“Oh! I know him,” said Adam. “He would sacrifice Malaga to us.”
“We shall see,” replied the Countess.
“If it were needful for his happiness, I should not hesitate to ask him to give her up. Constantino tells me that during the time when he was seeing her, Paz, usually so sober, sometimes came in quite fuddled. If he allowed himself to take to drink, I should be as much grieved as if he were my son.”
“Do not tell me any more!” cried the Countess with another gesture of disgust.
Two days later the Captain could see in her manner, in the tone of her voice, in her eyes, the terrible results of Adam’s betrayal. Scorn had opened gulfs between him and this charming woman. And he fell forthwith into deep melancholy, devoured by this thought, “You have made yourself unworthy of her.” Life became a burden to him; the bright sunshine was gloomy in his eyes. Nevertheless, under these floods of bitter thought, he had some happy moments: he could now give himself up without danger to his admiration for the Countess, who never paid him the slightest attention when, at a party, hidden in a corner, mute, all eyes and all heart, he did not lose one of her movements, not a note of her song when she sang. He lived in this enchanting life: he might himself groom the horse that she was to ride, and devote himself to the management of her splendid house with redoubled care for its interests.
These unspoken joys were buried in his heart like those of a mother, whose child never knows anything of his mother’s heart: for is it knowledge so long as even one thing remains unknown? Was not this finer than Petrarch’s chaste passion for Laura, which, after all, was well repaid by a wealth of glory, and by the triumph of the poetry she had inspired? Was not the emotion which Assas felt in dying, in truth a whole life? This emotion Paz felt every day without dying, but also without the guerdon of immortality.
What is there in love, that Paz, notwithstanding these secret delights, was consumed by sorrow? The Catholic religion has so elevated love that she has married it inseparably, so to speak, to esteem and generosity. Love does not exist apart from the fine qualities of which man is proud, and so rarely are we loved if we are contemned, that Thaddeus was perishing of his self-inflicted wounds. Only to hear her say that she could have loved him, and then to die! The hapless lover would have thought his life well paid for. The torments of his previous position seemed to him preferable to living close to her, loading her with his generosity without being appreciated or understood. In short, he wanted the price of his virtue.
He grew thin and yellow, and fell so thoroughly ill, consumed by low fever, that during the month of January he kept his bed, though refusing to see a physician. Count Adam grew extremely uneasy about his poor Thaddeus. The Countess then was so cruel as to say, when they were together one day, “Let him alone; do not you see that he has some Olympian remorse?”
This speech stung Thaddeus to the courage of despair; he got up, went out, tried some amusement, and recovered his health.
In the month of February Adam lost a rather considerable sum at the Jockey Club, and, being afraid of his wife, he begged Thaddeus to place this sum to the account of his extravagance for Malaga.
“What is there strange in the notion that the ballet-girl should have cost you twenty thousand francs? It concerns no one but me. Whereas, if the Countess should know that I had lost it at play, I should fall in her esteem, and she would be in alarm for the future.”
“This to crown all!” cried Thaddeus, with a deep sigh.
“Ah! Thaddeus, this service would make us quits if I were not already the debtor.”
“Adam, you may have children. Give up gambling,” said his friend.
“Twenty thousand francs more that Malaga has cost us!” exclaimed the Countess some days after, on discovering Adam’s generosity to Paz. “And ten thousand before—that is thirty thousand in all! Fifteen hundred francs a year, the price of my box at the Italian opera, a whole fortune to many people. … Oh! you Poles are incomprehensible!” cried she, as she picked some flowers in her beautiful conservatory. “You care no more than that!”
“Poor Paz—”
“Poor Paz, poor Paz!” she echoed, interrupting him. “What good does he do us? I will manage the house myself! Give him the hundred louis a year that he refused, and let him make his own arrangements with the Olympic Circus.”
“He is of the greatest use to us; he has saved us at least forty thousand francs this year. In short, my dearest, he placed a hundred thousand francs for us in Nucingen’s bank, and a steward would have netted them.”
Clémentine was softened, but she was not the less hard on Thaddeus.
Some days after she desired Paz to come to her in her boudoir, where, a year since, she had been startled by comparing him with the Count. This time she received him alone, without any suspicion of danger.
“My dear Paz,” said she, with the careless familiarity of fine folks to their inferiors, “if you love Adam as you say you do, you will do one thing which he will never ask, but which I, as his wife, do not hesitate to require of you—”
“It is about Malaga?” said Thaddeus with deep irony.
“Well, yes, it is,” she said. “If you want to end your days with us, if you wish that we should remain friends, give her up. How can an old soldier—”
“I am but five-and-thirty, and have not a gray hair!”
“You look as if you had,” said she, “and that is the same thing. How can a man so capable of putting two and two together, so superior …”
What was horrible was that
