Mercadet Part 12

De la Brive and Mericourt.

Justin M. Mercadet begs that the gentlemen will wait for him here. (Exit.)

Mericourt At last, my dear friend, you are on the ground, and you will be very soon officially recognized as Mlle. Mercadet's intended! Steer your bark well, for the father is a deep one.

De la Brive That is what frightens me, for difficulties loom ahead.

Mericourt I do not believe so; Mercadet is a speculator, rich to-day, to-morrow possibly a beggar. With the little I know of his affairs from his wife, I am led to believe that he is enchanted with the prospect of depositing a part of his fortune in the name of his daughter, and of obtaining a son-in-law capable of a.s.sisting him in carrying out his financial schemes.

De la Brive That is a good idea, and suits me exactly; but suppose he wishes to find out too much about me.

Mericourt I have given M. Mercadet an excellent account of you.

De la Brive I have fallen upon my feet truly.

Mericourt But you are not going to lose the dandy's self-possession? I quite understand that your position is risky. A man would not marry, excepting from utter despair. Marriage is suicide for the man of the world. (In a low voice) Come, tell me--can you hold out much longer?

De la Brive If I had not two names, one for the bailiffs and one for the fashionable world, I should be banished from the Boulevard. Woman and I, as you know, have wrought each the ruin of the other, and, as fashion now goes, to find a rich Englishwoman, an amiable dowager, an amorous gold mine, would be as impossible as to find an extinct animal.

Mericourt What of the gaming table?

De la Brive Oh! Gambling is an unreliable resource excepting for certain crooks, and I am not such a fool as to run the risk of disgrace for the sake of winnings which always have their limit. Publicity, my dear friend, has been the abolition of all those shady careers in which fortune once was to be found. So, that for a hundred thousand francs of accepted bills, the usurer gives me but ten thousand. Pierquin sent me to one of his agents, a sort of sub-Pierquin, a little old man called Violette, who said to my broker that he could not give me money on such paper at any rate! Meanwhile my tailor has refused to bank upon my prospects. My horse is living on credit; as to my tiger, the little wretch who wears such fine clothes, I do now know how he lives, or where he feeds. I dare not peer into the mystery. Now, as we are not so advanced in civilization as the Jews, who canceled all debts every half-century, a man must pay by the sacrifice of personal liberty.

Horrible things will be said about me. Here is a young man of high esteem in the world of fashion, pretty lucky at cards, of a pa.s.sable figure, less than twenty-eight years old, and he is going to marry the daughter of a rich speculator!

Mericourt What difference does it make?

De la Brive It is slightly off color! But I am tired of a sham life. I have learned at last that the only way to ama.s.s wealth is to work. But our misfortune is that we find ourselves quick at everything, but not good at anything! A man like me, capable of inspiring a pa.s.sion and of maintaining it, cannot become either a clerk or a soldier! Society has provided no employment for us. Accordingly, I am going to set up business with Mercadet. He is one of the greatest of schemers. You are sure that he won't give less than a hundred and fifty thousand francs to his daughter.

Mericourt Judge yourself, my dear friend, from the style which Mme. Mercadet puts on; you see her at all the first nights, in her own box, at the opera, and her conspicuous elegance--

De la Brive I myself am elegant enough, but--

Mericourt Look round you here--everything indicates opulence--Oh! they are well off!

De la Brive Yet, it is a sort of middle-cla.s.s splendor, something substantial which promises well.

Mericourt And then the mother is a woman of principle, of irreproachable behavior. Can you possibly conclude matters to-day?

De la Brive I have taken steps to do so. I won at the club yesterday sufficient to go on with; I shall pay something on the wedding presents, and let the balance stand.

Mericourt Without reckoning my account, what is the amount of your debts?

De la Brive A mere trifle! A hundred and fifty thousand francs, which my father- in-law will cut down to fifty thousand. I shall have a hundred thousand francs left to begin life on. I always said that I should never become rich until I hadn't a sou left.

Mericourt Mercadet is an astute man; he will question you about your fortune; are you prepared?

De la Brive Am I not the landed proprietor of La Brive? Three thousand acres in the Landes, which are worth thirty thousand francs, mortgaged for forty-five thousand and capable of being floated by a stock jobbing company for some commercial purpose or other, say, as representing a capital of a hundred thousand crowns! You cannot imagine how much this property has brought me in.

Mericourt Your name, your horse, and your lands seem to me to be on their last legs.

De la Brive Not so loud!

Mericourt So you have quite made up your mind?

De la Brive Yes, and all the more decidedly in that I am going into politics.

Mericourt Really--but you are too clever for that!

De la Brive As a preparation I shall take to journalism.

Mericourt And you have never written two lines in your life!

De la Brive There are journalists who write and journalists who do not write. The former are editors--and horses that drag the car; the latter, the proprietors, who furnish the funds; these give oats to their horses and keep the capital for themselves. I shall be a proprietor. You merely have to put on a lofty air and exclaim: "The Eastern question is a question of great importance and of wide influence, one about which there cannot be two opinions!" You sum up a discussion by declaiming: "England, sir, will always get the better of us!" or you make an answer to some one whom you have heard speak for a long time without paying attention to him: "We are advancing towards an abyss, we have not yet pa.s.sed through all the evolutions of the evolutionary phase!" You say to a representative of labor: "Sir, I think there is something to be done in this matter." A proprietor of a journal speaks very little, rushes about and makes himself useful by doing for a man in power what the latter cannot do himself. He is supposed to inspire the articles, those I mean, which attract any notice! And then, if it is absolutely necessary he undertakes to publish a yellow-backed volume on some Utopian topic, so well written, so strong, that no one opens it, although every one declares that he has read it! Then he is looked upon as an earnest man, and ends by finding himself acknowledged as somebody, instead of something.

Mericourt Alas! What you say is too true, in these times!

De la Brive And we ourselves are a startling proof of this! In order to claim a part in political power you must not show what good but what harm you can do. You must not alone possess talents, you must be able also to inspire fear. Accordingly, the very day after my marriage, I shall a.s.sume an air of seriousness, of profundity, of high principles! I can take my choice, for we have in France a list of principles which is as varied as a bill of fare. I elect to be a socialist! The word pleases me! At every epoch, my dear friend, there are adjectives which form the pa.s.s-words of ambition! Before 1789 a man called himself an economist; in 1815 he was a liberal; the next party will call itself the social party--perhaps because it is so unsocial. For in France you must always take the opposite sense of a word to understand its meaning.

Mericourt Let me tell you privately, that you are now talking nothing but the nonsense of masked ball chatter, which pa.s.ses for wit among those who do not indulge in it. What are you going to do when a certain definite knowledge becomes necessary?

De la Brive My dear friend! In every profession, whether of art, science or literature, a man needs intellectual capital, special knowledge and capacity. But in politics, my dear fellow, a man wins everything and attains to everything by means of a single phrase--

Mericourt What is that?

De la Brive "The principles of my friends, the party for which I stand, look for--"

Mericourt Hush! Here comes the father-in-law!

SCENE FIFTH

The same persons and Mercadet.

Mercadet Good-day, my dear Mericourt! (To De la Brive) The ladies have kept you waiting, sir. Ah! They are putting on their finery. For myself, I was just on the point of dismissing--whom do you think?--an aspirant to the hand of Mlle. Julie. Poor young man! I was perhaps hard on him, and yet I felt for him. He worships my daughter; but what could I do?

He has only ten thousand francs' income.

De la Brive That wouldn't go very far!

Mercadet A mere subsistence!

De la Brive You're not the man to give a rich and clever girl to the first comer--

Mericourt Certainly not.