From the doctor’s house Godefroid made his way to the rue Chanoinesse, passing along the quai des Augustins, where he hoped to find one of the shops of the commission-publishers open. He was fortunate enough to do so, and had a long talk with a young clerk on books of jurisprudence.
When he reached the rue Chanoinesse, he found Madame de la Chanterie and her friends just returning from high mass; in reply to the look she gave him Godefroid made her a significant sign with his head.
“Isn’t our dear father Alain here to-day?” he said.
“No,” she replied, “not this Sunday; you will not see him till a week from to-day—unless you go where he gave you rendezvous.”
“Madame,” said Godefroid in a low voice, “you know he doesn’t intimidate me as these gentlemen do; I wanted to make my report to him—”
“And I?”
“Oh you! I can tell you all; and I have a great deal to tell. For my first essay I have found a most extraordinary misfortune; a cruel mingling of pauperism and the need for luxuries; also scenes of a sublimity which surpasses all the inventions of our great novelists.”
“Nature, especially moral nature, is always greater than art, just as God is greater than his creatures. But come,” said madame de la Chanterie, “tell me the particulars of your first trip into worlds unknown to you.”
Monsieur Nicolas and Monsieur Joseph (for the Abbe de Veze had remained a few moments in Notre-Dame) left Madame de la Chanterie alone with Godefroid, who, being still under the influence of the emotions he had gone through the night before, related even the smallest details of his story with the force and ardor and action of a first experience of such a spectacle and its attendant persons and things. His narrative had a great success; for the calm and gentle Madame de la Chanterie wept, accustomed as she was to sound the depths of sorrows.
“You did quite right to send the accordion,” she said.
“I would like to do a great deal more,” said Godefroid; “inasmuch as this family is the first that has shown me the pleasures of charity, I should like to obtain for that splendid old man a full return for his great book. I don’t know if you have confidence enough in my capacity to give me the means of undertaking such an affair. From information I have obtained, it will cost nine thousand francs to manufacture an edition of fifteen hundred copies, and their selling value will be twenty-four thousand francs. But as we should have to pay off the three thousand and some hundred francs due to Barbet, it would be an outlay of twelve thousand francs to risk. Oh! madame, if you only knew what bitter regrets I feel for having dissipated my little fortune! The spirit of charity has appeared to me; it fills me with the ardor of an initiate. I wish to renounce the world, I long to embrace the life of these gentlemen and be worthy of you. Many a time during the last two days I have blessed the chance that brought me to this house. I will obey you in all things until you judge me fit to be one of yours.”
“Then,” said Madame de la Chanterie, after reflecting for a time, “listen to me, for I have important things to tell. You have been allured, my child, by the poesy of misfortune. Yes, misfortunes are often poetical; for, as I think, poesy is a certain effect on the sensibilities, and sorrows affect the sensibilities,—life is so intense in grief!”
“Yes, madame, I know that I have been gripped by the demon of curiosity. But how could I help it? I have not yet acquired the habit of penetrating to the heart of these great misfortunes; I cannot go among them with the calmness of your three soldiers of the Lord. But, let me tell you, it is since I have recovered from that first excitement that I have chiefly longed to devote myself to your work.”
“Listen to me, my dear angel!” said Madame de la Chanterie, who uttered the last three words with a gentle solemnity that touched the young man strangely. “We have forbidden ourselves absolutely,—and we do not trifle with words here; what is forbidden no longer occupies our minds,—we have forbidden ourselves to enter into any speculations. To print a book for sale on the chance of profit is a matter of business, and any operation of that kind would throw us into all the entanglements of commerce. Certainly your scheme seems to me feasible,—even necessary. But do you think it is the first that has offered itself? A score of times, a hundred times, we have come upon just such ways of saving families, or firms. What would have become of us if we had taken part in such affairs? We should be merchants. No, our true partnership with misfortune is not to take the work into our own hands, but to help the unfortunate to work themselves. Before long you will meet with misfortunes more bitter still than these. Would you then do the same thing,—that is, take the burdens of those unfortunates wholly on yourself? You would soon be overwhelmed. Reflect, too, my dear child, that for the last year even the Messieurs Mongenod find our accounts too heavy for them. Half your time would be taken up in merely keeping our books. We have to-day over two thousand debtors in Paris, and we must keep the record of their debts. Not that we ask for payment; we simply wait. We calculate that if half the money we expect is lost, the other half comes back to us, sometimes doubled. Now, suppose your Monsieur Bernard dies, the twelve thousand francs are probably lost. But if you cure his daughter, if his grandson is put in the way of succeeding, if he comes, some day, a magistrate, then, when the family is prosperous, they will remember the debt, and return the money of the poor with usury. Do you know that more than one family whom we have rescued from poverty, and put upon their feet on the road to prosperity by loans of money without interest, have laid aside a portion for the poor, and have returned to us the money loaned doubled, and sometimes tripled? Those are our only speculations. Moreover, reflect that what is now interesting