she had barely four hundred thousand francs deposited with him.
The daughter of Adolphus of Manheim, thus reduced to an income of
twenty-four thousand livres, lost herself in arithmetical exercises that
muddled her wits.
“‘I have _always_ had six thousand francs for our dress allowance,’ she
said to Malvina. ‘Why, how did your father find money? We shall have
nothing now with twenty-four thousand francs; it is destitution! Oh! if
my father could see me so come down in the world, it would kill him if
he were not dead already! Poor Wilhelmine!’ and she began to cry.
“Malvina, puzzled to know how to comfort her mother, represented to her
that she was still young and pretty, that rose-color still became her,
that she could continue to go to the Opera and the Bouffons, where Mme.
de Nucingen had a box. And so with visions of gaieties, dances, music,
pretty dresses, and social success, the Baroness was lulled to sleep
and pleasant dreams in the blue, silk-curtained bed in the charming
room next to the chamber in which Jean Baptiste, Baron d’Aldrigger, had
breathed his last but two nights ago.
“Here in a few words is the Baron’s history. During his lifetime that
worthy Alsacien accumulated about three millions of francs. In 1800,
at the age of thirty-six, in the apogee of a fortune made during
the Revolution, he made a marriage partly of ambition, partly of
inclination, with the heiress of the family of Adolphus of Manheim.
Wilhelmine, being the idol of her whole family, naturally inherited
their wealth after some ten years. Next, d’Aldrigger’s fortune being
doubled, he was transformed into a Baron by His Majesty, Emperor and
King, and forthwith became a fanatical admirer of the great man to whom
he owed his title. Wherefore, between 1814 and 1815 he ruined himself
by a too serious belief in the sun of Austerlitz. Honest Alsacien as he
was, he did not suspend payment, nor did he give his creditors shares
in doubtful concerns by way of settlement. He paid everything over the
counter, and retired from business, thoroughly deserving Nucingen’s
comment on his behavior--‘Honest but stoobid.’
“All claims satisfied, there remained to him five hundred thousand
francs and certain receipts for sums advanced to that Imperial
Government, which had ceased to exist. ‘See vat komms of too much pelief
in Nappolion,’ said he, when he had realized all his capital.
“When you have been one of the leading men in a place, how are you to
remain in it when your estate has dwindled? D’Aldrigger, like all ruined
provincials, removed to Paris, there intrepidly wore the tricolor braces
embroidered with Imperial eagles, and lived entirely in Bonapartist
circles. His capital he handed over to Nucingen, who gave him eight per
cent upon it, and took over the loans to the Imperial Government at
a mere sixty per cent of reduction; wherefore d’Aldrigger squeezed
Nucingen’s hand and said, ‘I knew dot in you I should find de heart of
ein Elzacien.’
“(Nucingen was paid in full through our friend des Lupeaulx.) Well
fleeced as d’Aldrigger had been, he still possessed an income
of forty-four thousand francs; but his mortification was further
complicated by the spleen which lies in wait for the business man
so soon as he retires from business. He set himself, noble heart, to
sacrifice himself to his wife, now that her fortune was lost, that
fortune of which she had allowed herself to be despoiled so easily,
after the manner of a girl entirely ignorant of money matters. Mme.
d’Aldrigger accordingly missed not a single pleasure to which she had
been accustomed; any void caused by the loss of Strasbourg acquaintances
were speedily filled, and more than filled, with Paris gaieties.
“Even then as now the Nucingens lived at the higher end of financial
society, and the Baron de Nucingen made it a point of honor to treat the
honest banker well. His disinterested virtue looked well in the Nucingen
salon.
“Every winter dipped into d’Aldrigger’s principal, but he did not
venture to remonstrate with his pearl of a Wilhelmine. His was the
most ingenious unintelligent tenderness in the world. A good man, but
a stupid one! ‘What will become of them when I am gone?’ he said, as he
lay dying; and when he was left alone for a moment with Wirth, his
old man-servant, he struggled for breath to bid him take care of his
mistress and her two daughters, as if the one reasonable being in the
house was this Alsacien Caleb Balderstone.
