Paz by Honoré de Balzac (the little red hen ebook txt) 📖

the faithful watchdog, understood its meaning. It was, we must remark, an affair of two seconds; but to describe the tempest it roused in the captain's soul would take far too much space in this brief history.

"What!" he said to himself, "do the aunt and uncle think I might be loved? Then my happiness only depends on my own audacity! But Adam--"

Ideal love and desire clashed with gratitude and friendship, all equally powerful, and, for a moment, love prevailed. The lover would have his day. Paz became brilliant, he tried to please, he told the story of the Polish insurrection in noble words, being questioned about it by the diplomatist. By the end of dinner Paz saw Clementine hanging upon his lips and regarding him as a hero, forgetting that Adam too, after sacrificing a third of his vast fortune, had been an exile. At nine o'clock, after coffee had been served, Madame de Serizy kissed her niece on the forehead, pressed her hand, and went away, taking Adam with her and leaving the Marquis de Ronquerolles and the Marquis du Rouvre, who soon followed. Paz and Clementine were alone together.

"I will leave you now, madame," said Thaddeus. "You will of course rejoin them at the Opera?"

"No," she answered, "I don't like dancing, and they give an odious ballet to-night 'La Revolte au Serail.'"

There was a moment's silence.

"Two years ago Adam would not have gone to the Opera without me," said Clementine, not looking at Paz.

"He loves you madly," replied Thaddeus.

"Yes, and because he loves me madly he is all the more likely not to love me to-morrow," said the countess.

"How inexplicable Parisian women are!" exclaimed Thaddeus. "When they are loved to madness they want to be loved reasonably: and when they are loved reasonably they reproach a man for not loving them at all."

"And they are quite right. Thaddeus," she went on, smiling, "I know Adam well; I am not angry with him; he is volatile and above all grand seigneur. He will always be content to have me as his wife and he will never oppose any of my tastes, but--"

"Where is the marriage in which there are no 'buts'?" said Thaddeus, gently, trying to give another direction to Clementine's mind.

The least presuming of men might well have had the thought which came near rendering this poor lover beside himself; it was this: "If I do not tell her now that I love her I am a fool," he kept saying to himself.

Neither spoke; and there came between the pair one of those deep silences that are crowded with thoughts. The countess examined Paz covertly, and Paz observed her in a mirror. Buried in an armchair like a man digesting his dinner, the image of a husband or an indifferent old man, Paz crossed his hands upon his stomach and twirled his thumbs mechanically, looking stupidly at them.

"Why don't you tell me something good of Adam?" cried Clementine suddenly. "Tell me that he is not volatile, you who know him so well."

The cry was fine.

"Now is the time," thought poor Paz, "to put an insurmountable barrier between us. Tell you good of Adam?" he said aloud. "I love him; you would not believe me; and I am incapable of telling you harm. My position is very difficult between you."

Clementine lowered her head and looked down at the tips of his varnished boots.

"You Northern men have nothing but physical courage," she said complainingly; "you have no constancy in your opinions."

"How will you amuse yourself alone, madame?" said Paz, assuming a careless air.

"Are not you going to keep me company?"

"Excuse me for leaving you."

"What do you mean? Where are you going?"

The thought of a heroic falsehood had come into his head.

"I--I am going to the Circus in the Champs Elysees; it opens to-night, and I can't miss it."

"Why not?" said Clementine, questioning him by a look that was half-anger.

"Must I tell you why?" he said, coloring; "must I confide to you what I hide from Adam, who thinks my only love is Poland."

"Ah! a secret in our noble captain?"

"A disgraceful one--which you will perhaps understand, and pity."

"You, disgraced?"

"Yes, I, Comte Paz; I am madly in love with a girl who travels all over France with the Bouthor family,--people who have the rival circus to Franconi; but they play only at fairs. I have made the director at the Cirque-Olympique engage her."

"Is she handsome?"

"To my thinking," said Paz, in a melancholy tone. "Malaga (that's her stage name) is strong, active, and supple. Why do I prefer her to all other women in the world?--well, I can't tell you. When I look at her, with her black hair tied with a blue satin ribbon, floating on her bare and olive-colored shoulders, and when she is dressed in a white tunic with a gold edge, and a knitted silk bodice that makes her look like a living Greek statue, and when I see her carrying those flags in her hand to the sound of martial music, and jumping through the paper hoops which tear as she goes through, and lighting so gracefully on the galloping horse to such applause,--no hired clapping,--well, all that moves me."

"More than a handsome woman in a ballroom?" asked Clementine, with amazement and curiosity.

"Yes," answered Paz, in a choking voice. "Such agility, such grace under constant danger seems to me the height of triumph for a woman. Yes, madame, Cinti and Malibran, Grisi and Taglioni, Pasta and Ellsler, all who reign or have reigned on the stage, can't be compared, to my mind, with Malaga, who can jump on or off a horse at full gallop, or stand on the point of one foot and fall easily into the saddle, and knit stockings, break eggs, and make an omelette with the horse at full speed, to the admiration of the people,--the real people, peasants and soldiers. Malaga, madame, is dexterity personified; her little wrist or her little foot can rid her of three or four men. She is the goddess of gymnastics."

