Title: Unconscious Comedians
Author: Balzac, Honoré de
Language: English
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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.

“I’m going to take you now, cousin Gazonal,” said Bixiou, after
indorsing the notes, “to see another comedian, who will play you a
charming scene gratis.”

“Who is it?” said Gazonal.

“A usurer. As we go along I’ll tell you the debut of friend Ravenouillet
in Paris.”

Passing in front of the porter’s lodge, Gazonal saw Mademoiselle
Lucienne Ravenouillet holding in her hand a music score (she was a
pupil of the Conservatoire), her father reading a newspaper, and Madame
Ravenouillet with a package of letters to be carried up to the lodgers.

“Thanks, Monsieur Bixiou!” said the girl.

“She’s not a rat,” explained Leon to his cousin; “she is the larva of
the grasshopper.”

“Here’s the history of Ravenouillet,” continued Bixiou, when the three
friends reached the boulevard. “In 1831 Massol, the councillor of state
who is dealing with your case, was a lawyer-journalist who at that time
never thought of being more than Keeper of the Seals, and deigned to
have King Louis-Philippe on his throne. Forgive his ambition, he’s from
Carcassonne. One morning there entered to him a young rustic of his
parts, who said: ‘You know me very well, Mossoo Massol; I’m your
neighbour the grocer’s little boy; I’ve come from down there, for
they tell me a fellow is certain to get a place if he comes to Paris.’
Hearing these words, Massol shuddered, and said to himself that if he
were weak enough to help this compatriot (to him utterly unknown) he
should have the whole department prone upon him, his bell-rope would
break, his valet leave him, he should have difficulties with his
landlord about the stairway, and the other lodgers would assuredly
complain of the smell of garlic pervading the house. Consequently, he
looked at his visitor as a butcher looks at a sheep whose throat he
intends to cut. But whether the rustic comprehended the stab of that
glance or not, he went on to say (so Massol told me), ‘I’ve as much
ambition as other men. I will never go back to my native place, if I
ever do go back, unless I am a rich man. Paris is the antechamber of
Paradise. They tell me that you who write the newspapers can make, as
they say, ‘fine weather and foul’; that is, you have things all your own
way, and it’s enough to ask your help to get any place, no matter what,
under government. Now, though I have faculties, like others, I know
myself: I have no education; I don’t know how to write, and that’s a
misfortune, for I have ideas. I am not seeking, therefore, to be your
rival; I judge myself, and I know I couldn’t succeed there. But, as you
are so powerful, and as we are almost brothers, having played together
in childhood, I count upon you to launch me in a career and to protect
me--Oh, you _must_; I want a place, a place suitable to my capacity, to
such as I am, a place were I can make my fortune.’ Massol was just about
to put his compatriot neck and crop out of the door with some brutal
speech, when the rustic ended his appeal thus: ‘I don’t ask to enter the
administration where people advance like tortoises--there’s your cousin,
who has stuck in one post for twenty years. No, I only want to make
my debut.’--‘On the stage?’ asked Massol only too happy at that
conclusion.--‘No, though I have gesture enough, and figure, and memory.
But there’s too much wear and tear; I prefer the career of _porter_.’
Massol kept his countenance, and replied: ‘I think there’s more wear and
tear in that, but as your choice is made I’ll see what I can do’; and he
got him, as Ravenouillet says, his first ‘cordon.’”

“I was the first master,” said Leon, “to consider the race of
porter. You’ll find knaves of morality, mountebanks of vanity, modern
sycophants, septembriseurs, disguised in philanthropy, inventors of
palpitating questions, preaching the emancipation of the negroes,
improvement of little thieves, benevolence to liberated convicts, and
who, nevertheless, leave their porters in a condition worse than that
of the Irish, in holes more dreadful than a mud cabin, and pay them less
money to live on than the State pays to support a convict. I have done
but one good action in my life, and that was to build my porter a decent
lodge.”

“Yes,” said Bixiou, “if a man, having built a great cage divided into
thousands of compartments like the cells of a beehive or the dens of
a menagerie, constructed to receive human beings of all trades and all
kinds, if that animal, calling itself the proprietor, should go to a man
of science and say: ‘I want an individual of the bimanous species, able
to live in holes full of old boots, pestiferous with rags, and ten
feet square; I want him such that he can live there all his life, sleep
there, eat there, be happy, get children as pretty as little cupids,
work, toil, cultivate flowers, sing there, stay there, and live in
darkness but see and know everything,’ most assuredly the man of science
could never have invented the porter to oblige the proprietor; Paris,
and Paris only could create him, or, if you choose, the devil.”

“Parisian creative powers have gone farther than that,” said Gazonal;
“look at the workmen! You don’t know all the products of industry,
though you exhibit them. Our toilers fight against the toilers of the
continent by force of misery, as Napoleon fought Europe by force of
regiments.”

“Here we are, at my friend the usurer’s,” said Bixiou. “His name is
Vauvinet. One of the greatest mistakes made by writers who describe our
manners and morals is to harp on old portraits. In these days all trades
change. The grocer becomes a peer of France, artists capitalize their
money, vaudevillists have incomes. A few rare beings may remain what
they originally were, but professions in general have no longer either
their special costume or their formerly fixed habits and ways. In the
past we had Gobseck, Gigounet, Samonon,--the last of the Romans; to-day
we rejoice in Vauvinet, the good-fellow usurer, the dandy who frequents
the greenroom and the lorettes, and drives about in a little coupe with
one horse. Take special note of my man, friend Gazonal, and you’ll see
the comedy of money, the cold man who won’t give a penny, the hot man
who snuffs a profit; listen to him attentively!”

All three went up to the second floor of a fine-looking house on the
boulevard des Italiens, where they found themselves surrounded by the
elegances then in fashion. A young man about twenty-eight years of
age advanced to meet them with a smiling face, for he saw Leon de Lora
first. Vauvinet held out his hand with apparent friendliness to Bixiou,
and bowed coldly to Gazonal as he motioned them to enter his office,
where bourgeois taste was visible beneath the artistic appearance of the
furniture, and in spite of the statuettes and the thousand other little
trifles applied to our little apartments by modern art, which has made
itself as small as its patrons.

Vauvinet was dressed, like other young men of our day who go into
business, with extreme elegance, which many of them regard as a species
of prospectus.

“I’ve come for some money,” said Bixiou, laughing, and presenting his
notes.

Vauvinet assumed a serious air, which made Gazonal smile, such
difference was there between the smiling visage that received them and
the countenance of the money-lender recalled to business.

“My dear fellow,” said Vauvinet, looking at Bixiou, “I should certainly
oblige you with the greatest pleasure, but I haven’t any money to loan
at the present time.”

“Ah, bah!”

“No; I have given all I had to--you know who. That poor Lousteau
went into partnership for the management of a theatre with an old
vaudevillist who has great influence with the ministry, Ridal; and they
came to me yesterday for thirty thousand francs. I’m cleaned out, and
so completely that I was just in the act of sending to Cerizet for
a hundred louis, when I lost at lansquenet this morning, at Jenny
Cadine’s.”

“You must indeed me hard-up if you can’t oblige this poor Bixiou,” said
Leon de Lora; “for he can be very sharp-tongued when he hasn’t a sou.”

“Well,” said Bixiou, “I could never say anything but good of Vauvinet;
he’s full of goods.”

“My dear friend,” said Vauvinet, “if I had the money, I couldn’t
possibly discount, even at fifty per cent, notes which are drawn by your
porter. Ravenouillet’s paper isn’t in demand. He’s not a Rothschild.
I warn you that his notes are worn thin; you had better invent another
firm. Find an uncle. As for a friend who’ll sign notes for us there’s
no such being to be found; the matter-of-factness of the present age is
making awful progress.”

“I have a friend,” said Bixiou, motioning to Leon’s cousin. “Monsieur
here; one of the most distinguished manufacturers of cloth in the South,
named Gazonal. His hair is not very well dressed,” added Bixiou, looking
at the touzled and luxuriant crop on the provincial’s head, “but I
am going to take him to Marius, who will make him look less like a
poodle-dog, an appearance so injurious to his credit, and to ours.”

“I don’t believe in Southern securities, be it said without offence to
monsieur,” replied Vauvinet, with whom Gazonal was so entertained that
he did not resent his insolence.

Gazonal, that extremely penetrating intellect, thought that the painter
and Bixiou intended, by way of teaching him to know Paris, to make him
pay the thousand francs for his breakfast at the Cafe de Paris, for this
son of the Pyrenees had never got out of that armor of distrust which
incloses the provincial in Paris.

“How can you expect me to have outstanding business at seven hundred
miles from Paris?” added Vauvinet.

“Then you refuse me positively?” asked Bixiou.

“I have twenty francs, and no more,” said the young usurer.

“I’m sorry for you,” said the joker. “I thought I was worth a thousand
francs.”

