第26章

"There! one must reform," he thought; and instead of going to a restaurant and spending fifty or sixty francs over his dinner, he retrenched by dining with the Duchesse de Maufrigneuse, and told her about the letter.

"I should like to see that man," she said, letting her eyes shine like two fixed stars.

"What would you do?"

"Why, he should manage my affairs for me."

Diane de Maufrigneuse was divinely dressed; she meant her toilet to do honor to Victurnien.The levity with which she treated his affairs or, more properly speaking, his debts fascinated him.

The charming pair went to the Italiens.Never had that beautiful and enchanting woman looked more seraphic, more ethereal.Nobody in the house could have believed that she had debts which reached the sum total mentioned by de Marsay that very morning.No single one of the cares of earth had touched that sublime forehead of hers, full of woman's pride of the highest kind.In her, a pensive air seemed to be some gleam of an earthly love, nobly extinguished.The men for the most part were wagering that Victurnien, with his handsome figure, laid her under contribution; while the women, sure of their rival's subterfuge, admired her as Michael Angelo admired Raphael, in petto.

Victurnien loved Diane, according to one of these ladies, for the sake of her hair--she had the most beautiful fair hair in France; another maintained that Diane's pallor was her principal merit, for she was not really well shaped, her dress made the most of her figure; yet others thought that Victurnien loved her for her foot, her one good point, for she had a flat figure.But (and this brings the present-day manner of Paris before you in an astonishing manner) whereas all the men said that the Duchess was subsidizing Victurnien's splendor, the women, on the other hand, gave people to understand that it was Victurnien who paid for the angel's wings, as Rastignac said.

As they drove back again, Victurnien had it on the tip of his tongue a score of times to open this chapter, for the Duchess' debts weighed more heavily upon his mind than his own; and a score of times his purpose died away before the attitude of the divine creature beside him.He could see her by the light of the carriage lamps; she was bewitching in the love-languor which always seemed to be extorted by the violence of passion from her madonna's purity.The Duchess did not fall into the mistake of talking of her virtue, of her angel's estate, as provincial women, her imitators, do.She was far too clever.She made him, for whom she made such great sacrifices, think these things for himself.At the end of six months she could make him feel that a harmless kiss on her hand was a deadly sin; she contrived that every grace should be extorted from her, and this with such consummate art, that it was impossible not to feel that she was more an angel than ever when she yielded.

None but Parisian women are clever enough always to give a new charm to the moon, to romanticize the stars, to roll in the same sack of charcoal and emerge each time whiter than ever.This is the highest refinement of intellectual and Parisian civilization.Women beyond the Rhine or the English Channel believe nonsense of this sort when they utter it; while your Parisienne makes her lover believe that she is an angel, the better to add to his bliss by flattering his vanity on both sides--temporal and spiritual.Certain persons, detractors of the Duchess, maintain that she was the first dupe of her own white magic.

A wicked slander.The Duchess believed in nothing but herself.

By the end of the year 1823 the Kellers had supplied Victurnien with two hundred thousand francs, and neither Chesnel nor Mlle.Armande knew anything about it.He had had, besides, two thousand crowns from Chesnel at one time and another, the better to hide the sources on which he was drawing.He wrote lying letters to his poor father and aunt, who lived on, happy and deceived, like most happy people under the sun.The insidious current of life in Paris was bringing a dreadful catastrophe upon the great and noble house; and only one person was in the secret of it.This was du Croisier.He rubbed his hands gleefully as he went past in the dark and looked in at the Antiquities.He had good hope of attaining his ends; and his ends were not, as heretofore, the simple ruin of the d'Esgrignons, but the dishonor of their house.He felt instinctively at such times that his revenge was at hand; he scented it in the wind! He had been sure of it indeed from the day when he discovered that the young Count's burden of debt was growing too heavy for the boy to bear.