Colonel Chabert - Honoré de Balzac (free books to read txt) 📗

class="calibre1">Association / Carnegie-Mellon University”.

 

ENDTHE SMALL PRINT! FOR PUBLIC DOMAIN ETEXTS*Ver.04.29.93END

 

Etext prepared by Dagny, dagnyj@hotmail.com

and John Bickers, jbickers@templar.actrix.gen.nz

 

Colonel Chabert

 

by Honore de Balzac

 

Translated by Ellen Marriage and Clara Bell

DEDICATION

To Madame la Comtesse Ida de Bocarme nee du Chasteler.

COLONEL CHABERT

“HULLO! There is that old Box-coat again!”

 

This exclamation was made by a lawyer’s clerk of the class called in

French offices a gutter-jumper—a messenger in fact—who at this

moment was eating a piece of dry bread with a hearty appetite. He

pulled off a morsel of crumb to make into a bullet, and fired it

gleefully through the open pane of the window against which he was

leaning. The pellet, well aimed, rebounded almost as high as the

window, after hitting the hat of a stranger who was crossing the

courtyard of a house in the Rue Vivienne, where dwelt Maitre Derville,

attorney-at-law.

 

“Come, Simonnin, don’t play tricks on people, or I will turn you out

of doors. However poor a client may be, he is still a man, hang it

all!” said the head clerk, pausing in the addition of a bill of costs.

 

The lawyer’s messenger is commonly, as was Simonnin, a lad of thirteen

or fourteen, who, in every office, is under the special jurisdiction

of the managing clerk, whose errands and billets-doux keep him

employed on his way to carry writs to the bailiffs and petitions to

the Courts. He is akin to the street boy in his habits, and to the

pettifogger by fate. The boy is almost always ruthless, unbroken,

unmanageable, a ribald rhymester, impudent, greedy, and idle. And yet,

almost all these clerklings have an old mother lodging on some fifth

floor with whom they share their pittance of thirty or forty francs a

month.

 

“If he is a man, why do you call him old Box-coat?” asked Simonnin,

with the air of a schoolboy who has caught out his master.

 

And he went on eating his bread and cheese, leaning his shoulder

against the window jamb; for he rested standing like a cab-horse, one

of his legs raised and propped against the other, on the toe of his

shoe.

 

“What trick can we play that cove?” said the third clerk, whose name

was Godeschal, in a low voice, pausing in the middle of a discourse he

was extemporizing in an appeal engrossed by the fourth clerk, of which

copies were being made by two neophytes from the provinces.

 

Then he went on improvising:

 

“/But, in his noble and beneficent wisdom, his Majesty, Louis the

Eighteenth/—(write it at full length, heh! Desroches the learned—

you, as you engross it!)—/when he resumed the reins of Government,

understood/—(what did that old nincompoop ever understand?)—/the

high mission to which he had been called by Divine Providence!/—(a

note of admiration and six stops. They are pious enough at the Courts

to let us put six)—/and his first thought, as is proved by the date

of the order hereinafter designated, was to repair the misfortunes

caused by the terrible and sad disasters of the revolutionary times,

by restoring to his numerous and faithful adherents/—(‘numerous’ is

flattering, and ought to please the Bench)—/all their unsold estates,

whether within our realm, or in conquered or acquired territory, or in

the endowments of public institutions, for we are, and proclaim

ourselves competent to declare, that this is the spirit and meaning of

the famous, truly loyal order given in/—Stop,” said Godeschal to the

three copying clerks, “that rascally sentence brings me to the end of

my page.—Well,” he went on, wetting the back fold of the sheet with

his tongue, so as to be able to fold back the page of thick stamped

paper, “well, if you want to play him a trick, tell him that the

master can only see his clients between two and three in the morning;

we shall see if he comes, the old ruffian!”

 

And Godeschal took up the sentence he was dictating—”given in—Are

you ready?”

 

“Yes,” cried the three writers.

 

It all went all together, the appeal, the gossip, and the conspiracy.

 

“Given in—Here, Daddy Boucard, what is the date of the order? We

must dot our i‘s and cross our t‘s, by Jingo! it helps to fill the

pages.”

 

“By Jingo!” repeated one of the copying clerks before Boucard, the

head clerk, could reply.

 

“What! have you written by Jingo?” cried Godeschal, looking at one

of the novices, with an expression at once stern and humorous.

 

“Why, yes,” said Desroches, the fourth clerk, leaning across his

neighbor’s copy, “he has written, ‘We must dot our i’s‘ and spelt it

by Gingo!”

 

All the clerks shouted with laughter.

 

“Why! Monsieur Hure, you take ‘By Jingo’ for a law term, and you say

you come from Mortagne!” exclaimed Simonnin.

 

“Scratch it cleanly out,” said the head clerk. “If the judge, whose

business it is to tax the bill, were to see such things, he would say

you were laughing at the whole boiling. You would hear of it from the

chief! Come, no more of this nonsense, Monsieur Hure! A Norman ought

not to write out an appeal without thought. It is the ‘Shoulder arms!’

of the law.”

 

“Given in—in?” asked Godeschal.—“Tell me when, Boucard.”

 

“June 1814,” replied the head clerk, without looking up from his work.

