The creditor who had exacted this louis with so much severity, belonged to the same village, and was really in absolute want of the money, because, his harvest having failed, he had not the necessary provisions for his family during the winter. Had the soldier's louis not arrived, however, it would have been useless for him to have put the father in prison; he would have gained nothing, as the old man possessed nothing; but with this louis he bought twenty or five-and-twenty bushels of potatoes, which were then very cheap, and these served to support himself and his children.
The woman, however, from whom he had purchased the potatoes, and who belonged to another village, having the imprudence to cross in the dark a wood, through which the road to her house lay, three villains of the neighbourhood in which she had sold her potatoes, who had seen her receive the louis, agreed to wait for her in the wood, and rob her of it. When, therefore, she had penetrated into the thicket, they burst upon her, threw her from her horse, took the louis, and were about to tear off her clothes, and perhaps kill her, when, fancying they heard a noise, they ran off in different directions. He who held the louis, endeavoured to escape from his companions, that he might not share it with them; but they met him that same evening at a tavern where he was spending it in drink. They demanded their share, quarrelled, fought, and discovered all their secrets. They were arrested and sent to the galleys. The tavern-keeper interposed in the lawsuit; he wished to have the louis, as it had been spent at his house; the woman who sold the potatoes, and who had recovered and again mounted her horse, also claimed it, as it had been stolen from her. I know not whether they were indemnified, but the louis, after having served as a proof of the theft, because it was the only one in the country, none of this particular coinage having been before introduced there, passed into the hands of an old lawyer, who quarrelled with an elderly lady, after a friendship of thirty years, because she had won it of him at piquet, during the course of six months, and had told him, besides, that he did not know how to play. This old lady sent it as a new-year's gift to one of her little granddaughters in Paris, who was saved by it from a very considerable annoyance. Her brother, who, though treated with a good deal of severity, was, nevertheless, very disobedient and ill-behaved, had taken from her father's library, notwithstanding his having been forbidden to touch it, a book which contained prints; while reading it, he had let an inkstand fall upon it, and in order that he might not be suspected, had carried it into the anteroom. All this he communicated to his sister, as a great secret, making her solemnly promise to say nothing about it, so that the servant might be suspected. As her father was very particular about his books, the young girl knew that the servant would be dismissed; still she could not denounce her brother. The book had been put in the anteroom, during the evening, and she wept all night at the thought of what was to happen next day; for she was extremely kind and just. In the morning, on awaking, the first thing she beheld was the louis, which had been put upon her bed as a present from her grandmamma; her joy was extreme, and she immediately sent for a copy of the book, as her brother, who had also received a louis, finding himself screened, would not spend his in this manner. However, she consoled herself, by thinking of the terrible pain she would have experienced in seeing an innocent person punished, without daring to justify him. The book cost exactly one louis; this louis passed into the hands of a librarian, and had a great influence on the destiny of a little boy, whose history I am about to relate to you.
LITTLE PETER.
Little Peter, when ten years old, had entered the service of M. Dubourg, a worthy man, who passed his life in the study of Greek and Latin, and was so much taken up with what happened three thousand years ago, that he did not even think of troubling himself with what was actually passing around him; for he was consoled for every inconvenience, provided he could apply to it an example or a maxim drawn from antiquity. If he cut his finger, or hurt his foot, his first movement was an exclamation of impatience, but immediately afterwards he checked himself and grew calm, saying, "The philosopher Epictetus suffered his leg to be broken by his master, who was beating him, without making any complaint beyond these words: 'I told you you would break my leg.'" One day, while dining in town, he found himself in company with some very ill-bred military men, who could talk of nothing but the stories of their regiment, and the number of bottles of wine they had drunk at a mess dinner. The mistress of the house, in order to make him some kind of apology for a conversation which wearied him, said, laughing, "You must allow, M. Dubourg, that I have made you dine in very bad company."
