The Works of Honore de Balzac Part 90

When the whole party had gone in, and the ponderous gate was shut, profound silence reigned in the narrow street where a few magnates at that time resided; for this side of the town was near to Le Plessis, the King's usual residence, enabling the courtiers to attend him at a moment's notice. The last house in this street was the last house in the town, and belonged to Maitre Cornelius Hoogworst, an old merchant from Brabant, whom the King Louis XI. honored with his confidence in such financial transactions as his astute policy required outside his realm. For reasons favoring the tyranny he exerted over his wife, the Comte de Saint-Vallier had settled in a mansion adjoining Maitre Cornelius' house.

The topography of the buildings will explain the advantages they offered to a jealous husband. The Count's house, known as the Hotel de Poitiers, had a garden, shut in on the north by the wall and moat that had been the boundary of the ancient borough of Chateauneuf skirted by the embankment then lately constructed by Louis XI. between Tours and Le Plessis. On that side dogs defended the entrance to the premises, which, on the east, were divided from the neighboring houses by a large courtyard, and on the west backed on to the house occupied by Maitre Cornelius. The street front faced south. Thus isolated on three sides, the suspicious and wily old Count was safe against all intruders but the inhabitants of the Brabant house, of which the roofs and chimneys were undistinguishable from those of the Hotel de Poitiers. The windows to the street were narrow, cut in the stone walls, and barred with iron; the door, low and arched like the entrance to our ancient prisons, was strong enough to resist any attack. A stone bench for mounting on horseback was close to the porch.

On seeing the side view of the houses occupied by Maitre Cornelius and the Comte de Poitiers, it could easily be supposed that they had both been built by the same architect, and constructed for tyrants. Both, with their sinister appearance, resembled little strongholds, and would have stood a siege for some time against a furious mob. They were protected by turrets at the corners, such as lovers of antiquities may yet see in some towns where the hammer of the destroyer has not found employment. The openings, which were everywhere narrow, allowed of the shutters and doors being constructed of extraordinary strength and clamped with iron. The riots and civil wars which were so frequent in those quarrelsome times amply justified these precautions.

As six o'clock struck by the clock of the Abbey of Saint-Martin, the Countess' lover walked past the Hotel de Poitiers, pausing a moment to hear the noise made by the Count's retainers over their supper. After glancing up at the room he might suppose to be that of his lady-love, he went on to the door of the next house. Everywhere on his way the young man had heard sounds of mirth from the feasters in every house doing honor to the holyday. From every window ineffectually shuttered came beams of light; chimneys were smoking, and the savor of roast meats gave cheer to the streets. Religious service being over, the whole town was reveling, and giving out confused sounds which the imagination can fancy better than words can describe them.

But here there was total silence; for in these two houses dwelt pa.s.sions which never rejoice. Beyond them the open country was still; and here, under the shadow of the abbey towers of Saint-Martin, the two dumb houses, apart from the rest and standing in the darkest part of the tortuous street, looked like a leper's home. The building opposite to them belonged to certain state criminals, and was under sequestration. Any young man could not fail to be easily impressed by so sudden a contrast. And, indeed, on the verge of embarking in a horribly perilous enterprise, the gentleman stood pensive in front of the goldsmith's house, recalling the various tales he had heard of Maitre Cornelius and his proceedings, which had inspired the Countess with such lively fears.

At that period a warrior, a lover even, every man quaked at the word "magic." There were few imaginations that could be incredulous of extraordinary facts, or indifferent to tales of wonder. And this lover of Madame de Saint-Vallier (one of Louis XI.'s daughters by Madame de Sa.s.senage, in Dauphine), brave as he might be, could not but think twice before venturing into a house that was full of sorceries.

The history of Maitre Cornelius Hoogworst will fully account for the confidence he had inspired in the Comte de Saint-Vallier, for the lady's terror, and for the hesitancy that gave pause to the lover. But to enable the nineteenth century reader to understand clearly how events apparently commonplace had been deemed supernatural, to make him enter into the terrors of that olden time, it is necessary to interrupt the narrative and glance at the previous career of Maitre Cornelius.

Cornelius Hoogworst, one of the wealthiest merchants of Ghent, having incurred the displeasure of Charles, Duke of Burgundy, had found a refuge and protection at the Court of Louis XI. The King was quite alive to the advantages he might derive from a man in communication with the princ.i.p.al houses of Flanders, Venice, and Brabant; he granted to Maitre Cornelius letters of n.o.bility and naturalization; nay, he flattered him,--a rare thing with Louis XI. And, indeed the Fleming liked the King as well as the King liked the Fleming. Crafty, suspicious, avaricious; equally astute, equally well-informed, equally superior to their time, they understood each other to perfection; they dropped and took up again with equal readiness, the one his conscience and the other his religion; they worshiped the same Virgin--one from conviction, the other from flattery; finally, if we may believe the jealous statements of Olivier le Daim and Tristan, the King resorted to the goldsmith's house to take his pleasure--as Louis XI. took it. History has taken care to preserve the memory of this monarch's licentious tastes, for he was not averse to a debauch. The old Fleming, no doubt, found it pleasant and profitable to lend himself to his royal patron's caprices and indulgences.

