“I am a non-dispossessable property-owner!” cried Thuillier, coming home after visiting his notary. “No human power can get that house away from me. Cardot says so.”
The bourgeoisie think much more of what their notary tells them than of what their attorney says. The notary is nearer to them than any other ministerial officer. The Parisian bourgeois never pays a visit to his attorney without a sense of fear; whereas he mounts the stairs with ever-renewed pleasure to see his notary; he admires that official’s virtue and his sound good sense.
“Cardot, who is looking for an apartment for one of his clients, wants to know about our second floor,” continued Thuillier. “If I choose he’ll introduce to me on Sunday a tenant who is ready to sign a lease for eighteen years at forty thousand francs and taxes! What do you say to that, Brigitte?”
“Better wait,” she replied. “Ah! that dear Theodose, what a fright he gave me!”
“Hey! my dearest girl, I must tell you that when Cardot asked who put me in the way of this affair he said I owed him a present of at least ten thousand francs. The fact is, I owe it all to him.”
“But he is the son of the house,” responded Brigitte.
“Poor lad! I’ll do him the justice to say that he asks for nothing.”
“Well, dear, good friend,” said la Peyrade, coming in about three o’clock, “here you are, richissime!”
“And through you, Theodose.”
“And you, little aunt, have you come to life again? Ah! you were not half as frightened as I was. I put your interests before my own; I haven’t breathed freely till this morning at eleven o’clock; and yet I am sure now of having two mortal enemies at my heels in the two men I have tricked for your sake. As I walked home, just now, I asked myself what could be your influence over me to make me commit such a crime, and whether the happiness of belonging to your family and becoming your son could ever efface the stain I have put upon my conscience.”
“Bah! you can confess it,” said Thuillier, the free-thinker.
“And now,” said Theodose to Brigitte, “you can pay, in all security, the cost of the house,—eighty thousand francs, and thirty thousand to Grindot; in all, with what you have paid in costs, one hundred and twenty thousand; and this last twenty thousand added make one hundred and forty thousand. If you let the house outright to a single tenant ask him for the last year’s rent in advance, and reserve for my wife and me the whole of the first floor above the entresol. Make those conditions and you’ll still get your forty thousand francs a year. If you should want to leave this quarter so as to be nearer the Chamber, you can always take up your abode with us on that vast first floor, which has stables and coach-house belonging to it; in fact, everything that is needful for a splendid life. And now, Thuillier, I am going to get the cross of the Legion of honor for you.”
Hearing this last promise, Brigitte cried out in her enthusiasm:—
“Faith! my dear boy, you’ve done our business so well that I’ll leave you to manage that of letting the house.”
“Don’t abdicate, dear aunt,” replied Theodose. “God keep me from ever taking a step without you! You are the good genius of this family; I think only of the day when Thuillier will take his seat in the Chamber. If you let the house you will come into possession of your forty thousand francs for the last year of the lease in two months from now; and that will not prevent Thuillier from drawing his quarterly ten thousand of the rental.”
After casting this hope into the mind of the old maid, who was jubilant, Theodose drew Thuillier into the garden and said to him, without beating round the bush:—
“Dear, good friend, find means to get ten thousand francs from your sister, and be sure not to let her suspect that you pay them to me; tell her that sum is required in the government office to facilitate your appointment as chevalier of the Legion of honor; tell her, too, that you know the persons among whom that sum should be distributed.”
“That’s a good idea,” said Thuillier; “besides, I’ll pay it back to her when I get my rents.”
“Have the money ready this evening, dear friend. Now I am going out on business about your cross; to-morrow we shall know something definitely about it.”
“What a man you are!” cried Thuillier.
“The ministry of the 1st of March is going to fall, and we must get it out of them beforehand,” said Theodose, shrewdly.
He now hurried to Madame Colleville, crying out as he entered her room:—
“I’ve conquered! We shall have a piece of landed property for Celeste worth a million, a life-interest in which will be given to her by her marriage-contract; but keep the secret, or your daughter will be hunted down by peers of France. Besides, this settlement will only be made in my favor. Now dress yourself, and let us go and call on Madame du Bruel; she can get the cross for Thuillier. While you are getting under arms I’ll do a little courting to Celeste; you and I can talk as we drive along.”
