the mode of life of Z. Marcas, He did copying, at so much
a sheet no doubt, for a law-writer who lived in the courtyard
of the Sainte-Chapelle. He worked half the night; after
sleeping from six till ten, he began again and wrote till
three. Then he went out to take the copy home before din-
ner, which he ate at Mizerai's in the Rue Michel-le-Comte,
at a cost of nine sous, and came in to bed at six o'clock. It
became known to us that Marcas did not utter fifteen sen-
tences in a month; he never talked to anybody, nor said a
word to himself in his dreadful garret.

"The Ruins of Palmyra are terribly silent!" said Juste.
' This taciturnity in a man whose appearance was so im-
posing was strangely significant. Sometimes when we met
him, we exchanged glances full of meaning on both sides,
but they never led to any advances. Insensibly this man
became the object of our secret admiration, though we knew
no reason for it. Did it lie in his secretly simple habits, his
monastic regularity, his hermit-like frugality, his idiotically
mechanical labor, allowing his mind to remain neuter or to
work on its own lines, seeming to us to hint at an expecta-
tion of some stroke of good luck, or at some foregone con-
clusion as to his life?

After wandering for a long time among the Ruins of
Palmyra, we forgot them — 'We were young! Then came the
Carnival, the Paris Carnival, which, henceforth, will eclipse
the old Carnival of Venice, unless some ill-advised Prefect
of Police is antagonistic.

Gambling ought to be allowed during the Carnival; but
the stupid moralists who have had gambling suppressed are
inept financiers, and this indispensable evil will be re-estab-
lished among us when it is proved that France leaves mil-
lions at the German tables.

This splendid Carnival brought us to utter penury, as it
does every student. We got rid of every object of luxury;
we sold our second coats, our second boots, our second waist-
coats — everything of which we had a duplicate, except our



514 BALZAC'S WORKS

friend. We ate bread aud cold sausages; we looked where
we walked; we had set to work in earnest. We owed two
months' rent, and were sure of having a bill from the porter
for sixty or eighty items each, and amounting to forty or
fifty francs. We made no noise, and did not laugh as we
crossed the little hall at the bottom of the stairs; we com-
monly took it at a flying leap from the lowest step into the
street. On the day when we first found ourselves bereft of
tobacco for our pipes, it struck us that for some days we had
been eating bread without any kind of butter.

Great was our distress.

"No tobacco!" said the Doctor.

"No cloak!" said the Keeper of the Seals.

"Ah, you rascals, you would dress as the postilion de
Longjumeau, you would appear as Debardeurs, sup in the
morning, and breakfast at night at Very's — sometimes even
at the Rocher de Cancale. — Dry bread foi you, my boys!
Why," said I, in a big bass voice, "you deserve to sleep
under the bed, you are not worthy to lie in it — "

"Yes, yes; but, Keeper of Seals, there is no more to-
bacco!" said Juste.

"It is high time to write home, to our aunts, our mothers,
and our sisters, to tell them we have no underlinen left, that
the wear and tear of Paris would ruin garments of wire.
Then we will solve an elegant chemical problem by trans-
muting linen into silver."

"But we must live till we get the answer."

"Well, I will go and bring out a loan among such of oar
friends as may still have some capital to invest."

"And how much will you find?"

"Say ten francs!" replied I with pride.

It was midnight. Marcas had heard everything. He
knocked at our door.

"Messieurs," said he, "here is some tobacco; you can
repay me on the first opportunity."

We were struck, not by the offer, which we accepted,
but by the rich, deep, full voice in which it was made;



Z. MARCAS 615

a tone only comparable to the lowest string of Paga-
nini's violin. Marcas vanished without waiting for our
thanks.

Juste and I looked at each other without a word. To be
rescued by a man evidently poorer than ourselves! Juste
sat down to write to every member of his family, and I went
off to effect a loan. I brought in twenty francs loaned me by
a fellow-provincial. In that evil but happy day gambling
was still tolerated, and in its lodes, as hard as the rocky ore
of Brazil, young men, by risking a small sum, had a chance
of winning a few gold pieces. My friend, too, had some
Turkish tobacco, brought home from Constantinople by a
sailor, and he gave me quite as much as we had taken
from Z. Marcas. I conveyed the splendid cargo into port,
and we went in triumph to repay our neighbor with a tawny
wig of Turkish tobacco for his dark caporal.

