladin's eyes seemed to sparkle yet under the visor.

This sea of inventions, fashions, furniture, works of art and fiascos,
made for him a poem without end. Shapes and colors and projects
all lived again for him, but his mind received no clear and perfect
conception. It was the poet's task to complete the sketches of the
great master, who had scornfully mingled on his palette the hues of the
numberless vicissitudes of human life. When the world at large at last
released him, when he had pondered over many lands, many epochs, and
various empires, the young man came back to the life of the individual.
He impersonated fresh characters, and turned his mind to details,
rejecting the life of nations as a burden too overwhelming for a single
soul.

Yonder was a sleeping child modeled in wax, a relic of Ruysch's
collection, an enchanting creation which brought back the happiness of
his own childhood. The cotton garment of a Tahitian maid next fascinated
him; he beheld the primitive life of nature, the real modesty of naked
chastity, the joys of an idleness natural to mankind, a peaceful fate
by a slow river of sweet water under a plantain tree that bears its
pleasant manna without the toil of man. Then all at once he became a
corsair, investing himself with the terrible poetry that Lara has given
to the part: the thought came at the sight of the mother-of-pearl tints
of a myriad sea-shells, and grew as he saw madrepores redolent of the
sea-weeds and the storms of the Atlantic.

The sea was forgotten again at a distant view of exquisite miniatures;
he admired a precious missal in manuscript, adorned with arabesques in
gold and blue. Thoughts of peaceful life swayed him; he devoted himself
afresh to study and research, longing for the easy life of the monk,
devoid alike of cares and pleasures; and from the depths of his cell
he looked out upon the meadows, woods, and vineyards of his convent.
Pausing before some work of Teniers, he took for his own the helmet
of the soldier or the poverty of the artisan; he wished to wear a
smoke-begrimed cap with these Flemings, to drink their beer and join
their game at cards, and smiled upon the comely plumpness of a peasant
woman. He shivered at a snowstorm by Mieris; he seemed to take part in
Salvator Rosa's battle-piece; he ran his fingers over a tomahawk
form Illinois, and felt his own hair rise as he touched a Cherokee
scalping-knife. He marveled over the rebec that he set in the hands of
some lady of the land, drank in the musical notes of her ballad, and in
the twilight by the gothic arch above the hearth he told his love in a
gloom so deep that he could not read his answer in her eyes.

He caught at all delights, at all sorrows; grasped at existence in every
form; and endowed the phantoms conjured up from that inert and plastic
material so liberally with his own life and feelings, that the sound of
his own footsteps reached him as if from another world, or as the hum of
Paris reaches the towers of Notre Dame.

He ascended the inner staircase which led to the first floor, with its
votive shields, panoplies, carved shrines, and figures on the wall at
every step. Haunted by the strangest shapes, by marvelous creations
belonging to the borderland betwixt life and death, he walked as if
under the spell of a dream. His own existence became a matter of doubt
to him; he was neither wholly alive nor dead, like the curious objects
about him. The light began to fade as he reached the show-rooms, but
the treasures of gold and silver heaped up there scarcely seemed to need
illumination from without. The most extravagant whims of prodigals, who
have run through millions to perish in garrets, had left their traces
here in this vast bazar of human follies. Here, beside a writing desk,
made at the cost of 100,000 francs, and sold for a hundred pence, lay a
lock with a secret worth a king's ransom. The human race was revealed
in all the grandeur of its wretchedness; in all the splendor of its
infinite littleness. An ebony table that an artist might worship,
carved after Jean Goujon's designs, in years of toil, had been purchased
perhaps at the price of firewood. Precious caskets, and things that
fairy hands might have fashioned, lay there in heaps like rubbish.

"You must have the worth of millions here!" cried the young man as he
entered the last of an immense suite of rooms, all decorated and gilt by
eighteenth century artists.

"Thousands of millions, you might say," said the florid shopman; "but
you have seen nothing as yet. Go up to the third floor, and you shall
see!"

The stranger followed his guide to a fourth gallery, where one by one
there passed before his wearied eyes several pictures by Poussin, a
magnificent statue by Michael Angelo, enchanting landscapes by Claude
Lorraine, a Gerard Dow (like a stray page from Sterne), Rembrandts,
Murillos, and pictures by Velasquez, as dark and full of color as a poem
of Byron's; then came classic bas-reliefs, finely-cut agates, wonderful
cameos! Works of art upon works of art, till the craftsman's skill
palled on the mind, masterpiece after masterpiece till art itself became
hateful at last and enthusiasm died. He came upon a Madonna by Raphael,
but he was tired of Raphael; a figure by Correggio never received the
glance it demanded of him. A priceless vase of antique porphyry carved
round about with pictures of the most grotesquely wanton of Roman
divinities, the pride of some Corinna, scarcely drew a smile from him.

The ruins of fifteen hundred vanished years oppressed him; he sickened
under all this human thought; felt bored by all this luxury and art. He
struggled in vain against the constantly renewed fantastic shapes that
sprang up from under his feet, like children of some sportive demon.

Are not fearful poisons set up in the soul by a swift concentration of
all her energies, her enjoyments, or ideas; as modern chemistry, in its
caprice, repeats the action of creation by some gas or other? Do not
many men perish under the shock of the sudden expansion of some moral
acid within them?

"What is there in that box?" he inquired, as he reached a large
closet--final triumph of human skill, originality, wealth, and splendor,
in which there hung a large, square mahogany coffer, suspended from a
nail by a silver chain.

"Ah, _monsieur_ keeps the key of it," said the stout assistant
mysteriously. "If you wish to see the portrait, I will gladly venture to
tell him."

"Venture!" said the young man; "then is your master a prince?"

"I don't know what he is," the other answered. Equally astonished, each
looked for a moment at the other. Then construing the stranger's silence
as an order, the apprentice left him alone in the closet.

Have you never launched into the immensity of time and space as you read
the geological writings of Cuvier? Carried by his fancy, have you hung
as if suspended by a magician's wand over the illimitable abyss of the
past? When the fossil bones of animals belonging to civilizations before
the Flood are turned up in bed after bed and layer upon layer of the
quarries of Montmartre or among the schists of the Ural range, the
soul receives with dismay a glimpse of millions of peoples forgotten
by feeble human memory and unrecognized by permanent divine tradition,
peoples whose ashes cover our globe with two feet of earth that yields
bread to us and flowers.

Is not Cuvier the great poet of our era? Byron has given admirable
expression to certain moral conflicts, but our immortal naturalist has
reconstructed past worlds from a few bleached bones; has rebuilt cities,
like Cadmus, with monsters' teeth; has animated forests with all the
secrets of zoology gleaned from a piece of coal; has discovered a giant
population from the footprints of a mammoth. These forms stand erect,
grow large, and fill regions commensurate with their giant size. He
treats figures like a poet; a naught set beside a seven by him produces
awe.

He can call up nothingness before you without the phrases of a
charlatan. He searches a lump of gypsum, finds an impression in it, says
to you, "Behold!" All at once marble takes an animal shape, the dead
come to life, the history of the world is laid open before you. After
countless dynasties of giant creatures, races of fish and clans of
mollusks, the race of man appears at last as the degenerate copy of a
splendid model, which the Creator has perchance destroyed. Emboldened
by his gaze into the past, this petty race, children of yesterday,
can overstep chaos, can raise a psalm without end, and outline for
themselves the story of the Universe in an Apocalypse that reveals the
past. After the tremendous resurrection that took place at the voice
of this man, the little drop in the nameless Infinite, common to all
spheres, that is ours to use, and that we call Time, seems to us a
pitiable moment of life. We ask ourselves the purpose of our triumphs,
our hatreds, our loves, overwhelmed as we are by the destruction of so
many past universes, and whether it is worth while to accept the pain of
life in order that hereafter we may become an intangible speck. Then we
remain as if dead, completely torn away from the present till the _valet
de chambre_ comes in and says, "_Madame la comtesse_ answers that she is
expecting _monsieur_."

All the wonders which had brought the known world before the young man's
mind wrought in his soul much the same feeling of dejection that besets
the philosopher investigating unknown creatures. He longed more than
ever for death as he flung himself back in a curule chair and let his
eyes wander across the illusions composing a panorama of the past.
The pictures seemed to light up, the Virgin's heads smiled on him, the
statues seemed alive. Everything danced and swayed around him, with a
motion due to the gloom and the tormenting fever that racked his brain;
each monstrosity grimaced at him, while the portraits on the canvas
closed their eyes for a little relief. Every shape seemed to tremble
and start, and to leave its place gravely or flippantly, gracefully or
awkwardly, according to its fashion, character, and surroundings.

A mysterious Sabbath began, rivaling the fantastic scenes witnessed
by Faust upon the Brocken. But these optical illusions, produced by
weariness, overstrained eyesight, or the accidents of twilight, could
not alarm the stranger. The terrors of life had no power over a soul
grown familiar with the terrors of death. He even gave himself up, half
amused by its bizarre eccentricities, to the influence of this moral
galvanism; its phenomena, closely connected with his last thoughts,
assured him that he was still alive. The silence about him was so deep
that he embarked once more in dreams that grew gradually darker and
darker as if by magic, as the light slowly faded. A last struggling ray
from the sun lit up rosy answering lights. He raised his head and saw a
skeleton dimly visible, with its skull bent doubtfully to one side, as
if to say, "The dead will none of thee as yet."

He passed his hand over his forehead to shake off the drowsiness, and
felt a cold breath of air as an unknown furry something swept past his
cheeks. He shivered. A muffled clatter of the windows followed; it was
a bat, he fancied, that had given him this chilly sepulchral caress. He
could yet dimly see for a moment the shapes that surrounded him, by the
vague light in the west; then all these inanimate objects were blotted
out in uniform darkness. Night and the hour of death had suddenly come.
Thenceforward, for a while, he lost consciousness of the things about
him; he was either buried in deep meditation or sleep overcame him,
brought on by weariness or by the stress of those many thoughts that
lacerated his heart.

Suddenly he thought that an awful voice called him by name; it was like
some feverish nightmare, when at a step the dreamer falls headlong over
into an abyss, and he trembled. He closed his eyes, dazzled by bright
rays from a red circle of light that shone out from the shadows. In the
midst of the circle stood a little old man who turned the light of the
lamp upon him, yet he had not heard him enter, nor move, nor speak.
There was something magical about the apparition. The boldest man,
awakened in such a sort, would have felt alarmed at the sight of this
figure, which might have issued from some sarcophagus hard by.

