The Human Comedy (39 page)

Now I will tell you the rest of the story, including some elements that emerged over the course of time, and details I later grasped through Gobseck’s insight, or my own.

When Comte de Restaud appeared to plunge into a whirl of dissipation and to squander his fortune, something occurred between the two spouses whose nature will never be known, but which caused the count to judge his wife still more unfavorably than before. Once he fell ill and was forced to take to his bed, he made clear his aversion to the countess and to her two younger children: He forbade them to enter his bedroom, and when they tried to evade the rule, their disobedience brought on crises so dangerous for his condition that the doctor urged the countess not to infringe on her husband’s orders.

Madame de Restaud had watched the family’s land and properties, even the mansion where she lived, pass successively into Gobseck’s hands—Gobseck who, in regard to their fortune, embodied the fantastical figure of an ogre—and she surely grasped her husband’s intentions. Monsieur de Trailles, being rather too vigorously pursued by his creditors, had gone off traveling in England. He alone might have explained to the countess what secret precautions against her Gobseck had suggested her husband take. It is said she long resisted giving her signature as the law requires for any sale of family holdings, but her husband did finally obtain it. The countess believed he was liquidating all his property, and that whatever small amount of money was so far realized probably lay in a safe somewhere in a notary’s office or perhaps in the Bank of France. But she figured that the count must have kept with him some document that would eventually allow the eldest son to recover any estate the count still owned. She therefore established a strict surveillance zone around her husband’s room. She reigned as a despot in the house, which was subjected to her feminine espionage. She spent the entire day in the parlor adjoining his bedroom, where she could hear his faintest words and slightest movements. At night, she had a bed laid for her in the parlor, and she barely slept. The doctor was in full accord with her concerns: Her devotion seemed admirable. With a cunning natural to a schemer she managed to disguise her husband’s revulsion for her and was so persuasive in feigning sorrow over it that she won a kind of fame. Some prudes even conceded that she was redeeming her sins. But constantly before her eyes loomed a vision of the poverty that lay in store for her upon the count’s death if her presence of mind should flag for a moment. And so this woman, driven from the sickbed where her husband lay groaning, drew a magic circle around it. Distant from him and near to him, in disgrace and all-powerful, the apparently devoted wife lay in wait for death and fortune, like that insect that carves a spiral pit in soft earth and waits at the bottom for its doomed prey, listening for any falling grain of sand. Even the harshest critic couldn’t refuse to acknowledge that the countess carried motherly concern to an extreme. People said her own father’s death had been a lesson to her. She adored her children; she had kept the spectacle of her misdeeds hidden from them, and their young age allowed her to achieve her goal—to have them love her. She had given them the finest, the most brilliant education. I confess that I couldn’t help but feel admiration and pity for this woman, and Gobseck still teases me about it. By then, the countess had come to acknowledge Maxime’s low character, and with tears of blood she was repenting the sins of her past life. I do believe that. However odious the steps she took to regain her husband’s wealth, were they not dictated by maternal love and by the desire to repair the wrongs she had done her children? Then, too, like many women who have suffered the storms of a passion, she may have felt the need to return to a virtuous life. Perhaps she only learned the price of that virtue when she came to gather the bitter harvest sown by her errors.

Each time young Ernest stepped out of his father’s room, the countess put him through an inquisitorial interrogation about everything the count had said and done. The boy lent himself willingly to his mother’s questions, which he attributed to loving concern, and he would reply with more than she even asked.

My visit was a sudden revelation for the countess; she saw me as the agent of the count’s vengeful actions, and she determined I should not come near the dying man. Impelled by some dark foreboding, I was very anxious to talk with Monsieur de Restaud, for I was uneasy about the fate of the counter deed. If it fell into the countess’s hands she could turn it to her own uses, and that would lead to endless lawsuits between her and Gobseck. I knew the moneylender well enough to be certain that he would never return the properties to the countess, and there were many complicated elements in the structure of these title transfers that only I could navigate. In hopes of heading off a horde of troubles, I went to see the countess a second time.

