Gobseck

H >> Honore de Balzac >> Gobseck


"One morning at the beginning of December 1824, he looked up at
Ernest, who sat at the foot of his bed gazing at his father with
wistful eyes.

"'Are you in pain?' the little Vicomte asked.

"'No,' said the Count, with a ghastly smile, 'it all lies _here and
about my heart_!'

"He pointed to his forehead, and then laid his wasted fingers on his
hollow chest. Ernest began to cry at the sight.

"'How is it that M. Derville does not come to me?' the Count asked
his servant (he thought that Maurice was really attached to him, but
the man was entirely in the Countess' interest)--'What! Maurice!' and
the dying man suddenly sat upright in his bed, and seemed to recover
all his presence of mind, 'I have sent for my attorney seven or eight
times during the last fortnight, and he does not come!' he cried. 'Do
you imagine that I am to be trifled with? Go for him, at once, this
very instant, and bring him back with you. If you do not carry out my
orders, I shall get up and go myself.'

"'Madame,' said the man as he came into the salon, 'you heard M. le
Comte; what ought I to do?'

"'Pretend to go to the attorney, and when you come back tell your
master that his man of business is forty leagues away from Paris on an
important lawsuit. Say that he is expected back at the end of the
week.--Sick people never know how ill they are,' thought the Countess;
'he will wait till the man comes home.'

"The doctor had said on the previous evening that the Count could
scarcely live through the day. When the servant came back two hours
later to give that hopeless answer, the dying man seemed to be greatly
agitated.

"'Oh God!' he cried again and again, 'I put my trust in none but
Thee.'

"For a long while he lay and gazed at his son, and spoke in a feeble
voice at last.

"'Ernest, my boy, you are very young; but you have a good heart; you
can understand, no doubt, that a promise given to a dying man is
sacred; a promise to a father . . . Do you feel that you can be
trusted with a secret, and keep it so well and so closely that even
your mother herself shall not know that you have a secret to keep?
There is no one else in this house whom I can trust to-day. You will
not betray my trust, will you?'

"'No, father.'

"'Very well, then, Ernest, in a minute or two I will give you a
sealed packet that belongs to M. Derville; you must take such care of
it that no one can know that you have it; then you must slip out of
the house and put the letter into the post-box at the corner.'

"'Yes, father.'

"'Can I depend upon you?'

"'Yes, father.'

"'Come and kiss me. You have made death less bitter to me, dear boy.
In six or seven years' time you will understand the importance of this
secret, and you will be well rewarded then for your quickness and
obedience, you will know then how much I love you. Leave me alone for
a minute, and let no one--no matter whom--come in meanwhile.'

"Ernest went out and saw his mother standing in the next room.

"'Ernest,' said she, 'come here.'

"She sat down, drew her son to her knees, and clasped him in her arms,
and held him tightly to her heart.

"'Ernest, your father said something to you just now.'

"'Yes, mamma.'

"'What did he say?'

"'I cannot repeat it, mamma.'

"'Oh, my dear child!' cried the Countess, kissing him in rapture.
'You have kept your secret; how glad that makes me! Never tell a lie;
never fail to keep your word--those are two principles which should
never be forgotten.'

"'Oh! mamma, how beautiful you are! _You_ have never told a lie, I am
quite sure.'

"'Once or twice, Ernest dear, I have lied. Yes, and I have not kept
my word under circumstances which speak louder than all precepts.
Listen, my Ernest, you are big enough and intelligent enough to see
that your father drives me away, and will not allow me to nurse him,
and this is not natural, for you know how much I love him.'

"'Yes, mamma.'

"The Countess began to cry. 'Poor child!' she said, 'this misfortune
is the result of treacherous insinuations. Wicked people have tried to
separate me from your father to satisfy their greed. They mean to take
all our money from us and to keep it for themselves. If your father
were well, the division between us would soon be over; he would listen
to me; he is loving and kind; he would see his mistake. But now his
mind is affected, and his prejudices against me have become a fixed
idea, a sort of mania with him. It is one result of his illness. Your
father's fondness for you is another proof that his mind is deranged.
Until he fell ill you never noticed that he loved you more than
Pauline and Georges. It is all caprice with him now. In his affection
for you he might take it into his head to tell you to do things for
him. If you do not want to ruin us all, my darling, and to see your
mother begging her bread like a pauper woman, you must tell her
everything----'

"'Ah!' cried the Count. He had opened the door and stood there, a
sudden, half-naked apparition, almost as thin and fleshless as a
skeleton.

