have something else for a change. He is a standing dish, and we have
had him with every sauce this hour or more. It is one of the
privileges of the good city of Paris that anybody may be born, or
live, or die there without attracting any attention whatsoever. Let
us profit by the advantages of civilization. There are fifty or sixty
deaths every day; if you have a mind to do it, you can sit down at any
time and wail over whole hecatombs of dead in Paris. Old Goriot has
gone off the hooks, has he? So much the better for him. If you
venerate his memory, keep it to yourselves, and let the rest of us
feed in peace."
"Oh, to be sure," said the widow, "it is all the better for him that
he is dead. It looks as tho he had had trouble enough, poor soul,
while he was alive."
And this was all the funeral oration delivered over him who had been
for Eugene the type and embodiment of fatherhood.
When the hearse came, Eugene had the coffin carried into the house
again, unscrewed the lid, and reverently laid on the old man's breast
the token that recalled the days when Delphine and Anastasie were
innocent little maidens, before they began "to think for themselves,"
as he had moaned out in his agony.
Rastignac and Christophe and the two undertaker's men were the only
followers of the funeral. The Church of Saint-Etienne du Mont was only
a little distance from the Rue Neuve-Sainte-Genevieve. When the coffin
had been deposited in a low, dark, little chapel, the law student
looked around in vain for Goriot's two daughters or their husbands.
Christophe was his only fellow mourner: Christophe, who appeared to
think it was his duty to attend the funeral of the man who had put him
in the way of such handsome tips. As they waited there in the chapel
for the two priests, the chorister, and the beadle, Rastignac grasped
Christophe's hand. He could not utter a word just then.
"Yes, Monsieur Eugene," said Christophe, "he was a good and worthy man
who never said one word louder than another; he never did any one any
harm, and gave nobody any trouble."
The two priests, the chorister, and the beadle came, and said and did
as much as could be expected for seventy francs in an age when
religion can not afford to say prayers for nothing.
The ecclesiastics chanted a psalm, the _Libera nos_ and the _De
profundis_. The whole service lasted about twenty minutes. There was
but one mourning coach, which the priest and chorister agreed to share
with Eugene and Christophe.
"There is no one else to follow us," remarked the priest, "so we may
as well go quickly, and so save time; it is half-past five."
But just as the coffin was put in the hearse, two empty carriages,
with the armorial bearings of the Comte de Restaud and the Baron de
Nucingen, arrived and followed in the procession to Pere-Lachaise. At
six o'clock Goriot's coffin was lowered into the grave, his daughters'
servants standing round the while. The ecclesiastic recited the short
prayer that the students could afford to pay for, and then both priest
and lackeys disappeared at once. The two grave-diggers flung in
several spadefuls of earth, and then stopt and asked Rastignac for
their fee. Eugene felt in vain in his pocket, and was obliged to
borrow five francs of Christophe.
II
BIROTTEAU'S EARLY MARRIED LIFE[55]
"You will have a good husband, my little girl," said M, Pillerault.
"He has a warm heart and sentiments of honor. He is as straight as a
line, and as good as the child Jesus; he is a king of men, in short."
[Footnote 55: From "The Rise and Fall of César Birotteau," as
translated by Ellen Marriàge.]
Constance put away once and for all the dreams of a brilliant future,
which, like most shop-girls, she had sometimes indulged. She meant to be a
faithful wife and a good mother, and took up this life in accordance with
the religious program of the middle classes. After all, her new ideas were
much better than the dangerous vanities tempting to a youthful Parisian
imagination. Constance's intelligence was a narrow one; she was the typical
small tradesman's wife, who always grumbles a little over her work, who
refuses a thing at the outset, and is vexed when she is taken at her word;
whose restless activity takes all things, from cash-box to kitchen, as its
province, and supervises everything, from the weightiest business
transaction down to almost invisible darns in the household linen. Such a
woman scolds while she loves, and can only conceive ideas of the very
simplest; only the small change, as it were; of thought passes current with
her; she argues about everything, lives in chronic fear of the unknown,
makes constant forecasts, and is always thinking of the future. Her
statuesque yet girlish beauty, her engaging looks, her freshness, prevented
César from thinking of her shortcomings; and moreover, she made up for them
by a woman's sensitive conscientiousness, an excessive thrift, by her
fanatical love of work, and genius as a saleswoman.
