The Deputy of Arcis

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The Deputy of Arcis

By

Honore de Balzac


Translated by Katharine Prescott Wormeley




PART I

THE ELECTION



I

ALL ELECTIONS BEGIN WITH A BUSTLE

Before beginning to describe an election in the provinces, it is
proper to state that the town of Arcis-sur-Aube was not the theatre of
the events here related.

The arrondissement of Arcis votes at Bar-sur-Aube, which is forty
miles from Arcis; consequently there is no deputy from Arcis in the
Chamber.

Discretion, required in a history of contemporaneous manners and
morals, dictates this precautionary word. It is rather an ingenious
contrivance to make the description of one town the frame for events
which happened in another; and several times already in the course of
the Comedy of Human Life, this means has been employed in spite of its
disadvantages, which consist chiefly in making the frame of as much
importance as the canvas.

Toward the end of the month of April, 1839, about ten o'clock in
the morning, the salon of Madame Marion, widow of a former
receiver-general of the department of the Aube, presented a singular
appearance. All the furniture had been removed except the curtains to
the windows, the ornaments on the fireplace, the chandelier, and the
tea-table. An Aubusson carpet, taken up two weeks before the usual
time, obstructed the steps of the portico, and the floor had been
violently rubbed and polished, though without increasing its usual
brightness. All this was a species of domestic premonition concerning
the result of the elections which were about to take place over the
whole surface of France. Often things are as spiritually intelligent
as men,--an argument in favor of the occult sciences.

The old man-servant of Colonel Giguet, Madame Marion's older brother,
had just finished dusting the room; the chamber-maid and the cook were
carrying, with an alacrity that denoted an enthusiasm equal to their
attachment, all the chairs of the house, and piling them up in the
garden, where the trees were already unfolding their leaves, through
which the cloudless blue of the sky was visible. The springlike
atmosphere and sun of May allowed the glass door and the two windows
of the oblong salon to be kept open.

An old lady, Madame Marion herself, now ordered the two maids to place
the chairs at one end of the salon, four rows deep, leaving between
the rows a space of about three feet. When this was done, each row
presented a front of ten chairs, all of divers species. A line of
chairs was also placed along the wall, under the windows and before
the glass door. At the other end of the salon, facing the forty
chairs, Madame Marion placed three arm-chairs behind the tea-table,
which was covered with a green cloth, on which she placed a bell.

Old Colonel Giguet arrived on this battle-field at the moment when his
sister bethought herself of filling the empty spaces on either side of
the fireplace with benches from the antechamber, disregarding the
baldness of their velvet covers which had done good service for
twenty-four years.

"We can seat seventy persons," she said to her brother triumphantly.

"God grant that we may have seventy friends!" replied the colonel.

"If, after receiving every night, for twenty-four years, the whole
society of Arcis-sur-Aube, a single one of my regular visitors fails
us on this occasion--" began the old lady, in a threatening manner.

"Pooh, pooh!" replied the colonel, interrupting his sister, "I'll name
you ten who cannot and ought not to come. First," he said, beginning
to count on his fingers, "Antonin Goulard, sub-prefect, for one;
Frederic Marest, _procureur-du-roi_, there's two; Monsieur Olivier
Vinet, his substitute, three; Monsieur Martener, examining-judge,
four; the justice of peace--"

"But I am not so silly," said the old lady, interrupting her brother
in her turn, "as to expect office-holders to come to a meeting the
object of which is to give another deputy to the Opposition. For all
that, Antonin Goulard, Simon's comrade and schoolmate, would be very
well pleased to see him a deputy because--"

"Come, sister, leave our own business of politics to us men. Where is
Simon?"

"He is dressing," she answered. "He was wise not to breakfast, for he
is very nervous. It is queer that, though he is in the habit of
speaking in court, he dreads this meeting as if he were certain to
meet enemies."

"Faith! I have often had to face masked batteries, and my soul--I
won't say my body--never quailed; but if I had to stand there," said
the old soldier, pointing to the tea-table, "and face forty bourgeois
gaping at me, their eyes fixed on mine, and expecting sonorous and
correct phrases, my shirt would be wringing wet before I could get out
a word."

