A charming movement of the head was her only answer.
“Even if he were very poor?”
Again the same mute answer.
“What nonsense are you talking, you two?” exclaimed Mme. Vauquer.
“Never mind,” answered Eugene; “we understand each other.”
“So there is to be an engagement of marriage between M. le Chevalier Eugene de Rastignac and Mlle. Victorine Taillefer, is there?” The words were uttered in Vautrin’s deep voice, and Vautrin appeared at the door as he spoke.
“Oh! how you startled me!” Mme. Couture and Mme. Vauquer exclaimed together.
“I might make a worse choice,” said Rastignac, laughing. Vautrin’s voice had thrown him into the most painful agitation that he had yet known.
“No bad jokes, gentlemen!” said Mme. Couture. “My dear, let us go upstairs.”
Mme. Vauquer followed the two ladies, meaning to pass the evening in their room, an arrangement that economized fire and candlelight. Eugene and Vautrin were left alone.
“I felt sure you would come round to it,” said the elder man with the coolness that nothing seemed to shake. “But stay a moment! I have as much delicacy as anybody else. Don’t make up your mind on the spur of the moment; you are a little thrown off your balance just now. You are in debt, and I want you to come over to my way of thinking after sober reflection, and not in a fit of passion or desperation. Perhaps you want a thousand crowns. There, you can have them if you like.”
The tempter took out a pocketbook, and drew thence three banknotes, which he fluttered before the student’s eyes. Eugene was in a most painful dilemma. He had debts, debts of honor. He owed a hundred louis to the Marquis d’Ajuda and to the Count de Trailles; he had not the money, and for this reason had not dared to go to Mme. de Restaud’s house, where he was expected that evening. It was one of those informal gatherings where tea and little cakes are handed round, but where it is possible to lose six thousand francs at whist in the course of a night.
“You must see,” said Eugene, struggling to hide a convulsive tremor, “that after what has passed between us, I cannot possibly lay myself under any obligation to you.”
“Quite right; I should be sorry to hear you speak otherwise,” answered the tempter. “You are a fine young fellow, honorable, brave as a lion, and as gentle as a young girl. You would be a fine haul for the devil! I like youngsters of your sort. Get rid of one or two more prejudices, and you will see the world as it is. Make a little scene now and then, and act a virtuous part in it, and a man with a head on his shoulders can do exactly as he likes amid deafening applause from the fools in the gallery. Ah! a few days yet, and you will be with us; and if you would only be tutored by me, I would put you in the way of achieving all your ambitions. You should no sooner form a wish than it should be realized to the full; you should have all your desires—honors, wealth, or women. Civilization should flow with milk and honey for you. You should be our pet and favorite, our Benjamin. We would all work ourselves to death for you with pleasure; every obstacle should be removed from your path. You have a few prejudices left; so you think that I am a scoundrel, do you? Well, M. de Turenne, quite as honorable a man as you take yourself to be, had some little private transactions with bandits, and did not feel that his honor was tarnished. You would rather not lie under any obligation to me, eh? You need not draw back on that account,” Vautrin went on, and a smile stole over his lips. “Take these bits of paper and write across this,” he added, producing a piece of stamped paper, “Accepted the sum of three thousand five hundred francs due this day twelvemonth, and fill in the date. The rate of interest is stiff enough to silence any scruples on your part; it gives you the right to call me a Jew. You can call quits with me on the score of gratitude. I am quite willing that you should despise me to-day, because I am sure that you will have a kindlier feeling towards me later on. You will find out fathomless depths in my nature, enormous and concentrated forces that weaklings call vices, but you will never find me base or ungrateful. In short, I am neither a pawn nor a bishop, but a castle, a tower of strength, my boy.”
“What manner of man are you?” cried Eugene. “Were you created to torment me?”
“Why no; I am a good-natured fellow, who is willing to do a dirty piece of work to put you high and dry above the mire for the rest of your days. Do you ask the reason of this devotion? All right; I will tell you that some of these days. A word or two in your ear will explain it. I have begun by shocking you, by showing you the way to ring the changes, and giving you a sight of the mechanism of the social machine; but your first fright will go off like a conscript’s terror on the battlefield. You will grow used to regarding men as common soldiers who have made up their minds to lose their lives for some self-constituted king. Times have altered strangely. Once you could say to a bravo, ‘Here are a hundred crowns; go and kill Monsieur So-and-so for me,’ and you could sup quietly after turning some one off into the dark for the least thing in the world. But nowadays I propose to put you in the way of a handsome fortune; you have only to nod your head, it won’t compromise you in any way, and you hesitate. ‘Tis an effeminate age.”
