‘You’re losing your head, Monsieur le Baron,’ said Louchard, ‘there is a holder for value without notice.’
‘Yo,’ he went on, ‘is a holter in due course… Cérizet! a nullity!’
‘Misfortune makes him witty,’ said Contenson with a smile, ‘that was a pun.’
‘Would Monsieur le Baron care to write a note to his cashier?’ said Louchard also smiling, ‘I can send Contenson with it and dismiss the others. Time’s getting on, and everybody will know…’
‘Horry, Gontenson!…’ cried Nucingen. ‘Ze gashier lifs at ze corner of ze roue tes Madurins and the roue te l’Argate. Here iss a note delling him to go to Keller’s or tu Dillet’s, in gase we hef not hundert tausend crown, for all our money iss at ze Pank… Get tressed, my enchel,’, he said to Esther, ‘you are now vree… Olt women,’ he cried looking at Asia, ‘are more tangerous zen young…’
‘I’ll be off and give the creditor a laugh,’ Asia told him, ‘and he’ll be seeing I’m all right for the day. No ill feelings, Monnessier le Paron…’ added Madame Saint-Estève with a horrible curtsey.
Louchard took the deeds from the baron’s hands, and remained alone with him in the drawing-room, where half an hour later the cashier arrived followed by Contenson. Esther then reappeared exquisitely dressed, though with some air of improvisation. When the money had been counted by Louchard, the baron wanted to examine the deeds; but Esther snatched them as quick as a cat and took them to her desk.
‘Are you going to tip the rabble?…’ said Contenson to Nucingen.
‘You showt no gonsideration,’ said the baron.
‘And what about my leg!…’ cried Contenson.
‘Luchard, you vill gif Gontenson hundert vranc of ze change from tausend…’
‘Iss a fery peautiful voman!’ said the cashier to Baron Nucingen as he left the rue Taitbout, ‘pud she is gosting much to Monnessière le Paron.’
‘Keeb zis a zegret,’ said the baron who had also enjoined secrecy upon Contenson and Louchard.
Louchard went followed by Contenson; but, in the main street, Asia who was waiting for him stopped the Trade Security Guard.
‘The bailiff and the creditor are there in a cab, they’re thirsty!’ she told him, ‘and you’re quids-in!’
While Louchard counted the money, Contenson was able to examine the clients. He perceived the eyes of Carlos, made out the shape of his forehead beneath the wig, and the wig itself looked suspect; he took the number of the cab, while seeming quite indifferent to all that went on; Asia and Europe intrigued him in the extreme. He decided that the baron had been a victim of exceptionally clever people, all the more as Louchard, enlisting his services, had been strangely discreet. The way Europe had brought him down hadn’t struck Contenson’s tibia alone. ‘That was a Saint Lazare kick!’ he’d said to himself as he got up.
Carlos sent off the bailiff, paying him well, and said to the driver at the same time: ‘Palais Royal, the Steps!’
‘Ah! the sly dog!’ Contenson thought as he heard this command, ‘there’s something afoot!…’
Carlos reached the Palais Royal at too great a speed to fear being followed. Doubly cautious, he then crossed the galleries, and took another cab outside the Château d’Eau, saying: ‘Passage de l’Opéra, the rue Pinon end.’ A quarter of an hour later, he was back at the rue Taitbout.
When she saw him, Esther said: ‘There are the fatal documents!’
Carlos picked up the deeds and examined them; then he took them to the kitchen fire and burned them.
‘Well, that’s over!’ he cried showing the three hundred and ten thousand francs rolled up inside an envelope which he took from the pocket of his frock coat. ‘These and the hundred thousand francs snitched by Asia will enable us to act.’
‘Good Lord! good Lord!’ cried poor Esther.
‘Don’t be a fool,’ said the ferocious schemer, ‘be ostensibly Nucingen’s mistress, and you’ll be able to see Lucien, he’s a friend of Nucingen’s, I don’t want to stop you having a passion for him!’
Esther saw a gleam of light in the darkness of her life, she took breath.
Further gleams
‘EUROPE, my child,’ said Carlos leading the creature to a corner of the boudoir where nobody could overhear a word of their conversation, ‘I’m very pleased with you.’
Europe raised her head, looked at this man with an expression which so transformed her withered face that Asia, witnessing the scene through the doorway, wondered whether the interest by which Carlos maintained his hold on Europe might be of greater depth than that by which she herself felt riveted to him.
