Works of Honore De Balzac, page 523
“And so they are,” said the priest; “that is why Jesus Christ said that it must needs be that offences come, my son; and that is why the world displays such horror of offences.”
“A man of your stamp will not be surprised by the question which I am about to ask?”
“Indeed, my son, you do not know me,” said Carlos Herrera. “Do you suppose that I should engage a secretary unless I knew that I could depend upon his principles sufficiently to be sure that he would not rob me? I like you. You are as innocent in every way as a twenty-year-old suicide. Your question?”
“Why do you take an interest in me? What price do you set on my obedience? Why should you give me everything? What is your share?”
The Spaniard looked at Lucien, and a smile came over his face.
“Let us wait till we come to the next hill; we can walk up and talk out in the open. The back seat of a traveling carriage is not the place for confidences.”
They traveled in silence for sometime; the rapidity of the movement seemed to increase Lucien’s moral intoxication.
“Here is a hill, father,” he said at last awakening from a kind of dream.
“Very well, we will walk.” The Abbe called to the postilion to stop, and the two sprang out upon the road.
“You child,” said the Spaniard, taking Lucien by the arm, “have you ever thought over Otway’s Venice Preserved? Did you understand the profound friendship between man and man which binds Pierre and Jaffier each to each so closely that a woman is as nothing in comparison, and all social conditions are changed? — Well, so much for the poet.”
“So the canon knows something of the drama,” thought Lucien. “Have you read Voltaire?” he asked.
“I have done better,” said the other; “I put his doctrine in practice.”
“You do not believe in God?”
“Come! it is I who am the atheist, is it?” the Abbe said, smiling. “Let us come to practical matters, my child,” he added, putting an arm round Lucien’s waist. “I am forty-six years old, I am the natural son of a great lord; consequently, I have no family, and I have a heart. But, learn this, carve it on that still so soft brain of yours — man dreads to be alone. And of all kinds of isolation, inward isolation is the most appalling. The early anchorite lived with God; he dwelt in the spirit world, the most populous world of all. The miser lives in a world of imagination and fruition; his whole life and all that he is, even his sex, lies in his brain. A man’s first thought, be he leper or convict, hopelessly sick or degraded, is to find another with a like fate to share it with him. He will exert the utmost that is in him, every power, all his vital energy, to satisfy that craving; it is his very life. But for that tyrannous longing, would Satan have found companions? There is a whole poem yet to be written, a first part of Paradise Lost; Milton’s poem is only the apology for the revolt.”
“It would be the Iliad of Corruption,” said Lucien.
“Well, I am alone, I live alone. If I wear the priest’s habit, I have not a priest’s heart. I like to devote myself to some one; that is my weakness. That is my life, that is how I came to be a priest. I am not afraid of ingratitude, and I am grateful. The Church is nothing to me; it is an idea. I am devoted to the King of Spain, but you cannot give affection to a King of Spain; he is my protector, he towers above me. I want to love my creature, to mould him, fashion him to my use, and love him as a father loves his child. I shall drive in your tilbury, my boy, enjoy your success with women, and say to myself, ‘This fine young fellow, this Marquis de Rubempre, my creation whom I have brought into this great world, is my very Self; his greatness is my doing, he speaks or is silent with my voice, he consults me in everything.’ The Abbe de Vermont felt thus for Marie-Antoinette.”
“He led her to the scaffold.”
“He did not love the Queen,” said the priest. “HE only loved the Abbe de Vermont.”
“Must I leave desolation behind me?”
“I have money, you shall draw on me.”
“I would do a great deal just now to rescue David Sechard,” said Lucien, in the tone of one who has given up all idea of suicide.
“Say but one word, my son, and by to-morrow morning he shall have money enough to set him free.”
“What! Would you give me twelve thousand francs?”
“Ah! child, do you not see that we are traveling on at the rate of four leagues an hour? We shall dine at Poitiers before long, and there, if you decide to sign the pact, to give me a single proof of obedience, a great proof that I shall require, then the Bordeaux coach shall carry fifteen thousand francs to your sister — — ”
“Where is the money?”
