Read The Lady of the Camellias for Free Online Page A

bidder, in a tone that seemed to defy anyone to challenge him.
    It became a battle.
    â€œThirty-five!” I shouted, in the same tone.
    â€œForty.”
    â€œFifty.”
    â€œSixty.”
    â€œA hundred.”
    I swear that if my goal had been to cause a sensation, I would have completely succeeded, because with this bid a great silence took over, and everyone started looking at me to figure out who this fellow was who seemed so intent on acquiring this book.
    Apparently the emphasis I put on my last word convinced my antagonist, and he abandoned this battle, which had served only to make me pay ten times what the volume was worth. Leaning toward me, he said to me quite graciously, if somewhat tardily, “I yield, sir.”
    Nobody else having spoken, the book went to me.
    Lest a new wave of stubbornness overtake me, which my pride might have enjoyed, but which my purse would have taken ill, I wrote down my name, had the book put to the side, and left. I must have given plenty to think about to the people who witnessed this scene, who undoubtedly asked themselves why on earth I had paid a hundred francs for a book I could have gotten anywhere for ten or fifteen francs at the most.
    An hour later I sent for my purchase.
    On the first page was written in ink, in an elegant script, a dedication to the recipient of the book. This dedication carried these sole words:
    MANON TO MARGUERITE,
    Humility
    It was signed: Armand Duval.
    What did this word mean:
humility
?
    Would Manon recognize in Marguerite, in M. Armand Duval’s opinion, a superiority of vice, or of heart?
    The latter interpretation seemed more likely, as the former would have been nothing but an insolent liberty that Marguerite could not have appreciated, whatever her opinion of herself.
    I went out again and thought no more of the book until that night, as I was going to bed.
    Certainly
Manon Lescaut
is a touching story, of which not one detail is unknown to me, and yet whenever I find that book in my hand, my sympathy for it draws me, I open it, and for the hundredth time I live again with Abbé Prévost’s heroine. That heroine is so real that I feel as if I have known her. In this new circumstance, the comparison made between her and Marguerite gave an unexpected character to my reading, and, out of pity, my indulgence for the poor girl who had left behind this volume grew into something almost like love. Manon had died in a desert, it is true, but in the arms of the man who had loved her with all the energy of his soul, who, when she was dead, laid her in a grave, watered her with his tears, and buried his own heart with her; whereas Marguerite, a sinner like Manon, and perhaps a convert like her, had died in the bosom of sumptuous luxury, and, if I could believe my own eyes, in the bed of her own past, but amid a desert of the heart far more arid, far more vast, far more pitiless than that in which Manon had been buried.
    And in fact Marguerite, as I learned from friends who knew of the final circumstances of her life, had not had one single truly consoling visit at her bedside throughout the two months of her lingering and painful death struggle.
    And then, from Manon and Marguerite, my thoughts traveled to certain women I knew who lightheartedly pursued the same path to destruction, which hardly ever varies its route.
    Poor creatures! If it’s wrong to love them, the least we can do is to pity them. You pity the blind man who has never seen the rays of the sun, the deaf man who has never heard the sounds of nature, the mute who has never been able to give voice to his soul, and yet, under the false pretext of modesty, you choose not to pity that blindness of the heart, that deafness of the soul, that muteness of conscience, which drive a miserable afflicted woman mad and make her incapable, however much she might wish it, of seeing goodness, of hearing the Lord, and of speaking the pure language of love and faith.
    Victor Hugo