“We shall not find it easy to get rid of that young fellow,” said Blondet to Rastignac, when he saw Lucien come in handsomer than ever, and uncommonly well dressed.
“It is wiser to make friends with him, for he is formidable,” said Rastignac.
“He?” said de Marsay. “No one is formidable to my knowledge but men whose position is assured, and his is unattacked rather than attackable! Look here, what does he live on? Where does his money come from? He has, I am certain, sixty thousand francs in debts.”
“He has found a friend in a very rich Spanish priest who has taken a fancy to him,” replied Rastignac.
“He is going to be married to the eldest Mademoiselle de Grandlieu,” said Mademoiselle des Touches.
“Yes,” said the Chevalier d’Espard, “but they require him to buy an estate worth thirty thousand francs a year as security for the fortune he is to settle on the young lady, and for that he needs a million francs, which are not to be found in any Spaniard’s shoes.”
“That is dear, for Clotilde is very ugly,” said the Baroness.
Madame de Nucingen affected to call Mademoiselle de Grandlieu by her Christian name, as though she, nee Goriot, frequented that society.
“No,” replied du Tillet, “the daughter of a duchess is never ugly to the like of us, especially when she brings with her the title of Marquis and a diplomatic appointment. But the great obstacle to the marriage is Madame de Serizy’s insane passion for Lucien. She must give him a great deal of money.”
“Then I am not surprised at seeing Lucien so serious; for Madame de Serizy will certainly not give him a million francs to help him to marry Mademoiselle de Grandlieu. He probably sees no way out of the scrape,” said de Marsay.
“But Mademoiselle de Grandlieu worships him,” said the Comtesse de Montcornet; “and with the young person’s assistance, he may perhaps make better terms.”
“And what will he do with his sister and brother-in-law at Angouleme?” asked the Chevalier d’Espard.
“Well, his sister is rich,” replied Rastignac, “and he now speaks of her as Madame Sechard de Marsac.”
“Whatever difficulties there may be, he is a very good-looking fellow,” said Bianchon, rising to greet Lucien.
“How ‘do, my dear fellow?” said Rastignac, shaking hands warmly with Lucien.
De Marsay bowed coldly after Lucien had first bowed to him.
Before dinner Desplein and Bianchon, who studied the Baron while amusing him, convinced themselves that this malady was entirely nervous; but neither could guess the cause, so impossible did it seem that the great politician of the money market could be in love. When Bianchon, seeing nothing but love to account for the banker’s condition, hinted as much to Delphine de Nucingen, she smiled as a woman who has long known all her husband’s weaknesses. After dinner, however, when they all adjourned to the garden, the more intimate of the party gathered round the banker, eager to clear up this extraordinary case when they heard Bianchon pronounce that Nucingen must be in love.
“Do you know, Baron,” said de Marsay, “that you have grown very thin? You are suspected of violating the laws of financial Nature.”
“Ach, nefer!” said the Baron.
“Yes, yes,” replied de Marsay. “They dare to say that you are in love.”
“Dat is true,” replied Nucingen piteously; “I am in lof for somebody I do not know.”
“You, in love, you? You are a coxcomb!” said the Chevalier d’Espard.
“In lof, at my aje! I know dat is too ridiculous. But vat can I help it! Dat is so.”
“A woman of the world?” asked Lucien.
“Nay,” said de Marsay. “The Baron would not grow so thin but for a hopeless love, and he has money enough to buy all the women who will or can sell themselves!”
“I do not know who she it,” said the Baron. “And as Motame de Nucingen is inside de trawing-room, I may say so, dat till now I have nefer known what it is to lof. Lof! I tink it is to grow tin.”
“And where did you meet this innocent daisy?” asked Rastignac.
“In a carriage, at mitnight, in de forest of Fincennes.”
“Describe her,” said de Marsay.
“A vhite gaze hat, a rose gown, a vhite scharf, a vhite feil — a face just out of de Biple. Eyes like Feuer, an Eastern color — — ”
“You were dreaming,” said Lucien, with a smile.
