“I pity you.”
The old cashier had reached that point when all the faculties, after being strained to their utmost limits, suddenly break down, when the strongest man gives up, and weeps like a child.
“Ah, I am the most wretched of villains!” he exclaimed.
He had hid his face in his hands; and in one second,—as it happens, they say, to the dying on the threshold of eternity,—he reviewed his entire existence.
“And yet,” he said, “I had not the soul of a villain. I wanted to get rich; but honestly, by labor, and by rigid economy. And I should have succeeded. I had a hundred and fifty thousand francs of my own when I met the Baron de Thaller. Alas! why did I meet him? ‘Twas he who first gave me to understand that it was stupid to work and save, when, at the bourse, with moderate luck, one might become a millionaire in six months.”
He stopped, shook his head, and suddenly,
“Do you know the Baron de Thaller?” he asked. And, without giving Marius time to answer,
“He is a German,” he went on, “a Prussian. His father was a cab-driver in Berlin, and his mother waiting-maid in a brewery. At the age of eighteen, he was compelled to leave his country, owing to some petty swindle, and came to take up his residence in Paris. He found employment in the office of a stock-broker, and was living very poorly, when he made the acquaintance of a young laundress named Affrays, who had for a lover a very wealthy gentleman, the Marquis de Tregars, whose weakness was to pass himself off for a poor clerk. Affrays and Thaller were well calculated to agree. They did agree, and formed an association,—she contributing her beauty; he, his genius for intrigue; both, their corruption and their vices. Soon after they met, she gave birth to a child, a daughter; whom she intrusted to some poor gardeners at Louveciennes, with the firm and settled intention to leave her there forever. And yet it was upon this daughter, whom they firmly hoped never to see again, that the two accomplices were building their fortune.
“It was in the name of that daughter that Affrays wrung considerable sums from the Marquis de Tregars. As soon as Thaller and she found themselves in possession of six hundred thousand francs, they dismissed the marquis, and got married. Already, at that time, Thaller had taken the title of baron, and lived in some style. But his first speculations were not successful. The revolution of 1848 finished his ruin, and he was about being expelled from the bourse, when he found me on his way,—I, poor fool, who was going about everywhere, asking how I could advantageously invest my hundred and fifty thousand francs.”
He was speaking in a hoarse voice, shaking his clinched fist in the air, doubtless at the Baron de Thaller.