"You were determined not to be my debtors," said he.
"You are giving me gold for copper. — You are boys — good
boys—"

The sentences, spoken in varying tones, were variously
emphasized. The words were nothing, but the expression!
— That made us friends of ten years' standing at once.

Marcas, on hearing us coming, had covered up his papers;
we understood that it would be taking a liberty to allude
to his means of subsistence, and felt ashamed of having
watched him. His cupboard stood open; in it there were
two shirts, a white necktie, and a razor. The razor made
me shudder. A looking-glass, worth five francs perhaps,
hung near the window.

The man's few and simple movements had a sort of
savage grandeur. The Doctor and I looked at each other,
wondering what we could say in reply. Juste, seeing that
I was speechless, asked Marcas jestingly —

"You cultivate literature, Monsieur?"

"Far from it!" replied Marcas. "I should not be so
wealthy. ' '

"I fancied," said I, "that poetry alone, in these days.



516 BALZAC'S WORKS

was amply sufficient to provide a man with lodgings as bad

as ours."

My remark made Marcas smile, and the smile gave a
charm to his yellow face.

"Ambition is not a less severe taskmaster to those who
fail," said he. "You, who are beginning life, walk in the
beaten paths. Never dream of rising superior, you will
be ruined!"

"You advise us to stay just as we are ?" said the Doctor,
smiling.

There is something so infectious and childlike in the
pleasantries of youth, that Marcas smiled again in reply,

"What incidents can have given you this detestable
philosophy?" asked I.

"1 forgot once more that chance is the result of an im-
mense equation of which we know not all the factors.
When we start from zero to work up to the unit, the chances
are incalculable. To ambitious men Paris is an immense
roulette table, and every young man fancies he can hit on
a successful progression of numbers."

He offered us the tobacco I had brought that we might
smoke with him; the Doctor went to fetch bur pipes; Marcas
filled his, and then he came to sit in our room, bringing the
tobacco with him, since there were but two chairs in his.
Juste, as brisk as a squirrel, ran out, and returned with a
boy carrying three bottles of Bordeaux, some Brie cheese,
and a loaf.

"Hah!" said I to myself, "fifteen francs," and I was
right to a sou.

Juste gravely laid five fraucs on the chimney-shelf.

There are immeasurable differences between the gregari-
ous man and the man who lives closest to nature. Toussaint
Louverture, after he was caught, died without speaking a
word. Napoleon, transplanted to a rock, talked like a mag-
pie — he wanted to account for himself. Z. Marcas erred in
the same way, but for our benefit only. Silence in all its
majesty is to be found only in the savage. There never



Z. MARCAS 517

is a criminal who, though he might let his secrets fall with
his head into the basket of sawdust, does not feel the purely
social impulse to tell them to somebody.

Nay, I am wrong. We have seen one Iroquois of the
Faubourg Saint-Marcestu who raised the Parisian to the
level of the natural savage — a Republican, a Conspirator,
a Frenchman, an old man, who outdid all we have heard
of Negro determination, and all that Cooper tells us of
the tenacity and coolness of the Eedskins under defeat.
Morey, the Guatimozin of the "Mountain," preserved an
attitude unparalleled in the annals of European justice.

This is what Marcas told us during the small hours,
sandwiching his discourse with slices of bread spread with
cheese and washed down with wine. All the tobacco was
burned out. Now and then the hackney coaches clattering
across the Place de I'Odeon, or the omnibuses toiling past,
sent up their dull rumbling, as if to remind us that Paris
was still close to us.

His family lived at Vitre; his father and mother had fif-
teen hundred francs a year in the Funds. He had received
an education gratis in a Seminary, but had refused to enter
the priesthood. He felt in himself the fires of immense
ambition, and had come to Paris on foot at the age of twenty,
the possessor of two hundred francs. He had studied the
law, working in an attorney's office, where he had risen to
be senior clerk. He had taken his doctor's degree in law,
had mastered the old and modern codes, and could hold his
own with the most famous pleaders. He had studied the
law of nations, and was familiar with European treaties
and international practice. He had studied men and things
in five capitals — London, Berlin, Vienna, St. Petersburg,
and Constantinople.