A curiously youthful look in the unmoving eyes of the spectre forbade
the idea of anything supernatural; but for all that, in the brief space
between his dreaming and waking life, the young man's judgment remained
philosophically suspended, as Descartes advises. He was, in spite
of himself, under the influence of an unaccountable hallucination, a
mystery that our pride rejects, and that our imperfect science vainly
tries to resolve.

Imagine a short old man, thin and spare, in a long black velvet gown
girded round him by a thick silk cord. His long white hair escaped on
either side of his face from under a black velvet cap which closely
fitted his head and made a formal setting for his countenance. His
gown enveloped his body like a winding sheet, so that all that was left
visible was a narrow bleached human face. But for the wasted arm, thin
as a draper's wand, which held aloft the lamp that cast all its light
upon him, the face would have seemed to hang in mid air. A gray pointed
beard concealed the chin of this fantastical appearance, and gave him
the look of one of those Jewish types which serve artists as models
for Moses. His lips were so thin and colorless that it needed a close
inspection to find the lines of his mouth at all in the pallid face. His
great wrinkled brow and hollow bloodless cheeks, the inexorably stern
expression of his small green eyes that no longer possessed eyebrows
or lashes, might have convinced the stranger that Gerard Dow's "Money
Changer" had come down from his frame. The craftiness of an inquisitor,
revealed in those curving wrinkles and creases that wound about his
temples, indicated a profound knowledge of life. There was no deceiving
this man, who seemed to possess a power of detecting the secrets of the
wariest heart.

The wisdom and the moral codes of every people seemed gathered up in his
passive face, just as all the productions of the globe had been heaped
up in his dusty showrooms. He seemed to possess the tranquil luminous
vision of some god before whom all things are open, or the haughty power
of a man who knows all things.

With two strokes of the brush a painter could have so altered the
expression of this face, that what had been a serene representation
of the Eternal Father should change to the sneering mask of a
Mephistopheles; for though sovereign power was revealed by the forehead,
mocking folds lurked about the mouth. He must have sacrificed all the
joys of earth, as he had crushed all human sorrows beneath his potent
will. The man at the brink of death shivered at the thought of the life
led by this spirit, so solitary and remote from our world; joyless,
since he had no one illusion left; painless, because pleasure had ceased
to exist for him. There he stood, motionless and serene as a star in a
bright mist. His lamp lit up the obscure closet, just as his green eyes,
with their quiet malevolence, seemed to shed a light on the moral world.

This was the strange spectacle that startled the young man's returning
sight, as he shook off the dreamy fancies and thoughts of death that
had lulled him. An instant of dismay, a momentary return to belief
in nursery tales, may be forgiven him, seeing that his senses were
obscured. Much thought had wearied his mind, and his nerves were
exhausted with the strain of the tremendous drama within him, and by the
scenes that had heaped on him all the horrid pleasures that a piece of
opium can produce.

But this apparition had appeared in Paris, on the Quai Voltaire, and in
the nineteenth century; the time and place made sorcery impossible.
The idol of French scepticism had died in the house just opposite,
the disciple of Gay-Lussac and Arago, who had held the charlatanism of
intellect in contempt. And yet the stranger submitted himself to the
influence of an imaginative spell, as all of us do at times, when we
wish to escape from an inevitable certainty, or to tempt the power of
Providence. So some mysterious apprehension of a strange force made him
tremble before the old man with the lamp. All of us have been stirred in
the same way by the sight of Napoleon, or of some other great man, made
illustrious by his genius or by fame.

"You wish to see Raphael's portrait of Jesus Christ, monsieur?" the old
man asked politely. There was something metallic in the clear, sharp
ring of his voice.

He set the lamp upon a broken column, so that all its light might fall
on the brown case.

At the sacred names of Christ and Raphael the young man showed some
curiosity. The merchant, who no doubt looked for this, pressed a spring,
and suddenly the mahogany panel slid noiselessly back in its groove, and
discovered the canvas to the stranger's admiring gaze. At sight of this
deathless creation, he forgot his fancies in the show-rooms and the
freaks of his dreams, and became himself again. The old man became a
being of flesh and blood, very much alive, with nothing chimerical about
him, and took up his existence at once upon solid earth.

The sympathy and love, and the gentle serenity in the divine face,
exerted an instant sway over the younger spectator. Some influence
falling from heaven bade cease the burning torment that consumed the
marrow of his bones. The head of the Saviour of mankind seemed to issue
from among the shadows represented by a dark background; an aureole of
light shone out brightly from his hair; an impassioned belief seemed to
glow through him, and to thrill every feature. The word of life had just
been uttered by those red lips, the sacred sounds seemed to linger still
in the air; the spectator besought the silence for those captivating
parables, hearkened for them in the future, and had to turn to the
teachings of the past. The untroubled peace of the divine eyes, the
comfort of sorrowing souls, seemed an interpretation of the Evangel.
The sweet triumphant smile revealed the secret of the Catholic religion,
which sums up all things in the precept, "Love one another." This
picture breathed the spirit of prayer, enjoined forgiveness, overcame
self, caused sleeping powers of good to waken. For this work of
Raphael's had the imperious charm of music; you were brought under the
spell of memories of the past; his triumph was so absolute that the
artist was forgotten. The witchery of the lamplight heightened the
wonder; the head seemed at times to flicker in the distance, enveloped
in cloud.

"I covered the surface of that picture with gold pieces," said the
merchant carelessly.

"And now for death!" cried the young man, awakened from his musings. His
last thought had recalled his fate to him, as it led him imperceptibly
back from the forlorn hopes to which he had clung.

"Ah, ha! then my suspicions were well founded!" said the other, and his
hands held the young man's wrists in a grip like that of a vice.

The younger man smiled wearily at his mistake, and said gently:

"You, sir, have nothing to fear; it is not your life, but my own that
is in question.... But why should I hide a harmless fraud?" he went on,
after a look at the anxious old man. "I came to see your treasures to
while away the time till night should come and I could drown myself
decently. Who would grudge this last pleasure to a poet and a man of
science?"

While he spoke, the jealous merchant watched the haggard face of his
pretended customer with keen eyes. Perhaps the mournful tones of his
voice reassured him, or he also read the dark signs of fate in the faded
features that had made the gamblers shudder; he released his hands, but,
with a touch of caution, due to the experience of some hundred years at
least, he stretched his arm out to a sideboard as if to steady himself,
took up a little dagger, and said:

"Have you been a supernumerary clerk of the Treasury for three years
without receiving any perquisites?"

The stranger could scarcely suppress a smile as he shook his head.

"Perhaps your father has expressed his regret for your birth a little
too sharply? Or have you disgraced yourself?"

"If I meant to be disgraced, I should live."

"You have been hissed perhaps at the Funambules? Or you have had to
compose couplets to pay for your mistress' funeral? Do you want to be
cured of the gold fever? Or to be quit of the spleen? For what blunder
is your life forfeit?"

"You must not look among the common motives that impel suicides for the
reason of my death. To spare myself the task of disclosing my unheard-of
sufferings, for which language has no name, I will tell you this--that
I am in the deepest, most humiliating, and most cruel trouble, and," he
went on in proud tones that harmonized ill with the words just uttered,
"I have no wish to beg for either help or sympathy."

"Eh! eh!"

The two syllables which the old man pronounced resembled the sound of a
rattle. Then he went on thus:

"Without compelling you to entreat me, without making you blush for
it, and without giving you so much as a French centime, a para from the
Levant, a German heller, a Russian kopeck, a Scottish farthing, a single
obolus or sestertius from the ancient world, or one piastre from the
new, without offering you anything whatever in gold, silver, or copper,
notes or drafts, I will make you richer, more powerful, and of more
consequence than a constitutional king."

The young man thought that the older was in his dotage, and waited in
bewilderment without venturing to reply.

"Turn round," said the merchant, suddenly catching up the lamp in order
to light up the opposite wall; "look at that leathern skin," he went on.

The young man rose abruptly, and showed some surprise at the sight of a
piece of shagreen which hung on the wall behind his chair. It was only
about the size of a fox's skin, but it seemed to fill the deep shadows
of the place with such brilliant rays that it looked like a small comet,
an appearance at first sight inexplicable. The young sceptic went up
to this so-called talisman, which was to rescue him from all points of
view, and he soon found out the cause of its singular brilliancy. The
dark grain of the leather had been so carefully burnished and polished,
the striped markings of the graining were so sharp and clear, that every
particle of the surface of the bit of Oriental leather was in itself a
focus which concentrated the light, and reflected it vividly.

He accounted for this phenomenon categorically to the old man, who only
smiled meaningly by way of answer. His superior smile led the young
scientific man to fancy that he himself had been deceived by some
imposture. He had no wish to carry one more puzzle to his grave, and
hastily turned the skin over, like some child eager to find out the
mysteries of a new toy.

"Ah," he cried, "here is the mark of the seal which they call in the
East the Signet of Solomon."

"So you know that, then?" asked the merchant. His peculiar method of
laughter, two or three quick breathings through the nostrils, said more
than any words however eloquent.

"Is there anybody in the world simple enough to believe in that idle
fancy?" said the young man, nettled by the spitefulness of the silent
chuckle. "Don't you know," he continued, "that the superstitions of the
East have perpetuated the mystical form and the counterfeit characters
of the symbol, which represents a mythical dominion? I have no more
laid myself open to a charge of credulity in this case, than if I had
mentioned sphinxes or griffins, whose existence mythology in a manner
admits."

"As you are an Orientalist," replied the other, "perhaps you can read
that sentence."

He held the lamp close to the talisman, which the young man held towards
him, and pointed out some characters inlaid in the surface of the
wonderful skin, as if they had grown on the animal to which it once
belonged.

"I must admit," said the stranger, "that I have no idea how the letters
could be engraved so deeply on the skin of a wild ass." And he turned
quickly to the tables strewn with curiosities and seemed to look for
something.

"What is it that you want?" asked the old man.

"Something that will cut the leather, so that I can see whether the
letters are printed or inlaid."

