Оноре де Бальзак
The Lesser Bourgeoisie
“Yes,” said la Peyrade, “and if I lose the case it will be I who have sent him to prison, – just as yesterday it was I who brought about the seizure.”
“As for that, it seems to me that if you had written nothing the police would have found nothing to bite.”
“My dear Brigitte,” said Thuillier, seeing la Peyrade shrug his shoulders, “your argument is vicious in the sense that the writing was not incriminating on any side. It is not la Peyrade’s fault if persons of high station have organized a persecution against me. You remember that little substitute, Monsieur Olivier Vinet, whom Cardot brought to one of our receptions. It seems that he and his father are furious that we didn’t want him for Celeste, and they’ve sworn my destruction.”
“Well, why did we refuse him,” said Brigitte, “if it wasn’t for the fine eyes of monsieur here? For, after all, a substitute in Paris is a very suitable match.”
“No doubt,” said la Peyrade, nonchalantly. “Only, he did not happen to bring you a million.”
“Ah!” cried Brigitte, firing up. “If you are going to talk any more about that house you helped us to buy, I shall tell you plainly that if you had had the money to trick the notary you never would have come after us. You needn’t think I have been altogether your dupe. You spoke just now of a bargain, but you proposed that bargain yourself. ‘Give me Celeste and I’ll get you that house,’ – that’s what you said to us in so many words. Besides which, we had to pay large sums on which we never counted.”
“Come, come, Brigitte,” said Thuillier, “you are making a great deal out of nothing.”
“Nothing! nothing!” exclaimed Brigitte. “Did we, or did we not, have to pay much more than we expected?”
“My dear Thuillier,” said la Peyrade, “I think, with you, that the matter is now settled, and it can only be embittered by discussing it further. My course was decided on before I came here; all that I have now heard can only confirm it. I shall not be the husband of Celeste, but you and I can remain good friends.”
He rose to leave the room.
“One moment, monsieur,” said Brigitte, barring his way; “there is one matter which I do not consider settled; and now that we are no longer to have interests in common, I should not be sorry if you would be so good as to tell me what has become of a sum of ten thousand francs which Thuillier gave you to bribe those rascally government offices in order to get the cross we have never got.”
“Brigitte!” cried Thuillier, in anguish, “you have a devil of a tongue! You ought to be silent about that; I told it to you in a moment of ill-temper, and you promised me faithfully never to open your lips about it to any one, no matter who.”
“So I did; but,” replied the implacable Brigitte, “we are parting. When people part they settle up; they pay their debts. Ten thousand francs! For my part, I thought the cross itself dear at that; but for a cross that has melted away, monsieur himself will allow the price is too high.”
“Come, la Peyrade, my friend, don’t listen to her,” said Thuillier, going up to the barrister, who was pale with anger. “The affection she has for me blinds her; I know very well what government offices are, and I shouldn’t be surprised if you had had to pay out money of your own.”
“Monsieur,” said la Peyrade, “I am, unfortunately, not in a position to return to you, instantly, that money, an accounting for which is so insolently demanded. Grant me a short delay; and have the goodness to accept my note, which I am ready to sign, if that will give you patience.”
“To the devil with your note!” cried Thuillier; “you owe me nothing; on the contrary, it is we who owe you; for Cardot told me I ought to give you at least ten thousand francs for enabling us to buy this magnificent property.”
“Cardot! Cardot!” said Brigitte; “he is very generous with other people’s money. We were giving monsieur Celeste, and that’s a good deal more than ten thousand francs.”
La Peyrade was too great a comedian not to turn the humiliation he had just endured into a scene finale. With tears in his voice, which presently fell from his eyes, he turned to Brigitte.
