the
mistress of the house, as she came and went, sat and chatted,
beckoned to this one or that, asked questions, listened to the
answers, as she leaned against the frame of the door; I
detected a
languid charm in her movements, a grace in the flutterings of her
dress, remarked the nature of the feelings she so powerfully excited,
and became very
incredulous as to her
virtue. If Foedora would none of
love to-day, she had had strong
passions at some time; past experience
of pleasure showed itself in the attitudes she chose in conversation,
in her coquettish way of leaning against the panel behind her; she
seemed scarcely able to stand alone, and yet ready for
flight from too
bold a glance. There was a kind of
eloquence about her
lightly folded
arms, which, even for
benevolent eyes, breathed
sentiment. Her fresh
red lips
sharplycontrasted with her
brilliantly pale
complexion. Her
brown hair brought out all the golden color in her eyes, in which blue
streaks mingled as in Florentine
marble; their expression seemed to
increase the
significance of her words. A
studied grace lay in the
charms of her bodice. Perhaps a rival might have found the lines of
the thick eyebrows, which almost met, a little hard; or found a fault
in the almost
visible" target="_blank" title="a.看不见的;无形的">
invisible down that covered her features. I saw the
signs of
passion everywhere, written on those Italian eyelids, on the
splendid shoulders
worthy of the Venus of Milo, on her features, in
the darker shade of down above a somewhat thick under-lip. She was not
merely a woman, but a
romance. The whole blended
harmony of lines, the
feminine luxuriance of her frame, and its
passionate promise, were
subdued by a
constantinexplicable reserve and
modesty at variance
with everything else about her. It needed an
observation as keen as my
own to
detect such signs as these in her
character. To explain myself
more clearly; there were two women in Foedora, divided perhaps by the
line between head and body: the one, the head alone, seemed to be
susceptible, and the other phlegmatic. She prepared her glance before
she looked at you, something unspeakably
mysterious, some
inwardconvulsion seemed revealed by her glittering eyes.
"So, to be brief, either my
imperfect moral science had left me a good
deal to learn in the moral world, or a lofty soul dwelt in the
countess, lent to her face those charms that fascinated and subdued
us, and gave her an ascendency only the more complete because it
comprehended a
sympathy of desire.
"I went away completely en
raptured with this woman, dazzled by the
luxury around her, gratified in every
faculty of my soul--noble and
base, good and evil. When I felt myself so excited, eager, and elated,
I thought I understood the
attraction that drew
thither those artists,
diplomatists, men in office, those stock-jobbers encased in triple
brass. They came, no doubt, to find in her society the delirious
emotion that now thrilled through every fibre in me, throbbing through
my brain,
setting the blood a-tingle in every vein, fretting even the
tiniest nerve. And she had given herself to none, so as to keep them
all. A woman is a coquette so long as she knows not love.
" 'Well,' I said to Rastignac, 'they married her, or sold her perhaps,
to some old man, and recollections of her first marriage have caused
her aversion for love.'
"I walked home from the Faubourg St. Honore, where Foedora lived.
Almost all the
breadth of Paris lies between her
mansion and the Rue
des Cordiers, but the distance seemed short, in spite of the cold. And
I was to lay siege to Foedora's heart, in winter, and a bitter winter,
with only thirty francs in my possession, and such a distance as that
lay between us! Only a poor man knows what such a
passion costs in
cab-hire, gloves, linen, tailor's bills, and the like. If the Platonic
stage lasts a little too long, the affair grows ruinous. As a matter
of fact, there is many a Lauzun among students of law, who finds it
impossible to approach a ladylove living on a first floor. And I,
sickly, thin,
poorly dressed, wan and pale as any artist convalescent
after a work, how could I
compete with other young men, curled,
handsome, smart, outcravatting Croatia;
wealthy" target="_blank" title="a.富有的;丰富的">
wealthy men, equipped with
tilburys, and armed with assurance?
" 'Bah, death or Foedora!' I cried, as I went round by a
bridge; 'my
fortune lies in Foedora.'
