MELMOTH RECONCILED
By Honore De Balzac
Translated by Ellen Marriage
To Monsieur le General Baron de Pommereul, a token of the friendship
between our fathers, which survives in their sons.
DE BALZAC.
MELMOTH RECONCILED
There is a special variety of human nature obtained in the Social
Kingdom by a process analogous to that of the gardener’s craft in the
Vegetable Kingdom, to wit, by the forcing-house--a species of hybrid
which can be raised neither from seed nor from slips. This product is
known as the Cashier, an anthropomorphous growth, watered by religious
doctrine, trained up in fear of the guillotine, pruned by vice, to
flourish on a third floor with an estimable wife by his side and an
uninteresting family. The number of cashiers in Paris must always be
a problem for the physiologist. Has any one as yet been able to state
correctly the terms of the proportion sum wherein the cashier figures as
the unknown _x_? Where will you find the man who shall live with wealth,
like a cat with a caged mouse? This man, for further qualification,
shall be capable of sitting boxed in behind an iron grating for seven
or eight hours a day during seven-eighths of the year, perched upon a
cane-seated chair in a space as narrow as a lieutenant’s cabin on board
a man-of-war. Such a man must be able to defy anchylosis of the knee
and thigh joints; he must have a soul above meanness, in order to live
meanly; must lose all relish for money by dint of handling it. Demand
this peculiar specimen of any creed, educational system, school, or
institution you please, and select Paris, that city of fiery ordeals
and branch establishment of hell, as the soil in which to plant the said
cashier. So be it. Creeds, schools, institutions and moral systems, all
human rules and regulations, great and small, will, one after another,
present much the same face that an intimate friend turns upon you when
you ask him to lend you a thousand francs. With a dolorous dropping of
the jaw, they indicate the guillotine, much as your friend aforesaid
will furnish you with the address of the money-lender, pointing you to
one of the hundred gates by which a man comes to the last refuge of the
destitute.
Yet nature has her freaks in the making of a man’s mind; she indulges
herself and makes a few honest folk now and again, and now and then a
cashier.
Wherefore, that race of corsairs whom we dignify with the title of
bankers, the gentry who take out a license for which they pay a thousand
crowns, as the privateer takes out his letters of marque, hold these
rare products of the incubations of virtue in such esteem that they
confine them in cages in their counting-houses, much as governments
procure and maintain specimens of strange beasts at their own charges.
If the cashier is possessed of an imagination or of a fervid
temperament; if, as will sometimes happen to the most complete cashier,
he loves his wife, and that wife grows tired of her lot, has ambitions,
or merely some vanity in her composition, the cashier is undone.
Search the chronicles of the counting-house. You will not find a single
instance of a cashier attaining _a position_, as it is called. They are
sent to the hulks; they go to foreign parts; they vegetate on a second
floor in the Rue Saint-Louis among the market gardens of the Marais.
Some day, when the cashiers of Paris come to a sense of their real
value, a cashier will be hardly obtainable for money. Still, certain
it is that there are people who are fit for nothing but to be cashiers,
just as the bent of a certain order of mind inevitably makes for
rascality. But, oh marvel of our civilization! Society rewards virtue
with an income of a hundred louis in old age, a dwelling on a second
floor, bread sufficient, occasional new bandana handkerchiefs, an
elderly wife and her offspring.
So much for virtue. But for the opposite course, a little boldness,
a faculty for keeping on the windward side of the law, as Turenne
outflanked Montecuculi, and Society will sanction the theft of millions,
shower ribbons upon the thief, cram him with honors, and smother him
with consideration.
Government, moreover, works harmoniously with this profoundly illogical
reasoner--Society. Government levies a conscription on the young
intelligence of the kingdom at the age of seventeen or eighteen,
a conscription of precocious brain-work before it is sent up to be
submitted to a process of selection. Nurserymen sort and select seeds
in much the same way. To this process the Government brings professional
appraisers of talent, men who can assay brains as experts assay gold
at the Mint. Five hundred such heads, set afire with hope, are sent up
annually by the most progressive portion of the population; and of these
the Government takes one-third, puts them in sacks called the Ecoles,
and shakes them up together for three years. Though every one of these
young plants represents vast productive power, they are made, as one
may say, into cashiers. They receive appointments; the rank and file
of engineers is made up of them; they are employed as captains of
artillery; there is no (subaltern) grade to which they may not aspire.
Finally, when these men, the pick of the youth of the nation, fattened
on mathematics and stuffed with knowledge, have attained the age of
fifty years, they have their reward, and receive as the price of their
services the third-floor lodging, the wife and family, and all the
comforts that sweeten life for mediocrity. If from among this race of
dupes there should escape some five or six men of genius who climb the
highest heights, is it not miraculous?
This is an exact statement of the relations between Talent and Probity
on the one hand and Government and Society on the other, in an age that
considers itself to be progressive. Without this prefatory explanation
a recent occurrence in Paris would seem improbable; but preceded by this
summing up of the situation, it will perhaps receive some thoughtful
attention from minds capable of recognizing the real plague-spots of
our civilization, a civilization which since 1815 as been moved by the
spirit of gain rather than by principles of honor.
