The Girl With the Golden Eyes by Honoré de Balzac, Charlotte Mandell Read Free Book Online

handkerchief: “Follow me.…”
    “Have you ever seen anyone motion more nicely with a handkerchief?” Henri said to Paul de Manerville.
    Then, noticing a fiacre ready to go after having discharged its passengers, he signed to the cabman to stop.
    “Follow that carriage, mark the street and house it turns into, you’ll have ten francs.—Goodbye, Paul.”
    The fiacre followed the carriage. The carriage returned to the Rue Saint-Lazare, to one of the most beautiful mansions in the neighborhood.
    De Marsay wasn’t stupid. Any other young man would have obeyed the wish to find out some more information about a girl who so well embodied the most luminous ideas expressed about women in Oriental poetry; but, too skilful thus to compromise the future of his love affair, he just told his fiacre to continue on the Rue Saint-Lazare and bring him back to his house. The next day, his chief valet-de-chambre, Laurent, a boy as crafty as a Frontin out ofthe old comedies, waited near the house inhabited by the unknown girl at the hour when the mail was delivered. In order to be able to spy at his ease and wander around the mansion, he had, following the habit of policemen who want to disguise themselves, provided himself with the outfit of a peasant from the Auvergne, and tried to make his face look the part. When the mailman who was making the deliveries that morning for the Rue Saint-Lazare came by, Laurent pretended to be a messenger who was having trouble remembering the name of a person to whom he was supposed to deliver a package, and consulted the mailman. Deceived first of all by appearances—the sight of such a picturesque person in the midst of Parisian civilization—the postman told him that the mansion where the Girl with the Golden Eyes lived belonged to Don Hijos, Marquis de San-Réal, a Spanish grandee. Naturally the Auvergnat had no business with the marquis.
    “My package,” he said, “is for the Marquise.”
    “She is away,” the mailman replied. “Her letters are forwarded to London.”
    “So the Marquise isn’t a young lady who …”
    “Aha!” said the mailman, interrupting the valet-de-chambre and looking at him attentively, “you’re a messenger like I can fly.”
    Laurent displayed a few gold coins to the functionary, who began to smile.
    “Look, here’s the name of your prey,” he said, taking out of his leather box a letter that bore a London stamp, and on which was this address:
    To Mademoiselle

PAQUITA VALDÈS,
Rue Saint-Lazare, Hôtel de San-Réal
,
PARIS.
    was written in the tiny, elongated letters of a woman’s hand.
    “Would you be hostile to a bottle of Chablis, accompanied by a steak sautéed with mushrooms, and preceded by a few dozen oysters?” Laurent said, who wanted to conquer the precious friendship of the mailman.
    “At 9:30, after work. Where?”
    “At the corner of the Rue de la Chaussée-d’Antin and the Rue Neuve-des-Mathurins, ‘Au Petit Sans Vin,’ ” said Laurent.
    “Listen, friend,” the mailman said when he joined the valet, an hour after that first meeting, “if your master is in love with this girl, he’s got his work cut out for him! I doubt you’ll be able to see her. In the ten years I’ve been a mailman in Paris, I’ve been able to study quite a few different security systems! But I can honestly say, without fear of being refuted by any of my comrades, that there isno gate as mysterious as M. de San-Réal’s. No one can penetrate the house without some sort of password, and notice that the house was chosen on purpose between a courtyard and a garden, to avoid any communication with other houses. The guard is an old Spaniard who never speaks a word of French, but who stares hard at people, the way the secret agent Vidocq would, to make sure they’re not thieves. Even if this head clerk let himself be tricked by a lover, a thief, or by you (no offense), well, in the first room, which is closed off by a glass door, you’d meet a majordomo