Constance was just eighteen years old, and the possessor of eleven
thousand francs. César, in whom love had developed the most unbounded
ambition, bought the perfumery business, and transplanted the Queen of
Roses to a handsome shop near the Place Vêndome. He was only
twenty-one years of age, married to a beautiful and adored wife, and
almost the owner of his establishment, for he had paid three-fourths
of the amount. He saw (how should he have seen otherwise?) the future
in fair colors, which seemed fairer still as he measured his career
from its starting-point.
Roguin (Ragon's notary) drew up the marriage-contract, and gave sage
counsels to the young perfumer; he it was who interfered when the
latter was about to complete the purchase of the business with the
wife's money. "Just keep the money by you, my boy; ready money is
sometimes a handy thing in a business," he had said....
During the first year César instructed his wife in all the ins and
outs of the perfumery business, which she was admirably quick to
grasp; she might have been brought into the world for that sole
purpose, so well did she adapt herself to her customers. The result of
the stock-taking at the end of the year alarmed the ambitious
perfumer. After deducting all expenses, he might perhaps hope, in
twenty years' time, to make the modest sum of a hundred thousand
francs, the price of his felicity. He determined then and there to
find some speedier road to fortune, and by way of a beginning, to be a
manufacturer as well as a retailer.
Acting against his wife's counsel, he took the lease of a shed on some
building land in the Faubourg du Temple, and painted up thereon, in
huge letters, CÉSAR BIROTTEAU'S FACTORY. He enticed a workman from
Grasse, and with him began to manufacture several kinds of soap,
essences, and eau-de-cologne, on the system of half profits. The
partnership only lasted six months, and ended in a loss, which he had
to sustain alone; but Birotteau did not lose heart. He meant to obtain
a result at any price, if it were only to escape a scolding from his
wife; and, indeed, he confest to her afterward that, in those days of
despair, his head used to boil like a pot on the fire, and that many a
time but for his religious principles he would have thrown himself
into the Seine.
One day, deprest by several unsuccessful experiments, he was
sauntering home to dinner along the boulevards (the lounger in Paris
is a man in despair quite as often as a genuine idler), when a book
among a hamperful at six sous apiece caught his attention; his eyes
were attracted by the yellow dusty title-page, Abdeker, so it ran, or
the Art of Preserving Beauty.
Birotteau took up the work. It claimed to be a translation from the
Arabic, but in reality it was a sort of romance written by a
physician in the previous century. César happened to stumble upon a
passage there which treated of perfumes, and with his back against a
tree in the boulevard, he turned the pages over till he reached a
foot-note, wherein the learned author discoursed of the nature of the
dermis and epidermis. The writer showed conclusively that such and
such an unguent or soap often produced an effect exactly opposite to
that intended, and the ointment, or the soap, acted as a tonic upon a
skin that required a lenitive treatment, or vice versa.
Birotteau saw a fortune in the book, and bought it. Yet, feeling
little confidence in his unaided lights, he went to Vauquelin, the
celebrated chemist, and in all simplicity asked him how to compose a
double cosmetic which should produce the required effect upon the
human epidermis in either case. The really learned--men so truly great
in this sense that they can never receive in their lifetime all the
fame that should reward vast labors like theirs--are almost always
helpful and kindly to the poor in intellect. So it was with Vauquelin.
He came to the assistance of the perfumer, gave him a formula for a
paste to whiten the hands, and allowed him to style himself its
inventor. It was this cosmetic that Birotteau called the Superfine
Pate des Sultanes. The more thoroughly to accomplish his purpose, he
used the recipe for the paste for a wash for the complexion, which he
called the Carminative Toilet Lotion....
César Birotteau might be a Royalist, but public opinion at that time
was in his favor; and tho he had scarcely a hundred thousand francs
beside his business, was looked upon as a very wealthy man. His
steady-going ways, his punctuality, his habit of paying ready money
for everything, of never discounting bills, while he would take paper
to oblige a customer of whom he was sure--all these things, together
with his readiness to oblige, had brought him a great reputation. And
not only so; he had really made a good deal of money, but the building
of his factories had absorbed most of it, and he paid nearly twenty
thousand francs a year in rent. The education of their only daughter,
whom Constance and César both idolized, had been a heavy expense.
