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The Lesser Bourgeoisie

by Honoré de Balzac · English · Gutenberg #1641 · 994,886 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Lesser Bourgeoisie

Author: Honoré de Balzac

Translator: Katharine Prescott Wormeley


        
Release date: December 9, 2004 [eBook #1641]
                Most recently updated: November 22, 2016

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1641

Credits: Produced by John Bickers, Dagny, and Bonnie Sala, and David Widger


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE LESSER BOURGEOISIE ***




Produced by John Bickers, Dagny, and Bonnie Sala





THE LESSER BOURGEOISIE (The Middle Classes)


By Honore De Balzac


Translated by Katharine Prescott Wormeley




                             DEDICATION

                         To Constance-Victoire.

  Here, madame, is one of those books which come into the mind,
  whence no one knows, giving pleasure to the author before he can
  foresee what reception the public, our great present judge, will
  accord to it. Feeling almost certain of your sympathy in my
  pleasure, I dedicate the book to you. Ought it not to belong to
  you as the tithe formerly belonged to the Church in memory of God,
  who makes all things bud and fruit in the fields and in the
  intellect?

  A few lumps of clay, left by Moliere at the feet of his colossal
  statue of Tartuffe, have here been kneaded by a hand more daring
  than able; but, at whatever distance I may be from the greatest of
  comic writers, I shall still be glad to have used these crumbs in
  showing the modern Hypocrite in action. The chief encouragement
  that I have had in this difficult undertaking was in finding it
  apart from all religious questions,--questions which ought to be
  kept out of it for the sake of one so pious as yourself; and also
  because of what a great writer has lately called our present
  “indifference in matters of religion.”

  May the double signification of your names be for my book a
  prophecy! Deign to find here the respectful gratitude of him who
  ventures to call himself the most devoted of your servants.


                                                 De Balzac.





THE LESSER BOURGEOISIE

(The Middle Classes)





PART I. THE LESSER BOURGEOIS OF PARIS




CHAPTER I. DEPARTING PARIS

The tourniquet Saint-Jean, the narrow passage entered through a
turnstile, a description of which was said to be so wearisome in the
study entitled “A Double Life” (Scenes from Private Life), that naive
relic of old Paris, has at the present moment no existence except in our
said typography. The building of the Hotel-de-Ville, such as we now see
it, swept away a whole section of the city.

In 1830, passers along the street could still see the turnstile painted
on the sign of a wine-merchant, but even that house, its last asylum,
has been demolished. Alas! old Paris is disappearing with frightful
rapidity. Here and there, in the course of this history of Parisian
life, will be found preserved, sometimes the type of the dwellings of
the middle ages, like that described in “Fame and Sorrow” (Scenes from
Private Life), one or two specimens of which exist to the present day;
sometimes a house like that of Judge Popinot, rue du Fouarre, a specimen
of the former bourgeoisie; here, the remains of Fulbert’s house; there,
the old dock of the Seine as it was under Charles IX. Why should not the
historian of French society, a new Old Mortality, endeavor to save these
curious expressions of the past, as Walter Scott’s old man rubbed up the
tombstones? Certainly, for the last ten years the outcries of literature
in this direction have not been superfluous; art is beginning to
disguise beneath its floriated ornaments those ignoble facades of what
are called in Paris “houses of product,” which one of our poets has
jocosely compared to chests of drawers.

Let us remark here, that the creation of the municipal commission
“del ornamento” which superintends at Milan the architecture of street
facades, and to which every house owner is compelled to subject his
plan, dates from the seventeenth century. Consequently, we see in that
charming capital the effects of this public spirit on the part of nobles
and burghers, while we admire their buildings so full of character and
originality. Hideous, unrestrained speculation which, year after year,
changes the uniform level of storeys, compresses a whole apartment into
the space of what used to be a salon, and wages war upon gardens, will
infallibly react on Parisian manners and morals. We shall soon be forced
to live more without than within. Our sacred private life, the freedom
and liberty of home, where will they be?--reserved for those who can
muster fifty thousand francs a year! In fact, few millionaires now allow
themselves the luxury of a house to themselves, guarded by a courtyard
on a street and protected from public curiosity by a shady garden at the
back.

By levelling fortunes, that section of the Code which regulates
testamentary bequests, has produced these huge stone phalansteries, in
which thirty families are often lodged, returning a rental of a hundred
thousand francs a year. Fifty years hence we shall be able to count on
our fingers the few remaining houses which resemble that occupied, at
the moment our narrative begins, by the Thuillier family,--a really
curious house which deserves the honor of an exact description, if only
to compare the life of the bourgeoisie of former times with that of
to-day.

The situation and the aspect of this house, the frame of our present
Scene of manners and morals, has, moreover, a flavor, a perfume of the
lesser bourgeoisie, which may attract or repel attention according to
the taste of each reader.

In the first place, the Thuillier house did not belong to either
Monsieur or Madame Thuillier, but to Mademoiselle Thuillier, the sister
of Monsieur Thuillier.

This house, bought during the first six months which followed the
revolution of July by Mademoiselle Marie-Jeanne-Brigitte Thuillier, a
spinster of full age, stands about the middle of the rue Saint-Dominique
d’Enfer, to the right as you enter by the rue d’Enfer, so that the main
building occupied by Monsieur Thuillier faces south.

The progressive movement which is carrying the Parisian population to
the heights along the right bank of the Seine had long injured the sale
of property in what is called the “Latin quarter,” when reasons, which
will be given when we come to treat of the character and habits of
Monsieur Thuillier, determined his sister to the purchase of real
estate. She obtained this property for the small sum of forty-six
thousand francs; certain extras amounted to six thousand more; in all,
the price paid was fifty-two thousand francs. A description of the
property given in the style of an advertisement, and the results
obtained by Monsieur Thuillier’s exertions, will explain by what means
so many fortunes increased enormously after July, 1830, while so many
others sank.

Toward the street the house presents a facade of rough stone covered
with plaster, cracked by weather and lined by the mason’s instrument
into a semblance of blocks of cut stone. This frontage is so common in
Paris and so ugly that the city ought to offer premiums to house-owners
who would build their facades of cut-stone blocks. Seven windows lighted
the gray front of this house which was raised three storeys, ending in
a mansard roof covered with slate. The porte-cochere, heavy and solid,
showed by its workmanship and style that the front building on the
street had been erected in the days of the Empire, to utilize a part
of the courtyard of the vast old mansion, built at an epoch when the
quarter d’Enfer enjoyed a certain vogue.

On one side was the porter’s lodge; on the other the staircase of the
front building. Two wings, built against the adjoining houses, had
formerly served as stables, coach-house, kitchen and offices to the rear
dwelling; but since 1830, they had been converted into warerooms. The
one on the right was let to a certain M. Metivier, jr., wholesale dealer
in paper; that on the left to a bookseller named Barbet. The offices
of each were above the warerooms; the bookseller occupying the first
storey, and the paper-dealer the second storey of the house on the
street. Metivier, jr., who was more of a commission merchant in paper
than a regular dealer, and Barbet, much more of a money lender and
discounter than a bookseller, kept these vast warerooms for the purpose
of storing,--one, his stacks of paper, bought of needy manufacturers,
the other, editions of books given as security for loans.

The shark of bookselling and the pike of paper-dealing lived on the best
of terms, and their mutual operations, exempt from the turmoil of retail
business, brought so few carriages into that tranquil courtyard that the
concierge was obliged to pull up the grass between the paving stones.
Messrs. Barbet and Metivier paid a few rare visits to their landlords,
and the punctuality with which they paid their rent classed them as
good tenants; in fact, they were looked upon as very honest men by the
Thuillier circle.

As for the third floor on the street, it was made into two apartments;
one of which was occupied by M. Dutocq, clerk of the justice of peace,
a retired government employee, and a frequenter of the Thuillier
salon; the other by the hero of this Scene, about whom we must
content ourselves at the present moment by fixing the amount of his
rent,--namely, seven hundred francs a year,--and the location he had
chosen in the heart of this well-filled building, exactly three years
before the curtain rises on the present domestic drama.

The clerk, a bachelor of fifty, occupied the larger of the two
apartments on the third floor. He kept a cook, and the rent of the
rooms was a thousand francs a year. Within two years of the time of
her purchase, Mademoiselle Thuillier was receiving seven thousand two
hundred francs in rentals, for a house which the late proprietor
had supplied with outside blinds, renovated within, and adorned with
mirrors, without being able to sell or let it. Moreover, the Thuilliers
themselves, nobly lodged, as we shall see, enjoyed also a fine
garden,--one of the finest in that quarter,--the trees of which shaded
the lonely little street named the rue Neuve-Saint-Catherine.

Standing between the courtyard and the garden, the main building,
which they inhabited, seems to have been the caprice of some enriched
bourgeois in the reign of Louis XIV.; the dwelling, perhaps, of a
president of the parliament, or that of a tranquil savant. Its
noble free-stone blocks, damaged by time, have a certain air of
Louis-the-Fourteenth grandeur; the courses of the facade define the
storeys; panels of red brick recall the appearance of the stables at
Versailles; the windows have masks carved as ornaments in the centre
of their arches and below their sills. The door, of small panels in the
upper half and plain below, through which, when open, the garden can be
seen, is of that honest, unassuming style which was often employed in
former days for the porter’s lodges of the royal chateaux.

This building, with five windows to each course, rises two storeys above
the ground-floor, and is particularly noticeable for a roof of four
sides ending in a weather-vane, and broken here and there by tall,
handsome chimneys, and oval windows. Perhaps this structure is the
remains of some great mansion; but after examining all the existing
old maps of Paris, we find nothing which bears out this conjecture.
Moreover, the title-deeds of property under Louis XIV. was Petitot,
the celebrated painter in miniature, who obtained it originally from
President Lecamus. We may therefore believe that Lecamus lived in this
building while he was erecting his more famous mansion in the rue de
Thorigny.

So Art and the legal robe have passed this way in turn. How many
instigations of needs and pleasures have led to the interior arrangement
of the dwelling! To right, as we enter a square hall forming a closed
vestibule, rises a stone staircase with two windows looking on the
garden. Beneath the staircase opens a door to the cellar. From this
vestibule we enter the dining-room, lighted from the courtyard, and the
dining-room communicates at its side with the kitchen, which forms a
continuation of the wing in which are the warerooms of Metivier and
Barbet. Behind the staircase extends, on the garden side, a fine study
or office with two large windows. The first and second floor form two
complete apartments, and the servants’ quarters are shown by the oval
windows in the four-sided roof.

A large porcelain stove heats the square vestibule, the two glass doors
of which, placed opposite to each other, light it. This room, paved in
black and white marble, is especially noticeable for a ceiling of beams
formerly painted and gilt, but which had since received, probably under
the Empire, a coat of plain white paint. The three doors of the study,
salon and dining-room, surmounted by oval panels, are awaiting a
restoration that is more than needed. The wood-work is heavy, but the
ornamentation is not without merit. The salon, panelled throughout,
recalls the great century by its tall mantelpiece of Languedoc marble,
its ceiling decorated at the corners, and by the style of its windows,
which still retain their little panes. The dining-room, communicating
with the salon by a double door, is floored with stone; the wood-work is
oak, unpainted, and an atrocious modern wall-paper has been substituted
for the tapestries of the olden time. The ceiling is of chestnut;
and the study, modernized by Thuillier, adds its quota to these
discordances.

The white and gold mouldings of the salon are so effaced that nothing
remains of the gilding but reddish lines, while the white enamelling is
yellow, cracked, and peeling off. Never did the Latin saying “Otium cum
dignitate” have a greater commentary to the mind of a poet than in this
noble building. The iron-work of the staircase baluster is worthy of
the artist and the magistrate; but to find other traces of their taste
to-day in this majestic relic, the eyes of an artistic observer are
needed.

The Thuilliers and their predecessors have frequently degraded this
jewel of the upper bourgeoisie by the habits and inventions of the
lesser bourgeoisie. Look at those walnut chairs covered with horse-hair,
that mahogany table with its oilcloth cover, that sideboard, also of
mahogany, that carpet, bought at a bargain, beneath the table, those
metal lamps, that wretched paper with its red border, those execrable
engravings, and the calico curtains with red fringes, in a dining-room,
where the friends of Petitot once feasted! Do you notice the effect
produced in the salon by those portraits of Monsieur and Madame and
Mademoiselle Thuillier by Pierre Grassou, the artist par excellence
of the modern bourgeoisie. Have you remarked the card-tables and the
consoles of the Empire, the tea-table supported by a lyre, and that
species of sofa, of gnarled mahogany, covered in painted velvet of a
chocolate tone? On the chimney-piece, with the clock (representing the
Bellona of the Empire), are candelabra with fluted columns. Curtains of
woollen damask, with under-curtains of embroidered muslin held back by
stamped brass holders, drape the windows. On the floor a cheap carpet.
The handsome vestibule has wooden benches, covered with velvet, and the
panelled walls with their fine carvings are mostly hidden by wardrobes,
brought there from time to time from the bedrooms occupied by the
Thuilliers. Fear, that hideous divinity, has caused the family to add
sheet-iron doors on the garden side and on the courtyard side, which are
folded back against the walls in the daytime, and are closed at night.

It is easy to explain the deplorable profanation practised on this
monument of the private life of the bourgeoisie of the seventeenth
century, by the private life of the bourgeoisie of the nineteenth. At
the beginning of the Consulate, let us say, some master-mason having
bought the ancient building, took the idea of turning to account the
ground which lay between it and the street. He probably pulled down
the fine porte-cochere or entrance gate, flanked by little lodges which
guarded the charming “sejour” (to use a word of the olden time), and
proceeded, with the industry of a Parisian proprietor, to impress his
withering mark on the elegance of the old building. What a curious study
might be made of the successive title-deeds of property in Paris! A
private lunatic asylum performs its functions in the rue des Batailles
in the former dwelling of the Chevalier Pierre Bayard du Terrail, once
without fear and without reproach; a street has now been built by the
present bourgeois administration through the site of the hotel Necker.
Old Paris is departing, following its kings who abandoned it. For one
masterpiece of architecture saved from destruction by a Polish princess
(the hotel Lambert, Ile Saint-Louis, bought and occupied by the Princess
Czartoriska) how many little palaces have fallen, like this dwelling of
Petitot, into the hands of such as Thuillier.

Here follows the causes which made Mademoiselle Thuillier the owner of
the house.




CHAPTER II. THE HISTORY OF A TYRANNY

At the fall of the Villele ministry, Monsieur Louis-Jerome Thuillier,
who had then seen twenty-six years’ service as a clerk in the ministry
of finance, became sub-director of a department thereof; but scarcely
had he enjoyed the subaltern authority of a position formerly his
lowest hope, when the events of July, 1830, forced him to resign it.
He calculated, shrewdly enough, that his pension would be honorably and
readily given by the new-comers, glad to have another office at their
disposal. He was right; for a pension of seventeen hundred francs was
paid to him immediately.

When the prudent sub-director first talked of resigning, his sister, who
was far more the companion of his life than his wife, trembled for his
future.

“What will become of Thuillier?” was a question which Madame and
Mademoiselle Thuillier put to each other with mutual terror in their
little lodging on a third floor of the rue d’Argenteuil.

“Securing his pension will occupy him for a time,” Mademoiselle
Thuillier said one day; “but I am thinking of investing my savings in
a way that will cut out work for him. Yes; it will be something like
administrating the finances to manage a piece of property.”

“Oh, sister! you will save his life,” cried Madame Thuillier.

“I have always looked for a crisis of this kind in Jerome’s life,”
 replied the old maid, with a protecting air.

Mademoiselle Thuillier had too often heard her brother remark: “Such
a one is dead; he only survived his retirement two years”; she had too
often heard Colleville, her brother’s intimate friend, a government
employee like himself, say, jesting on this climacteric of bureaucrats,
“We shall all come to it, ourselves,” not to appreciate the danger her
brother was running. The change from activity to leisure is, in truth,
the critical period for government employees of all kinds.

Those of them who know not how to substitute, or perhaps cannot
substitute other occupations for the work to which they have been
accustomed, change in a singular manner; some die outright; others take
to fishing, the vacancy of that amusement resembling that of their late
employment under government; others, who are smarter men, dabble in
stocks, lose their savings, and are thankful to obtain a place in
some enterprise that is likely to succeed, after a first disaster and
liquidation, in the hands of an abler management. The late clerk then
rubs his hands, now empty, and says to himself, “I always did foresee
the success of the business.” But nearly all these retired bureaucrats
have to fight against their former habits.

“Some,” Colleville used to say, “are victims to a sort of ‘spleen’
peculiar to the government clerk; they die of a checked circulation;
a red-tapeworm is in their vitals. That little Poiret couldn’t see the
well-known white carton without changing color at the beloved sight; he
used to turn from green to yellow.”

Mademoiselle Thuillier was considered the moving spirit of her brother’s
household; she was not without decision and force of character, as the
following history will show. This superiority over those who immediately
surrounded her enabled her to judge her brother, although she adored
him. After witnessing the failure of the hopes she had set upon her
idol, she had too much real maternity in her feeling for him to let
herself be mistaken as to his social value.

Thuillier and his sister were children of the head porter at the
ministry of finance. Jerome had escaped, thanks to his near-sightedness,
all drafts and conscriptions. The father’s ambition was to make his son
a government clerk. At the beginning of this century the army presented
too many posts not to leave various vacancies in the government offices.
A deficiency of minor officials enabled old Pere Thuillier to hoist his
son upon the lowest step of the bureaucratic hierarchy. The old man died
in 1814, leaving Jerome on the point of becoming sub-director, but with
no other fortune than that prospect. The worthy Thuillier and his wife
(who died in 1810) had retired from active service in 1806, with a
pension as their only means of support; having spent what property
they had in giving Jerome the education required in these days, and in
supporting both him and his sister.

The influence of the Restoration on the bureaucracy is well known. From
the forty and one suppressed departments a crowd of honorable employees
returned to Paris with nothing to do, and clamorous for places inferior
to those they had lately occupied. To these acquired rights were added
those of exiled families ruined by the Revolution. Pressed between the
two floods, Jerome thought himself lucky not to have been dismissed
under some frivolous pretext. He trembled until the day when, becoming
by mere chance sub-director, he saw himself secure of a retiring
pension. This cursory view of matters will serve to explain Monsieur
Thuillier’s very limited scope and knowledge. He had learned the Latin,
mathematics, history, and geography that are taught in schools, but
he never got beyond what is called the second class; his father having
preferred to take advantage of a sudden opportunity to place him at the
ministry. So, while the young Thuillier was making his first records
on the Grand-Livre, he ought to have been studying his rhetoric and
philosophy.

While grinding the ministerial machine, he had no leisure to cultivate
letters, still less the arts; but he acquired a routine knowledge of his
business, and when he had an opportunity to rise, under the Empire,
to the sphere of superior employees, he assumed a superficial air of
competence which concealed the son of a porter, though none of it rubbed
into his mind. His ignorance, however, taught him to keep silence, and
silence served him well. He accustomed himself to practise, under the
imperial regime, a passive obedience which pleased his superiors; and it
was to this quality that he owed at a later period his promotion to the
rank of sub-director. His routine habits then became great experience;
his manners and his silence concealed his lack of education, and his
absolute nullity was a recommendation, for a cipher was needed. The
government was afraid of displeasing both parties in the Chamber by
selecting a man from either side; it therefore got out of the difficulty
by resorting to the rule of seniority. That is how Thuillier became
sub-director. Mademoiselle Thuillier, knowing that her brother abhorred
reading, and could substitute no business for the bustle of a public
office, had wisely resolved to plunge him into the cares of property,
into the culture of a garden, in short, into all the infinitely petty
concerns and neighborhood intrigues which make up the life of the
bourgeoisie.

The transplanting of the Thuillier household from the rue d’Argenteuil
to the rue Saint-Dominique d’Enfer, the business of making the purchase,
of finding a suitable porter, and then of obtaining tenants occupied
Thuillier from 1831 to 1832. When the phenomenon of the change was
accomplished, and the sister saw that Jerome had borne it fairly well,
she found him other cares and occupations (about which we shall hear
later), all based upon the character of the man himself, as to which it
will now be useful to give information.

Though the son of a ministerial porter, Thuillier was what is called a
fine man, slender in figure, above middle height, and possessing a
face that was rather agreeable if wearing his spectacles, but frightful
without them; which is frequently the case with near-sighted persons;
for the habit of looking through glasses has covered the pupils of his
eyes with a sort of film.

Between the ages of eighteen and thirty, young Thuillier had much
success among women, in a sphere which began with the lesser bourgeois
and ended in that of the heads of departments. Under the Empire, war
left Parisian society rather denuded of men of energy, who were mostly
on the battlefield; and perhaps, as a great physician has suggested,
this may account for the flabbiness of the generation which occupies the
middle of the nineteenth century.

