The Lesser Bourgeoisie by Honore de Balzac (freenovel24 TXT) 📖
- Author: Honore de Balzac
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To Constance-Victoire.
Here, madame, is one of those books which come into the mind,
whence no one knows, giving pleasure to the author before he can
foresee what reception the public, our great present judge, will
accord to it. Feeling almost certain of your sympathy in my
pleasure, I dedicate the book to you. Ought it not to belong to
you as the tithe formerly belonged to the Church in memory of God,
who makes all things bud and fruit in the fields and in the
intellect?
A few lumps of clay, left by Moliere at the feet of his colossal
statue of Tartuffe, have here been kneaded by a hand more daring
than able; but, at whatever distance I may be from the greatest of
comic writers, I shall still be glad to have used these crumbs in
showing the modern Hypocrite in action. The chief encouragement
that I have had in this difficult undertaking was in finding it
apart from all religious questions,--questions which ought to be
kept out of it for the sake of one so pious as yourself; and also
because of what a great writer has lately called our present
"indifference in matters of religion."
May the double signification of your names be for my book a
prophecy! Deign to find here the respectful gratitude of him who
ventures to call himself the most devoted of your servants.
De Balzac.
CHAPTER I (DEPARTING PARIS)The tourniquet Saint-Jean, the narrow passage entered through a
turnstile, a description of which was said to be so wearisome in the
study entitled "A Double Life" (Scenes from Private Life), that naive
relic of old Paris, has at the present moment no existence except in
our said typography. The building of the Hotel-de-Ville, such as we
now see it, swept away a whole section of the city.
In 1830, passers along the street could still see the turnstile
painted on the sign of a wine-merchant, but even that house, its last
asylum, has been demolished. Alas! old Paris is disappearing with
frightful rapidity. Here and there, in the course of this history of
Parisian life, will be found preserved, sometimes the type of the
dwellings of the middle ages, like that described in "Fame and Sorrow"
(Scenes from Private Life), one or two specimens of which exist to the
present day; sometimes a house like that of Judge Popinot, rue du
Fouarre, a specimen of the former bourgeoisie; here, the remains of
Fulbert's house; there, the old dock of the Seine as it was under
Charles IX. Why should not the historian of French society, a new Old
Mortality, endeavor to save these curious expressions of the past, as
Walter Scott's old man rubbed up the tombstones? Certainly, for the
last ten years the outcries of literature in this direction have not
been superfluous; art is beginning to disguise beneath its floriated
ornaments those ignoble facades of what are called in Paris "houses of
product," which one of our poets has jocosely compared to chests of
drawers.
Let us remark here, that the creation of the municipal commission "del
ornamento" which superintends at Milan the architecture of street
facades, and to which every house owner is compelled to subject his
plan, dates from the seventeenth century. Consequently, we see in that
charming capital the effects of this public spirit on the part of
nobles and burghers, while we admire their buildings so full of
character and originality. Hideous, unrestrained speculation which,
year after year, changes the uniform level of storeys, compresses a
whole apartment into the space of what used to be a salon, and wages
war upon gardens, will infallibly react on Parisian manners and
morals. We shall soon be forced to live more without than within. Our
sacred private life, the freedom and liberty of home, where will they
be?--reserved for those who can muster fifty thousand francs a year!
In fact, few millionaires now allow themselves the luxury of a house
to themselves, guarded by a courtyard on a street and protected from
public curiosity by a shady garden at the back.
By levelling fortunes, that section of the Code which regulates
testamentary bequests, has produced these huge stone phalansteries, in
which thirty families are often lodged, returning a rental of a
hundred thousand francs a year. Fifty years hence we shall be able to
count on our fingers the few remaining houses which resemble that
occupied, at the moment our narrative begins, by the Thuillier family,
--a really curious house which deserves the honor of an exact
description, if only to compare the life of the bourgeoisie of former
times with that of to-day.
The situation and the aspect of this house, the frame of our present
Scene of manners and morals, has, moreover, a flavor, a perfume of the
lesser bourgeoisie, which may attract or repel attention according to
the taste of each reader.
In the first place, the Thuillier house did not belong to either
Monsieur or Madame Thuillier, but to Mademoiselle Thuillier, the
sister of Monsieur Thuillier.
This house, bought during the first six months which followed the
revolution of July by Mademoiselle Marie-Jeanne-Brigitte Thuillier,
a spinster of full age, stands about the middle of the rue
Saint-Dominique d'Enfer, to the right as you enter by the rue d'Enfer,
so that the main building occupied by Monsieur Thuillier faces south.
The progressive movement which is carrying the Parisian population to
the heights along the right bank of the Seine had long injured the
sale of property in what is called the "Latin quarter," when reasons,
which will be given when we come to treat of the character and habits
of Monsieur Thuillier, determined his sister to the purchase of real
estate. She obtained this property for the small sum of forty-six
thousand francs; certain extras amounted to six thousand more; in all,
the price paid was fifty-two thousand francs. A description of the
property given in the style of an advertisement, and the results
obtained by Monsieur Thuillier's exertions, will explain by what means
so many fortunes increased enormously after July, 1830, while so many
others sank.
