The Deputy of Arcis. Honore de Balzac
at the opening of a battle.”
“What will it be in the Chamber!” said the barrister.
“The Comte de Gondreville told me,” said the old colonel, “that he has known more than one orator affected with the qualms which precede, even with us old fire-eaters, the opening of a battle. But all this is idle talk. You want to be a deputy,” added the old man, shrugging his shoulders, “then be one!”
“Father, the real triumph will be Cecile! Cecile has an immense fortune. Now-a-days an immense fortune means power.”
“Dear me! how times have changed! Under the Emperor men had to be brave.”
“Each epoch is summed up in a phrase,” said Simon, recalling an observation of the Comte de Gondreville, which paints that personage well. He remarked: “Under the Empire, when it was desirable to destroy a man, people said, ‘He is a coward.’ To-day we say, ‘He is a cheat.’”
“Poor France! where are they leading you?” cried the colonel; “I shall go back to my roses.”
“Oh, stay, father! You are the keystone of the arch.”
III. OPPOSITION DEFINES ITSELF
The mayor, Monsieur Phileas Beauvisage, was the first to present himself, accompanied by the successor of his father-in-law, the busiest notary in town, Achille Pigoult, grandson of an old man who had continued justice of the peace in Arcis during the Revolution, the Empire, and the Restoration. Achille Pigoult, thirty-two years of age, had been eighteen years a clerk in Grevin’s office with no means of becoming himself a notary. His father, son of the justice of peace, had died of a so-called apoplexy, having gone wrong in business.
The Comte de Gondreville, however, with whom old Pigoult had relations dating back to 1793, lent money for the necessary security, and thus enabled the grandson of the judge who made the first examination in the Simeuse case to buy the practice of his master, Grevin. Achille had set up his office in the Place de l’Eglise, in a house belonging to the Comte de Gondreville, which the latter had leased to him at so low a price that any one could see how desirous that crafty politician was to hold the leading notary of Arcis in the hollow of his hand.
Young Pigoult, a short, skinny man, whose eyes seemed to pierce the green spectacles which could not modify the spitefulness of his glance, well-informed as to all the interests of the neighborhood, owing his aptitude in managing affairs to a certain facility of speech, passed for what is called a quizzer, saying things plainly and with more cleverness than the aborigines could put into their conversations. Still a bachelor, he was awaiting a rich marriage through the offices of his two protectors, Grevin and the Comte de Gondreville. Consequently, barrister Giguet was not a little surprised on seeing Achille appear at the meeting in company with Monsieur Phileas Beauvisage.
The notary, whose face was so seamed by the smallpox that it seemed to be covered with a white net, formed a perfect contrast to the rotund person of the mayor, whose face resembled a full moon, but a warm and lively moon; its tones of lily and of rose being still further brightened by a gracious smile, the result not so much of a disposition of the soul as of that formation of the lips for which the word “simpering” seems to have been created. Phileas Beauvisage was endowed with so great a contentment with himself that he smiled on all the world and under all circumstances. Those simpering lips smiled at a funeral. The liveliness that abounded in his infantine blue eyes did not contradict that perpetual and well-nigh intolerable smile.
This internal satisfaction passed all the more readily for benevolence and affability, because Phileas had made himself a language of his own, remarkable for its immoderate use of the formulas of politeness. He always “had the honor”; to all his inquiries as to the health of absent persons he added the adjectives “dear,” “good,” “excellent.” He lavished condoling or congratulatory phrases apropos of all the petty miseries and all the little felicities of life. He concealed under a deluge of commonplaces his native incapacity, his total want of education, and a weakness of character which can only be expressed by the old word “weathercock.” Be not uneasy: the weathercock had for its axis the beautiful Madame Beauvisage, Severine Grevin, the most remarkable woman in the arrondissement.
When Severine heard of what she called her husband’s “freak” as to the election, she said to him on the morning of the meeting at Madame Marion’s: —
“It was well enough to give yourself an air of independence; but you mustn’t go to that Giguet meeting unless Achille Pigoult accompanies you; I’ve told him to come and take you.”
Giving Achille Pigoult as mentor to Beauvisage meant sending a spy from the Gondreville party to the Giguet assemblage. We may therefore imagine the grimace which contracted the puritan visage of Simon, who was forced to welcome graciously an habitue of his aunt’s salon and an influential elector, in whom, nevertheless, he saw an enemy.
“Ah!” he thought to himself, “what a mistake I made in refusing him that security when he asked for it! Old Gondreville had more sense than I – Good-day to you, Achille,” he said, assuming a jaunty manner; “I suppose you mean to trip me up.”
“Your meeting isn’t a conspiracy against the independence of our votes,” replied the notary, smiling. “We are all playing above-board, I take it.”
“Above-board,” echoed Beauvisage.
And the mayor began to laugh with that expressionless laugh by which some persons end all their sentences; which may, perhaps, be called the ritornello of their conversation. After which he placed himself in what we must describe as his third position, standing full-front, his chest expanded, and his hands behind his back. He was dressed in black coat and trousers, with an effulgent white waistcoat, opened in such a way as to show two diamond shirt-buttons worth several thousand francs.
“We shall fight, but we shall not be the less good friends,” he said. “That is the essence of constitutional morals; he! he! he! That is how I understand the alliance of monarchy with liberty; ha! ha! ha!”
Whereupon the mayor took Simon’s hand, saying:
“How are you, my good friend? Your dear aunt and our worthy colonel are no doubt as well to-day as they were yesterday, – that is, I presume so, – he! he! he!” adding, with an air of perfect beatitude, “perhaps a little agitated by the ceremony now about to take place. Ha! ha! young man; so we intend to enter a political career? Ha! ha! ha! This is our first step – mustn’t step back – it is a great career. I’d rather it were you than I to rush into the storms and tempests of the legislative body, hi! hi! – however agreeable it may be to see that body in our own person, hi! hi! hi! – the sovereign power of France in one four hundred and fifty-third! Hi! hi! hi!”
The vocal organ of Phileas Beauvisage had an agreeable sonority altogether in harmony with the leguminous curves of his face (of the color of a light yellow pumpkin), his solid back, and his broadly expanded chest. That voice, bass in volume, could soften to a baritone and utter, in the giggle with which Phileas ended his phrases, a silvery note. When God desired, in order to place all species of mankind in this his terrestrial paradise, to create within it a provincial bourgeois, his hands never made a more perfect and complete type than Phileas Beauvisage.
“I admire,” said that great work, “the devotion of those who fling themselves into the tumult of political life; he! he! he! It takes more nerve than I possess. Who could have told us in 1812 or 1813 that we should come to this? As for me, nothing can surprise me in these days, when asphalt, India-rubber, railroads, and steam have changed the ground we tread on, and overcoats, and distances, he, he!”
These last words were seasoned with a prolonged laugh, and accompanied by a gesture which he had made more especially his own: he closed his right fist, struck it into the rounded palm of his left hand, and rubbed it there with joyous satisfaction. This performance coincided with his laughs on the frequent occasions when he thought he had said a witty thing. Perhaps it is superfluous to add that Phileas Beauvisage was regarded in Arcis as an amiable and charming man.
“I shall endeavor,” replied Simon Giguet, “to worthily represent – ”
“The