The Human Comedy (40 page)

“Ah, ah!” cried the count. He had flung open his door and now stood half naked on the sill, desiccated and fleshless as a skeleton. His strangled cry had a terrible effect on the countess; she sat frozen, as if struck dumb. Her husband was so fragile, so pale, that he seemed to emerge from the tomb.

“You have flooded my life with bitterness, and now you mean to trouble my death, twist my son’s mind, make a vicious man of him!” he shouted hoarsely.

The countess ran and threw herself at the feet of this dying figure, who appeared even more ghastly from these final effusions of life, and she poured out a torrent of tears.

“Mercy! Have mercy!” she cried.

“Did you have mercy for me?” he asked. “I let you devour your own fortune, now you want to devour mine and leave my son with nothing!”

“Oh yes! Yes! Be pitiless toward me, be ruthless,” she said, “but the children! Sentence your widow to a convent—I will obey, I will do anything you command me, to expiate my sins against you—but let the children live content! Oh, the children! The children!”

“I have only one child,” retorted the count, stretching his fleshless arm in despair toward Ernest.

“Oh, pity me! I repent, repent!” cried the countess, embracing her husband’s feet, damp with her tears. Her sobs choked her speech; broken, incoherent words rose from her burning throat.

“After what you said to Ernest, you dare talk about repentance!” said the dying man, knocking his wife back with a thrust of his foot. “You turn me to ice,” he added in a unfeeling tone that was horrifying. “You were a bad daughter, you have been a bad wife, you will be a bad mother.”

The unhappy woman collapsed in a faint. The dying man returned to his bed, lay down, and in a few hours lost consciousness. The priests came to administer the sacraments. At midnight he died. The events of the morning had exhausted the remains of his vitality.

I arrived at midnight with Papa Gobseck. Amid all the commotion, we walked directly into the small sitting room outside the death chamber and found the three children in tears, along with two priests who were to spend the night by the body. Ernest ran over to me and said that his mother wished to be alone in the count’s room. “Do not go in!” he said, his tone and expression touching. “She is praying in there!”

Gobseck began to laugh, that silent laughter that is peculiarly his. I was too moved by the emotion that lit Ernest’s young face to share the miser’s irony. When the boy saw us move toward the door, he ran and flattened himself against it, shouting, “Mama, there are two men in black here looking for you!”

Gobseck lifted the boy away as if he were a feather and opened the door. What a spectacle lay before us! A horrid chaos reigned in the room. Her hair tumbling loose from desperation, her eyes glittering, the countess stood speechless amid clothing and papers and rags strewn everywhere, a disorder appalling to see here in the presence of a dead man. Scarcely had her husband expired than the countess forced open all the drawers and the secretary; the carpet was covered in debris, overturned furniture, and boxes broken apart—everywhere were the signs of her violent hands. Her search might at first have been fruitless, but her expression and excitement now made clear to me that in the end she had indeed found the mysterious papers. I looked over at the bed, and with my instincts honed by professional experience, I could guess what had happened. The count’s body lay in the groove between the bed and the wall, almost crosswise, nose twisted into the mattress, the corpse left there disdainfully like one of the paper envelopes on the floor now that he was nothing more than an envelope himself. His limbs, inflexible, gave him a grotesque, hideous look. The dying man must have hidden the counter deed beneath his pillow, as if to protect it from any other hands until death. The countess had guessed her husband’s intent, which could also be seen in his final gesture, the clutch of his crooked fingers. The pillow had been flung off the bed and the countess’s footprint was still visible on it. Before her on the floor I saw a packet stamped in several places with the count’s coat of arms. I snatched it up and saw it was addressed to me. I stared at the countess with the shrewd severity of a judge questioning a suspect. Flames on the grate were devouring the contents of the packet. Hearing us approach, the countess had flung the papers into the fire. From her hasty glance at the first paragraphs, where I had set out provisions for her children, she must have thought she would be destroying a will that was to strip them of their fortune. A tortured conscience, along with the instinctive terror that a crime stirs in those who commit it, had undone her capacity to think. Caught in the act, now she could probably see the scaffold looming ahead, feel the law’s branding iron. Gasping for breath, staring at us with haggard eyes, the woman waited to hear our first words.

“Ah, madame,” I said, as I pulled from the grate a bit of paper that the fire had not fully consumed, “you have ruined your children! Those papers were their titles to your husband’s property.”