La Peyrade had seen, as he passed the door of the salon, Celeste and Felix Phellion in close conversation. Flavie had such confidence in her daughter that she did not fear to leave them together. Now that the great success of the morning was secured, Theodose felt the necessity of beginning his courtship of Celeste. It was high time, he thought, to bring about a quarrel between the lovers. He did not, therefore, hesitate to apply his ear to the door of the salon before entering it, in order to discover what letters of the alphabet of love they were spelling; he was even invited to commit this domestic treachery by sounds from within, which seemed to say that they were disputing. Love, according to one of our poets, is a privilege which two persons mutually take advantage of to cause each other, reciprocally, a great deal of sorrow about nothing at all.
When Celeste knew that Felix was elected by her heart to be the companion of her life, she felt a desire, not so much to study him as to unite herself closely with him by that communion of souls which is the basis of all affections, and leads, in youthful minds, to involuntary examination. The dispute to which Theodose was now to listen took its rise in a disagreement which had sprung up within the last few days between the mathematician and Celeste. The young girl’s piety was real; she belonged to the flock of the truly faithful, and to her, Catholicism, tempered by that mysticism which attracts young souls, was an inward poem, a life within her life. From this point young girls are apt to develop into either extremely high-minded women or saints. But, during this beautiful period of their youth they have in their heart, in their ideas, a sort of absolutism: before their eyes is the image of perfection, and all must be celestial, angelic, or divine to satisfy them. Outside of their ideal, nothing of good can exist; all is stained and soiled. This idea causes the rejection of many a diamond with a flaw by girls who, as women, fall in love with paste.
Now, Celeste had seen in Felix, not irreligion, but indifference to matters of religion. Like most geometricians, chemists, mathematicians, and great naturalists, he had subjected religion to reason; he recognized a problem in it as insoluble as the squaring of the circle. Deist “in petto,” he lived in the religion of most Frenchmen, not attaching more importance to it than he did to the new laws promulgated in July. It was necessary to have a God in heaven, just as they set up a bust of the king at the mayor’s office. Felix Phellion, a worthy son of his father, had never drawn the slightest veil over his opinions or his conscience; he allowed Celeste to read into them with the candor and the inattention of a student of problems. The young girl, on her side, professed a horror for atheism, and her conscience assured her that a deist was cousin-germain to an atheist.
“Have you thought, Felix, of doing what you promised me?” asked Celeste, as soon as Madame Colleville had left them alone.
“No, my dear Celeste,” replied Felix.
“Oh! to have broken his word!” she cried, softly.
“But to have kept it would have been a profanation,” said Felix. “I love you so deeply, with a tenderness so little proof against your wishes, that I promised a thing contrary to my conscience. Conscience, Celeste, is our treasure, our strength, our mainstay. How can you ask me to go into a church and kneel at the feet of a priest, in whom I can see only a man? You would despise me if I obeyed you.”
“And so, my dear Felix, you refuse to go to church,” said Celeste, casting a tearful glance at the man she loved. “If I were your wife you would let me go alone? You do not love me as I love you! for, alas! I have a feeling in my heart for an atheist contrary to that which God commands.”
“An atheist!” cried Felix. “Oh, no! Listen to me, Celeste. There is certainly a God; I believe in that; but I have higher ideas of Him than those of your priests; I do not wish to bring Him down to my level; I want to rise to Him. I listen to the voice He has put within me,—a voice which honest men call conscience, and I strive not to darken that divine ray as it comes to me. For instance, I will never harm others; I will do nothing against the commandments of universal morality, which was that of Confucius, Moses, Pythagoras, Socrates, as well as of Jesus Christ. I will stand in the presence of God; my actions shall be my prayers; I will never be false in word or deed; never will I do a base or shameful thing. Those are the precepts I have learned from my virtuous father, and which I desire to bequeath to my children. All the good that I can do I shall try to accomplish, even if I have to suffer for it. What can you ask more of a man than that?”
This profession of the Phellion faith caused Celeste to sadly shake her head.
“Read attentively,” she replied, “‘The Imitation of Jesus Christ.’ Strive to convert yourself to the holy Catholic, apostolic, and Roman Church, and you will see how empty your words are. Hear me, Felix; marriage is not, the Church says, the affair of a day, the mere satisfaction of our own desires; it is made for eternity. What! shall we be united day and night, shall we form one flesh, one word, and yet have two languages, two faiths in our heart, and a cause of perpetual dissension? Would you condemn me to weep tears over the state of your soul,—tears that I must ever conceal from you? Could I address myself in peace to God when I see his arm stretched out in wrath against you? Must my children inherit the blood of a deist and his convictions? Oh! God, what misery for a wife! No, no, these ideas are intolerable. Felix! be of my faith, for I cannot share yours. Do not put a gulf between us. If you loved me, you would already have read ‘The Imitation of Jesus Christ.’”
