The Human Comedy: Selected Stories

by Honoré de Balzac

  “Before we part tonight, Monsieur Hermann is going to tell us another one of those chilling German stories.” The announcement came from a pale, blond young woman who had doubtless read the stories of Hoffmann and Walter Scott. She was the banker’s only child, a ravishing creature who was putting the final touches to her education at the Gymnase and adored the plays that theater presented.

  The guests were in the contented state of languor and quiet that results from an exquisite meal, when we have demanded a little too much of our digestive capacities. Leaning back in their chairs, wrists and fingers resting lightly upon the table’s edge, a few guests played lazily with the gilded blades of their knives. When a dinner reaches that lull some people will work over a pear seed, others roll a pinch of bread between thumb and index finger, lovers shape clumsy letters out of fruit scraps, the miserly count their fruit pits and line them up on their plates the way a theater director arranges his extras at the rear of the stage. These small gastronomic felicities go unremarked by Brillat-Savarin, an otherwise observant writer. The serving staff had disappeared. The dessert table looked like a squadron after the battle, all dismembered, plundered, wilted. Platters lay scattered over the table despite the hostess’s determined efforts to set them back in order. A few people stared at some prints of Switzerland lined up on the gray walls of the dining room. No one was irritable; we have never known anyone to remain unhappy while digesting a good meal. We enjoy lingering in a becalmed state, a kind of midpoint between the reverie of a thinker and the contentment of a cud-chewing animal, a state that should be termed the physical melancholy of gastronomy.

  Thus the guests turned happily toward the good German, all of them delighted to have a tale to listen to, even a dull one. For during that benign interval, a storyteller’s voice always sounds delicious to our sated senses; it promotes their passive contentment. As an observer of scenes, I sat admiring these faces bright with smiles, lit by the candles and flushed dark by good food; their various expressions produced some piquant effects, seen through the candlesticks and porcelain baskets, the fruits and the crystal.

  My imagination was suddenly caught by the appearance of the guest directly across the table from me. He was a man of average height, somewhat plump, cheerful, with the style and bearing of a stockbroker, and apparently endowed with only a very ordinary turn of mind. I had not noticed him before, but just then his face, probably shadowed by a flicker of the light, seemed to me to change character: It had gone dull, earthen, furrowed with purplish folds. You might have described it as the cadaverous head of a dying man. He was immobile like a figure painted into a diorama; his vacant eyes stayed fixed on the glittering facets of a crystal stopper on a bottle, but he was certainly not counting them and seemed lost in some strange contemplation of the future or the past. I studied that puzzling face at some length, and it made me wonder: “Is he ill? Has he drunk too much? Has the market collapsed? Is he considering how to swindle his creditors?”

  “Look across there!” I murmured to the woman on my left, indicating the face of the unknown fellow. “Wouldn’t you say that’s the look of a bankruptcy about to happen?”

  “Oh,” she answered, “he’d be looking jollier if that were the case.” With a graceful tilt of the head, she added: “If that man should ever lose his fortune, it would be world news. He has millions in real estate. He used to be a provisioner for the imperial armies—a good fellow and rather unusual. He married his second wife as a financial move, but he does make her extremely happy. He has a pretty daughter, whom he refused to acknowledge for a very long time, but his son died—unfortunately killed in a duel—and that forced him to take the girl back into the household as they could no longer have children. The poor girl has suddenly become one of the richest heiresses in Paris. The loss of his only son has plunged this dear man into a grief that surfaces from time to time.”

  At that moment, the provisioner lifted his eyes to mine; his gaze made me shiver, it was so somber and pensive! That glance must sum up a whole lifetime. But suddenly his face turned merry: He took up the crystal stopper, set it crisply onto a carafe full of water that stood before his plate, and turned his head toward Monsieur Hermann with a smile. The man was beatific with gastronomic pleasure; he probably hadn’t a thought in his head, wasn’t pondering a thing. I immediately felt rather ashamed of squandering my powers of divination in anima vili—on a mere thickheaded financier. While I was engaged in pointless phrenological observation, the good German had filled his nose with a dose of snuff and started on his story. It would be difficult to reproduce the tale in the same terms, what with the man’s frequent interpolations and verbose digressions, so I have written it again here in my own way, leaving out the Nuremberger’s mistakes and using any poetic and interesting elements it might contain, with the boldness of those writers who somehow neglect to state on the title page of their publications: “Translated from the German.”

  THE IDEA AND THE FACT

  Late in the month of Vendémiaire in year VII of the republican era—or according to the style of our day, October 20, 1799—two young men left the city of Bonn in the morning and by day’s end had reached the outskirts of Andernach, a small town on the left bank of the Rhine a few leagues from Koblenz.