Cornelius had now lived in Tours for nine years. During these nine years incidents had occurred under his roof which made him the object of general execration. On arriving he had spent large sums on the house, with a view to securing his treasures. The ingenuity secretly exerted on his behalf by the locksmiths of the town, the singular precautions he had taken to get them into his house, in such a way as to feel sure of their compulsory secrecy, were for a long time the subject of a thousand wonderful tales which furnished the evening gossip of Touraine. The old man's extraordinary devices led to the idea that he was possessed of Oriental wealth. The story-tellers of the province which was the birth-place of romance in France built chambers of gold and precious stones in the Fleming's dwelling, never failing to ascribe his immense riches to unholy compacts.

Cornelius had brought with him originally a couple of Flemish varlets, an old woman, and a young apprentice of mild and attractive appearance; this youth served him as secretary, cashier, factotum, and messenger.

In the course of the first year of his residence at Tours, a considerable robbery was effected from his premises. Judicial investigation proved that the theft had been committed by someone living in the house. The old miser had his two men and his apprentice put in prison. The young lad was weakly; he died under torture, still protesting his innocence. The two men confessed, to escape torture; but on being asked by the judge where the stolen money was hidden, they were silent; so, after fresh tortures, they were tried, condemned, and hanged. On their way to the gallows they still declared that they were guiltless, after the manner of all men to be hanged.

The town of Tours talked over the strange business for many a day. But the criminals were Flemings, so the interest excited in the unfortunate men and the youthful clerk soon died out. In those days war and sedition supplied perpetual excitement, and to-day's drama extinguished yesterday's tragedy.

Maitre Cornelius, more affected by the loss of so large a sum than by the death of his three retainers, now lived alone with the old woman who was his sister. He obtained from the King the privilege of using the state couriers for his private business, put up his mules with a muleteer in the neighborhood, and thenceforth lived in perfect solitude, seeing scarce anyone but the King, and transacting his business through the medium of the Jews--crafty arithmeticians, who served him faithfully for the sake of his omnipotent interest.

Some time after this event, the King himself placed with his old _torconnier_ a young orphan in whom he took a great interest. Louis XI.

commonly called Maitre Cornelius by the old name of _torconnier_, which, in the reign of Saint-Louis, had meant an usurer, a tax-collector, a man who squeezed money out of folks by extortionate means. The word _tortionnaire_, a legal term still in use, in fact, explains the word _torconnier_, which was often written _tortionneur_. This poor lad devoted himself to the goldsmith's interest, succeeded in satisfying his master and winning his favor. One winter's night the diamonds placed in Cornelius' keeping by the King of England were stolen, and suspicion fell on the orphan lad. Louis XI. was all the more severe with him because he had answered for his honesty. So, after a summary inquiry, the hapless boy was hanged before the Provost Marshal.

n.o.body dared go to learn the arts of banking and exchange from Maitre Cornelius. Nevertheless two young men of the town, youths of honor and anxious to win a fortune, one after the other entered his service. Large robberies from the treasurer's house at once ensued; the circ.u.mstances of the crimes, and the way in which they were carried out, pointed clearly to some collusion between the thieves and the inmates of the house; it was impossible that the newcomers should escape accusation. The Fleming, more and more vindictive and suspicious, at once laid the matter before the King, who placed the cases in his Provost's hands. Each was promptly tried, and more promptly punished.

But the patriotism of the citizens was opposed to Tristan's swift proceedings. Guilty or no, the two young men were regarded as victims, and Cornelius as a ruffian. The two families thrown into mourning were persons in high esteem, their complaints met with sympathy, and step by step they succeeded in persuading everyone to believe in the innocence of all the men that the King's treasurer had sent to the gallows. Some declared that this cruel miser was imitating the King and trying to set terror and the gibbet between himself and the world; that he had never been robbed at all; that these horrible executions were brought about by cold self-interest; and that he only wanted to be quit of all alarms about his treasure.

The immediate result of these popular rumors was to isolate Cornelius. The good folks of Tours treated him as one plague-stricken, spoke of him as the extortioner, and called his house La Malemaison (the House of Ill). Even if the usurer could have found a youth bold enough to take service with him, the inhabitants of the town would have hindered it by their sayings. The most favorable opinions about Maitre Cornelius were those expressed by men who regarded him only as a sinister personage. In some he inspired involuntary terrors, in others, the deep respect that is always paid to unlimited power or great wealth; to some he had the attraction of mystery.

