Lost Illusions (Penguin Classics) (71 page)

‘If Matame vill vait tchust a qvarter off an hour, I vill to a
pit of reconnoitrink in ze enemy camp,’ said Kolb. ‘You vill see zat I know my way apout, efen if I look like a Tcherman. But I am a true Frentchman, ant I am cunnink enough.’

‘Yes, Madame, let him go,’ said Marion. ‘He only wants to protect Monsieur; that’s all he’s thinking of. He’s… what shall I say?… a real Newfoundland dog.’

‘Go, my good Kolb,’ said David. ‘We still have time to come to a decision.’

Kolb went off quietly to the bailiff’s house, where David’s enemies, in counsel together, were devising means to lay hands on him.

To put debtors under arrest in the provinces is as exceptional and abnormal an occurrence as could be imagined. To begin with, every person is too well known for anyone to take so odious a step. Creditors and debtors have to live out their whole lives face to face. Moreover, when a defaulting tradesman is contemplating bankruptcy on a large scale – in the provinces business ethics are uncompromisingly severe against this kind of legal robbery – he takes sanctuary in Paris. To some extent Paris is to the provinces what Belgium is to France: almost inaccessible hide-outs can be found there and the process-server’s writ has no validity outside his legal area. In the second place, there are other impediments which make it virtually null and void. For instance, the law establishing the inviolability of the domicile holds good without exception in the provinces; a process-server is not entitled, as he is in Paris, to make ingress into a third person’s house in order to apprehend a debtor. Our legislators deemed it necessary to make exception for Paris because there the same building regularly houses several different families. But in the provinces, even in order to intrude into the debtor’s own domicile, the process-server must have a
juge de paix
¹
with him. Now this magistrate, who has control over the process-server, is more or less free to grant or refuse his cooperation. It must be said in praise of these
juges de paix
that this obligation weighs heavily with them and that they are unwilling
to serve blind passion or personal vindictiveness. And there are other no less grave obstacles tending to mitigate the wholly useless cruelty of the law on arrest for debt through the operation of moral scruples which often modify and almost nullify the laws. In large cities there are plenty of depraved, unprincipled wretches who are ready to serve as informers. But in a small town everyone is too well known to put himself in the pay of a bailiff. Anyone, even in the lowest strata of society, who lent himself to this kind of baseness would be obliged to leave the town. And so, the arrest of debtors not being, as in Paris and other great centres of population, a privileged function like that of the ‘Gardes du Commerce’, it becomes an exceedingly difficult operation of legal procedure, a battle of wits between the debtor and the process-server, and the stratagems devised have occasionally provided very amusing news-items for the newspapers.

The elder Cointet had not wanted to appear in person, but stout Cointet, who made out that he was acting for Métivier, had called on Doublon with Cérizet, now one of his compositors, whose cooperation had been acquired by the promise of a thousand-franc note. Doublon had two of his own men to assist him, so that the Cointets already had three blood-hounds to keep watch over their prey. Moreover, when it came to the act of arrest, Doublon was entitled to employ the police militia which, by the terms of the court decisions, is obliged to give its support to the bailiff who calls for it. These five persons were therefore assembled at that very moment in Maître Doublon’s private office, situated on the ground-floor of the house and adjoining the main office.

Access to this office was given by a fairly wide paved corridor which formed a sort of alley. The house had a single-leaf door, on either side of which were the gilded escutcheons of the Court in the centre of which
BAILIFF
was inscribed in black letters. The two windows of the office opening on to the street were protected by stout iron bars. The private room looked out on to a garden in which the bailiff, a votary of Pomona, himself cultivated his espaliers with great success. The kitchen stood opposite the office, and behind it ran a
staircase leading to the upper storey. The house itself stood in a little street behind the law-courts, then under construction, but only to be finished after 1830. These details are not without utility for the understanding of what happened to Kolb. The Alsatian had had the idea of presenting himself to the process-server on the pretext of betraying his master – in order thereby to find out what traps were to be laid for him and circumvent them. The cook opened the door and Kolb expressed the desire to talk to Monsieur Doublon on business. Vexed at being disturbed while she was washing up, the woman opened the door of the office and told Kolb, whom she did not know, to wait there for Monsieur, who was at that moment holding consultation in his inner room. Then she went and informed her master that a man wanted to speak to him. The word ‘man’ so evidently meant ‘peasant’ that Doublon said: ‘Let him wait!’ Kolb sat down close to the door of the private room.

