“Bless me! what is it that you men want for wives? Wooden laths?” cried poor Esther. “If I had seven or eight millions, would you not marry me—come now?”
“Child! I was going to say that if all is over for me, I will have no wife but you.”
Esther bent her head to hide her sudden pallor and the tears she wiped away.
“You love me?” said she, looking at Lucien with the deepest melancholy. “Well, that is my sufficient blessing.—Do not compromise yourself. Go away by the side door, and come in to the drawing-room through the ante-room. Kiss me on the forehead.”
She threw her arms round Lucien, clasped him to her heart with frenzy, and said again:
“Go, only go—or I must live.”
When the doomed woman appeared in the drawing-room, there was a cry of admiration. Esther’s eyes expressed infinitude in which the soul sank as it looked into them. Her blue-black and beautiful hair set off the camellias. In short, this exquisite creature achieved all the effects she had intended. She had no rival. She looked like the supreme expression of that unbridled luxury which surrounded her in every form. Then she was brilliantly witty. She ruled the orgy with the cold, calm power that Habeneck displays when conducting at the Conservatoire, at those concerts where the first musicians in Europe rise to the sublime in interpreting Mozart and Beethoven.
But she observed with terror that Nucingen ate little, drank nothing, and was quite the master of the house.
By midnight everybody was crazy. The glasses were broken that they might never be used again; two of the Chinese curtains were torn; Bixiou was drunk, for the second time in his life. No one could keep his feet, the women were asleep on the sofas, and the guests were incapable of carrying out the practical joke they had planned of escorting Esther and Nucingen to the bedroom, standing in two lines with candles in their hands, and singing Buona sera from the Barber of Seville.
Nucingen simply gave Esther his hand. Bixiou, who saw them, though tipsy, was still able to say, like Rivarol, on the occasion of the Duc de Richelieu’s last marriage, “The police must be warned; there is mischief brewing here.”