Unconscious Comedians

Unconscious Comedians
Honoré Balzac

Honoré de Balzac

Unconscious Comedians

UNCONSCIOUS COMEDIANS

Leon de Lora, our celebrated landscape painter, belongs to one of the noblest families of the Roussillon (Spanish originally) which, although distinguished for the antiquity of its race, has been doomed for a century to the proverbial poverty of hidalgos. Coming, light-footed, to Paris from the department of the Eastern Pyrenees, with the sum of eleven francs in his pocket for all viaticum, he had in some degree forgotten the miseries and privations of his childhood and his family amid the other privations and miseries which are never lacking to “rapins,” whose whole fortune consists of intrepid vocation. Later, the cares of fame and those of success were other causes of forgetfulness.

If you have followed the capricious and meandering course of these studies, perhaps you will remember Mistigris, Schinner’s pupil, one of the heroes of “A Start in Life” (Scenes from Private Life), and his brief apparitions in other Scenes. In 1845, this landscape painter, emulator of the Hobbemas, Ruysdaels, and Lorraines, resembles no more the shabby, frisky rapin whom we then knew. Now an illustrious man, he owns a charming house in the rue de Berlin, not far from the hotel de Brambourg, where his friend Brideau lives, and quite close to the house of Schinner, his early master. He is a member of the Institute and an officer of the Legion of honor; he is thirty-six years old, has an income of twenty thousand francs from the Funds, his pictures sell for their weight in gold, and (what seems to him more extraordinary than the invitations he receives occasionally to court balls) his name and fame, mentioned so often for the last sixteen years by the press of Europe, has at last penetrated to the valley of the Eastern Pyrenees, where vegetate three veritable Loras: his father, his eldest brother, and an old paternal aunt, Mademoiselle Urraca y Lora.

In the maternal line the painter has no relation left except a cousin, the nephew of his mother, residing in a small manufacturing town in the department. This cousin was the first to bethink himself of Leon. But it was not until 1840 that Leon de Lora received a letter from Monsieur Sylvestre Palafox-Castal-Gazonal (called simply Gazonal) to which he replied that he was assuredly himself, – that is to say, the son of the late Leonie Gazonal, wife of Comte Fernand Didas y Lora.

During the summer of 1841 cousin Sylvestre Gazonal went to inform the illustrious unknown family of Lora that their little Leon had not gone to the Rio de la Plata, as they supposed, but was now one of the greatest geniuses of the French school of painting; a fact the family did not believe. The eldest son, Don Juan de Lora assured his cousin Gazonal that he was certainly the dupe of some Parisian wag.

Now the said Gazonal was intending to go to Paris to prosecute a lawsuit which the prefect of the Eastern Pyrenees had arbitrarily removed from the usual jurisdiction, transferring it to that of the Council of State. The worthy provincial determined to investigate this act, and to ask his Parisian cousin the reason of such high-handed measures. It thus happened that Monsieur Gazonal came to Paris, took shabby lodgings in the rue Croix-des-Petits-Champs, and was amazed to see the palace of his cousin in the rue de Berlin. Being told that the painter was then travelling in Italy, he renounced, for the time being, the intention of asking his advice, and doubted if he should ever find his maternal relationship acknowledged by so great a man.

During the years 1843 and 1844 Gazonal attended to his lawsuit. This suit concerned a question as to the current and level of a stream of water and the necessity of removing a dam, in which dispute the administration, instigated by the abutters on the river banks, had meddled. The removal of the dam threatened the existence of Gazonal’s manufactory. In 1845, Gazonal considered his cause as wholly lost; the secretary of the Master of Petitions, charged with the duty of drawing up the report, had confided to him that the said report would assuredly be against him, and his own lawyer confirmed the statement. Gazonal, though commander of the National Guard in his own town and one of the most capable manufacturers of the department, found himself of so little account in Paris, and he was, moreover, so frightened by the costs of living and the dearness of even the most trifling things, that he kept himself, all this time, secluded in his shabby lodgings. The Southerner, deprived of his sun, execrated Paris, which he called a manufactory of rheumatism. As he added up the costs of his suit and his living, he vowed within himself to poison the prefect on his return, or to minotaurize him. In his moments of deepest sadness he killed the prefect outright; in gayer mood he contented himself with minotaurizing him.