“Mademoiselle,” he said, “when I had the honor to be received by you I was poor; you long saw me suffering and ill at ease, knowing, alas! too well, the indignities that poverty must bear. From the day that I was able to give you a fortune which I never thought of for myself I have felt, it is true, more assurance; and your own kindness encouraged me to rise out of my timidity and depression. To-day, when I, by frank and loyal conduct, release you from anxiety, – for, if you chose to be honest, you would acknowledge that you have been thinking of another husband for Celeste, – we might still remain friends, even though I renounce a marriage which my delicacy forbids me to pursue. But you have not chosen to restrain yourself with the limits of social politeness, of which you have a model beside you in Madame de Godollo, who, I am persuaded, although she is not at all friendly to me, would never have approved of your odious behavior. Thank Heaven! I have in my heart some religious sentiment at least; the Gospel is not to me a mere dead-letter, and – understand me well, mademoiselle —I forgive you. It is not to Thuillier, who would refuse them, but to you that I shall, before long, pay the ten thousand francs which you insinuate I have applied to my own purposes. If, by the time they are returned to you, you feel regret for your unjust suspicions, and are unwilling to accept the money, I request that you will turn it over to the bureau of Benevolence to the poor – ”
“To the bureau of Benevolence!” cried Brigitte, interrupting him. “No, I thank you! the idea of all that money being distributed among a crowd of do-nothings and devotes, who’ll spend it in junketing! I’ve been poor too, my lad; I made bags for the money of others long before I had any money of my own; I have some now, and I take care of it. So, whenever you will, I am ready to receive that ten thousand francs and keep it. If you didn’t know how to do what you undertook to do, and spent that money in trying to put salt on a sparrow’s tail, so much the worse for you.”
Seeing that he had missed his effect, and had made not the slightest impression on Brigitte’s granite, la Peyrade cast a disdainful look upon her and left the room majestically. As he did so he noticed a movement made by Thuillier to follow him, and also the imperious gesture of Brigitte, always queen and mistress, which nailed her brother to his chair.
CHAPTER VIII
At the moment when la Peyrade was preparing to lay at the feet of the countess the liberty he had recovered in so brutal a manner, he received a perfumed note, which made his heart beat, for on the seal was that momentous “All or Nothing” which she had given him as the rule of the relation now to be inaugurated between them. The contents of the note were as follows: —
Dear Monsieur, – I have heard of the step you have taken; thank you! But I must now prepare to take my own. I cannot, as you may well think, continue to live in this house, and among these people who are so little of our own class and with whom we have nothing in common. To arrange this transaction, and to avoid explanations of the fact that the entresol welcomes the voluntary exile from the first-floor, I need to-day and to-morrow to myself. Do not therefore come to see me until the day after. By that time I shall have executed Brigitte, as they say at the Bourse, and have much to tell you.
Tua tota,
Torna de Godollo.
That “Wholly thine” in Latin seemed charming to la Peyrade, who was not, however, astonished, for Latin is a second national language to the Hungarians. The two days’ waiting to which he was thus condemned only fanned the flame of the ardent passion which possessed him, and on the third day when reached the house by the Madeleine his love had risen to a degree of incandescence of which only a few days earlier he would scarcely have supposed himself capable.
This time the porter’s wife perceived him; but he was now quite indifferent as to whether or not the object of his visit should be known. The ice was broken, his happiness was soon to be official, and he was more disposed to cry it aloud in the streets than to make a mystery of it.
Running lightly up the stairs, he prepared to ring the bell, when, on putting out his hand to reach the silken bell-cord he perceived that the bell-cord had disappeared. La Peyrade’s first thought was that one of those serious illnesses which make all noises intolerable to a patient would explain its absence; but with the thought came other observations that weakened it, and which, moreover, were not in themselves comforting.
From the vestibule to the countess’s door a stair carpet, held at each step by a brass rod, made a soft ascent to the feet of visitors; this, too, had been removed. A screen-door covered with green velvet and studded with brass nails had hitherto protected the entrance to the apartment; of that no sign, except the injury to the wall done by the workmen in taking it away. For a moment the barrister thought, in his agitation, that he must have mistaken the floor, but, casting his eye over the baluster he saw that he had not passed the entresol. Madame de Godollo must, therefore, be in the act of moving away.
He then resigned himself to make known his presence at the great lady’s door as he would have done at that of a grisette. He rapped with his knuckles, but a hollow sonority revealing the void, “intonuere cavernae,” echoed beyond the door which he vainly appealed to with his fist. He also perceived from beneath that door a ray of vivid light, the sure sign of an uninhabited apartment where curtains and carpets and furniture no longer dim the light or deaden sound. Compelled to believe in a total removal, la Peyrade now supposed that in the rupture with Brigitte, mentioned as probable by Madame de Godollo, some brutal insolence of the old maid had necessitated this abrupt departure. But why had he not been told of it? And what an idea, to expose him to this ridiculous meeting with what the common people call, in their picturesque language, “the wooden face”!
