That very morning when Lucien was designing to reconquer Louise, Cérizet informed Henriette of Basine’s secret and told her that their fortunes and marriage depended on discovering the spot in which David was hiding. Once instructed, Henriette had no difficulty in recognizing that the printer could not be elsewhere than in Mademoiselle Clerget’s dressing-room. She thought that this bit of spying was quite harmless, but by involving her in this initial co-operation Cérizet had already made her his accomplice in treachery.
Lucien was still asleep when Cérizet, having come to Petit-Claud’s office to find out what had happened at the reception, was listening to the lawyer’s account of the trivial though important events which were to throw Angoulême into a turmoil.
‘Has Lucien written any letter to you since his return?’ the Parisian asked after giving a satisfied nod when Petit-Claud had finished.
‘Here’s the only one I have,’ said the solicitor, handing Cérizet a few lines which Lucien had written to him on his sister’s writing-paper.
‘Right!’ said Cérizet. ‘Ten minutes before sunset, let Doublon lie in wait at the Porte-Palet. Let him post his gendarmes and keep them hidden, and you’ll get your man.’
‘Are you sure of the arrangements you’ve made?’ asked Petit-Claud with a close look at Cérizet.
‘I’m trusting to chance,’ said the former street-urchin. ‘But chance is a downright scoundrel and doesn’t like decent people.’
‘You must pull it off,’ the solicitor said curtly.
‘I shall pull it off. It’s you who have pushed me into this muck-heap, and you may well give me a few bank-notes to wipe myself clean… But, Monsieur,’ the Parisian added, detecting an expression on the solicitor’s face which displeased him, ‘if it turned out that you had taken me in, if you don’t buy the printing-works for me within a week… well, you’ll leave a young widow behind you.’ The former street-arab said this quietly with a murderous look.
‘If we get David under lock and key by six o’clock, come at nine to Monsieur Gannerac’s house, and we will settle your affair,’ the solicitor peremptorily replied.
‘It’s a bargain: you’ll get what you want, Guvnor!’ said Cérizet.
Cérizet was already an expert in the industry which consists in washing out paper, one which today is endangering the interests of the Inland Revenue. He washed out the four lines Lucien had written and replaced them by what follows, forging Lucien’s handwriting with a skill which promised a lamentable social future for the compositor.
My dear David,
You can go and see the Prefect without fear. Your affair is settled. What’s more, you can come out of hiding immediately. I’ll meet you on the way, to explain what line you should take with the Prefect.
Your brother,
LUCINE.
At noon Lucien wrote a letter to David, telling him that the soirée had been a success and assuring him of the Prefect’s protection. That very day, he said, du Châtelet would be sending the Minister a report on the invention: he was enthusiastic about it.
Just as Marion brought this letter to Mademoiselle Basine on the pretext of delivering Lucien’s shirts for laundering, Cérizet, whom Petit-Claud had warned about the probability of this letter, took Mademoiselle Signol out for a walk on the banks of the Charente. No doubt a debate ensued in which Henriette’s honesty put up a long resistance, for the stroll lasted two hours. Not only, Cérizet argued, were the interests of their child at stake, but also their future happiness and prosperity. What he was demanding was only a trifle: he was careful not to tell her what the consequences would be. What alarmed Henriette was the exorbitant price that had to be paid for this trifle. Nevertheless, in the end Cérizet persuaded his mistress to fall in with his stratagem. At five o’clock, Henriette was to go out, then return and tell Mademoiselle Clerget that Madame Séchard wanted to see her immediately. Then, a quarter of an hour after Basine had left, she was to go upstairs, knock at the dressing-room door and hand over the forged letter to David. After that Cérizet was staking everything on chance.
Eve, for the first time in over a year, felt that the iron grip in which neediness had held her was relaxing. She had some hope at last. She too wanted to enjoy her brother’s company, show herself in public on the arm of the man who was adulated in his home-town, adored by the women and loved by the haughty Comtesse du Châtelet. She smartened herself up and proposed to take a walk in Beaulieu after dinner, arm in arm with her brother. At that time in September the whole of Angoulême goes out to take a breath of fresh air.
‘Oh! It’s the beautiful Madame Séchard,’ a few voices exclaimed on seeing Eve.
‘I would never have believed she would show herself in public,’ one woman said.
‘The husband’s in hiding, the wife flaunts herself,’ said Madame Postel, loud enough for the poor woman to hear.
‘Oh! Let’s go back home. I shouldn’t have come out,’ said Eve to her brother.
A few minutes before sunset, the murmur of an assembled crowd rose from the slope leading down to L’Houmeau. Lucien and his sister, seized with curiosity, made their way in that direction, for they heard several people from L’Houmeau talking to one another as if some crime had just been committed.
‘Likely enough it’s a thief who’s just been arrested… He’s as pale as death,’ said a passer-by to the brother and sister as he saw them hurrying down in front of the swelling crowd.
Neither Lucien nor his sister had the slightest apprehension. They watched the thirty-odd children and old women, the workmen leaving their workshops and walking ahead of the gendarmes whose braided caps were conspicuous in the middle of the central group. This group, with a mob of about a hundred people behind it, was moving along like a storm-cloud.
