Ursule Mirouët (Tomlinson translation)/Part I/8
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At that moment, Madame de Portenduère, alone with the curé in her cold little parlor on the ground floor, had just finished confiding her troubles to this good priest, her only friend. In her hand she held the letters that the Abbé Chaperon had just returned to her after having read them, and which had completed the measure of her worries. Sitting in her easy-chair on one side of the square table covered with the remains of dessert, the old lady looked at the curé, who, on the other side, huddled in his armchair, was stroking his chin with the gesture common to theatrical valets, mathematicians and priests, and which betrays some reflection over a difficult problem.
This little parlor, lighted by two windows facing the road and wainscoted with gray painted woodwork, was so damp, that the lower panels showed the geometrical cracks of rotten wood when it is no longer preserved but by paint. The tiled floor, red and rubbed by the old lady’s only servant, required little rounds of matting in front of each seat, upon one of which the abbé was keeping his feet. The curtains, of old, light-green damask with green flowers, were drawn, and the outer blinds had been shut. Two candles lit up the table, leaving the room in shadow. Is it necessary to say that between the two windows was a fine pastel by Latour of the famous Admiral de Portenduère, the rival of the Suffrens, the Kergarouëts, the Guichens and the Simeuses? On the paneling, opposite the fireplace, could be seen the Vicomte de Portenduère, and the old lady’s mother, a Kergarouët-Ploëgat. And so Savinien’s great-uncle was the Vice-admiral Kergarouët, and his cousin the Comte de Portenduère, the admiral’s grandson, both of them very rich. The Vice-admiral de Kergarouët lived in Paris, and the Comte de Portenduère at the castle of that name in the Dauphiné. His cousin the count represented the elder branch, and Savinien was the only offspring of the younger De Portenduère. The count, past forty years of age, and married to a rich woman, had three children. His fortune, accruing from several legacies, amounted—so it was said—to sixty thousand francs income. Deputy of L’Isère, he passed his winters in Paris, where he had bought back the De Portenduère mansion with the indemnities brought him by the Villèle law. The Vice-admiral de Kergarouët had recently married his niece, Mademoiselle de Fontaine, solely in order to secure her his fortune. And so the viscount’s shortcomings were to lose him two powerful protectors. If Savinien, a young and handsome fellow, had entered the navy, with his name and backed by an admiral and a deputy, he might perhaps at twenty-three have already been a lieutenant; but his mother, objecting to her only son being destined for a military career, had had him educated at Nemours by one of the Abbé Chaperon’s curates, and had flattered herself that she would be able to keep her son beside her until her death. She sensibly wished to marry him to a Demoiselle d’Aiglemont, worth twelve thousand francs a year, to whose hand the name of De Portenduère and the farm of the Bordières made it possible to aspire. This restricted but prudent scheme, which might restore the family to the second generation, was to be defeated by events. The D’Aiglemonts then became ruined, and one of their daughters, the eldest, Hélène, disappeared without the family giving any explanation of this mystery. The tedium of a life without freedom, outlet or action, with no other food than filial love, so wearied Savinien, that he burst his bonds, however gentle they might be, and swore never to live in a province, understanding, somewhat late, that his future was not limited to the Rue des Bourgeois. And so at twenty-one he had left his mother to make the acquaintance of his relations and try his luck in Paris. To a young man of twenty-one, free, unopposed, necessarily eager for pleasure and to whose name of De Portenduère and rich kindred all fashionable circles were open, the life of Nemours and the life of Paris were bound to form a fatal contrast. Certain that his mother was keeping the savings of twenty years hoarded in some hiding-place, Savinien soon spent the six thousand francs she had given him with which to see Paris. This sum did not defray the expenses of his first six months, and then he owed double that amount to his hotel, his tailor, his bootmaker, his livery-stable keeper, to a jeweler, and to all the tradesmen who contribute to the luxury of young men. He had hardly succeeded in becoming known, hardly learnt how to talk, to make calls, to wear his waistcoats and choose them, to order his clothes and to put on a tie, when he found himself at the head of thirty thousand francs’ worth of debt and knowing no better than to seek a delicate turn of expression in which to declare his love to the sister of the Marquis de Ronquerolles, Madame de Sérizy, a fashionable woman, but whose youth had bloomed under the Empire.
“How did you others extricate yourselves?” said Savinien one day, at the end of a breakfast, to a few dandies with whom he had formed a connection, as nowadays young men form connections whose affectations in everything aim at the same goal and who lay claim to an impossible equality.
