The Girl With the Golden Eyes Read Online Free Page B

Raphael, and the passionate admiration it must inspire there at first sight, the main purpose of our story will be justified.
Quod erat demonstrandum
, what there was to demonstrate has been shown, if we be allowed to apply scholarly phrases to the science of manners.
    Now on one of those fine spring mornings—when the leaves are not yet green though they have unfurled, when the sun is beginning to make the roofs blaze and the sky is blue, when the Parisians emerge from their dens, come buzzing along on the boulevards, flow like a many-colored serpent along the Rue de la Paix towards the Tuileries to hail the nuptial rites that the countryside is celebrating once again—on one of those joyous days, then, a young man, handsome as the day itself, tastefully dressed, easy in his manners, and (we’ll tell the secret) a love child, natural child of Lord Dudley and the famous Marquise de Vordac, was strolling down the wide lane of the Tuileries. This Adonis, named Henri de Marsay, was born in France, where Lord Dudley had come to marry off the young lady, already Henri’s mother, to an old gentleman named M. de Marsay. This faded, almost extinct butterfly recognized the child as his own, in exchange for the usufruct of an income of 100,000 francs permanently granted his putative son; an extravagance that didn’t cost Lord Dudley much: French bonds werethen worth about seventeen francs fifty. The old gentleman died without having known his wife. Mme. de Marsay then married the Marquis de Vordac; but even before she became a marquise, she had not been all that concerned with her child or with Lord Dudley. To begin with, the war declared between France and England had separated the two lovers, and, in any case, fidelity was not and scarcely ever will be the fashion in Paris. And then the success of the elegant, pretty, universally adored woman drowned any maternal sentiment in the Parisian. Lord Dudley was no more concerned with his progeny than the mother was. The prompt infidelity of an ardently beloved young woman might perhaps have given him a sort of aversion for anything that came from her. Moreover, it might also be that fathers love only the children with whom they have become well acquainted; this is a social belief of the highest importance for a family’s peace of mind, one that every bachelor should maintain, proving that paternity is only a sentiment raised in a hothouse by woman, customs, and laws.
    Of the two men, poor Henri de Marsay knew a father only in the one not forced to be one. Naturally M. de Marsay’s paternity was very incomplete. In the natural order of things, children have a father only at rare moments; and in this respect the gentleman imitated nature. The good man wouldnot have sold his name if he hadn’t had any vices. So he dined in dives without remorse and drank elsewhere the meager income the national treasury paid to men of private means. Then he handed the child over to an old sister, a maiden lady de Marsay, who took great care of him, and gave him, using the meager pension allotted by her brother, a private tutor, a priest without a penny or a stitch, who sized up the young man’s future and resolved, out of the 100,000 francs allowance, to pay himself for the cares he devoted to his pupil, of whom he became fond. This private tutor one day found he had by chance become a genuine priest, one of those ecclesiastics cut out to become a cardinal in France, or a Borgia fit for the papal tiara. In three years he taught the child what they would have taken ten years to teach him in school. Then this great man, who was named the Abbé de Maronis, completed his student’s education by having him study civilization in all its forms: He fed him from his own experience, hardly ever brought him into churches, which in those days were kept locked; sometimes took him backstage in theaters, more often to the homes of courtesans; he took apart human emotions piece by piece for him; taught him politics