Lost Illusions

  Then the poor man realized the horrors of prison and was revolted at the brutality of its routine. But, thanks to a reaction common enough among thinking men, he cut himself off from this solitude, escaping into one of those dreams in which poetic minds have the power to indulge during their waking hours. In the end the unhappy man came round to reflecting about his affairs. Prison gives a tremendous impetus to examination of conscience. David asked himself if he had fulfilled his duties as head of a family, wondered what state of desolation his wife must be in and why, as Marion had suggested, he might not earn enough money to be able to carry out his researches at leisure.

  ‘How,’ he asked himself, ‘can I stay in Angoulême after such a disgrace? If I get out of prison, what will become of us? Where shall we go?’ He felt misgivings about his paper-making process, the sort of poignant misgivings which only other inventors would have been able to understand. From one doubt to another David came to a clear view of his predicament, and he told himself what the Cointets had told Papa Séchard, what Petit-Claud had just told Eve: ‘Supposing all goes well, what will happen when the invention is tried out? I need a patent, and that means money! I need a factory for experiments on a large scale, and that means divulging my secret! Oh! How right Petit-Claud was!’

  From the darkest prisons such shafts of light proceed.

  ‘Anyway,’ said David as he fell asleep on the wretched camp-bed with its horrible mattress of extremely coarse brown cloth, ‘no doubt I shall see Petit-Claud in the morning.’

  Thus David had worked himself into the mood for listening to the proposals of his enemies by the time his wife came to report them to him. After embracing her husband and sitting down at the foot of the bed, for there was only one chair of the most squalid sort, her regard fell on the hideous bucket standing in a corner and on the walls bespattered with the names and apophthegms which David’s predecessors had scrawled on them. Then, at the sight of her husband sharing the plight of criminals, the tears began to flow from her reddened eyes – she still had some tears left in spite of all those she had shed.

  ‘It’s to this then that a desire for glory can bring one!’ she cried. ‘Oh my angel, give up this career… Let’s follow the beaten track without trying to get rich quick… It needs so little to make me happy after so many sufferings!… And if you knew everything!… The disgrace of this arrest is not our worst misfortune!… Read this.’

  She handed over Lucien’s letter which David ran through quickly. In order to quiet his fears, she quoted the scathing remark Petit-Claud had made about Lucien.

  ‘If Lucien has committed suicide, all is over by now,’ said David. ‘And if all is not over, he won’t kill himself. As he says himself, his courage wouldn’t last longer than a single morning.’

  ‘But how can we stand this anxiety?’ Lucien’s sister cried, ready to forgive almost everything at the thought of her brother’s death.

  Then she repeated to her husband the proposals Petit-Claud had made a pretence of obtaining from the Cointets. David accepted them immediately with obvious pleasure.

  ‘We shall have enough to live on in a village close to L’Houmeau, and all I ask for is a peaceful life,’ the inventor exclaimed. ‘If Lucien has chosen to punish himself by dying, we shall have enough money to live on until my father dies. If Lucien is still alive, the poor boy will manage to conform to our modest circumstances… The Cointets will certainly reap the profit from my discovery; but after all what do I matter in comparison with my country?… I’m only one man. If everybody benefits from my invention, well, I am content. Look, my dear Eve, we’re neither of us cut out for business. We have neither the greed for gain nor the reluctance to let any money slip through our fingers, even when we have every right to it. These two kinds of avarice may be virtues in a tradesman: they are called prudence and business acumen!’

  Delighted at this unanimity, one of the most fragrant flowers which bloom from mutual love – for it is impossible that two beings who love each other should not see eye to eye in their interests and points of view – Eve asked the gaoler to send a note to Petit-Claud telling him to set David free and informing him of their mutual consent to the basic points of the projected arrangement. Ten minutes later Petit-Claud came to David’s horrible cell and told Eve: ‘Go home, Madame, we will follow you.’

  ‘So then, my dear friend,’ said Petit-Claud, ‘you let them catch you! How did it come about that you were so foolish as to leave your sanctuary?’

