



Produced by John Bickers, and Dagny





FACINO CANE

By Honore De Balzac


Translated by Clara Bell and others






FACINO CANE


I once used to live in a little street which probably is not known
to you--the Rue de Lesdiguieres. It is a turning out of the Rue
Saint-Antoine, beginning just opposite a fountain near the Place de
la Bastille, and ending in the Rue de la Cerisaie. Love of knowledge
stranded me in a garret; my nights I spent in work, my days in reading
at the Bibliotheque d'Orleans, close by. I lived frugally; I had
accepted the conditions of the monastic life, necessary conditions for
every worker, scarcely permitting myself a walk along the Boulevard
Bourdon when the weather was fine. One passion only had power to draw me
from my studies; and yet, what was that passion but a study of another
kind? I used to watch the manners and customs of the Faubourg, its
inhabitants, and their characteristics. As I dressed no better than a
working man, and cared nothing for appearances, I did not put them on
their guard; I could join a group and look on while they drove bargains
or wrangled among themselves on their way home from work. Even then
observation had come to be an instinct with me; a faculty of penetrating
to the soul without neglecting the body; or rather, a power of grasping
external details so thoroughly that they never detained me for a moment,
and at once I passed beyond and through them. I could enter into the
life of the human creatures whom I watched, just as the dervish in the
_Arabian Nights_ could pass into any soul or body after pronouncing a
certain formula.

If I met a working man and his wife in the streets between eleven
o'clock and midnight on their way home from the Ambigu Comique, I used
to amuse myself by following them from the Boulevard du Pont aux Choux
to the Boulevard Beaumarchais. The good folk would begin by talking
about the play; then from one thing to another they would come to their
own affairs, and the mother would walk on and on, heedless of complaints
or question from the little one that dragged at her hand, while she and
her husband reckoned up the wages to be paid on the morrow, and spent
the money in a score of different ways. Then came domestic details,
lamentations over the excessive dearness of potatoes, or the length
of the winter and the high price of block fuel, together with forcible
representations of amounts owing to the baker, ending in an acrimonious
dispute, in the course of which such couples reveal their characters in
picturesque language. As I listened, I could make their lives mine, I
felt their rags on my back, I walked with their gaping shoes on my feet;
their cravings, their needs, had all passed into my soul, or my soul had
passed into theirs. It was the dream of a waking man. I waxed hot with
them over the foreman's tyranny, or the bad customers that made them
call again and again for payment.

To come out of my own ways of life, to be another than myself through
a kind of intoxication of the intellectual faculties, and to play this
game at will, such was my recreation. Whence comes the gift? Is it a
kind of second sight? Is it one of those powers which when abused end in
madness? I have never tried to discover its source; I possess it, I use
it, that is all. But this it behooves you to know, that in those days
I began to resolve the heterogeneous mass known as the People into
its elements, and to evaluate its good and bad qualities. Even then I
realized the possibilities of my suburb, that hotbed of revolution
in which heroes, inventors, and practical men of science, rogues and
scoundrels, virtues and vices, were all packed together by poverty,
stifled by necessity, drowned in drink, and consumed by ardent spirits.

You would not imagine how many adventures, how many tragedies, lie
buried away out of sight in that Dolorous City; how much horror and
beauty lurks there. No imagination can reach the Truth, no one can go
down into that city to make discoveries; for one must needs descend too
low into its depths to see the wonderful scenes of tragedy or comedy
enacted there, the masterpieces brought forth by chance.

I do not know how it is that I have kept the following story so long
untold. It is one of the curious things that stop in the bag from which
Memory draws out stories at haphazard, like numbers in a lottery. There
are plenty of tales just as strange and just as well hidden still left;
but some day, you may be sure, their turn will come.



One day my charwoman, a working man's wife, came to beg me to honor
her sister's wedding with my presence. If you are to realize what this
wedding was like you must know that I paid my