Beatrix - Honoré de Balzac (best book reader TXT) 📗

at least two years; she must show him Switzerland, Italy, Germany,--in short, all possible countries."

"Ah! you confirm a fear of my director," said the duchess, naively, remembering the judicious objection of the Abbe Brossette.

Maxime and d'Ajuda could not refrain from smiling at the idea of this agreement between heaven and hell.

"To prevent Madame de Rochefide from ever seeing Calyste again," she continued, "we will all travel, Juste and his wife, Calyste, Sabine, and I. I will leave Clotilde with her father--"

"It is too soon to sing victory, madame," said Maxime. "I foresee enormous difficulties; though I shall no doubt vanquish them. Your esteem and your protection are rewards which would make me commit the vilest actions, but these will be--"

"The vilest actions!" cried the duchess, interrupting this modern condottiere, and showing on her countenance as much disgust as amazement.

"And you would share them, madame, inasmuch as I am only your agent. But are you ignorant of the degree of blindness to which Madame de Rochefide has brought your son-in-law? I know it from Canalis and Nathan, between whom she was hesitating when Calyste threw himself into the lioness's jaws. Beatrix has contrived to persuade that serious Breton that she has never loved any one but him; that she is virtuous; that Conti was merely a sentimental head-love in which neither the heart nor the rest of it had any part,--a musical love, in short! As for Rochefide, that was duty. So, you understand, she is virgin!--a fact she proves by forgetting her son, whom for more than a year she has not made the slightest attempt to see. The truth is, the little count will soon be twelve years old, and he finds in Madame Schontz a mother who is all the more a mother because maternity is, as you know, a passion with women of that sort. Du Guenic would let himself be cut in pieces, and would chop up his wife for Beatrix; and you think it is an easy matter to drag a man from the depths of such credulity! Ah! madame, Shakespeare's Iago would lose all his handkerchiefs. People think that Othello, or his younger brother, Orosmanes, or Saint-Preux, Rene, Werther, and other lovers now in possession of fame, represented love! Never did their frosty-hearted fathers know what absolute love is; Moliere alone conceived it. Love, Madame la duchesse, is not loving a noble woman, a Clarissa--a great effort, faith! Love is to say to one's self: 'She whom I love is infamous; she deceives me, she will deceive me; she is an abandoned creature, she smells of the frying of hell-fire;' but we rush to her, we find there the blue of heaven, the flowers of Paradise. That is how Moliere loved, and how we, scamps that we are! how we love. As for me, I weep at the great scene of Arnolphe. Now, that is how your son-in-law loves Beatrix. I shall have trouble separating Rochefide from Madame Schontz; but Madame Schontz will no doubt lend herself to the plot; I shall study her interior. But as for Calyste and Beatrix, they will need the blows of an axe, far deeper treachery, and so base an infamy that your virtuous imagination could never descend to it--unless indeed your director gave you a hand. You have asked the impossible, you shall be obeyed. But in spite of my settled intention to war with fire and sword, I cannot absolutely promise you success. I have known lovers who did not recoil before the most awful disillusions. You are too virtuous to know the full power of women who are not virtuous."

"Do not enter upon those infamous actions until I have consulted the Abbe Brossette to know how far I may be your accomplice," cried the duchess, with a naivete which disclosed what selfishness there is in piety.

"You shall be ignorant of everything, my dear mother," interposed d'Ajuda.

On the portico, while the carriage of the marquis was drawing up, d'Ajuda said to Maxime:--

"You frightened that good duchess."

"But she has no idea of the difficulty of what she asks. Let us go to the Jockey Club; Rochefide must invite me to dine with Madame Schontz to-morrow, for to-night my plan will be made, and I shall have chosen the pawns on my chess-board to carry it out. In the days of her splendor Beatrix refused to receive me; I intend to pay off that score, and I will avenge your sister-in-law so cruelly that perhaps she will find herself too well revenged."

The next day Rochefide told Madame Schontz that Maxime de Trailles was coming to dinner. That meant notifying her to display all her luxury, and prepare the choicest food for this connoisseur emeritus, whom all the women of the Madame Schontz type were in awe of. Madame Schontz herself thought as much of her toilet as of putting her house in a state to receive this personage.

In Paris there are as many royalties as there are varieties of art, mental and moral specialties, sciences, professions; the strongest and most capable of the men who practise them has a majesty which is all his own; he is appreciated, respected by his peers, who know the difficulties of his art or profession, and whose admiration is given to the man who surmounts them. Maxime was, in the eyes of _rats_ and courtesans, an extremely powerful and capable man, who had known how to make himself excessively loved. He was also admired by men who knew how difficult it is to live in Paris on good terms with creditors; in short, he had never had any other rival in elegance, deportment, and wit than the illustrious de Marsay, who frequently employed him on political missions. All this will suffice to explain his interview with the duchess, his prestige with Madame Schontz, and the authority of his words in a conference which he intended to have on the boulevard des Italiens with a young man already well-known, though lately arrived, in the Bohemia of Paris.


