Old Man Goriot (Penguin Classics) by Honore de Balzac

Author:Honore de Balzac [Balzac, Honore de]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780140449723
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2011-01-06T05:00:00+00:00

IV

CAT-O’-NINE-LIVES

Two days later, Poiret and Mademoiselle Michonneau found themselves sitting on a bench in the sun, on a secluded path in the Jardin des Plantes, talking to the gentleman whom, with some justification, the medical student had found suspicious.

‘Mademoiselle,’ Monsieur Gondureau was saying; ‘I see no reason for you to have any qualms. His Excellency Monseigneur the Minister of Police of the realm of France …’

‘Ah! His Excellency Monseigneur the Minister of Police of the realm of France …’ repeated Poiret.

‘Yes, His Excellency is handling this affair himself,’ said Gondureau.

It might seem improbable that Poiret, retired clerk, doubtless a man of sound middle-class values, although of limited initiative, should continue to listen to a self-styled man of private means living in the Rue de Buffon, once he had blown his cover by pronouncing the word ‘police’ and revealing the face of an operative from the Rue de Jérusalem162 under his mask of respectability. Yet nothing was more natural. Once we have shared a few comments made by certain observers, which have remained unpublished until now, we may gain a better understanding of the particular species to which Poiret belonged in the larger class of fools. His is the race of pen-pushers, who live crowded together on a budget ranging from the first degree of latitude – where wages of twelve hundred francs are found, a kind of administrative Greenland – to the third degree, where warmer wages of three to six thousand francs start to appear; a temperate region, one in which the bonus, although difficult to cultivate, may acclimatize and flourish. One of the characteristic features of this lesser breed, and one which best represents its unhealthy narrowness, is a sort of involuntary, mechanical, instinctive respect for that Grand Lama of any ministry, known to the clerk only as an illegible signature and the title HIS EXCELLENCY MONSEIGNEUR THE MINISTER, five words worth the Il Bondo Cani of the Caliph of Baghdad,163 and which, in the eyes of this grovelling people, are imbued with a sacred, irrevocable power. Like the Pope for a Christian, Monseigneur is administratively infallible in the eyes of the clerk; his every deed, his every word, not to mention every word spoken in his name, drips with splendour; his name embroiders everything and legalizes whatever deed he orders done; his title ‘Excellency’, which testifies to the purity of his intentions and the sanctity of his desires, serves as a passport for the least admissible ideas. Whatever deed these poor people would never perform in their own interest, they rush to carry out as soon as the words ‘His Excellency’ are pronounced. The bureaucratic system has its own kind of passive obedience, just as the army does: a system which numbs a conscience, annihilates a human being and ends up fixing him like a screw or a cog in the machine of government. So it was that Monsieur Gondureau, who seemed to know a thing or two about the human race, soon identified Poiret as one

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