The Magic Skin by Honoré de Balzac (best ebook reader for laptop .txt) 📕

summer or winter. It is all arranged very oddly. As I come in I say to him:

"'You must get up and dress, my Lord Marquis.'

"Then he rises and dresses himself. I have to give him his dressing-gown, and it is always after the same pattern, and of the same material. I am obliged to replace it when it can be used no longer, simply to save him the trouble of asking for a new one. A queer fancy! As a matter of fact, he has a thousand francs to spend every day, and he does as he pleases, the dear child. And besides, I am so fond of him that if he gave me a box on the ear on one side, I should hold out the other to him! The most difficult things he will tell me to do, and yet I do them, you know! He gives me a lot of trifles to attend to, that I am well set to work! He reads the newspapers, doesn't he? Well, my instructions are to put them always in the same place, on the same table. I always go at the same hour and shave him myself; and don't I tremble! The cook would forfeit the annuity of a thousand crowns that he is to come into after my lord's death, if breakfast is not served _inconciliably_ at ten o'clock precisely. The menus are drawn up for the whole year round, day after day. My Lord the Marquis has not a thing to wish for. He has strawberries whenever there are any, and he has the earliest mackerel to be had in Paris. The programme is printed every morning. He knows his dinner by rote. In the next place, he dresses himself at the same hour, in the same clothes, the same linen, that I always put on the same chair, you understand? I have to see that he always has the same cloth; and if it should happen that his coat came to grief (a mere supposition), I should have to replace it by another without saying a word about it to him. If it is fine, I go in and say to my master:

"'You ought to go out, sir.'

"He says Yes, or No. If he has a notion that he will go out, he doesn't wait for his horses; they are always ready harnessed; the coachman stops there _inconciliably_, whip in hand, just as you see him out there. In the evening, after dinner, my master goes one day to the Opera, the other to the Ital----no, he hasn't yet gone to the Italiens, though, for I could not find a box for him until yesterday. Then he comes in at eleven o'clock precisely, to go to bed. At any time in the day when he has nothing to do, he reads--he is always reading, you see--it is a notion he has. My instructions are to read the _Journal de la Librairie_ before he sees it, and to buy new books, so that he finds them on his chimney-piece on the very day that they are published. I have orders to go into his room every hour or so, to look after the fire and everything else, and to see that he wants nothing. He gave me a little book, sir, to learn off by heart, with all my duties written in it--a regular catechism! In summer I have to keep a cool and even temperature with blocks of ice and at all seasons to put fresh flowers all about. He is rich! He has a thousand francs to spend every day; he can indulge his fancies! And he hadn't even necessaries for so long, poor child! He doesn't annoy anybody; he is as good as gold; he never opens his mouth, for instance; the house and garden are absolutely silent. In short, my master has not a single wish left; everything comes in the twinkling of an eye, if he raises his hand, and _instanter_. Quite right, too. If servants are not looked after, everything falls into confusion. You would never believe the lengths he goes about things. His rooms are all--what do you call it?--er--er--_en suite_. Very well; just suppose, now, that he opens his room door or the door of his study; presto! all the other doors fly open of themselves by a patent contrivance; and then he can go from one end of the house to the other and not find a single door shut; which is all very nice and pleasant and convenient for us great folk! But, on my word, it cost us a lot of money! And, after all, M. Porriquet, he said to me at last:

"'Jonathan, you will look after me as if I were a baby in long clothes,' Yes, sir, 'long clothes!' those were his very words. 'You will think of all my requirements for me.' I am the master, so to speak, and he is the servant, you understand? The reason of it? Ah, my word, that is just what nobody on earth knows but himself and God Almighty. It is quite _inconciliable_!"

"He is writing a poem!" exclaimed the old professor.

"You think he is writing a poem, sir? It's a very absorbing affair, then! But, you know, I don't think he is. He often tells me that he wants to live like a _vergetation_; he wants to _vergetate_. Only yesterday he was looking at a tulip while he was dressing, and he said to me:

"'There is my own life--I am _vergetating_, my poor Jonathan.' Now, some of them insist that that is monomania. It is _inconciliable_!"

"All this makes it very clear to me, Jonathan," the professor answered, with a magisterial solemnity that greatly impressed the old servant, "that your master is absorbed in a great work. He is deep in vast meditations, and has no wish to be distracted by the petty preoccupations of ordinary life. A man of genius forgets everything among his intellectual labors. One day the famous Newton----"

"Newton?--oh, ah! I don't know the name," said Jonathan.

