Maitre Cornelius by Honoré de Balzac (i read book txt) 📖

to promote the marriage of the Burgundian heiress with Monseigneur. She will bring you a noble treasure, not of money, but of lands, which will round out the glory of your crown."

"There, there, Dutchman, you are trying to hoodwink me," said the king, with frowning brows, "or else you have already done so."

"Sire! can you doubt my devotion? you, who are the only man I love!"

"All that is talk," returned the king, looking the other in the eyes. "You need not have waited till this moment to do me that service. You are selling me your influence--Pasques-Dieu! to me, Louis XI.! Are you the master, and am I your servant?"

"Ah, sire," said the old man, "I was waiting to surprise you agreeably with news of the arrangements I had made for you in Ghent; I was awaiting confirmation from Oosterlinck through that apprentice. What has become of that young man?"

"Enough!" said the king; "this is only one more blunder you have committed. I do not like persons to meddle in my affairs without my knowledge. Enough! leave me; I wish to reflect upon all this."

Maitre Cornelius found the agility of youth to run downstairs to the lower rooms where he was certain to find his sister.

"Ah! Jeanne, my dearest soul, a hoard is hidden in this house; I have put thirteen hundred thousand crowns and all the jewels somewhere. I, I, I am the robber!"

Jeanne Hoogworst rose from her stool and stood erect as if the seat she quitted were of red-hot iron. This shock was so violent for an old maid accustomed for years to reduce herself by voluntary fasts, that she trembled in every limb, and horrible pains were in her back. She turned pale by degrees, and her face,--the changes in which were difficult to decipher among its wrinkles,--became distorted while her brother explained to her the malady of which he was the victim, and the extraordinary situation in which he found himself.

"Louis XI. and I," he said in conclusion, "have just been lying to each other like two peddlers of coconuts. You understand, my girl, that if he follows me, he will get the secret of the hiding-place. The king alone can watch my wanderings at night. I don't feel sure that his conscience, near as he is to death, can resist thirteen hundred thousand crowns. We MUST be beforehand with him; we must find the hidden treasure and send it to Ghent, and you alone--"

Cornelius stopped suddenly, and seemed to be weighing the heart of the sovereign who had had thoughts of parricide at twenty-two years of age. When his judgment of Louis XI. was concluded, he rose abruptly like a man in haste to escape a pressing danger. At this instant, his sister, too feeble or too strong for such a crisis, fell stark; she was dead. Maitre Cornelius seized her, and shook her violently, crying out:

"You cannot die now. There is time enough later--Oh! it is all over. The old hag never could do anything at the right time."

He closed her eyes and laid her on the floor. Then the good and noble feelings which lay at the bottom of his soul came back to him, and, half forgetting his hidden treasure, he cried out mournfully:--

"Oh! my poor companion, have I lost you?--you who understood me so well! Oh! you were my real treasure. There it lies, my treasure! With you, my peace of mind, my affections, all, are gone. If you had only known what good it would have done me to live two nights longer, you would have lived, solely to please me, my poor sister! Ah, Jeanne! thirteen hundred thousand crowns! Won't that wake you?--No, she is dead!"

Thereupon, he sat down, and said no more; but two great tears issued from his eyes and rolled down his hollow cheeks; then, with strange exclamations of grief, he locked up the room and returned to the king. Louis XI. was struck with the expression of sorrow on the moistened features of his old friend.

"What is the matter?" he asked.

"Ah! sire, misfortunes never come singly. My sister is dead. She precedes me there below," he said, pointing to the floor with a dreadful gesture.

"Enough!" cried Louis XI., who did not like to hear of death.

"I make you my heir. I care for nothing now. Here are my keys. Hang me, if that's your good pleasure. Take all, ransack the house; it is full of gold. I give up all to you--"

"Come, come, crony," replied Louis XI., who was partly touched by the sight of this strange suffering, "we shall find your treasure some fine night, and the sight of such riches will give you heart to live. I will come back in the course of this week--"

"As you please, sire."

At that answer the king, who had made a few steps toward the door of the chamber, turned round abruptly. The two men looked at each other with an expression that neither pen nor pencil can reproduce.

"Adieu, my crony," said Louis XI. at last in a curt voice, pushing up his cap.

"May God and the Virgin keep you in their good graces!" replied the silversmith humbly, conducting the king to the door of the house.

After so long a friendship, the two men found a barrier raised between them by suspicion and gold; though they had always been like one man on the two points of gold and suspicion. But they knew each other so well, they had so completely the habit, one may say, of each other, that the king could divine, from the tone in which Cornelius uttered the words, "As you please, sire," the repugnance that his visits would henceforth cause to the silversmith, just as the latter recognized a declaration of war in the "Adieu, my crony," of the king.