"His smothered cry produced a terrible effect upon the Countess; she
sat motionless, as if a sudden stupor had seized her. Her husband was
as white and wasted as if he had risen out of his grave.

"'You have filled my life to the full with trouble, and now you are
trying to vex my deathbed, to warp my boy's mind, and make a depraved
man of him!' he cried, hoarsely.

"The Countess flung herself at his feet. His face, working with the
last emotions of life, was almost hideous to see.

"'Mercy! mercy!' she cried aloud, shedding a torrent of tears.

"'Have you shown me any pity?' he asked. 'I allowed you to squander
your own money, and now do you mean to squander my fortune, too, and
ruin my son?'

"'Ah! well, yes, have no pity for me, be merciless to me!' she cried.
'But the children? Condemn your widow to live in a convent; I will
obey you; I will do anything, anything that you bid me, to expiate the
wrong I have done you, if that so the children may be happy! The
children! Oh, the children!'

"'I have only one child,' said the Count, stretching out a wasted
arm, in his despair, towards his son.

"'Pardon a penitent woman, a penitent woman! . . .' wailed the
Countess, her arms about her husband's damp feet. She could not speak
for sobbing; vague, incoherent sounds broke from her parched throat.

"'You dare to talk of penitence after all that you said to Ernest!'
exclaimed the dying man, shaking off the Countess, who lay groveling
over his feet.--'You turn me to ice!' he added, and there was
something appalling in the indifference with which he uttered the
words. 'You have been a bad daughter; you have been a bad wife; you
will be a bad mother.'

"The wretched woman fainted away. The dying man reached his bed and
lay down again, and a few hours later sank into unconsciousness. The
priests came and administered the sacraments.

"At midnight he died; the scene that morning had exhausted his
remaining strength, and on the stroke of midnight I arrived with Daddy
Gobseck. The house was in confusion, and under cover of it we walked
up into the little salon adjoining the death-chamber. The three
children were there in tears, with two priests, who had come to watch
with the dead. Ernest came over to me, and said that his mother
desired to be alone in the Count's room.

"'Do not go in,' he said; and I admired the child for his tone and
gesture; 'she is praying there.'

"Gobseck began to laugh that soundless laugh of his, but I felt too
much touched by the feeling in Ernest's little face to join in the
miser's sardonic amusement. When Ernest saw that we moved towards the
door, he planted himself in front of it, crying out, 'Mamma, here are
some gentlemen in black who want to see you!'

"Gobseck lifted Ernest out of the way as if the child had been a
feather, and opened the door.

"What a scene it was that met our eyes! The room was in frightful
disorder; clothes and papers and rags lay tossed about in a confusion
horrible to see in the presence of Death; and there, in the midst,
stood the Countess in disheveled despair, unable to utter a word, her
eyes glittering. The Count had scarcely breathed his last before his
wife came in and forced open the drawers and the desk; the carpet was
strewn with litter, some of the furniture and boxes were broken, the
signs of violence could be seen everywhere. But if her search had at
first proved fruitless, there was that in her excitement and attitude
which led me to believe that she had found the mysterious documents at
last. I glanced at the bed, and professional instinct told me all that
had happened. The mattress had been flung contemptuously down by the
bedside, and across it, face downwards, lay the body of the Count,
like one of the paper envelopes that strewed the carpet--he too was
nothing now but an envelope. There was something grotesquely horrible
in the attitude of the stiffening rigid limbs.

"The dying man must have hidden the counter-deed under his pillow to
keep it safe so long as life should last; and his wife must have
guessed his thought; indeed, it might be read plainly in his last
dying gesture, in the convulsive clutch of his claw-like hands. The
pillow had been flung to the floor at the foot of the bed; I could see
the print of her heel upon it. At her feet lay a paper with the
Count's arms on the seals; I snatched it up, and saw that it was
addressed to me. I looked steadily at the Countess with the pitiless
clear-sightedness of an examining magistrate confronting a guilty
creature. The contents were blazing in the grate; she had flung them
on the fire at the sound of our approach, imagining, from a first
hasty glance at the provisions which I had suggested for her children,
that she was destroying a will which disinherited them. A tormented
conscience and involuntary horror of the deed which she had done had
taken away all power of reflection. She had been caught in the act,
and possibly the scaffold was rising before her eyes, and she already
felt the felon's branding iron.

