Rise and Fall of Cesar Birotteau - Honoré de Balzac (best fiction novels .TXT) 📗

of the commercial Bellona, and reach a state of peaceful confidence. In Paris the astringent stage of suspicion and mistrust is as quick to declare itself as the expansive flow of confidence is slow in gathering way. The creditor who has once turned into the narrow path of commercial fears and precautions speedily takes a course of malignant meanness which puts him below the level of his debtor. He passes from specious civility to impatient rage, to the surly clamor of importunity, to bursts of disappointment, to the livid coldness of a mind made up to vengeance, and the scowling insolence of a summons before the courts. Braschon, the rich upholsterer of the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, who was not invited to the ball, and was therefore stabbed in his self-love, sounded the charge; he insisted on being paid within twenty-four hours. He demanded security; not an attachment on the furniture, but a second mortgage on the property in the Faubourg du Temple.

In spite of such attacks and the violence of these recriminations, a few peaceful intervals occurred, when Birotteau breathed once more; but instead of resolutely facing and vanquishing the first skirmishings of adverse fortune, Cesar employed his whole mind in the effort to keep his wife, the only person able to advise him, from knowing anything about them. He guarded the very threshold of his door, and set a watch on all around him. He took Celestin into confidence so far as to admit a momentary embarrassment, and Celestin examined him with an amazed and inquisitive look. In his eyes Cesar lessened, as men lessen in presence of disasters when accustomed only to success, and when their whole mental strength consists of knowledge which commonplace minds acquire through routine.

Menaced as he was on so many sides at once, and without the energy or capacity to defend himself, Cesar nevertheless had the courage to look his position in the face. To meet the payments on his house and on his loans, and to pay his rents and his current expenses, he required, between the end of December and the fifteenth of January, a sum of sixty thousand francs, half of which must be obtained before the thirtieth of December. All his resources put together gave him a scant twenty thousand; he lacked ten thousand francs for the first payments. To his mind the position did not seem desperate; for like an adventurer who lives from day to day, he saw only the present moment. He resolved to attempt, before the news of his embarrassments was made public, what seemed to him a great stroke, and seek out the famous Francois Keller, banker, orator, and philanthropist, celebrated for his benevolence and for his desire to serve the interests of Parisian commerce,--with the view, we may add, of being always returned to the Chamber as a deputy of Paris.

The banker was Liberal, Birotteau was Royalist; but the perfumer judged by his own heart, and believed that the difference in their political opinions would only be one reason the more for obtaining the credit he intended to ask. In case actual securities were required he felt no doubt of Popinot's devotion, from whom he expected to obtain some thirty thousand francs, which would enable him to await the result of his law-suit by satisfying the demands of the most exacting of the creditors. The demonstrative perfumer, who told his dear Constance, with his head on her pillow, the smallest thoughts and feelings of his whole life, looking for the lights of her contradiction, and gathering courage as he did so, was now prevented from speaking of his situation to his head-clerk, his uncle, or his wife. His thoughts were therefore doubly heavy,--and yet the generous martyr preferred to suffer, rather than fling the fiery brand into the soul of his wife. He meant to tell her of the danger when it was over. The awe with which she inspired him gave him courage. He went every morning to hear Mass at Saint-Roch, and took God for his confidant.

"If I do not meet a soldier coming home from Saint-Roch, my request will be granted. That will be God's answer," he said to himself, after praying that God would help him.

And he was overjoyed when it happened that he did not meet a soldier. Still, his heart was so heavy that he needed another heart on which to lean and moan. Cesarine, to whom from the first he confided the fatal truth, knew all his secrets. Many stolen glances passed between them, glances of despair or smothered hope,--interpellations of the eye darted with mutual eagerness, inquiries and replies full of sympathy, rays passing from soul to soul. Birotteau compelled himself to seem gay, even jovial, with his wife. If Constance asked a question--bah! everything was going well; Popinot (about whom Cesar knew nothing) was succeeding; the oil was looking up; the notes with Claparon would be paid; there was nothing to fear. His mock joy was terrible to witness. When his wife had fallen asleep in the sumptuous bed, Birotteau would rise to a sitting position and think over his troubles. Cesarine would sometimes creep in with her bare feet, in her chemise, and a shawl over her white shoulders.

"Papa, I hear you,--you are crying," she would say, crying herself.

Birotteau sank into such a torpor, after writing the letter which asked for an interview with the great Francois Keller, that his daughter took him out for a walk through the streets of Paris. For the first time he was roused to notice enormous scarlet placards on all the walls, and his eyes encountered the words "Cephalic Oil."

