The Human Comedy: Selected Stories

by Honoré de Balzac

  That day went on echoing in our lives; Marcas confirmed us in our determination to leave France, where talented young people bursting with energy are being crushed beneath the weight of mediocre climbers, envious and insatiable.

  We dined together on rue de la Harpe. From that night on we gave him our most respectful affection, and he gave us practical training in the sphere of ideas. The man knew everything; he had thought deeply about everything. He scanned the political globe, seeking the places where opportunities were the most plentiful and the most favorable for the success of our plans. He set out lines of study for us, and he urged us to move quickly, explaining the importance of timing, arguing that a massive exodus would soon begin, that its effect would be to strip France of its best energy, its young talent; that these necessarily nimble minds would choose the best destinations and that it was crucial to get there first. From then on, we would often work late by lamplight. Our generous teacher wrote us memoranda—two for Juste and three for me—marvelous instructions, full of the sort of information that only experience can yield, with guidelines that only genius can lay out. In those pages, perfumed with tobacco, jammed with writing in an almost hieroglyphic cacography, there were pointers toward fortune and uncanny predictions regarding various developments in America and Asia that have since, even before Juste and I could leave, come true.

  Marcas, like us in fact, had reached utter destitution; he earned his daily living, but he had neither linen, nor coats, nor shoes. He didn’t pretend to be a better person than he was; he had dreamed of luxury along with his dream of power. He didn’t view his present self as the true Marcas; he left its current shape to the whim of daily life. He lived on the breath of his ambition, dreamed of revenge, and reproached himself for harboring so hollow an attitude. The true statesman ought above all to be indifferent to vulgar passions; like the scholar, he should care only for matters within his expertise. Through those days of poverty Marcas seemed to us a great, even an awesome man: There was something terrifying in his gaze, which looked onto a world past the one that strikes the eyes of ordinary men. He was the focus of our constant study and amazement, for youth feels an urgent need to admire (who among us has not experienced this?); the young are eager to attach to something and naturally lean toward offering themselves to the service of figures they think superior, just as they dedicate themselves to great causes. We were particularly bemused by his indifference to sentimental matters: Women had never disturbed his life. Whenever we mentioned the subject, that eternal topic of conversation among Frenchmen, he would only say, “Dresses cost too much!” He saw the look Juste and I exchanged, and he went on: “Yes, they cost far too much. The woman you buy—and that’s the least expensive sort—takes a great deal of money; the woman who gives herself free takes all our time! A woman snuffs out all activity, all ambition. Napoleon reduced woman to what she ought to be; on that point he was great. He did not fall into ruinous fantasies like Louis XIV and Louis XV; still, he had his secret lovers.”

  We discovered that like Pitt, who took England to wife, Marcas carried France in his heart; he worshipped her, never had a thought that was not for his country. He was gnawed by rage at holding in his very hands the remedy for the ailment whose tenacity so saddened him and at his incapacity to apply it, but worse was his rage at France’s status as lower than Russia and England. France in third place! The cry recurred constantly in his conversation. The country’s intestinal upset had moved into his own gut! He called the chamber’s quarrels with the court cheap belowstairs squabbling revealed by so many shifts, such constant agitation, that damaged the nation’s well-being.

  “They give us peace by selling off the future,” he said.

  One evening, Juste and I were busy in our room, plunged in deep silence. Marcas was at work on his copying. He had refused our help with the task despite our strongest urgings; we had offered to take turns copying in his stead, so that he would have only a third of the dreary labor to do himself; he grew angry, and we stopped insisting. We heard the sound of expensive boots in our corridor and looked up at each other. The newcomer knocked at Marcas’s door, which was always left on the latch. We heard our great man say “Come in!” and then “You—here, monsieur?”

  “Yes, it is I,” replied the former minister, Emperor Diocletian to the unknown martyr.

  The two men talked for a while in low tones. Our neighbor’s voice emerged only rarely, as occurs in a meeting where the interested party begins by setting out his purpose, but suddenly Marcas burst forth at some proposal we had not caught.