‘Oh!’ said Eve. ‘It’s my husband!’
‘David!’ cried Lucien.
‘It’s his wife!’ said the crowd of people, moving aside.
‘But who or what brought you out?’ Lucien asked.
‘Your letter,’ David answered, looking deathly pale.
‘I knew it!’ said Eve, and she fainted away.
Lucien lifted his sister up, two people helped him to carry her home, and Marion put her to bed. She had not come to by the time the doctor arrived. Lucien was then forced to admit to his mother that he was the cause of David’s arrest, for he could not fathom the misunderstanding due to the forged letter. Thunderstruck by his mother’s maledictory glance, he went upstairs to his room and locked himself in.
29. A last farewell
ANYONE who reads the following letter, written in fits and starts in the course of the night, will gain some idea of Lucien’s agitation of mind from the disjointed statements thrown together one by one.
My beloved sister,
We saw each other just now for the last time. My mind is made up irrevocably. And this is why: in many a family there is a fatal being who, for that family, is a sort of blight. That is what I am in our family. This is not an observation of my own, but one made by a man with much experience of the world. We were supping, a gathering of friends, at the Rocher de Cancale. Among the many pleasantries exchanged this man, who was in the diplomatic service, told us that a certain young woman, who to everyone’s astonishment had remained unmarried, was suffering from ‘father-sickness’. He then developed his theory about family sicknesses. He explained to us how, without such and such a mother, such and such a household would have prospered, how such and such a son had ruined his father, how such and such a father had destroyed his children’s future and the consideration they could have enjoyed. This social thesis, although jestingly sustained, was supported by so many examples in a matter of ten minutes that I was struck by it. This one truth made up for all the witty but extravagant paradoxes with which journalists amuse one another when they’ve no one to make a fool of.
Well then, I am the fatal being in our family. With a heart full of tenderness I behave like an enemy. I have requited all your devotion wit
h evil. The latest blow I have dealt you, unintentionally, is the cruellest of all. Whilst I was leading an unworthy life in Paris, a life full of pleasure and misery, mistaking comradeship for friendship, giving up true friends for people who wanted and were bound to exploit me, forgetting you or only remembering you in order to bring evil upon you, you were modestly plodding along, making your way slowly yet surely towards the prosperity which I in my folly was trying to take by storm. While you were going from good to better, I was launching out into a disastrous way of life. Yes, I am a man of inordinate ambition, and it prevents me from following a humble career. I have tastes and have known pleasures the mere memory of which poisons the enjoyments within my reach, though in times past they would have satisfied me. Oh my dear Eve, I judge myself with more severity than anyone. I condemn myself and feel no pity for myself. The struggle for life in Paris calls for enduring strength, and my will-power only works in fits and starts; my brain only functions intermittently. I am so afraid of the future that I don’t want to have a future, and I find the present unbearable.
I did want to see you again but I should have done better to have stayed away for ever. Yet to go on living far from home with no means of subsistence would be a folly which I will not add to all my other follies. Death to me seems preferable to a frustrated life; and in whatever circumstances I can imagine for myself my overweening vanity would make me do stupid things. Some creatures are like noughts in arithmetic: they need a positive number in front of them so that the zero they represent becomes a ten. I could only acquire some value by marrying a person of strong, relentless will. Madame de Bargeton was certainly the wife I needed and I missed my destiny by not leaving Coralie for her. David and you would have been excellent pilots for me, but you are not forceful enough to master my weakness which so to speak shies at domination. I like an easy, trouble-free existence, and when I want to get out of an awkward situation I’m capable of a cowardice which could take me to extremities. I was born to be a prince. I have more mental adroitness than is needed for success, but it only works spasmodically: in a career which so many ambitious persons follow the prize is won by the man who husbands his wit and still has some left at the end of the day. I should do evil, as I have just done here, with the best intentions in the world. Some men are made of oak; I’m perhaps only an elegant shrub trying to be a cedar.
This disparity between my capacity and my desires, this lack of equilibrium will always bring my efforts to naught. There are many such people in literary circles, thanks to this continual disproportion between will-power and desire. What destiny would await me? I can see what it would be when I call to mind certain well-established reputations in Paris which I saw fall into oblivion. On the threshold of old age I should be older than my years, without fame or fortune. Everything in me at present recoils before an old age of that sort: I don’t want to be, socially speaking, a cast-off garment. Dear sister, whom I worship as much for your recent severity as for your early tenderness, if we have paid dearly for the pleasure I have had in seeing you and David again, later on perhaps you will think that no price was too high to pay for the last joys given to a poor creature who loved you!…
Make no search for me, and don’t try to find out what has become of me. What intelligence I have will at least have helped me to do what I want to do. To resign myself, dear angel, would be to commit suicide every day. I have only resignation enough for one day, and I shall make use of it this very day.
2 a.m. Yes, my mind is made up. So good-bye for ever, dear Eve. I find some sweetness in the thought that from now on I shall be living only in your hearts. I shall have no other grave and I ask for no other. Good-bye once more. This is the last adieu you will receive from
Your brother,
LUCIEN.
