The Lesser Bourgeoisie - Honoré de Balzac (top novels to read txt) 📗

profound silence reigned.

"Messieurs, our institutions! from which come the strength and grandeur of dynastic France!"

The bottles disappeared amid a chorus of admiration as to the marvellous goodness and delicacy of their contents.

Celeste Colleville here said timidly:--

"Mamma, will you permit me to give a toast?"

The good girl had noticed the dull, bewildered look of her godmother, neglected and forgotten,--she, the mistress of that house, wearing almost the expression of a dog that is doubtful which master to obey, looking from the face of her terrible sister-in-law to that of Thuillier, consulting each countenance, and oblivious of herself; but joy on the face of that poor helot, accustomed to be nothing, to repress her ideas, her feelings, had the effect of a pale wintry sun behind a mist; it barely lighted her faded, flabby flesh. The gauze cap trimmed with dingy flowers, the hair ill-dressed, the gloomy brown gown, with no ornament but a thick gold chain--all, combined with the expression of her countenance, stimulated the affection of the young Celeste, who--alone in the world--knew the value of that woman condemned to silence but aware of all about her, suffering from all yet consoling herself in God and in the girl who now was watching her.

"Yes, let the dear child give us her little toast," said la Peyrade to Madame Colleville.

"Go on, my daughter," cried Colleville; "here's the hermitage still to be drunk--and it's hoary with age," he added.

"To my kind godmother!" said the girl, lowering her glass respectfully before Madame Thuillier, and holding it towards her.

The poor woman, startled, looked through a veil of tears first at her husband, and then at Brigitte; but her position in the family was so well known, and the homage paid by innocence to weakness had something so beautiful about it, that the emotion was general; the men all rose and bowed to Madame Thuillier.

"Ah! Celeste, I would I had a kingdom to lay at your feet," murmured Felix Phellion.

The worthy Phellion wiped away a tear. Dutocq himself was moved.

"Oh! the charming child!" cried Mademoiselle Thuillier, rising, and going round to kiss her sister-in-law.

"My turn now!" said Colleville, posing like an athlete. "Now listen: To friendship! Empty your glasses; refill your glasses. Good! To the fine arts,--the flower of social life! Empty your glasses; refill your glasses. To another such festival on the day after election!"

"What is that little bottle you have there?" said Dutocq to Mademoiselle Thuillier.

"That," she said, "is one of my three bottles of Madame Amphoux' liqueur; the second is for the day of Celeste's marriage; the third for the day on which her first child is baptized."

"My sister is losing her head," remarked Thuillier to Colleville.

The dinner ended with a toast, offered by Thuillier, but suggested to him by Theodose at the moment when the malaga sparkled in the little glasses like so many rubies.

"Colleville, messieurs, has drunk to _friendship_. I now drink, in this most generous wine, To my friends!"

An hurrah, full of heartiness, greeted that fine sentiment, but Dutocq remarked aside to Theodose:--

"It is a shame to pour such wine down the throats of such people."

"Ah! if we could only make such wine as that!" cried Zelie, making her glass ring by the way in which she sucked down the Spanish liquid. "What fortunes we could get!"

Zelie had now reached her highest point of incandescence, and was really alarming.

"Yes," replied Minard, "but ours is made."

"Don't you think, sister," said Brigitte to Madame Thuillier, "that we had better take coffee in the salon?"

Madame Thuillier obediently assumed the air of mistress of the house, and rose.

"Ah! you are a great wizard," said Flavie Colleville, accepting la Peyrade's arm to return to the salon.

"And yet I care only to bewitch you," he answered. "I think you more enchanting than ever this evening."

"Thuillier," she said, to evade the subject, "Thuillier made to think himself a political character! oh! oh!"

"But, my dear Flavie, half the absurdities of life are the result of such conspiracies; and men are not alone in these deceptions. In how many families one sees the husband, children, and friends persuading a silly mother that she is a woman of sense, or an old woman of fifty that she is young and beautiful. Hence, inconceivable contrarieties for those who go about the world with their eyes shut. One man owes his ill-savored conceit to the flattery of a mistress; another owes his versifying vanity to those who are paid to call him a great poet. Every family has its great man; and the result is, as we see it in the Chamber, general obscurity of the lights of France. Well, men of real mind are laughing to themselves about it, that's all. You are the mind and the beauty of this little circle of the petty bourgeoisie; it is this superiority which led me in the first instance to worship you. I have since longed to drag you out of it; for I love you sincerely--more in friendship than in love; though a great deal of love is gliding into it," he added, pressing her to his heart under cover of the recess of a window to which he had taken her.

"Madame Phellion will play the piano," cried Colleville. "We must all dance to-night--bottles and Brigitte's francs and all the little girls! I'll go and fetch my clarionet."

He gave his empty coffee-cup to his wife, smiling to see her so friendly with la Peyrade.

