“You are ignorant of what is happening,” said des Lupeaulx, harshly, for he still thought it best to make a show of harshness. “Read that.”
He gave the two newspapers to the graceful woman, having drawn a line in red ink round each of the famous articles.
“Good heavens!” she exclaimed, “but this is dreadful! Who is this Baudoyer?”
“A donkey,” answered des Lupeaulx; “but, as you see, he uses means, — he gives monstrances; he succeeds, thanks to some clever hand that pulls the wires.”
The thought of her debts crossed Madame Rabourdin’s mind and blurred her sight, as if two lightning flashes had blinded her eyes at the same moment; her ears hummed under the pressure of the blood that began to beat in her arteries; she remained for a moment quite bewildered, gazing at a window which she did not see.
“But are you faithful to us?” she said at last, with a winning glance at des Lupeaulx, as if to attach him to her.
“That is as it may be,” he replied, answering her glance with an interrogative look which made the poor woman blush.
“If you demand caution-money you may lose all,” she said, laughing; “I thought you more magnanimous than you are. And you, you thought me less a person than I am, — a sort of school-girl.”
“You have misunderstood me,” he said, with a covert smile; “I meant that I could not assist a man who plays against me just as l’Etourdi played against Mascarille.”
“What can you mean?”
“This will prove to you whether I am magnanimous or not.”
He gave Madame Rabourdin the memorandum stolen by Dutocq, pointing out to her the passage in which her husband had so ably analyzed him.
“Read that.”
Celestine recognized the handwriting, read the paper, and turned pale under the blow.
“All the ministries, the whole service is treated in the same way,” said des Lupeaulx.
“Happily,” she said, “you alone possess this document. I cannot explain it, even to myself.”
“The man who stole it is not such a fool as to let me have it without keeping a copy for himself; he is too great a liar to admit it, and too clever in his business to give it up. I did not even ask him for it.”
“Who is he?”
“Your chief clerk.”
“Dutocq! People are always punished through their kindnesses! But,” she added, “he is only a dog who wants a bone.”
“Do you know what the other side offer me, poor devil of a general-secretary?”
“What?”
“I owe thirty-thousand and odd miserable francs, — you will despise me because it isn’t more, but here, I grant you, I am significant. Well, Baudoyer’s uncle has bought up my debts, and is, doubtless, ready to give me a receipt for them if Baudoyer is appointed.”
“But all that is monstrous.”
“Not at all; it is monarchical and religious, for the Grand Almoner is concerned in it. Baudoyer himself must appoint Colleville in return for ecclesiastical assistance.”
“What shall you do?”
“What will you bid me do?” he said, with charming grace, holding out his hand.
Celestine no longer thought him ugly, nor old, nor white and chilling as a hoar-frost, nor indeed anything that was odious and offensive, but she did not give him her hand. At night, in her salon, she would have let him take it a hundred times, but here, alone and in the morning, the action seemed too like a promise that might lead her far.
“And they say that statesmen have no hearts!” she cried enthusiastically, trying to hide the harshness of her refusal under the grace of her words. “The thought used to terrify me,” she added, assuming an innocent, ingenuous air.
“What a calumny!” cried des Lupeaulx. “Only this week one of the stiffest of diplomatists, a man who has been in the service ever since he came to manhood, has married the daughter of an actress, and has introduced her at the most iron-bound court in Europe as to quarterings of nobility.”
“You will continue to support us?”
“I am to draw up your husband’s appointment — But no cheating, remember.”
She gave him her hand to kiss, and tapped him on the cheek as she did so. “You are mine!” she said.
Des Lupeaulx admired the expression.
[That night, at the Opera, the old coxcomb related the incident as follows: “A woman who did not want to tell a man she would be his, — an acknowledgment a well-bred woman never allows herself to make, — changed the words into ‘You are mine.’ Don’t you think the evasion charming?”]
