“He has no one but me in the world,” Marie had said to her sister, “and I shall not fail him.”
In these words may be read the key to women’s hearts. They become heroic in the assurance of being all in all to a great and honorable man.
VIII
A Lover Saved and Lost
Du Tillet had heard many speculations as to the greater or less probability of his sister-in-law’s love for Nathan; but he was one of those who deemed the liaison incompatible with that existing between Raoul and Florine, or who denied it on other grounds. In his view, either the actress made the Countess impossible, or vice versa. But when, on his return that evening, he found his sister-in-law, whose agitation had been plainly written on her face at the opera, he surmised that Raoul had confided his plight to the Countess. This meant that the Countess loved him, and had come to beg from Marie-Eugénie the amount due to old Gigonnet. Mme. du Tillet, at a loss how to explain this apparently miraculous insight, had betrayed so much confusion, that du Tillet’s suspicion became a certainty. The banker was confident that he could now get hold of the clue to Nathan’s intrigues.
No one knew of the poor wretch who lay ill in a private hotel in the Rue du Mail, under the name of the attendant, François Quillet, to whom the Countess had promised five hundred francs as the reward for silence on the events of the night and morning. Quillet in consequence had taken the precaution of telling the portress that Nathan was ill from overwork. It was no surprise to du Tillet not to see Nathan, for it was only natural the journalist should keep in hiding from the bailiffs. When the detectives came to make inquiry, they were told that a lady had been there that morning and carried off the editor. Two days elapsed before they had discovered the number of the cab, questioned the driver, and identified and explored the house in which the poor insolvent was coming back to life. Thus Marie’s wary tactics had won for Nathan a respite of three days.
Each of the sisters passed an agitated night. Such a tragedy casts a lurid light, like the glow of its own charcoal, upon the whole substance of a life, throwing out its shoals and reefs rather than the heights which hitherto had struck the eye. Mme. du Tillet, overcome by the frightful spectacle of a young man dying in his editorial chair, and writing his last words with Roman stoicism, could think of nothing but how to help him, how to restore to life the being in whom her sister’s life was bound up. It is a law of the mind to look at effects before analyzing causes. Eugénie once more approved the idea, which had occurred to her, of applying to the Baronne Delphine de Nucingen, with whom she had a dining acquaintance, and felt that it promised well. With the generosity natural to those whose hearts have not been ground in the polished mill of society, Mme. du Tillet determined to take everything upon herself.
The Countess again, happy in having saved Nathan’s life, spent the night in scheming how to lay her hands on forty thousand francs. In such a crisis women are beyond praise. Under the impulse of feeling they light upon contrivances which would excite, if anything could, the admiration of thieves, brokers, usurers, those three more or less licensed classes of men who live by their wits. The Countess would sell her diamonds and wear false ones. Then she was for asking Vandenesse to give her the money for her sister, whom she had already used as a pretext; but she was too high-minded not to recoil from such degrading expedients, which occurred to her only to be rejected. To give Vandenesse’s money to Nathan! At the very thought she leaped up in bed, horrified at her own baseness. Wear false diamonds! her husband would find out sooner or later. She would go and beg the money from the Rothschilds, who had so much; from the Archbishop of Paris, whose duty it was to succor the poor. Then in her extremity she rushed from one religion to another with impartial prayers. She lamented being in opposition; in old days she could have borrowed from persons near to royalty. She thought of applying to her father. But the ex-judge had a horror of any breach of the law; his children had learned from experience how little sympathy he had with love troubles; he refused to hear of them, he had become a misanthrope, he could not away with intrigue of any description. As to the Comtesse de Granville, she had gone to live in retirement on one of her estates in Normandy, and, icy to the last, was ending her days, pinching and praying, between priests and moneybags. Even were there time for Marie to reach Bayeax, would her mother give her so large a sum without knowing what it was wanted for? Imaginary debts? Yes, possibly her favorite child might move her to compassion. Well, then, as a last resource, to Normandy the Countess would go. The Comte de Granville would not refuse to give her a pretext by sending false news of his wife’s serious illness.
The tragedy which had given her such a shock in the morning, the care she had lavished on Nathan, the hours passed by his bedside, the broken tale, the agony of a great mind, the career of genius cut short by a vulgar and ignoble detail, all rushed upon her memory as so many spurs to love. Once more she lived through every heartthrob, and felt her love stronger in the hour of Nathan’s abasement than in that