About five o’clock, on a dull autumn afternoon, the cashier of one of
the largest banks in Paris was still at his desk, working by the light
of a lamp that had been lit for some time. In accordance with the use
and wont of commerce, the counting-house was in the darkest corner of
the low-ceiled and far from spacious mezzanine floor, and at the very
end of a passage lighted only by borrowed lights. The office doors
along this corridor, each with its label, gave the place the look of a
bath-house. At four o’clock the stolid porter had proclaimed, according
to his orders, “The bank is closed.” And by this time the departments
were deserted, wives of the partners in the firm were expecting their
lovers; the two bankers dining with their mistresses. Everything was in
order.
The place where the strong boxes had been bedded in sheet-iron was just
behind the little sanctum, where the cashier was busy. Doubtless he was
balancing his books. The open front gave a glimpse of a safe of hammered
iron, so enormously heavy (thanks to the science of the modern inventor)
that burglars could not carry it away. The door only opened at the
pleasure of those who knew its password. The letter-lock was a warden
who kept its own secret and could not be bribed; the mysterious word was
an ingenious realization of the “Open sesame!” in the _Arabian Nights_.
But even this was as nothing. A man might discover the password; but
unless he knew the lock’s final secret, the _ultima ratio_ of this
gold-guarding dragon of mechanical science, it discharged a blunderbuss
at his head.
The door of the room, the walls of the room, the shutters of the windows
in the room, the whole place, in fact, was lined with sheet-iron a third
of an inch in thickness, concealed behind the thin wooden paneling. The
shutters had been closed, the door had been shut. If ever man could feel
confident that he was absolutely alone, and that there was no remote
possibility of being watched by prying eyes, that man was the cashier of
the house of Nucingen and Company, in the Rue Saint-Lazare.
Accordingly the deepest silence prevailed in that iron cave. The fire
had died out in the stove, but the room was full of that tepid warmth
which produces the dull heavy-headedness and nauseous queasiness of a
morning after an orgy. The stove is a mesmerist that plays no small part
in the reduction of bank clerks and porters to a state of idiocy.
A room with a stove in it is a retort in which the power of strong
men is evaporated, where their vitality is exhausted, and their wills
enfeebled. Government offices are part of a great scheme for the
manufacture of the mediocrity necessary for the maintenance of a Feudal
System on a pecuniary basis--and money is the foundation of the Social
Contract. (See _Les Employes_.) The mephitic vapors in the atmosphere
of a crowded room contribute in no small degree to bring about a gradual
deterioration of intelligences, the brain that gives off the largest
quantity of nitrogen asphyxiates the others, in the long run.
The cashier was a man of five-and-forty or thereabouts. As he sat at the
table, the light from a moderator lamp shining full on his bald head and
glistening fringe of iron-gray hair that surrounded it--this baldness
and the round outlines of his face made his head look very like a ball.
His complexion was brick-red, a few wrinkles had gathered about his
eyes, but he had the smooth, plump hands of a stout man. His blue cloth
coat, a little rubbed and worn, and the creases and shininess of his
trousers, traces of hard wear that the clothes-brush fails to remove,
would impress a superficial observer with the idea that here was a
thrifty and upright human being, sufficient of the philosopher or of the
aristocrat to wear shabby clothes. But, unluckily, it is easy to find
penny-wise people who will prove weak, wasteful, or incompetent in the
capital things of life.
The cashier wore the ribbon of the Legion of Honor at his button-hole,
for he had been a major of dragoons in the time of the Emperor. M. de
Nucingen, who had been a contractor before he became a banker, had had
reason in those days to know the honorable disposition of his cashier,
who then occupied a high position. Reverses of fortune had befallen the
major, and the banker out of regard for him paid him five hundred francs
a month. The soldier had become a cashier in the year 1813, after his
recovery from a wound received at Studzianka during the Retreat from
Moscow, followed by six months of enforced idleness at Strasbourg,
whither several officers had been transported by order of the Emperor,
that they might receive skilled attention. This particular officer,
Castanier by name, retired with the honorary grade of colonel, and a
pension of two thousand four hundred francs.
In ten years’ time the cashier had completely effaced the soldier,
and Castanier inspired the banker with such trust in him, that he was
associated in the transactions that went on in the private office behind
his little counting-house. The baron himself had access to it by means
of a secret staircase. There, matters of business were decided. It was
the bolting-room where proposals were sifted; the privy council chamber
where the reports of the money market were analyzed; circular notes
issued thence; and finally, the private ledger and the journal which
summarized the work of all the departments were kept there.
Castanier had gone himself to shut the door which opened on to a
staircase that led to the parlor occupied by the two bankers on the
first floor of their hotel. This done, he had sat down at his desk
again, and for a moment he gazed at a little collection of letters of
credit drawn on the firm of Watschildine of London. Then he had taken
up the pen and imitated the banker’s signature on each. _Nucingen_ he
wrote, and eyed the forged signatures critically to see which seemed the
most perfect copy.
