The Commission in Lunacy

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THE COMMISSION IN LUNACY

BY

HONORE DE BALZAC



Translated By

Clara Bell



DEDICATION

Dedicated to Monsieur le Contre-Amiral Bazoche,
Governor of the Isle of Bourbon, by the grateful writer.
DE BALZAC.



In 1828, at about one o'clock one morning, two persons came out of
a large house in the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honore, near the
Elysee-Bourbon. One was the famous doctor, Horace Bianchon; the other
was one of the most elegant men in Paris, the Baron de Rastignac;
they were friends of long standing. Each had sent away his carriage,
and no cab was to be seen in the street; but the night was fine, and
the pavement dry.

"We will walk as far as the boulevard," said Eugene de Rastignac to
Bianchon. "You can get a hackney cab at the club; there is always one
to be found there till daybreak. Come with me as far as my house."

"With pleasure."

"Well, and what have you to say about it?"

"About that woman?" said the doctor coldly.

"There I recognize my Bianchon!" exclaimed Rastignac.

"Why, how?"

"Well, my dear fellow, you speak of the Marquise d'Espard as if she
were a case for your hospital."

"Do you want to know what I think, Eugene? If you throw over Madame de
Nucingen for this Marquise, you will swap a one-eyed horse for a blind
one."

"Madame de Nucingen is six-and-thirty, Bianchon."

"And this woman is three-and-thirty," said the doctor quickly.

"Her worst enemies only say six-and-twenty."

"My dear boy, when you really want to know a woman's age, look at her
temples and the tip of her nose. Whatever women may achieve with their
cosmetics, they can do nothing against those incorruptible witnesses
to their experiences. There each year of life has left its stigmata.
When a woman's temples are flaccid, seamed, withered in a particular
way; when at the tip of her nose you see those minute specks, which
look like the imperceptible black smuts which are shed in London by
the chimneys in which coal is burnt. . . . Your servant, sir! That
woman is more than thirty. She may be handsome, witty, loving
--whatever you please, but she is past thirty, she is arriving at
maturity. I do not blame men who attach themselves to that kind of
woman; only, a man of your superior distinction must not mistake a
winter pippin for a little summer apple, smiling on the bough, and
waiting for you to crunch it. Love never goes to study the registers
of birth and marriage; no one loves a woman because she is handsome or
ugly, stupid or clever; we love because we love."

"Well, for my part, I love for quite other reasons. She is Marquise
d'Espard; she was a Blamont-Chauvry; she is the fashion; she has soul;
her foot is as pretty as the Duchesse de Berri's; she has perhaps a
hundred thousand francs a year--some day, perhaps, I may marry her! In
short, she will put me into a position which will enable me to pay my
debts."

"I thought you were rich," interrupted Bianchon.

"Bah! I have twenty thousand francs a year--just enough to keep up my
stables. I was thoroughly done, my dear fellow, in that Nucingen
business; I will tell you about that.--I have got my sisters married;
that is the clearest profit I can show since we last met; and I would
rather have them provided for than have five hundred thousand francs a
year. No, what would you have me do? I am ambitious. To what can
Madame de Nucingen lead? A year more and I shall be shelved, stuck in
a pigeon-hole like a married man. I have all the discomforts of
marriage and of single life, without the advantages of either; a false
position to which every man must come who remains tied too long to the
same apron-string."

"So you think you will come upon a treasure here?" said Bianchon.
"Your Marquise, my dear fellow, does not hit my fancy at all."

"Your liberal opinions blur your eyesight. If Madame d'Espard were a
Madame Rabourdin . . ."

"Listen to me. Noble or simple, she would still have no soul; she
would still be a perfect type of selfishness. Take my word for it,
medical men are accustomed to judge of people and things; the sharpest
of us read the soul while we study the body. In spite of that pretty
boudoir where we have spent this evening, in spite of the magnificence
of the house, it is quite possible that Madame la Marquise is in
debt."

"What makes you think so?"

"I do not assert it; I am supposing. She talked of her soul as Louis
XVIII. used to talk of his heart. I tell you this: That fragile, fair
woman, with her chestnut hair, who pities herself that she may be
pitied, enjoys an iron constitution, an appetite like a wolf's, and
the strength and cowardice of a tiger. Gauze, and silk, and muslin
were never more cleverly twisted round a lie! Ecco."

"Bianchon, you frighten me! You have learned a good many things, then,
since we lived in the Maison Vauquer?"

