The Firm of Nucingen Part 2

Modern medicine, which pa.s.sed (it is its fairest t.i.tle to glory) from a hypothetical to a positive science, through the influence of the great a.n.a.lytical school of Paris, has proved beyond a doubt that a man is periodically renewed throughout----"

"New haft, new blade, like Jeannot's knife, and yet you think that he is still the same man," broke in Bixiou. "So there are several lozenges in the harlequin's coat that we call happiness; and--well, there was neither hole nor stain in this G.o.defroid's costume. A young man of six-and-twenty, who would be happy in love, who would be loved, that is to say, not for his blossoming youth, nor for his wit, nor for his figure, but spontaneously, and not even merely in return for his own love; a young man, I say, who has found love in the abstract, to quote Royer-Collard, might yet very possibly find never a farthing in the purse which She, loving and beloved, embroidered for him; he might owe rent to his landlord; he might be unable to pay the bootmaker before mentioned; his very tailor, like France herself, might at last show signs of disaffection. In short, he might have love and yet be poor.

And poverty spoils a young man's happiness, unless he holds our transcendental views of the fusion of interests. I know nothing more wearing than happiness within combined with adversity without. It is as if you had one leg freezing in the draught from the door, and the other half-roasted by a brazier--as I have at this moment. I hope to be understood. Comes there an echo from thy waistcoat-pocket, Blondet?

Between ourselves, let the heart alone, it spoils the intellect.

"Let us resume. G.o.defroid de Beaudenord was respected by his tradespeople, for they were paid with tolerable regularity. The witty woman before quoted--I cannot give her name, for she is still living, thanks to her want of heart----"

"Who is this?"

"The Marquise d'Espard. She said that a young man ought to live on an entresol; there should be no sign of domesticity about the place; no cook, no kitchen, an old manservant to wait upon him, and no pretence of permanence. In her opinion, any other sort of establishment is bad form. G.o.defroid de Beaudenord, faithful to this programme, lodged on an entresol on the Quai Malaquais; he had, however, been obliged to have this much in common with married couples, he had put a bedstead in his room, though for that matter it was so narrow that he seldom slept in it. An Englishwoman might have visited his rooms and found nothing 'improper' there. Finot, you have yet to learn the great law of the 'Improper' that rules Britain. But, for the sake of the bond between us--that bill for a thousand francs--I will just give you some idea of it. I have been in England myself.--I will give him wit enough for a couple of thousand," he added in an aside to Blondet.

"In England, Finot, you grow extremely intimate with a woman in the course of an evening, at a ball or wherever it is; next day you meet her in the street and look as though you knew her again--'improper.'--At dinner you discover a delightful man beneath your left-hand neighbor's dresscoat; a clever man; no high mightiness, no constraint, nothing of an Englishman about him. In accordance with the tradition of French breeding, so urbane, so gracious as they are, you address your neighbor--'improper.'--At a ball you walk up to a pretty woman to ask her to dance--'improper.' You wax enthusiastic, you argue, laugh, and give yourself out, you fling yourself heart and soul into the conversation, you give expression to your real feelings, you play when you are at the card-table, chat while you chat, eat while you eat--'improper! improper! improper!' Stendhal, one of the cleverest and profoundest minds of the age, hit off the 'improper' excellently well when he said that such-and-such a British peer did not dare to cross his legs when he sat alone before his own hearth for fear of being improper.

An English gentlewoman, were she one of the rabid 'Saints'--that most straitest sect of Protestants that would leave their whole family to starve if the said family did anything 'improper'--may play the deuce's own delight in her own bedroom, and need not be 'improper,' but she would look on herself as lost if she received a visit from a man of her acquaintance in the aforesaid room. Thanks to propriety, London and its inhabitants will be found petrified some of these days."

"And to think that there are a.s.ses here in France that want to import the solemn tomfoolery that the English keep up among themselves with that admirable self-possession which you know!" added Blondet. "It is enough to make any man shudder if he has seen the English at home, and recollects the charming, gracious French manners. Sir Walter Scott was afraid to paint women as they are for fear of being 'improper'; and at the close of his life repented of the creation of the great character of Effie in _The Heart of Midlothian_."

"Do you wish not to be 'improper' in England?" asked Bixiou, addressing Finot.

"Well?"

