The next morning, at daybreak, Theodose went to the office of the banker
of the poor, to see the effect produced upon his enemy by the punctual
payment of the night before, and to make another effort to get rid of
his hornet.
He found Cerizet standing up, in conference with a woman, and he
received an imperative sign to keep at a distance and not to interrupt
the interview. The barrister was therefore reduced to conjectures as to
the importance of this woman, an importance revealed by the eager
look on the face of the lender “by the little week.” Theodose had
a presentiment, though a very vague one, that the upshot of this
conference would have some influence on Cerizet’s own arrangements, for
he suddenly beheld on that crafty countenance the change produced by a
dawning hope.
“But, my dear mamma Cardinal--”
“Yes, my good monsieur--”
“What is it you want--?”
“It must be decided--”
These beginnings, or these ends of sentences were the only gleams of
light that the animated conversation, carried on in the lowest tones
with lip to ear and ear to lip, conveyed to the motionless witness,
whose attention was fixed on Madame Cardinal.
Madame Cardinal was one of Cerizet’s earliest clients; she peddled fish.
If Parisians know these creations peculiar to their soil, foreigners
have no suspicion of their existence; and Mere Cardinal--technologically
speaking, of course, deserved all the interest she excited in Theodose.
So many women of her species may be met with in the streets that the
passers-by give them no more attention than they give to the three
thousand pictures of the Salon. But as she stood in Cerizet’s office
the Cardinal had all the value of an isolated masterpiece; she was a
complete and perfect type of her species.
The woman was mounted on muddy sabots; but her feet, carefully wrapped
in gaiters, were still further protected by stout and thick-ribbed
stockings. Her cotton gown, adorned with a glounce of mud, bore the
imprint of the strap which supported the fish-basket. Her principal
garment was a shawl of what was called “rabbit’s-hair cashmere,” the two
ends of which were knotted behind, above her bustle--for we must
needs employ a fashionable word to express the effect produced by the
transversal pressure of the basket upon her petticoats, which projected
below it, in shape like a cabbage. A printed cotton neckerchief, of the
coarsest description, gave to view a red neck, ribbed and lined like the
surface of a pond where people have skated. Her head was covered in a
yellow silk foulard, twined in a manner that was rather picturesque.
Short and stout, and ruddy of skin, Mere Cardinal probably drank her
little drop of brandy in the morning. She had once been handsome. The
Halle had formerly reproached her, in the boldness of its figurative
speech, for doing “a double day’s-work in the twenty-four.” Her voice,
in order to reduce itself to the diapason of ordinary conversation, was
obliged to stifle its sound as other voices do in a sick-room; but at
such times it came thick and muffled, from a throat accustomed to send
to the farthest recesses of the highest garret the names of the fish in
their season. Her nose, a la Roxelane, her well-cut lips, her blue eyes,
and all that formerly made up her beauty, was now buried in folds of
vigorous flesh which told of the habits and occupations of an outdoor
life. The stomach and bosom were distinguished for an amplitude worthy
of Rubens.
“Do you want to make me lie in the straw?” she said to Cerizet. “What
do I care for the Toupilliers? Ain’t I a Toupillier myself? What do you
want to do with them, those Toupilliers?”
This savage outburst was hastily repressed by Cerizet, who uttered a
prolonged “Hush-sh!” such as all conspirators obey.
“Well, go and find out all you can about it, and come back to me,” said
Cerizet, pushing the woman toward the door, and whispering, as he did
so, a few words in her ear.
“Well, my dear friend,” said Theodose to Cerizet, “you have got your
money?”
“Yes,” returned Cerizet “we have measured our claws, they are the same
length, the same strength, and the same sharpness. What next?”
“Am I to tell Dutocq that you received, last night, twenty-five thousand
francs?”
“Oh! my dear friend, not a word, if you love me!” cried Cerizet.
“Listen,” said Theodose. “I must know, once for all, what you want. I
am positively determined not to remain twenty-four hours longer on the
gridiron where you have got me. Cheat Dutocq if you will; I am utterly
indifferent to that; but I intend that you and I shall come to an
understanding. It is a fortune that I have paid you, twenty-five
thousand francs, and you must have earned ten thousand more in your
business; it is enough to make you an honest man. Cerizet, if you will
leave me in peace, if you won’t prevent my marriage with Mademoiselle
Colleville, I shall certainly be king’s attorney-general, or something
of that kind in Paris. You can’t do better than make sure of an
influence in that sphere.”
“Here are my conditions; and they won’t allow of discussion; you can
take them or leave them. You will obtain for me the lease of Thuillier’s
new house for eighteen years, and I’ll hand you back one of your five
notes cancelled, and you shall not find me any longer in your way. But
you will have to settle with Dutocq for the remaining four notes. You
got the better of _me_, and I know Dutocq hasn’t the force to stand
against you.”
