Honoré de Balzac: Premium Collection. Honore de Balzac

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СКАЧАТЬ at any rate, I was living with a dear being who loved me and suffered with me; whereas here, in this sumptuous house, I live in a desert.”

      At this terrible confession the countess caught her sister’s hand and kissed it, weeping.

      “How, then, can I help you,” said Eugenie, in a low voice. “He would be suspicious at once if he surprised us here, and would insist on knowing all that you have been saying to me. I should be forced to tell a lie, which is difficult indeed with so sly and treacherous a man; he would lay traps for me. But enough of my own miseries; let us think of yours. The forty thousand francs you want would be, of course, a mere nothing to Ferdinand, who handles millions with that fat banker, Baron de Nucingen. Sometimes, at dinner, in my presence, they say things to each other which make me shudder. Du Tillet knows my discretion, and they often talk freely before me, being sure of my silence. Well, robbery and murder on the high-road seem to me merciful compared to some of their financial schemes. Nucingen and he no more mind destroying a man than if he were an animal. Often I am told to receive poor dupes whose fate I have heard them talk of the night before,—men who rush into some business where they are certain to lose their all. I am tempted, like Leonardo in the brigand’s cave, to cry out, ‘Beware!’ But if I did, what would become of me? So I keep silence. This splendid house is a cut-throat’s den! But Ferdinand and Nucingen will lavish millions for their own caprices. Ferdinand is now buying from the other du Tillet family the site of their old castle; he intends to rebuild it and add a forest with large domains to the estate, and make his son a count; he declares that by the third generation the family will be noble. Nucingen, who is tired of his house in the rue Saint-Lazare, is building a palace. His wife is a friend of mine—Ah!” she cried, interrupting herself, “she might help us; she is very bold with her husband; her fortune is in her own right. Yes, she could save you.”

      “Dear heart, I have but a few hours left; let us go to her this evening, now, instantly,” said Madame de Vandenesse, throwing herself into Madame du Tillet’s arms with a burst of tears.

      “I can’t go out at eleven o’clock at night,” replied her sister.

      “My carriage is here.”

      “What are you two plotting together?” said du Tillet, pushing open the door of the boudoir.

      He came in showing a torpid face lighted now by a speciously amiable expression. The carpets had dulled his steps and the preoccupation of the two sisters had kept them from noticing the noise of his carriage-wheels on entering the court-yard. The countess, in whom the habits of social life and the freedom in which her husband had left her had developed both wit and shrewdness,—qualities repressed in her sister by marital despotism, which simply continued that of their mother,—saw that Eugenie’s terror was on the point of betraying them, and she evaded that danger by a frank answer.

      “I thought my sister richer than she is,” she replied, looking straight at her brother-in-law. “Women are sometimes embarrassed for money, and do not wish to tell their husbands, like Josephine with Napoleon. I came here to ask Eugenie to do me a service.”

      “She can easily do that, madame. Eugenie is very rich,” replied du Tillet, with concealed sarcasm.

      “Is she?” replied the countess, smiling bitterly.

      “How much do you want?” asked du Tillet, who was not sorry to get his sister-in-law into his meshes.

      “Ah, monsieur! but I have told you already we do not wish to let our husbands into this affair,” said Madame de Vandenesse, cautiously,—aware that if she took his money, she would put herself at the mercy of the man whose portrait Eugenie had fortunately drawn for her not ten minutes earlier. “I will come to-morrow and talk with Eugenie.”

      “To-morrow?” said the banker. “No; Madame du Tillet dines to-morrow with a future peer of France, the Baron de Nucingen, who is to leave me his place in the Chamber of Deputies.”

      “Then permit her to join me in my box at the Opera,” said the countess, without even glancing at her sister, so much did she fear that Eugenie’s candor would betray them.

      “She has her own box, madame,” said du Tillet, nettled.

      “Very good; then I will go to hers,” replied the countess.

      “It will be the first time you have done us that honor,” said du Tillet.

      The countess felt the sting of that reproach, and began to laugh.

      “Well, never mind; you shall not be made to pay anything this time. Adieu, my darling.”

      “She is an insolent woman,” said du Tillet, picking up the flowers that had fallen on the carpet. “You ought,” he said to his wife, “to study Madame de Vandenesse. I’d like to see you before the world as insolent and overbearing as your sister has just been here. You have a silly, bourgeois air which I detest.”

      Eugenie raised her eyes to heaven as her only answer.

      “Ah ca, madame! what have you both been talking of?” said the banker, after a pause, pointing to the flowers. “What has happened to make your sister so anxious all of a sudden to go to your opera-box?”

      The poor helot endeavored to escape questioning on the score of sleepiness, and turned to go into her dressing-room to prepare for the night; but du Tillet took her by the arm and brought her back under the full light of the wax-candles which were burning in two silver-gilt sconces between fragrant nosegays. He plunged his light eyes into hers and said, coldly:—

      “Your sister came here to borrow forty thousand francs for a man in whom she takes an interest, who’ll be locked up within three days in a debtor’s prison.”

      The poor woman was seized with a nervous trembling, which she endeavored to repress.

      “You alarm me,” she said. “But my sister is far too well brought up, and she loves her husband too much to be interested in any man to that extent.”

      “Quite the contrary,” he said, dryly. “Girls brought up as you two were, in the constraints and practice of piety, have a thirst for liberty; they desire happiness, and the happiness they get in marriage is never as fine as that they dreamt of. Such girls make bad wives.”

      “Speak for me,” said poor Eugenie, in a tone of bitter feeling, “but respect my sister. The Comtesse de Vandenesse is happy; her husband gives her too much freedom not to make her truly attached to him. Besides, if your supposition were true, she would never have told me of such a matter.”

      “It is true,” he said, “and I forbid you to have anything to do with the affair. My interests demand that the man shall go to prison. Remember my orders.”

      Madame du Tillet left the room.

      “She will disobey me, of course, and I shall find out all the facts by watching her,” thought du Tillet, when alone in the boudoir. “These poor fools always think they can do battle against us.”

      He shrugged his shoulders and rejoined his wife, or to speak the truth, his slave.

      The confidence made to Madame du Tillet by Madame Felix de Vandenesse is connected with so many points of the latter’s history for the last six years, that it would be unintelligible without a succinct account of the principal events of her life.

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