The poet told the history of his agony, pouring out a flood of clamorous thoughts into those friendly hearts, Eve and David listening in pained silence to a torrent of woes that exhibited such greatness and such pettiness.
“M. de Bargeton is an old dotard. The indigestion will carry him off before long, no doubt,” Lucien said, as he made an end, “and then I will look down on these proud people; I will marry Mme. de Bargeton. I read to-night in her eyes a love as great as mine for her. Yes, she felt all that I felt; she comforted me; she is as great and noble as she is gracious and beautiful. She will never give me up.”
“It is time that life was made smooth for him, is it not?” murmured David, and for answer Eve pressed his arm without speaking. David guessed her thoughts, and began at once to tell Lucien about his own plans.
If Lucien was full of his troubles, the lovers were quite as full of themselves. So absorbed were they, so eager that Lucien should approve their happiness, that neither Eve nor David so much as noticed his start of surprise at the news. Mme. de Bargeton’s lover had been dreaming of a great match for his sister; he would reach a high position first, and then secure himself by an alliance with some family of influence, and here was one more obstacle in his way to success! His hopes were dashed to the ground. “If Mme. de Bargeton consents to be Mme. de Rubempre, she would never care to have David Sechard for a brother-in-law!”
This stated clearly and precisely was the thought that tortured Lucien’s inmost mind. “Louise is right!” he thought bitterly. “A man with a career before him is never understood by his family.”
If the marriage had not been announced immediately after Lucien’s fancy had put M. de Bargeton to death, he would have been radiant with heartfelt delight at the news. If he had thought soberly over the probable future of a beautiful and penniless girl like Eve Chardon, he would have seen that this marriage was a piece of unhoped-for good fortune. But he was living just now in a golden dream; he had soared above all barriers on the wings of an if; he had seen a vision of himself, rising above society; and it was painful to drop so suddenly down to hard fact.
Eve and David both thought that their brother was overcome with the sense of such generosity; to them, with their noble natures, the silent consent was a sign of true friendship. David began to describe with kindly and cordial eloquence the happy fortunes in store for them all. Unchecked by protests put in by Eve, he furnished his first floor with a lover’s lavishness, built a second floor with boyish good faith for Lucien, and rooms above the shed for Mme. Chardon — he meant to be a son to her. In short, he made the whole family so happy and his brother-in-law so independent, that Lucien fell under the spell of David’s voice and Eve’s caresses; and as they went through the shadows beside the still Charente, a gleam in the warm, star-lit night, he forgot the sharp crown of thorns that had been pressed upon his head. “M. de Rubempre” discovered David’s real nature, in fact. His facile character returned almost at once to the innocent, hard-working burgher life that he knew; he saw it transfigured and free from care. The buzz of the aristocratic world grew more and more remote; and when at length they came upon the paved road of L’Houmeau, the ambitious poet grasped his brother’s hand, and made a third in the joy of the happy lovers.
“If only your father makes no objection to the marriage,” he said.
“You know how much he troubles himself about me; the old man lives for himself,” said David. “But I will go over to Marsac to-morrow and see him, if it is only to ask leave to build.”
David went back to the house with the brother and sister, and asked Mme. Chardon’s consent to his marriage with the eagerness of a man who would fain have no delay. Eve’s mother took her daughter’s hand, and gladly laid it in David’s; and the lover, grown bolder on this, kissed his fair betrothed on the forehead, and she flushed red, and smiled at him.
“The betrothal of the poor,” the mother said, raising her eyes as if to pray for heaven’s blessing upon them. — ”You are brave, my boy,” she added, looking at David, “but we have fallen on evil fortune, and I am afraid lest our bad luck should be infectious.”
“We shall be rich and happy,” David said earnestly. “To begin with, you must not go out nursing any more, and you must come and live with your daughter and Lucien in Angouleme.”
The three began at once to tell the astonished mother all their charming plans, and the family party gave themselves up to the pleasure of chatting and weaving a romance, in which it is so pleasant to enjoy future happiness, and to store the unsown harvest. They had to put David out at the door; he could have wished the evening to last for ever, and it was one o’clock in the morning when Lucien and his future brother-in-law reached the Palet Gate. The unwonted movement made honest Postel uneasy; he opened the window, and looking through the Venetian shutters, he saw a light in Eve’s room.
