Оноре де Бальзак
A Start in Life
Mistigris gave a sly glance at his companion.
“You know him, of course?” continued Estelle, after a slight pause.
“Who does not know him, madame?” said the painter.
“Knows him like his double,” remarked Mistigris.
“Monsieur Grindot told me your name,” said Madame Moreau to the painter. “But – ”
“Joseph Bridau,” he replied, wondering with what sort of woman he had to do.
Mistigris began to rebel internally against the patronizing manner of the steward’s wife; but he waited, like Bridau, for some word which might give him his cue; one of those words “de singe a dauphin” which artists, cruel, born-observers of the ridiculous – the pabulum of their pencils – seize with such avidity. Meantime Estelle’s clumsy hands and feet struck their eyes, and presently a word, or phrase or two, betrayed her past, and quite out of keeping with the elegance of her dress, made the two young fellows aware of their prey. A single glance at each other was enough to arrange a scheme that they should take Estelle seriously on her own ground, and thus find amusement enough during the time of their stay.
“You say you love art, madame; perhaps you cultivate it successfully,” said Joseph Bridau.
“No. Without being neglected, my education was purely commercial; but I have so profound and delicate a sense of art that Monsieur Schinner always asked me, when he had finished a piece of work, to give him my opinion on it.”
“Just as Moliere consulted La Foret,” said Mistigris.
Not knowing that La Foret was Moliere’s servant-woman, Madame Moreau inclined her head graciously, showing that in her ignorance she accepted the speech as a compliment.
“Didn’t he propose to ‘croquer’ you?” asked Bridau. “Painters are eager enough after handsome women.”
“What may you mean by such language?”
“In the studios we say croquer, craunch, nibble, for sketching,” interposed Mistigris, with an insinuating air, “and we are always wanting to croquer beautiful heads. That’s the origin of the expression, ‘She is pretty enough to eat.’”
“I was not aware of the origin of the term,” she replied, with the sweetest glance at Mistigris.
“My pupil here,” said Bridau, “Monsieur Leon de Lora, shows a remarkable talent for portraiture. He would be too happy, I know, to leave you a souvenir of our stay by painting your charming head, madame.”
Joseph Bridau made a sign to Mistigris which meant: “Come, sail in, and push the matter; she is not so bad in looks, this woman.”
Accepting the glance, Leon de Lora slid down upon the sofa beside Estelle and took her hand, which she permitted.
“Oh! madame, if you would like to offer a surprise to your husband, and will give me a few secret sittings I would endeavor to surpass myself. You are so beautiful, so fresh, so charming! A man without any talent might become a genius in painting you. He would draw from your eyes – ”
“We must paint your dear children in the arabesques,” said Bridau, interrupting Mistigris.
“I would rather have them in the salon; but perhaps I am indiscreet in asking it,” she replied, looking at Bridau coquettishly.
“Beauty, madame, is a sovereign whom all painters worship; it has unlimited claims upon them.”
“They are both charming,” thought Madame Moreau. “Do you enjoy driving? Shall I take you through the woods, after dinner, in my carriage?”
“Oh! oh! oh!” cried Mistigris, in three ecstatic tones. “Why, Presles will prove our terrestrial paradise.”
“With an Eve, a fair, young, fascinating woman,” added Bridau.
Just as Madame Moreau was bridling, and soaring to the seventh heaven, she was recalled like a kite by a twitch at its line.
“Madame!” cried her maid-servant, bursting into the room.
“Rosalie,” said her mistress, “who allowed you to come here without being sent for?”
Rosalie paid no heed to the rebuke, but whispered in her mistress’s ear: —
“The count is at the chateau.”
“Has he asked for me?” said the steward’s wife.
“No, madame; but he wants his trunk and the key of his apartment.”
“Then give them to him,” she replied, making an impatient gesture to hide her real trouble.
“Mamma! here’s Oscar Husson,” said her youngest son, bringing in Oscar, who turned as red as a poppy on seeing the two artists in evening dress.
