The Lesser Bourgeoisie - Honore de Balzac (speld decodable readers .TXT) 📗
- Author: Honore de Balzac
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But suddenly, in 1838, the girl left her mother, and "made her life,"
to use an expression by which the lower classes in Paris describe the
abuse of the most precious gifts of nature and youth.
To look for a girl in Paris is to look for a smelt in the Seine;
nothing but chance can throw her into the net. The chance came. Mere
Cardinal, who to entertain a neighbor had taken her to the Bobino
theatre, recognized in the leading lady her own daughter, whom the
first comedian had held under his control for three years. The mother,
gratified at first at beholding her daughter in a fine gown of gold
brocade, her hair dressed like that of a duchess, and wearing
open-worked stockings, satin shoes, and receiving the plaudits of the
audience, ended by screaming out from her seat in the gallery:--
"You shall soon hear of me, murderer of your own mother! I'll know
whether miserable strolling-players have the right to come and debauch
young girls of sixteen!"
She waited at the stage-door to capture her daughter, but the first
comedian and the leading lady had no doubt jumped across the
footlights and left the theatre with the audience, instead of issuing
by the stage-door, where Madame Cardinal and her crony, Mere
Mahoudeau, made an infernal rumpus, which two municipal guards were
called upon to pacify. Those august personages, before whom the two
women lowered the diapason of their voices, called the mother's
attention to the fact that the girl was of legitimate theatrical age,
and that instead of screaming at the door after the director, she
could summon him before the justice-of-peace, or the police-court,
whichever she pleased.
The next day Madame Cardinal intended to consult Cerizet, in view of
the fact that he was a clerk in the office of the justice-of-peace;
but, before reaching his lair in the rue des Poules, she was met by
the porter of a house in which an uncle of hers, a certain Toupillier,
was living, who told her that the old man hadn't probably two days to
live, being then in the last extremity.
"Well, how do you expect me to help it?" replied the widow Cardinal.
"We count on you, my dear Madame Cardinal; we know you won't forget
the good advice we'll give you. Here's the thing. Lately, your poor
uncle, not being able to stir round, has trusted me to go and collect
the rents of his house, rue Notre-Dame de Nazareth, and the arrears of
his dividends at the Treasury, which come to eighteen hundred francs."
By this time the widow Cardinal's eyes were becoming fixed instead of
wandering.
"Yes, my dear," continued Perrache, a hump-backed little concierge;
"and, seeing that you are the only person who ever thinks about him,
and that you come and see him sometimes, and bring him fish, perhaps
he may make a bequest in your favor. My wife, who has been nursing him
for the last few days since he has been so ill, spoke to him of you,
but he wouldn't have you told about his illness. But now, don't you
see, it is high time you should show yourself there. It is pretty nigh
two months since he has been able to attend to business."
"You may well think, you old thief," replied Madame Cardinal, hurrying
at top speed toward the rue Honore-Chevalier, where her uncle lived in
a wretched garret, "that the hair would grow on my hand before I could
ever imagine that. What! my uncle Toupillier rich! the old pauper of
the church of Saint-Sulpice!"
"Ah!" returned the porter, "but he fed well. He went to bed every
night with his best friend, a big bottle of Roussillon. My wife has
tasted it, though he told us it was common stuff. The wine-merchant in
the rue des Canettes supplies it to him."
"Don't say a word about all this," said the widow, when she parted
from the man who had given her the information. "I'll take care and
remember you--if anything comes of it."
Toupillier, former drum-major in the French Guards, had been for the
two years preceding 1789 in the service of the Church as beadle of
Saint-Sulpice. The Revolution deprived him of that post, and he then
dropped down into a state of abject misery. He was even obliged to
take to the profession of model, for he _enjoyed_, as they say, a fine
physique. When public worship was restored, he took up his beadle's
staff once more; but in 1816 he was dismissed, as much on account of
his immorality as for his political opinions. Nevertheless, he was
allowed to stay about the door of the church and distribute the holy
water. Later, an unfortunate affair, which we shall presently mention,
made him lose even that position; but, still finding means to keep to
the sanctuary, he obtained permission to be allowed as a pauper in the
porch. At this period of life, being then seventy-two years of age, he
made himself ninety-six, and began the profession of centenarian.
In all Paris it was impossible to find another such beard and head of
hair as Toupillier's. As he walked he appeared bent double; he held a
stick in his shaking hand,--a hand that was covered with lichen, like
a granite rock, and with the other he held out the classic hat with a
broad brim, filthy and battered, into which, however, there fell
abundant alms. His legs were swathed in rags and bandages, and his
feet shuffled along in miserable overshoes of woven mat-weed, inside
of which he had fastened excellent cork soles. He washed his face with
certain compounds, which gave it an appearance of forms of illness,
and he played the senility of a centenarian to the life. He reckoned
himself a hundred years old in 1830, at which time his actual age was
eighty; he was the head of the paupers of Saint-Sulpice, the master of
the place, and all those who came to beg under the arcades of the
church, safe from the persecutions of the police and beneath the
protection of the beadle and the giver of holy water, were forced to
pay him a sort of tithe.
