The Atheıst’s Mass
12 Temmuz 2007
THE ATHEIST’S MASS
BY
HONORE DE BALZAC
Translator,
Clara Bell
This is dedicated to Auguste Borget by his friend De Balzac
Bianchon, a physician to whom science owes a fine system of
theoretical physiology, and who, while still young, made himself
a celebrity in the medical school of Paris, that central luminary
to which European doctors do homage, practised surgery for a long
time before he took up medicine. His earliest studies were guided
by one of the greatest of French surgeons, the illustrious
Desplein, who flashed across science like a meteor. By the
consensus even of his enemies, he took with him to the tomb an
incommunicable method. Like all men of genius, he had no heirs;
he carried everything in him, and carried it away with him. The
glory of a surgeon is like that of an actor: they live only so
long as they are alive, and their talent leaves no trace when
they are gone. Actors and surgeons, like great singers too, like
the executants who by their performance increase the power of
music tenfold, are all the heroes of a moment.
Desplein is a case in proof of this resemblance in the destinies
of such transient genius. His name, yesterday so famous, to-day
almost forgotten, will survive in his special department without
crossing its limits. For must there not be some extraordinary
circumstances to exalt the name of a professor from the history
of Science to the general history of the human race? Had Desplein
that universal command of knowledge which makes a man the living
word, the great figure of his age? Desplein had a godlike eye; he
saw into the sufferer and his malady by an intuition, natural or
acquired, which enabled him to grasp the diagnostics peculiar to
the individual, to determine the very time, the hour, the minute
when an operation should be performed, making due allowance for
atmospheric conditions and peculiarities of individual
temperament. To proceed thus, hand in hand with nature, had he
then studied the constant assimilation by living beings, of the
elements contained in the atmosphere, or yielded by the earth to
man who absorbs them, deriving from them a particular expression
of life? Did he work it all out by the power of deduction and
analogy, to which we owe the genius of Cuvier? Be this as it may,
this man was in all the secrets of the human frame; he knew it in
the past and in the future, emphasizing the present.
But did he epitomize all science in his own person as Hippocrates
did and Galen and Aristotle? Did he guide a whole school towards
new worlds? No. Though it is impossible to deny that this
persistent observer of human chemistry possessed that antique
science of the Mages, that is to say, knowledge of the elements
in fusion, the causes of life, life antecedent to life, and what
it must be in its incubation or ever it IS, it must be confessed
that, unfortunately, everything in him was purely personal.
Isolated during his life by his egoism, that egoism is now
suicidal of his glory. On his tomb there is no proclaiming statue
to repeat to posterity the mysteries which genius seeks out at
its own cost.
But perhaps Desplein’s genius was answerable for his beliefs, and
for that reason mortal. To him the terrestrial atmosphere was a
generative envelope; he saw the earth as an egg within its shell;
and not being able to determine whether the egg or the hen first
was, he would not recognize either the cock or the egg. He
believed neither in the antecedent animal nor the surviving
spirit of man. Desplein had no doubts; he was positive. His bold
and unqualified atheism was like that of many scientific men, the
best men in the world, but invincible atheists–atheists such as
religious people declare to be impossible. This opinion could
scarcely exist otherwise in a man who was accustomed from his
youth to dissect the creature above all others–before, during,
and after life; to hunt through all his organs without ever
finding the individual soul, which is indispensable to religious
theory. When he detected a cerebral centre, a nervous centre, and
a centre for aerating the blood–the first two so perfectly
complementary that in the latter years of his life he came to a
conviction that the sense of hearing is not absolutely necessary
for hearing, nor the sense of sight for seeing, and that the
solar plexus could supply their place without any possibility of
doubt–Desplein, thus finding two souls in man, confirmed his
atheism by this fact, though it is no evidence against God. This
man died, it is said, in final impenitence, as do, unfortunately,
many noble geniuses, whom God may forgive.
