The Lesser Bourgeoisie

Brigitte’s nostrils dilated; she breathed in the words of the young lawyer. He gave her a side-long glance to enjoy his triumph; he had touched the right chord in her breast.

At this moment he was standing, but he now resumed his seat beside her, and said: —

“Now here is our affair, dear aunt – for you will be a sort of aunt – ”

“Hush! you naughty fellow!” said Brigitte, “and go on.”

“I’ll tell you the matter roughly – and remark, if you please, that I compromise myself in telling it to you; for these secrets are entrusted to me as a lawyer. Therefore understand that you and I are both committing a crime, so to speak, of leze-confidence! A notary of Paris was in partnership with an architect; they bought land and built upon it; at the present moment, property has come down with a rush; they find themselves embarrassed – but all that doesn’t concern us. Among the houses built by this illegal partnership – for notaries, you know, are sworn to have nothing to do with enterprises – is a very good one which, not being finished, must be sold at a great sacrifice; so great that they now ask only one hundred thousand francs for it, although the cost of the land and the building was at least four hundred thousand. As the whole interior is still unfinished, the value of what is still to do is easily appraised; it will probably not be more than fifty thousand francs. Now, owing to its excellent position, this house, when finished, will certainly bring in a rental, over and above the taxes, of forty thousand francs a year. It is built of freestone, the corners and copings of cut granite; the facade is covered with handsome carvings, on which they spent more than twenty thousand francs; the windows are plate glass with a new style of fastening called ‘cremona.’”

“Well, where is the difficulty?”

“Just here: the notary wants to reserve to himself this bit of the cake he is forced to surrender; he is, under the name of a friend, the creditor who requests the sale of the property by the assignee of the bankruptcy. The case has not been brought into court; for legal proceedings cost so much money. The sale is to be made by voluntary agreement. Now, this notary has applied to one of my clients to lend him his name for this purchase. My client, a poor devil, says to me: ‘There’s a fortune to made out of that house by fooling the notary.’”

“And they do that sort of thing in business!” said Brigitte, quickly.

“If that were the only difficulty,” continued Theodose, “it would be, as a friend of mine said to his pupil, who was complaining of the length of time it took to produce masterpieces in painting: ‘My dear young fellow, if it were not so, our valets would be painting pictures.’ But, mademoiselle, if we now get the better of this notary, who certainly deserves it, for he has compromised a number of private fortunes, yet, as he is a very shrewd man (though a notary), it might perhaps be very difficult to do it a second time, and here’s the rub: When a piece of landed property is bought at a forced sale, if those who have lent money on that property see that is likely to be sold so low as not to cover the sum loaned upon it, they have the right, until the expiration of a certain time, to bid it in; that is, to offer more and keep the property in their own hands. If this trickster can’t be hoodwinked as to the sale being a bona fide one until the time when his right to buy it expires, some other scheme must be resorted to. Now, is this business strictly legal? Am I justified in doing it for the benefit of a family I seek to enter? That is the question I have been revolving in my mind for the last three days.”

Brigitte, we must acknowledge, hesitated, and Theodose then brought forward his last card: —

“Take the night to think of it,” he said, “to-morrow we will talk it over.”

“My young friend,” said Brigitte, looking at the lawyer with an almost loving air, “the first thing to be done is to see the house. Where is it?”

“Near the Madeleine. That will be the heart of Paris in ten years. All that property has been desirable since 1819; the banker Du Tillet’s fortune was derived from property about there. The famous failure of Maitre Roquin, which carried terror to all Paris, and did such harm to the confidence given to the notariat, was also caused by it; they went into heavy speculations on that land too soon; they should have waited until now.”

“I remember about that,” said Brigitte.

“The house might be finished by the end of the year,” continued Theodose, “and the rentals could begin next spring.”

“Could we go there to-morrow?”

“Dear aunt, I am at your orders.”

“Ah ca!” she cried, “don’t call me that before people. As to this affair,” she continued, “I can’t have any opinion until I have seen the house.”

