“Then this is to take leave of her! Sainte Vierge! what happiness!”
Eugénie started and trembled for joy. Charles stirred in his chair, and Eugénie felt a chill of dread. Luckily, however, he did not wake. She went on reading.
When shall I come back? I cannot tell. Europeans grow old before their time in those tropical countries, especially Europeans who work hard. Let us look forward and try to see ourselves in ten years’ time. In ten years from now your little girl will be eighteen years old; she will be your constant companion; that is, she will be a spy upon you. If the world will judge you very harshly, your daughter will probably judge more harshly still; such ingratitude on a young girl’s part is common enough, and we know how the world regards these things. Let us take warning and be wise. Only keep the memory of those four years of happiness in the depths of your soul, as I shall keep them buried in mine; and be faithful, if you can, to your poor friend. I shall not be too exacting, dear Annette; for, as you can see, I must submit to my altered lot; I am compelled to look at life in a businesslike way, and to base my calculations on dull, prosaic fact. So I ought to think of marriage as a necessary step in my new existence; and I will confess to you that here, in my uncle’s house in Saumur, there is a cousin whose manners, face, character, and heart you would approve; and who, moreover, has, it appears—
“How tired he must have been to break off like this when he was writing to her!” said Eugénie to herself, as the letter ended abruptly in the middle of a sentence. She was ready with excuses for him.
How was it possible that an inexperienced girl should discover the coldness and selfishness of this letter? For young girls, religiously brought up as she had been, are innocent and unsuspecting, and can see nothing but love when they have set foot in love’s enchanted kingdom. It is as if a light from heaven shone in their own souls, shedding its beams upon their path; their lover shines transfigured before them in reflected glory, radiant with fair colors from love’s magic fires, and endowed with noble thoughts which perhaps in truth are none of his. Women’s errors spring, for the most part, from a belief in goodness, and a confidence in truth. In Eugénie’s heart the words, “My dear Annette—my beloved,” echoed like the fairest language of love; they stirred her soul like organ music—like the divine notes of the “Venite adoremus” falling upon her ears in childhood.
Surely the tears, not dry even yet upon her cousin’s eyelids, betokened the innate nobility of nature that never fails to attract a young girl. How could she know that Charles’ love and grief for his father, albeit genuine, was due rather to the fact that his father had loved him than to a deeply-rooted affection on his own part for his father? M. and Mme. Guillaume Grandet had indulged their son’s every whim; every pleasure that wealth could bestow had been his; and thus it followed that he had never been tempted to make the hideous calculations that are only too common among the younger members of a family in Paris, when they see around them all the delights of Parisian life, and reflect with disgust that, so long as their parents are alive, all these enjoyments are not for them. The strange result of the father’s lavish kindness had been a strong affection on the part of his son, an affection unalloyed by any after thought. But, for all that, Charles was a thorough child of Paris, with the Parisian’s habit of mind; Annette herself had impressed upon him the importance of thinking out all the consequences of every step; he was not youthful, despite the mask of youth.
He had received the detestable education of a world in which more crimes (in thought and word at least) are committed in one evening than come before a court of justice in the course of a whole session; a world in which great ideas perish, done to death by a witticism, and where it is reckoned a weakness not to see things as they are. To see things as they are—that means, believe in nothing, put faith in nothing and in no man, for there is no such thing as sincerity in opinion or affection; mistrust events, for even events at times have
