A Start in Life

“Monseigneur,” said Georges Marest, “I may have amused myself with the bourgeois in the diligence, but – ”

“Let his Excellency finish what he was saying,” said the notary, digging his elbow into his clerk’s ribs.

“A notary,” continued the count, “ought to practise discretion, shrewdness, caution from the start; he should be incapable of such a blunder as taking a peer of France for a tallow-chandler – ”

“I am willing to be blamed for my faults,” said Georges; “but I never left my deeds at the mercy of – ”

“Now you are committing the fault of contradicting the word of a minister of State, a gentleman, an old man, and a client,” said the count. “Give me that deed of sale.”

Georges turned over and over the papers in his portfolio.

“That will do; don’t disarrange those papers,” said the count, taking the deed from his pocket. “Here is what you are looking for.”

Crottat turned the paper back and forth, so astonished was he at receiving it from the hands of his client.

“What does this mean, monsieur?” he said, finally, to Georges.

“If I had not taken it,” said the count, “Pere Leger, – who is by no means such a ninny as you thought him from his questions about agriculture, by which he showed that he attended to his own business, – Pere Leger might have seized that paper and guessed my purpose. You must give me the pleasure of dining with me, but one on condition, – that of describing, as you promised, the execution of the Muslim of Smyrna, and you must also finish the memoirs of some client which you have certainly read to be so well informed.”

“Schlague for blague!” said Leon de Lora, in a whisper, to Joseph Bridau.

“Gentlemen,” said the count to the two notaries and Messieurs Margueron and de Reybert, “let us go into the next room and conclude this business before dinner, because, as my friend Mistigris would say: ‘Qui esurit constentit.’”

“Well, he is very good-natured,” said Leon de Lora to Georges Marest, when the count had left the room.

“Yes, HE may be, but my master isn’t,” said Georges, “and he will request me to go and blaguer somewhere else.”

“Never mind, you like travel,” said Bridau.

“What a dressing that boy will get from Monsieur and Madame Moreau!” cried Mistigris.

“Little idiot!” said Georges. “If it hadn’t been for him the count would have been amused. Well, anyhow, the lesson is a good one; and if ever again I am caught bragging in a public coach – ”

“It is a stupid thing to do,” said Joseph Bridau.

“And common,” added Mistigris. “‘Vulgarity is the brother of pretension.’”

While the matter of the sale was being settled between Monsieur Margueron and the Comte de Serizy, assisted by their respective notaries in presence of Monsieur de Reybert, the ex-steward walked with slow steps to his own house. There he entered the salon and sat down without noticing anything. Little Husson, who was present, slipped into a corner, out of sight, so much did the livid face of his mother’s friend alarm him.

“Eh! my friend!” said Estelle, coming into the room, somewhat tired with what she had been doing. “What is the matter?”

“My dear, we are lost, – lost beyond recovery. I am no longer steward of Presles, no longer in the count’s confidence.”

“Why not?”

“Pere Leger, who was in Pierrotin’s coach, told the count all about the affair of Les Moulineaux. But that is not the thing that has cost me his favor.”

“What then?”

“Oscar spoke ill of the countess, and he told about the count’s diseases.”

“Oscar!” cried Madame Moreau. “Ah! my dear, your sin has found you out. It was well worth while to warm that young serpent in your bosom. How often I have told you – ”

“Enough!” said Moreau, in a strained voice.

At this moment Estelle and her husband discovered Oscar cowering in his corner. Moreau swooped down on the luckless lad like a hawk on its prey, took him by the collar of the coat and dragged him to the light of a window. “Speak! what did you say to monseigneur in that coach? What demon let loose your tongue, you who keep a doltish silence whenever I speak to you? What did you do it for?” cried the steward, with frightful violence.

Too bewildered to weep, Oscar was dumb and motionless as a statue.

“Come with me and beg his Excellency’s pardon,” said Moreau.

“As if his Excellency cares for a little toad like that!” cried the furious Estelle.

“Come, I say, to the chateau,” repeated Moreau.

Oscar dropped like an inert mass to the ground.

“Come!” cried Moreau, his anger increasing at every instant.

“No! no! mercy!” cried Oscar, who could not bring himself to submit to a torture that seemed to him worse than death.

