The Magic Skin

“What unrecognized sacrifices I had made in the past three months for Foedora! How often I had given the price of a week’s sustenance to see her for a moment! To leave my work and go without food was the least of it! I must traverse the streets of Paris without getting splashed, run to escape showers, and reach her rooms at last, as neat and spruce as any of the coxcombs about her. For a poet and a distracted wooer the difficulties of this task were endless. My happiness, the course of my love, might be affected by a speck of mud upon my only white waistcoat! Oh, to miss the sight of her because I was wet through and bedraggled, and had not so much as five sous to give to a shoeblack for removing the least little spot of mud from my boot! The petty pangs of these nameless torments, which an irritable man finds so great, only strengthened my passion.

“The unfortunate must make sacrifices which they may not mention to women who lead refined and luxurious lives. Such women see things through a prism that gilds all men and their surroundings. Egoism leads them to take cheerful views, and fashion makes them cruel; they do not wish to reflect, lest they lose their happiness, and the absorbing nature of their pleasures absolves their indifference to the misfortunes of others. A penny never means millions to them; millions, on the contrary, seem a mere trifle. Perhaps love must plead his cause by great sacrifices, but a veil must be lightly drawn across them, they must go down into silence. So when wealthy men pour out their devotion, their fortunes, and their lives, they gain somewhat by these commonly entertained opinions, an additional lustre hangs about their lovers’ follies; their silence is eloquent; there is a grace about the drawn veil; but my terrible distress bound me over to suffer fearfully or ever I might speak of my love or of dying for her sake.

“Was it a sacrifice after all? Was I not richly rewarded by the joy I took in sacrificing everything to her? There was no commonest event of my daily life to which the countess had not given importance, had not overfilled with happiness. I had been hitherto careless of my clothes, now I respected my coat as if it had been a second self. I should not have hesitated between bodily harm and a tear in that garment. You must enter wholly into my circumstances to understand the stormy thoughts, the gathering frenzy, that shook me as I went, and which, perhaps, were increased by my walk. I gloated in an infernal fashion which I cannot describe over the absolute completeness of my wretchedness. I would have drawn from it an augury of my future, but there is no limit to the possibilities of misfortune. The door of my lodging-house stood ajar. A light streamed from the heart-shaped opening cut in the shutters. Pauline and her mother were sitting up for me and talking. I heard my name spoken, and listened.

“‘Raphael is much nicer-looking than the student in number seven,’ said Pauline; ‘his fair hair is such a pretty color. Don’t you think there is something in his voice, too, I don’t know what it is, that gives you a sort of a thrill? And, then, though he may be a little proud, he is very kind, and he has such fine manners; I am sure that all the ladies must be quite wild about him.’

“‘You might be fond of him yourself, to hear you talk,’ was Madame Gaudin’s comment.

“‘He is just as dear to me as a brother,’ she laughed. ‘I should be finely ungrateful if I felt no friendship for him. Didn’t he teach me music and drawing and grammar, and everything I know in fact? You don’t much notice how I get on, dear mother; but I shall know enough, in a while, to give lessons myself, and then we can keep a servant.’

“I stole away softly, made some noise outside, and went into their room to take the lamp, that Pauline tried to light for me. The dear child had just poured soothing balm into my wounds. Her outspoken admiration had given me fresh courage. I so needed to believe in myself and to come by a just estimate of my advantages. This revival of hope in me perhaps colored my surroundings. Perhaps also I had never before really looked at the picture that so often met my eyes, of the two women in their room; it was a scene such as Flemish painters have reproduced so faithfully for us, that I admired in its delightful reality. The mother, with the kind smile upon her lips, sat knitting stockings by the dying fire; Pauline was painting hand-screens, her brushes and paints, strewn over the tiny table, made bright spots of color for the eye to dwell on. When she had left her seat and stood lighting my lamp, one must have been under the yoke of a terrible passion indeed, not to admire her faintly flushed transparent hands, the girlish charm of her attitude, the ideal grace of her head, as the lamplight fell full on her pale face. Night and silence added to the charms of this industrious vigil and peaceful interior. The light-heartedness that sustained such continuous toil could only spring from devout submission and the lofty feelings that it brings.