‘Now then,’ said stout Cointet, ‘how do you propose to proceed? If we could nab him tomorrow morning it would be so much time gained.’

‘Nothing could be easier.’ cried Cérizet. ‘He’s quite rightly called the Gaffer. He makes gaffes in plenty.’

On recognizing stout Cointet’s voice and above all on hearing these two remarks, Kolb immediately guessed that they were talking about his master, and his astonishment increased when he picked out Cérizet’s voice.

‘A fellow who hass eaten his preat!’ he exclaimed, horror-stricken.

‘Now, friends,’ said Doublon, ‘this is what we have to do. We’ll spread our men round at wide intervals, from the rue de Beaulieu and the Place du Mûrier in every direction, so that we can follow the Gaffer (I like that nickname) without his noticing, and we’ll keep on his track until he’s got into the house where he proposes to hide. We’ll leave him for a few days until he feels secure, then we’ll pounce on him some day before sunrise or sunset.’

‘But what’s he up to just now? He might slip away,’ said stout Cointet.

‘He’s at home,’ said Maître Doublon. ‘I should know if he went out. I have one of my practitioners (bailiffs call their assistants by this honorable title) on watch in the Place du Mûrier, another at the corner of the law-courts, another thirty yards away from his house. If our quarry came out they would give a whistle, and he wouldn’t have taken three steps without my already knowing it thanks to this telegraphic means of communication.’

To hear this was a piece of luck on which Kolb had not reckoned. He quietly left the office and told the servant: ‘Monsieur Touplon vill pe encatchet for a lonk time. I vill kom pack early in ze mornink.’

The Alsatian, who had been a cavalryman, had been seized with an idea which he immediately proceeded to carry out. He hurried to a man he knew who hired out horses, chose a horse, had it saddled, and returned at full speed to his master’s house, where he found Eve plunged in grief.

‘What is it, Kolb?’ the printer asked on seeing the Alsatian in a state of mind which was both jubilant and disturbed.

‘You haf scountrelss all rount you. Ze best sink iss to hite ze master. Has Matame tought off somevere to put Monsieur out off ze vay?’

The honest Kolb told them of Cérizet’s treachery, the ring of spies circling the house and the part that stout Cointet was playing in the business. He also gave them some foreknowledge of the tricks these men were likely to devise against his master, and this threw a very sinister light on David’s predicament.

‘Then it’s the Cointets who are suing you,’ poor Eve, quite dumbfounded, exclaimed. ‘Since they’re paper-manufacturers they’re out after your secret.’

‘But what can be done to keep David out of their clutches?’ asked Madame Chardon.

‘If Matame can fint some little place for Monsieur to hite in,’ said Kolb, ‘I untertake to get him zere vizout anypoty efer knowink.’

‘Wait till night-fall,’ Eve replied, ‘and go and stay with Basine Clerget. I’ll go and arrange it all with her. In a case like this Basine will stand by me through thick and thin.’

David recovered his wits and found his tongue at last. ‘The spies will follow you. We must find a way to warn Basine without either of us going there.’

‘Matame can go zere,’ said Kolb. ‘Zis iss my plan: I vill go out viz Monsieur and ve vill traw ze vistlerss avay on our tracks. Turink zis time, Matame vill go ant see Matemoisselle Clerchet ant vill not pe followet. I haf a horse, Monsieur vill rite pehint me. Ze tefil take me if zey catch us!’

‘Very well… Good-bye, my dear,’ the poor woman cried, throwing herself into her husband’s arms. ‘None of us will come to see you, because that might lead to your arrest. We must say good-bye for the whole duration of this voluntary imprisonment. We’ll write to each other by post. Basine will put yours in the letter-box, and I’ll address mine to you in her name.’