The life of this man, great as he was, was marred by many
meannesses, to use the expression employed by his enemies, who
were anxious to diminish his glory, but which it would be more
proper to call apparent contradictions. Envious people and fools,
having no knowledge of the determinations by which superior
spirits are moved, seize at once on superficial inconsistencies,
to formulate an accusation and so to pass sentence on them. If,
subsequently, the proceedings thus attacked are crowned with
success, showing the correlations of the preliminaries and the
results, a few of the vanguard of calumnies always survive. In
our day, for instance, Napoleon was condemned by our
contemporaries when he spread his eagle’s wings to alight in
England: only 1822 could explain 1804 and the flatboats at
Boulogne.
As, in Desplein, his glory and science were invulnerable, his
enemies attacked his odd moods and his temper, whereas, in fact,
he was simply characterized by what the English call
eccentricity. Sometimes very handsomely dressed, like Crebillon
the tragical, he would suddenly affect extreme indifference as to
what he wore; he was sometimes seen in a carriage, and sometimes
on foot. By turns rough and kind, harsh and covetous on the
surface, but capable of offering his whole fortune to his exiled
masters–who did him the honor of accepting it for a few days–no
man ever gave rise to such contradictory judgements. Although to
obtain a black ribbon, which physicians ought not to intrigue
for, he was capable of dropping a prayer-book out of his pocket
at Court, in his heart he mocked at everything; he had a deep
contempt for men, after studying them from above and below, after
detecting their genuine expression when performing the most
solemn and the meanest acts of their lives.
The qualities of a great man are often federative. If among these
colossal spirits one has more talent than wit, his wit is still
superior to that of a man of whom it is simply stated that “he is
witty.” Genius always presupposes moral insight. This insight may
be applied to a special subject; but he who can see a flower must
be able to see the sun. The man who on hearing a diplomate he has
saved ask, “How is the Emperor?” could say, “The courtier is
alive; the man will follow!”–that man is not merely a surgeon or
a physician, he is prodigiously witty also. Hence a patient and
diligent student of human nature will admit Desplein’s exorbitant
pretensions, and believe–as he himself believed–that he might
have been no less great as a minister than he was as a surgeon.
Among the riddles which Desplein’s life presents to many of his
contemporaries, we have chosen one of the most interesting,
because the answer is to be found at the end of the narrative,
and will avenge him for some foolish charges.
Of all the students in Desplein’s hospital, Horace Bianchon was
one of those to whom he most warmly attached himself. Before
being a house surgeon at the Hotel-Dieu, Horace Bianchon had been
a medical student lodging in a squalid boarding house in the
Quartier Latin, known as the Maison Vauquer. This poor young man
had felt there the gnawing of that burning poverty which is a
sort of crucible from which great talents are to emerge as pure
and incorruptible as diamonds, which may be subjected to any
shock without being crushed. In the fierce fire of their
unbridled passions they acquire the most impeccable honesty, and
get into the habit of fighting the battles which await genius
with the constant work by which they coerce their cheated
appetites.
Horace was an upright young fellow, incapable of tergiversation
on a matter of honor, going to the point without waste of words,
and as ready to pledge his cloak for a friend as to give him his
time and his night hours. Horace, in short, was one of those
friends who are never anxious as to what they may get in return
for what they give, feeling sure that they will in their turn get
more than they give. Most of his friends felt for him that
deeply-seated respect which is inspired by unostentatious virtue,
and many of them dreaded his censure. But Horace made no pedantic
display of his qualities. He was neither a puritan nor a
preacher; he could swear with a grace as he gave his advice, and
was always ready for a jollification when occasion offered. A
jolly companion, not more prudish than a trooper, as frank and
outspoken–not as a sailor, for nowadays sailors are wily
diplomates–but as an honest man who has nothing in his life to
hide, he walked with his head erect, and a mind content. In
short, to put the facts into a word, Horace was the Pylades of
more than one Orestes–creditors being regarded as the nearest
modern equivalent to the Furies of the ancients.
He carried his poverty with the cheerfulness which is perhaps one
of the chief elements of courage, and, like all people who have
nothing, he made very few debts. As sober as a camel and active
as a stag, he was steadfast in his ideas and his conduct.
