The Firm of Nucingen

THE FIRM OF NUCINGEN

By Honore De Balzac

Translated by James Waring

TO MADAME ZULMA CARRAUD

To whom, madame, but to you should I inscribe this work; to you

whose lofty and candid intellect is a treasury to your friends;

to you that are to me not only a whole public, but the most

indulgent of sisters as well? Will you deign to accept a token of

the friendship of which I am proud? You, and some few souls as

noble, will grasp the whole of the thought underlying _The Firm of

Nucingen_, appended to _Cesar Birotteau_. Is there not a whole social

lesson in the contrast between the two stories?

DE BALZAC.

THE FIRM OF NUCINGEN

You know how slight the partitions are between the private rooms of

fashionable restaurants in Paris; Very’s largest room, for instance, is

cut in two by a removable screen. This Scene is _not_ laid at Very’s,

but in snug quarters, which for reasons of my own I forbear to specify.

We were two, so I will say, like Henri Monnier’s Prudhomme, “I should

not like to compromise _her_!”

We had remarked the want of solidity in the wall-structure, so we talked

with lowered voices as we sat together in the little private room,

lingering over the dainty dishes of a dinner exquisite in more senses

than one. We had come as far as the roast, however, and still we had no

neighbors; no sound came from the next room save the crackling of

the fire. But when the clock struck eight, we heard voices and noisy

footsteps; the waiters brought candles. Evidently there was a party

assembled in the next room, and at the first words I knew at once with

whom we had to do--four bold cormorants as ever sprang from the foam

on the crests of the ever-rising waves of this present generation--four

pleasant young fellows whose existence was problematical, since they

were not known to possess either stock or landed estates, yet they

lived, and lived well. These ingenious _condottieri_ of a modern

industrialism, that has come to be the most ruthless of all warfares,

leave anxieties to their creditors, and keep the pleasures for

themselves. They are careful for nothing, save dress. Still with the

courage of the Jean Bart order, that will smoke cigars on a barrel of

powder (perhaps by way of keeping up their character), with a quizzing

humor that outdoes the minor newspapers, sparing no one, not even

themselves; clear-sighted, wary, keen after business, grasping yet open

handed, envious yet self-complacent, profound politicians by fits and

starts, analyzing everything, guessing everything--not one of these in

question as yet had contrived to make his way in the world which they

chose for their scene of operations. Only one of the four, indeed, had

succeeded in coming as far as the foot of the ladder.

To have money is nothing; the self-made man only finds out all that he

lacks after six months of flatteries. Andoche Finot, the self-made man

in question, stiff, taciturn, cold, and dull-witted, possessed the sort

of spirit which will not shrink from groveling before any creature that

may be of use to him, and the cunning to be insolent when he needs a man

no longer. Like one of the grotesque figures in the ballet in _Gustave_,

he was a marquis behind, a boor in front. And this high-priest of

commerce had a following.

Emile Blondet, Journalist, with abundance of intellectual power,

reckless, brilliant, and indolent, could do anything that he chose, yet

he submitted to be exploited with his eyes open. Treacherous or kind

upon impulse, a man to love, but not to respect; quick-witted as a

_soubrette_, unable to refuse his pen to any one that asked, or his

heart to the first that would borrow it, Emile was the most fascinating

of those light-of-loves of whom a fantastic modern wit declared that “he

liked them better in satin slippers than in boots.”

The third in the party, Couture by name, lived by speculation, grafting

one affair upon another to make the gains pay for the losses. He was

always between wind and water, keeping himself afloat by his bold,

sudden strokes and the nervous energy of his play. Hither and thither

he would swim over the vast sea of interests in Paris, in quest of some

little isle that should be so far a debatable land that he might abide

upon it. Clearly Couture was not in his proper place.

As for the fourth and most malicious personage, his name will be

enough--it was Bixiou! Not (alas!) the Bixiou of 1825, but the Bixiou

of 1836, a misanthropic buffoon, acknowledged supreme, by reason of his

energetic and caustic wit; a very fiend let loose now that he saw how

he had squandered his intellect in pure waste; a Bixiou vexed by the

thought that he had not come by his share of the wreckage in the last

Revolution; a Bixiou with a kick for every one, like Pierrot at the

Funambules. Bixiou had the whole history of his own times at his

finger-ends, more particularly its scandalous chronicle, embellished

by added waggeries of his own. He sprang like a clown upon everybody’s

back, only to do his utmost to leave the executioner’s brand upon every

pair of shoulders.

The first cravings of gluttony satisfied, our neighbors reached the

stage at which we also had arrived, to wit, the dessert; and, as we made

no sign, they believed that they were alone. Thanks to the champagne,

the talk grew confidential as they dallied with the dessert amid the

cigar smoke. Yet through it all you felt the influence of the icy

_esprit_ that leaves the most spontaneous feeling frost-bound and stiff,

that checks the most generous inspirations, and gives a sharp ring to

the laughter. Their table-talk was full of bitter irony which turns

a jest into a sneer; it told of the exhaustion of souls given over

to themselves; of lives with no end in view but the satisfaction of

self--of egoism induced by these times of peace in which we live. I can

think of nothing like it save a pamphlet against mankind at large which

Diderot was afraid to publish, a book that bares man’s breast simply to

expose the plague-sores upon it. We listened to just such a pamphlet

as _Rameau’s Nephew_, spoken aloud in all good faith, in the course of

after-dinner talk in which nothing, not even the point which the speaker

wished to carry, was sacred from epigram; nothing taken for granted,

nothing built up except on ruins, nothing reverenced save the sceptic’s

adopted article of belief--the omnipotence, omniscience, and universal

applicability of money.

After some target practice at the outer circle of their acquaintances,

they turned their ill-natured shafts at their intimate friends. With a

sign I explained my wish to stay and listen as soon as Bixiou took up

his parable, as will shortly be seen. And so we listened to one of

those terrific improvisations which won that artist such a name among

a certain set of seared and jaded spirits; and often interrupted

and resumed though it was, memory serves me as a reporter of it. The

opinions expressed and the form of expression lie alike outside the

conditions of literature. It was, more properly speaking, a medley of

sinister revelations that paint our age, to which indeed no other kind

of story should be told; and, besides, I throw all the responsibility

upon the principal speaker. The pantomime and the gestures that

accompanied Bixiou’s changes of voice, as he acted the parts of the

various persons, must have been perfect, judging by the applause and

admiring comments that broke from his audience of three.

“Then did Rastignac refuse?” asked Blondet, apparently addressing Finot.

“Point-blank.”

“But did you threaten him with the newspapers?” asked Bixiou.

“He began to laugh,” returned Finot.

“Rastignac is the late lamented de Marsay’s direct heir; he will make

his way politically as well as socially,” commented Blondet.

“But how did he make his money?” asked Couture. “In 1819 both he and

the illustrious Bianchon lived in a shabby boarding-house in the Latin

Quarter; his people ate roast cockchafers and their own wine so as to

send him a hundred francs every month. His father’s property was not

worth a thousand crowns; he had two sisters and a brother on his hands,

and now----”

“Now he has an income of forty thousand livres,” continued Finot; “his

sisters had a handsome fortune apiece and married into noble families;

he leaves his mother a life interest in the property----”

“Even in 1827 I have known him without a penny,” said Blondet.

“Oh! in 1827,” said Bixiou.

“Well,” resumed Finot, “yet to-day, as we see, he is in a fair way to be

a Minister, a peer of France--anything that he likes. He broke decently

with Delphine three years ago; he will not marry except on good grounds;

and he may marry a girl of noble family. The chap had the sense to take

up with a wealthy woman.”

“My friends, give him the benefit of extenuating circumstances,” urged

Blondet. “When he escaped the clutches of want, he dropped into the

claws of a very clever man.”

“You know what Nucingen is,” said Bixiou. “In the early days, Delphine

and Rastignac thought him ‘good-natured’; he seemed to regard a wife as

a plaything, an ornament in his house. And that very fact showed me

that the man was square at the base as well as in height,” added Bixiou.

“Nucingen makes no bones about admitting that his wife is his fortune;

she is an indispensable chattel, but a wife takes a second place in the

high-pressure life of a political leader and great capitalist. He once

said in my hearing that Bonaparte had blundered like a bourgeois in his

early relations with Josephine; and that after he had had the spirit to

use her as a stepping-stone, he had made himself ridiculous by trying to

make a companion of her.”

“Any man of unusual powers is bound to take Oriental views of women,”

said Blondet.

“The Baron blended the opinions of East and West in a charming Parisian

creed. He abhorred de Marsay; de Marsay was unmanageable, but with

Rastignac he was much pleased; he exploited him, though Rastignac

was not aware of it. All the burdens of married life were put on him.

Rastignac bore the brunt of Delphine’s whims; he escorted her to

the Bois de Boulogne; he went with her to the play; and the little

politician and great man of to-day spent a good deal of his life at that

time in writing dainty notes. Eugene was scolded for little nothings

from the first; he was in good spirits when Delphine was cheerful, and

drooped when she felt low; he bore the weight of her confidences and her

ailments; he gave up his time, the hours of his precious youth, to fill

the empty void of that fair Parisian’s idleness. Delphine and he held

high councils on the toilettes which went best together; he stood the

fire of bad temper and broadsides of pouting fits, while she, by way of

trimming the balance, was very nice to the Baron. As for the Baron, he

laughed in his sleeve; but whenever he saw that Rastignac was bending

under the strain of the burden, he made ‘as if he suspected something,’

and reunited the lovers by a common dread.”

“I can imagine that a wealthy wife would have put Rastignac in the

way of a living, and an honorable living, but where did he pick up

his fortune?” asked Couture. “A fortune so considerable as his at the

present day must come from somewhere; and nobody ever accused him of

inventing a good stroke of business.”

“Somebody left it to him,” said Finot.

“Who?” asked Blondet.

“Some fool that he came across,” suggested Couture.

“He did not steal the whole of it, my little dears,” said Bixiou.

“Let not your terrors rise to fever-heat,

Our age is lenient with those who cheat.

Now, I will tell you about the beginnings of his fortune. In the first

place, honor to talent! Our friend is not a ‘chap,’ as Finot describes

him, but a gentleman in the English sense, who knows the cards and knows

the game; whom, moreover, the gallery respects. Rastignac has quite as

much intelligence as is needed at a given moment, as if a soldier should

make his courage payable at ninety days’ sight, with three witnesses

and guarantees. He may seem captious, wrong-headed, inconsequent,

vacillating, and without any fixed opinions; but let something serious

turn up, some combination to scheme out, he will not scatter himself

like Blondet here, who chooses these occasions to look at things from

his neighbor’s point of view. Rastignac concentrates himself, pulls

himself together, looks for the point to carry by storm, and goes full

tilt for it. He charges like a Murat, breaks squares, pounds away at

shareholders, promoters, and the whole shop, and returns, when the

breach is made, to his lazy, careless life. Once more he becomes the man

of the South, the man of pleasure, the trifling, idle Rastignac. He has

earned the right of lying in bed till noon because a crisis never finds

him asleep.”

“So far so good, but just get to his fortune,” said Finot.

“Bixiou will lash that off at a stroke,” replied Blondet. “Rastignac’s

fortune was Delphine de Nucingen, a remarkable woman; she combines

boldness with foresight.”

“Did she ever lend you money?” inquired Bixiou. Everybody burst out

laughing.

“You are mistaken in her,” said Couture, speaking to Blondet; “her

cleverness simply consists in making more or less piquant remarks, in

loving Rastignac with tedious fidelity, and obeying him blindly. She is

a regular Italian.”

“Money apart,” Andoche Finot put in sourly.

“Oh, come, come,” said Bixiou coaxingly; “after what we have just been

saying, will you venture to blame poor Rastignac for living at the

expense of the firm of Nucingen, for being installed in furnished rooms

precisely as La Torpille was once installed by our friend des Lupeaulx?

You would sink to the vulgarity of the Rue Saint-Denis! First of all,

‘in the abstract,’ as Royer-Collard says, the question may abide the

_Kritik of Pure Reason_; as for the impure reason----”

“There he goes!” said Finot, turning to Blondet.

“But there is reason in what he says,” exclaimed Blondet. “The problem

is a very old one; it was the grand secret of the famous duel between La

Chataigneraie and Jarnac. It was cast up to Jarnac that he was on good

terms with his mother-in-law, who, loving him only too well, equipped

him sumptuously. When a thing is so true, it ought not to be said.

Out of devotion to Henry II., who permitted himself this slander, La

Chataigneraie took it upon himself, and there followed the duel which

enriched the French language with the expression _coup de Jarnac_.”

“Oh! does it go so far back? Then it is noble?” said Finot.

“As a proprietor of newspapers and reviews of old standing, you are not

bound to know that,” said Blondet.

“There are women,” Bixiou gravely resumed, “and for that matter, men

too, who can cut their lives in two and give away but one-half. (Remark

how I word my phrase for you in humanitarian language.) For these, all

material interests lie without the range of sentiment. They give

their time, their life, their honor to a woman, and hold that between

themselves it is not the thing to meddle with bits of tissue paper

bearing the legend, ‘_Forgery is punishable with death_.’ And equally

they will take nothing from a woman. Yes, the whole thing is debased if

fusion of interests follows on fusion of souls. This is a doctrine much

preached, and very seldom practised.”

“Oh, what rubbish!” cried Blondet. “The Marechal de Richelieu understood

something of gallantry, and he settled an allowance of a thousand louis

d’or on Mme. de la Popeliniere after that affair of the hiding-place

behind the hearth. Agnes Sorel, in all simplicity, took her fortune to

Charles VII., and the King accepted it. Jacques Coeur kept the crown for

France; he was allowed to do it, and woman-like, France was ungrateful.”

“Gentlemen,” said Bixiou, “a love that does not imply an indissoluble

friendship, to my thinking, is momentary libertinage. What sort of

entire surrender is it that keeps something back? Between these two

diametrically opposed doctrines, the one as profoundly immoral as

the other, there is no possible compromise. It seems to me that any

shrinking from a complete union is surely due to a belief that the union

cannot last, and if so, farewell to illusion. The passion that does not

believe that it will last for ever is a hideous thing. (Here is pure

unadulterated Fenelon for you!) At the same time, those who know the

world, the observer, the man of the world, the wearers of irreproachable

gloves and ties, the men who do not blush to marry a woman for her

money, proclaim the necessity of a complete separation of sentiment and

interest. The other sort are lunatics that love and imagine that they

and the woman they love are the only two beings in the world; for them

millions are dirt; the glove or the camellia flower that She wore is

worth millions. If the squandered filthy lucre is never to be found

again in their possession, you find the remains of floral relics hoarded

in dainty cedar-wood boxes. They cannot distinguish themselves one from

the other; for them there is no ‘I’ left. _Thou_--that is their Word

made flesh. What can you do? Can you stop the course of this ‘hidden

disease of the heart’? There are fools that love without calculation and

wise men that calculate while they love.”

“To my thinking Bixiou is sublime,” cried Blondet. “What does Finot say

to it?”

“Anywhere else,” said Finot, drawing himself up in his cravat, “anywhere

else, I should say, with the ‘gentlemen’; but here, I think----”

“With the scoundrelly scapegraces with whom you have the honor to

associate?” said Bixiou.

“Upon my word, yes.”

“And you?” asked Bixiou, turning to Couture.

“Stuff and nonsense!” cried Couture. “The woman that will not make a

stepping-stone of her body, that the man she singles out may reach his

goal, is a woman that has no heart except for her own purposes.”

“And you, Blondet?”

“I do not preach, I practise.”

“Very good,” rejoined Bixiou in his most ironical tones. “Rastignac was

not of your way of thinking. To take without repaying is detestable, and

even rather bad form; but to take that you may render a hundred-fold,

like the Lord, is a chivalrous deed. This was Rastignac’s view. He felt

profoundly humiliated by his community of interests with Delphine de

Nucingen; I can tell you that he regretted it; I have seen him deploring

his position with tears in his eyes. Yes, he shed tears, he did

indeed--after supper. Well, now to _our_ way of thinking----”

“I say, you are laughing at us,” said Finot.

“Not the least in the world. We were talking of Rastignac. From your

point of view his affliction would be a sign of his corruption; for by

that time he was not nearly so much in love with Delphine. What would

you have? he felt the prick in his heart, poor fellow. But he was a

man of noble descent and profound depravity, whereas we are virtuous

artists. So Rastignac meant to enrich Delphine; he was a poor man, she

a rich woman. Would you believe it?--he succeeded. Rastignac, who might

have fought at need, like Jarnac, went over to the opinion of Henri II.

on the strength of his great maxim, ‘There is no such thing as absolute

right; there are only circumstances.’ This brings us to the history of

his fortune.”

“You might just as well make a start with your story instead of drawing

us on to traduce ourselves,” said Blondet with urbane good humor.

“Aha! my boy,” returned Bixiou, administering a little tap to the back

of Blondet’s head, “you are making up for lost time over the champagne!”

“Oh! by the sacred name of shareholder, get on with your story!” cried

Couture.

“I was within an ace of it,” retorted Bixiou, “but you with your

profanity have brought me to the climax.”

“Then, are there shareholders in the tale?” inquired Finot.

“Yes; rich as rich can be--like yours.”

“It seems to me,” Finot began stiffly, “that some consideration is owing

to a good fellow to whom you look for a bill for five hundred francs

upon occasion----”

“Waiter!” called Bixiou.

