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

is nothing but darkness compared with the light.”
    “What do you call ‘light’?”
    “You, my handsome Adolphe! You, for whom I would give my life. All the passionate things that I’ve been told and that I’ve inspired, I feel them all for you! Sometimes I understood nothing about existence, but now I know how we love. Till now I was loved, but I didn’t love in return. I would leave everything for you—take me away! If you like, take me like a toy, but let me stay near you until you break me.”
    “You won’t have any regrets?”
    “Not one!” she said, letting him read her eyes, whose golden tint remained pure and clear.
    “Am I her favorite?” Henri said to himself. Though he glimpsed the truth, he found himself in the position of forgiving the offense on account of so naïve a love. “I will see,” he thought.
    If Paquita didn’t owe him any account of the past, the slightest memory became a crime to him. He had that regrettable strength of keeping his thoughts to himself, judging his mistress, studying her, while at the same time abandoning himself to the most stirring pleasures that a Peri fallen from paradise could ever have contrived for her beloved. Paquita seemed to have been created expressly by nature for love. From last night to this, her woman’s genius had made the most rapid progress. What this young man’s power was, and whatever his carefree attitude towards pleasure, despite his satiety the night before, he found in the Girl with the Golden Eyes that whole harem that a loving woman knows how to create, which a man never turns from. Paquita responded to the passion that all truly great men feel for the infinite, a mysterious passion so dramatically expressed in Faust, so poetically conveyed in Manfred, the one that drove Don Juan to sound the hearts of women, hoping to find there that limitless thought that so many ghost huntersgo in search of, that learned men think they glimpse in science, and that mystics find in God alone. The hope that he had finally found the ideal Being with whom the struggle could be constant and tireless delighted de Marsay who, for the first time in a long time, opened up his heart to her. His nerves relaxed, his coldness melted in the atmosphere of this burning soul, his cold doctrines fled, and happiness colored his existence, like this white and pink boudoir. Sensing the stimulus of a superior voluptuousness, he was led beyond the limits within which he had till then enclosed his passion. He did not want to be surpassed by this girl who had been shaped to the needs of his soul in advance by a love that was in a sense artificial, so in that vanity of his that drives a man to be a conqueror in everything, he found the strength to dominate this girl; but also, hurled beyond that line where the soul is master of itself, he lost himself in that delicious limbo that common men so stupidly call
imaginary spaces
. He was tender, sweet, and communicative. He drove Paquita almost wild.
    “Why shouldn’t we go to Sorrento, to Nice, to Chiavari, to spend our lives this way? Would you like that?” he said to Paquita in a penetrating voice.
    “Do you ever need to say ‘Would you like that’ to me?” she cried. “Do I have a will of my own? I am something outside of you only so that I can bea pleasure for you. If you want to choose a retreat worthy of us, Asia is the only country where love can spread its wings.…”
    “You are right,” Henri said. “Let’s go to the Indies, where Spring is eternal, where the earth is always full of flowers, where man can rule like a sovereign, without bumbling about as in these stupid countries where they want to realize the insipid pipe dreams of equality. Let’s go to the country where you can live in the midst of a population of slaves, where the sun always illuminates a palace that stays white, where the air is impregnated with perfumes, where birds sing of love, and where you die when you can no longer