“Oh! so you have come, my little Oscar,” said Estelle, stiffly. “I hope you will now go and dress,” she added, after looking at him contemptuously from head to foot. “Your mother, I presume, has not accustomed you to dine in such clothes as those.”
“Oh!” cried the cruel Mistigris, “a future diplomatist knows the saying that ‘two coats are better than none.’”
“How do you mean, a future diplomatist?” exclaimed Madame Moreau.
Poor Oscar had tears in his eyes as he looked in turn from Joseph to Leon.
“Merely a joke made in travelling,” replied Joseph, who wanted to save Oscar’s feelings out of pity.
“The boy just wanted to be funny like the rest of us, and he blagued, that’s all,” said Mistigris.
“Madame,” said Rosalie, returning to the door of the salon, “his Excellency has ordered dinner for eight, and wants it served at six o’clock. What are we to do?”
During Estelle’s conference with her head-woman the two artists and Oscar looked at each other in consternation; their glances were expressive of terrible apprehension.
“His Excellency! who is he?” said Joseph Bridau.
“Why, Monsieur le Comte de Serizy, of course,” replied little Moreau.
“Could it have been the count in the coucou?” said Leon de Lora.
“Oh!” exclaimed Oscar, “the Comte de Serizy always travels in his own carriage with four horses.”
“How did the Comte de Serizy get here?” said the painter to Madame Moreau, when she returned, much discomfited, to the salon.
“I am sure I do not know,” she said. “I cannot explain to myself this sudden arrival; nor do I know what has brought him – And Moreau not here!”
“His Excellency wishes Monsieur Schinner to come over to the chateau,” said the gardener, coming to the door of the salon. “And he begs Monsieur Schinner to give him the pleasure to dine with him; also Monsieur Mistigris.”
“Done for!” cried the rapin, laughing. “He whom we took for a bourgeois in the coucou was the count. You may well say: ‘Sour are the curses of perversity.’”
Oscar was very nearly changed to a pillar of salt; for, at this revelation, his throat felt saltier than the sea.
“And you, who talked to him about his wife’s lovers and his skin diseases!” said Mistigris, turning on Oscar.
“What does he mean?” exclaimed the steward’s wife, gazing after the two artists, who went away laughing at the expression of Oscar’s face.
Oscar remained dumb, confounded, stupefied, hearing nothing, though Madame Moreau questioned him and shook him violently by his arm, which she caught and squeezed. She gained nothing, however, and was forced to leave him in the salon without an answer, for Rosalie appeared again, to ask for linen and silver, and to beg she would go herself and see that the multiplied orders of the count were executed. All the household, together with the gardeners and the concierge and his wife, were going and coming in a confusion that may readily be imagined. The master had fallen upon his own house like a bombshell.
From the top of the hill near La Cave, where he left the coach, the count had gone, by the path through the woods well-known to him, to the house of his gamekeeper. The keeper was amazed when he saw his real master.
“Is Moreau here?” said the count. “I see his horse.”
“No, monseigneur; he means to go to Moulineaux before dinner, and he has left his horse here while he went to the chateau to give a few orders.”
“If you value your place,” said the count, “you will take that horse and ride at once to Beaumont, where you will deliver to Monsieur Margueron the note that I shall now write.”
So saying the count entered the keeper’s lodge and wrote a line, folding it in a way impossible to open without detection, and gave it to the man as soon as he saw him in the saddle.
“Not a word to any one,” he said, “and as for you, madame,” he added to the gamekeeper’s wife, “if Moreau comes back for his horse, tell him merely that I have taken it.”
The count then crossed the park and entered the court-yard of the chateau through the iron gates. However worn-out a man may be by the wear and tear of public life, by his own emotions, by his own mistakes and disappointments, the soul of any man able to love deeply at the count’s age is still young and sensitive to treachery. Monsieur de Serizy had felt such pain at the thought that Moreau had deceived him, that even after hearing the conversation at Saint-Brice he thought him less an accomplice of Leger and the notary than their tool. On the threshold of the inn, and while that conversation was still going on, he thought of pardoning his steward after giving him a good reproof. Strange to say, the dishonesty of his confidential agent occupied his mind as a mere episode from the moment when Oscar revealed his infirmities. Secrets so carefully guarded could only have been revealed by Moreau, who had, no doubt, laughed over the hidden troubles of his benefactor with either Madame de Serizy’s former maid or with the Aspasia of the Directory.
