“It was winter, and Mongenod evidently had no cloak; for I noticed that
several lumps of snow, which must have dropped from the roofs as he
walked along, were sticking to the collar of his coat. When he took off
his rabbit-skin gloves, and I saw his right hand, I noticed the signs
of labor, and toilsome labor, too. Now his father, the advocate of the
Grand Council, had left him some property,--about five or six thousand
francs a year. I saw at once that he had come to me to borrow money.
I had, in a secret hiding-place, two hundred louis d’or,--an enormous
hoard at that time; for they were worth I couldn’t now tell you how many
hundred thousand francs in assignats. Mongenod and I had studied at
the same collage,--that of Grassins,--and we had met again in the same
law-office,--that of Bordin,--a truly honest man. When you have spent
your boyhood and played your youthful pranks with the same comrade, the
sympathy between you and him has something sacred about it; his voice,
his glance, stir certain chords in your heart which only vibrate
under the memories that he brings back. Even if you have had cause of
complaint against such a comrade, the rights of the friendship between
you can never be effaced. But there had never been the slightest jar
between us two. At the death of his father, in 1787, Mongenod was left
richer than I. Though I had never borrowed money from him, I owed him
pleasures which my father’s economy denied me. Without my generous
comrade I should never had seen the first representation of the
‘Marriage of Figaro.’ Mongenod was what was called in those days a
charming cavalier; he was very gallant. Sometimes I blamed him for his
facile way of making intimacies and his too great amiability. His purse
opened freely; he lived in a free-handed way; he would serve a man as
second having only seen him twice. Good God! how you send me back to
the days and the ways of my youth!” said the worthy man, with his cheery
smile.
“Are you sorry?” said Godefroid.
“Oh, no! and you can judge by the minuteness with which I am telling you
all this how great a place this event has held in my life.
“Mongenod, endowed with an excellent heart and fine courage, a trifle
Voltairean, was inclined to play the nobleman,” went on Monsieur Alain.
“His education at Grassins, where there were many young nobles, and
his various gallantries, had given him the polished manners and ways of
people of condition, who were then called aristocrats. You can therefore
imagine how great was my surprise to see such symptoms of poverty in the
young and elegant Mongenod of 1787 when my eyes left his face and rested
on his garments. But as, at that unhappy period of our history, some
persons assumed a shabby exterior for safety, and as he might have had
some other and sufficient reasons for disguising himself, I awaited an
explanation, although I opened the way to it. ‘What a plight you are in,
my dear Mongenod!’ I said, accepting the pinch of snuff he offered me
from a copper and zinc snuff-box. ‘Sad indeed!’ he answered; ‘I have
but one friend left, and that is you. I have done all I could to avoid
appealing to you; but I must ask you for a hundred louis. The sum is
large, I know,’ he went on, seeing my surprise; ‘but if you gave me
fifty I should be unable ever to return them; whereas with one hundred
I can seek my fortune in better ways,--despair will inspire me to find
them.’ ‘Then you have nothing?’ I exclaimed. ‘I have,’ he said, brushing
away a tear, ‘five sous left of my last piece of money. To come here
to you I have had my boots blacked and my face shaved. I possess what
I have on my back. But,’ he added, with a gesture, ‘I owe my landlady
a thousand francs in assignats, and the man I buy cold victuals from
refused me credit yesterday. I am absolutely without resources.’ ‘What
do you think of doing?’ ‘Enlisting as a soldier if you cannot help me.’
‘You! a soldier, Mongenod?’ ‘I will get myself killed, or I will be
General Mongenod.’ ‘Well,’ I said, much moved, ‘eat your breakfast in
peace; I have a hundred louis.’
“At that point,” said the goodman, interrupting himself and looking at
Godefroid with a shrewd air, “I thought it best to tell him a bit of a
fib.”
“‘That is all I possess in the world,’ I said. ‘I have been waiting
for a fall in the Funds to invest that money; but I will put it in your
hands instead, and you shall consider me your partner; I will leave
to your conscience the duty of returning it to me in due time. The
conscience of an honest man,’ I said, ‘is a better security than the
Funds.’ Mongenod looked at me fixedly as I spoke, and seemed to be
inlaying my words upon his heart. He put out his right hand, I laid my
left into it, and we held them together,--I deeply moved, and he with
two big tears rolling down his cheeks. The sight of those tears wrung my
heart. I was more moved still when Mongenod pulled out a ragged foulard
handkerchief to wipe them away. ‘Wait here,’ I said; and I went to my
secret hiding-place with a heart as agitated as though I had heard a
woman say she loved me. I came back with two rolls of fifty louis each.