"She must be stupid--"

"Oh, no," said Paz, "I find her as amusing as the heroine of 'Peveril of the Peak.' Thoughtless as a Bohemian, she says everything that comes into her head; she thinks no more about the future than you do of the sous you fling to the poor. She says grand things sometimes. You couldn't make her believe that an old diplomatist was a handsome young man, not if you offered her a million of francs. Such love as hers is perpetual flattery to a man. Her health is positively insolent, and she has thirty-two oriental pearls in lips of coral. Her muzzle--that's what she calls the lower part of her face--has, as Shakespeare expresses it, the savor of a heifer's nose. She can make a man unhappy. She likes handsome men, strong men, Alexanders, gymnasts, clowns. Her trainer, a horrible brute, used to beat her to make her supple, and graceful, and intrepid--"

"You are positively intoxicated with Malaga."

"Oh, she is called Malaga only on the posters," said Paz, with a piqued air. "She lives in the rue Saint-Lazare, in a pretty apartment on the third story, all velvet and silk, like a princess. She has two lives, her circus life and the life of a pretty woman."

"Does she love you?"

"She loves me--now you will laugh--solely because I'm a Pole. She saw an engraving of Poles rushing with Poniatowski into the Elster,--for all France persists in thinking that the Elster, where it is impossible to get drowned, is an impetuous flood, in which Poniatowski and his followers were engulfed. But in the midst of all this I am very unhappy, madame."

A tear of rage fell from his eyes and affected the countess.

"You men have such a passion for singularity."

"And you?" said Thaddeus.

"I know Adam so well that I am certain he could forget me for some mountebank like your Malaga. Where did you first see her?"

"At Saint-Cloud, last September, on the fete-day. She was at a corner of a booth covered with flags, where the shows are given. Her comrades, all in Polish costumes, were making a horrible racket. I watched her standing there, silent and dumb, and I thought I saw a melancholy expression in her face; in truth there was enough about her to sadden a girl of twenty. That touched me."

The countess was sitting in a delicious attitude, pensive and rather melancholy.

"Poor, poor Thaddeus!" she exclaimed. Then, with the kindliness of a true great lady she added, not without a malicious smile, "Well go, go to your Circus."

Thaddeus took her hand, kissed it, leaving a hot tear upon it, and went out.

Having invented this passion for a circus-rider, he bethought him that he must give it some reality. The only truth in his tale was the momentary attention he had given to Malaga at Saint-Cloud; and he had since seen her name on the posters of the Circus, where the clown, for a tip of five francs, had told him that the girl was a foundling, stolen perhaps. Thaddeus now went to the Circus and saw her again. For ten francs one of the grooms (who take the place in circuses of the dressers at a theatre) informed him that Malaga was named Marguerite Turquet, and lived on the fifth story of a house in the rue des Fosses-du-Temple.

The following day Paz went to the faubourg du Temple, found the house, and asked to see Mademoiselle Turquet, who during the summer was substituting for the leading horsewoman at the Cirque-Olympique, and a supernumerary at a boulevard theatre in winter.

"Malaga!" cried the portress, rushing into the attic, "there's a fine gentleman wanting you. He is getting information from Chapuzot, who is playing him off to give me time to tell you."

"Thank you, M'ame Chapuzot; but what will he think of me if he finds me ironing my gown?"

"Pooh! when a man's in love he loves everything about us."

"Is he an Englishman? they are fond of horses."

"No, he looks to me Spanish."

"That's a pity; they say Spaniards are always poor. Stay here with me, M'ame Chapuzot; I don't want him to think I'm deserted."

"Who is it you are looking for, monsieur?" asked Madame Chapuzot, opening the door for Thaddeus, who had now come upstairs.

"Mademoiselle Turquet."

"My dear," said the portress, with an air of importance, "here is some one to see you."

A line on which the clothes were drying caught the captain's hat and knocked it off.

"What is it you wish, monsieur?" said Malaga, picking up the hat and giving it to him.

"I saw you at the Circus," said Thaddeus, "and you reminded me of a daughter whom I have lost, mademoiselle; and out of affection for my Heloise, whom you resemble in a most striking manner, I should like to be of some service to you, if you will permit me."

"Why, certainly; pray sit down, general," said Madame Chapuzot; "nothing could be more straightforward, more gallant."

"But I am not gallant, my good lady," exclaimed Paz. "I am an unfortunate father who tries to deceive himself by a resemblance."

"Then am I to pass for your daughter?" said Malaga, slyly, and not in the least suspecting the perfect sincerity of his proposal.

"Yes," said Paz, "and