Оноре де Бальзак
The Brotherhood of Consolation
“Monsieur,” said Godefroid, “I am not afraid of robbers, for the same reasons that make those gentlemen invulnerable; and I despise life so heartily that if I were murdered by mistake I should bless the murderer!”
“You do not look to me very unhappy,” said the old man, examining Godefroid.
“I have, at the most, enough to get me bread to live on; and I have come to this place, monsieur, because of its silent neighborhood. May I ask you what interest you have in driving me away?”
The old man hesitated; he saw Madame Vauthier close behind them. Godefroid, who examined him attentively, was astonished at the degree of thinness to which grief, perhaps hunger, perhaps toil, had reduced him. There were signs of all those causes upon that face, where the parched skin clung to the bones as if it had been burned by the sun of Africa. The dome of the forehead, high and threatening, overshadowed a pair of steel-blue eyes, – two cold, hard, sagacious, penetrating eyes, like those of savages, surrounded by a black and wrinkled circle. The large nose, long and very thin, and the prominent chin, gave the old man a strong resemblance to the well-known mask popularly ascribed to Don Quixote; but a wicked Don Quixote, without illusions, – a terrible Don Quixote.
And yet the old man, in spite of this general aspect of severity, betrayed the weakness and timidity which indigence imparts to all unfortunates. These two emotions seemed to have made crevices in that solidly constructed face which the pickaxe of poverty was daily enlarging. The mouth was eloquent and grave; in that feature Don Quixote was complicated with Montesquieu’s president.
His clothing was entirely of black cloth, but cloth that was white at the seams. The coat, of an old-fashioned cut, and the trousers, showed various clumsy darns. The buttons had evidently just been renewed. The coat, buttoned to the chin, showed no linen; and the cravat, of a rusty black, hid the greater part of a false collar. These clothes, worn for many years, smelt of poverty. And yet the lofty air of this mysterious old man, his gait, the thought that dwelt on his brow and was manifest in his eyes, excluded the idea of pauperism. An observer would have hesitated how to class him.
Monsieur Bernard seemed so absorbed that he might have been taken for a teacher employed in that quarter of the city, or for some learned man plunged in exacting and tyrannical meditation. Godefroid, in any case, would have felt a curiosity which his present mission of benevolence sharpened into powerful interest.
“Monsieur,” continued the old man, “if I were sure that you are really seeking silence and seclusion, I should say take those rooms near mine.” He raised his voice so that Madame Vauthier, who was now passing them, could hear him. “Take those rooms. I am a father, monsieur. I have only a daughter and a grandson to enable me to bear the miseries of life. Now, my daughter needs silence and absolute tranquillity. All those persons who, so far, have looked at the rooms you are now considering, have listened to the reasons and the entreaties of a despairing father. It was indifferent to them whether they lived in one house or another of a quarter so deserted that plenty of lodgings can be had for a low price. But I see in you a fixed determination, and I beg you, monsieur, not to deceive me. Do you really desire a quiet life? If not, I shall be forced to move and go beyond the barrier, and the removal may cost me my daughter’s life.”
If the man could have wept, the tears would have covered his cheeks while he spoke; as it was, they were, to use an expression now become vulgar, “in his voice.” He covered his forehead with his hand, which was nothing but bones and muscle.
“What is your daughter’s illness?” asked Godefroid, in a persuasive and sympathetic voice.
“A terrible disease to which physicians give various names, but it has, in truth, no name. My fortune is lost,” he added, with one of those despairing gestures made only by the wretched. “The little money that I had, – for in 1830 I was cast from a high position, – in fact, all that I possessed, was soon used by on my daughter’s illness; her mother, too, was ruined by it, and finally her husband. To-day the pension I receive from the government barely suffices for the actual necessities of my poor, dear, saintly child. The faculty of tears has left me; I have suffered tortures. Monsieur, I must be granite not to have died. But no, God had kept alive the father that the child might have a nurse, a providence. Her poor mother died of the strain. Ah! you have come, young man, at a moment when the old tree that never yet has bent feels the axe – the axe of poverty, sharpened by sorrow – at his roots. Yes, here am I, who never complain, talking to you of this illness so as to prevent you from coming to the house; or, if you still persist, to implore you not to trouble our peace. Monsieur, at this moment my daughter barks like a dog, day and night.”