‘But that is not all, my girl. Four hundred thousand francs aren’t nearly enough… Paccard will give you an invoice for plate amounting to thirty thousand francs, duly receipted; but Biddin, the goldsmith, has been put to some expense. Our furniture, distrained by him, will no doubt be put up for sale tomorrow. Go and see Biddin, he lives in the rue de I'Arbre Sec, he’ll give you pawnshop tickets for ten thousand francs. You understand: Esther has had silverware made, hasn’t paid for it, but has given it as security, she’ll be threatened with a small action for fraud. So, the goldsmith will have to be paid thirty thousand francs and the pawnbroker another ten thousand before the plate can be got at. Total: forty-three thousand francs with expenses. That silver contains a good deal of alloy, the baron will have it replaced, we can bone him on that for a few more thousand-franc notes. You owe… what, for two years at the dressmaker’s?’
‘Call it six thousand francs,’ replied Europe.
‘So, if Madame Auguste wants to be paid and to stay in business, she must make out a bill for thirty thousand francs over four years. Same arrangements with the milliner. The jeweller, Samuel Frisch, the Jew in the rue Sainte Avoie, will lend you pawn tickets, we’ve got to “owe” him twenty-five thousand francs, and there’ll be supposed to have been six thousand francs worth of “our” jewels in hock. We’ll return the jewels to the jeweller, half of them will be paste; however, the baron won’t look. In the end, you’ll get our gull to cough up a hundred and fifty thousand francs by a week from now.’
‘Madame will have to help me a little,’ replied Europe, ‘speak to her, for she stands there like somebody speechless, and I have to rack my brains harder than three authors writing a play.’
‘If Esther starts being prudish, you must let me know,’ said Carlos. ‘Nucingen owes her an equipage and horses, she’ll want to chose and buy them herself. There we shall lay on admirable horses, very expensive, which’ll be lame within a month, and then we shall change them.’
‘We could manage another six thousand francs on a note from a perfumer,’ said Europe.
‘Oh,’ said he with a shake of the head, ‘go gently, from one concession to another. Nucingen’s arm is caught in the machine, we want his head. Beyond all that, I need five hundred thousand francs.’
‘You’ll get them,’ Europe answered. ‘Madame will soften towards this great imbecile at round about six hundred thousand, and she’ll ask four hundred more to love him properly.’
‘Listen to this, my girl,’ said Carlos. ‘The day I lay my hand on the last hundred thousand francs, there’ll be twenty thousand for you.’
‘What use will that be to me?’ said Europe throwing her arms out as one to whom life seems impossible.
‘You’d be able to go back to Valenciennes, buy a fine establishment, and become an honest woman, if you wanted; you find people with every kind of taste, that’s what Paccard dreams of; there’s nothing hanging over him, even his conscience is fairly easy, you could arrange yourselves,’ replied Carlos.
‘Go back to Valenciennes!… What are you thinking of, sir?’ cried Europe with a frightened air.
Born at Valenciennes the daughter of poor weavers, Europe was sent at the age of seven into a spinning-mill where modern Industry had made too great demands upon her physical strength, and Vice had depraved her too early. Corrupted at twelve, a mother at thirteen, she f
ound herself in the company of the most deeply degraded creatures. In connection with a murder, she had appeared, as a witness, at the Assizes. Being then sixteen, she had retained a shred of truthfulness, and moreover was afraid of the Law, and it was her evidence which sentenced the accused to twenty years’ hard labour. The criminal, one of those old offenders in whose constitution the instinct of vengeance is strong, had said in open court to the child: ‘In ten years, as if it were now, Prudence’ (Europe was called Prudence Servien), ‘I shall come back and bury you, if I’m sliced for it.’ The chairman of the Court did his best to reassure Prudence Servien by promising her the support, the interest of the Law; but the poor child was struck down with so profound a terror that she fell ill and remained almost a year in hospital. The Law is a rational entity represented by a collection of individuals endlessly replaced, whose good intentions and whose memories are, like themselves, itinerant. The magistracy in its diverse functions can do nothing to prevent crime, but is constituted only to deal with cases as they arise. A police force entirely devoted to prevention would be a great boon to a country; but the very word ‘police’ makes legislators nervous, so that they fail to distinguish between the terms ‘govern’, ‘administer’, ‘make laws’. The legislator tends to absorb everything into the State, as though it were capable of action. The convict is thinking all the time of his victim and his revenge, while the Law no longer gives either a thought. Prudence, who knew her danger instinctively, if darkly, left Valenciennes, and at seventeen came to Paris to hide. She piled four trades there, the best of them playing walking-on parts at a little theatre. She met Paccard, and told him her troubles. Paccard, Jacques Collin’s devoted follower and henchman, spoke of Prudence to his master; and when the master needed a slave, he said to Prudence: ‘If you’re willing to serve me as one might serve the devil, I’ll rid you of Durut.’ Durut was the convict, the sword of Damocles hanging over Prudence Servien’s head. Without these details, Europe’s attachment might strike some people as fantastic. Nobody can have known what theatrical stroke Carlos was to prepare.
