The Human Comedy

by Honoré de Balzac

  “Madame has only just rung,” the chambermaid tells me. “I don’t believe she is ready for visitors yet.”

  “I will wait,” I said, sitting down in an armchair.

  In a moment the Persian blinds opened and the chambermaid returned to say, “Do come in, sir.” From the sweetness of her tone, I understood that her mistress would not be paying me. But what a beautiful woman then appeared! She had hastily covered her naked shoulders with a cashmere shawl so closely wrapped that their nude form could be made out beneath. Her gown was trimmed with snowy ruffles that announced that some fine laundress earned a good two thousand francs a year there. Thick locks of the woman’s black hair slipped free of a pretty plaid kerchief knotted carelessly around her head like a Creole woman. Her disordered bed was the picture of a sleepless night. A painter would have paid good money to spend a few moments observing the scene. Beneath a voluptuously slung canopy, a pillow tucked into a blue silk eiderdown, its lace edge in sharp relief against the azure quilt, bore the print of vague forms that stirred the imagination. At the feet of the lions carved into the mahogany bedposts lay a broad bearskin rug, upon which gleamed two white satin slippers flung down carelessly in exhaustion from the late ball. On a chair lay a rumpled gown, its sleeves touching the floor. Stockings that the faintest breeze might waft away twined around the leg of an armchair. White garters trailed along a chaise. An elegant fan, half spread, glowed on the mantelpiece. Drawers hung open; flowers, diamonds, gloves, a nosegay, a sash lay here and there. A light scent of perfume filled the air. All was luxury and disorder, beauty and disharmony; for her or for her worshipper, trouble crouching below was already lifting its head, grazing them with its sharp teeth.

  The countess’s drawn face resembled that bedroom strewn with the remains of a festive night. I felt pity for the scattered baubles that only the night before, arrayed together, had roused excitement and envy. These vestiges of a love corroded by remorse, this picture of a life of dissipation, of luxury and riot, evoked a Tantalus-like effort to clutch at fleeting delights as they slip out of reach . . . Red marks on the young woman’s face showed the delicacy of her skin, but her features seemed somehow coarsened and the brown rings beneath her eyes looked unusually dark. Still, nature flowed so powerfully in her that these signs of excess did not lessen her beauty. Her eyes sparkled. Like some Herodias from Leonardo’s brush (I used to deal in paintings), she was magnificent with life and vigor; there was nothing mean about her contours or features; she inspired love, and I sensed she must be even stronger than love. She was entrancing. It is a long while since my heart had beat so hard. So I was already repaid enough! I would readily give a thousand francs for a sensation that so recalled the days of my youth.

  “Sir,” she said, offering me a chair, “would you be kind enough to wait?”

  “Until noon tomorrow, madame,” I replied, as I refolded the paper I had presented her. “I cannot legally protest the note before then.”

  At the same time, I was thinking, “Pay up for your luxury, pay for your name, pay for your ease, pay for the monopoly you live by! To keep their holdings safe, the rich invented courtrooms and judges, and the guillotine—a candle that draws the ignorant fluttering up to be burnt. But for you who sleep upon silk and beneath silk, what waits is remorse, grinding teeth hidden behind a smile, and those fantastical lion jaws biting at your heart.”

  “Protest the note! Do you actually intend to do that?” she exclaimed, staring at me. “You have so little consideration for me!”

  “Madame, if the king himself owed me a debt and failed to pay, I would file a complaint against him, and even quicker than against any other debtor.”

  At that moment we heard a discreet knock at the door.

  “I am not in!” the young woman declared imperiously.

  “But Anastasie, I wish to see you!”

  “Not just now, my dear,” she replied, her tone slightly less harsh, but still far from gentle.

  “Nonsense, you are talking to someone now,” the voice retorted, and a man entered who could be none other than the count. The countess looked at me, and I understood instantly: She had become my slave.

  “Young man, there was a time when I might have been foolish enough not to protest an unpaid bill. In 1763 in Pondicherry, I let a woman off and she took me for a fine ride. I deserved it—why had I ever trusted her?”

