“Behold a lieutenant of Alexander,” said Cesar, with the gaiety of grief, pointing to the sign.
This forced gaiety, through which an inextinguishable sense of the superiority which Birotteau attributed to himself was naively revealed, made Ragon shudder in spite of his seventy years. Cesar saw his wife passing down letters and papers for Popinot to sign; he could neither restrain his tears nor keep his face from turning pale.
“Good-morning, my friend,” she said to him, smiling.
“I do not ask if you are comfortable here,” said Cesar, looking at Popinot.
“As if I were living with my own son,” she answered, with a tender manner that struck her husband.
Birotteau took Popinot and kissed him, saying, —
“I have lost the right, forever, of calling him my son.”
“Let us hope!” said Popinot. “Your oil succeeds — thanks to my advertisements in the newspapers, and to Gaudissart, who has travelled over the whole of France; he has inundated the country with placards and prospectuses; he is now at Strasburg getting the prospectuses printed in the German language, and he is about to descend, like an invasion, upon Germany itself. We have received orders for three thousand gross.”
“Three thousand gross!” exclaimed Cesar.
“And I have bought a piece of land in the Faubourg Saint-Marceau, — not dear, — where I am building a manufactory.”
“Wife,” whispered Cesar to Constance, “with a little help we might have pulled through.”
After that fatal day Cesar, his wife, and daughter understood each other. The poor clerk resolved to attain an end which, if not impossible, was at least gigantic in its enterprise, — namely, the payment of his debts to their last penny. These three beings, — father, mother, daughter, — bound together by the tie of a passionate integrity, became misers, denying themselves everything; a farthing was sacred in their eyes. Out of sheer calculation Cesarine threw herself into her business with the devotion of a young girl. She sat up at night, taxing her ingenuity to find ways of increasing the prosperity of the establishment, and displaying an innate commercial talent. The masters of the house were obliged to check her ardor for work; they rewarded her by presents, but she refused all articles of dress and the jewels which they offered her. Money! money! was her cry. Every month she carried her salary and her little earnings to her uncle Pillerault. Cesar did the same; so did Madame Birotteau. All three, feeling themselves incapable, dared not take upon themselves the responsibility of managing their money, and they made over to Pillerault the whole business of investing their savings. Returning thus to business, the latter made the most of these funds by negotiations at the Bourse. It was known afterwards that he had been helped in this work by Jules Desmarets and Joseph Lebas, both of whom were eager to point out opportunities which Pillerault might take without risk.
Cesar, though he lived with his uncle, never ventured to question him as to what was done with the money acquired by his labor and that of his wife and daughter. He walked the streets with a bowed head, hiding from every eye his stricken, dull, distraught face. He felt, with self-reproach, that the cloth he wore was too good for him.
“At least,” he said to Pillerault, with a look that was angelic, “I do not eat the bread of my creditors. Your bread is sweet to me, though it is your pity that gives it; thanks to your sacred charity, I do not steal a farthing of my salary!”
The merchants, his old associates, who met the clerk could see no vestige of the perfumer. Even careless minds gained an idea of the immensity of human disaster from the aspect of this man, on whose face sorrow had cast its black pall, who revealed the havoc caused by that which had never before appeared in him, — by thought! N’est pas detruit qui veut. Light-minded people, devoid of conscience, to whom all things are indifferent, can never present such a spectacle of disaster. Religion alone sets a special seal upon fallen human beings; they believe in a future, in a divine Providence; from within them gleams a light that marks them, a look of saintly resignation mingled with hope, which lends them a certain tender emotion; they realize all that they have lost, like the exiled angel weeping at the gates of heaven. Bankrupts are forbidden to enter the Bourse. Cesar, driven from the regions of integrity, was like an angel sighing for pardon. For fourteen months he lived on, full of religious thoughts with which his fall inspired him, and denying himself every pleasure. Though sure of the Ragons’ friendship, nothing could induce him to dine with them, nor with the Lebas, nor the Matifats, nor the Protez and Chiffrevilles, not even with Monsieur Vauquelin; all of whom were eager to do honor to his rare virtue. Cesar preferred to be alone in his room rather than meet the eye of a creditor. The warmest greetings of his friends reminded him the more bitterly of his position. Constance and Cesarine went nowhere. On Sundays and fete days, the only days when they were at liberty, the two women went to fetch Cesar at the hour for Mass, and they stayed with him at Pillerault’s after their religious duties were accomplished. Pillerault often invited the Abbe Loraux, whose words sustained Cesar in this life of trial. And in this way their lives were spent. The old ironmonger had too tough a fibre of integrity not to approve of Cesar’s sensitive honor. His mind, however, turned on increasing the number of persons among whom the poor bankrupt might show himself with an open brow, and an eye that could meet the eyes of his fellows.