“Is she insane?” asked Godefroid.
“Her mind is sound; she is a saint,” replied the old man. “You will presently think I am mad when I tell you all. Monsieur, my only child, my daughter was born of a mother in excellent health. I never in my life loved but one woman, the one I married. I married the daughter of one of the bravest colonels of the Imperial guard, Tarlowski, a Pole, formerly on the staff of the Emperor. The functions that I exercised in my high position demanded the utmost purity of life and morals; but I have never had room in my heart for many feelings, and I faithfully loved my wife, who deserved such love. I am a father in like manner as I was a husband, and that is telling you all in one word. My daughter never left her mother; no child has ever lived more chastely, more truly a Christian life than my dear daughter. She was born more than pretty, she was born most beautiful; and her husband, a young man of whose morals I was absolutely sure, – he was the son of a friend of mine, the judge of one of the Royal courts, – did not in any way contribute to my daughter’s illness.”
Godefroid and Monsieur Bernard made an involuntary pause, and looked at each other.
“Marriage, as you know, sometimes changes a young woman greatly,” resumed the old man. “The first pregnancy passed well and produced a son, my grandson, who now lives with us, the last scion of two families. The second pregnancy was accompanied by such extraordinary symptoms that the physicians, much astonished, attributed them to the caprice of phenomena which sometimes manifest themselves in this state, and are recorded by physicians in the annals of science. My daughter gave birth to a dead child; in fact, it was twisted and smothered by internal movements. The disease had begun, the pregnancy counted for nothing. Perhaps you are a student of medicine?”
Godefroid made a sign which answered as well for affirmation as for negation.
“After this terrible confinement,” resumed Monsieur Bernard, – “so terrible and laborious that it made a violent impression on my son-in-law and began the mortal melancholy of which he died, – my daughter, two or three months later, complained of a general weakness affecting, particularly, her feet, which she declared felt like cottonwood. This debility changed to paralysis, – and what a paralysis! My daughter’s feet and legs can be bent or twisted in any way and she does not feel it. The limbs are there, apparently without blood or muscles or bones. This affection, which is not connected with anything known to science, spread to the arms and hands, and we then supposed it to be a disease of the spinal cord. Doctors and remedies only made matters worse until at last my poor daughter could not be moved without dislocating either the shoulders, the arms, or the knees. I kept an admirable surgeon almost constantly in the house, who, with the doctor, or doctors (for many came out of interest in the case), replaced the dislocated limbs, – sometimes, would you believe it monsieur? three and four times a day! Ah! – This disease has so many forms that I forgot to tell you that during the first period of weakness, before the paralysis began, the strangest signs of catalepsy appeared – you know what catalepsy is. She remained for days with her eyes wide open, motionless, in whatever position she was when the attack seized her. The worst symptoms of that strange affection were shown, even those of lockjaw. This phase of her illness suggested to me the idea of employing magnetism, and I was about to do so when the paralysis began. My daughter, monsieur, has a miraculous clear-sightedness; her soul has been the theatre of all the wonders of somnambulism, just as her body has been that of all diseases.”
Godefroid began to ask himself if the old man were really sane.
“So that I,” continued Monsieur Bernard paying no attention to the expression in Godefroid’s eyes, “even I, a child of the eighteenth century, fed on Voltaire, Diderot, Helvetius, – I, a son of the Revolution, who scoff at all that antiquity and the middle-ages tell us of demoniacal possession, – well, monsieur, I affirm that nothing but such possession can explain the condition of my child. As a somnambulist she has never been able to tell us the cause of her sufferings; she has never perceived it, and all the remedies she has proposed when in that state, though carefully carried out, have done her no good. For instance, she wished to be wrapped in the carcass of a freshly killed pig; then she ordered us to run the sharp points of ret-hot magnets into her legs; and to put hot sealing-wax on her spine – ”
Godefroid looked at him in amazement.