I have noticed, madame (Derville said to the viscountess as if confiding a secret), certain behaviors to which we pay too little attention in society. By nature I am an observer, and as I handle certain business matters where human passions come very sharply into play, I automatically bring an analytic eye to bear. Now, I often see, always with fresh surprise, that two adversaries more often than not sense one another’s hidden motives and ideas. Between enemies, you sometimes find a similar lucidity of mind, the same sort of intellectual insight, as between lovers reading each other’s soul.

So when the countess and I met this time, I suddenly understood the reason for her antipathy toward me, however well she concealed her feelings beneath her graceful civility and consideration: I had been forced on her as a confidant; I knew her secret, and it is impossible for a woman not to hate a man in whose presence she blushes. From her standpoint, she guessed that while I was the person in whom her husband had put his trust, he had not yet handed me his fortune. Our conversation, which I will spare you, I will always remember as one of the most dangerous struggles I have ever known. The countess, whom nature endowed with the qualities required for irresistible seduction, was in turn supple and proud, cajoling and confident; she even went so far as to try to pique my interest, to waken love in my heart, so as to dominate me. She failed. When I bade her good night I caught a look of hatred and fury that made me shudder. We parted enemies. She would have liked to annihilate me, and I . . . I felt pity for her, and to certain personalities that response is the cruelest insult. The same feelings colored my parting remarks. I believe I left her with a deep dread in her soul when I told her that however she went about matters, she was bound to lose everything.

“If I could meet with the count,” I told her, “at least your children’s well-being would—”

“I would be at your mercy,” she cut in with revulsion.

Now that the issues were so frankly set out between us, I resolved to save that family from the destitution that lay ahead of them. I was determined even to commit legal improprieties if need be to accomplish my goal, and this is how I prepared for it: I brought suit against the Count de Restaud for moneys he supposedly owed to Gobseck, and I won a judgment. The countess naturally kept the outcome quiet, but I now had acquired the right to seal the premises immediately upon the count’s death. I then bribed one of the house staff, who promised to come fetch me when his master was about to expire, even in the middle of the night, so that I could step in immediately, frighten the countess by threatening to seal her house, and thus salvage the counter deed. I later learned that the woman had been studying the civil code as she sat listening to the moans of her dying husband. What frightful images would be produced by the souls of people hovering around deathbeds, if only we could paint thoughts! And money is always the impelling motive for schemes being conceived, plans taking shape, plots being woven! But we can leave aside some of these details, which are fairly tedious in themselves, though they would offer some sense of the woman’s miseries, and her husband’s too, as well as a glimpse into the secrets of similar households.

For two months Count de Restaud, resigned to his fate, lay in bed, alone in his room. A fatal illness slowly enfeebled his body and spirit. In the grip of an invalid’s bizarre imaginings, he refused to let his room be tidied and rejected any sort of care, even bed-making. This extreme apathy was imprinted on everything around him: The furniture in the room stood in disarray, dust and spiderwebs covered the most delicate objects. This previously elegant man, so fastidious in his refined tastes, was content now to fester in the sorry spectacle of that room where the mantelpiece, the desk, the chairs were piled with a jumble of sickroom objects: pillboxes empty or full, smeared flasks, scattered undergarments, cracked plates, an open warming pan on the hearth, a bathtub full of old mineral water. The sense of destruction spoke in every detail of this repellent chaos. Death had become apparent in objects before it invaded the person. The count could not bear daylight, so the window blinds were pulled shut and the darkness added still more to the gloom of the sad place. The invalid had grown very thin. His eyes still shone; life seemed to have taken its last refuge there. The livid whiteness of his face was horrible, and was made starker yet by the great length of his hair—he would not let it be cut and it hung in long flat hanks along his cheeks. He looked like a crazed desert hermit. Bitter sorrow had killed off all the natural human impulses in this man, barely fifty years old, a man the whole city had known as so brilliant, so blessed.

