The Atheist's Mass

Produced by Dagny

THE ATHEIST'S MASS

By Honore De Balzac

Translated by Clara Bell

This is dedicated to Auguste Borget by his friend De Balzac

THE ATHEIST'S MASS

Bianchon, a physician to whom science owes a fine system of theoretical

physiology, and who, while still young, made himself a celebrity in the

medical school of Paris, that central luminary to which European doctors

do homage, practised surgery for a long time before he took up medicine.

His earliest studies were guided by one of the greatest of French

surgeons, the illustrious Desplein, who flashed across science like a

meteor. By the consensus even of his enemies, he took with him to the

tomb an incommunicable method. Like all men of genius, he had no heirs;

he carried everything in him, and carried it away with him. The glory of

a surgeon is like that of an actor: they live only so long as they are

alive, and their talent leaves no trace when they are gone. Actors

and surgeons, like great singers too, like the executants who by their

performance increase the power of music tenfold, are all the heroes of a

moment.

Desplein is a case in proof of this resemblance in the destinies of

such transient genius. His name, yesterday so famous, to-day almost

forgotten, will survive in his special department without crossing its

limits. For must there not be some extraordinary circumstances to exalt

the name of a professor from the history of Science to the general

history of the human race? Had Desplein that universal command of

knowledge which makes a man the living word, the great figure of his

age? Desplein had a godlike eye; he saw into the sufferer and his malady

by an intuition, natural or acquired, which enabled him to grasp the

diagnostics peculiar to the individual, to determine the very time,

the hour, the minute when an operation should be performed, making due

allowance for atmospheric conditions and peculiarities of individual

temperament. To proceed thus, hand in hand with nature, had he then

studied the constant assimilation by living beings, of the elements

contained in the atmosphere, or yielded by the earth to man who absorbs

them, deriving from them a particular expression of life? Did he work

it all out by the power of deduction and analogy, to which we owe the

genius of Cuvier? Be this as it may, this man was in all the secrets of

the human frame; he knew it in the past and in the future, emphasizing

the present.

But did he epitomize all science in his own person as Hippocrates did

and Galen and Aristotle? Did he guide a whole school towards new worlds?

No. Though it is impossible to deny that this persistent observer of

human chemistry possessed that antique science of the Mages, that is

to say, knowledge of the elements in fusion, the causes of life, life

antecedent to life, and what it must be in its incubation or ever it

_is_, it must be confessed that, unfortunately, everything in him was

purely personal. Isolated during his life by his egoism, that egoism is

now suicidal of his glory. On his tomb there is no proclaiming statue

to repeat to posterity the mysteries which genius seeks out at its own

cost.

But perhaps Desplein's genius was answerable for his beliefs, and for

that reason mortal. To him the terrestrial atmosphere was a generative

envelope; he saw the earth as an egg within its shell; and not being

able to determine whether the egg or the hen first was, he would

not recognize either the cock or the egg. He believed neither in the

antecedent animal nor the surviving spirit of man. Desplein had no

doubts; he was positive. His bold and unqualified atheism was like

that of many scientific men, the best men in the world, but invincible

atheists--atheists such as religious people declare to be impossible.

This opinion could scarcely exist otherwise in a man who was accustomed

from his youth to dissect the creature above all others--before, during,

and after life; to hunt through all his organs without ever finding the

individual soul, which is indispensable to religious theory. When he

detected a cerebral centre, a nervous centre, and a centre for aerating

the blood--the first two so perfectly complementary that in the latter

years of his life he came to a conviction that the sense of hearing is

not absolutely necessary for hearing, nor the sense of sight for

seeing, and that the solar plexus could supply their place without any

possibility of doubt--Desplein, thus finding two souls in man, confirmed

his atheism by this fact, though it is no evidence against God. This man

died, it is said, in final impenitence, as do, unfortunately, many noble

geniuses, whom God may forgive.

