The Human Comedy

by Honoré de Balzac

  On our side of the stairwell, there was only our room and another small one occupied by Z. Marcas, our neighbor. Juste and I lived for about six months utterly unaware of his presence. An elderly woman who ran the house had in fact told us the small room was occupied, but she added that we would not be disturbed in the slightest, the tenant was extraordinarily quiet. In fact, for six months we never saw our neighbor and we heard not a sound from the room despite the flimsiness of the wall between us—one of those partitions built of slats and plaster so common in Paris buildings.

  Our room, seven feet high, was lined in cheap blue wallpaper scattered with flowers. The painted floor had never known the polishers’ brushes. Thin mats lay alongside the beds. The chimney pipe stopped short above the roof and gave off so much smoke that we had to attach an extension to it, at our own expense. Our beds were painted wooden cots like the ones in boarding schools. On the mantelpiece stood only two copper candlesticks with or without candles in them, our two pipes, a little tobacco in a packet or loose, as well as some small heaps of cigar ash dropped there by visitors or ourselves. A couple of calico curtains slid along rods at the window, on either side of which hung the small cherrywood bookshelves familiar to anyone who ever strolled the Latin Quarter and on which we stacked the few books needed for our courses. The ink was always solid in the inkwell, like lava caked in the crater of a volcano. These days, can’t any inkwell become a Vesuvius? Our distorted pens we used for cleaning our pipestems. Contrary to the laws of credit, paper was even scarcer in our place than coin.

  How could young folk be expected to stay at home in furnished rooms like that? So students would often study in the cafés, in the theater, along the walks in the Luxembourg Gardens, in girlfriends’ quarters—anywhere, even at the law school—rather than in their rooms, which were awful for studying but charming for chatting and smoking. Spread a cloth on the table, lay out a last-minute dinner sent in from the best cookhouse in the neighborhood, four settings and two girls, catch the scene in a lithograph, and even a prig couldn’t help but smile at it.

  All we thought about was having a good time. The reason for our dissolute behavior was the very grave nature of the current political situation: Juste and I could see no place for us in the professions our parents insisted we should pursue. For every vacant post there are a hundred lawyers, a hundred doctors. Hordes of applicants block those two pathways, which are supposed to be the route to success but are more like two great arenas where men kill one another, not with knives or guns but with intrigue and slander and by horrendous toil, intellectual combat as murderous as the battles in Italy were for France’s Republican troops. Today, when everything is intellectual competition, a man must be capable of sitting in his chair at a desk for forty-eight hours straight just as a general had to sit for two days in his saddle on horseback.

  The crush of candidates has forced the medical field to divide into categories: the doctor who writes, the doctor who teaches, the political doctor, and the militant doctor—four different ways of being a doctor, four sectors already full to bursting. As for the fifth sector—the one involving doctors who peddle remedies—there is competition there, too, carried on by rivals posting squalid advertisements onto walls throughout Paris.

  And in every courtroom there are nearly as many lawyers as there are cases. The lawyer has been thrown back onto journalism, politics, literature. And the state, under siege for the lowliest posts in the justice system, has taken to requiring applicants to have independent means. The pear-shaped skull of some rich grocer’s son wins out over the square head of a talented but penniless youngster. Doing his utmost, deploying all his energy, a young man setting out from zero can wind up after ten years somewhere below where he started. Today, talent needs the kind of luck that favors the incompetent; in fact, if a skilled man rejects the vile arrangements that bring success to rampant mediocrity, he will never get on at all.

  While we understood our times perfectly well, we also understood ourselves, and we preferred a thinking man’s idleness to aimless agitation, loafing and pleasure to useless labors that would have taxed our enthusiasm and worn the edge off our intelligence. We analyzed the social situation while we laughed, smoked, and strolled around. But our thinking, our long discussions were no less wise, no less profound for going about them this way.