‘Yes, my child, you can go back to Valenciennes… Look, read this.’ And he handed her the previous day’s newspaper pointing with his finger at the following item: TOULON. The execution of Jean-François Durut took place yesterday… From early morning, the garrison, etc.
Prudence dropped the paper; her knees gave way beneath the weight of her body; her life was renewed, for she hadn’t, she said, known the taste of bread since Durut’s threat.
‘You see, I kept my word. It took four years to make Durut’s head roll by drawing him into a trap… Well, finish the job for me here, you’ll find yourself running your own little business near where you were born, with twenty thousand francs and married to Paccard, to whom I grant virtue as a pension.’
Europe picked the newspaper up, and with eager eyes read all the details which for twenty years newspapers have never tired of giving about the execution of convicts: the imposing spectacle, the chaplain who always converted the condemned man, the habitual criminal who exhorts his former colleagues, the artillery ready to fire, the kneeling convicts; then the trite comments which change nothing in the running of the penitentiary, where eighteen thousand crimes swarm.
‘We must get Asia back into the household,’ said Carlos.
Asia came forward, understanding nothing of Europe’s pantomime.
‘To install her as cook here again, you’ll begin by serving the baron a dinner such as he’s never eaten before,’ he went on; ‘then you’ll tell him that Asia has lost her money gambling and is back in service. We shan’t need a porter: Paccard will be coachman; coachmen stay on their boxes where they can hardly be seen; agents won’t spot him there. Madame will set him up with a powdered wig, a three-cornered hat in thick felt with gold braid; that’ll change him, besides I’ll make up his face.’
‘Are we going to have servants with us?’ said Asia squinting.
‘We shall have honest folk,’ replied Carlos.
‘All feeble-minded!’ was the mulatto’s comment.
‘If the baron takes a house, Paccard has a friend who can be caretaker,’ Carlos continued. ‘All we shall need then will be a footman and a kitchen maid, you can manage two people we don’t know…’
Just as Carlos was leaving, Paccard appeared.
‘Wait, there are people in the street,’ he said.
This simple statement was disturbing. Carlos went up to Europe’s room, and stayed there until Paccard came for him with a hired carriage which was brought into the yard. Carlos lowered the blinds and was driven out at a speed to discourage any pursuit. Reaching the Faubourg Saint Antoine, he alighted some little distance from a cab rank which he approached on foot, and thus returned to the Quai Malaquais without meeting inquisitive glances.
‘Look, child,’ he said to Lucien showing him four hundred thousand-franc notes, ‘this, I hope, will do on account towards the price of the Rubempré estate. We’ll chance a hundred thousand elsewhere. They’ve launched these Omnibuses, it’s a novelty the Parisians will take to, in three months we shall treble our capital. I know how to handle it: they’ll pay a handsome dividend, to make the shares seem attractive at the outset, and build things up fast. It’s an idea Nucingen’s started up again. Taking over the Rubempré estate, we shan’t pay cash down immediately. You’d better go and see des Lupeaulx, and ask him to recommend you personally to a solicitor called Desroches, a sharp rogue whom you’ll go to see in his office; tell him to go to Rubempré, and value the land, and you can promise him twenty thousand francs over and above his fee if he can buy eight hundred thousand francs worth round the castle ruins, and guarantee you thirty thousand annual income.’
‘You go too fast!… Too fast! too fast!…’
‘At least I move. Let’s not joke about this. Go and put a hundred thousand crowns into Treasury bonds, so as to begin drawing interest; you can leave them with Desroches, he’s sly but honest… Then go to Angoulême, persuade your sister and your brother-in-law to tell a little white lie. Your relations can say they gave you six hundred thousand francs to facilitate your marriage with Clotilde de Grandlieu, no disgrace in that.’