The life of this man, great as he was, was marred by many meannesses, to

use the expression employed by his enemies, who were anxious to

diminish his glory, but which it would be more proper to call apparent

contradictions. Envious people and fools, having no knowledge of the

determinations by which superior spirits are moved, seize at once on

superficial inconsistencies, to formulate an accusation and so to pass

sentence on them. If, subsequently, the proceedings thus attacked are

crowned with success, showing the correlations of the preliminaries and

the results, a few of the vanguard of calumnies always survive. In our

day, for instance, Napoleon was condemned by our contemporaries when he

spread his eagle's wings to alight in England: only 1822 could explain

1804 and the flatboats at Boulogne.

As, in Desplein, his glory and science were invulnerable, his enemies

attacked his odd moods and his temper, whereas, in fact, he was simply

characterized by what the English call eccentricity. Sometimes very

handsomely dressed, like Crebillon the tragical, he would suddenly

affect extreme indifference as to what he wore; he was sometimes seen

in a carriage, and sometimes on foot. By turns rough and kind, harsh and

covetous on the surface, but capable of offering his whole fortune to

his exiled masters--who did him the honor of accepting it for a few

days--no man ever gave rise to such contradictory judgements. Although

to obtain a black ribbon, which physicians ought not to intrigue for, he

was capable of dropping a prayer-book out of his pocket at Court, in

his heart he mocked at everything; he had a deep contempt for men,

after studying them from above and below, after detecting their genuine

expression when performing the most solemn and the meanest acts of their

lives.

The qualities of a great man are often federative. If among these

colossal spirits one has more talent than wit, his wit is still superior

to that of a man of whom it is simply stated that "he is witty." Genius

always presupposes moral insight. This insight may be applied to a

special subject; but he who can see a flower must be able to see the

sun. The man who on hearing a diplomate he has saved ask, "How is the

Emperor?" could say, "The courtier is alive; the man will follow!"--that

man is not merely a surgeon or a physician, he is prodigiously witty

also. Hence a patient and diligent student of human nature will

admit Desplein's exorbitant pretensions, and believe--as he himself

believed--that he might have been no less great as a minister than he

was as a surgeon.

Among the riddles which Desplein's life presents to many of his

contemporaries, we have chosen one of the most interesting, because the

answer is to be found at the end of the narrative, and will avenge him

for some foolish charges.

Of all the students in Desplein's hospital, Horace Bianchon was one

of those to whom he most warmly attached himself. Before being a house

surgeon at the Hotel-Dieu, Horace Bianchon had been a medical student

lodging in a squalid boarding house in the _Quartier Latin_, known as

the Maison Vauquer. This poor young man had felt there the gnawing

of that burning poverty which is a sort of crucible from which great

talents are to emerge as pure and incorruptible as diamonds, which may

be subjected to any shock without being crushed. In the fierce fire of

their unbridled passions they acquire the most impeccable honesty, and

get into the habit of fighting the battles which await genius with the

constant work by which they coerce their cheated appetites.

Horace was an upright young fellow, incapable of tergiversation on a

matter of honor, going to the point without waste of words, and as ready

to pledge his cloak for a friend as to give him his time and his night

hours. Horace, in short, was one of those friends who are never anxious

as to what they may get in return for what they give, feeling sure that

they will in their turn get more than they give. Most of his

friends felt for him that deeply-seated respect which is inspired by

unostentatious virtue, and many of them dreaded his censure. But Horace

made no pedantic display of his qualities. He was neither a puritan nor

a preacher; he could swear with a grace as he gave his advice, and

was always ready for a jollification when occasion offered. A jolly

companion, not more prudish than a trooper, as frank and outspoken--not

as a sailor, for nowadays sailors are wily diplomates--but as an honest

man who has nothing in his life to hide, he walked with his head erect,

and a mind content. In short, to put the facts into a word, Horace was

the Pylades of more than one Orestes--creditors being regarded as the

nearest modern equivalent to the Furies of the ancients.

He carried his poverty with the cheerfulness which is perhaps one of

the chief elements of courage, and, like all people who have nothing,

he made very few debts. As sober as a camel and active as a stag, he was

steadfast in his ideas and his conduct.

