The miller was busy spreading out his fishing-nets and lines. “It is my belief,” he said, “that the pretty fellow yonder is some starveling playactor without a brass farthing to bless himself with.”
“What makes you think that, little man?” asked the mistress of the mill.
“Lord, he is not a prince, nor a lord, nor a member of parliament, nor a bishop; why are his hands as white as if he did nothing?”
“Then it is very strange that he does not feel hungry and wake up,” retorted the miller’s wife; she had just prepared breakfast for yesterday’s chance guest. “A playactor, is he?” she continued. “Where will he be going? It is too early yet for the fair at Angoulême.”
But neither the miller nor his wife suspected that (actors, princes, and bishops apart) there is a kind of being who is both prince and actor, and invested besides with a magnificent order of priesthood—that the Poet seems to do nothing, yet reigns over all humanity when he can paint humanity.
“What can he be?” Courtois asked of his wife.
“Suppose it should be dangerous to take him in?” queried she.
“Pooh! thieves look more alive than that; we should have been robbed by this time,” returned her spouse.
“I am neither a prince nor a thief, nor a bishop nor an actor,” Lucien said wearily; he must have overheard the colloquy through the window, and now he suddenly appeared. “I am poor, I am tired out, I have come on foot from Paris. My name is Lucien de Rubempré, and my father was M. Chardon, who used to have Postel’s business in L’Houmeau. My sister married David Séchard, the printer in the Place du Mûrier at Angoulême.”
“Stop a bit,” said the miller, “that printer is the son of the old skinflint who farms his own land at Marsac, isn’t he?”
“The very same,” said Lucien.
“He is a queer kind of father, he is!” Courtois continued. “He is worth two hundred thousand francs and more, without counting his money-box, and he has sold his son up, they say.”
When body and soul have been broken by a prolonged painful struggle, there comes a crisis when a strong nature braces itself for greater effort; but those who give way under the strain either die or sink into unconsciousness like death. That hour of crisis had struck for Lucien; at the vague rumor of the catastrophe that had befallen David he seemed almost ready to succumb. “Oh! my sister!” he cried. “Oh, God! what have I done? Base wretch that I am!”
He dropped down on the wooden bench, looking white and powerless as a dying man; the miller’s wife brought out a bowl of milk and made him drink, but he begged the miller to help him back to his bed, and asked to be forgiven for bringing a dying man into their house. He thought his last hour had come. With the shadow of death, thoughts of religion crossed a brain so quick to conceive picturesque fancies; he would see the curé, he would confess and receive the last sacraments. The moan, uttered in the faint voice by a young man with such a comely face and figure, went to Mme. Courtois’ heart.
“I say, little man, just take the horse and go to Marsac and ask Dr. Marron to come and see this young man; he is in a very bad way, it seems to me, and you might bring the curé as well. Perhaps they may know more about that printer in the Place du Mûrier than you do, for Postel married M. Marron’s daughter.”
Courtois departed. The miller’s wife tried to make Lucien take food; like all country-bred folk, she was full of the idea that sick folk must be made to eat. He took no notice of her, but gave way to a violent storm of remorseful grief, a kind of mental process of counter-irritation, which relieved him.
The Courtois’ mill lies a league away from Marsac, the town of the district, and the halfway halt between Mansle and Angoulême; so it was not long before the good miller came back with the doctor and the curé. Both functionaries had heard rumors coupling Lucien’s name with the name of Mme. de Bargeton; and now when the whole department was talking of the lady’s marriage to the new Prefect and her return to Angoulême as the Comtesse du Châtelet, both curé and doctor were consumed with a violent curiosity to know why M. de Bargeton’s widow had not married the young poet with whom she had left Angoulême. And when they heard, furthermore, that Lucien was at the mill, they were eager to know whether the poet had come to the rescue of his brother-in-law. Curiosity and humanity alike prompted them to go at once to the dying man. Two hours after Courtois set out, Lucien heard the rattle of old iron over the stony causeway, the country doctor’s ramshackle chaise came up to the door, and out stepped MM. Marron, for the curé was the doctor’s uncle. Lucien’s bedside visitors were as intimate with David’s father as country neighbors usually are in a small vine-growing township. The doctor looked at the dying man, felt his pulse, and examined his tongue; then he looked at the miller’s wife, and smiled reassuringly.
“Mme. Courtois,” said he, “if, as I do not doubt, you have a bottle of good wine somewhere in the cellar, and a fat eel in your fishpond, put them before your patient, it is only exhaustion; there is nothing the matter with him. Our great man will be on his feet again directly.”
“Ah! monsieur,” said Lucien, “it is not the body, it is the mind that ails. These good people have told me tidings that nearly killed me; I have just heard the bad news of my sister, Mme. Séchard. Mme. Courtois says that your daughter is married to Postel, monsieur, so
