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

creditor agrees to help you, I shall not consider my interests; I shall sell out my Funds and live on dry bread; Popinot will get along between life and death, and as for you, you will be at the mercy of the smallest commercial mischance; but Cephalic Oil will undoubtedly make great returns. Popinot and I have consulted together; we will stand by you in this struggle. Ah! I shall eat my dry bread gaily if I see daylight breaking on the horizon. But everything depends on Gigonnet, who holds the notes, and the associates of Claparon. Popinot and I are going to see Gigonnet between seven and eight o'clock in the morning, and then we shall know what their intentions are."

Constance, wholly overcome, threw herself into her uncle's arms, voiceless except through tears and sobs.

Neither Popinot nor Pillerault knew or could know that Bidault, called Gigonnet, and Claparon were du Tillet under two shapes; and that du Tillet was resolved to read in the "Journal des Petites Affiches" this terrible article:--

"Judgment of the Court of Commerce, which declares the Sieur Cesar
Birotteau, merchant-perfumer, living in Paris, Rue Saint-Honore,
no. 397, insolvent, and appoints the preliminary examination on
the 17th of January, 1819. Commissioner, Monsieur
Gobenheim-Keller. Agent, Monsieur Molineux."

Anselme and Pillerault examined Cesar's affairs until daylight. At eight o'clock in the morning the two brave friends,--one an old soldier, the other a young recruit, who had never known, except by hearsay, the terrible anguish of those who commonly went up the staircase of Bidault called Gigonnet,--wended their way, without a word to each other, towards the Rue Grenetat. Both were suffering; from time to time Pillerault passed his hand across his brow.

The Rue Grenetat is a street where all the houses, crowded with trades of every kind, have a repulsive aspect. The buildings are horrible. The vile uncleanliness of manufactories is their leading feature. Old Gigonnet lived on the third floor of a house whose window-sashes, with small and very dirty panes, swung by the middle, on pivots. The staircase opened directly upon the street. The porter's lodge was on the _entresol_, in a space which was lighted only from the staircase. All the lodgers, with the exception of Gigonnet, worked at trades. Workmen were continually coming and going. The stairs were caked with a layer of mud, hard or soft according to the state of the atmosphere, and were covered with filth. Each landing of this noisome stairway bore the names of the occupants in gilt letters on a metal plate, painted red and varnished, to which were attached specimens of their craft. As a rule, the doors stood open and gave to view queer combinations of the domestic household and the manufacturing operations. Strange cries and grunts issued therefrom, with songs and whistles and hisses that recalled the hour of four o'clock in the Jardin des Plantes. On the first floor, in an evil-smelling lair, the handsomest braces to be found in the _article-Paris_ were made. On the second floor, the elegant boxes which adorn the shop-windows of the boulevards and the Palais-Royal at the beginning of the new year were manufactured, in the midst of the vilest filth. Gigonnet eventually died, worth eighteen hundred thousand francs, on a third floor of this house, from which no consideration could move him; though his niece, Madame Saillard, offered to give him an appartement in a hotel in the Place Royalle.

"Courage!" said Pillerault, as he pulled the deer's hoof hanging from the bell-rope of Gigonnet's clean gray door.

Gigonnet opened the door himself. Cesar's two supporters, entering the precincts of bankruptcy, crossed the first room, which was clean and chilly and without curtains to its windows. All three sat down in the inner room where the money-lender lived, before a hearth full of ashes, in the midst of which the wood was successfully defending itself against the fire. Popinot's courage froze at sight of the usurer's green boxes and the monastic austerity of the room, whose atmosphere was like that of a cellar. He looked with a wondering eye at the miserable blueish paper sprinkled with tricolor flowers, which had been on the walls for twenty-five years; and then his anxious glance fell upon the chimney-piece, ornamented with a clock shaped like a lyre, and two oval vases in Sevres blue richly mounted in copper-gilt. This relic, picked up by Gigonnet after the pillage of Versailles, where the populace broke nearly everything, came from the queen's boudoir; but these rare vases were flanked by two candelabra of abject shape made of wrought-iron, and the barbarous contrast recalled the circumstances under which the vases had been acquired.

"I know that you have not come on your own account," said Gigonnet, "but on behalf of the great Birotteau. Well, what is it, my friends?"

"We can tell you nothing that you do not already know; so I will be brief," said Pillerault. "You have notes to the order of Claparon?"

"Yes."

"Will you exchange the first fifty thousand of those notes against the notes of Monsieur Popinot, here present,--less the discount, of course?"

Gigonnet took off the terrible green cap which seemed to have been born on him, pointed to his skull, denuded of hair and of the color of fresh butter, made his usual Voltairean grimace, and said: "You wish to pay me in hair-oil; have I any use for it?"

"If you choose to jest, there is nothing to be done but to beat a retreat," said Pillerault.

"You speak like the wise man that you are," answered Gigonnet, with a flattering smile.

"Well, suppose I endorse Monsieur Popinot's notes?" said Pillerault, playing his last card.

