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 it. 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; for, don’t you see, an uncle, he’s a kind of father, and one shouldn’t mind what one does for him.”
So saying, she sat down, with her legs apart, on one of the dilapidated chairs, and poured into her apron the contents of her pockets, namely: a knife, her snuff-box, two pawn-tickets, some crusts of bread, and a handful of copper, from which she extracted a few silver bits.
This exhibition, intended to prove her generous and eager devotion, had no result. Toupillier seemed not to notice it. Exhausted by the feverish energy with which he had demanded his favorite remedy, he made an effort to change his position, and, with his back turned to his two nurses, he again muttered: “Wine! wine!” after which nothing more was heard of him but a stentorous breathing, that plainly showed the state of his lungs, which were beginning to congest.
“I suppose I must go and fetch his wine!” said the Cardinal, restoring to her pockets, with some ill-humor, the cargo she had just pulled out of them.
“If you don’t want to go — ” began Madame Perrache, always ready to offer her services.
The fishwife hesitated for a moment; then, reflecting that something might be got out of a conversation with the wine-merchant, and sure, moreover, that as long as Toupillier lay on his gold she could safely leave him alone with the portress, she said: —
“Thank you, Madame Perrache, but I’d better make acquaintance with his trades-folk.”
Then, having spied behind the night-table a dirty bottle which might hold about two quarts, —
“Did he say the rue des Canelles?” she inquired of the portress.
“Corner of the rue Guisarde,” replied Madame Perrache. “Monsieur Legrelu, a tall, fine man with big whiskers and no hair.” Then, lowering her voice, she added: “His number-six wine, you know, is Roussillon, and the best, too. However, the wine-merchant knows; it is enough if you tell him you have come from his customer, the pauper of Saint-Sulpice.”
“No need to tell me anything twice,” said the Cardinal, opening the door and making, as they say, a false exit. “Ah ca!” she said, coming back; “what does he burn in his stove, supposing I want to heat some remedy for him?”
“Goodness!” said the portress, “he doesn’t make much provision for winter, and here we are in the middle of summer!”
“And not a saucepan! not a pot, even! Gracious! what a way to live. I’ll have to fetch him some provisions; I hope nobody will see the things I bring back; I’d be ashamed they should — ”
“I’ll lend you a hand-bag,” said the portress, always ready and officious.
“No, I’ll buy a basket,” replied the fishwife, more anxious about what she expected to carry away than what she was about to bring home to the pauper. “There must be some Auvergnat in the neighborhood who sells wood,” she added.
“Corner of the rue Ferou; you’ll find one there. A fine establishment, with logs of wood painted in a kind of an arcade all round the shop — so like, you’d think they were going to speak to you.”
Before going finally off, Madame Cardinal went through a piece of very deep hypocrisy. We have seen how she hesitated about leaving the portress alone with the sick man: —
“Madame Perrache,” she said to her, “you won’t leave him, the poor darling, will you, till I get back?”
It may have been noticed that Cerizet had not decided on any definite course of action in the new affair he was now undertaking. The part of doctor, which for a moment he thought of assuming, frightened him, and he gave himself out, as we have seen, to Madame Perrache as the business agent of his accomplice. Once alone, he began to see that his original idea complicated with a doctor, a nurse, and a notary, presented the most serious difficulties. A regular will drawn in favor of Madame Cardinal was not a thing to be improvised in a moment. It would take some time to acclimatize the idea in the surly and suspicious mind of the old pauper, and death, which was close at hand, might play them a trick at any moment, and balk the most careful preparations.
It was true that unless a will were made the income of eight thousand francs on the Grand Livre and the house in the rue Notre-Dame de Nazareth would go to the heirs-at-law, and Madame Cardinal would get only her share of the property; but the abandonment of this visible portion of the inheritance was the surest means of laying hands on the invisible part of it. Besides, if the latter were secured, what hindered their returning to the idea of a will?
Resolving, therefore, to confine the operation to the simplest terms at first, Cerizet summed them up in the manoeuvre of the poppy-heads, already mentioned, and he was making his way back to Toupillier’s abode, armed with that single weapon of war, intending to give Madame Cardinal further instructions, when he met her, bearing on her arm the basket she had just bought; and in that basket was the sick man’s panacea.
“Upon my word!” cried the usurer, “is this the way you keep your watch?”
“I had to go out and buy him wine,” repli
ed the Cardinal; “he is howling like a soul in hell that he wants to be at peace, and to be let alone, and get his wine! It is his one idea that Roussillon is good for his disease. Well, when he has drunk it, I dare say he will be quieter.”
“You are right,” said Cerizet, sententiously; “never contradict a sick man. But this wine, you know, ought to be improved; by infusing these” (and lifting one of the covers of the basket he slipped in the poppies) “you’ll procure the poor man a good, long sleep, — five or six hours at least. This evening I’ll come and see you, and nothing, I think, need prevent us from examining a little closer those matters of inheritance.”
“I see,” said Madame Cardinal, winking.
“To-night, then,” said Cerizet, not wishing to prolong the conversation.
He had a strong sense of the difficulty and danger of the affair, and was very reluctant to be seen in the street conversing with his accomplice.
Returning to her uncle’s garret, Madame Cardinal found him still in a state of semi-torpor; she relieved Madame Perrache, and bade her good-bye, going to the door to receive a supply of wood, all sawed, which she had ordered from the Auvergnat in the rue Ferou.
Into an earthen pot, which she had bought of the right size to fit upon the hole in the stoves of the poor where they put their soup-kettles, she now threw the poppies, pouring over them two-thirds of the wine she had brought back with her. Then she lighted a fire beneath the pot, intending to obtain the decoction agreed upon as quickly as possible. The crackling of the wood and the heat, which soon spread about the room, brought Toupillier out of his stupor. Seeing the stove lighted he called out: —
Works of Honore De Balzac Page 816