Her mouth contorted as if she might have a stroke.

“Hee hee!” cried Gobseck, and his exclamation struck us like a metal candlestick scraping across marble. After a pause, the old man addressed me, his voice calm: “So—you would have the countess believe that I am not the lawful owner of the properties the count sold me? As of a moment ago, this house belongs to me.”

The blow of a truncheon on my head would have hurt and shocked me less. The countess could see the look of confusion I turned on the usurer.

“Monsieur . . . monsieur!” she said, unable to find other words.

“You are a trustee of this property, are you not?” I asked him.

“Possibly.”

“And you mean to take advantage of madame’s crime?”

“Exactly.”

I quit the room, leaving the countess seated by her husband’s bed weeping hot tears. Gobseck followed me out. When we reached the street, I turned away from him, but he came after me. He gave me one of those deep looks that pierce straight into a man’s heart and said, in his fluting voice, now with an acrid edge to it, “Do you presume to judge me, boy?”

Since that night we have scarcely seen one another. Gobseck leased out the count’s Paris mansion; he spends his summers on the Restaud country estates, living the life of a lord, constructing farm buildings, restoring mills and roads, planting woods. One day I met him on a path in the Tuileries. “The countess is leading a heroic life,” I told him. “She’s devoted herself entirely to bringing up her children, and she has raised them beautifully. The eldest boy is a fine fellow.”

“Possibly.”

“But,” I went on, “shouldn’t you give Ernest some help?”

“Help him!” cried Gobseck. “No, no. Hardship is our greatest teacher, hardship will teach him the value of money, of men and of women. Let him navigate the Paris seas. When he has become a good pilot, we will give him a ship.”

I left him without trying to make out the meaning of his remarks.

Madame de Restaud passed on her repugnance for me to her son, and the young count would never engage me as his legal counsel. Still, a week ago I visited Gobseck to tell him of Ernest’s love for Mademoiselle Camille, and to urge him to fulfill his obligations, now that the youth is coming of age.

The old moneylender had long become bedridden, suffering from the disease that would eventually carry him off. He said he would postpone his response until he could be up and attending to business properly. Of course he was not eager to hand anything over as long as he still had a breath in him; there could be no other reason for such a delaying tactic. Finding him much sicker than he believed he was, I stayed with him long enough to make out the progress of a passion that had aged into a kind of insanity.

Wanting no one else to live in the house he inhabited, he had made himself the principal tenant and left all the other rooms empty. Nothing had been changed in the one where he dwelled. The furnishings I knew so well from sixteen years back might have been preserved under glass, they were so completely unchanged. His loyal old porteress, married to a retired soldier who tended the office whenever she went upstairs to care for the master, was still his housekeeper, his right hand, his receptionist, and now she also functioned as his nurse. Despite his weak condition, Gobseck still received his clients and his revenues himself, and had so simplified his affairs that he could send the old soldier out on the occasional errand and manage the business from bed.

When France formally recognized the Republic of Haiti, Gobseck’s familiarity with the old estates in Santo Domingo and his knowledge about the colonists and their successors got him named to the commission to liquidate property and distribute compensation from
the new Haitian government
. His canniness led him to create an agency for discounting the credits due to the colonists or their heirs. The business operated under the names of Werbrust and Gigonnet. Gobseck shared in the profits without putting in capital, for his expertise counted as his investment. The agency was like a distillery steaming off profits from the ignorant, the credulous, or claimants whose rights might be contested. As liquidator, Gobseck was able to negotiate with the large landowners who, looking to obtain higher evaluations or quicker settlements and payouts, would send him gifts in proportion to the size of their business. The presents constituted a kind of tax on funds he did not wholly control. Furthermore, for a low price his firm gave him accounts involving small or dubious claims, and those of people who preferred immediate payment, however minimal, to the uncertainties of disbursements from the new republic.

So Gobseck was the insatiable boa constrictor of this huge enterprise. Every morning he would receive his tributes and eye them like an Indian nabob deciding whether to sign a pardon. He would take all sorts of payment, from some poor devil’s basket of fresh game to pounds of wax candles collected by a thrifty churchgoer, from a rich man’s silver dinner service to a speculator’s golden snuffbox. No one knew what became of all these gifts to the old usurer; everything went into his house and nothing came out. “On my faith as an honest woman,” said the concierge, who was my old acquaintance too, “I think he swallows it all down but without ever getting any fatter, for he’s as shriveled and thin as the bird in my cuckoo clock.”

