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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Z. Marcas, by Honore de Balzac
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Z. Marcas
+
+Author: Honore de Balzac
+
+Translator: Clara Bell and Others
+
+Release Date: August, 1999  [Etext #1841]
+Posting Date: March 3, 2010
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK Z. MARCAS ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by John Bickers, and Dagny
+
+
+
+
+
+Z. MARCAS
+
+
+By Honore De Balzac
+
+
+
+Translated by Clara Bell and Others
+
+
+
+
+                             DEDICATION
+
+  To His Highness Count William of Wurtemberg, as a token of the
+  Author's respectful gratitude.
+
+                                                      DE BALZAC.
+
+
+
+
+
+Z. MARCAS
+
+
+I never saw anybody, not even among the most remarkable men of the
+day, whose appearance was so striking as this man's; the study of his
+countenance at first gave me a feeling of great melancholy, and at last
+produced an almost painful impression.
+
+There was a certain harmony between the man and his name. The Z.
+preceding Marcas, which was seen on the addresses of his letters, and
+which he never omitted from his signature, as the last letter of the
+alphabet, suggested some mysterious fatality.
+
+MARCAS! say this two-syllabled name again and again; do you not feel as
+if it had some sinister meaning? Does it not seem to you that its owner
+must be doomed to martyrdom? Though foreign, savage, the name has a
+right to be handed down to posterity; it is well constructed, easily
+pronounced, and has the brevity that beseems a famous name. Is it not
+pleasant as well as odd? But does it not sound unfinished?
+
+I will not take it upon myself to assert that names have no influence on
+the destiny of men. There is a certain secret and inexplicable concord
+or a visible discord between the events of a man's life and his name
+which is truly surprising; often some remote but very real correlation
+is revealed. Our globe is round; everything is linked to everything
+else. Some day perhaps we shall revert to the occult sciences.
+
+Do you not discern in that letter Z an adverse influence? Does it not
+prefigure the wayward and fantastic progress of a storm-tossed life?
+What wind blew on that letter, which, whatever language we find it in,
+begins scarcely fifty words? Marcas' name was Zephirin; Saint Zephirin
+is highly venerated in Brittany, and Marcas was a Breton.
+
+Study the name once more: Z Marcas! The man's whole life lies in this
+fantastic juxtaposition of seven letters; seven! the most significant of
+all the cabalistic numbers. And he died at five-and-thirty, so his life
+extended over seven lustres.
+
+Marcas! Does it not hint of some precious object that is broken with a
+fall, with or without a crash?
+
+
+
+I had finished studying the law in Paris in 1836. I lived at that time
+in the Rue Corneille in a house where none but students came to lodge,
+one of those large houses where there is a winding staircase quite at
+the back lighted below from the street, higher up by borrowed
+lights, and at the top by a skylight. There were forty furnished
+rooms--furnished as students' rooms are! What does youth demand more
+than was here supplied? A bed, a few chairs, a chest of drawers, a
+looking-glass, and a table. As soon as the sky is blue the student opens
+his window.
+
+But in this street there are no fair neighbors to flirt with. In front
+is the Odeon, long since closed, presenting a wall that is beginning to
+go black, its tiny gallery windows and its vast expanse of slate roof.
+I was not rich enough to have a good room; I was not even rich enough
+to have a room to myself. Juste and I shared a double-bedded room on the
+fifth floor.
+
+On our side of the landing there were but two rooms--ours and a smaller
+one, occupied by Z. Marcas, our neighbor. For six months Juste and I
+remained in perfect ignorance of the fact. The old woman who managed the
+house had indeed told us that the room was inhabited, but she had added
+that we should not be disturbed, that the occupant was exceedingly
+quiet. In fact, for those six months, we never met our fellow-lodger,
+and we never heard a sound in his room, in spite of the thinness of the
+partition that divided us--one of those walls of lath and plaster which
+are common in Paris houses.
+
+Our room, a little over seven feet high, was hung with a vile cheap
+paper sprigged with blue. The floor was painted, and knew nothing of
+the polish given by the _frotteur's_ brush. By our beds there was only
+a scrap of thin carpet. The chimney opened immediately to the roof, and
+smoked so abominably that we were obliged to provide a stove at our own
+expense. Our beds were mere painted wooden cribs like those in schools;
+on the chimney shelf there were but two brass candlesticks, with or
+without tallow candles in them, and our two pipes with some tobacco in a
+pouch or strewn abroad, also the little piles of cigar-ash left there by
+our visitors or ourselves.
+
+A pair of calico curtains hung from the brass window rods, and on each
+side of the window was a small bookcase in cherry-wood, such as every
+one knows who has stared into the shop windows of the Quartier Latin,
+and in which we kept the few books necessary for our studies.
+
+The ink in the inkstand was always in the state of lava congealed in the
+crater of a volcano. May not any inkstand nowadays become a Vesuvius?
+The pens, all twisted, served to clean the stems of our pipes; and, in
+opposition to all the laws of credit, paper was even scarcer than coin.
+
+How can young men be expected to stay at home in such furnished
+lodgings? The students studied in the cafes, the theatre, the Luxembourg
+gardens, in _grisettes'_ rooms, even in the law schools--anywhere rather
+than in their horrible rooms--horrible for purposes of study, delightful
+as soon as they were used for gossiping and smoking in. Put a cloth on
+the table, and the impromptu dinner sent in from the best eating-house
+in the neighborhood--places for four--two of them in petticoats--show
+a lithograph of this "Interior" to the veriest bigot, and she will be
+bound to smile.
+
+We thought only of amusing ourselves. The reason for our dissipation lay
+in the most serious facts of the politics of the time. Juste and I could
+not see any room for us in the two professions our parents wished us to
+take up. There are a hundred doctors, a hundred lawyers, for one that is
+wanted. The crowd is choking these two paths which are supposed to lead
+to fortune, but which are merely two arenas; men kill each other there,
+fighting, not indeed with swords or fire-arms, but with intrigue and
+calumny, with tremendous toil, campaigns in the sphere of the intellect
+as murderous as those in Italy were to the soldiers of the Republic. In
+these days, when everything is an intellectual competition, a man must
+be able to sit forty-eight hours on end in his chair before a table, as
+a General could remain for two days on horseback and in his saddle.
