Unconscious Comedians

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UNCONSCIOUS COMEDIANS

BY

HONORE DE BALZAC



Translated by
Katharine Prescott Wormeley




DEDICATION

To Monsieur le Comte Jules de Castellane.




UNCONSCIOUS COMEDIANS



Leon de Lora, our celebrated landscape painter, belongs to one of the
noblest families of the Roussillon (Spanish originally) which,
although distinguished for the antiquity of its race, has been doomed
for a century to the proverbial poverty of hidalgos. Coming,
light-footed, to Paris from the department of the Eastern Pyrenees,
with the sum of eleven francs in his pocket for all viaticum, he had
in some degree forgotten the miseries and privations of his childhood
and his family amid the other privations and miseries which are never
lacking to "rapins," whose whole fortune consists of intrepid
vocation. Later, the cares of fame and those of success were other
causes of forgetfulness.

If you have followed the capricious and meandering course of these
studies, perhaps you will remember Mistigris, Schinner's pupil, one of
the heroes of "A Start in Life" (Scenes from Private Life), and his
brief apparitions in other Scenes. In 1845, this landscape painter,
emulator of the Hobbemas, Ruysdaels, and Lorraines, resembles no more
the shabby, frisky rapin whom we then knew. Now an illustrious man, he
owns a charming house in the rue de Berlin, not far from the hotel de
Brambourg, where his friend Brideau lives, and quite close to the
house of Schinner, his early master. He is a member of the Institute
and an officer of the Legion of honor; he is thirty-six years old, has
an income of twenty thousand francs from the Funds, his pictures sell
for their weight in gold, and (what seems to him more extraordinary
than the invitations he receives occasionally to court balls) his name
and fame, mentioned so often for the last sixteen years by the press
of Europe, has at last penetrated to the valley of the Eastern
Pyrenees, where vegetate three veritable Loras: his father, his eldest
brother, and an old paternal aunt, Mademoiselle Urraca y Lora.

In the maternal line the painter has no relation left except a cousin,
the nephew of his mother, residing in a small manufacturing town in
the department. This cousin was the first to bethink himself of Leon.
But it was not until 1840 that Leon de Lora received a letter from
Monsieur Sylvestre Palafox-Castal-Gazonal (called simply Gazonal) to
which he replied that he was assuredly himself,--that is to say, the
son of the late Leonie Gazonal, wife of Comte Fernand Didas y Lora.

During the summer of 1841 cousin Sylvestre Gazonal went to inform the
illustrious unknown family of Lora that their little Leon had not gone
to the Rio de la Plata, as they supposed, but was now one of the
greatest geniuses of the French school of painting; a fact the family
did not believe. The eldest son, Don Juan de Lora assured his cousin
Gazonal that he was certainly the dupe of some Parisian wag.

Now the said Gazonal was intending to go to Paris to prosecute a
lawsuit which the prefect of the Eastern Pyrenees had arbitrarily
removed from the usual jurisdiction, transferring it to that of the
Council of State. The worthy provincial determined to investigate this
act, and to ask his Parisian cousin the reason of such high-handed
measures. It thus happened that Monsieur Gazonal came to Paris, took
shabby lodgings in the rue Croix-des-Petits-Champs, and was amazed to
see the palace of his cousin in the rue de Berlin. Being told that the
painter was then travelling in Italy, he renounced, for the time
being, the intention of asking his advice, and doubted if he should
ever find his maternal relationship acknowledged by so great a man.

During the years 1843 and 1844 Gazonal attended to his lawsuit. This
suit concerned a question as to the current and level of a stream of
water and the necessity of removing a dam, in which dispute the
administration, instigated by the abutters on the river banks, had
meddled. The removal of the dam threatened the existence of Gazonal's
manufactory. In 1845, Gazonal considered his cause as wholly lost; the
secretary of the Master of Petitions, charged with the duty of drawing
up the report, had confided to him that the said report would
assuredly be against him, and his own lawyer confirmed the statement.
Gazonal, though commander of the National Guard in his own town and
one of the most capable manufacturers of the department, found himself
of so little account in Paris, and he was, moreover, so frightened by
the costs of living and the dearness of even the most trifling things,
that he kept himself, all this time, secluded in his shabby lodgings.
The Southerner, deprived of his sun, execrated Paris, which he called
a manufactory of rheumatism. As he added up the costs of his suit and
his living, he vowed within himself to poison the prefect on his
return, or to minotaurize him. In his moments of deepest sadness he
killed the prefect outright; in gayer mood he contented himself with
minotaurizing him.

