initial commit of ebook 1410HEADmain

1 files changed, 3023 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/1410-0.txt b/1410-0.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..6420221
--- /dev/null
+++ b/1410-0.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,3023 @@
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 1410 ***
+
+THE COMMISSION IN LUNACY
+
+
+By Honore De Balzac
+
+
+Translated By Clara Bell
+
+
+
+                                  DEDICATION
+
+     Dedicated to Monsieur le Contre-Amiral Bazoche,
+     Governor of the Isle of Bourbon, by the grateful writer.
+     DE BALZAC.
+
+
+
+
+THE COMMISSION IN LUNACY
+
+
+In 1828, at about one o’clock one morning, two persons came out of
+a large house in the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honore, near the
+Elysee-Bourbon. One was the famous doctor, Horace Bianchon; the other
+was one of the most elegant men in Paris, the Baron de Rastignac; they
+were friends of long standing. Each had sent away his carriage, and
+no cab was to be seen in the street; but the night was fine, and the
+pavement dry.
+
+“We will walk as far as the boulevard,” said Eugene de Rastignac to
+Bianchon. “You can get a hackney cab at the club; there is always one to
+be found there till daybreak. Come with me as far as my house.”
+
+“With pleasure.”
+
+“Well, and what have you to say about it?”
+
+“About that woman?” said the doctor coldly.
+
+“There I recognize my Bianchon!” exclaimed Rastignac.
+
+“Why, how?”
+
+“Well, my dear fellow, you speak of the Marquise d’Espard as if she were
+a case for your hospital.”
+
+“Do you want to know what I think, Eugene? If you throw over Madame de
+Nucingen for this Marquise, you will swap a one-eyed horse for a blind
+one.”
+
+“Madame de Nucingen is six-and-thirty, Bianchon.”
+
+“And this woman is three-and-thirty,” said the doctor quickly.
+
+“Her worst enemies only say six-and-twenty.”
+
+“My dear boy, when you really want to know a woman’s age, look at her
+temples and the tip of her nose. Whatever women may achieve with their
+cosmetics, they can do nothing against those incorruptible witnesses to
+their experiences. There each year of life has left its stigmata. When a
+woman’s temples are flaccid, seamed, withered in a particular way; when
+at the tip of her nose you see those minute specks, which look like the
+imperceptible black smuts which are shed in London by the chimneys
+in which coal is burnt.... Your servant, sir! That woman is more than
+thirty. She may be handsome, witty, loving--whatever you please, but
+she is past thirty, she is arriving at maturity. I do not blame men who
+attach themselves to that kind of woman; only, a man of your superior
+distinction must not mistake a winter pippin for a little summer apple,
+smiling on the bough, and waiting for you to crunch it. Love never
+goes to study the registers of birth and marriage; no one loves a woman
+because she is handsome or ugly, stupid or clever; we love because we
+love.”
+
+“Well, for my part, I love for quite other reasons. She is Marquise
+d’Espard; she was a Blamont-Chauvry; she is the fashion; she has soul;
+her foot is as pretty as the Duchesse de Berri’s; she has perhaps a
+hundred thousand francs a year--some day, perhaps, I may marry her! In
+short, she will put me into a position which will enable me to pay my
+debts.”
+
+“I thought you were rich,” interrupted Bianchon.
+
+“Bah! I have twenty thousand francs a year--just enough to keep up
+my stables. I was thoroughly done, my dear fellow, in that Nucingen
+business; I will tell you about that.--I have got my sisters married;
+that is the clearest profit I can show since we last met; and I would
+rather have them provided for than have five hundred thousand francs a
+year. No, what would you have me do? I am ambitious. To what can
+Madame de Nucingen lead? A year more and I shall be shelved, stuck in a
+pigeon-hole like a married man. I have all the discomforts of marriage
+and of single life, without the advantages of either; a false position
+to which every man must come who remains tied too long to the same
+apron-string.”
+
+“So you think you will come upon a treasure here?” said Bianchon. “Your
+Marquise, my dear fellow, does not hit my fancy at all.”
+
+“Your liberal opinions blur your eyesight. If Madame d’Espard were a
+Madame Rabourdin...”
+
+“Listen to me. Noble or simple, she would still have no soul; she would
+still be a perfect type of selfishness. Take my word for it, medical men
+are accustomed to judge of people and things; the sharpest of us read
+the soul while we study the body. In spite of that pretty boudoir where
+we have spent this evening, in spite of the magnificence of the house,
+it is quite possible that Madame la Marquise is in debt.”
+
+“What makes you think so?”
+
+“I do not assert it; I am supposing. She talked of her soul as Louis
+XVIII. used to talk of his heart. I tell you this: That fragile, fair
+woman, with her chestnut hair, who pities herself that she may be
+pitied, enjoys an iron constitution, an appetite like a wolf’s, and
+the strength and cowardice of a tiger. Gauze, and silk, and muslin were
+never more cleverly twisted round a lie! Ecco.”
+
+“Bianchon, you frighten me! You have learned a good many things, then,
+since we lived in the Maison Vauquer?”
+
+“Yes, since then, my boy, I have seen puppets, both dolls and manikins.
+I know something of the ways of the fine ladies whose bodies we attend
+to, saving that which is dearest to them, their child--if they love
+it--or their pretty faces, which they always worship. A man spends
+his nights by their pillow, wearing himself to death to spare them the
+slightest loss of beauty in any part; he succeeds, he keeps their secret
+like the dead; they send to ask for his bill, and think it horribly
+exorbitant. Who saved them? Nature. Far from recommending him, they
+speak ill of him, fearing lest he should become the physician of their
+best friends.
+
+“My dear fellow, those women of whom you say, ‘They are angels!’
+I--I--have seen stripped of the little grimaces under which they hide
+their soul, as well as of the frippery under which they disguise their
+defects--without manners and without stays; they are not beautiful.
+
+“We saw a great deal of mud, a great deal of dirt, under the waters of
+the world when we were aground for a time on the shoals of the Maison
+Vauquer.--What we saw there was nothing. Since I have gone into high
+society, I have seen monsters dressed in satin, Michonneaus in white
+gloves, Poirets bedizened with orders, fine gentlemen doing more
+usurious business than old Gobseck! To the shame of mankind, when I have
+wanted to shake hands with Virtue, I have found her shivering in a loft,
+persecuted by calumny, half-starving on a income or a salary of fifteen
+hundred francs a year, and regarded as crazy, or eccentric, or imbecile.
+
+“In short, my dear boy, the Marquise is a woman of fashion, and I have
+a particular horror of that kind of woman. Do you want to know why? A
+woman who has a lofty soul, fine taste, gentle wit, a generously warm
+heart, and who lives a simple life, has not a chance of being the
+fashion. Ergo: A woman of fashion and a man in power are analogous; but
+there is this difference: the qualities by which a man raises himself
+above others ennoble him and are a glory to him; whereas the qualities
+by which a woman gains power for a day are hideous vices; she belies her
+nature to hide her character, and to live the militant life of the world
+she must have iron strength under a frail appearance.
+
+“I, as a physician, know that a sound stomach excludes a good heart.
+Your woman of fashion feels nothing; her rage for pleasure has its
+source in a longing to heat up her cold nature, a craving for excitement
+and enjoyment, like an old man who stands night after night by
+the footlights at the opera. As she has more brain than heart, she
+sacrifices genuine passion and true friends to her triumph, as a general
+sends his most devoted subalterns to the front in order to win a battle.
+The woman of fashion ceases to be a woman; she is neither mother, nor
+wife, nor lover. She is, medically speaking, sex in the brain. And your
+Marquise, too, has all the characteristics of her monstrosity, the beak
+of a bird of prey, the clear, cold eye, the gentle voice--she is as
+polished as the steel of a machine, she touches everything except the
+heart.”
+
+“There is some truth in what you say, Bianchon.”
+
+“Some truth?” replied Bianchon. “It is all true. Do you suppose that
+I was not struck to the heart by the insulting politeness by which
+she made me measure the imaginary distance which her noble birth sets
+between us? That I did not feel the deepest pity for her cat-like
+civilities when I remembered what her object was? A year hence she will
+not write one word to do me the slightest service, and this evening she
+pelted me with smiles, believing that I can influence my uncle Popinot,
+on whom the success of her case----”
+
+“Would you rather she should have played the fool with you, my dear
+fellow?--I accept your diatribe against women of fashion; but you are
+beside the mark. I should always prefer for a wife a Marquise d’Espard
+to the most devout and devoted creature on earth. Marry an angel! you
+would have to go and bury your happiness in the depths of the country!
+The wife of a politician is a governing machine, a contrivance that
+makes compliments and courtesies. She is the most important and most
+faithful tool which an ambitious man can use; a friend, in short, who
+may compromise herself without mischief, and whom he may belie without
+harmful results. Fancy Mahomet in Paris in the nineteenth century! His
+wife would be a Rohan, a Duchesse de Chevreuse of the Fronde, as keen
+and as flattering as an Ambassadress, as wily as Figaro. Your loving
+wives lead nowhere; a woman of the world leads to everything; she is the
+diamond with which a man cuts every window when he has not the golden
+key which unlocks every door. Leave humdrum virtues to the humdrum,
+ambitious vices to the ambitious.
+
+“Besides, my dear fellow, do you imagine that the love of a Duchesse
+de Langeais, or de Maufrigneuse, or of a Lady Dudley does not bestow
+immense pleasure? If only you knew how much value the cold, severe style
+of such a woman gives to the smallest evidence of their affection! What
+a delight it is to see a periwinkle piercing through the snow! A smile
+from below a fan contradicts the reserve of an assumed attitude, and is
+worth all the unbridled tenderness of your middle-class women with
+their mortgaged devotion; for, in love, devotion is nearly akin to
+speculation.
+
+“And, then, a woman of fashion, a Blamont-Chauvry, has her virtues too!
+Her virtues are fortune, power, effect, a certain contempt of all that
+is beneath her----”
+
+“Thank you!” said Bianchon.
+
+“Old curmudgeon!” said Rastignac, laughing. “Come--do not be so common,
+do like your friend Desplein; be a Baron, a Knight of Saint-Michael;
+become a peer of France, and marry your daughters to dukes.”
+
+“I! May the five hundred thousand devils----”
+
+“Come, come! Can you be superior only in medicine? Really, you distress
+me...”
+
+“I hate that sort of people; I long for a revolution to deliver us from
+them for ever.”
+
+“And so, my dear Robespierre of the lancet, you will not go to-morrow to
+your uncle Popinot?”
+
+“Yes, I will,” said Bianchon; “for you I would go to hell to fetch
+water...”
+
+“My good friend, you really touch me. I have sworn that a commission
+shall sit on the Marquis. Why, here is even a long-saved tear to thank
+you.”
+
+“But,” Bianchon went on, “I do not promise to succeed as you wish with
+Jean-Jules Popinot. You do not know him. However, I will take him to see
+your Marquise the day after to-morrow; she may get round him if she can.
+I doubt it. If all the truffles, all the Duchesses, all the mistresses,
+and all the charmers in Paris were there in the full bloom of their
+beauty; if the King promised him the _Prairie_, and the Almighty gave
+him the Order of Paradise with the revenues of Purgatory, not one of all
+these powers would induce him to transfer a single straw from one saucer
+of his scales into the other. He is a judge, as Death is Death.”
+
+The two friends had reached the office of the Minister for Foreign
+Affairs, at the corner of the Boulevard des Capucines.
+
+“Here you are at home,” said Bianchon, laughing, as he pointed to the
+ministerial residence. “And here is my carriage,” he added, calling a
+hackney cab. “And these--express our fortune.”
+
+“You will be happy at the bottom of the sea, while I am still struggling
+with the tempests on the surface, till I sink and go to ask you for a
+corner in your grotto, old fellow!”
+
+“Till Saturday,” replied Bianchon.
+
+“Agreed,” said Rastignac. “And you promise me Popinot?”
+
+“I will do all my conscience will allow. Perhaps this appeal for a
+commission covers some little dramorama, to use a word of our good bad
+times.”
+
+“Poor Bianchon! he will never be anything but a good fellow,” said
+Rastignac to himself as the cab drove off.
+
+
+
+“Rastignac has given me the most difficult negotiation in the world,”
+ said Bianchon to himself, remembering, as he rose next morning, the
+delicate commission intrusted to him. “However, I have never asked
+the smallest service from my uncle in Court, and have paid more than a
+thousand visits gratis for him. And, after all, we are not apt to mince
+matters between ourselves. He will say Yes or No, and there an end.”
+
+After this little soliloquy the famous physician bent his steps, at
+seven in the morning, towards the Rue du Fouarre, where dwelt Monsieur
+Jean-Jules Popinot, judge of the Lower Court of the Department of
+the Seine. The Rue du Fouarre--an old word meaning straw--was in the
+thirteenth century the most important street in Paris. There stood the
+Schools of the University, where the voices of Abelard and of Gerson
+were heard in the world of learning. It is now one of the dirtiest
+streets of the Twelfth Arrondissement, the poorest quarter of Paris,
+that in which two-thirds of the population lack firing in winter, which
+leaves most brats at the gate of the Foundling Hospital, which sends
+most beggars to the poorhouse, most rag-pickers to the street corners,
+most decrepit old folks to bask against the walls on which the sun
+shines, most delinquents to the police courts.
+
+Half-way down this street, which is always damp, and where the gutter
+carries to the Seine the blackened waters from some dye-works, there is
+an old house, restored no doubt under Francis I., and built of bricks
+held together by a few courses of masonry. That it is substantial seems
+proved by the shape of its front wall, not uncommonly seen in some
+parts of Paris. It bellies, so to speak, in a manner caused by the
+protuberance of its first floor, crushed under the weight of the second
+and third, but upheld by the strong wall of the ground floor. At first
+sight it would seem as though the piers between the windows, though
+strengthened by the stone mullions, must give way, but the observer
+presently perceives that, as in the tower at Bologna, the old bricks and
+old time-eaten stones of this house persistently preserve their centre
+of gravity.
+
+At every season of the year the solid piers of the ground floor have the
+yellow tone and the imperceptible sweating surface that moisture gives
+to stone. The passer-by feels chilled as he walks close to this wall,
+where worn corner-stones ineffectually shelter him from the wheels of
+vehicles. As is always the case in houses built before carriages were
+in use, the vault of the doorway forms a very low archway not unlike
+the barbican of a prison. To the right of this entrance there are three
+windows, protected outside by iron gratings of so close a pattern, that
+the curious cannot possibly see the use made of the dark, damp rooms
+within, and the panes too are dirty and dusty; to the left are two
+similar windows, one of which is sometimes open, exposing to view the
+porter, his wife, and his children; swarming, working, cooking, eating,
+and screaming, in a floored and wainscoted room where everything is
+dropping to pieces, and into which you descend two steps--a depth which
+seems to suggest the gradual elevation of the soil of Paris.
+
+If on a rainy day some foot-passenger takes refuge under the long vault,
+with projecting lime-washed beams, which leads from the door to
+the staircase, he will hardly fail to pause and look at the picture
+presented by the interior of this house. To the left is a square
+garden-plot, allowing of not more than four long steps in each
+direction, a garden of black soil, with trellises bereft of vines, and
+where, in default of vegetation under the shade of two trees, papers
+collect, old rags, potsherds, bits of mortar fallen from the roof; a
+barren ground, where time has shed on the walls, and on the trunks and
+branches of the trees, a powdery deposit like cold soot. The two parts
+of the house, set at a right angle, derive light from this garden-court
+shut in by two adjoining houses built on wooden piers, decrepit and
+ready to fall, where on each floor some grotesque evidence is to be seen
+of the craft pursued by some lodger within. Here long poles are hung
+with immense skeins of dyed worsted put out to dry; there, on ropes,
+dance clean-washed shirts; higher up, on a shelf, volumes display their
+freshly marbled edges; women sing, husbands whistle, children shout; the
+carpenter saws his planks, a copper-turner makes the metal screech;
+all kinds of industries combine to produce a noise which the number of
+instruments renders distracting.
+
+The general system of decoration in this passage, which is neither
+courtyard, garden, nor vaulted way, though a little of all, consists of
+wooden pillars resting on square stone blocks, and forming arches. Two
+archways open on to the little garden; two others, facing the front
+gateway, lead to a wooden staircase, with an iron balustrade that was
+once a miracle of smith’s work, so whimsical are the shapes given to the
+metal; the worn steps creak under every tread. The entrance to each flat
+has an architrave dark with dirt, grease, and dust, and outer doors,
+covered with Utrecht velvet set with brass nails, once gilt, in a
+diamond pattern. These relics of splendor show that in the time of Louis
+XIV. the house was the residence of some councillor to the Parlement,
+some rich priests, or some treasurer of the ecclesiastical revenue. But
+these vestiges of former luxury bring a smile to the lips by the artless
+contrast of past and present.
+
+M. Jean-Jules Popinot lived on the first floor of this house, where the
+gloom, natural to all first floors in Paris houses, was increased by the
+narrowness of the street. This old tenement was known to all the twelfth
+arrondissement, on which Providence had bestowed this lawyer, as it
+gives a beneficent plant to cure or alleviate every malady. Here is a
+sketch of a man whom the brilliant Marquise d’Espard hoped to fascinate.
+
+M. Popinot, as is seemly for a magistrate, was always dressed in
+black--a style which contributed to make him ridiculous in the eyes of
+those who were in the habit of judging everything from a superficial
+examination. Men who are jealous of maintaining the dignity required
+by this color ought to devote themselves to constant and minute care of
+their person; but our dear M. Popinot was incapable of forcing himself
+to the puritanical cleanliness which black demands. His trousers, always
+threadbare, looked like camlet--the stuff of which attorneys’ gowns
+are made; and his habitual stoop set them, in time, in such innumerable
+creases, that in places they were traced with lines, whitish, rusty, or
+shiny, betraying either sordid avarice, or the most unheeding poverty.