“You are worth two hundred thousand francs,” replied Vauvinet, “and
sometimes you are worth your weight in gold, or at least your tongue is;
but I tell you I haven’t a penny.”

“Very good,” replied Bixiou; “then we won’t say anything more about
it. I had arranged for this evening, at Carabine’s, the thing you most
wanted--you know?”

Vauvinet winked an eye at Bixiou; the wink that two jockeys give each
other when they want to say: “Don’t try trickery.”

“Don’t you remember catching me round the waist as if I were a pretty
woman,” said Bixiou, “and coaxing me with look and speech, and saying,
‘I’ll do anything for you if you’ll only get me shares at par in that
railroad du Tillet and Nucingen have made an offer for?’ Well, old
fellow, du Tillet and Nucingen are coming to Carabine’s to-night, where
they will meet a number of political characters. You’ve lost a fine
opportunity. Good-bye to you, old carrot.”

Bixiou rose, leaving Vauvinet apparently indifferent, but inwardly
annoyed by the sense that he had committed a folly.

“One moment, my dear fellow,” said the money-lender. “Though I haven’t
the money, I have credit. If your notes are worth nothing, I can keep
them and give you notes in exchange. If we can come to an agreement
about that railway stock we could share the profits, of course in due
proportion and I’ll allow you that on--”

“No, no,” said Bixiou, “I want money in hand, and I must get those notes
of Ravenouillet’s cashed.”

“Ravenouillet is sound,” said Vauvinet. “He puts money into the
savings-bank; he is good security.”

“Better than you,” interposed Leon, “for HE doesn’t stipend lorettes; he
hasn’t any rent to pay; and he never rushes into speculations which keep
him dreading either a rise or fall.”

“You think you can laugh at me, great man,” returned Vauvinet, once more
jovial and caressing; “you’ve turned La Fontaine’s fable of ‘Le Chene
et le Roseau’ into an elixir--Come, Gubetta, my old accomplice,” he
continued, seizing Bixiou round the waist, “you want money; well, I can
borrow three thousand francs from my friend Cerizet instead of two; ‘Let
us be friends, Cinna!’ hand over your colossal cabbages,--made to trick
the public like a gardener’s catalogue. If I refused you it was because
it is pretty hard on a man who can only do his poor little business by
turning over his money, to have to keep your Ravenouillet notes in the
drawer of his desk. Hard, hard, very hard!”

“What discount do you want?” asked Bixiou.

“Next to nothing,” returned Vauvinet. “It will cost you a miserable
fifty francs at the end of the quarter.”

“As Emile Blondet used to say, you shall be my benefactor,” replied
Bixiou.

“Twenty per cent!” whispered Gazonal to Bixiou, who replied by a punch
of his elbow in the provincial’s oesophagus.

“Bless me!” said Vauvinet opening a drawer in his desk as if to put away
the Ravenouillet notes, “here’s an old bill of five hundred francs stuck
in the drawer! I didn’t know I was so rich. And here’s a note payable
at the end of the month for four hundred and fifty; Cerizet will take it
without much diminution, and there’s your sum in hand. But no nonsense,
Bixiou! Hein? to-night, at Carabine’s, will you swear to me--”

“Haven’t we _re_-friended?” said Bixiou, pocketing the
five-hundred-franc bill and the note for four hundred and fifty. “I give
you my word of honor that you shall see du Tillet, and many other men
who want to make their way--their railway--to-night at Carabine’s.”

Vauvinet conducted the three friends to the landing of the staircase,
cajoling Bixiou on the way. Bixiou kept a grave face till he reached the
outer door, listening to Gazonal, who tried to enlighten him on his late
operation, and to prove to him that if Vauvinet’s follower, Cerizet,
took another twenty francs out of his four hundred and fifty, he was
getting money at forty per cent.

When they reached the asphalt Bixiou frightened Gazonal by the laugh of
a Parisian hoaxer,--that cold, mute laugh, a sort of labial north wind.

“The assignment of the contract for that railway is adjourned,
positively, by the Chamber; I heard this yesterday from that marcheuse
whom we smiled at just now. If I win five or six thousand francs at
lansquenet to-night, why should I grudge sixty-five francs for the power
to stake, hey?”

“Lansquenet is another of the thousand facets of Paris as it is,” said
Leon. “And therefore, cousin, I intend to present you to-night in the
salon of a duchess,--a duchess of the rue Saint-Georges, where you will
see the aristocracy of the lorettes, and probably be able to win your
lawsuit. But it is quite impossible to present you anywhere with that
mop of Pyrenean hair; you look like a porcupine; and therefore we’ll
take you close by, Place de la Bourse, to Marius, another of our
comedians--”

“Who is he?”

“I’ll tell you his tale,” said Bixiou. “In the year 1800 a Toulousian
named Cabot, a young wig-maker devoured by ambition, came to Paris, and
set up a shop (I use your slang). This man of genius,--he now has an
income of twenty-four thousand francs a year, and lives, retired from
business, at Libourne,--well, he saw that so vulgar and ignoble a name
as Cabot could never attain celebrity. Monsieur de Parny, whose hair he
cut, gave him the name of Marius, infinitely superior, you perceive, to
the Christian names of Armand and Hippolyte, behind which patronymics
attacked by the Cabot evil are wont to hide. All the successors of Cabot
have called themselves Marius. The present Marius is Marius V.; his real
name is Mongin. This occurs in various other trades; for ‘Botot water,’
and for ‘Little-Virtue’ ink. Names become commercial property in Paris,
and have ended by constituting a sort of ensign of nobility. The present
Marius, who takes pupils, has created, he says, the leading school of
hair-dressing in the world.

“I’ve seen, in coming through France,” said Gazonal, “a great many signs
bearing the words: ‘Such a one, pupil of Marius.’”

“His pupils have to wash their hands after every head,” said Bixiou;
“but Marius does not take them indifferently; they must have nice hands,
and not be ill-looking. The most remarkable for manners, appearance,
and elocution are sent out to dress heads; and they come back tired to
death. Marius himself never turns out except for titled women; he drives
his cabriolet and has a groom.”

“But, after all, he is nothing but a barber!” cried Gazonal, somewhat
shocked.

“Barber!” exclaimed Bixiou; “please remember that he is captain in the
National Guard, and is decorated for being the first to spring into a
barricade in 1832.”

“And take care what you say to him: he is neither barber, hair-dresser,
nor wig-maker; he is a director of salons for hair-dressing,” said Leon,
as they went up a staircase with crystal balusters and mahogany rail,
the steps of which were covered with a sumptuous carpet.

“Ah ca! mind you don’t compromise us,” said Bixiou. “In the antechamber
you’ll see lacqueys who will take off your coat, and seize your hat, to
brush them; and they’ll accompany you to the door of the salons to open
and shut it. I mention this, friend Gazonal,” added Bixiou, slyly, “lest
you might think they were after your property, and cry ‘Stop thief!’”

“These salons,” said Leon, “are three boudoirs where the director
has collected all the inventions of modern luxury: lambrequins to the
windows, jardinieres everywhere, downy divans where each customer can
wait his turn and read the newspapers. You might suppose, when you
first go in, that five francs would be the least they’d get out of your
waistcoat pocket; but nothing is ever extracted beyond ten sous for
combing and frizzing your hair, or twenty sous for cutting and frizzing.
Elegant dressing-tables stand about among the jardinieres; water is
laid on to the washstands; enormous mirrors reproduce the whole figure.
Therefore don’t look astonished. When the client (that’s the elegant
word substituted by Marius for the ignoble word customer),--when the
client appears at the door, Marius gives him a glance which appraises
him: to Marius you are a _head_, more or less susceptible of occupying
his mind. To him there’s no mankind; there are only heads.”

“We let you hear Marius on all the notes of his scale,” said Bixiou,
“and you know how to follow our lead.”

As soon as Gazonal showed himself, the glance was given, and was
evidently favourable, for Marius exclaimed: “Regulus! yours this head!
Prepare it first with the little scissors.”

“Excuse me,” said Gazonal to the pupil, at a sign from Bixiou. “I prefer
to have my head dressed by Monsieur Marius himself.”

Marius, much flattered by this demand, advanced, leaving the head on
which he was engaged.

“I am with you in a moment; I am just finishing. Pray have no
uneasiness, my pupil will prepare you; I alone will decide the cut.”

Marius, a slim little man, his hair frizzed like that of Rubini, and jet
black, dressed also in black, with long white cuffs, and the frill of
his shirt adorned with a diamond, now saw Bixiou, to whom he bowed as to
a power the equal of his own.

“That is only an ordinary head,” he said to Leon, pointing to the person
on whom he was operating,--“a grocer, or something of that kind. But if
we devoted ourselves to art only, we should lie in Bicetre, mad!” and
he turned back with an inimitable gesture to his client, after saying to
Regulus, “Prepare monsieur, he is evidently an artist.”

“A journalist,” said Bixiou.