The old man held out his stiletto. The stranger took it and tried to cut
the skin above the lettering; but when he had removed a thin shaving of
leather from them, the characters still appeared below, so clear and so
exactly like the surface impression, that for a moment he was not sure
that he had cut anything away after all.

"The craftsmen of the Levant have secrets known only to themselves,"
he said, half in vexation, as he eyed the characters of this Oriental
sentence.

"Yes," said the old man, "it is better to attribute it to man's agency
than to God's."

The mysterious words were thus arranged:

     [Drawing of apparently Sanskrit characters omitted]

Or, as it runs in English:

     POSSESSING ME THOU SHALT POSSESS ALL THINGS.
     BUT THY LIFE IS MINE, FOR GOD HAS SO WILLED IT.
     WISH, AND THY WISHES SHALL BE FULFILLED;
     BUT MEASURE THY DESIRES, ACCORDING
     TO THE LIFE THAT IS IN THEE.
     THIS IS THY LIFE,
     WITH EACH WISH I MUST SHRINK
     EVEN AS THY OWN DAYS.
     WILT THOU HAVE ME?  TAKE ME.
     GOD WILL HEARKEN UNTO THEE.
     SO BE IT!

"So you read Sanskrit fluently," said the old man. "You have been in
Persia perhaps, or in Bengal?"

"No, sir," said the stranger, as he felt the emblematical skin
curiously. It was almost as rigid as a sheet of metal.

The old merchant set the lamp back again upon the column, giving
the other a look as he did so. "He has given up the notion of dying
already," the glance said with phlegmatic irony.

"Is it a jest, or is it an enigma?" asked the younger man.

The other shook his head and said soberly:

"I don't know how to answer you. I have offered this talisman with its
terrible powers to men with more energy in them than you seem to me to
have; but though they laughed at the questionable power it might exert
over their futures, not one of them was ready to venture to conclude the
fateful contract proposed by an unknown force. I am of their opinion, I
have doubted and refrained, and----"

"Have you never even tried its power?" interrupted the young stranger.

"Tried it!" exclaimed the old man. "Suppose that you were on the column
in the Place Vendome, would you try flinging yourself into space? Is it
possible to stay the course of life? Has a man ever been known to die
by halves? Before you came here, you had made up your mind to kill
yourself, but all at once a mystery fills your mind, and you think no
more about death. You child! Does not any one day of your life afford
mysteries more absorbing? Listen to me. I saw the licentious days of
Regency. I was like you, then, in poverty; I have begged my bread; but
for all that, I am now a centenarian with a couple of years to spare,
and a millionaire to boot. Misery was the making of me, ignorance has
made me learned. I will tell you in a few words the great secret of
human life. By two instinctive processes man exhausts the springs of
life within him. Two verbs cover all the forms which these two causes of
death may take--To Will and To have your Will. Between these two limits
of human activity the wise have discovered an intermediate formula, to
which I owe my good fortune and long life. To Will consumes us, and To
have our Will destroys us, but To Know steeps our feeble organisms
in perpetual calm. In me Thought has destroyed Will, so that Power is
relegated to the ordinary functions of my economy. In a word, it is not
in the heart which can be broken, or in the senses that become deadened,
but it is in the brain that cannot waste away and survives everything
else, that I have set my life. Moderation has kept mind and body
unruffled. Yet, I have seen the whole world. I have learned all
languages, lived after every manner. I have lent a Chinaman money,
taking his father's corpse as a pledge, slept in an Arab's tent on the
security of his bare word, signed contracts in every capital of Europe,
and left my gold without hesitation in savage wigwams. I have attained
everything, because I have known how to despise all things.

"My one ambition has been to see. Is not Sight in a manner Insight?
And to have knowledge or insight, is not that to have instinctive
possession? To be able to discover the very substance of fact and to
unite its essence to our essence? Of material possession what abides
with you but an idea? Think, then, how glorious must be the life of a
man who can stamp all realities upon his thought, place the springs of
happiness within himself, and draw thence uncounted pleasures in idea,
unspoiled by earthly stains. Thought is a key to all treasures; the
miser's gains are ours without his cares. Thus I have soared above this
world, where my enjoyments have been intellectual joys. I have reveled
in the contemplation of seas, peoples, forests, and mountains! I have
seen all things, calmly, and without weariness; I have set my desires
on nothing; I have waited in expectation of everything. I have walked
to and fro in the world as in a garden round about my own dwelling.
Troubles, loves, ambitions, losses, and sorrows, as men call them,
are for me ideas, which I transmute into waking dreams; I express and
transpose instead of feeling them; instead of permitting them to prey
upon my life, I dramatize and expand them; I divert myself with them as
if they were romances which I could read by the power of vision within
me. As I have never overtaxed my constitution, I still enjoy robust
health; and as my mind is endowed with all the force that I have not
wasted, this head of mine is even better furnished than my galleries.
The true millions lie here," he said, striking his forehead. "I spend
delicious days in communings with the past; I summon before me whole
countries, places, extents of sea, the fair faces of history. In my
imaginary seraglio I have all the women that I have never possessed.
Your wars and revolutions come up before me for judgment. What is a
feverish fugitive admiration for some more or less brightly colored
piece of flesh and blood; some more or less rounded human form; what
are all the disasters that wait on your erratic whims, compared with
the magnificent power of conjuring up the whole world within your soul,
compared with the immeasurable joys of movement, unstrangled by the
cords of time, unclogged by the fetters of space; the joys of beholding
all things, of comprehending all things, of leaning over the parapet of
the world to question the other spheres, to hearken to the voice of God?
There," he burst out, vehemently, "there are To Will and To have your
Will, both together," he pointed to the bit of shagreen; "there are your
social ideas, your immoderate desires, your excesses, your pleasures
that end in death, your sorrows that quicken the pace of life, for pain
is perhaps but a violent pleasure. Who could determine the point where
pleasure becomes pain, where pain is still a pleasure? Is not the utmost
brightness of the ideal world soothing to us, while the lightest shadows
of the physical world annoy? Is not knowledge the secret of wisdom? And
what is folly but a riotous expenditure of Will or Power?"

"Very good then, a life of riotous excess for me!" said the stranger,
pouncing upon the piece of shagreen.

"Young man, beware!" cried the other with incredible vehemence.

"I had resolved my existence into thought and study," the stranger
replied; "and yet they have not even supported me. I am not to be gulled
by a sermon worthy of Swedenborg, nor by your Oriental amulet, nor yet
by your charitable endeavors to keep me in a world wherein existence is
no longer possible for me.... Let me see now," he added, clutching the
talisman convulsively, as he looked at the old man, "I wish for a
royal banquet, a carouse worthy of this century, which, it is said, has
brought everything to perfection! Let me have young boon companions,
witty, unwarped by prejudice, merry to the verge of madness! Let one
wine succeed another, each more biting and perfumed than the last, and
strong enough to bring about three days of delirium! Passionate women's
forms should grace that night! I would be borne away to unknown regions
beyond the confines of this world, by the car and four-winged steed of
a frantic and uproarious orgy. Let us ascend to the skies, or plunge
ourselves in the mire. I do not know if one soars or sinks at such
moments, and I do not care! Next, I bid this enigmatical power
to concentrate all delights for me in one single joy. Yes, I must
comprehend every pleasure of earth and heaven in the final embrace that
is to kill me. Therefore, after the wine, I wish to hold high festival
to Priapus, with songs that might rouse the dead, and kisses without
end; the sound of them should pass like the crackling of flame through
Paris, should revive the heat of youth and passion in husband and wife,
even in hearts of seventy years."

A laugh burst from the little old man. It rang in the young man's ears
like an echo from hell; and tyrannously cut him short. He said no more.

"Do you imagine that my floors are going to open suddenly, so that
luxuriously-appointed tables may rise through them, and guests from
another world? No, no, young madcap. You have entered into the compact
now, and there is an end of it. Henceforward, your wishes will be
accurately fulfilled, but at the expense of your life. The compass of
your days, visible in that skin, will contract according to the strength
and number of your desires, from the least to the most extravagant. The
Brahmin from whom I had this skin once explained to me that it would
bring about a mysterious connection between the fortunes and wishes of
its possessor. Your first wish is a vulgar one, which I could fulfil,
but I leave that to the issues of your new existence. After all, you
were wishing to die; very well, your suicide is only put off for a
time."

The stranger was surprised and irritated that this peculiar old man
persisted in not taking him seriously. A half philanthropic intention
peeped so clearly forth from his last jesting observation, that he
exclaimed:

"I shall soon see, sir, if any change comes over my fortunes in the time
it will take to cross the width of the quay. But I should like us to be
quits for such a momentous service; that is, if you are not laughing
at an unlucky wretch, so I wish that you may fall in love with an
opera-dancer. You would understand the pleasures of intemperance then,
and might perhaps grow lavish of the wealth that you have husbanded so
philosophically."

He went out without heeding the old man's heavy sigh, went back through
the galleries and down the staircase, followed by the stout assistant
who vainly tried to light his passage; he fled with the haste of a
robber caught in the act. Blinded by a kind of delirium, he did not even
notice the unexpected flexibility of the piece of shagreen, which coiled
itself up, pliant as a glove in his excited fingers, till it would go
into the pocket of his coat, where he mechanically thrust it. As he
rushed out of the door into the street, he ran up against three young
men who were passing arm-in-arm.

"Brute!"

"Idiot!"

Such were the gratifying expressions exchanged between them.

"Why, it is Raphael!"

"Good! we were looking for you."

"What! it is you, then?"

These three friendly exclamations quickly followed the insults, as the
light of a street lamp, flickering in the wind, fell upon the astonished
faces of the group.

"My dear fellow, you must come with us!" said the young man that Raphael
had all but knocked down.

"What is all this about?"

"Come along, and I will tell you the history of it as we go."

By fair means or foul, Raphael must go along with his friends towards
the Pont des Arts; they surrounded him, and linked him by the arm among
their merry band.