“Dat is true; I vas shleeping like a pig — a pig mit his shkin full,” he added, “for I vas on my vay home from tinner at mine friend’s — — ”
“Was she alone?” said du Tillet, interrupting him.
“Ja,” said the Baron dolefully; “but she had ein heiduque behind dat carriage and a maid-shervant — — ”
“Lucien looks as if he knew her,” exclaimed Rastignac, seeing Esther’s lover smile.
“Who doesn’t know the woman who would go out at midnight to meet Nucingen?” said Lucien, turning on his heel.
“Well, she is not a woman who is seen in society, or the Baron would have recognized the man,” said the Chevalier d’Espard.
“I have nefer seen him,” replied the Baron. “And for forty days now I have had her seeked for by de Police, and dey do not find her.”
“It is better that she should cost you a few hundred francs than cost you your life,” said Desplein; “and, at your age, a passion without hope is dangerous, you might die of it.”
“Ja, ja,” replied the Baron, addressing Desplein. “And vat I eat does me no goot, de air I breade feels to choke me. I go to de forest of Fincennes to see de place vat I see her — and dat is all my life. I could not tink of de last loan — I trust to my partners vat haf pity on me. I could pay one million franc to see dat voman — and I should gain by dat, for I do nothing on de Bourse. — Ask du Tillet.”
“Very true,” replied du Tillet; “he hates business; he is quite unlike himself; it is a sign of death.”
“A sign of lof,” replied Nucingen; “and for me, dat is all de same ting.”
The simple candor of the old man, no longer the stock-jobber, who, for the first time in his life, saw that something was more sacred and more precious than gold, really moved these world-hardened men; some exchanged smiles; other looked at Nucingen with an expression that plainly said, “Such a man to have come to this!” — And then they all returned to the drawing-room, talking over the event.
For it was indeed an event calculated to produce the greatest sensation. Madame de Nucingen went into fits of laughter when Lucien betrayed her husband’s secret; but the Baron, when he heard his wife’s sarcasms, took her by the arm and led her into the recess of a window.
“Motame,” said he in an undertone, “have I ever laughed at all at your passions, that you should laugh at mine? A goot frau should help her husband out of his difficulty vidout making game of him like vat you do.”
From the description given by the old banker, Lucien had recognized his Esther. Much annoyed that his smile should have been observed, he took advantage of a moment when coffee was served, and the conversation became general, to vanish from the scene.
“What has become of Monsieur de Rubempre?” said the Baroness.
“He is faithful to his motto: Quid me continebit?” said Rastignac.
“Which means, ‘Who can detain me?’ or ‘I am unconquerable,’ as you choose,” added de Marsay.
“Just as Monsieur le Baron was speaking of his unknown lady, Lucien smiled in a way that makes me fancy he may know her,” said Horace Bianchon, not thinking how dangerous such a natural remark might be.
“Goot!” said the banker to himself.
Like all incurables, the Baron clutched at everything that seemed at all hopeful; he promised himself that he would have Lucien watched by some one besides Louchard and his men — Louchard, the sharpest commercial detective in Paris — to whom he had applied about a fortnight since.
Before going home to Esther, Lucien was due at the Hotel Grandlieu, to spend the two hours
which made Mademoiselle Clotilde Frederique de Grandlieu the happiest girl in the Faubourg Saint-Germain. But the prudence characteristic of this ambitious youth warned him to inform Carlos Herrera forthwith of the effect resulting from the smile wrung from him by the Baron’s description of Esther. The banker’s passion for Esther, and the idea that had occurred to him of setting the police to seek the unknown beauty, were indeed events of sufficient importance to be at once communicated to the man who had sought, under a priest’s robe, the shelter which criminals of old could find in a church. And Lucien’s road from the Rue Saint-Lazare, where Nucingen at that time lived, to the Rue Saint-Dominique, where was the Hotel Grandlieu, led him past his lodgings on the Quai Malaquais.
Lucien found his formidable friend smoking his breviary — that is to say, coloring a short pipe before retiring to bed. The man, strange rather than foreign, had given up Spanish cigarettes, finding them too mild.