"What have you said and done to my husband?" asked Flavie, when Colleville had left them.

"Must I tell you all our secrets?"

"Ah! you don't love me," she replied, looking at him with the coquettish slyness of a woman who is not quite decided in her mind.

"Well, since you tell me yours," he said, letting himself go to the lively impulse of Provencal gaiety, always so charming and apparently so natural, "I will not conceal from you an anxiety in my heart."

He took her back to the same window and said, smiling:--

"Colleville, poor man, has seen in me the artist repressed by all these bourgeois; silent before them because I feel misjudged, misunderstood, and repelled by them. He has felt the heat of the sacred fire that consumes me. Yes I am," he continued, in a tone of conviction, "an artist in words after the manner of Berryer; I could make juries weep, by weeping myself, for I'm as nervous as a woman. Your husband, who detests the bourgeoisie, began to tease me about them. At first we laughed; then, in becoming serious, he found out that I was as strong as he. I told him of the plan concocted to make _something_ of Thuillier, and I showed him all the good he could get himself out of a political puppet. 'If it were only,' I said to him, 'to make yourself Monsieur _de_ Colleville, and to put your charming wife where I should like to see her, as the wife of a receiver-general, or deputy. To make yourself all that you and she ought to be, you have only to go and live a few years in the Upper or Lower Alps, in some hole of a town where everybody will like you, and your wife will seduce everybody; and this,' I added, 'you cannot fail to obtain, especially if you give your dear Celeste to some man who can influence the Chamber.' Good reasons, stated in jest, have the merit of penetrating deeper into some minds than if they were given soberly. So Colleville and I became the best friends in the world. Didn't you hear him say to me at table, 'Rascal! you have stolen my speech'? To-night we shall be theeing and thouing each other. I intend to have a choice little supper-party soon, where artists, tied to the proprieties at home, always compromise themselves. I'll invite him, and that will make us as solidly good friends as he is with Thuillier. There, my dear adorned one, is what a profound sentiment gives a man the courage to produce. Colleville must adopt me; so that I may visit your house by his invitation. But what couldn't you make me do? lick lepers, swallow live toads, seduce Brigitte--yes, if you say so, I'll impale my own heart on that great picket-rail to please you."

"You frightened me this morning," she said.

"But this evening you are reassured. Yes," he added, "no harm will ever happen to you through me."

"You are, I must acknowledge, a most extraordinary man."

"Why, no! the smallest as well as the greatest of my efforts are merely the reflections of the flame which you have kindled. I intend to be your son-in-law that we may never part. My wife, heavens! what could she be to me but a machine for child-bearing? whereas the divinity, the sublime being will be--you," he whispered in her ear.

"You are Satan!" she said, in a sort of terror.

"No, I am something of a poet, like all the men of my region. Come, be my Josephine! I'll go and see you to-morrow. I have the most ardent desire to see where you live and how you live, the furniture you use, the color of your stuffs, the arrangement of all things about you. I long to see the pearl in its shell."

He slipped away cleverly after these words, without waiting for an answer.

Flavie, to whom in all her life love had never taken the language of romance, sat still, but happy, her heart palpitating, and saying to herself that it was very difficult to escape such influence. For the first time Theodose had appeared in a pair of new trousers, with gray silk stockings and pumps, a waistcoat of black silk, and a cravat of black satin on the knot of which shone a plain gold pin selected with taste. He wore also a new coat in the last fashion, and yellow gloves, relieved by white shirt-cuffs; he was the only man who had manners, or deportment in that salon, which was now filling up for the evening.

Madame Pron, nee Barniol, arrived with two school-girls, aged seventeen, confided to her maternal care by families residing in Martinique. Monsieur Pron, professor of rhetoric in a college presided over by priests, belonged to the Phellion class; but, instead of expanding on the surface in phrases and demonstrations, and posing as an example, he was dry and sententious. Monsieur and Madame Pron, the flowers of the Phellion salon, received every Monday. Though a professor, the little man danced. He enjoyed great influence in the quarter enclosed by the boulevard du Mont-Parnasse, the Luxembourg, and the rue de Sevres. Therefore, as soon as Phellion saw his friend, he took him by the arm into a corner to inform him of the Thuillier candidacy. After ten minutes' consultation they both went to find Thuillier, and the recess of a window, opposite to that where Flavie still sat absorbed in her reflections, no doubt, heard a "trio" worthy, in its way, of that of the Swiss in "Guillaume Tell."

"Do you see," said Theodose, returning to Flavie, "the pure and honest Phellion intriguing over there? Give a personal reason to a virtuous man and he'll paddle in the slimiest puddle; he is hooking that little Pron, and Pron is taking it all in, solely to get your little Celeste for Felix Phellion. Separate them, and in ten minutes they'll get together again, and that young Minard will be growling round them like an angry