"We have been after you for about a week," the speaker went on. "At your
respectable hotel _de Saint Quentin_, where, by the way, the sign with
the alternate black and red letters cannot be removed, and hangs out
just as it did in the time of Jean Jacques, that Leonarda of yours told
us that you were off into the country. For all that, we certainly did
not look like duns, creditors, sheriff's officers, or the like. But no
matter! Rastignac had seen you the evening before at the Bouffons; we
took courage again, and made it a point of honor to find out whether
you were roosting in a tree in the Champs-Elysees, or in one of those
philanthropic abodes where the beggars sleep on a twopenny rope, or if,
more luckily, you were bivouacking in some boudoir or other. We could
not find you anywhere. Your name was not in the jailers' registers
at the St. Pelagie nor at La Force! Government departments, cafes,
libraries, lists of prefects' names, newspaper offices, restaurants,
greenrooms--to cut it short, every lurking place in Paris, good or bad,
has been explored in the most expert manner. We bewailed the loss of a
man endowed with such genius, that one might look to find him at Court
or in the common jails. We talked of canonizing you as a hero of July,
and, upon my word, we regretted you!"

As he spoke, the friends were crossing the Pont des Arts. Without
listening to them, Raphael looked at the Seine, at the clamoring waves
that reflected the lights of Paris. Above that river, in which but
now he had thought to fling himself, the old man's prediction had been
fulfilled, the hour of his death had been already put back by fate.

"We really regretted you," said his friend, still pursuing his theme.
"It was a question of a plan in which we included you as a superior
person, that is to say, somebody who can put himself above other people.
The constitutional thimble-rig is carried on to-day, dear boy, more
seriously than ever. The infamous monarchy, displaced by the heroism of
the people, was a sort of drab, you could laugh and revel with her; but
La Patrie is a shrewish and virtuous wife, and willy-nilly you must take
her prescribed endearments. Then besides, as you know, authority passed
over from the Tuileries to the journalists, at the time when the Budget
changed its quarters and went from the Faubourg Saint-Germain to the
Chaussee de Antin. But this you may not know perhaps. The Government,
that is, the aristocracy of lawyers and bankers who represent the
country to-day, just as the priests used to do in the time of the
monarchy, has felt the necessity of mystifying the worthy people of
France with a few new words and old ideas, like philosophers of
every school, and all strong intellects ever since time began. So now
Royalist-national ideas must be inculcated, by proving to us that it
is far better to pay twelve million francs, thirty-three centimes to
La Patrie, represented by Messieurs Such-and-Such, than to pay eleven
hundred million francs, nine centimes to a king who used to say _I_
instead of _we_. In a word, a journal, with two or three hundred
thousand francs, good, at the back of it, has just been started, with a
view to making an opposition paper to content the discontented, without
prejudice to the national government of the citizen-king. We scoff
at liberty as at despotism now, and at religion or incredulity quite
impartially. And since, for us, 'our country' means a capital where
ideas circulate and are sold at so much a line, a succulent dinner every
day, and the play at frequent intervals, where profligate women swarm,
where suppers last on into the next day, and light loves are hired by
the hour like cabs; and since Paris will always be the most adorable of
all countries, the country of joy, liberty, wit, pretty women, _mauvais
sujets_, and good wine; where the truncheon of authority never makes
itself disagreeably felt, because one is so close to those who wield
it,--we, therefore, sectaries of the god Mephistopheles, have engaged to
whitewash the public mind, to give fresh costumes to the actors, to put
a new plank or two in the government booth, to doctor doctrinaires,
and warm up old Republicans, to touch up the Bonapartists a bit, and
revictual the Centre; provided that we are allowed to laugh _in petto_
at both kings and peoples, to think one thing in the morning and another
at night, and to lead a merry life _a la_ Panurge, or to recline upon
soft cushions, _more orientali_.

"The sceptre of this burlesque and macaronic kingdom," he went on, "we
have reserved for you; so we are taking you straightway to a dinner
given by the founder of the said newspaper, a retired banker, who, at a
loss to know what to do with his money, is going to buy some brains
with it. You will be welcomed as a brother, we shall hail you as king
of these free lances who will undertake anything; whose perspicacity
discovers the intentions of Austria, England, or Russia before either
Russia, Austria or England have formed any. Yes, we will invest you with
the sovereignty of those puissant intellects which give to the world its
Mirabeaus, Talleyrands, Pitts, and Metternichs--all the clever Crispins
who treat the destinies of a kingdom as gamblers' stakes, just as
ordinary men play dominoes for _kirschenwasser_. We have given you out
to be the most undaunted champion who ever wrestled in a drinking-bout
at close quarters with the monster called Carousal, whom all bold
spirits wish to try a fall with; we have gone so far as to say that
you have never yet been worsted. I hope you will not make liars of us.
Taillefer, our amphitryon, has undertaken to surpass the circumscribed
saturnalias of the petty modern Lucullus. He is rich enough to infuse
pomp into trifles, and style and charm into dissipation... Are you
listening, Raphael?" asked the orator, interrupting himself.

"Yes," answered the young man, less surprised by the accomplishment
of his wishes than by the natural manner in which the events had come
about.

He could not bring himself to believe in magic, but he marveled at the
accidents of human fate.

"Yes, you say, just as if you were thinking of your grandfather's
demise," remarked one of his neighbors.

"Ah!" cried Raphael, "I was thinking, my friends, that we are in a fair
way to become very great scoundrels," and there was an ingenuousness in
his tones that set these writers, the hope of young France, in a roar.
"So far our blasphemies have been uttered over our cups; we have passed
our judgments on life while drunk, and taken men and affairs in an
after-dinner frame of mind. We were innocent of action; we were bold in
words. But now we are to be branded with the hot iron of politics;
we are going to enter the convict's prison and to drop our illusions.
Although one has no belief left, except in the devil, one may regret
the paradise of one's youth and the age of innocence, when we devoutly
offered the tip of our tongue to some good priest for the consecrated
wafer of the sacrament. Ah, my good friends, our first peccadilloes gave
us so much pleasure because the consequent remorse set them off and lent
a keen relish to them; but nowadays----"

"Oh! now," said the first speaker, "there is still left----"

"What?" asked another.

"Crime----"

"There is a word as high as the gallows and deeper than the Seine," said
Raphael.

"Oh, you don't understand me; I mean political crime. Since this
morning, a conspirator's life is the only one I covet. I don't know that
the fancy will last over to-morrow, but to-night at least my gorge rises
at the anaemic life of our civilization and its railroad evenness. I am
seized with a passion for the miseries of retreat from Moscow, for the
excitements of the Red Corsair, or for a smuggler's life. I should like
to go to Botany Bay, as we have no Chartreaux left us here in France;
it is a sort of infirmary reserved for little Lord Byrons who, having
crumpled up their lives like a serviette after dinner, have nothing left
to do but to set their country ablaze, blow their own brains out, plot
for a republic or clamor for a war----"

"Emile," Raphael's neighbor called eagerly to the speaker, "on my honor,
but for the revolution of July I would have taken orders, and gone off
down into the country somewhere to lead the life of an animal, and----"

"And you would have read your breviary through every day."

"Yes."

"You are a coxcomb!"

"Why, we read the newspapers as it is!"

"Not bad that, for a journalist! But hold your tongue, we are going
through a crowd of subscribers. Journalism, look you, is the religion of
modern society, and has even gone a little further."

"What do you mean?"

"Its pontiffs are not obliged to believe in it any more than the people
are."

Chatting thus, like good fellows who have known their _De Viris
illustribus_ for years past, they reached a mansion in the Rue Joubert.

Emile was a journalist who had acquired more reputation by dint of
doing nothing than others had derived from their achievements. A bold,
caustic, and powerful critic, he possessed all the qualities that his
defects permitted. An outspoken giber, he made numberless epigrams on
a friend to his face; but would defend him, if absent, with courage
and loyalty. He laughed at everything, even at his own career. Always
impecunious, he yet lived, like all men of his calibre, plunged in
unspeakable indolence. He would fling some word containing volumes
in the teeth of folk who could not put a syllable of sense into their
books. He lavished promises that he never fulfilled; he made a pillow of
his luck and reputation, on which he slept, and ran the risk of waking
up to old age in a workhouse. A steadfast friend to the gallows foot,
a cynical swaggerer with a child's simplicity, a worker only from
necessity or caprice.

"In the language of Maitre Alcofribas, we are about to make a famous
_troncon de chiere lie_," he remarked to Raphael as he pointed out the
flower-stands that made a perfumed forest of the staircase.

"I like a vestibule to be well warmed and richly carpeted," Raphael
said. "Luxury in the peristyle is not common in France. I feel as if
life had begun anew here."

"And up above we are going to drink and make merry once more, my dear
Raphael. Ah! yes," he went on, "and I hope we are going to come off
conquerors, too, and walk over everybody else's head."

As he spoke, he jestingly pointed to the guests. They were entering
a large room which shone with gilding and lights, and there all the
younger men of note in Paris welcomed them. Here was one who had just
revealed fresh powers, his first picture vied with the glories of
Imperial art. There, another, who but yesterday had launched forth a
volume, an acrid book filled with a sort of literary arrogance, which
opened up new ways to the modern school. A sculptor, not far away, with
vigorous power visible in his rough features, was chatting with one of
those unenthusiastic scoffers who can either see excellence anywhere or
nowhere, as it happens. Here, the cleverest of our caricaturists,
with mischievous eyes and bitter tongue, lay in wait for epigrams to
translate into pencil strokes; there, stood the young and audacious
writer, who distilled the quintessence of political ideas better than
any other man, or compressed the work of some prolific writer as he held
him up to ridicule; he was talking with the poet whose works would
have eclipsed all the writings of the time if his ability had been as
strenuous as his hatreds. Both were trying not to say the truth while
they kept clear of lies, as they exchanged flattering speeches. A famous
musician administered soothing consolation in a rallying fashion, to
a young politician who had just fallen quite unhurt, from his rostrum.
Young writers who lacked style stood beside other young writers who
lacked ideas, and authors of poetical prose by prosaic poets.

