Rise and Fall of Cesar Birotteau. Honore de Balzac
demands. Government has brought me forward into prominence. I belong to the government; it is my duty to study its mind, and further its intentions by developing them. The Duc de Richelieu has just put an end to the occupation of France by the foreign armies. According to Monsieur de la Billardiere, the functionaries who represent the city of Paris should make it their duty, each in his own sphere of influence, to celebrate the liberation of our territory. Let us show a true patriotism which shall put these liberals, these damned intriguers, to the blush; hein? Do you think I don’t love my country? I wish to show the liberals, my enemies, that to love the king is to love France.”
“Do you think you have got any enemies, my poor Birotteau?”
“Why, yes, wife, we have enemies. Half our friends in the quarter are our enemies. They all say, ‘Birotteau has had luck; Birotteau is a man who came from nothing: yet here he is deputy-mayor; everything succeeds with him.’ Well, they are going to be finely surprised. You are the first to be told that I am made a chevalier of the Legion of honor. The king signed the order yesterday.”
“Oh! then,” said Madame Birotteau, much moved, “of course we must give the ball, my good friend. But what have you done to merit the cross?”
“Yesterday, when Monsieur de la Billardiere told me the news,” said Birotteau, modestly, “I asked myself, as you do, what claims I had to it; but I ended by seeing what they were, and in approving the action of the government. In the first place, I am a royalist; I was wounded at Saint-Roch in Vendemiaire: isn’t it something to have borne arms in those days for the good cause? Then, according to the merchants, I exercised my judicial functions in a way to give general satisfaction. I am now deputy-mayor. The king grants four crosses to the municipality of Paris; the prefect, selecting among the deputies suitable persons to be thus decorated, has placed my name first on the list. The king moreover knows me: thanks to old Ragon. I furnish him with the only powder he is willing to use; we alone possess the receipt of the late queen, – poor, dear, august victim! The mayor vehemently supported me. So there it is. If the king gives me the cross without my asking for it, it seems to me that I cannot refuse it without failing in my duty to him. Did I seek to be deputy-mayor? So, wife, since we are sailing before the wind, as your uncle Pillerault says when he is jovial, I have decided to put the household on a footing in conformity with our high position. If I can become anything, I’ll risk being whatever the good God wills that I shall be, – sub-prefect, if such be my destiny. My wife, you are much mistaken if you think a citizen has paid his debt to his country by merely selling perfumery for twenty years to those who came to buy it. If the State demands the help of our intelligence, we are as much bound to give it as we are to pay the tax on personal property, on windows and doors, et caetera. Do you want to stay forever behind your counter? You have been there, thank God, a long time. This ball shall be our fete, – yours and mine. Good-by to economy, – for your sake, be it understood. I burn our sign, ‘The Queen of Roses’; I efface the name, ‘Cesar Birotteau, Perfumer, Successor to Ragon,’ and put simply, ‘Perfumery’ in big letters of gold. On the entresol I place the office, the counting-room, and a pretty little sanctum for you. I make the shop out of the back-shop, the present dining-room, and kitchen. I hire the first floor of the next house, and open a door into it through the wall. I turn the staircase so as to pass from house to house on one floor; and we shall thus get a grand appartement, furnished like a nest. Yes, I shall refurnish your bedroom, and contrive a boudoir for you and a pretty chamber for Cesarine. The shop-girl whom you will hire, our head clerk, and your lady’s-maid (yes, Madame, you are to have one!) will sleep on the second floor. On the third will be the kitchen and rooms of the cook and the man-of-all-work. The fourth shall be a general store-house for bottle, crystals, and porcelains. The workshop for our people, in the attic! Passers-by shall no longer see them gumming on the labels, making the bags, sorting the flasks, and corking the phials. Very well for the Rue Saint-Denis, but for the Rue Saint-Honore – fy! bad style! Our shop must be as comfortable as a drawing-room. Tell me, are we the only perfumers who have reached public honors? Are there not vinegar merchants and mustard men who command in the National Guard and are very well received at the Palace? Let us imitate them; let us extend our business, and at the same time press forward into higher society.”
