am engaged, father.”
“David, you know nothing of business; you will ruin yourself, I see. Yes, if you marry this girl out of L’Houmeau, I shall square accounts and summons you for the rent, for I see that no good will come of this. Oh! my presses, my poor presses! it took some money to grease you and keep you going. Nothing but a good year can comfort me after this.”
“It seems to me, father, that until now I have given you very little trouble——”
“And paid mighty little rent,” put in his parent.
“I came to ask you something else besides. Will you build a second floor to your house, and some rooms above the shed?”
“Deuce a bit of it; I have not the cash, and that you know right well. Besides, it would be money thrown clean away, for what would it bring in? Oh! you get up early of a morning to come and ask me to build you a place that would ruin a king, do you? Your name may be David, but I have not got Solomon’s treasury. Why, you are mad! or they changed my child at nurse. There is one for you that will have grapes on it,” he said, interrupting himself to point out a shoot. “Offspring of this sort don’t disappoint their parents; you dung the vines, and they repay you for it. I sent you to school; I spent any amount of money to make a scholar of you; I sent you to the Didots to learn your business; and all this fancy education ends in a daughter-in-law out of L’Houmeau without a penny to her name. If you had not studied books, if I had kept you under my eye, you would have done as I pleased, and you would be marrying a miller’s widow this day with a hundred thousand francs in hand, to say nothing of the mill. Oh! your cleverness leads you to imagine that I am going to reward this fine sentiment by building palaces for you, does it?... Really, anybody might think that the house that has been a house these two hundred years was nothing but a pigsty, not fit for the girl out of L’Houmeau to sleep in! What next! She is the Queen of France, I suppose.”
“Very well, father, I will build the second floor myself; the son will improve his father’s property. It is not the usual way, but it happens so sometimes.”
“What, my lad! you can find money for building, can you, though you can’t find money to pay the rent, eh! You sly dog, to come round your father.”
The question thus raised was hard to lay, for the old man was only too delighted to seize an opportunity of posing as a good father without disbursing a penny; and all that David could obtain was his bare consent to the marriage and free leave to do what he liked in the house—at his own expense; the old “bear,” that pattern of a thrifty parent, kindly consenting not to demand the rent and drain the savings to which David imprudently owned. David went back again in low spirits. He saw that he could not reckon on his father’s help in misfortune.
In Angouleme that day people talked of nothing but the Bishop’s epigram and Mme. de Bargeton’s reply. Every least thing that happened that evening was so much exaggerated and embellished and twisted out of all knowledge, that the poet became the hero of the hour. While this storm in a teacup raged on high, a few drops fell among the bourgeoisie; young men looked enviously after Lucien as he passed on his way through Beaulieu, and he overheard chance phrases that filled him with conceit.
“There is a lucky young fellow!” said an attorney’s clerk, named Petit-Claud, a plain-featured youth who had been at school with Lucien, and treated him with small, patronizing airs.
“Yes, he certainly is,” answered one of the young men who had been present on the occasion of the reading; “he is a good-looking fellow, he has some brains, and Mme. de Bargeton is quite wild about him.”
Lucien had waited impatiently until he could be sure of finding Louise alone. He had to break the tidings of his sister’s marriage to the arbitress of his destinies. Perhaps after yesterday’s soiree, Louise would be kinder than usual, and her kindness might lead to a moment of happiness. So he thought, and he was not mistaken; Mme. de Bargeton met him with a vehemence of sentiment that seemed like a touching progress of passion to the novice in love. She abandoned her hands, her beautiful golden hair, to the burning kisses of the poet who had passed through such an ordeal.
“If only you could have seen your face whilst you were reading,” cried Louise, using the familiar tu, the caress of speech, since yesterday, while her white hands wiped the pearls of sweat from the brows on which she set a poet’s crown. “There were sparks of fire in those beautiful eyes! From your lips, as I watched them, there fell the golden chains that suspend the hearts of men upon the poet’s mouth. You shall read Chenier through to me from beginning to end; he is the lover’s poet. You shall not be unhappy any longer; I will not have it. Yes, dear angel, I will make an oasis for you, there you shall live your poet’s life, sometimes busy, sometimes languid; indolent, full of work, and musing by turns; but never forget that you owe your laurels to me, let that thought be my noble guerdon for the sufferings which I must endure. Poor love! the world will not spare me any more than it has spared you; the world is avenged on all happiness in which it has no share. Yes, I shall always be a mark for envy—did you not see that last night? The bloodthirsty insects are quick enough to drain every wound that they pierce. But I was happy; I lived. It is so long since all my heartstrings vibrated.”
The tears flowed fast, and for all answer Lucien took Louise’s hand and gave it a lingering kiss. Every one about him soothed and caressed the poet’s vanity; his mother and his sister and David and Louise now did the same. Every one helped to raise the imaginary pedestal on which he had set himself. His friends’s kindness and the fury of his enemies combined to establish him more firmly in an unreal world. A young imagination readily falls in with the flattering estimates of others, a handsome young fellow so full of promise finds others eager to help him on every side, and only after one or two sharp and bitter lessons does he begin to see himself as an ordinary mortal.
“My beautiful Louise, do you mean in very truth to be my Beatrice, a Beatrice who condescends to be loved?”
Louise raised the fine eyes, hitherto down-dropped.
“If you show yourself worthy—some day!” she said, with an angelic smile which belied her words. “Are you not happy? To be the sole possessor of a heart, to speak freely at all times, with the certainty of being understood, is not this happiness?”
“Yes,” he answered, with a lover’s pout of vexation.
“Child!” she exclaimed, laughing at him. “Come, you have something to tell me, have you not? You came in absorbed in thought, my Lucien.”
Lucien, in fear and trembling, confided to his beloved that David was in love with his sister Eve, and that his sister Eve was in love with David, and that the two were to be married shortly.
“Poor Lucien!” said Louise, “he was afraid he should be beaten and scolded, as if it was he himself that was going to be married! Why, where is the harm?” she continued, her fingers toying with Lucien’s hair. “What is your family to me when you are an exception? Suppose that my father were to marry his cook, would that trouble you much? Dear boy, lovers are for each other their whole family. Have I a greater interest than my Lucien in the world? Be great, find the way to win fame, that is our affair!”
This selfish answer made Lucien the happiest of mortals. But in the middle of the fantastic reasonings, with which Louise convinced him that they two were alone in the world, in came M. de Bargeton. Lucien frowned and seemed to be taken aback, but Louise made him a sign, and asked him to stay to dinner and to read Andre de Chenier aloud to them until people arrived for their evening game at cards.
“You will give her pleasure,” said M. de Bargeton, “and me also. Nothing suits me better than listening to reading
