The Works of Honore de Balzac Part 97

"In such cases," Coyctier went on, "men transact their business in their sleep. As our friend here is not averse to h.o.a.rding, he has quietly yielded to his favorite habit. Indeed, he probably has an attack whenever, during the day, he has been in alarm for his treasure."

"_Pasques Dieu!_ and what a treasure!" cried the King.

"Where is it?" asked Cornelius, who, by a singular peculiarity of our nature, heard all that the King and his leech were saying, though almost stunned by his reflections and his misfortune.

"Oh!" replied Coyctier, with a coa.r.s.e, diabolical laugh, "somnambulists have no recollection of their acts and deeds when they awake."

"Leave us!" said the King.

When Louis XI. was alone with his gossip, he looked at him with a cold chuckle.

"Worshipful Master Hoogworst," said he, bowing low, "all treasure-trove in France belongs to the King."

"Yes, my liege, it is all yours; and our lives and fortunes are in your hands; but hitherto you have been so merciful as to take no more than you found necessary."

"Listen to me, gossip. If I help you to recover this treasure, you may, in all confidence and without fear, divide it with me."

"No, Sire, I will not divide it. It shall be all yours, when I am dead. But what scheme have you for finding it?"

"I have only to watch you, myself, while you are taking your nocturnal walks. Any one but myself would be a danger."

"Ah, Sire," replied Cornelius, falling at the King's feet, "you are the only man in the kingdom whom I would trust with that office, and I shall find means to prove my grat.i.tude for your kindness to your humble servant by doing my utmost to promote the marriage of the Heiress of Bourgogne to Monseigneur the Dauphin. There indeed is a treasure, not, to be sure, in crown-pieces, but in land, which will n.o.bly round out your dominions!"

"Pshaw, Fleming, you are deceiving me!" said the King, knitting his brows, "or you have played me false."

"Nay, Sire, can you doubt my devotion--you, the only man I love?"

"Words, words!" said the King, turning to face the miser. "You ought not to have waited for this to be of use to me. You are selling me your patronage--_Pasques Dieu!_ to me--Louis the Eleventh! Are you the master, I would know, and am I the servant?"

"Ah, my liege," replied the old usurer, "I had hoped to give you an agreeable surprise by news of the communications I had established with the men of Ghent. I expected confirmation of it by the hand of Oosterlinck's apprentice. But what has become of him?"

"Enough," said the King. "Another error. I do not choose that any one should interfere, uncalled for, in my concerns. Enough! I must think all this over."

Maitre Cornelius found the agility of youth to fly to the lower room, where his sister was sitting.

"Oh, Jeanne, dear heart, we have somewhere a h.o.a.rd where I have hidden the thirteen hundred thousand crowns. And I--I am the thief!"

Jeanne Hoogworst rose from her stool, starting to her feet as if the seat were of red-hot iron. The shock was so frightful to an old woman accustomed for many years to exhaust herself by voluntary abstinence, that she quaked in every limb and felt a terrible pain in her back. By degrees her color faded, and her face, in which the wrinkles made any change very difficult to detect, gradually fell, while her brother explained to her the disease to which he was a victim, and the strange situation in which they both stood.

"King Louis and I," said he in conclusion, "have just been telling each other as many lies as two miracle-mongers. You see, child, if he were to watch me, he would be sole master of the secret of the treasure. No one in the world but the King can spy on my nocturnal movements. Now I do not know that the King's conscience, near on death as he is, could stand out against thirteen hundred and seventeen thousand crowns. We must be beforehand with him, find the nest, and send all treasure to Ghent. Now you alone----"

Cornelius suddenly stopped short, as if he were gauging the heart of this King, who, at two and twenty, had dreamed of parricide. When the treasurer had made up his mind as to Louis XI., he hastily rose, as a man in a hurry to escape some danger.

At this sudden movement, his sister, too weak or too strong for such a crisis, fell down flat; she was dead. Cornelius lifted her up and shook her violently, saying:

"This is no time for dying; you will have time enough for that afterwards.

Oh! it is all over! Wretched creature, she could never do the right thing----"

He closed her eyes and laid her on the floor. But then the kind and n.o.ble feelings that lurked at the bottom of his heart came to the surface, and almost forgetting his undiscovered treasure, he cried out in sorrow:

"My poor companion! what, have I lost you--you who understood me so well?

Ah! you were my real treasure. There, there, lies the treasure. With you I have lost all my peace of mind, all my affections. If you had but known how well it would have paid you to live only two nights longer, you would not have died, if only to please me, poor little woman. I say, Jeanne--thirteen hundred and seventeen thousand crowns! No, even that does not rouse you.

No, she is dead, quite dead!"

He thereupon sat down and said no more, but two large tears gathered in his eyes and rolled down his hollow cheeks; then with many an "Ah!" and sigh he locked the room up and returned to the King. Louis was startled by the grief he saw written on his old friend's features.

"What is this?" said he.

"Alas, Sire, a misfortune never comes single. My sister is dead. She has gone below before me," and he pointed to the ground with startling emphasis.

"Enough, enough!" said Louis XI., who did not like to hear any mention of death.

"You are my heir. I care for nothing now. Here are my keys. Hang me, if it is your good pleasure. Take everything; search the house; it is full of gold. I give it all to you."