“What do you want with the waiter?” asked Blondet.

“I want five hundred francs to repay Finot, so that I can tear up my I.

O. U. and set my tongue free.”

“Get on with your story,” said Finot, making believe to laugh.

“I take you all to witness that I am not the property of this insolent

fellow, who fancies that my silence is worth no more than five hundred

francs. You will never be a minister if you cannot gauge people’s

consciences. There, my good Finot,” he added soothingly, “I will get on

with my story without personalities, and we shall be quits.”

“Now,” said Couture with a smile, “he will begin to prove for our

benefit that Nucingen made Rastignac’s fortune.”

“You are not so far out as you think,” returned Bixiou. “You do not know

what Nucingen is, financially speaking.”

“Do you know so much as a word as to his beginnings?” asked Blondet.

“I have only known him in his own house,” said Bixiou, “but we may have

seen each other in the street in the old days.”

“The prosperity of the firm of Nucingen is one of the most extraordinary

things seen in our days,” began Blondet. “In 1804 Nucingen’s name was

scarcely known. At that time bankers would have shuddered at the idea of

three hundred thousand francs’ worth of his acceptances in the market.

The great capitalist felt his inferiority. How was he to get known? He

suspended payment. Good! Every market rang with a name hitherto only

known in Strasbourg and the Quartier Poissonniere. He issued deposit

certificates to his creditors, and resumed payment; forthwith people

grew accustomed to his paper all over France. Then an unheard-of-thing

happened--his paper revived, was in demand, and rose in value.

Nucingen’s paper was much inquired for. The year 1815 arrives, my banker

calls in his capital, buys up Government stock before the battle of

Waterloo, suspends payment again in the thick of the crisis, and meets

his engagements with shares in the Wortschin mines, which he

himself issued at twenty per cent more than he gave for them! Yes,

gentlemen!--He took a hundred and fifty thousand bottles of champagne of

Grandet to cover himself (forseeing the failure of the virtuous parent

of the present Comte d’Aubrion), and as much Bordeaux wine of Duberghe

at the same time. Those three hundred thousand bottles which he took

over (and took at thirty sous apiece, my dear boy) he supplied at the

price of six francs per bottle to the Allies in the Palais Royal during

the foreign occupation, between 1817 and 1819. Nucingen’s name and his

paper acquired a European celebrity. The illustrious Baron, so far from

being engulfed like others, rose the higher for calamities. Twice his

arrangements had paid holders of his paper uncommonly well; _he_ try to

swindle them? Impossible. He is supposed to be as honest a man as

you will find. When he suspends payment a third time, his paper will

circulate in Asia, Mexico, and Australia, among the aborigines. No one

but Ouvrard saw through this Alsacien banker, the son of some Jew or

other converted by ambition; Ouvrard said, ‘When Nucingen lets gold go,

you may be sure that it is to catch diamonds.’”

“His crony, du Tillet, is just such another,” said Finot. “And, mind

you, that of birth du Tillet has just precisely as much as is necessary

to exist; the chap had not a farthing in 1814, and you see what he is

now; and he has done something that none of us has managed to do (I am

not speaking of you, Couture), he has had friends instead of enemies.

In fact, he has kept his past life so quiet, that unless you rake the

sewers you are not likely to find out that he was an assistant in a

perfumer’s shop in the Rue Saint Honore, no further back than 1814.”

“Tut, tut, tut!” said Bixiou, “do not think of comparing Nucingen with a

little dabbler like du Tillet, a jackal that gets on in life through his

sense of smell. He scents a carcass by instinct, and comes in time to

get the best bone. Besides, just look at the two men. The one has

a sharp-pointed face like a cat, he is thin and lanky; the other is

cubical, fat, heavy as a sack, imperturbable as a diplomatist. Nucingen

has a thick, heavy hand, and lynx eyes that never light up; his depths

are not in front, but behind; he is inscrutable, you never see what he

is making for. Whereas du Tillet’s cunning, as Napoleon said to somebody

(I have forgotten the name), is like cotton spun too fine, it breaks.”

“I do not myself see that Nucingen has any advantage over du Tillet,”

said Blondet, “unless it is that he has the sense to see that a

capitalist ought not to rise higher than a baron’s rank, while du Tillet

has a mind to be an Italian count.”

“Blondet--one word, my boy,” put in Couture. “In the first place,

Nucingen dared to say that honesty is simply a question of appearances;

and secondly, to know him well you must be in business yourself. With

him banking is but a single department, and a very small one; he holds

Government contracts for wines, wools, indigoes--anything, in short, on

which any profit can be made. He has an all-round genius. The elephant

of finance would contract to deliver votes on a division, or the Greeks

to the Turks. For him business means the sum-total of varieties; as

Cousin would say, the unity of specialties. Looked at in this way,

banking becomes a kind of statecraft in itself, requiring a powerful

head; and a man thoroughly tempered is drawn on to set himself above the

laws of a morality that cramps him.”

“Right, my son,” said Blondet; “but we, and we alone, can comprehend

that this means bringing war into the financial world. A banker is a

conquering general making sacrifices on a tremendous scale to gain ends

that no one perceives; his soldiers are private people’s interests. He

has stratagems to plan out, partisans to bring into the field, ambushes

to set, towns to take. Most men of this stamp are so close upon the

borders of politics, that in the end they are drawn into public life,

and thereby lose their fortunes. The firm of Necker, for instance, was

ruined in this way; the famous Samuel Bernard was all but ruined. Some

great capitalist in every age makes a colossal fortune, and leaves

behind him neither fortune nor a family; there was the firm of Paris

Brothers, for instance, that helped to pull down Law; there was Law

himself (beside whom other promoters of companies are but pigmies);

there was Bouret and Beaujon--none of them left any representative.

Finance, like Time, devours its own children. If the banker is to

perpetuate himself, he must found a noble house, a dynasty; like the

Fuggers of Antwerp, that lent money to Charles V. and were created

Princes of Babenhausen, a family that exists at this day--in the

_Almanach de Gotha_. The instinct of self-preservation, working it may

be unconsciously, leads the banker to seek a title. Jacques Coeur was

the founder of the great noble house of Noirmoutier, extinct in the

reign of Louis XIII. What power that man had! He was ruined for making

a legitimate king; and he died, prince of an island in the Archipelago,

where he built a magnificent cathedral.”

“Oh! you are giving us an historical lecture, we are wandering away from

the present, the crown has no right of conferring nobility, and barons

and counts are made with closed doors; more is the pity!” said Finot.

“You regret the times of the _savonnette a vilain_, when you could buy

an office that ennobled?” asked Bixiou. “You are right. _Je reviens a

nos moutons_.--Do you know Beaudenord? No? no? no? Ah, well! See how

all things pass away! Poor fellow, ten years ago he was the flower of

dandyism; and now, so thoroughly absorbed that you no more know him than

Finot just now knew the origin of the expression ‘_coup de Jarnac_’--I

repeat that simply for the sake of illustration, and not to tease you,

Finot. Well, it is a fact, he belonged to the Faubourg Saint-Germain.

“Beaudenord is the first pigeon that I will bring on the scene. And, in

the first place, his name was Godefroid de Beaudenord; neither Finot,

nor Blondet, nor Couture, nor I am likely to undervalue such an

advantage as that! After a ball, when a score of pretty women stand

behooded waiting for their carriages, with their husbands and adorers at

their sides, Beaudenord could hear his people called without a pang of

mortification. In the second place, he rejoiced in the full complement

of limbs; he was whole and sound, had no mote in his eyes, no false

hair, no artificial calves; he was neither knock-kneed nor bandy-legged,

his dorsal column was straight, his waist slender, his hands white and

shapely. His hair was black; he was of a complexion neither too pink,

like a grocer’s assistant, nor yet too brown, like a Calabrese. Finally,

and this is an essential point, Beaudenord was not too handsome, like

some of our friends that look rather too much of professional beauties

to be anything else; but no more of that; we have said it, it is

shocking! Well, he was a crack shot, and sat a horse to admiration; he

had fought a duel for a trifle, and had not killed his man.

“If you wish to know in what pure, complete, and unadulterated happiness

consists in this Nineteenth Century in Paris--the happiness, that is to

say, of a young man of twenty-six--do you realize that you must enter

into the infinitely small details of existence? Beaudenord’s bootmaker

had precisely hit off his style of foot; he was well shod; his tailor

loved to clothe him. Godefroid neither rolled his r’s, nor lapsed into

Normanisms nor Gascon; he spoke pure and correct French, and tied his

cravat correctly (like Finot). He had neither father nor mother--such

luck had he!--and his guardian was the Marquis d’Aiglemont, his cousin

by marriage. He could go among city people as he chose, and the Faubourg

Saint-Germain could make no objection; for, fortunately, a young

bachelor is allowed to make his own pleasure his sole rule of life, he

is at liberty to betake himself wherever amusement is to be found, and

to shun the gloomy places where cares flourish and multiply. Finally, he

had been vaccinated (you know what I mean, Blondet).

“And yet, in spite of all these virtues,” continued Bixiou, “he

might very well have been a very unhappy young man. Eh! eh! that word

happiness, unhappily, seems to us to mean something absolute, a delusion

which sets so many wiseacres inquiring what happiness is. A very clever

woman said that ‘Happiness was where you chose to put it.’”

“She formulated a dismal truth,” said Blondet.

“And a moral,” added Finot.

“Double distilled,” said Blondet. “Happiness, like Good, like Evil, is

relative. Wherefore La Fontaine used to hope that in the course of time

the damned would feel as much at home in hell as a fish in water.”

“La Fontaine’s sayings are known in Philistia!” put in Bixiou.

“Happiness at six-and-twenty in Paris is not the happiness of

six-and-twenty at--say Blois,” continued Blondet, taking no notice of

the interruption. “And those that proceed from this text to rail at

the instability of opinion are either knaves or fools for their pains.

Modern medicine, which passed (it is its fairest title to glory) from a

hypothetical to a positive science, through the influence of the great

analytical school of Paris, has proved beyond a doubt that a man is

periodically renewed throughout----”

“New haft, new blade, like Jeannot’s knife, and yet you think that he is

still the same man,” broke in Bixiou. “So there are several lozenges

in the harlequin’s coat that we call happiness; and--well, there was

neither hole nor stain in this Godefroid’s costume. A young man of

six-and-twenty, who would be happy in love, who would be loved, that

is to say, not for his blossoming youth, nor for his wit, nor for his

figure, but spontaneously, and not even merely in return for his own

love; a young man, I say, who has found love in the abstract, to quote

Royer-Collard, might yet very possibly find never a farthing in the

purse which She, loving and beloved, embroidered for him; he might owe

rent to his landlord; he might be unable to pay the bootmaker before

mentioned; his very tailor, like France herself, might at last show

signs of disaffection. In short, he might have love and yet be poor.

And poverty spoils a young man’s happiness, unless he holds our

transcendental views of the fusion of interests. I know nothing more

wearing than happiness within combined with adversity without. It is as

if you had one leg freezing in the draught from the door, and the

other half-roasted by a brazier--as I have at this moment. I hope to

be understood. Comes there an echo from thy waistcoat-pocket, Blondet?

Between ourselves, let the heart alone, it spoils the intellect.

“Let us resume. Godefroid de Beaudenord was respected by his

tradespeople, for they were paid with tolerable regularity. The witty

woman before quoted--I cannot give her name, for she is still living,

thanks to her want of heart----”

“Who is this?”

“The Marquise d’Espard. She said that a young man ought to live on an

entresol; there should be no sign of domesticity about the place; no

cook, no kitchen, an old manservant to wait upon him, and no pretence of

permanence. In her opinion, any other sort of establishment is bad

form. Godefroid de Beaudenord, faithful to this programme, lodged on an

entresol on the Quai Malaquais; he had, however, been obliged to have

this much in common with married couples, he had put a bedstead in his

room, though for that matter it was so narrow that he seldom slept

in it. An Englishwoman might have visited his rooms and found nothing

‘improper’ there. Finot, you have yet to learn the great law of the

‘Improper’ that rules Britain. But, for the sake of the bond between

us--that bill for a thousand francs--I will just give you some idea of

it. I have been in England myself.--I will give him wit enough for a

couple of thousand,” he added in an aside to Blondet.

“In England, Finot, you grow extremely intimate with a woman in the

course of an evening, at a ball or wherever it is; next day you meet

her in the street and look as though you knew her again--‘improper.’--At

dinner you discover a delightful man beneath your left-hand neighbor’s

dresscoat; a clever man; no high mightiness, no constraint, nothing

of an Englishman about him. In accordance with the tradition of

French breeding, so urbane, so gracious as they are, you address your

neighbor--‘improper.’--At a ball you walk up to a pretty woman to ask

her to dance--‘improper.’ You wax enthusiastic, you argue, laugh,

and give yourself out, you fling yourself heart and soul into the

conversation, you give expression to your real feelings, you play

when you are at the card-table, chat while you chat, eat while you

eat--‘improper! improper! improper!’ Stendhal, one of the cleverest and

profoundest minds of the age, hit off the ‘improper’ excellently well

when he said that such-and-such a British peer did not dare to cross his

legs when he sat alone before his own hearth for fear of being improper.

An English gentlewoman, were she one of the rabid ‘Saints’--that most

straitest sect of Protestants that would leave their whole family to

starve if the said family did anything ‘improper’--may play the deuce’s

own delight in her own bedroom, and need not be ‘improper,’ but she

would look on herself as lost if she received a visit from a man of her

acquaintance in the aforesaid room. Thanks to propriety, London and its

inhabitants will be found petrified some of these days.”

“And to think that there are asses here in France that want to import

the solemn tomfoolery that the English keep up among themselves with

that admirable self-possession which you know!” added Blondet. “It is

enough to make any man shudder if he has seen the English at home, and

recollects the charming, gracious French manners. Sir Walter Scott was

afraid to paint women as they are for fear of being ‘improper’; and at

the close of his life repented of the creation of the great character of

Effie in _The Heart of Midlothian_.”

“Do you wish not to be ‘improper’ in England?” asked Bixiou, addressing

Finot.

“Well?”

“Go to the Tuileries and look at a figure there, something like a

fireman carved in marble [‘Themistocles,’ the statuary calls it), try to

walk like the Commandant’s statue, and you will never be ‘improper.’ It

was through strict observance of the great law of the _im_proper that

Godefroid’s happiness became complete. There is the story:

“Beaudenord had a tiger, not a ‘groom,’ as they write that know nothing

of society. The tiger, a diminutive Irish page called Paddy, Toby,

Joby (which you please), was three feet in height by twenty inches

in breadth, a weasel-faced infant, with nerves of steel tempered in

fire-water, and agile as a squirrel. He drove a landau with a skill

never yet at fault in London or Paris. He had a lizard’s eye, as sharp

as my own, and he could mount a horse like the elder Franconi. With

the rosy cheeks and yellow hair of one of Rubens’ Madonnas he was

double-faced as a prince, and as knowing as an old attorney; in short,

at the age of ten he was nothing more nor less than a blossom of

depravity, gambling and swearing, partial to jam and punch, pert as a

_feuilleton_, impudent and light-fingered as any Paris street-arab. He

had been a source of honor and profit to a well-known English lord,

for whom he had already won seven hundred thousand francs on the

race-course. The aforesaid nobleman set no small store on Toby. His

tiger was a curiosity, the very smallest tiger in town. Perched aloft on

the back of a thoroughbred, Joby looked like a hawk. Yet--the great man

dismissed him. Not for greediness, not for dishonesty, nor murder, nor

rudeness to my lady, nor for cutting holes in my lady’s own woman’s

pockets, nor because he had been ‘got at’ by some of his master’s rivals

on the turf, nor for playing games of a Sunday, nor for bad behavior of

any sort or description. Toby might have done all these things, he might

even have spoken to milord before milord spoke to him, and his noble

master might, perhaps, have pardoned that breach of the law domestic.

Milord would have put up with a good deal from Toby; he was very fond

of him. Toby could drive a tandem dog-cart, riding on the wheeler,

postilion fashion; his legs did not reach the shafts, he looked in fact

very much like one of the cherub heads circling about the Eternal Father

in old Italian pictures. But an English journalist wrote a delicious

description of the little angel, in the course of which he said that

Paddy was quite too pretty for a tiger; in fact, he offered to bet

that Paddy was a tame tigress. The description, on the heads of it,

was calculated to poison minds and end in something ‘improper.’ And

the superlative of ‘improper’ is the way to the gallows. Milord’s

circumspection was highly approved by my lady.

“But poor Toby, now that his precise position in insular zoology had

been called in question, found himself hopelessly out of place. At that

time Godefroid had blossomed out at the French Embassy in London, where

he learned the adventures of Toby, Joby, Paddy. Godefroid found the

infant weeping over a pot of jam (he had already lost the guineas with

which milord gilded his misfortune). Godefroid took possession of him;

and so it fell out that on his return among us he brought back with him

the sweetest thing in tigers from England. He was known by his tiger--as

Couture is known by his waistcoats--and found no difficulty in entering

the fraternity of the club yclept to-day the Grammont. He had

renounced the diplomatic career; he ceased accordingly to alarm the

susceptibilites of the ambitious; and as he had no very dangerous amount

of intellect, he was well looked upon everywhere.

