Melmoth Reconciled , livre ebook

The Floating Press - De Balzac Honore ,
traduit par Ellen Marriage

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39 pages

English

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In this long story, part of the Philosophical Studies section of Honore de Balzac's epic masterwork The Human Comedy, the author takes the uncharacteristic step of alluding to a previously published novel, Charles Robert Maturin's 1820 work Melmoth the Wanderer. In Balzac's Melmoth Reconciled, Melmoth is a mysterious figure who comes to the aid of a desperate clerk who is on the brink of committing a crime.

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Short story

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Publié par	The Floating Press
Date de parution	01 juillet 2014
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781776539291
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0064€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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MELMOTH RECONCILED
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HONORE DE BALZAC
Translated by
ELLEN MARRIAGE

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Melmoth Reconciled First published in 1835 Epub ISBN 978-1-77653-929-1 Also available: PDF ISBN 978-1-77653-930-7 © 2014 The Floating Press and its licensors. All rights reserved. While every effort has been used to ensure the accuracy and reliability of the information contained in The Floating Press edition of this book, The Floating Press does not assume liability or responsibility for any errors or omissions in this book. The Floating Press does not accept responsibility for loss suffered as a result of reliance upon the accuracy or currency of information contained in this book. Do not use while operating a motor vehicle or heavy equipment. Many suitcases look alike. Visit www.thefloatingpress.com
Contents
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Melmoth Reconciled Addendum Endnotes
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To Monsieur le General Baron de Pommereul, a token of the friendship between our fathers, which survives in their sons.
DE BALZAC.
Melmoth Reconciled
*
There is a special variety of human nature obtained in the SocialKingdom by a process analogous to that of the gardener's craft in theVegetable Kingdom, to wit, by the forcing-house—a species of hybridwhich can be raised neither from seed nor from slips. This product isknown as the Cashier, an anthropomorphous growth, watered by religiousdoctrine, trained up in fear of the guillotine, pruned by vice, toflourish on a third floor with an estimable wife by his side and anuninteresting family. The number of cashiers in Paris must always bea problem for the physiologist. Has any one as yet been able to statecorrectly the terms of the proportion sum wherein the cashier figures asthe unknown x ? Where will you find the man who shall live with wealth,like a cat with a caged mouse? This man, for further qualification,shall be capable of sitting boxed in behind an iron grating for sevenor eight hours a day during seven-eighths of the year, perched upon acane-seated chair in a space as narrow as a lieutenant's cabin on boarda man-of-war. Such a man must be able to defy anchylosis of the kneeand thigh joints; he must have a soul above meanness, in order to livemeanly; must lose all relish for money by dint of handling it. Demandthis peculiar specimen of any creed, educational system, school, orinstitution you please, and select Paris, that city of fiery ordealsand branch establishment of hell, as the soil in which to plant the saidcashier. So be it. Creeds, schools, institutions and moral systems, allhuman rules and regulations, great and small, will, one after another,present much the same face that an intimate friend turns upon you whenyou ask him to lend you a thousand francs. With a dolorous dropping ofthe jaw, they indicate the guillotine, much as your friend aforesaidwill furnish you with the address of the money-lender, pointing you toone of the hundred gates by which a man comes to the last refuge of thedestitute.
Yet nature has her freaks in the making of a man's mind; she indulgesherself and makes a few honest folk now and again, and now and then acashier.
Wherefore, that race of corsairs whom we dignify with the title ofbankers, the gentry who take out a license for which they pay a thousandcrowns, as the privateer takes out his letters of marque, hold theserare products of the incubations of virtue in such esteem that theyconfine them in cages in their counting-houses, much as governmentsprocure and maintain specimens of strange beasts at their own charges.
If the cashier is possessed of an imagination or of a fervidtemperament; if, as will sometimes happen to the most complete cashier,he loves his wife, and that wife grows tired of her lot, has ambitions,or merely some vanity in her composition, the cashier is undone.Search the chronicles of the counting-house. You will not find a singleinstance of a cashier attaining a position , as it is called. They aresent to the hulks; they go to foreign parts; they vegetate on a secondfloor in the Rue Saint-Louis among the market gardens of the Marais.Some day, when the cashiers of Paris come to a sense of their realvalue, a cashier will be hardly obtainable for money. Still, certainit is that there are people who are fit for nothing but to be cashiers,just as the bent of a certain order of mind inevitably makes forrascality. But, oh marvel of our civilization! Society rewards virtuewith an income of a hundred louis in old age, a dwelling on a secondfloor, bread sufficient, occasional new bandana handkerchiefs, anelderly wife and her offspring.