“You were no richer than I, you go along without anxiety, you keep up your positions, and I, I already have debts!”
“We all began that way,” laughed Rastignac, Lucien de Rubempré, Maxime de Trailles, and Émile Blondet, the dandies of the day.
“If De Marsay happened to be rich at the outset of life, it was an accident!” said the host, a parvenu called Finot, who was trying to associate with these young men. “And had he not been himself,” he added, bowing to him, “his fortune might be the undoing of him.”
“You have hit upon the right expression,” said Maxime de Trailles.
“And the right idea too,” rejoined Rastignac.
“My dear fellow,” said De Marsay gravely, to Savinien, “debts are the silent partners of experience. A good University education with masters for accomplishments and for uninviting utilities, who teach you nothing, costs sixty thousand francs. If the world’s education costs double that, it teaches you life, business, politics, men, and sometimes, women.”
Blondet concluded this lesson with this translation of a verse from La Fontaine:
“The world sells dearly what one thinks it gives!”
Instead of pondering over the sense of what was told him by the most skilful pilots of the Parisian archipelago, Savinien merely took it as a joke.
“Take care, my dear fellow,” said De Marsay, “you have a good name, and if you do not get the good luck required by your name, you may end your days in the garb of a quarter-master in a cavalry regiment—
“Nobler heads have we seen fall!”
he added, spouting this verse by Corneille and taking Savinien’s arm—“Nearly six years ago,” he resumed, “a young Comte d’Esgrignon came amongst us, who did not live more than two years in the paradise of high life! Alas! he lived the life of a rocket He soared as high as to the Duchesse de Maufrigneuse, and he relapsed into his native town, where he atones for his trespasses between an old catarrhal father and a game of whist at two-penny points. Tell Madame de Sérizy your position quite simply, without shame; she would be very useful to you; whilst, if you play the charade of a first love with her, she will pose as a Raphael Madonna, play at forfeits and make you journey at great expense into the Land of Love.”
Savinien, still too young, and out of sheer gentlemanly honor, did not dare confess his financial position to Madame de Sérizy. Madame de Portenduère, just when her son did not know which way to turn, sent twenty thousand francs—all that she possessed—in consequence of a letter in which Savinien, initiated by his friends into the ballistics of the wiles directed by children against the paternal strong-box, spoke of bills to be paid and of the disgrace of allowing his signature to be protested. With this assistance he reached the end of the first year. The second year, still bound to the chariot wheels of Madame de Sérizy, who was seriously in love with him and who also improved him, he availed himself of the dangerous aid of usurers. A deputy among his friends, a friend of his cousin De Portenduère, Des Lupeaulx, directed him, one day of distress, to Gobseck, to Gigonnet and to Palma, who, rightly and duly informed of the value of his mother’s property, gave him delightfully easy discount. The usurer and the delusive help of renewals made his life happy for about eighteen months. Without daring to forsake Madame de Sérizy, the poor boy fell madly in love with the beautiful Comtesse de Kergarouët, prudish like all young women who are waiting for the death of an old husband, and who skilfully preserve their virtue for a second marriage. Incapable of understanding that a calculated virtue is unconquerable, Savinien continued paying his court to Émilie de Kergarouët with the full appearance of a rich man; he never missed a ball or a play at which she happened to be.
“My dear fellow, you have not got enough powder with which to blow up that rock,” said De Marsay to him one evening, laughing.
In vain this young king of Paris fashion, out of pity, tried to explain Émilie de Fontaine to this boy; it needed the dismal enlightenment of misery and the darkness of a prison to open Savinien’s eyes. A bill of exchange, rashly signed for a jeweler, in league with the usurers who did not want to have the odium of the arrest, caused Savinien de Portenduère, unknown to his friends, to be imprisoned at Sainte-Pélagie for the sum of one hundred and seventeen thousand francs. As soon as Rastignac, De Marsay and Lucien de Rubempre heard this news, all three came to see Savinien and finding him stripped of everything, each one offered him a bill for one thousand francs. The valet, bribed by two creditors, had told of the secret apartment where Savinien lodged, and everything had been seized, except the clothes and the little jewelry that he was wearing. The three young men, provided with an excellent dinner, and whilst drinking the sherry brought by De Marsay, enquired into Savinien’s situation, apparently in order to organize his future, but doubtless in order to try him.
“When one is called Savinien de Portenduère,” cried Rastignac, “when one has a future peer of France for a cousin, and the Admiral de Kergarouët for a great-uncle, if one commits the huge mistake of allowing one’s self to be put in Sainte-Pélagie, one must not stay there, my dear fellow!”
