_To Monsieur le baron de Nucingen_:
My dear Baron,--The bearer of this letter is Monsieur Cesar
Birotteau, deputy-mayor of the second arrondissement, and one of
the best known manufacturers of Parisian perfumery; he wishes to
have business relations with your house. You can confidently do
all that he asks of you; and in obliging him you will oblige
Your friend,
F. Du Tillet.
Du Tillet did not dot the _i_ in his signature. To those with whom he
did business this intentional error was a sign previously agreed upon.
The strongest recommendations, the warmest appeals contained in the
letter were to mean nothing. All such letters, in which exclamation
marks were suppliants and du Tillet placed himself, as it were, upon
his knees, were to be considered as extorted by necessity; he could
not refuse to write them, but they were to be regarded as not written.
Seeing the _i_ without a dot, the correspondent was to amuse the
petitioner with empty promises. Even men of the world, and sometimes
the most distinguished, are thus gulled like children by business men,
bankers, and lawyers, who all have a double signature,--one dead,
the other living. The cleverest among them are fooled in this way. To
understand the trick, we must experience the two-fold effects of a warm
letter and a cold one.
“You have saved me, du Tillet!” said Cesar, reading the letter.
“Thank heaven!” said du Tillet, “ask for what money you want. When
Nucingen reads my letter he will give you all you need. Unhappily, my
own funds are tied up for a few days; if not, I certainly would not send
you to the great banking princes. The Kellers are mere pygmies compared
to Baron de Nucingen. Law reappears on earth in Nucingen. With this
letter of mine you can face the 15th of January, and after that, we will
see about it. Nucingen and I are the best friends in the world; he would
not disoblige me for a million.”
“It is a guarantee in itself,” thought Birotteau, as he went away full
of gratitude to his old clerk. “Well, a benefit is never lost!” he
continued, philosophizing very wide of the mark. Nevertheless, one
thought embittered his joy. For several days he had prevented his wife
from looking into the ledgers; he had put the business on Celestin’s
shoulders and assisted in it himself; he wished, apparently, that his
wife and daughter should be at liberty to take full enjoyment out of
the beautiful appartement he had given them. But the first flush of
happiness over, Madame Birotteau would have died rather than renounce
her right of personally inspecting the affairs of the house,--of
holding, as she phrased it, the handle of the frying-pan. Birotteau was
at his wits’ end; he had used all his cunning in trying to hide from his
wife the symptoms of his embarrassment. Constance strongly disapproved
of sending round the bills; she had scolded the clerks and accused
Celestin of wishing to ruin the establishment, thinking that it was all
his doing. Celestin, by Birotteau’s order, had allowed himself to be
scolded. In the eyes of the clerks Madame Cesar governed her husband;
for though it is possible to deceive the public, the inmates of a
household are never deceived as to who exercises the real authority.
Birotteau knew that he must now reveal his real situation to his wife,
for the account with du Tillet needed an explanation. When he got back
to the shop, he saw, not without a shudder, that Constance was sitting
in her old place behind the counter, examining the expense account, and
no doubt counting up the money in the desk.
“How will you meet your payments to-morrow?” she whispered as he sat
down beside her.
“With money,” he answered, pulling out the bank-bills, and signing to
Celestin to take them.
“Where did you get that money?”
“I’ll tell you all about it this evening. Celestin, write down, ‘Last of
March, note for ten thousand francs, to du Tillet’s order.’”
“Du Tillet!” repeated Constance, struck with consternation.
“I am going to see Popinot,” said Cesar; “it is very wrong in me not to
have gone before. Have we sold his oil?”
“The three hundred bottles he sent us are all gone.”
“Birotteau, don’t go out; I want to speak to you,” said Constance,
taking him by the arm, and leading him into her bedroom with an
impetuosity which would have caused a laugh under other circumstances.
“Du Tillet,” she said, when she had made sure no one but Cesarine was
with them,--“du Tillet, who robbed us of three thousand francs! So you
are doing business with du Tillet,--a monster, who wished to seduce me,”
she whispered in his ear.
“Folly of youth,” said Birotteau, assuming for the nonce the tone of a
free-thinker.
“Listen to me, Birotteau! You are all upset; you don’t go to the
manufactory any more; there is something the matter, I feel it! You must
tell me; I must know what it is.”
“Well,” said Birotteau, “we came very near being ruined,--we were ruined
this very morning; but it is all safe now.”
And he told the horrible story of his two weeks’ misery.
“So that was the cause of your illness!” exclaimed Constance.
