The Lesser Bourgeoisie by Honore de Balzac (freenovel24 TXT) 📖

beams formerly painted and gilt, but which had since

received, probably under the Empire, a coat of plain white paint. The

three doors of the study, salon and dining-room, surmounted by oval

panels, are awaiting a restoration that is more than needed. The

wood-work is heavy, but the ornamentation is not without merit. The

salon, panelled throughout, recalls the great century by its tall

mantelpiece of Languedoc marble, its ceiling decorated at the corners,

and by the style of its windows, which still retain their little panes.

The dining-room, communicating with the salon by a double door, is

floored with stone; the wood-work is oak, unpainted, and an atrocious

modern wall-paper has been substituted for the tapestries of the olden

time. The ceiling is of chestnut; and the study, modernized by

Thuillier, adds its quota to these discordances.

 

The white and gold mouldings of the salon are so effaced that nothing

remains of the gilding but reddish lines, while the white enamelling

is yellow, cracked, and peeling off. Never did the Latin saying "Otium

cum dignitate" have a greater commentary to the mind of a poet than in

this noble building. The iron-work of the staircase baluster is worthy

of the artist and the magistrate; but to find other traces of their

taste to-day in this majestic relic, the eyes of an artistic observer

are needed.

 

The Thuilliers and their predecessors have frequently degraded this

jewel of the upper bourgeoisie by the habits and inventions of the

lesser bourgeoisie. Look at those walnut chairs covered with

horse-hair, that mahogany table with its oilcloth cover, that

sideboard, also of mahogany, that carpet, bought at a bargain, beneath

the table, those metal lamps, that wretched paper with its red border,

those execrable engravings, and the calico curtains with red fringes,

in a dining-room, where the friends of Petitot once feasted! Do you

notice the effect produced in the salon by those portraits of Monsieur

and Madame and Mademoiselle Thuillier by Pierre Grassou, the artist

par excellence of the modern bourgeoisie. Have you remarked the

card-tables and the consoles of the Empire, the tea-table supported by

a lyre, and that species of sofa, of gnarled mahogany, covered in

painted velvet of a chocolate tone? On the chimney-piece, with the

clock (representing the Bellona of the Empire), are candelabra with

fluted columns. Curtains of woollen damask, with under-curtains of

embroidered muslin held back by stamped brass holders, drape the

windows. On the floor a cheap carpet. The handsome vestibule has

wooden benches, covered with velvet, and the panelled walls with their

fine carvings are mostly hidden by wardrobes, brought there from time

to time from the bedrooms occupied by the Thuilliers. Fear, that

hideous divinity, has caused the family to add sheet-iron doors on the

garden side and on the courtyard side, which are folded back against

the walls in the daytime, and are closed at night.

 

It is easy to explain the deplorable profanation practised on this

monument of the private life of the bourgeoisie of the seventeenth

century, by the private life of the bourgeoisie of the nineteenth. At

the beginning of the Consulate, let us say, some master-mason having

bought the ancient building, took the idea of turning to account the

ground which lay between it and the street. He probably pulled down

the fine porte-cochere or entrance gate, flanked by little lodges

which guarded the charming "sejour" (to use a word of the olden time),

and proceeded, with the industry of a Parisian proprietor, to impress

his withering mark on the elegance of the old building. What a curious

study might be made of the successive title-deeds of property in

Paris! A private lunatic asylum performs its functions in the rue des

Batailles in the former dwelling of the Chevalier Pierre Bayard du

Terrail, once without fear and without reproach; a street has now been

built by the present bourgeois administration through the site of the

hotel Necker. Old Paris is departing, following its kings who

abandoned it. For one masterpiece of architecture saved from

destruction by a Polish princess (the hotel Lambert, Ile Saint-Louis,

bought and occupied by the Princess Czartoriska) how many little

palaces have fallen, like this dwelling of Petitot, into the hands of

such as Thuillier.

 

Here follows the causes which made Mademoiselle Thuillier the owner of

the house. 

CHAPTER II (THE HISTORY OF A TYRANNY)

At the fall of the Villele ministry, Monsieur Louis-Jerome Thuillier,

who had then seen twenty-six years' service as a clerk in the ministry

of finance, became sub-director of a department thereof; but scarcely

had he enjoyed the subaltern authority of a position formerly his

lowest hope, when the events of July, 1830, forced him to resign it.

He calculated, shrewdly enough, that his pension would be honorably

and readily given by the new-comers, glad to have another office at

their disposal. He was right; for a pension of seventeen hundred

francs was paid to him immediately.

 

When the prudent sub-director first talked of resigning, his sister,

who was far more the companion of his life than his wife, trembled for

his future.

 

"What will become of Thuillier?" was a question which Madame and

Mademoiselle Thuillier put to each other with mutual terror in their

little lodging on a third floor of the rue d'Argenteuil.

 

"Securing his pension will occupy him for a time," Mademoiselle

Thuillier said one day; "but I am thinking of investing my savings in

a way that will cut out work for him. Yes; it will be something like

administrating the finances to manage a piece of property."

 

"Oh, sister! you will save his life," cried Madame Thuillier.

 

"I have always looked for a crisis of this kind in Jerome's life,"

replied the old maid, with a protecting air.