As they went out David and Kolb heard the spies whistling and drew them off to the bottom of the Porte Palet where the horse-dealer lived. There Kolb took his master on the crupper and recommended him to hold on tight.

‘Vistle avay, vistle avay, goot frients,’ cried Kolb. ‘I make foolss off all off you. You vont catch an olt cafalryman!’

And the old cavalryman spurred on into the country at a speed which necessarily made it impossible for the spies either to follow them or to guess where they were going.

Meanwhile Eve went to see Postel on the ingenious pretext of consulting him. After stomaching the insulting kind of pity which is prodigal only of words, she left him and reached Basine’s house without being seen. She confided her griefs to her and asked her for succour and protection. Basine, who for greater precaution had drawn Eve into her bedroom, opened the door of an adjacent dressing-room which had a hinged skylight through which no eye could peer. The two friends opened up a small fire-place whose chimney-pipe ran parallel with the one belonging to the workshop in which the laundresses kept a fire going to heat their irons. Eve and Basine spread some shabby blankets on the floor-tiles to muffle any noise that David might inadvertently make. They gave him a trestle-bed to sleep on, a stove for his experiments, and a table and chair for sitting down to write. Basine promised
to bring him food at night, and since no one ever found their way into this room, David could defy all his enemies, and even the police.

‘There we are then,’ said Eve, embracing her friend. ‘He’s safe now.’

She returned to Postel’s house in order, so she said, to clear up some doubt which had brought her back to consult so learned a juryman in the Tribunal du Commerce, and she got him to escort her home while she listened to his winnings. ‘You wouldn’t be in a mess like this if you had married me!’ This was the burden of every sentence the little apothecary uttered. When he was home again, Postel found his wife in a fit of jealousy because of Madame Séchard’s remarkable beauty. Furious at the politeness her husband had shown, Léonie was only pacified by the opinion the apothecary claimed to hold about the superiority of red-headed over dark-haired women. The latter, he maintained, were like beautiful thoroughbreds which always had to be kept in the stable. No doubt he put up a good show of sincerity, for the next day Madame Postel was in a simperingly affectionate mood.

‘We can set our minds at rest,’ Eve said to her mother and Marion, whom she found, to use Marion’s own expression, still ‘all of a flutter’.

When Eve cast an involuntary glance into the bedroom, Marion told her: ‘They’ve gone.’

‘Marsac,’ David answered. ‘Since we’re half way there I’m going to make a last appeal to my father’s feelings.’

‘I myself voult razer leat a tcharche against a pattery of cannonss. Monsieur’s fazer hass no heart.’

The old pressman had no faith in his son. Like all working-class people, he judged by results. In the first place he would
not admit that he had despoiled David. In the second place, without taking into account the fact that times had changed, he thought to himself: ‘I made him boss of a printing-office, the same as I had been myself. He knew a lot more about it than I did, and yet he couldn’t make a go of it!’ Totally incapable of understanding his son, he passed judgement on him and assumed a sort of superiority over this highly intelligent man by telling himself: ‘After all, I’m saving up food and drink for him.’

Kolb and David arrived at Marsac at eight o’clock and caught the old fellow as he was finishing dinner and therefore on the point of going to bed.

‘So the beaks still let you come to see me*’ he said to his son with a bitter smile.

‘How can you ant my master efer come togezzer?’ cried the indignant Kolb. ‘He iss flyink high in ze skiess and you are alvays vine-pippink… Gif him vat he neets! Zat iss vat a fazzer iss for!’

‘Now, Kolb, be off, and stable the horse with Madame Courtois so as not to bother my father with it. And learn this fact: fathers are always in the right.’

Kolb went off growling like a dog who, though scolded by his master for his vigilance, lies down – but only under protest. Then, without revealing his secret process, David offered to give his father the clearest possible proof of his discovery and proposed that he should have a stake in the concern in return for the money David now needed in order to shake free from legal pursuit, so that he might give himself up to the exploitation of his invention.

