



Produced by John Bickers, Bonnie Sala, and Dagny





BUREAUCRACY


By Honore De Balzac



Translated By Katharine Prescott Wormeley



                             DEDICATION

    To the Comtesse Seraphina San Severino, with the respectful
               homage of sincere and deep admiration
                                                  De Balzac





BUREAUCRACY




CHAPTER I. THE RABOURDIN HOUSEHOLD


In Paris, where men of thought and study bear a certain likeness to one
another, living as they do in a common centre, you must have met with
several resembling Monsieur Rabourdin, whose acquaintance we are about
to make at a moment when he is head of a bureau in one of our most
important ministries. At this period he was forty years old, with gray
hair of so pleasing a shade that women might at a pinch fall in love
with it for it softened a somewhat melancholy countenance, blue eyes
full of fire, a skin that was still fair, though rather ruddy and
touched here and there with strong red marks; a forehead and nose a la
Louis XV., a serious mouth, a tall figure, thin, or perhaps wasted, like
that of a man just recovering from illness, and finally, a bearing that
was midway between the indolence of a mere idler and the thoughtfulness
of a busy man. If this portrait serves to depict his character, a sketch
of this man's dress will bring it still further into relief. Rabourdin
wore habitually a blue surcoat, a white cravat, a waistcoat crossed a la
Robespierre, black trousers without straps, gray silk stockings and low
shoes. Well-shaved, and with his stomach warmed by a cup of coffee, he
left home at eight in the morning with the regularity of clock-work,
always passing along the same streets on his way to the ministry: so
neat was he, so formal, so starched that he might have been taken for an
Englishman on the road to his embassy.

From these general signs you will readily discern a family man,
harassed by vexations in his own household, worried by annoyances at the
ministry, yet philosopher enough to take life as he found it; an honest
man, loving his country and serving it, not concealing from himself the
obstacles in the way of those who seek to do right; prudent, because he
knew men; exquisitely courteous with women, of whom he asked nothing,--a
man full of acquirements, affable with his inferiors, holding his equals
at great distance, and dignified towards his superiors. At the epoch of
which we write, you would have noticed in him the coldly resigned air of
one who has buried the illusions of his youth and renounced every secret
ambition; you would have recognized a discouraged, but not disgusted
man, one who still clings to his first projects,--more perhaps to
employ his faculties than in the hope of a doubtful success. He was not
decorated with any order, and always accused himself of weakness
for having worn that of the Fleur-de-lis in the early days of the
Restoration.

The life of this man was marked by certain mysterious peculiarities.
He had never known his father; his mother, a woman to whom luxury was
everything, always elegantly dressed, always on pleasure bent, whose
beauty seemed to him miraculous and whom he very seldom saw, left
him little at her death; but she had given him that too common and
incomplete education which produces so much ambition and so little
ability. A few days before his mother's death, when he was just sixteen,
he left the Lycee Napoleon to enter as supernumerary a government
office, where an unknown protector had provided him with a place.
At twenty-two years of age Rabourdin became under-head-clerk; at
twenty-five, head-clerk, or, as it was termed, head of the bureau. From
that day the hand that assisted the young man to start in life was never
felt again in his career, except as to a single circumstance; it led
him, poor and friendless, to the house of a Monsieur Leprince, formerly
an auctioneer, a widower said to be extremely rich, and father of
an only daughter. Xavier Rabourdin fell desperately in love with
Mademoiselle Celestine Leprince, then seventeen years of age, who had
all the matrimonial claims of a dowry of two hundred thousand francs.
Carefully educated by an artistic mother, who transmitted her own
talents to her daughter, this young lady was fitted to attract
distinguished men. Tall, handsome, and finely-formed, she was a good
musician, drew and painted, spoke several languages, and even knew
something of science,--a dangerous advantage, which requires a woman
to avoid carefully all appearance of pedantry. Blinded by mistaken
tenderness, the mother gave the daughter false ideas as to her probable
future; to the maternal eyes a duke or an ambassador, a marshal of
France or a minister of State, could alone give her Celestine her due
place in society. The young lady had, moreover, the manners, language,
and habits of the great world. Her dress was richer and more elegant
than was suitable for an unmarried girl; a husband could give her
nothing more than she now had, except happiness. Besides all such
indulgences, the foolish spoiling of the mother, who died a year after
the girl's marriage, made a husband's task all the more difficult.
What coolness and composure of mind were needed to rule such a woman!
Commonplace suitors held back in fear. Xavier Rabourdin, without parents
and without fortune other than his situation under government, was
proposed to Celestine by her father. She resisted for a long time;
not that she had any personal objection to her suitor, who was young,
handsome, and much in love, but she shrank from the plain name of Madame
Rabourdin. Monsieur Leprince assured his daughter that Xavier was of
the stock that statesmen came of. Celestine answered that a man named
Rabourdin would never be anything under the government of the Bourbons,
etc. Forced back to his intrenchments, the father made the serious
mistake of telling his daughter that her future husband was certain of
becoming Rabourdin "de something or other" before he reached the age
of admission to the Chamber. Xavier was soon to be appointed Master of
petitions, and general-secretary at his ministry. From these lower steps
of the ladder the young man would certainly rise to the higher ranks of
the administration, possessed of a fortune and a name bequeathed to him
in a certain will of which he, Monsieur Leprince, was cognizant. On this
the marriage took place.