+His coarse worsted stockings were twisted anyhow in his ill-shaped
+shoes. His linen had the tawny tinge acquired by long sojourn in a
+wardrobe, showing that the late lamented Madame Popinot had had a mania
+for much linen; in the Flemish fashion, perhaps, she had given herself
+the trouble of a great wash no more than twice a year. The old man’s
+coat and waistcoat were in harmony with his trousers, shoes, stockings,
+and linen. He always had the luck of his carelessness; for, the first
+day he put on a new coat, he unfailingly matched it with the rest of his
+costume by staining it with incredible promptitude. The good man waited
+till his housekeeper told him that his hat was too shabby before buying
+a new one. His necktie was always crumpled and starchless, and he never
+set his dog-eared shirt collar straight after his judge’s bands had
+disordered it. He took no care of his gray hair, and shaved but twice
+a week. He never wore gloves, and generally kept his hands stuffed into
+his empty trousers’ pockets; the soiled pocket-holes, almost always
+torn, added a final touch to the slovenliness of his person.
+
+Any one who knows the Palais de Justice at Paris, where every variety
+of black attire may be studied, can easily imagine the appearance of M.
+Popinot. The habit of sitting for days at a time modifies the structure
+of the body, just as the fatigue of hearing interminable pleadings tells
+on the expression of a magistrate’s face. Shut up as he is in courts
+ridiculously small, devoid of architectural dignity, and where the air
+is quickly vitiated, a Paris judge inevitably acquires a countenance
+puckered and seamed by reflection, and depressed by weariness; his
+complexion turns pallid, acquiring an earthy or greenish hue according
+to his individual temperament. In short, within a given time the most
+blooming young man is turned into an “inasmuch” machine--an instrument
+which applies the Code to individual cases with the indifference of
+clockwork.
+
+Hence, nature, having bestowed on M. Popinot a not too pleasing
+exterior, his life as a lawyer had not improved it. His frame was
+graceless and angular. His thick knees, huge feet, and broad hands
+formed a contrast with a priest-like face having a vague resemblance
+to a calf’s head, meek to unmeaningness, and but little brightened by
+divergent bloodless eyes, divided by a straight flat nose, surmounted
+by a flat forehead, flanked by enormous ears, flabby and graceless. His
+thin, weak hair showed the baldness through various irregular partings.
+
+One feature only commended this face to the physiognomist. This man
+had a mouth to whose lips divine kindness lent its sweetness. They were
+wholesome, full, red lips, finely wrinkled, sinuous, mobile, by which
+nature had given expression to noble feelings; lips which spoke to the
+heart and proclaimed the man’s intelligence and lucidity, a gift of
+second-sight, and a heavenly temper; and you would have judged him
+wrongly from looking merely at his sloping forehead, his fireless eyes,
+and his shambling gait. His life answered to his countenance; it was
+full of secret labor, and hid the virtue of a saint. His superior
+knowledge of law proved so strong a recommendation at a time when
+Napoleon was reorganizing it in 1808 and 1811, that, by the advice of
+Cambaceres, he was one of the first men named to sit on the Imperial
+High Court of Justice at Paris. Popinot was no schemer. Whenever any
+demand was made, any request preferred for an appointment, the Minister
+would overlook Popinot, who never set foot in the house of the High
+Chancellor or the Chief Justice. From the High Court he was sent down to
+the Common Court, and pushed to the lowest rung of the ladder by active
+struggling men. There he was appointed supernumerary judge. There was
+a general outcry among the lawyers: “Popinot a supernumerary!” Such
+injustice struck the legal world with dismay--the attorneys, the
+registrars, everybody but Popinot himself, who made no complaint. The
+first clamor over, everybody was satisfied that all was for the best
+in the best of all possible worlds, which must certainly be the legal
+world. Popinot remained supernumerary judge till the day when the most
+famous Great Seal under the Restoration avenged the oversights heaped on
+this modest and uncomplaining man by the Chief Justices of the Empire.
+After being a supernumerary for twelve years, M. Popinot would no doubt
+die a puisne judge of the Court of the Seine.
+
+To account for the obscure fortunes of one of the superior men of the
+legal profession, it is necessary to enter here into some details which
+will serve to reveal his life and character, and which will, at the same
+time, display some of the wheels of the great machine known as Justice.
+M. Popinot was classed by the three Presidents who successively
+controlled the Court of the Seine under the category of possible judges,
+the stuff of which judges are made. Thus classified, he did not achieve
+the reputation for capacity which his previous labors had deserved.
+Just as a painter is invariably included in a category as a landscape
+painter, a portrait painter, a painter of history, of sea pieces, or of
+genre, by a public consisting of artists, connoisseurs, and simpletons,
+who, out of envy, or critical omnipotence, or prejudice, fence in his
+intellect, assuming, one and all, that there are ganglions in every
+brain--a narrow judgment which the world applies to writers, to
+statesmen, to everybody who begins with some specialty before being
+hailed as omniscient; so Popinot’s fate was sealed, and he was hedged
+round to do a particular kind of work. Magistrates, attorneys, pleaders,
+all who pasture on the legal common, distinguish two elements in
+every case--law and equity. Equity is the outcome of facts, law is the
+application of principles to facts. A man may be right in equity but
+wrong in law, without any blame to the judge. Between his conscience and
+the facts there is a whole gulf of determining reasons unknown to the
+judge, but which condemn or legitimatize the act. A judge is not God;
+the duty is to adapt facts to principles, to judge cases of infinite
+variety while measuring them by a fixed standard.
+
+France employs about six thousand judges; no generation has six thousand
+great men at her command, much less can she find them in the legal
+profession. Popinot, in the midst of the civilization of Paris, was just
+a very clever cadi, who, by the character of his mind, and by dint of
+rubbing the letter of the law into the essence of facts, had learned to
+see the error of spontaneous and violent decisions. By the help of his
+judicial second-sight he could pierce the double casing of lies in
+which advocates hide the heart of a trial. He was a judge, as the great
+Desplein was a surgeon; he probed men’s consciences as the anatomist
+probed their bodies. His life and habits had led him to an exact
+appreciation of their most secret thoughts by a thorough study of facts.
+
+He sifted a case as Cuvier sifted the earth’s crust. Like that great
+thinker, he proceeded from deduction to deduction before drawing his
+conclusions, and reconstructed the past career of a conscience as Cuvier
+reconstructed an Anoplotherium. When considering a brief he would often
+wake in the night, startled by a gleam of truth suddenly sparkling
+in his brain. Struck by the deep injustice, which is the end of these
+contests, in which everything is against the honest man, everything
+to the advantage of the rogue, he often summed up in favor of equity
+against law in such cases as bore on questions of what may be termed
+divination. Hence he was regarded by his colleagues as a man not of
+a practical mind; his arguments on two lines of deduction made their
+deliberations lengthy. When Popinot observed their dislike to listening
+to him he gave his opinion briefly; it was said that he was not a good
+judge in this class of cases; but as his gift of discrimination was
+remarkable, his opinion lucid, and his penetration profound, he was
+considered to have a special aptitude for the laborious duties of an
+examining judge. So an examining judge he remained during the greater
+part of his legal career.
+
+Although his qualifications made him eminently fitted for its difficult
+functions, and he had the reputation of being so learned in criminal
+law that his duty was a pleasure to him, the kindness of his heart
+constantly kept him in torture, and he was nipped as in a vise between
+his conscience and his pity. The services of an examining judge are
+better paid than those of a judge in civil actions, but they do not
+therefore prove a temptation; they are too onerous. Popinot, a man of
+modest and virtuous learning, without ambition, an indefatigable
+worker, never complained of his fate; he sacrificed his tastes and
+his compassionate soul to the public good, and allowed himself to be
+transported to the noisome pools of criminal examinations, where he
+showed himself alike severe and beneficent. His clerk sometimes would
+give the accused some money to buy tobacco, or a warm winter garment,
+as he led him back from the judge’s office to the Souriciere, the
+mouse-trap--the House of Detention where the accused are kept under the
+orders of the Examining Judge. He knew how to be an inflexible judge
+and a charitable man. And no one extracted a confession so easily as
+he without having recourse to judicial trickery. He had, too, all the
+acumen of an observer. This man, apparently so foolishly good-natured,
+simple, and absent-minded, could guess all the cunning of a prison
+wag, unmask the astutest street huzzy, and subdue a scoundrel. Unusual
+circumstances had sharpened his perspicacity; but to relate these we
+must intrude on his domestic history, for in him the judge was the
+social side of the man; another man, greater and less known, existed
+within.
+
+Twelve years before the beginning of this story, in 1816, during the
+terrible scarcity which coincided disastrously with the stay in
+France of the so-called Allies, Popinot was appointed President of the
+Commission Extraordinary formed to distribute food to the poor of his
+neighborhood, just when he had planned to move from the Rue du Fouarre,
+which he as little liked to live in as his wife did. The great lawyer,
+the clear-sighted criminal judge, whose superiority seemed to his
+colleagues a form of aberration, had for five years been watching legal
+results without seeing their causes. As he scrambled up into the lofts,
+as he saw the poverty, as he studied the desperate necessities which
+gradually bring the poor to criminal acts, as he estimated their long
+struggles, compassion filled his soul. The judge then became the Saint
+Vincent de Paul of these grown-up children, these suffering toilers.
+The transformation was not immediately complete. Beneficence has its
+temptations as vice has. Charity consumes a saint’s purse, as roulette
+consumes the possessions of a gambler, quite gradually. Popinot went
+from misery to misery, from charity to charity; then, by the time he had
+lifted all the rags which cover public pauperism, like a bandage under
+which an inflamed wound lies festering, at the end of a year he had
+become the Providence incarnate of that quarter of the town. He was
+a member of the Benevolent Committee and of the Charity Organization.
+Wherever any gratuitous services were needed he was ready, and did
+everything without fuss, like the man with the short cloak, who spends
+his life in carrying soup round the markets and other places where there
+are starving folks.
+
+Popinot was fortunate in acting on a larger circle and in a higher
+sphere; he had an eye on everything, he prevented crime, he gave work to
+the unemployed, he found a refuge for the helpless, he distributed
+aid with discernment wherever danger threatened, he made himself the
+counselor of the widow, the protector of homeless children, the sleeping
+partner of small traders. No one at the Courts, no one in Paris, knew of
+this secret life of Popinot’s. There are virtues so splendid that they
+necessitate obscurity; men make haste to hide them under a bushel. As to
+those whom the lawyer succored, they, hard at work all day and tired
+at night, were little able to sing his praises; theirs was the
+gracelessness of children, who can never pay because they owe too much.
+There is such compulsory ingratitude; but what heart that has sown good
+to reap gratitude can think itself great?
+
+By the end of the second year of his apostolic work, Popinot had turned
+the storeroom at the bottom of his house into a parlor, lighted by the
+three iron-barred windows. The walls and ceiling of this spacious room
+were whitewashed, and the furniture consisted of wooden benches like
+those seen in schools, a clumsy cupboard, a walnut-wood writing-table,
+and an armchair. In the cupboard were his registers of donations, his
+tickets for orders for bread, and his diary. He kept his ledger like a
+tradesman, that he might not be ruined by kindness. All the sorrows of
+the neighborhood were entered and numbered in a book, where each had its
+little account, as merchants’ customers have theirs. When there was any
+question as to a man or a family needing help, the lawyer could always
+command information from the police.
+
+Lavienne, a man made for his master, was his aide-de-camp. He redeemed
+or renewed pawn-tickets, and visited the districts most threatened with
+famine, while his master was in court.
+
+From four till seven in the morning in summer, from six till nine
+in winter, this room was full of women, children, and paupers, while
+Popinot gave audience. There was no need for a stove in winter; the
+crowd was so dense that the air was warmed; only, Lavienne strewed straw
+on the wet floor. By long use the benches were as polished as varnished
+mahogany; at the height of a man’s shoulders the wall had a coat of
+dark, indescribable color, given to it by the rags and tattered clothes
+of these poor creatures. The poor wretches loved Popinot so well that
+when they assembled before his door was opened, before daybreak on a
+winter’s morning, the women warming themselves with their foot-brasiers,
+the men swinging their arms for circulation, never a sound had disturbed
+his sleep. Rag-pickers and other toilers of the night knew the house,
+and often saw a light burning in the lawyer’s private room at unholy
+hours. Even thieves, as they passed by, said, “That is his house,” and
+respected it. The morning he gave to the poor, the mid-day hours to
+criminals, the evening to law work.
+
+Thus the gift of observation that characterized Popinot was necessarily
+bifrons; he could guess the virtues of a pauper--good feelings nipped,
+fine actions in embryo, unrecognized self-sacrifice, just as he could
+read at the bottom of a man’s conscience the faintest outlines of a
+crime, the slenderest threads of wrongdoing, and infer all the rest.
+
+Popinot’s inherited fortune was a thousand crowns a year. His wife,
+sister to M. Bianchon _Senior_, a doctor at Sancerre, had brought him
+about twice as much. She, dying five years since, had left her fortune
+to her husband. As the salary of a supernumerary judge is not large,
+and Popinot had been a fully salaried judge only for four years, we may
+guess his reasons for parsimony in all that concerned his person and
+mode of life, when we consider how small his means were and how great
+his beneficence. Besides, is not such indifference to dress as stamped
+Popinot an absent-minded man, a distinguishing mark of scientific
+attainment, of art passionately pursued, of a perpetually active mind?
+To complete this portrait, it will be enough to add that Popinot was one
+of the few judges of the Court of the Seine on whom the ribbon of the
+Legion of Honor had not been conferred.
+
+Such was the man who had been instructed by the President of the
+Second Chamber of the Court--to which Popinot had belonged since his
+reinstatement among the judges in civil law--to examine the Marquis
+d’Espard at the request of his wife, who sued for a Commission in
+Lunacy.
+
+The Rue du Fouarre, where so many unhappy wretches swarmed in the early
+morning, would be deserted by nine o’clock, and as gloomy and squalid as
+ever. Bianchon put his horse to a trot in order to find his uncle in the
+midst of his business. It was not without a smile that he thought of the
+curious contrast the judge’s appearance would make in Madame d’Espard’s
+room; but he promised himself that he would persuade him to dress in a
+way that should not be too ridiculous.
+
+“If only my uncle happens to have a new coat!” said Bianchon to himself,
+as he turned into the Rue du Fouarre, where a pale light shone from
+the parlor windows. “I shall do well, I believe, to talk that over with
+Lavienne.”
+
+At the sound of wheels half a score of startled paupers came out from
+under the gateway, and took off their hats on recognizing Bianchon; for
+the doctor, who treated gratuitously the sick recommended to him by the
+lawyer, was not less well known than he to the poor creatures assembled
+there.
+
+Bianchon found his uncle in the middle of the parlor, where the benches
+were occupied by patients presenting such grotesque singularities of
+costume as would have made the least artistic passer-by turn round
+to gaze at them. A draughtsman--a Rembrandt, if there were one in our
+day--might have conceived of one of his finest compositions from seeing
+these children of misery, in artless attitudes, and all silent.
+
+Here was the rugged countenance of an old man with a white beard and
+an apostolic head--a Saint Peter ready to hand; his chest, partly
+uncovered, showed salient muscles, the evidence of an iron constitution
+which had served him as a fulcrum to resist a whole poem of sorrows.
+There a young woman was suckling her youngest-born to keep it from
+crying, while another of about five stood between her knees. Her white
+bosom, gleaming amid rags, the baby with its transparent flesh-tints,
+and the brother, whose attitude promised a street arab in the future,
+touched the fancy with pathos by its almost graceful contrast with the
+long row of faces crimson with cold, in the midst of which sat this
+family group. Further away, an old woman, pale and rigid, had the
+repulsive look of rebellious pauperism, eager to avenge all its past
+woes in one day of violence.
+
+There, again, was the young workman, weakly and indolent, whose brightly
+intelligent eye revealed fine faculties crushed by necessity struggled
+with in vain, saying nothing of his sufferings, and nearly dead for lack
+of an opportunity to squeeze between the bars of the vast stews where
+the wretched swim round and round and devour each other.
+
+The majority were women; their husbands, gone to their work, left it
+to them, no doubt, to plead the cause of the family with the ingenuity
+which characterizes the woman of the people, who is almost always queen
+in her hovel. You would have seen a torn bandana on every head, on every
+form a skirt deep in mud, ragged kerchiefs, worn and dirty jackets, but
+eyes that burnt like live coals. It was a horrible assemblage, raising
+at first sight a feeling of disgust, but giving a certain sense of
+terror the instant you perceived that the resignation of these souls,
+all engaged in the struggle for every necessary of life, was purely
+fortuitous, a speculation on benevolence. The two tallow candles which
+lighted the parlor flickered in a sort of fog caused by the fetid
+atmosphere of the ill-ventilated room.
+
+The magistrate himself was not the least picturesque figure in the midst
+of this assembly. He had on his head a rusty cotton night-cap; as he had
+no cravat, his neck was visible, red with cold and wrinkled, in contrast
+with the threadbare collar of his old dressing-gown. His worn face had
+the half-stupid look that comes of absorbed attention. His lips, like
+those of all men who work, were puckered up like a bag with the strings
+drawn tight. His knitted brows seemed to bear the burden of all the
+sorrows confided to him: he felt, analyzed, and judged them all. As
+watchful as a Jew money-lender, he never raised his eyes from his books
+and registers but to look into the very heart of the persons he was
+examining, with the flashing glance by which a miser expresses his
+alarm.
+
+Lavienne, standing behind his master, ready to carry out his orders,
+served no doubt as a sort of police, and welcomed newcomers by
+encouraging them to get over their shyness. When the doctor appeared
+there was a stir on the benches. Lavienne turned his head, and was
+strangely surprised to see Bianchon.
+
+“Ah! It is you, old boy!” exclaimed Popinot, stretching himself. “What
+brings you so early?”
+
+“I was afraid lest you should make an official visit about which I wish
+to speak to you before I could see you.”
+
+“Well,” said the lawyer, addressing a stout little woman who was still
+standing close to him, “if you do not tell me what it is you want, I
+cannot guess it, child.”
