Unconscious Comedians, Honoré de Balzac [good books to read .txt] 📗

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.