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Page 2
The place where the strong boxes had been bedded in sheet-iron was
just behind the little sanctum, where the cashier was busy. Doubtless
he was balancing his books. The open front gave a glimpse of a safe of
hammered iron, so enormously heavy (thanks to the science of the
modern inventor) that burglars could not carry it away. The door only
opened at the pleasure of those who knew its password. The letter-lock
was a warden who kept its own secret and could not be bribed; the
mysterious word was an ingenious realization of the "Open sesame!" in
the _Arabian Nights_. But even this was as nothing. A man might discover
the password; but unless he knew the lock's final secret, the _ultima
ratio_ of this gold-guarding dragon of mechanical science, it
discharged a blunderbuss at his head.
The door of the room, the walls of the room, the shutters of the
windows in the room, the whole place, in fact, was lined with
sheet-iron a third of an inch in thickness, concealed behind the thin
wooden paneling. The shutters had been closed, the door had been shut.
If ever man could feel confident that he was absolutely alone, and
that there was no remote possibility of being watched by prying eyes,
that man was the cashier of the house of Nucingen and Company, in the
Rue Saint-Lazare.
Accordingly the deepest silence prevailed in that iron cave. The fire
had died out in the stove, but the room was full of that tepid warmth
which produces the dull heavy-headedness and nauseous queasiness of a
morning after an orgy. The stove is a mesmerist that plays no small
part in 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 strong men
is evaporated, where their vitality is exhausted, and their wills
enfeebled. Government offices are part of a great scheme for the
manufacture of the mediocrity necessary for the maintenance of a
Feudal System on a pecuniary basis--and money is the foundation of the
Social Contract. (See _Les Employes_.) The mephitic vapors in the
atmosphere of a crowded room contribute in no small degree to bring
about a gradual deterioration of intelligences, the brain that gives
off the largest quantity of nitrogen asphyxiates the others, in the
long run.
The cashier was a man of five-and-forty or thereabouts. As he sat at
the table, the light from a moderator lamp shining full on his bald
head and glistening fringe of iron-gray hair that surrounded it--this
baldness and the round outlines of his face made his head look very
like a ball. His complexion was brick-red, a few wrinkles had gathered
about his eyes, but he had the smooth, plump hands of a stout man. His
blue cloth coat, a little rubbed and worn, and the creases and
shininess of his trousers, traces of hard wear that the clothes-brush
fails to remove, would impress a superficial observer with the idea
that here was a thrifty and upright human being, sufficient of the
philosopher or of the aristocrat to wear shabby clothes. But,
unluckily, it is easy to find penny-wise people who will prove weak,
wasteful, or incompetent in the capital things of life.
The cashier wore the ribbon of the Legion of Honor at his
button-hole, for he had been a major of dragoons in the time of the
Emperor. M. de Nucingen, who had been a contractor before he became a
banker, had had reason in those days to know the honorable disposition
of his cashier, who then occupied a high position. Reverses of fortune
had befallen the major, and the banker out of regard for him paid him
five hundred francs a month. The soldier had become a cashier in the
year 1813, after his recovery from a wound received at Studzianka
during the Retreat from Moscow, followed by six months of enforced
idleness at Strasbourg, whither several officers had been transported
by order of the Emperor, that they might receive skilled attention.
This particular officer, Castanier by name, retired with the honorary
grade of colonel, and a pension of two thousand four hundred francs.
In ten years' time the cashier had completely effaced the soldier, and
Castanier inspired the banker with such trust in him, that he was
associated in the transactions that went on in the private office
behind his little counting-house. The baron himself had access to it
by means of a secret staircase. There, matters of business were
decided. It was the bolting-room where proposals were sifted; the
privy council chamber where the reports of the money market were
analyzed; circular notes issued thence; and finally, the private
ledger and the journal which summarized the work of all the
departments were kept there.
Castanier had gone himself to shut the door which opened on to a
staircase that led to the parlor occupied by the two bankers on the
first floor of their hotel. This done, he had sat down at his desk
again, and for a moment he gazed at a little collection of letters of
credit drawn on the firm of Watschildine of London. Then he had taken
up the pen and imitated the banker's signature on each. _Nucingen_ he
wrote, and eyed the forged signatures critically to see which seemed
the most perfect copy.
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