A Start in Life - Honoré de Balzac (each kindness read aloud .txt) 📗

my eye, nunc alii,'" whispered Mistigris.

"--you seem to know little of the language of the courts. I ask your future protection, Excellency," added Schinner, turning to Oscar.

"I congratulate myself on having travelled with three such distinguished men," said the count,--"a painter already famous, a future general, and a young diplomatist who may some day recover Belgium for France."

Having committed the odious crime of repudiating his mother, Oscar, furious from a sense that his companions were laughing at him, now resolved, at any cost, to make them pay attention to him.

"'All is not gold that glitters,'" he began, his eyes flaming.

"That's not it," said Mistigris. "'All is not old that titters.' You'll never get on in diplomacy if you don't know your proverbs better than that."

"I may not know proverbs, but I know my way--"

"It must be far," said Georges, "for I saw that person in charge of your household give you provisions enough for an ocean voyage: rolls, chocolate--"

"A special kind of bread and chocolate, yes, monsieur," returned Oscar; "my stomach is much too delicate to digest the victuals of a tavern."

"'Victuals' is a word as delicate and refined as your stomach," said Georges.

"Ah! I like that word 'victuals,'" cried the great painter.

"The word is all the fashion in the best society," said Mistigris. "I use it myself at the cafe of the Black Hen."

"Your tutor is, doubtless, some celebrated professor, isn't he?--Monsieur Andrieux of the Academie Francaise, or Monsieur Royer-Collard?" asked Schinner.

"My tutor is or was the Abbe Loraux, now vicar of Saint-Sulpice," replied Oscar, recollecting the name of the confessor at his school.

"Well, you were right to take a private tutor," said Mistigris. "'Tuto, tutor, celeritus, and jocund.' Of course, you will reward him well, your abbe?"

"Undoubtedly he will be made a bishop some day," said Oscar.

"By your family influence?" inquired Georges gravely.

"We shall probably contribute to his rise, for the Abbe Frayssinous is constantly at our house."

"Ah! you know the Abbe Frayssinous?" asked the count.

"He is under obligations to my father," answered Oscar.

"Are you on your way to your estate?" asked Georges.

"No, monsieur; but I am able to say where I am going, if others are not. I am going to the Chateau de Presles, to the Comte de Serizy."

"The devil! are you going to Presles?" cried Schinner, turning as red as a cherry.

"So you know his Excellency the Comte de Serizy?" said Georges.

Pere Leger turned round to look at Oscar with a stupefied air.

"Is Monsieur de Serizy at Presles?" he said.

"Apparently, as I am going there," replied Oscar.

"Do you often see the count," asked Monsieur de Serizy.

"Often," replied Oscar. "I am a comrade of his son, who is about my age, nineteen; we ride together on horseback nearly every day."

"'Aut Caesar, aut Serizy,'" said Mistigris, sententiously.

Pierrotin and Pere Leger exchanged winks on hearing this statement.

"Really," said the count to Oscar, "I am delighted to meet with a young man who can tell me about that personage. I want his influence on a rather serious matter, although it would cost him nothing to oblige me. It concerns a claim I wish to press on the American government. I should be glad to obtain information about Monsieur de Serizy."

"Oh! if you want to succeed," replied Oscar, with a knowing look, "don't go to him, but go to his wife; he is madly in love with her; no one knows more than I do about that; but she can't endure him."

"Why not?" said Georges.

"The count has a skin disease which makes him hideous. Doctor Albert has tried in vain to cure it. The count would give half his fortune if he had a chest like mine," said Oscar, swelling himself out. "He lives a lonely life in his own house; gets up very early in the morning and works from three to eight o'clock; after eight he takes his remedies,--sulphur-baths, steam-baths, and such things. His valet bakes him in a sort of iron box--for he is always in hopes of getting cured."

"If he is such a friend of the King as they say he is, why doesn't he get his Majesty to touch him?" asked Georges.

"The count has lately promised thirty thousand francs to a celebrated Scotch doctor who is coming over to treat him," continued Oscar.

"Then his wife can't be blamed if she finds better--" said Schinner, but he did not finish his sentence.

"I should say so!" resumed Oscar. "The poor man is so shrivelled and old you would take him for eighty! He's as dry as parchment, and, unluckily for him, he feels his position."

"Most men would," said Pere Leger.

"He adores his wife and dares not find fault with her," pursued Oscar, rejoicing to have found a topic to which they listened. "He plays scenes with her which would make you die of laughing,--exactly like Arnolphe in Moliere's comedy."

The count, horror-stricken, looked at Pierrotin, who, finding that the count said nothing, concluded that Madame Clapart's son was telling falsehoods.

"So, monsieur," continued Oscar, "if you want the count's influence, I advise you to apply to the Marquis d'Aiglemont. If you get that former adorer of Madame de Serizy on your side, you will win husband and wife at one stroke."

"Look here!" said the painter, "you seem to have seen the count without his clothes; are you his valet?"

"His valet!" cried Oscar.