The Spaniard made no answer, and Lucien said within himself, “There I had him; he was laughing at me.”
In another moment they took their places. Neither of them said a word. Silently the Abbe groped in the pocket of the coach, and drew out a traveler’s leather pouch with three divisions in it; thence he took a hundred Portuguese moidores, bringing out his large hand filled with gold three times.
“Father, I am yours,” said Lucien, dazzled by the stream of gold.
“Child!” said the priest, and set a tender kiss on Lucien’s forehead. “There is twice as much still left in the bag, besides the money for traveling expenses.”
“And you are traveling alone!” cried Lucien.
“What is that?” asked the Spaniard. “I have more than a hundred thousand crowns in drafts on Paris. A diplomatist without money is in your position of this morning — a poet without a will of his own!”
As Lucien took his place in the caleche beside the so-called Spanish diplomatist, Eve rose to give her child a draught of milk, found the fatal letter in the cradle, and read it. A sudden cold chilled the damps of morning slumber, dizziness came over her, she could not see. She called aloud to Marion and Kolb.
“Has my brother gone out?” she asked, and Kolb answered at once with, “Yes, Montame, pefore tay.”
“Keep this that I am going to tell you a profound secret,” said Eve. “My brother has gone no doubt to make away with himself. Hurry, both of you, make inquiries cautiously, and look along the river.”
Eve was left alone in a dull stupor, dreadful to see. Her trouble was at its height when Petit-Claud came in at seven o’clock to talk over the steps to be taken in David’s case. At such a time, any voice in the world may speak, and we let them speak.
“Our poor, dear David is in prison, madame,” so began Petit-Claud. “I foresaw all along that it would end in this. I advised him at the time to go into partnership with his competitors the Cointets; for while your husband has simply the idea, they have the means of putting it into practical shape. So as soon as I heard of his arrest yesterday evening, what did I do but hurry away to find the Cointets and try to obtain such concessions as might satisfy you. If you try to keep the discovery to yourselves, you will continue to live a life of shifts and chicanery. You must give in, or else when you are exhausted and at the last gasp, you will end by making a bargain with some capitalist or other, and perhaps to your own detriment, whereas to-day I hope to see you make a good one with MM. Cointet. In this way you will save yourselves the hardships and the misery of the inventor’s duel with the greed of the capitalist and the indifference of the public. Let us see! If the MM. Cointet should pay your debts — if, over and above your debts, they should pay you a further sum of money down, whether or no the invention succeeds; while at the same time it is thoroughly understood that if it succeeds a certain proportion of the profits of working the patent shall be yours, would you not be doing very well? — You yourself, madame, would then be the proprietor of the plant in the printing-office. You would sell the business, no doubt; it is quite worth twenty thousand francs. I will undertake to find you a buyer at that price.
“Now if you draw up a deed of partnership with the MM. Cointet, and receive fifteen thousand francs of capital; and if you invest it in the funds at the present moment, it will bring you in an income of two thousand francs. You can live on two thousand francs in the provinces. Bear in mind, too, madame, that, given certain contingencies, there will be yet further payments. I say ‘contingencies,’ because we must lay our accounts with failure.
“Very well,” continued Petit-Claud, “now these things I am sure that I can obtain for you. First of all, David’s release from prison; secondly, fifteen thousand francs, a premium paid on his discovery, whether the experiments fail or succeed; and lastly, a partnership between David and the MM. Cointet, to be taken out after private experiment made jointly. The deed of partnership for the working of the patent should be drawn up on the following basis: The MM. Cointet to bear all the expenses, the capital invested by David to be confined to the expenses of procuring the patent, and his share of the profits to be fixed at twenty-five per cent. You are a clear-headed and very sensible woman, qualities which are not often found combined with great beauty; think over these proposals, and you will see that they are very favorable.”