+
+The throng of aspirants has necessitated a division of the Faculty of
+Medicine into categories. There is the physician who writes and the
+physician who practises, the political physician, and the physician
+militant--four different ways of being a physician, four classes already
+filled up. As to the fifth class, that of physicians who sell remedies,
+there is such a competition that they fight each other with disgusting
+advertisements on the walls of Paris.
+
+In all the law courts there are almost as many lawyers as there are
+cases. The pleader is thrown back on journalism, on politics, on
+literature. In fact, the State, besieged for the smallest appointments
+under the law, has ended by requiring that the applicants should
+have some little fortune. The pear-shaped head of the grocer's son is
+selected in preference to the square skull of a man of talent who has
+not a sou. Work as he will, with all his energy, a young man, starting
+from zero, may at the end of ten years find himself below the point
+he set out from. In these days, talent must have the good luck which
+secures success to the most incapable; nay, more, if it scorns the base
+compromises which insure advancement to crawling mediocrity, it will
+never get on.
+
+If we thoroughly knew our time, we also knew ourselves, and we preferred
+the indolence of dreamers to aimless stir, easy-going pleasure to the
+useless toil which would have exhausted our courage and worn out the
+edge of our intelligence. We had analyzed social life while smoking,
+laughing, and loafing. But, though elaborated by such means as these,
+our reflections were none the less judicious and profound.
+
+While we were fully conscious of the slavery to which youth is
+condemned, we were amazed at the brutal indifference of the authorities
+to everything connected with intellect, thought, and poetry. How often
+have Juste and I exchanged glances when reading the papers as we studied
+political events, or the debates in the Chamber, and discussed the
+proceedings of a Court whose wilful ignorance could find no parallel but
+in the platitude of the courtiers, the mediocrity of the men forming
+the hedge round the newly-restored throne, all alike devoid of talent or
+breadth of view, of distinction or learning, of influence or dignity!
+
+Could there be a higher tribute to the Court of Charles X. than the
+present Court, if Court it may be called? What a hatred of the country
+may be seen in the naturalization of vulgar foreigners, devoid of
+talent, who are enthroned in the Chamber of Peers! What a perversion of
+justice! What an insult to the distinguished youth, the ambitions native
+to the soil of France! We looked upon these things as upon a spectacle,
+and groaned over them, without taking upon ourselves to act.
+
+Juste, whom no one ever sought, and who never sought any one, was, at
+five-and-twenty, a great politician, a man with a wonderful aptitude for
+apprehending the correlation between remote history and the facts of the
+present and of the future. In 1831, he told me exactly what would and
+did happen--the murders, the conspiracies, the ascendency of the Jews,
+the difficulty of doing anything in France, the scarcity of talent in
+the higher circles, and the abundance of intellect in the lowest ranks,
+where the finest courage is smothered under cigar ashes.
+
+What was to become of him? His parents wished him to be a doctor. But if
+he were a doctor, must he not wait twenty years for a practice? You
+know what he did? No? Well, he is a doctor; but he left France, he is in
+Asia. At this moment he is perhaps sinking under fatigue in a desert, or
+dying of the lashes of a barbarous horde--or perhaps he is some Indian
+prince's prime minister.
+
+Action is my vocation. Leaving a civil college at the age of twenty, the
+only way for me to enter the army was by enlisting as a common soldier;
+so, weary of the dismal outlook that lay before a lawyer, I acquired the
+knowledge needed for a sailor. I imitate Juste, and keep out of France,
+where men waste, in the struggle to make way, the energy needed for the
+noblest works. Follow my example, friends; I am going where a man steers
+his destiny as he pleases.
+
+These great resolutions were formed in the little room in the
+lodging-house in the Rue Corneille, in spite of our haunting the Bal
+Musard, flirting with girls of the town, and leading a careless and
+apparently reckless life. Our plans and arguments long floated in the
+air.
+
+Marcas, our neighbor, was in some degree the guide who led us to the
+margin of the precipice or the torrent, who made us sound it, and showed
+us beforehand what our fate would be if we let ourselves fall into it.
+It was he who put us on our guard against the time-bargains a man
+makes with poverty under the sanction of hope, by accepting precarious
+situations whence he fights the battle, carried along by the devious
+tide of Paris--that great harlot who takes you up or leaves you
+stranded, smiles or turns her back on you with equal readiness, wears
+out the strongest will in vexatious waiting, and makes misfortune wait
+on chance.
+
+
+
+At our first meeting, Marcas, as it were, dazzled us. On our return from
+the schools, a little before the dinner-hour, we were accustomed to go
+up to our room and remain there a while, either waiting for the other,
+to learn whether there were any change in our plans for the evening. One
+day, at four o'clock, Juste met Marcas on the stairs, and I saw him in
+the street. It was in the month of November, and Marcas had no cloak;
+he wore shoes with heavy soles, corduroy trousers, and a blue
+double-breasted coat buttoned to the throat, which gave a military air
+to his broad chest, all the more so because he wore a black stock. The
+costume was not in itself extraordinary, but it agreed well with the
+man's mien and countenance.
+
+My first impression on seeing him was neither surprise, nor distress,
+nor interest, nor pity, but curiosity mingled with all these feelings.
+He walked slowly, with a step that betrayed deep melancholy, his head
+forward with a stoop, but not bent like that of a conscience-stricken
+man. That head, large and powerful, which might contain the treasures
+necessary for a man of the highest ambition, looked as if it were loaded
+with thought; it was weighted with grief of mind, but there was no touch
+of remorse in his expression. As to his face, it may be summed up in
+a word. A common superstition has it that every human countenance
+resembles some animal. The animal for Marcas was the lion. His hair was
+like a mane, his nose was sort and flat; broad and dented at the tip
+like a lion's; his brow, like a lion's, was strongly marked with a
+deep median furrow, dividing two powerful bosses. His high, hairy
+cheek-bones, all the more prominent because his cheeks were so thin,
+his enormous mouth and hollow jaws, were accentuated by lines of tawny
+shadows. This almost terrible countenance seemed illuminated by two
+lamps--two eyes, black indeed, but infinitely sweet, calm and deep, full
+of thought. If I may say so, those eyes had a humiliated expression.
+
+Marcas was afraid of looking directly at others, not for himself, but
+for those on whom his fascinating gaze might rest; he had a power, and
+he shunned using it; he would spare those he met, and he feared notice.
