UNCONSCIOUS COMEDIANS
By Honore De Balzac
Translated by Katharine Prescott Wormeley
DEDICATION
To Monsieur le Comte Jules de Castellane.
UNCONSCIOUS COMEDIANS
Leon de Lora, our celebrated landscape painter, belongs to one of the
noblest families of the Roussillon (Spanish originally) which, although
distinguished for the antiquity of its race, has been doomed for a
century to the proverbial poverty of hidalgos. Coming, light-footed,
to Paris from the department of the Eastern Pyrenees, with the sum of
eleven francs in his pocket for all viaticum, he had in some degree
forgotten the miseries and privations of his childhood and his family
amid the other privations and miseries which are never lacking to
“rapins,” whose whole fortune consists of intrepid vocation. Later, the
cares of fame and those of success were other causes of forgetfulness.
If you have followed the capricious and meandering course of these
studies, perhaps you will remember Mistigris, Schinner’s pupil, one
of the heroes of “A Start in Life” (Scenes from Private Life), and his
brief apparitions in other Scenes. In 1845, this landscape painter,
emulator of the Hobbemas, Ruysdaels, and Lorraines, resembles no more
the shabby, frisky rapin whom we then knew. Now an illustrious man, he
owns a charming house in the rue de Berlin, not far from the hotel de
Brambourg, where his friend Brideau lives, and quite close to the house
of Schinner, his early master. He is a member of the Institute and
an officer of the Legion of honor; he is thirty-six years old, has an
income of twenty thousand francs from the Funds, his pictures sell for
their weight in gold, and (what seems to him more extraordinary than the
invitations he receives occasionally to court balls) his name and fame,
mentioned so often for the last sixteen years by the press of Europe,
has at last penetrated to the valley of the Eastern Pyrenees, where
vegetate three veritable Loras: his father, his eldest brother, and an
old paternal aunt, Mademoiselle Urraca y Lora.
In the maternal line the painter has no relation left except a cousin,
the nephew of his mother, residing in a small manufacturing town in the
department. This cousin was the first to bethink himself of Leon. But
it was not until 1840 that Leon de Lora received a letter from Monsieur
Sylvestre Palafox-Castal-Gazonal (called simply Gazonal) to which he
replied that he was assuredly himself,--that is to say, the son of the
late Leonie Gazonal, wife of Comte Fernand Didas y Lora.
During the summer of 1841 cousin Sylvestre Gazonal went to inform the
illustrious unknown family of Lora that their little Leon had not
gone to the Rio de la Plata, as they supposed, but was now one of the
greatest geniuses of the French school of painting; a fact the family
did not believe. The eldest son, Don Juan de Lora assured his cousin
Gazonal that he was certainly the dupe of some Parisian wag.
Now the said Gazonal was intending to go to Paris to prosecute a lawsuit
which the prefect of the Eastern Pyrenees had arbitrarily removed from
the usual jurisdiction, transferring it to that of the Council of State.
The worthy provincial determined to investigate this act, and to ask
his Parisian cousin the reason of such high-handed measures. It thus
happened that Monsieur Gazonal came to Paris, took shabby lodgings in
the rue Croix-des-Petits-Champs, and was amazed to see the palace of
his cousin in the rue de Berlin. Being told that the painter was then
travelling in Italy, he renounced, for the time being, the intention
of asking his advice, and doubted if he should ever find his maternal
relationship acknowledged by so great a man.
During the years 1843 and 1844 Gazonal attended to his lawsuit. This
suit concerned a question as to the current and level of a stream
of water and the necessity of removing a dam, in which dispute the
administration, instigated by the abutters on the river banks, had
meddled. The removal of the dam threatened the existence of Gazonal’s
manufactory. In 1845, Gazonal considered his cause as wholly lost; the
secretary of the Master of Petitions, charged with the duty of drawing
up the report, had confided to him that the said report would assuredly
be against him, and his own lawyer confirmed the statement. Gazonal,
though commander of the National Guard in his own town and one of the
most capable manufacturers of the department, found himself of so little
account in Paris, and he was, moreover, so frightened by the costs of
living and the dearness of even the most trifling things, that he kept
himself, all this time, secluded in his shabby lodgings. The Southerner,
deprived of his sun, execrated Paris, which he called a manufactory
of rheumatism. As he added up the costs of his suit and his living,
he vowed within himself to poison the prefect on his return, or to
minotaurize him. In his moments of deepest sadness he killed the prefect
outright; in gayer mood he contented himself with minotaurizing him.
One morning as he ate his breakfast and cursed his fate, he picked up
a newspaper savagely. The following lines, ending an article, struck
Gazonal as if the mysterious voice which speaks to gamblers before they
win had sounded in his ear: “Our celebrated landscape painter, Leon de
Lora, lately returned from Italy, will exhibit several pictures at the
Salon; thus the exhibition promises, as we see, to be most brilliant.”
With the suddenness of action that distinguishes the sons of the sunny
South, Gazonal sprang from his lodgings to the street, from the street
to a street-cab, and drove to the rue de Berlin to find his cousin.
Leon de Lora sent word by a servant to his cousin Gazonal that he
invited him to breakfast the next day at the Cafe de Paris, but he was
now engaged in a matter which did not allow him to receive his cousin at
the present moment. Gazonal, like a true Southerner, recounted all his
troubles to the valet.
The next day at ten o’clock, Gazonal, much too well-dressed for the
occasion (he had put on his bottle-blue coat with brass buttons,
a frilled shirt, a white waistcoat and yellow gloves), awaited his
amphitryon a full hour, stamping his feet on the boulevard, after
hearing from the master of the cafe that “these gentlemen” breakfasted
habitually between eleven and twelve o’clock.
