“He got up, pushed the bolt of the door, drew a tapestry curtain across it with a sharp grating sound of the rings on the rod, then he sat down again.
“‘This morning,’ he said, ‘I had only two amounts to collect; the rest of the bills that were due I gave away instead of cash to my customers yesterday. So much saved, you see, for when I discount a bill I always deduct two francs for a hired brougham – expenses of collection. A pretty thing it would be, would it not, if my clients were to set me trudging all over Paris for half-a-dozen francs of discount, when no man is my master, and I only pay seven francs in the shape of taxes?
“‘The first bill for a thousand francs was presented by a young fellow, a smart buck with a spangled waistcoat, and an eyeglass, and a tilbury and an English horse, and all the rest of it. The bill bore the signature of one of the prettiest women in Paris, married to a Count, a great landowner. Now, how came that Countess to put her name to a bill of exchange, legally not worth the paper it was written upon, but practically very good business; for these women, poor things, are afraid of the scandal that a protested bill makes in a family, and would give themselves away in payment sooner than fail? I wanted to find out what that bill of exchange really represented. Was it stupidity, imprudence, love or charity?
“‘The second bill, bearing the signature “Fanny Malvaut,” came to me from a linen-draper on the highway to bankruptcy. Now, no creature who has any credit with a bank comes to me. The first step to my door means that a man is desperately hard up; that the news of his failure will soon come out: and, most of all, it means that he has been everywhere else first. The stag is always at bay when I see him, and a pack of creditors are hard upon his track. The Countess lived in the Rue du Helder, and my Fanny in the Rue Montmartre. How many conjectures I made as I set out this morning! If these two women were not able to pay, they would show me more respect than they would show their own fathers. What tricks and grimaces would not the Countess try for a thousand francs! She would be so nice to me, she would talk to me in that ingratiating tone peculiar to endorsers of bills, she would pour out a torrent of coaxing words, perhaps she would beg and pray, and I…’ (here the old man turned his pale eyes upon me) – ‘and I not to be moved, inexorable!’ he continued. ‘I am there as the avenger, the apparition of Remorse. So much for hypotheses. I reached the house.
“‘"Madame la Comtesse is asleep,” says the maid.
“‘"When can I see her?”
“‘"At twelve o’clock.”
“‘"Is Madame la Comtesse ill?”
“‘"No, sir, but she only came home at three o’clock this morning from a ball.”
“‘"My name is Gobseck, tell her that I shall call again at twelve o’clock,” and I went out, leaving traces of my muddy boots on the carpet which covered the paved staircase. I like to leave mud on a rich man’s carpet; it is not petty spite; I like to make them feel a touch of the claws of Necessity. In the Rue Montmartre I thrust open the old gateway of a poor-looking house, and looked into a dark courtyard where the sunlight never shines. The porter’s lodge was grimy, the window looked like the sleeve of some shabby wadded gown – greasy, dirty, and full of holes.
“‘"Mlle. Fanny Malvaut?”
“‘"She has gone out; but if you have come about a bill, the money is waiting for you.”
“‘"I will look in again,” said I.
“‘As soon as I knew that the porter had the money for me, I wanted to know what the girl was like; I pictured her as pretty. The rest of the morning I spent in looking at the prints in the shop windows along the boulevard; then, just as it struck twelve, I went through the Countess’ ante-chamber.
“‘"Madame has just this minute rung for me,” said the maid; “I don’t think she can see you yet.”
“‘"I will wait,” said I, and sat down in an easy-chair.
“‘Venetian shutters were opened, and presently the maid came hurrying back.
“‘"Come in, sir.”
“‘From the sweet tone of the girl’s voice, I knew that the mistress could not be ready to pay. What a handsome woman it was that I saw in another moment! She had flung an Indian shawl hastily over her bare shoulders, covering herself with it completely, while it revealed the bare outlines of the form beneath. She wore a loose gown trimmed with snowy ruffles, which told plainly that her laundress’ bills amounted to something like two thousand francs in the course of a year. Her dark curls escaped from beneath a bright Indian handkerchief, knotted carelessly about her head after the fashion of Creole women. The bed lay in disorder that told of broken slumber. A painter would have paid money to stay a while to see the scene that I saw. Under the luxurious hanging draperies, the pillow, crushed into the depths of an eider-down quilt, its lace border standing out in contrast against the background of blue silk, bore a vague impress that kindled the imagination. A pair of satin slippers gleamed from the great bear-skin rug spread by the carved mahogany lions at the bed-foot, where she had flung them off in her weariness after the ball. A crumpled gown hung over a chair, the sleeves touching the floor; stockings which a breath would have blown away were twisted about the leg of an easy-chair; while ribbon garters straggled over a settee. A fan of price, half unfolded, glittered on the chimney-piece. Drawers stood open; flowers, diamonds, gloves, a bouquet, a girdle, were littered about. The room was full of vague sweet perfume. And – beneath all the luxury and disorder, beauty and incongruity, I saw Misery crouching in wait for her or for her adorer, Misery rearing its head, for the Countess had begun to feel the edge of those fangs. Her tired face was an epitome of the room strewn with relics of past festival. The scattered gewgaws, pitiable this morning, when gathered together and coherent, had turned heads the night before.