The Phellion class, sons of the “Constitutionnel,” dislike the priestly mind. Felix had the imprudence to reply to this sort of prayer from the depths of an ardent heart:—
“You are repeating, Celeste, the lessons your confessor teaches you; nothing, believe me, is more fatal to happiness than the interference of priests in a home.”
“Oh!” cried Celeste, wounded to the quick, for love alone inspired her, “you do not love! The voice of my heart is not in unison with yours! You have not understood me, because you have not listened to me; but I forgive you, for you know not what you say.”
She wrapped herself in solemn silence, and Felix went to the window and drummed upon the panes,—music familiar to those who have indulged in poignant reflections. Felix was, in fact, presenting the following delicate and curious questions to the Phellion conscience.
“Celeste is a rich heiress, and, in yielding against the voice of natural religion, to her ideas, I should have in view the making of what is certainly an advantageous marriage,—an infamous act. I ought not, as father of a family, to allow the priesthood to have an influence in my home. If I yield to-day, I do a weak act, which will be followed by many others equally pernicious to the authority of a husband and father. All this is unworthy of a philosopher.”
Then he returned to his beloved.
“Celeste, I entreat you on my knees,” he said, “not to mingle that which the law, in its wisdom, has separated. We live in two worlds,—society and heaven. Each has its own way of salvation; but as to society, is it not obeying God to obey the laws? Christ said: ‘Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s.’ Caesar is the body politic. Dear, let us forget our little quarrel.”
“Little quarrel!” cried the young enthusiast; “I want you to have my whole heart as I want to have the whole of yours; and you make it into two parts! Is not that an evil? You forget that marriage is a sacrament.”
“Your priesthood have turned your head,” exclaimed the mathematician, impatiently.
“Monsieur Phellion,” said Celeste, interrupting him hastily, “enough of this!”
It was at this point of the quarrel that Theodose considered it judicious to enter the room. He found Celeste pale, and the young professor as anxious as a lover should be who has just irritated his mistress.
“I heard the word ‘enough’; then something is too much?” he said, inquiringly, looking in turn from Celeste to Felix.
“We were talking religion,” replied Felix, “and I was saying to mademoiselle how dangerous ecclesiastical influence is in the bosom of families.”
“That was not the point, monsieur,” said Celeste, sharply; “it was to know if husband and wife could be of one heart when the one is an atheist and the other Catholic.”
“Can there be such a thing as atheists?” cried Theodose, with all the signs of extreme wonderment. “Could a true Catholic marry a Protestant? There is no safety possible for a married pair unless they have perfect conformity in the matter of religious opinions. I, who come from the Comtat, of a family which counts a pope among its ancestors—for our arms are: gules, a key argent, with supporters, a monk holding a church, and a pilgrim with a staff, or, and the motto, ‘I open, I shut’—I am, of course, intensely dogmatic on such points. But in these days, thanks to our modern system of education, it does not seem to me strange that religion should be called into question. I myself would never marry a Protestant, had she millions, even if I loved her distractedly. Faith is a thing that cannot be tampered with. ‘Una fides, unus Dominus,’ that is my device in life.”
“You hear that!” cried Celeste, triumphantly, looking at Felix Phellion.
“I am not openly devout,” continued la Peyrade. “I go to mass at six every morning, that I may not be observed; I fast on Fridays; I am, in short, a son of the Church, and I would not undertake any serious enterprise without prayer, after the ancient fashion of our ancestors; but no one is able to notice my religion. A singular thing happened to our family during the Revolution of 1789, which attached us more closely than ever to our holy mother the Church. A poor young lady of the elder branch of the Peyrades, who owned the little estate of la Peyrade,—for we ourselves are Peyrades of Canquoelle, but the two branches inherit from one another,—well, this young lady married, six years before the Revolution, a barrister who, after the fashion of the times, was Voltairean, that is to say, an unbeliever, or, if you choose, a deist. He took up all the revolutionary ideas, and practised the charming rites that you know of in the worship of the goddess Reason. He came into our part of the country imbued with the ideas of the Convention, and fanatical about them. His wife was very handsome; he compelled her to play the part of Liberty; and the poor unfortunate creature went mad. She died insane! Well, as things are going now it looks as if we might have another 1793.”
