The Lesser Bourgeoisie, Honoré de Balzac [pdf e book reader TXT] 📗

requested to take "pot-luck" without ceremony. Mademoiselle Thuillier used to say:--

"Then we know that he will get a good dinner, poor fellow!"

A social phenomenon which has certainly been observed, but never, as yet, formulated, or, if you like it better, published, though it fully deserves to be recorded, is the return of habits, mind, and manners to primitive conditions in certain persons who, between youth and old age, have raised themselves above their first estate. Thus Thuillier had become, once more, morally speaking, the son of a concierge. He now made use of many of his father's jokes, and a little of the slime of early days was beginning to appear on the surface of his declining life. About five or six times a month, when the soup was rich and good he would deposit his spoon in his empty plate and say, as if the proposition were entirely novel:--

"That's better than a kick on the shin-bone!"

On hearing that witticism for the first time Theodose, to whom it was really new, laughed so heartily that the handsome Thuillier was tickled in his vanity as he had never been before. After that, Theodose greeted the same speech with a knowing little smile. This slight detail will explain how it was that on the morning of the day when Theodose had his passage at arms with Vinet he had said to Thuillier, as they were walking in the garden to see the effect of a frost:--

"You have much more wit than you give yourself credit for."

To which he received this answer:--

"In any other career, my dear Theodose, I should have made my way nobly; but the fall of the Emperor broke my neck."

"There is still time," said the young lawyer. "In the first place, what did that mountebank, Colleville, ever do to get the cross?"

There la Peyrade laid his finger on a sore wound which Thuillier hid from every eye so carefully that even his sister did not know of it; but the young man, interested in studying these bourgeois, had divined the secret envy that gnawed at the heart of the ex-official.

"If you, experienced as you are, will do the honor to follow my advice," added the philanthropist, "and, above all, not mention our compact to any one, I will undertake to have you decorated with the Legion of honor, to the applause of the whole quarter."

"Oh! if we succeed in that," cried Thuillier, "you don't know what I would do for you."

This explains why Thuillier carried his head high when Theodose had the audacity that evening to put opinions into his mouth.

In art--and perhaps Moliere had placed hypocrisy in the rank of art by classing Tartuffe forever among comedians--there exists a point of perfection to which genius alone attains; mere talent falls below it. There is so little difference between a work of genius and a work of talent, that only men of genius can appreciate the distance that separates Raffaelle from Correggio, Titian from Rubens. More than that; common minds are easily deceived on this point. The sign of genius is a certain appearance of facility. In fact, its work must appear, at first sight, ordinary, so natural is it, even on the highest subjects. Many peasant-women hold their children as the famous Madonna in the Dresden gallery holds hers. Well, the height of art in a man of la Peyrade's force was to oblige others to say of him later: "Everybody would have been taken in by him."

Now, in the salon Thuillier, he noted a dawning opposition; he perceived in Colleville the somewhat clear-sighted and criticising nature of an artist who has missed his vocation. The barrister felt himself displeasing to Colleville, who (as the result of circumstances not necessary to here report) considered himself justified in believing in the science of anagrams. None of this anagrams had ever failed. The clerks in the government office had laughed at him when, demanding an anagram on the name of the poor helpless Auguste-Jean-Francois Minard, he had produced, "J'amassai une si grande fortune"; and the event had justified him after the lapse of ten years! Theodose, on several occasions, had made advances to the jovial secretary of the mayor's office, and had felt himself rebuffed by a coldness which was not natural in so sociable a man. When the game of bouillotte came to an end, Colleville seized the moment to draw Thuillier into the recess of a window and say to him:--

"You are letting that lawyer get too much foothold in your house; he kept the ball in his own hands all the evening."

"Thank you, my friend; forewarned is forearmed," replied Thuillier, inwardly scoffing at Colleville.

Theodose, who was talking at the moment to Madame Colleville, had his eye on the two men, and, with the same prescience by which women know when and how they are spoken of, he perceived that Colleville was trying to injure him in the mind of the weak and silly Thuillier. "Madame," he said in Flavie's ear, "if any one here is capable of appreciating you it is certainly I. You seem to me a pearl dropped into the mire. You say you are forty-two, but a woman is no older than she looks, and many women of thirty would be thankful to have your figure and that noble countenance, where love has passed without ever filling the void in your heart. You have given yourself to God, I know, and I have too much religion myself to regret it, but I also know that you have done so because no human being has proved worthy of you. You have been loved, but you have never been adored--I have divined that. There is your husband, who has not known how to please you in a position in keeping with your deserts. He dislikes me, as if he thought I loved you; and he prevents me from telling you of a way that I think I have found to place you in the sphere for which you were destined. No, madame," he continued, rising, "the Abbe Gondrin will not preach this year through Lent at our humble Saint-Jacques du Haut-Pas; the preacher will be Monsieur d'Estival, a compatriot of mine, and you will hear in him one of the most impressive speakers that I have ever known,--a priest whose outward appearance is not agreeable, but, oh! what a soul!"

