Chapters I–VIII: The Two Millions · Armance

Octave de Malivert had barely turned twenty when he left the École Polytechnique. His father, the Marquis de Malivert, wished to keep his only son in Paris; and Octave, once he was sure that this was the constant wish of a father he respected and a mother he loved passionately, gave up his plan of entering the artillery. He would have liked to serve a few years in a regiment, then resign until the first war, in which it would have made no difference to him whether he were lieutenant or colonel.

He was tall, noble in bearing, with the finest dark eyes in the world; but there was something so sombre in the gentle look of those eyes that people pitied him rather than envied him. He desired nothing, and seemed to be moved neither by joy nor by grief. Sickly as a child, since his health had returned he had always been seen submitting without hesitation to what seemed to him the rule of duty; one would have said that, had duty not spoken, he would have had no reason to act at all.

His uncle, the Commander de Soubirane, found this alarming. When Octave told him coolly that he would always keep to the path of reason, the Commander replied that his nephew never strayed an inch on either side of it, and that he must be either the Messiah or Lucifer, since he was duty incarnate. Octave answered that he wished only to return his soul to its Creator as pure as he had received it; and the Commander, delighted with his own wit, left the room.

Madame de Malivert was nearly fifty, but still young in heart, and full of sympathy for the hopes and fears of young people. Her servants noticed that she often went out alone in a hired cab and came back with strangers; the old valet followed one of them to the Charité, and learned that he was the famous Doctor Duquerrel. She was bringing the first physicians of Paris to observe her son unseen; she feared that he had consumption. The doctors told her that he suffered only from the discontented melancholy of the young men of his class — and that it was her own lungs she should look after.

The Marquis, once rich and careless, had come back to France in 1814 with an income of twenty or thirty thousand francs, and thought himself a beggar. He had a single idea: to see his son married. The household was gloomy. The great salon, hung with green velvet and heavy with gilding, kept out the light; above it was Octave's little room, so low that he hated it, and in which he regretted his bare cell at the Polytechnique, which had been like a monastery. He had once thought of giving his life to God; his father feared a relapse.

One autumn day his mother begged him to ride; he refused, because of the expense. She bought him a fine English horse; he thanked her, and then said that he could not accept so costly a present. She showed him her will: she left him her diamonds, on condition that he kept a horse; and she had already secretly sold two of the diamonds to buy it. Octave told her he hoped the law of indemnity would be thrown out: it was unjust, and it would oblige him to marry. His only real happiness, he said, was to live alone, without anyone troubling him.

They talked until one in the morning. When he had gone, she could not sleep. She felt that his feelings were deeper than she understood; that those beautiful eyes reflected heaven and hell at once.

Then everything changed. One morning the old Marquis came into his wife's room, where she was still in bed, and wept as he told her that they would see their grandchildren before they died: the law of indemnity would pass, three hundred and nineteen votes out of four hundred and twenty were secured, and she would receive about two million for the estates she had lost in the Revolution. Octave was no longer a beggar; he could find a wife. Madame de Malivert, looking at her son, thought she saw a faint flush on his pale cheeks, and forgot the money in her fear for his lungs.

That evening, at the salon of the Marquise de Bonnivet, Octave was received with a new and marked politeness. He answered it with arrogance. He saw that people valued him only for his money; he would rather have made his fortune in trade.

Opposite him sat his poor cousin, Armance de Zohiloff, who did not say a word to him all evening. At first he resented her silence; then it comforted him. She alone, he thought, had a noble soul. When a provincial deputy congratulated him clumsily on the two millions his vote would bring, Octave answered with contempt, and his eyes met Armance's. He thought her look judged him and despised him; and he found this strangely pleasant. Then he heard the Duchesse d'Ancre say to her friend Madame de la Ronce that Mademoiselle de Zohiloff seemed jealous of Malivert's fortune, and that envy did not become a woman. He decided that Armance had been slandered, and he was disgusted with the whole society, which adored money though its own families had once had heroes.

He walked home in the pouring rain. He imagined a beautiful soul untouched by the wisdom of duchesses, and loving her passionately. In the rue de Bourbon a carriage at full speed almost crushed him; it grazed his chest and tore his waistcoat. He stood still, and asked himself why he had not been killed.

At home, alone, he opened his case of pistols. Death was nothing; his mother, he told himself, was dying of consumption and would soon be gone; his father and his uncle loved only his name. Then the word "duty" struck him, and he was ashamed. He would be stronger than his unhappiness. He laughed at himself, calculating from the Saint-Gobain price-list what it would cost to raise his ceiling and put up three great mirrors; he wrote a few lines in Greek letters in a notebook hidden in his desk; he played an act of Mozart's "Don Giovanni" on the piano, and the music gave him peace.