"There she stood gasping for breath, waiting for us to speak, staring
at us with haggard eyes.

"I went across to the grate and pulled out an unburned fragment. 'Ah,
madame!' I exclaimed, 'you have ruined your children! Those papers
were their titles to their property.'

"Her mouth twitched, she looked as if she were threatened by a
paralytic seizure.

"'Eh! eh!' cried Gobseck; the harsh, shrill tone grated upon our ears
like the sound of a brass candlestick scratching a marble surface.

"There was a pause, then the old man turned to me and said quietly:

"'Do you intend Mme. la Comtesse to suppose that I am not the
rightful owner of the property sold to me by her late husband? This
house belongs to me now.'

"A sudden blow on the head from a bludgeon would have given me less
pain and astonishment. The Countess saw the look of hesitation in my
face.

"'Monsieur,' she cried, 'Monsieur!' She could find no other words.

"'You are a trustee, are you not?' I asked.

"'That is possible.'

"'Then do you mean to take advantage of this crime of hers?'

"'Precisely.'

"I went at that, leaving the Countess sitting by her husband's
bedside, shedding hot tears. Gobseck followed me. Outside in the
street I separated from him, but he came after me, flung me one of
those searching glances with which he probed men's minds, and said in
the husky flute-tones, pitched in a shriller key:

"'Do you take it upon yourself to judge me?'



"From that time forward we saw little of each other. Gobseck let the
Count's mansion on lease; he spent the summers on the country estates.
He was a lord of the manor in earnest, putting up farm buildings,
repairing mills and roadways, and planting timber. I came across him
one day in a walk in the Jardin des Tuileries.

"'The Countess is behaving like a heroine,' said I; 'she gives
herself up entirely to the children's education; she is giving them a
perfect bringing up. The oldest boy is a charming young fellow----'

"'That is possible.'

"'But ought you not to help Ernest?' I suggested.

"'Help him!' cried Gobseck. 'Not I. Adversity is the greatest of all
teachers; adversity teaches us to know the value of money and the
worth of men and women. Let him set sail on the seas of Paris; when he
is a qualified pilot, we will give him a ship to steer.'

"I left him without seeking to explain the meaning of his words.

"M. de Restaud's mother has prejudiced him against me, and he is very
far from taking me as his legal adviser; still, I went to see Gobseck
last week to tell him about Ernest's love for Mlle. Camille, and
pressed him to carry out his contract, since that young Restaud is
just of age.

"I found the old bill-discounter had been kept to his bed for a long
time by the complaint of which he was to die. He put me off, saying
that he would give the matter his attention when he could get up again
and see after his business; his idea being no doubt that he would not
give up any of his possessions so long as the breath was in him; no
other reason could be found for his shuffling answer. He seemed to me
to be much worse than he at all suspected. I stayed with him long
enough to discern the progress of a passion which age had converted
into a sort of craze. He wanted to be alone in the house, and had
taken the rooms one by one as they fell vacant. In his own room he had
changed nothing; the furniture which I knew so well sixteen years ago
looked the same as ever; it might have been kept under a glass case.
Gobseck's faithful old portress, with her husband, a pensioner, who
sat in the entry while she was upstairs, was still his housekeeper and
charwoman, and now in addition his sick-nurse. In spite of his
feebleness, Gobseck saw his clients himself as heretofore, and
received sums of money; his affairs had been so simplified, that he
only needed to send his pensioner out now and again on an errand, and
could carry on business in his bed.

"After the treaty, by which France recognized the Haytian Republic,
Gobseck was one of the members of the commission appointed to
liquidate claims and assess repayments due by Hayti; his special
knowledge of old fortunes in San Domingo, and the planters and their
heirs and assigns to whom the indemnities were due, had led to his
nomination. Gobseck's peculiar genius had then devised an agency for
discounting the planters' claims on the government. The business was
carried on under the names of Werbrust and Gigonnet, with whom he
shared the spoil without disbursements, for his knowledge was accepted
instead of capital. The agency was a sort of distillery, in which
money was extracted from doubtful claims, and the claims of those who
knew no better, or had no confidence in the government. As a
liquidator, Gobseck could make terms with the large landed
proprietors; and these, either to gain a higher percentage of their
claims, or to ensure prompt settlements, would send him presents in
proportion to their means. In this way presents came to be a kind of
percentage upon sums too large to pass through his control, while the
agency bought up cheaply the small and dubious claims, or the claims
of those persons who preferred a little ready money to a deferred and
somewhat hazy repayment by the Republic. Gobseck was the insatiable
boa constrictor of the great business. Every morning he received his
tribute, eyeing it like a Nabob's prime minister, as he considers
whether he will sign a pardon. Gobseck would take anything, from the
present of game sent him by some poor devil or the pound's weight of
wax candles from devout folk, to the rich man's plate and the
speculator's gold snuff-box. Nobody knew what became of the presents
sent to the old money-lender. Everything went in, but nothing came
out.