  “You would laugh at me if I took you seriously!” he cried. “The Jesuits are over, but Jesuitism is eternal! There’s no good faith in your Machiavellianism or in your generosity. You know how to count, but no one can count on you. Your royal court is made up of owls afraid of the light, old men who are either terrified of the young or pay them no attention. And the government does the same as the court. You’ve searched out the leftovers of the Empire, just as the Restoration court recruited Louis XIV’s old Voltigeur troops! So far, people have taken your cowardly, timid evasions for smart maneuvering, but the dangers will come, and the young generation will rise up as they did in 1790. Our youth did some fine things back then. Now you keep changing ministers like a sick man changing positions in bed. These fidgetings show the decrepitude of your government. Your system of political evasions will be turned against you because the country will tire of all this equivocation. The nation won’t tell you outright that it’s tired of it; an invalid never knows exactly how he’s dying—the why is for the historian to say—but die you surely will, for failing to ask the youth of France for their strength and vigor, their dedication and ardor; for scorning capable people, for not picking them out, with love, from this beautiful generation; for always, in every sphere, choosing mediocrity. You come to ask my support, but you are a part of that decrepit mob made hideous by their self-interest, the crowd that trembles, that cringes, that wants to reduce France to a mean thing because you yourselves are mean things. My strong nature, my ideas would be like poison to you. You’ve tricked me twice, twice I’ve brought you down, and you know it. For us to join forces a third time, it would have to be very serious. I would kill myself if I allowed you to dupe me again, for I would lose faith in my own person: Not you but I would be to blame.”

  Then we heard humble appeals, hot pleadings to not deprive the nation of its finest talent. There was talk of “patriotism”; Marcas uttered some sardonic grunts of “Hmpf hmpf!” he mocked his would-be employer. The politician grew more explicit: He acknowledged the superiority of his former counselor and swore to see to it that Marcas would stay on in the administration and become a deputy. Then he offered him a position of real eminence, saying that he, the minister, would take a subordinate role to Marcas, that he could only be the lieutenant to such a figure. He was expected to join the new cabinet, he said, and did not want to return to power unless Marcas held a post that was worthy of him; he had mentioned that condition to the others, and Marcas was understood to be indispensable.

  Marcas refused.

  The minister said, “I’ve never before been in a position to keep my commitments; here is a chance to be faithful to my promises, and you reject it.”

  Marcas did not reply. The fine boots rang in the corridor again, moving toward the stairwell.

  “Marcas! Marcas!” the two of us shouted, rushing into his room. “Why refuse? The man meant what he said. His conditions were honorable. And besides, you’d be working with the other ministers!”

  In the blink of an eye we listed a hundred reasons why Marcas should agree: The future minister’s tone was honest; without seeing him, we were sure he was not lying.

  “I have no clothes,” Marcas said.

  “We’ll take care of that,” Juste said, looking over at me.

  Marcas was brave enough to trust us; a light flared in his eyes. He ran a hand through his hair, baring his forehead in one of those gestures that reveal
a belief in good fortune, and when he had, so to speak, unveiled his face, we saw a man who was utterly unknown to us: Marcas sublime, Marcas in power, the mind in its element, the bird released into the air, the fish returned to the water, the horse galloping across the steppe. It was transitory: The forehead darkened again, and he had a kind of vision of his destiny. Halting Doubt followed close upon the heels of White-Winged Hope. We left him.

  “Well,” I said to Doctor, “we promised, but how will we manage it?”

  “We’ll think overnight,” Juste replied, “and in the morning we’ll see what ideas we’ve had.”

  The next morning we took a walk in the Luxembourg Gardens. We reviewed the events of the night before, both of us surprised at Marcas’s feeble capacity for confronting life’s smaller difficulties—he who was cowed by nothing when it came to solving the most complex problems of theoretical or practical politics. But these great natures are all susceptible to tripping over a grain of sand, to fumbling the most promising projects for lack of a thousand francs. It is the story of Napoleon who for lack of boots did not go off to the Indies.