One morning as he ate his breakfast and cursed his fate, he picked up a newspaper savagely. The following lines, ending an article, struck Gazonal as if the mysterious voice which speaks to gamblers before they win had sounded in his ear: “Our celebrated landscape painter, Leon de Lora, lately returned from Italy, will exhibit several pictures at the Salon; thus the exhibition promises, as we see, to be most brilliant.” With the suddenness of action that distinguishes the sons of the sunny South, Gazonal sprang from his lodgings to the street, from the street to a street-cab, and drove to the rue de Berlin to find his cousin.

Leon de Lora sent word by a servant to his cousin Gazonal that he invited him to breakfast the next day at the Cafe de Paris, but he was now engaged in a matter which did not allow him to receive his cousin at the present moment. Gazonal, like a true Southerner, recounted all his troubles to the valet.

The next day at ten o’clock, Gazonal, much too well-dressed for the occasion (he had put on his bottle-blue coat with brass buttons, a frilled shirt, a white waistcoat and yellow gloves), awaited his amphitryon a full hour, stamping his feet on the boulevard, after hearing from the master of the cafe that “these gentlemen” breakfasted habitually between eleven and twelve o’clock.

“Between eleven and half-past,” he said when he related his adventures to his cronies in the provinces, “two Parisians dressed in simple frock-coats, looking like nothing at all, called out when they saw me on the boulevard, ‘There’s our Gazonal!’”

The speaker was Bixiou, with whom Leon de Lora had armed himself to “bring out” his provincial cousin, in other words, to make him pose.

“‘Don’t be vexed, cousin, I’m at your service!’ cried out that little Leon, taking me in his arms,” related Gazonal on his return home. “The breakfast was splendid. I thought I was going blind when I saw the number of bits of gold it took to pay that bill. Those fellows must earn their weight in gold, for I saw my cousin give the waiter thirty sous– the price of a whole day’s work!”

During this monstrous breakfast – advisedly so called in view of six dozen Osten oysters, six cutlets a la Soubise, a chicken a la Marengo, lobster mayonnaise, green peas, a mushroom pasty, washed down with three bottles of Bordeaux, three bottles of Champagne, plus coffee and liqueurs, to say nothing of relishes – Gazonal was magnificent in his diatribes against Paris. The worthy manufacturer complained of the length of the four-pound bread-loaves, the height of the houses, the indifference of the passengers in the streets to one another, the cold, the rain, the cost of hackney-coaches, all of which and much else he bemoaned in so witty a manner that the two artists took a mighty fancy to cousin Gazonal, and made him relate his lawsuit from beginning to end.

“My lawsuit,” he said in his Southern accent and rolling his r’s, “is a very simple thing; they want my manufactory. I’ve employed here in Paris a dolt of a lawyer, to whom I give twenty francs every time he opens an eye, and he is always asleep. He’s a slug, who drives in his coach, while I go afoot and he splashes me. I see now I ought to have had a carriage! On the other hand, that Council of State are a pack of do-nothings, who leave their duties to little scamps every one of whom is bought up by our prefect. That’s my lawsuit! They want my manufactory! Well, they’ll get it! and they must manage the best they can with my workmen, a hundred of ‘em, who’ll make them sing another tune before they’ve done with them.”

“Two years. Ha! that meddling prefect! he shall pay dear for this; I’ll have his life if I have to give mine on the scaffold – ”

“Which state councillor presides over your section?”

“A former newspaper man, – doesn’t pay ten sous in taxes, – his name is Massol.”

The two Parisians exchanged glances.

“Who is the commissioner who is making the report?”

“Ha! that’s still more queer; he’s Master of Petitions, professor of something or other at the Sorbonne, – a fellow who writes things in reviews, and for whom I have the profoundest contempt.”

“Claude Vignon,” said Bixiou.

“Yes, that’s his name,” replied Gazonal. “Massol and Vignon – there you have Social Reason, in which there’s no reason at all.”

