Lost Illusions (Penguin Classics) (78 page)

‘E
VE
, my dear,’ said Lucien, waking his sister up. ‘Good news! In one month David will be out of debt.’

‘How so?’

‘Well, my Louise of former days has peeped out from behind Madame du Châtelet. She loves me more than ever and is getting her husband to report to the Ministry of the Interior in favour of our discovery!… And so we haven’t more than
a month of tribulation – time enough for me to avenge myself on the Prefect and make him the happiest of husbands!’

Eve thought she was still dreaming as she listened to her brother.

‘When I saw the little grey salon again in which I had trembled like a child two years ago, when I examined the furniture, the painting and people’s faces, the scales fell from my eyes! How one’s ideas change in Paris!’

‘Is that a good thing?’ asked Eve, at last understanding what her brother was talking about.

‘Come now, you’re still asleep. We’ll have a chat after breakfast,’ said Lucien.

Cérizet’s plan was exceedingly simple. Although it was one of those chancy ruses adopted by provincial bailiffs for the arrest of debtors, it was bound to succeed, for it was based as much on knowledge of Lucien’s and David’s characters as on their hopes. Among the little laundresses over whom he ruled like a Don Juan by playing them one against the other, the Cointets’ compositor, temporarily seconded for special tasks, had picked out one of Basine Clerget’s ironing-girls, one almost as beautiful as Madame Séchard, whose name was Henriette Signol and whose parents were small vine-growers living on their holding five miles away from Angoulême, on the road to Saintonges. Like all peasants, the Signols were not sufficiently well-off to keep their only child at home, and they had destined her for domestic service as a chamber-maid. In the provinces a chamber-maid must be able to starch and iron fine linen, and the reputation of Basine’s predecessor, Madame Prieur, was such that the Signols apprenticed their daughter to her and paid for her board and keep. Madame Prieur belonged to the old breed of provincial employers who feel that they stand
in loco parentis.
She treated her apprentices as members of the family, took them to church and kept a conscientious eye on them. Henriette Signol, a buxom, dark-haired young woman with long, bushy hair, had the magnolia complexion which many Southern girls possess. That is why Henriette was one of the first working-girls whom Cérizet singled out. But since she belonged to a family of honest land-workers
her only motives for yielding to him were jealousy, bad example, and the seductive phrase ‘We’ll get married!’ which Cérizet whispered to her once he had become the Cointets’ assistant compositor. Learning that the Signols owned vineyards worth ten or twelve thousand francs and a habitable house, the Parisian lost no time in making it impossible for Henriette to become another man’s wife. The amours of the beautiful Henriette and little Cérizet had reached this stage when Petit-Claud talked of making him the owner of the Séchard printing-press by holding out the prospect of a kind of limited partnership whose purpose was to put a halter round his neck. The compositor was dazzled and his head was turned. Mademoiselle Signol now looked like standing in the way of his ambitions and he began to neglect the poor girl. In her despair Henriette clung the more closely to the Cointets’ little compositor because it seemed as if he intended to drop her. Once he discovered that David was hiding in Mademoiselle Clerget’s house, the ex-Parisian changed his ideas about Henriette, but not his behaviour to her. He proposed to exploit for his own ends the kind of lunacy which takes hold of a girl when she needs to marry her seducer if she is to hide her dishonour.

That very morning when Lucien was designing to reconquer Louise, Cérizet informed Henriette of Basine’s secret and told her that their fortunes and marriage depended on discovering the spot in which David was hiding. Once instructed, Henriette had no difficulty in recognizing that the printer could not be elsewhere than in Mademoiselle Clerget’s dressing-room. She thought that this bit of spying was quite harmless, but by involving her in this initial co-operation Cérizet had already made her his accomplice in treachery.

Lucien was still asleep when Cérizet, having come to Petit-Claud’s office to find out what had happened at the reception, was listening to the lawyer’s account of the trivial though important events which were to throw Angoulême into a turmoil.

‘Has Lucien written any letter to you since his return?’ the Parisian asked after giving a satisfied nod when Petit-Claud had finished.

‘Here’s the only one I have,’ said the solicitor, handing Cérizet a few lines which Lucien had written to him on his sister’s writing-paper.