"Newton, a great geometrician," Porriquet went on, "once sat for twenty-four hours leaning his elbow on the table; when he emerged from his musings, he was a day out in his reckoning, just as if he had been sleeping. I will go to see him, dear lad; I may perhaps be of some use to him."

"Not for a moment!" Jonathan cried. "Not though you were King of France--I mean the real old one. You could not go in unless you forced the doors open and walked over my body. But I will go and tell him you are here, M. Porriquet, and I will put it to him like this, 'Ought he to come up?' And he will say Yes or No. I never say, 'Do you wish?' or 'Will you?' or 'Do you want?' Those words are scratched out of the dictionary. He let out at me once with a 'Do you want to kill me?' he was so very angry."

Jonathan left the old schoolmaster in the vestibule, signing to him to come no further, and soon returned with a favorable answer. He led the old gentleman through one magnificent room after another, where every door stood open. At last Porriquet beheld his pupil at some distance seated beside the fire.

Raphael was reading the paper. He sat in an armchair wrapped in a dressing-gown with some large pattern on it. The intense melancholy that preyed upon him could be discerned in his languid posture and feeble frame; it was depicted on his brow and white face; he looked like some plant bleached by darkness. There was a kind of effeminate grace about him; the fancies peculiar to wealthy invalids were also noticeable. His hands were soft and white, like a pretty woman's; he wore his fair hair, now grown scanty, curled about his temples with a refinement of vanity.

The Greek cap that he wore was pulled to one side by the weight of its tassel; too heavy for the light material of which it was made. He had let the paper-knife fall at his feet, a malachite blade with gold mounting, which he had used to cut the leaves of the book. The amber mouthpiece of a magnificent Indian hookah lay on his knee; the enameled coils lay like a serpent in the room, but he had forgotten to draw out its fresh perfume. And yet there was a complete contradiction between the general feebleness of his young frame and the blue eyes, where all his vitality seemed to dwell; an extraordinary intelligence seemed to look out from them and to grasp everything at once.

That expression was painful to see. Some would have read despair in it, and others some inner conflict terrible as remorse. It was the inscrutable glance of helplessness that must perforce consign its desires to the depths of its own heart; or of a miser enjoying in imagination all the pleasures that his money could procure for him, while he declines to lessen his hoard; the look of a bound Prometheus, of the fallen Napoleon of 1815, when he learned at the Elysee the strategical blunder that his enemies had made, and asked for twenty-four hours of command in vain; or rather it was the same look that Raphael had turned upon the Seine, or upon his last piece of gold at the gaming-table only a few months ago.

He was submitting his intelligence and his will to the homely common-sense of an old peasant whom fifty years of domestic service had scarcely civilized. He had given up all the rights of life in order to live; he had despoiled his soul of all the romance that lies in a wish; and almost rejoiced at thus becoming a sort of automaton. The better to struggle with the cruel power that he had challenged, he had followed Origen's example, and had maimed and chastened his imagination.

The day after he had seen the diminution of the Magic Skin, at his sudden accession of wealth, he happened to be at his notary's house. A well-known physician had told them quite seriously, at dessert, how a Swiss attacked by consumption had cured himself. The man had never spoken a word for ten years, and had compelled himself to draw six breaths only, every minute, in the close atmosphere of a cow-house, adhering all the time to a regimen of exceedingly light diet. "I will be like that man," thought Raphael to himself. He wanted life at any price, and so he led the life of a machine in the midst of all the luxury around him.

The old professor confronted this youthful corpse and shuddered; there seemed something unnatural about the meagre, enfeebled frame. In the Marquis, with his eager eyes and careworn forehead, he could hardly recognize the fresh-cheeked and rosy pupil with the active limbs, whom he remembered. If the worthy classicist, sage critic, and general preserver of the traditions of correct taste had read Byron, he would have thought that he had come on a Manfred when he looked to find Childe Harold.

"Good day, pere Porriquet," said Raphael, pressing the old schoolmaster's frozen fingers in his own damp ones; "how are you?"

"I am very well," replied the other, alarmed by the touch of that feverish hand. "But how about you?"

"Oh, I am hoping to keep myself in health."

"You are engaged in some great work, no doubt?"

"No," Raphael answered. "Exegi monumemtum, pere Porriquet; I have contributed an important page to science, and have now bidden her farewell for ever. I scarcely know where my manuscript is."

"The style is no doubt correct?" queried the schoolmaster. "You, I hope, would