Lost Illusions (Penguin Classics) (54 page)

‘I’ll take them at three thousand francs,’ said Barbet with imperturbable calm.

‘Three thousand francs!’ cried Lucien.

‘No one else will take them,’ the bookseller replied. ‘Those gentlemen will go bankrupt within three months. But I know they have two good works whose sale is dragging; they can’t afford to wait, so I shall settle for them on the spot – with their own bills. In that way I shall get the goods for two thousand francs less.’

‘Are you ready to lose two thousand francs?’ Etienne asked Lucien.

‘No!’ cried Lucien, appalled by this first transaction.

‘You’re making a mistake!’ Etienne replied.

‘You won’t get their paper cashed anywhere,’ said Barbet. ‘This gentleman’s book is the last card Fendant and Cavalier can play. They can only print it by depositing the copies with their printer; if it’s a success it will only give them six months’ grace, for sooner or later they’ll crash. People like them do more elbow-lifting than book-selling. Their bills are a matter of business for me, and so you can get better terms from me than the discounters will give, since they’ll figure out how much each signature is worth. Discount-broking consists in knowing if three signatures will each of them yield thirty per cent in case of bankruptcy. To start with, you only offer me two signatures, and neither of them is worth more than ten per cent.’

The two friends stared at each other, surprised to hear this villainous man giving a concise analysis of the discounters’ point of view.

‘Speechifying apart, Barbet,’ said Lousteau. ‘What money-broker can we go to?’

‘Old Chaboisseau at the Quai Saint-Michel – you know him – he dealt with Fendant’s last monthly account. If you refuse my offer, try him; but you’ll come back to me, and then I shall only give you two thousand five hundred francs.’

Etienne and Lousteau went along the Quai Saint-Michel to a little house at the end of an alley, where Chaboisseau, one of the discount-brokers for the book-trade, lived. They found him on the second floor, in rooms furnished in a most bizarre fashion. This petty banker, who was none the less a millionaire, was enamoured of the ancient Greek style. The bedroom cornice was an imitation of this. The bed, of purely classical design, had purple drapings and was arranged along the wall in Greek fashion as in the background of a canvas by David: it dated from Imperial days when this was the predominant taste. The arm-chairs, tables, lamps, sconces and the smallest oddments, no doubt patiently collected in the furniture shops, were redolent of the fine, slight and elegant grace of antiquity. This mythological
ensemble
contrasted strangely with the discounter’s manners. It is to be noted that the most eccentric types are found among men given over to the pursuit of money. They are, in a sense, libertines in the realm of thought. Able to turn everything into gold and surfeited therewith, they go to enormous efforts to shake free of satiety. A shrewd observer can always detect in them some mania, a vulnerable spot in their hearts. But Chaboisseau seemed to be entrenched in Antiquity as in an impregnable fortress.

‘No doubt he conforms to his background,’ Etienne said to Lucien with a smile.

Chaboisseau, a little man with powdered hair, a drab green frockcoat and a nut-brown waistcoat set off with black breeches, patterned stockings and shoes with creaking soles, took the bills and examined them; then he solemnly returned them to Lucien.

‘Messrs Fendant and Cavalier are charming and very intelligent young men, but I’m out of money,’ he said in a mild voice.

‘My friend will be accommodating about the discount,’ Etienne replied.

‘I wouldn’t take those bills at any price,’ said the little man, and this dismissal of Lousteau’s proposition was like the blade of a guillotine sliding towards a criminal’s neck.

The two friends withdrew. As they crossed the anteroom, through which Chaboisseau prudently escorted them, Lucien noticed a heap of books which the broker, a former bookseller, had bought up and among which the novelist’s eye suddenly lit on the architect Ducerceau’s work on the royal palaces and famous châteaux of France, a book in which the plans are drawn with the greatest accuracy.

‘Would you sell me this work?’ asked Lucien.

‘Yes,’ said Chaboisseau, becoming a bookseller once more.

‘How much?’

‘Fifty francs.’

‘It’s a stiff price, but I need it. I could only pay you with the bills you won’t take.’

‘You have one for five hundred francs due in six months. I’ll take that one,’ said Chaboisseau, who no doubt had an unpaid account with Cavalier for that sum.

