Eugénie

“ In her father’s absence Eugenie had the happiness of busying herself openly with her much-loved cousin, of spending upon him fearlessly the treasures of her pity,—woman’s sublime superiority, the sole she desires to have recognized, the sole she pardons man for letting her assume. ”

“ Eugenie had seen in the furtive glance that she cast about the young man's room—that girlish glance which sees all in the twinkling of an eye—the pretty trifles of his dressing-case, his scissors, his razors embossed with gold. This gleam of luxury across her cousin's grief only made him the more interesting to her, possibly by way of contrast. Never before had so serious an event, so dramatic a sight, touched the imaginations of these two passive beings, hitherto sunk in the stillness and calm of solitude.
"Mamma," said Eugenie, "we must wear mourning for my uncle." ”

“ Eugenie turned as pale as death, and then again the red blood mounted to her cheek with a quick vehement blush: she too felt that there was an infinity to be said, and feared that there might be little time to say it. There was much--she felt there was much--to be staked upon the conversation of the next few instants; and she determined that, whatever report of her sentiments St. Real might bear his cousin, it should be such as to put an end for ever to his hopes of her affection. ”

“ One consideration alone restrains me—I fear being suspected of seeking her hand from interested motives."
"The time for such suspicions is past. If Eugénie still cherishes them, it will lower her in my estimation. She is twenty-two years of age. She has a good deal of heart and an elevated mind, and is capable of deciding her own destiny. I therefore approve of your plan. If she loves you, she will have the courage to avow it to her parents. If she does not love you, she has sufficient courage to make it evident to you." ”

“ Eugenie took delight in lulling her cousin’s pain with the pretty childish joys of a new-born love. Are there no sweet similitudes between the birth of love and the birth of life? Do we not rock the babe with gentle songs and softest glances? Do we not tell it marvellous tales of the golden future? Hope herself, does she not spread her radiant wings above its head? ”

“ You can never, with all your kind eloquence, make a wild, ardent, passionate Italian girl, a calm, gentle, yielding being like yourself, all charity and half Huguenot. It is in vain, it is in vain. But you speak of happiness, Eugenie, as if I knew what happiness is. Now listen to me, and you shall hear more of Beatrice of Ferrara than ever you have yet done. ”

“ From his town-house in London, Eugenie had seen the young, fair-haired girl driving by and looking so eagerly at the place, and with her thorough knowledge of the world, she knew her to be an American, and guessed her to be some new flame whom he had lured from home, as the plaything of an hour. She never for a moment believed him married; he was not a marrying man; he dared not marry, bound as he was to her by the tie of honor, which, in her infidel heart, she held above the marriage vow. ”

“ During all this trying period the love of Eugénie for her brother did not wane, nor did her confidence in him, in his genius and ultimate success, become abated. Troubled as she herself was with mental conflicts, with a constitutional melancholy which made her peculiarly sensitive to the pangs of bereavement, to the sorrows of all around her, and all the weariness of daily life, she never forgot her brother. Her journal, written as it was to him, discloses a life of the most tender solicitude and most pathetic interest on the part of a sister towards a brother on record. ”

“ Eugenie had begun to suffer. For her, wealth was neither a power nor a consolation; she could not live except through love, through religion, through faith in the future. Love explained to her the mysteries of eternity. Her heart and the Gospel taught her to know two worlds; she bathed, night and day, in the depths of two infinite thoughts, which for her may have had but one meaning. She drew back within herself, loving, and believing herself beloved. For seven years her passion had invaded everything. Her treasuries were not the millions whose revenues were rolling up ”

“ Marise felt that the talk was on a plane different from hers, so that she did not get its meaning, although the words were clear enough. What was all that about Eugenia and Eugénie? She hadn't caught the point of that, at all.
Being only eighteen, she found her bewilderment rather comic, and began to laugh. "I still don't see that Eugenia isn't just as good as Eugénie!" she said, "I honestly don't know what you're talking about, Eugenia, but if you do, it's all right." ”