+
+“Make haste,” said Lavienne. “Do not waste other people’s time.”
+
+“Monsieur,” said the woman at last, turning red, and speaking so low as
+only to be heard by Popinot and Lavienne, “I have a green-grocery truck,
+and I have my last baby to nurse, and I owe for his keep. Well, I had
+hidden my little bit of money----”
+
+“Yes; and your man took it?” said Popinot, guessing the sequel.
+
+“Yes, sir.”
+
+“What is your name?”
+
+“La Pomponne.”
+
+“And your husband’s?”
+
+“Toupinet.”
+
+“Rue du Petit-Banquier?” said Popinot, turning over his register. “He
+is in prison,” he added, reading a note at the margin of the section in
+which this family was described.
+
+“For debt, my kind monsieur.”
+
+Popinot shook his head.
+
+“But I have nothing to buy any stock for my truck; the landlord came
+yesterday and made me pay up; otherwise I should have been turned out.”
+
+Lavienne bent over his master, and whispered in his ear.
+
+“Well, how much do you want to buy fruit in the market?”
+
+“Why, my good monsieur, to carry on my business, I should want--Yes, I
+should certainly want ten francs.”
+
+Popinot signed to Lavienne, who took ten francs out of a large bag, and
+handed them to the woman, while the lawyer made a note of the loan in
+his ledger. As he saw the thrill of delight that made the poor hawker
+tremble, Bianchon understood the apprehensions that must have agitated
+her on her way to the lawyer’s house.
+
+“You next,” said Lavienne to the old man with the white beard.
+
+Bianchon drew the servant aside, and asked him how long this audience
+would last.
+
+“Monsieur has had two hundred persons this morning, and there are eight
+to be turned off,” said Lavienne. “You will have time to pay your early
+visit, sir.”
+
+“Here, my boy,” said the lawyer, turning round and taking Horace by the
+arm; “here are two addresses near this--one in the Rue de Seine, and the
+other in the Rue de l’Arbalete. Go there at once. Rue de Seine, a young
+girl has just asphyxiated herself; and Rue de l’Arbalete, you will find
+a man to remove to your hospital. I will wait breakfast for you.”
+
+Bianchon returned an hour later. The Rue du Fouarre was deserted; day
+was beginning to dawn there; his uncle had gone up to his rooms; the
+last poor wretch whose misery the judge had relieved was departing, and
+Lavienne’s money bag was empty.
+
+“Well, how are they going on?” asked the old lawyer, as the doctor came
+in.
+
+“The man is dead,” replied Bianchon; “the girl will get over it.”
+
+Since the eye and hand of a woman had been lacking, the flat in which
+Popinot lived had assumed an aspect in harmony with its master’s. The
+indifference of a man who is absorbed in one dominant idea had set its
+stamp of eccentricity on everything. Everywhere lay unconquerable
+dust, every object was adapted to a wrong purpose with a pertinacity
+suggestive of a bachelor’s home. There were papers in the flower vases,
+empty ink-bottles on the tables, plates that had been forgotten, matches
+used as tapers for a minute when something had to be found, drawers or
+boxes half-turned out and left unfinished; in short, all the confusion
+and vacancies resulting from plans for order never carried out. The
+lawyer’s private room, especially disordered by this incessant rummage,
+bore witness to his unresting pace, the hurry of a man overwhelmed with
+business, hunted by contradictory necessities. The bookcase looked as
+if it had been sacked; there were books scattered over everything,
+some piled up open, one on another, others on the floor face downwards;
+registers of proceedings laid on the floor in rows, lengthwise, in front
+of the shelves; and that floor had not been polished for two years.
+
+The tables and shelves were covered with ex votos, the offerings of
+the grateful poor. On a pair of blue glass jars which ornamented the
+chimney-shelf there were two glass balls, of which the core was made up
+of many-colored fragments, giving them the appearance of some singular
+natural product. Against the wall hung frames of artificial flowers, and
+decorations in which Popinot’s initials were surrounded by hearts and
+everlasting flowers. Here were boxes of elaborate and useless cabinet
+work; there letter-weights carved in the style of work done by
+convicts in penal servitude. These masterpieces of patience, enigmas of
+gratitude, and withered bouquets gave the lawyer’s room the appearance
+of a toyshop. The good man used these works of art as hiding-places
+which he filled with bills, worn-out pens, and scraps of paper. All
+these pathetic witnesses to his divine charity were thick with dust,
+dingy, and faded.
+
+Some birds, beautifully stuffed, but eaten by moth, perched in this
+wilderness of trumpery, presided over by an Angora cat, Madame Popinot’s
+pet, restored to her no doubt with all the graces of life by some
+impecunious naturalist, who thus repaid a gift of charity with a
+perennial treasure. Some local artist whose heart had misguided his
+brush had painted portraits of M. and Madame Popinot. Even in the
+bedroom there were embroidered pin-cushions, landscapes in cross-stitch,
+and crosses in folded paper, so elaborately cockled as to show the
+senseless labor they had cost.
+
+The window-curtains were black with smoke, and the hangings absolutely
+colorless. Between the fireplace and the large square table at which the
+magistrate worked, the cook had set two cups of coffee on a small table,
+and two armchairs, in mahogany and horsehair, awaited the uncle and
+nephew. As daylight, darkened by the windows, could not penetrate to
+this corner, the cook had left two dips burning, whose unsnuffed wicks
+showed a sort of mushroom growth, giving the red light which promises
+length of life to the candle from slowness of combustion--a discovery
+due to some miser.
+
+“My dear uncle, you ought to wrap yourself more warmly when you go down
+to that parlor.”
+
+“I cannot bear to keep them waiting, poor souls!--Well, and what do you
+want of me?”
+
+“I have come to ask you to dine to-morrow with the Marquise d’Espard.”
+
+“A relation of ours?” asked Popinot, with such genuine absence of mind
+that Bianchon laughed.
+
+“No, uncle; the Marquise d’Espard is a high and puissant lady, who has
+laid before the Courts a petition desiring that a Commission in Lunacy
+should sit on her husband, and you are appointed----”
+
+“And you want me to dine with her! Are you mad?” said the lawyer, taking
+up the code of proceedings. “Here, only read this article, prohibiting
+any magistrate’s eating or drinking in the house of either of two
+parties whom he is called upon to decide between. Let her come and see
+me, your Marquise, if she has anything to say to me. I was, in fact,
+to go to examine her husband to-morrow, after working the case up
+to-night.”
+
+He rose, took up a packet of papers that lay under a weight where he
+could see it, and after reading the title, he said:
+
+“Here is the affidavit. Since you take an interest in this high and
+puissant lady, let us see what she wants.”
+
+Popinot wrapped his dressing-gown across his body, from which it was
+constantly slipping and leaving his chest bare; he sopped his bread in
+the half-cold coffee, and opened the petition, which he read, allowing
+himself to throw in a parenthesis now and then, and some discussions, in
+which his nephew took part:--
+
+“‘To Monsieur the President of the Civil Tribunal of the Lower Court of
+the Department of the Seine, sitting at the Palais de Justice.
+
+“‘Madame Jeanne Clementine Athenais de Blamont-Chauvry, wife of
+M. Charles Maurice Marie Andoche, Comte de Negrepelisse, Marquis
+d’Espard’--a very good family--‘landowner, the said Mme. d’Espard living
+in the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honore, No. 104, and the said M. d’Espard
+in the Rue de la Montagne-Sainte-Genevieve, No. 22,’--to be sure, the
+President told me he lived in this part of the town--‘having for her
+solicitor Maitre Desroches’--Desroches! a pettifogging jobber, a man
+looked down upon by his brother lawyers, and who does his clients no
+good--”
+
+“Poor fellow!” said Bianchon, “unluckily he has no money, and he rushes
+round like the devil in holy water--That is all.”
+
+“‘Has the honor to submit to you, Monsieur the President, that for a
+year past the moral and intellectual powers of her husband, M. d’Espard,
+have undergone so serious a change, that at the present day they have
+reached the state of dementia and idiocy provided for by Article 448 of
+the Civil Code, and require the application of the remedies set forth
+by that article, for the security of his fortune and his person, and to
+guard the interest of his children whom he keeps to live with him.
+
+“‘That, in point of fact, the mental condition of M. d’Espard, which
+for some years has given grounds for alarm based on the system he has
+pursued in the management of his affairs, has reached, during the last
+twelvemonth, a deplorable depth of depression; that his infirm will was
+the first thing to show the results of the malady; and that its effete
+state leaves M. the Marquis d’Espard exposed to all the perils of his
+incompetency, as is proved by the following facts:
+
+“‘For a long time all the income accruing from M. d’Espard’s estates are
+paid, without any reasonable cause, or even temporary advantage,
+into the hands of an old woman, whose repulsive ugliness is generally
+remarked on, named Madame Jeanrenaud, living sometimes in Paris, Rue
+de la Vrilliere, No. 8, sometimes at Villeparisis, near Claye, in the
+Department of Seine et Marne, and for the benefit of her son, aged
+thirty-six, an officer in the ex-Imperial Guards, whom the Marquis
+d’Espard has placed by his influence in the King’s Guards, as Major in
+the First Regiment of Cuirassiers. These two persons, who in 1814
+were in extreme poverty, have since then purchased house-property of
+considerable value; among other items, quite recently, a large house
+in the Grand Rue Verte, where the said Jeanrenaud is laying out
+considerable sums in order to settle there with the woman Jeanrenaud,
+intending to marry: these sums amount already to more than a hundred
+thousand francs. The marriage has been arranged by the intervention of
+M. d’Espard with his banker, one Mongenod, whose niece he has asked
+in marriage for the said Jeanrenaud, promising to use his influence
+to procure him the title and dignity of baron. This has in fact been
+secured by His Majesty’s letters patent, dated December 29th of last
+year, at the request of the Marquis d’Espard, as can be proved by His
+Excellency the Keeper of the Seals, if the Court should think proper to
+require his testimony.
+
+“‘That no reason, not even such as morality and the law would concur in
+disapproving, can justify the influence which the said Mme. Jeanrenaud
+exerts over M. d’Espard, who, indeed, sees her very seldom; nor account
+for his strange affection for the said Baron Jeanrenaud, Major with whom
+he has but little intercourse. And yet their power is so considerable,
+that whenever they need money, if only to gratify a mere whim, this
+lady, or her son----’ Heh, heh! _No reason even such as morality and the
+law concur in disapproving!_ What does the clerk or the attorney mean to
+insinuate?” said Popinot.
+
+Bianchon laughed.
+
+“‘This lady, or her son, obtain whatever they ask of the Marquis
+d’Espard without demur; and if he has not ready money, M. d’Espard draws
+bills to be paid by the said Mongenod, who has offered to give evidence
+to that effect for the petitioner.
+
+“‘That, moreover, in further proof of these facts, lately, on the
+occasion of the renewal of the leases on the Espard estate, the farmers
+having paid a considerable premium for the renewal of their leases on
+the old terms, M. Jeanrenaud at once secured the payment of it into his
+own hands.
+
+“‘That the Marquis d’Espard parts with these sums of money so little of
+his own free-will, that when he was spoken to on the subject he seemed
+to remember nothing of the matter; that whenever anybody of any weight
+has questioned him as to his devotion to these two persons, his replies
+have shown so complete an absence of ideas and of sense of his own
+interests, that there obviously must be some occult cause at work to
+which the petitioner begs to direct the eye of justice, inasmuch as it
+is impossible but that this cause should be criminal, malignant, and
+wrongful, or else of a nature to come under medical jurisdiction;
+unless this influence is of the kind which constitutes an abuse of moral
+power--such as can only be described by the word _possession_----‘The
+devil!” exclaimed Popinot. “What do you say to that, doctor. These are
+strange statements.”
+
+“They might certainly,” said Bianchon, “be an effect of magnetic force.”
+
+“Then do you believe in Mesmer’s nonsense, and his tub, and seeing
+through walls?”
+
+“Yes, uncle,” said the doctor gravely. “As I heard you read that
+petition I thought of that. I assure you that I have verified, in
+another sphere of action, several analogous facts proving the unlimited
+influence one man may acquire over another. In contradiction to the
+opinion of my brethren, I am perfectly convinced of the power of the
+will regarded as a motor force. All collusion and charlatanism apart,
+I have seen the results of such a possession. Actions promised during
+sleep by a magnetized patient to the magnetizer have been scrupulously
+performed on waking. The will of one had become the will of the other.”
+
+“Every kind of action?”
+
+“Yes.”
+
+“Even a criminal act?”
+
+“Even a crime.”
+
+“If it were not from you, I would not listen to such a thing.”
+
+“I will make you witness it,” said Bianchon.
+
+“Hm, hm,” muttered the lawyer. “But supposing that this so-called
+possession fell under this class of facts, it would be difficult to
+prove it as legal evidence.”
+
+“If this woman Jeanrenaud is so hideously old and ugly, I do not see
+what other means of fascination she can have used,” observed Bianchon.
+
+“But,” observed the lawyer, “in 1814, the time at which this fascination
+is supposed to have taken place, this woman was fourteen years younger;
+if she had been connected with M. d’Espard ten years before that, these
+calculations take us back four-and-twenty years, to a time when the lady
+may have been young and pretty, and have won for herself and her son a
+power over M. d’Espard which some men do not know how to evade. Though
+the source of this power is reprehensible in the sight of justice, it
+is justifiable in the eye of nature. Madame Jeanrenaud may have been
+aggrieved by the marriage, contracted probably at about that time,
+between the Marquis d’Espard and Mademoiselle de Blamont-Chauvry, and at
+the bottom of all this there may be nothing more than the rivalry of
+two women, since the Marquis had for a long time lived apart from Mme.
+d’Espard.”
+
+“But her repulsive ugliness, uncle?”
+
+“Power of fascination is in direct proportion to ugliness,” said the
+lawyer; “that is the old story. And then think of the smallpox, doctor.
+But to proceed.
+
+“‘That so long ago as in 1815, in order to supply the sums of money
+required by these two persons, the Marquis d’Espard went with his two
+children to live in the Rue de la Montagne-Sainte-Genevieve, in
+rooms quite unworthy of his name and rank’--well, we may live as
+we please--‘that he keeps his two children there, the Comte Clement
+d’Espard and Vicomte Camille d’Espard, in a style of living quite
+unsuited to their future prospects, their name and fortune; that he
+often wants money, to such a point, that not long since the landlord,
+one Mariast, put in an execution on the furniture in the rooms; that
+when this execution was carried out in his presence, the Marquis
+d’Espard helped the bailiff, whom he treated like a man of rank, paying
+him all the marks of attention and respect which he would have shown to
+a person of superior birth and dignity to himself.’”
+
+The uncle and nephew glanced at each other and laughed.
+
+“‘That, moreover, every act of his life, besides the facts with
+reference to the widow Jeanrenaud and the Baron Jeanrenaud, her son, are
+those of a madman; that for nearly ten years he has given his thoughts
+exclusively to China, its customs, manners, and history; that he refers
+everything to a Chinese origin; that when he is questioned on the
+subject, he confuses the events of the day and the business of
+yesterday with facts relating to China; that he censures the acts of
+the Government and the conduct of the King, though he is personally much
+attached to him, by comparing them with the politics of China;
+
+“‘That this monomania has driven the Marquis d’Espard to conduct devoid
+of all sense: against the customs of men of rank, and, in opposition to
+his own professed ideas as to the duties of the nobility, he has joined
+a commercial undertaking, for which he constantly draws bills which, as
+they fall due, threaten both his honor and his fortune, since they
+stamp him as a trader, and in default of payment may lead to his being
+declared insolvent; that these debts, which are owing to stationers,
+printers, lithographers, and print-colorists, who have supplied the
+materials for his publication, called A Picturesque History of China,
+now coming out in parts, are so heavy that these tradesmen have
+requested the petitioner to apply for a Commission in Lunacy with regard
+to the Marquis d’Espard in order to save their own credit.’”
+
+“The man is mad!” exclaimed Bianchon.
+
+“You think so, do you?” said his uncle. “If you listen to only one bell,
+you hear only one sound.”
+
+“But it seems to me----” said Bianchon.
+
+“But it seems to me,” said Popinot, “that if any relation of mine wanted
+to get hold of the management of my affairs, and if, instead of being a
+humble lawyer, whose colleagues can, any day, verify what his condition
+is, I were a duke of the realm, an attorney with a little cunning, like
+Desroches, might bring just such a petition against me.
+
+“‘That his children’s education has been neglected for this monomania;
+and that he has taught them, against all the rules of education, the
+facts of Chinese history, which contradict the tenets of the Catholic
+Church. He also has them taught the Chinese dialects.’”
+
+“Here Desroches strikes me as funny,” said Bianchon.
+
+“The petition is drawn up by his head-clerk Godeschal, who, as you know,
+is not strong in Chinese,” said the lawyer.
+
+“‘That he often leaves his children destitute of the most necessary
+things; that the petitioner, notwithstanding her entreaties, can never
+see them; that the said Marquis d’Espard brings them to her only once a
+year; that, knowing the privations to which they are exposed, she makes
+vain efforts to give them the things most necessary for their
+existence, and which they require----’ Oh! Madame la Marquise, this is
+preposterous. By proving too much you prove nothing.--My dear boy,” said
+the old man, laying the document on his knee, “where is the mother who
+ever lacked heart and wit and yearning to such a degree as to fall
+below the inspirations suggested by her animal instinct? A mother is as
+cunning to get at her children as a girl can be in the conduct of a love
+intrigue. If your Marquise really wanted to give her children food and
+clothes, the Devil himself would not have hindered her, heh? That is
+rather too big a fable for an old lawyer to swallow!--To proceed.
