A Start in Life

H >> Honore de Balzac >> A Start in Life


"Enough!" said Moreau, in a strained voice.

At this moment Estelle and her husband discovered Oscar cowering in
his corner. Moreau swooped down on the luckless lad like a hawk on its
prey, took him by the collar of the coat and dragged him to the light
of a window. "Speak! what did you say to monseigneur in that coach?
What demon let loose your tongue, you who keep a doltish silence
whenever I speak to you? What did you do it for?" cried the steward,
with frightful violence.

Too bewildered to weep, Oscar was dumb and motionless as a statue.

"Come with me and beg his Excellency's pardon," said Moreau.

"As if his Excellency cares for a little toad like that!" cried the
furious Estelle.

"Come, I say, to the chateau," repeated Moreau.

Oscar dropped like an inert mass to the ground.

"Come!" cried Moreau, his anger increasing at every instant.

"No! no! mercy!" cried Oscar, who could not bring himself to submit to
a torture that seemed to him worse than death.

Moreau then took the lad by his coat, and dragged him, as he might a
dead body, through the yards, which rang with the boy's outcries and
sobs. He pulled him up the portico, and, with an arm that fury made
powerful, he flung him, bellowing, and rigid as a pole, into the
salon, at the very feet of the count, who, having completed the
purchase of Les Moulineaux, was about to leave the salon for the
dining-room with his guests.

"On your knees, wretched boy! and ask pardon of him who gave food to
your mind by obtaining your scholarship."

Oscar, his face to the ground, was foaming with rage, and did not say
a word. The spectators of the scene were shocked. Moreau seemed no
longer in his senses; his face was crimson with injected blood.

"This young man is a mere lump of vanity," said the count, after
waiting a moment for Oscar's excuses. "A proud man humiliates himself
because he sees there is grandeur in a certain self-abasement. I am
afraid that you will never make much of that lad."

So saying, his Excellency passed on. Moreau took Oscar home with him;
and on the way gave orders that the horses should immediately be put
to Madame Moreau's caleche.



CHAPTER VII

A MOTHER'S TRIALS

While the horses were being harnessed, Moreau wrote the following
letter to Madame Clapart:--

My dear,--Oscar has ruined me. During his journey in Pierrotin's
coach, he spoke of Madame de Serizy's behavior to his Excellency,
who was travelling incognito, and actually told, to himself, the
secret of his terrible malady. After dismissing me from my
stewardship, the count told me not to let Oscar sleep at Presles,
but to send him away immediately. Therefore, to obey his orders,
the horses are being harnessed at this moment to my wife's
carriage, and Brochon, my stable-man, will take the miserable
child to you to-night.

We are, my wife and I, in a distress of mind which you may perhaps
imagine, though I cannot describe it to you. I will see you in a
few days, for I must take another course. I have three children,
and I ought to consider their future. At present I do not know
what to do; but I shall certainly endeavor to make the count aware
of what seventeen years of the life of a man like myself is worth.
Owning at the present moment about two hundred and fifty thousand
francs, I want to raise myself to a fortune which may some day
make me the equal of his Excellency. At this moment I feel within
me the power to move mountains and vanquish insurmountable
difficulties. What a lever is such a scene of bitter humiliation
as I have just passed through! Whose blood has Oscar in his veins?
His conduct has been that of a blockhead; up to this moment when I
write to you, he has not said a word nor answered, even by a sign,
the questions my wife and I have put to him. Will he become an
idiot? or is he one already? Dear friend, why did you not instruct
him as to his behavior before you sent him to me? How many
misfortunes you would have spared me, had you brought him here
yourself as I begged you to do. If Estelle alarmed you, you might
have stayed at Moisselles. However, the thing is done, and there
is no use talking about it.

Adieu; I shall see you soon.

Your devoted servant and friend,

Moreau


At eight o'clock that evening, Madame Clapart, just returned from a
walk she had taken with her husband, was knitting winter socks for
Oscar, by the light of a single candle. Monsieur Clapart was expecting
a friend named Poiret, who often came in to play dominoes, for never
did he allow himself to spend an evening at a cafe. In spite of the
prudent economy to which his small means forced him, Clapart would not
have answered for his temperance amid a luxury of food and in presence
of the usual guests of a cafe whose inquisitive observation would have
piqued him.