‘Right!’ said Cérizet. ‘Ten minutes before sunset, let Doublon lie in wait at the Porte-Palet. Let him post his gendarmes and keep them hidden, and you’ll get your man.’

‘Are you sure of the arrangements you’ve made?’ asked Petit-Claud with a close look at Cérizet.

‘I’m trusting to chance,’ said the former street-urchin. ‘But chance is a downright scoundrel and doesn’t like decent people.’

‘You must pull it off,’ the solicitor said curtly.

‘I shall pull it off. It’s you who have pushed me into this muck-heap, and you may well give me a few bank-notes to wipe myself clean… But, Monsieur,’ the Parisian added, detecting an expression on the solicitor’s face which displeased him, ‘if it turned out that you had taken me in, if you don’t buy the printing-works for me within a week… well, you’ll leave a young widow behind you.’ The former street-arab said this quietly with a murderous look.

‘If we get David under lock and key by six o’clock, come at nine to Monsieur Gannerac’s house, and we will settle your affair,’ the solicitor peremptorily replied.

‘It’s a bargain: you’ll get what you want, Guvnor!’ said Cérizet.

Cérizet was already an expert in the industry which consists in washing out paper, one which today is endangering the interests of the Inland Revenue. He washed out the four lines Lucien had written and replaced them by what follows, forging Lucien’s handwriting with a skill which promised a lamentable social future for the compositor.

My dear David,

You can go and see the Prefect without fear. Your affair is settled. What’s more, you can come out of hiding immediately. I’ll meet you on the way, to explain what line you should take with the Prefect.

Your brother,

LUCINE
.

At noon Lucien wrote a letter to David, telling him that the soirée had been a success and assuring him of the Prefect’s protection. That very day, he said, du Châtelet would be sending the Minister a report on the invention: he was enthusiastic about it.

Just as Marion brought this letter to Mademoiselle Basine on the pretext of delivering Lucien’s shirts for laundering, Cérizet, whom Petit-Claud had warned about the probability of this letter, took Mademoiselle Signol out for a walk on the banks of the Charente. No doubt a debate ensued in which Henriette’s honesty put up a long resistance, for the stroll lasted two hours. Not only, Cérizet argued, were the interests of their child at stake, but also their future happiness and prosperity. What he was demanding was only a trifle: he was careful not to tell her what the consequences would be. What alarmed Henriette was the exorbitant price that had to be paid for this trifle. Nevertheless, in the end Cérizet persuaded his mistress to fall in with his stratagem. At five o’clock, Henriette was to go out, then return and tell Mademoiselle Clerget that Madame Séchard wanted to see her immediately. Then, a quarter of an hour after Basine had left, she was to go upstairs, knock at the dressing-room door and hand over the forged letter to David. After that Cérizet was staking everything on chance.

Eve, for the first time in over a year, felt that the iron grip in which neediness had held her was relaxing. She had some hope at last. She too wanted to enjoy her brother’s company, show herself in public on the arm of the man who was adulated in his home-town, adored by the women and loved by the haughty Comtesse du Châtelet. She smartened herself up and proposed to take a walk in Beaulieu after dinner, arm in arm with her brother. At that time in September the whole of Angoulême goes out to take a breath of fresh air.

‘Oh! It’s the beautiful Madame Séchard,’ a few voices exclaimed on seeing Eve.

‘I would never have believed she would show herself in public,’ one woman said.

‘The husband’s in hiding, the wife flaunts herself,’ said
Madame Postel, loud enough for the poor woman to hear.

‘Oh! Let’s go back home. I shouldn’t have come out,’ said Eve to her brother.

A few minutes before sunset, the murmur of an assembled crowd rose from the slope leading down to L’Houmeau. Lucien and his sister, seized with curiosity, made their way in that direction, for they heard several people from L’Houmeau talking to one another as if some crime had just been committed.

‘Likely enough it’s a thief who’s just been arrested… He’s as pale as death,’ said a passer-by to the brother and sister as he saw them hurrying down in front of the swelling crowd.

