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

The house in which Toupillier lived is one of those which have lost

half their depth, owing to the straightening of the line of the

street, the rue Honore-Chevalier being one of the narrowest in the

Saint-Sulpice quarter. The owner, forbidden by the law to repair it,

or to add new storeys, was compelled to let the wretched building in

the condition in which he bought it. It consisted of a first storey

above the ground-floor, surmounted by garrets, with two small wings

running back on either side. The courtyard thus formed ended in a

garden planted with trees, which was always rented to the occupant of

the first floor. This garden, separated by an iron railing from the

courtyard, would have allowed a rich owner to sell the front buildings

to the city, and to build a new house upon the courtyard; but the

whole of the first floor was let on an eighteen years' lease to a

mysterious personage, about whom neither the official policing of the

concierge nor the curiosity of the other tenants could find anything

to censure.

 

This tenant, now seventy years of age, had built, in 1829, an outer

stairway, leading from the right wing of the first floor to the

garden, so that he could get there without going through the

courtyard. Half the ground-floor was occupied by a book-stitcher, who

for the last ten years had used the stable and coach-house for

workshops. A book-binder occupied the other half. The binder and the

stitcher lived, each of them, in half the garret rooms over the front

building on the street. The garrets above the rear wings were

occupied, the one on the right by the mysterious tenant, the one on

the left by Toupillier, who paid a hundred francs a year for it, and

reached it by a dark staircase, lighted by small round windows. The

porte-cochere was made in the circular form indispensable in a street

so narrow that two carriages cannot pass in it.

 

Cerizet laid hold of the rope which served as a baluster, to climb the

species of ladder leading to the room where the so-called beggar was

dying,--a room in which the odious spectacle of pretended pauperism

was being played. In Paris, everything that is done for a purpose is

thoroughly done. Would-be paupers are as clever at mounting their

disguise as shopkeepers in preparing their show-windows, or sham rich

men in obtaining credit.

 

The floor had never been swept; the bricks had disappeared beneath

layers of dirt, dust, dried mud, and any and every thing thrown down

by Toupillier. A miserable stove of cast-iron, the pipe of which

entered a crumbling chimney, was the most apparent piece of furniture

in this hovel. In an alcove stood a bed, with tester and valence of

green serge, which the moths had transformed into lace. The window,

almost useless, had a heavy coating of grease upon its panes, which

dispensed with the necessity of curtains. The whitewashed walls

presented to the eye fuliginous tones, due to the wood and peat burned

by the pauper in his stove. On the fireplace were a broken

water-pitcher, two bottles, and a cracked plate. A worm-eaten chest of

drawers contained his linen and decent clothes. The rest of the

furniture consisted of a night-table of the commonest description,

another table, worth about forty sous, and two kitchen chairs with the

straw seats almost gone. The extremely picturesque costume of the

centenarian pauper was hanging from a nail, and below it, on the

floor, were the shapeless mat-weed coverings that served him for

shoes, the whole forming, with his amorphous old hat and knotty stick,

a sort of panoply of misery.

 

As he entered, Cerizet gave a rapid glance at the old man, whose head

lay on a pillow brown with grease and without a pillow-case; his

angular profile, like those which engravers of the last century were

fond of making out of rocks in the landscapes they engraved, was

strongly defined in black against the green serge hangings of the

tester. Toupillier, a man nearly six feet tall, was looking fixedly at

some object at the foot of his bed; he did not move on hearing the

groaning of the heavy door, which, being armed with iron bolts and a

strong lock, closed his domicile securely.

 

"Is he conscious?" said Cerizet, before whom Madame Cardinal started

back, not having recognized him till he spoke.

 

"Pretty nearly," she replied.

 

"Come out on the staircase, so that he doesn't hear us," whispered

Cerizet. "This is how we'll manage it," he continued, in the ear of

his future mother-in-law. "He is weak, but he isn't so very low; we

have fully a week before us. I'll send you a doctor who'll suit us,

--you understand? and later in the evening I'll bring you six

poppy-heads. In the state he's in, you see, a decoction of poppy-heads

will send him into a sound sleep. I'll send you a cot-bed on pretence of

your sleeping in the room with him. We'll move him from one bed to the

other, and when we've found the money there won't be any difficulty in

carrying it off. But we ought to know who the people are who live in

this old barrack. If Perrache suspects, as you think, about the money,

he might give an alarm, and so many tenants, so many spies, you

know--"

 

"Oh! as for that," said Madame Cardinal, "I've found out already that

Monsieur du Portail, the old man who occupies the first floor, has

charge of an insane woman; I heard their Dutch servant-woman, Katte,

calling her Lydie this morning. The only other servant is an old valet

named Bruneau; he does everything, except cook."

 

"But the binder and the stitcher down below," returned Cerizet, "they

begin work very early in the morning--Well, anyhow, we must study the

matter," he added, in the tone of a man whose plans are not yet

decided. "I'll go to the mayor's office of your arrondissement, and

get Olympe's register of birth, and put up the banns. The marriage

must take place a week from Saturday."

 

"How he goes it, the rascal!" cried the admiring Madame Cardinal,

pushing her formidable son-in-law by the shoulder.

 

As he went downstairs Cerizet was surprised to see, through one of the

small round windows, an old man, evidently du Portail, walking in the

garden with a very important member of the government, Comte Martial

de la Roche-Hugon. He stopped in the courtyard when he reached it, as

if to examine the old house, built in the reign of Louis XIV., the

yellow walls of which, though of freestone, were bent like the elderly

beggar they contained. Then he looked at the workshops, and counted

the workmen. The house was otherwise as silent as a cloister. Being

observed himself, Cerizet departed, thinking over in his mind the

various difficulties that might arise in extracting the sum hidden

beneath the dying man.