“But you must be my ally,” he answered. “Now listen, your husband has spoken to the minister of a plan for the reform of the administration; the paper I have shown you is a part of that plan. I want to know what it is. Find out, and tell me to-night.”
“I will,” she answered, wholly unaware of the important nature of the errand which brought des Lupeaulx to the house that morning.
“Madame, the hair-dresser.”
“At last!” thought Celestine. “I don’t see how I should have got out of it if he had delayed much longer.”
“You do not know to what lengths my devotion can go,” said des Lupeaulx, rising. “You shall be invited to the first select party given by his Excellency’s wife.”
“Ah, you are an angel!” she cried. “And I see now how much you love me; you love me intelligently.”
“To-night, dear child,” he said, “I shall find out at the Opera what journalists are conspiring for Baudoyer, and we will measure swords together.”
“Yes, but you must dine with us, will you not? I have taken pains to get the things you like best — ”
“All that is so like love,” said des Lupeaulx to himself as he went downstairs, “that I am willing to be deceived in that way for a long time. Well, if she IS tricking me I shall know it. I’ll set the cleverest of all traps before the appointment is fairly signed, and I’ll read her heart. Ah! my little cats, I know you! for, after all, women are just what we men are. Twenty-eight years old, virtuous, and living here in the rue Duphot! — a rare piece of luck and worth cultivating,” thought the elderly butterfly as he fluttered down the staircase.
“Good heavens! that man, without his glasses, must look funny enough in a dressing-gown!” thought Celestine, “but the harpoon is in his back and he’ll tow me where I want to go; I am sure now of that invitation. He has played his part in my comedy.”
When, at five o’clock in the afternoon, Rabourdin came home to dress for dinner, his wife presided at his toilet and presently laid before him the fatal memorandum which, like the slipper in the Arabian Nights, the luckless man was fated to meet at every turn.
“Who gave you that?” he asked, thunderstruck.
“Monsieur des Lupeaulx.”
“So he has been here!” cried Rabourdin, with a look which would certainly have made a guilty woman turn pale, but which Celestine received with unruffled brow and a laughing eye.
“And he is coming back to dinner,” she said. “Why that startled air?”
“My dear,” replied Rabourdin, “I have mortally offended des Lupeaulx; such men never forgive, and yet he fawns upon me! Do you think I don’t see why?”
“The man seems to me,” she said, “to have good taste; you can’t expect me to blame him. I really don’t know anything more flattering to a woman than to please a worn-out palate. After — ”
“A truce to nonsense, Celestine. Spare a much-tried man. I cannot get an audience of the minister, and my honor is at stake.”
“Good heavens, no! Dutocq can have the promise of a good place as soon as you are named head of the division.”
“Ah! I see what you are about, dear child,” said Rabourdin; “but the game you are playing is just as dishonorable as the real thing that is going on around us. A lie is a lie, and an honest woman — ”
“Let me use the weapons employed against us.”
“Celestine, the more that man des Lupeaulx feels he is fo
olishly caught in a trap, the more bitter he will be against me.”
“What if I get him dismissed altogether?”
Rabourdin looked at his wife in amazement.
“I am thinking only of your advancement; it was high time, my poor husband,” continued Celestine. “But you are mistaking the dog for the game,” she added, after a pause. “In a few days des Lupeaulx will have accomplished all that I want of him. While you are trying to speak to the minister, and before you can even see him on business, I shall have seen him and spoken with him. You are worn out in trying to bring that plan of your brain to birth, — a plan which you have been hiding from me; but you will find that in three months your wife has accomplished more than you have done in six years. Come, tell me this fine scheme of yours.”
Rabourdin, continuing to shave, cautioned his wife not to say a word about his work, and after assuring her that to confide a single idea to des Lupeaulx would be to put the cat near the milk-jug, he began an explanation of his labors.
