Rise and Fall of Cesar Birotteau

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These phrases, divided by eloquent pauses and delivered like shot,
after the manner of those who recriminate, expressed so deep and
constant an attachment that Madame Birotteau was inwardly touched,
though, like all women, she made use of the love she inspired to gain
her end.

"Well! Birotteau," she said, "if you love me, let me be happy in my
own way. Neither you nor I have education; we don't know how to talk,
nor to play 'your obedient servant' like men of the world; how then do
you expect that we could succeed in government places? I shall be
happy at Les Tresorieres, indeed I shall. I have always loved birds
and animals, and I can pass my life very well taking care of the hens
and the farm. Let us sell the business, marry Cesarine, and give up
your visions. We can come and pass the winters in Paris with our
son-in-law; we shall be happy; nothing in politics or commerce can
then change our way of life. Why do you want to crush others? Isn't
our present fortune enough for us? When you are a millionaire can you
eat two dinners; will you want two wives? Look at my uncle Pillerault!
He is wisely content with his little property, and spends his life in
good deeds. Does he want fine furniture? Not he! I know very well you
have been ordering furniture for me; I saw Braschon here, and it was
not to buy perfumery."

"Well, my beauty, yes! Your furniture is ordered; our improvements
begin to-morrow, and are superintended by an architect recommended to
me by Monsieur de la Billardiere."

"My God!" she cried, "have pity upon us!"

"But you are not reasonable, my love. Do you think that at
thirty-seven years of age, fresh and pretty as you are, you can go and
bury yourself at Chinon? I, thank God, am only thirty-nine. Chance
opens to me a fine career; I enter upon it. If I conduct myself
prudently I can make an honorable house among the bourgeoisie of Paris,
as was done in former times. I can found the house of Birotteau, like
the house of Keller, or Jules Desmartes, or Roguin, Cochin, Guillaume,
Lebas, Nucingen, Saillard, Popinot, Matifat, who make their mark, or
have made it, in their respective quarters. Come now! If this affair
were not as sure as bars of gold--"

"Sure!"

"Yes, sure. For two months I have figured at it. Without seeming to do
so, I have been getting information on building from the department of
public works, from architects and contractors. Monsieur Grindot, the
young architect who is to alter our house, is in despair that he has
no money to put into the speculation."

"He hopes for the work; he says that to screw something out of you."

"Can he take in such men as Pillerault, as Charles Claparon, as
Roguin? The profit is as sure as that of the Paste of Sultans."

"But, my dear friend, why should Roguin speculate? He gets his
commissions, and his fortune is made. I see him pass sometimes more
full of care than a minister of state, with an underhand look which I
don't like; he hides some secret anxiety. His face has grown in five
years to look like that of an old rake. Who can be sure that he won't
kick over the traces when he gets all your property into his own
hands. Such things happen. Do we know him well? He has only been a
friend for fifteen years, and I wouldn't put my hand into the fire for
him. Why! he is not decent: he does not live with his wife. He must
have mistresses who ruin him; I don't see any other cause for his
anxiety. When I am dressing I look through the blinds, and I often see
him coming home in the mornings: where from? Nobody knows. He seems to
me like a man who has an establishment in town, who spends on his
pleasures, and Madame on hers. Is that the life of a notary? If they
make fifty thousand francs a year and spend sixty thousand, in twenty
years they will get to the end of their property and be as naked as
the little Saint John; and then, as they can't do without luxury, they
will prey upon their friends without compunction. Charity begins at
home. He is intimate with that little scamp du Tillet, our former
clerk; and I see nothing good in that friendship. If he doesn't know
how to judge du Tillet he must be blind; and if he does know him, why
does he pet him? You'll tell me, because his wife is fond of du
Tillet. Well, I don't look for any good in a man who has no honor with
respect to his wife. Besides, the present owners of that land must be
fools to sell for a hundred sous what is worth a hundred francs. If
you met a child who did not know the value of a louis, wouldn't you
feel bound to tell him of it? Your affair looks to me like a theft, be
it said without offence."

"Good God! how queer women are sometimes, and how they mix up ideas!
If Roguin were not in this business, you would say to me: 'Look here,
Cesar, you are going into a thing without Roguin; therefore it is
worth nothing.' But to-day he is in it, as security, and you tell
me--"

"No, that is a Monsieur Claparon."

"But a notary cannot put his own name into a speculation."

"Then why is he doing a thing forbidden by law? How do you answer
that, you who are guided by law?"