Thus Louis XI. and his torconnier parted much in doubt as to the conduct they ought in future to hold to each other. The monarch possessed the secret of the Fleming; but on the other hand, the latter could, by his connections, bring about one of the finest acquisitions that any king of France had ever made; namely, that of the domains of the house of Burgundy, which the sovereigns of Europe were then coveting. The marriage of the celebrated Marguerite depended on the people of Ghent and the Flemings who surrounded her. The gold and the influence of Cornelius could powerfully support the negotiations now begun by Desquerdes, the general to whom Louis XI. had given the command of the army encamped on the frontiers of Belgium. These two master-foxes were, therefore, like two duellists, whose arms are paralyzed by chance.

So, whether it were that from that day the king's health failed and went from bad to worse, or that Cornelius did assist in bringing into France Marguerite of Burgundy--who arrived at Ambroise in July, 1438, to marry the Dauphin to whom she was betrothed in the chapel of the castle--certain it is that the king took no steps in the matter of the hidden treasure; he levied no tribute from his silversmith, and the pair remained in the cautious condition of an armed friendship. Happily for Cornelius a rumor was spread about Tours that his sister was the actual robber, and that she had been secretly put to death by Tristan. Otherwise, if the true history had been known, the whole town would have risen as one man to destroy the Malemaison before the king could have taken measures to protect it.

But, although these historical conjectures have some foundation so far as the inaction of Louis XI. is concerned, it is not so as regards Cornelius Hoogworst. There was no inaction there. The silversmith spent the first days which succeeded that fatal night in ceaseless occupation. Like carnivorous animals confined in cages, he went and came, smelling for gold in every corner of his house; he studied the cracks and crevices, he sounded the walls, he besought the trees of the garden, the foundations of the house, the roofs of the turrets, the earth and the heavens, to give him back his treasure. Often he stood motionless for hours, casting his eyes on all sides, plunging them into the void. Striving for the miracles of ecstasy and the powers of sorcery, he tried to see his riches through space and obstacles. He was constantly absorbed in one overwhelming thought, consumed with a single desire that burned his entrails, gnawed more cruelly still by the ever-increasing agony of the duel he was fighting with himself since his passion for gold had turned to his own injury,--a species of uncompleted suicide which kept him at once in the miseries of life and in those of death.

Never was a Vice more punished by itself. A miser, locked by accident into the subterranean strong-room that contains his treasures, has, like Sardanapalus, the happiness of dying in the midst of his wealth. But Cornelius, the robber and the robbed, knowing the secret of neither the one nor the other, possessed and did not possess his treasure,--a novel, fantastic, but continually terrible torture. Sometimes, becoming forgetful, he would leave the little gratings of his door wide open, and then the passers in the street could see that already wizened man, planted on his two legs in the midst of his untilled garden, absolutely motionless, and casting on those who watched him a fixed gaze, the insupportable light of which froze them with terror. If, by chance, he walked through the streets of Tours, he seemed like a stranger in them; he knew not where he was, nor whether the sun or the moon were shining. Often he would ask his way of those who passed him, believing that he was still in Ghent, and seeming to be in search of something lost.

The most perennial and the best materialized of human ideas, the idea by which man reproduces himself by creating outside of himself the fictitious being called Property, that mental demon, drove its steel claws perpetually into his heart. Then, in the midst of this torture, Fear arose, with all its accompanying sentiments. Two men had his secret, the secret he did not know himself. Louis XI. or Coyctier could post men to watch him during his sleep and discover the unknown gulf into which he had cast his riches,--those riches he had watered with the blood of so many innocent men. And then, beside his fear, arose Remorse.

In order to prevent during his lifetime the abduction of his hidden treasure, he took the most cruel precautions against sleep; besides which, his commercial relations put him in the way of obtaining powerful anti-narcotics. His struggles to keep awake were awful--alone with night, silence, Remorse, and Fear, with all the thoughts that man, instinctively perhaps, has best embodied--obedient thus to a moral truth as yet devoid of actual proof.

At last this man so powerful, this heart so hardened by political and commercial life, this genius, obscure in history, succumbed to the horrors of the torture he had himself created. Maddened by certain thoughts more agonizing than those he had as yet resisted, he cut his throat with a razor.

This death coincided, almost, with that of Louis XI. Nothing then restrained the populace, and Malemaison, that Evil House, was pillaged. A tradition exists among the older inhabitants of Touraine that a contractor of public works, named Bohier, found the miser's treasure and used it in the construction of Chenonceaux, that marvellous chateau which, in spite of the wealth of several kings and the taste of Diane de Poitiers and Catherine de' Medici for building,