“Some of us would feel mortified if we saw only smiling faces wherever

we went; we enjoy the sour contortions of envy. Godefroid did not like

to be disliked. Every one has his taste. Now for the solid, practical

aspects of life!

“The distinguishing feature of his chambers, where I have licked my lips

over breakfast more than once, was a mysterious dressing-closet, nicely

decorated, and comfortably appointed, with a grate in it and a bath-tub.

It gave upon a narrow staircase, the folding doors were noiseless,

the locks well oiled, the hinges discreet, the window panes of frosted

glass, the curtain impervious to light. While the bedroom was, as

it ought to have been, in a fine disorder which would suit the most

exacting painter in water-colors; while everything therein was redolent

of the Bohemian life of a young man of fashion, the dressing-closet was

like a shrine--white, spotless, neat, and warm. There were no draughts

from door or window, the carpet had been made soft for bare feet hastily

put to the floor in a sudden panic of alarm--which stamps him as your

thoroughbred dandy that knows life; for here, in a few moments, he may

show himself either a noodle or a master in those little details in

which a man’s character is revealed. The Marquise previously quoted--no,

it was the Marquise de Rochefide--came out of that dressing-closet in

a furious rage, and never went back again. She discovered nothing

‘improper’ in it. Godefroid used to keep a little cupboard full of----”

“Waistcoats?” suggested Finot.

“Come, now, just like you, great Turcaret that you are. (I shall never

form that fellow.) Why, no. Full of cakes, and fruit, and dainty little

flasks of Malaga and Lunel; an en cas de nuit in Louis Quatorze’s style;

anything that can tickle the delicate and well-bred appetite of

sixteen quarterings. A knowing old man-servant, very strong in matters

veterinary, waited on the horses and groomed Godefroid. He had been with

the late M. de Beaudenord, Godefroid’s father, and bore Godefroid

an inveterate affection, a kind of heart complaint which has

almost disappeared among domestic servants since savings banks were

established.

“All material well-being is based upon arithmetic. You to whom Paris is

known down to its very excrescences, will see that Beaudenord must have

acquired about seventeen thousand livres per annum; for he paid some

seventeen francs of taxes and spent a thousand crowns on his own whims.

Well, dear boys, when Godefroid came of age, the Marquis d’Aiglemont

submitted to him such an account of his trust as none of us would be

likely to give a nephew; Godefroid’s name was inscribed as the owner of

eighteen thousand livres of _rentes_, a remnant of his father’s wealth

spared by the harrow of the great reduction under the Republic and the

hailstorms of Imperial arrears. D’Aiglemont, that upright guardian, also

put his ward in possession of some thirty thousand francs of savings

invested with the firm of Nucingen; saying with all the charm of a

_grand seigneur_ and the indulgence of a soldier of the Empire, that he

had contrived to put it aside for his ward’s young man’s follies. ‘If

you will take my advice, Godefroid,’ added he, ‘instead of squandering

the money like a fool, as so many young men do, let it go in follies

that will be useful to you afterwards. Take an attache’s post at Turin,

and then go to Naples, and from Naples to London, and you will be

amused and learn something for your money. Afterwards, if you think of a

career, the time and the money will not have been thrown away.’ The late

lamented d’Aiglemont had more sense than people credited him with, which

is more than can be said of some of us.”

“A young fellow that starts with an assured income of eighteen thousand

livres at one-and-twenty is lost,” said Couture.

“Unless he is miserly, or very much above the ordinary level,” added

Blondet.

“Well, Godefroid sojourned in the four capitals of Italy,” continued

Bixiou. “He lived in England and Germany, he spent some little time

at St. Petersburg, he ran over Holland but he parted company with the

aforesaid thirty thousand francs by living as if he had thirty thousand

a year. Everywhere he found the same _supreme de volaille_, the same

aspics, and French wines; he heard French spoken wherever he went--in

short, he never got away from Paris. He ought, of course, to have tried

to deprave his disposition, to fence himself in triple brass, to get rid

of his illusions, to learn to hear anything said without a blush, and

to master the inmost secrets of the Powers.--Pooh! with a good deal of

trouble he equipped himself with four languages--that is to say, he laid

in a stock of four words for one idea. Then he came back, and certain

tedious dowagers, styled ‘conquests’ abroad, were left disconsolate.

Godefroid came back, shy, scarcely formed, a good fellow with a

confiding disposition, incapable of saying ill of any one who honored

him with an admittance to his house, too staunch to be a diplomatist,

altogether he was what we call a thoroughly good fellow.”

“To cut it short, a brat with eighteen thousand livres per annum to drop

over the first investment that turns up,” said Couture.

“That confounded Couture has such a habit of anticipating dividends,

that he is anticipating the end of my tale. Where was I? Oh! Beaudenord

came back. When he took up his abode on the Quai Malaquais, it came

to pass that a thousand francs over and above his needs was altogether

insufficient to keep up his share of a box at the Italiens and the Opera

properly. When he lost twenty-five or thirty louis at play at one swoop,

naturally he paid; when he won, he spent the money; so should we if we

were fools enough to be drawn into a bet. Beaudenord, feeling pinched

with his eighteen thousand francs, saw the necessity of creating what we

to-day call a balance in hand. It was a great notion of his ‘not to get

too deep.’ He took counsel of his sometime guardian. ‘The funds are now

at par, my dear boy,’ quoth d’Aiglemont; ‘sell out. I have sold mine and

my wife’s. Nucingen has all my capital, and is giving me six per cent;

do likewise, you will have one per cent the more upon your capital, and

with that you will be quite comfortable.’

“In three days’ time our Godefroid was comfortable. His increase of

income exactly supplied his superfluities; his material happiness was

complete.

“Suppose that it were possible to read the minds of all the young men in

Paris at one glance (as, it appears, will be done at the Day of Judgment

with all the millions upon millions that have groveled in all spheres,

and worn all uniforms or the uniform of nature), and to ask them whether

happiness at six-and-twenty is or is not made up of the following

items--to wit, to own a saddle-horse and a tilbury, or a cab, with a

fresh, rosy-faced Toby Joby Paddy no bigger than your fist, and to

hire an unimpeachable brougham for twelve francs an evening; to appear

elegantly arrayed, agreeably to the laws that regulate a man’s clothes,

at eight o’clock, at noon, four o’clock in the afternoon, and in

the evening; to be well received at every embassy, and to cull the

short-lived flowers of superficial, cosmopolitan friendships; to be

not insufferably handsome, to carry your head, your coat, and your name

well; to inhabit a charming little entresol after the pattern of the

rooms just described on the Quai Malaquais; to be able to ask a party

of friends to dine at the _Rocher de Cancale_ without a previous

consultation with your trousers’ pocket; never to be pulled up in any

rational project by the words, ‘And the money?’ and finally, to be able

to renew at pleasure the pink rosettes that adorn the ears of three

thoroughbreds and the lining of your hat?

“To such inquiry any ordinary young man (and we ourselves that are not

ordinary men) would reply that the happiness is incomplete; that it is

like the Madeleine without the altar; that a man must love and be loved,

or love without return, or be loved without loving, or love at cross

purposes. Now for happiness as a mental condition.

“In January 1823, after Godefroid de Beaudenord had set foot in the

various social circles which it pleased him to enter, and knew his

way about in them, and felt himself secure amid these joys, he saw

the necessity of a sunshade--the advantage of having a great lady to

complain of, instead of chewing the stems of roses bought for fivepence

apiece of Mme. Prevost, after the manner of the callow youngsters that

chirp and cackle in the lobbies of the Opera, like chickens in a

coop. In short, he resolved to centre his ideas, his sentiments, his

affections upon a woman, _one woman_?--LA PHAMME! Ah!....

“At first he conceived the preposterous notion of an unhappy passion,

and gyrated for a while about his fair cousin, Mme. d’Aiglemont,

not perceiving that she had already danced the waltz in Faust with

a diplomatist. The year ‘25 went by, spent in tentatives, in futile

flirtations, and an unsuccessful quest. The loving object of which he

was in search did not appear. Passion is extremely rare; and in our

time as many barriers have been raised against passion in social life

as barricades in the streets. In truth, my brothers, the ‘improper’ is

gaining upon us, I tell you!

“As we may incur reproach for following on the heels of portrait

painters, auctioneers, and fashionable dressmakers, I will not inflict

any description upon you of _her_ in whom Godefroid recognized the

female of his species. Age, nineteen; height, four feet eleven inches;

fair hair, eyebrows _idem_, blue eyes, forehead neither high nor

low, curved nose, little mouth, short turned-up chin, oval face;

distinguishing signs--none. Such was the description on the passport

of the beloved object. You will not ask more than the police, or their

worships the mayors, of all the towns and communes of France, the

gendarmes and the rest of the powers that be? In other respects--I give

you my word for it--she was a rough sketch of a Venus dei Medici.

“The first time that Godefroid went to one of the balls for which Mme.

de Nucingen enjoyed a certain not undeserved reputation, he caught a

glimpse of his future lady-love in a quadrille, and was set marveling

by that height of four feet eleven inches. The fair hair rippled in a

shower of curls about the little girlish head, she looked as fresh as a

naiad peeping out through the crystal pane of her stream to take a look

at the spring flowers. (This is quite in the modern style, strings of

phrases as endless as the macaroni on the table a while ago.) On that

‘eyebrows _idem_’ (no offence to the prefect of police) Parny, that

writer of light and playful verse, would have hung half-a-dozen

couplets, comparing them very agreeably to Cupid’s bow, at the same time

bidding us to observe that the dart was beneath; the said dart,

however, was neither very potent nor very penetrating, for as yet it

was controlled by the namby-pamby sweetness of a Mlle. de la Valliere

as depicted on fire-screens, at the moment when she solemnizes her

betrothal in the sight of heaven, any solemnization before the registrar

being quite out to the question.

“You know the effect of fair hair and blue eyes in the soft, voluptuous

decorous dance? Such a girl does not knock audaciously at your heart,

like the dark-haired damsels that seem to say after the fashion of

Spanish beggars, ‘Your money or your life; give me five francs or take

my contempt!’ These insolent and somewhat dangerous beauties may find

favor in the sight of many men, but to my thinking the blonde that has

the good fortune to look extremely tender and yielding, while foregoing

none of her rights to scold, to tease, to use unmeasured language, to

be jealous without grounds, to do anything, in short, that makes woman

adorable,--the fair-haired girl, I say, will always be more sure to

marry than the ardent brunette. Firewood is dear, you see.

“Isaure, white as an Alsacienne (she first saw the light at Strasbourg,

and spoke German with a slight and very agreeable French accent), danced

to admiration. Her feet, omitted on the passport, though they really

might have found a place there under the heading Distinguishing Signs,

were remarkable for their small size, and for that particular something

which old-fashioned dancing masters used to call flic-flac, a something

that put you in mind of Mlle. Mars’ agreeable delivery, for all the

Muses are sisters, and the dancer and poet alike have their feet upon

the earth. Isaure’s feet spoke lightly and swiftly with a clearness

and precision which augured well for things of the heart. ‘_Elle a duc

flic-flac_,’ was old Marcel’s highest word of praise, and old Marcel was

the dancing master that deserved the epithet of ‘the Great.’ People used

to say ‘the Great Marcel,’ as they said ‘Frederick the Great,’ and in

Frederick’s time.”

“Did Marcel compose any ballets?” inquired Finot.

“Yes, something in the style of _Les Quatre Elements_ and _L’Europe

galante_.”

“What times they were, when great nobles dressed the dancers!” said

Finot.

“Improper!” said Bixiou. “Isaure did not raise herself on the tips of

her toes, she stayed on the ground, she swayed in the dance without

jerks, and neither more nor less voluptuously than a young lady ought

to do. There was a profound philosophy in Marcel’s remark that every

age and condition had its dance; a married woman should not dance like

a young girl, nor a little jackanapes like a capitalist, nor a soldier

like a page; he even went so far as to say that the infantry ought not

to dance like the cavalry, and from this point he proceeded to classify

the world at large. All these fine distinctions seem very far away.”

“Ah!” said Blondet, “you have set your finger on a great calamity. If

Marcel had been properly understood, there would have been no French

Revolution.”

“It had been Godefroid’s privilege to run over Europe,” resumed Bixiou,

“nor had he neglected his opportunities of making a thorough comparative

study of European dancing. Perhaps but for profound diligence in the

pursuit of what is usually held to be useless knowledge, he would never

have fallen in love with this young lady; as it was, out of the three

hundred guests that crowded the handsome rooms in the Rue Saint-Lazare,

he alone comprehended the unpublished romance revealed by a garrulous

quadrille. People certainly noticed Isaure d’Aldrigger’s dancing; but in

this present century the cry is ‘Skim lightly over the surface, do not

lean your weight on it;’ so one said (he was a notary’s clerk), ‘There

is a girl that dances uncommonly well;’ another (a lady in a turban),

‘There is a young lady that dances enchantingly;’ and a third (a woman

of thirty), ‘That little thing is not dancing badly.’--But to return to

the great Marcel, let us parody his best known saying with, ‘How much

there is in an _avant-deux_.’”

“And let us get on a little faster,” said Blondet; “you are maundering.”

“Isaure,” continued Bixiou, looking askance at Blondet, “wore a simple

white crepe dress with green ribbons; she had a camellia in her hair,

a camellia at her waist, another camellia at her skirt-hem, and a

camellia----”

“Come, now! here comes Sancho’s three hundred goats.”

“Therein lies all literature, dear boy. _Clarissa_ is a masterpiece,

there are fourteen volumes of her, and the most wooden-headed playwright

would give you the whole of _Clarissa_ in a single act. So long as I

amuse you, what have you to complain of? That costume was positively

lovely. Don’t you like camillias? Would you rather have dahlias? No?

Very good, chestnuts then, here’s for you.” (And probably Bixiou flung a

chestnut across the table, for we heard something drop on a plate.)

“I was wrong, I acknowledge it. Go on,” said Blondet.

“I resume. ‘Pretty enough to marry, isn’t she?’ said Rastignac, coming

up to Godefroid de Beaudenord, and indicating the little one with the

spotless white camellias, every petal intact.

“Rastignac being an intimate friend, Godefroid answered in a low

voice, ‘Well, so I was thinking. I was saying to myself that instead of

enjoying my happiness with fear and trembling at every moment; instead

of taking a world of trouble to whisper a word in an inattentive ear,

of looking over the house at the Italiens to see if some one wears a red

flower or a white in her hair, or watching along the Corso for a gloved

hand on a carriage door, as we used to do at Milan; instead of snatching

a mouthful of baba like a lackey finishing off a bottle behind a door,

or wearing out one’s wits with giving and receiving letters like a

postman--letters that consist not of a mere couple of tender lines, but

expand to five folio volumes to-day and contract to a couple of sheets

to-morrow (a tiresome practice); instead of dragging along over the

ruts and dodging behind hedges--it would be better to give way to the

adorable passion that Jean-Jacques Rousseau envied, to fall frankly in

love with a girl like Isaure, with a view to making her my wife, if upon

exchange of sentiments our hearts respond to each other; to be Werther,

in short, with a happy ending.’

“‘Which is a common weakness,’ returned Rastignac without laughing.

‘Possibly in your place I might plunge into the unspeakable delights of

that ascetic course; it possesses the merits of novelty and originality,

and it is not very expensive. Your Monna Lisa is sweet, but inane as

music for the ballet; I give you warning.’

“Rastignac made this last remark in a way which set Beaudenord thinking

that his friend had his own motives for disenchanting him; Beaudenord

had not been a diplomatist for nothing; he fancied that Rastignac wanted

to cut him out. If a man mistakes his vocation, the false start none the

less influences him for the rest of his life. Godefroid was so evidently

smitten with Mlle. Isaure d’Aldrigger, that Rastignac went off to a tall

girl chatting in the card-room.--‘Malvina,’ he said, lowering his voice,

‘your sister has just netted a fish worth eighteen thousand francs a

year. He has a name, a manner, and a certain position in the world;

keep an eye on them; be careful to gain Isaure’s confidence; and if

they philander, do not let her send word to him unless you have seen it

first----’

“Towards two o’clock in the morning, Isaure was standing beside a

diminutive Shepherdess of the Alps, a little woman of forty, coquettish

as a Zerlina. A footman announced that ‘Mme. la Baronne’s carriage stops

the way,’ and Godefroid forthwith saw his beautiful maiden out of a

German song draw her fantastical mother into the cloakroom, whither

Malvina followed them; and (boy that he was) he must needs go to

discover into what pot of preserves the infant Joby had fallen, and

had the pleasure of watching Isaure and Malvina coaxing that sparkling

person, their mamma, into her pelisse, with all the little tender

precautions required for a night journey in Paris. Of course, the girls

on their side watched Beaudenord out of the corners of their eyes, as

well-taught kittens watch a mouse, without seeming to see it at all.

With a certain satisfaction Beaudenord noted the bearing, manner, and

appearance, of the tall well-gloved Alsacien servant in livery who

brought three pairs of fur-lined overshoes for his mistresses.

“Never were two sisters more unlike than Isaure and Malvina. Malvina

the elder was tall and dark-haired, Isaure was short and fair, and

her features were finely and delicately cut, while her sister’s were

vigorous and striking. Isaure was one of those women who reign like

queens through their weakness, such a woman as a schoolboy would feel it

incumbent upon him to protect; Malvina was the _Andalouse_ of Musset’s

poem. As the sisters stood together, Isaure looked like a miniature

beside a portrait in oils.

