Works of Honore De Balzac, page 566
The second son of the vine-dresser, Jean Birotteau, was drafted into the militia, and won the rank of captain early in the wars of the Revolution. At the battle of Trebia, Macdonald called for volunteers to carry a battery. Captain Jean Birotteau advanced with his company, and was killed. The destiny of the Birotteaus demanded, no doubt, that they should be oppressed by men, or by circumstances, wheresoever they planted themselves.
The last child is the hero of this story. When Cesar at fourteen years of age could read, write, and cipher, he left his native place and came to Paris on foot to seek his fortune, with one louis in his pocket. The recommendation of an apothecary at Tours got him a place as shop-boy with Monsieur and Madame Ragon, perfumers. Cesar owned at this period a pair of hob-nailed shoes, a pair of breeches, blue stockings, a flowered waistcoat, a peasant’s jacket, three coarse shirts of good linen, and his travelling cudgel. If his hair was cut like that of a choir-boy, he at least had the sturdy loins of a Tourangian; if he yielded sometimes to the native idleness of his birthplace, it was counterbalanced by his desire to make his fortune; if he lacked cleverness and education, he possessed an instinctive rectitude and delicate feelings, which he inherited from his mother, — a being who had, in Tourangian phrase, a “heart of gold.” Cesar received from the Ragons his food, six francs a month as wages, and a pallet to sleep upon in the garret near the cook. The clerks who taught him to pack the goods, to do the errands, and sweep up the shop and the pavement, made fun of him as they did so, according to the manners and customs of shop-keeping, in which chaff is a principal element of instruction. Monsieur and Madame Ragon spoke to him like a dog. No one paid attention to his weariness, though many a night his feet, blistered by the pavements of Paris, and his bruised shoulders, made him suffer horribly. This harsh application of the maxim “each for himself,” — the gospel of large cities, — made Cesar think the life of Paris very hard. At night he cried as he thought of Touraine, where the peasant works at his ease, where the mason lays a stone between breakfast and dinner, and idleness is wisely mingled with labor; but he always fell asleep without having time to think of running away, for he had his errands to do in the morning, and obeyed his duty with the instinct of a watch-dog. If occasionally he complained, the head clerk would smile with a jovial air, and say, —
“Ah, my boy! all is not rose at ‘The Queen of Roses.’ Larks don’t fall down roasted; you must run after them and catch them, and then you must find some way to cook them.”
The cook, a big creature from Picardy, took the best bits for herself, and only spoke to Cesar when she wanted to complain of Monsieur and Madame Ragon, who left her nothing to steal. Towards the end of the first month this girl, who was forced to keep house of a Sunday, opened a conversation with Cesar. Ursula with the grease washed off seemed charming to the poor shop-boy, who, unless hindered by chance, was likely to strike on the first rock that lay hidden in his way. Like all unprotected boys, he loved the first woman who threw him a kind look. The cook took Cesar under her protection; and thence followed certain secret relations, which the clerks laughed at pitilessly. Two years later, the cook happily abandoned Cesar for a young recruit belonging to her native place who was then hiding in Paris, — a lad twenty years old, owning a few acres of land, who let Ursula marry him.
During those two years the cook had fed her little Cesar well, and had explained to him certain mysteries of Parisian life, which she made him look at from the bottom; and she impressed upon him, out of jealousy, a profound horror of evil places, whose dangers seemed not unknown to her. In 1792 the feet of the deserted Cesar were well-toughened to the pavements, his shoulders to the bales, and his mind to what he called the “humbugs” of Paris. So when Ursula abandoned him he was speedily consoled, for she had realized none of his instinctive ideas in relation to sentiment. Licentious and surly, wheedling and pilfering, selfish and a tippler, she clashed with the simple nature of Birotteau without offering him any compensating perspective. Sometimes the poor lad felt with pain that he was bound by ties that are strong enough to hold ingenuous hearts to a creature with whom he could not sympathize. By the time that he became master of his own heart he had reached his growth, and was sixteen years old. His mind, developed by Ursula and by the banter of the clerks, made him study commerce with an eye in which intelligence was veiled beneath simplicity: he observed the customers; asked in leisure moments for explanations about the merchandise, whose divers sorts and proper places he retained in his head. The day came when he knew all the articles, and their prices and marks, better than any new-comer; and from that time Monsieur and Madame Ragon made a practice of employing him in the business.
