A Man of Business

“Since the firm bought up Maxime’s debts, Cerizet’s likeness to a bailiff’s officer grew more and more striking, and one morning after seven fruitless attempts he succeeded in penetrating into the Count’s presence. Suzon, the old man-servant, albeit he was by no means in his novitiate, at last mistook the visitor for a petitioner, come to propose a thousand crowns if Maxime would obtain a license to sell postage stamps for a young lady. Suzon, without the slightest suspicion of the little scamp, a thoroughbred Paris street-boy into whom prudence had been rubbed by repeated personal experience of the police-courts, induced his master to receive him. Can you see the man of business, with an uneasy eye, a bald forehead, and scarcely any hair on his head, standing in his threadbare jacket and muddy boots – ”

“What a picture of a Dun!” cried Lousteau.

“ – standing before the Count, that image of flaunting Debt, in his blue flannel dressing-gown, slippers worked by some Marquise or other, trousers of white woolen stuff, and a dazzling shirt? There he stood, with a gorgeous cap on his black dyed hair, playing with the tassels at his waist – ”

“‘Tis a bit of genre for anybody who knows what the pretty little morning room, hung with silk and full of valuable paintings, where Maxime breakfasts,” said Nathan. “You tread on a Smyrna carpet, you admire the sideboards filled with curiosities and rarities fit to make a King of Saxony envious – ”

“Now for the scene itself,” said Desroches, and the deepest silence followed.

“‘Monsieur le Comte,’ began Cerizet, ‘I have come from a M. Charles Claparon, who used to be a banker – ’

“‘Ah! poor devil, and what does he want with me?’

“‘Well, he is at present your creditor for a matter of three thousand two hundred francs, seventy-five centimes, principal, interest, and costs – ’

“‘Coutelier’s business?’ put in Maxime, who knew his affairs as a pilot knows his coast.

“‘Yes, Monsieur le Comte,’ said Cerizet with a bow. ‘I have come to ask your intentions.’

“‘I shall only pay when the fancy takes me,’ returned Maxime, and he rang for Suzon. ‘It was very rash of Claparon to buy up bills of mine without speaking to me beforehand. I am sorry for him, for he did so very well for such a long time as a man of straw for friends of mine. I always said that a man must really be weak in his intellect to work for men that stuff themselves with millions, and to serve them so faithfully for such low wages. And now here he gives me another proof of his stupidity! Yes, men deserve what they get. It is your own doing whether you get a crown on your forehead or a bullet through your head; whether you are a millionaire or a porter, justice is always done you. I cannot help it, my dear fellow; I myself am not a king, I stick to my principles. I have no pity for those that put me to expense or do not know their business as creditors. – Suzon! my tea! Do you see this gentleman?’ he continued when the man came in. ‘Well, you have allowed yourself to be taken in, poor old boy. This gentleman is a creditor; you ought to have known him by his boots. No friend nor foe of mine, nor those that are neither and want something of me, come to see me on foot. – My dear M. Cerizet, do you understand? You will not wipe your boots on my carpet again’ (looking as he spoke at the mud that whitened the enemy’s soles). ‘Convey my compliments and sympathy to Claparon, poor buffer, for I shall file this business under the letter Z.’

“All this with an easy good-humor fit to give a virtuous citizen the colic.

“‘You are wrong, Monsieur le Comte,’ retorted Cerizet, in a slightly peremptory tone. ‘We will be paid in full, and that in a way which you may not like. That is why I came to you first in a friendly spirit, as is right and fit between gentlemen – ’

“‘Oh! so that is how you understand it?’ began Maxime, enraged by this last piece of presumption. There was something of Talleyrand’s wit in the insolent retort, if you have quite grasped the contrast between the two men and their costumes. Maxime scowled and looked full at the intruder; Cerizet not merely endured the glare of cold fury, but even returned it, with an icy, cat-like malignance and fixity of gaze.

“‘Very good, sir, go out – ’

“‘Very well, good-day, Monsieur le Comte. We shall be quits before six months are out.’