"I'm afraid Poiret came while we were out," said Clapart to his wife.

"Why, no, my friend; the portress would have told us so when we came
in," replied Madame Clapart.

"She may have forgotten it."

"What makes you think so?"

"It wouldn't be the first time she has forgotten things for us,--for
God knows how people without means are treated."

"Well," said the poor woman, to change the conversation and escape
Clapart's cavilling, "Oscar must be at Presles by this time. How he
will enjoy that fine house and the beautiful park."

"Oh! yes," snarled Clapart, "you expect fine things of him; but, mark
my words, there'll be squabbles wherever he goes."

"Will you never cease to find fault with that poor child?" said the
mother. "What has he done to you? If some day we should live at our
ease, we may owe it all to him; he has such a good heart--"

"Our bones will be jelly long before that fellow makes his way in the
world," cried Clapart. "You don't know your own child; he is
conceited, boastful, deceitful, lazy, incapable of--"

"Why don't you go to meet Poiret?" said the poor mother, struck to the
heart by the diatribe she had brought upon herself.

"A boy who has never won a prize at school!" continued Clapart.

To bourgeois eyes, the obtaining of school prizes means the certainty
of a fine future for the fortunate child.

"Did you win any?" asked his wife. "Oscar stood second in philosophy."

This remark imposed silence for a moment on Clapart; but presently he
began again.

"Besides, Madame Moreau hates him like poison, you know why. She'll
try to set her husband against him. Oscar to step into his shoes as
steward of Presles! Why he'd have to learn agriculture, and know how
to survey."

"He can learn."

"He--that pussy cat! I'll bet that if he does get a place down there,
it won't be a week before he does some doltish thing which will make
the count dismiss him."

"Good God! how can you be so bitter against a poor child who is full
of good qualities, sweet-tempered as an angel, incapable of doing harm
to any one, no matter who."

Just then the cracking of a postilion's whip and the noise of a
carriage stopping before the house was heard, this arrival having
apparently put the whole street into a commotion. Clapart, who heard
the opening of many windows, looked out himself to see what was
happening.

"They have sent Oscar back to you in a post-chaise," he cried, in a
tone of satisfaction, though in truth he felt inwardly uneasy.

"Good heavens! what can have happened to him?" cried the poor mother,
trembling like a leaf shaken by the autumn wind.

Brochon here came up, followed by Oscar and Poiret.

"What has happened?" repeated the mother, addressing the stable-man.

"I don't know, but Monsieur Moreau is no longer steward of Presles,
and they say your son has caused it. His Excellency ordered that he
should be sent home to you. Here's a letter from poor Monsieur Moreau,
madame, which will tell you all. You never saw a man so changed in a
single day."

"Clapart, two glasses of wine for the postilion and for monsieur!"
cried the mother, flinging herself into a chair that she might read
the fatal letter. "Oscar," she said, staggering towards her bed, "do
you want to kill your mother? After all the cautions I gave you this
morning--"

She did not end her sentence, for she fainted from distress of mind.
When she came to herself she heard her husband saying to Oscar, as he
shook him by the arm:--

"Will you answer me?"

"Go to bed, monsieur," she said to her son. "Let him alone, Monsieur
Clapart. Don't drive him out of his senses; he is frightfully
changed."

Oscar did not hear his mother's last words; he had slipped away to bed
the instant that he got the order.

Those who remember their youth will not be surprised to learn that
after a day so filled with events and emotions, Oscar, in spite of the
enormity of his offences, slept the sleep of the just. The next day he
did not find the world so changed as he thought it; he was surprised
to be very hungry,--he who the night before had regarded himself as
unworthy to live. He had only suffered mentally. At his age mental
impressions succeed each other so rapidly that the last weakens its
predecessor, however deeply the first may have been cut in. For this
reason corporal punishment, though philanthropists are deeply opposed
to it in these days, becomes necessary in certain cases for certain
children. It is, moreover, the most natural form of retribution, for
Nature herself employs it; she uses pain to impress a lasting memory
of her precepts. If to the shame of the preceding evening, unhappily
too transient, the steward had joined some personal chastisement,
perhaps the lesson might have been complete. The discernment with
which such punishment needs to be administered is the greatest
argument against it. Nature is never mistaken; but the teacher is, and
frequently.

