Modeste Mignon, Honoré de Balzac [booksvooks txt] 📗

unable to pay for it when finished,--a fox-head in gold, with a ruby of exorbitant value; all his savings went into the purchase, the cost of which was seven thousand francs. Ernest gave a drawing of the arms of La Bastie, and allowed the shop-people twenty hours to engrave them. The handle, a masterpiece of delicate workmanship, was fitted to an india-rubber whip and put into a morocco case lined with velvet, on which two M.'s interlaced were stamped in gold.

La Briere got back to Havre by the mail-coach Wednesday morning in time to breakfast with Canalis. The poet had concealed his secretary's absence by declaring that he was busy with some work sent from Paris. Butscha, who met La Briere at the coach-door, took the box containing the precious work of art to Francoise Cochet, with instructions to place it on Modeste's dressing-table.

"Of course you will accompany Mademoiselle Modeste on her ride to-day?" said Butscha, who went to Canalis's house to let La Briere know by a wink that the whip had gone to its destination.

"I?" answered Ernest; "no, I am going to bed."

"Bah!" exclaimed Canalis, looking at him. "I don't know what to make of you."

Breakfast was then served, and the poet naturally invited their visitor to stay and take it. Butscha complied, having seen in the expression of the valet's face the success of a trick in which we shall see the first fruits of his promise to Modeste.

"Monsieur is very right to detain the clerk of Monsieur Latournelle," whispered Germain in his master's ear.

Canalis and Germain went into the salon on a sign that passed between them.

"I went out this morning to see the men fish, monsieur," said the valet,--"an excursion proposed to me by the captain of a smack, whose acquaintance I have made."

Germain did not acknowledge that he had the bad taste to play billiards in a cafe,--a fact of which Butscha had taken advantage to surround him with friends of his own and manage him as he pleased.

"Well?" said Canalis, "to the point,--quick!"

"Monsieur le baron, I heard a conversation about Monsieur Mignon, which I encouraged as far as I could; for no one, of course, knew that I belong to you. Ah! monsieur, judging by the talk of the quays, you are running your head into a noose. The fortune of Mademoiselle de La Bastie is, like her name, modest. The vessel on which the father returned does not belong to him, but to rich China merchants to whom he renders an account. They even say things that are not at all flattering to Monsieur Mignon's honor. Having heard that you and Monsieur le duc were rivals for Mademoiselle de La Bastie's hand, I have taken the liberty to warn you; of the two, wouldn't it be better that his lordship should gobble her? As I came home I walked round the quays, and into that theatre-hall where the merchants meet; I slipped boldly in and out among them. Seeing a well-dressed stranger, those worthy fellows began to talk to me of Havre, and I got them, little by little, to speak of Colonel Mignon. What they said only confirms the stories the fishermen told me; and I feel that I should fail in my duty if I keep silence. That is why I did not get home in time to dress monsieur this morning."

"What am I to do?" cried Canalis, who remembered his proposals to Modeste the night before, and did not see how he could get out of them.

"Monsieur knows my attachment to him," said Germain, perceiving that the poet was quite thrown off his balance; "he will not be surprised if I give him a word of advice. There is that clerk; try to get the truth out of him. Perhaps he'll unbutton after a bottle or two of champagne, or at any rate a third. It would be strange indeed if monsieur, who will one day be ambassador, as Philoxene has heard Madame la duchesse say time and time again, couldn't turn a little notary's clerk inside out."


CHAPTER XXIII. BUTSCHA DISTINGUISHES HIMSELF

At this instant Butscha, the hidden prompter of the fishing part, was requesting the secretary to say nothing about his trip to Paris, and not to interfere in any way with what he, Butscha, might do. The dwarf had already made use of an unfavorable feeling lately roused against Monsieur Mignon in Havre in consequence of his reserve and his determination to keep silence as to the amount of his fortune. The persons who were most bitter against him even declared calumniously that he had made over a large amount of property to Dumay to save it from the just demands of his associates in China. Butscha took advantage of this state of feeling. He asked the fishermen, who owed him many a good turn, to keep the secret and lend him their tongues. They served him well. The captain of the fishing-smack told Germain that one of his cousins, a sailor, had just returned from Marseilles, where he had been paid off from the brig in which Monsieur Mignon returned to France. The brig had been sold to the account of some other person than Monsieur Mignon, and the cargo was only worth three or four hundred thousand francs at the utmost.

"Germain," said Canalis, as the valet was leaving the room, "serve champagne and claret. A member of the legal fraternity of Havre must carry away with him proper ideas of a poet's hospitality. Besides, he has got a wit that is equal to Figaro's," added Canalis, laying his hand on the dwarf's shoulder, "and we must make it foam and sparkle with champagne; you and I, Ernest, will not spare the bottle either. Faith, it is over two years since I've been drunk," he added, looking at La Briere.