Before leaving the door finally, and as if some doubt still remained in his mind, la Peyrade made a last and most thundering assault upon it.
“Who’s knocking like that, as if they’d bring the house down?” said the porter, attracted by the noise to the foot of the staircase.
“Doesn’t Madame de Godollo still live here?” asked la Peyrade.
“Of course she doesn’t live here now; she has moved away. If monsieur had told me he was going to her apartment I would have spared him the trouble of battering down the door.”
“I knew that she was going to leave the apartment,” said la Peyrade, not wishing to seem ignorant of the project of departure, “but I had no idea she was going so soon.”
“I suppose it was something sudden,” said the porter, “for she went off early this morning with post-horses.”
“Post-horses!” echoed la Peyrade, stupefied. “Then she has left Paris?”
“That’s to be supposed,” said the porter; “people don’t usually take post-horses and a postilion to change from one quarter of Paris to another.”
“And she did not tell you where she was going?”
“Ah! monsieur, what an idea! Do people account to us porters for what they do?”
“No, but her letters – those that come after her departure?”
“Her letters? I am ordered to deliver them to Monsieur le commandeur, the little old gentlemen who came to see her so often; monsieur must have met him.”
“Yes, yes, certainly,” said la Peyrade, keeping his presence of mind in the midst of the successive shocks which came upon him, – “the powered little man who was here every day.”
“I couldn’t say every day; but he came often. Well, I am told to give the countess’s letters to him.”
“And for other persons of her acquaintance,” said la Peyrade, carelessly, “did she leave no message?”
“None, monsieur.”
“Very well,” said la Peyrade, “good-morning.” And he turned to go out.
“But I think,” said the porter, “that Mademoiselle Thuillier knows more about it than I do. Won’t monsieur go up? She is at home; and so is Monsieur Thuillier.”
“No, never mind,” said la Peyrade, “I only came to tell Madame de Godollo about a commission she asked me to execute; I haven’t time to stop now.”
“Well, as I told you, she left with post-horses this morning. Two hours earlier monsieur might still have found her; but now, with post-horses, she must by this time have gone a good distance.”
La Peyrade departed, with a sense of despair in his heart. Added to the anxiety caused by this hasty departure, jealousy entered his soul, and in this agonizing moment of disappointment the most distressing explanations crowded on his mind.
Then, after further reflection, he said to himself: —
“These clever diplomatic women are often sent on secret missions which require the most absolute silence, and extreme rapidity of movement.”
But here a sudden revulsion of thought overcame him: —
“Suppose she were one of those intriguing adventurers whom foreign governments employ as agents? Suppose the tale, more or less probable, of that Russian princess forced to sell her furniture to Brigitte were also that of this Hungarian countess? And yet,” he continued, as his brain made a third evolution in this frightful anarchy of ideas and feelings, “her education, her manners, her language, all bespoke a woman of the best position. Besides, if she were only a bird of passage, why have given herself so much trouble to win me over?”
La Peyrade might have continued to plead thus for and against for a long time had he not been suddenly grasped round the shoulders by a strong arm and addressed in a well-known voice.
“Take care! my dear barrister; a frightful danger threatens you; you are running right into it.”
La Peyrade, thus arrested, looked round and found himself in the arms of Phellion.
The scene took place in front of a house which was being pulled down at the corner of the rues Duphot and Saint-Honore. Posted on the pavement of the other side of the street, Phellion, whose taste for watching the process of building our readers may remember, had been witnessing for the last fifteen minutes the drama of a wall about to fall beneath the united efforts of a squadron of workmen. Watch in hand, the great citizen was estimating the length of the resistance which that mass of freestone would present to the destructive labor of which it was the object. Precisely at the crucial moment of the impending catastrophe la Peyrade, lost in the tumult of his thoughts, was entering, heedless of the shouts addressed to him on all sides, the radius within which the stones would fall. Seen by Phellion (who, it must be said, would have done the same for a total stranger) la Peyrade undoubtedly owed his life to him; for, at the moment when he was violently flung back by the vigorous grasp of the worthy citizen, the wall fell with the noise of a cannon-shot, and the stones rolled in clouds of dust almost to his very feet.
