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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 1220 ***
+
+THE ATHEIST'S MASS
+
+
+By Honore De Balzac
+
+
+Translated by Clara Bell
+
+
+
+This is dedicated to Auguste Borget by his friend De Balzac
+
+
+
+
+
+THE ATHEIST'S MASS
+
+
+Bianchon, a physician to whom science owes a fine system of theoretical
+physiology, and who, while still young, made himself a celebrity in the
+medical school of Paris, that central luminary to which European doctors
+do homage, practised surgery for a long time before he took up medicine.
+His earliest studies were guided by one of the greatest of French
+surgeons, the illustrious Desplein, who flashed across science like a
+meteor. By the consensus even of his enemies, he took with him to the
+tomb an incommunicable method. Like all men of genius, he had no heirs;
+he carried everything in him, and carried it away with him. The glory of
+a surgeon is like that of an actor: they live only so long as they are
+alive, and their talent leaves no trace when they are gone. Actors
+and surgeons, like great singers too, like the executants who by their
+performance increase the power of music tenfold, are all the heroes of a
+moment.
+
+Desplein is a case in proof of this resemblance in the destinies of
+such transient genius. His name, yesterday so famous, to-day almost
+forgotten, will survive in his special department without crossing its
+limits. For must there not be some extraordinary circumstances to exalt
+the name of a professor from the history of Science to the general
+history of the human race? Had Desplein that universal command of
+knowledge which makes a man the living word, the great figure of his
+age? Desplein had a godlike eye; he saw into the sufferer and his malady
+by an intuition, natural or acquired, which enabled him to grasp the
+diagnostics peculiar to the individual, to determine the very time,
+the hour, the minute when an operation should be performed, making due
+allowance for atmospheric conditions and peculiarities of individual
+temperament. To proceed thus, hand in hand with nature, had he then
+studied the constant assimilation by living beings, of the elements
+contained in the atmosphere, or yielded by the earth to man who absorbs
+them, deriving from them a particular expression of life? Did he work
+it all out by the power of deduction and analogy, to which we owe the
+genius of Cuvier? Be this as it may, this man was in all the secrets of
+the human frame; he knew it in the past and in the future, emphasizing
+the present.
+
+But did he epitomize all science in his own person as Hippocrates did
+and Galen and Aristotle? Did he guide a whole school towards new worlds?
+No. Though it is impossible to deny that this persistent observer of
+human chemistry possessed that antique science of the Mages, that is
+to say, knowledge of the elements in fusion, the causes of life, life
+antecedent to life, and what it must be in its incubation or ever it
+_is_, it must be confessed that, unfortunately, everything in him was
+purely personal. Isolated during his life by his egoism, that egoism is
+now suicidal of his glory. On his tomb there is no proclaiming statue
+to repeat to posterity the mysteries which genius seeks out at its own
+cost.
+
+But perhaps Desplein's genius was answerable for his beliefs, and for
+that reason mortal. To him the terrestrial atmosphere was a generative
+envelope; he saw the earth as an egg within its shell; and not being
+able to determine whether the egg or the hen first was, he would
+not recognize either the cock or the egg. He believed neither in the
+antecedent animal nor the surviving spirit of man. Desplein had no
+doubts; he was positive. His bold and unqualified atheism was like
+that of many scientific men, the best men in the world, but invincible
+atheists--atheists such as religious people declare to be impossible.
+This opinion could scarcely exist otherwise in a man who was accustomed
+from his youth to dissect the creature above all others--before, during,
+and after life; to hunt through all his organs without ever finding the
+individual soul, which is indispensable to religious theory. When he
+detected a cerebral centre, a nervous centre, and a centre for aerating
+the blood--the first two so perfectly complementary that in the latter
+years of his life he came to a conviction that the sense of hearing is
+not absolutely necessary for hearing, nor the sense of sight for
+seeing, and that the solar plexus could supply their place without any
+possibility of doubt--Desplein, thus finding two souls in man, confirmed
+his atheism by this fact, though it is no evidence against God. This man
+died, it is said, in final impenitence, as do, unfortunately, many noble
+geniuses, whom God may forgive.
