Lost Illusions (Penguin Classics) (65 page)

‘Oh! that’s not all…’ David exclaimed. Then he stopped short: he had almost let out the secret of his brother-in-law’s
forgery. Unfortunately Eve noticed this hesitation and was left with a vague anxiety. ‘Not all? What do you mean?’ she asked. ‘And where shall we get the three thousand francs we have to pay?’

‘In the first place,’ David continued, ‘we shall soon be renewing Cérizet’s lease for the running of our printing-office. During the last six months the fifteen per cent which the Cointets allow him on the work he does for them have brought him six hundred francs, and he’s made five hundred francs with the town work.’

‘If the Cointets know that,’ said Eve, ‘perhaps they won’t take the lease on again. They’ll be afraid of him. Cérizet’s a dangerous man.’

‘Well, what do I care!’ cried Séchard. ‘In a few days’ time we shall be rich! And, my darling, once Lucien is rich he’ll lead an exemplary life.’

‘Ah! David, my love, my love, what an admission you’ve just made! According to you, when Lucien’s down on his luck there’s no crime he won’t commit! You have the same ideas about him as Monsieur d’Arthez. A man must be strong if he wants to rise in the world, and Lucien is weak… What good would even an angel be if he can’t resist temptation?’

‘Well, men of his kind are at their best only when they’re in their proper environment, their proper sphere and climate. Lucien’s not a fighting man: I’ll do the fighting for him. Come and take a look! I’m too close to results not to tell you all about the way I’m getting them.’ He drew from his pocket several octavo sheets of white paper, flourished them triumphantly and laid them in his wife’s lap.

‘A
REAM
of this paper, royal format, will not cost more than five francs,’ he said, inviting Eve, who showed childlike surprise, to handle the specimens.

‘Tell me, how did you make these samples?’ she asked.

‘With an old hair-sieve I got from Marion.’

‘But you’re not satisfied with them yet?’

‘It’s not a problem of manufacture: it’s the cost price of the pulp. Unfortunately, darling, I’m only one of the latest to have entered on this difficult path. Back in 1794 Madame Masson tried to produce blank paper from printed paper. She succeeded, but at what a cost! Round about 1800, in England, the Earl of Salisbury, like the Frenchman Seguin in 1801, was trying to use straw for the manufacture of paper. The sheets you are holding were made from our common reed
arundo phragmitis.
But I intend to use nettles and thistles because, in order to keep down the cost of the raw material, recourse must be had to vegetable substances which grow in marshes and infertile soil and therefore are very cheap. The whole secret lies in finding a way to treat these plants. So far I have not discovered a simple enough process. Never mind! In spite of the difficulty, I’m sure I can confer on paper-making in France the same privilege as our literature already enjoys and establish a French monopoly equivalent to the monopoly which the English have in steel, coal and earthenware. I want to be in paper-manufacture what Jacquard was in the weaving industry.’

Eve rose to her feet, moved with enthusiasm and admiration by David’s simple explanation. She opened her arms, pressed him to her heart and leaned her head on his shoulder.

‘You’re rewarding me as if I’d already discovered the process,’ he said.

Eve’s only response was to raise her lovely face all bathed in tears: for a moment she was unable to utter a word.

‘It’s not the man of genius that I’m hugging,’ she said, ‘but the man bringing consolation. One star has fallen, you show me one that is rising. Over against the grief I feel at the abasement of a brother, you are setting the great-heartedness of a husband. Greatness will certainly come to you, as it came to Graindorge, Rouvet, Van Robens and the Persian who introduced the cultivation of the madder-wort into France; as also to all the men you mentioned, whose names are still
unknown because they did good unostentatiously by perfecting an industrial process.’

*

‘What are they up to?…’ Boniface was asking. Tall Cointet was walking with Cérizet in the Place du Mûrier and watching the shadows of husband and wife outlined against the muslin curtains of their living-room. The latter came there regularly at midnight to spy on the slightest activities of his former employer.

‘It’s clear enough,’ replied Cérizet. ‘He’s showing her the paper he’s made this morning.’

‘But what’s he making it of?’ asked the paper-manufacturer.

‘I just can’t guess,’ Cérizet replied. ‘I made a hole in the roof, climbed on to it and saw my gaffer boiling his pulp all night long in a copper cauldron. It was no use my examining the supplies he had heaped up in a corner. All I could see was that his raw material looked like stacks of tow.’

‘Go no further,’ Boniface Cointet said to his spy in sanctimonious tones. ‘It would be dishonest!… When Madame Séchard proposes to renew your lease for the running of the printing-office, tell her you want to become a master-printer. Offer her half the value of the licence and stock; and if they accept, come and see me. In any case, let things drag out… They have no money.’

‘Not a sou?’ Cérizet asked.

‘Not a sou,’ tall Cointet echoed. – ‘I have them!’ he said to himself.

The firm of Métivier and the Cointet firm combined the function of bankers with their business as commission agents in paper supply, paper-manufacture and printing: be it said that they were careful not to pay any licence for their banking activities. Taxation authorities have not yet found a way to keep such close surveillance on trading concerns as would enable them to force all those who carry on banking surreptitiously to take out a banking licence, which, in Paris for example, costs five hundred francs a year. None the less the
Cointet brothers and Métivier between them, although in this capacity they were what are called ‘maroons’ at the Stock Exchange, handled no less than some hundreds of thousands of francs each quarter in the money markets of Paris, Bordeaux and Angoulême. It so happened that on that very evening the Cointet firm had received from Paris the bills for three thousand francs which Lucien had forged. Tall Cointet had immediately made this debt the basis of a formidable machination directed, as we shall see, against the poor, long-suffering inventor.

N
EXT
day at seven in the morning Boniface Cointet was taking a walk along the mill-race which drove his enormous paper-mill and deadened all speech with the roar it made. He was waiting for a young man of twenty-nine who had six weeks’ standing as a solicitor at the Angoulême County Court: his name was Petit-Claud.

‘Were you at the college of Angoulême with David Séchard?’ tall Cointet asked after saying good morning to the young solicitor, who had taken good care to answer the rich manufacturer’s summons.

‘Yes, monsieur,’ Petit-Claud replied, walking in step with Cointet.

‘Have you met him since then?’

‘Not more than twice since his return from Paris. There were no opportunities. On week-days I was either deep in office work or attending at court. Sundays and holidays I carried on my studies, for I had only myself to depend on.’

Tall Cointet gave a nod of approval.

‘When David and I met again, he asked me what I was doing. I told him that after taking my law degree at Poitiers I had become chief clerk to Maître Olivet and that sooner or later I hoped to succeed to his post… I was much better acquainted with Lucien Chardon who now styles himself
Monsieur de Rubempré, the lover of Madame de Bargeton, our great local poet: in short, David Séchard’s brother-in-law.’

‘Consequently you can go and tell David that you are qualified and offer him your services.’

‘That isn’t done,’ the young solicitor replied.

‘He has never been to law and has no solicitor. That can certainly be done,’ Cointet replied, peering through his glasses at the little solicitor.

Pierre Petit-Claud was the son of a tailor in L’Houmeau and had been cold-shouldered by his school-fellows, so that a certain amount of bile seemed to have passed into his bloodstream. His face had the blurred and murky colouring which speaks of childhood sicknesses, late hours imposed by poverty and – almost always – resentful feelings. Colloquial speech provides adjectives to depict this young individual in two words: he was snappy and prickly. His cracked voice was in keeping with his sour looks, frail appearance and the indeterminate colour of his magpie eyes. Napoleon once observed that magpie eyes are a sign of dishonesty. ‘Look at so-and-so,’ he said to Las Casas at Saint Helena, speaking of a confidant whom he had been obliged to dismiss for embezzlement. ‘I don’t know how I could have been mistaken for so long: he has the eye of a magpie.’ And so, after tall Cointet had scrutinized this skinny, pock-marked little solicitor, with hair so sparse that one could scarcely tell where cranium left off and forehead began, when he saw him striking the pose of a sophisticated man with one hand on his hip, he said to himself: ‘He’s the fellow I need!’ In fact Petit-Claud, having had his fill of disdain, eaten up with a gnawing desire to push himself forward, had been bold enough, penniless as he was, to buy his employer’s practice for thirty thousand francs, counting on marriage to furnish him with this sum. As was customary, he expected his employer to find him a wife, for a predecessor always has a motive for making a match for his successor in order to get the money for his practice. But Petit-Claud relied even more on himself, for he was not without a certain superiority, rare
in the provinces, though hatred was the ruling principle behind it. The more a man hates, the greater the efforts he will make.