+
+“‘That at the age the said children have now attained it is necessary
+that steps should be taken to preserve them from the evil effects of
+such an education; that they should be provided for as beseems their
+rank, and that they should cease to have before their eyes the sad
+example of their father’s conduct;
+
+“‘That there are proofs in support of these allegations which the Court
+can easily order to be produced. Many times has M. d’Espard spoken
+of the judge of the Twelfth Arrondissement as a mandarin of the third
+class; he often speaks of the professors of the College Henri IV. as
+“men of letters”’--and that offends them! ‘In speaking of the simplest
+things, he says, “They were not done so in China;” in the course of
+the most ordinary conversation he will sometimes allude to Madame
+Jeanrenaud, or sometimes to events which happened in the time of Louis
+XIV., and then sit plunged in the darkest melancholy; sometimes he
+fancies he is in China. Several of his neighbors, among others one Edme
+Becker, medical student, and Jean Baptiste Fremiot, a professor, living
+under the same roof, are of opinion, after frequent intercourse with the
+Marquis d’Espard, that his monomania with regard to everything Chinese
+is the result of a scheme laid by the said Baron Jeanrenaud and the
+widow his mother to bring about the deadening of all the Marquis
+d’Espard’s mental faculties, since the only service which Mme.
+Jeanrenaud appears to render M. d’Espard is to procure him everything
+that relates to the Chinese Empire;
+
+“‘Finally, that the petitioner is prepared to show to the Court that the
+moneys absorbed by the said Baron and Mme. Jeanrenaud between 1814 and
+1828 amount to not less than one million francs.
+
+“‘In confirmation of the facts herein set forth, the petitioner can
+bring the evidence of persons who are in the habit of seeing the Marquis
+d’Espard, whose names and professions are subjoined, many of whom
+have urged her to demand a commission in lunacy to declare M. d’Espard
+incapable of managing his own affairs, as being the only way to preserve
+his fortune from the effects of his maladministration and his children
+from his fatal influence.
+
+“‘Taking all this into consideration, M. le President, and the
+affidavits subjoined, the petitioner desires that it may please you,
+inasmuch as the foregoing facts sufficiently prove the insanity and
+incompetency of the Marquis d’Espard herein described with his titles
+and residence, to order that, to the end that he may be declared
+incompetent by law, this petition and the documents in evidence may be
+laid before the King’s public prosecutor; and that you will charge one
+of the judges of this Court to make his report to you on any day you may
+be pleased to name, and thereupon to pronounce judgment,’ etc.
+
+“And here,” said Popinot, “is the President’s order instructing
+me!--Well, what does the Marquise d’Espard want with me? I know
+everything. But I shall go to-morrow with my registrar to see M. le
+Marquis, for this does not seem at all clear to me.”
+
+“Listen, my dear uncle, I have never asked the least little favor of you
+that had to do with your legal functions; well, now I beg you to show
+Madame d’Espard the kindness which her situation deserves. If she came
+here, you would listen to her?”
+
+“Yes.”
+
+“Well, then, go and listen to her in her own house. Madame d’Espard is
+a sickly, nervous, delicate woman, who would faint in your rat-hole of a
+place. Go in the evening, instead of accepting her dinner, since the law
+forbids your eating or drinking at your client’s expense.”
+
+“And does not the law forbid you from taking any legacy from your dead?”
+ said Popinot, fancying that he saw a touch of irony on his nephew’s
+lips.
+
+“Come, uncle, if it were only to enable you to get at the truth of this
+business, grant my request. You will come as the examining judge, since
+matters do not seem to you very clear. Deuce take it! It is as necessary
+to cross-question the Marquise as it is to examine the Marquis.”
+
+“You are right,” said the lawyer. “It is quite possible that it is she
+who is mad. I will go.”
+
+“I will call for you. Write down in your engagement book: ‘To-morrow
+evening at nine, Madame d’Espard.’--Good!” said Bianchon, seeing his
+uncle make a note of the engagement.
+
+
+
+Next evening at nine Bianchon mounted his uncle’s dusty staircase, and
+found him at work on the statement of some complicated judgment. The
+coat Lavienne had ordered of the tailor had not been sent, so Popinot
+put on his old stained coat, and was the Popinot unadorned whose
+appearance made those laugh who did not know the secrets of his
+private life. Bianchon, however, obtained permission to pull his cravat
+straight, and to button his coat, and he hid the stains by crossing the
+breast of it with the right side over the left, and so displaying the
+new front of the cloth. But in a minute the judge rucked the coat
+up over his chest by the way in which he stuffed his hands into his
+pockets, obeying an irresistible habit. Thus the coat, deeply wrinkled
+both in front and behind, made a sort of hump in the middle of the back,
+leaving a gap between the waistcoat and trousers through which his shirt
+showed. Bianchon, to his sorrow, only discovered this crowning absurdity
+at the moment when his uncle entered the Marquise’s room.
+
+A brief sketch of the person and the career of the lady in whose
+presence the doctor and the judge now found themselves is necessary for
+an understanding of her interview with Popinot.
+
+Madame d’Espard had, for the last seven years, been very much the
+fashion in Paris, where Fashion can raise and drop by turns various
+personages who, now great and now small, that is to say, in view or
+forgotten, are at last quite intolerable--as discarded ministers are,
+and every kind of decayed sovereignty. These flatterers of the past,
+odious with their stale pretensions, know everything, speak ill of
+everything, and, like ruined profligates, are friends with all the
+world. Since her husband had separated from her in 1815, Madame d’Espard
+must have married in the beginning of 1812. Her children, therefore,
+were aged respectively fifteen and thirteen. By what luck was the mother
+of a family, about three-and-thirty years of age, still the fashion?
+
+Though Fashion is capricious, and no one can foresee who shall be her
+favorites, though she often exalts a banker’s wife, or some woman of
+very doubtful elegance and beauty, it certainly seems supernatural when
+Fashion puts on constitutional airs and gives promotion for age. But
+in this case Fashion had done as the world did, and accepted Madame
+d’Espard as still young.
+
+The Marquise, who was thirty-three by her register of birth, was
+twenty-two in a drawing-room in the evening. But by what care, what
+artifice! Elaborate curls shaded her temples. She condemned herself to
+live in twilight, affecting illness so as to sit under the protecting
+tones of light filtered through muslin. Like Diane de Poitiers, she used
+cold water in her bath, and, like her again, the Marquise slept on a
+horse-hair mattress, with morocco-covered pillows to preserve her hair;
+she ate very little, only drank water, and observed monastic regularity
+in the smallest actions of her life.
+
+This severe system has, it is said, been carried so far as to the use of
+ice instead of water, and nothing but cold food, by a famous Polish lady
+of our day who spends a life, now verging on a century old, after the
+fashion of a town belle. Fated to live as long as Marion Delorme, whom
+history has credited with surviving to be a hundred and thirty, the old
+vice-queen of Poland, at the age of nearly a hundred, has the heart
+and brain of youth, a charming face, an elegant shape; and in her
+conversation, sparkling with brilliancy like faggots in the fire, she
+can compare the men and books of our literature with the men and books
+of the eighteenth century. Living in Warsaw, she orders her caps of
+Herbault in Paris. She is a great lady with the amiability of a mere
+girl; she swims, she runs like a schoolboy, and can sink on to a sofa
+with the grace of a young coquette; she mocks at death, and laughs at
+life. After having astonished the Emperor Alexander, she can still amaze
+the Emperor Nicholas by the splendor of her entertainments. She can
+still bring tears to the eyes of a youthful lover, for her age is
+whatever she pleases, and she has the exquisite self-devotion of a
+grisette. In short, she is herself a fairy tale, unless, indeed, she is
+a fairy.
+
+Had Madame d’Espard known Madame Zayonseck? Did she mean to imitate
+her career? Be that as it may, the Marquise proved the merits of the
+treatment; her complexion was clear, her brow unwrinkled, her figure,
+like that of Henri II.’s lady-love, preserved the litheness, the
+freshness, the covered charms which bring a woman love and keep it
+alive. The simple precautions of this course, suggested by art and
+nature, and perhaps by experience, had met in her with a general system
+which confirmed the results. The Marquise was absolutely indifferent
+to everything that was not herself: men amused her, but no man had
+ever caused her those deep agitations which stir both natures to their
+depths, and wreck one on the other. She knew neither hatred nor love.
+When she was offended, she avenged herself coldly, quietly, at her
+leisure, waiting for the opportunity to gratify the ill-will she
+cherished against anybody who dwelt in her unfavorable remembrance. She
+made no fuss, she did not excite herself, she talked, because she knew
+that by two words a woman may cause the death of three men.
+
+She had parted from M. d’Espard with the greatest satisfaction. Had he
+not taken with him two children who at present were troublesome, and in
+the future would stand in the way of her pretensions? Her most intimate
+friends, as much as her least persistent admirers, seeing about her none
+of Cornelia’s jewels, who come and go, and unconsciously betray their
+mother’s age, took her for quite a young woman. The two boys, about
+whom she seemed so anxious in her petition, were, like their father, as
+unknown in the world as the northwest passage is unknown to navigators.
+M. d’Espard was supposed to be an eccentric personage who had deserted
+his wife without having the smallest cause for complaint against her.
+
+Mistress of herself at two-and-twenty, and mistress of her fortune of
+twenty-six thousand francs a year, the Marquise hesitated long before
+deciding on a course of action and ordering her life. Though she
+benefited by the expenses her husband had incurred in his house, though
+she had all the furniture, the carriages, the horses, in short, all the
+details of a handsome establishment, she lived a retired life during the
+years 1816, 17, and 18, a time when families were recovering from the
+disasters resulting from political tempests. She belonged to one of the
+most important and illustrious families of the Faubourg Saint-Germain,
+and her parents advised her to live with them as much as possible after
+the separation forced upon her by her husband’s inexplicable caprice.
+
+In 1820 the Marquise roused herself from her lethargy; she went to
+Court, appeared at parties, and entertained in her own house. From 1821
+to 1827 she lived in great style, and made herself remarked for her
+taste and her dress; she had a day, an hour, for receiving visits, and
+ere long she had seated herself on the throne, occupied before her by
+Madame la Vicomtesse de Beauseant, the Duchesse de Langeais, and Madame
+Firmiani--who on her marriage with M. de Camps had resigned the sceptre
+in favor of the Duchesse de Maufrigneuse, from whom Madame d’Espard
+snatched it. The world knew nothing beyond this of the private live
+of the Marquise d’Espard. She seemed likely to shine for long on the
+Parisian horizon, like the sun near its setting, but which will never
+set.
+
+The Marquise was on terms of great intimacy with a duchess as famous for
+her beauty as for her attachment to a prince just now in banishment,
+but accustomed to play a leading part in every prospective government.
+Madame d’Espard was also a friend of a foreign lady, with whom a famous
+and very wily Russian diplomate was in the habit of discussing public
+affairs. And then an antiquated countess, who was accustomed to shuffle
+the cards for the great game of politics, had adopted her in a maternal
+fashion. Thus, to any man of high ambitions, Madame d’Espard was
+preparing a covert but very real influence to follow the public and
+frivolous ascendency she now owed to fashion. Her drawing-room
+was acquiring political individuality: “What do they say at Madame
+d’Espard’s?” “Are they against the measure in Madame d’Espard’s
+drawing-room?” were questions repeated by a sufficient number of
+simpletons to give the flock of the faithful who surrounded her the
+importance of a coterie. A few damaged politicians whose wounds she had
+bound up, and whom she flattered, pronounced her as capable in diplomacy
+as the wife of the Russian ambassador to London. The Marquise had indeed
+several times suggested to deputies or to peers words and ideas that had
+rung through Europe. She had often judged correctly of certain events on
+which her circle of friends dared not express an opinion. The principal
+persons about the Court came in the evening to play whist in her rooms.
+
+Then she also had the qualities of her defects; she was thought to
+be--and she was--indiscreet. Her friendship seemed to be staunch; she
+worked for her proteges with a persistency which showed that she cared
+less for patronage than for increased influence. This conduct was based
+on her dominant passion, Vanity. Conquests and pleasure, which so many
+women love, to her seemed only means to an end; she aimed at living on
+every point of the largest circle that life can describe.
+
+Among the men still young, and to whom the future belonged, who crowded
+her drawing-room on great occasions, were to be seen MM. de Marsay and
+de Ronquerolles, de Montriveau, de la Roche-Hugon, de Serizy, Ferraud,
+Maxime de Trailles, de Listomere, the two Vandenesses, du Chatelet,
+and others. She would frequently receive a man whose wife she would not
+admit, and her power was great enough to induce certain ambitious men to
+submit to these hard conditions, such as two famous royalist bankers, M.
+de Nucingen and Ferdinand du Tillet. She had so thoroughly studied the
+strength and the weakness of Paris life, that her conduct had never
+given any man the smallest advantage over her. An enormous price might
+have been set on a note or letter by which she might have compromised
+herself, without one being produced.
+
+If an arid soul enabled her to play her part to the life, her person was
+no less available for it. She had a youthful figure. Her voice was, at
+will, soft and fresh, or clear and hard. She possessed in the highest
+degree the secret of that aristocratic pose by which a woman wipes out
+the past. The Marquise knew well the art of setting an immense space
+between herself and the sort of man who fancies he may be familiar after
+some chance advances. Her imposing gaze could deny everything. In her
+conversation fine and beautiful sentiments and noble resolutions flowed
+naturally, as it seemed, from a pure heart and soul; but in reality she
+was all self, and quite capable of blasting a man who was clumsy in
+his negotiations, at the very time when she was shamelessly making a
+compromise for the benefit of her own interest.
+
+Rastignac, in trying to fasten on to this woman, had discerned her to
+be the cleverest of tools, but he had not yet used it; far from handling
+it, he was already finding himself crushed by it. This young Condottiere
+of the brain, condemned, like Napoleon, to give battle constantly, while
+knowing that a single defeat would prove the grave of his fortunes, had
+met a dangerous adversary in his protectress. For the first time in his
+turbulent life, he was playing a game with a partner worthy of him. He
+saw a place as Minister in the conquest of Madame d’Espard, so he was
+her tool till he could make her his--a perilous beginning.
+
+The Hotel d’Espard needed a large household, and the Marquise had
+a great number of servants. The grand receptions were held in the
+ground-floor rooms, but she lived on the first floor of the house. The
+perfect order of a fine staircase splendidly decorated, and rooms fitted
+in the dignified style which formerly prevailed at Versailles, spoke of
+an immense fortune. When the judge saw the carriage gates thrown open
+to admit his nephew’s cab, he took in with a rapid glance the lodge, the
+porter, the courtyard, the stables, the arrangement of the house,
+the flowers that decorated the stairs, the perfect cleanliness of the
+banisters, walls, and carpets, and counted the footmen in livery who, as
+the bell rang, appeared on the landing. His eyes, which only yesterday
+in his parlor had sounded the dignity of misery under the muddy clothing
+of the poor, now studied with the same penetrating vision the furniture
+and splendor of the rooms he passed through, to pierce the misery of
+grandeur.
+
+“M. Popinot--M. Bianchon.”
+
+The two names were pronounced at the door of the boudoir where the
+Marquise was sitting, a pretty room recently refurnished, and looking
+out on the garden behind the house. At the moment Madame d’Espard was
+seated in one of the old rococo armchairs of which Madame had set the
+fashion. Rastignac was at her left hand on a low chair, in which he
+looked settled like an Italian lady’s “cousin.” A third person was
+standing by the corner of the chimney-piece. As the shrewd doctor had
+suspected, the Marquise was a woman of a parched and wiry constitution.
+But for her regimen her complexion must have taken the ruddy tone
+that is produced by constant heat; but she added to the effect of her
+acquired pallor by the strong colors of the stuffs she hung her rooms
+with, or in which she dressed. Reddish-brown, marone, bistre with a
+golden light in it, suited her to perfection. Her boudoir, copied from
+that of a famous lady then at the height of fashion in London, was in
+tan-colored velvet; but she had added various details of ornament which
+moderated the pompous splendor of this royal hue. Her hair was dressed
+like a girl’s in bands ending in curls, which emphasized the rather
+long oval of her face; but an oval face is as majestic as a round one is
+ignoble. The mirrors, cut with facets to lengthen or flatten the face at
+will, amply proved the rule as applied to the physiognomy.
+
+On seeing Popinot, who stood in the doorway craning his neck like a
+startled animal, with his left hand in his pocket, and the right hand
+holding a hat with a greasy lining, the Marquise gave Rastignac a look
+wherein lay a germ of mockery. The good man’s rather foolish appearance
+was so completely in harmony with his grotesque figure and scared looks,
+that Rastignac, catching sight of Bianchon’s dejected expression of
+humiliation through his uncle, could not help laughing, and turned away.
+The Marquise bowed a greeting, and made a great effort to rise from her
+seat, falling back again, not without grace, with an air of apologizing
+for her incivility by affected weakness.
+
+At this instant the person who was standing between the fireplace and
+the door bowed slightly, and pushed forward two chairs, which he offered
+by a gesture to the doctor and the judge; then, when they had seated
+themselves, he leaned against the wall again, crossing his arms.
+
+A word as to this man. There is living now, in our day, a
+painter--Decamps--who possesses in the very highest degree the art of
+commanding your interest in everything he sets before your eyes, whether
+it be a stone or a man. In this respect his pencil is more skilful than
+his brush. He will sketch an empty room and leave a broom against the
+wall. If he chooses, you shall shudder; you shall believe that this
+broom has just been the instrument of crime, and is dripping with blood;
+it shall be the broom which the widow Bancal used to clean out the room
+where Fualdes was murdered. Yes, the painter will touzle that broom like
+a man in a rage; he will make each hair of it stand on-end as though
+it were on your own bristling scalp; he will make it the interpreter
+between the secret poem of his imagination and the poem that shall have
+its birth in yours. After terrifying you by the aspect of that broom,
+to-morrow he will draw another, and lying by it a cat, asleep, but
+mysterious in its sleep, shall tell you that this broom is that on which
+the wife of a German cobbler rides off to the Sabbath on the Brocken. Or
+it will be a quite harmless broom, on which he will hang the coat of a
+clerk in the Treasury. Decamps had in his brush what Paganini had in his
+bow--a magnetically communicative power.