“Between eleven and half-past,” he said when he related his adventures
to his cronies in the provinces, “two Parisians dressed in simple
frock-coats, looking like _nothing at all_, called out when they saw me
on the boulevard, ‘There’s our Gazonal!’”
The speaker was Bixiou, with whom Leon de Lora had armed himself to
“bring out” his provincial cousin, in other words, to make him pose.
“‘Don’t be vexed, cousin, I’m at your service!’ cried out that little
Leon, taking me in his arms,” related Gazonal on his return home. “The
breakfast was splendid. I thought I was going blind when I saw the
number of bits of gold it took to pay that bill. Those fellows must
earn their weight in gold, for I saw my cousin give the waiter _thirty
sous_--the price of a whole day’s work!”
During this monstrous breakfast--advisedly so called in view of six
dozen Osten oysters, six cutlets a la Soubise, a chicken a la Marengo,
lobster mayonnaise, green peas, a mushroom pasty, washed down with
three bottles of Bordeaux, three bottles of Champagne, plus coffee and
liqueurs, to say nothing of relishes--Gazonal was magnificent in his
diatribes against Paris. The worthy manufacturer complained of the
length of the four-pound bread-loaves, the height of the houses, the
indifference of the passengers in the streets to one another, the cold,
the rain, the cost of hackney-coaches, all of which and much else he
bemoaned in so witty a manner that the two artists took a mighty fancy
to cousin Gazonal, and made him relate his lawsuit from beginning to
end.
“My lawsuit,” he said in his Southern accent and rolling his r’s, “is a
very simple thing; they want my manufactory. I’ve employed here in Paris
a dolt of a lawyer, to whom I give twenty francs every time he opens
an eye, and he is always asleep. He’s a slug, who drives in his coach,
while I go afoot and he splashes me. I see now I ought to have had
a carriage! On the other hand, that Council of State are a pack of
do-nothings, who leave their duties to little scamps every one of
whom is bought up by our prefect. That’s my lawsuit! They want my
manufactory! Well, they’ll get it! and they must manage the best they
can with my workmen, a hundred of ‘em, who’ll make them sing another
tune before they’ve done with them.”
“Two years. Ha! that meddling prefect! he shall pay dear for this; I’ll
have his life if I have to give mine on the scaffold--”
“Which state councillor presides over your section?”
“A former newspaper man,--doesn’t pay ten sous in taxes,--his name is
Massol.”
The two Parisians exchanged glances.
“Who is the commissioner who is making the report?”
“Ha! that’s still more queer; he’s Master of Petitions, professor of
something or other at the Sorbonne,--a fellow who writes things in
reviews, and for whom I have the profoundest contempt.”
“Claude Vignon,” said Bixiou.
“Yes, that’s his name,” replied Gazonal. “Massol and Vignon--there you
have Social Reason, in which there’s no reason at all.”
“There must be some way out of it,” said Leon de Lora. “You see, cousin,
all things are possible in Paris for good as well as for evil, for the
just as well as the unjust. There’s nothing that can’t be done, undone,
and redone.”
“The devil take me if I stay ten days more in this hole of a place, the
dullest in all France!”
The two cousins and Bixiou were at this moment walking from one end to
the other of that sheet of asphalt on which, between the hours of one
and three, it is difficult to avoid seeing some of the personages in
honor of whom Fame puts one or the other of her trumpets to her lips.
Formerly that locality was the Place Royale; next it was the Pont Neuf;
in these days this privilege had been acquired by the Boulevard des
Italiens.
“Paris,” said the painter to his cousin, “is an instrument on which we
must know how to play; if we stand here ten minutes I’ll give you your
first lesson. There, look!” he said, raising his cane and pointing to a
couple who were just then coming out from the Passage de l’Opera.
“Goodness! who’s that?” asked Gazonal.
_That_ was an old woman, in a bonnet which had spent six months in a
show-case, a very pretentious gown and a faded tartan shawl, whose face
had been buried twenty years of her life in a damp lodge, and whose
swollen hand-bag betokened no better social position than that of an
ex-portress. With her was a slim little girl, whose eyes, fringed with
black lashes, had lost their innocence and showed great weariness; her
face, of a pretty shape, was fresh and her hair abundant, her forehead
charming but audacious, her bust thin,--in other words, an unripe fruit.
“That,” replied Bixiou, “is a rat tied to its mother.”
“A rat!--what’s that?”
“That particular rat,” said Leon, with a friendly nod to Mademoiselle
Ninette, “may perhaps win your suit for you.”
Gazonal bounded; but Bixiou had held him by the arm ever since they left
the cafe, thinking perhaps that the flush on his face was rather vivid.
“That rat, who is just leaving a rehearsal at the Opera-house, is going
home to eat a miserable dinner, and will return about three o’clock to
dress, if she dances in the ballet this evening--as she will, to-day
being Monday. This rat is already an old rat for she is thirteen years
of age. Two years from now that creature may be worth sixty thousand
francs; she will be all or nothing, a great danseuse or a marcheuse, a
celebrated person or a vulgar courtesan. She has worked hard since she
was eight years old. Such as you see her, she is worn out with fatigue;
she exhausted her body this morning in the dancing-class, she is just
leaving a rehearsal where the evolutions are as complicated as a Chinese
puzzle; and she’ll go through them again to-night. The rat is one of
the primary elements of the Opera; she is to the leading danseuse what a
junior clerk is to a notary. The rat is--hope.”
