The Human Comedy (34 page)

His mother had sent him off at the age of ten as a cabin boy to the Dutch East Indies, and he had knocked about there for twenty years. Thus the creases in his sallow brow harbored secrets of dreadful events, sudden terrors, unexpected turns, romantic escapades, sublime joys: hunger was borne, love trampled underfoot, a fortune threatened, lost, and regained; life a thousand times in peril, and saved perhaps by quick decisions whose urgency justified their ruthlessness.

He had known Monsieur de Lally
and Monsieur de Kergarouet, Monsieur d’Estaing, the bailiff Suffren, Monsieur de Portenduère, Lord Cornwallis, Lord Hastings, Tippu Sahib’s father, and Tippu Sahib himself. The Savoyard who served Mahadaji Sindhia, the King of Delhi, and did so much to establish the power of the Marathas—Gobseck had done business with him, as well as with Victor Hugues and a number of famous pirates, having spent a long time in St. Thomas. So determined was he to try every path to fortune that he had gone hunting for the treasure of that tribe of savages so famous around Buenos Aires. He was familiar with all the events of the American War of Independence. But when he spoke of the Indies or the Americas, which he never did with anyone else and rarely did with me, he seemed to feel he’d committed an indiscretion and appeared to regret it. If humanity, if sociability were a religion, he could be considered an atheist. I had hoped to plumb his character, but I confess to my shame that it remained quite opaque to me. I sometimes even wondered which sex he belonged to; if all usurers are like him, I believe they are neuter in gender. Had he kept to his mother’s religion, and did he consider Christians his prey? Had he turned Catholic, Muslim, Brahmin, or Lutheran? I never learned a thing about his religious views. He seemed indifferent rather than a nonbeliever.

One evening I entered the room of this man who had turned himself into gold, the man whom his victims—his clients, as he said—called “Papa” Gobseck, either as a euphemism or perhaps with sarcasm. I found him in his armchair, motionless as a statue, his eyes fixed on the mantelpiece as if he were reviewing his account statements there. A smoky lamp on a once-green base cast a glow that, far from throwing color on his face instead brought out its pallor. He looked at me in silence and pointed to my waiting chair. “What could this creature be thinking?” I said to myself. “Does he even know if a God exists, or an emotion, or women, or happiness?” I pitied him as I would a sick creature. But I understood, too, that in addition to his millions in the bank, he could also lay mental claim to the whole earth, which he had roamed, mined, weighed up, evaluated, and developed.

“Hello, Papa Gobseck,” I said. He turned his head toward me, his thick black eyebrows pulled together slightly; that characteristic expression from him was the equivalent of the merriest smile from a southerner. “You’re looking as gloomy as the day you heard about the bankruptcy of that bookseller you admired for his cleverness, despite being a victim of it.”

“I, a victim?” he said, surprised.

“To get him to settle, didn’t you let him pay you in discounted notes, and then when he was back in business he redeemed them for full value rather than at the discount?”

“He was sharp, yes,” Gobseck replied, “but I got even later.”

“What is it then, some overdue bills to protest? Today is the thirtieth, I think.”

It was the first time I had ever spoken to him of money. He looked up teasingly, and then, in his soft voice with tones like those produced by a flute student with a poor embouchure, he said, “I’m playing.”

“So, you do sometimes play?”

“Do you think the only poets in the world are the people who publish verses?” he asked, shrugging and throwing me a pitying look.

“Poetry . . . in that head?” I said to myself, for at the time I knew nothing about his life.

“What finer existence can there possibly be than mine?” he went on, and his eyes glowed. “You’re young, you think with your blood, you look at your glowing embers and see women’s faces, whereas I see only cinders in mine. You believe in everything; I believe in nothing. Hold on to your illusions, if you can. I’ll show you life as it is, minus the discount. Whether you travel the world or stay close to hearth and wife, there always comes a certain age when life is simply a habit carried out in some chosen setting. From then on happiness consists in applying our faculties to a given reality. Apart from these precepts, everything else is false. My own principles have always shifted to match those of the men I live among—I have had to adjust them according to latitude: what Europe admires, Asia punishes; what’s a vice in Paris is a requirement once you sail past the Azores. Nothing on this earth is absolute; everything is only convention that changes with the local climate. For anyone who’s had to leap into a multitude of social molds, convictions and moral rules become empty words. What stays in us is the one true feeling nature put there: the instinct for self-preservation. In your European societies, it’s called self-interest. If you’d lived as long as I have, you would know that there is only one material thing whose value is reliable enough to be worth caring about: That thing is GOLD. Gold represents every sort of human power. I have traveled, I have seen that everywhere there are plains or mountains—plains are tiresome and mountains are tiring, so place makes no difference. As to behaviors, man is everywhere the same: Everywhere the struggle between the poor and the rich is a given; everywhere it is inevitable, so much the better to be exploiter than exploited; everywhere you find sinewy men who labor and indolent men who torment themselves; pleasures are the same everywhere; everywhere the senses grow jaded and only one sentiment endures: vanity! Vanity is always about the self. Vanity is only satisfied with floods of gold. Our fantasies take time, or physical means, or care in order to be realized. Well, gold contains every potential and provides every reality. Only madmen and invalids are happy to shuffle cards every night to see if they’ll win a few sous in the end. Only fools will spend their time wondering about what goes on around them, whether Madame So-and-so slept alone or with a companion, whether she has more blood than lymph, more temperament than virtue. Only idiots believe they serve their fellow man by working out political principles to foretell events that will always be unpredictable. Only simpletons like to chatter about theater folk and quote their sayings; or like an animal in its cage, pace daily the same trail if a little broader; dressing for other people, eating for other people, boasting about a horse or a carriage that the next fellow cannot acquire for another three days. Isn’t that in a nutshell the life you Parisians lead? Let’s look at existence from a higher vantage point. Happiness lies either in strong emotions that wear out life or in routine activities that give existence the relentless rhythm of an English-style machine. At a higher level than such gratifications is the curiosity—considered noble—to plumb nature’s secrets or to achieve a kind of imitation of her effects. Is this not—in two words—art or science, passion or calm? Well, I tell you, every human passion, writ larger by the play of social interests, they all come and parade before me in my life of calm. Furthermore, that scientific curiosity of yours, a kind of struggle with man always getting the worst of it—I replace it with insight into the springs that set mankind moving. In a word, I possess the world with no effort at all, and the world has no grip on me.

“Listen,” he went on, “an account of my morning’s adventures will give you an idea of my pleasures.”

He rose, bolted the door, pulled shut an old tapestry curtain whose rings creaked along the rod, and returned to his seat.

“This morning,” he said, “I had only two bills to collect, the others I had passed on to clients as loans yesterday evening. That already puts me ahead, because I always charge in advance for the cost of collection—forty sous to hire a good carriage, for instance. Wouldn’t it be a fine thing if a client had me running all over Paris for a six-franc fee, when I answer to no one, and when I pay only seven francs in taxes!

“So then, the first bill, for a thousand francs, came to me from a handsome young dandy in a beaded waistcoat who wore a monocle, drove a tilbury carriage pulled by an English horse, and so on. It was endorsed by one of the finest women in Paris, the wife of a rich landowner, a count. Why had the countess underwritten a bill of exchange, which is worth nothing legally but worth a great deal in practice? These unfortunate women are terrified of the scandal a publicly protested bill could set off in their household and would give their very selves as payment rather than default. I wanted to find out the secret value of that bill of exchange: Was it stupidity, imprudence, love, or charity?

“The second bill, for the same amount, was signed ‘Fanny Malvaut’—it had been given to me by a cloth merchant on the verge of collapse. No one who has any credit at the bank comes to my office, where the first step from the door to my desk declares a hopeless situation: an imminent bankruptcy and above all the refusal of credit by every banker in town. So all I ever see are stags at bay, hounded by packs of creditors.

“The countess lived on rue du Helder and my Fanny on rue Montmartre. What a mass of conjectures I mulled as I left my house this morning! If these two women were not able to pay, they would receive me with greater respect than if I were their own father. How many contortions and wiles would the countess muster for the sake of a thousand francs? She would take on an affectionate manner, use that cajoling tone peculiar to an endorser of notes, murmur endearments, plead, even beg. And I”—here the old man turned his pale gaze on me—“I am unshakable!” He continued, “I am the Avenger, I am the embodiment of Remorse!

“Well, enough imaginings. I arrive at the house . . .”

“Madame la comtesse is still asleep,” a chambermaid tells me.

“When will she be available?”

“At noon.”

“Is madame unwell?”

“No, monsieur, but she returned from a ball at three in the morning.”

“My name is Gobseck. Tell her I called and that I shall return at twelve o’clock.”

And I leave, marking my visit on the carpet lining the stone staircase. I like to soil the carpets of the rich, not out of spite but to make them feel the claw of necessity.

On rue Montmartre, arriving at a shabby building, I push open a crooked carriage gate and enter one of those murky courtyards where the sun never shines. The porter’s lodge is dark, the windowpane looks like the edge of a worn old robe—grimy, brown, cracked.

“Mademoiselle Fanny Malvaut?”

“She’s gone out, but if you’ve come about a bill, the money is here for you.”

“I’ll come back,” I said. Upon hearing that the porter had the money, I wanted to meet the young lady; I imagined she was pretty. I spent the morning looking through the prints on display along the boulevard; then as noon rang I crossed the parlor adjoining the countess’s room.

“Madame has only just rung,” the chambermaid tells me. “I don’t believe she is ready for visitors yet.”

“I will wait,” I said, sitting down in an armchair.

In a moment the Persian blinds opened and the chambermaid returned to say, “Do come in, sir.” From the sweetness of her tone, I understood that her mistress would not be paying me. But what a beautiful woman then appeared! She had hastily covered her naked shoulders with a cashmere shawl so closely wrapped that their nude form could be made out beneath. Her gown was trimmed with snowy ruffles that announced that some fine laundress earned a good two thousand francs a year there. Thick locks of the woman’s black hair slipped free of a pretty plaid kerchief knotted carelessly around her head like a Creole woman. Her disordered bed was the picture of a sleepless night. A painter would have paid good money to spend a few moments observing the scene. Beneath a voluptuously slung canopy, a pillow tucked into a blue silk eiderdown, its lace edge in sharp relief against the azure quilt, bore the print of vague forms that stirred the imagination. At the feet of the lions carved into the mahogany bedposts lay a broad bearskin rug, upon which gleamed two white satin slippers flung down carelessly in exhaustion from the late ball. On a chair lay a rumpled gown, its sleeves touching the floor. Stockings that the faintest breeze might waft away twined around the leg of an armchair. White garters trailed along a chaise. An elegant fan, half spread, glowed on the mantelpiece. Drawers hung open; flowers, diamonds, gloves, a nosegay, a sash lay here and there. A light scent of perfume filled the air. All was luxury and disorder, beauty and disharmony; for her or for her worshipper, trouble crouching below was already lifting its head, grazing them with its sharp teeth.

The countess’s drawn face resembled that bedroom strewn with the remains of a festive night. I felt pity for the scattered baubles that only the night before, arrayed together, had roused excitement and envy. These vestiges of a love corroded by remorse, this picture of a life of dissipation, of luxury and riot, evoked a Tantalus-like effort to clutch at fleeting delights as they slip out of reach . . . Red marks on the young woman’s face showed the delicacy of her skin, but her features seemed somehow coarsened and the brown rings beneath her eyes looked unusually dark. Still, nature flowed so powerfully in her that these signs of excess did not lessen her beauty. Her eyes sparkled. Like some Herodias from Leonardo’s brush (I used to deal in paintings), she was magnificent with life and vigor; there was nothing mean about her contours or features; she inspired love, and I sensed she must be even stronger than love. She was entrancing. It is a long while since my heart had beat so hard. So I was already repaid enough! I would readily give a thousand francs for a sensation that so recalled the days of my youth.

“Sir,” she said, offering me a chair, “would you be kind enough to wait?”

“Until noon tomorrow, madame,” I replied, as I refolded the paper I had presented her. “I cannot legally protest the note before then.”

At the same time, I was thinking, “Pay up for your luxury, pay for your name, pay for your ease, pay for the monopoly you live by! To keep their holdings safe, the rich invented courtrooms and judges, and the guillotine—a candle that draws the ignorant fluttering up to be burnt. But for you who sleep upon silk and beneath silk, what waits is remorse, grinding teeth hidden behind a smile, and those fantastical lion jaws biting at your heart.”