Suddenly he looked up as if a needle had pricked him. “You are not
alone!” a boding voice seemed to cry in his heart; and indeed the forger
saw a man standing at the little grated window of the counting-house, a
man whose breathing was so noiseless that he did not seem to breathe at
all. Castanier looked, and saw that the door at the end of the passage
was wide open; the stranger must have entered by that way.
For the first time in his life the old soldier felt a sensation of dread
that made him stare open-mouthed and wide-eyed at the man before him;
and for that matter, the appearance of the apparition was sufficiently
alarming even if unaccompanied by the mysterious circumstances of so
sudden an entry. The rounded forehead, the harsh coloring of the long
oval face, indicated quite as plainly as the cut of his clothes that the
man was an Englishman, reeking of his native isles. You had only to look
at the collar of his overcoat, at the voluminous cravat which smothered
the crushed frills of a shirt front so white that it brought out the
changeless leaden hue of an impassive face, and the thin red line of the
lips that seemed made to suck the blood of corpses; and you can guess
at once at the black gaiters buttoned up to the knee, and the
half-puritanical costume of a wealthy Englishman dressed for a walking
excursion. The intolerable glitter of the stranger’s eyes produced a
vivid and unpleasant impression, which was only deepened by the rigid
outlines of his features. The dried-up, emaciated creature seemed to
carry within him some gnawing thought that consumed him and could not be
appeased.
He must have digested his food so rapidly that he could doubtless
eat continually without bringing any trace of color into his face or
features. A tun of Tokay _vin de succession_ would not have caused any
faltering in that piercing glance that read men’s inmost thoughts, nor
dethroned the merciless reasoning faculty that always seemed to go
to the bottom of things. There was something of the fell and tranquil
majesty of a tiger about him.
“I have come to cash this bill of exchange, sir,” he said. Castanier
felt the tones of his voice thrill through every nerve with a violent
shock similar to that given by a discharge of electricity.
“The safe is closed,” said Castanier.
“It is open,” said the Englishman, looking round the counting-house.
“To-morrow is Sunday, and I cannot wait. The amount is for five hundred
thousand francs. You have the money there, and I must have it.”
“But how did you come in, sir?”
The Englishman smiled. That smile frightened Castanier. No words could
have replied more fully nor more peremptorily than that scornful and
imperial curl of the stranger’s lips. Castanier turned away, took up
fifty packets each containing ten thousand francs in bank-notes, and
held them out to the stranger, receiving in exchange for them a bill
accepted by the Baron de Nucingen. A sort of convulsive tremor ran
through him as he saw a red gleam in the stranger’s eyes when they fell
on the forged signature on the letter of credit.
“It... it wants your signature...” stammered Castanier, handing back the
bill.
“Hand me your pen,” answered the Englishman.
Castanier handed him the pen with which he had just committed forgery.
The stranger wrote _John Melmoth_, then he returned the slip of paper
and the pen to the cashier. Castanier looked at the handwriting,
noticing that it sloped from right to left in the Eastern fashion, and
Melmoth disappeared so noiselessly that when Castanier looked up again
an exclamation broke from him, partly because the man was no longer
there, partly because he felt a strange painful sensation such as our
imagination might take for an effect of poison.
The pen that Melmoth had handled sent the same sickening heat through
him that an emetic produces. But it seemed impossible to Castanier
that the Englishman should have guessed his crime. His inward qualms he
attributed to the palpitation of the heart that, according to received
ideas, was sure to follow at once on such a “turn” as the stranger had
given him.
“The devil take it; I am very stupid. Providence is watching over me;
for if that brute had come round to see my gentleman to-morrow, my goose
would have been cooked!” said Castanier, and he burned the unsuccessful
attempts at forgery in the stove.
He put the bill that he meant to take with him in an envelope, and
helped himself to five hundred thousand francs in French and English
bank-notes from the safe, which he locked. Then he put everything in
order, lit a candle, blew out the lamp, took up his hat and umbrella,
and went out sedately, as usual, to leave one of the two keys of the
strong room with Madame de Nucingen, in the absence of her husband the
Baron.
“You are in luck, M. Castanier,” said the banker’s wife as he entered
the room; “we have a holiday on Monday; you can go into the country, or
to Soizy.”
“Madame, will you be so good as to tell your husband that the bill
of exchange on Watschildine, which was behind time, has just been
presented? The five hundred thousand francs have been paid; so I shall
not come back till noon on Tuesday.”
“Good-bye, monsieur; I hope you will have a pleasant time.”
“The same to you, madame,” replied the old dragoon as he went out. He
glanced as he spoke at a young man well known in fashionable society at
that time, a M. de Rastignac, who was regarded as Madame de Nucingen’s
lover.
“Madame,” remarked this latter, “the old boy looks to me as if he meant
to play you some ill turn.”
“Pshaw! impossible; he is too stupid.”
“Piquoizeau,” said the cashier, walking into the porter’s room, “what
made you let anybody come up after four o’clock?”
