The Human Comedy: Selected Stories

  “Is it a pity? I don’t think so,” the girl had replied. “Monsieur de Restaud is very talented, he is knowledgeable, and the minister he works for thinks highly of him. I have no doubt he will become a very notable person. ‘That lad’ will have all the fortune he likes, the day he has power.”

  “Yes, but suppose he were already rich now?”

  “If he were rich,” Camille said, flushing, “then every girl in the room would be competing for him.” She nodded toward the quadrille dancers.

  “And then,” said the attorney, “Mademoiselle de Grandlieu would no longer be the only one he’d look to. Is that why you’re coloring? You do rather like him, don’t you? Come, say it.”

  Camille rose abruptly.

  “She loves him,” Derville thought.

  From that day on, Camille had been especially attentive to the lawyer, now that she understood that he approved of her inclination for the young Ernest de Restaud. Till then, though she was quite aware of her family’s debt to Derville, she had displayed more respect than real friendship for him, more courtesy than warmth; her manner, and her tone of voice, had always kept him on notice of the social distance between them. Gratitude is a debt that the next generation is not always happy to count among the family obligations.

  “This situation,” Derville told Madame de Grandlieu after a moment, “calls to mind the only romantic story in my life. You’re already laughing,” he said, “at hearing a lawyer claim to have had a romance in his past. But like everyone else, I was once twenty-five, and by that age I had already seen some curious things. I must start by telling you about a person whom you could never have known: This man was a usurer . . .”

  * * *

  Can you possibly picture that pallid, wan face, one to which I wish the Academy would allow me to apply the term “lunar”—it was like a vermeil piece with the gilt worn off. His hair lay flat to his head, scrupulously combed down and ashen gray. His face was as impassive as Talleyrand’s, the features immobile as a bronze casting. His small eyes were as yellow as a ferret’s and almost lashless, and they seemed to cringe at the light, but the visor of an old cap shielded them from it. His pointed nose tapered to a narrow tip that made you think of a gimlet, and his lips were thin, like the lips of the alchemists and the wizened old men in paintings by Rembrandt or Metzu. The man spoke low, his tone was soft, and he never became agitated. His age was a question: It was impossible to say whether he was old before his time or had managed his youth so economically as to make it last forever.

  In his room, everything was clean and threadbare, from the green baize on his desk to the bedcover. It was like the chilly sanctum of those old maids who spend their days rubbing down their furniture. In winter he kept the embers in his hearth smoldering beneath layers of ash and never let them flame up. His every act, from the hour he woke to his evening fit of coughing, was regular as a pendulum. He was a kind of automaton, rewound each night by sleep. If you touch a woodlouse as it crosses a sheet of paper, it will stop short and play dead; in the same way, this man would stop speaking in mid-sentence while a carriage passed in the street, so as not to strain his voice. Like Fontenelle, he was sparing with his vital energies and concentrated all his human feeling on the self. Thus his life flowed as quietly as the sand in an hourglass. Occasionally his victims would raise a ruckus and carry on; then there would come a great silence, as in a kitchen when a duck has its throat slit. Toward evening this banknote man would turn into an ordinary human, and his metals metamorphosed into a human heart. If he was pleased with his day, he would rub his hands together and the crevassed folds of his face would let off a smoke of gaiety—there is no other way to describe the silent play of those muscles, an effect akin to Leatherstocking’s hollow laughter. In even his fiercest transports of pleasure, though, his conversation was still monosyllabic and his face remained empty of expression.

  This was the neighbor whom chance provided me in the house where I lodged on rue des Grès when I was still just an assistant clerk and finishing my third year at the law faculty. The house has no courtyard, and it is damp and gloomy. The building is divided into a series of cell-like rooms of equal size; their only light comes from the street-front windows, and their only exit is onto a single long corridor lit by dim transoms. The claustral arrangement indicates that the building was once part of a convent. In the melancholy air of the place, a well-born lad’s high spirits would die away before he even entered my neighbor’s door; the man’s house and the man resembled each other, you might say, like an oyster and its rock.