"Let me go on. Roguin is in it, and you tell me the business is
worthless. Is that reasonable? You say, 'He is acting against the
law.' But he would put himself openly in the business if it were
necessary. Can't they say the same of me? Would Ragon and Pillerault
come and say to me: 'Why do you have to do with this affair,--you who
have made your money as a merchant?'"

"Merchants are not in the same position as notaries," said Madame
Birotteau.

"Well, my conscience is clear," said Cesar, continuing; "the people
who sell, sell because they must; we do not steal from them any more
than you steal from others when you buy their stocks at seventy-five.
We buy the ground to-day at to-day's price. In two years it will be
another thing; just so with stocks. Know then, Constance-Barbe-
Josephine Pillerault, that you will never catch Cesar Birotteau doing
anything against the most rigid honor, nor against the laws, nor
against his conscience, nor against delicacy. A man established and
known for eighteen years, to be suspected in his own household of
dishonesty!"

"Come, be calm, Cesar! A woman who has lived with you all that time
knows down to the bottom of your soul. You are the master, after all.
You earned your fortune, didn't you? It is yours, and you can spend
it. If we are reduced to the last straits of poverty, neither your
daughter nor I will make you a single reproach. But, listen; when you
invented your Paste of Sultans and Carminative Balm, what did you
risk? Five or six thousand francs. To-day you put all your fortune on
a game of cards. And you are not the only one to play; you have
associates who may be much cleverer than you. Give your ball, remodel
the house, spend ten thousand francs if you like,--it is useless but
not ruinous. As to your speculations near the Madeleine, I formally
object. You are perfumer: be a perfumer, and not a speculator in land.
We women have instincts which do not deceive us. I have warned you;
now follow your own lead. You have been judge in the department of
commerce, you know the laws. So far, you have guided the ship well,
Cesar; I shall follow you! But I shall tremble till I see our fortune
solidly secure and Cesarine well married. God grant that my dream be
not a prophecy!"

This submission thwarted Birotteau, who now employed an innocent ruse
to which he had had recourse on similar occasions.

"Listen, Constance. I have not given my word; though it is the same as
if I had."

"Oh, Cesar, all is said; let us say no more. Honor before fortune.
Come, go to bed, dear friend, there is no more wood. Besides, we shall
talk better in bed, if it amuses you. Oh! that horrid dream! My God!
to see one's self! it was fearful! Cesarine and I will have to make a
pretty number of _neuvaines_ for the success of your speculations."

"Doubtless the help of God can do no harm," said Birotteau, gravely.
"But the oil in nuts is also powerful, wife. I made this discovery
just as I made that of the Double Paste of Sultans,--by chance. The
first time by opening a book; this time by looking at an engraving of
Hero and Leander: you know, the woman who pours oil on the head of her
lover; pretty, isn't it? The safest speculations are those which
depend on vanity, on self-love, on the desire of appearing well. Those
sentiments never die."

"Alas! I know it well."

"At a certain age men will turn their souls inside out to get hair, if
they haven't any. For some time past hair-dressers have told me that
they sell not only Macassar, but all the drugs which are said to dye
hair or make it grow. Since the peace, men are more with women, and
women don't like bald-heads; hey! hey! Mimi? The demand for that
article grows out of the political situation. A composition which will
keep the hair in good health will sell like bread; all the more if it
has the sanction, as it will have, of the Academy of Sciences. My good
Monsieur Vauquelin will perhaps help me once more. I shall go to him
to-morrow and submit my idea; offering him at the same time that
engraving which I have at last found in Germany, after two years'
search. He is now engaged in analyzing hair: Chiffreville, his
associate in the manufacture of chemical products, told me so. If my
discovery should jump with his, my essence will be bought by both
sexes. The idea is a fortune; I repeat it. Mon Dieu! I can't sleep.
Hey! luckily little Popinot has the finest head of hair in the world.
A shop-girl with hair long enough to touch the ground, and who could
say--if the thing were possible without offence to God or my neighbor
--that the Oil Comagene (for it shall be an oil, decidedly) has had
something to do with it,--all the gray-heads in Paris will fling
themselves upon the invention like poverty upon the world. Hey! hey!
Mignonne! how about the ball? I am not wicked, but I should like to
meet that little scamp du Tillet, who swells out with his fortune and
avoids me at the Bourse. He knows that I know a thing about him which
was not fine. Perhaps I have been too kind to him. Isn't it odd, wife,
that we are always punished for our good deeds?--here below, I mean. I
behaved like a father to him; you don't know all I did for him."

"You give me goose-flesh merely speaking of it. If you knew what he
wished to make of you, you would never have kept the secret of his
stealing that three thousand francs,--for I guessed just how the thing
was done. If you had sent him to the correctional police, perhaps you
would have done a service to a good many people."