"Come, come, gossip," said the King, half moved by the sight of this strange anguish, "we will discover the h.o.a.rd some fine night, and the sight of so much riches will revive your taste for life. I will come again this week."

"Whenever Your Majesty pleases."

At these words, the King, who had gone a few steps towards the door, turned sharply round, and the two men looked at each other with an expression that no brush, nor words, could render.

"Good-bye, gossip," said Louis, at last, in a sharp voice, as he put his bonnet straight.

"May G.o.d and the Virgin keep you in their good grace!" the usurer replied humbly, as he escorted the King to the street.

After so long a friendship these two men found a barrier raised between them by distrust and money, whereas they had hitherto been quite agreed on matters of money and distrust; but they knew each other so well, they were so much in the habit of intimacy, that the King could guess from the miser's tone as he rashly said, "Whenever Your Majesty pleases," the annoyance his visits would thenceforth be to his treasurer, just as Cornelius had discerned a declaration of war in the way Louis had said "Good-bye, gossip."

So Louis XI. and his banker parted, very uncertain as to what, for the future, their demeanor was to be. The monarch, indeed, knew the Fleming's secret; but the Fleming on his part could, through his connections, secure the grandest conquest any king of France had yet achieved--that of the domains of the House of Burgundy, which were just then the object of envy to every sovereign in Europe.

The famous Margaret's choice would be guided by the good folks of Ghent and the Flemings about her. Hoogworst's gold and influence would tell for a great deal in the negotiations opened by Desquerdes, the captain to whom Louis XI. had given the command of the army on the Belgian frontier. Thus these two master foxes were in the position of duelists whose strength had been neutralized by some stroke of fate.

And whether it was that from that day the King's health had failed visibly, or that Cornelius in part promoted the arrival in France of Marguerite of Burgundy, who came to Amboise in July 1438 to be married to the Dauphin in the chapel of the chateau, the King claimed no fine from his treasurer and no trial was held; but they remained in the half-cordial terms of an armed friendship.

Happily for the miser, a rumor got about that his sister had committed the thefts, and that she had been privily executed by Tristan. Otherwise, and if the true story had become known, the whole town would have risen in arms to destroy the Malemaison before the King could possibly have defended it.

However, if all this historical guesswork has some foundation with regard to Louis XI.'s inaction, Master Cornelius Hoogworst cannot be accused of supineness. He spent the first days after this fatal morning in a constant hurry. Like a beast of prey shut up in a cage, he came and went, scenting gold in every corner of his dwelling; he examined every cranny; he tapped the walls; he demanded his treasure of the trees in the garden, of the foundations, of the turret roofs, of earth, and of heaven. Often he would stand for hours looking at everything around him, his eyes searching vacancy. He tried the miracles and second-sight of magic powers, endeavoring to see his gold through s.p.a.ce and solid obstacles.

He was constantly absorbed in one overwhelming thought, consumed by an idea that gnawed at his vitals, and yet more cruelly racked by the perennial torments of his duel with himself, since his love of gold had turned to rend itself; it was a sort of incomplete suicide comprehending all the pangs of living and of dying. Never had a vice so effectually entrapped itself; for the miser who inadvertently locks himself into the subterranean cell where his wealth is buried, has, like Sardanapalus, the satisfaction of perishing in the midst of it. But Cornelius, at once the robber and the robbed, and in the secret of neither, possessed, and yet did not possess, his treasures--a quite new, quite whimsical form of torture, but perpetually excruciating.

Sometimes, almost oblivious, he would leave the little wicket of his door open, and then the pa.s.sers-by could see the shriveled old man standing in the middle of his neglected garden, perfectly motionless, and looking at any who stopped to gaze at him, with a fixed stare, a lurid glare, that froze them with terror. If by chance he went out into the streets of the town, you would have thought he was a stranger; he never knew where he was, nor whether it was the sun or the moon that were shining. He would often ask his way of the persons he met, fancying himself at Ghent, and he seemed always to be looking for his lost treasure.

The most irrepressible and most incorporate of all human ideas,--that by which a man identifies himself by creating outside and apart from his person the whole fict.i.tious ent.i.ty which he calls his property,--this demon idea had its talons constantly clutching at the miser's soul.

Then, in the midst of his torments, Fear would rise up with all the feelings that come in its train. For, in fact, two men knew his secret--the secret which he himself did not know. Louis XI. or Coyctier might post their spies to watch his movements while he was asleep, and discover the unknown gulf into which he had flung his wealth with the blood of so many innocent men; for Remorse kept watch with Fear.

To preserve his lost riches from being s.n.a.t.c.hed from him while he lived, during the early days after his disaster, he took the utmost precaution to avoid sleeping, and his connection with the commercial world enabled him to procure the strongest anti-narcotics. His wakeful nights must have been terrible; he was alone to struggle against the night and silence, against remorse and fear, and all the thoughts that man has most effectually personified--instinctively, no doubt, in obedience to some law of the mind, true, though not yet proved.

In short, this man, strong as he was; this heart, annealed by the life of politics and commerce; this genius, though unknown to history,--was doomed to succ.u.mb under the horrors of the torments he himself had created.

Crushed by some reflection even more cruel than all that had gone before, he cut his throat with a razor.