The happy phase of Bianchon's life began on the day when the famous

surgeon had proof of the qualities and the defects which, these no less

than those, make Doctor Horace Bianchon doubly dear to his friends. When

a leading clinical practitioner takes a young man to his bosom, that

young man has, as they say, his foot in the stirrup. Desplein did not

fail to take Bianchon as his assistant to wealthy houses, where some

complimentary fee almost always found its way into the student's pocket,

and where the mysteries of Paris life were insensibly revealed to the

young provincial; he kept him at his side when a consultation was to

be held, and gave him occupation; sometimes he would send him to a

watering-place with a rich patient; in fact, he was making a practice

for him. The consequence was that in the course of time the Tyrant of

surgery had a devoted ally. These two men--one at the summit of

honor and of his science, enjoying an immense fortune and an immense

reputation; the other a humble Omega, having neither fortune nor

fame--became intimate friends.

The great Desplein told his house surgeon everything; the disciple knew

whether such or such a woman had sat on a chair near the master, or on

the famous couch in Desplein's surgery, on which he slept. Bianchon knew

the mysteries of that temperament, a compound of the lion and the bull,

which at last expanded and enlarged beyond measure the great man's

torso, and caused his death by degeneration of the heart. He studied the

eccentricities of that busy life, the schemes of that sordid avarice,

the hopes of the politician who lurked behind the man of science; he was

able to foresee the mortifications that awaited the only sentiment that

lay hid in a heart that was steeled, but not of steel.

One day Bianchon spoke to Desplein of a poor water-carrier of the

Saint-Jacques district, who had a horrible disease caused by fatigue and

want; this wretched Auvergnat had had nothing but potatoes to eat during

the dreadful winter of 1821. Desplein left all his visits, and at the

risk of killing his horse, he rushed off, followed by Bianchon, to the

poor man's dwelling, and saw, himself, to his being removed to a sick

house, founded by the famous Dubois in the Faubourg Saint-Denis. Then

he went to attend the man, and when he had cured him he gave him

the necessary sum to buy a horse and a water-barrel. This Auvergnat

distinguished himself by an amusing action. One of his friends fell ill,

and he took him at once to Desplein, saying to his benefactor, "I could

not have borne to let him go to any one else!"

Rough customer as he was, Desplein grasped the water-carrier's hand, and

said, "Bring them all to me."

He got the native of Cantal into the Hotel-Dieu, where he took the

greatest care of him. Bianchon had already observed in his chief a

predilection for Auvergnats, and especially for water carriers; but as

Desplein took a sort of pride in his cures at the Hotel-Dieu, the pupil

saw nothing very strange in that.

One day, as he crossed the Place Saint-Sulpice, Bianchon caught sight of

his master going into the church at about nine in the morning. Desplein,

who at that time never went a step without his cab, was on foot, and

slipped in by the door in the Rue du Petit-Lion, as if he were stealing

into some house of ill fame. The house surgeon, naturally possessed

by curiosity, knowing his master's opinions, and being himself a rabid

follower of Cabanis (_Cabaniste en dyable_, with the _y_, which in

Rabelais seems to convey an intensity of devilry)--Bianchon stole into

the church, and was not a little astonished to see the great Desplein,

the atheist, who had no mercy on the angels--who give no work to the

lancet, and cannot suffer from fistula or gastritis--in short, this

audacious scoffer kneeling humbly, and where? In the Lady Chapel,

where he remained through the mass, giving alms for the expenses of the

service, alms for the poor, and looking as serious as though he were

superintending an operation.

"He has certainly not come here to clear up the question of the Virgin's

delivery," said Bianchon to himself, astonished beyond measure. "If I

had caught him holding one of the ropes of the canopy on Corpus Christi

day, it would be a thing to laugh at; but at this hour, alone, with no

one to see--it is surely a thing to marvel at!"

Bianchon did not wish to seem as though he were spying the head surgeon

of the Hotel-Dieu; he went away. As it happened, Desplein asked him to

dine with him that day, not at his own house, but at a restaurant. At

dessert Bianchon skilfully contrived to talk of the mass, speaking of it

as mummery and a farce.