  I was the only person he had anything to do with, socially speaking; he would come to ask me for a light or to borrow a book or a newspaper, and on the occasional evening he would allow me into his cell where we would chat when he was in a good mood. These marks of trust were the fruit of four years of proximity and of my orderly way of life; through lack of money, my life was much like his own. Did he have relatives or friends? Was he rich or poor? No one could have answered such questions. I never saw money in his room. His funds must have been stored in the vaults of the Bank of France. He would collect on his bills himself, running about Paris on legs as bony as a stag’s. In fact he was a martyr to his own cautious ways: One day, he chanced to be carrying some money, and a gold double Napoleon coin somehow fell out of his pouch. A tenant climbing the stairs behind him picked it up and handed it to him. “That’s not mine!” he exclaimed, looking startled, as if to say, “Gold? mine? Would I be living like this if I were rich?”

  Mornings, he made his own coffee on a tin brazier that stood always in the dark corner of his grate. He had his dinner sent in from a cookshop. Our elderly porteress came upstairs daily to tidy the room.

  Well, by an odd chance, the sort of detail Sterne would call predestination, this man’s name was Gobseck. When in later days I handled his legal business, I learned that at the time we met he was about seventy-six years old. He was born in 1740, on the outskirts of Antwerp, of a Jewish mother and a Dutch father, and was named Jean-Esther van Gobseck. You remember back when all of Paris was obsessed with the murder of a woman called La Belle Hollandaise? When I happened to mention the crime to my neighbor, he told me, showing neither the slightest interest nor the least surprise, “That was my great-niece.” Those words were all that could be drawn from him on the death of his only near kin, his sister’s granddaughter. I learned from the court records that La Belle Hollandaise was indeed named Sara van Gobseck. When I asked him once by what curious circumstance his niece bore his own last name, he smiled and replied, “The women in our family have never married.” The odd fellow had never cared to see a single person of the four generations of women among his relatives. He wanted nothing to do with any heirs and could not conceive that his riches should ever belong to anyone but himself, even after his death.

  His mother had sent him off at the age of ten as a cabin boy to the Dutch East Indies, and he had knocked about there for twenty years. Thus the creases in his sallow brow harbored secrets of dreadful events, sudden terrors, unexpected turns, romantic escapades, sublime joys: hunger was borne, love trampled underfoot, a fortune threatened, lost, and regained; life a thousand times in peril, and saved perhaps by quick decisions whose urgency justified their ruthlessness.

  He had known Monsieur de Lally and Monsieur de Kergarouet, Monsieur d’Estaing, the bailiff Suffren, Monsieur de Portenduère, Lord Cornwallis, Lord Hastings, Tippu Sahib’s father, and Tippu Sahib himself. The Savoyard who served Mahadaji Sindhia, the King of Delhi, and did so much to establish the power of the Marathas—Gobseck had done business with him, as well as with Victor Hugues and a number of famous pirates, having spent a long time in St. Thomas. So determined was he to try every path to fortune that he had gone hunting for the treasure of that tribe of savages so famous around Buenos Aires. He was familiar with all the events of the American War of Independence. But when he spoke of the Indies or the Americas, which he never did with anyone else and rarely did with me, he seemed to
feel he’d committed an indiscretion and appeared to regret it. If humanity, if sociability were a religion, he could be considered an atheist. I had hoped to plumb his character, but I confess to my shame that it remained quite opaque to me. I sometimes even wondered which sex he belonged to; if all usurers are like him, I believe they are neuter in gender. Had he kept to his mother’s religion, and did he consider Christians his prey? Had he turned Catholic, Muslim, Brahmin, or Lutheran? I never learned a thing about his religious views. He seemed indifferent rather than a nonbeliever.