“‘She is rich!’ exclaimed Godefroid, going back to Rastignac in the

ballroom.

“‘Who?’

“‘That young lady.’

“‘Oh, Isaure d’Aldrigger? Why, yes. The mother is a widow; Nucingen was

once a clerk in her husband’s bank at Strasbourg. Do you want to see

them again? Just turn off a compliment for Mme. de Restaud; she is

giving a ball the day after to-morrow; the Baroness d’Aldrigger and her

two daughters will be there. You will have an invitation.’

“For three days Godefroid beheld Isaure in the camera obscura of his

brain--_his_ Isaure with her white camellias and the little ways she

had with her head--saw her as you see the bright thing on which you have

been gazing after your eyes are shut, a picture grown somewhat

smaller; a radiant, brightly-colored vision flashing out of a vortex of

darkness.”

“Bixiou, you are dropping into phenomena, block us out our pictures,”

put in Couture.

“Here you are, gentlemen! Here is the picture you ordered!” (from the

tones of Bixiou’s voice, he evidently was posing as a waiter.) “Finot,

attention, one has to pull at your mouth as a jarvie pulls at his

jade. In Madame Theodora Marguerite Wilhelmine Adolphus (of the firm of

Adolphus and Company, Manheim), relict of the late Baron d’Aldrigger,

you might expect to find a stout, comfortable German, compact and

prudent, with a fair complexion mellowed to the tint of the foam on

a pot of beer; and as to virtues, rich in all the patriarchal good

qualities that Germany possesses--in romances, that is to say. Well

there was not a gray hair in the frisky ringlets that she wore on either

side of her face; she was still as fresh and as brightly colored on

the cheek-bone as a Nuremberg doll; her eyes were lively and bright; a

closely-fitting bodice set off the slenderness of her waist. Her brow

and temples were furrowed by a few involuntary wrinkles which, like

Ninon, she would fain have banished from her head to her heel, but they

persisted in tracing their zigzags in the more conspicuous place. The

outlines of the nose had somewhat fallen away, and the tip had reddened,

and this was the more awkward because it matched the color on the

cheek-bones.

“An only daughter and an heiress, spoilt by her father and mother,

spoilt by her husband and the city of Strasbourg, spoilt still by two

daughters who worshiped their mother, the Baroness d’Aldrigger indulged

a taste for rose color, short petticoats, and a knot of ribbon at the

point of the tightly-fitting corselet bodice. Any Parisian meeting the

Baroness on the boulevard would smile and condemn her outright; he does

not admit any plea of extenuating circumstances, like a modern jury on a

case of fratricide. A scoffer is always superficial, and in consequence

cruel; the rascal never thinks of throwing the proper share of ridicule

on society that made the individual what he is; for Nature only makes

dull animals of us, we owe the fool to artificial conditions.”

“The thing that I admire about Bixiou is his completeness,” said

Blondet; “whenever he is not gibing at others, he is laughing at

himself.”

“I will be even with you for that, Blondet,” returned Bixiou in a

significant tone. “If the little Baroness was giddy, careless, selfish,

and incapable in practical matters, she was not accountable for her

sins; the responsibility is divided between the firm of Adolphus and

Company of Manheim and Baron d’Aldrigger with his blind love for his

wife. The Baroness was a gentle as a lamb; she had a soft heart that was

very readily moved; unluckily, the emotion never lasted long, but it was

all the more frequently renewed.

“When the Baron died, for instance, the Shepherdess all but followed

him to the tomb, so violent and sincere was her grief, but--next morning

there was green peas at lunch, she was fond of green peas, the delicious

green peas calmed the crisis. Her daughters and her servants loved her

so blindly that the whole household rejoiced over a circumstance that

enabled them to hide the dolorous spectacle of the funeral from the

sorrowing Baroness. Isaure and Malvina would not allow their idolized

mother to see their tears.

“While the Requiem was chanted, they diverted her thoughts to the choice

of mourning dresses. While the coffin was placed in the huge, black and

white, wax-besprinkled catafalque that does duty for some three

thousand dead in the course of its career--so I was informed by a

philosophically-minded mute whom I once consulted on a point over a

couple of glasses of _petit blanc_--while an indifferent priest mumbling

the office for the dead, do you know what the friends of the departed

were saying as, all dressed in black from head to foot, they sat or

stood in the church? (Here is the picture you ordered.) Stay, do you see

them?

“‘How much do you suppose old d’Aldrigger will leave?’ Desroches asked

of Taillefer.--You remember Taillefer that gave us the finest orgy ever

known not long before he died?”

“He was in treaty for practice in 1822,” said Couture. “It was a bold

thing to do, for he was the son of a poor clerk who never made more than

eighteen hundred francs a year, and his mother sold stamped paper. But

he worked very hard from 1818 to 1822. He was Derville’s fourth clerk

when he came; and in 1819 he was second!”

“Desroches?”

“Yes. Desroches, like the rest of us, once groveled in the poverty of

Job. He grew so tired of wearing coats too tight and sleeves too short

for him, that he swallowed down the law in desperation and had just

bought a bare license. He was a licensed attorney, without a penny, or a

client, or any friends beyond our set; and he was bound to pay interest

on the purchase-money and the cautionary deposit besides.”

“He used to make me feel as if I had met a tiger escaped from the Jardin

des Plantes,” said Couture. “He was lean and red-haired, his eyes were

the color of Spanish snuff, and his complexion was harsh. He looked cold

and phlegmatic. He was hard upon the widow, pitiless to the orphan,

and a terror to his clerks; they were not allowed to waste a minute.

Learned, crafty, double-faced, honey-tongued, never flying into a

passion, rancorous in his judicial way.”

“But there is goodness in him,” cried Finot; “he is devoted to his

friends. The first thing he did was to take Godeschal, Mariette’s

brother, as his head-clerk.”

“At Paris,” said Blondet, “there are attorneys of two shades. There

is the honest man attorney; he abides within the province of the law,

pushes on his cases, neglects no one, never runs after business, gives

his clients his honest opinion, and makes them compromise on doubtful

points--he is a Derville, in short. Then there is the starveling

attorney, to whom anything seems good provided that he is sure of

expenses; he will set, not mountains fighting, for he sells them, but

planets; he will work to make the worse appear the better cause, and

take advantage of a technical error to win the day for a rogue. If one

of these fellows tries one of Maitre Gonin’s tricks once too often,

the guild forces him to sell his connection. Desroches, our friend

Desroches, understood the full resources of a trade carried on in a

beggarly way enough by poor devils; he would buy up causes of men

who feared to lose the day; he plunged into chicanery with a fixed

determination to make money by it. He was right; he did his business

very honestly. He found influence among men in public life by getting

them out of awkward complications; there was our dear les Lupeaulx, for

instance, whose position was so deeply compromised. And Desroches stood

in need of influence; for when he began, he was anything but well looked

on at the court, and he who took so much trouble to rectify the errors

of his clients was often in trouble himself. See now, Bixiou, to go back

to the subject--How came Desroches to be in the church?”

“‘D’Aldrigger is leaving seven or eight hundred thousand francs,’

Taillefer answered, addressing Desroches.

“‘Oh, pooh, there is only one man who knows how much _they_ are worth,’

put in Werbrust, a friend of the deceased.

“‘Who?’

“‘That fat rogue Nucingen; he will go as far as the cemetery;

d’Aldrigger was his master once, and out of gratitude he put the old

man’s capital into his business.’

“‘The widow will soon feel a great difference.’

“‘What do you mean?’

“‘Well, d’Aldrigger was so fond of his wife. Now, don’t laugh, people

are looking at us.’

“‘Look here comes du Tillet; he is very late. The epistle is just

beginning.’

“‘He will marry the eldest girl in all probability.’

“‘Is it possible?’ asked Desroches; ‘why, he is tied more than ever to

Mme. Roguin.’

“‘_Tied_--he?--You do not know him.’

“‘Do you know how Nucingen and du Tillet stand?’ asked Desroches.

“‘Like this,’ said Taillefer; ‘Nucingen is just the man to swallow down

his old master’s capital, and then to disgorge it.’

“‘Ugh! ugh!’ coughed Werbrust, ‘these churches are confoundedly damp;

ugh! ugh! What do you mean by “disgorge it”’?

“‘Well, Nucingen knows that du Tillet has a lot of money; he wants to

marry him to Malvina; but du Tillet is shy of Nucingen. To a looker-on,

the game is good fun.’

“‘What!’ exclaimed Werbrust, ‘is she old enough to marry? How quickly we

grow old!’

“‘Malvina d’Aldrigger is quite twenty years old, my dear fellow. Old

d’Aldrigger was married in 1800. He gave some rather fine entertainments

in Strasbourg at the time of his wedding, and afterwards when Malvina

was born. That was in 1801 at the peace of Amiens, and here are we in

the year 1823, Daddy Werbrust! In those days everything was Ossianized;

he called his daughter Malvina. Six years afterwards there was a rage

for chivalry, _Partant pour la Syrie_--a pack of nonsense--and he

christened his second daughter Isaure. She is seventeen. So there are

two daughters to marry.’

“‘The women will not have a penny left in ten years’ time,’ said

Werbrust, speaking to Desroches in a confidential tone.

“‘There is d’Aldrigger’s man-servant, the old fellow bellowing away at

the back of the church; he has been with them since the two young ladies

were children, and he is capable of anything to keep enough together for

them to live upon,’ said Taillefer.

“_Dies iroe_! (from the minor cannons). _Dies illa_! (from the

choristers).

“‘Good-day, Werbrust (from Taillefer), the _Dies iroe_ puts me too much

in mind of my poor boy.’

“‘I shall go too; it is too damp in here,’ said Werbrust.

“_In favilla_.

“‘A few halfpence, kind gentlemen!’ (from the beggars at the door).

“‘For the expenses of the church!’ (from the beadle, with a rattling

clatter of the money-box).

“‘_Amen_’ (from the choristers).

“‘What did he die of?’ (from a friend).

“‘He broke a blood-vessel in the heel’ (from an inquisitive wag).

“‘Who is dead?’ (from a passer-by).

“‘The President de Montesquieu!’ (from a relative).

“The sacristan to the poor, ‘Get away, all of you; the money for you has

been given to us; don’t ask for any more.’”

“Done to the life!” cried Couture. And indeed it seemed to us that we

heard all that went on in the church. Bixiou imitated everything, even

the shuffling sound of the feet of the men that carried the coffin over

the stone floor.

“There are poets and romancers and writers that say many fine things

abut Parisian manners,” continued Bixiou, “but that is what really

happens at a funeral. Ninety-nine out of a hundred that come to pay

their respects to some poor devil departed, get together and talk

business or pleasure in the middle of the church. To see some poor

little touch of real sorrow, you need an impossible combination of

circumstances. And, after all, is there such a thing as grief without a

thought of self in it?”

“Ugh!” said Blondet. “Nothing is less respected than death; is it that

there is nothing less respectable?”

“It is so common!” resumed Bixiou. “When the service was over Nucingen

and du Tillet went to the graveside. The old man-servant walked;

Nucingen and du Tillet were put at the head of the procession of

mourning coaches.--‘Goot, mein goot friend,’ said Nucingen as they

turned into the boulevard. ‘It ees a goot time to marry Malfina; you

vill be der brodector off that boor family vat ess in tears; you

vill haf ein family, a home off your own; you vill haf a house ready

vurnished, und Malfina is truly ein dreashure.’”

“I seem to hear that old Robert Macaire of a Nucingen himself,” said

Finot.

“‘A charming girl,’ said Ferdinand du Tillet in a cool, unenthusiastic

tone,” Bixiou continued.

“Just du Tillet himself summed up in a word!” cried Couture.

“‘Those that do not know her may think her plain,’ pursued du Tillet,

‘but she has character, I admit.’

“‘Und ein herz, dot is the pest of die pizness, mein der poy; she vould

make you an indelligent und defoted vife. In our beastly pizness, nopody

cares to know who lifs or dies; it is a crate plessing gif a mann kann

put drust in his vife’s heart. Mein Telvine prouht me more as a million,

as you know, but I should gladly gif her for Malfina dot haf not so pig

a _dot_.’

“‘But how much has she?’

“‘I do not know precisely; boot she haf somdings.’

“‘Yes, she has a mother with a great liking for rose-color.’ said du

Tillet; and with that epigram he cut Nucingen’s diplomatic efforts

short.

“After dinner the Baron de Nucingen informed Wilhelmine Adolphus that

she had barely four hundred thousand francs deposited with him.

The daughter of Adolphus of Manheim, thus reduced to an income of

twenty-four thousand livres, lost herself in arithmetical exercises that

muddled her wits.

“‘I have _always_ had six thousand francs for our dress allowance,’ she

said to Malvina. ‘Why, how did your father find money? We shall have

nothing now with twenty-four thousand francs; it is destitution! Oh! if

my father could see me so come down in the world, it would kill him if

he were not dead already! Poor Wilhelmine!’ and she began to cry.

“Malvina, puzzled to know how to comfort her mother, represented to her

that she was still young and pretty, that rose-color still became her,

that she could continue to go to the Opera and the Bouffons, where Mme.

de Nucingen had a box. And so with visions of gaieties, dances, music,

pretty dresses, and social success, the Baroness was lulled to sleep

and pleasant dreams in the blue, silk-curtained bed in the charming

room next to the chamber in which Jean Baptiste, Baron d’Aldrigger, had

breathed his last but two nights ago.

“Here in a few words is the Baron’s history. During his lifetime that

worthy Alsacien accumulated about three millions of francs. In 1800,

at the age of thirty-six, in the apogee of a fortune made during

the Revolution, he made a marriage partly of ambition, partly of

inclination, with the heiress of the family of Adolphus of Manheim.

Wilhelmine, being the idol of her whole family, naturally inherited

their wealth after some ten years. Next, d’Aldrigger’s fortune being

doubled, he was transformed into a Baron by His Majesty, Emperor and

King, and forthwith became a fanatical admirer of the great man to whom

he owed his title. Wherefore, between 1814 and 1815 he ruined himself

by a too serious belief in the sun of Austerlitz. Honest Alsacien as he

was, he did not suspend payment, nor did he give his creditors shares

in doubtful concerns by way of settlement. He paid everything over the

counter, and retired from business, thoroughly deserving Nucingen’s

comment on his behavior--‘Honest but stoobid.’

“All claims satisfied, there remained to him five hundred thousand

francs and certain receipts for sums advanced to that Imperial

Government, which had ceased to exist. ‘See vat komms of too much pelief

in Nappolion,’ said he, when he had realized all his capital.

“When you have been one of the leading men in a place, how are you to

remain in it when your estate has dwindled? D’Aldrigger, like all ruined

provincials, removed to Paris, there intrepidly wore the tricolor braces

embroidered with Imperial eagles, and lived entirely in Bonapartist

circles. His capital he handed over to Nucingen, who gave him eight per

cent upon it, and took over the loans to the Imperial Government at

a mere sixty per cent of reduction; wherefore d’Aldrigger squeezed

Nucingen’s hand and said, ‘I knew dot in you I should find de heart of

ein Elzacien.’

“(Nucingen was paid in full through our friend des Lupeaulx.) Well

fleeced as d’Aldrigger had been, he still possessed an income

of forty-four thousand francs; but his mortification was further

complicated by the spleen which lies in wait for the business man

so soon as he retires from business. He set himself, noble heart, to

sacrifice himself to his wife, now that her fortune was lost, that

fortune of which she had allowed herself to be despoiled so easily,

after the manner of a girl entirely ignorant of money matters. Mme.

d’Aldrigger accordingly missed not a single pleasure to which she had

been accustomed; any void caused by the loss of Strasbourg acquaintances

were speedily filled, and more than filled, with Paris gaieties.

“Even then as now the Nucingens lived at the higher end of financial

society, and the Baron de Nucingen made it a point of honor to treat the

honest banker well. His disinterested virtue looked well in the Nucingen

salon.

“Every winter dipped into d’Aldrigger’s principal, but he did not

venture to remonstrate with his pearl of a Wilhelmine. His was the

most ingenious unintelligent tenderness in the world. A good man, but

a stupid one! ‘What will become of them when I am gone?’ he said, as he

lay dying; and when he was left alone for a moment with Wirth, his

old man-servant, he struggled for breath to bid him take care of his

mistress and her two daughters, as if the one reasonable being in the

house was this Alsacien Caleb Balderstone.

“Three years afterwards, in 1826, Isaure was twenty years old, and

Malvina still unmarried. Malvina had gone into society, and in course of

time discovered for herself how superficial their friendships were, how

accurately every one was weighed and appraised. Like most girls that

have been ‘well brought up,’ as we say, Malvina had no idea of the

mechanism of life, of the importance of money, of the difficulty of

obtaining it, of the prices of things. And so, for six years, every

lesson that she had learned had been a painful one for her.

“D’Aldrigger’s four hundred thousand francs were carried to the

credit of the Baroness’ account with the firm of Nucingen (she was her

husband’s creditor for twelve hundred thousand francs under her marriage

settlement), and when in any difficulty the Shepherdess of the Alps

dipped into her capital as though it were inexhaustible.

