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

for the flabbiness of the generation which occupies

the middle of the nineteenth century.

 

Thuillier, forced to make himself noticeable by other charms than

those of mind, learned to dance and to waltz in a way to be cited; he

was called "that handsome Thuillier"; he played billiards to

perfection; he knew how to cut out likenesses in black paper, and his

friend Colleville coached him so well that he was able to sing all the

ballads of the day. These various small accomplishments resulted in

that appearance of success which deceives youth and befogs it about

the future. Mademoiselle Thuillier, from 1806 to 1814, believed in her

brother as Mademoiselle d'Orleans believed in Louis-Philippe. She was

proud of Jerome; she expected to see him the director-general of his

department of the ministry, thanks to his successes in certain salons,

where, undoubtedly, he would never have been admitted but for the

circumstances which made society under the Empire a medley.

 

But the successes of "that handsome Thuillier" were usually of short

duration; women did not care to keep his devotion any more than he

desired to make his devotion eternal. He was really an unwilling Don

Juan; the career of a "beau" wearied him to the point of aging him;

his face, covered with lines like that of an old coquette, looked a

dozen years older than the registers made him. There remained to him

of all his successes in gallantry, a habit of looking at himself in

mirrors, of buttoning his coat to define his waist, and of posing in

various dancing attitudes; all of which prolonged, beyond the period

of enjoying his advantages, the sort of lease that he held on his

cognomen, "that handsome Thuillier."

 

The truth of 1806 has, however, become a fable, in 1826. He retains a

few vestiges of the former costume of the beaux of the Empire, which

are not unbecoming to the dignity of a former sub-director. He still

wears the white cravat with innumerable folds, wherein his chin is

buried, and the coquettish bow, formerly tied by the hands of beauty,

the two ends of which threaten danger to the passers to right and

left. He follows the fashions of former days, adapting them to his

present needs; he tips his hat on the back of his head, and wears

shoes and thread stockings in summer; his long-tailed coats remind one

of the well-known "surtouts" of the Empire; he has not yet abandoned

his frilled shirts and his white waistcoats; he still plays with his

Empire switch, and holds himself so erect that his back bends in. No

one, seeing Thuillier promenading on the boulevards, would take him

for the son of a man who cooked the breakfasts of the clerks at a

ministry and wore the livery of Louis XVI.; he resembles an imperial

diplomatist or a sub-prefect. Now, not only did Mademoiselle Thuillier

very innocently work upon her brother's weak spot by encouraging in

him an excessive care of his person, which, in her, was simply a

continuation of her worship, but she also provided him with family

joys, by transplanting to their midst a household which had hitherto

been quasi-collateral to them.

 

It was that of Monsieur Colleville, an intimate friend of Thuillier.

But before we proceed to describe Pylades let us finish with Orestes,

and explain why Thuillier--that handsome Thuillier--was left without a

family of his own--for the family, be it said, is non-existent without

children. Herein appears one of those deep mysteries which lie buried

in the arena of private life, a few shreds of which rise to the

surface at moments when the pain of a concealed situation grows

poignant. This concerns the life of Madame and Mademoiselle Thuillier;

so far, we have seen only the life (and we may call it the public

life) of Jerome Thuillier.

 

Marie-Jeanne-Brigitte Thuillier, four years older than her brother,

had been utterly sacrificed to him; it was easier to give a career to

one than a "dot" to the other. Misfortune to some natures is a pharos,

which illumines to their eyes the dark low corners of social

existence. Superior to her brother both in mind and energy, Brigitte

had one of those natures which, under the hammer of persecution,

gather themselves together, become compact and powerfully resistant,

not to say inflexible. Jealous of her independence, she kept aloof

from the life of the household; choosing to make herself the sole

arbiter of her own fate. At fourteen years of age, she went to live

alone in a garret, not far from the ministry of finance, which was

then in the rue Vivienne, and also not far from the Bank of France,

then, and now, in the rue de la Vrilliere. There she bravely gave

herself up to a form of industry little known and the perquisite of a

few persons, which she obtained, thanks to the patrons of her father.

It consisted in making bags to hold coin for the Bank, the Treasury,

and the great financial houses. At the end of three years she employed

two workwomen. By investing her savings on the Grand-Livre, she found

herself, in 1814, the mistress of three thousand six hundred francs a

year, earned in fifteen years. As she spent little, and dined with her

father as long as he lived, and, as government securities were very

low during the last convulsions of the Empire, this result, which

seems at first sight exaggerated, explains itself.

 

On the death of their father, Brigitte and Jerome, the former being

twenty-seven, the latter twenty-three, united their existence. Brother

and sister were bound together by an extreme affection. If Jerome,

then at the height of his success, was pinched for money, his sister,

clothed in serge, and her fingers roughened by the coarse thread with

which she sewed her bags, would give him a few louis. In Brigitte's

eyes Jerome was the handsomest and most charming man in the whole

French Empire. To keep house for this cherished brother, to be

initiated into the secrets of Lindor and Don Juan, to be his

handmaiden, his spaniel, was Brigitte's dream. She immolated herself

lovingly to an idol whose selfishness, always great, was enormously

increased by her self-sacrifice. She sold her business to her

fore-woman for fifteen thousand francs and came to live with Thuillier

in the rue d'Argenteuil, where she made herself the mother, protectress,

and servant of this spoiled child of women. Brigitte, with the natural

caution of a girl who owed everything to her own discretion and her

own labor, concealed the amount of her savings from Jerome,--fearing,

no doubt, the extravagance of a man of gallantry. She merely paid a

quota of six hundred francs a year to the expenses of the household,

and this, with her brother's eighteen hundred, enabled her to make

both ends meet at the end of the year.