+
+The life of this man, great as he was, was marred by many meannesses, to
+use the expression employed by his enemies, who were anxious to
+diminish his glory, but which it would be more proper to call apparent
+contradictions. Envious people and fools, having no knowledge of the
+determinations by which superior spirits are moved, seize at once on
+superficial inconsistencies, to formulate an accusation and so to pass
+sentence on them. If, subsequently, the proceedings thus attacked are
+crowned with success, showing the correlations of the preliminaries and
+the results, a few of the vanguard of calumnies always survive. In our
+day, for instance, Napoleon was condemned by our contemporaries when he
+spread his eagle's wings to alight in England: only 1822 could explain
+1804 and the flatboats at Boulogne.
+
+As, in Desplein, his glory and science were invulnerable, his enemies
+attacked his odd moods and his temper, whereas, in fact, he was simply
+characterized by what the English call eccentricity. Sometimes very
+handsomely dressed, like Crebillon the tragical, he would suddenly
+affect extreme indifference as to what he wore; he was sometimes seen
+in a carriage, and sometimes on foot. By turns rough and kind, harsh and
+covetous on the surface, but capable of offering his whole fortune to
+his exiled masters--who did him the honor of accepting it for a few
+days--no man ever gave rise to such contradictory judgements. Although
+to obtain a black ribbon, which physicians ought not to intrigue for, he
+was capable of dropping a prayer-book out of his pocket at Court, in
+his heart he mocked at everything; he had a deep contempt for men,
+after studying them from above and below, after detecting their genuine
+expression when performing the most solemn and the meanest acts of their
+lives.
+
+The qualities of a great man are often federative. If among these
+colossal spirits one has more talent than wit, his wit is still superior
+to that of a man of whom it is simply stated that "he is witty." Genius
+always presupposes moral insight. This insight may be applied to a
+special subject; but he who can see a flower must be able to see the
+sun. The man who on hearing a diplomate he has saved ask, "How is the
+Emperor?" could say, "The courtier is alive; the man will follow!"--that
+man is not merely a surgeon or a physician, he is prodigiously witty
+also. Hence a patient and diligent student of human nature will
+admit Desplein's exorbitant pretensions, and believe--as he himself
+believed--that he might have been no less great as a minister than he
+was as a surgeon.
+
+Among the riddles which Desplein's life presents to many of his
+contemporaries, we have chosen one of the most interesting, because the
+answer is to be found at the end of the narrative, and will avenge him
+for some foolish charges.
+
+Of all the students in Desplein's hospital, Horace Bianchon was one
+of those to whom he most warmly attached himself. Before being a house
+surgeon at the Hotel-Dieu, Horace Bianchon had been a medical student
+lodging in a squalid boarding house in the _Quartier Latin_, known as
+the Maison Vauquer. This poor young man had felt there the gnawing
+of that burning poverty which is a sort of crucible from which great
+talents are to emerge as pure and incorruptible as diamonds, which may
+be subjected to any shock without being crushed. In the fierce fire of
+their unbridled passions they acquire the most impeccable honesty, and
+get into the habit of fighting the battles which await genius with the
+constant work by which they coerce their cheated appetites.
+
+Horace was an upright young fellow, incapable of tergiversation on a
+matter of honor, going to the point without waste of words, and as ready
+to pledge his cloak for a friend as to give him his time and his night
+hours. Horace, in short, was one of those friends who are never anxious
+as to what they may get in return for what they give, feeling sure that
+they will in their turn get more than they give. Most of his
+friends felt for him that deeply-seated respect which is inspired by
+unostentatious virtue, and many of them dreaded his censure. But Horace
+made no pedantic display of his qualities. He was neither a puritan nor
+a preacher; he could swear with a grace as he gave his advice, and
+was always ready for a jollification when occasion offered. A jolly
+companion, not more prudish than a trooper, as frank and outspoken--not
+as a sailor, for nowadays sailors are wily diplomates--but as an honest
+man who has nothing in his life to hide, he walked with his head erect,
+and a mind content. In short, to put the facts into a word, Horace was
+the Pylades of more than one Orestes--creditors being regarded as the
+nearest modern equivalent to the Furies of the ancients.
+
+He carried his poverty with the cheerfulness which is perhaps one of
+the chief elements of courage, and, like all people who have nothing,
+he made very few debts. As sober as a camel and active as a stag, he was
+steadfast in his ideas and his conduct.
