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

class="calibre1">indescribable grimace. He probably reflected that whichever way his

client might be wrung, it would be impossible to squeeze out a

centime, so he put in a few brief words to rid the office of a bad

customer.

 

“It is the truth, monsieur. The chief only works at night. If your

business is important, I recommend you to return at one in the

morning.” The stranger looked at the head clerk with a bewildered

expression, and remained motionless for a moment. The clerks,

accustomed to every change of countenance, and the odd whimsicalities

to which indecision or absence of mind gives rise in “parties,” went

on eating, making as much noise with their jaws as horses over a

manger, and paying no further heed to the old man.

 

“I will come again to-night,” said the stranger at length, with the

tenacious desire, peculiar to the unfortunate, to catch humanity at

fault.

 

The only irony allowed to poverty is to drive Justice and Benevolence

to unjust denials. When a poor wretch has convicted Society of

falsehood, he throws himself more eagerly on the mercy of God.

 

“What do you think of that for a cracked pot?” said Simonnin, without

waiting till the old man had shut the door.

 

“He looks as if he had been buried and dug up again,” said a clerk.

 

“He is some colonel who wants his arrears of pay,” said the head

clerk.

 

“No, he is a retired concierge,” said Godeschal.

 

“I bet you he is a nobleman,” cried Boucard.

 

“I bet you he has been a porter,” retorted Godeschal. “Only porters

are gifted by nature with shabby box-coats, as worn and greasy and

frayed as that old body’s. And did you see his trodden-down boots that

let the water in, and his stock which serves for a shirt? He has slept

in a dry arch.”

 

“He may be of noble birth, and yet have pulled the doorlatch,” cried

Desroches. “It has been known!”

 

“No,” Boucard insisted, in the midst of laughter, “I maintain that he

was a brewer in 1789, and a colonel in the time of the Republic.”

 

“I bet theatre tickets round that he never was a soldier,” said

Godeschal.

 

“Done with you,” answered Boucard.

 

“Monsieur! Monsieur!” shouted the little messenger, opening the

window.

 

“What are you at now, Simonnin?” asked Boucard.

 

“I am calling him that you may ask him whether he is a colonel or a

porter; he must know.”

 

All the clerks laughed. As to the old man, he was already coming

upstairs again.

 

“What can we say to him?” cried Godeschal.

 

“Leave it to me,” replied Boucard.

 

The poor man came in nervously, his eyes cast down, perhaps not to

betray how hungry he was by looking too greedily at the eatables.

 

“Monsieur,” said Boucard, “will you have the kindness to leave your

name, so that M. Derville may know–-”

 

“Chabert.”

 

“The Colonel who was killed at Eylau?” asked Hure, who, having so far

said nothing, was jealous of adding a jest to all the others.

 

“The same, monsieur,” replied the good man, with antique simplicity.

And he went away.

 

“Whew!”

 

“Done brown!”

 

“Poof!”

 

“Oh!”

 

“Ah!”

 

“Boum!”

 

“The old rogue!”

 

“Ting-a-ring-ting!”

 

“Sold again!”

 

“Monsieur Desroches, you are going to the play without paying,” said

Hure to the fourth clerk, giving him a slap on the shoulder that might

have killed a rhinoceros.

 

There was a storm of cat-calls, cries, and exclamations, which all the

onomatopeia of the language would fail to represent.

 

“Which theatre shall we go to?”

 

“To the opera,” cried the head clerk.

 

“In the first place,” said Godeschal, “I never mentioned which

theatre. I might, if I chose, take you to see Madame Saqui.”

 

“Madame Saqui is not the play.”

 

“What is a play?” replied Godeschal. “First, we must define the point

of fact. What did I bet, gentlemen? A play. What is a play? A

spectacle. What is a spectacle? Something to be seen—”

 

“But on that principle you would pay your bet by taking us to see the

water run under the Pont Neuf!” cried Simonnin, interrupting him.

 

“To be seen for money,” Godeschal added.

 

“But a great many things are to be seen for money that are not plays.

The definition is defective,” said Desroches.

 

“But do listen to me!”

 

“You are talking nonsense, my dear boy,” said Boucard.

 

“Is Curtius’ a play?” said Godeschal.

 

“No,” said the head clerk, “it is a collection of figures—but it is a

spectacle.”

 

“I bet you a hundred francs to a sou,” Godeschal resumed, “that

Curtius’ Waxworks forms such a show as might be called a play or

theatre. It contains a thing to be seen at various prices, according

to the place you choose to occupy.”

 

“And so on, and so forth!” said Simonnin.

 

“You mind I don’t box your ears!” said Godeschal.

 

The clerk shrugged their shoulders.

 

“Besides, it is not proved that that old ape was not making game of

us,” he said, dropping his argument, which was drowned in the laughter

of the other clerks. “On my honor, Colonel Chabert is really and truly

dead. His wife is married again to Comte Ferraud, Councillor of State.

Madame Ferraud is one of our clients.”

 

“Come, the case is remanded till to-morrow,” said Boucard. “To work,

gentlemen. The deuce is in it; we get nothing done here. Finish

copying that appeal; it must be handed in before the sitting of the

Fourth Chamber, judgment is to be given to-day. Come, on you go!”