“When our pigeon first advanced towards his dove, Nucingen, knowing

the Baroness’ character, must have spoken plainly to Malvina on the

financial position. At that time three hundred thousand francs were

left; the income of twenty-four thousand francs was reduced to eighteen

thousand. Wirth had kept up this state of things for three years! After

that confidential interview, Malvina put down the carriage, sold the

horses, and dismissed the coachman, without her mother’s knowledge. The

furniture, now ten years old, could not be renewed, but it all faded

together, and for those that like harmony the effect was not half bad.

The Baroness herself, that so well-preserved flower, began to look

like the last solitary frost-touched rose on a November bush. I myself

watched the slow decline of luxury by half-tones and semi-tones!

Frightful, upon my honor! It was my last trouble of the kind; afterwards

I said to myself, ‘It is silly to care so much about other people.’

But while I was in civil service, I was fool enough to take a personal

interest in the houses where I dined; I used to stand up for them; I

would say no ill of them myself; I--oh! I was a child.

“Well, when the ci-devant pearl’s daughter put the state of the case

before her, ‘Oh my poor children,’ cried she, ‘who will make my dresses

now? I cannot afford new bonnets; I cannot see visitors here nor go

out.’--Now by what token do you know that a man is in love?” said

Bixiou, interrupting himself. “The question is, whether Beaudenord was

genuinely in love with the fair-haired girl.”

“He neglects his interests,” said Couture.

“He changes his shirt three times a day,” opined Blondet; “a man of more

than ordinary ability, can he, and ought he, to fall in love?”

“My friends,” resumed Bixiou, with a sentimental air, “there is a kind

of man who, when he feels that he is in peril of falling in love, will

snap his fingers or fling away his cigar (as the case may be) with a

‘Pooh! there are other women in the world.’ Beware of that man for

a dangerous reptile. Still, the Government may employ that citizen

somewhere in the Foreign Office. Blondet, I call your attention to the

fact that this Godefroid had thrown up diplomacy.”

“Well, he was absorbed,” said Blondet. “Love gives the fool his one

chance of growing great.”

“Blondet, Blondet, how is it that we are so poor?” cried Bixiou.

“And why is Finot so rich?” returned Blondet. “I will tell you how

it is; there, my son, we understand each other. Come, there is Finot

filling up my glass as if I had carried in his firewood. At the end of

dinner one ought to sip one’s wine slowly,--Well?”

“Thou has said. The absorbed Godefroid became fully acquainted with the

family--the tall Malvina, the frivolous Baroness, and the little lady

of the dance. He became a servant after the most conscientious and

restricted fashion. He was not scared away by the cadaverous remains

of opulence; not he! by degrees he became accustomed to the threadbare

condition of things. It never struck the young man that the green silk

damask and white ornaments in the drawing-room needed refurnishing.

The curtains, the tea-table, the knick-knacks on the chimney-piece, the

rococo chandelier, the Eastern carpet with the pile worn down to the

thread, the pianoforte, the little flowered china cups, the fringed

serviettes so full of holes that they looked like open work in the

Spanish fashion, the green sitting-room with the Baroness’ blue bedroom

beyond it,--it was all sacred, all dear to him. It is only your stupid

woman with the brilliant beauty that throws heart, brain, and soul into

the shade, who can inspire forgetfulness like this; a clever woman never

abuses her advantages; she must be small-natured and silly to gain such

a hold upon a man. Beaudenord actually loved the solemn old Wirth--he

has told me so himself!

“That old rogue regarded his future master with the awe which a good

Catholic feels for the Eucharist. Honest Wirth was a kind of Gaspard,

a beer-drinking German sheathing his cunning in good-nature, much as a

cardinal in the Middle Ages kept his dagger up his sleeve. Wirth saw a

husband for Isaure, and accordingly proceeded to surround Godefroid with

the mazy circumlocutions of his Alsacien’s geniality, that most adhesive

of all known varieties of bird-lime.

“Mme. d’Aldrigger was radically ‘improper.’ She thought love the most

natural thing imaginable. When Isaure and Malvina went out together to

the Champs Elysees or the Tuileries, where they were sure to meet the

young men of their set, she would simply say, ‘A pleasant time to you,

dear girls.’ Their friends among men, the only persons who might have

slandered the sisters, championed them; for the extraordinary liberty

permitted in the d’Aldriggers’ salon made it unique in Paris. Vast

wealth could scarcely have procured such evenings, the talk was good on

any subject; dress was not insisted upon; you felt so much at home there

that you could ask for supper. The sisters corresponded as they pleased,

and quietly read their letters by their mother’s side; it never occurred

to the Baroness to interfere in any way; the adorable woman gave the

girls the full benefits of her selfishness, and in a certain sense

selfish persons are the easiest to live with; they hate trouble, and

therefore do not trouble other people; they never beset the lives of

their fellow-creatures with thorny advice and captious fault-finding;

nor do they torment you with the waspish solicitude of excessive

affection that must know all things and rule all things----”

“This comes home,” said Blondet, “but my dear fellow, this is not

telling a story, this is _blague_----”

“Blondet, if you were not tipsy, I should really feel hurt! He is the

one serious literary character among us; for his benefit, I honor you by

treating you like men of taste, I am distilling my tale for you, and now

he criticises me! There is no greater proof of intellectual sterility,

my friends, than the piling up of facts. _Le Misanthrope_, that supreme

comedy, shows us that art consists in the power of building a palace

on a needle’s point. The gist of my idea is in the fairy wand which can

turn the Desert into an Interlaken in ten seconds (precisely the time

required to empty this glass). Would you rather that I fired off at you

like a cannon-ball, or a commander-in-chief’s report? We chat and laugh;

and this journalist, a bibliophobe when sober, expects me, forsooth,

when he is drunk, to teach my tongue to move at the dull jogtrot of

a printed book.” (Here he affected to weep.) “Woe unto the French

imagination when men fain would blunt the needle points of her pleasant

humor! _Dies iroe_! Let us weep for _Candide_. Long live the _Kritik of

Pure Reason_, _La Symbolique_, and the systems in five closely packed

volumes, printed by Germans, who little suspect that the gist of the

matter has been known in Paris since 1750, and crystallized in a few

trenchant words--the diamonds of our national thought. Blondet is

driving a hearse to his own suicide; Blondet, forsooth! who manufactures

newspaper accounts of the last words of all the great men that die

without saying anything!”

“Come, get on,” put in Finot.

“It was my intention to explain to you in what the happiness of a man

consists when he is not a shareholder (out of compliment to Couture).

Well, now, do you not see at what a price Godefroid secured the greatest

happiness of a young man’s dreams? He was trying to understand Isaure,

by way of making sure that she should understand him. Things which

comprehend one another must needs be similar. Infinity and Nothingness,

for instance, are like; everything that lies between the two is like

neither. Nothingness is stupidity; genius, Infinity. The lovers wrote

each other the stupidest letters imaginable, putting down various

expressions then in fashion upon bits of scented paper: ‘Angel! Aeolian

harp! with thee I shall be complete! There is a heart in my man’s

breast! Weak woman, poor me!’ all the latest heart-frippery. It was

Godefroid’s wont to stay in a drawing-room for a bare ten minutes; he

talked without any pretension to the women in it, and at these times

they thought him very clever. In short, judge of his absorption; Joby,

his horses and carriages, became secondary interests in his life. He was

never happy except in the depths of a snug settee opposite the Baroness,

by the dark-green porphyry chimney-piece, watching Isaure, taking tea,

and chatting with the little circle of friends that dropped in every

evening between eleven and twelve in the Rue Joubert. You could play

bouillotte there safely. (I always won.) Isaure sat with one little foot

thrust out in its black satin shoe; Godefroid would gaze and gaze, and

stay till every one else was gone, and say, ‘Give me your shoe!’ and

Isaure would put her little foot on a chair and take it off and give

it to him, with a glance, one of those glances that--in short, you

understand.

“At length Godefroid discovered a great mystery in Malvina. Whenever

du Tillet knocked at the door, the live red that colored Malvina’s face

said ‘Ferdinand!’ When the poor girl’s eyes fell on that two-footed

tiger, they lighted up like a brazier fanned by a current of air. When

Ferdinand drew her away to the window or a side table, she betrayed her

secret infinite joy. It is a rare and wonderful thing to see a woman so

much in love that she loses her cunning to be strange, and you can read

her heart; as rare (dear me!) in Paris as the Singing Flower in the

Indies. But in spite of a friendship dating from the d’Aldriggers’

first appearance at the Nucingens’, Ferdinand did not marry Malvina.

Our ferocious friend was not apparently jealous of Desroches, who paid

assiduous court to the young lady; Desroches wanted to pay off the rest

of the purchase-money due for his connection; Malvina could not well

have less than fifty thousand crowns, he thought, and so the lawyer

was fain to play the lover. Malvina, deeply humiliated as she was by

du Tillet’s carelessness, loved him too well to shut the door upon

him. With her, an enthusiastic, highly-wrought, sensitive girl, love

sometimes got the better of pride, and pride again overcame wounded

love. Our friend Ferdinand, cool and self-possessed, accepted her

tenderness, and breathed the atmosphere with the quiet enjoyment of a

tiger licking the blood that dyes his throat. He would come to make sure

of it with new proofs; he never allowed two days to pass without a visit

to the Rue Joubert.

“At that time the rascal possessed something like eighteen hundred

thousand francs; money must have weighted very little with him in the

question of marriage; and he had not merely been proof against Malvina,

he had resisted the Barons de Nucingen and de Rastignac; though both of

them had set him galloping at the rate of seventy-five leagues a day,

with outriders, regardless of expense, through mazes of their cunning

devices--and with never a clue of thread.

“Godefroid could not refrain from saying a word to his future

sister-in-law as to her ridiculous position between a banker and an

attorney.

“‘You mean to read me a lecture on the subject of Ferdinand,’ she said

frankly, ‘to know the secret between us. Dear Godefroid, never mention

this again. Ferdinand’s birth, antecedents, and fortune count for

nothing in this, so you may think it is something extraordinary.’ A few

days afterwards, however, Malvina took Godefroid apart to say, ‘I do

not think that Desroches is sincere’ (such is the instinct of love);

‘he would like to marry me, and he is paying court to some tradesman’s

daughter as well. I should very much like to know whether I am a second

shift, and whether marriage is a matter of money with him.’ The fact was

that Desroches, deep as he was, could not make out du Tillet, and

was afraid that he might marry Malvina. So the fellow had secured

his retreat. His position was intolerable, he was scarcely paying his

expenses and interest on the debt. Women understand nothing of these

things; for them, love is always a millionaire.”

“But since neither du Tillet nor Desroches married her; just explain

Ferdinand’s motive,” said Finot.

“Motive?” repeated Bixiou; “why, this. General Rule: A girl that has

once given away her slipper, even if she refused it for ten years, is

never married by the man who----”

“Bosh!” interrupted Blondet, “one reason for loving is the fact that

one has loved. His motive? Here it is. General Rule: Do not marry as a

sergeant when some day you may be Duke of Dantzig and Marshal of France.

Now, see what a match du Tillet has made since then. He married one of

the Comte de Granville’s daughters, into one of the oldest families in

the French magistracy.”

“Desroches’ mother had a friend, a druggist’s wife,” continued Bixiou.

“Said druggist had retired with a fat fortune. These druggist folk have

absurdly crude notions; by way of giving his daughter a good education,

he had sent her to a boarding-school! Well, Matifat meant the girl to

marry well, on the strength of two hundred thousand francs, good hard

coin with no scent of drugs about it.”

“Florine’s Matifat?” asked Blondet.

“Well, yes. Lousteau’s Matifat; ours, in fact. The Matifats, even then

lost to us, had gone to live in the Rue du Cherche-Midi, as far as may

be from the Rue des Lombards, where their money was made. For my own

part, I had cultivated those Matifats. While I served my time in the

galleys of the law, when I was cooped up for eight hours out of the

twenty-four with nincompoops of the first water, I saw queer characters

enough to convince myself that all is not dead-level even in obscure

places, and that in the flattest inanity you may chance upon an angle.

Yes, dear boy, such and such a philistine is to such another as Raphael

is to Natoire.

“Mme. Desroches, the widowed mother, had long ago planned this marriage

for her son, in spite of a tremendous obstacle which took the shape

of one Cochin, Matifat’s partner’s son, a young clerk in the adult

department. M. and Mme. Matifat were of the opinion that an attorney’s

position ‘gave some guarantee for a wife’s happiness,’ to use their own

expression; and as for Desroches, he was prepared to fall in with his

mother’s views in case he could do no better for himself. Wherefore, he

kept up his acquaintance with the druggists in the Rue du Cherche-Midi.

“To put another kind of happiness before you, you should have a

description of these shopkeepers, male and female. They rejoiced in

the possession of a handsome ground floor and a strip of garden; for

amusement, they watched a little squirt of water, no bigger than a

cornstalk, perpetually rising and falling upon a small round freestone

slab in the middle of a basin some six feet across; they would rise

early of a morning to see if the plants in the garden had grown in the

night; they had nothing to do, they were restless, they dressed for the

sake of dressing, bored themselves at the theatre, and were for ever

going to and fro between Paris and Luzarches, where they had a country

house. I have dined there.

“Once they tried to quiz me, Blondet. I told them a long-winded story

that lasted from nine o’clock till midnight, one tale inside another.

I had just brought my twenty-ninth personage upon the scene (the

newspapers have plagiarized with their ‘continued in our next’), when

old Matifat, who as host still held out, snored like the rest, after

blinking for five minutes. Next day they all complimented me upon the

ending of my tale!

“These tradespeople’s society consisted of M. and Mme. Cochin, Mme.

Desroches, and a young Popinot, still in the drug business, who used

to bring them news of the Rue des Lombards. (You know him, Finot.) Mme.

Matifat loved the arts; she bought lithographs, chromo-lithographs, and

colored prints,--all the cheapest things she could lay her hands on. The

Sieur Matifat amused himself by looking into new business speculations,

investing a little capital now and again for the sake of the excitement.

Florine had cured him of his taste for the Regency style of thing. One

saying of his will give you some idea of the depths in my Matifat. ‘Art

_thou_ going to bed, my nieces?’ he used to say when he wished them

good-night, because (as he explained) he was afraid of hurting their

feelings with the more formal ‘you.’

“The daughter was a girl with no manner at all. She looked rather like a

superior sort of housemaid. She could get through a sonata, she wrote

a pretty English hand, knew French grammar and orthography--a complete

commercial education, in short. She was impatient enough to be married

and leave the paternal roof, finding it as dull at home as a lieutenant

finds the nightwatch at sea; at the same time, it should be said that

her watch lasted through the whole twenty-four hours. Desroches or

Cochin junior, a notary or a lifeguardsman, or a sham English lord,--any

husband would have suited her. As she so obviously knew nothing of life,

I took pity upon her, I determined to reveal the great secret of it.

But, pooh! the Matifats shut their doors on me. The bourgeois and I

shall never understand each other.”

“She married General Gouraud,” said Finot.

“In forty-eight hours, Godefroid de Beaudenord, late of the diplomatic

corps, saw through the Matifats and their nefarious designs,” resumed

Bixiou. “Rastignac happened to be chatting with the frivolous Baroness

when Godefroid came in to give his report to Malvina. A word here and

there reached his ear; he guessed the matter on foot, more particularly

from Malvina’s look of satisfaction that it was as she had suspected.

Then Rastignac actually stopped on till two o’clock in the morning. And

yet there are those that call him selfish! Beaudenord took his departure

when the Baroness went to bed.

“As soon as Rastignac was left alone with Malvina, he spoke in a

fatherly, good-humored fashion. ‘Dear child, please to bear in mind that

a poor fellow, heavy with sleep, has been drinking tea to keep himself

awake till two o’clock in the morning, all for a chance of saying a

solemn word of advice to you--_Marry_! Do not be too particular; do not

brood over your feelings; never mind the sordid schemes of men that have

one foot here and another in the Matifats’ house; do not stop to think

at all: Marry!--When a girl marries, it means that the man whom she

marries undertakes to maintain her in a more or less good position in

life, and at any rate her comfort is assured. I know the world. Girls,

mammas, and grandmammas are all of them hypocrites when they fly off

into sentiment over a question of marriage. Nobody really thinks of

anything but a good position. If a mother marries her daughter well, she

says that she has made an excellent bargain.’ Here Rastignac unfolded

his theory of marriage, which to his way of thinking is a business

arrangement, with a view to making life tolerable; and ended up with,

‘I do not ask to know your secret, Malvina; I know it already. Men talk

things over among themselves, just as you women talk after you leave the

dinner-table. This is all I have to say: Marry. If you do not, remember

that I begged you to marry, here, in this room, this evening!’

“There was a certain ring in Rastignac’s voice which compelled,

not attention, but reflection. There was something startling in his

insistence; something that went, as Rastignac meant that it should, to

the quick of Malvina’s intelligence. She thought over the counsel again

next day, and vainly asked herself why it had been given.”

Couture broke in. “In all these tops that you have set spinning, I see

nothing at all like the beginnings of Rastignac’s fortune,” said he.

“You apparently take us for Matifats multiplied by half-a-dozen bottles

of champagne.”

“We are just coming to it,” returned Bixiou. “You have followed the

course of all the rivulets which make up that forty thousand livres a

year which so many people envy. By this time Rastignac held the threads

of all these lives in his hand.”

