Now, the young man, without knowing it, was being followed by a masker who might have been thought to have murder in his heart, a short, heavily built man who rolled like a barrel. To anyone who regularly attended the Opera, this domino could only conceal some land agent, stockbroker, banker, a well-to-do citizen of some kind suspicious of his unfaithful lady, wife or other. In the best society, nobody looks for unflattering evidence. More than one masker had already laughingly pointed out to another this monstrous individual, others had apostrophized him, several young people had openly mocked him. He stoutly and squarely showed disdain for these shafts which did not carry; he followed where the young man led him, like a hunted boar who cares nothing either for the shot whistling about his ears or for the dogs barking round him. Although at first glance pleasure and uneasiness put on the same livery, the well-known Venetian black robe, and though all at an Opera ball is confusion, the various circles of which Parisian society is composed meet, recognize and observe each other. For some of the initiated, the seemingly unintelligible black book of conflicting interests is so precisely notated that they read it as though it were a novel, here and there amusing. To them, this man was therefore out of luck, otherwise he would have borne some agreed mark, red, white or green, the sign of happiness impending. Was it a question of revenge? Watching the mask so closely following a lucky man, a number of idlers looked again at the handsome face upon which pleasure’s aureole was set. The young man aroused interest: the further he proceeded, the more curiosity he awakened. Everything about him clearly indicated habituation to an elegant life. In accordance with a fatal law of our age, there existed little difference, whether physical or moral, between the most distinguished, the best-bred son of a duke and peer, and this pleasant young fellow whom poverty’s iron hand once held gripped in Paris. Youth and good looks were able

to hide deep abysses in his nature and life, as in so many young men bent on cutting a figure in Paris without capital to support their pretensions, and who daily cast their all upon the all in a sacrifice to the most courted god of this royal city, Chance. Nevertheless, his bearing, his manners, were irreproachable, he trod the classic enclosure like one to whom the Opera crush-room was familiar ground. Who can fail to observe that there, as in every other zone of Paris, there is a mode of being which reveals what you are, what you do, where you come from, and what you are after?

‘What a fine young man! There’s room here to turn and look at him,’ said a masker in whom regular visitors perceived a highly respectable woman.

‘Don’t you remember him?’ replied her cavalier. ‘Mme du Châtelet introduced him to you…’

‘What! it’s the little apothecary she was enamoured of, who became a journalist, Mlle Coralie’s lover?’

‘I thought he’d fallen too low ever to rise again, and I don’t understand how he can reappear in Paris society,’ said Count Sixte du Châtelet.

‘He looks like a prince,’ said the masker, ‘and it wasn’t the actress he lived with who taught him that; my cousin, who knew all about it, couldn’t get him out of the scrape; I wish I knew the mistress of this Sargine, love’s pupil, tell me something about her that I can rouse his curiosity with.’

This couple who also followed the young man, whispering, were now closely watched by the square-shouldered masker.

‘Dear Monsieur Chardon,’ said the prefect of Charente taking the dandy by the arm, ‘allow me to introduce you to someone who wishes to renew acquaintance with you…’

‘Dear Count Châtelet,’ replied the young man, ‘it was she who taught me to find the name you give me absurd. An ordinance of the King has restored to me that of my ancestors on my mother’s side,. the Rubemprés. It was in the papers, but, as the fact concerns a person of so little consequence, I do not blush at recalling it to my friends, my enemies or the indifferent: you will put yourself in which category you please, but I am sure you cannot disapprove of a step recommended to me by your wife when she was still only Madame de Bargeton.’ (This pretty stroke of wit, which made the marquise smile, caused the prefect of Charente a nervous start.) ‘Tell her,’ added Lucien, ‘that I now bear Gules, within a tressure vert a bull rampant argent.’

‘Pawing the air for money?’ Châtelet ventured.

‘The marchioness will explain to you, if you don’t know, why this ancient scutcheon ranks somewhat above the Empire chamberlain’s key and bees or found in yours, to the despair of Madame Châtelet, née Nègrepelisse d’Espard…’ said Lucien with feeling.