“Yes, mamma,” cried Cesarine, “and papa has been so courageous! All that
I desire in life is to be loved as he loves you. He has thought only of
your grief.”
“My dream is fulfilled!” said the poor woman, dropping upon the sofa at
the corner of the fireplace, pale, livid, terrified. “I foresaw it all.
I warned you on that fatal night, in our old room which you pulled to
pieces, that we should have nothing left but our eyes to weep with. My
poor Cesarine, I--”
“Now, there you go!” cried Cesar; “you will take away from me the
courage I need.”
“Forgive me, dear friend,” said Constance, taking his hand, and pressing
it with a tenderness which went to the heart of the poor man. “I do
wrong. Misfortune has come; I will be silent, resigned, strong to bear
it. No, you shall never hear a complaint from me.” She threw herself
into his arms, weeping, and whispering, “Courage, dear friend, courage!
I will have courage for both, if necessary.”
“My oil, wife,--my oil will save us!”
“May God help us!” said Constance.
“Anselme will help my father,” said Cesarine.
“I’ll go and see him,” cried Cesar, deeply moved by the passionate
accents of his wife, who after nineteen years of married life was not
yet fully known to him. “Constance, fear nothing! Here, read du
Tillet’s letter to Monsieur de Nucingen; we are sure to obtain a credit.
Besides,” he said, allowing himself a necessary lie, “there is our uncle
Pillerault; that is enough to give us courage.”
“If that were all!” said Constance, smiling.
Birotteau, relieved of a heavy weight, walked away like a man suddenly
set at liberty, though he felt within him that indefinable sinking which
succeeds great moral struggles in which more of the nervous fluid, more
of the will is emitted than should be spent at one time, and by which,
if we may say so, the capital of the existence is drawn upon. Birotteau
had aged already.
* * * * *
The house of A. Popinot, Rue des Cinq-Diamants, had undergone a great
change in two months. The shop was repainted. The shelves, re-varnished
and gilded and crowded with bottles, rejoiced the eye of those who had
eyes to see the symptoms of prosperity. The floors were littered with
packages and wrapping-paper. The storerooms held small casks of various
oils, obtained for Popinot on commission by the devoted Gaudissart. The
ledgers, the accounts, and the desks were moved into the rooms above the
shop and the back-shop. An old cook did all the household work for the
master and his three clerks. Popinot, penned up in a corner of the shop
closed in with glass, might be seen in a serge apron and long sleeves
of green linen, with a pen behind his ear, in the midst of a mass of
papers, where in fact Birotteau now found him, as he was overhauling his
letters full of proposals and checks and orders. At the words “Hey, my
boy!” uttered by his old master, Popinot raised his head, locked up his
cubby-hole, and came forward with a joyous air and the end of his nose a
little red. There was no fire in the shop, and the door was always open.
“I feared you were never coming,” he said respectfully.
The clerks crowded round to look at the distinguished perfumer, the
decorated deputy-mayor, the partner of their own master. Birotteau,
so pitifully small at the Kellers, felt a craving to imitate
those magnates; he stroked his chin, rose on his heels with native
self-complacency, and talked his usual platitudes.
“Hey, my lad! we get up early, don’t we?” he remarked.
“No, for we don’t always go to bed,” said Popinot. “We must clutch
success.”
“What did I tell you? My oil will make your fortune!”
“Yes, monsieur. But the means employed to sell it count for something. I
have set your diamond well.”
“How do we stand?” said Cesar. “How far have you got? What are the
profits?”
“Profits! at the end of two months! How can you expect it? Friend
Gaudissart has only been on the road for twenty-five days; he took a
post-chaise without saying a word to me. Oh, he is devoted! We owe
a great deal to my uncle. The newspapers alone (here he whispered in
Birotteau’s ear) will cost us twelve thousand francs.”
“Newspapers!” exclaimed the deputy-mayor.
“Haven’t you read them?”
“No.”
“Then you know nothing,” said Popinot. “Twenty thousand francs worth of
placards, gilt frames, copies of the prospectus. One hundred thousand
bottles bought. Ah, it is all paying through the nose at this moment! We
are manufacturing on a grand scale. If you had set foot in the faubourg,
where I often work all night, you would have seen a little nut-cracker
which isn’t to be sneezed at, I can tell you. On my own account, I have
made, in the last five days, not less than ten thousand francs, merely
by commissions on the sale of druggists’ oils.”
“What a capable head!” said Birotteau, laying his hand on little
Popinot’s thick hair and rubbing it about as if he were a baby. “I found
it out.”
Several persons here came in.
“On Sunday we dine at your aunt Ragon’s,” added Cesar, leaving Popinot
to go on with his business, for he perceived that the fresh meat he had
come to taste was not yet cut up.