“Why didn’t you tell me this before, Rabourdin?” said Celestine, cutting her husband short at his fifth sentence. “You might have saved yourself a world of trouble. I can understand that a man should be blinded by an idea for a moment, but to nurse it up for six or seven years, that’s a thing I cannot comprehend! You want to reduce the budget, — a vulgar and commonplace idea! The budget ought, on the contrary, to reach two hundred millions. Then, indeed, France would be great. If you want a new system let it be one of loans, as Monsieur de Nucingen keeps saying. The poorest of all treasuries is the one with a surplus that it never uses; the mission of a minister of finance is to fling gold out of the windows. It will come back to him through the cellars; and you, you want to hoard it! The thing to do is to increase the offices and all government employments, instead of reducing them! So far from lessening the public debt, you ought to increase the creditors. If the Bourbons want to reign in peace, let them seek creditors in the towns and villages, and place their loans there; above all, they ought not to let foreigners draw interest away from France; some day an alien nation might ask us for the capital. Whereas if capital and interest are held only in France, neither France nor credit can perish. That’s what saved England. Your plan is the tradesman’s plan. An ambitious public man should produce some bold scheme, — he should make himself another Law, without Law’s fatal ill-luck; he ought to exhibit the power of credit, and show that we should reduce, not principal, but interest, as they do in England.”
“Come, come, Celestine,” said Rabourdin; “mix up ideas as much as you please, and make fun of them, — I’m accustomed to that; but don’t criticise a work of which you know nothing as yet.”
“Do I need,” she asked, “to know a scheme the essence of which is to govern France with a civil service of six thousand men instead of twenty thousand? My dear friend, even allowing it were the plan of a man of genius, a king of France who attempted to carry it out would get himself dethroned. You can keep down a feudal aristocracy by levelling a few heads, but you can’t subdue a hydra with thousands. And is it with the present ministers — between ourselves, a wretched crew — that you expect to carry out your reform? No, no; change the monetary system if you will, but do not meddle with men, with little men; they cry out too much, whereas gold is dumb.”
“But, Celestine, if you will talk, and put wit before argument, we shall never understand each other.”
“Understand! I understand what that paper, in which you have analyzed the capacities of the men in office, will lead to,” she replied, paying no attention to what her husband said. “Good heavens! you have sharpened the axe to cut off your own head. Holy Virgin! why didn’t you consult me? I could have at least prevented you from committing anything to writing, or, at any rate, if you insisted on putting it to paper, I would have written it down myself, and it should never have left this house. Good God! to think that he never told me! That’s what men are! capable of sleeping with the wife of their bosom for seven years, and keeping a secret from her! Hiding their thoughts from a poor woman for seven years! — doubting her devotion!”
“But,” cried Rabourdin, provoked, “for eleven years and more I have been unable to discuss anything with you because you insist on cutting me short and substituting your ideas for mine. You know nothing at all about my scheme.”
“Nothing! I know all.”
“Then tell it to me!” cried Rabourdin, angry for the first time since his marriage.
“There! it is half-past six o’clock; finish shaving and dress at once,” she cried hastily, after the fashion of women when pressed on a point they are not ready to talk of. “I must go; we’ll adjourn the discussion, for I don’t want to be nervous on a reception-day. Good heavens! the poor soul!” she thought, as she left the room, “it /is/ hard to be in labor for seven years and bring forth a dead child! And not trust his wife!”
She went back into the room.
“If you had listened to me you would never had interceded to keep your chief clerk; he stole that abominable paper, and has, no doubt, kept a fac-simile of it. Adieu, man of genius!”
Then she noticed the almost tragic expression of her husband’s grief; she felt she had gone too far, and ran to him, seized him just as he was, all lathered with soap-suds, and kissed him tenderly.
“Dear Xavier, don’t be vexed,” she said. “To-night, after the people are gone, we will study your plan; you shall speak at your ease, — I will listen just as long as you wish me to. Isn’t that nice of me? What do I want better than to be the wife of Mohammed?”