“Matters look serious,” said the Spaniard, when Lucien had told him all. “The Baron, who employs Louchard to hunt up the girl, will certainly be sharp enough to set a spy at your heels, and everything will come out. To-night and to-morrow morning will not give me more than enough time to pack the cards for the game I must play against the Baron; first and foremost, I must prove to him that the police cannot help him. When our lynx has given up all hope of finding his ewe-lamb, I will undertake to sell her for all she is worth to him — — ”
“Sell Esther!” cried Lucien, whose first impulse was always the right one.
“Do you forget where we stand?” cried Carlos Herrera.
“No money left,” the Spaniard went on, “and sixty thousand francs of debts to be paid! If you want to marry Clotilde de Grandlieu, you must invest a million of francs in land as security for that ugly creature’s settlement. Well, then, Esther is the quarry I mean to set before that lynx to help us to ease him of that million. That is my concern.”
“Esther will never — — ”
“That is my concern.”
“She will die of it.”
“That is the undertaker’s concern. Besides, what then?” cried the savage, checking Lucien’s lamentations merely by his attitude. “How many generals died in the prime of life for the Emperor Napoleon?” he asked, after a short silence. “There are always plenty of women. In 1821 Coralie was unique in your eyes; and yet you found Esther. After her will come — do you know who? — the unknown fair. And she of all women is the fairest, and you will find her in the capital where the Duc de Grandlieu’s son-in-law will be Minister and representative of the King of France. — And do you tell me now, great Baby, that Esther will die of it? Again, can Mademoiselle de Grandlieu’s husband keep Esther?
“You have only to leave everything to me; you need not take the trouble to think at all; that is my concern. Only you must do without Esther for a week or two; but go to the Rue Taitbout, all the same. — Come, be off to bill and coo on your plank of salvation, and play your part well; slip the flaming note you wrote this morning into Clotilde’s hand, and bring me back a warm response. She will recompense herself for many woes in writing. I take to that girl.
“You will find Esther a little depressed, but tell her to obey. We must display our livery of virtue, our doublet of honesty, the screen behind which all great men hide their infamy. — I must show off my handsomer self — you must never be suspected. Chance has served us better than my brain, which has been beating about in a void for these two months past.”
All the while he was jerking out these dreadful sentences, one by one, like pistol shots, Carlos Herrera was dressing himself to go out.
“You are evidently delighted,” cried Lucien. “You never liked poor Esther, and you look forward with joy to the moment when you will be rid of her.”
“You have never tired of loving her, have you? Well, I have never tired of detesting her. But have I not always behaved as though I were sincerely attached to the hussy — I, who, through Asie, hold her life in my hands? A few bad mushrooms in a stew — and there an end. But Mademoiselle Esther still lives! — and is happy! — And do you know why? Because you love her. Do not be a fool. For four years we have been waiting for a chance to turn up, for us or against us; well, it will take something more than mere cleverness to wash the cabbage luck has flung at us now. There are good and bad together in this turn of the wheel — as there are in everything. Do you know what I was thinking of when you came in?”
“No.”
“Of making myself heir here, as I did at Barcelona, to an old bigot, by Asie’s help.”
“A crime?”
“I saw no other way of securing your fortune. The creditors are making a stir. If once the bailiffs were at your heels, and you were turned out of the Hotel Grandlieu, where would you be? There would be the devil to pay then.”
And Carlos Herrera, by a pantomimic gesture, showed the suicide of a man throwing himself into the water; then he fixed on Lucien one of those steady, piercing looks by which the will of a strong man is injected, so to speak, into a weak one. This fascinating glare, which relaxed all Lucien’s fibres of resistance, revealed the existence not merely of secrets of life and death between him and his adviser, but also of feelings as far above ordinary feeling as the man himself was above his vile position.
