文档介绍：MELMOTH RECONCILED
MELMOTH
RECONCILED
BY HONORE DE BALZAC
Translator Ellen Marriage
To Monsieur le General Baron de Pommereul, a token of the
friendship between our fathers, which survives in their sons.
1
MELMOTH RECONCILED
There is a special variety of human nature obtained in the Social
Kingdom by a process analogous to that of the gardener's craft in the
Vegetable Kingdom, to wit, by the forcing-house--a species of hybrid
which can be raised neither from seed nor from slips. This product is
known as the Cashier, an anthropomorphous growth, watered by religious
doctrine, trained up in fear of the guillotine, pruned by vice, to flourish on
a third floor with an estimable wife by his side and an uninteresting family.
The number of cashiers in Paris must always be a problem for the
physiologist. Has any one as yet been able to state correctly the terms of
the proportion sum wherein the cashier figures as the unknown X? Where
will you find the man who shall live with wealth, like a cat with a caged
mouse? This man, for further qualification, shall be capable of sitting
boxed in behind an iron grating for seven or eight hours a day during
seven-eighths of the year, perched upon a cane-seated chair in a space as
narrow as a lieutenant's cabin on board a man-of-war. Such a man must be
able to defy anchylosis of the knee and thigh joints; he must have a soul
above meanness, in order to live meanly; must lose all relish for money by
dint of handling it. Demand this peculiar specimen of any creed,
educational system, school, or institution you please, and select Paris, that
city of fiery ordeals and branch establishment of hell, as the soil in which
to plant the said cashier. So be it. Creeds, schools, institutions and moral
systems, all human rules and regulations, great and small, will, one after
another, present much the same face that an intimate friend turns upon you
when you ask him to lend you a thousand francs. With a dolorous