The Human Comedy: Selected Stories

  “Now that’s proper talk,” Papa Gobseck replied, offering his hand and shaking mine. “Never before in my business,” he continued, “has anyone laid out more clearly the purpose of his visit.”

  He looked me over from head to foot. “Any guarantees?” he asked. “None, I can see,” he concluded after a pause. “How old are you?”

  “Twenty-five, in ten days,” I replied. “Otherwise, I could not qualify to—”

  “Correct!”

  “So then—”

  “Possibly.”

  “Good Lord, I’ll have to move fast or other buyers will bid the price up!”

  “Bring me your birth certificate tomorrow morning, and we will discuss your plan. I’ll think it over.”

  The next morning at eight, I was at the old man’s door. He took the document in his hands, put on his spectacles, coughed, spat, wrapped himself in his black greatcoat, and read through the whole sheet from the local registry. Then he flipped it over, flipped it back again, looked up at me, coughed again, twisted about on his seat, and said, “We will try to arrange the matter.”

  I jumped.

  “I take fifty percent interest on my money,” he said, “sometimes one hundred, two hundred, five hundred percent.”

  I paled at his words.

  “But given our acquaintance, I will take twelve and a half per year . . .” He hesitated. “Well . . . for you I’ll settle for thirteen percent annually. Will that suit you?”

  “Yes,” I replied.

  “But if that’s too much,” he parried, “stand up for yourself, Grotius!” He often addressed me as the great Dutch jurist to tease. “When I ask thirteen percent, I am doing my job. It’s your job to decide whether you can pay it. I don’t like a man who agrees with everything. Is it too much?”

  “No,” I said, “I’ll just expect to work a little harder.”

  “Well, in any case,” he teased, with a sly sidelong glance, “your clients will pay for it.”

  “No, absolutely not!” I exclaimed. “I will be the one paying. I would rather cut off my hand than take advantage of my clients.”

  “Then good evening to you,” said Papa Gobseck.

  “But fees are set by the state,” I said.

  “Not for time spent on mediation, or clients coming to terms under your guidance, or negotiated agreements—for such things you can bill a thousand francs, even six thousand, depending on the amounts involved—and then for consultations, outside conferences, expenses, memoranda and drafts, professional terminology. You must learn to seek out these aspects of business. I will recommend you as a very learned and able attorney. I’ll send you so much work that your colleagues will die of jealousy. Werbrust, Palma, Gigonnet—my friends will all give you their expropriation cases, and Lord knows they have plenty of those! So you’ll have two practices: the one you’re buying and the one I’ll set up for you. You should almost pay me fifteen percent on my hundred and fifty thousand.”

  “All right, but no more,” I said with the firm tone of a man who means to grant nothing further. Papa Gobseck softened; he seemed pleased with me.

  “I will pay your employer myself, to establish a solid primary-debtor position on the purchase and the surety bond.”

  “Fine, whatever guarantees you like.”

  “And you’ll write me bills of exchange for the amount yourself: fifteen notes for ten thousand francs each, made out to an unnamed third party.”

  “Yes, with a note in writing that this is a duplicate copy, not a different purchase—”

  “Oh, no,” Gobseck broke in. “Why should I trust you more any than you trust me?”

  I kept silent.

  “And,” he continued in a comradely tone, “you’ll handle my business affairs without a fee for as long as I live, yes?”

  “All right, so long as there is no outlay on my part.”

  “Correct!” he said. “Now then,” continued the old man, whose face showed the strain of adopting that companionable manner, “you’ll allow me to come to your office?”

  “With pleasure.”

  “Yes, but mornings will be very difficult. You’ll have business to attend to and so will I.”

  “Then come in the evening.”

  “Ah, no,” he replied emphatically. “You must go out socially, to see your clients. And I have my friends to see, in my café.”

  “His friends!” I thought to myself. “Well, then—why not come at dinnertime?”

  “Fine,” said Gobseck, “at five, then, after the stock exchange closes. So, very good: You will see me Wednesdays and Saturdays. We’ll chat about business as a couple of friends. Ah . . . you know, I’m a jolly fellow at times. Just give me a partridge wing and a glass of champagne, and we’ll talk. I know a lot of things that can be revealed now, and that will teach you to know men—and especially women.”