"Not drunk with wine, you mean," said Butscha, looking keenly at him, "yes, I can believe that. You get drunk every day on yourself, you drink in so much praise. Ha, you are handsome, you are a poet, you are famous in your lifetime, you have the gift of an eloquence that is equal to your genius, and you please all women,--even my master's wife. Admired by the finest sultana-valide that I ever saw in my life (and I never saw but her) you can, if you choose, marry Mademoiselle de La Bastie. Goodness! the mere inventory of your present advantages, not to speak of the future (a noble title, peerage, embassy!), is enough to make me drunk already,--like the men who bottle other men's wine."

"All such social distinctions," said Canalis, "are of little use without the one thing that gives them value,--wealth. Here we can talk as men with men; fine sentiments only do in verse."

"That depends on circumstances," said the dwarf, with a knowing gesture.

"Ah! you writer of conveyances," said the poet, smiling at the interruption, "you know as well as I do that 'cottage' rhymes with 'pottage,'--and who would like to live on that for the rest of his days?"

At table Butscha played the part of Trigaudin, in the "Maison en loterie," in a way that alarmed Ernest, who did not know the waggery of a lawyer's office, which is quite equal to that of an atelier. Butscha poured forth the scandalous gossip of Havre, the private history of fortune and boudoirs, and the crimes committed code in hand, which are called in Normandy, "getting out of a thing as best you can." He spared no one; and his liveliness increased with the torrents of wine which poured down his throat like rain through a gutter.

"Do you know, La Briere," said Canalis, filling Butscha's glass, "that this fellow would make a capital secretary to the embassy?"

"And oust his chief!" cried the dwarf flinging a look at Canalis whose insolence was lost in the gurgling of carbonic acid gas. "I've little enough gratitude and quite enough scheming to get astride of your shoulders. Ha, ha, a poet carrying a hunchback! that's been seen, often seen--on book-shelves. Come, don't look at me as if I were swallowing swords. My dear great genius, you're a superior man; you know that gratitude is the word of fools; they stick it in the dictionary, but it isn't in the human heart; pledges are worth nothing, except on a certain mount that is neither Pindus nor Parnassus. You think I owe a great deal to my master's wife, who brought me up. Bless you, the whole town has paid her for that in praises, respect, and admiration,--the very best of coin. I don't recognize any service that is only the capital of self-love. Men make a commerce of their services, and gratitude goes down on the debit side,--that's all. As to schemes, they are my divinity. What?" he exclaimed, at a gesture of Canalis, "don't you admire the faculty which enables a wily man to get the better of a man of genius? it takes the closest observation of his vices, and his weaknesses, and the wit to seize the happy moment. Ask diplomacy if its greatest triumphs are not those of craft over force? If I were your secretary, Monsieur le baron, you'd soon be prime-minister, because it would be my interest to have you so. Do you want a specimen of my talents in that line? Well then, listen; you love Mademoiselle Modeste distractedly, and you've good reason to do so. The girl has my fullest esteem; she is a true Parisian. Sometimes we get a few real Parisians born down here in the provinces. Well, Modeste is just the woman to help a man's career. She's got _that_ in her," he cried, with a turn of his wrist in the air. "But you've a dangerous competitor in the duke; what will you give me to get him out of Havre within three days?"

"Finish this bottle," said the poet, refilling Butscha's glass.

"You'll make me drunk," said the dwarf, tossing off his ninth glass of champagne. "Have you a bed where I could sleep it off? My master is as sober as the camel that he is, and Madame Latournelle too. They are brutal enough, both of them, to scold me; and they'd have the rights of it too--there are those deeds I ought to be drawing!--" Then, suddenly returning to his previous ideas, after the fashion of a drunken man, he exclaimed, "and I've such a memory; it is on a par with my gratitude."

"Butscha!" cried the poet, "you said just now you had no gratitude; you contradict yourself."

"Not at all," he replied. "To forget a thing means almost always recollecting it. Come, come, do you want me to get rid of the duke? I'm cut out for a secretary."

"How could you manage it?" said Canalis, delighted to find the conversation taking this turn of its own accord.

"That's none of your business," said the dwarf, with a portentous hiccough.

Butscha's head rolled between his shoulders, and his eyes turned from Germain to La Briere, and from La Briere to Canalis, after the manner of men who, knowing they are tipsy, wish to see what other men are thinking of them; for in the shipwreck of drunkenness it is noticeable that self-love is the last thing that goes to the bottom.

"Ha! my great poet, you're a pretty good trickster yourself; but you are not deep enough. What do you mean by taking me for one of your own readers,--you who sent your friend to Paris, full gallop, to inquire into the property of the Mignon family? Ha, ha! I hoax, thou hoaxest, we hoax--Good! But do me the