"A farce," said Desplein, "which has cost Christendom more blood than

all Napoleon's battles and all Broussais' leeches. The mass is a papal

invention, not older than the sixth century, and based on the _Hoc est

corpus_. What floods of blood were shed to establish the Fete-Dieu, the

Festival of Corpus Christi--the institution by which Rome established

her triumph in the question of the Real Presence, a schism which rent

the Church during three centuries! The wars of the Count of Toulouse

against the Albigenses were the tail end of that dispute. The Vaudois

and the Albigenses refused to recognize this innovation."

In short, Desplein was delighted to disport himself in his most

atheistical vein; a flow of Voltairean satire, or, to be accurate, a

vile imitation of the _Citateur_.

"Hallo! where is my worshiper of this morning?" said Bianchon to

himself.

He said nothing; he began to doubt whether he had really seen his chief

at Saint-Sulpice. Desplein would not have troubled himself to tell

Bianchon a lie, they knew each other too well; they had already

exchanged thoughts on quite equally serious subjects, and discussed

systems de natura rerum, probing or dissecting them with the knife and

scalpel of incredulity.

Three months went by. Bianchon did not attempt to follow the matter up,

though it remained stamped on his memory. One day that year, one of the

physicians of the Hotel-Dieu took Desplein by the arm, as if to question

him, in Bianchon's presence.

"What were you doing at Saint-Sulpice, my dear master?" said he.

"I went to see a priest who has a diseased knee-bone, and to whom the

Duchesse d'Angouleme did me the honor to recommend me," said Desplein.

The questioner took this defeat for an answer; not so Bianchon.

"Oh, he goes to see damaged knees in church!--He went to mass," said the

young man to himself.

Bianchon resolved to watch Desplein. He remembered the day and hour when

he had detected him going into Saint-Sulpice, and resolved to be there

again next year on the same day and at the same hour, to see if he

should find him there again. In that case the periodicity of his

devotion would justify a scientific investigation; for in such a man

there ought to be no direct antagonism of thought and action.

Next year, on the said day and hour, Bianchon, who had already ceased

to be Desplein's house surgeon, saw the great man's cab standing at

the corner of the Rue de Tournon and the Rue du Petit-Lion, whence his

friend jesuitically crept along by the wall of Saint-Sulpice, and once

more attended mass in front of the Virgin's altar. It was Desplein,

sure enough! The master-surgeon, the atheist at heart, the worshiper

by chance. The mystery was greater than ever; the regularity of the

phenomenon complicated it. When Desplein had left, Bianchon went to

the sacristan, who took charge of the chapel, and asked him whether the

gentleman were a constant worshiper.

"For twenty years that I have been here," replied the man, "M. Desplein

has come four times a year to attend this mass. He founded it."

"A mass founded by him!" said Bianchon, as he went away. "This is as

great a mystery as the Immaculate Conception--an article which alone is

enough to make a physician an unbeliever."

Some time elapsed before Doctor Bianchon, though so much his friend,

found an opportunity of speaking to Desplein of this incident of his

life. Though they met in consultation, or in society, it was difficult

to find an hour of confidential solitude when, sitting with their feet

on the fire-dogs and their head resting on the back of an armchair, two

men tell each other their secrets. At last, seven years later, after

the Revolution of 1830, when the mob invaded the Archbishop's residence,

when Republican agitators spurred them on to destroy the gilt crosses

which flashed like streaks of lightning in the immensity of the ocean

of houses; when Incredulity flaunted itself in the streets, side by

side with Rebellion, Bianchon once more detected Desplein going into

Saint-Sulpice. The doctor followed him, and knelt down by him without

the slightest notice or demonstration of surprise from his friend. They

both attended this mass of his founding.

"Will you tell me, my dear fellow," said Bianchon, as they left the

church, "the reason for your fit of monkishness? I have caught you three

times going to mass---- You! You must account to me for this mystery,

explain such a flagrant disagreement between your opinions and your

conduct. You do not believe in God, and yet you attend mass? My dear

master, you are bound to give me an answer."

"I am like a great many devout people, men who on the surface are deeply

religious, but quite as much atheists as you or I can be."

And he poured out a torrent of epigrams on certain political personages,

of whom the best known gives us, in this century, a new edition of

Moliere's _Tartufe_.