+
+The happy phase of Bianchon's life began on the day when the famous
+surgeon had proof of the qualities and the defects which, these no less
+than those, make Doctor Horace Bianchon doubly dear to his friends. When
+a leading clinical practitioner takes a young man to his bosom, that
+young man has, as they say, his foot in the stirrup. Desplein did not
+fail to take Bianchon as his assistant to wealthy houses, where some
+complimentary fee almost always found its way into the student's pocket,
+and where the mysteries of Paris life were insensibly revealed to the
+young provincial; he kept him at his side when a consultation was to
+be held, and gave him occupation; sometimes he would send him to a
+watering-place with a rich patient; in fact, he was making a practice
+for him. The consequence was that in the course of time the Tyrant of
+surgery had a devoted ally. These two men--one at the summit of
+honor and of his science, enjoying an immense fortune and an immense
+reputation; the other a humble Omega, having neither fortune nor
+fame--became intimate friends.
+
+The great Desplein told his house surgeon everything; the disciple knew
+whether such or such a woman had sat on a chair near the master, or on
+the famous couch in Desplein's surgery, on which he slept. Bianchon knew
+the mysteries of that temperament, a compound of the lion and the bull,
+which at last expanded and enlarged beyond measure the great man's
+torso, and caused his death by degeneration of the heart. He studied the
+eccentricities of that busy life, the schemes of that sordid avarice,
+the hopes of the politician who lurked behind the man of science; he was
+able to foresee the mortifications that awaited the only sentiment that
+lay hid in a heart that was steeled, but not of steel.
+
+One day Bianchon spoke to Desplein of a poor water-carrier of the
+Saint-Jacques district, who had a horrible disease caused by fatigue and
+want; this wretched Auvergnat had had nothing but potatoes to eat during
+the dreadful winter of 1821. Desplein left all his visits, and at the
+risk of killing his horse, he rushed off, followed by Bianchon, to the
+poor man's dwelling, and saw, himself, to his being removed to a sick
+house, founded by the famous Dubois in the Faubourg Saint-Denis. Then
+he went to attend the man, and when he had cured him he gave him
+the necessary sum to buy a horse and a water-barrel. This Auvergnat
+distinguished himself by an amusing action. One of his friends fell ill,
+and he took him at once to Desplein, saying to his benefactor, "I could
+not have borne to let him go to any one else!"
+
+Rough customer as he was, Desplein grasped the water-carrier's hand, and
+said, "Bring them all to me."
+
+He got the native of Cantal into the Hotel-Dieu, where he took the
+greatest care of him. Bianchon had already observed in his chief a
+predilection for Auvergnats, and especially for water carriers; but as
+Desplein took a sort of pride in his cures at the Hotel-Dieu, the pupil
+saw nothing very strange in that.
+
+One day, as he crossed the Place Saint-Sulpice, Bianchon caught sight of
+his master going into the church at about nine in the morning. Desplein,
+who at that time never went a step without his cab, was on foot, and
+slipped in by the door in the Rue du Petit-Lion, as if he were stealing
+into some house of ill fame. The house surgeon, naturally possessed
+by curiosity, knowing his master's opinions, and being himself a rabid
+follower of Cabanis (_Cabaniste en dyable_, with the _y_, which in
+Rabelais seems to convey an intensity of devilry)--Bianchon stole into
+the church, and was not a little astonished to see the great Desplein,
+the atheist, who had no mercy on the angels--who give no work to the
+lancet, and cannot suffer from fistula or gastritis--in short, this
+audacious scoffer kneeling humbly, and where? In the Lady Chapel,
+where he remained through the mass, giving alms for the expenses of the
+service, alms for the poor, and looking as serious as though he were
+superintending an operation.
+
+"He has certainly not come here to clear up the question of the Virgin's
+delivery," said Bianchon to himself, astonished beyond measure. "If I
+had caught him holding one of the ropes of the canopy on Corpus Christi
+day, it would be a thing to laugh at; but at this hour, alone, with no
+one to see--it is surely a thing to marvel at!"
+
+Bianchon did not wish to seem as though he were spying the head surgeon
+of the Hotel-Dieu; he went away. As it happened, Desplein asked him to
+dine with him that day, not at his own house, but at a restaurant. At
+dessert Bianchon skilfully contrived to talk of the mass, speaking of it
+as mummery and a farce.