  Even though we were fully aware of the abject state to which the young generation was condemned, we were still astonished at the government’s brutal indifference toward anything to do with intellect, or thought, or poetry. What looks we exchanged, Juste and I, as we read the newspapers and watched the political goings-on, scanned the debates in the chambers, discussed the behavior of a court whose willful ignorance was matched only by the courtiers’ servility, the mediocre quality of the men who formed a hedge around the newly restored throne—all of them without wit or vision, without achievement or learning, without influence or nobility. What a compliment to the old court of Charles X is this one, if it can even be called a court! What hatred for the nation, handing citizenship to vulgar talentless foreigners who go on to be enthroned in the Chamber of Peers! What a miscarriage of justice! What an insult to our own distinguished youth, to the ambitions sprung from our own soil! We watched all these developments like theater, and we groaned over them without taking a position for ourselves.

  Juste, whom no one came to seek out and who would never seek out anyone himself, was, at twenty-five, a profound political thinker, a man with an extraordinary capacity to grasp obscure connections between present events and events yet to come. He told me in 1831 what was going to occur, and those things actually did come to pass: assassinations, conspiracies, the dominance of the Jews, France’s constraints on any real movement, the shortage of good minds in the upper echelons, and the abundance of talented men in the lower ranks, where the noblest hearts are smothered beneath cigar ash.

  What was to become of him? His family wanted him to be a doctor. But wouldn’t that mean spending twenty years to establish a practice? You know what did become of him? No? Well, he is a doctor, but he has left France—he is in the East. At this very moment, he may be fainting with exhaustion in a desert, he may be dying beneath the pummeling of a barbarian horde, or he may be the prime minister to some Hindu prince.

  My own vocation is action. Finishing school at twenty, I could join the army only as a common soldier, and unenthusiastic at the dreary prospect of a lawyer’s life, I set about acquiring a seaman’s skills. I shall do as Juste did: I mean to quit France, where in order to make any place at all for oneself requires expending the time and energy needed for the very loftiest activities. Do as I do, my friends: I’m off to where a man makes his own destiny as he pleases.

  These grand resolutions were coolly decided in that little room in the house on the rue Corneille, as we went along, stopping in at the Musard dance hall, flirting with the street girls, leading a wild, seemingly careless life. Our resolutions, our ponderings floated formless for a long while. Our neighbor Marcas was a kind of guide who led us to the edge of the precipice or the torrent and made us understand it, who showed us what our future would be if we let ourselves fall over. He put us on guard against making compromises with poverty in the name of hope, accepting a precarious position to fight from, succumbing to the wiles of Paris, that great courtesan who will take you up and drop you, who smiles on you and then just as lightly turns away, who wears down the firmest purpose with specious delays, and where Bad Luck is sustained by Chance.

  Our first encounter with Marcas was rather dazzling. Coming in separately before dinner after a day at the schools, we always went up to our room and waited there for one another, to discuss any change in our evening plans. One day, at four o’clock, Juste saw Marcas on the stairs; I had passed him in the street. It was November by now, and Marcas had no cloak; he wore thick-soled shoes, heavy felt trousers, and a blue frock coat buttoned up to the chin, with a stiff collar that lent an even more military look to his torso given his black
neckerchief. There is nothing unusual about such an outfit, but it did suit the style of the man and his face. My first impression at the sight of him wasn’t surprise or amazement, or sorrow, or interest, or pity, but a curiosity that combined traces of all those responses. He moved slowly, with a gait that suggested a deep melancholy, head crooked forward but not lowered like a man who feels himself to be guilty. His head, large and strong, seemed to contain the resources required for a highly ambitious man and looked heavy with thought, bent beneath the weight of some mental grief, but his expression showed no sign of any remorse. As for his face, a single word would describe it, according to a folk tradition that says every human face resembles some animal: Marcas’s was the lion. His hair looked like a mane, his nose was short, flattened, broad, and cleft at the tip like a lion’s. A strong groove divided his forehead into two prominent lobes; his furry cheekbones looked the sharper for the thinness of the flesh below; his huge mouth and hollow jaws—all were marked by a bold pattern of creases brought out by a complexion full of yellowish tones. This almost fearsome visage seemed brightened by two lights—eyes that were black but infinitely kind, calm, profound, full of thought. If I may express it so, those eyes were humiliated. Marcas was afraid to look at people—less for his own sake than for those on whom he might level his compelling gaze: He possessed a certain power, and he was reluctant to wield it; he wanted to spare passersby, so he feared to be noticed. This was not modesty but resignation, and not the Christian resignation that involves charity but the resignation advised by reason that sees our talents going useless, the impossibility of entering and living within the setting where we ought to be. At moments that gaze could shoot lightning. From that mouth one expected a thunderous voice; it was much like the mouth of Mirabeau.

