Ferragus

H >> Honore de Balzac >> Ferragus


When he went with his report to Jules, he found it necessary to
deceive him, for the unhappy man was in a high fever, unable to leave
his bed. The minister of the Interior mentioned, at a ministerial
dinner that same evening, the singular fancy of a Parisian in wishing
to burn his wife after the manner of the Romans. The clubs of Paris
took up the subject, and talked for a while of the burials of
antiquity. Ancient things were just then becoming a fashion, and some
persons declared that it would be a fine thing to re-establish, for
distinguished persons, the funeral pyre. This opinion had its
defenders and its detractors. Some said that there were too many such
personages, and the price of wood would be enormously increased by
such a custom; moreover, it would be absurd to see our ancestors in
their urns in the procession at Longchamps. And if the urns were
valuable, they were likely some day to be sold at auction, full of
respectable ashes, or seized by creditors,--a race of men who
respected nothing. The other side made answer that our ancestors were
much safer in urns than at Pere-Lachaise, for before very long the
city of Paris would be compelled to order a Saint-Bartholomew against
its dead, who were invading the neighboring country, and threatening
to invade the territory of Brie. It was, in short, one of those futile
but witty discussions which sometimes cause deep and painful wounds.
Happily for Jules, he knew nothing of the conversations, the witty
speeches, and arguments which his sorrow had furnished to the tongues
of Paris.

The prefect of police was indignant that Monsieur Jacquet had appealed
to a minister to avoid the wise delays of the commissioners of the
public highways; for the exhumation of Madame Jules was a question
belonging to that department. The police bureau was doing its best to
reply promptly to the petition; one appeal was quite sufficient to set
the office in motion, and once in motion matters would go far. But as
for the administration, that might take the case before the Council of
state,--a machine very difficult indeed to move.

After the second day Jacquet was obliged to tell his friend that he
must renounce his desire, because, in a city where the number of tears
shed on black draperies is tariffed, where the laws recognize seven
classes of funerals, where the scrap of ground to hold the dead is
sold at its weight in silver, where grief is worked for what it is
worth, where the prayers of the Church are costly, and the vestry
claim payment for extra voices in the _Dies irae_,--all attempt to get
out of the rut prescribed by the authorities for sorrow is useless and
impossible.

"It would have been to me," said Jules, "a comfort in my misery. I
meant to have died away from here, and I hoped to hold her in my arms
in a distant grave. I did not know that bureaucracy could send its
claws into our very coffins."

He now wished to see if room had been left for him beside his wife.
The two friends went to the cemetery. When they reached it they found
(as at the doors of museums, galleries, and coach-offices) _ciceroni_,
who proposed to guide them through the labyrinth of Pere-Lachaise.
Neither Jules nor Jacquet could have found the spot where Clemence
lay. Ah, frightful anguish! They went to the lodge to consult the
porter of the cemetery. The dead have a porter, and there are hours
when the dead are "not receiving." It is necessary to upset all the
rules and regulations of the upper and lower police to obtain
permission to weep at night, in silence and solitude, over the grave
where a loved one lies. There's a rule for summer and a rule for
winter about this.

Certainly, of all the porters in Paris, the porter of Pere-Lachaise is
the luckiest. In the first place, he has no gate-cord to pull; then,
instead of a lodge, he has a house,--an establishment which is not
quite ministerial, although a vast number of persons come under his
administration, and a good many employees. And this governor of the
dead has a salary, with emoluments, and acts under powers of which
none complain; he plays despot at his ease. His lodge is not a place
of business, though it has departments where the book-keeping of
receipts, expenses, and profits, is carried on. The man is not a
_suisse_, nor a concierge, nor actually a porter. The gate which
admits the dead stands wide open; and though there are monuments and
buildings to be cared for, he is not a care-taker. In short, he is an
indefinable anomaly, an authority which participates in all, and yet
is nothing,--an authority placed, like the dead on whom it is based,
outside of all. Nevertheless, this exceptional man grows out of the
city of Paris,--that chimerical creation like the ship which is its
emblem, that creature of reason moving on a thousand paws which are
seldom unanimous in motion.