+
+"A farce," said Desplein, "which has cost Christendom more blood than
+all Napoleon's battles and all Broussais' leeches. The mass is a papal
+invention, not older than the sixth century, and based on the _Hoc est
+corpus_. What floods of blood were shed to establish the Fete-Dieu, the
+Festival of Corpus Christi--the institution by which Rome established
+her triumph in the question of the Real Presence, a schism which rent
+the Church during three centuries! The wars of the Count of Toulouse
+against the Albigenses were the tail end of that dispute. The Vaudois
+and the Albigenses refused to recognize this innovation."
+
+In short, Desplein was delighted to disport himself in his most
+atheistical vein; a flow of Voltairean satire, or, to be accurate, a
+vile imitation of the _Citateur_.
+
+"Hallo! where is my worshiper of this morning?" said Bianchon to
+himself.
+
+He said nothing; he began to doubt whether he had really seen his chief
+at Saint-Sulpice. Desplein would not have troubled himself to tell
+Bianchon a lie, they knew each other too well; they had already
+exchanged thoughts on quite equally serious subjects, and discussed
+systems de natura rerum, probing or dissecting them with the knife and
+scalpel of incredulity.
+
+Three months went by. Bianchon did not attempt to follow the matter up,
+though it remained stamped on his memory. One day that year, one of the
+physicians of the Hotel-Dieu took Desplein by the arm, as if to question
+him, in Bianchon's presence.
+
+"What were you doing at Saint-Sulpice, my dear master?" said he.
+
+"I went to see a priest who has a diseased knee-bone, and to whom the
+Duchesse d'Angouleme did me the honor to recommend me," said Desplein.
+
+The questioner took this defeat for an answer; not so Bianchon.
+
+"Oh, he goes to see damaged knees in church!--He went to mass," said the
+young man to himself.
+
+Bianchon resolved to watch Desplein. He remembered the day and hour when
+he had detected him going into Saint-Sulpice, and resolved to be there
+again next year on the same day and at the same hour, to see if he
+should find him there again. In that case the periodicity of his
+devotion would justify a scientific investigation; for in such a man
+there ought to be no direct antagonism of thought and action.
+
+Next year, on the said day and hour, Bianchon, who had already ceased
+to be Desplein's house surgeon, saw the great man's cab standing at
+the corner of the Rue de Tournon and the Rue du Petit-Lion, whence his
+friend jesuitically crept along by the wall of Saint-Sulpice, and once
+more attended mass in front of the Virgin's altar. It was Desplein,
+sure enough! The master-surgeon, the atheist at heart, the worshiper
+by chance. The mystery was greater than ever; the regularity of the
+phenomenon complicated it. When Desplein had left, Bianchon went to
+the sacristan, who took charge of the chapel, and asked him whether the
+gentleman were a constant worshiper.
+
+"For twenty years that I have been here," replied the man, "M. Desplein
+has come four times a year to attend this mass. He founded it."
+
+"A mass founded by him!" said Bianchon, as he went away. "This is as
+great a mystery as the Immaculate Conception--an article which alone is
+enough to make a physician an unbeliever."
+
+Some time elapsed before Doctor Bianchon, though so much his friend,
+found an opportunity of speaking to Desplein of this incident of his
+life. Though they met in consultation, or in society, it was difficult
+to find an hour of confidential solitude when, sitting with their feet
+on the fire-dogs and their head resting on the back of an armchair, two
+men tell each other their secrets. At last, seven years later, after
+the Revolution of 1830, when the mob invaded the Archbishop's residence,
+when Republican agitators spurred them on to destroy the gilt crosses
+which flashed like streaks of lightning in the immensity of the ocean
+of houses; when Incredulity flaunted itself in the streets, side by
+side with Rebellion, Bianchon once more detected Desplein going into
+Saint-Sulpice. The doctor followed him, and knelt down by him without
+the slightest notice or demonstration of surprise from his friend. They
+both attended this mass of his founding.
+
+"Will you tell me, my dear fellow," said Bianchon, as they left the
+church, "the reason for your fit of monkishness? I have caught you three
+times going to mass---- You! You must account to me for this mystery,
+explain such a flagrant disagreement between your opinions and your
+conduct. You do not believe in God, and yet you attend mass? My dear
+master, you are bound to give me an answer."
+
+"I am like a great many devout people, men who on the surface are deeply
+religious, but quite as much atheists as you or I can be."
+
+And he poured out a torrent of epigrams on certain political personages,
+of whom the best known gives us, in this century, a new edition of
+Moliere's _Tartufe_.
