Rise and Fall of Cesar Birotteau. Оноре де Бальзак
a hurry; but I ought to have made Popinot enter the sum,” said Ferdinand.
“That is true,” said Birotteau, bewildered by the cool unconcern of the Norman, who well knew the worthy people among whom he had come meaning to make his fortune. The perfumer and his clerk passed the whole night in examining accounts, a labor which the good man knew to be useless. In coming and going about the desk Cesar slipped three bills of a thousand francs each into the money-drawer, catching them against the top of it; then he pretended to be much fatigued and to fall asleep and snore. Du Tillet awoke him triumphantly, with an excessive show of joy at discovering the error. The next day Birotteau scolded Popinot and his little wife publicly, as if very angry with them for their negligence. Fifteen days later Ferdinand du Tillet got a situation with a stockbroker. He said perfumery did not suit him, and he wished to learn banking. In leaving Birotteau, he spoke of Madame Cesar in a way to make people suppose that his master had dismissed him out of jealousy. A few months later, however, du Tillet went to see Birotteau and asked his endorsement for twenty thousand francs, to enable him to make up the securities he needed in an enterprise which was to put him on the high-road to fortune. Observing the surprise which Cesar showed at this impudence, du Tillet frowned, and asked if he had no confidence in him. Matifat and two other merchants, who were present on business with Birotteau, also observed the indignation of the perfumer, who repressed his anger in their presence. Du Tillet, he thought, might have become an honest man; his previous fault might have been committed for some mistress in distress or from losses at cards; the public reprobation of an honest man might drive one still young, and possibly repentant, into a career of crime. So this angel took up his pen and endorsed du Tillet’s notes, telling him that he was heartily willing thus to oblige a lad who had been very useful to him. The blood rushed to his face as he uttered the falsehood. Du Tillet could not meet his eye, and no doubt vowed to him at that moment the undying hatred which the spirits of darkness feel towards the angels of light.
From this time du Tillet held his balance-pole so well as he danced the tight-rope of financial speculation, that he was rich and elegant in appearance before he became so in reality. As soon as he got hold of a cabriolet he was always in it; he kept himself in the high sphere of those who mingle business with pleasure, and make the foyer of the opera-house a branch of the Bourse—in short, the Turcarets of the period. Thanks to Madame Roguin, whom he had known at the Birotteau’s, he was received at once among people of the highest standing in finance; and, at the moment of which we write, he had reached a prosperity in which there was nothing fictitious. He was on the best terms with the house of Nucingen, to which Roguin had introduced him, and he had promptly become connected with the brothers Keller and with several other great banking-houses. No one knew from whence this youth had derived the immense capital which he handled, but every one attributed his success to his intelligence and his integrity.
The Restoration made Cesar a personage, and the turmoil of political crises naturally lessened his recollection of these domestic misadventures. The constancy of his royalist opinions (to which he had become exceedingly indifferent since his wound, though he remained faithful to them out of decency) and the memory of his devotion in Vendemiaire won him very high patronage, precisely because he had asked for none. He was appointed major in the National Guard, although he was utterly incapable of giving the word of command. In 1815 Napoleon, always his enemy, dismissed him. During the Hundred Days Birotteau was the bugbear of the liberals of his quarter; for it was not until 1815 that differences of political opinion grew up among merchants, who had hitherto been unanimous in their desires for public tranquillity, of which, as they knew, business affairs stood much in need.
