The Lesser Bourgeoisie

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THE LESSER BOURGEOISIE
(The Middle Classes)

BY

HONORE DE BALZAC


Translated By
Katharine Prescott Wormeley




DEDICATION

To Constance-Victoire.

Here, madame, is one of those books which come into the mind,
whence no one knows, giving pleasure to the author before he can
foresee what reception the public, our great present judge, will
accord to it. Feeling almost certain of your sympathy in my
pleasure, I dedicate the book to you. Ought it not to belong to
you as the tithe formerly belonged to the Church in memory of God,
who makes all things bud and fruit in the fields and in the
intellect?

A few lumps of clay, left by Moliere at the feet of his colossal
statue of Tartuffe, have here been kneaded by a hand more daring
than able; but, at whatever distance I may be from the greatest of
comic writers, I shall still be glad to have used these crumbs in
showing the modern Hypocrite in action. The chief encouragement
that I have had in this difficult undertaking was in finding it
apart from all religious questions,--questions which ought to be
kept out of it for the sake of one so pious as yourself; and also
because of what a great writer has lately called our present
"indifference in matters of religion."

May the double signification of your names be for my book a
prophecy! Deign to find here the respectful gratitude of him who
ventures to call himself the most devoted of your servants.


De Balzac.




THE LESSER BOURGEOISIE
(The Middle Classes)




PART I

THE LESSER BOURGEOIS OF PARIS



CHAPTER I

DEPARTING PARIS

The tourniquet Saint-Jean, the narrow passage entered through a
turnstile, a description of which was said to be so wearisome in the
study entitled "A Double Life" (Scenes from Private Life), that naive
relic of old Paris, has at the present moment no existence except in
our said typography. The building of the Hotel-de-Ville, such as we
now see it, swept away a whole section of the city.

In 1830, passers along the street could still see the turnstile
painted on the sign of a wine-merchant, but even that house, its last
asylum, has been demolished. Alas! old Paris is disappearing with
frightful rapidity. Here and there, in the course of this history of
Parisian life, will be found preserved, sometimes the type of the
dwellings of the middle ages, like that described in "Fame and Sorrow"
(Scenes from Private Life), one or two specimens of which exist to the
present day; sometimes a house like that of Judge Popinot, rue du
Fouarre, a specimen of the former bourgeoisie; here, the remains of
Fulbert's house; there, the old dock of the Seine as it was under
Charles IX. Why should not the historian of French society, a new Old
Mortality, endeavor to save these curious expressions of the past, as
Walter Scott's old man rubbed up the tombstones? Certainly, for the
last ten years the outcries of literature in this direction have not
been superfluous; art is beginning to disguise beneath its floriated
ornaments those ignoble facades of what are called in Paris "houses of
product," which one of our poets has jocosely compared to chests of
drawers.

Let us remark here, that the creation of the municipal commission "del
ornamento" which superintends at Milan the architecture of street
facades, and to which every house owner is compelled to subject his
plan, dates from the seventeenth century. Consequently, we see in that
charming capital the effects of this public spirit on the part of
nobles and burghers, while we admire their buildings so full of
character and originality. Hideous, unrestrained speculation which,
year after year, changes the uniform level of storeys, compresses a
whole apartment into the space of what used to be a salon, and wages
war upon gardens, will infallibly react on Parisian manners and
morals. We shall soon be forced to live more without than within. Our
sacred private life, the freedom and liberty of home, where will they
be?--reserved for those who can muster fifty thousand francs a year!
In fact, few millionaires now allow themselves the luxury of a house
to themselves, guarded by a courtyard on a street and protected from
public curiosity by a shady garden at the back.

By levelling fortunes, that section of the Code which regulates
testamentary bequests, has produced these huge stone phalansteries, in
which thirty families are often lodged, returning a rental of a
hundred thousand francs a year. Fifty years hence we shall be able to
count on our fingers the few remaining houses which resemble that
occupied, at the moment our narrative begins, by the Thuillier family,
--a really curious house which deserves the honor of an exact
description, if only to compare the life of the bourgeoisie of former
times with that of to-day.