Neither the husband nor the wife thought of money where Cesarine's
pleasure was concerned, and they had never brought themselves to part
with her.
Imagine the delight of the poor peasant parvenu when he heard his
charming Cesarine play a sonata by Steibelt or sing a ballad; when he
saw her writing French correctly, or making sepia drawings of
landscapes, or listened while she read aloud from the Racines, father
and son, and explained the beauties of the poetry. What happiness it
was for him to live again in this fair, innocent flower, not yet
plucked from the parent stem; this angel, over whose growing graces
and earliest development they had watched with such passionate
tenderness; this only child, incapable of despising her father or of
laughing at his want of education, so much was she his little
daughter.
When César came to Paris, he had known how to read, write, and cipher,
and at that point his education had been arrested. There had been no
opportunity in his hard-working life of acquiring new ideas and
information beyond the perfumery trade. He had spent his time among
folk to whom science and literature were matters of indifference, and
whose knowledge was of a limited and special kind; he himself, having
no time to spare for loftier studies, became perforce a practical man.
He adopted (how should he have done otherwise?) the language, errors,
and opinions of the Parisian tradesman who admires Molière, Voltaire,
and Rousseau on hearsay, and buys their works, but never opens them;
who will have it that the proper way to pronounce "armoire" is
"ormoire"; "or" means gold, and "moire" means silk, and women's
dresses used almost always to be made of silk, and in their cupboards
they locked up silk and gold--therefore, "ormoire" is right and
"armoire" is an innovation. Potier, Talma, Mlle. Mars, and other
actors and actresses were millionaires ten times over, and did not
live like ordinary mortals: the great tragedian lived on raw meat, and
Mlle. Mars would have a fricassee of pearls now and then--an idea she
had taken from some celebrated Egyptian actress. As to the Emperor,
his waistcoat pockets were lined with leather, so that he could take a
handful of snuff at a time; he used to ride at full gallop up the
staircase of the orangery at Versailles. Authors and artists ended in
the workhouse, the natural close to their eccentric careers; they
were, every one of them, atheists into the bargain, so that you had to
be very careful not to admit anybody of that sort into your house,
Joseph Lebas used to advert with horror to the story of his
sister-in-law Augustine, who married the artist Sommervieux.
Astronomers lived on spiders. These bright examples of the attitude of
the bourgeois mind toward philology, the drama, politics, and science
will throw light upon its breadth of view and powers of
comprehension....
César's wife, who had learned to know her husband's character during
the early years of their marriage, led a life of perpetual terror; she
represented sound sense and foresight in the partnership; she was
doubt, opposition, and fear, while César represented boldness,
ambition, activity, the element of chance and undreamed-of good luck.
In spite of appearances, the merchant was the weaker vessel, and it
was the wife who really had the patience and courage. So it had come
to pass that a timid mediocrity, without education, knowledge, or
strength of character, a being who could in nowise have succeeded in
the world's most slippery places, was taken for a remarkable man, a
man of spirit and resolution, thanks to his instinctive uprightness
and sense of justice, to the goodness of a truly Christian soul, and
love for the one woman who had been his.
ALFRED DE VIGNY
Born in 1799, died in 1863; entered the army in 1815,
becoming a captain in 1823; published a volume of verse in
1822; "Cinq-Mars," his famous historical novel, published in
1826; made translations from Shakespeare and wrote original
historical dramas; admitted to the French Academy in 1845.
RICHELIEU'S WAY WITH HIS MASTER[56]
The latter [Cardinal de Richelieu], attired in all the pomp of a
cardinal, leaning upon two young pages, and followed by his captain of
the guards and more than five hundred gentlemen attached to his house,
advanced toward the King slowly and stopping at each step, as if
forcibly arrested by his sufferings, but in reality to observe the
faces before him. A glance sufficed.
[Footnote 56: From "Cinq-Mars; or the Conspiracy Under Louis XIII."