“ It is most curious to observe Eugénie’s relation to this new sister. Even for a mother, who has her own distinct, [184] assured claim, it is hard enough to give up a son she loves. But a sister, with all a mother’s love, but only a sister’s intimacy, cannot see the forming of a new and stronger bond without some dread, some repugnance, some coldness at the heart. Eugénie, like all persons who analyze their feelings, was naturally inclined to doubt others’ affection because she doubted her own desert. When her friends fail to write to her, she hints her grief about it. ”

“ Eugenie, tall and strongly made, had none of the prettiness which pleases the masses; but she was beautiful with a beauty which the spirit recognizes, and none but artists truly love. A painter seeking here below for a type of Mary's celestial purity, searching womankind for those proud modest eyes which Raphael divined, for those virgin lines, often due to chances of conception, which the modesty of Christian life alone can bestow or keep unchanged,—such a painter, in love with his ideal, would have found in the face of Eugenie the innate nobleness that is ignorant of itself ”

“ The manners of the young man, his gestures, the way in which he took up his eye-glass, his affected superciliousness, his contemptuous glance at the coffer which had just given so much pleasure to the rich heiress, and which he evidently regarded as without value, or even as ridiculous,—all these things, which shocked the Cruchots and the des Grassins, pleased Eugenie so deeply that before she slept she dreamed long dreams of her phoenix cousin. ”

“ She initiated herself into her destiny. To feel, to love, to suffer, to devote herself,—is not this the sum of woman's life? Eugenie was to be in all things a woman, except in the one thing that consoles for all. ”

“ So you see, Eugenie, that I, even I, am not without fears of scandal; I who have not scrupled, when my purpose served, to go disguised as I am now, and live disguised in the house of a strange man. Ay, Eugenie I do not look so horrified, for I was as safe there as in my own chamber. I was surrounded by own attendants, whom I had contrived by one means or another to force into his service. ”

“ Here is Eugénie's reply:—
January 22nd, 1832.
"It is Sunday to-day: the day for repose. So I hear no other sound than that which my pen makes on the paper. I am thinking of you. You are not so tranquil in your great Paris, except in your little chamber, where you find again Le Cayla in a more enjoyable form. When I saw yesterday the great oak of the Teoulet covered with hoar-frost, I thought of the great fir of Maurice. Nothing is more elegant than these trees in winter dress; but hurrah for their summer toilet! When one must only see trees, one loves better to have them green than white. ”

“ I never will be your wife! Death were preferable--ay, the most terrible death were preferable to that!"
"Hear me, Eugenie!" said D'Aubin. "Eugenie, you must hear me! for this house is surrounded by my soldiers; you are utterly and perfectly in my power; and if I have recourse to reason and persuasion with you, it is alone from tenderness and affection towards you, and because I would rather induce my bride to accompany me willingly and tranquilly, than use towards her those means of compulsion which I have a right to exercise in regard to a disobedient wife. Eugenie, will you hear me?" ”

“ Mme. des Grassins, unwilling to see the triumph of her old rivals, the Cruchots, went about saying that the heiress of the Grandet millions would marry a peer of France rather than a magistrate. Eugénie, however, thought neither of the peer nor of the magistrate. She gave away enormous sums in charity, and lived on quietly in the dreary old house. Her wealth brought her no comfort, her only treasures were the two portraits left in her charge. Yet she went on loving, and believed herself loved in return. ”

“ Eugenie's first and only love was a wellspring of sadness within her. Meeting her lover for a few brief days, she had given him her heart between two kisses furtively exchanged; then he had left her, and a whole world lay between them. This love, cursed by her father, had cost the life of her mother and brought her only sorrow, mingled with a few frail hopes. Thus her upward spring towards happiness had wasted her strength and given her nothing in exchange for it. In the life of the soul, as in the physical life, there is an inspiration and a respiration ”

