Thus, at no time have men demanded public recognition on more puerile grounds. They must be remarked at any cost for an affectation of devotion to the cause of Poland, to the penitential system, to the future prospects of released convicts, to that of small rogues under or over the age of twelve, to any kind of social quackery. These various manias give rise to spurious dignities—Presidents, Vice-presidents, and Secretaries of Societies, which, in Paris, outnumber the social questions to be solved. Society on a grand scale has been demolished to make way for a thousand small ones in the image of the dead one.
Do not all these parasitical organisms point to decomposition? Are they not the worms swarming in the carcase? All these social bodies are the daughters of one mother—Vanity. Not thus does Catholic charity act, or true benevolence; these study disease while healing its sores, and do not speechify in public on morbid symptoms for the mere pleasure of talking.
Fabien du Ronceret, without being a superior man, had divined, by the exercise of that acquisitive spirit peculiar to the Norman race, all the advantage he might take of this public distemper. Each age has its characteristic, which clever men trade on. Fabien’s only aim was to get himself talked about.
“My dear fellow, a man must make his name known if he wants to get on,” said he as he left, to du Bousquier, a friend of his father’s, and the King of Alençon. “In six months I shall be better known than you.”
This was how Fabien interpreted the spirit of his time; he did not rule it, he obeyed it.
He had first appeared in bohemia, a district of the moral topography of Paris (see “A Prince of Bohemia”), and was known as “The Heir,” in consequence of a certain premeditated parade of extravagance. Du Ronceret had taken advantage of Couture’s follies in behalf of pretty Madame Cadine—one of the newer actresses, who was considered extremely clever at the second-class theatres—for whom he had furnished a charming ground-floor apartment with a garden, in the Rue Blanche.
This was the way in which the men made acquaintance. The Norman, in search of ready-made luxury, bought the furniture from Couture, with all the decorative fixtures he could not remove from the rooms, a garden room for smoking in, with a veranda built of rustic woodwork, hung with Indian matting, and decorated with pottery, to get to the smoking-room in rainy weather. When the Heir was complimented on his rooms, he called them his den. The provincial took care not to mention that Grindot the architect had lavished all his art there, as had Stidmann on the carvings, and Léon de Lora on the paintings; for his greatest fault was that form of conceit which goes so far as lying with a view to self-glorification.
The Heir put the finishing touch to this splendor by building a conservatory against a south wall, not because he loved flowers, but because he meant to attack public repute by means of horticulture. At this moment he had almost attained his end. As Vice-president of some gardening society, under the presidency of the Duc de Vissembourg, brother of the Prince de Chiavari, the younger son of the late Maréchal Vernon, he had been able to decorate the vice-presidential coat with the ribbon of the Legion of Honor after an exhibition of horticultural produce, which he opened by an address given out as his own, but purchased of Lousteau for five hundred francs. He was conspicuous by wearing a flower given to him by old Blondet of Alençon, Émile Blondet’s father, which he said had bloomed in his conservatory.
But this triumph was nothing. Du Ronceret, who was anxious to pass as a man of superior intelligence, had schemed to ally himself with a set of famous men, to shine by a reflected light, a plan very difficult to carry out on the basis of an income of eight thousand francs. And, in fact, he had looked by turns, but in vain, to Bixiou, Stidmann, and Léon de Lora to introduce him to Madame Schontz, so as to become a member of that menagerie of lions of every degree. Then he dined Couture so often, that Couture proved categorically to Madame Schontz that she had to admit such an eccentric specimen, were it only to secure him as one of those graceful unpaid messengers whom house-mistresses are glad to employ on the errands for which servants are unsuited.
By the end of the third evening Madame Schontz knew Fabien through and through, and said to herself, “If Couture does not serve my turn, I am perfectly certain of this man. My future life runs on wheels.”
So this simpleton, laughed at by everyone, was the man of her choice; but with a deliberate purpose which made the preference an insult, and the choice was never suspected from its utter improbability. Madame Schontz turned Fabien’s brain by stolen smiles, by little scenes on the threshold when she saw him out the last, if Monsieur de Rochefide spent the evening there. She constantly invited Fabien to be the third, with Arthur in her box at the Italiens, or at first-night performances; excusing herself by saying that he had done her this or that service, and that she had no other way of returning it.
Men have a rivalry of conceit among themselves—in common indeed with women—in their desire to be loved for themselves. Hence of all flattering attachments, none is more highly valued
