Mme. du Tillet left Vandenesse’s house somewhat comforted. Félix, on his part, went at once to draw forty thousand francs from the Bank of France, and then hastened to Mme. de Nucingen. He found her at home, thanked her for the confidence she had shown in his wife, and returned her the money. He gave, as the reason for this mysterious loan, an excessive almsgiving, on which he had wished to impose some limit.

“Do not trouble to explain, since Mme. de Vandenesse has told you about it,” said the Baronne de Nucingen.

“She knows all,” thought Vandenesse.

The Baroness handed him his wife’s guarantee and sent for the four bills. Vandenesse, while this was going on, scanned the Baroness with the statesman’s piercing eye; she flinched a little, and he judged the time had come for negotiating.

“We live, madame,” he said, “at a period when nothing is stable. Thrones rise and disappear in France with a disconcerting rapidity. Fifteen years may see the end of a great empire, of a monarchy, and also of a revolution. No one can take upon himself to answer for the future. You know my devotion to the legitimist party. Such words in my mouth cannot surprise you. Imagine a catastrophe: would it not be a satisfaction to you to have a friend on the winning side?”

“Undoubtedly,” she replied with a smile.

“Supposing such a case to occur, will you have in me, unknown to the world, a grateful friend, ready to secure for M. de Nucingen under these circumstances the peerage to which he aspires?”

“What do you ask from me?” she said.

“Not much. Only the facts in your possession about M. Nathan.”

The Baroness repeated her conversation of the morning with Rastignac, and said to the ex-peer of France, as she handed him the four bills which the cashier brought her:

“Don’t forget your promise.”

So far was Vandenesse from forgetting this magical promise, that he dangled it before the eyes of the Baron de Rastignac in order to extract from him further information.

On leaving the Baron, he dictated to a scrivener the following letter addressed to Florine:

“If Mlle. Florine wishes to know what part is awaiting her, will she be so good as come to the approaching masked ball, and bring M. Nathan as her escort?”

This letter posted, he went next to his man of business, a very acute fellow, full of resource, and withal honest.

Him he begged to personate a friend, to whom the visit of Mme. de Vandenesse should have been confided by Schmucke, aroused to a tardy suspicion by the fourfold repetition of the words, “I promise to pay ten thousand francs,” and who should have come to request from M. Nathan a bill for forty thousand francs in exchange. It was a risky game. Nathan might already have learned how the thing had been arranged, but something had to be dared for so great a prize. In her agitation, Marie might easily have forgotten to ask her beloved Raoul for an acknowledgment for Schmucke. The man of business went at once to Nathan’s office, and returned triumphant to the Count by five o’clock with the bill of forty thousand francs. The very first words exchanged with Nathan had enabled him to pass for an emissary from the Countess.

This success obliged Félix to take steps for preventing a meeting between Raoul and his wife before the masked ball, whither he intended to escort her, in order that she might discover for herself the relation in which Nathan stood to Florine. He knew the jealous pride of the Countess, and was anxious to bring her to renounce the love affair of her own will, so that she might be spared from humiliation before himself. He also hoped to show her before it was too late her letters to Nathan sold by Florine, from whom he reckoned on buying them back. This prudent plan, so swiftly conceived and in part executed, was destined to fail through one of those chances to which the affairs of mortals are subject. After dinner Félix turned the conversation on the masked ball, remarking that Marie had never been to one, and proposed to take her there the following day by way of diversion.

“I will find someone for you to mystify.”

“Ah! I should like that immensely.”

“To make it really amusing, a woman ought to get hold of a foeman worthy of her steel, some celebrity or wit, and make mincemeat of him. What do you say to Nathan? A man who knows Florine could put me up to a few little things that would drive him wild.”

“Florine,” said the Countess, “the actress?”

Marie had already heard this name from the lips of Quillet the office attendant; a thought flashed through her like lightning.

“Well, yes, his mistress,” replied the Count. “What is there surprising in that?”

“I should have thought M. Nathan was too busy for such things. How can literary men find time for love?”

“I say nothing about love, my dear, but they have to lodge somewhere, like other people; and when they have no home and the bloodhounds of the law are after them, they lodge with their mistresses, which may seem a little strong to you, but which is infinitely preferable to lodging in prison.”