you so deeply (and you ought to be interested in it), namely, the sale of this lawyer’s book, depends on the value of the work. Have you read it? Besides, though the book may be an excellent one, how many excellent books remain one, two, three years without obtaining the success they deserve. Alas! how many crowns of fame are laid upon a grave! I know that publishers have ways of negotiating and realizing profits which make their business the most hazardous to do with, and the most difficult to unravel, of all the trades of Paris. Monsieur Joseph can tell you of these difficulties, inherent in the making of books. Thus, you see, we are sensible; we have experience of all miseries, also of all trades, for we have studied Paris for many years. The Mongenods have helped us in this; they have been like torches to us. It is through them that we know how the Bank of France holds the publishing business under constant suspicion; although it is one of the most profitable trades, it is unsound. As for the four thousand francs necessary to save this noble family from the horrors of penury,—for that poor boy and his grandfather must be fed and clothed properly,—I will give them to you at once. There are sufferings, miseries, wants, which we immediately relieve, without hesitation, without even asking whom we help; religion, honor, character, are all indifferent to us; but when it comes to lending money to the poor to assist them in any active form of industry or commerce, then we require guarantees, with all the sternness of usurers. So you must, my dear child, limit your enthusiasm for this unhappy family to finding for the father an honest publisher. This concerns Monsieur Joseph. He knows lawyers, professors, authors of works on jurisprudence; I will speak to him, and next Sunday he will be sure to have some good advice to give you. Don’t feel uneasy; some way will certainly be found to solve the difficulty. Perhaps it would be well, however, if Monsieur Joseph were to read the lawyer’s book. If you think it can be done, you had better obtain the manuscript.”
Godefroid was amazed at the good sense of this woman, whom he had thought controlled by the spirit of charity only. He took her beautiful hand and kissed it, saying:—
“You are good sense and judgment too!”
“We must be all that in our business,” she replied, with the soft gaiety of a real saint.
There was a moment’s silence, and then Godefroid exclaimed:—
“Two thousand debtors! did you say that, madame? two thousand accounts to keep! why, it is immense!”
“Oh! I meant two thousand accounts which rely for liquidation, as I told you, on the delicacy and good feeling of our debtors; but there are fully three thousand other families whom we help who make us no other return than thanks to God. This is why we feel, as I told you, the necessity of keeping books ourselves. If you prove to us your discretion and capacity you shall be, if you like, our accountant. We keep a day-book, a ledger, a book of current accounts, and a bank-book. We have many notes, but we lose a great deal of time in looking them up. Ah! here are the gentlemen,” she added.
Godefroid, grave and thoughtful, took little part in the general conversation which now followed. He was stunned by the communication Madame de la Chanterie had just made to him, in a tone which implied that she wished to reward his ardor.
“Five thousand families assisted!” he kept repeating to himself. “If they were to cost what I am to spend on Monsieur Bernard, we must have millions scattered through Paris.”
This thought was the last expiring movement of the spirit of the world, which had slowly and insensibly become extinguished in Godefroid. On reflection he saw that the united fortunes of Madame de la Chanterie, Messieurs Alain, Nicolas, Joseph, and that of Judge Popinot, the gifts obtained through the Abbe de Veze, and the assistance lent by the firm of Mongenod must produce a large capital; and that this capital, increased during the last dozen years by grateful returns from those assisted, must have grown like a snowball, inasmuch as the charitable stewards of it spent so little on themselves. Little by little he began to see clearly into this vast work, and his desire to co-operate in it increased.
He was preparing at nine o’clock to return on foot to the boulevard du Mont-Parnasse; but Madame de la Chanterie, fearing the solitude of that neighborhood at a late hour, made him take a cab. When he reached the house Godefroid heard the sound of an instrument, though the shutters were so carefully closed that not a ray of light issued through them. As soon as he reached the landing, Auguste, who was probably on the watch for him, opened the door of Monsieur Bernard’s apartment and said:—
“Mamma would like to see you, and my grandfather offers you a cup of tea.”
When Godefroid entered, the patient seemed to him transfigured by the pleasure she felt in making music; her face was radiant, her eyes were sparkling like diamonds.
“I ought to have waited to let you hear the first sounds,” she said to Godefroid, “but I flung myself upon the little organ as a starving man flings himself on food. You have a soul that comprehends me, and I know you will forgive.”
Vanda made a sign to her son, who placed himself in such a way as to press with his foot the pedal which filled the bellows; and then the invalid, whose fingers had for the time recovered all their strength and agility, raising her eyes to heaven like Saint Cecilia, played the “Prayer of Moses in Egypt,” which her son had bought for her and which she had learned by heart in a few hours. Godefroid recognized in her playing the same quality as in Chopin’s. The soul was satisfied by divine sounds of which the dominant note was that of tender melancholy. Monsieur Bernard had received Godefroid with a look that was long a stranger to his eyes. If tears were not forever dried at their source, withered by such scorching sorrows, that look would have been tearful.