“I have been smoking a pipe here in the doorway ever since four
o’clock,” said the man, “and nobody has gone into the bank. Nobody has
come out either except the gentlemen----”
“Are you quite sure?”
“Yes, upon my word and honor. Stay, though, at four o’clock M.
Werbrust’s friend came, a young fellow from Messrs. du Tillet & Co., in
the Rue Joubert.”
“All right,” said Castanier, and he hurried away.
The sickening sensation of heat that he had felt when he took back the
pen returned in greater intensity. “_Mille diables_!” thought he, as he
threaded his way along the Boulevard de Gand, “haven’t I taken proper
precautions? Let me think! Two clear days, Sunday and Monday, then a day
of uncertainty before they begin to look for me; altogether, three days
and four nights’ respite. I have a couple of passports and two different
disguises; is not that enough to throw the cleverest detective off the
scent? On Tuesday morning I shall draw a million francs in London before
the slightest suspicion has been aroused. My debts I am leaving behind
for the benefit of my creditors, who will put a ‘P’ * on the bills, and
I shall live comfortably in Italy for the rest of my days as the Conte
Ferraro. [*Protested.] I was alone with him when he died, poor fellow,
in the marsh of Zembin, and I shall slip into his skin.... _Mille
diables_! the woman who is to follow after me might give them a clue!
Think of an old campaigner like me infatuated enough to tie myself to a
petticoat tail!... Why take her? I must leave her behind. Yes, I could
make up my mind to it; but--I know myself--I should be ass enough to
go back to her. Still, nobody knows Aquilina. Shall I take her or leave
her?”
“You will not take her!” cried a voice that filled Castanier with
sickening dread. He turned sharply, and saw the Englishman.
“The devil is in it!” cried the cashier aloud.
Melmoth had passed his victim by this time; and if Castanier’s first
impulse had been to fasten a quarrel on a man who read his own thoughts,
he was so much torn up by opposing feelings that the immediate result
was a temporary paralysis. When he resumed his walk he fell once more
into that fever of irresolution which besets those who are so carried
away by passion that they are ready to commit a crime, but have not
sufficient strength of character to keep it to themselves without
suffering terribly in the process. So, although Castanier had made up
his mind to reap the fruits of a crime which was already half executed,
he hesitated to carry out his designs. For him, as for many men of mixed
character in whom weakness and strength are equally blended, the least
trifling consideration determines whether they shall continue to lead
blameless lives or become actively criminal. In the vast masses of
men enrolled in Napoleon’s armies there are many who, like Castanier,
possessed the purely physical courage demanded on the battlefield, yet
lacked the moral courage which makes a man as great in crime as he could
have been in virtue.
The letter of credit was drafted in such terms that immediately on
his arrival he might draw twenty-five thousand pounds on the firm of
Watschildine, the London correspondents of the house of Nucingen. The
London house had already been advised of the draft about to be made upon
them, he had written to them himself. He had instructed an agent (chosen
at random) to take his passage in a vessel which was to leave Portsmouth
with a wealthy English family on board, who were going to Italy, and
the passage-money had been paid in the name of the Conte Ferraro. The
smallest details of the scheme had been thought out. He had arranged
matters so as to divert the search that would be made for him into
Belgium and Switzerland, while he himself was at sea in the English
vessel. Then, by the time that Nucingen might flatter himself that he
was on the track of his late cashier, the said cashier, as the Conte
Ferraro, hoped to be safe in Naples. He had determined to disfigure his
face in order to disguise himself the more completely, and by means of
an acid to imitate the scars of smallpox. Yet, in spite of all these
precautions, which surely seemed as if they must secure him complete
immunity, his conscience tormented him; he was afraid. The even and
peaceful life that he had led for so long had modified the morality of
the camp. His life was stainless as yet; he could not sully it without a
pang. So for the last time he abandoned himself to all the influences of
the better self that strenuously resisted.
“Pshaw!” he said at last, at the corner of the Boulevard and the Rue
Montmartre, “I will take a cab after the play this evening and go out to
Versailles. A post-chaise will be ready for me at my old quartermaster’s
place. He would keep my secret even if a dozen men were standing ready
to shoot him down. The chances are all in my favor, so far as I see; so
I shall take my little Naqui with me, and I will go.”
“You will not go!” exclaimed the Englishman, and the strange tones of
his voice drove all the cashier’s blood back to his heart.
Melmoth stepped into a tilbury which was waiting for him, and was
whirled away so quickly, that when Castanier looked up he saw his foe
some hundred paces away from him, and before it even crossed his mind
to cut off the man’s retreat the tilbury was far on its way up the
Boulevard Montmartre.
“Well, upon my word, there is something supernatural about this!” said
he to himself. “If I were fool enough to believe in God, I should think
that He had set Saint Michael on my tracks. Suppose that the devil and
the police should let me go on as I please, so as to nab me in the nick
of time? Did any one ever see the like! But there, this is folly...”
