V

"Mme. d'Aldrigger was radically 'improper.' She thought love the most

natural thing imaginable. When Isaure and Malvina went out together to

the Champs Elysees or the Tuileries, where they were sure to meet the

young men of their set, she would simply say, 'A pleasant time to you,

dear girls.' Their friends among men, the only persons who might have

slandered the sisters, championed them; for the extraordinary liberty

permitted in the d'Aldriggers' salon made it unique in Paris. Vast

wealth could scarcely have procured such evenings, the talk was good

on any subject; dress was not insisted upon; you felt so much at home

there that you could ask for supper. The sisters corresponded as they

pleased, and quietly read their letters by their mother's side; it

never occurred to the Baroness to interfere in any way; the adorable

woman gave the girls the full benefits of her selfishness, and in a

certain sense selfish persons are the easiest to live with; they hate

trouble, and therefore do not trouble other people; they never beset

the lives of their fellow-creatures with thorny advice and captious

fault-finding; nor do they torment you with the waspish solicitude of

excessive affection that must know all things and rule all things"

"This comes home," said Blondet, "but my dear fellow, this is not

telling a story, this is blague"

"Blondet, if you were not tipsy, I should really feel hurt! He is the

one serious literary character among us; for his benefit, I honor you

by treating you like men of taste, I am distilling my tale for you,

and now he criticises me! There is no greater proof of intellectual

sterility, my friends, than the piling up of facts. Le Misanthrope,

that supreme comedy, shows us that art consists in the power of

building a palace on a needle's point. The gist of my idea is in the

fairy wand which can turn the Desert into an Interlaken in ten seconds

(precisely the time required to empty this glass). Would you rather

that I fired off at you like a cannon-ball, or a commander-in-chief's

report? We chat and laugh; and this journalist, a bibliophobe when

sober, expects me, forsooth, when he is drunk, to teach my tongue to

move at the dull jogtrot of a printed book." (Here he affected to

weep.) "Woe unto the French imagination when men fain would blunt the

needle points of her pleasant humor! Dies iroe! Let us weep for

Candide. Long live the Kritik of Pure Reason, La Symbolique, and the

systems in five closely packed volumes, printed by Germans, who little

suspect that the gist of the matter has been known in Paris since

1750, and crystallized in a few trenchant wordsthe diamonds of our

national thought. Blondet is driving a hearse to his own suicide;

Blondet, forsooth! who manufactures newspaper accounts of the last

words of all the great men that die without saying anything!"

"Come, get on," put in Finot.

"It was my intention to explain to you in what the happiness of a man

consists when he is not a shareholder (out of compliment to Couture).

Well, now, do you not see at what a price Godefroid secured the

greatest happiness of a young man's dreams? He was trying to

understand Isaure, by way of making sure that she should understand

him. Things which comprehend one another must needs be similar.

Infinity and Nothingness, for instance, are like; everything that lies

between the two is like neither. Nothingness is stupidity; genius,

Infinity. The lovers wrote each other the stupidest letters

imaginable, putting down various expressions then in fashion upon bits

of scented paper: 'Angel! Aeolian harp! with thee I shall be complete!

There is a heart in my man's breast! Weak woman, poor me!' all the

latest heart-frippery. It was Godefroid's wont to stay in a drawing-

room for a bare ten minutes; he talked without any pretension to the

women in it, and at these times they thought him very clever. In

short, judge of his absorption; Joby, his horses and carriages, became

secondary interests in his life. He was never happy except in the

depths of a snug settee opposite the Baroness, by the dark-green

porphyry chimney-piece, watching Isaure, taking tea, and chatting with

the little circle of friends that dropped in every evening between

eleven and twelve in the Rue Joubert. You could play bouillotte there

safely. (I always won.) Isaure sat with one little foot thrust out in

its black satin shoe; Godefroid would gaze and gaze, and stay till

every one else was gone, and say, 'Give me your shoe!' and Isaure

would put her little foot on a chair and take it off and give it to

him, with a glance, one of those glances thatin short, you

understand.