One morning as he ate his breakfast and cursed his fate, he picked up
a newspaper savagely. The following lines, ending an article, struck
Gazonal as if the mysterious voice which speaks to gamblers before
they win had sounded in his ear: "Our celebrated landscape painter,
Leon de Lora, lately returned from Italy, will exhibit several
pictures at the Salon; thus the exhibition promises, as we see, to be
most brilliant." With the suddenness of action that distinguishes the
sons of the sunny South, Gazonal sprang from his lodgings to the
street, from the street to a street-cab, and drove to the rue de
Berlin to find his cousin.

Leon de Lora sent word by a servant to his cousin Gazonal that he
invited him to breakfast the next day at the Cafe de Paris, but he was
now engaged in a matter which did not allow him to receive his cousin
at the present moment. Gazonal, like a true Southerner, recounted all
his troubles to the valet.

The next day at ten o'clock, Gazonal, much too well-dressed for the
occasion (he had put on his bottle-blue coat with brass buttons, a
frilled shirt, a white waistcoat and yellow gloves), awaited his
amphitryon a full hour, stamping his feet on the boulevard, after
hearing from the master of the cafe that "these gentlemen" breakfasted
habitually between eleven and twelve o'clock.

"Between eleven and half-past," he said when he related his adventures
to his cronies in the provinces, "two Parisians dressed in simple
frock-coats, looking like _nothing at all_, called out when they saw me
on the boulevard, 'There's our Gazonal!'"

The speaker was Bixiou, with whom Leon de Lora had armed himself to
"bring out" his provincial cousin, in other words, to make him pose.

"'Don't be vexed, cousin, I'm at your service!' cried out that little
Leon, taking me in his arms," related Gazonal on his return home. "The
breakfast was splendid. I thought I was going blind when I saw the
number of bits of gold it took to pay that bill. Those fellows must
earn their weight in gold, for I saw my cousin give the waiter _thirty
sous_--the price of a whole day's work!"

During this monstrous breakfast--advisedly so called in view of six
dozen Osten oysters, six cutlets a la Soubise, a chicken a la Marengo,
lobster mayonnaise, green peas, a mushroom pasty, washed down with
three bottles of Bordeaux, three bottles of Champagne, plus coffee and
liqueurs, to say nothing of relishes--Gazonal was magnificent in his
diatribes against Paris. The worthy manufacturer complained of the
length of the four-pound bread-loaves, the height of the houses, the
indifference of the passengers in the streets to one another, the
cold, the rain, the cost of hackney-coaches, all of which and much
else he bemoaned in so witty a manner that the two artists took a
mighty fancy to cousin Gazonal, and made him relate his lawsuit from
beginning to end.

"My lawsuit," he said in his Southern accent and rolling his r's, "is
a very simple thing; they want my manufactory. I've employed here in
Paris a dolt of a lawyer, to whom I give twenty francs every time he
opens an eye, and he is always asleep. He's a slug, who drives in his
coach, while I go afoot and he splashes me. I see now I ought to have
had a carriage! On the other hand, that Council of State are a pack of
do-nothings, who leave their duties to little scamps every one of whom
is bought up by our prefect. That's my lawsuit! They want my
manufactory! Well, they'll get it! and they must manage the best they
can with my workmen, a hundred of 'em, who'll make them sing another
tune before they've done with them."

"Two years. Ha! that meddling prefect! he shall pay dear for this;
I'll have his life if I have to give mine on the scaffold--"

"Which state councillor presides over your section?"

"A former newspaper man,--doesn't pay ten sous in taxes,--his name is
Massol."

The two Parisians exchanged glances.

"Who is the commissioner who is making the report?"

"Ha! that's still more queer; he's Master of Petitions, professor of
something or other at the Sorbonne,--a fellow who writes things in
reviews, and for whom I have the profoundest contempt."

"Claude Vignon," said Bixiou.

"Yes, that's his name," replied Gazonal. "Massol and Vignon--there you
have Social Reason, in which there's no reason at all."

"There must be some way out of it," said Leon de Lora. "You see,
cousin, all things are possible in Paris for good as well as for evil,
for the just as well as the unjust. There's nothing that can't be
done, undone, and redone."

"The devil take me if I stay ten days more in this hole of a place,
the dullest in all France!"

The two cousins and Bixiou were at this moment walking from one end to
the other of that sheet of asphalt on which, between the hours of one
and three, it is difficult to avoid seeing some of the personages in
honor of whom Fame puts one or the other of her trumpets to her lips.
Formerly that locality was the Place Royale; next it was the Pont
Neuf; in these days this privilege had been acquired by the Boulevard
des Italiens.