"What did he wish to make of me?"

"Nothing. If you were inclined to listen to me to-night, I would give
you a piece of good advice, Birotteau; and that is, to let your du
Tillet alone."

"Won't it seem strange if I exclude him from my house,--a clerk for
whom I endorsed to the amount of twenty thousand francs when he first
went into business? Come, let us do good for good's sake. Besides,
perhaps du Tillet has mended his ways."

"Everything is to be turned topsy-turvy, then?"

"What do you mean with your topsy-turvy? Everything will be ruled like
a sheet of music-paper. Have you forgotten what I have just told you
about turning the staircase and hiring the first floor of the next
house?--which is all settled with the umbrella-maker, Cayron. He and I
are going to-morrow to see his proprietor, Monsieur Molineux.
To-morrow I have as much to do as a minister of state."

"You turn my brain with your projects," said Constance. "I am all
mixed up. Besides, Birotteau, I'm asleep."

"Good-day," replied the husband. "Just listen; I say good-day because
it is morning, Mimi. Ah! there she is off, the dear child. Yes! you
shall be rich, _richissime_, or I'll renounce my name of Cesar!"

A few moments later Constance and Cesar were peacefully snoring.



II

A glance rapidly thrown over the past life of this household will
strengthen the ideas which ought to have been suggested by the
friendly altercation of the two personages in this scene. While
picturing the manners and customs of retail shopkeepers, this sketch
will also show by what singular chances Cesar Birotteau became
deputy-mayor and perfumer, retired officer of the National Guard,
and chevalier of the Legion of honor. In bringing to light the depths
of his character and the causes of his rise, we shall show that
fortuitous commercial events which strong brains dominate, may become
irreparable catastrophes for weak ones. Events are never absolute;
their results depend on individuals. Misfortune is a stepping-stone
for genius, the baptismal font of Christians, a treasure for the
skilful man, an abyss for the feeble.

A vine-dresser in the neighborhood of Chinon, named Jean Birotteau,
married the waiting-maid of a lady whose vines he tilled. He had three
sons; his wife died in giving birth to the last, and the poor man did
not long survive her. The mistress had been fond of the maid, and
brought up with her own sons the eldest child, Francois, and placed
him in a seminary. Ordained priest, Francois Birotteau hid himself
during the Revolution, and led the wandering life of priests not sworn
by the Republic, hunted like wild beasts and guillotined at the first
chance. At the time when this history begins he was vicar of the
cathedral of Tours, and had only once left that city to visit his
brother Cesar. The bustle of Paris so bewildered the good priest that
he was afraid to leave his room. He called the cabriolets
"half-coaches," and wondered at all he saw. After a week's stay he
went back to Tours resolving never to revisit the capital.

The second son of the vine-dresser, Jean Birotteau, was drafted into
the militia, and won the rank of captain early in the wars of the
Revolution. At the battle of Trebia, Macdonald called for volunteers
to carry a battery. Captain Jean Birotteau advanced with his company,
and was killed. The destiny of the Birotteaus demanded, no doubt, that
they should be oppressed by men, or by circumstances, wheresoever they
planted themselves.

The last child is the hero of this story. When Cesar at fourteen years
of age could read, write, and cipher, he left his native place and
came to Paris on foot to seek his fortune, with one louis in his
pocket. The recommendation of an apothecary at Tours got him a place
as shop-boy with Monsieur and Madame Ragon, perfumers. Cesar owned at
this period a pair of hob-nailed shoes, a pair of breeches, blue
stockings, a flowered waistcoat, a peasant's jacket, three coarse
shirts of good linen, and his travelling cudgel. If his hair was cut
like that of a choir-boy, he at least had the sturdy loins of a
Tourangian; if he yielded sometimes to the native idleness of his
birthplace, it was counterbalanced by his desire to make his fortune;
if he lacked cleverness and education, he possessed an instinctive
rectitude and delicate feelings, which he inherited from his mother,
--a being who had, in Tourangian phrase, a "heart of gold." Cesar
received from the Ragons his food, six francs a month as wages, and a
pallet to sleep upon in the garret near the cook. The clerks who
taught him to pack the goods, to do the errands, and sweep up the shop
and the pavement, made fun of him as they did so, according to the
manners and customs of shop-keeping, in which chaff is a principal
element of instruction. Monsieur and Madame Ragon spoke to him like a
dog. No one paid attention to his weariness, though many a night his
feet, blistered by the pavements of Paris, and his bruised shoulders,
made him suffer horribly. This harsh application of the maxim "each
for himself,"--the gospel of large cities,--made Cesar think the life
of Paris very hard. At night he cried as he thought of Touraine, where
the peasant works at his ease, where the mason lays a stone between
breakfast and dinner, and idleness is wisely mingled with labor; but
he always fell asleep without having time to think of running away,
for he had his errands to do in the morning, and obeyed his duty with
the instinct of a watch-dog. If occasionally he complained, the head
clerk would smile with a jovial air, and say,--

"Ah, my boy! all is not rose at 'The Queen of Roses.' Larks don't fall
down roasted; you must run after them and catch them, and then you
must find some way to cook them."