At the sight of all these incomplete beings, a simple Saint Simonian,
ingenuous enough to believe in his own doctrine, charitably paired them
off, designing, no doubt, to convert them into monks of his order. A
few men of science mingled in the conversation, like nitrogen in the
atmosphere, and several _vaudevillistes_ shed rays like the sparking
diamonds that give neither light nor heat. A few paradox-mongers,
laughing up their sleeves at any folk who embraced their likes or
dislikes in men or affairs, had already begun a two-edged policy,
conspiring against all systems, without committing themselves to any
side. Then there was the self-appointed critic who admires nothing, and
will blow his nose in the middle of a _cavatina_ at the Bouffons, who
applauds before any one else begins, and contradicts every one who says
what he himself was about to say; he was there giving out the sayings
of wittier men for his own. Of all the assembled guests, a future lay
before some five; ten or so should acquire a fleeting renown; as for the
rest, like all mediocrities, they might apply to themselves the famous
falsehood of Louis XVIII., Union and oblivion.

The anxious jocularity of a man who is expending two thousand crowns sat
on their host. His eyes turned impatiently towards the door from time to
time, seeking one of his guests who kept him waiting. Very soon a stout
little person appeared, who was greeted by a complimentary murmur;
it was the notary who had invented the newspaper that very morning.
A valet-de-chambre in black opened the doors of a vast dining-room,
whither every one went without ceremony, and took his place at an
enormous table.

Raphael took a last look round the room before he left it. His wish had
been realized to the full. The rooms were adorned with silk and gold.
Countless wax tapers set in handsome candelabra lit up the slightest
details of gilded friezes, the delicate bronze sculpture, and the
splendid colors of the furniture. The sweet scent of rare flowers, set
in stands tastefully made of bamboo, filled the air. Everything, even
the curtains, was pervaded by elegance without pretension, and there was
a certain imaginative charm about it all which acted like a spell on the
mind of a needy man.

"An income of a hundred thousand livres a year is a very nice beginning
of the catechism, and a wonderful assistance to putting morality into
our actions," he said, sighing. "Truly my sort of virtue can scarcely
go afoot, and vice means, to my thinking, a garret, a threadbare coat, a
gray hat in winter time, and sums owing to the porter.... I should like
to live in the lap of luxury a year, or six months, no matter! And then
afterwards, die. I should have known, exhausted, and consumed a thousand
lives, at any rate."

"Why, you are taking the tone of a stockbroker in good luck," said
Emile, who overheard him. "Pooh! your riches would be a burden to you as
soon as you found that they would spoil your chances of coming out above
the rest of us. Hasn't the artist always kept the balance true between
the poverty of riches and the riches of poverty? And isn't struggle a
necessity to some of us? Look out for your digestion, and only look,"
he added, with a mock-heroic gesture, "at the majestic, thrice holy, and
edifying appearance of this amiable capitalist's dining-room. That man
has in reality only made his money for our benefit. Isn't he a kind of
sponge of the polyp order, overlooked by naturalists, which should be
carefully squeezed before he is left for his heirs to feed upon? There
is style, isn't there, about those bas-reliefs that adorn the walls? And
the lustres, and the pictures, what luxury well carried out! If one may
believe those who envy him, or who know, or think they know, the origins
of his life, then this man got rid of a German and some others--his best
friend for one, and the mother of that friend, during the Revolution.
Could you house crimes under the venerable Taillefer's silvering locks?
He looks to me a very worthy man. Only see how the silver sparkles, and
is every glittering ray like a stab of a dagger to him?... Let us go in,
one might as well believe in Mahomet. If common report speak truth, here
are thirty men of talent, and good fellows too, prepared to dine off the
flesh and blood of a whole family;... and here are we ourselves, a pair
of youngsters full of open-hearted enthusiasm, and we shall be partakers
in his guilt. I have a mind to ask our capitalist whether he is a
respectable character...."

"No, not now," cried Raphael, "but when he is dead drunk, we shall have
had our dinner then."

The two friends sat down laughing. First of all, by a glance more rapid
than a word, each paid his tribute of admiration to the splendid general
effect of the long table, white as a bank of freshly-fallen snow, with
its symmetrical line of covers, crowned with their pale golden rolls of
bread. Rainbow colors gleamed in the starry rays of light reflected by
the glass; the lights of the tapers crossed and recrossed each other
indefinitely; the dishes covered with their silver domes whetted both
appetite and curiosity.

Few words were spoken. Neighbors exchanged glances as the Maderia
circulated. Then the first course appeared in all its glory; it would
have done honor to the late Cambaceres, Brillat-Savarin would have
celebrated it. The wines of Bordeaux and Burgundy, white and red, were
royally lavished. This first part of the banquet might been compared in
every way to a rendering of some classical tragedy. The second act grew
a trifle noisier. Every guest had had a fair amount to drink, and had
tried various crus at this pleasure, so that as the remains of the
magnificent first course were removed, tumultuous discussions began;
a pale brow here and there began to flush, sundry noses took a purpler
hue, faces lit up, and eyes sparkled.

While intoxication was only dawning, the conversation did not overstep
the bounds of civility; but banter and bon mots slipped by degrees from
every tongue; and then slander began to rear its little snake's heard,
and spoke in dulcet tones; a few shrewd ones here and there gave heed to
it, hoping to keep their heads. So the second course found their minds
somewhat heated. Every one ate as he spoke, spoke while he ate, and
drank without heeding the quantity of the liquor, the wine was so
biting, the bouquet so fragrant, the example around so infectious.
Taillefer made a point of stimulating his guests, and plied them with
the formidable wines of the Rhone, with fierce Tokay, and heady old
Roussillon.

The champagne, impatiently expected and lavishly poured out, was a
scourge of fiery sparks to these men; released like post-horses from
some mail-coach by a relay; they let their spirits gallop away into the
wilds of argument to which no one listened, began to tell stories which
had no auditors, and repeatedly asked questions to which no answer was
made. Only the loud voice of wassail could be heard, a voice made up
of a hundred confused clamors, which rose and grew like a crescendo of
Rossini's. Insidious toasts, swagger, and challenges followed.

Each renounced any pride in his own intellectual capacity, in order to
vindicate that of hogsheads, casks, and vats; and each made noise enough
for two. A time came when the footmen smiled, while their masters all
talked at once. A philosopher would have been interested, doubtless, by
the singularity of the thoughts expressed, a politician would have been
amazed by the incongruity of the methods discussed in the melee of words
or doubtfully luminous paradoxes, where truths, grotesquely caparisoned,
met in conflict across the uproar of brawling judgments, of arbitrary
decisions and folly, much as bullets, shells, and grapeshot are hurled
across a battlefield.

It was at once a volume and a picture. Every philosophy, religion, and
moral code differing so greatly in every latitude, every government,
every great achievement of the human intellect, fell before a scythe as
long as Time's own; and you might have found it hard to decide whether
it was wielded by Gravity intoxicated, or by Inebriation grown sober and
clear-sighted. Borne away by a kind of tempest, their minds, like the
sea raging against the cliffs, seemed ready to shake the laws which
confine the ebb and flow of civilization; unconsciously fulfilling the
will of God, who has suffered evil and good to abide in nature, and
reserved the secret of their continual strife to Himself. A frantic
travesty of debate ensued, a Walpurgis-revel of intellects. Between the
dreary jests of these children of the Revolution over the inauguration
of a newspaper, and the talk of the joyous gossips at Gargantua's
birth, stretched the gulf that divides the nineteenth century from the
sixteenth. Laughingly they had begun the work of destruction, and our
journalists laughed amid the ruins.

"What is the name of that young man over there?" said the notary,
indicating Raphael. "I thought I heard some one call him Valentin."

"What stuff is this?" said Emile, laughing; "plain Valentin, say you?
Raphael DE Valentin, if you please. We bear an eagle or, on a field
sable, with a silver crown, beak and claws gules, and a fine motto:
NON CECIDIT ANIMUS. We are no foundling child, but a descendant of the
Emperor Valens, of the stock of the Valentinois, founders of the cities
of Valence in France, and Valencia in Spain, rightful heirs to the
Empire of the East. If we suffer Mahmoud on the throne of Byzantium, it
is out of pure condescension, and for lack of funds and soldiers."

With a fork flourished above Raphael's head, Emile outlined a crown upon
it. The notary bethought himself a moment, but soon fell to drinking
again, with a gesture peculiar to himself; it was quite impossible,
it seemed to say to secure in his clientele the cities of Valence and
Byzantium, the Emperor Valens, Mahmoud, and the house of Valentinois.

"Should not the destruction of those ant-hills, Babylon, Tyre, Carthage,
and Venice, each crushed beneath the foot of a passing giant, serve as
a warning to man, vouchsafed by some mocking power?" said Claude Vignon,
who must play the Bossuet, as a sort of purchased slave, at the rate of
fivepence a line.

"Perhaps Moses, Sylla, Louis XI., Richelieu, Robespierre, and Napoleon
were but the same man who crosses our civilizations now and again, like
a comet across the sky," said a disciple of Ballanche.

"Why try to fathom the designs of Providence?" said Canalis, maker of
ballads.

"Come, now," said the man who set up for a critic, "there is nothing
more elastic in the world than your Providence."

"Well, sir, Louis XIV. sacrificed more lives over digging the
foundations of the Maintenon's aqueducts, than the Convention expended
in order to assess the taxes justly, to make one law for everybody, and
one nation of France, and to establish the rule of equal inheritance,"
said Massol, whom the lack of a syllable before his name had made a
Republican.

"Are you going to leave our heads on our shoulders?" asked Moreau (of
the Oise), a substantial farmer. "You, sir, who took blood for wine just
now?"

"Where is the use? Aren't the principles of social order worth some
sacrifices, sir?"

"Hi! Bixiou! What's-his-name, the Republican, considers a landowner's
head a sacrifice!" said a young man to his neighbor.

"Men and events count for nothing," said the Republican, following out
his theory in spite of hiccoughs; "in politics, as in philosophy, there
are only principles and ideas."

"What an abomination! Then you would ruthlessly put your friends to
death for a shibboleth?"

"Eh, sir! the man who feels compunction is your thorough scoundrel, for
he has some notion of virtue; while Peter the Great and the Duke of Alva
were embodied systems, and the pirate Monbard an organization."

"But can't society rid itself of your systems and organizations?" said
Canalis.

"Oh, granted!" cried the Republican.

"That stupid Republic of yours makes me feel queasy. We sha'n't be able
to carve a capon in peace, because we shall find the agrarian law inside
it."

