“Yes, bread. See things as they are, Cesar. You cannot extricate yourself. With five thousand six hundred francs income, I could set aside four thousand francs for you and the Ragons. If misfortune overtakes you,—I know Constance, she will work herself to the bone, she will deny herself everything; and so will you, Cesar.”
“All is not hopeless, uncle.”
“I cannot see it as you do.”
“I will prove that you are mistaken.”
“Nothing would give me greater happiness.”
Birotteau left Pillerault without another word. He had come to seek courage and consolation, and he received a blow less severe, perhaps, than the first; but instead of striking his head it struck his heart, and his heart was the whole of life to the poor man. After going down a few stairs he returned.
“Monsieur,” he said, in a cold voice, “Constance knows nothing. Keep my secret at any rate; beg the Ragons to say nothing, and not to take from my home the peace I need so much in my struggle against misfortune.”
Pillerault made a gesture of assent.
“Courage, Cesar!” he said. “I see you are angry with me; but later, when you think of your wife and daughter, you will do me justice.”
Discouraged by his uncle’s opinion, and recognizing its clear-sightedness, Cesar tumbled from the heights of hope into the miry marshes of doubt and uncertainty. In such horrible commercial straits a man, unless his soul is tempered like that of Pillerault, becomes the plaything of events; he follows the ideas of others, or his own, as a traveller pursues a will-o’-the-wisp. He lets the gust whirl him along, instead of lying flat and not looking up as it passes; or else gathering himself together to follow the direction of the storm till he can escape from the edges of it. In the midst of his pain Birotteau bethought him of the steps he ought to take about the mortgage on his property. He turned towards the Rue Vivienne to find Derville, his solicitor, and institute proceedings at once, in case the lawyer should see any chance of annulling the agreement. He found Derville sitting by the fire, wrapped in a white woollen dressing-gown, calm and composed in manner, like all lawyers long used to receiving terrible confidences. Birotteau noticed for the first time in his life this necessary coldness, which struck a chill to the soul of a man grasped by the fever of imperilled interests,—passionate, wounded, and cruelly gashed in his life, his honor, his wife, his child, as Cesar showed himself to be while he related his misfortunes.