+This was not from modesty, but from resignation founded on reason, which
+had demonstrated the immediate inutility of his gifts, the impossibility
+of entering and living in the sphere for which he was fitted. Those eyes
+could at times flash lightnings. From those lips a voice of thunder must
+surely proceed; it was a mouth like Mirabeau's.
+
+"I have seen such a grand fellow in the street," said I to Juste on
+coming in.
+
+"It must be our neighbor," replied Juste, who described, in fact, the
+man I had just met. "A man who lives like a wood-louse would be sure to
+look like that," he added.
+
+"What dejection and what dignity!"
+
+"One is the consequence of the other."
+
+"What ruined hopes! What schemes and failures!"
+
+"Seven leagues of ruins! Obelisks--palaces--towers!--The ruins of
+Palmyra in the desert!" said Juste, laughing.
+
+So we called him the Ruins of Palmyra.
+
+As we went out to dine at the wretched eating-house in the Rue de la
+Harpe to which we subscribed, we asked the name of Number 37, and then
+heard the weird name Z. Marcas. Like boys, as we were, we repeated
+it more than a hundred times with all sorts of comments, absurd or
+melancholy, and the name lent itself to a jest. Juste would fire off the
+Z like a rocket rising, _z-z-z-z-zed_; and after pronouncing the first
+syllable of the name with great importance, depicted a fall by the dull
+brevity of the second.
+
+"Now, how and where does the man live?"
+
+From this query, to the innocent espionage of curiosity there was no
+pause but that required for carrying out our plan. Instead of loitering
+about the streets, we both came in, each armed with a novel. We read
+with our ears open. And in the perfect silence of our attic rooms, we
+heard the even, dull sound of a sleeping man breathing.
+
+"He is asleep," said I to Juste, noticing this fact.
+
+"At seven o'clock!" replied the Doctor.
+
+This was the name by which I called Juste, and he called me the Keeper
+of the Seals.
+
+"A man must be wretched indeed to sleep as much as our neighbor!" cried
+I, jumping on to the chest of drawers with a knife in my hand, to which
+a corkscrew was attached.
+
+I made a round hole at the top of the partition, about as big as a
+five-sou piece. I had forgotten that there would be no light in the
+room, and on putting my eye to the hole, I saw only darkness. At about
+one in the morning, when we had finished our books and were about to
+undress, we heard a noise in our neighbor's room. He got up, struck a
+match, and lighted his dip. I got on to the drawers again, and I then
+saw Marcas seated at his table and copying law-papers.
+
+His room was about half the size of ours; the bed stood in a recess by
+the door, for the passage ended there, and its breadth was added to
+his garret; but the ground on which the house was built was evidently
+irregular, for the party-wall formed an obtuse angle, and the room was
+not square. There was no fireplace, only a small earthenware stove,
+white blotched with green, of which the pipe went up through the roof.
+The window, in the skew side of the room, had shabby red curtains. The
+furniture consisted of an armchair, a table, a chair, and a wretched
+bed-table. A cupboard in the wall held his clothes. The wall-paper was
+horrible; evidently only a servant had ever been lodged there before
+Marcas.
+
+"What is to be seen?" asked the Doctor as I got down.
+
+"Look for yourself," said I.
+
+At nine next morning, Marcas was in bed. He had breakfasted off a
+saveloy; we saw on a plate, with some crumbs of bread, the remains of
+that too familiar delicacy. He was asleep; he did not wake till eleven.
+He then set to work again on the copy he had begun the night before,
+which was lying on the table.
+
+On going downstairs we asked the price of that room, and were told
+fifteen francs a month.
+
+In the course of a few days, we were fully informed as to the mode of
+life of Z. Marcas. He did copying, at so much a sheet no doubt, for a
+law-writer who lived in the courtyard of the Sainte-Chapelle. He worked
+half the night; after sleeping from six till ten, he began again and
+wrote till three. Then he went out to take the copy home before dinner,
+which he ate at Mizerai's in the Rue Michel-le-Comte, at a cost of nine
+sous, and came in to bed at six o'clock. It became known to us that
+Marcas did not utter fifteen sentences in a month; he never talked to
+anybody, nor said a word to himself in his dreadful garret.
+
+"The Ruins of Palmyra are terribly silent!" said Juste.
+
+This taciturnity in a man whose appearance was so imposing was strangely
+significant. Sometimes when we met him, we exchanged glances full of
+meaning on both sides, but they never led to any advances. Insensibly
+this man became the object of our secret admiration, though we knew no
+reason for it. Did it lie in his secretly simple habits, his monastic
+regularity, his hermit-like frugality, his idiotically mechanical labor,
+allowing his mind to remain neuter or to work on his own lines, seeming
+to us to hint at an expectation of some stroke of good luck, or at some
+foregone conclusion as to his life?
+
+After wandering for a long time among the Ruins of Palmyra, we forgot
+them--we were young! Then came the Carnival, the Paris Carnival,
+which, henceforth, will eclipse the old Carnival of Venice, unless some
+ill-advised Prefect of Police is antagonistic.
+
+Gambling ought to be allowed during the Carnival; but the stupid
+moralists who have had gambling suppressed are inert financiers, and
+this indispensable evil will be re-established among us when it is
+proved that France leaves millions at the German tables.
+
+This splendid Carnival brought us to utter penury, as it does every
+student. We got rid of every object of luxury; we sold our second coats,
+our second boots, our second waistcoats--everything of which we had a
+duplicate, except our friend. We ate bread and cold sausages; we looked
+where we walked; we had set to work in earnest. We owed two months'
+rent, and were sure of having a bill from the porter for sixty or eighty
+items each, and amounting to forty or fifty francs. We made no noise,
+and did not laugh as we crossed the little hall at the bottom of the
+stairs; we commonly took it at a flying leap from the lowest step into
+the street. On the day when we first found ourselves bereft of tobacco
+for our pipes, it struck us that for some days we had been eating bread
+without any kind of butter.
+
+Great was our distress.
+
+"No tobacco!" said the Doctor.
+
+"No cloak!" said the Keeper of the Seals.
+
+"Ah, you rascals, you would dress as the postillion de Longjumeau, you
+would appear as Debardeurs, sup in the morning, and breakfast at night
+at Very's--sometimes even at the _Rocher de Cancale_.--Dry bread for
+you, my boys! Why," said I, in a big bass voice, "you deserve to sleep
+under the bed, you are not worthy to lie in it--"
+
+"Yes, yes; but, Keeper of the Seals, there is no more tobacco!" said
+Juste.