Castanier went along the Rue du Faubourg-Montmartre, slackening his pace
as he neared the Rue Richer. There on the second floor of a block of
buildings which looked out upon some gardens lived the unconscious cause
of Castanier’s crime--a young woman known in the quarter as Mme. de la
Garde. A concise history of certain events in the cashier’s past life
must be given in order to explain these facts, and to give a complete
presentment of the crisis when he yielded to temptation.
Mme. de la Garde said that she was a Piedmontese. No one, not even
Castanier, knew her real name. She was one of those young girls, who
are driven by dire misery, by inability to earn a living, or by fear of
starvation, to have recourse to a trade which most of them loathe, many
regard with indifference, and some few follow in obedience to the laws
of their constitution. But on the brink of the gulf of prostitution in
Paris, the young girl of sixteen, beautiful and pure as the Madonna, had
met with Castanier. The old dragoon was too rough and homely to make his
way in society, and he was tired of tramping the boulevard at night and
of the kind of conquests made there by gold. For some time past he had
desired to bring a certain regularity into an irregular life. He was
struck by the beauty of the poor child who had drifted by chance into
his arms, and his determination to rescue her from the life of the
streets was half benevolent, half selfish, as some of the thoughts of
the best of men are apt to be. Social conditions mingle elements of evil
with the promptings of natural goodness of heart, and the mixture
of motives underlying a man’s intentions should be leniently judged.
Castanier had just cleverness enough to be very shrewd where his own
interests were concerned. So he concluded to be a philanthropist on
either count, and at first made her his mistress.
“Hey! hey!” he said to himself, in his soldierly fashion. “I am an
old wolf, and a sheep shall not make a fool of me. Castanier, old man,
before you set up housekeeping, reconnoitre the girl’s character for a
bit, and see if she is a steady sort.”
This irregular union gave the Piedmontese a status the most nearly
approaching respectability among those which the world declines to
recognize. During the first year she took the _nom de guerre_ of
Aquilina, one of the characters in _Venice Preserved_ which she had
chanced to read. She fancied that she resembled the courtesan in face
and general appearance, and in a certain precocity of heart and brain of
which she was conscious. When Castanier found that her life was as
well regulated and virtuous as was possible for a social outlaw, he
manifested a desire that they should live as husband and wife. So she
took the name of Mme. de la Garde, in order to approach, as closely as
Parisian usages permit, the conditions of a real marriage. As a matter
of fact, many of these unfortunate girls have one fixed idea, to be
looked upon as respectable middle-class women, who lead humdrum lives of
faithfulness to their husbands; women who would make excellent mothers,
keepers of household accounts, and menders of household linen. This
longing springs from a sentiment so laudable, that society should take
it into consideration. But society, incorrigible as ever, will assuredly
persist in regarding the married woman as a corvette duly authorized by
her flag and papers to go on her own course, while the woman who is a
wife in all but name is a pirate and an outlaw for lack of a document.
A day came when Mme. de la Garde would fain have signed herself “Mme.
Castanier.” The cashier was put out by this.
“So you do not love me well enough to marry me?” she said.
Castanier did not answer; he was absorbed by his thoughts. The poor girl
resigned herself to her fate. The ex-dragoon was in despair. Naqui’s
heart softened towards him at the sight of his trouble; she tried to
soothe him, but what could she do when she did not know what ailed him?
When Naqui made up her mind to know the secret, although she never asked
him a question, the cashier dolefully confessed to the existence of a
Mme. Castanier. This lawful wife, a thousand times accursed, was living
in a humble way in Strasbourg on a small property there; he wrote to her
twice a year, and kept the secret of her existence so well, that no one
suspected that he was married. The reason of this reticence? If it
is familiar to many military men who may chance to be in a like
predicament, it is perhaps worth while to give the story.
Your genuine trooper (if it is allowable here to employ the word which
in the army signifies a man who is destined to die as a captain) is a
sort of serf, a part and parcel of his regiment, an essentially simple
creature, and Castanier was marked out by nature as a victim to the
wiles of mothers with grown-up daughters left too long on their hands.
It was at Nancy, during one of those brief intervals of repose when the
Imperial armies were not on active service abroad, that Castanier was so
unlucky as to pay some attention to a young lady with whom he danced at
a _ridotto_, the provincial name for the entertainments often given
by the military to the townsfolk, or vice versa, in garrison towns. A
scheme for inveigling the gallant captain into matrimony was immediately
set on foot, one of those schemes by which mothers secure accomplices in
a human heart by touching all its motive springs, while they convert all
their friends into fellow-conspirators. Like all people possessed by
one idea, these ladies press everything into the service of their great
project, slowly elaborating their toils, much as the ant-lion excavates
its funnel in the sand and lies in wait at the bottom for its victim.
Suppose that no one strays, after all, into that carefully constructed
labyrinth? Suppose that the ant-lion dies of hunger and thirst in her
pit? Such things may be, but if any heedless creature once enters in, it
never comes out. All the wires which could be pulled to induce action
on the captain’s part were tried; appeals were made to the secret
interested motives that always come into play in such cases; they worked
on Castanier’s hopes and on the weaknesses and vanity of human nature.
