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Cousin Pons

by Honoré de Balzac · English · Gutenberg #1856 · 652,804 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Cousin Pons

Author: Honoré de Balzac

Translator: Ellen Marriage


        
Release date: August 1, 1999 [eBook #1856]
                Most recently updated: February 18, 2025

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1856

Credits: Produced by John Bickers, and Dagny, and David Widger


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK COUSIN PONS ***




COUSIN PONS


By Honore De Balzac



Translated by Ellen Marriage




COUSIN PONS


Towards three o’clock in the afternoon of one October day in the year
1844, a man of sixty or thereabouts, whom anybody might have credited
with more than his actual age, was walking along the Boulevard des
Italiens with his head bent down, as if he were tracking some one. There
was a smug expression about the mouth--he looked like a merchant who
has just done a good stroke of business, or a bachelor emerging from
a boudoir in the best of humors with himself; and in Paris this is
the highest degree of self-satisfaction ever registered by a human
countenance.

As soon as the elderly person appeared in the distance, a smile broke
out over the faces of the frequenters of the boulevard, who daily, from
their chairs, watch the passers-by, and indulge in the agreeable pastime
of analyzing them. That smile is peculiar to Parisians; it says so many
things--ironical, quizzical, pitying; but nothing save the rarest of
human curiosities can summon that look of interest to the faces of
Parisians, sated as they are with every possible sight.

A saying recorded of Hyacinthe, an actor celebrated for his repartees,
will explain the archaeological value of the old gentleman, and the
smile repeated like an echo by all eyes. Somebody once asked Hyacinthe
where the hats were made that set the house in a roar as soon as he
appeared. “I don’t have them made,” he said; “I keep them!” So also
among the million actors who make up the great troupe of Paris, there
are unconscious Hyacinthes who “keep” all the absurd freaks of vanished
fashions upon their backs; and the apparition of some bygone decade will
startle you into laughter as you walk the streets in bitterness of soul
over the treason of one who was your friend in the past.

In some respects the passer-by adhered so faithfully to the fashions
of the year 1806, that he was not so much a burlesque caricature as a
reproduction of the Empire period. To an observer, accuracy of detail in
a revival of this sort is extremely valuable, but accuracy of detail,
to be properly appreciated, demands the critical attention of an expert
_flaneur_; while the man in the street who raises a laugh as soon as he
comes in sight is bound to be one of those outrageous exhibitions which
stare you in the face, as the saying goes, and produce the kind of
effect which an actor tries to secure for the success of his entry. The
elderly person, a thin, spare man, wore a nut-brown spencer over a coat
of uncertain green, with white metal buttons. A man in a spencer in the
year 1844! it was as if Napoleon himself had vouchsafed to come to life
again for a couple of hours.

The spencer, as its name indicates, was the invention of an English
lord, vain, doubtless, of his handsome shape. Some time before the Peace
of Amiens, this nobleman solved the problem of covering the bust without
destroying the outlines of the figure and encumbering the person with
the hideous boxcoat, now finishing its career on the backs of aged
hackney cabmen; but, elegant figures being in the minority, the success
of the spencer was short-lived in France, English though it was.

At the sight of the spencer, men of forty or fifty mentally invested
the wearer with top-boots, pistachio-colored kerseymere small clothes
adorned with a knot of ribbon; and beheld themselves in the costumes of
their youth. Elderly ladies thought of former conquests; but the younger
men were asking each other why the aged Alcibiades had cut off the
skirts of his overcoat. The rest of the costume was so much in keeping
with the spencer, that you would not have hesitated to call the wearer
“an Empire man,” just as you call a certain kind of furniture “Empire
furniture;” yet the newcomer only symbolized the Empire for those who
had known that great and magnificent epoch at any rate _de visu_, for a
certain accuracy of memory was needed for the full appreciation of the
costume, and even now the Empire is so far away that not every one of us
can picture it in its Gallo-Grecian reality.

The stranger’s hat, for instance, tipped to the back of his head so as
to leave almost the whole forehead bare, recalled a certain jaunty air,
with which civilians and officials attempted to swagger it with military
men; but the hat itself was a shocking specimen of the fifteen-franc
variety. Constant friction with a pair of enormous ears had left their
marks which no brush could efface from the underside of the brim; the
silk tissue (as usual) fitted badly over the cardboard foundation, and
hung in wrinkles here and there; and some skin-disease (apparently) had
attacked the nap in spite of the hand which rubbed it down of a morning.

Beneath the hat, which seemed ready to drop off at any moment, lay
an expanse of countenance grotesque and droll, as the faces which the
Chinese alone of all people can imagine for their quaint curiosities.
The broad visage was as full of holes as a colander, honeycombed with
the shadows of the dints, hollowed out like a Roman mask. It set all
the laws of anatomy at defiance. Close inspection failed to detect the
substructure. Where you expected to find a bone, you discovered a layer
of cartilaginous tissue, and the hollows of an ordinary human face were
here filled out with flabby bosses. A pair of gray eyes, red-rimmed
and lashless, looked forlornly out of a countenance which was flattened
something after the fashion of a pumpkin, and surmounted by a Don
Quixote nose that rose out of it like a monolith above a plain. It was
the kind of nose, as Cervantes must surely have explained somewhere,
which denotes an inborn enthusiasm for all things great, a tendency
which is apt to degenerate into credulity.

And yet, though the man’s ugliness was something almost ludicrous, it
aroused not the slightest inclination to laugh. The exceeding melancholy
which found an outlet in the poor man’s faded eyes reached the mocker
himself and froze the gibes on his lips; for all at once the thought
arose that this was a human creature to whom Nature had forbidden any
expression of love or tenderness, since such expression could only be
painful or ridiculous to the woman he loved. In the presence of such
misfortune a Frenchman is silent; to him it seems the most cruel of all
afflictions--to be unable to please!

The man so ill-favored was dressed after the fashion of shabby
gentility, a fashion which the rich not seldom try to copy. He wore
low shoes beneath gaiters of the pattern worn by the Imperial Guard,
doubtless for the sake of economy, because they kept the socks clean.
The rusty tinge of his black breeches, like the cut and the white or
shiny line of the creases, assigned the date of the purchase some three
years back. The roomy garments failed to disguise the lean proportions
of the wearer, due apparently rather to constitution than to a
Pythagorean regimen, for the worthy man was endowed with thick lips
and a sensual mouth; and when he smiled, displayed a set of white teeth
which would have done credit to a shark.

A shawl-waistcoat, likewise of black cloth, was supplemented by a white
under-waistcoat, and yet again beneath this gleamed the edge of a red
knitted under-jacket, to put you in mind of Garat’s five waistcoats.
A huge white muslin stock with a conspicuous bow, invented by some
exquisite to charm “the charming sex” in 1809, projected so far above
the wearer’s chin that the lower part of his face was lost, as it were,
in a muslin abyss. A silk watch-guard, plaited to resemble the keepsakes
made of hair, meandered down the shirt front and secured his watch from
the improbable theft. The greenish coat, though older by some three
years than the breeches, was remarkably neat; the black velvet collar
and shining metal buttons, recently renewed, told of carefulness which
descended even to trifles.

The particular manner of fixing the hat on the occiput, the triple
waistcoat, the vast cravat engulfing the chin, the gaiters, the metal
buttons on the greenish coat,--all these reminiscences of Imperial
fashions were blended with a sort of afterwaft and lingering perfume of
the coquetry of the Incroyable--with an indescribable finical something
in the folds of the garments, a certain air of stiffness and correctness
in the demeanor that smacked of the school of David, that recalled
Jacob’s spindle-legged furniture.

At first sight, moreover, you set him down either for the gentleman by
birth fallen a victim to some degrading habit, or for the man of small
independent means whose expenses are calculated to such a nicety that
the breakage of a windowpane, a rent in a coat, or a visit from the
philanthropic pest who asks you for subscriptions to a charity, absorbs
the whole of a month’s little surplus of pocket-money. If you had seen
him that afternoon, you would have wondered how that grotesque face came
to be lighted up with a smile; usually, surely, it must have worn
the dispirited, passive look of the obscure toiler condemned to labor
without ceasing for the barest necessaries of life. Yet when you
noticed that the odd-looking old man was carrying some object (evidently
precious) in his right hand with a mother’s care; concealing it under
the skirts of his coat to keep it from collisions in the crowd, and
still more, when you remarked that important air always assumed by an
idler when intrusted with a commission, you would have suspected him of
recovering some piece of lost property, some modern equivalent of the
marquise’s poodle; you would have recognized the assiduous gallantry of
the “man of the Empire” returning in triumph from his mission to some
charming woman of sixty, reluctant as yet to dispense with the daily
visit of her elderly _attentif_.

In Paris only among great cities will you see such spectacles as this;
for of her boulevards Paris makes a stage where a never-ending drama is
played gratuitously by the French nation in the interests of Art.

In spite of the rashly assumed spencer, you would scarcely have thought,
after a glance at the contours of the man’s bony frame, that this was an
artist--that conventional type which is privileged, in something of the
same way as a Paris gamin, to represent riotous living to the bourgeois
and philistine mind, the most _mirific_ joviality, in short (to use the
old Rabelaisian word newly taken into use). Yet this elderly person had
once taken the medal and the traveling scholarship; he had composed
the first cantata crowned by the Institut at the time of the
re-establishment of the Academie de Rome; he was M. Sylvain Pons, in
fact--M. Sylvain Pons, whose name appears on the covers of well-known
sentimental songs trilled by our mothers, to say nothing of a couple
of operas, played in 1815 and 1816, and divers unpublished scores. The
worthy soul was now ending his days as the conductor of an orchestra
in a boulevard theatre, and a music master in several young ladies’
boarding-schools, a post for which his face particularly recommended
him. He was entirely dependent upon his earnings. Running about to give
private lessons at his age!--Think of it. How many a mystery lies in
that unromantic situation!

But the last man to wear the spencer carried something about him besides
his Empire Associations; a warning and a lesson was written large over
that triple waistcoat. Wherever he went, he exhibited, without fee or
charge, one of the many victims of the fatal system of competition which
still prevails in France in spite of a century of trial without result;
for Poisson de Marigny, brother of the Pompadour and Director of Fine
Arts, somewhere about 1746 invented this method of applying pressure to
the brain. That was a hundred years ago. Try if you can count upon your
fingers the men of genius among the prizemen of those hundred years.

In the first place, no deliberate effort of schoolmaster or
administrator can replace the miracles of chance which produce great
men: of all the mysteries of generation, this most defies the ambitious
modern scientific investigator. In the second--the ancient Egyptians
(we are told) invented incubator-stoves for hatching eggs; what would be
thought of Egyptians who should neglect to fill the beaks of the callow
fledglings? Yet this is precisely what France is doing. She does
her utmost to produce artists by the artificial heat of competitive
examination; but, the sculptor, painter, engraver, or musician once
turned out by this mechanical process, she no more troubles herself
about them and their fate than the dandy cares for yesterday’s flower in
his buttonhole. And so it happens that the really great man is a Greuze,
a Watteau, a Felicien David, a Pagnesi, a Gericault, a Decamps, an
Auber, a David d’Angers, an Eugene Delacroix, or a Meissonier--artists
who take but little heed of _grande prix_, and spring up in the open
field under the rays of that invisible sun called Vocation.

To resume. The Government sent Sylvain Pons to Rome to make a great
musician of himself; and in Rome Sylvain Pons acquired a taste for
the antique and works of art. He became an admirable judge of those
masterpieces of the brain and hand which are summed up by the useful
neologism “bric-a-brac;” and when the child of Euterpe returned to
Paris somewhere about the year 1810, it was in the character of a rabid
collector, loaded with pictures, statuettes, frames, wood-carving,
ivories, enamels, porcelains, and the like. He had sunk the greater
part of his patrimony, not so much in the purchases themselves as on the
expenses of transit; and every penny inherited from his mother had
been spent in the course of a three-years’ travel in Italy after the
residence in Rome came to an end. He had seen Venice, Milan, Florence,
Bologna, and Naples leisurely, as he wished to see them, as a dreamer of
dreams, and a philosopher; careless of the future, for an artist looks
to his talent for support as the _fille de joie_ counts upon her beauty.

