Melmoth Reconciled | Page 2

outflanked Montecuculi, and Society will
sanction the theft of millions, shower ribbons upon the thief, cram him with honors, and
smother him with consideration.
Government, moreover, works harmoniously with this profoundly illogical
reasoner--Society. Government levies a conscription on the young intelligence of the
kingdom at the age of seventeen or eighteen, a conscription of precocious brain-work
before it is sent up to be submitted to a process of selection. Nurserymen sort and select
seeds in much the same way. To this process the Government brings professional
appraisers of talent, men who can assay brains as experts assay gold at the Mint. Five
hundred such heads, set afire with hope, are sent up annually by the most progressive

portion of the population; and of these the Government takes one-third, puts them in
sacks called the Ecoles, and shakes them up together for three years. Though every one of
these young plants represents vast productive power, they are made, as one may say, into
cashiers. They receive appointments; the rank and file of engineers is made up of them;
they are employed as captains of artillery; there is no (subaltern) grade to which they may
not aspire. Finally, when these men, the pick of the youth of the nation, fattened on
mathematics and stuffed with knowledge, have attained the age of fifty years, they have
their reward, and receive as the price of their services the third-floor lodging, the wife
and family, and all the comforts that sweeten life for mediocrity. If from among this race
of dupes there should escape some five or six men of genius who climb the highest
heights, is it not miraculous?
This is an exact statement of the relations between Talent and Probity on the one hand
and Government and Society on the other, in an age that considers itself to be progressive.
Without this prefatory explanation a recent occurrence in Paris would seem improbable;
but preceded by this summing up of the situation, it will perhaps receive some thoughtful
attention from minds capable of recognizing the real plague-spots of our civilization, a
civilization which since 1815 as been moved by the spirit of gain rather than by
principles of honor.

About five o'clock, on a dull autumn afternoon, the cashier of one of the largest banks in
Paris was still at his desk, working by the light of a lamp that had been lit for some time.
In accordance with the use and wont of commerce, the counting-house was in the darkest
corner of the low-ceiled and far from spacious mezzanine floor, and at the very end of a
passage lighted only by borrowed lights. The office doors along this corridor, each with
its label, gave the place the look of a bath-house. At four o'clock the stolid porter had
proclaimed, according to his orders, "The bank is closed." And by this time the
departments were deserted, wives of the partners in the firm were expecting their lovers;
the two bankers dining with their mistresses. Everything was in order.
The place where the strong boxes had been bedded in sheet-iron was just behind the little
sanctum, where the cashier was busy. Doubtless he was balancing his books. The open
front gave a glimpse of a safe of hammered iron, so enormously heavy (thanks to the
science of the modern inventor) that burglars could not carry it away. The door only
opened at the pleasure of those who knew its password. The letter-lock was a warden
who kept its own secret and could not be bribed; the mysterious word was an ingenious
realization of the "Open sesame!" in the Arabian Nights. But even this was as nothing. A
man might discover the password; but unless he knew the lock's final secret, the ultima
ratio of this gold-guarding dragon of mechanical science, it discharged a blunderbuss at
his head.
The door of the room, the walls of the room, the shutters of the windows in the room, the
whole place, in fact, was lined with sheet-iron a third of an inch in thickness, concealed
behind the thin wooden paneling. The shutters had been closed, the door had been shut. If
ever man could feel confident that he was absolutely alone, and that there was no remote
possibility of being watched by prying eyes, that man was the cashier of the house of
Nucingen and Company, in the Rue Saint-Lazare.
Accordingly the deepest silence prevailed in that iron cave. The fire had died out in the
stove, but the room was full of that tepid warmth which produces the dull

heavy-headedness and nauseous queasiness of a morning after an orgy. The stove is a
mesmerist that plays no small part in the reduction of bank clerks and porters to a state of
idiocy.
A room with a stove in