"And yet, my dear father," said Simon Giguet, entering from the
smaller salon, "you really must make that effort for me; for if there
is a man in the department of the Aube whose voice is all-powerful it
is assuredly you. In 1815--"

"In 1815," said the little old man, who was wonderfully well
preserved, "I did not have to speak; I simply wrote out a little
proclamation which brought us two thousand men in twenty-four hours.
But it is a very different thing putting my name to a paper which is
read by a department, and standing up before a meeting to make a
speech. Napoleon himself failed there; at the 18th Brumaire he talked
nothing but nonsense to the Five Hundred."

"But, my dear father," urged Simon, "it concerns my life, my fortune,
my happiness. Fix your eyes on some one person and think you are
talking to him, and you'll get through all right."

"Heavens!" cried Madame Marion, "I am only an old woman, but under
such circumstances and knowing what depends on it, I--oh! I should be
eloquent!"

"Too eloquent, perhaps," said the colonel. "To go beyond the mark is
not attaining it. But why make so much of all this?" he added, looking
at his son. "It is only within the last two days you have taken up
this candidacy of ideas; well, suppose you are not nominated,--so much
the worse for Arcis, that's all."

These words were in keeping with the whole life of him who said them.
Colonel Giguet was one of the most respected officers in the Grand
Army, the foundation of his character being absolute integrity joined
to extreme delicacy. Never did he put himself forward; favors, such as
he received, sought him. For this reason he remained eleven years a
mere captain of the artillery of the Guard, not receiving the rank of
major until 1814. His almost fanatical attachment to Napoleon forbade
his taking service under the Bourbons after the first abdication. In
fact, his devotion in 1815 was such that he would have been banished
with so many others if the Comte de Gondreville had not contrived to
have his name effaced from the ordinance and put on the retired list
with a pension, and the rank of colonel.

Madame Marion, _nee_ Giguet, had another brother who was colonel of
gendarmerie at Troyes, whom she followed to that town at an earlier
period. It was there that she married Monsieur Marion,
receiver-general of the Aube, who also had had a brother, the
chief-justice of an imperial court. While a mere barrister at Arcis
this young man had lent his name during the Terror to the famous
Malin de l'Aube, the representative of the people, in order to hold
possession of the estate of Gondreville. [See "An Historical Mystery."]
Consequently, all the support and influence of Malin, now become count
and senator, was at the service of the Marion family. The barrister's
brother was made receiver-general of the department, at a period when,
far from having forty applicants for one place, the government was
fortunate in getting any one to accept such a slippery office.

Marion, the receiver-general, inherited the fortune of his brother the
chief-justice, and Madame Marion that of her brother the colonel of
gendarmerie. In 1814, the receiver-general met with reverses. He died
when the Empire died; but his widow managed to gather fifteen thousand
francs a year from the wreck of his accumulated fortunes. The colonel
of gendarmerie had left his property to his sister on learning the
marriage of his brother the artillery officer to the daughter of a
rich banker of Hamburg. It is well known what a fancy all Europe had
for the splendid troopers of Napoleon!

In 1814, Madame Marion, half-ruined, returned to Arcis, her native
place, where she bought, on the Grande-Place, one of the finest houses
in the town. Accustomed to receive much company at Troyes, where the
receiver-general reigned supreme, she now opened her salon to the
notabilities of the liberal party in Arcis. A woman accustomed to the
advantages of salon royalty does not easily renounce them. Vanity is
the most tenacious of all habits.

Bonapartist, and afterwards a liberal--for, by the strangest of
metamorphoses, the soldiers of Napoleon became almost to a man
enamoured of the constitutional system--Colonel Giguet was, during
the Restoration, the natural president of the governing committee
of Arcis, which consisted of the notary Grevin, his son-in-law
Beauvisage, and Varlet junior, the chief physician of Arcis,
brother-in-law of Grevin, and a few other liberals.

"If our dear boy is not nominated," said Madame Marion, having first
looked into the antechamber and garden to make sure that no one
overheard her, "he cannot have Mademoiselle Beauvisage; his success in
this election means a marriage with Cecile."

"Cecile!" exclaimed the old man, opening his eyes very wide and
looking at his sister in stupefaction.

"There is no one but you in the whole department who would forget the
_dot_ and the expectations of Mademoiselle Beauvisage," said his
sister.

"She is the richest heiress in the department of the Aube," said Simon
Giguet.

"But it seems to me," said the old soldier, "that my son is not to be
despised as a match; he is your heir, he already has something from
his mother, and I expect to leave him something better than a dry
name."

"All that put together won't make thirty thousand a year, and suitors
are already coming forward who have as much as that, not counting
their position," returned Madame Marion.

"And?" asked the colonel.

"They have been refused."

