Unconscious Comedians. Honore de Balzac
his name,” replied Gazonal. “Massol and Vignon – there you have Social Reason, in which there’s no reason at all.”
“There must be some way out of it,” said Leon de Lora. “You see, cousin, all things are possible in Paris for good as well as for evil, for the just as well as the unjust. There’s nothing that can’t be done, undone, and redone.”
“The devil take me if I stay ten days more in this hole of a place, the dullest in all France!”
The two cousins and Bixiou were at this moment walking from one end to the other of that sheet of asphalt on which, between the hours of one and three, it is difficult to avoid seeing some of the personages in honor of whom Fame puts one or the other of her trumpets to her lips. Formerly that locality was the Place Royale; next it was the Pont Neuf; in these days this privilege had been acquired by the Boulevard des Italiens.
“Paris,” said the painter to his cousin, “is an instrument on which we must know how to play; if we stand here ten minutes I’ll give you your first lesson. There, look!” he said, raising his cane and pointing to a couple who were just then coming out from the Passage de l’Opera.
“Goodness! who’s that?” asked Gazonal.
That was an old woman, in a bonnet which had spent six months in a show-case, a very pretentious gown and a faded tartan shawl, whose face had been buried twenty years of her life in a damp lodge, and whose swollen hand-bag betokened no better social position than that of an ex-portress. With her was a slim little girl, whose eyes, fringed with black lashes, had lost their innocence and showed great weariness; her face, of a pretty shape, was fresh and her hair abundant, her forehead charming but audacious, her bust thin, – in other words, an unripe fruit.
“That,” replied Bixiou, “is a rat tied to its mother.”
“A rat! – what’s that?”
“That particular rat,” said Leon, with a friendly nod to Mademoiselle Ninette, “may perhaps win your suit for you.”
Gazonal bounded; but Bixiou had held him by the arm ever since they left the cafe, thinking perhaps that the flush on his face was rather vivid.
“That rat, who is just leaving a rehearsal at the Opera-house, is going home to eat a miserable dinner, and will return about three o’clock to dress, if she dances in the ballet this evening – as she will, to-day being Monday. This rat is already an old rat for she is thirteen years of age. Two years from now that creature may be worth sixty thousand francs; she will be all or nothing, a great danseuse or a marcheuse, a celebrated person or a vulgar courtesan. She has worked hard since she was eight years old. Such as you see her, she is worn out with fatigue; she exhausted her body this morning in the dancing-class, she is just leaving a rehearsal where the evolutions are as complicated as a Chinese puzzle; and she’ll go through them again to-night. The rat is one of the primary elements of the Opera; she is to the leading danseuse what a junior clerk is to a notary. The rat is – hope.”
“Who produces the rat?” asked Gazonal.
“Porters, paupers, actors, dancers,” replied Bixiou. “Only the lowest depths of poverty could force a child to subject her feet and joints to positive torture, to keep herself virtuous out of mere speculation until she is eighteen years of age, and to live with some horrible old crone like a beautiful plant in a dressing of manure. You shall see now a procession defiling before you, one after the other, of men of talent, little and great, artists in seed or flower, who are raising to the glory of France that every-day monument called the Opera, an assemblage of forces, wills, and forms of genius, nowhere collected as in Paris.
“I have already seen the Opera,” said Gazonal, with a self-sufficient air.
“Yes, from a three-francs-sixty-sous seat among the gods,” replied the landscape painter; “just as you have seen Paris in the rue Croix-des-Petits-Champs, without knowing anything about it. What did they give at the Opera when you were there?”
“Guillaume Tell.”
“Well,” said Leon, “Matilde’s grand DUO must have delighted you. What do you suppose that charming singer did when she left the stage?”
“She – well, what?”
“She ate two bloody mutton-chops which her servant had ready for her.”
“Pooh! nonsense!”
“Malibran kept up on brandy – but it killed her in the end. Another thing! You have seen the ballet, and you’ll now see it defiling past you in its every-day clothes, without knowing that the face of your lawsuit depends on a pair of those legs.”
“My lawsuit!”
“See, cousin, here comes what is called a marcheuse.”
Leon pointed to one of those handsome creatures who at twenty-five years of age have lived sixty, and whose beauty is so real and so sure of being cultivated that they make no display of it. She was tall, and walked well, with the arrogant look of a dandy; her toilet was remarkable for its ruinous simplicity.
“That is Carabine,” said Bixiou, who gave her, as did Leon, a slight nod to which she responded by a smile.
“There’s another who may possibly get your prefect turned out.”
“A marcheuse! – but what is that?”
“A marcheuse is a rat of great beauty whom her mother, real or fictitious, has sold as soon as it was clear she would become neither first, second, nor third danseuse, but who prefers the occupation of coryphee to any other, for the main reason that having spent her youth in that employment she is unfitted for any other. She has been rejected at the minor theatres where they want danseuses; she has not succeeded in the three towns where ballets are given; she has not had the money, or perhaps the desire to go to foreign countries – for perhaps you don’t know that the great school of dancing in Paris supplies the whole world with male and female dancers. Thus a rat who becomes a marcheuse, – that is to say, an ordinary figurante in a ballet, – must have some solid attachment which keeps her in Paris: either a rich man she does not love or a poor man she loves too well. The one you have just seen pass will probably dress and redress three times this evening, – as a princess, a peasant-girl, a Tyrolese; by which she will earn about two hundred francs a month.”
“She is better dressed than my prefect’s wife.”
“If you should go to her house,” said Bixiou, “you would find there a chamber-maid, a cook, and a man-servant. She occupies a fine apartment in the rue Saint-Georges; in short, she is, in proportion to French fortunes of the present day compared with those of former times, a relic of the eighteenth century ‘opera-girl.’ Carabine is a power; at this moment she governs du Tillet, a banker who is very influential in the Chamber of Deputies.”
“And above these two rounds in the ballet ladder what comes next?” asked Gazonal.
“Look!” said his cousin, pointing to an elegant caleche which was turning at that moment from the boulevard into the rue Grange-Bateliere, “there’s one of the leading danseuses whose name on the posters attracts all Paris. That woman earns sixty thousand francs a year and lives like a princess; the price of your manufactory all told wouldn’t suffice to buy you the privilege of bidding her good-morning a dozen times.”
“Do you see,” said Bixiou, “that young man who is sitting on the front seat of her carriage? Well, he’s a viscount who bears a fine old name; he’s her first gentleman of the bed-chamber; does all her business with the newspapers; carries messages of peace or war in the morning to the director of the Opera; and takes charge of the applause which salutes her as she enters or leaves the stage.”
“Well, well, my good friends, that’s the finishing touch! I see now that I knew nothing of the ways of Paris.”
“At any rate, you are learning what you can see in ten minutes in the Passage de l’Opera,” said Bixiou. “Look there.”
Two persons, a man and a woman, came out of the Passage at that moment. The woman was neither plain nor pretty; but her dress had that distinction of style and cut