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

love.…”
    “And where you die together!” said Paquita. “But let’s not leave tomorrow, let’s leave right away, let’s bring Christemio with us.”
    “Pleasure is the most beautiful climax of life. Let’s go to Asia, but, child, in order to leave, you need a lot of gold, and to have gold, one has to put one’s affairs in order.”
    She didn’t understand any of this.
    “There’s gold up to there, here!” she said, raising her hand.
    “But it’s not mine.”
    “What does that matter?” she said, “if we need it, let’s take it.”
    “It doesn’t belong to you.”
    “Belong!” she repeated. “Haven’t you possessed me? When we possess each other, it belongs to us.”
    He began to laugh.
    “Poor innocent! You know nothing of the things of this world.”
    “No, but here is what I know,” she cried out, pulling Henri onto her.
    At the very instant when de Marsay was forgetting everything, and was consolidating his desire to appropriate this creature forever, he received at the height of his joy a dagger thrust that went right through his heart, mortified for the first time. Paquita, who had pushed him vigorously above her to contemplate him, cried out, “Oh! Mariquita!”
    “Mariquita!” the young man cried out, turning red. “Now I know everything I didn’t want to believe was true!”
    He leaped to the wardrobe where the long dagger was kept. Fortunately for her and for him, the wardrobe was locked. His rage increased at this obstacle; but he recovered his calmness, went to get his cravat, and came towards her in such a fiercely significant way that, without knowing what crime she was guilty of, Paquita nonetheless understood that her death was in the offing. So she leaped in one single bound to the end of the room to avoid the fatal knot that de Marsay wanted to loop around her neck. There was a fight. On bothsides suppleness, agility, vigor were equal. To end the struggle, Paquita threw a cushion between her lover’s legs that made him fall; she took advantage of the respite this advantage left her to press down the spring that was attached to a warning bell. The mulatto arrived right away. In the blink of an eye Christemio leaped onto de Marsay, pinned him to the ground, put his foot on his chest, the heel turned towards his throat. De Marsay understood that if he fought he would be instantly crushed at one signal from Paquita.
    “Why did you want to kill me, my love?” she asked him.
    De Marsay didn’t reply.
    “How have I displeased you?” she asked him. “Speak, let us explain ourselves.”
    Henri kept the phlegmatic attitude of the strong man who feels he has been conquered; cold countenance, silent, thoroughly English, which proclaimed his awareness of his dignity through a temporary resignation. Moreover he had already thought, despite his fit of rage, that it wasn’t very prudent to endanger his reputation with the law by killing this girl without warning and without having prepared the murder in a way that would guarantee his impunity.
    “My beloved,” Paquita went on, “speak to me; don’t leave me without a loving farewell! I don’twant to keep in my heart the terror you’ve just set there. Why won’t you speak?” she said, stamping her foot in anger.
    In response de Marsay fixed her with a look that so obviously meant
You will die
that Paquita rushed over to him.
    “You want to kill me, then? If my death can make you happy, kill me!”
    She made a sign to Christemio, who lifted his foot from on top of the young man and moved away without letting any judgment, good or bad, of Paquita be seen on his face.
    “That is a man!” de Marsay said, pointing darkly at the mulatto. “There is no devotion like one that obeys friendship without judging it. You have a true friend in this man.”
    “I will give him to you if you want,” she replied; “he will serve you with the same devotion he has for me if I tell him to.”
    She waited for a word in reply, and continued