Moreau then took the lad by his coat, and dragged him, as he might a dead body, through the yards, which rang with the boy’s outcries and sobs. He pulled him up the portico, and, with an arm that fury made powerful, he flung him, bellowing, and rigid as a pole, into the salon, at the very feet of the count, who, having completed the purchase of Les Moulineaux, was about to leave the salon for the dining-room with his guests.

“On your knees, wretched boy! and ask pardon of him who gave food to your mind by obtaining your scholarship.”

Oscar, his face to the ground, was foaming with rage, and did not say a word. The spectators of the scene were shocked. Moreau seemed no longer in his senses; his face was crimson with injected blood.

“This young man is a mere lump of vanity,” said the count, after waiting a moment for Oscar’s excuses. “A proud man humiliates himself because he sees there is grandeur in a certain self-abasement. I am afraid that you will never make much of that lad.”

So saying, his Excellency passed on. Moreau took Oscar home with him; and on the way gave orders that the horses should immediately be put to Madame Moreau’s caleche.

CHAPTER VII. A MOTHER’S TRIALS

While the horses were being harnessed, Moreau wrote the following letter to Madame Clapart: —

My dear, – Oscar has ruined me. During his journey in Pierrotin’s coach, he spoke of Madame de Serizy’s behavior to his Excellency, who was travelling incognito, and actually told, to himself, the secret of his terrible malady. After dismissing me from my stewardship, the count told me not to let Oscar sleep at Presles, but to send him away immediately. Therefore, to obey his orders, the horses are being harnessed at this moment to my wife’s carriage, and Brochon, my stable-man, will take the miserable child to you to-night.

We are, my wife and I, in a distress of mind which you may perhaps imagine, though I cannot describe it to you. I will see you in a few days, for I must take another course. I have three children, and I ought to consider their future. At present I do not know what to do; but I shall certainly endeavor to make the count aware of what seventeen years of the life of a man like myself is worth. Owning at the present moment about two hundred and fifty thousand francs, I want to raise myself to a fortune which may some day make me the equal of his Excellency. At this moment I feel within me the power to move mountains and vanquish insurmountable difficulties. What a lever is such a scene of bitter humiliation as I have just passed through! Whose blood has Oscar in his veins? His conduct has been that of a blockhead; up to this moment when I write to you, he has not said a word nor answered, even by a sign, the questions my wife and I have put to him. Will he become an idiot? or is he one already? Dear friend, why did you not instruct him as to his behavior before you sent him to me? How many misfortunes you would have spared me, had you brought him here yourself as I begged you to do. If Estelle alarmed you, you might have stayed at Moisselles. However, the thing is done, and there is no use talking about it.

Adieu; I shall see you soon.

Your devoted servant and friend,

Moreau

At eight o’clock that evening, Madame Clapart, just returned from a walk she had taken with her husband, was knitting winter socks for Oscar, by the light of a single candle. Monsieur Clapart was expecting a friend named Poiret, who often came in to play dominoes, for never did he allow himself to spend an evening at a cafe. In spite of the prudent economy to which his small means forced him, Clapart would not have answered for his temperance amid a luxury of food and in presence of the usual guests of a cafe whose inquisitive observation would have piqued him.

“I’m afraid Poiret came while we were out,” said Clapart to his wife.

“Why, no, my friend; the portress would have told us so when we came in,” replied Madame Clapart.

“She may have forgotten it.”

“What makes you think so?”

“It wouldn’t be the first time she has forgotten things for us, – for God knows how people without means are treated.”

“Well,” said the poor woman, to change the conversation and escape Clapart’s cavilling, “Oscar must be at Presles by this time. How he will enjoy that fine house and the beautiful park.”

“Oh! yes,” snarled Clapart, “you expect fine things of him; but, mark my words, there’ll be squabbles wherever he goes.”

“Will you never cease to find fault with that poor child?” said the mother. “What has he done to you? If some day we should live at our ease, we may owe it all to him; he has such a good heart – ”

“Our bones will be jelly long before that fellow makes his way in the world,” cried Clapart. “You don’t know your own child; he is conceited, boastful, deceitful, lazy, incapable of – ”

“Why don’t you go to meet Poiret?” said the poor mother, struck to the heart by the diatribe she had brought upon herself.