“Who produces the rat?” asked Gazonal.
“Porters, paupers, actors, dancers,” replied Bixiou. “Only the lowest
depths of poverty could force a child to subject her feet and joints to
positive torture, to keep herself virtuous out of mere speculation until
she is eighteen years of age, and to live with some horrible old crone
like a beautiful plant in a dressing of manure. You shall see now a
procession defiling before you, one after the other, of men of talent,
little and great, artists in seed or flower, who are raising to the
glory of France that every-day monument called the Opera, an assemblage
of forces, wills, and forms of genius, nowhere collected as in Paris.
“I have already seen the Opera,” said Gazonal, with a self-sufficient
air.
“Yes, from a three-francs-sixty-sous seat among the gods,” replied
the landscape painter; “just as you have seen Paris in the rue
Croix-des-Petits-Champs, without knowing anything about it. What did
they give at the Opera when you were there?”
“Guillaume Tell.”
“Well,” said Leon, “Matilde’s grand DUO must have delighted you. What do
you suppose that charming singer did when she left the stage?”
“She--well, what?”
“She ate two bloody mutton-chops which her servant had ready for her.”
“Pooh! nonsense!”
“Malibran kept up on brandy--but it killed her in the end. Another
thing! You have seen the ballet, and you’ll now see it defiling past you
in its every-day clothes, without knowing that the face of your lawsuit
depends on a pair of those legs.”
“My lawsuit!”
“See, cousin, here comes what is called a marcheuse.”
Leon pointed to one of those handsome creatures who at twenty-five years
of age have lived sixty, and whose beauty is so real and so sure of
being cultivated that they make no display of it. She was tall,
and walked well, with the arrogant look of a dandy; her toilet was
remarkable for its ruinous simplicity.
“That is Carabine,” said Bixiou, who gave her, as did Leon, a slight nod
to which she responded by a smile.
“There’s another who may possibly get your prefect turned out.”
“A marcheuse!--but what is that?”
“A marcheuse is a rat of great beauty whom her mother, real or
fictitious, has sold as soon as it was clear she would become neither
first, second, nor third danseuse, but who prefers the occupation of
coryphee to any other, for the main reason that having spent her youth
in that employment she is unfitted for any other. She has been rejected
at the minor theatres where they want danseuses; she has not succeeded
in the three towns where ballets are given; she has not had the money,
or perhaps the desire to go to foreign countries--for perhaps you don’t
know that the great school of dancing in Paris supplies the whole world
with male and female dancers. Thus a rat who becomes a marcheuse,--that
is to say, an ordinary figurante in a ballet,--must have some solid
attachment which keeps her in Paris: either a rich man she does not love
or a poor man she loves too well. The one you have just seen pass will
probably dress and redress three times this evening,--as a princess,
a peasant-girl, a Tyrolese; by which she will earn about two hundred
francs a month.”
“She is better dressed than my prefect’s wife.”
“If you should go to her house,” said Bixiou, “you would find there a
chamber-maid, a cook, and a man-servant. She occupies a fine apartment
in the rue Saint-Georges; in short, she is, in proportion to French
fortunes of the present day compared with those of former times, a relic
of the eighteenth century ‘opera-girl.’ Carabine is a power; at this
moment she governs du Tillet, a banker who is very influential in the
Chamber of Deputies.”
“And above these two rounds in the ballet ladder what comes next?” asked
Gazonal.
“Look!” said his cousin, pointing to an elegant caleche which was
turning at that moment from the boulevard into the rue Grange-Bateliere,
“there’s one of the leading danseuses whose name on the posters attracts
all Paris. That woman earns sixty thousand francs a year and lives like
a princess; the price of your manufactory all told wouldn’t suffice to
buy you the privilege of bidding her good-morning a dozen times.”
“Do you see,” said Bixiou, “that young man who is sitting on the front
seat of her carriage? Well, he’s a viscount who bears a fine old name;
he’s her first gentleman of the bed-chamber; does all her business with
the newspapers; carries messages of peace or war in the morning to the
director of the Opera; and takes charge of the applause which salutes
her as she enters or leaves the stage.”
“Well, well, my good friends, that’s the finishing touch! I see now that
I knew nothing of the ways of Paris.”
“At any rate, you are learning what you can see in ten minutes in the
Passage de l’Opera,” said Bixiou. “Look there.”
Two persons, a man and a woman, came out of the Passage at that
moment. The woman was neither plain nor pretty; but her dress had that
distinction of style and cut and color which reveals an artist; the man
had the air of a singer.
“There,” said Bixiou, “is a baritone and a second danseuse. The baritone
is a man of immense talent, but a baritone voice being only an accessory
to the other parts he scarcely earns what the second danseuse earns. The
danseuse, who was celebrated before Taglioni and Ellsler appeared, has
preserved to our day some of the old traditions of the character dance
and pantomime. If the two others had not revealed in the art of dancing
a poetry hitherto unperceived, she would have been the leading talent;
as it is, she is reduced to the second line. But for all that, she
fingers her thirty thousand francs a year, and her faithful friend is
a peer of France, very influential in the Chamber. And see! there’s a
danseuse of the third order, who, as a dancer, exists only through
the omnipotence of a newspaper. If her engagement were not renewed the
ministry would have one more journalistic enemy on its back. The corps
de ballet is a great power; consequently it is considered better form
in the upper ranks of dandyism and politics to have relations with
dance than with song. In the stalls, where the habitues of the Opera
congregate, the saying ‘Monsieur is all for singing’ is a form of
ridicule.”