“There was an indescribable harmony between them and their possessions. The splendor of Foedora’s home did not satisfy; it called out all my worst instincts; something in this lowly poverty and unfeigned goodness revived me. It may have been that luxury abased me in my own eyes, while here my self-respect was restored to me, as I sought to extend the protection that a man is so eager to make felt, over these two women, who in the bare simplicity of the existence in their brown room seemed to live wholly in the feelings of their hearts. As I came up to Pauline, she looked at me in an almost motherly way; her hands shook a little as she held the lamp, so that the light fell on me and cried:

“‘Dieu! how pale you are! and you are wet through! My mother will try to wipe you dry. Monsieur Raphael,’ she went on, after a little pause, ‘you are so very fond of milk, and to-night we happen to have some cream. Here, will you not take some?’

“She pounced like a kitten, on a china bowl full of milk. She did it so quickly, and put it before me so prettily, that I hesitated.

“‘You are going to refuse me?’ she said, and her tones changed.

“The pride in each felt for the other’s pride. It was Pauline’s poverty that seemed to humiliate her, and to reproach me with my want of consideration, and I melted at once and accepted the cream that might have been meant for her morning’s breakfast. The poor child tried not to show her joy, but her eyes sparkled.

“‘I needed it badly,’ I said as I sat down. (An anxious look passed over her face.) ‘Do you remember that passage, Pauline, where Bossuet tells how God gave more abundant reward for a cup of cold water than for a victory?’

“‘Yes,’ she said, her heart beating like some wild bird’s in a child’s hands.

“‘Well, as we shall part very soon, now,’ I went on in an unsteady voice, ‘you must let me show my gratitude to you and to your mother for all the care you have taken of me.’

“‘Oh, don’t let us cast accounts,’ she said laughing. But her laughter covered an agitation that gave me pain. I went on without appearing to hear her words:

“‘My piano is one of Erard’s best instruments; and you must take it. Pray accept it without hesitation; I really could not take it with me on the journey I am about to make.’

“Perhaps the melancholy tones in which I spoke enlightened the two women, for they seemed to understand, and eyed me with curiosity and alarm. Here was the affection that I had looked for in the glacial regions of the great world, true affection, unostentatious but tender, and possibly lasting.

“‘Don’t take it to heart so,’ the mother said; ‘stay on here. My husband is on his way towards us even now,’ she went on. ‘I looked into the Gospel of St. John this evening while Pauline hung our door-key in a Bible from her fingers. The key turned; that means that Gaudin is in health and doing well. Pauline began again for you and for the young man in number seven – it turned for you, but not for him. We are all going to be rich. Gaudin will come back a millionaire. I dreamed once that I saw him in a ship full of serpents; luckily the water was rough, and that means gold or precious stones from over-sea.’

“The silly, friendly words were like the crooning lullaby with which a mother soothes her sick child; they in a manner calmed me. There was a pleasant heartiness in the worthy woman’s looks and tones, which, if it could not remove trouble, at any rate soothed and quieted it, and deadened the pain. Pauline, keener-sighted than her mother, studied me uneasily; her quick eyes seemed to read my life and my future. I thanked the mother and daughter by an inclination of the head, and hurried away; I was afraid I should break down.

“I found myself alone under my roof, and laid myself down in my misery. My unhappy imagination suggested numberless baseless projects, and prescribed impossible resolutions. When a man is struggling in the wreck of his fortunes, he is not quite without resources, but I was engulfed. Ah, my dear fellow, we are too ready to blame the wretched. Let us be less harsh on the results of the most powerful of all social solvents. Where poverty is absolute there exist no such things as shame or crime, or virtue or intelligence. I knew not what to do; I was as defenceless as a maiden on her knees before a beast of prey. A penniless man who has no ties to bind him is master of himself at any rate, but a luckless wretch who is in love no longer belongs to himself, and may not take his own life. Love makes us almost sacred in our own eyes; it is the life of another that we revere within us; then and so it begins for us the cruelest trouble of all – the misery with a hope in it, a hope for which we must even bear our torments. I thought I would go to Rastignac on the morrow to confide Foedora’s strange resolution to him, and with that I slept.

“‘Ah, ha!’ cried Rastignac, as he saw me enter his lodging at nine o’clock in the morning. ‘I know what brings you here. Foedora has dismissed you. Some kind souls, who were jealous of your ascendency over the countess, gave out that you were going to be married. Heaven only knows what follies your rivals have equipped you with, and what slanders have been directed at you.’