"'On the word of an honest woman,' said the portress, an old
acquaintance of mine, 'I believe he swallows it all and is none the
fatter for it; he is as thin and dried up as the cuckoo in the clock.'

"At length, last Monday, Gobseck sent his pensioner for me. The man
came up to my private office.

"'Be quick and come, M. Derville,' said he, 'the governor is just
going to hand in his checks; he has grown as yellow as a lemon; he is
fidgeting to speak with you; death has fair hold of him; the rattle is
working in his throat.'

"When I entered Gobseck's room, I found the dying man kneeling before
the grate. If there was no fire on the hearth, there was at any rate a
monstrous heap of ashes. He had dragged himself out of bed, but his
strength had failed him, and he could neither go back nor find the
voice to complain.

"'You felt cold, old friend,' I said, as I helped him back to his
bed; 'how can you do without a fire?'

"'I am not cold at all,' he said. 'No fire here! no fire! I am going,
I know not where, lad,' he went on, glancing at me with blank,
lightless eyes, 'but I am going away from this.--I have _carpology_,'
said he (the use of the technical term showing how clear and accurate
his mental processes were even now). 'I thought the room was full of
live gold, and I got up to catch some of it.--To whom will all mine
go, I wonder? Not to the crown; I have left a will, look for it,
Grotius. _La belle Hollandaise_ had a daughter; I once saw the girl
somewhere or other, in the Rue Vivienne, one evening. They call her
"_La Torpille_," I believe; she is as pretty as pretty can be; look her
up, Grotius. You are my executor; take what you like; help yourself.
There are Strasburg pies, there, and bags of coffee, and sugar, and
gold spoons. Give the Odiot service to your wife. But who is to have
the diamonds? Are you going to take them, lad? There is snuff too
--sell it at Hamburg, tobaccos are worth half as much again at Hamburg.
All sorts of things I have in fact, and now I must go and leave them
all.--Come, Papa Gobseck, no weakness, be yourself!'

"He raised himself in bed, the lines of his face standing out as
sharply against the pillow as if the profile had been cast in bronze;
he stretched out a lean arm and bony hand along the coverlet and
clutched it, as if so he would fain keep his hold on life, then he
gazed hard at the grate, cold as his own metallic eyes, and died in
full consciousness of death. To us--the portress, the old pensioner,
and myself--he looked like one of the old Romans standing behind the
Consuls in Lethiere's picture of the _Death of the Sons of Brutus_.

"'He was a good-plucked one, the old Lascar!' said the pensioner in
his soldierly fashion.

"But as for me, the dying man's fantastical enumeration of his riches
still sounding in my ears, and my eyes, following the direction of
his, rested on that heap of ashes. It struck me that it was very
large. I took the tongs, and as soon as I stirred the cinders, I felt
the metal underneath, a mass of gold and silver coins, receipts taken
during his illness, doubtless, after he grew too feeble to lock the
money up, and could trust no one to take it to the bank for him.

"'Run for the justice of the peace,' said I, turning to the old
pensioner, 'so that everything can be sealed here at once.'

"Gobseck's last words and the old portress' remarks had struck me. I
took the keys of the rooms on the first and second floor to make a
visitation. The first door that I opened revealed the meaning of the
phrases which I took for mad ravings; and I saw the length to which
covetousness goes when it survives only as an illogical instinct, the
last stage of greed of which you find so many examples among misers in
country towns.

