VI

"Here it is," returned Blondet. "There has been a good deal said about

affairs at Lyons; about the Republic cannonaded in the streets; well,

there was not a word of truth in it all. The Republic took up the

riots, just as an insurgent snatches up a rifle. The truth is queer

and profound, I can tell you. The Lyons trade is a soulless trade.

They will not weave a yard of silk unless they have the order and are

sure of payment. If orders fall off; the workmen may starve; they can

scarcely earn a living, convicts are better off. After the Revolution

of July, the distress reached such a pitch that the Lyons weaversthe

canuts, as they call themhoisted the flag, 'Bread or Death!' a

proclamation of a kind which compels the attention of a government. It

was really brought about by the cost of living at Lyons; Lyons must

build theatres and become a metropolis, forsooth, and the octroi

duties accordingly were insanely high. The Republicans got wind of

this bread riot, they organized the canuts in two camps, and fought

among themselves. Lyons had her Three Days, but order was restored,

and the silk weavers went back to their dens. Hitherto the canut had

been honest; the silk for his work was weighed out to him in hanks,

and he brought back the same weight of woven tissue; now he made up

his mind that the silk merchants were oppressing him; he put honesty

out at the door and rubbed oil on his fingers. He still brought back

weight for weight, but he sold the silk represented by the oil; and

the French silk trade has suffered from a plague of 'greased silks,'

which might have ruined Lyons and a whole branch of French commerce.

The masters and the government, instead of removing the causes of the

evil, simply drove it in with a violent external application. They

ought to have sent a clever man to Lyons, one of those men that are

said to have no principle, an Abbe Terray; but they looked at the

affair from a military point of view. The result of the troubles is a

gros de Naples at forty sous per yard; the silk is sold at this day, I

dare say, and the masters no doubt have hit upon some new check upon

the men. This method of manufacturing without looking ahead ought

never to have existed in the country where one of the greatest

citizens that France has ever known ruined himself to keep six

thousand weavers in work without orders. Richard Lenoir fed them, and

the government was thickheaded enough to allow him to suffer from the

fall of the prices of textile fabrics brought about by the Revolution

of 1814. Richard Lenoir is the one case of a merchant that deserves a

statue. And yet the subscription set on foot for him has no

subscribers, while the fund for General Foy's children reached a

million francs. Lyons has drawn her own conclusions; she knows France,

she knows that there is no religion left. The story of Richard Lenoir

is one of those blunders which Fouche condemned as worse than a

crime."

"Suppose that there is a tinge of charlatanism in the way in which

concerns are put before the public," began Couture, returning to the

charge, "that word charlatanism has come to be a damaging expression,

a middle term, as it were, between right and wrong; for where, I ask

you, does charlatanism begin? where does it end? what is charlatanism?