The situation and the aspect of this house, the frame of our present
Scene of manners and morals, has, moreover, a flavor, a perfume of the
lesser bourgeoisie, which may attract or repel attention according to
the taste of each reader.

In the first place, the Thuillier house did not belong to either
Monsieur or Madame Thuillier, but to Mademoiselle Thuillier, the
sister of Monsieur Thuillier.

This house, bought during the first six months which followed the
revolution of July by Mademoiselle Marie-Jeanne-Brigitte Thuillier,
a spinster of full age, stands about the middle of the rue
Saint-Dominique d'Enfer, to the right as you enter by the rue d'Enfer,
so that the main building occupied by Monsieur Thuillier faces south.

The progressive movement which is carrying the Parisian population to
the heights along the right bank of the Seine had long injured the
sale of property in what is called the "Latin quarter," when reasons,
which will be given when we come to treat of the character and habits
of Monsieur Thuillier, determined his sister to the purchase of real
estate. She obtained this property for the small sum of forty-six
thousand francs; certain extras amounted to six thousand more; in all,
the price paid was fifty-two thousand francs. A description of the
property given in the style of an advertisement, and the results
obtained by Monsieur Thuillier's exertions, will explain by what means
so many fortunes increased enormously after July, 1830, while so many
others sank.

Toward the street the house presents a facade of rough stone covered
with plaster, cracked by weather and lined by the mason's instrument
into a semblance of blocks of cut stone. This frontage is so common
in Paris and so ugly that the city ought to offer premiums to
house-owners who would build their facades of cut-stone blocks.
Seven windows lighted the gray front of this house which was raised
three storeys, ending in a mansard roof covered with slate. The
porte-cochere, heavy and solid, showed by its workmanship and style
that the front building on the street had been erected in the days of
the Empire, to utilize a part of the courtyard of the vast old mansion,
built at an epoch when the quarter d'Enfer enjoyed a certain vogue.

On one side was the porter's lodge; on the other the staircase of the
front building. Two wings, built against the adjoining houses, had
formerly served as stables, coach-house, kitchen and offices to the
rear dwelling; but since 1830, they had been converted into warerooms.
The one on the right was let to a certain M. Metivier, jr., wholesale
dealer in paper; that on the left to a bookseller named Barbet. The
offices of each were above the warerooms; the bookseller occupying the
first storey, and the paper-dealer the second storey of the house on
the street. Metivier, jr., who was more of a commission merchant in
paper than a regular dealer, and Barbet, much more of a money lender
and discounter than a bookseller, kept these vast warerooms for the
purpose of storing,--one, his stacks of paper, bought of needy
manufacturers, the other, editions of books given as security for
loans.

The shark of bookselling and the pike of paper-dealing lived on the
best of terms, and their mutual operations, exempt from the turmoil of
retail business, brought so few carriages into that tranquil courtyard
that the concierge was obliged to pull up the grass between the paving
stones. Messrs. Barbet and Metivier paid a few rare visits to their
landlords, and the punctuality with which they paid their rent classed
them as good tenants; in fact, they were looked upon as very honest
men by the Thuillier circle.

As for the third floor on the street, it was made into two apartments;
one of which was occupied by M. Dutocq, clerk of the justice of peace,
a retired government employee, and a frequenter of the Thuillier
salon; the other by the hero of this Scene, about whom we must content
ourselves at the present moment by fixing the amount of his rent,
--namely, seven hundred francs a year,--and the location he had chosen
in the heart of this well-filled building, exactly three years before
the curtain rises on the present domestic drama.

The clerk, a bachelor of fifty, occupied the larger of the two
apartments on the third floor. He kept a cook, and the rent of the
rooms was a thousand francs a year. Within two years of the time of
her purchase, Mademoiselle Thuillier was receiving seven thousand two
hundred francs in rentals, for a house which the late proprietor had
supplied with outside blinds, renovated within, and adorned with
mirrors, without being able to sell or let it. Moreover, the
Thuilliers themselves, nobly lodged, as we shall see, enjoyed also a
fine garden,--one of the finest in that quarter,--the trees of which
shaded the lonely little street named the rue Neuve-Saint-Catherine.