“Are you blind and deaf?” said the workman whose business it was to warn the passers, in a tone of amenity it is easy to imagine.
“Thank you, my dear friend,” said la Peyrade, recalled to earth. “I should certainly have been crushed like an idiot if it hadn’t been for you.”
And he pressed Phellion’s hand.
“My reward,” replied the latter, “lies in the satisfaction of knowing that you are saved from an imminent peril. And I may say that that satisfaction is mingled, for me, with a certain pride; for I was not mistaken by a single second in the calculation which enabled me to foresee the exact moment when that formidable mass would be displaced from its centre of gravity. But what were you thinking of, my dear monsieur? Probably of the plea you are about to make in the Thuillier affair. The public prints have informed me of the danger of prosecution by the authorities which hangs above the head of our estimable friend. You have a noble cause to defend, monsieur. Habituated as I am, through my labors as a member of the reading committee of the Odeon, to judge of works of intellect, and with my hand upon my conscience, I declare that after reading the incriminated passages, I can find nothing in the tone of that pamphlet which justifies the severe measures of which it is the object. Between ourselves,” added the great citizen, lowering his voice, “I think the government has shown itself petty.”
“So I think,” said la Peyrade, “but I am not employed for the defence. I have advised Thuillier to engage some noted lawyer.”
“It may be good advice,” said Phellion; “at any rate, it speaks well for your modesty. Poor man! I went to him at once when the blow fell, but I did not see him; I saw only Brigitte, who was having a discussion with Madame de Godollo. There is a woman with strong political views; it seems she predicted that the seizure would be made.”
“Did you know that the countess had left Paris?” said la Peyrade, rushing at the chance of speaking on the subject of his present monomania.
“Ah! left Paris, has she?” said Phellion. “Well, monsieur, I must tell you that, although there was not much sympathy between us, I regard her departure as a misfortune. She will leave a serious void in the salon of our friends. I say this, because it is my belief, and I am not in the habit of disguising my convictions.”
“Yes,” said la Peyrade, “she is certainly a very distinguished woman, with whom in spite of her prejudice against me, I think I should have come to an understanding. But this morning, without leaving any word as to where she was going, she started suddenly with post-horses.”
“Post-horses!” said Phellion. “I don’t know whether you will agree with me, monsieur, but I think that travelling by post is a most agreeable method of conveyance. Certainly Louis XI., to whom we owe the institution, had a fortunate inspiration in the matter; although, on the other hand, his sanguinary and despotic government was not, to my humble thinking, entirely devoid of reproach. Once only in my life have I used that method of locomotion, and I can truly say I found it far superior, in spite of its inferior relative rapidity, to the headlong course of what in England are called railways; where speed is attained only at the price of safety.”
La Peyrade paid but little attention to Phellion’s phraseology. “Where can she have gone?” – round that idea he dug and delved in every direction, an occupation that would have made him indifferent to a far more interesting topic. However, once started, like the locomotive he objected to, the great citizen went on: —
“I made that journey at the period of Madame Phellion’s last confinement. She was in Perche, with her mother, when I learned that serious complications were feared from the milk-fever. Overcome with terror at the danger which threatened my wife, I went instantly to the post-office to obtain a seat in the mail-coach, but all were taken; I found they had been engaged for more than a week. Upon that, I came to a decision; I went to the rue Pigalle, and, for a very large sum in gold a post-chaise and three horses were placed at my disposal, when unfortunately the formality of a passport, with which I had neglected to supply myself, and without which, in virtue of the decrees of the consulate of 17 Nivose, year VII., the post agents were not permitted to deliver horses to travellers – ”
The last few words were like a flash of light to la Peyrade, and without waiting for the end of the postal odyssey of the great citizen, he darted away in the direction of the rue Pigalle, before Phellion, in the middle of his sentence, perceived his departure.