do me the kindness of telling me what it is NOT. Now for a little

plain speaking, the rarest social ingredient. A business which should

consist in going out at night to look for goods to sell in the day

would obviously be impossible. You find the instinct of forestalling

the market in the very match-seller. How to forestall the marketthat

is the one idea of the so-called honest tradesman of the Rue Saint-

Denis, as of the most brazen-fronted speculator. If stocks are heavy,

sell you must. If sales are slow, you must tickle your customer; hence

the signs of the Middle Ages, hence the modern prospectus. I do not

see a hair's-breadth of difference between attracting custom and

forcing your goods upon the consumer. It may happen, it is sure to

happen, it often happens, that a shopkeeper gets hold of damaged

goods, for the seller always cheats the buyer. Go and ask the most

upright folk in Paristhe best known men in business, that isand

they will all triumphantly tell you of dodges by which they passed off

stock which they knew to be bad upon the public. The well-known firm

of Minard began by sales of this kind. In the Rue Saint-Denis they

sell nothing but 'greased silk'; it is all that they can do. The most

honest merchants tell you in the most candid way that 'you must get

out of a bad bargain as best you can'a motto for the most

unscrupulous rascality. Blondet has given you an account of the Lyons

affair, its causes and effects, and I proceed in my turn to illustrate

my theory with an anecdote:There was once a woolen weaver, an

ambitious man, burdened with a large family of children by a wife too

much beloved. He put too much faith in the Republic, laid in a stock

of scarlet wool, and manufactured those red-knitted caps that you may

have noticed on the heads of all the street urchins in Paris. How this

came about I am just going to tell you. The Republic was beaten. After

the Saint-Merri affair the caps were quite unsalable. Now, when a

weaver finds that besides a wife and children he has some ten thousand

red woolen caps in the house, and that no hatter will take a single

one of them, notions begin to pass through his head as fast as if he

were a banker racking his brains to get rid of ten million francs'

worth of shares in some dubious investment. As for this Law of the

Faubourg, this Nucingen of caps, do you know what he did? He went to

find a pothouse dandy, one of those comic men that drive police

sergeants to despair at open-air dancing saloons at the barriers; him

he engaged to play the part of an American captain staying at

Meurice's and buying for export trade. He was to go to some large

hatter, who still had a cap in his shop window, and 'inquire for' ten

thousand red woolen caps. The hatter, scenting business in the wind,

hurried round to the woolen weaver and rushed upon the stock. After

that, no more of the American captain, you understand, and great

plenty of caps. If you interfere with the freedom of trade, because

free trade has its drawbacks, you might as well tie the hands of

justice because a crime sometimes goes unpunished, or blame the bad

organization of society because civilization produces some evils. From

the caps and the Rue Saint-Denis to joint-stock companies and the Bank

draw your own conclusions."

"A crown for Couture!" said Blondet, twisting a serviette into a

wreath for his head. "I go further than that, gentlemen. If there is a

defect in the working hypothesis, what is the cause? The law! the

whole system of legislation. The blame rests with the legislature. The

great men of their districts are sent up to us by the provinces,

crammed with parochial notions of right and wrong; and ideas that are

indispensable if you want to keep clear of collisions with justice,

are stupid when they prevent a man from rising to the height at which

a maker of the laws ought to abide. Legislation may prohibit such and

such developments of human passionsgambling, lotteries, the Ninons

of the pavement, anything you pleasebut you cannot extirpate the

passions themselves by any amount of legislation. Abolish them, you

would abolish the society which develops them, even if it does not

produce them. The gambling passion lurks, for instance, at the bottom

of every heart, be it a girl's heart, a provincial's, a diplomatist's;

everybody longs to have money without working for it; you may hedge

the desire about with restrictions, but the gambling mania immediately

breaks out in another form. You stupidly suppress lotteries, but the

cook-maid pilfers none the less, and puts her ill-gotten gains in the

savings bank. She gambles with two hundred and fifty franc stakes

instead of forty sous; joint-stock companies and speculation take the

place of the lottery; the gambling goes on without the green cloth,

the croupier's rake is invisible, the cheating planned beforehand. The

gambling houses are closed, the lottery has come to an end; 'and now,'

cry idiots, 'morals have greatly improved in France,' as if, forsooth,

they had suppressed the punters. The gambling still goes on, only the

State makes nothing from it now; and for a tax paid with pleasure, it

has substituted a burdensome duty. Nor is the number of suicides

reduced, for the gambler never dies, though his victim does."

"I am not speaking now of foreign capital lost to France," continued

Couture, "nor of the Frankfort lotteries. The Convention passed a

decree of death against those who hawked foreign lottery-tickets, and

procureur-syndics used to traffic in them. So much for the sense of

our legislator and his driveling philanthropy. The encouragement given

to savings banks is a piece of crass political folly. Suppose that

things take a doubtful turn and people lose confidence, the Government

will find that they have instituted a queue for money, like the queues

outside the bakers' shops. So many savings banks, so many riots. Three

street boys hoist a flag in some corner or other, and you have a

revolution ready made.

"But this danger, however great it may be, seems to me less to be

dreaded than the widespread demoralization. Savings banks are a means

of inoculating the people, the classes least restrained by education

or by reason from schemes that are tacitly criminal, with the vices

bred of self-interest. See what comes of philanthropy!

