“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.