All through those splendid years of travel Pons was as happy as was
possible to a man with a great soul, a sensitive nature, and a face so
ugly that any “success with the fair” (to use the stereotyped formula of
1809) was out of the question; the realities of life always fell short
of the ideals which Pons created for himself; the world without was
not in tune with the soul within, but Pons had made up his mind to the
dissonance. Doubtless the sense of beauty that he had kept pure and
living in his inmost soul was the spring from which the delicate,
graceful, and ingenious music flowed and won him reputation between 1810
and 1814.

Every reputation founded upon the fashion or the fancy of the hour, or
upon the short-lived follies of Paris, produces its Pons. No place in
the world is so inexorable in great things; no city of the globe so
disdainfully indulgent in small. Pons’ notes were drowned before long in
floods of German harmony and the music of Rossini; and if in 1824 he
was known as an agreeable musician, a composer of various drawing-room
melodies, judge if he was likely to be famous in 183l! In 1844, the year
in which the single drama of this obscure life began, Sylvain Pons was
of no more value than an antediluvian semiquaver; dealers in music had
never heard of his name, though he was still composing, on scanty pay,
for his own orchestra or for neighboring theatres.

And yet, the worthy man did justice to the great masters of our day; a
masterpiece finely rendered brought tears to his eyes; but his religion
never bordered on mania, as in the case of Hoffmann’s Kreislers; he kept
his enthusiasm to himself; his delight, like the paradise reached by
opium or hashish, lay within his own soul.

The gift of admiration, of comprehension, the single faculty by which
the ordinary man becomes the brother of the poet, is rare in the city
of Paris, that inn whither all ideas, like travelers, come to stay for
awhile; so rare is it, that Pons surely deserves our respectful esteem.
His personal failure may seem anomalous, but he frankly admitted that he
was weak in harmony. He had neglected the study of counterpoint; there
was a time when he might have begun his studies afresh and held his
own among modern composers, when he might have been, not certainly a
Rossini, but a Herold. But he was alarmed by the intricacies of modern
orchestration; and at length, in the pleasures of collecting, he found
such ever-renewed compensation for his failure, that if he had been made
to choose between his curiosities and the fame of Rossini--will it be
believed?--Pons would have pronounced for his beloved collection.

Pons was of the opinion of Chenavard, the print-collector, who laid it
down as an axiom--that you only fully enjoy the pleasure of looking at
your Ruysdael, Hobbema, Holbein, Raphael, Murillo, Greuze, Sebastian del
Piombo, Giorgione, Albrecht Durer, or what not, when you have paid less
than sixty francs for your picture. Pons never gave more than a hundred
francs for any purchase. If he laid out as much as fifty francs, he was
careful to assure himself beforehand that the object was worth three
thousand. The most beautiful thing in the world, if it cost three
hundred francs, did not exist for Pons. Rare had been his bargains; but
he possessed the three qualifications for success--a stag’s legs, an
idler’s disregard of time, and the patience of a Jew.

This system, carried out for forty years, in Rome or Paris alike, had
borne its fruits. Since Pons returned from Italy, he had regularly spent
about two thousand francs a year upon a collection of masterpieces of
every sort and description, a collection hidden away from all eyes but
his own; and now his catalogue had reached the incredible number of
1907. Wandering about Paris between 1811 and 1816, he had picked up
many a treasure for ten francs, which would fetch a thousand or twelve
hundred to-day. Some forty-five thousand canvases change hands annually
in Paris picture sales, and these Pons had sifted through year by year.
Pons had Sevres porcelain, _pate tendre_, bought of Auvergnats, those
satellites of the Black Band who sacked chateaux and carried off the
marvels of Pompadour France in their tumbril carts; he had, in fact,
collected the drifted wreck of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries;
he recognized the genius of the French school, and discerned the merit
of the Lepautres and Lavallee-Poussins and the rest of the great obscure
creators of the Genre Louis Quinze and the Genre Louis Seize. Our modern
craftsmen now draw without acknowledgment from them, pore incessantly
over the treasures of the Cabinet des Estampes, borrow adroitly, and
give out their _pastiches_ for new inventions. Pons had obtained many a
piece by exchange, and therein lies the ineffable joy of the
collector. The joy of buying bric-a-brac is a secondary delight; in
the give-and-take of barter lies the joy of joys. Pons had begun
by collecting snuff-boxes and miniatures; his name was unknown in
bric-a-bracology, for he seldom showed himself in salesrooms or in the
shops of well-known dealers; Pons was not aware that his treasures had
any commercial value.

The late lamented Dusommerard tried his best to gain Pons’ confidence,
but the prince of bric-a-brac died before he could gain an entrance to
the Pons museum, the one private collection which could compare with
the famous Sauvageot museum. Pons and M. Sauvageot indeed resembled each
other in more ways than one. M. Sauvageot, like Pons, was a musician;
he was likewise a comparatively poor man, and he had collected his
bric-a-brac in much the same way, with the same love of art, the same
hatred of rich capitalists with well-known names who collect for the
sake of running up prices as cleverly as possible. There was yet another
point of resemblance between the pair; Pons, like his rival competitor
and antagonist, felt in his heart an insatiable craving after specimens
of the craftsman’s skill and miracles of workmanship; he loved them as
a man might love a fair mistress; an auction in the salerooms in the
Rue des Jeuneurs, with its accompaniments of hammer strokes and brokers’
men, was a crime of _lese-bric-a-brac_ in Pons’ eyes. Pons’ museum was
for his own delight at every hour; for the soul created to know and
feel all the beauty of a masterpiece has this in common with the
lover--to-day’s joy is as great as the joy of yesterday; possession
never palls; and a masterpiece, happily, never grows old. So the object
that he held in his hand with such fatherly care could only be a “find,”
 carried off with what affection amateurs alone know!

After the first outlines of this biographical sketch, every one will
cry at once, “Why! this is the happiest man on earth, in spite of
his ugliness!” And, in truth, no spleen, no dullness can resist the
counter-irritant supplied by a “craze,” the intellectual moxa of a
hobby. You who can no longer drink of “the cup of pleasure,” as it has
been called through all ages, try to collect something, no matter what
(people have been known to collect placards), so shall you receive the
small change for the gold ingot of happiness. Have you a hobby? You have
transferred pleasure to the plane of ideas. And yet, you need not
envy the worthy Pons; such envy, like all kindred sentiments, would be
founded upon a misapprehension.

With a nature so sensitive, with a soul that lived by tireless
admiration of the magnificent achievements of art, of the high rivalry
between human toil and the work of Nature--Pons was a slave to that one
of the Seven Deadly Sins with which God surely will deal least hardly;
Pons was a glutton. A narrow income, combined with a passion for
bric-a-brac, condemned him to a regimen so abhorrent to a discriminating
palate, that, bachelor as he was, he had cut the knot of the problem by
dining out every day.

Now, in the time of the Empire, celebrities were more sought after than
at present, perhaps because there were so few of them, perhaps because
they made little or no political pretension. In those days, besides,
you could set up for a poet, a musician, or a painter, with so little
expense. Pons, being regarded as the probable rival of Nicolo, Paer, and
Berton, used to receive so many invitations, that he was forced to keep
a list of engagements, much as barristers note down the cases for which
they are retained. And Pons behaved like an artist. He presented his
amphitryons with copies of his songs, he “obliged” at the pianoforte,
he brought them orders for boxes at the Feydeau, his own theatre, he
organized concerts, he was not above taking the fiddle himself sometimes
in a relation’s house, and getting up a little impromptu dance. In those
days, all the handsome men in France were away at the wars exchanging
sabre-cuts with the handsome men of the Coalition. Pons was said to
be, not ugly, but “peculiar-looking,” after the grand rule laid down by
Moliere in Eliante’s famous couplets; but if he sometimes heard himself
described as a “charming man” (after he had done some fair lady a
service), his good fortune went no further than words.

It was between the years 1810 and 1816 that Pons contracted the unlucky
habit of dining out; he grew accustomed to see his hosts taking pains
over the dinner, procuring the first and best of everything, bringing
out their choicest vintages, seeing carefully to the dessert, the
coffee, the liqueurs, giving him of their best, in short; the best,
moreover, of those times of the Empire when Paris was glutted with
kings and queens and princes, and many a private house emulated royal
splendours.

People used to play at Royalty then as they play nowadays at parliament,
creating a whole host of societies with presidents, vice-presidents,
secretaries and what not--agricultural societies, industrial societies,
societies for the promotion of sericulture, viticulture, the growth of
flax, and so forth. Some have even gone so far as to look about them for
social evils in order to start a society to cure them.

But to return to Pons. A stomach thus educated is sure to react upon the
owner’s moral fibre; the demoralization of the man varies directly with
his progress in culinary sapience. Voluptuousness, lurking in every
secret recess of the heart, lays down the law therein. Honor and
resolution are battered in breach. The tyranny of the palate has never
been described; as a necessity of life it escapes the criticism of
literature; yet no one imagines how many have been ruined by the table.
The luxury of the table is indeed, in this sense, the courtesan’s one
competitor in Paris, besides representing in a manner the credit side in
another account, where she figures as the expenditure.

With Pons’ decline and fall as an artist came his simultaneous
transformation from invited guest to parasite and hanger-on; he could
not bring himself to quit dinners so excellently served for the Spartan
broth of a two-franc ordinary. Alas! alas! a shudder ran through him at
the mere thought of the great sacrifices which independence required him
to make. He felt that he was capable of sinking to even lower depths
for the sake of good living, if there were no other way of enjoying the
first and best of everything, of guzzling (vulgar but expressive word)
nice little dishes carefully prepared. Pons lived like a bird, pilfering
his meal, flying away when he had taken his fill, singing a few notes by
way of return; he took a certain pleasure in the thought that he lived
at the expense of society, which asked of him--what but the trifling
toll of grimaces? Like all confirmed bachelors, who hold their lodgings
in horror, and live as much as possible in other people’s houses, Pons
was accustomed to the formulas and facial contortions which do duty for
feeling in the world; he used compliments as small change; and as far as
others were concerned, he was satisfied with the labels they bore, and
never plunged a too-curious hand into the sack.

This not intolerable phase lasted for another ten years. Such years!
Pons’ life was closing with a rainy autumn. All through those years he
contrived to dine without expense by making himself necessary in the
houses which he frequented. He took the first step in the downward path
by undertaking a host of small commissions; many and many a time Pons
ran on errands instead of the porter or the servant; many a purchase he
made for his entertainers. He became a kind of harmless, well-meaning
spy, sent by one family into another; but he gained no credit with those
for whom he trudged about, and so often sacrificed self-respect.

“Pons is a bachelor,” said they; “he is at a loss to know what to do
with his time; he is only too glad to trot about for us.--What else
would he do?”

Very soon the cold which old age spreads about itself began to set in;
the communicable cold which sensibly lowers the social temperature,
especially if the old man is ugly and poor. Old and ugly and poor--is
not this to be thrice old? Pons’ winter had begun, the winter which
brings the reddened nose, and frost-nipped cheeks, and the numbed
fingers, numb in how many ways!

Invitations very seldom came for Pons now. So far from seeking the
society of the parasite, every family accepted him much as they accepted
the taxes; they valued nothing that Pons could do for them; real
services from Pons counted for nought. The family circles in which the
worthy artist revolved had no respect for art or letters; they went down
on their knees to practical results; they valued nothing but the fortune
or social position acquired since the year 1830. The bourgeoisie is
afraid of intellect and genius, but Pons’ spirit and manner were not
haughty enough to overawe his relations, and naturally he had come at
last to be accounted less than nothing with them, though he was not
altogether despised.

He had suffered acutely among them, but, like all timid creatures, he
kept silence as to his pain; and so by degrees schooled himself to hide
his feelings, and learned to take sanctuary in his inmost self.
Many superficial persons interpret this conduct by the short word
“selfishness;” and, indeed, the resemblance between the egoist and the
solitary human creature is strong enough to seem to justify the harsher
verdict; and this is especially true in Paris, where nobody observes
others closely, where all things pass swift as waves, and last as little
as a Ministry.

