“Nearly all these statesmen are dead, and no secrecy is due to them. They belong to history; and the history of that night and its consequences has been terrible. I tell it to you now because I alone know it; because Louis XVIII. never revealed the truth to that poor Madame de Cinq-Cygne; and because the present government which I serve is wholly indifferent as to whether the truth be known to the world or not.
“All four of these personages sat down in the boudoir. The lame man undoubtedly closed the door before a word was said; it is even thought that he ran the bolt. It is only persons of high rank who pay attention to such trifles. The three priests had the livid, impassible faces which you all remember. Carnot alone was ruddy. He was the first to speak. ‘What is the point to be discussed?’ he asked. ‘France,’ must have been the answer of the Prince (whom I admire as one of the most extraordinary men of our time). ‘The Republic,’ undoubtedly said Fouche. ‘Power,’ probably said Sieyes.”
All present looked at each other. With voice, look, and gesture de Marsay had wonderfully represented the three men.
“The three priests fully understood one another,” he continued, resuming his narrative. “Carnot no doubt looked at his colleagues and the ex-consul in a dignified manner. He must, however, have felt bewildered in his own mind.
“‘Do you believe in the success of the army?’ Sieyes said to him.
“‘We may expect everything from Bonaparte,’ replied the minister of war; ‘he has crossed the Alps.’
“‘At this moment,’ said the minister of foreign affairs, with deliberate slowness, ‘he is playing his last stake.’
“‘Come, let’s speak out,’ said Fouche; ‘what shall we do if the First Consul is defeated? Is it possible to collect another army? Must we continue his humble servants?’
“‘There is no republic now,’ remarked Sieyes; ‘Bonaparte is consul for ten years.’
“‘He has more power than ever Cromwell had,’ said the former bishop, ‘and he did not vote for the death of the king.’
“‘We have a master,’ said Fouche; ‘the question is, shall we continue to keep him if he loses the battle or shall we return to a pure republic?’
“‘France,’ replied Carnot, sententiously, ‘cannot resist except she reverts to the old Conventional energy.’
“‘I agree with Carnot,’ said Sieyes; ‘if Bonaparte returns defeated we must put an end to him; he has let us know him too well during the last seven months.’
“‘The army is for him,’ remarked Carnot, thoughtfully.
“‘And the people for us!’ cried Fouche.
“‘You go fast, monsieur,’ said the Prince, in that deep bass voice which he still preserves and which now drove Fouche back into himself.
“‘Be frank,’ said a voice, as a former Conventional rose from a corner of the boudoir and showed himself; ‘if Bonaparte returns a victor, we shall adore him; if vanquished, we’ll bury him!’
“‘So you were there, Malin, were you?’ said the Prince, without betraying the least feeling. ‘Then you must be one of us; sit down’; and he made him a sign to be seated.
“It is to this one circumstance that Malin, a Conventional of small repute, owes the position he afterwards obtained and, ultimately, that in which we see him at the present moment. He proved discreet, and the ministers were faithful to him; but they made him the pivot of the machine and the cat’s-paw of the machination. To return to my tale.
“‘Bonaparte has never yet been vanquished,’ cried Carnot, in a tone of conviction, ‘and he has just surpassed Hannibal.’
“‘If the worst happens, here is the Directory,’ said Sieyes, artfully, indicating with a wave of his hand the five persons present.
“‘And,’ added the Prince, ‘we are all committed to the maintenance of the French republic; we three priests have literally unfrocked ourselves; the general, here, voted for the death of the king; and you,’ he said, turning to Malin, ‘have got possession of the property of emigres.’
“‘Yes, we have all the same interests,’ said Sieyes, dictatorially, ‘and our interests are one with those of the nation.’
“‘A rare thing,’ said the Prince, smiling.
“‘We must act,’ interrupted Fouche. ‘In all probability the battle is now going on; the Austrians outnumber us; Genoa has surrendered; Massena has committed the great mistake of embarking for Antibes; it is very doubtful if he can rejoin Bonaparte, who will then be reduced to his own resources.’
“‘Who gave you that news?’ asked Carnot.