"Paris," said the painter to his cousin, "is an instrument on which we
must know how to play; if we stand here ten minutes I'll give you your
first lesson. There, look!" he said, raising his cane and pointing to
a couple who were just then coming out from the Passage de l'Opera.

"Goodness! who's that?" asked Gazonal.

_That_ was an old woman, in a bonnet which had spent six months in a
show-case, a very pretentious gown and a faded tartan shawl, whose
face had been buried twenty years of her life in a damp lodge, and
whose swollen hand-bag betokened no better social position than that
of an ex-portress. With her was a slim little girl, whose eyes,
fringed with black lashes, had lost their innocence and showed great
weariness; her face, of a pretty shape, was fresh and her hair
abundant, her forehead charming but audacious, her bust thin,--in
other words, an unripe fruit.

"That," replied Bixiou, "is a rat tied to its mother."

"A rat!--what's that?"

"That particular rat," said Leon, with a friendly nod to Mademoiselle
Ninette, "may perhaps win your suit for you."

Gazonal bounded; but Bixiou had held him by the arm ever since they
left the cafe, thinking perhaps that the flush on his face was rather
vivid.

"That rat, who is just leaving a rehearsal at the Opera-house, is
going home to eat a miserable dinner, and will return about three
o'clock to dress, if she dances in the ballet this evening--as she
will, to-day being Monday. This rat is already an old rat for she is
thirteen years of age. Two years from now that creature may be worth
sixty thousand francs; she will be all or nothing, a great danseuse or
a marcheuse, a celebrated person or a vulgar courtesan. She has worked
hard since she was eight years old. Such as you see her, she is worn
out with fatigue; she exhausted her body this morning in the
dancing-class, she is just leaving a rehearsal where the evolutions are
as complicated as a Chinese puzzle; and she'll go through them again
to-night. The rat is one of the primary elements of the Opera; she is
to the leading danseuse what a junior clerk is to a notary. The rat is
--hope."

"Who produces the rat?" asked Gazonal.

"Porters, paupers, actors, dancers," replied Bixiou. "Only the lowest
depths of poverty could force a child to subject her feet and joints
to positive torture, to keep herself virtuous out of mere speculation
until she is eighteen years of age, and to live with some horrible old
crone like a beautiful plant in a dressing of manure. You shall see
now a procession defiling before you, one after the other, of men of
talent, little and great, artists in seed or flower, who are raising
to the glory of France that every-day monument called the Opera, an
assemblage of forces, wills, and forms of genius, nowhere collected as
in Paris.

"I have already seen the Opera," said Gazonal, with a self-sufficient
air.

"Yes, from a three-francs-sixty-sous seat among the gods," replied
the landscape painter; "just as you have seen Paris in the rue
Croix-des-Petits-Champs, without knowing anything about it. What did
they give at the Opera when you were there?"

"Guillaume Tell."

"Well," said Leon, "Matilde's grand DUO must have delighted you. What
do you suppose that charming singer did when she left the stage?"

"She--well, what?"

"She ate two bloody mutton-chops which her servant had ready for her."

"Pooh! nonsense!"

"Malibran kept up on brandy--but it killed her in the end. Another
thing! You have seen the ballet, and you'll now see it defiling past
you in its every-day clothes, without knowing that the face of your
lawsuit depends on a pair of those legs."

"My lawsuit!"

"See, cousin, here comes what is called a marcheuse."

Leon pointed to one of those handsome creatures who at twenty-five
years of age have lived sixty, and whose beauty is so real and so sure
of being cultivated that they make no display of it. She was tall, and
walked well, with the arrogant look of a dandy; her toilet was
remarkable for its ruinous simplicity.

"That is Carabine," said Bixiou, who gave her, as did Leon, a slight
nod to which she responded by a smile.

"There's another who may possibly get your prefect turned out."

"A marcheuse!--but what is that?"

"A marcheuse is a rat of great beauty whom her mother, real or
fictitious, has sold as soon as it was clear she would become neither
first, second, nor third danseuse, but who prefers the occupation of
coryphee to any other, for the main reason that having spent her youth
in that employment she is unfitted for any other. She has been
rejected at the minor theatres where they want danseuses; she has not
succeeded in the three towns where ballets are given; she has not had
the money, or perhaps the desire to go to foreign countries--for
perhaps you don't know that the great school of dancing in Paris
supplies the whole world with male and female dancers. Thus a rat who
becomes a marcheuse,--that is to say, an ordinary figurante in a
ballet,--must have some solid attachment which keeps her in Paris:
either a rich man she does not love or a poor man she loves too well.
The one you have just seen pass will probably dress and redress three
times this evening,--as a princess, a peasant-girl, a Tyrolese; by
which she will earn about two hundred francs a month."

