The Human Comedy (37 page)

“Possibly.”

“Without us spendthrifts, where would you be? We two are one, we’re body and soul together.”

“Correct.”

“Well then, how about a nice handclasp, my good Papa Gobseck, and a little magnanimity from you—if all I’ve said is true, correct, and possible?”

“You come to me,” replied the usurer coldly, “because Girard, Palma, Werbrust, and Gigonnet are fed up with your bills of exchange, which they are offering everywhere at a fifty percent loss. Now, since they probably gave you only half the face value in the first place, the notes are not worth twenty-five percent. Your servant, sir! Can I,” Gobseck went on, “decently lend a single franc to a man who owes thirty thousand and hasn’t got a sou? You lost ten thousand francs the day before yesterday at Baron de Nucingen’s party.”

“Monsieur,” replied the count with startling impudence, staring down the old man, “my affairs are no concern of yours. A man with a due date ahead is not a man in debt.”

“True!”

“My bills will be paid when they are due.”

“Possibly!”

“And right now, the question between us is simply whether I can present you with sufficient security for the sum I have come to borrow.”

“Exactly.”

The clatter of a cab filled the room as it stopped at the doorstep.

“I will show you something that may satisfy you,” cried the young count, and he went out.

“Oh, my boy!” exclaimed Gobseck, standing and opening his arms to me when the borrower had vanished. “If he has some worthwhile collateral, you’ve saved my life! This would have been the death of me. Werbrust and Gigonnet thought they were putting one over on me. Thanks to you, I’ll have a good laugh tonight at their expense!”

There was something frightening about the old man’s exhilaration. It was the only time I ever saw him expansive. His ecstasy lasted a brief moment, but in my memory it will live forever.

“Please do me the favor of staying here a little,” he said. “I’m armed, and I’m a sure shot, as a man must be who has hunted tigers and held his own on deck when it was conquer or die, but I don’t trust that elegant rascal.” He returned to the chair at his desk. His face was again colorless and calm.

“Ah!” he said, turning to me. “I believe you are about to see the beautiful creature I once told you about; I hear an aristocrat’s step in the hallway.”

And indeed, the young man returned escorting a woman I recognized as the countess whose noontime rising Gobseck had described to me, one of old Goriot’s daughters. The countess didn’t see me right away; I was standing in the window recess, my face to the glass. Stepping into the moneylender’s damp, dim room, she cast a mistrustful glance at Maxime. She was so lovely that, despite her faults, I felt pity for her. An awful anguish was riling her heart; her noble, proud features were contorted in an expression of pain that was barely disguised. The young man had become an evil genie in her eyes. I admired Gobseck for foreseeing the future of these two beings from that one bill four years earlier. I thought, “This angel-faced monster probably rules over her with every possible mechanism: vanity, jealousy, erotic pleasure, the ways of her world.”

* * *

“But,” here the Vicomtesse de Grandlieu broke in on Derville, “the woman’s very virtues were weapons in his hands—he brought her to tears of devotion, he roused the generosity that comes so naturally to our sex, and then he took advantage of her feelings to charge her a very high price for sinful pleasures!”

“I must admit,” said Derville, oblivious to the signals of the viscountess, “I hardly mourn the fate of that unlucky woman, so splendid to the world’s eyes and so repugnant to anyone who could read her heart. I did shudder, though, at the sight of her assassin, this young fellow with his brow so untroubled, his mouth so fresh, his smile so winning, his teeth so white—the look of an angel. At that moment the two of them stood before their judge, who was scrutinizing them the way an old sixteenth-century Dominican monk must have watched a couple of Moors being tortured, down in the dungeons of the Inquisition.”

* * *

“Monsieur,” the countess asked Gobseck, “is there a way to obtain the price of these diamonds but keep the right to buy them back?” Her voice trembled as she held out a jewel box to him.

“Yes, madame, there is,” I interjected, stepping forward and revealing myself. She glanced over, recognized me, shuddered, and threw me that look which in every land means “Not a word!”

I went on: “There is a procedure we call a ‘sale with right of redemption,’ which consists in ceding and transferring a property, real or personal, for a fixed period of time, at the expiration of which one may retrieve the object in question against payment of a prearranged sum.”