“Goodness! Birotteau, do you know what I am thinking of as I listen to you? You are like the man who looks for knots in a bulrush. Recollect what I said when it was a question of making you deputy-mayor: ‘your peace of mind before everything!’ You are as fit, I told you, ‘to be put forward in public life as my arm is to turn a windmill. Honors will be your ruin!’ You would not listen to me, and now the ruin has come. To play a part in politics you must have money: have we any? What! would you burn your sign, which cost six hundred francs, and renounce ‘The Queen of Roses,’ your true glory? Leave ambition to others. He who puts his hand in the fire gets burned, – isn’t that true? Politics burn in these days. We have one hundred good thousand francs invested outside of our business, our productions, our merchandise. If you want to increase your fortune, do as they did in 1793. The Funds are at sixty-two: buy into the Funds. You will get ten thousand francs’ income, and the investment won’t hamper our property. Take advantage of the occasion to marry our daughter; sell the business, and let us go and live in your native place. Why! for fifteen years you have talked of nothing but buying Les Tresorieres, that pretty little property near Chinon, where there are woods and fields, and ponds and vineyards, and two dairies, which bring in a thousand crowns a year, with a house which we both like, – all of which we can have for sixty thousand francs; and, lo! Monsieur now wants to become something under government! Recollect what we are, – perfumers. If sixteen years before you invented the DOUBLE PASTE OF SULTANS and the CARMINATIVE BALM some one had said, ‘You are going to make enough money to buy Les Tresorieres,’ wouldn’t you have been half sick with joy? Well, you can acquire that property which you wanted so much that you hardly opened your mouth about anything else, and now you talk of spending on nonsense money earned by the sweat of our brow: I can say ours, for I’ve sat behind the desk through all that time, like a poor dog in his kennel. Isn’t it much better to come and visit our daughter after she is married to a notary of Paris, and live eight months of the year at Chinon, than to begin here to make five sous six blanks, and of six blanks nothing? Wait for a rise in the Funds, and you can give eight thousand francs a year to your daughter and we can keep two thousand for ourselves, and the proceeds of the business will allow us to buy Les Tresorieres. There in your native place, my good little cat, with our furniture, which is worth a great deal, we shall live like princes; whereas here we want at least a million to make any figure at all.”
“I expected you to say all this, wife,” said Cesar Birotteau. “I am not quite such a fool (though you think me a great fool, you do) as not to have thought of all that. Now, listen to me. Alexandre Crottat will fit us like a glove for a son-in-law, and he will succeed Roguin; but do you suppose he will be satisfied with a hundred thousand francs dot? – supposing that we gave our whole property outside of the business to establish our daughter, and I am willing; I would gladly live on dry bread the rest of my days to see her happy as a queen, the wife of a notary of Paris, as you say. Well, then, a hundred thousand francs, or even eight thousand francs a year, is nothing at all towards buying Roguin’s practice. Little Xandrot, as we call him, thinks, like all the rest of the world, that we are richer than we are. If his father, that big farmer who is as close as a snail, won’t sell a hundred thousand francs worth of land Xandrot can’t be a notary, for Roguin’s practice is worth four or five hundred thousand. If Crottat does not pay half down, how could he negotiate the affair? Cesarine must have two hundred thousand francs dot; and I mean that you and I shall retire solid bourgeois of Paris, with fifteen thousand francs a year. Hein! If I could make you see that as plain as day, wouldn’t it shut your mouth?”
“Oh, if you’ve got the mines of Peru – ”
“Yes, I have, my lamb. Yes,” he said, taking his wife by the waist and striking her with little taps, under an emotion of joy which lighted up his features, “I did not wish to tell you of this matter till it was all cooked; but to-morrow it will be done, – that is, perhaps it will. Here it is then: Roguin has proposed a speculation to me, so safe that he has gone into it with Ragon, with your uncle Pillerault, and two other of his clients. We are to buy property near the Madeleine, which, according to Roguin’s calculations, we shall get