"I looked at Pauline in bewilderment. She left me before I noticed her departure; the sound of her words had reached me, but not their sense.
Very soon I had to take my Memoirs in manu to my literary-contractor. I was so absorbed by my passion, that I could not remember how I had managed to live without money; I only knew that the four hundred and fifty francs due to me would pay my debts. So I went to receive my salary, and met Rastignac, who thought me changed and thinner.
" 'What hospital have you been discharged from?' he asked.
" 'That woman is killing me,' I answered; 'I can neither despise her nor forget her.'
" 'You had much better kill her, then perhaps you would think no more of her,' he said, laughing.
" 'I have often thought of it,' I replied; 'but though sometimes the thought of a crime revives my spirits, of violence and murder, either or both, I am really incapable of carrying out the design. The countess is an admirable monster who would crave for pardon, and not every man is an Othello.'
" 'She is like every woman who is beyond our reach,' Rastignac interrupted.
" 'I am mad,' I cried; 'I can feel the madness raging at times in my brain. My ideas are like shadows; they flit before me, and I cannot grasp them. Death would be preferable to this life, and I have carefully considered the best way of putting an end to the struggle. Iam not thinking of the living Foedora in the Faubourg Saint Honore, but of my Foedora here,' and I tapped my forehead. 'What to you say to opium?'
" 'Pshaw! horrid agonies,' said Rastignac.
" 'Or charcoal fumes?'
" 'A low dodge.'
" 'Or the Seine?'
" 'The drag-nets, and the Morgue too, are filthy.'
" 'A pistol-shot?'
" 'And if you miscalculate, you disfigure yourself for life. Listen to me,' he went on, 'like all young men, I have pondered over suicide.
Which of us hasn't killed himself two or three times before he is thirty? I find there is no better course than to use existence as a means of pleasure. Go in for thorough dissipation, and your passion or you will perish in it. Intemperance, my dear fellow, commands all forms of death. Does she not wield the thunderbolt of apoplexy?
Apoplexy is a pistol-shot that does not miscalculate. Orgies are lavish in all physical pleasures; is not that the small change for opium? And the riot that makes us drink to excess bears a challenge to mortal combat with wine. That butt of Malmsey of the Duke of Clarence's must have had a pleasanter flavor than Seine mud. When we sink gloriously under the table, is not that a periodical death by drowning on a small scale? If we are picked up by the police and stretched out on those chilly benches of theirs at the police-station, do we not enjoy all the pleasures of the Morgue? For though we are not blue and green, muddy and swollen corpses, on the other hand we have the consciousness of the climax.
" 'Ah,' he went on, 'this protracted suicide has nothing in common with the bankrupt grocer's demise. Tradespeople have brought the river into disrepute; they fling themselves in to soften their creditors' hearts. In your place I should endeavor to die gracefully; and if you wish to invent a novel way of doing it, by struggling with life after this manner, I will be your second. I am disappointed and sick of everything. The Alsacienne, whom it was proposed that I should marry, had six toes on her left foot; I cannot possibly live with a woman who has six toes! It would get about to a certainty, and then I should be ridiculous. Her income was only eighteen thousand francs; her fortune diminished in quantity as her toes increased. The devil take it; if we begin an outrageous sort of life, we may come on some bit of luck, perhaps!'
"Rastignac's eloquence carried me away. The attractions of the plan shone too temptingly, hopes were kindled, the poetical aspects of the matter appealed to a poet.
" 'How about money?' I said.
" 'Haven't you four hundred and fifty francs?'
" 'Yes, but debts to my landlady and the tailor----'
" 'You would pay your tailor? You will never be anything whatever, not so much as a minister.'
" 'But what can one do with twenty louis?'
" 'Go to the gaming-table.'
"I shuddered.
" 'You are going to launch out into what I call systematic dissipation,' said he, noticing my scruples, 'and yet you are afraid of a green table-cloth.'
" 'Listen to me,' I answered. 'I promised my father never to set foot in a gaming-house. Not only is that a sacred promise, but I still feel an unconquerable disgust whenever I pass a gambling-hell; take the money and go without me. While our fortune is at stake, I will set my own affairs straight, and then I will go to your lodgings and wait for you.'
"That was the way I went to perdition. A young man has only to come across a woman who will not love him, or a woman who loves him too well, and his whole life becomes a chaos. Prosperity swallows up our energy just as adversity obscures our virtues. Back once more in my Hotel de Saint-Quentin, I gazed about me a long while in the garret where I had led my scholar's temperate life, a life which would perhaps have been a long and honorable one, and that I ought not to have quitted for the fevered existence which had urged me to the brink of a precipice. Pauline surprised me in this dejected attitude.
" 'Why, what is the matter with you?' she asked.
"I rose and quietly counted out the money owing to her mother, and added to it sufficient to pay for six months' rent in advance. She watched me in some alarm.
" 'I am going to leave you, dear Pauline.'
" 'I knew it!' she exclaimed.
" 'Listen, my child. I have not given up the idea of coming back. Keep my room for me for six months. If I do not return by the fifteenth of November, you will come into possession of my things. This sealed packet of manu is the fair copy of my great work on "The Will," ' I went on, pointing to a package. 'Will you deposit it in the King's Library? And you may do as you wish with everything that is left here.'
"Her look weighed heavily on my heart; Pauline was an embodiment of conscience there before me.
