Free The Unknown Masterpiece by Honoré de Balzac

aunt lives nearby, and she’s very fond of foreigners.”
    Andrea pulled his cloak up to his mustache and hurried out of the street, repelled by this unpleasant individual whose garments and gestures closely matched the wretched house into which the unknown woman had just vanished. He was relieved to return to the innumerable comforts of his lodgings, and spent the rest of the evening at the Marquise d’Espard’s in an attempt to purge the contamination of this folly which had so tyrannically preoccupied him for a good part of the day. Yet after he had gone to bed, in the stillness of the night, the day’s vision returned, even more distinct and vivid than in reality. The unknown woman was still walking ahead of him: occasionally, as she stepped over a gutter, she raised her skirt and showed a shapely leg; her hips shifted nervously at every step. Once again Andrea longed to speak to her, and—he, Marcosini, a Milanese nobleman!—dared not. Then she entered the dark doorway which swallowed her up, and he chided himself for not having followed her. “For after all,” he said to himself, “if she was avoiding me and wanted to put me off the scent, that means she’s attracted to me. With women of her kind, resistance is a proof of love. If I had gone a little further with this business, I might have encountered something really disgusting, but at least I’d be able to sleep in peace.” The count was in the habit of analyzing his keenest sensations, as men involuntarily do whose brains are as active as their hearts, and he was amazed to see the unknown woman of the rue Froidmanteau again, not in the ideal majesty of visions but in all the nakedness of her distressing reality. Yet if his fantasy had stripped this woman of her livery of wretchedness, she would have been spoiled for him, for he wanted her, he desired her, he loved her with her muddy stockings, her down-at-the-heel shoes, her battered straw bonnet! He wanted her in that very house he had seen her enter! “Am I enslaved by vice?” he asked himself, with some alarm. “I haven’t come to that—not yet! I’m twenty-three years old, and I’m hardly an old roué.” The very energy of his obsession reassured him a little. This strange struggle, this reflection, and this love of the chase might with good reason surprise some persons accustomed to the ways of Paris; but it must be borne in mind that Count Andrea Marcosini was not a Frenchman.
    Raised by two abbés who, on the instructions of a pious father, rarely granted him any freedom whatever, Andrea had not loved a cousin at eleven, nor at twelve seduced his mother’s chambermaid; he had not frequented those academies where the most advanced instruction is not the kind provided by the State. Moreover, he had lived in Paris only a few years: he was therefore still open to those sudden and intense impressions against which French education and manners form so powerful a shield. In southern countries, grand passions are frequently generated by no more than a glance. A Gascon nobleman of the count’s acquaintance who had learned to temper a powerful sensibility by powerful reflection, accumulating a thousand little defenses against sudden paroxysms of head and heart, had advised Marcosini to indulge at least once a month in some magisterial orgy in order to dispel these tempests of the soul which, in the absence of such precautions, are likely to explode malapropos. Andrea recalled this advice. “Well,” he resolved, “I’ll begin tomorrow, January first!”
    This explains why Count Andrea Marcosini was wavering so timidly about entering the rue Froidmanteau. The man of fashion embarrassed the lover and hesitated a long while, but after making a final appeal to his courage, the lover walked quite resolutely to the doorway he recognized without difficulty. Here he stopped once more. Was this woman really all he imagined? Wasn’t he about to commit some enormous gaffe? Then he remembered the Italian