"Madame," replied M. Dubourg, "Alcibiades knew how to accommodate himself to every grade of society, to every company, and even to the customs of every nation;" and in order to follow the example of Alcibiades, he commenced talking to them of the battle of Salamis, and the feasts of Bacchus. As to the rest, M. Dubourg only dined out six times a year; this was a rule which he had laid down for himself, however numerous might be the invitations which he received. The only irregularity he allowed himself was in the periods. Thus, for instance, he might one year dine out on the 6th of March, and the following year on the 7th or the 10th; it might even happen that he accepted two invitations in the same month, though as a general rule he placed them as nearly as possible at equal distances; but if by any extraordinary chance, the six dinners were expended by the month of July, no consideration would induce him to dine away from home during the rest of the year. His expenditure was regulated as strictly as his manner of life. With a very small income, M. Dubourg wished to live in such a manner as to be perfectly independent of every one, and especially so as never to be reduced to the necessity of borrowing, which he regarded as the greatest of all faults; "for," said he, "one can never be sufficiently sure of repaying." Thus, his dinners were furnished by a restaurateur, who, for the same sum, brought him every day the same thing. On one occasion the restaurateur wished to increase his charge. "It is all the same to me," said M. Dubourg, "I shall take less; Diogenes was able, by mere philosophy, to bring himself to drink out of his hand, although he had still a wooden cup of which he might have made use." It was probably less out of respect for philosophy, than from the fear of disobliging a customer, that the restaurateur, by the means of certain arrangements, agreed to furnish him, for the old price, a dinner of pretty nearly the same kind.
The other expenses of the day were calculated with the same precision, so that, without ever counting, M. Dubourg, had always a year's income in advance, and was consequently never inconvenienced by having to wait for his returns. He had, besides, a sum in reserve for extraordinary cases; such as an illness, an accident, or even a goblet broken, or a bottle of ink overturned, &c. It might also happen, on a rainy day, that he had to pay for crossing a stream upon a plank, or, in winter, to give a sous to the little sweeper who cleaned the crossing; all these expenses fell upon the extraordinary fund, for as to coaches, M. Dubourg had only hired two during the whole course of thirty years. One was to pay a visit to a rich man from whom he had accepted an invitation to dinner, and to whose house he was told he must not go splashed. This broke off their acquaintance, and he never would go again, however much he was pressed. The other he took when going to declare his sentiments to a young lady whom he had been persuaded to fancy himself desirous of marrying. He took it for fear that the wind should shake the powder out of his hair, and it gave him an opportunity of reflecting, as he proceeded, on the disorders into which the passions lead us. On arriving at the young lady's house, he paid the coachman, returned home on foot, and renounced for ever the idea of marrying. His reserved fund was always maintained in the same state, by means of a portion of his income regularly set apart for this purpose. When it did not happen to be all spent by the end of the year, M. Dubourg gave the remainder to the poor, otherwise, he neither gave nor lent; for he said that "it is not proper to give unless we are certain of not being obliged to ask, and that he who, in order to lend, exposes himself to the chance of being obliged to borrow, places his integrity at the mercy of a bad paymaster." It may be seen then, that with some follies, M. Dubourg was a man highly to be esteemed for his integrity.
Little Peter passed with him the happiest of lives. Provided he was careful not to arrange the books that were scattered or heaped together upon the desk or floor, which M. Dubourg called disarranging them; provided he took care to sweep the room only once a fortnight, when M. Dubourg had taken away certain fine editions, which he did not wish to have exposed to the dust; provided he was careful never to remove the cobwebs, that he might not run the risk of upsetting the busts of Homer, of Plato, of Aristotle, of Cicero, of Virgil, &c., which adorned the top of the library, little Peter might do pretty nearly what he pleased. If he happened to be out at the hour at which the restaurateur brought, every day, M. Dubourg's dinner, so that it had to be left at the door, M. Dubourg having forbidden the man ever to ring, for fear of interrupting his studies, and if M. Dubourg found his dinner quite cold, or partly eaten by the cat, Peter merely excused himself by saying, that he had been detained by some business. Then M. Dubourg would say to him: "It is quite natural, Peter, that you should occupy yourself principally with your own affairs; you are not my slave; I have not purchased you with my money: but were you my slave, the case would be very different." Then, whilst taking his dinner, he would explain to him the duties and condition of slaves; and how it was that their masters possessed over them the power of life and death, which was indeed but just, since they had purchased them; "But as for me, Peter," he would add, "I am not permitted to do you the least harm, for you are not my slave." And, in fact, he would not give him a caning, even when he learned his Latin grammar badly; this was, nevertheless, the greatest annoyance Peter could cause M. Dubourg; who, on this point, sometimes got into violent passions, quite at variance with his general character; for he could not understand how it was possible for any one to dislike so excellent a thing as the Latin grammar. This dislike, however, was very sincere on the part of little Peter, who had no fancy for study, and who, though he had learned to read and to write, had done so much against his will. When M. Dubourg, who did not wish any one to live with him without understanding Latin, first put an Accidence into his hand, his parents were delighted at the idea of his making, as they thought, little Peter a learned man like himself; but Peter had not the slightest wish to resemble M. Dubourg, who passed the whole day in poring over books; who often only half dined, for fear of allowing a Greek passage to escape him, the meaning of which he was beginning to seize; who took water, scarcely coloured, because wine disturbed the judgment, and had, he said, caused Alexander the Great to commit many crimes; and who, finally, as his only pleasure, walked for two hours every day in the gardens of the Tuileries, with three other learned men, who, on their part, met there for the purpose of conversing together, after the manner of the Peripaticians.
