Unconscious Comedians

“I assure you, my good Madame Nourrisson,” said Bixiou, “that we only wanted the pleasure of making your acquaintance, and we should like very much to be informed as to how you ever came to slip into this business.”

“I was confidential maid in the family of a marshal of France, Prince d’Ysembourg,” she said, assuming the airs of a Dorine. “One morning, one of the most beplumed countesses of the Imperial court came to the house and wanted to speak to the marshal privately. I put myself in the way of hearing what she said. She burst into tears and confided to that booby of a marshal – yes, the Conde of the Republic is a booby! – that her husband, who served under him in Spain, had left her without means, and if she didn’t get a thousand francs, or two thousand, that day her children must go without food; she hadn’t any for the morrow. The marshal, who was always ready to give in those days, took two notes of a thousand francs each out of his desk, and gave them to her. I saw that fine countess going down the staircase where she couldn’t see me. She was laughing with a satisfaction that certainly wasn’t motherly, so I slipped after her to the peristyle where I heard her say to the coachman, ‘To Leroy’s.’ I ran round quickly to Leroy’s, and there, sure enough, was the poor mother. I got there in time to see her order and pay for a fifteen-hundred-franc dress; you understand that in those days people were made to pay when they bought. The next day but one she appeared at an ambassador’s ball, dressed to please all the world and some one in particular. That day I said to myself: ‘I’ve got a career! When I’m no longer young I’ll lend money to great ladies on their finery; for passion never calculates, it pays blindly.’ If you want subjects for a vaudeville I can sell you plenty.”

She departed after delivering this tirade, in which all the phases of her past life were outlined, leaving Gazonal as much horrified by her revelations as by the five yellow teeth she showed when she tried to smile.

“What shall we do now?” he asked presently.

“Make notes,” replied Bixiou, whistling for his porter; “for I want some money, and I’ll show you the use of porters. You think they only pull the gate-cord; whereas they really pull poor devils like me and artists whom they take under their protection out of difficulties. Mine will get the Montyon prize one of these days.”

Gazonal opened his eyes to their utmost roundness.

A man between two ages, partly a graybeard, partly an office-boy, but more oily within and without, hair greasy, stomach puffy, skin dull and moist, like that of the prior of a convent, always wearing list shoes, a blue coat, and grayish trousers, made his appearance.

“What is it, monsieur?” he said with an air which combined that of a protector and a subordinate.

“Ravenouillet – His name is Ravenouillet,” said Bixiou turning to Gazonal. “Have you our notebook of bills due with you?”

Ravenouillet pulled out of his pocket the greasiest and stickiest book that Gazonal’s eyes had ever beheld.

“Write down at three months’ sight two notes of five hundred francs each, which you will proceed to sign.”

And Bixiou handed over two notes already drawn to his order by Ravenouillet, which Ravenouillet immediately signed and inscribed on the greasy book, in which his wife also kept account of the debts of the other lodgers.

“Thanks, Ravenouillet,” said Bixiou. “And here’s a box at the Vaudeville for you.”

“Oh! my daughter will enjoy that,” said Ravenouillet, departing.

“There are seventy-one tenants in this house,” said Bixiou, “and the average of what they owe Ravenouillet is six thousand francs a month, eighteen thousand quarterly for money advanced, postage, etc., not counting the rents due. He is Providence – at thirty per cent, which we all pay him, though he never asks for anything.”

“Oh, Paris! Paris!” cried Gazonal.

“I’m going to take you now, cousin Gazonal,” said Bixiou, after indorsing the notes, “to see another comedian, who will play you a charming scene gratis.”

“Who is it?” said Gazonal.

“A usurer. As we go along I’ll tell you the debut of friend Ravenouillet in Paris.”

Passing in front of the porter’s lodge, Gazonal saw Mademoiselle Lucienne Ravenouillet holding in her hand a music score (she was a pupil of the Conservatoire), her father reading a newspaper, and Madame Ravenouillet with a package of letters to be carried up to the lodgers.

“Thanks, Monsieur Bixiou!” said the girl.

“She’s not a rat,” explained Leon to his cousin; “she is the larva of the grasshopper.”

