That which persons in the
social position of De Marsay, living as he lived, are best able to
recognize is a girl's innocence. But, strange phenomenon! The girl of
the golden eyes might be virgin, but innocent she was certainly not.
The fantastic union of the mysterious and the real, of darkness and
light, horror and beauty, pleasure and danger, paradise and hell,
which had already been met with in this adventure, was resumed in the
capricious and sublime being with which De Marsay dallied. All the
utmost science or the most refined pleasure, all that Henri could know
of that poetry of the senses which is called love, was excelled by the
treasures poured forth by this girl, whose radiant eyes gave the lie
to none of the promises which they made.
She was an Oriental poem, in which shone the sun that Saadi, that
Hafiz, have set in their pulsing strophes. Only, neither the rhythm of
Saadi, nor that of Pindar, could have expressed the ecstasy--full of
confusion and stupefaction--which seized the delicious girl when the
error in which an iron hand had caused her to live was at an end.
"Dead!" she said, "I am dead, Adolphe! Take me away to the world's
end, to an island where no one knows us. Let there be no traces of our
flight! We should be followed to the gates of hell. God! here is the
day! Escape! Shall I ever see you again? Yes, to-morrow I will see
you, if I have to deal death to all my warders to have that joy. Till
to-morrow."
She pressed him in her arms with an embrace in which the terror of
death mingled.
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