Unluckily, he had praised the daughter to her mother when he brought her
back after a waltz, a little chat followed, and then an invitation in
the most natural way in the world. Once introduced into the house,
the dragoon was dazzled by the hospitality of a family who appeared
to conceal their real wealth beneath a show of careful economy. He was
skilfully flattered on all sides, and every one extolled for his benefit
the various treasures there displayed. A neatly timed dinner, served on
plate lent by an uncle, the attention shown to him by the only daughter
of the house, the gossip of the town, a well-to-do sub-lieutenant who
seemed likely to cut the ground from under his feet--all the innumerable
snares, in short, of the provincial ant-lion were set for him, and to
such good purpose, that Castanier said five years later, “To this day I
do not know how it came about!”
The dragoon received fifteen thousand francs with the lady, who after
two years of marriage, became the ugliest and consequently the
most peevish woman on earth. Luckily they had no children. The fair
complexion (maintained by a Spartan regimen), the fresh, bright color
in her face, which spoke of an engaging modesty, became overspread with
blotches and pimples; her figure, which had seemed so straight, grew
crooked, the angel became a suspicious and shrewish creature who drove
Castanier frantic. Then the fortune took to itself wings. At length the
dragoon, no longer recognizing the woman whom he had wedded, left her to
live on a little property at Strasbourg, until the time when it should
please God to remove her to adorn Paradise. She was one of those
virtuous women who, for want of other occupation, would weary the life
out of an angel with complainings, who pray till (if their prayers are
heard in heaven) they must exhaust the patience of the Almighty, and say
everything that is bad of their husbands in dovelike murmurs over a game
of boston with their neighbors. When Aquilina learned all these troubles
she clung still more affectionately to Castanier, and made him so happy,
varying with woman’s ingenuity the pleasures with which she filled his
life, that all unwittingly she was the cause of the cashier’s downfall.
Like many women who seem by nature destined to sound all the depths of
love, Mme. de la Garde was disinterested. She asked neither for gold
nor for jewelry, gave no thought to the future, lived entirely for the
present and for the pleasures of the present. She accepted expensive
ornaments and dresses, the carriage so eagerly coveted by women of
her class, as one harmony the more in the picture of life. There was
absolutely no vanity in her desire not to appear at a better advantage
but to look the fairer, and moreover, no woman could live without
luxuries more cheerfully. When a man of generous nature (and military
men are mostly of this stamp) meets with such a woman, he feels a sort
of exasperation at finding himself her debtor in generosity. He feels
that he could stop a mail coach to obtain money for her if he has not
sufficient for her whims. He will commit a crime if so he may be great
and noble in the eyes of some woman or of his special public; such
is the nature of the man. Such a lover is like a gambler who would be
dishonored in his own eyes if he did not repay the sum he borrowed from
a waiter in a gaming-house; but will shrink from no crime, will leave
his wife and children without a penny, and rob and murder, if so he
may come to the gaming-table with a full purse, and his honor remain
untarnished among the frequenters of that fatal abode. So it was with
Castanier.
He had begun by installing Aquiline is a modest fourth-floor dwelling,
the furniture being of the simplest kind. But when he saw the girl’s
beauty and great qualities, when he had known inexpressible and
unlooked-for happiness with her, he began to dote upon her; and longed
to adorn his idol. Then Aquilina’s toilette was so comically out of
keeping with her poor abode, that for both their sakes it was clearly
incumbent on him to move. The change swallowed up almost all Castanier’s
savings, for he furnished his domestic paradise with all the prodigality
that is lavished on a kept mistress. A pretty woman must have everything
pretty about her; the unity of charm in the woman and her surroundings
singles her out from among her sex. This sentiment of homogeneity
indeed, though it has frequently escaped the attention of observers,
is instinctive in human nature; and the same prompting leads elderly
spinsters to surround themselves with dreary relics of the past. But
the lovely Piedmontese must have the newest and latest fashions, and
all that was daintiest and prettiest in stuffs for hangings, in silks
or jewelry, in fine china and other brittle and fragile wares. She
asked for nothing; but when she was called upon to make a choice, when
Castanier asked her, “Which do you like?” she would answer, “Why, this
is the nicest!” Love never counts the cost, and Castanier therefore
always took the “nicest.”
When once the standard had been set up, there was nothing for it but
everything in the household must be in conformity, from the linen,
plate, and crystal through a thousand and one items of expenditure down
to the pots and pans in the kitchen. Castanier had meant to “do things
simply,” as the saying goes, but he gradually found himself more and
more in debt. One expense entailed another. The clock called for
candle sconces. Fires must be lighted in the ornamental grates, but the
curtains and hangings were too fresh and delicate to be soiled by smuts,
so they must be replaced by patent and elaborate fireplaces, warranted
to give out no smoke, recent inventions of the people who are so clever
at drawing up a prospectus. Then Aquilina found it so nice to run about
barefooted on the carpet in her room, that Castanier must have soft
carpets laid everywhere for the pleasure of playing with Naqui. A
bathroom, too, was built for her, everything to the end that she might
be more comfortable.