“It is amazing! A clerk becomes a merchant in twenty-four hours,”
thought Birotteau, who understood the happiness and self-assurance of
Anselme as little as the dandy luxury of du Tillet. “Anselme put on
a little stiff air when I patted him on the head, just as if he were
Francois Keller himself.”
Birotteau never once reflected that the clerks were looking on, and that
the master of the establishment had his dignity to preserve. In this
instance, as in the case of his speech to du Tillet, the worthy soul
committed a folly out of pure goodness of heart, and for lack of knowing
how to withhold an honest sentiment vulgarly expressed. By this trifling
act Cesar would have wounded irretrievably any other man than little
Popinot.
* * * * *
The Sunday dinner at the Ragon’s was destined to be the last pleasure of
the nineteen happy years of the Birotteau household,--years of
happiness that were full to overflowing. Ragon lived in the Rue du
Petit-Bourbon-Saint-Sulpice, on the second floor of a dignified old
house, in an appartement decorated with large panels where painted
shepherdesses danced in panniers, before whom fed the sheep of our
nineteenth century, the sober and serious bourgeoisie,--whose comical
demeanor, with their respectful notions about the nobility, and their
devotion to the Sovereign and the Church, were all admirably represented
by Ragon himself. The furniture, the clocks, linen, dinner-service, all
seemed patriarchal; novel in form because of their very age. The salon,
hung with old damask and draped with curtains in brocatelle, contained
portraits of duchesses and other royalist tributes; also a superb
Popinot, sheriff of Sancerre, painted by Latour,--the father of Madame
Ragon, a worthy, excellent man, in a picture out of which he smiled like
a parvenu in all his glory. When at home, Madame Ragon completed her
natural self with a little King Charles spaniel, which presented a
surprisingly harmonious effect as it lay on the hard little sofa, rococo
in shape, that assuredly never played the part assigned to the sofa of
Crebillon.
Among their many virtues, the Ragons were noted for the possession
of old wines which had come to perfect mellowness, and for certain of
Madame Anfoux’s liqueurs, which certain persons, obstinately (though it
was said hopelessly) bent on making love to Madame Ragon, had brought
her from the West Indies. Thus their little dinners were much prized.
Jeannette, the old cook, took care of the aged couple with blind
devotion: she would have stolen the fruit to make their sweetmeats.
Instead of taking her money to the savings-bank, she put it judiciously
into lotteries, hoping that some day she could bestow a good round sum
on her master and mistress. On the appointed Sundays when they received
their guests, she was, despite her years, active in the kitchen to
superintend the dishes, which she served at the table with an agility
that (to use a favorite expression of the worthy Ragon) might have given
points to Mademoiselle Contat when she played Susanne in the “Mariage de
Figaro.”
The guests on this occasion were Popinot the judge, Pillerault, Anselme,
the three Birotteaus, three Matifats, and the Abbe Loraux. Madame
Matifat, whom we lately met crowned with a turban for the ball, now
wore a gown of blue velvet, with coarse cotton stockings, leather shoes,
gloves of chamois-skin with a border of green plush, and a bonnet
lined with pink, filled in with white puffs about the face. These ten
personages assembled at five o’clock. The old Ragons always requested
their guests to be punctual. When this worthy couple were invited out,
their hosts always put the dinner at the same hour, remembering that
stomachs which were sixty-five years old could not adapt themselves to
the novel hours recently adopted in the great world.
Cesarine was sure that Madame Ragon would place her beside Anselme;
for all women, be they fools or saints, know what is what in love. The
daughter of “The Queen of Roses” therefore dressed with the intention of
turning Popinot’s head. Her mother--having renounced, not without pain,
the thought of marrying her to Crottat, who to her eyes played the part
of heir-apparent--assisted, with some bitter thoughts, at the toilet.
Maternal forethought lowered the modest gauzy neckerchief to show a
little of Cesarine’s shoulders and the spring of her graceful throat,
which was remarkably elegant. The Grecian bodice, crossing from left to
right with five folds, opened slightly, showing delicious curves; the
gray merino dress with green furbelows defined the pretty waist, which
had never looked so slender nor so supple. She wore earrings of gold
fret-work, and her hair, gathered up _a la chinoise_, let the eye take
in the soft freshness of a skin traced with blue veins, where the light
shone chastely on the pure white tones. Cesarine was so coquettishly
lovely that Madame Matifat could not help admitting it, without,
however, perceiving that mother and daughter had the one purpose of
bewitching Anselme.