"You are gold by the ingot, Monsieur Pillerault; but I don't want bars of gold, I want my money."

Pillerault and Popinot bowed and went away. Going down the stairs, Popinot's knees shook under him.

"Is that a man?" he said to Pillerault.

"They say so," replied the other. "My boy, always bear in mind this short interview. Anselme, you have just seen the banking-business unmasked, without its cloak of courtesy. Unexpected events are the screw of the press, we are the grapes, the bankers are the casks. That land speculation is no doubt a good one; Gigonnet, or some one behind him, means to strangle Cesar and step into his skin. It is all over; there's no remedy. But such is the Bank: be warned; never have recourse to it!"

After this horrible morning, during which Madame Birotteau for the first time sent away those who came for their money, taking their addresses, the courageous woman, happy in the thought that she was thus sparing her husband from distress, saw Popinot and Pillerault, for whom she waited with ever-growing anxiety, return at eleven o'clock, and read her sentence in their faces. The assignment was inevitable.

"He will die of grief," said the poor woman.

"I could almost wish he might," said Pillerault, solemnly; "but he is so religious that, as things are now, his director, the Abbe Loraux, alone can save him."

Pillerault, Popinot, and Constance waited while a clerk was sent to bring the Abbe Loraux, before they carried up to Cesar the schedule which Celestin had prepared, and asked him to affix his signature. The clerks were in despair, for they loved their master. At four o'clock the good priest came; Constance explained the misfortune that had fallen upon them, and the abbe went upstairs as a soldier mounts the breach.

"I know why you have come!" cried Birotteau.

"My son," said the priest, "your feelings of resignation to the Divine will have long been known to me; it now remains to apply them. Keep your eyes upon the cross; never cease to behold it, and think upon the humiliations heaped upon the Saviour of men. Meditate upon the agonies of his passion, and you will be able to bear the mortification which God has laid upon you--"

"My brother, the abbe, has already prepared me," said Cesar, showing the letter, which he had re-read and now held out to his confessor.

"You have a good brother," said Monsieur Loraux, "a virtuous and gentle wife, a tender daughter, two good friends,--your uncle and our dear Anselme,--two indulgent creditors, the Ragons: all these kind hearts will pour balm upon your wounds daily, and will help you to bear your cross. Promise me to have the firmness of a martyr, and to face the blow without faltering."

The abbe coughed, to give notice to Pillerault who was waiting in the salon.

"My resignation is unbounded," said Cesar, calmly. "Dishonor has come; I must now think only of reparation."

The firm voice of the poor man and his whole manner surprised Cesarine and the priest. Yet nothing could be more natural. All men can better bear a known and definite misfortune than the cruel uncertainties of a fate which, from one moment to another, brings excessive hope or crushing sorrow.

"I have dreamed a dream for twenty-two years; to-day I awake with my cudgel in my hand," said Cesar, his mind turning back to the Tourangian peasant days.

Pillerault pressed his nephew in his arms as he heard the words. Birotteau saw that his wife, Anselme, and Celestin were present. The papers which the head-clerk held in his hand were significant. Cesar calmly contemplated the little group where every eye was sad but loving.

"Stay!" he said, unfastening his cross, which he held out to the Abbe Loraux; "give it back to me on the day when I can wear it without shame. Celestin," he added, "write my resignation as deputy-mayor,--Monsieur l'abbe will dictate the letter to you; date it the 14th, and send it at once to Monsieur de la Billardiere by Raguet."

Celestin and the abbe went down stairs. For a quarter of an hour silence reigned unbroken in Cesar's study. Such strength of mind surprised the family. Celestin and the abbe came back, and Cesar signed his resignation. When his uncle Pillerault presented the schedule and the papers of his assignment, the poor man could not repress a horrible nervous shudder.

"My God, have pity upon me!" he said, signing the dreadful paper, and holding it out to Celestin.

"Monsieur," said Anselme Popinot, over whose dejected brow a luminous light flashed suddenly, "madame, do me the honor to grant me the hand of Mademoiselle Cesarine."

At these words tears came into the eyes of all present except Cesar; he rose, took Anselme by the hand and said, in a hollow voice, "My son, you shall never marry the daughter of a bankrupt."

Anselme looked fixedly at Birotteau and said: "Monsieur, will you pledge yourself, here, in presence of your whole family, to consent to our marriage, if mademoiselle will accept me as her husband, on the day when you have retrieved your failure?"

There was an instant's silence, during which all present were affected by the emotions painted on the worn face of the poor man.

"Yes," he said, at last.

Anselme made a gesture of unspeakable joy, as he took the hand which Cesarine held out to him, and kissed it.

"You consent, then?" he said to her.

"Yes," she answered.

"Now that I am one of the family, I have the right to concern myself in its affairs," he said, with a strange, excited expression of face.

He left the room precipitately, that he might not show a joy which contrasted too cruelly with the sorrow of his master. Anselme was not actually happy at the failure, but love is such an egoist! Even Cesarine