The Muse of the Department, Honoré de Balzac [good book club books TXT] 📗

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"Your joke is as stupid as my Muse is handsome," retorted Lousteau. "Ask Bianchon, my dear fellow."

"A Muse and a Poet! A homoeopathic cure then!" said Bixiou.

On the tenth day Lousteau received a letter with the Sancerre post-mark.

"Good! very good!" said Lousteau.

"'Beloved friend, idol of my heart and soul----' twenty pages of it! all at one sitting, and dated midnight! She writes when she finds herself alone. Poor woman! Ah, ha! And a postscript--

"'I dare not ask you to write to me as I write, every day; still, I hope to have a few lines from my dear one every week, to relieve my mind.'--What a pity to burn it all! it is really well written," said Lousteau to himself, as he threw the ten sheets of paper into the fire after having read them. "That woman was born to reel off copy!"

Lousteau was not much afraid of Madame Schontz, who really loved him for himself, but he had supplanted a friend in the heart of a Marquise. This Marquise, a lady nowise coy, sometimes dropped in unexpectedly at his rooms in the evening, arriving veiled in a hackney coach; and she, as a literary woman, allowed herself to hunt through all his drawers.

A week later, Lousteau, who hardly remembered Dinah, was startled by another budget from Sancerre--eight leaves, sixteen pages! He heard a woman's step; he thought it announced a search from the Marquise, and tossed these rapturous and entrancing proofs of affections into the fire--unread!

"A woman's letter!" exclaimed Madame Schontz, as she came in. "The paper, the wax, are scented--"

"Here you are, sir," said a porter from the coach office, setting down two huge hampers in the ante-room. "Carriage paid. Please to sign my book."

"Carriage paid!" cried Madame Schontz. "It must have come from Sancerre."

"Yes, madame," said the porter.

"Your Tenth Muse is a remarkably intelligent woman," said the courtesan, opening one of the hampers, while Lousteau was writing his name. "I like a Muse who understands housekeeping, and who can make game pies as well as blots. And, oh! what beautiful flowers!" she went on, opening the second hamper. "Why, you could get none finer in Paris!--And here, and here! A hare, partridges, half a roebuck!--We will ask your friends and have a famous dinner, for Athalie has a special talent for dressing venison."

Lousteau wrote to Dinah; but instead of writing from the heart, he was clever. The letter was all the more insidious; it was like one of Mirabeau's letters to Sophie. The style of a true lover is transparent. It is a clear stream which allows the bottom of the heart to be seen between two banks, bright with the trifles of existence, and covered with the flowers of the soul that blossom afresh every day, full of intoxicating beauty--but only for two beings. As soon as a love letter has any charm for a third reader, it is beyond doubt the product of the head, not of the heart. But a woman will always be beguiled; she always believes herself to be the determining cause of this flow of wit.

By the end of December Lousteau had ceased to read Dinah's letters; they lay in a heap in a drawer of his chest that was never locked, under his shirts, which they scented.

Then one of those chances came to Lousteau which such bohemians ought to clutch by every hair. In the middle of December, Madame Schontz, who took a real interest in Etienne, sent to beg him to call on her one morning on business.

"My dear fellow, you have a chance of marrying."

"I can marry very often, happily, my dear."

"When I say marrying, I mean marrying well. You have no prejudices: I need not mince matters. This is the position: A young lady has got into trouble; her mother knows nothing of even a kiss. Her father is an honest notary, a man of honor; he has been wise enough to keep it dark. He wants to get his daughter married within a fortnight, and he will give her a fortune of a hundred and fifty thousand francs--for he has three other children; but--and it is not a bad idea--he will add a hundred thousand francs, under the rose, hand to hand, to cover the damages. They are an old family of Paris citizens, Rue des Lombards----"

"Well, then, why does not the lover marry her?"

"Dead."

"What a romance! Such things are nowhere to be heard of but in the Rue des Lombards."

"But do not take it into your head that a jealous brother murdered the seducer. The young man died in the most commonplace way of a pleurisy caught as he came out of the theatre. A head-clerk and penniless, the man entrapped the daughter in order to marry into the business--A judgment from heaven, I call it!"

"Where did you hear the story?"

"From Malaga; the notary is her _milord_."

"What, Cardot, the son of that little old man in hair-powder, Florentine's first friend?"

"Just so. Malaga, whose 'fancy' is a little tomtit of a fiddler of eighteen, cannot in conscience make such a boy marry the girl. Besides, she has no cause to do him an ill turn.--Indeed, Monsieur Cardot wants a man of thirty at least. Our notary, I feel sure, will be proud to have a famous man for his son-in-law. So just feel yourself all over.--You will pay your debts, you will have twelve thousand francs a year, and be a father without any trouble on your part; what do you say to that to the good? And, after all, you only marry a very consolable widow. There is an income of fifty thousand francs in the house, and the value of the connection, so in due time you may look forward to not less than fifteen thousand francs a year more for your share, and you will enter a family holding a fine political position; Cardot is the brother-in-law of old Camusot, the depute who lived so long with Fanny Beaupre."