The happy phase of Bianchon’s life began on the day when the
famous surgeon had proof of the qualities and the defects which,
these no less than those, make Doctor Horace Bianchon doubly dear
to his friends. When a leading clinical practitioner takes a
young man to his bosom, that young man has, as they say, his foot
in the stirrup. Desplein did not fail to take Bianchon as his
assistant to wealthy houses, where some complimentary fee almost
always found its way into the student’s pocket, and where the
mysteries of Paris life were insensibly revealed to the young
provincial; he kept him at his side when a consultation was to be
held, and gave him occupation; sometimes he would send him to a
watering-place with a rich patient; in fact, he was making a
practice for him. The consequence was that in the course of time
the Tyrant of surgery had a devoted ally. These two men–one at
the summit of honor and of his science, enjoying an immense
fortune and an immense reputation; the other a humble Omega,
having neither fortune nor fame–became intimate friends.
The great Desplein told his house surgeon everything; the
disciple knew whether such or such a woman had sat on a chair
near the master, or on the famous couch in Desplein’s surgery, on
which he slept. Bianchon knew the mysteries of that temperament,
a compound of the lion and the bull, which at last expanded and
enlarged beyond measure the great man’s torso, and caused his
death by degeneration of the heart. He studied the eccentricities
of that busy life, the schemes of that sordid avarice, the hopes
of the politician who lurked behind the man of science; he was
able to foresee the mortifications that awaited the only
sentiment that lay hid in a heart that was steeled, but not of
steel.
One day Bianchon spoke to Desplein of a poor water-carrier of the
Saint-Jacques district, who had a horrible disease caused by
fatigue and want; this wretched Auvergnat had had nothing but
potatoes to eat during the dreadful winter of 1821. Desplein left
all his visits, and at the risk of killing his horse, he rushed
off, followed by Bianchon, to the poor man’s dwelling, and saw,
himself, to his being removed to a sick house, founded by the
famous Dubois in the Faubourg Saint-Denis. Then he went to attend
the man, and when he had cured him he gave him the necessary sum
to buy a horse and a water-barrel. This Auvergnat distinguished
himself by an amusing action. One of his friends fell ill, and he
took him at once to Desplein, saying to his benefactor, “I could
not have borne to let him go to any one else!”
Rough customer as he was, Desplein grasped the water-carrier’s
hand, and said, “Bring them all to me.”
He got the native of Cantal into the Hotel-Dieu, where he took
the greatest care of him. Bianchon had already observed in his
chief a predilection for Auvergnats, and especially for water
carriers; but as Desplein took a sort of pride in his cures at
the Hotel-Dieu, the pupil saw nothing very strange in that.
One day, as he crossed the Place Saint-Sulpice, Bianchon caught
sight of his master going into the church at about nine in the
morning. Desplein, who at that time never went a step without his
cab, was on foot, and slipped in by the door in the Rue du Petit-
Lion, as if he were stealing into some house of ill fame. The
house surgeon, naturally possessed by curiosity, knowing his
master’s opinions, and being himself a rabid follower of Cabanis
(Cabaniste en dyable, with the y, which in Rabelais seems to
convey an intensity of devilry)–Bianchon stole into the church,
and was not a little astonished to see the great Desplein, the
atheist, who had no mercy on the angels–who give no work to the
lancet, and cannot suffer from fistula or gastritis–in short,
this audacious scoffer kneeling humbly, and where? In the Lady
Chapel, where he remained through the mass, giving alms for the
expenses of the service, alms for the poor, and looking as
serious as though he were superintending an operation.
“He has certainly not come here to clear up the question of the
Virgin’s delivery,” said Bianchon to himself, astonished beyond
measure. “If I had caught him holding one of the ropes of the
canopy on Corpus Christi day, it would be a thing to laugh at;
but at this hour, alone, with no one to see–it is surely a thing
to marvel at!”
Bianchon did not wish to seem as though he were spying the head
surgeon of the Hotel-Dieu; he went away. As it happened, Desplein
asked him to dine with him that day, not at his own house, but at
a restaurant. At dessert Bianchon skilfully contrived to talk of
the mass, speaking of it as mummery and a farce.