XXV. A PRINCE OF BOHEMIA

The next day, when Maxime de Trailles rose, Finot (whom he had summoned the night before) was announced. Maxime requested his visitor to arrange, as if by accident, a breakfast at the cafe Anglais, where Finot, Couture, and Lousteau should gossip beside him. Finot, whose position toward the Comte de Trailles was that of a sub-lieutenant before a marshall of France, could refuse him nothing; it was altogether too dangerous to annoy that lion. Consequently, when Maxime came to the breakfast, he found Finot and his two friends at table and the conversation already started on Madame Schontz, about whom Couture, well manoeuvred by Finot and Lousteau (Lousteau being, though not aware of it, Finot's tool), revealed to the Comte de Trailles all that he wanted to know about her.

About one o'clock, Maxime was chewing a toothpick and talking with du Tillet on Tortoni's portico, where speculation held a little Bourse, a sort of prelude to the great one. He seemed to be engaged in business, but he was really awaiting the Comte de la Palferine, who, within a given time, was certain to pass that way. The boulevard des Italiens is to-day what the Pont Neuf was in 1650; all persons known to fame pass along it once, at least, in the course of the day. Accordingly, at the end of about ten minutes, Maxime dropped du Tillet's arm, and nodding to the young Prince of Bohemia said, smiling:--

"One word with you, count."

The two rivals in their own principality, the one orb on its decline, the other like the rising sun, sat down upon four chairs before the Cafe de Paris. Maxime took care to place a certain distance between himself and some old fellows who habitually sunned themselves like wall-fruit at that hour in the afternoon, to dry out their rheumatic affections. He had excellent reasons for distrusting old men.

"Have you debts?" said Maxime, to the young count.

"If I had none, should I be worthy of being your successor?" replied La Palferine.

"In putting that question to you I don't place the matter in doubt; I only want to know if the total is reasonable; if it goes to the five or the six?"

"Six what?"

"Figures; whether you owe fifty or one hundred thousand? I have owed, myself, as much as six hundred thousand."

La Palferine raised his hat with an air as respectful as it was humorous.

"If I had sufficient credit to borrow a hundred thousand francs," he replied, "I should forget my creditors and go and pass my life in Venice, amid masterpieces of painting and pretty women and--"

"And at my age what would you be?" asked Maxime.

"I should never reach it," replied the young count.

Maxime returned the civility of his rival, and touched his hat lightly with an air of laughable gravity.

"That's one way of looking at life," he replied in the tone of one connoisseur to another. "You owe--?"

"Oh! a mere trifle, unworthy of being confessed to an uncle; he would disinherit me for such a paltry sum,--six thousand."

"One is often more hampered by six thousand than by a hundred thousand," said Maxime, sententiously. "La Palferine, you've a bold spirit, and you have even more spirit than boldness; you can go far, and make yourself a position. Let me tell you that of all those who have rushed into the career at the close of which I now am, and who have tried to oppose me, you are the only one who has ever pleased me."

La Palferine colored, so flattered was he by this avowal made with gracious good-humor by the leader of Parisian adventurers. This action of his own vanity was however a recognition of inferiority which wounded him; but Maxime divined that unpleasant reaction, easy to foresee in so clever a mind, and he applied a balm instantly by putting himself at the discretion of the young man.

"Will you do something for me that will facilitate my retreat from the Olympic circus by a fine marriage? I will do as much for you."

"You make me very proud; it realizes the fable of the Rat and the Lion," said La Palferine.

"I shall begin by lending you twenty thousand francs," continued Maxime.

"Twenty thousand francs! I knew very well that by dint of walking up and down this boulevard--" said La Palferine, in the style of a parenthesis.

"My dear fellow, you must put yourself on a certain footing," said Maxime, laughing. "Don't go on your own two feet, have six; do as I do, I never get out of my tilbury."

"But you must be going to ask me for something beyond my powers."

"No, it is only to make a woman love you within a fortnight."

"Is it a lorette?"

"Why?"

"Because that's impossible; but if it concerns a woman, and a well-bred one who is also clever--"

"She is a very illustrious marquise."

"You want her letters?" said the young count.

"Ah! you are after my own heart!" cried Maxime. "No, that's not it."

"Then you want me to love her?"

"Yes, in the real sense--"

"If I am to abandon the aesthetic, it is utterly impossible," said La Palferine. "I have, don't you see, as to women a certain honor; we may play the fool with them, but not--"

"Ah! I was not mistaken!" cried Maxime. "Do you think I'm a man to propose mere twopenny infamies to you? No, you must go, and dazzle, and conquer. My good mate, I