  At the time, the French army under General Augereau was holding maneuvers before the Austrian forces then occupying the right bank of the river. The republican division headquarters was Koblenz, and one of the demi-brigades from Augereau’s corps was stationed at Andernach. The two young travelers were French. By their uniforms (blue mixed with white and faced in red velvet), by their sabers, and especially by the hats covered in green oilcloth and ornamented with a tricolor plume, even the German peasants could recognize that these were military surgeons, men of science and skill who were generally well liked, not only by the army but also by the people whose lands the French troops had invaded. At that time, many youngsters of good family who were snatched from their medical training by General Jourdan’s recent conscription law quite naturally chose to continue their studies on the battlefield rather than be assigned to action as a soldier, a role so little suited to their previous training and their peaceable purpose. Men of science, pacific and useful, such young men did some good amid so much misery, and they got on well with the educated people in the various countries through which the cruel civilization of the Republic drove its way. Each carrying a travel warrant and credentials as assistant surgeon signed by Coste and Bernadotte, the two were reporting to their assigned demi-brigade. Both came of bourgeois families in Beauvais who were only moderately wealthy but in which the genteel manners and loyalties of the provinces were transmitted as part of their legacy. Drawn by a curiosity quite natural in the young to see the theater of war before they were actually obliged to begin their duties, they had traveled by coach as far as Strasbourg. Maternal prudence had provided them each with only a meager sum of money, but they felt rich with their few louis in hand, a veritable treasure in a period when the revolutionary banknotes had dropped to their lowest value and gold was worth a great deal.

  The two assistant surgeons, twenty years old at most, succumbed to the poetry of their situation with all the enthusiasm of youth. From Strasbourg to Bonn, they had toured the lands of the Electorate and the banks of the Rhine as artists, as philosophers, as observers. People of a scientific bent are at that age truly multifaceted beings. Even when making love, or traveling, a medical intern should be collecting the rudiments of his fortune or of his future renown. So the two youths surrendered to that profound admiration that seizes an educated person at the spectacle of the banks of the Rhine and the Swabian countryside between Mayence and Cologne: powerful, rich, hugely various nature full of feudal traces, lush green but everywhere stamped with the scars of steel and fire. Louis XIV and Marshal Turenne have cauterized that gorgeous land. Here and there ruins attest to the pride, or perhaps the foresight, of the Versailles king, who ordered the destruction of the fine châteaus that once grac
ed this part of Germany. Seeing this marvelous forested terrain abounding in the picturesque quality of the Middle Ages, however ruined, you sense the German spirit, its reveries and its mysticism.

  The two friends’ stay at Bonn had served the goals of both science and pleasure. The main hospital of the Gallo-Batavian Army and of Augereau’s division was installed in the actual palace of the elector. The newly qualified surgeons thus went there to see old schoolmates, present their letters of recommendation, and become acquainted with some basic aspects of their profession. But also, there as elsewhere, they were stripped of some of the narrow prejudices we all retain for so long about the superiority of the monuments and beauties of our own homeland. Surprised by the spectacle of the marble columns decorating the electoral palace, they went on to admire the grandeur of German buildings, and at every turn found still more antique or modern treasures. Time and again, the roads the two friends wandered on their way to Andernach would take them onto the peak of some granite mountain higher than the rest. From there, through a gap in the forest, through some crevice in the rock, they would glimpse the Rhine framed in the sandstone or festooned with vigorous plant life. The valleys, the trails, the trees released an autumnal fragrance that transports one toward reverie; the treetops were starting to turn golden, to take on warm, brown tones that signal aging; the leaves were dropping but the sky was still a deep azure, and the dry roads traced yellow lines through the landscape lit now by the slanted beams of the setting sun. Half a league before Andernach, the two friends walked their horses through a deep silence, as if the war were not devastating this lovely land, and they followed a trail cut for goats across the high bluish granite walls with the Rhine roiling past below. Soon they descended a slope of the gorge at whose base lay the little town set charmingly at the river’s edge, offering sailors a pretty port.

  “Germany is truly a beautiful country!” exclaimed one of the two youths, the one called Prosper Magnan, as he caught sight of Andernach’s colorful houses, nestled like eggs in a basket and separated by trees, gardens, and flowers. Then he stood for a moment admiring the pointed roofs with their projecting gables, the wooden staircases and galleries of a thousand tranquil houses, and the boats rocking to the waves in the harbor.

  When Monsieur Hermann pronounced the name Prosper Magnan, the provisioner seized the carafe, dashed water into his glass, and swallowed it in a single gulp. The movement having drawn my attention, I thought I noticed a slight trembling in the capitalist’s hands and a dampness on his brow.

  “What’s the provisioner’s name?” I quietly asked my helpful neighbor.

  “Taillefer,” she replied.

  “Are you feeling ill?” I asked him, seeing the curious fellow turn pale.

  “No, no,” he replied, thanking me with a polite wave. “I am listening,” he added, and nodded toward the other guests, who had all turned at once to look at him.

  Monsieur Hermann went on: “I’ve forgotten the name of the second young man, but from Prosper Magnan’s account, I learned that his companion was dark-haired, rather thin, and good-humored. If I may, I’ll call him Wilhelm, to make the storytelling easier to follow.”

  And so the good German took up the tale again, having—with no concern for the romantic or for local color—baptized the young French doctor with a Germanic name.