Hearing that word, Marius gave two or three strokes of the comb to the
ordinary head and flung himself upon Gazonal, taking Regulus by the arm
at the instant that the pupil was about to begin the operation of the
little scissors.

“I will take charge of monsieur. Look, monsieur,” he said to the grocer,
“reflect yourself in the great mirror--if the mirror permits. Ossian!”

A lacquey entered, and took hold of the client to dress him.

“You pay at the desk, monsieur,” said Marius to the stupefied grocer,
who was pulling out his purse.

“Is there any use, my dear fellow,” said Bixiou, “in going through this
operation of the little scissors?”

“No head ever comes to me uncleansed,” replied the illustrious
hair-dresser; “but for your sake, I will do that of monsieur myself,
wholly. My pupils sketch out the scheme, or my strength would not hold
out. Every one says as you do: ‘Dressed by Marius!’ Therefore, I can
give only the finishing strokes. What journal is monsieur on?”

“If I were you, I should keep three or four Mariuses,” said Gazonal.

“Ah! monsieur, I see, is a feuilletonist,” said Marius. “Alas! in
dressing heads which expose us to notice it is impossible. Excuse me!”

He left Gazonal to overlook Regulus, who was “preparing” a newly arrived
head. Tapping his tongue against his palate, he made a disapproving
noise, which may perhaps be written down as “titt, titt, titt.”

“There, there! good heavens! that cut is not square; your scissors are
hacking it. Here! see there! Regulus, you are not clipping poodles;
these are men--who have a character; if you continue to look at the
ceiling instead of looking only between the glass and the head, you will
dishonor my house.”

“You are stern, Monsieur Marius.”

“I owe them the secrets of my art.”

“Then it is an art?” said Gazonal.

Marius, affronted, looked at Gazonal in the glass, and stopped short,
the scissors in one hand, the comb in the other.

“Monsieur, you speak like a--child! and yet, from your accent, I judge
you are from the South, the birthplace of men of genius.”

“Yes, I know that hair-dressing requires some taste,” replied Gazonal.

“Hush, monsieur, hush! I expected better things of YOU. Let me tell you
that a hair-dresser,--I don’t say a good hair-dresser, for a man is, or
he is not, a hair-dresser,--a hair-dresser, I repeat, is more
difficult to find than--what shall I say? than--I don’t know what--a
minister?--(Sit still!) No, for you can’t judge by ministers, the
streets are full of them. A Paganini? No, he’s not great enough. A
hair-dresser, monsieur, a man who divines your soul and your habits, in
order to dress your hair conformably with your being, that man has all
that constitutes a philosopher--and such he is. See the women! Women
appreciate us; they know our value; our value to them is the conquest
they make when they have placed their heads in our hands to attain a
triumph. I say to you that a hair-dresser--the world does not know
what he is. I who speak to you, I am very nearly all that there is
of--without boasting I may say I am known--Still, I think more might be
done--The execution, that is everything! Ah! if women would only give
me carte blanche!--if I might only execute the ideas that come to me! I
have, you see, a hell of imagination!--but the women don’t fall in with
it; they have their own plans; they’ll stick their fingers or combs, as
soon as my back is turned, through the most delicious edifices--which
ought to be engraved and perpetuated; for our works, monsieur, last
unfortunately but a few hours. A great hair-dresser, hey! he’s like
Careme and Vestris in their careers. (Head a little this way, if you
please, SO; I attend particularly to front faces!) Our profession is
ruined by bunglers who understand neither the epoch nor their art. There
are dealers in wigs and essences who are enough to make one’s hair stand
on end; they care only to sell you bottles. It is pitiable! But that’s
business. Such poor wretches cut hair and dress it as they can. I, when
I arrived in Paris from Toulouse, my ambition was to succeed the great
Marius, to be a true Marius, to make that name illustrious. I alone,
more than all the four others, I said to myself, ‘I will conquer, or
die.’ (There! now sit straight, I am going to finish you.) I was the
first to introduce _elegance_; I made my salons the object of curiosity.
I disdain advertisements; what advertisements would have cost, monsieur,
I put into elegance, charm, comfort. Next year I shall have a quartette
in one of the salons to discourse music, and of the best. Yes, we ought
to charm away the ennui of those whose heads we dress. I do not conceal
from myself the annoyances to a client. (Look at yourself!) To have
one’s hair dressed is fatiguing, perhaps as much so as posing for one’s
portrait. Monsieur knows perhaps that the famous Monsieur Humbolt (I did
the best I could with the few hairs America left him--science has this
in common with savages, that she scalps her men clean), that illustrious
savant, said that next to the suffering of going to be hanged was
that of going to be painted; but I place the trial of having your head
dressed before that of being painted, and so do certain women. Well,
monsieur, my object is to make those who come here to have their hair
cut or frizzed enjoy themselves. (Hold still, you have a tuft which
_must_ be conquered.) A Jew proposed to supply me with Italian
cantatrices who, during the interludes, were to depilate the young
men of forty; but they proved to be girls from the Conservatoire, and
music-teachers from the Rue Montmartre. There you are, monsieur; your
head is dressed as that of a man of talent ought to be. Ossian,” he said
to the lacquey in livery, “dress monsieur and show him out. Whose turn
next?” he added proudly, gazing round upon the persons who awaited him.

“Don’t laugh, Gazonal,” said Leon as they reached the foot of the
staircase, whence his eye could take in the whole of the Place de la
Bourse. “I see over there one of our great men, and you shall compare
his language with that of the barber, and tell me which of the two you
think the most original.”

“Don’t laugh, Gazonal,” said Bixiou, mimicking Leon’s intonation. “What
do you suppose is Marius’s business?”

“Hair-dressing.”

“He has obtained a monopoly of the sale of hair in bulk, as a certain
dealer in comestibles who is going to sell us a pate for three francs
has acquired a monopoly of the sale of truffles; he discounts the paper
of that business; he loans money on pawn to clients when embarrassed; he
gives annuities on lives; he gambles at the Bourse; he is a stockholder
in all the fashion papers; and he sells, under the name of a certain
chemist, an infamous drug which, for his share alone, gives him an
income of thirty thousand francs, and costs in advertisements a hundred
thousand yearly.”

“Is it possible!” cried Gazonal.

“Remember this,” said Bixiou, gravely. “In Paris there is no such thing
as a small business; all things swell to large proportions, down to the
sale of rags and matches. The lemonade-seller who, with his napkin
under his arm, meets you as you enter his shop, may be worth his fifty
thousand francs a year; the waiter in a restaurant is eligible for the
Chamber; the man you take for a beggar in the street carries a hundred
thousand francs worth of unset diamonds in his waistcoat pocket, and
didn’t steal them either.”

The three inseparables (for one day at any rate) now crossed the Place
de la Bourse in a way to intercept a man about forty years of age,
wearing the Legion of honor, who was coming from the boulevard by way of
the rue Neuve-Vivienne.

“Hey!” said Leon, “what are you pondering over, my dear Dubourdieu?
Some fine symbolic composition? My dear cousin, I have the pleasure to
present to you our illustrious painter Dubourdieu, not less celebrated
for his humanitarian convictions than for his talents in art.
Dubourdieu, my cousin Palafox.”

Dubourdieu, a small, pale man with melancholy blue eyes, bowed slightly
to Gazonal, who bent low as before a man of genius.

“So you have elected Stidmann in place of--” he began.

“How could I help it? I wasn’t there,” replied Lora.

“You bring the Academy into disrepute,” continued the painter. “To
choose such a man as that! I don’t wish to say ill of him, but he works
at a trade. Where are you dragging the first of arts,--the art those
works are the most lasting; bringing nations to light of which the world
has long lost even the memory; an art which crowns and consecrates great
men? Yes, sculpture is priesthood; it preserves the ideas of an
epoch, and you give its chair to a maker of toys and mantelpieces, an
ornamentationist, a seller of bric-a-brac! Ah! as Chamfort said, one has
to swallow a viper every morning to endure the life of Paris. Well,
at any rate, Art remains to a few of us; they can’t prevent us from
cultivating it--”

“And besides, my dear fellow, you have a consolation which few artists
possess; the future is yours,” said Bixiou. “When the world is converted
to our doctrine, you will be at the head of your art; for you are
putting into it ideas which people will understand--_when_ they are
generalized! In fifty years from now you’ll be to all the world what you
are to a few of us at this moment,--a great man. The only question is
how to get along till then.”