The fire was less red than the cheeks of the Countess.

“Would you like him for your victim? You could easily give him a fright,” the Count went on, paying no attention to his wife’s looks. “I can give you proofs by which you can show him that he has been a mere child in the hands of your brother-in-law du Tillet. The wretch wanted to clap him in prison in order to disqualify him for opposing his candidature in Nucingen’s constituency. I have learned from a friend of Florine’s the amount produced by the sale of her furniture, the whole of which she gave to Nathan for starting his paper, and I know what portion was sent to him of the harvest which she reaped this year in the provinces and Belgium; money which, in the long run, all goes into the pockets of du Tillet, Nucingen, and Massol. These three have sold the paper in advance to the Government, so confident are they of dispossessing the great man.”

“M. Nathan would never take money from an actress.”

“You don’t know these people, my dear,” said the Count; “he won’t deny the fact.”

“I shall certainly go to the ball,” said the Countess.

“You will have some fun,” replied Vandenesse. “Armed with such weapons, you will read a sharp lesson to Nathan’s vanity, and it will be a kindness to him. You will watch the ebb and flow of his rage, and his writhings under your stinging epigrams. Your badinage will be quite enough to show a clever man like him the danger in which he stands, and you will have the satisfaction of getting a good trouncing for the juste milieu team within their own stables.⁠ ⁠… You are not listening, my child.”

“Yes, indeed, I am only too much interested,” she answered. “I will tell you later why I am so anxious to be certain about all this.”

“Certain?” replied Vandenesse. “If you keep on your mask, I will take you to supper with Florine and Nathan. It will be sport for a great lady like you to take in an actress after having kept a famous man on the stretch, manoeuvring round his most precious secrets; you can harness them both to the same mystification. I shall put myself on the track of Nathan’s infidelities. If I can lay hold of the details of any recent affair, you will be able to indulge yourself in the spectacle of a courtesan’s rage, which is worth seeing. The fury of Florine will seethe like an Alpine torrent. She adores Nathan; he is everything to her, precious as the marrow of her bones, dear as her cubs to a lioness. I remember in my youth having seen a celebrated actress, whose writing was like a kitchen-maid’s, come to demand back her letters from one of my friends. I have never seen anything like it since; that quiet fury, that impudent dignity, that barbaric pose.⁠ ⁠… Are you ill, Marie?”

“No! only the fire is so hot.”

The Countess went to fling herself down on a sofa. All at once an incalculable impulse, inspired by the consuming ache of jealousy, drove her to her feet. Trembling in every limb, she crossed her arms, and advanced slowly towards her husband.

“How much do you know?” she asked. “It is not like you to torture me. Even were I guilty, you would give me an easy death.”

“What should I know, Marie?”

“About Nathan?”

“You believe you love him,” he replied, “but you love only a phantom made of words.”

“Then you do know⁠—?”

“Everything,” he said.

The word fell like a blow on Marie’s head.

“If you wish,” he continued, “it shall be as though I knew nothing. My child, you have fallen into an abyss, and I must save you; already I have done something. See⁠—”

He drew from his pocket her guarantee and Schmucke’s four bills, which the Countess recognized, and threw them into the fire.