"At length Godefroid discovered a great mystery in Malvina. Whenever

du Tillet knocked at the door, the live red that colored Malvina's

face said 'Ferdinand!' When the poor girl's eyes fell on that two-

footed tiger, they lighted up like a brazier fanned by a current of

air. When Ferdinand drew her away to the window or a side table, she

betrayed her secret infinite joy. It is a rare and wonderful thing to

see a woman so much in love that she loses her cunning to be strange,

and you can read her heart; as rare (dear me!) in Paris as the Singing

Flower in the Indies. But in spite of a friendship dating from the

d'Aldriggers' first appearance at the Nucingens', Ferdinand did not

marry Malvina. Our ferocious friend was not apparently jealous of

Desroches, who paid assiduous court to the young lady; Desroches

wanted to pay off the rest of the purchase-money due for his

connection; Malvina could not well have less than fifty thousand

crowns, he thought, and so the lawyer was fain to play the lover.

Malvina, deeply humiliated as she was by du Tillet's carelessness,

loved him too well to shut the door upon him. With her, an

enthusiastic, highly-wrought, sensitive girl, love sometimes got the

better of pride, and pride again overcame wounded love. Our friend

Ferdinand, cool and self-possessed, accepted her tenderness, and

breathed the atmosphere with the quiet enjoyment of a tiger licking

the blood that dyes his throat. He would come to make sure of it with

new proofs; he never allowed two days to pass without a visit to the

Rue Joubert.

"At that time the rascal possessed something like eighteen hundred

thousand francs; money must have weighted very little with him in the

question of marriage; and he had not merely been proof against

Malvina, he had resisted the Barons de Nucingen and de Rastignac;

though both of them had set him galloping at the rate of seventy-five

leagues a day, with outriders, regardless of expense, through mazes of

their cunning devicesand with never a clue of thread.

"Godefroid could not refrain from saying a word to his future sister-

in-law as to her ridiculous position between a banker and an attorney.

" 'You mean to read me a lecture on the subject of Ferdinand,' she

said frankly, 'to know the secret between us. Dear Godefroid, never

mention this again. Ferdinand's birth, antecedents, and fortune count

for nothing in this, so you may think it is something extraordinary.'

A few days afterwards, however, Malvina took Godefroid apart to say,

'I do not think that Desroches is sincere' (such is the instinct of

love); 'he would like to marry me, and he is paying court to some

tradesman's daughter as well. I should very much like to know whether

I am a second shift, and whether marriage is a matter of money with

him.' The fact was that Desroches, deep as he was, could not make out

du Tillet, and was afraid that he might marry Malvina. So the fellow

had secured his retreat. His position was intolerable, he was scarcely

paying his expenses and interest on the debt. Women understand nothing

of these things; for them, love is always a millionaire."

"But since neither du Tillet nor Desroches married her; just explain

Ferdinand's motive," said Finot.

"Motive?" repeated Bixiou; "why, this. General Rule: A girl that has

once given away her slipper, even if she refused it for ten years, is

never married by the man who"

"Bosh!" interrupted Blondet, "one reason for loving is the fact that

one has loved. His motive? Here it is. General Rule: Do not marry as a

sergeant when some day you may be Duke of Dantzig and Marshal of

France. Now, see what a match du Tillet has made since then. He

married one of the Comte de Granville's daughters, into one of the

oldest families in the French magistracy."

"Desroches' mother had a friend, a druggist's wife," continued Bixiou.

"Said druggist had retired with a fat fortune. These druggist folk

have absurdly crude notions; by way of giving his daughter a good

education, he had sent her to a boarding-school! Well, Matifat meant

the girl to marry well, on the strength of two hundred thousand

francs, good hard coin with no scent of drugs about it."

"Florine's Matifat?" asked Blondet.

"Well, yes. Lousteau's Matifat; ours, in fact. The Matifats, even then

lost to us, had gone to live in the Rue du Cherche-Midi, as far as may

be from the Rue des Lombards, where their money was made. For my own

part, I had cultivated those Matifats. While I served my time in the

galleys of the law, when I was cooped up for eight hours out of the

twenty-four with nincompoops of the first water, I saw queer

characters enough to convince myself that all is not dead-level even

in obscure places, and that in the flattest inanity you may chance

upon an angle. Yes, dear boy, such and such a philistine is to such

another as Raphael is to Natoire.

