Du Tillet cut the pate, poured out a glass of claret, and urged Cesar to eat. The poor man felt he was saved, and gave way to convulsive laughter; he played with his watch-chain, and only put a mouthful into his mouth, when du Tillet said to him, "You are not eating!" Birotteau thus betrayed the depths of the abyss into which du Tillet's hand had plunged him, from which that hand now withdrew him, and into which it had the power to plunge him again. When the cashier returned, and Cesar signed the note, and felt the ten bank-notes in his pocket, he was no longer master of himself. A moment sooner, and the Bank, his neighborhood, every one, was to know that he could not meet his payments, and he must have told his ruin to his wife; now, all was safe! The joy of this deliverance equalled in its intensity the tortures of his peril. The eyes of the poor man moistened, in spite of himself.
"What is the matter with you, my dear master?" asked du Tillet. "Would you not do for me to-morrow what I do for you to-day? Is it not as simple as saying, How do you do?"
"Du Tillet," said the worthy man, with gravity and emphasis, and rising to take the hand of his former clerk, "I give you back my esteem."
"What! had I lost it?" cried du Tillet, so violently stabbed in the very bosom of his prosperity that the color came into his face.
"Lost?--well, not precisely," said Birotteau, thunder-struck at his own stupidity: "they told me certain things about your /liaison/ with Madame Roguin. The devil! taking the wife of another man--"
"You are beating round the bush, old fellow," thought du Tillet, and as the words crossed his mind he came back to his original project, and vowed to bring that virtue low, to trample it under foot, to render despicable in the marts of Paris the honorable and virtuous merchant who had caught him, red-handed, in a theft. All hatreds, public or private, from woman to woman, from man to man, have no other cause then some such detection. People do not hate each other for injured interests, for wounds, not even for a blow; all such wrongs can be redressed. But to have been seized, /flagrante delicto/, in a base act! The duel which follows between the criminal and the witness of his crime ends only with the death of the one or of the other.
"Oh! Madame Roguin!" said du Tillet, jestingly, "don't you call that a feather in a young man's cap? I understand you, my dear master;
somebody has told you that she lent me money. Well, on the contrary it is I who have protected her fortune, which was strangely involved in her husband's affairs. The origin of my fortune is pure, as I have just told you. I had nothing, you know. Young men are sometimes in positions of frightful necessity. They may lose their self-control in the depths of poverty, and if they make, as the Republic made, forced loans--well, they pay them back; and in so doing they are more honest than France herself."
"That is true," cried Birotteau. "My son, God--is it not Voltaire who says,--
"'He rendered repentance the virtue of mortals'?"
"Provided," answered du Tillet, stabbed afresh by this quotation,--
"provided they do not carry off the property of their neighbors, basely, meanly; as, for example, you would do if you failed within three months, and my ten thousand francs went to perdition."
"I fail!" cried Birotteau, who had taken three glasses of wine, and was half-drunk with joy. "Everybody knows what I think about failure!
Failure is death to a merchant; I should die of it!"
"I drink your health," said du Tillet.
"Your health and prosperity," returned Cesar. "Why don't you buy your perfumery from me?"
"The fact is," said du Tillet, "I am afraid of Madame Cesar; she always made an impression on me. If you had not been my master, on my word! I--"
"You are not the first to think her beautiful; others have desired her; but she loves me! Well, now, du Tillet, my friend," resumed Birotteau, "don't do things by halves."
"What is it?"
Birotteau explained the affair of the lands to his former clerk, who pretended to open his eyes wide, and complimented the perfumer on his perspicacity and penetration, and praised the enterprise.
"Well, I am very glad to have your approbation; you are thought one of the wise-heads of the banking business, du Tillet. Dear fellow, you might get me a credit at the Bank of France, so that I can wait for the profits of Cephalic Oil at my ease."
"I can give you a letter to the firm of Nucingen," answered du Tillet, perceiving that he could make his victim dance all the figures in the reel of bankruptcy.
Ferdinand sat down to his desk and wrote the following letter:--
/To Monsieur le baron de Nucingen/:
My dear Baron,--The bearer of this letter is Monsieur Cesar Birotteau, deputy-mayor of the second arrondissement, and one of the best known manufacturers of Parisian perfumery; he wishes to have business relations with your house. You can confidently do all that he asks of you; and in obliging him you will oblige Your friend, F. Du Tillet.
Du Tillet did not dot the /i/ in his signature. To those with whom he did business this intentional error was a sign previously agreed upon.
The strongest recommendations, the warmest appeals contained in the letter were to mean nothing. All such letters, in which exclamation marks were suppliants and du Tillet placed himself, as it were, upon his knees, were to be considered as extorted by necessity; he could not refuse to write them, but they were to be regarded as not written.
Seeing the /i/ without a dot, the correspondent was to amuse the petitioner with empty promises. Even men of the world, and sometimes the most distinguished, are thus gulled like children by business men, bankers, and lawyers, who all have a double signature,--one dead, the other living. The cleverest among them are fooled in this way. To understand the trick, we must experience the two-fold effects of a warm letter and a cold one.
"You have saved me, du Tillet!" said Cesar, reading the letter.