"Then what do the Beauvisage family want?" said the colonel, looking
alternately at his son and sister.

It may seem extraordinary that Colonel Giguet, the brother of Madame
Marion in whose house the society of Arcis had met for twenty-four
years, and whose salon was the echo of all reports, all scandals, and
all the gossip of the department of the Aube,--a good deal of it being
there manufactured,--should be ignorant of facts of this nature. But
his ignorance will seem natural when we mention that this noble relic
of the Napoleonic legions went to bed at night and rose in the morning
with the chickens, as all old persons should do if they wish to live
out their lives. He was never present at the intimate conversations
which went on in the salon. In the provinces there are two sorts of
intimate conversation,--one, which is held officially when all the
company are gathered together, playing at cards or conversing; the
other, which _simmers_, like a well made soup, when three or four
friends remain around the fireplace, friends who can be trusted to
repeat nothing of what is said beyond their own limits.

For nine years, ever since the triumph of his political ideas, the
colonel had lived almost entirely outside of social life. Rising with
the sun, he devoted himself to horticulture; he adored flowers, and of
all flowers he best loved roses. His hands were brown as those of a
real gardener; he took care himself of his beds. Constantly in
conference with his working gardener he mingled little, especially for
the last two years, with the life of others; of whom, indeed, he saw
little. He took but one meal with the family, namely, his dinner; for
he rose too early to breakfast with his son and sister. To his efforts
we owe the famous rose Giguet, known so well to all amateurs.

This old man, who had now passed into the state of a domestic fetich,
was exhibited, as we may well suppose, on all extraordinary occasions.
Certain families enjoy the benefit of a demi-god of this kind, and
plume themselves upon him as they would upon a title.

"I have noticed," replied Madame Marion to her brother's question,
"that ever since the revolution of July Madame Beauvisage has aspired
to live in Paris. Obliged to stay here as long as her father lives,
she has fastened her ambition on a future son-in-law, and my lady
dreams now of the splendors and dignities of political life."

"Could you love Cecile?" said the colonel to his son.

"Yes, father."

"And does she like you?"

"I think so; but the thing is, to please the mother and grandfather.
Though old Grevin himself wants to oppose my election, my success
would determine Madame Beauvisage to accept me, because she expects to
manage me as she pleases and to be minister under my name."

"That's a good joke!" cried Madame Marion. "What does she take us
for?"

"Whom has she refused?" asked the colonel.

"Well, within the last three months, Antonin Goulard and the
_procureur-du-roi_, Frederic Marest, have received, so they say,
equivocal answers which mean anything--_except yes_."

"Heavens!" cried the old man throwing up his arms. "What days we live
in, to be sure! Why, Lucie was the daughter of a hosier, and the
grand-daughter of a farmer. Does Madame Beauvisage want the Comte de
Cinq-Cygne for a son-in-law?"

"Don't laugh at Madame Beauvisage, brother. Cecile is rich enough to
choose a husband anywhere, even in the class to which the Cinq-Cygnes
belong. But there's the bell announcing the electors, and I disappear
--regretting much I can't hear what you are all going to say."



II

REVOLT OF A LIBERAL ROTTEN-BOROUGH

Though 1839 is, politically speaking, very distant from 1847, we can
still remember the elections produced by the Coalition, an ephemeral
effort of the Chamber of Deputies to realize the threat of
parliamentary government,--a threat _a la_ Cromwell, which without a
Cromwell could only end, under a prince "the enemy of fraud," in the
triumph of the present system, by which the Chambers and the ministers
are like the wooden puppets which the proprietor of the Guignolet
shows exhibits to the great satisfaction of wonder-stricken idlers in
the streets.

The arrondissement of Arcis-sur-Aube then found itself in a singular
position. It supposed itself free to choose its deputy. From 1816 to
1836 it had always elected one of the heaviest orators of the Left,
belonging to the famous seventeen who were called "Great Citizens" by
the liberal party,--namely, Francois Keller, of the house of Keller
Bros., the son-in-law of the Comte de Gondreville. Gondreville, one of
the most magnificent estates in France, is situated about a mile from
Arcis.

This banker, recently made count and peer of France, expected, no
doubt, to transfer to his son, then thirty years of age, his electoral
succession, in order to make him some day eligible for the peerage.
Already a major on the staff and a great favorite of the prince-royal,
Charles Keller, now a viscount, belonged to the court party of the
citizen-king. The most brilliant future seemed pledged to a young man
enormously rich, full of energy, already remarkable for his devotion
to the new dynasty, the grandson of the Comte de Gondreville, and
nephew of the Marechal de Carigliano; but this election, so necessary
to his future prospects, presented suddenly certain difficulties to
overcome.