The cook, a big creature from Picardy, took the best bits for herself,
and only spoke to Cesar when she wanted to complain of Monsieur and
Madame Ragon, who left her nothing to steal. Towards the end of the
first month this girl, who was forced to keep house of a Sunday,
opened a conversation with Cesar. Ursula with the grease washed off
seemed charming to the poor shop-boy, who, unless hindered by chance,
was likely to strike on the first rock that lay hidden in his way.
Like all unprotected boys, he loved the first woman who threw him a
kind look. The cook took Cesar under her protection; and thence
followed certain secret relations, which the clerks laughed at
pitilessly. Two years later, the cook happily abandoned Cesar for a
young recruit belonging to her native place who was then hiding in
Paris,--a lad twenty years old, owning a few acres of land, who let
Ursula marry him.

During those two years the cook had fed her little Cesar well, and had
explained to him certain mysteries of Parisian life, which she made
him look at from the bottom; and she impressed upon him, out of
jealousy, a profound horror of evil places, whose dangers seemed not
unknown to her. In 1792 the feet of the deserted Cesar were
well-toughened to the pavements, his shoulders to the bales, and his
mind to what he called the "humbugs" of Paris. So when Ursula
abandoned him he was speedily consoled, for she had realized none of
his instinctive ideas in relation to sentiment. Licentious and surly,
wheedling and pilfering, selfish and a tippler, she clashed with the
simple nature of Birotteau without offering him any compensating
perspective. Sometimes the poor lad felt with pain that he was bound
by ties that are strong enough to hold ingenuous hearts to a creature
with whom he could not sympathize. By the time that he became master
of his own heart he had reached his growth, and was sixteen years old.
His mind, developed by Ursula and by the banter of the clerks, made
him study commerce with an eye in which intelligence was veiled
beneath simplicity: he observed the customers; asked in leisure
moments for explanations about the merchandise, whose divers sorts and
proper places he retained in his head. The day came when he knew all
the articles, and their prices and marks, better than any new-comer;
and from that time Monsieur and Madame Ragon made a practice of
employing him in the business.

When the terrible levy of the year II. made a clean sweep in the shop
of citizen Ragon, Cesar Birotteau, promoted to be second clerk,
profited by the occasion to obtain a salary of fifty francs a month,
and took his seat at the dinner-table of the Ragons with ineffable
delight. The second clerk of "The Queen of Roses," possessing already
six hundred francs, now had a chamber where he could put away, in
long-coveted articles of furniture, the clothing he had little by
little got together. Dressed like other young men of an epoch when
fashion required the assumption of boorish manners, the gentle and
modest peasant had an air and manner which rendered him at least their
equal; and he thus passed the barriers which in other times ordinary
life would have placed between himself and the bourgeoisie. Towards
the end of this year his integrity won him a place in the
counting-room. The dignified citoyenne Ragon herself looked after his
linen, and the two shopkeepers became familiar with him.