“A boy who has never won a prize at school!” continued Clapart.

To bourgeois eyes, the obtaining of school prizes means the certainty of a fine future for the fortunate child.

“Did you win any?” asked his wife. “Oscar stood second in philosophy.”

This remark imposed silence for a moment on Clapart; but presently he began again.

“Besides, Madame Moreau hates him like poison, you know why. She’ll try to set her husband against him. Oscar to step into his shoes as steward of Presles! Why he’d have to learn agriculture, and know how to survey.”

“He can learn.”

“He – that pussy cat! I’ll bet that if he does get a place down there, it won’t be a week before he does some doltish thing which will make the count dismiss him.”

“Good God! how can you be so bitter against a poor child who is full of good qualities, sweet-tempered as an angel, incapable of doing harm to any one, no matter who.”

Just then the cracking of a postilion’s whip and the noise of a carriage stopping before the house was heard, this arrival having apparently put the whole street into a commotion. Clapart, who heard the opening of many windows, looked out himself to see what was happening.

“They have sent Oscar back to you in a post-chaise,” he cried, in a tone of satisfaction, though in truth he felt inwardly uneasy.

“Good heavens! what can have happened to him?” cried the poor mother, trembling like a leaf shaken by the autumn wind.

Brochon here came up, followed by Oscar and Poiret.

“What has happened?” repeated the mother, addressing the stable-man.

“I don’t know, but Monsieur Moreau is no longer steward of Presles, and they say your son has caused it. His Excellency ordered that he should be sent home to you. Here’s a letter from poor Monsieur Moreau, madame, which will tell you all. You never saw a man so changed in a single day.”

“Clapart, two glasses of wine for the postilion and for monsieur!” cried the mother, flinging herself into a chair that she might read the fatal letter. “Oscar,” she said, staggering towards her bed, “do you want to kill your mother? After all the cautions I gave you this morning – ”

She did not end her sentence, for she fainted from distress of mind. When she came to herself she heard her husband saying to Oscar, as he shook him by the arm: —

“Will you answer me?”

“Go to bed, monsieur,” she said to her son. “Let him alone, Monsieur Clapart. Don’t drive him out of his senses; he is frightfully changed.”

Oscar did not hear his mother’s last words; he had slipped away to bed the instant that he got the order.

Those who remember their youth will not be surprised to learn that after a day so filled with events and emotions, Oscar, in spite of the enormity of his offences, slept the sleep of the just. The next day he did not find the world so changed as he thought it; he was surprised to be very hungry, – he who the night before had regarded himself as unworthy to live. He had only suffered mentally. At his age mental impressions succeed each other so rapidly that the last weakens its predecessor, however deeply the first may have been cut in. For this reason corporal punishment, though philanthropists are deeply opposed to it in these days, becomes necessary in certain cases for certain children. It is, moreover, the most natural form of retribution, for Nature herself employs it; she uses pain to impress a lasting memory of her precepts. If to the shame of the preceding evening, unhappily too transient, the steward had joined some personal chastisement, perhaps the lesson might have been complete. The discernment with which such punishment needs to be administered is the greatest argument against it. Nature is never mistaken; but the teacher is, and frequently.

Madame Clapart took pains to send her husband out, so that she might be alone with her son the next morning. She was in a state to excite pity. Her eyes, worn with tears; her face, weary with the fatigue of a sleepless night; her feeble voice, – in short, everything about her proved an excess of suffering she could not have borne a second time, and appealed to sympathy.

When Oscar entered the room she signed to him to sit down beside her, and reminded him in a gentle but grieved voice of the benefits they had so constantly received from the steward of Presles. She told him that they had lived, especially for the last six years, on the delicate charity of Monsieur Moreau; and that Monsieur Clapart’s salary, also the “demi-bourse,” or scholarship, by which he (Oscar) had obtained an education, was due to the Comte de Serizy. Most of this would now cease. Monsieur Clapart, she said, had no claim to a pension, – his period of service not being long enough to obtain one. On the day when he was no longer able to keep his place, what would become of them?