Since the accession to power of the bourgeois class, Arcis had felt a
vague desire to show itself independent. Consequently, the last
election of Francois Keller had been disturbed by certain republicans,
whose red caps and long beards had not, however, seriously alarmed the
bourgeois of Arcis. By canvassing the country carefully the radical
candidate would be able to secure some thirty or forty votes. A few of
the townspeople, humiliated at seeing their town always treated as a
rotten borough, joined the democrats, though enemies to democracy. In
France, under the system of balloting, politico-chemical products are
formed in which the laws of affinity are reversed.

Now, to elect young Keller in 1839, after having elected his father
for twenty years, would show a monstrous electoral servitude, against
which the pride of the newly enriched bourgeoisie revolved, for they
felt themselves to be fully worth either Monsieur Malin, otherwise
called Comte de Gondreville, the Keller Bros., the Cinq-Cygnes, or
even, the King of the French.

The numerous partisans of old Gondreville, the king of the department
of the Aube, were therefore awaiting some fresh proof of his ability,
already so thoroughly tested, to circumvent this rising revolt. In
order not to compromise the influence of his family in the
arrondissement of Arcis, that old statesman would doubtless propose
for candidate some young man who could be induced to accept an
official function and then yield his place to Charles Keller,--a
parliamentary arrangement which renders the elect of the people
subject to re-election.

When Simon Giguet sounded the old notary Grevin, the faithful friend
of the Comte de Gondreville, on the subject of the elections, the old
man replied that, while he did not know the intentions of the Comte de
Gondreville, he should himself vote for Charles Keller and employ his
influence for that election.

As soon as this answer of old Grevin had circulated through Arcis, a
reaction against him set in. Although for thirty years this provincial
Aristides possessed the confidence of the whole town,--having been
mayor of Arcis from 1804 to 1814 and again during the Hundred Days,
--and although the Opposition had accepted him as their leader until
the triumph of 1830, at which period he refused the honors of the
mayoralty on the ground of his great age, and finally, although the
town, in order to manifest its affection for him, elected his
son-in-law, Monsieur Beauvisage, mayor in his stead, it now revolted
against him and some young striplings went so far as to talk of his
dotage. The partisans of Simon Giguet then turned to Phileas Beauvisage,
the mayor, and won him over the more easily to their side because,
without having quarrelled with his father-in-law, he assumed an
independence of him which had ended in coldness,--an independence that
the sly old notary allowed him to maintain, seeing in it an excellent
means of action on the town of Arcis.

The mayor, questioned the evening before in the open street, declared
positively that he should cast his vote for the first-comer on the
list of eligibles rather than give it to Charles Keller, for whom,
however, he had a high esteem.

"Arcis shall be no longer a rotten borough!" he said, "or I'll
emigrate to Paris."

Flatter the passions of the moment and you will always be a hero, even
at Arcis-sur-Aube.

"Monsieur le maire," said everybody, "gives noble proof of his
firmness of character."

Nothing progresses so rapidly as a legal revolt. That evening Madame
Marion and her friends organized for the morrow a meeting of
"independent electors" in the interests of Simon Giguet, the colonel's
son. The morrow had now come and had turned the house topsy-turvy to
receive the friends on whose independence the leaders of the movement
counted. Simon Giguet, the native-born candidate of a little town
jealously desirous to elect a son of its own, had, as we have seen,
put to profit this desire; and yet, the whole prosperity and fortune
of the Giguet family were the work of the Comte de Gondreville. But
when it comes to an election, what are sentiments!

This Scene is written for the information of countries so unfortunate
as not to know the blessings of national representation, and which
are, therefore, ignorant by what intestinal convulsions, what
Brutus-like sacrifices, a little town gives birth to a deputy. Majestic
but natural spectacle, which may, indeed, be compared with that of
childbirth,--the same throes, the same impurities, the same
lacerations, the same final triumph!

It may be asked why an only son, whose fortune was sufficient, should
be, like Simon Giguet, an ordinary barrister in a little country town
where barristers are pretty nearly useless. A word about the candidate
is therefore necessary.

