Rise and Fall of Cesar Birotteau, Honoré de Balzac [good fiction books to read .TXT] 📗

/> have business relations with your house. You can confidently do
all that he asks of you; and in obliging him you will oblige

Your friend,
F. Du Tillet.

Du Tillet did not dot the _i_ in his signature. To those with whom he did business this intentional error was a sign previously agreed upon. The strongest recommendations, the warmest appeals contained in the letter were to mean nothing. All such letters, in which exclamation marks were suppliants and du Tillet placed himself, as it were, upon his knees, were to be considered as extorted by necessity; he could not refuse to write them, but they were to be regarded as not written. Seeing the _i_ without a dot, the correspondent was to amuse the petitioner with empty promises. Even men of the world, and sometimes the most distinguished, are thus gulled like children by business men, bankers, and lawyers, who all have a double signature,--one dead, the other living. The cleverest among them are fooled in this way. To understand the trick, we must experience the two-fold effects of a warm letter and a cold one.

"You have saved me, du Tillet!" said Cesar, reading the letter.

"Thank heaven!" said du Tillet, "ask for what money you want. When Nucingen reads my letter he will give you all you need. Unhappily, my own funds are tied up for a few days; if not, I certainly would not send you to the great banking princes. The Kellers are mere pygmies compared to Baron de Nucingen. Law reappears on earth in Nucingen. With this letter of mine you can face the 15th of January, and after that, we will see about it. Nucingen and I are the best friends in the world; he would not disoblige me for a million."

"It is a guarantee in itself," thought Birotteau, as he went away full of gratitude to his old clerk. "Well, a benefit is never lost!" he continued, philosophizing very wide of the mark. Nevertheless, one thought embittered his joy. For several days he had prevented his wife from looking into the ledgers; he had put the business on Celestin's shoulders and assisted in it himself; he wished, apparently, that his wife and daughter should be at liberty to take full enjoyment out of the beautiful appartement he had given them. But the first flush of happiness over, Madame Birotteau would have died rather than renounce her right of personally inspecting the affairs of the house,--of holding, as she phrased it, the handle of the frying-pan. Birotteau was at his wits' end; he had used all his cunning in trying to hide from his wife the symptoms of his embarrassment. Constance strongly disapproved of sending round the bills; she had scolded the clerks and accused Celestin of wishing to ruin the establishment, thinking that it was all his doing. Celestin, by Birotteau's order, had allowed himself to be scolded. In the eyes of the clerks Madame Cesar governed her husband; for though it is possible to deceive the public, the inmates of a household are never deceived as to who exercises the real authority. Birotteau knew that he must now reveal his real situation to his wife, for the account with du Tillet needed an explanation. When he got back to the shop, he saw, not without a shudder, that Constance was sitting in her old place behind the counter, examining the expense account, and no doubt counting up the money in the desk.

"How will you meet your payments to-morrow?" she whispered as he sat down beside her.

"With money," he answered, pulling out the bank-bills, and signing to Celestin to take them.

"Where did you get that money?"

"I'll tell you all about it this evening. Celestin, write down, 'Last of March, note for ten thousand francs, to du Tillet's order.'"

"Du Tillet!" repeated Constance, struck with consternation.

"I am going to see Popinot," said Cesar; "it is very wrong in me not to have gone before. Have we sold his oil?"

"The three hundred bottles he sent us are all gone."

"Birotteau, don't go out; I want to speak to you," said Constance, taking him by the arm, and leading him into her bedroom with an impetuosity which would have caused a laugh under other circumstances. "Du Tillet," she said, when she had made sure no one but Cesarine was with them,--"du Tillet, who robbed us of three thousand francs! So you are doing business with du Tillet,--a monster, who wished to seduce me," she whispered in his ear.

"Folly of youth," said Birotteau, assuming for the nonce the tone of a free-thinker.

"Listen to me, Birotteau! You are all upset; you don't go to the manufactory any more; there is something the matter, I feel it! You must tell me; I must know what it is."

"Well," said Birotteau, "we came very near being ruined,--we were ruined this very morning; but it is all safe now."

And he told the horrible story of his two weeks' misery.

"So that was the cause of your illness!" exclaimed Constance.

"Yes, mamma," cried Cesarine, "and papa has been so courageous! All that I desire in life is to be loved as he loves you. He has thought only of your grief."

"My dream is fulfilled!" said the poor woman, dropping upon the sofa at the corner of the fireplace, pale, livid, terrified. "I foresaw it all. I warned you on that fatal night, in our old room which you pulled to pieces, that we should have nothing left but our eyes to weep with. My poor Cesarine, I--"

"Now, there you go!" cried Cesar; "you will take away from me the courage I need."