+
+"It is high time to write home, to our aunts, our mothers, and our
+sisters, to tell them we have no underlinen left, that the wear and
+tear of Paris would ruin garments of wire. Then we will solve an elegant
+chemical problem by transmuting linen into silver."
+
+"But we must live till we get the answer."
+
+"Well, I will go and bring out a loan among such of our friends as may
+still have some capital to invest."
+
+"And how much will you find?"
+
+"Say ten francs!" replied I with pride.
+
+It was midnight. Marcas had heard everything. He knocked at our door.
+
+"Messieurs," said he, "here is some tobacco; you can repay me on the
+first opportunity."
+
+We were struck, not by the offer, which we accepted, but by the rich,
+deep, full voice in which it was made; a tone only comparable to the
+lowest string of Paganini's violin. Marcas vanished without waiting for
+our thanks.
+
+Juste and I looked at each other without a word. To be rescued by a man
+evidently poorer than ourselves! Juste sat down to write to every member
+of his family, and I went off to effect a loan. I brought in twenty
+francs lent me by a fellow-provincial. In that evil but happy day
+gambling was still tolerated, and in its lodes, as hard as the rocky ore
+of Brazil, young men, by risking a small sum, had a chance of winning a
+few gold pieces. My friend, too, had some Turkish tobacco brought home
+from Constantinople by a sailor, and he gave me quite as much as we had
+taken from Z. Marcas. I conveyed the splendid cargo into port, and
+we went in triumph to repay our neighbor with a tawny wig of Turkish
+tobacco for his dark _Caporal_.
+
+"You are determined not to be my debtors," said he. "You are giving me
+gold for copper.--You are boys--good boys----"
+
+The sentences, spoken in varying tones, were variously emphasized. The
+words were nothing, but the expression!--That made us friends of ten
+years' standing at once.
+
+Marcas, on hearing us coming, had covered up his papers; we understood
+that it would be taking a liberty to allude to his means of subsistence,
+and felt ashamed of having watched him. His cupboard stood open; in it
+there were two shirts, a white necktie and a razor. The razor made
+me shudder. A looking-glass, worth five francs perhaps, hung near the
+window.
+
+The man's few and simple movements had a sort of savage grandeur. The
+Doctor and I looked at each other, wondering what we could say in reply.
+Juste, seeing that I was speechless, asked Marcas jestingly:
+
+"You cultivate literature, monsieur?"
+
+"Far from it!" replied Marcas. "I should not be so wealthy."
+
+"I fancied," said I, "that poetry alone, in these days, was amply
+sufficient to provide a man with lodgings as bad as ours."
+
+My remark made Marcas smile, and the smile gave a charm to his yellow
+face.
+
+"Ambition is not a less severe taskmaster to those who fail," said he.
+"You, who are beginning life, walk in the beaten paths. Never dream of
+rising superior, you will be ruined!"
+
+"You advise us to stay just as we are?" said the Doctor, smiling.
+
+There is something so infectious and childlike in the pleasantries of
+youth, that Marcas smiled again in reply.
+
+"What incidents can have given you this detestable philosophy?" asked I.
+
+"I forgot once more that chance is the result of an immense equation of
+which we know not all the factors. When we start from zero to work up
+to the unit, the chances are incalculable. To ambitious men Paris is
+an immense roulette table, and every young man fancies he can hit on a
+successful progression of numbers."
+
+He offered us the tobacco I had brought that we might smoke with him;
+the Doctor went to fetch our pipes; Marcas filled his, and then he came
+to sit in our room, bringing the tobacco with him, since there were but
+two chairs in his. Juste, as brisk as a squirrel, ran out, and returned
+with a boy carrying three bottles of Bordeaux, some Brie cheese, and a
+loaf.
+
+"Hah!" said I to myself, "fifteen francs," and I was right to a sou.
+
+Juste gravely laid five francs on the chimney-shelf.
+
+There are immeasurable differences between the gregarious man and the
+man who lives closest to nature. Toussaint Louverture, after he was
+caught, died without speaking a word. Napoleon, transplanted to a rock,
+talked like a magpie--he wanted to account for himself. Z. Marcas erred
+in the same way, but for our benefit only. Silence in all its majesty is
+to be found only in the savage. There is never a criminal who, though he
+might let his secrets fall with his head into the basket of sawdust does
+not feel the purely social impulse to tell them to somebody.
+
+Nay, I am wrong. We have seen one Iroquois of the Faubourg Saint-Marceau
+who raised the Parisian to the level of the natural savage--a
+republican, a conspirator, a Frenchman, an old man, who outdid all we
+have heard of Negro determination, and all that Cooper tells us of
+the tenacity and coolness of the Redskins under defeat. Morey, the
+Guatimozin of the "Mountain," preserved an attitude unparalleled in the
+annals of European justice.
+
+
+
+This is what Marcas told us during the small hours, sandwiching his
+discourse with slices of bread spread with cheese and washed down with
+wine. All the tobacco was burned out. Now and then the hackney coaches
+clattering across the Place de l'Odeon, or the omnibuses toiling past,
+sent up their dull rumbling, as if to remind us that Paris was still
+close to us.
+
+His family lived at Vitre; his father and mother had fifteen hundred
+francs a year in the funds. He had received an education gratis in a
+Seminary, but had refused to enter the priesthood. He felt in himself
+the fires of immense ambition, and had come to Paris on foot at the age
+of twenty, the possessor of two hundred francs. He had studied the
+law, working in an attorney's office, where he had risen to be superior
+clerk. He had taken his doctor's degree in law, had mastered the old and
+modern codes, and could hold his own with the most famous pleaders. He
+had studied the law of nations, and was familiar with European treaties
+and international practice. He had studied men and things in five
+capitals--London, Berlin, Vienna, Petersburg, and Constantinople.
+
+No man was better informed than he as to the rules of the Chamber. For
+five years he had been reporter of the debates for a daily paper. He
+spoke extempore and admirably, and could go on for a long time in that
+deep, appealing voice which had struck us to the soul. Indeed, he proved
+by the narrative of his life that he was a great orator, a concise
+orator, serious and yet full of piercing eloquence; he resembled Berryer
+in his fervor and in the impetus which commands the sympathy of the
+masses, and was like Thiers in refinement and skill; but he would
+have been less diffuse, less in difficulties for a conclusion. He had
+intended to rise rapidly to power without burdening himself first with
+the doctrines necessary to begin with, for a man in opposition, but an
+incubus later to the statesman.