When a new heir, a bridegroom, or some godfather left the church,
saying, "Here, this is for all of you; don't torment any of my party,"
Toupillier, appointed by the beadle to receive these alms, pocketed
three-fourths, and distributed only the remaining quarter among his
henchmen, whose tribute amounted to a sou a day. Money and wine were
his last two passions; but he regulated the latter and gave himself up
to the former, with neglecting his personal comfort. He drank at night
only, after his dinner, and for twenty years he slept in the arms of
drunkenness, his last mistress.
In the early morning he was at his post with all his faculties. From
then until his dinner, which he took at Pere Lathuile's (made famous
by Charlet), he gnawed crusts of bread by way of nourishment; and he
gnawed them artistically, with an air of resignation which earned him
abundant alms. The beadle and the giver of holy water, with whom he
may have had some private understanding, would say of him:--
"He is one of the worthy poor of the church; he used to know the
rector Languet, who built Saint-Sulpice; he was for twenty years
beadle of the church before the Revolution, and he is now over a
hundred years old."
This little biography, well known to all the pious attendants of the
church, was, of course, the best of his advertisements, and no hat was
so well lined as his. He bought his house in 1826, and began to invest
his money in the Funds in 1830. From the value of the two investments
he must have made something like six thousand francs a year, and
probably turned them over by usury, after Cerizet's own fashion; for
the sum he paid for the house was forty thousand francs, while his
investment in 1830 was forty-eight thousand more. His niece, deceived
by the old man as much as he deceived the functionaries and the pious
souls of the church, believed him the most miserable of paupers, and
when she had any fish that were spoiling she sometimes took them to
the aged beggar.
Consequently, she now felt it her right to get what she could in
return for her pity and her liberality to an uncle who was likely to
have a crowd of collateral heirs; she herself being the third and last
Toupillier daughter. She had four brothers, and her father, a porter
with a hand-cart, had told her, in her childhood, of three aunts and
four uncles, who all led an existence of the baser sort.
After inspecting the sick man, she went, at full speed, to consult
Cerizet, telling him, in the first place, how she had found her
daughter, and then the reasons and indications which made her think
that her uncle Toupillier was hoarding a pile of gold in his mattress.
Mere Cardinal did not feel herself strong enough to seize upon the
property, legally or illegally, and she therefore came to confide in
Cerizet and get his advice.
So, then, the banker of the poor, like other scavengers, had, at last,
found diamonds in the slime in which he had paddled for the last four
years, being always on the watch for some such chance,--a chance, they
say, occasionally met with in the purlieus, which give birth to
heiresses in sabots. This was the secret of his unexpected gentleness
to la Peyrade, the man whose ruin he had vowed. It is easy to imagine
the anxiety with which he awaited the return of Madame Cardinal, to
whom this wily schemer of nefarious plots had given means to verify
her suspicions as to the existence of the hoarded treasure, promising
her complete success if she would trust him to obtain for her so rich
a harvest. He was not the man to shrink from a crime, above all, when
he saw that others could commit it, while he obtained the benefits.
"Well, monsieur," cried the fishwife, entering Cerizet's den with a
face as much inflamed by cupidity as by the haste of her movements,
"my uncle sleeps on more than a hundred thousand francs in gold, and I
am certain that those Perraches, by dint of nursing him, have smelt
the rat."
"Shared among forty heirs that won't be much to each," said Cerizet.
"Listen to me, Mere Cardinal: I'll marry your daughter; give her your
uncle's gold, and I'll guarantee to you a life-interest in the house
and the dividends from the money in the Funds."
"We sha'n't run any risk?"
"None, whatever."
"Agreed, then," said the widow Cardinal, holding out her hand to her
future son-in-law. "Six thousand francs a year; hey! what a fine life
I'll have."
"With a son-in-law like me!" added Cerizet.
"I shall be a bourgeoisie of Paris!"
"Now," resumed Cerizet, after a pause, "I must study the ground. Don't
leave your uncle alone a minute; tell the Perraches that you expect a
doctor. I'll be the doctor, and when I get there you must seem not to
know me."
"Aren't you sly, you old rogue," said Madame Cardinal, with a punch on
Cerizet's stomach by way of farewell.
An hour later, Cerizet, dressed in black, disguised by a rusty wig and
an artificially painted physiognomy, arrived at the house in the rue
Honore-Chevalier in the regulation cabriolet. He asked the porter to
tell him how to find the lodging of an old beggar named Toupillier.
"Is monsieur the doctor whom Madame Cardinal expects?" asked Perrache.
Cerizet had no doubt reflected on the gravity of the affair he was
undertaking, for he avoided giving an answer to that question.
"Is this the way?" he said, turning at random to one side of the
courtyard.
"No, monsieur," replied Perrache, who then took him to the back stairs
of the house, which led up to the wretched attic occupied by the
pauper.
Nothing remained for the inquisitive porter to do but to question the
driver of the cabriolet; to which employment we will leave him, while
we pursue our own inquiries elsewhere.
CHAPTER XV (THE DIFFICULTIES THAT CROP UP IN THE EASIEST OF THEFTS)
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