Sarrasine [7]
She spied us.
"Ah! were you here?" she said, blushing.
After a searching glance at us as if to question us, she ran away to her partner with the careless petulance of her years.
"What does this mean?" queried my young partner. "Is he her husband? I believe I am dreaming. Where am I?"
"You!" I retorted, "you, madame, who are easily excited, and who, understanding so well the most imperceptible emotions, are able to cultivate in a man's heart the most delicate of sentiments, without crushing it, without shattering it at the very outset, you who have compassion for the tortures of the heart, and who, with the wit of the Parisian, combine a passionate temperament worthy of Spain or Italy----"
She realized that my words were heavily charged with bitter irony; and, thereupon, without seeming to notice it, she interrupted me to say:
"Oh! you describe me to suit your own taste. A strange kind of tyranny! You wish me not to be /myself/!"
"Oh! I wish nothing," I cried, alarmed by the severity of her manner. "At all events, it is true, is it not, that you like to hear stories of the fierce passions, kindled in our heart by the enchanting women of the South?"
"Yes. And then?"
"Why, I will come to your house about nine o'clock to-morrow evening, and elucidate this mystery for you."
"No," she replied, with a pout; "I wish it done now."
"You have not yet given me the right to obey you when you say, 'I wish it.' "
"At this moment," she said, with an exhibition of coquetry of the sort that drives men to despair, "I have a most violent desire to know this secret. To-morrow it may be that I will not listen to you."
She smiled and we parted, she still as proud and as cruel, I as ridiculous, as ever. She had the audacity to waltz with a young aide- de-camp, and I was by turns angry, sulky, admiring, loving, and jealous.
"Until to-morrow," she said to me, as she left the ball about two o'clock in the morning.
"I won't go," I thought. "I give up. You are a thousand times more capricious, more fanciful, than--my imagination."
The next evening we were seated in front of a bright fire in a dainty little salon, she on a couch, I on cushions almost at her feet, looking up into her face. The street was silent. The lamp shed a soft light. It was one of those evenings which delight the soul, one of those moments which are never forgotten, one of those hours passed in peace and longing, whose charm is always in later years a source of regret, even when we are happier. What can efface the deep imprint of the first solicitations of love?
"Go on," she said. "I am listening."
"But I dare not begin. There are passages in the story which are dangerous to the narrator. If I become excited, you will make me hold my peace."
"Speak."
"I obey.
"Ernest-Jean Sarrasine was the only son of a prosecuting attorney of Franche-Comte," I began after a pause. "His father had, by faithful work, amassed a fortune which yielded an income of six to eight thousand francs, then considered a colossal fortune for an attorney in the provinces. Old Maitre Sarrasine, having but one child, determined to give him a thorough education; he hoped to make a magistrate of him, and to live long enough to see, in his old age, the grandson of Mathieu Sarrasine, a ploughman in the Saint-Die country, seated on the lilies, and dozing through the sessions for the greater glory of the Parliament; but Heaven had not that joy in store for the attorney. Young Sarrasine, entrusted to the care of the Jesuits at an early age, gave indications of an extraordinarily unruly disposition. His was the childhood of a man of talent. He would not study except as his inclination led him, often rebelled, and sometimes remained for whole hours at a time buried in tangled meditations, engaged now in watching his comrades at play, now in forming mental pictures of Homer's heroes. And, when he did choose to amuse himself, he displayed extraordinary ardor in his games. Whenever there was a contest of any sort between a comrade and himself, it rarely ended