Rise and Fall of Cesar Birotteau

“Lourdois,” said Birotteau, smiling, “would you believe – ”

The poor man stopped short; he was about to ask the painter to take the note given to Grindot, ridiculing the architect with the good nature of a merchant sure of his own standing; but he saw a cloud upon Lourdois’ brow, and he shuddered at his own imprudence. The innocent jest would have been the death of his suspected credit. In such a case a prosperous merchant takes back his note, and does not offer it elsewhere. Birotteau felt his head swim, as though he had looked down the sides of a precipice into a measureless abyss.

“My dear Monsieur Birotteau,” said Lourdois, drawing him to the back of the shop, “my account has been examined, audited, and certified; I must ask you to have the money ready for me to-morrow. I marry my daughter to little Crottat; he wants money, for notaries will not take paper; besides, I never give promissory notes.”

“Send to me on the day after to-morrow,” said Birotteau proudly, counting on the payment of his own bills. “And you too, Monsieur,” he said to the architect.

“Why not pay at once?” said Grindot.

“I have my workmen in the faubourg to pay,” said Birotteau, who knew not how to lie.

He took his hat once more intending to follow them out, but the mason, Thorein, and Chaffaroux stopped him as he was closing the door.

“Monsieur,” said Chaffaroux, “we are in great need of money.”

“Well, I have not the mines of Peru,” said Cesar, walking quickly away from them. “There is something beneath all this,” he said to himself. “That cursed ball! All the world thinks I am worth millions. Yet Lourdois had a look that was not natural; there’s a snake in the grass somewhere.”

He walked along the Rue Saint-Honore, in no special direction, and feeling much discomposed. At the corner of a street he ran against Alexandre Crottat, just as a ram, or a mathematician absorbed in the solution of a problem, might have knocked against another of his kind.

“Ah, monsieur,” said the future notary, “one word! Has Roguin given your four hundred thousand francs to Monsieur Claparon?”

“The business was settled in your presence. Monsieur Claparon gave me no receipt; my acceptances were to be – negotiated. Roguin was to give him – my two hundred and forty thousand francs. He was told that he was to pay for the property definitely. Monsieur Popinot the judge said – The receipt! – but – why do you ask the question?”

“Why ask the question? To know if your two hundred and forty thousand francs are still with Roguin. Roguin was so long connected with you, that perhaps out of decent feeling he may have paid them over to Claparon, and you will escape! But, no! what a fool I am! He has carried off Claparon’s money as well! Happily, Claparon had only paid over, to my care, one hundred thousand francs. I gave them to Roguin just as I would give you my purse, and I have no receipt for them. The owners of the land have not received one penny; they have just been talking to me. The money you thought you raised upon your property in the Faubourg du Temple had no existence for you, or the borrower; Roguin has squandered it, together with your hundred thousand francs, which he used up long ago, – and your last hundred thousand as well, for I just remember drawing them from the bank.”

The pupils of Cesar’s eyes dilated so enormously that he saw only red flames.

“Your hundred thousand francs in his hands, my hundred thousand for his practice, a hundred thousand from Claparon, – there’s three hundred thousand francs purloined, not to speak of other thefts which will be discovered,” exclaimed the young notary. “Madame Roguin is not to be counted on. Du Tillet has had a narrow escape. Roguin tormented him for a month to get into that land speculation, but happily all his funds were tied up in an affair with Nucingen. Roguin has written an atrocious letter to his wife; I have read it. He has been making free with his clients’ money for years; and why? for a mistress, – la belle Hollandaise. He left her two weeks ago. The squandering hussy hasn’t a farthing left; they sold her furniture, – she had signed promissory notes. To escape arrest, she took refuge in a house in the Palais-Royal, where she was assassinated last night by a captain in the army. God has quickly punished her; she has wasted Roguin’s whole fortune and much more. There are some women to whom nothing is sacred: think of squandering the trust moneys of a notary! Madame Roguin won’t have a penny, except by claiming her rights of dower; the scoundrel’s whole property is encumbered to its full value. I bought the practice for three hundred thousand francs, – I, who thought I was getting a good thing! – and paid a hundred thousand down. I have no receipt; the creditors will think I am an accomplice if I say a word about that hundred thousand francs, and when a man is starting in life he must be careful of his reputation. There will hardly be thirty per cent saved for the creditors. At my age, to get such a set-back! A man fifty-nine years of age to keep a mistress! the old villain! It is only two weeks since he told me not to marry Cesarine; he said you would soon be without bread, – the monster!”

Alexandre might have talked on indefinitely, for Birotteau stood still, petrified. Every phrase was a calamity, like the blows of a bludgeon. He heard the death-bells tolling in his ears, – just as his eyes had seen, at the first word, the flames of his fortune. Alexandre Crottat, who thought the worthy perfumer a strong and able man, was alarmed at his paleness and rigidity. He was not aware that Roguin had carried off Cesar’s whole property. The thought of immediate suicide passed through the brain of the victim, deeply religious as he was. In such a case suicide is only a way to escape a thousand deaths; it seems logical to take it. Alexandre Crottat gave him his arm, and tried to make him walk on, but it was impossible: his legs gave way under him as if he were drunk.