  “I just saw an extraordinary man in the street,” I told Juste as I came in.

  “That must be our neighbor,” he answered, and described exactly the figure I had passed. “A man who lives like a wood louse must look that way.”

  “Such humility, and such dignity!”

  “The one is the effect of the other.”

  “So many hopes dashed, so many plans thwarted!”

  “Seven leagues’ worth of ruins! Obelisks and palaces and towers: the ruins of Palmyra in the desert.” Juste laughed.

  So we named our neighbor “the Ruins of Palmyra.” On our way out to dine in the gloomy restaurant on rue de la Harpe where we had meal tickets, we asked about the man in number 37, and thus we learned the wondrous name “Z. Marcas.” Like the children we were, we took to repeating it a hundred times in a hundred different ways, clownish and melancholic, that name whose sound lent itself so neatly to our game. Sometimes Juste would hiss the “Z” like a rising rocket, make a brilliant flash of the next syllable, then enact its fall to earth in the brief, blunt thud of the ending.

  “Ah . . . well, where and how does he make a living?” we wondered. From that question to the playful espionage born of curiosity, it took us only a moment to start our project. Instead of wandering the streets that night, we returned to the house, each with a book in hand, and sat down to read and listen. In the absolute silence of our garret we heard the soft, regular sound of the breathing of a man asleep.

  “He’s sleeping,” I said, as the first to make it out.

  “At seven o’clock!” Doctor replied. I called Juste “Doctor”; he called me “Attorney General.”

  “A person has got to be pretty unhappy to sleep as much as our neighbor does,” I said, as I climbed onto the dresser holding an enormous knife with a corkscrew in its handle. At the top of the partition I bored a round hole the size of a five-sou coin. It hadn’t occurred to me that there would be no light at the far side; I put my eye to the hole and all I saw was darkness. At one in the morning, having finished our books and starting to undress, we heard sounds from our neighbor’s room: He rose from his bed, struck a match, and lit his candle. I climbed back onto the dresser and spied Marcas seated at his table copying out what looked like legal documents. His room was half the size of ours; the bed stood in a recess beside the door, for the hallway ended at his threshold and its width added to his space. But apparently the land beneath the building was irregular, for that wall met the mansard ceiling at a slant. He had no fireplace, just a small white porcelain stove trimmed in green, with its pipe leading out onto the roof. The window in the slanted wall was hung with worn red curtains. An armchair, a table, and a flimsy nightstand made up the furnishings. His linens hung in a cupboard. The wallpaper was stained. Probably no one but a housemaid had ever lived there until Marcas arrived.

  “What did you see?” Doctor asked as I jumped down.

  “Look for yourself,” I replied.

  The following morning, at nine o’clock, Marcas was still in bed, asleep. He had breakfasted on a cervelat sausage—on a plate, among some bread crumbs, lay the remains of that mainstay we knew so well. He woke only at about eleven and sat down again to the copying he had begun during the night, which lay open on the table. Downstairs, we asked the price for that room and we were told it cost fifteen francs a month.