This history, invented on the spot, made such an impression on Celeste’s fresh and youthful imagination that she rose, bowed to the young men and hastened to her chamber.
“Ah! monsieur, why did you tell her that?” cried Felix, struck to the heart by the cold look the young girl, affecting profound indifference, cast upon him. She fancied herself transformed into a goddess of Reason.
“Why not? What were you talking about?” asked Theodose.
“About my indifference to religion.”
“The great sore of this century,” replied Theodose, gravely.
“I am ready,” said Madame Colleville, appearing in a toilet of much taste. “But what is the matter with my poor daughter? She is crying!”
“Crying? madame,” exclaimed Felix; “please tell her that I will study ‘The Imitation of Christ’ at once.”
Felix left the house with Theodose and Flavie, whose arm the barrister pressed to let her know he would explain in the carriage the apparent dementia of the young professor.
An hour later, Madame Colleville and Celeste, Colleville and Theodose were entering the Thuilliers’ apartment to dine there. Theodose and Flavie took Thuillier into the garden, where the former said to him:—
“Dear, good friend! you will have the cross within a week. Our charming friend here will tell you about our visit to the Comtesse du Bruel.”
And Theodose left Thuillier, having caught sight of Desroches in the act of being brought by Mademoiselle Thuillier into the garden; he went, driven by a terrible and glacial presentiment, to meet him.
“My good friend,” said Desroches in his ear, “I have come to see if you can procure at once twenty-five thousand francs plus two thousand six hundred and eighty for costs.”
“Are you acting for Cerizet?” asked the barrister.
“Cerizet has put all the papers into the hands of Louchard, and you know what you have to expect if arrested. Is Cerizet wrong in thinking you have twenty-five thousand francs in your desk? He says you offered them to him and he thinks it only natural not to leave them in your hands.”
“Thank you for taking the step, my good friend,” replied Theodose. “I have been expecting this attack.”
“Between ourselves,” replied Desroches, “you have made an utter fool of him, and he is furious. The scamp will stop at nothing to get his revenge upon you—for he’ll lose everything if he forces you to fling your barrister’s gown, as they say, to the nettles and go to prison.”
“I?” said Theodose. “I’m going to pay him. But even so, there will still be five notes of mine in his hands, for five thousand francs each; what does he mean to do with them?”
“Oh! after the affair of this morning, I can’t tell you; my client is a crafty, mangy cur, and he is sure to have his little plans.”
“Look here, Desroches,” said Theodose, taking the hard, unyielding attorney round the waist, “those papers are in your hands, are not they?”
“Will you pay them?”
“Yes, in three hours.”
“Very good, then. Be at my office at nine o’clock; I’ll receive the money and give you your notes; but, at half-past nine o’clock, they will be in the sheriff’s hands.”
“To-night, then, at nine o’clock,” said Theodose.
“Nine o’clock,” repeated Desroches, whose glance had taken in the whole family, then assembled in the garden.
Celeste, with red eyes, was talking to her godmother; Colleville and Brigitte, Flavie and Thuillier were on the steps of the broad portico leading to the entrance-hall. Desroches remarked to Theodose, who followed him to the door:—
“You can pay off those notes.”
At a single glance the shrewd attorney had comprehended the whole scheme of the barrister.
The next morning, at daybreak, Theodose went to the office of the banker of the poor, to see the effect produced upon his enemy by the punctual payment of the night before, and to make another effort to get rid of his hornet.
He found Cerizet standing up, in conference with a woman, and he received an imperative sign to keep at a distance and not to interrupt the interview. The barrister was therefore reduced to conjectures as to the importance of this woman, an importance revealed by the eager look on the face of the lender “by the little week.” Theodose had a presentiment, though a very vague one, that the upshot of this conference would have some influence on Cerizet’s own arrangements, for he suddenly beheld on that crafty countenance the change produced by a dawning hope.
“But, my dear mamma Cardinal—”
“Yes, my good monsieur—”
“What is it you want—?”