“Why did you tell me nothing of all this?” cried De Marsay, “you had my traveling carriage, ten thousand francs and letters for Germany at your disposal. We know Gobseck, Gigonnet and other crocodiles, we would have made them come to terms. And in the first place, who was the ass who led you to drink at this deadly source?” asked De Marsay.
“Des Lupeaulx.”
The three young men looked at each other, thus exchanging the same thought, a suspicion, but without uttering it.
“Explain your resources to me, show me your hand?” asked De Marsay.
When Savinien had described his mother and her bow-trimmed caps, her little house with its three windows facing the Rue des Bourgeois, with no other garden than a yard with a well and a shed for storing the wood; when he had counted up the value of this house, built of sandstone, rough-cast in reddish mortar, and had appreciated the Bordières farm, the three dandies looked at each other and feelingly quoted the saying of the abbé in the Marrons du Feu, by Alfred de Musset, whose Contes d’Espagne had just then appeared:
“Sad!”
“Your mother would pay on receipt of a cleverly written letter,” said Rastignac.
“Yes, and then—?” cried De Marsay.
“Had you only been put into a cab,” said Lucien, “the King’s government would have procured you a position in diplomacy; but Sainte-Pélagie is not the anteroom of an embassy.”
“You are not strong enough for Paris life,” said Rastignac.
“Let’s see!” rejoined De Marsay, measuring Savinien as a dealer rates a horse, “you have beautiful, well-formed blue eyes, you have a white, well-cut forehead, magnificent black hair, a small moustache which looks well against your pale cheeks, and a slender figure; you have a foot which indicates breeding, shoulders and chest that are not too much like a porter’s and are yet solid. You are what I call an elegant dark man. Your face is of the Louis XIII. style, with little color, and a nicely shaped nose; and you have besides, that which pleases women, a something indefinable that men themselves do not understand and which is in the appearance, the bearing, the sound of the voice, in the darting of the glance, in the gestures, a host of little things that women see and to which they attach a certain meaning which escapes us. You do not know yourself, my dear fellow. With a little steadiness, in six months you would bewitch an Englishwoman with a hundred thousand francs, especially by taking the title of Vicomte de Portenduère to which you have a right. My charming mother-in-law, Lady Dudley, who is without her match in impaling two hearts, will discover her for you in some one of the alluvial grounds of Great Britain. But you must be able and know how to carry over your debts for ninety days by some deft manoeuvre of financial policy. Why did you keep it from me? At Baden, the usurers would have respected you, and perhaps have served you; but, after having put you in prison they despise you. The usurer is like society, like the people, on his knees before a man who is strong enough to laugh at him, and pitiless toward the lambs. In the eyes of certain people, Sainte-Pélagie is a she-devil who madly scorches young men’s souls. Do you want my advice, my dear boy? I should say to you as to little D’Esgrignon: ‘Pay your debts with caution, keeping enough to live upon for three years, and marry in the provinces the first girl who may have thirty thousand francs income. In three years, you will have found some sensible heiress who wants to call herself Madame de Portenduère.’ This is wisdom. So let us drink. I propose this toast: ‘To the girl with cash!’”
The young men did not leave their ex-friend until the official hour for leave-taking, and on the doorstep they said to each other:
“He is not strong!” “He is very much downcast!” “Will he get over it?”
The next day, Savinien wrote his mother a general confession of twenty-two pages. After having wept for a whole day, Madame de Portenduère first wrote to her son, promising to get him out of prison: then to the Comtes de Portenduère and De Kergarouët.
The letters that the curé had just been reading and that the poor mother was holding in her hands, wet with tears, had arrived that same morning and had broken her heart.
TO MADAME DE PORTENDUÈRE.
“Paris, September, 1829.
“MADAME,
“You cannot doubt the interest the admiral and I take in your troubles. What you write to Monsieur de Kergarouët grieves me all the more as my house was your son’s; we were proud of him. If Savinien had had more confidence in the admiral we would have taken him with us, and he would already have been suitably placed; but he said nothing to us, the unhappy boy! The admiral could not pay a hundred thousand francs; he is in debt himself and has involved himself for me who knew nothing of his pecuniary position. He is all the more grieved in that Savinien has, for the moment, tied our hands by allowing himself to be arrested. If my handsome nephew had not had I cannot say how foolish a passion for me which stifled the voice of the kinship in the pride of the lover, we would have made him travel in Germany whilst his affairs were being settled here. Monsieur de Kergarouët would have been able to ask for a post in the naval offices for his grand-nephew; but an imprisonment for debt will doubtless paralyze the admiral’s applications. Pay Savinien’s debts, let him serve in the navy—he will make his way like a true Portenduère—he has their fire in his beautiful black eyes—and we will all help him.