  ‘How could I not leave it? This is what Lucien wrote to me.’

  He handed Cérizet’s forgery to Petit-Claud, who took it, read it, gazed at it, felt the paper and went on talking business while he folded the letter and slipped it into his pocket as if through absent-mindedness. Then the solicitor took David by the arm and left the prison with him, the bailiff’s warrant for release having been brought to the gaoler during the conversation. When he was back home David felt as if he were in Heaven: he wept like a child as he hugged his little Lucien and found himself back in his own bedroom after three weeks of duress, the last hours of which, according to provincial standards, had brought disgrace upon him. Kolb and Marion had returned. Marion had learnt in L’Houmeau that Lucien had been seen walking along the road to Paris beyond Marsac. His dandyish clothes had been noticed by country people who were bringing produce to market. Kolb had ridden on horseback along the high-road and in the end had learned that Lucien, whom the Abbé Marron had recognized, was travelling post in a barouche.

  ‘What did I say?’ exclaimed Petit-Claud. ‘He’s not a poet, that young man: he’s a serial novel!’

  ‘Travelling post,’ Eve was saying. ‘But where’s he going to this time?’

  ‘Now,’ said Petit-Claud to David, ‘come to the Cointets. They’re waiting for you.’ ‘Oh, Monsieur!’ cried the beautiful Madame Séchard. ‘I implore you to defend our interests as best you can. Our whole future is in your hands.’

  ‘Madame,’ said Petit-Claud, ‘would you like the discussion to take place here? I’ll leave David with you. The Cointet brothers will come here this evening, and you’ll see if I know how to defend your interests.’

  ‘Oh, Monsieur!’ said Eve. ‘You would be doing me a real service.’

  ‘Very good. Then we’ll be here this evening about seven.’

  ‘I am very grateful,’ Eve replied with a look and tone of voice which showed Petit-Claud how far he had gone in gaining his client’s confidence. ‘Have no fear,’ he added. ‘You can see I was right. Your brother is a long way from suicide. Well now, perhaps by this evening you’ll have a small fortune. A serious purchaser has come forward for your printing works.’

  ‘In that case,’ said Eve, ‘why not wait before binding ourselves to the Cointets?’

  ‘You’re forgetting, Madame,’ Petit-Claud replied, seeing that he had made a dangerous avowal, ‘that you won’t be free to sell your printing-works before paying Monsieur Métivier, for all your plant is still under distraint.’

  Petit-Claud went home and sent for Cérizet. Once the compositor was in his office, he took him aside into a window-recess.

  ‘Tomorrow,’ he whispered to him, ‘you’ll be owner of the Séchard press, with enough influence behind you to obtain the transfer of the licence… But you don’t want to finish up in a convict-prison, do you?’

  ‘Here! What do you mean? convict-prison?’ Cérizet stammered.

  ‘Your letter to David was a forgery, and I hold it… If Henriette were questioned, what would she say?… But I don’t want to bring you to ruin,’ Petit-Claud quickly added on seeing Cérizet turn pale.

  ‘There’s still something you want me to do?’ the Parisian exclaimed.

  ‘Yes indeed. This is what I expect of you. Listen carefully. In two months you’ll be a master-printer in Angoulême… but you’ll owe the money for your press, and it will take you more than ten years to pay it back!… You’ll be working a long time for those who found you the capital! And what’s more you’ll hav
e to act as figure-head for the Liberal party… I myself will draw up your deed of partnership with Gannerac, and I’ll do it in such a way that one day you’ll have the printing-works to yourself… But if they found a newspaper, if you become managing-editor, if I become deputy Public Attorney here, you’ll arrange with tall Cointet to insert in your newspaper some articles of such a nature as to get it confiscated and suppressed. The Cointets will pay you generously to do them that service. It’s true you’ll be sentenced and get a taste of prison, but you’ll pass for an important and persecuted man. You’ll become a somebody in the Liberal party, a Sergeant Mercier, a Paul-Louis Courier, a small-scale Manuel. I won’t ever let your licence be cancelled. Finally, the day when the journal is suppressed, I’ll burn this letter in front of you… It won’t have cost you a lot to make your fortune…’

  The popular classes have very erroneous ideas about the legal ins and outs of forgery, and Cérizet, who had imagined himself already in the dock, breathed again.