+
+"All that has nothing to do with my question," retorted Bianchon. "I
+want to know the reason for what you have just been doing, and why you
+founded this mass."
+
+"Faith! my dear boy," said Desplein, "I am on the verge of the tomb; I
+may safely tell you about the beginning of my life."
+
+At this moment Bianchon and the great man were in the Rue des
+Quatre-Vents, one of the worst streets in Paris. Desplein pointed to
+the sixth floor of one of the houses looking like obelisks, of which the
+narrow door opens into a passage with a winding staircase at the end,
+with windows appropriately termed "borrowed lights"--or, in French,
+_jours de souffrance_. It was a greenish structure; the ground floor
+occupied by a furniture-dealer, while each floor seemed to shelter a
+different and independent form of misery. Throwing up his arm with a
+vehement gesture, Desplein exclaimed:
+
+"I lived up there for two years."
+
+"I know; Arthez lived there; I went up there almost every day during my
+first youth; we used to call it then the pickle-jar of great men! What
+then?"
+
+"The mass I have just attended is connected with some events which took
+place at the time when I lived in the garret where you say Arthez lived;
+the one with the window where the clothes line is hanging with linen
+over a pot of flowers. My early life was so hard, my dear Bianchon, that
+I may dispute the palm of Paris suffering with any man living. I have
+endured everything: hunger and thirst, want of money, want of clothes,
+of shoes, of linen, every cruelty that penury can inflict. I have blown
+on my frozen fingers in that _pickle-jar of great men_, which I should
+like to see again, now, with you. I worked through a whole winter,
+seeing my head steam, and perceiving the atmosphere of my own moisture
+as we see that of horses on a frosty day. I do not know where a man
+finds the fulcrum that enables him to hold out against such a life.
+
+"I was alone, with no one to help me, no money to buy books or to pay
+the expenses of my medical training; I had not a friend; my irascible,
+touchy, restless temper was against me. No one understood that this
+irritability was the distress and toil of a man who, at the bottom of
+the social scale, is struggling to reach the surface. Still, I had, as
+I may say to you, before whom I need wear no draperies, I had that
+ground-bed of good feeling and keen sensitiveness which must always be
+the birthright of any man who is strong enough to climb to any height
+whatever, after having long trampled in the bogs of poverty. I could
+obtain nothing from my family, nor from my home, beyond my inadequate
+allowance. In short, at that time, I breakfasted off a roll which the
+baker in the Rue du Petit-Lion sold me cheap because it was left from
+yesterday or the day before, and I crumbled it into milk; thus my
+morning meal cost me but two sous. I dined only every other day in a
+boarding-house where the meal cost me sixteen sous. You know as well
+as I what care I must have taken of my clothes and shoes. I hardly know
+whether in later life we feel grief so deep when a colleague plays us
+false as we have known, you and I, on detecting the mocking smile of a
+gaping seam in a shoe, or hearing the armhole of a coat split, I drank
+nothing but water; I regarded a cafe with distant respect. Zoppi's
+seemed to me a promised land where none but the Lucullus of the _pays
+Latin_ had a right of entry. 'Shall I ever take a cup of coffee there
+with milk in it?' said I to myself, 'or play a game of dominoes?'
+
+"I threw into my work the fury I felt at my misery. I tried to master
+positive knowledge so as to acquire the greatest personal value,
+and merit the position I should hold as soon as I could escape from
+nothingness. I consumed more oil than bread; the light I burned during
+these endless nights cost me more than food. It was a long duel,
+obstinate, with no sort of consolation. I found no sympathy anywhere.
+To have friends, must we not form connections with young men, have a
+few sous so as to be able to go tippling with them, and meet them
+where students congregate? And I had nothing! And no one in Paris
+can understand that nothing means _nothing_. When I even thought of
+revealing my beggary, I had that nervous contraction of the throat which
+makes a sick man believe that a ball rises up from the oesophagus into
+the larynx.
+
+"In later life I have met people born to wealth who, never having wanted
+for anything, had never even heard this problem in the rule of three:
+A young man is to crime as a five-franc piece is to X.--These gilded
+idiots say to me, 'Why did you get into debt? Why did you involve
+yourself in such onerous obligations?' They remind me of the princess
+who, on hearing that the people lacked bread, said, 'Why do not they buy
+cakes?' I should like to see one of these rich men, who complain that I
+charge too much for an operation,--yes, I should like to see him alone
+in Paris without a sou, without a friend, without credit, and forced to
+work with his five fingers to live at all! What would he do? Where would
+he go to satisfy his hunger?
