The World’s Greatest Books Vol 1 (page 4)

unfastidious, and so garrulous,” she would marry to-morrow.

But Mr. Elton was unaware of Emma having thought of making such a self-denying ordinance; and so one night when the Woodhouses and the Knightleys were returning home from a party at Randalls he took advantage of his being alone in a carriage with her to propose to her, seeming never to doubt his being accepted. When he learned, however, for whom his hand had been destined, he became very indignant and contemptuous.

“Never, madam!” cried he. “Never, I assure you! _I_ think seriously of Miss Smith! Miss Smith is a very good sort of girl; and I should be happy to see her respectably settled. I wish her extremely well; and, no doubt, there are men who might not object to–Everybody has their level; but as for myself, I am not, I think, quite so much at a loss. I need not so totally despair of an equal alliance as to be addressing myself to Miss Smith! No, madam; my visits to Hatfield have been for yourself only.”

Needless to say, Emma refused him, and they parted on terms of mutually deep mortification. Fortunately, the task of enlightening Harriet as to the state of Mr. Elton’s feelings proved less troublesome than Emma had expected it to be. Harriet’s tears fell abundantly, but otherwise she bore the intelligence very meekly and well.

_III.–Emma’s Schemes in a Tangle_

As if to make up for the absence of Mr. Elton, who went to spend a few weeks in Bath, in an endeavour to cure his wounded affections. Highbury society was shortly enlarged by the arrival of two such welcome additions as Miss Jane Fairfax and Mr. Frank Churchill.

Miss Fairfax, who was the orphan daughter of Lieutenant Fairfax, and Miss Janes Bates had for many years been living with her father’s brother-officer, Colonel Campbell, and his wife and daughter. A beautiful girl of nineteen, with only a few hundred pounds of her own, and no monetary expectations from her adoptive father, she had received such an education as qualified her to become a governess; and though as long as Colonel and Mrs. Campbell lived their home might always be hers, she had all along resolved to start earning her own living at one-and- twenty. Her friend, Miss Campbell, had recently married a rich and agreeable young man called Dixon; and though the Dixons had urgently invited her to join Colonel and Mrs. Campbell in a visit to them in Ireland, Jane preferred to spend three months’ holiday with her aunt and grandmother at Highbury, with some vague intention of starting her scholastic career at the end of this period. Emma did not like Jane Fairfax, partly because Jane’s aunt was always boring people by talking of her; partly, perhaps, because–as Mr. Knightley once told her–she saw in her the really accomplished young woman which she wanted to be thought herself. At any rate, she still found her as reserved as ever. Jane had been a little acquainted with Mr. Frank Churchill at Weymouth, but she either could not, or would not, tell Emma anything about him.

That gentleman, however, soon presented himself in person. He was the son of Mr. Weston by his first wife. At the age of three he had been adopted by his maternal uncle, Mr. Churchill; and so avowedly had he been brought up as their heir by Mr. and Mrs. Churchill–who had no children of their own–that on his coming of age he had assumed the name of Churchill. For some months he had been promising to pay a visit to his father and stepmother to compliment them on their marriage; but on the pretext of his not being able to leave Enscombe, his uncle’s place, it had been repeatedly postponed.

Emma was inclined to make allowances for him as a young man dependent on the caprices of relations. But Mr. Knightley condemned his conduct roundly. “He cannot want money, he cannot want leisure,” he said. “We know, on the contrary, that he has so much of both that he is glad to get rid of them at the idlest haunts in the kingdom.” Notwithstanding, when he did arrive, Frank Churchill carried all before him by reason of his good looks, sprightliness, and amiability. Emma and he soon became great friends. He favoured an idea of hers, that Jane’s refusal to go to the Dixons’ in Ireland was due either to Mr. Dixon’s attachment to her, or to her attachment to Mr. Dixon. When a Broadwood pianoforte arrived for Jane–which was generally taken to be a gift from Colonel Campbell–he agreed with her in thinking that this was another occurrence for which Mr. Dixon’s love was responsible; and he was busily engaged in planning out the details of a projected ball at the Crown Inn when a letter from Mr. Churchill urging his instant departure compelled him to make a hurried return to Enscombe.

Meanwhile, while Emma was entertaining no doubt of her being in love with Frank, and only wondering how deep her feeling was, while she was content to think that Frank was very much in love with her, and was concluding every imaginary declaration on his side with a refusal of his proposals, Mr. Elton returned to Highbury with his bride. Miss Augusta Hawkins–to give Mrs. Elton her maiden name–was the younger of the two daughters of a Bristol tradesman, and was credited with having ten thousand pounds of her own. A self-important, presuming, familiar, ignorant, and ill-bred woman, with a little beauty and a little accomplishment, who was always expatiating on the charms of Mr. Suckling’s–her brother-in-law’s–place, Maple Grove, she soon excited disgust in Emma, who offended her by the scanty encouragement with which she received her proposals of intimacy, and was herself offended by the great fancy which Mrs. Elton took to Jane Fairfax. Long before Emma had forfeited her confidence, she was not satisfied with expressing a natural and reasonable admiration of Jane, but, without solicitation, or plea, or privilege, she must be wanting to assist and befriend her. The ill-feeling thus aroused found significant expression on the occasion of the long-talked-of ball at the Crown, which Mr. Weston was able to give one evening in May, thanks to the settlement of the Churchills at Richmond, and the consequent reappearance of Frank Churchill at Highbury. Indeed, Emma met with two annoyances on that famous evening. Mr. Weston had entreated her to come early, before any other person came, for the purpose of taking her opinion as to the propriety and comfort of the rooms; and when she got there, she found that quite half the company had come, by particular desire, to help Mr. Weston’s judgment. She felt that to be the favourite and intimate of a man who had so many intimates was not the first distinction in the scale of vanity.

The other vexing circumstance was due to the conduct of Mr. Elton, who, asked by Mrs. Weston to dance with Harriet Smith, declined on the ground that he was an old married man, and that his dancing days were over. Fortunately, Mr. Knightley, who has recently disappointed Mrs. Weston, and pleased Emma by disclaiming any idea of being attached to Jane Fairfax, was able in some measure to redeem the situation by leading Harriet to the set himself. Emma had no opportunity of speaking to him till after supper; and then he said to her: “They aimed at wounding more than Harriet. Emma, why is it that they are your enemies?” He looked with smiling penetration, and, on receiving no answer, added: “_She_ ought not to be angry with you, I suspect, whatever he may be. To that surmise you say nothing, of course; but confess, Emma, that you did want him to marry Harriet.” “I did,” replied Emma, “and they cannot forgive me.”

A day or two afterwards, Harriet figured as the heroine of another little scene. She was rescued by Frank Churchill from an encounter with some gipsies; and after telling Emma, in a very serious tone, a few days later, that she should never marry, confessed that she had come to this resolution because the person she might prefer to marry was one so greatly her superior in situation.

_IV.–Love Finds its Own Way_

His own attentions, his father’s hints, his stepmother’s guarded silence, all seemed to declare that Emma was Frank Churchill’s object. But while so many were devoting him to Emma, and Emma herself was making him over to Harriet, Mr. Knightley began to suspect him of some inclination to trifle with Jane Fairfax. When Mr. Knightley mentioned these suspicions to Emma, she declared them sheer imagination, and said that she could _answer_ for there being no attachment on the side of the gentleman; while he himself, as if to ridicule the whole idea, flirted outrageously with Emma on an excursion to Box Hill at which Jane was present, and even asked the former lady to choose a wife for him. The next day Emma, calling on Miss Bates, learned that Jane, who, was at present too unwell to see her, had just accepted a post as governess, obtained for her by Mrs. Elton, and that Frank Churchill had been summoned to return immediately to Richmond in consequence of Mrs. Churchill’s state of health. On the following day an express arrived at Randalls to announce the death of Mrs. Churchill.

Emma, seeing in this latter event a circumstance favourable to the union of Frank and Harriet (for Mr. Churchill, independent of his wife, was feared by nobody), now only wished for some proof of the former’s attachment to her friend. She could, however, for the moment do nothing for Harriet, whereas she could show some attention to Jane, whose prospects were closing, while Harriet’s were opening. But here she proved to be mistaken; all her endeavours were to no purpose. The invalid refused everything that was offered, no matter what its character; and Emma had to console herself with the thought that her intentions were good, and would have satisfied even so strict an investigator of motives as Mr. Knightley.

One morning, about ten days after Mrs. Churchill’s death, Emma was called downstairs to Mr. Weston, who asked her to come to Randalls as Mrs. Weston wanted to see her alone. Relieved to find that the matter was not one of illness, either there or at Brunswick Square, Emma resolved to wait patiently till she could see her old friend. But what was her surprise, on Mr. Weston leaving them together, when his wife revealed the fact that Frank and Jane had been secretly engaged since October of the previous year! It was almost greater than Mrs. Weston’s relief when she learned, to her joy, that Emma now cared nothing at all for Frank, and so had been in no wise injured by this clandestine understanding, the divulgence of which was due, it seemed, to the fact that, immediately on hearing of Jane’s agreement to take up the post of governess, Frank had gone to his uncle, told him of the engagement, and with little difficulty obtained his consent to it.

It was with a heavy heart that Emma went home to give Harriet the news that must blast her hopes of happiness once more. But, again, a surprise was in store for her. Harriet had already been told by Mr. Weston, and seemed to bear her misfortune quite stoically, the reason being that the person of “superior situation” whom she despaired of securing was not Mr. Frank Churchill, but Mr. George Knightley.

Emma was not prepared for this development. It darted through her, with the speed of an arrow, that Mr. Knightley must marry no one but herself! Which desirable consummation was brought about at their next interview; for, after trying to console her for the abominable conduct of Frank Churchill, under the mistaken impression that that young gentleman had succeeded in engaging her affections, Mr. Knightley proposed marriage to her, and was accepted. As for Harriet, she was invited, at Emma’s suggestion, to spend a fortnight with Mr. and Mrs. John Knightley in Brunswick Square, and there, meeting Mr. Robert Martin, through Mr. George Knightley’s contrivance, was easily persuaded to become his wife.

About this same time, too, Mrs. Weston’s husband and friends were all made happy by knowing her to be the mother of a little girl; while Emma and Mrs. Weston were enabled to take a more lenient view of Frank Churchill’s conduct, thanks to a long letter which he wrote to the latter lady in which he apologised for his equivocal conduct to Emma, and expressed his regret that those attentions should have caused such poignant distress to the lady whom he was shortly to make his wife. The much discussed pianoforte had been his gift.

* * * * *

Persuasion

Jane Austen began her last book soon after she had finished “Emma,” and completed it in August, 1816. “Persuasion” is connected with “Northanger Abbey” not only by the fact that the two books were originally bound up in one volume and published together two years later, and are still so issued, but in the circumstance that in both stories the scene is laid partly in Bath, a health resort with which Jane Austen was well acquainted, as having been her place of residence from the year 1801 till 1805.

