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

Marsay cried, furious at losing a happiness that had been promised him. Moreover, he saw the impossibility of arguing with a slave whose obedience was blind as an executioner’s. And why should it be on this passive instrument that his anger should fall?
    The mulatto whistled; the carriage returned. Henri quickly climbed in. Already some curious onlookers were stupidly gathering on the boulevard. Henri was strong, he wanted to trick the mulatto. When the carriage left at a fast trot, he grabbed his hands, trying to get control of him so as, by overcoming his guard, to be able to keep the exercise of his faculties so he could know where he was going. Vain attempt. The mulatto’s eyes gleamed in the shadows. The man uttered furious cries, got free, threw de Marsay down with an iron hand, and nailed him, so to speak, to the floor of the carriage. Then, with his free hand, he drew out a triangular dagger, and whistled. The coachman heard thewhistle, and stopped. Henri, weaponless, was forced to give in; he offered his head for the blindfold. This gesture of submission appeased Christemio, who tied his eyes with a respect and care that testified to a kind of veneration for the body of the man his idol loved. But, before taking this precaution, he had defiantly put his dagger away in his side pocket, and buttoned himself up to his chin.
    “He would have killed me, that Chinaman!” de Marsay said to himself.
    The carriage quickly started up again. One resource remained for a young man who knew Paris as well as Henri knew it. To learn where he was going, it was enough for him to concentrate and count, by the number of gutters they crossed, the streets they passed on the boulevards, as long as the carriage continued to go straight ahead. He could thus recognize along which side street the carriage would head, whether towards the Seine, or towards the hills of Montmartre, and guess the name or position of the street where his guide would stop. But the violent emotion that his struggle had caused him, the fury at his compromised dignity, the ideas of revenge he dwelt on, the suppositions suggested to him by the meticulous care this mysterious girl was taking to bring him to her—all this prevented him from having that blind man’sattention necessary to the concentration of his intelligence and to the perfect hindsight of memory. The journey lasted half 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 through several rooms, guiding him by the hands, and left him in a room whose atmosphere was perfumed, and whose thick rug he could feel beneath his feet. A woman’s hand pushed him onto a divan and untied his blindfold. Henri saw Paquita in front of him, but Paquita in her glory as a voluptuous woman.
    One half of the boudoir in which Henri found himself described a softly gracious circular outline, which contrasted with the other part perfectly square, in the middle of which gleamed a mantelpiece of white marble and gold. He had entered by a side door concealed beneath a rich tapestry curtain, which faced a window. The horseshoe part of the chamber was adorned with a real Turkish divan, that is to say a mattress placed on the ground,but a mattress deep as a bed, a divan fifty feet around, in white cashmere, adorned by black and poppy-red silk tassels arranged in diamond patterns. The back of this immense bed rose several inches above the many cushions that enriched it even more by their tasteful charm. This boudoir was hung with a red fabric overlaid by the sheerest Indian chiffon, fluted