Melmoth Reconciled

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MELMOTH RECONCILED

BY

HONORE DE BALZAC



Translated by
Ellen Marriage



To Monsieur le General Baron de Pommereul, a token of the friendship
between our fathers, which survives in their sons.

DE BALZAC.



There is a special variety of human nature obtained in the Social
Kingdom by a process analogous to that of the gardener's craft in the
Vegetable Kingdom, to wit, by the forcing-house--a species of hybrid
which can be raised neither from seed nor from slips. This product is
known as the Cashier, an anthropomorphous growth, watered by religious
doctrine, trained up in fear of the guillotine, pruned by vice, to
flourish on a third floor with an estimable wife by his side and an
uninteresting family. The number of cashiers in Paris must always be a
problem for the physiologist. Has any one as yet been able to state
correctly the terms of the proportion sum wherein the cashier figures
as the unknown _x_? Where will you find the man who shall live with
wealth, like a cat with a caged mouse? This man, for further
qualification, shall be capable of sitting boxed in behind an iron
grating for seven or eight hours a day during seven-eighths of the
year, perched upon a cane-seated chair in a space as narrow as a
lieutenant's cabin on board a man-of-war. Such a man must be able to
defy anchylosis of the knee and thigh joints; he must have a soul
above meanness, in order to live meanly; must lose all relish for
money by dint of handling it. Demand this peculiar specimen of any
creed, educational system, school, or institution you please, and
select Paris, that city of fiery ordeals and branch establishment of
hell, as the soil in which to plant the said cashier. So be it.
Creeds, schools, institutions and moral systems, all human rules and
regulations, great and small, will, one after another, present much
the same face that an intimate friend turns upon you when you ask him
to lend you a thousand francs. With a dolorous dropping of the jaw,
they indicate the guillotine, much as your friend aforesaid will
furnish you with the address of the money-lender, pointing you to one
of the hundred gates by which a man comes to the last refuge of the
destitute.

Yet nature has her freaks in the making of a man's mind; she indulges
herself and makes a few honest folk now and again, and now and then a
cashier.

Wherefore, that race of corsairs whom we dignify with the title of
bankers, the gentry who take out a license for which they pay a
thousand crowns, as the privateer takes out his letters of marque,
hold these rare products of the incubations of virtue in such esteem
that they confine them in cages in their counting-houses, much as
governments procure and maintain specimens of strange beasts at their
own charges.

If the cashier is possessed of an imagination or of a fervid
temperament; if, as will sometimes happen to the most complete
cashier, he loves his wife, and that wife grows tired of her lot, has
ambitions, or merely some vanity in her composition, the cashier is
undone. Search the chronicles of the counting-house. You will not find
a single instance of a cashier attaining _a position_, as it is called.
They are sent to the hulks; they go to foreign parts; they vegetate on
a second floor in the Rue Saint-Louis among the market gardens of the
Marais. Some day, when the cashiers of Paris come to a sense of their
real value, a cashier will be hardly obtainable for money. Still,
certain it is that there are people who are fit for nothing but to be
cashiers, just as the bent of a certain order of mind inevitably makes
for rascality. But, oh marvel of our civilization! Society rewards
virtue with an income of a hundred louis in old age, a dwelling on a
second floor, bread sufficient, occasional new bandana handkerchiefs,
an elderly wife and her offspring.

So much for virtue. But for the opposite course, a little boldness, a
faculty for keeping on the windward side of the law, as Turenne
outflanked Montecuculi, and Society will sanction the theft of
millions, shower ribbons upon the thief, cram him with honors, and
smother him with consideration.

Government, moreover, works harmoniously with this profoundly
illogical reasoner--Society. Government levies a conscription on the
young intelligence of the kingdom at the age of seventeen or eighteen,
a conscription of precocious brain-work before it is sent up to be
submitted to a process of selection. Nurserymen sort and select seeds
in much the same way. To this process the Government brings
professional appraisers of talent, men who can assay brains as experts
assay gold at the Mint. Five hundred such heads, set afire with hope,
are sent up annually by the most progressive portion of the
population; and of these the Government takes one-third, puts them in
sacks called the Ecoles, and shakes them up together for three years.
Though every one of these young plants represents vast productive
power, they are made, as one may say, into cashiers. They receive
appointments; the rank and file of engineers is made up of them; they
are employed as captains of artillery; there is no (subaltern) grade
to which they may not aspire. Finally, when these men, the pick of the
youth of the nation, fattened on mathematics and stuffed with
knowledge, have attained the age of fifty years, they have their
reward, and receive as the price of their services the third-floor
lodging, the wife and family, and all the comforts that sweeten life
for mediocrity. If from among this race of dupes there should escape
some five or six men of genius who climb the highest heights, is it
not miraculous?

