The Human Comedy (33 page)

Here
Charles fell silent
; he seemed pained by his memories.

“Well?” we all cried. “What happened?”

“I’ll tell you in a few words, as this is a story, not a novel. We saw nothing of Marcas for some time. That government lasted three months; it fell after the parliamentary session. Marcas came back to us penniless, exhausted from work. He had plumbed the crater of power; he climbed out of it with the beginnings of brain fever. The illness progressed fast; we nursed him. Juste brought in the chief physician from the hospital where he had started as intern. I was living alone in our room and was a very attentive caretaker, but the care and the science—it was all futile. In that month of January 1838, Marcas himself felt that he had only a few days to live. The minister whose soul he had been for six months never came to see him, didn’t even send for news. Marcas made clear his deep contempt for the administration; he seemed to doubt the very future of France and this doubt had made him ill. He thought he saw treason at the heart of the government—not a palpable, actionable betrayal by particular acts but a betrayal produced by a whole system, by the subjection of the national interests to selfish ends. His belief in the abasement of the country was so strong that his illness worsened daily from it.

“I was witness to proposals made him by a leader of the opposition group he had been fighting. His hatred for the men he had tried to serve was so violent that he would have consented joyfully to join the coalition taking shape among these ambitious men who harbored at least one idea: the idea of shaking off the yoke of the court. But Marcas answered the negotiator with the phrase of the Hôtel de Ville: ‘
It is too late
!’

“Marcas did not leave enough to provide for his burial. Juste and I went to great pains to spare him the shame of the pauper’s cart, and the two of us alone followed behind the hearse bearing Z. Marcas’s coffin, which was thrown into the common grave at the Montparnasse cemetery.”

We looked at one another sadly as we listened to this story, the last one Charles Rabourdin told us, the day before he boarded a brig at Le Havre for the Malay Islands—for we all knew more than one Marcas, more than one victim of a political dedication that is rewarded by betrayal or oblivion.

Les Jardies, 1840
Translated by Linda Asher

GOBSECK

To Monsieur le Baron Barchou de Penhoen,

Of all us students at Vendôme, you and I are, I believe, the only ones who have met anew in the course of literary careers, we who were already exploring philosophy at the age when we ought to have been exploring the
De viris!
This is the story I was writing at the time of our recent encounter and when you were engaged in your fine works on German philosophy. Thus we have neither of us missed our vocation. I hope you will experience as much pleasure from seeing your name inscribed here as I had in writing it.

A
T ONE
o’clock of a night in the winter of 1829–1830, two guests who were not family members still lingered in the drawing room of the Vicomtesse de Grandlieu. One, a handsome young man, left the house upon hearing the clock toll the hour. While his carriage clattered out of the courtyard and the viscountess saw only her brother and a family friend finishing their game of piquet, she approached her daughter, who stood by the mantelpiece pretending to study a lampshade as she listened to the departing carriage in a way that justified her mother’s fears.

“Camille, if you go on behaving as you did this evening with the young Comte de Restaud, you will compel me to end his visits here. Listen, my child: If you trust in my love for you, do let me guide you in life. At seventeen a person is not equipped to assess the future, nor the past, nor certain social considerations. I would offer this one remark: Monsieur de Restaud has a mother who would eat through millions of francs, a woman who comes of modest stock, a Mademoiselle Goriot. She caused all sorts of talk in times past, and
she behaved so very badly toward her father
that she certainly does not deserve to have such a good son. The young count adores her and stands by her with a degree of filial care that is highly praiseworthy, and he is extremely good to his brother and sister as well. But however admirable his own conduct,” the viscountess continued, with a worldly-wise look, “so long as his mother is alive, any family would shudder to entrust young Restaud with a daughter’s future and fortune.”

“I’ve overheard a few words that make me eager to intervene between you and Mademoiselle de Grandlieu,” the family friend called from across the room. He turned back to his opponent: “I’ve won this game, count. I’m abandoning you to run to your niece’s aid.”

“That is what they mean by ‘having a lawyer’s ears,’” said Madame de Grandlieu. “My dear Derville, how could you have heard what I was saying so quietly?”

“I could tell from your expression,” Derville answered, moving to an easy chair by the fire.

