Produced by John Bickers, Dagny, and Bonnie Sala
THE LESSER BOURGEOISIE (The Middle Classes)
By Honore De Balzac
Translated by Katharine Prescott Wormeley
DEDICATION
To Constance-Victoire.
Here, madame, is one of those books which come into the mind,
whence no one knows, giving pleasure to the author before he can
foresee what reception the public, our great present judge, will
accord to it. Feeling almost certain of your sympathy in my
pleasure, I dedicate the book to you. Ought it not to belong to
you as the tithe formerly belonged to the Church in memory of God,
who makes all things bud and fruit in the fields and in the
intellect?
A few lumps of clay, left by Moliere at the feet of his colossal
statue of Tartuffe, have here been kneaded by a hand more daring
than able; but, at whatever distance I may be from the greatest of
comic writers, I shall still be glad to have used these crumbs in
showing the modern Hypocrite in action. The chief encouragement
that I have had in this difficult undertaking was in finding it
apart from all religious questions,--questions which ought to be
kept out of it for the sake of one so pious as yourself; and also
because of what a great writer has lately called our present
“indifference in matters of religion.”
May the double signification of your names be for my book a
prophecy! Deign to find here the respectful gratitude of him who
ventures to call himself the most devoted of your servants.
De Balzac.
THE LESSER BOURGEOISIE
(The Middle Classes)
PART I. THE LESSER BOURGEOIS OF PARIS
CHAPTER I. DEPARTING PARIS
The tourniquet Saint-Jean, the narrow passage entered through a
turnstile, a description of which was said to be so wearisome in the
study entitled “A Double Life” (Scenes from Private Life), that naive
relic of old Paris, has at the present moment no existence except in our
said typography. The building of the Hotel-de-Ville, such as we now see
it, swept away a whole section of the city.
In 1830, passers along the street could still see the turnstile painted
on the sign of a wine-merchant, but even that house, its last asylum,
has been demolished. Alas! old Paris is disappearing with frightful
rapidity. Here and there, in the course of this history of Parisian
life, will be found preserved, sometimes the type of the dwellings of
the middle ages, like that described in “Fame and Sorrow” (Scenes from
Private Life), one or two specimens of which exist to the present day;
sometimes a house like that of Judge Popinot, rue du Fouarre, a specimen
of the former bourgeoisie; here, the remains of Fulbert’s house; there,
the old dock of the Seine as it was under Charles IX. Why should not the
historian of French society, a new Old Mortality, endeavor to save these
curious expressions of the past, as Walter Scott’s old man rubbed up the
tombstones? Certainly, for the last ten years the outcries of literature
in this direction have not been superfluous; art is beginning to
disguise beneath its floriated ornaments those ignoble facades of what
are called in Paris “houses of product,” which one of our poets has
jocosely compared to chests of drawers.
Let us remark here, that the creation of the municipal commission
“del ornamento” which superintends at Milan the architecture of street
facades, and to which every house owner is compelled to subject his
plan, dates from the seventeenth century. Consequently, we see in that
charming capital the effects of this public spirit on the part of nobles
and burghers, while we admire their buildings so full of character and
originality. Hideous, unrestrained speculation which, year after year,
changes the uniform level of storeys, compresses a whole apartment into
the space of what used to be a salon, and wages war upon gardens, will
infallibly react on Parisian manners and morals. We shall soon be forced
to live more without than within. Our sacred private life, the freedom
and liberty of home, where will they be?--reserved for those who can
muster fifty thousand francs a year! In fact, few millionaires now allow
themselves the luxury of a house to themselves, guarded by a courtyard
on a street and protected from public curiosity by a shady garden at the
back.
By levelling fortunes, that section of the Code which regulates
testamentary bequests, has produced these huge stone phalansteries, in
which thirty families are often lodged, returning a rental of a hundred
thousand francs a year. Fifty years hence we shall be able to count on
our fingers the few remaining houses which resemble that occupied, at
the moment our narrative begins, by the Thuillier family,--a really
curious house which deserves the honor of an exact description, if only
to compare the life of the bourgeoisie of former times with that of
to-day.
The situation and the aspect of this house, the frame of our present
Scene of manners and morals, has, moreover, a flavor, a perfume of the
lesser bourgeoisie, which may attract or repel attention according to
the taste of each reader.
In the first place, the Thuillier house did not belong to either
Monsieur or Madame Thuillier, but to Mademoiselle Thuillier, the sister
of Monsieur Thuillier.
This house, bought during the first six months which followed the
revolution of July by Mademoiselle Marie-Jeanne-Brigitte Thuillier, a
spinster of full age, stands about the middle of the rue Saint-Dominique
d’Enfer, to the right as you enter by the rue d’Enfer, so that the main
building occupied by Monsieur Thuillier faces south.
