'You are wild for honors and titles?
Well, only let me love you; bid my pen write and my voice speak for you alone; be the inmost soul of my life, my guiding star!
Then, only accept me for your husband as a minister, a peer of France, a duke. I will make of myself whatever you would have me be!'
"'You made good use of the time you spent with the advocate,' she said smiling. 'There is a fervency about your pleadings.'
"'The present is yours,' I cried, 'but the future is mine!
I only lose a woman; you are losing a name and a family.
Time is big with my revenge; time will spoil your beauty, and yours will be a solitary death; and glory waits for me!'
"'Thanks for your peroration!' she said, repressing a yawn; the wish that she might never see me again was expressed in her whole bearing.
"That remark silenced me.
I flung at her a glance full of hatred, and hurried away.
"Foedora must be forgotten; I must cure myself of my infatuation, and betake myself once more to my lonely studies, or die.
So I set myself tremendous tasks; I determined to complete my labors.
For fifteen days I never left my garret, spending whole nights in pallid thought.
I worked with difficulty, and by fits and starts, despite my courage and the stimulation of despair.
The music had fled.
I could not exorcise the brilliant mocking image of Foedora.
Something morbid brooded over every thought, a vague longing as dreadful as remorse.
I imitated the anchorites of the Thebaid.
If I did not pray as they did, I lived a life in the desert like theirs, hewing out my ideas as they were wont to hew their rocks.
I could at need have girdled my waist with spikes, that physical suffering might quell mental anguish.
"One evening Pauline found her way into my room.
"'You are killing yourself,' she said imploringly; 'you should go out and see your friends——'
"'Pauline, you were a true prophet; Foedora is killing me, I want to die.
My life is intolerable.'
"'Is there only one woman in the world?' she asked, smiling.
'Why make yourself so miserable in so short a life?'
"I looked at Pauline in bewilderment.
She left me before I noticed her departure; the sound of her words had reached me, but not their sense.
Very soon I had to take my Memoirs in manuscript to my literary-contractor.
I was so absorbed by my passion, that I could not remember how I had managed to live without money; I only knew that the four hundred and fifty francs due to me would pay my debts. So I went to receive my salary, and met Rastignac, who thought me changed and thinner.
"'What hospital have you been discharged from?' he asked.
"'That woman is killing me,' I answered;
'I can neither despise her nor forget her.'
"'You had much better kill her, then perhaps you would think no more of her,' he said, laughing.
"'I have often thought of it,' I replied; 'but though sometimes the thought of a crime revives my spirits, of violence and murder, either or both, I am really incapable of carrying out the design.
The countess is an admirable monster who would crave for pardon, and not every man is an Othello.'
"'She is like every woman who is beyond our reach,' Rastignac interrupted.
"'I am mad,' I cried;
'I can feel the madness raging at times in my brain.
My ideas are like shadows; they flit before me, and I cannot grasp them.
Death would be preferable to this life, and I have carefully considered the best way of putting an end to the struggle.
I am not thinking of the living Foedora in the Faubourg Saint Honore, but of my Foedora here,' and I tapped my forehead.
'What to you say to opium?'
"'Pshaw! horrid agonies,' said Rastignac.
"'Or charcoal fumes?'
"'A low dodge.'
"'Or the Seine?'
"'The drag-nets, and the Morgue too, are filthy.'
"'A pistol-shot?'
"'And if you miscalculate, you disfigure yourself for life.