“And then! what endless other troubles, monsieur! her teeth fell out; she became deaf, then dumb; and then, after six months of absolute dumbness, utter deafness, speech and hearing have returned to her! She recovered, just as capriciously as she had lost, the use of her hands. But her feet have continued in the same hapless condition for the last seven years. She has shown marked and well-characterized symptoms of hydrophobia. Not only does the sight of water, the sound of water, the presence of a glass or a cup fling her at times into a state of fury, but she barks like a dog, that melancholy bark, or rather howl, a dog utters when he hears an organ. Several times we have thought her dying, and the priests had administered the last sacraments; but she has always returned to life to suffer with her full reason and the most absolute clearness of mind; for her faculties of heart and soul are still untouched. Though she has lived, monsieur, she has caused the deaths of her mother and her husband, who have not been able to endure the suffering of such scenes. Alas! monsieur, those distressing scenes are becoming worse. All the natural functions are perverted; the Faculty alone can explain the strange aberration of the organs. She was in this state when I brought her from the provinces to Paris in 1829, because the two or three distinguished doctors to whom I wrote, Desplein, Bianchon, and Haudry, thought from my letters that I was telling them fables. Magnetism was then energetically denied by all the schools of medicine, and without saying that they doubted either my word or that of the provincial doctors, they said we could not have observed thoroughly, or else we had been misled by the exaggeration which patients are apt to indulge in. But they were forced to change their minds when they saw my daughter; and it is to the phenomena they then observed that the great researches made in these latter days are owing; for I must tell you that they class my daughter’s singular state as a form of neurosis. At the last consultation of these gentlemen they decided to stop all medicines, to let nature alone and study it. Since then I have had but one doctor, and he is the doctor who attends the poor of this quarter. We do nothing for her now but alleviate pain, for we know not the cause of it.”
Here the old man stopped as if overcome with his harrowing confidence.
“For the last five years,” he continued, “my daughter alternates between revivals and relapses, but no new phenomena have appeared. She suffers more or less from the varied nervous attacks I have briefly described to you, but the paralysis of the legs and the derangement of the natural functions are constant. The poverty into which we fell, and which alas! is only increasing, obliged me to leave the rooms that I took, in 1829, in the faubourg du Roule. My daughter cannot endure the fatigue of moving; I came near losing her when I brought her to Paris, and again when I removed her to this house. Here my worst financial misfortunes have come upon me. After thirty years in the public service I was made to wait four years before my pension was granted. I have only received it during the last six months and even then the new government has sternly cut it down to the minimum.”
Godefroid made a gesture of surprise which seemed to ask for a more complete confidence. The old man so understood it, for he answered immediately, casting a reproachful glance to heaven: —
“I am one of the thousand victims of political reaction. I conceal my name because it is the mark for many a revenge. If the lessons of experience were not always wasted from one generation to another I should warn you, young man, never to adopt the sternness of any policy. Not that I regret having done my duty; my conscience is perfectly clear on that score; but the powers of to-day have not that solidarity which formerly bound all governments together as governments, no matter how different they might be; if to-day they reward zealous agents it is because they are afraid of them. The instrument they have used, no matter how faithful it has been, is, sooner or later, cast aside. You see in me one of the firmest supporters of the government of the elder branch of the Bourbons, as I was later of the Imperial power; yet here I am in penury! Since I am too proud to beg, they have never dreamed that I suffer untold misery. Five days ago, monsieur, the doctor who takes care of my daughter, or rather I should say, observes her, told me that he was unable to cure a disease the forms of which varied perpetually. He says that neurotic patients are the despair of science, for the causes of their conditions are only to be found in some as yet unexplored system. He advised me to have recourse to a physician who has been called a quack; but he carefully pointed out that this man was a stranger, a Polish Jew, a refugee, and that the Parisian doctors were extremely jealous of certain wonderful cures he had made, and also of the opinion expressed by many that he is very learned and extremely able. Only, Dr. Berton says, he is very exacting and overbearing. He selects his patients, and will not allow an instant of his time to be wasted; and he is – a communist! His name is Halpersohn. My grandson has been twice to find him, but he is always too busy to attend to him; he has not been to see us; I fully understand why.”
“Why?” asked Godefroid.
