The Lesser Bourgeoisie Part 18

The moment when wild beasts seize their food is always the most critical, and that moment had now arrived for these three hungry tigers.

Cerizet would sometimes say to Theodose, with that revolutionary glance which twice in this century sovereigns have had to meet:--

"I have made you king, and here am I still nothing! for it is nothing not to be all."

A reaction of envy was rus.h.i.+ng its avalanche through Cerizet. Dutocq was at the mercy of his copying clerk. Theodose would gladly have burned his copartners could he have burned their papers in the same conflagration.

All three studied each other too carefully, in order to conceal their own thoughts, not to be in turn divined. Theodose lived a life of three h.e.l.ls as he thought of what lay below the cards, then of his own game, and then of his future. His speech to Thuillier was a cry of despair; he threw his lead into the waters of the old bourgeois and found there nothing more than twenty-five thousand francs.

"And," he said to himself as he went to his own room, "possibly nothing at all a month hence."

He new felt the deepest hatred to the Thuilliers. But Thuillier himself he held by a harpoon stuck into the depths of the man's vanity; namely, by the projected work, ent.i.tled "Taxation and the Sinking Fund," for which he intended to rearrange the ideas of the Saint-Simonian "Globe,"

giving them a systematic form, and coloring them with his fervid Southern diction. Thuillier's bureaucratic knowledge of the subject would be of use to him here. Theodose therefore clung to this rope, resolving to do battle, on so poor a base of operations, with the vanity of a fool, which, according to individual character, is either granite or sand. On reflection, Theodose was inclined to be content with the prospect.

On the evening before the right of redemption expired, Claparon and Cerizet proceeded to manipulate the notary in the following manner.

Cerizet, to whom Claparon had revealed the pa.s.sword and the notary's retreat, went out to this hiding-place to say to the latter:--

"One of my friends, Claparon, whom you know, has asked me to come and see you; he will expect you to-morrow, in the evening, you know where.

He has the paper you expect from him, which he will exchange with you for the ten thousand agreed upon; but I must be present, for five thousand of that sum belong to me; and I warn you, my dear monsieur, that the name in the counter-deed is in blank."

"I shall be there," replied the ex-notary.

The poor devil waited the whole night in agonies of mind that can well be imagined, for safety or inevitable ruin were in the balance. At sunrise he saw approaching him, instead of Claparon, a bailiff of the Court of commerce, who produced a judgment against him in regular form, and informed him that he must go with him to Clichy.

Cerizet had made an arrangement with one of the creditors of the luckless notary, pledging himself to deliver up the debtor on payment to himself of half the debt. Out of the ten thousand francs promised to Claparon, the victim of this trap was obliged, in order to obtain his liberty, to pay six thousand down, the amount of his debt.

On receiving his share of this extortion Cerizet said to himself: "There's three thousand to make Cerizet clear out."

Cerizet then returned to the notary and said: "Claparon is a scoundrel, monsieur; he has received fifteen thousand francs from the proposed purchaser of your house, who will now, of course, become the owner.

Threaten to reveal his hiding-place to his creditors, and to have him sued for fraudulent bankruptcy, and he'll give you half."

In his wrath the notary wrote a fulminating letter to Claparon.

Claparon, alarmed, feared an arrest, and Cerizet offered to get him a pa.s.sport.

"You have played me many a trick, Claparon," he said, "but listen to me now, and you can judge of my kindness. I possess, as my whole means, three thousand francs; I'll give them to you; start for America, and make your fortune there, as I'm trying to make mine here."

That evening Claparon, carefully disguised by Cerizet, left for Havre by the diligence. Cerizet remained master of the fifteen thousand francs to be paid to Claparon, and he awaited Theodose with the payment thereof tranquilly.

"The limit for bidding-in is pa.s.sed," thought Theodose, as he went to find Dutocq and ask him to bring Cerizet to his office. "Suppose I were now to make an effort to get rid of my leech?"