+
+Well, I should have to transfer to my style that striking genius, that
+marvelous knack of the pencil, to depict the upright, tall, lean man
+dressed in black, with black hair, who stood there without speaking a
+word. This gentleman had a face like a knife-blade, cold and harsh, with
+a color like Seine water when it was muddy and strewn with fragments
+of charcoal from a sunken barge. He looked at the floor, listening and
+passing judgment. His attitude was terrifying. He stood there like
+the dreadful broom to which Decamps has given the power of revealing a
+crime. Now and then, in the course of conversation, the Marquise tried
+to get some tacit advice; but however eager her questioning, he was as
+grave and as rigid as the statue of the Commendatore.
+
+The worthy Popinot, sitting on the edge of his chair in front of the
+fire, his hat between his knees, stared at the gilt chandeliers, the
+clock, and the curiosities with which the chimney-shelf was covered,
+the velvet and trimmings of the curtains, and all the costly and elegant
+nothings that a woman of fashion collects about her. He was roused from
+his homely meditations by Madame d’Espard, who addressed him in a piping
+tone:
+
+“Monsieur, I owe you a million thanks----”
+
+“A million thanks,” thought he to himself, “that is too many; it does
+not mean one.”
+
+“For the trouble you condescend----”
+
+“Condescend!” thought he; “she is laughing at me.”
+
+“To take in coming to see an unhappy client, who is too ill to go
+out----”
+
+Here the lawyer cut the Marquise short by giving her an inquisitorial
+look, examining the sanitary condition of the unhappy client.
+
+“As sound as a bell,” said he to himself.
+
+“Madame,” said he, assuming a respectful mien, “you owe me nothing.
+Although my visit to you is not in strict accordance with the practice
+of the Court, we ought to spare no pains to discover the truth in cases
+of this kind. Our judgment is then guided less by the letter of the law
+than by the promptings of our conscience. Whether I seek the truth here
+or in my own consulting-room, so long as I find it, all will be well.”
+
+While Popinot was speaking, Rastignac was shaking hands with Bianchon;
+the Marquise welcomed the doctor with a little bow full of gracious
+significance.
+
+“Who is that?” asked Bianchon in a whisper of Rastignac, indicating the
+dark man.
+
+“The Chevalier d’Espard, the Marquis’ brother.”
+
+“Your nephew told me,” said the Marquise to Popinot, “how much you are
+occupied, and I know too that you are so good as to wish to conceal your
+kind actions, so as to release those whom you oblige from the burden of
+gratitude. The work in Court is most fatiguing, it would seem. Why have
+they not twice as many judges?”
+
+“Ah, madame, that would not be difficult; we should be none the worse if
+they had. But when that happens, fowls will cut their teeth!”
+
+As he heard this speech, so entirely in character with the lawyer’s
+appearance, the Chevalier measured him from head to foot, out of one
+eye, as much as to say, “We shall easily manage him.”
+
+The Marquise looked at Rastignac, who bent over her. “That is the
+sort of man,” murmured the dandy in her ear, “who is trusted to pass
+judgments on the life and interests of private individuals.”
+
+Like most men who have grown old in a business, Popinot readily let
+himself follow the habits he had acquired, more particularly habits of
+mind. His conversation was all of “the shop.” He was fond of questioning
+those he talked to, forcing them to unexpected conclusions, making them
+tell more than they wished to reveal. Pozzo di Borgo, it is said, used
+to amuse himself by discovering other folks’ secrets, and entangling
+them in his diplomatic snares, and thus, by invincible habit, showed
+how his mind was soaked in wiliness. As soon as Popinot had surveyed
+the ground, so to speak, on which he stood, he saw that it would
+be necessary to have recourse to the cleverest subtleties, the most
+elaborately wrapped up and disguised, which were in use in the Courts,
+to detect the truth.
+
+Bianchon sat cold and stern, as a man who has made up his mind to endure
+torture without revealing his sufferings; but in his heart he wished
+that his uncle could only trample on this woman as we trample on a
+viper--a comparison suggested to him by the Marquise’s long dress, by
+the curve of her attitude, her long neck, small head, and undulating
+movements.
+
+“Well, monsieur,” said Madame d’Espard, “however great my dislike to be
+or seem selfish, I have been suffering too long not to wish that you may
+settle matters at once. Shall I soon get a favorable decision?”
+
+“Madame, I will do my best to bring matters to a conclusion,” said
+Popinot, with an air of frank good-nature. “Are you ignorant of the
+reason which made the separation necessary which now subsists between
+you and the Marquis d’Espard?”
+
+“Yes, monsieur,” she replied, evidently prepared with a story to tell.
+“At the beginning of 1816 M. d’Espard, whose temper had completely
+changed within three months or so, proposed that we should go to live
+on one of his estates near Briancon, without any regard for my health,
+which that climate would have destroyed, or for my habits of life; I
+refused to go. My refusal gave rise to such unjustifiable reproaches on
+his part, that from that hour I had my suspicions as to the soundness of
+his mind. On the following day he left me, leaving me his house and
+the free use of my own income, and he went to live in the Rue de la
+Montagne-Sainte-Genevieve, taking with him my two children----”
+
+“One moment, madame,” said the lawyer, interrupting her. “What was that
+income?”
+
+“Twenty-six thousand francs a year,” she replied parenthetically. “I
+at once consulted old M. Bordin as to what I ought to do,” she went
+on; “but it seems that there are so many difficulties in the way of
+depriving a father of the care of his children, that I was forced to
+resign myself to remaining alone at the age of twenty-two--an age
+at which many young women do very foolish things. You have read my
+petition, no doubt, monsieur; you know the principal facts on which I
+rely to procure a Commission in Lunacy with regard to M. d’Espard?”
+
+“Have you ever applied to him, madame, to obtain the care of your
+children?”
+
+“Yes, monsieur; but in vain. It is very hard on a mother to be deprived
+of the affection of her children, particularly when they can give her
+such happiness as every woman clings to.”
+
+“The elder must be sixteen,” said Popinot.
+
+“Fifteen,” said the Marquise eagerly.
+
+Here Bianchon and Rastignac looked at each other. Madame d’Espard bit
+her lips.
+
+“What can the age of my children matter to you?”
+
+“Well, madame,” said the lawyer, without seeming to attach any
+importance to his words, “a lad of fifteen and his brother, of thirteen,
+I suppose, have legs and their wits about them; they might come to see
+you on the sly. If they do not, it is because they obey their father,
+and to obey him in that matter they must love him very dearly.”
+
+“I do not understand,” said the Marquise.
+
+“You do not know, perhaps,” replied Popinot, “that in your petition
+your attorney represents your children as being very unhappy with their
+father?”
+
+Madame d’Espard replied with charming innocence:
+
+“I do not know what my attorney may have put into my mouth.”
+
+“Forgive my inferences,” said Popinot, “but Justice weighs everything.
+What I ask you, madame, is suggested by my wish thoroughly to understand
+the matter. By your account M. d’Espard deserted you on the most
+frivolous pretext. Instead of going to Briancon, where he wished to take
+you, he remained in Paris. This point is not clear. Did he know this
+Madame Jeanrenaud before his marriage?”
+
+“No, monsieur,” replied the Marquise, with some asperity, visible only
+to Rastignac and the Chevalier d’Espard.
+
+She was offended at being cross-examined by this lawyer when she had
+intended to beguile his judgment; but as Popinot still looked stupid
+from sheer absence of mind, she ended by attributing his interrogatory
+to the Questioning Spirit of Voltaire’s bailiff.
+
+“My parents,” she went on, “married me at the age of sixteen to M.
+d’Espard, whose name, fortune, and mode of life were such as my family
+looked for in the man who was to be my husband. M. d’Espard was then
+six-and-twenty; he was a gentleman in the English sense of the word;
+his manners pleased me, he seemed to have plenty of ambition, and I like
+ambitious people,” she added, looking at Rastignac. “If M. d’Espard
+had never met that Madame Jeanrenaud, his character, his learning, his
+acquirements would have raised him--as his friends then believed--to
+high office in the Government. King Charles X., at that time Monsieur,
+had the greatest esteem for him, and a peer’s seat, an appointment at
+Court, some important post certainly would have been his. That woman
+turned his head, and has ruined all the prospects of my family.”
+
+“What were M. d’Espard’s religious opinions at that time?”
+
+“He was, and is still, a very pious man.”
+
+“You do not suppose that Madame Jeanrenaud may have influenced him by
+mysticism?”
+
+“No, monsieur.”
+
+“You have a very fine house, madame,” said Popinot suddenly, taking his
+hands out of his pockets, and rising to pick up his coat-tails and warm
+himself. “This boudoir is very nice, those chairs are magnificent, the
+whole apartment is sumptuous. You must indeed be most unhappy when,
+seeing yourself here, you know that your children are ill lodged, ill
+clothed, and ill fed. I can imagine nothing more terrible for a mother.”
+
+“Yes, indeed. I should be so glad to give the poor little fellows some
+amusement, while their father keeps them at work from morning till night
+at that wretched history of China.”
+
+“You give handsome balls; they would enjoy them, but they might acquire
+a taste for dissipation. However, their father might send them to you
+once or twice in the course of the winter.”
+
+“He brings them here on my birthday and on New Year’s Day. On those days
+M. d’Espard does me the favor of dining here with them.”
+
+“It is very singular behaviour,” said the judge, with an air of
+conviction. “Have you ever seen this Dame Jeanrenaud?”
+
+“My brother-in-law one day, out of interest in his brother----”
+
+“Ah! monsieur is M. d’Espard’s brother?” said the lawyer, interrupting
+her.
+
+The Chevalier bowed, but did not speak.
+
+“M. d’Espard, who has watched this affair, took me to the Oratoire,
+where this woman goes to sermon, for she is a Protestant. I saw her;
+she is not in the least attractive; she looks like a butcher’s wife,
+extremely fat, horribly marked with the smallpox; she has feet and hands
+like a man’s, she squints, in short, she is monstrous!”
+
+“It is inconceivable,” said the judge, looking like the most imbecile
+judge in the whole kingdom. “And this creature lives near here, Rue
+Verte, in a fine house? There are no plain folk left, it would seem?”
+
+“In a mansion on which her son has spent absurd sums.”
+
+“Madame,” said Popinot, “I live in the Faubourg Saint-Marceau; I know
+nothing of such expenses. What do you call absurd sums?”
+
+“Well,” said the Marquise, “a stable with five horses and three
+carriages, a phaeton, a brougham, and a cabriolet.”
+
+“That costs a large sum, then?” asked Popinot in surprise.
+
+“Enormous sums!” said Rastignac, intervening. “Such an establishment
+would cost, for the stables, the keeping the carriages in order, and
+the liveries for the men, between fifteen and sixteen thousand francs a
+year.”
+
+“Should you think so, madame?” said the judge, looking much astonished.
+
+“Yes, at least,” replied the Marquise.
+
+“And the furniture, too, must have cost a lot of money?”
+
+“More than a hundred thousand francs,” replied Madame d’Espard, who
+could not help smiling at the lawyer’s vulgarity.
+
+“Judges, madame, are apt to be incredulous; it is what they are paid
+for, and I am incredulous. The Baron Jeanrenaud and his mother must have
+fleeced M. d’Espard most preposterously, if what you say is correct.
+There is a stable establishment which, by your account, costs sixteen
+thousand francs a year. Housekeeping, servants’ wages, and the gross
+expenses of the house itself must run to twice as much; that makes a
+total of from fifty to sixty thousand francs a year. Do you suppose that
+these people, formerly so extremely poor, can have so large a fortune? A
+million yields scarcely forty thousand a year.”
+
+“Monsieur, the mother and son invested the money given them by M.
+d’Espard in the funds when they were at 60 to 80. I should think their
+income must be more than sixty thousand francs. And then the son has
+fine appointments.”
+
+“If they spend sixty thousand francs a year,” said the judge, “how much
+do you spend?”
+
+“Well,” said Madame d’Espard, “about the same.” The Chevalier started a
+little, the Marquise colored; Bianchon looked at Rastignac; but Popinot
+preserved an expression of simplicity which quite deceived Madame
+d’Espard. The chevalier took no part in the conversation; he saw that
+all was lost.
+
+“These people, madame, might be indicted before the superior Court,”
+ said Popinot.
+
+“That was my opinion,” exclaimed the Marquise, enchanted. “If threatened
+with the police, they would have come to terms.”
+
+“Madame,” said Popinot, “when M. d’Espard left you, did he not give
+you a power of attorney enabling you to manage and control your own
+affairs?”
+
+“I do not understand the object of all these questions,” said the
+Marquise with petulance. “It seems to me that if you would only consider
+the state in which I am placed by my husband’s insanity, you ought to be
+troubling yourself about him, and not about me.”
+
+“We are coming to that, madame,” said the judge. “Before placing in
+your hands, or in any others, the control of M. d’Espard’s property,
+supposing he were pronounced incapable, the Court must inquire as to how
+you have managed your own. If M. d’Espard gave you the power, he would
+have shown confidence in you, and the Court would recognize the fact.
+Had you any power from him? You might have bought or sold house property
+or invested money in business?”
+
+“No, monsieur, the Blamont-Chauvrys are not in the habit of trading,”
+ said she, extremely nettled in her pride as an aristocrat, and
+forgetting the business in hand. “My property is intact, and M. d’Espard
+gave me no power to act.”
+
+The Chevalier put his hand over his eyes not to betray the vexation
+he felt at his sister-in-law’s short-sightedness, for she was ruining
+herself by her answers. Popinot had gone straight to the mark in spite
+of his apparent doublings.
+
+“Madame,” said the lawyer, indicating the Chevalier, “this gentleman, of
+course, is your near connection? May we speak openly before these other
+gentlemen?”
+
+“Speak on,” said the Marquise, surprised at this caution.
+
+“Well, madame, granting that you spend only sixty thousand francs
+a year, to any one who sees your stables, your house, your train of
+servants, and a style of housekeeping which strikes me as far more
+luxurious than that of the Jeanrenauds, that sum would seem well laid
+out.”
+
+The Marquise bowed an agreement.
+
+“But,” continued the judge, “if you have no more than twenty-six
+thousand francs a year, you may have a hundred thousand francs of debt.
+The Court would therefore have a right to imagine that the motives which
+prompt you to ask that your husband may be deprived of the control of
+his property are complicated by self-interest and the need of paying
+your debts--if--you--have--any. The requests addressed to me have
+interested me in your position; consider fully and make your confession.
+If my suppositions have hit the truth, there is yet time to avoid the
+blame which the Court would have a perfect right to express in the
+saving clauses of the verdict if you could not show your attitude to be
+absolutely honorable and clear.
+
+“It is our duty to examine the motives of the applicant as well as
+to listen to the plea of the witness under examination, to ascertain
+whether the petitioner may not have been prompted by passion, by a
+desire for money, which is unfortunately too common----”
+
+The Marquise was on Saint Laurence’s gridiron.
+
+“And I must have explanations on this point. Madame, I have no wish to
+call you to account; I only want to know how you have managed to live at
+the rate of sixty thousand francs a year, and that for some years past.
+There are plenty of women who achieve this in their housekeeping, but
+you are not one of those. Tell me, you may have the most legitimate
+resources, a royal pension, or some claim on the indemnities lately
+granted; but even then you must have had your husband’s authority to
+receive them.”
+
+The Marquise did not speak.
+
+“You must remember,” Popinot went on, “that M. d’Espard may wish to
+enter a protest, and his counsel will have a right to find out whether
+you have any creditors. This boudoir is newly furnished, your rooms are
+not now furnished with the things left to you by M. d’Espard in 1816.
+If, as you did me the honor of informing me, furniture is costly for
+the Jeanrenauds, it must be yet more so for you, who are a great
+lady. Though I am a judge, I am but a man; I may be wrong--tell me so.
+Remember the duties imposed on me by the law, and the rigorous inquiries
+it demands, when the case before it is the suspension from all his
+functions of the father of a family in the prime of life. So you will
+pardon me, Madame la Marquise, for laying all these difficulties before
+you; it will be easy for you to give me an explanation.
+
+“When a man is pronounced incapable of the control of his own affairs, a
+trustee has to be appointed. Who will be the trustee?”
+
+“His brother,” said the Marquise.
+
+The Chevalier bowed. There was a short silence, very uncomfortable for
+the five persons who were present. The judge, in sport as it were,
+had laid open the woman’s sore place. Popinot’s countenance of common,
+clumsy good-nature, at which the Marquise, the Chevalier, and Rastignac
+had been inclined to laugh, had gained importance in their eyes. As
+they stole a look at him, they discerned the various expressions of
+that eloquent mouth. The ridiculous mortal was a judge of acumen. His
+studious notice of the boudoir was accounted for: he had started from
+the gilt elephant supporting the chimney-clock, examining all this
+luxury, and had ended by reading this woman’s soul.
+
+“If the Marquis d’Espard is mad about China, I see that you are not less
+fond of its products,” said Popinot, looking at the porcelain on the
+chimney-piece. “But perhaps it was from M. le Marquis that you had these
+charming Oriental pieces,” and he pointed to some precious trifles.
+
+This irony, in very good taste, made Bianchon smile, and petrified
+Rastignac, while the Marquise bit her thin lips.
+
+“Instead of being the protector of a woman placed in a cruel dilemma--an
+alternative between losing her fortune and her children, and being
+regarded as her husband’s enemy,” she said, “you accuse me, monsieur!
+You suspect my motives! You must own that your conduct is strange!”
+
+“Madame,” said the judge eagerly, “the caution exercised by the Court in
+such cases as these might have given you, in any other judge, a perhaps
+less indulgent critic than I am.--And do you suppose that M. d’Espard’s
+lawyer will show you any great consideration? Will he not be suspicious
+of motives which may be perfectly pure and disinterested? Your life will
+be at his mercy; he will inquire into it without qualifying his search
+by the respectful deference I have for you.”
+
+“I am much obliged to you, monsieur,” said the Marquise satirically.
