pilgrimage for youths who for lack of a mistress bestow their ardent
affection upon the whole sex. On the first floor of the most rigidly
respectable domicile therein dwelt one of those exquisite creatures
whom it has pleased heaven to endow with the rarest and most surpassing
beauty. As it is impossible that they should all be duchesses or queens
(since there are many more pretty women in the world than titles and
thrones for them to adorn), they are content to make a stockbroker or a
banker happy at a fixed price. To this good-natured beauty, Euphrasia
by name, an unbounded ambition had led a notary’s clerk to aspire. In
short, the second clerk in the office of Maitre Crottat, notary, had
fallen in love with her, as youth at two-and-twenty can fall in love.
The scrivener would have murdered the Pope and run amuck through the
whole sacred college to procure the miserable sum of a hundred louis to
pay for a shawl which had turned Euphrasia’s head, at which price her
waiting-woman had promised that Euphrasia should be his. The infatuated
youth walked to and fro under Madame Euphrasia’s windows, like the
polar bears in their cage at the Jardin des Plantes, with his right hand
thrust beneath his waistcoat in the region of the heart, which he was
fit to tear from his bosom, but as yet he had only wrenched at the
elastic of his braces.
“What can one do to raise ten thousand francs?” he asked himself. “Shall
I make off with the money that I must pay on the registration of that
conveyance? Good heavens! my loan would not ruin the purchaser, a man
with seven millions! And then next day I would fling myself at his feet
and say, ‘I have taken ten thousand francs belonging to you, sir; I am
twenty-two years of age, and I am in love with Euphrasia--that is my
story. My father is rich, he will pay you back; do not ruin me! Have
not you yourself been twenty-two years old and madly in love?’ But these
beggarly landowners have no souls! He would be quite likely to give me
up to the public prosecutor, instead of taking pity upon me. Good God!
if it were only possible to sell your soul to the Devil! But there is
neither a God nor a Devil; it is all nonsense out of nursery tales and
old wives’ talk. What shall I do?”
“If you have a mind to sell your soul to the Devil, sir,” said the
house-painter, who had overheard something that the clerk let fall, “you
can have the ten thousand francs.”
“And Euphrasia!” cried the clerk, as he struck a bargain with the devil
that inhabited the house-painter.
The pact concluded, the frantic clerk went to find the shawl, and
mounted Madame Euphrasia’s staircase; and as (literally) the devil was
in him, he did not come down for twelve days, drowning the thought
of hell and of his privileges in twelve days of love and riot and
forgetfulness, for which he had bartered away all his hopes of a
paradise to come.
And in this way the secret of the vast power discovered and acquired by
the Irishman, the offspring of Maturin’s brain, was lost to mankind;
and the various Orientalists, Mystics, and Archaeologists who take an
interest in these matters were unable to hand down to posterity the
proper method of invoking the Devil, for the following sufficient
reasons:
On the thirteenth day after these frenzied nuptials the wretched
clerk lay on a pallet bed in a garret in his master’s house in the Rue
Saint-Honore. Shame, the stupid goddess who dares not behold herself,
had taken possession of the young man. He had fallen ill; he would nurse
himself; misjudged the quantity of a remedy devised by the skill of
a practitioner well known on the walls of Paris, and succumbed to the
effects of an overdose of mercury. His corpse was as black as a mole’s
back. A devil had left unmistakable traces of its passage there; could
it have been Ashtaroth?
“The estimable youth to whom you refer has been carried away to the
planet Mercury,” said the head clerk to a German demonologist who came
to investigate the matter at first hand.
“I am quite prepared to believe it,” answered the Teuton.
“Oh!”
“Yes, sir,” returned the other. “The opinion you advance coincides with
the very words of Jacob Boehme. In the forty-eighth proposition of _The
Threefold Life of Man_ he says that ‘if God hath brought all things
to pass with a LET THERE BE, the FIAT is the secret matrix which
comprehends and apprehends the nature which is formed by the spirit born
of Mercury and of God.’”
“What do you say, sir?”
The German delivered his quotation afresh.
“We do not know it,” said the clerks.
“_Fiat_?...” said a clerk. “_Fiat lux_!”
“You can verify the citation for yourselves,” said the German. “You will
find the passage in the _Treatise of the Threefold Life of Man_, page
75; the edition was published by M. Migneret in 1809. It was translated
into French by a philosopher who had a great admiration for the famous
shoemaker.”
“Oh! he was a shoemaker, was he?” said the head clerk.
“In Prussia,” said the German.
“Did he work for the King of Prussia?” inquired a Boeotian of a second
clerk.
“He must have vamped up his prose,” said a third.
“That man is colossal!” cried the fourth, pointing to the Teuton.
That gentleman, though a demonologist of the first rank, did not know
the amount of devilry to be found in a notary’s clerk. He went away
without the least idea that they were making game of him, and fully
under the impression that the young fellows regarded Boehme as a
colossal genius.
“Education is making strides in France,” said he to himself.
PARIS, May 6, 1835.
ADDENDUM
The following personages appear in other stories of the Human Comedy.
Aquilina
The Magic Skin
Claparon, Charles
A Bachelor’s Establishment
Cesar Birotteau
The Firm of Nucingen
A Man of Business
The Middle Classes
Euphrasia
The Magic Skin
Nucingen, Baronne Delphine de
Father Goriot
The Thirteen
Eugenie Grandet
Cesar Birotteau
Lost Illusions
A Distinguished Provincial at Paris
The Commission in Lunacy
Scenes from a Courtesan’s Life
Modeste Mignon
The Firm of Nucingen
Another Study of Woman
A Daughter of Eve
The Member for Arcis
Tillet, Ferdinand du
Cesar Birotteau
The Firm of Nucingen
The Middle Classes
A Bachelor’s Establishment
Pierrette
A Distinguished Provencial at Paris
The Secrets of a Princess
A Daughter of Eve
The Member for Arcis
Cousin Betty
The Unconscious Humorists