Madame Clapart took pains to send her husband out, so that she might
be alone with her son the next morning. She was in a state to excite
pity. Her eyes, worn with tears; her face, weary with the fatigue of a
sleepless night; her feeble voice,--in short, everything about her
proved an excess of suffering she could not have borne a second time,
and appealed to sympathy.

When Oscar entered the room she signed to him to sit down beside her,
and reminded him in a gentle but grieved voice of the benefits they
had so constantly received from the steward of Presles. She told him
that they had lived, especially for the last six years, on the
delicate charity of Monsieur Moreau; and that Monsieur Clapart's
salary, also the "demi-bourse," or scholarship, by which he (Oscar)
had obtained an education, was due to the Comte de Serizy. Most of
this would now cease. Monsieur Clapart, she said, had no claim to a
pension,--his period of service not being long enough to obtain one.
On the day when he was no longer able to keep his place, what would
become of them?

"For myself," she said, "by nursing the sick, or living as a
housekeeper in some great family, I could support myself and Monsieur
Clapart; but you, Oscar, what could you do? You have no means, and you
must earn some, for you must live. There are but four careers for a
young man like you,--commerce, government employment, the licensed
professions, or military service. All forms of commerce need capital,
and we have none to give you. In place of capital, a young man can
only give devotion and his capacity. But commerce also demands the
utmost discretion, and your conduct yesterday proves that you lack it.
To enter a government office, you must go through a long probation by
the help of influence, and you have just alienated the only protector
that we had,--a most powerful one. Besides, suppose you were to meet
with some extraordinary help, by which a young man makes his way
promptly either in business or in the public employ, where could you
find the money to live and clothe yourself during the time that you
are learning your employment?"

Here the mother wandered, like other women, into wordy lamentation:
What should she do now to feed the family, deprived of the benefits
Moreau's stewardship had enabled him to send her from Presles? Oscar
had overthrown his benefactor's prosperity! As commerce and a
government clerkship were now impossible, there remained only the
professions of notary and lawyer, either barristers or solicitors, and
sheriffs. But for those he must study at least three years, and pay
considerable sums for entrance fees, examinations, certificates, and
diplomas; and here again the question of maintenance presented itself.

"Oscar," she said, in conclusion, "in you I had put all my pride, all
my life. In accepting for myself an unhappy old age, I fastened my
eyes on you; I saw you with the prospect of a fine career, and I
imagined you succeeding in it. That thought, that hope, gave me
courage to face the privations I have endured for six years in order
to carry you through school, where you have cost me, in spite of the
scholarship, between seven and eight hundred francs a year. Now that
my hope is vanishing, your future terrifies me. I cannot take one
penny from Monsieur Clapart's salary for my son. What can you do? You
are not strong enough to mathematics to enter any of the technical
schools; and, besides, where could I get the three thousand francs
board-money which they extract? This is life as it is, my child. You
are eighteen, you are strong. Enlist in the army; it is your only
means, that I can see, to earn your bread."

Oscar knew as yet nothing whatever of life. Like all children who have
been kept from a knowledge of the trials and poverty of the home, he
was ignorant of the necessity of earning his living. The word
"commerce" presented no idea whatever to his mind; "public employment"
said almost as little, for he saw no results of it. He listened,
therefore, with a submissive air, which he tried to make humble, to
his mother's exhortations, but they were lost in the void, and did not
reach his mind. Nevertheless, the word "army," the thought of being a
soldier, and the sight of his mother's tears did at last make him cry.
No sooner did Madame Clapart see the drops coursing down his cheeks
than she felt herself helpless, and, like most mothers in such cases,
she began the peroration which terminates these scenes,--scenes in
which they suffer their own anguish and that of their children also.

"Well, Oscar, _promise_ me that you will be more discreet in future,
--that you will not talk heedlessly any more, but will strive to
repress your silly vanity," et cetera, et cetera.

Oscar of course promised all his mother asked him to promise, and
then, after gently drawing him to her, Madame Clapart ended by kissing
him to console him for being scolded.