“What would have become of you, poor Marie, in three months from now? You would have been dragged into Court by bailiffs. Don’t hang your head, don’t be ashamed; you have been betrayed by the noblest of feelings; you have trifled, not with a man, but with your own imagination. There is not a woman⁠—not one, do you hear, Marie?⁠—who would not have been fascinated in your place. It would be absurd that men, who, in the course of twenty years, have committed a thousand acts of folly, should insist that a woman is not to lose her head once in a lifetime. Pray Heaven I may never triumph over you or burden you with a pity such as you repudiated with scorn the other day! Possibly this wretched man was sincere when he wrote to you, sincere in trying to put an end to himself, sincere in returning that very evening to Florine. A man is a poor creature compared to a woman. I am speaking now for you, not for myself. I am tolerant, but society is not; it shuns the woman who makes a scandal; it will allow none to be rich at once in its regard and in the indulgence of passion. Whether this is just or not, I cannot say. Enough that the world is cruel. It may be that, taken in the mass, it is harsher than are the individuals separately. A thief, sitting in the pit, will applaud the triumph of innocence, and filch its jewels as he goes out. Society has no balm for the ills it creates; it honors clever roguery, and leaves unrewarded silent devotion. All this I see and know; but if I cannot reform the world, at least I can protect you from yourself. We have here to do with a man who brings you nothing but trouble, not with a saintly and pious love, such as sometimes commands self-effacement and brings its own excuse with it. Perhaps I have been to blame in not bringing more variety into your peaceful life; I ought to have enlivened our calm routine with the stir and excitement of travel and change. I can see also an explanation of the attraction which drew you to a man of note, in the envy you roused in certain women. Lady Dudley, Mme. d’Espard, Mme. de Manerville, and my sister-in-law Émilie count for something in all this. These women, whom I warned you against, have no doubt worked on your curiosity, more with the object of annoying me than in order to precipitate you among storms which, I trust, may have only threatened without breaking over you.”

The Countess, as she listened to these generous words, was tossed about by a host of conflicting feelings, but lively admiration for Félix dominated the tempest. A noble and high-spirited soul quickly responds to gentle handling. This sensitiveness is the counterpart of physical grace. Marie appreciated a magnanimity which sought in self-depreciation a screen for the blushes of an erring woman. She made a frantic motion to leave the room, then turned back, fearing lest her husband should misunderstand and take alarm.

“Wait!” she said, as she vanished.

Félix had artfully prepared her defence, and he was soon recompensed for his adroitness; for his wife returned with the whole of Nathan’s letters in her hand, and held them out to him.

“Be my judge,” she said, kneeling before him.

“How can a man judge where he loves?” he replied.

He took the letters and threw them on the fire; later, the thought that he had read them might have stood between him and his wife. Marie, her head upon his knees, burst into tears.

“My child, where are yours?” he said, raising her head.

At this question, the Countess no longer felt the intolerable burning of her cheeks, a cold chill went through her.

“That you may not suspect your husband of slandering the man whom you have thought worthy of you, I will have those letters restored to you by Florine herself.”

“Oh! surely he would give them back if I asked him.”

“And supposing he refused?”

The Countess hung her head.

“The world is horrid,” she said; “I will not go into it any more; I will live alone with you, if you forgive me.”

“You might weary again. Besides, what would the world say if you left it abruptly? When spring comes, we will travel, we will go to Italy, we will wander about Europe, until another child comes to need your care. We must not give up the ball tomorrow, for it is the only way to get hold of your letters without compromising ourselves; and when Florine brings them to you, will not that be the measure of her power?”

“And I must see that?” said the terrified Countess.

“Tomorrow night.”

Towards midnight next evening Nathan was pacing the promenade at the masked ball, giving his arm to a domino with a very fair imitation of the conjugal manner. After two or three turns two masked women came up to them.

“Fool! you have done for yourself; Marie is here and sees you,” said Vandenesse, in the disguise of a woman, to Nathan, while the Countess, all trembling, addressed Florine:

“If you will listen, I will tell you secrets which Nathan has kept from you, and which will show you the dangers that threaten your love for him.”

Nathan had abruptly dropped Florine’s arm in order to follow the Count, who escaped him in the crowd. Florine went to take a seat beside the Countess, who had drawn her away to a form by the side of Vandenesse, now returned to look after his wife.

“Speak out, my dear,” said Florine, “and don’t suppose you can keep me long on the tenterhooks. Not a creature in the world can get Raoul from me, I can tell you. He is bound to me by habit, which is better than love any day.”

“In the first place, are you Florine?” said Félix, resuming his natural voice.

“A pretty question indeed! If you don’t know who I am, why should I believe you, pray?”

“Go and ask Nathan, who is hunting now for the mistress of whom I speak, where he spent the night three days ago! He tried to stifle himself with charcoal, my dear, unknown to you, because he was ruined. That’s all you know about the affairs of the man whom you profess to love; you leave him penniless, and he kills himself, or rather he doesn’t, he tries to and fails. Suicide when it doesn’t come off is much on a par with a bloodless duel.”