‘Come on now, how can you prove you can make fine paper out of nothing and one which will cost nothing?’ the ex-typographer demanded, throwing his son a drunken, but astute, inquisitive and avid glance, which was like a flash of lightning darting through a rain-cloud; for the old ‘bear’, keeping to his long-established practice, never went to bed without his ‘night-cap’, consisting of two bottles of excellent old wine at which, as he put it, he took a sip now and then.

‘That’s an easy matter,’ David replied. ‘I have no paper on
me. I came here to get away from Doublon and, happening to be on the way to Marsac, I thought I could certainly find in your house the facilities which even a money-lender would give me. I have nothing here but the clothes I stand up in. Shut me up in a sealed-up out-house which no one can enter and in which no one can see me. And then…’

‘What!’ said the old man, casting a terrible glance at his son. ‘You won’t let me watch you while you work?’

‘My father,’ David replied. ‘You have proved to me that in business fathers don’t exist…’

‘So you don’t trust the man who brought you into the world.’

‘It’s not that. I don’t trust the man who robbed me of the means of living in it.’

‘You’re right! Everyone for himself!’ said the old man. ‘Very well, I’ll put you in my store-room.’

‘I shall take Kolb in with me, and you’ll give me a cauldron to make my pulp,’ David continued, without noticing the look his father shot at him. ‘Then you’ll go out and find me some artichoke and asparagus stalks, stinging nettles and reeds which you’ll cut from the banks of your little river. Tomorrow morning I shall come out of your store-room with some magnificent paper.’

‘If you can do that,’ cried the Bear, with a hiccough, ‘I’ll give you maybe… I’ll see if I can give you… dammit, I’ll give you twenty-five thousand francs – on condition that I get the same amount back every year.’

‘Put me to the test, I accept it!’ cried David. ‘Kolb, get on your horse, ride over to Mansle, buy me a big hair-sieve from the dry cooper and size from a grocer and get back as quickly as you can.’

‘Come on, have a drink,’ said his father, setting a bottle of wine, some bread and some left-over cold meat in front of his son. ‘Get your strength up and I’ll go and find you your supply of rags – green rags! May be they’re a bit too green! Like the grapes the fox was after!’

Two hours later, at about eleven o’clock, the old man was shutting up his son and Kolb in a little room backing on to his
store-room, roofed with gutter-tiles, where he kept the utensils needed for distilling the wines of Angoulême which, as is well known, furnish all the brandies supposed to come from Cognac.

‘Why! It’s as good as being in a factory,’ said David. ‘Wood and basins, just what I need.’

‘Well, see you tomorrow,’ said old Séchard. ‘I’ll shut you in and let my two dogs loose. That way I’ll be sure no one will bring in any paper. Show me the sheets tomorrow and I declare I’ll be your partner. Then everything will be straight and above-board.’

Kolb and David let him shut them in and spent about two hours crushing and preparing the stalks with the help of a couple of planks. The fire burned bright and the water boiled. But at about two in the morning Kolb, less busy than David, heard a sound of heavy breathing which ended in a drunken hiccough. He took one of the two candles and began looking all around. Then he caught sight of old Séchard’s purple face blocking up a small square aperture cut out of the door leading from the store-room to the distilling-room and concealed behind empty casks. The wily old man had let his son and Kolb into the distilling-room through an outer door which was used for rolling out barrels for delivery. The inner door enabled puncheons to be rolled from the storeroom into the distillery without taking them round the courtyard.

‘Ah, Papa Séchard! You are tcheatink, you vant to svintle your son… Shall I tell you vat you’re toink ven you trink a pottle of goot vine? You are qvenchink ze tirst off a scountrel.’

‘Oh, father!’ said David.

‘I came to find out if you needed anything,’ said the vine-grower, almost sober by now.

‘And it iss for our sakes zat you haf brought a little latter?’ said Kolb, clearing the way to the door and opening it. The old man was in his shirt-sleeves and standing on a step-ladder.

‘You might break a limb!’ cried David.

‘I think I must be a sleep-walker,’ said the shamefaced
old man as he climbed down. ‘The way you don’t trust your father gave me bad dreams. I dreamt you were in league with the devil to do something that just can’t be done.’