  “What is your business here, sir?” the count asked me. I saw the woman trembling from head to foot; the sleek white skin of her neck turned rough with what people call “gooseflesh.” And I—I was laughing without twitching a muscle.

  “Monsieur is a merchant I have dealings with,” she said. The count turned his back to me; I drew the note partway out of my pocket again. Seeing this inexorable gesture, the young woman crossed the room and handed me a diamond. “Take this,” she said, “and go.”

  We exchanged the two assets, and with a bow I left the room. The diamond was easily worth twelve hundred francs to me. Outside in the courtyard I came across a crowd of lackeys brushing their uniforms, waxing their boots, scrubbing sumptuous carriages. I said to myself, “This is what brings these people to my office. This is what impels them to legally steal millions and betray their country. The great lord, or his would-be imitator, will plunge his whole self into the mud to keep a spot of it from hitting his boots if he were to go about on foot.” Just then the main gate opened to make way for the tilbury carriage of the young man who had given me the co-signed bill of exchange.

  “Monsieur,” I said when he had climbed down, “please return this two hundred francs to the countess and tell her that for the next week I will hold available the security she left with me this morning.”

  He took the two hundred francs and allowed himself a sardonic smile, as if to say, “Ha! She did pay it . . . Well, so much the better!”

  I could read the countess’s future on that face. This cold, handsome, blond gentleman, this soulless gambler, will ruin himself, ruin her, her husband, and their children, he will devour their fortunes and wreak more havoc in the Paris drawing rooms than a regiment’s worth of mortar shells.

  I went back to rue Montmartre to see Miss Fanny. I climbed a very steep staircase to the fifth floor and entered a two-room apartment where all was as neat as a new coin. I saw not a trace of dust on the furnishings of the first room, where I was received by Miss Fanny. She was a Parisian girl, simply dressed, her face fine and fresh, her gaze forthright. Her chestnut hair, smoothly coiffed, was looped into two curves at her temples, and set off the elegance of blue eyes as clear as crystal. Daylight filtered through small curtains at the casements and cast a soft gleam on her modest face. Around her, several pieces of cut fabric revealed her customary occupation: She worked as a seamstress. She seemed the very spirit of solitude. I presented her the signed bill of exchange, remarking that I had failed to find her in earlier that morning.

  “But I had left the money with the porter,” she said.

  I pretended not to hear her. “Mademoiselle goes out very early, it seems?”

  “I do not leave this room often, but when a person works all night, it is sometimes necessary to visit the baths.”

  I looked at her. With a single glance I understood everything about her life: This was a girl consigned by misfortune to a life of labor, her family most likely farmers, for she had some of those freckles common to country folk. Her features gave off a sense of goodness. I felt I had entered an atmosphere of sincerity, of candor, and my lungs seemed refreshed. The poor innocent was a believer: Above her plain-painted wood bed hung a crucifix with two sprigs of bay leaf. I was rather touched; I even felt inclined to charge her only twelve percent on her bill and thus help her to set up in some suitable little business. But then I thought, “Oh, but she might have a little cousin who would use her signature to raise money and live off the poor girl,” and I left, stifling my generous impulse, for I have often observed that while a charitable act may do no harm to the benefactor, it is death to t
he one who receives it.

  “Tonight, when you came into my room, I was musing that Fanny Malvaut would make a good little wife; I was comparing her pure, solitary life to the countess’s: That woman has already sunk to bills of exchange, and she will go tumbling on down to the depths of vice!