"Go to the Tuileries and look at a figure there, something like a fireman carved in marble ('Themistocles,' the statuary calls it), try to walk like the Commandant's statue, and you will never be 'improper.' It was through strict observance of the great law of the _im_proper that G.o.defroid's happiness became complete. There is the story:

"Beaudenord had a tiger, not a 'groom,' as they write that know nothing of society. The tiger, a diminutive Irish page called Paddy, Toby, Joby (which you please), was three feet in height by twenty inches in breadth, a weasel-faced infant, with nerves of steel tempered in fire-water, and agile as a squirrel. He drove a landau with a skill never yet at fault in London or Paris. He had a lizard's eye, as sharp as my own, and he could mount a horse like the elder Franconi. With the rosy cheeks and yellow hair of one of Rubens' Madonnas he was double-faced as a prince, and as knowing as an old attorney; in short, at the age of ten he was nothing more nor less than a blossom of depravity, gambling and swearing, partial to jam and punch, pert as a _feuilleton_, impudent and light-fingered as any Paris street-arab. He had been a source of honor and profit to a well-known English lord, for whom he had already won seven hundred thousand francs on the race-course. The aforesaid n.o.bleman set no small store on Toby. His tiger was a curiosity, the very smallest tiger in town. Perched aloft on the back of a thoroughbred, Joby looked like a hawk. Yet--the great man dismissed him. Not for greediness, not for dishonesty, nor murder, nor rudeness to my lady, nor for cutting holes in my lady's own woman's pockets, nor because he had been 'got at' by some of his master's rivals on the turf, nor for playing games of a Sunday, nor for bad behavior of any sort or description. Toby might have done all these things, he might even have spoken to milord before milord spoke to him, and his n.o.ble master might, perhaps, have pardoned that breach of the law domestic.

Milord would have put up with a good deal from Toby; he was very fond of him. Toby could drive a tandem dog-cart, riding on the wheeler, postilion fas.h.i.+on; his legs did not reach the shafts, he looked in fact very much like one of the cherub heads circling about the Eternal Father in old Italian pictures. But an English journalist wrote a delicious description of the little angel, in the course of which he said that Paddy was quite too pretty for a tiger; in fact, he offered to bet that Paddy was a tame tigress. The description, on the heads of it, was calculated to poison minds and end in something 'improper.' And the superlative of 'improper' is the way to the gallows. Milord's circ.u.mspection was highly approved by my lady.

"But poor Toby, now that his precise position in insular zoology had been called in question, found himself hopelessly out of place. At that time G.o.defroid had blossomed out at the French Emba.s.sy in London, where he learned the adventures of Toby, Joby, Paddy. G.o.defroid found the infant weeping over a pot of jam (he had already lost the guineas with which milord gilded his misfortune). G.o.defroid took possession of him; and so it fell out that on his return among us he brought back with him the sweetest thing in tigers from England. He was known by his tiger--as Couture is known by his waistcoats--and found no difficulty in entering the fraternity of the club yclept to-day the Grammont. He had renounced the diplomatic career; he ceased accordingly to alarm the susceptibilites of the ambitious; and as he had no very dangerous amount of intellect, he was well looked upon everywhere.

"Some of us would feel mortified if we saw only smiling faces wherever we went; we enjoy the sour contortions of envy. G.o.defroid did not like to be disliked. Every one has his taste. Now for the solid, practical aspects of life!

"The distinguis.h.i.+ng feature of his chambers, where I have licked my lips over breakfast more than once, was a mysterious dressing-closet, nicely decorated, and comfortably appointed, with a grate in it and a bath-tub.

It gave upon a narrow staircase, the folding doors were noiseless, the locks well oiled, the hinges discreet, the window panes of frosted gla.s.s, the curtain impervious to light. While the bedroom was, as it ought to have been, in a fine disorder which would suit the most exacting painter in water-colors; while everything therein was redolent of the Bohemian life of a young man of fas.h.i.+on, the dressing-closet was like a shrine--white, spotless, neat, and warm. There were no draughts from door or window, the carpet had been made soft for bare feet hastily put to the floor in a sudden panic of alarm--which stamps him as your thoroughbred dandy that knows life; for here, in a few moments, he may show himself either a noodle or a master in those little details in which a man's character is revealed. The Marquise previously quoted--no, it was the Marquise de Rochefide--came out of that dressing-closet in a furious rage, and never went back again. She discovered nothing 'improper' in it. G.o.defroid used to keep a little cupboard full of----"

"Waistcoats?" suggested Finot.

"Come, now, just like you, great Turcaret that you are. (I shall never form that fellow.) Why, no. Full of cakes, and fruit, and dainty little flasks of Malaga and Lunel; an en cas de nuit in Louis Quatorze's style; anything that can tickle the delicate and well-bred appet.i.te of sixteen quarterings. A knowing old man-servant, very strong in matters veterinary, waited on the horses and groomed G.o.defroid. He had been with the late M. de Beaudenord, G.o.defroid's father, and bore G.o.defroid an inveterate affection, a kind of heart complaint which has almost disappeared among domestic servants since savings banks were established.