Poor Eve in her despair burst into tears. “Ah, sir! why did you not come yesterday evening to tell me this? We should have been spared disgrace and — and something far worse — — ”
“I was talking with the Cointets until midnight. They are behind Metivier, as you must have suspected. But how has something worse than our poor David’s arrest happened since yesterday evening?”
“Here is the awful news that I found when I awoke this morning,” she said, holding out Lucien’s letter. “You have just given me proof of your interest in us; you are David’s friend and Lucien’s; I need not ask you to keep the secret — — ”
“You need not feel the least anxiety,” said Petit-Claud, as he returned the letter. “Lucien will not take his life. Your husband’s arrest was his doing; he was obliged to find some excuse for leaving you, and this exit of his looks to me like a piece of stage business.”
The Cointets had gained their ends. They had tormented the inventor and his family, until, worn out by the torture, the victims longed for a respite, and then seized their opportunity and made the offer. Not every inventor has the tenacity of the bull-dog that will perish with his teeth fast set in his capture; the Cointets had shrewdly estimated David’s character. The tall Cointet looked upon David’s imprisonment as the first scene of the first act of the drama. The second act opened with the proposal which Petit-Claud had just made. As arch-schemer, the attorney looked upon Lucien’s frantic folly as a bit of unhoped-for luck, a chance that would finally decide the issues of the day.
Eve was completely prostrated by this event; Petit-Claud saw this, and meant to profit by her despair to win her confidence, for he saw at last how much she influenced her husband. So far from discouraging Eve, he tried to reassure her, and very cleverly diverted her thoughts to the prison. She should persuade David to take the Cointets into partnership.
“David told me, madame, that he only wished for a fortune for your sake and your brother’s; but it should be clear to you by now that to try to make a rich man of Lucien would be madness. The youngster would run through three fortunes.”
Eve’s attitude told plainly enough that she had no more illusions left with regard to her brother. The lawyer waited a little so that her silence should have the weight of consent.
“Things being so, it is now a question of you and your child,” he said. “It rests with you to decide whether an income of two thousand francs will be enough for your welfare, to say nothing of old Sechard’s property. Your father-in-law’s income has amounted to seven or eight thousand francs for a long time past, to say nothing of capital lying out at interest. So, after all, you have a good prospect before you. Why torment yourself?”
Petit-Claud left Eve Sechard to reflect upon this prospect. The whole scheme had been drawn up with no little skill by the tall Cointet the evening before.
“Give them the glimpse of a possibility of money in hand,” the lynx had said, when Petit-Claud brought the news of the arrest; “once let them grow accustomed to that idea, and they are ours; we will drive a bargain, and little by little we shall bring them down to our price for the secret.”
The argument of the second act of the commercial drama was in a manner summed up in that speech.
Mme. Sechard, heartbroken and full of dread for her brother’s fate, dressed and came downstairs. An agony of terror seized her when she thought that she must cross Angouleme alone on the way to the prison. Petit-Claud gave little thought to his fair client’s distress. When he came back to offer his arm, it was from a tolerably Machiavellian motive; but Eve gave him credit for delicate consideration, and he allowed her to thank him for it. The little attention, at such a moment, from so hard a man, modified Mme. Sechard’s previous opinion of Petit-Claud.
“I am taking you round by the longest way,” he said, “and we shall meet nobody.”
“For the first time in my life, monsieur, I feel that I have no right to hold up my head before other people; I had a sharp lesson given to me last night — — ”
“It will be the first and the last.”
“Oh! I certainly shall not stay in the town now — — ”
“Let me know if your husband consents to the proposals that are all but definitely offered by the Cointets,” said Petit-Claud at the gate of the prison; “I will come at once with an order for David’s release from Cachan, and in all likelihood he will not go back again to prison.”
This suggestion, made on the very threshold of the jail, was a piece of cunning strategy — a combinazione, as the Italians call an indefinable mixture of treachery and truth, a cunningly planned fraud which does not break the letter of the law, or a piece of deft trickery for which there is no legal remedy. St. Bartholomew’s for instance, was a political combination.