As he walked along the wood-path, this peer of France, this statesman, wept as young men weep; he wept his last tears. All human feelings were so cruelly hurt by one stroke that the usually calm man staggered through his park like a wounded deer.
When Moreau arrived at the gamekeeper’s lodge and asked for his horse, the keeper’s wife replied: —
“Monsieur le comte has just taken it.”
“Monsieur le comte!” cried Moreau. “Whom do you mean?”
“Why, the Comte de Serizy, our master,” she replied. “He is probably at the chateau by this time,” she added, anxious to be rid of the steward, who, unable to understand the meaning of her words, turned back towards the chateau.
But he presently turned again and came back to the lodge, intending to question the woman more closely; for he began to see something serious in this secret arrival, and the apparently strange method of his master’s return. But the wife of the gamekeeper, alarmed to find herself caught in a vise between the count and his steward, had locked herself into the house, resolved not to open to any but her husband. Moreau, more and more uneasy, ran rapidly, in spite of his boots and spurs, to the chateau, where he was told that the count was dressing.
“Seven persons invited to dinner!” cried Rosalie as soon as she saw him.
Moreau then went through the offices to his own house. On his way he met the poultry-girl, who was having an altercation with a handsome young man.
“Monsieur le comte particularly told me a colonel, an aide-de-camp of Mina,” insisted the girl.
“I am not a colonel,” replied Georges.
“But isn’t your name Georges?”
“What’s all this?” said the steward, intervening.
“Monsieur, my name is Georges Marest; I am the son of a rich wholesale ironmonger in the rue Saint-Martin; I come on business to Monsieur le Comte de Serizy from Maitre Crottat, a notary, whose second clerk I am.”
“And I,” said the girl, “am telling him that monseigneur said to me: ‘There’ll come a colonel named Czerni-Georges, aide-de-camp to Mina; he’ll come by Pierrotin’s coach; if he asks for me show him into the waiting-room.’”
“Evidently,” said the clerk, “the count is a traveller who came down with us in Pierrotin’s coucou; if it hadn’t been for the politeness of a young man he’d have come as a rabbit.”
“A rabbit! in Pierrotin’s coucou!” exclaimed Moreau and the poultry-girl together.
“I am sure of it, from what this girl is now saying,” said Georges.
“How so?” asked the steward.
“Ah! that’s the point,” cried the clerk. “To hoax the travellers and have a bit of fun I told them a lot of stuff about Egypt and Greece and Spain. As I happened to be wearing spurs I have myself out for a colonel of cavalry: pure nonsense!”
“Tell me,” said Moreau, “what did this traveller you take to be Monsieur le comte look like?”
“Face like a brick,” said Georges, “hair snow-white, and black eyebrows.”
“That is he!”
“Then I’m lost!” exclaimed Georges.
“Why?”
“Oh, I chaffed him about his decorations.”
“Pooh! he’s a good fellow; you probably amused him. Come at once to the chateau. I’ll go in and see his Excellency. Where did you say he left the coach?”
“At the top of the mountain.”
“I don’t know what to make of it!”
“After all,” thought Georges, “though I did blague him, I didn’t say anything insulting.”
“Why have you come here?” asked the steward.
“I have brought the deed of sale for the farm at Moulineaux, all ready for signature.”
“Good heavens!” exclaimed the steward, “I don’t understand one word of all this!”
Moreau felt his heart beat painfully when, after giving two raps on his master’s door, he heard the words: —
“Is that you, Monsieur Moreau?”
“Yes, monseigneur.”
“Come in.”
