Melmoth Reconciled

by Honore de Balzac
Translated by Ellen Marriage

To Monsieur le General Baron de Pommereul, a token of the friendship
between our fathers, which survives in their sons.

DE BALZAC.
There is a special variety of human nature obtained in the Social

Kingdom by a process analogous to that of the gardener's craft in the
Vegetable Kingdom, to wit, by the forcing-house--a species of hybrid

which can be raised neither from seed nor from slips. This product is
known as the Cashier, an anthropomorphous growth, watered by religious

doctrine, trained up in fear of the guillotine, pruned by vice, to
flourish on a third floor with an estimable wife by his side and an

uninteresting family. The number of cashiers in Paris must always be a
problem for the physiologist. Has any one as yet been able to state

correctly the terms of the portion" target="_blank" title="n.比率 vt.使成比例">proportion sum wherein the cashier figures
as the unknown X? Where will you find the man who shall live with

wealth, like a cat with a caged mouse? This man, for further
qualification, shall be capable of sitting boxed in behind an iron

grating for seven or eight hours a day during seven-eighths of the
year, perched upon a cane-seated chair in a space as narrow as a

lieutenant's cabin on board a man-of-war. Such a man must be able to
defy anchylosis of the knee and thigh joints; he must have a soul

above meanness, in order to live meanly; must lose all relish for
money by dint of handling it. Demand this peculiarspecimen of any

creed, educationalsystem, school, or institution you please, and
select Paris, that city of fiery ordeals and branch establishment of

hell, as the soil in which to plant the said cashier. So be it.
Creeds, schools, institutions and moral systems, all human rules and

regulations, great and small, will, one after another, present much
the same face that an intimate friend turns upon you when you ask him

to lend you a thousand francs. With a dolorous dropping of the jaw,
they indicate the guillotine, much as your friend aforesaid will

furnish you with the address of the money-lender, pointing you to one
of the hundred gates by which a man comes to the last refuge of the

destitute.
Yet nature has her freaks in the making of a man's mind; she indulges

herself and makes a few honest folk now and again, and now and then a
cashier.

Wherefore, that race of corsairs whom we dignify with the title of
bankers, the gentry who take out a license for which they pay a

thousand crowns, as the privateer takes out his letters of marque,
hold these rare products of the incubations of virtue in such esteem

that they confine them in cages in their counting-houses, much as
governments procure and maintainspecimens of strange beasts at their

own charges.
If the cashier is possessed of an imagination or of a fervid

temperament; if, as will sometimes happen to the most complete
cashier, he loves his wife, and that wife grows tired of her lot, has

ambitions, or merely some vanity in her composition, the cashier is
undone. Search the chronicles of the counting-house. You will not find

a single instance of a cashier attaining A POSITION, as it is called.
They are sent to the hulks; they go to foreign parts; they vegetate on

a second floor in the Rue Saint-Louis among the market gardens of the
Marais. Some day, when the cashiers of Paris come to a sense of their

real value, a cashier will be hardly obtainable for money. Still,
certain it is that there are people who are fit for nothing but to be

cashiers, just as the bent of a certain order of mind inevitably makes
for rascality. But, oh marvel of our civilization! Society rewards

virtue with an income of a hundred louis in old age, a dwelling on a
second floor, bread sufficient, occasional new bandana handkerchiefs,

an elderly wife and her offspring.
So much for virtue. But for the opposite course, a little boldness, a

faculty for keeping on the windward side of the law, as Turenne
outflanked Montecuculi, and Society will sanction the theft of

millions, showerribbons upon the thief, cram him with honors, and
smother him with consideration.

Government, moreover, works harmoniously with this profoundly
illogical reasoner--Society. Government levies a conscription on the

young intelligence of the kingdom at the age of seventeen or eighteen,
a conscription of precocious brain-work before it is sent up to be

submitted to a process of selection. Nurserymen sort and select seeds
in much the same way. To this process the Government brings

professional appraisers of talent, men who can assay brains as experts
assay gold at the Mint. Five hundred such heads, set afire with hope,

are sent up annually by the most progressiveportion of the
population; and of these the Government takes one-third, puts them in

sacks called the Ecoles, and shakes them up together for three years.
Though every one of these young plants represents vast productive

power, they are made, as one may say, into cashiers. They receive
appointments; the rank and file of engineers is made up of them; they

are employed as captains of artillery; there is no (subaltern) grade
to which they may not aspire. Finally, when these men, the pick of the

youth of the nation, fattened on mathematics and stuffed with
knowledge, have attained the age of fifty years, they have their

reward, and receive as the price of their services the third-floor
lodging, the wife and family, and all the comforts that sweeten life

for mediocrity. If from among this race of dupes there should escape
some five or six men of genius who climb the highest heights, is it

not miraculous?
This is an exact statement of the relations between Talent and Probity

on the one hand and Government and Society on the other, in an age
that considers itself to be progressive. Without this prefatory

explanation a recent occurrence in Paris would seem improbable; but
preceded by this summing up of the situation, it will perhaps receive

some thoughtful attention from minds capable of recognizing the real
plague-spots of our civilization, a civilization which since 1815 as

been moved by the spirit of gain rather than by principles of honor.
About five o'clock, on a dull autumn afternoon, the cashier of one of

the largest banks in Paris was still at his desk, working by the light
of a lamp that had been lit for some time. In accordance with the use

and wont of commerce, the counting-house was in the darkest corner of
the low-ceiled and far from spacious mezzanine floor, and at the very

end of a passage lighted only by borrowed lights. The office doors
along this corridor, each with its label, gave the place the look of a

bath-house. At four o'clock the stolid porter had proclaimed,
according to his orders, "The bank is closed." And by this time the

departments were deserted, wives of the partners in the firm were
expecting their lovers; the two bankers dining with their mistresses.

Everything was in order.
The place where the strong boxes had been bedded in sheet-iron was

just behind the little sanctum, where the cashier was busy. Doubtless
he was balancing his books. The open front gave a glimpse of a safe of

hammered iron, so enormously heavy (thanks to the science of the
modern inventor) that burglars could not carry it away. The door only

opened at the pleasure of those who knew its password. The letter-lock
was a warden who kept its own secret and could not be bribed; the

mysterious word was an ingeniousrealization of the "Open sesame!" in
the Arabian Nights. But even this was as nothing. A man might discover

the password; but unless he knew the lock's final secret, the ultima
ratio of this gold-guarding dragon of mechanical science, it

discharged a blunderbuss at his head.
The door of the room, the walls of the room, the shutters of the

windows in the room, the whole place, in fact, was lined with sheet-
iron a third of an inch in thickness, concealed behind the thin wooden

paneling. The shutters had been closed, the door had been shut. If
ever man could feel confident that he was absolutely alone, and that

there was no remotepossibility of being watched by prying eyes, that
man was the cashier of the house of Nucingen and Company, in the Rue

Saint-Lazare.
Accordingly the deepest silence prevailed in that iron cave. The fire

had died out in the stove, but the room was full of that tepid warmth
which produces the dull heavy-headedness and nauseous queasiness of a

morning after an orgy. The stove is a mesmerist that plays no small
part in the reduction of bank clerks and porters to a state of idiocy.

A room with a stove in it is a retort in which the power of strong men
is evaporated, where their vitality is exhausted, and their wills

enfeebled. Government offices are part of a great scheme for the
manufacture of the mediocrity necessary for the maintenance of a

Feudal System on a pecuniary basis--and money is the foundation of the
Social Contract. (See Les Employes.) The mephitic vapors in the