There is a great difference between Parisian and provincial solicitors, and tall Cointet was too clever not to take advantage of the petty passions to which petty lawyers are prone. In Paris, a solicitor of some repute – there are many of them – has some of the qualities of a diplomat by virtue of the numerous affairs with which he has to deal, the importance of the interests involved and the wide scope of the issues confided to him; all this exempts him from the temptation to make a living out of legal shifts and tricks. Legal procedure, whether it is used as an offensive or defensive weapon, is no longer for him what it had been in former times – a source of lucre. In the provinces the opposite is true: solicitors go in for what Paris lawyers call ‘nibblings’, a superabundance of pettifoggeries which load their accounts with costs and use up a lot of stamped paper. A provincial solicitor is taken up with these trivialities. His concern is to pile up costs, whereas a Paris solicitor thinks only of his ‘retainer’. This honorarium is what a client owes, over and above costs, to his solicitor for the more or less skilful management of his affairs. The State takes half of the costs, whereas the retainer is his entirely. Let us face this fact: the fees paid rarely square with those which are asked for – reasonably so – for the services a good solicitor can render. Solicitors, doctors and barristers in Paris are like courtesans with their casual customers, extremely careful not to put too great a strain on their clients’ gratitude. Two admirable
genre
pictures worthy of Meissonier might be made of a client before and after his case is concluded, and no doubt a society of emeritus solicitors would bid a high price for them.

There is yet one more difference between a Paris and a provincial solicitor. The former rarely pleads, although he sometimes addresses a judge sitting in chambers. But in 1822, in most country districts (since then advocates have multiplied like rabbits), solicitors were also advocates and conducted
their own cases. From this twofold function results a twofold responsibility which confers on a provincial solicitor the intellectual defects of a barrister without relieving him of his onerous obligations as a solicitor. He therefore becomes a gas-bag and loses that lucidity of judgement which is indispensable for the conduct of affairs. Through this doubling of parts an exceptional man often finds himself reduced to the status of two mediocre men. A solicitor in Paris, since he does not spend himself making speeches in court and rarely pleads on one side or the other, is able to preserve his sanity of judgment. True, he ranges his legalistic artillery and ransacks his arsenal to find the ways and means which the pros and cons of jurisprudence can furnish, but he allows himself no delusions over the case in hand, even though he is making every effort to win it. In a word, thinking goes to the head much less than talking. A man can talk himself into believing what he says, whereas it is possible to act against one’s own opinion while still holding to it and successfully conduct a bad case without maintaining that it is a good one, which is what an advocate does when he pleads. And so there are many reasons for a provincial solicitor turning out to be a mediocre person: he becomes involved in petty squabbles, takes on petty cases, makes his living on costs, misuses the code of procedure… and he pleads! In brief, he has many shortcomings. Consequently, when a noteworthy man is found among provincial solicitors, he stands head and shoulders above the rest.

‘I imagined, Monsieur, that you had sent for me to talk of your own affairs,’ Petit-Claud replied, and the look he cast on tall Cointet’s impenetrable spectacles gave added point to this remark.

‘Let’s come to the point,’ answered Boniface Cointet. ‘Listen.’ After uttering this one word, pregnant with confidential statements, Cointet went and sat down on a bench and invited Petit-Claud to do the same.