"All material well-being is based upon arithmetic. You to whom Paris is known down to its very excrescences, will see that Beaudenord must have acquired about seventeen thousand livres per annum; for he paid some seventeen francs of taxes and spent a thousand crowns on his own whims.

Well, dear boys, when G.o.defroid came of age, the Marquis d'Aiglemont submitted to him such an account of his trust as none of us would be likely to give a nephew; G.o.defroid's name was inscribed as the owner of eighteen thousand livres of _rentes_, a remnant of his father's wealth spared by the harrow of the great reduction under the Republic and the hailstorms of Imperial arrears. D'Aiglemont, that upright guardian, also put his ward in possession of some thirty thousand francs of savings invested with the firm of Nucingen; saying with all the charm of a _grand seigneur_ and the indulgence of a soldier of the Empire, that he had contrived to put it aside for his ward's young man's follies. 'If you will take my advice, G.o.defroid,' added he, 'instead of squandering the money like a fool, as so many young men do, let it go in follies that will be useful to you afterwards. Take an attache's post at Turin, and then go to Naples, and from Naples to London, and you will be amused and learn something for your money. Afterwards, if you think of a career, the time and the money will not have been thrown away.' The late lamented d'Aiglemont had more sense than people credited him with, which is more than can be said of some of us."

"A young fellow that starts with an a.s.sured income of eighteen thousand livres at one-and-twenty is lost," said Couture.

"Unless he is miserly, or very much above the ordinary level," added Blondet.

"Well, G.o.defroid sojourned in the four capitals of Italy," continued Bixiou. "He lived in England and Germany, he spent some little time at St. Petersburg, he ran over Holland but he parted company with the aforesaid thirty thousand francs by living as if he had thirty thousand a year. Everywhere he found the same _supreme de volaille_, the same aspics, and French wines; he heard French spoken wherever he went--in short, he never got away from Paris. He ought, of course, to have tried to deprave his disposition, to fence himself in triple bra.s.s, to get rid of his illusions, to learn to hear anything said without a blush, and to master the inmost secrets of the Powers.--Pooh! with a good deal of trouble he equipped himself with four languages--that is to say, he laid in a stock of four words for one idea. Then he came back, and certain tedious dowagers, styled 'conquests' abroad, were left disconsolate.

G.o.defroid came back, shy, scarcely formed, a good fellow with a confiding disposition, incapable of saying ill of any one who honored him with an admittance to his house, too staunch to be a diplomatist, altogether he was what we call a thoroughly good fellow."

"To cut it short, a brat with eighteen thousand livres per annum to drop over the first investment that turns up," said Couture.

"That confounded Couture has such a habit of antic.i.p.ating dividends, that he is antic.i.p.ating the end of my tale. Where was I? Oh! Beaudenord came back. When he took up his abode on the Quai Malaquais, it came to pa.s.s that a thousand francs over and above his needs was altogether insufficient to keep up his share of a box at the Italiens and the Opera properly. When he lost twenty-five or thirty louis at play at one swoop, naturally he paid; when he won, he spent the money; so should we if we were fools enough to be drawn into a bet. Beaudenord, feeling pinched with his eighteen thousand francs, saw the necessity of creating what we to-day call a balance in hand. It was a great notion of his 'not to get too deep.' He took counsel of his sometime guardian. 'The funds are now at par, my dear boy,' quoth d'Aiglemont; 'sell out. I have sold mine and my wife's. Nucingen has all my capital, and is giving me six per cent; do likewise, you will have one per cent the more upon your capital, and with that you will be quite comfortable.'

"In three days' time our G.o.defroid was comfortable. His increase of income exactly supplied his superfluities; his material happiness was complete.

"Suppose that it were possible to read the minds of all the young men in Paris at one glance (as, it appears, will be done at the Day of Judgment with all the millions upon millions that have groveled in all spheres, and worn all uniforms or the uniform of nature), and to ask them whether happiness at six-and-twenty is or is not made up of the following items--to wit, to own a saddle-horse and a tilbury, or a cab, with a fresh, rosy-faced Toby Joby Paddy no bigger than your fist, and to hire an unimpeachable brougham for twelve francs an evening; to appear elegantly arrayed, agreeably to the laws that regulate a man's clothes, at eight o'clock, at noon, four o'clock in the afternoon, and in the evening; to be well received at every emba.s.sy, and to cull the short-lived flowers of superficial, cosmopolitan friends.h.i.+ps; to be not insufferably handsome, to carry your head, your coat, and your name well; to inhabit a charming little entresol after the pattern of the rooms just described on the Quai Malaquais; to be able to ask a party of friends to dine at the _Rocher de Cancale_ without a previous consultation with your trousers' pocket; never to be pulled up in any rational project by the words, 'And the money?' and finally, to be able to renew at pleasure the pink rosettes that adorn the ears of three thoroughbreds and the lining of your hat?