Translated by William C. Hazlitt. The Marquis de Cinq-Mars was a
favorite of Louis XIII, grand-master of the wardrobe and the horse,
and aspired to a seat in the royal council and to the hand of Maria de
Gonzaga, Princess of Mantua. Having been refused by Richelieu a place
in the council, he formed a conspiracy against the cardinal and
entered into a treasonable correspondence with Spain. The conspiracy
being discovered, he was beheaded at Lyons in 1642. Bulwer's popular
play "Richelieu," tho founded on this episode, diverges radically in
several details.]
His suite remained at the entrance of the royal tent; of all those
within it not one was bold enough to salute him, or to look toward
him. Even La Vallette feigned to be deeply occupied in a conversation
with Montresor; and the King, who desired to give him an unfavorable
reception, greeted him lightly and continued a conversation aside in a
low voice with the Duc de Beaufort.
The cardinal was therefore forced, after the first salute, to stop and
pass to the side of the crowd of courtiers, as tho he wished to mix
with them, but in reality to test them more closely; they all recoiled
as at the sight of a leper. Fabert alone advanced toward him with the
frank and blunt air habitual with him, and making use of the terms
belonging to his profession, said:
"Well, my Lord, you make a breach in the midst of them like a
cannon-ball; I ask pardon in their name."
"And you stand firm before me as before the enemy," said the cardinal;
"you will have no cause to regret it in the end, my dear Fabert."
Mazarin also approached the cardinal, but with caution, and giving to
his flexible features an expression of profound sadness, made him five
or six very low bows, turning his back to the group gathered round the
King, so that in the latter quarter they might be taken for those cold
and hasty salutations which are made to a person one desires to be rid
of, and, on the part of the Duc, for tokens of respect blended with a
discreet and silent sorrow.
The minister, ever calm, smiled in disdain; and assuming that firm
look and that air of grandeur which he wore so perfectly in the hour
of danger, he again leaned upon his pages, and without waiting for a
word or glance from his sovereign, he suddenly resolved upon his line
of conduct, and walked directly toward him, traversing the whole
length of the tent. No one had lost sight of him, altho affecting not
to observe him. Every one now became silent, even those who were
talking to the King; all the courtiers bent forward to see and to
hear.
Louis XIII turned round in astonishment, and all presence of mind
totally failing him, remained motionless, and waited with an icy
glance--his sole force, but a _vis inertiæ_ very effectual in a
prince.
The cardinal, on coming close to the prince, did not bow; and without
changing his position, his eyes lowered and his hands placed on the
shoulders of the two boys half-bending, he said:
"Sire, I come to implore your Majesty at length to grant me the
retirement for which I have long sighed. My health is failing; I feel
that my life will soon be ended. Eternity approaches me, and before
rendering an account to the eternal King, I would render one to my
temporal sovereign. It is eighteen years, Sire, since you placed in my
hands a weak and divided kingdom; I return it to you united and
powerful. Your enemies are overthrown and humiliated. My work is
accomplished. I ask your Majesty's permission to retire to Citeaux, of
which I am abbot, and where I may end my days in prayer and
meditation."
The King, irritated with some haughty expressions in this address,
showed none of the signs of weakness which the cardinal had expected,
and which he had always seen in him when he had threatened to resign
the management of affairs. On the contrary, feeling that he had the
eyes of the whole court upon him, Louis looked upon him with the air
of a king, and coldly replied:
"We thank you, then, for your services, M. le Cardinal, and wish you
the repose you desire."
Richelieu was deeply angered, but no indication of his rage appeared
upon his countenance. "Such was the coldness with which you left
Montmorency to die," he said to himself; "but you shall not escape me
thus." He then continued aloud, bowing at the same time:
"The only recompense I ask for my services is that your Majesty will
deign to accept from me, as a gift, the Palais-Cardinal I have already
erected at my own cost in Paris."
The King, astonished, bowed in token of assent. A murmur of surprize
for a moment agitated the attentive court.
"I also petition your Majesty to grant me the revocation of an act of
rigor, which I solicited (I publicly confess it), and which I perhaps
regarded as too beneficial to the repose of the state. Yes, when I was
of this world, I was too forgetful of my old sentiments of personal
respect and attachment, in my eagerness for the public welfare; now
that I already enjoy the enlightenment of solitude, I see that I have
been wrong, and I repent."