"A great politician ought to be without a conscience in abstract

questions, or he is a bad steersman for a nation. An honest politician

is a steam-engine with feelings, a pilot that would make love at the

helm and let the ship go down. A prime minister who helps himself to

millions but makes France prosperous and great is preferable, is he

not, to a public servant who ruins his country, even though he is

buried at the public expense? Would you hesitate between a Richelieu,

a Mazarin, or a Potemkin, each with his hundreds of millions of

francs, and a conscientious Robert Lindet that could make nothing out

of assignats and national property, or one of the virtuous imbeciles

who ruined Louis XVI.? Go on, Bixiou."

"I will not go into the details of the speculation which we owe to

Nucingen's financial genius. It would be the more inexpedient because

the concern is still in existence and shares are quoted on the Bourse.

The scheme was so convincing, there was such life in an enterprise

sanctioned by royal letters patent, that though the shares issued at a

thousand francs fell to three hundred, they rose to seven and will

reach par yet, after weathering the stormy years '27, '30, and '32.

The financial crisis of 1827 sent them down; after the Revolution of

July they fell flat; but there really is something in the affair,

Nucingen simply could not invent a bad speculation. In short, as

several banks of the highest standing have been mixed up in the

affair, it would be unparliamentary to go further into detail. The

nominal capital amounted to ten millions; the real capital to seven.

Three millions were allotted to the founders and bankers that brought

it out. Everything was done with a view to sending up the shares two

hundred francs during the first six months by the payment of a sham

dividend. Twenty per cent, on ten millions! Du Tillet's interest in

the concern amounted to five hundred thousand francs. In the

stock-exchange slang of the day, this share of the spoils was a 'sop

in the pan.' Nucingen, with his millions made by the aid of a

lithographer's stone and a handful of pink paper, proposed to himself

to operate certain nice little shares carefully hoarded in his private

office till the time came for putting them on the market. The

shareholders' money floated the concern, and paid for splendid

business premises, so they began operations. And Nucingen held in

reserve founders' shares in Heaven knows what coal and argentiferous

lead-mines, also in a couple of canals; the shares had been given to

him for bringing out the concerns. All four were in working order,

well got up and popular, for they paid good dividends.

"Nucingen might, of course, count on getting the differences if the

shares went up, but this formed no part of the Baron's schemes; he

left the shares at sea-level on the market to tempt the fishes.

"So he had massed his securities as Napoleon massed his troops, all

with a view to suspending payment in the thick of the approaching

crisis of 1826-27 which revolutionized European markets. If Nucingen

had had his Prince of Wagram, he might have said, like Napoleon from

the heights of Santon, 'Make a careful survey of the situation; on

such and such a day, at such an hour funds will be poured in at such a

spot.' But in whom could he confide? Du Tillet had no suspicion of his

own complicity in Nucingen's plot; and the bold Baron had learned from

his previous experiments in suspensions of payment that he must have

some man whom he could trust to act at need as a lever upon the

creditor. Nucingen had never a nephew, he dared not take a confidant;

yet he must have a devoted and intelligent Claparon, a born

diplomatist with a good manner, a man worthy of him, and fit to take

office under government. Such connections are not made in a day nor

yet in a year. By this time Rastignac had been so thoroughly entangled

by Nucingen, that being, like the Prince de la Paix, equally beloved

by the King and Queen of Spain, he fancied that he (Rastignac) had

secured a very valuable dupe in NUCINGEN! For a long while he had

laughed at a man whose capacities he was unable to estimate; he ended

in a sober, serious, and devout admiration of Nucingen, owning that

Nucingen really had the power which he thought he himself alone

possessed.