Thuillier, forced to make himself noticeable by other charms than those
of mind, learned to dance and to waltz in a way to be cited; he was
called “that handsome Thuillier”; he played billiards to perfection; he
knew how to cut out likenesses in black paper, and his friend Colleville
coached him so well that he was able to sing all the ballads of the
day. These various small accomplishments resulted in that appearance
of success which deceives youth and befogs it about the future.
Mademoiselle Thuillier, from 1806 to 1814, believed in her brother as
Mademoiselle d’Orleans believed in Louis-Philippe. She was proud of
Jerome; she expected to see him the director-general of his department
of the ministry, thanks to his successes in certain salons, where,
undoubtedly, he would never have been admitted but for the circumstances
which made society under the Empire a medley.

But the successes of “that handsome Thuillier” were usually of short
duration; women did not care to keep his devotion any more than he
desired to make his devotion eternal. He was really an unwilling Don
Juan; the career of a “beau” wearied him to the point of aging him; his
face, covered with lines like that of an old coquette, looked a dozen
years older than the registers made him. There remained to him of all
his successes in gallantry, a habit of looking at himself in mirrors, of
buttoning his coat to define his waist, and of posing in various dancing
attitudes; all of which prolonged, beyond the period of enjoying his
advantages, the sort of lease that he held on his cognomen, “that
handsome Thuillier.”

The truth of 1806 has, however, become a fable, in 1826. He retains a
few vestiges of the former costume of the beaux of the Empire, which are
not unbecoming to the dignity of a former sub-director. He still wears
the white cravat with innumerable folds, wherein his chin is buried, and
the coquettish bow, formerly tied by the hands of beauty, the two ends
of which threaten danger to the passers to right and left. He follows
the fashions of former days, adapting them to his present needs; he tips
his hat on the back of his head, and wears shoes and thread stockings in
summer; his long-tailed coats remind one of the well-known “surtouts”
 of the Empire; he has not yet abandoned his frilled shirts and his white
waistcoats; he still plays with his Empire switch, and holds himself so
erect that his back bends in. No one, seeing Thuillier promenading
on the boulevards, would take him for the son of a man who cooked the
breakfasts of the clerks at a ministry and wore the livery of Louis
XVI.; he resembles an imperial diplomatist or a sub-prefect. Now, not
only did Mademoiselle Thuillier very innocently work upon her brother’s
weak spot by encouraging in him an excessive care of his person, which,
in her, was simply a continuation of her worship, but she also provided
him with family joys, by transplanting to their midst a household which
had hitherto been quasi-collateral to them.

It was that of Monsieur Colleville, an intimate friend of Thuillier. But
before we proceed to describe Pylades let us finish with Orestes, and
explain why Thuillier--that handsome Thuillier--was left without a
family of his own--for the family, be it said, is non-existent without
children. Herein appears one of those deep mysteries which lie buried in
the arena of private life, a few shreds of which rise to the surface
at moments when the pain of a concealed situation grows poignant. This
concerns the life of Madame and Mademoiselle Thuillier; so far, we
have seen only the life (and we may call it the public life) of Jerome
Thuillier.

Marie-Jeanne-Brigitte Thuillier, four years older than her brother, had
been utterly sacrificed to him; it was easier to give a career to one
than a “dot” to the other. Misfortune to some natures is a pharos,
which illumines to their eyes the dark low corners of social existence.
Superior to her brother both in mind and energy, Brigitte had one of
those natures which, under the hammer of persecution, gather themselves
together, become compact and powerfully resistant, not to say
inflexible. Jealous of her independence, she kept aloof from the life
of the household; choosing to make herself the sole arbiter of her own
fate. At fourteen years of age, she went to live alone in a garret, not
far from the ministry of finance, which was then in the rue Vivienne,
and also not far from the Bank of France, then, and now, in the rue de
la Vrilliere. There she bravely gave herself up to a form of industry
little known and the perquisite of a few persons, which she obtained,
thanks to the patrons of her father. It consisted in making bags to hold
coin for the Bank, the Treasury, and the great financial houses. At the
end of three years she employed two workwomen. By investing her savings
on the Grand-Livre, she found herself, in 1814, the mistress of three
thousand six hundred francs a year, earned in fifteen years. As she
spent little, and dined with her father as long as he lived, and, as
government securities were very low during the last convulsions of the
Empire, this result, which seems at first sight exaggerated, explains
itself.

On the death of their father, Brigitte and Jerome, the former being
twenty-seven, the latter twenty-three, united their existence. Brother
and sister were bound together by an extreme affection. If Jerome, then
at the height of his success, was pinched for money, his sister, clothed
in serge, and her fingers roughened by the coarse thread with which she
sewed her bags, would give him a few louis. In Brigitte’s eyes Jerome
was the handsomest and most charming man in the whole French Empire. To
keep house for this cherished brother, to be initiated into the
secrets of Lindor and Don Juan, to be his handmaiden, his spaniel,
was Brigitte’s dream. She immolated herself lovingly to an idol
whose selfishness, always great, was enormously increased by her
self-sacrifice. She sold her business to her fore-woman for fifteen
thousand francs and came to live with Thuillier in the rue d’Argenteuil,
where she made herself the mother, protectress, and servant of this
spoiled child of women. Brigitte, with the natural caution of a girl who
owed everything to her own discretion and her own labor, concealed the
amount of her savings from Jerome,--fearing, no doubt, the extravagance
of a man of gallantry. She merely paid a quota of six hundred francs
a year to the expenses of the household, and this, with her brother’s
eighteen hundred, enabled her to make both ends meet at the end of the
year.

From the first days of their coming together, Thuillier listened to his
sister as to an oracle; he consulted her in his trifling affairs, kept
none of his secrets from her, and thus made her taste the fruit of
despotism which was, in truth, the one little sin of her nature. But the
sister had sacrificed everything to the brother; she had staked her all
upon his heart; she lived by him only. Brigitte’s ascendancy over Jerome
was singularly proved by the marriage which she procured for him about
the year 1814.

Seeing the tendency to enforced reduction which the new-comers to power
under the Restoration were beginning to bring about in the government
offices, and particularly since the return of the old society which
sought to ride over the bourgeoisie, Brigitte understood, far better
than her brother could explain it to her, the social crisis which
presently extinguished their common hopes. No more successes for that
handsome Thuillier in the salons of the nobles who now succeeded the
plebeians of the Empire!

Thuillier was not enough of a person to take up a politic opinion and
choose a party; he felt, as his sister did for him, the necessity of
profiting by the remains of his youth to make a settlement. In such a
situation, a sister as jealous of her power as Brigitte naturally would,
and ought, to marry her brother, to suit herself as well as to suit him;
for she alone could make him really happy, Madame Thuillier being only
an indispensable accessory to the obtaining of two or three children. If
Brigitte did not have an intellect quite the equal of her will, at least
she had the instinct of her despotism; without, it is true, education,
she marched straight before her, with the headstrong determination of
a nature accustomed to succeed. She had the genius of housekeeping, a
faculty for economy, a thorough understanding of how to live, and a
love for work. She saw plainly that she could never succeed in marrying
Jerome into a sphere above their own, where parents might inquire
into their domestic life and feel uneasy at finding a mistress already
reigning in the home. She therefore sought in a lower grade for persons
to dazzle, and found, almost beside her, a suitable match.

The oldest usher at the Bank, a man named Lemprun, had an only daughter,
called Celeste. Mademoiselle Celeste Lemprun would inherit the fortune
of her mother, the only daughter of a rich farmer. This fortune
consisted of some acres of land in the environs of Paris, which the
old father still worked; besides this, she would have the property of
Lemprun himself, a man who had left the firms of Thelusson and of Keller
to enter the service of the Bank of France. Lemprun, now the head of
that service, enjoyed the respect and consideration of the governors and
auditors.

The Bank council, on hearing of the probable marriage of Celeste to
an honorable employee at the ministry of finance, promised a wedding
present of six thousand francs. This gift, added to twelve thousand
given by Pere Lemprun, and twelve thousand more from the maternal
grandfather, Sieur Galard, market-gardener at Auteuil, brought up the
dowry to thirty thousand francs. Old Galard and Monsieur and Madame
Lemprun were delighted with the marriage. Lemprun himself knew
Mademoiselle Thuillier, and considered her one of the worthiest and most
conscientious women in Paris. Brigitte then, for the first time, allowed
her investments on the Grand-Livre to shine forth, assuring Lemprun that
she should never marry; consequently, neither he nor his wife, persons
devoted to the main chance, would ever allow themselves to find fault
with Brigitte. Above all, they were greatly struck by the splendid
prospects of the handsome Thuillier, and the marriage took place, as the
conventional saying is, to the general satisfaction.

The governor of the Bank and the secretary were the bride’s witnesses;
Monsieur de la Billardiere, director of Thuillier’s department, and
Monsieur Rabourdin, head of the office, being those of the groom. Six
days after the marriage old Lemprun was the victim of a daring robbery
which made a great noise in the newspapers of the day, though it was
quickly forgotten during the events of 1815. The guilty parties having
escaped detection, Lemprun wished to make up the loss; but the
Bank agreed to carry the deficit to its profit and loss account;
nevertheless, the poor old man actually died of the grief this affair
had caused him. He regarded it as an attack upon his aged honor.

Madame Lemprun then resigned all her property to her daughter, Madame
Thuillier, and went to live with her father at Auteuil until he died
from an accident in 1817. Alarmed at the prospect of having to manage
or lease the market-garden and the farm of her father, Madame Lemprun
entreated Brigitte, whose honesty and capacity astonished her, to wind
up old Galard’s affairs, and to settle the property in such a way that
her daughter should take possession of everything, securing to her
mother fifteen hundred francs a year and the house at Auteuil. The
landed property of the old farmer was sold in lots, and brought in
thirty thousand francs. Lemprun’s estate had given as much more, so that
Madame Thuillier’s fortune, including her “dot,” amounted in 1818 to
ninety thousand francs. Joining the revenue of this property to that of
the brother and sister, the Thuillier household had an income, in 1818,
amounting to eleven thousand francs, managed by Brigitte alone on her
sole responsibility. It is necessary to begin by stating this financial
position, not only to prevent objections but to rid the drama of
difficulties.

Brigitte began, from the first, by allowing her brother five hundred
francs a month, and by sailing the household boat at the rate of five
thousand francs a year. She granted to her sister-in-law fifty francs a
month, explaining to her carefully that she herself was satisfied with
forty. To strengthen her despotism by the power of money, Brigitte laid
by the surplus of her own funds. She made, so it was said in business
offices, usurious loans by means of her brother, who appeared as
a money-lender. If, between the years 1813 and 1830, Brigitte had
capitalized sixty thousand francs, that sum can be explained by the rise
in the Funds, and there is no need to have recourse to accusations more
or less well founded, which have nothing to do with our present history.

From the first days of the marriage, Brigitte subdued the unfortunate
Madame Thuillier with a touch of the spur and a jerk of the bit, both
of which she made her feel severely. A further display of tyranny
was useless; the victim resigned herself at once. Celeste, thoroughly
understood by Brigitte, a girl without mind or education, accustomed
to a sedentary life and a tranquil atmosphere, was extremely gentle by
nature; she was pious in the fullest acceptation of the word; she would
willingly have expiated by the hardest punishments the involuntary
wrong of giving pain to her neighbor. She was utterly ignorant of life;
accustomed to be waited on by her mother, who did the whole service
of the house, for Celeste was unable to make much exertion, owing to
a lymphatic constitution which the least toil wearied. She was truly a
daughter of the people of Paris, where children, seldom handsome, and of
no vigor, the product of poverty and toil, of homes without fresh air,
without freedom of action, without any of the conveniences of life, meet
us at every turn.

At the time of the marriage, Celeste was seen to be a little woman, fair
and faded almost to sickliness, fat, slow, and silly in the countenance.
Her forehead, much too large and too prominent, suggested water on the
brain, and beneath that waxen cupola her face, noticeably too small and
ending in a point like the nose of a mouse, made some people fear she
would become, sooner or later, imbecile. Her eyes, which were light
blue, and her lips, always fixed in a smile, did not contradict that
idea. On the solemn occasion of her marriage she had the manner, air,
and attitude of a person condemned to death, whose only desire is that
it might all be over speedily.

“She is rather round,” said Colleville to Thuillier.

Brigitte was just the knife to cut into such a nature, to which her own
formed the strongest contrast. Mademoiselle Thuillier was remarkable for
her regular and correct beauty, but a beauty injured by toil which, from
her very childhood, had bent her down to painful, thankless tasks, and
by the secret privations she imposed upon herself in order to amass her
little property. Her complexion, early discolored, had something the
tint of steel. Her brown eyes were framed in brown; on the upper lip
was a brown floss like a sort of smoke. Her lips were thin, and her
imperious forehead was surmounted by hair once black, now turning to
chinchilla. She held herself as straight as the fairest beauty; but all
things else about her showed the hardiness of her life, the deadening of
her natural fire, the cost of what she was!

To Brigitte, Celeste was simply a fortune to lay hold of, a future
mother to rule, one more subject in her empire. She soon reproached her
for being _weak_, a constant word in her vocabulary, and the jealous
old maid, who would strongly have resented any signs of activity in
her sister-in-law, now took a savage pleasure in prodding the
languid inertness of the feeble creature. Celeste, ashamed to see her
sister-in-law displaying such energy in household work, endeavored to
help her, and fell ill in consequence. Instantly, Brigitte was devoted
to her, nursed her like a beloved sister, and would say, in presence
of Thuillier: “You haven’t any strength, my child; you must never do
anything again.” She showed up Celeste’s incapacity by that display of
sympathy with which strength, seeming to pity weakness, finds means to
boast of its own powers.

But, as all despotic natures liking to exercise their strength are full
of tenderness for physical sufferings, Brigitte took such real care of
her sister-in-law as to satisfy Celeste’s mother when she came to see
her daughter. After Madame Thuillier recovered, however, she called her,
in Celeste’s hearing, “a helpless creature, good for nothing!” which
sent the poor thing crying to her room. When Thuillier found her there,
drying her eyes, he excused her sister, saying:--

“She is an excellent woman, but rather hasty; she loves you in her own
way; she behaves just so with me.”

Celeste, remembering the maternal care of her sister-in-law during her
illness, forgave the wound. Brigitte always treated her brother as the
king of the family; she exalted him to Celeste, and made him out an
autocrat, a Ladislas, an infallible pope. Madame Thuillier having lost
her father and grandfather, and being well-nigh deserted by her mother,
who came to see her on Thursdays only (she herself spending Sundays at
Auteuil in summer), had no one left to love except her husband, and
she did love him,--in the first place, because he was her husband, and
secondly, because he still remained to her “that handsome Thuillier.”
 Besides, he sometimes treated her like a wife, and all these reasons
together made her adore him. He seemed to her all the more perfect
because he often took up her defence and scolded his sister, not from
any real interest in his wife, but for pure selfishness, and in order to
have peace in the household during the very few moments that he stayed
there.

In fact, that handsome Thuillier was never at home except at dinner,
after which meal he went out, returning very late at night. He went to
balls and other social festivities by himself, precisely as if he were
still a bachelor. Thus the two women were always alone together. Celeste
insensibly fell into a passive attitude, and became what Brigitte wanted
her,--a helot. The Queen Elizabeth of the household then passed
from despotism to a sort of pity for the poor victim who was always
sacrificed. She ended by softening her haughty ways, her cutting
speech, her contemptuous tones, as soon as she was certain that her
sister-in-law was completely under the yoke. When she saw the wounds it
made on the neck of her victim, she took care of her as a thing of her
own, and Celeste entered upon happier days. Comparing the end with the
beginning, she even felt a sort of love for her torturer. To gain
some power of self-defence, to become something less a cipher in the
household, supported, unknown to herself, by her own means, the poor
helot had but a single chance, and that chance never came to her.

Celeste had no child. This barrenness, which, from month to month,
brought floods of tears from her eyes, was long the cause of Brigitte’s
scorn; she reproached the poor woman bitterly for being fit for nothing,
not even to bear children. The old maid, who had longed to love her
brother’s child as if it were her own, was unable, for years, to
reconcile herself to this irremediable sterility.

At the time when our history begins, namely, in 1840, Celeste, then
forty-six years old, had ceased to weep; she now had the certainty of
never being a mother. And here is a strange thing. After twenty-five
years of this life, in which victory had ended by first dulling and then
breaking its own knife, Brigitte loved Celeste as much as Celeste loved
Brigitte. Time, ease, and the perpetual rubbing of domestic life, had
worn off the angles and smoothed the asperities; Celeste’s resignation
and lamb-like gentleness had brought, at last, a serene and peaceful
autumn. The two women were still further united by the one sentiment
that lay within them, namely, their adoration for the lucky and selfish
Thuillier.

Moreover, these two women, both childless, had each, like all women
who have vainly desired children, fallen in love with a child. This
fictitious motherhood, equal in strength to a real motherhood, needs an
explanation which will carry us to the very heart of our drama, and
will show the reason of the new occupation which Mademoiselle Thuillier
provided for her brother.




CHAPTER III. COLLEVILLE

Thuillier had entered the ministry of finance as supernumerary at the
same time as Colleville, who has been mentioned already as his intimate
friend. In opposition to the well-regulated, gloomy household of
Thuillier, social nature had provided that of Colleville; and if it
is impossible not to remark that this fortuitous contrast was scarcely
moral, we must add that, before deciding that point, it would be well
to wait for the end of this drama, unfortunately too true, for which the
present historian is not responsible.

Colleville was the only son of a talented musician, formerly first
violin at the Opera under Francoeur and Rebel, who related, at least
six times a month during his lifetime, anecdotes concerning the
representations of the “Village Seer”; and mimicked Jean-Jacques
Rousseau, taking him off to perfection. Colleville and Thuillier were
inseparable friends; they had no secrets from each other, and their
friendship, begun at fifteen years of age, had never known a cloud up to
the year 1839. The former was one of those employees who are called,
in the government offices, pluralists. These clerks are remarkable
for their industry. Colleville, a good musician, owed to the name
and influence of his father a situation as first clarionet at the
Opera-Comique, and so long as he was a bachelor, Colleville, who was
rather richer than Thuillier, shared his means with his friend. But,
unlike Thuillier, Colleville married for love a Mademoiselle Flavie,
the natural daughter of a celebrated danseuse at the Opera; her reputed
father being a certain du Bourguier, one of the richest contractors
of the day. In style and origin, Flavie was apparently destined for
a melancholy career, when Colleville, often sent to her mother’s
apartments, fell in love with her and married her. Prince Galathionne,
who at that time was “protecting” the danseuse, then approaching the end
of her brilliant career, gave Flavie a “dot” of twenty thousand francs,
to which her mother added a magnificent trousseau. Other friends and
opera-comrades sent jewels and silver-ware, so that the Colleville
household was far richer in superfluities than in capital. Flavie,
brought up in opulence, began her married life in a charming apartment,
furnished by her mother’s upholsterer, where the young wife, who was
full of taste for art and for artists, and possessed a certain elegance,
ruled, a queen.

Madame Colleville was pretty and piquant, clever, gay, and graceful;
to express her in one sentence,--a charming creature. Her mother, the
danseuse, now forty-three years old, retired from the stage and went
to live in the country,--thus depriving her daughter of the resources
derived from her wasteful extravagance. Madame Colleville kept a very
agreeable but extremely free and easy household. From 1816 to 1826 she
had five children. Colleville, a musician in the evening, kept the books
of a merchant from seven to nine in the morning, and by ten o’clock he
was at his ministry. Thus, by blowing into a bit of wood by night, and
writing double-entry accounts in the early morning, he managed to eke
out his earnings to seven or eight thousand francs a year.

Madame Colleville played the part of a “comme il faut” woman; she
received on Wednesdays, gave a concert once a month and a dinner every
fortnight. She never saw Colleville except at dinner and at night, when
he returned about twelve o’clock, at which hour she was frequently not
at home herself. She went to the theatres, where boxes were sometimes
given to her; and she would send word to Colleville to come and fetch
her from such or such a house, where she was supping and dancing. At her
own house, guests found excellent cheer, and her society, though rather
mixed, was very amusing; she received and welcomed actresses, artists,
men of letters, and a few rich men. Madame Colleville’s elegance was on
a par with that of Tullia, the leading prima-donna, with whom she was
intimate; but though the Collevilles encroached on their capital and
were often in difficulty by the end of the month, Flavie was never in
debt.

Colleville was very happy; he still loved his wife, and he made himself
her best friend. Always received by her with affectionate smiles and
sympathetic pleasure, he yielded readily to the irresistible grace
of her manners. The vehement activity with which he pursued his three
avocations was a part of his natural character and temperament. He was
a fine stout man, ruddy, jovial, extravagant, and full of ideas. In ten
years there was never a quarrel in his household. Among business men
he was looked upon, in common with all artists, as a scatter-brained
fellow; and superficial persons thought that the constant hurry of this
hard worker was only the restless coming and going of a busybody.