Imprisonment for debt, for reasons previously explained, is such a rare occurrence in the provinces, that there is no house of detention, and a debtor is perforce imprisoned with the accused, convicted, and condemned — the three graduated subdivisions of the class generically styled criminal. David was put for the time being in a cell on the ground floor from which some prisoner had probably been recently discharged at the end of his time. Once inscribed on the jailer’s register, with the amount allowed by the law for a prisoner’s board for one month, David confronted a big, stout man, more powerful than the King himself in a prisoner’s eyes; this was the jailer.
An instance of a thin jailer is unknown in the provinces. The place, to begin with, is almost a sinecure, and a jailer is a kind of innkeeper who pays no rent and lives very well, while his prisoners fare very ill; for, like an innkeeper, he gives them rooms according to their payments. He knew David by name, and what was more, knew about David’s father, and thought that he might venture to let the printer have a good room on credit for one night; for David was penniless.
The prison of Angouleme was built in the Middle Ages, and has no more changed than the old cathedral. It is built against the old presidial, or ancient court of appeal, and people still call it the maison de justice. It boasts the conventional prison gateway, the solid-looking, nail-studded door, the low, worn archway which the better deserves the qualification “cyclopean,” because the jailer’s peephole or judas looks out like a single eye from the front of the building. As you enter you find yourself in a corridor which runs across the entire width of the building, with a row of doors of cells that give upon the prison yard and are lighted by high windows covered with a square iron grating. The jailer’s house is separated from these cells by an archway in the middle, through which you catch a glimpse of the iron gate of the prison yard. The jailer installed David in a cell next to the archway, thinking that he would like to have a man of David’s stamp as a near neighbor for the sake of company.
“This is the best room,” he said. David was struck dumb with amazement at the sight of it.
The stone walls were tolerably damp. The windows, set high in the wall, were heavily barred; the stone-paved floor was cold as ice, and from the corridor outside came the sound of the measured tramp of the warder, monotonous as waves on the beach. “You are a prisoner! you are watched and guarded!” said the footsteps at every moment of every hour. All these small things together produce a prodigious effect upon the minds of honest folk. David saw that the bed was execrable, but the first night in a prison is full of violent agitation, and only on the second night does the prisoner notice that his couch is hard. The jailer was graciously disposed; he naturally suggested that his prisoner should walk in the yard until nightfall.
David’s hour of anguish only began when he was locked into his cell for the night. Lights are not allowed in the cells. A prisoner detained on arrest used to be subjected to rules devised for malefactors, unless he brought a special exemption signed by the public prosecutor. The jailer certainly might allow David to sit by his fire, but the prisoner must go back to his cell at locking-up time. Poor David learned the horrors of prison life by experience, the rough coarseness of the treatment revolted him. Yet a revulsion, familiar to those who live by thought, passed over him. He detached himself from his loneliness, and found a way of escape in a poet’s waking dream.
At last the unhappy man’s thoughts turned to his own affairs. The stimulating influence of a prison upon conscience and self-scrutiny is immense. David asked himself whether he had done his duty as the head of a family. What despairing grief his wife must feel at this moment! Why had he not done as Marion had said, and earned money enough to pursue his investigations at leisure?
“How can I stay in Angouleme after such a disgrace? And when I come out of prison, what will become of us? Where shall we go?”
Doubts as to his process began to occur to him, and he passed through an agony which none save inventors can understand. Going from doubt to doubt, David began to see his real position more clearly; and to himself he said, as the Cointets had said to old Sechard, as Petit-Claud had just said to Eve, “Suppose that all should go well, what does it amount to in practice? The first thing to be done is to take out a patent, and money is needed for that — and experiments must be tried on a large scale in a paper-mill, which means that the discovery must pass into other hands. Oh! Petit-Claud was right!”