+
+"Bianchon, if you have sometimes seen me hard and bitter, it was
+because I was adding my early sufferings on to the insensibility, the
+selfishness of which I have seen thousands of instances in the highest
+circles; or, perhaps, I was thinking of the obstacles which hatred,
+envy, jealousy, and calumny raised up between me and success. In Paris,
+when certain people see you ready to set your foot in the stirrup, some
+pull your coat-tails, others loosen the buckle of the strap that you may
+fall and crack your skull; one wrenches off your horse's shoes, another
+steals your whip, and the least treacherous of them all is the man whom
+you see coming to fire his pistol at you point blank.
+
+"You yourself, my dear boy, are clever enough to make acquaintance
+before long with the odious and incessant warfare waged by mediocrity
+against the superior man. If you should drop five-and-twenty louis one
+day, you will be accused of gambling on the next, and your best friends
+will report that you have lost twenty-five thousand. If you have a
+headache, you will be considered mad. If you are a little hasty, no one
+can live with you. If, to make a stand against this armament of pigmies,
+you collect your best powers, your best friends will cry out that you
+want to have everything, that you aim at domineering, at tyranny. In
+short, your good points will become your faults, your faults will be
+vices, and your virtues crime.
+
+"If you save a man, you will be said to have killed him; if he reappears
+on the scene, it will be positive that you have secured the present at
+the cost of the future. If he is not dead, he will die. Stumble, and
+you fall! Invent anything of any kind and claim your rights, you will be
+crotchety, cunning, ill-disposed to rising younger men.
+
+"So, you see, my dear fellow, if I do not believe in God, I believe
+still less in man. But do not you know in me another Desplein,
+altogether different from the Desplein whom every one abuses?--However,
+we will not stir that mud-heap.
+
+"Well, I was living in that house, I was working hard to pass my first
+examination, and I had no money at all. You know. I had come to one of
+those moments of extremity when a man says, 'I will enlist.' I had one
+hope. I expected from my home a box full of linen, a present from one
+of those old aunts who, knowing nothing of Paris, think of your shirts,
+while they imagine that their nephew with thirty francs a month is
+eating ortolans. The box arrived while I was at the schools; it had cost
+forty francs for carriage. The porter, a German shoemaker living in a
+loft, had paid the money and kept the box. I walked up and down the Rue
+des Fosses-Saint-Germain-des-Pres and the Rue de l'Ecole de Medecine
+without hitting on any scheme which would release my trunk without the
+payment of the forty francs, which of course I could pay as soon as I
+should have sold the linen. My stupidity proved to me that surgery was
+my only vocation. My good fellow, refined souls, whose powers move in a
+lofty atmosphere, have none of that spirit of intrigue that is fertile
+in resource and device; their good genius is chance; they do not invent,
+things come to them.
+
+"At night I went home, at the very moment when my fellow lodger also
+came in--a water-carrier named Bourgeat, a native of Saint-Flour. We
+knew each other as two lodgers do who have rooms off the same landing,
+and who hear each other sleeping, coughing, dressing, and so at last
+become used to one another. My neighbor informed me that the landlord,
+to whom I owed three quarters' rent, had turned me out; I must clear
+out next morning. He himself was also turned out on account of his
+occupation. I spent the most miserable night of my life. Where was I to
+get a messenger who could carry my few chattels and my books? How
+could I pay him and the porter? Where was I to go? I repeated these
+unanswerable questions again and again, in tears, as madmen repeat their
+tunes. I fell asleep; poverty has for its friends heavenly slumbers full
+of beautiful dreams.
+
+"Next morning, just as I was swallowing my little bowl of bread soaked
+in milk, Bourgeat came in and said to me in his vile Auvergne accent:
+
+"'_Mouchieur l'Etudiant_, I am a poor man, a foundling from the hospital
+at Saint-Flour, without either father or mother, and not rich enough to
+marry. You are not fertile in relations either, nor well supplied with
+the ready? Listen, I have a hand-cart downstairs which I have hired for
+two sous an hour; it will hold all our goods; if you like, we will try
+to find lodgings together, since we are both turned out of this. It is
+not the earthly paradise, when all is said and done.'