“Three years afterwards, in 1826, Isaure was twenty years old, and
Malvina still unmarried. Malvina had gone into society, and in course of
time discovered for herself how superficial their friendships were, how
accurately every one was weighed and appraised. Like most girls that
have been ‘well brought up,’ as we say, Malvina had no idea of the
mechanism of life, of the importance of money, of the difficulty of
obtaining it, of the prices of things. And so, for six years, every
lesson that she had learned had been a painful one for her.
“D’Aldrigger’s four hundred thousand francs were carried to the
credit of the Baroness’ account with the firm of Nucingen (she was her
husband’s creditor for twelve hundred thousand francs under her marriage
settlement), and when in any difficulty the Shepherdess of the Alps
dipped into her capital as though it were inexhaustible.
“When our pigeon first advanced towards his dove, Nucingen, knowing
the Baroness’ character, must have spoken plainly to Malvina on the
financial position. At that time three hundred thousand francs were
left; the income of twenty-four thousand francs was reduced to eighteen
thousand. Wirth had kept up this state of things for three years! After
that confidential interview, Malvina put down the carriage, sold the
horses, and dismissed the coachman, without her mother’s knowledge. The
furniture, now ten years old, could not be renewed, but it all faded
together, and for those that like harmony the effect was not half bad.
The Baroness herself, that so well-preserved flower, began to look
like the last solitary frost-touched rose on a November bush. I myself
watched the slow decline of luxury by half-tones and semi-tones!
Frightful, upon my honor! It was my last trouble of the kind; afterwards
I said to myself, ‘It is silly to care so much about other people.’
But while I was in civil service, I was fool enough to take a personal
interest in the houses where I dined; I used to stand up for them; I
would say no ill of them myself; I--oh! I was a child.
“Well, when the ci-devant pearl’s daughter put the state of the case
before her, ‘Oh my poor children,’ cried she, ‘who will make my dresses
now? I cannot afford new bonnets; I cannot see visitors here nor go
out.’--Now by what token do you know that a man is in love?” said
Bixiou, interrupting himself. “The question is, whether Beaudenord was
genuinely in love with the fair-haired girl.”
“He neglects his interests,” said Couture.
“He changes his shirt three times a day,” opined Blondet; “a man of more
than ordinary ability, can he, and ought he, to fall in love?”
“My friends,” resumed Bixiou, with a sentimental air, “there is a kind
of man who, when he feels that he is in peril of falling in love, will
snap his fingers or fling away his cigar (as the case may be) with a
‘Pooh! there are other women in the world.’ Beware of that man for
a dangerous reptile. Still, the Government may employ that citizen
somewhere in the Foreign Office. Blondet, I call your attention to the
fact that this Godefroid had thrown up diplomacy.”
“Well, he was absorbed,” said Blondet. “Love gives the fool his one
chance of growing great.”
“Blondet, Blondet, how is it that we are so poor?” cried Bixiou.
“And why is Finot so rich?” returned Blondet. “I will tell you how
it is; there, my son, we understand each other. Come, there is Finot
filling up my glass as if I had carried in his firewood. At the end of
dinner one ought to sip one’s wine slowly,--Well?”
“Thou has said. The absorbed Godefroid became fully acquainted with the
family--the tall Malvina, the frivolous Baroness, and the little lady
of the dance. He became a servant after the most conscientious and
restricted fashion. He was not scared away by the cadaverous remains
of opulence; not he! by degrees he became accustomed to the threadbare
condition of things. It never struck the young man that the green silk
damask and white ornaments in the drawing-room needed refurnishing.
The curtains, the tea-table, the knick-knacks on the chimney-piece, the
rococo chandelier, the Eastern carpet with the pile worn down to the
thread, the pianoforte, the little flowered china cups, the fringed
serviettes so full of holes that they looked like open work in the
Spanish fashion, the green sitting-room with the Baroness’ blue bedroom
beyond it,--it was all sacred, all dear to him. It is only your stupid
woman with the brilliant beauty that throws heart, brain, and soul into
the shade, who can inspire forgetfulness like this; a clever woman never
abuses her advantages; she must be small-natured and silly to gain such
a hold upon a man. Beaudenord actually loved the solemn old Wirth--he
has told me so himself!
“That old rogue regarded his future master with the awe which a good
Catholic feels for the Eucharist. Honest Wirth was a kind of Gaspard,
a beer-drinking German sheathing his cunning in good-nature, much as a
cardinal in the Middle Ages kept his dagger up his sleeve. Wirth saw a
husband for Isaure, and accordingly proceeded to surround Godefroid with
the mazy circumlocutions of his Alsacien’s geniality, that most adhesive
of all known varieties of bird-lime.
“Mme. d’Aldrigger was radically ‘improper.’ She thought love the most
natural thing imaginable. When Isaure and Malvina went out together to
the Champs Elysees or the Tuileries, where they were sure to meet the
young men of their set, she would simply say, ‘A pleasant time to you,
dear girls.’ Their friends among men, the only persons who might have
slandered the sisters, championed them; for the extraordinary liberty
permitted in the d’Aldriggers’ salon made it unique in Paris. Vast
wealth could scarcely have procured such evenings, the talk was good on
any subject; dress was not insisted upon; you felt so much at home there
that you could ask for supper. The sisters corresponded as they pleased,
and quietly read their letters by their mother’s side; it never occurred
to the Baroness to interfere in any way; the adorable woman gave the
girls the full benefits of her selfishness, and in a certain sense
selfish persons are the easiest to live with; they hate trouble, and
therefore do not trouble other people; they never beset the lives of
their fellow-creatures with thorny advice and captious fault-finding;
nor do they torment you with the waspish solicitude of excessive
affection that must know all things and rule all things----”
“This comes home,” said Blondet, “but my dear fellow, this is not
telling a story, this is _blague_----”
“Blondet, if you were not tipsy, I should really feel hurt! He is the
one serious literary character among us; for his benefit, I honor you by
treating you like men of taste, I am distilling my tale for you, and now
he criticises me! There is no greater proof of intellectual sterility,
my friends, than the piling up of facts. _Le Misanthrope_, that supreme
comedy, shows us that art consists in the power of building a palace
on a needle’s point. The gist of my idea is in the fairy wand which can
turn the Desert into an Interlaken in ten seconds (precisely the time
required to empty this glass). Would you rather that I fired off at you
like a cannon-ball, or a commander-in-chief’s report? We chat and laugh;
and this journalist, a bibliophobe when sober, expects me, forsooth,
when he is drunk, to teach my tongue to move at the dull jogtrot of
a printed book.” (Here he affected to weep.) “Woe unto the French
imagination when men fain would blunt the needle points of her pleasant
humor! _Dies iroe_! Let us weep for _Candide_. Long live the _Kritik of
Pure Reason_, _La Symbolique_, and the systems in five closely packed
volumes, printed by Germans, who little suspect that the gist of the
matter has been known in Paris since 1750, and crystallized in a few
trenchant words--the diamonds of our national thought. Blondet is
driving a hearse to his own suicide; Blondet, forsooth! who manufactures
newspaper accounts of the last words of all the great men that die
without saying anything!”
“Come, get on,” put in Finot.
“It was my intention to explain to you in what the happiness of a man
consists when he is not a shareholder (out of compliment to Couture).
Well, now, do you not see at what a price Godefroid secured the greatest
happiness of a young man’s dreams? He was trying to understand Isaure,
by way of making sure that she should understand him. Things which
comprehend one another must needs be similar. Infinity and Nothingness,
for instance, are like; everything that lies between the two is like
neither. Nothingness is stupidity; genius, Infinity. The lovers wrote
each other the stupidest letters imaginable, putting down various
expressions then in fashion upon bits of scented paper: ‘Angel! Aeolian
harp! with thee I shall be complete! There is a heart in my man’s
breast! Weak woman, poor me!’ all the latest heart-frippery. It was
Godefroid’s wont to stay in a drawing-room for a bare ten minutes; he
talked without any pretension to the women in it, and at these times
they thought him very clever. In short, judge of his absorption; Joby,
his horses and carriages, became secondary interests in his life. He was
never happy except in the depths of a snug settee opposite the Baroness,
by the dark-green porphyry chimney-piece, watching Isaure, taking tea,
and chatting with the little circle of friends that dropped in every
evening between eleven and twelve in the Rue Joubert. You could play
bouillotte there safely. (I always won.) Isaure sat with one little foot
thrust out in its black satin shoe; Godefroid would gaze and gaze, and
stay till every one else was gone, and say, ‘Give me your shoe!’ and
Isaure would put her little foot on a chair and take it off and give
it to him, with a glance, one of those glances that--in short, you
understand.
“At length Godefroid discovered a great mystery in Malvina. Whenever
du Tillet knocked at the door, the live red that colored Malvina’s face
said ‘Ferdinand!’ When the poor girl’s eyes fell on that two-footed
tiger, they lighted up like a brazier fanned by a current of air. When
Ferdinand drew her away to the window or a side table, she betrayed her
secret infinite joy. It is a rare and wonderful thing to see a woman so
much in love that she loses her cunning to be strange, and you can read
her heart; as rare (dear me!) in Paris as the Singing Flower in the
Indies. But in spite of a friendship dating from the d’Aldriggers’
first appearance at the Nucingens’, Ferdinand did not marry Malvina.
Our ferocious friend was not apparently jealous of Desroches, who paid
assiduous court to the young lady; Desroches wanted to pay off the rest
of the purchase-money due for his connection; Malvina could not well
have less than fifty thousand crowns, he thought, and so the lawyer
was fain to play the lover. Malvina, deeply humiliated as she was by
du Tillet’s carelessness, loved him too well to shut the door upon
him. With her, an enthusiastic, highly-wrought, sensitive girl, love
sometimes got the better of pride, and pride again overcame wounded
love. Our friend Ferdinand, cool and self-possessed, accepted her
tenderness, and breathed the atmosphere with the quiet enjoyment of a
tiger licking the blood that dyes his throat. He would come to make sure
of it with new proofs; he never allowed two days to pass without a visit
to the Rue Joubert.
“At that time the rascal possessed something like eighteen hundred
thousand francs; money must have weighted very little with him in the
question of marriage; and he had not merely been proof against Malvina,
he had resisted the Barons de Nucingen and de Rastignac; though both of
them had set him galloping at the rate of seventy-five leagues a day,
with outriders, regardless of expense, through mazes of their cunning
devices--and with never a clue of thread.
“Godefroid could not refrain from saying a word to his future
sister-in-law as to her ridiculous position between a banker and an
attorney.
“‘You mean to read me a lecture on the subject of Ferdinand,’ she said
frankly, ‘to know the secret between us. Dear Godefroid, never mention
this again. Ferdinand’s birth, antecedents, and fortune count for
nothing in this, so you may think it is something extraordinary.’ A few
days afterwards, however, Malvina took Godefroid apart to say, ‘I do
not think that Desroches is sincere’ (such is the instinct of love);
‘he would like to marry me, and he is paying court to some tradesman’s
daughter as well. I should very much like to know whether I am a second
shift, and whether marriage is a matter of money with him.’ The fact was
that Desroches, deep as he was, could not make out du Tillet, and
was afraid that he might marry Malvina. So the fellow had secured
his retreat. His position was intolerable, he was scarcely paying his
expenses and interest on the debt. Women understand nothing of these
things; for them, love is always a millionaire.”
“But since neither du Tillet nor Desroches married her; just explain
Ferdinand’s motive,” said Finot.
“Motive?” repeated Bixiou; “why, this. General Rule: A girl that has
once given away her slipper, even if she refused it for ten years, is
never married by the man who----”
“Bosh!” interrupted Blondet, “one reason for loving is the fact that
one has loved. His motive? Here it is. General Rule: Do not marry as a
sergeant when some day you may be Duke of Dantzig and Marshal of France.
Now, see what a match du Tillet has made since then. He married one of
the Comte de Granville’s daughters, into one of the oldest families in
the French magistracy.”
“Desroches’ mother had a friend, a druggist’s wife,” continued Bixiou.
“Said druggist had retired with a fat fortune. These druggist folk have
absurdly crude notions; by way of giving his daughter a good education,
he had sent her to a boarding-school! Well, Matifat meant the girl to
marry well, on the strength of two hundred thousand francs, good hard
coin with no scent of drugs about it.”