“For myself,” she said, “by nursing the sick, or living as a housekeeper in some great family, I could support myself and Monsieur Clapart; but you, Oscar, what could you do? You have no means, and you must earn some, for you must live. There are but four careers for a young man like you, – commerce, government employment, the licensed professions, or military service. All forms of commerce need capital, and we have none to give you. In place of capital, a young man can only give devotion and his capacity. But commerce also demands the utmost discretion, and your conduct yesterday proves that you lack it. To enter a government office, you must go through a long probation by the help of influence, and you have just alienated the only protector that we had, – a most powerful one. Besides, suppose you were to meet with some extraordinary help, by which a young man makes his way promptly either in business or in the public employ, where could you find the money to live and clothe yourself during the time that you are learning your employment?”

Here the mother wandered, like other women, into wordy lamentation: What should she do now to feed the family, deprived of the benefits Moreau’s stewardship had enabled him to send her from Presles? Oscar had overthrown his benefactor’s prosperity! As commerce and a government clerkship were now impossible, there remained only the professions of notary and lawyer, either barristers or solicitors, and sheriffs. But for those he must study at least three years, and pay considerable sums for entrance fees, examinations, certificates, and diplomas; and here again the question of maintenance presented itself.

“Oscar,” she said, in conclusion, “in you I had put all my pride, all my life. In accepting for myself an unhappy old age, I fastened my eyes on you; I saw you with the prospect of a fine career, and I imagined you succeeding in it. That thought, that hope, gave me courage to face the privations I have endured for six years in order to carry you through school, where you have cost me, in spite of the scholarship, between seven and eight hundred francs a year. Now that my hope is vanishing, your future terrifies me. I cannot take one penny from Monsieur Clapart’s salary for my son. What can you do? You are not strong enough to mathematics to enter any of the technical schools; and, besides, where could I get the three thousand francs board-money which they extract? This is life as it is, my child. You are eighteen, you are strong. Enlist in the army; it is your only means, that I can see, to earn your bread.”

Oscar knew as yet nothing whatever of life. Like all children who have been kept from a knowledge of the trials and poverty of the home, he was ignorant of the necessity of earning his living. The word “commerce” presented no idea whatever to his mind; “public employment” said almost as little, for he saw no results of it. He listened, therefore, with a submissive air, which he tried to make humble, to his mother’s exhortations, but they were lost in the void, and did not reach his mind. Nevertheless, the word “army,” the thought of being a soldier, and the sight of his mother’s tears did at last make him cry. No sooner did Madame Clapart see the drops coursing down his cheeks than she felt herself helpless, and, like most mothers in such cases, she began the peroration which terminates these scenes, – scenes in which they suffer their own anguish and that of their children also.

“Well, Oscar, promise me that you will be more discreet in future, – that you will not talk heedlessly any more, but will strive to repress your silly vanity,” et cetera, et cetera.

Oscar of course promised all his mother asked him to promise, and then, after gently drawing him to her, Madame Clapart ended by kissing him to console him for being scolded.

“In future,” she said, “you will listen to your mother, and will follow her advice; for a mother can give nothing but good counsel to her child. We will go and see your uncle Cardot; that is our last hope. Cardot owed a great deal to your father, who gave him his sister, Mademoiselle Husson, with an enormous dowry for those days, which enabled him to make a large fortune in the silk trade. I think he might, perhaps, place you with Monsieur Camusot, his successor and son-in-law, in the rue des Bourdonnais. But, you see, your uncle Cardot has four children. He gave his establishment, the Cocon d’Or, to his eldest daughter, Madame Camusot; and though Camusot has millions, he has also four children by two wives; and, besides, he scarcely knows of our existence. Cardot has married his second daughter, Mariane, to Monsieur Protez, of the firm of Protez and Chiffreville. The practice of his eldest son, the notary, cost him four hundred thousand francs; and he has just put his second son, Joseph, into the drug business of Matifat. So you see, your uncle Cardot has many reasons not to take an interest in you, whom he sees only four times a year. He has never come to call upon me here, though he was ready enough to visit me at Madame Mere’s when he wanted to sell his silks to the Emperor, the imperial highnesses, and all the great people at court. But now the Camusots have turned ultras. The eldest son of Camusot’s first wife married a daughter of one of the king’s ushers. The world is mighty hump-backed when it stoops! However, it was a clever thing to do, for the Cocon d’Or has the custom of the present court as it had that of the Emperor. But to-morrow we will go and see your uncle Cardot, and I hope that you will endeavor to behave properly; for, as I said before, and I repeat it, that is our last hope.”

