Honoré de Balzac

“ Some of you think that you know a thing or two,” he continued, glancing round at Nathan, Bixiou, La Palferine, and Lousteau, “but the king of the ground is a certain Count, now busy ranging himself. In his time, he was supposed to be the cleverest, adroitest, canniest, boldest, stoutest, most subtle and experienced of all the pirates, who, equipped with fine manners, yellow kid gloves, and cabs, have ever sailed or ever will sail upon the stormy seas of Paris. He fears neither God nor man. He applies in private life the principles that guide the English Cabinet. ”

“ I have found a young lady for you that asks no better than to buy your reading-room. She is a ruined woman with nothing before her but a plunge into the river; but she had four thousand francs in cash, and the best thing to do is to turn them to account, so as to feed and educate a couple of children.'
"'Very well. It is kind of you, Daddy Croizeau,' said Antonia.
"'Oh, I shall be much kinder before I have done. Just imagine it, poor M. Denisart has been worried into the jaundice! Yes, it has gone to the liver, as it usually does with susceptible old men. It is a pity he feels things so. ”

“ 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. ”

“ That evening at the Varietes, Antonia spoke to the Count.
“‘A reading-room is very dull, all the same,’ said she; ‘I feel that I have no sort of taste for that kind of life, and I see no future in it. It is only fit for a widow that wishes to keep body and soul together, or for some hideously ugly thing that fancies she can catch a husband with a little finery.’
“‘It was your own choice,’ returned the Count. Just at that moment, in came Nucingen, of whom Maxime, king of lions (the ‘yellow kid gloves’ were the lions of that day) had won three thousand francs the evening before. ”

“ Whenever a new word comes to supply the place of an unwieldy circumlocution, its fortune is assured; the word lorette has passed into the language of every class of society, even where the lorette herself will never gain an entrance. ”

“ 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! ”

“ 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. ”

“ He thought the coach-builder uncommonly green. Croizeau might pay all three bills, and get nothing for a long while; for Maxime felt more infatuated with Antonia than ever.”
“I can well believe it,” said La Palferine. “She is the bella Imperia of our day.”
“With her rough skin!” exclaimed Malaga; “so rough, that she ruins herself in bran baths!”
“Croizeau spoke with a coach-builder’s admiration of the sumptuous furniture provided by the amorous Denisart as a setting for his fair one, describing it all in detail with diabolical complacency for Antonia’s benefit,” continued Desroches. ”

“ The court divides the whole sum attached, proportionately among them all. That division, made under the eye of a magistrate, is what we call a contribution. If you owe ten thousand francs, and your creditors issue writs of attachment on a debt due to you of a thousand francs, each one of them gets so much per cent, ‘so much in the pound,’ in legal phrase; so much (that means) in proportion to the amounts severally claimed by the creditors. But—the creditors cannot touch the money without a special order from the clerk of the court. ”

“ 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 quart d'heure de Rabelais arrived; the Count had no money. So the first bill of three thousand francs was met by the amiable coach-builder; that old scoundrel Denisart having recommended him to secure himself with a mortgage on the reading-room.
"'For my own part,' said Denisart, 'I have seen pretty doings from pretty women. So in all cases, even when I have lost my head, I am always on my guard with a woman. There is this creature, for instance; I am madly in love with her; but this is not her furniture; no, it belongs to me. The lease is taken out in my name.'
"You know Maxime! ”

“ Each partner slept in a little closet, so carefully closed from prudence, that my head-clerk could never get inside. The furniture of the other three rooms—an ante-chamber, a waiting-room, and a private office—would not have fetched three hundred francs altogether at a distress-warrant sale. You know enough of Paris to know the look of it ”

“ You can imagine the part that a ruined man was sure to play in 1830 when his name in politics was ‘the courageous Cerizet.’ He was sent off into a very snug little sub-prefecture. Unluckily for him, it is one thing to be in opposition—any missile is good enough to throw, so long as the flight lasts ”

“ At dinner, in such a house, one does not expect to meet the patriarchal beef, the skinny fowl and salad of domestic and family life, nor is there any attempt at the hypocritical conversation of drawing-rooms furnished with highly respectable matrons. ”

“ She was too handsome to keep a reading-room."
"Perhaps you are the father of her child?" suggested the lorette.
Desroches resumed.
"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. ”

“ It is particularly easy to manage it if the debtor eggs you on to run up costs till they eat up the amount. And, as a rule, the Count’s creditors took nothing by that move, and were out of pocket in law and personal expenses. To get money out of so experienced a debtor as the Count, a creditor should really be in a position uncommonly difficult to reach ”

“ This partnership of two 'dabblers' (let the Stock Exchange term pass, for it is the only word which describes them) , this partnership of dabblers did not last very long. They fought like famished curs over every bit of garbage.
"The earlier speculations of the firm of Cerizet and Claparon were, however, well planned. The two scamps joined forces with Barbet, Chaboisseau, Samanon, and usurers of that stamp, and bought up hopelessly bad debts.
"Claparon's place of business at that time was a cramped entresol in the Rue Chabannais—five rooms at a rent of seven hundred francs at most. ”

“ In short, it was the mahogany furniture of furnished apartments which usually descends from one occupant of chambers to another during fifty years of service. Now you know the pair of antagonists.
“During the first three months of a partnership dissolved four months later in a bout of fisticuffs, Cerizet and Claparon bought up two thousand francs’ worth of bills bearing Maxime’s signature (since Maxime was his name) , and filled a couple of letters to bursting with judgments, appeals, orders of the court, distress-warrants, application for stay of proceedings, and all the rest of it ”

“ DEDICATION To Monsieur le Baron James de Rothschild, Banker and Austrian Consul-General at Paris. A MAN OF BUSINESS The word lorette is a euphemism invented to describe the status of a personage, or a personage of a status, of which it is awkward to speak ”

“ Maxime looked through the directory, and found the following reassuring item:
“DENISART,* retired custom-house officer, Rue de la Victoire.
“His uneasiness vanished.
“Gradually the Sieur Denisart and the Sieur Croizeau began to exchange confidences. Nothing so binds two men together as a similarity of views in the matter of womankind. Daddy Croizeau went to dine with ‘M. Denisart’s fair lady,’ as he called her. And here I must make a somewhat important observation.
“The reading-room had been paid for half in cash, half in bills signed by the said Mlle. Chocardelle. ”