Colleville had the sense to seem stupid; he boasted of his family
happiness, and gave himself unheard-of trouble in making anagrams, in
order at times to seem absorbed in that passion. The government clerks
of his division at the ministry, the office directors, and even the
heads of divisions came to his concerts; now and then he quietly
bestowed upon them opera tickets, when he needed some extra indulgence
on account of his frequent absence. Rehearsals took half the time that
he ought to have been at his desk; but the musical knowledge his father
had bequeathed to him was sufficiently genuine and well-grounded to
excuse him from all but final rehearsals. Thanks to Madame Colleville’s
intimacies, both the theatre and the ministry lent themselves kindly to
the needs of this industrious pluralist, who, moreover, was bringing
up, with great care, a youth, warmly recommended to him by his wife,
a future great musician, who sometimes took his place in the orchestra
with a promise of eventually succeeding him. In fact, about the year
1827 this young man became the first clarionet when Colleville resigned
his position.

The usual comment on Flavie was, “That little slip of a coquette, Madame
Colleville.” The eldest of the Colleville children, born in 1816, was
the living image of Colleville himself. In 1818, Madame Colleville held
the cavalry in high estimation, above even art; and she distinguished
more particularly a sub-lieutenant in the dragoons of Saint-Chamans,
the young and rich Charles de Gondreville, who afterwards died in the
Spanish campaign. By that time Flavie had had a second son, whom she
henceforth dedicated to a military career. In 1820 she considered
banking the nursing mother of trade, the supporter of Nations, and she
made the great Keller, that famous banker and orator, her idol. She
then had another son, whom she named Francois, resolving to make him a
merchant,--feeling sure that Keller’s influence would never fail him.
About the close of the year 1820, Thuillier, the intimate friend of
Monsieur and Madame Colleville, felt the need of pouring his sorrows
into the bosom of this excellent woman, and to her he related his
conjugal miseries. For six years he had longed to have children, but God
did not bless him; although that poor Madame Thuillier had made novenas,
and had even gone, uselessly, to Notra-Dame de Liesse! He depicted
Celeste in various lights, which brought the words “Poor Thuillier!”
 from Flavie’s lips. She herself was rather sad, having at the moment no
dominant opinion. She poured her own griefs into Thuillier’s bosom. The
great Keller, that hero of the Left, was, in reality, extremely petty;
she had learned to know the other side of public fame, the follies of
banking, the emptiness of eloquence! The orator only spoke for show;
to her he had behaved extremely ill. Thuillier was indignant. “None
but stupid fellows know how to love,” he said; “take me!” That
handsome Thuillier was henceforth supposed to be paying court to Madame
Colleville, and was rated as one of her “attentives,”--a word in vogue
during the Empire.

“Ha! you are after my wife,” said Colleville, laughing. “Take care;
she’ll leave you in the lurch, like all the rest.”

A rather clever speech, by which Colleville saved his marital dignity.
From 1820 to 1821, Thuillier, in virtue of his title as friend of the
family, helped Colleville, who had formerly helped him; so much so,
that in eighteen months he had lent nearly ten thousand francs to the
Colleville establishment, with no intention of ever claiming them. In
the spring of 1821, Madame Colleville gave birth to a charming
little girl, to whom Monsieur and Madame Thuillier were godfather and
godmother. The child was baptized Celeste-Louise-Caroline-Brigitte;
Mademoiselle Thuillier wishing that her name should be given among
others to the little angel. The name of Caroline was a graceful
attention paid to Colleville. Old mother Lemprun assumed the care of
putting the baby to nurse under her own eyes at Auteuil, where Celeste
and her sister-in-law Brigitte, paid it regularly a semi-weekly visit.

As soon as Madame Colleville recovered she said to Thuillier, frankly,
in a very serious tone:--

“My dear friend, if we are all to remain good friends, you must be our
friend only. Colleville is attached to you; well, that’s enough for you
in this household.”

“Explain to me,” said the handsome Thuillier to Tullia after this
remark, “why women are never attached to me. I am not the Apollo
Belvidere, but for all that I’m not a Vulcan; I am passably
good-looking, I have sense, I am faithful--”

“Do you want me to tell you the truth?” replied Tullia.

“Yes,” said Thuillier.

“Well, though we can, sometimes, love a stupid fellow, we never love a
silly one.”

Those words killed Thuillier; he never got over them; henceforth he was
a prey to melancholy and accused all women of caprice.

The secretary-general of the ministry, des Lupeaulx, whose influence
Madame Colleville thought greater than it was, and of whom she said,
later, “That was one of my mistakes,” became for a time the great man
of the Colleville salon; but as Flavie found he had no power to promote
Colleville into the upper division, she had the good sense to resent des
Lupeaulx’s attentions to Madame Rabourdin (whom she called a minx),
to whose house she had never been invited, and who had twice had the
impertinence not to come to the Colleville concerts.

Madame Colleville was deeply affected by the death of young Gondreville;
she felt, she said, the finger of God. In 1824 she turned over a new
leaf, talked of economy, stopped her receptions, busied herself with her
children, determined to become a good mother of a family; no favorite
friend was seen at her house. She went to church, reformed her dress,
wore gray, and talked Catholicism, mysticism, and so forth. All this
produced, in 1825, another little son, whom she named Theodore. Soon
after, in 1826, Colleville was appointed sub-director of the
Clergeot division, and later, in 1828, collector of taxes in a Paris
arrondissement. He also received the cross of the Legion of honor, to
enable him to put his daughter at the royal school of Saint-Denis. The
half-scholarship obtained by Keller for the eldest boy, Charles, was
transferred to the second in 1830, when Charles entered the school
of Saint-Louis on a full scholarship. The third son, taken under the
protection of Madame la Dauphine, was provided with a three-quarter
scholarship in the Henri IV. school.

In 1830 Colleville, who had the good fortune not to lose a child, was
obliged, owing to his well-known attachment to the fallen royal family,
to send in his resignation; but he was clever enough to make a bargain
for it,--obtaining in exchange a pension of two thousand four hundred
francs, based on his period of service, and ten thousand francs
indemnity paid by his successor; he also received the rank of officer of
the Legion of honor. Nevertheless, he found himself in rather a cramped
condition when Mademoiselle Thuillier, in 1832, advised him to come and
live near them; pointing out to him the possibility of obtaining some
position in the mayor’s office, which, in fact, he did obtain a few
weeks later, at a salary of three thousand francs. Thus Thuillier and
Colleville were destined to end their days together. In 1833 Madame
Colleville, then thirty-five years old, settled herself in the rue
d’Enfer, at the corner of the rue des Deux-Eglises with Celeste
and little Theodore, the other boys being at their several schools.
Colleville was equidistant between the mayor’s office and the rue
Saint-Dominique d’Enfer. Thus the household, after a brilliant,
gay, headlong, reformed, and calmed existence, subsided finally into
bourgeois obscurity with five thousand four hundred francs a year for
its sole dependence.

Celeste was by this time twelve years of age, and she promised to be
pretty. She needed masters, and her education ought to cost not less
than two thousand francs a year. The mother felt the necessity of
keeping her under the eye of her godfather and godmother. She therefore
very willingly adopted the proposal of Mademoiselle Thuillier, who,
without committing herself to any engagement, allowed Madame Colleville
to understand that the fortunes of her brother, his wife, and herself
would go, ultimately, to the little Celeste. The child had been left at
Auteuil until she was seven years of age, adored by the good old Madame
Lemprun, who died in 1829, leaving twenty thousand francs, and a house
which was sold for the enormous sum of twenty-eight thousand. The
lively little girl had seen very little of her mother, but very much
of Mademoiselle and Madame Thuillier when she first returned to the
paternal mansion in 1829; but in 1833 she fell under the dominion of
Flavie, who was then, as we have said, endeavoring to do her duty,
which, like other women instigated by remorse, she exaggerated. Without
being an unkind mother, Flavie was very stern with her daughter. She
remembered her own bringing-up, and swore within herself to make Celeste
a virtuous woman. She took her to mass, and had her prepared for her
first communion by a rector who has since become a bishop. Celeste was
all the more readily pious, because her godmother, Madame Thuillier,
was a saint, and the child adored her; she felt that the poor neglected
woman loved her better than her own mother.

From 1833 to 1840 she received a brilliant education according to
the ideas of the bourgeoisie. The best music-masters made her a fair
musician; she could paint a water-color properly; she danced extremely
well; and she had studied the French language, history, geography,
English, Italian,--in short, all that constitutes the education of
a well-brought-up young lady. Of medium height, rather plump,
unfortunately near-sighted, she was neither plain nor pretty; not
without delicacy or even brilliancy of complexion, it is true, but
totally devoid of all distinction of manner. She had a great fund of
reserved sensibility, and her godfather and godmother, Mademoiselle
Thuillier and Colleville, were unanimous on one point,--the great
resource of mothers--namely, that Celeste was capable of attachment. One
of her beauties was a magnificent head of very fine blond hair; but her
hands and feet showed her bourgeois origin.

Celeste endeared herself by precious qualities; she was kind, simple,
without gall of any kind; she loved her father and mother, and would
willingly sacrifice herself for their sake. Brought up to the deepest
admiration for her godfather by Brigitte (who taught her to say “Aunt
Brigitte”), and by Madame Thuillier and her own mother, Celeste imbibed
the highest idea of the ex-beau of the Empire. The house in the rue
Saint-Dominique d’Enfer produced upon her very much the effect of the
Chateau des Tuileries on a courtier of the new dynasty.

Thuillier had not escaped the action of the administrative rolling-pin
which thins the mind as it spreads it out. Exhausted by irksome toil, as
much as by his life of gallantry, the ex-sub-director had well-nigh
lost all his faculties by the time he came to live in the rue
Saint-Dominique. But his weary face, on which there still reigned an air
of imperial haughtiness, mingled with a certain contentment, the conceit
of an upper official, made a deep impression upon Celeste. She alone
adored that haggard face. The girl, moreover, felt herself to be the
happiness of the Thuillier household.




CHAPTER IV. THE CIRCLE OF MONSIEUR AND MADAME THUILLIER

The Collevilles and their children became, naturally, the nucleus of the
circle which Mademoiselle Thuillier had the ambition to group around
her brother. A former clerk in the Billardiere division of the ministry,
named Phellion, had lived for the last thirty years in their present
quarter. He was promptly greeted by Colleville and Thuillier at the
first review. Phellion proved to be one of the most respected men in the
arrondissement. He had one daughter, now married to a school-teacher in
the rue Saint-Hyacinthe, a Monsieur Barniol. Phellion’s eldest son was
a professor of mathematics in a royal college; he gave lectures and
private lessons, being devoted, so his father was wont to say, to pure
mathematics. A second son was in the government School of Engineering.
Phellion had a pension of nine hundred francs, and he possessed a little
property of nine thousand and a few odd hundred francs; the fruit of his
economy and that of his wife during thirty years of toil and privation.
He was, moreover, the owner of a little house and garden where he lived
in the “impasse” des Feuillantines,--in thirty years he had never used
the old-fashioned word “cul-de-sac”!

Dutocq, the clerk of the justice of peace, was also a former employee
at the ministry of finance. Sacrificed, in former days, to one of those
necessities which are always met with in representative government, he
had accepted the position of scapegoat, receiving, privately, a round
sum of money and the opportunity to buy his present post of clerk in the
arrondissement. This man, not very honorable, and known to be a spy in
the government offices, was never welcomed as he thought he ought to be
by the Thuilliers; but the coldness of his landlords only made him the
more persistent in going to see them. He was a bachelor and had various
vices; he therefore concealed his life carefully, knowing well how to
maintain his position by flattering his superiors. The justice of peace
was much attached to Dutocq. This man, base as he was, managed, in the
end, to make himself tolerated by the Thuilliers, chiefly by coarse and
cringing adulation. He knew the facts of Thuillier’s whole life, his
relations with Colleville, and, above all, with Madame Colleville. One
and all they feared his tongue, and the Thuilliers, without admitting
him to any intimacy, endured his visits.

The family which became the flower of the Thuillier salon was that of
a former ministerial clerk, once an object of pity in the government
offices, who, driven by poverty, left the public service, in 1827, to
fling himself into a business enterprise, having, as he thought, an
idea. Minard (that was his name) foresaw a fortune in one of those
wicked conceptions which reflect such discredit on French commerce,
but which, in the year 1827, had not yet been exposed and blasted by
publicity. Minard bought tea and mixed it with tea-leaves already used;
also he adulterated the elements of chocolate in a manner which enabled
him to sell the chocolate itself very cheaply. This trade in colonial
products, begun in the quartier Saint-Marcel, made a merchant of Minard.
He started a factory, and through these early connections he was able to
reach the sources of raw material. He then did honorably, and on a large
scale, a business begun in the first instance dishonorably. He became a
distiller, worked upon untold quantities of products, and, by the year
1835, was considered the richest merchant in the region of the Place
Maubert. By that time he had bought a handsome house in the rue des
Macons-Sorbonne; he had been assistant mayor, and in 1839 became mayor
of his arrondissement and judge in the Court of Commerce. He kept a
carriage, had a country-place near Lagny; his wife wore diamonds at the
court balls, and he prided himself on the rosette of an officer of the
Legion of honor in his buttonhole.

Minard and his wife were exceedingly benevolent. Perhaps he wished to
return in retail to the poor the sums he had mulcted from the public
by the wholesale. Phellion, Colleville, and Thuillier met their old
comrade, Minard, at election, and an intimacy followed; all the closer
with the Thuilliers and Collevilles because Madame Minard seemed
enchanted to make an acquaintance for her daughter in Celeste
Colleville. It was at a grand ball given by the Minards that Celeste
made her first appearance in society (being at that time sixteen and a
half years old), dressed as her Christian named demanded, which seemed
to be prophetic of her coming life. Delighted to be friendly with
Mademoiselle Minard, her elder by four years, she persuaded her father
and godfather to cultivate the Minard establishment, with its gilded
salons and great opulence, where many political celebrities of the
“juste milieu” were wont to congregate, such as Monsieur Popinot, who
became, after a time, minister of commerce; Cochin, since made Baron
Cochin, a former employee at the ministry of finance, who, having a
large interest in the drug business, was now the oracle of the Lombard
and Bourdonnais quarters, conjointly with Monsieur Anselme Popinot.
Minard’s eldest son, a lawyer, aiming to succeed those barristers who
were turned down from the Palais for political reasons in 1830, was
the genius of the household, and his mother, even more than his father,
aspired to marry him well. Zelie Minard, formerly a flower-maker, felt
an ardent passion for the upper social spheres, and desired to enter
them through the marriages of her son and daughter; whereas Minard,
wiser than she, and imbued with the vigor of the middle classes, which
the revolution of July had infiltrated into the fibres of government,
thought only of wealth and fortune.

He frequented the Thuillier salon to gain information as to Celeste’s
probable inheritance. He knew, like Dutocq and Phellion, the reports
occasioned by Thuillier’s former intimacy with Flavie, and he saw at
a glance the idolatry of the Thuilliers for their godchild. Dutocq, to
gain admittance to Minard’s house, fawned upon him grossly. When Minard,
the Rothschild of the arrondissement, appeared at the Thuilliers’, he
compared him cleverly to Napoleon, finding him stout, fat, and blooming,
having left him at the ministry thin, pale, and puny.

“You looked, in the division Billardiere,” he said, “like Napoleon
before the 18th Brumaire, and I behold you now the Napoleon of the
Empire.”

Notwithstanding which flattery, Minard received Dutocq very coldly and
did not invite him to his house; consequently, he made a mortal enemy of
the former clerk.

Monsieur and Madame Phellion, worthy as they were, could not keep
themselves from making calculations and cherishing hopes; they thought
that Celeste would be the very wife for their son the professor;
therefore, to have, as it were, a watcher in the Thuillier salon, they
introduced their son-in-law, Monsieur Barniol, a man much respected
in the faubourg Saint-Jacques, and also an old employee at the mayor’s
office, an intimate friend of theirs, named Laudigeois. Thus the
Phellions formed a phalanx of seven persons; the Collevilles were not
less numerous; so that on Sundays it often appeared that thirty persons
were assembled in the Thuillier salon. Thuillier renewed acquaintance
with the Saillards, Baudoyers, and Falleixs,--all persons of
respectability in the quarter of the Palais-Royal, whom they often
invited to dinner.

Madame Colleville was, as a woman, the most distinguished member of
this society, just as Minard junior and Professor Phellion were superior
among the men. All the others, without ideas or education, and issuing
from the lower ranks, presented the types and the absurdities of the
lesser bourgeoisie. Though all success, especially if won from distant
sources, seems to presuppose some genuine merit, Minard was really
an inflated balloon. Expressing himself in empty phrases, mistaking
sycophancy for politeness, and wordiness for wit, he uttered his
commonplaces with a brisk assurance that passed for eloquence. Certain
words which said nothing but answered all things,--progress, steam,
bitumen, National guard, order, democratic element, spirit of
association, legality, movement, resistance,--seemed, as each political
phase developed, to have been actually made for Minard, whose talk was
a paraphrase on the ideas of his newspaper. Julien Minard, the young
lawyer, suffered from his father as much as his father suffered from
his wife. Zelie had grown pretentious with wealth, without, at the same
time, learning to speak French. She was now very fat, and gave the idea,
in her rich surroundings, of a cook married to her master.

Phellion, that type and model of the petty bourgeois, exhibited as many
virtues as he did absurdities. Accustomed to subordination during his
bureaucratic life, he respected all social superiority. He was therefore
silent before Minard. During the critical period of retirement from
office, he had held his own admirably, for the following reason. Never
until now had that worthy and excellent man been able to indulge his
own tastes. He loved the city of Paris; he was interested in its
embellishment, in the laying out of its streets; he was capable of
standing for hours to watch the demolition of houses. He might now
have been observed, stolidly planted on his legs, his nose in the air,
watching for the fall of a stone which some mason was loosening at the
top of a wall, and never moving till the stone fell; when it had fallen
he went away as happy as an academician at the fall of a romantic drama.
Veritable supernumeraries of the social comedy, Phellion, Laudigeois,
and their kind, fulfilled the functions of the antique chorus. They wept
when weeping was in order, laughed when they should laugh, and sang in
parts the public joys and sorrows; they triumphed in their corner with
the triumphs of Algiers, of Constantine, of Lisbon, of Sainte-Jean
d’Ulloa; they deplored the death of Napoleon and the fatal catastrophes
of the Saint-Merri and the rue Transnonnain, grieving over celebrated
men who were utterly unknown to them. Phellion alone presents a double
side: he divides himself conscientiously between the reasons of the
opposition and those of the government. When fighting went on in
the streets, Phellion had the courage to declare himself before his
neighbors; he went to the Place Saint-Michel, the place where his
battalion assembled; he felt for the government and did his duty. Before
and during the riot, he supported the dynasty, the product of July; but,
as soon as the political trials began, he stood by the accused. This
innocent “weather-cockism” prevails in his political opinions; he
produces, in reply to all arguments, the “colossus of the North.”
 England is, to his thinking, as to that of the old “Constitutionnel,”
 a crone with two faces,--Machiavellian Albion, and the model nation:
Machiavellian, when the interests of France and of Napoleon are
concerned; the model nation when the faults of the government are in
question. He admits, with his chosen paper, the democratic element,
but refuses in conversation all compact with the republican spirit. The
republican spirit to him means 1793, rioting, the Terror, and
agrarian law. The democratic element is the development of the lesser
bourgeoisie, the reign of Phellions.

The worthy old man is always dignified; dignity serves to explain his
life. He has brought up his children with dignity; he has kept himself
a father in their eyes; he insists on being honored in his home, just as
he himself honors power and his superiors. He has never made debts. As
a juryman his conscience obliges him to sweat blood and water in the
effort to follow the debates of a trial; he never laughs, not even if
the judge, and audience, and all the officials laugh. Eminently useful,
he gives his services, his time, everything--except his money. Felix
Phellion, his son, the professor, is his idol; he thinks him capable of
attaining to the Academy of Sciences. Thuillier, between the audacious
nullity of Minard, and the solid silliness of Phellion, was a neutral
substance, but connected with both through his dismal experience. He
managed to conceal the emptiness of his brain by commonplace talk, just
as he covered the yellow skin of his bald pate with thready locks of his
gray hair, brought from the back of his head with infinite art by the
comb of his hairdresser.

“In any other career,” he was wont to say, speaking of the government
employ, “I should have made a very different fortune.”

He had seen the _right_, which is possible in theory and impossible in
practice,--results proving contrary to premises,--and he related the
intrigues and the injustices of the Rabourdin affair.

“After that, one can believe all, and believe nothing,” he would say.
“Ah! it is a queer thing, government! I’m very glad not to have a son,
and never to see him in the career of a place-hunter.”

Colleville, ever gay, rotund, and good-humored, a sayer of “quodlibets,”
 a maker of anagrams, always busy, represented the capable and bantering
bourgeois, with faculty without success, obstinate toil without result;
he was also the embodiment of jovial resignation, mind without object,
art with usefulness, for, excellent musician that he was, he never
played now except for his daughter.