_I.–The Vain Baronet of Kellynch Hall_

Sir Walter Elliot, of Kellynch Hall, in Somersetshire, was a man who, for his own amusement, never took up any book but the Baronetage. There he found occupation for an idle hour, and consolation in a distressed one; there his faculties were roused into admiration and respect by contemplating the limited remnant of the earliest patents; there any unwelcome sensations derived from domestic affairs changed naturally into pity and contempt as he turned over the almost endless creations of the last century; and there, if every other leaf was powerless, he could read his own history with an interest which never failed. This was the page at which the favourite volume always opened:

“ELLIOT OF KELLYNCH HALL.”

“Walter Elliot, born March 1, 1760, married July 15, 1784, Elizabeth, daughter of James Stevenson, Esq., of South Park, in the county of Gloucester; by which lady (who died 1800) he has issue, Elizabeth, born June 1, 1785; Anne, born August 9, 1787; a still-born son, November 5, 1789; Mary, born November 20, 1791.”

Precisely thus had the paragraph originally stood from the printer’s hands. But Sir Walter had improved it by adding, for the information of himself and his family, these words, after the date of Mary’s birth: “Married, December 16, 1810, Charles, son and heir of Charles Musgrove, Esq., of Uppercross, in the county of Somerset,” and by inserting most accurately the day of the month on which he had lost his wife.

Then followed the history and rise of the ancient and respectable family in the usual terms; how it had been first settled in Cheshire; how mentioned in Dugdale, serving the office of High Sheriff, representing a borough in three successive parliaments, exertions of loyalty, and dignity of baronet, in the first year of Charles II., with all the Marys and Elizabeths they had married; forming altogether two handsome duodecimo pages, and concluding with the arms and motto: “Principal seat, Kellynch Hall, in the county of Somerset,” and Sir Walter’s handwriting again in the finale: “Heir-presumptive, William Walter Elliot, Esq., great-grandson of the second Sir Walter.”

Vanity was the beginning and end of Sir Walter Elliot’s character–vanity of person and of situation. He had been remarkably handsome in his youth, and, at fifty-four, was still a very fine man. Few women could think more of their personal appearance than he did, nor could the valet of any new-made lord be more delighted with the place he held in society. He considered the blessing of beauty as inferior only to the blessing of a baronetcy; and the Sir Walter Elliot, who united these gifts, was the constant object of his warmest respect and devotion.

His good looks and his rank had a fair claim on his attachment, since to them he must have owed a wife of very superior character to anything deserved by his own. Lady Elliot had been an excellent woman, sensible and amiable, whose judgment and conduct, if they might be pardoned the youthful infatuation which made her Lady Elliot, had never required indulgence afterwards. Three girls, however–the two eldest sixteen and fourteen–were an awful legacy for a mother to bequeath, an awful charge rather to confide, to the authority of a conceited, silly father. Fortunately, Lady Elliot had one very intimate friend, Lady Russell, a sensible, deserving woman, who had been brought, by strong attachment to herself, to settle close by her in the village of Kellynch; and on her kindness Lady Elliot mainly relied for the best help and maintenance of the good principles and instruction which she had been anxiously giving her daughters.

Elizabeth had succeeded at sixteen to all that was possible of her mother’s rights and consequence; and being very handsome, and very like himself, her influence had always been great, and they had gone on together most happily. His two other children were of very inferior value. Mary had acquired a little artificial importance by becoming Mrs. Charles Musgrove; but Anne, with an elegance of mind and sweetness of character which must have placed her high with any people of real understanding, was nobody with either father or sister. To Lady Russell, indeed, she was a most dear and highly valued god-daughter, favourite and friend. Lady Russell loved them all; but it was only in Anne that she could fancy the mother to revive again.

It sometimes happens that a woman is handsomer at twenty-nine than she was ten years before; and, generally speaking, it is a time of life at which scarcely any charm is lost. It was so with Elizabeth, still the same handsome Miss Elliot that she had begun to be thirteen years ago; and Sir Walter might be excused, therefore, in forgetting her age, or, at least, be deemed only half a fool for thinking himself and Elizabeth as blooming as ever, amid the wreck of the good looks of everybody else.

Elizabeth did not quite equal her father in personal contentment. She had the consciousness of being nine-and-twenty to give her some regrets and some apprehensions. Moreover, she had been disappointed by the heir-presumptive, the very William Walter Elliot, Esq., whose rights had been so generously supported by her father. Soon after Lady Elliot’s death, Sir Walter had sought Mr. Elliot’s society, and had introduced him to Elizabeth, who was quite ready to marry him. But despite the assiduity of the baronet, the younger man let the acquaintance drop, and married a rich woman of inferior birth, for whom, at the present time (the summer of 1814), Elizabeth was wearing black ribbons.

Anne, too, had had her disappointment. Eight years ago, before she had lost her bloom, when, in fact, she had been an extremely pretty girl, with gentleness, modesty, taste and feeling added, she had fallen in love with Captain Wentworth, a young naval officer who had distinguished himself in the action off Domingo; but her father and Lady Russell had frowned upon the match, and, persuaded chiefly by the arguments of the latter that it would be prejudicial to the professional interests of her lover, who had still his fortune to make, she had rather weakly submitted to have the engagement broken off. But though he had angrily cast her out of his heart, she still loved him, having in the meantime rejected Charles Musgrove, who subsequently consoled himself by marrying her sister Mary. So that when her father’s embarrassed affairs compelled him to let Kellynch Hall to Admiral Croft, an eminent seaman who had fought at Trafalgar, and had happened to marry a sister of Captain Wentworth, she could not help thinking, with a gentle sigh, as she walked along her favourite grove: “A few months more, and he, perhaps, may be walking here.”

_II.–Anne Elliot and her Old Lover_

Sir Walter and Elizabeth went to Bath, and settled themselves in a good house in Camden Place, while it was arranged that Anne should divide her time between Uppercross Cottage–where Mr. and Mrs. Charles Musgrove lived–and Kellynch Lodge, and come on from the latter house to Bath when Lady Russell was prepared to take her. Sir Walter had included in his party a Mrs. Clay, a young widow, with whom, despite the fact that she had freckles and a projecting tooth, and was the daughter of Mr. Shepherd, the family solicitor, Elizabeth had recently struck up a great friendship. Anne had tried to warn her sister against this attractive and seemingly designing young woman, but her advice had not been taken in good part; and she had to content herself with hoping that, though her suspicion had been resented, it might yet be remembered.

At Uppercross she found things very little altered. The

Musgroves saw too much of one another. The two families were so continually meeting, so much in the habit of running in and out of each other’s houses at all hours, that their various members inevitably found much to complain of in one another’s conduct. These complaints were brought to Anne, who was treated with such confidence by all parties that if she had not been a very discreet young lady she might have considerably increased the difficulties of the situation. Mary she found as selfish, as querulous, as ready to think herself ailing, as lacking in sense and understanding, as unable to manage her children as ever.

Charles Musgrove was civil and agreeable; in sense and temper he was undoubtedly superior to his wife, though neither his powers nor his conversation were remarkable. He did nothing with much zeal but sport; and his time was otherwise trifled away without benefit from books or anything else. He had, however, excellent spirits, which never seemed much affected by his wife’s occasional moroseness; and he bore with her unreasonableness sometimes to Anne’s admiration. As for the Miss Musgroves, Henrietta and Louisa, young ladies of nineteen and twenty, they were living to be fashionable, happy and merry. Their dress had every advantage, their faces were pretty, their spirits good, their manners unembarrassed and pleasant; they were of consequence at home, and favourites abroad.

The Crofts took possession of Kellynch Hall with true naval alertness, and, naturally enough, intercourse was soon established between them and the Musgroves. Soon it was known that the admiral’s brother-in-law, Captain Wentworth, had come to stop with them; and one day he made the inevitable call at the Cottage on his way to shoot with Charles. It was soon over. Anne’s eyes half met his; a bow, a courtesy passed. He talked to Mary, said all that was right, said something to the Miss Musgroves, enough to mark an easy footing. Charles showed himself at the window, all was ready, their visitor had bowed and was gone; the Miss Musgroves were gone, too, suddenly resolving to walk to the end of the village with the sportsmen.

She had seen him; they had met. They had been once more in the same room. Now, how were his sentiments to be read? On one question she was soon spared all suspense; for, after the Miss Musgroves had returned and finished their visit at the Cottage, she had this spontaneous information from Mary: “Captain Wentworth is not very gallant by you, Anne, though he was so attentive to me. Henrietta asked him what he thought of you. ‘You were so altered he should not have known you again,’ he said.”

Doubtless it was so; and she could take no revenge, for he was not altered, or not for the worse. No; the years which had destroyed her bloom had only given him a more glowing, manly, open look, in no respect lessening his personal advantages.

“Altered beyond his knowledge.” Frederick Wentworth had used such words, or something like them, but without an idea that they would be carried round to her. He had thought her wretchedly altered, and, in the first moment of appeal, had spoken as he felt. He had not forgiven Anne Elliot. She had used him ill–deserted and disappointed him; and worse, in doing so had shown weakness and timidity. He had been most warmly attached to her, and had never seen a woman since whom he thought her equal. It was now his object to marry. He was rich, and, being turned on shore, intended to settle as soon as he could be tempted. “Yes, here I am, Sophia,” he said to his sister, “quite ready to make a foolish match. Anybody between fifteen and thirty may have me for the asking. A little beauty, and a few smiles, and a few compliments to the navy, and I am a lost man.”

It looked, indeed, as if he would soon be lost, either to Louisa or to Henrietta. It was soon Uppercross with him almost every day. The Musgroves could hardly be more ready to invite than he to come; and as for Henrietta and Louisa, they both seemed so entirely occupied by him that nothing but the continued appearance of the most perfect goodwill between themselves could have made it credible that they were not decided rivals. Indeed, Mr. Charles Hayter, a young curate with some expectations, who was a cousin of the Musgroves, began to get uneasy. Previous to Captain Wentworth’s introduction, there had been a considerable appearance of attachment between Henrietta and himself; but now he seemed to be very much forgotten.

_III.–Love-making at Lyme Regis_

At this interesting juncture the scene of action was changed from Uppercross to Lyme Regis, owing to Captain Wentworth’s receipt of a letter from his old friend Captain Harville, announcing his being settled at this latter place. Captain Wentworth, after a visit to Lyme Regis, gave so interesting an account of the adjacent country that the young people were all wild to see it. Accordingly, it was agreed to stay the night there, and not to be expected back till the next day’s dinner.

They found Captain Harville a tall, dark man, with a sensible, benevolent countenance: a little lame, but unaffected, warm and obliging. Mrs. Harville, a degree less polished than her husband, seemed to have the same good feelings and cordiality; while Captain Benwick, who was the youngest of the three naval officers and a comparatively little man, had a pleasing face and a melancholic air, just as he ought to have. He had been engaged to Captain Harville’s sister, and was now mourning her loss. They had been a year or two waiting for fortune and promotion. Fortune came, his prize-money as lieutenant being great; promotion, too, came at last; but Fanny Harville did not live to know it. She had died the preceding summer while he was at sea; and the friendship between him and the Harvilles having been augmented by the event which closed all their views of alliance, he was now living with them entirely. A man of retiring manners and of sedentary pursuits, with a decided taste for reading, he was drawn a good deal to Anne Elliot during this excursion, and talked to her of poetry, of Scott and Byron, of “Marmion” and “The Lady of the Lake,” of “The Giaour” and “The Bride of Abydos.” He repeated with such feeling the various lines of Byron which imaged a broken heart, or a mind destroyed by wretchedness, and looked so entirely as if he meant to be understood, that Anne ventured to recommend to him a larger allowance of prose in his daily study.