“Here’s the history of Ravenouillet,” continued Bixiou, when the three friends reached the boulevard. “In 1831 Massol, the councillor of state who is dealing with your case, was a lawyer-journalist who at that time never thought of being more than Keeper of the Seals, and deigned to have King Louis-Philippe on his throne. Forgive his ambition, he’s from Carcassonne. One morning there entered to him a young rustic of his parts, who said: ‘You know me very well, Mossoo Massol; I’m your neighbour the grocer’s little boy; I’ve come from down there, for they tell me a fellow is certain to get a place if he comes to Paris.’ Hearing these words, Massol shuddered, and said to himself that if he were weak enough to help this compatriot (to him utterly unknown) he should have the whole department prone upon him, his bell-rope would break, his valet leave him, he should have difficulties with his landlord about the stairway, and the other lodgers would assuredly complain of the smell of garlic pervading the house. Consequently, he looked at his visitor as a butcher looks at a sheep whose throat he intends to cut. But whether the rustic comprehended the stab of that glance or not, he went on to say (so Massol told me), ‘I’ve as much ambition as other men. I will never go back to my native place, if I ever do go back, unless I am a rich man. Paris is the antechamber of Paradise. They tell me that you who write the newspapers can make, as they say, ‘fine weather and foul’; that is, you have things all your own way, and it’s enough to ask your help to get any place, no matter what, under government. Now, though I have faculties, like others, I know myself: I have no education; I don’t know how to write, and that’s a misfortune, for I have ideas. I am not seeking, therefore, to be your rival; I judge myself, and I know I couldn’t succeed there. But, as you are so powerful, and as we are almost brothers, having played together in childhood, I count upon you to launch me in a career and to protect me – Oh, you must; I want a place, a place suitable to my capacity, to such as I am, a place were I can make my fortune.’ Massol was just about to put his compatriot neck and crop out of the door with some brutal speech, when the rustic ended his appeal thus: ‘I don’t ask to enter the administration where people advance like tortoises – there’s your cousin, who has stuck in one post for twenty years. No, I only want to make my debut.’ – ‘On the stage?’ asked Massol only too happy at that conclusion. – ‘No, though I have gesture enough, and figure, and memory. But there’s too much wear and tear; I prefer the career of porter.’ Massol kept his countenance, and replied: ‘I think there’s more wear and tear in that, but as your choice is made I’ll see what I can do’; and he got him, as Ravenouillet says, his first ‘cordon.’”

“I was the first master,” said Leon, “to consider the race of porter. You’ll find knaves of morality, mountebanks of vanity, modern sycophants, septembriseurs, disguised in philanthropy, inventors of palpitating questions, preaching the emancipation of the negroes, improvement of little thieves, benevolence to liberated convicts, and who, nevertheless, leave their porters in a condition worse than that of the Irish, in holes more dreadful than a mud cabin, and pay them less money to live on than the State pays to support a convict. I have done but one good action in my life, and that was to build my porter a decent lodge.”

“Yes,” said Bixiou, “if a man, having built a great cage divided into thousands of compartments like the cells of a beehive or the dens of a menagerie, constructed to receive human beings of all trades and all kinds, if that animal, calling itself the proprietor, should go to a man of science and say: ‘I want an individual of the bimanous species, able to live in holes full of old boots, pestiferous with rags, and ten feet square; I want him such that he can live there all his life, sleep there, eat there, be happy, get children as pretty as little cupids, work, toil, cultivate flowers, sing there, stay there, and live in darkness but see and know everything,’ most assuredly the man of science could never have invented the porter to oblige the proprietor; Paris, and Paris only could create him, or, if you choose, the devil.”

“Parisian creative powers have gone farther than that,” said Gazonal; “look at the workmen! You don’t know all the products of industry, though you exhibit them. Our toilers fight against the toilers of the continent by force of misery, as Napoleon fought Europe by force of regiments.”

“Here we are, at my friend the usurer’s,” said Bixiou. “His name is Vauvinet. One of the greatest mistakes made by writers who describe our manners and morals is to harp on old portraits. In these days all trades change. The grocer becomes a peer of France, artists capitalize their money, vaudevillists have incomes. A few rare beings may remain what they originally were, but professions in general have no longer either their special costume or their formerly fixed habits and ways. In the past we had Gobseck, Gigounet, Samonon, – the last of the Romans; to-day we rejoice in Vauvinet, the good-fellow usurer, the dandy who frequents the greenroom and the lorettes, and drives about in a little coupe with one horse. Take special note of my man, friend Gazonal, and you’ll see the comedy of money, the cold man who won’t give a penny, the hot man who snuffs a profit; listen to him attentively!”