So Cousin Pons was accused of selfishness (behind his back); and if the
world accuses any one, it usually finds him guilty and condemns him into
the bargain. Pons bowed to the decision. Do any of us know how such a
timid creature is cast down by an unjust judgment? Who will ever paint
all that the timid suffer? This state of things, now growing daily
worse, explains the sad expression on the poor old musician’s face;
he lived by capitulations of which he was ashamed. Every time we sin
against self-respect at the bidding of the ruling passion, we rivet
its hold upon us; the more that passion requires of us, the stronger
it grows, every sacrifice increasing, as it were, the value of a
satisfaction for which so much has been given up, till the negative
sum-total of renouncements looms very large in a man’s imagination.
Pons, for instance, after enduring the insolently patronizing looks of
some bourgeois, incased in buckram of stupidity, sipped his glass of
port or finished his quail with breadcrumbs, and relished something of
the savor of revenge, besides. “It is not too dear at the price!” he
said to himself.

After all, in the eyes of the moralist, there were extenuating
circumstances in Pons’ case. Man only lives, in fact, by some personal
satisfaction. The passionless, perfectly righteous man is not human; he
is a monster, an angel wanting wings. The angel of Christian mythology
has nothing but a head. On earth, the righteous person is the
sufficiently tiresome Grandison, for whom the very Venus of the
Crosswords is sexless.

Setting aside one or two commonplace adventures in Italy, in which
probably the climate accounted for his success, no woman had ever smiled
upon Pons. Plenty of men are doomed to this fate. Pons was an abnormal
birth; the child of parents well stricken in years, he bore the stigma
of his untimely genesis; his cadaverous complexion might have been
contracted in the flask of spirit-of-wine in which science preserves
some extraordinary foetus. Artist though he was, with his tender,
dreamy, sensitive soul, he was forced to accept the character which
belonged to his face; it was hopeless to think of love, and he remained
a bachelor, not so much of choice as of necessity. Then Gluttony, the
sin of the continent monk, beckoned to Pons; he rushed upon temptation,
as he had thrown his whole soul into the adoration of art and the cult
of music. Good cheer and bric-a-brac gave him the small change for the
love which could spend itself in no other way. As for music, it was
his profession, and where will you find the man who is in love with
his means of earning a livelihood? For it is with a profession as
with marriage: in the long length you are sensible of nothing but the
drawbacks.

Brillat-Savarin has deliberately set himself to justify the gastronome,
but perhaps even he has not dwelt sufficiently on the reality of the
pleasures of the table. The demands of digestion upon the human economy
produce an internal wrestling-bout of human forces which rivals the
highest degree of amorous pleasure. The gastronome is conscious of an
expenditure of vital power, an expenditure so vast that the brain is
atrophied (as it were), that a second brain, located in the diaphragm,
may come into play, and the suspension of all the faculties is in itself
a kind of intoxication. A boa constrictor gorged with an ox is so stupid
with excess that the creature is easily killed. What man, on the wrong
side of forty, is rash enough to work after dinner? And remark in the
same connection, that all great men have been moderate eaters. The
exhilarating effect of the wing of a chicken upon invalids recovering
from serious illness, and long confined to a stinted and carefully
chosen diet, has been frequently remarked. The sober Pons, whose whole
enjoyment was concentrated in the exercise of his digestive organs, was
in the position of chronic convalescence; he looked to his dinner to
give him the utmost degree of pleasurable sensation, and hitherto he had
procured such sensations daily. Who dares to bid farewell to old
habit? Many a man on the brink of suicide has been plucked back on the
threshold of death by the thought of the cafe where he plays his nightly
game of dominoes.

In the year 1835, chance avenged Pons for the indifference of womankind
by finding him a prop for his declining years, as the saying goes; and
he, who had been old from his cradle, found a support in friendship.
Pons took to himself the only life-partner permitted to him among his
kind--an old man and a fellow-musician.

But for La Fontaine’s fable, _Les Deux Amis_, this sketch should have
borne the title of _The Two Friends_; but to take the name of this
divine story would surely be a deed of violence, a profanation from
which every true man of letters would shrink. The title ought to be
borne alone and for ever by the fabulist’s masterpiece, the revelation
of his soul, and the record of his dreams; those three words were set
once and for ever by the poet at the head of a page which is his by
a sacred right of ownership; for it is a shrine before which all
generations, all over the world, will kneel so long as the art of
printing shall endure.

Pons’ friend gave lessons on the pianoforte. They met and struck up
an acquaintance in 1834, one prize day at a boarding-school; and so
congenial were their ways of thinking and living, that Pons used to say
that he had found his friend too late for his happiness. Never, perhaps,
did two souls, so much alike, find each other in the great ocean of
humanity which flowed forth, in disobedience to the will of God, from
its source in the Garden of Eden. Before very long the two musicians
could not live without each other. Confidences were exchanged, and in
a week’s time they were like brothers. Schmucke (for that was his name)
had not believed that such a man as Pons existed, nor had Pons imagined
that a Schmucke was possible. Here already you have a sufficient
description of the good couple; but it is not every mind that takes
kindly to the concise synthetic method, and a certain amount of
demonstration is necessary if the credulous are to accept the
conclusion.

This pianist, like all other pianists, was a German. A German, like the
eminent Liszt and the great Mendelssohn, and Steibelt, and Dussek, and
Meyer, and Mozart, and Doelher, and Thalberg, and Dreschok, and Hiller,
and Leopold Hertz, Woertz, Karr, Wolff, Pixis, and Clara Wieck--and
all Germans, generally speaking. Schmucke was a great musical composer
doomed to remain a music master, so utterly did his character lack the
audacity which a musical genius needs if he is to push his way to the
front. A German’s naivete does not invariably last him through his life;
in some cases it fails after a certain age; and even as a cultivator
of the soil brings water from afar by means of irrigation channels, so,
from the springs of his youth, does the Teuton draw the simplicity which
disarms suspicion--the perennial supplies with which he fertilizes his
labors in every field of science, art, or commerce. A crafty Frenchman
here and there will turn a Parisian tradesman’s stupidity to good
account in the same way. But Schmucke had kept his child’s simplicity
much as Pons continued to wear his relics of the Empire--all
unsuspectingly. The true and noble-hearted German was at once the
theatre and the audience, making music within himself for himself
alone. In this city of Paris he lived as a nightingale lives among the
thickets; and for twenty years he sang on, mateless, till he met with a
second self in Pons. [See _Une Fille d’Eve_.]

Both Pons and Schmucke were abundantly given, both by heart and
disposition, to the peculiarly German sentimentality which shows itself
alike in childlike ways--in a passion for flowers, in that form of
nature-worship which prompts a German to plant his garden-beds with big
glass globes for the sake of seeing miniature pictures of the view which
he can behold about him of a natural size; in the inquiring turn of mind
that sets a learned Teuton trudging three hundred miles in his gaiters
in search of a fact which smiles up in his face from a wayside spring,
or lurks laughing under the jessamine leaves in the back-yard; or (to
take a final instance) in the German craving to endow every least detail
in creation with a spiritual significance, a craving which produces
sometimes Hoffmann’s tipsiness in type, sometimes the folios with which
Germany hedges the simplest questions round about, lest haply any fool
should fall into her intellectual excavations; and, indeed, if you
fathom these abysses, you find nothing but a German at the bottom.

Both friends were Catholics. They went to Mass and performed the duties
of religion together; and, like children, found nothing to tell their
confessors. It was their firm belief that music is to feeling and
thought as thought and feeling are to speech; and of their converse on
this system there was no end. Each made response to the other in orgies
of sound, demonstrating their convictions, each for each, like lovers.

Schmucke was as absent-minded as Pons was wide-awake. Pons was a
collector, Schmucke a dreamer of dreams; Schmucke was a student of
beauty seen by the soul, Pons a preserver of material beauty. Pons would
catch sight of a china cup and buy it in the time that Schmucke took to
blow his nose, wondering the while within himself whether the musical
phrase that was ringing in his brain--the _motif_ from Rossini or
Bellini or Beethoven or Mozart--had its origin or its counterpart in the
world of human thought and emotion. Schmucke’s economies were controlled
by an absent mind, Pons was a spendthrift through passion, and for both
the result was the same--they had not a penny on Saint Sylvester’s day.

Perhaps Pons would have given way under his troubles if it had not been
for this friendship; but life became bearable when he found some one to
whom he could pour out his heart. The first time that he breathed a
word of his difficulties, the good German had advised him to live as he
himself did, and eat bread and cheese at home sooner than dine abroad at
such a cost. Alas! Pons did not dare to confess that heart and stomach
were at war within him, that he could digest affronts which pained his
heart, and, cost what it might, a good dinner that satisfied his palate
was a necessity to him, even as your gay Lothario must have a mistress
to tease.

In time Schmucke understood; not just at once, for he was too much of
a Teuton to possess that gift of swift perception in which the French
rejoice; Schmucke understood and loved poor Pons the better. Nothing so
fortifies a friendship as a belief on the part of one friend that he is
superior to the other. An angel could not have found a word to say to
Schmucke rubbing his hands over the discovery of the hold that
gluttony had gained over Pons. Indeed, the good German adorned their
breakfast-table next morning with delicacies of which he went in search
himself; and every day he was careful to provide something new for his
friend, for they always breakfasted together at home.

If any one imagines that the pair could not escape ridicule in Paris,
where nothing is respected, he cannot know that city. When Schmucke
and Pons united their riches and poverty, they hit upon the economical
expedient of lodging together, each paying half the rent of the very
unequally divided second-floor of a house in the Rue de Normandie in the
Marais. And as it often happened that they left home together and walked
side by side along their beat of boulevard, the idlers of the quarter
dubbed them “the pair of nutcrackers,” a nickname which makes any
portrait of Schmucke quite superfluous, for he was to Pons as the famous
statue of the Nurse of Niobe in the Vatican is to the Tribune Venus.

Mme. Cibot, portress of the house in the Rue de Normandie, was the pivot
on which the domestic life of the nutcrackers turned; but Mme. Cibot
plays so large a part in the drama which grew out of their double
existence, that it will be more appropriate to give her portrait on her
first appearance in this Scene of Parisian Life.

One thing remains to be said of the characters of the pair of friends;
but this one thing is precisely the hardest to make clear to ninety-nine
readers out of a hundred in this forty-seventh year of the nineteenth
century, perhaps by reason of the prodigious financial development
brought about by the railway system. It is a little thing, and yet it
is so much. It is a question, in fact, of giving an idea of the extreme
sensitiveness of their natures. Let us borrow an illustration from the
railways, if only by way of retaliation, as it were, for the loans which
they levy upon us. The railway train of to-day, tearing over the metals,
grinds away fine particles of dust, grains so minute that a traveler
cannot detect them with the eye; but let a single one of those invisible
motes find its way into the kidneys, it will bring about that most
excruciating, and sometimes fatal, disease known as gravel. And our
society, rushing like a locomotive along its metaled track, is heedless
of the all but imperceptible dust made by the grinding of the wheels;
but it was otherwise with the two musicians; the invisible grains of
sand sank perpetually into the very fibres of their being, causing them
intolerable anguish of heart. Tender exceedingly to the pain of
others, they wept for their own powerlessness to help; and their
own susceptibilities were almost morbidly acute. Neither age nor the
continual spectacle of the drama of Paris life had hardened two souls
still young and childlike and pure; the longer they lived, indeed, the
more keenly they felt their inward suffering; for so it is, alas! with
natures unsullied by the world, with the quiet thinker, and with such
poets among the poets as have never fallen into any excess.

Since the old men began housekeeping together, the day’s routine was
very nearly the same for them both. They worked together in harness
in the fraternal fashion of the Paris cab-horse; rising every morning,
summer and winter, at seven o’clock, and setting out after breakfast
to give music lessons in the boarding-schools, in which, upon occasion,
they would take lessons for each other. Towards noon Pons repaired to
his theatre, if there was a rehearsal on hand; but all his spare moments
were spent in sauntering on the boulevards. Night found both of them in
the orchestra at the theatre, for Pons had found a place for Schmucke,
and upon this wise.