This guardian of the cemetery may be called a concierge who has
reached the condition of a functionary, not soluble by dissolution!
His place is far from being a sinecure. He does not allow any one to
be buried without a permit; he must count his dead. He points out to
you in this vast field the six feet square of earth where you will one
day put all you love, or all you hate, a mistress, or a cousin. Yes,
remember this: all the feelings and emotions of Paris come to end
here, at this porter's lodge, where they are administrationized. This
man has registers in which his dead are booked; they are in their
graves, and also on his records. He has under him keepers, gardeners,
grave-diggers, and their assistants. He is a personage. Mourning
hearts do not speak to him at first. He does not appear at all except
in serious cases, such as one corpse mistaken for another, a murdered
body, an exhumation, a dead man coming to life. The bust of the
reigning king is in his hall; possibly he keeps the late royal,
imperial, and quasi-royal busts in some cupboard,--a sort of little
Pere-Lachaise all ready for revolutions. In short, he is a public man,
an excellent man, good husband and good father,--epitaph apart. But so
many diverse sentiments have passed before him on biers; he has seen
so many tears, true and false; he has beheld sorrow under so many
aspects and on so many faces; he has heard such endless thousands of
eternal woes,--that to him sorrow has come to be nothing more than a
stone an inch thick, four feet long, and twenty-four inches wide. As
for regrets, they are the annoyances of his office; he neither
breakfasts nor dines without first wiping off the rain of an
inconsolable affliction. He is kind and tender to other feelings; he
will weep over a stage-hero, over Monsieur Germeuil in the "Auberge
des Adrets," the man with the butter-colored breeches, murdered by
Macaire; but his heart is ossified in the matter of real dead men.
Dead men are ciphers, numbers, to him; it is his business to organize
death. Yet he does meet, three times in a century, perhaps, with an
occasion when his part becomes sublime, and then he _is_ sublime
through every hour of his day,--in times of pestilence.

When Jacquet approached him this absolute monarch was evidently out of
temper.

"I told you," he was saying, "to water the flowers from the rue
Massena to the place Regnault de Saint-Jean-d'Angely. You paid no
attention to me! _Sac-a-papier_! suppose the relations should take it
into their heads to come here to-day because the weather is fine, what
would they say to me? They'd shriek as if they were burned; they'd say
horrid things of us, and calumniate us--"

"Monsieur," said Jacquet, "we want to know where Madame Jules is
buried."

"Madame Jules _who_?" he asked. "We've had three Madame Jules within
the last week. Ah," he said, interrupting himself, "here comes the
funeral of Monsieur le Baron de Maulincour! A fine procession, that!
He has soon followed his grandmother. Some families, when they begin
to go, rattle down like a wager. Lots of bad blood in Parisians."

"Monsieur," said Jacquet, touching him on the arm, "the person I spoke
of is Madame Jules Desmarets, the wife of the broker of that name."

"Ah, I know!" he replied, looking at Jacquet. "Wasn't it a funeral
with thirteen mourning coaches, and only one mourner in the twelve
first? It was so droll we all noticed it--"

"Monsieur, take care, Monsieur Desmarets is with me; he might hear
you, and what you say is not seemly."

"I beg pardon, monsieur! you are quite right. Excuse me, I took you
for heirs. Monsieur," he continued, after consulting a plan of the
cemetery, "Madame Jules is in the rue Marechal Lefebre, alley No. 4,
between Mademoiselle Raucourt, of the Comedie-Francaise, and Monsieur
Moreau-Malvin, a butcher, for whom a handsome tomb in white marble has
been ordered, which will be one of the finest in the cemetery--"

"Monsieur," said Jacquet, interrupting him, "that does not help us."

"True," said the official, looking round him. "Jean," he cried, to a
man whom he saw at a little distance, "conduct these gentlemen to the
grave of Madame Jules Desmarets, the broker's wife. You know where it
is,--near to Mademoiselle Raucourt, the tomb where there's a bust."

The two friends followed the guide; but they did not reach the steep
path which leads to the upper part of the cemetery without having to
pass through a score of proposals and requests, made, with honied
softness, by the touts of marble-workers, iron-founders, and
monumental sculptors.

"If monsieur would like to order _something_, we would do it on the
most reasonable terms."

Jacquet was fortunate enough to be able to spare his friend the
hearing of these proposals so agonizing to bleeding hearts; and
presently they reached the resting-place. When Jules beheld the earth
so recently dug, into which the masons had stuck stakes to mark the
place for the stone posts required to support the iron railing, he
turned, and leaned upon Jacquet's shoulder, raising himself now and
again to cast long glances at the clay mound where he was forced to
leave the remains of the being in and by whom he still lived.

