Honore de Balzac: Cousin Betty

1. PART I: THE PRODIGAL FATHER (continued)

Steinbock, with Polish vainglory, wanted to appear familiar with this drawing-room fairy. After defying Stidmann, Vignon, and Crevel with a look, he took Valerie's hand and forced her to sit down by him on the settee.

"You are rather too lordly, Count Steinbock," said she, resisting a little. But she laughed as she dropped on to the seat, not without arranging the rosebud pinned into her bodice.

"Alas! if I were really lordly," said he, "I should not be here to borrow money."

"Poor boy! I remember how you worked all night in the Rue du Doyenne. You really were rather a spooney; you married as a starving man snatches a loaf. You knew nothing of Paris, and you see where you are landed. But you turned a deaf ear to Lisbeth's devotion, as you did to the love of a woman who knows her Paris by heart."

"Say no more!" cried Steinbock; "I am done for!"

"You shall have your ten thousand francs, my dear Wenceslas; but on one condition," she went on, playing with his handsome curls.

"What is that?"

"I will take no interest----"

"Madame!"

"Oh, you need not be indignant; you shall make it good by giving me a bronze group. You began the story of Samson; finish it.--Do a Delilah cutting off the Jewish Hercules' hair. And you, who, if you will listen to me, will be a great artist, must enter into the subject. What you have to show is the power of woman. Samson is a secondary consideration. He is the corpse of dead strength. It is Delilah-- passion--that ruins everything. How far more beautiful is that replica--That is what you call it, I think--" She skilfully interpolated, as Claude Vignon and Stidmann came up to them on hearing her talk of sculpture--"how far more beautiful than the Greek myth is that replica of Hercules at Omphale's feet.--Did Greece copy Judaea, or did Judaea borrow the symbolism from Greece?"