Paris is the antechamber of Paradise. They tell me that you who write the newspapers can make, as they say, "fine weather and foul"; that is, you have things all your own way, and it's enough to ask your help to get any place, no matter what, under government. Now, though I have faculties, like others, I know myself: I have no education; I don't know how to write, and that's a misfortune, for I have ideas. I am not seeking, therefore, to be your rival; I judge myself, and I know I couldn't succeed there. But, as you are so powerful, and as we are almost brothers, having played together in childhood, I count upon you to launch me in a career and to protect me-- Oh, you MUST; I want a place, a place suitable to my capacity, to such as I am, a place were I can make my fortune.' Massol was just about to put his compatriot neck and crop out of the door with some brutal speech, when the rustic ended his appeal thus: 'I don't ask to enter the administration where people advance like tortoises--there's your cousin, who has stuck in one post for twenty years. No, I only want to make my debut.'--'On the stage?' asked Massol only too happy at that conclusion.--'No, though I have gesture enough, and figure, and memory. But there's too much wear and tear; I prefer the career of PORTER.' Massol kept his countenance, and replied: 'I think there's more wear and tear in that, but as your choice is made I'll see what I can do'; and he got him, as Ravenouillet says, his first 'cordon.'"
"I was the first master," said Leon, "to consider the race of porter.
You'll find knaves of morality, mountebanks of vanity, modern sycophants, septembriseurs, disguised in philanthropy, inventors of palpitating questions, preaching the emancipation of the negroes, improvement of little thieves, benevolence to liberated convicts, and who, nevertheless, leave their porters in a condition worse than that of the Irish, in holes more dreadful than a mud cabin, and pay them less money to live on than the State pays to support a convict. I have done but one good action in my life, and that was to build my porter a decent lodge."
"Yes," said Bixiou, "if a man, having built a great cage divided into thousands of compartments like the cells of a beehive or the dens of a menagerie, constructed to receive human beings of all trades and all kinds, if that animal, calling itself the proprietor, should go to a man of science and say: 'I want an individual of the bimanous species, able to live in holes full of old boots, pestiferous with rags, and ten feet square; I want him such that he can live there all his life, sleep there, eat there, be happy, get children as pretty as little cupids, work, toil, cultivate flowers, sing there, stay there, and live in darkness but see and know everything,' most assuredly the man of science could never have invented the porter to oblige the proprietor; Paris, and Paris only could create him, or, if you choose, the devil."
"Parisian creative powers have gone farther than that," said Gazonal;
"look at the workmen! You don't know all the products of industry, though you exhibit them. Our toilers fight against the toilers of the continent by force of misery, as Napoleon fought Europe by force of regiments."
"Here we are, at my friend the usurer's," said Bixiou. "His name is Vauvinet. One of the greatest mistakes made by writers who describe our manners and morals is to harp on old portraits. In these days all trades change. The grocer becomes a peer of France, artists capitalize their money, vaudevillists have incomes. A few rare beings may remain what they originally were, but professions in general have no longer either their special costume or their formerly fixed habits and ways.
In the past we had Gobseck, Gigounet, Samonon,--the last of the Romans; to-day we rejoice in Vauvinet, the good-fellow usurer, the dandy who frequents the greenroom and the lorettes, and drives about in a little coupe with one horse. Take special note of my man, friend Gazonal, and you'll see the comedy of money, the cold man who won't give a penny, the hot man who snuffs a profit; listen to him attentively!"
All three went up to the second floor of a fine-looking house on the boulevard des Italiens, where they found themselves surrounded by the elegances then in fashion. A young man about twenty-eight years of age advanced to meet them with a smiling face, for he saw Leon de Lora first. Vauvinet held out his hand with apparent friendliness to Bixiou, and bowed coldly to Gazonal as he motioned them to enter his office, where bourgeois taste was visible beneath the artistic appearance of the furniture, and in spite of the statuettes and the thousand other little trifles applied to our little apartments by modern art, which has made itself as small as its patrons.
Vauvinet was dressed, like other young men of our day who go into business, with extreme elegance, which many of them regard as a species of prospectus.
"I've come for some money," said Bixiou, laughing, and presenting his notes.
Vauvinet assumed a serious air, which made Gazonal smile, such difference was there between the smiling visage that received them and the countenance of the money-lender recalled to business.
"My dear fellow," said Vauvinet, looking at Bixiou, "I should certainly oblige you with the greatest pleasure, but I haven't any money to loan at the present time."
"Ah, bah!"
"No; I have given all I had to--you know who. That poor Lousteau went into partnership for the management of a theatre with an old vaudevillist who has great influence with the ministry, Ridal; and they came to me yesterday for thirty thousand francs. I'm cleaned out, and so completely that I was just in the act of sending to Cerizet for a hundred louis, when I lost at lansquenet this morning, at Jenny Cadine's."
"You must indeed me hard-up if you can't oblige this poor Bixiou," said Leon de Lora; "for he can be very sharp-tongued when he hasn't a sou."
"Well," said Bixiou, "I could never say anything but good of Vauvinet; he's full of goods."