"Yes, since then, my boy, I have seen puppets, both dolls and
manikins. I know something of the ways of the fine ladies whose bodies
we attend to, saving that which is dearest to them, their child--if
they love it--or their pretty faces, which they always worship. A man
spends his nights by their pillow, wearing himself to death to spare
them the slightest loss of beauty in any part; he succeeds, he keeps
their secret like the dead; they send to ask for his bill, and think
it horribly exorbitant. Who saved them? Nature. Far from recommending
him, they speak ill of him, fearing lest he should become the
physician of their best friends.

"My dear fellow, those women of whom you say, 'They are angels!' I
--I--have seen stripped of the little grimaces under which they hide
their soul, as well as of the frippery under which they disguise their
defects--without manners and without stays; they are not beautiful.

"We saw a great deal of mud, a great deal of dirt, under the waters of
the world when we were aground for a time on the shoals of the Maison
Vauquer.--What we saw there was nothing. Since I have gone into high
society, I have seen monsters dressed in satin, Michonneaus in white
gloves, Poirets bedizened with orders, fine gentlemen doing more
usurious business than old Gobseck! To the shame of mankind, when I
have wanted to shake hands with Virtue, I have found her shivering in
a loft, persecuted by calumny, half-starving on a income or a salary
of fifteen hundred francs a year, and regarded as crazy, or eccentric,
or imbecile.

"In short, my dear boy, the Marquise is a woman of fashion, and I have
a particular horror of that kind of woman. Do you want to know why? A
woman who has a lofty soul, fine taste, gentle wit, a generously warm
heart, and who lives a simple life, has not a chance of being the
fashion. Ergo: A woman of fashion and a man in power are analogous;
but there is this difference: the qualities by which a man raises
himself above others ennoble him and are a glory to him; whereas the
qualities by which a woman gains power for a day are hideous vices;
she belies her nature to hide her character, and to live the militant
life of the world she must have iron strength under a frail
appearance.

"I, as a physician, know that a sound stomach excludes a good heart.
Your woman of fashion feels nothing; her rage for pleasure has its
source in a longing to heat up her cold nature, a craving for
excitement and enjoyment, like an old man who stands night after night
by the footlights at the opera. As she has more brain than heart, she
sacrifices genuine passion and true friends to her triumph, as a
general sends his most devoted subalterns to the front in order to win
a battle. The woman of fashion ceases to be a woman; she is neither
mother, nor wife, nor lover. She is, medically speaking, sex in the
brain. And your Marquise, too, has all the characteristics of her
monstrosity, the beak of a bird of prey, the clear, cold eye, the
gentle voice--she is as polished as the steel of a machine, she
touches everything except the heart."

"There is some truth in what you say, Bianchon."

"Some truth?" replied Bianchon. "It is all true. Do you suppose that I
was not struck to the heart by the insulting politeness by which she
made me measure the imaginary distance which her noble birth sets
between us? That I did not feel the deepest pity for her cat-like
civilities when I remembered what her object was? A year hence she
will not write one word to do me the slightest service, and this
evening she pelted me with smiles, believing that I can influence my
uncle Popinot, on whom the success of her case----"

"Would you rather she should have played the fool with you, my dear
fellow?--I accept your diatribe against women of fashion; but you are
beside the mark. I should always prefer for a wife a Marquise d'Espard
to the most devout and devoted creature on earth. Marry an angel! you
would have to go and bury your happiness in the depths of the country!
The wife of a politician is a governing machine, a contrivance that
makes compliments and courtesies. She is the most important and most
faithful tool which an ambitious man can use; a friend, in short, who
may compromise herself without mischief, and whom he may belie without
harmful results. Fancy Mahomet in Paris in the nineteenth century! His
wife would be a Rohan, a Duchesse de Chevreuse of the Fronde, as keen
and as flattering as an Ambassadress, as wily as Figaro. Your loving
wives lead nowhere; a woman of the world leads to everything; she is
the diamond with which a man cuts every window when he has not the
golden key which unlocks every door. Leave humdrum virtues to the
humdrum, ambitious vices to the ambitious.

"Besides, my dear fellow, do you imagine that the love of a Duchesse
de Langeais, or de Maufrigneuse, or of a Lady Dudley does not bestow
immense pleasure? If only you knew how much value the cold, severe
style of such a woman gives to the smallest evidence of their
affection! What a delight it is to see a periwinkle piercing through
the snow! A smile from below a fan contradicts the reserve of an
assumed attitude, and is worth all the unbridled tenderness of your
middle-class women with their mortgaged devotion; for, in love,
devotion is nearly akin to speculation.