Early one morning in December 1824, he looked up at his son Ernest who was sitting at the foot of his bed gazing at him in sorrow. “Are you in pain, Father?” the young viscount asked.

“No!” the man replied with a frightening smile. “It is all here, and here around my heart!” He pointed to his head, then pressed his fleshless fingers to his bony chest, in a gesture that sent Ernest into tears.

“Maurice, why hasn’t Monsieur Derville come to see me?” the count suddenly demanded of his manservant, who he believed was deeply attached to him but who was instead thoroughly caught up in the countess’s interests. “What is this, Maurice!” cried the dying man. Abruptly he sat up in bed and seemed to have recovered all his presence of mind. “I’ve sent you to fetch my lawyer seven or eight times these past two weeks, and he’s still not come. Do you think you can play games with me? Go find him right now, this minute, and bring him back. If you don’t carry out my orders I will get up and go myself!”

“Madame,” the servant said as he left the bedchamber, “you heard the count. What should I do?”

“Pretend to go to the attorney’s office, then come back and tell monsieur that his counsel has gone forty leagues away on an important case. You can add that he is expected back at the end of the week.”

To herself she thought, “Sick people are often deluded about their condition; he’ll wait for the fellow to return.” The doctor had declared the night before that the count was unlikely to live another day.

When the houseman returned two hours later and told his master the heartbreaking news, the dying man grew agitated. “Ah, my Lord! My Lord!” he kept repeating. “I trust in You alone!”

He gazed at his son for a long while, and finally, his voice grown still weaker, he said, “Ernest, my child, you are very young, but you have a good heart. I’m sure you understand that a promise to a dying man, to a father, is a sacred thing. Do you feel you could keep a secret, could bury it so deep inside yourself that even your mother would never suspect you are hiding something? My son, you are now the only one in this house who I can rely on. You won’t betray my secret?”

“No, Father!”

“Well then, Ernest, in a few moments I will give you a sealed packet that belongs to Monsieur Derville. You must keep it safe in a way that no one will know you even have it. Then later you must slip out of the house and put it into the little mailbox at the end of the street.”

“Yes, Father.”

“Come kiss me. You will be making my death less bitter, my darling boy. In six or seven years, you’ll understand the importance of this secret, and you will be well rewarded for your skill and loyalty today. You’ll know then how much I love you. Leave me now for a moment, and keep absolutely everyone—no matter who—from coming in here.”

Ernest left the bedchamber and found his mother standing in the salon. “Ernest,” she said to him, “come here.” She sat down and, taking her son between her knees and pressing him hard to her heart, she kissed him. “Ernest, your father just told you something.”

“Yes, Mama.”

“What did he tell you?”

“I may not repeat it, Mama.”

“Oh, my darling boy,” cried the countess, kissing him again with enthusiasm, “what pleasure it gives me to see how discreet you can be! Never lie, and always keep your word: Those are two principles you must never forget.”

“How beautiful you are, Mama! You’ve never lied, not you! I’m sure you never have.”

“There have been times, dear Ernest, when I lied. Yes, I have sometimes broken my word, in circumstances where all the laws break down. Listen, my Ernest—you are old enough, sensible enough, to see how your father drives me away from him, refuses to let me care for him, and that is not natural, for you know how much I love him.”

“Yes, Mama.”

“My poor child,” the countess said, weeping, “this terrible situation comes from lying insinuations. Wicked people have tried their best to separate me from your father, for their own greed. They want to do us out of our money and take it for themselves. If your father were well, the discord between us would soon disappear, he would listen to me, and he is a good, loving man, so he would recognize his error. But his mind is disturbed, and his suspicions against me have hardened into a kind of madness—it stems from his sickness. His preference for you lately is another sign of his confusion: Before he fell ill you never felt that he loved Pauline and Georges any less than you. Everything is caprice with him now. This special attachment he feels for you could give him the idea of asking you to do special errands for him. If you don’t want to ruin the family, my dear angel, if you don’t want to see your mother begging for her bread one day like a pauper, you must tell her everything—”