A short man with a common face, quite simply dressed, passed them at
this moment.
“There’s the other half of the Opera receipts--that man who just
went by; the tenor. There is no longer any play, poem, music, or
representation of any kind possible unless some celebrated tenor can
reach a certain note. The tenor is love, he is the Voice that touches
the heart, that vibrates in the soul, and his value is reckoned at a
much higher salary than that of a minister. One hundred thousand
francs for a throat, one hundred thousand francs for a couple of
ankle-bones,--those are the two financial scourges of the Opera.”
“I am amazed,” said Gazonal, “at the hundreds of thousands of francs
walking about here.”
“We’ll amaze you a good deal more, my dear cousin,” said Leon de Lora.
“We’ll take Paris as an artist takes his violoncello, and show you how
it is played,--in short, how people amuse themselves in Paris.”
“It is a kaleidoscope with a circumference of twenty miles,” cried
Gazonal.
“Before piloting monsieur about, I have to see Gaillard,” said Bixiou.
“But we can use Gaillard for the cousin,” replied Leon.
“What sort of machine is that?” asked Gazonal.
“He isn’t a machine, he is a machinist. Gaillard is a friend of ours who
has ended a miscellaneous career by becoming the editor of a newspaper,
and whose character and finances are governed by movements comparable
to those of the tides. Gaillard can contribute to make you win your
lawsuit--”
“It is lost.”
“That’s the very moment to win it,” replied Bixiou.
When they reached Theodore Gaillard’s abode, which was now in the rue
de Menars, the valet ushered the three friends into a boudoir and asked
them to wait, as monsieur was in secret conference.
“With whom?” asked Bixiou.
“With a man who is selling him the incarceration of an _unseizable_
debtor,” replied a handsome woman who now appeared in a charming morning
toilet.
“In that case, my dear Suzanne,” said Bixiou, “I am certain we may go
in.”
“Oh! what a beautiful creature!” said Gazonal.
“That is Madame Gaillard,” replied Leon de Lora, speaking low into his
cousin’s ear. “She is the most humble-minded woman in Paris, for she had
the public and has contented herself with a husband.”
“What is your will, messeigneurs?” said the facetious editor, seeing his
two friends and imitating Frederic Lemaitre.
Theodore Gaillard, formerly a wit, had ended by becoming a stupid man in
consequence of remaining constantly in one centre,--a moral phenomenon
frequently to be observed in Paris. His principal method of conversation
consisted in sowing his speeches with sayings taken from plays then in
vogue and pronounced in imitation of well-known actors.
“We have come to blague,” said Leon.
“‘Again, young men’” (Odry in the Saltimbauques).
“Well, this time, we’ve got him, sure,” said Gaillard’s other visitor,
apparently by way of conclusion.
“_Are_ you sure of it, pere Fromenteau?” asked Gaillard. “This it the
eleventh time you’ve caught him at night and missed him in the morning.”
“How could I help it? I never saw such a debtor! he’s a locomotive; goes
to sleep in Paris and wakes up in the Seine-et-Oise. A safety lock I
call him.” Seeing a smile on Gaillard’s face he added: “That’s a
saying in our business. Pinch a man, means arrest him, lock him up.
The criminal police have another term. Vidoeq said to his man, ‘You are
served’; that’s funnier, for it means the guillotine.”
A nudge from Bixiou made Gazonal all eyes and ears.
“Does monsieur grease my paws?” asked Fromenteau of Gaillard, in a
threatening but cool tone.
“‘A question that of fifty centimes’” (Les Saltimbauques), replied the
editor, taking out five francs and offering them to Fromenteau.
“And the rapscallions?” said the man.
“What rapscallions?” asked Gaillard.
“Those I employ,” replied Fromenteau calmly.
“Is there a lower depth still?” asked Bixiou.
“Yes, monsieur,” said the spy. “Some people give us information without
knowing they do so, and without getting paid for it. I put fools and
ninnies below rapscallions.”
“They are often original, and witty, your rapscallions!” said Leon.
“Do you belong to the police?” asked Gazonal, eying with uneasy
curiosity the hard, impassible little man, who was dressed like the
third clerk in a sheriff’s office.
“Which police do you mean?” asked Fromenteau.
“There are several?”
“As many as five,” replied the man. “Criminal, the head of which was
Vidoeq; secret police, which keeps an eye on the other police, the head
of it being always unknown; political police,--that’s Fouche’s. Then
there’s the police of Foreign Affairs, and finally, the palace police
(of the Emperor, Louis XVIII., etc.), always squabbling with that of the
quai Malaquais. It came to an end under Monsieur Decazes. I belonged to
the police of Louis XVIII.; I’d been in it since 1793, with that poor
Contenson.”
The four gentlemen looked at each other with one thought: “How many
heads he must have brought to the scaffold!”
“Now-a-days, they are trying to get on without us. Folly!” continued the
little man, who began to seem terrible. “Since 1830 they want honest men
at the prefecture! I resigned, and I’ve made myself a small vocation by
arresting for debt.”
“He is the right arm of the commercial police,” said Gaillard in
Bixiou’s ear, “but you can never find out who pays him most, the debtor
or the creditor.”
“The more rascally a business is, the more honor it needs. I’m for him
who pays me best,” continued Fromenteau addressing Gaillard. “You want
to recover fifty thousand francs and you talk farthings to your means
of action. Give me five hundred francs and your man is pinched to-night,
for we spotted him yesterday!”
“Five hundred francs for you alone!” cried Theodore Gaillard.
“Lizette wants a shawl,” said the spy, not a muscle of his face moving.
