Works of Honore De Balzac

by Honoré de Balzac

  “Bah! you will find him a good fellow, with no pretension,” said Roguin.

  “I have put Raguet on guard in the shop. We can’t go through our own door; everything is pulled down.”

  “Why did you not bring your nephew?” said Pillerault to Madame Ragon.

  “Shall we not see him?” asked Cesarine.

  “No, my love,” said Madame Ragon; “Anselme, dear boy, is working himself to death. That bad-smelling Rue des Cinq-Diamants, without sun and without air, frightens me. The gutter is always blue or green or black. I am afraid he will die of it. But when a young man has something in his head — ” and she looked at Cesarine with a gesture which explained that the word head meant heart.

  “Has he got his lease?” asked Cesar.

  “Yesterday, before a notary,” replied Ragon. “He took the place for eighteen years, but they exacted six months’ rent in advance.”

  “Well, Monsieur Ragon, are you satisfied with me?” said the perfumer. “I have given him the secret of a great discovery — ”

  “We know you by heart, Cesar,” said little Ragon, taking Cesar’s hands and pressing them with religious friendship.

  Roguin was not without anxiety as to Claparon’s entrance on the scene; for his tone and manners were quite likely to alarm these virtuous and worthy people; he therefore thought it advisable to prepare their minds.

  “You are going to see,” he said to Pillerault and the two ladies, “a thorough original, who hides his methods under a fearfully bad style of manners; from a very inferior position he has raised himself up by intelligence. He will acquire better manners through his intercourse with bankers. You may see him on the boulevard, or on a cafe tippling, disorderly, betting at billiards, and think him a mere idler; but he is not; he is thinking and studying all the time to keep industry alive by new projects.”

  “I understand that,” said Birotteau; “I got my great ideas when sauntering on the boulevard; didn’t I, Mimi?”

  “Claparon,” resumed Roguin, “makes up by night-work the time lost in looking about him in the daytime, and watching the current of affairs. All men of great talent lead curious lives, inexplicable lives; well, in spite of his desultory ways he attains his object, as I can testify. In this instance he has managed to make the owners of these lands give way: they were unwilling, doubtful, timid; he fooled them all, tired them out, went to see them every day, — and here we are, virtually masters of the property.”

  At this moment a curious broum! broum! peculiar to tipplers of brandy and other liquors, announced the arrival of the most fantastic personage of our story, and the arbiter in flesh and blood of the future destinies of Cesar Birotteau. The perfumer rushed headlong to the little dark staircase, as much to tell Raguet to close the shop as to pour out his excuses to Claparon for receiving him in the dining-room.

  “What of that? It’s the very place to juggle a — I mean to settle a piece of business.”

  In spite of Roguin’s clever precautions, Monsieur and Madame Ragon, people of old-fashioned middle-class breeding, the observer Pillerault, Cesarine, and her mother were disagreeably impressed at first sight by this sham banker of high finance.

  About twenty-eight years of age at the time of which we write, the late commercial traveller possessed not a hair on his head, and wore a wig curled in ringlets. This head-gear needed, by rights, a virgin freshness, a lacteal purity of complexion, and all the softer corresponding graces: as it was, however, it threw into ignoble relief a pimpled face, brownish-red in color, inflamed like that of the conductor of a diligence, and seamed with premature wrinkles, which betrayed in the puckers of their deep-cut lines a licentious life, whose misdeeds were still further evidenced by the badness of the man’s teeth, and the black speckles which appeared here and there on his corrugated skin. Claparon had the air of a provincial comedian who knows all the roles, and plays the clown with a wink; his cheeks, where the rouge never stuck, were jaded by excesses, his lips clammy, though his tongue was forever wagging, especially when he was drunk; his glances were immodest, and his gestures compromising. Such a face, flushed with the jovial features of punch, was enough to turn grave business matters into a farce; so that the embryo banker had been forced to put himself through a long course of mimicry before he managed to acquire even the semblance of a manner that accorded with his fictitious importance.

