Lost Illusions (Penguin Classics) (67 page)

The law obliges the banks to have the rate of exchange certified by a stockbroker. In ‘places’ unfortunate enough not to have a stock exchange a couple of business men act in lieu of the stockbroker. The commission known as brokerage due to the stockbroker is fixed at one quarter per cent of the sum stated in the protested bill. It has become usual to count this commission as paid to the business men who replace the stockbroker; but the banker simply slips it into his cash-box. Hence the third item in this fascinating account.

The fourth item covers the cost of the sheet of stamped paper on which the ‘Return Account’ is drawn up; also the stamp for what is so ingeniously called the re-draft, that is to say the new bill drawn by the banker on his colleague in order to recoup himself.

The fifth item comprises the cost of postage and the legal interest on the sum for so long as it is missing from the banker’s coffers.

Finally the exchange transference, the very purpose for which banking exists, represents what it costs to draw one’s money in a different ‘place’ or ‘domicile’.

Let us now make a closer analysis of this account, judging by which, according to Punchinello’s way of computing in the Neapolitan
chanson
so dramatically sung by Lablache, fifteen plus five makes twenty-two! Clearly the signature of Messrs Postel and Gannerac was a matter of mutual accommodation: when need arose, the Cointets wrote a certificate
for Gannerac and Gannerac did the same for the Cointets: as the well-known proverb goes: ‘You scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours.’ The brothers Cointet, having a running account with Métivier, had no need to draw bills on him. No draft passed between them ever added a single line to the credit or debit side.

In reality then this fantastic account could well be whittled down to the thousand francs owed, the protest, amounting to thirteen francs and interest for one month at one half per cent: in all perhaps one thousand and eighteen francs.

If a banking house has an average of one ‘Return Account’
per diem
on a value of one thousand francs, it draws in twenty-eight francs every day by the grace of God and the rules of banking. A formidable kind of royal levy invented by the Jews in the twelfth century and operative today over both monarchs and their subjects! In other terms then, a thousand francs bring in twenty-eight francs a day to the banking house or ten thousand two hundred and twenty francs a year. Multiply by three the average number of these ‘Return Accounts’ and you reach an income of thirty thousand francs drawn from fictitious capital. That is why nothing is more tenderly cared for than these accounts. Had David Séchard come along to pay off his draft on the third of May or even the day after the protest, Cointet brothers would have told him: ‘We have returned your draft to Monsieur Métivier!’ – even though the protest might still have been lying on their desk. The ‘Return Account’ becomes operative on the very evening of the protest.

And this, in provincial bankers’ language, is called ‘making the money sweat’. Postage for letters alone produces about twenty thousand francs per annum for the Keller bank which has a correspondence stretching over the whole wide world. Return Accounts pay for Madame la Baronne de Nucingen’s box at the
Italiens,
her carriage, clothes and cosmetics. Letter postage is so much more a scandalous abuse because bankers deal with ten similar matters in one ten-line letter. Strangely enough, the Inland Revenue takes its share of this premium
extorted from misfortune: the Treasury waxes! As for the Bank, from the vantage-point of its counters it flings an eminently reasonable question at a debtor: ‘Why can’t you meet your obligations?’ Alas! There is no answer to this. It follows then that the tale of items in a Return Account is a tale full of hair-raising fictions which debtors who ponder over these informative pages will henceforth hold in salutary awe.

On May the fourth Métivier received the Return Account from Messrs Cointet with instructions to take relentless proceedings against Monsieur Chardon styled de Rubempré.

A
FEW
days later Eve received, in reply to a letter she had written to Monsieur Métivier, the following note which put her mind completely at rest:

TO MONSIEUR SÉCHARD JUNIOR, PRINTER IN ANGOULÊME

I am in receipt of your esteemed letter of the fifth instant. I understood from your explanation relative to the unpaid draft of the 30th ultimate that you drew it to oblige your brother-in-law Monsieur de Rubempré, who lives on a sufficiently lavish scale for it to be doing you a service to force him to pay: his situation is such that he need not let the proceedings against him continue for long. If your honoured brother-in-law does not settle the debt I shall rely upon the loyalty of your firm, and I sign myself, as always,

Your devoted servant,

MÉTIVIER
.