“I’ll agree to that, provided you’ll pay a rent of forty-eight thousand
francs for the house, the last year in advance, and begin the lease in
October.”
“Yes; but I shall not give for the last year’s rent more than
forty-three thousand francs; your note will pay the remainder. I have
seen the house, and examined it. It suits me very well.”
“One last condition,” said Theodose; “you’ll help me against Dutocq?”
“No,” said Cerizet, “you’ll cook him brown yourself; he doesn’t need any
basting from me; he’ll give out his gravy fast enough. But you ought to
be reasonable. The poor fellow can’t pay off the last fifteen thousand
francs due on his practice, and you should reflect that fifteen thousand
francs would certainly buy back your notes.”
“Well; give me two weeks to get your lease--”
“No, not a day later than Monday next! Tuesday your notes will be in
Louchard’s hands; unless you pay them Monday, or Thuillier signs the
lease.”
“Well, Monday, so be it!” said Theodose; “are we friends?”
“We shall be Monday,” responded Cerizet.
“Well, then, Monday you’ll pay for my dinner,” said Theodose, laughing.
“Yes, at the Rocher de Cancale, if I have the lease. Dutocq shall be
there--we’ll all be there--ah! it is long since I’ve had a good laugh.”
Theodose and Cerizet shook hands, saying, reciprocally:--
“We’ll meet soon.”
Cerizet had not calmed down so suddenly without reasons. In the first
place, as Desroches once said, “Bile does not facilitate business,” and
the usurer had too well seen the justice of that remark not to coolly
resolve to get something out of his position, and to squeeze the jugular
vein of the crafty Provencal until he strangled him.
“It is a fair revenge,” Desroches said to him; “mind you extract its
quintessence. You hold that fellow.”
For ten years past Cerizet had seen men growing rich by practising the
trade of principal tenant. The principal tenant is, in Paris, to the
owners of houses what farmers are to country landlords. All Paris has
seen one of its great tailors, building at his own cost, on the famous
site of Frascati, one of the most sumptuous of houses, and paying, as
principal tenant, fifty thousand francs a year for the ground rent of
the house, which, at the end of nineteen years’ lease, was to become
the property of the owner of the land. In spite of the costs of
construction, which were something like seven hundred thousand francs,
the profits of those nineteen years proved, in the end, very large.
Cerizet, always on the watch for business, had examined the chances
for gain offered by the situation of the house which Thuillier had
_stolen_,--as he said to Desroches,--and he had seen the possibility of
letting it for sixty thousand at the end of six years. There were four
shops, two on each side, for it stood on a boulevard corner. Cerizet
expected, therefore, to get clear ten thousand a year for a dozen years,
allowing for eventualities and sundries attendant on renewal of leases.
He therefore proposed to himself to sell his money-lending business
to the widow Poiret and Cadenet for ten thousand francs; he already
possessed thirty thousand; and the two together would enable him to pay
the last year’s rent in advance, which house-owners in Paris usually
demand as a guarantee from a principal tenant on a long lease. Cerizet
had spent a happy night; he fell asleep in a glorious dream; he
saw himself in a fair way to do an honest business, and to become a
bourgeois like Thuillier, like Minard, and so many others.
But he had a waking of which he did not dream. He found Fortune standing
before him, and emptying her gilded horns of plenty at his feet in the
person of Madame Cardinal. He had always had a liking for the woman, and
had promised her for a year past the necessary sum to buy a donkey and
a little cart, so that she could carry on her business on a large scale,
and go from Paris to the suburbs. Madame Cardinal, widow of a porter in
the corn-market, had an only daughter, whose beauty Cerizet had heard
of from some of the mother’s cronies. Olympe Cardinal was about thirteen
years of age at the time, 1837, when Cerizet began his system of loans
in the quarter; and with a view to an infamous libertinism, he had paid
great attention to the mother, whom he rescued from utter misery, hoping
to make Olympe his mistress. But suddenly, in 1838, the girl left her
mother, and “made her life,” to use an expression by which the lower
classes in Paris describe the abuse of the most precious gifts of nature
and youth.
To look for a girl in Paris is to look for a smelt in the Seine; nothing
but chance can throw her into the net. The chance came. Mere Cardinal,
who to entertain a neighbor had taken her to the Bobino theatre,
recognized in the leading lady her own daughter, whom the first comedian
had held under his control for three years. The mother, gratified at
first at beholding her daughter in a fine gown of gold brocade, her hair
dressed like that of a duchess, and wearing open-worked stockings, satin
shoes, and receiving the plaudits of the audience, ended by screaming
out from her seat in the gallery:--
“You shall soon hear of me, murderer of your own mother! I’ll know
whether miserable strolling-players have the right to come and debauch
young girls of sixteen!”
She waited at the stage-door to capture her daughter, but the first
comedian and the leading lady had no doubt jumped across the footlights
and left the theatre with the audience, instead of issuing by the
stage-door, where Madame Cardinal and her crony, Mere Mahoudeau, made an
infernal rumpus, which two municipal guards were called upon to pacify.
Those august personages, before whom the two women lowered the diapason
of their voices, called the mother’s attention to the fact that the girl
was of legitimate theatrical age, and that instead of screaming at
the door after the director, she could summon him before the
justice-of-peace, or the police-court, whichever she pleased.
The next day Madame Cardinal intended to consult Cerizet, in view of
the fact that he was a clerk in the office of the justice-of-peace;
but, before reaching his lair in the rue des Poules, she was met by the
porter of a house in which an uncle of hers, a certain Toupillier, was
living, who told her that the old man hadn’t probably two days to live,
being then in the last extremity.
“Well, how do you expect me to help it?” replied the widow Cardinal.
“We count on you, my dear Madame Cardinal; we know you won’t forget the
good advice we’ll give you. Here’s the thing. Lately, your poor uncle,
not being able to stir round, has trusted me to go and collect the
rents of his house, rue Notre-Dame de Nazareth, and the arrears of his
dividends at the Treasury, which come to eighteen hundred francs.”
By this time the widow Cardinal’s eyes were becoming fixed instead of
wandering.
“Yes, my dear,” continued Perrache, a hump-backed little concierge;
“and, seeing that you are the only person who ever thinks about him, and
that you come and see him sometimes, and bring him fish, perhaps he may
make a bequest in your favor. My wife, who has been nursing him for
the last few days since he has been so ill, spoke to him of you, but he
wouldn’t have you told about his illness. But now, don’t you see, it is
high time you should show yourself there. It is pretty nigh two months
since he has been able to attend to business.”
“You may well think, you old thief,” replied Madame Cardinal, hurrying
at top speed toward the rue Honore-Chevalier, where her uncle lived in
a wretched garret, “that the hair would grow on my hand before I could
ever imagine that. What! my uncle Toupillier rich! the old pauper of the
church of Saint-Sulpice!”
“Ah!” returned the porter, “but he fed well. He went to bed every night
with his best friend, a big bottle of Roussillon. My wife has tasted it,
though he told us it was common stuff. The wine-merchant in the rue des
Canettes supplies it to him.”
“Don’t say a word about all this,” said the widow, when she parted from
the man who had given her the information. “I’ll take care and remember
you--if anything comes of it.”
Toupillier, former drum-major in the French Guards, had been for the
two years preceding 1789 in the service of the Church as beadle of
Saint-Sulpice. The Revolution deprived him of that post, and he then
dropped down into a state of abject misery. He was even obliged to
take to the profession of model, for he _enjoyed_, as they say, a fine
physique. When public worship was restored, he took up his beadle’s
staff once more; but in 1816 he was dismissed, as much on account of his
immorality as for his political opinions. Nevertheless, he was allowed
to stay about the door of the church and distribute the holy water.
Later, an unfortunate affair, which we shall presently mention, made
him lose even that position; but, still finding means to keep to the
sanctuary, he obtained permission to be allowed as a pauper in the
porch. At this period of life, being then seventy-two years of age, he
made himself ninety-six, and began the profession of centenarian.
In all Paris it was impossible to find another such beard and head of
hair as Toupillier’s. As he walked he appeared bent double; he held a
stick in his shaking hand,--a hand that was covered with lichen, like
a granite rock, and with the other he held out the classic hat with
a broad brim, filthy and battered, into which, however, there fell
abundant alms. His legs were swathed in rags and bandages, and his feet
shuffled along in miserable overshoes of woven mat-weed, inside of which
he had fastened excellent cork soles. He washed his face with certain
compounds, which gave it an appearance of forms of illness, and he
played the senility of a centenarian to the life. He reckoned himself a
hundred years old in 1830, at which time his actual age was eighty; he
was the head of the paupers of Saint-Sulpice, the master of the place,
and all those who came to beg under the arcades of the church, safe from
the persecutions of the police and beneath the protection of the beadle
and the giver of holy water, were forced to pay him a sort of tithe.
When a new heir, a bridegroom, or some godfather left the church,
saying, “Here, this is for all of you; don’t torment any of my party,”
Toupillier, appointed by the beadle to receive these alms, pocketed
three-fourths, and distributed only the remaining quarter among his
henchmen, whose tribute amounted to a sou a day. Money and wine were his
last two passions; but he regulated the latter and gave himself up to
the former, with neglecting his personal comfort. He drank at night
only, after his dinner, and for twenty years he slept in the arms of
drunkenness, his last mistress.