No man was better informed than he as to the rules of
the Chamber. For five years he had been reporter of the
debates for a daily paper. He spoke extempore and admira-
bly, and could go on for a long time in that deep, appealing



518 BALZAC'S WORKS

voice which had struck us to the soul. Indeed, he proved
by the narrative of his life that he was a great orator, a con-
cise orator, serious and yet full of piercing eloquence; he
resembled Berryer in his fervor and in the impetus which
commands the sympathy of the masSes, and was like Thiers
in refinement and skill; but he would have been less diffuse,
less in difficulties for a conclusion. He had intended to rise
rapidly to power without burdening himself first with the
doctrines necessary to begin with, for a man in opposition,
but an incubus later to the statesman.

Marcas had learned ev^ery thing that a real statesman
should know; indeed, his amazement was considerable when
he had occasion to discern the utter ignorance of men who
have risen to the administration of public affairs in France.
Though in him it was vocation that had led to study, nature
had been generous and bestowed all that cannot be acquired
— keen perceptions, self-command, a nimble wit, rapid judg-
ment, decisiveness, and, what is the genius of these men,
fertility in resource.

By the time when Marcas thought himself duly equipped,
France was torn by intestine divisions arising from the tri-
umph of the House of Orleans ov^er the elder branch of the
Bourbons.

The field of political warfare is evidently changed. Civil
war henceforth cannot last for long, and will not be fought
out in the provinces. In France such struggles will be of
brief duration and at the seat of government; and the battle
will be the close of the moral contest which will have been
brought to an issue by superior minds. This state of things
will continue so long as France has her present singular form
of government, which has no analogy with that of any
other country; for there is no more resemblance between
the English and the French constitutions than between the
two lands.

Thus Marcus's place was in the political press. Being
poor and unable to secure his election, he hoped to make
a sudden appearance. He resolved on making the greatest



Z. MARC AS 619

possible sacrifice for a man of superior intellect, to work as
subordinate to some rich and ambitious deputy. Like a
second Bonaparte, he sought his Barras; the new Colbert
hoped to find a Maz;arin. He did immense services, and
he did tliem then and there; he assumed no importance, he
made no boast, he did not complain of ingratitude. He did
them in the hope that his patron would put him in a position
to be elected deputy; Marcas wished for nothing but a loan
that might enable him to purchase a house in Paris, the
qualification required by law. Richard III. asked for
nothing but his horse.

In three years Marcas had made his man — one of the
fifty supposed great statesmen who are the battledores with
which two cunning players toss the ministerial portfolios, ex-
actly as the man behind the puppet-show hits Punch against
the constable in his street tlieatre, and counts on always
getting paid. This man existed only by Marcas, but he
had just brains enough to appreciate the value of his "ghost"
and to know that Marcas, if he ever came to the front, would
remain there, would be indispensable, while he himself
would be translated to the polar zone of the Luxembourg.
So he determined to put insurmountable obstacles in the
way of his Mentor's advancement, and hid his purpose under
the semblance of the utmost sincerity. Like all mean men,
he could dissimulate to perfection, and he soon made prog-
ress in the ways of ingratitude, for he felt that he must kill
Marcas, not to be killed by him. These two men, appar-
ently so united, hated each other as soon as one had once
deceived the other.

The politician was made one of a ministry; Marcas re-
mained in the opposition to hinder his man from being at-
tacked; nay, by skilful tactics he won him the applause
of the opposition. To excuse himself for not rewarding his
subaltern, the chief pointed out the impossibility of finding
a place suddenly for a man on the other side, without a great
deal of manoeuvring. Marcas had hoped confidently for a
place to enable hira to marry, and thus acquire the qualifica-



520 BALZAC'S \VORKS

tion he so ardently desired. He was two-and- thirty, and the
Chamber erelong must be dissolved. Having detected his
man in this flagrant act of bad faith, he overthrew him, or
at any rate contributed largely to his overthrow, and covered
him with mud.

A fallen minister, if he is to rise again to power, must
show that he is to be feared; this man, intoxicated by Eoyal
glibness, had fancied that his position would be permanent;
he acknowledged his delinquencies; besides confessing
them, he did Marcas a small money service, for Marcas had
got into debt. He subsidized the newspaper on which
Marcas worked, and made him the manager of it.