“I have just finished,” resumed the great artist, his face expanding
like that of a man whose hobby is stroked, “an allegorical figure of
Harmony; and if you will come and see it, you will understand why it
should have taken me two years to paint it. Everything is in it! At
the first glance one divines the destiny of the globe. A queen holds
a shepherd’s crook in her hand,--symbolical of the advancement of the
races useful to mankind; she wears on her head the cap of Liberty; her
breasts are sixfold, as the Egyptians carved them--for the Egyptians
foresaw Fourier; her feet are resting on two clasped hands which embrace
a globe,--symbol of the brotherhood of all human races; she tramples
cannon under foot to signify the abolition of war; and I have tried to
make her face express the serenity of triumphant agriculture. I have
also placed beside her an enormous curled cabbage, which, according
to our master, is an image of Harmony. Ah! it is not the least among
Fourier’s titles to veneration that he has restored the gift of thought
to plants; he has bound all creation in one by the signification of
things to one another, and by their special language. A hundred years
hence this earth will be much larger than it is now.”

“And how will that, monsieur, come to pass?” said Gazonal, stupefied at
hearing a man outside of a lunatic asylum talk in this way.

“Through the extending of production. If men will apply The System, it
will not be impossible to act upon the stars.”

“What would become of painting in that case?” asked Gazonal.

“It would be magnified.”

“Would our eyes be magnified too?” said Gazonal, looking at his two
friends significantly.

“Man will return to what he was before he became degenerate; our
six-feet men will then be dwarfs.”

“Is your picture finished?” asked Leon.

“Entirely finished,” replied Dubourdieu. “I have tried to see Hiclar,
and get him to compose a symphony for it; I wish that while viewing my
picture the public should hear music a la Beethoven to develop its ideas
and bring them within range of the intellect by two arts. Ah! if the
government would only lend me one of the galleries of the Louvre!”

“I’ll mention it, if you want me to do so; you should never neglect an
opportunity to strike minds.”

“Ah! my friends are preparing articles; but I am afraid they’ll go too
far.”

“Pooh!” said Bixiou, “they can’t go as far as the future.”

Dubourdieu looked askance at Bixiou, and continued his way.

“Why, he’s mad,” said Gazonal; “he is following the moon in her
courses.”

“His skill is masterly,” said Leon, “and he knows his art, but
Fourierism has killed him. You have just seen, cousin, one of the
effects of ambition upon artists. Too often, in Paris, from a desire to
reach more rapidly than by natural ways the celebrity which to them is
fortune, artists borrow the wings of circumstance, they think they make
themselves of more importance as men of a specialty, the supporters
of some ‘system’; and they fancy they can transform a clique into
the public. One is a republican, another Saint-Simonian; this one
aristocrat, that one Catholic, others juste-milieu, middle ages, or
German, as they choose for their purpose. Now, though opinions do not
give talent, they always spoil what talent there is; and the poor fellow
whom you have just seen is a proof thereof. An artist’s opinion ought to
be: Faith in his art, in his work; and his only way of success is toil
when nature has given him the sacred fire.”

“Let us get away,” said Bixiou. “Leon is beginning to moralize.”

“But that man was sincere,” said Gazonal, still stupefied.

“Perfectly sincere,” replied Bixiou; “as sincere as the king of barbers
just now.”

“He is mad!” repeated Gazonal.

“And he is not the first man driven man by Fourier’s ideas,” said
Bixiou. “You don’t know anything about Paris. Ask it for a hundred
thousand francs to realize an idea that will be useful to humanity,--the
steam-engine for instance,--and you’ll die, like Salomon de Caux, at
Bicetre; but if the money is wanted for some paradoxical absurdity,
Parisians will annihilate themselves and their fortune for it. It is the
same with systems as it is with material things. Utterly impracticable
newspapers have consumed millions within the last fifteen years. What
makes your lawsuit so hard to win, is that you have right on your side,
and on that of the prefect there are (so you suppose) secret motives.”

“Do you think that a man of intellect having once understood the nature
of Paris could live elsewhere?” said Leon to his cousin.

“Suppose we take Gazonal to old Mere Fontaine?” said Bixiou, making a
sign to the driver of a citadine to draw up; “it will be a step from the
real to the fantastic. Driver, Vieille rue du Temple.”

And all three were presently rolling in the direction of the Marais.

“What are you taking me to see now?” asked Gazonal.

“The proof of what Bixiou told you,” replied Leon; “we shall show you
a woman who makes twenty thousand francs a year by working a fantastic
idea.”

“A fortune-teller,” said Bixiou, interpreting the look of the Southerner
as a question. “Madame Fontaine is thought, by those who seek to pry
into the future, to be wiser in her wisdom than Mademoiselle Lenormand.”

“She must be very rich,” remarked Gazonal.

“She was the victim of her own idea, as long as lotteries existed,” said
Bixiou; “for in Paris there are no great gains without corresponding
outlays. The strongest heads are liable to crack there, as if to
give vent to their steam. Those who make much money have vices or
fancies,--no doubt to establish an equilibrium.”

“And now that the lottery is abolished?” asked Gazonal.

“Oh! now she has a nephew for whom she is hoarding.”

When they reached the Vieille rue du Temple the three friends entered
one of the oldest houses in that street and passed up a shaking
staircase, the steps of which, caked with mud, led them in
semi-darkness, and through a stench peculiar to houses on an alley, to
the third story, where they beheld a door which painting alone could
render; literature would have to spend too many nights in suitably
describing it.

An old woman, in keeping with that door, and who might have been that
door in human guise, ushered the three friends into a room which served
as an ante-chamber, where, in spite of the warm atmosphere which fills
the streets of Paris, they felt the icy chill of crypts about them. A
damp air came from an inner courtyard which resembled a huge air-shaft;
the light that entered was gray, and the sill of the window was filled
with pots of sickly plants. In this room, which had a coating of some
greasy, fuliginous substance, the furniture, the chairs, the table, were
all most abject. The floor tiles oozed like a water-cooler. In short,
every accessory was in keeping with the fearful old woman of the hooked
nose, ghastly face, and decent rags who directed the “consulters” to
sit down, informing them that only one at a time could be admitted to
Madame.

Gazonal, who played the intrepid, entered bravely, and found himself in
presence of one of those women forgotten by Death, who no doubt forgets
them intentionally in order to leave some samples of Itself among the
living. He saw before him a withered face in which shone fixed gray
eyes of wearying immobility; a flattened nose, smeared with snuff;
knuckle-bones well set up by muscles that, under pretence of being
hands, played nonchalantly with a pack of cards, like some machine
the movement of which is about to run down. The body, a species of
broom-handle decently covered with clothes, enjoyed the advantages of
death and did not stir. Above the forehead rose a coif of black velvet.
Madame Fontaine, for it was really a woman, had a black hen on her right
hand and a huge toad, named Astaroth, on her left. Gazonal did not at
first perceive them.

The toad, of surprising dimensions, was less alarming in himself than
through the effect of two topaz eyes, large as a ten-sous piece, which
cast forth vivid gleams. It was impossible to endure that look. The toad
is a creature as yet unexplained. Perhaps the whole animal creation,
including man, is comprised in it; for, as Lassailly said, the toad
exists indefinitely; and, as we know, it is of all created animals the
one whose marriage lasts the longest.

The black hen had a cage about two feet distant from the table, covered
with a green cloth, to which she came along a plank which formed a sort
of drawbridge between the cage and the table.

When the woman, the least real of the creatures in this Hoffmanesque
den, said to Gazonal: “Cut!” the worthy provincial shuddered
involuntarily. That which renders these beings so formidable is the
importance of what we want to know. People go to them, as they know very
well, to buy hope.

The den of the sibyl was much darker than the antechamber; the color
of the walls could scarcely be distinguished. The ceiling, blackened
by smoke, far from reflecting the little light that came from a window
obstructed by pale and sickly vegetations, absorbed the greater part
of it; but the table where the sorceress sat received what there was of
this half-light fully. The table, the chair of the woman, and that on
which Gazonal was seated, formed the entire furniture of the little
room, which was divided at one end by a sort of loft where Madame
Fontaine probably slept. Gazonal heard through a half-opened door the
bubbling murmur of a soup-pot. That kitchen sound, accompanied by a
composite odor in which the effluvia of a sink predominated, mingled
incongruous ideas of the necessities of actual life with those of
supernatural power. Disgust entered into curiosity.

Gazonal observed one stair of pine wood, the lowest no doubt of the
staircase which led to the loft. He took in these minor details at a
glance, with a sense of nausea. It was all quite otherwise alarming than
the romantic tales and scenes of German drama lead one to expect; here
was suffocating actuality. The air diffused a sort of dizzy heaviness,
the dim light rasped the nerves. When the Southerner, impelled by a
species of self-assertion, gazed firmly at the toad, he felt a sort of
emetic heat at the pit of his stomach, and was conscious of a
terror like that a criminal might feel in presence of a gendarme. He
endeavoured to brace himself by looking at Madame Fontaine; but there
he encountered two almost white eyes, the motionless and icy pupils of
which were absolutely intolerable to him. The silence became terrifying.

“Which do you wish, monsieur, the five-franc fortune, the ten-franc
fortune, or the grand game?”

“The five-franc fortune is dear enough,” replied the Southerner, making
powerful efforts not to yield to the influence of the surroundings in
which he found himself.