"From Rastignac's introduction to society in Paris, he had been led to

contemn it utterly. From the year 1820 he thought, like the Baron,

that honesty was a question of appearances; he looked upon the world

as a mixture of corruption and rascality of every sort. If he admitted

exceptions, he condemned the mass; he put no belief in any virtuemen

did right or wrong, as circumstances decided. His worldly wisdom was

the work of a moment; he learned his lesson at the summit of Pere

Lachaise one day when he buried a poor, good man there; it was his

Delphine's father, who died deserted by his daughters and their

husbands, a dupe of our society and of the truest affection. Rastignac

then and there resolved to exploit this world, to wear full dress of

virtue, honesty, and fine manners. He was empanoplied in selfishness.

When the young scion of nobility discovered that Nucingen wore the

same armor, he respected him much as some knight mounted upon a barb

and arrayed in damascened steel would have respected an adversary

equally well horsed and equipped at a tournament in the Middle Ages.

But for the time he had grown effeminate amid the delights of Capua.

The friendship of such a woman as the Baronne de Nucingen is of a kind

that sets a man abjuring egoism in all its forms.

"Delphine had been deceived once already; in her first venture of the

affections she came across a piece of Birmingham manufacture, in the

shape of the late lamented de Marsay; and therefore she could not but

feel a limitless affection for a young provincial's articles of faith.

Her tenderness reacted upon Rastignac. So by the time that Nucingen

had put his wife's friend into the harness in which the exploiter

always gets the exploited, he had reached the precise juncture when he

(the Baron) meditated a third suspension of payment. To Rastignac he

confided his position; he pointed out to Rastignac a means of making

'reparation.' As a consequence of his intimacy, he was expected to

play the part of confederate. The Baron judged it unsafe to

communicate the whole of his plot to his conjugal collaborator.

Rastignac quite believed in impending disaster; and the Baron allowed

him to believe further that he (Rastignac) saved the shop.

"But when there are so many threads in a skein, there are apt to be

knots. Rastignac trembled for Delphine's money. He stipulated that

Delphine must be independent and her estate separated from her

husband's, swearing to himself that he would repay her by trebling her

fortune. As, however, Rastignac said nothing of himself, Nucingen

begged him to take, in the event of success, twenty-five shares of a

thousand francs in the argentiferous lead-mines, and Eugene took them

not to offend him! Nucingen had put Rastignac up to this the day

before that evening in the Rue Joubert when our friend counseled

Malvina to marry. A cold shiver ran through Rastignac at the sight of

so many happy folk in Paris going to and fro unconscious of the

impending loss; even so a young commander might shiver at the first

sight of an army drawn up before a battle. He saw the d'Aiglemonts,

the d'Aldriggers, and Beaudenord. Poor little Isaure and Godefroid

playing at love, what were they but Acis and Galatea under the rock

which a hulking Polyphemus was about to send down upon them?"

"That monkey of a Bixiou has something almost like talent," said

Blondet.

"Oh! so I am not maundering now?" asked Bixiou, enjoying his success

as he looked round at his surprised auditors."For two months past,"