+
+Marcas had learned everything that a real statesman should know; indeed,
+his amazement was considerable when he had occasion to discern the utter
+ignorance of men who have risen to the administration of public affairs
+in France. Though in him it was vocation that had led to study, nature
+had been generous and bestowed all that cannot be acquired--keen
+perceptions, self-command, a nimble wit, rapid judgment, decisiveness,
+and, what is the genius of these men, fertility in resource.
+
+By the time when Marcas thought himself duly equipped, France was torn
+by intestine divisions arising from the triumph of the House of Orleans
+over the elder branch of the Bourbons.
+
+The field of political warfare is evidently changed. Civil war
+henceforth cannot last for long, and will not be fought out in the
+provinces. In France such struggles will be of brief duration and at
+the seat of government; and the battle will be the close of the moral
+contest which will have been brought to an issue by superior minds. This
+state of things will continue so long as France has her present singular
+form of government, which has no analogy with that of any other country;
+for there is no more resemblance between the English and the French
+constitutions than between the two lands.
+
+Thus Marcas' place was in the political press. Being poor and unable to
+secure his election, he hoped to make a sudden appearance. He resolved
+on making the greatest possible sacrifice for a man of superior
+intellect, to work as a subordinate to some rich and ambitious deputy.
+Like a second Bonaparte, he sought his Barras; the new Colbert hoped to
+find a Mazarin. He did immense services, and he did them then and there;
+he assumed no importance, he made no boast, he did not complain of
+ingratitude. He did them in the hope that his patron would put him in a
+position to be elected deputy; Marcas wished for nothing but a loan
+that might enable him to purchase a house in Paris, the qualification
+required by law. Richard III. asked for nothing but his horse.
+
+In three years Marcas had made his man--one of the fifty supposed great
+statesmen who are the battledores with which two cunning players toss
+the ministerial portfolios exactly as the man behind the puppet-show
+hits Punch against the constable in his street theatre, and counts on
+always getting paid. This man existed only by Marcas, but he had just
+brains enough to appreciate the value of his "ghost" and to know that
+Marcas, if he ever came to the front, would remain there, would be
+indispensable, while he himself would be translated to the polar zone of
+Luxembourg. So he determined to put insurmountable obstacles in the way
+of his Mentor's advancement, and hid his purpose under the semblance
+of the utmost sincerity. Like all mean men, he could dissimulate to
+perfection, and he soon made progress in the ways of ingratitude, for he
+felt that he must kill Marcas, not to be killed by him. These two men,
+apparently so united, hated each other as soon as one had deceived the
+other.
+
+The politician was made one of a ministry; Marcas remained in the
+opposition to hinder his man from being attacked; nay, by skilful
+tactics he won him the applause of the opposition. To excuse himself for
+not rewarding his subaltern, the chief pointed out the impossibility of
+finding a place suddenly for a man on the other side, without a great
+deal of manoeuvring. Marcas had hoped confidently for a place to enable
+him to marry, and thus acquire the qualification he so ardently desired.
+He was two-and-thirty, and the Chamber ere long must be dissolved.
+Having detected his man in this flagrant act of bad faith, he overthrew
+him, or at any rate contributed largely to his overthrow, and covered
+him with mud.
+
+A fallen minister, if he is to rise again to power, must show that he is
+to be feared; this man, intoxicated by Royal glibness, had fancied that
+his position would be permanent; he acknowledged his delinquencies;
+besides confessing them, he did Marcas a small money service, for Marcas
+had got into debt. He subsidized the newspaper on which Marcas worked,
+and made him the manager of it.
+
+Though he despised the man, Marcas, who, practically, was being
+subsidized too, consented to take the part of the fallen minister.
+Without unmasking at once all the batteries of his superior intellect,
+Marcas came a little further than before; he showed half his shrewdness.
+The Ministry lasted only a hundred and eighty days; it was swallowed
+up. Marcas had put himself into communication with certain deputies, had
+moulded them like dough, leaving each impressed with a high opinion of
+his talent; his puppet again became a member of the Ministry, and then
+the paper was ministerial. The Ministry united the paper with another,
+solely to squeeze out Marcas, who in this fusion had to make way for a
+rich and insolent rival, whose name was well known, and who already had
+his foot in the stirrup.
+
+Marcas relapsed into utter destitution; his haughty patron well knew the
+depths into which he had cast him.
+
+Where was he to go? The ministerial papers, privily warned, would have
+nothing to say to him. The opposition papers did not care to admit him
+to their offices. Marcas could side neither with the Republicans nor
+with the Legitimists, two parties whose triumph would mean the overthrow
+of everything that now is.
+
+"Ambitious men like a fast hold on things," said he with a smile.
+
+He lived by writing a few articles on commercial affairs, and
+contributed to one of those encyclopedias brought out by speculation and
+not by learning. Finally a paper was founded, which was destined to
+live but two years, but which secured his services. From that moment he
+renewed his connection with the minister's enemies; he joined the party
+who were working for the fall of the Government; and as soon as his
+pickaxe had free play, it fell.
+
+This paper had now for six months ceased to exist; he had failed to find
+employment of any kind; he was spoken of as a dangerous man, calumny
+attacked him; he had unmasked a huge financial and mercantile job by a
+few articles and a pamphlet. He was known to be a mouthpiece of a banker
+who was said to have paid him largely, and from whom he was supposed to
+expect some patronage in return for his championship. Marcas, disgusted
+by men and things, worn out by five years of fighting, regarded as a
+free lance rather than as a great leader, crushed by the necessity of
+earning his daily bread, which hindered him from gaining ground, in
+despair at the influence exerted by money over mind, and given over to
+dire poverty, buried himself in a garret, to make thirty sous a day, the
+sum strictly answering to his needs. Meditation had leveled a desert all
+round him. He read the papers to be informed of what was going on. Pozzo
+di Borgo had once lived like this for some time.
+
+Marcas, no doubt, was planning a serious attack, accustoming himself
+to dissimulation, and punishing himself for his blunders by Pythagorean
+muteness. But he did not tell us the reasons for his conduct.