"In the room next to the one in which Gobseck had died, a quantity of
eatables of all kinds were stored--putrid pies, mouldy fish, nay, even
shell-fish, the stench almost choked me. Maggots and insects swarmed.
These comparatively recent presents were put down, pell-mell, among
chests of tea, bags of coffee, and packing-cases of every shape. A
silver soup tureen on the chimney-piece was full of advices of the
arrival of goods consigned to his order at Havre, bales of cotton,
hogsheads of sugar, barrels of rum, coffees, indigo, tobaccos, a
perfect bazaar of colonial produce. The room itself was crammed with
furniture, and silver-plate, and lamps, and vases, and pictures; there
were books, and curiosities, and fine engravings lying rolled up,
unframed. Perhaps these were not all presents, and some part of this
vast quantity of stuff had been deposited with him in the shape of
pledges, and had been left on his hands in default of payment. I
noticed jewel-cases, with ciphers and armorial bearings stamped upon
them, and sets of fine table-linen, and weapons of price; but none of
the things were docketed. I opened a book which seemed to be
misplaced, and found a thousand-franc note in it. I promised myself
that I would go through everything thoroughly; I would try the
ceilings, and floors, and walls, and cornices to discover all the
gold, hoarded with such passionate greed by a Dutch miser worthy of a
Rembrandt's brush. In all the course of my professional career I have
never seen such impressive signs of the eccentricity of avarice.

"I went back to his room, and found an explanation of this chaos
and accumulation of riches in a pile of letters lying under the
paper-weights on his desk--Gobseck's correspondence with the various
dealers to whom doubtless he usually sold his presents. These persons
had, perhaps, fallen victims to Gobseck's cleverness, or Gobseck may
have wanted fancy prices for his goods; at any rate, every bargain hung
in suspense. He had not disposed of the eatables to Chevet, because
Chevet would only take them of him at a loss of thirty per cent.
Gobseck haggled for a few francs between the prices, and while they
wrangled the goods became unsalable. Again, Gobseck had refused free
delivery of his silver-plate, and declined to guarantee the weights of
his coffees. There had been a dispute over each article, the first
indication in Gobseck of the childishness and incomprehensible
obstinacy of age, a condition of mind reached at last by all men in
whom a strong passion survives the intellect.

"I said to myself, as he had said, 'To whom will all these riches go?'
. . . And then I think of the grotesque information he gave me as to
the present address of his heiress, I foresee that it will be my duty
to search all the houses of ill-fame in Paris to pour out an immense
fortune on some worthless jade. But, in the first place, know this
--that in a few days time Ernest de Restaud will come into a fortune
to which his title is unquestionable, a fortune which will put him in
a position to marry Mlle. Camille, even after adequate provision has
been made for his mother the Comtesse de Restaud and his sister and
brother."




ADDENDUM

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

Bidault (known as Gigonnet)
The Government Clerks
The Vendetta
Cesar Birotteau
The Firm of Nucingen
A Daughter of Eve

Derville
A Start in Life
The Gondreville Mystery
Father Goriot
Colonel Chabert
Scenes from a Courtesan's Life

Derville, Madame
Cesar Birotteau

Gobseck, Jean-Esther Van
Father Goriot
Cesar Birotteau
The Government Clerks
The Unconscious Humorists

Gobseck, Sarah Van
Cesar Birotteau
The Maranas
Scenes from a Courtesan's Life
The Member for Arcis

Gobseck, Esther Van
The Firm of Nucingen
A Bachelor's Establishment
Scenes from a Courtesan's Life

Grandlieu, Vicomtesse de
Scenes from a Courtesan's Life
Colonel Chabert

Grandlieu, Vicomte Juste de
Scenes from a Courtesan's Life

Grandlieu, Vicomtesse Juste de
Scenes from a Courtesan's Life
A Daughter of Eve

Maurice (de Restaud's valet)
Father Goriot

Palma (banker)
The Firm of Nucingen
Cesar Birotteau
Lost Illusions
A Distinguished Provincial at Paris
The Ball at Sceaux

Restaud, Comte de
Father Goriot

Restaud, Comtesse Anastasie de
Father Goriot

Restaud, Ernest de
The Member for Arcis

Restaud, Madame Ernest de
The Member for Arcis

Restaud, Felix-Georges de
The Member for Arcis

Trailles, Comte Maxime de
Cesar Birotteau
Father Goriot
Ursule Mirouet
A Man of Business
The Member for Arcis
The Secrets of a Princess
Cousin Betty
The Member for Arcis
Beatrix
The Unconscious Humorists