"How miserably she lies there!" he said.

"But she is not there," said Jacquet, "she is in your memory. Come,
let us go; let us leave this odious cemetery, where the dead are
adorned like women for a ball."

"Suppose we take her away?"

"Can it be done?"

"All things can be done!" cried Jules. "So, I shall lie there," he
added, after a pause. "There is room enough."

Jacquet finally succeeded in getting him to leave the great enclosure,
divided like a chessboard by iron railings and elegant compartments,
in which were tombs decorated with palms, inscriptions, and tears as
cold as the stones on which sorrowing hearts had caused to be carved
their regrets and coats of arms. Many good words are there engraved in
black letters, epigrams reproving the curious, _concetti_, wittily
turned farewells, rendezvous given at which only one side appears,
pretentious biographies, glitter, rubbish and tinsel. Here the
floriated thyrsus, there a lance-head, farther on Egyptian urns, now
and then a few cannon; on all sides the emblems of professions, and
every style of art,--Moorish, Greek, Gothic,--friezes, ovules,
paintings, vases, guardian-angels, temples, together with innumerable
_immortelles_, and dead rose-bushes. It is a forlorn comedy! It is
another Paris, with its streets, its signs, its industries, and its
lodgings; but a Paris seen through the diminishing end of an
opera-glass, a microscopic Paris reduced to the littleness of shadows,
spectres, dead men, a human race which no longer has anything great
about it, except its vanity. There Jules saw at his feet, in the long
valley of the Seine, between the slopes of Vaugirard and Meudon and
those of Belleville and Montmartre, the real Paris, wrapped in a misty
blue veil produced by smoke, which the sunlight tendered at that
moment diaphanous. He glanced with a constrained eye at those forty
thousand houses, and said, pointing to the space comprised between the
column of the Place Vendome and the gilded cupola of the Invalides:--

"She was wrenched from me there by the fatal curiosity of that world
which excites itself and meddles solely for excitement and
occupation."

Twelve miles from where they were, on the banks of the Seine, in a
modest village lying on the slope of a hill of that long hilly basin
the middle of which great Paris stirs like a child in its cradle, a
death scene was taking place, far indeed removed from Parisian pomps,
with no accompaniment of torches or tapers or mourning-coaches,
without prayers of the Church, in short, a death in all simplicity.
Here are the facts: The body of a young girl was found early in the
morning, stranded on the river-bank in the slime and reeds of the
Seine. Men employed in dredging sand saw it as they were getting into
their frail boat on their way to their work.

"_Tiens_! fifty francs earned!" said one of them.

"True," said the other.

They approached the body.

"A handsome girl! We had better go and make our statement."

And the two dredgers, after covering the body with their jackets, went
to the house of the village mayor, who was much embarrassed at having
to make out the legal papers necessitated by this discovery.

The news of this event spread with the telegraphic rapidity peculiar
to regions where social communications have no distractions, where
gossip, scandal, calumny, in short, the social tale which feasts the
world has no break of continuity from one boundary to another. Before
long, persons arriving at the mayor's office released him from all
embarrassment. They were able to convert the _proces-verbal_ into a
mere certificate of death, by recognizing the body as that of the
Demoiselle Ida Gruget, corset-maker, living rue de la
Corderie-du-Temple, number 14. The judiciary police of Paris arrived,
and the mother, bearing her daughter's last letter. Amid the mother's
moans, a doctor certified to death by asphyxia, through the injection
of black blood into the pulmonary system,--which settled the matter.
The inquest over, and the certificates signed, by six o'clock the same
evening authority was given to bury the grisette. The rector of the
parish, however, refused to receive her into the church or to pray for
her. Ida Gruget was therefore wrapped in a shroud by an old
peasant-woman, put into a common pine-coffin, and carried to the
village cemetery by four men, followed by a few inquisitive
peasant-women, who talked about the death with wonder mingled with
some pity.

The widow Gruget was charitably taken in by an old lady who prevented
her from following the sad procession of her daughter's funeral. A man
of triple functions, the bell-ringer, beadle, and grave-digger of the
parish, had dug a grave in the half-acre cemetery behind the church,
--a church well known, a classic church, with a square tower and
pointed roof covered with slate, supported on the outside by strong
corner buttresses. Behind the apse of the chancel, lay the cemetery,
enclosed with a dilapidated wall,--a little field full of hillocks;
no marble monuments, no visitors, but surely in every furrow, tears
and true regrets, which were lacking to Ida Gruget. She was cast into
a corner full of tall grass and brambles. After the coffin had been
laid in this field, so poetic in its simplicity, the grave-digger
found himself alone, for night was coming on. While filling the grave,
he stopped now and then to gaze over the wall along the road. He was
standing thus, resting on his spade, and looking at the Seine, which
had brought him the body.