"Hang it! people don't tell such things about their friends in public conveyances," exclaimed Mistigris. "As for me, I'm not listening to you; I'm deaf: 'discretion plays the better part of adder.'"

"'A poet is nasty and not fit,' and so is a tale-bearer," cried Schinner.

"Great painter," said Georges, sententiously, "learn this: you can't say harm of people you don't know. Now the little one here has proved, indubitably, that he knows his Serizy by heart. If he had told us about the countess, perhaps--?"

"Stop! not a word about the Comtesse de Serizy, young men," cried the count. "I am a friend of her brother, the Marquis de Ronquerolles, and whoever attempts to speak disparagingly of the countess must answer to me."

"Monsieur is right," cried the painter; "no man should blaguer women."

"God, Honor, and the Ladies! I believe in that melodrama," said Mistigris.

"I don't know the guerrilla chieftain, Mina, but I know the Keeper of the Seals," continued the count, looking at Georges; "and though I don't wear my decorations," he added, looking at the painter, "I prevent those who do not deserve them from obtaining any. And finally, let me say that I know so many persons that I even know Monsieur Grindot, the architect of Presles. Pierrotin, stop at the next inn; I want to get out a moment."

Pierrotin hurried his horses through the village street of Moisselles, at the end of which was the inn where all travellers stopped. This short distance was done in silence.

"Where is that young fool going?" asked the count, drawing Pierrotin into the inn-yard.

"To your steward. He is the son of a poor lady who lives in the rue de la Cerisaie, to whom I often carry fruit, and game, and poultry from Presles. She is a Madame Husson."

"Who is that man?" inquired Pere Leger of Pierrotin when the count had left him.

"Faith, I don't know," replied Pierrotin; "this is the first time I have driven him. I shouldn't be surprised if he was that prince who owns Maffliers. He has just told me to leave him on the road near there; he doesn't want to go on to Isle-Adam."

"Pierrotin thinks he is the master of Maffliers," said Pere Leger, addressing Georges when he got back into the coach.

The three young fellows were now as dull as thieves caught in the act; they dared not look at each other, and were evidently considering the consequences of their fibs.

"This is what is called 'suffering for license sake,'" said Mistigris.

"You see I did know the count," said Oscar.

"Possibly. But you'll never be an ambassador," replied Georges. "When people want to talk in public conveyances, they ought to be careful, like me, to talk without saying anything."

"That's what speech is for," remarked Mistigris, by way of conclusion.

The count returned to his seat and the coucou rolled on amid the deepest silence.

"Well, my friends," said the count, when they reached the Carreau woods, "here we all are, as silent as if we were going to the scaffold."

"'Silence gives content,'" muttered Mistigris.

"The weather is fine," said Georges.

"What place is that?" said Oscar, pointing to the chateau de Franconville, which produces a fine effect at that particular spot, backed, as it is, by the noble forest of Saint-Martin.

"How is it," cried the count, "that you, who say you go so often to Presles, do not know Franconville?"

"Monsieur knows men, not castles," said Mistigris.

"Budding diplomatists have so much else to take their minds," remarked Georges.

"Be so good as to remember my name," replied Oscar, furious. "I am Oscar Husson, and ten years hence I shall be famous."

After that speech, uttered with bombastic assumption, Oscar flung himself back in his corner.

"Husson of what, of where?" asked Mistigris.

"It is a great family," replied the count. "Husson de la Cerisaie; monsieur was born beneath the steps of the Imperial throne."

Oscar colored crimson to the roots of his hair, and was penetrated through and through with a dreadful foreboding.

They were now about to descend the steep hill of La Cave, at the foot of which, in a narrow valley, flanked by the forest of Saint-Martin, stands the magnificent chateau of Presles.

"Messieurs," said the count, "I wish you every good fortune in your various careers. Monsieur le colonel, make your peace with the King of France; the Czerni-Georges ought not to snub the Bourbons. I have nothing to wish for you, my dear Monsieur Schinner; your fame is already won, and nobly won by splendid work. But you are much to be feared in domestic life, and I, being a married man, dare not invite you to my house. As for Monsieur Husson, he needs no protection; he possesses the secrets of statesmen and can make them tremble. Monsieur Leger is about to pluck the Comte de Serizy, and I can only exhort him to do it with a firm hand. Pierrotin, put me out here, and pick me up at the same place to-morrow," added the count, who then left the coach and took a path through the woods, leaving his late companions confused and bewildered.

"He must be that count who has hired Franconville; that's the path to it," said Leger.

"If ever again," said the false Schinner, "I am caught blague-ing in a public coach, I'll fight a duel with myself. It was your fault, Mistigris," giving his rapin a tap on the head.

"All I did was to help you out, and follow you to Venice," said Mistigris; "but that's always the way, 'Fortune belabors the slave.'"

"Let me tell you," said Georges to his neighbor Oscar, "that if, by chance, that was the Comte de Serizy, I wouldn't be in your skin for a good deal, healthy as you think it."

Oscar, remembering his mother's injunctions, which these words