Colonel Giguet had had, between 1806 and 1813, by his wife who died in
1814, three children, the eldest of whom, Simon, alone survived. Until
he became an only child, Simon was brought up as a youth to whom the
exercise of a profession would be necessary. And about the time he
became by the death of his brothers the family heir, the young man met
with a serious disappointment. Madame Marion had counted much, for her
nephew, on the inheritance of his grandfather the banker of Hamburg.
But when that old German died in 1826, he left his grandson Giguet a
paltry two thousand francs a year. The worthy banker, endowed with
great procreative powers, having soothed the worries of business by
the pleasures of paternity, favored the families of eleven other
children who surrounded him, and who made him believe, with some
appearance of justice, that Simon Giguet was already a rich man.

Besides all this, the colonel was bent on giving his son an
independent position, and for this reason: the Giguets could not
expect any government favors under the Restoration. Even if Simon had
not been the son of an ardent Bonapartist, he belonged to a family
whose members had justly incurred the animosity of the Cinq-Cygne
family, owing to the part which Giguet, the colonel of gendarmerie,
and the Marions, including Madame Marion, had taken as witnesses on
the famous trial of the Messieurs de Simeuse, unjustly condemned in
1805 for the abduction of the Comte de Gondreville, then senator, and
formerly representative of the people, who had despoiled the
Cinq-Cygne family of their property. [See "An Historical Mystery."]

Grevin was not only one of the most important witnesses at that trial,
but he was one of the chief promoters of the prosecution. That affair
divides to this day the arrondissement of Arcis into two parties; one
of which declares the innocence of the condemned; the other standing
by the Comte de Gondreville and his adherents. Though, under the
Restoration, the Comtesse de Cinq-Cygne used all the influence the
return of the Bourbons gave her to arrange things as she wished in the
department of the Aube, the Comte de Gondreville contrived to
counterbalance this Cinq-Cygne royalty by the secret authority he
wielded over the liberals of the town through the notary Grevin,
Colonel Giguet, his son-in-law Keller (always elected deputy in spite
of the Cinq-Cygnes), and also by the credit he maintained, as long as
Louis XVIII. lived, in the counsels of the crown. It was not until
after the death of that king that the Comtesse de Cinq-Cygne was able
to get Michu appointed judge of the court of assizes in Arcis. She
desired of all things to obtain this place for the son of the steward
who had perished on the scaffold at Troyes, the victim of his devotion
to the Simeuse family, whose full-length portrait always hung in her
salon, whether in Paris or at Cinq-Cygne. Until 1823 the Comte de
Gondreville had possessed sufficient power over Louis XVIII. to
prevent this appointment of Michu.

It was by the advice of the Comte de Gondreville that Colonel Giguet
made his son a lawyer. Simon had all the more opportunity of shining
at the bar in the arrondissement of Arcis because he was the only
barrister, solicitors pleading their own cases in these petty
localities. The young man had really secured certain triumphs in the
court of assizes of the Aube, but he was none the less an object of
derision to Frederic Marest, _procureur-du-roi_, Olivier Vinet, the
substitute _procureur_, and the judge, Michu,--the three best minds in
the court.

Simon Giguet, like other men, paid goodly tribute to the mighty power
of ridicule that pursued him. He liked to hear himself talk, and he
talked on all occasions; he solemnly delivered himself of dry and
long-winded sentences which passed for eloquence among the upper
bourgeoisie of Arcis. The poor fellow belonged to that species of bore
which desires to explain everything, even the simplest thing. He
explained rain; he explained the revolution of July; he explained
things impenetrable; he explained Louis-Philippe, Odilon Barrot,
Monsieur Thiers, the Eastern Question; he explained Champagne; he
explained 1788; he explained the tariff of custom houses and
humanitarians, magnetism and the economy of the civil list.

This lean young man, with a bilious skin, tall enough to justify his
sonorous nullity (for it is rare that a tall man does not have eminent
faculties of some kind) outdid the puritanism of the votaries of the
extreme Left, all of them so sensitive, after the manner of prudes who
have their intrigues to hide. Dressed invariably in black, he wore a
white cravat which came down low on his chest, so that his face seemed
to issue from a horn of white paper, for the collar of his shirt was
high and stiff after a fashion now, fortunately, exploded. His
trousers and his coats were always too large for him. He had what is
called in the provinces dignity; that is to say, he was stiffly erect
and pompously dull in manner. His friend, Antonin Goulard, accused him
of imitating Monsieur Dupin. And in truth, the young barrister was apt
to wear shoes and stout socks of black filoselle.