The Lesser Bourgeoisie, Honore de Balzac [good book recommendations .TXT] 📗

Phellion, had lived for the last thirty years in their

present quarter. He was promptly greeted by Colleville and Thuillier

at the first review. Phellion proved to be one of the most respected

men in the arrondissement. He had one daughter, now married to a

school-teacher in the rue Saint-Hyacinthe, a Monsieur Barniol.

Phellion's eldest son was a professor of mathematics in a royal

college; he gave lectures and private lessons, being devoted, so his

father was wont to say, to pure mathematics. A second son was in the

government School of Engineering. Phellion had a pension of nine

hundred francs, and he possessed a little property of nine thousand

and a few odd hundred francs; the fruit of his economy and that of his

wife during thirty years of toil and privation. He was, moreover, the

owner of a little house and garden where he lived in the "impasse" des

Feuillantines,--in thirty years he had never used the old-fashioned

word "cul-de-sac"!

 

Dutocq, the clerk of the justice of peace, was also a former employee

at the ministry of finance. Sacrificed, in former days, to one of

those necessities which are always met with in representative

government, he had accepted the position of scapegoat, receiving,

privately, a round sum of money and the opportunity to buy his present

post of clerk in the arrondissement. This man, not very honorable, and

known to be a spy in the government offices, was never welcomed as he

thought he ought to be by the Thuilliers; but the coldness of his

landlords only made him the more persistent in going to see them. He

was a bachelor and had various vices; he therefore concealed his life

carefully, knowing well how to maintain his position by flattering his

superiors. The justice of peace was much attached to Dutocq. This man,

base as he was, managed, in the end, to make himself tolerated by the

Thuilliers, chiefly by coarse and cringing adulation. He knew the

facts of Thuillier's whole life, his relations with Colleville, and,

above all, with Madame Colleville. One and all they feared his tongue,

and the Thuilliers, without admitting him to any intimacy, endured his

visits.

 

The family which became the flower of the Thuillier salon was that of

a former ministerial clerk, once an object of pity in the government

offices, who, driven by poverty, left the public service, in 1827, to

fling himself into a business enterprise, having, as he thought, an

idea. Minard (that was his name) foresaw a fortune in one of those

wicked conceptions which reflect such discredit on French commerce,

but which, in the year 1827, had not yet been exposed and blasted by

publicity. Minard bought tea and mixed it with tea-leaves already

used; also he adulterated the elements of chocolate in a manner which

enabled him to sell the chocolate itself very cheaply. This trade in

colonial products, begun in the quartier Saint-Marcel, made a merchant

of Minard. He started a factory, and through these early connections

he was able to reach the sources of raw material. He then did

honorably, and on a large scale, a business begun in the first

instance dishonorably. He became a distiller, worked upon untold

quantities of products, and, by the year 1835, was considered the

richest merchant in the region of the Place Maubert. By that time he

had bought a handsome house in the rue des Macons-Sorbonne; he had

been assistant mayor, and in 1839 became mayor of his arrondissement

and judge in the Court of Commerce. He kept a carriage, had a

country-place near Lagny; his wife wore diamonds at the court balls,

and he prided himself on the rosette of an officer of the Legion of

honor in his buttonhole.

 

Minard and his wife were exceedingly benevolent. Perhaps he wished to

return in retail to the poor the sums he had mulcted from the public

by the wholesale. Phellion, Colleville, and Thuillier met their old

comrade, Minard, at election, and an intimacy followed; all the closer

with the Thuilliers and Collevilles because Madame Minard seemed

enchanted to make an acquaintance for her daughter in Celeste

Colleville. It was at a grand ball given by the Minards that Celeste

made her first appearance in society (being at that time sixteen and a

half years old), dressed as her Christian named demanded, which seemed

to be prophetic of her coming life. Delighted to be friendly with

Mademoiselle Minard, her elder by four years, she persuaded her father

and godfather to cultivate the Minard establishment, with its gilded

salons and great opulence, where many political celebrities of the

"juste milieu" were wont to congregate, such as Monsieur Popinot, who

became, after a time, minister of commerce; Cochin, since made Baron

Cochin, a former employee at the ministry of finance, who, having a

large interest in the drug business, was now the oracle of the Lombard

and Bourdonnais quarters, conjointly with Monsieur Anselme Popinot.