When the terrible levy of the year II. made a clean sweep in the shop of citizen Ragon, Cesar Birotteau, promoted to be second clerk, profited by the occasion to obtain a salary of fifty francs a month, and took his seat at the dinner-table of the Ragons with ineffable delight. The second clerk of “The Queen of Roses,” possessing already six hundred francs, now had a chamber where he could put away, in long-coveted articles of furniture, the clothing he had little by little got together. Dressed like other young men of an epoch when fashion required the assumption of boorish manners, the gentle and modest peasant had an air and manner which rendered him at least their equal; and he thus passed the barriers which in other times ordinary life would have placed between himself and the bourgeoisie. Towards the end of this year his integrity won him a place in the counting-room. The dignified citoyenne Ragon herself looked after his linen, and the two shopkeepers became familiar with him.
In Vendemiaire, 1794, Cesar, who possessed a hundred louis d’or, changed them for six thousand francs in assignats, with which he bought into the Funds at thirty, paying for the investment on the very day before the paper began its course of depreciation at the Bourse, and locking up his securities with unspeakable satisfaction. From that day forward he watched the movement of stocks and public affairs with secret anxieties of his own, which made him quiver at each rumor of the reverses or successes that marked this period of our history. Monsieur Ragon, formerly perfumer to her majesty Queen Marie-Antoinette, confided to Cesar Birotteau, during this critical period, his attachment to the fallen tyrants. This disclosure was one of the cardinal events in Cesar’s life. The nightly conversations when the shop was closed, the street quiet, the accounts regulated, made a fanatic of the Tourangian, who in becoming a royalist obeyed an inborn instinct. The recital of the virtuous deeds of Louis XVI., the anecdotes with which husband and wife exalted the memory of the queen, fired the imagination of the young man. The horrible fate of those two crowned heads, decapitated a few steps from the shop-door, roused his feeling heart and made him hate a system of government which was capable of shedding blood without repugnance. His commercial interests showed him the death of trade in the Maximum, and in political convulsions, which are always destructive of business. Moreover, like a true perfumer, he hated the revolution which made a Titus of every man and abolished powder. The tranquillity resulting from absolutism could alone, he thought, give life to money, and he grew bigoted on behalf of royalty. When Monsieur Ragon saw that Cesar was well-disposed on this point, he made him head-clerk and initiated him into the secrets of “The Queen of Roses,” several of whose customers were the most active and devoted emissaries of the Bourbons, and where the correspondence between Paris and the West secretly went on. Carried away by the fervor of youth, electrified by his intercourse with the Georges, the Billardiere, Montauran, Bauvan, Longuy, Manda, Bernier, du Guenic, and the Fontaines, Cesar flung himself into the conspiracy by which the royalists and the terrorists combined on the 13th Vendemiaire against the expiring Convention.
On that day Cesar had the honor of fighting against Napoleon on the steps of Saint-Roch, and was wounded at the beginning of the affair. Every one knows the result of that attempt. If the aide-de-camp of Barras then issued from his obscurity, the obscurity of Birotteau saved the clerk’s life. A few friends carried the belligerent perfumer to “The Queen of Roses,” where he remained hidden in the garret, nursed by Madame Ragon, and happily forgotten. Cesar Birotteau never had but that one spurt of martial courage. During the month his convalescence lasted, he made solid reflections on the absurdity of an alliance between politics and perfumery. Although he remained royalist, he resolved to be, purely and simply, a royalist perfumer, and never more to compromise himself, body and soul, for his country.
On the 18th Brumaire, Monsieur and Madame Ragon, despairing of the royal cause, determined to give up perfumery, and live like honest bourgeois without meddling in politics. To recover the value of their business, it was necessary to find a man who had more integrity than ambition, more plain good sense than ability. Ragon proposed the affair to his head-clerk. Birotteau, now master at twenty years of age of a thousand francs a year from the public Funds, hesitated. His ambition was to live near Chinon as soon as he could get together an income of fifteen hundred francs, or whenever the First Consul should have consolidated the public debt by consolidating himself in the Tuileries. Why should he risk his honest and simple independence in commercial uncertainties? he asked himself. He had never expected to win so large a fortune, and he owed it to happy chances which only come in early youth; he intended to marry in Touraine some woman rich enough to enable him to buy and cultivate Les Tresorieres, a little property which, from the dawn of his reason, he had coveted, which he dreamed of augmenting, where he could make a thousand crowns a year, and where he would lead a life of happy obscurity. He was about to refuse the offer, when love suddenly changed all his resolutions by increasing tenfold the measure of his ambition.
