



Produced by Dagny, Bonnie Sala





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.





MELMOTH RECONCILED


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 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 peculiar specimen of any creed, educational system, 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 maintain specimens 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,
shower ribbons 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 progressive portion 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 ingenious realization 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 remote
possibility 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