‘Here, count them.’ He would not count them; and he looked about him
for a desk on which to write, he said, a proper receipt. I positively
refused to take any paper. ‘If I should die,’ I said, ‘my heirs would
trouble you. This is to be between ourselves.’
“Well,” continued Monsieur Alain, smiling, “when Mongenod found me a
good friend he ceased to look as sad and anxious as when he entered; in
fact, he became quite gay. My housekeeper gave us some oysters, white
wine, and an omelet, with broiled kidneys, and the remains of a pate my
old mother had sent me; also some dessert, coffee, and liqueur of the
Iles. Mongenod, who had been starving for two days, was fed up. We were
so interested in talking about our life before the Revolution that we
sat at table till three in the afternoon. Mongenod told me how he had
lost his fortune. In the first place, his father having invested the
greater part of his capital in city loans, when they fell Mongenod lost
two thirds of all he had. Then, having sold his house in the rue de
Savoie, he was forced to receive the price in assignats. After that he
took into his head to found a newspaper, ‘La Sentinelle;’ that compelled
him to fly at the end of six months. His hopes, he said, were now fixed
on the success of a comic opera called ‘Les Peruviens.’ When he said
that I began to tremble. Mongenod turned author, wasting his money on
a newspaper, living no doubt in the theatres, connected with singers at
the Feydeau, with musicians, and all the queer people who lurk behind
the scenes,--to tell you the truth, he didn’t seem my Mongenod. I
trembled. But how could I take back the hundred louis? I saw each roll
in each pocket of his breeches like the barrels of two pistols.
“Then,” continued Monsieur Alain, and this time he sighed, “Mongenod
went away. When I was alone, and no longer in presence of hard and
cruel poverty, I began, in spite of myself, to reflect. I was sobered.
‘Mongenod,’ thought I, ‘is perhaps thoroughly depraved; he may have been
playing a comedy at my expense.’ His gaiety, the moment I had handed
over to him readily such a large sum of money, struck me then as being
too like the joy of the valets on the stage when they catch a Geronte.
I ended, where I ought to have begun, by resolving to make some
investigations as to my friend Mongenod, who had given me his
address,--written on the back of a playing card! I did not choose, as
a matter of delicacy, to go and see him the next day; he might have
thought there was distrust in such promptness, as, indeed, there would
have been. The second day I had certain matters to attend to which took
all my time, and it was only at the end of two weeks that, not seeing
or hearing of Mongenod, I went one morning from the Croix-Rouge, where I
was then living, to the rue des Moineaux, where he lived. I found he was
living in furnished lodgings of the lowest class; but the landlady was
a very worthy woman, the widow of a magistrate who had died on the
scaffold; she was utterly ruined by the Revolution, and had only a few
louis with which to begin the hazardous trade of taking lodgers.”
Here Monsieur Alain interrupted himself to explain. “I knew her later,”
he said; “she then had seven houses in Saint-Roch, and was making quite
a little fortune.
“‘The citizen Mongenod is not at home,’ the landlady said to me; ‘but
there is some one there.’ This remark excited my curiosity. I went up to
the fifth story. A charming person opened the door,--oh, such a pretty
young woman! who looked at me rather suspiciously and kept the door half
closed. ‘I am Alain, a friend of Mongenod’s,’ I said. Instantly the door
opened wide, and I entered a miserable garret, which was, nevertheless,
kept with the utmost neatness. The pretty young woman offered me a chair
before a fireplace where were ashes but no fire, at the corner of which
I saw a common earthen foot-warmer. ‘It makes me very happy, monsieur,’
she said, taking my hand and pressing it affectionately, ‘to be able to
express to you my gratitude. You have indeed saved us. Were it not for
you I might never have seen Mongenod again. He might,--yes, he would
have thrown himself in the river. He was desperate when he left me to go
and see you.’ On examining this person I was surprised to see her head
tied up in a foulard, and along the temples a curious dark line; but I
presently saw that her head was shaved. ‘Have you been ill?’ I asked,
as I noticed this singularity. She cast a glance at a broken mirror in
a shabby frame and colored; then the tears came into her eyes. ‘Yes,
monsieur,’ she said, ‘I had horrible headaches, and I was obliged to
have my hair cut off; it came to my feet.’ ‘Am I speaking to Madame
Mongenod?’ I asked. ‘Yes, monsieur,’ she answered, giving me a truly
celestial look. I bowed to the poor little woman and went away,
intending to make the landlady tell me something about them; but she was
out. I was certain that poor young woman had sold her hair to buy bread.