"Mme. Desroches, the widowed mother, had long ago planned this

marriage for her son, in spite of a tremendous obstacle which took the

shape of one Cochin, Matifat's partner's son, a young clerk in the

adult department. M. and Mme. Matifat were of the opinion that an

attorney's position 'gave some guarantee for a wife's happiness,' to

use their own expression; and as for Desroches, he was prepared to

fall in with his mother's views in case he could do no better for

himself. Wherefore, he kept up his acquaintance with the druggists in

the Rue du Cherche-Midi.

"To put another kind of happiness before you, you should have a

description of these shopkeepers, male and female. They rejoiced in

the possession of a handsome ground floor and a strip of garden; for

amusement, they watched a little squirt of water, no bigger than a

cornstalk, perpetually rising and falling upon a small round freestone

slab in the middle of a basin some six feet across; they would rise

early of a morning to see if the plants in the garden had grown in the

night; they had nothing to do, they were restless, they dressed for

the sake of dressing, bored themselves at the theatre, and were for

ever going to and fro between Paris and Luzarches, where they had a

country house. I have dined there.

"Once they tried to quiz me, Blondet. I told them a long-winded story

that lasted from nine o'clock till midnight, one tale inside another.

I had just brought my twenty-ninth personage upon the scene (the

newspapers have plagiarized with their 'continued in our next'), when

old Matifat, who as host still held out, snored like the rest, after

blinking for five minutes. Next day they all complimented me upon the

ending of my tale!

"These tradespeople's society consisted of M. and Mme. Cochin, Mme.

Desroches, and a young Popinot, still in the drug business, who used

to bring them news of the Rue des Lombards. (You know him, Finot.)

Mme. Matifat loved the arts; she bought lithographs, chromo-

lithographs, and colored prints,all the cheapest things she could

lay her hands on. The Sieur Matifat amused himself by looking into new

business speculations, investing a little capital now and again for

the sake of the excitement. Florine had cured him of his taste for the

Regency style of thing. One saying of his will give you some idea of

the depths in my Matifat. 'Art THOU going to bed, my nieces?' he used

to say when he wished them good-night, because (as he explained) he

was afraid of hurting their feelings with the more formal 'you.'

"The daughter was a girl with no manner at all. She looked rather like

a superior sort of housemaid. She could get through a sonata, she

wrote a pretty English hand, knew French grammar and orthographya

complete commercial education, in short. She was impatient enough to

be married and leave the paternal roof, finding it as dull at home as

a lieutenant finds the nightwatch at sea; at the same time, it should

be said that her watch lasted through the whole twenty-four hours.

Desroches or Cochin junior, a notary or a lifeguardsman, or a sham

English lord,any husband would have suited her. As she so obviously

knew nothing of life, I took pity upon her, I determined to reveal the

great secret of it. But, pooh! the Matifats shut their doors on me.

The bourgeois and I shall never understand each other."

"She married General Gouraud," said Finot.

"In forty-eight hours, Godefroid de Beaudenord, late of the diplomatic

corps, saw through the Matifats and their nefarious designs," resumed

Bixiou. "Rastignac happened to be chatting with the frivolous Baroness

when Godefroid came in to give his report to Malvina. A word here and

there reached his ear; he guessed the matter on foot, more

particularly from Malvina's look of satisfaction that it was as she

had suspected. Then Rastignac actually stopped on till two o'clock in

the morning. And yet there are those that call him selfish! Beaudenord

took his departure when the Baroness went to bed.

"As soon as Rastignac was left alone with Malvina, he spoke in a

fatherly, good-humored fashion. 'Dear child, please to bear in mind

that a poor fellow, heavy with sleep, has been drinking tea to keep

himself awake till two o'clock in the morning, all for a chance of

saying a solemn word of advice to youMARRY! Do not be too

particular; do not brood over your feelings; never mind the sordid

schemes of men that have one foot here and another in the Matifats'

house; do not stop to think at all: Marry!When a girl marries, it

means that the man whom she marries undertakes to maintain her in a

more or less good position in life, and at any rate her comfort is

assured. I know the world. Girls, mammas, and grandmammas are all of

them hypocrites when they fly off into sentiment over a question of

marriage. Nobody really thinks of anything but a good position. If a

mother marries her daughter well, she says that she has made an

excellent bargain.' Here Rastignac unfolded his theory of marriage,

which to his way of thinking is a business arrangement, with a view to

making life tolerable; and ended up with, 'I do not ask to know your

secret, Malvina; I know it already. Men talk things over among

themselves, just as you women talk after you leave the dinner-table.