“A farce,” said Desplein, “which has cost Christendom more blood
than all Napoleon’s battles and all Broussais’ leeches. The mass
is a papal invention, not older than the sixth century, and
based on the Hoc est corpus. What floods of blood were shed to
establish the Fete-Dieu, the Festival of Corpus Christi–the
institution by which Rome established her triumph in the question
of the Real Presence, a schism which rent the Church during three
centuries! The wars of the Count of Toulouse against the
Albigenses were the tail end of that dispute. The Vaudois and the
Albigenses refused to recognize this innovation.”
In short, Desplein was delighted to disport himself in his most
atheistical vein; a flow of Voltairean satire, or, to be
accurate, a vile imitation of the Citateur.
“Hallo! where is my worshiper of this morning?” said Bianchon to
himself.
He said nothing; he began to doubt whether he had really seen his
chief at Saint-Sulpice. Desplein would not have troubled himself
to tell Bianchon a lie, they knew each other too well; they had
already exchanged thoughts on quite equally serious subjects, and
discussed systems de natura rerum, probing or dissecting them
with the knife and scalpel of incredulity.
Three months went by. Bianchon did not attempt to follow the
matter up, though it remained stamped on his memory. One day that
year, one of the physicians of the Hotel-Dieu took Desplein by
the arm, as if to question him, in Bianchon’s presence.
“What were you doing at Saint-Sulpice, my dear master?” said he.
“I went to see a priest who has a diseased knee-bone, and to whom
the Duchesse d’Angouleme did me the honor to recommend me,” said
Desplein.
The questioner took this defeat for an answer; not so Bianchon.
“Oh, he goes to see damaged knees in church!–He went to mass,”
said the young man to himself.
Bianchon resolved to watch Desplein. He remembered the day and
hour when he had detected him going into Saint-Sulpice, and
resolved to be there again next year on the same day and at the
same hour, to see if he should find him there again. In that case
the periodicity of his devotion would justify a scientific
investigation; for in such a man there ought to be no direct
antagonism of thought and action.
Next year, on the said day and hour, Bianchon, who had already
ceased to be Desplein’s house surgeon, saw the great man’s cab
standing at the corner of the Rue de Tournon and the Rue du
Petit-Lion, whence his friend jesuitically crept along by the
wall of Saint-Sulpice, and once more attended mass in front of
the Virgin’s altar. It was Desplein, sure enough! The master-
surgeon, the atheist at heart, the worshiper by chance. The
mystery was greater than ever; the regularity of the phenomenon
complicated it. When Desplein had left, Bianchon went to the
sacristan, who took charge of the chapel, and asked him whether
the gentleman were a constant worshiper.
“For twenty years that I have been here,” replied the man, “M.
Desplein has come four times a year to attend this mass. He
founded it.”
“A mass founded by him!” said Bianchon, as he went away. “This is
as great a mystery as the Immaculate Conception–an article which
alone is enough to make a physician an unbeliever.”
Some time elapsed before Doctor Bianchon, though so much his
friend, found an opportunity of speaking to Desplein of this
incident of his life. Though they met in consultation, or in
society, it was difficult to find an hour of confidential
solitude when, sitting with their feet on the fire-dogs and their
head resting on the back of an armchair, two men tell each other
their secrets. At last, seven years later, after the Revolution
of 1830, when the mob invaded the Archbishop’s residence, when
Republican agitators spurred them on to destroy the gilt crosses
which flashed like streaks of lightning in the immensity of the
ocean of houses; when Incredulity flaunted itself in the streets,
side by side with Rebellion, Bianchon once more detected Desplein
going into Saint-Sulpice. The doctor followed him, and knelt down
by him without the slightest notice or demonstration of surprise
from his friend. They both attended this mass of his founding.
“Will you tell me, my dear fellow,” said Bianchon, as they left
the church, “the reason for your fit of monkishness? I have
caught you three times going to mass—- You! You must account to
me for this mystery, explain such a flagrant disagreement between
your opinions and your conduct. You do not believe in God, and
yet you attend mass? My dear master, you are bound to give me an
answer.”
“I am like a great many devout people, men who on the surface are
deeply religious, but quite as much atheists as you or I can be.”
And he poured out a torrent of epigrams on certain political
personages, of whom the best known gives us, in this century, a
new edition of Moliere’s Tartufe.