The Thuillier salon was in some sort a provincial salon, lighted,
however, by continual flashes from the Parisian conflagration; its
mediocrity and its platitudes followed the current of the times. The
popular saying and thing (for in Paris the thing and its saying are
like the horse and its rider) ricochetted, so to speak, to this company.
Monsieur Minard was always impatiently expected, for he was certain to
know the truth of important circumstances. The women of the Thuillier
salon held by the Jesuits; the men defended the University; and, as a
general thing, the women listened. A man of intelligence (could he have
borne the dulness of these evenings) would have laughed, as he would at
a comedy of Moliere, on hearing, amid endless discussion, such remarks
as the following:--

“How could the Revolution of 1789 have been avoided? The loans of Louis
XIV. prepared the way for it. Louis XV., an egotist, a man of narrow
mind (didn’t he say, ‘If I were lieutenant of police I would suppress
cabriolets’?), that dissolute king--you remember his Parc aux
Cerfs?--did much to open the abyss of revolution. Monsieur de Necker,
an evil-minded Genovese, set the thing a-going. Foreigners have always
tried to injure France. The maximum did great harm to the Revolution.
Legally Louis XVI. should never have been condemned; a jury would have
acquitted him. Why did Charles X. fall? Napoleon was a great man, and
the facts that prove his genius are anecdotal: he took five pinches of
snuff a minute out of a pocket lined with leather made in his waistcoat.
He looked into all his tradesmen’s accounts; he went to Saint-Denis
to judge for himself the prices of things. Talma was his friend; Talma
taught him his gestures; nevertheless, he always refused to give Talma
the Legion of honor! The emperor mounted guard for a sentinel who went
to sleep, to save him from being shot. Those were the things that made
his soldiers adore him. Louis XVIII., who certainly had some sense, was
very unjust in calling him Monsieur de Buonaparte. The defect of the
present government is in letting itself be led instead of leading. It
holds itself too low. It is afraid of men of energy. It ought to have
torn up all the treaties of 1815 and demanded the Rhine. They keep the
same men too long in the ministry”; etc., etc.

“Come, you’ve exerted your minds long enough,” said Mademoiselle
Thuillier, interrupting one of these luminous talks; “the altar is
dressed; begin your little game.”

If these anterior facts and all these generalities were not placed here
as the frame of the present Scene, to give an idea of the spirit of
this society, the following drama would certainly have suffered greatly.
Moreover, this sketch is historically faithful; it shows a social
stratum of importance in any portrayal of manners and morals, especially
when we reflect that the political system of the Younger branch rests
almost wholly upon it.

The winter of the year 1839 was, it may be said, the period when the
Thuillier salon was in its greatest glory. The Minards came nearly every
Sunday, and began their evening by spending an hour there, if they had
other engagements elsewhere. Often Minard would leave his wife at the
Thuilliers and take his son and daughter to other houses. This assiduity
on the part of the Minards was brought about by a somewhat tardy meeting
between Messieurs Metivier, Barbet, and Minard on an evening when the
two former, being tenants of Mademoiselle Thuillier, remained rather
longer than usual in discussing business with her. From Barbet, Minard
learned that the old maid had money transactions with himself and
Metivier to the amount of sixty thousand francs, besides having a large
deposit in the Bank.

“Has she an account at the Bank?” asked Minard.

“I believe so,” replied Barbet. “I give her at least eighty thousand
francs there.”

Being on intimate terms with a governor of the Bank, Minard ascertained
that Mademoiselle Thuillier had, in point of fact, an account of over
two hundred thousand francs, the result of her quarterly deposits for
many years. Besides this, she owned the house they lived in, which was
not mortgaged, and was worth at least one hundred thousand francs, if
not more.

“Why should Mademoiselle Thuillier work in this way?” said Minard to
Metivier. “She’d be a good match for you,” he added.

“I? oh, no,” replied Metivier. “I shall do better by marrying a cousin;
my uncle Metivier has given me the succession to his business; he has a
hundred thousand francs a year and only two daughters.”

However secretive Mademoiselle Thuillier might be,--and she said nothing
of her investments to any one, not even to her brother, although a large
amount of Madame Thuillier’s fortune went to swell the amount of her
own savings,--it was difficult to prevent some ray of light from gliding
under the bushel which covered her treasure.

Dutocq, who frequented Barbet, with whom he had some resemblance in
character and countenance, had appraised, even more correctly than
Minard, the Thuillier finances. He knew that their savings amounted, in
1838, to one hundred and fifty thousand francs, and he followed their
progress secretly, calculating profits by the help of that all-wise
money-lender, Barbet.

“Celeste will have from my brother and myself two hundred thousand
francs in ready money,” the old maid had said to Barbet in confidence,
“and Madame Thuillier wishes to secure to her by the marriage contract
the ultimate possession of her own fortune. As for me, my will is made.
My brother will have everything during his lifetime, and Celeste will
be my heiress with that reservation. Monsieur Cardot, the notary, is my
executor.”

Mademoiselle Thuillier now instigated her brother to renew his former
relations with the Saillards, Baudoyers, and others, who held a position
similar to that of the Thuilliers in the quartier Saint-Antoine, of
which Monsieur Saillard was mayor. Cardot, the notary, had produced
his aspirant for Celeste’s hand in the person of Monsieur Godeschal,
attorney and successor to Derville; an able man, thirty-six years of
age, who had paid one hundred thousand francs for his practice, which
the two hundred thousand of the “dot” would doubly clear off. Minard,
however, got rid of Godeschal by informing Mademoiselle Thuillier that
Celeste’s sister-in-law would be the famous Mariette of the Opera.

“She came from the stage,” said Colleville, alluding to his wife, “and
there’s no need she should return to it.”

“Besides, Monsieur Godeschal is too old for Celeste,” remarked Brigitte.

“And ought we not,” added Madame Thuillier, timidly, “to let her marry
according to her own taste, so as to be happy?”

The poor woman had detected in Felix Phellion a true love for Celeste;
the love that a woman crushed by Brigitte and wounded by her husband’s
indifference (for Thuillier cared less for his wife than he did for
a servant) had dreamed that love might be,--bold in heart, timid
externally, sure of itself, reserved, hidden from others, but expanding
toward heaven. At twenty-three years of age, Felix Phellion was a
gentle, pure-minded young man, like all true scholars who cultivate
knowledge for knowledge’s sake. He had been sacredly brought up by his
father, who, viewing all things seriously, had given him none but good
examples accompanied by trivial maxims. He was a young man of medium
height, with light chestnut hair, gray eyes, and a skin full of
freckles; gifted with a charming voice, a tranquil manner; making
few gestures; thoughtful, saying little, and that little sensible;
contradicting no one, and quite incapable of a sordid thought or a
selfish calculation.

“That,” thought Madame Thuillier, “is what I should have liked my
husband to be.”

One evening, in the month of February, 1840, the Thuillier salon
contained the various personages whose silhouettes we have just traced
out, together with some others. It was nearly the end of the month.
Barbet and Metivier having business with mademoiselle Brigitte, were
playing whist with Minard and Phellion. At another table were Julien
the advocate (a nickname given by Colleville to young Minard), Madame
Colleville, Monsieur Barniol, and Madame Phellion. “Bouillotte,” at
five sous a stake, occupied Madame Minard, who knew no other game,
Colleville, old Monsieur Saillard, and Bandoze, his son-in-law. The
substitutes were Laudigeois and Dutocq. Mesdames Falleix, Baudoyer,
Barniol, and Mademoiselle Minard were playing boston, and Celeste was
sitting beside Prudence Minard. Young Phellion was listening to Madame
Thuillier and looking at Celeste.

At a corner of the fireplace sat enthroned on a sofa the Queen Elizabeth
of the family, as simply dressed as she had been for the last thirty
years; for no prosperity could have made her change her habits. She
wore on her chinchilla hair a black gauze cap, adorned with the geranium
called Charles X.; her gown, of plum-colored stuff, made with a yoke,
cost fifteen francs, her embroidered collarette was worth six, and
it ill disguised the deep wrinkle produced by the two muscles which
fastened the head to the vertebral column. The actor, Monvel, playing
Augustus Caesar in his old age, did not present a harder and sterner
profile than that of this female autocrat, knitting socks for her
brother. Before the fireplace stood Thuillier in an attitude, ready to
go forward and meet the arriving guests; near him was a young man whose
entrance had produced a great effect, when the porter (who on Sundays
wore his best clothes and waited on the company) announced Monsieur
Olivier Vinet.

A private communication made by Cardot to the celebrated
“procureur-general,” father of this young man, was the cause of
his visit. Olivier Vinet had just been promoted from the court of
Arcis-sur-Aube to that of the Seine, where he now held the post of
substitute “procureur-de-roi.” Cardot had already invited Thuillier and
the elder Vinet, who was likely to become minister of justice, with his
son, to dine with him. The notary estimated the fortunes which would
eventually fall to Celeste at seven hundred thousand francs. Vinet
junior appeared charmed to obtain the right to visit the Thuilliers
on Sundays. Great dowries make men commit great and unbecoming follies
without reserve or decency in these days.

Ten minutes later another young man, who had been talking with Thuillier
before the arrival of Olivier Vinet, raised his voice eagerly, in a
political discussion, and forced the young magistrate to follow his
example in the vivacious argument which now ensued. The matter related
to the vote by which the Chamber of Deputies had just overthrown the
ministry of the 12th of May, refusing the allowance demanded for the Duc
de Nemours.

“Assuredly,” said the young man, “I am far from belonging to the
dynastic party; I am very far from approving of the rise of the
bourgeoisie to power. The bourgeoisie ought not, any more than the
aristocracy of other days, to assume to be the whole nation. But the
French bourgeoisie has now taken upon itself to create a new dynasty, a
royalty of its own, and behold how it treats it! When the people allowed
Napoleon to rise to power, it created with him a splendid and monumental
state of things; it was proud of his grandeur; and it nobly gave its
blood and sweat in building up the edifice of the Empire. Between
the magnificence of the aristocratic throne and those of the imperial
purple, between the great of the earth and the People, the bourgeoisie
is proving itself petty; it degrades power to its own level instead
of rising up to it. The saving of candle-ends it has so long practised
behind its counters, it now seeks to impose on its princes. What may
perhaps have been virtue in its shops is a blunder and a crime higher
up. I myself have wanted many things for the people, but I never should
have begun by lopping off ten millions of francs from the new civil
list. In becoming, as it were, nearly the whole of France, the
bourgeoisie owed to us the prosperity of the people, splendor without
ostentation, grandeur without privilege.”

The father of Olivier Vinet was just now sulking with the government.
The robe of Keeper of the Seals, which had been his dream, was slow in
coming to him. The young substitute did not, therefore, know exactly how
to answer this speech; he thought it wise to enlarge on one of its side
issues.

“You are right, monsieur,” said Olivier Vinet. “But, before manifesting
itself magnificently, the bourgeoisie has other duties to fulfil towards
France. The luxury you speak of should come after duty. That which seems
to you so blameable is the necessity of the moment. The Chamber is far
from having its full share in public affairs; the ministers are less for
France than they are for the crown, and parliament has determined that
the administration shall have, as in England, a strength and power
of its own, and not a mere borrowed power. The day on which the
administration can act for itself, and represent the Chamber as the
Chamber represents the country, parliament will be found very liberal
toward the crown. The whole question is there. I state it without
expressing my own opinion, for the duties of my post demand, in
politics, a certain fealty to the crown.”

“Setting aside the political question,” replied the young man, whose
voice and accent were those of a native of Provence, “it is certainly
true that the bourgeoisie has ill understood its mission. We can see,
any day, the great law officers, attorney-generals, peers of France in
omnibuses, judges who live on their salaries, prefects without fortunes,
ministers in debt! Whereas the bourgeoisie, who have seized upon those
offices, ought to dignify them, as in the olden time when aristocracy
dignified them, and not occupy such posts solely for the purpose of
making their fortune, as scandalous disclosures have proved.”

“Who is this young man?” thought Olivier Vinet. “Is he a relative?
Cardot ought to have come with me on this first visit.”

“Who is that little monsieur?” asked Minard of Barbet. “I have seen him
here several times.”

“He is a tenant,” replied Metivier, shuffling the cards.

“A lawyer,” added Barbet, in a low voice, “who occupies a small
apartment on the third floor front. Oh! _He_ doesn’t amount to much; he
has nothing.”

“What is the name of that young man?” said Olivier Vinet to Thuillier.

“Theodose de la Peyrade; he is a barrister,” replied Thuillier, in a
whisper.

At that moment the women present, as well as the men, looked at the two
young fellows, and Madame Minard remarked to Colleville:--

“He is rather good-looking, that stranger.”

“I have made his anagram,” replied Colleville, “and his name,
Charles-Marie-Theodose de la Peyrade, prophecies: ‘Eh! monsieur payera,
de la dot, des oies et le char.’ Therefore, my dear Mamma Minard, be
sure you don’t give him your daughter.”

“They say that young man is better-looking than my son,” said Madame
Phellion to Madame Colleville. “What do you think about it?”

“Oh! in the matter of physical beauty a woman might hesitate before
choosing,” replied Madame Colleville.

At that moment it occurred to young Vinet as he looked round the salon,
so full of the lesser bourgeoisie, that it might be a shrewd thing
to magnify that particular class; and he thereupon enlarged upon the
meaning of the young Provencal barrister, declaring that men so honored
by the confidence of the government should imitate royalty and encourage
a magnificence surpassing that of the former court. It was folly, he
said, to lay by the emoluments of an office. Besides, could it be done,
in Paris especially, where costs of living had trebled,--the apartment
of a magistrate, for instance, costing three thousand francs a year?

“My father,” he said in conclusion, “allows me three thousand francs a
year, and that, with my salary, barely allows me to maintain my rank.”

When the young substitute rode boldly into this bog-hole, the Provencal,
who had slyly enticed him there, exchanged, without being observed, a
wink with Dutocq, who was just then waiting for the place of a player at
bouillotte.

“There is such a demand for offices,” remarked the latter, “that they
talk of creating two justices of the peace to each arrondissement in
order to make a dozen new clerkships. As if they could interfere with
our rights and our salaries, which already require an exhorbitant tax!”

“I have not yet had the pleasure of hearing you at the Palais,” said
Vinet to Monsieur de la Peyrade.

“I am advocate for the poor, and I plead only before the justice of
peace,” replied la Peyrade.

Mademoiselle Thuillier, as she listened to young Vinet’s theory of the
necessity of spending an income, assumed a distant air and manner,
the significance of which was well understood by Dutocq and the young
Provencal. Vinet left the house in company with Minard and Julien the
advocate, so that the battle-field before the fire-place was abandoned
to la Peyrade and Dutocq.

“The upper bourgeoisie,” said Dutocq to Thuillier, “will behave, in
future, exactly like the old aristocracy. The nobility wanted girls with
money to manure their lands, and the parvenus of to-day want the same to
feather their nests.”

“That’s exactly what Monsieur Thuillier was saying to me this morning,”
 remarked la Peyrade, boldly.

“Vinet’s father,” said Dutocq, “married a Demoiselle de Chargeboeuf
and has caught the opinions of the nobility; he wants a fortune at any
price; his wife spends money regally.”

“Oh!” said Thuillier, in whom the jealousy between the two classes of
the bourgeoisie was fully roused, “take offices away from those fellows
and they’d fall back where they came.”

Mademoiselle was knitting with such precipitous haste that she seemed to
be propelled by a steam-engine.

“Take my place, Monsieur Dutocq,” said Madame Minard, rising. “My feet
are cold,” she added, going to the fire, where the golden ornaments of
her turban made fireworks in the light of the Saint-Aurora wax-candles
that were struggling vainly to light the vast salon.

“He is very small fry, that young substitute,” said Madame Minard,
glancing at Mademoiselle Thuillier.

“Small fry!” cried la Peyrade. “Ah, madame! how witty!”

“But madame has so long accustomed us to that sort of thing,” said the
handsome Thuillier.

Madame Colleville was examining la Peyrade and comparing him with young
Phellion, who was just then talking to Celeste, neither of them paying
any heed to what was going on around them. This is, certainly, the
right moment to depict the singular personage who was destined to play
a signal part in the Thuillier household, and who fully deserves the
appellation of a great artist.




CHAPTER V. A PRINCIPAL PERSONAGE

There exists in Provence, especially about Avignon, a race of men with
blond or chestnut hair, fair skin, and eyes that are almost tender,
their pupils calm, feeble, or languishing, rather than keen, ardent, or
profound, as they usually are in the eyes of Southerners. Let us remark,
in passing, that among Corsicans, a race subject to fits of anger and
dangerous irascibility, we often meet with fair skins and physical
natures of the same apparent tranquillity. These pale men, rather stout,
with somewhat dim and hazy eyes either green or blue, are the worst
species of humanity in Provence; and Charles-Marie-Theodose de la
Peyrade presents a fine type of that race, the constitution of which
deserves careful examination on the part of medical science and
philosophical physiology. There rises, at times, within such men, a
species of bile,--a bitter gall, which flies to their head and makes
them capable of ferocious actions, done, apparently, in cold blood.
Being the result of an inward intoxication, this sort of dumb violence
seems to be irreconcilable with their quasi-lymphatic outward man, and
the tranquillity of their benignant glance.

Born in the neighborhood of Avignon, the young Provencal whose name we
have just mentioned was of middle height, well-proportioned, and rather
stout; the tone of his skin had no brilliancy; it was neither livid nor
dead-white, nor colored, but gelatinous,--that word can alone give a
true idea of the flabby, hueless envelope, beneath which were concealed
nerves that were less vigorous than capable of enormous resistance at
certain given moments. His eyes, of a pale cold blue, expressed in their
ordinary condition a species of deceptive sadness, which must have
had great charms for women. The forehead, finely cut, was not without
dignity, and it harmonized well with the soft, light chestnut hair
curling naturally, but slightly, at its tips. The nose, precisely
like that of a hunting dog, flat and furrowed at the tip, inquisitive,
intelligent, searching, always on the scent, instead of expressing
good-humor, was ironical and mocking; but this particular aspect of his
nature never showed itself openly; the young man must have ceased to
watch himself, he must have flown into fury before the power came to
him to flash out the sarcasm and the wit which embittered, tenfold, his
infernal humor. The mouth, the curving lines and pomegranate-colored
lips of which were very pleasing, seemed the admirable instrument of an
organ that was almost sweet in its middle tones, where its owner usually
kept it, but which, in its higher key, vibrated on the ear like the
sound of a gong. This falsetto was the voice of his nerves and his
anger. His face, kept expressionless by an inward command, was oval in
form. His manners, in harmony with the sacerdotal calmness of the face,
were reserved and conventional; but he had supple, pliant ways which,
though they never descended to wheedling, were not lacking in seduction;
although as soon as his back was turned their charm seemed inexplicable.
Charm, when it takes its rise in the heart, leaves deep and lasting
traces; that which is merely a product of art, or of eloquence, has only
a passing power; it produces its immediate effect, and that is all. But
how many philosophers are there in life who are able to distinguish
the difference? Almost always the trick is played (to use a popular
expression) before the ordinary run of men have perceived its methods.

Everything about this young man of twenty-seven was in harmony with his
character; he obeyed his vocation by cultivating philanthropy,--the only
expression which explains the philanthropist. Theodose loved the People,
for he limited his love for humanity. Like the horticulturist who
devotes himself to roses, or dahlias, or heart’s-ease, or geraniums,
and pays no attention to the plants his fancy has not selected, so this
young La Rochefoucault-Liancourt gave himself to the workingmen,
the proletariat and the paupers of the faubourgs Saint-Jacques and
Saint-Marceau. The strong man, the man of genius at bay, the worthy poor
of the bourgeois class, he cut them off from the bosom of his charity.
The heart of all persons with a mania is like those boxes with
compartments, in which sugarplums are kept in sorts: “suum cuique
tribuere” is their motto; they measure to each duty its dose. There are
some philanthropists who pity nothing but the man condemned to death.
Vanity is certainly the basis of philanthropy; but in the case of this
Provencal it was calculation, a predetermined course, a “liberal” and
democratic hypocrisy, played with a perfection that no other actor will
ever attain.

Theodose did not attack the rich; he contented himself with not
understanding them; he endured them; every one, in his opinion, ought to
enjoy the fruits of his labor. He had been, he said, a fervent disciple
of Saint-Simon, but that mistake must be attributed to his youth: modern
society could have no other basis than heredity. An ardent Catholic,
like all men from the Comtat, he went to the earliest morning masses,
and thus concealed his piety. Like other philanthropists, he practised
a sordid economy, and gave to the poor his time, his legal advice, his
eloquence, and such money as he extracted for them from the rich. His
clothes, always of black cloth, were worn until the seams became white.
Nature had done a great deal for Theodose in not giving him that fine
manly Southern beauty which creates in others an imaginary expectation,
to which it is more than difficult for a man to respond. As it was,
he could be what suited him at the moment,--an agreeable man or a very
ordinary one. Never, since his admission to the Thuilliers’, had
he ventured, till this evening, to raise his voice and speak as
dogmatically as he had risked doing to Olivier Vinet; but perhaps
Theodose de la Peyrade was not sorry to seize the opportunity to come
out from the shade in which he had hitherto kept himself. Besides, it
was necessary to get rid of the young substitute, just as the Minards
had previously ruined the hopes of Monsieur Godeschal. Like all superior
men (for he certainly had some superiority), Vinet had never lowered
himself to the point where the threads of these bourgeois spider-webs
became visible to him, and he had therefore plunged, like a fly,
headforemost, into the almost invisible trap to which Theodose inveigled
him.