“‘It is sure,’ replied Fouche. ‘You will have the courier when the Bourse opens.’
“Those men didn’t mince their words,” said de Marsay, smiling, and stopping short for a moment.
“‘Remember,’ continued Fouche, ‘it is not when the news of a disaster comes that we can organize clubs, rouse the patriotism of the people, and change the constitution. Our 18th Brumaire ought to be prepared beforehand.’
“‘Let us leave the care of that to the minister of police,’ said the Prince, bowing to Fouche, ‘and beware ourselves of Lucien.’ (Lucien Bonaparte was then minister of the interior.)
“‘I’ll arrest him,’ said Fouche.
“‘Messieurs!’ cried Sieyes, ‘our Directory ought not to be subject to anarchical changes. We must organize a government of the few, a Senate for life, and an elective chamber the control of which shall be in our hands; for we ought to profit by the blunders of the past.’
“‘With such a system, there would be peace for me,’ remarked the ex-bishop.
“‘Find me a sure man to negotiate with Moreau; for the Army of the Rhine will be our sole resource,’ cried Carnot, who had been plunged in meditation.
“Ah!” said de Marsay, pausing, “those men were right. They were grand in this crisis. I should have done as they did”; then he resumed his narrative.
“‘Messieurs!’ cried Sieyes, in a grave and solemn tone.
“That word ‘Messieurs!’ was perfectly understood by all present; all eyes expressed the same faith, the same promise, that of absolute silence, and unswerving loyalty to each other in case the First Consul returned triumphant.
“‘We all know what we have to do,’ added Fouche.
“Sieyes softly unbolted the door; his priestly ear had warned him. Lucien entered the room.
“‘Good news!’ he said. ‘A courier has just brought Madame Bonaparte a line from the First Consul. The campaign has opened with a victory at Montebello.’
“The three ministers exchanged looks.
“‘Was it a general engagement?’ asked Carnot.
“‘No, a fight, in which Lannes has covered himself with glory. The affair was bloody. Attacked with ten thousand men by eighteen thousand, he was only saved by a division sent to his support. Ott is in full retreat. The Austrian line is broken.’
“‘When did the fight take place?’ asked Carnot.
“‘On the 8th,’ replied Lucien.
“‘And this is the 13th,’ said the sagacious minister. ‘Well, if that is so, the destinies of France are in the scale at the very moment we are speaking.’”
(In fact, the battle of Marengo did begin at dawn of the 14th.)
“‘Four days of fatal uncertainty!’ said Lucien.
“‘Fatal?’ said the minister of foreign affairs, coldly and interrogatively.
“‘Four days,’ echoed Fouche.
“An eye-witness told me,” said de Marsay, continuing the narrative in his own person, “that the consuls, Cambaceres and Lebrun, knew nothing of this momentous news until after the six personages returned to the salon. It was then four in the morning. Fouche left first. That man of dark and mysterious genius, extraordinary, profound, and little understood, but who undoubtedly had the gifts of a Philip the Second, a Tiberius and a Borgia, went at once to work with an infernal and secret activity. His conduct at the time of the affair at Walcheren was that of a consummate soldier, a great politician, a far-seeing administrator.
He was the only real minister that Napoleon ever had. And you all know how he then alarmed him.
“Fouche, Massena and the Prince,” continued de Marsay, reflectively, “are the three greatest men, the wisest heads in diplomacy, war, and government, that I have ever known. If Napoleon had frankly allied them with his work there would no longer be a Europe, only a vast French Empire. Fouche did not finally detach himself from Napoleon until he saw Sieyes and the Prince de Talleyrand shoved aside.
“He now went to work, and in three days (all the while hiding the hand that stirred the ashes of the Montagne) he had organized that general agitation which then arose all over France and revived the republicanism of 1793. As it is necessary that I should explain this obscure corner of our history, I must tell you that this agitation, starting from Fouche’s own hand (which held the wires of the former Montagne), produced republican plots against the life of the First Consul, which was in peril from this cause long after the victory of Marengo. It was Fouche’s sense of the evil he had thus brought about which led him to warn Napoleon, who held a contrary opinion, that republicans were more concerned than royalists in the various conspiracies.