“‘If you can steal the amount of your bill, which is legally due I own, I shall be indebted to you, sir,’ replied Maxime. ‘You will have taught me a new precaution to take. I am very much your servant.’

“‘Monsieur le Comte,’ said Cerizet, ‘it is I, on the contrary, who am yours.’

“Here was an explicit, forcible, confident declaration on either side. A couple of tigers confabulating, with the prey before them, and a fight impending, would have been no finer and no shrewder than this pair; the insolent fine gentleman as great a blackguard as the other in his soiled and mud-stained clothes.

“Which will you lay your money on?” asked Desroches, looking round at an audience, surprised to find how deeply it was interested.

“A pretty story!” cried Malaga. “My dear boy, go on, I beg of you. This goes to one’s heart.”

“Nothing commonplace could happen between two fighting-cocks of that calibre,” added La Palferine.

“Pooh!” cried Malaga. “I will wager my cabinet-maker’s invoice (the fellow is dunning me) that the little toad was too many for Maxime.”

“I bet on Maxime,” said Cardot. “Nobody ever caught him napping.”

Desroches drank off a glass that Malaga handed to him.

“Mlle. Chocardelle’s reading-room,” he continued, after a pause, “was in the Rue Coquenard, just a step or two from the Rue Pigalle where Maxime was living. The said Mlle. Chocardelle lived at the back on the garden side of the house, beyond a big dark place where the books were kept. Antonia left her aunt to look after the business – ”

“Had she an aunt even then?” exclaimed Malaga. “Hang it all, Maxime did things handsomely.”

“Alas! it was a real aunt,” said Desroches; “her name was – let me see – ”

“Ida Bonamy,” said Bixiou.

“So as Antonia’s aunt took a good deal of the work off her hands, she went to bed late and lay late of a morning, never showing her face at the desk until the afternoon, some time between two and four. From the very first her appearance was enough to draw custom. Several elderly men in the quarter used to come, among them a retired coach-builder, one Croizeau. Beholding this miracle of female loveliness through the window-panes, he took it into his head to read the newspapers in the beauty’s reading-room; and a sometime custom-house officer, named Denisart, with a ribbon in his button-hole, followed the example. Croizeau chose to look upon Denisart as a rival. ‘Monsieur,’ he said afterwards, ‘I did not know what to buy for you!’

“That speech should give you an idea of the man. The Sieur Croizeau happens to belong to a particular class of old man which should be known as ‘Coquerels’ since Henri Monnier’s time; so well did Monnier render the piping voice, the little mannerisms, little queue, little sprinkling of powder, little movements of the head, prim little manner, and tripping gait in the part of Coquerel in La Famille Improvisee. This Croizeau used to hand over his halfpence with a flourish and a ‘There, fair lady!’

“Mme. Ida Bonamy the aunt was not long in finding out through a servant that Croizeau, by popular report of the neighborhood of the Rue de Buffault, where he lived, was a man of exceeding stinginess, possessed of forty thousand francs per annum. A week after the instalment of the charming librarian he was delivered of a pun:

“‘You lend me books (livres), but I give you plenty of francs in return,’ said he.

“A few days later he put on a knowing little air, as much as to say, ‘I know you are engaged, but my turn will come one day; I am a widower.’

“He always came arrayed in fine linen, a cornflower blue coat, a paduasoy waistcoat, black trousers, and black ribbon bows on the double soled shoes that creaked like an abbe’s; he always held a fourteen franc silk hat in his hand.

“‘I am old and I have no children,’ he took occasion to confide to the young lady some few days after Cerizet’s visit to Maxime. ‘I hold my relations in horror. They are peasants born to work in the fields. Just imagine it, I came up from the country with six francs in my pocket, and made my fortune here. I am not proud. A pretty woman is my equal. Now would it not be nicer to be Mme. Croizeau for some years to come than to do a Count’s pleasure for a twelvemonth? He will go off and leave you some time or other; and when that day comes, you will think of me… your servant, my pretty lady!’