To complete this portrait of the poor man’s lawyer we must here relate
the circumstances of his first arrival at the Thuilliers’.

Theodose came to lodge in Mademoiselle Thuillier’s house toward the
close of the year 1837. He had taken his degree about five years
earlier, and had kept the proper number of terms to become a barrister.
Circumstances, however, about which he said nothing, had interfered
to prevent his being called to the bar; he was, therefore, still a
licentiate. But soon after he was installed in the little apartment on
the third floor, with the furniture rigorously required by all members
of his noble profession,--for the guild of barristers admits no brother
unless he has a suitable study, a legal library, and can thus, as it
were, verify his claims,--Theodose de la Peyrade began to practise as a
barrister before the Royal Court of Paris.

The whole of the year 1838 was employed in making this change in his
condition, and he led a most regular life. He studied at home in the
mornings till dinner-time, going sometimes to the Palais for important
cases. Having become very intimate with Dutocq (so Dutocq said), he
did certain services to the poor of the faubourg Saint-Jacques who were
brought to his notice by that official. He pleaded their cases before
the court, after bringing them to the notice of the attorneys, who,
according to the statutes of their order, are obliged to take turns in
doing business for the poor. As Theodose was careful to plead only safe
cases, he won them all. Those persons whom he thus obliged expressed
their gratitude and their admiration, in spite of the young lawyer’s
admonitions, among their own class, and to the porters of private
houses, through whom many anecdotes rose to the ears of the proprietors.
Delighted to have in their house a tenant so worthy and so charitable,
the Thuilliers wished to attract him to their salon, and they questioned
Dutocq about him. The mayor’s clerk replied as the envious reply; while
doing justice to the young man he dwelt on his remarkable avarice, which
might, however, be the effect of poverty.

“I have had other information about him. He belongs to the Peyrades, an
old family of the ‘comtat’ of Avignon; he came here toward the end
of 1829, to inquire about an uncle whose fortune was said to be
considerable; he discovered the address of the old man only three days
before his death; and the furniture of the deceased merely sufficed to
bury him and pay his debts. A friend of this useless uncle gave a couple
of hundred louis to the poor fortune-hunter, advising him to finish his
legal studies and enter the judiciary career. Those two hundred
louis supported him for three years in Paris, where he lived like
an anchorite. But being unable to discover his unknown friend and
benefactor, the poor student was in abject distress in 1833. He worked
then, like so many other licentiates, in politics and literature, by
which he kept himself for a time above want--for he had nothing to
expect from his family. His father, the youngest brother of the dead
uncle, has eleven other children, who live on a small estate called Les
Canquoelles. He finally obtained a place on a ministerial newspaper,
the manager of which was the famous Cerizet, so celebrated for the
persecutions he met with, under the Restoration, on account of his
attachment to the liberals,--a man whom the new Left will never forgive
for having made his paper ministerial. As the government of these days
does very little to protect even its most devoted servants (witness the
Gisquet affair), the republicans have ended by ruining Cerizet. I tell
you this to explain how it is that Cerizet is now a copying clerk in
my office. Well, in the days when he flourished as managing editor of a
paper directed by the Perier ministry against the incendiary journals,
the ‘Tribune’ and others, Cerizet, who is a worthy fellow after all,
though he is too fond of women, pleasure, and good living, was very
useful to Theodose, who edited the political department of the paper;
and if it hadn’t been for the death of Casimir Perier that young man
would certainly have received an appointment as substitute judge in
Paris. As it was, he dropped back in 1834-35, in spite of his talent;
for his connection with a ministerial journal of course did him harm.
‘If it had not been for my religious principles,’ he said to me, ‘I
should have thrown myself into the Seine.’ However, it seems that the
friend of his uncle must have heard of his distress, for again he sent
him a sum of money; enough to complete his terms for the bar; but,
strange to say, he has never known the name or the address of this
mysterious benefactor. After all, perhaps, under such circumstances, his
economy is excusable, and he must have great strength of mind to refuse
what the poor devils whose cases he wins by his devotion offer him. He
is indignant at the way other lawyers speculate on the possibility or
impossibility of poor creatures, unjustly sued, paying for the costs of
their defence. Oh! he’ll succeed in the end. I shouldn’t be surprised
to see that fellow in some very brilliant position; he has tenacity,
honesty, and courage. He studies, he delves.”

Notwithstanding the favor with which he was greeted, la Peyrade went
discreetly to the Thuilliers’. When reproached for this reserve he went
oftener, and ended by appearing every Sunday; he was invited to all
dinner-parties, and became at last so familiar in the house that
whenever he came to see Thuillier about four o’clock he was always
requested to take “pot-luck” without ceremony. Mademoiselle Thuillier
used to say:--

“Then we know that he will get a good dinner, poor fellow!”

A social phenomenon which has certainly been observed, but never, as
yet, formulated, or, if you like it better, published, though it fully
deserves to be recorded, is the return of habits, mind, and manners to
primitive conditions in certain persons who, between youth and old age,
have raised themselves above their first estate. Thus Thuillier had
become, once more, morally speaking, the son of a concierge. He now made
use of many of his father’s jokes, and a little of the slime of early
days was beginning to appear on the surface of his declining life. About
five or six times a month, when the soup was rich and good he would
deposit his spoon in his empty plate and say, as if the proposition were
entirely novel:--

“That’s better than a kick on the shin-bone!”

On hearing that witticism for the first time Theodose, to whom it was
really new, laughed so heartily that the handsome Thuillier was tickled
in his vanity as he had never been before. After that, Theodose greeted
the same speech with a knowing little smile. This slight detail will
explain how it was that on the morning of the day when Theodose had
his passage at arms with Vinet he had said to Thuillier, as they were
walking in the garden to see the effect of a frost:--

“You have much more wit than you give yourself credit for.”

To which he received this answer:--

“In any other career, my dear Theodose, I should have made my way nobly;
but the fall of the Emperor broke my neck.”

“There is still time,” said the young lawyer. “In the first place, what
did that mountebank, Colleville, ever do to get the cross?”

There la Peyrade laid his finger on a sore wound which Thuillier hid
from every eye so carefully that even his sister did not know of it; but
the young man, interested in studying these bourgeois, had divined the
secret envy that gnawed at the heart of the ex-official.

“If you, experienced as you are, will do the honor to follow my advice,”
 added the philanthropist, “and, above all, not mention our compact
to any one, I will undertake to have you decorated with the Legion of
honor, to the applause of the whole quarter.”

“Oh! if we succeed in that,” cried Thuillier, “you don’t know what I
would do for you.”

This explains why Thuillier carried his head high when Theodose had the
audacity that evening to put opinions into his mouth.

In art--and perhaps Moliere had placed hypocrisy in the rank of art
by classing Tartuffe forever among comedians--there exists a point of
perfection to which genius alone attains; mere talent falls below it.
There is so little difference between a work of genius and a work
of talent, that only men of genius can appreciate the distance that
separates Raffaelle from Correggio, Titian from Rubens. More than that;
common minds are easily deceived on this point. The sign of genius is a
certain appearance of facility. In fact, its work must appear, at first
sight, ordinary, so natural is it, even on the highest subjects. Many
peasant-women hold their children as the famous Madonna in the Dresden
gallery holds hers. Well, the height of art in a man of la Peyrade’s
force was to oblige others to say of him later: “Everybody would have
been taken in by him.”

Now, in the salon Thuillier, he noted a dawning opposition; he perceived
in Colleville the somewhat clear-sighted and criticising nature of
an artist who has missed his vocation. The barrister felt himself
displeasing to Colleville, who (as the result of circumstances not
necessary to here report) considered himself justified in believing
in the science of anagrams. None of this anagrams had ever failed. The
clerks in the government office had laughed at him when, demanding an
anagram on the name of the poor helpless Auguste-Jean-Francois Minard,
he had produced, “J’amassai une si grande fortune”; and the event
had justified him after the lapse of ten years! Theodose, on several
occasions, had made advances to the jovial secretary of the mayor’s
office, and had felt himself rebuffed by a coldness which was not
natural in so sociable a man. When the game of bouillotte came to an
end, Colleville seized the moment to draw Thuillier into the recess of a
window and say to him:--

“You are letting that lawyer get too much foothold in your house; he
kept the ball in his own hands all the evening.”

“Thank you, my friend; forewarned is forearmed,” replied Thuillier,
inwardly scoffing at Colleville.

Theodose, who was talking at the moment to Madame Colleville, had his
eye on the two men, and, with the same prescience by which women know
when and how they are spoken of, he perceived that Colleville was trying
to injure him in the mind of the weak and silly Thuillier. “Madame,” he
said in Flavie’s ear, “if any one here is capable of appreciating you
it is certainly I. You seem to me a pearl dropped into the mire. You
say you are forty-two, but a woman is no older than she looks, and many
women of thirty would be thankful to have your figure and that noble
countenance, where love has passed without ever filling the void in
your heart. You have given yourself to God, I know, and I have too much
religion myself to regret it, but I also know that you have done so
because no human being has proved worthy of you. You have been loved,
but you have never been adored--I have divined that. There is your
husband, who has not known how to please you in a position in keeping
with your deserts. He dislikes me, as if he thought I loved you; and he
prevents me from telling you of a way that I think I have found to
place you in the sphere for which you were destined. No, madame,” he
continued, rising, “the Abbe Gondrin will not preach this year through
Lent at our humble Saint-Jacques du Haut-Pas; the preacher will be
Monsieur d’Estival, a compatriot of mine, and you will hear in him one
of the most impressive speakers that I have ever known,--a priest whose
outward appearance is not agreeable, but, oh! what a soul!”

“Then my desire will be gratified,” said poor Madame Thuillier. “I have
never yet been able to understand a famous preacher.”

A smile flickered on the lips of Mademoiselle Thuillier and several
others who heard the remark.

“They devote themselves too much to theological demonstration,” said
Theodose. “I have long thought so myself--but I never talk religion; if
it had not been for Madame _de_ Colleville, I--”

“Are there demonstrations in theology?” asked the professor of
mathematics, naively, plunging headlong into the conversation.

“I think, monsieur,” replied Theodose, looking straight at Felix
Phellion, “that you cannot be serious in asking me such a question.”

“Felix,” said old Phellion, coming heavily to the rescue of his son, and
catching a distressed look on the pale face of Madame Thuillier,--“Felix
separates religion into two categories; he considers it from the human
point of view and the divine point of view,--tradition and reason.”

“That is heresy, monsieur,” replied Theodose. “Religion is one; it
requires, above all things, faith.”

Old Phellion, nonplussed by that remark, nodded to his wife:--

“It is getting late, my dear,” and he pointed to the clock.

“Oh, Monsieur Felix,” said Celeste in a whisper to the candid
mathematician, “Couldn’t you be, like Pascal and Bossuet, learned and
pious both?”

The Phellions, on departing, carried the Collevilles with them. Soon no
one remained in the salon but Dutocq, Theodose, and the Thuilliers.

The flattery administered by Theodose to Flavie seems at the first sight
coarsely commonplace, but we must here remark, in the interests of this
history, that the barrister was keeping himself as close as possible
to these vulgar minds; he was navigating their waters; he spoke their
language. His painter was Pierre Grassou, and not Joseph Bridau; his
book was “Paul and Virginia.” The greatest living poet for him was
Casimire de la Vigne; to his eyes the mission of art was, above all
things, utility. Parmentier, the discoverer of the potato, was greater
to him that thirty Raffaelles; the man in the blue cloak seemed to him
a sister of charity. These were Thuillier’s expressions, and Theodose
remembered them all--on occasion.

“That young Felix Phellion,” he now remarked, “is precisely the
academical man of our day; the product of knowledge which sends God
to the rear. Heavens, what are we coming to? Religion alone can save
France; nothing but the fear of hell will preserve us from domestic
robbery, which is going on at all hours in the bosom of families, and
eating into the surest fortunes. All of you have a secret warfare in
your homes.”

After this shrewd tirade, which made a great impression upon Brigitte,
he retired, followed by Dutocq, after wishing good evening to the three
Thuilliers.

“That young man has great capacity,” said Thuillier, sententiously.

“Yes, that he has,” replied Brigitte, extinguishing the lamps.

“He has religion,” said Madame Thuillier, as she left the room.

“Monsieur,” Phellion was saying to Colleville as they came abreast of
the Ecole de Mines, looking about him to see that no one was near, “it
is usually my custom to submit my insight to that of others, but it is
impossible for me not to think that that young lawyer plays the master
at our friend Thuillier’s.”

“My own opinion,” said Colleville, who was walking with Phellion behind
his wife, Madame Phellion, and Celeste, “is that he’s a Jesuit; and I
don’t like Jesuits; the best of them are no good. To my mind a Jesuit
means knavery, and knavery for knavery’s sake; they deceive for the
pleasure of deceiving, and, as the saying is, to keep their hand in.
That’s my opinion, and I don’t mince it.”

“I understand you, monsieur,” said Phellion, who was arm-in-arm with
Colleville.

“No, Monsieur Phellion,” remarked Flavie in a shrill voice, “you don’t
understand Colleville; but I know what he means, and I think he had
better stop saying it. Such subjects are not to be talked of in the
street, at eleven o’clock at night, and before a young lady.”

“You are right, wife,” said Colleville.

When they reached the rue des Deux-Eglises, which Phellion was to take,
they all stopped to say good-night, and Felix Phellion, who was bring up
the rear, said to Colleville:--

“Monsieur, your son Francois could enter the Ecole Polytechnique if he
were well-coached; I propose to you to fit him to pass the examinations
this year.”

“That’s an offer not to be refused! Thank you, my friend,” said
Colleville. “We’ll see about it.”

“Good!” said Phellion to his son, as they walked on.

“Not a bad stroke!” said the mother.

“What do you mean by that?” asked Felix.

“You are very cleverly paying court to Celeste’s parents.”

“May I never find the solution of my problem if I even thought of it!”
 cried the young professor. “I discovered, when talking with the little
Collevilles, that Francois has a strong turn for mathematics, and I
thought I ought to enlighten his father.”

“Good, my son!” repeated Phellion. “I wouldn’t have you otherwise. My
prayers are granted! I have a son whose honor, probity, and private and
civic virtues are all that I could wish.”

Madame Colleville, as soon as Celeste had gone to bed, said to her
husband:--

“Colleville, don’t utter those blunt opinions about people without
knowing something about them. When you talk of Jesuits I know you mean
priests; and I wish you would do me the kindness to keep your opinions
on religion to yourself when you are in company with your daughter.
We may sacrifice our own souls, but not the souls of our children. You
don’t want Celeste to be a creature without religion? And remember,
my dear, that we are at the mercy of others; we have four children to
provide for; and how do you know that, some day or other, you may not
need the services of this one or that one? Therefore don’t make enemies.
You haven’t any now, for you are a good-natured fellow; and, thanks to
that quality, which amounts in you to a charm, we have got along pretty
well in life, so far.”

“That’s enough!” said Colleville, flinging his coat on a chair and
pulling off his cravat. “I’m wrong, and you are right, my beautiful
Flavie.”

“And on the next occasion, my dear old sheep,” said the sly creature,
tapping her husband’s cheek, “you must try to be polite to that young
lawyer; he is a schemer and we had better have him on our side. He is
playing comedy--well! play comedy with him; be his dupe apparently; if
he proves to have talent, if he has a future before him, make a friend
of him. Do you think I want to see you forever in the mayor’s office?”

“Come, wife Colleville,” said the former clarionet, tapping his knee to
indicate the place he wished his wife to take. “Let us warm our toes and
talk.--When I look at you I am more than ever convinced that the youth
of women is in their figure.”

“And in their heart.”

“Well, both,” assented Colleville; “waist slender, heart solid--”

“No, you old stupid, deep.”

“What is good about you is that you have kept your fairness without
growing fat. But the fact is, you have such tiny bones. Flavie, it is
a fact that if I had life to live over again I shouldn’t wish for any
other wife than you.”

“You know very well I have always preferred you to _others_. How unlucky
that monseigneur is dead! Do you know what I covet for you?”

“No; what?”

“Some office at the Hotel de Ville,--an office worth twelve thousand
francs a year; cashier, or something of that kind; either there, or at
Poissy, in the municipal department; or else as manufacturer of musical
instruments--”

“Any one of them would suit me.”

“Well, then! if that queer barrister has power, and he certainly has
plenty of intrigue, let us manage him. I’ll sound him; leave me to do
the thing--and, above all, don’t thwart his game at the Thuilliers’.”

Theodose had laid a finger on a sore sport in Flavie Colleville’s heart;
and this requires an explanation, which may, perhaps, have the value of
a synthetic glance at women’s life.

At forty years of age a woman, above all, if she has tasted the poisoned
apple of passion, undergoes a solemn shock; she sees two deaths before
her: that of the body and that of the heart. Dividing women into two
great categories which respond to the common ideas, and calling them
either virtuous or guilty, it is allowable to say that after that fatal
period they both suffer pangs of terrible intensity. If virtuous, and
disappointed in the deepest hopes of their nature--whether they have had
the courage to submit, whether they have buried their revolt in their
hearts or at the foot of the altar--they never admit to themselves that
all is over for them without horror. That thought has such strange and
diabolical depths that in it lies the reason of some of those apostasies
which have, at times, amazed the world and horrified it. If guilty,
women of that age fall into one of several delirious conditions which
often turn, alas! to madness, or end in suicide, or terminate in some
with passion greater than the situation itself.

The following is the “dilemmatic” meaning of this crisis. Either they
have known happiness, known it in a virtuous life, and are unable to
breathe in any air but that surcharged with incense, or act in any but a
balmy atmosphere of flattery and worship,--if so, how is it possible
to renounce it?--or, by a phenomenon less rare than singular, they
have found only wearying pleasures while seeking for the happiness
that escaped them--sustained in that eager chase by the irritating
satisfactions of vanity, clinging to the game like a gambler to his
double or quits; for to them these last days of beauty are their last
stake against despair.

“You have been loved, but never adored.”

That speech of Theodose, accompanied by a look which read, not into her
heart, but into her life, was the key-note to her enigma, and Flavie
felt herself divined.

The lawyer had merely repeated ideas which literature has rendered
trivial; but what matter where the whip comes from, or how it is made,
if it touches the sensitive spot of a horse’s hide? The emotion was in
Flavie, not in the speech, just as the noise is not in the avalanche,
though it produces it.

A young officer, two fops, a banker, a clumsy youth, and Colleville,
were poor attempts at happiness. Once in her life Madame Colleville had
dreamed of it, but never attained it. Death had hastened to put an end
to the only passion in which she had found a charm. For the last two
years she had listened to the voice of religion, which told her that
neither the Church, nor its votaries, should talk of love or happiness,
but of duty and resignation; that the only happiness lay in the
satisfaction of fulfilling painful and costly duties, the rewards for
which were not in this world. All the same, however, she was conscious
of another clamoring voice; but, inasmuch as her religion was only a
mask which it suited her to wear, and not a conversion, she did not lay
it aside, thinking it a resource. Believing also that piety, false or
true, was a becoming manner in which to meet her future, she continued
in the Church, as though it were the cross-roads of a forest, where,
seated on a bench, she read the sign-posts, and waited for some lucky
chance; feeling all the while that night was coming on.

Thus it happened that her interest was keenly excited when Theodose
put her secret condition of mind into words, seeming to promise her the
realization of her castle in the air, already built and overthrown some
six or eight times.

From the beginning of the winter she had noticed that Theodose was
examining and studying her, though cautiously and secretly. More than
once, she had put on her gray moire silk with its black lace, and her
headdress of Mechlin with a few flowers, in order to appear to her best
advantage; and men know very well when a toilet has been made to please
them. The old beau of the Empire, that handsome Thuillier, overwhelmed
her with compliments, assuring her she was queen of the salon, but la
Peyrade said infinitely more to the purpose by a look.

Flavie had expected, Sunday after Sunday, a declaration, saying to
herself at times:--

“He knows I am ruined and haven’t a sou. Perhaps he is really pious.”

Theodose did nothing rashly; like a wise musician, he had marked the
place in his symphony where he intended to tap his drum. When he saw
Colleville attempting to warn Thuillier against him, he fired his
broadside, cleverly prepared during the three or four months in which he
had been studying Flavie; he now succeeded with her as he had, earlier
in the day, succeeded with Thuillier.

While getting into bed, Theodose said to himself:--

“The wife is on my side; the husband can’t endure me; they are now
quarrelling; and I shall get the better of it, for she does what she
likes with that man.”

The lawyer was mistaken in one thing: there was no dispute whatever, and
Colleville was sleeping peacefully beside his dear little Flavie, while
she was saying to herself:--

“Certainly Theodose must be a superior man.”