+“Admitting for the moment that I owe thirty thousand or fifty thousand
+francs, in the first place, it would be a mere trifle to the d’Espards
+and the Blamont-Chauvrys. But if my husband is not in the possession
+of his mental faculties, would that prevent his being pronounced
+incapable?”
+
+“No, madame,” said Popinot.
+
+“Although you have questioned me with a sort of cunning which I
+should not have suspected in a judge, and under circumstances where
+straightforwardness would have answered your purpose,” she went on, “I
+will tell you without subterfuge that my position in the world, and the
+efforts I have to make to keep up my connection, are not in the least
+to my taste. I began my life by a long period of solitude; but my
+children’s interest appealed to me; I felt that I must fill their
+father’s place. By receiving my friends, by keeping up all this
+connection, by contracting these debts, I have secured their future
+welfare; I have prepared for them a brilliant career where they will
+find help and favor; and to have what has thus been acquired, many a man
+of business, lawyer or banker, would gladly pay all it has cost me.”
+
+“I appreciate your devoted conduct, madame,” replied Popinot. “It does
+you honor, and I blame you for nothing. A judge belongs to all: he must
+know and weigh every fact.”
+
+Madame d’Espard’s tact and practice in estimating men made
+her understand that M. Popinot was not to be influenced by any
+consideration. She had counted on an ambitious lawyer, she had found
+a man of conscience. She at once thought of finding other means for
+securing the success of her side.
+
+The servants brought in tea.
+
+“Have you any further explanations to give me, madame?” said Popinot,
+seeing these preparations.
+
+“Monsieur,” she replied haughtily, “do your business your own way;
+question M. d’Espard, and you will pity me, I am sure.” She raised her
+head, looking Popinot in the face with pride, mingled with impertinence;
+the worthy man bowed himself out respectfully.
+
+“A nice man is your uncle,” said Rastignac to Bianchon. “Is he really
+so dense? Does not he know what the Marquise d’Espard is, what her
+influence means, her unavowed power over people? The Keeper of the Seals
+will be with her to-morrow----”
+
+“My dear fellow, how can I help it?” said Bianchon. “Did not I warn you?
+He is not a man you can get over.”
+
+“No,” said Rastignac; “he is a man you must run over.”
+
+The doctor was obliged to make his bow to the Marquise and her mute
+Chevalier to catch up Popinot, who, not being the man to endure an
+embarrassing position, was pacing through the rooms.
+
+“That woman owes a hundred thousand crowns,” said the judge, as he
+stepped into his nephew’s cab.
+
+“And what do you think of the case?”
+
+“I,” said the judge. “I never have an opinion till I have gone into
+everything. To-morrow early I will send to Madame Jeanrenaud to call on
+me in my private office at four o’clock, to make her explain the facts
+which concern her, for she is compromised.”
+
+“I should very much like to know what the end will be.”
+
+“Why, bless me, do not you see that the Marquise is the tool of that
+tall lean man who never uttered a word? There is a strain of Cain in
+him, but of the Cain who goes to the Law Courts for his bludgeon, and
+there, unluckily for him, we keep more than one Damocles’ sword.”
+
+“Oh, Rastignac! what brought you into that boat, I wonder?” exclaimed
+Bianchon.
+
+“Ah, we are used to seeing these little family conspiracies,”
+ said Popinot. “Not a year passes without a number of verdicts of
+‘insufficient evidence’ against applications of this kind. In our state
+of society such an attempt brings no dishonor, while we send a poor
+devil to the galleys who breaks a pane of glass dividing him from a bowl
+full of gold. Our Code is not faultless.”
+
+“But these are the facts?”
+
+“My boy, do you not know all the judicial romances with which clients
+impose on their attorneys? If the attorneys condemned themselves to
+state nothing but the truth, they would not earn enough to keep their
+office open.”
+
+
+
+Next day, at four in the afternoon, a very stout dame, looking a good
+deal like a cask dressed up in a gown and belt, mounted Judge Popinot’s
+stairs, perspiring and panting. She had, with great difficulty, got out
+of a green landau, which suited her to a miracle; you could not think of
+the woman without the landau, or the landau without the woman.
+
+“It is I, my dear sir,” said she, appearing in the doorway of the
+judge’s room. “Madame Jeanrenaud, whom you summoned exactly as if I were
+a thief, neither more nor less.”
+
+The common words were spoken in a common voice, broken by the wheezing
+of asthma, and ending in a cough.
+
+“When I go through a damp place, I can’t tell you what I suffer, sir. I
+shall never make old bones, saving your presence. However, here I am.”
+
+The lawyer was quite amazed at the appearance of this supposed Marechale
+d’Ancre. Madame Jeanrenaud’s face was pitted with an infinite number of
+little holes, was very red, with a pug nose and a low forehead, and was
+as round as a ball; for everything about the good woman was round. She
+had the bright eyes of a country woman, an honest gaze, a cheerful tone,
+and chestnut hair held in place by a bonnet cap under a green bonnet
+decked with a shabby bunch of auriculas. Her stupendous bust was a thing
+to laugh at, for it made one fear some grotesque explosion every time
+she coughed. Her enormous legs were of the shape which make the Paris
+street boy describe such a woman as being built on piles. The widow wore
+a green gown trimmed with chinchilla, which looked on her as a splash of
+dirty oil would look on a bride’s veil. In short, everything about her
+harmonized with her last words: “Here I am.”
+
+“Madame,” said Popinot, “you are suspected of having used some seductive
+arts to induce M. d’Espard to hand over to you very considerable sums of
+money.”
+
+“Of what! of what!” cried she. “Of seductive arts? But, my dear sir, you
+are a man to be respected, and, moreover, as a lawyer you ought to have
+some good sense. Look at me! Tell me if I am likely to seduce any one.
+I cannot tie my own shoes, nor even stoop. For these twenty years past,
+the Lord be praised, I have not dared to put on a pair of stays under
+pain of sudden death. I was as thin as an asparagus stalk when I was
+seventeen, and pretty too--I may say so now. So I married Jeanrenaud, a
+good fellow, and headman on the salt-barges. I had my boy, who is a fine
+young man; he is my pride, and it is not holding myself cheap to say
+he is my best piece of work. My little Jeanrenaud was a soldier who did
+Napoleon credit, and who served in the Imperial Guard. But, alas! at the
+death of my old man, who was drowned, times changed for the worse. I had
+the smallpox. I was kept two years in my room without stirring, and I
+came out of it the size you see me, hideous for ever, and as wretched as
+could be. These are my seductive arts.”
+
+“But what, then, can the reasons be that have induced M. d’Espard to
+give you sums----”
+
+“Hugious sums, monsieur, say the word; I do not mind. But as to his
+reasons, I am not at liberty to explain them.”
+
+“You are wrong. At this moment, his family, very naturally alarmed, are
+about to bring an action----”
+
+“Heavens above us!” said the good woman, starting up. “Is it possible
+that he should be worried on my account? That king of men, a man that
+has not his match! Rather than he should have the smallest trouble, or
+hair less on his head I could almost say, we would return every sou,
+monsieur. Write that down on your papers. Heaven above us! I will go at
+once and tell Jeanrenaud what is going on! A pretty thing indeed!”
+
+And the little old woman went out, rolled herself downstairs, and
+disappeared.
+
+“That one tells no lies,” said Popinot to himself. “Well, to-morrow I
+shall know the whole story, for I shall go to see the Marquis d’Espard.”
+
+People who have outlived the age when a man wastes his vitality at
+random, know how great an influence may be exercised on more important
+events by apparently trivial incidents, and will not be surprised at the
+weight here given to the following minor fact. Next day Popinot had
+an attack of coryza, a complaint which is not dangerous, and generally
+known by the absurd and inadequate name of a cold in the head.
+
+The judge, who could not suppose that the delay could be serious,
+feeling himself a little feverish, kept his room, and did not go to see
+the Marquis d’Espard. This day lost was, to this affair, what on the Day
+of Dupes the cup of soup had been, taken by Marie de Medici, which, by
+delaying her meeting with Louis XIII., enabled Richelieu to arrive at
+Saint-Germain before her, and recapture his royal slave.
+
+Before accompanying the lawyer and his registering clerk to the Marquis
+d’Espard’s house, it may be as well to glance at the home and the
+private affairs of this father of sons whom his wife’s petition
+represented to be a madman.
+
+Here and there in the old parts of Paris a few buildings may still be
+seen in which the archaeologist can discern an intention of decorating
+the city, and that love of property, which leads the owner to give a
+durable character to the structure. The house in which M. d’Espard was
+then living, in the Rue de la Montagne-Sainte-Genevieve, was one of
+these old mansions, built in stone, and not devoid of a certain richness
+of style; but time had blackened the stone, and revolutions in the town
+had damaged it both outside and inside. The dignitaries who formerly
+dwelt in the neighborhood of the University having disappeared with
+the great ecclesiastical foundations, this house had become the home
+of industries and of inhabitants whom it was never destined to shelter.
+During the last century a printing establishment had worn down the
+polished floors, soiled the carved wood, blackened the walls, and
+altered the principal internal arrangements. Formerly the residence of
+a Cardinal, this fine house was now divided among plebeian tenants. The
+character of the architecture showed that it had been built under the
+reigns of Henry III., Henry IV., and Louis XIII., at the time when the
+hotels Mignon and Serpente were erected in the same neighborhood, with
+the palace of the Princess Palatine, and the Sorbonne. An old man
+could remember having heard it called, in the last century, the hotel
+Duperron, so it seemed probable that the illustrious Cardinal of that
+name had built, or perhaps merely lived in it.
+
+There still exists, indeed, in the corner of the courtyard, a perron or
+flight of several outer steps by which the house is entered; and the way
+into the garden on the garden front is down a similar flight of steps.
+In spite of dilapidations, the luxury lavished by the architect on the
+balustrade and entrance porch crowning these two perrons suggests the
+simple-minded purpose of commemorating the owner’s name, a sort of
+sculptured pun which our ancestors often allowed themselves. Finally,
+in support of this evidence, archaeologists can still discern in the
+medallions which show on the principal front some traces of the cords of
+the Roman hat.
+
+M. le Marquis d’Espard lived on the ground floor, in order, no doubt, to
+enjoy the garden, which might be called spacious for that neighborhood,
+and which lay open for his children’s health. The situation of the
+house, in a street on a steep hill, as its name indicates, secured these
+ground-floor rooms against ever being damp. M. d’Espard had taken them,
+no doubt, for a very moderate price, rents being low at the time when
+he settled in that quarter, in order to be among the schools and to
+superintend his boys’ education. Moreover, the state in which he found
+the place, with everything to repair, had no doubt induced the owner to
+be accommodating. Thus M. d’Espard had been able to go to some expense
+to settle himself suitably without being accused of extravagance. The
+loftiness of the rooms, the paneling, of which nothing survived but the
+frames, the decoration of the ceilings, all displayed the dignity which
+the prelacy stamped on whatever it attempted or created, and which
+artists discern to this day in the smallest relic that remains, though
+it be but a book, a dress, the panel of a bookcase, or an armchair.
+
+The Marquis had the rooms painted in the rich brown tones loved of
+the Dutch and of the citizens of Old Paris, hues which lend such good
+effects to the painter of genre. The panels were hung with plain paper
+in harmony with the paint. The window curtains were of inexpensive
+materials, but chosen so as to produce a generally happy result; the
+furniture was not too crowded and judiciously placed. Any one on going
+into this home could not resist a sense of sweet peacefulness, produced
+by the perfect calm, the stillness which prevailed, by the unpretentious
+unity of color, the keeping of the picture, in the words a painter might
+use. A certain nobleness in the details, the exquisite cleanliness of
+the furniture, and a perfect concord of men and things, all brought the
+word “suavity” to the lips.
+
+Few persons were admitted to the rooms used by the Marquis and his two
+sons, whose life might perhaps seem mysterious to their neighbors. In a
+wing towards the street, on the third floor, there are three large rooms
+which had been left in the state of dilapidation and grotesque bareness
+to which they had been reduced by the printing works. These three rooms,
+devoted to the evolution of the Picturesque History of China, were
+contrived to serve as a writing-room, a depository, and a private room,
+where M. d’Espard sat during part of the day; for after breakfast till
+four in the afternoon the Marquis remained in this room on the third
+floor to work at the publication he had undertaken. Visitors wanting to
+see him commonly found him there, and often the two boys on their return
+from school resorted thither. Thus the ground-floor rooms were a sort
+of sanctuary where the father and sons spent their time from the hour
+of dinner till the next day, and his domestic life was carefully closed
+against the public eye.
+
+His only servants were a cook--an old woman who had long been attached
+to his family--and a man-servant forty years old, who was with him
+when he married Mademoiselle de Blamont. His children’s nurse had also
+remained with them, and the minute care to which the apartment bore
+witness revealed the sense of order and the maternal affections expended
+by this woman in her master’s interest, in the management of his house,
+and the charge of his children. These three good souls, grave, and
+uncommunicative folk, seemed to have entered into the idea which ruled
+the Marquis’ domestic life. And the contrast between their habits and
+those of most servants was a peculiarity which cast an air of mystery
+over the house, and fomented the calumny to which M. d’Espard himself
+lent occasion. Very laudable motives had made him determine never to
+be on visiting terms with any of the other tenants in the house. In
+undertaking to educate his boys he wished to keep them from all contact
+with strangers. Perhaps, too, he wished to avoid the intrusion of
+neighbors.
+
+In a man of his rank, at a time when the Quartier Latin was distracted
+by Liberalism, such conduct was sure to rouse in opposition a host of
+petty passions, of feelings whose folly is only to be measured by their
+meanness, the outcome of porters’ gossip and malevolent tattle from door
+to door, all unknown to M. d’Espard and his retainers. His man-servant
+was stigmatized as a Jesuit, his cook as a sly fox; the nurse was in
+collusion with Madame Jeanrenaud to rob the madman. The madman was
+the Marquis. By degrees the other tenants came to regard as proofs of
+madness a number of things they had noticed in M. d’Espard, and passed
+through the sieve of their judgment without discerning any reasonable
+motive for them.
+
+Having no belief in the success of the History of China, they had
+managed to convince the landlord of the house that M. d’Espard had no
+money just at a time when, with the forgetfulness which often befalls
+busy men, he had allowed the tax-collector to send him a summons for
+non-payment of arrears. The landlord forthwith claimed his quarter’s
+rent from January 1st by sending in a receipt, which the porter’s wife
+had amused herself by detaining. On the 15th a summons to pay was served
+on M. d’Espard, the portress had delivered it at her leisure, and
+he supposed it to be some misunderstanding, not conceiving of any
+incivility from a man in whose house he had been living for twelve
+years. The Marquis was actually seized by a bailiff at the time when his
+man-servant had gone to carry the money for the rent to the landlord.
+
+This arrest, assiduously reported to the persons with whom he was in
+treaty for his undertaking, had alarmed some of them who were already
+doubtful of M. d’Espard’s solvency in consequence of the enormous sums
+which Baron Jeanrenaud and his mother were said to be receiving from
+him. And, indeed, these suspicions on the part of the tenants, the
+creditors, and the landlord had some excuse in the Marquis’ extreme
+economy in housekeeping. He conducted it as a ruined man might. His
+servants always paid in ready money for the most trifling necessaries
+of life, and acted as not choosing to take credit; if now they had asked
+for anything on credit, it would probably have been refused, calumnious
+gossip had been so widely believed in the neighborhood. There are
+tradesmen who like those of their customers who pay badly when they
+see them often, while they hate others, and very good ones, who hold
+themselves on too high a level to allow of any familiarity as CHUMS, a
+vulgar but expressive word. Men are made so; in almost every class they
+will allow to a gossip, or a vulgar soul that flatters them, facilities
+and favors they refuse to the superiority they resent, in whatever
+form it may show itself. The shopkeeper who rails at the Court has his
+courtiers.
+
+In short, the manners of the Marquis and his children were certain to
+arouse ill-feeling in their neighbors, and to work them up by degrees to
+the pitch of malevolence when men do not hesitate at an act of meanness
+if only it may damage the adversary they have themselves created.
+
+M. d’Espard was a gentleman, as his wife was a lady, by birth and
+breeding; noble types, already so rare in France that the observer
+can easily count the persons who perfectly realize them. These two
+characters are based on primitive ideas, on beliefs that may be called
+innate, on habits formed in infancy, and which have ceased to exist. To
+believe in pure blood, in a privileged race, to stand in thought above
+other men, must we not from birth have measured the distance which
+divides patricians from the mob? To command, must we not have never
+met our equal? And finally, must not education inculcate the ideas with
+which Nature inspires those great men on whose brow she has placed a
+crown before their mother has ever set a kiss there? These ideas, this
+education, are no longer possible in France, where for forty years past
+chance has arrogated the right of making noblemen by dipping them in the
+blood of battles, by gilding them with glory, by crowning them with the
+halo of genius; where the abolition of entail and of eldest sonship,
+by frittering away estates, compels the nobleman to attend to his own
+business instead of attending to affairs of state, and where personal
+greatness can only be such greatness as is acquired by long and patient
+toil: quite a new era.
+
+Regarded as a relic of that great institution know as feudalism, M.
+d’Espard deserved respectful admiration. If he believed himself to be by
+blood the superior of other men, he also believed in all the obligations
+of nobility; he had the virtues and the strength it demands. He had
+brought up his children in his own principles, and taught them from the
+cradle the religion of their caste. A deep sense of their own dignity,
+pride of name, the conviction that they were by birth great, gave rise
+in them to a kingly pride, the courage of knights, and the protecting
+kindness of a baronial lord; their manners, harmonizing with their
+notions, would have become princes, and offended all the world of the
+Rue de la Montagne-Sainte-Genevieve--a world, above all others, of
+equality, where every one believed that M. d’Espard was ruined, and
+where all, from the lowest to the highest, refused the privileges of
+nobility to a nobleman without money, because they were all ready to
+allow an enriched bourgeois to usurp them. Thus the lack of communion
+between this family and other persons was as much moral as it was
+physical.