"To such inquiry any ordinary young man (and we ourselves that are not ordinary men) would reply that the happiness is incomplete; that it is like the Madeleine without the altar; that a man must love and be loved, or love without return, or be loved without loving, or love at cross purposes. Now for happiness as a mental condition.

"In January 1823, after G.o.defroid de Beaudenord had set foot in the various social circles which it pleased him to enter, and knew his way about in them, and felt himself secure amid these joys, he saw the necessity of a sunshade--the advantage of having a great lady to complain of, instead of chewing the stems of roses bought for fivepence apiece of Mme. Prevost, after the manner of the callow youngsters that chirp and cackle in the lobbies of the Opera, like chickens in a coop. In short, he resolved to centre his ideas, his sentiments, his affections upon a woman, _one woman_?--LA PHAMME! Ah!....

"At first he conceived the preposterous notion of an unhappy pa.s.sion, and gyrated for a while about his fair cousin, Mme. d'Aiglemont, not perceiving that she had already danced the waltz in Faust with a diplomatist. The year '25 went by, spent in tentatives, in futile flirtations, and an unsuccessful quest. The loving object of which he was in search did not appear. Pa.s.sion is extremely rare; and in our time as many barriers have been raised against pa.s.sion in social life as barricades in the streets. In truth, my brothers, the 'improper' is gaining upon us, I tell you!

"As we may incur reproach for following on the heels of portrait painters, auctioneers, and fas.h.i.+onable dressmakers, I will not inflict any description upon you of _her_ in whom G.o.defroid recognized the female of his species. Age, nineteen; height, four feet eleven inches; fair hair, eyebrows _idem_, blue eyes, forehead neither high nor low, curved nose, little mouth, short turned-up chin, oval face; distinguis.h.i.+ng signs--none. Such was the description on the pa.s.sport of the beloved object. You will not ask more than the police, or their wors.h.i.+ps the mayors, of all the towns and communes of France, the gendarmes and the rest of the powers that be? In other respects--I give you my word for it--she was a rough sketch of a Venus dei Medici.

"The first time that G.o.defroid went to one of the b.a.l.l.s for which Mme.

de Nucingen enjoyed a certain not undeserved reputation, he caught a glimpse of his future lady-love in a quadrille, and was set marveling by that height of four feet eleven inches. The fair hair rippled in a shower of curls about the little girlish head, she looked as fresh as a naiad peeping out through the crystal pane of her stream to take a look at the spring flowers. (This is quite in the modern style, strings of phrases as endless as the macaroni on the table a while ago.) On that 'eyebrows _idem_' (no offence to the prefect of police) Parny, that writer of light and playful verse, would have hung half-a-dozen couplets, comparing them very agreeably to Cupid's bow, at the same time bidding us to observe that the dart was beneath; the said dart, however, was neither very potent nor very penetrating, for as yet it was controlled by the namby-pamby sweetness of a Mlle. de la Valliere as depicted on fire-screens, at the moment when she solemnizes her betrothal in the sight of heaven, any solemnization before the registrar being quite out to the question.

"You know the effect of fair hair and blue eyes in the soft, voluptuous decorous dance? Such a girl does not knock audaciously at your heart, like the dark-haired damsels that seem to say after the fas.h.i.+on of Spanish beggars, 'Your money or your life; give me five francs or take my contempt!' These insolent and somewhat dangerous beauties may find favor in the sight of many men, but to my thinking the blonde that has the good fortune to look extremely tender and yielding, while foregoing none of her rights to scold, to tease, to use unmeasured language, to be jealous without grounds, to do anything, in short, that makes woman adorable,--the fair-haired girl, I say, will always be more sure to marry than the ardent brunette. Firewood is dear, you see.