Octave was subject to sudden fits of despair, especially at night and alone, in which he behaved with violence. If he had been a poor law-student without connections, he would have been shut up as a madman. A year earlier, rushing out of his mother's salon, he had thrown out of a window a young footman who tried to stop him; the man fell into a tub of oleanders and was only slightly hurt. Octave had nursed him for two months, given him money, and taught him every day. Some months before the evening of the two millions, he had fled from a ball at Madame de Bonnivet's after a too-bold compliment from a lady, and come home the next day with three slight sword-wounds. The doctors spoke of a "monomania."

To his mother he said little of these things; to his cousin Armance he said more. He told her that his fits were not quite madness, but would make people think him mad; that he was lonely, that he had no friend. Armance answered that he drove away with his own excuses those who might love him. He admitted that she was right, and said he wished he were the son of a cloth-merchant, who would have been working since he was sixteen. Armance was moved. She felt that his excessive sensitivity made him both unhappy and lovable, and that what he lacked was only an ordinary soul.

The next morning a parcel arrived, sealed with two crossed bones: a Bible in a fine binding, and an unsigned letter, which Octave threw into the fire. His old valet told him, with a malicious look, that the parcel came from a former servant of Madame de Bonnivet, who now ran secret errands for the "new religion." Octave pulled the half-burnt letter out of the fire, and learned that people knew he read bad books — Helvétius, Bentham, Bayle. Since the law of indemnity, he reflected, he had become important enough for people to worry about his soul.

That evening, at Madame de Bonnivet's, he paid court with great attention to the spiteful Duchesse d'Ancre, and watched Armance without once looking at her. When the marquise asked for her Chinese chess set, he went to fetch it; passing a half-open door, he heard Armance's voice, talking to her friend Méry de Tersan: he was like all the others; a soul she had once thought so beautiful had been changed by the prospect of two millions.

The words struck him like lightning. It was not the tone of envy. He walked away without a sound, and came back with the chess set, blushing at his indiscretion. That night he rode for hours along the new boulevard under the frost and the moon, and passed the Bonnivet house at three in the morning without knowing why.

For twenty-four hours Octave could think of nothing but how to prove to Mademoiselle de Zohiloff that his fortune had not turned his head. For the first time in his life his soul was carried away without his consent. And for weeks Armance gave him no chance to speak to her alone. He began to talk a great deal in society, whenever she could hear him; whomever he spoke to, he was speaking to her.

Armance was born near the Russian frontier of the Caucasus, and had spent her childhood at Sevastopol, where her father served. Her mother, a relative of the Bonnivets and of the Maliverts, had married a Russian colonel; her mother had died in 1811, and her father, General de Zohiloff, had fallen at Montmirail. Madame de Bonnivet had brought the penniless orphan from a little Russian town to France, intending to call her her niece and to marry her off. Armance had a calm, gay disposition, a sharp mind, and large dark-blue eyes; her beauty was a mixture of the Circassian and the German. Her enemies thought her cold and prudish, and mocked her fixed and serious gaze.

Once the law was public, Octave became an important person. Mothers sought him for their daughters; a duchess apologised for not keeping him a seat in her box. He told her he was not made for the world or its comedies; her granddaughters laughed at his misanthropy, and were friendlier the next day. Society admired him the more. Only Armance grew colder, sometimes almost rude.

Madame de Bonnivet, who wished to make him the ornament of her salon, set about converting him from the philosophers of the eighteenth century to German mysticism. One evening, over cards, she begged him to tell her his secret. He made her swear by Jehovah, on the iron cross from Königsberg she wore on her watch-chain, never to repeat it; and then he told her that he had no conscience — that he felt no instinctive horror of crime, and avoided vice only by reasoning. She was delighted, and called him a rebellious being; she hoped to awaken his inner sense.

By the middle of winter Armance believed that he was hunting a rich marriage. A great nobleman, who had a granddaughter and heiress to marry, invited Octave to hunt at his château in Normandy; Octave came back after three days. When Madame de Bonnivet asked him whether he disliked the young lady, he answered that she was pretty, but that his soul had grown gloomy when he thought of returning to the marquise's salon.

The next morning, a fine April day, Madame de Bonnivet took their discussion of theology into her garden; then she was called away, and asked Octave to wait, saying that Armance would keep him company. Octave seized the moment. He told Armance that for three months she had treated him as a fortune-hunter; he told her of the words he had overheard behind the door, and how they had decided his whole conduct since; and he asked what he could do to regain his place in her heart. Armance listened in silence, and wept. Then she gave him her hand, and said: "You have my entire esteem." A maid was coming; she used the moment to leave the garden.