Z. Marcas

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Z. Marcas

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Title: Z. Marcas
Author: Honore de Balzac
Translator: Clara Bell and others
Release Date: November 20, 2005 [EBook #1841]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ASCII
*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK Z.
MARCAS ***

Produced by Dagny; and John Bickers

Z. MARCAS

BY
HONORE DE BALZAC

Translated by Clara Bell and others

DEDICATION
To His Highness Count William of Wurtemberg, as a token of the
Author's respectful gratitude.
DE BALZAC.

Z. MARCAS

I never saw anybody, not even among the most remarkable men of the
day, whose appearance was so striking as this man's; the study of his
countenance at first gave me a feeling of great melancholy, and at last
produced an almost painful impression.
There was a certain harmony between the man and his name. The Z.
preceding Marcas, which was seen on the addresses of his letters, and
which he never omitted from his signature, as the last letter of the
alphabet, suggested some mysterious fatality.
MARCAS! say this two-syllabled name again and again; do you not
feel as if it had some sinister meaning? Does it not seem to you that its
owner must be doomed to martyrdom? Though foreign, savage, the
name has a right to be handed down to posterity; it is well constructed,
easily pronounced, and has the brevity that beseems a famous name. Is
it not pleasant as well as odd? But does it not sound unfinished?
I will not take it upon myself to assert that names have no influence on

the destiny of men. There is a certain secret and inexplicable concord or
a visible discord between the events of a man's life and his name which
is truly surprising; often some remote but very real correlation is
revealed. Our globe is round; everything is linked to everything else.
Some day perhaps we shall revert to the occult sciences.
Do you not discern in that letter Z an adverse influence? Does it not
prefigure the wayward and fantastic progress of a storm-tossed life?
What wind blew on that letter, which, whatever language we find it in,
begins scarcely fifty words? Marcas' name was Zephirin; Saint
Zephirin is highly venerated in Brittany, and Marcas was a Breton.
Study the name once more: Z Marcas! The man's whole life lies in this
fantastic juxtaposition of seven letters; seven! the most significant of all
the cabalistic numbers. And he died at five-and-thirty, so his life
extended over seven lustres.
Marcas! Does it not hint of some precious object that is broken with a
fall, with or without a crash?

I had finished studying the law in Paris in 1836. I lived at that time in
the Rue Corneille in a house where none but students came to lodge,
one of those large houses where there is a winding staircase quite at the
back lighted below from the street, higher up by borrowed lights, and at
the top by a skylight. There were forty furnished rooms --furnished as
students' rooms are! What does youth demand more than was here
supplied? A bed, a few chairs, a chest of drawers, a looking-glass, and a
table. As soon as the sky is blue the student opens his window.
But in this street there are no fair neighbors to flirt with. In front is the
Odeon, long since closed, presenting a wall that is beginning to go
black, its tiny gallery windows and its vast expanse of slate roof. I was
not rich enough to have a good room; I was not even rich enough to
have a room to myself. Juste and I shared a double-bedded room on the
fifth floor.

On our side of the landing there were but two rooms--ours and a
smaller one, occupied by Z. Marcas, our neighbor. For six months Juste
and I remained in perfect ignorance of the fact. The old woman who
managed the house had indeed told us that the room was inhabited, but
she had added that we should not be disturbed, that the occupant was
exceedingly quiet. In fact, for those six months, we never met our
fellow-lodger, and we never heard a sound in his room, in spite of the
thinness of the partition that divided us--one of those walls of lath and
plaster which are common in Paris houses.
Our room, a little over seven feet high,