The countess held the letter to her heart; she was calm, and seemed reconciled to herself. Seeing her thus, the count gave visible expression to his happiness.
‘That’s what they’re like, then, the people who decide our fate and that of whole peoples!’ thought Jacques Collin, who shrugged his shoulders when the two friends had come in. ‘A sigh breathed amiss by some female turns their intelligence inside out like a glove! They lose their heads for a glance! A skirt raised or lowered by a fraction, and they rush all over Paris in despair. A woman’s fancies affect the whole State! Oh! what strength a man acquires when, like me, he eludes that childish tyranny, that loyalty overturned by passion, that candid malice, that primitive cunning! Woman, with her executioner’s skill, her torturer’s gifts, is and always will be man’s ruin. Attorney General, minister of State, look at them, all blind, twisting everything for the letters of duchesses and little girls, or to save the reason of a woman who will be madder in her right mind than out of it.’ He assumed a proud smile. ‘And,’ he thought, ‘they believe me, they act upon my disclosures, and they will leave me standing where I did. I shall always reign over this world, in which, for twenty-five years, I have been obeyed…’
Jacques Collin had employed that supreme power which he formerly exercised upon poor Esther; for he possessed, as we have many times seen, the way of speaking, the looks, the gestures which tame madness, he had presented Lucien as having borne away the countess’s image with him.
No woman can resist the idea of being the only beloved.
‘You no longer have a rival!’ was the last mocking word of this cold man.
He stayed a whole hour, forgotten, there, in the drawing-room. Monsieur de Granville arrived and found him sombre, erect, lost in the dream of those who have attained the 18 Brumaire of their lives.
The Attorney General walked as far as the threshold of the countess’s bedroom, stayed there a moment or two; then he came up to Jacques Collin and said to him:
‘Do you hold to your intentions?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Right, then, you shall replace Bibi-Lupin, and the sentence on Calvi will be commuted.’
‘He won’t be going to Rochefort?’
‘Not even to Toulon, you can take him into your service; but these reprieves and your nomination depend on your conduct over a period of six months during which you will act as Bibi-Lupin’s deputy.’
Conclusion
WITHIN a week, Bibi-Lupin’s deputy recovered four hundred thousand francs on behalf of the Crottat family. He also turned in Ruffard and Godet.
The proceeds of the sale of Treasury scrip by Esther Gobseck were found in the harlot’s bed, and Monsieur de Sérisy placed to Jacques Collin’s account the three hundred thousand francs left him in Lucien de Rubempré’s will.
The monument ordained by Lucien, for Esther and himself, is regarded as one of the finest in Pére Lachaise, and the plot on which it stands belongs to Jacques Collin.
After having exercised his functions for some fifteen years, Jacques Collin retired in 1845 or thereabouts.
Honoré de Balzac, A Harlot High and Low
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