  ‘In three years from now I shall be Public Attorney in Angoulême,’ Petit-Claud continued. ‘You might well have need of me. Think it over.’

  ‘It’s agreed,’ said Cérizet. ‘But how little you know me! Burn this letter in front of me, and trust to my gratitude.’

  Petit-Claud scrutinized Cérizet. There ensued one of those eye-to-eye duels in which the regard of the scrutinizer is like a lancet probing deep into the soul and in which the eyes of the man trying to show how trustworthy he is provide an interesting spectacle.

  Petit-Claud made no reply. He lit a candle and burnt the letter, saying to himself: ‘He has his fortune to make!’

  ‘I’ll serve you hand and foot,’ said the compositor.

  38. A day too late

  DAVID waited in a state of vague disquietude for the conference with the Cointets. What was worrying him was neither the discussion of his interests nor the debate about the deed to be drawn up, but the opinion the paper-manufacturers were likely to form about the work he had done. He found himself in the situation of a dramatic author in front of his critics. His pride as an inventor and his anxieties at the moment when he was approaching his goal threw all other feelings into the shade. At last, about seven in the evening – just when Madame la Comtesse Châtelet was taking to her bed on the pretext of a migraine and leaving her husband to do the honours of the dinner, so afflicted she was by the contradictory news circulating about Lucien – Cointet the Stout and Cointet the Tall came with Petit-Claud to the house of the rival who was delivering himself over to them bound hand and foot. First of all a preliminary dilemma had to be faced: how could a deed of association be drawn up without David’s process being revealed? And once David’s process was divulged he would be at the Cointets’ mercy. Petit-Claud stipulated that the deed should first be drawn up. Then tall Cointet asked David to show samples of his products, and the inventor offered them the latest sheets he had made, guaranteeing that the cost price would be low.

  ‘Very well, there we are!’ said Petit-Claud, now that the groundwork for the deed was complete. ‘You can form your company on these data, inserting a dissolution clause in case the terms of the patent are not fulfilled when the process is put into fabrication.’

  ‘It’s one thing, Monsieur,’ tall Cointet said to David, ‘it’s one thing to make samples of paper on a small scale in a private workshop with a small mould, another thing to carry out manufacture on a large scale. Judge of this by one simple fact. We manufacture coloured papers and, for the dyeing process, we buy parcels of identical colour. For example, the indigo we use to blue our post-demy is delivered to us in boxes in which every cake of dye comes from the same lot. And yet we have never been able to produce two vatfuls of exactly the same shade. Phenomena which we can’t account for occur in the preparation of our material. Any change in the quantity and quality of pulp used immediately complicates the problem. When you had your ingredients (I’m not asking you what they are) measured into your pan, they were under your control. You could work evenly on every portion of them, bind them, macerate them, knead them at will and make a smooth mixture of them. But who can guarantee that in a vatful of five hundred reams the same thing will happen and that your process will be successful?’

  The glances which David, Eve and Petit-Claud exchanged were eloquent with unspoken thoughts.

  ‘Take an example which offers some sort of analogy,’ said tall Cointet after a pause. ‘You cut two bundles of hay from your meadow, and you put them close packed in your room without letting the grass throw off its heat, as the peasants say: fermentation takes place butcauses no accident. Would you rely on this experiment and stack two thousand bundles in a wooden barn?… You know very well that the hay would catch fire and that your barn would burn like matchwood.

  ‘– You’re an educated man,’ Cointet continued. ‘What’s your conclusion? So far you have cut two bundles of hay, but we should be afraid of setting our mill on fire if we packed two thousand into it. In other words we might waste many a vatful, incur losses and find ourselves with nothing in our hands after spending a lot of money.’

