The Girl with the Golden Eyes | Page 3

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Etext prepared by Dagny, [email protected] and John Bickers,
[email protected]

THE GIRL WITH THE GOLDEN EYES
by HONORE DE BALZAC

Translated by Ellen Marriage

DEDICATION
To Eugene Delacroix, Painter.

PREPARER'S NOTE
The Girl with the Golden Eyes is the third part of a trilogy. Part one is
entitled Ferragus and part two is The Duchesse de Langeais. The three
stories are frequently combined under the title The Thirteen.

THE GIRL WITH THE GOLDEN EYES

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? A few observations
upon the soul of Paris may explain the causes of its cadaverous
physiognomy, which has but two ages--youth and decay: youth, wan
and colorless; decay, painted to seem young. In looking at this
excavated people, foreigners, who are not prone to reflection,
experience at first a movement of disgust towards the capital, that vast
workshop of delights, from which, in a short time, they cannot even
extricate themselves, and where they stay willingly to be corrupted. A
few words will suffice to justify physiologically the almost infernal hue
of Parisian faces, for it is not in mere sport that Paris has been called a

hell. Take the phrase for truth. There all is smoke and fire, everything
gleams, crackles, flames, evaporates, dies out, then lights up again,
with shooting sparks, and is consumed. In no other country has life ever
been more ardent or acute. The social nature, even in fusion, seems to
say after each completed work: "Pass on to another!" just as Nature
says herself. Like Nature herself, this social nature is busied with
insects and flowers of a day--ephemeral trifles; and so, too, it throws up
fire and flame from its eternal crater. Perhaps, before analyzing the
causes which lend a special physiognomy to each tribe of this
intelligent and mobile nation, the general cause should be pointed out
which bleaches and discolors, tints with blue or brown individuals in
more or less degree.
By dint of taking interest in everything, the Parisian ends by being
interested in nothing. No emotion dominating his face, which friction
has rubbed away, it turns gray like the faces of those houses upon
which all kinds of dust and smoke have blown. In effect, the Parisian,
with his indifference on the day for what the morrow will bring forth,
lives like a child, whatever may be his age. He grumbles at everything,
consoles himself for everything, jests at everything, forgets, desires,
and tastes everything, seizes all with passion, quits all with
indifference--his kings, his conquests, his glory, his idols of bronze or
glass--as he throws away his stockings, his hats, and his fortune. In
Paris no sentiment can withstand the drift of things, and their current
compels a struggle in which the passions are relaxed: there love is a
desire, and hatred a whim; there's no true kinsman but the
thousand-franc note, no better friend than the pawnbroker. This
universal toleration bears its fruits, and in the salon, as in the street,
there is no one /de trop/, there is no one absolutely useful, or absolutely
harmful--knaves or fools, men of wit or integrity. There everything is
tolerated: the government