Then last Monday Gobseck sent for me by the old soldier, who arrived at my office and said, “Come quick, Monsieur Derville, the old man is about to turn in his last bills. He’s gone yellow as a lemon, he’s impatient to talk to you; death is moving in and his last hiccup is already rattling in his gullet.”

When I stepped into the room of the dying man, I surprised him on his knees before the hearth; no fire was burning, but there was an enormous cold mound of ashes. Gobseck had dragged himself across the room from his bed, but he lacked the strength to get back to it and lie down, as well as any voice to complain.

“My old friend,” I said to him, lifting him up and helping him back to his bed, “you’re cold—why don’t you make a fire?”

“I am not cold,” he said firmly. “No fire! No fire! I’m going, boy, where to I don’t know,” he went on, flashing me a last blank, untender glance. “But I am leaving here! I have carphologia,” he said, using the term to show that his mind was still clear and precise. “I thought I saw real gold piled around my room, and I left the bed to take an armful of it. Who will it all go to? I won’t give it to the government! I made a will—find it, Grotius. La Belle Hollandaise had a daughter; I saw her one night on rue Vivienne. I think they call her ‘
The Torpedo
,’ she’s as pretty as a picture—look for her, will you, Grotius? You’re the executor of my will. Take whatever you want from here— Eat up! there are pots of foie gras, sacks of coffee, sugars, gold spoons. Give your wife the Odiot dinner service . . . But the diamonds, who gets them? Do you take snuff, boy? I’ve got all kinds of tobaccos, sell them at Hamburg, they go for half again higher there. Look, I have some of everything, and I have to leave everything! . . . Oh, come now, Papa Gobseck!” he said scolding himself. “Stop being so weak—get hold of yourself!”

He sat straight up in his bed; his face stood out sharp against the pillow like a bronze, he stretched a withered arm and bony hand forward along his coverlet and gripped it as if to hold himself upright, looked over at the hearth, as cold as his metallic gaze, and died, his mind fully intact. To us—the concierge, the old soldier, and me—he looked the image of those alert old Romans that Lethière painted standing behind the consuls in his
Brutus Condemning His Sons to Death
.

“The old rascal had real nerve,” said the veteran in his soldier’s style. I could still hear the dying man’s insane enumeration of his riches, and my gaze, which had followed his earlier, went again to the mound of ashes. I was struck by its size. I took the fire tongs and plunged them into the mound. I hit a mass of gold and silver, doubtless made up of the payments brought in during his last illness, which his feeble state had kept him from hiding away, or perhaps his mistrust from sending to the bank.

“Run and fetch the justice of the peace,” I told the old soldier. “The premises must be sealed instantly!”

Recalling Gobseck’s last words, and what the old woman had told me earlier, I took the keys to the rooms on the first and second floors and went to have a look inside. In the first room lay the full meaning of the talk I had thought was his mad ranting: Here was a harvest of a greed that lives on unchecked until all that’s left is the mindless instinct we often see among hoarders in the provinces. In the room next to the one where Gobseck had died were rotted pâtés and masses of food of all sorts, even shellfish, fishes sprouting mold—the mix of stenches nearly choked me. Worms and insects crawled everywhere. The bounty more recently arrived was tangled together with boxes of all shapes, cases of tea, bales of coffee. On the chimneypiece in a silver tureen were notices of shipments arrived to his name at Le Havre for cotton bales, vats of sugar, casks of rum, coffees, indigo dyes, tobaccos, a whole bazaar of products from the colonies! The room was piled high with furniture, silverware, lamps, and paintings and vases and books, rolled canvases without frames, and all sorts of curios. That enormous quantity of valuables may not have come entirely as gifts; they might have been deposited with Gobseck as collateral and never redeemed. I saw jewel boxes marked with coats of arms or monograms, fine linens and costly weapons, none with labels. Opening a book I had thought was simply lying out of place, I found thousand-franc notes in it. I swore to myself that I would inspect every last thing, tap the floorboards, the ceiling panels, the moldings, and the walls to locate all the gold he so passionately lived for, this Dutchman worthy of Rembrandt’s brush. In all my career in the law never have I seen such a spectacle of greed and eccentricity.