This is an exact statement of the relations between Talent and Probity
on the one hand and Government and Society on the other, in an age
that considers itself to be progressive. Without this prefatory
explanation a recent occurrence in Paris would seem improbable; but
preceded by this summing up of the situation, it will perhaps receive
some thoughtful attention from minds capable of recognizing the real
plague-spots of our civilization, a civilization which since 1815 as
been moved by the spirit of gain rather than by principles of honor.



About five o'clock, on a dull autumn afternoon, the cashier of one of
the largest banks in Paris was still at his desk, working by the light
of a lamp that had been lit for some time. In accordance with the use
and wont of commerce, the counting-house was in the darkest corner of
the low-ceiled and far from spacious mezzanine floor, and at the very
end of a passage lighted only by borrowed lights. The office doors
along this corridor, each with its label, gave the place the look of a
bath-house. At four o'clock the stolid porter had proclaimed,
according to his orders, "The bank is closed." And by this time the
departments were deserted, wives of the partners in the firm were
expecting their lovers; the two bankers dining with their mistresses.
Everything was in order.

The place where the strong boxes had been bedded in sheet-iron was
just behind the little sanctum, where the cashier was busy. Doubtless
he was balancing his books. The open front gave a glimpse of a safe of
hammered iron, so enormously heavy (thanks to the science of the
modern inventor) that burglars could not carry it away. The door only
opened at the pleasure of those who knew its password. The letter-lock
was a warden who kept its own secret and could not be bribed; the
mysterious word was an ingenious realization of the "Open sesame!" in
the _Arabian Nights_. But even this was as nothing. A man might discover
the password; but unless he knew the lock's final secret, the _ultima
ratio_ of this gold-guarding dragon of mechanical science, it
discharged a blunderbuss at his head.

The door of the room, the walls of the room, the shutters of the
windows in the room, the whole place, in fact, was lined with
sheet-iron a third of an inch in thickness, concealed behind the thin
wooden paneling. The shutters had been closed, the door had been shut.
If ever man could feel confident that he was absolutely alone, and
that there was no remote possibility of being watched by prying eyes,
that man was the cashier of the house of Nucingen and Company, in the
Rue Saint-Lazare.

Accordingly the deepest silence prevailed in that iron cave. The fire
had died out in the stove, but the room was full of that tepid warmth
which produces the dull heavy-headedness and nauseous queasiness of a
morning after an orgy. The stove is a mesmerist that plays no small
part in the reduction of bank clerks and porters to a state of idiocy.

A room with a stove in it is a retort in which the power of strong men
is evaporated, where their vitality is exhausted, and their wills
enfeebled. Government offices are part of a great scheme for the
manufacture of the mediocrity necessary for the maintenance of a
Feudal System on a pecuniary basis--and money is the foundation of the
Social Contract. (See _Les Employes_.) The mephitic vapors in the
atmosphere of a crowded room contribute in no small degree to bring
about a gradual deterioration of intelligences, the brain that gives
off the largest quantity of nitrogen asphyxiates the others, in the
long run.

The cashier was a man of five-and-forty or thereabouts. As he sat at
the table, the light from a moderator lamp shining full on his bald
head and glistening fringe of iron-gray hair that surrounded it--this
baldness and the round outlines of his face made his head look very
like a ball. His complexion was brick-red, a few wrinkles had gathered
about his eyes, but he had the smooth, plump hands of a stout man. His
blue cloth coat, a little rubbed and worn, and the creases and
shininess of his trousers, traces of hard wear that the clothes-brush
fails to remove, would impress a superficial observer with the idea
that here was a thrifty and upright human being, sufficient of the
philosopher or of the aristocrat to wear shabby clothes. But,
unluckily, it is easy to find penny-wise people who will prove weak,
wasteful, or incompetent in the capital things of life.