  “Done, for a partridge and a glass of champagne.”

  “Do nothing foolish, or you’ll lose my trust. Don’t go in for some grand style at home: Hire yourself an elderly housemaid, just one. I will come around to see how you’re getting on. I have an investment riding on you, after all, heh heh heh . . . I must keep abreast of your activities. That’s all, then, come back this evening with your employer.”

  As we reached the door, I said to the old fellow, “Could you tell me, if it is not indiscreet to ask, what was the significance of my birth certificate in all of this?”

  Jean-Esther van Gobseck hunched his shoulders, smiled wickedly, and replied, “Young people are thick. Learn this, then, Monsieur Lawyer—something you ought to know, to keep from being taken in: Under the age of thirty, honesty and talent are still qualities solid enough to lay money on; past that age, a man is no longer a sure thing.” And he closed his door.

  * * *

  “Three months later I became an attorney, and soon after that, madame, I had the good fortune to see to the restitution of your properties. Winning those cases brought me some recognition. Despite the enormous interest I had to pay to Gobseck, in less than five years I was free of debt. I married Fanny Malvaut, whom I love deeply. Similarities in our two lives, in our work, and in our progress constantly strengthen our feelings for each other. An uncle of hers, a farmer who’d got rich, died and left her seventy thousand francs, which helped me to pay off the loan. From that day on, my life has been nothing but happiness and prosperity.

  “But that’s enough about me; nothing is so tedious as a happy man. To return to our characters: A year after I bought my practice, I was drawn, almost despite myself, into a gentlemen’s luncheon. The occasion was the paying off of a bet that a friend of mine had lost to a young man then much in vogue in fashionable social circles. Monsieur de Trailles, the flower of dandyism at that moment, enjoyed a tremendous reputation—”

  “But he still does,” the count broke in, interrupting the attorney. “There’s nobody who carries off an outfit with more dash or drives a tandem better than he. Maxime has the talent of gambling, eating, and drinking with more elegance than anyone in the world. He knows horses, hats, paintings. The women all go mad for him. He spends a good hundred thousand francs a year and yet no one can say if he has a single hectare of land or one investment to his name. The very model of a knight-errant of our salons, boudoirs, and boulevards, an amphibian breed as much woman as man, Comte Maxime de Trailles is a remarkable figure—good at everything and good for nothing, both feared and mocked, knowing everything and nothing, as likely to commit a good deed as an offense, one minute base and noble the next, more likely smeared with mud than stained with blood, quicker to apprehensions than remorse, more interested in good digestion than good thinking, feigning passion and feeling nothing. A brilliant link between the criminal and high society, Maxime de Trailles is a man of that eminently intelligent class that occasionally spins out a Mirabeau, a Pitt, a Richelieu, but more often gives us the Comtes de Horn, the Fouquier-Tinvilles, the Coignards.”

  “Well,” Derville said after listening to the old stat
esman, “I had heard a good deal about this person from poor old Goriot, a client of mine, and I had managed on several occasions to avoid the dangerous honor of his acquaintance when we crossed paths in society. However, my friend was so insistent that I should come to his luncheon that I couldn’t refuse without looking like a prude. Madame, you would be hard-pressed to imagine a gentlemen’s luncheon. It is a business of rare magnificence and affectation, the splurge of a miser driven by vanity to one great day of display . . .”

  * * *

  When you first arrive, you are astonished at the beauty and order laid out before you, a table dazzling with silver, crystal, damask linens. Life is in full flower there: The young men are graceful, smiling, their voices are low, they behave like new brides, everything around them fresh and virginal. Two hours later, you’d think it was a battlefield after the battle: broken glass everywhere, napkins rumpled and ripped; revolting dregs of half-eaten food; a head-shattering uproar, with smart toasts; an onslaught of salty epigrams and bad jokes; flushed faces and swollen eyes that can no longer express a thing; and blurted confidences that say everything. There’s an infernal racket, fellows smash bottles, roar out songs, someone shouts a challenge, someone else hangs tenderly on a neck or starts a fight, the room gives off a hideous stench of a hundred odors and a hubbub of a hundred voices; nobody knows any longer what he’s eating, or drinking, or saying; some are morose and others babble; this one is a monomaniac who keeps repeating the same word like a bell tolling, that one tries to get a hand on the tumult; the soberest fellow in the room proposes an orgy. If some levelheaded passerby should step into the room he’d think he had fallen into a bacchanal.