 

A knock at the office door interrupted the circumlocutions of the

prolix document. Five clerks with rows of hungry teeth, bright,

mocking eyes, and curly heads, lifted their noses towards the door,

after crying all together in a singing tone, “Come in!”

 

Boucard kept his face buried in a pile of papers—/broutilles/ (odds

and ends) in French law jargon—and went on drawing out the bill of

costs on which he was busy.

 

The office was a large room furnished with the traditional stool which

is to be seen in all these dens of law-quibbling. The stove-pipe

crossed the room diagonally to the chimney of a bricked-up fireplace;

on the marble chimney-piece were several chunks of bread, triangles of

Brie cheese, pork cutlets, glasses, bottles, and the head clerk’s cup

of chocolate. The smell of these dainties blended so completely with

that of the immoderately overheated stove and the odor peculiar to

offices and old papers, that the trail of a fox would not have been

perceptible. The floor was covered with mud and snow, brought in by

the clerks. Near the window stood the desk with a revolving lid, where

the head clerk worked, and against the back of it was the second

clerk’s table. The second clerk was at this moment in Court. It was

between eight and nine in the morning.

 

The only decoration of the office consisted in huge yellow posters,

announcing seizures of real estate, sales, settlements under trust,

final or interim judgments,—all the glory of a lawyer’s office.

Behind the head clerk was an enormous room, of which each division was

crammed with bundles of papers with an infinite number of tickets

hanging from them at the ends of red tape, which give a peculiar

physiognomy to law papers. The lower rows were filled with cardboard

boxes, yellow with use, on which might be read the names of the more

important clients whose cases were juicily stewing at this present

time. The dirty window-panes admitted but little daylight. Indeed,

there are very few offices in Paris where it is possible to write

without lamplight before ten in the morning in the month of February,

for they are all left to very natural neglect; every one comes and no

one stays; no one has any personal interest in a scene of mere routine

—neither the attorney, nor the counsel, nor the clerks, trouble

themselves about the appearance of a place which, to the youths, is a

schoolroom; to the clients, a passage; to the chief, a laboratory. The

greasy furniture is handed down to successive owners with such

scrupulous care, that in some offices may still be seen boxes of

remainders, machines for twisting parchment gut, and bags left by

the prosecuting parties of the Chatelet (abbreviated to Chlet)—a

Court which, under the old order of things, represented the present

Court of First Instance (or County Court).

 

So in this dark office, thick with dust, there was, as in all its

fellows, something repulsive to the clients—something which made it

one of the most hideous monstrosities of Paris. Nay, were it not for

the mouldy sacristies where prayers are weighed out and paid for like

groceries, and for the old-clothes shops, where flutter the rags that

blight all the illusions of life by showing us the last end of all our

festivities—an attorney’s office would be, of all social marts, the

most loathsome. But we might say the same of the gambling-hell, of the

Law Court, of the lottery office, of the brothel.

 

But why? In these places, perhaps, the drama being played in a man’s

soul makes him indifferent to accessories, which would also account

for the single-mindedness of great thinkers and men of great

ambitions.

 

“Where is my penknife?”

 

“I am eating my breakfast.”

 

“You go and be hanged! here is a blot on the copy.”

 

“Silence, gentlemen!”

 

These various exclamations were uttered simultaneously at the moment

when the old client shut the door with the sort of humility which

disfigures the movements of a man down on his luck. The stranger tried

to smile, but the muscles of his face relaxed as he vainly looked for

some symptoms of amenity on the inexorably indifferent faces of the

six clerks. Accustomed, no doubt, to gauge men, he very politely

addressed the gutter-jumper, hoping to get a civil answer from this

boy of all work.

 

“Monsieur, is your master at home?”

 

The pert messenger made no reply, but patted his ear with the fingers

of his left hand, as much as to say, “I am deaf.”

 

“What do you want, sir?” asked Godeschal, swallowing as he spoke a

mouthful of bread big enough to charge a four-pounder, flourishing his

knife and crossing his legs, throwing up one foot in the air to the

level of his eyes.

 

“This is the fifth time I have called,” replied the victim. “I wish to

speak to M. Derville.”

 

“On business?”

 

“Yes, but I can explain it to no one but—”

 

“M. Derville is in bed; if you wish to consult him on some difficulty,

he does no serious work till midnight. But if you will lay the case

before us, we could help you just as well as he can to–-”

 

The stranger was unmoved; he looked timidly about him, like a dog who

has got into a strange kitchen and expects a kick. By grace of their

profession, lawyers’ clerks have no fear of thieves; they did not

suspect the owner of the box-coat, and left him to study the place,

where he looked in vain for a chair to sit on, for he was evidently

tired. Attorneys, on principle, do not have many chairs in their

offices. The inferior client, being kept waiting on his feet, goes

away grumbling, but then he does not waste time, which, as an old

lawyer once said, is not allowed for when the bill is taxed.

 

“Monsieur,” said the old man, “as I have already told you, I cannot

explain my business to any one but M. Derville. I will wait till he is

up.”

 

Boucard had finished his bill. He smelt the fragrance of his

chocolate, rose from his cane armchair, went to the chimney-piece,

looked the old man from head to foot, stared at his coat, and made an