+
+In the father and the children alike, their personality harmonized with
+the spirit within. M. d’Espard, at this time about fifty, might have
+sat as a model to represent the aristocracy of birth in the nineteenth
+century. He was slight and fair; there was in the outline and general
+expression of his face a native distinction which spoke of lofty
+sentiments, but it bore the impress of a deliberate coldness which
+commanded respect a little too decidedly. His aquiline nose bent at the
+tip from left to right, a slight crookedness which was not devoid of
+grace; his blue eyes, his high forehead, prominent enough at the brows
+to form a thick ridge that checked the light and shaded his eyes, all
+indicated a spirit of rectitude, capable of perseverance and perfect
+loyalty, while it gave a singular look to his countenance. This
+penthouse forehead might, in fact, hint at a touch of madness, and his
+thick-knitted eyebrows added to the apparent eccentricity. He had the
+white well-kept hands of a gentleman; his foot was high and narrow. His
+hesitating speech--not merely as to his pronunciation, which was that
+of a stammerer, but also in the expression of his ideas, his thought
+and language--produced on the mind of the hearer the impression of a
+man who, in familiar phraseology, comes and goes, feels his way, tries
+everything, breaks off his gestures, and finishes nothing. This defect
+was purely superficial, and in contrast with the decisiveness of a
+firmly-set mouth, and the strongly-marked character of his physiognomy.
+His rather jerky gait matched his mode of speech. These peculiarities
+helped to affirm his supposed insanity. In spite of his elegant
+appearance, he was systematically parsimonious in his personal expenses,
+and wore the same black frock-coat for three or four years, brushed with
+extreme care by his old man-servant.
+
+As to the children, they both were handsome, and endowed with a grace
+which did not exclude an expression of aristocratic disdain. They had
+the bright coloring, the clear eye, the transparent flesh which reveal
+habits of purity, regularity of life, and a due proportion of work and
+play. They both had black hair and blue eyes, and a twist in their nose,
+like their father; but their mother, perhaps, had transmitted to them
+the dignity of speech, of look and mien, which are hereditary in the
+Blamont-Chauvrys. Their voices, as clear as crystal, had an emotional
+quality, the softness which proves so seductive; they had, in short, the
+voice a woman would willingly listen to after feeling the flame of their
+looks. But, above all, they had the modesty of pride, a chaste reserve,
+a _touch-me-not_ which at a maturer age might have seemed intentional
+coyness, so much did their demeanor inspire a wish to know them. The
+elder, Comte Clement de Negrepelisse, was close upon his sixteenth year.
+For the last two years he had ceased to wear the pretty English round
+jacket which his brother, Vicomte Camille d’Espard, still wore. The
+Count, who for the last six months went no more to the College Henri
+IV., was dressed in the style of a young man enjoying the first
+pleasures of fashion. His father had not wished to condemn him to a
+year’s useless study of philosophy; he was trying to give his knowledge
+some consistency by the study of transcendental mathematics. At the
+same time, the Marquis was having him taught Eastern languages, the
+international law of Europe, heraldry, and history from the original
+sources, charters, early documents, and collections of edicts. Camille
+had lately begun to study rhetoric.
+
+The day when Popinot arranged to go to question M. d’Espard was a
+Thursday, a holiday. At about nine in the morning, before their father
+was awake, the brothers were playing in the garden. Clement was
+finding it hard to refuse his brother, who was anxious to go to the
+shooting-gallery for the first time, and who begged him to second his
+request to the Marquis. The Viscount always rather took advantage of his
+weakness, and was very fond of wrestling with his brother. So the couple
+were quarreling and fighting in play like schoolboys. As they ran in
+the garden, chasing each other, they made so much noise as to wake their
+father, who came to the window without their perceiving him in the heat
+of the fray. The Marquis amused himself with watching his two children
+twisted together like snakes, their faces flushed by the exertion of
+their strength; their complexion was rose and white, their eyes flashed
+sparks, their limbs writhed like cords in the fire; they fell, sprang up
+again, and caught each other like athletes in a circus, affording their
+father one of those moments of happiness which would make amends for the
+keenest anxieties of a busy life. Two other persons, one on the second
+and one on the first floor, were also looking into the garden, and
+saying that the old madman was amusing himself by making his children
+fight. Immediately a number of heads appeared at the windows; the
+Marquis, noticing them, called a word to his sons, who at once climbed
+up to the window and jumped into his room, and Clement obtained the
+permission asked by Camille.
+
+All through the house every one was talking of the Marquis’ new form of
+insanity. When Popinot arrived at about twelve o’clock, accompanied by
+his clerk, the portress, when asked for M. d’Espard, conducted him to
+the third floor, telling him “as how M. d’Espard, no longer ago than
+that very morning, had set on his two children to fight, and laughed
+like the monster he was on seeing the younger biting the elder till he
+bled, and as how no doubt he longed to see them kill each other.--Don’t
+ask me the reason why,” she added; “he doesn’t show himself!”
+
+Just as the woman spoke these decisive words, she had brought the judge
+to the landing on the third floor, face to face with a door covered with
+notices announcing the successive numbers of the Picturesque History of
+China. The muddy floor, the dirty banisters, the door where the printers
+had left their marks, the dilapidated window, and the ceiling on which
+the apprentices had amused themselves with drawing monstrosities with
+the smoky flare of their tallow dips, the piles of paper and litter
+heaped up in the corners, intentionally or from sheer neglect--in short,
+every detail of the picture lying before his eyes, agreed so well
+with the facts alleged by the Marquise that the judge, in spite of his
+impartiality, could not help believing them.
+
+“There you are, gentlemen,” said the porter’s wife; “there is the
+manifactor, where the Chinese swallow up enough to feed the whole
+neighborhood.”
+
+The clerk looked at the judge with a smile, and Popinot found it hard to
+keep his countenance. They went together into the outer room, where
+sat an old man, who, no doubt, performed the functions of office clerk,
+shopman, and cashier. This old man was the Maitre Jacques of China.
+Along the walls ran long shelves, on which the published numbers lay in
+piles. A partition in wood, with a grating lined with green curtains,
+cut off the end of the room, forming a private office. A till with a
+slit to admit or disgorge crown pieces indicated the cash-desk.
+
+“M. d’Espard?” said Popinot, addressing the man, who wore a gray blouse.
+
+The shopman opened the door into the next room, where the lawyer and
+his companion saw a venerable old man, white-headed and simply dressed,
+wearing the Cross of Saint-Louis, seated at a desk. He ceased comparing
+some sheets of colored prints to look up at the two visitors. This room
+was an unpretentious office, full of books and proof-sheets. There was
+a black wood table at which some one, at the moment absent, no doubt was
+accustomed to work.
+
+“The Marquis d’Espard?” said Popinot.
+
+“No, monsieur,” said the old man, rising; “what do you want with him?”
+ he added, coming forward, and showing by his demeanor the dignified
+manners and habits due to a gentlemanly education.
+
+“We wish to speak with him on business exclusively personal to himself,”
+ replied Popinot.
+
+“D’Espard, here are some gentlemen who want to see you,” then said the
+old man, going into the furthest room, where the Marquis was sitting by
+the fire reading the newspaper.
+
+This innermost room had a shabby carpet, the windows were hung with gray
+holland curtains; the furniture consisted of a few mahogany chairs, two
+armchairs, a desk with a revolving front, an ordinary office table, and
+on the chimney-shelf, a dingy clock and two old candlesticks. The old
+man led the way for Popinot and his registrar, and pulled forward two
+chairs, as though he were master of the place; M. d’Espard left it to
+him. After the preliminary civilities, during which the judge watched
+the supposed lunatic, the Marquis naturally asked what was the object of
+this visit. On this Popinot glanced significantly at the old gentleman
+and the Marquis.
+
+“I believe, Monsieur le Marquis,” said he, “that the character of my
+functions, and the inquiry that has brought me here, make it desirable
+that we should be alone, though it is understood by law that in such
+cases the inquiries have a sort of family publicity. I am judge on the
+Inferior Court of Appeal for the Department of the Seine, and charged
+by the President with the duty of examining you as to certain facts
+set forth in a petition for a Commission in Lunacy on the part of the
+Marquise d’Espard.”
+
+The old man withdrew. When the lawyer and the Marquis were alone, the
+clerk shut the door, and seated himself unceremoniously at the office
+table, where he laid out his papers and prepared to take down his notes.
+Popinot had still kept his eye on M. d’Espard; he was watching the
+effect on him of this crude statement, so painful for a man in full
+possession of his reason. The Marquis d’Espard, whose face was usually
+pale, as are those of fair men, suddenly turned scarlet with anger; he
+trembled for an instant, sat down, laid his paper on the chimney-piece,
+and looked down. In a moment he had recovered his gentlemanly dignity,
+and looked steadily at the judge, as if to read in his countenance the
+indications of his character.
+
+“How is it, monsieur,” he asked, “that I have had no notice of such a
+petition?”
+
+“Monsieur le Marquis, persons on whom such a commission is held not
+being supposed to have the use of their reason, any notice of the
+petition is unnecessary. The duty of the Court chiefly consists in
+verifying the allegations of the petitioner.”
+
+“Nothing can be fairer,” replied the Marquis. “Well, then, monsieur, be
+so good as to tell me what I ought to do----”
+
+“You have only to answer my questions, omitting nothing. However
+delicate the reasons may be which may have led you to act in such a
+manner as to give Madame d’Espard a pretext for her petition, speak
+without fear. It is unnecessary to assure you that lawyers know their
+duties, and that in such cases the profoundest secrecy----”
+
+“Monsieur,” said the Marquis, whose face expressed the sincerest pain,
+“if my explanations should lead to any blame being attached to Madame
+d’Espard’s conduct, what will be the result?”
+
+“The Court may add its censure to its reasons for its decision.”
+
+“Is such censure optional? If I were to stipulate with you, before
+replying, that nothing should be said that could annoy Madame d’Espard
+in the event of your report being in my favor, would the Court take my
+request into consideration?”
+
+The judge looked at the Marquis, and the two men exchanged sentiments of
+equal magnanimity.
+
+“Noel,” said Popinot to his registrar, “go into the other room. If you
+can be of use, I will call you in.--If, as I am inclined to think,” he
+went on, speaking to the Marquis when the clerk had gone out, “I find
+that there is some misunderstanding in this case, I can promise you,
+monsieur, that on your application the Court will act with due courtesy.
+
+“There is a leading fact put forward by Madame d’Espard, the most
+serious of all, of which I must beg for an explanation,” said the judge
+after a pause. “It refers to the dissipation of your fortune to the
+advantage of a certain Madame Jeanrenaud, the widow of a bargemaster--or
+rather, to that of her son, Colonel Jeanrenaud, for whom you are said to
+have procured an appointment, to have exhausted your influence with the
+King, and at last to have extended such protection as secures him a good
+marriage. The petition suggests that such a friendship is more devoted
+than any feelings, even those which morality must disapprove----”
+
+A sudden flush crimsoned the Marquis’ face and forehead, tears even
+started to his eyes, for his eyelashes were wet, then wholesome pride
+crushed the emotions, which in a man are accounted a weakness.
+
+“To tell you the truth, monsieur,” said the Marquis, in a broken voice,
+“you place me in a strange dilemma. The motives of my conduct were to
+have died with me. To reveal them I must disclose to you some secret
+wounds, must place the honor of my family in your keeping, and must
+speak of myself, a delicate matter, as you will fully understand. I
+hope, monsieur, that it will all remain a secret between us. You will,
+no doubt, be able to find in the formulas of the law one which
+will allow of judgment being pronounced without any betrayal of my
+confidences.”
+
+“So far as that goes, it is perfectly possible, Monsieur le Marquis.”
+
+“Some time after my marriage,” said M. d’Espard, “my wife having run
+into considerable expenses, I was obliged to have recourse to borrowing.
+You know what was the position of noble families during the Revolution;
+I had not been able to keep a steward or a man of business. Nowadays
+gentlemen are for the most part obliged to manage their affairs
+themselves. Most of my title-deeds had been brought to Paris, from
+Languedoc, Provence, or le Comtat, by my father, who dreaded, and not
+without reason, the inquisition which family title-deeds, and what was
+then styled the ‘parchments’ of the privileged class, brought down on
+the owners.
+
+“Our name is Negrepelisse; d’Espard is a title acquired in the time of
+Henri IV. by a marriage which brought us the estates and titles of the
+house of d’Espard, on condition of our bearing an escutcheon of pretence
+on our coat-of-arms, those of the house of d’Espard, an old family of
+Bearn, connected in the female line with that of Albret: quarterly, paly
+of or and sable; and azure two griffins’ claws armed, gules in saltire,
+with the famous motto Des partem leonis. At the time of this alliance
+we lost Negrepelisse, a little town which was as famous during the
+religious struggles as was my ancestor who then bore the name. Captain
+de Negrepelisse was ruined by the burning of all his property, for the
+Protestants did not spare a friend of Montluc’s.
+
+“The Crown was unjust to M. de Negrepelisse; he received neither a
+marshal’s baton, nor a post as governor, nor any indemnity; King Charles
+IX., who was fond of him, died without being able to reward him; Henri
+IV. arranged his marriage with Mademoiselle d’Espard, and secured
+him the estates of that house, but all those of the Negrepelisses had
+already passed into the hands of his creditors.
+
+“My great-grandfather, the Marquis d’Espard, was, like me, placed early
+in life at the head of his family by the death of his father, who, after
+dissipating his wife’s fortune, left his son nothing but the entailed
+estates of the d’Espards, burdened with a jointure. The young Marquis
+was all the more straitened for money because he held a post at Court.
+Being in great favor with Louis XIV., the King’s goodwill brought him
+a fortune. But here, monsieur, a blot stained our escutcheon, an
+unconfessed and horrible stain of blood and disgrace which I am making
+it my business to wipe out. I discovered the secret among the deeds
+relating to the estate of Negrepelisse and the packets of letters.”
+
+At this solemn moment the Marquis spoke without hesitation or any of the
+repetition habitual with him; but it is a matter of common observation
+that persons who, in ordinary life, are afflicted with these two
+defects, are freed from them as soon as any passionate emotion underlies
+their speech.
+
+“The Revocation of the Edict of Nantes was decreed,” he went on. “You
+are no doubt aware, monsieur, that this was an opportunity for many
+favorites to make their fortunes. Louis XIV. bestowed on the magnates
+about his Court the confiscated lands of those Protestant families who
+did not take the prescribed steps for the sale of their property. Some
+persons in high favor went ‘Protestant-hunting,’ as the phrase was. I
+have ascertained beyond a doubt that the fortune enjoyed to this day by
+two ducal families is derived from lands seized from hapless merchants.
+
+“I will not attempt to explain to you, a man of law, all the manoeuvres
+employed to entrap the refugees who had large fortunes to carry away. It
+is enough to say that the lands of Negrepelisse, comprising twenty-two
+churches and rights over the town, and those of Gravenges which had
+formerly belonged to us, were at that time in the hands of a Protestant
+family. My grandfather recovered them by gift from Louis XIV. This gift
+was effected by documents hall-marked by atrocious iniquity. The owner
+of these two estates, thinking he would be able to return, had gone
+through the form of a sale, and was going to Switzerland to join his
+family, whom he had sent in advance. He wished, no doubt, to take
+advantage of every delay granted by the law, so as to settle the
+concerns of his business.
+
+“This man was arrested by order of the governor, the trustee confessed
+the truth, the poor merchant was hanged, and my ancestor had the two
+estates. I would gladly have been able to ignore the share he took in
+the plot; but the governor was his uncle on the mother’s side, and I
+have unfortunately read the letter in which he begged him to apply to
+Deodatus, the name agreed upon by the Court to designate the King. In
+this letter there is a tone of jocosity with reference to the victim,
+which filled me with horror. In the end, the sums of money sent by the
+refugee family to ransom the poor man were kept by the governor, who
+despatched the merchant all the same.”
+
+The Marquis paused, as though the memory of it were still too heavy for
+him to bear.
+
+“This unfortunate family were named Jeanrenaud,” he went on. “That name
+is enough to account for my conduct. I could never think without keen
+pain of the secret disgrace that weighed on my family. That fortune
+enabled my grandfather to marry a demoiselle de Navarreins-Lansac,
+heiress to the younger branch of that house, who were at that time much
+richer than the elder branch of the Navarreins. My father thus became
+one of the largest landowners in the kingdom. He was able to marry
+my mother, a Grandlieu of the younger branch. Though ill-gotten, this
+property has been singularly profitable.
+
+“For my part, being determined to remedy the mischief, I wrote
+to Switzerland, and knew no peace till I was on the traces of the
+Protestant victim’s heirs. At last I discovered that the Jeanrenauds,
+reduced to abject want, had left Fribourg and returned to live in
+France. Finally, I found a M. Jeanrenaud, lieutenant in a cavalry
+regiment under Napoleon, the sole heir of this unhappy family. In my
+eyes, monsieur, the rights of the Jeanrenauds were clear. To establish a
+prescriptive right is it not necessary that there should have been some
+possibility of proceeding against those who are in the enjoyment of it?
+To whom could these refugees have appealed? Their Court of Justice was
+on high, or rather, monsieur, it was here,” and the Marquis struck his
+hand on his heart. “I did not choose that my children should be able to
+think of me as I have thought of my father and of my ancestors. I aim at
+leaving them an unblemished inheritance and escutcheon. I did not choose
+that nobility should be a lie in my person. And, after all,
+politically speaking, ought those emigres who are now appealing
+against revolutionary confiscations, to keep the property derived from
+antecedent confiscations by positive crimes?
