Z. Marcas | Page 6

every
member of his family, and I went off to effect a loan. I brought in
twenty francs lent me by a fellow-provincial. In that evil but happy day
gambling was still tolerated, and in its lodes, as hard as the rocky ore of
Brazil, young men, by risking a small sum, had a chance of winning a
few gold pieces. My friend, too, had some Turkish tobacco brought
home from Constantinople by a sailor, and he gave me quite as much as
we had taken from Z. Marcas. I conveyed the splendid cargo into port,
and we went in triumph to repay our neighbor with a tawny wig of
Turkish tobacco for his dark Caporal.
"You are determined not to be my debtors," said he. "You are giving
me gold for copper.--You are boys--good boys----"
The sentences, spoken in varying tones, were variously emphasized.
The words were nothing, but the expression!--That made us friends of
ten years' standing at once.
Marcas, on hearing us coming, had covered up his papers; we
understood that it would be taking a liberty to allude to his means of
subsistence, and felt ashamed of having watched him. His cupboard
stood open; in it there were two shirts, a white necktie and a razor. The
razor made me shudder. A looking-glass, worth five francs perhaps,
hung near the window.
The man's few and simple movements had a sort of savage grandeur.
The Doctor and I looked at each other, wondering what we could say in
reply. Juste, seeing that I was speechless, asked Marcas jestingly:
"You cultivate literature, monsieur?"
"Far from it!" replied Marcas. "I should not be so wealthy."

"I fancied," said I, "that poetry alone, in these days, was amply
sufficient to provide a man with lodgings as bad as ours."
My remark made Marcas smile, and the smile gave a charm to his
yellow face.
"Ambition is not a less severe taskmaster to those who fail," said he.
"You, who are beginning life, walk in the beaten paths. Never dream of
rising superior, you will be ruined!"
"You advise us to stay just as we are?" said the Doctor, smiling.
There is something so infectious and childlike in the pleasantries of
youth, that Marcas smiled again in reply.
"What incidents can have given you this detestable philosophy?" asked
I.
"I forgot once more that chance is the result of an immense equation of
which we know not all the factors. When we start from zero to work up
to the unit, the chances are incalculable. To ambitious men Paris is an
immense roulette table, and every young man fancies he can hit on a
successful progression of numbers."
He offered us the tobacco I had brought that we might smoke with him;
the Doctor went to fetch our pipes; Marcas filled his, and then he came
to sit in our room, bringing the tobacco with him, since there were but
two chairs in his. Juste, as brisk as a squirrel, ran out, and returned with
a boy carrying three bottles of Bordeaux, some Brie cheese, and a loaf.
"Hah!" said I to myself, "fifteen francs," and I was right to a sou.
Juste gravely laid five francs on the chimney-shelf.
There are immeasurable differences between the gregarious man and
the man who lives closest to nature. Toussaint Louverture, after he was
caught, died without speaking a word. Napoleon, transplanted to a rock,
talked like a magpie--he wanted to account for himself. Z. Marcas erred

in the same way, but for our benefit only. Silence in all its majesty is to
be found only in the savage. There is never a criminal who, though he
might let his secrets fall with his head into the basket of sawdust does
not feel the purely social impulse to tell them to somebody.
Nay, I am wrong. We have seen one Iroquois of the Faubourg
Saint-Marceau who raised the Parisian to the level of the natural savage
--a republican, a conspirator, a Frenchman, an old man, who outdid all
we have heard of Negro determination, and all that Cooper tells us of
the tenacity and coolness of the Redskins under defeat. Morey, the
Guatimozin of the "Mountain," preserved an attitude unparalleled in the
annals of European justice.

This is what Marcas told us during the small hours, sandwiching his
discourse with slices of bread spread with cheese and washed down
with wine. All the tobacco was burned out. Now and then the hackney
coaches clattering across the Place de l'Odeon, or the omnibuses toiling
past, sent up their dull rumbling, as if to remind us that Paris was still
close to us.
His family lived at Vitre; his father and mother had fifteen hundred
francs a year in the funds. He had received an education gratis