‘We’re saved!’ cried Lucien dazzled.
‘You, yes!’ Carlos went on; ‘but only when you walk out of Saint Thomas Aquinas with Clotilde on your arm…’
‘What are you afraid of?’ said Lucien apparently full of concern for his mentor.
‘I’m being watched… I must seem like a real priest, and that is very tedious! The devil won’t look after me any longer, when he sees me with a breviary under my arm.’
At that moment, Baron Nucingen, helped along by his cashier, reached home.
Profit and loss
‘I AM afrait,’ said he as they went in, ‘zet I hef mate a pad pargain… Och, ve shell recover oll…’
‘Vot iss unvortunade iss zet Mennesier le Paron teglared himzelv,’ replied the worthy German concerned only with decorum.
‘Yo, my ecknowledged misdress shoult pe in a bosition vorthy off me,’ replied the Louis XIV of the counting house.
Sure of having Esther sooner or later, the baron once more became the great financier he was. He again took up the direction of his affairs with so much zest that his cashier, finding him next day, at six o’clock, in his study, checking various securities, rubbed his hands.
‘Tecitetly, Mennesier le Paron mate egonomies turing ze night,’ he said with a German smile, half cunning, half stupid.
If those who are rich as Baron Nucingen was rich have more opportunities than other people of losing money, they also have more opportunities of gaining it, even while they abandon themselves to their follies. The financial policy of the famous House of Nucingen must be studied elsewhere, but we may point out here that fortunes of that size are not acquired, are not built up, augmented, maintained, amid the commercial, political and industrial revolutions of their time, without enormous losses of capital, or, if you like, levies taken on the
fortunes of individuals. Not many new securities are created in the common treasury of the globe. Every corner made represents a new inequality in the general distribution of wealth. What the State demands, it gives back; but what a House of Nucingen takes, it keeps. When it stabs somebody in the back, there are no legal consequences, for the same reason as Frederick II would have been a Jacques Collin, a Mandrin, if, instead of operating on whole provinces by means of battles, he had worked at smuggling or in liquid assets. Forcing the states of Europe to borrow at twenty or ten per cent, making up this ten or twenty per cent from public funds, holding whole industries to ransom by monopolizing raw materials, throwing a line to some large speculator to pull him out of the water while one recovers his drowned enterprise, such pecuniary warfare constitutes the high politics of money. True, for the banker, as for the conqueror, there are risks to be faced; but there are so few people in a position to take part in such contests that the sheep are unaware of what is happening. These great things take place among the shepherds. When people are hammered, to use the jargon of the Stock Exchange, it is because they were guilty of wanting to make too much too quickly, and few of us care much what situations a Nucingen or two may bring about. A speculator blowing his brains out, a stockbroker fleeing the country, a notary making off with the savings of a hundred families, which is far worse than homicide; a banker going into liquidation; such catastrophes are forgotten within a few months in Paris and overlaid by the tidal movements of the great city. The huge fortunes of those like Jacques Coeur, the Medici, the Angots of Dieppe, the Auffredi of La Rochelle, the Fuggers, the Tiepolos, the Corners, were at one time acquired without question through privileges due to mass ignorance of the source of all those precious commodities; but, nowadays, geographical knowledge is so widespread, and competition has so narrowed margins of profit, that any quickly made fortune must be either the effect of chance or lucky discovery, or the result of a legal theft. Corrupted by scandalous examples, petty commerce has, in recent years, copied all that is worst in the trading practice of its betters, and vilely contaminated raw materials. Wherever chemistry is practised, what we drink is no longer wine; so viticulture declines. Artificial salt is sold to avoid taxation. The courts are appalled by this general lack of probity. French trade practice is suspect in the eyes of the world, and England has become equally demoralized. The Charter has proclaimed the reign of money, success justifies all in an atheistical age. Thus corruption at the highest levels, despite financially dazzling results and specious self-justification, has become more ignoble than the merely personal corruptness which flourishes elsewhere and provides elements of comic relief, not it is true of the pleasantest, on this great Stage. The Government, afraid of all new thought, has banished from the theatre proper all comedy which reflects the life of today. The Middle Class, less liberal in its views than Louis XIV, trembles at the thought of seeing its own Marriage of Figaro, bans any political Tartuffe from the boards, and, certainly, would no longer license Turcaret, for Turcaret now is our lord and sovereign. Henceforward, the comic genius must become a story-teller, and the Book is the poet’s less rapid but surer weapon.