After writing this letter Lucien went noiselessly downstairs, laid it on his nephew’s cradle, imprinted a last kiss, moist with tears, on the brow of his sleeping sister and left the room. As day was breaking he put out his candle and, after taking a last look at the old house, very quietly opened the door into the alley. But in spite of the care he took, he awakened Kolb who was sleeping on a mattress on the workshop floor.
‘Who goess zere!’ cried Kolb.
‘It is I,’ said Lucien. ‘I’m leaving, Kolb.’
‘It voult haf peen petter if you hat nefer come,’ Kolb muttered to himself, but loudly enough for Lucien to hear him.
‘It would have been better if I had never come into the world,’ Lucien replied. ‘Good-bye, Kolb. I bear no grudge against you for having the same thought as myself. Tell David that in my dying breath I shall regret that I could not give him a farewell embrace.’
By the time the Alsatian was up and dressed, Lucien had closed the door of the house and was walking down towards the Charente along the Beaulieu promenade, clad as if he were going to a banquet, for his clothes from Paris and his elegant dandy’s outfit were to be his funeral garments. Impressed by Lucien’s tone and final words, Kolb thought of going to find out if his mistress knew about her brother’s departure and if she had said good-bye to him; but seeing that the house was plunged in deep silence he concluded that this departure had been agreed upon beforehand and went back to bed.
30. A chance encounter
CONSIDERING the gravity of the subject, very little has been written about suicide, and no study has been made of it. Perhaps it is a malady that cannot be studied. Suicide results from a feeling which if you like we will call self-esteem in order not to confuse it with sense of honour. The day when a man despises himself, the day when he sees that others despise him, the moment when the realities of life are at variance with his hopes, he kills himself and thus pays homage to society, refusing to stand before it stripped of his virtues or his splendour. Whatever one may say, amongst atheists (exception must be made for the Christian view of suicide) cowards alone accept a life of dishonour. There are three kinds of suicide: firstly the kind which is no more than the last bout of a long-lasting sickness and surely belongs to the domain of pathology; secondly suicide born of despair; thirdly suicide which is reasoned out. Lucien was proposing to kill himself through despair and reasoning: from these two kinds of suicide retreat is possible. Pathological suicide alone is irrevocable; but often the three causes come together, as in the case of Jean-Jacques Rousseau.1
Once he had made his resolve, Lucien fell to deliberating about the means: as a poet he wanted to make a poetic end. He had first of all thought of simply throwing himself into the Charente; but as he walked down the slopes of Beaulieu for the last time he could hear in advance the hubbub his suicide would arouse and visualize the appalling spectacle of his body, swollen and deformed, being dragged from the water and the inquest which would follow: as is the case with a number of suicides, his self-esteem looked beyond death. During the day he had spent at Courtois’s mill he had walked along the river and had noticed, not far from the mill, one of those round pools such as are formed along a small water-course, whose tremendous depth is emphasized by the calmness of the surface. The water is neither green, nor blue, nor yellow: it looks like a mirror of polished steel. The edges of this basin presented neither blue nor yellow flags, nor the wide leaves of the water-lily; the grass on the bank was short and close, and it was surrounded by weeping willows, all of them picturesquely spaced. One could easily guess that it was unfathomably deep. Anyone with the courage to fill his pockets with stones must inevitably drown in it, and his body would never be recovered. ‘This spot,’ the poet had said to himself while admiring the pretty scene, ‘would be a delicious one to drown in.’
The memory of this came back to him just as he was reaching L’Houmeau. So he made his way towards Marsac, his mind full of final and funereal thoughts, but firmly resolved to use this means of keeping his death secret, not to be the subject of an inquest, not to be buried in earth, not to be seen in the horrible state of drowned men coming up to the surface. He quickly arrived at the foot of one of those slopes too frequently fou
nd on the roads of France, and especially between Angoulême and Poitiers. The stage-coach from Bordeaux to Paris was speeding along and no doubt the passengers would soon be getting down in order to walk up this long hill. Lucien did not want to be seen, so he hurried down a little sunken lane into a vineyard where he began to pick flowers. When he returned to the main road he had in his hand a big bunch of stonecrop, a yellow flower which grows on the pebbly soil in vineyards. He emerged just behind a traveller dressed entirely in black, with powdered hair, wearing shoes of Orleans calf-skin with silver buckles, his face tanned and seamed as if it had been accidentally scorched when he was a child. This traveller, in a patently clerical garb, was walking slowly and smoking a cigar. On hearing Lucien jumping on the road from the vineyard, the stranger turned round and seemed to be struck by the poet’s profoundly melancholy beauty, his symbolic bouquet and his elegant clothes. He looked like a hunter coming upon a prey long and vainly tracked. In naval fashion, he waited for Lucien to reach him and slackened his pace as if he wished to survey the plain below the slope. Lucien did likewise and noticed a little barouche drawn by two horses and a postilion who was leading them.
Lost Illusions (Penguin Classics) Page 72