+
+"'I know that, my good Bourgeat,' said I. 'But I am in a great fix. I
+have a trunk downstairs with a hundred francs' worth of linen in it,
+out of which I could pay the landlord and all I owe to the porter, and I
+have not a hundred sous.'
+
+"'Pooh! I have a few dibs,' replied Bourgeat joyfully, and he pulled out
+a greasy old leather purse. 'Keep your linen.'
+
+"Bourgeat paid up my arrears and his own, and settled with the porter.
+Then he put our furniture and my box of linen in his cart, and pulled
+it along the street, stopping in front of every house where there was a
+notice board. I went up to see whether the rooms to let would suit us.
+At midday we were still wandering about the neighborhood without having
+found anything. The price was the great difficulty. Bourgeat proposed
+that we should eat at a wine shop, leaving the cart at the door. Towards
+evening I discovered, in the Cour de Rohan, Passage du Commerce, at the
+very top of a house next the roof, two rooms with a staircase between
+them. Each of us was to pay sixty francs a year. So there we were
+housed, my humble friend and I. We dined together. Bourgeat, who earned
+about fifty sous a day, had saved a hundred crowns or so; he would
+soon be able to gratify his ambition by buying a barrel and a horse.
+On learning of my situation--for he extracted my secrets with a quiet
+craftiness and good nature, of which the remembrance touches my heart
+to this day, he gave up for a time the ambition of his whole life; for
+twenty-two years he had been carrying water in the street, and he now
+devoted his hundred crowns to my future prospects."
+
+Desplein at these words clutched Bianchon's arm tightly. "He gave me the
+money for my examination fees! That man, my friend, understood that I
+had a mission, that the needs of my intellect were greater than his. He
+looked after me, he called me his boy, he lent me money to buy books, he
+would come in softly sometimes to watch me at work, and took a mother's
+care in seeing that I had wholesome and abundant food, instead of the
+bad and insufficient nourishment I had been condemned to. Bourgeat, a
+man of about forty, had a homely, mediaeval type of face, a prominent
+forehead, a head that a painter might have chosen as a model for that
+of Lycurgus. The poor man's heart was big with affections seeking an
+object; he had never been loved but by a poodle that had died some time
+since, of which he would talk to me, asking whether I thought the Church
+would allow masses to be said for the repose of its soul. His dog, said
+he, had been a good Christian, who for twelve years had accompanied him
+to church, never barking, listening to the organ without opening his
+mouth, and crouching beside him in a way that made it seem as though he
+were praying too.
+
+"This man centered all his affections in me; he looked upon me as
+a forlorn and suffering creature, and he became, to me, the most
+thoughtful mother, the most considerate benefactor, the ideal of the
+virtue which rejoices in its own work. When I met him in the street, he
+would throw me a glance of intelligence full of unutterable dignity; he
+would affect to walk as though he carried no weight, and seemed happy in
+seeing me in good health and well dressed. It was, in fact, the devoted
+affection of the lower classes, the love of a girl of the people
+transferred to a loftier level. Bourgeat did all my errands, woke me at
+night at any fixed hour, trimmed my lamp, cleaned our landing; as good
+as a servant as he was as a father, and as clean as an English girl. He
+did all the housework. Like Philopoemen, he sawed our wood, and gave to
+all he did the grace of simplicity while preserving his dignity, for he
+seemed to understand that the end ennobles every act.
+
+"When I left this good fellow, to be house surgeon at the Hotel-Dieu, I
+felt an indescribable, dull pain, knowing that he could no longer live
+with me; but he comforted himself with the prospect of saving up money
+enough for me to take my degree, and he made me promise to go to see him
+whenever I had a day out: Bourgeat was proud of me. He loved me for my
+own sake, and for his own. If you look up my thesis, you will see that I
+dedicated it to him.
+
+"During the last year of my residence as house surgeon I earned enough
+to repay all I owed to this worthy Auvergnat by buying him a barrel and
+a horse. He was furious with rage at learning that I had been depriving
+myself of spending my money, and yet he was delighted to see his wishes
+fulfilled; he laughed and scolded, he looked at his barrel, at his
+horse, and wiped away a tear, as he said, 'It is too bad. What a
+splendid barrel! You really ought not. Why, that horse is as strong as
+an Auvergnat!'