  In all this confusion, Monsieur de Trailles was busy wheedling his way into my good graces. I had more or less held on to my own sanity; I was on guard. For his part, though he pretended to be decently drunk, he was in full control and keeping a firm eye on business. In fact, I don’t know how this happened, but by the time we left the Grignon rooms at nine that night, he had me utterly bewitched, and I had promised to take him the next day to see our Papa Gobseck. What with his golden tongue, the words “honor,” “virtue,” “countess,” “honest woman,” “bad luck” were magically scattered through his talk. Waking up the next morning and trying to recall what I had done the night before, I had great difficulty collecting my thoughts. In the end, the story seemed to be that the daughter of one of my clients was in danger of losing her reputation, as well as the respect and love of her husband, unless she could get hold of fifty thousand francs in the course of the morning. Something about gambling debts, bills from the coach maker, money lost to something or other . . . My distinguished companion had assured me that the woman was rich and it would require only a few years of careful spending to repair the damage to her fortune. Only then did I start to see the reason for the fellow’s urgency. I confess, to my shame, that I never suspected that it was important for Papa Gobseck to make up with this dandy.

  As I was dressing, Monsieur de Trailles arrived. “Monsieur le comte,” I said formally, “I don’t see why you should need me to introduce you to Monsieur van Gobseck. He’s the most courteous, the mildest of any of the capitalists. He will give you money if he has it—that is, if you provide him adequate security.”

  “Monsieur,” he replied, “it would never enter my mind to force you to do me a service, even though you did promise.”

  “Sardanapalus!” I said to myself. “Am I going to let this fellow think I am not a man of my word?”

  He went on: “I had the honor of telling you yesterday that I had, most inconveniently, quarreled with Papa Gobseck. Now, because there is hardly another lender in Paris who could spit out a hundred thousand francs on a moment’s notice, especially on the first day of the month, I asked you to make my peace with him. But we’ll just leave it at that.” Monsieur de Trailles gazed at me in a politely insulting manner and prepared to leave my room.

  “Wait . . . I am ready to take you there,” I conceded.

  When we reached rue des Grès, the dandy looked up and down the street with an unease that surprised me. His face turned pale, then flushed a dark, sickly yellow; a few drops of sweat appeared on his brow as we neared Gobseck’s house. As we stepped down from his gig, a hired cab turned into rue des Grès. My hawkeyed companion made out a woman sitting deep inside the carriage. An expression of nearly savage joy livened his face; he called to a small boy walking by and gave him his horse to hold. We climbed the stairs to the old bill-discounter’s rooms.

  “Monsieur Gobseck,” I said, “I bring you one of my most intimate friends,” and murmured into his ear, “whom I trust like the devil.” I went on aloud: “I would be obliged if you would offer him your kind services (at your usual rates) to help him out of a difficulty (if it suits you).”

  Monsieur de Trailles bowed before the usurer, sat down, and prepared to listen, assuming a courtier’s posture of obsequious modesty that would have charmed you, but my Gobseck sat unmoved and impassive in his chair at the chimney corner. He looked like the statue of Voltaire we see at night beneath the peristyle of the Théâtre-Français; as if in greeting, he slightly lifted the worn cap covering his head, and the patch of yellow skull he disclosed completed the resemblance to a marble figure.

  “I only have money for my own clients,” he said.

  “So then, you’re irritated that I already looked elsewhere to ruin myself?” The count laughed.

  “Ruin yourself!” Gobseck retorted, with irony.

  “Are you going to say that it’s impossible to ruin a man who has nothing? But I defy you to find a better investment prospect than this in the whole of Paris,” exclaimed the stylish fellow, standing up and pivoting on his heels. That half-serious buffoonery left Gobseck utterly unaffected. “Am I not an intimate friend of the Ronquerolles, the Marsays, the Franceschinis, the two Vandenesses, the Ajuda-Pintos—that is, of all the most sought-after young men in Paris? I play cards with a prince and an ambassador, whom you know. I draw my income from London, Carlsbad, Baden-Baden, Bath. Surely that is the most brilliant industry of all?”