Standing between the courtyard and the garden, the main building,
which they inhabited, seems to have been the caprice of some enriched
bourgeois in the reign of Louis XIV.; the dwelling, perhaps, of a
president of the parliament, or that of a tranquil savant. Its noble
free-stone blocks, damaged by time, have a certain air of
Louis-the-Fourteenth grandeur; the courses of the facade define the
storeys; panels of red brick recall the appearance of the stables at
Versailles; the windows have masks carved as ornaments in the centre
of their arches and below their sills. The door, of small panels in
the upper half and plain below, through which, when open, the garden
can be seen, is of that honest, unassuming style which was often
employed in former days for the porter's lodges of the royal chateaux.

This building, with five windows to each course, rises two storeys
above the ground-floor, and is particularly noticeable for a roof of
four sides ending in a weather-vane, and broken here and there by
tall, handsome chimneys, and oval windows. Perhaps this structure is
the remains of some great mansion; but after examining all the
existing old maps of Paris, we find nothing which bears out this
conjecture. Moreover, the title-deeds of property under Louis XIV. was
Petitot, the celebrated painter in miniature, who obtained it
originally from President Lecamus. We may therefore believe that
Lecamus lived in this building while he was erecting his more famous
mansion in the rue de Thorigny.

So Art and the legal robe have passed this way in turn. How many
instigations of needs and pleasures have led to the interior
arrangement of the dwelling! To right, as we enter a square hall
forming a closed vestibule, rises a stone staircase with two windows
looking on the garden. Beneath the staircase opens a door to the
cellar. From this vestibule we enter the dining-room, lighted from the
courtyard, and the dining-room communicates at its side with the
kitchen, which forms a continuation of the wing in which are the
warerooms of Metivier and Barbet. Behind the staircase extends, on the
garden side, a fine study or office with two large windows. The first
and second floor form two complete apartments, and the servants'
quarters are shown by the oval windows in the four-sided roof.

A large porcelain stove heats the square vestibule, the two glass
doors of which, placed opposite to each other, light it. This room,
paved in black and white marble, is especially noticeable for a
ceiling of beams formerly painted and gilt, but which had since
received, probably under the Empire, a coat of plain white paint. The
three doors of the study, salon and dining-room, surmounted by oval
panels, are awaiting a restoration that is more than needed. The
wood-work is heavy, but the ornamentation is not without merit. The
salon, panelled throughout, recalls the great century by its tall
mantelpiece of Languedoc marble, its ceiling decorated at the corners,
and by the style of its windows, which still retain their little panes.
The dining-room, communicating with the salon by a double door, is
floored with stone; the wood-work is oak, unpainted, and an atrocious
modern wall-paper has been substituted for the tapestries of the olden
time. The ceiling is of chestnut; and the study, modernized by
Thuillier, adds its quota to these discordances.

The white and gold mouldings of the salon are so effaced that nothing
remains of the gilding but reddish lines, while the white enamelling
is yellow, cracked, and peeling off. Never did the Latin saying "Otium
cum dignitate" have a greater commentary to the mind of a poet than in
this noble building. The iron-work of the staircase baluster is worthy
of the artist and the magistrate; but to find other traces of their
taste to-day in this majestic relic, the eyes of an artistic observer
are needed.

The Thuilliers and their predecessors have frequently degraded this
jewel of the upper bourgeoisie by the habits and inventions of the
lesser bourgeoisie. Look at those walnut chairs covered with
horse-hair, that mahogany table with its oilcloth cover, that
sideboard, also of mahogany, that carpet, bought at a bargain, beneath
the table, those metal lamps, that wretched paper with its red border,
those execrable engravings, and the calico curtains with red fringes,
in a dining-room, where the friends of Petitot once feasted! Do you
notice the effect produced in the salon by those portraits of Monsieur
and Madame and Mademoiselle Thuillier by Pierre Grassou, the artist
par excellence of the modern bourgeoisie. Have you remarked the
card-tables and the consoles of the Empire, the tea-table supported by
a lyre, and that species of sofa, of gnarled mahogany, covered in
painted velvet of a chocolate tone? On the chimney-piece, with the
clock (representing the Bellona of the Empire), are candelabra with
fluted columns. Curtains of woollen damask, with under-curtains of
embroidered muslin held back by stamped brass holders, drape the
windows. On the floor a cheap carpet. The handsome vestibule has
wooden benches, covered with velvet, and the panelled walls with their
fine carvings are mostly hidden by wardrobes, brought there from time
to time from the bedrooms occupied by the Thuilliers. Fear, that
hideous divinity, has caused the family to add sheet-iron doors on the
garden side and on the courtyard side, which are folded back against
the walls in the daytime, and are closed at night.