So much for virtue. But for the opposite course, a little boldness,a faculty for keeping on the windward side of the law, as Turenneoutflanked Montecuculi, and Society will sanction the theft of millions,shower ribbons upon the thief, cram him with honors, and smother himwith consideration.
Government, moreover, works harmoniously with this profoundly illogicalreasoner—Society. Government levies a conscription on the youngintelligence of the kingdom at the age of seventeen or eighteen,a conscription of precocious brain-work before it is sent up to besubmitted to a process of selection. Nurserymen sort and select seedsin much the same way. To this process the Government brings professionalappraisers of talent, men who can assay brains as experts assay goldat the Mint. Five hundred such heads, set afire with hope, are sent upannually by the most progressive portion of the population; and of thesethe Government takes one-third, puts them in sacks called the Ecoles,and shakes them up together for three years. Though every one of theseyoung plants represents vast productive power, they are made, as onemay say, into cashiers. They receive appointments; the rank and fileof engineers is made up of them; they are employed as captains ofartillery; there is no (subaltern) grade to which they may not aspire.Finally, when these men, the pick of the youth of the nation, fattenedon mathematics and stuffed with knowledge, have attained the age offifty years, they have their reward, and receive as the price of theirservices the third-floor lodging, the wife and family, and all thecomforts that sweeten life for mediocrity. If from among this race ofdupes there should escape some five or six men of genius who climb thehighest heights, is it not miraculous?
This is an exact statement of the relations between Talent and Probityon the one hand and Government and Society on the other, in an age thatconsiders itself to be progressive. Without this prefatory explanationa recent occurrence in Paris would seem improbable; but preceded by thissumming up of the situation, it will perhaps receive some thoughtfulattention from minds capable of recognizing the real plague-spots ofour civilization, a civilization which since 1815 as been moved by thespirit of gain rather than by principles of honor.
About five o'clock, on a dull autumn afternoon, the cashier of one ofthe largest banks in Paris was still at his desk, working by the lightof a lamp that had been lit for some time. In accordance with the useand wont of commerce, the counting-house was in the darkest corner ofthe low-ceiled and far from spacious mezzanine floor, and at the veryend of a passage lighted only by borrowed lights. The office doorsalong this corridor, each with its label, gave the place the look of abath-house. At four o'clock the stolid porter had proclaimed, accordingto his orders, "The bank is closed." And by this time the departmentswere deserted, wives of the partners in the firm were expecting theirlovers; the two bankers dining with their mistresses. Everything was inorder.
The place where the strong boxes had been bedded in sheet-iron was justbehind the little sanctum, where the cashier was busy. Doubtless he wasbalancing his books. The open front gave a glimpse of a safe of hammerediron, so enormously heavy (thanks to the science of the modern inventor)that burglars could not carry it away. The door only opened at thepleasure of those who knew its password. The letter-lock was a wardenwho kept its own secret and could not be bribed; the mysterious word wasan ingenious realization of the "Open sesame!" in the Arabian Nights .But even this was as nothing. A man might discover the password; butunless he knew the lock's final secret, the ultima ratio of thisgold-guarding dragon of mechanical science, it discharged a blunderbussat his head.
The door of the room, the walls of the room, the shutters of the windowsin the room, the whole place, in fact, was lined with sheet-iron a thirdof an inch in thickness, concealed behind the thin wooden paneling. Theshutters had been closed, the door had been shut. If ever man could feelconfident that he was absolutely alone, and that there was no remotepossibility of being watched by prying eyes, that man was the cashier ofthe house of Nucingen and Company, in the Rue Saint-Lazare.
Accordingly the deepest silence prevailed in that iron cave. The firehad died out in the stove, but the room was full of that tepid warmthwhich produces the dull heavy-headedness and nauseous queasiness of amorning after an orgy. The stove is a mesmerist that plays no small partin the reduction of bank clerks and porters to a state of idiocy.
A room with a stove in it is a retort in which the power of strongmen is evaporated, where their vitality is exhausted, and their willsenfeebled. Government offices are part of a great scheme for themanufacture of the mediocrity necessary for the maintenance of a FeudalSystem on a pecuniary basis—and money is the foundation of the SocialContract. (See Les Employes .) The mephitic vapors in the atmosphereof a crowded room contribute in no small degree to bring about a gradualdeterioration of intelligences, the brain that gives off the largestquantity of nitrogen asphyxiates the others, in the long run.
The cashier was a man of five-and-forty or thereabouts. As he sat at thetable, the light from a moderator lamp shining full on his bald