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

door

of that room which opened on the common landing should be walled up.

The place had thus become a fortress. The bedroom above had a cheap

carpet bought for twenty francs, an iron bedstead, a bureau, three

chairs, and an iron safe, made by a good workman, which Cerizet had

bought at a bargain. He shaved before a glass on the chimney-piece; he

owned two pairs of cotton sheets and six cotton shirts; the rest of

his visible wardrobe was of the same character. Cadenet had once seen

Cerizet dressed like a dandy of the period; he must, therefore, have

kept hidden, in some drawer of his bureau, a complete disguise with

which he could go to the opera, see the world, and not be recognized,

for, had it not been that Cadenet heard his voice, he would certainly

have asked him who he was.

 

What pleased the clients of this man most was his joviality and his

repartees; he talked their language. Cadenet, his two shop-men, and

Cerizet, living in the midst of dreadful misery, behaved with the

calmness of undertakers in presence of afflicted heirs, of old

sergeants of the Guard among heaps of dead. They no more shuddered on

hearing cries of hunger and despair than surgeons shudder at the cries

of their patients in hospital; they said, as the soldiers and the

dressers said, the perfunctory words, "Have patience! a little

courage! What's the good of grieving? Suppose you kill yourself, what

then? One gets accustomed to everything; be reasonable!"

 

Though Cerizet took the precaution to hide the money necessary for his

morning operations in the hollow seat of the chair in which he sat,

taking out no more than a hundred francs at a time, which he put in

the pockets of his trousers, never dipping into the funds of the chair

except between the entrance of two batches of clients (keeping his

door locked and not opening it till all was safely stowed in his

pockets), he had really nothing to fear from the various despairs

which found their way from all sides to this rendezvous of misery.

Certainly, there are many different ways of being honest and virtuous;

and the "Monograph of Virtue" has no other basis than this social

axiom.[*] A man is false to his conscience; he fails, apparently, in

delicacy; he forfeits that bloom of honor which, though lost, does

not, as yet, mean general disrepute; at last, however, he fails

decidedly in honor; if he falls into the hands of the correctional

police, he is not, as yet, guilty of crime before the court of

assizes; but after he is branded with infamy by the verdict of a jury

he may still be honored at the galleys for the species of honor and

integrity practised by criminals among themselves, which consists in

not betraying each other, in sharing booty loyally, and in running all

dangers. Well, this last form of honor--which is perhaps a

calculation, a necessity, the practice of which offers certain

opportunities for grandeur to the guilty man and the possibility of a

return to good--reigned absolutely between Cerizet and his clients.

Never did Cerizet make an error, nor his poor people either; neither

side ever denied what was due, either capital or interests. Many a

time Cerizet, who was born among the people, corrected from one week

to another some accidental error, to the benefit of a poor man who had

never discovered it. He was called a Jew, but an honest one, and his

word in that city of sorrows was sacred. A woman died, causing a loss

to him of thirty francs:

 

[*] A book on which the author has been at work since 1833, the year

   in which it was first announced.--Author's note.

 

"See my profits! there they go!" he said to his assemblage, "and you

howl upon me! You know I'll never trouble the brats; in fact, Cadenet

has already taken them bread and heel-taps."

 

After that it was said of him in both faubourgs:--

 

"He is not a bad fellow!"

 

The "loan by the little week," as interpreted by Cerizet, is not,

considering all things, so cruel a thing as the pawn-shop. Cerizet

loaned ten francs Tuesday on condition of receiving twelve francs

Sunday morning. In five weeks he doubled his capital; but he had to

make many compromises. His kindness consisted in accepting, from time

to time, eleven francs and fifty centimes; sometimes the whole

interest was still owing. When he gave fifty francs for sixty to a

fruit-stall man, or a hundred francs for one hundred and twenty to a

seller of peat-fuel, he ran great risks.

 

On reaching the rue des Poules through the rue des Postes, Theodose

and Dutocq saw a great assemblage of men and women, and by the light

which the wine-merchant's little oil-lamps cast upon these groups,

they were horrified at beholding that mass of red, seamed, haggard

faces; solemn with suffering, withered, distorted, swollen with wine,

pallid from liquor; some threatening, others resigned, some sarcastic

or jeering, others besotted; all rising from the midst of those

terrible rags, which no designer can surpass in his most extravagant

caricatures.

 

"I shall be recognized," said Theodose, pulling Dutocq away; "we have

done a foolish thing to come here at this hour and take him in the

midst of his business."

 

"All the more that Claparon may be sleeping in his lair, the interior

of which we know nothing about. Yes, there are dangers for you, but

none for me; I shall be thought to have business with my

copying-clerk, and I'll go and tell him to come and dine with us; this

is court day, so we can't have him to breakfast. I'll tell him to meet

us at the 'Chaumiere' in one of the garden dining-rooms."

 

"Bad; anybody could listen to us there without being seen," said la

Peyrade. "I prefer the 'Petit Rocher de Cancale'; we can go into a

private room and speak low."

 

"But suppose you are seen with Cerizet?"

 

"Well, then, let's go to the 'Cheval Rouge,' quai de la Tournelle."

 

"That's best; seven o'clock; nobody will be there then."