+
+It is impossible to give you an idea of the scenes of the highest comedy
+that lay behind this algebraic statement of his career; his useless
+patience dogging the footsteps of fortune, which presently took wings,
+his long tramps over the thorny brakes of Paris, his breathless chases
+as a petitioner, his attempts to win over fools; the schemes laid only
+to fail through the influence of some frivolous woman; the meetings with
+men of business who expected their capital to bring them places and a
+peerage, as well as large interest. Then the hopes rising in a towering
+wave only to break in foam on the shoal; the wonders wrought in
+reconciling adverse interests which, after working together for a week,
+fell asunder; the annoyance, a thousand times repeated, of seeing a
+dunce decorated with the Legion of Honor, and preferred, though as
+ignorant as a shop-boy, to a man of talent. Then, what Marcas called the
+stratagems of stupidity--you strike a man, and he seems convinced, he
+nods his head--everything is settled; next day, this india-rubber ball,
+flattened for a moment, has recovered itself in the course of the night;
+it is as full of wind as ever; you must begin all over again; and you go
+on till you understand that you are not dealing with a man, but with a
+lump of gum that loses shape in the sunshine.
+
+These thousand annoyances, this vast waste of human energy on barren
+spots, the difficulty of achieving any good, the incredible facility of
+doing mischief; two strong games played out, twice won, and then twice
+lost; the hatred of a statesman--a blockhead with a painted face and a
+wig, but in whom the world believed--all these things, great and small,
+had not crushed, but for the moment had dashed Marcas. In the days when
+money had come into his hands, his fingers had not clutched it; he
+had allowed himself the exquisite pleasure of sending it all to his
+family--to his sisters, his brothers, his old father. Like Napoleon in
+his fall, he asked for no more than thirty sous a day, and any man of
+energy can earn thirty sous for a day's work in Paris.
+
+When Marcas had finished the story of his life, intermingled with
+reflections, maxims, and observations, revealing him as a great
+politician, a few questions and answers on both sides as to the progress
+of affairs in France and in Europe were enough to prove to us that he
+was a real statesman; for a man may be quickly and easily judged when
+he can be brought on to the ground of immediate difficulties: there is a
+certain Shibboleth for men of superior talents, and we were of the tribe
+of modern Levites without belonging as yet to the Temple. As I have
+said, our frivolity covered certain purposes which Juste has carried
+out, and which I am about to execute.
+
+When we had done talking, we all three went out, cold as it was, to walk
+in the Luxembourg gardens till the dinner hour. In the course of that
+walk our conversation, grave throughout, turned on the painful aspects
+of the political situation. Each of us contributed his remarks, his
+comment, or his jest, a pleasantry or a proverb. This was no longer
+exclusively a discussion of life on the colossal scale just described
+by Marcas, the soldier of political warfare. Nor was it the distressful
+monologue of the wrecked navigator, stranded in a garret in the Hotel
+Corneille; it was a dialogue in which two well-informed young men,
+having gauged the times they lived in, were endeavoring, under the
+guidance of a man of talent, to gain some light on their own future
+prospects.
+
+"Why," asked Juste, "did you not wait patiently for an opportunity,
+and imitate the only man who has been able to keep the lead since the
+Revolution of July by holding his head above water?"
+
+"Have I not said that we never know where the roots of chance lie?
+Carrell was in identically the same position as the orator you speak of.
+That gloomy young man, of a bitter spirit, had a whole government in
+his head; the man of whom you speak had no idea beyond mounting on the
+crupper of every event. Of the two, Carrel was the better man. Well,
+one becomes a minister, Carrel remained a journalist; the incomplete but
+craftier man is living; Carrel is dead.
+
+"I may point out that your man has for fifteen years been making his
+way, and is but making it still. He may yet be caught and crushed
+between two cars full of intrigues on the highroad to power. He has no
+house; he has not the favor of the palace like Metternich; nor, like
+Villele, the protection of a compact majority.
+
+"I do not believe that the present state of things will last ten years
+longer. Hence, supposing I should have such poor good luck, I am already
+too late to avoid being swept away by the commotion I foresee. I should
+need to be established in a superior position."
+
+"What commotion?" asked Juste.
+
+"AUGUST, 1830," said Marcas in solemn tones, holding out his hand
+towards Paris; "AUGUST, the offspring of Youth which bound the sheaves,
+and of Intellect which had ripened the harvest, forgot to provide for
+Youth and Intellect.
+
+"Youth will explode like the boiler of a steam-engine. Youth has
+no outlet in France; it is gathering an avalanche of underrated
+capabilities, of legitimate and restless ambitions; young men are not
+marrying now; families cannot tell what to do with their children. What
+will the thunderclap be that will shake down these masses? I know
+not, but they will crash down into the midst of things, and overthrow
+everything. These are laws of hydrostatics which act on the human race;
+the Roman Empire had failed to understand them, and the Barbaric hordes
+came down.
+
+"The Barbaric hordes now are the intelligent class. The laws of
+overpressure are at this moment acting slowly and silently in our midst.
+The Government is the great criminal; it does not appreciate the two
+powers to which it owes everything; it has allowed its hands to be tied
+by the absurdities of the Contract; it is bound, ready to be the victim.
+
+"Louis XIV., Napoleon, England, all were or are eager for intelligent
+youth. In France the young are condemned by the new legislation, by
+the blundering principles of elective rights, by the unsoundness of the
+ministerial constitution.
+
+"Look at the elective Chamber; you will find no deputies of thirty; the
+youth of Richelieu and of Mazarin, of Turenne and of Colbert, of Pitt
+and of Saint-Just, of Napoleon and of Prince Metternich, would find no
+admission there; Burke, Sheridan, or Fox could not win seats. Even if
+political majority had been fixed at one-and-twenty, and eligibility had
+been relieved of every disabling qualification, the Departments would
+have returned the very same members, men devoid of political talent,
+unable to speak without murdering French grammar, and among whom, in ten
+years, scarcely one statesman has been found.
+
+"The causes of an impending event may be seen, but the event itself
+cannot be foretold. At this moment the youth of France is being driven
+into Republicanism, because it believes that the Republic would bring it
+emancipation. It will always remember the young representatives of the
+people and the young army leaders! The imprudence of the Government is
+only comparable to its avarice."