“I call her Lizette because of Beranger.”
“You have a Lizette, and you stay in such a business!” cried the
virtuous Gazonal.
“It is amusing! People may cry up the pleasures of hunting and fishing
as much as they like but to stalk a man in Paris is far better fun.”
“Certainly,” said Gazonal, reflectively, speaking to himself, “they must
have great talent.”
“If I were to enumerate the qualities which make a man remarkable in our
vocation,” said Fromenteau, whose rapid glance had enabled him to fathom
Gazonal completely, “you’d think I was talking of a man of genius.
First, we must have the eyes of a lynx; next, audacity (to tear into
houses like bombs, accost the servants as if we knew them, and propose
treachery--always agreed to); next, memory, sagacity, invention (to make
schemes, conceived rapidly, never the same--for spying must be guided
by the characters and habits of the persons spied upon; it is a gift
of heaven); and, finally, agility, vigor. All these facilities and
qualities, monsieur, are depicted on the door of the Gymnase-Amoros as
Virtue. Well, we must have them all, under pain of losing the salaries
given us by the State, the rue de Jerusalem, or the minister of
Commerce.”
“You certainly seem to me a remarkable man,” said Gazonal.
Fromenteau looked at the provincial without replying, without betraying
the smallest sign of feeling, and departed, bowing to no one,--a trait
of real genius.
“Well, cousin, you have now seen the police incarnate,” said Leon to
Gazonal.
“It has something the effect of a dinner-pill,” said the worthy
provincial, while Gaillard and Bixiou were talking together in a low
voice.
“I’ll give you an answer to-night at Carabine’s,” said Gaillard aloud,
re-seating himself at his desk without seeing or bowing to Gazonal.
“He is a rude fellow!” cried the Southerner as they left the room.
“His paper has twenty-two thousand subscribers,” said Leon de Lora.
“He is one of the five great powers of the day, and he hasn’t, in
the morning, the time to be polite. Now,” continued Leon, speaking to
Bixiou, “if we are going to the Chamber to help him with his lawsuit let
us take the longest way round.”
“Words said by great men are like silver-gilt spoons with the gilt
washed off; by dint of repetition they lose their brilliancy,” said
Bixiou. “Where shall we go?”
“Here, close by, to our hatter?” replied Leon.
“Bravo!” cried Bixiou. “If we keep on in this way, we shall have an
amusing day of it.”
“Gazonal,” said Leon, “I shall make the man pose for you; but mind that
you keep a serious face, like the king on a five-franc piece, for you
are going to see a choice original, a man whose importance has turned
his head. In these days, my dear fellow, under our new political
dispensation, every human being tries to cover himself with glory,
and most of them cover themselves with ridicule; hence a lot of living
caricatures quite new to the world.”
“If everybody gets glory, who can be famous?” said Gazonal.
“Fame! none but fools want that,” replied Bixiou. “Your cousin wears the
cross, but I’m the better dressed of the two, and it is I whom people
are looking at.”
After this remark, which may explain why orators and other great
statesmen no longer put the ribbon in their buttonholes when in Paris,
Leon showed Gazonal a sign, bearing, in golden letters, the illustrious
name of “Vital, successor to Finot, manufacturer of hats” (no longer
“hatter” as formerly), whose advertisements brought in more money to
the newspapers than those of any half-dozen vendors of pills or
sugarplums,--the author, moreover, of an essay on hats.
“My dear fellow,” said Bixiou to Gazonal, pointing to the splendors of
the show-window, “Vital has forty thousand francs a year from invested
property.”
“And he stays a hatter!” cried the Southerner, with a bound that almost
broke the arm which Bixiou had linked in his.
“You shall see the man,” said Leon. “You need a hat and you shall have
one gratis.”
“Is Monsieur Vital absent?” asked Bixiou, seeing no one behind the desk.
“Monsieur is correcting proof in his study,” replied the head clerk.
“Hein! what style!” said Leon to his cousin; then he added, addressing
the clerk: “Could we speak to him without injury to his inspiration?”
“Let those gentlemen enter,” said a voice.
It was a bourgeois voice, the voice of one eligible to the Chamber, a
powerful voice, a wealthy voice.
Vital deigned to show himself, dressed entirely in black cloth, with
a splendid frilled shirt adorned with one diamond. The three friends
observed a young and pretty woman sitting near the desk, working at some
embroidery.
Vital is a man between thirty and forty years of age, with a natural
joviality now repressed by ambitious ideas. He is blessed with that
medium height which is the privilege of sound organizations. He is
rather plump, and takes great pains with his person. His forehead is
getting bald, but he uses that circumstance to give himself the air of a
man consumed by thought. It is easy to see by the way his wife looks at
him and listens to him that she believes in the genius and glory of her
husband. Vital loves artists, not that he has any taste for art, but
from fellowship; for he feels himself an artist, and makes this felt by
disclaiming that title of nobility, and placing himself with constant
premeditation at so great a distance from the arts that persons may be
forced to say to him: “You have raised the construction of hats to the
height of a science.”
“Have you at last discovered a hat to suit me?” asked Leon de Lora.
“Why, monsieur! in fifteen days?” replied Vital, “and for you! Two
months would hardly suffice to invent a shape in keeping with your
countenance. See, here is your lithographic portrait: I have studied it
most carefully. I would not give myself that trouble for a prince; but
you are more; you are an artist, and you understand me.”
“This is one of our greatest inventors,” said Bixiou presenting Gazonal.
“He might be as great as Jacquart if he would only let himself die. Our
friend, a manufacturer of cloth, has discovered a method of replacing
the indigo in old blue coats, and he wants to see you as another great
phenomenon, because he has heard of your saying, ‘The hat is the man.’