Shopkeepers, workmen, and manufacturers in Paris have a mysterious knack
of enlarging a hole in a man’s purse. They cannot give the price of
anything upon inquiry; and as the paroxysm of longing cannot abide
delay, orders are given by the feeble light of an approximate estimate
of cost. The same people never send in the bills at once, but ply the
purchaser with furniture till his head spins. Everything is so pretty,
so charming; and every one is satisfied.
A few months later the obliging furniture dealers are metamorphosed, and
reappear in the shape of alarming totals on invoices that fill the soul
with their horrid clamor; they are in urgent want of the money; they
are, as you may say on the brink of bankruptcy, their tears flow, it
is heartrending to hear them! And then----the gulf yawns, and gives up
serried columns of figures marching four deep, when as a matter of fact
they should have issued innocently three by three.
Before Castanier had any idea of how much he had spent, he had arranged
for Aquilina to have a carriage from a livery stable when she went out,
instead of a cab. Castanier was a gourmand; he engaged an excellent
cook; and Aquilina, to please him, had herself made the purchases of
early fruit and vegetables, rare delicacies, and exquisite wines. But,
as Aquilina had nothing of her own, these gifts of hers, so precious by
reason of the thought and tact and graciousness that prompted them, were
no less a drain upon Castanier’s purse; he did not like his Naqui to
be without money, and Naqui could not keep money in her pocket. So the
table was a heavy item of expenditure for a man with Castanier’s income.
The ex-dragoon was compelled to resort to various shifts for obtaining
money, for he could not bring himself to renounce this delightful life.
He loved the woman too well to cross the freaks of the mistress. He
was one of those men who, through self-love or through weakness of
character, can refuse nothing to a woman; false shame overpowers them,
and they rather face ruin than make the admissions: “I cannot----” “My
means will not permit----” “I cannot afford----”
When, therefore, Castanier saw that if he meant to emerge from the abyss
of debt into which he had plunged, he must part with Aquilina and live
upon bread and water, he was so unable to do without her or to change
his habits of life, that daily he put off his plans of reform until the
morrow. The debts were pressing, and he began by borrowing money. His
position and previous character inspired confidence, and of this he took
advantage to devise a system of borrowing money as he required it. Then,
as the total amount of debt rapidly increased, he had recourse to those
commercial inventions known as accommodation bills. This form of bill
does not represent goods or other value received, and the first endorser
pays the amount named for the obliging person who accepts it. This
species of fraud is tolerated because it is impossible to detect it,
and, moreover, it is an imaginary fraud which only becomes real if
payment is ultimately refused.
When at length it was evidently impossible to borrow any longer, whether
because the amount of the debt was now so greatly increased, or
because Castanier was unable to pay the large amount of interest on
the aforesaid sums of money, the cashier saw bankruptcy before him. On
making this discovery, he decided for a fraudulent bankruptcy rather
than an ordinary failure, and preferred a crime to a misdemeanor. He
determined, after the fashion of the celebrated cashier of the Royal
Treasury, to abuse the trust deservedly won, and to increase the number
of his creditors by making a final loan of the sum sufficient to keep
him in comfort in a foreign country for the rest of his days. All this,
as has been seen, he had prepared to do.
Aquilina knew nothing of the irksome cares of this life; she enjoyed her
existence, as many a woman does, making no inquiry as to where the
money came from, even as sundry other folk will eat their buttered rolls
untroubled by any restless spirit of curiosity as to the culture and
growth of wheat; but as the labor and miscalculations of agriculture
lie on the other side of the baker’s oven, so beneath the unappreciated
luxury of many a Parisian household lie intolerable anxieties and
exorbitant toil.
While Castanier was enduring the torture of the strain, and his thoughts
were full of the deed that should change his whole life, Aquilina was
lying luxuriously back in a great armchair by the fireside, beguiling
the time by chatting with her waiting-maid. As frequently happens in
such cases the maid had become the mistress’ confidant, Jenny having
first assured herself that her mistress’ ascendency over Castanier was
complete.
“What are we to do this evening? Leon seems determined to come,” Mme.
de la Garde was saying, as she read a passionate epistle indited upon a
faint gray notepaper.
“Here is the master!” said Jenny.
Castanier came in. Aquilina, nowise disconcerted, crumpled up the
letter, took it with the tongs, and held it in the flames.
“So that is what you do with your love-letters, is it?” asked Castanier.
“Oh goodness, yes,” said Aquilina; “is it not the best way of keeping
them safe? Besides, fire should go to fire, as water makes for the
river.”
“You are talking as if it were a real love-letter, Naqui----”
“Well, am I not handsome enough to receive them?” she said, holding up
her forehead for a kiss. There was a carelessness in her manner that
would have told any man less blind than Castanier that it was only a
piece of conjugal duty, as it were, to give this joy to the cashier, but
use and wont had brought Castanier to the point where clear-sightedness
is no longer possible for love.
“I have taken a box at the Gymnase this evening,” he said; “let us have
dinner early, and then we need not dine in a hurry.”
“Go and take Jenny. I am tired of plays. I do not know what is the
matter with me this evening; I would rather stay here by the fire.”
