Dresses, cashmeres, jewels, were sold with incredible rapidity. There
was nothing that I cared for, and I still waited. All at once I heard:
"A volume, beautifully bound, gilt-edged, entitled Manon Lescaut. There
is something written on the first page. Ten francs."
"Twelve," said a voice after a longish silence.
"Fifteen," I said.
Why? I did not know. Doubtless for the something written.
"Fifteen," repeated the auctioneer.
"Thirty," said the first bidder in a tone which seemed to defy further
competition.
It had now become a struggle. "Thirty-five," I cried in the same tone.
"Forty."
"Fifty."
"Sixty."
"A hundred."
If I had wished to make a sensation I should certainly have succeeded,
for a profound silence had ensued, and people gazed at me as if to see
what sort of a person it was, who seemed to be so determined to possess
the volume.
The accent which I had given to my last word seemed to convince my
adversary; he preferred to abandon a conflict which could only have
resulted in making me pay ten times its price for the volume, and,
bowing, he said very gracefully, though indeed a little late: "I give way, sir."
Nothing more being offered, the book was assigned to me.
As I was afraid of some new fit of obstinacy, which my amour propre
might have sustained somewhat better than my purse, I wrote down my
name, had the book put on one side, and went out. I must have given
considerable food for reflection to the witnesses of this scene, who
would no doubt ask themselves what my purpose could have been in paying
a hundred francs for a book which I could have had anywhere for ten, or,
at the outside, fifteen.
An hour after, I sent for my purchase. On the first page was written
in ink, in an elegant hand, an inscription on the part of the giver. It
consisted of these words: Manon to Marguerite.
Humility.
It was signed Armand Duval.
What was the meaning of the word Humility? Was Manon to recognise in
Marguerite, in the opinion of M. Armand Duval, her superior in vice or
in affection? The second interpretation seemed the more probable, for
the first would have been an impertinent piece of plain speaking which
Marguerite, whatever her opinion of herself, would never have accepted.
I went out again, and thought no more of the book until at night, when I
was going to bed.
Manon Lescaut is a touching story. I know every detail of it, and yet
whenever I come across the volume the same sympathy always draws me to
it; I open it, and for the hundredth time I live over again with the
heroine of the Abbe Prevost. Now this heroine is so true to life that I
feel as if I had known her; and thus the sort of comparison between
her and Marguerite gave me an unusual inclination to read it, and my
indulgence passed into pity, almost into a kind of love for the poor
girl to whom I owed the volume. Manon died in the desert, it is true,
but in the arms of the man who loved her with the whole energy of his
soul; who, when she was dead, dug a grave for her, and watered it with
his tears, and buried his heart in it; while Marguerite, a sinner like
Manon, and perhaps converted like her, had died in a sumptuous bed (it
seemed, after what I had seen, the bed of her past), but in that desert
of the heart, a more barren, a vaster, a more pitiless desert than that
in which Manon had found her last resting-place.