It is easy to explain the deplorable profanation practised on this
monument of the private life of the bourgeoisie of the seventeenth
century, by the private life of the bourgeoisie of the nineteenth. At
the beginning of the Consulate, let us say, some master-mason having
bought the ancient building, took the idea of turning to account the
ground which lay between it and the street. He probably pulled down
the fine porte-cochere or entrance gate, flanked by little lodges
which guarded the charming "sejour" (to use a word of the olden time),
and proceeded, with the industry of a Parisian proprietor, to impress
his withering mark on the elegance of the old building. What a curious
study might be made of the successive title-deeds of property in
Paris! A private lunatic asylum performs its functions in the rue des
Batailles in the former dwelling of the Chevalier Pierre Bayard du
Terrail, once without fear and without reproach; a street has now been
built by the present bourgeois administration through the site of the
hotel Necker. Old Paris is departing, following its kings who
abandoned it. For one masterpiece of architecture saved from
destruction by a Polish princess (the hotel Lambert, Ile Saint-Louis,
bought and occupied by the Princess Czartoriska) how many little
palaces have fallen, like this dwelling of Petitot, into the hands of
such as Thuillier.

Here follows the causes which made Mademoiselle Thuillier the owner of
the house.



CHAPTER II

THE HISTORY OF A TYRANNY

At the fall of the Villele ministry, Monsieur Louis-Jerome Thuillier,
who had then seen twenty-six years' service as a clerk in the ministry
of finance, became sub-director of a department thereof; but scarcely
had he enjoyed the subaltern authority of a position formerly his
lowest hope, when the events of July, 1830, forced him to resign it.
He calculated, shrewdly enough, that his pension would be honorably
and readily given by the new-comers, glad to have another office at
their disposal. He was right; for a pension of seventeen hundred
francs was paid to him immediately.

When the prudent sub-director first talked of resigning, his sister,
who was far more the companion of his life than his wife, trembled for
his future.

"What will become of Thuillier?" was a question which Madame and
Mademoiselle Thuillier put to each other with mutual terror in their
little lodging on a third floor of the rue d'Argenteuil.

"Securing his pension will occupy him for a time," Mademoiselle
Thuillier said one day; "but I am thinking of investing my savings in
a way that will cut out work for him. Yes; it will be something like
administrating the finances to manage a piece of property."

"Oh, sister! you will save his life," cried Madame Thuillier.

"I have always looked for a crisis of this kind in Jerome's life,"
replied the old maid, with a protecting air.

Mademoiselle Thuillier had too often heard her brother remark: "Such a
one is dead; he only survived his retirement two years"; she had too
often heard Colleville, her brother's intimate friend, a government
employee like himself, say, jesting on this climacteric of
bureaucrats, "We shall all come to it, ourselves," not to appreciate
the danger her brother was running. The change from activity to
leisure is, in truth, the critical period for government employees of
all kinds.

Those of them who know not how to substitute, or perhaps cannot
substitute other occupations for the work to which they have been
accustomed, change in a singular manner; some die outright; others
take to fishing, the vacancy of that amusement resembling that of
their late employment under government; others, who are smarter men,
dabble in stocks, lose their savings, and are thankful to obtain a
place in some enterprise that is likely to succeed, after a first
disaster and liquidation, in the hands of an abler management. The
late clerk then rubs his hands, now empty, and says to himself, "I
always did foresee the success of the business." But nearly all these
retired bureaucrats have to fight against their former habits.

"Some," Colleville used to say, "are victims to a sort of 'spleen'
peculiar to the government clerk; they die of a checked circulation; a
red-tapeworm is in their vitals. That little Poiret couldn't see the
well-known white carton without changing color at the beloved sight;
he used to turn from green to yellow."

