The weight of the name

by Paul Bourget

One afternoon in November Chaffin had appeared, in a state of great agitation. He had told his son that the marquis had made him the scapegoat of his follies. He had inveighed against the ingratitude of the grand seigneur, in whose service his life had been passed, had declared that he would accept nothing, not even the smallest pension, from that man, and had forbidden his name to be mentioned in his presence. Since then he had been wasting away in a melancholic state, the true causes of which were, on the one hand, terror lest his son should learn the real reason of his disgrace, and on the other hand the most violent and invincible remorse.

Landri's instinct had led him to the right conclusion. Chaffin was the anonymous informer. Enraged by the sudden collapse of his hopes, the loss of a commission which would have rounded out his fortune, and really convinced in his own mind that M. de Claviers would renounce the Jaubourg legacy, Chaffin had gone to Altona to strike another bargain with him, and to demand not one but two per cent of the four millions offered for the list of treasures preserved at Grandchamp. He agreed, in consideration of that sum, to induce the marquis to reopen the negotiations that had been instantly broken off by the legacy. Altona had accepted his offer.

Chaffin had in his possession a letter from Madame de Claviers to Jaubourg. He had opened it when he was only a tutor, nearly eighteen years before. Finding it on a table, in a package prepared for the post, he had yielded to an intense curiosity to learn the real relations between the friend of the family and the marchioness. That was the period at which the process of corruption already described began. Perhaps this discovery of the sin of his pupil's mother was the most virulent element in his moral degeneration. He had not used the paper, as he might have done, as the foundation of a lucrative system of blackmail. He was not ripe for such villainy. But he had not destroyed it, by reason of that sort of vague expectation which, in certain natures, outwardly sound but rotten at the core, is, as it were, the gestation of crime. He had, in fact, supplemented it by adding to it—these were the "other documents"—three notes from Jaubourg, pilfered from Landri's mother's desk. At the time the lovers had discovered, with dismay, the disappearance of Madame de Claviers' letter. They had both made cautious inquiry, and failing to learn anything, had attributed the loss to some irregularity on the part of the mail. The marchioness had not detected the second theft, which would have put her on the scent. Jaubourg had always suspected Chaffin. That was the meaning of the question, "What is he?" uttered in such distress on his death-bed.

That is the sort of man that the former tutor was: a scoundrel who lacked only a tempting opportunity. The bait of eighty thousand francs was the opportunity. He had written the anonymous letter himself, on his typewriter. He had placed it in an envelope with the other, the incriminating one, and despatched them both to the marquis. But although a greedy longing for gain, added to base and pitiless envy of the grand seigneur, had impelled him to do this disgraceful deed in an hour of madness, when the blow was dealt, his conscience of the earlier days, of the humble giver of lessons to worthy bourgeois, had begun to make itself heard. He could not banish from his thoughts the haunting image of M. de Claviers' face as he had seen it during the fortnight between his crime and his dismissal, so haggard, so ravaged by suffering! His handiwork terrified him, especially as the end sought—at such a price!—was not attained. Contrary to his expectation, the marquis went on paying his debts. Pictures, furniture, hangings, remained at Grandchamp. The eighty thousand francs Altona had promised him would never come to his hands.

There are not many criminals who, in the face of a useless crime, practise the calm philosophy of the assassin in the old story, who found only a single sou in his victim's pocket, and observed: "A hundred like this will make five francs!" The absolute inutility of his murderous villainy did not even afford Chaffin the semi-insensibility which might have come from the possession of that little fortune which, added to the store already accumulated, would have given him a round twenty thousand francs a year.

Tormented by this fixed idea, he was beginning to exhibit symptoms of the acute mental alienation which incessant, poignant regret for an irreparable sin is likely to cause in a man of some education. He could no longer eat or sleep, read or write, attend to any business or remain quiet. This agitation had not escaped the son's notice. The doctor had begun, almost automatically, to watch his father. He soon assured himself that these symptoms, so readily interpreted by an alienist, were caused by no physical disturbance. The cause was entirely mental—the physician said, cerebral. Almost automatically again, he had sought that cause.

One fact aroused his suspicion: he fancied that he observed a certain constraint in Professor Louvet's manner toward himself. As the head of the clinical staff he was in constant communication with the illustrious master of the Hôtel-Dieu. It had seemed to him, during the last weeks, that his chief's handshake was, not less cordial, but less unreserved, less familiar—in a word, that there was "a thorn" in it, as they would have said to each other in neurologists' parlance, in speaking of a common abrasion of the skin on a patient. Under any other circumstances Pierre would not have hesitated to question the professor. He did not do it. He had put together the two symptoms: the change in his master's manner to him, and the change in his father. He had drawn therefrom the conclusion, still automatically,—a profession like his ends by imparting a mechanical method, an instinctive gait, to the mind,—that the same fact was at the root of both. What fact? The quarrel between Chaffin and M. de Claviers, that old and very important patient of Louvet.

Pierre knew the marquis well, and although he had for him the antipathy of one social class for another, his innate sense of justice compelled him to esteem the great nobleman's greatness of soul. No, the châtelain of Grandchamp, who bestowed pensions on scores of old servants,—only two months since, his factotum was bewailing the fact at the family table!—had not parted, without weighty reasons, from one whom he had had in his service so many years.

What were those reasons? This question had been haunting the physician for several days, with such persistent and increasing distress, that it had occurred to him to seek an answer to it from Landri. He had been deterred by very diverse considerations. It will be recalled that their relations had never been perfectly simple. It was hard for the plebeian to ask the titled man if his, the plebeian's, father had been guilty of any offence contrary to honor. It was painful, too, for the physician, who had learned, in the delirium of a death-agony, the secret of an illegitimate birth, to seek a meeting with the son of the patient,—a meeting over which that consciousness would hover like a pall, especially as Pierre knew the terms of Jaubourg's will, and he did the child of that adulterous connection the justice to believe that M. de Claviers' acceptance of the legacy was torture to him.

One can imagine now the shock that it caused him, as he sat at work one afternoon in his little study, littered with books and pamphlets, when the maid handed him a card on which he read: "Comte de Claviers-Grandchamp." Fate, which is wont to teach such lessons, brought those two men face to face, who were born and reared under such widely different conditions, and who were undergoing, unknown to each other, the same universal ordeal of heredity, whereof one of the ancients said: "We shall be punished, either in our own persons or in those of our descendants, for the sins we have committed in this world." This is the principle, at once mysterious and natural, moral and physiological, which, by uniting persons of the same blood, creates the Family and Society.