第21章

"Two days later," resumed the worthy man, "I met one of those men who are neither friends nor strangers, with whom we have relations from time to time, and call acquaintances,--a certain Monsieur Barillaud, who remarked accidentally, /a propos/ of the 'Peruviens,' that the author was a friend of his.'Then you know citizen Mongenod?' I said.

"In those days we were obliged by law to call each other 'citizen,'"said Monsieur Alain to Godefroid, by way of parenthesis.Then he continued his narrative:--"The citizen looked at me, exclaiming, 'I wish I never had known him;for he has several times borrowed money of me, and shown his friendship by not returning it.He is a queer fellow,--good-hearted and all that, but full of illusions! always an imagination on fire! Iwill do him this justice,--he does not mean to deceive; but as he deceives himself about everything, he manages to behave like a dishonest man.' 'How much does he owe you?' I asked.'Oh! a good many hundred francs.He's a basket with a hole in the bottom.Nobody knows where his money goes; perhaps he doesn't know himself.' 'Has he any resources?' 'Well, yes,' said Barillaud, laughing; 'just now he is talking of buying land among the savages in the United States.' Icarried away with me the drop of vinegar which casual gossip thus put into my heart, and it soured all my feelings.I went to see my old master, in whose office Mongenod and I had studied law; he was now my counsel.When I told him about my loan to Mongenod and the manner in which I had acted,--'What!' he cried, 'one of my old clerks to behave in that way! You ought to have put him off till the next day and come to see me.You would then have found out that I have forbidden my clerks to let Mongenod into this office.Within the last year he has borrowed three hundred francs of me in silver,--an enormous sum at present rates.Three days before he breakfasted with you I met him on the street, and he gave such a piteous account of his poverty that Ilet him have two louis.' 'If I have been the dupe of a clever comedian,' I said to Bordin, 'so much the worse for him, not for me.

But tell me what to do.' 'You must try to get from him a written acknowledgment; for a debtor, however, insolvent he may be, may become solvent, and then he will pay.' Thereupon Bordin took from a tin box a case on which I saw the name of Mongenod; he showed me three receipts of a hundred francs each.'The next time he comes I shall have him admitted, and I shall make him add the interest and the two louis, and give me a note for the whole.I shall, at any rate, have things properly done, and be in a position to obtain payment.' 'Well,' said Ito Bordin, 'can you have my matter set right so far, as well as yours?

for I know you are a good man, and what you do will be right.' 'I have remained master of my ground,' he said; 'but when persons behave as you have done they are at the mercy of a man who can snap his fingers at them.As for me, I don't choose that any man should get the better of me,--get the better of a former attorney to the Chatelet!--ta-ra-ra! Every man to whom a sum of money is lent as heedlessly as you lent yours to Mongenod, ends, after a certain time, by thinking that money his own.It is no longer your money, it is /his/ money; you become his creditor,--an inconvenient, unpleasant person.A debtor will then try to get rid of you by some juggling with his conscience, and out of one hundred men in his position, seventy-five will do their best never to see or hear of you again.' 'Then you think only twenty-five men in a hundred are honest?' 'Did I say that?' he replied, smiling maliciously.'The estimate is too high?'"Monsieur Alain paused to put the fire together; that done, he resumed:--"Two weeks later I received a letter from Bordin asking me to go to his office and get my receipt.I went.'I tried to get fifty of your louis for you,' he said, 'but the birds had flown.Say good-by to your yellow boys; those pretty canaries are off to other climes.You have had to do with a sharper; that's what he is.He declared to me that his wife and father-in-law had gone to the United States with sixty of your louis to buy land; that he intended to follow, for the purpose, he said, of making a fortune and paying his debts; the amount of which, carefully drawn up, he confided to me, requesting me to keep an eye on what became of his creditors.Here is a list of the items,'

continued Bordin, showing me a paper from which he read the total,--'Seventeen thousand francs in coin; a sum with which a house could be bought that would bring in two thousand francs a year.' After replacing the list in the case, Bordin gave me a note for a sum equivalent to a hundred louis in gold, with a letter in which Mongenod admitted having received my hundred louis, on which he owed interest.

'So now I am all right,' I said to Bordin.'He cannot deny the debt,'

replied my old master; 'but where there are no funds, even the king--Ishould say the Directory--can't enforce rights.' I went home.

Believing that I had been robbed in a way intentionally screened from the law, I withdrew my esteem from Mongenod, and resigned myself philosophically.

"If I have dwelt on these details, which are so commonplace and seem so slight," said the worthy man, looking at Godefroid, "it is not without good reason.I want to explain to you how I was led to act, as most men act, in defiance of the rules which savages observe in the smallest matters.Many persons would justify themselves by the opinion of so excellent a man as Bordin; but to-day I know myself to have been inexcusable.When it comes to condemning one of our fellows, and withdrawing our esteem from him, we should act from our own convictions only.But have we any right to make our heart a tribunal before which we arraign our neighbor? Where is the law? what is our standard of judgment? That which in us is weakness may be strength in our neighbor.So many beings, so many different circumstances for every act; and there are no two beings exactly alike in all humanity.