Neither Lucien nor his sister had the slightest apprehension. They watched the thirty-odd children and old women, the workmen leaving their workshops and walking ahead of the gendarmes whose braided caps were conspicuous in the middle of the central group. This group, with a mob of about a hundred people behind it, was moving along like a storm-cloud.

‘Oh!’ said Eve. ‘It’s my husband!’

‘David!’ cried Lucien.

‘It’s his wife!’ said the crowd of people, moving aside.

‘But who or what brought you out?’ Lucien asked.

‘Your letter,’ David answered, looking deathly pale.

‘I knew it!’ said Eve, and she fainted away.

Lucien lifted his sister up, two people helped him to carry her home, and Marion put her to bed. She had not come to by the time the doctor arrived. Lucien was then forced to admit to his mother that he was the cause of David’s arrest, for he could not fathom the misunderstanding due to the forged letter. Thunderstruck by his mother’s maledictory glance, he went upstairs to his room and locked himself in.

A
NYONE
who reads the following letter, written in fits and starts in the course of the night, will gain some idea of Lucien’s agitation of mind from the disjointed statements thrown together one by one.

My beloved sister,

We saw each other just now for the last time. My mind is made up irrevocably. And this is why: in many a family there is a fatal being who, for that family, is a sort of blight. That is what I am in our family. This is not an observation of my own, but one made by a man with much experience of the world. We were supping, a gathering of friends, at the Rocher de Cancale. Among the many pleasantries exchanged this man, who was in the diplomatic service, told us that a certain young woman, who to everyone’s astonishment had remained unmarried, was suffering from ‘father-sickness’. He then developed his theory about family sicknesses. He explained to us how, without such and such a mother, such and such a household would have prospered, how such and such a son had ruined his father, how such and such a father had destroyed his children’s future and the consideration they could have enjoyed. This social thesis, although jestingly sustained, was supported by so many examples in a matter of ten minutes that I was struck by it. This one truth made up for all the witty but extravagant paradoxes with which journalists amuse one another when they’ve no one to make a fool of.

Well then, I am the fatal being in our family. With a heart full of tenderness I behave like an enemy. I have requited all your devotion with evil. The latest blow I have dealt you, unintentionally, is the cruellest of all. Whilst I was leading an unworthy life in Paris, a life full of pleasure and misery, mistaking comradeship for friendship, giving up true friends for people who wanted and were bound to exploit me, forgetting you or only remembering you in order to bring evil upon you, you were modestly plodding along, making your way slowly yet surely towards the prosperity which I in my folly was trying to take by storm. While you were going from good to better, I was launching out into a disastrous way of life. Yes, I am a man of inordinate ambition, and it prevents me
from following a humble career. I have tastes and have known pleasures the mere memory of which poisons the enjoyments within my reach, though in times past they would have satisfied me. Oh my dear Eve, I judge myself with more severity than anyone. I condemn myself and feel no pity for myself. The struggle for life in Paris calls for enduring strength, and my will-power only works in fits and starts; my brain only functions intermittently. I am so afraid of the future that I don’t want to have a future, and I find the present unbearable.

I did want to see you again but I should have done better to have stayed away for ever. Yet to go on living far from home with no means of subsistence would be a folly which I will not add to all my other follies. Death to me seems preferable to a frustrated life; and in whatever circumstances I can imagine for myself my overweening vanity would make me do stupid things. Some creatures are like noughts in arithmetic: they need a positive number in front of them so that the zero they represent becomes a ten. I could only acquire some value by marrying a person of strong, relentless will. Madame de Bargeton was certainly the wife I needed and I missed my destiny by not leaving Coralie for her. David and you would have been excellent pilots for me, but you are not forceful enough to master my weakness which so to speak shies at domination. I like an easy, trouble-free existence, and when I want to get out of an awkward situation I’m capable of a cowardice which could take me to extremities. I was born to be a prince. I have more mental adroitness than is needed for success, but it only works spasmodically: in a career which so many ambitious persons follow the prize is won by the man who husbands his wit and still has some left at the end of the day. I should do evil, as I have just done here, with the best intentions in the world. Some men are made of oak; I’m perhaps only an elegant shrub trying to be a cedar.