"In future," she said, "you will listen to your mother, and will
follow her advice; for a mother can give nothing but good counsel to
her child. We will go and see your uncle Cardot; that is our last
hope. Cardot owed a great deal to your father, who gave him his
sister, Mademoiselle Husson, with an enormous dowry for those days,
which enabled him to make a large fortune in the silk trade. I think
he might, perhaps, place you with Monsieur Camusot, his successor and
son-in-law, in the rue des Bourdonnais. But, you see, your uncle
Cardot has four children. He gave his establishment, the Cocon d'Or,
to his eldest daughter, Madame Camusot; and though Camusot has
millions, he has also four children by two wives; and, besides, he
scarcely knows of our existence. Cardot has married his second
daughter, Mariane, to Monsieur Protez, of the firm of Protez and
Chiffreville. The practice of his eldest son, the notary, cost him
four hundred thousand francs; and he has just put his second son,
Joseph, into the drug business of Matifat. So you see, your uncle
Cardot has many reasons not to take an interest in you, whom he sees
only four times a year. He has never come to call upon me here, though
he was ready enough to visit me at Madame Mere's when he wanted to
sell his silks to the Emperor, the imperial highnesses, and all the
great people at court. But now the Camusots have turned ultras. The
eldest son of Camusot's first wife married a daughter of one of the
king's ushers. The world is mighty hump-backed when it stoops!
However, it was a clever thing to do, for the Cocon d'Or has the
custom of the present court as it had that of the Emperor. But
to-morrow we will go and see your uncle Cardot, and I hope that you
will endeavor to behave properly; for, as I said before, and I repeat
it, that is our last hope."

Monsieur Jean-Jerome-Severin Cardot had been a widower six years. As
head-clerk of the Cocon d'Or, one of the oldest firms in Paris, he had
bought the establishment in 1793, at a time when the heads of the
house were ruined by the maximum; and the money of Mademoiselle
Husson's dowry had enabled him to do this, and so make a fortune that
was almost colossal in ten years. To establish his children richly
during his lifetime, he had conceived the idea of buying an annuity
for himself and his wife with three hundred thousand francs, which
gave him an income of thirty thousand francs a year. He then divided
his capital into three shares of four hundred thousand francs each,
which he gave to three of his children,--the Cocon d'Or, given to his
eldest daughter on her marriage, being the equivalent of a fourth
share. Thus the worthy man, who was now nearly seventy years old,
could spend his thirty thousand a year as he pleased, without feeling
that he injured the prospects of his children, all finely provided
for, whose attentions and proofs of affection were, moreover, not
prompted by self-interest.

Uncle Cardot lived at Belleville, in one of the first houses above the
Courtille. He there occupied, on the first floor, an apartment
overlooking the valley of the Seine, with a southern exposure, and the
exclusive enjoyment of a large garden, for the sum of a thousand
francs a year. He troubled himself not at all about the three or four
other tenants of the same vast country-house. Certain, through a long
lease, of ending his days there, he lived rather plainly, served by an
old cook and the former maid of the late Madame Cardot,--both of whom
expected to reap an annuity of some six hundred francs apiece on the
old man's death. These two women took the utmost care of him, and were
all the more interested in doing so because no one was ever less fussy
or less fault-finding than he. The apartment, furnished by the late
Madame Cardot, had remained in the same condition for the last six
years,--the old man being perfectly contented with it. He spent in all
not more than three thousand francs a year there; for he dined in
Paris five days in the week, and returned home at midnight in a
hackney-coach, which belonged to an establishment at Courtille. The
cook had only her master's breakfast to provide on those days. This
was served at eleven o'clock; after that he dressed and perfumed
himself, and departed for Paris. Usually, a bourgeois gives notice in
the household if he dines out; old Cardot, on the contrary, gave
notice when he dined at home.

This little old man--fat, rosy, squat, and strong--always looked, in
popular speech, as if he had stepped from a bandbox. He appeared in
black silk stockings, breeches of "pou-de-soie" (paduasoy), a white
pique waistcoat, dazzling shirt-front, a blue-bottle coat, violet silk
gloves, gold buckles to his shoes and his breeches, and, lastly, a
touch of powder and a little queue tied with black ribbon. His face
was remarkable for a pair of eyebrows as thick as bushes, beneath
which sparkled his gray eyes; and for a square nose, thick and long,
which gave him somewhat the air of the abbes of former times. His
countenance did not belie him. Pere Cardot belonged to that race of
lively Gerontes which is now disappearing rapidly, though it once
served as Turcarets to the comedies and tales of the eighteenth
century. Uncle Cardot always said "Fair lady," and he placed in their
carriages, and otherwise paid attention to those women whom he saw
without protectors; he "placed himself at their disposition," as he
said, in his chivalrous way.