“It is a lie,” said Florine. “He dined with me that day, but not till after sunset. The bailiffs were after him, poor boy. He was in hiding, that’s all.”

“Well, you can go and ask at the Hôtel du Mail, Rue du Mail, whether he was not brought there at the point of death by a beautiful lady, with whom he has had intimate relations for a year; the letters of your rival are hidden in your house, under your very nose. If you care to catch Nathan out, we can go all three to your house; there I shall give you ocular proof that you can get him clear of his difficulties very shortly if you like to be good-natured.”

“That’s not good enough for Florine, thank you, my friend. I know very well that Nathan can’t have a love affair.”

“Because, I suppose, he has redoubled his attentions to you of late, as if that were not the very proof that he is tremendously in love⁠—”

“With a society woman?⁠—Nathan?” said Florine. “Oh! I don’t trouble about a trifle like that.”

“Very well, would you like him to come and tell you himself that he won’t take you home this evening?”

“If you get him to say that,” answered Florine, “I will let you come with me, and we can hunt together for those letters, which I shall believe in when I see them.”

“Stay here,” said Félix, “and watch.”

He took his wife’s arm and waited within a few steps of Florine. Before long Nathan, who was walking up and down the promenade, searching in all directions for his mask like a dog who has lost his master, returned to the spot where the mysterious warning had been spoken. Seeing evident marks of disturbance on Raoul’s brow, Florine planted herself firmly in front of him and said in a commanding voice:

“You must not leave me; I have a reason for wanting you.”

“Marie!” whispered the Countess, by her husband’s instructions, in Raoul’s ear. Then she added, “Who is that woman? Leave her immediately, go outside, and wait for me at the foot of the staircase.”

In this terrible strait, Raoul shook off roughly the arm of Florine, who was quite unprepared for such violence, and, though clinging to him forcibly, was obliged to let go. Nathan at once lost himself in the crowd.

“What did I tell you?” cried Félix in the ear of the stupefied Florine, to whom he offered his arm.

“Come,” she said, “let us go, whoever you are. Have you a carriage?”

Vandenesse’s only reply was to hurry Florine out and hasten to rejoin his wife at a spot agreed upon under the colonnade. In a few minutes the three dominoes, briskly conveyed by Vandenesse’s coachman, arrived at the house of the actress, who took off her mask. Mme. de Vandenesse could not repress a thrill of surprise at the sight of the actress, boiling with rage, magnificent in her wrath and jealousy.

“There is,” said Vandenesse, “a certain writing-case, the key of which has never been in your hands; the letters must be in it.”

“You have me there; you know something, at any rate, which has been bothering me for some days,” said Florine, dashing into the study to fetch the writing-case.

Vandenesse saw his wife grow pale under her mask. Florine’s room told more of Nathan’s intimacy with the actress than was altogether pleasant for a romantic ladylove. A woman’s eye is quick to seize the truth in such matters, and the Countess read in the promiscuous household arrangements a confirmation of what Vandenesse had told her.

Florine returned with the case.

“How shall we open it?” she said.

Then she sent for a large kitchen knife, and when her maid brought it, brandished it with a mocking air, exclaiming:

“This is the way to cut off the pretty dears’ heads!”3

The Countess shuddered. She realized now, even more than her husband’s words had enabled her to do the evening before, the depths from which she had so narrowly escaped.

“What a fool I am!” cried Florine. “His razor would be better.”

She went to fetch the razor, which had just served Nathan for shaving, and cut the edges of the morocco. They fell apart, and Marie’s letters appeared. Florine took up one at random.

“Sure enough, this is some fine lady’s work! Only see how she can spell!”

Vandenesse took the letters and handed them to his wife, who carried them to a table in order to see if they were all there.

“Will you give them up for this?” said Vandenesse, holding out to Florine the bill for forty thousand francs.

“What a donkey he is to sign such things!⁠ ⁠… ‘Bond for bills,’ ” cried Florine, reading the document. “Ah! yes, you shall have your fill of Countesses! And I, who worked myself to death, body and soul, raising money in the provinces for him⁠—I, who slaved like a broker to save him! That’s a man all over; go to the devil for him, and he’ll trample you under foot! I shall have it out with him for this.”

Mme. de Vandenesse had fled with the letters.