Reaching the Royal postal establishment, la Peyrade was puzzled as to whom to address himself in order to obtain the information he wanted. He began by explaining to the porter that he had a letter to send to a lady of his acquaintance that morning by post, neglecting, very thoughtlessly, to send him her address, and that he thought he might discover it by means of the passport which she must have presented in order to obtain horses.
“Was it a lady accompanied by a maid whom I took up on the boulevard de la Madeleine?” asked a postilion sitting in the corner of the room where la Peyrade was making his preliminary inquiry.
“Exactly,” said la Peyrade, going eagerly up to the providential being, and slipping a five-franc piece into his hand.
“Ah! well, she’s a queer traveller!” said the man, “she told me to take her to the Bois de Boulogne, and there she made me drive round and round for an hour. After that, we came back to the Barriere de l’Etoile, where she gave me a good ‘pourboire’ and got into a hackney coach, telling me to take the travelling carriage back to the man who lets such carriages in the Cour des Coches, Faubourg Saint-Honore.”
“Give me the name of that man?” said la Peyrade, eagerly.
“Simonin,” replied the postilion.
Furnished with that information la Peyrade resumed his course, and fifteen minutes later he was questioning the livery-stable keeper; but that individual knew only that a lady residing on the Boulevard de la Madeleine had hired, without horses, a travelling-carriage for half a day; that he had sent out the said carriage at nine that morning, and it was brought back at twelve by a postilion of the Royal Post house.
“Never mind,” thought la Peyrade, “I am certain now she has not left Paris, and is not avoiding me. Most probably, she wants to break utterly with the Thuilliers, and so has invented this journey. Fool that I am! no doubt there’s a letter waiting for me at home, explaining the whole thing.”
Worn out with emotion and fatigue, and in order to verify as quickly as possible this new supposition, la Peyrade flung himself into a street cab, and in less than a quarter of an hour, having promised the driver a good pourboire, he was deposited at the house in the rue Saint-Dominique d’Enfer. There he was compelled to endure still longer the tortures of waiting. Since Brigitte’s departure, the duty of the porter, Coffinet, had been very negligently performed, and when la Peyrade rushed to the lodge to inquire for his letter, which he thought he saw in the case that belonged to him, the porter and his wife were both absent and their door was locked. The wife was doing some household work in the building, and Coffinet himself, taking advantage of that circumstance, had allowed a friend to entice him into a neighboring wine-shop, where, between two glasses, he was supporting, against a republican who was talking disrespectfully against it, the cause of the owners of property.
It was twenty minutes before the worthy porter, remembering the “property” entrusted to his charge, decided to return to his post. It is easy to imagine the reproaches with which la Peyrade overwhelmed him. He excused himself by saying that he had gone to do a commission for Mademoiselle, and that he couldn’t be at the door and where his masters chose to send him at the same time. At last, however, he gave the lawyer a letter bearing the Paris postmark.
With his heart rather than his eyes la Peyrade recognized the handwriting, and, turning over the missive, the arms and motto confirmed the hope that he had reached the end of the cruellest emotion he had ever in his life experienced. To read that letter before that odious porter seemed to him a profanation. With a refinement of feeling which all lovers will understand, he gave himself the pleasure of pausing before his happiness; he would not even unseal that blissful note until the moment when, with closed doors and no interruptions to distract him, he could enjoy at his ease the delicious sensation of which his heart had a foretaste.
Rushing up the staircase two steps at a time, the now joyous lover committed the childish absurdity of locking himself in; then, having settled himself at his ease before his desk, and having broken the seal with religious care, he was forced to press his hand on his heart, which seemed to burst from his bosom, before he could summon calmness to read the following letter: —
Dear Monsieur, – I disappear forever, because my play is played out. I thank you for having made it both attractive and easy. By setting against you the Thuilliers and Collevilles (who are fully informed of your sentiments towards them), and by relating in a manner most mortifying to their bourgeois self-love the true reason of your sudden and pitiless rupture with them, I am proud and happy to believe that I have done you a signal service. The girl does not love you, and you love nothing but the eyes of her “dot”; I have therefore saved you both from a species of hell. But, in exchange for the bride you have so curtly rejected, another charming girl is proposed to you; she is richer and more beautiful than Mademoiselle Colleville, and – to speak of myself – more at liberty than
Your unworthy servant,Torna “Comtesse de Godollo.”