Rabourdin and his wife believed in the mysterious protector to whom
the auctioneer alluded. Led away by such hopes and by the natural
extravagance of happy love, Monsieur and Madame Rabourdin spent nearly
one hundred thousand francs of their capital in the first five years
of married life. By the end of this time Celestine, alarmed at the
non-advancement of her husband, insisted on investing the remaining
hundred thousand francs of her dowry in landed property, which returned
only a slender income; but her future inheritance from her father would
amply repay all present privations with perfect comfort and ease of
life. When the worthy auctioneer saw his son-in-law disappointed of the
hopes they had placed on the nameless protector, he tried, for the
sake of his daughter, to repair the secret loss by risking part of his
fortune in a speculation which had favourable chances of success. But
the poor man became involved in one of the liquidations of the house of
Nucingen, and died of grief, leaving nothing behind him but a dozen fine
pictures which adorned his daughter's salon, and a few old-fashioned
pieces of furniture, which she put in the garret.

Eight years of fruitless expectation made Madame Rabourdin at last
understand that the paternal protector of her husband must have died,
and that his will, if it ever existed, was lost or destroyed. Two years
before her father's death the place of chief of division, which became
vacant, was given, over her husband's head, to a certain Monsieur de la
Billardiere, related to a deputy of the Right who was made minister in
1823. It was enough to drive Rabourdin out of the service; but how could
he give up his salary of eight thousand francs and perquisites, when
they constituted three fourths of his income and his household was
accustomed to spend them? Besides, if he had patience for a few more
years he would then be entitled to a pension. What a fall was this for
a woman whose high expectations at the opening of her life were more or
less warranted, and one who was admitted on all sides to be a superior
woman.

Madame Rabourdin had justified the expectations formed of Mademoiselle
Leprince; she possessed the elements of that apparent superiority which
pleases the world; her liberal education enabled her to speak to every
one in his or her own language; her talents were real; she showed an
independent and elevated mind; her conversation charmed as much by its
variety and ease as by the oddness and originality of her ideas. Such
qualities, useful and appropriate in a sovereign or an ambassadress,
were of little service to a household compelled to jog in the common
round. Those who have the gift of speaking well desire an audience;
they like to talk, even if they sometimes weary others. To satisfy the
requirements of her mind Madame Rabourdin took a weekly reception-day
and went a great deal into society to obtain the consideration her
self-love was accustomed to enjoy. Those who know Parisian life will
readily understand how a woman of her temperament suffered, and was
martyrized at heart by the scantiness of her pecuniary means. No matter
what foolish declarations people make about money, they one and all, if
they live in Paris, must grovel before accounts, do homage to figures,
and kiss the forked hoof of the golden calf. What a problem was hers!
twelve thousand francs a year to defray the costs of a household
consisting of father, mother, two children, a chambermaid and cook,
living on the second floor of a house in the rue Duphot, in an apartment
costing two thousand francs a year. Deduct the dress and the carriage of
Madame before you estimate the gross expenses of the family, for dress
precedes everything; then see what remains for the education of the
children (a girl of eight and a boy of nine, whose maintenance must
cost at least two thousand francs besides) and you will find that Madame
Rabourdin could barely afford to give her husband thirty francs a month.
That is the position of half the husbands in Paris, under penalty of
being thought monsters.