"Ah, my little Brutus, stuffed with truffles, your principles are all
right enough. But you are like my valet, the rogue is so frightfully
possessed with a mania for property that if I left him to clean my
clothes after his fashion, he would soon clean me out."

"Crass idiots!" replied the Republican, "you are for setting a nation
straight with toothpicks. To your way of thinking, justice is more
dangerous than thieves."

"Oh, dear!" cried the attorney Deroches.

"Aren't they a bore with their politics!" said the notary Cardot. "Shut
up. That's enough of it. There is no knowledge nor virtue worth shedding
a drop of blood for. If Truth were brought into liquidation, we might
find her insolvent."

"It would be much less trouble, no doubt, to amuse ourselves with evil,
rather than dispute about good. Moreover, I would give all the speeches
made for forty years past at the Tribune for a trout, for one of
Perrault's tales or Charlet's sketches."

"Quite right!... Hand me the asparagus. Because, after all, liberty
begets anarchy, anarchy leads to despotism, and despotism back again
to liberty. Millions have died without securing a triumph for any one
system. Is not that the vicious circle in which the whole moral world
revolves? Man believes that he has reached perfection, when in fact he
has but rearranged matters."

"Oh! oh!" cried Cursy, the _vaudevilliste_; "in that case, gentlemen,
here's to Charles X., the father of liberty."

"Why not?" asked Emile. "When law becomes despotic, morals are relaxed,
and vice versa.

"Let us drink to the imbecility of authority, which gives us such an
authority over imbeciles!" said the good banker.

"Napoleon left us glory, at any rate, my good friend!" exclaimed a naval
officer who had never left Brest.

"Glory is a poor bargain; you buy it dear, and it will not keep.
Does not the egotism of the great take the form of glory, just as for
nobodies it is their own well-being?"

"You are very fortunate, sir----"

"The first inventor of ditches must have been a weakling, for society
is only useful to the puny. The savage and the philosopher, at either
extreme of the moral scale, hold property in equal horror."

"All very fine!" said Cardot; "but if there were no property, there
would be no documents to draw up."

"These green peas are excessively delicious!"

"And the _cure_ was found dead in his bed in the morning...."

"Who is talking about death? Pray don't trifle, I have an uncle."

"Could you bear his loss with resignation?"

"No question."

"Gentlemen, listen to me! _How to kill an uncle_. Silence! (Cries of
"Hush! hush!") In the first place, take an uncle, large and stout,
seventy years old at least, they are the best uncles. (Sensation.) Get
him to eat a pate de foie gras, any pretext will do."

"Ah, but my uncle is a thin, tall man, and very niggardly and
abstemious."

"That sort of uncle is a monster; he misappropriates existence."

"Then," the speaker on uncles went on, "tell him, while he is digesting
it, that his banker has failed."

"How if he bears up?"

"Let loose a pretty girl on him."

"And if----?" asked the other, with a shake of the head.

"Then he wouldn't be an uncle--an uncle is a gay dog by nature."

"Malibran has lost two notes in her voice."

"No, sir, she has not."

"Yes, sir, she has."

"Oh, ho! No and yes, is not that the sum-up of all religious, political,
or literary dissertations? Man is a clown dancing on the edge of an
abyss."

"You would make out that I am a fool."

"On the contrary, you cannot make me out."

"Education, there's a pretty piece of tomfoolery. M. Heineffettermach
estimates the number of printed volumes at more than a thousand
millions; and a man cannot read more than a hundred and fifty thousand
in his lifetime. So, just tell me what that word _education_ means. For
some it consists in knowing the name of Alexander's horse, of the dog
Berecillo, of the Seigneur d'Accords, and in ignorance of the man to
whom we owe the discovery of rafting and the manufacture of porcelain.
For others it is the knowledge how to burn a will and live respected, be
looked up to and popular, instead of stealing a watch with half-a-dozen
aggravating circumstances, after a previous conviction, and so
perishing, hated and dishonored, in the Place de Greve."

"Will Nathan's work live?"

"He has very clever collaborators, sir."

"Or Canalis?"

"He is a great man; let us say no more about him."

"You are all drunk!"

"The consequence of a Constitution is the immediate stultification of
intellects. Art, science, public works, everything, is consumed by a
horribly egoistic feeling, the leprosy of the time. Three hundred of
your bourgeoisie, set down on benches, will only think of planting
poplars. Tyranny does great things lawlessly, while Liberty will
scarcely trouble herself to do petty ones lawfully."

"Your reciprocal instruction will turn out counters in human flesh,"
broke in an Absolutist. "All individuality will disappear in a people
brought to a dead level by education."

"For all that, is not the aim of society to secure happiness to each
member of it?" asked the Saint-Simonian.

"If you had an income of fifty thousand livres, you would not think much
about the people. If you are smitten with a tender passion for the race,
go to Madagascar; there you will find a nice little nation all ready to
Saint-Simonize, classify, and cork up in your phials, but here every one
fits into his niche like a peg in a hole. A porter is a porter, and a
blockhead is a fool, without a college of fathers to promote them to
those positions."

"You are a Carlist."

"And why not? Despotism pleases me; it implies a certain contempt for
the human race. I have no animosity against kings, they are so amusing.
Is it nothing to sit enthroned in a room, at a distance of thirty
million leagues from the sun?"

"Let us once more take a broad view of civilization," said the man of
learning who, for the benefit of the inattentive sculptor, had opened a
discussion on primitive society and autochthonous races. "The vigor of a
nation in its origin was in a way physical, unitary, and crude; then as
aggregations increased, government advanced by a decomposition of the
primitive rule, more or less skilfully managed. For example, in remote
ages national strength lay in theocracy, the priest held both sword and
censer; a little later there were two priests, the pontiff and the king.
To-day our society, the latest word of civilization, has distributed
power according to the number of combinations, and we come to the forces
called business, thought, money, and eloquence. Authority thus divided
is steadily approaching a social dissolution, with interest as its one
opposing barrier. We depend no longer on either religion or physical
force, but upon intellect. Can a book replace the sword? Can discussion
be a substitute for action? That is the question."

"Intellect has made an end of everything," cried the Carlist. "Come now!
Absolute freedom has brought about national suicides; their triumph left
them as listless as an English millionaire."

"Won't you tell us something new? You have made fun of authority of all
sorts to-day, which is every bit as vulgar as denying the existence of
God. So you have no belief left, and the century is like an old Sultan
worn out by debauchery! Your Byron, in short, sings of crime and its
emotions in a final despair of poetry."

"Don't you know," replied Bianchon, quite drunk by this time, "that
a dose of phosphorus more or less makes the man of genius or the
scoundrel, a clever man or an idiot, a virtuous person or a criminal?"

"Can any one treat of virtue thus?" cried Cursy. "Virtue, the subject of
every drama at the theatre, the denoument of every play, the foundation
of every court of law...."

"Be quiet, you ass. You are an Achilles for virtue, without his heel,"
said Bixiou.

"Some drink!"

"What will you bet that I will drink a bottle of champagne like a flash,
at one pull?"

"What a flash of wit!"

"Drunk as lords," muttered a young man gravely, trying to give some wine
to his waistcoat.

"Yes, sir; real government is the art of ruling by public opinion."

"Opinion? That is the most vicious jade of all. According to you
moralists and politicians, the laws you set up are always to go before
those of nature, and opinion before conscience. You are right and wrong
both. Suppose society bestows down pillows on us, that benefit is made
up for by the gout; and justice is likewise tempered by red-tape, and
colds accompany cashmere shawls."

"Wretch!" Emile broke in upon the misanthrope, "how can you slander
civilization here at table, up to the eyes in wines and exquisite
dishes? Eat away at that roebuck with the gilded horns and feet, and do
not carp at your mother..."

"Is it any fault of mine if Catholicism puts a million deities in a sack
of flour, that Republics will end in a Napoleon, that monarchy dwells
between the assassination of Henry IV. and the trial of Louis XVI., and
Liberalism produces Lafayettes?"

"Didn't you embrace him in July?"

"No."

"Then hold your tongue, you sceptic."

"Sceptics are the most conscientious of men."

"They have no conscience."

"What are you saying? They have two apiece at least!"

"So you want to discount heaven, a thoroughly commercial notion. Ancient
religions were but the unchecked development of physical pleasure, but
we have developed a soul and expectations; some advance has been made."

"What can you expect, my friends, of a century filled with politics
to repletion?" asked Nathan. "What befell _The History of the King of
Bohemia and his Seven Castles_, a most entrancing conception?..."

"I say," the would-be critic cried down the whole length of the table.
"The phrases might have been drawn at hap-hazard from a hat, 'twas a
work written 'down to Charenton.'"

"You are a fool!"

"And you are a rogue!"

"Oh! oh!"

"Ah! ah!"

"They are going to fight."

"No, they aren't."

"You will find me to-morrow, sir."

"This very moment," Nathan answered.

"Come, come, you pair of fire-eaters!"

"You are another!" said the prime mover in the quarrel.

"Ah, I can't stand upright, perhaps?" asked the pugnacious Nathan,
straightening himself up like a stag-beetle about to fly.

He stared stupidly round the table, then, completely exhausted by the
effort, sank back into his chair, and mutely hung his head.

"Would it not have been nice," the critic said to his neighbor, "to
fight about a book I have neither read nor seen?"

"Emile, look out for your coat; your neighbor is growing pale," said
Bixiou.

"Kant? Yet another ball flung out for fools to sport with, sir!
Materialism and spiritualism are a fine pair of battledores with which
charlatans in long gowns keep a shuttlecock a-going. Suppose that God
is everywhere, as Spinoza says, or that all things proceed from God, as
says St. Paul... the nincompoops, the door shuts or opens, but isn't the
movement the same? Does the fowl come from the egg, or the egg from the
fowl?... Just hand me some duck... and there, you have all science."

"Simpleton!" cried the man of science, "your problem is settled by
fact!"

"What fact?"

"Professors' chairs were not made for philosophy, but philosophy for the
professors' chairs. Put on a pair of spectacles and read the budget."

"Thieves!"

"Nincompoops!"

"Knaves!"

"Gulls!"

"Where but in Paris will you find such a ready and rapid exchange of
thought?" cried Bixiou in a deep, bass voice.

"Bixiou! Act a classical farce for us! Come now."

"Would you like me to depict the nineteenth century?"