"That
gothic boudoir and Louis Quatorze salon came before my eyes. I
saw the
countess again in her white dress with its large graceful
sleeves, and all the fascinations of her form and movements. These
pictures of Foedora and her
luxurious surroundings
haunted me even in
my bare, cold
garret, when at last I reached it, as disheveled as any
naturalist's wig. The
contrast suggested evil
counsel; in such a way
crimes are conceived. I cursed my honest, self-respecting
poverty, my
garret where such teeming fancies had stirred within me. I trembled
with fury, I reproached God, the devil, social conditions, my own
father, the whole
universe, indeed, with my fate and my misfortunes. I
went hungry to bed, muttering ludicrous imprecations, but fully
determined to win Foedora. Her heart was my last ticket in the
lottery, my fortune depended upon it.
"I spare you the history of my earlier visits, to reach the drama the
sooner. In my efforts to
appeal to her, I essayed to engage her
intellect and her
vanity on my side; in order to secure her love, I
gave her any quantity of reasons for increasing her self-esteem; I
never left her in a state of
indifference; women like
emotions at any
cost, I gave them to her in plenty; I would rather have had her angry
with me than indifferent.
"At first, urged by a strong will and a desire for her love, I assumed
a little authority, but my own feelings grew stronger and mastered me;
I relapsed into truth, I lost my head, and fell
desperately in love.
"I am not very sure what we mean by the word love in our
poetry and
our talk; but I know that I have never found in all the ready
rhetorical phrases of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, in whose room perhaps I
was
lodging; nor among the
feeble inventions of two centuries of our
literature, nor in any picture that Italy has produced, a
representation of the feelings that expanded all at once in my double
nature. The view of the lake of Bienne, some music of Rossini's, the
Madonna of Murillo's now in the possession of General Soult,
Lescombat's letters, a few sayings scattered through collections of
anecdotes; but most of all the prayers of religious ecstatics, and
passages in our fabliaux,--these things alone have power to carry me
back to the
divine heights of my first love.
"Nothing expressed in human language, no thought reproducible in
color,
marble, sound, or
articulate speech, could ever render the
force, the truth, the completeness, the suddenness with which love
awoke in me. To speak of art, is to speak of
illusion. Love passes
through endless transformations before it passes for ever into our
existence and makes it glow with its own color of flame. The process
is im
perceptible, and baffles the artist's
analysis. Its moans and
complaints are
tedious to an uninterested
spectator. One would need to
be very much in love to share the
furious transports of Lovelace, as
one reads Clarissa Harlowe. Love is like some fresh spring, that
leaves its cresses, its
gravel bed and flowers to become first a
stream and then a river, changing its
aspect and its nature as it
flows to
plunge itself in some
boundless ocean, where restricted
natures only find
monotony, but where great souls are engulfed in
endless contemplation.
"How can I dare to describe the hues of
fleetingemotions, the
nothings beyond all price, the
spoken accents that
beggar language,
the looks that hold more than all the
wealth of
poetry? Not one of the
mysterious scenes that draw us insensibly nearer and nearer to a
woman, but has depths in it which can
swallow up all the
poetry that
ever was written. How can the inner life and
mystery that stirs in our
souls
penetrate through our glozes, when we have not even words to
describe the
visible and
outward mysteries of beauty? What enchantment
steeped me for how many hours in
unspeakablerapture, filled with the
sight of Her! What made me happy? I know not. That face of hers
overflowed with light at such times; it seemed in some way to glow
with it; the outlines of her face, with the scarcely
perceptible down
on its
delicate surface, shone with a beauty belonging to the far
distant
horizon that melts into the
sunlight. The light of day seemed
to
caress her as she mingled in it; rather it seemed that the light of
her eyes was brighter than the
daylight itself; or some shadow passing
over that fair face made a kind of change there, altering its hues and
its expression. Some thought would often seem to glow on her white
brows; her eyes appeared to
dilate, and her eyelids trembled; a smile
rippled over her features; the living coral of her lips grew full of
meaning as they closed and unclosed; an indistinguishable something in
her hair made brown shadows on her fair temples; in each new phase
Foedora spoke. Every slight
variation in her beauty made a new
pleasure for my eyes, disclosed charms my heart had never known
before; I tried to read a separate
emotion or a hope in every change
that passed over her face. This mute
converse passed between soul and
soul, like sound and answering echo; and the short-lived delights then