"You can't settle this affair anywhere but at Cerizet's, because Claparon must be present, and he is hiding there," said Dutocq.

Accordingly, Theodose went, between seven and eight o'clock, to the den of the "banker of the poor," whom Dutocq had notified of his coming.

Cerizet received him in the horrible kitchen where miseries and sorrows were chopped and cooked, as we have seen already. The pair then walked up and down, precisely like two animals in a cage, while mutually playing the following scene:--

"Have you brought the fifteen thousand francs?"

"No, but I have them at home."

"Why not have them in your pocket?" asked Cerizet, sharply.

"I'll tell you," replied Theodose, who, as he walked from the rue Saint-Dominique to the Estrapade, had decided on his course of action.

The Provencal, writhing upon the gridiron on which his partners held him, became suddenly possessed with a good idea, which flashed from the body of the live coal under him. Peril has gleams of light. He resolved to rely on the power of frankness, which affects all men, even swindlers. Every one is grateful to an adversary who bares himself to the waist in a duel.

"Well!" said Cerizet, "now the humbug begins."

The words seemed to come wholly through the hole in his nose with horrible intonations.

"You have put me in a magnificent position, and I shall never forget the service you have done me, my friend," began Theodose, with emotion.

"Oh, that's how you take it, is it?" said Cerizet.

"Listen to me; you don't understand my intentions."

"Yes, I do!" replied the lender by "the little week."

"No, you don't."

"You intend not to give up those fifteen thousand francs."

Theodose shrugged his shoulders and looked fixedly at Cerizet, who, struck by the two motions, kept silence.

"Would you live in my position, knowing yourself within range of a cannon loaded with grape-shot, without feeling a strong desire to get out of it? Now listen to me carefully. You are doing a dangerous business, and you would be glad enough to have some solid protection in the very heart of the magistracy of Paris. If I can continue my present course, I shall be subst.i.tute attorney-general, possibly attorney-general, in three years. I offer you to-day the offices of a devoted friends.h.i.+p, which will serve you hereafter most a.s.suredly, if only to replace you in a honorable position. Here are my conditions--"

"Conditions!" exclaimed Cerizet.

"In ten minutes I will bring you twenty-five thousand francs if you return to me all the notes which you have against me."

"But Dutocq? and Claparon?" said Cerizet.

"Leave them in the lurch!" replied Theodose, with his lips at Cerizet's ear.

"That's a pretty thing to say!" cried Cerizet. "And so you have invented this little game of hocus-pocus because you hold in your fingers fifteen thousand francs that don't belong to you!"

"But I've added ten thousand francs to them. Besides, you and I know each other."

"If you are able to get ten thousand francs out of your bourgeois you can surely get fifteen," said Cerizet. "For thirty thousand I'm your man. Frankness for frankness, you know."

"You ask the impossible," replied Theodose. "At this very moment, if you had to do with Claparon instead of with me, your fifteen thousand would be lost, for Thuillier is to-day the owner of that house."

"I'll speak to Claparon," said Cerizet, pretending to go and consult him, and mounting the stairs to the bedroom, from which Claparon had only just departed on his road to Havre.

The two adversaries had been speaking, we should here remark, in a manner not to be overheard; and every time that Theodose raised his voice Cerizet would make a gesture, intimating that Claparon, from above, might be listening. The five minutes during which Theodose heard what seemed to be the murmuring of two voices were torture to him, for he had staked his very life upon the issue. Cerizet at last came down, with a smile upon his lips, his eyes sparkling with infernal mischief, his whole frame quivering in his joy, a Lucifer of gaiety!

"I know nothing, so it seems!" he cried, shaking his shoulders, "but Claparon knows a great deal; he has worked with the big-wig bankers, and when I told what you wanted he began to laugh, and said, 'I thought as much!' You will have to bring me the twenty-five thousand you offer me to-morrow morning, my lad; and as much more before you can recover your notes."

"Why?" asked Theodose, feeling his spinal column liquidizing as if the discharge of some inward electric fluid had melted it.

"The house is ours."