+
+That day left its echoes in our lives. Marcas confirmed us in our
+resolution to leave France, where young men of talent and energy
+are crushed under the weight of successful commonplace, envious, and
+insatiable middle age.
+
+We dined together in the Rue de la Harpe. We thenceforth felt for Marcas
+the most respectful affection; he gave us the most practical aid in the
+sphere of the mind. That man knew everything; he had studied everything.
+For us he cast his eye over the whole civilized world, seeking the
+country where openings would be at once the most abundant and the most
+favorable to the success of our plans. He indicated what should be the
+goal of our studies; he bid us make haste, explaining to us that time
+was precious, that emigration would presently begin, and that its
+effect would be to deprive France of the cream of its powers and of its
+youthful talent; that their intelligence, necessarily sharpened, would
+select the best places, and that the great thing was to be first in the
+field.
+
+Thenceforward, we often sat late at work under the lamp. Our generous
+instructor wrote some notes for our guidance--two pages for Juste and
+three for me--full of invaluable advice--the sort of information which
+experience alone can supply, such landmarks as only genius can place. In
+those papers, smelling of tobacco, and covered with writing so vile
+as to be almost hieroglyphic, there are suggestions for a fortune, and
+forecasts of unerring acumen. There are hints as to certain parts of
+America and Asia which have been fully justified, both before and since
+Juste and I could set out.
+
+Marcas, like us, was in the most abject poverty. He earned, indeed, his
+daily bread, but he had neither linen, clothes, nor shoes. He did not
+make himself out any better than he was; his dreams had been of luxury
+as well as of power. He did not admit that this was the real Marcas; he
+abandoned this person, indeed, to the caprices of life. What he lived by
+was the breath of ambition; he dreamed of revenge while blaming himself
+for yielding to so shallow a feeling. The true statesman ought, above
+all things, to be superior to vulgar passions; like the man of science.
+It was in these days of dire necessity that Marcas seemed to us so
+great--nay, so terrible; there was something awful in the gaze which saw
+another world than that which strikes the eye of ordinary men. To us he
+was a subject of contemplation and astonishment; for the young--which of
+us has not known it?--the young have a keen craving to admire; they love
+to attach themselves, and are naturally inclined to submit to the men
+they feel to be superior, as they are to devote themselves to a great
+cause.
+
+Our surprise was chiefly roused by his indifference in matters of
+sentiment; women had no place in his life. When we spoke of this matter,
+a perennial theme of conversation among Frenchmen, he simply remarked:
+
+"Gowns cost too much."
+
+He saw the look that passed between Juste and me, and went on:
+
+"Yes, far too much. The woman you buy--and she is the least
+expensive--takes a great deal of money. The woman who gives herself
+takes all your time! Woman extinguishes every energy, every ambition.
+Napoleon reduced her to what she should be. From that point of view, he
+really was great. He did not indulge such ruinous fancies of Louis XIV.
+and Louis XV.; at the same time he could love in secret."
+
+We discovered that, like Pitt, who made England his wife, Marcas bore
+France in his heart; he idolized his country; he had not a thought that
+was not for his native land. His fury at feeling that he had in his
+hands the remedy for the evils which so deeply saddened him, and could
+not apply it, ate into his soul, and this rage was increased by the
+inferiority of France at that time, as compared with Russia and England.
+France a third-rate power! This cry came up again and again in his
+conversation. The intestinal disorders of his country had entered into
+his soul. All the contests between the Court and the Chamber, showing,
+as they did, incessant change and constant vacillation, which must
+injure the prosperity of the country, he scoffed at as backstairs
+squabbles.
+
+"This is peace at the cost of the future," said he.
+
+
+
+One evening Juste and I were at work, sitting in perfect silence. Marcas
+had just risen to toil at his copying, for he had refused our assistance
+in spite of our most earnest entreaties. We had offered to take it in
+turns to copy a batch of manuscript, so that he should do but a third
+of his distasteful task; he had been quite angry, and we had ceased to
+insist.
+
+We heard the sound of gentlemanly boots in the passage, and raised our
+heads, looking at each other. There was a tap at Marcas' door--he never
+took the key out of the lock--and we heard the hero answer:
+
+"Come in." Then--"What, you here, monsieur?"
+
+"I, myself," replied the retired minister.
+
+It was the Diocletian of this unknown martyr.
+
+For some time he and our neighbor conversed in an undertone. Suddenly
+Marcas, whose voice had been heard but rarely, as is natural in a
+dialogue in which the applicant begins by setting forth the situation,
+broke out loudly in reply to some offer we had not overheard.
+
+"You would laugh at me for a fool," cried he, "if I took you at your
+word. Jesuits are a thing of the past, but Jesuitism is eternal. Your
+Machiavelism and your generosity are equally hollow and untrustworthy.
+You can make your own calculations, but who can calculate on you? Your
+Court is made up of owls who fear the light, of old men who quake in the
+presence of the young, or who simply disregard them. The Government is
+formed on the same pattern as the Court. You have hunted up the remains
+of the Empire, as the Restoration enlisted the Voltigeurs of Louis XIV.
+
+"Hitherto the evasions of cowardice have been taken for the manoeuvring
+of ability; but dangers will come, and the younger generation will rise
+as they did in 1790. They did grand things then.--Just now you change
+ministries as a sick man turns in his bed; these oscillations betray the
+weakness of the Government. You work on an underhand system of policy
+which will be turned against you, for France will be tired of your
+shuffling. France will not tell you that she is tired of you; a man
+never knows whence his ruin comes; it is the historian's task to find
+out; but you will undoubtedly perish as the reward of not having the
+youth of France to lend you its strength and energy; for having hated
+really capable men; for not having lovingly chosen them from this noble
+generation; for having in all cases preferred mediocrity.
+
+"You have come to ask my support, but you are an atom in that decrepit
+heap which is made hideous by self-interest, which trembles and squirms,
+and, because it is so mean, tries to make France mean too. My strong
+nature, my ideas, would work like poison in you; twice you have tricked
+me, twice have I overthrown you. If we unite a third time, it must be
+a very serious matter. I should kill myself if I allowed myself to be
+duped; for I should be to blame, not you."
