Quite at his ease, and very much at home, Des Esseintes was talking familiarly in a low voice with the mistress of the house.
“Don’t be afraid, stupid,” he turned to the child to say; “come now, make your choice, it’s my treat,”—and he pushed the lad gently towards a divan, onto which he fell between two women. They drew a little closer together, on a sign from Madame Laure, enveloping Auguste’s knees in their peignoirs and bringing under his nose their powdered shoulders that emitted a warm, heady perfume. The child never stirred, but sat there with burning cheeks, a dry mouth and downcast eyes, darting from under their lids downward glances of curiosity, that refused obstinately to leave the upper part of the girls’ thighs.
Vanda, the handsome Jewess, kissed him, giving him good advice, telling him to do what father and mother told him, while her hands were straying all the time over the lad’s person; a change came over his face and he threw himself back in a kind of transport on her bosom.
“So it’s not on your own account you’ve come tonight,” observed Madame Laure to Des Esseintes. “But where the devil did you get hold of that baby?” she added, when Auguste had disappeared with the handsome Jewess.
“In the street, my dear lady.”
“Yet you’re not drunk,” muttered the old woman. Then, after thinking a bit, she proceeded, with a motherly smile: “Ah, I understand; you rascal, you like ’em young, do you?”
Des Esseintes shrugged his shoulders. — “You’re wide of the mark! oh! miles away from it,” he laughed; “the plain truth is I am simply trying to train a murderer. Now just follow my argument. This boy is virgin and has reached the age when the blood begins to boil; he might, of course, run after the little girls of his neighbourhood, and still remain an honest lad while enjoying his bit of amusement; in fact, have his little share of the monotonous happiness open to the poor. On the contrary, by bringing him here and plunging him in a luxury he had never even suspected the existence of and which will make a lasting impression on his memory; by offering him every fortnight a treat like this, I shall make him acquire the habit of these pleasures which his means forbid his enjoying; let us grant it will take three months for them to become absolutely indispensable to him—and by spacing them out as I do, I avoid all risk of satiating him—well, at the end of the three months, I stop the little allowance I am going to pay you in advance for the benevolence you show him. Then he will take to thieving to pay for his visits here; he will stop at nothing that he may take his usual diversions on this divan in this fine gas-lit apartment.
“If the worst comes to the worst, he will, I hope, one fine day kill the gentleman who turns up just at the wrong moment as he is breaking open his desk; then my object will be attained, I shall have contributed, so far as in me lay, to create a scoundrel, an enemy the more for the odious society that wrings so heavy a ransom from us all.”
The woman gazed at the speaker with eyes of amazement.
“Ah! so there you are!” he exclaimed, as he saw Auguste creeping back into the room, red and shy, skulking behind the fair Vanda. “Come, youngster, it is getting late, make your bow to the ladies.” Then he explained to him on their way downstairs that, once every fortnight, he might pay a visit to Madame Laure’s without putting hand in pocket. Finally, on reaching the street, as they stood together on the pavement, he looked the abashed child in the face and said:
“We shall not meet again after this; do you go back hot foot to your father, whose hand is itching for work to do, and never forget this half divine command: ’Do unto others as you would not have them do unto you.’ With that to guide you will go far.”
“Good night, sir.”
“But whatever you do, do not be ungrateful, let me hear tidings of you soon as may be—in the columns of the Police News.”
“The little Judas!” Des Esseintes muttered to himself on this occasion, as he stirred the glowing embers; “to think that I have never once seen his name in the newspapers! True, it has been out of my power to play a sure game; that I have foreseen, yet been unable to prevent certain contingencies—old mother Laure’s little tricks, for instance, pocketing the money and not delivering the goods; the chance of one of the women getting infatuated with Auguste, and, when the three months was up, letting him have his whack on tick; or even the possibility of the handsome Jewess’s highly-spiced vices having scared the lad, too young and impatient to brook the slow and elaborate preliminaries, or stand the exhausting consummations of her caprices. Unless, therefore, he has been in trouble with the criminal courts since I have been at Fontenay where I never read the papers, I am dished.”
He got up from his chair and took two or three turns up and down the room.
“It would be a thousand pities all the same,” he mused, “for, by acting in this way, I had really been putting in practice the parable of lay instruction, the allegory of popular education, which, while tending to nothing else than to turn everybody into Langlois, instead of definitely and mercifully putting out the wretched creatures’ eyes, tries its hardest to force them wide open that they may see all about them other lots unearned by any merit yet more benignant, pleasures keener and more brightly gilded, and