“‘That explains everything!’ I exclaimed. I remembered all my presumptuous speeches, and gave the countess credit for no little magnanimity. It pleased me to think that I was a miscreant who had not been punished nearly enough, and I saw nothing in her indulgence but the long-suffering charity of love.

“‘Not quite so fast,’ urged the prudent Gascon; ‘Foedora has all the sagacity natural to a profoundly selfish woman; perhaps she may have taken your measure while you still coveted only her money and her splendor; in spite of all your care, she could have read you through and through. She can dissemble far too well to let any dissimulation pass undetected. I fear,’ he went on, ‘that I have brought you into a bad way. In spite of her cleverness and her tact, she seems to me a domineering sort of person, like every woman who can only feel pleasure through her brain. Happiness for her lies entirely in a comfortable life and in social pleasures; her sentiment is only assumed; she will make you miserable; you will be her head footman.’

“He spoke to the deaf. I broke in upon him, disclosing, with an affectation of light-heartedness, the state of my finances.

“‘Yesterday evening,’ he rejoined, ‘luck ran against me, and that carried off all my available cash. But for that trivial mishap, I would gladly have shared my purse with you. But let us go and breakfast at the restaurant; perhaps there is good counsel in oysters.’

“He dressed, and had his tilbury brought round. We went to the Cafe de Paris like a couple of millionaires, armed with all the audacious impertinence of the speculator whose capital is imaginary. That devil of a Gascon quite disconcerted me by the coolness of his manners and his absolute self-possession. While we were taking coffee after an excellent and well-ordered repast, a young dandy entered, who did not escape Rastignac. He had been nodding here and there among the crowd to this or that young man, distinguished both by personal attractions and elegant attire, and now he said to me:

“‘Here’s your man,’ as he beckoned to this gentleman with a wonderful cravat, who seemed to be looking for a table that suited his ideas.

“‘That rogue has been decorated for bringing out books that he doesn’t understand a word of,’ whispered Rastignac; ‘he is a chemist, a historian, a novelist, and a political writer; he has gone halves, thirds, or quarters in the authorship of I don’t know how many plays, and he is as ignorant as Dom Miguel’s mule. He is not a man so much as a name, a label that the public is familiar with. So he would do well to avoid shops inscribed with the motto, “Ici l’on peut ecrire soi-meme.” He is acute enough to deceive an entire congress of diplomatists. In a couple of words, he is a moral half-caste, not quite a fraud, nor entirely genuine. But, hush! he has succeeded already; nobody asks anything further, and every one calls him an illustrious man.’

“‘Well, my esteemed and excellent friend, and how may Your Intelligence be?’ So Rastignac addressed the stranger as he sat down at a neighboring table.

“‘Neither well nor ill; I am overwhelmed with work. I have all the necessary materials for some very curious historical memoirs in my hands, and I cannot find any one to whom I can ascribe them. It worries me, for I shall have to be quick about it. Memoirs are falling out of fashion.’

“‘What are the memoirs – contemporaneous, ancient, or memoirs of the court, or what?’

“‘They relate to the Necklace affair.’

“‘Now, isn’t that a coincidence?’ said Rastignac, turning to me and laughing. He looked again to the literary speculation, and said, indicating me:

“‘This is M. de Valentin, one of my friends, whom I must introduce to you as one of our future literary celebrities. He had formerly an aunt, a marquise, much in favor once at court, and for about two years he has been writing a Royalist history of the Revolution.’

“Then, bending over this singular man of business, he went on:

“‘He is a man of talent, and a simpleton that will do your memoirs for you, in his aunt’s name, for a hundred crowns a volume.’

“‘It’s a bargain,’ said the other, adjusting his cravat. ‘Waiter, my oysters.’

“‘Yes, but you must give me twenty-five louis as commission, and you will pay him in advance for each volume,’ said Rastignac.

“‘No, no. He shall only have fifty crowns on account, and then I shall be sure of having my manuscript punctually.’

“Rastignac repeated this business conversation to me in low tones; and then, without giving me any voice in the matter, he replied:

“‘We agree to your proposal. When can we call upon you to arrange the affair?’