"And, then, a woman of fashion, a Blamont-Chauvry, has her virtues
too! Her virtues are fortune, power, effect, a certain contempt of all
that is beneath her----"

"Thank you!" said Bianchon.

"Old curmudgeon!" said Rastignac, laughing. "Come--do not be so
common, do like your friend Desplein; be a Baron, a Knight of
Saint-Michael; become a peer of France, and marry your daughters
to dukes."

"I! May the five hundred thousand devils----"

"Come, come! Can you be superior only in medicine? Really, you
distress me . . ."

"I hate that sort of people; I long for a revolution to deliver us
from them for ever."

"And so, my dear Robespierre of the lancet, you will not go to-morrow
to your uncle Popinot?"

"Yes, I will," said Bianchon; "for you I would go to hell to fetch
water . . ."

"My good friend, you really touch me. I have sworn that a commission
shall sit on the Marquis. Why, here is even a long-saved tear to thank
you."

"But," Bianchon went on, "I do not promise to succeed as you wish with
Jean-Jules Popinot. You do not know him. However, I will take him to
see your Marquise the day after to-morrow; she may get round him if
she can. I doubt it. If all the truffles, all the Duchesses, all the
mistresses, and all the charmers in Paris were there in the full bloom
of their beauty; if the King promised him the /Prairie/, and the
Almighty gave him the Order of Paradise with the revenues of
Purgatory, not one of all these powers would induce him to transfer a
single straw from one saucer of his scales into the other. He is a
judge, as Death is Death."

The two friends had reached the office of the Minister for Foreign
Affairs, at the corner of the Boulevard des Capucines.

"Here you are at home," said Bianchon, laughing, as he pointed to the
ministerial residence. "And here is my carriage," he added, calling a
hackney cab. "And these--express our fortune."

"You will be happy at the bottom of the sea, while I am still
struggling with the tempests on the surface, till I sink and go to ask
you for a corner in your grotto, old fellow!"

"Till Saturday," replied Bianchon.

"Agreed," said Rastignac. "And you promise me Popinot?"

"I will do all my conscience will allow. Perhaps this appeal for a
commission covers some little dramorama, to use a word of our good bad
times."

"Poor Bianchon! he will never be anything but a good fellow," said
Rastignac to himself as the cab drove off.



"Rastignac has given me the most difficult negotiation in the world,"
said Bianchon to himself, remembering, as he rose next morning, the
delicate commission intrusted to him. "However, I have never asked the
smallest service from my uncle in Court, and have paid more than a
thousand visits gratis for him. And, after all, we are not apt to
mince matters between ourselves. He will say Yes or No, and there an
end."

After this little soliloquy the famous physician bent his steps, at
seven in the morning, towards the Rue du Fouarre, where dwelt Monsieur
Jean-Jules Popinot, judge of the Lower Court of the Department of the
Seine. The Rue du Fouarre--an old word meaning straw--was in the
thirteenth century the most important street in Paris. There stood the
Schools of the University, where the voices of Abelard and of Gerson
were heard in the world of learning. It is now one of the dirtiest
streets of the Twelfth Arrondissement, the poorest quarter of Paris,
that in which two-thirds of the population lack firing in winter,
which leaves most brats at the gate of the Foundling Hospital, which
sends most beggars to the poorhouse, most rag-pickers to the street
corners, most decrepit old folks to bask against the walls on which
the sun shines, most delinquents to the police courts.

Half-way down this street, which is always damp, and where the gutter
carries to the Seine the blackened waters from some dye-works, there
is an old house, restored no doubt under Francis I., and built of
bricks held together by a few courses of masonry. That it is
substantial seems proved by the shape of its front wall, not
uncommonly seen in some parts of Paris. It bellies, so to speak, in a
manner caused by the protuberance of its first floor, crushed under
the weight of the second and third, but upheld by the strong wall of
the ground floor. At first sight it would seem as though the piers
between the windows, though strengthened by the stone mullions, must
give way, but the observer presently perceives that, as in the tower
at Bologna, the old bricks and old time-eaten stones of this house
persistently preserve their centre of gravity.