VII
In the month of May, 1821, this family, ever grappling with adversity, received a first reward for its efforts at a little fete which Pillerault, the arbiter of its destinies, prepared for it. The last Sunday of that month was the anniversary of the day on which Constance had consented to marry Cesar. Pillerault, in concert with the Ragons, hired a little country-house at Sceaux, and the worthy old ironmonger silently prepared a joyous house-warming.
“Cesar,” said Pillerault, on the Saturday evening, “to-morrow we are all going into the country, and you must come.”
Cesar, who wrote a superb hand, spent his evenings in copying for Derville and other lawyers. On Sundays, justified by ecclesiastical permission, he worked like a Negro.
“No,” he said, “Monsieur Derville is waiting for a guardianship account.”
“Your wife and daughter ought to have some reward. You will meet none but our particular friends, — the Abbe Loraux, the Ragons, Popinot, and his uncle. Besides, I wish it.”
Cesar and his wife, carried along by the whirlwind of business, had never revisited Sceaux, though from time to time each longed to see once more the tree under which the head-clerk of “The Queen of Roses” had fainted with joy. During the trip, which Cesar made in a hackney-coach with his wife and daughter, and Popinot who escorted them, Constance cast many meaning glances at her husband without bringing to his lips a single smile. She whispered a few words in his ear; for all answer he shook his head. The soft signs of her tenderness, ever-present yet at the moment forced, instead of brightening Cesar’s face made it more sombre, and brought the long-repressed tears into his eyes. Poor man! he had gone over this road twenty years before, young, prosperous, full of hope, the lover of a girl as beautiful as their own Cesarine; he was dreaming then of happiness. To-day, in the coach before him, sat his noble child pale and worn by vigils, and his brave wife, whose only beauty now was that of cities through whose streets have flowed the lava waves of a volcano. Love alone remained to him! Cesar’s sadness smothered the joy that welled up in the hearts of Cesarine and Anselme, who embodied to his eyes the charming scene of other days.
“Be happy, my children! you have earned the right,” said the poor father in heart-rending tones. “You may love without one bitter thought.”
As he said these words he took his wife’s hands and kissed them with a sacred and admiring effect which touched Constance more than the brightest gaiety. When they reached the house where Pillerault, the Ragons, the Abbe Loraux, and Popinot the judge were waiting for them, these five choice people assumed an air and manner and speech which put Cesar at his ease; for all were deeply moved
to see him still on the morrow of his great disaster.
“Go and take a walk in the Aulnay woods,” said Pillerault, putting Cesar’s hand into that of Constance; “go with Anselme and Cesarine! but come back by four o’clock.”
“Poor souls, we should be a restraint upon them,” said Madame Ragon, touched by the deep grief of her debtor. “He will be very happy presently.”
“It is repentance without sin,” said the Abbe Loraux.
“He could rise to greatness only through adversity,” said the judge.
To forget is the great secret of strong, creative natures, — to forget, in the way of Nature herself, who knows no past, who begins afresh, at every hour, the mysteries of her untiring travail.
Feeble existences, like that of Birotteau, live sunk in sorrows, instead of transmuting them into doctrines of experience: they let them saturate their being, and are worn-out, finally, by falling more and more under the weight of past misfortunes.
When the two couples reached the path which leads to the woods of Aulnay, placed like a crown upon the prettiest hillside in the neighborhood of Paris, and from which the Vallee-aux-Loups is seen in all its coquetry, the beauty of the day, the charm of the landscape, the first spring verdure, the delicious memory of the happiest day of all his youth, loosened the tight chords in Cesar’s soul; he pressed the arm of his wife against his beating heart; his eye was no longer glassy, for the light of pleasure once more brightened in it.
