that his wife is his fortune; she is an indispensable chattel, but a wife takes a second place in the high-pressure life of a political leader and great capitalist. He once said in my hearing that Bonaparte had blundered like a bourgeois in his early relations with Josephine; and that after he had had the spirit to use her as a stepping-stone, he had made himself ridiculous by trying to make a companion of her.”
“Any man of unusual powers is bound to take Oriental views of women,” said Blondet.
“The Baron blended the opinions of East and West in a charming Parisian creed. He abhorred de Marsay; de Marsay was unmanageable, but with Rastignac he was much pleased; he exploited him, though Rastignac was not aware of it. All the burdens of married life were put on him. Rastignac bore the brunt of Delphine’s whims; he escorted her to the Bois de Boulogne; he went with her to the play; and the little politician and great man of to-day spent a good deal of his life at that time in writing dainty notes. Eugene was scolded for little nothings from the first; he was in good spirits when Delphine was cheerful, and drooped when she felt low; he bore the weight of her confidences and her ailments; he gave up his time, the hours of his precious youth, to fill the empty void of that fair Parisian’s idleness. Delphine and he held high councils on the toilettes which went best together; he stood the fire of bad temper and broadsides of pouting fits, while she, by way of trimming the balance, was very nice to the Baron. As for the Baron, he laughed in his sleeve; but whenever he saw that Rastignac was bending under the strain of the burden, he made ‘as if he suspected something,’ and reunited the lovers by a common dread.”
“I can imagine that a wealthy wife would have put Rastignac in the way of a living, and an honorable living, but where did he pick up his fortune?” asked Couture. “A fortune so considerable as his at the present day must come from somewhere; and nobody ever accused him of inventing a good stroke of business.”
“Somebody left it to him,” said Finot.
“Who?” asked Blondet.
“Some fool that he came across,” suggested Couture.
“He did not steal the whole of it, my little dears,” said Bixiou.
“Let not your terrors rise to fever-heat,
Our age is lenient with those who cheat.
Now, I will tell you about the beginnings of his fortune. In the first place, honor to talent! Our friend is not a ‘chap,’ as Finot describes him, but a gentleman in the English sense, who knows the cards and knows the game; whom, moreover, the gallery respects. Rastignac has quite as much intelligence as is needed at a given moment, as if a soldier should make his courage payable at ninety days’ sight, with three witnesses and guarantees. He may seem captious, wrong-headed, inconsequent, vacillating, and without any fixed opinions; but let something serious turn up, some combination to scheme out, he will not scatter himself like Blondet here, who chooses these occasions to look at things from his neighbor’s point of view. Rastignac concentrates himself, pulls himself together, looks for the point to carry by storm, and goes full tilt for it. He charges like a Murat, breaks squares, pounds away at shareholders, promoters, and the whole shop, and returns, when the breach is made, to his lazy, careless life. Once more he becomes the man of the South, the man of pleasure, the trifling, idle Rastignac. He has earned the right of lying in bed till noon because a crisis never finds him asleep.”
“So far so good, but just get to his fortune,” said Finot.
“Bixiou will lash that off at a stroke,” replied Blondet. “Rastignac’s fortune was Delphine de Nucingen, a remarkable woman; she combines boldness with foresight.”
“Did she ever lend you money?” inquired Bixiou. Everybody burst out laughing.
“You are mistaken in her,” said Couture, speaking to Blondet; “her cleverness simply consists in making more or less piquant remarks, in loving Rastignac with tedious fidelity, and obeying him blindly. She is a regular Italian.”
“Money apart,” Andoche Finot put in sourly.
“Oh, come, come,” said Bixiou coaxingly; “after what we have just been saying, will you venture to blame poor Rastignac for living at the expense of the firm of Nucingen, for being installed in furnished rooms precisely as La Torpille was once installed by our friend des Lupeaulx? You would sink to the vulgarity of the Rue Saint-Denis! First of all, ‘in the abstract,’ as Royer-Collard says, the question may abide the Kritik of Pure Reason; as for the impure reason – ”
“There he goes!” said Finot, turning to Blondet.
“But there is reason in what he says,” exclaimed Blondet. “The problem is a very old one; it was the grand secret of the famous duel between La Chataigneraie and Jarnac. It was cast up to Jarnac that he was on good terms with his mother-in-law, who, loving him only too well, equipped him sumptuously. When a thing is so true, it ought not to be said. Out of devotion to Henry II., who permitted himself this slander, La Chataigneraie took it upon himself, and there followed the duel which enriched the French language with the expression coup de Jarnac.”
“Oh! does it go so far back? Then it is noble?” said Finot.
“As a proprietor of newspapers and reviews of old standing, you are not bound to know that,” said Blondet.
“There are women,” Bixiou gravely resumed, “and for that matter, men too, who can cut their lives in two and give away but one-half. (Remark how I word my phrase for you in humanitarian language.) For these, all material interests lie without the range of sentiment. They give their time, their life, their honor to a woman, and hold that between themselves it is not the thing to meddle with bits of tissue paper bearing the legend, ‘Forgery is punishable with death.’ And equally they will take nothing from a woman. Yes, the whole thing is debased if fusion of interests follows on fusion of souls. This is a doctrine much preached, and very seldom practised.”
“Oh, what rubbish!” cried Blondet. “The Marechal de Richelieu understood something of gallantry, and he settled an allowance of a thousand louis d’or on Mme. de la Popeliniere after that affair of the hiding-place behind the hearth. Agnes Sorel, in all simplicity, took her fortune to Charles VII., and the King accepted it. Jacques Coeur kept the crown for France; he was allowed to do it, and woman-like, France was ungrateful.”
“Gentlemen,” said Bixiou, “a love that does not imply an indissoluble friendship, to my thinking, is momentary libertinage. What sort of entire surrender is it that keeps something back? Between these two diametrically opposed doctrines, the one as profoundly immoral as the other, there is no possible compromise. It seems to me that any shrinking from a complete union is surely due to a belief that the union cannot last, and if so, farewell to illusion. The passion that does not believe that it will last for ever is a hideous thing. (Here is pure unadulterated Fenelon for you!) At the same time, those who know the world, the observer, the man of the world, the wearers of irreproachable gloves and ties, the men who do not blush to marry a woman for her money, proclaim the necessity of a complete separation of sentiment and interest. The other sort are lunatics that love and imagine that they and the woman they love are the only two beings in the world; for them millions are dirt; the glove or the camellia flower that She wore is worth millions. If the squandered filthy lucre is never to be found again in their possession, you find the remains of floral relics hoarded in dainty cedar-wood boxes. They cannot distinguish themselves one from the other; for them there is no ‘I’ left. Thou– that is their Word made flesh. What can you do? Can you stop the course of this ‘hidden disease of the heart’? There are fools that love without calculation and wise men that calculate while they love.”
“To my thinking Bixiou is sublime,” cried Blondet. “What does Finot say to it?”