“What can be happening at the Chardons’?” thought he, and seeing Lucien come in, he called out to him —
“What is the matter, sonny? Do you want me to do anything?”
“No, sir,” returned the poet; “but as you are our friend, I can tell you about it; my mother has just given her consent to my sister’s engagement to David Sechard.”
For all answer, Postel shut the window with a bang, in despair that he had not asked for Mlle. Chardon earlier.
David, however, did not go back into Angouleme; he took the road to Marsac instead, and walked through the night the whole way to his father’s house. He went along by the side of the croft just as the sun rose, and caught sight of the old “bear’s” face under an almond-tree that grew out of the hedge.
“Good day, father,” called David.
“Why, is it you, my boy? How come you to be out on the road at this time of day? There is your way in,” he added, pointing to a little wicket gate. “My vines have flowered and not a shoot has been frosted. There will be twenty puncheons or more to the acre this year; but then look at all the dung that has been put on the land!”
“Father, I have come on important business.”
“Very well; how are your presses doing? You must be making heaps of money as big as yourself.”
“I shall some day, father, but I am not very well off just now.”
“They all tell me that I ought not to put on so much manure,” replied his father. “The gentry, that is M. le Marquis, M. le Comte, and Monsieur What-do-you-call-’em, say that I am letting down the quality of the wine. What is the good of book-learning except to muddle your wits? Just you listen: these gentlemen get seven, or sometimes eight puncheons of wine to the acre, and they sell them for sixty francs apiece, that means four hundred francs per acre at most in a good year. Now, I make twenty puncheons, and get thirty francs apiece for them — that is six hundred francs! And where are they, the fools? Quality, quality, what is quality to me? They can keep their quality for themselves, these Lord Marquises. Quality means hard cash for me, that is what it means, You were saying? — — ”
“I am going to be married, father, and I have come to ask for — — ”
“Ask me for what? Nothing of the sort, my boy. Marry; I give you my consent, but as for giving you anything else, I haven’t a penny to bless myself with. Dressing the soil is the ruin of me. These two years I have been paying money out of pocket for top-dressing, and taxes, and expenses of all kinds; Government eats up everything, nearly all the profit goes to the Government. The poor growers have made nothing these last two seasons. This year things don’t look so bad; and, of course, the beggarly puncheons have gone up to eleven francs already. We work to put money into the coopers’ pockets. Why, are you going to marry before the vintage? — — ”
“I only came to ask for your consent, father.”
“Oh! that is another thing. And who is the victim, if one may ask?”
“I am going to marry Mlle. Eve Chardon.”
“Who may she be? What kind of victual does she eat?”
“She is the daughter of the late M. Chardon,
the druggist in L’Houmeau.”
“You are going to marry a girl out of L’Houmeau! you! a burgess of Angouleme, and printer to His Majesty! This is what comes of book-learning! Send a boy to school, forsooth! Oh! well, then she is very rich, is she, my boy?” and the old vinegrower came up closer with a cajoling manner; “if you are marrying a girl out of L’Houmeau, it must be because she has lots of cash, eh? Good! you will pay me my rent now. There are two years and one-quarter owing, you know, my boy; that is two thousand seven hundred francs altogether; the money will come just in the nick of time to pay the cooper. If it was anybody else, I should have a right to ask for interest; for, after all, business is business, but I will let you off the interest. Well, how much has she?”
“Just as much as my mother had.”
The old vinegrower very nearly said, “Then she has only ten thousand francs!” but he recollected just in time that he had declined to give an account of her fortune to her son, and exclaimed, “She has nothing!”
“My mother’s fortune was her beauty and intelligence,” said David.