“Desroches, the Matifats, Beaudenord, the d’Aldriggers, d’Aiglemont?”

“Yes, and a hundred others,” assented Bixiou.

“Oh, come now, how?” cried Finot. “I know a few things, but I cannot see

a glimpse of an answer to this riddle.”

“Blondet has roughly given you the account of Nucingen’s first two

suspensions of payment; now for the third, with full details.--After

the peace of 1815, Nucingen grasped an idea which some of us only fully

understood later, to wit, that capital is a power only when you are very

much richer than other people. In his own mind, he was jealous of the

Rothschilds. He had five millions of francs, he wanted ten. He knew a

way to make thirty millions with ten, while with five he could only

make fifteen. So he made up his mind to operate a third suspension of

payment. About that time, the great man hit on the idea of indemnifying

his creditors with paper of purely fictitious value and keeping their

coin. On the market, a great idea of this sort is not expressed in

precisely this cut-and-dried way. Such an arrangement consists in giving

a lot of grown-up children a small pie in exchange for a gold piece;

and, like children of a smaller growth, they prefer the pie to the gold

piece, not suspecting that they might have a couple of hundred pies for

it.”

“What is this all about, Bixiou?” cried Couture. “Nothing more _bona

fide_. Not a week passes but pies are offered to the public for a louis.

But who compels the public to take them? Are they not perfectly free to

make inquiries?”

“You would rather have it made compulsory to take up shares, would you?”

asked Blondet.

“No,” said Finot. “Where would the talent come in?”

“Very good for Finot.”

“Who put him up to it?” asked Couture.

“The fact was,” continued Bixiou, “that Nucingen had twice had the luck

to present the public (quite unintentionally) with a pie that turned out

to be worth more than the money he received for it. That unlucky good

luck gave him qualms of conscience. A course of such luck is fatal to a

man in the long run. This time he meant to make no mistake of this sort;

he waited ten years for an opportunity of issuing negotiable securities

which should seem on the face of it to be worth something, while as a

matter of fact----”

“But if you look at banking in that light,” broke in Couture, “no sort

of business would be possible. More than one _bona fide_ banker, backed

up by a _bona fide_ government, has induced the hardest-headed men on

‘Change to take up stock which is bound to fall within a given time.

You have seen better than that. Have you not seen stock created with the

concurrence of a government to pay the interest upon older stock, so as

to keep things going and tide over the difficulty? These operations were

more or less like Nucingen’s settlements.”

“The thing may look queer on a small scale,” said Blondet, “but on a

large we call it finance. There are high-handed proceedings criminal

between man and man that amount to nothing when spread out over any

number of men, much as a drop of prussic acid becomes harmless in a pail

of water. You take a man’s life, you are guillotined. But if, for any

political conviction whatsoever, you take five hundred lives, political

crimes are respected. You take five thousand francs out of my desk;

to the hulks you go. But with a sop cleverly pushed into the jaws of a

thousand speculators, you can cram the stock of any bankrupt republic

or monarchy down their throats; even if the loan has been floated,

as Couture says, to pay the interest on that very same national debt.

Nobody can complain. These are the real principles of the present Golden

Age.”

“When the stage machinery is so huge,” continued Bixiou, “a good many

puppets are required. In the first place, Nucingen had purposely and

with his eyes open invested his five millions in an American investment,

foreseeing that the profits would not come in until it was too late. The

firm of Nucingen deliberately emptied its coffers. Any liquidation

ought to be brought about naturally. In deposits belonging to private

individuals and other investments, the firm possessed about six millions

of capital altogether. Among those private individuals was the Baroness

d’Aldrigger with her three hundred thousand francs, Beaudenord with four

hundred thousand, d’Aiglemont with a million, Matifat with three hundred

thousand, Charles Grandet (who married Mlle. d’Aubrion) with half a

million, and so forth, and so forth.

“Now, if Nucingen had himself brought out a joint-stock company, with

the shares of which he proposed to indemnify his creditors after more or

less ingenious manoeuvring, he might perhaps have been suspected. He

set about it more cunningly than that. He made some one else put up the

machinery that was to play the part of the Mississippi scheme in Law’s

system. Nucingen can make the longest-headed men work out schemes

for him without confiding a word to them; it is his peculiar talent.

Nucingen just let fall a hint to du Tillet of the pyramidal, triumphant

notion of bringing out a joint-stock enterprise with capital sufficient

to pay very high dividends for a time. Tried for the first time, in days

when noodles with capital were plentiful, the plan was pretty sure

to end in a run upon the shares, and consequently in a profit for the

banker that issued them. You must remember that this happened in 1826.

“Du Tillet, struck through he was by an idea both pregnant and

ingenious, naturally bethought himself that if the enterprise failed,

the blame must fall upon somebody. For which reason, it occurred to

him to put forward a figurehead director in charge of his commercial

machinery. At this day you know the secret of the firm of Claparon and

Company, founded by du Tillet, one of the finest inventions----”

“Yes,” said Blondet, “the responsible editor in business matters, the

instigator, and scapegoat; but we know better than that nowadays. We

put, ‘Apply at the offices of the Company, such and such a number, such

and such a street,’ where the public find a staff of clerks in green

caps, about as pleasing to behold as broker’s men.”

“Nucingen,” pursued Bixiou, “had supported the firm of Charles Claparon

and Company with all his credit. There were markets in which you might

safely put a million francs’ worth of Claparon’s paper. So du Tillet

proposed to bring his firm of Claparon to the fore. So said, so done.

In 1825 the shareholder was still an unsophisticated being. There was

no such thing as cash lying at call. Managing directors did not pledge

themselves not to put their own shares upon the market; they kept no

deposit with the Bank of France; they guaranteed nothing. They did not

even condescend to explain to shareholders the exact limits of their

liabilities when they informed them that the directors in their

goodness, refrained from asking any more than a thousand, or five

hundred, or even two hundred and fifty francs. It was not given out that

the experiment in _aere publico_ was not meant to last for more than

seven, five, or even three years, so that shareholders would not have

long to wait for the catastrophe. It was in the childhood of the art.

Promoters did not even publish the gigantic prospectuses with which they

stimulate the imagination, and at the same time make demands for money

of all and sundry.”

“That only comes when nobody wishes to part with money,” said Couture.

“In short, there was no competition in investments,” continued Bixiou.

“Paper-mache manufacturers, cotton printers, zinc-rollers, theatres, and

newspapers as yet did not hurl themselves like hunting dogs upon their

quarry--the expiring shareholder. ‘Nice things in shares,’ as Couture

says, put thus artlessly before the public, and backed up by the

opinions of experts [‘the princes of science’), were negotiated

shamefacedly in the silence and shadow of the Bourse. Lynx-eyed

speculators used to execute (financially speaking) the air _Calumny_ out

of _The Barber of Seville_. They went about piano, piano, making known

the merits of the concern through the medium of stock-exchange gossip.

They could only exploit the victim in his own house, on the Bourse, or

in company; so they reached him by means of the skilfully created rumor

which grew till it reached a _tutti_ of a quotation in four figures----”

“And as we can say anything among ourselves,” said Couture, “I will go

back to the last subject.”

“_Vous etes orfevre, Monsieur Josse_!” cried Finot.

“Finot will always be classic, constitutional, and pedantic,” commented

Blondet.

“Yes,” rejoined Couture, on whose account Cerizet had just been

condemned on a criminal charge. “I maintain that the new way is

infinitely less fraudulent, less ruinous, more straightforward than the

old. Publicity means time for reflection and inquiry. If here and there

a shareholder is taken in, he has himself to blame, nobody sells him a

pig in a poke. The manufacturing industry----”

“Ah!” exclaimed Bixiou, “here comes industry----”

“---- is a gainer by it,” continued Couture, taking no notice of the

interruption. “Every government that meddles with commerce and

cannot leave it free, sets about an expensive piece of folly; State

interference ends in a _maximum_ or a monopoly. To my thinking, few

things can be more in conformity with the principles of free trade than

joint-stock companies. State interference means that you try to regulate

the relations of principal and interest, which is absurd. In business,

generally speaking, the profits are in proportion to the risks. What

does it matter to the State how money is set circulating, provided that

it is always in circulation? What does it matter who is rich or who is

poor, provided that there is a constant quantity of rich people to be

taxed? Joint-stock companies, limited liability companies, every sort of

enterprise that pays a dividend, has been carried on for twenty years

in England, commercially the first country in the world. Nothing passes

unchallenged there; the Houses of Parliament hatch some twelve hundred

laws every session, yet no member of Parliament has ever yet raised an

objection to the system----”

“A cure for plethora of the strong box. Purely vegetable remedy,” put in

Bixiou, “_les carottes_” (gambling speculation).

“Look here!” cried Couture, firing up at this. “You have ten thousand

francs. You invest it in ten shares of a thousand francs each in ten

different enterprises. You are swindled nine times out of the ten--as a

matter of fact you are not, the public is a match for anybody, but

say that you are swindled, and only one affair turns out well (by

accident!--oh, granted!--it was not done on purpose--there, chaff

away!). Very well, the punter that has the sense to divide up his stakes

in this way hits on a splendid investment, like those who took shares in

the Wortschin mines. Gentlemen, let us admit among ourselves that those

who call out are hypocrites, desperately vexed because they have no good

ideas of their own, and neither power to advertise nor skill to exploit

a business. You will not have long to wait for proof. In a very short

time you will see the aristocracy, the court, and public men descend

into speculation in serried columns; you will see that their claws are

longer, their morality more crooked than ours, while they have not our

good points. What a head a man must have if he has to found a business

in times when the shareholder is as covetous and keen as the inventor!

What a great magnetizer must he be that can create a Claparon and hit

upon expedients never tried before! Do you know the moral of it all?

Our age is no better than we are; we live in an era of greed; no one

troubles himself about the intrinsic value of a thing if he can only

make a profit on it by selling it to somebody else; so he passes it on

to his neighbor. The shareholder that thinks he sees a chance of making

money is just as covetous as the founder that offers him the opportunity

of making it.”

“Isn’t he fine, our Couture? Isn’t he fine?” exclaimed Bixiou, turning

to Blondet. “He will ask us next to erect statues to him as a benefactor

of the species.”

“It would lead people to conclude that the fool’s money is the wise

man’s patrimony by divine right,” said Blondet.

“Gentlemen,” cried Couture, “let us have our laugh out here to make

up for all the times when we must listen gravely to solemn nonsense

justifying laws passed on the spur of the moment.”

“He is right,” said Blondet. “What times we live in, gentlemen! When

the fire of intelligence appears among us, it is promptly quenched by

haphazard legislation. Almost all our lawgivers come up from little

parishes where they studied human nature through the medium of the

newspapers; forthwith they shut down the safety-valve, and when the

machinery blows up there is weeping and gnashing of teeth! We do nothing

nowadays but pass penal laws and levy taxes. Will you have the sum of it

all!--There is no religion left in the State!”

“Oh, bravo, Blondet!” cried Bixiou, “thou hast set thy finger on the

weak spot. Meddlesome taxation has lost us more victories here in France

than the vexatious chances of war. I once spent seven years in the hulks

of a government department, chained with bourgeois to my bench. There

was a clerk in the office, a man with a head on his shoulders; he

had set his mind upon making a sweeping reform of the whole fiscal

system--ah, well, we took the conceit out of him nicely. France might

have been too prosperous, you know she might have amused herself by

conquering Europe again; we acted in the interests of the peace of

nations. I slew Rabourdin with a caricature.”[*]

[*] See Les Employes [The Government Clerks aka Bureaucracy].

“By _religion_ I do not mean cant; I use the word in its wide political

sense,” rejoined Blondet.

“Explain your meaning,” said Finot.

“Here it is,” returned Blondet. “There has been a good deal said about

affairs at Lyons; about the Republic cannonaded in the streets; well,

there was not a word of truth in it all. The Republic took up the

riots, just as an insurgent snatches up a rifle. The truth is queer and

profound, I can tell you. The Lyons trade is a soulless trade. They

will not weave a yard of silk unless they have the order and are sure of

payment. If orders fall off; the workmen may starve; they can scarcely

earn a living, convicts are better off. After the Revolution of July,

the distress reached such a pitch that the Lyons weavers--the _canuts_,

as they call them--hoisted the flag, ‘Bread or Death!’ a proclamation

of a kind which compels the attention of a government. It was really

brought about by the cost of living at Lyons; Lyons must build theatres

and become a metropolis, forsooth, and the octroi duties accordingly

were insanely high. The Republicans got wind of this bread riot, they

organized the _canuts_ in two camps, and fought among themselves. Lyons

had her Three Days, but order was restored, and the silk weavers went

back to their dens. Hitherto the _canut_ had been honest; the silk for

his work was weighed out to him in hanks, and he brought back the same

weight of woven tissue; now he made up his mind that the silk merchants

were oppressing him; he put honesty out at the door and rubbed oil on

his fingers. He still brought back weight for weight, but he sold the

silk represented by the oil; and the French silk trade has suffered from

a plague of ‘greased silks,’ which might have ruined Lyons and a whole

branch of French commerce. The masters and the government, instead

of removing the causes of the evil, simply drove it in with a violent

external application. They ought to have sent a clever man to Lyons,

one of those men that are said to have no principle, an Abbe Terray; but

they looked at the affair from a military point of view. The result of

the troubles is a _gros de Naples_ at forty _sous_ per yard; the silk

is sold at this day, I dare say, and the masters no doubt have hit

upon some new check upon the men. This method of manufacturing without

looking ahead ought never to have existed in the country where one of

the greatest citizens that France has ever known ruined himself to keep

six thousand weavers in work without orders. Richard Lenoir fed them,

and the government was thickheaded enough to allow him to suffer

from the fall of the prices of textile fabrics brought about by the

Revolution of 1814. Richard Lenoir is the one case of a merchant that

deserves a statue. And yet the subscription set on foot for him has no

subscribers, while the fund for General Foy’s children reached a million

francs. Lyons has drawn her own conclusions; she knows France, she knows

that there is no religion left. The story of Richard Lenoir is one of

those blunders which Fouche condemned as worse than a crime.”

“Suppose that there is a tinge of charlatanism in the way in which

concerns are put before the public,” began Couture, returning to the

charge, “that word charlatanism has come to be a damaging expression, a

middle term, as it were, between right and wrong; for where, I ask you,

does charlatanism begin? where does it end? what is charlatanism? do

me the kindness of telling me what it is _not_. Now for a little plain

speaking, the rarest social ingredient. A business which should consist

in going out at night to look for goods to sell in the day would

obviously be impossible. You find the instinct of forestalling the

market in the very match-seller. How to forestall the market--that is

the one idea of the so-called honest tradesman of the Rue Saint-Denis,

as of the most brazen-fronted speculator. If stocks are heavy, sell you

must. If sales are slow, you must tickle your customer; hence the

signs of the Middle Ages, hence the modern prospectus. I do not see a

hair’s-breadth of difference between attracting custom and forcing your

goods upon the consumer. It may happen, it is sure to happen, it often

happens, that a shopkeeper gets hold of damaged goods, for the seller

always cheats the buyer. Go and ask the most upright folk in Paris--the

best known men in business, that is--and they will all triumphantly tell

you of dodges by which they passed off stock which they knew to be bad

upon the public. The well-known firm of Minard began by sales of this

kind. In the Rue Saint-Denis they sell nothing but ‘greased silk’; it

is all that they can do. The most honest merchants tell you in the most

candid way that ‘you must get out of a bad bargain as best you can’--a

motto for the most unscrupulous rascality. Blondet has given you an

account of the Lyons affair, its causes and effects, and I proceed in my

turn to illustrate my theory with an anecdote:--There was once a woolen

weaver, an ambitious man, burdened with a large family of children by a

wife too much beloved. He put too much faith in the Republic, laid in a

stock of scarlet wool, and manufactured those red-knitted caps that you

may have noticed on the heads of all the street urchins in Paris. How

this came about I am just going to tell you. The Republic was beaten.

After the Saint-Merri affair the caps were quite unsalable. Now, when a

weaver finds that besides a wife and children he has some ten thousand

red woolen caps in the house, and that no hatter will take a single one

of them, notions begin to pass through his head as fast as if he were

a banker racking his brains to get rid of ten million francs’ worth of

shares in some dubious investment. As for this Law of the Faubourg, this

Nucingen of caps, do you know what he did? He went to find a pothouse

dandy, one of those comic men that drive police sergeants to despair

at open-air dancing saloons at the barriers; him he engaged to play the

part of an American captain staying at Meurice’s and buying for export

trade. He was to go to some large hatter, who still had a cap in his

shop window, and ‘inquire for’ ten thousand red woolen caps. The hatter,

scenting business in the wind, hurried round to the woolen weaver and

rushed upon the stock. After that, no more of the American captain, you

understand, and great plenty of caps. If you interfere with the freedom

of trade, because free trade has its drawbacks, you might as well tie

the hands of justice because a crime sometimes goes unpunished, or

blame the bad organization of society because civilization produces some

evils. From the caps and the Rue Saint-Denis to joint-stock companies

and the Bank----draw your own conclusions.”