“It has six storeys; nine windows on the front; a fine courtyard, four shops, and it stands on a corner. Ah! that notary knows what he is about in wishing to hold on to such pieces of property! But let political events interfere, and down go the Funds! If I were you, I should sell out all that you and Madame Thuillier have on the Grand Livre and buy this fine piece of real estate for Thuillier, and I’d recover the fortune of that poor, pious creature by savings from its proceeds. Can the Funds go higher than they are to-day? One hundred and twenty-two! it is fabulous; I should make haste to sell.”

Brigitte licked her lips; she perceived the means of keeping her own property intact, and of enriching her brother by this use of Madame Thuillier’s fortune.

“My brother is right,” she said to Theodose; “you certainly are a rare man; you’ll get on in the world.”

“And he’ll walk before me,” responded Theodose with a naivete that touched the old maid.

“You will live in the family,” she said.

“There may be obstacles to that,” he remarked. “Madame Thuillier is very queer at times; she doesn’t like me.”

“Ha! I’ll settle that,” cried Brigitte. “Do you attend to that affair and carry it through if it is feasible, and leave your interests in my hands.”

“Thuillier, member of the municipal council, owner of an estate with a rental of forty thousand francs a year, with the cross of the Legion of honor and the author of a political work, grave, serious, important, will be deputy at the forthcoming general election. But, between ourselves, little aunt, one couldn’t devote one’s self so utterly except for a father-in-law.”

“You are right.”

“Though I have no fortune I shall have doubled yours; and if this affair goes through discreetly, others will turn up.”

“Until I have seen the house,” said Mademoiselle Thuillier again, “I can decide on nothing.”

“Well then, send for a carriage to-morrow and let us go there. I will get a ticket early in the morning to view the premises.”

“To-morrow, then, about mid-day,” responded Brigitte, holding out her hand to Theodose that he might shake it, but instead of that he laid upon it the most respectful and the most tender kiss that Brigitte had ever in her life received.

“Adieu, my child,” she said, as he reached the door.

She rang the bell hurriedly and when the servant came: —

“Josephine,” she cried, “go at once to Madame Colleville, and ask her to come over and speak to me.”

Fifteen minutes later Flavie entered the salon, where Brigitte was walking up and down, in a state of extreme agitation.

“My dear,” she cried on seeing Flavie, “you can do me a great service, which concerns our dear Celeste. You know Tullia, don’t you? – a danseuse at the opera; my brother was always dinning her into my ears at one time.”

“Yes, I know her; but she is no longer a danseuse; she is Madame la Comtesse du Bruel. Her husband is peer of France!”

“Does she still like you?”

“We never see each other now.”

“Well, I know that Chaffaroux, the rich contractor, is her uncle,” said Brigitte. “He is old and wealthy. Go and see your former friend, and get her to give you a line of introduction to him, saying he would do her an eminent favor if he would give a piece of friendly advice to the bearer of the note, and then you and I will take it to him to-morrow about one o’clock. But tell Tullia she must request her uncle to keep secret about it. Go, my dear. Celeste, our dear child, will be a millionaire! I can’t say more; but she’ll have, from me, a husband who will put her on a pinnacle.”

“Do you want me to tell you the first letters of his name?”

“Yes.”

“T. P., – Theodose de la Peyrade. You are right. That’s a man who may, if supported by a woman like you, become a minister.”

“It is God himself who has placed him in our house!” cried the old maid.

At this moment Monsieur and Madame Thuillier returned home.

Five days later, in the month of April, the ordinance which convoked the electors to appoint a member of the municipal council on the 20th of the same month was inserted in the “Moniteur,” and placarded about Paris. For several weeks the ministry, called that of March 1st, had been in power. Brigitte was in a charming humor. She had been convinced of the truth of all la Peyrade’s assertions. The house, visited from garret to cellar by old Chaffaroux, was admitted by him to be an admirable construction; poor Grindot, the architect, who was interested with the notary and Claparon in the affair, thought the old man was employed in the interests of the contractor; the old fellow himself thought he was acting in the interests of his niece, and he gave it as his opinion that thirty thousand francs would finish the house. Thus, in the course of one week la Peyrade became Brigitte’s god; and she proved to him by the most naively nefarious arguments that fortune should be seized when it offered itself.

“Well, if there is any sin in the business,” she said to him in the middle of the garden, “you can confess it.”