Mademoiselle Thuillier was considered the moving spirit of her
brother's household; she was not without decision and force of
character, as the following history will show. This superiority over
those who immediately surrounded her enabled her to judge her brother,
although she adored him. After witnessing the failure of the hopes she
had set upon her idol, she had too much real maternity in her feeling
for him to let herself be mistaken as to his social value.

Thuillier and his sister were children of the head porter at the
ministry of finance. Jerome had escaped, thanks to his
near-sightedness, all drafts and conscriptions. The father's ambition
was to make his son a government clerk. At the beginning of this
century the army presented too many posts not to leave various
vacancies in the government offices. A deficiency of minor officials
enabled old Pere Thuillier to hoist his son upon the lowest step of the
bureaucratic hierarchy. The old man died in 1814, leaving Jerome on
the point of becoming sub-director, but with no other fortune than
that prospect. The worthy Thuillier and his wife (who died in 1810)
had retired from active service in 1806, with a pension as their only
means of support; having spent what property they had in giving Jerome
the education required in these days, and in supporting both him and
his sister.

The influence of the Restoration on the bureaucracy is well known.
From the forty and one suppressed departments a crowd of honorable
employees returned to Paris with nothing to do, and clamorous for
places inferior to those they had lately occupied. To these acquired
rights were added those of exiled families ruined by the Revolution.
Pressed between the two floods, Jerome thought himself lucky not to
have been dismissed under some frivolous pretext. He trembled until
the day when, becoming by mere chance sub-director, he saw himself
secure of a retiring pension. This cursory view of matters will serve
to explain Monsieur Thuillier's very limited scope and knowledge. He
had learned the Latin, mathematics, history, and geography that are
taught in schools, but he never got beyond what is called the second
class; his father having preferred to take advantage of a sudden
opportunity to place him at the ministry. So, while the young
Thuillier was making his first records on the Grand-Livre, he ought to
have been studying his rhetoric and philosophy.

While grinding the ministerial machine, he had no leisure to cultivate
letters, still less the arts; but he acquired a routine knowledge of
his business, and when he had an opportunity to rise, under the
Empire, to the sphere of superior employees, he assumed a superficial
air of competence which concealed the son of a porter, though none of
it rubbed into his mind. His ignorance, however, taught him to keep
silence, and silence served him well. He accustomed himself to
practise, under the imperial regime, a passive obedience which pleased
his superiors; and it was to this quality that he owed at a later
period his promotion to the rank of sub-director. His routine habits
then became great experience; his manners and his silence concealed
his lack of education, and his absolute nullity was a recommendation,
for a cipher was needed. The government was afraid of displeasing both
parties in the Chamber by selecting a man from either side; it
therefore got out of the difficulty by resorting to the rule of
seniority. That is how Thuillier became sub-director. Mademoiselle
Thuillier, knowing that her brother abhorred reading, and could
substitute no business for the bustle of a public office, had wisely
resolved to plunge him into the cares of property, into the culture of
a garden, in short, into all the infinitely petty concerns and
neighborhood intrigues which make up the life of the bourgeoisie.

The transplanting of the Thuillier household from the rue d'Argenteuil
to the rue Saint-Dominique d'Enfer, the business of making the
purchase, of finding a suitable porter, and then of obtaining tenants
occupied Thuillier from 1831 to 1832. When the phenomenon of the
change was accomplished, and the sister saw that Jerome had borne it
fairly well, she found him other cares and occupations (about which we
shall hear later), all based upon the character of the man himself, as
to which it will now be useful to give information.

Though the son of a ministerial porter, Thuillier was what is called a
fine man, slender in figure, above middle height, and possessing a
face that was rather agreeable if wearing his spectacles, but
frightful without them; which is frequently the case with near-sighted
persons; for the habit of looking through glasses has covered the
pupils of his eyes with a sort of film.

Between the ages of eighteen and thirty, young Thuillier had much
success among women, in a sphere which began with the lesser bourgeois
and ended in that of the heads of departments. Under the Empire, war
left Parisian society rather denuded of men of energy, who were mostly
on the battlefield; and perhaps, as a great physician has suggested,
this may account for the flabbiness of the generation which occupies
the middle of the nineteenth century.