“It must be decided—”
These beginnings, or these ends of sentences were the only gleams of light that the animated conversation, carried on in the lowest tones with lip to ear and ear to lip, conveyed to the motionless witness, whose attention was fixed on Madame Cardinal.
Madame Cardinal was one of Cerizet’s earliest clients; she peddled fish. If Parisians know these creations peculiar to their soil, foreigners have no suspicion of their existence; and Mere Cardinal—technologically speaking, of course, deserved all the interest she excited in Theodose. So many women of her species may be met with in the streets that the passers-by give them no more attention than they give to the three thousand pictures of the Salon. But as she stood in Cerizet’s office the Cardinal had all the value of an isolated masterpiece; she was a complete and perfect type of her species.
The woman was mounted on muddy sabots; but her feet, carefully wrapped in gaiters, were still further protected by stout and thick-ribbed stockings. Her cotton gown, adorned with a glounce of mud, bore the imprint of the strap which supported the fish-basket. Her principal garment was a shawl of what was called “rabbit’s-hair cashmere,” the two ends of which were knotted behind, above her bustle—for we must needs employ a fashionable word to express the effect produced by the transversal pressure of the basket upon her petticoats, which projected below it, in shape like a cabbage. A printed cotton neckerchief, of the coarsest description, gave to view a red neck, ribbed and lined like the surface of a pond where people have skated. Her head was covered in a yellow silk foulard, twined in a manner that was rather picturesque. Short and stout, and ruddy of skin, Mere Cardinal probably drank her little drop of brandy in the morning. She had once been handsome. The Halle had formerly reproached her, in the boldness of its figurative speech, for doing “a double day’s-work in the twenty-four.” Her voice, in order to reduce itself to the diapason of ordinary conversation, was obliged to stifle its sound as other voices do in a sick-room; but at such times it came thick and muffled, from a throat accustomed to send to the farthest recesses of the highest garret the names of the fish in their season. Her nose, a la Roxelane, her well-cut lips, her blue eyes, and all that formerly made up her beauty, was now buried in folds of vigorous flesh which told of the habits and occupations of an outdoor life. The stomach and bosom were distinguished for an amplitude worthy of Rubens.
“Do you want to make me lie in the straw?” she said to Cerizet. “What do I care for the Toupilliers? Ain’t I a Toupillier myself? What do you want to do with them, those Toupilliers?”
This savage outburst was hastily repressed by Cerizet, who uttered a prolonged “Hush-sh!” such as all conspirators obey.
“Well, go and find out all you can about it, and come back to me,” said Cerizet, pushing the woman toward the door, and whispering, as he did so, a few words in her ear.
“Well, my dear friend,” said Theodose to Cerizet, “you have got your money?”
“Yes,” returned Cerizet “we have measured our claws, they are the same length, the same strength, and the same sharpness. What next?”
“Am I to tell Dutocq that you received, last night, twenty-five thousand francs?”
“Oh! my dear friend, not a word, if you love me!” cried Cerizet.
“Listen,” said Theodose. “I must know, once for all, what you want. I am positively determined not to remain twenty-four hours longer on the gridiron where you have got me. Cheat Dutocq if you will; I am utterly indifferent to that; but I intend that you and I shall come to an understanding. It is a fortune that I have paid you, twenty-five thousand francs, and you must have earned ten thousand more in your business; it is enough to make you an honest man. Cerizet, if you will leave me in peace, if you won’t prevent my marriage with Mademoiselle Colleville, I shall certainly be king’s attorney-general, or something of that kind in Paris. You can’t do better than make sure of an influence in that sphere.”
“Here are my conditions; and they won’t allow of discussion; you can take them or leave them. You will obtain for me the lease of Thuillier’s new house for eighteen years, and I’ll hand you back one of your five notes cancelled, and you shall not find me any longer in your way. But you will have to settle with Dutocq for the remaining four notes. You got the better of me, and I know Dutocq hasn’t the force to stand against you.”
“I’ll agree to that, provided you’ll pay a rent of forty-eight thousand francs for the house, the last year in advance, and begin the lease in October.”
“Yes; but I shall not give for the last year’s rent more than forty-three thousand francs; your note will pay the remainder. I have seen the house, and examined it. It suits me very well.”
“One last condition,” said Theodose; “you’ll help me against Dutocq?”