Though he despised the man, Marcas, who, practically,
was being subsidized too, consented to take the part of the
fallen minister. Without unmasking at once all the batteries
of his superior intellect, Marcas came a little further than
before; he showed half his shrewdness. The Ministry
lasted only a hundred and eighty days; it was swallowed
up. Marcas had put himself into communication with cer-
tain deputies, had molded them like dough, leaving each
impressed with a high opinion of his talent; his puppet again
became a member of the Ministry, and then the paper was
ministerial. The Ministry united the paper with another,
solely to squeeze out Marcas, who in this fusion had to make
way for a rich and insolent rival, whose name was well
known, and who already had his foot in the stirrup.

Marcas relapsed into utter destitution; his haughty
patron well knew the depths into which he had cast him.

Where was he to go? The ministerial papers, privily
warned, would have nothing to say to him. The opposition
papers did not care to admit him to their offices. Marcas
could side neither with the Kepublicans nor with the Legiti-
mists, two parties whose triumph would mean the overthrow
of everything that now is.

"Ambitious men like a fast hold on things," said he
with a smile.

He lived by writing a few articles on commercial afEairs,



Z. MARQASi 521

and contributed to one of those encyclopedias brought out
by specalation and not by learning. Finally a paper was
founded, which was destined to live but two years, but
which secured his services. From that moment he renewed
his connection with the minister's enemies; he joined the
party who were working for the fall of the Government;
and as soon as his pickaxe had free play, it fell.

This paper had now for six months ceased to exist; he
had failed to find employment of any kind; he was spoken
of as a dangerous man, calumny attacked him; he had un-
masked a huge financial and mercantile job by a few articles
and a pamphlet. He was known to be the mouthpiece of
a banker who was said to have paid him largely, and from
whom he was supposed to expect some patronage in return
for his championship. Marcas, disgusted by men and things,
worn out by five years of fighting, regarded as a free lance
rather than as a great leader, crushed by the necessity for
earning his daily bread, which hindered him from gaining
ground, in despair at the influence exerted by money over
fnind, and given over to dire poverty, buried himself in a
garret, to make thirty sous a day, the sum strictly answering
to his needs. Meditation had levelled a desert all round him.
He read the papers to be informed of what was going on.
Pozzo di Borgo had once lived like this for some time.

Marcas, no doubt, was planning a serious attack, accus-
toming himself to dissimulation, and punishing himself for
his blunders by Pythagorean muteness. But he did not tell
us the reasons for his conduct.

It is impossible to give you an idea of the scenes of the
highest comedy that lay behind this algebraic statement of
his career; his useless patience dogging the footsteps of For-
tune, which presently took wings, his long tramps over the
thorny brakes of Paris, his breathless chases as a petitioner}
his attempts to win over fools; the schemes laid only to fail
through the influence of some frivolous woman ; the meet-
ings with men of business who expected their capital to
bring them places and a peerage, as well as large interest.



522 BALZAC'S WORKS

Then the hopes rising in a towering wave only to break in
foam on the shoal; the wonders wrought in reconciling
adverse interests which, after working together for a week,
fell asunder; the annoyance, a thousand times repeated, of
seeing a dunce decorated with the Legion of Honor, and
preferred, though as ignorant as a shop-boy, to a man of
talent. Then, what Marcas called the stratagems of stu-
pidity — you strike a man, and he seems convinced, he nods
his head — everj'thing is settled; next day, this India-rubber
ball, flattened for a moment, has recovered itself in the course
of the night; it is as full of wind as ever; you must begin
all over again; and you go on till you understand that you
are not dealing with a man, but with a lump of gum that
loses shape in the sunshine.

These thousand annoyances, this vast waste of human
energy on barren spots, the difficulty of achieving any
good, the incredible facility of doing mischief; two strong
games played out, twice won and then twice lost; the hatred
of a statesman — a blockhead with a painted face and a wig,
but in whom the world believed — all these things, great and
small, had not crushed, but for the moment had dashed,
Marcas. In the days when money had come into his hands,
his fingers had not clutched it; he had allowed himself the
exquisite pleasure of sending it all to his family — to his
sisters, his brothers, his old father. Like Napoleon in his
fall, he asked for no more than thirty sous a day, and any
man of energy can earn thirty sous for a day's work in
Paris.