The old man sat playing with his snuff-box and looking at his daughter in silent ecstasy.
“To-morrow, madame,” said Godefroid, when the music ceased; “to-morrow your fate will be decided. I bring you good news. The celebrated Halpersohn is coming to see you at three o’clock in the afternoon. He has promised,” added Godefroid in a low voice to Monsieur Bernard, “to tell me the exact truth.”
The old man rose, and grasping Godefroid’s hand, drew him to a corner of the room beside the fireplace.
“Ah! what a night I shall pass! a definitive decision! My daughter cured or doomed!”
“Courage!” said Godefroid; “after tea come out with me.”
“My child, my child, don’t play any more,” said the old man; “you will bring on an attack; such a strain upon your strength must end in reaction.”
He made Auguste take away the instrument and offered a cup of tea to his daughter with the coaxing manner of a nurse quieting the petulance of a child.
“What is the doctor like?” she asked, her mind already distracted by the prospect of seeing a new person.
Vanda, like all prisoners, was full of eager curiosity. When the physical phenomena of her malady ceased, they seemed to betake themselves to the moral nature; she conceived the strangest fancies, the most violent caprices; she insisted on seeing Rossini, and wept when her father, whom she believed to be all powerful, refused to fetch him.
Godefroid now gave her a minute account of the Jewish doctor and his study; of which she knew nothing, for Monsieur Bernard had cautioned Auguste not to tell his mother of his visits to Halpersohn, so much had he feared to rouse hopes in her mind which might not be realized.
Vanda hung upon Godefroid’s words like one fascinated; and she fell into a sort of ecstasy in her passionate desire to see this strange Polish doctor.
“Poland has produced many singular, mysterious beings,” said Monsieur Bernard. “To-day, for instance, besides this extraordinary doctor, we have Hoene Wronski, the enlightened mathematician, the poet Mickievicz, Towianksi the mystic, and Chopin, whose talent is supernatural. Great national convulsions always produce various species of dwarfed giants.”
“Oh! dear papa; what a man you are! If you would only write down what we hear you say merely to amuse me you would make your reputation. Fancy, monsieur, my dear old father invents wonderful stories when I have no novels to read; he often puts me to sleep in that way. His voice lulls me, and he quiets my mind with his wit. Who can ever reward him? Auguste, my child, you ought for my sake, to kiss the print of your grandfather’s footsteps.”
The young man raised his beautiful moist eyes to his mother, and the look he gave her, full of a long-repressed compassion, was a poem. Godefroid rose, took the lad’s hand, and pressed it.
“God has placed two angels beside you, madame,” he said.
“Yes, I know that. And for that reason I often reproach myself for harassing them. Come, my dear Auguste, and kiss your mother. He is a child, monsieur, of whom all mothers might be proud; pure as gold, frank and honest, a soul without sin—but too passionate a soul, alas! like that of his poor mother. Perhaps God has fastened me in this bed to keep me from the follies of women—who have too much heart,” she added, smiling.
Godefroid replied with a smile and a bow.
“Adieu, monsieur; and thank your friend for the instrument; tell him it makes the happiness of a poor cripple.”
“Monsieur,” said Godefroid, when they were alone in the latter’s room. “I think I may assure you that you shall not be robbed by that trio of bloodsuckers. I have the necessary sum to free your book, but you must first show me your written agreement with them. And after that, in order to do still more for you, you must let me have your work to read,—not I myself, of course, I have not knowledge enough to judge of it, but a former magistrate, a lawyer of eminence and of perfect integrity, who will undertake, according to what he thinks of the book, to find you an honorable publisher with whom you can make an equitable agreement. This, however, I will not insist upon. Meantime here are five hundred francs,” he added, giving a bank-note to the stupefied old man, “to meet your present needs. I do not ask for any receipt; you will be under obligations to your own conscience only, and that conscience is not to move you until you have recovered a sufficient competence,—I undertake to pay Halpersohn.”
“Who are you, then?” asked the old man, dropping into a chair.
“I myself,” replied Godefroid, “am nothing; but I serve powerful persons to whom your distress is known, and who feel an interest in you. Ask me nothing more about them.”
“But what induces them to do this?” said the old man.
“Religion.”
“Religion! is it possible?”
“Yes, the catholic, apostolic, and Roman religion.”
“Ah! do you belong to the order of Jesus?”
“No, monsieur,” replied Godefroid. “Do not feel uneasy; these persons have no designs upon you, except that of helping you to restore your family to prosperity.”
“Can philanthropy be anything but vanity?”
“Ah! monsieur,” said Godefroid, hastily; “do not insult the virtue defined by Saint Paul, sacred, catholic Love!”
Monsieur Bernard, hearing this answer, began to stride up and down with long steps.
