Have you ever noticed how, in childhood, or at the start of our social life, we fashion a model for ourselves, often unawares? Thus a bank-clerk, as he enters his manager’s drawing-room, dreams of owning one just like it. If he is successful, it will not be the luxury then in fashion that he will install in his house twenty years later, but the out-of-date luxury that charmed him years ago.
We don’t know all the follies which stem from such retrospective envy, just as we don’t know all those due to the secret rivalries which drive men to imitate the ideal type they have set themselves, to consume their strength in pursuit of a moonbeam.
Crevel was a deputy mayor because his employer had been a deputy mayor. He was a major because he had wanted César Birotteau’s epaulettes. Consequently, impressed by the marvels created by the architect Grindot at the moment when fortune had carried his employer to the top of her wheel, Crevel, as he said in his own words, hadn’t thought twice about it when it came to decorating his own home. With closed eyes and open purse he went to Grindot, by that time a quite forgotten architect.
We cannot tell how long faded glories linger on sustained by such out-of-date admiration.
Grindot had recreated there for the thousandth time his gold and white drawing-room hung with red damask. The rosewood furniture, carved rather crudely as is usual today, had aroused in the provinces a well-deserved pride in Parisian workmanship at the time of the Exhibition of manufactured goods.* The candlesticks, the sconces, the fender, the chandelier, and the clock were all in the rococo style.
The round table, a fixture in the middle of the room, displayed a marble top inlaid with every kind of Italian and antique marble brought from Rome, where they make this kind of mineralogical map, rather like a card of tailor’s samples; it regularly aroused the admiration of all Crevel’s bourgeois guests.
The portraits of the late Madame Crevel, of Crevel, of his daughter and son-in-law (from the brush of Pierre Grassou,* the popular painter in middle-class society, to whom Crevel owed his ridiculous Byronic pose) were hung in matching couples on the walls. The frames, which had cost a thousand francs each, were in keeping with all this café splendour, that would certainly have made a real artist shrug his shoulders.
Money has never lost the least opportunity of showing how stupid it is. We would have ten Venices in Paris today if our retired businessmen had had the instinctive good taste which distinguishes the Italians. Even in our own day, a Milanese merchant might well leave five hundred thousand francs to the Duomo for gilding the colossal Virgin on top of its cupola. In his will, Canova* instructed his brother to build a church costing four million, and the brother added something of his own.
Would a bourgeois of Paris (and, like Rivet, they all have a love for Paris in their hearts) ever think of building the spires missing from the towers of Notre-Dame?
And yet, consider the sums that have reverted to the state from property left without heirs.
All the improvements of Paris could have been completed for the money spent on absurdities of moulded stucco, gilded plaster, and so-called sculptures by individuals of Crevel’s stamp.
Beyond this drawing-room was a magnificent study, furnished with imitation Boule* tables and cabinets.
The bedroom, all hung in chintz, also opened out of the drawing-room. Mahogany in all its glory proliferated in the dining-room, whose panelling was decorated with richly framed views of Switzerland. Père Crevel, who dreamed of going to Switzerland, enjoyed possessing that country in paintings until the time came when he would go and see it in reality.
Crevel, a former deputy mayor, a member of the Legion of Honour and of the national Guard, had, as we see, faithfully reproduced all the grandeurs of his unfortunate predecessor,* even to the furniture. Where, under the Restoration, the one had fallen, the other, completely unnoticed, had risen, not because of any unusual stroke of fortune but by force of circumstances. In revolutions, as in storms at sea, solid worth goes to the bottom, and the waves bring lightweight stuff to the surface. César Birotteau, a royalist, in favour and an object of envy, became the target of the bourgeois opposition, while the triumphant bourgeoisie saw Crevel as its own representative.
His flat, rented at a thousand crowns a year, chock-full of all the commonplace fine things that money can buy, occupied the first floor of an old mansion, standing between a courtyard and a garden. Everything in it was kept like beetles in an entomologist’s cabinet, for Crevel lived there very little.
This sumptuous abode was the official domicile of the ambitious bourgeois. He kept a cook and a valet there, hiring two extra servants and ordering his party dinners from Chevet* when he entertained political friends, people he wanted to impress, or members of his family.
Crevel’s real existence used to be spent at the Rue Notre-Dame-de-Lorette, at Mademoiselle Héloïse Brisetout’s, but it had been transferred, as we have seen, to the Rue Chauchat.
Every morning, the former merchant (all retired shopkeepers call themselves former merchants) spent two hours at the Rue des Saussayes to attend to business, and gave the rest of his time to Zaïre, to Zaïre’s great annoyance.
Orosmane*-Crevel had a fixed arrangement with Mademoiselle Héloïse; she owed him five hundred francs’ worth of happiness every month, with nothing carried over. In addition, Crevel paid for his dinner and all the extras.
This contract, with bonuses (for he gave her a lot of presents), seemed economical to the celebrated singer’s former lover. On this subject, he would say to widowed merchants who were too fond of their daughters, that it was better to hire horses by the month than to have one’s own stable. Nevertheless, if we recall the confidences of the porter of the Rue Chauchat to the Baron, Crevel could not dispense with either the coachman or the groom.
As we see, Crevel had turned his extreme affection for his daughter to the advantage of his pleasures. The immorality of his situation was justified on high moral grounds. Moreover, the former perfumer acquired from his way of life (inevitable but dissolute, in the style of the Regency,* Pompadour,* Maréchal de Richelieu,* etc.) a veneer of superiority.
Crevel adopted the pose of a broad-minded man, a great lord on a small scale, a generous man, not narrow in his ideas, and all for about twelve to fifteen hundred francs a month. This was not due to political hypocrisy, but to bourgeois vanity; nevertheless, the result was the same. At the Stock Exchange Crevel had the reputation of being a man superior to his age and above all of one who enjoyed the pleasures of life.
In this respect, Crevel believed he was vastly superior to good old Birotteau.