This is all I have to say: Marry. If you do not, remember that I

begged you to marry, here, in this room, this evening!'

"There was a certain ring in Rastignac's voice which compelled, not

attention, but reflection. There was something startling in his

insistence; something that went, as Rastignac meant that it should, to

the quick of Malvina's intelligence. She thought over the counsel

again next day, and vainly asked herself why it had been given."

Couture broke in. "In all these tops that you have set spinning, I see

nothing at all like the beginnings of Rastignac's fortune," said he.

"You apparently take us for Matifats multiplied by half-a-dozen

bottles of champagne."

"We are just coming to it," returned Bixiou. "You have followed the

course of all the rivulets which make up that forty thousand livres a

year which so many people envy. By this time Rastignac held the

threads of all these lives in his hand."

"Desroches, the Matifats, Beaudenord, the d'Aldriggers, d'Aiglemont?"

"Yes, and a hundred others," assented Bixiou.

"Oh, come now, how?" cried Finot. "I know a few things, but I cannot

see a glimpse of an answer to this riddle."

"Blondet has roughly given you the account of Nucingen's first two

suspensions of payment; now for the third, with full details.After

the peace of 1815, Nucingen grasped an idea which some of us only

fully understood later, to wit, that capital is a power only when you

are very much richer than other people. In his own mind, he was

jealous of the Rothschilds. He had five millions of francs, he wanted

ten. He knew a way to make thirty millions with ten, while with five

he could only make fifteen. So he made up his mind to operate a third

suspension of payment. About that time, the great man hit on the idea

of indemnifying his creditors with paper of purely fictitious value

and keeping their coin. On the market, a great idea of this sort is

not expressed in precisely this cut-and-dried way. Such an arrangement

consists in giving a lot of grown-up children a small pie in exchange

for a gold piece; and, like children of a smaller growth, they prefer

the pie to the gold piece, not suspecting that they might have a

couple of hundred pies for it."

"What is this all about, Bixiou?" cried Couture. "Nothing more bona

fide. Not a week passes but pies are offered to the public for a

louis. But who compels the public to take them? Are they not perfectly

free to make inquiries?"

"You would rather have it made compulsory to take up shares, would

you?" asked Blondet.

"No," said Finot. "Where would the talent come in?"

"Very good for Finot."

"Who put him up to it?" asked Couture.

"The fact was," continued Bixiou, "that Nucingen had twice had the

luck to present the public (quite unintentionally) with a pie that

turned out to be worth more than the money he received for it. That

unlucky good luck gave him qualms of conscience. A course of such luck

is fatal to a man in the long run. This time he meant to make no

mistake of this sort; he waited ten years for an opportunity of

issuing negotiable securities which should seem on the face of it to

be worth something, while as a matter of fact"

"But if you look at banking in that light," broke in Couture, "no sort

of business would be possible. More than one bona fide banker, backed

up by a bona fide government, has induced the hardest-headed men on

'Change to take up stock which is bound to fall within a given time.

You have seen better than that. Have you not seen stock created with

the concurrence of a government to pay the interest upon older stock,

so as to keep things going and tide over the difficulty? These

operations were more or less like Nucingen's settlements."

"The thing may look queer on a small scale," said Blondet, "but on a

large we call it finance. There are high-handed proceedings criminal

between man and man that amount to nothing when spread out over any

number of men, much as a drop of prussic acid becomes harmless in a

pail of water. You take a man's life, you are guillotined. But if, for

any political conviction whatsoever, you take five hundred lives,

political crimes are respected. You take five thousand francs out of

my desk; to the hulks you go. But with a sop cleverly pushed into the

jaws of a thousand speculators, you can cram the stock of any bankrupt

republic or monarchy down their throats; even if the loan has been

floated, as Couture says, to pay the interest on that very same

national debt. Nobody can complain. These are the real principles of

the present Golden Age."