His mode of life, his countenance, and the King's favor justified every rumor of which he was the subject.

Since the death of his persecutor, the Duke of Burgundy, Cornelius frequently traveled in foreign parts, and during his absence the King had his house guarded by a company of his Scottish guard. This royal care led the courtiers to suppose that the old man had left his fortune to Louis XI.

The Fleming rarely went out; the gentlemen about the Court visited him frequently; he was ready enough to lend them money, but he was whimsical.

On certain days he would not give them a sou _Parisis_; on the morrow he would offer them enormous sums, always at a high rate of interest and on good security. He was, however, a good Catholic, and attended the services regularly; but he went to Saint-Martin at a very early hour, and as he had purchased a chapel in perpetuity, there, as elsewhere, he was divided from other Christians.

A proverb which became popular at this period and survived at Tours for a long time was the saying: "You have crossed the usurer's path; woe will befall you." "You have crossed the usurer's path" accounted for sudden ailments, involuntary depression, and the evil turns of fortune. Even at Court Cornelius was credited with the fatal influence which, in Italy, Spain, and the East, superst.i.tion has named the Evil Eye.

But for the terrible power of Louis XI., which was extended like a shield over his house, the populace would, on the slenderest pretext, have demolished the Malemaison of the Rue du Murier. And yet it was by Cornelius that the first mulberry trees in Tours had been planted, and at that time the inhabitants had regarded him as a good genius. Who then may trust to popular favor?

Certain gentlemen who had met Maitre Cornelius in foreign lands had been amazed by his good humor. At Tours he was constantly gloomy and absent-minded; but he always came back there. Some inexplicable attraction always brought him home to his dismal house in the Rue du Murier. Like the snail whose life is inseparable from that of his sh.e.l.l, he confessed to the King that he never felt so happy as behind the time-eaten stones, the bolts of his little bastille, albeit he knew that in the event of Louis' death it would be the most dangerous spot on earth to him.

"The devil is amusing himself at the expense of our friend the _torconnier_," said Louis XI. to his barber, a few days before the festival of All Saints. "He complains of having been robbed again! But there is n.o.body this time for him to hang--unless he hangs himself. If the old vagabond did not come to ask me whether I had carried off by mistake a chain of rubies he had been meaning to sell me? By the Ma.s.s! I do not steal what I have only to take, said I."

"And was he frightened?" asked the barber.

"Misers are afraid but of one thing," replied the King. "My gossip the usurer knows full well that I should not flay him for nothing; otherwise I should be unjust, and I have never done anything that was not just and necessary."

"And yet the old hulk cheats you," replied the barber.

"You only wish that were true, heh?" said the King, with a cunning leer at the barber.

"Nay, Sire," replied the man, with an oath; "but there would be a snug fortune to divide between you and the devil."

"That will do," said the King. "Do not put mischief into my head. My gossip is a more faithful friend than all the men whose fortunes I have made--possibly because he owes me nothing."

Thus, for two years past, Cornelius lived alone with his sister, who was believed to be a witch. A tailor who lived hard by declared that he had often seen her at night waiting on the roof to fly off to her Sabbath. This statement was all the more extraordinary because the old miser shut his sister up in a room of which the windows were barred with iron.

Cornelius in his old age, fearing more and more that men should rob him, had conceived a hatred for all the world excepting the King, whom he esteemed highly. He had sunk into deep misanthropy; but, in his pa.s.sion for gold, the a.s.similation of the metal with his very substance had become more and more complete, and, as is commonly the case with misers, his avarice increased with age. He was suspicious even of his sister, though she was perhaps more avaricious and thrifty than himself, and outdid him in sordid inventiveness. There was something mysterious and questionable in their way of life. The old woman so rarely took bread from the baker, and was so seldom seen at market, that the least credulous observers had at last attributed to these strange beings the knowledge of some occult means of sustaining life. Some, who meddled in alchemy, said that Maitre Cornelius could make gold. The learned declared that he had discovered the universal panacea. And to most of the country folk, when the townspeople spoke of him, he was a chimerical creature, so that they would come out of curiosity to stare at his house.

The young gentleman, sitting on a bench by the house facing that of Maitre Cornelius, looked at the Malemaison and the Hotel de Poitiers by turns. The moon shed high lights on the salient parts, lending color by the contrast of light and shade on the sculpture in relief. The play of this capricious pale light gave a somewhat sinister expression to both houses. Nature seemed to lend herself to the superst.i.tious notions that hung about the place.