  In a few days we knew all about Z. Marcas’s way of life. He drew up documents, probably at so much per page, for a transcription service with offices in the courtyard of the Sainte-Chapelle. He worked through half the night; after sleeping six to ten hours he would return to his table and go on copying until three in the afternoon, then leave to deliver his copies before dinner. He would eat on rue Michel-le-Comte at Mizerai’s for about nine sous, then go home to sleep until six o’clock. We reckoned that Marcas said no more than fifteen sentences in the course of a month; he spoke to no one, and he said not a word to himself there in his horrid little garret.

  “Really, the Ruins of Palmyra are terribly silent!” exclaimed Juste.

  That silence, in a man whose appearance was so impressive, seemed deeply significant to us. Sometimes, running across him, we would exchange very interested looks, but they were never followed by any overture. Gradually the man became the object of our private admiration, though we could not explain it to ourselves. Was it his plain, private habits? The monastic routine? The hermit-like frugality? The idiot toil that left the mind free to be neutral or active, and which suggested expectation of some happy event or some exceptional attitude toward life?

  We spent a good while exploring the Ruins of Palmyra, and then forgot about him; we were so young. And then carnival arrived! The Parisian carnival that will overtake the old Venice carnival and in a few years draw the whole of Europe to Paris, that is if certain wretched police commissioners do not oppose it. Gambling ought to be tolerated during carnival, but the stupid moralists who had it outlawed are narrow-minded bean counters who will only bring back the necessary evil when it is clear that France regularly leaves millions on German gaming tables.

  The merry carnival reduced us to awful poverty, along with all the other students. We stripped ourselves of our luxury possessions, having already sold our extra suits, our extra boots, our extra waistcoats, whatever we had two of except our friends. We ate bread and sausages, we walked carefully to spare our shoes, we settled down to work. We owed two months’ rent and expected at any moment to be presented with a bill listing sixty or eighty charges amounting to forty or fifty francs. We quit our noisy passage through the tiled foyer at the bottom of the stairs; rather, we often crossed it in silence with a single leap from the last step right into the street. The day our pipe tobacco ran out, we realized that for the past several days we had been eating our bread without any kind of butter. The grief was enormous.

  “No more tobacco!” said Doctor.

  “No more overcoat!” said Attorney General.

  “Ah, you rascals! Dressing up like the Coachman of Longjumeau! You thought you’d live like dockworkers, snack in the morning and lunch at Very’s, maybe even at the Rocher de Cancale! Well, it’s back to dry crusts, gentlemen! You’d best” (here I broadened my voice) “go sleep under your beds, you’re n
ot worthy to sleep on top of them—”

  “Yes, but Attorney General! No more tobacco!” Juste cried.

  “It’s time to write to our aunts, our mothers, our sisters that we’re out of linens, that working in Paris could wear out even iron-mail underclothes. And we’ll solve an interesting chemistry problem: turning linens into silver.”

  “We’ve still got to live till they reply.”

  “Well, I’ll see about engineering a loan from friends who haven’t run through their capital yet.”

  “What can you get?”

  “Maybe ten francs!” I boasted.

  Marcas had heard the whole conversation: It was noontime. He knocked on our door and said, “Gentlemen, here is some tobacco. You can pay me back later.”

  We stood dumbstruck—not at the offer, which we accepted, but at the richness, the depth, the fullness of that voice; it could only be compared to the low string on Paganini’s violin. Marcas vanished without waiting for our thanks. We looked at each other, Juste and I, in utter silence. To be rescued by someone obviously poorer than ourselves! Juste sat down to write to all his familial sources, and I went off to negotiate the loan.

  I collected twenty francs from a hometown friend. In those hard but rollicking days gambling still went on, and mining its veins, tough as any mineral lode in Brazil, young people could risk a little and just possibly dig out a few chunks of gold. My countryman had some Turkish tobacco that a sailor had brought back from Constantinople, and he gave me the amount we had received from Z. Marcas. I sailed the rich cargo back to port, and we went in triumph to repay his black caporal with a voluptuous blond hank of Turkish tobacco.