“So superior as you are,” she went on, after a little pause, which a gesture from Paz forced from her, “allow yourself to be entrapped like a boy. Your affair with her has made Malaga famous.—Well! My uncle wanted to see her, My uncle is not the only one; Malaga is very ready to receive all these gentlemen.—I believed you to be high-minded.—Take shame to yourself! Come, would she be an irreparable loss to you?”
“Madame, if I knew of any sacrifice by which I might recover your esteem, it would soon be made; but to give up Malaga is not a sacrifice—”
“In your place that is what I should say if I were a man,” replied Clémentine. “Well, but if I take it as a great sacrifice, there is nothing to be angry at.”
Paz went away, fearing he might do some mad act; he felt his brain invaded by crazy notions. He went out for a walk, lightly dressed in spite of the cold, but failed to cool the burning of his face and brow. “I believed you to be high-minded!” He heard the words again and again. “And scarcely a year ago,” said he to himself, “to hear Clémentine, I had beaten the Russians single-handed!” He thought of quitting the Laginski household, of asking to be sent on service in the Spahi regiment, and getting himself killed in Africa; but a dreadful fear checked him: “What would become of them without me? They would soon be ruined. Poor Countess, what a horrible life it would be for her to be reduced even to thirty thousand francs a year! Come,” said he to himself, “since she can never be yours, courage, finish your work!”
As all the world knows, since 1830 the Carnival in Paris has grown to prodigious proportions, making it European, and burlesque, and animated to a far greater degree than the departed carnivals of Venice. Is this because, since fortunes have so enormously diminished, Parisians have thought of amusing themselves collectively, just as in their clubs they have a drawing-room without any mistress of the house, without politeness, and quite cheap? Be this as it may, the month of March was prodigal of those balls, where dancing, farce, coarse fun, delirium, grotesque figures, and banter made keen by Paris wit, achieved gigantic results. This madness had its Pandemonium at that time in the Rue Saint-Honoré, and its Napoleon in Musard, a little man born to rule an orchestra as tremendous as the rampant mob, and to conduct a galop—that whirl of witches at their Sabbath, and one of Auber’s triumphs, for the galop derived its form and its poetry from the famous galop in Gustavus. May not this vehement finale serve as a symbol of an age when, for fifty years, everything has rushed on with the swiftness of a dream?
Now, our grave Thaddeus, bearing an immaculate image in his heart, went to Malaga to invite her, the queen of carnival dancing, to spend an evening at Musard’s as soon as he learned that the Countess, disguised to the teeth, was intending to come with two other young ladies, escorted by their husbands, to see the curious spectacle of one of these monster balls. On Shrove Tuesday night, in the year of grace 1838, at four o’clock in the morning, the Countess, wrapped in a black domino, and seated on a bench of one of the amphitheatres of the Babylonian hall where Valentino has since given his concerts, saw Thaddeus, dressed as Robert Macaire, leading the circus-rider in the costume of a savage, her head dressed with nodding plumes like a horse at a coronation, and leaping among the groups like a perfect Jack-o’-lantern.
“Oh!” exclaimed Clémentine to her husband, “you Poles are not men of character. Who would not have felt sure of Thaddeus? He gave me his word, not knowing that I should be here and see all without being seen.”
Some days after this she invited Paz to dinner. After dinner, Adam left them together, and Clémentine scolded Thaddeus in such a way as to make him feel that she would no longer have him about the house.
“Indeed, madame,” said Thaddeus humbly, “you are quite right. I am a wretch; I had pledged my word. But what can I do? I put off the parting with Malaga till after the Carnival. … And I will be honest with you; the woman has so much power over me …”
“A woman who gets herself turned out of Musard’s by the police, and for such dancing?”
“I admit it; I sit condemned; I will quit your house. But you know Adam. If I hand over to you the conduct of your affairs, you will have to exert great energy. Though I have the vice of Malaga, I know how to keep an eye on your concerns, how to manage your household, and superintend the smallest details. Allow me then to remain till I have seen you qualified to continue my system of management. You have now been married three years, and are safe from the first follies consequent on the honeymoon. The ladies of Paris society, even with the highest titles, understand very well in these days how to control a fortune and a household. … Well, as soon as I am assured, not of your capacity, but of your firmness, I will leave Paris.”
“It is Thaddeus of Warsaw that speaks, not Thaddeus of the circus. Come back to us cured.”
“Cured?—Never!” said Paz, his eyes fixed on Clémentine’s pretty feet. “You cannot know, Countess, all the spice, the unexpectedness there is in that woman’s wit.” And feeling his courage fail him, he added: “There is not a single woman of fashion, with her prim airs, who is worth that frank young animal nature.”
“In fact, I should not choose to have anything in me of the animal!” said the Countess, with a