“All that has nothing to do with my question,” retorted Bianchon.
“I want to know the reason for what you have just been doing, and
why you founded this mass.”
“Faith! my dear boy,” said Desplein, “I am on the verge of the
tomb; I may safely tell you about the beginning of my life.”
At this moment Bianchon and the great man were in the Rue des
Quatre-Vents, one of the worst streets in Paris. Desplein pointed
to the sixth floor of one of the houses looking like obelisks, of
which the narrow door opens into a passage with a winding
staircase at the end, with windows appropriately termed “borrowed
lights”–or, in French, jours de souffrance. It was a greenish
structure; the ground floor occupied by a furniture-dealer, while
each floor seemed to shelter a different and independent form of
misery. Throwing up his arm with a vehement gesture, Desplein
exclaimed:
“I lived up there for two years.”
“I know; Arthez lived there; I went up there almost every day
during my first youth; we used to call it then the pickle-jar of
great men! What then?”
“The mass I have just attended is connected with some events
which took place at the time when I lived in the garret where you
say Arthez lived; the one with the window where the clothes line
is hanging with linen over a pot of flowers. My early life was so
hard, my dear Bianchon, that I may dispute the palm of Paris
suffering with any man living. I have endured everything: hunger
and thirst, want of money, want of clothes, of shoes, of linen,
every cruelty that penury can inflict. I have blown on my frozen
fingers in that PICKLE-JAR OF GREAT MEN, which I should like to
see again, now, with you. I worked through a whole winter, seeing
my head steam, and perceiving the atmosphere of my own moisture
as we see that of horses on a frosty day. I do not know where a
man finds the fulcrum that enables him to hold out against such a
life.
“I was alone, with no one to help me, no money to buy books or to
pay the expenses of my medical training; I had not a friend; my
irascible, touchy, restless temper was against me. No one
understood that this irritability was the distress and toil of a
man who, at the bottom of the social scale, is struggling to
reach the surface. Still, I had, as I may say to you, before whom
I need wear no draperies, I had that ground-bed of good feeling
and keen sensitiveness which must always be the birthright of any
man who is strong enough to climb to any height whatever, after
having long trampled in the bogs of poverty. I could obtain
nothing from my family, nor from my home, beyond my inadequate
allowance. In short, at that time, I breakfasted off a roll which
the baker in the Rue du Petit-Lion sold me cheap because it was
left from yesterday or the day before, and I crumbled it into
milk; thus my morning meal cost me but two sous. I dined only
every other day in a boarding-house where the meal cost me
sixteen sous. You know as well as I what care I must have taken
of my clothes and shoes. I hardly know whether in later life we
feel grief so deep when a colleague plays us false as we have
known, you and I, on detecting the mocking smile of a gaping seam
in a shoe, or hearing the armhole of a coat split, I drank
nothing but water; I regarded a cafe with distant respect.
Zoppi’s seemed to me a promised land where none but the Lucullus
of the pays Latin had a right of entry. ‘Shall I ever take a cup
of coffee there with milk in it?’ said I to myself, ‘or play a
game of dominoes?’
“I threw into my work the fury I felt at my misery. I tried to
master positive knowledge so as to acquire the greatest personal
value, and merit the position I should hold as soon as I could
escape from nothingness. I consumed more oil than bread; the
light I burned during these endless nights cost me more than
food. It was a long duel, obstinate, with no sort of consolation.
I found no sympathy anywhere. To have friends, must we not form
connections with young men, have a few sous so as to be able to
go tippling with them, and meet them where students congregate?
And I had nothing! And no one in Paris can understand that
nothing means NOTHING. When I even thought of revealing my
beggary, I had that nervous contraction of the throat which makes
a sick man believe that a ball rises up from the oesophagus into
the larynx.
“In later life I have met people born to wealth who, never having
wanted for anything, had never even heard this problem in the
rule of three: A young man is to crime as a five-franc piece is
to X.–These gilded idiots say to me, ‘Why did you get into debt?