  “What have you come up with?” asked Juste.

  “Well, I have a way to get a full outfit on credit.”

  “Where?”

  “At Humann’s.”

  “How is that?”

  “Humann, my good fellow, never goes to his clients, the clients come to him, so he doesn’t know whether I am rich; all he knows is that I dress well and carry off the suit he makes for me. I’ll tell him that I’ve just been handed an uncle from the provinces whose indifference in matters of dress is a huge problem for me in the fine houses where I hope to marry, and that he wouldn’t be Humann if he sent his bill before three months.”

  Doctor found this an excellent idea for a vaudeville act but a deplorable one for real life, and he doubted it could succeed. But I swear to you, Humann did dress Marcas and, artist that he is, managed to dress him as a political figure should be dressed.

  Juste gave Marcas two hundred francs, the earnings off two watches bought on credit and immediately handed over to the pawnshop. Myself, I said nothing about the six shirts and all the necessary linen that cost me only the pleasure of asking for them from the forelady of a lingerie shop with whom I had spent some time during carnival. Marcas accepted it all with no more thanks than was appropriate. He did inquire how we had come by all this treasure, and we made him laugh for the last time. We gazed upon our Marcas the way shipowners who have exhausted their every last credit and all their resources to fit out a vessel must look on as it hoists sail.

  Here Charles fell silent; he seemed pained by his memories.

  “Well?” we all cried. “What happened?”

  “I’ll tell you in a few words, as this is a story, not a novel. We saw nothing of Marcas for some time. That government lasted three months; it fell after the parliamentary session. Marcas came back to us penniless, exhausted from work. He had plumbed the crater of power; he climbed out of it with the beginnings of brain fever. The illness progressed fast; we nursed him. Juste brought in the chief physician from the hospital where he had started as intern. I was living alone in our room and was a very attentive caretaker, but the care and the science—it was all futile. In that month of January 1838, Marcas himself felt that he had only a few days to live. The minister whose soul he had been for six months never came to see him, didn’t even send for news. Marcas made clear his deep contempt for the administration; he seemed to doubt the very future of France and this doubt had made him ill. He thought he saw treason at the heart of the government—not a palpable, actionable betrayal by particular acts but a betrayal produced by a whole system, by the subjection of the national interests to selfish ends. His belief in the abasement of the country was so strong that his illness worsened daily from it.

  “I was witness to proposals made him by a leader of the opposition group he had been fighting. His hatred for the men he had tried to serve was so violent that he would have consented joyfully to join the coalition taking shape among these ambitious men who harbored at least one idea: the idea of shaking off the yoke of the court. But Marcas answered the negotiator with the phrase of the Hôtel de Ville: ‘It is too late!’

  “Marcas did not leave enough to provide for his burial. Juste and I went to great pains to spare him the shame of the pauper’s cart, and the two of us alone followed behind the hearse bearing Z. Marcas’s coffin, which was thrown into the common grave at the Montparnasse cemetery.”

  We looked at one another sadly as we listened to this story, the last one Charles Rabourdin told us, the day before he boarded a brig at Le Havre for the Malay Islands—for we all knew more than one Marcas, more than one victim of a political dedication that is rewarded by betrayal or oblivion.

  Les Jardies, 1840

  Translated by Linda Asher

  GOBSECK

  To Monsieur le Baron Barchou de Penhoen,

  Of all us students at Vendôme, you and I are, I believe, the only ones who have met anew in the course of literary careers, we who were already exploring philosophy at the age when we ought to have been exploring the De viris! This is the story I was writing at the time of our recent encounter and when you were engaged in your fine works on German philosophy. Thus we have neither of us missed our vocation. I hope you will experience as much pleasure from seeing your name inscribed here as I had in writing it.

  AT ONE o’clock of a night in the winter of 1829–1830, two guests who were not family members still lingered in the drawing room of the Vicomtesse de Grandlieu. One, a handsome young man, left the house upon hearing the clock toll the hour. While his carriage clattered out of the courtyard and the viscountess saw only her brother and a family friend finishing their game of piquet, she approached her daughter, who stood by the mantelpiece pretending to study a lampshade as she listened to the departing carriage in a way that justified her mother’s fears.