“Because my grandson, who is sixteen years old, is even more shabbily dressed than I am. Would you believe it, monsieur? I dare not go to that doctor; my clothes are so out of keeping with a man of my age and dignity. If he saw the father as shabby as I am, and the boy even worse, he might not give my daughter the needful attention; he would treat us as doctors treat the poor. And think, my dear monsieur, that I love my daughter for all the suffering she has caused me, just as I used to love her for the joys I had in her. She has become angelic. Alas! she is nothing now but a soul, a soul which beams upon her son and me; the body no longer exists; she has conquered suffering. Think what a spectacle for a father! The whole world, to my daughter, is within the walls of her room. I keep it filled with flowers, for she loves them. She reads a great deal; and when she has the use of her hands she works like a fairy. She has no conception of the horrible poverty to which we are reduced. This makes our household way of life so strange, so eccentric, that we cannot admit visitors. Do you now understand me, monsieur? Can you not see how impossible a neighbor is? I should have to ask for so much forbearance from him that the obligation would be too heavy. Besides, I have no time for friends; I educate my grandson, and I have so much other work to do that I only sleep three, or at most four hours at night.”
“Monsieur,” said Godefroid, who had listened patiently, observing the old man with sorrowful attention, “I will be your neighbor, and I will help you.”
A scornful gesture, even an impatient one, escaped the old man, for he was one who believed in nothing good in human nature.
“I will help you,” pursued Godefroid, taking his hand, “but in my own way. Listen to me. What do you mean to make of your grandson?”
“He is soon to enter the Law school. I am bringing him up to the bar.”
“Then he will cost you six hundred francs a year.”
The old man made no reply.
“I myself,” continued Godefroid after a pause, “have nothing, but I may be able to do much. I will obtain the Polish doctor for you. And if your daughter is curable she shall be cured. We will find some way of paying Halpersohn.”
“Oh! if my daughter be cured I will make a sacrifice I can make but once,” cried the old man. “I will sell the pear I have kept for a thirsty day.”
“You shall keep the pear – ”
“Oh, youth! youth!” exclaimed Monsieur Bernard, shaking his head. “Adieu, monsieur; or rather, au revoir. This is the hour for the Library, and as my books are all sold I am obliged to go there every day to do my work. I shall bear in mind the kindness you express, but I must wait and see whether you will grant us the consideration I must ask from my neighbor. That is all I expect of you.”
“Yes, monsieur, let me be your neighbor; for, I assure you, Barbet is not a man to allow the rooms to be long unrented, and you might have far worse neighbors than I. I do not ask you to believe in me, only to let me be useful to you.”
“What object have you?” said the old man, preparing to go down the steps from the cloister of the Chartreux which leads from the great alley of the Luxembourg to the rue d’Enfer.
“Did you never, in your public functions, oblige any one?”
The old man looked at Godefroid with frowning brows; his eyes were full of memories, like a man who turns the leaves of his book of life, seeking for the action to which he owed this gratitude; then he turned away coldly, with a bow, full of doubt.
“Well, for a first investigation I did not frighten him too much,” thought Godefroid.
XIII. FURTHER INVESTIGATIONS
Godefroid now went to the rue d’Enfer, the address given him by Monsieur Alain, and there found Dr. Berton, a cold, grave man, who astonished him much by confirming all the details given by Monsieur Bernard about his daughter’s illness. From him Godefroid obtained the address of Halpersohn.
This Polish doctor, since so celebrated, then lived in Chaillot, rue Marbeuf, in an isolated house where he occupied the first floor. General Romanus Zarnowski lived on the second floor, and the servants of the two refugees inhabited the garret of this little house, which had but two stories. Godefroid did not find Halpersohn, and was told that he had gone into the provinces, sent for by a rich patient; he was almost glad not to meet him, for in his hurry he had forgotten to supply himself with money; and he now went back to the hotel de la Chanterie to get some.
These various trips and the time consumed in dining at a restaurant in the rue de l’Odeon brought Godefroid to the hour when he said he would return and take possession of his lodging on the boulevard du Mont-Parnasse. Nothing could be more forlorn than the manner in which Madame Vauthier had furnished the two rooms. It seemed as though the woman let rooms with the express purpose that no one should stay in them. Evidently the bed, chairs, tables, bureau, secretary, curtains, came from forced sales at auction, articles massed together in lots as having no separate intrinsic value.
Madame Vauthier, with her hands on her hips, stood waiting for thanks; she took Godefroid’s smile for one of surprise.
“There! I picked out for you the very best we have, my dear Monsieur Godefroid,” she said with a triumphant air. “See those pretty silk curtains, and the mahogany bedstead which hasn’t got a worm-hole in it! It formerly belonged to the Prince of Wissembourg. When he left his house, rue Louis-le-Grand, in 1809, I was the kitchen-girl. From there, I went to live as cook with the present owner of this house.”