Many men, like la Peyrade, derive their superiority from the audacity,
or the difficulty, of an enterprise; the strength they display increases
their muscular power, and they spend it freely. Then when success is
won, or defeat is met, the public is astonished to find how small,
exhausted, and puny those men really are. After casting into the minds
of the two persons on whom Celeste’s fate chiefly depended, an interest
and curiosity that were almost feverish, Theodose pretended to be a very
busy man; for five or six days he was out of the house from morning
till night, in order not to meet Flavie until the time when her interest
should increase to the point of overstepping conventionality, and also
in order to force the handsome Thuillier to come and fetch him.

The following Sunday he felt certain he should find Madame Colleville
at church; he was not mistaken, for they came out, each of them, at the
same moment, and met at the corner of the rue des Deux-Eglises. Theodose
offered his arm, which Flavie accepted, leaving her daughter to walk in
front with her brother Anatole. This youngest child, then about twelve
years old, being destined for the seminary, was now at the Barniol
institute, where he obtained an elementary education; Barniol, the
son-in-law of the Phellions, was naturally making the tuition fees
light, with a view to the hoped-for alliance between Felix and Celeste.

“Have you done me the honor and favor of thinking over what I said to
you so badly the other day?” asked the lawyer, in a caressing tone,
pressing the lady’s arm to his heart with a movement both soft and
strong; for he seemed to wish to restrain himself and appear respectful,
in spite of his evident eagerness. “Do not misunderstand my intentions,”
 he continued, after receiving from Madame Colleville one of those looks
which women trained to the management of passion know how to give,--a
look that, by mere expression, can convey both severe rebuke and secret
community of sentiment. “I love you as we love a noble nature struggling
against misfortune; Christian charity enfolds both the strong and the
weak; its treasure belongs to both. Refined, graceful, elegant as you
are, made to be an ornament of the highest society, what man could see
you without feeling an immense compassion in his heart--buried here
among these odious bourgeois, who know nothing of you, not even
the aristocratic value of a single one of your attitudes, or those
enchanting inflections of your voice! Ah! if I were only rich! if I
had power! your husband, who is certainly a good fellow, should be made
receiver-general, and you yourself could get him elected deputy. But,
alas! poor ambitious man, my first duty is to silence my ambition.
Knowing myself at the bottom of the bag like the last number in a family
lottery, I can only offer you my arm and not my heart. I hope all from a
good marriage, and, believe me, I shall make my wife not only happy, but
I shall make her one of the first in the land, receiving from her the
means of success. It is so fine a day, will you not take a turn in the
Luxembourg?” he added, as they reached the rue d’Enfer at the corner
of Colleville’s house, opposite to which was a passage leading to the
gardens by the stairway of a little building, the last remains of the
famous convent of the Chartreux.

The soft yielding of the arm within his own, indicated a tacit consent
to this proposal, and as Flavie deserved the honor of a sort of
enthusiasm, he drew her vehemently along, exclaiming:--

“Come! we may never have so good a moment--But see!” he added, “there is
your husband at the window looking at us; let us walk slowly.”

“You have nothing to fear from Monsieur Colleville,” said Flavie,
smiling; “he leaves me mistress of my own actions.”

“Ah! here, indeed, is the woman I have dreamed of,” cried the Provencal,
with that ecstasy that inflames the soul only, and in tones that issue
only from Southern lips. “Pardon me, madame,” he said, recovering
himself, and returning from an upper sphere to the exiled angel whom he
looked at piously,--“pardon me, I abandon what I was saying; but how
can a man help feeling for the sorrows he has known himself when he
sees them the lot of a being to whom life should bring only joy and
happiness? Your sufferings are mine; I am no more in my right place than
you are in yours; the same misfortune has made us brother and sister.
Ah! dear Flavie, the first day it was granted to me to see you--the last
Sunday in September, 1838--you were very beautiful; I shall often recall
you to memory in that pretty little gown of mousseline-de-laine of the
color of some Scottish tartan! That day I said to myself: ‘Why is that
woman so often at the Thuilliers’; above all, why did she ever have
intimate relations with Thuillier himself?--’”

“Monsieur!” said Flavie, alarmed at the singular course la Peyrade was
giving to the conversation.

“Eh! I know all,” he cried, accompanying the words with a shrug of his
shoulders. “I explain it all to my own mind, and I do not respect you
less. You now have to gather the fruits of your sin, and I will help
you. Celeste will be very rich, and in that lies your own future. You
can have only one son-in-law; chose him wisely. An ambitious man might
become a minister, but you would humble your daughter and make her
miserable; and if such a man lost his place and fortune he could
never recover it. Yes, I love you,” he continued. “I love you with an
unlimited affection; you are far above the mass of petty considerations
in which silly women entangle themselves. Let us understand each other.”

Flavie was bewildered; she was, however, awake to the extreme frankness
of such language, and she said to herself, “He is not a secret
manoeuvrer, certainly.” Moreover, she admitted to her own mind that no
one had ever so deeply stirred and excited her as this young man.

“Monsieur,” she said, “I do not know who could have put into your mind
so great an error as to my life, nor by what right you--”

“Ah! pardon me, madame,” interrupted the Provencal with a coolness that
smacked of contempt. “I must have dreamed it. I said to myself, ‘She is
all that!’ But I see I was judging from the outside. I know now why you
are living and will always live on a fourth floor in the rue d’Enfer.”

And he pointed his speech with an energetic gesture toward the
Colleville windows, which could be seen through the passage from the
alley of the Luxembourg, where they were walking alone, in that immense
tract trodden by so many and various young ambitions.

“I have been frank, and I expected reciprocity,” resumed Theodose.
“I myself have had days without food, madame; I have managed to live,
pursue my studies, obtain my degree, with two thousand francs for my
sole dependence; and I entered Paris through the Barriere d’Italie,
with five hundred francs in my pocket, firmly resolved, like one of
my compatriots, to become, some day, one of the foremost men of our
country. The man who has often picked his food from baskets of scraps
where the restaurateurs put their refuse, which are emptied at six
o’clock every morning--that man is not likely to recoil before any
means,--avowable, of course. Well, do you think me the friend of the
people?” he said, smiling. “One has to have a speaking-trumpet to reach
the ear of Fame; she doesn’t listen if you speak with your lips; and
without fame of what use is talent? The poor man’s advocate means to be
some day the advocate of the rich. Is that plain speaking? Don’t I open
my inmost being to you? Then open your heart to me. Say to me, ‘Let us
be friends,’ and the day will come when we shall both be happy.”

“Good heavens! why did I ever come here? Why did I ever take your arm?”
 cried Flavie.

“Because it is in your destiny,” he replied. “Ah! my dear, beloved
Flavie,” he added, again pressing her arm upon his heart, “did you
expect to hear the vulgarities of love from me? We are brother and
sister; that is all.”

And he led her towards the passage to return to the rue d’Enfer.

Flavie felt a sort of terror in the depths of the contentment which all
women find in violent emotions; and she took that terror for the sort of
fear which a new passion always excites; but for all that, she felt she
was fascinated, and she walked along in absolute silence.

“What are you thinking of?” asked Theodose, when they reached the middle
of the passage.

“Of what you have just said to me,” she answered.

“At our age,” he said, “it is best to suppress preliminaries; we are not
children; we both belong to a sphere in which we should understand each
other. Remember this,” he added, as they reached the rue d’Enfer.--“I am
wholly yours.”

So saying, he bowed low to her.

“The iron’s in the fire now!” he thought to himself as he watched his
giddy prey on her way home.




CHAPTER VI. A KEYNOTE

When Theodose reached home he found, waiting for him on the landing, a
personage who is, as it were, the submarine current of this history; he
will be found within it like some buried church on which has risen the
facade of a palace. The sight of this man, who, after vainly ringing
at la Peyrade’s door, was now trying that of Dutocq, made the Provencal
barrister tremble--but secretly, within himself, not betraying
externally his inward emotion. This man was Cerizet, whom Dutocq had
mentioned to Thuillier as his copying-clerk.

Cerizet was only thirty-eight years old, but he looked a man of fifty,
so aged had he become from causes which age all men. His hairless head
had a yellow skull, ill-covered by a rusty, discolored wig; the mask of
his face, pale, flabby, and unnaturally rough, seemed the more horrible
because the nose was eaten away, though not sufficiently to admit of
its being replaced by a false one. From the spring of this nose at the
forehead, down to the nostrils, it remained as nature had made it; but
disease, after gnawing away the sides near the extremities, had left
two holes of fantastic shape, which vitiated pronunciation and hampered
speech. The eyes, originally handsome, but weakened by misery of all
kinds and by sleepless nights, were red around the edges, and deeply
sunken; the glance of those eyes, when the soul sent into them an
expression of malignancy, would have frightened both judges and
criminals, or any others whom nothing usually affrights.

The mouth, toothless except for a few black fangs, was threatening; the
saliva made a foam within it, which did not, however, pass the pale
thin lips. Cerizet, a short man, less spare than shrunken, endeavored
to remedy the defects of his person by his clothes, and although his
garments were not those of opulence, he kept them in a condition
of neatness which may even have increased his forlorn appearance.
Everything about him seemed dubious; his age, his nose, his glance
inspired doubt. It was impossible to know if he were thirty-eight or
sixty; if his faded blue trousers, which fitted him well, were of a
coming or a past fashion. His boots, worn at the heels, but scrupulously
blacked, resoled for the third time, and very choice, originally, may
have trodden in their day a ministerial carpet. The frock coat, soaked
by many a down-pour, with its brandebourgs, the frogs of which were
indiscreet enough to show their skeletons, testified by its cut to
departed elegance. The satin stock-cravat fortunately concealed the
shirt, but the tongue of the buckle behind the neck had frayed the
satin, which was re-satined, that is, re-polished, by a species of oil
distilled from the wig. In the days of its youth the waistcoat was not,
of course, without freshness, but it was one of those waistcoats, bought
for four francs, which come from the hooks of the ready-made clothing
dealer. All these things were carefully brushed, and so was the shiny
and misshapen hat. They harmonized with each other, even to the black
gloves which covered the hands of this subaltern Mephistopheles, whose
whole anterior life may be summed up in a single phrase:--

He was an artist in evil, with whom, from the first, evil had succeeded;
a man misled by these early successes to continue the plotting of
infamous deeds within the lines of strict legality. Becoming the head of
a printing-office by betraying his master [see “Lost Illusions”], he
had afterwards been condemned to imprisonment as editor of a liberal
newspaper. In the provinces, under the Restoration, he became the bete
noire of the government, and was called “that unfortunate Cerizet”
 by some, as people spoke of “the unfortunate Chauvet” and “the heroic
Mercier.” He owed to this reputation of persecuted patriotism a place as
sub-prefect in 1830. Six months later he was dismissed; but he insisted
that he was judged without being heard; and he made so much talk about
it that, under the ministry of Casimir Perier, he became the editor of
an anti-republican newspaper in the pay of the government. He left that
position to go into business, one phase of which was the most nefarious
stock-company that ever fell into the hands of the correctional police.
Cerizet proudly accepted the severe sentence he received; declaring it
to be a revengeful plot on the part of the republicans, who, he said,
would never forgive him for the hard blows he had dealt them in his
journal. He spent the time of his imprisonment in a hospital. The
government by this time were ashamed of a man whose almost infamous
habits and shameful business transactions, carried on in company with a
former banker, named Claparon, led him at last into well-deserved public
contempt.

Cerizet, thus fallen, step by step, to the lowest rung of the social
ladder, had recourse to pity in order to obtain the place of copying
clerk in Dutocq’s office. In the depths of his wretchedness the man
still dreamed of revenge, and, as he had nothing to lose, he employed
all means to that end. Dutocq and himself were bound together in
depravity. Cerizet was to Dutocq what the hound is the huntsman. Knowing
himself the necessities of poverty and wretchedness, he set up that
business of gutter usury called, in popular parlance, “the loan by the
little week.” He began this at first by help of Dutocq, who shared the
profits; but, at the present moment this man of many legal crimes, now
the banker of fishwives, the money-lender of costermongers, was the
gnawing rodent of the whole faubourg.

“Well,” said Cerizet as Dutocq opened his door, “Theodose has just come
in; let us go to his room.”

The advocate of the poor was fain to allow the two men to pass before
him.

All three crossed a little room, the tiled floor of which, covered with
a coating of red encaustic, shone in the light; thence into a little
salon with crimson curtains and mahogany furniture, covered with
red Utrecht velvet; the wall opposite the window being occupied by
book-shelves containing a legal library. The chimney-piece was covered
with vulgar ornaments, a clock with four columns in mahogany, and
candelabra under glass shades. The study, where the three men seated
themselves before a soft-coal fire, was the study of a lawyer just
beginning to practise. The furniture consisted of a desk, an armchair,
little curtains of green silk at the windows, a green carpet, shelves
for lawyer’s boxes, and a couch, above which hung an ivory Christ on
a velvet background. The bedroom, kitchen, and rest of the apartment
looked out upon the courtyard.

“Well,” said Cerizet, “how are things going? Are we getting on?”

“Yes,” replied Theodose.

“You must admit,” cried Dutocq, “that my idea was a famous one, in
laying hold of that imbecile of a Thuillier?”

“Yes, but I’m not behindhand either,” exclaimed Cerizet. “I have come
now to show you a way to put the thumbscrews on the old maid and make
her spin like a teetotum. We mustn’t deceive ourselves; Mademoiselle
Thuillier is the head and front of everything in this affair; if we get
her on our side the town is won. Let us say little, but that little to
the point, as becomes strong men with each other. Claparon, you know, is
a fool; he’ll be all his life what he always was,--a cat’s-paw. Just now
he is lending his name to a notary in Paris, who is concerned with a
lot of contractors, and they are all--notary and masons--on the point of
ruin. Claparon is going headlong into it. He never yet was bankrupt; but
there’s a first time for everything. He is hidden now in my hovel in the
rue des Poules, where no one will ever find him. He is desperate, and
he hasn’t a penny. Now, among the five or six houses built by these
contractors, which have to be sold, there’s a jewel of a house, built of
freestone, in the neighborhood of the Madeleine,--a frontage laced like
a melon, with beautiful carvings,--but not being finished, it will have
to be sold for what it will bring; certainly not more than a hundred
thousand francs. By spending twenty-five thousand francs upon it it
could be let, undoubtedly, for ten thousand. Make Mademoiselle Thuillier
the proprietor of that house and you’ll win her love; she’ll believe
that you can put such chances in her way every year. There are two ways
of getting hold of vain people: flatter their vanity, _or_ threaten
them; and there are also two ways of managing misers: fill their purse,
or else attack it. Now, this stroke of business, while it does good to
Mademoiselle Thuillier, does good to us as well, and it would be a pity
not to profit by the chance.”

“But why does the notary let it slip through his fingers?” asked Dutocq.

“The notary, my dear fellow! Why, he’s the very one who saves us.
Forced to sell his practice, and utterly ruined besides, he reserved for
himself this crumb of the cake. Believing in the honesty of that idiot
Claparon, he has asked him to find a dummy purchaser. We’ll let him
suppose that Mademoiselle Thuillier is a worthy soul who allows Claparon
to use her name; they’ll both be fooled, Claparon and the notary too.
I owe this little trick to my friend Claparon, who left me to bear the
whole weight of the trouble about his stock-company, in which we were
tricked by Conture, and I hope you may never be in that man’s skin!” he
added, infernal hatred flashing from his worn and withered eyes. “Now,
I’ve said my say, gentlemen,” he continued, sending out his voice
through his nasal holes, and taking a dramatic attitude; for once, at a
moment of extreme penury, he had gone upon the stage.

As he finished making his proposition some one rang at the outer door,
and la Peyrade rose to go and open it. As soon as his back was turned,
Cerizet said, hastily, to Dutocq:--

“Are you sure of him? I see a sort of air about him--And I’m a good
judge of treachery.”

“He is so completely in our power,” said Dutocq, “that I don’t trouble
myself to watch; but, between ourselves, I didn’t think him as strong as
he proves to be. The fact is, we thought we were putting a barb between
the legs of a man who didn’t know how to ride, and the rogue is an old
jockey!”

“Let him take care,” growled Cerizet. “I can blow him down like a house
of cards any day. As for you, papa Dutocq, you are able to see him at
work all the time; watch him carefully. Besides, I’ll feel his pulse by
getting Claparon to propose to him to get rid of us; that will help us
to judge him.”

“Pretty good, that!” said Dutocq. “You are daring, anyhow.”

“I’ve got my hand in, that’s all,” replied Cerizet.

These words were exchanged in a low voice during the time that it took
Theodose to go to the outer door and return. Cerizet was looking at the
books when the lawyer re-entered the room.

“It is Thuillier,” said Theodose. “I thought he’d come; he is in the
salon. He mustn’t see Cerizet’s frock-coat; those frogs would frighten
him.”

“Pooh! you receive the poor in your office, don’t you? That’s in your
role. Do you want any money?” added Cerizet, pulling a hundred francs
out of his trousers’ pocket. “There it is; it won’t look amiss.”

And he laid the pile on the chimney-piece.

“And now,” said Dutocq, “we had better get out through the bedroom.”

“Well, good-bye,” said Theodose, opening a hidden door which
communicated from the study to the bedroom. “Come in, Monsieur
Thuillier,” he called out to the beau of the Empire.

When he saw him safely in the study he went to let out his two
associates through the bedroom and kitchen into the courtyard.

“In six months,” said Cerizet, “you’ll have married Celeste and got your
foot into the stirrup. You are lucky, you are, not to have sat, like
me, in the prisoners’ dock. I’ve been there twice: once in 1825, for
‘subversive articles’ which I never wrote, and the second time for
receiving the profits of a joint-stock company which had slipped through
my fingers! Come, let’s warm this thing up! Sac-a-papier! Dutocq and I
are sorely in need of that twenty-five thousand francs. Good courage,
old fellow!” he added, holding out his hand to Theodose, and making the
grasp a test of faithfulness.

The Provencal gave Cerizet his right hand, pressing the other’s hand
warmly:--

“My good fellow,” he said, “be very sure that in whatever position I may
find myself I shall never forget that from which you have drawn me by
putting me in the saddle here. I’m simply your bait; but you are giving
me the best part of the catch, and I should be more infamous than a
galley-slave who turns policeman if I didn’t play fair.”

As soon as the door was closed, Cerizet peeped through the key-hole,
trying to catch sight of la Peyrade’s face. But the Provencal had turned
back to meet Thuillier, and his distrustful associate could not detect
the expression of his countenance.

That expression was neither disgust nor annoyance, it was simply joy,
appearing on a face that now seemed freed. Theodose saw the means of
success approaching him, and he flattered himself that the day would
come when he might get rid of his ignoble associates, to whom he owed
everything. Poverty has unfathomable depths, especially in Paris, slimy
bottoms, from which, when a drowned man rises to the surface of the
water, he brings with him filth and impurity clinging to his clothes,
or to his person. Cerizet, the once opulent friend and protector of
Theodose, was the muddy mire still clinging to the Provencal, and the
former manager of the joint-stock company saw very plainly that his tool
wanted to brush himself on entering a sphere where decent clothing was a
necessity.

“Well, my dear Theodose,” began Thuillier, “we have hoped to see you
every day this week, and every evening we find our hopes deceived. As
this is our Sunday for a dinner, my sister and my wife have sent me here
to beg you to come to us.”

“I have been so busy,” said Theodose, “that I have not had two minutes
to give to any one, not even to you, whom I count among my friends, and
with whom I have wished to talk about--”

“What? have you really been thinking seriously over what you said to
me?” cried Thuillier, interrupting him.

“If you had not come here now for a full understanding, I shouldn’t
respect you as I do,” replied la Peyrade, smiling. “You have been a
sub-director, and therefore you must have the remains of ambition--which
is deucedly legitimate in your case! Come, now, between ourselves, when
one sees a Minard, that gilded pot, displaying himself at the Tuileries,
and complimenting the king, and a Popinot about to become a minister of
State, and then look at you! a man trained to administrative work, a
man with thirty years’ experience, who has seen six governments, left
to plant balsams in a little garden! Heavens and earth!--I am frank,
my dear Thuillier, and I’ll say, honestly, that I want to advance you,
because you’ll draw me after you. Well, here’s my plan. We are soon to
elect a member of the council-general from this arrondissement; and that
member must be you. And,” he added, dwelling on the word, “it _will_ be
you! After that, you will certainly be deputy from the arrondissement
when the Chamber is re-elected, which must surely be before long. The
votes that elect you to the municipal council will stand by you in the
election for deputy, trust me for that.”

“But how will you manage all this?” cried Thuillier, fascinated.

“You shall know in good time; but you must let me conduct this long and
difficult affair; if you commit the slightest indiscretion as to what is
said, or planned, or agreed between us, I shall have to drop the whole
matter, and good-bye to you!”

“Oh! you can rely on the absolute dumbness of a former sub-director;
I’ve had secrets to keep.”

“That’s all very well; but these are secrets to keep from your wife and
sister, and from Monsieur and Madame Colleville.”

“Not a muscle of my face shall reveal them,” said Thuillier, assuming a
stolid air.