That speech of yours enraptured him. Ah! Vital, you have faith; you
believe in something; you have enthusiasm for your work.”
Vital scarcely listened; he grew pale with pleasure.
“Rise, my wife! Monsieur is a man of science.”
Madame Vital rose at her husband’s gesture. Gazonal bowed to her.
“Shall I have the honor to cover your head?” said Vital, with joyful
obsequiousness.
“At the same price as mine,” interposed Bixiou.
“Of course, of course; I ask no other fee than to be quoted by you,
messieurs--Monsieur needs a picturesque hat, something in the style of
Monsieur Lousteau’s,” he continued, looking at Gazonal with the eye of a
master. “I will consider it.”
“You give yourself a great deal of trouble,” said Gazonal.
“Oh! for a few persons only; for those who know how to appreciate the
value of the pains I bestow upon them. Now, take the aristocracy--there
is but one man there who has truly comprehended the Hat; and that is the
Prince de Bethune. How is it that men do not consider, as women do, that
the hat is the first thing that strikes the eye? And why have they never
thought of changing the present system, which is, let us say it frankly,
ignoble? Yes, ignoble; and yet a Frenchman is, of all nationalities, the
one most persistent in this folly! I know the difficulties of a change,
messieurs. I don’t speak of my own writings on the matter, which, as
I think, approach it philosophically, but simply as a hatter. I have
myself studied means to accentuate the infamous head-covering to which
France is now enslaved until I succeed in overthrowing it.”
So saying he pointed to the hideous hat in vogue at the present day.
“Behold the enemy, messieurs,” he continued. “How is it that the
wittiest and most satirical people on earth will consent to wear upon
their heads a bit of stove-pipe?--as one of our great writers has called
it. Here are some of the infections I have been able to give to those
atrocious lines,” he added, pointing to a number of his creations. “But,
although I am able to conform them to the character of each wearer--for,
as you see, there are the hats of a doctor, a grocer, a dandy, an
artist, a fat man, a thin man, and so forth--the style itself remains
horrible. Seize, I beg of you, my whole thought--”
He took up a hat, low-crowned and wide-brimmed.
“This,” he continued, “is the old hat of Claude Vignon, a great critic,
in the days when he was a free man and a free-liver. He has lately come
round to the ministry; they’ve made him a professor, a librarian;
he writes now for the Debats only; they’ve appointed him Master of
Petitions with a salary of sixteen thousand francs; he earns four
thousand more out of his paper, and he is decorated. Well, now see his
new hat.”
And Vital showed them a hat of a form and design which was truly
expressive of the juste-milieu.
“You ought to have made him a Punch and Judy hat!” cried Gazonal.
“You are a man of genius, Monsieur Vital,” said Leon.
Vital bowed.
“Would you kindly tell me why the shops of your trade in Paris remain
open late at night,--later than the cafes and the wineshops? That fact
puzzles me very much,” said Gazonal.
“In the first place, our shops are much finer when lighted up than they
are in the daytime; next, where we sell ten hats in the daytime we sell
fifty at night.”
“Everything is queer in Paris,” said Leon.
“Thanks to my efforts and my successes,” said Vital, returning to
the course of his self-laudation, “we are coming to hats with round
headpieces. It is to that I tend!”
“What obstacle is there?” asked Gazonal.
“Cheapness, monsieur. In the first place, very handsome silk hats can be
built for fifteen francs, which kills our business; for in Paris no one
ever has fifteen francs in his pocket to spend on a hat. If a beaver hat
costs thirty, it is still the same thing--When I say beaver, I ought to
state that there are not ten pounds of beaver skins left in France. That
article is worth three hundred and fifty francs a pound, and it takes an
ounce for a hat. Besides, a beaver hat isn’t really worth anything; the
skin takes a wretched dye; gets rusty in ten minutes under the sun, and
heat puts it out of shape as well. What we call ‘beaver’ in the trade is
neither more nor less than hare’s-skin. The best qualities are made from
the back of the animal, the second from the sides, the third from the
belly. I confide to you these trade secrets because you are men of
honor. But whether a man has hare’s-skin or silk on his head, fifteen
or thirty francs in short, the problem is always insoluble. Hats must be
paid for in cash, and that is why the hat remains what it is. The honor
of vestural France will be saved on the day that gray hats with round
crowns can be made to cost a hundred francs. We could then, like the
tailors, give credit. To reach that result men must resolve to wear
buckles, gold lace, plumes, and the brims lined with satin, as in the
days of Louis XIII. and Louis XIV. Our business, which would then enter
the domain of fancy, would increase tenfold. The markets of the world
should belong to France; Paris will forever give the tone to women’s
fashions, and yet the hats which all Frenchmen wear to-day are made in
every country on earth! There are ten millions of foreign money to be
gained annually for France in that question--”
“A revolution!” cried Bixiou, pretending enthusiasm.
“Yes, and a radical one; for the form must be changed.”
“You are happy after the manner of Luther in dreaming of reform,” said
Leon.
“Yes, monsieur. Ah! if a dozen or fifteen artists, capitalists, or
dandies who set the tone would only have courage for twenty-four hours
France would gain a splendid commercial battle! To succeed in this
reform I would give my whole fortune! Yes, my sole ambition is to
regenerate the hat and disappear.”
“The man is colossal,” said Gazonal, as they left the shop; “but I
assure you that all your originals so far have a touch of the Southerner
about them.”
“Let us go this way,” said Bixiou pointing to the rue Saint-Marc.