The uncle settled in beside his niece, and Madame de Grandlieu took a seat on a hearth stool between her daughter and Derville.

“It is time, madame la vicomtesse, to tell you a story that should change your views on Comte Ernest de Restaud’s prospects.”

“A story!” cried Camille. “Do tell us, please, sir!”

Derville sent Madame de Grandlieu a glance that said the tale was intended for her. By reason of her fortune and the venerable antiquity of her name, the viscountess was one of the most prominent ladies in the Faubourg Saint-Germain. And if it seems unlikely that a Paris attorney could address her with such familiarity and behave so freely in her house, the phenomenon is easily explained.

Madame de Grandlieu had returned to France in 1815 with the Restoration of the royal family. She took up residence in Paris, living initially on only the pension that Louis XVIII granted her from the civil list funds, an intolerable situation. The Hôtel de Grandlieu had been confiscated and sold by the Republic; the young Derville had occasion to discover some technical flaws in the sale and claimed that the house must be returned to Madame de Grandlieu. On a contingency basis, he brought suit to that effect and prevailed. Encouraged by that success, he wrangled well enough with some hospice or other and brought about the restitution of her family’s timberlands. He went on to recover Grandlieu shares in the Orléans Canal Company, as well as some sizable buildings that the emperor had awarded to some other public institutions. Thus reestablished by the young lawyer’s skills, Madame de Grandlieu’s estate was already yielding an income of some sixty thousand francs a year when
the new indemnification law restored further enormous sums to her
. A man of great probity, informed and modest, and good company besides, the young attorney became a family friend.

Although his work for Madame de Grandlieu earned him the esteem, and the business, of the finest houses in the Faubourg Saint-Germain, he did not exploit his reputation as an ambitious man would have done. He resisted the viscountess’s urging to sell his law practice and enter the magistrature, a career in which her patronage would have helped him to quick advancement. Except for spending an occasional evening at the Grandlieu house, he went out into society only to keep up relations with clients. It was good luck that his talents had been brought to light through his dedication to Madame de Grandlieu, for otherwise he might have risked his practice dying off; Derville did not have the soul of an attorney. Lately, since Comte Ernest de Restaud had begun attending the Grandlieu salon and Derville noticed Camille’s interest in the young man, the attorney had become as assiduous a visitor to madame’s house as any dandy from the Chaussée d’Antin newly admitted into the Faubourg’s social circles. A few days before this evening, sitting by Camille at a ball, he had nodded toward the count and said, “A pity that lad hasn’t got a few millions, isn’t it?”

“Is it a pity? I don’t think so,” the girl had replied. “Monsieur de Restaud is very talented, he is knowledgeable, and the minister he works for thinks highly of him. I have no doubt he will become a very notable person. ‘That lad’ will have all the fortune he likes, the day he has power.”

“Yes, but suppose he were already rich now?”

“If he were rich,” Camille said, flushing, “then every girl in the room would be competing for him.” She nodded toward the quadrille dancers.

“And then,” said the attorney, “Mademoiselle de Grandlieu would no longer be the only one he’d look to. Is that why you’re coloring? You do rather like him, don’t you? Come, say it.”

Camille rose abruptly.

“She loves him,” Derville thought.

From that day on, Camille had been especially attentive to the lawyer, now that she understood that he approved of her inclination for the young Ernest de Restaud. Till then, though she was quite aware of her family’s debt to Derville, she had displayed more respect than real friendship for him, more courtesy than warmth; her manner, and her tone of voice, had always kept him on notice of the social distance between them. Gratitude is a debt that the next generation is not always happy to count among the family obligations.

“This situation,” Derville told Madame de Grandlieu after a moment, “calls to mind the only romantic story in my life. You’re already laughing,” he said, “at hearing a lawyer claim to have had a romance in his past. But like everyone else, I was once twenty-five, and by that age I had already seen some curious things. I must start by telling you about a person whom you could never have known: This man was a usurer . . .”