  Du Tillet assisted in dressing him for this occasion, like the manager of a theatre who is uneasy about the debut of his principal actor; he feared lest the vulgar habits of this devil-may-care life should crop up to the surface of the newly-fledged banker. “Talk as little as you can,” he said to him. “No banker ever gabbles; he acts, thinks, reflects, listens, weighs. To seem like a banker you must say nothing, or, at any rate, mere nothings. Check that ribald eye of yours, and look serious, even if you have to look stupid. If you talk politics, go for the government, but keep to generalities. For instance: ‘The budget is heavy’; ‘No compromise is possible between the parties’; ‘The Liberals are dangerous’; ‘The Bourbons must avoid a conflict’; ‘Liberalism is the cloak of a coalition’; ‘The Bourbons are inaugurating an era of prosperity: let us sustain them, even if we do not like them’; ‘France has had enough of politics,’ etc. Don’t gorge yourself at every table where you dine; recollect you are to maintain the dignity of a millionaire. Don’t shovel in your snuff like an old Invalide; toy with your snuff-box, glance often at your feet, and sometimes at the ceiling, before you answer; try to look sagacious, if you can. Above all, get rid of your vile habit of touching everything; in society a banker ought to seem tired of seeing and touching things. Hang it! you are supposed to be passing wakeful nights; finance makes you brusque, so many elements must be brought together to launch an enterprise, — so much study! Remember to take gloomy views of business; it is heavy, dull, risky, unsettled. Now, don’t go beyond that, and mind you specify nothing. Don’t sing those songs of Beranger at table; and don’t get fuddled. If you are drunk, your future is lost. Roguin will keep an eye on you. You are going now among moral people, virtuous people; and you are not to scare them with any of your pot-house principles.”

  This lecture produced upon the mind of Charles Claparon very much the effect that his new clothes produced upon his body. The jovial scapegrace, easy-going with all the world, and long used to a comfortable shabbiness, in which his body was no more shackled than his mind was shackled by language, was now encased in the new clothes his tailor had just sent home, rigid as a picket-stake, anxious about his motions as well as about his speech; drawing back his hand when it was imprudently thrust out to grasp a bottle, just as he stopped his tongue in the middle of a sentence. All this presented a laughable discrepancy to the keen observation of Pillerault. Claparon’s red face, and his wig with its profligate ringlets, gave the lie to his apparel and pretended bearing, just as his thoughts clashed and jangled with his speech. But these worthy people ended by crediting such discordances to the preoccupation of his busy mind.

  “He is so full of business,” said Roguin.

  “Business has given him little education,” whispered Madame Ragon to Cesarine.

  Monsieur Roguin overheard her, and put a finger on his lips: —

  “He is rich, clever, and extremely honorable,” he said, stooping to Madame Ragon’s ear.

  “Something may be forgiven in consideration of such qualities,” said Pillerault to Ragon.

  “Let us read the deeds before dinner,” said Roguin; “we are all alone.”

  Madame Ragon, Cesarine, and Constance left the contracting parties to listen to the deeds read over to them by Alexandre Crottat. Cesar signed, in favor of one of Roguin’s clients, a mortgage bond for forty thousand francs, on his grounds and manufactories in the Faubourg du Temple; he turned over to Roguin Pillerault’s cheque on the Bank of France, and gave, without receipt, bills for twenty thousand francs from his current funds, and notes for one hundred and forty thousand francs payable to the order of Claparon.
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br />   “I have no receipt to give you,” said Claparon; “you deal, for your half of the property, with Monsieur Roguin, as I do for ours. The sellers will get their pay from him in cash; all that I engage to do is to see that you get the equivalent of the hundred and forty thousand francs paid to my order.”

  “That is equitable,” said Pillerault.

  “Well, gentlemen, let us call in the ladies; it is cold without them,” said Claparon, glancing at Roguin, as if to ask whether that jest were too broad.

  “Ladies! Ah! mademoiselle is doubtless yours,” said Claparon, holding himself very straight and looking at Birotteau; “hey! you are not a bungler. None of the roses you distil can be compared with her; and perhaps it is because you have distilled roses that — ”

  “Faith!” said Roguin, interrupting him, “I am very hungry.”

  “Let us go to dinner,” said Birotteau.

  “We shall dine before a notary,” said Claparon, catching himself up.

  “You do a great deal of business?” said Pillerault, seating himself intentionally next to Claparon.