At the moment when Gazonal was thus endeavouring to collect himself,
a voice--an infernal voice--made him bound in his chair; the black hen
clucked.

“Go back, my daughter, go back; monsieur chooses to spend only five
francs.”

The hen seemed to understand her mistress, for, after coming within a
foot of the cards, she turned and resumed her former place.

“What flower to you like best?” asked the old woman, in a voice
hoarsened by the phlegm which seemed to rise and fall incessantly in her
bronchial tubes.

“The rose.”

“What color are you fond of?”

“Blue.”

“What animal do you prefer?”

“The horse. Why these questions?” he asked.

“Man derives his form from his anterior states,” she said sententiously.
“Hence his instincts; and his instincts rule his destiny. What food
do you like best to eat,--fish, game, cereals, butcher’s meat, sweet
things, vegetables, or fruits?”

“Game.”

“In what month where you born?”

“September.”

“Put out your hand.”

Madame Fontaine looked attentively at the lines of the hand that was
shown to her. It was all done seriously, with no pretence of sorcery; on
the contrary, with the simplicity a notary might have shown when asking
the intentions of a client about a deed. Presently she shuffled the
cards, and asked Gazonal to cut them, and then to make three packs of
them himself. After which she took the packs, spread them out before
her, and examined them as a gambler examines the thirty-six numbers at
roulette before he risks his stake. Gazonal’s bones were freezing; he
seemed not to know where he was; but his amazement grew greater and
greater when this hideous old woman in a green bonnet, stout and squat,
whose false front was frizzed into points of interrogation, proceeded,
in a thick voice, to relate to him all the particular circumstances,
even the most secret, of his past life: she told him his tastes, his
habits, his character; the thoughts of his childhood; everything that
had influenced his life; a marriage broken off, why, with whom, the
exact description of the woman he had loved; and, finally, the place he
came from, his lawsuit, etc.

Gazonal at first thought it was a hoax prepared by his companions; but
the absolute impossibility of such a conspiracy appeared to him almost
as soon as the idea itself, and he sat speechless before that truly
infernal power, the incarnation of which borrowed from humanity a form
which the imagination of painters and poets has throughout all ages
regarded as the most awful of created things,--namely, a toothless,
hideous, wheezing hag, with cold lips, flattened nose, and whitish eyes.
The pupils of those eyes had brightened, through them rushed a ray,--was
it from the depths of the future or from hell?

Gazonal asked, interrupting the old creature, of what use the toad and
the hen were to her.

“They predict the future. The consulter himself throws grain upon the
cards; Bilouche comes and pecks it. Astaroth crawls over the cards
to get the food the client holds for him, and those two wonderful
intelligences are never mistaken. Will you see them at work?--you will
then know your future. The cost is a hundred francs.”

Gazonal, horrified by the gaze of Astaroth, rushed into the antechamber,
after bowing to the terrible old woman. He was moist from head to foot,
as if under the incubation of some evil spirit.

“Let us get away!” he said to the two artists. “Did you ever consult
that sorceress?”

“I never do anything important without getting Astaroth’s opinion,” said
Leon, “and I am always the better for it.”

“I’m expecting the virtuous fortune which Bilouche has promised me,”
 said Bixiou.

“I’ve a fever,” cried Gazonal. “If I believed what you say I should have
to believe in sorcery, in some supernatural power.”

“It may be only natural,” said Bixiou. “One-third of all the lorettes,
one-fourth of all the statesmen, and one-half of all artists consult
Madame Fontaine; and I know a minister to whom she is an Egeria.”

“Did she tell you about your future?” asked Leon.

“No; I had enough of her about my past. But,” added Gazonal, struck by
a sudden thought, “if she can, by the help of those dreadful
collaborators, predict the future, how came she to lose in the lottery?”

“Ah! you put your finger on one of the greatest mysteries of occult
science,” replied Leon. “The moment that the species of inward mirror on
which the past or the future is reflected to their minds become clouded
by the breath of a personal feeling, by an idea foreign to the purpose
of the power they are exerting, sorcerers and sorceresses can see
nothing; just as an artist who blurs art with political combinations and
systems loses his genius. Not long ago, a man endowed with the gift
of divining by cards, a rival to Madame Fontaine, became addicted to
vicious practices, and being unable to tell his own fate from the cards,
was arrested, tried, and condemned at the court of assizes. Madame
Fontaine, who predicts the future eight times out of ten, was never able
to know if she would win or lose in a lottery.”

“It is the same thing in magnetism,” remarked Bixiou. “A man can’t
magnetize himself.”

“Heavens! now we come to magnetism!” cried Gazonal. “Ah ca! do you know
everything?”

“Friend Gazonal,” replied Bixiou, gravely, “to be able to laugh at
everything one must know everything. As for me, I’ve been in Paris since
my childhood; I’ve lived, by means of my pencil, on its follies and
absurdities, at the rate of five caricatures a month. Consequently, I
often laugh at ideas in which I have faith.”

“Come, let us get to something else,” said Leon. “We’ll go to the
Chamber and settle the cousin’s affair.”

“This,” said Bixiou, imitating Odry in “Les Funambules,” “is high
comedy, for we will make the first orator we meet pose for us, and you
shall see that in those halls of legislation, as elsewhere, the Parisian
language has but two tones,--Self-interest, Vanity.”

As they got into their citadine, Leon saw in a rapidly driven cabriolet
a man to whom he made a sign that he had something to say to him.

“There’s Publicola Masson,” said Leon to Bixiou. “I’m going to ask for
a sitting this evening at five o’clock, after the Chamber. The cousin
shall then see the most curious of all the originals.”

“Who is he?” asked Gazonal, while Leon went to speak to Publicola
Masson.

“An artist-pedicure,” replied Bixiou, “author of a ‘Treatise on
Corporistics,’ who cuts your corns by subscription, and who, if the
Republications triumph for six months, will assuredly become immortal.”

“Drives his carriage!” ejaculated Gazonal.

“But, my good Gazonal, it is only millionaires who have time to go afoot
in Paris.”

“To the Chamber!” cried Leon to the coachman, getting back into the
carriage.

“Which, monsieur?”

“Deputies,” replied Leon, exchanging a smile with Bixiou.

“Paris begins to confound me,” said Gazonal.

“To make you see its immensity,--moral, political, and literary,--we are
now proceeding like the Roman cicerone, who shows you in Saint Peter’s
the thumb of the statue you took to be life-size, and the thumb proves
to be a foot long. You haven’t yet measured so much as a great toe of
Paris.”

“And remark, cousin Gazonal, that we take things as they come; we
haven’t selected.”

“This evening you shall sup as they feasted at Belshazzar’s; and there
you shall see our Paris, our own particular Paris, playing lansquenet,
and risking a hundred thousand francs at a throw without winking.”

A quarter of an hour later the citadine stopped at the foot of the
steps going up to the Chamber of Deputies, at that end of the Pont de la
Concorde which leads to discord.

“I thought the Chamber unapproachable?” said the provincial, surprised
to find himself in the great lobby.

“That depends,” replied Bixiou; “materially speaking, it costs thirty
sous for a citadine to approach it; politically, you have to spend
rather more. The swallows thought, so a poet says, that the Arc de
Triomphe was erected for them; we artists think that this public
building was built for us,--to compensate for the stupidities of the
Theatre-Francais and make us laugh; but the comedians on this stage are
much more expensive; and they don’t give us every day the value of our
money.”

“So this is the Chamber!” cried Gazonal, as he paced the great hall in
which there were then about a dozen persons, and looked around him with
an air which Bixiou noted down in his memory and reproduced in one of
the famous caricatures with which he rivalled Gavarni.

Leon went to speak to one of the ushers who go and come continually
between this hall and the hall of sessions, with which it communicates
by a passage in which are stationed the stenographers of the “Moniteur”
 and persons attached to the Chamber.

“As for the minister,” replied the usher to Leon as Gazonal approached
them, “he is there, but I don’t know if Monsieur Giraud has come. I’ll
see.”

As the usher opened one side of the double door through which none but
deputies, ministers, or messengers from the king are allowed to pass,
Gazonal saw a man come out who seemed still young, although he was
really forty-eight years old, and to whom the usher evidently indicated
Leon de Lora.

“Ha! you here!” he exclaimed, shaking hands with both Bixiou and Lora.
“Scamps! what are you doing in the sanctuary of the laws?”

“Parbleu! we’ve come to learn how to blague,” said Bixiou. “We might get
rusty if we didn’t.”

“Let us go into the garden,” said the young man, not observing that
Gazonal belonged to the party.

Seeing that this new-comer was well-dressed, in black, the provincial
did not know in which political category to place him; but he followed
the others into the garden contiguous to the hall which follows the line
of the quai Napoleon. Once in the garden the ci-devant young man gave
way to a peal of laughter which he seemed to have been repressing since
he entered the lobby.

“What is it?” asked Leon de Lora.

