Rise and Fall of Cesar Birotteau. Honore de Balzac
a minister of state.”
“You turn my brain with your projects,” said Constance. “I am all mixed up. Besides, Birotteau, I’m asleep.”
“Good-day,” replied the husband. “Just listen; I say good-day because it is morning, Mimi. Ah! there she is off, the dear child. Yes! you shall be rich, richissime, or I’ll renounce my name of Cesar!”
A few moments later Constance and Cesar were peacefully snoring.
II
A glance rapidly thrown over the past life of this household will strengthen the ideas which ought to have been suggested by the friendly altercation of the two personages in this scene. While picturing the manners and customs of retail shopkeepers, this sketch will also show by what singular chances Cesar Birotteau became deputy-mayor and perfumer, retired officer of the National Guard, and chevalier of the Legion of honor. In bringing to light the depths of his character and the causes of his rise, we shall show that fortuitous commercial events which strong brains dominate, may become irreparable catastrophes for weak ones. Events are never absolute; their results depend on individuals. Misfortune is a stepping-stone for genius, the baptismal font of Christians, a treasure for the skilful man, an abyss for the feeble.
A vine-dresser in the neighborhood of Chinon, named Jean Birotteau, married the waiting-maid of a lady whose vines he tilled. He had three sons; his wife died in giving birth to the last, and the poor man did not long survive her. The mistress had been fond of the maid, and brought up with her own sons the eldest child, Francois, and placed him in a seminary. Ordained priest, Francois Birotteau hid himself during the Revolution, and led the wandering life of priests not sworn by the Republic, hunted like wild beasts and guillotined at the first chance. At the time when this history begins he was vicar of the cathedral of Tours, and had only once left that city to visit his brother Cesar. The bustle of Paris so bewildered the good priest that he was afraid to leave his room. He called the cabriolets “half-coaches,” and wondered at all he saw. After a week’s stay he went back to Tours resolving never to revisit the capital.
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