“What is the matter?” said Crottat. “Dear Monsieur Cesar, take courage! it is not the death of a man. Besides, you will get back your forty thousand francs. The lender hadn’t the money ready, you never received it, – that is sufficient to set aside the agreement.”

“My ball – my cross – two hundred thousand francs in paper on the market, – no money in hand! The Ragons, Pillerault, – and my wife, who saw true – ”

A rain of confused words, revealing a weight of crushing thoughts and unutterable suffering, poured from his lips, like hail lashing the flowers in the garden of “The Queen of Roses.”

“I wish they would cut off my head,” he said at last; “its weight troubles me, it is good for nothing.”

“Poor Pere Birotteau,” said Alexandre, “are you in danger?”

“Danger!”

“Well, take courage; make an effort.”

“Effort!”

“Du Tillet was your clerk; he has a good head; he will help you.”

“Du Tillet!”

“Come, try to walk.”

“My God! I cannot go home as I am,” said Birotteau. “You who are my friend, if there are friends, – you in whom I took an interest, who have dined at my house, – take me somewhere in a carriage, for my wife’s sake. Xandrot, go with me!”

The young notary compassionately put the inert mechanism which bore the name of Cesar into a street coach, not without great difficulty.

“Xandrot,” said the perfumer, in a voice choked with tears, – for the tears were now falling from his eyes, and loosening the iron band which bound his brow, – “stop at my shop; go in and speak to Celestin for me. My friend, tell him it is a matter of life or death, that on no consideration must he or any one talk about Roguin’s flight. Tell Cesarine to come down to me, and beg her not to say a word to her mother. We must beware of our best friends, of Pillerault, Ragon, everybody.”

The change in Birotteau’s voice startled Crottat, who began to understand the importance of the warning; he fulfilled the instructions of the poor man, whom Celestin and Cesarine were horrified to find pale and half insensible in a corner of the carriage.

“Keep the secret,” he said.

“Ah!” said Xandrot to himself, “he is coming to. I thought him lost.”

From thence they went, at Cesar’s request, to a judge of the commercial courts. The conference between Crottat and the magistrate lasted long, and the president of the chamber of notaries was summoned. Cesar was carried about from place to place, like a bale of goods; he never moved, and said nothing. Towards seven in the evening Alexandre Crottat took him home. The thought of appearing before Constance braced his nerves. The young notary had the charity to go before, and warn Madame Birotteau that her husband had had a rush of blood to the head.

“His ideas are rather cloudy,” he said, with a gesture implying disturbance of the brain. “Perhaps he should be bled, or leeches applied.”

“No wonder,” said Constance, far from dreaming of a disaster; “he did not take his precautionary medicine at the beginning of the winter, and for the last two months he has been working like a galley slave, – just as if his fortune were not made.”

The wife and daughter entreated Cesar to go to bed, and they sent for his old friend Monsieur Haudry. The old man was a physician of the school of Moliere, a great practitioner and in favor of the old-fashioned formulas, who dosed his patients neither more nor less than a quack, consulting physician though he was. He came, studied the expression of Cesar’s face, and observing symptoms of cerebral congestion, ordered an immediate application of mustard plasters to the soles of his feet.

“What can have caused it?” asked Constance.

“The damp weather,” said the doctor, to whom Cesarine had given a hint.

It often becomes a physician’s duty to utter deliberately some silly falsehood, to save honor or life, to those who are about a sick-bed. The old doctor had seen much in his day, and he caught the meaning of half a word. Cesarine followed him to the staircase, and asked for directions in managing the case.

“Quiet and silence; when the head is clear we will try tonics.”

Madame Cesar passed two days at the bedside of her husband, who seemed to her at times delirious. He lay in her beautiful blue room, and as he looked at the curtains, the furniture, and all the costly magnificence about him, he said things that were wholly incomprehensible to her.

“He must be out of his mind,” she whispered to Cesarine, as Cesar rose up in bed and recited clauses of the commercial Code in a solemn voice.

“‘If the expenditure is judged excessive!’ Away with those curtains!”

At the end of three terrible days, during which his reason was in danger, the strong constitution of the Tourangian peasant triumphed; his head grew clear. Monsieur Haudry ordered stimulants and generous diet, and before long, after an occasional cup of coffee, Cesar was on his feet again. Constance, wearied out, took her husband’s place in bed.

“Poor woman!” said Cesar, looking at her as she slept.

“Come, papa, take courage! you are so superior a man that you will triumph in the end. This trouble won’t last; Monsieur Anselme will help you.”

Cesarine said these vague words in the tender tones which give courage to a stricken heart, just as the songs of a mother soothe the weary child tormented with pain as its cuts its teeth.

“Yes, my child, I shall struggle on; but say not a word to any one, – not to Popinot who loves us, nor to your uncle Pillerault. I shall first write to my brother; he is canon and vicar of the cathedral. He spends nothing, and I have no doubt he has means. If he saves only three thousand francs a year, that would give him at the end of twenty years one hundred thousand francs. In the provinces the priests lay up money.”

Cesarine hastened to bring her father a little table with writing-things upon it, – among them the surplus of invitations printed on pink paper.