The two friends went back to Chaboisseau’s Greek room, where the money-broker wrote out a little invoice at six per cent interest with six per cent commission, which amounted to a deduction of thirty francs. He put to his account the fifty francs for the Ducerceau and drew four hundred and twenty francs from his cash-box, which was full of glittering crowns.

‘Come now, Monsieur Chaboisseau! These bills are all good or they’re all bad. Why can’t you discount the rest of them?’

‘I’m not discounting. I’m taking payment for a sale,’ the man said.

Etienne and Lucien were still laughing – uncomprehendingly – at Chaboisseau when they arrived at Dauriat’s where Lousteau asked Gabusson to tell them of another money-broker. The two friends hired a cab and drove to the Boulevard Poissonnière, armed with a letter of recommendation from Gabusson, who had foretold that they would be meeting the oddest of men, a ‘queer fish’, to quote his expression.

‘If Samanon won’t take your bills,’ he had said, ‘no one else will.’

Samanon was a second-hand bookseller on his ground floor, an old clothes merchant on his first floor, a dealer in prohibited engravings on his second floor; he was also a pawnbroker. No character from the tales of Hoffmann, no one among Scott’s sinister misers could be compared to what Nature in social and literary garb had ventured to create in this man – if indeed Samanon could be called a man. Lucien could not repress a start of fright when he saw this small, wizened greybeard, whose bones seemed to be forcing their way through the perfectly tanned hide of a face spotted with numerous green or yellow blotches, like a painting by Titian or Paul Veronese when viewed from close up. Samanon had one eye fixed and glazed, the other sharp and glittering. This man, who appeared to use the dead eye for discounting and the other for selling obscene prints, wore a small flat wig of a rusty black, under which his white hair poked up. His yellow forehead had a menacing expression, his protruding jaws emphasized the hollowness of his cheeks and his lips, drawn back from his still white teeth, made him look like a neighing horse. The contrast between his eyes and his grimacing mouth, everything in fact gave him quite a ferocious appearance. The stiff, sharp bristles of his beard must have been as prickly as pins. A small threadbare frockcoat which had become as dry as tinder, a cravat of faded black rubbed through by his beard, disclosing a neck as wrinkled as a turkey’s, gave little evidence of a desire to let care of his person compensate for his sinister physiognomy.

The two journalists found this man sitting at a horribly dirty counter busily pasting tickets on the backs of a few old books bought at a sale. After exchanging a glance by which they asked each other the numerous questions which the very existence of such a character inspired, Lucien and Lousteau saluted him and presented Gabusson’s letter together with Fendant and Cavalier’s bills of exchange. While Samanon was reading, there came into the shop a highly intelligent-looking man wearing a short coat so stiffened by the many foreign
substances which had been worked into it that it seemed as if it had been cut out of a piece of zinc.

‘I need my coat, my black trousers and my satin waistcoat,’ he said, offering Samanon a numbered ticket.

Samanon pulled at the copper knob of a bell and a woman came in whose fresh, bright pink cheeks suggested she came from Normandy.

‘Lend this gentleman his clothes,’ he said, holding out a hand to his customer, who was an author. ‘Dealing with you is a pleasure, but one of your friends brought me a young chap who took me in completely.’

‘So he can be taken in!’ said the writer to the two journalists, pointing to Samanon with a profoundly comical gesture.

Like an Italian beggar fetching his best clothes out of pawn for one day, the great man handed over thirty sous which the broker grabbed with a yellow, chapped hand and dropped into the cash-box under his counter.

‘What extraordinary trade are you carrying on?’ asked Lousteau of this great artist, an opium addict living in a dreamworld of enchanted palaces who was neither willing nor able to do any creative work.

‘This man lends more money on pledgeable articles than the State pawn-shop,’ he replied. ‘What’s more, he’s so appallingly charitable that he lets you have them back for occasions when you have to dress up. This evening I’m dining with my mistress at the Keller’s. I can more easily find thirty sous than two hundred francs, and I’ve come for my wardrobe which has brought in a hundred francs to this charitable userer during the last six months. Samanon has already eaten away my library book by book and franc by franc.’

‘And sou by sou,’ said Lousteau with a laugh.

‘I’ll pay you fifteen hundred francs,’ Samanon told Lucien.