"When the stage machinery is so huge," continued Bixiou, "a good many

puppets are required. In the first place, Nucingen had purposely and

with his eyes open invested his five millions in an American

investment, foreseeing that the profits would not come in until it was

too late. The firm of Nucingen deliberately emptied its coffers. Any

liquidation ought to be brought about naturally. In deposits belonging

to private individuals and other investments, the firm possessed about

six millions of capital altogether. Among those private individuals

was the Baroness d'Aldrigger with her three hundred thousand francs,

Beaudenord with four hundred thousand, d'Aiglemont with a million,

Matifat with three hundred thousand, Charles Grandet (who married

Mlle. d'Aubrion) with half a million, and so forth, and so forth.

"Now, if Nucingen had himself brought out a joint-stock company, with

the shares of which he proposed to indemnify his creditors after more

or less ingenious manoeuvring, he might perhaps have been suspected.

He set about it more cunningly than that. He made some one else put up

the machinery that was to play the part of the Mississippi scheme in

Law's system. Nucingen can make the longest-headed men work out

schemes for him without confiding a word to them; it is his peculiar

talent. Nucingen just let fall a hint to du Tillet of the pyramidal,

triumphant notion of bringing out a joint-stock enterprise with

capital sufficient to pay very high dividends for a time. Tried for

the first time, in days when noodles with capital were plentiful, the

plan was pretty sure to end in a run upon the shares, and consequently

in a profit for the banker that issued them. You must remember that

this happened in 1826.

"Du Tillet, struck through he was by an idea both pregnant and

ingenious, naturally bethought himself that if the enterprise failed,

the blame must fall upon somebody. For which reason, it occurred to

him to put forward a figurehead director in charge of his commercial

machinery. At this day you know the secret of the firm of Claparon and

Company, founded by du Tillet, one of the finest inventions"

"Yes," said Blondet, "the responsible editor in business matters, the

instigator, and scapegoat; but we know better than that nowadays. We

put, 'Apply at the offices of the Company, such and such a number,

such and such a street,' where the public find a staff of clerks in

green caps, about as pleasing to behold as broker's men."

"Nucingen," pursued Bixiou, "had supported the firm of Charles

Claparon and Company with all his credit. There were markets in which

you might safely put a million francs' worth of Claparon's paper. So

du Tillet proposed to bring his firm of Claparon to the fore. So said,

so done. In 1825 the shareholder was still an unsophisticated being.

There was no such thing as cash lying at call. Managing directors did

not pledge themselves not to put their own shares upon the market;

they kept no deposit with the Bank of France; they guaranteed nothing.

They did not even condescend to explain to shareholders the exact

limits of their liabilities when they informed them that the directors

in their goodness, refrained from asking any more than a thousand, or

five hundred, or even two hundred and fifty francs. It was not given

out that the experiment in aere publico was not meant to last for more

than seven, five, or even three years, so that shareholders would not

have long to wait for the catastrophe. It was in the childhood of the

art. Promoters did not even publish the gigantic prospectuses with

which they stimulate the imagination, and at the same time make

demands for money of all and sundry."

"That only comes when nobody wishes to part with money," said Couture.

"In short, there was no competition in investments," continued Bixiou.

"Paper-mache manufacturers, cotton printers, zinc-rollers, theatres,

and newspapers as yet did not hurl themselves like hunting dogs upon

their quarrythe expiring shareholder. 'Nice things in shares,' as

Couture says, put thus artlessly before the public, and backed up by

the opinions of experts ('the princes of science'), were negotiated

shamefacedly in the silence and shadow of the Bourse. Lynx-eyed

speculators used to execute (financially speaking) the air Calumny out

of The Barber of Seville. They went about piano, piano, making known

the merits of the concern through the medium of stock-exchange gossip.

They could only exploit the victim in his own house, on the Bourse, or

in company; so they reached him by means of the skilfully created

rumor which grew till it reached a tutti of a quotation in four

figures"

"And as we can say anything among ourselves," said Couture, "I will go

back to the last subject."

"Vous etes orfevre, Monsieur Josse!" cried Finot.

"Finot will always be classic, constitutional, and pedantic,"

commented Blondet.