+
+“I found in M. Jeanrenaud and his mother the most perverse honesty; to
+hear them you would suppose that they were robbing me. In spite of all
+I could say, they will accept no more than the value of the lands at
+the time when the King bestowed them on my family. The price was settled
+between us at the sum of eleven hundred thousand francs, which I was
+to pay at my convenience and without interest. To achieve this I had
+to forego my income for a long time. And then, monsieur, began the
+destruction of some illusions I had allowed myself as to Madame
+d’Espard’s character. When I proposed to her that we should leave Paris
+and go into the country, where we could live respected on half of her
+income, and so more rapidly complete a restitution of which I spoke to
+her without going into the more serious details, Madame d’Espard treated
+me as a madman. I then understood my wife’s real character. She would
+have approved of my grandfather’s conduct without a scruple, and have
+laughed at the Huguenots. Terrified by her coldness, and her little
+affection for her children, whom she abandoned to me without regret,
+I determined to leave her the command of her fortune, after paying our
+common debts. It was no business of hers, as she told me, to pay for
+my follies. As I then had not enough to live on and pay for my sons’
+education, I determined to educate them myself, to make them gentlemen
+and men of feeling. By investing my money in the funds I have been
+enabled to pay off my obligation sooner than I had dared to hope, for
+I took advantage of the opportunities afforded by the improvement
+in prices. If I had kept four thousand francs a year for my boys and
+myself, I could only have paid off twenty thousand crowns a year, and it
+would have taken almost eighteen years to achieve my freedom. As it is,
+I have lately repaid the whole of the eleven hundred thousand
+francs that were due. Thus I enjoy the happiness of having made this
+restitution without doing my children the smallest wrong.
+
+“These, monsieur, are the reasons for the payments made to Madame
+Jeanrenaud and her son.”
+
+“So Madame d’Espard knew the motives of your retirement?” said the
+judge, controlling the emotion he felt at this narrative.
+
+“Yes, monsieur.”
+
+Popinot gave an expressive shrug; he rose and opened the door into the
+next room.
+
+“Noel, you can go,” said he to his clerk.
+
+“Monsieur,” he went on, “though what you have told me is enough to
+enlighten me thoroughly, I should like to hear what you have to say to
+the other facts put forward in the petition. For instance, you are here
+carrying on a business such as is not habitually undertaken by a man of
+rank.”
+
+“We cannot discuss that matter here,” said the Marquis, signing to the
+judge to quit the room. “Nouvion,” said he to the old man, “I am going
+down to my rooms; the children will soon be in; dine with us.”
+
+“Then, Monsieur le Marquis,” said Popinot on the stairs, “that is not
+your apartment?”
+
+“No, monsieur; I took those rooms for the office of this undertaking.
+You see,” and he pointed to an advertisement sheet, “the History is
+being brought out by one of the most respectable firms in Paris, and not
+by me.”
+
+The Marquis showed the lawyer into the ground-floor rooms, saying, “This
+is my apartment.”
+
+Popinot was quite touched by the poetry, not aimed at but pervading this
+dwelling. The weather was lovely, the windows were open, the air from
+the garden brought in a wholesome earthy smell, the sunshine brightened
+and gilded the woodwork, of a rather gloomy brown. At the sight Popinot
+made up his mind that a madman would hardly be capable of inventing the
+tender harmony of which he was at that moment conscious.
+
+“I should like just such an apartment,” thought he. “You think of
+leaving this part of town?” he inquired.
+
+“I hope so,” replied the Marquis. “But I shall remain till my younger
+son has finished his studies, and till the children’s character is
+thoroughly formed, before introducing them to the world and to their
+mother’s circle. Indeed, after giving them the solid information
+they possess, I intend to complete it by taking them to travel to
+the capitals of Europe, that they may see men and things, and become
+accustomed to speak the languages they have learned. And, monsieur,”
+ he went on, giving the judge a chair in the drawing-room, “I could not
+discuss the book on China with you, in the presence of an old friend of
+my family, the Comte de Nouvion, who, having emigrated, has returned
+to France without any fortune whatever, and who is my partner in this
+concern, less for my profit than his. Without telling him what my
+motives were, I explained to him that I was as poor as he, but that I
+had enough money to start a speculation in which he might be usefully
+employed. My tutor was the Abbe Grozier, whom Charles X. on my
+recommendation appointed Keeper of the Books at the Arsenal, which were
+returned to that Prince when he was still Monsieur. The Abbe Grozier was
+deeply learned with regard to China, its manners and customs; he made
+me heir to this knowledge at an age when it is difficult not to become a
+fanatic for the things we learn. At five-and-twenty I knew Chinese,
+and I confess I have never been able to check myself in an exclusive
+admiration for that nation, who conquered their conquerors, whose annals
+extend back indisputably to a period more remote than mythological or
+Bible times, who by their immutable institutions have preserved
+the integrity of their empire, whose monuments are gigantic, whose
+administration is perfect, among whom revolutions are impossible, who
+have regarded ideal beauty as a barren element in art, who have carried
+luxury and industry to such a pitch that we cannot outdo them in
+anything, while they are our equals in things where we believe ourselves
+superior.
+
+“Still, monsieur, though I often make a jest of comparing China with the
+present condition of European states, I am not a Chinaman, I am a French
+gentleman. If you entertain any doubts as to the financial side of this
+undertaking, I can prove to you that at this moment we have two
+thousand five hundred subscribers to this work, which is literary,
+iconographical, statistical, and religious; its importance has been
+generally appreciated; our subscribers belong to every nation in Europe,
+we have but twelve hundred in France. Our book will cost about three
+hundred francs, and the Comte de Nouvion will derive from it from six to
+seven thousand francs a year, for his comfort was the real motive of the
+undertaking. For my part, I aimed only at the possibility of affording
+my children some pleasures. The hundred thousand francs I have made,
+quite in spite of myself, will pay for their fencing lessons, horses,
+dress, and theatres, pay the masters who teach them accomplishments,
+procure them canvases to spoil, the books they may wish to buy, in
+short, all the little fancies which a father finds so much pleasure in
+gratifying. If I had been compelled to refuse these indulgences to my
+poor boys, who are so good and work so hard, the sacrifice I made to the
+honor of my name would have been doubly painful.
+
+“In point of fact, the twelve years I have spent in retirement from the
+world to educate my children have led to my being completely forgotten
+at Court. I have given up the career of politics; I have lost my
+historical fortune, and all the distinctions which I might have acquired
+and bequeathed to my children; but our house will have lost nothing;
+my boys will be men of mark. Though I have missed the senatorship, they
+will win it nobly by devoting themselves to the affairs of the country,
+and doing such service as is not soon forgotten. While purifying the
+past record of my family, I have insured it a glorious future; and is
+not that to have achieved a noble task, though in secret and without
+glory?--And now, monsieur, have you any other explanations to ask me?”
+
+At this instant the tramp of horses was heard in the courtyard.
+
+“Here they are!” said the Marquis. In a moment the two lads, fashionably
+but plainly dressed, came into the room, booted, spurred, and gloved,
+and flourishing their riding-whips. Their beaming faces brought in the
+freshness of the outer air; they were brilliant with health. They both
+grasped their father’s hand, giving him a look, as friends do, a glance
+of unspoken affection, and then they bowed coldly to the lawyer. Popinot
+felt that it was quite unnecessary to question the Marquis as to his
+relations towards his sons.
+
+“Have you enjoyed yourselves?” asked the Marquis.
+
+“Yes, father; I knocked down six dolls in twelve shots at the first
+trial!” cried Camille.
+
+“And where did you ride?”
+
+“In the Bois; we saw my mother.”
+
+“Did she stop?”
+
+“We were riding so fast just then that I daresay she did not see us,”
+ replied the young Count.
+
+“But, then, why did you not go to speak to her?”
+
+“I fancy I have noticed, father, that she does not care that we should
+speak to her in public,” said Clement in an undertone. “We are a little
+too big.”
+
+The judge’s hearing was keen enough to catch these words, which brought
+a cloud to the Marquis’ brow. Popinot took pleasure in contemplating the
+picture of the father and his boys. His eyes went back with a sense
+of pathos to M. d’Espard’s face; his features, his expression, and his
+manner all expressed honesty in its noblest aspect, intellectual and
+chivalrous honesty, nobility in all its beauty.
+
+“You--you see, monsieur,” said the Marquis, and his hesitation had
+returned, “you see that Justice may look in--in here at any time--yes,
+at any time--here. If there is anybody crazy, it can only be the
+children--the children--who are a little crazy about their father,
+and the father who is very crazy about his children--but that sort of
+madness rings true.”
+
+At this juncture Madame Jeanrenaud’s voice was heard in the ante-room,
+and the good woman came bustling in, in spite of the man-servant’s
+remonstrances.
+
+“I take no roundabout ways, I can tell you!” she exclaimed. “Yes,
+Monsieur le Marquis, I want to speak to you, this very minute,” she went
+on, with a comprehensive bow to the company. “By George, and I am too
+late as it is, since Monsieur the criminal Judge is before me.”
+
+“Criminal!” cried the two boys.
+
+“Good reason why I did not find you at your own house, since you are
+here. Well, well! the Law is always to the fore when there is mischief
+brewing.--I came, Monsieur le Marquis, to tell you that my son and I are
+of one mind to give you everything back, since our honor is threatened.
+My son and I, we had rather give you back everything than cause you
+the smallest trouble. My word, they must be as stupid as pans without
+handles to call you a lunatic----”
+
+“A lunatic! My father?” exclaimed the boys, clinging to the Marquis.
+“What is this?”
+
+“Silence, madame,” said Popinot.
+
+“Children, leave us,” said the Marquis.
+
+The two boys went into the garden without a word, but very much alarmed.
+
+“Madame,” said the judge, “the moneys paid to you by Monsieur le Marquis
+were legally due, though given to you in virtue of a very far-reaching
+theory of honesty. If all the people possessed of confiscated goods, by
+whatever cause, even if acquired by treachery, were compelled to make
+restitution every hundred and fifty years, there would be few legitimate
+owners in France. The possessions of Jacques Coeur enriched twenty noble
+families; the confiscations pronounced by the English to the advantage
+of their adherents at the time when they held a part of France made the
+fortune of several princely houses.
+
+“Our law allows M. d’Espard to dispose of his income without accounting
+for it, or suffering him to be accused of its misapplication. A
+Commission in Lunacy can only be granted when a man’s actions are devoid
+of reason; but in this case, the remittances made to you have a reason
+based on the most sacred and most honorable motives. Hence you may keep
+it all without remorse, and leave the world to misinterpret a noble
+action. In Paris, the highest virtue is the object of the foulest
+calumny. It is, unfortunately, the present condition of society that
+makes the Marquis’ actions sublime. For the honor of my country, I would
+that such deeds were regarded as a matter of course; but, as things are,
+I am forced by comparison to look upon M. d’Espard as a man to whom a
+crown should be awarded, rather than that he should be threatened with a
+Commission in Lunacy.
+
+“In the course of a long professional career, I have seen and heard
+nothing that has touched me more deeply than that I have just seen and
+heard. But it is not extraordinary that virtue should wear its noblest
+aspect when it is practised by men of the highest class.
+
+“Having heard me express myself in this way, I hope, Monsieur le
+Marquis, that you feel certain of my silence, and that you will not
+for a moment be uneasy as to the decision pronounced in the case--if it
+comes before the Court.”
+
+“There, now! Well said,” cried Madame Jeanrenaud. “That is something
+like a judge! Look here, my dear sir, I would hug you if I were not so
+ugly; you speak like a book.”
+
+The Marquis held out his hand to Popinot, who gently pressed it with
+a look full of sympathetic comprehension at this great man in private
+life, and the Marquis responded with a pleasant smile. These two
+natures, both so large and full--one commonplace but divinely kind, the
+other lofty and sublime--had fallen into unison gently, without a jar,
+without a flash of passion, as though two pure lights had been merged
+into one. The father of a whole district felt himself worthy to grasp
+the hand of this man who was doubly noble, and the Marquis felt in the
+depths of his soul an instinct that told him that the judge’s hand
+was one of those from which the treasures of inexhaustible beneficence
+perennially flow.
+
+“Monsieur le Marquis,” added Popinot, with a bow, “I am happy to be able
+to tell you that, from the first words of this inquiry, I regarded my
+clerk as quite unnecessary.”
+
+He went close to M. d’Espard, led him into the window-bay, and said: “It
+is time that you should return home, monsieur. I believe that Madame la
+Marquise has acted in this matter under an influence which you ought at
+once to counteract.”
+
+Popinot withdrew. He looked back several times as he crossed the
+courtyard, touched by the recollection of the scene. It was one of those
+which take root in the memory to blossom again in certain hours when the
+soul seeks consolation.
+
+“Those rooms would just suit me,” said he to himself as he reached home.
+“If M. d’Espard leaves them, I will take up his lease.”
+
+
+
+The next day, at about ten in the morning, Popinot, who had written out
+his report the previous evening, made his way to the Palais de Justice,
+intending to have prompt and righteous justice done. As he went to the
+robing-room to put on his gown and bands, the usher told him that the
+President of his Court begged him to attend in his private room, where
+he was waiting for him. Popinot forthwith obeyed.
+
+“Good-morning, my dear Popinot,” said the President, “I have been
+waiting for you.”
+
+“Why, Monsieur le President, is anything wrong?”
+
+“A mere silly trifle,” said the President. “The Keeper of the Seals,
+with whom I had the honor of dining yesterday, led me apart into a
+corner. He had heard that you had been to tea with Madame d’Espard, in
+whose case you were employed to make inquiries. He gave me to understand
+that it would be as well that you should not sit on this case----”
+
+“But, Monsieur le President, I can prove that I left Madame d’Espard’s
+house at the moment when tea was brought in. And my conscience----”
+
+“Yes, yes; the whole Bench, the two Courts, all the profession know you.
+I need not repeat what I said about you to his Eminence; but, you know,
+‘Caesar’s wife must not be suspected.’ So we shall not make this
+foolish trifle a matter of discipline, but only of proprieties. Between
+ourselves, it is not on your account, but on that of the Bench.”
+
+“But, monsieur, if you only knew the kind of woman----” said the judge,
+trying to pull his report out of his pocket.
+
+“I am perfectly certain that you have proceeded in this matter with the
+strictest independence of judgment. I myself, in the provinces, have
+often taken more than a cup of tea with the people I had to try; but the
+fact that the Keeper of the Seals should have mentioned it, and that you
+might be talked about, is enough to make the Court avoid any discussion
+of the matter. Any conflict with public opinion must always be dangerous
+for a constitutional body, even when the right is on its side against
+the public, because their weapons are not equal. Journalism may say or
+suppose anything, and our dignity forbids us even to reply. In fact,
+I have spoken of the matter to your President, and M. Camusot has been
+appointed in your place on your retirement, which you will signify.
+It is a family matter, so to speak. And I now beg you to signify your
+retirement from the case as a personal favor. To make up, you will get
+the Cross of the Legion of Honor, which has so long been due to you. I
+make that my business.”
+
+When he saw M. Camusot, a judge recently called to Paris from a
+provincial Court of the same class, as he went forward bowing to the
+Judge and the President, Popinot could not repress an ironical smile.
+This pale, fair young man, full of covert ambition, looked ready to hang
+and unhang, at the pleasure of any earthy king, the innocent and the
+guilty alike, and to follow the example of a Laubardemont rather than
+that of a Mole.
+
+Popinot withdrew with a bow; he scorned to deny the lying accusation
+that had been brought against him.
+
+
+PARIS, February 1836.
+
+
+
+
+ADDENDUM
+
+The following personages appear in other stories of the Human Comedy.
+
+Note: The Commission in Lunacy is also known as The Interdiction and is
+referred to by that title in certain of the addendums.
+
+   Bianchon, Horace
+     Father Goriot
+     The Atheist’s Mass
+     Cesar Birotteau
+     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
+
+   Bordin
+     The Gondreville Mystery
+     The Seamy Side of History
+     Jealousies of a Country Town
+
+   Camusot de Marville
+     Cousin Pons
+     Jealousies of a Country Town
+     Scenes from a Cuortesan’s Life
+
+   Desroches (son)
+     A Bachelor’s Establishment
+     Colonel Chabert
+     A Start in Life
+     A Woman of Thirty
+     The Government Clerks
+     A Distinguished Provincial at Paris
+     Scenes from a Courtesan’s Life
+     The Firm of Nucingen
+     A Man of Business
+     The Middle Classes
+
+   Espard, Charles-Maurice-Marie-Andoche, Comte de Negrepelisse, Marquis d’
+     Scenes from a Courtesan’s Life
+
+   Espard, Chevalier d’
+     Scenes from a Courtesan’s Life
+     The Secrets of a Princess
+
+   Espard, Jeanne-Clementine-Athenais de Blamont-Chauvry, Marquise d’
+     A Distinguished Provincial at Paris
+     Scenes from a Courtesan’s Life
+     Letters of Two Brides
+     Another Study of Woman
+     The Gondreville Mystery
+     The Secrets of a Princess
+     A Daughter of Eve
+     Beatrix
+
+   Godeschal, Francois-Claude-Marie
+     Colonel Chabert
+     A Bachelor’s Establishment
+     A Start in Life
+     The Middle Classes
+     Cousin Pons
+
+   Grozier, Abbe
+     Lost Illusions
+
+   Jeanrenaud
+     Albert Savarus
+
+   Mongenod, Frederic
+     The Seamy Side of History
+
+   Negrepelisse, De
+     Lost Illusions
+     A Distinguished Provincial at Paris
+
+   Nucingen, Baronne Delphine de
+     Father Goriot
+     The Thirteen
+     Eugenie Grandet
+     Cesar Birotteau
+     Melmoth Reconciled
+     Lost Illusions
+     A Distinguished Provincial at Paris
+     Scenes from a Courtesan’s Life
+     Modeste Mignon
+     The Firm of Nucingen
+     Another Study of Woman
+     A Daughter of Eve
+     The Member for Arcis
+
+   Popinot, Jean-Jules
+     Cesar Birotteau
+     Honorine
+     The Seamy Side of History
+     The Middle Classes
+
+   Rabourdin, Madame
+     The Government Clerks
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg’s The Commission in Lunacy, by Honore de Balzac
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 1410 ***