 

Mademoiselle Thuillier had too often heard her brother remark: "Such a

one is dead; he only survived his retirement two years"; she had too

often heard Colleville, her brother's intimate friend, a government

employee like himself, say, jesting on this climacteric of

bureaucrats, "We shall all come to it, ourselves," not to appreciate

the danger her brother was running. The change from activity to

leisure is, in truth, the critical period for government employees of

all kinds.

 

Those of them who know not how to substitute, or perhaps cannot

substitute other occupations for the work to which they have been

accustomed, change in a singular manner; some die outright; others

take to fishing, the vacancy of that amusement resembling that of

their late employment under government; others, who are smarter men,

dabble in stocks, lose their savings, and are thankful to obtain a

place in some enterprise that is likely to succeed, after a first

disaster and liquidation, in the hands of an abler management. The

late clerk then rubs his hands, now empty, and says to himself, "I

always did foresee the success of the business." But nearly all these

retired bureaucrats have to fight against their former habits.

 

"Some," Colleville used to say, "are victims to a sort of 'spleen'

peculiar to the government clerk; they die of a checked circulation; a

red-tapeworm is in their vitals. That little Poiret couldn't see the

well-known white carton without changing color at the beloved sight;

he used to turn from green to yellow."

 

Mademoiselle Thuillier was considered the moving spirit of her

brother's household; she was not without decision and force of

character, as the following history will show. This superiority over

those who immediately surrounded her enabled her to judge her brother,

although she adored him. After witnessing the failure of the hopes she

had set upon her idol, she had too much real maternity in her feeling

for him to let herself be mistaken as to his social value.

 

Thuillier and his sister were children of the head porter at the

ministry of finance. Jerome had escaped, thanks to his

near-sightedness, all drafts and conscriptions. The father's ambition

was to make his son a government clerk. At the beginning of this

century the army presented too many posts not to leave various

vacancies in the government offices. A deficiency of minor officials

enabled old Pere Thuillier to hoist his son upon the lowest step of the

bureaucratic hierarchy. The old man died in 1814, leaving Jerome on

the point of becoming sub-director, but with no other fortune than

that prospect. The worthy Thuillier and his wife (who died in 1810)

had retired from active service in 1806, with a pension as their only

means of support; having spent what property they had in giving Jerome

the education required in these days, and in supporting both him and

his sister.

 

The influence of the Restoration on the bureaucracy is well known.

From the forty and one suppressed departments a crowd of honorable

employees returned to Paris with nothing to do, and clamorous for

places inferior to those they had lately occupied. To these acquired

rights were added those of exiled families ruined by the Revolution.

Pressed between the two floods, Jerome thought himself lucky not to

have been dismissed under some frivolous pretext. He trembled until

the day when, becoming by mere chance sub-director, he saw himself

secure of a retiring pension. This cursory view of matters will serve

to explain Monsieur Thuillier's very limited scope and knowledge. He

had learned the Latin, mathematics, history, and geography that are

taught in schools, but he never got beyond what is called the second

class; his father having preferred to take advantage of a sudden

opportunity to place him at the ministry. So, while the young

Thuillier was making his first records on the Grand-Livre, he ought to

have been studying his rhetoric and philosophy.

 

While grinding the ministerial machine, he had no leisure to cultivate

letters, still less the arts; but he acquired a routine knowledge of

his business, and when he had an opportunity to rise, under the

Empire, to the sphere of superior employees, he assumed a superficial

air of competence which concealed the son of a porter, though none of

it rubbed into his mind. His ignorance, however, taught him to keep

silence, and silence served him well. He accustomed himself to

practise, under the imperial regime, a passive obedience which pleased

his superiors; and it was to this quality that he owed at a later

period his promotion to the rank of sub-director. His routine habits

then became great experience; his manners and his silence concealed

his lack of education, and his absolute nullity was a recommendation,

for a cipher was needed. The government was afraid of displeasing both

parties in the Chamber by selecting a man from either side; it

therefore got out of the difficulty by resorting to the rule of

seniority. That is how Thuillier became sub-director. Mademoiselle

Thuillier, knowing that her brother abhorred reading, and could

substitute no business for the bustle of a public office, had wisely

resolved to plunge him into the cares of property, into the culture of

a garden, in short, into all the infinitely petty concerns and

neighborhood intrigues which make up the life of the bourgeoisie.

 

The transplanting of the Thuillier household from the rue d'Argenteuil

to the rue Saint-Dominique d'Enfer, the business of making the

purchase, of finding a suitable porter, and then of obtaining tenants

occupied Thuillier from 1831 to 1832. When the phenomenon of the

change was accomplished, and the sister saw that Jerome had borne it

fairly well, she found him other cares and occupations (about which we

shall hear later), all based upon the character of the man himself, as

to which it will now be useful to give information.

 

Though the son of a ministerial porter, Thuillier was what is called a

fine man, slender in figure, above middle height, and possessing a

face that was rather agreeable if wearing his spectacles, but

frightful without them; which is frequently the case with near-sighted

persons; for the habit of looking through glasses has covered the

pupils of his eyes with a sort of film.

 

Between the ages of eighteen and thirty, young Thuillier had much

success among women, in a sphere which began with the lesser bourgeois

and ended in that of the heads of departments. Under the Empire, war

left Parisian society rather denuded of men of energy, who were mostly

on the battlefield; and perhaps, as a great physician has suggested,

this may account