"Yes," said Lousteau, "old Camusot married little Daddy Cardot's eldest daughter, and they had high times together!"

"Well!" Madame Schontz went on, "and Madame Cardot, the notary's wife, was a Chiffreville--manufacturers of chemical products, the aristocracy of these days! Potash, I tell you! Still, this is the unpleasant side of the matter. You will have a terrible mother-in-law, a woman capable of killing her daughter if she knew--! This Cardot woman is a bigot; she has lips like two faded narrow pink ribbons.

"A man of the town like you would never pass muster with that woman, who, in her well-meaning way, will spy out your bachelor life and know every fact of the past. However, Cardot says he means to exert his paternal authority. The poor man will be obliged to do the civil to his wife for some days; a woman made of wood, my dear fellow; Malaga, who has seen her, calls her a penitential scrubber. Cardot is a man of forty; he will be mayor of his district, and perhaps be elected deputy. He is prepared to give in lieu of the hundred thousand francs a nice little house in the Rue Saint-Lazare, with a forecourt and a garden, which cost him no more than sixty thousand at the time of the July overthrow; he would sell, and that would be an opportunity for you to go and come at the house, to see the daughter, and be civil to the mother.--And it would give you a look of property in Madame Cardot's eyes. You would be housed like a prince in that little mansion. Then, by Camusot's interest, you may get an appointment as librarian to some public office where there is no library.--Well, and then if you invest your money in backing up a newspaper, you will get ten thousand francs a year on it, you can earn six, your librarianship will bring you in four.--Can you do better for yourself?

"If you were to marry a lamb without spot, it might be a light woman by the end of two years. What is the damage?--an anticipated dividend! It is quite the fashion.

"Take my word for it, you can do no better than come to dine with Malaga to-morrow. You will meet your father-in-law; he will know the secret has been let out--by Malaga, with whom he cannot be angry--and then you are master of the situation. As to your wife!--Why her misconduct leaves you as free as a bachelor----"

"Your language is as blunt as a cannon ball."

"I love you for your own sake, that is all--and I can reason. Well! why do you stand there like a wax image of Abd-el-Kader? There is nothing to meditate over. Marriage is heads or tails--well, you have tossed heads up."

"You shall have my reply to-morrow," said Lousteau.

"I would sooner have it at once; Malaga will write you up to-night."

"Well, then, yes."

Lousteau spent the evening in writing a long letter to the Marquise, giving her the reasons which compelled him to marry; his constant poverty, the torpor of his imagination, his white hairs, his moral and physical exhaustion--in short, four pages of arguments.--"As to Dinah, I will send her a circular announcing the marriage," said he to himself. "As Bixiou says, I have not my match for knowing how to dock the tail of a passion."

Lousteau, who at first had been on some ceremony with himself, by next day had come to the point of dreading lest the marriage should not come off. He was pressingly civil to the notary.

"I knew monsieur your father," said he, "at Florentine's, so I may well know you here, at Mademoiselle Turquet's. Like father, like son. A very good fellow and a philosopher, was little Daddy Cardot--excuse me, we always called him so. At that time, Florine, Florentine, Tullia, Coralie, and Mariette were the five fingers of your hand, so to speak--it is fifteen years ago. My follies, as you may suppose, are a thing of the past.--In those days it was pleasure that ran away with me; now I am ambitious; but, in our day, to get on at all a man must be free from debt, have a good income, a wife, and a family. If I pay taxes enough to qualify me, I may be a deputy yet, like any other man."

Maitre Cardot appreciated this profession of faith. Lousteau had laid himself out to please and the notary liked him, feeling himself more at his ease, as may be easily imagined, with a man who had known his father's secrets than he would have been with another. On the following day Lousteau was introduced to the Cardot family as the purchaser of the house in the Rue Saint-Lazare, and three days later he dined there.

Cardot lived in an old house near the Place du Chatelet. In this house everything was "good." Economy covered every scrap of gilding with green gauze; all the furniture wore holland covers. Though it was impossible to feel a shade of uneasiness as to the wealth of the inhabitants, at the end of half an hour no one could suppress a yawn. Boredom perched in every nook; the curtains hung dolefully; the dining-room was like Harpagon's. Even if Lousteau had not known all about Malaga, he could have guessed that the notary's real life was spent elsewhere.

The journalist saw a tall, fair girl with blue eyes, at once shy and languishing. The elder brother took a fancy to him; he was the fourth clerk in the office,