The attention of the spectators was redoubled, and the uneasiness of
the King became visible.
"Yes, there is one person, Sire, whom I have always loved, despite her
wrongs toward you, and the banishment which the affairs of the kingdom
forced me to procure for her; a person to whom I have owed much, and
who should be very dear to you, notwithstanding her armed attempts
against you; a person, in a word, whom I implore you to recall from
exile--the Queen Marie de Medicis, your mother."
The King sent forth an involuntary exclamation, so far was he from
expecting to hear that name. A represt agitation suddenly appeared
upon every face. All awaited in silence the King's reply. Louis XIII
looked for a long time at his old minister without speaking, and this
look decided the fate of France; in that instant he called to mind all
the indefatigable services of Richelieu, his unbounded devotion, his
wonderful capacity, and was surprized at himself for having wished to
part with him. He felt deeply affected at this request, which hunted
out, as it were, the exact cause of his anger at the bottom of his
heart, rooted it up, and took from his hands the only weapon he had
against his old servant; filial love brought the words of pardon to
his lips and tears into his eyes. Delighted to grant what he desired
most of all things in the world, he extended his hand to the Duc with
all the nobleness and kindliness of a Bourbon. The cardinal bowed, and
respectfully kissed it; and his heart, which should have burst with
remorse, only swelled in the joy of a haughty triumph.
The prince, much moved, abandoning his hand to him, turned gracefully
toward his court and said with a tremulous voice:
"We often deceive ourselves, gentlemen, and especially in our
knowledge of so great a politician as this; I hope he will never leave
us, since his heart is as good as his head."
Cardinal de la Vallette on the instant seized the arm of the King's
mantle, and kissed it with all the ardor of a lover, and the young
Mazarin did much the same with Richelieu himself, assuming with
admirable Italian suppleness an expression radiant with joyful
emotion. Two streams of flatterers hastened, one toward the King, the
other toward the minister; the former group, not less adroit than the
second, altho less direct, addrest to the prince thanks which could be
heard by the minister, and burned at the feet of the one incense which
was destined for the other. As for Richelieu, bestowing a bow on the
right and a smile on the left, he stept forward, and stood on the
right hand of the King, as his natural place.
VICTOR HUGO
Born in 1802, died in 1885; his childhood spent partly in
Corsica, Italy and Spain, his father an officer in
Napoleon's army; educated at home by a priest and at a
school in Paris; published in 1816 his first tragedy,
"Irtamème," followed by other plays and poems; his most
notable work down to 1859 being "La Legende"; his writings
extremely numerous, other titles being "L'Art d'être
Grand-Père" 1877, "Notre Dame de Paris" 1831, "Napoleon le
Petit" 1852, "Les Misérables" 1862, "Les Travailleurs de la
Mer" 1866, "L'Homme Qui Rit" 1869, "Quatrevingt-treize"
1874, "History of a Crime" 1877; elected to the French
Academy in 1841; exiled from France in 1851, living first in
Belgium, then in Jersey and Guernsey; returned to France
after the fall of the Empire in 1870; elected a life member
of the Senate in 1876.
THE BATTLE OF WATERLOO[57]
The battle of Waterloo is an enigma as obscure for those who gained it
as for him who lost it. To Napoleon it is a panic; Blucher sees
nothing in it but fire; Wellington does not understand it at all. Look
at the reports: the bulletins are confused; the commentaries are
entangled; the latter stammer, the former stutter. Jomini divides the
battle of Waterloo into four moments; Muffling cuts it into three
acts; Charras, altho we do not entirely agree with him in all his
appreciations, has alone caught with his haughty eye the
characteristic lineaments of this catastrophe of human genius
contending with divine chance. All the other historians suffer from a
certain bedazzlement in which they grope about. It was a flashing day,
in truth the overthrow of the military monarchy which, to the great
stupor of the kings, has dragged down all kingdoms, the downfall of
strength and the rout of war.
[Footnote 57: Chapter XV of "Cosette," in "Les Misérables."
Translation of Lascelles Wraxall.]