“Florine’s Matifat?” asked Blondet.
“Well, yes. Lousteau’s Matifat; ours, in fact. The Matifats, even then
lost to us, had gone to live in the Rue du Cherche-Midi, as far as may
be from the Rue des Lombards, where their money was made. For my own
part, I had cultivated those Matifats. While I served my time in the
galleys of the law, when I was cooped up for eight hours out of the
twenty-four with nincompoops of the first water, I saw queer characters
enough to convince myself that all is not dead-level even in obscure
places, and that in the flattest inanity you may chance upon an angle.
Yes, dear boy, such and such a philistine is to such another as Raphael
is to Natoire.
“Mme. Desroches, the widowed mother, had long ago planned this marriage
for her son, in spite of a tremendous obstacle which took the shape
of one Cochin, Matifat’s partner’s son, a young clerk in the adult
department. M. and Mme. Matifat were of the opinion that an attorney’s
position ‘gave some guarantee for a wife’s happiness,’ to use their own
expression; and as for Desroches, he was prepared to fall in with his
mother’s views in case he could do no better for himself. Wherefore, he
kept up his acquaintance with the druggists in the Rue du Cherche-Midi.
“To put another kind of happiness before you, you should have a
description of these shopkeepers, male and female. They rejoiced in
the possession of a handsome ground floor and a strip of garden; for
amusement, they watched a little squirt of water, no bigger than a
cornstalk, perpetually rising and falling upon a small round freestone
slab in the middle of a basin some six feet across; they would rise
early of a morning to see if the plants in the garden had grown in the
night; they had nothing to do, they were restless, they dressed for the
sake of dressing, bored themselves at the theatre, and were for ever
going to and fro between Paris and Luzarches, where they had a country
house. I have dined there.
“Once they tried to quiz me, Blondet. I told them a long-winded story
that lasted from nine o’clock till midnight, one tale inside another.
I had just brought my twenty-ninth personage upon the scene (the
newspapers have plagiarized with their ‘continued in our next’), when
old Matifat, who as host still held out, snored like the rest, after
blinking for five minutes. Next day they all complimented me upon the
ending of my tale!
“These tradespeople’s society consisted of M. and Mme. Cochin, Mme.
Desroches, and a young Popinot, still in the drug business, who used
to bring them news of the Rue des Lombards. (You know him, Finot.) Mme.
Matifat loved the arts; she bought lithographs, chromo-lithographs, and
colored prints,--all the cheapest things she could lay her hands on. The
Sieur Matifat amused himself by looking into new business speculations,
investing a little capital now and again for the sake of the excitement.
Florine had cured him of his taste for the Regency style of thing. One
saying of his will give you some idea of the depths in my Matifat. ‘Art
_thou_ going to bed, my nieces?’ he used to say when he wished them
good-night, because (as he explained) he was afraid of hurting their
feelings with the more formal ‘you.’
“The daughter was a girl with no manner at all. She looked rather like a
superior sort of housemaid. She could get through a sonata, she wrote
a pretty English hand, knew French grammar and orthography--a complete
commercial education, in short. She was impatient enough to be married
and leave the paternal roof, finding it as dull at home as a lieutenant
finds the nightwatch at sea; at the same time, it should be said that
her watch lasted through the whole twenty-four hours. Desroches or
Cochin junior, a notary or a lifeguardsman, or a sham English lord,--any
husband would have suited her. As she so obviously knew nothing of life,
I took pity upon her, I determined to reveal the great secret of it.
But, pooh! the Matifats shut their doors on me. The bourgeois and I
shall never understand each other.”
“She married General Gouraud,” said Finot.
“In forty-eight hours, Godefroid de Beaudenord, late of the diplomatic
corps, saw through the Matifats and their nefarious designs,” resumed
Bixiou. “Rastignac happened to be chatting with the frivolous Baroness
when Godefroid came in to give his report to Malvina. A word here and
there reached his ear; he guessed the matter on foot, more particularly
from Malvina’s look of satisfaction that it was as she had suspected.
Then Rastignac actually stopped on till two o’clock in the morning. And
yet there are those that call him selfish! Beaudenord took his departure
when the Baroness went to bed.