"Silence."

"Pay attention."

"Clap a muffle on your trumpets."

"Shut up, you Turk!"

"Give him some wine, and let that fellow keep quiet."

"Now, then, Bixiou!"

The artist buttoned his black coat to the collar, put on yellow gloves,
and began to burlesque the _Revue des Deux Mondes_ by acting a squinting
old lady; but the uproar drowned his voice, and no one heard a word of
the satire. Still, if he did not catch the spirit of the century, he
represented the _Revue_ at any rate, for his own intentions were not
very clear to him.

Dessert was served as if by magic. A huge epergne of gilded bronze
from Thomire's studio overshadowed the table. Tall statuettes, which a
celebrated artist had endued with ideal beauty according to conventional
European notions, sustained and carried pyramids of strawberries, pines,
fresh dates, golden grapes, clear-skinned peaches, oranges brought
from Setubal by steamer, pomegranates, Chinese fruit; in short, all
the surprises of luxury, miracles of confectionery, the most tempting
dainties, and choicest delicacies. The coloring of this epicurean work
of art was enhanced by the splendors of porcelain, by sparkling outlines
of gold, by the chasing of the vases. Poussin's landscapes, copied
on Sevres ware, were crowned with graceful fringes of moss, green,
translucent, and fragile as ocean weeds.

The revenue of a German prince would not have defrayed the cost of this
arrogant display. Silver and mother-of-pearl, gold and crystal, were
lavished afresh in new forms; but scarcely a vague idea of this almost
Oriental fairyland penetrated eyes now heavy with wine, or crossed the
delirium of intoxication. The fire and fragrance of the wines acted like
potent philters and magical fumes, producing a kind of mirage in the
brain, binding feet, and weighing down hands. The clamor increased.
Words were no longer distinct, glasses flew in pieces, senseless peals
of laughter broke out. Cursy snatched up a horn and struck up a flourish
on it. It acted like a signal given by the devil. Yells, hisses, songs,
cries, and groans went up from the maddened crew. You might have smiled
to see men, light-hearted by nature, grow tragical as Crebillon's
dramas, and pensive as a sailor in a coach. Hard-headed men blabbed
secrets to the inquisitive, who were long past heeding them. Saturnine
faces were wreathed in smiles worthy of a pirouetting dancer. Claude
Vignon shuffled about like a bear in a cage. Intimate friends began to
fight.

Animal likenesses, so curiously traced by physiologists in human faces,
came out in gestures and behavior. A book lay open for a Bichat if he
had repaired thither fasting and collected. The master of the house,
knowing his condition, did not dare stir, but encouraged his guests'
extravangances with a fixed grimacing smile, meant to be hospitable and
appropriate. His large face, turning from blue and red to a purple shade
terrible to see, partook of the general commotion by movements like the
heaving and pitching of a brig.

"Now, did you murder them?" Emile asked him.

"Capital punishment is going to be abolished, they say, in favor of
the Revolution of July," answered Taillefer, raising his eyebrows with
drunken sagacity.

"Don't they rise up before you in dreams at times?" Raphael persisted.

"There's a statute of limitations," said the murderer-Croesus.

"And on his tombstone," Emile began, with a sardonic laugh, "the
stonemason will carve 'Passer-by, accord a tear, in memory of one that's
here!' Oh," he continued, "I would cheerfully pay a hundred sous to
any mathematician who would prove the existence of hell to me by an
algebraical equation."

He flung up a coin and cried:

"Heads for the existence of God!"

"Don't look!" Raphael cried, pouncing upon it. "Who knows? Suspense is
so pleasant."

"Unluckily," Emile said, with burlesque melancholy, "I can see no
halting-place between the unbeliever's arithmetic and the papal _Pater
noster_. Pshaw! let us drink. _Trinq_ was, I believe, the oracular
answer of the _dive bouteille_ and the final conclusion of Pantagruel."

"We owe our arts and monuments to the _Pater noster_, and our knowledge,
too, perhaps; and a still greater benefit--modern government--whereby a
vast and teeming society is wondrously represented by some five hundred
intellects. It neutralizes opposing forces and gives free play to
_Civilization_, that Titan queen who has succeeded the ancient terrible
figure of the _King_, that sham Providence, reared by man between
himself and heaven. In the face of such achievements, atheism seems like
a barren skeleton. What do you say?"

"I am thinking of the seas of blood shed by Catholicism." Emile replied,
quite unimpressed. "It has drained our hearts and veins dry to make a
mimic deluge. No matter! Every man who thinks must range himself beneath
the banner of Christ, for He alone has consummated the triumph of spirit
over matter; He alone has revealed to us, like a poet, an intermediate
world that separates us from the Deity."

"Believest thou?" asked Raphael with an unaccountable drunken smile.
"Very good; we must not commit ourselves; so we will drink the
celebrated toast, _Diis ignotis_!"

And they drained the chalice filled up with science, carbonic acid gas,
perfumes, poetry, and incredulity.

"If the gentlemen will go to the drawing-room, coffee is ready for
them," said the major-domo.

There was scarcely one of those present whose mind was not floundering
by this time in the delights of chaos, where every spark of intelligence
is quenched, and the body, set free from its tyranny, gives itself up
to the frenetic joys of liberty. Some who had arrived at the apogee of
intoxication were dejected, as they painfully tried to arrest a single
thought which might assure them of their own existence; others, deep in
the heavy morasses of indigestion, denied the possibility of movement.
The noisy and the silent were oddly assorted.

For all that, when new joys were announced to them by the stentorian
tones of the servant, who spoke on his master's behalf, they all rose,
leaning upon, dragging or carrying one another. But on the threshold
of the room the entire crew paused for a moment, motionless, as if
fascinated. The intemperate pleasures of the banquet seemed to fade away
at this titillating spectacle, prepared by their amphitryon to appeal to
the most sensual of their instincts.

Beneath the shining wax-lights in a golden chandelier, round about a
table inlaid with gilded metal, a group of women, whose eyes shone
like diamonds, suddenly met the stupefied stare of the revelers. Their
toilettes were splendid, but less magnificent than their beauty, which
eclipsed the other marvels of this palace. A light shone from their
eyes, bewitching as those of sirens, more brilliant and ardent than the
blaze that streamed down upon the snowy marble, the delicately carved
surfaces of bronze, and lit up the satin sheen of the tapestry. The
contrasts of their attitudes and the slight movements of their heads,
each differing in character and nature of attraction, set the heart
afire. It was like a thicket, where blossoms mingled with rubies,
sapphires, and coral; a combination of gossamer scarves that flickered
like beacon-lights; of black ribbons about snowy throats; of gorgeous
turbans and demurely enticing apparel. It was a seraglio that appealed
to every eye, and fulfilled every fancy. Each form posed to admiration
was scarcely concealed by the folds of cashmere, and half hidden, half
revealed by transparent gauze and diaphanous silk. The little slender
feet were eloquent, though the fresh red lips uttered no sound.

Demure and fragile-looking girls, pictures of maidenly innocence, with
a semblance of conventional unction about their heads, were there like
apparitions that a breath might dissipate. Aristocratic beauties with
haughty glances, languid, flexible, slender, and complaisant, bent their
heads as though there were royal protectors still in the market. An
English-woman seemed like a spirit of melancholy--some coy, pale,
shadowy form among Ossian's mists, or a type of remorse flying from
crime. The Parisienne was not wanting in all her beauty that consists
in an indescribable charm; armed with her irresistible weakness, vain of
her costume and her wit, pliant and hard, a heartless, passionless siren
that yet can create factitious treasures of passion and counterfeit
emotion.

Italians shone in the throng, serene and self-possessed in their bliss;
handsome Normans, with splendid figures; women of the south, with black
hair and well-shaped eyes. Lebel might have summoned together all the
fair women of Versailles, who since morning had perfected all their
wiles, and now came like a troupe of Oriental women, bidden by the slave
merchant to be ready to set out at dawn. They stood disconcerted and
confused about the table, huddled together in a murmuring group
like bees in a hive. The combination of timid embarrassment with
coquettishness and a sort of expostulation was the result either of
calculated effect or a spontaneous modesty. Perhaps a sentiment of which
women are never utterly divested prescribed to them the cloak of modesty
to heighten and enhance the charms of wantonness. So the venerable
Taillefer's designs seemed on the point of collapse, for these unbridled
natures were subdued from the very first by the majesty with which woman
is invested. There was a murmur of admiration, which vibrated like a
soft musical note. Wine had not taken love for traveling companion;
instead of a violent tumult of passions, the guests thus taken by
surprise, in a moment of weakness, gave themselves up to luxurious
raptures of delight.

Artists obeyed the voice of poetry which constrains them, and studied
with pleasure the different delicate tints of these chosen examples of
beauty. Sobered by a thought perhaps due to some emanation from a
bubble of carbonic acid in the champagne, a philosopher shuddered at the
misfortunes which had brought these women, once perhaps worthy of the
truest devotion, to this. Each one doubtless could have unfolded a cruel
tragedy. Infernal tortures followed in the train of most of them, and
they drew after them faithless men, broken vows, and pleasures atoned
for in wretchedness. Polite advances were made by the guests, and
conversations began, as varied in character as the speakers. They broke
up into groups. It might have been a fashionable drawing-room where
ladies and young girls offer after dinner the assistance that coffee,
liqueurs, and sugar afford to diners who are struggling in the toils
of a perverse digestion. But in a little while laughter broke out,
the murmur grew, and voices were raised. The saturnalia, subdued for a
moment, threatened at times to renew itself. The alternations of sound
and silence bore a distant resemblance to a symphony of Beethoven's.

The two friends, seated on a silken divan, were first approached by
a tall, well-proportioned girl of stately bearing; her features were
irregular, but her face was striking and vehement in expression, and
impressed the mind by the vigor of its contrasts. Her dark hair fell
in luxuriant curls, with which some hand seemed to have played havoc
already, for the locks fell lightly over the splendid shoulders that
thus attracted attention. The long brown curls half hid her queenly
throat, though where the light fell upon it, the delicacy of its fine
outlines was revealed. Her warm and vivid coloring was set off by the
dead white of her complexion. Bold and ardent glances came from under
the long eyelashes; the damp, red, half-open lips challenged a kiss. Her
frame was strong but compliant; with a bust and arms strongly developed,
as in figures drawn by the Caracci, she yet seemed active and elastic,
with a panther's strength and suppleness, and in the same way the
energetic grace of her figure suggested fierce pleasures.