At the time of their first meeting, Pons had just received that
marshal’s baton of the unknown musical composer--an appointment as
conductor of an orchestra. It had come to him unasked, by a favor of
Count Popinot, a bourgeois hero of July, at that time a member of the
Government. Count Popinot had the license of a theatre in his gift,
and Count Popinot had also an old acquaintance of the kind that the
successful man blushes to meet. As he rolls through the streets of Paris
in his carriage, it is not pleasant to see his boyhood’s chum down at
heel, with a coat of many improbable colors and trousers innocent of
straps, and a head full of soaring speculations on too grand a scale to
tempt shy, easily scared capital. Moreover, this friend of his youth,
Gaudissart by name, had done not a little in the past towards founding
the fortunes of the great house of Popinot. Popinot, now a Count and a
peer of France, after twice holding a portfolio had no wish to shake off
“the Illustrious Gaudissart.” Quite otherwise. The pomps and vanities
of the Court of the Citizen-King had not spoiled the sometime druggist’s
kind heart; he wished to put his ex-commercial traveler in the way of
renewing his wardrobe and replenishing his purse. So when Gaudissart,
always an enthusiastic admirer of the fair sex, applied for the license
of a bankrupt theatre, Popinot granted it on condition that Pons (a
parasite of the Hotel Popinot) should be engaged as conductor of the
orchestra; and at the same time, the Count was careful to send certain
elderly amateurs of beauty to the theatre, so that the new manager might
be strongly supported financially by wealthy admirers of feminine charms
revealed by the costume of the ballet.

Gaudissart and Company, who, be it said, made their fortune, hit
upon the grand idea of operas for the people, and carried it out in a
boulevard theatre in 1834. A tolerable conductor, who could adapt or
even compose a little music upon occasion, was a necessity for ballets
and pantomimes; but the last management had so long been bankrupt, that
they could not afford to keep a transposer and copyist. Pons therefore
introduced Schmucke to the company as copier of music, a humble calling
which requires no small musical knowledge; and Schmucke, acting on
Pons’ advice, came to an understanding with the _chef-de-service_ at the
Opera-Comique, so saving himself the clerical drudgery.

The partnership between Pons and Schmucke produced one brilliant result.
Schmucke being a German, harmony was his strong point; he looked over
the instrumentation of Pons’ compositions, and Pons provided the airs.
Here and there an amateur among the audience admired the new pieces of
music which served as accompaniment to two or three great successes, but
they attributed the improvement vaguely to “progress.” No one cared to
know the composer’s name; like occupants of the _baignoires_, lost
to view of the house, to gain a view of the stage, Pons and Schmucke
eclipsed themselves by their success. In Paris (especially since the
Revolution of July) no one can hope to succeed unless he will push his
way _quibuscumque viis_ and with all his might through a formidable host
of competitors; but for this feat a man needs thews and sinews, and our
two friends, be it remembered, had that affection of the heart which
cripples all ambitious effort.

Pons, as a rule, only went to his theatre towards eight o’clock, when
the piece in favor came on, and overtures and accompaniments needed the
strict ruling of the baton; most minor theatres are lax in such matters,
and Pons felt the more at ease because he himself had been by no means
grasping in all his dealings with the management; and Schmucke, if
need be, could take his place. Time went by, and Schmucke became an
institution in the orchestra; the Illustrious Gaudissart said nothing,
but he was well aware of the value of Pons’ collaborator. He was obliged
to include a pianoforte in the orchestra (following the example of the
leading theatres); the instrument was placed beside the conductor’s
chair, and Schmucke played without increase of salary--a volunteer
supernumerary. As Schmucke’s character, his utter lack of ambition
or pretence became known, the orchestra recognized him as one of
themselves; and as time went on, he was intrusted with the often needed
miscellaneous musical instruments which form no part of the regular
band of a boulevard theatre. For a very small addition to his stipend,
Schmucke played the viola d’amore, hautboy, violoncello, and harp, as
well as the piano, the castanets for the _cachucha_, the bells, saxhorn,
and the like. If the Germans cannot draw harmony from the mighty
instruments of Liberty, yet to play all instruments of music comes to
them by nature.

The two old artists were exceedingly popular at the theatre, and took
its ways philosophically. They had put, as it were, scales over their
eyes, lest they should see the offences that needs must come when a
_corps de ballet_ is blended with actors and actresses, one of the most
trying combinations ever created by the laws of supply and demand for
the torment of managers, authors, and composers alike.

Every one esteemed Pons with his kindness and his modesty, his great
self-respect and respect for others; for a pure and limpid life wins
something like admiration from the worst nature in every social sphere,
and in Paris a fair virtue meets with something of the success of a
large diamond, so great a rarity it is. No actor, no dancer however
brazen, would have indulged in the mildest practical joke at the expense
of either Pons or Schmucke.

Pons very occasionally put in an appearance in the _foyer_; but all that
Schmucke knew of the theatre was the underground passage from the street
door to the orchestra. Sometimes, however, during an interval, the
good German would venture to make a survey of the house and ask a few
questions of the first flute, a young fellow from Strasbourg, who
came of a German family at Kehl. Gradually under the flute’s tuition
Schmucke’s childlike imagination acquired a certain amount of knowledge
of the world; he could believe in the existence of that fabulous
creature the _lorette_, the possibility of “marriages at the Thirteenth
Arrondissement,” the vagaries of the leading lady, and the contraband
traffic carried on by box-openers. In his eyes the more harmless forms
of vice were the lowest depths of Babylonish iniquity; he did not
believe the stories, he smiled at them for grotesque inventions. The
ingenious reader can see that Pons and Schmucke were exploited, to use
a word much in fashion; but what they lost in money they gained in
consideration and kindly treatment.

It was after the success of the ballet with which a run of success began
for the Gaudissart Company that the management presented Pons with a
piece of plate--a group of figures attributed to Benvenuto Cellini. The
alarming costliness of the gift caused talk in the green-room. It was
a matter of twelve hundred francs! Pons, poor honest soul, was for
returning the present, and Gaudissart had a world of trouble to persuade
him to keep it.

“Ah!” said the manager afterwards, when he told his partner of the
interview, “if we could only find actors up to that sample.”

In their joint life, outwardly so quiet, there was the one disturbing
element--the weakness to which Pons sacrificed, the insatiable craving
to dine out. Whenever Schmucke happened to be at home while Pons was
dressing for the evening, the good German would bewail this deplorable
habit.

“Gif only he vas ony fatter vor it!” he many a time cried.

And Schmucke would dream of curing his friend of his degrading vice,
for a true friend’s instinct in all that belongs to the inner life is
unerring as a dog’s sense of smell; a friend knows by intuition the
trouble in his friend’s soul, and guesses at the cause and ponders it in
his heart.

Pons, who always wore a diamond ring on the little finger of his right
hand, an ornament permitted in the time of the Empire, but ridiculous
to-day--Pons, who belonged to the “troubadour time,” the sentimental
periods of the first Empire, was too much a child of his age, too much
of a Frenchman to wear the expression of divine serenity which softened
Schmucke’s hideous ugliness. From Pons’ melancholy looks Schmucke knew
that the profession of parasite was growing daily more difficult and
painful. And, in fact, in that month of October 1844, the number of
houses at which Pons dined was naturally much restricted; reduced to
move round and round the family circle, he had used the word family in
far too wide a sense, as will shortly be seen.

M. Camusot, the rich silk mercer of the Rue des Bourdonnais, had married
Pons’ first cousin, Mlle. Pons, only child and heiress of one of the
well-known firm of Pons Brothers, court embroiderers. Pons’ own father
and mother retired from a firm founded before the Revolution of 1789,
leaving their capital in the business until Mlle. Pons’ father sold
it in 1815 to M. Rivet. M. Camusot had since lost his wife and married
again, and retired from business some ten years, and now in 1844 he was
a member of the Board of Trade, a deputy, and what not. But the Camusot
clan were friendly; and Pons, good man, still considered that he was
some kind of cousin to the children of the second marriage, who were not
relations, or even connected with him in any way.

The second Mme. Camusot being a Mlle. Cardot, Pons introduced himself as
a relative into the tolerably numerous Cardot family, a second bourgeois
tribe which, taken with its connections, formed quite as strong a clan
as the Camusots; for Cardot the notary (brother of the second Mme.
Camusot) had married a Mlle. Chiffreville; and the well-known family of
Chiffreville, the leading firm of manufacturing chemists, was closely
connected with the whole drug trade, of which M. Anselme Popinot was for
many years the undisputed head, until the Revolution of July plunged him
into the very centre of the dynastic movement, as everybody knows.
So Pons, in the wake of the Camusots and Cardots, reached the
Chiffrevilles, and thence the Popinots, always in the character of a
cousin’s cousin.

The above concise statement of Pons’ relations with his entertainers
explains how it came to pass that an old musician was received in 1844
as one of the family in the houses of four distinguished persons--to
wit, M. le Comte Popinot, peer of France, and twice in office; M.
Cardot, retired notary, mayor and deputy of an arrondissement in Paris;
M. Camusot senior, a member of the Board of Trade and the Municipal
Chamber and a peerage; and lastly, M. Camusot de Marville, Camusot’s son
by his first marriage, and Pons’ one genuine relation, albeit even he
was a first cousin once removed.

This Camusot, President of a Chamber of the Court of Appeal in Paris,
had taken the name of his estate at Marville to distinguish himself from
his father and a younger half brother.

Cardot the retired notary had married his daughter to his successor,
whose name was Berthier; and Pons, transferred as part of the
connection, acquired a right to dine with the Berthiers “in the presence
of a notary,” as he put it.

This was the bourgeois empyrean which Pons called his “family,” that
upper world in which he so painfully reserved his right to a knife and
fork.

Of all these houses, some ten in all, the one in which Pons ought to
have met with the kindest reception should by rights have been his own
cousin’s; and, indeed, he paid most attention to President Camusot’s
family. But, alas! Mme. Camusot de Marville, daughter of the Sieur
Thirion, usher of the cabinet to Louis XVIII. and Charles X., had never
taken very kindly to her husband’s first cousin, once removed. Pons had
tried to soften this formidable relative; he wasted his time; for in
spite of the pianoforte lessons which he gave gratuitously to Mlle.
Camusot, a young woman with hair somewhat inclined to red, it was
impossible to make a musician of her.

And now, at this very moment, as he walked with that precious object in
his hand, Pons was bound for the President’s house, where he always felt
as if he were at the Tuileries itself, so heavily did the solemn green
curtains, the carmelite-brown hangings, thick piled carpets, heavy
furniture, and general atmosphere of magisterial severity oppress his
soul. Strange as it may seem, he felt more at home in the Hotel Popinot,
Rue Basse-du-Rempart, probably because it was full of works of art; for
the master of the house, since he entered public life, had acquired a
mania for collecting beautiful things, by way of contrast no doubt, for
a politician is obliged to pay for secret services of the ugliest kind.

President de Marville lived in the Rue de Hanovre, in a house which his
wife had bought ten years previously, on the death of her parents, for
the Sieur and Dame Thirion left their daughter about a hundred and fifty
thousand francs, the savings of a lifetime. With its north aspect,
the house looks gloomy enough seen from the street, but the back looks
towards the south over the courtyard, with a rather pretty garden beyond
it. As the President occupied the whole of the first floor, once the
abode of a great financier of the time of Louis XIV., and the second
was let to a wealthy old lady, the house wore a look of dignified repose
befitting a magistrate’s residence. President Camusot had invested all
that he inherited from his mother, together with the savings of twenty
years, in the purchase of the splendid Marville estate; a chateau (as
fine a relic of the past as you will find to-day in Normandy) standing
in a hundred acres of park land, and a fine dependent farm, nominally
bringing in twelve thousand francs per annum, though, as it cost the
President at least a thousand crowns to keep up a state almost princely
in our days, his yearly revenue, “all told,” as the saying is, was a
bare nine thousand francs. With this and his salary, the President’s
income amounted to about twenty thousand francs; but though to all
appearance a wealthy man, especially as one-half of his father’s
property would one day revert to him as the only child of the first
marriage, he was obliged to live in Paris as befitted his official
position, and M. and Mme. de Marville spent almost the whole of their
incomes. Indeed, before the year 1834 they felt pinched.

