Lost Illusions (Penguin Classics) (70 page)

‘Who?’

‘That demon Doublon and his men. Kolb is struggling with them. They are going to sell us up.’

‘No, no, they shall not sell you up, don’t be alarmed!’ cried Petit-Claud in a voice which echoed through the room leading to the bedroom. ‘I have just launched an appeal.
We must not submit to a judgment which taxes us with bad faith. To gain time for you, I have allowed Cachan to go on blathering. I’m sure of getting the better of him again at Poitiers.’

‘But how much will it cost us?’ asked Madame Séchard.

‘Legal fees if you win, a thousand francs if we lose.’

‘Good Heavens!’ poor Eve cried. ‘Isn’t the remedy worse than the disease?’ – When he heard this cry of innocence, now clear-sighted thanks to the glare judicial procedure was casting on their predicament, Petit-Claud stood quite abashed, so impressed he was by Eve’s beauty.

At this juncture old Séchard put in his appearance. He had been summoned by Petit-Claud. The presence of this old man in the young couple’s bedroom, with his grandson in his cradle smiling amid all this sorrow, gave the finishing touch to this scene.

‘Papa Séchard,’ said the young lawyer, ‘You owe me seven hundred francs for having intervened in this case; but you will claim them as against your son and add them to the rent payments due to you.’

The old vinegrower was alive to the stinging irony which Petit-Claud’s air and tone of voice conveyed as he made this remark.

‘It would have cost you less to have stood surety for your son!’ said Eve as she came forward from the cradle to embrace the old man.

David, overwhelmed at the sight of the crowd which had gathered in front of his house, to which Kolb’s scuffle with Doublon’s assistants had attracted many people, tendered a hand to his father without wishing him good-day.

‘Seven hundred francs! How can I owe you that?’ the old man asked Petit-Claud.

‘In the first place, because I have acted for you. Since it’s a question of your rents, as far as I am concerned you and your debtor are jointly responsible. If your son doesn’t pay me the costs for this, you’ll have to pay them… But that’s a trifling matter. In an hour or two they’ll try to get your son in prison. Will you let him be taken there?’

‘How much does he owe?’

‘Something to the tune of five or six thousand francs, apart from what he owes you and what he owes his wife.’

The old man, now suspicious of all and sundry, looked round at the touching spectacle before his eyes in this blue and white bedroom: a lovely woman in tears over her son’s cradle, David, at last bending under the weight of his afflictions, and the solicitor, who had perhaps brought him to this pass in order to entrap him. The ‘bear’ then decided that they were staking on his paternal benevolence, and he was afraid of being exploited. He went over to fondle the child who stretched out his tiny hands to him. In the midst of all this anxiety the tiny boy, who was wearing a little embroidered bonnet with a pink lining, was the object of as much attention as the son of an English peer.

‘All right,’ the old grandfather blurted out. ‘Let David manage as best he can. All I’m thinking of is the baby, and his mother will back me in this. David’s such a scholar that he’ll surely manage to pay his debts.’

‘I’m going to translate your feelings into plain language,’ said the solicitor with a sarcastic air. ‘See now, Papa Séchard, you’re jealous of your son. Listen to the truth: it’s you who put David in his present predicament by selling him your printing-works for three times its real value and you’ve ruined him by making him pay this exorbitant price. It’s a fact. Don’t shake your head. The price the Cointets paid for the periodical – and you pocketed the whole of it – was all your printing-press was worth… You hate your son, not only because you’ve fleeced him, but more so still because you’ve made him a far better man than you are. You’re making a pretence of prodigious love for your grandson in order to disguise the bankruptcy of your feelings for your son and daughter-in-law who might cost you money
hic et nunc,
whereas your grandson will need your affection only when you’re
in extremis.
You fondle that little one so that you may appear to love someone in your family and not be taxed with hardhearted-ness. That’s all there is to it, Papa Séchard.’

‘Is that why you sent for me, in order to tell me that?’ the
old man said in blustering tones, looking round in turn at the solicitor, his daughter-in-law and his son.

‘Monsieur Petit-Claud,’ cried the unhappy Eve, ‘are you dead set on ruining us? Never has my husband complained about his father.’ – The vine-grower cast a mocking glance at his daughter-in-law – ‘He has told me a hundred times that you’re fond of him in your way,’ she said to the old man, for she was able to understand why he was so much on his guard.

Complying with tall Cointet’s instructions, Petit-Claud was completing the task of embroiling father and son so that the father should not extricate his son from the cruel situation in which he found himself. ‘The day when we get David in prison,’ tall Cointet had told him the evening before, ‘you will be introduced to Madame de Sénonches.’ The understanding born of affection had given enlightenment to Madame Séchard, who tumbled to the lawyer’s show of severity as easily as she had sensed Cérizet’s treachery. The reader will readily understand David’s air of surprise. He could not fathom why Petit-Claud knew so much about his father and his affairs. The honest printer knew nothing about the connivance between his solicitor and the Cointets. Nor did he realize that the Cointets were hand in glove with Métivier. David said nothing, and the old vine-grower took this as an insult. And so the solicitor took advantage of his client’s astonishment in order to withdraw.

‘Good-bye, my dear David. I warn you: imprisonment for debt cannot be invalidated by appeal. That is the only recourse left to your creditors, and they’ll make use of it. And so, get away from here!… Or rather, if you’ll take my advice, go and see the brothers Cointet. They have capital, and if you’ve brought your invention to completion and if it comes up to expectations, go into partnership with them. After all, they’re very decent people…’

‘What invention?’ old Séchard asked.

‘Well now, do you think your son’s such a fool as to have given up his printing without having something else in mind?’ the solicitor exclaimed. ‘He’s on the way, he tells me, to discovering a process for manufacturing a ream of paper for three francs. The present cost is ten francs…’

‘One more trick for catching me,’ old Séchard cried. ‘You’re all as thick as thieves. If David has made an invention like that he doesn’t need me. He’ll be a millionaire! Good-bye, my friends. Nothing doing.’ And the old man clattered downstairs.

‘You must go into hiding,’ said Petit-Claud to David as he ran after old Séchard with a view to getting him still more exasperated. The diminutive solicitor caught up with the grumbling vine-grower at the Place du Mûrier and escorted him as far as L’Houmeau. As he left him he threatened to serve him with a writ for the costs due to him if he was not paid within a week. Old Séchard replied: ‘I’ll pay them if you can find some way for me to disinherit my son without cutting out my grandson and daughter-in-law!’ And he abruptly took leave of Petit-Claud.

‘How well tall Cointet understands these people!… Yes, he was right! Having to pay seven hundred francs will prevent the father from paying the seven thousand francs which his son owes!’ Such were the little solicitor’s reflections as he made his way to Angoulême. ‘Nevertheless I must not let Cointet get the better of me. It’s time I asked this wily old paper-manufacturer for something more than words.’

‘Well, David my dear, what are you thinking of doing?’ Eve asked her husband when old Séchard and the solicitor had left them.

‘Put your biggest pan on the fire, my girl,’ cried David to Marion. ‘I’ve solved the problem.’ On hearing these words, Eve took up her hat, shawl and shoes in a fever of excitement. ‘Get your clothes on, my friend,’ she said to Kolb. ‘You shall go with me, for I must know if there’s a way out of this inferno…’

‘Monsieur David,’ Marion exclaimed once Eve had gone. ‘Do be reasonable, or Madame will die of grief. Earn some money to pay what you owe, and after that you can spend all the time you like searching for your treasure…’

‘Be quiet, Marion,’ David replied. ‘The final difficulty will be overcome. I shall get the two patents I need: the one for invention, and the one for improvement.’

