



Produced by John Bickers, and Dagny





RISE AND FALL OF CESAR BIROTTEAU


By Honore De Balzac



Translated by Katharine Prescott Wormeley






PART I. CESAR AT HIS APOGEE




I

During winter nights noise never ceases in the Rue Saint-Honore except
for a short interval. Kitchen-gardeners carrying their produce to market
continue the stir of carriages returning from theatres and balls. Near
the middle of this sustained pause in the grand symphony of Parisian
uproar, which occurs about one o'clock in the morning, the wife of
Monsieur Cesar Birotteau, a perfumer established near the Place Vendome,
was startled from her sleep by a frightful dream. She had seen her
double. She had appeared to herself clothed in rags, turning with a
shrivelled, withered hand the latch of her own shop-door, seeming to be
at the threshold, yet at the same time seated in her armchair behind the
counter. She was asking alms of herself, and heard herself speaking from
the doorway and also from her seat at the desk.

She tried to grasp her husband, but her hand fell on a cold place.
Her terror became so intense that she could not move her neck, which
stiffened as if petrified; the membranes of her throat became glued
together, her voice failed her. She remained sitting erect in the same
posture in the middle of the alcove, both panels of which were wide
open, her eyes staring and fixed, her hair quivering, her ears filled
with strange noises, her heart tightened yet palpitating, and her person
bathed in perspiration though chilled to the bone.

Fear is a half-diseased sentiment, which presses so violently upon the
human mechanism that the faculties are suddenly excited to the highest
degree of their power or driven to utter disorganization. Physiologists
have long wondered at this phenomenon, which overturns their systems
and upsets all theories; it is in fact a thunderbolt working within the
being, and, like all electric accidents, capricious and whimsical in its
course. This explanation will become a mere commonplace in the day
when scientific men are brought to recognize the immense part which
electricity plays in human thought.

Madame Birotteau now passed through several of the shocks, in some sort
electrical, which are produced by terrible explosions of the will forced
out, or held under, by some mysterious mechanism. Thus during a
period of time, very short if judged by a watch, but immeasurable when
calculated by the rapidity of her impressions, the poor woman had the
supernatural power of emitting more ideas and bringing to the surface
more recollections than, under any ordinary use of her faculties, she
could put forth in the course of a whole day. The poignant tale of her
monologue may be abridged into a few absurd sentences, as contradictory
and bare of meaning as the monologue itself.

"There is no reason why Birotteau should leave my bed! He has eaten so
much veal that he may be ill. But if he were ill he would have waked
me. For nineteen years that we have slept together in this bed, in this
house, it has never happened that he left his place without telling
me,--poor sheep! He never slept away except to pass the night in the
guard-room. Did he come to bed to-night? Why, of course; goodness! how
stupid I am."

She cast her eyes upon the bed and saw her husband's night-cap, which
still retained the almost conical shape of his head.

"Can he be dead? Has he killed himself? Why?" she went on. "For the
last two years, since they made him deputy-mayor, he is
_all-I-don't-know-how_. To put him into public life! On the word of an
honest woman, isn't it pitiable? His business is doing well, for he gave
me a shawl. But perhaps it isn't doing well? Bah! I should know of
it. Does one ever know what a man has got in his head; or a woman
either?--there is no harm in that. Didn't we sell five thousand francs'
worth to-day? Besides, a deputy mayor couldn't kill himself; he knows
the laws too well. Where is he then?"

She could neither turn her neck, nor stretch out her hand to pull
the bell, which would have put in motion a cook, three clerks, and a
shop-boy. A prey to the nightmare, which still lasted though her
mind was wide awake, she forgot her daughter peacefully asleep in an
adjoining room, the door of which opened at the foot of her bed. At last
she cried "Birotteau!" but got no answer.