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Page 16
"I was the first master," said Leon, "to consider the race of porter.
You'll find knaves of morality, mountebanks of vanity, modern
sycophants, septembriseurs, disguised in philanthropy, inventors of
palpitating questions, preaching the emancipation of the negroes,
improvement of little thieves, benevolence to liberated convicts, and
who, nevertheless, leave their porters in a condition worse than that
of the Irish, in holes more dreadful than a mud cabin, and pay them
less money to live on than the State pays to support a convict. I have
done but one good action in my life, and that was to build my porter a
decent lodge."
"Yes," said Bixiou, "if a man, having built a great cage divided into
thousands of compartments like the cells of a beehive or the dens of a
menagerie, constructed to receive human beings of all trades and all
kinds, if that animal, calling itself the proprietor, should go to a
man of science and say: 'I want an individual of the bimanous species,
able to live in holes full of old boots, pestiferous with rags, and
ten feet square; I want him such that he can live there all his life,
sleep there, eat there, be happy, get children as pretty as little
cupids, work, toil, cultivate flowers, sing there, stay there, and
live in darkness but see and know everything,' most assuredly the man
of science could never have invented the porter to oblige the
proprietor; Paris, and Paris only could create him, or, if you choose,
the devil."
"Parisian creative powers have gone farther than that," said Gazonal;
"look at the workmen! You don't know all the products of industry,
though you exhibit them. Our toilers fight against the toilers of the
continent by force of misery, as Napoleon fought Europe by force of
regiments."
"Here we are, at my friend the usurer's," said Bixiou. "His name is
Vauvinet. One of the greatest mistakes made by writers who describe
our manners and morals is to harp on old portraits. In these days all
trades change. The grocer becomes a peer of France, artists capitalize
their money, vaudevillists have incomes. A few rare beings may remain
what they originally were, but professions in general have no longer
either their special costume or their formerly fixed habits and ways.
In the past we had Gobseck, Gigounet, Samonon,--the last of the
Romans; to-day we rejoice in Vauvinet, the good-fellow usurer, the
dandy who frequents the greenroom and the lorettes, and drives about
in a little coupe with one horse. Take special note of my man, friend
Gazonal, and you'll see the comedy of money, the cold man who won't
give a penny, the hot man who snuffs a profit; listen to him
attentively!"
All three went up to the second floor of a fine-looking house on the
boulevard des Italiens, where they found themselves surrounded by the
elegances then in fashion. A young man about twenty-eight years of age
advanced to meet them with a smiling face, for he saw Leon de Lora
first. Vauvinet held out his hand with apparent friendliness to
Bixiou, and bowed coldly to Gazonal as he motioned them to enter his
office, where bourgeois taste was visible beneath the artistic
appearance of the furniture, and in spite of the statuettes and the
thousand other little trifles applied to our little apartments by
modern art, which has made itself as small as its patrons.
Vauvinet was dressed, like other young men of our day who go into
business, with extreme elegance, which many of them regard as a
species of prospectus.
"I've come for some money," said Bixiou, laughing, and presenting his
notes.
Vauvinet assumed a serious air, which made Gazonal smile, such
difference was there between the smiling visage that received them and
the countenance of the money-lender recalled to business.
"My dear fellow," said Vauvinet, looking at Bixiou, "I should
certainly oblige you with the greatest pleasure, but I haven't any
money to loan at the present time."
"Ah, bah!"
"No; I have given all I had to--you know who. That poor Lousteau went
into partnership for the management of a theatre with an old
vaudevillist who has great influence with the ministry, Ridal; and
they came to me yesterday for thirty thousand francs. I'm cleaned out,
and so completely that I was just in the act of sending to Cerizet for
a hundred louis, when I lost at lansquenet this morning, at Jenny
Cadine's."
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