“Very good,” continued Theodose. “I shall test you. In order to make
yourself eligible, you must pay taxes on a certain amount of property,
and you are not paying them.”

“I beg your pardon; I’m all right for the municipal council at any rate;
I pay two francs ninety-six centimes.”

“Yes, but the tax on property necessary for election to the chamber
is five hundred francs, and there is no time to lose in acquiring that
property, because you must prove possession for one year.”

“The devil!” cried Thuillier; “between now and a year hence to be taxed
five hundred francs on property which--”

“Between now and the end of July, at the latest, you must pay that tax.
Well, I feel enough interest in you to tell you the secret of an affair
by which you might make from thirty to forty thousand francs a year, by
employing a capital of one hundred and fifty thousand at most. I know
that in your family it is your sister who does your business; I am far
from thinking that a mistake; she has, they tell me, excellent judgment;
and you must let me begin by obtaining her good-will and friendship,
and proposing this investment to her. And this is why: If Mademoiselle
Thuillier is not induced to put faith in my plan, we shall certainly
have difficulty with her. Besides, it won’t do for YOU to propose to her
that she should put the investment of her money in your name. The idea
had better come from me. As to my means of getting you elected to the
municipal council, they are these: Phellion controls one quarter of the
arrondissement; he and Laudigeois have lived in it these thirty years,
and they are listened to like oracles. I have a friend who controls
another quarter; and the rector of Saint-Jacques, who is not without
influence, thanks to his virtues, disposes of certain votes. Dutocq, in
his close relation to the people, and also the justice of peace, will
help me, above all, as I’m not acting for myself; and Colleville, as
secretary of the mayor’s office, can certainly manage to obtain another
fourth of the votes.”

“You are right!” cried Thuillier. “I’m elected!”

“Do you think so?” said la Peyrade, in a voice of the deepest sarcasm.
“Very good! then go and ask your friend Colleville to help you, and see
what he’ll say. No triumph in election cases is ever brought about by
the candidate himself, but by his friends. He should never ask anything
himself for himself; he must be invited to accept, and appear to be
without ambition.”

“La Peyrade!” cried Thuillier, rising, and taking the hand of the young
lawyer, “you are a very capable man.”

“Not as capable as you, but I have my merits,” said the Provencal,
smiling.

“If we succeed how shall I ever repay you?” asked Thuillier, naively.

“Ah! that, indeed! I am afraid you will think me impertinent, but
remember, there is a true feeling in my heart which offers some excuse
for me; in fact, it has given me the spirit to undertake this affair. I
love--and I take you for my confidant.”

“But who is it?” said Thuillier.

“Your dear little Celeste,” replied la Peyrade. “My love for her will
be a pledge to you of my devotion. What would I not do for a
_father-in-law_! This is pure selfishness; I shall be working for
myself.”

“Hush!” cried Thuillier.

“Eh, my friend!” said la Peyrade, catching Thuillier round the body; “if
I hadn’t Flavie on my side, and if I didn’t know _all_ should I venture
to be talking to you thus? But please say nothing to Flavie about this;
wait till she speaks to you. Listen to me; I’m of the metal that makes
ministers; I do not seek to obtain Celeste until I deserve her. You
shall not be asked to give her to me until the day when your election
as a deputy of Paris is assured. In order to be deputy of Paris, we must
get the better of Minard; and in order to crush Minard you must keep in
your own hands all your means of influence; for that reason use Celeste
as a hope; we’ll play them off, these people, against each other and
fool them all--Madame Colleville and you and I will be persons of
importance one of these days. Don’t think me mercenary. I want Celeste
without a ‘dot,’ with nothing more than her future expectations. To
live in your family with you, to keep my wife in your midst, that is my
desire. You see now that I have no hidden thoughts. As for you, my dear
friend, six months after your election to the municipal council, you
will have the cross of the Legion of honor, and when you are deputy
you will be made an officer of it. As for your speeches in the
Chamber--well! we’ll write them together. Perhaps it would be desirable
for you to write a book,--a serious book on matters half moral and
philanthropic, half political; such, for instance, as charitable
institutions considered from the highest stand-point; or reforms in the
pawning system, the abuses of which are really frightful. Let us fasten
some slight distinction to your name; it will help you,--especially in
the arrondissement. Now, I say again, trust me, believe in me; do not
think of taking me into your family until you have the ribbon in your
buttonhole on the morrow of the day when you take your seat in the
Chamber. I’ll do more than that, however; I’ll put you in the way of
making forty thousand francs a year.”

“For any one of those three things you shall have our Celeste,” said
Thuillier.

“Ah! what a pearl she is!” exclaimed la Peyrade, raising his eyes to
heaven. “I have the weakness to pray to God for her every day. She is
charming; she is exactly like you--oh! nonsense; surely you needn’t
caution me! Dutocq told me all. Well, I’ll be with you to-night. I must
go to the Phellions’ now, and begin to work our plan. You don’t need me
to caution you not to let it be known that you are thinking of me for
Celeste; if you do, you’ll cut off my arms and legs. Therefore, silence!
even to Flavie. Wait till she speaks to you herself. Phellion shall
to-night broach the matter of proposing you as candidate for the
council.”

“To-night?” said Thuillier.

“Yes, to-night,” replied la Peyrade, “unless I don’t find him at home
now.”

Thuillier departed, saying to himself:--

“That’s a very superior man; we shall always understand each other.
Faith! it might be hard to do better for Celeste. They will live with
us, as in our own family, and that’s a good deal! Yes, he’s a fine
fellow, a sound man.”

To minds of Thuillier’s calibre, a secondary consideration often assumes
the importance of a principal reason. Theodose had behaved to him with
charming bonhomie.




CHAPTER VII. THE WORTHY PHELLIONS

The house to which Theodose de la Peyrade now bent his steps had been
the “hoc erat in votis” of Monsieur Phellion for twenty years; it was
the house of the Phellions, just as much as Cerizet’s frogged coat was
the necessary complement of his personality.

This dwelling was stuck against the side of a large house, but only to
the depth of one room (about twenty feet or so), and terminated at each
end in a sort of pavilion with one window. Its chief charm was a garden,
one hundred and eighty feet square, longer than the facade of the house
by the width of a courtyard which opened on the street, and a little
clump of lindens. Beyond the second pavilion, the courtyard had, between
itself and the street, an iron railing, in the centre of which was a
little gate opening in the middle.

This building, of rouge stone covered with stucco, and two storeys in
height, had received a coat of yellow-wash; the blinds were painted
green, and so were the shutters on the lower storey. The kitchen
occupied the ground-floor of the pavilion on the courtyard, and the
cook, a stout, strong girl, protected by two enormous dogs, performed
the functions of portress. The facade, composed of five windows, and the
two pavilions, which projected nine feet, were in the style Phellion.
Above the door the master of the house had inserted a tablet of white
marble, on which, in letters of gold, were read the words, “Aurea
mediocritas.” Above the sun-dial, affixed to one panel of the facade,
he had also caused to be inscribed this sapient maxim: “Umbra mea vita,
sic!”

The former window-sills had recently been superceded by sills of red
Languedoc marble, found in a marble shop. At the bottom of the garden
could be seen a colored statue, intended to lead casual observers to
imagine that a nurse was carrying a child. The ground-floor of the house
contained only the salon and the dining-room, separated from each other
by the well of the staircase and the landing, which formed a sort of
antechamber. At the end of the salon, in the other pavilion, was a
little study occupied by Phellion.

On the first upper floor were the rooms of the father and mother and
that of the young professor. Above were the chambers of the children and
the servants; for Phellion, on consideration of his own age and that of
his wife, had set up a male domestic, aged fifteen, his son having by
that time entered upon his duties of tuition. To right, on entering
the courtyard, were little offices where wood was stored, and where
the former proprietor had lodged a porter. The Phellions were no doubt
awaiting the marriage of their son to allow themselves that additional
luxury.

This property, on which the Phellions had long had their eye, cost
them eighteen thousand francs in 1831. The house was separated from
the courtyard by a balustrade with a base of freestone and a coping of
tiles; this little wall, which was breast-high, was lined with a hedge
of Bengal roses, in the middle of which opened a wooden gate opposite
and leading to the large gates on the street. Those who know the
cul-de-sac of the Feuillantines, will understand that the Phellion
house, standing at right angles to the street, had a southern exposure,
and was protected on the north by the immense wall of the adjoining
house, against which the smaller structure was built. The cupola of the
Pantheon and that of the Val-de-Grace looked from there like two giants,
and so diminished the sky space that, walking in the garden, one felt
cramped and oppressed. No place could be more silent than this blind
street.

Such was the retreat of the great unknown citizen who was now tasting
the sweets of repose, after discharging his duty to the nation in the
ministry of finance, from which he had retired as registration clerk
after a service of thirty-six years. In 1832 he had led his battalion of
the National Guard to the attack on Saint-Merri, but his neighbors had
previously seen tears in his eyes at the thought of being obliged to
fire on misguided Frenchmen. The affair was already decided by the time
his legion crossed the pont Notre-Dame at a quick step, after debouching
by the flower-market. This noble hesitation won him the respect of his
whole quarter, but he lost the decoration of the Legion of honor; his
colonel told him in a loud voice that, under arms, there was no such
thing as deliberation,--a saying of Louis-Philippe to the National Guard
of Metz. Nevertheless, the bourgeois virtues of Phellion, and the great
respect in which he was held in his own quarter had kept him major of
the battalion for eight years. He was now nearly sixty, and seeing the
moment coming when he must lay off the sword and stock, he hoped that
the king would deign to reward his services by granting him at last the
Legion of honor.

Truth compels us to say, in spite of the stain this pettiness will put
upon so fine a character, that Commander Phellion rose upon the tips of
his toes at the receptions in the Tuileries, and did all that he could
to put himself forward, even eyeing the citizen-king perpetually when
he dined at his table. In short, he intrigued in a dumb sort of way; but
had never yet obtained a look in return from the king of his choice. The
worthy man had more than once thought, but was not yet decided, to beg
Monsieur Minard to assist him in obtaining his secret desire.

Phellion, a man of passive obedience, was stoical in the matter of duty,
and iron in all that touched his conscience. To complete this picture
by a sketch of his person, we must add that at fifty-nine years of age
Phellion had “thickened,” to use a term of the bourgeois vocabulary. His
face, of one monotonous tone and pitted with the small-pox, had grown
to resemble a full moon; so that his lips, formerly large, now seemed
of ordinary size. His eyes, much weakened, and protected by glasses, no
longer showed the innocence of their light-blue orbs, which in former
days had often excited a smile; his white hair now gave gravity to much
that twelve years earlier had looked like silliness, and lent itself
to ridicule. Time, which does such damage to faces with refined and
delicate features, only improves those which, in their youth, have been
course and massive. This was the case with Phellion. He occupied the
leisure of his old age in making an abridgment of the History of France;
for Phellion was the author of several works adopted by the University.

When la Peyrade presented himself, the family were all together. Madame
Barniol was just telling her mother about one of her babies, which was
slightly indisposed. They were dressed in their Sunday clothes, and were
sitting before the fireplace of the wainscoted salon on chairs bought
at a bargain; and they all felt an emotion when Genevieve, the cook and
portress, announced the personage of whom they were just then speaking
in connection with Celeste, whom, we must here state, Felix Phellion
loved, to the extent of going to mass to behold her. The learned
mathematician had made that effort in the morning, and the family were
joking him about it in a pleasant way, hoping in their hearts that
Celeste and her parents might understand the treasure that was thus
offered to them.

“Alas! the Thuilliers seem to me infatuated with a very dangerous man,”
 said Madame Phellion. “He took Madame Colleville by the arm this morning
after church, and they went together to the Luxembourg.”

“There is something about that lawyer,” remarked Felix Phellion, “that
strikes me as sinister. He might be found to have committed some crime
and I shouldn’t be surprised.”

“That’s going too far,” said old Phellion. “He is cousin-germain to
Tartuffe, that immortal figure cast in bronze by our honest Moliere; for
Moliere, my children, had honesty and patriotism for the basis of his
genius.”

It was at that instant that Genevieve came in to say, “There’s a
Monsieur de la Peyrade out there, who wants to see monsieur.”

“To see me!” exclaimed Phellion. “Ask him to come in,” he added, with
that solemnity in little things which gave him even now a touch of
absurdity, though it always impressed his family, which accepted him as
king.

Phellion, his two sons, and his wife and daughter, rose and received the
circular bow made by the lawyer.

“To what do we owe the honor of your visit, monsieur?” asked Phellion,
stiffly.

“To your importance in this arrondissement, my dear Monsieur Phellion,
and to public interests,” replied Theodose.

“Then let us go into my study,” said Phellion.

“No, no, my friend,” said the rigid Madame Phellion, a small woman, flat
as a flounder, who retained upon her features the grim severity with
which she taught music in boarding-schools for young ladies; “we will
leave you.”

An upright Erard piano, placed between the two windows and opposite to
the fireplace, showed the constant occupation of a proficient.

“Am I so unfortunate as to put you to flight?” said Theodose, smiling in
a kindly way at the mother and daughter. “You have a delightful retreat
here,” he continued. “You only lack a pretty daughter-in-law to pass
the rest of your days in this ‘aurea mediocritas,’ the wish of the Latin
poet, surrounded by family joys. Your antecedents, my dear Monsieur
Phellion, ought surely to win you such rewards, for I am told that you
are not only a patriot but a good citizen.”

“Monsieur,” said Phellion, embarrassed, “monsieur, I have only done
my duty.” At the word “daughter-in-law,” uttered by Theodose, Madame
Barniol, who resembled her mother as much as one drop of water is like
another, looked at Madame Phellion and at Felix as if she would say,
“Were we mistaken?”

The desire to talk this incident over carried all four personages into
the garden, for, in March, 1840, the weather was spring-like, at least
in Paris.

“Commander,” said Theodose, as soon as he was alone with Phellion, who
was always flattered by that title, “I have come to speak to you about
the election--”

“Yes, true; we are about to nominate a municipal councillor,” said
Phellion, interrupting him.

“And it is apropos of that candidacy that I have come to disturb your
Sunday joys; but perhaps in so doing we shall not go beyond the limits
of the family circle.”

It would be impossible for Phellion to be more Phellion than Theodose
was Phellion at that moment.

“I shall not let you say another word,” replied the commander, profiting
by the pause made by Theodose, who watched for the effect of his speech.
“My choice is made.”

“We have had the same idea!” exclaimed Theodose; “men of the same
character agree as well as men of the same mind.”

“In this case I do not believe in that phenomenon,” replied Phellion.
“This arrondissement had for its representative in the municipal council
the most virtuous of men, as he was the noblest of magistrates. I allude
to the late Monsieur Popinot, the deceased judge of the Royal courts.
When the question of replacing him came up, his nephew, the heir to
his benevolence, did not reside in this quarter. He has since, however,
purchased, and now occupies, the house where his uncle lived in the
rue de la Montagne-Sainte-Genevieve; he is the physician of the Ecole
Polytechnique and that of our hospitals; he does honor to this quarter;
for these reasons, and to pay homage in the person of the nephew to the
memory of the uncle, we have decided to nominate Doctor Horace Bianchon,
member of the Academy of Sciences, as you are aware, and one of the most
distinguished young men in the illustrious faculty of Paris. A man is
not great in our eyes solely because he is celebrated; to my mind the
late Councillor Popinot was almost another Saint Vincent de Paul.”

“But a doctor is not an administrator,” replied Theodose; “and, besides,
I have come to ask your vote for a man to whom your dearest interests
require that you should sacrifice a predilection, which, after all, is
quite unimportant to the public welfare.”

“Monsieur!” cried Phellion, rising and striking an attitude like that of
Lafon in “Le Glorieux,” “Do you despise me sufficiently to suppose that
my personal interests could ever influence my political conscience? When
a matter concerns the public welfare, I am a citizen--nothing more, and
nothing less.”

Theodose smiled to himself at the thought of the battle which was now to
take place between the father and the citizen.

“Do not bind yourself to your present ideas, I entreat you,” he said,
“for this matter concerns the happiness of your dear Felix.”

“What do you mean by those words?” asked Phellion, stopping short in the
middle of the salon and posing, with his hand thrust through the bosom
of his waistcoat from right to left, in the well-known attitude of
Odilon Barrot.

“I have come in behalf of our mutual friend, the worthy and excellent
Monsieur Thuillier, whose influence on the destiny of that beautiful
Celeste Colleville must be well known to you. If, as I think, your son,
whose merits are incontestable, and of whom both families may well be
proud, if, I say, he is courting Celeste with a view to a marriage in
which all expediencies may be combined, you cannot do more to promote
that end than to obtain Thuillier’s eternal gratitude by proposing
your worthy friend to the suffrages of your fellow-citizens. As for
me, though I have lately come into the quarter, I can, thanks to the
influence I enjoy through certain legal benefits done to the poor,
materially advance his interests. I might, perhaps, have put myself
forward for this position; but serving the poor brings in but little
money; and, besides, the modesty of my life is out of keeping with such
distinctions. I have devoted myself, monsieur, to the service of the
weak, like the late Councillor Popinot,--a sublime man, as you justly
remarked. If I had not already chosen a career which is in some sort
monastic, and precludes all idea of marriage and public office, my
taste, my second vocation, would lead me to the service of God, to the
Church. I do not trumpet what I do, like the philanthropists; I do not
write about it; I simply act; I am pledged to Christian charity. The
ambition of our friend Thuillier becoming known to me, I have wished to
contribute to the happiness of two young people who seem to me made for
each other, by suggesting to you the means of winning the rather cold
heart of Monsieur Thuillier.”

Phellion was bewildered by this tirade, admirably delivered; he was
dazzled, attracted; but he remained Phellion; he walked up to the lawyer
and held out his hand, which la Peyrade took.

“Monsieur,” said the commander, with emotion, “I have misjudged you.
What you have done me the honor to confide to me will die _there_,”
 laying his hand on his heart. “You are one of the men of whom we have
too few,--men who console us for many evils inherent in our social
state. Righteousness is seen so seldom that our too feeble natures
distrust appearances. You have in me a friend, if you will allow me the
honor of assuming that title. But you must learn to know me, monsieur.
I should lose my own esteem if I nominated Thuillier. No, my son shall
never own his happiness to an evil action on his father’s part. I shall
not change my candidate because my son’s interests demand it. That is
civic virtue, monsieur.”

La Peyrade pulled out his handkerchief and rubbed it in his eye so
that it drew a tear, as he said, holding out his hand to Phellion, and
turning aside his head:--

“Ah! monsieur, how sublime a struggle between public and private duty!
Had I come here only to see this sight, my visit would not have been
wasted. You cannot do otherwise! In your place, I should do the same.
You are that noblest thing that God has made--a righteous man! a
citizen of the Jean-Jacques type! With many such citizens, oh France!
my country! what mightest thou become! It is I, monsieur, who solicit,
humbly, the honor to be your friend.”

“What can be happening?” said Madame Phellion, watching the scene
through the window. “Do see your father and that horrid man embracing
each other.”

Phellion and la Peyrade now came out and joined the family in the
garden.

“My dear Felix,” said the old man, pointing to la Peyrade, who was
bowing to Madame Phellion, “be very grateful to that admirable young
man; he will prove most useful to you.”

The lawyer walked for about five minutes with Madame Barniol and Madame
Phellion beneath the leafless lindens, and gave them (in consequence
of the embarrassing circumstances created by Phellion’s political
obstinacy) a piece of advice, the effects of which were to bear fruit
that evening, while its first result was to make both ladies admire his
talents, his frankness, and his inappreciable good qualities. When the
lawyer departed the whole family conducted him to the street gate,
and all eyes followed him until he had turned the corner of the rue du
Faubourg-Saint-Jacques. Madame Phellion then took the arm of her husband
to return to the salon, saying:--

“Hey! my friend! what does this mean? You, such a good father, how can
you, from excessive delicacy, stand in the way of such a fine marriage
for our Felix?”

“My dear,” replied Phellion, “the great men of antiquity, Brutus
and others, were never fathers when called upon to be citizens. The
bourgeoisie has, even more than the aristocracy whose place it has been
called upon to take, the obligations of the highest virtues. Monsieur
de Saint-Hilaire did not think of his lost arm in presence of the dead
Turenne. We must give proof of our worthiness; let us give it at every
state of the social hierarchy. Shall I instruct my family in the highest
civic principles only to ignore them myself at the moment for applying
them? No, my dear; weep, if you must, to-day, but to-morrow you will
respect me,” he added, seeing tears in the eyes of his starched better
half.

These noble words were said on the sill of the door, above which was
written, “Aurea mediocritas.”

“I ought to have put, ‘et digna,’” added Phellion, pointing to the
tablet, “but those two words would imply self-praise.”

“Father,” said Marie-Theodore Phellion, the future engineer of “ponts
et chaussees,” when the family were once more seated in the salon,
“it seems to me that there is nothing dishonorable in changing one’s
determination about a choice which is of no real consequence to public
welfare.”