But beneath his calm air and his snowy poll he concealed an old age
almost wholly given up to mere pleasure. Among men he openly professed
epicureanism, and gave himself the license of free talk. He had seen
no harm in the devotion of his son-in-law, Camusot, to Mademoiselle
Coralie, for he himself was secretly the Mecaenas of Mademoiselle
Florentine, the first danseuse at the Gaiete. But this life and these
opinions never appeared in his own home, nor in his external conduct
before the world. Uncle Cardot, grave and polite, was thought to be
somewhat cold, so much did he affect decorum; a "devote" would have
called him a hypocrite.

The worthy old gentleman hated priests; he belonged to that great
flock of ninnies who subscribed to the "Constitutionnel," and was much
concerned about "refusals to bury." He adored Voltaire, though his
preferences were really for Piron, Vade, and Colle. Naturally, he
admired Beranger, whom he wittily called the "grandfather of the
religion of Lisette." His daughters, Madame Camusot and Madame Protez,
and his two sons would, to use a popular expression, have been
flabbergasted if any one had explained to them what their father meant
by "singing la Mere Godichon."

This long-headed parent had never mentioned his income to his
children, who, seeing that he lived in a cheap way, reflected that he
had deprived himself of his property for their sakes, and, therefore,
redoubled their attentions and tenderness. In fact, he would sometimes
say to his sons:--

"Don't lose your property; remember, I have none to leave you."

Camusot, in whom he recognized a certain likeness to his own nature,
and whom he liked enough to make a sharer in his secret pleasures,
alone knew of the thirty thousand a year annuity. But Camusot approved
of the old man's ethics, and thought that, having made the happiness
of his children and nobly fulfilled his duty by them, he now had a
right to end his life jovially.

"Don't you see, my friend," said the former master of the Cocon d'Or,
"I might re-marry. A young woman would give me more children. Well,
Florentine doesn't cost me what a wife would; neither does she bore
me; and she won't give me children to lessen your property."

Camusot considered that Pere Cardot gave expression to a high sense
of family duty in these words; he regarded him as an admirable
father-in-law.

"He knows," thought he, "how to unite the interests of his children
with the pleasures which old age naturally desires after the worries
of business life."

Neither the Cardots, nor the Camusots, nor the Protez knew anything of
the ways of life of their aunt Clapart. The family intercourse was
restricted to the sending of notes of "faire part" on the occasion of
deaths and marriages, and cards at the New Year. The proud Madame
Clapart would never have brought herself to seek them were it not for
Oscar's interests, and because of her friendship for Moreau, the only
person who had been faithful to her in misfortune. She had never
annoyed old Cardot by her visits, or her importunities, but she held
to him as to a hope, and always went to see him once every three
months and talked to him of Oscar, the nephew of the late respectable
Madame Cardot; and she took the boy to call upon him three times
during each vacation. At each of these visits the old gentleman had
given Oscar a dinner at the Cadran-Bleu, taking him, afterwards, to
the Gaiete, and returning him safely to the rue de la Cerisaie. On one
occasion, having given the boy an entirely new suit of clothes, he
added the silver cup and fork and spoon required for his school
outfit.

Oscar's mother endeavored to impress the old gentleman with the idea
that his nephew cherished him, and she constantly referred to the cup
and the fork and spoon and to the beautiful suit of clothes, though
nothing was then left of the latter but the waistcoat. But such little
arts did Oscar more harm than good when practised on so sly an old fox
as uncle Cardot. The latter had never much liked his departed wife, a
tall, spare, red-haired woman; he was also aware of the circumstances
of the late Husson's marriage with Oscar's mother, and without in the
least condemning her, he knew very well that Oscar was a posthumous
child. His nephew, therefore, seemed to him to have no claims on the
Cardot family. But Madame Clapart, like all women who concentrate
their whole being into the sentiment of motherhood, did not put
herself in Cardot's place and see the matter from his point of view;
she thought he must certainly be interested in so sweet a child, who
bore the maiden name of his late wife.

"Monsieur," said old Cardot's maid-servant, coming out to him as he
walked about the garden while awaiting his breakfast, after his
hairdresser had duly shaved him and powdered his queue, "the mother of
your nephew, Oscar, is here."