"All that has nothing to do with my question," retorted Bianchon. "I

want to know the reason for what you have just been doing, and why you

founded this mass."

"Faith! my dear boy," said Desplein, "I am on the verge of the tomb; I

may safely tell you about the beginning of my life."

At this moment Bianchon and the great man were in the Rue des

Quatre-Vents, one of the worst streets in Paris. Desplein pointed to

the sixth floor of one of the houses looking like obelisks, of which the

narrow door opens into a passage with a winding staircase at the end,

with windows appropriately termed "borrowed lights"--or, in French,

_jours de souffrance_. It was a greenish structure; the ground floor

occupied by a furniture-dealer, while each floor seemed to shelter a

different and independent form of misery. Throwing up his arm with a

vehement gesture, Desplein exclaimed:

"I lived up there for two years."

"I know; Arthez lived there; I went up there almost every day during my

first youth; we used to call it then the pickle-jar of great men! What

then?"

"The mass I have just attended is connected with some events which took

place at the time when I lived in the garret where you say Arthez lived;

the one with the window where the clothes line is hanging with linen

over a pot of flowers. My early life was so hard, my dear Bianchon, that

I may dispute the palm of Paris suffering with any man living. I have

endured everything: hunger and thirst, want of money, want of clothes,

of shoes, of linen, every cruelty that penury can inflict. I have blown

on my frozen fingers in that _pickle-jar of great men_, which I should

like to see again, now, with you. I worked through a whole winter,

seeing my head steam, and perceiving the atmosphere of my own moisture

as we see that of horses on a frosty day. I do not know where a man

finds the fulcrum that enables him to hold out against such a life.

"I was alone, with no one to help me, no money to buy books or to pay

the expenses of my medical training; I had not a friend; my irascible,

touchy, restless temper was against me. No one understood that this

irritability was the distress and toil of a man who, at the bottom of

the social scale, is struggling to reach the surface. Still, I had, as

I may say to you, before whom I need wear no draperies, I had that

ground-bed of good feeling and keen sensitiveness which must always be

the birthright of any man who is strong enough to climb to any height

whatever, after having long trampled in the bogs of poverty. I could

obtain nothing from my family, nor from my home, beyond my inadequate

allowance. In short, at that time, I breakfasted off a roll which the

baker in the Rue du Petit-Lion sold me cheap because it was left from

yesterday or the day before, and I crumbled it into milk; thus my

morning meal cost me but two sous. I dined only every other day in a

boarding-house where the meal cost me sixteen sous. You know as well

as I what care I must have taken of my clothes and shoes. I hardly know

whether in later life we feel grief so deep when a colleague plays us

false as we have known, you and I, on detecting the mocking smile of a

gaping seam in a shoe, or hearing the armhole of a coat split, I drank

nothing but water; I regarded a cafe with distant respect. Zoppi's

seemed to me a promised land where none but the Lucullus of the _pays

Latin_ had a right of entry. 'Shall I ever take a cup of coffee there

with milk in it?' said I to myself, 'or play a game of dominoes?'

"I threw into my work the fury I felt at my misery. I tried to master

positive knowledge so as to acquire the greatest personal value,

and merit the position I should hold as soon as I could escape from

nothingness. I consumed more oil than bread; the light I burned during

these endless nights cost me more than food. It was a long duel,

obstinate, with no sort of consolation. I found no sympathy anywhere.

To have friends, must we not form connections with young men, have a

few sous so as to be able to go tippling with them, and meet them

where students congregate? And I had nothing! And no one in Paris

can understand that nothing means _nothing_. When I even thought of

revealing my beggary, I had that nervous contraction of the throat which

makes a sick man believe that a ball rises up from the oesophagus into

the larynx.

"In later life I have met people born to wealth who, never having wanted

for anything, had never even heard this problem in the rule of three:

A young man is to crime as a five-franc piece is to X.--These gilded

idiots say to me, 'Why did you get into debt? Why did you involve

yourself in such onerous obligations?' They remind me of the princess

who, on hearing that the people lacked bread, said, 'Why do not they buy

cakes?' I should like to see one of these rich men, who complain that I

charge too much for an operation,--yes, I should like to see him alone

in Paris without a sou, without a friend, without credit, and forced to

work with his five fingers to live at all! What would he do? Where would

he go to satisfy his hunger?