The patent of improvement is a plague for inventors in
France. A man spends ten years of his life researching into a new industrial process, a machine, some discovery or other; he takes out his patent and believes he has everything under control. Then he finds a competitor on his heels, and if he has not foreseen every contingency this man perfects the invention by adding a screw, and thus takes it out of his hands. The fact of inventing a cheap pulp for papermaking did not clinch the matter: others might improve on the process. David wanted to allow for every possibility so that the fortune for which he had striven in such adverse circumstances should not be snatched from his grasp. Holland paper (paper made entirely from linen rag still keeps this name although it is no longer made in Holland) is only lightly-sized. If it became possible to size the pulp in the vat with a fairly cheap size (that is in fact what is done today, but the process is still imperfect) there could be no further ‘improvement’. For a month then David had been trying to size his pulp in the vat and was thus aiming at two simultaneous discoveries.

Eve went to see her mother. By a lucky chance, Madame was nursing Madame Milhaud, the Deputy Public Attorney’s wife, who had just presented the Milhaud family at Nevers with an heir presumptive. Eve distrusted all the ministerial officials and had had the idea of consulting the legal champion of widows and orphans about her position and asking him if she could extricate David by standing surety for him and liquidating her own rights; but she was also hoping to learn the truth about Petit-Claud’s ambiguous dealings.

Impressed by Madame Séchard’s beauty, the magistrate received her not only with the consideration due to a woman, but also with a kind of courtesy to which she was not accustomed. At long last the poor woman read in the magistrate’s eyes an expression which, since her marriage, she had only read in Kolb’s eyes. That, for beautiful women like Eve, is a criterion for judging men. When some ruling passion, or self-interest, or old age puts a chill in a man’s eyes and quenches the gleam of complete deference which is ablaze in a young man’s eyes, a woman then conceives mistrust for such a man
and begins to watch him closely. The Cointets, Petit-Claud, Cérizet, every man in whom Eve had divined hostility, had looked at her with a dry, cold eye. She therefore felt at ease with this magistrate. But although he gave her a gracious hearing, a few words from him sufficed to crush all her hopes.

‘It is not certain, Madame,’ he said, ‘that the Court of Appeal will reverse the decision limiting to movable furniture the cession which your husband has made to you of all he possessed in satisfaction of your claim. The privilege you enjoy ought not to serve as cover for fraudulence. However, since as a creditor you will be entitled to your share in the price obtained for the articles distrained, and since your father-in-law will have a preferential claim for the amount of rent due, there will be, once the court has made its order, matter for still further contestation in regard to what in legal terms we call a
contribution.’

‘But in that case Monsieur Petit-Claud is bringing us to ruin?’

‘Petit-Claud’s procedure in this affair,’ the magistrate went on, ‘is in conformity with the instructions of your husband who, according to his solicitor, wants to gain time. In my view it would perhaps be better to withdraw the appeal and, when the auction comes off, to buy in the apparatus most necessary for the running of your business: you to the limit of what should be restored to you, and your father-in-law for the amount of his rents… But that would be rushing things too much for the lawyers: they are battening on you!’

‘In that case I should be in the hands of Monsieur Séchard senior, to whom I should owe rent for the apparatus and rent for the house. But my husband would still be subject to prosecution from Monsieur Métivier, who would have scarcely got anything back.’

‘That is so, Madame.’

‘So then our position would be even worse than it is now…’

‘The law, Madame, comes down in the long run on the creditor’s side. You received three thousand francs, and it goes without saying that you must pay them back.’

‘Oh, Monsieur, do you think we are capable of…’ – Eve stopped short on realizing the danger her brother might incur if she exonerated David and herself.

‘Oh, I well know that there are obscurities in this case, both as regards the debtors who are honest, scrupulous and even high-minded people… and as regards the creditor, who is merely a man of straw.’

Eve was appalled and gave the magistrate a bewildered stare.

‘You must realize,’ he said, looking at her with an undisguisedly sly expression, ‘that we magistrates have plenty of time for reflecting on what is happening before our eyes as we sit listening to the learned counsels’ speeches.’

Eve went home in despair at having made no headway. That evening, at seven, Doublon brought the court order giving notice of David’s impending arrest. Thus, at this moment, the proceedings against him reached their climax.

‘From tomorrow onwards,’ said David, ‘I shall only be able to go out at night.’