“So do not despair, madame; you still have friends, amongst whom I wish to be included as one of the most sincere, and I send all wishes with the respects of
“Your very affectionate servant,
“ÉMILIE DE KERGAROUËT.”
TO MADAME DE PORTENDUERE.
“Portenduère, August, 1829.
“MY DEAR AUNT,
“I am as much vexed as distressed at Savinien’s escapades. Married, the father of two sons and a daughter, my fortune, already so slender relatively to my position and prospects, does not permit me to diminish it by a sum of one hundred thousand francs to pay the ransom of a Portenduère whom the moneylenders have seized. Sell your farm, pay his debts and come to Portenduère; you will there find the welcome we owe you, even were our hearts not wholly yours. You will live happily, and we will end by marrying Savinien, whom my wife thinks charming. This prank is nothing, do not be unhappy, it will never be known in our province, where we know several very rich girls who would be delighted to belong to us.
“My wife joins with me in telling you of the pleasure you would give us, and begs you will accept her wishes for the realization of this project and the assurance of our affectionate respects.
“LUC-SAVINIEN COMTE DE PORTENDUERE.”
“What letters for a Kergarouët!” cried the old Bretonne, wiping her eyes.
“The admiral does not know that his nephew is in prison,” finally said the Abbé Chaperon, “only the countess has read your letter, and she has answered it. But it is necessary to come to some decision,” he continued after a pause, “and this is what I have the honor of advising you to do. Do not sell your farm. The lease is up, and it has lasted now for twenty-four years; in a few months, you will be able to raise the rent to six thousand francs, and have a bonus equal to two years’ rent. Borrow from an honest man, and not from the men of the town who trade in mortgages. Your neighbor is a worthy man, a man of good society, who was in the fashionable world before the Revolution, and who from atheism has turned to Catholicism. Do not feel any reluctance in coming to see him this evening, he would be much affected by your step; forget for a moment that you are a Kergarouët.”
“Never!” said the aged mother in a harsh voice.
“Well then, be an amiable Kergarouët; come when he is alone, he will only lend at three and a half, perhaps at three per cent, and will do you service with delicacy, you will be pleased; he himself will go to deliver Savinien, for he would be obliged to sell some stock, and he will bring him back to you.”
“Are you then speaking of that little Minoret?”
“That little one is eighty-three years old,” replied the Abbé Chaperon, smiling. “My dear lady, have a little Christian charity, do not wound him, he may be useful to you in more ways than one.”
“And how?”
“But he has an angel beside him, the most heavenly young girl—”
“Yes, that little Ursule—Well, and then?”
The poor curé dared not continue upon hearing that “Well,—and then?” the dryness and asperity of which decided beforehand the proposition that he wished to make.
“I believe doctor Minoret to be extremely rich—”
“All the better for him.”
“You have very indirectly caused your son’s present misfortunes by not giving him any career, take care of the future!” said the curé severely. “Am I to announce your visit to your neighbor?”
“But why, knowing that I want him, should he not come here?”
“Ah! madame! by going to him, you will pay three per cent, and, if he comes to you, you will pay five,” said the curé, who hit upon this good reason in order to decide the old lady, “and, if you were forced to sell your farm through Dionis the notary, or through Massin the clerk, who would refuse you cash in the hope of profiting by your misfortune, you would lose half the value of the Bordières. I have not the least influence over the Dionis, the Massins, and the Levraults, rich men of the district who covet your farm and know that your son is in prison.”
“They know it! they know it!” she cried, raising her arms.—“Oh! my poor curé, you have let your coffee grow cold—Tiennette! Tiennette!”
Tiennette, an old Bretonne in a Breton jacket and cap, about sixty years old, entered briskly and took the curé’s coffee to heat it.
“Stay quiet, Monsieur le Recteur,” she said, seeing that the curé wanted to drink it, “I will put it into hot water, it will not get nasty.”
“Well,” resumed the curé with his insinuating voice, “I will go and warn Monsieur le Docteur of your visit, and you will come.”
The old mother only yielded after an hour’s discussion, in which the curé was obliged to repeat his arguments ten times over. And even then the haughty Kergarouët was only conquered by these parting words:
“Savinien would go!”
“Then it is better that I go,” she said.