The progressive movement which is carrying the Parisian population to
the heights along the right bank of the Seine had long injured the sale
of property in what is called the “Latin quarter,” when reasons, which
will be given when we come to treat of the character and habits of
Monsieur Thuillier, determined his sister to the purchase of real
estate. She obtained this property for the small sum of forty-six
thousand francs; certain extras amounted to six thousand more; in all,
the price paid was fifty-two thousand francs. A description of the
property given in the style of an advertisement, and the results
obtained by Monsieur Thuillier’s exertions, will explain by what means
so many fortunes increased enormously after July, 1830, while so many
others sank.
Toward the street the house presents a facade of rough stone covered
with plaster, cracked by weather and lined by the mason’s instrument
into a semblance of blocks of cut stone. This frontage is so common in
Paris and so ugly that the city ought to offer premiums to house-owners
who would build their facades of cut-stone blocks. Seven windows lighted
the gray front of this house which was raised three storeys, ending in
a mansard roof covered with slate. The porte-cochere, heavy and solid,
showed by its workmanship and style that the front building on the
street had been erected in the days of the Empire, to utilize a part
of the courtyard of the vast old mansion, built at an epoch when the
quarter d’Enfer enjoyed a certain vogue.
On one side was the porter’s lodge; on the other the staircase of the
front building. Two wings, built against the adjoining houses, had
formerly served as stables, coach-house, kitchen and offices to the rear
dwelling; but since 1830, they had been converted into warerooms. The
one on the right was let to a certain M. Metivier, jr., wholesale dealer
in paper; that on the left to a bookseller named Barbet. The offices
of each were above the warerooms; the bookseller occupying the first
storey, and the paper-dealer the second storey of the house on the
street. Metivier, jr., who was more of a commission merchant in paper
than a regular dealer, and Barbet, much more of a money lender and
discounter than a bookseller, kept these vast warerooms for the purpose
of storing,--one, his stacks of paper, bought of needy manufacturers,
the other, editions of books given as security for loans.
The shark of bookselling and the pike of paper-dealing lived on the best
of terms, and their mutual operations, exempt from the turmoil of retail
business, brought so few carriages into that tranquil courtyard that the
concierge was obliged to pull up the grass between the paving stones.
Messrs. Barbet and Metivier paid a few rare visits to their landlords,
and the punctuality with which they paid their rent classed them as
good tenants; in fact, they were looked upon as very honest men by the
Thuillier circle.
As for the third floor on the street, it was made into two apartments;
one of which was occupied by M. Dutocq, clerk of the justice of peace,
a retired government employee, and a frequenter of the Thuillier
salon; the other by the hero of this Scene, about whom we must
content ourselves at the present moment by fixing the amount of his
rent,--namely, seven hundred francs a year,--and the location he had
chosen in the heart of this well-filled building, exactly three years
before the curtain rises on the present domestic drama.
The clerk, a bachelor of fifty, occupied the larger of the two
apartments on the third floor. He kept a cook, and the rent of the
rooms was a thousand francs a year. Within two years of the time of
her purchase, Mademoiselle Thuillier was receiving seven thousand two
hundred francs in rentals, for a house which the late proprietor
had supplied with outside blinds, renovated within, and adorned with
mirrors, without being able to sell or let it. Moreover, the Thuilliers
themselves, nobly lodged, as we shall see, enjoyed also a fine
garden,--one of the finest in that quarter,--the trees of which shaded
the lonely little street named the rue Neuve-Saint-Catherine.
Standing between the courtyard and the garden, the main building,
which they inhabited, seems to have been the caprice of some enriched
bourgeois in the reign of Louis XIV.; the dwelling, perhaps, of a
president of the parliament, or that of a tranquil savant. Its
noble free-stone blocks, damaged by time, have a certain air of
Louis-the-Fourteenth grandeur; the courses of the facade define the
storeys; panels of red brick recall the appearance of the stables at
Versailles; the windows have masks carved as ornaments in the centre
of their arches and below their sills. The door, of small panels in the
upper half and plain below, through which, when open, the garden can be
seen, is of that honest, unassuming style which was often employed in
former days for the porter’s lodges of the royal chateaux.
This building, with five windows to each course, rises two storeys above
the ground-floor, and is particularly noticeable for a roof of four
sides ending in a weather-vane, and broken here and there by tall,
handsome chimneys, and oval windows. Perhaps this structure is the
remains of some great mansion; but after examining all the existing
old maps of Paris, we find nothing which bears out this conjecture.
Moreover, the title-deeds of property under Louis XIV. was Petitot,
the celebrated painter in miniature, who obtained it originally from
President Lecamus. We may therefore believe that Lecamus lived in this
building while he was erecting his more famous mansion in the rue de
Thorigny.