Eugene accepted the draft, and received the banknotes in exchange for it.
“Well, well. Come, now, let us talk rationally,” Vautrin continued. “I mean to leave this country in a few months’ time for America, and set about planting tobacco. I will send you the cigars of friendship. If I make money at it, I will help you in your career. If I have no children—which will probably be the case, for I have no anxiety to raise slips of myself here—you shall inherit my fortune. That is what you may call standing by a man; but I myself have a liking for you. I have a mania, too, for devoting myself to some one else. I have done it before. You see, my boy, I live in a loftier sphere than other men do; I look on all actions as means to an end, and the end is all that I look at. What is a man’s life to me? Not that,” he said, and he snapped his thumb-nail against his teeth. “A man, in short, is everything to me, or just nothing at all. Less than nothing if his name happens to be Poiret; you can crush him like a bug, he is flat and he is offensive. But a man is a god when he is like you; he is not a machine covered with a skin, but a theatre in which the greatest sentiments are displayed—great thoughts and feelings—and for these, and these only, I live. A sentiment—what is that but the whole world in a thought? Look at Father Goriot. For him, his two girls are the whole universe; they are the clue by which he finds his way through creation. Well, for my own part, I have fathomed the depths of life, there is only one real sentiment—comradeship between man and man. Pierre and Jaffier, that is my passion. I knew Venice Preserved by heart. Have you met many men plucky enough when a comrade says, ‘Let us bury a dead body!’ to go and do it without a word or plaguing him by taking a high moral tone? I have done it myself. I should not talk like this to just everybody, but you are not like an ordinary man; one can talk to you, you can understand things. You will not dabble about much longer among the tadpoles in these swamps. Well, then, it is all settled. You will marry. Both of us carry our point. Mine is made of iron, and will never soften, he! he!”
Vautrin went out. He would not wait to hear the student’s repudiation, he wished to put Eugene at his ease. He seemed to understand the secret springs of the faint resistance still made by the younger man; the struggles in which men seek to preserve their self-respect by justifying their blameworthy actions to themselves.
“He may do as he likes; I shall not marry Mlle. Taillefer, that is certain,” said Eugene to himself.
He regarded this man with abhorrence, and yet the very cynicism of Vautrin’s ideas, and the audacious way in which he used other men for his own ends, raised him in the student’s eyes; but the thought of a compact threw Eugene into a fever of apprehension, and not until he had recovered somewhat did he dress, call for a cab, and go to Mme. de Restaud’s.
For some days the Countess had paid more and more attention to a young man whose every step seemed a triumphal progress in the great world; it seemed to her that he might be a formidable power before long. He paid Messieurs de Trailles and d’Ajuda, played at whist for part of the evening, and made good his losses. Most men who have their way to make are more or less of fatalists, and Eugene was superstitious; he chose to consider that his luck was heaven’s reward for his perseverance in the right way. As soon as possible on the following morning he asked Vautrin whether the bill he had given was still in the other’s possession; and on receiving a reply in the affirmative, he repaid the three thousand francs with a not unnatural relief.
“Everything is going on well,” said Vautrin.
“But I am not your accomplice,” said Eugene.
“I know, I know,” Vautrin broke in. “You are still acting like a child. You are making mountains out of molehills at the outset.”
Two days later, Poiret and Mlle. Michonneau were sitting together on a bench in the sun. They had chosen a little frequented alley in the Jardin des Plantes, and a gentleman was chatting with them, the same person, as a matter of fact, about whom the medical student had, not without good reason, his own suspicions.
“Mademoiselle,” this M. Gondureau was saying, “I do not see any cause for your scruples. His Excellency, Monseigneur the Minister of Police——”
“Yes, his Excellency is taking a personal interest in the matter,” said Gondureau.