Another interesting person whom the Uppercross party met at Lyme was Mr. Elliot. He did not recognise Anne and her friends, or did they till he had left the town find out who he was; but he was obviously struck with Anne, and gazed at her with a degree of earnest admiration which she could not be insensible of. She was looking remarkably well, her very regular, very pretty features having the bloom and freshness of youth restored by the fine wind which had been blowing on her complexion, and by the animation of eye which it had also produced.

It was evident that the gentleman admired her exceedingly. Captain Wentworth looked round at her, in a way which showed his noticing of it. He gave her a momentary glance, a glance of brightness, which seemed to say: “That man is struck with you; and even I, at this moment, see something like Anne Elliot again.”

But the folly of Louisa Musgrove, and the consequences that attended it, soon obliterated from Anne’s memory all such recollections as these. Louisa, who was walking with Captain Wentworth, persuaded him to jump her down the steps on the Lower Cob. Contrary to his advice, she ran up the steps to be jumped down again; and, being too precipitate by a second, fell on the pavement and was taken up senseless. Fortunately, no bones were broken, the only injury was to the head; and Captain and Mrs. Harville insisting on her being taken to their house, she recovered health so steadily that before Anne and Lady Russell left Kellynch Lodge for Bath there was talk of the possibility of her being able to be removed to Uppercross.

When the accident occurred, Captain Wentworth’s attitude was very much that of the lover. “Oh, God! that I had not given way at the fatal moment!” he cried. “Had I but done as I ought! But so eager and so resolute; dear, sweet Louisa!”

Anne feared there could not be a doubt as to what would follow the recovery; but she was amused to hear Charles Musgrove tell how much Captain Benwick admired herself–“elegance, sweetness, beauty!” Oh, there was no end to Miss Elliot’s charms!

Another surprise awaited her at Bath, where she found her father and sister Elizabeth happy in the submission and society of the heir-presumptive. He had explained away all the appearance of neglect on his own side as originating in misapprehension. He had never had an idea of throwing himself off; he had feared that he was thrown off, and delicacy had kept him silent. These explanations having been made, Sir Walter took him by the hand, affirming that “Mr. Elliot was better to look at than most men, and that he had no objection to being seen with him anywhere.”

The gentleman called one evening, soon after Anne’s arrival in the town; and his little start of surprise on being introduced to her showed that he was not more astonished than delighted at meeting, in the character of Sir Walter’s daughter, the young lady who had so strongly struck his fancy at Lyme. He stopped an hour, and his tone, his expressions, his choice of subject, all showed the operation of a sensible, discerning mind.

Still, Anne could not understand what his object was in seeking this reconciliation. Even the engagement of Louisa Musgrove to Captain Benwick, which was announced to her by Mary about a month later, seemed more susceptible of explanation–had not the young couple been thrown together for weeks?–than this determination of Mr. Elliot to become friends with relations from whom he could derive no possible advantage.

_IV.–Love Triumphant_

Following close on the news of Louisa’s engagement came the arrival at Bath of Admiral and Mrs. Croft. He had come for the cure of his gout; and he was soon followed by Captain Wentworth, who, for the first time since their second meeting, deliberately sought Anne out at a concert which she and her people were attending. The most significant part of their conversation was his comment on Louisa’s engagement to Captain Benwick. He frankly confessed he could not understand it as far as it concerned Benwick.

“A man like him, in his situation, with a heart pierced, wounded, almost broken! Fanny Harville was a very superior person, and his attachment to her was indeed attachment. A man does not recover from such a devotion of the heart to such a woman. He ought not; he does not.”

But the captain was prevented from saying much more by the assiduous attention which Mr. Elliot paid to her at this concert.

“Very long,” said he, “has the name of Anne Elliot possessed a charm over my fancy; and, if I dared, I would breathe my wishes that the name might never change.”

Such language might almost be taken to be a proposal; but Anne was too much interested in watching Captain Wentworth to pay much attention to it.

She had still in mind the words which her sometime lover had spoken at the concert, when a visit she had paid to an invalid friend, an old schoolfellow of hers called Mrs. Smith, gave her complete enlightenment as to the character and present objects of Mr. Elliot. Mrs. Smith, who was a widow, and whose husband had been a bosom friend of Mr. Elliot’s, described him as “a man without heart or conscience, a designing, wary, cold-blooded being, who thinks only of himself; who for his own interest or ease would be guilty of any cruelty, or any treachery that could be perpetrated without risk of damaging his general character.” She told how he had encouraged her husband, to whom he was under great obligations, to indulge in the most ruinous expense, and then, on his death, caused her endless difficulties and distress by refusing to act as his executor. She also informed Anne that he had married his first wife, whom he treated badly, entirely on account of her fortune, and that, though among the present reasons for continuing the acquaintance with his relations was a genuine attachment to herself, his original intention in seeking a reconciliation with Sir Walter had been to secure for himself the reversion of the baronetcy by preventing the holder of the title from falling into the snares of Mrs. Clay.

The next day a party of the Musgroves appeared at Camden Place. Mrs. Musgrove, senior, had some old friends at Bath whom she wanted to see; Mrs. Charles Musgrove could not bear to be left behind in any excursion which her husband was taking; Henrietta, who had arrived at an understanding with Mr. Charles Hayter, had come to buy wedding clothes for herself and Louisa; and Captain Harville had come on business. It was on a visit to the Musgroves, who were stopping at the White Hart Hotel, that Anne had a momentous conversation with the last-named person. The captain had been reverting to the topic of his friend Benwick’s engagement, and Anne had been saying that women did not forget as readily as men.

“No, no,” said Harville, “it is not man’s nature to forget. I will not allow it to be more man’s nature than woman’s to be inconstant and to forget those they do love or have loved. I believe the reverse. I believe in a true analogy between our bodily frames and our mental; and that as our bodily frames are stronger than yours, so are our feelings.”

“Your feelings may be the stronger,” replied Anne, “but the same spirit of analogy will authorise me to assert that ours are the more tender. Man is more robust than woman, but he is not longer lived; which exactly explains my view of the nature of their attachment.”

Captain Wentworth, who was sitting down at a writing-table in another part of the room, engaged in correspondence, seemed very much interested in this conversation; and a few minutes later he placed before Anne, with eyes of glowing entreaty, a letter addressed to “Miss A. E.”

“I offer myself to you again,” he wrote, “with a heart even more your own than when you almost broke it eight years and a half ago. Dare not say that man forgets sooner than woman, that his love has an earlier death; I have loved none but you.”

To such a declaration there could be but one answer; and soon Frederick Wentworth and Anne Elliot were exchanging again those feelings and those promises which once before had seemed to secure everything, but which had been followed by so many years of division and estrangement.

This time there was no opposition to the engagement. Captain Wentworth’s wealth, personal appearance, and well-sounding name enabled Sir Walter to prepare his pen, with a very good grace, for the insertion of the marriage in the volume of honour.

As for Mr. Elliot, the news of his cousin Anne’s engagement burst on him with unexpected suddenness. He soon quitted Bath; and on Mrs. Clay’s leaving it shortly afterwards and being next heard of as established under his protection in London, it was evident how double a game he had been playing, and how determined he was to save himself at all events from being cut out by one artful woman at least.

* * * * *

HONORE DE BALZAC

Eugenie Grandet

Honore de Balzac was born May 20, 1799, at Tours, in France, and died at Paris, Aug. 18, 1850. His early life was filled with hard work and oppressed by poverty. He attained success by the publication of “Les Derniers Chouans” in 1829, and he soon established his fame as the leader of realistic fiction. In spite of frequent coarseness, he stands for all time as a great writer by reason of his powers of character analysis. “Eugenie Grandet” is, justly, one of the most famous of Balzac’s novels. As a study of avarice, in the character of old Grandet, it is superb, and the picture of manners in the country town of Saumur is painted as only a supreme artist like Balzac could paint it. The pathos of Eugenie’s wasted life, the long suffering of Mme. Grandet, the craft and cunning of the Des Grassins and the Cruchots, the fidelity of Nanon, and the frank egotism of Charles Grandet–all these things combine to make the book a masterpiece of French fiction. “Eugenie Grandet” was written in the full vigour of Balzac’s genius in 1833, and was published in the first volume of “Scenes of Provincial Life” in 1834, and finally included in the “Human Comedy” in 1843.

_I.–The Rich Miser of Saumur_

The town of Saumur is old-fashioned and in every way “provincial.” Its houses are dark within, its shops, undecorated, recall the workshops of the Middle Ages. Its inhabitants gossip freely, according to the fashion of country towns, and the arrival of a stranger in the town is an important item of news. The trade of Saumur depends upon the vineyards of the district. The prosperity of landowners, vinegrowers, coopers, and innkeepers rises or falls according to whether the season is good or bad for the grapes.

A certain house in Saumur, larger and more sombre than most, and once the residence of nobility, belonged to M. Grandet.

This M. Grandet was a master cooper in 1789, a good man of business with a remarkable head for accounts. He prospered in the Revolution, bought the confiscated Church lands at a low price, married the daughter of a wealthy timber merchant, was made mayor under the consulate, became Monsieur Grandet when the empire was established, and every year grew wealthier and more miserly.

In 1817 M. Grandet was 68, his wife 47, and their only child, Eugenie, was 21.

A careful, cunning, silent man was M. Grandet, who loved his gold and to get the better in a bargain beyond all else. He cultivated 100 acres of vineyard, had thirteen little farms, an old abbey, and 127 acres of grazing land, and owned the house he lived in. The town estimated old Grandet’s income to be five or six million francs, but only two people were in a position to guess with any chance of probability, and these were M. Cruchot the notary, and M. des Grassins the banker, and they disclosed no secrets.

Both M. Cruchot and M. des Grassins were men of considerable importance in Saumur, and enjoyed the right of entry to M. Grandet’s house–a privilege extended to only a very few of their neighbours.

There was rivalry between these two families of the Cruchots and Des Grassins, rivalry for the hand of Grandet’s daughter, Eugenie. Cruchot’s nephew was a rising lawyer, already, at the age of thirty-three, a president of the court of first instance, and Cruchot’s brother was an abbe of Tours. The hopes of the Cruchots were centred on the successful marriage of the nephew (who called himself Cruchot de Bonfons, after an estate he had bought) with Grandet’s heiress.

Mme. des Grassins was equally hopeful and indefatigable on behalf of her son Adolphe.

The whole town knew of the struggle between these two families, and watched it with interest. Would Mlle. Grandet marry M. Adolphe des Grassins or M. le President? There were others who declared the old cooper was rich enough to marry his daughter to a peer in France.

With all his wealth and the fortune his wife brought him, M. Grandet lived as meanly and cheaply as he could. His house was cold and dreary, and his table was supplied with poultry, eggs, butter and corn by his tenants. M. Grandet never paid visits or invited people to dinner.