Why did you involve yourself in such onerous obligations?’ They
remind me of the princess who, on hearing that the people lacked
bread, said, ‘Why do not they buy cakes?’ I should like to see
one of these rich men, who complain that I charge too much for an
operation,–yes, I should like to see him alone in Paris without
a sou, without a friend, without credit, and forced to work with
his five fingers to live at all! What would he do? Where would he
go to satisfy his hunger?
“Bianchon, if you have sometimes seen me hard and bitter, it was
because I was adding my early sufferings on to the insensibility,
the selfishness of which I have seen thousands of instances in
the highest circles; or, perhaps, I was thinking of the obstacles
which hatred, envy, jealousy, and calumny raised up between me
and success. In Paris, when certain people see you ready to set
your foot in the stirrup, some pull your coat-tails, others
loosen the buckle of the strap that you may fall and crack your
skull; one wrenches off your horse’s shoes, another steals your
whip, and the least treacherous of them all is the man whom you
see coming to fire his pistol at you point blank.
“You yourself, my dear boy, are clever enough to make
acquaintance before long with the odious and incessant warfare
waged by mediocrity against the superior man. If you should drop
five-and-twenty louis one day, you will be accused of gambling on
the next, and your best friends will report that you have lost
twenty-five thousand. If you have a headache, you will be
considered mad. If you are a little hasty, no one can live with
you. If, to make a stand against this armament of pigmies, you
collect your best powers, your best friends will cry out that you
want to have everything, that you aim at domineering, at tyranny.
In short, your good points will become your faults, your faults
will be vices, and your virtues crime.
“If you save a man, you will be said to have killed him; if he
reappears on the scene, it will be positive that you have secured
the present at the cost of the future. If he is not dead, he will
die. Stumble, and you fall! Invent anything of any kind and claim
your rights, you will be crotchety, cunning, ill-disposed to
rising younger men.
“So, you see, my dear fellow, if I do not believe in God, I
believe still less in man. But do not you know in me another
Desplein, altogether different from the Desplein whom every one
abuses?–However, we will not stir that mud-heap.
“Well, I was living in that house, I was working hard to pass my
first examination, and I had no money at all. You know. I had
come to one of those moments of extremity when a man says, ‘I
will enlist.’ I had one hope. I expected from my home a box full
of linen, a present from one of those old aunts who, knowing
nothing of Paris, think of your shirts, while they imagine that
their nephew with thirty francs a month is eating ortolans. The
box arrived while I was at the schools; it had cost forty francs
for carriage. The porter, a German shoemaker living in a loft,
had paid the money and kept the box. I walked up and down the Rue
des Fosses-Saint-Germain-des-Pres and the Rue de l’Ecole de
Medecine without hitting on any scheme which would release my
trunk without the payment of the forty francs, which of course I
could pay as soon as I should have sold the linen. My stupidity
proved to me that surgery was my only vocation. My good fellow,
refined souls, whose powers move in a lofty atmosphere, have none
of that spirit of intrigue that is fertile in resource and
device; their good genius is chance; they do not invent, things
come to them.
“At night I went home, at the very moment when my fellow lodger
also came in–a water-carrier named Bourgeat, a native of Saint-
Flour. We knew each other as two lodgers do who have rooms off
the same landing, and who hear each other sleeping, coughing,
dressing, and so at last become used to one another. My neighbor
informed me that the landlord, to whom I owed three quarters’
rent, had turned me out; I must clear out next morning. He
himself was also turned out on account of his occupation. I spent
the most miserable night of my life. Where was I to get a
messenger who could carry my few chattels and my books? How could
I pay him and the porter? Where was I to go? I repeated these
unanswerable questions again and again, in tears, as madmen
repeat their tunes. I fell asleep; poverty has for its friends
heavenly slumbers full of beautiful dreams.
“Next morning, just as I was swallowing my little bowl of bread
soaked in milk, Bourgeat came in and said to me in his vile
Auvergne accent:
” ‘Mouchieur l’Etudiant, I am a poor man, a foundling from the
hospital at Saint-Flour, without either father or mother, and not
rich enough to marry. You are not fertile in relations either,
nor well supplied with the ready? Listen, I have a hand-cart
downstairs which I have hired for two sous an hour; it will hold
all our goods; if you like, we will try to find lodgings
together, since we are both turned out of this. It is not the
earthly paradise, when all is said and done.’