"Yes," rejoined Couture, on whose account Cerizet had just been

condemned on a criminal charge. "I maintain that the new way is

infinitely less fraudulent, less ruinous, more straightforward than

the old. Publicity means time for reflection and inquiry. If here and

there a shareholder is taken in, he has himself to blame, nobody sells

him a pig in a poke. The manufacturing industry"

"Ah!" exclaimed Bixiou, "here comes industry"

" is a gainer by it," continued Couture, taking no notice of the

interruption. "Every government that meddles with commerce and cannot

leave it free, sets about an expensive piece of folly; State

interference ends in a MAXIMUM or a monopoly. To my thinking, few

things can be more in conformity with the principles of free trade

than joint-stock companies. State interference means that you try to

regulate the relations of principal and interest, which is absurd. In

business, generally speaking, the profits are in proportion to the

risks. What does it matter to the State how money is set circulating,

provided that it is always in circulation? What does it matter who is

rich or who is poor, provided that there is a constant quantity of

rich people to be taxed? Joint-stock companies, limited liability

companies, every sort of enterprise that pays a dividend, has been

carried on for twenty years in England, commercially the first country

in the world. Nothing passes unchallenged there; the Houses of

Parliament hatch some twelve hundred laws every session, yet no member

of Parliament has ever yet raised an objection to the system"

"A cure for plethora of the strong box. Purely vegetable remedy," put

in Bixiou, "les carottes" (gambling speculation).

"Look here!" cried Couture, firing up at this. "You have ten thousand

francs. You invest it in ten shares of a thousand francs each in ten

different enterprises. You are swindled nine times out of the tenas

a matter of fact you are not, the public is a match for anybody, but

say that you are swindled, and only one affair turns out well (by

accident!oh, granted!it was not done on purposethere, chaff

away!). Very well, the punter that has the sense to divide up his

stakes in this way hits on a splendid investment, like those who took

shares in the Wortschin mines. Gentlemen, let us admit among ourselves

that those who call out are hypocrites, desperately vexed because they

have no good ideas of their own, and neither power to advertise nor

skill to exploit a business. You will not have long to wait for proof.

In a very short time you will see the aristocracy, the court, and

public men descend into speculation in serried columns; you will see

that their claws are longer, their morality more crooked than ours,

while they have not our good points. What a head a man must have if he

has to found a business in times when the shareholder is as covetous

and keen as the inventor! What a great magnetizer must he be that can

create a Claparon and hit upon expedients never tried before! Do you

know the moral of it all? Our age is no better than we are; we live in

an era of greed; no one troubles himself about the intrinsic value of

a thing if he can only make a profit on it by selling it to somebody

else; so he passes it on to his neighbor. The shareholder that thinks

he sees a chance of making money is just as covetous as the founder

that offers him the opportunity of making it."

"Isn't he fine, our Couture? Isn't he fine?" exclaimed Bixiou, turning

to Blondet. "He will ask us next to erect statues to him as a

benefactor of the species."

"It would lead people to conclude that the fool's money is the wise

man's patrimony by divine right," said Blondet.

"Gentlemen," cried Couture, "let us have our laugh out here to make up

for all the times when we must listen gravely to solemn nonsense

justifying laws passed on the spur of the moment."

"He is right," said Blondet. "What times we live in, gentlemen! When

the fire of intelligence appears among us, it is promptly quenched by

haphazard legislation. Almost all our lawgivers come up from little

parishes where they studied human nature through the medium of the

newspapers; forthwith they shut down the safety-valve, and when the

machinery blows up there is weeping and gnashing of teeth! We do

nothing nowadays but pass penal laws and levy taxes. Will you have the

sum of it all!There is no religion left in the State!"

"Oh, bravo, Blondet!" cried Bixiou, "thou hast set thy finger on the

weak spot. Meddlesome taxation has lost us more victories here in

France than the vexatious chances of war. I once spent seven years in

the hulks of a government department, chained with bourgeois to my

bench. There was a clerk in the office, a man with a head on his

shoulders; he had set his mind upon making a sweeping reform of the

whole fiscal systemah, well, we took the conceit out of him nicely.

France might have been too prosperous, you know she might have amused

herself by conquering Europe again; we acted in the interests of the

peace of nations. I slew Rabourdin with a caricature."[*]

[*] See Les Employes [The Government Clerks aka Bureaucracy].

"By RELIGION I do not mean cant; I use the word in its wide political

sense," rejoined Blondet.

"Explain your meaning," said Finot.