Poor Relations. Honore de Balzac
his august nephew, Napoleon's right hand, and said, as he led him into the house:
"You do not want them to know at the Bank of France that you paid me the thirty thousand francs, after endorsing the bills? – It was bad enough to see them signed by such a man as you! – "
"Come to the bottom of your little garden, Father Fischer," said the important man. "You are hearty?" he went on, sitting down under a vine arbor and scanning the old man from head to foot, as a dealer in human flesh scans a substitute for the conscription.
"Ay, hearty enough for a tontine," said the lean little old man; his sinews were wiry, and his eye bright.
"Does heat disagree with you?"
"Quite the contrary."
"What do you say to Africa?"
"A very nice country! – The French went there with the little Corporal" (Napoleon).
"To get us all out of the present scrape, you must go to Algiers," said the Baron.
"And how about my business?"
"An official in the War Office, who has to retire, and has not enough to live on with his pension, will buy your business."
"And what am I to do in Algiers?"
"Supply the Commissariat with victuals, corn, and forage; I have your commission ready filled in and signed. You can collect supplies in the country at seventy per cent below the prices at which you can credit us."
"How shall we get them?"
"Oh, by raids, by taxes in kind, and the Khaliphat. – The country is little known, though we settled there eight years ago; Algeria produces vast quantities of corn and forage. When this produce belongs to Arabs, we take it from them under various pretences; when it belongs to us, the Arabs try to get it back again. There is a great deal of fighting over the corn, and no one ever knows exactly how much each party has stolen from the other. There is not time in the open field to measure the corn as we do in the Paris market, or the hay as it is sold in the Rue d'Enfer. The Arab chiefs, like our Spahis, prefer hard cash, and sell the plunder at a very low price. The Commissariat needs a fixed quantity and must have it. It winks at exorbitant prices calculated on the difficulty of procuring food, and the dangers to which every form of transport is exposed. That is Algiers from the army contractor's point of view.
"It is a muddle tempered by the ink-bottle, like every incipient government. We shall not see our way through it for another ten years – we who have to do the governing; but private enterprise has sharp eyes. – So I am sending you there to make a fortune; I give you the job, as Napoleon put an impoverished Marshal at the head of a kingdom where smuggling might be secretly encouraged.
"I am ruined, my dear Fischer; I must have a hundred thousand francs within a year."
"I see no harm in getting it out of the Bedouins," said the Alsatian calmly. "It was always done under the Empire – "
"The man who wants to buy your business will be here this morning, and pay you ten thousand francs down," the Baron went on. "That will be enough, I suppose, to take you to Africa?"
The old man nodded assent.
"As to capital out there, be quite easy. I will draw the remainder of the money due if I find it necessary."
"All I have is yours – my very blood," said old Fischer.
"Oh, do not be uneasy," said Hulot, fancying that his uncle saw more clearly than was the fact. "As to our excise dealings, your character will not be impugned. Everything depends on the authority at your back; now I myself appointed the authorities out there; I am sure of them. This, Uncle Fischer, is a dead secret between us. I know you well, and I have spoken out without concealment or circumlocution."
"It shall be done," said the old man. "And it will go on – ?"
"For two years, You will have made a hundred thousand francs of your own to live happy on in the Vosges."
"I will do as you wish; my honor is yours," said the little old man quietly.
"That is the sort of man I like. – However, you must not go till you have seen your grand-niece happily married. She is to be a Countess."
But even taxes and raids and the money paid by the War Office clerk for Fischer's business could not forthwith provide sixty thousand francs to give Hortense, to say nothing of her trousseau, which was to cost about five thousand, and the forty thousand spent – or to be spent – on Madame Marneffe.
Where, then had the Baron found the thirty thousand francs he had just produced? This was the history.
A few days previously Hulot had insured his life for the sum of a hundred and fifty thousand francs, for three years, in two separate companies. Armed with the policies, of which he paid the premium, he had spoken as follows to the Baron de Nucingen, a peer of the Chamber, in whose carriage he found himself after a sitting, driving home, in fact, to dine with him: —
"Baron, I want seventy thousand francs, and I apply to you. You must find some one to lend his name, to whom I will make over the right to draw my pay for three years; it amounts to twenty-five thousand francs a year – that is, seventy-five thousand francs. – You will say, 'But you may die'" – the banker signified his assent – "Here, then, is a policy of insurance for a hundred and fifty thousand francs, which I will deposit with you till you have drawn up the eighty thousand francs," said Hulot, producing the document form his pocket.
"But if you should lose your place?" said the millionaire Baron, laughing.
The other Baron – not a millionaire – looked grave.
"Be quite easy; I only raised the question to show you that I was not devoid of merit in handing you the sum. Are you so short of cash? for the Bank will take your signature."
"My daughter is to be married," said Baron Hulot, "and I have no fortune – like every one else who remains in office in these thankless times, when five hundred ordinary men seated on benches will never reward the men who devote themselves to the service as handsomely as the Emperor did."
"Well, well; but you had Josepha on your hands!" replied Nucingen, "and that accounts for everything. Between ourselves, the Duc d'Herouville has done you a very good turn by removing that leech from sucking your purse dry. 'I have known what that is, and can pity your case,'" he quoted. "Take a friend's advice: Shut up shop, or you will be done for."
This dirty business was carried out in the name of one Vauvinet, a small money-lender; one of those jobbers who stand forward to screen great banking houses, like the little fish that is said to attend the shark. This stock-jobber's apprentice was so anxious to gain the patronage of Monsieur le Baron Hulot, that he promised the great man to negotiate bills of exchange for thirty thousand francs at eighty days, and pledged himself to renew them four times, and never pass them out of his hands.
Fischer's successor was to pay forty thousand francs for the house and the business, with the promise that he should supply forage to a department close to Paris.
This was the desperate maze of affairs into which a man who had hitherto been absolutely honest was led by his passions – one of the best administrative officials under Napoleon – peculation to pay the money-lenders, and borrowing of the money-lenders to gratify his passions and provide for his daughter. All the efforts of this elaborate prodigality were directed at making a display before Madame Marneffe, and to playing Jupiter to this middle-class Danae. A man could not expend more activity, intelligence, and presence of mind in the honest acquisition of a fortune than the Baron displayed in shoving his head into a wasp's nest: He did all the business of his department, he hurried on the upholsterers, he talked to the workmen, he kept a sharp lookout on the smallest details of the house in the Rue Vanneau. Wholly devoted to Madame Marneffe, he nevertheless attended the sittings of the Chambers; he was everywhere at once, and neither his family nor anybody else discovered where his thoughts were.
Adeline, quite amazed to hear that her uncle was rescued, and to see a handsome sum figure in the marriage-contract, was not altogether easy, in spite of her joy at seeing her daughter married under such creditable circumstances. But, on the day before the wedding, fixed by the Baron to coincide