“At last,” said Constance to her husband, “I see you again, my poor Cesar. I think we have all behaved well enough to allow ourselves a little pleasure now and then.”
“Ought I?” said the poor man. “Ah! Constance, thy affection is all that remains to me. Yes, I have lost even my old self-confidence; I have no strength left; my only desire is that I may live to die discharged of debt on earth. Thou, dear wife, thou who art my wisdom and my prudence, thou whose eyes saw clear, thou who art irreproachable, thou canst have pleasure. I alone — of us three — am guilty. Eighteen months ago, in the midst of that fatal ball, I saw my Constance, the only woman I have ever loved, more beautiful than the young girl I followed along this path twenty years ago — like our children yonder! In eighteen months I have blasted that beauty, — my pride, my legitimate and sanctioned pride. I love thee better since I know thee well. Oh, dear!” he said, giving to the word a tone which reached to the inmost heart of his wife, “I would rather have thee scold me, than see thee so tender to my pain.”
“I did not think,” she said, “that after twenty years of married life the love of a wife for her husband could deepen.”
These words drove from Cesar’s mind, for one brief moment, all his sorrows; his heart was so true that they were to him a fortune. He walked forward almost joyously to their tree, which by chance had not been felled. Husband and wife sat down beneath it, watching Anselme and Cesarine, who were sauntering across the grassy slope without perceiving them, thinking probably that they were still following.
“Mademoiselle,” Anselme was saying, “do not think me so base and grasping as to profit by your father’s share which I have acquired in the Cephalic Oil. I am keeping his share for him; I nurse it with careful love. I invest the profits; if there is any loss I put it to my own account. We can only belong to one another on the day when your father is restored to his position, free of debt. I work for that day with all the strength that love has given me.”
“Will it come soon?” she said.
“Soon,” said Popinot. The word was uttered in a tone so full of meaning, that the chaste and pure young girl inclined her head to her dear Anselme, who laid an eager and respectful kiss upon her brow, — so noble was her gesture and action.
“Papa, all is well,” she said to Cesar with a little air of confidence. “Be good and sweet; talk to us, put away that sad look.”
When this family, so tenderly bound together, re-entered the house, even Cesar, little observing as he was, saw a change in the manner of the Ragons which seemed to denote some remarkable event. The greeting of Madame Ragon was particularly impressive; her look and accent seemed to say to Cesar, “We are paid.”
At the dessert, the notary of Sceaux appeared. Pillerault made him sit down, and then looked at Cesar, who began to suspect a surprise, though he was far indeed from imagining the extent of it.
“My nephew, the savings of your wife, your daughter, and yourself, for the last eighteen months, amounted to twenty thousand francs. I have received thirty thousand by the dividend on my claim. We have therefore fifty thousand francs to divide among your creditors. Monsieur Ragon has received thirty thousand francs for his dividend, and you have now paid him the balance of his claim in full, interest included, for which monsieur here, the notary of Sceaux, has brought you a receipt. The rest of the money is with Crottat, ready for Lourdois, Madame Madou, the mason, carpenter, and the other most pressing creditors. Next year, we may do as well. With time and patience we can go far.”
Birotteau’s joy is not to be described; he threw himself into his uncle’s arms, weeping.
“May he not wear his cross?” said Ragon to the Abbe Loraux.
The confessor fastened the red ribbon to Cesar’s buttonhole. The poor clerk looked at himself again and again during the evening in the mirrors of the salon, manifesting a joy at which people thinking themselves superior might have laughed, but which these good bourgeois thought quite natural.
The next day Birotteau went to find Madame Madou.
“Ah, there you are, good soul!” she cried. “I didn’t recognize you, you have turned so gray. Yet you don’t really drudge, you people; you’ve got good places. As for me, I work like a turnspit that deserves baptism.”
“But, madame — ”
“Never mind, I don’t mean it as a reproach,” she said. “You have got my receipt.”
“I came to tell you that I shall pay you to-morrow, at Monsieur Crottat’s, the rest of your claim in full, with interest.”
“Is that true?”
“Be there at eleven o’clock.”
