The Girl With the Golden Eyes by Honoré de Balzac, Charlotte Mandell

but he saw she was pale and changed. She had been crying. Kneeling like an angel at prayer, but like a sad, profoundly melancholic angel, the poor girl no longer resembled the curious, urgent, leaping creature who had taken de Marsay on her wings to carry him up to the seventh heaven of love. There was something so real in this despair veiled by pleasure, that the terrible de Marsay felt in himself an admiration for this new masterpiece of nature, and temporarily forgot the main point of this meeting.
    “What is wrong, my Paquita?”
    “My friend,” she said, “take me away, this very night! Cast me somewhere where they can’t say when they see me: There is Paquita! where no one replies: Here is a girl with a golden gaze, who has long hair. In that place I will give you pleasures as long as you want them from me. Then, when you don’t love me anymore, you can leave me, I won’t complain, I won’t say anything; and your abandoning me won’t have to make you feel any remorse, since one day spent beside you, one single day during which I can look at you, will have been worth an entire life to me. But if I stay here, I am lost.”
    “I cannot leave Paris, my little one,” Henri replied. “I am not my own master, I am tied by oath to the fate of many people who belong to me as I belong to them. But I can make a retreat for you in Paris, where no human power can reach.”
    “No,” she said, “you forget feminine power.”
    Never had a phrase uttered by a human voice expressed terror more completely.
    “What could reach you, then, if I place myself between you and the world?”
    “Poison!” she said. “Already Doña Concha suspects you. And,” she continued as tears streamed forth gleaming down her cheeks, “it is very easy to see that I am not the same anymore. Well, if you abandon me to the fury of the monster who will devour me, may your holy will be done!But come, summon all the sensual delights of life to flourish in our love. In any case, I will beg, I will cry, I will shout, I will defend myself, I might even save myself.”
    “Who will you implore, then?” he said.
    “Silence!” Paquita went on. “If I obtain my pardon, it might be because of my discretion.”
    “Give me my dress,” Henri said insidiously.
    “No, no,” she replied spiritedly, “stay what you are, one of those angels I have been taught to hate, in whom I saw only monsters, whereas you are the handsomest thing under heaven,” she said, caressing Henri’s hair. “Don’t you know what an idiot I am? I haven’t learned anything. Since I was twelve years old, I’ve been shut up, without seeing anyone. I don’t know how to read or write, I speak nothing but English and Spanish.”
    “How is it, then, that you receive letters from London?”
    “My letters! Look, here they are!” she said, taking some papers out of a tall Japanese vase.
    She held out to de Marsay some letters where the young man saw with surprise strange figures like those in a rebus, drawn with blood, which expressed phrases full of passion.
    “But,” he cried out, admiring these hieroglyphs created by a cunning jealousy, “are you under the power of an infernal genius?”
    “Infernal,” she repeated.
    “But then how could you have gotten away …”
    “Ha!” she said, “my doom stems from that. I placed Doña Concha between fear of immediate death and an anger to come. I had the curiosity of a demon, I wanted to break this bronze circle that had been drawn between the world and me, I wanted to see what young men are like, for the only men I know are the Marquis and Christemio. Our coachman and the valet who accompanies us are old men.…”
    “But, you weren’t always locked up, were you? Your health …”
    “Ha!” she continued, “we took walks, but only at night and in the countryside, by the Seine, far from other people.”
    “Aren’t you proud of being so loved?”
    “No,” she said, “not any more! This hidden life, although full,