“‘Oh, well! Come and dine here to-morrow at seven o’clock.’

“We rose. Rastignac flung some money to the waiter, put the bill in his pocket, and we went out. I was quite stupified by the flippancy and ease with which he had sold my venerable aunt, la Marquise de Montbauron.

“‘I would sooner take ship for the Brazils, and give the Indians lessons in algebra, though I don’t know a word of it, than tarnish my family name.’

“Rastignac burst out laughing.

“‘How dense you are! Take the fifty crowns in the first instance, and write the memoirs. When you have finished them, you will decline to publish them in your aunt’s name, imbecile! Madame de Montbauron, with her hooped petticoat, her rank and beauty, rouge and slippers, and her death upon the scaffold, is worth a great deal more than six hundred francs. And then, if the trade will not give your aunt her due, some old adventurer, or some shady countess or other, will be found to put her name to the memoirs.’

“‘Oh,’ I groaned; ‘why did I quit the blameless life in my garret? This world has aspects that are very vilely dishonorable.’

“‘Yes,’ said Rastignac, ‘that is all very poetical, but this is a matter of business. What a child you are! Now, listen to me. As to your work, the public will decide upon it; and as for my literary middle-man, hasn’t he devoted eight years of his life to obtaining a footing in the book-trade, and paid heavily for his experience? You divide the money and the labor of the book with him very unequally, but isn’t yours the better part? Twenty-five louis means as much to you as a thousand francs does to him. Come, you can write historical memoirs, a work of art such as never was, since Diderot once wrote six sermons for a hundred crowns!’

“‘After all,’ I said, in agitation, ‘I cannot choose but do it. So, my dear friend, my thanks are due to you. I shall be quite rich with twenty-five louis.’

“‘Richer than you think,’ he laughed. ‘If I have my commission from Finot in this matter, it goes to you, can’t you see? Now let us go to the Bois de Boulogne,’ he said; ‘we shall see your countess there, and I will show you the pretty little widow that I am to marry – a charming woman, an Alsacienne, rather plump. She reads Kant, Schiller, Jean Paul, and a host of lachrymose books. She has a mania for continually asking my opinion, and I have to look as if I entered into all this German sensibility, and to know a pack of ballads – drugs, all of them, that my doctor absolutely prohibits. As yet I have not been able to wean her from her literary enthusiasms; she sheds torrents of tears as she reads Goethe, and I have to weep a little myself to please her, for she has an income of fifty thousand livres, my dear boy, and the prettiest little hand and foot in the world. Oh, if she would only say mon ange and brouiller instead of mon anche and prouiller, she would be perfection!’

“We saw the countess, radiant amid the splendors of her equipage. The coquette bowed very graciously to us both, and the smile she gave me seemed to me to be divine and full of love. I was very happy; I fancied myself beloved; I had money, a wealth of love in my heart, and my troubles were over. I was light-hearted, blithe, and content. I found my friend’s lady-love charming. Earth and air and heaven – all nature – seemed to reflect Foedora’s smile for me.

“As we returned through the Champs-Elysees, we paid a visit to Rastignac’s hatter and tailor. Thanks to the ‘Necklace,’ my insignificant peace-footing was to end, and I made formidable preparations for a campaign. Henceforward I need not shrink from a contest with the spruce and fashionable young men who made Foedora’s circle. I went home, locked myself in, and stood by my dormer window, outwardly calm enough, but in reality I bade a last good-bye to the roofs without. I began to live in the future, rehearsed my life drama, and discounted love and its happiness. Ah, how stormy life can grow to be within the four walls of a garret! The soul within us is like a fairy; she turns straw into diamonds for us; and for us, at a touch of her wand, enchanted palaces arise, as flowers in the meadows spring up towards the sun.

“Towards noon, next day, Pauline knocked gently at my door, and brought me – who could guess it? – a note from Foedora. The countess asked me to take her to the Luxembourg, and to go thence to see with her the Museum and Jardin des Plantes.

“‘The man is waiting for an answer,’ said Pauline, after quietly waiting for a moment.