One servant, Nanon, a big, strong woman of five feet eight inches, did all the work of the house, the cooking and washing, the baking and cleaning, and watched over her master’s interests with an absolute fidelity. The strength of Nanon appealed to M. Grandet when he was on the lookout for a housekeeper before his marriage, and the girl, out of work and wretched, had never lost her gratitude for having been taken into his service. For twenty-eight years Nanon had worked early and late for the Grandets, and on a yearly wage of seventy livres had accumulated more money than any other servant in Saumur. She was one of the family, spending her evenings in the sitting-room of her employers, where a single candle was all that was allowed for illumination. M. Grandet also decided that no fire must be lit in the sitting-room from April 1 to October 31, and every morning he went into the kitchen and doled out the bread, sugar, and other provisions for the day to Nanon, and candles to his daughter.

As for Mme. Grandet, her gentleness and meekness could not stand up against her husband’s force of character. She had brought more than 300,000 francs to her husband, and yet had no money save an occasional six francs for pocket-money, and the only certain source of income was four or five louis which Grandet made the Belgian merchants, who bought his wine, pay over and above the stipulated price. Often enough he would borrow some of this money even. Mme. Grandet was too gentle to revolt, but her pride forbade her ever asking a sou from her husband. With her daughter she attended to the household linen, and found compensation for the unhappiness of her lot in the consolations of religion, and also in the company of Eugenie. It never occurred to M. Grandet that his wife suffered, or had reason to suffer. He was making money; every year his riches increased. He paid for sittings in church, and gave his daughter five francs a month for a dress allowance. That his wife hardly ever left the house except occasionally to go to church, that her dress was invariably the same, and that she never asked him for anything, never troubled M. Grandet. Avarice was his consuming passion, and it was satisfactory to him that no one attempted to cross him.

Twice a year, on her birthday, and on the day of her patron saint, Eugenie received some rare gold coin from her father, and then he would take pleasure in looking at her store–for these coins were not to be spent. Old M. Grandet liked to think that his daughter was learning to appreciate gold, and that in giving her these precious coins he was not parting with his money, but only putting it in another box.

_II.–Eugenie’s Springtime of Love_

On Eugenie’s twenty-third birthday, November, 1819, the three Cruchots–the notary, the abbe, and the magistrate–and the three Des Grassins–M. des Grassins, Mme. des Grassins, and their son Adolphe– hastened to pay their respects to the heiress as soon as dinner was over. Mr. Grandet, in honour of the occasion, lit a second candle in the sitting-room. “It is Eugenie’s birthday, and we must have an illumination,” he remarked. The Cruchots all brought handsome bouquets of flowers for Eugenie, but their gifts were eclipsed by a showy workbox fitted with trumpery gilded silver fittings, which Mme. des Grassins presented, and which filled Eugenie with delight. “Adolphe brought it from Paris,” whispered Mme. des Grassins in the girl’s ear. Old Grandet quite understood that both families were in pursuit of his daughter for the sake of her fortune, and made up his mind that neither of them should have her.

They all sat down to play lotto at half-past eight, except old Grandet, who never played any game. Just as Mme. Grandet had won a pool of sixteen sous, a heavy knock at the front door startled everybody in the room. Nanon took up one of the candles and went to the door, followed by Grandet. Presently they returned with a young man, good-looking, and fashionably dressed. This was Charles Grandet, the son of the old cooper’s brother, a merchant in Paris. The young man brought a good many trunks, and while Nanon saw to the bestowal of his luggage, all the lotto players looked at the visitor. Old Grandet took the only remaining candle from the table to read a long letter which his nephew had brought. Charles had set off from Paris at his father’s bidding to pay a visit to his uncle at Saumur. He was a dandy, and his appearance was in striking contrast to the attire of the Cruchots and the Des Grassins. Moreover, he already had had a love affair with a great lady whom he called Annette, and he was a good shot. Altogether, Charles Grandet was a vain and selfish youth, conscious of his superiority over the unfashionable provincials of Saumur, but determined at all costs to enjoy himself as best he could.

As for Eugenie, it seemed to her that she had never seen such a perfect gentleman as this cousin from Paris, and, at the risk of incurring her father’s wrath, succeeded in persuading Nanon to do what she could to make things comfortable for their guest in the cold and dreary house.

Nanon was milking the cow when Eugenie preferred her kindly and considerate request, and the faithful serving-maid at once obligingly promised to save a little cream from her master’s supply of milk. The Cruchots and Des Grassins retired discomfited before the presence of Charles Grandet. The young Parisian, brought up in luxury by his father, could not understand why he should have been sent to this outlandish place, and he was the more mystified by his uncle telling him they would talk over “important business” on the morrow. Then, indeed, in plain and brutal words he learnt the contents of the fatal letter he had brought from his father. It was twenty-three years since old Grandet had seen his brother in Paris, but this brother had become a rich man, too; of that old Grandet was aware. And now Victor-Ange-Guillaume Grandet wrote to him from Paris, saying: “By the time that this letter is in your hands, I shall cease to exist. The failure of my stockbroker and my notary has ruined me, and while I owe nearly four million francs, my assets are only a quarter of my debts. I cannot survive the disgrace of bankruptcy. I know you cannot satisfy my creditors, but you can be a father to my unhappy child, Charles, who is now alone in the world. Lay everything before him, and tell him that in my work he can restore the fortune he has lost. My failure is due neither to dishonesty nor to carelessness, but to causes beyond my control.”

Old Grandet told his nephew plainly that his father was dead, and even showed him a paragraph already in the papers referring to the ruin and suicide of the unhappy man–so quickly is such news spread abroad.

For the moment, his penniless state was nothing to the young man; the loss of his father was the only grief.

Old Grandet let him alone, and in a day or two Charles gathered up strength to face the situation.

Mme. Grandet and Eugenie were full of tender sympathy for the unhappy young man, and this sympathy in Eugenie’s case ripened into love. One day, when Eugenie passed her cousin’s chamber, the door stood ajar; she thrust it open, and saw that Charles had fallen asleep in his chair. She entered and found out from a letter her cousin had written to Annette, which she read as it lay on the table, that he was in want of money–for old Grandet was resolved to do nothing for his nephew beyond paying his passage to Nantes. The next night she brought him all her store of gold coins, worth six thousand francs. Her confidence and devoted affection touched Charles deeply. He accepted the money, and in return gave into her keeping a small leather box containing portraits of his father and mother, richly set in gold. Eugenie promised to guard this box until he returned.

For it was decided that Charles Grandet must go to the Indies to seek his fortune. He sold his jewels and finery, and paid his personal debts in Paris, and waited on at Saumur till the ship should be ready to sail for Nantes.

And in those few weeks came the springtime of love for Eugenie.

Old Grandet was too busy to trouble about his nephew, who was so shortly to be got rid of, and both Nanon and Mme. Grandet liked and pities the young man.

Charles Grandet, on his side, was conscious that his Parisian friends would not have shown him a like kindness, and the purity and truth of Eugenie’s love were something he had not hitherto experienced.

The cousins would snatch a few moments together in the early morning, and once, only a few days before his departure, they met in the long, dark passage at the foot of the staircase. “Dear cousin, I cannot expect to return for many years,” Charles said sadly. “We must not consider ourselves bound in any way.”

“You love me?” was all Eugenie asked. And on his reply, she added: “Then I will wait for you, Charles.”

Presently his arms were round her waist. Eugenie made no resistance, and, pressed to his heart, received her lover’s kiss.

“Dear Eugenie, a cousin is better than a brother; he can marry you,” said Charles.

Thus the lovers vowed themselves to each other. Then came the terrible hour of parting, and Charles Grandet sailed from Nantes for the Indies; and the old house at Saumur suddenly seemed to Eugenie to have become very empty and bare indeed.

_III.–M. Grandet’s Discovery_

Grandet, on the advice of M. Cruchot, the notary, saved the honour of his dead brother. There was no act of bankruptcy. M. Cruchot, to gain favour with old Grandet, proposed to go to Paris to look after the dead man’s affairs, but suggested the payment of expenses. It was M. des Grassins, however, who went to Paris, for he undertook to make no charge; and the banker not only attended to Guillaume Grandet’s creditors, but stayed on in Paris–having been made a deputy–and fell in love with an actress. Adolphe joined his father, and achieved an equally unpleasant reputation.

The property of Guillaume Grandet realised enough money to pay the creditors a dividend of 47 per cent. They agreed that they would deposit, upon certain conditions, their bills with an accredited notary, and each one said to himself that Grandet of Saumur would pay.

Grandet of Saumur, however, did not pay. Endless delays were forthcoming, and Des Grassins was always holding out promises that were not fulfilled.

As years went by some of the creditors gave up all hope of payment, others died; till at the end of five years the deficit stood at 1,200,000 francs.

In the meantime, a terrible blow had fallen on Mine. Grandet. On January 1, 1820, old Grandet, according to his wont, presented his daughter with a gold coin, and asked to see her store of gold pieces.

All Eugenie would tell him was that her money was gone. In vain the old man stormed. Eugenie kept on saying: “I am of age; the money was mine.”

Grandet raved at his wife, who, weary and ill, gave him no satisfaction. In fact, Mine. Grandet’s character had become stronger through her daughter’s trouble, and she refused to support her husband’s angry demands.

Then old Grandet ordered Eugenie to retire to her own apartment. “Do you hear what I say? Go!” he shouted.

Soon all the town knew that Eugenie was a prisoner in her own room, seeing no one but her mother and old Nanon; and public opinion, knowing nothing of the cause of the quarrel, blamed the old cooper. For six months this state of things lasted, and Mine. Grandet’s illness became steadily worse. M. Cruchot, the notary, warned old Grandet that, in the event of his wife’s death, he would have to give an account to Eugenie of her mother’s share in the joint estate; and that Eugenie could then, if she chose, demand her mother’s fortune, to which she would be entitled.

This seriously alarmed the avaricious old cooper, and he made up his mind to a reconciliation, for his wife assured him she would never get better while Eugenie was treated so badly. Eugenie and her mother were talking of Charles, from whom no letter had come, and getting what pleasure they could from looking at the portraits of his parents, when old Grandet burst into the room. Catching sight of the gold fittings, he snatched up the dressing-case, and would have wrenched off the precious metal. “Father, father,” Eugenie called out, “this case is not yours; it is not mine, it is a sacred trust! It belongs to my unhappy cousin. Do not pull it to pieces!”

Old Grandet took no notice.

“Oh, have pity; you are killing me!” said the mother.

Eugenie caught up a knife, and her cry brought Nanon on the scene.

“Father, if you cut away a single piece of gold, I shall stab myself. You are killing my mother, and you will kill me, too.”

Old Grandet for once was frightened. He tried to make it up with his wife, he kissed Eugenie, and even promised that Eugenie should marry her cousin if she wanted to.

Mme. Grandet lingered till October, and then died. “There is no happiness to be had except in heaven; some day you will understand that,” she said to her daughter just before she passed away.