+
+Then we heard the humblest entreaties, the most fervent adjuration,
+not to deprive the country of such superior talents. The man spoke of
+patriotism, and Marcas uttered a significant "_Ouh! ouh!_" He laughed at
+his would-be patron. Then the statesman was more explicit; he bowed to
+the superiority of his erewhile counselor; he pledged himself to enable
+Marcas to remain in office, to be elected deputy; then he offered him a
+high appointment, promising him that he, the speaker, would thenceforth
+be the subordinate of a man whose subaltern he was only worthy to be.
+He was in the newly-formed ministry, and he would not return to power
+unless Marcas had a post in proportion to his merit; he had already made
+it a condition, Marcas had been regarded as indispensable.
+
+Marcas refused.
+
+"I have never before been in a position to keep my promises; here is an
+opportunity of proving myself faithful to my word, and you fail me."
+
+To this Marcas made no reply. The boots were again audible in the
+passage on the way to the stairs.
+
+"Marcas! Marcas!" we both cried, rushing into his room. "Why refuse? He
+really meant it. His offers are very handsome; at any rate, go to see
+the ministers."
+
+In a twinkling, we had given Marcas a hundred reasons. The minister's
+voice was sincere; without seeing him, we had felt sure that he was
+honest.
+
+"I have no clothes," replied Marcas.
+
+"Rely on us," said Juste, with a glance at me.
+
+Marcas had the courage to trust us; a light flashed in his eye, he
+pushed his fingers through his hair, lifting it from his forehead with
+a gesture that showed some confidence in his luck and when he had thus
+unveiled his face, so to speak, we saw in him a man absolutely unknown
+to us--Marcas sublime, Marcas in his power! His mind was in its
+element--the bird restored to the free air, the fish to the water, the
+horse galloping across the plain.
+
+It was transient. His brow clouded again, he had, it would seem, a
+vision of his fate. Halting doubt had followed close on the heels of
+white-winged hope.
+
+We left him to himself.
+
+"Now, then," said I to the Doctor, "we have given our word; how are we
+to keep it?"
+
+"We will sleep upon it," said Juste, "and to-morrow morning we will talk
+it over."
+
+Next morning we went for a walk in the Luxembourg.
+
+We had had time to think over the incident of the past night, and were
+both equally surprised at the lack of address shown by Marcas in the
+minor difficulties of life--he, a man who never saw any difficulties in
+the solution of the hardest problems of abstract or practical politics.
+But these elevated characters can all be tripped up on a grain of sand,
+and will, like the grandest enterprise, miss fire for want of a thousand
+francs. It is the old story of Napoleon, who, for lack of a pair of
+boots, did not set out for India.
+
+"Well, what have you hit upon?" asked Juste.
+
+"I have thought of a way to get him a complete outfit."
+
+"Where?"
+
+"From Humann."
+
+"How?"
+
+"Humann, my boy, never goes to his customers--his customers go to him;
+so that he does not know whether I am rich or poor. He only knows that I
+dress well and look decent in the clothes he makes for me. I shall tell
+him that an uncle of mine has dropped in from the country, and that his
+indifference in matters of dress is quite a discredit to me in the upper
+circles where I am trying to find a wife.--It will not be Humann if he
+sends in his bill before three months."
+
+The Doctor thought this a capital idea for a vaudeville, but poor enough
+in real life, and doubted my success. But I give you my word of honor,
+Humann dressed Marcas, and, being an artist, turned him out as a
+political personage ought to be dressed.
+
+Juste lent Marcas two hundred francs in gold, the product of two watches
+bought on credit, and pawned at the Mont-de-Piete. For my part, I had
+said nothing of the six shirts and all necessary linen, which cost me
+no more than the pleasure of asking for them from a forewoman in a shop
+whom I had treated to Musard's during the carnival.
+
+Marcas accepted everything, thanking us no more than he ought. He only
+inquired as to the means by which we had got possession of such riches,
+and we made him laugh for the last time. We looked on our Marcas as
+shipowners, when they have exhausted their credit and every resource
+at their command it fit out a vessel, must look on it as it puts out to
+sea.
+
+Here Charles was silent; he seemed crushed by his memories.
+
+"Well," cried the audience, "and what happened?"
+
+"I will tell you in a few words--for this is not romance--it is
+history."
+
+We saw no more of Marcas. The administration lasted for three months; it
+fell at the end of the session. Then Marcas came back to us, worked to
+death. He had sounded the crater of power; he came away from it with the
+beginnings of brain fever. The disease made rapid progress; we nursed
+him. Juste at once called in the chief physician of the hospital where
+he was working as house-surgeon. I was then living alone in our room,
+and I was the most attentive attendant; but care and science alike were
+in vain. By the month of January, 1838, Marcas himself felt that he had
+but a few days to live.
+
+The man whose soul and brain he had been for six months never even sent
+to inquire after him. Marcas expressed the greatest contempt for the
+Government; he seemed to doubt what the fate of France might be, and
+it was this doubt that had made him ill. He had, he thought, detected
+treason in the heart of power, not tangible, seizable treason, the
+result of facts, but the treason of a system, the subordination of
+national interests to selfish ends. His belief in the degradation of the
+country was enough to aggravate his complaint.
+
+I myself was witness to the proposals made to him by one of the leaders
+of the antagonistic party which he had fought against. His hatred of
+the men he had tried to serve was so virulent, that he would gladly have
+joined the coalition that was about to be formed among certain ambitious
+spirits who, at least, had one idea in common--that of shaking off the
+yoke of the Court. But Marcas could only reply to the envoy in the words
+of the Hotel de Ville:
+
+"It is too late!"
+
+Marcas did not leave money enough to pay for his funeral. Juste and I
+had great difficulty in saving him from the ignominy of a pauper's bier,
+and we alone followed the coffin of Z. Marcas, which was dropped into
+the common grave of the cemetery of Mont-Parnasse.
+
+
+
+We looked sadly at each other as we listened to this tale, the last we
+heard from the lips of Charles Rabourdin the day before he embarked at
+le Havre on a brig that was to convey him to the islands of Malay. We
+all knew more than one Marcas, more than one victim of his devotion to a
+party, repaid by betrayal or neglect.
+
+
+LES JARDIES, May 1840.
+
+
+
+
+ADDENDUM
+
+The following personage appears in other stories of the Human Comedy.
+
+     Marcas, Zephirin
+       A Prince of Bohemia
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Z. Marcas, by Honore de Balzac
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