This family schedule sufficiently explains why Mlle. de Marville, aged
three-and-twenty, was still unwed, in spite of a hundred thousand francs
of dowry and tempting prospects, frequently, skilfully, but so far
vainly, held out. For the past five years Pons had listened to Mme. la
Presidente’s lamentations as she beheld one young lawyer after another
led to the altar, while all the newly appointed judges at the Tribunal
were fathers of families already; and she, all this time, had displayed
Mlle. de Marville’s brilliant expectations before the undazzled eyes of
young Vicomte Popinot, eldest son of the great man of the drug trade,
he of whom it was said by the envious tongues of the neighborhood of the
Rue des Lombards, that the Revolution of July had been brought about at
least as much for his particular benefit as for the sake of the Orleans
branch.

Arrived at the corner of the Rue de Choiseul and the Rue de Hanovre,
Pons suffered from the inexplicable emotions which torment clear
consciences; for a panic terror such as the worst of scoundrels might
feel at sight of a policeman, an agony caused solely by a doubt as
to Mme. de Marville’s probable reception of him. That grain of sand,
grating continually on the fibres of his heart, so far from losing its
angles, grew more and more jagged, and the family in the Rue de Hanovre
always sharpened the edges. Indeed, their unceremonious treatment and
Pons’ depreciation in value among them had affected the servants; and
while they did not exactly fail in respect, they looked on the poor
relation as a kind of beggar.

Pons’ arch-enemy in the house was the ladies’-maid, a thin and wizened
spinster, Madeleine Vivet by name. This Madeleine, in spite of, nay,
perhaps on the strength of, a pimpled complexion and a viper-like length
of spine, had made up her mind that some day she would be Mme. Pons.
But in vain she dangled twenty thousand francs of savings before the
old bachelor’s eyes; Pons had declined happiness accompanied by so many
pimples. From that time forth the Dido of the ante-chamber, who fain had
called her master and mistress “cousin,” wreaked her spite in petty ways
upon the poor musician. She heard him on the stairs, and cried audibly,
“Oh! here comes the sponger!” She stinted him of wine when she waited at
dinner in the footman’s absence; she filled the water-glass to the brim,
to give him the difficult task of lifting it without spilling a drop;
or she would pass the old man over altogether, till the mistress of the
house would remind her (and in what a tone!--it brought the color to the
poor cousin’s face); or she would spill the gravy over his clothes. In
short, she waged petty war after the manner of a petty nature, knowing
that she could annoy an unfortunate superior with impunity.

Madeleine Vivet was Mme. de Marville’s maid and housekeeper. She had
lived with M. and Mme. Camusot de Marville since their marriage; she had
shared the early struggles in the provinces when M. Camusot was a judge
at Alencon; she had helped them to exist when M. Camusot, President
of the Tribunal of Mantes, came to Paris, in 1828, to be an examining
magistrate. She was, therefore, too much one of the family not to wish,
for reasons of her own, to revenge herself upon them. Beneath her desire
to pay a trick upon her haughty and ambitious mistress, and to call her
master her cousin, there surely lurked a long-stifled hatred, built up
like an avalanche, upon the pebble of some past grievance.

“Here comes your M. Pons, madame, still wearing that spencer of his!”
 Madeleine came to tell the Presidente. “He really might tell me how he
manages to make it look the same for five-and-twenty years together.”

Mme. Camusot de Marville, hearing a man’s footstep in the little
drawing-room between the large drawing-room and her bedroom, looked at
her daughter and shrugged her shoulders.

“You always make these announcements so cleverly that you leave me no
time to think, Madeleine.”

“Jean is out, madame, I was all alone; M. Pons rang the bell, I opened
the door; and as he is almost one of the family, I could not prevent him
from coming after me. There he is, taking off his spencer.”

“Poor little puss!” said the Presidente, addressing her daughter, “we
are caught. We shall have to dine at home now.--Let us see,” she added,
seeing that the “dear puss” wore a piteous face; “must we get rid of him
for good?”

“Oh! poor man!” cried Mlle. Camusot, “deprive him of one of his
dinners?”

Somebody coughed significantly in the next room by way of warning that
he could hear.

“Very well, let him come in!” said Mme. Camusot, looking at Madeleine
with another shrug.

“You are here so early, cousin, that you have come in upon us just as
mother was about to dress,” said Cecile Camusot in a coaxing tone. But
Cousin Pons had caught sight of the Presidente’s shrug, and felt so
cruelly hurt that he could not find a compliment, and contented himself
with the profound remark, “You are always charming, my little cousin.”

Then, turning to the mother, he continued with a bow:

“You will not take it amiss, I think, if I have come a little earlier
than usual, dear cousin; I have brought something for you; you once did
me the pleasure of asking me for it.”

Poor Pons! Every time he addressed the President, the President’s wife,
or Cecile as “cousin,” he gave them excruciating annoyance. As he spoke,
he draw a long, narrow cherry-wood box, marvelously carved, from his
coat-pocket.

“Oh, did I?--I had forgotten,” the lady answered drily.

It was a heartless speech, was it not? Did not those few words deny all
merit to the pains taken for her by the cousin whose one offence lay in
the fact that he was a poor relation?

“But it is very kind of you, cousin,” she added. “How much to I owe you
for this little trifle?”

Pons quivered inwardly at the question. He had meant the trinket as a
return for his dinners.

“I thought that you would permit me to offer it you----” he faltered
out.

“What?” said Mme. Camusot. “Oh! but there need be no ceremony between
us; we know each other well enough to wash our linen among ourselves. I
know very well that you are not rich enough to give more than you get.
And to go no further, it is quite enough that you should have spent a
good deal of time in running among the dealers--”

“If you were asked to pay the full price of the fan, my dear cousin, you
would not care to have it,” answered poor Pons, hurt and insulted; “it
is one of Watteau’s masterpieces, painted on both sides; but you may be
quite easy, cousin, I did not give one-hundredth part of its value as a
work of art.”

To tell a rich man that he is poor! you might as well tell the
Archbishop of Granada that his homilies show signs of senility. Mme. la
Presidente, proud of her husband’s position, of the estate of Marville,
and her invitations to court balls, was keenly susceptible on this
point; and what was worse, the remark came from a poverty-stricken
musician to whom she had been charitable.

“Then the people of whom you buy things of this kind are very stupid,
are they?” she asked quickly.

“Stupid dealers are unknown in Paris,” Pons answered almost drily.

“Then you must be very clever,” put in Cecile by way of calming the
dispute.

“Clever enough to know a Lancret, a Watteau, a Pater, or Greuze when
I see it, little cousin; but anxious, most of all, to please your dear
mamma.”

Mme. de Marville, ignorant and vain, was unwilling to appear to receive
the slightest trifle from the parasite; and here her ignorance served
her admirably, she did not even know the name of Watteau. And, on
the other hand, if anything can measure the extent of the collector’s
passion, which, in truth, is one of the most deeply seated of all
passions, rivaling the very vanity of the author--if anything can give
an idea of the lengths to which a collector will go, it is the audacity
which Pons displayed on this occasion, as he held his own against his
lady cousin for the first time in twenty years. He was amazed at his own
boldness. He made Cecile see the beauties of the delicate carving on the
sticks of this wonder, and as he talked to her his face grew serene
and gentle again. But without some sketch of the Presidente, it is
impossible fully to understand the perturbation of heart from which Pons
suffered.

Mme. de Marville had been short and fair, plump and fresh; at forty-six
she was as short as ever, but she looked dried up. An arched forehead
and thin lips, that had been softly colored once, lent a soured look to
a face naturally disdainful, and now grown hard and unpleasant with a
long course of absolute domestic rule. Time had deepened her fair hair
to a harsh chestnut hue; the pride of office, intensified by suppressed
envy, looked out of eyes that had lost none of their brightness nor
their satirical expression. As a matter of fact, Mme. Camusot de
Marville felt almost poor in the society of self-made wealthy bourgeois
with whom Pons dined. She could not forgive the rich retail druggist,
ex-president of the Commercial Court, for his successive elevations as
deputy, member of the Government, count and peer of France. She could
not forgive her father-in-law for putting himself forward instead of his
eldest son as deputy of his arrondissement after Popinot’s promotion to
the peerage. After eighteen years of services in Paris, she was still
waiting for the post of Councillor of the Court of Cassation for her
husband. It was Camusot’s own incompetence, well known at the Law
Courts, which excluded him from the Council. The Home Secretary of 1844
even regretted Camusot’s nomination to the presidency of the Court
of Indictments in 1834, though, thanks to his past experience as an
examining magistrate, he made himself useful in drafting decrees.

These disappointments had told upon Mme. de Marville, who, moreover, had
formed a tolerably correct estimate of her husband. A temper naturally
shrewish was soured till she grew positively terrible. She was not old,
but she had aged; she deliberately set herself to extort by fear all
that the world was inclined to refuse her, and was harsh and rasping
as a file. Caustic to excess she had few friends among women; she
surrounded herself with prim, elderly matrons of her own stamp, who lent
each other mutual support, and people stood in awe of her. As for poor
Pons, his relations with this fiend in petticoats were very much those
of a schoolboy with the master whose one idea of communication is the
ferule.

The Presidente had no idea of the value of the gift. She was puzzled by
her cousin’s sudden access of audacity.

“Then, where did you find this?” inquired Cecile, as she looked closely
at the trinket.

“In the Rue de Lappe. A dealer in second-hand furniture there had just
brought it back with him from a chateau that is being pulled down near
Dreux, Aulnay. Mme. de Pompadour used to spend part of her time there
before she built Menars. Some of the most splendid wood-carving ever
known has been saved from destruction; Lienard (our most famous living
wood-carver) had kept a couple of oval frames for models, as the _ne
plus ultra_ of the art, so fine it is.--There were treasures in that
place. My man found the fan in the drawer of an inlaid what-not, which
I should certainly have bought if I were collecting things of the
kind, but it is quite out of the question--a single piece of Riesener’s
furniture is worth three or four thousand francs! People here in
Paris are just beginning to find out that the famous French and
German marquetry workers of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth
centuries composed perfect pictures in wood. It is a collector’s
business to be ahead of the fashion. Why, in five years’ time, the
Frankenthal ware, which I have been collecting these twenty years, will
fetch twice the price of Sevres _pata tendre_.”

“What is Frankenthal ware?” asked Cecile.

“That is the name of the porcelain made by the Elector of the
Palatinate; it dates further back than our manufactory at Sevres; just
as the famous gardens at Heidelberg, laid waste by Turenne, had the bad
luck to exist before the garden of Versailles. Sevres copied Frankenthal
to a large extent.--In justice to the Germans, it must be said that they
have done admirable work in Saxony and in the Palatinate.”

Mother and daughter looked at one another as if Pons were speaking
Chinese. No one can imagine how ignorant and exclusive Parisians are;
they only learn what they are taught, and that only when they choose.

“And how do you know the Frankenthal ware when you see it?”

“Eh! by the mark!” cried Pons with enthusiasm. “There is a mark on every
one of those exquisite masterpieces. Frankenthal ware is marked with a
C and T (for Charles Theodore) interlaced and crowned. On old Dresden
china there are two crossed swords and the number of the order in gilt
figures. Vincennes bears a hunting-horn; Vienna, a V closed and barred.
You can tell Berlin by the two bars, Mayence by the wheel, and Sevres by
the two crossed L’s. The queen’s porcelain is marked A for Antoinette,
with a royal crown above it. In the eighteenth century, all the
crowned heads of Europe had rival porcelain factories, and workmen were
kidnaped. Watteau designed services for the Dresden factory; they fetch
frantic prices at the present day. One has to know what one is about
with them too, for they are turning out imitations now at Dresden.
Wonderful things they used to make; they will never make the like
again--”

“Oh! pshaw!”

“No, cousin. Some inlaid work and some kinds of porcelain will never be
made again, just as there will never be another Raphael, nor Titian,
nor Rembrandt, nor Van Eyck, nor Cranach.... Well, now! there are the
Chinese; they are very ingenious, very clever; they make modern copies
of their ‘grand mandarin’ porcelain, as it is called. But a pair of
vases of genuine ‘grand mandarin’ vases of the largest size, are worth,
six, eight, and ten thousand francs, while you can buy the modern
replicas for a couple of hundred!”

“You are joking.”