Monsieur Jean-Jerome-Severin Cardot had been a widower six years. As head-clerk of the Cocon d’Or, one of the oldest firms in Paris, he had bought the establishment in 1793, at a time when the heads of the house were ruined by the maximum; and the money of Mademoiselle Husson’s dowry had enabled him to do this, and so make a fortune that was almost colossal in ten years. To establish his children richly during his lifetime, he had conceived the idea of buying an annuity for himself and his wife with three hundred thousand francs, which gave him an income of thirty thousand francs a year. He then divided his capital into three shares of four hundred thousand francs each, which he gave to three of his children, – the Cocon d’Or, given to his eldest daughter on her marriage, being the equivalent of a fourth share. Thus the worthy man, who was now nearly seventy years old, could spend his thirty thousand a year as he pleased, without feeling that he injured the prospects of his children, all finely provided for, whose attentions and proofs of affection were, moreover, not prompted by self-interest.

Uncle Cardot lived at Belleville, in one of the first houses above the Courtille. He there occupied, on the first floor, an apartment overlooking the valley of the Seine, with a southern exposure, and the exclusive enjoyment of a large garden, for the sum of a thousand francs a year. He troubled himself not at all about the three or four other tenants of the same vast country-house. Certain, through a long lease, of ending his days there, he lived rather plainly, served by an old cook and the former maid of the late Madame Cardot, – both of whom expected to reap an annuity of some six hundred francs apiece on the old man’s death. These two women took the utmost care of him, and were all the more interested in doing so because no one was ever less fussy or less fault-finding than he. The apartment, furnished by the late Madame Cardot, had remained in the same condition for the last six years, – the old man being perfectly contented with it. He spent in all not more than three thousand francs a year there; for he dined in Paris five days in the week, and returned home at midnight in a hackney-coach, which belonged to an establishment at Courtille. The cook had only her master’s breakfast to provide on those days. This was served at eleven o’clock; after that he dressed and perfumed himself, and departed for Paris. Usually, a bourgeois gives notice in the household if he dines out; old Cardot, on the contrary, gave notice when he dined at home.

This little old man – fat, rosy, squat, and strong – always looked, in popular speech, as if he had stepped from a bandbox. He appeared in black silk stockings, breeches of “pou-de-soie” (paduasoy), a white pique waistcoat, dazzling shirt-front, a blue-bottle coat, violet silk gloves, gold buckles to his shoes and his breeches, and, lastly, a touch of powder and a little queue tied with black ribbon. His face was remarkable for a pair of eyebrows as thick as bushes, beneath which sparkled his gray eyes; and for a square nose, thick and long, which gave him somewhat the air of the abbes of former times. His countenance did not belie him. Pere Cardot belonged to that race of lively Gerontes which is now disappearing rapidly, though it once served as Turcarets to the comedies and tales of the eighteenth century. Uncle Cardot always said “Fair lady,” and he placed in their carriages, and otherwise paid attention to those women whom he saw without protectors; he “placed himself at their disposition,” as he said, in his chivalrous way.

But beneath his calm air and his snowy poll he concealed an old age almost wholly given up to mere pleasure. Among men he openly professed epicureanism, and gave himself the license of free talk. He had seen no harm in the devotion of his son-in-law, Camusot, to Mademoiselle Coralie, for he himself was secretly the Mecaenas of Mademoiselle Florentine, the first danseuse at the Gaiete. But this life and these opinions never appeared in his own home, nor in his external conduct before the world. Uncle Cardot, grave and polite, was thought to be somewhat cold, so much did he affect decorum; a “devote” would have called him a hypocrite.

The worthy old gentleman hated priests; he belonged to that great flock of ninnies who subscribed to the “Constitutionnel,” and was much concerned about “refusals to bury.” He adored Voltaire, though his preferences were really for Piron, Vade, and Colle. Naturally, he admired Beranger, whom he wittily called the “grandfather of the religion of Lisette.” His daughters, Madame Camusot and Madame Protez, and his two sons would, to use a popular expression, have been flabbergasted if any one had explained to them what their father meant by “singing la Mere Godichon.”