第55章 A WOMAN WITHOUT A HEART(31)
" 'I shall have no more lessons,' she said, pointing to the piano.
"I did not answer that.
" 'Will you write to me?'
" 'Good-bye, Pauline.'
"I gently drew her towards me, and set a kiss on that innocent fair brow of hers, like snow that has not yet touched the earth--a father's or a brother's kiss. She fled. I would not see Madame Gaudin, hung my key in its wonted place, and departed. I was almost at the end of the Rue de Cluny when I heard a woman's light footstep behind me.
" 'I have embroidered this purse for you,' Pauline said; 'will you refuse even that?'
"By the light of the street lamp I thought I saw tears in Pauline's eyes, and I groaned. Moved perhaps by a common impulse, we parted in haste like people who fear the contagion of the plague.
"As I waited with dignified calmness for Rastignac's return, his room seemed a grotesque interpretation of the sort of life I was about to enter upon. The clock on the chimney-piece was surmounted by a Venus resting on her tortoise; a half-smoked cigar lay in her arms. Costly furniture of various kinds--love tokens, very likely--was scattered about. Old shoes lay on a luxurious sofa. The comfortable armchair into which I had thrown myself bore as many scars as a veteran; the arms were gnashed, the back was overlaid with a thick, stale deposit of pomade and hair-oil from the heads of all his visitors. Splendor and squalor were oddly mingled, on the walls, the bed, and everywhere.
You might have thought of a Neapolitan palace and the groups of lazzaroni about it. It was the room of a gambler or a mauvais sujet, where the luxury exists for one individual, who leads the life of the senses and does not trouble himself over inconsistencies.
"There was a certain imaginative element about the picture it presented. Life was suddenly revealed there in its rags and spangles as the incomplete thing it really is, of course, but so vividly and picturesquely; it was like a den where a brigand has heaped up all the plunder in which he delights. Some pages were missing from a copy of Byron's poems: they had gone to light a fire of a few sticks for this young person, who played for stakes of a thousand francs, and had not a faggot; he kept a tilbury, and had not a whole shirt to his back.
Any day a countess or an actress or a run of luck at ecarte might set him up with an outfit worthy of a king. A candle had been stuck into the green bronze sheath of a vestaholder; a woman's portrait lay yonder, torn out of its carved gold setting. How was it possible that a young man, whose nature craved excitement, could renounce a life so attractive by reason of its contradictions; a life that afforded all the delights of war in the midst of peace? I was growing drowsy when Rastignac kicked the door open and shouted:
" 'Victory! Now we can take our time about dying.'
"He held out his hat filled with gold to me, and put it down on the table; then we pranced round it like a pair of cannibals about to eat a victim; we stamped, and danced, and yelled, and sang; we gave each other blows fit to kill an elephant, at sight of all the pleasures of the world contained in that hat.
" 'Twenty-seven thousand francs,' said Rastignac, adding a few bank-notes to the pile of gold. 'That would be enough for other folk to live upon; will it be sufficient for us to die on? Yes! we will breathe our last in a bath of gold--hurrah!' and we capered afresh.
"We divided the windfall. We began with double-napoleons, and came down to the smaller coins, one by one. 'This for you, this for me,' we kept saying, distilling our joy drop by drop.
" 'We won't go to sleep,' cried Rastignac. 'Joseph! some punch!'
"He threw gold to his faithful attendant.
" 'There is your share,' he said; 'go and bury yourself if you can.'
"Next day I went to Lesage and chose my furniture, took the rooms that you know in the Rue Taitbout, and left the decoration to one of the best upholsterers. I bought horses. I plunged into a vortex of pleasures, at once hollow and real. I went in for play, gaining and losing enormous sums, but only at friends' houses and in ballrooms;never in gaming-houses, for which I still retained the holy horror of my early days. Without meaning it, I made some friends, either through quarrels or owing to the easy confidence established among those who are going to the bad together; nothing, possibly, makes us cling to one another so tightly as our evil propensities.
"I made several ventures in literature, which were flatteringly received. Great men who followed the profession of letters, having nothing to fear from me, belauded me, not so much on account of my merits as to cast a slur on those of their rivals.
"I became a 'free-liver,' to make use of the picturesque expression appropriated by the language of excess. I made it a point of honor not to be long about dying, and that my zeal and prowess should eclipse those displayed by all others in the jolliest company. I was always spruce and carefully dressed. I had some reputation for cleverness.
There was no sign about me of the fearful way of living which makes a man into a mere disgusting apparatus, a funnel, a pampered beast.
"Very soon Debauch rose before me in all the majesty of its horror, and I grasped all that it meant. Those prudent, steady-going characters who are laying down wine in bottles for their heirs, can barely conceive, it is true, of so wide a theory of life, nor appreciate its normal condition; but when will you instill poetry into the provincial intellect? Opium and tea, with all their delights, are merely drugs to folk of that calibre.
"Is not the imperfect sybarite to be met with even in Paris itself, that intellectual metropolis? Unfit to endure the fatigues of pleasure, this sort of person, after a drinking bout, is very much like those worthy bourgeois who fall foul of music after hearing a new opera by Rossini. Does he not renounce these courses in the same frame of mind that leads an abstemious man to forswear Ruffec pates, because the first one, forsooth, gave him the indigestion?