I went from there to a wood merchant and ordered half a cord of wood,
telling the cartman and the sawyer to take the bill, which I made the
dealer receipt to the name of citizen Mongenod, and give it to the
little woman.
“There ends the period of what I long called _my foolishness_,” said
Monsieur Alain, clasping his hands and lifting them with a look of
repentance.
Godefroid could not help smiling. He was, as we shall see, greatly
mistaken in that smile.
“Two days later,” resumed the worthy man, “I met one of those men who
are neither friends nor strangers, with whom we have relations from
time to time, and call acquaintances,--a certain Monsieur Barillaud, who
remarked accidentally, _a propos_ of the ‘Peruviens,’ that the author
was a friend of his. ‘Then you know citizen Mongenod?’ I said.
“In those days we were obliged by law to call each other ‘citizen,’”
said Monsieur Alain to Godefroid, by way of parenthesis. Then he
continued his narrative:--
“The citizen looked at me, exclaiming, ‘I wish I never had known him;
for he has several times borrowed money of me, and shown his friendship
by not returning it. He is a queer fellow,--good-hearted and all that,
but full of illusions! always an imagination on fire! I will do him this
justice,--he does not mean to deceive; but as he deceives himself about
everything, he manages to behave like a dishonest man.’ ‘How much does
he owe you?’ I asked. ‘Oh! a good many hundred francs. He’s a basket
with a hole in the bottom. Nobody knows where his money goes; perhaps
he doesn’t know himself.’ ‘Has he any resources?’ ‘Well, yes,’ said
Barillaud, laughing; ‘just now he is talking of buying land among
the savages in the United States.’ I carried away with me the drop of
vinegar which casual gossip thus put into my heart, and it soured all
my feelings. I went to see my old master, in whose office Mongenod and I
had studied law; he was now my counsel. When I told him about my loan to
Mongenod and the manner in which I had acted,--‘What!’ he cried, ‘one of
my old clerks to behave in that way! You ought to have put him off till
the next day and come to see me. You would then have found out that I
have forbidden my clerks to let Mongenod into this office. Within the
last year he has borrowed three hundred francs of me in silver,--an
enormous sum at present rates. Three days before he breakfasted with
you I met him on the street, and he gave such a piteous account of his
poverty that I let him have two louis.’ ‘If I have been the dupe of a
clever comedian,’ I said to Bordin, ‘so much the worse for him, not for
me. But tell me what to do.’ ‘You must try to get from him a written
acknowledgment; for a debtor, however, insolvent he may be, may become
solvent, and then he will pay.’ Thereupon Bordin took from a tin box a
case on which I saw the name of Mongenod; he showed me three receipts
of a hundred francs each. ‘The next time he comes I shall have him
admitted, and I shall make him add the interest and the two louis, and
give me a note for the whole. I shall, at any rate, have things properly
done, and be in a position to obtain payment.’ ‘Well,’ said I to Bordin,
‘can you have my matter set right so far, as well as yours? for I know
you are a good man, and what you do will be right.’ ‘I have remained
master of my ground,’ he said; ‘but when persons behave as you have done
they are at the mercy of a man who can snap his fingers at them. As for
me, I don’t choose that any man should get the better of me,--get the
better of a former attorney to the Chatelet!--ta-ra-ra! Every man to
whom a sum of money is lent as heedlessly as you lent yours to Mongenod,
ends, after a certain time, by thinking that money his own. It is no
longer your money, it is _his_ money; you become his creditor,--an
inconvenient, unpleasant person. A debtor will then try to get rid of
you by some juggling with his conscience, and out of one hundred men in
his position, seventy-five will do their best never to see or hear
of you again.’ ‘Then you think only twenty-five men in a hundred
are honest?’ ‘Did I say that?’ he replied, smiling maliciously. ‘The
estimate is too high?’”