“The devil!” cried Thuillier, “a man owes himself to his relatives, and you are one of us now.”

“Then I decide to do it,” replied la Peyrade, in a voice of emotion; “but on conditions that I must now distinctly state. I will not, in marrying Celeste, be accused of greed and mercenary motives. If you lay remorse upon me, at least you must consent that I shall remain as I am for the present. Do not settle upon Celeste, my old Thuillier, the future possession of the property I am about to obtain for you – ”

“You are right.”

“Don’t rob yourself; and let my dear little aunt here act in the same way in relation to the marriage contract. Put the remainder of the capital in Madame Thuillier’s name, on the Grand Livre, and she can do what she likes with it. We shall all live together as one family, and I’ll undertake to make my own fortune, now that I am free from anxiety about the future.”

“That suits me,” said Thuillier; “that’s the talk of an honest man.”

“Let me kiss you on the forehead, my son,” said the old maid; “but, inasmuch as Celeste cannot be allowed to go without a ‘dot,’ we shall give her sixty thousand francs.”

“For her dress,” said la Peyrade.

“We are all three persons of honor,” cried Thuillier. “It is now settled, isn’t it? You are to manage the purchase of the house; we are to write together, you and I, my political work; and you’ll bestir yourself to get me the decoration?”

“You will have that as soon as you are made a municipal councillor on the 1st of May. Only, my good friend, I must beg you, and you, too, dear aunt, to keep the most profound secrecy about me in this affair; and do not listen to the calumnies which all the men I am about to trick will spread about me. I shall become, you’ll see, a vagabond, a swindler, a dangerous man, a Jesuit, an ambitious fortune-hunter. Can you hear those accusations against me with composure?”

“Fear nothing,” replied Brigitte.

CHAPTER XI. THE REIGN OF THEODOSE

From that day forth Thuillier became a dear, good friend. “My dear, good friend,” was the name given to him by Theodose, with voice inflections of varieties of tenderness which astonished Flavie. But “little aunt,” a name that flattered Brigitte deeply, was only given in family secrecy, and occasionally before Flavie. The activity of Theodose and Dutocq, Cerizet, Barbet, Metivier, Minard, Phellion, Colleville, and others of the Thuillier circle was extreme. Great and small, they all put their hands to the work. Cadenet procured thirty votes in his section. On the 30th of April Thuillier was proclaimed member of the Council-general of the department of the Seine by an imposing majority; in fact, he only needed sixty more votes to make his election unanimous. May 1st Thuillier joined the municipal body and went to the Tuileries to congratulate the King on his fete-day, and returned home radiant. He had gone where Minard went!

Ten days later a yellow poster announced the sale of the house, after due publication; the price named being seventy-five thousand francs; the final purchase to take place about the last of July. On this point Cerizet and Claparon had an agreement by which Cerizet pledged the sum of fifteen thousand francs (in words only, be it understood) to Claparon in case the latter could deceive the notary and keep him quiet until the time expired during which he might withdraw the property by bidding it in. Mademoiselle Thuillier, notified by Theodose, agreed entirely to this secret clause, understanding perfectly the necessity of paying the culprits guilty of the treachery. The money was to pass through la Peyrade’s hands. Claparon met his accomplice, the notary, on the Place de l’Observatoire by midnight. This young man, the successor of Leopold Hannequin, was one of those who run after fortune instead of following it leisurely. He now saw another future before him, and he managed his present affairs in order to be free to take hold of it. In this midnight interview, he offered Claparon ten thousand francs to secure himself in this dirty business, – a sum which was only to be paid on receipt, through Claparon, of a counter-deed from the nominal purchaser of the property. The notary was aware that that sum was all-important to Claparon to extricate him from present difficulties, and he felt secure of him.

“Who but you, in all Paris, would give me such a fee for such an affair?” Claparon said to him, with a false show of naivete. “You can sleep in peace; my ostensible purchaser is one of those men of honor who are too stupid to have ideas of your kind; he is a retired government employee; give him the money to make the purchase and he’ll sign the counter-deed at once.”