“My dear friend, to prove the sincerity of the constitutional
government we are forced to tell the most frightful lies with incredible
self-possession. But as for me, I’m freakish; some days I can lie like
a prospectus; other days I can’t be serious. This is one of my hilarious
days. Now, at this moment, the prime minister, being summoned by the
Opposition to make known a certain diplomatic secret, is going through
his paces in the tribune. Being an honest man who never lies on his own
account, he whispered to me as he mounted the breach: ‘Heaven knows
what I shall say to them.’ A mad desire to laugh overcame me, and as one
mustn’t laugh on the ministerial bench I rushed out, for my youth does
come back to me most unseasonably at times.”

“At last,” cried Gazonal, “I’ve found an honest man in Paris! You must
be a very superior man,” he added, looking at the stranger.

“Ah ca! who is this gentleman?” said the ci-devant young man, examining
Gazonal.

“My cousin,” said Leon, hastily. “I’ll answer for his silence and his
honor as for my own. It is on his account we have come here now; he has
a case before the administration which depends on your ministry. His
prefect evidently wants to ruin him, and we have come to see you in
order to prevent the Council of State from ratifying a great injustice.”

“Who brings up the case?”

“Massol.”

“Good.”

“And our friends Giraud and Claude Vignon are on the committee,” said
Bixiou.

“Say just a word to them,” urged Leon; “tell them to come to-night to
Carabine’s, where du Tillet gives a fete apropos of railways,--they are
plundering more than ever on the roads.”

“Ah ca! but isn’t your cousin from the Pyrenees?” asked the young man,
now become serious.

“Yes,” replied Gazonal.

“And you did not vote for us in the last elections?” said the statesman,
looking hard at Gazonal.

“No; but what you have just said in my hearing has bribed me; on the
word of a commandant of the National Guard I’ll have your candidate
elected--”

“Very good; will you guarantee your cousin?” asked the young man,
turning to Leon.

“We are forming him,” said Bixiou, in a tone irresistibly comic.

“Well, I’ll see about it,” said the young man, leaving his friends and
rushing precipitately back to the Chamber.

“Who is that?” asked Gazonal.

“The Comte de Rastignac; the minister of the department in which your
affair is brought up.”

“A minister! Isn’t a minister anything more than that?”

“He is an old friend of ours. He now has three hundred thousand francs
a year; he’s a peer of France; the king has made him a count; he
married Nucingen’s daughter; and he is one of the two or three statesmen
produced by the revolution of July. But his fame and his power bore him
sometimes, and he comes down to laugh with us.”

“Ah ca! cousin; why didn’t you tell us you belonged to the Opposition?”
 asked Leon, seizing Gazonal by the arm. “How stupid of you! One deputy
more or less to Right or Left and your bed is made.”

“We are all for the Others down my way.”

“Let ‘em go,” said Bixiou, with a facetious look; “they have Providence
on their side, and Providence will bring them back without you and in
spite of themselves. A manufacturer ought to be a fatalist.”

“What luck! There’s Maxime, with Canalis and Giraud,” said Leon.

“Come along, friend Gazonal, the promised actors are mustering on the
stage,” said Bixiou.

And all three advanced to the above-named personages, who seemed to be
sauntering along with nothing to do.

“Have they turned you out, or why are you idling about in this way?”
 said Bixiou to Giraud.

“No, while they are voting by secret ballot we have come out for a
little air,” replied Giraud.

“How did the prime minister pull through?”

“He was magnificent!” said Canalis.

“Magnificent!” repeated Maxime.

“Magnificent!” cried Giraud.

“So! so! Right, Left, and Centre are unanimous!”

“All with a different meaning,” observed Maxime de Trailles.

Maxime was the ministerial deputy.

“Yes,” said Canalis, laughing.

Though Canalis had already been a minister, he was at this moment
tending toward the Right.

“Ah! but you had a fine triumph just now,” said Maxime to Canalis; “it
was you who forced the minister into the tribune.”

“And made him lie like a charlatan,” returned Canalis.

“A worthy victory,” said the honest Giraud. “In his place what would you
have done?”

“I should have lied.”

“It isn’t called lying,” said Maxime de Trailles; “it is called
protecting the crown.”

So saying, he led Canalis away to a little distance.

“That’s a great orator,” said Leon to Giraud, pointing to Canalis.

“Yes and no,” replied the councillor of state. “A fine bass voice, and
sonorous, but more of an artist in words than an orator. In short, he’s
a fine instrument but he isn’t music, consequently he has not, and he
never will have, the ear of the Chamber; in no case will he ever be
master of the situation.”

Canalis and Maxime were returning toward the little group as Giraud,
deputy of the Left Centre, pronounced this verdict. Maxime took Giraud
by the arm and led him off, probably to make the same confidence he had
just made Canalis.

“What an honest, upright fellow that is,” said Leon to Canalis, nodding
towards Giraud.

“One of those upright fellows who kill administrators,” replied Canalis.

“Do you think him a good orator?”

“Yes and no,” replied Canalis; “he is wordy; he’s long-winded, a plodder
in argument, and a good logician; but he doesn’t understand the higher
logic, that of events and circumstances; consequently he has never had,
and never will have, the ear of the Chamber.”

At the moment when Canalis uttered this judgment on Giraud, the latter
was returning with Maxime to the group; and forgetting the presence of
a stranger whose discretion was not known to them like that of Leon and
Bixiou, he took Canalis by the hand in a very significant manner.

“Well,” he said, “I consent to what Monsieur de Trailles proposes. I’ll
put the question to you in the Chamber, but I shall do it with great
severity.”

“Then we shall have the house with us, for a man of your weight and
your eloquence is certain to have the ear of the Chamber,” said Canalis.
“I’ll reply to you; but I shall do it sharply, to crush you.”

“You could bring about a change of the cabinet, for on such ground you
can do what you like with the Chamber, and be master of the situation.”

“Maxime has trapped them both,” said Leon to his cousin; “that fellow is
like a fish in water among the intrigues of the Chamber.”

“Who is he?” asked Gazonal.

“An ex-scoundrel who is now in a fair way to become an ambassador,”
 replied Bixiou.

“Giraud!” said Leon to the councillor of state, “don’t leave the Chamber
without asking Rastignac what he promised to tell you about a suit you
are to render a decision on two days hence. It concerns my cousin here;
I’ll go and see you to-morrow morning early about it.”

The three friends followed the three deputies, at a distance, into the
lobby.

“Cousin, look at those two men,” said Leon, pointing out to him a former
minister and the leader of the Left Centre. “Those are two men who
really have ‘the ear of the Chamber,’ and who are called in jest
ministers of the department of the Opposition. They have the ear of the
Chamber so completely that they are always pulling it.”

“It is four o’clock,” said Bixiou, “let us go back to the rue de
Berlin.”

“Yes; you’ve now seen the heart of the government, cousin, and you
must next be shown the ascarides, the taenia, the intestinal worm,--the
republican, since I must needs name him,” said Leon.

When the three friends were once more packed into their hackney-coach,
Gazonal looked at his cousin and Bixiou like a man who had a mind to
launch a flood of oratorical and Southern bile upon the elements.

“I distrusted with all my might this great hussy of a town,” he rolled
out in Southern accents; “but since this morning I despise her! The poor
little province you think so petty is an honest girl; but Paris is a
prostitute, a greedy, lying comedian; and I am very thankful not to be
robbed of my skin in it.”

“The day is not over yet,” said Bixiou, sententiously, winking at Leon.

“And why do you complain in that stupid way,” said Leon, “of a
prostitution to which you will owe the winning of your lawsuit? Do you
think you are more virtuous than we, less of a comedian, less greedy,
less liable to fall under some temptation, less conceited than those we
have been making dance for you like puppets?”

“Try me!”

“Poor lad!” said Leon, shrugging his shoulders, “haven’t you already
promised Rastignac your electoral influence?”

“Yes, because he was the only one who ridiculed himself.”

“Poor lad!” repeated Bixiou, “why slight me, who am always ridiculing
myself? You are like a pug-dog barking at a tiger. Ha! if you saw us
really ridiculing a man, you’d see that we can drive a sane man mad.”

This conversation brought Gazonal back to his cousin’s house, where the
sight of luxury silenced him, and put an end to the discussion. Too late
he perceived that Bixiou had been making him pose.

At half-past five o’clock, the moment when Leon de Lora was making
his evening toilet to the great wonderment of Gazonal, who counted the
thousand and one superfluities of his cousin, and admired the solemnity
of the valet as he performed his functions, the “pedicure of monsieur”
 was announced, and Publicola Masson, a little man fifty years of age,
made his appearance, laid a small box of instruments on the floor, and
sat down on a small chair opposite to Leon, after bowing to Gazonal and
Bixiou.

“How are matters going with you?” asked Leon, delivering to Publicola
one of his feet, already washed and prepared by the valet.