"Poor girl!" cried the voice of a man who suddenly appeared.

"How you made me jump, monsieur," said the grave-digger.

"Was any service held over the body you are burying?"

"No, monsieur. Monsieur le cure wasn't willing. This is the first
person buried here who didn't belong to the parish. Everybody knows
everybody else in this place. Does monsieur--Why, he's gone!"

Some days had elapsed when a man dressed in black called at the house
of Monsieur Jules Desmarets, and without asking to see him carried up
to the chamber of his wife a large porphyry vase, on which were
inscribed the words:--


INVITA LEGE
CONJUGI MOERENTI
FILIOLAE CINERES
RESTITUIT
AMICIS XII. JUVANTIBUS
MORIBUNDUS PATER.


"What a man!" cried Jules, bursting into tears.

Eight days sufficed the husband to obey all the wishes of his wife,
and to arrange his own affairs. He sold his practice to a brother of
Martin Falleix, and left Paris while the authorities were still
discussing whether it was lawful for a citizen to dispose of the body
of his wife.

* * * * *

Who has not encountered on the boulevards of Paris, at the turn of a
street, or beneath the arcades of the Palais-Royal, or in any part of
the world where chance may offer him the sight, a being, man or woman,
at whose aspect a thousand confused thoughts spring into his mind? At
that sight we are suddenly interested, either by features of some
fantastic conformation which reveal an agitated life, or by a singular
effect of the whole person, produced by gestures, air, gait, clothes;
or by some deep, intense look; or by other inexpressible signs which
seize our minds suddenly and forcibly without our being able to
explain even to ourselves the cause of our emotion. The next day other
thoughts and other images have carried out of sight that passing
dream. But if we meet the same personage again, either passing at some
fixed hour, like the clerk of a mayor's office, or wandering about the
public promenades, like those individuals who seem to be a sort of
furniture of the streets of Paris, and who are always to be found in
public places, at first representations or noted restaurants,--then
this being fastens himself or herself on our memory, and remains there
like the first volume of a novel the end of which is lost. We are
tempted to question this unknown person, and say, "Who are you?" "Why
are you lounging here?" "By what right do you wear that pleated
ruffle, that faded waistcoat, and carry that cane with an ivory top;
why those blue spectacles; for what reason do you cling to that cravat
of a dead and gone fashion?" Among these wandering creations some
belong to the species of the Greek Hermae; they say nothing to the
soul; _they are there_, and that is all. Why? is known to none. Such
figure are a type of those used by sculptors for the four Seasons, for
Commerce, for Plenty, etc. Some others--former lawyers, old merchants,
elderly generals--move and walk, and yet seem stationary. Like old
trees that are half uprooted by the current of a river, they seem
never to take part in the torrent of Paris, with its youthful, active
crowd. It is impossible to know if their friends have forgotten to
bury them, or whether they have escaped out of their coffins. At any
rate, they have reached the condition of semi-fossils.

One of these Parisian Melmoths had come within a few days into a
neighborhood of sober, quiet people, who, when the weather is fine,
are invariably to be found in the space which lies between the south
entrance of the Luxembourg and the north entrance of the Observatoire,
--a space without a name, the neutral space of Paris. There, Paris is
no longer; and there, Paris still lingers. The spot is a mingling of
street, square, boulevard, fortification, garden, avenue, high-road,
province, and metropolis; certainly, all of that is to be found there,
and yet the place is nothing of all that,--it is a desert. Around this
spot without a name stand the Foundling hospital, the Bourbe, the
Cochin hospital, the Capucines, the hospital La Rochefoucauld, the
Deaf and Dumb Asylum, the hospital of the Val-de-Grace; in short, all
the vices and all the misfortunes of Paris find their asylum there.
And (that nothing may lack in this philanthropic centre) Science there
studies the tides and longitudes, Monsieur de Chateaubriand has
erected the Marie-Therese Infirmary, and the Carmelites have founded a
convent. The great events of life are represented by bells which ring
incessantly through this desert,--for the mother giving birth, for the
babe that is born, for the vice that succumbs, for the toiler who
dies, for the virgin who prays, for the old man shaking with cold, for
genius self-deluded. And a few steps off is the cemetery of
Mont-Parnasse, where, hour after hour, the sorry funerals of the
faubourg Saint-Marceau wend their way. This esplanade, which commands
a view of Paris, has been taken possession of by bowl-players; it is,
in fact, a sort of bowling green frequented by old gray faces,
belonging to kindly, worthy men, who seem to continue the race of our
ancestors, whose countenances must only be compared with those of
their surroundings.