“I accept,” he said suddenly, “and I have but one way of thanking you, and that is to offer you my work. The notes and citations are unnecessary to the magistrate you speak of; and I have still two months’ work to do in arranging them for the press. To-morrow I will give you the five volumes,” he added, offering Godefroid his hand.
“Can I have made a conversion?” thought Godefroid, struck by the new expression which he saw on the old man’s face.
The next afternoon at three o’clock a cabriolet stopped before the house, and Godefroid saw Halpersohn getting out of it, wrapped in a monstrous bear-skin pelisse. The cold had strengthened during the night, the thermometer marking ten degrees of it.
The Jewish doctor examined with curious eyes, though furtively, the room in which his client of the day before received him, and Godefroid detected the suspicious thought which darted from his eyes like the sharp point of a dagger. This rapid conception of distrust gave Godefroid a cold chill, for he thought within himself that such a man would be pitiless in all relations; it is so natural to suppose that genius is connected with goodness that a strong sensation of disgust took possession of him.
“Monsieur,” he said, “I see that the simplicity of my room makes you uneasy; therefore you need not be surprised at my method of proceeding. Here are your two hundred francs, and here, too, are three notes of a thousand francs each,” he added, drawing from his pocket-book the money Madame de la Chanterie had given him to release Monsieur Bernard’s book; but in case you still feel doubtful of my solvency I offer you as reference Messrs. Mongenod, bankers, rue de la Victoire.”
“I know them,” said Halpersohn, putting the ten gold pieces into his pocket.
“He’ll inquire of them,” thought Godefroid.
“Where is the patient?” asked the doctor, rising like a man who knows the value of time.
“This way, monsieur,” said Godefroid, preceding him to show the way.
The Jew examined with a shrewd and suspicious eye the places he passed through, giving them the keen, rapid glance of a spy; he saw all the horrors of poverty through the door of the room in which the grandfather and the grandson lived; for, unfortunately, Monsieur Bernard had gone in to change his clothes before entering his daughter’s room, and in his haste to open the outer door to the doctor, he had forgotten to close that of his lair.
He bowed in a stately manner to Halpersohn, and opened the door of his daughter’s room cautiously.
“Vanda, my child, here is the doctor,” he said.
Then he stood aside to allow Halpersohn, who kept on his bear-skin pelisse, to pass him. The Jew was evidently surprised at the luxury of the room, which in this quarter, and more especially in this house, was an anomaly; but his surprise only lasted for an instant, for he had seen among German and Russian Jews many instances of the same contrast between apparent misery and hoarded wealth. As he walked from the door to the bed he kept his eye on the patient, and the moment he reached her he said in Polish:—
“You are a Pole?”
“No, I am not; my mother was.”
“Whom did your grandfather, Colonel Tarlowski, marry?”
“A Pole.”
“From what province?”
“A Soboleska, of Pinsk.”
“Very good; monsieur is your father?”
“Yes.”
“Monsieur,” he said, turning to the old man; “your wife—”
“Is dead;” said Monsieur Bernard.
“Was she very fair?” said Halpersohn, showing a slight impatience at being interrupted.
“Here is her portrait,” said Monsieur Bernard, unhooking from the wall a handsome frame which enclosed several fine miniatures.
Halpersohn felt the head and handled the hair of the patient while he looked at the portrait of Vanda Tarlowska, born Countess Sobolewska.
“Relate to me the symptoms of your illness,” he said, placing himself on the sofa and looking fixedly at Vanda during the twenty minutes the history, given alternately by the father and daughter, lasted.
“How old are you?”
“Thirty-eight.”
“Ah! good!” he cried, rising; “I will answer for the cure. Mind, I do not say that I can restore the use of her legs; but cured of the disease, that she shall be. Only, I must have her in a private hospital under my own eye.”
“But, monsieur, my daughter cannot be moved!”
“I will answer for her,” said Halpersohn, curtly; “but I will answer for her only on those conditions. She will have to exchange her present malady for another still more terrible, which may last a year, six months at the very least. You may come and see her at the hospital, since you are her father.”
“Are you certain of curing her?” said Monsieur Bernard.
“Certain,” repeated the Jew. “Madame has in her body an element, a vitiated fluid, the national disease, and it must be eliminated. You must bring her to me at Challot, rue Basse-Saint-Pierre, private hospital of Doctor Halpersohn.”
“How can I?”
“On a stretcher, just as all sick persons are carried to hospitals.”
“But the removal will kill her!”
“No.”
As he said the word in a curt tone he was already at the door; Godefroid rejoined him on the staircase. The Jew, who was stifling with heat, said in his ear:
“Besides the three thousand francs, the cost will be fifteen francs a day, payable three months in advance.”
“Very good, monsieur. And,” continued Godefroid, putting one foot on the step of the cabriolet, into which the doctor had sprung, “you say you will answer for the cure?”
“I will answer for it,” said the Jewish doctor. “Are you in love with the lady?”
“No,” replied Godefroid.
“You must not repeat what I am about to say to you; I only say it to prove to you that I am certain of a cure. If you are guilty of the slightest indiscretion you will kill her.”