” ‘I know that, my good Bourgeat,’ said I. ‘But I am in a great
fix. I have a trunk downstairs with a hundred francs’ worth of
linen in it, out of which I could pay the landlord and all I owe
to the porter, and I have not a hundred sous.’
” ‘Pooh! I have a few dibs,’ replied Bourgeat joyfully, and he
pulled out a greasy old leather purse. ‘Keep your linen.’
“Bourgeat paid up my arrears and his own, and settled with the
porter. Then he put our furniture and my box of linen in his
cart, and pulled it along the street, stopping in front of every
house where there was a notice board. I went up to see whether
the rooms to let would suit us. At midday we were still wandering
about the neighborhood without having found anything. The price
was the great difficulty. Bourgeat proposed that we should eat at
a wine shop, leaving the cart at the door. Towards evening I
discovered, in the Cour de Rohan, Passage du Commerce, at the
very top of a house next the roof, two rooms with a staircase
between them. Each of us was to pay sixty francs a year. So there
we were housed, my humble friend and I. We dined together.
Bourgeat, who earned about fifty sous a day, had saved a hundred
crowns or so; he would soon be able to gratify his ambition by
buying a barrel and a horse. On learning of my situation–for he
extracted my secrets with a quiet craftiness and good nature, of
which the remembrance touches my heart to this day, he gave up
for a time the ambition of his whole life; for twenty-two years
he had been carrying water in the street, and he now devoted his
hundred crowns to my future prospects.”
Desplein at these words clutched Bianchon’s arm tightly. “He gave
me the money for my examination fees! That man, my friend,
understood that I had a mission, that the needs of my intellect
were greater than his. He looked after me, he called me his boy,
he lent me money to buy books, he would come in softly sometimes
to watch me at work, and took a mother’s care in seeing that I
had wholesome and abundant food, instead of the bad and
insufficient nourishment I had been condemned to. Bourgeat, a man
of about forty, had a homely, mediaeval type of face, a prominent
forehead, a head that a painter might have chosen as a model for
that of Lycurgus. The poor man’s heart was big with affections
seeking an object; he had never been loved but by a poodle that
had died some time since, of which he would talk to me, asking
whether I thought the Church would allow masses to be said for
the repose of its soul. His dog, said he, had been a good
Christian, who for twelve years had accompanied him to church,
never barking, listening to the organ without opening his mouth,
and crouching beside him in a way that made it seem as though he
were praying too.
“This man centered all his affections in me; he looked upon me as
a forlorn and suffering creature, and he became, to me, the most
thoughtful mother, the most considerate benefactor, the ideal of
the virtue which rejoices in its own work. When I met him in the
street, he would throw me a glance of intelligence full of
unutterable dignity; he would affect to walk as though he carried
no weight, and seemed happy in seeing me in good health and well
dressed. It was, in fact, the devoted affection of the lower
classes, the love of a girl of the people transferred to a
loftier level. Bourgeat did all my errands, woke me at night at
any fixed hour, trimmed my lamp, cleaned our landing; as good as
a servant as he was as a father, and as clean as an English girl.
He did all the housework. Like Philopoemen, he sawed our wood,
and gave to all he did the grace of simplicity while preserving
his dignity, for he seemed to understand that the end ennobles
every act.
“When I left this good fellow, to be house surgeon at the Hotel-
Dieu, I felt an indescribable, dull pain, knowing that he could
no longer live with me; but he comforted himself with the
prospect of saving up money enough for me to take my degree, and
he made me promise to go to see him whenever I had a day out:
Bourgeat was proud of me. He loved me for my own sake, and for
his own. If you look up my thesis, you will see that I dedicated
it to him.
“During the last year of my residence as house surgeon I earned
enough to repay all I owed to this worthy Auvergnat by buying him
a barrel and a horse. He was furious with rage at learning that I
had been depriving myself of spending my money, and yet he was
delighted to see his wishes fulfilled; he laughed and scolded, he
looked at his barrel, at his horse, and wiped away a tear, as he
said, ‘It is too bad. What a splendid barrel! You really ought
not. Why, that horse is as strong as an Auvergnat!’