  David was flattened. It was a case of Practice talking in positive terms to Theory, which only uses the future tense.

  ‘Devil take me if I sign such a deed,’ stout Cointet cried out in brutal tones. ‘Boniface, you may waste your money if you like: I’m keeping mine… I’ll pay Monsieur Séchard’s debts and offer him six thousand francs into the bargain… Or rather,’ he said, taking himself up, ‘three thousand francs in bills of exchange payable in twelve or fifteen months… That’s quite enough money to risk… We have twelve thousand francs to take over on our account with Métivier. That will come to fifteen thousand francs!… Why, that’s all I would pay for the discovery in order to exploit it all by myself. – So that’s the windfall you were telling me about, Boniface… Well, no thank you. I thought you had more sense. No indeed, that’s not what I call business.’

  ‘For you,’ said Petit-Claud, without being alarmed by this outburst, ‘the question comes down to this: are you willing to risk twenty thousand francs to buy a process which might make you rich? Why, gentlemen, risks are always proportionate to profits. It’s staking twenty thousand francs against a fortune. A gambler puts down a louis at roulette in order to get back thirty-six, but he knows his louis is gone. Do likewise.’

  ‘I must have time to reflect,’ said stout Cointet. ‘I’m not so clever as my brother. I’m a plain, simple fellow who knows only one thing: how to produce a prayer-book for one franc and sell it for two. I can see ruination coming from an invention which is only at the experimental stage. The first vatful will be a success, the second a failure; you’ll go on with it, you’ll let yourself be dragged along, and when you’ve got one arm caught in that sort of machinery your whole body will follow.’ He told the story of a Bordeaux merchant who was ruined because he tried to cultivate a tract of the Landes on the word of a scientist. He thought of half a dozen similar examples, both industrial and agricultural, in the districts of the Charente and Dordogne. He flew into a rage, refused to listen any more, and Petit-Claud’s objections increased instead of calming his irritation. ‘I prefer to pay more for something more certain than this invention and make only a small profit,’ he said with a glance at his brother. And he ended up by saying: ‘In my opinion, none of this work has gone far enough for a deal to be based on it.’

  ‘But after all,’ said Petit-Claud, ‘you didn’t come here for nothing. What do you offer?’

  ‘To free Monsieur Séchard of debt and, in case of success, pay him thirty per cent of the profits,’ was stout Cointet’s sharp reply.

  ‘Come now, Monsieur,’ said Eve, ‘What are we to live on all the time the experiments are being made? My husband has been put to the shame of arrest. He can go back to prison. There’s nothing more to be said. We will pay our debts.’

  Petit-Claud laid a finger on his mouth as he looked at Eve.

  ‘You’re being unreasonable,’ he said
to the two brothers. ‘You’ve seen the paper, Séchard senior told you that his son, shut in by himself, had made some excellent paper in a single night, with ingredients which must have cost very little… You came here with a view to buying. Will you buy or not?’

  ‘Look now,’ said tall Cointet, ‘whether my brother is willing or not, I myself will take the risk of paying Monsieur Séchard’s debts. I will give six thousand francs, cash down, and Monsieur Séchard will have thirty per cent share in the profits. And if within the space of one year he has not fulfilled the conditions which he himself will set down in the deed, he will return the six thousand francs, we shall retain the patent, and we’ll recoup ourselves as best we may.’

  ‘Are you sure of yourself?’ asked Petit-Claud, drawing David aside.

  ‘Yes,’ said David, caught in the toils and trembling lest stout Cointet should put an end to the parley on which his future depended.

  ‘Very well, I’ll draw up the deed,’ said Petit-Claud to Eve and the Cointets. ‘Each of you will have a duplicate for this evening and you can ponder over it the whole of tomorrow morning. Then tomorrow evening, at four, when I’ve finished at court, you will sign it. You gentlemen will please call in the Métivier documents. I shall write and halt the suit in the Court of Appeal, and we will give notification of our reciprocal withdrawals.’