Godefroid replied with a gesture only.
“For the last seventeen years she has been a victim to the element in her system called plica polonica,[*] which has produced all these ravages. I have seen more terrible cases than this. Now, I alone in the present day know how to bring this disease to a crisis, and force it outward so as to obtain a chance to cure it—for it cannot always be cured. You see, monsieur, that I am disinterested. If this lady were of great importance, a Baronne de Nucingen, or any other wife or daughter of a modern Croesus, this cure would bring me one hundred—two hundred thousand francs; in short, anything I chose to ask for it. However, it is only a trifling loss to me.”
“About conveying her?”
“Bah! she’ll seem to be dying, but she won’t die. There’s life enough in her to last a hundred years, when the disease is out of her system. Come, Jacques, drive on! quick,—rue de Monsieur! quick!” he said to his man.
Godefroid was left on the boulevard gazing stupidly after the cabriolet.
“Who is that queer man in a bearskin?” asked Madame Vauthier, whom nothing escaped; “is it true, what the man in the cabriolet told me, that he is one of the greatest doctors in Paris?”
“What is that to you?”
“Oh! nothing at all,” she replied, making a face.
“You made a great mistake in not putting yourself on my side,” said Godefroid, returning slowly to the house; “you would have made more out of me than you will ever get from Barbet and Metivier; from whom, mark my words, you’ll get nothing.”
“I am not for them particularly,” said Madame Vauthier, shrugging her shoulders; “Monsieur Barbet is my proprietor, that’s all!”
It required two days’ persuasion to induce Monsieur Bernard to separate from his daughter and take her to Chaillot. Godefroid and the old man made the trip walking on each side of the litter, canopied with blue and white striped linen, in which was the dear patient, partly bound to a mattress, so much did her father dread the possible convulsions of a nervous attack. They started at three o’clock and reached their destination at five just as evening was coming on. Godefroid paid the sum demanded for three months’ board in advance, being careful to obtain a receipt for the money. When he went back to pay the bearers of the litter, he was followed by Monsieur Bernard, who took from beneath the mattress a bulky package carefully sealed up, and gave it to Godefroid.
“One of these men will fetch you a cab,” said the old man; “for you cannot carry these four volumes under your arm. That is my book; give it to your reader; he may keep it the whole of the coming week. I shall stay at least that time in this quarter; for I cannot leave my daughter in such total abandonment. I trust my grandson; he can take care of our rooms; especially if you keep an eye on him. If I were what I once was I would ask you the name of my critic, the former magistrate you spoke of; there were but few of them whom I did not know.”
“Oh, there’s no mystery about it!” said Godefroid, interrupting Monsieur Bernard. “Now that you have shown this entire confidence in trusting me with your book, I will tell you that your censor is the former president, Lecamus de Tresnes.”
“Oh, yes!—of the Royal Court of Paris. Take him the book; he is one of the noblest characters of the present day. He and the late Popinot, a judge of the Lower Court, were both worthy of the days of the old Parliaments. All my fears, if I had any, are dissipated. Where does he live? I should like to go and thank him for the trouble he is taking.”
“You will find him in the rue Chanoinesse, under the name of Monsieur Joseph. I am going there now. Where is that agreement you made with your swindlers?”
“Auguste will give it to you,” said the old man, re-entering the courtyard of the hospital.
A cab was now brought up by the porter, and Godefroid jumped into it,—promising the coachman a good pourboire if he would get him to the rue Chanoinesse in good time, for he wanted to dine there.
Half an hour after Vanda’s departure, three men dressed in black, whom Madame Vauthier let into the house by the door on the rue Notre-Dame des Champs, filed up the staircase, accompanied by their female Judas, and knocked gently at the door of Monsieur Bernard’s lodging. As it happened to be a Thursday, Auguste was at home. He opened the door, and the three men glided in like shadows.
“What do you want, messieurs?” asked the lad.
“These are the rooms of Monsieur Bernard,—that is, Monsieur le baron,—are they not?”
“Yes; but what do you want?”
“You know very well, young man, what we want! We are informed that your grandfather has left this house with a covered litter. That’s not surprising; he had the right to do so. But I am the sheriff, and I have come to seize everything he has left. On Monday he received a summons to pay three thousand francs, with interest and costs, to Monsieur Metivier, under pain of arrest for debt duly notified to him, and like an old stager who is up to the tricks of his own trade, he has walked off just in time. However, if we can’t catch him, his furniture hasn’t taken wings. You see we know all about it, young man.”
“Here are the stamped papers your grandpapa didn’t choose to take,” said Madame Vauthier, thrusting three writs into Auguste’s hand.
“Remain here, madame,” said the sheriff; “we shall make you legal guardian of the property. The law gives you forty sous a day, and that’s not to be sneezed at.”
“Ha! now I shall see the inside of that fine bedroom!” cried the Vauthier.
