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

mistress.

But suddenly, in 1838, the girl left her mother, and "made her life,"

to use an expression by which the lower classes in Paris describe the

abuse of the most precious gifts of nature and youth.

 

To look for a girl in Paris is to look for a smelt in the Seine;

nothing but chance can throw her into the net. The chance came. Mere

Cardinal, who to entertain a neighbor had taken her to the Bobino

theatre, recognized in the leading lady her own daughter, whom the

first comedian had held under his control for three years. The mother,

gratified at first at beholding her daughter in a fine gown of gold

brocade, her hair dressed like that of a duchess, and wearing

open-worked stockings, satin shoes, and receiving the plaudits of the

audience, ended by screaming out from her seat in the gallery:--

 

"You shall soon hear of me, murderer of your own mother! I'll know

whether miserable strolling-players have the right to come and debauch

young girls of sixteen!"

 

She waited at the stage-door to capture her daughter, but the first

comedian and the leading lady had no doubt jumped across the

footlights and left the theatre with the audience, instead of issuing

by the stage-door, where Madame Cardinal and her crony, Mere

Mahoudeau, made an infernal rumpus, which two municipal guards were

called upon to pacify. Those august personages, before whom the two

women lowered the diapason of their voices, called the mother's

attention to the fact that the girl was of legitimate theatrical age,

and that instead of screaming at the door after the director, she

could summon him before the justice-of-peace, or the police-court,

whichever she pleased.

 

The next day Madame Cardinal intended to consult Cerizet, in view of

the fact that he was a clerk in the office of the justice-of-peace;

but, before reaching his lair in the rue des Poules, she was met by

the porter of a house in which an uncle of hers, a certain Toupillier,

was living, who told her that the old man hadn't probably two days to

live, being then in the last extremity.

 

"Well, how do you expect me to help it?" replied the widow Cardinal.

 

"We count on you, my dear Madame Cardinal; we know you won't forget

the good advice we'll give you. Here's the thing. Lately, your poor

uncle, not being able to stir round, has trusted me to go and collect

the rents of his house, rue Notre-Dame de Nazareth, and the arrears of

his dividends at the Treasury, which come to eighteen hundred francs."

 

By this time the widow Cardinal's eyes were becoming fixed instead of

wandering.

 

"Yes, my dear," continued Perrache, a hump-backed little concierge;

"and, seeing that you are the only person who ever thinks about him,

and that you come and see him sometimes, and bring him fish, perhaps

he may make a bequest in your favor. My wife, who has been nursing him

for the last few days since he has been so ill, spoke to him of you,

but he wouldn't have you told about his illness. But now, don't you

see, it is high time you should show yourself there. It is pretty nigh

two months since he has been able to attend to business."

 

"You may well think, you old thief," replied Madame Cardinal, hurrying

at top speed toward the rue Honore-Chevalier, where her uncle lived in

a wretched garret, "that the hair would grow on my hand before I could

ever imagine that. What! my uncle Toupillier rich! the old pauper of

the church of Saint-Sulpice!"

 

"Ah!" returned the porter, "but he fed well. He went to bed every

night with his best friend, a big bottle of Roussillon. My wife has

tasted it, though he told us it was common stuff. The wine-merchant in

the rue des Canettes supplies it to him."

 

"Don't say a word about all this," said the widow, when she parted

from the man who had given her the information. "I'll take care and

remember you--if anything comes of it."

 

Toupillier, former drum-major in the French Guards, had been for the

two years preceding 1789 in the service of the Church as beadle of

Saint-Sulpice. The Revolution deprived him of that post, and he then

dropped down into a state of abject misery. He was even obliged to

take to the profession of model, for he _enjoyed_, as they say, a fine

physique. When public worship was restored, he took up his beadle's

staff once more; but in 1816 he was dismissed, as much on account of

his immorality as for his political opinions. Nevertheless, he was

allowed to stay about the door of the church and distribute the holy

water. Later, an unfortunate affair, which we shall presently mention,

made him lose even that position; but, still finding means to keep to

the sanctuary, he obtained permission to be allowed as a pauper in the

porch. At this period of life, being then seventy-two years of age, he

made himself ninety-six, and began the profession of centenarian.

 

In all Paris it was impossible to find another such beard and head of

hair as Toupillier's. As he walked he appeared bent double; he held a

stick in his shaking hand,--a hand that was covered with lichen, like

a granite rock, and with the other he held out the classic hat with a

broad brim, filthy and battered, into which, however, there fell

abundant alms. His legs were swathed in rags and bandages, and his

feet shuffled along in miserable overshoes of woven mat-weed, inside

of which he had fastened excellent cork soles. He washed his face with

certain compounds, which gave it an appearance of forms of illness,

and he played the senility of a centenarian to the life. He reckoned

himself a hundred years old in 1830, at which time his actual age was

eighty; he was the head of the paupers of Saint-Sulpice, the master of

the place, and all those who came to beg under the arcades of the

church, safe from the persecutions of the police and beneath the

protection of the beadle and the giver of holy water, were forced to

pay him a sort of tithe.