"Bianchon, if you have sometimes seen me hard and bitter, it was

because I was adding my early sufferings on to the insensibility, the

selfishness of which I have seen thousands of instances in the highest

circles; or, perhaps, I was thinking of the obstacles which hatred,

envy, jealousy, and calumny raised up between me and success. In Paris,

when certain people see you ready to set your foot in the stirrup, some

pull your coat-tails, others loosen the buckle of the strap that you may

fall and crack your skull; one wrenches off your horse's shoes, another

steals your whip, and the least treacherous of them all is the man whom

you see coming to fire his pistol at you point blank.

"You yourself, my dear boy, are clever enough to make acquaintance

before long with the odious and incessant warfare waged by mediocrity

against the superior man. If you should drop five-and-twenty louis one

day, you will be accused of gambling on the next, and your best friends

will report that you have lost twenty-five thousand. If you have a

headache, you will be considered mad. If you are a little hasty, no one

can live with you. If, to make a stand against this armament of pigmies,

you collect your best powers, your best friends will cry out that you

want to have everything, that you aim at domineering, at tyranny. In

short, your good points will become your faults, your faults will be

vices, and your virtues crime.

"If you save a man, you will be said to have killed him; if he reappears

on the scene, it will be positive that you have secured the present at

the cost of the future. If he is not dead, he will die. Stumble, and

you fall! Invent anything of any kind and claim your rights, you will be

crotchety, cunning, ill-disposed to rising younger men.

"So, you see, my dear fellow, if I do not believe in God, I believe

still less in man. But do not you know in me another Desplein,

altogether different from the Desplein whom every one abuses?--However,

we will not stir that mud-heap.

"Well, I was living in that house, I was working hard to pass my first

examination, and I had no money at all. You know. I had come to one of

those moments of extremity when a man says, 'I will enlist.' I had one

hope. I expected from my home a box full of linen, a present from one

of those old aunts who, knowing nothing of Paris, think of your shirts,

while they imagine that their nephew with thirty francs a month is

eating ortolans. The box arrived while I was at the schools; it had cost

forty francs for carriage. The porter, a German shoemaker living in a

loft, had paid the money and kept the box. I walked up and down the Rue

des Fosses-Saint-Germain-des-Pres and the Rue de l'Ecole de Medecine

without hitting on any scheme which would release my trunk without the

payment of the forty francs, which of course I could pay as soon as I

should have sold the linen. My stupidity proved to me that surgery was

my only vocation. My good fellow, refined souls, whose powers move in a

lofty atmosphere, have none of that spirit of intrigue that is fertile

in resource and device; their good genius is chance; they do not invent,

things come to them.

"At night I went home, at the very moment when my fellow lodger also

came in--a water-carrier named Bourgeat, a native of Saint-Flour. We

knew each other as two lodgers do who have rooms off the same landing,

and who hear each other sleeping, coughing, dressing, and so at last

become used to one another. My neighbor informed me that the landlord,

to whom I owed three quarters' rent, had turned me out; I must clear

out next morning. He himself was also turned out on account of his

occupation. I spent the most miserable night of my life. Where was I to

get a messenger who could carry my few chattels and my books? How

could I pay him and the porter? Where was I to go? I repeated these

unanswerable questions again and again, in tears, as madmen repeat their

tunes. I fell asleep; poverty has for its friends heavenly slumbers full

of beautiful dreams.

"Next morning, just as I was swallowing my little bowl of bread soaked

in milk, Bourgeat came in and said to me in his vile Auvergne accent:

"'_Mouchieur l'Etudiant_, I am a poor man, a foundling from the hospital

at Saint-Flour, without either father or mother, and not rich enough to

marry. You are not fertile in relations either, nor well supplied with

the ready? Listen, I have a hand-cart downstairs which I have hired for

two sous an hour; it will hold all our goods; if you like, we will try

to find lodgings together, since we are both turned out of this. It is

not the earthly paradise, when all is said and done.'