When Marcas had finished the story of his life, inter-
mingled with reflections, maxims, and observations, reveal-
ing him as a great politician, a few questions and answers
on both sides as to the progress of affairs in France and in
Europe were enough to prove to us that he was a real states-
man; for a man may be quickly and easily judged when he
can be brought on to the ground of immediate difficulties:
there is a certain Shibboleth for men of superior talents, and
we were of the tribe of modern Levites without belonging as



Z. MARCAS 523

yet to the Temple. As I have said, our frivolity covered
certain purposes which Juste has carried out, and which I
am about to execute.

When we had done talking, we all three went out, cold
as it was, to walk in the Luxembourg gardens till the
dinner-hour. In the course of that walk our conversation,
grave throughout, turned on the painful aspects of the
political situation. Each of us contributed his remarks, his
comment, or his jest, a pleasantry or a proverb. This was
no longer exclusively a discussion of life on the colossal
scale just described by Marcas, the soldier of political war-
fare. Nor was it the distressful monologue of the wrecked
navigator, stranded in a garret in the Hotel Corneille; it
was a dialogue in which two well-informed young men,
having gauged the times they lived in, were endeavoring,
under the guidance of a man of talent, to gain some light on
their own future prospects.

"Why," asked Juste, "did you not wait patiently for an
opportunity, and imitate the only man who has been able to
keep the lead since the Revolution of July by holding his
head above water?"

"Have I not said that we never know where the roots of
chance lie ? Carrel was in identically the same position as
the orator you speak of. That gloomy young man, of a
bitter spirit, had a whole government in his head ; the ijian
of whom you speak had no idea beyond mounting on the
crupper of every event. Of the two, Carrel was the better
man. Well, one became a minister, Carrel remained a
journalist; the incomplete but craftier man is living; Carrel
is dead.

"1 may point out that your man has for fifteen years
been making his way, and is but making it still. He may
yet be caught and crushed between two cars full of intrigues
on the highroad to power. He has no house; he has not
the favor of the Palace like Metternich; nor, like Vill^le,
the protection of a compact majority.

"I do not believe that the present state of things will



524 BALZAC'8 WORKS

last ten years longer. Hence, supposing 1 should have
such poor good luck, I am already too late to avoid being
swept away by the commotion I foresee. I should need to
be established in a superior position."

"What commotion?" asked Juste.

"August, 1830," said Marcas in solemn tones, holding
out his hand toward Paris; "August, the offspring of
Youth which bound the sheaves, and of Intellect which
had ripened the harvest, forgot to provide for Youth and
Intellect.

"Youth will explode like the boiler of a steam-engine.
Youth has no outlet in France; it is gathering an avalanche
of underrated capabilities, of legitimate and restless ambi-
tions; young men are not marrying now; families cannot
tell what to do with their children. What will the thunder-
clap be that will shake down these masses ? I know not,
but they will crash down into the midst of things, and over-
throw everything. These are laws of hydrostatics which
act on the human race; the Roman Empire had failed to
understand them, and the Barbaric hordes came down.

"The Barbaric hordes now are the intelligent class. The
laws of overpressure are at this moment acting slowly and
silently in our midst. The Government is the great crimi-
nal; it does not appreciate the two powers to which it owes
everything; it has allowed its hands to be tied by the ab-
surdities of the Contract; it is bound, ready to be the victim.

"Louis XIV., Napoleon, England, all were or are eager
for intelligent youth. In France the young are condemned
by the new legislation, by the blundering principles of elec-
tive rights, by the unsoundness of the ministerial con-
stitution.

"Look at the elective Chamber; you will find no depu-
ties of thirty; the youth of Richelieu and of Mazarin, of
Turenne and of Colbert, of Pitt and of Saint-Just, of Napo-
leon and of Prince Metternich, would find no admission
there; Burke, Sheridan, or Fox could not win seats. Even
if political majority had been fixed at one-and-twenty, and



Z. MARC AS 525

eligibility had been relieved of every disabling qualification,
the Departments would have returned the very same mem-
bers, men devoid of political talent, unable to speak without
murdering French grammar, and among whom, in ten years,
scarcely one statesman has been found.

"The causes of an impending event may be seen, but the
event itself cannot be foretold. At this moment the youth
of France is being driven into Republicanism, because it
believes that the Republic would bring it emancipation. It
will always remember the young representatives of the