“All this was simmering below the surface. The slightest approach at love-making was made quite on the sly. Not a soul suspected that the trim little old fogy was smitten with Antonia; and so prudent was the elderly lover, that no rival could have guessed anything from his behavior in the reading-room. For a couple of months Croizeau watched the retired custom-house official; but before the third month was out he had good reason to believe that his suspicions were groundless. He exerted his ingenuity to scrape an acquaintance with Denisart, came up with him in the street, and at length seized his opportunity to remark, ‘It is a fine day, sir!’

“Whereupon the retired official responded with, ‘Austerlitz weather, sir. I was there myself – I was wounded indeed, I won my Cross on that glorious day.’

“And so from one thing to another the two drifted wrecks of the Empire struck up an acquaintance. Little Croizeau was attached to the Empire through his connection with Napoleon’s sisters. He had been their coach-builder, and had frequently dunned them for money; so he gave out that he ‘had had relations with the Imperial family.’ Maxime, duly informed by Antonia of the ‘nice old man’s’ proposals (for so the aunt called Croizeau), wished to see him. Cerizet’s declaration of war had so far taken effect that he of the yellow kid gloves was studying the position of every piece, however insignificant, upon the board; and it so happened that at the mention of that ‘nice old man,’ an ominous tinkling sounded in his ears. One evening, therefore, Maxime seated himself among the book-shelves in the dimly lighted back room, reconnoitred the seven or eight customers through the chink between the green curtains, and took the little coach-builder’s measure. He gauged the man’s infatuation, and was very well satisfied to find that the varnished doors of a tolerably sumptuous future were ready to turn at a word from Antonia so soon as his own fancy had passed off.

“‘And that other one yonder?’ asked he, pointing out the stout fine-looking elderly man with the Cross of the Legion of Honor. ‘Who is he?’

“‘A retired custom-house officer.’

“‘The cut of his countenance is not reassuring,’ said Maxime, beholding the Sieur Denisart.

“And indeed the old soldier held himself upright as a steeple. His head was remarkable for the amount of powder and pomatum bestowed upon it; he looked almost like a postilion at a fancy ball. Underneath that felted covering, moulded to the top of the wearer’s cranium, appeared an elderly profile, half-official, half-soldierly, with a comical admixture of arrogance, – altogether something like caricatures of the Constitutionnel. The sometime official finding that age, and hair-powder, and the conformation of his spine made it impossible to read a word without spectacles, sat displaying a very creditable expanse of chest with all the pride of an old man with a mistress. Like old General Montcornet, that pillar of the Vaudeville, he wore earrings. Denisart was partial to blue; his roomy trousers and well-worn greatcoat were both of blue cloth.

“‘How long is it since that old fogy came here?’ inquired Maxime, thinking that he saw danger in the spectacles.

“‘Oh, from the beginning,’ returned Antonia, ‘pretty nearly two months ago now.’

“‘Good,” said Maxime to himself, ‘Cerizet only came to me a month ago. – Just get him to talk,’ he added in Antonia’s ear; ‘I want to hear his voice.’

“‘Pshaw,’ said she, ‘that is not so easy. He never says a word to me.’

“‘Then why does he come here?’ demanded Maxime.

“‘For a queer reason,’ returned the fair Antonia. ‘In the first place, although he is sixty-nine, he has a fancy; and because he is sixty-nine, he is as methodical as a clock face. Every day at five o’clock the old gentleman goes to dine with her in the Rue de la Victoire. (I am sorry for her.) Then at six o’clock, he comes here, reads steadily at the papers for four hours, and goes back at ten o’clock. Daddy Croizeau says that he knows M. Denisart’s motives, and approves his conduct; and in his place, he would do the same. So I know exactly what to expect. If ever I am Mme. Croizeau, I shall have four hours to myself between six and ten o’clock.’

“Maxime looked through the directory, and found the following reassuring item: