The Human Comedy: Selected Stories

  The tale at an end, all the women rose from the table, and with this the spell Bianchon had cast on them was broken. Nevertheless, some had felt almost cold on hearing those final words.

  Translated by Jordan Stump

  THE RED INN

  To M. Le Marquis de Custine

  SOME TIME ago, a Paris banker with extensive commercial relations in Germany was giving a dinner party for a man who till then was unknown to him, an acquaintance of the sort that businessmen acquire here and there through their correspondence. This friend, the head of a rather large firm in Nuremberg, was a good hefty German, a man of taste and erudition, above all a connoisseur of pipes, with a broad handsome Nuremberger face, the wide smooth brow crossed with a few sparse strands of blond hair. He looked the very model of the sons of that pure noble Germania, so fertile in honorable characters, and whose peaceable ways have never failed even after seven invasions. The foreigner laughed readily, listened attentively, and drank remarkably well; to all appearances he enjoyed our champagne wines perhaps as much as he would his own straw-toned Johannisbergers. His name was Hermann, like most Germans whom authors write about. As a man who can do nothing lightly, he sat solid at the banker’s table, eating with that Teutonic appetite famous throughout Europe and bidding a conscientious farewell to the cuisine of our great Carême. To do his guest honor, the master of the house had gathered a few good friends, capitalists and merchants, and a number of pretty and pleasant ladies whose agreeable banter and open manner harmonized with the cordial German spirit. Truly, if you could have experienced, as I had the good fortune to do, this merry gathering of people who had retracted their commercial claws to speculate instead on life’s pleasures, you would have found it difficult to detest usurious loans or deplore bankruptcies. Man cannot spend all his time doing evil, and even in the company of pirates there must be some sweet moments on their sinister ship when you feel as if you were aboard a pleasure yacht.