“No,” said Cerizet, “you’ll cook him brown yourself; he doesn’t need any basting from me; he’ll give out his gravy fast enough. But you ought to be reasonable. The poor fellow can’t pay off the last fifteen thousand francs due on his practice, and you should reflect that fifteen thousand francs would certainly buy back your notes.”
“Well; give me two weeks to get your lease—”
“No, not a day later than Monday next! Tuesday your notes will be in Louchard’s hands; unless you pay them Monday, or Thuillier signs the lease.”
“Well, Monday, so be it!” said Theodose; “are we friends?”
“We shall be Monday,” responded Cerizet.
“Well, then, Monday you’ll pay for my dinner,” said Theodose, laughing.
“Yes, at the Rocher de Cancale, if I have the lease. Dutocq shall be there—we’ll all be there—ah! it is long since I’ve had a good laugh.”
Theodose and Cerizet shook hands, saying, reciprocally:—
“We’ll meet soon.”
Cerizet had not calmed down so suddenly without reasons. In the first place, as Desroches once said, “Bile does not facilitate business,” and the usurer had too well seen the justice of that remark not to coolly resolve to get something out of his position, and to squeeze the jugular vein of the crafty Provencal until he strangled him.
“It is a fair revenge,” Desroches said to him; “mind you extract its quintessence. You hold that fellow.”
For ten years past Cerizet had seen men growing rich by practising the trade of principal tenant. The principal tenant is, in Paris, to the owners of houses what farmers are to country landlords. All Paris has seen one of its great tailors, building at his own cost, on the famous site of Frascati, one of the most sumptuous of houses, and paying, as principal tenant, fifty thousand francs a year for the ground rent of the house, which, at the end of nineteen years’ lease, was to become the property of the owner of the land. In spite of the costs of construction, which were something like seven hundred thousand francs, the profits of those nineteen years proved, in the end, very large.
Cerizet, always on the watch for business, had examined the chances for gain offered by the situation of the house which Thuillier had stolen,—as he said to Desroches,—and he had seen the possibility of letting it for sixty thousand at the end of six years. There were four shops, two on each side, for it stood on a boulevard corner. Cerizet expected, therefore, to get clear ten thousand a year for a dozen years, allowing for eventualities and sundries attendant on renewal of leases. He therefore proposed to himself to sell his money-lending business to the widow Poiret and Cadenet for ten thousand francs; he already possessed thirty thousand; and the two together would enable him to pay the last year’s rent in advance, which house-owners in Paris usually demand as a guarantee from a principal tenant on a long lease. Cerizet had spent a happy night; he fell asleep in a glorious dream; he saw himself in a fair way to do an honest business, and to become a bourgeois like Thuillier, like Minard, and so many others.
But he had a waking of which he did not dream. He found Fortune standing before him, and emptying her gilded horns of plenty at his feet in the person of Madame Cardinal. He had always had a liking for the woman, and had promised her for a year past the necessary sum to buy a donkey and a little cart, so that she could carry on her business on a large scale, and go from Paris to the suburbs. Madame Cardinal, widow of a porter in the corn-market, had an only daughter, whose beauty Cerizet had heard of from some of the mother’s cronies. Olympe Cardinal was about thirteen years of age at the time, 1837, when Cerizet began his system of loans in the quarter; and with a view to an infamous libertinism, he had paid great attention to the mother, whom he rescued from utter misery, hoping to make Olympe his mistress. But suddenly, in 1838, the girl left her mother, and “made her life,” to use an expression by which the lower classes in Paris describe the abuse of the most precious gifts of nature and youth.
To look for a girl in Paris is to look for a smelt in the Seine; nothing but chance can throw her into the net. The chance came. Mere Cardinal, who to entertain a neighbor had taken her to the Bobino theatre, recognized in the leading lady her own daughter, whom the first comedian had held under his control for three years. The mother, gratified at first at beholding her daughter in a fine gown of gold brocade, her hair dressed like that of a duchess, and wearing open-worked stockings, satin shoes, and receiving the plaudits of the audience, ended by screaming out from her seat in the gallery:—
“You shall soon hear of me, murderer of your own mother! I’ll know whether miserable strolling-players have the right to come and debauch young girls of sixteen!”