M. Cruchot was called in after Mine. Grandet’s death, and in his presence Eugenie agreed to sign a deed renouncing her claim to her mother’s fortune while her father lived. She signed it without making any objection, to old Grandet’s great relief, and he promised to allow her 100 francs a month. But the old man himself was failing. Bit by bit he relinquished his many activities, but lived on till seven years had passed. Then he died, his eyes kindling at the end at the sight of the priest’s sacred vessels of silver. His brother’s creditors were still unpaid. Eugenie was informed by M. Cruchot that her property amounted to 17,000,000 francs. “Where can my cousin be?” she asked herself. “If only we knew where the young gentleman was, I would set off myself and find him,” Nanon said to her. The poor heiress was very lonely. The faithful Nanon, now fifty-nine, married Antoine Cornoiller, the bailiff of the estates, and these two, who had known one another for years, lived in the house.

The Cruchots still hoped to marry M. le President to Eugenie, and every birthday the magistrate brought a handsome bouquet. But the heart of Eugenie remained steadfast to her cousin.

“Ah, Nanon,” she would say, “why has he never written to me once all these years?”

Mme. des Grassins, unwilling to see the triumph of her old rivals, the Cruchots, went about saying that the heiress of the Grandet millions would marry a peer of France rather than a magistrate. Eugenie, however, thought neither of the peer nor of the magistrate. She gave away enormous sums in charity, and lived on quietly in the dreary old house. Her wealth brought her no comfort, her only treasures were the two portraits left in her charge. Yet she went on loving, and believed herself loved in return.

_IV.–The Honour of the Grandets_

Charles Grandet, in the course of eight years, met with considerable success in his trading ventures. He saw very quickly that the way to make money in the tropics, as in Europe, was to go in for buying and selling men, and so he plunged into the slave trade of Africa, and under the name of Carl Shepherd was known in the East Indies, in the United States, and on the African coasts. His plan was to get rich as speedily as possible, and then return to Paris and live respected. For a time–that is, on his first voyage–the thought of Eugenie gave him infinite pleasure; but soon all recollection of Saumur was blotted out, and his cousin became merely a person to whom he owed 6,000 francs.

In 1827, Charles returned to Bordeaux with 1,900,000 francs in gold dust. On board the ship he became very intimate with the d’Aubrions, an old aristocratic but impoverished family. Mme. d’Aubrion was anxious to secure Charles Grandet for her only daughter, and they all travelled to Paris together. Mme. d’Aubrion pointed out to Grandet that her influence would get him a court appointment, with title of Comte d’Aubrion; and Annette, with whom Grandet took counsel, approved the alliance.

Des Grassins, hearing of the wanderer’s return, called, and, anxious to get some remuneration for all the trouble he had taken, explained that 300,000 francs were still owing to his father’s creditors. But Charles Grandet answered coolly that he had nothing to do with his father’s debts.

Des Grassins, however, wrote to his wife that he would yet make the dead Guillaume Grandet a bankrupt, and that would stop the marriage, and Mme. des Grassins showed the letter to Eugenie.

Eugenie had already heard from her cousin. Charles Grandet sent a cheque for 8,000 francs, asked for the return of his dressing-case, and casually mentioned that he was going to make a brilliant marriage with Mlle. d’Aubrion, for whom he admitted he had not the slightest affection.

This was the shipwreck of all Eugenie’s hopes–the utter and complete ruin.

“My mother was right,” she said, weeping. “To suffer, and then die–that is our lot!”

That same evening when M. Cruchot de Bonfons, the magistrate, called on Eugenie, she promised to marry him on condition that he claimed none of the rights of marriage over her, and that he would immediately go and settle all her uncle’s creditors in full.

M. de Bonfons, only too thankful to win the heiress of the Grandet millions on any terms, agreed, and set off at once for Paris with a cheque for 1,500,000 francs. He carried a letter from Eugenie to Charles Grandet, a letter that contained no word of reproach, but announced the full discharge of his father’s debts.

Charles was astonished to hear from M. de Bonfons of his forthcoming marriage with Eugenie, and he was dumfounded when the president told him that Mlle. Grandet possessed 17,000,000 francs.

Mme. d’Aubrion interrupted the interview; her husband’s objection to Grandet’s marriage with his daughter was removed with the payment of the long-standing creditors and the restoration of the family honour of the Grandets.

M. de Bonfons, who now dropped the name of Cruchot, married Eugenie, and shortly afterwards was made Councillor to the Court Royal at Angers. His loyalty to the government was rewarded with further office. M. de Bonfons became deputy of Saumur; and then, dreaming of higher honours, perhaps a peerage, he died.

M. de Bonfons always respected his wife’s request that they should live apart; with remarkable cunning he had drafted the marriage contract, in which, “In case there was no issue of the marriage, husband and wife bequeathed to each other all their property, without exception or reservation.” Death disappointed his schemes. Mme. de Bonfons was left a widow three years after marriage, with an income of 800,000 livres.

She is a beautiful woman still, but pale and sorrowful. In spite of her income she lives on in the old house, and cold and sunless it bears a likeness to her own life. Spending little on herself, Mme. de Bonfons gives away large sums in succouring the unfortunate; but she is very lonely–without husband, children, or kindred. She dwells in the world, but is not of it.

* * * * *

Old Goriot

“Old Goriot,” or, to give it its French title, “Le Pere Goriot,” is one of the series of novels to which Balzac gave the title of “The Comedy of Human Life.” It is a comedy, mingled with lurid tragic touches, of society in the French capital in the early decades of the nineteenth century. The leading character in this story is, of course, Old Goriot, and the passion which dominates him is that of paternity. In the picture which Balzac draws of Parisian life, from the sordid boarding-house to the luxurious mansions of the gilded aristocracy in the days of the Bourbon Restoration, the author exhibits that tendency to over-description for which he was criticised by his contemporaries, and to dwell too much on petty details. It may be urged, however, that it is the cumulative effect of these minute touches that is necessary for the true realisation of character.

_I.–In a Paris Boarding-House_

Madame Vauquer, nee Conflans, is an elderly lady who for forty years past has kept a Parisian middle-class boarding-house, situated in the Rue Neuve Sainte-Genevieve, between the Latin Quarter and the Faubourg Saint Marcel. This pension, known under the name of the Maison Vauquer, receives men as well as women–young men and old; but hitherto scandal has never attacked the moral principles on which the respectable establishment has been conducted. Moreover, for more than thirty years, no young woman has been seen in the house; and if any young man ever lived there, it was because his family were able to make him only a very slender allowance. Nevertheless, in 1819, the date at which this drama begins, a poor young girl was found there.

The Maison Vauquer is of three stories, with attic chambers, and a tiny garden at the back. The ground floor consists of a parlour lighted by two windows looking upon the street. Nothing could be more depressing than this chamber, which is used as the sitting-room. It is furnished with chairs, the seats of which are covered with strips of alternate dull and shining horsehair stuff, while in the centre is a round table with a marble top. The room exhales a smell for which there is no name, in any language, except that of _odour de pension_. And yet, if you compare it with the dining-room which adjoins, you will find the sitting-room as elegant and as perfumed as a lady’s boudoir. There misery reigns without a redeeming touch of poesie–poverty, penetrating, concentrated, rasping. This room appears at its best when at seven in the morning Madame Vauquer, preceded by her cat, enters it from her sleeping chamber. She wears a tulle cap, under which hangs awry a front of false hair; her gaping slippers flop as she walks across the room. Her features are oldish and flabby; from their midst springs a nose like the beak of a parrot. Her small fat hands, her person plump as a church rat, her bust too full and tremulous, are all in harmony with the room. About fifty years of age, Madame Vauquer looks as most women do who say that they have had misfortunes.

At the date when this story opens there were seven boarders in the house. The first floor contained the two best suites of rooms. Madame Vauquer occupied the small, and the other was let to Madame Couture, the widow of a paymaster in the army of the French Republic. She had with her a very young girl, named Victorine Taillefer. On the second floor, one apartment was tenanted by an old gentleman named Poiret; the other by a man of about forty years of age, who wore a black wig, dyed his whiskers, gave out that he was a retired merchant, and called himself Monsieur Vautrin. The third story was divided into four single rooms, of which one was occupied by an old maid named Mademoiselle Michonneau, and another by an aged manufacturer of vermicelli, who allowed himself to be called “Old Goriot.” The two remaining rooms were allotted to a medical student known as Bianchon, and to a law student named Eugene de Rastignac. Above the third story were a loft where linen was dried, and two attic rooms, in one of which slept the man of all work, Christophe, and in the other the fat cook, Sylvie.

The desolate aspect of the interior of the establishment repeated itself in the shabby attire of the boarders. Mademoiselle Michonneau protected her weak eyes with a shabby green silk shade mounted on brass wire, which would have scared the Angel of Pity. Although the play of passions had ravished her features, she retained certain traces of a fine complexion, which suggested that the figure conserved some fragments of beauty. Poiret was a human automaton, who had earned a pension by mechanical labour as a government functionary.

Mademoiselle Victorine Taillefer was of a sickly paleness, like a girl in feeble health; but her grey-black eyes expressed the sweetness and resignation of a Christian. Her dress, simple and cheap, betrayed her youthful form. Happy, she might have been beautiful, for happiness imparts a poetic charm to women, as dress is the artifice of it. If love had ever given sparkle to her eyes, Victorine would have been able to hold her own with the fairest of her compeers. Her father believed he had reason to doubt his paternity, though she loved him with passionate tenderness; and after making her a yearly allowance of six hundred francs, he disinherited her in favour of his only son, who was to be the sole successor to his millions. Madame Couture was a distant relation of Victorine’s mother, who had died in her arms, and she had brought up the orphan as her own daughter in a strictly pious fashion, taking her with rigid regularity to mass and confession.

Eugene de Rastignac, the eldest son of a poor baron of Angouleme, was a characteristic son of the South. His complexion was clear, hair black, eyes blue. His figure, manner, and habitual poses proved that he was a scion of a noble family, and that his early education had been based on aristocratic traditions. The connecting link between these two individuals and the other boarders was Vautrin–the man of forty, with the dyed whiskers. He was one of that sort of men who are familiarly described as “jolly good fellows.” His face, furrowed with premature wrinkles, showed signs of hardness which belied his insinuating address. He was invariably obliging, with a breezy cheerfulness, though at times there was a steely expression in the eyes which inspired his fellow-boarders with a sense of fear. He knew or guessed the affairs of everybody in the house, but no one could divine his real business or his most inmost thoughts.

_II.–The Beginnings of the Tragedy_

Such a household ought to offer, and did present in miniature, the elements of a complete society. Among the inmates there was, as in the world at large, one poor discouraged creature–a butt on whom mocking pleasantries were rained. This patient sufferer was the old vermicelli maker, Goriot. Six years before, he had come to live at the Maison Vauquer, having, so he said, retired from business. He dressed handsomely, wore a gold watch, with thick gold chain and seals, flourished a gold snuff-box, and, when Madame Vauquer insinuated that he was a gallant, he smiled with the complacency of vanity tickled. Among the china and silver articles with which he decorated his sitting-room were a dish and porringer, on the cover of which were figures representing two doves billing and cooing.