She began to laugh; and Rabourdin laughed too, for the soapsuds were clinging to Celestine’s lips, and her voice had the tones of the purest and most steadfast affection.
“Go and dress, dear child; and above all, don’t say a word of this to des Lupeaulx. Swear you will not. That is the only punishment that I impose — ”
“/Impose/!” she cried. “Then I won’t swear anything.”
“Come, come, Celestine, I said in jest a really serious thing.”
“To-night,” she said, “I mean your general-secretary to know whom I am really intending to attack; he has given me the means.”
“Attack whom?”
“The minister,” she answered, drawing himself up. “We are to be invited to his wife’s private parties.”
In spite of his Celestine’s loving caresses, Rabourdin, as he finished dressing, could not prevent certain painful thoughts from clouding his brow.
“Will she ever appreciate me?” he said to himself. “She does not even understand that she is the sole incentive of my whole work. How wrong-headed, and yet how excellent a mind! — If I had not married I might now have been high in office and rich. I could have saved half my salary; my savings well-invested would have given me to-day ten thousand francs a year outside of my office, and I might then have become, through a good marriage — Yes, that is all true,” he exclaimed, interrupting himself, “but I have Celestine and my two children.” The man flung himself back on his happiness. To the best of married lives there come moments of regret. He entered the salon and looked around him. “There are not two women in Paris who understand making life pleasant as she does. To keep such a home as this on twelve thousand francs a year!” he thought, looking at the flower-stands bright with bloom, and thinking of the social enjoyments that were about to gratify his vanity. “She was made to be the wife of a minister. When I think of his Excellency’s wife, and how little she helps him! the good woman is a comfortable middle-class dowdy, and when she goes to the palace or into society — ” He pinched his lips together. Very busy men are apt to have very ignorant notions about household matters, and you can make them believe that a hundred thousand francs afford little or that twelve thousand afford all.
Though impatiently expected, and in spite of the flattering dishes prepared for the palate of the gourmet-emeritus, des Lupeaulx did not come to dinner; in fact he came in very late, about midnight, an hour when company dwindles and co
nversations become intimate and confidential. Andoche Finot, the journalist, was one of the few remaining guests.
“I now know all,” said des Lupeaulx, when he was comfortably seated on a sofa at the corner of the fireplace, a cup of tea in his hand and Madame Rabourdin standing before him with a plate of sandwiches and some slices of cake very appropriately called “leaden cake.” “Finot, my dear and witty friend, you can render a great service to our gracious queen by letting loose a few dogs upon the men we were talking of. You have against you,” he said to Rabourdin, lowering his voice so as to be heard only by the three persons whom he addressed, “a set of usurers and priests — money and the church. The article in the liberal journal was instituted by an old money-lender to whom the paper was under obligations; but the young fellow who wrote it cares nothing about it. The paper is about to change hands, and in three days more will be on our side. The royalist opposition, — for we have, thanks to Monsieur de Chateaubriand, a royalist opposition, that is to say, royalists who have gone over to the liberals, — however, there’s no need to discuss political matters now, — these assassins of Charles X. have promised me to support your appointment at the price of our acquiescence in one of their amendments. All my batteries are manned. If they threaten us with Baudoyer we shall say to the clerical phalanx, ‘Such and such a paper and such and such men will attack your measures and the whole press will be against you’ (for even the ministerial journals which I influence will be deaf and dumb, won’t they, Finot?). ‘Appoint Rabourdin, a faithful servant, and public opinion is with you — ’”
“Hi, hi!” laughed Finot.
“So, there’s no need to be uneasy,” said des Lupeaulx. “I have arranged it all to-night; the Grand Almoner must yield.”
“I would rather have had less hope, and you to dinner,” whispered Celestine, looking at him with a vexed air which might very well pass for an expression of wounded love.
Works of Honore De Balzac Page 783