  “Well now,” Gobseck continued after a deep silence, during which I watched him with some curiosity, “do you think it’s nothing, this power to see into the most secret recesses of the human heart, to engage another person’s life, to see it all stripped naked? It is always drama, always different: hideous wounds, deathly sorrows, love scenes, griefs likely to end beneath the waters of the Seine, a young man’s pleasures that lead to the scaffold, despairing laughter, and sumptuous celebrations. Yesterday a tragedy: A good-hearted father hangs himself because he can no longer feed his children. Tomorrow a comedy: A young fellow will try an updated version of the Monsieur Dimanche scene on me. People rave about the eloquence of the latest preachers; I have wasted a little time listening to them, and they might persuade me to change my opinions but, as someone once said, never my actions. Well, I tell you: Those fine preachers, and your Mirabeaus and Vergniauds and such—they are all just stammering amateurs compared to the orators who come in and perform for me.

  “It may be a girl in love, or an old shopkeeper sliding toward collapse, a mother desperate to cover up her son’s misdeeds, a starving artist, or some prominent figure who’s slipping in favor and for lack of money may lose the fruit of his work—they’ve all made me shudder with the power of their words. These sublime actors perform for me alone, and they cannot manage to deceive me. My gaze is like God’s: I can see into their hearts. Nothing is hidden from me. No one refuses the man who ties and unties the purse strings. I am rich enough to buy the consciences of those who rule over the actions of ministers, from their office boys to their mistresses: Is that not power? I can have the loveliest women and their sweetest caresses: Is that not pleasure? Power and pleasure—do these two words together not sum up your whole social order?

  “There are a dozen of us here in Paris, all silent unknown kings, the arbiters of your destinies. Life is a machine fueled by money, is it not? The truth is this: Means are always tangled up with ends; you can never separate the soul from the senses, spirit from matter. Gold is the spiritual ground of your contemporary societies. Our bunch are bound together by similar interests; we meet on certain days of the week at Café Thémis, by the Pont Neuf. There we uncover the mysteries of finance. There is no fortune that can keep the truth from us; we know every family’s secrets. We keep a kind of black book where we track the most important bills issued and redeemed, drafts on the public credit system, on the bank, in trade. We are casuists of the stock exchange; we sit as a Vatican council judging and analyzing the slightest activities of everyone with any level of wealth —and our assessments are always right. One of us watches the judicial sector, another the financial sector; one the administrative world, another the commercial world. Myself, I follow eldest sons, the artists, fashionable society, the gamblers—the liveliest segment of Paris life. Everyone tells us his neighbor’s secrets; betrayed love and ruffled vanity are great gossips; vice and disappointment and vengeance are the sharpest detectives. Like myself, my colleagues have all enjoyed everything, had our fill of everything, and we’ve reached the point of enjoying power and money for the simple sake of power and money. Right here in this place,” he said, waving a hand about his bare cold room, “the fiercest lover, a man who anywhere else explodes at a word and draws his sword at a remark—here he will stand and implore me with his hands clasped! Here the most arrogant merchant, the vainest beauty, the most formidable general—all of them come here to plead, they beg and beseech, their eyes wet with rage or sorrow. Here in this room they kneel and pray—the most renowned artist or writer, people whose names will pass down to posterity. And in here,” he added, touching a hand to his brow, “inside here is a set of pitiless scales that weigh the wealth, the estates, the interests of all Paris.

  “So now: Do you still think there are no ecstasies beneath this blank mask whose impassive stillness has so often puzzled you?” he inquired, offering me his colorless face with its smell of money.

  I returned to my room in a daze. This dry little old fellow had grown vast. Before my eyes he had become a phantasm, the very power of gold made flesh. Life, mankind, filled me with horror. “Is it true, then, that everything must come down to money?” I wondered. That night, I remember, it was very late before I slept. I saw mounds of gold all around me. The lovely countess filled my mind; to my shame, I confess that she completely eclipsed the image of the simple chaste creature absorbed in a life of labor and obscurity. But the next morning, through the mists of waking, gentle Fanny appeared to me in all her beauty; I thought of nothing else but her.

  * * *

  “Would you like a glass of sugar water?” the viscountess broke in on Derville.

  “Very much,” he replied.

  “But I see nothing in your story that could concern us,” said Madame de Grandlieu as she rang for the drink.