In the early morning he was at his post with all his faculties. From
then until his dinner, which he took at Pere Lathuile’s (made famous by
Charlet), he gnawed crusts of bread by way of nourishment; and he gnawed
them artistically, with an air of resignation which earned him abundant
alms. The beadle and the giver of holy water, with whom he may have had
some private understanding, would say of him:--
“He is one of the worthy poor of the church; he used to know the rector
Languet, who built Saint-Sulpice; he was for twenty years beadle of the
church before the Revolution, and he is now over a hundred years old.”
This little biography, well known to all the pious attendants of the
church, was, of course, the best of his advertisements, and no hat was
so well lined as his. He bought his house in 1826, and began to invest
his money in the Funds in 1830. From the value of the two investments he
must have made something like six thousand francs a year, and probably
turned them over by usury, after Cerizet’s own fashion; for the sum he
paid for the house was forty thousand francs, while his investment in
1830 was forty-eight thousand more. His niece, deceived by the old man
as much as he deceived the functionaries and the pious souls of the
church, believed him the most miserable of paupers, and when she had any
fish that were spoiling she sometimes took them to the aged beggar.
Consequently, she now felt it her right to get what she could in return
for her pity and her liberality to an uncle who was likely to have
a crowd of collateral heirs; she herself being the third and last
Toupillier daughter. She had four brothers, and her father, a porter
with a hand-cart, had told her, in her childhood, of three aunts and
four uncles, who all led an existence of the baser sort.
After inspecting the sick man, she went, at full speed, to consult
Cerizet, telling him, in the first place, how she had found her
daughter, and then the reasons and indications which made her think that
her uncle Toupillier was hoarding a pile of gold in his mattress. Mere
Cardinal did not feel herself strong enough to seize upon the property,
legally or illegally, and she therefore came to confide in Cerizet and
get his advice.
So, then, the banker of the poor, like other scavengers, had, at last,
found diamonds in the slime in which he had paddled for the last four
years, being always on the watch for some such chance,--a chance,
they say, occasionally met with in the purlieus, which give birth to
heiresses in sabots. This was the secret of his unexpected gentleness to
la Peyrade, the man whose ruin he had vowed. It is easy to imagine the
anxiety with which he awaited the return of Madame Cardinal, to whom
this wily schemer of nefarious plots had given means to verify her
suspicions as to the existence of the hoarded treasure, promising her
complete success if she would trust him to obtain for her so rich a
harvest. He was not the man to shrink from a crime, above all, when he
saw that others could commit it, while he obtained the benefits.
“Well, monsieur,” cried the fishwife, entering Cerizet’s den with a face
as much inflamed by cupidity as by the haste of her movements, “my uncle
sleeps on more than a hundred thousand francs in gold, and I am certain
that those Perraches, by dint of nursing him, have smelt the rat.”
“Shared among forty heirs that won’t be much to each,” said Cerizet.
“Listen to me, Mere Cardinal: I’ll marry your daughter; give her your
uncle’s gold, and I’ll guarantee to you a life-interest in the house and
the dividends from the money in the Funds.”
“We sha’n’t run any risk?”
“None, whatever.”
“Agreed, then,” said the widow Cardinal, holding out her hand to her
future son-in-law. “Six thousand francs a year; hey! what a fine life
I’ll have.”
“With a son-in-law like me!” added Cerizet.
“I shall be a bourgeoisie of Paris!”
“Now,” resumed Cerizet, after a pause, “I must study the ground. Don’t
leave your uncle alone a minute; tell the Perraches that you expect a
doctor. I’ll be the doctor, and when I get there you must seem not to
know me.”
“Aren’t you sly, you old rogue,” said Madame Cardinal, with a punch on
Cerizet’s stomach by way of farewell.
An hour later, Cerizet, dressed in black, disguised by a rusty wig and
an artificially painted physiognomy, arrived at the house in the rue
Honore-Chevalier in the regulation cabriolet. He asked the porter to
tell him how to find the lodging of an old beggar named Toupillier.
“Is monsieur the doctor whom Madame Cardinal expects?” asked Perrache.
Cerizet had no doubt reflected on the gravity of the affair he was
undertaking, for he avoided giving an answer to that question.
“Is this the way?” he said, turning at random to one side of the
courtyard.
“No, monsieur,” replied Perrache, who then took him to the back stairs
of the house, which led up to the wretched attic occupied by the pauper.
Nothing remained for the inquisitive porter to do but to question the
driver of the cabriolet; to which employment we will leave him, while we
pursue our own inquiries elsewhere.