Bureaucracy | Page 5

enabled her
to speak to every one in his or her own language; her talents were real;
she showed an independent and elevated mind; her conversation
charmed as much by its variety and ease as by the oddness and
originality of her ideas. Such qualities, useful and appropriate in a
sovereign or an ambassadress, were of little service to a household
compelled to jog in the common round. Those who have the gift of
speaking well desire an audience; they like to talk, even if they
sometimes weary others. To satisfy the requirements of her mind
Madame Rabourdin took a weekly reception-day and went a great deal
into society to obtain the consideration her self-love was accustomed to
enjoy. Those who know Parisian life will readily understand how a
woman of her temperament suffered, and was martyrized at heart by
the scantiness of her pecuniary means. No matter what foolish
declarations people make about money, they one and all, if they live in

Paris, must grovel before accounts, do homage to figures, and kiss the
forked hoof of the golden calf. What a problem was hers! twelve
thousand francs a year to defray the costs of a household consisting of
father, mother, two children, a chambermaid and cook, living on the
second floor of a house in the rue Duphot, in an apartment costing two
thousand francs a year. Deduct the dress and the carriage of Madame
before you estimate the gross expenses of the family, for dress precedes
everything; then see what remains for the education of the children (a
girl of eight and a boy of nine, whose maintenance must cost at least
two thousand francs besides) and you will find that Madame Rabourdin
could barely afford to give her husband thirty francs a month. That is
the position of half the husbands in Paris, under penalty of being
thought monsters.
Thus it was that this woman who believed herself destined to shine in
the world was condemned to use her mind and her faculties in a sordid
struggle, fighting hand to hand with an account-book. Already, terrible
sacrifice of pride! she had dismissed her man-servant, not long after the
death of her father. Most women grow weary of this daily struggle;
they complain but they usually end by giving up to fate and taking what
comes to them; Celestine's ambition, far from lessening, only increased
through difficulties, and led her, when she found she could not conquer
them, to sweep them aside. To her mind this complicated tangle of the
affairs of life was a Gordian knot impossible to untie and which genius
ought to cut. Far from accepting the pettiness of middle-class existence,
she was angry at the delay which kept the great things of life from her
grasp,--blaming fate as deceptive. Celestine sincerely believed herself a
superior woman. Perhaps she was right; perhaps she would have been
great under great circumstances; perhaps she was not in her right place.
Let us remember there are as many varieties of woman as there are of
man, all of which society fashions to meet its needs. Now in the social
order, as in Nature's order, there are more young shoots than there are
trees, more spawn than full-grown fish, and many great capacities
(Athanase Granson, for instance) which die withered for want of
moisture, like seeds on stony ground. There are, unquestionably,
household women, accomplished women, ornamental women, women
who are exclusively wives, or mothers, or sweethearts, women purely

spiritual or purely material; just as there are soldiers, artists, artisans,
mathematicians, poets, merchants, men who understand money, or
agriculture, or government, and nothing else. Besides all this, the
eccentricity of events leads to endless cross-purposes; many are called
and few are chosen is the law of earth as of heaven. Madame
Rabourdin conceived herself fully capable of directing a statesman,
inspiring an artist, helping an inventor and pushing his interests, or of
devoting her powers to the financial politics of a Nucingen, and playing
a brilliant part in the great world. Perhaps she was only endeavouring
to excuse to her own mind a hatred for the laundry lists and the duty of
overlooking the housekeeping bills, together with the petty economies
and cares of a small establishment. She was superior only in those
things where it gave her pleasure to be so. Feeling as keenly as she did
the thorns of a position which can only be likened to that of
Saint-Laurence on his grid-iron, is it any wonder that she sometimes
cried out? So, in her paroxysms of thwarted ambition, in the moments
when her wounded vanity gave her terrible shooting pains, Celestine
turned upon Xavier Rabourdin. Was it not her husband's duty to give
her a suitable position in the world? If she were a man she would