"Bianchon, if you have sometimes seen me hard and bitter, it was
because I was adding my early
sufferings on to the insensibility,
the
selfishness of which I have seen thousands of instances in
the highest circles; or, perhaps, I was thinking of the obstacles
which
hatred, envy,
jealousy, and calumny raised up between me
and success. In Paris, when certain people see you ready to set
your foot in the
stirrup, some pull your coat-tails, others
loosen the
buckle of the strap that you may fall and crack your
skull; one wrenches off your horse's shoes, another steals your
whip, and the least
treacherous of them all is the man whom you
see coming to fire his
pistol at you point blank.
"You yourself, my dear boy, are clever enough to make
acquaintance before long with the
odious and
incessant warfare
waged by mediocrity against the superior man. If you should drop
five-and-twenty louis one day, you will be accused of gambling on
the next, and your best friends will report that you have lost
twenty-five thousand. If you have a
headache, you will be
considered mad. If you are a little hasty, no one can live with
you. If, to make a stand against this
armament of pigmies, you
collect your best powers, your best friends will cry out that you
want to have everything, that you aim at domineering, at tyranny.
In short, your good points will become your faults, your faults
will be vices, and your
virtues crime.
"If you save a man, you will be said to have killed him; if he
reappears on the scene, it will be
positive that you have secured
the present at the cost of the future. If he is not dead, he will
die. Stumble, and you fall! Invent anything of any kind and claim
your rights, you will be crotchety,
cunning, ill-disposed to
rising younger men.
"So, you see, my dear fellow, if I do not believe in God, I
believe still less in man. But do not you know in me another
Desplein,
altogether different from the Desplein whom every one
abuses?--However, we will not stir that mud-heap.
"Well, I was living in that house, I was
working hard to pass my
first
examination, and I had no money at all. You know. I had
come to one of those moments of
extremity when a man says, 'I
will enlist.' I had one hope. I expected from my home a box full
of linen, a present from one of those old aunts who,
knowingnothing of Paris, think of your shirts, while they imagine that
their
nephew with thirty francs a month is eating ortolans. The
box arrived while I was at the schools; it had cost forty francs
for
carriage. The
porter, a German
shoemaker living in a loft,
had paid the money and kept the box. I walked up and down the Rue
des Fosses-Saint-Germain-des-Pres and the Rue de l'Ecole de
Medecine without hitting on any
scheme which would
release my
trunk without the
payment of the forty francs, which of course I
could pay as soon as I should have sold the linen. My stupidity
proved to me that
surgery was my only
vocation. My good fellow,
refined souls, whose powers move in a lofty
atmosphere, have none
of that spirit of intrigue that is
fertile in
resource and
device; their good
genius is chance; they do not
invent, things
come to them.
"At night I went home, at the very moment when my fellow lodger
also came in--a water-carrier named Bourgeat, a native of Saint-
Flour. We knew each other as two lodgers do who have rooms off
the same
landing, and who hear each other
sleeping, coughing,
dressing, and so at last become used to one another. My neighbor
informed me that the
landlord, to whom I owed three quarters'
rent, had turned me out; I must clear out next morning. He
himself was also turned out on
account of his
occupation. I spent
the most
miserable night of my life. Where was I to get a
messenger who could carry my few chattels and my books? How could
I pay him and the
porter? Where was I to go? I
repeated these
unanswerable questions again and again, in tears, as madmen
repeat their tunes. I fell asleep;
poverty has for its friends
heavenly slumbers full of beautiful dreams.
"Next morning, just as I was swallowing my little bowl of bread
soaked in milk, Bourgeat came in and said to me in his vile
Auvergne accent:
" 'Mouchieur l'Etudiant, I am a poor man, a foundling from the
hospital at Saint-Flour, without either father or mother, and not
rich enough to marry. You are not
fertile in relations either,
nor well supplied with the ready? Listen, I have a hand-cart
downstairs which I have hired for two sous an hour; it will hold
all our goods; if you like, we will try to find lodgings
together, since we are both turned out of this. It is not the
earthly
paradise, when all is said and done.'
" 'I know that, my good Bourgeat,' said I. 'But I am in a great
fix. I have a trunk
downstairs with a hundred francs' worth of
linen in it, out of which I could pay the
landlord and all I owe
to the
porter, and I have not a hundred sous.'
" 'Pooh! I have a few dibs,' replied Bourgeat
joyfully, and he
pulled out a
greasy old leather purse. 'Keep your linen.'
"Bourgeat paid up my arrears and his own, and settled with the
porter. Then he put our furniture and my box of linen in his
cart, and pulled it along the street, stopping in front of every
house where there was a notice board. I went up to see whether
the rooms to let would suit us. At
midday we were still wandering
about the
neighborhood without having found anything. The price
was the great difficulty. Bourgeat proposed that we should eat at
a wine shop, leaving the cart at the door. Towards evening I
discovered, in the Cour de Rohan, Passage du Commerce, at the
very top of a house next the roof, two rooms with a staircase
between them. Each of us was to pay sixty francs a year. So there
we were housed, my
humble friend and I. We dined together.
Bourgeat, who earned about fifty sous a day, had saved a hundred
crowns or so; he would soon be able to
gratify his
ambition by
buying a
barrel and a horse. On
learning of my situation--for he
extracted my secrets with a quiet craftiness and good nature, of
which the
remembrance touches my heart to this day, he gave up
for a time the
ambition of his whole life; for twenty-two years
he had been carrying water in the street, and he now
devoted his
hundred crowns to my future prospects."
Desplein at these words clutched Bianchon's arm
tightly. "He gave
me the money for my
examination fees! That man, my friend,
understood that I had a
mission, that the needs of my intellect
were greater than his. He looked after me, he called me his boy,
he lent me money to buy books, he would come in
softly sometimes
to watch me at work, and took a mother's care in
seeing that I
had
wholesome and
abundant food, instead of the bad and
insufficient
nourishment I had been condemned to. Bourgeat, a man
of about forty, had a
homely, mediaeval type of face, a prominent
forehead, a head that a
painter might have chosen as a model for
that of Lycurgus. The poor man's heart was big with
affections
seeking an object; he had never been loved but by a poodle that
had died some time since, of which he would talk to me, asking
whether I thought the Church would allow masses to be said for
the
repose of its soul. His dog, said he, had been a good
Christian, who for twelve years had accompanied him to church,
never barking, listening to the organ without
opening his mouth,
and crouching beside him in a way that made it seem as though he
were praying too.
"This man centered all his
affections in me; he looked upon me as
a
forlorn and
suffering creature, and he became, to me, the most
thoughtful mother, the most
consideratebenefactor, the ideal of
the
virtue which rejoices in its own work. When I met him in the
street, he would throw me a glance of
intelligence full of
unutterable
dignity; he would
affect to walk as though he carried
no weight, and seemed happy in
seeing me in good health and well
dressed. It was, in fact, the
devotedaffection of the lower
classes, the love of a girl of the people transferred to a
loftier level. Bourgeat did all my errands, woke me at night at
any fixed hour, trimmed my lamp, cleaned our
landing; as good as
a servant as he was as a father, and as clean as an English girl.
He did all the
housework. Like Philopoemen, he sawed our wood,
and gave to all he did the grace of
simplicity while preserving