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You are boys good boys " The sentences, spoken in varying tones, were variously emphasized. The words were nothing, but the expression! That made us friends of ten years' standing at once. Marcas, on hearing us coming, had covered up his papers; we understood that it would be taking a liberty to allude to his means of subsistence, and felt ashamed of having watched him.
Marcas had just risen to toil at his copying, for he had refused our assistance in spite of our most earnest entreaties. We had offered to take it in turns to copy a batch of manuscript, so that he should do but a third of his distasteful task; he had been quite angry, and we had ceased to insist. We heard the sound of gentlemanly boots in the passage, and raised our heads, looking at each other.
It became known to us that Marcas did not utter fifteen sentences in a month; he never talked to anybody, nor said a word to himself in his dreadful garret. "The Ruins of Palmyra are terribly silent!" said Juste. This taciturnity in a man whose appearance was so imposing was strangely significant.
Z. Marcas lived next door to me in my ungainly, ill-smelling hotel of the Rue Racine; I dined at my villainous restaurant with Lousteau and with Rastignac: if a curricle nearly ran me down at a street-crossing, Maxime de Trailles would be the driver. I dined, I say, at a poor restaurant and lived in a poor hotel; and this was not from need, but sentiment.
"AUGUST, 1830," said Marcas in solemn tones, holding out his hand towards Paris; "AUGUST, the offspring of Youth which bound the sheaves, and of Intellect which had ripened the harvest, forgot to provide for Youth and Intellect. "Youth will explode like the boiler of a steam-engine.
He did them in the hope that his patron would put him in a position to be elected deputy; Marcas wished for nothing but a loan that might enable him to purchase a house in Paris, the qualification required by law. Richard III. asked for nothing but his horse.
Thousands of names were considered and rejected, and it was only after his companion, utterly worn out by fatigue, had flatly refused to drag his weary limbs through more than one additional street, that Balzac suddenly saw upon a sign the name "Marcas," and gave a shout of joy at having finally secured what he was seeking.
Marcas expressed the greatest contempt for the Government; he seemed to doubt what the fate of France might be, and it was this doubt that had made him ill. He had, he thought, detected treason in the heart of power, not tangible, seizable treason, the result of facts, but the treason of a system, the subordination of national interests to selfish ends.
By the time when Marcas thought himself duly equipped, France was torn by intestine divisions arising from the triumph of the House of Orleans over the elder branch of the Bourbons. The field of political warfare is evidently changed. Civil war henceforth cannot last for long, and will not be fought out in the provinces.
But I give you my word of honor, Humann dressed Marcas, and, being an artist, turned him out as a political personage ought to be dressed. Juste lent Marcas two hundred francs in gold, the product of two watches bought on credit, and pawned at the Mont-de-Piete.
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