“Hey! there’s honor for you! good measure and running over!” she cried with naive admiration. “Look here, my good monsieur, I am doing a fine trade with your little red-head. He’s a nice young fellow; he lets me earn a fair penny without haggling over it, so that I may get an equivalent for that loss. Well, I’ll get you a receipt in full, anyhow; you keep the money, my poor old man! La Madou may get in a fury, and she does scold; but she has got something here — ” she cried, thumping the most voluminous mounds of flesh ever yet seen in the markets.
“No,” said Birotteau, “the law is plain. I wish to pay you in full.”
“Then I won’t deny you the pleasure,” she said; “and to-morrow I’ll trumpet your conduct through the markets. Ha! it’s rare, rare!”
The worthy man had much the same scene, with variations, at Lourdois the house painter’s, father-in-law of Crottat. It was raining; Cesar left his umbrella at the corner of the door. The prosperous painter, seeing the water trickling into the room where he was breakfasting with his wife, was not tender.
“Come, what do you want, my poor Pere Birotteau?” he said, in the hard tone which some people take to importunate beggars.
“Monsieur, has not your son-in-law told you — ”
“What?” cried Lourdois, expecting some appeal.
“To be at his office this morning at half past eleven, and give me a receipt for the payment of your claims in full, with interest?”
“Ah, that’s another thing! Sit down, Monsieur Birotteau, and eat a mouthful with us.”
“Do us the pleasure to share our breakfast,” said Madame Lourdois.
“You are doing well, then?” asked the fat Lourdois.
“No, monsieur, I have lived from hand to mouth, that I might scrape up this money; but I hope, in time, to repair the wrongs I have done to my neighbor.”
“Ah!” said the painter, swallowing a mouthful of pate de foie gras, “you are truly a man
of honor.”
“What is Madame Birotteau doing?” asked Madame Lourdois.
“She is keeping the books of Monsieur Anselme Popinot.”
“Poor people!” said Madame Lourdois, in a low voice to her husband.
“If you ever need me, my dear Monsieur Birotteau, come and see me,” said Lourdois. “I might help — ”
“I do need you — at eleven o’clock to-day, monsieur,” said Birotteau, retiring.
This first result gave courage to the poor bankrupt, but not peace of mind. On the contrary, the thought of regaining his honor agitated his life inordinately; he completely lost the natural color of his cheeks, his eyes grew sunken and dim, and his face hollow. When old acquaintances met him, in the morning at eight o’clock or in the evening at four, as he went to and from the Rue de l’Oratoire, wearing the surtout coat he wore at the time of his fall, and which he husbanded as a poor sub-lieutenant husbands his uniform, — his hair entirely white, his face pale, his manner timid, — some few would stop him in spite of himself; for his eye was alert to avoid those he knew as he crept along beside the walls, like a thief.
“Your conduct is known, my friend,” said one; “everybody regrets the sternness with which you treat yourself, also your wife and daughter.”
“Take a little more time,” said others; “the wounds of money do not kill.”
“No, but the wounds of the soul do,” the poor worn Cesar answered one day to his friend Matifat.
At the beginning of the year 1822, the Canal Saint-Martin was begun. Land in the Faubourg du Temple increased enormously in value. The canal would cut through the property which du Tillet had bought of Cesar Birotteau. The company who obtained the right of building it agreed to pay the banker an exorbitant sum, provided they could take possession within a given time. The lease Cesar had granted to Popinot, which went with the sale to du Tillet, now hindered the transfer to the canal company. The banker came to the Rue des Cinq-Diamants to see the druggist. If du Tillet was indifferent to Popinot, it is very certain that the lover of Cesarine felt an instinctive hatred for du Tillet. He knew nothing of the theft and the infamous scheme of the prosperous banker, but an inward voice cried to him, “The man is an unpunished rascal.” Popinot would never have transacted the smallest business with him; du Tillet’s very presence was odious to his feelings. Under the present circumstances it was doubly so, for the banker was now enriched through the forced spoliation of his former master; the lands about the Madeleine, as well as those in the Faubourg du Temple, were beginning to rise in price, and to foreshadow the enormous value they were to reach in 1827. So that after du Tillet had explained the object of his visit, Popinot looked at him with concentrated wrath.
Works of Honore De Balzac Page 594