“‘What efforts to drink of the Tantalus cup of bliss I could read in these traces of love stricken by the thunderbolt remorse – in this visible presentment of a life of luxury, extravagance, and riot. There were faint red marks on her young face, signs of the fineness of the skin; but her features were coarsened, as it were, and the circles about her eyes were unwontedly dark. Nature nevertheless was so vigorous in her, that these traces of past folly did not spoil her beauty. Her eyes glittered. She looked like some Herodias of da Vinci’s (I have dealt in pictures), so magnificently full of life and energy was she; there was nothing starved nor stinted in feature or outline; she awakened desire; it seemed to me that there was some passion in her yet stronger than love. I was taken with her. It was a long while since my heart had throbbed; so I was paid then and there – for I would give a thousand francs for a sensation that should bring me back memories of youth.
“‘"Monsieur,” she said, finding a chair for me, “will you be so good as to wait?”
“‘"Until this time to-morrow, madame,” I said, folding up the bill again. “I cannot legally protest this bill any sooner.” And within myself I said – “Pay the price of your luxury, pay for your name, pay for your ease, pay for the monopoly which you enjoy! The rich have invented judges and courts of law to secure their goods, and the guillotine – that candle in which so many lie in silk, under silken coverlets, there is remorse, and grinding of teeth beneath a smile, and those fantastical lions’ jaws are gaping to set their fangs in your heart.”
“‘"Protest the bill! Can you mean it?” she cried, with her eyes upon me; “could you have so little consideration for me?”
“‘"If the King himself owed money to me, madame, and did not pay it, I should summons him even sooner than any other debtor.”
“‘While we were speaking, somebody tapped gently at the door.
“‘"I cannot see any one,” she cried imperiously.
“‘"But, Anastasie, I particularly wish to speak to you.”
“‘"Not just now, dear,” she answered in a milder tone, but with no sign of relenting.
“‘"What nonsense! You are talking to some one,” said the voice, and in came a man who could only be the Count.
“‘The Countess gave me a glance. I saw how it was. She was thoroughly in my power. There was a time, when I was young, and might perhaps have been stupid enough not to protest the bill. At Pondicherry, in 1763, I let a woman off, and nicely she paid me out afterwards. I deserved it; what call was there for me to trust her?
“‘"What does this gentleman want?” asked the Count.
“‘I could see that the Countess was trembling from head to foot; the white satin skin of her throat was rough, “turned to goose flesh,” to use the familiar expression. As for me, I laughed in myself without moving a muscle.
“‘"This gentleman is one of my tradesmen,” she said.
“‘The Count turned his back on me; I drew the bill half out of my pocket. After that inexorable movement, she came over to me and put a diamond into my hands. “Take it,” she said, “and be gone.”
“‘We exchanged values, and I made my bow and went. The diamond was quite worth twelve hundred francs to me. Out in the courtyard I saw a swarm of flunkeys, brushing out their liveries, waxing their boots, and cleaning sumptuous equipages.
“‘"This is what brings these people to me!” said I to myself. “It is to keep up this kind of thing that they steal millions with all due formalities, and betray their country. The great lord, and the little man who apes the great lord, bathes in mud once for all to save himself a splash or two when he goes afoot through the streets.”
“‘Just then the great gates were opened to admit a cabriolet. It was the same young fellow who had brought the bill to me.
“‘"Sir,” I said, as he alighted, “here are two hundred francs, which I beg you to return to Mme. la Comtesse, and have the goodness to tell her that I hold the pledge which she deposited with me this morning at her disposition for a week.”
“‘He took the two hundred francs, and an ironical smile stole over his face; it was as if he had said, “Aha! so she has paid it, has she? … Faith, so much the better!” I read the Countess’ future in his face. That good-looking, fair-haired young gentleman is a heartless gambler; he will ruin himself, ruin her, ruin her husband, ruin the children, eat up their portions, and work more havoc in Parisian salons than a whole battery of howitzers in a regiment.
“‘I went back to see Mlle. Fanny in the Rue Montmartre, climbed a very steep, narrow staircase, and reached a two-roomed dwelling on the fifth floor. Everything was as neat as a new ducat. I did not see a speck of dust on the furniture in the first room, where Mlle. Fanny was sitting. Mlle. Fanny herself was a young Parisian girl, quietly dressed, with a delicate fresh face, and a winning look. The arrangement of her neatly brushed chestnut hair in a double curve on her forehead lent a refined expression to blue eyes, clear as crystal. The broad daylight streaming in through the short curtains against the window pane fell with softened light on her girlish face. A pile of shaped pieces of linen told me that she was a sempstress. She looked like a spirit of solitude. When I held out the bill, I remarked that she had not been at home when I called in the morning.
“‘"But the money was left with the porter’s wife,” said she.
“‘I pretended not to understand.
“‘"You go out early, mademoiselle, it seems.”
“‘"I very seldom leave my room; but when you work all night, you are obliged to take a bath sometimes.”
“‘I looked at her. A glance told me all about her life. Here was a girl condemned by misfortune to toil, a girl who came of honest farmer folk, for she had still a freckle or two that told of country birth. There was an indefinable atmosphere of goodness about her; I felt as if I were breathing sincerity and frank innocence. It was refreshing to my lungs. Poor innocent child, she had faith in something; there was a crucifix and a sprig or two of green box above her poor little painted wooden bedstead; I felt touched, or somewhat inclined that way. I felt ready to offer to charge no more than twelve per cent, and so give something towards establishing her in a good way of business.
“‘"But maybe she has a little youngster of a cousin,” I said to myself, “who would raise money on her signature and sponge on the poor girl.”
“‘So I went away, keeping my generous impulses well under control; for I have frequently had occasion to observe that when benevolence does no harm to him who gives it, it is the ruin of him who takes. When you came in I was thinking that Fanny Malvaut would make a nice little wife; I was thinking of the contrast between her pure, lonely life and the life of the Countess – she has sunk as low as a bill of exchange already, she will sink to the lowest depths of degradation before she has done!’ – I scrutinized him during the deep silence that followed, but in a moment he spoke again. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘do you think that it is nothing to have this power of insight into the deepest recesses of the human heart, to embrace so many lives, to see the naked truth underlying it all? There are no two dramas alike: there are hideous sores, deadly chagrins, love scenes, misery that soon will lie under the ripples of the Seine, young men’s joys that lead to the scaffold, the laughter of despair, and sumptuous banquets. Yesterday it was a tragedy. A worthy soul of a father drowned himself because he could not support his family. To-morrow is a comedy; some youngster will try to rehearse the scene of M. Dimanche, brought up to date. You have heard the people extol the eloquence of our latter day preachers; now and again I have wasted my time by going to hear them; they produced a change in my opinions, but in my conduct (as somebody said, I can’t recollect his name), in my conduct – never! – Well, well; these good priests and your Mirabeaus and Vergniauds and the rest of them, are mere stammering beginners compared with these orators of mine.
“‘Often it is some girl in love, some gray-headed merchant on the verge of bankruptcy, some mother with a son’s wrong-doing to conceal, some starving artist, some great man whose influence is on the wane, and, for lack of money, is like to lose the fruit of all his labors – the power of their pleading has made me shudder. Sublime actors such as these play for me, for an audience of one, and they cannot deceive me. I can look into their inmost thoughts, and read them as God reads them. Nothing is hidden from me. Nothing is refused to the holder of the purse-strings to loose and to bind. I am rich enough to buy the consciences of those who control the action of ministers, from their office boys to their mistresses. Is not that power? – I can possess the fairest women, receive their softest caresses; is not that Pleasure? And is not your whole social economy summed up in terms of Power and Pleasure?
“‘There are ten of us in Paris, silent, unknown kings, the arbiters of your destinies. What is life but a machine set in motion by money? Know this for certain – methods are always confounded with results; you will never succeed in separating the soul from the senses, spirit from matter. Gold is the spiritual basis of existing society. – The ten of us are bound by the ties of common interest; we meet on certain days of the week at the Cafe Themis near the Pont Neuf, and there, in conclave, we reveal the mysteries of finance. No fortune can deceive us; we are in possession of family secrets in all directions. We keep a kind of Black Book, in which we note the most important bills issued, drafts on public credit, or on banks, or given and taken in the course of business. We are the Casuists of the Paris Bourse, a kind of Inquisition weighing and analyzing the most insignificant actions of every man of any fortune, and our forecasts are infallible. One of us looks out over the judicial world, one over the financial, another surveys the administrative, and yet another the business world. I myself keep an eye on eldest sons, artists, people in the great world, and gamblers – on the most sensational side of Paris. Every one who comes to us lets us into his neighbor’s secrets. Thwarted passion and mortified vanity are great babblers. Vice and disappointment and vindictiveness are the best of all detectives. My colleagues, like myself, have enjoyed all things, are sated with all things, and have reached the point when power and money are loved for their own sake.
“‘Here,’ he said, indicating his bare, chilly room, ‘here the most high-mettled gallant, who chafes at a word and draws swords for a syllable elsewhere will entreat with clasped hands. There is no city merchant so proud, no woman so vain of her beauty, no soldier of so bold a spirit, but that they entreat me here, one and all, with tears of rage or anguish in their eyes. Here they kneel – the famous artist, and the man of letters, whose name will go down to posterity. Here, in short’ (he lifted his hand to his forehead), ‘all the inheritances and all the concerns of all Paris are weighed in the balance. Are you still of the opinion that there are no delights behind the blank mask which so often has amazed you by its impassiveness?’ he asked, stretching out that livid face which reeked of money.
“I went back to my room, feeling stupefied. The little, wizened old man had grown great. He had been metamorphosed under my eyes into a strange visionary symbol; he had come to be the power of gold personified. I shrank, shuddering, from life and my kind.
“‘Is it really so?’ I thought; ‘must everything be resolved into gold?’
“I remember that it was long before I slept that night. I saw heaps of gold all about me. My thoughts were full of the lovely Countess; I confess, to my shame, that the vision completely eclipsed another quiet, innocent figure, the figure of the woman who had entered upon a life of toil and obscurity; but on the morrow, through the clouds of slumber, Fanny’s sweet face rose before me in all its beauty, and I thought of nothing else.”
“Will you take a glass of eau sucree?” asked the Vicomtesse, interrupting Derville.
“I should be glad of it.”
“But I can see nothing in this that can touch our concerns,” said Mme. de Grandlieu, as she rang the bell.
“Sardanapalus!” cried Derville, flinging out his favorite invocation. “Mademoiselle Camille will be wide awake in a moment if I say that her happiness depended not so long ago upon Daddy Gobseck; but as the old gentleman died at the age of ninety, M. de Restaud will soon be in possession of a handsome fortune. This requires some explanation. As for poor Fanny Malvaut, you know her; she is my wife.”
“Poor fellow, he would admit that, with his usual frankness, with a score of people to hear him!” said the Vicomtesse.
“I would proclaim it to the universe,” said the attorney.
“Go on, drink your glass, my poor Derville. You will never be anything but the happiest and the best of men.”
“I left you in the Rue du Helder,” remarked the uncle, raising his face after a gentle doze. “You had gone to see a Countess; what have you done with her?”
“A few days after my conversation with the old Dutchman,” Derville continued, “I sent in my thesis, and became first a licentiate in law, and afterwards an advocate. The old miser’s opinion of me went up considerably. He consulted me (gratuitously) on all the ticklish bits of business which he undertook when he had made quite sure how he stood, business which would have seemed unsafe to any ordinary practitioner. This man, over whom no one appeared to have the slightest influence, listened to my advice with something like respect. It is true that he always found that it turned out very well.
“At length I became head-clerk in the office where I had worked for three years and then I left the Rue des Gres for rooms in my employer’s house. I had my board and lodging and a hundred and fifty francs per month. It was a great day for me!
“When I went to bid the usurer good-bye, he showed no sign of feeling, he was neither cordial nor sorry to lose me, he did not ask me to come to see him, and only gave me one of those glances which seemed in some sort to reveal a power of second-sight.
“By the end of a week my old neighbor came to see me with a tolerably thorny bit of business, an expropriation, and he continued to ask for my advice with as much freedom as if he paid for it.
“My principal was a man of pleasure and expensive tastes; before the second year (1818-1819) was out he had got himself into difficulties, and was obliged to sell his practice. A professional connection in those days did not fetch the present exorbitant prices, and my principal asked a hundred and fifty thousand francs. Now an active man, of competent knowledge and intelligence, might hope to pay off the capital in ten years, paying interest and living respectably in the meantime – if he could command confidence. But I as the seventh child of a small tradesman at Noyon, I had not a sou to my name, nor personal knowledge of any capitalist but Daddy Gobseck. An ambitious idea, and an indefinable glimmer of hope, put heart into me. To Gobseck I betook myself, and slowly one evening I made my way to the Rue des Gres. My heart thumped heavily as I knocked at his door in the gloomy house. I recollected all the things that he used to tell me, at a time when I myself was very far from suspecting the violence of the anguish awaiting those who crossed his threshold. Now it was I who was about to beg and pray like so many others.
“‘Well, no, not that,’ I said to myself; ‘an honest man must keep his self-respect wherever he goes. Success is not worth cringing for; let us show him a front as decided as his own.’
“Daddy Gobseck had taken my room since I left the house, so as to have no neighbor; he had made a little grated window too in his door since then, and did not open until he had taken a look at me and saw who I was.
“‘Well,’ said he, in his thin, flute notes, ‘so your principal is selling his practice?’
“‘How did you know that?’ said I; ‘he has not spoken of it as yet except to me.’
“The old man’s lips were drawn in puckers, like a curtain, to either corner of his mouth, as a soundless smile bore a hard glance company.
“‘Nothing else would have brought you here,’ he said drily, after a pause, which I spent in confusion.