Rise and Fall of César Birotteau | Page 3

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Etext prepared by John Bickers, [email protected] and
Dagny, [email protected]

Rise and Fall of Cesar Birotteau
by Honore de Balzac
Translated by Katharine Prescott Wormeley

RISE AND FALL OF CESAR BIROTTEAU



PART I
CESAR AT HIS APOGEE

I
During winter nights noise never ceases in the Rue Saint-Honore

except for a short interval. Kitchen-gardeners carrying their produce to
market continue the stir of carriages returning from theatres and balls.
Near the middle of this sustained pause in the grand symphony of
Parisian uproar, which occurs about one o'clock in the morning, the
wife of Monsieur Cesar Birotteau, a perfumer established near the
Place Vendome, was startled from her sleep by a frightful dream. She
had seen her double. She had appeared to herself clothed in rags,
turning with a shrivelled, withered hand the latch of her own shop-
door, seeming to be at the threshold, yet at the same time seated in her
armchair behind the counter. She was asking alms of herself, and heard
herself speaking from the doorway and also from her seat at the desk.
She tried to grasp her husband, but her hand fell on a cold place. Her
terror became so intense that she could not move her neck, which
stiffened as if petrified; the membranes of her throat became glued
together, her voice failed her. She remained sitting erect in the same
posture in the middle of the alcove, both panels of which were wide
open, her eyes staring and fixed, her hair quivering, her ears filled with
strange noises, her heart tightened yet palpitating, and her person
bathed in perspiration though chilled to the bone.
Fear is a half-diseased sentiment, which presses so violently upon the
human mechanism that the faculties are suddenly excited to the highest
degree of their power or driven to utter disorganization. Physiologists
have long wondered at this phenomenon, which overturns their systems
and upsets all theories; it is in fact a thunderbolt working within the
being, and, like all electric accidents, capricious and whimsical in its
course. This explanation will become a mere commonplace in the day
when scientific men are brought to recognize the immense part which
electricity plays in human thought.
Madame Birotteau now passed through several of the shocks, in some
sort electrical, which are produced by terrible explosions of the will
forced out, or held under, by some mysterious mechanism. Thus during
a period of time, very short if judged by a watch, but immeasurable
when calculated by the rapidity of her impressions, the poor woman
had the supernatural power of emitting more ideas and bringing to the

surface more recollections than, under any ordinary use of her faculties,
she could put forth in the course of a whole day. The poignant tale of
her monologue may be abridged into a few absurd sentences, as
contradictory and bare of meaning as the monologue itself.
"There is no reason