But though she might romp perhaps and laugh, there was something
terrible in her eyes and her smile. Like a pythoness possessed by the
demon, she inspired awe rather than pleasure. All changes, one after
another, flashed like lightning over every mobile feature of her face.
She might captivate a jaded fancy, but a young man would have feared
her. She was like some colossal statue fallen from the height of a Greek
temple, so grand when seen afar, too roughly hewn to be seen anear.
And yet, in spite of all, her terrible beauty could have stimulated
exhaustion; her voice might charm the deaf; her glances might put life
into the bones of the dead; and therefore Emile was vaguely reminded of
one of Shakespeare's tragedies--a wonderful maze, in which joy
groans, and there is something wild even about love, and the magic of
forgiveness and the warmth of happiness succeed to cruel storms of rage.
She was a siren that can both kiss and devour; laugh like a devil, or
weep as angels can. She could concentrate in one instant all a woman's
powers of attraction in a single effort (the sighs of melancholy and
the charms of maiden's shyness alone excepted), then in a moment rise
in fury like a nation in revolt, and tear herself, her passion, and her
lover, in pieces.

Dressed in red velvet, she trampled under her reckless feet the stray
flowers fallen from other heads, and held out a salver to the two
friends, with careless hands. The white arms stood out in bold relief
against the velvet. Proud of her beauty; proud (who knows?) of her
corruption, she stood like a queen of pleasure, like an incarnation of
enjoyment; the enjoyment that comes of squandering the accumulations of
three generations; that scoffs at its progenitors, and makes merry over
a corpse; that will dissolve pearls and wreck thrones, turn old men into
boys, and make young men prematurely old; enjoyment only possible to
giants weary of their power, tormented by reflection, or for whom strife
has become a plaything.

"What is your name?" asked Raphael.

"Aquilina."

"Out of _Venice Preserved_!" exclaimed Emile.

"Yes," she answered. "Just as a pope takes a new name when he is exalted
above all other men, I, too, took another name when I raised myself
above women's level."

"Then have you, like your patron saint, a terrible and noble lover, a
conspirator, who would die for you?" cried Emile eagerly--this gleam of
poetry had aroused his interest.

"Once I had," she answered. "But I had a rival too in La Guillotine. I
have worn something red about me ever since, lest any happiness should
carry me away."

"Oh, if you are going to get her on to the story of those four lads
of La Rochelle, she will never get to the end of it. That's enough,
Aquilina. As if every woman could not bewail some lover or other, though
not every one has the luck to lose him on the scaffold, as you have
done. I would a great deal sooner see a lover of mine in a trench at the
back of Clamart than in a rival's arms."

All this in the gentlest and most melodious accents, and pronounced by
the prettiest, gentlest, and most innocent-looking little person that
a fairy wand ever drew from an enchanted eggshell. She had come
up noiselessly, and they became aware of a slender, dainty figure,
charmingly timid blue eyes, and white transparent brows. No ingenue
among the naiads, a truant from her river spring, could have been shyer,
whiter, more ingenuous than this young girl, seemingly about sixteen
years old, ignorant of evil and of the storms of life, and fresh from
some church in which she must have prayed the angels to call her to
heaven before the time. Only in Paris are such natures as this to be
found, concealing depths of depravity behind a fair mask, and the most
artificial vices beneath a brow as young and fair as an opening flower.

At first the angelic promise of those soft lineaments misled the
friends. Raphael and Emile took the coffee which she poured into the
cups brought by Aquilina, and began to talk with her. In the eyes of the
two poets she soon became transformed into some sombre allegory, of
I know not what aspect of human life. She opposed to the vigorous
and ardent expression of her commanding acquaintance a revelation
of heartless corruption and voluptuous cruelty. Heedless enough to
perpetrate a crime, hardy enough to feel no misgivings; a pitiless demon
that wrings larger and kinder natures with torments that it is incapable
of knowing, that simpers over a traffic in love, sheds tears over a
victim's funeral, and beams with joy over the reading of the will.
A poet might have admired the magnificent Aquilina; but the winning
Euphrasia must be repulsive to every one--the first was the soul of sin;
the second, sin without a soul in it.

"I should dearly like to know," Emile remarked to this pleasing being,
"if you ever reflect upon your future?"

"My future!" she answered with a laugh. "What do you mean by my future?
Why should I think about something that does not exist as yet? I never
look before or behind. Isn't one day at a time more than I can concern
myself with as it is? And besides, the future, as we know, means the
hospital."

"How can you forsee a future in the hospital, and make no effort to
avert it?"

"What is there so alarming about the hospital?" asked the terrific
Aquilina. "When we are neither wives nor mothers, when old age draws
black stockings over our limbs, sets wrinkles on our brows, withers up
the woman in us, and darkens the light in our lover's eyes, what could
we need when that comes to pass? You would look on us then as mere
human clay; we with our habiliments shall be for you like so much
mud--worthless, lifeless, crumbling to pieces, going about with the
rustle of dead leaves. Rags or the daintiest finery will be as one to us
then; the ambergris of the boudoir will breathe an odor of death and dry
bones; and suppose there is a heart there in that mud, not one of you
but would make mock of it, not so much as a memory will you spare to
us. Is not our existence precisely the same whether we live in a fine
mansion with lap-dogs to tend, or sort rags in a workhouse? Does it make
much difference whether we shall hide our gray heads beneath lace or a
handkerchief striped with blue and red; whether we sweep a crossing with
a birch broom, or the steps of the Tuileries with satins; whether we sit
beside a gilded hearth, or cower over the ashes in a red earthen pot;
whether we go to the Opera or look on in the Place de Greve?"

"_Aquilina mia_, you have never shown more sense than in this depressing
fit of yours," Euphrasia remarked. "Yes, cashmere, _point d'Alencon_,
perfumes, gold, silks, luxury, everything that sparkles, everything
pleasant, belongs to youth alone. Time alone may show us our folly, but
good fortune will acquit us. You are laughing at me," she went on, with
a malicious glance at the friends; "but am I not right? I would sooner
die of pleasure than of illness. I am not afflicted with a mania for
perpetuity, nor have I a great veneration for human nature, such as God
has made it. Give me millions, and I would squander them; I should not
keep one centime for the year to come. Live to be charming and have
power, that is the decree of my every heartbeat. Society sanctions my
life; does it not pay for my extravagances? Why does Providence pay me
every morning my income, which I spend every evening? Why are hospitals
built for us? And Providence did not put good and evil on either hand
for us to select what tires and pains us. I should be very foolish if I
did not amuse myself."

"And how about others?" asked Emile.

"Others? Oh, well, they must manage for themselves. I prefer laughing
at their woes to weeping over my own. I defy any man to give me the
slightest uneasiness."

"What have you suffered to make you think like this?" asked Raphael.

"I myself have been forsaken for an inheritance," she said, striking an
attitude that displayed all her charms; "and yet I had worked night and
day to keep my lover! I am not to be gulled by any smile or vow, and I
have set myself to make one long entertainment of my life."

"But does not happiness come from the soul within?" cried Raphael.

"It may be so," Aquilina answered; "but is it nothing to be conscious of
admiration and flattery; to triumph over other women, even over the most
virtuous, humiliating them before our beauty and our splendor? Not only
so; one day of our life is worth ten years of a bourgeoise existence,
and so it is all summed up."

"Is not a woman hateful without virtue?" Emile said to Raphael.

Euphrasia's glance was like a viper's, as she said, with an irony in her
voice that cannot be rendered:

"Virtue! we leave that to deformity and to ugly women. What would the
poor things be without it?"

"Hush, be quiet," Emile broke in. "Don't talk about something you have
never known."

"That I have never known!" Euphrasia answered. "You give yourself for
life to some person you abominate; you must bring up children who will
neglect you, who wound your very heart, and you must say, 'Thank you!'
for it; and these are the virtues you prescribe to woman. And that is
not enough. By way of requiting her self-denial, you must come and
add to her sorrows by trying to lead her astray; and though you are
rebuffed, she is compromised. A nice life! How far better to keep one's
freedom, to follow one's inclinations in love, and die young!"

"Have you no fear of the price to be paid some day for all this?"

"Even then," she said, "instead of mingling pleasures and troubles, my
life will consist of two separate parts--a youth of happiness is secure,
and there may come a hazy, uncertain old age, during which I can suffer
at my leisure."

"She has never loved," came in the deep tones of Aquilina's voice. "She
never went a hundred leagues to drink in one look and a denial with
untold raptures. She has not hung her own life on a thread, nor tried
to stab more than one man to save her sovereign lord, her king, her
divinity.... Love, for her, meant a fascinating colonel."

"Here she is with her La Rochelle," Euphrasia made answer. "Love comes
like the wind, no one knows whence. And, for that matter, if one of
those brutes had once fallen in love with you, you would hold sensible
men in horror."

"Brutes are put out of the question by the Code," said the tall,
sarcastic Aquilina.

"I thought you had more kindness for the army," laughed Euphrasia.

"How happy they are in their power of dethroning their reason in this
way," Raphael exclaimed.

"Happy?" asked Aquilina, with dreadful look, and a smile full of pity
and terror. "Ah, you do not know what it is to be condemned to a life of
pleasure, with your dead hidden in your heart...."

A moment's consideration of the rooms was like a foretaste of Milton's
Pandemonium. The faces of those still capable of drinking wore a hideous
blue tint, from burning draughts of punch. Mad dances were kept up with
wild energy; excited laughter and outcries broke out like the explosion
of fireworks. The boudoir and a small adjoining room were strewn like
a battlefield with the insensible and incapable. Wine, pleasure,
and dispute had heated the atmosphere. Wine and love, delirium and
unconsciousness possessed them, and were written upon all faces, upon
the furniture; were expressed by the surrounding disorder, and brought
light films over the vision of those assembled, so that the air seemed
full of intoxicating vapor. A glittering dust arose, as in the luminous
paths made by a ray of sunlight, the most bizarre forms flitted through
it, grotesque struggles were seen athwart it. Groups of interlaced