Godefroid stopped the flux of confidences by paying a month’s rent in advance; and he also gave, in advance, the six francs he was to pay Madame Vauthier for the care of his rooms. At that moment he heard barking, and if he had not been duly warned by Monsieur Bernard, he would certainly have supposed that his neighbor kept a dog.
“Does that dog bark at night?” he asked.
“Oh! don’t be uneasy, monsieur; you’ll only have one week to stand those persons. Monsieur Bernard can’t pay his rent and we are going to put him out. They are queer people, I tell you! I have never seen their dog. That animal is sometimes months, yes, six months at a time without making a sound; you might think they hadn’t a dog. The beast never leaves the lady’s room. There’s a sick lady in there, and very sick, too; she’s never been out of her room since she came. Old Monsieur Bernard works hard, and the son, too; the lad is a day-scholar at the school of Louis-le-Grand, where he is nearly through his philosophy course, and only sixteen, too; that’s something to boast of! but the little scamp has to work like one possessed. Presently you’ll hear them bring out the plants they keep in the lady’s room and carry in fresh ones. They themselves, the grandfather and the boy, only eat bread, though they buy flowers and all sorts of dainties for the lady. She must be very ill, not to leave her room once since entering it; and if one’s to believe Monsieur Berton, the doctor, she’ll never come out except feet foremost.”
“What does this Monsieur Bernard do?”
“It seems he’s a learned man; he writes and goes about to libraries. Monsieur lends him money on his compositions.”
“Monsieur? who is he?”
“The proprietor of the house, Monsieur Barbet, the old bookseller. He is a Norman who used to sell green stuff in the streets, and afterwards set up a bookstall, in 1818, on the quay. Then he got a little shop, and now he is very rich. He is a kind of a Jew, with a score of trades; he was even a partner with the Italian who built this barrack to lodge silk-worms.”
“So this house is a refuge for unfortunate authors?” said Godefroid.
“Is monsieur unluckily one himself?” asked the widow Vauthier.
“I am only just starting,” replied Godefroid.
“Oh! my dear monsieur, take my advice and don’t go on; journalist? well, – I won’t say anything against that.”
Godefroid could not help laughing as he bade good-night to the portress, who thus, all unconsciously, represented the bourgeoisie. As he went to bed in the horrible room, floored with bricks that were not even colored, and hung with a paper at seven sous a roll, Godefroid not only regretted his little rooms in the rue Chanoinesse, but also the society of Madame de la Chanterie. He felt a void in his soul. He had already acquired habits of mind; and could not remember to have so keenly regretted anything in all his former life as this break in his new existence. These thoughts, as they pressed upon him, had a great effect upon his soul; he felt that no life could compare in value with the one he sought to embrace, and his resolution to emulate the good old Alain became unshakable. Without having any vocation for the work, he had the will to do it.
The next day Godefroid, already habituated by his new life to rising early, saw from his window a young man about seventeen years of age, dressed in a blouse, who was coming back, no doubt from the public fountain, bringing a crock full of water in each hand. The face of this lad, who was not aware that he was seen, revealed his feelings, and never had Godefroid observed one so artless and so melancholy. The graces of youth were all repressed by poverty, by study, by great physical fatigue. Monsieur Bernard’s grandson was remarkable for a complexion of extreme whiteness, which the contrast with his dark hair seemed to make still whiter. He made three trips; when he returned from the last he saw some men unloading a cord of wood which Godefroid had ordered the night before, for the long-delayed winter of 1838 was beginning to be felt; snow had fallen slightly during the night.
Nepomucene, who had begun his day by going for the wood (on which Madame Vauthier levied a handsome tribute), spoke to the young lad while waiting until the woodman had sawed enough for him to carry upstairs. It was easy to see that the sudden cold was causing anxiety to Monsieur Bernard’s grandson, and that the sight of the wood, as well as that of the threatening sky, warned him that they ought to be making their own provision for wintry weather. Suddenly, however, as if reproaching himself for lost time, he seized his crocks and hastily entered the house. It was, in fact, half-past seven o’clock, the hour was just ringing from the belfry of the convent of the Visitation, and he was due at the college of Louis-le-Grand by half-past eight.