‘Since you’ve recognized me, I can no longer rouse your curiosity, and the extent to which you rouse mine could be expressed only with difficulty,’ the Marquise d’Espard said to him in an undertone, taken aback by the cool impertinence of the man she had formerly despised.

‘Allow me, then, dear lady, by remaining in a mysterious half-light, to preserve my only means of occupying your thoughts,’ said he with the smile of a man who does not wish to compromise the luck of which he is certain.

The marquise could not repress a little shrug at feeling herself to have been, in an English expression, so unmistakably ‘cut’ by Lucien.

‘My compliments on the change in your position,’ said Count Châtelet.

‘I receive them as you intend,’ Lucien answered, bowing to the marquise with infinite grace.

‘Impudent fop!’ the count muttered to Madame d’Espard. ‘He has ended by acquiring ancestors.’

‘In young people, that sort of conceit, when we’re faced with it, almost invariably proclaims luck at the highest level; among people like you, it never bodes any good. Anyway, I should like to know which of the ladies of our acquaintance has taken this fine bird under her protection; I might then begin to enjoy myself this evening. That anonymous letter was probably a bit of mischief contrived by some rival, for the young man was mentioned in it; his impudence had been dictated to him: keep an eye on him. I’m going to take the arm of the Duc de Navarreins, you’ll know where to find me.’

At the moment at which Madame d’Espard was on the point of approaching her kinsman, the mysterious masker interposed between her and the duke to whisper to her: ‘Lucien’s devoted to you, he wrote the letter; your prefect is his greatest enemy, his presence ruled out any explanation.’

The unknown man walked away, leaving Madame d’Espard a prey to astonishment on two counts. The marquise did not know anybody whose face could lie under that mask, she feared a trap, went and sat down to hide. Count Sixte du Châtelet, from whose name Lucien had cut out the high-flown du with an ostentatiousness in which one detected a revenge long dreamed of, followed that remarkable dandy at a distance, and presently met a young man to whom he felt he could open his heart.

‘Well, Rastignac, have you seen Lucien? He’s cast his slough.’

‘If I were as good-looking a fellow, I should be even richer than he is,’ replied the young swell in a casual but shrewd tone which contained a good deal of Attic salt.

‘No,’ murmured in his ear the heavily built masker, accentuating the monosyllable in a way that multiplied the raillery by a thousand.

Rastignac, who was not one to swallow insults, stood as though struck by lightning, and allowed himself to be led to a window corner by a hand of steel, which he could not shake off.

‘Young cock out of Ma Vauquer’s chicken-run, you whose heart failed him in laying hold of Papa Taillefer’s millions when the worst of the work had been done, know, for your own safety’s sake, that if you don’t behave towards Lucien as to a brother whom you might love, you are in our hands without us being in yours. Silence and friendship, or I join in your game and bowl the skittles over. Lucien de Rubempré is protected by the greatest power of today, the Church. Choose between life and death. Your reply?’

Rastignac experienced the vertigo of a man who, having fallen asleep in a forest, should awake beside a famished lioness. He was afraid, but without witnesses: the bravest men then give way to their fear.

‘Only he could know… and would dare…’ he said, as though to himself.

The masker gripped his hand to stop him completing the phrase, and said: ‘Act as though it were he.’

Further masks

RASTIGNAC thereupon did what a millionaire does when confronted with a highwayman: he surrendered.

‘My dear count,’ he said to Châtelet, to whom he returned, ‘if you care for your position, treat Lucien de Rubempré as a man whom one day you will find placed much higher than you are.’

The masked man permitted himself a barely perceptible movement of satisfaction, and returned to tracking Lucien.

‘My dear fellow, you’ve very quickly changed your opinion of him,’ replied the justly astonished prefect.

‘As quickly,’ said Rastignac to this prefect-deputy who for some days past had not voted with the Ministry, ‘as those who belong to the Centre but vote with the Right.’

‘Are there opinions nowadays? Surely, there are only conflicting interests,’ put in des Lupeaulx, who was listening.