After Ursula’s desertion, Cesar had remained virtuous, as much through fear of the dangers of Paris as from application to his work. When the passions are without food they change their wants; marriage then becomes, to persons of the middle class, a fixed idea, for it is their only way of winning and appropriating a woman. Cesar Birotteau had reached that point. Everything at “The Queen of Roses” now rested on the head-clerk; he had not a moment to give to pleasure. In such a life wants become imperious, and a chance meeting with a beautiful young woman, of whom a libertine clerk would scarcely have dreamed, produced on Cesar an overpowering effect. On a fine June day, crossing by the Pont-Marie to the Ile Saint-Louis, he saw a young girl standing at the door of a shop at the angle of the Quai d’Anjou. Constance Pillerault was the forewoman of a linen-draper’s establishment called Le Petit Matelot, — the first of those shops which have since been established in Paris with more or less of painted signs, floating banners, show-cases filled with swinging shawls, cravats arranged like houses of cards, and a thousand other commercial seductions, such as fixed prices, fillets of suspended objects, placards, illusions and optical effects carried to such a degree of perfection that a shop-front has now become a commercial poem. The low price of all the articles called “Novelties” which were to be found at the Petit-Matelot gave the shop an unheard of vogue, and that in a part of Paris which was the least favorable to fashion and commerce. The young forewoman was at this time cited for her beauty, as was the case in later days with the beautiful lemonade-girl of the cafe of the Milles Colonnnes, and several other poor creatures who flattened more noses, young and old, against the window-panes of milliners, confectioners, and linen-drapers, than there are stones in the streets of Paris.
The head-clerk of “The Queen of Roses,” living between Saint-Roch and the Rue de la Sourdiere, knew nothing of the existence of the Petit-Matelot; for the smaller trades of Paris are more or less strangers to each other. Cesar was so vigorously smitten by the beauty of Constance that he rushed furiously into the shop to buy six linen shirts, disputing the price a long time, and requiring volumes of linen to be unfolded and shown to him, precisely like an Englishwoman in the humor for “shopping.” The young person deigned to take notice of Cesar, perceiving, by certain symptoms known to women, that he came more for the seller than the goods. He dictated his name and address to the young lady, who grew very indifferent to the admiration of her customer once the purchase was made. The poor clerk had had little to do to win the good graces of Ursula; in such matters he was as silly as a sheep, and love now made him sillier. He dared not utter a word, and was moreover too dazzled to observe the indifference which succeeded the smiles of the siren shopwoman.
For eight succeeding days Cesar mounted guard every evening before the Petit-Matelot, watching for a look as a dog waits for a bone at the kitchen door, indifferent to the derision of the clerks and the shop-girls, humbly stepping aside for the buyers and passers-by, and absorbed in the little revolving world of the shop. Some days later he again entered the paradise of his angel, less to purchase handkerchiefs than to communicate to her a luminous idea.
“If you should have need of perfumery, Mademoiselle, I could furnish you in the same manner,” he said as he paid for the handkerchiefs.
Constance Pillerault was daily receiving brilliant proposals, in which there was no question of marriage; and though her heart was as pure as her forehead was white, it was only after six months of marches and counter-marches, in the course of which Cesar revealed his inextinguishable love, that she condescended to receive his attentions, and even then without committing herself to an answer, — a prudence suggested by the number of her swains, wholesale wine-merchants, rich proprietors of cafes, and others who made soft eyes at her. The lover was backed up in his suit by the guardian of Constance, Monsieur Claude-Joseph Pillerault, at that time an ironmonger on the Quai de la Ferraille, whom the young man had finally discovered by devoting himself to the subterraneous spying which distinguishes a genuine love.