“Fouche was an admirable judge of men; he relied on Sieyes because of his thwarted ambition, on Talleyrand because he was a great seigneur, on Carnot for his perfect honesty; but the man he dreaded was the one whom you have seen here this evening. I will now tell how he entangled that man in his meshes.
“Malin was only Malin in those days, — a secret agent and correspondent of Louis XVIII. Fouche now compelled him to reduce to writing all the proclamations of the proposed revolutionary government, its warrants and edicts against the factions of the 18th Brumaire. An accomplice against his own will, Malin was required to have these documents secretly printed, and the copies held ready in his own house for distribution if Bonaparte were defeated. The printer was subsequently imprisoned and detained two months; he died in 1816, and always believed he had been employed by a Montagnard conspiracy.
“One of the most singular scenes ever played by Fouche’s police was caused by the blunder of an agent, who despatched a courier to a famous banker of that day with the news of a defeat at Marengo. Victory, you will remember, did not declare itself for Napoleon until seven o’clock in the evening of the battle. At midday the banker’s agent, considering the day lost and the French army about to be annihilated, hastened to despatch the courier. On receipt of that news Fouche was about to put into motion a whole army of bill-posters and cries, with a truck full of proclamations, when the second courier arrived with the news of the triumph which put all France beside itself with joy. There were heavy losses at the Bourse, of course. But the criers and posters who were gathered to announce the political death of Bonaparte and to post up the new proclamations were only kept waiting awhile till the news of the victory could be struck off!
“Malin, on whom the whole responsibility of the plot of which he had been the working agent was likely to fall if it ever became known, was so terrified that he packed the proclamations and other papers in carts and took them down to Gondreville in the night-time, where no doubt they were hidden in the cellars of that chateau, which he had bought in the name of another man — who was it, by the bye? he had him made chief-justice of an Imperial court — Ah! Marion. Having thus disposed of these damning proofs he returned to Paris to congratulate the First Consul on his victory. Napoleon, as you know, rushed from Italy to Paris after the battle of Marengo with alarming celerity. Those who know the secret history of that time are well aware that a message from Lucien brought him back. The minister of the interior had foreseen the attitude of the Montagnard party, and though he had no idea of the quarter from which the wind really blew, he feared a storm. Incapable of suspecting the three ministers and Carnot, he attributed the movement which stirred all France to the hatred his brother had excited by the 18th Brumaire, and to the confident belief of the men of 1793 that defeat was certain in Italy.
“The battle of Marengo detained Napoleon on the plains of Lombardy until the 25th of June, but he reached Paris on the 2nd of July. Imagine the faces of the five conspirators as they met the First Consul at the Tuileries, and congratulated him on the victory. Fouche on that very occasion at the palace told Malin to have patience, for all was not over yet. The truth was, Talleyrand and Fouche both held that Bonaparte was not as much bound to the principles of the Revolution as they were, and as he ought to be; and for this reason, as well as for their own safety, they subsequently, in 1804, buckled him irrevocably, as they believed, to its cause by the affair of the Duc d’Enghien. The execution of that prince is connected by a series of discoverable ramifications with the plot which was laid on that June evening in the boudoir of the ministry of foreign affairs, the night before the battle of Marengo. Those who have the means of judging, and who have known persons who were well-informed, are fully aware that Bonaparte was handled like a child by Talleyrand and Fouche, who were determined to alienate him irrevocably from the House of Bourbon, whose agents were even then, at the last moment, endeavoring to negotiate with the First Consul.”
“Talleyrand was playing whist in the salon of Madame de Luynes,” said a personage who had been listening attentively to de Marsay’s narrative. “It was about three o’clock in the morning, when he pulled out his watch, looked at it, stopped the game, and asked his three companions abruptly and without any preface whether the Prince de Conde had any other children than the Duc d’Enghien. Such an absurd inquiry from the lips of Talleyrand caused the utmost surprise. ‘Why do you ask us what you know perfectly well yourself?’ they said to him. ‘Only to let you know that the House of Conde comes to an end at this moment.’ Now Monsieur de Talleyrand had been at the hotel de Luynes the entire evening, and he must have known that Bonaparte was absolutely unable to grant the pardon.”
