The Firm of Nucingen | Page 9

them left any representative.
Finance, like Time, devours its own children. If the banker is to
perpetuate himself, he must found a noble house, a dynasty; like the
Fuggers of Antwerp, that lent money to Charles V. and were created
Princes of Babenhausen, a family that exists at this day--in the
Almanach de Gotha. The instinct of self-preservation, working it may
be unconsciously, leads the banker to seek a title. Jacques Coeur was
the founder of the great noble house of Noirmoutier, extinct in the reign
of Louis XIII. What power that man had! He was ruined for making a
legitimate king; and he died, prince of an island in the Archipelago,
where he built a magnificent cathedral."
"Oh! you are giving us an historical lecture, we are wandering away
from the present, the crown has no right of conferring nobility, and
barons and counts are made with closed doors; more is the pity!" said
Finot.
"You regret the times of the savonnette a vilain, when you could buy an
office that ennobled?" asked Bixiou. "You are right. Je reviens a nos
moutons.--Do you know Beaudenord? No? no? no? Ah, well! See how
all things pass away! Poor fellow, ten years ago he was the flower of
dandyism; and now, so thoroughly absorbed that you no more know
him than Finot just now knew the origin of the expression 'coup de
Jarnac'--I repeat that simply for the sake of illustration, and not to tease
you, Finot. Well, it is a fact, he belonged to the Faubourg
Saint-Germain.
"Beaudenord is the first pigeon that I will bring on the scene. And, in
the first place, his name was Godefroid de Beaudenord; neither Finot,
nor Blondet, nor Couture, nor I am likely to undervalue such an
advantage as that! After a ball, when a score of pretty women stand
behooded waiting for their carriages, with their husbands and adorers at
their sides, Beaudenord could hear his people called without a pang of
mortification. In the second place, he rejoiced in the full complement of
limbs; he was whole and sound, had no mote in his eyes, no false hair,
no artificial calves; he was neither knock-kneed nor bandy-legged, his
dorsal column was straight, his waist slender, his hands white and
shapely. His hair was black; he was of a complexion neither too pink,

like a grocer's assistant, nor yet too brown, like a Calabrese. Finally,
and this is an essential point, Beaudenord was not too handsome, like
some of our friends that look rather too much of professional beauties
to be anything else; but no more of that; we have said it, it is shocking!
Well, he was a crack shot, and sat a horse to admiration; he had fought
a duel for a trifle, and had not killed his man.
"If you wish to know in what pure, complete, and unadulterated
happiness consists in this Nineteenth Century in Paris--the happiness,
that is to say, of a young man of twenty-six--do you realize that you
must enter into the infinitely small details of existence? Beaudenord's
bootmaker had precisely hit off his style of foot; he was well shod; his
tailor loved to clothe him. Godefroid neither rolled his r's, nor lapsed
into Normanisms nor Gascon; he spoke pure and correct French, and
tied his cravat correctly (like Finot). He had neither father nor
mother--such luck had he!--and his guardian was the Marquis
d'Aiglemont, his cousin by marriage. He could go among city people as
he chose, and the Faubourg Saint-Germain could make no objection;
for, fortunately, a young bachelor is allowed to make his own pleasure
his sole rule of life, he is at liberty to betake himself wherever
amusement is to be found, and to shun the gloomy places where cares
flourish and multiply. Finally, he had been vaccinated (you know what
I mean, Blondet).
"And yet, in spite of all these virtues," continued Bixiou, "he might
very well have been a very unhappy young man. Eh! eh! that word
happiness, unhappily, seems to us to mean something absolute, a
delusion which sets so many wiseacres inquiring what happiness is. A
very clever woman said that 'Happiness was where you chose to put it.'
"
"She formulated a dismal truth," said Blondet.
"And a moral," added Finot.
"Double distilled," said Blondet. "Happiness, like Good, like Evil, is
relative. Wherefore La Fontaine used to hope that in the course of time
the damned would feel as much at home in hell as a fish in water."
"La Fontaine's sayings are known in Philistia!" put in Bixiou.
"Happiness at six-and-twenty in Paris is not the happiness of six-and-
twenty at--say Blois," continued Blondet, taking no notice of the
interruption. "And those that proceed from this text to rail at the

instability of opinion are either