P.S. For further information apply, without delay, to Monsieur du Portail, householder, rue Honore-Chevalier, near the rue de la Cassette, quartier Saint-Sulpice, by whom you are expected.
When he had read this letter the advocate of the poor took his head in his hands; he saw nothing, heard nothing, thought nothing; he was annihilated.
Several days were necessary to la Peyrade before he could even begin to recover from the crushing blow which had struck him down. The shock was terrible. Coming out of that golden dream which had shown him a perspective of the future in so smiling an aspect, he found himself fooled under conditions most cruel to his self-love, and to his pretensions to depth and cleverness; irrevocably parted from the Thuilliers; saddled with a hopeless debt of twenty-five thousand francs to Madame Lambert, together with another of ten thousand to Brigitte, which his dignity required him to pay with the least delay possible; and, worst of all, – to complete his humiliation and his sense of failure, – he felt that he was not cured of the passionate emotion he had felt for this woman, the author of his great disaster, and the instrument of his ruin.
Either this Delilah was a very great lady, sufficiently high in station to allow herself such compromising caprices, – but even so, she would scarcely have cared to play the role of a coquette in a vaudeville where he himself played the part of ninny, —or she was some noted adventuress who was in the pay of this du Portail and the agent of his singular matrimonial designs. Evil life or evil heart, these were the only two verdicts to be pronounced on this dangerous siren, and in either case, it would seem, she was not very deserving of the regrets of her victim; nevertheless, he was conscious of feeling them. We must put ourselves in the place of this son of Provence, this region of hot blood and ardent heads, who, for the first time in his life finding himself face to face with jewelled love in laces, believed he was to drink that passion from a wrought-gold cup. Just as our minds on waking keep the impression of a vivid dream and continue in love with what we know was but a shadow, la Peyrade had need of all his mental energy to drive away the memory of that treacherous countess. We might go further and say that he never ceased to long for her, though he was careful to drape with an honest pretext the intense desire that he had to find her. That desire he called curiosity, ardor for revenge; and here follow the ingenious deductions which he drew for himself: —
“Cerizet talked to me about a rich heiress; the countess, in her letter, intimates that the whole intrigue she wound about me was to lead to a rich marriage; rich marriages flung at a man’s head are not so plentiful that two such chances should come to me within a few weeks; therefore the match offered by Cerizet and that proposed by the countess must be the crazy girl they are so frantic to make me marry; therefore Cerizet, being in the plot, must know the countess; therefore, through him I shall get upon her traces. In any case, I am sure of information about this extraordinary choice that has fallen upon me; evidently, these people, whoever they are, who can pull the wires of such puppets to reach their ends must be persons of considerable position; therefore, I’ll go and see Cerizet.”
And he went to see Cerizet.
Since the dinner at the Rocher de Cancale, the pair had not met. Once or twice la Peyrade had asked Dutocq at the Thuilliers’ (where the latter seldom went now, on account of the distance to their new abode) what had become of his copying clerk.
“He never speaks of you,” Dutocq had answered.
Hence it might be inferred that resentment, the “manet alta mente repostum” was still living in the breast of the vindictive usurer. La Peyrade, however, was not stopped by that consideration. After all, he was not going to ask for anything; he went under the pretext of renewing an affair in which Cerizet had taken part, and Cerizet never took part in anything unless he had a personal interest in it. The chances were, therefore, that he would be received with affectionate eagerness rather than unpleasant acerbity. Moreover, he decided to go and see the copying clerk at Dutocq’s office; it would look, he thought, less like a visit than if he went to his den in the rue des Poules. It was nearly two o’clock when la Peyrade made his entrance into the precincts of the justice-of-peace of the 12th arrondissement. He crossed the first room, in which were a crowd of persons whom civil suits of one kind or another summoned before the magistrate. Without pausing in that waiting-room, la Peyrade pushed on to the office adjoining that of Dutocq. There he found Cerizet at a shabby desk of blackened wood, at which another clerk, then absent, occupied the opposite seat.
Seeing his visitor, Cerizet cast a savage look at him and said, without rising, or suspending the copy of the judgment he was then engrossing: —
“You here, Sieur la Peyrade? You have been doing fine things for your friend Thuillier!”