The Collected Works of Honore de Balzac. The griffin classics
the collectorship of Beaumont while awaiting that of Pontoise?”
“Yes, monsieur,” said Oscar.
“I hope you will give me the pleasure, monsieur,” said the great painter, “of being present at my marriage at Isle-Adam.”
“Whom do you marry?” asked Oscar, after accepting the invitation.
“Mademoiselle Leger,” replied Joseph Bridau, “the granddaughter of Monsieur de Reybert. Monsieur le comte was kind enough to arrange the marriage for me. As an artist I owe him a great deal, and he wished, before his death, to secure my future, about which I did not think, myself.”
“Whom did Pere Leger marry?” asked Georges.
“My daughter,” replied Monsieur de Reybert, “and without a ‘dot.’”
“Ah!” said Georges, assuming a more respectful manner toward Monsieur Leger, “I am fortunate in having chosen this particular day to do the valley of the Oise. You can all be useful to me, gentlemen.”
“How so?” asked Monsieur Leger.
“In this way,” replied Georges. “I am employed by the ‘Esperance,’ a company just formed, the statutes of which have been approved by an ordinance of the King. This institution gives, at the end of ten years, dowries to young girls, annuities to old men; it pays the education of children, and takes charge, in short, of the fortunes of everybody.”
“I can well believe it,” said Pere Leger, smiling. “In a word, you are a runner for an insurance company.”
“No, monsieur. I am the inspector-general; charged with the duty of establishing correspondents and appointing the agents of the company throughout France. I am only operating until the agents are selected; for it is a matter as delicate as it is difficult to find honest agents.”
“But how did you lose your thirty thousand a year?” asked Oscar.
“As you lost your arm,” replied the son of Czerni-Georges, curtly.
“Then you must have shared in some brilliant action,” remarked Oscar, with a sarcasm not unmixed with bitterness.
“Parbleu! I’ve too many — shares! that’s just what I wanted to sell.”
By this time they had arrived at Saint-Leu-Taverny, where all the passengers got out while the coach changed horses. Oscar admired the liveliness which Pierrotin displayed in unhooking the traces from the whiffle-trees, while his driver cleared the reins from the leaders.
“Poor Pierrotin,” thought he; “he has stuck like me, — not far advanced in the world. Georges has fallen low. All the others, thanks to speculation and to talent, have made their fortune. Do we breakfast here, Pierrotin?” he said, aloud, slapping that worthy on the shoulder.
“I am not the driver,” said Pierrotin.
“What are you, then?” asked Colonel Husson.
“The proprietor,” replied Pierrotin.
“Come, don’t be vexed with an old acquaintance,” said Oscar, motioning to his mother, but still retaining his patronizing manner. “Don’t you recognize Madame Clapart?”
It was all the nobler of Oscar to present his mother to Pierrotin, because, at that moment, Madame Moreau de l’Oise, getting out of the coupe, overheard the name, and stared disdainfully at Oscar and his mother.
“My faith! madame,” said Pierrotin, “I should never have known you; nor you, either, monsieur; the sun burns black in Africa, doesn’t it?”
The species of pity which Oscar thus felt for Pierrotin was the last blunder that vanity ever led our hero to commit, and, like his other faults, it was punished, but very gently, thus: —
Two months after his official installation at Beaumont-sur-Oise, Oscar was paying his addresses to Mademoiselle Georgette Pierrotin, whose ‘dot’ amounted to one hundred and fifty thousand francs, and he married the pretty daughter of the proprietor of the stage-coaches of the Oise, toward the close of the winter of 1838.
The adventure of the journey to Presles was a lesson to Oscar Husson in discretion; his disaster at Florentine’s card-party strengthened him in honesty and uprightness; the hardships of his military career taught him to understand the social hierarchy and to yield obedience to his lot. Becoming wise and capable, he was happy. The Comte de Serizy, before his death, obtained for him the collectorship at Pontoise. The influence of Monsieur Moreau de l’Oise and that of the Comtesse de Serizy and the Baron de Canalis secured, in after years, a receiver-generalship for Monsieur Husson, in whom the Camusot family now recognize a relation.
Oscar is a commonplace man, gentle, without assumption, modest, and always keeping, like his government, to a middle course. He excites neither envy nor contempt. In short, he is the modern bourgeois.
DEDICATION
To Madame Emile Girardin
ALBERT SAVARUS
One of the few drawing-rooms where, under the Restoration, the Archbishop of Besancon was sometimes to be seen, was that of the Baronne de Watteville, to whom he was particularly attached on account of her religious sentiments.
A word as to this lady, the most important lady of Besancon.
Monsieur de Watteville, a descendant of the famous Watteville, the most successful and illustrious of murderers and renegades — his extraordinary adventures are too much a part of history to be related here — this nineteenth century Monsieur de Watteville was as gentle and peaceable as his ancestor of the Grand Siecle had been passionate and turbulent. After living in the Comte (La Franche Comte) like a wood-louse in the crack of a wainscot, he had married the heiress of the celebrated house of Rupt. Mademoiselle de Rupt brought twenty thousand francs a year in the funds to add to the ten thousand francs a year in real estate of the Baron de Watteville. The Swiss gentleman’s coat-of-arms (the Wattevilles are Swiss) was then borne as an escutcheon of pretence on the old shield of the Rupts. The marriage, arranged in 1802, was solemnized in 1815 after the second Restoration. Within three years of the birth of a daughter all Madame de Watteville’s grandparents were dead, and their estates wound up. Monsieur de Watteville’s house was then sold, and they settled in the Rue de la Prefecture in the fine old mansion of the Rupts, with an immense garden stretching to the Rue du Perron. Madame de Watteville, devout as a girl, became even more so after her marriage. She is one of the queens of the saintly brotherhood which gives the upper circles of Besancon a solemn air and prudish manners in harmony with the character of the town.
Monsieur le Baron de Watteville, a dry, lean man devoid of intelligence, looked worn out without any one knowing whereby, for he enjoyed the profoundest ignorance; but as his wife was a red-haired woman, and of a stern nature that became proverbial (we still say “as sharp as Madame de Watteville”), some wits of the legal profession declared that he had been worn against that rock — Rupt is obviously derived from rupes. Scientific students of social phenomena will not fail to have observed that Rosalie was the only offspring of the union between the Wattevilles and the Rupts.
Monsieur de Watteville spent his existence in a handsome workshop with a lathe; he was a turner! As subsidiary to this pursuit, he took up a fancy for making collections. Philosophical doctors, devoted to the study of madness, regard this tendency towards collecting as a first degree of mental aberration when it is set on small things. The Baron de Watteville treasured shells and geological fragments of the neighborhood of Besancon. Some contradictory folk, especially women, would say of Monsieur de Watteville, “He has a noble soul! He perceived from the first days of his married life that he would never be his wife’s master, so he threw himself into a mechanical occupation and good living.”
The house of the Rupts was not devoid of a certain magnificence worthy of Louis XIV., and bore traces of the nobility of the two families who had mingled in 1815. The chandeliers of glass cut in the shape of leaves, the brocades, the damask, the carpets, the gilt furniture, were all in harmony with the old