“I never saw a more touching scene. Bourgeat insisted on buying
for me the case of instruments mounted in silver which you have
seen in my room, and which is to me the most precious thing
there. Though enchanted with my first success, never did the
least sign, the least word, escape him which might imply, ‘This
man owes all to me!’ And yet, but for him, I should have died of
want; he had eaten bread rubbed with garlic that I might have
coffee to enable me to sit up at night.
“He fell ill. As you may suppose, I passed my nights by his
bedside, and the first time I pulled him through; but two years
after he had a relapse; in spite of the utmost care, in spite of
the greatest exertions of science, he succumbed. No king was ever
nursed as he was. Yes, Bianchon, to snatch that man from death I
tried unheard-of things. I wanted him to live long enough to show
him his work accomplished, to realize all his hopes, to give
expression to the only need for gratitude that ever filled my
heart, to quench a fire that burns in me to this day.
“Bourgeat, my second father, died in my arms,” Desplein went on,
after a pause, visibly moved. “He left me everything he possessed
by a will he had had made by a public scrivener, dating from the
year when we had gone to live in the Cour de Rohan.
“This man’s faith was perfect; he loved the Holy Virgin as he
might have loved his wife. He was an ardent Catholic, but never
said a word to me about my want of religion. When he was dying he
entreated me to spare no expense that he might have every
possible benefit of clergy. I had a mass said for him every day.
Often, in the night, he would tell me of his fears as to his
future fate; he feared his life had not been saintly enough. Poor
man! he was at work from morning till night. For whom, then, is
Paradise–if there be a Paradise? He received the last sacrament
like the saint that he was, and his death was worthy of his life.
“I alone followed him to the grave. When I had laid my only
benefactor to rest, I looked about to see how I could pay my debt
to him; I found he had neither family nor friends, neither wife
nor child. But he believed. He had a religious conviction; had I
any right to dispute it? He had spoken to me timidly of masses
said for the repose of the dead; he would not impress it on me as
a duty, thinking that it would be a form of repayment for his
services. As soon as I had money enough I paid to Saint-Sulpice
the requisite sum for four masses every year. As the only thing I
can do for Bourgeat is thus to satisfy his pious wishes, on the
days when that mass is said, at the beginning of each season of
the year, I go for his sake and say the required prayers; and I
say with the good faith of a sceptic–’Great God, if there is a
sphere which Thou hast appointed after death for those who have
been perfect, remember good Bourgeat; and if he should have
anything to suffer, let me suffer it for him, that he may enter
all the sooner into what is called Paradise.’
“That, my dear fellow, is as much as a man who holds my opinions
can allow himself. But God must be a good fellow; He cannot owe
me any grudge. I swear to you, I would give my whole fortune if
faith such as Bourgeat’s could enter my brain.”
Bianchon, who was with Desplein all through his last illness,
dares not affirm to this day that the great surgeon died an
atheist. Will not those who believe like to fancy that the humble
Auvergnat came to open the gate of Heaven to his friend, as he
did that of the earthly temple on whose pediment we read the
words–”A grateful country to its great men.”
PARIS, January 1836.
ADDENDUM
The following personages appear in other stories of the Human Comedy.
Bianchon, Horace
Father Goriot
Cesar Birotteau
The Commission in Lunacy
Lost Illusions
A Distinguished Provincial at Paris
A Bachelor’s Establishment
The Secrets of a Princess
The Government Clerks
Pierrette
A Study of Woman
Scenes from a Courtesan’s Life
Honorine
The Seamy Side of History
The Magic Skin
A Second Home
A Prince of Bohemia
Letters of Two Brides
The Muse of the Department
The Imaginary Mistress
The Middle Classes
Cousin Betty
The Country Parson
In addition, M. Bianchon narrated the following:
Another Study of Woman
La Grande Breteche
Desplein
Cousin Pons
Lost Illusions
The Thirteen
The Government Clerks
Pierrette
A Bachelor’s Establishment
The Seamy Side of History
Modeste Mignon
Scenes from a Courtesan’s Life
Honorine
End of The Project Gutenberg Etext of The Atheist’s Mass by Honore de Balzac
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