“I hastily scrawled my acknowledgements, and Pauline took the note. I changed my dress. When my toilette was ended, and I looked at myself with some complaisance, an icy shiver ran through me as I thought:

“‘Will Foedora walk or drive? Will it rain or shine? – No matter, though,’ I said to myself; ‘whichever it is, can one ever reckon with feminine caprice? She will have no money about her, and will want to give a dozen francs to some little Savoyard because his rags are picturesque.’

“I had not a brass farthing, and should have no money till the evening came. How dearly a poet pays for the intellectual prowess that method and toil have brought him, at such crises of our youth! Innumerable painfully vivid thoughts pierced me like barbs. I looked out of my window; the weather was very unsettled. If things fell out badly, I might easily hire a cab for the day; but would not the fear lie on me every moment that I might not meet Finot in the evening? I felt too weak to endure such fears in the midst of my felicity. Though I felt sure that I should find nothing, I began a grand search through my room; I looked for imaginary coins in the recesses of my mattress; I hunted about everywhere – I even shook out my old boots. A nervous fever seized me; I looked with wild eyes at the furniture when I had ransacked it all. Will you understand, I wonder, the excitement that possessed me when, plunged deep in the listlessness of despair, I opened my writing-table drawer, and found a fair and splendid ten-franc piece that shone like a rising star, new and sparkling, and slily hiding in a cranny between two boards? I did not try to account for its previous reserve and the cruelty of which it had been guilty in thus lying hidden; I kissed it for a friend faithful in adversity, and hailed it with a cry that found an echo, and made me turn sharply, to find Pauline with a face grown white.

“‘I thought,’ she faltered, ‘that you had hurt yourself! The man who brought the letter – ’ (she broke off as if something smothered her voice). ‘But mother has paid him,’ she added, and flitted away like a wayward, capricious child. Poor little one! I wanted her to share in my happiness. I seemed to have all the happiness in the world within me just then; and I would fain have returned to the unhappy, all that I felt as if I had stolen from them.

“The intuitive perception of adversity is sound for the most part; the countess had sent away her carriage. One of those freaks that pretty women can scarcely explain to themselves had determined her to go on foot, by way of the boulevards, to the Jardin des Plantes.

“‘It will rain,’ I told her, and it pleased her to contradict me.

“As it fell out, the weather was fine while we went through the Luxembourg; when we came out, some drops fell from a great cloud, whose progress I had watched uneasily, and we took a cab. At the Museum I was about to dismiss the vehicle, and Foedora (what agonies!) asked me not to do so. But it was like a dream in broad daylight for me, to chat with her, to wander in the Jardin des Plantes, to stray down the shady alleys, to feel her hand upon my arm; the secret transports repressed in me were reduced, no doubt, to a fixed and foolish smile upon my lips; there was something unreal about it all. Yet in all her movements, however alluring, whether we stood or whether we walked, there was nothing either tender or lover-like. When I tried to share in a measure the action of movement prompted by her life, I became aware of a check, or of something strange in her that I cannot explain, or an inner activity concealed in her nature. There is no suavity about the movements of women who have no soul in them. Our wills were opposed, and we did not keep step together. Words are wanting to describe this outward dissonance between two beings; we are not accustomed to read a thought in a movement. We instinctively feel this phenomenon of our nature, but it cannot be expressed.

“I did not dissect my sensations during those violent seizures of passion,” Raphael went on, after a moment of silence, as if he were replying to an objection raised by himself. “I did not analyze my pleasures nor count my heartbeats then, as a miser scrutinizes and weighs his gold pieces. No; experience sheds its melancholy light over the events of the past to-day, and memory brings these pictures back, as the sea-waves in fair weather cast up fragment after fragment of the debris of a wrecked vessel upon the strand.

“‘It is in your power to render me a rather important service,’ said the countess, looking at me in an embarrassed way. ‘After confiding in you my aversion to lovers, I feel myself more at liberty to entreat your good offices in the name of friendship. Will there not be very much more merit in obliging me to-day?’ she asked, laughing.

“I looked at her in anguish. Her manner was coaxing, but in no wise affectionate; she felt nothing for me; she seemed to be playing a part, and I thought her a consummate actress. Then all at once my hopes awoke once more, at a single look and word. Yet if reviving love expressed itself in my eyes, she bore its light without any change in the clearness of her own; they seemed, like a tiger’s eyes, to have a sheet of metal behind them. I used to hate her in such moments.