“You shall not go into my mother’s room!” said the young lad, in a threatening voice, springing between the door and the three men in black.
At a sign from the sheriff, two of the men seized Auguste.
“No resistance, young man; you are not master here,” said the sheriff. “We shall draw up the proces-verbal, and you will sleep in jail.”
Hearing that dreadful word, Auguste burst into tears.
“Ah, how fortunate,” he cried, “that mamma has gone! It would have killed her.”
A conference now took place between the sheriff, the other men, and Vauthier, by which Auguste discovered, although they spoke in a low voice, that his grandfather’s manuscripts were what they chiefly wanted. On that, he opened the door of his mother’s bedroom.
“Go in,” he said, “but take care to do no injury. You will be paid to-morrow morning.”
Then he went off weeping into the lair, seized his grandfather’s notes and stuck them into the stove, in which, as he knew very well, there was not a spark of fire.
The thing was done so rapidly that the sheriff—a sly, keen fellow, worthy of his clients Barbet and Metivier—found the lad weeping in his chair when he entered the wretched room, after assuring himself that the manuscripts were not in the antechamber.
Though it is not permissible to seize books or manuscripts for debt, the bill of sale which Monsieur Bernard had made of his work justified this proceeding. It was, however, easy to oppose various delays to this seizure, and Monsieur Bernard, had he been there, would not have failed to do so. For that reason the whole affair had been conducted slyly. Madame Vauthier had not attempted to give the writs to Monsieur Bernard; she meant to have flung them into the room on entering behind the sheriff’s men, so to give the appearance of their being in the old man’s possession.
The proces-verbal of the seizure took an hour to write down; the sheriff omitted nothing, and declared that the value of the property seized was sufficient to pay the debt. As soon as he and his men had departed, Auguste took the writs and rushed to the hospital to find his grandfather. The sheriff having told him that Madame Vauthier was now responsible, under heavy penalties, for the safety of the property, he could leave the house without fear of robbery.
The idea of his grandfather being dragged to prison for debt drove the poor lad, if not exactly crazy, at any rate as crazy as youth becomes under one of those dangerous and fatal excitements in which all powers ferment at once, and lead as often to evil actions as to heroic deeds. When he reached the rue Basse-Saint-Pierre, the porter told him that he did not know what had become of the father of the lady who had arrived that afternoon; the orders of Monsieur Halpersohn were to admit no one to see her for the next eight days, under pain of putting her life in danger.
This answer brought Auguste’s exasperation to a crisis. He returned to the boulevard du Mont-Parnasse, turning over in his mind the wildest and most extravagant plans of action. He reached home at half-past eight o’clock, half famished, and so exhausted with hunger and distress that he listened to Madame Vauthier when she asked him to share her supper, which happened to be a mutton stew with potatoes. The poor lad fell half dead upon a chair in that atrocious woman’s room.
Persuaded by the wheedling and honeyed words of the old vulture, he replied to a few questions about Godefroid which she adroitly put to him, letting her discover that it was really her other lodger who was to pay his grandfather’s debts the next day, and also that it was to him they owed the improvement in their condition during the past week. The widow listened to these confidences with a dubious air, plying Auguste with several glasses of wine meantime.
About ten o’clock a cab stopped before the house, and Madame Vauthier looking out exclaimed:—
“Oh! it is Monsieur Godefroid.”
Auguste at once took the key of his apartment and went up to meet the protector of his family; but he found Godefroid’s face and manner so changed that he hesitated to address him until, generous lad that he was, the thought of his grandfather’s danger came over him and gave him courage.
The cause of this change and of the sternness in Godefroid’s face was an event which had just taken place in the rue Chanoinesse. When the initiate arrived there he found Madame de la Chanterie and her friends assembled in the salon awaiting dinner; and he instantly took Monsieur Joseph apart to give him the four volumes on “The Spirit of Modern Laws.” Monsieur Joseph took the voluminous manuscript to his room and returned for dinner; then, after sharing in the conversation for part of the evening, he went back to his room, intending to begin the reading of the book that night.
Godefroid was much astonished when Manon came to him soon after Monsieur Joseph’s retirement and asked if he would at once go up and speak to that gentleman. He went up, conducted by Manon, and was unable to pay any heed to the apartment (which he had never before entered) so amazed was he by the agitated look and manner of a man who was usually calm and placid.
“Do you know,” asked Monsieur Joseph, once more a judge, “who the author of this work is?”
“He is Monsieur Bernard,” said Godefroid; “I know him only under that name. I did not open the package.”
“True,” said Monsieur Joseph, as if to himself, “I broke the seals myself. You have not tried to find out anything about his antecedents?”
“No, I only know that he made a love-match with the daughter of General Tarlowski; that the daughter is named after the mother, Vanda; the grandson is called Auguste; and I have seen a portrait of Monsieur Bernard in the red robes of a president of the Royal Courts.”