“But,” said Eugene de Rastignac, “I don’t see in all this any connection with Madame de Cinq-Cygnes and her troubles.”
“Ah, you were so young at that time, my dear fellow; I forgot to explain the conclusion. You all know the affair of the abduction of the Comte de Gondreville, then senator of the Empire, for which the Simeuse brothers and the two d’Hauteserres were condemned to the galleys, — an affair which did, in fact, lead to their death.”
De Marsay, entreated by several persons present to whom the circumstances were unknown, related the whole trial, stating that the mysterious abductors were five sharks of the secret service of the ministry of the police, who were ordered to obtain the proclamations of the would-be Directory which Malin had surreptitiously taken from his house in Paris, and which he had himself come to Gondreville for the express purpose of destroying, being convinced at last that the Empire was on a sure foundation and could not be overthrown. “I have no doubt,” added de Marsay, “that Fouche took the opportunity to have the house searched for the correspondence between Malin and Louis XVIII., which was always kept up, even during the Terror. But in this cruel affair there was a private element, a passion of revenge in the mind of the leader of the party, a man named Corentin, who is still living, and who is one of those subaltern agents whom nothing can replace and who makes himself felt by his amazing ability. It appears that Madame, then Mademoiselle de Cinq-Cygne, had ill-treated him on a former occasion when he attempted to arrest the Simeuse brothers. What happened afterwards in connection with the senator’s abduction was the result of his private vengeance.
“These facts were known, of course, to Malin, and through him to Louis XVIII. You may therefore,” added de Marsay, turning to the Princesse de Cadignan, “explain the whole matter to the Marquise de Cinq-Cygne, and show her why Louis XVIII. thought fit to keep silence.”
The Deputy of Arcis
Translated by Katharine Prescott Wormeley
This novel was intended to be composed of three parts (The Election, Count Sallenauve and Family Beauvisage), but the final two parts were left incomplete on Balzac’s death. The trilogy was begun in 1839 and the first
part was published in 1847 under the title L’Élection. All three texts were finally published in 1854, with the help of Charles Rabou, who finished the incomplete two parts, under the instructions of the Countess Hanska, Balzac’s wife.
The novel is set in 1839 and introduces Simon Giguet, an ambitious lawyer and son of a colonel of the Empire, who has applied for the district election of Arcis-sur-Aube, an area previously reserved to the banker Keller.
An original illustration
THE ELECTION
CONTENTS
I. ALL ELECTIONS BEGIN WITH A BUSTLE
II. REVOLT OF A LIBERAL ROTTEN-BOROUGH
III. OPPOSITION DEFINES ITSELF
IV. THE FIRST PARLIAMENTARY TEMPEST
V. THE PERPLEXITIES OF THE GOVERNMENT IN ARCIS
VI. THE CAMPAIGN OF 1814 FROM THE HOSIERY POINT OF VIEW
VII. THE BEAUVISAGE FAMILY
VIII. IN WHICH THE DOT, ONE OF THE HEROINES OF THIS HISTORY, APPEARS
IX. A STRANGER
X. THE REVELATIONS OF AN OPERA-GLASS
XI. IN WHICH THE CANDIDATE BEGINS TO LOSE VOTES
XII. THE SALON OF MADAME D’ESPARD
XIII. PREFACE BEFORE LETTERING
I. ALL ELECTIONS BEGIN WITH A BUSTLE
Before beginning to describe an election in the provinces, it is proper to state that the town of Arcis-sur-Aube was not the theatre of the events here related.
The arrondissement of Arcis votes at Bar-sur-Aube, which is forty miles from Arcis; consequently there is no deputy from Arcis in the Chamber.
Discretion, required in a history of contemporaneous manners and morals, dictates this precautionary word. It is rather an ingenious contrivance to make the description of one town the frame for events which happened in another; and several times already in the course of the Comedy of Human Life, this means has been employed in spite of its disadvantages, which consist chiefly in making the frame of as much importance as the canvas.
Works of Honore De Balzac Page 896