The Girl With the Golden Eyes Read Online Free PDF Page A

in the heart of salons, where it was cooking; he explicated for him the machinery of government, and tried, out of friendship for a fine neglected nature,but one rich in hope, to serve as a virile replacement for the mother: Isn’t the Church the mother of orphans? His student responded well to so many attentions. This worthy man died a bishop in 1812, with the satisfaction of having left beneath heaven a child whose heart and mind were so well formed at sixteen years of age, that he could easily get the upper hand of a man of forty. Who would have expected to meet a heart of bronze, an unfeeling brain beneath so seductive an exterior, like those that the painters of old, those naïve artists, gave to the serpent in the earthly paradise? That was still not enough. The good purple devil had also introduced his favorite child to certain acquaintances in high Parisian society who would be the equivalent, in the young man’s hands, of another 100,000 in income. Finally, this priest, lecherous but political, unbelieving but knowledgeable, treacherous but likeable, weak in appearance but as vigorous of mind as he was of body, was so truly useful to his student, so indulgent towards his vices, such a good calculator of every kind of strength, so profound when some kind of human deduction had to be made, so fresh at table, at Frascati’s gaming rooms, at … I don’t know where else, that the grateful Henri de Marsay was now, by 1814, scarcely moved by anything but the sight of the portrait of his dear bishop, the only personal belonging this prelatewas able to bequeath to him. The bishop was an admirable example of the men whose genius will save the Catholic, Apostolic, and Roman church, which is at the moment compromised by the weakness of its recruits, and by the old age of its pontiffs; but so the Church wishes it. The continental war prevented the young de Marsay from meeting his true father, whose name it is doubtful he even knew. An abandoned child, he didn’t know Mme de Marsay either. Naturally he barely missed his putative father. As to Mlle. de Marsay, his only mother, he had a pretty little tomb raised to her in the Père Lachaise Cemetery when she died. Monseigneur de Maronis had guaranteed one of the best places in heaven to this old maid, so that, seeing her happy to die, Henri gave her egotistical tears and began to cry for himself. Seeing this suffering, the abbé dried the tears of his student, pointing out to him that the good lady took her snuff in such a disgusting way, and had become so ugly, so deaf, and so boring, that he should be grateful to death. The bishop had had his student set free in 1811. Then when the mother of M. de Marsay married again, the priest chose, in a family council, one of those honest brainless men picked out by him from the confessional, and charged him with administering the fortune whose income he did indeed apply to the needs of the community, but whose capital he wanted to preserve.
    Near the end of 1814, then, Henri de Marsay had no remaining obligatory sentiment left on Earth, and found himself as free as a bird without a mate. Although he had completed his twenty-second year, he looked as if he were scarcely seventeen. Even his severest rivals regarded him as the prettiest boy in Paris. From his father, Lord Dudley, he had acquired the most amorously seductive blue eyes; from his mother, the thickest black hair; from them both, a pure blood, the skin of a young girl, a gentle, modest bearing, a slim, aristocratic waist, beautiful hands. For a woman, to see him was to be crazy about him; you know how it is—she conceives of one of those desires that gnaws at her heart, but that is soon forgotten thanks to the impossibility of satisfying it, because the woman is one of the common Parisian variety without tenacity. Few of them say to themselves the I WILL PREVAIL of the men of the House of Orange. Beneath this youthful bloom, and despite the limpid pool of his eyes, Henri had