Carlos Herrera, a man at once ignoble and magnanimous, obscure and famous, compelled to live out of the world from which the law had banned him, exhausted by vice and by frenzied and terrible struggles, though endowed with powers of mind that ate into his soul, consumed especially by a fever of vitality, now lived again in the elegant person of Lucien de Rubempre, whose soul had become his own. He was represented in social life by the poet, to whom he lent his tenacity and iron will. To him Lucien was more than a son, more than a woman beloved, more than a family, more than his life; he was his revenge; and as souls cling more closely to a feeling than to existence, he had bound the young man to him by insoluble ties.
After rescuing Lucien’s life at the moment when the poet in desperation was on the verge of suicide, he had proposed to him one of those infernal bargains which are heard of only in romances, but of which the hideous possibility has often been proved in courts of justice by celebrated criminal dramas. While lavishing on Lucien all the delights of Paris life, and proving to him that he yet had a great future before him, he had made him his chattel.
But, indeed, no sacrifice was too great for this strange man when it was to gratify his second self. With all his strength, he was so weak to this creature of his making that he had even told him all his secrets. Perhaps this abstract complicity was a bond the more between them.
Since the day when La Torpille had been snatched away, Lucien had known on what a vile foundation his good fortune rested. That priest’s robe covered Jacques Collin, a man famous on the hulks, who ten years since had lived under the homely name of Vautrin in the Maison Vauquer, where Rastignac and Bianchon were at that time boarders.
Jacques Collin, known as Trompe-la-Mort, had escaped from Rochefort almost as soon as he was recaptured, profiting by the example of the famous Comte de Sainte-Helene, while modifying all that was ill planned in Coignard’s daring scheme. To take the place of an honest man and carry on the convict’s career is a proposition of which the two terms are too contradictory for a disastrous outcome not to be inevitable, especially in Paris; for, by establishing himself in a family, a convict multiplies tenfold the perils of such a substitution. And to be safe from all investigation, must not a man assume a position far above the ordinary interests of life. A man of the world is subject to risks such as rarely trouble those who have no contact with the world; hence the priest’s gown is the safest disguise when it can be authenticated by an exemplary life in solitude and inactivity.
“So a priest I will be,” said the legally dead man, who was quite determined to resuscitate as a figure in the world, and to satisfy passions as strange as himself.
The civil war caused by the Constitution of 1812 in Spain, wh
ither this energetic man had betaken himself, enabled him to murder secretly the real Carlos Herrera from an ambush. This ecclesiastic, the bastard son of a grandee, long since deserted by his father, and not knowing to what woman he owed his birth, was intrusted by King Ferdinand VII., to whom a bishop had recommended him, with a political mission to France. The bishop, the only man who took any interest in Carlos Herrera, died while this foundling son of the Church was on his journey from Cadiz to Madrid, and from Madrid to France. Delighted to have met with this longed-for opportunity, and under the most desirable conditions, Jacques Collin scored his back to efface the fatal letters, and altered his complexion by the use of chemicals. Thus metamorphosing himself face to face with the corpse, he contrived to achieve some likeness to his Sosia. And to complete a change almost as marvelous as that related in the Arabian tale, where a dervish has acquired the power, old as he is, of entering into a young body, by a magic spell, the convict, who spoke Spanish, learned as much Latin as an Andalusian priest need know.
As banker to three hulks, Collin was rich in the cash intrusted to his known, and indeed enforced, honesty. Among such company a mistake is paid for by a dagger thrust. To this capital he now added the money given by the bishop to Don Carlos Herrera. Then, before leaving Spain, he was able to possess himself of the treasure of an old bigot at Barcelona, to whom he gave absolution, promising that he would make restitution of the money constituting her fortune, which his penitent had stolen by means of murder.
Jacques Collin, now a priest, and charged with a secret mission which would secure him the most brilliant introductions in Paris, determined to do nothing that might compromise the character he had assumed, and had given himself up to the chances of his new life, when he met Lucien on the road between Angouleme and Paris. In this youth the sham priest saw a wonderful instrument for power; he saved him from suicide saying:
“Give yourself over to me as to a man of God, as men give themselves over to the devil, and you will have every chance of a new career. You will live as in a dream, and the worst awakening that can come to you will be death, which you now wish to meet.”
Works of Honore De Balzac Page 613