  “Camille, if you go on behaving as you did this evening with the young Comte de Restaud, you will compel me to end his visits here. Listen, my child: If you trust in my love for you, do let me guide you in life. At seventeen a person is not equipped to assess the future, nor the past, nor certain social considerations. I would offer this one remark: Monsieur de Restaud has a mother who would eat through millions of francs, a woman who comes of modest stock, a Mademoiselle Goriot. She caused all sorts of talk in times past, and she behaved so very badly toward her father that she certainly does not deserve to have such a good son. The young count adores her and stands by her with a degree of filial care that is highly praiseworthy, and he is extremely good to his brother and sister as well. But however admirable his own conduct,” the viscountess continued, with a worldly-wise look, “so long as his mother is alive, any family would shudder to entrust young Restaud with a daughter’s future and fortune.”

  “I’ve overheard a few words that make me eager to intervene between you and Mademoiselle de Grandlieu,” the family friend called from across the room. He turned back to his opponent: “I’ve won this game, count. I’m abandoning you to run to your niece’s aid.”

  “That is what they mean by ‘having a lawyer’s ears,’” said Madame de Grandlieu. “My dear Derville, how could you have heard what I was saying so quietly?”

  “I could tell from your expression,” Derville answered, moving to an easy chair by the fire.

  The uncle settled in beside his niece, and Madame de Grandlieu took a seat on a hearth stool between her daughter and Derville.

  “It is time, madame la vicomtesse, to tell you a story that should change your views on Comte Ernest de Restaud’s prospects.”

  “A story!” cried Camille. “Do tell us, please, sir!”

  Derville sent Madame de Grandlieu a glance that said the tale was intended for her. By reason of her fortune and the venerable antiquity of her name, the viscountess was one of the most prominent ladies in the Faubourg Saint-Germain. And if it seems unlikely that a Paris attorney could address
her with such familiarity and behave so freely in her house, the phenomenon is easily explained.

  Madame de Grandlieu had returned to France in 1815 with the Restoration of the royal family. She took up residence in Paris, living initially on only the pension that Louis XVIII granted her from the civil list funds, an intolerable situation. The Hôtel de Grandlieu had been confiscated and sold by the Republic; the young Derville had occasion to discover some technical flaws in the sale and claimed that the house must be returned to Madame de Grandlieu. On a contingency basis, he brought suit to that effect and prevailed. Encouraged by that success, he wrangled well enough with some hospice or other and brought about the restitution of her family’s timberlands. He went on to recover Grandlieu shares in the Orléans Canal Company, as well as some sizable buildings that the emperor had awarded to some other public institutions. Thus reestablished by the young lawyer’s skills, Madame de Grandlieu’s estate was already yielding an income of some sixty thousand francs a year when the new indemnification law restored further enormous sums to her. A man of great probity, informed and modest, and good company besides, the young attorney became a family friend.

  Although his work for Madame de Grandlieu earned him the esteem, and the business, of the finest houses in the Faubourg Saint-Germain, he did not exploit his reputation as an ambitious man would have done. He resisted the viscountess’s urging to sell his law practice and enter the magistrature, a career in which her patronage would have helped him to quick advancement. Except for spending an occasional evening at the Grandlieu house, he went out into society only to keep up relations with clients. It was good luck that his talents had been brought to light through his dedication to Madame de Grandlieu, for otherwise he might have risked his practice dying off; Derville did not have the soul of an attorney. Lately, since Comte Ernest de Restaud had begun attending the Grandlieu salon and Derville noticed Camille’s interest in the young man, the attorney had become as assiduous a visitor to madame’s house as any dandy from the Chaussée d’Antin newly admitted into the Faubourg’s social circles. A few days before this evening, sitting by Camille at a ball, he had nodded toward the count and said, “A pity that lad hasn’t got a few millions, isn’t it?”