“I am forced to take two pupils,--two young fellows who, despairing of
fortune, have quitted surgery for corporistics; they were actually dying
of hunger; and yet they are full of talent.”

“I’m not asking you about pedestrial affairs, I want to know how you are
getting on politically.”

Masson gave a glance at Gazonal, more eloquent than any species of
question.

“Oh! you can speak out, that’s my cousin; in a way he belongs to you; he
thinks himself legitimist.”

“Well! we are coming along, we are advancing! In five years from now
Europe will be with us. Switzerland and Italy are fermenting finely; and
when the occasion comes we are all ready. Here, in Paris, we have fifty
thousand armed men, without counting two hundred thousand citizens who
haven’t a penny to live upon.”

“Pooh,” said Leon, “how about the fortifications?”

“Pie-crust; we can swallow them,” replied Masson.

“In the first place, we sha’n’t let the cannon in, and, in the second,
we’ve got a little machine more powerful than all the forts in the
world,--a machine, due to a doctor, which cured more people during the
short time we worked it than the doctors ever killed.”

“How you talk!” exclaimed Gazonal, whose flesh began to creep at
Publicola’s air and manner.

“Ha! that’s the thing we rely on! We follow Saint-Just and Robespierre;
but we’ll do better than they; they were timid, and you see what came
of it; an emperor! the elder branch! the younger branch! The Montagnards
didn’t lop the social tree enough.”

“Ah ca! you, who will be, they tell me, consul, or something of that
kind, tribune perhaps, be good enough to remember,” said Bixiou, “that I
have asked your protection for the last dozen years.”

“No harm shall happen to you; we shall need wags, and you can take the
place of Barere,” replied the corn-doctor.

“And I?” said Leon.

“Ah, you! you are my client, and that will save you; for genius is an
odious privilege, to which too much is accorded in France; we shall be
forced to annihilate some of our greatest men in order to teach others
to be simple citizens.”

The corn-cutter spoke with a semi-serious, semi-jesting air that made
Gazonal shudder.

“So,” he said, “there’s to be no more religion?”

“No more religion _of the State_,” replied the pedicure, emphasizing the
last words; “every man will have his own. It is very fortunate that the
government is just now endowing convents; they’ll provide our funds.
Everything, you see, conspires in our favour. Those who pity the
peoples, who clamor on behalf of proletaries, who write works against
the Jesuits, who busy themselves about the amelioration of no matter
what,--the communists, the humanitarians, the philanthropists, you
understand,--all these people are our advanced guard. While we are
storing gunpowder, they are making the tinder which the spark of a
single circumstance will ignite.”

“But what do you expect will make the happiness of France?” cried
Gazonal.

“Equality of citizens and cheapness of provisions. We mean that there
will be no persons lacking anything, no millionaires, no suckers of
blood and victims.”

“That’s it!--maximum and minimum,” said Gazonal.

“You’ve said it,” replied the corn-cutter, decisively.

“No more manufacturers?” asked Gazonal.

“The state will manufacture. We shall all be the usufructuaries of
France; each will have his ration as on board ship; and all the world
will work according to their capacity.”

“Ah!” said Gazonal, “and while awaiting the time when you can cut off
the heads of aristocrats--”

“I cut their nails,” said the radical republican, putting up his tools
and finishing the jest himself.

Then he bowed very politely and went away.

“Can this be possible in 1845?” cried Gazonal.

“If there were time we could show you,” said his cousin, “all the
personages of 1793, and you could talk with them. You have just seen
Marat; well! we know Fouquier-Tinville, Collot d’Herbois, Robespierre,
Chabot, Fouche, Barras; there is even a magnificent Madame Roland.”

“Well, the tragic is not lacking in your play,” said Gazonal.

“It is six o’clock. Before we take you to see Odry in ‘Les
Saltimbauques’ to-night,” said Leon to Gazonal, “we must go and pay
a visit to Madame Cadine,--an actress whom your committee-man Massol
cultivates, and to whom you must therefore pay the most assiduous
court.”

“And as it is all important that you conciliate that power, I am going
to give you a few instructions,” said Bixiou. “Do you employ workwomen
in your manufactory?”

“Of course I do,” replied Gazonal.

“That’s all I want to know,” resumed Bixiou. “You are not married, and
you are a great--”

“Yes!” cried Gazonal, “you’ve guessed my strong point, I’m a great lover
of women.”

“Well, then! if you will execute the little manoeuvre which I am about
to prescribe for you, you will taste, without spending a farthing, the
sweets to be found in the good graces of an actress.”

When they reached the rue de la Victoire where the celebrated actress
lived, Bixiou, who meditated a trick upon the distrustful provincial,
had scarcely finished teaching him his role; but Gazonal was quick, as
we shall see, to take a hint.

The three friends went up to the second floor of a rather handsome
house, and found Madame Jenny Cadine just finishing dinner, for she
played that night in an afterpiece at the Gymnase. Having presented
Gazonal to this great power, Leon and Bixiou, in order to leave them
alone together, made the excuse of looking at a piece of furniture in
another room; but before leaving, Bixiou had whispered in the actress’s
ear: “He is Leon’s cousin, a manufacturer, enormously rich; he wants
to win a suit before the Council of State against his prefect, and he
thinks it wise to fascinate you in order to get Massol on his side.”

All Paris knows the beauty of that young actress, and will therefore
understand the stupefaction of the Southerner on seeing her. Though she
had received him at first rather coldly, he became the object of her
good graces before they had been many minutes alone together.

“How strange!” said Gazonal, looking round him disdainfully on the
furniture of the salon, the door of which his accomplices had left
half open, “that a woman like you should be allowed to live in such an
ill-furnished apartment.”

“Ah, yes, indeed! but how can I help it? Massol is not rich; I am hoping
he will be made a minister.”

“What a happy man!” cried Gazonal, heaving the sigh of a provincial.

“Good!” thought she. “I shall have new furniture, and get the better of
Carabine.”

“Well, my dear!” said Leon, returning, “you’ll be sure to come to
Carabine’s to-night, won’t you?--supper and lansquenet.”

“Will monsieur be there?” said Jenny Cadine, looking artlessly and
graciously at Gazonal.

“Yes, madame,” replied the countryman, dazzled by such rapid success.

“But Massol will be there,” said Bixiou.

“Well, what of that?” returned Jenny. “Come, we must part, my treasures;
I must go to the theatre.”

Gazonal gave his hand to the actress, and led her to the citadine which
was waiting for her; as he did so he pressed hers with such ardor that
Jenny Cadine exclaimed, shaking her fingers: “Take care! I haven’t any
others.”

When the three friends got back into their own vehicle, Gazonal
endeavoured to seize Bixiou round the waist, crying out: “She bites!
You’re a fine rascal!”

“So women say,” replied Bixiou.

At half-past eleven o’clock, after the play, another citadine took the
trio to the house of Mademoiselle Seraphine Sinet, better known under
the name of Carabine,--one of those pseudonyms which famous lorettes
take, or which are given to them; a name which, in this instance, may
have referred to the pigeons she had killed.

Carabine, now become almost a necessity for the banker du Tillet, deputy
of the Left, lived in a charming house in the rue Saint-Georges. In
Paris there are many houses the destination of which never varies; and
the one we now speak of had already seen seven careers of courtesans.
A broker had brought there, about the year 1827, Suzanne du Val-Noble,
afterwards Madame Gaillard. In that house the famous Esther caused the
Baron de Nucingen to commit the only follies of his life. Florine, and
subsequently, a person now called in jest “the late Madame Schontz,”
 had scintillated there in turn. Bored by his wife, du Tillet bought this
modern little house, and there installed the celebrated Carabine,
whose lively wit and cavalier manners and shameless brilliancy were a
counterpoise to the dulness of domestic life, and the toils of finance
and politics.

Whether du Tillet or Carabine were at home or not at home, supper was
served, and splendidly served, for ten persons every day. Artists, men
of letters, journalists, and the habitues of the house supped there when
they pleased. After supper they gambled. More than one member of
both Chambers came there to buy what Paris pays for by its weight in
gold,--namely, the amusement of intercourse with anomalous untrammelled
women, those meteors of the Parisian firmament who are so difficult to
class. There wit reigns; for all can be said, and all is said. Carabine,
a rival of the no less celebrated Malaga, had finally inherited the
salon of Florine, now Madame Raoul Nathan, and of Madame Schontz, now
wife of Chief-Justice du Ronceret.

As he entered, Gazonal made one remark only, but that remark was both
legitimate and legitimist: “It is finer than the Tuileries!” The satins,
velvets, brocades, the gold, the objects of art that swarmed there,
so filled the eyes of the wary provincial that at first he did not
see Madame Jenny Cadine, in a toilet intended to inspire respect, who,
concealed behind Carabine, watched his entrance observingly, while
conversing with others.