“That,” said Goriot, “is the present which my wife made to me on the first anniversary of our wedding-day. Poor dear, she bought it with the little savings she hoarded before our marriage. Look you, madame, I would rather scratch the ground with my nails for a living than part with that porringer. God be praised, however, I shall be able to drink my coffee out of this dish every morning during the rest of my days. I cannot complain. I have on the shelf, as the saying is, plenty of baked bread for a long time to come.”

At the close of his first year Goriot began to practise little economies; at the end of the second he removed his rooms to the second floor, and did without a fire all the winter. This although, as Madame Vauquer’s prying eyes had seen, Goriot’s name appeared in the list of state funds for a sum representing an income of from eight to ten thousand francs. Henceforth she denounced him to the other paying-guests as an unprincipled old libertine, who lavished his enormous income from the funds on unknown youthful charmers. The boarders agreed; and when two young ladies in the most fashionable and costly attire visited him in succession in a semi-stealthy manner, their suspicions, as they believed, were confirmed. On one occasion, Sylvie followed Old Goriot and his beautiful visitor to a side street, and saw that there was a splendid carriage waiting and that she got into it. When challenged upon the point, the old man meekly declared that they were his daughters, though he never disclosed that their occasional visits were paid only to wheedle money from him.

The years passed, and with the gentleness of a broken spirit, beaten down to the docility of misery, Goriot curtailed his personal expenses, and again removed his lodgings; this time to the third floor. His dress turned shabbier; with each ascending grade his diamonds, gold snuff-box, and jewels disappeared. He grew thinner in person; his face, which had once the beaming roundness of a well-to-do middle-class gentleman, became furrowed with wrinkles. Lines appeared in his forehead, his jaws grew gaunt and sharp; and at the end of the fourth year he bore no longer the likeness of his former self. He was now a wan, worn-out septuagenarian–stupid, vacillating.

Eugene de Rastignac had ambitions, not only to win distinction as a lawyer, but also to play a part in the aristocratic society of Paris. He observed the influence which women exert upon society; and at his suggestion his aunt, Madame de Marcillac, who lived with his father in the old family chateau near Angouleme, and who had been at court in the days before the French Revolution, wrote to one of her great relatives, the Viscomtesse de Beauseant, one of the queens of Parisian society, asking her to give kindly recognition to her nephew. On the strength of that letter Eugene was invited to a ball at the mansion of the viscomtesse in the Faubourg Saint-Germain. The viscomtesse became interested in him, especially as she was suffering from the desertion of the Marquis d’Ajuda-Pinto, a Portuguese nobleman who had been long her lover, and stood sponsor for him in society. At the Faubourg, Eugene met the Duchesse de Langeais, from whom he learned the history of Old Goriot.

“During the Revolution,” said the duchesse, “Goriot was a flour and vermicelli merchant, and, being president of his section, was behind the scenes. When a great scarcity of food was at hand he made his fortune by selling his goods for ten times what they cost him. He had but one passion; he loved his daughters, and by endowing each of them with a dot of eight hundred thousand francs, he married the eldest, Anastasie, to the Count de Restaud, and the youngest, Delphine, to the Baron de Nucingen, a rich German financier. During the Empire, his daughters sometimes asked their father to visit them; but after the Restoration the old man became an annoyance to his sons-in-law. He saw that his daughters were ashamed of him; he made the sacrifice which only a father can, and banished himself from their homes. There is,” continued the duchesse, “something in these Goriot sisters even more shocking than their neglect of their father, for whose death they wish. I mean their rivalry to each other. Restaud is of ancient family; his wife has been adopted by his relatives and presented at court. But the rich sister, the beautiful Madame Delphine de Nucingen, is dying with envy, the victim of jealousy. She is a hundred leagues lower in society than her sister. They renounce each other as they both renounced their father. Madame de Nucingen would lap up all the mud between the Rue Saint-Lazare and the Rue de Crenelle to gain admission to my salon.” What the duchesse did not reveal was that Anastasie had a lover, Count Maxime de Trailles, a gambler and a duellist. To pay the gambling losses of this unscrupulous lover, to the extent of two hundred thousand francs, the Countess de Restaud induced Old Goriot to sell out of the funds nearly all that remained of his great fortune, and give the proceeds to her.

Returning to his lodgings from a ball in the Faubourg Saint-Germain, Eugene saw a light in Goriot’s room; and, without being noticed, watched the old man laboriously twisting two pieces of silver plate–his precious dish and porringer–into one lump.

“He must be mad,” thought the student.

“The poor child!” groaned Goriot.

The next morning Goriot visited a silversmith, and the Countess de Restaud received the money to redeem a note of hand which she had given to a moneylender on behalf of her lover.

“Old Goriot is sublime,” muttered Eugene when he heard of the transaction.

Delphine de Nucingen also had an admirer, Count de Marsay, through whose influence she expected to be introduced into the exclusive aristocratic society to which even the great wealth of her husband and his German patent of nobility could not secure an entry. Apart from her social aspirations, Delphine was personally extravagant; and as the baron was miserly and only gave her a very scanty allowance, she visited the gambling dens of the Palais Royale to try and raise the money which she could no longer coax from her old father.

_III.–A Temptation and a Murder_

To be young, to thirst after a position in the world of fashion, to hunger for the smiles of beautiful women, to obtain an entry into the salons of the Faubourg, meant to Rastignac large expenditure. He wrote home asking for a loan of twelve hundred francs, which, he said, he must have at all costs. The Viscomtesse de Beauseant had taken him under her protection, and he was in a situation to make an immediate fortune. He must go into society, but had not a penny even to buy gloves. The loan would be returned tenfold.

The mother sold her jewels, the aunt her old laces, his sisters sacrificed their economies, and the twelve hundred francs were sent to Eugene. With this sum he launched into the gay life of a man of fashion, dressed extravagantly, and gambled recklessly. One day Vautrin arrived in high spirits, surprising Eugene conversing with Victorine. This was Vautrin’s opportunity, for which he had been preparing. When Victorine retired, Vautrin pointed out how impossible it was to maintain a position in society as a law student, and if Eugene wished to get on quickly he must either be rich, or make believe to be so.

“In view of all the circumstances, therefore, I make a proposition to you,” said Vautrin to Eugene, “which I think no man in your position should refuse. I wish to become a great planter in the Southern States of America, and need two hundred thousand francs. If I get you a dot of a million, will you give me two hundred thousand francs? Is twenty per cent, commission on such a transaction too much? You will secure the affection of a little wife. A few weeks after marriage you will seem distracted. Some night, between kisses, you can own a debt of two hundred thousand francs, and ask your darling to pay it. The farce is acted every day by young men of good family, and no amorous young wife will refuse the money to the man she adores. Moreover, you will not lose the money; you will easily get it back by judicious speculation!”

“But where can I find such a girl?” said Eugene.

“She is here, close at hand.”

“Mademoiselle Victorine?”

“Precisely!”

“But how can that be?”

“She loves you; already she thinks herself the little Baroness de Rastignac.”

“She has not a penny!” cried Eugene in amazement.

“Ah, now we are coming to the point,” said Vautrin.

Thereupon, Vautrin insinuated that if papa Taillefer lost his son through the interposition of a wise Providence, he would take back his pretty and amiable daughter, who would inherit his millions. To this end he, Vautrin, frankly volunteered to play the part of destiny. He had a friend, a colonel in the army of the Loire, who would pick a quarrel with Frederic, the young blackguard son who had never sent a five-franc piece to his poor sister, and then “to the shades”–making a pass as if with a sword.

“Silence, monsieur! I will hear no more.”

“As you please, my beautiful boy! I thought you were stronger.”

A few days after this scene, Mademoiselle Michonneau and Poiret were sitting on a bench in the Jardin des Plantes, when they were accosted by the chief of the detective force. He told them that the minister of police believed that a man calling himself Vautrin, who lived with them in the Maison Vauquer, was an escaped convict from Toulon galleys, Jacques Collin, but known by the nickname of Trompe-la-Mort, and one of the most dangerous criminals in all France. In order to obtain certainty as to the identity of Vautrin with Collin he offered a bribe of three thousand francs if mademoiselle would administer a potion in his coffee or wine, which would affect him as if he were stricken with apoplexy. During his insensibility they could easily discover whether Vautrin had the convict’s brand on his shoulder. The pair accepted the bribe, and the plot succeeded. Vautrin was identified as Collin and arrested, just as a messenger came to announce that Frederic Taillefer had been killed in a duel, and Victorine was carried off with Madame Couture to her father’s home, the sole heir to his millions. When he was being pinioned to be conveyed back to the galleys, Collin looked upon his late fellow boarders with fierce scorn. “Are you any better than we convicts are?” said he. “We have less infamy branded on our shoulders than you have in your hearts–you flabby members of a gangrened society. There is some virtue here,” exclaimed he, striking his breast. “I have never betrayed anyone. As for you, you old female Judas,” turning to Mademoiselle Michonneau, “look at these people. They regard me with terror, but their hearts turn with disgust even to glance at you. Pick up your ill-gotten gains and begone.” As Jacques Collin disappeared from the Maison Vauquer, and from our story, Sylvie, the fat cook, exclaimed: “Well, he was a man all the same!”

Although the way was now clear for Rastignac to marry the enormously wealthy Victorine, he paid court instead to Delphine, the Baroness de Nucingen, and dined with her every night. Old Goriot was informed of the intrigue by the baroness’s maid. He did not resent but rather encouraged the liaison, and spent his last ten thousand francs in furnishing a suite of apartments for the young couple, on condition that he was to be allowed to occupy an adjoining room, and see his daughter every day.

_IV.–Old Goriot’s Death-Bed_

The Viscomtesse de Beauseant was broken-hearted when the marriage of her lover was accomplished, but to maintain a brave spirit in the face of society she gave a farewell ball before retiring to her country estate. Among those invited was the Countess de Restaud, who ordered a rich costume for the occasion, which, however, she was unable to pay for. Her husband, the count, insisted on her appearing at the ball and wearing the family diamonds, which she had pawned to discharge her lover’s gambling debts, and which had been redeemed to save the family honour. Anastasie sent her maid to Old Goriot, who rose from a sick-bed, sold his last forks and spoons for six hundred francs, pledged his annuity for four hundred francs, and so raised a thousand, which enabled Anastasie to obtain the gown and shine at the ball. Through Rastignac’s influence, Delphine, Baroness de Nucingen, received from the viscomtesse a ticket for the dance, and insisted on going, as Rastignac declared “even over the dead body of her father,” to challenge her sister’s social precedence at the supreme society function. The ball was the most brilliant of the Parisian season. Both Goriot’s daughters satisfied their selfish ambitions and gave never a thought to their old parent in the wretched Maison Vauquer.

For Old Goriot was sick unto death. His garret was bare; the walls dripped with moisture; the floor was damp; the bed was comfortless, and the few faggots which made the handful of fire had been bought only by the money got from pawning Eugene’s watch. Christophe, the man servant, was sent by Rastignac to tell the daughters of their father’s condition.

“Tell them that I am not very well,” said Old Goriot; “that I should like to see them, to kiss them before I die.”