“You are astonished at the prices, but that is nothing, cousin. A dinner
service of Sevres _pate tendre_ (and _pate tendre_ is not porcelain)--a
complete dinner service of Sevres _pate tendre_ for twelve persons
is not merely worth a hundred thousand francs, but that is the price
charged on the invoice. Such a dinner-service cost fifteen thousand
francs at Sevres in 1750; I have seen the original invoices.”

“But let us go back to this fan,” said Cecile. Evidently in her opinion
the trinket was an old-fashioned thing.

“You can understand that as soon as your dear mamma did me the honor of
asking for a fan, I went round of all the curiosity shops in Paris, but
I found nothing fine enough. I wanted nothing less than a masterpiece
for the dear Presidente, and thought of giving her one that once
belonged to Marie Antoinette, the most beautiful of all celebrated
fans. But yesterday I was dazzled by this divine _chef-d’oeuvre_, which
certainly must have been ordered by Louis XV. himself. Do you ask how I
came to look for fans in the Rue de Lappe, among an Auvergnat’s stock of
brass and iron and ormolu furniture? Well, I myself believe that there
is an intelligence in works of art; they know art-lovers, they call to
them--‘Cht-tt!’”

Mme. de Marville shrugged her shoulders and looked at her daughter; Pons
did not notice the rapid pantomime.

“I know all those sharpers,” continued Pons, “so I asked him, ‘Anything
fresh to-day, Daddy Monistrol?’--(for he always lets me look over his
lots before the big buyers come)--and at that he began to tell me how
Lienard, that did such beautiful work for the Government in the Chapelle
de Dreux, had been at the Aulnay sale and rescued the carved panels out
of the clutches of the Paris dealers, while their heads were running
on china and inlaid furniture.--‘I did not do much myself,’ he went on,
‘but I may make my traveling expenses out of _this_,’ and he showed me
a what-not; a marvel! Boucher’s designs executed in marquetry, and with
such art!--One could have gone down on one’s knees before it.--‘Look,
sir,’ he said, ‘I have just found this fan in a little drawer; it was
locked, I had to force it open. You might tell me where I can sell
it’--and with that he brings out this little carved cherry-wood
box.--‘See,’ says he, ‘it is the kind of Pompadour that looks like
decorated Gothic.’--‘Yes,’ I told him, ‘the box is pretty; the box might
suit me; but as for the fan, Monistrol, I have no Mme. Pons to give the
old trinket to, and they make very pretty new ones nowadays; you can buy
miracles of painting on vellum cheaply enough. There are two thousand
painters in Paris, you know.’--And I opened out the fan carelessly,
keeping down my admiration, looked indifferently at those two exquisite
little pictures, touched off with an ease fit to send you into raptures.
I held Mme. de Pompadour’s fan in my hand! Watteau had done his utmost
for this.--‘What do you want for the what-not?’--‘Oh! a thousand
francs; I have had a bid already.’--I offered him a price for the fan
corresponding with the probable expenses of the journey. We looked each
other in the eyes, and I saw that I had my man. I put the fan back into
the box lest my Auvergnat should begin to look at it, and went into
ecstasies over the box; indeed, it is a jewel.--‘If I take it,’ said I,
‘it is for the sake of the box; the box tempts me. As for the what-not,
you will get more than a thousand francs for that. Just see how the
brass is wrought; it is a model. There is business in it.... It has
never been copied; it is a unique specimen, made solely for Mme. de
Pompadour’--and so on, till my man, all on fire for his what-not,
forgets the fan, and lets me have it for a mere trifle, because I have
pointed out the beauties of his piece of Riesener’s furniture. So here
it is; but it needs a great deal of experience to make such a bargain
as that. It is a duel, eye to eye; and who has such eyes as a Jew or an
Auvergnat?”

The old artist’s wonderful pantomime, his vivid, eager way of telling
the story of the triumph of his shrewdness over the dealer’s ignorance,
would have made a subject for a Dutch painter; but it was all thrown
away upon the audience. Mother and daughter exchanged cold, contemptuous
glances.--“What an oddity!” they seemed to say.

“So it amuses you?” remarked Mme. de Marville. The question sent a cold
chill through Pons; he felt a strong desire to slap the Presidente.

“Why, my dear cousin, that is the way to hunt down a work of art. You
are face to face with antagonists that dispute the game with you. It
is craft against craft! A work of art in the hands of a Norman, an
Auvergnat, or a Jew, is like a princess guarded by magicians in a fairy
tale.”

“And how can you tell that this is by Wat--what do you call him?”

“Watteau, cousin. One of the greatest eighteenth century painters
in France. Look! do you not see that it is his work?” (pointing to a
pastoral scene, court-shepherd swains and shepherdesses dancing in
a ring). “The movement! the life in it! the coloring! There it
is--see!--painted with a stroke of the brush, as a writing-master makes
a flourish with a pen. Not a trace of effort here! And, turn it over,
look!--a ball in a drawing-room. Summer and Winter! And what ornaments!
and how well preserved it is! The hinge-pin is gold, you see, and on
cleaning it, I found a tiny ruby at either side.”

“If it is so, cousin, I could not think of accepting such a valuable
present from you. It would be better to lay up the money for yourself,”
 said Mme. de Marville; but all the same, she asked no better than to
keep the splendid fan.

“It is time that it should pass from the service of Vice into the hands
of Virtue,” said the good soul, recovering his assurance. “It has taken
a century to work the miracle. No princess at Court, you may be sure,
will have anything to compare with it; for, unfortunately, men will do
more for a Pompadour than for a virtuous queen, such is human nature.”

“Very well,” Mme. de Marville said, laughing, “I will accept your
present.--Cecile, my angel, go to Madeleine and see that dinner is
worthy of your cousin.”

Mme. de Marville wished to make matters even. Her request, made aloud,
in defiance of all rules of good taste, sounded so much like an attempt
to repay at once the balance due to the poor cousin, that Pons flushed
red, like a girl found out in fault. The grain of sand was a little too
large; for some moments he could only let it work in his heart. Cecile,
a red-haired young woman, with a touch of pedantic affectation, combined
her father’s ponderous manner with a trace of her mother’s hardness. She
went and left poor Pons face to face with the terrible Presidente.

“How nice she is, my little Lili!” said the mother. She still called her
Cecile by this baby name.

“Charming!” said Pons, twirling his thumbs.

“I _cannot_ understand these times in which we live,” broke out the
Presidente. “What is the good of having a President of the Court of
Appeal in Paris and a Commander of the Legion of Honor for your father,
and for a grandfather the richest wholesale silk merchant in Paris, a
deputy, and a millionaire that will be a peer of France some of these
days?”

The President’s zeal for the new Government had, in fact, recently
been rewarded with a commander’s ribbon--thanks to his friendship with
Popinot, said the envious. Popinot himself, modest though he was, had,
as has been seen, accepted the title of count, “for his son’s sake,” he
told his numerous friends.

“Men look for nothing but money nowadays,” said Cousin Pons. “No one
thinks anything of you unless you are rich, and--”

“What would it have been if Heaven had spared my poor little Charles!--”
 cried the lady.

“Oh, with two children you would be poor,” returned the cousin. “It
practically means the division of the property. But you need not trouble
yourself, cousin; Cecile is sure to marry sooner or later. She is the
most accomplished girl I know.”

To such depths had Pons fallen by adapting himself to the company of
his entertainers! In their houses he echoed their ideas, and said the
obvious thing, after the manner of a chorus in a Greek play. He did not
dare to give free play to the artist’s originality, which had overflowed
in bright repartee when he was young; he had effaced himself, till he
had almost lost his individuality; and if the real Pons appeared, as he
had done a moment ago, he was immediately repressed.

“But I myself was married with only twenty thousand francs for my
portion--”

“In 1819, cousin. And it was _you_, a woman with a head on your
shoulders, and the royal protection of Louis XVIII.”

“Be still, my child is a perfect angel. She is clever, she has a warm
heart, she will have a hundred thousand francs on her wedding day, to
say nothing of the most brilliant expectations; and yet she stays on our
hands,” and so on and so on. For twenty minutes, Mme. de Marville talked
on about herself and her Cecile, pitying herself after the manner of
mothers in bondage to marriageable daughters.

Pons had dined at the house every week for twenty years, and Camusot de
Marville was the only cousin he had in the world; but he had yet to hear
the first word spoken as to his own affairs--nobody cared to know how he
lived. Here and elsewhere the poor cousin was a kind of sink down which
his relatives poured domestic confidences. His discretion was well
known; indeed, was he not bound over to silence when a single imprudent
word would have shut the door of ten houses upon him? And he must
combine his role of listener with a second part; he must applaud
continually, smile on every one, accuse nobody, defend nobody; from his
point of view, every one must be in the right. And so, in the house
of his kinsman, Pons no longer counted as a man; he was a digestive
apparatus.

In the course of a long tirade, Mme. Camusot de Marville avowed with due
circumspection that she was prepared to take almost any son-in-law with
her eyes shut. She was even disposed to think that at eight-and-forty or
so a man with twenty thousand francs a year was a good match.

“Cecile is in her twenty-third year. If it should fall out so
unfortunately that she is not married before she is five or
six-and-twenty, it will be extremely hard to marry her at all. When a
girl reaches that age, people want to know why she has been so long on
hand. We are a good deal talked about in our set. We have come to the
end of all the ordinary excuses--‘She is so young.--She is so fond of
her father and mother that she doesn’t like to leave them.--She is so
happy at home.--She is hard to please, she would like a good name--’ We
are beginning to look silly; I feel that distinctly. And besides, Cecile
is tired of waiting, poor child, she suffers--”

“In what way?” Pons was noodle enough to ask.

“Why, because it is humiliating to her to see all her girl friends
married before her,” replied the mother, with a duenna’s air.

“But, cousin, has anything happened since the last time that I had the
pleasure of dining here? Why do you think of men of eight-and-forty?”
 Pons inquired humbly.

“This has happened,” returned the Presidente. “We were to have had an
interview with a Court Councillor; his son is thirty years old and
very well-to-do, and M. de Marville would have obtained a post in
the audit-office for him and paid the money. The young man is a
supernumerary there at present. And now they tell us that he has taken
it into his head to rush off to Italy in the train of a duchess from the
Bal Mabille.... It is nothing but a refusal in disguise. The fact is,
the young man’s mother is dead; he has an income of thirty thousand
francs, and more to come at his father’s death, and they don’t care
about the match for him. You have just come in in the middle of all
this, dear cousin, so you must excuse our bad temper.”

While Pons was casting about for the complimentary answer which
invariably occurred to him too late when he was afraid of his host,
Madeleine came in, handed a folded note to the Presidente, and waited
for an answer. The note ran as follows:

  “DEAR MAMMA,--If we pretend that this note comes to you from papa
  at the Palais, and that he wants us both to dine with his friend
  because proposals have been renewed--then the cousin will go, and
  we can carry out our plan of going to the Popinots.”

“Who brought the master’s note?” the Presidente asked quickly.

“A lad from the Salle du Palais,” the withered waiting woman
unblushingly answered, and her mistress knew at once that Madeleine had
woven the plot with Cecile, now at the end of her patience.

“Tell him that we will both be there at half-past five.”

Madeleine had no sooner left the room than the Presidente turned to
Cousin Pons with that insincere friendliness which is about as grateful
to a sensitive soul as a mixture of milk and vinegar to the palate of an
epicure.

“Dinner is ordered, dear cousin; you must dine without us; my husband
has just sent word from the court that the question of the marriage has
been reopened, and we are to dine with the Councillor. We need not stand
on ceremony at all. Do just as if you were at home. I have no secrets
from you; I am perfectly open with you, as you see. I am sure you would
not wish to break off the little darling’s marriage.”

“_I_, cousin? On the contrary, I should like to find some one for her;
but in my circle--”

“Oh, that is not at all likely,” said the Presidente, cutting him short
insolently. “Then you will stay, will you not? Cecile will keep you
company while I dress.

“Oh! I can dine somewhere else, cousin.”

Cruelly hurt though he was by her way of casting up his poverty to
him, the prospect of being left alone with the servants was even more
alarming.

“But why should you? Dinner is ready; you may just as well have it; if
you do not, the servants will eat it.”