When the notary had made Claparon clearly understand that he could not get more than the ten thousand francs from him, Cerizet offered the latter twelve thousand down, and asked Theodose for fifteen thousand, intending to keep the balance for himself. All these scenes between the four men were seasoned with the finest speeches about feelings, integrity, and the honor that men owed to one another in doing business. While these submarine performances were going on, apparently in the interests of Thuillier, to whom Theodose related them with the deepest manifestations of disgust at being implicated therein, the pair were meditating the great political work which “my dear good friend” was to publish. Thus the new municipal councillor naturally acquired a conviction that he could never do or be anything without the help of this man of genius; whose mind so amazed him, and whose ability was now so important to him, that every day he became more and more convinced of the necessity of marrying him to Celeste, and of taking the young couple to live with him. In fact, after May the 1st, Theodose had already dined four times a week with “my dear, good friend.”

This was the period when Theodose reigned without a dissenting voice in the bosom of that household, and all the friends of the family approved of him – for the following reason: The Phellions, hearing his praises sung by Brigitte and Thuillier, feared to displease the two powers and chorussed their words, even when such perpetual laudation seemed to them exaggerated. The same may be said of the Minards. Moreover la Peyrade’s behavior, as “friend of the family” was perfect. He disarmed distrust by the manner in which he effaced himself; he was there like a new piece of furniture; and he contrived to make both the Phellions and Minards believe that Brigitte and Thuillier had weighed him, and found him too light in the scales to be anything more in the family than a young man whose services were useful to them.

“He may think,” said Thuillier one day to Minard, “that my sister will put him in her will; he doesn’t know her.”

This speech, inspired by Theodose himself, calmed the uneasiness of Minard “pere.”

“He is devoted to us,” said Brigitte to Madame Phellion; “but he certainly owes us a great deal of gratitude. We have given him his lodging rent-free, and he dines with us almost every day.”

This speech of the old maid, also instigated by Theodose, went from ear to ear among the families who frequented the Thuillier salon, and dissipated all fears. The young man called attention to the remarks of Thuillier and his sister with the servility of a parasite; when he played whist he justified the blunders of his dear, good friend, and he kept upon his countenance a smile, fixed and benign, like that of Madame Thuillier, ready to bestow upon all the bourgeois sillinesses of the brother and sister.

He obtained, what he wanted above all, the contempt of his true antagonists; and he used it as a cloak to hide his real power. For four consecutive months his face wore a torpid expression, like that of a snake as it gulps and digests its prey. But at times he would rush into the garden with Colleville or Flavie, to laugh and lay off his mask, and rest himself; or get fresh strength by giving way before his future mother-in-law to fits of nervous passion which either terrified or deeply touched her.

“Don’t you pity me?” he cried to her the evening before the preparatory sale of the house, when Thuillier was to make the purchase at seventy-five thousand francs. “Think of a man like me, forced to creep like a cat, to choke down every pointed word, to swallow my own gall, and submit to your rebuffs!”

“My friend! my child!” Flavie replied, undecided in mind how to take him.

These words are a thermometer which will show the temperature at which this clever manipulator maintained his intrigue with Flavie. He kept her floating between her heart and her moral sense, between religious sentiments and this mysterious passion.

During this time Felix Phellion was giving, with a devotion and constancy worthy of all praise, regular lessons to young Colleville. He spent much of his time upon these lessons, feeling that he was thus working for his future family. To acknowledge this service, he was invited, by advice of Theodose to Flavie, to dine at the Collevilles’ every Thursday, where la Peyrade always met him. Flavie was usually making either a purse or slippers or a cigar-case for the happy young man, who would say, deprecatingly: —

“I am only too well rewarded, madame, by the happiness I feel in being useful to you.”

“We are not rich, monsieur,” replied Colleville, “but, God bless me! we are not ungrateful.”

Old Phellion would rub his hands as he listened to his son’s account of these evenings, beholding his dear and noble Felix already wedded to Celeste.

But Celeste, the more she loved Felix, the more grave and serious she became with him; partly because her mother sharply lectured her, saying to her one evening: —

“Don’t give any hope whatever to that young Phellion. Neither your father nor I can arrange your marriage. You have expectations to be consulted. It is much less important to please a professor without a penny than to make sure of the affection and good-will of Mademoiselle Brigitte and your godfather. If you don’t want to kill your mother – yes, my dear, kill her – you must obey me in this affair blindly; and remember that what we want to secure, above all, is your good.”