“You just go into the market and see what you can get for it! Bless my buttons! what bad luck parents have with their children. David, when I married, I had a paper cap on my head for my whole fortune, and a pair of arms; I was a poor pressman; but with the fine printing-house that I gave you, with your industry, and your education, you might marry a burgess’ daughter, a woman with thirty or forty thousand francs. Give up your fancy, and I will find you a wife myself. There is some one about three miles away, a miller’s widow, thirty-two years old, with a hundred thousand francs in land. There is your chance! You can add her property to Marsac, for they touch. Ah! what a fine property we should have, and how I would look after it! They say she is going to marry her foreman Courtois, but you are the better man of the two. I would look after the mill, and she should live like a lady up in Angouleme.”
“I am engaged, father.”
“David, you know nothing of business; you will ruin yourself, I see. Yes, if you marry this girl out of L’Houmeau, I shall square accounts and summons you for the rent, for I see that no good will come of this. Oh! my presses, my poor presses! it took some money to grease you and keep you going. Nothing but a good year can comfort me after this.”
“It seems to me, father, that until now I have given you very little trouble — — ”
“And paid mighty little rent,” put in his parent.
“I came to ask you something else besides. Will you build a second floor to your house, and some rooms above the shed?”
“Deuce a bit of it; I have not the cash, and that you know right well. Besides, it would be money thrown clean away, for what would it bring in? Oh! you get up early of a morning to come and ask me to build you a place that would ruin a king, do you? Your name may be David, but I have not got Solomon’s treasury. Why, you are mad! or they changed my child at nurse. There is one for you that will have grapes on it,” he said, interrupting himself to point out a shoot. “Offspring of this sort don’t disappoint their parents; you dung the vines, and they repay you for it. I sent you to school; I spent any amount of money to make a scholar of you; I sent you to the Didots to learn your business; and all this fancy education ends in a daughter-in-law out of L’Houmeau without a penny to her name. If you had not studied books, if I had kept you under my eye, you would have done as I pleased, and you would be marrying a miller’s widow this day with a hundred thousand francs in hand, to say nothing of the mill. Oh! your cleverness leads you to imagine that I am going to reward this fine sentiment by building palaces for you, does it?... Really, anybody might think that the house that has been a house these two hundred years was nothing but a pigsty, not fit for the girl out of L’Houmeau to sleep in! What next! She is the Queen of France, I suppose.”
“Very well, father, I will build the second floor myself; the son will improve his father’s property. It is not the usual way, but it happens so sometimes.”
“What, my lad! you can find money for building, can you, though you can’t find money to pay the rent, eh! You sly dog, to come round your father.”
The question thus raised was hard to lay, for the old man was only too delighted to seize an opportunity of posing as a good father without disbursing a penny; and all that David could obtain was his bare consent to the marriage and free leave to do what he liked in the house — at his own expense; the old “bear,” that pattern of a thrifty parent, kindly consenting not to demand the rent and drain the savings to which David imprudently owned. David went back again in low spirits. He saw that he could not reckon on his father’s help in misfortune.
In Angouleme that day people talked of nothing but the Bishop’s epigram and Mme. de Bargeton’s reply. Every least thing that happened that evening was so much exaggerated and embellished and twisted out of all knowledge, that the poet became the hero of the hour. While this storm in a teacup raged on high, a few drops fell among the bourgeoisie; young men looked enviously after Lucien as he passed on his way through Beaulieu, and he overheard chance phrases that filled him with conceit.
“There is a lucky young fellow!” said an attorney’s clerk, named Petit-Claud, a plain-featured youth who had been at school with Lucien, and treated him with small, patronizing airs.
“Yes, he certainly is,” answered one of the young men who had been present on the occasion of the reading; “he is a good-looking fellow, he has some brains, and Mme. de Bargeton is quite wild about him.”
Lucien had waited impatiently until he could be sure of finding Louise alone. He had to break the tidings of his sister’s marriage to the arbitress of his destinies. Perhaps after yesterday’s soiree, Louise would be kinder than usual, and her kindness might lead to a moment of happiness. So he thought, and he was not mistaken; Mme. de Bargeton met him with a vehemence of sentiment that seemed like a touching progress of passion to the novice in love. She abandoned her hands, her beautiful golden hair, to the burning kisses of the poet who had passed through such an ordeal.