In Vendemiaire, 1794, Cesar, who possessed a hundred louis d'or,
changed them for six thousand francs in assignats, with which he
bought into the Funds at thirty, paying for the investment on the very
day before the paper began its course of depreciation at the Bourse,
and locking up his securities with unspeakable satisfaction. From that
day forward he watched the movement of stocks and public affairs with
secret anxieties of his own, which made him quiver at each rumor of
the reverses or successes that marked this period of our history.
Monsieur Ragon, formerly perfumer to her majesty Queen
Marie-Antoinette, confided to Cesar Birotteau, during this critical
period, his attachment to the fallen tyrants. This disclosure was one
of the cardinal events in Cesar's life. The nightly conversations when
the shop was closed, the street quiet, the accounts regulated, made a
fanatic of the Tourangian, who in becoming a royalist obeyed an inborn
instinct. The recital of the virtuous deeds of Louis XVI., the
anecdotes with which husband and wife exalted the memory of the queen,
fired the imagination of the young man. The horrible fate of those two
crowned heads, decapitated a few steps from the shop-door, roused his
feeling heart and made him hate a system of government which was
capable of shedding blood without repugnance. His commercial interests
showed him the death of trade in the Maximum, and in political
convulsions, which are always destructive of business. Moreover, like
a true perfumer, he hated the revolution which made a Titus of every
man and abolished powder. The tranquillity resulting from absolutism
could alone, he thought, give life to money, and he grew bigoted on
behalf of royalty. When Monsieur Ragon saw that Cesar was well-disposed
on this point, he made him head-clerk and initiated him into the
secrets of "The Queen of Roses," several of whose customers were the
most active and devoted emissaries of the Bourbons, and where the
correspondence between Paris and the West secretly went on. Carried
away by the fervor of youth, electrified by his intercourse with the
Georges, the Billardiere, Montauran, Bauvan, Longuy, Manda, Bernier,
du Guenic, and the Fontaines, Cesar flung himself into the conspiracy
by which the royalists and the terrorists combined on the 13th
Vendemiaire against the expiring Convention.

On that day Cesar had the honor of fighting against Napoleon on the
steps of Saint-Roch, and was wounded at the beginning of the affair.
Every one knows the result of that attempt. If the aide-de-camp of
Barras then issued from his obscurity, the obscurity of Birotteau
saved the clerk's life. A few friends carried the belligerent perfumer
to "The Queen of Roses," where he remained hidden in the garret,
nursed by Madame Ragon, and happily forgotten. Cesar Birotteau never
had but that one spurt of martial courage. During the month his
convalescence lasted, he made solid reflections on the absurdity of an
alliance between politics and perfumery. Although he remained
royalist, he resolved to be, purely and simply, a royalist perfumer,
and never more to compromise himself, body and soul, for his country.

On the 18th Brumaire, Monsieur and Madame Ragon, despairing of the
royal cause, determined to give up perfumery, and live like honest
bourgeois without meddling in politics. To recover the value of their
business, it was necessary to find a man who had more integrity than
ambition, more plain good sense than ability. Ragon proposed the
affair to his head-clerk. Birotteau, now master at twenty years of age
of a thousand francs a year from the public Funds, hesitated. His
ambition was to live near Chinon as soon as he could get together an
income of fifteen hundred francs, or whenever the First Consul should
have consolidated the public debt by consolidating himself in the
Tuileries. Why should he risk his honest and simple independence in
commercial uncertainties? he asked himself. He had never expected to
win so large a fortune, and he owed it to happy chances which only
come in early youth; he intended to marry in Touraine some woman rich
enough to enable him to buy and cultivate Les Tresorieres, a little
property which, from the dawn of his reason, he had coveted, which he
dreamed of augmenting, where he could make a thousand crowns a year,
and where he would lead a life of happy obscurity. He was about to
refuse the offer, when love suddenly changed all his resolutions by
increasing tenfold the measure of his ambition.

After Ursula's desertion, Cesar had remained virtuous, as much through
fear of the dangers of Paris as from application to his work. When the
passions are without food they change their wants; marriage then
becomes, to persons of the middle class, a fixed idea, for it is their
only way of winning and appropriating a woman. Cesar Birotteau had
reached that point. Everything at "The Queen of Roses" now rested on
the head-clerk; he had not a moment to give to pleasure. In such a
life wants become imperious, and a chance meeting with a beautiful
young woman, of whom a libertine clerk would scarcely have dreamed,
produced on Cesar an overpowering effect. On a fine June day, crossing
by the Pont-Marie to the Ile Saint-Louis, he saw a young girl standing
at the door of a shop at the angle of the Quai d'Anjou. Constance
Pillerault was the forewoman of a linen-draper's establishment called
Le Petit Matelot,--the first of those shops which have since been
established in Paris with more or less of painted signs, floating
banners, show-cases filled with swinging shawls, cravats arranged like
houses of cards, and a thousand other commercial seductions, such as
fixed prices, fillets of suspended objects, placards, illusions and
optical effects carried to such a degree of perfection that a
shop-front has now become a commercial poem. The low price of all the
articles called "Novelties" which were to be found at the
Petit-Matelot gave the shop an unheard of vogue, and that in a part of
Paris which was the least favorable to fashion and commerce. The young
forewoman was at this time cited for her beauty, as was the case in
later days with the beautiful lemonade-girl of the cafe of the Milles
Colonnnes, and several other poor creatures who flattened more noses,
young and old, against the window-panes of milliners, confectioners,
and linen-drapers, than there are stones in the streets of Paris.