* * *

Can you possibly picture that pallid, wan face, one to which I wish the Academy would allow me to apply the term “lunar”—it was like a vermeil piece with the gilt worn off. His hair lay flat to his head, scrupulously combed down and ashen gray. His face was as impassive as Talleyrand’s, the features immobile as a bronze casting. His small eyes were as yellow as a ferret’s and almost lashless, and they seemed to cringe at the light, but the visor of an old cap shielded them from it. His pointed nose tapered to a narrow tip that made you think of a gimlet, and his lips were thin, like the lips of the alchemists and the wizened old men in paintings by Rembrandt or Metzu. The man spoke low, his tone was soft, and he never became agitated. His age was a question: It was impossible to say whether he was old before his time or had managed his youth so economically as to make it last forever.

In his room, everything was clean and threadbare, from the green baize on his desk to the bedcover. It was like the chilly sanctum of those old maids who spend their days rubbing down their furniture. In winter he kept the embers in his hearth smoldering beneath layers of ash and never let them flame up. His every act, from the hour he woke to his evening fit of coughing, was regular as a pendulum. He was a kind of automaton, rewound each night by sleep. If you touch a woodlouse as it crosses a sheet of paper, it will stop short and play dead; in the same way, this man would stop speaking in mid-sentence while a carriage passed in the street, so as not to strain his voice.
Like Fontenelle, he was sparing with his vital energies
and concentrated all his human feeling on the self. Thus his life flowed as quietly as the sand in an hourglass. Occasionally his victims would raise a ruckus and carry on; then there would come a great silence, as in a kitchen when a duck has its throat slit. Toward evening this banknote man would turn into an ordinary human, and his metals metamorphosed into a human heart. If he was pleased with his day, he would rub his hands together and the crevassed folds of his face would let off a smoke of gaiety—there is no other way to describe the silent play of those muscles, an effect akin to Leatherstocking’s hollow laughter. In even his fiercest transports of pleasure, though, his conversation was still monosyllabic and his face remained empty of expression.

This was the neighbor whom chance provided me in the house where I lodged on rue des Grès when I was still just an assistant clerk and finishing my third year at the law faculty. The house has no courtyard, and it is damp and gloomy. The building is divided into a series of cell-like rooms of equal size; their only light comes from the street-front windows, and their only exit is onto a single long corridor lit by dim transoms. The claustral arrangement indicates that the building was once part of a convent. In the melancholy air of the place, a well-born lad’s high spirits would die away before he even entered my neighbor’s door; the man’s house and the man resembled each other, you might say, like an oyster and its rock.

I was the only person he had anything to do with, socially speaking; he would come to ask me for a light or to borrow a book or a newspaper, and on the occasional evening he would allow me into his cell where we would chat when he was in a good mood. These marks of trust were the fruit of four years of proximity and of my orderly way of life; through lack of money, my life was much like his own. Did he have relatives or friends? Was he rich or poor? No one could have answered such questions. I never saw money in his room. His funds must have been stored in the vaults of the Bank of France. He would collect on his bills himself, running about Paris on legs as bony as a stag’s. In fact he was a martyr to his own cautious ways: One day, he chanced to be carrying some money, and a gold double Napoleon coin somehow fell out of his pouch. A tenant climbing the stairs behind him picked it up and handed it to him. “That’s not mine!” he exclaimed, looking startled, as if to say, “Gold? mine? Would I be living like this if I were rich?”

Mornings, he made his own coffee on a tin brazier that stood always in the dark corner of his grate. He had his dinner sent in from a cookshop. Our elderly porteress came upstairs daily to tidy the room.

Well, by an odd chance, the sort of detail Sterne would call predestination, this man’s
name was Gobseck
. When in later days I handled his legal business, I learned that at the time we met he was about seventy-six years old. He was born in 1740, on the outskirts of Antwerp, of a Jewish mother and a Dutch father, and was named Jean-Esther van Gobseck. You remember back when all of Paris was obsessed with the murder of a woman called La Belle Hollandaise? When I happened to mention the crime to my neighbor, he told me, showing neither the slightest interest nor the least surprise, “That was my great-niece.” Those words were all that could be drawn from him on the death of his only near kin, his sister’s granddaughter. I learned from the court records that La Belle Hollandaise was indeed named Sara van Gobseck. When I asked him once by what curious circumstance his niece bore his own last name, he smiled and replied, “The women in our family have never married.” The odd fellow had never cared to see a single person of the four generations of women among his relatives. He wanted nothing to do with any heirs and could not conceive that his riches should ever belong to anyone but himself, even after his death.