



Produced by John Bickers, and Dagny





THE GIRL WITH THE GOLDEN EYES


By Honore De Balzac



Translated by Ellen Marriage



PREPARER'S NOTE: The Girl with the Golden Eyes is the third part of a
trilogy. Part one is entitled Ferragus and part two is The Duchesse de
Langeais. The three stories are frequently combined under the title The
Thirteen.




                             DEDICATION

                    To Eugene Delacroix, Painter.




THE GIRL WITH THE GOLDEN EYES


One of those sights in which most horror is to be encountered is,
surely, the general aspect of the Parisian populace--a people fearful
to behold, gaunt, yellow, tawny. Is not Paris a vast field in perpetual
turmoil from a storm of interests beneath which are whirled along a crop
of human beings, who are, more often than not, reaped by death, only to
be born again as pinched as ever, men whose twisted and contorted faces
give out at every pore the instinct, the desire, the poisons with
which their brains are pregnant; not faces so much as masks; masks of
weakness, masks of strength, masks of misery, masks of joy, masks of
hypocrisy; all alike worn and stamped with the indelible signs of
a panting cupidity? What is it they want? Gold or pleasure? A few
observations upon the soul of Paris may explain the causes of its
cadaverous physiognomy, which has but two ages--youth and decay: youth,
wan and colorless; decay, painted to seem young. In looking at
this excavated people, foreigners, who are not prone to reflection,
experience at first a movement of disgust towards the capital, that
vast workshop of delights, from which, in a short time, they cannot even
extricate themselves, and where they stay willingly to be corrupted. A
few words will suffice to justify physiologically the almost infernal
hue of Parisian faces, for it is not in mere sport that Paris has been
called a hell. Take the phrase for truth. There all is smoke and fire,
everything gleams, crackles, flames, evaporates, dies out, then lights
up again, with shooting sparks, and is consumed. In no other country has
life ever been more ardent or acute. The social nature, even in fusion,
seems to say after each completed work: "Pass on to another!" just as
Nature says herself. Like Nature herself, this social nature is busied
with insects and flowers of a day--ephemeral trifles; and so, too,
it throws up fire and flame from its eternal crater. Perhaps, before
analyzing the causes which lend a special physiognomy to each tribe of
this intelligent and mobile nation, the general cause should be pointed
out which bleaches and discolors, tints with blue or brown individuals
in more or less degree.

By dint of taking interest in everything, the Parisian ends by being
interested in nothing. No emotion dominating his face, which friction
has rubbed away, it turns gray like the faces of those houses upon which
all kinds of dust and smoke have blown. In effect, the Parisian, with
his indifference on the day for what the morrow will bring forth,
lives like a child, whatever may be his age. He grumbles at everything,
consoles himself for everything, jests at everything, forgets,
desires, and tastes everything, seizes all with passion, quits all with
indifference--his kings, his conquests, his glory, his idols of bronze
or glass--as he throws away his stockings, his hats, and his fortune. In
Paris no sentiment can withstand the drift of things, and their current
compels a struggle in which the passions are relaxed: there love is
a desire, and hatred a whim; there's no true kinsman but the
thousand-franc note, no better friend than the pawnbroker. This
universal toleration bears its fruits, and in the salon, as in the
street, there is no one _de trop_, there is no one absolutely useful,
or absolutely harmful--knaves or fools, men of wit or integrity. There
everything is tolerated: the government and the guillotine, religion and
the cholera. You are always acceptable to this world, you will never
be missed by it. What, then, is the dominating impulse in this country
without morals, without faith, without any sentiment, wherein, however,
every sentiment, belief, and moral has its origin and end? It is gold
and pleasure. Take those two words for a lantern, and explore that great
stucco cage, that hive with its black gutters, and follow the windings
of that thought which agitates, sustains, and occupies it! Consider!
And, in the first place, examine the world which possesses nothing.

The artisan, the man of the proletariat, who uses his hands, his tongue,
his back, his right arm, his five fingers, to live--well, this very man,
who should be the first to economize his vital principle, outruns his
strength, yokes his wife to some machine, wears out his child, and ties
him to the wheel. The manufacturer--or I know not what secondary thread
which sets in motion all these folk who with their foul hands mould
and gild porcelain, sew coats and dresses, beat out iron, turn wood and
steel, weave hemp, festoon crystal, imitate flowers, work woolen things,
break in horses, dress harness, carve in copper, paint carriages, blow
glass, corrode the diamond, polish metals, turn marble into leaves,
labor on pebbles, deck out thought, tinge, bleach, or blacken
everything--well, this middleman has come to that world of sweat and
good-will, of study and patience, with promises of lavish wages, either
in the name of the town's caprices or with the voice of the monster
dubbed speculation. Thus, these _quadrumanes_ set themselves to watch,
work, and suffer, to fast, sweat, and bestir them. Then, careless of the
future, greedy of pleasure, counting on their right arm as the painter
on his palette, lords for one day, they throw their money on Mondays
to the _cabarets_ which gird the town like a belt of mud, haunts of the
most shameless of the daughters of Venus, in which the periodical money
of this people, as ferocious in their pleasures as they are calm at
work, is squandered as it had been at play. For five days, then, there
is no repose for this laborious portion of Paris! It is given up to
actions which make it warped and rough, lean and pale, gush forth with a
thousand fits of creative energy. And then its pleasure, its repose,
are an exhausting debauch, swarthy and black with blows, white with
intoxication, or yellow with indigestion. It lasts but two days, but it
steals to-morrow's bread, the week's soup, the wife's dress, the child's
wretched rags. Men, born doubtless to be beautiful--for all creatures
have a relative beauty--are enrolled from their childhood beneath the
yoke of force, beneath the rule of the hammer, the chisel, the loom, and
have been promptly vulcanized. Is not Vulcan, with his hideousness and
his strength, the emblem of this strong and hideous nation--sublime
in its mechanical intelligence, patient in its season, and once in a
century terrible, inflammable as gunpowder, and ripe with brandy for
the madness of revolution, with wits enough, in fine, to take fire at
a captious word, which signifies to it always: Gold and Pleasure! If
we comprise in it all those who hold out their hands for an alms, for
lawful wages, or the five francs that are granted to every kind of
Parisian prostitution, in short, for all the money well or ill earned,
this people numbers three hundred thousand individuals. Were it not for
the _cabarets_, would not the Government be overturned every Tuesday?
Happily, by Tuesday, this people is glutted, sleeps off its pleasure, is
penniless, and returns to its labor, to dry bread, stimulated by a need
of material procreation, which has become a habit to it. None the
less, this people has its phenomenal virtues, its complete men, unknown
Napoleons, who are the type of its strength carried to its highest
expression, and sum up its social capacity in an existence wherein
thought and movement combine less to bring joy into it than to
neutralize the action of sorrow.

Chance has made an artisan economical, chance has favored him with
forethought, he has been able to look forward, has met with a wife and
found himself a father, and, after some years of hard privation, he
embarks in some little draper's business, hires a shop. If neither
sickness nor vice blocks his way--if he has prospered--there is the
sketch of this normal life.

And, in the first place, hail to that king of Parisian activity, to whom
time and space give way. Yes, hail to that being, composed of saltpetre
and gas, who makes children for France during his laborious nights,
and in the day multiplies his personality for the service, glory,
and pleasure of his fellow-citizens. This man solves the problem
of sufficing at once to his amiable wife, to his hearth, to the
_Constitutionnel_, to his office, to the National Guard, to the opera,
and to God;