he continued, "Godefroid had given himself up to all the little

pleasures of preparation for the marriage. At such times men are like

birds building nests in spring; they come and go, pick up their bits

of straw, and fly off with them in their beaks to line the nest that

is to hold a brood of young birds by and by. Isaure's bridegroom had

taken a house in the Rue de la Plancher at a thousand crowns, a

comfortable little house neither too large nor too small, which suited

them. Every morning he went round to take a look at the workmen and to

superintend the painters. He had introduced 'comfort' (the only good

thing in England)heating apparatus to maintain an even temperature

all over the house; fresh, soft colors, carefully chosen furniture,

neither too showy nor too much in fashion; spring-blinds fitted to

every window inside and out; silver plate and new carriages. He had

seen to the stables, coach-house, and harness-room, where Toby Joby

Paddy floundered and fidgeted about like a marmot let loose,

apparently rejoiced to know that there would be women about the place

and a 'lady'! This fervent passion of a man that sets up housekeeping,

choosing clocks, going to visit his betrothed with his pockets full of

patterns of stuffs, consulting her as to the bedroom furniture, going,

coming, and trotting about, for love's sake,all this, I say, is a

spectacle in the highest degree calculated to rejoice the hearts of

honest people, especially tradespeople. And as nothing pleases folk

better than the marriage of a good-looking young fellow of seven-and-

twenty and a charming girl of nineteen that dances admirably well,

Godefroid in his perplexity over the corbeille asked Mme. de Nucingen

and Rastignac to breakfast with him and advise him on this all-

important point. He hit likewise on the happy idea of asking his

cousin d'Aiglemont and his wife to meet them, as well as Mme. de

Serizy. Women of the world are ready enough to join for once in an

improvised breakfast-party at a bachelor's rooms."

"It is their way of playing truant," put in Blondet.

"Of course they went over the new house," resumed Bixiou. "Married

women relish these little expeditions as ogres relish warm flesh; they

feel young again with the young bliss, unspoiled as yet by fruition.

Breakfast was served in Godefroid's sitting-room, decked out like a

troop horse for a farewell to bachelor life. There were dainty little

dishes such as women love to devour, nibble at, and sip of a morning,

when they are usually alarmingly hungry and horribly afraid to confess

to it. It would seem that a woman compromises herself by admitting

that she is hungry.'Why have you come alone?' inquired Godefroid

when Rastignac appeared.'Mme. de Nucingen is out of spirits; I will

tell you all about it,' answered Rastignac, with the air of a man

whose temper has been tried.'A quarrel?' hazarded Godefroid.'No.'

At four o'clock the women took flight for the Bois de Boulogne;

Rastignac stayed in the room and looked out of the window, fixing his

melancholy gaze upon Toby Joby Paddy, who stood, his arms crossed in

Napoleonic fashion, audaciously posted in front of Beaudenord's cab

horse. The child could only control the animal with his shrill little

voice, but the horse was afraid of Joby Toby.

" 'Well,' began Godefroid, 'what is the matter with you, my dear

fellow? You look gloomy and anxious; your gaiety is forced. You are

tormented by incomplete happiness. It is wretched, and that is a fact,

when one cannot marry the woman one loves at the mayor's office and

the church.'

" 'Have you courage to hear what I have to say? I wonder whether you

will see how much a man must be attached to a friend if he can be

guilty of such a breach of confidence as this for his sake.'

"Something in Rastignac's voice stung like a lash of a whip.

" 'WHAT?' asked Godefroid de Beaudenord, turning pale.

" 'I was unhappy over your joy; I had not the heart to keep such a

secret to myself when I saw all these preparations, your happiness in

bloom.'

" 'Just say it out in three words!'

" 'Swear to me on your honor that you will be as silent as the

grave'

" 'As the grave,' repeated Beaudenord.

" 'That if one of your relatives were concerned in this secret, he

should not know it.'

" 'No.'

" 'Very well. Nucingen started to-night for Brussels. He must file his

schedule if he cannot arrange a settlement. This very morning Delphine

petitioned for the separation of her estate. You may still save your

fortune.'

" 'How?' faltered Godefroid; the blood turned to ice in his veins.

" 'Simply write to the Baron de Nucingen, antedating your letter a

fortnight, and instruct him to invest all your capital in shares.'

Rastignac suggested Claparon and Company, and continued'You have a

fortnight, a month, possibly three months, in which to realize and

make something; the shares are still going up'

" 'But d'Aiglemont, who was here at breakfast with us, has a million

in Nucingen's bank.'

" 'Look here; I do not know whether there will be enough of these

shares to cover it; and besides, I am not his friend, I cannot betray

Nucingen's confidence. You must not speak to d'Aiglemont. If you say a

word, you must answer to me for the consequences.'

"Godefroid stood stock still for ten minutes.

" 'Do you accept? Yes or no!' said the inexorable Rastignac.

"Godefroid took up the pen, wrote at Rastignac's dictation, and signed

his name.

" 'My poor cousin!' he cried.

" 'Each for himself,' said Rastignac. 'And there is one more settled!'

he added to himself as he left Beaudenord.