 

Dutocq advanced alone into the midst of that congress of beggars, and

he heard his own name repeated from mouth to mouth, for he could

hardly fail to encounter among them some jail-bird familiar with the

judge's office, just as Theodose was certain to have met a client.

 

In these quarters the justice-of-peace is the supreme authority; all

legal contests stop short at his office, especially since the law was

passed giving to those judges sovereign power in all cases of

litigation involving not over one hundred and forty francs. A way was

made for the judge's clerk, who was not less feared than the judge

himself. He saw women seated on the staircase; a horrible display of

pallor and suffering of many kinds. Dutocq was almost asphyxiated when

he opened the door of the room in which already sixty persons had left

their odors.

 

"Your number? your number?" cried several voices.

 

"Hold your jaw!" cried a gruff voice from the street, "that's the pen

of the judge."

 

Profound silence followed. Dutocq found his copying clerk clothed in a

jacket of yellow leather like that of the gloves of the gendarmerie,

beneath which he wore an ignoble waistcoat of knitted wool. The reader

must imagine the man's diseased head issuing from this species of

scabbard and covered with a miserable Madras handkerchief, which,

leaving to view the forehead and neck, gave to that head, by the gleam

of a tallow candle of twelve to the pound, its naturally hideous and

threatening character.

 

"It can't be done that way, papa Lantimeche," Cerizet was saying to a

tall old man, seeming to be about seventy years of age, who was

standing before him with a red woollen cap in his hand, exhibiting a

bald head, and a breast covered with white hairs visible through his

miserable linen jacket. "Tell me exactly what you want to undertake.

One hundred francs, even on condition of getting back one hundred and

twenty, can't be let loose that way, like a dog in a church--"

 

The five other applicants, among whom were two women, both with

infants, one knitting, the other suckling her child, burst out

laughing.

 

When Cerizet saw Dutocq, he rose respectfully and went rather hastily

to meet him, adding to his client:--

 

"Take time to reflect; for, don't you see? it makes me doubtful to

have such a sum as that, one hundred francs! asked for by an old

journeyman locksmith!"

 

"But I tell you it concerns an invention," cried the old workman.

 

"An invention and one hundred francs!" said Dutocq. "You don't know

the laws; you must take out a patent, and that costs two thousand

francs, and you want influence."

 

"All that is true," said Cerizet, who, however, reckoned a good deal

on such chances. "Come to-morrow morning, papa Lantimeche, at six

o'clock, and we'll talk it over; you can't talk inventions in public."

 

Cerizet then turned to Dutocq whose first words were:--

 

"If the thing turns out well, half profits!"

 

"Why did you get up at this time in the morning to come here and say

that to me?" demanded the distrustful Cerizet, already displeased with

the mention of "half profits." "You could have seen me as usual at the

office."

 

And he looked askance at Dutocq; the latter, while telling him his

errand and speaking of Claparon and the necessity of pushing forward

in the Theodose affair, seemed confused.

 

"All the same you could have seen me this morning at the office,"

repeated Cerizet, conducting his visitor to the door.

 

"There's a man," thought he, as he returned to his seat, "who seems to

me to have breathed on his lantern so that I may not see clear. Well,

well, I'll give up that place of copying clerk. Ha! your turn, little

mother!" he cried; "you invent children! That's amusing enough, though

the trick is well known."

 

It is all the more useless to relate the conversation which took place

between the three confederates at the "Cheval Rouge," because the

arrangements there concluded were the basis of certain confidences

made, as we shall see, by Theodose to Mademoiselle Thuillier; but it

is necessary to remark that the cleverness displayed by la Peyrade

seemed almost alarming to Cerizet and Dutocq. After this conference,

the banker of the poor, finding himself in company with such powerful

players, had it in mind to make sure of his own stake at the first

chance. To win the game at any price over the heads of the ablest

gamblers, by cheating if necessary, is the inspiration of a special

sort of vanity peculiar to friends of the green cloth. Hence came the

terrible blow which la Peyrade was about to receive.

 

He knew his two associates well; and therefore, in spite of the

perpetual activity of his intellectual forces, in spite of the

perpetual watchfulness his personality of ten faces required, nothing

fatigued him as much as the part he had to play with his two

accomplices. Dutocq was a great knave, and Cerizet had once been a

comic actor; they were both experts in humbug. A motionless face like

Talleyrand's would have made then break at once with the Provencal,

who was now in their clutches; it was necessary, therefore, that he

should make a show of ease and confidence and of playing above board

--the very height of art in such affairs. To delude the pit is an

every-day triumph, but to deceive Mademoiselle Mars, Frederic

Lemaitre, Potier, Talma, Monrose, is the acme of art.

 

This conference at the "Cheval Rouge" had therefore the result of

giving to la Peyrade, who was fully as sagacious as Cerizet, a secret

fear, which, during the latter period of this daring game, so fired

his blood and heated his brain that there came moments when he fell

into the morbid condition of the gambler, who follows with his eye the

roll of the ball on which he has staked his last penny. The senses

then have a lucidity in their action and the mind takes a range, which

human knowledge has no means of measuring. 

CHAPTER X (HOW BRIGITTE WAS WON)

The day after this conference