She breathed more easily. Count Maxime frowned; he suspected quite rightly that the usurer would now offer a smaller amount for the diamonds, since their value would fluctuate. Gobseck, still seated unmoving at his desk, had fitted a loupe against his eye and was silently looking through the jewel case. If I live a hundred years, I will never forget the sight of his face: His pale cheeks colored; his eyes, which seemed to collect the stones’ sparkle, shone with a supernatural blaze. He rose, moved to the window, and held the diamonds close to his toothless mouth as if he would devour them. He mumbled vague words, lifting bracelets, brooches, pendants, necklaces, tiaras one by one, holding them to the light to judge their clarity, their whiteness, their cut; he pulled them out of the jewel box and put them back, picked them up again, jostled them to bring out their every glint, more a child than an old man, or rather child and old man both at once.

“Beautiful diamonds! These would have brought three hundred thousand francs before the Revolution. What brilliance! They’re true Asia diamonds, from Golconda or Visapur! Do you know what these are worth? No, no, Gobseck is the only person in Paris who can appreciate them. Under the Empire it would have cost more than two hundred thousand to put together such a set.” He shook his head in disgust and added, “But diamonds are dropping in value every day now. Brazil has been pouring them out since the end of the war, the market is glutted with stones that aren’t so white as the ones from India. And nowadays women are wearing them everywhere, not only at court. Does madame go to court?” Muttering these awful remarks he went on examining the stones, one after the other, with unspeakable pleasure. “Not a flaw!” he exclaimed. “There’s one here . . . Here’s something, a streak . . . Fine diamond, this one.”

His colorless face was so brilliantly illuminated by the blazing jewels that I thought of those murky old mirrors you see in country inns, which absorb the surrounding light and send nothing back, so that a traveler who looks for his image in the glass sees a fellow in an apoplectic spasm.

“Well now!” said the young count, slapping Gobseck on the shoulder. The aged child gave a start. He let go the trinkets, set them on his desk, sat down, and became the moneylender once again—hard, cold, polished as a marble column.

“How much do you need?”

“One hundred thousand francs, for three years,” said the count.

“Possible!” said Gobseck, and from a mahogany box—his own sort of jewel case!—he drew scales of irreproachable accuracy. He weighed the stones and—heaven knows how—his practiced eye calculated the weight of the settings as well. Throughout the operation the old miser’s face struggled between excitement and sternness. The countess was sunk in a stupor; watching her, I felt she was looking at the depths of the chasm she was falling into. There was still some remorse in the woman’s soul; perhaps it would take only a small effort, a charitable hand offered, to save her. I decided to try.

“Do these diamonds belong to you personally, madame?” I asked in a clear voice.

“Yes, monsieur,” she replied, with a haughty look.

“Draw up the purchase and redemption contract, chatterbox!” Gobseck snarled, standing and pointing me to his seat at the desk.

“Madame is probably a married woman?” I asked her further.

She nodded curtly.

“I will not draw up the contract,” I declared.

“And why not?” asked Gobseck.

“Why not?” I said, drawing the old man into the window niche to speak privately. “This woman is under her husband’s authority; the contract would be null and void; you couldn’t claim ignorance of a fact that is stated in the document itself. You would be required to produce the diamonds deposited with you, whose weight, value, and cut would be described right there.”

Gobseck interrupted me with a nod and turned to the two culprits. “He is right,” he said. “This is a different situation entirely. Eighty thousand francs cash, and you leave the diamonds with me!” he added in a hollow, fluting voice. “In matters of personal property, possession equals title.”

“But—” objected the young man.

“Take it or leave it,” Gobseck said, handing the jewel case back to the countess. “There are too many risks in it for me.”

“You would do best to throw yourself on your husband’s mercy,” I murmured into her ear, leaning toward her. The usurer doubtless understood my words from the movement of my lips, and he threw me a cold look. The young man’s face turned livid. The countess’s hesitation was palpable. The young count went to her, and though he spoke very low, I heard: “Farewell, dear Anastasie, I wish you happiness! As for me, tomorrow my cares will be over.”

“Monsieur,” cried the countess, “I accept your offer.”