“A crown for Couture!” said Blondet, twisting a serviette into a wreath

for his head. “I go further than that, gentlemen. If there is a defect

in the working hypothesis, what is the cause? The law! the whole system

of legislation. The blame rests with the legislature. The great men

of their districts are sent up to us by the provinces, crammed with

parochial notions of right and wrong; and ideas that are indispensable

if you want to keep clear of collisions with justice, are stupid when

they prevent a man from rising to the height at which a maker of the

laws ought to abide. Legislation may prohibit such and such developments

of human passions--gambling, lotteries, the Ninons of the pavement,

anything you please--but you cannot extirpate the passions themselves by

any amount of legislation. Abolish them, you would abolish the society

which develops them, even if it does not produce them. The gambling

passion lurks, for instance, at the bottom of every heart, be it a

girl’s heart, a provincial’s, a diplomatist’s; everybody longs to

have money without working for it; you may hedge the desire about with

restrictions, but the gambling mania immediately breaks out in another

form. You stupidly suppress lotteries, but the cook-maid pilfers none

the less, and puts her ill-gotten gains in the savings bank. She

gambles with two hundred and fifty franc stakes instead of forty sous;

joint-stock companies and speculation take the place of the lottery;

the gambling goes on without the green cloth, the croupier’s rake is

invisible, the cheating planned beforehand. The gambling houses are

closed, the lottery has come to an end; ‘and now,’ cry idiots, ‘morals

have greatly improved in France,’ as if, forsooth, they had suppressed

the punters. The gambling still goes on, only the State makes nothing

from it now; and for a tax paid with pleasure, it has substituted a

burdensome duty. Nor is the number of suicides reduced, for the gambler

never dies, though his victim does.”

“I am not speaking now of foreign capital lost to France,” continued

Couture, “nor of the Frankfort lotteries. The Convention passed a

decree of death against those who hawked foreign lottery-tickets, and

procureur-syndics used to traffic in them. So much for the sense of our

legislator and his driveling philanthropy. The encouragement given to

savings banks is a piece of crass political folly. Suppose that things

take a doubtful turn and people lose confidence, the Government will

find that they have instituted a queue for money, like the queues

outside the bakers’ shops. So many savings banks, so many riots.

Three street boys hoist a flag in some corner or other, and you have a

revolution ready made.

“But this danger, however great it may be, seems to me less to be

dreaded than the widespread demoralization. Savings banks are a means of

inoculating the people, the classes least restrained by education or by

reason from schemes that are tacitly criminal, with the vices bred of

self-interest. See what comes of philanthropy!

“A great politician ought to be without a conscience in abstract

questions, or he is a bad steersman for a nation. An honest politician

is a steam-engine with feelings, a pilot that would make love at the

helm and let the ship go down. A prime minister who helps himself to

millions but makes France prosperous and great is preferable, is he not,

to a public servant who ruins his country, even though he is buried at

the public expense? Would you hesitate between a Richelieu, a Mazarin,

or a Potemkin, each with his hundreds of millions of francs, and a

conscientious Robert Lindet that could make nothing out of assignats

and national property, or one of the virtuous imbeciles who ruined Louis

XVI.? Go on, Bixiou.”

“I will not go into the details of the speculation which we owe to

Nucingen’s financial genius. It would be the more inexpedient because

the concern is still in existence and shares are quoted on the Bourse.

The scheme was so convincing, there was such life in an enterprise

sanctioned by royal letters patent, that though the shares issued at a

thousand francs fell to three hundred, they rose to seven and will

reach par yet, after weathering the stormy years ‘27, ‘30, and ‘32. The

financial crisis of 1827 sent them down; after the Revolution of July

they fell flat; but there really is something in the affair, Nucingen

simply could not invent a bad speculation. In short, as several banks

of the highest standing have been mixed up in the affair, it would be

unparliamentary to go further into detail. The nominal capital amounted

to ten millions; the real capital to seven. Three millions were allotted

to the founders and bankers that brought it out. Everything was done

with a view to sending up the shares two hundred francs during the first

six months by the payment of a sham dividend. Twenty per cent, on ten

millions! Du Tillet’s interest in the concern amounted to five hundred

thousand francs. In the stock-exchange slang of the day, this share of

the spoils was a ‘sop in the pan.’ Nucingen, with his millions made by

the aid of a lithographer’s stone and a handful of pink paper, proposed

to himself to operate certain nice little shares carefully hoarded in

his private office till the time came for putting them on the market.

The shareholders’ money floated the concern, and paid for splendid

business premises, so they began operations. And Nucingen held in

reserve founders’ shares in Heaven knows what coal and argentiferous

lead-mines, also in a couple of canals; the shares had been given to him

for bringing out the concerns. All four were in working order, well got

up and popular, for they paid good dividends.

“Nucingen might, of course, count on getting the differences if the

shares went up, but this formed no part of the Baron’s schemes; he left

the shares at sea-level on the market to tempt the fishes.

“So he had massed his securities as Napoleon massed his troops, all with

a view to suspending payment in the thick of the approaching crisis of

1826-27 which revolutionized European markets. If Nucingen had had his

Prince of Wagram, he might have said, like Napoleon from the heights of

Santon, ‘Make a careful survey of the situation; on such and such a day,

at such an hour funds will be poured in at such a spot.’ But in whom

could he confide? Du Tillet had no suspicion of his own complicity

in Nucingen’s plot; and the bold Baron had learned from his previous

experiments in suspensions of payment that he must have some man whom

he could trust to act at need as a lever upon the creditor. Nucingen

had never a nephew, he dared not take a confidant; yet he must have a

devoted and intelligent Claparon, a born diplomatist with a good manner,

a man worthy of him, and fit to take office under government. Such

connections are not made in a day nor yet in a year. By this time

Rastignac had been so thoroughly entangled by Nucingen, that being, like

the Prince de la Paix, equally beloved by the King and Queen of Spain,

he fancied that he (Rastignac) had secured a very valuable dupe in

_Nucingen_! For a long while he had laughed at a man whose capacities

he was unable to estimate; he ended in a sober, serious, and devout

admiration of Nucingen, owning that Nucingen really had the power which

he thought he himself alone possessed.

“From Rastignac’s introduction to society in Paris, he had been led to

contemn it utterly. From the year 1820 he thought, like the Baron, that

honesty was a question of appearances; he looked upon the world as

a mixture of corruption and rascality of every sort. If he admitted

exceptions, he condemned the mass; he put no belief in any virtue--men

did right or wrong, as circumstances decided. His worldly wisdom was the

work of a moment; he learned his lesson at the summit of Pere Lachaise

one day when he buried a poor, good man there; it was his Delphine’s

father, who died deserted by his daughters and their husbands, a dupe

of our society and of the truest affection. Rastignac then and there

resolved to exploit this world, to wear full dress of virtue, honesty,

and fine manners. He was empanoplied in selfishness. When the young

scion of nobility discovered that Nucingen wore the same armor, he

respected him much as some knight mounted upon a barb and arrayed in

damascened steel would have respected an adversary equally well horsed

and equipped at a tournament in the Middle Ages. But for the time he had

grown effeminate amid the delights of Capua. The friendship of such a

woman as the Baronne de Nucingen is of a kind that sets a man abjuring

egoism in all its forms.

“Delphine had been deceived once already; in her first venture of the

affections she came across a piece of Birmingham manufacture, in the

shape of the late lamented de Marsay; and therefore she could not but

feel a limitless affection for a young provincial’s articles of faith.

Her tenderness reacted upon Rastignac. So by the time that Nucingen had

put his wife’s friend into the harness in which the exploiter always

gets the exploited, he had reached the precise juncture when he (the

Baron) meditated a third suspension of payment. To Rastignac he

confided his position; he pointed out to Rastignac a means of making

‘reparation.’ As a consequence of his intimacy, he was expected to play

the part of confederate. The Baron judged it unsafe to communicate the

whole of his plot to his conjugal collaborator. Rastignac quite believed

in impending disaster; and the Baron allowed him to believe further that

he (Rastignac) saved the shop.

“But when there are so many threads in a skein, there are apt to be

knots. Rastignac trembled for Delphine’s money. He stipulated that

Delphine must be independent and her estate separated from her

husband’s, swearing to himself that he would repay her by trebling her

fortune. As, however, Rastignac said nothing of himself, Nucingen begged

him to take, in the event of success, twenty-five shares of a thousand

francs in the argentiferous lead-mines, and Eugene took them--not to

offend him! Nucingen had put Rastignac up to this the day before that

evening in the Rue Joubert when our friend counseled Malvina to marry. A

cold shiver ran through Rastignac at the sight of so many happy folk

in Paris going to and fro unconscious of the impending loss; even so

a young commander might shiver at the first sight of an army drawn

up before a battle. He saw the d’Aiglemonts, the d’Aldriggers, and

Beaudenord. Poor little Isaure and Godefroid playing at love, what were

they but Acis and Galatea under the rock which a hulking Polyphemus was

about to send down upon them?”

“That monkey of a Bixiou has something almost like talent,” said

Blondet.

“Oh! so I am not maundering now?” asked Bixiou, enjoying his success as

he looked round at his surprised auditors.--“For two months past,” he

continued, “Godefroid had given himself up to all the little pleasures

of preparation for the marriage. At such times men are like birds

building nests in spring; they come and go, pick up their bits of straw,

and fly off with them in their beaks to line the nest that is to hold a

brood of young birds by and by. Isaure’s bridegroom had taken a house in

the Rue de la Plancher at a thousand crowns, a comfortable little house

neither too large nor too small, which suited them. Every morning

he went round to take a look at the workmen and to superintend

the painters. He had introduced ‘comfort’ (the only good thing in

England)--heating apparatus to maintain an even temperature all over the

house; fresh, soft colors, carefully chosen furniture, neither too showy

nor too much in fashion; spring-blinds fitted to every window inside

and out; silver plate and new carriages. He had seen to the stables,

coach-house, and harness-room, where Toby Joby Paddy floundered and

fidgeted about like a marmot let loose, apparently rejoiced to know that

there would be women about the place and a ‘lady’! This fervent passion

of a man that sets up housekeeping, choosing clocks, going to visit his

betrothed with his pockets full of patterns of stuffs, consulting her as

to the bedroom furniture, going, coming, and trotting about, for love’s

sake,--all this, I say, is a spectacle in the highest degree calculated

to rejoice the hearts of honest people, especially tradespeople. And as

nothing pleases folk better than the marriage of a good-looking young

fellow of seven-and-twenty and a charming girl of nineteen that dances

admirably well, Godefroid in his perplexity over the corbeille asked

Mme. de Nucingen and Rastignac to breakfast with him and advise him on

this all-important point. He hit likewise on the happy idea of asking

his cousin d’Aiglemont and his wife to meet them, as well as Mme. de

Serizy. Women of the world are ready enough to join for once in an

improvised breakfast-party at a bachelor’s rooms.”

“It is their way of playing truant,” put in Blondet.

“Of course they went over the new house,” resumed Bixiou. “Married women

relish these little expeditions as ogres relish warm flesh; they

feel young again with the young bliss, unspoiled as yet by fruition.

Breakfast was served in Godefroid’s sitting-room, decked out like a

troop horse for a farewell to bachelor life. There were dainty little

dishes such as women love to devour, nibble at, and sip of a morning,

when they are usually alarmingly hungry and horribly afraid to confess

to it. It would seem that a woman compromises herself by admitting

that she is hungry.--‘Why have you come alone?’ inquired Godefroid when

Rastignac appeared.--‘Mme. de Nucingen is out of spirits; I will tell

you all about it,’ answered Rastignac, with the air of a man whose

temper has been tried.--‘A quarrel?’ hazarded Godefroid.--‘No.’--At four

o’clock the women took flight for the Bois de Boulogne; Rastignac stayed

in the room and looked out of the window, fixing his melancholy gaze

upon Toby Joby Paddy, who stood, his arms crossed in Napoleonic fashion,

audaciously posted in front of Beaudenord’s cab horse. The child could

only control the animal with his shrill little voice, but the horse was

afraid of Joby Toby.

“‘Well,’ began Godefroid, ‘what is the matter with you, my dear fellow?

You look gloomy and anxious; your gaiety is forced. You are tormented

by incomplete happiness. It is wretched, and that is a fact, when one

cannot marry the woman one loves at the mayor’s office and the church.’

“‘Have you courage to hear what I have to say? I wonder whether you will

see how much a man must be attached to a friend if he can be guilty of

such a breach of confidence as this for his sake.’

“Something in Rastignac’s voice stung like a lash of a whip.

“‘_What_?’ asked Godefroid de Beaudenord, turning pale.

“‘I was unhappy over your joy; I had not the heart to keep such a secret

to myself when I saw all these preparations, your happiness in bloom.’

“‘Just say it out in three words!’

“‘Swear to me on your honor that you will be as silent as the grave----’

“‘As the grave,’ repeated Beaudenord.

“‘That if one of your relatives were concerned in this secret, he should

not know it.’

“‘No.’

“‘Very well. Nucingen started to-night for Brussels. He must file his

schedule if he cannot arrange a settlement. This very morning Delphine

petitioned for the separation of her estate. You may still save your

fortune.’

“‘How?’ faltered Godefroid; the blood turned to ice in his veins.

“‘Simply write to the Baron de Nucingen, antedating your letter

a fortnight, and instruct him to invest all your capital in

shares.’--Rastignac suggested Claparon and Company, and continued--‘You

have a fortnight, a month, possibly three months, in which to realize

and make something; the shares are still going up----’

“‘But d’Aiglemont, who was here at breakfast with us, has a million in

Nucingen’s bank.’

“‘Look here; I do not know whether there will be enough of these

shares to cover it; and besides, I am not his friend, I cannot betray

Nucingen’s confidence. You must not speak to d’Aiglemont. If you say a

word, you must answer to me for the consequences.’

“Godefroid stood stock still for ten minutes.

“‘Do you accept? Yes or no!’ said the inexorable Rastignac.

“Godefroid took up the pen, wrote at Rastignac’s dictation, and signed

his name.

“‘My poor cousin!’ he cried.

“‘Each for himself,’ said Rastignac. ‘And there is one more settled!’ he

added to himself as he left Beaudenord.

“While Rastignac was manoeuvring thus in Paris, imagine the state of

things on the Bourse. A friend of mine, a provincial, a stupid creature,

once asked me as we came past the Bourse between four and five in the

afternoon what all that crowd of chatterers was doing, what they could

possibly find to say to each other, and why they were wandering to

and fro when business in public securities was over for the day. ‘My

friend,’ said I, ‘they have made their meal, and now they are digesting

it; while they digest it, they gossip about their neighbors, or there

would be no commercial security in Paris. Concerns are floated here,

such and such a man--Palma, for instance, who is something the same

here as Sinard at the Academie Royale des Sciences--Palma says, “let the

speculation be made!” and the speculation is made.’”

“What a man that Hebrew is,” put in Blondet; “he has not had a

university education, but a universal education. And universal does not

in his case mean superficial; whatever he knows, he knows to the bottom.

He has a genius, an intuitive faculty for business. He is the oracle

of all the lynxes that rule the Paris market; they will not touch an

investment until Palma has looked into it. He looks solemn, he

listens, ponders, and reflects; his interlocutor thinks that after this

consideration he has come round his man, till Palma says, ‘This will not

do for me.’--The most extraordinary thing about Palma, to my mind, is

the fact that he and Werbrust were partners for ten years, and there was

never the shadow of a disagreement between them.”

“That is the way with the very strong or the very weak; any two between

the extremes fall out and lose no time in making enemies of each other,”

said Couture.

“Nucingen, you see, had neatly and skilfully put a little bombshell

under the colonnades of the Bourse, and towards four o’clock in the

afternoon it exploded.--‘Here is something serious; have you heard

the news?’ asked du Tillet, drawing Werbrust into a corner. ‘Here is

Nucingen gone off to Brussels, and his wife petitioning for a separation

of her estate.’

“‘Are you and he in it together for a liquidation?’ asked Werbrust,

smiling.

“‘No foolery, Werbrust,’ said du Tillet. ‘You know the holders of his

paper. Now, look here. There is business in it. Shares in this new

concern of ours have gone up twenty per cent already; they will go up to

five-and-twenty by the end of the quarter; you know why. They are going

to pay a splendid dividend.’

“‘Sly dog,’ said Werbrust. ‘Get along with you; you are a devil with

long and sharp claws, and you have them deep in the butter.’

“‘Just let me speak, or we shall not have time to operate. I hit on

the idea as soon as I heard the news. I positively saw Mme. de Nucingen

crying; she is afraid for her fortune.’

“‘Poor little thing!’ said the old Alsacien Jew, with an ironical

expression. ‘Well?’ he added, as du Tillet was silent.

“‘Well. At my place I have a thousand shares of a thousand francs in our

concern; Nucingen handed them over to me to put on the market, do you

understand? Good. Now let us buy up a million of Nucingen’s paper at

a discount of ten or twenty per cent, and we shall make a handsome

percentage out of it. We shall be debtors and creditors both; confusion

will be worked! But we must set about it carefully, or the holders may

imagine that we are operating in Nucingen’s interests.’

“Then Werbrust understood. He squeezed du Tillet’s hand with an

expression such as a woman’s face wears when she is playing her neighbor

a trick.

“Martin Falleix came up.--‘Well, have you heard the news?’ he asked.

‘Nucingen has stopped payment.’

“‘Pooh,’ said Werbrust, ‘pray don’t noise it about; give those that hold

his paper a chance.’

“‘What is the cause of the smash; do you know?’ put in Claparon.