At that atrocious speech Pons started up as if he had received a shock
from a galvanic battery, bowed stiffly to the lady, and went to find his
spencer. Now, it so happened that the door of Cecile’s bedroom, beyond
the little drawing-room, stood open, and looking into the mirror, he
caught sight of the girl shaking with laughter as she gesticulated and
made signs to her mother. The old artist understood beyond a doubt that
he had been the victim of some cowardly hoax. Pons went slowly down the
stairs; he could not keep back the tears. He understood that he had been
turned out of the house, but why and wherefore he did not know.

“I am growing too old,” he told himself. “The world has a horror of
old age and poverty--two ugly things. After this I will not go anywhere
unless I am asked.”

Heroic resolve!

Downstairs the great gate was shut, as it usually is in houses occupied
by the proprietor; the kitchen stood exactly opposite the porter’s
lodge, and the door was open. Pons was obliged to listen while Madeleine
told the servants the whole story amid the laughter of the servants. She
had not expected him to leave so soon. The footman loudly applauded a
joke at the expense of a visitor who was always coming to the house and
never gave you more than three francs at the year’s end.

“Yes,” put in the cook; “but if he cuts up rough and does not come back,
there will be three francs the less for some of us on New Year’s day.”

“Eh! How is he to know?” retorted the footman.

“Pooh!” said Madeleine, “a little sooner or a little later--what
difference does it make? The people at the other houses where he dines
are so tired of him that they are going to turn him out.”

“The gate, if you please!”

Madeleine had scarcely uttered the words when they heard the old
musician’s call to the porter. It sounded like a cry of pain. There was
a sudden silence in the kitchen.

“He heard!” the footman said.

“Well, and if he did, so much the worser, or rather so much the better,”
 retorted Madeleine. “He is an arrant skinflint.”

Poor Pons had lost none of the talk in the kitchen; he heard it all,
even to the last word. He made his way home along the boulevards, in
the same state, physical and mental, as an old woman after a desperate
struggle with burglars. As he went he talked to himself in quick
spasmodic jerks; his honor had been wounded, and the pain of it drove
him on as a gust of wind whirls away a straw. He found himself at last
in the Boulevard du Temple; how he had come thither he could not tell.
It was five o’clock, and, strange to say, he had completely lost his
appetite.

But if the reader is to understand the revolution which Pons’ unexpected
return at that hour was to work in the Rue de Normandie, the promised
biography of Mme. Cibot must be given in this place.

Any one passing along the Rue de Normandie might be pardoned for
thinking that he was in some small provincial town. Grass runs to
seed in the street, everybody knows everybody else, and the sight of a
stranger is an event. The houses date back to the reign of Henry IV.,
when there was a scheme afoot for a quarter in which every street was to
be named after a French province, and all should converge in a handsome
square to which La France should stand godmother. The Quartier de
l’Europe was a revival of the same idea; history repeats itself
everywhere in the world, and even in the world of speculation.

The house in which the two musicians used to live is an old mansion with
a courtyard in front and a garden at the back; but the front part of the
house which gives upon the street is comparatively modern, built during
the eighteenth century when the Marais was a fashionable quarter. The
friends lived at the back, on the second floor of the old part of
the house. The whole building belongs to M. Pillerault, an old man of
eighty, who left matters very much in the hands of M. and Mme. Cibot,
his porters for the past twenty-six years.

Now, as a porter cannot live by his lodge alone, the aforesaid Cibot had
other means of gaining a livelihood; and supplemented his five per cent
on the rental and his faggot from every cartload of wood by his own
earnings as a tailor. In time Cibot ceased to work for the master
tailors; he made a connection among the little trades-people of the
quarter, and enjoyed a monopoly of the repairs, renovations, and fine
drawing of all the coats and trousers in three adjacent streets. The
lodge was spacious and wholesome, and boasted a second room; wherefore
the Cibot couple were looked upon as among the luckiest porters in the
arrondissement.

Cibot, small and stunted, with a complexion almost olive-colored by
reason of sitting day in day out in Turk-fashion on a table level with
the barred window, made about twelve or fourteen francs a week. He
worked still, though he was fifty-eight years old, but fifty-eight is
the porter’s golden age; he is used to his lodge, he and his room
fit each other like the shell and the oyster, and “he is known in the
neighborhood.”

Mme. Cibot, sometime opener of oysters at the _Cadran Bleu_, after all
the adventures which come unsought to the belle of an oyster-bar, left
her post for love of Cibot at the age of twenty-eight. The beauty of
a woman of the people is short-lived, especially if she is planted
espalier fashion at a restaurant door. Her features are hardened
by puffs of hot air from the kitchen; the color of the heeltaps of
customers’ bottles, finished in the company of the waiters, gradually
filters into her complexion--no beauty is full blown so soon as the
beauty of an oyster-opener. Luckily for Mme. Cibot, lawful wedlock and
a portress’ life were offered to her just in time; while she still
preserved a comeliness of a masculine order slandered by rivals of the
Rue de Normandie, who called her “a great blowsy thing,” Mme. Cibot
might have sat as a model to Rubens. Those flesh tints reminded you of
the appetizing sheen on a pat of Isigny butter; but plump as she was, no
woman went about her work with more agility. Mme. Cibot had attained the
time of life when women of her stamp are obliged to shave--which is as
much as to say that she had reached the age of forty-eight. A porter’s
wife with a moustache is one of the best possible guarantees of
respectability and security that a landlord can have. If Delacroix
could have seen Mme. Cibot leaning proudly on her broom handle, he would
assuredly have painted her as Bellona.

Strange as it may seem, the circumstances of the Cibots, man and wife
(in the style of an indictment), were one day to affect the lives of the
two friends; wherefore the chronicler, as in duty bound, must give some
particulars as to the Cibots’ lodge.

The house brought in about eight thousand francs for there were three
complete sets of apartments--back and front, on the side nearest the Rue
de Normandie, as well as the three floors in the older mansion between
the courtyard and the garden, and a shop kept by a marine store-dealer
named Remonencq, which fronted on the street. During the past few months
this Remonencq had begun to deal in old curiosities, and knew the
value of Pons’ collection so well that he took off his hat whenever the
musician came in or went out.

A sou in the livre on eight thousand francs therefore brought in about
four hundred francs to the Cibots. They had no rent to pay and no
expenses for firing; Cibot’s earnings amounted on an average to seven or
eight hundred francs, add tips at New Year, and the pair had altogether
in income of sixteen hundred francs, every penny of which they spent,
for the Cibots lived and fared better than working people usually do.
“One can only live once,” La Cibot used to say. She was born during the
Revolution, you see, and had never learned her Catechism.

The husband of this portress with the unblenching tawny eyes was an
object of envy to the whole fraternity, for La Cibot had not forgotten
the knowledge of cookery picked up at the _Cadran Bleu_. So it had come
to pass that the Cibots had passed the prime of life, and saw themselves
on the threshold of old age without a hundred francs put by for the
future. Well clad and well fed, they enjoyed among the neighbors, it is
true, the respect due to twenty-six years of strict honesty; for if
they had nothing of their own, they “hadn’t nothing belonging to nobody
else,” according to La Cibot, who was a prodigal of negatives. “There
wasn’t never such a love of a man,” she would say to her husband. Do you
ask why? You might as well ask the reason of her indifference in matters
of religion.

Both of them were proud of a life lived in open day, of the esteem in
which they were held for six or seven streets round about, and of the
autocratic rule permitted to them by the proprietor (“perprietor,” they
called him); but in private they groaned because they had no money lying
at interest. Cibot complained of pains in his hands and legs, and his
wife would lament that her poor, dear Cibot should be forced to work
at his age; and, indeed, the day is not far distant when a porter after
thirty years of such a life will cry shame upon the injustice of the
Government and clamor for the ribbon of the Legion of Honor. Every
time that the gossip of the quarter brought news of such and such a
servant-maid, left an annuity of three or four hundred francs after
eight or ten years of service, the porters’ lodges would resound with
complaints, which may give some idea of the consuming jealousies in the
lowest walks of life in Paris.

“Oh, indeed! It will never happen to the like of us to have our names
mentioned in a will! We have no luck, but we do more than servants,
for all that. We fill a place of trust; we give receipts, we are on the
lookout for squalls, and yet we are treated like dogs, neither more nor
less, and that’s the truth!”

“Some find fortune and some miss fortune,” said Cibot, coming in with a
coat.

“If I had left Cibot here in his lodge and taken a place as cook, we
should have our thirty thousand francs out at interest,” cried Mme.
Cibot, standing chatting with a neighbor, her hands on her prominent
hips. “But I didn’t understand how to get on in life; housed inside of a
snug lodge and firing found and want for nothing, but that is all.”

In 1836, when the friends took up their abode on the second floor, they
brought about a sort of revolution in the Cibot household. It befell
on this wise. Schmucke, like his friend Pons, usually arranged that the
porter or the porter’s wife should undertake the cares of housekeeping;
and being both of one mind on this point when they came to live in the
Rue de Normandie, Mme. Cibot became their housekeeper at the rate of
twenty-five francs per month--twelve francs fifty centimes for each
of them. Before the year was out, the emeritus portress reigned in the
establishment of the two old bachelors, as she reigned everywhere in
the house belonging to M. Pillerault, great uncle of Mme. le Comtesse
Popinot. Their business was her business; she called them “my
gentlemen.” And at last, finding the pair of nutcrackers as mild as
lambs, easy to live with, and by no means suspicious--perfect children,
in fact--her heart, the heart of a woman of the people, prompted her
to protect, adore, and serve them with such thorough devotion, that she
read them a lecture now and again, and saved them from the impositions
which swell the cost of living in Paris. For twenty-five francs a month,
the two old bachelors inadvertently acquired a mother.

As they became aware of Mme. Cibot’s full value, they gave her outspoken
praises, and thanks, and little presents which strengthened the bonds
of the domestic alliance. Mme. Cibot a thousand times preferred
appreciation to money payments; it is a well-known fact that the sense
that one is appreciated makes up for a deficiency in wages. And Cibot
did all that he could for his wife’s two gentlemen, and ran errands and
did repairs at half-price for them.

The second year brought a new element into the friendship between the
lodge and the second floor, and Schmucke concluded a bargain which
satisfied his indolence and desire for a life without cares. For thirty
sous per day, or forty-five francs per month, Mme. Cibot undertook
to provide Schmucke with breakfast and dinner; and Pons, finding his
friend’s breakfast very much to his mind, concluded a separate treaty
for that meal only at the rate of eighteen francs. This arrangement,
which added nearly ninety francs every month to the takings of the
porter and his wife, made two inviolable beings of the lodgers; they
became angels, cherubs, divinities. It is very doubtful whether the King
of the French, who is supposed to understand economy, is as well served
as the pair of nutcrackers used to be in those days.

For them the milk issued pure from the can; they enjoyed a free perusal
of all the morning papers taken by other lodgers, later risers, who
were told, if need be, that the newspapers had not come yet. Mme. Cibot,
moreover, kept their clothes, their rooms, and the landing as clean as
a Flemish interior. As for Schmucke, he enjoyed unhoped-for happiness;
Mme. Cibot had made life easy for him; he paid her about six francs
a month, and she took charge of his linen, washing, and mending.
Altogether, his expenses amounted to sixty-six francs per month (for
he spent fifteen francs on tobacco), and sixty-six francs multiplied by
twelve produces the sum total of seven hundred and ninety-two francs.
Add two hundred and twenty francs for rent, rates, and taxes, and you
have a thousand and twelve francs. Cibot was Schmucke’s tailor; his
clothes cost him on average a hundred and fifty francs, which further
swells the total to the sum of twelve hundred. On twelve hundred francs
per annum this profound philosopher lived. How many people in Europe,
whose one thought it is to come to Paris and live there, will be
agreeably surprised to learn that you may exist in comfort upon an
income of twelve hundred francs in the Rue de Normandie in the Marais,
under the wing of a Mme. Cibot.

Mme. Cibot, to resume the story, was amazed beyond expression to see
Pons, good man, return at five o’clock in the evening. Such a thing had
never happened before; and not only so, but “her gentleman” had given
her no greeting--had not so much as seen her!