“Well now,” replied the old man, “you are very difficult to bring around, my lovely lady.”

He wrote a check for fifty thousand francs drawn on the Bank of France and handed it to the countess. “Now,” he said with a smile that rather resembled Voltaire’s, “the balance of thirty thousand francs I will give you in my own bills of exchange . . . and no one would ever contest their validity. They are as good as gold bullion. Monsieur de Trailles said earlier, ‘My bills will be paid when they are due.’” Gobseck brought out a bundle of notes signed by the young count, all of them contested the day before at the request of a fellow lender who had probably then sold them cheap to Gobseck. The young man gave a roar that contained the phrase “Old scoundrel!”

Papa Gobseck didn’t turn a hair; from a box he lifted out a pair of pistols and said coldly, “As the insulted party, I shall fire first.”

“Maxime, you owe the gentleman an apology,” the trembling countess exclaimed softly.

“I had no intention of offending you,” the young man stammered.

“I am sure of that,” Gobseck replied tranquilly. “Your only intention was to not pay your bills of exchange.”

The countess rose, bowed, and left in what must have been a state of deep dread.

Monsieur de Trailles was obliged to follow her, but before going out he turned to us. “If the slightest indiscretion should escape your lips, gentlemen,” he said, “I will have your blood or you will have mine.”

“Amen,” Gobseck exclaimed, as he put away his pistols. “But to gamble his blood, a man must have some in his veins, little one, and you have nothing but muck in yours.”

When the door had closed and the two carriages were gone, Gobseck rose and began to dance about, chanting, “I’ve got the diamonds! I’ve got the diamonds! The beautiful diamonds, such diamonds! And cheap! Ah, ah, Werbrust and Gigonnet! You thought you could trick old Papa Gobseck!
Ego sum papa!
I am the master of you all! Fully paid for, the interest too! Won’t they feel like fools tonight when I tell them this story, between a couple of games of dominoes!”

That dark exuberance, that ferocity of a savage, over the possession of a few shiny pebbles made me shudder. I was silent, stunned.

“Ah, you’re still here, my boy!” he said. “Let’s go eat together, we’ll have a good time at your place—I don’t keep house here, and all those restaurant folk, with their purées and their sauces and their wines, they’d poison the devil himself!”

The look on my face abruptly returned him to his cold impassivity. “You don’t understand all this,” he said, taking his seat again by the fire and setting a tin saucepan of milk on the grate. “Would you like to have breakfast with me?” he went on. “There may be enough here for two.”

“Thank you,” I replied, “I don’t breakfast until noon.”

Just then rapid footsteps sounded in the corridor. The unknown arrival stopped at Gobseck’s door and rapped several times in what seemed a fury. The moneylender went to look through the grille, then opened the door to a man of about thirty-five who must have looked harmless to him, despite the man’s anger. The newcomer was dressed simply; he resembled the late Duc de Richelieu. It was the count (whom you have probably met, madame? If you’ll permit the liberty—he had the aristocratic look of the statesmen from your neighborhood).

“Monsieur,” the man said to Gobseck, who had resumed his calm stolid demeanor again, “my wife just left here?”

“Possibly.”

“What, monsieur—do you not understand me?”

“I have not had the honor of meeting madame, your wife,” replied the usurer. “I’ve received a good many visitors this morning: women, men, young ladies who looked like young men and young men who looked like young ladies. It would be rather difficult for me to—”

“Enough foolishness, sir! I am talking about the woman who left your office a moment ago.”

“How should I know whether she is your wife?” asked the usurer. “I have never had occasion to see you before.”

“You are mistaken, Monsieur Gobseck,” said the count with heavy irony. “We met in my wife’s room, one morning. You came to collect a note she had underwritten, a note she did not owe.”

“It was not my business to discover how she came to underwrite the note,” replied Gobseck, shooting a mischievous look at the count. “I had taken it over from a colleague. And by the way, monsieur,” said the moneyman, his voice neither agitated nor hurried as he added coffee to his mug of milk, “allow me to remark that it is not clear by what right you come and lecture me here in my office: I have been an adult since the sixty-first year of the past century.”

“Monsieur, you have just bought for a pittance family diamonds that did not belong to my wife.”