Catherine De Medici. Оноре де Бальзак

Coligny. Never draw your sword; be a pen man; keep to your future role of lawyer. Now, then, tell me nothing until after you have succeeded. If I do not hear from you by the fourth day after you reach Blois, that silence will tell me that you are in some danger. The old man will go to save the young one. I have not sold furs for thirty-two years without a good knowledge of the wrong side of court robes. I have the means of making my way through many doors.”

      Christophe opened his eyes very wide as he heard his father talking thus; but he thought there might be some parental trap in it, and he made no reply further than to say:—

      “Well, make out the bill, and write a letter to the queen; I must start at once, or the greatest misfortunes may happen.”

      “Start? How?”

      “I shall buy a horse. Write at once, in God’s name.”

      “Hey! mother! give your son some money,” cried the furrier to his wife.

      The mother returned, went to her chest, took out a purse of gold, and gave it to Christophe, who kissed her with emotion.

      “The bill was all ready,” said his father; “here it is. I will write the letter at once.”

      Christophe took the bill and put it in his pocket.

      “But you will sup with us, at any rate,” said the old man. “In such a crisis you ought to exchange rings with Lallier’s daughter.”

      “Very well, I will go and fetch her,” said Christophe.

      The young man was distrustful of his father’s stability in the matter. The old man’s character was not yet fully known to him. He ran up to his room, dressed himself, took a valise, came downstairs softly and laid it on a counter in the shop, together with his rapier and cloak.

      “What the devil are you doing?” asked his father, hearing him.

      Christophe came up to the old man and kissed him on both cheeks.

      “I don’t want any one to see my preparations for departure, and I have put them on a counter in the shop,” he whispered.

      “Here is the letter,” said his father.

      Christophe took the paper and went out as if to fetch his young neighbor.

      A few moments after his departure the goodman Lallier and his daughter arrived, preceded by a servant-woman, bearing three bottles of old wine.

      “Well, where is Christophe?” said old Lecamus.

      “Christophe!” exclaimed Babette. “We have not seen him.”

      “Ha! ha! my son is a bold scamp! He tricks me as if I had no beard. My dear crony, what think you he will turn out to be? We live in days when the children have more sense than their fathers.”

      “Why, the quarter has long been saying he is in some mischief,” said Lallier.

      “Excuse him on that point, crony,” said the furrier. “Youth is foolish; it runs after new things; but Babette will keep him quiet; she is newer than Calvin.”

      Babette smiled; she loved Christophe, and was angry when anything was said against him. She was one of those daughters of the old bourgeoisie brought up under the eyes of a mother who never left her. Her bearing was gentle and correct as her face; she always wore woollen stuffs of gray, harmonious in tone; her chemisette, simply pleated, contrasted its whiteness against the gown. Her cap of brown velvet was like an infant’s coif, but it was trimmed with a ruche and lappets of tanned gauze, that is, of a tan color, which came down on each side of her face. Though fair and white as a true blonde, she seemed to be shrewd and roguish, all the while trying to hide her roguishness under the air and manner of a well-trained girl. While the two servant-women went and came, laying the cloth and placing the jugs, the great pewter dishes, and the knives and forks, the jeweller and his daughter, the furrier and his wife, sat before the tall chimney-piece draped with lambrequins of red serge and black fringes, and were talking of trifles. Babette asked once or twice where Christophe could be, and the father and mother of the young Huguenot gave evasive answers; but when the two families were seated at table, and the two servants had retired to the kitchen, Lecamus said to his future daughter-in-law:—

      “Christophe has gone to court.”

      “To Blois! Such a journey as that without bidding me good-bye!” she said.

      “The matter was pressing,” said the old mother.

      “Crony,” said the furrier, resuming a suspended conversation. “We are going to have troublous times in France. The Reformers are bestirring themselves.”

      “If they triumph, it will only be after a long war, during which business will be at a standstill,” said Lallier, incapable of rising higher than the commercial sphere.

      “My father, who saw the wars between the Burgundians and the Armagnacs told me that our family would never have come out safely if one of his grandfathers—his mother’s father—had not been a Goix, one of those famous butchers in the Market who stood by the Burgundians; whereas the other, the Lecamus, was for the Armagnacs; they seemed ready to flay each other alive before the world, but they were excellent friends in the family. So, let us both try to save Christophe; perhaps the time may come when he will save us.”

      “You are a shrewd one,” said the jeweller.

      “No,” replied Lecamus. “The burghers ought to think of themselves; the populace and the nobility are both against them. The Parisian bourgeoisie alarms everybody except the king, who knows it is his friend.”

      “You who are so wise and have seen so many things,” said Babette, timidly, “explain to me what the Reformers really want.”

      “Yes, tell us that, crony,” cried the jeweller. “I knew the late king’s tailor, and I held him to be a man of simple life, without great talent; he was something like you; a man to whom they’d give the sacrament without confession; and behold! he plunged to the depths of this new religion—he! a man whose two ears were worth all of a hundred thousand crowns apiece. He must have had secrets to reveal to induce the king and the Duchesse de Valentinois to be present at his torture.”

      “And terrible secrets, too!” said the furrier. “The Reformation, my friends,” he continued in a low voice, “will give back to the bourgeoisie the estates of the Church. When the ecclesiastical privileges are suppressed the Reformers intend to ask that the vilain shall be imposed on nobles as well as on burghers, and they mean to insist that the king alone shall be above others—if indeed, they allow the State to have a king.”

      “Suppress the Throne!” ejaculated Lallier.

      “Hey! crony,” said Lecamus, “in the Low Countries the burghers govern themselves with burgomasters of their own, who elect their own temporary head.”

      “God bless me, crony; we ought to do these fine things and yet stay Catholics,” cried the jeweller.

      “We are too old, you and I, to see the triumph of the Parisian bourgeoisie, but it will triumph, I tell you, in times to come as it did of yore. Ha! the king must rest upon it in order to resist, and we have always sold him our help dear. The last time, all the burghers were ennobled, and he gave them permission to buy seignorial estates and take titles from the land without special letters from the king. You and I, grandsons of the Goix through our mothers, are not we as good as any lord?”

      These words were so alarming to the jeweller and the two women that they were followed by a dead silence. The ferments of 1789 were already tingling in the veins of Lecamus, who was not yet so old but what he could live to see the bold burghers of the Ligue.

      “Are you selling well in spite of these troubles?” said Lallier to Mademoiselle Lecamus.

      “Troubles always do harm,” she replied.

      “That’s one reason why I am so set on making my son a lawyer,” said Lecamus;