Oh, that I should be dying for her, must still adore her, always see her through my potations, see her still when I was overcome with wine, or in the arms of courtesans; and know that I was a target for her scornful jests!
Oh, that I should be unable to tear the love of her out of my breast and to fling it at her feet!
"Well, I quickly exhausted my funds, but owing to those three years of discipline, I enjoyed the most robust health, and on the day that I found myself without a penny I felt remarkably well.
In order to carry on the process of dying, I signed bills at short dates, and the day came when they must be met.
Painful excitements! but how they quicken the pulses of youth!
I was not prematurely aged; I was young yet, and full of vigor and life.
"At my first debt all my virtues came to life; slowly and despairingly they seemed to pace towards me; but I could compound with them—they were like aged aunts that begin with a scolding and end by bestowing tears and money upon you.
"Imagination was less yielding; I saw my name bandied about through every city in Europe.
'One's name is oneself' says Eusebe Salverte.
After these excursions I returned to the room I had never quitted, like a doppelganger in a German tale, and came to myself with a start.
"I used to see with indifference a banker's messenger going on his errands through the streets of Paris, like a commercial Nemesis, wearing his master's livery—a gray coat and a silver badge; but now I hated the species in advance.
One of them came one morning to ask me to meet some eleven bills that I had scrawled my name upon.
My signature was worth three thousand francs! Taking me altogether, I myself was not worth that amount.
Sheriff's deputies rose up before me, turning their callous faces upon my despair, as the hangman regards the criminal to whom he says,
'It has just struck half-past three.' I was in the power of their clerks; they could scribble my name, drag it through the mire, and jeer at it.
I was a defaulter.
Has a debtor any right to himself?
Could not other men call me to account for my way of living?
Why had I eaten puddings a la chipolata?
Why had I iced my wine?
Why had I slept, or walked, or thought, or amused myself when I had not paid them?
"At any moment, in the middle of a poem, during some train of thought, or while I was gaily breakfasting in the pleasant company of my friends, I might look to see a gentleman enter in a coat of chestnut-brown, with a shabby hat in his hand.
This gentleman's appearance would signify my debt, the bill I had drawn; the spectre would compel me to leave the table to speak to him, blight my spirits, despoil me of my cheerfulness, of my mistress, of all I possessed, down to my very bedstead.
"Remorse itself is more easily endured. Remorse does not drive us into the street nor into the prison of Sainte-Pelagie; it does not force us into the detestable sink of vice. Remorse only brings us to the scaffold, where the executioner invests us with a certain dignity; as we pay the extreme penalty, everybody believes in our innocence; but people will not credit a penniless prodigal with a single virtue.
"My debts had other incarnations. There is the kind that goes about on two feet, in a green cloth coat, and blue spectacles, carrying umbrellas of various hues; you come face to face with him at the corner of some street, in the midst of your mirth. These have the detestable prerogative of saying,
'M. de Valentin owes me something, and does not pay.
I have a hold on him.
He had better not show me any offensive airs!'
You must bow to your creditors, and moreover bow politely.
'When are you going to pay me?' say they.
And you must lie, and beg money of another man, and cringe to a fool seated on his strong-box, and receive sour looks in return from these horse-leeches; a blow would be less hateful; you must put up with their crass ignorance and calculating morality.
A debt is a feat of the imaginative that they cannot appreciate.
A borrower is often carried away and over-mastered by generous impulses; nothing great, nothing magnanimous can move or dominate those who live for money, and recognize nothing but money.
I myself held money in abhorrence.
"Or a bill may undergo a final transformation into some meritorious old man with a family dependent upon him.
My creditor might be a living picture for Greuze, a paralytic with his children round him, a soldier's widow, holding out beseeching hands to me.
Terrible creditors are these with whom we are forced to sympathize, and when their claims are satisfied we owe them a further debt of assistance.
"The night before the bills fell due, I lay down with the false calm of those who sleep before their approaching execution, or with a duel in prospect, rocked as they are by delusive hopes.
But when I woke, when I was cool and collected, when I found myself imprisoned in a banker's portfolio, and floundering in statements covered with red ink—then my debts sprang up everywhere, like grasshoppers, before my eyes. There were my debts, my clock, my armchairs; my debts were inlaid in the very furniture which I liked best to use.
These gentle inanimate slaves were to fall prey to the harpies of the Chatelet, were to be carried off by the broker's men, and brutally thrown on the market.
Ah, my property was a part of myself!
"The sound of the door-bell rang through my heart; while it seemed to strike at me, where kings should be struck at—in the head.
Mine was a martyrdom, without heaven for its reward.
For a magnanimous nature, debt is a hell, and a hell, moreover, with sheriff's officers and brokers in it.
An undischarged debt is something mean and sordid; it is a beginning of knavery; it is something worse, it is a lie; it prepares the way for crime, and brings together the planks for the scaffold.
My bills were protested.
Three days afterwards I met them, and this is how it happened.
"A speculator came, offering to buy the island in the Loire belonging to me, where my mother lay buried. I closed with him.
When I went to his solicitor to sign the deeds, I felt a cavern-like chill in the dark office that made me shudder; it was the same cold dampness that had laid hold upon me at the brink of my father's grave.
I looked upon this as an evil omen.