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

the Bank of France.

"Try to renew your notes," she said; "go and see Monsieur Claparon, your copartner, and all the others to whom you gave notes for the 15th, and ask them to renew. It will be time enough to go to the money-lenders with Popinot's paper if that fails."

"To-morrow is the 13th," said Birotteau, completely crushed.

In the language of his own prospectus, he enjoyed a sanguine temperament, which was subject to an enormous waste through emotions and the pressure of thought, and imperatively demanded sleep to repair it. Cesarine took her father into the salon and played to him "Rousseau's Dream,"--a pretty piece of music by Herold; while Constance sat sewing beside him. The poor man laid his head on a cushion, and every time he looked up at his wife he saw a soft smile upon her lips; and thus he fell asleep.

"Poor man!" said Constance; "what misery is in store for him! God grant he may have strength to bear it!"

"Oh! what troubles you, mamma?" said Cesarine, seeing that her mother was weeping.

"Dear daughter, I see a failure coming. If your father is forced to make an assignment, we must ask no one's pity. My child, be prepared to become a simple shop-girl. If I see you accepting your life courageously, I shall have strength to begin my life over again. I know your father,--he will not keep back one farthing; I shall resign my dower; all that we possess will be sold. My child, you must take your jewels and your clothes to-morrow to your uncle Pillerault; for you are not bound to any sacrifice."

Cesarine was seized with a terror beyond control as she listened to these words, spoken with religious simplicity. The thought came into her mind to go and see Anselme; but her native delicacy checked it.

On the morrow, at nine o'clock, Birotteau, following his wife's advice, went to find Claparon in the Rue de Provence, in the grasp of anxieties quite other than those through which he had lately passed. To ask for a credit is an ordinary business matter; it happens every day that those who undertake an enterprise are obliged to borrow capital; but to ask for the renewal of notes is in commercial jurisprudence what the correctional police is to the court of assizes,--a first step towards bankruptcy, just as a misdemeanor leads to crime. The secret of your embarrassment is in other hands than your own. A merchant delivers himself over, bound hand and foot, to another merchant; and mercy is a virtue not practised at the Bourse.

Cesar, who once walked the streets of Paris with his head high and his eye beaming with confidence, now, unstrung by perplexity, shrank from meeting Claparon; he began to realize that a banker's heart is mere viscera. Claparon had seemed to him so brutal in his coarse jollity, and he had felt the man's vulgarity so keenly, that he shuddered at the necessity of accosting him.

"But he is nearer to the people; perhaps he will therefore have more heart!" Such was the first reproachful word which the anguish of his position forced from Cesar's lips.

Birotteau drew upon the dregs of his courage, and went up the stairway of a mean little _entresol_, at whose windows he had caught a glimpse of green curtains yellowed by the sun. He read the word "Offices," stamped in black letters on an oval copper-plate; he rapped, nobody answered, and he went in. The place, worse than humble, conveyed an idea of penury, or avarice, or neglect. No employe was to be seen behind the brass lattice which topped an unpainted white wooden enclosure, breast-high, within which were tables and desks in stained black wood. These deserted places were littered with inkstands, in which the ink was mouldy and the pens as rumpled as a ragammufin's head, and twisted like sunfish; with boxes and papers and printed matter,--all worthless, no doubt. The floor was as dirty, defaced, and damp as that of a boarding-house. The second room, announced by the word "Counting-Room" on its door, harmonized with the grim _facetiae_ of its neighbor. In one corner was a large space screened off by an oak balustrade, trellised with copper wire and furnished with a sliding cat-hole, within which was an enormous iron chest. This space, apparently given over to the rioting of rats, also contained an odd-looking desk, with a shabby arm-chair, which was ragged, green, and torn in the seat,--from which the horse-hair protruded, like the wig of its master, in half a hundred libertine curls. The chief adornment of this room, which had evidently been the salon of the appartement before it was converted into a banking-office, was a round table covered with a green cloth, round which stood a few old chairs of black leather with tarnished gilt nails. The fireplace, somewhat elegant, showed none of the sooty marks of a fire; the hearth was clean; the mirror, covered with fly-specks, had a paltry air, in keeping with a mahogany clock bought at the sale of some old notary, which annoyed the eye, already depressed by two candelabras without candles and the sticky dust that covered them. The wall-paper, mouse-gray with a pink border, revealed, by certain fuliginous stains, the unwholesome presence of smokers. Nothing ever more faithfully represented that prosaic precinct called by the newspapers an "editorial sanctum." Birotteau, fearing that he might be indiscreet, knocked sharply three times on the door opposite to that by which he entered.

"Come in!" cried Claparon, the reverberation of whose voice revealed the distance it had to traverse and the emptiness of the room,--in which Cesar heard the crackling of a good fire, though the owner was apparently not there.