The cashier wore the ribbon of the Legion of Honor at his
button-hole, for he had been a major of dragoons in the time of the
Emperor. M. de Nucingen, who had been a contractor before he became a
banker, had had reason in those days to know the honorable disposition
of his cashier, who then occupied a high position. Reverses of fortune
had befallen the major, and the banker out of regard for him paid him
five hundred francs a month. The soldier had become a cashier in the
year 1813, after his recovery from a wound received at Studzianka
during the Retreat from Moscow, followed by six months of enforced
idleness at Strasbourg, whither several officers had been transported
by order of the Emperor, that they might receive skilled attention.
This particular officer, Castanier by name, retired with the honorary
grade of colonel, and a pension of two thousand four hundred francs.

In ten years' time the cashier had completely effaced the soldier, and
Castanier inspired the banker with such trust in him, that he was
associated in the transactions that went on in the private office
behind his little counting-house. The baron himself had access to it
by means of a secret staircase. There, matters of business were
decided. It was the bolting-room where proposals were sifted; the
privy council chamber where the reports of the money market were
analyzed; circular notes issued thence; and finally, the private
ledger and the journal which summarized the work of all the
departments were kept there.

Castanier had gone himself to shut the door which opened on to a
staircase that led to the parlor occupied by the two bankers on the
first floor of their hotel. This done, he had sat down at his desk
again, and for a moment he gazed at a little collection of letters of
credit drawn on the firm of Watschildine of London. Then he had taken
up the pen and imitated the banker's signature on each. _Nucingen_ he
wrote, and eyed the forged signatures critically to see which seemed
the most perfect copy.

Suddenly he looked up as if a needle had pricked him. "You are not
alone!" a boding voice seemed to cry in his heart; and indeed the
forger saw a man standing at the little grated window of the
counting-house, a man whose breathing was so noiseless that he did not
seem to breathe at all. Castanier looked, and saw that the door at the
end of the passage was wide open; the stranger must have entered by
that way.

For the first time in his life the old soldier felt a sensation of
dread that made him stare open-mouthed and wide-eyed at the man before
him; and for that matter, the appearance of the apparition was
sufficiently alarming even if unaccompanied by the mysterious
circumstances of so sudden an entry. The rounded forehead, the harsh
coloring of the long oval face, indicated quite as plainly as the cut
of his clothes that the man was an Englishman, reeking of his native
isles. You had only to look at the collar of his overcoat, at the
voluminous cravat which smothered the crushed frills of a shirt front
so white that it brought out the changeless leaden hue of an impassive
face, and the thin red line of the lips that seemed made to suck the
blood of corpses; and you can guess at once at the black gaiters
buttoned up to the knee, and the half-puritanical costume of a wealthy
Englishman dressed for a walking excursion. The intolerable glitter of
the stranger's eyes produced a vivid and unpleasant impression, which
was only deepened by the rigid outlines of his features. The dried-up,
emaciated creature seemed to carry within him some gnawing thought
that consumed him and could not be appeased.

He must have digested his food so rapidly that he could doubtless eat
continually without bringing any trace of color into his face or
features. A tun of Tokay _vin de succession_ would not have caused any
faltering in that piercing glance that read men's inmost thoughts, nor
dethroned the merciless reasoning faculty that always seemed to go to
the bottom of things. There was something of the fell and tranquil
majesty of a tiger about him.

"I have come to cash this bill of exchange, sir," he said. Castanier
felt the tones of his voice thrill through every nerve with a violent
shock similar to that given by a discharge of electricity.

"The safe is closed," said Castanier.

"It is open," said the Englishman, looking round the counting-house.
"To-morrow is Sunday, and I cannot wait. The amount is for five
hundred thousand francs. You have the money there, and I must have
it."

"But how did you come in, sir?"

The Englishman smiled. That smile frightened Castanier. No words could
have replied more fully nor more peremptorily than that scornful and
imperial curl of the stranger's lips. Castanier turned away, took up
fifty packets each containing ten thousand francs in bank-notes, and
held them out to the stranger, receiving in exchange for them a bill
accepted by the Baron de Nucingen. A sort of convulsive tremor ran
through him as he saw a red gleam in the stranger's eyes when they
fell on the forged signature on the letter of credit.

"It . . . it wants your signature . . ." stammered Castanier, handing
back the bill.

"Hand me your pen," answered the Englishman.