Lucien gave a leap as if the discounter had plunged a red-hot skewer into his heart. Samanon was looking carefully through the bills and examining the dates.

‘Even so,’ said the dealer, ‘I shall have to go and see Fendant who’ll have to deposit some books with me. – Your
credit’s no good,’ he said to Lucien. ‘You’re living with Coralie and your furniture is under distraint.’

Lousteau looked at Lucien who took up his bills and rushed out into the street exclaiming: ‘He must be the devil incarnate!’ For a few minutes the poet gazed at the little shop, which could only have drawn smiles from passers-by – so pitiable it looked, so mean and dirty were its little boxes with their labelled books – and made them wonder: ‘What sort of business goes on there?’

A few moments later the anonymous great man, who ten years later was to take part in the vast but unrealistic enterprise of Saint-Simonism, emerged in fine clothes, gave the two journalists a smile and with them made for the Passage des Panoramas to complete his transformation by having his shoes polished.

‘When Samanon goes to see a bookseller, a paper-merchant or a printer, you may know they’re on the rocks,’ said the artist to the two writers. ‘At such times Samanon is like an undertaker coming to measure someone for a coffin.’

‘There’s no hope now of getting your bills discounted,’ said Etienne to Lucien.

‘When Samanon refuses,’ said the stranger, ‘no one accepts: he’s the
ultima ratio
! He acts as a stooge for Gigonnet, Palma, Werbrust, Gobseck and the other crocodiles who infest the Paris money-market; any man with a fortune to make or un-unmake comes up against them sooner or later.’

‘If you can’t get your bills discounted at fifty per cent,’ continued Etienne, ‘you’ll have to change them for cash.’

‘But how?’

‘Give them to Coralie, and she’ll take them to Camusot.’

‘… That revolts you,’ Etienne went on, after a start from Lucien had cut him short. ‘What childishness! Can you let such nonsense weigh against your future?’

‘In any case I’ll take this money to Coralie,’ said Lucien.

‘Another piece of stupidity!’ said Lousteau. ‘You’ll get nowhere with four hundred francs when you need four thousand. Let’s keep enough to get drunk with in case we lose, and try our luck at the tables.’

‘Good advice,’ said the anonymous great man.

With Frascati’s only a few yards away, these words had magnetic power. The two friends dismissed their cab-driver and climbed up to the gambling-den. First they won three thousand francs, dropped to five hundred, then won back three thousand seven hundred francs; then they got down to five francs, worked up again to two thousand and staked then on
Pair
in order to double them at one stroke:
Pair
had not shown up for five rounds, and they punted the whole sum on it.
Impair
came up again. Then Lucien and Lousteau tumbled down the stairs of this celebrated pavilion after wasting two hours in a fever of excitement. They had kept a hundred francs. As they stood on the steps of the little peristyle whose double pillars outside the building supported a small iron porch which many eyes have lovingly or despairingly contemplated, Lousteau said as he saw Lucien’s flushed countenance: ‘Let’s dine on fifty francs.’

The two journalists remounted the stairs. In an hour they rose again to three thousand francs. They put them on the Red, which had come up five times, trusting in the chance to which they owed their previous loss. Black came up. It was six o’clock.

‘Let’s keep only twenty-five francs for our food,’ said Lucien.

This new attempt was short-lived, the twenty-five francs being lost in ten throws. Raging, Lucien threw his last twenty-five francs on the number representing his age and won: who could describe how his hand shook as he took the rake to pull in the crowns that the banker threw down one by one? He gave Lousteau ten louis and said: ‘Run off to Véry’s.’

Lousteau understood and went off to order dinner.

Lucien, now gambling on his own, put his thirty louis on Red and won. Emboldened by the hidden voice which gamblers sometimes hear, he left it all on Red. Red came up again, and he felt as if he had live coals inside him. Heedless of the voice, he put the hundred and twenty louis on Black and lost. Then he experienced the delicious sensation which comes to gamblers once their terrible excitement is over, when they
have nothing more to stake and leave the glaring palace in which their fleeting dreams have faded. He rejoined Lousteau at Véry’s where he ‘fell to with a will’, to use a popular expression, and drowned his cares in wine. By nine he was so completely drunk that he was unable to understand why the concierge in the rue de Vendôme sent him off to the rue de la Lune.