“‘You know nothing about it,’ said du Tillet. ‘There isn’t any smash.

Payment will be made in full. Nucingen will start again; I shall find

him all the money he wants. I know the causes of the suspension. He has

put all his capital into Mexican securities, and they are sending him

metal in return; old Spanish cannon cast in such an insane fashion that

they melted down gold and bell-metal and church plate for it, and all

the wreck of the Spanish dominion in the Indies. The specie is slow in

coming, and the dear Baron is hard up. That is all.’

“‘It is a fact,’ said Werbrust; ‘I am taking his paper myself at twenty

per cent discount.’

“The news spread swift as fire in a straw rick. The most contradictory

reports got about. But such confidence was felt in the firm after the

two previous suspensions, that every one stuck to Nucingen’s paper.

‘Palma must lend us a hand,’ said Werbrust.

“Now Palma was the Keller’s oracle, and the Kellers were brimful of

Nucingen’s paper. A hint from Palma would be enough. Werbrust arranged

with Palma, and he rang the alarm bell. There was a panic next day on

the Bourse. The Kellers, acting on Palma’s advice, let go Nucingen’s

paper at ten per cent of loss; they set the example on ‘Change, for they

were supposed to know very well what they were about. Taillefer followed

up with three hundred thousand francs at a discount of twenty per cent,

and Martin Falleix with two hundred thousand at fifteen. Gigonnet saw

what was going on. He helped to spread the panic, with a view to buying

up Nucingen’s paper himself and making a commission of two or three per

cent out of Werbrust.

“In a corner of the Bourse he came upon poor Matifat, who had three

hundred thousand francs in Nucingen’s bank. Matifat, ghastly and

haggard, beheld the terrible Gigonnet, the bill-discounter of his old

quarter, coming up to worry him. He shuddered in spite of himself.

“‘Things are looking bad. There is a crisis on hand. Nucingen is

compounding with his creditors. But this does not interest you, Daddy

Matifat; you are out of business.’

“‘Oh, well, you are mistaken, Gigonnet; I am in for three hundred

thousand francs. I meant to speculate in Spanish bonds.’

“‘Then you have saved your money. Spanish bonds would have swept

everything away; whereas I am prepared to offer you something like fifty

per cent for your account with Nucingen.’

“‘You are very keen about it, it seems to me,’ said Matifat. ‘I never

knew a banker yet that paid less than fifty per cent. Ah, if it were

only a matter of ten per cent of loss--’ added the retired man of drugs.

“‘Well, will you take fifteen?’ asked Gigonnet.

“‘You are very keen about it, it seems to me,’ said Matifat.

“‘Good-night.’

“‘Will you take twelve?’

“‘Done,’ said Gigonnet.

“Before night two millions had been bought up in the names of the three

chance-united confederates, and posted by du Tillet to the debit side of

Nucingen’s account. Next day they drew their premium.

“The dainty little old Baroness d’Aldrigger was at breakfast with her

two daughters and Godefroid, when Rastignac came in with a diplomatic

air to steer the conversation on the financial crisis. The Baron

de Nucingen felt a lively regard for the d’Aldrigger family; he was

prepared, if things went amiss, to cover the Baroness’ account with his

best securities, to wit, some shares in the argentiferous lead-mines,

but the application must come from the lady.

“‘Poor Nucingen!’ said the Baroness. ‘What can have become of him?’

“‘He is in Belgium. His wife is petitioning for a separation of her

property; but he had gone to see if he can arrange with some bankers to

see him through.’

“‘Dear me! That reminds me of my poor husband! Dear M. de Rastignac, how

you must feel this, so attached as you are to the house!’

“‘If all the indifferent are covered, his personal friends will be

rewarded later on. He will pull through; he is a clever man.’

“‘An honest man, above all things,’ said the Baroness.

“A month later, Nucingen met all his liabilities, with no formalities

beyond the letters by which creditors signified the investments which

they preferred to take in exchange for their capital; and with no action

on the part of other banks beyond registering the transfer of Nucingen’s

paper for the investments in favor.

“While du Tillet, Werbrust, Claparon, Gigonnet, and others that thought

themselves clever were fetching in Nucingen’s paper from abroad with a

premium of one per cent--for it was still worth their while to exchange

it for securities in a rising market--there was all the more talk on

the Bourse, because there was nothing now to fear. They babbled over

Nucingen; he was discussed and judged; they even slandered him. His

luxurious life, his enterprises! When a man has so much on his hands, he

overreaches himself, and so forth, and so forth.

“The talk was at its height, when several people were greatly astonished

to receive letters from Geneva, Basel, Milan, Naples, Genoa, Marseilles,

and London, in which their correspondents, previously advised of the

failure, informed them that somebody was offering one per cent for

Nucingen’s paper! ‘There is something up,’ said the lynxes of the

Bourse.

“The Court meanwhile had granted the application for Mme. de Nucingen’s

separation as to her estate, and the question became still more

complicated. The newspapers announced the return of M. le Baron de

Nucingen from a journey to Belgium; he had been arranging, it was said,

with a well-known Belgian firm to resume the working of some coal-pits

in the Bois de Bossut. The Baron himself appeared on the Bourse, and

never even took the trouble to contradict the slanders circulating

against him. He scorned to reply through the press; he simply bought a

splendid estate just outside Paris for two millions of francs. Six

weeks afterwards, the Bordeaux shipping intelligence announced that

two vessels with cargoes of bullion to the amount of seven millions,

consigned to the firm of Nucingen, were lying in the river.

“Then it was plain to Palma, Werbrust, and du Tillet that the trick had

been played. Nobody else was any the wiser. The three scholars studied

the means by which the great bubble had been created, saw that it had

been preparing for eleven months, and pronounced Nucingen the greatest

financier in Europe.

“Rastignac understood nothing of all this, but he had the four hundred

thousand francs which Nucingen had allowed him to shear from the

Parisian sheep, and he portioned his sisters. D’Aiglemont, at a hint

from his cousin Beaudenord, besought Rastignac to accept ten per cent

upon his million if he would undertake to convert it into shares in

a canal which is still to make, for Nucingen worked things with the

Government to such purpose that the concessionaires find it to their

interest not to finish their scheme. Charles Grandet implored Delphine’s

lover to use his interest to secure shares for him in exchange for his

cash. And altogether Rastignac played the part of Law for ten days; he

had the prettiest duchesses in France praying to him to allot shares

to them, and to-day the young man very likely has an income of forty

thousand livres, derived in the first instance from the argentiferous

lead-mines.”

“If every one was better off, who can have lost?” asked Finot.

“Hear the conclusion,” rejoined Bixiou. “The Marquis d’Aiglemont and

Beaudenord (I put them forward as two examples out of many) kept their

allotted shares, enticed by the so-called dividend that fell due a few

months afterwards. They had another three per cent on their capital,

they sang Nucingen’s praises, and took his part at a time when everybody

suspected that he was going bankrupt. Godefroid married his beloved

Isaure and took shares in the mines to the value of a hundred thousand

francs. The Nucingens gave a ball even more splendid than people

expected of them on the occasion of the wedding; Delphine’s present to

the bride was a charming set of rubies. Isaure danced, a happy wife, a

girl no longer. The little Baroness was more than ever a Shepherdess of

the Alps. The ball was at its height when Malvina, the _Andalouse_

of Musset’s poem, heard du Tillet’s voice drily advising her to take

Desroches. Desroches, warmed to the right degree by Rastignac and

Nucingen, tried to come to an understanding financially; but at the

first hint of shares in the mines for the bride’s portion, he broke off

and went back to the Matifat’s in the Rue du Cherche-Midi, only to find

the accursed canal shares which Gigonnet had foisted on Matifat in lieu

of cash.

“They had not long to wait for the crash. The firm of Claparon did

business on too large a scale, the capital was locked up, the

concern ceased to serve its purposes, or to pay dividends, though the

speculations were sound. These misfortunes coincided with the events of

1827. In 1829 it was too well known that Claparon was a man of straw set

up by the two giants; he fell from his pedestal. Shares that had

fetched twelve hundred and fifty francs fell to four hundred, though

intrinsically they were worth six. Nucingen, knowing their value, bought

them up at four.

“Meanwhile the little Baroness d’Aldrigger had sold out of the mines

that paid no dividends, and Godefroid had reinvested the money belonging

to his wife and her mother in Claparon’s concern. Debts compelled

them to realize when the shares were at their lowest, so that of seven

hundred thousand francs only two hundred thousand remained. They made a

clearance, and all that was left was prudently invested in the three per

cents at seventy-five. Godefroid, the sometime gay and careless bachelor

who had lived without taking thought all his life long, found himself

saddled with a little goose of a wife totally unfitted to bear adversity

(indeed, before six months were over, he had witnessed the anserine

transformation of his beloved) to say nothing of a mother-in-law whose

mind ran on pretty dresses while she had not bread to eat. The two

families must live together to live at all. It was only by stirring up

all his considerably chilled interest that Godefroid got a post in

the audit department. His friends?--They were out of town. His

relatives?--All astonishment and promises. ‘What! my dear boy! Oh!

count upon me! Poor fellow!’ and Beaudenord was clean forgotten fifteen

minutes afterwards. He owed his place to Nucingen and de Vandenesse.

“And to-day these so estimable and unfortunate people are living on

a third floor (not counting the entresol) in the Rue du Mont Thabor.

Malvina, the Adolphus’ pearl of a granddaughter, has not a farthing. She

gives music-lessons, not to be a burden upon her brother-in-law. You

may see a tall, dark, thin, withered woman, like a mummy escaped

from Passalacqua’s about afoot through the streets of Paris. In 1830

Beaudenord lost his situation just as his wife presented him with a

fourth child. A family of eight and two servants (Wirth and his wife)

and an income of eight thousand livres. And at this moment the mines are

paying so well, that an original share of a thousand francs brings in a

dividend of cent per cent.

“Rastignac and Mme. de Nucingen bought the shares sold by the Baroness

and Godefroid. The Revolution made a peer of France of Nucingen and a

Grand Officer of the Legion of Honor. He has not stopped payment since

1830, but still I hear that he has something like seventeen millions.

He put faith in the Ordinances of July, sold out of all his investments,

and boldly put his money into the funds when the three per cents stood

at forty-five. He persuaded the Tuileries that this was done out

of devotion, and about the same time he and du Tillet between them

swallowed down three millions belonging to that great scamp Philippe

Bridau.

“Quite lately our Baron was walking along the Rue de Rivoli on his way

to the Bois when he met the Baroness d’Aldrigger under the colonnade.

The little old lady wore a tiny green bonnet with a rose-colored lining,

a flowered gown, and a mantilla; altogether, she was more than ever the

Shepherdess of the Alps. She could no more be made to understand the

causes of her poverty than the sources of her wealth. As she went along,

leaning upon poor Malvina, that model of heroic devotion, she seemed

to be the young girl and Malvina the old mother. Wirth followed them,

carrying an umbrella.

“‘Dere are beoples whose vordune I vound it imbossible to make,’ said

the Baron, addressing his companion (M. Cointet, a cabinet minister).

‘Now dot de baroxysm off brincibles haf bassed off, chust reinshtate dot

boor Peautenord.’

“So Beaudenord went back to his desk, thanks to Nucingen’s good offices;

and the d’Aldriggers extol Nucingen as a hero of friendship, for he

always sends the little Shepherdess of the Alps and her daughters

invitations to his balls. No creature whatsoever can be made to

understand that the Baron yonder three times did his best to plunder the

public without breaking the letter of the law, and enriched people

in spite of himself. No one has a word to say against him. If anybody

should suggest that a big capitalist often is another word for a

cut-throat, it would be a most egregious calumny. If stocks rise and

fall, if property improves and depreciates, the fluctuations of the

market are caused by a common movement, a something in the air, a tide

in the affairs of men subject like other tides to lunar influences.

The great Arago is much to blame for giving us no scientific theory to

account for this important phenomenon. The only outcome of all this is

an axiom which I have never seen anywhere in print----”

“And that is?”

“The debtor is more than a match for the creditor.”

“Oh!” said Blondet. “For my own part, all that we have been saying seems

to me to be a paraphrase of the epigram in which Montesquieu summed up

_l’Esprit des Lois_.”

“What?” said Finot.

“Laws are like spiders’ webs; the big flies get through, while the

little ones are caught.”

“Then, what are you for?” asked Finot.

“For absolute government, the only kind of government under which

enterprises against the spirit of the law can be put down. Yes.

Arbitrary rule is the salvation of a country when it comes to the

support of justice, for the right of mercy is strictly one-sided. The

king can pardon a fraudulent bankrupt; he cannot do anything for the

victims. The letter of the law is fatal to modern society.”

“Just get that into the electors’ heads!” said Bixiou.

“Some one has undertaken to do it.”

“Who?”

“Time. As the Bishop of Leon said, ‘Liberty is ancient, but kingship is

eternal; any nation in its right mind returns to monarchical government

in one form or another.’”

“I say, there was somebody next door,” said Finot, hearing us rise to

go.

“There always is somebody next door,” retorted Bixiou. “But he must have

been drunk.”

PARIS, November 1837.

ADDENDUM

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

Aiglemont, General, Marquis Victor d’

At the Sign of the Cat and Racket

A Woman of Thirty

Beaudenord, Godefroid de

A Distinguished Provincial at Paris

The Ball at Sceaux

Bidault (known as Gigonnet)

The Government Clerks

Gobseck

The Vendetta

Cesar Birotteau

A Daughter of Eve

Bixiou, Jean-Jacques

The Purse

A Bachelor’s Establishment

The Government Clerks

Modeste Mignon

Scenes from a Courtesan’s Life

The Muse of the Department

Cousin Betty

The Member for Arcis

Beatrix

A Man of Business

Gaudissart II.

The Unconscious Humorists

Cousin Pons

Blondet, Emile

Jealousies of a Country Town

A Distinguished Provincial at Paris

Scenes from a Courtesan’s Life

Modeste Mignon

Another Study of Woman

The Secrets of a Princess

A Daughter of Eve

The Peasantry

Claparon, Charles

A Bachelor’s Establishment

Cesar Birotteau

Melmoth Reconciled

A Man of Business

The Middle Classes

Cochin, Emile-Louis-Lucien-Emmanuel

Cesar Birotteau

The Government Clerks

The Middle Classes

Cochin, Adolphe

Cesar Birotteau

Cointet, Boniface

Lost Illusions

The Member for Arcis

Couture

Beatrix

The Middle Classes

Desroches (son)

A Bachelor’s Establishment

Colonel Chabert

A Start in Life

A Woman of Thirty

The Commission in Lunacy

The Government Clerks

A Distinguished Provincial at Paris

Scenes from a Courtesan’s Life

A Man of Business

The Middle Classes

Falleix, Martin

The Government Clerks

Finot, Andoche

Cesar Birotteau

A Bachelor’s Establishment

A Distinguished Provincial at Paris

Scenes from a Courtesan’s Life

The Government Clerks

A Start in Life

Gaudissart the Great

Gobseck, Esther Van

Gobseck

A Bachelor’s Establishment

Scenes from a Courtesan’s Life

Grandet, Victor-Ange-Guillaume

Eugenie Grandet

Grandet, Charles

Eugenie Grandet

Matifat (wealthy druggist)

Cesar Birotteau

A Bachelor’s Establishment

Lost Illusions

A Distinguished Provincial at Paris

Cousin Pons

Matifat, Madame

Cesar Birotteau

Matifat, Mademoiselle

Pierrette

Minard, Auguste-Jean-Francois

The Government Clerks

The Middle Classes

Nucingen, Baron Frederic de

Father Goriot

Pierrette

Cesar Birotteau

Lost Illusions

A Distinguished Provincial at Paris

Scenes from a Courtesan’s Life

Another Study of Woman

The Secrets of a Princess

A Man of Business

Cousin Betty

The Muse of the Department

The Unconscious Humorists

Nucingen, Baronne Delphine de

Father Goriot

The Thirteen

Eugenie Grandet

Cesar Birotteau

Melmoth Reconciled

Lost Illusions

A Distinguished Provincial at Paris

The Commission in Lunacy

Scenes from a Courtesan’s Life

Modeste Mignon

Another Study of Woman

A Daughter of Eve

The Member for Arcis

Palma (banker)

Cesar Birotteau

Gobseck

Lost Illusions

A Distinguished Provincial at Paris

The Ball at Sceaux

Rastignac, Eugene de

Father Goriot

A Distinguished Provincial at Paris

Scenes from a Courtesan’s Life

The Ball at Sceaux

The Interdiction

A Study of Woman

Another Study of Woman

The Magic Skin

The Secrets of a Princess

A Daughter of Eve

The Gondreville Mystery

Cousin Betty

The Member for Arcis

The Unconscious Humorists

Taillefer, Jean-Frederic

Father Goriot

The Magic Skin

The Red Inn

Tillet, Ferdinand du

Cesar Birotteau

The Middle Classes

A Bachelor’s Establishment

Pierrette

Melmoth Reconciled

A Distinguished Provincial at Paris

The Secrets of a Princess

A Daughter of Eve

The Member for Arcis

Cousin Betty

The Unconscious Humorists

Toby (Joby, Paddy)

The Secrets of a Princess

Werbrust

Cesar Birotteau

End of ’s The Firm of Nucingen, by Honore de Balzac