 

From the first days of their coming together, Thuillier listened to

his sister as to an oracle; he consulted her in his trifling affairs,

kept none of his secrets from her, and thus made her taste the fruit

of despotism which was, in truth, the one little sin of her nature.

But the sister had sacrificed everything to the brother; she had

staked her all upon his heart; she lived by him only. Brigitte's

ascendancy over Jerome was singularly proved by the marriage which she

procured for him about the year 1814.

 

Seeing the tendency to enforced reduction which the new-comers to

power under the Restoration were beginning to bring about in the

government offices, and particularly since the return of the old

society which sought to ride over the bourgeoisie, Brigitte

understood, far better than her brother could explain it to her, the

social crisis which presently extinguished their common hopes. No more

successes for that handsome Thuillier in the salons of the nobles who

now succeeded the plebeians of the Empire!

 

Thuillier was not enough of a person to take up a politic opinion and

choose a party; he felt, as his sister did for him, the necessity of

profiting by the remains of his youth to make a settlement. In such a

situation, a sister as jealous of her power as Brigitte naturally

would, and ought, to marry her brother, to suit herself as well as to

suit him; for she alone could make him really happy, Madame Thuillier

being only an indispensable accessory to the obtaining of two or three

children. If Brigitte did not have an intellect quite the equal of her

will, at least she had the instinct of her despotism; without, it is

true, education, she marched straight before her, with the headstrong

determination of a nature accustomed to succeed. She had the genius of

housekeeping, a faculty for economy, a thorough understanding of how

to live, and a love for work. She saw plainly that she could never

succeed in marrying Jerome into a sphere above their own, where

parents might inquire into their domestic life and feel uneasy at

finding a mistress already reigning in the home. She therefore sought

in a lower grade for persons to dazzle, and found, almost beside her,

a suitable match.

 

The oldest usher at the Bank, a man named Lemprun, had an only

daughter, called Celeste. Mademoiselle Celeste Lemprun would inherit

the fortune of her mother, the only daughter of a rich farmer. This

fortune consisted of some acres of land in the environs of Paris,

which the old father still worked; besides this, she would have the

property of Lemprun himself, a man who had left the firms of Thelusson

and of Keller to enter the service of the Bank of France. Lemprun, now

the head of that service, enjoyed the respect and consideration of the

governors and auditors.

 

The Bank council, on hearing of the probable marriage of Celeste to an

honorable employee at the ministry of finance, promised a wedding

present of six thousand francs. This gift, added to twelve thousand

given by Pere Lemprun, and twelve thousand more from the maternal

grandfather, Sieur Galard, market-gardener at Auteuil, brought up the

dowry to thirty thousand francs. Old Galard and Monsieur and Madame

Lemprun were delighted with the marriage. Lemprun himself knew

Mademoiselle Thuillier, and considered her one of the worthiest and

most conscientious women in Paris. Brigitte then, for the first time,

allowed her investments on the Grand-Livre to shine forth, assuring

Lemprun that she should never marry; consequently, neither he nor his

wife, persons devoted to the main chance, would ever allow themselves

to find fault with Brigitte. Above all, they were greatly struck by

the splendid prospects of the handsome Thuillier, and the marriage

took place, as the conventional saying is, to the general

satisfaction.

 

The governor of the Bank and the secretary were the bride's witnesses;

Monsieur de la Billardiere, director of Thuillier's department, and

Monsieur Rabourdin, head of the office, being those of the groom. Six

days after the marriage old Lemprun was the victim of a daring robbery

which made a great noise in the newspapers of the day, though it was

quickly forgotten during the events of 1815. The guilty parties having

escaped detection, Lemprun wished to make up the loss; but the Bank

agreed to carry the deficit to its profit and loss account;

nevertheless, the poor old man actually died of the grief this affair

had caused him. He regarded it as an attack upon his aged honor.

 

Madame Lemprun then resigned all her property to her daughter, Madame

Thuillier, and went to live with her father at Auteuil until he died

from an accident in 1817. Alarmed at the prospect of having to manage

or lease the market-garden and the farm of her father, Madame Lemprun

entreated Brigitte, whose honesty and capacity astonished her, to wind

up old Galard's affairs, and to settle the property in such a way that

her daughter should take possession of everything, securing to her

mother fifteen hundred francs a year and the house at Auteuil. The

landed property of the old farmer was sold in lots, and brought in

thirty thousand francs. Lemprun's estate had given as much more, so

that Madame Thuillier's fortune, including her "dot," amounted in 1818

to ninety thousand francs. Joining the revenue of this property to

that of the brother and sister, the Thuillier household had an income,

in 1818, amounting to eleven thousand francs, managed by Brigitte

alone on her sole responsibility. It is necessary to begin by stating

this financial position, not only to prevent objections but to rid the

drama of difficulties.

 

Brigitte began, from the first, by allowing her brother five hundred

francs a month, and by sailing the household boat at the rate of five

thousand francs a year. She granted to her sister-in-law fifty francs

a month, explaining to her carefully that she herself was satisfied

with forty. To strengthen her despotism by the power of money,

Brigitte laid by the surplus of her own funds. She made, so it was

said in business offices, usurious loans by means of her brother, who

appeared as a money-lender. If, between