Poor Relations. Honore de Balzac

evening, by one of those strokes of luck which come to pretty women, Valerie was charmingly dressed. Her white bosom gleamed under a lace tucker of rusty white, which showed off the satin texture of her beautiful shoulders – for Parisian women, Heaven knows how, have some way of preserving their fine flesh and remaining slender. She wore a black velvet gown that looked as if it might at any moment slip off her shoulders, and her hair was dressed with lace and drooping flowers. Her arms, not fat but dimpled, were graced by deep ruffles to her sleeves. She was like a luscious fruit coquettishly served in a handsome dish, and making the knife-blade long to be cutting it.

      "Valerie," the Brazilian was saying in her ear, "I have come back faithful to you. My uncle is dead; I am twice as rich as I was when I went away. I mean to live and die in Paris, for you and with you."

      "Lower, Henri, I implore you – "

      "Pooh! I mean to speak to you this evening, even if I should have to pitch all these creatures out of window, especially as I have lost two days in looking for you. I shall stay till the last. – I can, I suppose?"

      Valerie smiled at her adopted cousin, and said:

      "Remember that you are the son of my mother's sister, who married your father during Junot's campaign in Portugal."

      "What, I, Montes de Montejanos, great grandson of a conquerer of Brazil! Tell a lie?"

      "Hush, lower, or we shall never meet again."

      "Pray, why?"

      "Marneffe, like all dying wretches, who always take up some last whim, has a revived passion for me – "

      "That cur?" said the Brazilian, who knew his Marneffe; "I will settle him!"

      "What violence!"

      "And where did you get all this splendor?" the Brazilian went on, just struck by the magnificence of the apartment.

      She began to laugh.

      "Henri! what bad taste!" said she.

      She had felt two burning flashes of jealousy which had moved her so far as to make her look at the two souls in purgatory. Crevel, playing against Baron Hulot and Monsieur Coquet, had Marneffe for his partner. The game was even, because Crevel and the Baron were equally absent-minded, and made blunder after blunder. Thus, in one instant, the old men both confessed the passion which Valerie had persuaded them to keep secret for the past three years; but she too had failed to hide the joy in her eyes at seeing the man who had first taught her heart to beat, the object of her first love. The rights of such happy mortals survive as long as the woman lives over whom they have acquired them.

      With these three passions at her side – one supported by the insolence of wealth, the second by the claims of possession, and the third by youth, strength, fortune, and priority – Madame Marneffe preserved her coolness and presence of mind, like General Bonaparte when, at the siege of Mantua, he had to fight two armies, and at the same time maintain the blockade.

      Jealousy, distorting Hulot's face, made him look as terrible as the late Marshal Montcornet leading a cavalry charge against a Russian square. Being such a handsome man, he had never known any ground for jealousy, any more than Murat knew what it was to be afraid. He had always felt sure that he should triumph. His rebuff by Josepha, the first he had ever met, he ascribed to her love of money; "he was conquered by millions, and not by a changeling," he would say when speaking of the Duc d'Herouville. And now, in one instant, the poison and delirium that the mad passion sheds in a flood had rushed to his heart. He kept turning from the whist-table towards the fireplace with an action a la Mirabeau; and as he laid down his cards to cast a challenging glance at the Brazilian and Valerie, the rest of the company felt the sort of alarm mingled with curiosity that is caused by evident violence ready to break out at any moment. The sham cousin stared at Hulot as he might have looked at some big China mandarin.