Toward the street the house presents a facade of rough stone covered
with plaster, cracked by weather and lined by the mason's instrument
into a semblance of blocks of cut stone. This frontage is so common
in Paris and so ugly that the city ought to offer premiums to
house-owners who would build their facades of cut-stone blocks.
Seven windows lighted the gray front of this house which was raised
three storeys, ending in a mansard roof covered with slate. The
porte-cochere, heavy and solid, showed by its workmanship and style
that the front building on the street had been erected in the days of
the Empire, to utilize a part of the courtyard of the vast old mansion,
built at an epoch when the quarter d'Enfer enjoyed a certain vogue.
On one side was the porter's lodge; on the other the staircase of the
front building. Two wings, built against the adjoining houses, had
formerly served as stables, coach-house, kitchen and offices to the
rear dwelling; but since 1830, they had been converted into warerooms.
The one on the right was let to a certain M. Metivier, jr., wholesale
dealer in paper; that on the left to a bookseller named Barbet. The
offices of each were above the warerooms; the bookseller occupying the
first storey, and the paper-dealer the second storey of the house on
the street. Metivier, jr., who was more of a commission merchant in
paper than a regular dealer, and Barbet, much more of a money lender
and discounter than a bookseller, kept these vast warerooms for the
purpose of storing,--one, his stacks of paper, bought of needy
manufacturers, the other, editions of books given as security for
loans.
The shark of bookselling and the pike of paper-dealing lived on the
best of terms, and their mutual operations, exempt from the turmoil of
retail business, brought so few carriages into that tranquil courtyard
that the concierge was obliged to pull up the grass between the paving
stones. Messrs. Barbet and Metivier paid a few rare visits to their
landlords, and the punctuality with which they paid their rent classed
them as good tenants; in fact, they were looked upon as very honest
men by the Thuillier circle.
As for the third floor on the street, it was made into two apartments;
one of which was occupied by M. Dutocq, clerk of the justice of peace,
a retired government employee, and a frequenter of the Thuillier
salon; the other by the hero of this Scene, about whom we must content
ourselves at the present moment by fixing the amount of his rent,
--namely, seven hundred francs a year,--and the location he had chosen
in the heart of this well-filled building, exactly three years before
the curtain rises on the present domestic drama.
The clerk, a bachelor of fifty, occupied the larger of the two
apartments on the third floor. He kept a cook, and the rent of the
rooms was a thousand francs a year. Within two years of the time of
her purchase, Mademoiselle Thuillier was receiving seven thousand two
hundred francs in rentals, for a house which the late proprietor had
supplied with outside blinds, renovated within, and adorned with
mirrors, without being able to sell or let it. Moreover, the
Thuilliers themselves, nobly lodged, as we shall see, enjoyed also a
fine garden,--one of the finest in that quarter,--the trees of which
shaded the lonely little street named the rue Neuve-Saint-Catherine.
Standing between the courtyard and the garden, the main building,
which they inhabited, seems to have been the caprice of some enriched
bourgeois in the reign of Louis XIV.; the dwelling, perhaps, of a
president of the parliament, or that of a tranquil savant. Its noble
free-stone blocks, damaged by time, have a certain air of
Louis-the-Fourteenth grandeur; the courses of the facade define the
storeys; panels of red brick recall the appearance of the stables at
Versailles; the windows have masks carved as ornaments in the centre
of their arches and below their sills. The door, of small panels in
the upper half and plain below, through which, when open, the garden
can be seen, is of that honest, unassuming style which was often
employed in former days for the porter's lodges of the royal chateaux.
This building, with five windows to each course, rises two storeys
above the ground-floor, and is particularly noticeable for a roof of
four sides ending in a weather-vane, and broken here and there by
tall, handsome chimneys, and oval windows. Perhaps this structure is
the remains of some great mansion; but after examining all the
existing old maps of Paris, we find nothing which bears out this
conjecture. Moreover, the title-deeds of property under Louis XIV. was
Petitot, the celebrated painter in miniature, who obtained it
originally from President Lecamus. We may therefore believe that
Lecamus lived in this building while he was erecting his more famous
mansion in the rue de Thorigny.
So Art and the legal robe have passed this way in turn. How many
instigations of needs and pleasures have led to the interior
arrangement of the dwelling! To right, as we enter a square hall
forming a closed vestibule, rises a stone staircase with two windows
looking on the garden. Beneath the staircase opens a door to the
cellar. From this vestibule we enter the dining-room, lighted from the
courtyard, and the dining-room communicates at its side with the
kitchen, which forms a continuation of the wing in which are the
warerooms of Metivier and Barbet. Behind the staircase extends, on the
garden side, a fine study or office with two large windows. The first
and second floor form two complete apartments, and the servants'
quarters are shown by the oval windows in the four-sided roof.
A large porcelain stove heats the square vestibule, the two glass
doors of which, placed opposite to each other, light it. This room,
paved in black and white marble, is especially noticeable for a
ceiling of
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