At the second Restoration the royal government was obliged to remodel the municipality of Paris. The prefect wished to nominate Birotteau as mayor. Thanks to his wife, the perfumer would only accept the place of deputy-mayor, which brought him less before the public. Such modesty increased the respect generally felt for him, and won him the friendship of the new mayor, Monsieur Flamet de la Billardiere. Birotteau, who had seen him in the shop in the days when “The Queen of Roses” was the headquarters of royalist conspiracy, mentioned him to the prefect of the Seine when that official consulted Cesar on the choice to be made. Monsieur and Madame Birotteau were therefore never forgotten in the invitations of the mayor. Madame Birotteau frequently took up the collections at Saint-Roch in the best of good company. La Billardiere warmly supported Birotteau when the question of bestowing the crosses given to the municipality came up, and dwelt upon his wound at Saint-Roch, his attachment to the Bourbons, and the respect which he enjoyed. The government, wishing on the one hand to cheapen Napoleon’s order by lavishing the cross of the Legion of honor, and on the other to win adherents and rally to the Bourbons the various trades and men of arts and sciences, included Birotteau in the coming promotion. This honor, which suited well with the show that Cesar made in his arrondissement, put him in a position where the ideas of a man accustomed to succeed naturally enlarged themselves. The news which the mayor had just given him of his preferment was the determining reason that decided him to plunge into the scheme which he now for the first time revealed to his wife; he believed it would enable him to give up perfumery all the more quickly, and rise into the regions of the higher bourgeoisie of Paris.
Cesar was now forty years old. The work he had undertaken in his manufactories had given him a few premature wrinkles, and had slightly silvered the thick tufts of hair on which the pressure of his hat left a shining circle. His forehead, where the hair grew in a way to mark five distinct points, showed the simplicity of his life. The heavy eyebrows were not alarming because the limpid glance of his frank blue eyes harmonized with the open forehead of an honest man. His nose, broken at the bridge and thick at the end, gave him the wondering look of a gaby in the streets of Paris. His lips were very thick, and his large chin fell in a straight line below them. His face, high-colored and square in outline, revealed, by the lines of its wrinkles and by the general character of its expression, the ingenuous craftiness of a peasant. The strength of his body, the stoutness of his limbs, the squareness of his shoulders, the width of his feet—all denoted the villager transplanted to Paris. His powerful hairy hands, with their large square nails, would alone have attested his origin if other vestiges had not remained in various parts of his person. His lips wore the cordial smile which shopkeepers put on when a customer enters; but this commercial sunshine was really the image of his inward content, and pictured the state of his kindly soul. His distrust never went beyond the lines of his business, his craftiness left him on the steps of the Bourse, or when he closed the pages of his ledger. Suspicion was to him very much what his printed bill-heads were—a necessity of the sale itself. His countenance presented a sort of comical assurance and conceit mingled with good nature, which gave it originality and saved it from too close a resemblance to the insipid face of a Parisian bourgeois. Without this air of naive self-admiration and faith in his own person, he would have won too much respect; he drew nearer to his fellows by thus contributing his quota of absurdity. When speaking, he habitually crossed his hands behind his back. When he thought he had said something striking or gallant, he rose imperceptibly on the points of his toes twice, and dropped back heavily on his heels, as if to emphasize what he said. In the midst of an argument he might be seen turning round upon himself and walking off a few steps, as if he had gone to find objections with which he returned upon his adversary brusquely. He never interrupted, and was sometimes a victim to this careful observance of civility; for others would take the words out of his mouth, and the good man had to yield his ground without opening his lips. His great experience in commercial matters had given him a few fixed habits, which some people called eccentricities. If a note were overdue he sent for the bailiff, and thought only of recovering capital, interest, and costs; and the bailiff was ordered to pursue the matter until the debtor went into bankruptcy. Cesar then stopped all proceedings, never appeared at any meeting of creditors, and held on to his securities. He adopted this system and his implacable contempt for bankrupts from Monsieur Ragon, who in the course of his commercial life had seen such loss of time in litigation that he had come to look upon the meagre and uncertain dividends obtained by such compromises as fully counterbalanced by a better employment of the time spent in coming and going, in making proposals, or in listening to excuses for dishonesty.
“If the bankrupt is an honest man, and recovers himself, he will pay you,” Ragon would say. “If he is without means and simply unfortunate, why torment him? If he is a scoundrel, you will never get anything. Your known severity