"Then my desire will be gratified," said poor Madame Thuillier. "I have never yet been able to understand a famous preacher."

A smile flickered on the lips of Mademoiselle Thuillier and several others who heard the remark.

"They devote themselves too much to theological demonstration," said Theodose. "I have long thought so myself--but I never talk religion; if it had not been for Madame _de_ Colleville, I--"

"Are there demonstrations in theology?" asked the professor of mathematics, naively, plunging headlong into the conversation.

"I think, monsieur," replied Theodose, looking straight at Felix Phellion, "that you cannot be serious in asking me such a question."

"Felix," said old Phellion, coming heavily to the rescue of his son, and catching a distressed look on the pale face of Madame Thuillier,--"Felix separates religion into two categories; he considers it from the human point of view and the divine point of view,--tradition and reason."

"That is heresy, monsieur," replied Theodose. "Religion is one; it requires, above all things, faith."

Old Phellion, nonplussed by that remark, nodded to his wife:--

"It is getting late, my dear," and he pointed to the clock.

"Oh, Monsieur Felix," said Celeste in a whisper to the candid mathematician, "Couldn't you be, like Pascal and Bossuet, learned and pious both?"

The Phellions, on departing, carried the Collevilles with them. Soon no one remained in the salon but Dutocq, Theodose, and the Thuilliers.

The flattery administered by Theodose to Flavie seems at the first sight coarsely commonplace, but we must here remark, in the interests of this history, that the barrister was keeping himself as close as possible to these vulgar minds; he was navigating their waters; he spoke their language. His painter was Pierre Grassou, and not Joseph Bridau; his book was "Paul and Virginia." The greatest living poet for him was Casimire de la Vigne; to his eyes the mission of art was, above all things, utility. Parmentier, the discoverer of the potato, was greater to him that thirty Raffaelles; the man in the blue cloak seemed to him a sister of charity. These were Thuillier's expressions, and Theodose remembered them all--on occasion.

"That young Felix Phellion," he now remarked, "is precisely the academical man of our day; the product of knowledge which sends God to the rear. Heavens, what are we coming to? Religion alone can save France; nothing but the fear of hell will preserve us from domestic robbery, which is going on at all hours in the bosom of families, and eating into the surest fortunes. All of you have a secret warfare in your homes."

After this shrewd tirade, which made a great impression upon Brigitte, he retired, followed by Dutocq, after wishing good evening to the three Thuilliers.

"That young man has great capacity," said Thuillier, sententiously.

"Yes, that he has," replied Brigitte, extinguishing the lamps.

"He has religion," said Madame Thuillier, as she left the room.

"Monsieur," Phellion was saying to Colleville as they came abreast of the Ecole de Mines, looking about him to see that no one was near, "it is usually my custom to submit my insight to that of others, but it is impossible for me not to think that that young lawyer plays the master at our friend Thuillier's."

"My own opinion," said Colleville, who was walking with Phellion behind his wife, Madame Phellion, and Celeste, "is that he's a Jesuit; and I don't like Jesuits; the best of them are no good. To my mind a Jesuit means knavery, and knavery for knavery's sake; they deceive for the pleasure of deceiving, and, as the saying is, to keep their hand in. That's my opinion, and I don't mince it."

"I understand you, monsieur," said Phellion, who was arm-in-arm with Colleville.

"No, Monsieur Phellion," remarked Flavie in a shrill voice, "you don't understand Colleville; but I know what he means, and I think he had better stop saying it. Such subjects are not to be talked of in the street, at eleven o'clock at night, and before a young lady."

"You are right, wife," said Colleville.

When they reached the rue des Deux-Eglises, which Phellion was to take, they all stopped to say good-night, and Felix Phellion, who was bring up the rear, said to Colleville:--

"Monsieur, your son Francois could enter the Ecole Polytechnique if he were well-coached; I propose to you to fit him to pass the examinations this year."

"That's an offer not to be refused! Thank you, my friend," said Colleville. "We'll see about it."

"Good!" said Phellion to his son, as they walked on.

"Not a bad stroke!" said the mother.

"What do you mean by that?" asked Felix.

"You are very cleverly paying court to Celeste's parents."

"May I never find the solution of my problem if I even thought of it!" cried the young professor. "I discovered, when talking with the little Collevilles, that Francois has a strong turn for mathematics, and I thought I ought to enlighten his father."

"Good, my son!" repeated Phellion. "I wouldn't have you otherwise. My prayers are granted! I have a son whose honor, probity, and private and civic virtues are all that I could wish."

Madame Colleville, as soon as Celeste had gone to