 

“If he really were Colonel Chabert, would not that impudent rascal

Simonnin have felt the leather of his boot in the right place when he

pretended to be deaf?” said Desroches, regarding this remark as more

conclusive than Godeschal’s.

 

“Since nothing is settled,” said Boucard, “let us all agree to go to

the upper boxes of the Francais and see Talma in ‘Nero.’ Simonnin may

go to the pit.”

 

And thereupon the head clerk sat down at his table, and the others

followed his example.

 

“Given in June eighteen hundred and fourteen (in words),” said

Godeschal. “Ready?”

 

“Yes,” replied the two copying-clerks and the engrosser, whose pens

forthwith began to creak over the stamped paper, making as much noise

in the office as a hundred cockchafers imprisoned by schoolboys in

paper cages.

 

“And we hope that my lords on the Bench,” the extemporizing clerk

went on. “Stop! I must read my sentence through again. I do not

understand it myself.”

 

“Forty-six (that must often happen) and three forty-nines,” said

Boucard.

 

“We hope,” Godeschal began again, after reading all through the

document, “/that my lords on the Bench will not be less magnanimous

than the august author of the decree, and that they will do justice

against the miserable claims of the acting committee of the chief

Board of the Legion of Honor by interpreting the law in the wide sense

we have here set forth/–-”

 

“Monsieur Godeschal, wouldn’t you like a glass of water?” said the

little messenger.

 

“That imp of a boy!” said Boucard. “Here, get on your double-soled

shanks-mare, take this packet, and spin off to the Invalides.”

 

“Here set forth,” Godeschal went on. “Add /in the interest of Madame

la Vicomtesse/ (at full length) de Grandlieu.”

 

“What!” cried the chief, “are you thinking of drawing up an appeal in

the case of Vicomtesse de Grandlieu against the Legion of Honor—a

case for the office to stand or fall by? You are something like an

ass! Have the goodness to put aside your copies and your notes; you

may keep all that for the case of Navarreins against the Hospitals. It

is late. I will draw up a little petition myself, with a due allowance

of ‘inasmuch,’ and go to the Courts myself.”

 

This scene is typical of the thousand delights which, when we look

back on our youth, make us say, “Those were good times.”

 

At about one in the morning Colonel Chabert, self-styled, knocked at

the door of Maitre Derville, attorney to the Court of First Instance

in the Department of the Seine. The porter told him that Monsieur

Derville had not yet come in. The old man said he had an appointment,

and was shown upstairs to the rooms occupied by the famous lawyer,

who, notwithstanding his youth, was considered to have one of the

longest heads in Paris.

 

Having rung, the distrustful applicant was not a little astonished at

finding the head clerk busily arranging in a convenient order on his

master’s dining-room table the papers relating to the cases to be

tried on the morrow. The clerk, not less astonished, bowed to the

Colonel and begged him to take a seat, which the client did.

 

“On my word, monsieur, I thought you were joking yesterday when you

named such an hour for an interview,” said the old man, with the

forced mirth of a ruined man, who does his best to smile.

 

“The clerks were joking, but they were speaking the truth too,”

replied the man, going on with his work. “M. Derville chooses this

hour for studying his cases, taking stock of their possibilities,

arranging how to conduct them, deciding on the line of defence. His

prodigious intellect is freer at this hour—the only time when he can

have the silence and quiet needed for the conception of good ideas.

Since he entered the profession, you are the third person to come to

him for a consultation at this midnight hour. After coming in the

chief will discuss each case, read everything, spend four or five

hours perhaps over the business, then he will ring for me and explain

to me his intentions. In the morning from ten to two he hears what his

clients have to say, then he spends the rest of his day in

appointments. In the evening he goes into society to keep up his

connections. So he has only the night for undermining his cases,

ransacking the arsenal of the code, and laying his plan of battle. He

is determined never to lose a case; he loves his art. He will not

undertake every case, as his brethren do. That is his life, an

exceptionally active one. And he makes a great deal of money.”

 

As he listened to this explanation, the old man sat silent, and his

strange face assumed an expression so bereft of intelligence, that the

clerk, after looking at him, thought no more about him.

 

A few minutes later Derville came in, in evening dress; his head clerk

opened the door to him, and went back to finish arranging the papers.

The young lawyer paused for a moment in amazement on seeing in the dim

light the strange client who awaited him. Colonel Chabert was as

absolutely immovable as one of the wax figures in Curtius’ collection

to which Godeschal had proposed to treat his fellow-clerks. This

quiescence would not have been a subject for astonishment if it had

not completed the supernatural aspect of the man’s whole person. The

old soldier was dry and lean. His forehead, intentionally hidden under

a smoothly combed wig, gave him a look of mystery. His eyes seemed

shrouded in a transparent film; you would have compared them to dingy

mother-of-pearl with a blue iridescence changing in the gleam of the

wax lights. His face, pale, livid, and as thin as a knife, if I may

use such a vulgar expression, was as the face of the dead. Round his

neck was a tight black silk stock.

 

Below the dark line