“Do you want to show me something else?”
“Yes; you shall see the usuress of rats, marcheuses and great ladies,--a
woman who possesses more terrible secrets than there are gowns hanging
in her window,” said Bixiou.
And he showed Gazonal one of those untidy shops which made an ugly stain
in the midst of the dazzling show-windows of modern retail commerce.
This shop had a front painted in 1820, which some bankrupt had doubtless
left in a dilapidated condition. The color had disappeared beneath a
double coating of dirt, the result of usage, and a thick layer of
dust; the window-panes were filthy, the door-knob turned of itself, as
door-knobs do in all places where people go out more quickly than they
enter.
“What do you say of _that_? First cousin to Death, isn’t she?” said
Leon in Gazonal’s ear, showing him, at the desk, a terrible individual.
“Well, she calls herself Madame Nourrisson.”
“Madame, how much is this guipure?” asked the manufacturer, intending to
compete in liveliness with the two artists.
“To you, monsieur, who come from the country, it will be only three
hundred francs,” she replied. Then, remarking in his manner a sort of
eagerness peculiar to Southerners, she added, in a grieved tone, “It
formerly belonged to that poor Princess de Lamballe.”
“What! do you dare exhibit it so near the palace?” cried Bixiou.
“Monsieur, _they_ don’t believe in it,” she replied.
“Madame, we have not come to make purchases,” said Bixiou, with a show
of frankness.
“So I see, monsieur,” returned Madame Nourrisson.
“We have several things to sell,” said the illustrious caricaturist.
“I live close by, rue de Richelieu, 112, sixth floor. If you will come
round there for a moment, you may perhaps make some good bargains.”
Ten minutes later Madame Nourrisson did in fact present herself at
Bixiou’s lodgings, where by that time he had taken Leon and Gazonal.
Madame Nourrisson found them all three as serious as authors whose
collaboration does not meet with the success it deserves.
“Madame,” said the intrepid hoaxer, showing her a pair of women’s
slippers, “these belonged formerly to the Empress Josephine.”
He felt it incumbent on him to return change for the Prince de Lamballe.
“Those!” she exclaimed; “they were made this year; look at the mark.”
“Don’t you perceive that the slippers are only by way of preface?” said
Leon; “though, to be sure, they are usually the conclusion of a tale.”
“My friend here,” said Bixiou, motioning to Gazonal, “has an immense
family interest in ascertaining whether a young lady of a good and
wealthy house, whom he wishes to marry, has ever gone wrong.”
“How much will monsieur give for the information,” she asked, looking at
Gazonal, who was no longer surprised by anything.
“One hundred francs,” he said.
“No, thank you!” she said with a grimace of refusal worthy of a macaw.
“Then say how much you want, my little Madame Nourrisson,” cried Bixiou
catching her round the waist.
“In the first place, my dear gentlemen, I have never, since I’ve been in
the business, found man or woman to haggle over happiness. Besides,” she
said, letting a cold smile flicker on her lips, and enforcing it by
an icy glance full of catlike distrust, “if it doesn’t concern your
happiness, it concerns your fortune; and at the height where I find you
lodging no man haggles over a ‘dot’--Come,” she said, “out with it! What
is it you want to know, my lambs?”
“About the Beunier family,” replied Bixiou, very glad to find out
something in this indirect manner about persons in whom he was
interested.
“Oh! as for that,” she said, “one louis is quite enough.”
“Why?”
“Because I hold all the mother’s jewels and she’s on tenter-hooks
every three months, I can tell you! It is hard work for her to pay the
interest on what I’ve lent her. Do you want to marry there, simpleton?”
she added, addressing Gazonal; “then pay me forty francs and I’ll talk
four hundred worth.”
Gazonal produced a forty-franc gold-piece, and Madame Nourrisson gave
him startling details as to the secret penury of certain so-called
fashionable women. This dealer in cast-off clothes, getting lively as
she talked, pictured herself unconsciously while telling of others.
Without betraying a single name or any secret, she made the three men
shudder by proving to them how little so-called happiness existed in
Paris that did not rest on the vacillating foundation of borrowed
money. She possessed, laid away in her drawers, the secrets of
departed grandmothers, living children, deceased husbands, dead
granddaughters,--memories set in gold and diamonds. She learned
appalling stories by making her clients talk of one another; tearing
their secrets from them in moments of passion, of quarrels, of anger,
and during those cooler negotiations which need a loan to settle
difficulties.
“Why were you ever induced to take up such a business?” asked Gazonal.
“For my son’s sake,” she said naively.
Such women almost invariably justify their trade by alleging noble
motives. Madame Nourrisson posed as having lost several opportunities
for marriage, also three daughters who had gone to the bad, and all her
illusions. She showed the pawn-tickets of the Mont-de-Piete to prove the
risks her business ran; declared that she did not know how to meet the
“end of the month”; she was robbed, she said,--_robbed_.
The two artists looked at each other on hearing that expression, which
seemed exaggerated.