Castanier handed him the pen with which he had just committed forgery.
The stranger wrote _John Melmoth_, then he returned the slip of paper
and the pen to the cashier. Castanier looked at the handwriting,
noticing that it sloped from right to left in the Eastern fashion, and
Melmoth disappeared so noiselessly that when Castanier looked up again
an exclamation broke from him, partly because the man was no longer
there, partly because he felt a strange painful sensation such as our
imagination might take for an effect of poison.

The pen that Melmoth had handled sent the same sickening heat through
him that an emetic produces. But it seemed impossible to Castanier
that the Englishman should have guessed his crime. His inward qualms
he attributed to the palpitation of the heart that, according to
received ideas, was sure to follow at once on such a "turn" as the
stranger had given him.

"The devil take it; I am very stupid. Providence is watching over me;
for if that brute had come round to see my gentleman to-morrow, my
goose would have been cooked!" said Castanier, and he burned the
unsuccessful attempts at forgery in the stove.

He put the bill that he meant to take with him in an envelope, and
helped himself to five hundred thousand francs in French and English
bank-notes from the safe, which he locked. Then he put everything in
order, lit a candle, blew out the lamp, took up his hat and umbrella,
and went out sedately, as usual, to leave one of the two keys of the
strong room with Madame de Nucingen, in the absence of her husband the
Baron.

"You are in luck, M. Castanier," said the banker's wife as he entered
the room; "we have a holiday on Monday; you can go into the country,
or to Soizy."

"Madame, will you be so good as to tell your husband that the bill of
exchange on Watschildine, which was behind time, has just been
presented? The five hundred thousand francs have been paid; so I shall
not come back till noon on Tuesday."

"Good-bye, monsieur; I hope you will have a pleasant time."

"The same to you, madame," replied the old dragoon as he went out. He
glanced as he spoke at a young man well known in fashionable society
at that time, a M. de Rastignac, who was regarded as Madame de
Nucingen's lover.

"Madame," remarked this latter, "the old boy looks to me as if he
meant to play you some ill turn."

"Pshaw! impossible; he is too stupid."



"Piquoizeau," said the cashier, walking into the porter's room, "what
made you let anybody come up after four o'clock?"

"I have been smoking a pipe here in the doorway ever since four
o'clock," said the man, "and nobody has gone into the bank. Nobody has
come out either except the gentlemen----"

"Are you quite sure?"

"Yes, upon my word and honor. Stay, though, at four o'clock M.
Werbrust's friend came, a young fellow from Messrs. du Tillet & Co.,
in the Rue Joubert."

"All right," said Castanier, and he hurried away.

The sickening sensation of heat that he had felt when he took back the
pen returned in greater intensity. "_Mille diables_!" thought he, as he
threaded his way along the Boulevard de Gand, "haven't I taken proper
precautions? Let me think! Two clear days, Sunday and Monday, then a
day of uncertainty before they begin to look for me; altogether, three
days and four nights' respite. I have a couple of passports and two
different disguises; is not that enough to throw the cleverest
detective off the scent? On Tuesday morning I shall draw a million
francs in London before the slightest suspicion has been aroused. My
debts I am leaving behind for the benefit of my creditors, who will
put a 'P'* on the bills, and I shall live comfortably in Italy for the
rest of my days as the Conte Ferraro. [*Protested.] I was alone with
him when he died, poor fellow, in the marsh of Zembin, and I shall
slip into his skin. . . . _Mille diables_! the woman who is to follow
after me might give them a clue! Think of an old campaigner like me
infatuated enough to tie myself to a petticoat tail! . . . Why take
her? I must leave her behind. Yes, I could make up my mind to it;
but--I know myself--I should be ass enough to go back to her. Still,
nobody knows Aquilina. Shall I take her or leave her?"

"You will not take her!" cried a voice that filled Castanier with
sickening dread. He turned sharply, and saw the Englishman.

"The devil is in it!" cried the cashier aloud.