All three went up to the second floor of a fine-looking house on the boulevard des Italiens, where they found themselves surrounded by the elegances then in fashion. A young man about twenty-eight years of age advanced to meet them with a smiling face, for he saw Leon de Lora first. Vauvinet held out his hand with apparent friendliness to Bixiou, and bowed coldly to Gazonal as he motioned them to enter his office, where bourgeois taste was visible beneath the artistic appearance of the furniture, and in spite of the statuettes and the thousand other little trifles applied to our little apartments by modern art, which has made itself as small as its patrons.

Vauvinet was dressed, like other young men of our day who go into business, with extreme elegance, which many of them regard as a species of prospectus.

“I’ve come for some money,” said Bixiou, laughing, and presenting his notes.

Vauvinet assumed a serious air, which made Gazonal smile, such difference was there between the smiling visage that received them and the countenance of the money-lender recalled to business.

“My dear fellow,” said Vauvinet, looking at Bixiou, “I should certainly oblige you with the greatest pleasure, but I haven’t any money to loan at the present time.”

“Ah, bah!”

“No; I have given all I had to – you know who. That poor Lousteau went into partnership for the management of a theatre with an old vaudevillist who has great influence with the ministry, Ridal; and they came to me yesterday for thirty thousand francs. I’m cleaned out, and so completely that I was just in the act of sending to Cerizet for a hundred louis, when I lost at lansquenet this morning, at Jenny Cadine’s.”

“You must indeed me hard-up if you can’t oblige this poor Bixiou,” said Leon de Lora; “for he can be very sharp-tongued when he hasn’t a sou.”

“Well,” said Bixiou, “I could never say anything but good of Vauvinet; he’s full of goods.”

“My dear friend,” said Vauvinet, “if I had the money, I couldn’t possibly discount, even at fifty per cent, notes which are drawn by your porter. Ravenouillet’s paper isn’t in demand. He’s not a Rothschild. I warn you that his notes are worn thin; you had better invent another firm. Find an uncle. As for a friend who’ll sign notes for us there’s no such being to be found; the matter-of-factness of the present age is making awful progress.”

“I have a friend,” said Bixiou, motioning to Leon’s cousin. “Monsieur here; one of the most distinguished manufacturers of cloth in the South, named Gazonal. His hair is not very well dressed,” added Bixiou, looking at the touzled and luxuriant crop on the provincial’s head, “but I am going to take him to Marius, who will make him look less like a poodle-dog, an appearance so injurious to his credit, and to ours.”

“I don’t believe in Southern securities, be it said without offence to monsieur,” replied Vauvinet, with whom Gazonal was so entertained that he did not resent his insolence.

Gazonal, that extremely penetrating intellect, thought that the painter and Bixiou intended, by way of teaching him to know Paris, to make him pay the thousand francs for his breakfast at the Cafe de Paris, for this son of the Pyrenees had never got out of that armor of distrust which incloses the provincial in Paris.

“How can you expect me to have outstanding business at seven hundred miles from Paris?” added Vauvinet.

“Then you refuse me positively?” asked Bixiou.

“I have twenty francs, and no more,” said the young usurer.

“I’m sorry for you,” said the joker. “I thought I was worth a thousand francs.”

“You are worth two hundred thousand francs,” replied Vauvinet, “and sometimes you are worth your weight in gold, or at least your tongue is; but I tell you I haven’t a penny.”

“Very good,” replied Bixiou; “then we won’t say anything more about it. I had arranged for this evening, at Carabine’s, the thing you most wanted – you know?”

Vauvinet winked an eye at Bixiou; the wink that two jockeys give each other when they want to say: “Don’t try trickery.”

“Don’t you remember catching me round the waist as if I were a pretty woman,” said Bixiou, “and coaxing me with look and speech, and saying, ‘I’ll do anything for you if you’ll only get me shares at par in that railroad du Tillet and Nucingen have made an offer for?’ Well, old fellow, du Tillet and Nucingen are coming to Carabine’s to-night, where they will meet a number of political characters. You’ve lost a fine opportunity. Good-bye to you, old carrot.”

Bixiou rose, leaving Vauvinet apparently indifferent, but inwardly annoyed by the sense that he had committed a folly.

“One moment, my dear fellow,” said the money-lender. “Though I haven’t the money, I have credit. If your notes are worth nothing, I can keep them and give you notes in exchange. If we can come to an agreement about that railway stock we could share the profits, of course in due proportion and I’ll allow you that on – ”