The Human Comedy: Selected Stories by Honoré de Balzac
“You didn’t want to owe me anything,” he said. “But you give me gold for copper. You’re children . . . good children . . .”
Those three sentences, each spoken at a different pitch, bore different tonalities. The words were nothing, but the tone—oh! The tone turned us into decade-old friends in a moment.
Marcas had covered over his worksheets when he heard us approach, and we understood that it would be indiscreet to mention his livelihood; we were ashamed then to have spied on him. His closet stood open, revealing just two shirts, a white cravat, and a razor. The straight razor made me shudder. A mirror worth perhaps a few francs hung by the window. The man’s simple, spare gestures had a kind of primitive nobility. We looked at each other, Doctor and I, as if to determine what to say. Seeing me caught short, Juste asked jokingly, “Are you involved in literature, sir?”
“Certainly not!” Marcas answered. “I wouldn’t be this wealthy.”
“I thought,” I said, “that these days poetry was the only thing that could consign a man to a room as bad as ours.”
My sally made Marcas smile, and that smile warmed his yellow face. “Ambition is no less demanding for people who do not succeed,” he said. “So, you boys starting out in life: Stick to the beaten paths! Don’t aim high—it will be the end of you!”
“You advise us to stay just what we are?” Doctor smiled.
The banter of youth has such contagious, childlike charm that Juste’s teasing line made Marcas smile again.
“What experiences could have given you such a dreadful philosophy?” I asked him.
“Once again I forgot that chance is the result of an elaborate equation, and we cannot know all of its roots. When we start at zero on our way to one, the odds are incalculable. For ambitious people, Paris is one immense roulette wheel, and every young man believes he’s got the winning strategy.”
He offered us the tobacco I had brought him by way of inviting us to smoke with him. Doctor went to fetch our pipes; Marcas filled his own and then, carrying it, he came to sit at our place; in his room he had only a desk chair and his armchair. Nimble as a squirrel, Juste slipped downstairs and reappeared with a boy carrying three bottles of Bordeaux, a slice of Brie, and some bread.
“Well,” I said to myself, “that’s fifteen francs right there!” And indeed, Juste gravely laid a hundred sous in change on the mantelpiece.
There are immeasurable differences between social man and the man who lives as close as possible to nature. Once he was captured, Toussaint Louverture died without uttering another word. Napoleon, on his rock, babbled like a magpie; he kept trying to explain himself. Z. Marcas committed the same error, but for our sake alone. Silence and all its majesty are found only in the savage. There is no criminal who, given the chance to drop his secrets into the bloody basket along with his head, doesn’t instead feel the purely social need to tell them to somebody. No, I’m wrong: We have seen one of those Iroquois from the Faubourg Saint-Marceau raise Parisian character to the level of the savage’s: A man—a Republican, a conspirator, a Frenchman, an old man—outdid everything we knew of an African’s resolve, and anything Fenimore Cooper ascribed to the redskins in the way of calm disdain in the midst of defeat. Morey, that Cuauhtémoc of the Montagne Sainte-Geneviève, maintained a posture unseen in the annals of European justice.
This is what Marcas told us that morning, interlacing his tale with tartines smeared with cheese and moistened by wine. All the tobacco disappeared. Occasionally carriages crossing place de l’Odéon and buses trundling around it would send up their dim rumble to us, as if to attest that Paris was still there.
His family was from Vitré; his father and mother lived on fifteen hundred francs a year. Marcas was educated tuition-free in a seminary, then refused to become a priest: He felt inside himself the flame of a huge ambition, and he came on foot to Paris at the age of twenty with two hundred francs in his pocket. He read law, working the while at an attorney’s office where he rose to chief clerk. He took his doctorate in law; he knew the old and the new codes; he could more than match the most illustrious barristers. He knew The Law of Nations and was familiar with all the European treaties and international customs. He had studied men and events in five capital cities: London, Berlin, Vienna, Petersburg, and Constantinople. No one knew legislative precedent better than he; for five years he had reported on the chambers for a daily newspaper. He could improvise; he spoke admirably and at length in that deep, rich voice that had struck us to the soul. Telling the story of his life, he showed himself a great orator, concise and grave, with a penetrating eloquence. He had Berryer’s qualities of warmth, his impulses to appeal to the masses; he had Monsieur Thiers’s finesse and skill, but he would have rambled less, been less awkward in his closings. He expected to move rapidly into power without becoming tangled in doctrines, which may initially be necessary for a man of the opposition but which can burden a statesman later on.
Marcas had learned everything a true statesman must know, so he was astonished when he witnessed the profound ignorance of those already established in public service. For him such a vocation meant study, but nature had also been generous, granting him much that cannot be acquired by study alone: a lively grasp, insight, self-discipline, a supple mind, swift judgment, decisiveness, and—the special genius of such figures—fertile resourcefulness.
When he felt adequately prepared, Marcas returned to France but to a country wracked by internal divisions born of the triumph of the Orléans branch over the elder Bourbon branch. Clearly the political battleground is different. Civil war in France cannot last for long now, and it will not be waged in the provinces; from now on struggle will be brief, fought right at the seat of government, and it will end the intellectual struggle that superior minds fought in the past. This state of affairs will persist as long as France has this singular political system, which is unlike that of any other country; there is no more equivalence between the English government and ours than there is between the two nation’s physical terrains.
So Marcas’s place was in the political press. As a poor man, and thus unable to stand for election, he would have to give prompt evidence of his abilities. He decided on the most costly sacrifice a superior man can make: to work under some rich, ambitious deputy. Like a new Bonaparte, he sought his Barras; like Colbert, he hoped to find a Mazarin. He rendered enormous service and rendered it promptly; he made no display of it, he never boasted, he never complained of ingratitude; he rendered service in the hope that his deputy would make it possible for Marcas to be elected deputy himself. All Marcas wanted was a loan to buy a house in Paris, to meet the requirements of the election law. All Richard III wanted was a horse.
Within three years, Marcas built his man into one of the country’s fifty would-be power centers: the racquets which a couple of shrewd players wield to bat cabinet posts back and forth, the way a puppeteer knocks Punch and the Constable about in his little theater stall, always with profit in mind. This man only existed through Marcas’s skill, but he was intelligent enough to appreciate his aide’s value, to know that once Marcas came to the fore he would remain there as an indispensable figure, whereas he himself would be relegated to the antipodes of the Luxembourg Palace. He therefore set impossible obstacles in Marcas’s path to advancement and masked his strategy with protestations of heartfelt devotion. Like all small men, he was expert at dissembling; then he moved ahead in the ingratitude game: He had to kill Marcas so as not to be killed by him. These two men, seemingly so close, hated each other once the one had tricked the other.
The politician was named to a ministry; Marcas stayed behind with the opposition forces to keep them from attacking his man—and he even managed, by an ingenious maneuver, to win him their praise. To avoid rewarding his lieutenant, the new minister claimed that obviously he could not, suddenly and without some subtle preparations, appoint a man so strongly identified with the opposition. Marcas had counted on the appointment to enable him to marry and to quali
Any fallen minister seeking to return to power must arrange to look formidable; this man, drunk on royal flattery, had believed his position would last a long while. Now, however, he acknowledged his wrongdoing and did a small financial favor for Marcas, who had gone into debt during their quarrel: He underwrote the journal Marcas worked on and had him appointed editor in chief. Thus Marcas was indirectly subsidized as well, and although he despised the man, he agreed to an apparent alliance with him. Without yet revealing all the many aspects of his excellence, Marcas advanced farther than he had the first time around while using only half his skills. The new government lasted a mere hundred and eighty days before it was swallowed up. But Marcas had been working closely with a few deputies, manipulated them like pastry dough, and left them all with a lofty idea of his talents. His puppet-chief was again named to a ministry, and the newspaper became a ministerial organ.
The man then merged the paper with another, solely in order to do away with Marcas, who in the merger was forced to give over to a rich, insolent rival with a well-known name and one foot already in the stirrup. Marcas fell back into the direst poverty; his patron/protégé was fully aware of the abyss into which he had thrown his aide. Where could he go? The governmental journals, quietly warned off, would have nothing to do with him. The opposition papers were unwilling to take him on. Marcas could join neither the Republicans nor the Legitimists, two parties whose victory would mean the upending of the current situation.
“Ambitious men love current events,” he told us with a smile.
He managed a living by writing an occasional article on business; he worked at one of the encyclopedias produced out of speculation rather than learning. Finally someone started a paper that was destined only to publish for two years but which sought out Marcas as editor. He renewed his acquaintance with his minister’s enemies; he joined the faction that sought to bring down the government; and once his own pickax set to work, the administration was overthrown.
When we met, it was already six months since Marcas’s paper had gone under; he had not found another position anywhere. He was reputed to be a dangerous man; the calumny gnawed at him that he had just killed off an enormous financial and industrial operation with a few articles and a pamphlet. He was called the mouthpiece of a banker who was said to have paid him extremely well and from whom he could supposedly expect some favors in return for his dedication. Disgusted with men and politics, wearied by a five-year struggle, Marcas—viewed rather as a mercenary soldier than as a great captain, broken by the need to make a living which kept him from making other headway, despairing over the influence of money on thought, gripped by severe poverty—withdrew into his garret, earning thirty sous a day as the absolute lowest sum required for his needs. Meditation stretched a kind of wilderness around him. Now he had to read the papers to keep current with events; Pozzo di Borgo had lived in that condition for a period. Marcas was probably plotting some serious attack, learning to cover his tracks and punishing himself for his mistakes by living in Pythagorean silence; he didn’t tell us the reasons for his behavior.
It is impossible to describe the scenes of high comedy that lay beneath this algebraic account of his life: the futile rituals offered at the feet of elusive Fortune, the long chases through the Parisian underbrush, the endless errands of a panting petitioner, the efforts spent wooing idiots, the elaborate projects that finally miscarried because of some foolish woman, the meetings with shopkeepers who expected their investments to bring them not only sizable interest but a box at the theater and a peerage besides, the hopes that rose to a crest then crashed onto a rocky reef, miracles worked to bring together opposing interests in projects that functioned well for a week and then fell apart, the vexation time and again of seeing a fool decorated with the Legion of Honor (a fellow as ignorant as an errand boy preferred over a man of talent), and then what Marcas called the stratagems of stupidity: You hit on a prospect, he seems convinced, he nods, it is all coming together, and then the next morning the rubber wad that was momentarily molded into a useful shape has regained its old form overnight—it’s even become inflated and the whole business must begin over again. You keep reworking it until you recognize that what you are dealing with is not a man but some gummy mass that dries out in the sun. These thousand setbacks, this huge waste of human energy poured onto barren terrain, underscores the difficulty of doing good, the incredible ease of doing ill: two major games played, twice won and twice lost; the hatred of a statesman, a blockhead with a face painted on it, and a wig, but a figure people believed in—all those large and small things had not undone Marcas but only temporarily knocked him down. On days when money came in, his hands never held on to it; he afforded himself the heavenly pleasure of sending it all on to his family—to his sisters, his brothers, his old father. He himself, like the fallen Napoleon, needed only thirty sous a day to live, and any energetic fellow can make thirty sous a day in Paris.
When Marcas had finished recounting the story of his life, interspersed with reflections, maxims, and observations that bespoke a great politician, a few more queries and discussions among us on the direction of matters in France and Europe sufficed to persuade us that Marcas was indeed a true statesman—for the quality of a man can be promptly and readily measured when he consents to step onto the terrain of problems: Certain shibboleths can reveal a superior person, and we belonged to the tribe of modern Levites without yet dwelling in the temple. As I have said, our frivolous life was a cover for plans that Juste, for his part, has already carried out; mine will soon come to pass.
After our exchange, we all three left the house, and despite the cold we went to walk a little before dinner in the Luxembourg Gardens. Our discussion, still somber, touched on the painful points of the political situation. Each of us had his own view, observation, statement, jest, or maxim. The talk wasn’t only of life at the colossal scale laid out before us by Marcas, the veteran of political battle, nor was it the horrible monologue of the shipwrecked navigator cast up in the garret atop the Hotel Corneille; rather, it was a conversation in which two thoughtful young men, having come to a judgment on their times, were exploring their own futures under the guidance of an accomplished man.
“Why,” Juste asked him, “did you not bide your time and follow the example of the only man to emerge since the July Revolution, by always just keeping his head above water?”
“Haven’t I said that we never know all the roots of chance? Carrel was in exactly the same position as the orator you mean: Carrel the morose young man, that bitter character, carried a whole government in his head; the one you are talking about had just one idea—to climb onto the rump of every event as it came along. Of the two, Carrel was the better man. Well, the one became a government minister, and Carrel remained a journalist; that incomplete but shrewd fellow, the minister, is still alive, but Carrel is dead. I would point out that that fellow has spent fifteen years making his way, and he has still only partly made it; he could get caught anytime and ground up between two carts on the high road. He has no home; he hasn’t a palace, a stronghold of royal favor, like Metternich, nor like Villèle the sheltering roof of a reliable majority. I don’t believe the present situation will still exist in ten years. So supposing such a sorry good fortune, I am too late; in order not to be swept aside in the upheaval I foresee, I would have to be already established in a high position.”
“What upheaval?” Juste asked.
“August 1830,” Marcas answered in solemn tones, stretching a hand toward Paris. “August—the child born of Youth, who tied up the sheaves of grain, and of Intellect, who had cultivated the harvest—August 1830 failed to provide for youth and intellect. Youth is going to explode like the boiler of a steam engine. Youth has no