The Brotherhood of Consolation, Honoré de Balzac [robert munsch read aloud txt] 📗

they were all too short and too narrow, so that the lad seemed likely to crack them at every motion. The seams were white, the edges curled, the buttonholes torn in spite of many mendings; the whole presenting to the most unobservant eyes the heart-breaking stigmas of honest penury. This livery contrasted sadly with the youth of the lad, who now disappeared munching a crust of stale bread with his strong and handsome teeth. He breakfasted thus on his way to the rue Saint-Jacques, carrying his books and papers under his arm, and wearing a little cap much too small for his head, from which stuck out a mass of magnificent black hair.

In passing before his grandfather the lad had given him rapidly a look of deep distress; for he knew him to be in an almost hopeless difficulty, the consequences of which might be terrible. To leave room for the boy to pass, the gardener had stepped back to the sill of Godefroid's door, and as at that moment Nepomucene arrived with a quantity of wood, the creditor was forced to retreat into the room.

"Monsieur Bernard!" cried the widow Vauthier, "do you think Monsieur Godefroid hired his rooms to have you hold your meetings in them?"

"Excuse me, madame," said the gardener, "but there was no room on the landing."

"I didn't say that for you, Monsieur Cartier," said the widow.

"Remain where you are!" cried Godefroid, addressing the gardener; "and you, my dear neighbor," he added, looking at Monsieur Bernard, who seemed insensible to the cruel insult, "if it is convenient to you to have an explanation with your gardener in my room, come in."

The old man, half stupefied with his troubles, cast a look of gratitude on Godefroid.

"As for you, my dear Madame Vauthier," continued Godefroid, "don't be so rough with monsieur, who is in the first place an old man, and one to whom you owe the obligation of my lodging here."

"Oh, pooh!" said the widow.

"Besides, if poor people do not help each other, who will help them? Leave us, Madame Vauthier; I'll blow the fire myself. Have the rest of my wood put in your cellar; I am sure you will take good care of it."

Madame Vauthier disappeared, for Godefroid in telling her to take care of his wood had given an opportunity to her greed.

"Come in this way," said Godefroid, offering chairs to both debtor and creditor.

The old man conversed standing, but the gardener sat down.

"My good Monsieur Cartier," went on Godefroid, "rich people do not pay as regularly as you say they do, and you ought not to dun a worthy man for a few louis. Monsieur draws his pension every six months, and he could not make you an assignment of it for such a paltry sum. I am willing to advance the money, if you absolutely insist on having it."

"Monsieur Bernard drew his pension two weeks ago, and has not paid me. I am sorry to trouble him, of course."

"Have you furnished him with plants all along?"

"Yes, monsieur, for six years, and he has always paid me."

Monsieur Bernard, who was listening to some sound in his own rooms and paying no attention to what was being said, now heard a cry through the partitions and hurried away without a word.

"Come, come, my good man," said Godefroid, taking advantage of the old man's absence, "bring some nice flowers, your best flowers, this very morning, and tell your wife to send the eggs and milk as usual; I will pay you this evening."

Cartier looked oddly at Godefroid.

"Then you must know more than Madame Vauthier does; she sent me word to hurry if I hoped to be paid," he said. "Neither she nor I can make out why folks who eat nothing but bread and the odds and ends of vegetables, bits of carrots, turnips, and such things, which they get at the back-doors of restaurants,--yes, monsieur, I assure you I came one day on the little fellow filling an old handbag,--well, I want to know why such persons spend nearly forty francs a month on flowers. They say the old man's pension is only three thousand francs."

"At any rate," said Godefroid, "it is not your business to complain if they ruin themselves in flowers."

"That's true, monsieur,--provided they pay me."

"Bring your bill to me."

"Very good, monsieur," said the gardener, with a tinge of respect. "Monsieur no doubt wants to see the mysterious lady."

"My good friend," said Godefroid, stiffly, "you forget yourself. Go home now and bring fresh plants for those you are to take away. If you can also supply me with good cream and fresh eggs I will take them, and I will go this morning and take a look at your establishment."

"It is one of the finest in Paris, monsieur. I exhibit at the Luxembourg. My garden, which covers three acres, is on the boulevard, behind the garden of La Grande-Chaumiere."

"Very good, Monsieur Cartier. You are, I see, much richer than I. Have some consideration for us, therefore. Who knows how soon we may have mutual need of each other?"

The gardener went away, much puzzled as to who and what Godefroid might be.

"And yet I was once just like that," thought Godefroid, blowing his fire. "What a fine specimen of the bourgeois of to-day!--gossiping, inquisitive, crazy for equality, jealous of his customers, furious at not knowing why a poor sick woman stays in her room without being seen; concealing his wealth, and yet vain enough to betray it when he thinks it will put him above his neighbor. That man ought to be the lieutenant of his company. I dare say he is. With what ease he plays the scene of Monsieur Dimanche! A little more and I should have made a friend of Monsieur Cartier."