“Here, read that,” said Monsieur Joseph, pointing to the titlepage of the manuscript, written probably in Auguste’s handwriting:—
By M. Bernard-Jean-Baptiste Macloud, Baron Bourlac.
Formerly attorney-general to the Royal Court of Rouen. Grand officer of the Legion of honor.
“Ha! the slayer of Madame’s daughter! of the Chevalier du Vissard! the man who condemned her to twenty years’ imprisonment!” said Godefroid, in a feeble voice. His legs gave way under him, and he dropped into a chair. “What a beginning!” he muttered.
“This matter, my dear Godefroid,” resumed Monsieur Joseph, “concerns us all. You have done your part; leave the rest to us. I beg you to have no more to do with it; go and fetch the things you have left behind you. Don’t say a word of all this. Practise absolute discretion. Tell the Baron de Bourlac to address himself to me. By that time we shall have decided how to act under the circumstances.”
Godefroid left him, took a cab, and went back as fast as he could to the boulevard du Mont-Parnasse, filled with horror as he remembered that indictment signed with Bourlac’s name, the bloody drama ending on the scaffold, and Madame de la Chanterie’s imprisonment at Bicetre. He understood now the abandonment in which this former attorney-general, another Fourquier-Tinville in the public mind, was ending his days, and the true reasons for the concealment of his name.
“May Monsieur Joseph avenge her terribly!” he thought. As he uttered the wish in his own mind, he saw Auguste.
“What do you want of me?” he asked.
“My good friend, such a dreadful misfortune has overtaken us that I am almost mad. Wretches have come here and seized all my mother’s property, and they are going to put my grandfather in prison. But it is not on account of those misfortunes that I come to implore you,” said the lad, with Roman pride; “it is to ask you to do me a service such as people do to those who are condemned to die.”
“Go on, what is it?” said Godefroid.
“They came here to seize my grandfather’s manuscript; and as I think he gave you the book itself I want you to take the notes, for Madame Vauthier will not let me carry anything out of the house. Put them with the volumes and—”
“Yes, yes,” said Godefroid, “go and get them at once.”
While the lad went back to his own rooms, returning immediately, Godefroid reflected that the poor child was guilty of no crime, and that he ought not to put despair into that young heart by speaking of his grandfather and of the punishment for his savage political actions that had overtaken his old age. He therefore took the little package with a good grace.
“What is your mother’s name?” he asked.
“My mother is the Baronne de Mergi; my father was the son of the president of the Royal Court at Rouen.”
“Ah!” said Godefroid; “then your grandfather married his daughter to the son of the famous president Mergi.”
“Yes, monsieur.”
“Now, my little friend, leave me,” said Godefroid. He went with young Mergi to the landing, and called to Madame Vauthier.
“Mere Vauthier,” he said, “you can let my rooms. I shall not come back any more.”
He gathered his things together, went downstairs, and got into the cab.
“Have you given anything to that gentleman?” said the Vauthier to Auguste.
“Yes,” said the young man.
“You’re a pretty fellow! that’s the agent of your grandfather’s enemies. He managed this whole business, and the proof is that, now that the trick is played, he goes off and isn’t coming back any more. He has just told me I can let his lodgings.”
Auguste flew to the boulevard and ran after the cab shouting so loudly that he finally stopped it.
“What do you want?” asked Godefroid.
“My grandfather’s manuscripts.”
“Tell them he can get them from Monsieur Joseph.”
The youth thought the words were intended as a cruel joke. He sat down in the snow as he saw the cab disappearing rapidly. Presently he sprang up with momentary vigor, returned to his room and went to bed worn out with fatigue and distress.
The next morning, when the poor boy woke alone in that apartment so lately occupied by his mother and grandfather, the painful emotions of his cruel position filled his mind. The solitude of his home, where up to this time every moment had had its duty and its occupation, seemed so hard to bear that he went down to Madame Vauthier to ask if she had received any news of his grandfather. The woman answered sneeringly that he knew very well, or he might know, where to find his grandfather; the reason why he had not come in, she said, was because he had gone to live at the chateau de Clichy. This malicious speech, from the woman who had coaxed and wheedled him the evening before, put the lad into another frenzy, and he rushed to the hospital once more, desperate with the idea that his grandfather was in prison.
Baron Bourlac had wandered all night round the hospital, where he was refused entrance, and round the private residence of Dr. Halpersohn from whom he wished, naturally, to obtain an explanation of such treatment. The doctor did not get home till two in the morning. At half-past one the old man was at his door; on being told he was absent, he turned and walked about the grand alley of the Champs Elysees until half-past two. When he again went to the house, the porter told him that Monsieur Halpersohn had returned, gone to bed, was asleep, and could not be disturbed.
The poor father, in despair, wandered along the quay and under the frost-laden trees of the Cours-la-reine, waiting for daylight. At nine o’clock in the morning he again presented himself at the doctor’s house, demanding to know the reason why his daughter was thus virtually imprisoned.