Melmoth had passed his victim by this time; and if Castanier's first
impulse had been to fasten a quarrel on a man who read his own
thoughts, he was so much torn up by opposing feelings that the
immediate result was a temporary paralysis. When he resumed his walk
he fell once more into that fever of irresolution which besets those
who are so carried away by passion that they are ready to commit a
crime, but have not sufficient strength of character to keep it to
themselves without suffering terribly in the process. So, although
Castanier had made up his mind to reap the fruits of a crime which was
already half executed, he hesitated to carry out his designs. For him,
as for many men of mixed character in whom weakness and strength are
equally blended, the least trifling consideration determines whether
they shall continue to lead blameless lives or become actively
criminal. In the vast masses of men enrolled in Napoleon's armies
there are many who, like Castanier, possessed the purely physical
courage demanded on the battlefield, yet lacked the moral courage
which makes a man as great in crime as he could have been in virtue.

The letter of credit was drafted in such terms that immediately on his
arrival he might draw twenty-five thousand pounds on the firm of
Watschildine, the London correspondents of the house of Nucingen. The
London house had already been advised of the draft about to be made
upon them, he had written to them himself. He had instructed an agent
(chosen at random) to take his passage in a vessel which was to leave
Portsmouth with a wealthy English family on board, who were going to
Italy, and the passage-money had been paid in the name of the Conte
Ferraro. The smallest details of the scheme had been thought out. He
had arranged matters so as to divert the search that would be made for
him into Belgium and Switzerland, while he himself was at sea in the
English vessel. Then, by the time that Nucingen might flatter himself
that he was on the track of his late cashier, the said cashier, as the
Conte Ferraro, hoped to be safe in Naples. He had determined to
disfigure his face in order to disguise himself the more completely,
and by means of an acid to imitate the scars of smallpox. Yet, in
spite of all these precautions, which surely seemed as if they must
secure him complete immunity, his conscience tormented him; he was
afraid. The even and peaceful life that he had led for so long had
modified the morality of the camp. His life was stainless as yet; he
could not sully it without a pang. So for the last time he abandoned
himself to all the influences of the better self that strenuously
resisted.

"Pshaw!" he said at last, at the corner of the Boulevard and the Rue
Montmartre, "I will take a cab after the play this evening and go out
to Versailles. A post-chaise will be ready for me at my old
quartermaster's place. He would keep my secret even if a dozen men
were standing ready to shoot him down. The chances are all in my
favor, so far as I see; so I shall take my little Naqui with me, and I
will go."

"You will not go!" exclaimed the Englishman, and the strange tones of
his voice drove all the cashier's blood back to his heart.

Melmoth stepped into a tilbury which was waiting for him, and was
whirled away so quickly, that when Castanier looked up he saw his foe
some hundred paces away from him, and before it even crossed his mind
to cut off the man's retreat the tilbury was far on its way up the
Boulevard Montmartre.

"Well, upon my word, there is something supernatural about this!" said
he to himself. "If I were fool enough to believe in God, I should
think that He had set Saint Michael on my tracks. Suppose that the
devil and the police should let me go on as I please, so as to nab me
in the nick of time? Did any one ever see the like! But there, this is
folly . . ."

Castanier went along the Rue du Faubourg-Montmartre, slackening his
pace as he neared the Rue Richer. There on the second floor of a block
of buildings which looked out upon some gardens lived the unconscious
cause of Castanier's crime--a young woman known in the quarter as Mme.
de la Garde. A concise history of certain events in the cashier's past
life must be given in order to explain these facts, and to give a
complete presentment of the crisis when he yielded to temptation.

Mme. de la Garde said that she was a Piedmontese. No one, not even
Castanier, knew her real name. She was one of those young girls, who
are driven by dire misery, by inability to earn a living, or by fear
of starvation, to have recourse to a trade which most of them loathe,
many regard with indifference, and some few follow in obedience to the
laws of their constitution. But on the brink of the gulf of
prostitution in Paris, the young girl of sixteen, beautiful and pure
as the Madonna, had met with Castanier. The old dragoon was too rough
and homely to make his way in society, and he was tired of tramping
the boulevard at night and of the kind of conquests made there by
gold. For some time past he had desired to bring a certain regularity
into an irregular life. He was struck by the beauty of the poor child
who had drifted by chance into his arms, and his determination to
rescue her from the life of the streets was half benevolent, half
selfish, as some of the thoughts of the best of men are apt to be.
Social conditions mingle elements of evil with the promptings of
natural goodness of heart, and the mixture of motives underlying a
man's intentions should be leniently judged. Castanier had just
cleverness enough to be very shrewd where his own interests were
concerned. So he concluded to be a philanthropist on either count, and
at first made her his mistress.