  One evening I entered the room of this man who had turned himself into gold, the man whom his victims—his clients, as he said—called “Papa” Gobseck, either as a euphemism or perhaps with sarcasm. I found him in his armchair, motionless as a statue, his eyes fixed on the mantelpiece as if he were reviewing his account statements there. A smoky lamp on a once-green base cast a glow that, far from throwing color on his face instead brought out its pallor. He looked at me in silence and pointed to my waiting chair. “What could this creature be thinking?” I said to myself. “Does he even know if a God exists, or an emotion, or women, or happiness?” I pitied him as I would a sick creature. But I understood, too, that in addition to his millions in the bank, he could also lay mental claim to the whole earth, which he had roamed, mined, weighed up, evaluated, and developed.

  “Hello, Papa Gobseck,” I said. He turned his head toward me, his thick black eyebrows pulled together slightly; that characteristic expression from him was the equivalent of the merriest smile from a southerner. “You’re looking as gloomy as the day you heard about the bankruptcy of that bookseller you admired for his cleverness, despite being a victim of it.”

  “I, a victim?” he said, surprised.

  “To get him to settle, didn’t you let him pay you in discounted notes, and then when he was back in business he redeemed them for full value rather than at the discount?”

  “He was sharp, yes,” Gobseck replied, “but I got even later.”

  “What is it then, some overdue bills to protest? Today is the thirtieth, I think.”

  It was the first time I had ever spoken to him of money. He looked up teasingly, and then, in his soft voice with tones like those produced by a flute student with a poor embouchure, he said, “I’m playing.”

  “So, you do sometimes play?”

  “Do you think the only poets in the world are the people who publish verses?” he asked, shrugging and throwing me a pitying look.

  “Poetry . . . in that head?” I said to myself, for at the time I knew nothing about his life.

  “What finer existence can there possibly be than mine?” he went on, and his eyes glowed. “You’re young, you think with your blood, you look at your glowing embers and see women’s faces, whereas I see only cinders in mine. You believe in everything; I believe in nothing. Hold on to your illusions, if you can. I’ll show you life as it is, minus the discount. Whether you travel the world or stay close to hearth and wife, there always comes a certain age when life is simply a habit carried out in some chosen setting. From then on happiness consists in applying our faculties to a given reality. Apart from these precepts, everything else is false. My own principles have always shifted to match those of the men I live among—I have had to adjust them according to latitude: what Europe admires, Asia punishes; what’s a vice in Paris is a requirement once you sail past the Azores. Nothing on this earth is absolute; everything is only convention that changes with the local climate. For anyone who’s had to leap into a multitude of social molds, convictions and moral rules become empty words. What stays in us is the one true feeling nature put there: the instinct for self-preservation. In your European societies, it’s called self-interest. If you’d lived as long as I have, you would know that there is only one material thing whose value is reliable enough to be worth caring about: That thing is GOLD. Gold represents every sort of human power. I have traveled, I have seen that everywhere there are plains or mountains—plains are tiresome and mountains are tiring, so place makes no difference. As to behaviors, man is everywhere the same: Everywhere the struggle between the poor and the rich is a given; everywhere it is inevitable, so much the better to be exploiter than exploited; everywhere you find sinewy men who labor and indolent men who torment themselves; pleasures are the same everywhere; everywhere the senses grow jaded and only one sentiment endures: vanity! Vanity is always about the self. Vanity is only satisfied with floods of gold. Our fantasies take time, or physical means, or care in order to be realized. Well, gold contains every potential and provides every reality. Only madmen and invalids are happy to shuffle cards every night to see if they’ll win a few sous in the end. Only fools will spend their time wondering about what goes on around them, whether Madame So-and-so slept alone or with a companion, whether she has more blood than lymph, more temperament than virtue. Only idiots believe they serve their fellow man by working out political principles to foretell events that will always be unpredictable. Only simpletons like to chatter about theater folk and quote their sayings; or like an animal in its cage, pace daily the same trail if a little broader; dressing for other people, eating for other people, boasting about a horse or a carriage that the next fellow cannot acquire for another three days. Isn’t that in a nutshell the life you Parisians lead? Let’s look at existence from a higher vantage point. Happiness lies either in strong emotions that wear out life or in routine activities that give existence the relentless rhythm of an English-style machine. At a higher level than such gratifications is the curiosity—considered noble—to plumb nature’s secrets or to achieve a kind of imitation of her effects. Is this not—in two words—art or science, passion or calm? Well, I tell you, every human passion, writ larger by the play of social interests, they all come and parade before me in my life of calm. Furthermore, that scientific curiosity of yours, a kind of struggle with man always getting the worst of it—I replace it with insight into the springs that set mankind moving. In a word, I possess the world with no effort at all, and the world has no grip on me.