By and by, when the messenger had gone, the old man said: “I don’t want to die. To die, my good Eugene, is–not to see them there, where I am going. How lonely I shall be! Hell, to a father, is to be without his children. Tell me, if I go to heaven, can I come back in spirit and hover near them? You saw them at the ball; they did not know that I was ill, did they?”

On the return of the messenger, Old Goriot was told that both his daughters refused to come and see him. Delphine was too tired and sleepy; Anastasie was discussing with her husband the future disposition of her marriage portion. Then alternately Goriot blamed his daughters and pardoned their unfilial and selfish behaviour.

“My daughters were my vice–my mistresses. Oh, they will come! Come, my darlings! A kiss, a last kiss, the viaticum of your father! I am justly punished; my children were good, and I have spoiled them; on my head be their sins. I alone am guilty; but guilty through love.” Eugene tried to soothe the old man by saying that he would go himself to fetch his daughters; but Goriot kept muttering in his semi-delirium. “Here, Nasie! here Delphine, come to your father who has been so good to you, and who is dying! Are they coming? No? Am I to die like a dog? This is my reward; forsaken, abandoned! They are wicked; they are criminal. I hate them. I will rise from my coffin to curse them. Oh, this is horrible! Ah, it is my sons-in-law who keep them away from me!”

“My good Old Goriot,” said Eugene, “be calm.”

“Not to see them–it is the agony of death!”

“You shall see them.”

“Ah! my angels!”

And with these feeble words, Old Goriot sank back on the pillow and breathed his last.

Anastasie did come to the death-chamber, but too late. “I could not escape soon enough,” she said to Rastignac. The student smiled sadly, and Madame de Restaud took her father’s hand and kissed it, saying, “Forgive me, my father.”

Goriot had a pauper’s funeral. The aristocratic sons-in-law refused to pay the expenses of the burial. These were scraped together with difficulty by Eugene de Rastignac, the law student, and Bianchon, the medical student, who had nursed him with loving tenderness to the last. At the graveside in Pere Lachaise, Eugene and Christophe were the only mourners; Bianchon’s duties detained him at the hospital. When the body of Old Goriot was lowered into the earth, the clergy recited a short prayer–all that could be given for the student’s money. The pall of night was falling; the mist struck a chill on Eugene’s nerves, and when he took a last glance at the shell containing all that was mortal of his old friend, he buried the last tear of his young manhood–a tear drawn by a sacred emotion from a pure heart.

Eugene wandered to the most elevated part of the cemetery, whence he surveyed that portion of the city between the Place Vendome and the dome of the Invalides, where lives that world of fashion which he had hungered to penetrate. With bitterness he muttered: “Now there is relentless war between us.” And as the first act of defiance which he had sworn against society, Rastignac went to dine with Madame Nucingen!

* * * * *

The Magic Skin

In no other work is the special quality of Balzac’s genius displayed so completely as in “La Peau de Chagrin,” which we render as “The Magic Skin.” Published in 1831, it is the earliest in date of his veritable masterpieces, and the finest in conception. There is no novel more soberly true to life than this strange fairy tale. His hero, the Marquis de Valentin, is a young aristocrat of the Byronic type. He rejects the simple joys and stern realities of human existence; he wants more than life can give. He gets what he wants. He obtains a magic skin which enables him to fulfil his every wish. But in so doing he uses up his vital powers. Such is the idea which makes this fantastic story a profound philosophical study.

_I.–The Seal of Solomon_

On a dull morning towards the end of October, 1830, a tall, pale, and rather handsome young man came to the Pont Royal, and leaned over the bridge, and gazed with wild and yet resolute eyes at the swirling waters below. Just as he was preparing to leap down, a ragged old woman passed by.

“Wretched weather for drowning oneself, isn’t it?” she said, with a grin. “How cold and dirty the Seine looks!”

The young man turned and smiled at her in the delirium of his courage. Then, suddenly he shuddered. On a shed by the Tuileries he saw, written in large letters: “Help for the drowned.” He foresaw the whole thing. A boat would put off to the rescue. If the rowers did not smash his skull in with their oars as he came to the surface, he would be taken to the shed and revived. If he were dead, a crowd would collect, newspaper men would come; his body would be recognised; and the Press would publish the news of the suicide of Raphael de Valentin. No! He would wait till nightfall, and then in a decent, private manner bequeath an unrecognizable corpse to a world that had disregarded his genius.

With the air of a wealthy man of leisure sauntering about the streets to kill time, the young marquis strolled down the Quai Voltaire, and followed the line of shops, looking listlessly at every window. But as he thought of the fate awaiting him at nightfall, men and houses swam in a mist before his eyes. To recover himself he entered a curiosity shop. “If you care to go through our galleries,” said the red-haired shop-boy, “you will find something worth looking at.”

Raphael climbed up a dark staircase lined with mummies, Indian idols, stuffed crocodiles, and goggle-eyed monsters. They all seemed to grin at him as he passed. Haunted by these strange shapes belonging to the borderland between life and death, he walked in a kind of dream through a series of long, dimly lighted galleries, in which was piled, in mad confusion, the work of every age and every clime. Here was a lovely statue by Michael Angelo, from which dangled the scalp of a Red Indian. There, cold and impassive, was the lord of the ancient world, the Emperor Augustus, with a modern air-pump sticking in his eye. The walls were hung with priceless pictures, which were half-hidden by grimacing skeletons, rude wooden idols with horrible features, tall suits of gleaming armour, and figures of Egyptian deities, with the bodies of men and heads of animals. The place was a kitchen of all the arts and religions and interests of mankind.

This extraordinary confusion was rendered still more bizarre by the dim cross-lights that played upon everything. Raphael’s eyes grew weary with gazing, and his mind was oppressed by the spectacle of the ruined splendours of thousands of years of human life. A fever born of hunger and exhaustion possessed him. The pictures appeared to light up, the statues seemed to move. Everything danced and swayed around him. Then a horrible Chinese monster advanced upon him with menacing eyes from the other side of the room, and he swooned away in terror.

When he came to, his eyes were dazzled by a flood or radiance streaming from a circle of crimson light. Before him, holding a bright red lamp, was a frail, white-haired, extraordinary man, clad in a long robe of black velvet. His body was wasted by extreme old age. His skin was like wrinkled parchment, and his lips were so thin and colourless that it was hardly possible to discern on his ivory-white face the line made by his mouth. But his eyes were marvellous. They were calm, clear and searching, and they glowed with the light and freshness of youth.

“So you have been looking over my collection,” the old man said. “Do you wish to buy anything?”

“Buy?” said Raphael, with a strange smile. “I am utterly penniless. I have been examining your treasures just to while away the time till I could drown myself quietly and secretly at night. You will not grudge this last pleasure to a poet and man of learning, will you?”

“Penniless?” said the old man. “But you do not want to die because you are penniless! A young, handsome, intellectual lad like you could pick up a living somehow. What is it? Some woman, eh? Now let me help—-“

“I want no help or advice or consolation,” said Raphael furiously.

“And I will give you none,” said the old man. “But as you are resolved to die, will you do something for me. I want to get rid of this.”

He held the lamp up the wall, and showed Raphael a piece of very old shagreen, about the size of a fox’s skin.

“Ah!” said Raphael. “A wild ass’s skin engraved with Sanscrit characters. Why, here’s the mark that some of the Eastern races call the Seal of Solomon!”

“You are truly a man of learning,” said the strange old merchant, his breath coming in quick pants through his nostrils. “No doubt you can read the inscription.”

“I should translate it thus,” said Raphael, fixing his eyes upon the skin.

POSSESSING ME THOU POSSESSEST EVERYTHING. YET I POSSESS THEE. SO GOD HAS WILLED IT. WISH, AND THY WISHES SHALL BE ACCOMPLISHED. BUT MEASURE THE WISHES ACCORDING TO THY LIFE. HERE IT IS. I SHALL SHRINK WITH EACH WISH, AND SO SHALL THY LIFE, WILT THOU TAKE ME?
TAKE ME! GOD WILL HEAR THEE. AMEN.

“Is it a joke or a mystery?”

“I do not know,” said the old man. “I have offered the magic skin to many men. They laughed at it; but none would take it. I am like them. I doubt its power, but will not put it to the test.”

“What!” said Raphael. “You have never formed a wish all the time you had it?”

“No!” said the old man. “I have discovered the great secret of human life. Look! I am a hundred and two years old. Do you know why men die? Because they use up the energy of life by wishing to do things and doing them. I am content to know things. My days have been spent wandering quietly over all the earth in the calm acquisition of knowledge. All desire, all lust after power are dead within me. So this skin, which I picked up in India, has never shrunk an inch since it came into my possession.”

“You have never lived!” cried Raphael, turning from the old man, and seizing the skin. “Yes, I will take you. Now for a test. I am starving. Set before me a splendid banquet. Let me have as guests all the wildest, gayest, wittiest minds of young France. And women? Oh, the prettiest, wickedest women of the town! Wine, wit and women!”

A roar of laughter came from the old man. It resounded in the ears of Raphael like the laughter of a fiend from hell.

“Do you think my floors are going to open, and tables, waiters, and guests pop up before your eyes?” he said. “No! Your first wish is mean and vulgar; but it will be fulfilled in a natural manner. You wanted to die, eh? Your suicide is only postponed.”

Raphael put the skin in his pocket, and abruptly left, saying, “You have never lived. I wish you knew what love was.”

He heard the old man groan strangely, but without listening to his reproaches he rushed out of the shop, and in the street ran full tilt up against three young men.

“Brute! Ass! Idiot! Why, it’s Raphael!” they cried. “You must come. Talk about a Roman orgy I We’ve been all over Paris looking, for you. A gorgeous feed. And all the girls from the Opera! The ancient Romans aren’t in it.”

“One at a time,” said Raphael. “Now, Emile, just tell me what are you all shouting about?”

“Do you know Taillefer, the wealthy banker?” said Emile. “He is founding a newspaper. All the talent of young France is to be enlisted. You’re invited to the inaugural festival to-night at the Rue Joubert. The ballot girls of the Opera are coming. Oh, Taillefer’s doing the thing in style!”

Arm linked in arm, the four friends made their way to Taillefer’s mansion, and there, in a large room brilliantly set out, they were welcomed by all the younger men of note in Paris. For some time Raphael felt ill at ease. He was surprised by the natural manner in which his wish had suddenly been accomplished. He took the magic skin out of his pocket, and looked at it. Magic? What man could believe nowadays in magic? But, nevertheless, he marvelled at the accidents of human life.

_II–A Fight Against Fate_

Although the banquet which he had desired was now set before him, Raphael was still very moody. Deaf to the loud, wild merriment of his companions, he thought sadly of the misfortune which had driven him that morning to the brink of the grave. Many noblemen find it difficult to exist in Paris on an income of several thousand pounds. The young Marquis de Valentin had lived there very happily on L12 a year. In 1826, his father, who had lost his wealth and lands in the Revolution, had died, leaving him L40. Taking a garret in the Rue des Cordiers, he had set about earning his living with his pen, and for three years he had laboured at a great work on “The Theory of the Will.” He never went into society, but found a pleasant distraction from his studies in educating the daughter of his landlady.