  “Quantities; by the gross,” answered the banker. “But it is all heavy, dull; there are risks, canals. Oh, canals! you have no idea how canals occupy us; it is easy to explain. Government needs canals. Canals are a want especially felt in the departments; they concern commerce, you know. ‘Rivers,’ said Pascal, ‘are walking markets.’ We must have markets. Markets depend on embankments, tremendous earth-works; earth-works employ the laboring-classes; hence loans, which find their way back, in the end, to the pockets of the poor. Voltaire said, ‘Canaux, canards, canaille!’ But the government has its own engineers; you can’t get a finger in the matter unless you get on the right side of them; for the Chamber, — oh, monsieur, the Chamber does us all the harm in the world! It won’t take in the political question hidden under the financial question. There’s bad faith on one side or the other. Would you believe it? there’s Keller in the Chamber: now Francois Keller is an orator, he attacks the government about the budget, about canals. Well, when he gets home to the bank, and we go to him with proposals, canals, and so forth, the sly dog is all the other way: everything is right; we must arrange it with the government which he has just been been impudently attacking. The interests of the orator and the interests of the banker clash; we are between two fires! Now, you understand how it is that business is risky; we have got to please everybody, — clerks, chambers, antechambers, ministers — ”

  “Ministers?” said Pillerault, determined to get to the bottom of this co-associate.

  “Yes, monsieur, ministers.”

  “Well, then the newspapers are right?” said Pillerault.

  “There’s my uncle talking politics,” said Birotteau. “Monsieur Claparon has won his heart.”

  “Devilish rogues, the newspapers,” said Claparon. “Monsieur, the newspapers do all the mischief. They are useful sometimes, but they keep me awake many a night. I wish they didn’t. I have put my eyes out reading and ciphering.”

  “To go back to the ministers,” said Pillerault, hoping for revelations.

  “Ministers are a mere necessity of government. Ah! what am I eating? ambrosia?” said Claparon, breaking off. “This is a sauce you’ll never find except at a tradesman’s table, for the pot-houses — ”

  Here the flowers in Madame Ragon’s cap skipped like young rams. Claparon perceived the word was low, and tried to catch himself up.

  “In bank circles,” he said, “we call the best cafes. — Very, and the Freres Provencaux, — pot-houses in jest. Well, neither those infamous pot-houses nor our most scientific cooks can make us a sauce like this; mellifluous! Some give you clear water soured with lemon, and the rest drugs, chemicals.”

  Pillerault tried throughout the dinner to fathom this extraordinary being; finding only a void, he began to think him dangerous.

  “All’s well,” whispered Roguin to Claparon.

  “I shall get out of these clothes to-night, at any rate,” answered Claparon, who was choking.

  “Monsieur,” said Cesar, addressing him, “we are compelled to dine in this little room because we are preparing, eighteen days hence, to assemble our friends, as much to celebrate the emancipation of our territory — ”

  “Right, monsieur; I myself am for the government. I belong, in opinion, to the statu quo of the great man who guides the destinies of the house of Austria, jolly dog! Hold fast that you may acquire; and, above all, acquire that you may hold. Those are my opinions, which I have the honor to share with Prince Metternich.”

  “ — as to commemorate my promotion to the order of the Legion of honor,” continued Cesar.

  “Yes, I know. Who told me of that, — the Kellers, or Nucingen?”

  Roguin, surprised at such tact, made an admiring gesture.

  “No, no; it was in the Chamber.”

  “In the Chamber? was it Monsieur de la Billardiere?” said Birotteau.

  “Precisely.”

  “He is charming,” whispered Cesar to his uncle.

  “He pours out phrases, phrases, phrases,” said Pillerault, “enough to drown you.”

  “Possibly I showed myself worthy of this signal, royal favor, — ” resumed Birotteau.

  “By your labors in perfumery; the Bourbons know how to reward all merit. Ah! let us support those generous princes, to whom we are about to owe unheard-of prosperity. Believe me, the Restoration feels that it must run a tilt against the Empire; the Bourbons have conquests to make, the conquests of peace. You will see their conquests!”

  “Monsieur will perhaps do us the honor to be present at our ball?” said Madame Cesar.

  “To pass an evening with you, Madame, I would sacrifice the making of millions.”

  “He certainly does chatter,” said Cesar to his uncle.