At every season of the year the solid piers of the ground floor have
the yellow tone and the imperceptible sweating surface that moisture
gives to stone. The passer-by feels chilled as he walks close to this
wall, where worn corner-stones ineffectually shelter him from the
wheels of vehicles. As is always the case in houses built before
carriages were in use, the vault of the doorway forms a very low
archway not unlike the barbican of a prison. To the right of this
entrance there are three windows, protected outside by iron gratings
of so close a pattern, that the curious cannot possibly see the use
made of the dark, damp rooms within, and the panes too are dirty and
dusty; to the left are two similar windows, one of which is sometimes
open, exposing to view the porter, his wife, and his children;
swarming, working, cooking, eating, and screaming, in a floored and
wainscoted room where everything is dropping to pieces, and into which
you descend two steps--a depth which seems to suggest the gradual
elevation of the soil of Paris.

If on a rainy day some foot-passenger takes refuge under the long
vault, with projecting lime-washed beams, which leads from the door to
the staircase, he will hardly fail to pause and look at the picture
presented by the interior of this house. To the left is a square
garden-plot, allowing of not more than four long steps in each
direction, a garden of black soil, with trellises bereft of vines, and
where, in default of vegetation under the shade of two trees, papers
collect, old rags, potsherds, bits of mortar fallen from the roof; a
barren ground, where time has shed on the walls, and on the trunks and
branches of the trees, a powdery deposit like cold soot. The two parts
of the house, set at a right angle, derive light from this
garden-court shut in by two adjoining houses built on wooden piers,
decrepit and ready to fall, where on each floor some grotesque evidence
is to be seen of the craft pursued by some lodger within. Here long
poles are hung with immense skeins of dyed worsted put out to dry;
there, on ropes, dance clean-washed shirts; higher up, on a shelf,
volumes display their freshly marbled edges; women sing, husbands
whistle, children shout; the carpenter saws his planks, a copper-turner
makes the metal screech; all kinds of industries combine to produce a
noise which the number of instruments renders distracting.

The general system of decoration in this passage, which is neither
courtyard, garden, nor vaulted way, though a little of all, consists
of wooden pillars resting on square stone blocks, and forming arches.
Two archways open on to the little garden; two others, facing the
front gateway, lead to a wooden staircase, with an iron balustrade
that was once a miracle of smith's work, so whimsical are the shapes
given to the metal; the worn steps creak under every tread. The
entrance to each flat has an architrave dark with dirt, grease, and
dust, and outer doors, covered with Utrecht velvet set with brass
nails, once gilt, in a diamond pattern. These relics of splendor show
that in the time of Louis XIV. the house was the residence of some
councillor to the Parlement, some rich priests, or some treasurer of
the ecclesiastical revenue. But these vestiges of former luxury bring
a smile to the lips by the artless contrast of past and present.

M. Jean-Jules Popinot lived on the first floor of this house, where
the gloom, natural to all first floors in Paris houses, was increased
by the narrowness of the street. This old tenement was known to all
the twelfth arrondissement, on which Providence had bestowed this
lawyer, as it gives a beneficent plant to cure or alleviate every
malady. Here is a sketch of a man whom the brilliant Marquise d'Espard
hoped to fascinate.

M. Popinot, as is seemly for a magistrate, was always dressed in black
--a style which contributed to make him ridiculous in the eyes of
those who were in the habit of judging everything from a superficial
examination. Men who are jealous of maintaining the dignity required
by this color ought to devote themselves to constant and minute care
of their person; but our dear M. Popinot was incapable of forcing
himself to the puritanical cleanliness which black demands. His
trousers, always threadbare, looked like camlet--the stuff of which
attorneys' gowns are made; and his habitual stoop set them, in time,
in such innumerable creases, that in places they were traced with
lines, whitish, rusty, or shiny, betraying either sordid avarice, or
the most unheeding poverty. His coarse worsted stockings were twisted
anyhow in his ill-shaped shoes. His linen had the tawny tinge acquired
by long sojourn in a wardrobe, showing that the late lamented Madame
Popinot had had a mania for much linen; in the Flemish fashion,
perhaps, she had given herself the trouble of a great wash no more
than twice a year. The old man's coat and waistcoat were in harmony
with his trousers, shoes, stockings, and linen. He always had the luck
of his carelessness; for, the first day he put on a new coat, he
unfailingly matched it with the rest of his costume by staining it
with incredible promptitude. The good man waited till his housekeeper
told him that his hat was too shabby before buying a new one. His
necktie was always crumpled and starchless, and he never set his
dog-eared shirt collar straight after his judge's bands had disordered
it. He took no care of his gray hair, and shaved but twice a week. He
never wore gloves, and generally kept his hands stuffed into his empty
trousers' pockets; the soiled pocket-holes, almost always torn, added
a final touch to the slovenliness of his person.