She waited at the stage-door to capture her daughter, but the first comedian and the leading lady had no doubt jumped across the footlights and left the theatre with the audience, instead of issuing by the stage-door, where Madame Cardinal and her crony, Mere Mahoudeau, made an infernal rumpus, which two municipal guards were called upon to pacify. Those august personages, before whom the two women lowered the diapason of their voices, called the mother’s attention to the fact that the girl was of legitimate theatrical age, and that instead of screaming at the door after the director, she could summon him before the justice-of-peace, or the police-court, whichever she pleased.
The next day Madame Cardinal intended to consult Cerizet, in view of the fact that he was a clerk in the office of the justice-of-peace; but, before reaching his lair in the rue des Poules, she was met by the porter of a house in which an uncle of hers, a certain Toupillier, was living, who told her that the old man hadn’t probably two days to live, being then in the last extremity.
“Well, how do you expect me to help it?” replied the widow Cardinal.
“We count on you, my dear Madame Cardinal; we know you won’t forget the good advice we’ll give you. Here’s the thing. Lately, your poor uncle, not being able to stir round, has trusted me to go and collect the rents of his house, rue Notre-Dame de Nazareth, and the arrears of his dividends at the Treasury, which come to eighteen hundred francs.”
By this time the widow Cardinal’s eyes were becoming fixed instead of wandering.
“Yes, my dear,” continued Perrache, a hump-backed little concierge; “and, seeing that you are the only person who ever thinks about him, and that you come and see him sometimes, and bring him fish, perhaps he may make a bequest in your favor. My wife, who has been nursing him for the last few days since he has been so ill, spoke to him of you, but he wouldn’t have you told about his illness. But now, don’t you see, it is high time you should show yourself there. It is pretty nigh two months since he has been able to attend to business.”
“You may well think, you old thief,” replied Madame Cardinal, hurrying at top speed toward the rue Honore-Chevalier, where her uncle lived in a wretched garret, “that the hair would grow on my hand before I could ever imagine that. What! my uncle Toupillier rich! the old pauper of the church of Saint-Sulpice!”
“Ah!” returned the porter, “but he fed well. He went to bed every night with his best friend, a big bottle of Roussillon. My wife has tasted it, though he told us it was common stuff. The wine-merchant in the rue des Canettes supplies it to him.”
“Don’t say a word about all this,” said the widow, when she parted from the man who had given her the information. “I’ll take care and remember you—if anything comes of it.”
Toupillier, former drum-major in the French Guards, had been for the two years preceding 1789 in the service of the Church as beadle of Saint-Sulpice. The Revolution deprived him of that post, and he then dropped down into a state of abject misery. He was even obliged to take to the profession of model, for he enjoyed, as they say, a fine physique. When public worship was restored, he took up his beadle’s staff once more; but in 1816 he was dismissed, as much on account of his immorality as for his political opinions. Nevertheless, he was allowed to stay about the door of the church and distribute the holy water. Later, an unfortunate affair, which we shall presently mention, made him lose even that position; but, still finding means to keep to the sanctuary, he obtained permission to be allowed as a pauper in the porch. At this period of life, being then seventy-two years of age, he made himself ninety-six, and began the profession of centenarian.
In all Paris it was impossible to find another such beard and head of hair as Toupillier’s. As he walked he appeared bent double; he held a stick in his shaking hand,—a hand that was covered with lichen, like a granite rock, and with the other he held out the classic hat with a broad brim, filthy and battered, into which, however, there fell abundant alms. His legs were swathed in rags and bandages, and his feet shuffled along in miserable overshoes of woven mat-weed, inside of which he had fastened excellent cork soles. He washed his face with certain compounds, which gave it an appearance of forms of illness, and he played the senility of a centenarian to the life. He reckoned himself a hundred years old in 1830, at which time his actual age was eighty; he was the head of the paupers of Saint-Sulpice, the master of the place, and all those who came to beg under the arcades of the church, safe from the persecutions of the police and beneath the protection of the beadle and the giver of holy water, were forced to pay him a sort of tithe.
When a new heir, a bridegroom, or some godfather left the church, saying, “Here, this is for all of you; don’t torment any of my party,” Toupillier, appointed by the beadle to receive these alms, pocketed three-fourths, and distributed only the remaining quarter among his henchmen, whose tribute amounted to a sou a day. Money and wine were his last two passions; but he regulated the latter and gave himself up to the former, with neglecting his personal comfort. He drank at night only, after his dinner, and for twenty years he slept in the arms of drunkenness, his last mistress.