"'I know that, my good Bourgeat,' said I. 'But I am in a great fix. I

have a trunk downstairs with a hundred francs' worth of linen in it,

out of which I could pay the landlord and all I owe to the porter, and I

have not a hundred sous.'

"'Pooh! I have a few dibs,' replied Bourgeat joyfully, and he pulled out

a greasy old leather purse. 'Keep your linen.'

"Bourgeat paid up my arrears and his own, and settled with the porter.

Then he put our furniture and my box of linen in his cart, and pulled

it along the street, stopping in front of every house where there was a

notice board. I went up to see whether the rooms to let would suit us.

At midday we were still wandering about the neighborhood without having

found anything. The price was the great difficulty. Bourgeat proposed

that we should eat at a wine shop, leaving the cart at the door. Towards

evening I discovered, in the Cour de Rohan, Passage du Commerce, at the

very top of a house next the roof, two rooms with a staircase between

them. Each of us was to pay sixty francs a year. So there we were

housed, my humble friend and I. We dined together. Bourgeat, who earned

about fifty sous a day, had saved a hundred crowns or so; he would

soon be able to gratify his ambition by buying a barrel and a horse.

On learning of my situation--for he extracted my secrets with a quiet

craftiness and good nature, of which the remembrance touches my heart

to this day, he gave up for a time the ambition of his whole life; for

twenty-two years he had been carrying water in the street, and he now

devoted his hundred crowns to my future prospects."

Desplein at these words clutched Bianchon's arm tightly. "He gave me the

money for my examination fees! That man, my friend, understood that I

had a mission, that the needs of my intellect were greater than his. He

looked after me, he called me his boy, he lent me money to buy books, he

would come in softly sometimes to watch me at work, and took a mother's

care in seeing that I had wholesome and abundant food, instead of the

bad and insufficient nourishment I had been condemned to. Bourgeat, a

man of about forty, had a homely, mediaeval type of face, a prominent

forehead, a head that a painter might have chosen as a model for that

of Lycurgus. The poor man's heart was big with affections seeking an

object; he had never been loved but by a poodle that had died some time

since, of which he would talk to me, asking whether I thought the Church

would allow masses to be said for the repose of its soul. His dog, said

he, had been a good Christian, who for twelve years had accompanied him

to church, never barking, listening to the organ without opening his

mouth, and crouching beside him in a way that made it seem as though he

were praying too.

"This man centered all his affections in me; he looked upon me as

a forlorn and suffering creature, and he became, to me, the most

thoughtful mother, the most considerate benefactor, the ideal of the

virtue which rejoices in its own work. When I met him in the street, he

would throw me a glance of intelligence full of unutterable dignity; he

would affect to walk as though he carried no weight, and seemed happy in

seeing me in good health and well dressed. It was, in fact, the devoted

affection of the lower classes, the love of a girl of the people

transferred to a loftier level. Bourgeat did all my errands, woke me at

night at any fixed hour, trimmed my lamp, cleaned our landing; as good

as a servant as he was as a father, and as clean as an English girl. He

did all the housework. Like Philopoemen, he sawed our wood, and gave to

all he did the grace of simplicity while preserving his dignity, for he

seemed to understand that the end ennobles every act.

"When I left this good fellow, to be house surgeon at the Hotel-Dieu, I

felt an indescribable, dull pain, knowing that he could no longer live

with me; but he comforted himself with the prospect of saving up money

enough for me to take my degree, and he made me promise to go to see him

whenever I had a day out: Bourgeat was proud of me. He loved me for my

own sake, and for his own. If you look up my thesis, you will see that I

dedicated it to him.

"During the last year of my residence as house surgeon I earned enough

to repay all I owed to this worthy Auvergnat by buying him a barrel and

a horse. He was furious with rage at learning that I had been depriving

myself of spending my money, and yet he was delighted to see his wishes

fulfilled; he laughed and scolded, he looked at his barrel, at his

horse, and wiped away a tear, as he said, 'It is too bad. What a

splendid barrel! You really ought not. Why, that horse is as strong as

an Auvergnat!'