Minard's eldest son, a lawyer, aiming to succeed those barristers who

were turned down from the Palais for political reasons in 1830, was

the genius of the household, and his mother, even more than his

father, aspired to marry him well. Zelie Minard, formerly a

flower-maker, felt an ardent passion for the upper social spheres, and

desired to enter them through the marriages of her son and daughter;

whereas Minard, wiser than she, and imbued with the vigor of the

middle classes, which the revolution of July had infiltrated into the

fibres of government, thought only of wealth and fortune.

 

He frequented the Thuillier salon to gain information as to Celeste's

probable inheritance. He knew, like Dutocq and Phellion, the reports

occasioned by Thuillier's former intimacy with Flavie, and he saw at a

glance the idolatry of the Thuilliers for their godchild. Dutocq, to

gain admittance to Minard's house, fawned upon him grossly. When

Minard, the Rothschild of the arrondissement, appeared at the

Thuilliers', he compared him cleverly to Napoleon, finding him stout,

fat, and blooming, having left him at the ministry thin, pale, and

puny.

 

"You looked, in the division Billardiere," he said, "like Napoleon

before the 18th Brumaire, and I behold you now the Napoleon of the

Empire."

 

Notwithstanding which flattery, Minard received Dutocq very coldly and

did not invite him to his house; consequently, he made a mortal enemy

of the former clerk.

 

Monsieur and Madame Phellion, worthy as they were, could not keep

themselves from making calculations and cherishing hopes; they thought

that Celeste would be the very wife for their son the professor;

therefore, to have, as it were, a watcher in the Thuillier salon, they

introduced their son-in-law, Monsieur Barniol, a man much respected in

the faubourg Saint-Jacques, and also an old employee at the mayor's

office, an intimate friend of theirs, named Laudigeois. Thus the

Phellions formed a phalanx of seven persons; the Collevilles were not

less numerous; so that on Sundays it often appeared that thirty

persons were assembled in the Thuillier salon. Thuillier renewed

acquaintance with the Saillards, Baudoyers, and Falleixs,--all persons

of respectability in the quarter of the Palais-Royal, whom they often

invited to dinner.

 

Madame Colleville was, as a woman, the most distinguished member of

this society, just as Minard junior and Professor Phellion were

superior among the men. All the others, without ideas or education,

and issuing from the lower ranks, presented the types and the

absurdities of the lesser bourgeoisie. Though all success, especially

if won from distant sources, seems to presuppose some genuine merit,

Minard was really an inflated balloon. Expressing himself in empty

phrases, mistaking sycophancy for politeness, and wordiness for wit,

he uttered his commonplaces with a brisk assurance that passed for

eloquence. Certain words which said nothing but answered all things,

--progress, steam, bitumen, National guard, order, democratic element,

spirit of association, legality, movement, resistance,--seemed, as

each political phase developed, to have been actually made for Minard,

whose talk was a paraphrase on the ideas of his newspaper. Julien

Minard, the young lawyer, suffered from his father as much as his

father suffered from his wife. Zelie had grown pretentious with

wealth, without, at the same time, learning to speak French. She was

now very fat, and gave the idea, in her rich surroundings, of a cook

married to her master.