“There must be some way out of it,” said Leon de Lora. “You see, cousin, all things are possible in Paris for good as well as for evil, for the just as well as the unjust. There’s nothing that can’t be done, undone, and redone.”

“The devil take me if I stay ten days more in this hole of a place, the dullest in all France!”

The two cousins and Bixiou were at this moment walking from one end to the other of that sheet of asphalt on which, between the hours of one and three, it is difficult to avoid seeing some of the personages in honor of whom Fame puts one or the other of her trumpets to her lips. Formerly that locality was the Place Royale; next it was the Pont Neuf; in these days this privilege had been acquired by the Boulevard des Italiens.

“Paris,” said the painter to his cousin, “is an instrument on which we must know how to play; if we stand here ten minutes I’ll give you your first lesson. There, look!” he said, raising his cane and pointing to a couple who were just then coming out from the Passage de l’Opera.

“Goodness! who’s that?” asked Gazonal.

That was an old woman, in a bonnet which had spent six months in a show-case, a very pretentious gown and a faded tartan shawl, whose face had been buried twenty years of her life in a damp lodge, and whose swollen hand-bag betokened no better social position than that of an ex-portress. With her was a slim little girl, whose eyes, fringed with black lashes, had lost their innocence and showed great weariness; her face, of a pretty shape, was fresh and her hair abundant, her forehead charming but audacious, her bust thin, – in other words, an unripe fruit.

“That,” replied Bixiou, “is a rat tied to its mother.”

“A rat! – what’s that?”

“That particular rat,” said Leon, with a friendly nod to Mademoiselle Ninette, “may perhaps win your suit for you.”

Gazonal bounded; but Bixiou had held him by the arm ever since they left the cafe, thinking perhaps that the flush on his face was rather vivid.

“That rat, who is just leaving a rehearsal at the Opera-house, is going home to eat a miserable dinner, and will return about three o’clock to dress, if she dances in the ballet this evening – as she will, to-day being Monday. This rat is already an old rat for she is thirteen years of age. Two years from now that creature may be worth sixty thousand francs; she will be all or nothing, a great danseuse or a marcheuse, a celebrated person or a vulgar courtesan. She has worked hard since she was eight years old. Such as you see her, she is worn out with fatigue; she exhausted her body this morning in the dancing-class, she is just leaving a rehearsal where the evolutions are as complicated as a Chinese puzzle; and she’ll go through them again to-night. The rat is one of the primary elements of the Opera; she is to the leading danseuse what a junior clerk is to a notary. The rat is – hope.”

“Who produces the rat?” asked Gazonal.

“Porters, paupers, actors, dancers,” replied Bixiou. “Only the lowest depths of poverty could force a child to subject her feet and joints to positive torture, to keep herself virtuous out of mere speculation until she is eighteen years of age, and to live with some horrible old crone like a beautiful plant in a dressing of manure. You shall see now a procession defiling before you, one after the other, of men of talent, little and great, artists in seed or flower, who are raising to the glory of France that every-day monument called the Opera, an assemblage of forces, wills, and forms of genius, nowhere collected as in Paris.

“I have already seen the Opera,” said Gazonal, with a self-sufficient air.

“Yes, from a three-francs-sixty-sous seat among the gods,” replied the landscape painter; “just as you have seen Paris in the rue Croix-des-Petits-Champs, without knowing anything about it. What did they give at the Opera when you were there?”

“Guillaume Tell.”

“Well,” said Leon, “Matilde’s grand DUO must have delighted you. What do you suppose that charming singer did when she left the stage?”

“She – well, what?”

“She ate two bloody mutton-chops which her servant had ready for her.”

“Pooh! nonsense!”

“Malibran kept up on brandy – but it killed her in the end. Another thing! You have seen the ballet, and you’ll now see it defiling past you in its every-day clothes, without knowing that the face of your lawsuit depends on a pair of those legs.”

“My lawsuit!”

“See, cousin, here comes what is called a marcheuse.”

Leon pointed to one of those handsome creatures who at twenty-five years of age have lived sixty, and whose beauty is so real and so sure of being cultivated that they make no display of it. She was tall, and walked well, with the arrogant look of a dandy; her toilet was remarkable for its ruinous simplicity.