The gentleman recalled all the many traditions which made Cornelius an object at once of curiosity and dread. Though the vehemence of his pa.s.sion confirmed him in his determination to get into the house and to stay there as long as might be necessary to carry out his projects, he hesitated before taking this final step, though well aware that he should do so. But who, in the critical hours of life, does not love to listen to presentiments and play see-saw, as it were, over the abyss of futurity? As a lover worthy of his love, the youth feared lest he should perish before the Countess' love should grace his life.

This secret hesitancy was so painfully absorbing that he did not feel the cold wind that blew round his legs and against the projecting ma.s.ses of the houses. If he entered the goldsmith's service, he must renounce his name, as he had already doffed his handsome garb as a n.o.bleman. In the event of disaster, he could make no appeal to the privileges of his birth or the protection of his friends but at the cost of destroying the Comtesse de Saint-Vallier beyond all rescue. If the old lord suspected her of having a lover, he was capable of roasting her in an iron cage by a slow fire, of torturing her to death day by day in the depths of some dungeon.

As he looked down on the wretched clothes in which he was disguised, the gentleman was ashamed of his own appearance. To behold his black leather belt, his clumsy shoes, his wrinkled hose, his frieze breeches, and his gray cloth jerkin, he might be the follower of some mean sergeant of the law. To a n.o.bleman of the fifteenth century it was as bad as death to play the part of pauper townsman and renounce the privileges of his rank. Still, to climb the roof of the mansion where his mistress sat weeping; to creep down the chimney or run along the parapet, crawling from gutter to gutter till he reached her window; to risk his life, if only he might sit by her side on a silken cushion, in front of a good fire, during the slumbers of that sinister husband, whose snore would enhance their rapture; to defy heaven and earth; to exchange the most audacious embrace; to speak words which would inevitably be punished by death, or at least by a b.l.o.o.d.y struggle,--all these enchanting visions, with the romantic perils of the adventure brought him to a decision. The smaller the prize of his endeavor,--were it only to be that he should once more kiss his lady's hand,--the more determined was he to dare everything, prompted by the chivalrous and impa.s.sioned spirit of the time. Then he did not really suppose that the Countess would dare to refuse him the sweetest reward of love, in the midst of such mortal dangers. The adventure was too perilous, too impossible, not to be carried through to the end.

At this juncture every bell in the town rang the curfew. The law had fallen into disuse, but in the provinces the hour was still tolled, for customs die slowly in the country. Though the lights were not put out, the captains of the watch stretched chains across the streets. Many doors were bolted and barred; the steps of a few belated citizens were heard in the distance as they made their way, surrounded by their followers, armed to the teeth and carrying lanterns; and then, ere long, the town, gagged as it were, seemed to fall asleep, fearing no attack from malefactors, unless by way of the roof.

And at that time the house-tops were a recognized highway during the night.

The streets were so narrow in country towns, and even in Paris, that robbers could jump from one side to the other. This dangerous game was a constant amus.e.m.e.nt to King Charles IX. in his youth, if we may believe the memoirs of the time.

Fearing to be too late in presenting himself to Maitre Cornelius, the young gentleman was on the point of rising to knock at the door of the House of Evil, when, on looking at it, his attention was riveted by a sort of vision, such as the writers of the day would have called diabolical. He rubbed his eyes as if to clear them, and a thousand different emotions flashed through his brain. On each side of the door he beheld a face framed between the bars of a sort of loophole. At first he supposed these faces to be grotesque masks carved in stone, so wrinkled were they, so angular, twisted, exaggerated, and motionless; they were tanned,--that is to say, brown; but the cold and the moonlight enabled him to detect the slight white cloud of thin breath coming out of the two blue noses, and at last he could make out in each haggard face, under s.h.a.ggy eyebrows, a pair of china-blue eyes that sparkled with a pale light, like those of a wolf crouching in a thicket when he hears the hounds in full cry. The uneasy gleam of those eyes rested so fixedly on him, that, after meeting it during the moment when he was studying these singular objects, he felt like a bird put up by a sporting dog; a fevered spasm clutched at his heart, but was at once controlled. These two faces were beyond a doubt those of Cornelius and his sister.

The gentleman at once affected to be examining the street and to be in search of a dwelling of which the address was written on a card that he took out of his pocket, trying to read it by the moonlight; he then went straight up to the extortioner's door and gave three knocks, which echoed within the house as if this were the portal of a cellar. A small light became visible, and an eye was applied to a small and strongly barred wicket.

"Who is there?"

"A friend, sent by Oosterlinck of Bruges."

"What do you want?"

"To be let in."

"Your name?"

"Philippe Goulenoire."

"Have you letters of introduction?"

"Here they are."

"Put them in through the box."