Pauline Gaudin was a charming and beautiful child; her father, a baron of the empire, and an officer in the Grand Army, had been taken prisoner by the Russians in 1812, and never heard of since. Raphael was moved by the grace and innocence of the lovely human flower, that grew from a bud into an opening blossom under his care. But as he was too poor to marry her, he never made love to her.

Then, in January, 1830, he met the Countess Foedora, a brilliant, wealthy woman of society, widowed at the age of thirty, and eager to shine and astonish and captivate. For her sake, Raphael had put aside his scholarly studies and engaged in money-making hack-work. But after keeping him dangling about her for some months, she had cast him off, and in his misery he had resolved to end his life. Now he had got the magic skin. What if it were true what the strange old man had said? Should he wish to win the heart of Foedora? No! She was a woman without a heart. He would have nothing to do with women. Still, this skin!

“Measure it! Measure it!” he cried, flinging it down on the table.

“Measure what?” said Emile. “Has Taillefer’s wine got into your head already?”

Raphael told them of the curiosity shop.

“That can be easily tested,” said Emile, taking the skin and drawing its outline on a napkin. “Now wish, and see if it shrinks.”

“I wish for six million pounds!” said Raphael.

“Hurrah!” said Emile. “And while you’re about it make us all millionaires.”

Taillefer’s notary, Cardot, who had been gazing at Raphael during the dinner, walked across the room to him.

“My dear marquis,” he said, “I’ve been looking for you all the evening. Wasn’t your mother a Miss O’Flaharty?”

“Yes, she was,” said Raphael–“Barbara O’Flaharty.”

“Well, you are the sole heir of Major O’Flaharty, who died last August at Calcutta, leaving a fortune of six millions.”

“An incalculable fortune,” said Emile. Raphael spread out the skin upon the napkin. He shuddered violently on seeing a slight margin between the pencil-line on the napkin and the edge of the skin.

“What’s the matter?” said the notary. “He has got a fortune very cheaply.”

“Hold him up,” said some one. “The joy will kill him.”

A ghostly whiteness spread over the face of the happy heir. He had seen Death! He stared at the shrunken skin and the merciless outline on the napkin, and a feeling of horror came over him. The whole world was his; he could have all things. But at what a cost!

“Do you wish for some asparagus, sir?” said, a waiter.

“_I wish for nothing!_” shrieked Raphael. And he fled from the banquet.

“So,” he said, when he was at last alone, “in this enlightened age, when science has stripped the very stars of their secrets, here am I frightened out of my senses by an old piece of wild ass’s skin. To-morrow I will have it examined by Planchette, and put an end to this mad fancy.”

Planchette, the celebrated professor of mechanics, treated the thing as a joke.

“Come with me to Spieghalter,” he said. “He has just built a new kind of hydraulic press which I designed.”

Arrived there, Planchette asked Spieghalter to stretch the magic skin. “Our friend,” he said, “doubts if we can do it.”

“You see this crank?” said Spieghalter to Raphael, pointing to the new press. “Seven turns to it, and a solid steel bar would break into thousands of pieces.”

“The very thing I want,” said Raphael.

Planchette put the skin between the metal plates, and, proud of his new invention, he energetically twisted the crank.

“Lie flat all of you!” shouted Spieghalter. “We’re dead men.”

There was an explosion, and a jet of water spurted out with terrific force. Falling on a furnace it twisted up the mass of iron as if it had been paper. The hydraulic chamber of the press had given way.

“The skin is untouched,” said Planchette. “There was a flaw in the press.”

“No, no!” said Spieghalter. “My press was as sound as a bell. The devil’s in your skin, sir. Take it away!”

Spieghalter seized the talisman, and flung it on an anvil, and furiously belaboured it with a heavy sledgehammer. He then pitched it in a furnace, and ordered his workmen to blow the coal into a fierce white heat. At the end of ten minutes he drew it out with a pair of tongs uninjured. With a cry of horror the workmen fled from the foundry.

“I now believe in the devil,” said Spieghalter.

“And I believe in God,” said Planchette.

Raphael departed in a hard, bitter rage. He was resolved to fight like a man against his strange fate. He would follow the example of the former owner of the magic skin, and give himself up to study and meditation, and live his life in the tranquil acquisition of knowledge, undisturbed by passion and desire, and lust for power, and dominion and glory. On receiving his vast inheritance, he bought a mansion in the Rue de Varenne, and engaged a crowd of intelligent, quiet servants to wait upon him.

But his first care had been to seek out his foster-father, Jonathan, the old and devoted servitor of his family. To him he confided his dreadful secret.

“You must stand between the world and me, Jonathan,” he said. “Treat me as a baby. Never ask me for orders. See that the servants feed me, and tend me, and care for me in absolute silence. Above all things, never let anyone pester me. Never let me form a wish of any kind.”

For some months, the eccentric Marquis de Valentin was the talk of Paris. He lived in monastic silence and seclusion, and Jonathan never permitted any of his friends to enter the mansion. But one morning his old tutor, Porriquet, called, and Jonathan thought he might cheer his young master. He could not ask Raphael: “Do you wish to see M. Porriquet?” But after some thought he found a way of putting the question: “M. Porriquet is here, my lord. Do you think he ought to enter?”

Raphael nodded. Porriquet was alarmed at the appearance of his pupil. He looked like a plant bleached by darkness. The fact was, Raphael had surrendered every right in life in order to live. He had despoiled his soul of all the romance that lies in a wish. The better to struggle with the cruel power that he had challenged, he had stifled his imagination. He did not allow himself even the pleasures of fancy, lest they should awaken some desire. He had become an automaton.

Porriquet, unfortunately, was now an irritating old proser. He had failed in life and wanted to air all his grievances. At the end of five minutes’ talk Raphael was about to wish that he would depart, when he caught sight of the magic skin hanging in a frame, with a red line drawn around it. Suppressing, with a shudder, his secret desire, he patiently bore with the old man’s prolixity. Porriquet wanted very much to ask him for money, but did not like to do so, and after complaining for quite an hour or more about things in general, he rose to depart.

“Perhaps,” he said, as he turned to leave the room, “I shall hear of a headmastership of a good school.”

“The very thing for you!” said Raphael. “I _wish_ you could get it.”

Then, with a sudden cry, he looked at the frame. There was a thin white edge between the skin and the red line.

“Go, you fool!” he shouted. “I have made you a headmaster. Why didn’t you ask me for an annuity of a thousand pounds instead of using up ten years of my life on a silly wish? I could have won Foedora at the price! Conquered a kingdom!”

His lips were covered with froth, and there was a savage light in his eyes. Porriquet fled in terror. Then Raphael fell back in a chair, and wept.

“Oh, my precious life!” he sobbed. “No more kindly thoughts! No more friendship!”

_III.–The Agony of Death_

Raphael’s condition had by now become so critical that a trip to Savoy was advised, and a few weeks later he was at Aix. One day, moving among the crowd of pleasure-seekers and invalids, a number of young men deliberately picked a quarrel with him, with the result that from one of them he received a challenge to fight a duel. Raphael did his utmost to persuade the other to apologise, even going to the extent of informing him of the terrible powers he possessed. Failing in his object, the fatal morning came round, and the unfortunate individual was shot through the heart. Not heeding the fallen man, Raphael hurriedly glanced at the skin to see what another man’s life had cost him. The talisman had shrunk to the size of a small oak-leaf.

Seeing that his master was given over to a gloomy despair that verged upon madness, Jonathan resolved to distract his mind at all costs, and knowing that he was passionately fond of music, he engaged a box for him at the Opera. But Raphael was afraid above all things, of falling in love. Under the illimitable desire of passion the magic skin would shrivel up in an hour. So he used a strange, distorting opera-glass which made the loveliest face seem hideous.

With this he sat in his box, he surveyed the scene around him. Who was that old man over there, sitting beside a dancing-girl that Raphael had seen at Taillefer’s? The owner of the curiosity shop! He had at last fallen in love, as Raphael had jestingly desired. No doubt the magic skin had shrunk under that wish before Raphael had measured it. A beautiful woman entered the theatre with a peer of France at her side. A murmur of admiration arose as she took her seat. She smiled at Raphael. In spite of the distorted image on his opera-glass, Raphael knew her. It was the Countess Foedora! In a single glance of intolerable scorn the man she had played false avenged himself. He did not waste an ill-wish on her. He merely took the glasses from his eyes, and answered her smile with a look of cold contempt. Everybody observed the sudden pallor of the countess; it was a public rejection.

“Raphael!”

The marquis turned at the sound of a beloved voice. Pauline was sitting in the box next to his. How beautiful she had grown! How maidenly she was still! Putting down his opera-glasses, Raphael talked to her of old times.

“You must come and see me to-morrow,” said Pauline. “I have your great work on ‘The Theory of the Will.’ Don’t you remember leaving it in the garret?”

“I was mad and blind then,” said Raphael. “But I am cured at last.”

“I wish Pauline to love me!” he kept repeating to himself all the way home. “I wish Pauline to love me!”

With a strange mixture of wild anguish and fierce joy, he looked at the magic skin to see what this vehement wish had cost him. Nothing! Not a sign of shrinkage could be discerned. The fact was that even the greatest talisman could not realise a desire which had long since been fulfilled. Pauline had loved Raphael from the time when they first met; while he had been priding himself on living on twelve pounds a year, she had been painting screens up to two or three o’clock every night, in order to buy him food and firing.

“Oh, my simple-minded darling,” she said to him the next day, sitting on his lap and twining her arms about his neck, “you will never know what a pleasure it was for me to pay my handsome tutor for all his kindness. And wasn’t I cunning? You never found me out.”

“But I’ve found out now,” said Raphael, “and I am going to punish you severely. Instead of marrying you in three months’ time, as you suggest, I shall marry you at the end of this week.”

Raphael was now the happiest man in Paris. Seeing that the magic skin had not shrunk with his last wish, he thought that the spell over his life was removed. And that morning he had thrown the talisman down a disused well in the garden.

At the end of the week, Pauline was sitting at breakfast with Raphael in the conservatory overlooking the garden. She was wearing a light dressing-gown; her long hair was all dishevelled, and her little, white, blue-veined feet peeped out of their velvet slippers. She gave a little cry of dismay, when the gardener appeared.

“I’ve just found this strange thing at the bottom of one of the wells,” he said.

He gave Raphael the magic skin. It was now scarcely as large as a rose leaf.

“Leave me, Pauline! Leave me at once!” cried Raphael. “If you remain I shall die before your eyes.”

“Die?” she said. “Die? You cannot. I love you–I love you!”

“Yes, die!” he exclaimed, showing her the little bit of skin. “Look, dearest. This is a talisman which represents the length of my life, and accomplishes my wishes. You see how little is left.”

Pauline thought he had suddenly grown mad. She bent over him, and took up the magic skin. As Raphael saw her, beautiful with love and terror, he lost all control over his desires. To possess her again, and die on her breast!

“Come to me Pauline!” he said.

She felt the skin tickling her hand as it rapidly shrivelled up. She rushed into the bedroom, and closed the door.

“Pauline! Pauline!” cried the dying man, stumbling after her. “I love