The count was now wearing a pair of white trousers and thin boots, a white waistcoat and a black coat on which shone the grand cross of the Legion upon the right breast, and fastened to a buttonhole on the left was the order of the Golden Fleece hanging by a short gold chain. He had arranged his hair himself, and had, no doubt, put himself in full dress to do the honors of Presles to Monsieur Margueron; and, possibly, to impress the good man’s mind with a prestige of grandeur.
“Well, monsieur,” said the count, who remained seated, leaving Moreau to stand before him. “We have not concluded that purchase from Margueron.”
“He asks too much for the farm at the present moment.”
“But why is he not coming to dinner as I requested?”
“Monseigneur, he is ill.”
“Are you sure?”
“I have just come from there.”
“Monsieur,” said the count, with a stern air which was really terrible, “what would you do with a man whom you trusted, if, after seeing you dress wounds which you desired to keep secret from all the world, he should reveal your misfortunes and laugh at your malady with a strumpet?”
“I would thrash him for it.”
“And if you discovered that he was also betraying your confidence and robbing you?”
“I should endeavor to detect him, and send him to the galleys.”
“Monsieur Moreau, listen to me. You have undoubtedly spoken of my infirmities to Madame Clapart; you have laughed at her house, and with her, over my attachment to the Comtesse de Serizy; for her son, little Husson, told a number of circumstances relating to my medical treatment, to travellers by a public conveyance in my presence, and Heaven knows in what language! He dared to calumniate my wife. Besides this, I learned from the lips of Pere Leger himself, who was in the coach, of the plan laid by the notary at Beaumont and by you and by himself in relation to Les Moulineaux. If you have been, as you say, to Monsieur Margueron, it was to tell him to feign illness. He is so little ill that he is coming here to dinner this evening. Now, monsieur, I could pardon you having made two hundred and fifty thousand francs out of your situation in seventeen years, – I can understand that. You might each time have asked me for what you took, and I would have given it to you; but let that pass. You have been, notwithstanding this disloyalty, better than others, as I believe. But that you, who knew my toil for our country, for France, you have seen me giving night after night to the Emperor’s service, and working eighteen hours of each twenty-four for months together, you who knew my love for Madame de Serizy, – that you should have gossiped about me before a boy! holding up my secrets and my affections to the ridicule of a Madame Husson! – ”
“Monseigneur!”
“It is unpardonable. To injure a man’s interest, why, that is nothing; but to stab his heart! – Oh! you do not know what you have done!”
The count put his head in his hands and was silent for some moments.
“I leave you what you have gained,” he said after a time, “and I shall forget you. For my sake, for my dignity, and for your honor, we will part decently; for I cannot but remember even now what your father did for mine. You will explain the duties of the stewardship in a proper manner to Monsieur de Reybert, who succeeds you. Be calm, as I am. Give no opportunity for fools to talk. Above all, let there be no recrimination or petty meanness. Though you no longer possess my confidence, endeavor to behave with the decorum of well-bred persons. As for that miserable boy who has wounded me to death, I will not have him sleep at Presles; send him to the inn; I will not answer for my own temper if I see him.”
“I do not deserve such gentleness, monseigneur,” said Moreau, with tears in his eyes. “Yes, you are right; if I had been utterly dishonest I should now be worth five hundred thousand francs instead of half that sum. I offer to give you an account of my fortune, with all its details. But let me tell you, monseigneur, that in talking of you with Madame Clapart, it was never in derision; but, on the contrary, to deplore your state, and to ask her for certain remedies, not used by physicians, but known to the common people. I spoke of your feelings before the boy, who was in his bed and, as I supposed, asleep (it seems he must have been awake and listening to us), with the utmost affection and respect. Alas! fate wills that indiscretions be punished like crimes. But while accepting the results of your just anger, I wish you to know what actually took place. It was, indeed, from heart to heart that I spoke of you to Madame Clapart. As for my wife, I have never said one word of these things – ”
“Enough,” said the count, whose conviction was now complete; “we are not children. All is now irrevocable. Put your affairs and mine in order. You can stay in the pavilion until October. Monsieur and Madame de Reybert will lodge for the present in the chateau; endeavor to keep on terms with them, like well-bred persons who hate each other, but still keep up appearances.”