  While the declining glory of perfumery was about to send forth its setting rays, a star was rising with feeble light upon the commercial horizon. Anselme Popinot was laying the corner-stone of his fortune in the Rue des Cinq-Diamants. This narrow little street, where loaded wagons can scarcely pass each other, runs from the Rue des Lombards at one end, to the Rue Aubry-le-Boucher at the other, entering the latter opposite to the Rue Quincampoix, that famous thoroughfare of old Paris where French history has so often been enacted. In spite of this disadvantage, the congregation of druggists in that neighborhood made Popinot’s choice of the little street a good one. The house, which stands second from the Rue des Lombards, was so dark that except at certain seasons it was necessary to use lights in open day. The embryo merchant had taken possession, the preceding evening, of the dingy and disgusting premises. His predecessor, who sold molasses and coarse sugars, had left the stains of his dirty business upon the walls, in the court, in the store-rooms. Imagine a large and spacious shop, with great iron-bound doors, painted a dragon-green, strengthened with long iron bars held on by nails whose heads looked like mushrooms, and covered with an iron trellis-work, which swelled out at the bottom after the fashion of the bakers’-shops in former days; the floor paved with large white stones, most of them broken, the walls yellow, and as bare as those of a guard-room. Next to the shop came the back-shop, and two other rooms lighted from the street, in which Popinot proposed to put his office, his books, and his own workroom. Above these rooms were three narrow little chambers pushed up against the party-wall, with an outlook into the court; here he intended to dwell. The three rooms were dilapidated, and had no view but that of the court, which was dark, irregular, and surrounded by high walls, to which perpetual dampness, even in dry weather, gave the look of being daubed with fresh plaster. Between the stones of this court was a filthy and stinking black substance, left by the sugars and the molasses that once occupied it. Only one of the bedrooms had a chimney, all the walls were without paper, and the floors were tiled with brick.

  Since early morning Gaudissart and Popinot, helped by a journeyman whose services the commercial traveller had invoked, were busily employed in stretching a fifte
en-sous paper on the walls of these horrible rooms, the workman pasting the lengths. A collegian’s mattress on a bedstead of red wood, a shabby night-stand, an old-fashioned bureau, one table, two armchairs, and six common chairs, the gift of Popinot’s uncle the judge, made up the furniture. Gaudissart had decked the chimney-piece with a frame in which was a mirror much defaced, and bought at a bargain. Towards eight o’clock in the evening the two friends, seated before the fireplace where a fagot of wood was blazing, were about to attack the remains of their breakfast.

  “Down with the cold mutton!” cried Gaudissart, suddenly, “it is not worthy of such a housewarming.”

  “But,” said Popinot, showing his solitary coin of twenty francs, which he was keeping to pay for the prospectus, “I — ”

  “I — ” cried Gaudissart, sticking a forty-franc piece in his own eye.

  A knock resounded throughout the court, naturally empty and echoing of a Sunday, when the workpeople were away from it and the laboratories empty.

  “Here comes the faithful slave of the Rue de la Poterie!” cried the illustrious Gaudissart.

  Sure enough, a waiter entered, followed by two scullions bearing in three baskets a dinner, and six bottles of wine selected with discernment.

  “How shall we ever eat it all up?” said Popinot.

  “The man of letters!” cried Gaudissart, “don’t forget him. Finot loves the pomps and the vanities; he is coming, the innocent boy, armed with a dishevelled prospectus — the word is pat, hein? Prospectuses are always thirsty. We must water the seed if we want flowers. Depart, slaves!” he added, with a gorgeous air, “there is gold for you.”

  He gave them ten sous with a gesture worthy of Napoleon, his idol.

  “Thank you, Monsieur Gaudissart,” said the scullions, better pleased with the jest than with the money.

  “As for you, my son,” he said to the waiter, who stayed to serve the dinner, “below is a porter’s wife; she lives in a lair where she sometimes cooks, as in other days Nausicaa washed, for pure amusement. Find her, implore her goodness; interest her, young man, in the warmth of these dishes. Tell her she shall be blessed, and above all, respected, most respected, by Felix Gaudissart, son of Jean-Francois Gaudissart, grandson of all the Gaudissarts, vile proletaries of ancient birth, his forefathers. March! and mind that everything is hot, or I’ll deal retributive justice by a rap on your knuckles!”