So Art and the legal robe have passed this way in turn. How many
instigations of needs and pleasures have led to the interior arrangement
of the dwelling! To right, as we enter a square hall forming a closed
vestibule, rises a stone staircase with two windows looking on the
garden. Beneath the staircase opens a door to the cellar. From this
vestibule we enter the dining-room, lighted from the courtyard, and the
dining-room communicates at its side with the kitchen, which forms a
continuation of the wing in which are the warerooms of Metivier and
Barbet. Behind the staircase extends, on the garden side, a fine study
or office with two large windows. The first and second floor form two
complete apartments, and the servants’ quarters are shown by the oval
windows in the four-sided roof.
A large porcelain stove heats the square vestibule, the two glass doors
of which, placed opposite to each other, light it. This room, paved in
black and white marble, is especially noticeable for a ceiling of beams
formerly painted and gilt, but which had since received, probably under
the Empire, a coat of plain white paint. The three doors of the study,
salon and dining-room, surmounted by oval panels, are awaiting a
restoration that is more than needed. The wood-work is heavy, but the
ornamentation is not without merit. The salon, panelled throughout,
recalls the great century by its tall mantelpiece of Languedoc marble,
its ceiling decorated at the corners, and by the style of its windows,
which still retain their little panes. The dining-room, communicating
with the salon by a double door, is floored with stone; the wood-work is
oak, unpainted, and an atrocious modern wall-paper has been substituted
for the tapestries of the olden time. The ceiling is of chestnut;
and the study, modernized by Thuillier, adds its quota to these
discordances.
The white and gold mouldings of the salon are so effaced that nothing
remains of the gilding but reddish lines, while the white enamelling is
yellow, cracked, and peeling off. Never did the Latin saying “Otium cum
dignitate” have a greater commentary to the mind of a poet than in this
noble building. The iron-work of the staircase baluster is worthy of
the artist and the magistrate; but to find other traces of their taste
to-day in this majestic relic, the eyes of an artistic observer are
needed.
The Thuilliers and their predecessors have frequently degraded this
jewel of the upper bourgeoisie by the habits and inventions of the
lesser bourgeoisie. Look at those walnut chairs covered with horse-hair,
that mahogany table with its oilcloth cover, that sideboard, also of
mahogany, that carpet, bought at a bargain, beneath the table, those
metal lamps, that wretched paper with its red border, those execrable
engravings, and the calico curtains with red fringes, in a dining-room,
where the friends of Petitot once feasted! Do you notice the effect
produced in the salon by those portraits of Monsieur and Madame and
Mademoiselle Thuillier by Pierre Grassou, the artist par excellence
of the modern bourgeoisie. Have you remarked the card-tables and the
consoles of the Empire, the tea-table supported by a lyre, and that
species of sofa, of gnarled mahogany, covered in painted velvet of a
chocolate tone? On the chimney-piece, with the clock (representing the
Bellona of the Empire), are candelabra with fluted columns. Curtains of
woollen damask, with under-curtains of embroidered muslin held back by
stamped brass holders, drape the windows. On the floor a cheap carpet.
The handsome vestibule has wooden benches, covered with velvet, and the
panelled walls with their fine carvings are mostly hidden by wardrobes,
brought there from time to time from the bedrooms occupied by the
Thuilliers. Fear, that hideous divinity, has caused the family to add
sheet-iron doors on the garden side and on the courtyard side, which are
folded back against the walls in the daytime, and are closed at night.
It is easy to explain the deplorable profanation practised on this
monument of the private life of the bourgeoisie of the seventeenth
century, by the private life of the bourgeoisie of the nineteenth. At
the beginning of the Consulate, let us say, some master-mason having
bought the ancient building, took the idea of turning to account the
ground which lay between it and the street. He probably pulled down
the fine porte-cochere or entrance gate, flanked by little lodges which
guarded the charming “sejour” (to use a word of the olden time), and
proceeded, with the industry of a Parisian proprietor, to impress his
withering mark on the elegance of the old building. What a curious study
might be made of the successive title-deeds of property in Paris! A
private lunatic asylum performs its functions in the rue des Batailles
in the former dwelling of the Chevalier Pierre Bayard du Terrail, once
without fear and without reproach; a street has now been built by the
present bourgeois administration through the site of the hotel Necker.
Old Paris is departing, following its kings who abandoned it. For one
masterpiece of architecture saved from destruction by a Polish princess
(the hotel Lambert, Ile Saint-Louis, bought and occupied by the Princess
Czartoriska) how many little palaces have fallen, like this dwelling of
Petitot, into the hands of such as Thuillier.
Here follows the causes which made Mademoiselle Thuillier the owner of
the house.