As the date of the final sale was set for the last of July, Theodose advised Brigitte by the end of June to arrange her affairs in time to be ready for the payment. Accordingly, she now sold out her own and her sister-in-law’s property in the Funds. The catastrophe of the treaty of the four powers, an insult to France, is now an established historical fact; but it is necessary to remind the reader that from July to the last of August the French funds, alarmed by the prospect of war, a fear which Monsieur Thiers did much to promote, fell twenty francs, and the Three-per-cents went down to sixty. That was not all: this financial fiasco had a most unfortunate influence on the value of real estate in Paris; and all those who had such property then for sale suffered loss. These events made Theodose a prophet in the eyes of Brigitte and Thuillier, to whom the house was now about to be definitely sold for seventy-five thousand francs. The notary, involved in the political disaster, and whose practice was already sold, concealed himself for a time in the country; but he took with him the ten thousand francs for Claparon. Advised by Theodose, Thuillier made a contract with Grindot, who supposed he was really working for the notary in finishing the house; and as, during this period of financial depression, suspended work left many workmen with their arms folded, the architect was able to finish off the building in a splendid manner at a low cost. Theodose insisted that the agreement should be in writing.

This purchase increased Thuillier’s importance ten-fold. As for the notary, he had temporarily lost his head in presence of political events which came upon him like a waterspout out of cloudless skies. Theodose, certain now of his supremacy, holding Thuillier fast by his past services and by the literary work in which they were both engaged, admired by Brigitte for his modesty and discretion, – for never had he made the slightest allusion to his own poverty or uttered one word about money, – Theodose began to assume an air that was rather less servile than it had been. Brigitte and Thuillier said to him one day: —

“Nothing can deprive you of our esteem; you are here in this house as if in your own home; the opinion of Minard and Phellion, which you seem to fear, has no more value for us than a stanza of Victor Hugo. Therefore, let them talk! Carry your head high!”

“But we shall still need them for Thuillier’s election to the Chamber,” said Theodose. “Follow my advice; you have found it good so far, haven’t you? When the house is actually yours, you will have got it for almost nothing; for you can now buy into the Three-per-cents at sixty in Madame Thuillier’s name, and thus replace nearly the whole of her fortune. Wait only for the expiration of the time allowed to the nominal creditor to buy it in, and have the fifteen thousand francs ready for our scoundrels.”

Brigitte did not wait; she took her whole capital with the exception of a sum of one hundred and twenty thousand francs, and bought into the Three-per-cents in Madame Thuillier’s name to the amount of twelve thousand francs a year, and in her own for ten thousand a year, resolving in her own mind to choose no other kind of investment in future. She saw her brother secure of forty thousand francs a year besides his pension, twelve thousand a year for Madame Thuillier and eighteen thousand a year for herself, besides the house they lived in, the rental of which she valued at eight thousand.

“We are worth quite as much as the Minards,” she remarked.

“Don’t chant victory before you win it,” said Theodose. “The right of redemption doesn’t expire for another week. I have attended to your affairs, but mine have gone terribly to pieces.”

“My dear child, you have friends,” cried Brigitte; “if you should happen to want five hundred francs or so, you will always find them here.”

Theodose exchanged a smile with Thuillier, who hastened to carry him off, saying: —

“Excuse my poor sister; she sees the world through a small hole. But if you should want twenty-five thousand francs I’ll lend them to you – out of my first rents,” he added.

“Thuillier,” exclaimed Theodose, “the rope is round my neck. Ever since I have been a barrister I have had notes of hand running. But say nothing about it,” added Theodose, frightened himself at having let out the secret of his situation. “I’m in the claws of scoundrels, but I hope to crush them yet.”

In telling this secret Theodose, though alarmed as he did so, had a two-fold purpose: first, to test Thuillier; and next, to avert the consequences of a fatal blow which might be dealt to him any day in a secret and sinister struggle he had long foreseen. Two words will explain his horrible position.