Who would think it probable that Poiret, a retired clerk, doubtless possessed of some notions of civic virtue, though there might be nothing else in his head—who would think it likely that such a man would continue to lend an ear to this supposed independent gentleman of the Rue de Buffon, when the latter dropped the mask of a decent citizen by that word “police,” and gave a glimpse of the features of a detective from the Rue de Jerusalem? And yet nothing was more natural. Perhaps the following remarks from the hitherto unpublished records made by certain observers will throw a light on the particular species to which Poiret belonged in the great family of fools. There is a race of quill-drivers, confined in the columns of the budget between the first degree of latitude (a kind of administrative Greenland where the salaries begin at twelve hundred francs) to the third degree, a more temperate zone, where incomes grow from three to six thousand francs, a climate where the bonus flourishes like a half-hardy annual in spite of some difficulties of culture. A characteristic trait that best reveals the feeble narrow-mindedness of these inhabitants of petty officialdom is a kind of involuntary, mechanical, and instinctive reverence for the Grand Lama of every Ministry, known to the rank and file only by his signature (an illegible scrawl) and by his title—“His Excellency Monseigneur le Ministre,” five words which produce as much effect as the il Bondo Cani of the Calife de Bagdad, five words which in the eyes of this low order of intelligence represent a sacred power from which there is no appeal. The Minister is administratively infallible for the clerks in the employ of the Government, as the Pope is infallible for good Catholics. Something of this peculiar radiance invests everything he does or says, or that is said or done in his name; the robe of office covers everything and legalizes everything done by his orders; does not his very title—His Excellency—vouch for the purity of his intentions and the righteousness of his will, and serve as a sort of passport and introduction to ideas that otherwise would not be entertained for a moment? Pronounce the words “His Excellency,” and these poor folk will forthwith proceed to do what they would not do for their own interests. Passive obedience is as well known in a Government department as in the army itself; and the administrative system silences consciences, annihilates the individual, and ends (give it time enough) by fashioning a man into a vise or a thumbscrew, and he becomes part of the machinery of Government. Wherefore, M. Gondureau, who seemed to know something of human nature, recognized Poiret at once as one of those dupes of officialdom, and brought out for his benefit, at the proper moment, the deus ex machina, the magical words “His Excellency,” so as to dazzle Poiret just as he himself unmasked his batteries, for he took Poiret and the Michonneau for the male and female of the same species.
“If his Excellency himself, his Excellency the Minister... Ah! that is quite another thing,” said Poiret.
“You seem to be guided by this gentleman’s opinion, and you hear what he says,” said the man of independent means, addressing Mlle. Michonneau. “Very well, his Excellency is at this moment absolutely certain that the so-called Vautrin, who lodges at the Maison Vauquer, is a convict who escaped from penal servitude at Toulon, where he is known by the nickname Trompe-la-Mort.”
“Trompe-la-Mort?” said Pioret. “Dear me, he is very lucky if he deserves that nickname.”
“Well, yes,” said the detective. “They call him so because he has been so lucky as not to lose his life in the very risky businesses that he has carried through. He is a dangerous man, you see! He has qualities that are out of the common; the thing he is wanted for, in fact, was a matter which gained him no end of credit with his own set——”
“Then is he a man of honor?” asked Poiret.
“Yes, according to his notions. He agreed to take another man’s crime upon himself—a forgery committed by a very handsome young fellow that he had taken a great fancy to, a young Italian, a bit of a gambler, who has since gone into the army, where his conduct has been unexceptionable.”
“But if his Excellency the Minister of Police is certain that M. Vautrin is this Trompe-la-Mort, why should he want me?” asked Mlle. Michonneau.
“Oh yes,” said Poiret, “if the Minister, as you have been so obliging as to tell us, really knows for a certainty——”
“Certainty is not the word; he only suspects. You will soon understand how things are. Jacques Collin, nicknamed Trompe-la-Mort, is in the confidence of every convict in the three prisons; he is their man of business and their banker. He makes a very good thing out of managing their affairs, which want a man of mark to see about them.”
“Ha! ha! do you see the pun, mademoiselle?” asked Poiret. “This gentleman calls himself a man of mark because he is a marked man—branded, you know.”
“This so-called Vautrin,” said the detective, “receives the money belonging to my lords the convicts, invests it for them, and holds it at the disposal of those who escape, or hands it over to their families if they leave a will, or to their mistresses when they draw upon him for their benefit.”