+
+"I never saw a more touching scene. Bourgeat insisted on buying for
+me the case of instruments mounted in silver which you have seen in my
+room, and which is to me the most precious thing there. Though enchanted
+with my first success, never did the least sign, the least word, escape
+him which might imply, 'This man owes all to me!' And yet, but for him,
+I should have died of want; he had eaten bread rubbed with garlic that I
+might have coffee to enable me to sit up at night.
+
+"He fell ill. As you may suppose, I passed my nights by his bedside,
+and the first time I pulled him through; but two years after he had a
+relapse; in spite of the utmost care, in spite of the greatest exertions
+of science, he succumbed. No king was ever nursed as he was. Yes,
+Bianchon, to snatch that man from death I tried unheard-of things. I
+wanted him to live long enough to show him his work accomplished, to
+realize all his hopes, to give expression to the only need for gratitude
+that ever filled my heart, to quench a fire that burns in me to this
+day.
+
+"Bourgeat, my second father, died in my arms," Desplein went on, after
+a pause, visibly moved. "He left me everything he possessed by a will
+he had had made by a public scrivener, dating from the year when we had
+gone to live in the Cour de Rohan.
+
+"This man's faith was perfect; he loved the Holy Virgin as he might have
+loved his wife. He was an ardent Catholic, but never said a word to me
+about my want of religion. When he was dying he entreated me to spare
+no expense that he might have every possible benefit of clergy. I had
+a mass said for him every day. Often, in the night, he would tell me of
+his fears as to his future fate; he feared his life had not been saintly
+enough. Poor man! he was at work from morning till night. For whom,
+then, is Paradise--if there be a Paradise? He received the last
+sacrament like the saint that he was, and his death was worthy of his
+life.
+
+"I alone followed him to the grave. When I had laid my only benefactor
+to rest, I looked about to see how I could pay my debt to him; I found
+he had neither family nor friends, neither wife nor child. But he
+believed. He had a religious conviction; had I any right to dispute it?
+He had spoken to me timidly of masses said for the repose of the dead;
+he would not impress it on me as a duty, thinking that it would be a
+form of repayment for his services. As soon as I had money enough I paid
+to Saint-Sulpice the requisite sum for four masses every year. As the
+only thing I can do for Bourgeat is thus to satisfy his pious wishes, on
+the days when that mass is said, at the beginning of each season of the
+year, I go for his sake and say the required prayers; and I say with
+the good faith of a sceptic--'Great God, if there is a sphere which Thou
+hast appointed after death for those who have been perfect, remember
+good Bourgeat; and if he should have anything to suffer, let me suffer
+it for him, that he may enter all the sooner into what is called
+Paradise.'
+
+"That, my dear fellow, is as much as a man who holds my opinions can
+allow himself. But God must be a good fellow; He cannot owe me any
+grudge. I swear to you, I would give my whole fortune if faith such as
+Bourgeat's could enter my brain."
+
+
+
+Bianchon, who was with Desplein all through his last illness, dares
+not affirm to this day that the great surgeon died an atheist. Will not
+those who believe like to fancy that the humble Auvergnat came to open
+the gate of Heaven to his friend, as he did that of the earthly temple
+on whose pediment we read the words--"A grateful country to its great
+men."
+
+
+PARIS, January 1836.
+
+
+
+
+ADDENDUM
+
+The following personages appear in other stories of the Human Comedy.
+
+     Bianchon, Horace
+       Father Goriot
+       Cesar Birotteau
+       The Commission in Lunacy
+       Lost Illusions
+       A Distinguished Provincial at Paris
+       A Bachelor's Establishment
+       The Secrets of a Princess
+       The Government Clerks
+       Pierrette
+       A Study of Woman
+       Scenes from a Courtesan's Life
+       Honorine
+       The Seamy Side of History
+       The Magic Skin
+       A Second Home
+       A Prince of Bohemia
+       Letters of Two Brides
+       The Muse of the Department
+       The Imaginary Mistress
+       The Middle Classes
+       Cousin Betty
+       The Country Parson
+     In addition, M. Bianchon narrated the following:
+       Another Study of Woman
+       La Grande Breteche
+
+     Desplein
+       Cousin Pons
+       Lost Illusions
+       The Thirteen
+       The Government Clerks
+       Pierrette
+       A Bachelor's Establishment
+       The Seamy Side of History
+       Modeste Mignon
+       Scenes from a Courtesan's Life
+       Honorine
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Atheist's Mass, by Honore de Balzac
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 1220 ***