As the young lad entered the house, Godefroid went to his door to admit Madame Vauthier who brought her new lodger the wherewithal to make a fire, and he thus became the witness of a scene which took place on the landing.
A neighboring gardener, who had rung several times at Monsieur Bernard’s door without making any one hear (for the bell was wrapped in paper), had a rather rough dispute with the young lad who now came up with the water, demanding to be paid for the flowers he had supplied. As the man raised his voice angrily Monsieur Bernard appeared. “Auguste,” he said to his grandson, “dress yourself, it is time for school.”
He himself took the two crocks of water, carried them into the first of his rooms, in which were many pots of flowers, and returned to speak to the gardener, carefully closing the door behind him. Godefroid’s door was open, for Nepomucene had begun his trips, and was stacking the wood in the front room. The gardener was silent in presence of Monsieur Bernard, whose tall figure, robed in a violet silk dressing-gown, buttoned to the throat, gave him an imposing air.
“You might ask for what is owing to you without such noise,” said Monsieur Bernard.
“Be fair, my dear monsieur,” said the gardener. “You agreed to pay me every week, and it now three months, ten weeks, since I have had a penny; you owe me a hundred and twenty francs. We let out our plants to rich people who pay us when we ask for the money; but this is the fifth time I have come to you for it. I have my rent to pay and the wages of my men; I am not a bit richer than you. My wife, who supplied you with eggs and milk, will not come here any more; you owe her thirty francs. She does not like to dun you, for she is kind-hearted, that she is! If I listened to her, I couldn’t do business at all. And so I, who am not so soft – you understand?”
Just then Auguste came out dressed in a shabby little green coat with cloth trousers of the same color, a black cravat, and worn-out boots. These clothes, though carefully brushed, showed the lowest degree of poverty; they were all too short and too narrow, so that the lad seemed likely to crack them at every motion. The seams were white, the edges curled, the buttonholes torn in spite of many mendings; the whole presenting to the most unobservant eyes the heart-breaking stigmas of honest penury. This livery contrasted sadly with the youth of the lad, who now disappeared munching a crust of stale bread with his strong and handsome teeth. He breakfasted thus on his way to the rue Saint-Jacques, carrying his books and papers under his arm, and wearing a little cap much too small for his head, from which stuck out a mass of magnificent black hair.
In passing before his grandfather the lad had given him rapidly a look of deep distress; for he knew him to be in an almost hopeless difficulty, the consequences of which might be terrible. To leave room for the boy to pass, the gardener had stepped back to the sill of Godefroid’s door, and as at that moment Nepomucene arrived with a quantity of wood, the creditor was forced to retreat into the room.
“Monsieur Bernard!” cried the widow Vauthier, “do you think Monsieur Godefroid hired his rooms to have you hold your meetings in them?”
“Excuse me, madame,” said the gardener, “but there was no room on the landing.”
“I didn’t say that for you, Monsieur Cartier,” said the widow.
“Remain where you are!” cried Godefroid, addressing the gardener; “and you, my dear neighbor,” he added, looking at Monsieur Bernard, who seemed insensible to the cruel insult, “if it is convenient to you to have an explanation with your gardener in my room, come in.”
The old man, half stupefied with his troubles, cast a look of gratitude on Godefroid.
“As for you, my dear Madame Vauthier,” continued Godefroid, “don’t be so rough with monsieur, who is in the first place an old man, and one to whom you owe the obligation of my lodging here.”
“Oh, pooh!” said the widow.
“Besides, if poor people do not help each other, who will help them? Leave us, Madame Vauthier; I’ll blow the fire myself. Have the rest of my wood put in your cellar; I am sure you will take good care of it.”
Madame Vauthier disappeared, for Godefroid in telling her to take care of his wood had given an opportunity to her greed.
“Come in this way,” said Godefroid, offering chairs to both debtor and creditor.
The old man conversed standing, but the gardener sat down.
“My good Monsieur Cartier,” went on Godefroid, “rich people do not pay as regularly as you say they do, and you ought not to dun a worthy man for a few louis. Monsieur draws his pension every six months, and he could not make you an assignment of it for such a paltry sum. I am willing to advance the money, if you absolutely insist on having it.”