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

“I served under him,” said the count.

“What a man he was, wasn’t he?” cried Georges.

“A man to whom I owe many obligations,” replied the count, with a silly expression that was admirably assumed.

“For all those crosses?” inquired Mistigris.

“And what quantities of snuff he took!” continued Monsieur de Serizy.

“He carried it loose in his pockets,” said Georges.

“So I’ve been told,” remarked Pere Leger with an incredulous look.

“Worse than that; he chewed and smoked,” continued Georges. “I saw him smoking, in a queer way, too, at Waterloo, when Marshal Soult took him round the waist and flung him into his carriage, just as he had seized a musket and was going to charge the English — ”

“You were at Waterloo!” cried Oscar, his eyes stretching wide open.

“Yes, young man, I did the campaign of 1815. I was a captain at Mont-Saint-Jean, and I retired to the Loire, after we were all disbanded. Faith! I was disgusted with France; I couldn’t stand it. In fact, I should certainly have got myself arrested; so off I went, with two or three dashing fellows, — Selves, Besson, and others, who are now in Egypt, — and we entered the service of pacha Mohammed; a queer sort of fellow he was, too! Once a tobacco merchant in the bazaars, he is now on the high-road to be a sovereign prince. You’ve all seen him in that picture by Horace Vernet, — ’The Massacre of the Mameluks.’ What a handsome fellow he was! But I wouldn’t give up the religion of my fathers and embrace Islamism; all the more because the abjuration required a surgical operation which I hadn’t any fancy for. Besides, nobody respects a renegade. Now if they had offered me a hundred thousand francs a year, perhaps — and yet, no! The pacha did give me a thousand talari as a present.”

“How much is that?” asked Oscar, who was listening to Georges with all his ears.

“Oh! not much. A talaro is, as you might say, a five-franc piece. But faith! I got no compensation for the vices I contracted in that God-forsaken country, if country it is. I can’t live now without smoking a narghile twice a-day, and that’s very costly.”

“How did you find Egypt?” asked the count.

“Egypt? Oh! Egypt is all sand,” replied Georges, by no means taken aback. “There’s nothing green but the valley of the Nile. Draw a green line down a sheet of yellow paper, and you have Egypt. But those Egyptians — fellahs they are called — have an immense advantage over us. There are no gendarmes in that country. You may go from end to end of Egypt, and you won’t see one.”

“But I suppose there are a good many Egyptians,” said Mistigris.

“Not as many as you think for,” replied Georges. “There are many more Abyssinians, and Giaours, and Vechabites, Bedouins, and Cophs. But all that kind of animal is very uninteresting, and I was glad enough to embark on a Genoese polacca which was loading for the Ionian Islands with gunpowder and munitions for Ali de Tebelen. You know, don’t you, that the British sell powder and munitions of war to all the world, — Turks, Greeks, and the devil, too, if the devil has money? From Zante we were to skirt the coasts of Greece and tack about, on and off. Now it happens that my name of Georges is famous in that country. I am, such as you see me, the grandson of the famous Czerni-Georges who made war upon the Porte, and, instead of crushing it, as he meant to do, got crushed himself. His son took refuge in the house of the French consul at Smyrna, and he afterwards died in Paris, leaving my mother pregnant with me, his seventh child. Our property was all stolen by friends of my grandfather; in fact, we were ruined. My mother, who lived on her diamonds, which she sold one by one, married, in 1799, my step-father, Monsieur Yung, a purveyor. But my mother is dead, and I have quarrelled with my step-father, who, between ourselves, is a blackguard; he is still alive, but I never see him. That’s why, in despair, left all to myself, I went off to the wars as a private in 1813. Well, to go back to the time I returned to Greece; you wouldn’t believe with what joy old Ali Tebelen received the grandson of Czerni-Georges. Here, of course, I call myself simply Georges. The pacha gave me a harem — ”

“You have had a harem?” said Oscar.

“Were you a pacha with many tails?” asked Mistigris.

“How is it that you don’t know,” replied Georges, “that only the Sultan makes pachas, and that my friend Tebelen (for we were as friendly as Bourbons) was in rebellion against the Padishah! You know, or you don’t know, that the true title of the Grand Seignior is Padishah, and not Sultan or Grand Turk. You needn’t think that a harem is much of a thing; you might as well have a herd of goats. The women are horribly stupid down there; I much prefer the grisettes of the Chaumieres at Mont-Parnasse.”

“They are nearer, at any rate,” said the count.

“The women of the harem couldn’t speak a word of French, and that language is indispensable for talking. Ali gave me five legitimate wives and ten slaves; that’s equivalent to having none at all at Janina. In the East, you must know, it is thought very bad style to have wives and women. They have them, just as we have Voltaire and Rousseau; but who ever opens his Voltaire or his Rousseau? Nobody. But, for all that, the highest style is to be jealous. They sew a woman up in a sack and fling her into the water on the slightest suspicion, — that’s according to their Code.”

“Did you fling any in?” asked the farmer.

“I, a Frenchman! for shame! I loved them.”

Whereupon Georges twirled and twisted his moustache with a dreamy air.

They were now entering Saint-Denis, and Pierrotin presently drew up before the door of a tavern where were sold the famous cheese-cakes of that place. All the travellers got out. Puzzled by the apparent truth mingled with Georges’ inventions, the count returned to the coucou when the others had entered the house, and looked beneath the cushion for the portfolio which Pierrotin told him that enigmatical youth had placed there. On it he read the words in gilt letters: “Maitre Crottat, notary.” The count at once opened it, and fearing, with some reason, that Pere Leger might be seized with the same curiosity, he took out the deed of sale for the farm at Moulineaux, put it into his coat pocket, and entered the inn to keep an eye on the travellers.

“This Georges is neither more nor less than Crottat’s second clerk,” thought he. “I shall pay my compliments to his master, whose business it was to send me his head-clerk.”

From the respectful glances of Pere Leger and Oscar, Georges perceived that he had made for himself two fervent admirers. Accordingly, he now posed as a great personage; paid for their cheese-cakes, and ordered for each a glass of Alicante. He offered the same to Mistigris and his master, who refused with smiles; but the friend of Ali Tebelen profited by the occasion to ask the pair their names.

“Oh! monsieur,” said Mistigris’ master, “I am not blessed, like you, with an illustrious name; and I have not returned from Asia — ”

At this moment the count, hastening into the huge inn-kitchen lest his absence should excite inquiry, entered the place in time to hear the conclusion of the young man’s speech.

“ — I am only a poor painter lately returned from Rome, where I went at the cost of the government, after winning the ‘grand prix’ five years ago. My name is Schinner.”

“Hey! bourgeois, may I offer you a glass of Alicante and some cheese-cakes?” said Georges to the count.

“Thank you,” replied the latter. “I never leave home without taking my cup of coffee and cream.”

“Don’t you eat anything between meals? How bourgeois, Marais, Place Royale, that is!” cried Georges. “When he ‘blagued’ just now about his crosses, I thought there was something in him,” whispered the Eastern hero to the painter. “However, we’ll set him going on his decorations, the old tallow-chandler! Come, my lad,” he added, calling to Oscar, “drink me down the glass poured out for the chandler; that will start your moustache.”