  “Sardanapalus!” Derville cried, his customary exclamation. “Surely Mademoiselle Camille will be interested to hear that her happiness used to depend entirely on this Papa Gobseck, but that with the old man’s death just now, at eighty-nine, Monsieur de Restaud will soon come into a nice fortune. This will require some explanation. And as to Fanny Malvaut—you know her: She is my wife!”

  “The poor boy,” said the viscountess. “He’d proclaim it in front of twenty people, with his usual openness.”

  “I would shout it out to the whole universe,” said the attorney.

  “Drink up, my poor Derville. You will never be anything but the happiest and best of men.”

  The old uncle raised his dozing head. “I left you at rue du Helder, in some countess’s house,” he said. “What have you done with her?”

  Derville resumed his tale.

  * * *

  A few days after my conversation with the old Dutchman, I presented my thesis, won my law license, and soon became an attorney. The old miser’s confidence in me increased enormously. He took to consulting me—without pay—about various thorny projects he was undertaking, investments founded on solid investigation but which other counselors would have considered unwise. This man, whom no one had ever influenced in the slightest, listened to my advice with a kind of respect. And in truth he always did quite well with it.

  Time passed, and I was named head clerk of the firm where I had been working for three years; I left my lodgings at rue des Grès and moved into my employer’s house; I would have room, board, and a salary of one hundred fifty francs a month. A wonderful day! When I went to say farewell to my neighbor the usurer, he gave no sign of either friendship or regret, he did not ask me to come see him, he merely gave me one of those looks that, from him, somehow implied the gift of second sight. A week later, though, I did receive a visit from the old man; he brought me a rather difficult case, an expropriation; and he continued to make use of my free consultations as readily as if he were paying for them.

  After two years in my new situation, through 1818 and 1819, my employer, a man who lived extravagantly and spent freely, found himself in serious difficulties and was forced to sell his practice. Although at that time a professional office didn’t yet command the exorbitant prices of today, my employer was still practically giving his away, asking only one hundred fifty thousand francs. I thought that an energetic man, skilled and intelligent, could manage to live respectably, meet the interest payments on such a sum, and pay off the principal in ten years, if he inspired trust. But as the seventh son of a small tradesman from Noyon, I didn’t have a sou to my name, and the only capitalist I knew in the world was Papa Gobseck. An ambitious idea, and some inexplicable glimmer of hope, gave me the courage to go see him, and so one evening I slowly made my way to rue des Grès. My heart pounded in my chest as I knocked at the door to the gloomy house. I recalled
everything the old miser used to tell me, back when I never imagined what violent anxieties stormed on this threshold. I was now about to beg and entreat like so many others . . .

  “Well, no!” I told myself. “An honest man should maintain his dignity in every circumstance. Not even a fortune is worth groveling for. I’ll look just as confident as he is.”

  Since I’d left the place, Papa Gobseck had taken over my room to avoid having a new neighbor; he had set a small grilled window into the door, which he didn’t open until after he looked through the grille and saw my face.

  “Well, now!” he said in his thin fluting voice. “So your employer is selling his practice?”

  “How do you know that? He has told no one but me!”

  The old man’s lips stretched into a crease at the corners, exactly like curtains, and the silent smile was accompanied by a cold gaze. “It took such an event to bring you here,” he added dryly after a pause, during which I stood confused.

  “Listen to me, Monsieur Gobseck,” I began again, with what calm I could muster, standing before this old man who stared at me with impassive eyes, their clear fire making me uneasy.

  He gestured as if to say “Go on.”

  “I know you’re not easily moved, so I will not waste any eloquence trying to describe the situation of a penniless clerk whose only hope lies in you, and who knows no heart in the world but yours that could understand his prospects. But we can leave heart aside: Business is business, nothing mawkish like a novel. So here are the facts: In my employer’s hands, the practice brings in some twenty thousand francs annually, but I believe that in mine it could be doubled. He wants to sell it for one hundred fifty thousand francs. I feel, right in here,” I said, tapping my forehead, “that if you were to lend me the funds to buy it, I could repay you within ten years.”