Neither Birotteau, his wife, Madame Matifat nor any of the others
disturbed the sweet converse which the young people, thrilling with
love, held in whispering voices within the embrasure of a window,
through whose chinks the north wind blew its chilly whistle. The
conversation of the elders became animated when Popinot the judge let
fall a word about Roguin’s flight, remarking that he was the second
notary who had absconded,--a crime formerly unknown. Madame Ragon, at
the word Roguin, touched her brother’s foot, Pillerault spoke loudly to
drown his voice, and both made him a sign to remember Madame Birotteau.
“I know all,” said Constance in a low, pained voice.
“Well, then,” said Madame Matifat to Birotteau, who humbly bowed his
head, “how much did he carry of? If we are to believe the gossips, you
are ruined.”
“He had two hundred thousand francs of mine,” said Cesar. “As to the
forty thousand he pretended to make me borrow from one of his clients,
whose property he had already squandered, I am now bringing a suit to
recover them.”
“The case will be decided this week,” said Popinot. “I thought you would
not be unwilling that I should explain your situation to Monsieur le
president; he has ordered that all Roguin’s papers be submitted to the
custody of the court, so as to ascertain the exact time when Roguin made
away with the funds of his client, and thus verify the facts alleged by
Derville, who made the argument himself to save you the expense.”
“Shall we win?” asked Madame Birotteau.
“I don’t know,” answered Popinot. “Though I belong to the court in which
the suit is bought, I shall abstain from giving an opinion, even if
called upon.”
“Can there be any doubt in such a simple case?” said Pillerault. “Such
deeds make mention that payment has been made, and notaries are obliged
to declare that they have seen the money passed from the lender to the
borrower. Roguin would be sent to the galleys if the law could get hold
of him.
“According to my ideas,” said the judge, “the lender ought to have sued
Roguin for the costs and the caution-money; but it sometimes happens
at the Cour Royale that in matters even more plain than this the judges
stand six against six.”
“Mademoiselle, what are they saying? Has Monsieur Roguin absconded?”
said Anselme, hearing at last what was going on about him. “Monsieur
said nothing of it to me,--to me who would shed my blood for him--”
Cesarine fully understood that the whole family were included in the
“for him”; for if the innocent girl could mistake the accent, she could
not misunderstand the glance, which wrapped her, as it were, in a rosy
flame.
“I know you would; I told him so. He hid everything from my mother, and
confided only in me.”
“You spoke to him of me?” said Popinot; “you have read my heart? Have
you read all that is there?”
“Perhaps.”
“I am very happy,” said Popinot. “If you would lighten all my fears--in
a year I shall be so prosperous that your father cannot object when I
speak to him of our marriage. From henceforth I shall sleep only five
hours a night.”
“Do not injure yourself,” said Cesarine, with an inexpressible accent
and a look in which Popinot was suffered to read her thoughts.
“Wife,” said Cesar, as they rose from table, “I think those young people
love each other.”
“Well, so much the better,” said Constance, in a grave voice; “my
daughter will be the wife of a man of sense and energy. Talent is the
best dower a man can offer.”
She left the room hastily and went to Madame Ragon’s bedchamber. Cesar
during the dinner had make various fatuous remarks, which caused the
judge and Pillerault to smile, and reminded the unhappy woman of how
unfitted her poor husband was to grapple with misfortune. Her heart was
full of tears; and she instinctively dreaded du Tillet, for every mother
knows the _Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes_, even if she does not know
Latin. Constance wept in the arms of Madame Ragon and her daughter,
though she would not tell them the cause of her distress.
“I’m nervous,” she said.
The rest of the evening was spent by the elders at the card-table, and
by the young people in those little games called innocent because they
cover the innocent by-play of bourgeois love. The Matifats joined in
these games.
“Cesar,” said Constance as they drove home, “go and see Monsieur le
Baron de Nucingen on the 8th so as to be sure of having your payments
ready in advance of the 15th. If there should be any hitch, how could
you scrape the money together if you have only one day to do it in?”
“I will see to it, wife,” said Cesar, pressing his wife’s hand and his
daughter’s, adding, “Ah, my dear white lambs, I have given you a sad New
Year’s gift!”
The two women, unable to see him in the obscurity of the hackney coach,
felt his tears falling hot upon their hands.
“Be hopeful, dear friend,” said Constance.
“All will go well, papa; Monsieur Anselme Popinot told me he would shed
his blood for you.”
“For me?” said Cesar, trying to speak gaily; “and for the family as
well. Isn’t it so?”
Cesarine pressed her father’s hand, as if to let him know she was
betrothed to Anselme.