The Girl with the Golden Eyes
Language: English
Pages: 70
ISBN: 1492860441
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
One of those sights in which most horror is to be encountered is, surely, the general aspect of the Parisian populace—a people fearful to behold, gaunt, yellow, tawny. Is not Paris a vast field in perpetual turmoil from a storm of interests beneath which are whirled along a crop of human beings, who are, more often than not, reaped by death, only to be born again as pinched as ever, men whose twisted and contorted faces give out at every pore the instinct, the desire, the poisons with which their brains are pregnant; not faces so much as masks; masks of weakness, masks of strength, masks of misery, masks of joy, masks of hypocrisy; all alike worn and stamped with the indelible signs of a panting cupidity? What is it they want? Gold or pleasure?
Justine, Philosophy in the Bedroom, and Other Writings
Paris-Bucharest, Bucharest-Paris: Francophone writers from Romania (Faux Titre, Volume 367)
PQ2167.F5E5 2005 843′.7—dc22 2005033178 v3.1 TO EUGÈNE DELACROIX, PAINTER Contents Cover Title Page Copyright Dedication First Page Other Titles in the Art of the Novella Series Titles in the Companion Series One of the most appalling spectacles that exists is undoubtedly the general appearance of the Parisian population, a people horrible to see, gaunt, sallow, weather-beaten. Isn’t Paris a vast field constantly whirled around by a hurricane of vested.
Nothing more than either passions sharpened by some Parisian vanity, or wagers made with himself to cause some woman to sink to a degree of corruption, or adventures that stimulated his curiosity. The report of Laurent, his valet, had just given an enormous value to the Girl with the Golden Eyes. It was a matter of waging battle with some secret enemy, who seemed as dangerous as he was cunning; to earn victory, all the forces at Henri’s disposal would be needed. He was going to play the ancient.
An hour. When the carriage stopped, it was no longer on a paved road. The mulatto and the coachman took Henri bodily round the waist, lifted him up, put him on a kind of stretcher, and carried him through a garden whose flowers and particular odor of the trees and greenery Henri could smell. The silence that reigned there was so profound that he could make out the sound a few drops of water made as they fell from wet leaves. The two men carried him into a stairway, made him stand up, then led him.
He promised himself he would carry out to recognize the mansion that held Paquita’s boudoir. Likewise he paid close attention to the turns his bearers took in the house, and thought he could remember them. He saw he was on the ottoman like the night before, in front of Paquita who was undoing his scarf; but he saw she was pale and changed. She had been crying. Kneeling like an angel at prayer, but like a sad, profoundly melancholic angel, the poor girl no longer resembled the curious, urgent,.
She asked him. “Speak, let us explain ourselves.” Henri kept the phlegmatic attitude of the strong man who feels he has been conquered; cold countenance, silent, thoroughly English, which proclaimed his awareness of his dignity through a temporary resignation. Moreover he had already thought, despite his fit of rage, that it wasn’t very prudent to endanger his reputation with the law by killing this girl without warning and without having prepared the murder in a way that would guarantee his.