  “Listen,” he went on, “an account of my morning’s adventures will give you an idea of my pleasures.”

  He rose, bolted the door, pulled shut an old tapestry curtain whose rings creaked along the rod, and returned to his seat.

  “This morning,” he said, “I had only two bills to collect, the others I had passed on to clients as loans yesterday evening. That already puts me ahead, because I always charge in advance for the cost of collection—forty sous to hire a good carriage, for instance. Wouldn’t it be a fine thing if a client had me running all over Paris for a six-franc fee, when I answer to no one, and when I pay only seven francs in taxes!

  “So then, the first bill, for a thousand francs, came to me from a handsome young dandy in a beaded waistcoat who wore a monocle, drove a tilbury carriage pulled by an English horse, and so on. It was endorsed by one of the finest women in Paris, the wife of a rich landowner, a count. Why had the countess underwritten a bill of exchange, which is worth nothing legally but worth a great deal in practice? These unfortunate women are terrified of the scandal a publicly protested bill could set off in their household and would give their very selves as payment rather than default. I wanted to find out the secret value of that bill of exchange: Was it stupidity, imprudence, love, or charity?

  “The second bill, for the same amount, was signed ‘Fanny Malvaut’—it had been given to me by a cloth merchant on the verge of collapse. No one who has any credit at the bank comes to my office, where the first step from the door to my desk declares a hopeless situation: an imminent bankruptcy and above all the refusal of credit by every banker in town. So all I ever see are stags at bay, hounded by packs of creditors.

  “The countess lived on rue du Helder and my Fanny on rue Montmartre. What a mass of conjectures I mulled as I left my house this morning! If these two women were not able to pay, they would receive me with greater respect than if I were their own father. How many contortions and wiles woul
d the countess muster for the sake of a thousand francs? She would take on an affectionate manner, use that cajoling tone peculiar to an endorser of notes, murmur endearments, plead, even beg. And I”—here the old man turned his pale gaze on me—“I am unshakable!” He continued, “I am the Avenger, I am the embodiment of Remorse!

  “Well, enough imaginings. I arrive at the house . . .”

  “Madame la comtesse is still asleep,” a chambermaid tells me.

  “When will she be available?”

  “At noon.”

  “Is madame unwell?”

  “No, monsieur, but she returned from a ball at three in the morning.”

  “My name is Gobseck. Tell her I called and that I shall return at twelve o’clock.”

  And I leave, marking my visit on the carpet lining the stone staircase. I like to soil the carpets of the rich, not out of spite but to make them feel the claw of necessity.

  On rue Montmartre, arriving at a shabby building, I push open a crooked carriage gate and enter one of those murky courtyards where the sun never shines. The porter’s lodge is dark, the windowpane looks like the edge of a worn old robe—grimy, brown, cracked.

  “Mademoiselle Fanny Malvaut?”

  “She’s gone out, but if you’ve come about a bill, the money is here for you.”

  “I’ll come back,” I said. Upon hearing that the porter had the money, I wanted to meet the young lady; I imagined she was pretty. I spent the morning looking through the prints on display along the boulevard; then as noon rang I crossed the parlor adjoining the countess’s room.