 

Phellion, that type and model of the petty bourgeois, exhibited as

many virtues as he did absurdities. Accustomed to subordination during

his bureaucratic life, he respected all social superiority. He was

therefore silent before Minard. During the critical period of

retirement from office, he had held his own admirably, for the

following reason. Never until now had that worthy and excellent man

been able to indulge his own tastes. He loved the city of Paris; he

was interested in its embellishment, in the laying out of its streets;

he was capable of standing for hours to watch the demolition of

houses. He might now have been observed, stolidly planted on his legs,

his nose in the air, watching for the fall of a stone which some mason

was loosening at the top of a wall, and never moving till the stone

fell; when it had fallen he went away as happy as an academician at

the fall of a romantic drama. Veritable supernumeraries of the social

comedy, Phellion, Laudigeois, and their kind, fulfilled the functions

of the antique chorus. They wept when weeping was in order, laughed

when they should laugh, and sang in parts the public joys and sorrows;

they triumphed in their corner with the triumphs of Algiers, of

Constantine, of Lisbon, of Sainte-Jean d'Ulloa; they deplored the

death of Napoleon and the fatal catastrophes of the Saint-Merri and

the rue Transnonnain, grieving over celebrated men who were utterly

unknown to them. Phellion alone presents a double side: he divides

himself conscientiously between the reasons of the opposition and

those of the government. When fighting went on in the streets,

Phellion had the courage to declare himself before his neighbors; he

went to the Place Saint-Michel, the place where his battalion

assembled; he felt for the government and did his duty. Before and

during the riot, he supported the dynasty, the product of July; but,

as soon as the political trials began, he stood by the accused. This

innocent "weather-cockism" prevails in his political opinions; he

produces, in reply to all arguments, the "colossus of the North."

England is, to his thinking, as to that of the old "Constitutionnel,"

a crone with two faces,--Machiavellian Albion, and the model nation:

Machiavellian, when the interests of France and of Napoleon are

concerned; the model nation when the faults of the government are in

question. He admits, with his chosen paper, the democratic element,

but refuses in conversation all compact with the republican spirit.

The republican spirit to him means 1793, rioting, the Terror, and

agrarian law. The democratic element is the development of the lesser

bourgeoisie, the reign of Phellions.

 

The worthy old man is always dignified; dignity serves to explain his

life. He has brought up his children with dignity; he has kept himself

a father in their eyes; he insists on being honored in his home, just

as he himself honors power and his superiors. He has never made debts.

As a juryman his conscience obliges him to sweat blood and water in

the effort to follow the debates of a trial; he never laughs, not even

if the judge, and audience, and all the officials laugh. Eminently

useful, he gives his services, his time, everything--except his money.

Felix Phellion, his son, the professor, is his idol; he thinks him

capable of attaining to the Academy of Sciences. Thuillier, between

the audacious nullity of Minard, and the solid silliness of Phellion,

was a neutral substance, but connected with both through his dismal

experience. He managed to conceal the emptiness of his brain by

commonplace talk, just as he covered the yellow skin of his bald pate

with thready locks of his gray hair, brought from the back of his head

with infinite art by the comb of his hairdresser.

 

"In any other career," he was wont to say, speaking of the government

employ, "I should have made a very different fortune."

 

He had seen the _right_, which is possible in theory and impossible in

practice,--results proving contrary to premises,--and he related the

intrigues and the injustices of the Rabourdin affair.

 

"After that, one can believe all, and believe nothing," he would say.

"Ah! it is a queer thing, government! I'm very glad not to have a son,

and never to see him in the career of a place-hunter."

 

Colleville, ever gay, rotund, and good-humored, a sayer of

"quodlibets," a maker of anagrams, always busy, represented the

capable and bantering bourgeois, with faculty without success,

obstinate toil without result; he was also the embodiment of jovial

resignation, mind without object, art with usefulness, for, excellent

musician that he was, he never played now except for his daughter.

 

The Thuillier salon was in some sort a provincial salon, lighted,

however, by continual flashes from the Parisian conflagration; its

mediocrity and its platitudes followed the current of the times. The

popular saying and thing (for in Paris the thing and its