‘Well,’ said Eve to David, ‘at any rate my brother will learn from these proceedings that we have not been able to pay.’

What a change in Eve this remark betokened! The growing love inspired in her by David’s character, which she was coming to know better and better, was taking the place of
brotherly affection in her heart. But… to how many illusions was she not saying good-bye?

Let us now see how the Return Account fared on the Paris exchange. A third endorser – this is the commercial term for one who holds a bill through transmission – is legally entitled to proceed solely against that person amongst the various debtors for the bill who he thinks will most promptly repay him. By virtue of this option Lucien was sued by Monsieur Métivier’s bailiff. The stages of this action, quite a useless one as it turned out, were as follows: Métivier, the Cointets’ catspaw, was well aware that Lucien was insolvent, but
de facto
insolvency can only exist
de jure
once it has been established as a fact. So then the impossibility of getting payment from Lucien was established in the following manner.

On 5 May Métivier’s bailiff gave notice to Lucien of the Return Account and the protest made at Angoulême, citing him to the Commercial Court of Paris to be informed of a number of facts, one of them being that as a merchant he would be liable to imprisonment for debt. When Lucien, living as he was the life of a hunted stag, came to read this gibberish, he also received notification of a judgment made against him
in absentia
at the Commercial Court. His mistress Coralie, knowing nothing about all this, had supposed that Lucien had been lending money to his brother-in-law, and she handed all the writs over to him too tardily, at one and the same time. An actress sees too many actors taking the parts of bailiffs in light comedies to take legal documents seriously. Tears came to Lucien’s eyes: he was moved with pity for Séchard, ashamed of his forgery and desirous to pay up. Naturally he consulted his friends about means of gaining time. But when Lousteau, Blondet, Bixiou and Nathan told him what little attention a poet should pay to the Tribunal de Commerce – a jurisdiction set up by shopkeepers – this particular poet was already under the threat of distraint. On his door was pinned the little yellow placard whose jaundiced colour washes off on to concierges, has an astringent effect on the facilities of credit, strikes fear into the heart of all caterers and above all chills the blood of poets sensitive enough
to become attached to the sticks of wood, rags of silk, piles of dyed wool, in short the baubles which go by the name of furnishings. When the bailiffs came to fetch Coralie’s furniture, the author of
Les Marguerites
went to see a friend of Bixiou, a solicitor names Desroches, who laughed when he saw Lucien alarmed at such a trifle.

‘It’s nothing to worry about, my friend. I suppose you want to gain time?’

‘As much time as possible.’

‘Well then, apply for a stay of execution. Go and see a friend of mine, Masson, an attorney at the Commercial Court. He will renew the stay of execution, represent you at that court and challenge its competence to judge your case. There won’t be the slightest difficulty about that, for it’s well known you are a journalist. If you’re summoned before the Civil Court, come and see me and I’ll take your case on. I undertake to dispose of the people who want to vex our beautiful Coralie.’

On 28 May Lucien, cited before the Civil Court, lost his case more promptly than Desroches had expected, for the proceedings against him were being vigorously pursued. When a new distraint was set in motion, when the yellow placard was once more gilding the pilasters of Coralie’s door and there was a new threat to take away the furniture, Desroches, feeling a little foolish at having ‘his fingers nipped’, as he put it, by a colleague, demanded another stay of execution, claiming, rightly enough, that the furniture belonged to Coralie. He called for a hearing in chambers, and as a result of this summary procedure, the chairman of the Court reopened the case. Judgment was delivered in favour of Coralie as being the owner of the furniture. Métivier appealed, and on the thirtieth of July his appeal was dismissed.

On 7 August, Maître Cachan received by stage-coach an enormous file of documents with the heading:
MÉTIVIER
versus
SÉCHARD AND LUCIEN CHARDON.

The first of these documents was the following dainty little memorandum, the accuracy of which is guaranteed, since it is copied from the original: