Array The griffin classics - The Collected Works of Honore de Balzac

“Pere Leger,” said Pierrotin, when they reached the steep hill of the faubourg Saint-Denis by the rue de la Fidelite, “suppose we get out, hey?”

“I’ll get out, too,” said the count, hearing Leger’s name.

“Goodness! if this is how we are going, we shall do fourteen miles in fifteen days!” cried Georges.

“It isn’t my fault,” said Pierrotin, “if a passenger wishes to get out.”

“Ten louis for you if you keep the secret of my being here as I told you before,” said the count in a low voice, taking Pierrotin by the arm.

“Oh, my thousand francs!” thought Pierrotin as he winked an eye at Monsieur de Serizy, which meant, “Rely on me.”

Oscar and Georges stayed in the coach.

“Look here, Pierrotin, since Pierrotin you are,” cried Georges, when the passengers were once more stowed away in the vehicle, “if you don’t mean to go faster than this, say so! I’ll pay my fare and take a post-horse at Saint-Denis, for I have important business on hand which can’t be delayed.”

“Oh! he’ll go well enough,” said Pere Leger. “Besides, the distance isn’t great.”

“I am never more than half an hour late,” asserted Pierrotin.

“Well, you are not wheeling the Pope in this old barrow of yours,” said Georges, “so, get on.”

“Perhaps he’s afraid of shaking monsieur,” said Mistigris looking round at the count. “But you shouldn’t have preferences, Pierrotin, it isn’t right.”

“Coucous and the Charter make all Frenchmen equals,” said Georges.

“Oh! be easy,” said Pere Leger; “we are sure to get to La Chapelle by mid-day,” — La Chapelle being the village next beyond the Barriere of Saint-Denis.

CHAPTER IV. THE GRANDSON OF THE FAMOUS CZERNI-GEORGES

Those who travel in public conveyances know that the persons thus united by chance do not immediately have anything to say to one another; unless under special circumstances, conversation rarely begins until they have gone some distance. This period of silence is employed as much in mutual examination as in settling into their places. Minds need to get their equilibrium as much as bodies. When each person thinks he has discovered the age, profession, and character of his companions, the most talkative member of the company begins, and the conversation gets under way with all the more vivacity because those present feel a need of enlivening the journey and forgetting its tedium.

That is how things happen in French stage-coaches. In other countries customs are very different. Englishmen pique themselves on never opening their lips; Germans are melancholy in a vehicle; Italians too wary to talk; Spaniards have no public conveyances; and Russians no roads. There is no amusement except in the lumbering diligences of France, that gabbling and indiscreet country, where every one is in a hurry to laugh and show his wit, and where jest and epigram enliven all things, even the poverty of the lower classes and the weightier cares of the solid bourgeois. In a coach there is no police to check tongues, and legislative assemblies have set the fashion of public discussion. When a young man of twenty-two, like the one named Georges, is clever and lively, he is much tempted, especially under circumstances like the present, to abuse those qualities.

In the first place, Georges had soon decided that he was the superior human being of the party there assembled. He saw in the count a manufacturer of the second-class, whom he took, for some unknown reason, to be a chandler; in the shabby young man accompanied by Mistigris, a fellow of no account; in Oscar a ninny, and in Pere Leger, the fat farmer, an excellent subject to hoax. Having thus looked over the ground, he resolved to amuse himself at the expense of such companions.

“Let me see,” he thought to himself, as the coucou went down the hill from La Chapelle to the plain of Saint-Denis, “shall I pass myself off for Etienne or Beranger? No, these idiots don’t know who they are. Carbonaro? the deuce! I might get myself arrested. Suppose I say I’m the son of Marshal Ney? Pooh! what could I tell them? — about the execution of my father? It wouldn’t be funny. Better be a disguised Russian prince and make them swallow a lot of stuff about the Emperor Alexander. Or I might be Cousin, and talk philosophy; oh, couldn’t I perplex ‘em! But no, that shabby fellow with the tousled head looks to me as if he had jogged his way through the Sorbonne. What a pity! I can mimic an Englishman so perfectly I might have pretended to be Lord Byron, travelling incognito. Sapristi! I’ll command the troops of Ali, pacha of Janina!”

During this mental monologue, the coucou rolled through clouds of dust rising on either side of it from that much travelled road.

“What dust!” cried Mistigris.

“Henry IV. is dead!” retorted his master. “If you’d say it was scented with vanilla that would be emitting a new opinion.”

“You think you’re witty,” replied Mistigris. “Well, it is like vanilla at times.”

“In the Levant — ” said Georges, with the air of beginning a story.

“‘Ex Oriente flux,’” remarked Mistigris’s master, interrupting the speaker.

“I said in the Levant, from which I have just returned,” continued Georges, “the dust smells very good; but here it smells of nothing, except in some old dust-barrel like this.”

“Has monsieur lately returned from the Levant?” said Mistigris, maliciously. “He isn’t much tanned by the sun.”

“Oh! I’ve just left my bed after an illness of three months, from the germ, so the doctors said, of suppressed plague.”

“Have you had the plague?” cried the count, with a gesture of alarm. “Pierrotin, stop!”

“Go on, Pierrotin,” said Mistigris. “Didn’t you hear him say it was inward, his plague?” added the rapin, talking back to Monsieur de Serizy. “It isn’t catching; it only comes out in conversation.”

“Mistigris! if you interfere again I’ll have you put off into the road,” said his master. “And so,” he added, turning to Georges, “monsieur has been to the East?”

“Yes, monsieur; first to Egypt, then to Greece, where I served under Ali, pacha of Janina, with whom I had a terrible quarrel. There’s no enduring those climates long; besides, the emotions of all kinds in Oriental life have disorganized my liver.”

“What, have you served as a soldier?” asked the fat farmer. “How old are you?”

“Twenty-nine,” replied Georges, whereupon all the passengers looked at him. “At eighteen I enlisted as a private for the famous campaign of 1813; but I was present at only one battle, that of Hanau, where I was promoted sergeant-major. In France, at Montereau, I won the rank of sub-lieutenant, and was decorated by, — there are no informers here, I’m sure, — by the Emperor.”

“What! are you decorated?” cried Oscar. “Why don’t you wear your cross?”

“The cross of ‘ceux-ci’? No, thank you! Besides, what man of any breeding would wear his decorations in travelling? There’s monsieur,” he said, motioning to the Comte de Serizy. “I’ll bet whatever you like — ”

“Betting whatever you like means, in France, betting nothing at all,” said Mistigris’s master.

“I’ll bet whatever you like,” repeated Georges, incisively, “that monsieur here is covered with stars.”

“Well,” said the count, laughing, “I have the grand cross of the Legion of honor, that of Saint Andrew of Russia, that of the Prussian Eagle, that of the Annunciation of Sardinia, and the Golden Fleece.”

“Beg pardon,” said Mistigris, “are they all in the coucou?”

“Hey! that brick-colored old fellow goes it strong!” whispered Georges to Oscar. “What was I saying? — oh! I know. I don’t deny that I adore the Emperor — ”