  “True.”

  “You make me into a sponge, for God’s sake, you encourage me to swell up and out into the world, and then at a crucial moment you squeeze me dry. But you are all sponges yourselves, and death will come and squeeze you too!”

  “Possibly.”

  “Without us spendthrifts, where would you be? We two are one, we’re body and soul together.”

  “Correct.”

  “Well then, how about a nice handclasp, my good Papa Gobseck, and a little magnanimity from you—if all I’ve said is true, correct, and possible?”

  “You come to me,” replied the usurer coldly, “because Girard, Palma, Werbrust, and Gigonnet are fed up with your bills of exchange, which they are offering everywhere at a fifty percent loss. Now, since they probably gave you only half the face value in the first place, the notes are not worth twenty-five percent. Your servant, sir! Can I,” Gobseck went on, “decently lend a single franc to a man who owes thirty thousand and hasn’t got a sou? You lost ten thousand francs the day before yesterday at Baron de Nucingen’s party.”

  “Monsieur,” replied the count with startling impudence, staring down the old man, “my affairs are no concern of yours. A man with a due date ahead is not a man in debt.”

  “True!”

  “My bills will be paid when they are due.”

  “Possibly!”

  “And right now, the question between us is simply whether I can present you with sufficient security for the sum I have come to borrow.”

  “Exactly.”

  The clatter of a cab filled the room as it stopped at the doorstep.

  “I will show you something that may satisfy you,” cried the young count, and he went out.

  “Oh, my boy!” exclaimed Gobseck, standing and opening his arms to me when the borrower had vanished. “If he has some worthwhile collateral, you’ve saved my life! This would have been
the death of me. Werbrust and Gigonnet thought they were putting one over on me. Thanks to you, I’ll have a good laugh tonight at their expense!”

  There was something frightening about the old man’s exhilaration. It was the only time I ever saw him expansive. His ecstasy lasted a brief moment, but in my memory it will live forever.

  “Please do me the favor of staying here a little,” he said. “I’m armed, and I’m a sure shot, as a man must be who has hunted tigers and held his own on deck when it was conquer or die, but I don’t trust that elegant rascal.” He returned to the chair at his desk. His face was again colorless and calm.

  “Ah!” he said, turning to me. “I believe you are about to see the beautiful creature I once told you about; I hear an aristocrat’s step in the hallway.”

  And indeed, the young man returned escorting a woman I recognized as the countess whose noontime rising Gobseck had described to me, one of old Goriot’s daughters. The countess didn’t see me right away; I was standing in the window recess, my face to the glass. Stepping into the moneylender’s damp, dim room, she cast a mistrustful glance at Maxime. She was so lovely that, despite her faults, I felt pity for her. An awful anguish was riling her heart; her noble, proud features were contorted in an expression of pain that was barely disguised. The young man had become an evil genie in her eyes. I admired Gobseck for foreseeing the future of these two beings from that one bill four years earlier. I thought, “This angel-faced monster probably rules over her with every possible mechanism: vanity, jealousy, erotic pleasure, the ways of her world.”

  * * *

  “But,” here the Vicomtesse de Grandlieu broke in on Derville, “the woman’s very virtues were weapons in his hands—he brought her to tears of devotion, he roused the generosity that comes so naturally to our sex, and then he took advantage of her feelings to charge her a very high price for sinful pleasures!”

  “I must admit,” said Derville, oblivious to the signals of the viscountess, “I hardly mourn the fate of that unlucky woman, so splendid to the world’s eyes and so repugnant to anyone who could read her heart. I did shudder, though, at the sight of her assassin, this young fellow with his brow so untroubled, his mouth so fresh, his smile so winning, his teeth so white—the look of an angel. At that moment the two of them stood before their judge, who was scrutinizing them the way an old sixteenth-century Dominican monk must have watched a couple of Moors being tortured, down in the dungeons of the Inquisition.”