“Hi, there! pretty domino! leave me one, if you please, just to throw in his face.”

“That is impossible now,” said Vandenesse.

“And why, pray?”

“The other domino is your late rival.”

“You don’t say so! Well, she might have said ‘Thank you!’ ” cried Florine.

“And what then do you call the forty thousand francs?” said Vandenesse, with a polite bow.

It very seldom happens that a young fellow who has once attempted suicide cares to taste for a second time its discomforts. When suicide does not cure a man of life altogether, it cures him of a self-sought death. Thus Raoul no longer thought of making away with himself even after Florine’s possession of Schmucke’s guarantee⁠—plainly through the intervention of Vandenesse⁠—had reduced him to a still worse plight than that from which he had tried to escape. He made an attempt to see the Countess again in order to explain to her the nature of the love which burned brighter than ever in his breast. But the first time they met in society, the Countess fixed Raoul with that stony, scornful glance which makes an impassable barrier between a man and a woman. With all his audacity, Nathan made no further attempt during the winter to address the Countess.

He unburdened his soul, however, to Blondet, discoursing to him of Laura and Beatrice, whenever the name of Mme. de Vandenesse occurred. He paraphrased that beautiful passage of one of the greatest poets of his day⁠—

“Dream of the soul, blue flower with golden heart, whose spreading roots, finer a thousandfold than fairies’ silken tresses, pierce to the inmost being and draw their life from all that is purest there: flower sweet and bitter! To uproot thee is to draw the heart’s blood, oozing in ruddy drops from thy broken stem! Ah! cursed flower, how thou hast thriven on my soul!”

“You’re driveling, old boy,” said Blondet. “I grant you there was a pretty enough flower, only it has nothing to do with the soul; and instead of crooning like a blind man before an empty shrine, you had better be thinking how to get out of this scrape, so as to put yourself straight with the authorities and settle down. You are too much of the artist to make a politician. You have been played on by men who are your inferiors. Go and get yourself played on some other stage.”

“Marie can’t prevent my loving her,” said Nathan. “She shall be my Beatrice.”

“My dear fellow, Beatrice was a child of twelve, whom Dante never saw again; otherwise, would she have been Beatrice? If we are to make a divinity of a woman, we must not see her today in a mantle, tomorrow in a low-necked dress, the day after on the Boulevards, cheapening toys for her last baby. While there is Florine handy to play by turns a comedy duchess, a tragedy middle-class wife, a negress, a marchioness, a colonel, a Swiss peasant girl, a Peruvian virgin of the sun (the only virginity she knows much about), I don’t know why one should bother about society women.”

Du Tillet, by means of a forced sale, compelled the penniless Nathan to surrender his share in the paper. The great man received only five votes in the constituency which elected du Tillet.

When the Comtesse de Vandenesse, after a long and delightful time of travel in Italy, returned in the following winter to Paris, Nathan had exactly carried out the forecast of Félix. Following Blondet’s advice, he was negotiating with the party in power. His personal affairs were so embarrassed that, one day in the Champs-Élysées, the Comtesse Marie saw her ancient adorer walking in the sorriest plight, with Florine on his arm. In the eyes of a woman, the man to whom she is indifferent is always more or less ugly; but the man whom she has ceased to love is a monster, especially if he is of the type to which Nathan belonged. Mme. de Vandenesse felt a pang of shame as she remembered her fancy for Raoul. Had she not been cured before of any unlawful passion, the contrast which this man, already declining in popular estimation, then offered to her husband, would have sufficed to give the latter precedence over an angel.

At the present day this ambitious author, of ready pen but halting character, has at last capitulated and installed himself in a sinecure like any ordinary being. Having supported every scheme of disintegration, he now lives in peace beneath the shade of a ministerial broadsheet. The Cross of the Legion of Honor, fruitful text of his mockery, adorns his buttonhole. “Peace at any price,” the stock-in-trade of his denunciation as editor of a revolutionary organ, has now become the theme of his laudatory articles. The hereditary principle, butt of his Saint-Simonian oratory, is defended by him today in weighty arguments. This inconsistency has its origin and explanation in the change of front of certain men who, in the course of our latest political developments, have acted as Raoul did.