Thus it was that this woman who believed herself destined to shine in
the world was condemned to use her mind and her faculties in a sordid
struggle, fighting hand to hand with an account-book. Already, terrible
sacrifice of pride! she had dismissed her man-servant, not long after
the death of her father. Most women grow weary of this daily struggle;
they complain but they usually end by giving up to fate and taking what
comes to them; Celestine's ambition, far from lessening, only increased
through difficulties, and led her, when she found she could not conquer
them, to sweep them aside. To her mind this complicated tangle of the
affairs of life was a Gordian knot impossible to untie and which
genius ought to cut. Far from accepting the pettiness of middle-class
existence, she was angry at the delay which kept the great things of
life from her grasp,--blaming fate as deceptive. Celestine sincerely
believed herself a superior woman. Perhaps she was right; perhaps she
would have been great under great circumstances; perhaps she was not in
her right place. Let us remember there are as many varieties of woman as
there are of man, all of which society fashions to meet its needs. Now
in the social order, as in Nature's order, there are more young shoots
than there are trees, more spawn than full-grown fish, and many great
capacities (Athanase Granson, for instance) which die withered for want
of moisture, like seeds on stony ground. There are, unquestionably,
household women, accomplished women, ornamental women, women who are
exclusively wives, or mothers, or sweethearts, women purely spiritual
or purely material; just as there are soldiers, artists, artisans,
mathematicians, poets, merchants, men who understand money, or
agriculture, or government, and nothing else. Besides all this, the
eccentricity of events leads to endless cross-purposes; many are called
and few are chosen is the law of earth as of heaven. Madame Rabourdin
conceived herself fully capable of directing a statesman, inspiring an
artist, helping an inventor and pushing his interests, or of devoting
her powers to the financial politics of a Nucingen, and playing a
brilliant part in the great world. Perhaps she was only endeavouring to
excuse to her own mind a hatred for the laundry lists and the duty of
overlooking the housekeeping bills, together with the petty economies
and cares of a small establishment. She was superior only in those
things where it gave her pleasure to be so. Feeling as keenly as she
did the thorns of a position which can only be likened to that of
Saint-Laurence on his grid-iron, is it any wonder that she sometimes
cried out? So, in her paroxysms of thwarted ambition, in the moments
when her wounded vanity gave her terrible shooting pains, Celestine
turned upon Xavier Rabourdin. Was it not her husband's duty to give her
a suitable position in the world? If she were a man she would have had
the energy to make a rapid fortune for the sake of rendering an adored
wife happy! She reproached him for being too honest a man. In the mouth
of some women this accusation is a charge of imbecility. She sketched
out for him certain brilliant plans in which she took no account of the
hindrances imposed by men and things; then, like all women under the
influence of vehement feeling, she became in thought as Machiavellian
as Gondreville, and more unprincipled than Maxime de Trailles. At such
times Celestine's mind took a wide range, and she imagined herself at
the summit of her ideas.

When these fine visions first began Rabourdin, who saw the practical
side, was cool. Celestine, much grieved, thought her husband
narrow-minded, timid, unsympathetic; and she acquired, insensibly, a
wholly false opinion of the companion of her life. In the first place,
she often extinguished him by the brilliancy of her arguments. Her ideas
came to her in flashes, and she sometimes stopped him short when he
began an explanation, because she did not choose to lose the slightest
sparkle of her own mind. From the earliest days of their marriage
Celestine, feeling herself beloved and admired by her husband, treated
him without ceremony; she put herself above conjugal laws and the
rules of private courtesy by expecting love to pardon all her little
wrong-doings; and, as she never in any way corrected herself, she was
always in the ascendant. In such a situation the man holds to the wife
very much the position of a child to a teacher when the latter cannot or
will not recognize that the mind he has ruled in childhood is becoming
mature. Like Madame de Stael, who exclaimed in a room full of people,
addressing, as we may say, a greater man than herself, "Do you know you
have really said something very profound!" Madame Rabourdin said of
her husband: "He certainly has a good deal of sense at times." Her
disparaging opinion of him gradually appeared in her behavior through
almost imperceptible motions. Her attitude and manners expressed a want
of respect. Without being aware of it she injured her husband in the
eyes of others; for in all countries society, before making up its mind
