“What are you going to do alone, madame?” replied Paz, with a perfectly ingenuous expression.
“You are not going to keep me company?”
“Forgive me for leaving you.”
“Why! where are you going?”
“I am going to the circus; it is the first night, in the Champs-Élysées, and I must not fail to be there …”
“Why not?” asked Clémentine, with a half-angry flash.
“Must I lay bare my heart?” he replied, coloring, “and confide to you what I conceal from my dear Adam, who believes that I love Poland alone?”
“What! our dear, noble Captain has a secret?”
“A disgrace which you will understand, and for which you can comfort me.”
“A disgrace!—You? …”
“Yes, I—Count Paz, am madly in love with a girl who was touring round France with the Bouthor family, people who have a circus after the pattern of Franconi’s, but who only perform at fairs! I got her an engagement from the manager of the Cirque-Olympique.”
“Is she handsome?” asked the Countess.
“In my eyes,” he replied sadly. “Malaga, that is her name to the public, is strong, nimble, and supple. Why do I prefer her to every other woman in the world?—Indeed, I cannot tell you. When I see her with her black hair tied back with blue ribbons that float over her bare olive-tinted shoulders, dressed in a white tunic with a gilt border, and silk tights which make her appear a living Greek statue, her feet in frayed satin slippers, flourishing flags in her hand to the sound of a military band, and flying through an enormous hoop covered with paper which crashes in the air—when her horse rushes round at a gallop, and she gracefully drops on to him again, applauded, honestly applauded, by a whole people—well, it excites me.”
“More than a woman at a ball?” said Clémentine, with insinuating surprise.
“Yes,” said Paz in a choked voice. “This splendid agility, this unfailing grace in constant peril, seem to me the greatest triumph of woman. Yes, madame, Cinti and Malibran, Grisi and Taglioni, Pasta and Ellsler, all who reign or ever reigned on the boards, seem to me unworthy to untie Malaga’s shoe strings—Malaga, who can mount or dismount a horse at a mad gallop, who slips under him from the left to reappear on the right, who flutters about the most fiery steed like a white will-o’-the-wisp, who can stand on the tip of one toe and then drop, sitting with her feet hanging, on a horse still galloping round, and who finally stands on his back without any reins, knitting a stocking, beating eggs, or stirring an omelette, to the intense admiration of the people, the true people, the peasantry and soldiers. During the walk round, madame, that enchanting Columbine used to carry chairs balanced on the tip of her nose, the prettiest Greek nose I ever saw. Malaga is dexterity personified. Her strength is Herculean; with her tiny fist or her little foot she can shake off three or four men. She is the goddess of athletics.”
“She must be stupid.”
“Oh!” cried Paz, “she is as amusing as the heroine of Peveril of the Peak. As heedless as a gypsy, she says everything that comes into her head; she cares no more for the future than you care for the halfpence you throw to a beggar, and she lets out really sublime things. Nothing will ever convince her that an old diplomat is a handsome young man, and a million of francs would not make her change her opinion. Her love for a man is a perpetual flattery. Enjoying really insolent health, her teeth are two-and-thirty Oriental pearls set in coral. Her ‘snout’—so she calls the lower part of her face—is, as Shakespeare has it, as fresh and sweet as a heifer’s muzzle. And it can give bitter pain! She respects fine men, strong men—an Adolphus, an Augustus, an Alexander—acrobats and tumblers. Her teacher, a horrible Cassandro, thrashed her unmercifully; it cost thousands of blows to give her such agility, grace, and intrepidity.”
“You are drunk with Malaga!” said the Countess.
“Her name is Malaga only on the posters,” said Paz, with a look of annoyance. “She lives in the Rue Saint-Lazare, in a little apartment on the third floor, in velvet and silk, like a princess. She leads two lives—one as a dancer, and one as a pretty woman.”
“And does she love you?”
“She loves me—you will laugh—solely because I am a Pole. She sees in every Pole a Poniatowski, as he is shown in the print, jumping into the Elster; for to every Frenchman the Elster, in which it is impossible to drown, is a foaming torrent which swallowed up Poniatowski.—And with all this I am very unhappy, madame—”
Clémentine was touched by a tear of rage in the Captain’s eye.
“You love the extraordinary, you men,” said she.
“And you?” asked Thaddeus.
“I know Adam so well that I know he could forget me for some acrobatic tumbler like your Malaga. But where did you find her?”
“At Saint-Cloud, last September, at the fair. She was standing in a corner of the platform covered with canvas where the performers walk round. Her comrades, all dressed as Poles, were making a terrific Babel. I saw her silent and dreamy, and fancied I could guess that her thoughts were melancholy. Was there not enough to make her so—a girl of twenty? That was what touched me.”
The Countess was leaning in a bewitching attitude, pensive, almost sad.
“Poor, poor Thaddeus!” she exclaimed. And with the good-fellowship of a really great lady, she added, not without a meaning smile, “Go; go to the circus!”
Thaddeus took her hand and kissed it, dropping a hot tear, and then went out. After having invented a passion for a circus-rider, he must give it some reality. Of his whole story nothing had been true but the minute’s attention he had given to the famous Malaga, the rider of the Bouthor troupe at Saint-Cloud; her name had just caught his eye on an advertisement of the circus. The clown, bribed by a single