The old man broke into this soliloquy, which proves how Godefroid's ideas had changed in four months.

"Excuse me, neighbor," said Monsieur Bernard, in a troubled voice; "I see you have sent that gardener away satisfied, for he bowed civilly to me on the landing. It seems, young man, as if Providence had sent you to me at the very moment when I was about to succumb. Alas! the hard talk of that man must have shown you many things! It is true that I received the half-yearly payment of my pension two weeks ago; but I had more pressing debts than his, and I was forced to put aside my rent for fear of being turned out of the house. I have told you the state my daughter is in, and you have probably heard her."

He looked uneasily at Godefroid, who made him an affirmative sign.

"Well, then, you know it would be her death warrant, for I should then be compelled to put her in a hospital. My grandson and I were fearing that end this morning; but we do not dread Cartier so much as we do the cold."

"My dear Monsieur Bernard," said Godefroid, "I have plenty of wood; take all you want."

"Ah!" said the old man, "but how can I ever return such services?"

"By accepting them without difficulty," said Godefroid, quickly, "and by giving me your confidence."

"But what are my claims to so much generosity?" asked Monsieur Bernard, becoming once more distrustful. "Ah! my pride and that of my grandson are lowered indeed!" he cried bitterly. "We are compelled to offer explanations to the few creditors--only two or three--whom we cannot pay. The utterly unfortunate have no creditors; to have them one must needs present an exterior of some show, and that we have now lost. But I have not yet abdicated my common-sense,--my reason," he added, as if he were talking to himself.

"Monsieur," replied Godefroid, gravely, "the history you gave me yesterday would touch even a usurer."

"No, no! for Barbet, that publisher, the proprietor of this house, is speculating on my poverty, and has sent the Vauthier woman, his former cook, to spy upon it."

"How can he speculate upon you?" asked Godefroid.

"I will tell you later," replied the old man. "My daughter is cold, and since you offer it, I am reduced to accept alms, were it even from my worst enemy."

"I will carry in some wood," said Godefroid, gathering up ten or a dozen sticks, and taking them into Monsieur Bernard's first room. The old man took as many himself; and when he saw the little provision safely deposited, he could not restrain the silly, and even idiotic smile with which those who are saved from a mortal danger, which has seemed to them inevitable, express their joy; for terror still lingers in their joy.

"Accept things from me, my dear Monsieur Bernard, without reluctance; and when your daughter is safe, and you are once more at ease, we will settle all. Meantime, let me act for you. I have been to see that Polish doctor; unfortunately he is absent; he will not be back for two days."

At this moment a voice which seemed to Godefroid to have, and really had, a fresh, melodious ring, cried out, "Papa, papa!" on two expressive notes.

While speaking to the old man, Godefroid had noticed that the jambs of a door leading to another room were painted in a delicate manner, altogether different from that of the rest of the lodging. His curiosity, already so keenly excited, was now roused to the highest pitch. He was conscious that his mission of benevolence was becoming nothing more than a pretext; what he really wanted was to see that sick woman. He refused to believe for an instant that a creature endowed with such a voice could be an object of repulsion.

"You do, indeed, take too much trouble, papa!" said the voice. "Why not have more servants?--and at your age, too! Good God!"

"But you know, my dear Vanda, that the boy and I cannot bear that any one should wait upon you but ourselves!"

Those sentences, which Godefroid heard through the door, or rather divined, for a heavy portiere on the inside smothered the sounds, gave him an inkling of the truth. The sick woman, surrounded by luxury, was evidently kept in ignorance of the real situation of her father and son. The violet silk dressing-gown of Monsieur Bernard, the flowers, his remarks to Cartier, had already roused some suspicion of this in Godefroid's mind. The young man stood still where he was, bewildered by this prodigy of paternal love. The contrast, such as he imagined it, between the invalid's room and the rest of that squalid place,--yes, it was bewildering!


XIV. HOW THE POOR AND HELPLESS ARE PREYED UPON

Through the door of a third chamber, which the old man had left open, Godefroid beheld two cots of painted wood, like those of the cheapest boarding-schools, each with a straw bed and a thin mattress, on which there was but one blanket. A small iron stove like those that porters cook by, near which lay a few squares of peat, would alone have shown the poverty of the household without the help of other details.

Advancing a step or two, Godefroid saw utensils such as the poorest persons use,--earthenware jugs, and pans in which potatoes floated in dirty water. Two tables of blackened wood, covered with books and papers, stood before the windows that looked out upon the rue Notre-Dame des Champs, and indicated the nocturnal occupations of father and son. On each of the tables was a flat iron candlestick, such as