“Come, all the same though, Naqui; I shall not be here to bore you much
longer. Yes, Quiqui, I am going to start to-night, and it will be some
time before I come back again. I am leaving everything in your charge.
Will you keep your heart for me too?”
“Neither my heart nor anything else,” she said; “but when you come back
again, Naqui will still be Naqui for you.”
“Well, this is frankness. So you would not follow me?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Eh! why, how can I leave the lover who writes me such sweet little
notes?” she asked, pointing to the blackened scrap of paper with a
mocking smile.
“Is there any truth in it?” asked Castanier. “Have you really a lover?”
“Really!” cried Aquilina; “and have you never given it a serious
thought, dear? To begin with, you are fifty years old. Then you have
just the sort of face to put on a fruit stall; if the woman tried to see
you for a pumpkin, no one would contradict her. You puff and blow like a
seal when you come upstairs; your paunch rises and falls like a diamond
on a woman’s forehead! It is pretty plain that you served in the
dragoons; you are a very ugly-looking old man. Fiddle-de-dee. If you
have any mind to keep my respect, I recommend you not to add imbecility
to these qualities by imagining that such a girl as I am will be content
with your asthmatic love, and not look for youth and good looks and
pleasure by way of a variety----”
“Aquilina! you are laughing, of course?”
“Oh, very well; and are you not laughing too? Do you take me for a fool,
telling me that you are going away? ‘I am going to start to-night!’” she
said, mimicking his tones. “Stuff and nonsense! Would you talk like that
if you were really going from your Naqui? You would cry, like the booby
that you are!”
“After all, if I go, will you follow?” he asked.
“Tell me first whether this journey of yours is a bad joke or not.”
“Yes, seriously, I am going.”
“Well, then, seriously, I shall stay. A pleasant journey to you, my boy!
I will wait till you come back. I would sooner take leave of life than
take leave of my dear, cozy Paris----”
“Will you not come to Italy, to Naples, and lead a pleasant life
there--a delicious, luxurious life, with this stout old fogy of yours,
who puffs and blows like a seal?”
“No.”
“Ungrateful girl!”
“Ungrateful?” she cried, rising to her feet. “I might leave this house
this moment and take nothing out of it but myself. I shall have given
you all the treasures a young girl can give, and something that not
every drop in your veins and mine can ever give me back. If, by any
means whatever, by selling my hopes of eternity, for instance, I could
recover my past self, body and soul (for I have, perhaps, redeemed
my soul), and be pure as a lily for my lover, I would not hesitate a
moment! What sort of devotion has rewarded mine? You have housed and fed
me, just as you give a dog food and a kennel because he is a protection
to the house, and he may take kicks when we are out of humor, and lick
our hands as soon as we are pleased to call him. And which of us two
will have been the more generous?”
“Oh! dear child, do you not see that I am joking?” returned Castanier.
“I am going on a short journey; I shall not be away for very long. But
come with me to the Gymnase; I shall start just before midnight, after I
have had time to say good-bye to you.”
“Poor pet! so you are really going, are you?” she said. She put her arms
round his neck, and drew down his head against her bodice.
“You are smothering me!” cried Castanier, with his face buried in
Aquilina’s breast. That damsel turned to say in Jenny’s ear, “Go to
Leon, and tell him not to come till one o’clock. If you do not find
him, and he comes here during the leave-taking, keep him in your
room.--Well,” she went on, setting free Castanier, and giving a tweak
to the tip of his nose, “never mind, handsomest of seals that you are. I
will go to the theatre with you this evening? But all in good time; let
us have dinner! There is a nice little dinner for you--just what you
like.”
“It is very hard to part from such a woman as you!” exclaimed Castanier.
“Very well then, why do you go?” asked she.
“Ah! why? why? If I were to begin to begin to explain the reasons why,
I must tell you things that would prove to you that I love you almost to
madness. Ah! if you have sacrificed your honor for me, I have sold mine
for you; we are quits. Is that love?”
“What is all this about?” said she. “Come, now, promise me that if I had
a lover you would still love me as a father; that would be love! Come,
now, promise it at once, and give us your fist upon it.”
“I should kill you,” and Castanier smiled as he spoke.
They sat down to the dinner table, and went thence to the Gymnase. When
the first part of the performance was over, it occurred to Castanier to
show himself to some of his acquaintances in the house, so as to turn
away any suspicion of his departure. He left Mme. de la Garde in the
corner box where she was seated, according to her modest wont, and went
to walk up and down in the lobby. He had not gone many paces before he
saw the Englishman, and with a sudden return of the sickening sensation
of heat that once before had vibrated through him, and of the terror
that he had felt already, he stood face to face with Melmoth.
“Forger!”
At the word, Castanier glanced round at the people who were moving about
them. He fancied that he could see astonishment and curiosity in their
eyes, and wishing to be rid of this Englishman at once, he raised his
hand to strike him--and felt his arm paralyzed by some invisible power
that sapped his strength and nailed him to the spot. He allowed the
stranger to take him by the arm, and they walked together to the
green-room like two friends.