“Monsieur,” replied the doctor, to whose presence he was admitted, “yesterday I told you I would answer for your daughter’s recovery; but to-day I am responsible for her life and you will readily understand that I must be the sovereign master in such a case. Yesterday your daughter took a medicine intended to bring out her disease, the plica polonica; until that horrible disease shows itself on the surface you cannot see her. I will not allow excitement or any mistake of management to carry off my patient and your daughter. If you positively insist on seeing her, I shall call a consultation of three physicians, so as to relieve myself of responsibility, for the patient may die of it.”
The old man, worn out with fatigue, dropped on a chair; but he rose immediately, saying:—
“Forgive me, monsieur. I have spent the night waiting for you in dreadful distress of mind. You cannot know to what degree I love my daughter; I have nursed her for fifteen years hovering between life and death, and this week of waiting is torture to me.”
The baron left the room staggering like a drunken man. The doctor followed and supported him by the arm until he saw him safely down the staircase.
An hour later Auguste de Mergi entered the doctor’s room. On questioning the porter at the hospital the unhappy lad heard that his grandfather had been refused an entrance and had gone away to find Monsieur Halpersohn, who could probably give information about him. As Auguste entered the doctor’s study Halpersohn was breakfasting on a cup of chocolate and a glass of water. He did not disturb himself at the young man’s entrance, but went on sopping his bread in the chocolate; for he never ate anything for breakfast but a small roll cut into four strips with careful precision.
“Well, young man,” he said, glancing at Vanda’s son, “so you have come, too, to find out about your mother?”
“Yes, monsieur;” replied Auguste de Mergi.
Auguste was standing near the table on which lay several bank-notes among a pile of gold louis. Under the circumstances in which the unhappy boy was placed the temptation was stronger than his principles, solid as they were. He saw a means of saving his grandfather and the fruits of almost a lifetime of toil. He yielded. The fascination was rapid as thought; and it was justified to the child’s mind by the idea of self-devotion. “I destroy myself, but I save my mother and my grandfather,” he thought. Under the strain put upon his reason by this criminal temptation he acquired, like madmen, a singular and momentary dexterity.
Halpersohn, an experienced observer, had divined, retrospectively, the life of the old man and that of the lad and of the mother. He felt or perceived the truth; the Baronne de Mergi’s remarks had helped to unveil it to him; and the result was a feeling of benevolent pity for his new clients. As for respect or admiration, he was incapable of those emotions.
“Well, my dear boy,” he replied familiarly, “I am taking care of your mother, and I shall return her to you young and handsome and perfectly well in health. Here is one of those rare cases in which physicians take an interest. Besides, through her mother, she is a compatriot of mine. You and your grandfather must for two weeks have the courage to keep away from Madame—?”
“The Baronne de Mergi.”
“Ah! if she is a baroness, you must be a baron,” remarked Halpersohn.
At that instant the theft was accomplished. While the doctor was looking at his sopped bread heavy with chocolate, Auguste snatched four notes and put them into his pocket, as if he were merely putting his hand there by accident.
“Yes, monsieur,” he replied, “I am a baron, and so is my grandfather; he was attorney-general under the Restoration.”
“You blush, young man; there’s no need to blush for being a poor baron; that’s common enough.”
“Who told you, monsieur, that we are poor?”
“Your grandfather told me he had spent the night in the Champs Elysees; and though I know no palace with half so fine a ceiling as that of the skies at two o’clock this morning, I assure you it was pretty cold in the palace where your grandfather passed the night. We don’t select the ‘Star’ inn from choice.”
“Has my grandfather been here this morning?” said Auguste, seizing the opportunity to get away. “I thank you, monsieur, and I will call again, if you will permit me, to ask for news of my mother.”
As soon as he was in the street the young baron took a cab to go as rapidly as he could to the sheriff’s office, where he paid his grandfather’s debt. The sheriff gave him the papers and a receipted bill of costs, and told one of his clerks to accompany the young man home and relieve the legal guardian of her functions.
“As Messieurs Barbet and Metivier live in your quarter,” he said, “I will tell my young man to carry the money there and obtain the bill of sale of the books and return it to you.”
Auguste who did not understand either the terms or the formalities of the law, did exactly as he was told. He received seven hundred francs change from the four thousand francs he had stolen, and went away with the clerk. He got back into the cab in a condition of semi-stupor; for, the result being now obtained, remorse began; he saw himself dishonored, cursed by his grandfather, whose inflexible nature was well-known to him, and he felt that his mother would surely die if she knew him guilty. All nature changed for him. He was hot; he did not see the snow; the houses looked like spectres flitting past him.
By the time he reached home the young baron had decided on his course which was certainly that of an honest man. He went to his mother’s room, took the gold snuff-box set with diamonds given to his grandfather by the Emperor, and wrapped it in a parcel with the seven hundred francs and the following letter, which required several rough copies before it was satisfactory. Then he directed the whole to Doctor Halpersohn:—