The Brotherhood of Consolation - Honoré de Balzac (best free ebook reader for android txt) 📗

two big tears rolling down his cheeks. The sight of those tears wrung my heart. I was more moved still when Mongenod pulled out a ragged foulard handkerchief to wipe them away. 'Wait here,' I said; and I went to my secret hiding-place with a heart as agitated as though I had heard a woman say she loved me. I came back with two rolls of fifty louis each. 'Here, count them.' He would not count them; and he looked about him for a desk on which to write, he said, a proper receipt. I positively refused to take any paper. 'If I should die,' I said, 'my heirs would trouble you. This is to be between ourselves.'

"Well," continued Monsieur Alain, smiling, "when Mongenod found me a good friend he ceased to look as sad and anxious as when he entered; in fact, he became quite gay. My housekeeper gave us some oysters, white wine, and an omelet, with broiled kidneys, and the remains of a pate my old mother had sent me; also some dessert, coffee, and liqueur of the Iles. Mongenod, who had been starving for two days, was fed up. We were so interested in talking about our life before the Revolution that we sat at table till three in the afternoon. Mongenod told me how he had lost his fortune. In the first place, his father having invested the greater part of his capital in city loans, when they fell Mongenod lost two thirds of all he had. Then, having sold his house in the rue de Savoie, he was forced to receive the price in assignats. After that he took into his head to found a newspaper, 'La Sentinelle;' that compelled him to fly at the end of six months. His hopes, he said, were now fixed on the success of a comic opera called 'Les Peruviens.' When he said that I began to tremble. Mongenod turned author, wasting his money on a newspaper, living no doubt in the theatres, connected with singers at the Feydeau, with musicians, and all the queer people who lurk behind the scenes,--to tell you the truth, he didn't seem my Mongenod. I trembled. But how could I take back the hundred louis? I saw each roll in each pocket of his breeches like the barrels of two pistols.

"Then," continued Monsieur Alain, and this time he sighed, "Mongenod went away. When I was alone, and no longer in presence of hard and cruel poverty, I began, in spite of myself, to reflect. I was sobered. 'Mongenod,' thought I, 'is perhaps thoroughly depraved; he may have been playing a comedy at my expense.' His gaiety, the moment I had handed over to him readily such a large sum of money, struck me then as being too like the joy of the valets on the stage when they catch a Geronte. I ended, where I ought to have begun, by resolving to make some investigations as to my friend Mongenod, who had given me his address,--written on the back of a playing card! I did not choose, as a matter of delicacy, to go and see him the next day; he might have thought there was distrust in such promptness, as, indeed, there would have been. The second day I had certain matters to attend to which took all my time, and it was only at the end of two weeks that, not seeing or hearing of Mongenod, I went one morning from the Croix-Rouge, where I was then living, to the rue des Moineaux, where he lived. I found he was living in furnished lodgings of the lowest class; but the landlady was a very worthy woman, the widow of a magistrate who had died on the scaffold; she was utterly ruined by the Revolution, and had only a few louis with which to begin the hazardous trade of taking lodgers."

Here Monsieur Alain interrupted himself to explain. "I knew her later," he said; "she then had seven houses in Saint-Roch, and was making quite a little fortune.

"'The citizen Mongenod is not at home,' the landlady said to me; 'but there is some one there.' This remark excited my curiosity. I went up to the fifth story. A charming person opened the door,--oh, such a pretty young woman! who looked at me rather suspiciously and kept the door half closed. 'I am Alain, a friend of Mongenod's,' I said. Instantly the door opened wide, and I entered a miserable garret, which was, nevertheless, kept with the utmost neatness. The pretty young woman offered me a chair before a fireplace where were ashes but no fire, at the corner of which I saw a common earthen foot-warmer. 'It makes me very happy, monsieur,' she said, taking my hand and pressing it affectionately, 'to be able to express to you my gratitude. You have indeed saved us. Were it not for you I might never have seen Mongenod again. He might,--yes, he would have thrown himself in the river. He was desperate when he left me to go and see you.' On examining this person I was surprised to see her head tied up in a foulard, and along the temples a curious dark line; but I presently saw that her head was shaved. 'Have you been ill?' I asked, as I noticed this singularity. She cast a glance at a broken mirror in a shabby frame and colored; then the tears came into her eyes. 'Yes, monsieur,' she said, 'I had horrible headaches, and I was obliged to have my hair cut off; it came to my feet.' 'Am I speaking to Madame Mongenod?' I asked. 'Yes, monsieur,' she answered, giving me a truly celestial look. I bowed to the poor little woman and went away, intending to make the landlady tell me something about them; but she was out. I was certain that poor young woman had sold her hair to buy bread. I went from there to a wood merchant and ordered half a cord of wood, telling the cartman and the sawyer to take the bill, which I made the dealer receipt to the name of citizen Mongenod, and give it to the little woman.

