“A week or so later I met Bordin and told him of that interview. He smiled and said: ’I hope it was not a pretty bit of comedy. Didn’t he ask for anything?’ ‘No,’ I answered. ’Well, he came to see me the same day. I was almost as touched as you; and he asked me for means to get food on his journey. Well, well, time will show!’ These remarks of Bordin made me fear I had foolishly yielded to mistaken sensibility. ‘Nevertheless,’ I said to myself, ‘he, the old lawyer, did as I did.’ I do not think it necessary to explain to you how I lost all, or nearly all, my property. I had placed a little in the Funds, which gave me five hundred francs a year; all else was gone. I was then thirty-four years old. I obtained, through the influence of Monsieur Bordin, a place as clerk, with a salary of eight hundred francs, in a branch office of the Mont-de-piete, rue des Augustins.[*] From that time I lived very modestly. I found a small lodging in the rue des Marais, on the third floor (two rooms and a closet), for two hundred and fifty francs a year. I dined at a common boarding-house for forty francs a month. I copied writings at night. Ugly as I was and poor, I had to renounce marriage.”
[*] The Mont-de-Piete and its branches are pawn-shops
under control of
the government.—TR.
As Godefroid heard this judgment which the poor man passed upon himself with beautiful simplicity and resignation, he made a movement which proved, far more than any confidence in words could have done, the resemblance of their destinies; and the goodman, in answer to that eloquent gesture, seemed to expect the words that followed it.
“Have you never been loved?” asked Godefroid.
“Never!” he said; “except by Madame, who returns to us all the love we have for her,—a love which I may call divine. You must be aware of it. We live through her life as she lives through ours; we have but one soul among us; and such pleasures, though they are not physical, are none the less intense; we exist through our hearts. Ah, my child!” he continued, “when women come to appreciate moral qualities, they are indifferent to others; and they are then old—Oh! I have suffered deeply,—yes, deeply!”
“And I, in the same way,” said Godefroid.
“Under the Empire,” said the worthy man, resuming his narrative, “the Funds did not always pay their dividends regularly; it was necessary to be prepared for suspensions of payment. From 1802 to 1814 there was scarcely a week that I did not attribute my misfortune to Mongenod. ‘If it were not for Mongenod,’ I used to say to myself, ’I might have married. If I had never known him I should not be obliged to live in such privation.’ But then, again, there were other times when I said, ‘Perhaps the unfortunate fellow has met with ill luck over there.’ In 1806, at a time when I found my life particularly hard to bear, I wrote him a long letter, which I sent by way of Holland.