The room was, in truth, Claparon's private office. Between the ostentatious reception-room of Francois Keller and the untidy abode of the counterfeit banker, there was all the difference that exists between Versailles and the wigwam of a Huron chief. Birotteau had witnessed the splendors of finance; he was now to see its fooleries. Lying in bed, in a sort of oblong recess or den opening from the farther end of the office, and where the habits of a slovenly life had spoiled, dirtied, greased, torn, defaced, obliterated, and ruined furniture which had been elegant in its day, Claparon, at the entrance of Birotteau, wrapped his filthy dressing-gown around him, laid down his pipe, and drew together the curtains of the bed with a haste which made even the innocent perfumer suspect his morals.

"Sit down, monsieur," said the make-believe banker.

Claparon, without his wig, his head wrapped up in a bandanna handkerchief twisted awry, seemed all the more hideous to Birotteau because, when the dressing-gown gaped open, he saw an undershirt of knitted wool, once white, but now yellowed by wear indefinitely prolonged.

"Will you breakfast with me?" said Claparon, recollecting the perfumer's ball, and thinking to make him a return and also to put him off the scent by this invitation.

Cesar now perceived a round table, hastily cleared of its litter, which bore testimony to the presence of jovial company by a pate, oysters, white wine, and vulgar kidneys, _sautes au vin de champagne_, sodden in their own sauce. The light of a charcoal brazier gleamed on an _omelette aux truffes_.

Two covers and two napkins, soiled by the supper of the previous night, might have enlightened the purest innocence. Claparon, thinking himself very clever, pressed his invitation in spite of Cesar's refusal.

"I was to have had a guest, but that guest has disappointed me," said the crafty traveller, in a voice likely to reach a person buried under coverlets.

"Monsieur," said Birotteau, "I came solely on business, and I shall not detain you long."

"I'm used up," said Claparon, pointing to the desk and the tables piled with documents; "they don't leave me a poor miserable moment to myself! I don't receive people except on Saturdays. But as for you, my dear friend, I'll see you at any time. I haven't a moment to love or to loaf; I have lost even the inspiration of business; to catch its vim one must have the sloth of ease. Nobody ever sees me now on the boulevard doing nothing. Bah! I'm sick of business; I don't want to talk about business; I've got money enough, but I never can get enough happiness. My gracious! I want to travel,--to see Italy! Oh, that dear Italy! beautiful in spite of all her reverses! adorable land, where I shall no doubt encounter some angel, complying yet majestic! I have always loved Italian women. Did you ever have an Italian woman yourself? No? Then come with me to Italy. We will see Venice, the abode of doges,--unfortunately fallen into those intelligent Austrian hands that know nothing of art! Bah! let us get rid of business, canals, loans, and peaceful governments. I'm a good fellow when I've got my pockets lined. Thunder! let's travel."

"One word, monsieur, and I will release you," said Birotteau. "You made over my notes to Monsieur Bidault."

"You mean Gigonnet, that good little Gigonnet, easy-going--"

"Yes," said Cesar; "but I wish,--and here I count upon your honor and delicacy,--"

Claparon bowed.

"--to renew those notes."

"Impossible!" snapped the banker. "I'm not alone in the matter. We have met in council,--regular Chamber; but we all agreed like bacon in a frying-pan. The devil! we deliberated. Those lands about the Madeleine don't amount to anything; we are operating elsewhere. Hey! my dear sir, if we were not involved in the Champs Elysees and at the Bourse which they are going to finish, and in the quartier Saint-Lazare and at Tivoli, we shouldn't be, as that fat Nucingen says, in _peaseness_ at all. What's the Madeleine to us?--a midge of a thing. Pr-r-r! We don't play low, my good fellow," he said, tapping Birotteau on the stomach and catching him round the waist. "Come, let's have our breakfast, and talk," added Claparon, wishing to soften his refusal.

"Very good," said Birotteau. "So much the worse for the other guest," he thought, meaning to make Claparon drunk, and to find out who were his real associates in an affair which began to look suspicious to him.

"All right! Victoire!" called the banker.

This call brought a regular Leonarde, tricked out like a fish-woman.

"Tell the clerks that I can't see any one,--not even Nucingen, Keller, Gigonnet, and all the rest of them."

"No one has come but Monsieur Lempereur."

"He can receive the great people," said Claparon; "the small fry are not to get beyond the first room. They are to say I'm cogitating a great enterprise--in champagne."

To make an old commercial traveller drunk is an impossibility. Cesar mistook the elation of the man's vulgarity when he attempted to sound his mind.

"That infamous Roguin is still connected with you," he began; "don't you think you ought to write and tell him to assist an old friend whom he has compromised,--a man with whom he dined every Sunday, and whom he has known for twenty years?"

"Roguin? A fool! his share is ours now. Don't be worried, old fellow, all will go well. Pay up to the 15th, and after that we will see--I say, we will see. Another glass of wine? The capital doesn't concern me one atom; pay or don't pay, I sha'n't make faces at you. I'm only in the business for a commission on the sales, and for a share when the lands are converted into money; and it's for that I manage the owners. Don't you understand? You have got solid men behind you, so I'm not afraid, my good sir. Nowadays, business is all