"Forgive me, dear friend," said Constance, taking his hand, and pressing it with a tenderness which went to the heart of the poor man. "I do wrong. Misfortune has come; I will be silent, resigned, strong to bear it. No, you shall never hear a complaint from me." She threw herself into his arms, weeping, and whispering, "Courage, dear friend, courage! I will have courage for both, if necessary."

"My oil, wife,--my oil will save us!"

"May God help us!" said Constance.

"Anselme will help my father," said Cesarine.

"I'll go and see him," cried Cesar, deeply moved by the passionate accents of his wife, who after nineteen years of married life was not yet fully known to him. "Constance, fear nothing! Here, read du Tillet's letter to Monsieur de Nucingen; we are sure to obtain a credit. Besides," he said, allowing himself a necessary lie, "there is our uncle Pillerault; that is enough to give us courage."

"If that were all!" said Constance, smiling.

Birotteau, relieved of a heavy weight, walked away like a man suddenly set at liberty, though he felt within him that indefinable sinking which succeeds great moral struggles in which more of the nervous fluid, more of the will is emitted than should be spent at one time, and by which, if we may say so, the capital of the existence is drawn upon. Birotteau had aged already.

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The house of A. Popinot, Rue des Cinq-Diamants, had undergone a great change in two months. The shop was repainted. The shelves, re-varnished and gilded and crowded with bottles, rejoiced the eye of those who had eyes to see the symptoms of prosperity. The floors were littered with packages and wrapping-paper. The storerooms held small casks of various oils, obtained for Popinot on commission by the devoted Gaudissart. The ledgers, the accounts, and the desks were moved into the rooms above the shop and the back-shop. An old cook did all the household work for the master and his three clerks. Popinot, penned up in a corner of the shop closed in with glass, might be seen in a serge apron and long sleeves of green linen, with a pen behind his ear, in the midst of a mass of papers, where in fact Birotteau now found him, as he was overhauling his letters full of proposals and checks and orders. At the words "Hey, my boy!" uttered by his old master, Popinot raised his head, locked up his cubby-hole, and came forward with a joyous air and the end of his nose a little red. There was no fire in the shop, and the door was always open.

"I feared you were never coming," he said respectfully.

The clerks crowded round to look at the distinguished perfumer, the decorated deputy-mayor, the partner of their own master. Birotteau, so pitifully small at the Kellers, felt a craving to imitate those magnates; he stroked his chin, rose on his heels with native self-complacency, and talked his usual platitudes.

"Hey, my lad! we get up early, don't we?" he remarked.

"No, for we don't always go to bed," said Popinot. "We must clutch success."

"What did I tell you? My oil will make your fortune!"

"Yes, monsieur. But the means employed to sell it count for something. I have set your diamond well."

"How do we stand?" said Cesar. "How far have you got? What are the profits?"

"Profits! at the end of two months! How can you expect it? Friend Gaudissart has only been on the road for twenty-five days; he took a post-chaise without saying a word to me. Oh, he is devoted! We owe a great deal to my uncle. The newspapers alone (here he whispered in Birotteau's ear) will cost us twelve thousand francs."

"Newspapers!" exclaimed the deputy-mayor.

"Haven't you read them?"

"No."

"Then you know nothing," said Popinot. "Twenty thousand francs worth of placards, gilt frames, copies of the prospectus. One hundred thousand bottles bought. Ah, it is all paying through the nose at this moment! We are manufacturing on a grand scale. If you had set foot in the faubourg, where I often work all night, you would have seen a little nut-cracker which isn't to be sneezed at, I can tell you. On my own account, I have made, in the last five days, not less than ten thousand francs, merely by commissions on the sale of druggists' oils."

"What a capable head!" said Birotteau, laying his hand on little Popinot's thick hair and rubbing it about as if he were a baby. "I found it out."

Several persons here came in.

"On Sunday we dine at your aunt Ragon's," added Cesar, leaving Popinot to go on with his business, for he perceived that the fresh meat he had come to taste was not yet cut up.

"It is amazing! A clerk becomes a merchant in twenty-four hours," thought Birotteau, who understood the happiness and self-assurance of Anselme as little as the dandy luxury of du Tillet. "Anselme put on a little stiff air when I patted him on the head, just as if he were Francois Keller himself."

Birotteau never once reflected that the clerks were looking on, and that the master of the establishment had his dignity to preserve. In this instance, as in the case of his speech to du Tillet, the worthy soul committed a folly out of pure goodness of heart, and for lack of knowing how to withhold an honest sentiment vulgarly expressed. By this trifling act Cesar would have wounded irretrievably any other man than little Popinot.

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