



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 charwoman, poor creature,
four francs a month; for which sum she came every morning to make my
bed, clean my shoes, brush my clothes, sweep the room, and make ready
my breakfast, before going to her day's work of turning the handle of
a machine, at which hard drudgery she earned five-pence. Her husband, a
cabinetmaker, made four francs a day at his trade; but as they had three
children, it was all that they could do to gain an honest living. Yet I
have never met with more sterling honesty than in this man and wife. For
five years after I left the quarter, Mere Vaillant used to come on my
birthday with a bunch of flowers and some oranges for me--she that had
never a sixpence to put by! Want had drawn us together. I never could
give her more than a ten-franc piece, and often I had to borrow the
money for the occasion. This will perhaps explain my promise to go
to the wedding; I hoped to efface myself in these poor people's
merry-making.

The banquet and the ball were given on a first floor above a wineshop in
the Rue de Charenton. It was a large room, lighted by oil lamps with
tin reflectors. A row of wooden benches ran round the walls, which were
black with grime to the height of the tables. Here some eighty persons,
all in their Sunday best, tricked out with ribbons and bunches of
flowers, all of them on pleasure bent, were dancing away with heated
visages as if the world were about to come to an end. Bride and
bridegroom exchanged salutes to the general satisfaction, amid a chorus
of facetious "Oh, ohs!" and "Ah, ahs!" less really indecent than the
furtive glances of young girls that have been well brought up. There was
something indescribably infectious about the rough, homely enjoyment in
all countenances.

But neither the faces, nor the wedding, nor the wedding-guests have
anything to do with my story. Simply bear them in mind as the odd
setting to it. Try to realize the scene, the shabby red-painted
wineshop, the smell of wine, the yells of merriment; try to feel that
you are really in the faubourg, among old people, working men and poor
women giving themselves up to a night's enjoyment.

The band consisted of a fiddle, a clarionet, and a flageolet from the
Blind Asylum. The three were paid seven francs in a lump sum for the
night. For the money, they gave us, not Beethoven certainly, nor yet
Rossini; they played as they had the will and the skill; and every one
in the room (with charming delicacy of feeling) refrained from finding
fault. The music made such a brutal assault on the drum of my ear, that
after a first glance round the room my eyes fell at once upon the blind
trio, and the sight of their uniform inclined me from the first to
indulgence. As the artists stood in a window recess, it was difficult
to distinguish their faces except at close quarters, and I kept away at
first; but when I came nearer (I hardly know why) I thought of nothing
else; the wedding party and the music ceased to exist, my curiosity was
roused to the highest pitch, for my soul passed into the body of the
clarionet player.

The fiddle and the flageolet were neither of them interesting; their
faces were of the ordinary type among the blind--earnest, attentive, and
grave. Not so the clarionet player; any artist or philosopher must have
come to a stop at the sight of him.

Picture to yourself a plaster mask of Dante in the red lamplight, with
a forest of silver-white hair above the brows. Blindness intensified the
expression of bitterness and sorrow in that grand face of his; the dead
eyes were lighted up, as it were, by a thought within that broke forth
like a burning flame, lit by one sole insatiable desire, written large
in vigorous characters upon an arching brow scored across with as many
lines as an old stone wall.

The old man was playing at random, without the slightest regard for time
or tune. His fingers traveled mechanically over the worn keys of his
instrument; he did not trouble himself over a false note now and again
(a _canard_, in the language of the orchestra), neither did the dancers,
nor, for that matter, did my old Italian's acolytes; for I had made
up my mind that he must be Italian, and an Italian he was. There was
something great, something too of the despot about this old Homer
bearing within him an _Odyssey_ doomed to oblivion. The greatness was so
real that it triumphed over his abject position; the despotism so much a
part of him, that it rose above his poverty.

There are violent passions which drive a man to good or evil, making of
him a hero or a convict; of these there was not one that had failed to
leave its traces on the grandly-hewn, lividly Italian face. You trembled
lest a flash of thought should suddenly light up the deep sightless
hollows under the grizzled brows, as you might fear to see brigands with
torches and poniards in the mouth of a cavern. You felt that there was
a lion in that cage of flesh, a lion spent with useless raging against
iron bars. The fires of despair had burned themselves out into ashes,
the lava had cooled; but the tracks of the flames, the wreckage, and a
little smoke remained to bear witness to the violence of the eruption,
the ravages of the fire. These images crowded up at the sight of the
clarionet player, till the thoughts now grown cold in his face burned
hot within my soul.

The fiddle and the flageolet took a deep interest in bottles and
glasses; at the end of a country-dance, they hung their instruments from
a button on their reddish-colored coats, and stretched out their hands
to a little table set in the window recess to hold their liquor supply.
Each time they did so they held out a full glass to the Italian, who
could not reach it for himself because he sat in front of the table,
and each time the Italian thanked them with a friendly nod. All their
movements were made with the precision which always amazes you so much
at the Blind Asylum. You could almost think that they can see. I came
nearer to listen; but when I stood beside them, they evidently guessed I
was not a working man, and kept themselves to themselves.

"What part of the world do you come from, you that are playing the
clarionet?"

"From Venice," he said, with a trace of Italian accent.

"Have you always been blind, or did it come on afterwards--"

"Afterwards," he answered quickly. "A cursed gutta serena."

"Venice is a fine city; I have always had a fancy to go there."

The old man's face lighted up, the wrinkles began to work, he was
violently excited.

"If I went with you, you would not lose your time," he said.

"Don't talk about Venice to our Doge," put in the fiddle, "or you will
start him off, and he has stowed away a couple of bottles as it is--has
the prince!"

"Come, strike up, Daddy Canard!" added the flageolet, and the three
began to play. But while they executed the four figures of a square
dance, the Venetian was scenting my thoughts; he guessed the great
interest I felt in him. The dreary, dispirited look died out of his
face, some mysterious hope brightened his features and slid like a blue
flame over his wrinkles. He smiled and wiped his brow, that fearless,
terrible brow of his, and at length grew gay like a man mounted on his
hobby.

"How old are you?" I asked.

"Eighty-two."

"How long have you been blind?"

"For very nearly fifty years," he said, and there was that in his tone
which told me that his regret was for something more than his lost
sight, for great power of which he had been robbed.

"Then why do they call you 'the Doge'?" I asked.

"Oh, it is a joke. I am a Venetian noble, and I might have been a doge
like any one else."

"What is your name?"

"Here, in Paris, I am Pere Canet," he said. "It was the only way of
spelling my name on the register. But in Italy I am Marco Facino Cane,
Prince of Varese."

"What, are you descended from the great _condottiere_ Facino Cane, whose
lands won by the sword were taken by the Dukes of Milan?"

"_E vero_," returned he. "His son's life was not safe under the
Visconti; he fled to Venice, and his name was inscribed on the Golden
Book. And now neither Cane or Golden Book are in existence." His gesture
startled me; it told of patriotism extinguished and weariness of life.

"But if you were once a Venet