“ Ah! if my wife still lived, it would all be different."
Eugénie blushed and remained silent, but Valentine exclaimed; "No, no Doctor, don't disturb your daughters in their merry making. It is true that I have praised them so much to my dear Eugénie that she will not leave L---- without having made their acquaintance, but there will be time for that to-morrow, for the moon does not make its appearance, and I hear that we shall be well provided for at the inn of the Crown."--"Are you not of my opinion darling," he said turning to Eugénie, and suddenly approaching his lips to hers. ”

“ Endowed with the delicate perception which a solitary soul acquires through constant meditation, through the exquisite clear-sightedness with which a mind aloof from life fastens on all that falls within its sphere, Eugenie, taught by suffering and by her later education to divine thought, knew well that the president desired her death that he might step into possession of their immense fortune, augmented by the property of his uncle the notary and his uncle the abbe, whom it had lately pleased God to call to himself. ”

“ There was not only the passionate sister's love, but hearts and mind were cast in a similar mould, and as tastes and inclinations became developed, the sacred promise to the dead mother—the tenderness of heart which led Eugénie to care for all things feeble, were strengthened by the added charm of kindred thought and pursuit.
Eugénie has recorded that Maurice from his earliest years showed a remarkable intelligence. One of his first masters on being asked by his father his opinion of his pupil replied, "Ah, sir! you have there a transcendent child." ”

“ I am silent. I came to speak to you on business; but I see that you are conferring with—"
"Madame," said the cure, "I leave the field to you."
"Oh! monsieur le cure," said Eugenie, "come back later; your support is very necessary to me just now."
"Ah, yes, indeed, my poor child!" said Madame des Grassins.
"What do you mean?" asked Eugenie and the cure together.
"Don't I know about your cousin's return, and his marriage with Mademoiselle d'Aubrion? A woman doesn't carry her wits in her pocket." ”

“ The desire of having plenty of time for dressing carefully had led her to get up too early. Ignorant of the art of retouching every curl and studying every effect, Eugenie simply crossed her arms, sat down by the window, and looked at the court-yard, the narrow garden, and the high terraced walls that over-topped it: a dismal, hedged-in prospect, yet not wholly devoid of those mysterious beauties which belong to solitary or uncultivated nature. ”

“ The modern god,—the only god in whom faith is preserved,—money, is here, in all its power, manifested in a single countenance. The tender sentiments of life hold here but a secondary place; only the three pure, simple hearts of Nanon, of Eugenie, and of her mother were inspired by them. And how much of ignorance there was in the simplicity of these poor women! Eugenie and her mother knew nothing of Grandet’s wealth; they could only estimate the things of life by the glimmer of their pale ideas, and they neither valued nor despised money, because they were accustomed to do without it. ”

“ It speedily became evident that the marriage, unpopular as it had been among the counsellors of the emperor, was still more so among the people at large. No cries of "Long live the empress!" save from the throats of paid agents of the government, rose to greet the beautiful Eugénie when she appeared in public. People stared sullenly at her as at a passing pageant, but were moved neither by her charms nor her gentle and gracious courtesy to any outburst of enthusiasm. To the masses she was "L'Espagnole," the heiress to the bitter hate inspired by the Austrian, Marie Antoinette. ”

“ She it was that always crossed me in your esteem; she frustrated the arrangements for our marriage; she laid the scheme, and executed the whole of your flight from Paris. Is not this true? and do you think she had not a motive? Eugenie, I tell you she had. It may make me appear vain in your eyes; but, to exculpate myself, I must reveal that motive. Eugenie, she has loved me from our first meeting; she has loved me with all the ardour and all the fire of which an Italian is capable; but so to love unsought, is never to win love. She has teased me; she has persecuted me with her affection. ”

“ Is it the lady to whom you wrote that—"
"No," he said, smiling; "this is my mother, and here is my father, your aunt and uncle. Eugenie, I beg you on my knees, keep my treasure safely. If I die and your little fortune is lost, this gold and these pearls will repay you. To you alone could I leave these portraits; you are worthy to keep them. ”