"She is better dressed than my prefect's wife."

"If you should go to her house," said Bixiou, "you would find there a
chamber-maid, a cook, and a man-servant. She occupies a fine apartment
in the rue Saint-Georges; in short, she is, in proportion to French
fortunes of the present day compared with those of former times, a
relic of the eighteenth century 'opera-girl.' Carabine is a power; at
this moment she governs du Tillet, a banker who is very influential in
the Chamber of Deputies."

"And above these two rounds in the ballet ladder what comes next?"
asked Gazonal.

"Look!" said his cousin, pointing to an elegant caleche which
was turning at that moment from the boulevard into the rue
Grange-Bateliere, "there's one of the leading danseuses whose name
on the posters attracts all Paris. That woman earns sixty thousand
francs a year and lives like a princess; the price of your manufactory
all told wouldn't suffice to buy you the privilege of bidding her
good-morning a dozen times."

"Do you see," said Bixiou, "that young man who is sitting on the front
seat of her carriage? Well, he's a viscount who bears a fine old name;
he's her first gentleman of the bed-chamber; does all her business
with the newspapers; carries messages of peace or war in the morning
to the director of the Opera; and takes charge of the applause which
salutes her as she enters or leaves the stage."

"Well, well, my good friends, that's the finishing touch! I see now
that I knew nothing of the ways of Paris."

"At any rate, you are learning what you can see in ten minutes in the
Passage de l'Opera," said Bixiou. "Look there."

Two persons, a man and a woman, came out of the Passage at that
moment. The woman was neither plain nor pretty; but her dress had that
distinction of style and cut and color which reveals an artist; the
man had the air of a singer.

"There," said Bixiou, "is a baritone and a second danseuse. The
baritone is a man of immense talent, but a baritone voice being only
an accessory to the other parts he scarcely earns what the second
danseuse earns. The danseuse, who was celebrated before Taglioni and
Ellsler appeared, has preserved to our day some of the old traditions
of the character dance and pantomime. If the two others had not
revealed in the art of dancing a poetry hitherto unperceived, she
would have been the leading talent; as it is, she is reduced to the
second line. But for all that, she fingers her thirty thousand francs
a year, and her faithful friend is a peer of France, very influential
in the Chamber. And see! there's a danseuse of the third order, who,
as a dancer, exists only through the omnipotence of a newspaper. If
her engagement were not renewed the ministry would have one more
journalistic enemy on its back. The corps de ballet is a great power;
consequently it is considered better form in the upper ranks of
dandyism and politics to have relations with dance than with song. In
the stalls, where the habitues of the Opera congregate, the saying
'Monsieur is all for singing' is a form of ridicule."

A short man with a common face, quite simply dressed, passed them at
this moment.

"There's the other half of the Opera receipts--that man who just went
by; the tenor. There is no longer any play, poem, music, or
representation of any kind possible unless some celebrated tenor can
reach a certain note. The tenor is love, he is the Voice that touches
the heart, that vibrates in the soul, and his value is reckoned at a
much higher salary than that of a minister. One hundred thousand
francs for a throat, one hundred thousand francs for a couple of
ankle-bones,--those are the two financial scourges of the Opera."

"I am amazed," said Gazonal, "at the hundreds of thousands of francs
walking about here."

"We'll amaze you a good deal more, my dear cousin," said Leon de Lora.
"We'll take Paris as an artist takes his violoncello, and show you how
it is played,--in short, how people amuse themselves in Paris."

"It is a kaleidoscope with a circumference of twenty miles," cried
Gazonal.

"Before piloting monsieur about, I have to see Gaillard," said Bixiou.

"But we can use Gaillard for the cousin," replied Leon.

"What sort of machine is that?" asked Gazonal.

"He isn't a machine, he is a machinist. Gaillard is a friend of ours
who has ended a miscellaneous career by becoming the editor of a
newspaper, and whose character and finances are governed by movements
comparable to those of the tides. Gaillard can contribute to make you
win your lawsuit--"

"It is lost."

"That's the very moment to win it," replied Bixiou.

When they reached Theodore Gaillard's abode, which was now in the rue
de Menars, the valet ushered the three friends into a boudoir and
asked them to wait, as monsieur was in secret conference.

"With whom?" asked Bixiou.

"With a man who is selling him the incarceration of an _unseizable_
debtor," replied a handsome woman who now appeared in a charming
morning toilet.

"In that case, my dear Suzanne," said Bixiou, "I am certain we may go
in."

"Oh! what a beautiful creature!" said Gazonal.