 

"Carry off all that gold at night?" he said to himself; "why, those

porters will be on the watch, and twenty persons might see us! It is

hard work to carry even twenty-five thousand francs of gold on one's

person."

 

Societies have two goals of perfection; the first is a state of

civilization in which morality equally infused and pervasive does not

admit even the idea of crime; the Jesuits reached that point, formerly

presented by the primitive Church. The second is the state of another

civilization in which the supervision of citizens over one another

makes crime impossible. The end which modern society has placed before

itself is the latter; namely, that in which a crime presents such

difficulties that a man must abandon all reasoning in order to commit

In fact, iniquities which the law cannot reach are not left

actually unpunished, for social judgment is even more severe than that

of courts. If a man like Minoret, the post-master at Nemours [see

"Ursule Mirouet"] suppresses a will and no one witnesses the act, the

crime is traced home to him by the watchfulness of virtue as surely as

a robbery is followed up by the detective police. No wrong-doing

passes actually unperceived; and wherever a lesion in rectitude takes

place the scar remains. Things can be no more made to disappear than

men; so carefully, in Paris especially, are articles and objects

ticketed and numbered, houses watched, streets observed, places spied

upon. To live at ease, crime must have a sanction like that of the

Bourse; like that conceded by Cerizet's clients; who never complained

of his usury, and, indeed, would have been troubled in mind if their

flayer were not in his den of a Tuesday.

 

"Well, my dear monsieur," said Madame Perrache, the porter's wife, as

he passed her lodge, "how do you find him, that friend of God, that

poor man?"

 

"I am not the doctor," replied Cerizet, who now decidedly declined

that role. "I am Madame Cardinal's business man. I have just advised

her to have a cot-bed put up, so as to nurse her uncle night and day;

though, perhaps, she will have to get a regular nurse."

 

"I can help her," said Madame Perrache. "I nurse women in childbed."

 

"Well, we'll see about it," said Cerizet; "I'll arrange all that. Who

is the tenant on your first floor?"

 

"Monsieur du Portail. He has lodged here these thirty years. He is a

man with a good income, monsieur; highly respectable, and elderly. You

know people who invest in the Funds live on their incomes. He used to

be in business. But it is more than eleven years now since he has been

trying to restore the reason of a daughter of one of his friends,

Mademoiselle Lydie de la Peyrade. She has the best advice, I can tell

you; the very first doctors in Paris; only this morning they had a

consultation. But so far nothing has cured her; and they have to watch

her pretty close; for sometimes she gets up and walks at night--"

 

"Mademoiselle Lydie de la Peyrade!" exclaimed Cerizet; "are you sure

of the name?"

 

"I've heard Madame Katte, her nurse, who also does the cooking, call

her so a thousand times, monsieur; though, generally, neither Monsieur

Bruneau, the valet, nor Madame Katte say much. It's like talking to

the wall to try and get any information out of them. We have been

porters here these twenty years and we've never found out anything

about Monsieur du Portail yet. More than that, monsieur, he owns the

little house alongside; you see the double door from here. Well, he

can go out that way and receive his company too, and we know nothing

about it. Our owner doesn't know anything more than we do; when people

ring at that door, Monsieur Bruneau goes and opens it."

 

"Then you didn't see the gentleman who is talking with him in the

garden go by this way?"

 

"Bless me! no, that I didn't!"

 

"Ah!" thought Cerizet as he got into the cabriolet, "she must be the

daughter of that uncle of Theodose. I wonder if du Portail can be the

secret benefactor who sent money from time to time to that rascal?

Suppose I send an anonymous letter to the old fellow, warning him of

the danger the barrister runs from those notes for twenty-five

thousand francs?"

 

An hour later the cot-bed had arrived for Madame Cardinal, to whom the

inquisitive portress offered her services to bring her something to

eat.

 

"Do you want to see the rector?" Madame Cardinal inquired of her

uncle.

 

She had noticed that the arrival of the bed seemed to draw him from

his somnolence.

 

"I want wine!" replied the pauper.

 

"How do you feel now, Pere Toupillier?" asked Madame Perrache, in a

coaxing voice.

 

"I tell you I want wine," repeated the old man, with an energetic

insistence scarcely to be expected of his feebleness.

 

"We must first find out if it is good for you, uncle," said Madame

Cardinal, soothingly. "Wait till the doctor comes."

 

"Doctor! I won't have a doctor!" cried Toupillier; "and you, what are

you doing here? I don't want anybody."

 

"My good uncle, I came to know if you'd like something tasty. I've got

some nice fresh soles--hey! a bit of fried sole, with a squeeze of

lemon on it?"

 

"Your fish, indeed!" cried Toupillier; "all rotten! That last you

brought me, more than six weeks ago, it is there in the cupboard; you

can take it away with you."

 

"Heavens! how ungrateful sick men are!" whispered the widow Cardinal

to Perrache.

 

Nevertheless, to exhibit solicitude, she arranged the pillow under the

patient's head, saying:--

 

"There! uncle, don't you feel better like that?"

 

"Let me alone!" shouted Toupillier, angrily; "I want no one here; I

want wine; leave me in peace."

 

"Don't get angry, little uncle; we'll fetch you some wine."

 

"Number six wine, rue des Canettes," cried the pauper.

 

"Yes, I know," replied Madame Cardinal; "but let me count out my

coppers. I want to get something better for you than that kind of

wine;