“If only you could have seen your face whilst you were reading,” cried Louise, using the familiar tu, the caress of speech, since yesterday, while her white hands wiped the pearls of sweat from the brows on which she set a poet’s crown. “There were sparks of fire in those beautiful eyes! From your lips, as I watched them, there fell the golden chains that suspend the hearts of men upon the poet’s mouth. You shall read Chenier through to me from beginning to end; he is the lover’s poet. You shall not be unhappy any longer; I will not have it. Yes, dear angel, I will make an oasis for you, there you shall live your poet’s life, sometimes busy, sometimes languid; indolent, full of work, and musing by turns; but never forget that you owe your laurels to me, let that thought be my noble guerdon for the sufferings which I must endure. Poor love! the world will not spare me any more than it has spared you; the world is avenged on all happiness in which it has no share. Yes, I shall always be a mark for envy — did you not see that last night? The bloodthirsty insects are quick enough to drain every wound that they pierce. But I was happy; I lived. It is so long since all my heartstrings vibrated.”
The tears flowed fast, and for all answer Lucien took Louise’s hand and gave it a lingering kiss. Every one about him soothed and caressed the poet’s vanity; his mother and his sister and David and Louise now did the same. Every one helped to raise the imaginary pedestal on which he had set himself. His friends’s kindness and the fury of his enemies combined to establish him more firmly in an unreal world. A young imagination readily falls in with the flattering estimates of others, a handsome young fellow so full of promise finds others eager to help him on every side, and only after one or two sharp and bitter lessons does he begin to see himself as an ordinary mortal.
“My beautiful Louise, do you mean in very truth to be my Beatrice, a Beatrice who condescends to be loved?”
Louise raised the fine eyes, hitherto down-dropped.
“If you show yourself worthy — some day!�
� she said, with an angelic smile which belied her words. “Are you not happy? To be the sole possessor of a heart, to speak freely at all times, with the certainty of being understood, is not this happiness?”
“Yes,” he answered, with a lover’s pout of vexation.
“Child!” she exclaimed, laughing at him. “Come, you have something to tell me, have you not? You came in absorbed in thought, my Lucien.”
Lucien, in fear and trembling, confided to his beloved that David was in love with his sister Eve, and that his sister Eve was in love with David, and that the two were to be married shortly.
“Poor Lucien!” said Louise, “he was afraid he should be beaten and scolded, as if it was he himself that was going to be married! Why, where is the harm?” she continued, her fingers toying with Lucien’s hair. “What is your family to me when you are an exception? Suppose that my father were to marry his cook, would that trouble you much? Dear boy, lovers are for each other their whole family. Have I a greater interest than my Lucien in the world? Be great, find the way to win fame, that is our affair!”
This selfish answer made Lucien the happiest of mortals. But in the middle of the fantastic reasonings, with which Louise convinced him that they two were alone in the world, in came M. de Bargeton. Lucien frowned and seemed to be taken aback, but Louise made him a sign, and asked him to stay to dinner and to read Andre de Chenier aloud to them until people arrived for their evening game at cards.
“You will give her pleasure,” said M. de Bargeton, “and me also. Nothing suits me better than listening to reading aloud after dinner.”
Cajoled by M. de Bargeton, cajoled by Louise, waited upon with the respect which servants show to a favored guest of the house, Lucien remained in the Hotel de Bargeton, and began to think of the luxuries which he enjoyed for the time being as the rightful accessories of Lucien de Rubempre. He felt his position so strong through Louise’s love and M. de Bargeton’s weakness, that as the rooms filled, he assumed a lordly air, which that fair lady encouraged. He tasted the delights of despotic sway which Nais had acquired by right of conquest, and liked to share with him; and, in short, that evening he tried to act up to the part of the lion of the little town. A few of those who marked these airs drew their own conclusions from them, and thought that, according to the old expression, he had come to the last term with the lady. Amelie, who had come with M. du Chatelet, was sure of the deplorable fact, in a corner of the drawing-room, where the jealous and envious gathered together.
Works of Honore De Balzac Page 464