"I never saw a more touching scene. Bourgeat insisted on buying for

me the case of instruments mounted in silver which you have seen in my

room, and which is to me the most precious thing there. Though enchanted

with my first success, never did the least sign, the least word, escape

him which might imply, 'This man owes all to me!' And yet, but for him,

I should have died of want; he had eaten bread rubbed with garlic that I

might have coffee to enable me to sit up at night.

"He fell ill. As you may suppose, I passed my nights by his bedside,

and the first time I pulled him through; but two years after he had a

relapse; in spite of the utmost care, in spite of the greatest exertions

of science, he succumbed. No king was ever nursed as he was. Yes,

Bianchon, to snatch that man from death I tried unheard-of things. I

wanted him to live long enough to show him his work accomplished, to

realize all his hopes, to give expression to the only need for gratitude

that ever filled my heart, to quench a fire that burns in me to this

day.

"Bourgeat, my second father, died in my arms," Desplein went on, after

a pause, visibly moved. "He left me everything he possessed by a will

he had had made by a public scrivener, dating from the year when we had

gone to live in the Cour de Rohan.

"This man's faith was perfect; he loved the Holy Virgin as he might have

loved his wife. He was an ardent Catholic, but never said a word to me

about my want of religion. When he was dying he entreated me to spare

no expense that he might have every possible benefit of clergy. I had

a mass said for him every day. Often, in the night, he would tell me of

his fears as to his future fate; he feared his life had not been saintly

enough. Poor man! he was at work from morning till night. For whom,

then, is Paradise--if there be a Paradise? He received the last

sacrament like the saint that he was, and his death was worthy of his

life.

"I alone followed him to the grave. When I had laid my only benefactor

to rest, I looked about to see how I could pay my debt to him; I found

he had neither family nor friends, neither wife nor child. But he

believed. He had a religious conviction; had I any right to dispute it?

He had spoken to me timidly of masses said for the repose of the dead;

he would not impress it on me as a duty, thinking that it would be a

form of repayment for his services. As soon as I had money enough I paid

to Saint-Sulpice the requisite sum for four masses every year. As the

only thing I can do for Bourgeat is thus to satisfy his pious wishes, on

the days when that mass is said, at the beginning of each season of the

year, I go for his sake and say the required prayers; and I say with

the good faith of a sceptic--'Great God, if there is a sphere which Thou

hast appointed after death for those who have been perfect, remember

good Bourgeat; and if he should have anything to suffer, let me suffer

it for him, that he may enter all the sooner into what is called

Paradise.'

"That, my dear fellow, is as much as a man who holds my opinions can

allow himself. But God must be a good fellow; He cannot owe me any

grudge. I swear to you, I would give my whole fortune if faith such as

Bourgeat's could enter my brain."

Bianchon, who was with Desplein all through his last illness, dares

not affirm to this day that the great surgeon died an atheist. Will not

those who believe like to fancy that the humble Auvergnat came to open

the gate of Heaven to his friend, as he did that of the earthly temple

on whose pediment we read the words--"A grateful country to its great

men."

PARIS, January 1836.

ADDENDUM

The following personages appear in other stories of the Human Comedy.

Bianchon, Horace

Father Goriot

Cesar Birotteau

The Commission in Lunacy

Lost Illusions

A Distinguished Provincial at Paris

A Bachelor's Establishment

The Secrets of a Princess

The Government Clerks

Pierrette

A Study of Woman

Scenes from a Courtesan's Life

Honorine

The Seamy Side of History

The Magic Skin

A Second Home

A Prince of Bohemia

Letters of Two Brides

The Muse of the Department

The Imaginary Mistress

The Middle Classes

Cousin Betty

The Country Parson

In addition, M. Bianchon narrated the following:

Another Study of Woman

La Grande Breteche

Desplein

Cousin Pons

Lost Illusions

The Thirteen

The Government Clerks

Pierrette

A Bachelor's Establishment

The Seamy Side of History

Modeste Mignon

Scenes from a Courtesan's Life

Honorine