Little Peter, fancying that Latin led to nothing better than this, could not perceive in it anything very attractive, and only learned his Accidence, ill or well as the case might be, for the sake of pleasing M. Dubourg, who wept with joy when he had repeated his lesson well. He read, however, with tolerable pleasure, some books of history which M. Dubourg had lent him, and he passed the remainder of his time with his parents, to whom M. Dubourg had promised to send him for several hours each day, and to whom Peter, according to custom, remitted a very considerable portion of the hundred francs which he annually received as his wages; for they said that, having consented to place him with M. Dubourg at an age in which his labour might have been useful to them in their trade of braziers, they ought to be indemnified, in some other manner, for the expenses he had occasioned them in his childhood. Little Peter, better fed and better clothed than he could have been at home, ought to have considered himself very well off; but he was discontented, because he could not run about like other boys of his age, and because he had not the free disposal of his money; in fact he regretted all the follies which he could not commit, and then the Rudiments greatly disgusted him. Besides, little Peter affected to be ambitious; he must make his fortune, and that was an impossibility so long as he remained with M. Dubourg. He related his troubles to a little groom with whom he became acquainted, from having seen him at the door of a house, situated between the residence of M. Dubourg and his father's shop. One day this groom, whose name was John, told him that if he wished he would procure him a good situation, with a young gentleman, a friend of his master, who was in want of a groom. He would have to take his meals with the other servants of the family, as long as the young gentleman resided with his parents, and receive a hundred francs a year, as with M. Dubourg, besides a louis d'or for his new-year's gift, not to mention the perquisites, which, according to John's account, would amount to three times as much as his wages. Peter felt himself greatly tempted by the louis d'or, which he hoped to keep for himself, and by the livery, which he thought much finer than his grey jacket, forgetting, that from his grey jacket he might pass to a better dress without the change being remarked, whereas livery is a costume which once seen upon a person is never forgotten. John had taught him to groom a horse, and this pleased him much more than the Rudiments; he thought it would be very delightful to have to groom one every day, and, besides, it seemed to him that he should have his own way much more. However, he told John that the thing was impossible; that he could not leave M. Dubourg; but as he went along he could think of nothing else. His parents, seeing him thus preoccupied, said to him a dozen times, "Peter, are you ill?" He replied that he was not, and left them much earlier than usual, to go and find John; not that he knew what answer to give him, but simply that he might hear him talk of the situation, of the louis d'or, of the perquisites, and of the horse.
The desire he felt to obtain the situation increased at every moment. John told him that nothing was easier; that he had only to allow him to speak to M. and Madame Jerôme,—these were the parents of little Peter; and that he would make them listen to reason. Peter took him at his word, and told him to come with him. John went, and as he was a boy of great determination, he represented, in glowing colours, to M. and Madame Jerôme, all the advantages of the situation which he proposed, with the exception, however, of the louis d'or, to which Peter had begged him not to allude, as he wished to keep it for himself. "But see, Madame Jerôme," said John, "the master he will have, lays aside his clothes almost new, and I will wager that, every year, Peter will be able to bring a suit to M. Jerôme; but that is on condition that you let him have a little more of his wages."