"That is Madame Gaillard," replied Leon de Lora, speaking low into his
cousin's ear. "She is the most humble-minded woman in Paris, for she
had the public and has contented herself with a husband."

"What is your will, messeigneurs?" said the facetious editor, seeing
his two friends and imitating Frederic Lemaitre.

Theodore Gaillard, formerly a wit, had ended by becoming a stupid man
in consequence of remaining constantly in one centre,--a moral
phenomenon frequently to be observed in Paris. His principal method of
conversation consisted in sowing his speeches with sayings taken from
plays then in vogue and pronounced in imitation of well-known actors.

"We have come to blague," said Leon.

"'Again, young men'" (Odry in the Saltimbauques).

"Well, this time, we've got him, sure," said Gaillard's other visitor,
apparently by way of conclusion.

"_Are_ you sure of it, pere Fromenteau?" asked Gaillard. "This it the
eleventh time you've caught him at night and missed him in the
morning."

"How could I help it? I never saw such a debtor! he's a locomotive;
goes to sleep in Paris and wakes up in the Seine-et-Oise. A safety
lock I call him." Seeing a smile on Gaillard's face he added: "That's
a saying in our business. Pinch a man, means arrest him, lock him up.
The criminal police have another term. Vidoeq said to his man, 'You
are served'; that's funnier, for it means the guillotine."

A nudge from Bixiou made Gazonal all eyes and ears.

"Does monsieur grease my paws?" asked Fromenteau of Gaillard, in a
threatening but cool tone.

"'A question that of fifty centimes'" (Les Saltimbauques), replied the
editor, taking out five francs and offering them to Fromenteau.

"And the rapscallions?" said the man.

"What rapscallions?" asked Gaillard.

"Those I employ," replied Fromenteau calmly.

"Is there a lower depth still?" asked Bixiou.

"Yes, monsieur," said the spy. "Some people give us information
without knowing they do so, and without getting paid for it. I put
fools and ninnies below rapscallions."

"They are often original, and witty, your rapscallions!" said Leon.

"Do you belong to the police?" asked Gazonal, eying with uneasy
curiosity the hard, impassible little man, who was dressed like the
third clerk in a sheriff's office.

"Which police do you mean?" asked Fromenteau.

"There are several?"

"As many as five," replied the man. "Criminal, the head of which was
Vidoeq; secret police, which keeps an eye on the other police, the
head of it being always unknown; political police,--that's Fouche's.
Then there's the police of Foreign Affairs, and finally, the palace
police (of the Emperor, Louis XVIII., etc.), always squabbling with
that of the quai Malaquais. It came to an end under Monsieur Decazes.
I belonged to the police of Louis XVIII.; I'd been in it since 1793,
with that poor Contenson."

The four gentlemen looked at each other with one thought: "How many
heads he must have brought to the scaffold!"

"Now-a-days, they are trying to get on without us. Folly!" continued
the little man, who began to seem terrible. "Since 1830 they want
honest men at the prefecture! I resigned, and I've made myself a small
vocation by arresting for debt."

"He is the right arm of the commercial police," said Gaillard in
Bixiou's ear, "but you can never find out who pays him most, the
debtor or the creditor."

"The more rascally a business is, the more honor it needs. I'm for him
who pays me best," continued Fromenteau addressing Gaillard. "You want
to recover fifty thousand francs and you talk farthings to your means
of action. Give me five hundred francs and your man is pinched to-night,
for we spotted him yesterday!"

"Five hundred francs for you alone!" cried Theodore Gaillard.

"Lizette wants a shawl," said the spy, not a muscle of his face
moving. "I call her Lizette because of Beranger."

"You have a Lizette, and you stay in such a business!" cried the
virtuous Gazonal.

"It is amusing! People may cry up the pleasures of hunting and fishing
as much as they like but to stalk a man in Paris is far better fun."

"Certainly," said Gazonal, reflectively, speaking to himself, "they
must have great talent."

"If I were to enumerate the qualities which make a man remarkable in
our vocation," said Fromenteau, whose rapid glance had enabled him to
fathom Gazonal completely, "you'd think I was talking of a man of
genius. First, we must have the eyes of a lynx; next, audacity (to
tear into houses like bombs, accost the servants as if we knew them,
and propose treachery--always agreed to); next, memory, sagacity,
invention (to make schemes, conceived rapidly, never the same--for
spying must be guided by the characters and habits of the persons
spied upon; it is a gift of heaven); and, finally, agility, vigor. All
these facilities and qualities, monsieur, are depicted on the door of
the Gymnase-Amoros as Virtue. Well, we must have them all, under pain
of losing the salaries given us by the State, the rue de Jerusalem, or
the minister of Commerce."