The rapidity of this narrative compels us to pass over in silence the joys of Parisian love tasted with innocence, the prodigalities peculiar to clerkdom, such as melons in their earliest prime, choice dinners at Venua’s followed by the theatre, Sunday jaunts to the country in hackney-coaches. Without being handsome, there was nothing in Cesar’s person which made it difficult to love him. The life of Paris and his sojourn in a dark shop had dulled the brightness of his peasant complexion. His abundant black hair, his solid neck and shoulders like those of a Norman horse, his sturdy limbs, his honest and straightforward manner, all contributed to predispose others in his favor. The uncle Pillerault, whose duty it was to watch over the happiness of his brother’s daughter, made inquiries which resulted in his sanctioning the wishes of the young Tourangian. In the year 1800, and in the pretty month of May, Mademoiselle Pillerault consented to marry Cesar Birotteau, who fainted with joy at the moment when, under a linden at Sceaux, Constance-Barbe-Josephine Pillerault accepted him as her husband.
“My little girl,” said Monsieur Pillerault, “you have won a good husband. He has a warm heart and honorable feelings; he is true as gold, and as good as an infant Jesus, — in fact, a king of men.”
Constance frankly abdicated the more brilliant destiny to which, like all shop-girls, she may at times have aspired. She wished to be an honest woman, a good mother of a family, and looked at life according to the religious programme of the middle classes. Such a career suited her own ideas far better than the dangerous vanities which seduce so many youthful Parisian imaginations. Constance, with her narrow intelligence, was a type of the petty bourgeoisie whose labors are not performed without grumbling; who begin by refusing what they desire, and end by getting angry when taken at their word; whose restless activity is carried into the kitchen and into the counting-room, into the gravest matters of business, and into the invisible darns of the household linen; who love while scolding, who conceive no ideas but the simplest (the small change of the mind); who argue about everything, fear everything, calculate everything, and fret perpetually over the future. Her cold but ingenuous beauty, her touching expression, her freshness and purity, prevented Birotteau from thinking of her defects, which moreover were more than compensated by a delicate sense of honor natural to women, by an excessive love of order, by a fanaticism for work, and by her genius as a saleswoman. Constance was eighteen years old, and possessed eleven thousand francs of her own. Cesar, inspired by his love with an excessive ambition, bought the business of “The Queen of Roses” and removed it to a handsome building near the Place Vendome. At the early age of twenty-one, married to a woman he adored, the proprietor of an establishment for which he had paid three quarters of the price down, he had the right to view, and did view, the future in glowing colors; all the more when he measured the path which led from his original point of departure. Roguin, notary of Ragon, who had drawn up the marriage contract, gave the new perfumer some sound advice, and prevented him from paying the whole purchase money down with the fortune of his wife.
“Keep the means of undertaking some good enterprise, my lad,” he had said to him.
Birotteau looked up to the notary with admiration, fell into the habit of consulting him, and made him his friend. Like Ragon and Pillerault, he had so much faith in the profession that he gave himself up to Roguin without allowing himself a suspicion. Thanks to this advice, Cesar, supplied with the eleven thousand francs of his wife for his start in business, would have scorned to exchange his possessions for those of the First Consul, brilliant as the prospects of Napoleon might seem. At first the Birotteaus kept only a cook, and lived in the entresol above the shop, — a sort of den tolerably well decorated by an upholsterer, where the bride and bridegroom began a honeymoon that was never to end. Madame Cesar appeared to advantage behind the counter. Her celebrated beauty had an enormous influence upon the sales, and the beautiful Madame Birotteau became a topic among the fashionable young men of the Empire. If Cesar was sometimes accused of royalism, the world did justice to his honesty; if a few neighboring shopkeepers envied his happiness, every one at least thought him worthy of it. The bullet which struck him on the steps of Saint-Roch gave him the reputation of being mixed up with political secrets, and also of being a courageous man, — though he had no military courage in his heart, and not the smallest political idea in his brain. Upon these grounds the worthy people of the arrondissement made him captain of the National Guard; but he was cashiered by Napoleon, who, according to Birotteau, owed him a grudge for their encounter on the 13th Vendemiaire. Cesar thus obtained at a cheap rate a varnish of persecution, which made him interesting in the eyes of the opposition, and gave him a certain importance.