“No consequence, my son!” cried Phellion. “Between ourselves I will say,
and Felix shares my opinion, Monsieur Thuillier is absolutely without
capacity; he knows nothing. Monsieur Horace Bianchon is an able man; he
will obtain a thousand things for our arrondissement, and Thuillier will
obtain none! Remember this, my son; to change a good determination for
a bad one from motives of self-interest is one of those infamous actions
which escape the control of men but are punished by God. I am, or I
think I am, void of all blame before my conscience, and I owe it to you,
my children, to leave my memory unstained among you. Nothing, therefore,
can make me change my determination.”

“Oh, my good father!” cried the little Barniol woman, flinging herself
on a cushion at Phellion’s knees, “don’t ride your high horse! There are
many fools and idiots in the municipal council, and France gets along
all the same. That old Thuillier will adopt the opinions of those about
him. Do reflect that Celeste will probably have five hundred thousand
francs.”

“She might have millions,” said Phellion, “and I might see them there
at my feet before I would propose Thuillier, when I owe to the memory of
the best of men to nominate, if possible, Horace Bianchon, his nephew.
From the heaven above us Popinot is contemplating and applauding me!”
 cried Phellion, with exaltation. “It is by such considerations as you
suggest that France is being lowered, and the bourgeoisie are bringing
themselves into contempt.”

“My father is right,” said Felix, coming out of a deep reverie. “He
deserves our respect and love; as he has throughout the whole course
of his modest and honored life. I would not owe my happiness either to
remorse in his noble soul, or to a low political bargain. I love Celeste
as I love my own family; but, above all that, I place my father’s honor,
and since this question is a matter of conscience with him it must not
be spoken of again.”

Phellion, with his eyes full of tears, went up to his eldest son and
took him in his arms, saying, “My son! my son!” in a choking voice.

“All that is nonsense,” whispered Madame Phellion in Madame Barniol’s
ear. “Come and dress me; I shall make an end of this; I know your
father; he has put his foot down now. To carry out the plan that pious
young man, Theodose, suggested, I want your help; hold yourself ready to
give it, my daughter.”

At this moment, Genevieve came in and gave a letter to Monsieur
Phellion.

“An invitation for dinner to-day, for Madame Phellion and Felix and
myself, at the Thuilliers’,” he said.

The magnificent and surprising idea of Thuillier’s municipal
advancement, put forth by the “advocate of the poor” was not less
upsetting in the Thuillier household than it was in the Phellion salon.
Jerome Thuillier, without actually confiding anything to his sister, for
he made it a point of honor to obey his Mephistopheles, had rushed to
her in great excitement to say:--

“My dearest girl” (he always touched her heart with those caressing
words), “we shall have some big-wigs at dinner to-day. I’m going to ask
the Minards; therefore take pains about your dinner. I have written to
Monsieur and Madame Phellion; it is rather late; but there’s no need of
ceremony with them. As for the Minards, I must throw a little dust in
their eyes; I have a particular need of them.”

“Four Minards, three Phellions, four Collevilles, and ourselves; that
makes thirteen--”

“La Peyrade, fourteen; and it is worth while to invite Dutocq; he may be
useful to us. I’ll go up and see him.”

“What are you scheming?” cried his sister. “Fifteen to dinner! There’s
forty francs, at the very least, waltzing off.”

“You won’t regret them, my dearest. I want you to be particularly
agreeable to our young friend, la Peyrade. There’s a friend, indeed!
you’ll soon have proofs of that! If you love me, cosset him well.”

So saying, he departed, leaving Brigitte bewildered.

“Proofs, indeed! yes, I’ll look out for proofs,” she said. “I’m not to
be caught with fine words, not I! He is an amiable fellow; but before I
take him into my heart I shall study him a little closer.”

After inviting Dutocq, Thuillier, having bedizened himself, went to the
hotel Minard, rue des Macons-Sorbonne, to capture the stout Zelie, and
gloss over the shortness of the invitation.

Minard had purchased one of those large and sumptuous habitations which
the old religious orders built about the Sorbonne, and as Thuillier
mounted the broad stone steps with an iron balustrade, that proved how
arts of the second class flourished under Louis XIII., he envied both
the mansion and its occupant,--the mayor.

This vast building, standing between a courtyard and garden, is
noticeable as a specimen of the style, both noble and elegant, of the
reign of Louis XIII., coming singularly, as it did, between the bad
taste of the expiring renaissance and the heavy grandeur of Louis XIV.,
at its dawn. This transition period is shown in many public buildings.
The massive scroll-work of several facades--that of the Sorbonne, for
instance,--and columns rectified according to the rules of Grecian art,
were beginning to appear in this architecture.

A grocer, a lucky adulterator, now took the place of the former
ecclesiastical governor of an institution called in former times
L’Economat; an establishment connected with the general agency of the
old French clergy, and founded by the long-sighted genius of Richelieu.
Thuillier’s name opened for him the doors of the salon, where sat
enthroned in velvet and gold, amid the most magnificent “Chineseries,”
 the poor woman who weighed with all her avoirdupois on the hearts and
minds of princes and princesses at the “popular balls” of the palace.

“Isn’t she a good subject for ‘La Caricature’?” said a so-called lady
of the bedchamber to a duchess, who could hardly help laughing at the
aspect of Zelie, glittering with diamonds, red as a poppy, squeezed into
a gold brocade, and rolling along like the casts of her former shop.

“Will you pardon me, fair lady,” began Thuillier, twisting his body,
and pausing in pose number two of his imperial repertory, “for having
allowed this invitation to remain in my desk, thinking, all the while,
that it was sent? It is for to-day, but perhaps I am too late?”

Zelie examined her husband’s face as he approached them to receive
Thuillier; then she said:--

“We intended to drive into the country and dine at some chance
restaurant; but we’ll give up that idea and all the more readily
because, in my opinion, it is getting devilishly vulgar to drive out of
Paris on Sundays.”

“We will have a little dance to the piano for the young people, if
enough come, as I hope they will. I have sent a line to Phellion, whose
wife is intimate with Madame Pron, the successor--”

“Successor_ess_,” interrupted Madame Minard.

“No,” said Thuillier, “it ought to be success’ress; just as we say
may’ress, dropping the O, you know.”

“Is it full dress?” asked Madame Minard.

“Heavens! no,” replied Thuillier; “you would get me finely scolded by my
sister. No, it is only a family party. Under the Empire, madame, we all
devoted ourselves to dancing. At that great epoch of our national life
they thought as much of a fine dancer as they did of a good soldier.
Nowadays the country is so matter-of-fact.”

“Well, we won’t talk politics,” said the mayor, smiling. “The King is
grand; he is very able. I have a deep admiration for my own time, and
for the institutions which we have given to ourselves. The King, you
may be sure, knows very well what he is doing by the development of
industries. He is struggling hand to hand against England; and we are
doing him more harm during this fruitful peace than all the wars of the
Empire would have done.”

“What a deputy Minard would make!” cried Zelie, naively. “He practises
speechifying at home. You’ll help us to get him elected, won’t you,
Thuillier?”

“We won’t talk politics now,” replied Thuillier. “Come at five.”

“Will that little Vinet be there?” asked Minard; “he comes, no doubt,
for Celeste.”

“Then he may go into mourning,” replied Thuillier. “Brigitte won’t hear
of him.”

Zelie and Minard exchanged a smile of satisfaction.

“To think that we must hob-nob with such common people, all for the sake
of our son!” cried Zelie, when Thuillier was safely down the staircase,
to which the mayor had accompanied him.

“Ha! he thinks to be deputy!” thought Thuillier, as he walked away.
“These grocers! nothing satisfies them. Heavens! what would Napoleon
say if he could see the government in the hands of such people! I’m a
trained administrator, at any rate. What a competitor, to be sure! I
wonder what la Peyrade will say?”

The ambitious ex-beau now went to invite the whole Laudigeois family for
the evening, after which he went to the Collevilles’, to make sure that
Celeste should wear a becoming gown. He found Flavie rather pensive. She
hesitated about coming, but Thuillier overcame her indecision.

“My old and ever young friend,” he said, taking her round the waist, for
she was alone in her little salon, “I won’t have any secret from you. A
great affair is in the wind for me. I can’t tell you more than that, but
I can ask you to be particularly charming to a certain young man--”

“Who is it?”

“La Peyrade.”

“Why, Charles?”

“He holds my future in his hands. Besides, he’s a man of genius. I know
what that is. He’s got this sort of thing,”--and Thuillier made the
gesture of a dentist pulling out a back tooth. “We must bind him to us,
Flavie. But, above all, don’t let him see his power. As for me, I shall
just give and take with him.”

“Do you want me to be coquettish?”

“Not too much so, my angel,” replied Thuillier, with a foppish air.

And he departed, not observing the stupor which overcame Flavie.

“That young man is a power,” she said to herself. “Well, we shall see!”

For these reasons she dressed her hair with marabouts, put on her
prettiest gown of gray and pink, which allowed her fine shoulders to be
seen beneath a pelerine of black lace, and took care to keep Celeste
in a little silk frock made with a yoke and a large plaited collarette,
telling her to dress her hair plainly, a la Berthe.




CHAPTER VIII. AD MAJOREM THEODOSIS GLORIAM

At half-past four o’clock Theodose was at his post. He had put on his
vacant, half-servile manner and soft voice, and he drew Thuillier at
once into the garden.

“My friend,” he said, “I don’t doubt your triumph, but I feel the
necessity of again warning you to be absolutely silent. If you are
questioned about anything, especially about Celeste, make evasive
answers which will keep your questioners in suspense. You must have
learned how to do that in a government office.”

“I understand!” said Thuillier. “But what certainty have you?”

“You’ll see what a fine dessert I have prepared for you. But please
be modest. There come the Minards; let me pipe to them. Bring them out
here, and then disappear yourself.”

After the first salutations, la Peyrade was careful to keep close to the
mayor, and presently at an opportune moment he drew him aside to say:--

“Monsieur le maire, a man of your political importance doesn’t come to
bore himself in a house of this kind without an object. I don’t want to
fathom your motives--which, indeed, I have no right to do--and my part
in this world is certainly not to mingle with earthly powers; but please
pardon my apparent presumption, and deign to listen to a piece of advice
which I shall venture to give you. If I do you a service to-day you are
in a position to return it to me to-morrow; therefore, in case I should
be so fortunate as to do you a good turn, I am really only obeying the
law of self-interest. Our friend Thuillier is in despair at being
a nobody; he has taken it into his head that he wants to become a
personage in this arrondissement--”

“Ah! ah!” exclaimed Minard.

“Oh! nothing very exalted; he wants to be elected to the municipal
council. Now, I know that Phellion, seeing the influence such a service
would have on his family interests, intends to propose your poor
friend as candidate. Well, perhaps you might think it wise, in your own
interests, to be beforehand with him. Thuillier’s nomination could only
be favorable for you--I mean agreeable; and he’ll fill his place in the
council very well; there are some there who are not as strong as he.
Besides, owing to his place to your support, he will see with your eyes;
he already looks to you as one of the lights of the town.”

“My dear fellow, I thank you very much,” replied Minard. “You are doing
me a service I cannot sufficiently acknowledge, and which proves to
me--”

“That I don’t like those Phellions,” said la Peyrade, taking advantage
of a slight hesitation on the part of the mayor, who feared to express
an idea in which the lawyer might see contempt. “I hate people who make
capital out of their honesty and coin money from fine sentiments.”

“You know them well,” said Minard; “they are sycophants. That man’s
whole life for the last ten years is explained by this bit of red
ribbon,” added the mayor, pointing to his own buttonhole.

“Take care!” said the lawyer, “his son is in love with Celeste, and he’s
fairly in the heart of the family.”

“Yes, but my son has twelve thousand a year in his own right.”

“Oh!” said Theodose, with a start, “Mademoiselle Brigitte was saying the
other day that she wanted at least as much as that in Celeste’s suitor.
Moreover, six months hence you’ll probably hear that Thuillier has a
property worth forty thousand francs a year.”

“The devil! well, I thought as much. Yes, certainly, he shall be made a
member of the municipal council.”

“In any case, don’t say anything about me to him,” said the advocate of
the poor, who now hastened away to speak to Madame Phellion. “Well, my
fair lady,” he said, when he reached her, “have you succeeded?”

“I waited till four o’clock, and then that worthy and excellent man
would not let me finish what I had to say. He is much to busy to accept
such an office, and he sent a letter which Monsieur Phellion has read,
saying that he, Doctor Bianchon, thanked him for his good intentions,
and assured him that his own candidate was Monsieur Thuillier. He said
that he should use all his influence in his favor, and begged my husband
to do the same.”

“And what did your excellent husband say?”

“‘I have done my duty,’ he said. ‘I have not been false to my
conscience, and now I am all for Thuillier.’”

“Well, then, the thing is settled,” said la Peyrade. “Ignore my visit,
and take all the credit of the idea to yourselves.”

Then he went to Madame Colleville, composing himself in the attitude and
manner of the deepest respect.

“Madame,” he said, “have the goodness to send out to me here that kindly
papa Colleville. A surprise is to be given to Monsieur Thuillier, and I
want Monsieur Colleville to be in the secret.”

While la Peyrade played the part of man of the world with Colleville,
and allowed himself various witty sarcasms when explaining to him
Thuillier’s candidacy, telling him he ought to support it, if only
to exhibit his incapacity, Flavie was listening in the salon to the
following conversation, which bewildered her for the moment and made her
ears ring.

“I should like to know what Monsieur Colleville and Monsieur de la
Peyrade can be saying to each other to make them laugh like that,” said
Madame Thuillier, foolishly, looking out of the window.

“A lot of improper things, as men always do when they talk together,”
 replied Mademoiselle Thuillier, who often attacked men with the sort of
instinct natural to old maids.

“No, they are incapable of that,” said Phellion, gravely. “Monsieur de
la Peyrade is one of the most virtuous young men I have ever met.
People know what I think of Felix; well, I put the two on the same line;
indeed, I wish my son had a little more of Monsieur de la Peyrade’s
beautiful piety.”

“You are right; he is a man of great merit, who is sure to succeed,”
 said Minard. “As for me, my suffrages--for I really ought not to say
protection--are his.”

“He pays more for oil than for bread,” said Dutocq. “I know that.”

“His mother, if he has the happiness to still possess her, must be proud
of him,” remarked Madame Thuillier, sententiously.

“He is a real treasure for us,” said Thuillier. “If you only knew how
modest he is! He doesn’t do himself justice.”

“I can answer for one thing,” added Dutocq; “no young man ever
maintained a nobler attitude in poverty; he triumphed over it; but he
suffered--it is easy to see that.”

“Poor young man!” cried Zelie. “Such things make my heart ache!”

“Any one could safely trust both secrets and fortune to him,” said
Thuillier; “and in these days that is the finest thing that can be said
of a man.”

“It is Colleville who is making him laugh,” cried Dutocq.

Just then Colleville and la Peyrade returned from the garden the very
best friends in the world.

“Messieurs,” said Brigitte, “the soup and the King must never be kept
waiting; give your hand to the ladies.”

Five minutes after this little pleasantry (issuing from the lodge of
her father the porter) Brigitte had the satisfaction of seeing her table
surrounded by the principal personages of this drama; the rest, with the
one exception of the odious Cerizet, arrived later.

The portrait of the former maker of canvas money-bags would be
incomplete if we omitted to give a description of one of her best
dinners. The physiognomy of the bourgeois cook of 1840 is, moreover,
one of those details essentially necessary to a history of manners and
customs, and clever housewives may find some lessons in it. A woman
doesn’t make empty bags for twenty years without looking out for
the means to fill a few of them. Now Brigitte had one peculiar
characteristic. She united the economy to which she owed her fortune
with a full understanding of necessary expenses. Her relative
prodigality, when it concerned her brother or Celeste, was the antipodes
of avarice. In fact, she often bemoaned herself that she couldn’t be
miserly. At her last dinner she had related how, after struggling ten
minute and enduring martyrdom, she had ended by giving ten francs to a
poor workwoman whom she knew, positively, had been without food for two
days.

“Nature,” she said naively, “is stronger than reason.”

The soup was a rather pale bouillon; for, even on an occasion like this,
the cook had been enjoined to make a great deal of bouillon out of the
beef supplied. Then, as the said beef was to feed the family on the next
day and the day after that, the less juice it expended in the bouillon,
the more substantial were the subsequent dinners. The beef, little
cooked, was always taken away at the following speech from Brigitte,
uttered as soon as Thuillier put his knife into it:--

“I think it is rather tough; send it away, Thuillier, nobody will eat
it; we have other things.”

The soup was, in fact, flanked by four viands mounted on old hot-water
chafing-dishes, with the plating worn off. At this particular dinner
(afterwards called that of the candidacy) the first course consisted
of a pair of ducks with olives, opposite to which was a large pie with
forcemeat balls, while a dish of eels “a la tartare” corresponded in
like manner with a fricandeau on chicory. The second course had for its
central dish a most dignified goose stuffed with chestnuts, a salad of
vegetables garnished with rounds of beetroot opposite to custards in
cups, while lower down a dish of turnips “au sucre” faced a timbale of
macaroni. This gala dinner of the concierge type cost, at the utmost,
twenty francs, and the remains of the feast provided the household for a
couple of days; nevertheless, Brigitte would say:--

“Pest! when one has to have company how the money goes! It is fearful!”

The table was lighted by two hideous candlesticks of plated silver with
four branches each, in which shone eight of those thrifty wax-candles
that go by the name of Aurora. The linen was dazzling in whiteness,
and the silver, with beaded edges, was the fruit, evidently, of some
purchase made during the Revolution by Thuillier’s father. Thus the fare
and the service were in keeping with the house, the dining-room, and
the Thuilliers themselves, who could never, under any circumstances, get
themselves above this style of living. The Minards, Collevilles, and
la Peyrade exchanged now and then a smile which betrayed their mutually
satirical but repressed thoughts. La Peyrade, seated beside Flavie,
whispered in her ear:--

“You must admit that they ought to be taught how to live. But those
Minards are no better in their way. What cupidity! they’ve come here
solely after Celeste. Your daughter will be lost to you if you let them
have her. These parvenus have all the vices of the great lords of other
days without their elegance. Minard’s son, who has twelve thousand
francs a year of his own, could very well find a wife elsewhere, instead
of pushing his speculating rake in here. What fun it would be to play
upon those people as one would on a bass-viol or a clarionet!”

While the dishes of the second course were being removed, Minard, afraid
that Phellion would precede him, said to Thuillier with a grave air:--

“My dear Thuillier, in accepting your dinner, I did so for the purpose
of making an important communication, which does you so much honor that
all here present ought to be made participants in it.”

Thuillier turned pale.

“Have you obtained the cross for me?” he cried, on receiving a glance
from Theodose, and wishing to prove that he was not without craft.

“You will doubtless receive it ere long,” replied the mayor. “But the
matter now relates to something better than that. The cross is a favor
due to the good opinion of a minister, whereas the present question
concerns an election due to the consent of your fellow citizens. In a
word, a sufficiently large number of electors in your arrondissement
have cast their eyes upon you, and wish to honor you with their
confidence by making you the representative of this arrondissement
in the municipal council of Paris; which, as everybody knows, is the
Council-general of the Seine.”

“Bravo!” cried Dutocq.

Phellion rose.

“Monsieur le maire has forestalled me,” he said in an agitated voice,
“but it is so flattering for our friend to be the object of eagerness on
the part of all good citizens, and to obtain the public vote of high
and low, that I cannot complain of being obliged to come second only;
therefore, all honor to the initiatory authority!” (Here he bowed
respectfully to Minard.) “Yes, Monsieur Thuillier, many electors think
of giving you their votes in that portion of the arrondissement where
I keep my humble penates; and you have the special advantage of being
suggested to their minds by a distinguished man.” (Sensation.) “By a man
in whose person we desired to honor one of the most virtuous inhabitants
of the arrondissement, who for twenty years, I may say, was the father
of it. I allude to the late Monsieur Popinot, counsellor, during his
lifetime, to the Royal court, and our delegate in the municipal council
of Paris. But his nephew, of whom I speak, Doctor Bianchon, one of
our glories, has, in view of his absorbing duties, declined the
responsibility with which we sought to invest him. While thanking us for
our compliment he has--take note of this--indicated for our suffrages
the candidate of Monsieur le maire as being, in his opinion, capable,
owing to the position he formerly occupied, of exercising the
magisterial functions of the aedileship.”

And Phellion sat down amid approving murmurs.

“Thuillier, you can count on me, your old friend,” said Colleville.

At this moment the guests were sincerely touched by the sight presented
of old Mademoiselle Brigitte and Madame Thuillier. Brigitte, pale as
though she were fainting, was letting the slow tears run, unheeded,
down her cheeks, tears of deepest joy; while Madame Thuillier sat, as if
struck by lightning, with her eyes fixed. Suddenly the old maid darted
into the kitchen, crying out to Josephine the cook:--

“Come into the cellar my girl, we must get out the wine behind the
wood!”

“My friends,” said Thuillier, in a shaking voice, “this is the finest
moment of my life, finer than even the day of my election, should
I consent to allow myself to be presented to the suffrages of my
fellow-citizens” (“You must! you 

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