‘Ze only tefil here iss your lof for little colt coinss,’ said Kolb.

‘Father, go back to bed,’ said David. ‘Shut us in if you like, but don’t bother to come back. Kolb will be on guard.’

At four o’clock David came out of the distilling-room after clearing away all traces of his operation and brought his father about thirty sheets of paper whose fineness, whiteness, consistency and strength left nothing to be desired and had as its water-mark the stronger and weaker threads of the hair-sieve. The old man took these samples and put his tongue to them like any old ‘bear’ accustomed since youth to use his palate as a test of paper. He felt them in his hands, crumpled them, folded them and tried out all the tests which typographers make on paper in order to assess its quality. Although he could find no fault, he was reluctant to admit defeat.

‘We must see how it stands up to the presses!’ he said, in order to avoid praising his son.

‘Vat a schtranche man!’ cried Kolb.

The vine-grower, now chilled down, made a pretence of hesitancy and covered it with a show of paternal dignity.

‘I don’t want to deceive you, father. I think that this paper is still likely to cost too dear, and I want to solve the problem of sizing it in the vat. That’s the only improvement I still have to make.’

‘Ho! Ho! You’re trying to take me in!’

‘However… can I tell you this much? I can certainly do the sizing in the vat, but so far the size doesn’t mix evenly with the pulp and makes the paper as rough as a brush.’

‘Very well, perfect your process of sizing in the vat and you shall have my money.’

‘My master vill nefer see ze colour of your money!’ said Kolb. It was evident that the old man wanted to pay David out for the humiliation he had suffered the previous night. His attitude grew even colder.

‘Father,’ said David after sending Kolb away. ‘I have never borne a grudge against you for having put an exorbitant
price on your printing-office and making me buy it on your own valuation. I have always remembered you were my father. I have said to myself: let an old man who has toiled hard and brought me up better than I had a right to expect enjoy the fruits of his labour in peace and in the way he likes. I even surrendered my mother’s estate to you and uncomplainingly accepted the debt-encumbered existence to which you reduced me. I promised myself I would make a fine fortune without being a burden to you. Well, I have been through fire and water to make my discovery and have made it, deprived of my daily bread and tortured with debts which I had not myself incurred. Yes, I have struggled on patiently until my strength was exhausted. You ought perhaps to come to my help… But don’t bother about me. Think of my wife and the little child!…’ (At this point David could not hold back his tears) ‘and give them aid and protection. Will you be less generous than Marion and Kolb who have given me their savings?’ As he made this appeal he saw that his father was as cold as one of his imposing-stones.

‘And you want more still?’ the old man exclaimed without feeling the slightest shame. ‘Why, you’d swallow up the whole of France… Nothing doing! I’m too ignorant to dabble in inventions. All the dabbling would be done on me. The “monkey” shan’t eat up the “bear”,’ he said, reverting to printing-office slang. ‘I’m a vine-grower, not a banker. And besides, mark my words, no good can come of father and son doing business together. Let’s have dinner – you shan’t say I don’t give you anything at all!…’

David was one of those men of intense feeling who thrust their sufferings deep down and hide them from those who are dear to them, so that when grief overflows, as his did now, they have reached the limit of endurance. Eve had well understood this trait in her husband’s fine character. But his father only looked on this flood of grief welling up from David’s heart as the commonplace wailings of a child trying to get his own way with his parents: he attributed his son’s extreme dejection to the shame born of failure. When they parted, father and son were at loggerheads.

David and Kolb were back about midnight in Angoulême
which they entered on foot as warily as thieves bent on burglary. At about one in the morning David slipped unobserved into Mademoiselle Basine Clerget’s house, the inviolable sanctuary his wife had prepared for him. Once inside, David was to be guarded by the most resourceful kind of compassion, that of a working-class girl. The next morning Kolb boasted that he had helped his master to escape on horseback and had only left him after seeing him into a public vehicle which was to take him to the environs of Limoges.

A considerable amount of raw material was stored in Basine’s cellar, so that Kolb, Marion, Madame Séchard and her mother need have no open contact with Mademoiselle Clerget.