While catastrophes thus threatened "The Queen of Roses" to westward, the house of A. Popinot was rising, radiant in the eastern splendors of success. By the advice of Gaudissart and Finot, Anselme launched his oil heroically. Two thousand placards were pasted in three days on the most conspicuous spots in all Paris. No one could avoid coming face to face with Cephalic Oil, and reading a pithy sentence, constructed by Finot, which announced the impossibility of forcing the hair to grow and the dangers of dyeing it, and was judiciously accompanied by a quotation from Vauquelin's report to the Academy of Sciences,--in short, a regular certificate of life for dead hair, offered to all those who used Cephalic Oil. Every hair-dresser in Paris, and all the perfumers, ornamented their doorways with gilt frames containing a fine impression of the prospectus on vellum, at the top of which shone the engraving of Hero and Leander, reduced in size, with the following assertion as an epigraph: "The peoples of antiquity preserved their hair by the use of Cephalic Oil."

"He has devised frames, permanent frames, perpetual placards," said Birotteau to himself, quite dumbfounded as he stood before the shop-front of the Cloche d'Argent.

"Then you have not seen," said his daughter, "the frame which Monsieur Anselme has brought with his own hands, sending Celestin three hundred bottles of oil?"

"No," he said.

"Celestin has already sold fifty to passers-by, and sixty to regular customers."

"Ah!" exclaimed Cesar.

The poor man, bewildered by the clash of bells which misery jangles in the ears of its victims, lived and moved in a dazed condition. The night before, Popinot had waited more than an hour to see him, and went away after talking with Constance and Cesarine, who told him that Cesar was absorbed in his great enterprise.

"Ah, true! the lands about the Madeleine."

Happily, Popinot--who for a month had never left the Rue des Cinq-Diamants, sitting up all night, and working all Sunday at the manufactory--had seen neither the Ragons, nor Pillerault, nor his uncle the judge. He allowed himself but two hours' sleep, poor lad! he had only two clerks, but at the rate things were now going, he would soon need four. In business, opportunity is everything. He who does not spring upon the back of success and clutch it by the mane, lets fortune escape. Popinot felt that his suit would prosper if six months hence he could say to his uncle and aunt, "I am secure; my fortune is made," and carry to Birotteau thirty or forty thousand francs as his share of the profits. He was ignorant of Roguin's flight, of the disasters and embarrassments which were closing down on Cesar, and he therefore could say nothing indiscreet to Madame Birotteau.

Popinot had promised Finot five hundred francs for every puff in a first-class newspaper, and already there were ten of them; three hundred francs for every second-rate paper, and there were ten of those,--in all of them Cephalic Oil was mentioned three times a month! Finot saw three thousand francs for himself out of these eight thousand--his first stake on the vast green table of speculation! He therefore sprang like a lion on his friends and acquaintances; he haunted the editorial rooms; he wormed himself to the very bedsides of editors in the morning, and prowled about the lobby of the theatres at night. "Think of my oil, dear friend; I have no interest in it--bit of good fellowship, you know!" "Gaudissart, jolly dog!" Such was the first and the last phrase of all his allocutions. He begged for the bottom lines of the final columns of the newspapers, and inserted articles for which he asked no pay from the editors. Wily as a supernumerary who wants to be an actor, wide-awake as an errand-boy who earns sixty francs a month, he wrote wheedling letters, flattered the self-love of editors-in-chief, and did them base services to get his articles inserted. Money, dinners, platitudes, all served the purpose of his eager activity. With tickets for the theatre, he bribed the printers who about midnight are finishing up the columns of a newspaper with little facts and ready-made items kept on hand. At that hour Finot hovered around printing-presses, busy, apparently, with proofs to be corrected. Keeping friends with everybody, he brought Cephalic Oil to a triumphant success over Pate de Regnauld, and Brazilian Mixture, and all the other inventions which had the genius to comprehend journalistic influence and the suction power that reiterated newspaper articles have upon the public mind. In these early days of their innocence many journalists were like cattle; they were unaware of their inborn power; their heads were full of actresses,--Florine, Tullia, Mariette, etc. They laid down the law to everybody, but they picked up nothing for themselves. As Finot's schemes did not concern actresses who wanted applause, nor plays to be puffed, nor vaudevilles to be accepted, nor articles which had to be paid for,--on the contrary, he paid money on occasion, and gave timely breakfasts,--there was soon not a newspaper in Paris which did not mention Cephalic Oil, and call attention to its remarkable concurrence with the principles of Vauquelin's analysis; ridiculing all those who thought hair could be made to grow, and proclaiming the danger of dyeing it.

These articles rejoiced the soul of Gaudissart, who used them as ammunition to destroy prejudices, bringing to bear upon the provinces what his successors have since named, in honor of him, "the charge of the tongue-battery." In those days Parisian newspapers ruled the departments, which were still (unhappy regions!) without _local organs_. The papers were therefore soberly studied, from the title to the name of the printer,--a last line which may have hidden the ironies of persecuted opinion. Gaudissart, thus backed up by the press, met with startling success from the very first town which he favored with his tongue. Every shopkeeper in the provinces wanted the gilt frames, and the prospectuses with Hero and Leander at the top of them.

In Paris, Finot fired at Macassar Oil that delightful joke which made people so merry at the Funambules, when Pierrot, taking an old hair-broom, anointed