“Look here, my sons, I’ll show you how we are _done_. It is not about
myself, but about my opposite neighbour, Madame Mahuchet, a ladies’
shoemaker. I had loaned money to a countess, a woman who has too many
passions for her means,--lives in a fine apartment filled with splendid
furniture, and makes, as we say, a devil of a show with her high and
mighty airs. She owed three hundred francs to her shoemaker, and was
giving a dinner no later than yesterday. The shoemaker, who heard of the
dinner from the cook, came to see me; we got excited, and she wanted to
make a row; but I said: ‘My dear Madame Mahuchet, what good will that
do? you’ll only get yourself hated. It is much better to obtain some
security; and you save your bile.’ She wouldn’t listen, but go she
would, and asked me to support her; so I went. ‘Madame is not at
home.’--‘Up to that! we’ll wait,’ said Madame Mahuchet, ‘if we have to
stay all night,’--and down we camped in the antechamber. Presently the
doors began to open and shut, and feet and voices came along. I felt
badly. The guests were arriving for dinner. You can see the appearance
it had. The countess sent her maid to coax Madame Mahuchet: ‘Pay you
to-morrow!’ in short, all the snares! Nothing took. The countess,
dressed to the nines, went to the dining-room. Mahuchet heard her
and opened the door. Gracious! when she saw that table sparkling with
silver, the covers to the dishes and the chandeliers all glittering like
a jewel-case, didn’t she go off like soda-water and fire her shot:
‘When people spend the money of others they should be sober and not give
dinner-parties. Think of your being a countess and owing three hundred
francs to a poor shoemaker with seven children!’ You can guess how she
railed, for the Mahuchet hasn’t any education. When the countess tried
to make an excuse [‘no money’) Mahuchet screamed out: ‘Look at all your
fine silver, madame; pawn it and pay me!’--‘Take some yourself,’ said
the countess quickly, gathering up a quantity of forks and spoons and
putting them into her hands. Downstairs we rattled!--heavens! like
success itself. No, before we got to the street Mahuchet began to
cry--she’s a kind woman! She turned back and restored the silver; for
she now understood that countess’ poverty--it was plated ware!”
“And she forked it over,” said Leon, in whom the former Mistigris
occasionally reappeared.
“Ah! my dear monsieur,” said Madame Nourrisson, enlightened by the
slang, “you are an artist, you write plays, you live in the rue du
Helder and are friends with Madame Anatolia; you have habits that I know
all about. Come, do you want some rarity in the grand style,--Carabine
or Mousqueton, Malaga or Jenny Cadine?”
“Malaga, Carabine! nonsense!” cried Leon de Lora. “It was we who
invented them.”
“I assure you, my good Madame Nourrisson,” said Bixiou, “that we only
wanted the pleasure of making your acquaintance, and we should like very
much to be informed as to how you ever came to slip into this business.”
“I was confidential maid in the family of a marshal of France, Prince
d’Ysembourg,” she said, assuming the airs of a Dorine. “One morning, one
of the most beplumed countesses of the Imperial court came to the house
and wanted to speak to the marshal privately. I put myself in the way of
hearing what she said. She burst into tears and confided to that booby
of a marshal--yes, the Conde of the Republic is a booby!--that her
husband, who served under him in Spain, had left her without means,
and if she didn’t get a thousand francs, or two thousand, that day
her children must go without food; she hadn’t any for the morrow. The
marshal, who was always ready to give in those days, took two notes of
a thousand francs each out of his desk, and gave them to her. I saw that
fine countess going down the staircase where she couldn’t see me. She
was laughing with a satisfaction that certainly wasn’t motherly, so
I slipped after her to the peristyle where I heard her say to the
coachman, ‘To Leroy’s.’ I ran round quickly to Leroy’s, and there, sure
enough, was the poor mother. I got there in time to see her order and
pay for a fifteen-hundred-franc dress; you understand that in those
days people were made to pay when they bought. The next day but one she
appeared at an ambassador’s ball, dressed to please all the world and
some one in particular. That day I said to myself: ‘I’ve got a career!
When I’m no longer young I’ll lend money to great ladies on their
finery; for passion never calculates, it pays blindly.’ If you want
subjects for a vaudeville I can sell you plenty.”
She departed after delivering this tirade, in which all the phases of
her past life were outlined, leaving Gazonal as much horrified by her
revelations as by the five yellow teeth she showed when she tried to
smile.
“What shall we do now?” he asked presently.
“Make notes,” replied Bixiou, whistling for his porter; “for I want some
money, and I’ll show you the use of porters. You think they only pull
the gate-cord; whereas they really pull poor devils like me and artists
whom they take under their protection out of difficulties. Mine will get
the Montyon prize one of these days.”
Gazonal opened his eyes to their utmost roundness.
A man between two ages, partly a graybeard, partly an office-boy, but
more oily within and without, hair greasy, stomach puffy, skin dull and
moist, like that of the prior of a convent, always wearing list shoes, a
blue coat, and grayish trousers, made his appearance.
“What is it, monsieur?” he said with an air which combined that of a
protector and a subordinate.
“Ravenouillet--His name is Ravenouillet,” said Bixiou turning to
Gazonal. “Have you our notebook of bills due with you?”
Ravenouillet pulled out of his pocket the greasiest and stickiest book
that Gazonal’s eyes had ever beheld.
“Write down at three months’ sight two notes of five hundred francs
each, which you will proceed to sign.”
And Bixiou handed over two notes already drawn to his order by
Ravenouillet, which Ravenouillet immediately signed and inscribed on
the greasy book, in which his wife also kept account of the debts of the
other lodgers.
“Thanks, Ravenouillet,” said Bixiou. “And here’s a box at the Vaudeville
for you.”
“Oh! my daughter will enjoy that,” said Ravenouillet, departing.
“There are seventy-one tenants in this house,” said Bixiou, “and the
average of what they owe Ravenouillet is six thousand francs a month,
eighteen thousand quarterly for money advanced, postage, etc., not
counting the rents due. He is Providence--at thirty per cent, which we
all pay him, though he never asks for anything.”
“Oh, Paris! Paris!” cried Gazonal.