In the early morning he was at his post with all his faculties. From then until his dinner, which he took at Pere Lathuile’s (made famous by Charlet), he gnawed crusts of bread by way of nourishment; and he gnawed them artistically, with an air of resignation which earned him abundant alms. The beadle and the giver of holy water, with whom he may have had some private understanding, would say of him:—
“He is one of the worthy poor of the church; he used to know the rector Languet, who built Saint-Sulpice; he was for twenty years beadle of the church before the Revolution, and he is now over a hundred years old.”
This little biography, well known to all the pious attendants of the church, was, of course, the best of his advertisements, and no hat was so well lined as his. He bought his house in 1826, and began to invest his money in the Funds in 1830. From the value of the two investments he must have made something like six thousand francs a year, and probably turned them over by usury, after Cerizet’s own fashion; for the sum he paid for the house was forty thousand francs, while his investment in 1830 was forty-eight thousand more. His niece, deceived by the old man as much as he deceived the functionaries and the pious souls of the church, believed him the most miserable of paupers, and when she had any fish that were spoiling she sometimes took them to the aged beggar.
Consequently, she now felt it her right to get what she could in return for her pity and her liberality to an uncle who was likely to have a crowd of collateral heirs; she herself being the third and last Toupillier daughter. She had four brothers, and her father, a porter with a hand-cart, had told her, in her childhood, of three aunts and four uncles, who all led an existence of the baser sort.
After inspecting the sick man, she went, at full speed, to consult Cerizet, telling him, in the first place, how she had found her daughter, and then the reasons and indications which made her think that her uncle Toupillier was hoarding a pile of gold in his mattress. Mere Cardinal did not feel herself strong enough to seize upon the property, legally or illegally, and she therefore came to confide in Cerizet and get his advice.
So, then, the banker of the poor, like other scavengers, had, at last, found diamonds in the slime in which he had paddled for the last four years, being always on the watch for some such chance,—a chance, they say, occasionally met with in the purlieus, which give birth to heiresses in sabots. This was the secret of his unexpected gentleness to la Peyrade, the man whose ruin he had vowed. It is easy to imagine the anxiety with which he awaited the return of Madame Cardinal, to whom this wily schemer of nefarious plots had given means to verify her suspicions as to the existence of the hoarded treasure, promising her complete success if she would trust him to obtain for her so rich a harvest. He was not the man to shrink from a crime, above all, when he saw that others could commit it, while he obtained the benefits.
“Well, monsieur,” cried the fishwife, entering Cerizet’s den with a face as much inflamed by cupidity as by the haste of her movements, “my uncle sleeps on more than a hundred thousand francs in gold, and I am certain that those Perraches, by dint of nursing him, have smelt the rat.”
“Shared among forty heirs that won’t be much to each,” said Cerizet. “Listen to me, Mere Cardinal: I’ll marry your daughter; give her your uncle’s gold, and I’ll guarantee to you a life-interest in the house and the dividends from the money in the Funds.”
“We sha’n’t run any risk?”
“None, whatever.”
“Agreed, then,” said the widow Cardinal, holding out her hand to her future son-in-law. “Six thousand francs a year; hey! what a fine life I’ll have.”
“With a son-in-law like me!” added Cerizet.
“I shall be a bourgeoisie of Paris!”
“Now,” resumed Cerizet, after a pause, “I must study the ground. Don’t leave your uncle alone a minute; tell the Perraches that you expect a doctor. I’ll be the doctor, and when I get there you must seem not to know me.”
“Aren’t you sly, you old rogue,” said Madame Cardinal, with a punch on Cerizet’s stomach by way of farewell.
An hour later, Cerizet, dressed in black, disguised by a rusty wig and an artificially painted physiognomy, arrived at the house in the rue Honore-Chevalier in the regulation cabriolet. He asked the porter to tell him how to find the lodging of an old beggar named Toupillier.
“Is monsieur the doctor whom Madame Cardinal expects?” asked Perrache.
Cerizet had no doubt reflected on the gravity of the affair he was undertaking, for he avoided giving an answer to that question.
“Is this the way?” he said, turning at random to one side of the courtyard.
“No, monsieur,” replied Perrache, who then took him to the back stairs of the house, which led up to the wretched attic occupied by the pauper.
Nothing remained for the inquisitive porter to do but to question the driver of the cabriolet; to which employment we will leave him, while we pursue our own inquiries elsewhere.