“My dear child,” said Leon to Carabine, “this is my cousin, a
manufacturer, who descended upon me from the Pyrenees this morning. He
knows nothing of Paris, and he wants Massol to help him in a suit he
has before the Council of State. We have therefore taken the liberty to
bring him--his name is Gazonal--to supper, entreating you to leave him
his full senses.”

“That’s as monsieur pleases; wine is dear,” said Carabine, looking
Gazonal over from head to foot, and thinking him in no way remarkable.

Gazonal, bewildered by the toilets, the lights, the gilding, the chatter
of the various groups whom he thought to be discussing him, could only
manage to stammer out the words: “Madame--madame--is--very good.”

“What do you manufacture?” said the mistress of the house, laughing.

“Say laces and offer her some guipure,” whispered Bixiou in Gazonal’s
ear.

“La-ces,” said Gazonal, perceiving that he would have to pay for his
supper. “It will give me the greatest pleasure to offer you a dress--a
scarf--a mantilla of my make.”

“Ah, three things! Well, you are nicer than you look to be,” returned
Carabine.

“Paris has caught me!” thought Gazonal, now perceiving Jenny Cadine, and
going up to her.

“And I,” said the actress, “what am I to have?”

“All I possess,” replied Gazonal, thinking that to offer all was to give
nothing.

Massol, Claude Vignon, du Tillet, Maxime de Trailles, Nucingen, du
Bruel, Malaga, Monsieur and Madame Gaillard, Vauvinet, and a crowd of
other personages now entered.

After a conversation with the manufacturer on the subject of his suit,
Massol, without making any promises, told him that the report was not
yet written, and that citizens could always rely on the knowledge
and the independence of the Council of State. Receiving that cold and
dignified response, Gazonal, in despair, thought it necessary to set
about seducing the charming Jenny, with whom he was by this time in
love. Leon de Lora and Bixiou left their victim in the hands of that
most roguish and frolicsome member of the anomalous society,--for Jenny
Cadine is the sole rival in that respect of the famous Dejazet.

At the supper-table, where Gazonal was fascinated by a silver service
made by the modern Benvenuto Cellini, Froment-Meurice, the contents of
which were worthy of the container, his mischievous friends were careful
to sit at some distance from him; but they followed with cautious
eye the manoeuvres of the clever actress, who, being attracted by the
insidious hope of getting her furniture renewed, was playing her cards
to take the provincial home with her. No sheep upon the day of the
Fete-Dieu ever more meekly allowed his little Saint John to lead him
along than Gazonal as he followed his siren.

Three days later, Leon and Bixiou, who had not seen Gazonal since that
evening, went to his lodgings about two in the afternoon.

“Well, cousin,” said Leon, “the Council of State has decided in favour
of your suit.”

“Maybe, but it is useless now, cousin,” said Gazonal, lifting a
melancholy eye to his two friends. “I’ve become a republican.”

“What does that mean?” asked Leon.

“I haven’t anything left; not even enough to pay my lawyer,” replied
Gazonal. “Madame Jenny Cadine has got notes of hand out of me to the
amount of more money than all the property I own--”

“The fact is Cadine is rather dear; but--”

“Oh, but I didn’t get anything for my money,” said Gazonal. “What a
woman! Well, I’ll own the provinces are not a match for Paris; I shall
retire to La Trappe.”

“Good!” said Bixiou, “now you are reasonable. Come, recognize the
majesty of the capital.”

“And of capital,” added Leon, holding out to Gazonal his notes of hand.

Gazonal gazed at the papers with a stupefied air.

“You can’t say now that we don’t understand the duties of hospitality;
haven’t we educated you, saved you from poverty, feasted you, and amused
you?” said Bixiou.

“_And_ fooled you,” added Leon, making the gesture of gamins to express
the action of picking pockets.



ADDENDUM

The following personages appear in other stories of the Human Comedy.

     Brambourg, Comte de
       A Bachelor’s Establishment

     Cadine, Jenny
       Cousin Betty
       Beatrix
       The Member for Arcis

     Canalis, Constant-Cyr-Melchior, Baron de
       Letters of Two Brides
       A Distinguished Provincial at Paris
       Modeste Mignon
       The Magic Skin
       Another Study of Woman
       A Start in Life
       Beatrix
       The Member for Arcis

     Collin, Jacqueline
       Scenes from a Courtesan’s Life
       Cousin Betty

     Fontaine, Madame
       Cousin Pons

     Gaillard, Theodore
       A Distinguished Provincial at Paris
       Beatrix
       Scenes from a Courtesan’s Life

     Gaillard, Madame Theodore
       Jealousies of a Country Town
       A Distinguished Provincial at Paris
       A Bachelor’s Establishment
       Scenes from a Courtesan’s Life
       Beatrix

     Giraud, Leon
       A Distinguished Provincial at Paris
       A Bachelor’s Establishment
       The Secrets of a Princess

     Gobseck, Jean-Esther Van
       Gobseck
       Father Goriot
       Cesar Birotteau
       The Government Clerks

     Lora, Leon de
       A Bachelor’s Establishment
       A Start in Life
       Pierre Grassou
       Honorine
       Cousin Betty
       Beatrix

     Lousteau, Etienne
       A Distinguished Provincial at Paris
       A Bachelor’s Establishment
       Scenes from a Courtesan’s Life
       A Daughter of Eve
       Beatrix
       The Muse of the Department
       Cousin Betty
       A Prince of Bohemia
       A Man of Business
       The Middle Classes

     Marsay, Henri de
       The Thirteen
       Another Study of Woman
       The Lily of the Valley
       Father Goriot
       Jealousies of a Country Town
       Ursule Mirouet
       A Marriage Settlement
       Lost Illusions
       A Distinguished Provincial at Paris
       Letters of Two Brides
       The Ball at Sceaux
       Modest Mignon
       The Secrets of a Princess
       The Gondreville Mystery
       A Daughter of Eve

     Massol
       Scenes from a Courtesan’s Life
       The Magic Skin
       A Daughter of Eve
       Cousin Betty

     Nathan, Raoul
       Lost Illusions
       A Distinguished Provincial at Paris
       Scenes from a Courtesan’s Life
       The Secrets of a Princess
       A Daughter of Eve
       Letters of Two Brides
       The Seamy Side of History
       The Muse of the Department
       A Prince of Bohemia
       A Man of Business

     Nathan, Madame Raoul
       The Muse of the Department
       Lost Illusions
       A Distinguished Provincial at Paris
       Scenes from a Courtesan’s Life
       The Government Clerks
       A Bachelor’s Establishment
       Ursule Mirouet
       Eugenie Grandet
       The Imaginary Mistress
       A Prince of Bohemia
       A Daughter of Eve

     Nourrisson, Madame
       Scenes from a Courtesan’s Life
       Cousin Betty

     Nucingen, Baron Frederic de
       The Firm of Nucingen
       Father Goriot
       Pierrette
       Cesar Birotteau
       Lost Illusions
       A Distinguished Provincial at Paris
       Scenes from a Courtesan’s Life
       Another Study of Woman
       The Secrets of a Princess
       A Man of Business
       Cousin Betty
       The Muse of the Department

     Rastignac, Eugene de
       Father Goriot
       A Distinguished Provincial at Paris
       Scenes from a Courtesan’s Life
       The Ball at Sceaux
       The Interdiction
       A Study of Woman
       Another Study of Woman
       The Magic Skin
       The Secrets of a Princess
       A Daughter of Eve
       The Gondreville Mystery
       The Firm of Nucingen
       Cousin Betty
       The Member for Arcis

     Ridal, Fulgence
       A Bachelor’s Establishment
       A Distinguished Provincial at Paris

     Ronceret, Madame Fabien du
       Beatrix
       The Muse of the Department
       Cousin Betty

     Schinner, Hippolyte
       The Purse
       A Bachelor’s Establishment
       Pierre Grassou
       A Start in Life
       Albert Savarus
       The Government Clerks
       Modeste Mignon
       The Imaginary Mistress

     Sinet, Seraphine
       Cousin Betty

     Stidmann
       Modeste Mignon
       Beatrix
       The Member for Arcis
       Cousin Betty
       Cousin Pons

     Tillet, Ferdinand du
       Cesar Birotteau
       The Firm of Nucingen
       The Middle Classes
       A Bachelor’s Establishment
       Pierrette
       Melmoth Reconciled
       A Distinguished Provincial at Paris
       The Secrets of a Princess
       A Daughter of Eve
       The Member for Arcis
       Cousin Betty

     Trailles, Comte Maxime de
       Cesar Birotteau
       Father Goriot
       Gobseck
       Ursule Mirouet
       A Man of Business
       The Member for Arcis
       The Secrets of a Princess
       Cousin Betty
       The Member for Arcis
       Beatrix

     Vauvinet
       Cousin Betty

     Vignon, Claude
       A Distinguished Provincial at Paris
       A Daughter of Eve
       Honorine
       Beatrix
       Cousin Betty





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