Free The Girl With the Golden Eyes by Honoré de Balzac, Charlotte Mandell

secret rage, and he revealed it completely in the looks he gave the Spanish girl that she understood, as if she were used to receiving such looks.
    “If you were not going to be mine alone, I would kill you!” he cried out.
    Hearing this, Paquita covered her face with her hands and naively cried: “Holy Virgin, what have I gotten myself into?”
    She got up, threw herself on the red sofa, plunged her head into the rags that covered her mother’s bosom, and wept. The old lady received her daughter without emerging from her immobility, without showing her any emotion. The mother exhibited to the fullest that gravity of savage peoples, that impassivity of statues, on which observation runs aground. Did she, or did she not, love her daughter? No answer. Beneath this mask all human emotions were smoldering, good and bad, and anything at all might be expected from this creature. Her gaze passed slowly from herdaughter’s beautiful hair, which covered her like a mantle, to Henri’s face, which she observed with an inexpressible curiosity. She seemed to be wondering by what magic spell he was there, by what caprice nature had made so seductive a man.
    “These women are making fun of me!” Henri said to himself.
    At that instant, Paquita raised her head and gave him one of those looks that sear your soul and burn you. She looked so beautiful to him that he swore to himself he would possess this treasure of beauty.
    “My Paquita, be mine!”
    “Do you want to kill me?” she said, fearful, trembling, anxious, but led back to him by some inexplicable force.
    “Me, kill you!” he said, smiling.
    Paquita let out a cry of fear and said a word to the old woman, who took Henri’s hand without asking, and her daughter’s hand, studied them a long time, then returned their hands to them, nodding her head in a horribly significant way.
    “Be mine tonight, this very instant, follow me, don’t leave me, you must, Paquita! Do you love me? Come with me!”
    In an instant, he said a thousand senseless words to her with the rapidity of a torrent leaping between rocks, repeating the same sound in a thousand different ways.
    “It’s the same voice!” Paquita said sadly, without de Marsay hearing her, “and … the same fervor,” she added.
    “All right, yes,” she said with an abandon of passion that nothing could express. “Yes, but not tonight. Tonight, Adolphe, I didn’t give enough opium to the
Concha
, she might wake up, I would be lost. At this moment, everyone in the house thinks I’m asleep in my bedroom. In two days, be at the same spot, say the same word to the same man. This man is my foster father, Christemio adores me and would die in torment for me without anyone being able to tear a word against me from him. Adieu,” she said, seizing Henri’s body and twisting herself around him like a snake.
    She squeezed him tight, brought her head up to his, offered her lips, and gave him a kiss that gave them both such vertigo that de Marsay thought the earth was opening up, and then Paquita cried out, “Go away!” in a voice that let him know how little in control of herself she really was. But she clung to him, still crying “Go!”, and led him slowly to the stairway.
    There the mulatto, whose white eyes lit up at sight of Paquita, took the torch from his idol’s hands, and led Henri out to the street. He left the torch under the archway, opened the door, put Henri back in the carriage, and let him out on theBoulevard des Italiens with amazing speed. The horses seemed to have hellfire in their bodies.
    The scene was like a dream for de Marsay, but one of those dreams that, even as they evaporate, leave behind a feeling of supernatural voluptuousness in the soul, which a man chases after for the rest of his life. One single kiss had been enough. No tryst had ever taken place in so decent a way, or so chaste, or even so cold, in a place made more terrible in its details, before a more hideous divinity—for this