The man who had become, during the last few days, an inhabitant of
this desert region, proved an assiduous attendant at these games of
bowls; and must, undoubtedly, be considered the most striking creature
of these various groups, who (if it is permissible to liken Parisians
to the different orders of zoology) belonged to the genus mollusk. The
new-comer kept sympathetic step with the _cochonnet_,--the little bowl
which serves as a goal and on which the interest of the game must
centre. He leaned against a tree when the _cochonnet_ stopped; then,
with the same attention that a dog gives to his master's gestures, he
looked at the other bowls flying through the air, or rolling along the
ground. You might have taken him for the weird and watchful genii of
the _cochonnet_. He said nothing; and the bowl-players--the most
fanatic men that can be encountered among the sectarians of any faith
--had never asked the reason of his dogged silence; in fact, the most
observing of them thought him deaf and dumb.

When it happened that the distances between the bowls and the
_cochonnet_ had to be measured, the cane of this silent being was used
as a measure, the players coming up and taking it from the icy hands
of the old man and returning it without a word or even a sign of
friendliness. The loan of his cane seemed a servitude to which he had
negatively consented. When a shower fell, he stayed near the
_cochonnet_, the slave of the bowls, and the guardian of the
unfinished game. Rain affected him no more than the fine weather did;
he was, like the players themselves, an intermediary species between a
Parisian who has the lowest intellect of his kind and an animal which
has the highest.

In other respects, pallid and shrunken, indifferent to his own person,
vacant in mind, he often came bareheaded, showing his sparse white
hair, and his square, yellow, bald skull, like the knee of a beggar
seen through his tattered trousers. His mouth was half-open, no ideas
were in his glance, no precise object appeared in his movements; he
never smiled; he never raised his eyes to heaven, but kept them
habitually on the ground, where he seemed to be looking for something.
At four o'clock an old woman arrived, to take him Heaven knows where;
which she did by towing him along by the arm, as a young girl drags a
wilful goat which still wants to browse by the wayside. This old man
was a horrible thing to see.

In the afternoon of the day when Jules Desmarets left Paris, his
travelling-carriage, in which he was alone, passed rapidly through the
rue de l'Est, and came out upon the esplanade of the Observatoire at
the moment when the old man, leaning against a tree, had allowed his
cane to be taken from his hand amid the noisy vociferations of the
players, pacifically irritated. Jules, thinking that he recognized
that face, felt an impulse to stop, and at the same instant the
carriage came to a standstill; for the postilion, hemmed in by some
handcarts, had too much respect for the game to call upon the players
to make way for him.

"It is he!" said Jules, beholding in that human wreck, Ferragus
XXIII., chief of the Devorants. Then, after a pause, he added, "How he
loved her!--Go on, postilion."




ADDENDUM

Note: Ferragus is the first part of a trilogy. Part two is
entitled The Duchesse de Langeais and part three is The Girl with
the Golden Eyes. In other addendum references all three stories
are usually combined under the title The Thirteen.

The following personages appear in other stories of the Human Comedy.

Bourignard, Gratien-Henri-Victor-Jean-Joseph
The Girl with the Golden Eyes

Desmartes, Jules
Cesar Birotteau

Desmartes, Madame Jules
Cesar Birotteau

Desplein
The Atheist's Mass
Cousin Pons
Lost Illusions
The Government Clerks
Pierrette
A Bachelor's Establishment
The Seamy Side of History
Modeste Mignon
Scenes from a Courtesan's Life
Honorine

Gruget, Madame Etienne
The Government Clerks
A Bachelor's Establishment

Haudry (doctor)
Cesar Birotteau
A Bachelor's Establishment
The Seamy Side of History
Cousin Pons

Langeais, Duchesse Antoinette de
Father Goriot
The Duchesse of Langeais