 

When a new heir, a bridegroom, or some godfather left the church,

saying, "Here, this is for all of you; don't torment any of my party,"

Toupillier, appointed by the beadle to receive these alms, pocketed

three-fourths, and distributed only the remaining quarter among his

henchmen, whose tribute amounted to a sou a day. Money and wine were

his last two passions; but he regulated the latter and gave himself up

to the former, with neglecting his personal comfort. He drank at night

only, after his dinner, and for twenty years he slept in the arms of

drunkenness, his last mistress.

 

In the early morning he was at his post with all his faculties. From

then until his dinner, which he took at Pere Lathuile's (made famous

by Charlet), he gnawed crusts of bread by way of nourishment; and he

gnawed them artistically, with an air of resignation which earned him

abundant alms. The beadle and the giver of holy water, with whom he

may have had some private understanding, would say of him:--

 

"He is one of the worthy poor of the church; he used to know the

rector Languet, who built Saint-Sulpice; he was for twenty years

beadle of the church before the Revolution, and he is now over a

hundred years old."

 

This little biography, well known to all the pious attendants of the

church, was, of course, the best of his advertisements, and no hat was

so well lined as his. He bought his house in 1826, and began to invest

his money in the Funds in 1830. From the value of the two investments

he must have made something like six thousand francs a year, and

probably turned them over by usury, after Cerizet's own fashion; for

the sum he paid for the house was forty thousand francs, while his

investment in 1830 was forty-eight thousand more. His niece, deceived

by the old man as much as he deceived the functionaries and the pious

souls of the church, believed him the most miserable of paupers, and

when she had any fish that were spoiling she sometimes took them to

the aged beggar.

 

Consequently, she now felt it her right to get what she could in

return for her pity and her liberality to an uncle who was likely to

have a crowd of collateral heirs; she herself being the third and last

Toupillier daughter. She had four brothers, and her father, a porter

with a hand-cart, had told her, in her childhood, of three aunts and

four uncles, who all led an existence of the baser sort.

 

After inspecting the sick man, she went, at full speed, to consult

Cerizet, telling him, in the first place, how she had found her

daughter, and then the reasons and indications which made her think

that her uncle Toupillier was hoarding a pile of gold in his mattress.

Mere Cardinal did not feel herself strong enough to seize upon the

property, legally or illegally, and she therefore came to confide in

Cerizet and get his advice.

 

So, then, the banker of the poor, like other scavengers, had, at last,

found diamonds in the slime in which he had paddled for the last four

years, being always on the watch for some such chance,--a chance, they

say, occasionally met with in the purlieus, which give birth to

heiresses in sabots. This was the secret of his unexpected gentleness

to la Peyrade, the man whose ruin he had vowed. It is easy to imagine

the anxiety with which he awaited the return of Madame Cardinal, to

whom this wily schemer of nefarious plots had given means to verify

her suspicions as to the existence of the hoarded treasure, promising

her complete success if she would trust him to obtain for her so rich

a harvest. He was not the man to shrink from a crime, above all, when

he saw that others could commit it, while he obtained the benefits.

 

"Well, monsieur," cried the fishwife, entering Cerizet's den with a

face as much inflamed by cupidity as by the haste of her movements,

"my uncle sleeps on more than a hundred thousand francs in gold, and I

am certain that those Perraches, by dint of nursing him, have smelt

the rat."

 

"Shared among forty heirs that won't be much to each," said Cerizet.

"Listen to me, Mere Cardinal: I'll marry your daughter; give her your

uncle's gold, and I'll guarantee to you a life-interest in the house

and the dividends from the money in the Funds."

 

"We sha'n't run any risk?"

 

"None, whatever."

 

"Agreed, then," said the widow Cardinal, holding out her hand to her

future son-in-law. "Six thousand francs a year; hey! what a fine life

I'll have."

 

"With a son-in-law like me!" added Cerizet.

 

"I shall be a bourgeoisie of Paris!"

 

"Now," resumed Cerizet, after a pause, "I must study the ground. Don't

leave your uncle alone a minute; tell the Perraches that you expect a

doctor. I'll be the doctor, and when I get there you must seem not to

know me."

 

"Aren't you sly, you old rogue," said Madame Cardinal, with a punch on

Cerizet's stomach by way of farewell.

 

An hour later, Cerizet, dressed in black, disguised by a rusty wig and

an artificially painted physiognomy, arrived at the house in the rue

Honore-Chevalier in the regulation cabriolet. He asked the porter to

tell him how to find the lodging of an old beggar named Toupillier.

 

"Is monsieur the doctor whom Madame Cardinal expects?" asked Perrache.

 

Cerizet had no doubt reflected on the gravity of the affair he was

undertaking, for he avoided giving an answer to that question.

 

"Is this the way?" he said, turning at random to one side of the

courtyard.

 

"No, monsieur," replied Perrache, who then took him to the back stairs

of the house, which led up to the wretched attic occupied by the

pauper.

 

Nothing remained for the inquisitive porter to do but to question the

driver of the cabriolet; to which employment we will leave him, while

we pursue our own inquiries elsewhere. 

CHAPTER XV (THE DIFFICULTIES THAT CROP UP IN THE EASIEST OF THEFTS)