"Isaure, white as an Alsacienne (she first saw the light at Strasbourg, and spoke German with a slight and very agreeable French accent), danced to admiration. Her feet, omitted on the pa.s.sport, though they really might have found a place there under the heading Distinguis.h.i.+ng Signs, were remarkable for their small size, and for that particular something which old-fas.h.i.+oned dancing masters used to call flic-flac, a something that put you in mind of Mlle. Mars' agreeable delivery, for all the Muses are sisters, and the dancer and poet alike have their feet upon the earth. Isaure's feet spoke lightly and swiftly with a clearness and precision which augured well for things of the heart. '_Elle a duc flic-flac_,' was old Marcel's highest word of praise, and old Marcel was the dancing master that deserved the epithet of 'the Great.' People used to say 'the Great Marcel,' as they said 'Frederick the Great,' and in Frederick's time."

"Did Marcel compose any ballets?" inquired Finot.

"Yes, something in the style of _Les Quatre Elements_ and _L'Europe galante_."

"What times they were, when great n.o.bles dressed the dancers!" said Finot.

"Improper!" said Bixiou. "Isaure did not raise herself on the tips of her toes, she stayed on the ground, she swayed in the dance without jerks, and neither more nor less voluptuously than a young lady ought to do. There was a profound philosophy in Marcel's remark that every age and condition had its dance; a married woman should not dance like a young girl, nor a little jackanapes like a capitalist, nor a soldier like a page; he even went so far as to say that the infantry ought not to dance like the cavalry, and from this point he proceeded to cla.s.sify the world at large. All these fine distinctions seem very far away."

"Ah!" said Blondet, "you have set your finger on a great calamity. If Marcel had been properly understood, there would have been no French Revolution."

"It had been G.o.defroid's privilege to run over Europe," resumed Bixiou, "nor had he neglected his opportunities of making a thorough comparative study of European dancing. Perhaps but for profound diligence in the pursuit of what is usually held to be useless knowledge, he would never have fallen in love with this young lady; as it was, out of the three hundred guests that crowded the handsome rooms in the Rue Saint-Lazare, he alone comprehended the unpublished romance revealed by a garrulous quadrille. People certainly noticed Isaure d'Aldrigger's dancing; but in this present century the cry is 'Skim lightly over the surface, do not lean your weight on it;' so one said (he was a notary's clerk), 'There is a girl that dances uncommonly well;' another (a lady in a turban), 'There is a young lady that dances enchantingly;' and a third (a woman of thirty), 'That little thing is not dancing badly.'--But to return to the great Marcel, let us parody his best known saying with, 'How much there is in an _avant-deux_.'"

"And let us get on a little faster," said Blondet; "you are maundering."

"Isaure," continued Bixiou, looking askance at Blondet, "wore a simple white crepe dress with green ribbons; she had a camellia in her hair, a camellia at her waist, another camellia at her skirt-hem, and a camellia----"

"Come, now! here comes Sancho's three hundred goats."

"Therein lies all literature, dear boy. _Clarissa_ is a masterpiece, there are fourteen volumes of her, and the most wooden-headed playwright would give you the whole of _Clarissa_ in a single act. So long as I amuse you, what have you to complain of? That costume was positively lovely. Don't you like camillias? Would you rather have dahlias? No?

Very good, chestnuts then, here's for you." (And probably Bixiou flung a chestnut across the table, for we heard something drop on a plate.)

"I was wrong, I acknowledge it. Go on," said Blondet.

"I resume. 'Pretty enough to marry, isn't she?' said Rastignac, coming up to G.o.defroid de Beaudenord, and indicating the little one with the spotless white camellias, every petal intact.

"Rastignac being an intimate friend, G.o.defroid answered in a low voice, 'Well, so I was thinking. I was saying to myself that instead of enjoying my happiness with fear and trembling at every moment; instead of taking a world of trouble to whisper a word in an inattentive ear, of looking over the house at the Italiens to see if some one wears a red flower or a white in her hair, or watching along the Corso for a gloved hand on a carriage door, as we used to do at Milan; instead of s.n.a.t.c.hing a mouthful of baba like a lackey finis.h.i.+ng off a bottle behind a door, or wearing out one's wits with giving and receiving letters like a postman--letters that consist not of a mere couple of tender lines, but expand to five folio volumes to-day and contract to a couple of sheets to-morrow (a tiresome practice); instead of dragging along over the ruts and dodging behind hedges--it would be better to give way to the adorable pa.s.sion that Jean-Jacques Rousseau envied, to fall frankly in love with a girl like Isaure, with a view to making her my wife, if upon exchange of sentiments our hearts respond to each other; to be Werther, in short, with a happy ending.'

"'Which is a common weakness,' returned Rastignac without laughing.

'Possibly in your place I might plunge into the unspeakable delights of that ascetic course; it possesses the merits of novelty and originality, and it is not very expensive. Your Monna Lisa is sweet, but inane as music for the ballet; I give you warning.'