"There ends the period of what I long called _my foolishness_," said Monsieur Alain, clasping his hands and lifting them with a look of repentance.

Godefroid could not help smiling. He was, as we shall see, greatly mistaken in that smile.

"Two days later," resumed the worthy man, "I met one of those men who are neither friends nor strangers, with whom we have relations from time to time, and call acquaintances,--a certain Monsieur Barillaud, who remarked accidentally, _a propos_ of the 'Peruviens,' that the author was a friend of his. 'Then you know citizen Mongenod?' I said.

"In those days we were obliged by law to call each other 'citizen,'" said Monsieur Alain to Godefroid, by way of parenthesis. Then he continued his narrative:--

"The citizen looked at me, exclaiming, 'I wish I never had known him; for he has several times borrowed money of me, and shown his friendship by not returning it. He is a queer fellow,--good-hearted and all that, but full of illusions! always an imagination on fire! I will do him this justice,--he does not mean to deceive; but as he deceives himself about everything, he manages to behave like a dishonest man.' 'How much does he owe you?' I asked. 'Oh! a good many hundred francs. He's a basket with a hole in the bottom. Nobody knows where his money goes; perhaps he doesn't know himself.' 'Has he any resources?' 'Well, yes,' said Barillaud, laughing; 'just now he is talking of buying land among the savages in the United States.' I carried away with me the drop of vinegar which casual gossip thus put into my heart, and it soured all my feelings. I went to see my old master, in whose office Mongenod and I had studied law; he was now my counsel. When I told him about my loan to Mongenod and the manner in which I had acted,--'What!' he cried, 'one of my old clerks to behave in that way! You ought to have put him off till the next day and come to see me. You would then have found out that I have forbidden my clerks to let Mongenod into this office. Within the last year he has borrowed three hundred francs of me in silver,--an enormous sum at present rates. Three days before he breakfasted with you I met him on the street, and he gave such a piteous account of his poverty that I let him have two louis.' 'If I have been the dupe of a clever comedian,' I said to Bordin, 'so much the worse for him, not for me. But tell me what to do.' 'You must try to get from him a written acknowledgment; for a debtor, however, insolvent he may be, may become solvent, and then he will pay.' Thereupon Bordin took from a tin box a case on which I saw the name of Mongenod; he showed me three receipts of a hundred francs each. 'The next time he comes I shall have him admitted, and I shall make him add the interest and the two louis, and give me a note for the whole. I shall, at any rate, have things properly done, and be in a position to obtain payment.' 'Well,' said I to Bordin, 'can you have my matter set right so far, as well as yours? for I know you are a good man, and what you do will be right.' 'I have remained master of my ground,' he said; 'but when persons behave as you have done they are at the mercy of a man who can snap his fingers at them. As for me, I don't choose that any man should get the better of me,--get the better of a former attorney to the Chatelet!--ta-ra-ra! Every man to whom a sum of money is lent as heedlessly as you lent yours to Mongenod, ends, after a certain time, by thinking that money his own. It is no longer your money, it is _his_ money; you become his creditor,--an inconvenient, unpleasant person. A debtor will then try to get rid of you by some juggling with his conscience, and out of one hundred men in his position, seventy-five will do their best never to see or hear of you again.' 'Then you think only twenty-five men in a hundred are honest?' 'Did I say that?' he replied, smiling maliciously. 'The estimate is too high?'"

Monsieur Alain paused to put the fire together; that done, he resumed:--

"Two weeks later I received a letter from Bordin asking me to go to his office and get my receipt. I went. 'I tried to get fifty of your louis for you,' he said, 'but the birds had flown. Say good-by to your yellow boys; those pretty canaries are off to other climes. You have had to do with a sharper; that's what he is. He declared to me that his wife and father-in-law had gone to the United States with sixty of your louis to buy land; that he intended to follow, for the purpose, he said, of making a fortune and paying his debts; the amount of which, carefully drawn up, he confided to me, requesting me to keep an eye on what became of his creditors. Here is a list of the items,' continued Bordin, showing me a paper from which he read the total,--'Seventeen thousand francs in coin; a sum with which a house could be bought that would bring in two thousand francs a year.' After replacing the list in the case, Bordin gave me a note for a sum equivalent to a hundred louis in gold, with a letter in which Mongenod admitted having