The count and Moreau went downstairs; Moreau white as the count’s hair, the count himself calm and dignified.
During the time this interview lasted the Beaumont coach, which left Paris at one o’clock, had stopped before the gates of the chateau, and deposited Maitre Crottat, the notary, who was shown, according to the count’s orders, into the salon, where he found his clerk, extremely subdued in manner, and the two painters, all three of them painfully self-conscious and embarrassed. Monsieur de Reybert, a man of fifty, with a crabbed expression of face, was also there, accompanied by old Margueron and the notary of Beaumont, who held in his hand a bundle of deeds and other papers.
When these various personages saw the count in evening dress, and wearing his orders, Georges Marest had a slight sensation of colic, Joseph Bridau quivered, but Mistigris, who was conscious of being in his Sunday clothes, and had, moreover, nothing on his conscience, remarked, in a sufficiently loud tone: —
“Well, he looks a great deal better like that.”
“Little scamp,” said the count, catching him by the ear, “we are both in the decoration business. I hope you recognize your own work, my dear Schinner,” he added, pointing to the ceiling of the salon.
“Monseigneur,” replied the artist, “I did wrong to take such a celebrated name out of mere bravado; but this day will oblige me to do fine things for you, and so bring credit on my own name of Joseph Bridau.”
“You took up my defence,” said the count, hastily; “and I hope you will give me the pleasure of dining with me, as well as my lively friend Mistigris.”
“Your Excellency doesn’t know to what you expose yourself,” said the saucy rapin; “‘facilis descensus victuali,’ as we say at the Black Hen.”
“Bridau!” exclaimed the minister, struck by a sudden thought. “Are you any relation to one of the most devoted toilers under the Empire, the head of a bureau, who fell a victim to his zeal?”
“His son, monseigneur,” replied Joseph, bowing.
“Then you are most welcome here,” said the count, taking Bridau’s hand in both of his. “I knew your father, and you can count on me as on – on an uncle in America,” added the count, laughing. “But you are too young to have pupils of your own; to whom does Mistigris really belong?”
“To my friend Schinner, who lent him to me,” said Joseph. “Mistigris’ name is Leon de Lora. Monseigneur, if you knew my father, will you deign to think of his other son, who is now accused of plotting against the State, and is soon to be tried before the Court of Peers?”
“Ah! that’s true,” said the count. “Yes, I will think about it, be sure of that. As for Colonel Czerni-Georges, the friend of Ali Pacha, and Mina’s aide-de-camp – ” he continued, walking up to Georges.
“He! why that’s my second clerk!” cried Crottat.
“You are quite mistaken, Maitre Crottat,” said the count, assuming a stern air. “A clerk who intends to be a notary does not leave important deeds in a diligence at the mercy of other travellers; neither does he spend twenty francs between Paris and Moisselles; or expose himself to be arrested as a deserter – ”
“Monseigneur,” said Georges Marest, “I may have amused myself with the bourgeois in the diligence, but – ”
“Let his Excellency finish what he was saying,” said the notary, digging his elbow into his clerk’s ribs.
“A notary,” continued the count, “ought to practise discretion, shrewdness, caution from the start; he should be incapable of such a blunder as taking a peer of France for a tallow-chandler – ”
“I am willing to be blamed for my faults,” said Georges; “but I never left my deeds at the mercy of – ”
“Now you are committing the fault of contradicting the word of a minister of State, a gentleman, an old man, and a client,” said the count. “Give me that deed of sale.”
Georges turned over and over the papers in his portfolio.
“That will do; don’t disarrange those papers,” said the count, taking the deed from his pocket. “Here is what you are looking for.”
Crottat turned the paper back and forth, so astonished was he at receiving it from the hands of his client.
“What does this mean, monsieur?” he said, finally, to Georges.
“If I had not taken it,” said the count, “Pere Leger, – who is by no means such a ninny as you thought him from his questions about agriculture, by which he showed that he attended to his own business, – Pere Leger might have seized that paper and guessed my purpose. You must give me the pleasure of dining with me, but one on condition, – that of describing, as you promised, the execution of the Muslim of Smyrna, and you must also finish the memoirs of some client which you have certainly read to be so well informed.”