Any one who knows the Palais de Justice at Paris, where every variety
of black attire may be studied, can easily imagine the appearance of
M. Popinot. The habit of sitting for days at a time modifies the
structure of the body, just as the fatigue of hearing interminable
pleadings tells on the expression of a magistrate's face. Shut up as
he is in courts ridiculously small, devoid of architectural dignity,
and where the air is quickly vitiated, a Paris judge inevitably
acquires a countenance puckered and seamed by reflection, and
depressed by weariness; his complexion turns pallid, acquiring an
earthy or greenish hue according to his individual temperament. In
short, within a given time the most blooming young man is turned into
an "inasmuch" machine--an instrument which applies the Code to
individual cases with the indifference of clockwork.

Hence, nature, having bestowed on M. Popinot a not too pleasing
exterior, his life as a lawyer had not improved it. His frame was
graceless and angular. His thick knees, huge feet, and broad hands
formed a contrast with a priest-like face having a vague resemblance
to a calf's head, meek to unmeaningness, and but little brightened by
divergent bloodless eyes, divided by a straight flat nose, surmounted
by a flat forehead, flanked by enormous ears, flabby and graceless.
His thin, weak hair showed the baldness through various irregular
partings.

One feature only commended this face to the physiognomist. This man
had a mouth to whose lips divine kindness lent its sweetness. They
were wholesome, full, red lips, finely wrinkled, sinuous, mobile, by
which nature had given expression to noble feelings; lips which spoke
to the heart and proclaimed the man's intelligence and lucidity, a
gift of second-sight, and a heavenly temper; and you would have judged
him wrongly from looking merely at his sloping forehead, his fireless
eyes, and his shambling gait. His life answered to his countenance; it
was full of secret labor, and hid the virtue of a saint. His superior
knowledge of law proved so strong a recommendation at a time when
Napoleon was reorganizing it in 1808 and 1811, that, by the advice of
Cambaceres, he was one of the first men named to sit on the Imperial
High Court of Justice at Paris. Popinot was no schemer. Whenever any
demand was made, any request preferred for an appointment, the
Minister would overlook Popinot, who never set foot in the house of
the High Chancellor or the Chief Justice. From the High Court he was
sent down to the Common Court, and pushed to the lowest rung of the
ladder by active struggling men. There he was appointed supernumerary
judge. There was a general outcry among the lawyers: "Popinot a
supernumerary!" Such injustice struck the legal world with dismay--the
attorneys, the registrars, everybody but Popinot himself, who made no
complaint. The first clamor over, everybody was satisfied that all was
for the best in the best of all possible worlds, which must certainly
be the legal world. Popinot remained supernumerary judge till the day
when the most famous Great Seal under the Restoration avenged the
oversights heaped on this modest and uncomplaining man by the Chief
Justices of the Empire. After being a supernumerary for twelve years,
M. Popinot would no doubt die a puisne judge of the Court of the
Seine.

To account for the obscure fortunes of one of the superior men of the
legal profession, it is necessary to enter here into some details
which will serve to reveal his life and character, and which will, at
the same time, display some of the wheels of the great machine known
as Justice. M. Popinot was classed by the three Presidents who
successively controlled the Court of the Seine under the category of
possible judges, the stuff of which judges are made. Thus classified,
he did not achieve the reputation for capacity which his previous
labors had deserved. Just as a painter is invariably included in a
category as a landscape painter, a portrait painter, a painter of
history, of sea pieces, or of genre, by a public consisting of
artists, connoisseurs, and simpletons, who, out of envy, or critical
omnipotence, or prejudice, fence in his intellect, assuming, one and
all, that there are ganglions in every brain--a narrow judgment which
the world applies to writers, to statesmen, to everybody who begins
with some specialty before being hailed as omniscient; so Popinot's
fate was sealed, and he was hedged round to do a particular kind of
work. Magistrates, attorneys, pleaders, all who pasture on the legal
common, distinguish two elements in every case--law and equity. Equity
is the outcome of facts, law is the application of principles to
facts. A man may be right in equity but wrong in law, without any
blame to the judge. Between his conscience and the facts there is a
whole gulf of determining reasons unknown to the judge, but which
condemn or legitimatize the act. A judge is not God; the duty is to
adapt facts to principles, to judge cases of infinite variety while
measuring them by a fixed standard.