  When the two young men arrived at Andernach, night had fallen. Assuming that they would lose a good deal of time seeking out their commanders, establishing their credentials, and arranging for military billets in a city already full of soldiers, they resolved to spend their last night of freedom at an inn situated a short distance outside Andernach, and which from the rocky cliffs above they had admired for its rich coloring, lovelier still in the flames of the setting sun. Painted entirely in red, the building stood out sharply from the rest of the landscape, separated as it was from the general mass of the town itself and setting its broad crimson swath against the greens of the varied foliage, its vivid walls against the grayish tones of the water. The place owed its name to its exterior paintwork, which had probably been laid on eons ago at the whim of its original owner. A marketing superstition quite natural to the successive owners of the inn, renowned as it was among Rhine boatmen, had assiduously preserved the traditional decor. Hearing horses approach, the proprietor of the Red Inn came to the doorway.

  “Good lord,” he exclaimed. “Gentlemen, a moment later and you would have had to bed down outdoors under the stars, like most of your countrymen bivouacking at the other end of Andernach. My place is full. If you must have a real bed, all I can offer you is my own room. As for your horses, I’ll have hay put down for them in a corner of the courtyard. Today my stable is full of Christians . . . The gentlemen are arriving from France?” he went on after a slight pause.

  “From Bonn,” replied Prosper. “And we’ve had nothing to eat since morning.”

  “Oh well, as for food,” said the innkeeper nodding his head, “people come from ten leagues around to feast at the Red Inn! You’ll have a banquet fit for a prince—fish from the Rhine! That says it all.”

  Handing over their exhausted mounts to the host, who called rather uselessly for his grooms, the two young surgeons stepped into the inn’s common room. At first a thick whitish cloud exhaled by a crowd of smokers prevented them from seeing much of the people they would be joining, but once they were seated at a table, with the practical patience of philosophical travelers who have come to understand complaints are useless, they made out through the tobacco fumes the obligatory furnishings of a German inn: potbelly stove, clock, tables, beer mugs, long pipes; here and there a face stood out, Jewish, German, the rough mugs of a few river men. The epaulettes of several French officers glittered within the fog, and spurs and sabers clattered constantly against the stone floor. Some men were playing cards, others bickering or silent, eating, drinking, walking about. A short heavy woman wearing a black velvet bonnet, a blue-and-silver stomacher, a pincushion, a bundle of keys, a silver clasp, with her hair in braids—the distinctive markers of all mistresses of German inns, an outfit so regularly pictured in a thousand popular prints that it is too commonplace to bother describing—well then, the innkeeper’s wife did a skillful job of keeping the two youths alternately waiting and grumbling. Gradually the din lessened, the travelers retired, and the cloud of smoke cleared. By the time the doctors’ plates arrived and the classic Rhine carp appeared on the table, it was eleven o’clock and the room was empty. Through the nighttime silence they could hear the horses chomping their fodder and stamping a hoof, the murmur of the Rhine, and those indefinable sounds of a full house when everyone is bedding down. Doors and windows open and close, voices mumble half-heard words, and a few queries echo from the bedchambers. In that moment of quiet bustle, the two Frenchmen and their host—who was busily extolling Andernach, the food, the Rhine wine, the French Republican army, his wife—all pricked up their ears at the hoarse cries of a few sailors and the scrape of a boat against the wharf. The innkeeper, doubtless familiar with the guttural talk of boatmen, abruptly left the room and soon returned. He brought with him a short stout man trailed by two sailors carrying a heavy valise and a few bundles. The sailors set down the packs, and the man picked up his valise himself and kept it close as he unceremoniously sat down at the table facing the two young doctors.

  “Go sleep on your boat,” he told the sailors, “as the inn is full. All things considered, that will be better.”

  “Monsieur,” said the innkeeper to the new arrival, “this is all the food I have left.” And he pointed to the supper he had served to the two Frenchmen. “I haven’t one bread crust more, not a bone.”

  “No sauerkraut?”

  “Not even enough to fill my wife’s thimble! And as I had the honor of telling you, there’s not a bed to be had but the chair you’re sitting in, and no room but this one.”

  At these words, the short man cast upon the innkeeper, the room, and the two Frenchmen a gaze expressing equal meas
ures of fear and caution.

  Here Monsieur Hermann interrupted his tale. “At this point I must note,” he said, “that we never learned either the actual name nor the story of this stranger. His papers showed that he had come from Aix-la-Chapelle; he went by the name Walhenfer, and he owned a rather sizable pin factory outside Neuwied. Like all the manufacturers in that area, he was wearing a plain fabric redingote, trousers, and a waistcoat of deep green velours, boots, and a wide leather belt. His face was quite round, his manner open and cordial, but throughout the evening he had difficulty fully masking some secret worries, or perhaps some racking trouble. The innkeeper has always thought that the German businessman was fleeing his country. I later learned that his factory had been burned down by one of those random events unfortunately so frequent in wartime. Despite his generally anxious look, his face showed a very comradely disposition. He had handsome features, in particular a thick neck whose whiteness was so nicely set off by a black cravat that Wilhelm jokingly remarked on it to Prosper . . .”