“Schlague for blague!” said Leon de Lora, in a whisper, to Joseph Bridau.
“Gentlemen,” said the count to the two notaries and Messieurs Margueron and de Reybert, “let us go into the next room and conclude this business before dinner, because, as my friend Mistigris would say: ‘Qui esurit constentit.’”
“Well, he is very good-natured,” said Leon de Lora to Georges Marest, when the count had left the room.
“Yes, HE may be, but my master isn’t,” said Georges, “and he will request me to go and blaguer somewhere else.”
“Never mind, you like travel,” said Bridau.
“What a dressing that boy will get from Monsieur and Madame Moreau!” cried Mistigris.
“Little idiot!” said Georges. “If it hadn’t been for him the count would have been amused. Well, anyhow, the lesson is a good one; and if ever again I am caught bragging in a public coach – ”
“It is a stupid thing to do,” said Joseph Bridau.
“And common,” added Mistigris. “‘Vulgarity is the brother of pretension.’”
While the matter of the sale was being settled between Monsieur Margueron and the Comte de Serizy, assisted by their respective notaries in presence of Monsieur de Reybert, the ex-steward walked with slow steps to his own house. There he entered the salon and sat down without noticing anything. Little Husson, who was present, slipped into a corner, out of sight, so much did the livid face of his mother’s friend alarm him.
“Eh! my friend!” said Estelle, coming into the room, somewhat tired with what she had been doing. “What is the matter?”
“My dear, we are lost, – lost beyond recovery. I am no longer steward of Presles, no longer in the count’s confidence.”
“Why not?”
“Pere Leger, who was in Pierrotin’s coach, told the count all about the affair of Les Moulineaux. But that is not the thing that has cost me his favor.”
“What then?”
“Oscar spoke ill of the countess, and he told about the count’s diseases.”
“Oscar!” cried Madame Moreau. “Ah! my dear, your sin has found you out. It was well worth while to warm that young serpent in your bosom. How often I have told you – ”
“Enough!” said Moreau, in a strained voice.
At this moment Estelle and her husband discovered Oscar cowering in his corner. Moreau swooped down on the luckless lad like a hawk on its prey, took him by the collar of the coat and dragged him to the light of a window. “Speak! what did you say to monseigneur in that coach? What demon let loose your tongue, you who keep a doltish silence whenever I speak to you? What did you do it for?” cried the steward, with frightful violence.
Too bewildered to weep, Oscar was dumb and motionless as a statue.
“Come with me and beg his Excellency’s pardon,” said Moreau.
“As if his Excellency cares for a little toad like that!” cried the furious Estelle.
“Come, I say, to the chateau,” repeated Moreau.
Oscar dropped like an inert mass to the ground.
“Come!” cried Moreau, his anger increasing at every instant.
“No! no! mercy!” cried Oscar, who could not bring himself to submit to a torture that seemed to him worse than death.
Moreau then took the lad by his coat, and dragged him, as he might a dead body, through the yards, which rang with the boy’s outcries and sobs. He pulled him up the portico, and, with an arm that fury made powerful, he flung him, bellowing, and rigid as a pole, into the salon, at the very feet of the count, who, having completed the purchase of Les Moulineaux, was about to leave the salon for the dining-room with his guests.
“On your knees, wretched boy! and ask pardon of him who gave food to your mind by obtaining your scholarship.”
Oscar, his face to the ground, was foaming with rage, and did not say a word. The spectators of the scene were shocked. Moreau seemed no longer in his senses; his face was crimson with injected blood.
“This young man is a mere lump of vanity,” said the count, after waiting a moment for Oscar’s excuses. “A proud man humiliates himself because he sees there is grandeur in a certain self-abasement. I am afraid that you will never make much of that lad.”
So saying, his Excellency passed on. Moreau took Oscar home with him; and on the way gave orders that the horses should immediately be put to Madame Moreau’s caleche.