“Well, well, Cibot,” said she to her spouse, “M. Pons has come in for a
million, or gone out of his mind!”

“That is how it looks to me,” said Cibot, dropping the coat-sleeve in
which he was making a “dart,” in tailor’s language.

The savory odor of a stew pervaded the whole courtyard, as Pons returned
mechanically home. Mme. Cibot was dishing up Schmucke’s dinner, which
consisted of scraps of boiled beef from a little cook-shop not above
doing a little trade of this kind. These morsels were fricasseed in
brown butter, with thin slices of onion, until the meat and vegetables
had absorbed the gravy and this true porter’s dish was browned to the
right degree. With that fricassee, prepared with loving care for Cibot
and Schmucke, and accompanied by a bottle of beer and a piece of cheese,
the old German music-master was quite content. Not King Solomon in all
his glory, be sure, could dine better than Schmucke. A dish of boiled
beef fricasseed with onions, scraps of _saute_ chicken, or beef and
parsley, or venison, or fish served with a sauce of La Cibot’s own
invention (a sauce with which a mother might unsuspectingly eat her
child),--such was Schmucke’s ordinary, varying with the quantity and
quality of the remnants of food supplied by boulevard restaurants to
the cook-shop in the Rue Boucherat. Schmucke took everything that “goot
Montame Zipod” gave him, and was content, and so from day to day “goot
Montame Zipod” cut down the cost of his dinner, until it could be served
for twenty sous.

“It won’t be long afore I find out what is the matter with him, poor
dear,” said Mme. Cibot to her husband, “for here is M. Schmucke’s dinner
all ready for him.”

As she spoke she covered the deep earthenware dish with a plate; and,
notwithstanding her age, she climbed the stair and reached the door
before Schmucke opened it to Pons.

“Vat is de matter mit you, mein goot friend?” asked the German, scared
by the expression of Pons’ face.

“I will tell you all about it; but I have come home to have dinner with
you--”

“Tinner! tinner!” cried Schmucke in ecstasy; “but it is impossible!” the
old German added, as he thought of his friend’s gastronomical tastes;
and at that very moment he caught sight of Mme. Cibot listening to the
conversation, as she had a right to do as his lawful housewife. Struck
with one of those happy inspirations which only enlighten a friend’s
heart, he marched up to the portress and drew her out to the stairhead.

“Montame Zipod,” he said, “der goot Pons is fond of goot dings; shoost
go rount to der _Catran Pleu_ und order a dainty liddle tinner, mit
anjovies und maggaroni. Ein tinner for Lugullus, in vact.”

“What is that?” inquired La Cibot.

“Oh! ah!” returned Schmucke, “it is veal _a la pourcheoise_”
 (_bourgeoise_, he meant), “a nice fisch, ein pottle off Porteaux, und
nice dings, der fery best dey haf, like groquettes of rice und shmoked
pacon! Bay for it, und say nodings; I vill gif you back de monny
to-morrow morning.”

Back went Schmucke, radiant and rubbing his hands; but his expression
slowly changed to a look of bewildered astonishment as he heard Pons’
story of the troubles that had but just now overwhelmed him in a moment.
He tried to comfort Pons by giving him a sketch of the world from his
own point of view. Paris, in his opinion, was a perpetual hurly-burly,
the men and women in it were whirled away by a tempestuous waltz; it
was no use expecting anything of the world, which only looked at the
outsides of things, “und not at der inderior.” For the hundredth time he
related how that the only three pupils for whom he had really cared, for
whom he was ready to die, the three who had been fond of him, and even
allowed him a little pension of nine hundred francs, each contributing
three hundred to the amount--his favorite pupils had quite forgotten
to come to see him; and so swift was the current of Parisian life which
swept them away, that if he called at their houses, he had not succeeded
in seeing them once in three years--(it is a fact, however, that
Schmucke had always thought fit to call on these great ladies at ten
o’clock in the morning!)--still, his pension was paid quarterly through
the medium of solicitors.

“Und yet, dey are hearts of gold,” he concluded. “Dey are my liddle
Saint Cecilias, sharming vimmen, Montame de Bordentuere, Montame de
Fantenesse, und Montame du Dilet. Gif I see dem at all, it is at die
Jambs Elusees, und dey do not see me... yet dey are ver’ fond of me, und
I might go to dine mit dem, und dey vould be ver’ bleased to see me; und
I might go to deir country-houses, but I vould much rader be mit mine
friend Bons, because I kann see him venefer I like, und efery tay.”

Pons took Schmucke’s hand and grasped it between his own. All that was
passing in his inmost soul was communicated in that tight pressure. And
so for awhile the friends sat like two lovers, meeting at last after a
long absence.

“Tine here, efery tay!” broke out Schmucke, inwardly blessing Mme.
de Marville for her hardness of heart. “Look here! Ve shall go a
prick-a-pracking togeders, und der teufel shall nefer show his tail
here.”

“Ve shall go prick-a-pracking togeders!” for the full comprehension of
those truly heroic words, it must be confessed that Schmucke’s ignorance
of bric-a-brac was something of the densest. It required all the
strength of his friendship to keep him from doing heedless damage in the
sitting-room and study which did duty as a museum for Pons. Schmucke,
wholly absorbed in music, a composer for love of his art, took about as
much interest in his friend’s little trifles as a fish might take in a
flower-show at the Luxembourg, supposing that it had received a ticket
of admission. A certain awe which he certainly felt for the marvels was
simply a reflection of the respect which Pons showed his treasures when
he dusted them. To Pons’ exclamations of admiration, he was wont to
reply with a “Yes, it is ver’ bretty,” as a mother answers baby-gestures
with meaningless baby-talk. Seven times since the friends had lived
together, Pons had exchanged a good clock for a better one, till at last
he possessed a timepiece in Boule’s first and best manner, for Boule had
two manners, as Raphael had three. In the first he combined ebony and
copper; in the second--contrary to his convictions--he sacrificed to
tortoise-shell inlaid work. In spite of Pons’ learned dissertations,
Schmucke never could see the slightest difference between the
magnificent clock in Boule’s first manner and its six predecessors; but,
for Pons’ sake, Schmucke was even more careful among the “chimcracks”
 than Pons himself. So it should not be surprising that Schmucke’s
sublime words comforted Pons in his despair; for “Ve shall go
prick-a-pracking togeders,” meant, being interpreted, “I will put money
into bric-a-brac, if you will only dine here.”

“Dinner is ready,” Mme. Cibot announced, with astonishing
self-possession.

It is not difficult to imagine Pons’ surprise when he saw and relished
the dinner due to Schmucke’s friendship. Sensations of this kind, that
came so rarely in a lifetime, are never the outcome of the constant,
close relationship by which friend daily says to friend, “You are a
second self to me”; for this, too, becomes a matter of use and wont.
It is only by contact with the barbarism of the world without that
the happiness of that intimate life is revealed to us as a sudden glad
surprise. It is the outer world which renews the bond between friend and
friend, lover and lover, all their lives long, wherever two great souls
are knit together by friendship or by love.

Pons brushed away two big tears, Schmucke himself wiped his eyes; and
though nothing was said, the two were closer friends than before. Little
friendly nods and glances exchanged across the table were like balm to
Pons, soothing the pain caused by the sand dropped in his heart by the
President’s wife. As for Schmucke, he rubbed his hands till they were
sore; for a new idea had occurred to him, one of those great discoveries
which cause a German no surprise, unless they sprout up suddenly in
a Teuton brain frost-bound by the awe and reverence due to sovereign
princes.

“Mine goot Bons?” began Schmucke.

“I can guess what you mean; you would like us both to dine together
here, every day--”

“Gif only I vas rich enof to lif like dis efery tay--” began the good
German in a melancholy voice. But here Mme. Cibot appeared upon the
scene. Pons had given her an order for the theatre from time to time,
and stood in consequence almost as high in her esteem and affection as
her boarder Schmucke.

“Lord love you,” said she, “for three francs and wine extra I can give
you both such a dinner every day that you will be ready to lick the
plates as clean as if they were washed.”

“It is a fact,” Schmucke remarked, “dat die dinners dat Montame Zipod
cooks for me are better as de messes dey eat at der royal dable!” In his
eagerness, Schmucke, usually so full of respect for the powers that
be, so far forgot himself as to imitate the irreverent newspapers which
scoffed at the “fixed-price” dinners of Royalty.

“Really?” said Pons. “Very well, I will try to-morrow.”

And at that promise Schmucke sprang from one end of the table to the
other, sweeping off tablecloth, bottles, and dishes as he went, and
hugged Pons to his heart. So might gas rush to combine with gas.

“Vat happiness!” cried he.

Mme. Cibot was quite touched. “Monsieur is going to dine here every
day!” she cried proudly.

That excellent woman departed downstairs again in ignorance of the event
which had brought about this result, entered her room like Josepha in
_William Tell_, set down the plates and dishes on the table with a bang,
and called aloud to her husband:

“Cibot! run to the _Cafe Turc_ for two small cups of coffee, and tell
the man at the stove that it is for me.”

Then she sat down and rested her hands on her massive knees, and gazed
out of the window at the opposite wall.

“I will go to-night and see what Ma’am Fontaine says,” she thought.
(Madame Fontaine told fortunes on the cards for all the servants in the
quarter of the Marais.) “Since these two gentlemen came here, we have
put two thousand francs in the savings bank. Two thousand francs in
eight years! What luck! Would it be better to make no profit out of M.
Pons’ dinner and keep him here at home? Ma’am Fontaine’s hen will tell
me that.”

Three years ago Mme. Cibot had begun to cherish a hope that her name
might be mentioned in “her gentlemen’s” wills; she had redoubled her
zeal since that covetous thought tardily sprouted up in the midst of
that so honest moustache. Pons hitherto had dined abroad, eluding her
desire to have both of “her gentlemen” entirely under her management;
his “troubadour” collector’s life had scared away certain vague ideas
which hovered in La Cibot’s brain; but now her shadowy projects assumed
the formidable shape of a definite plan, dating from that memorable
dinner. Fifteen minutes later she reappeared in the dining-room with
two cups of excellent coffee, flanked by a couple of tiny glasses of
_kirschwasser_.

“Long lif Montame Zipod!” cried Schmucke; “she haf guessed right!”

The diner-out bemoaned himself a little, while Schmucke met his
lamentations with coaxing fondness, like a home pigeon welcoming back a
wandering bird. Then the pair set out for the theatre.

Schmucke could not leave his friend in the condition to which he had
been brought by the Camusots--mistresses and servants. He knew Pons so
well; he feared lest some cruel, sad thought should seize on him at his
conductor’s desk, and undo all the good done by his welcome home to the
nest.

And Schmucke brought his friend back on his arm through the streets at
midnight. A lover could not be more careful of his lady. He pointed out
the edges of the curbstones, he was on the lookout whenever they stepped
on or off the pavement, ready with a warning if there was a gutter
to cross. Schmucke could have wished that the streets were paved with
cotton-down; he would have had a blue sky overhead, and Pons should hear
the music which all the angels in heaven were making for him. He had won
the lost province in his friend’s heart!

For nearly three months Pons and Schmucke dined together every day. Pons
was obliged to retrench at once; for dinner at forty-five francs a month
and wine at thirty-five meant precisely eighty francs less to spend on
bric-a-brac. And very soon, in spite of all that Schmucke could do, in
spite of his little German jokes, Pons fell to regretting the delicate
dishes, the liqueurs, the good coffee, the table talk, the insincere
politeness, the guests, and the gossip, and the houses where he used to
dine. On the wrong side of sixty a man cannot break himself of a habit
of thirty-six years’ growth. Wine at a hundred and thirty francs per
hogshead is scarcely a generous liquid in a _gourmet’s_ glass; every
time that Pons raised it to his lips he thought, with infinite regret,
of the exquisite wines in his entertainers’ cellars.

In short, at the end of three months, the cruel pangs which had gone
near to break Pons’ sensitive heart had died away; he forgot everything
but the charms of society; and languished for them like some elderly
slave of a petticoat compelled to leave the mistress who too repeatedly
deceives him. In vain he tried to hide his profound and consuming
melancholy; it was too plain that he was suffering from one of the
mysterious complaints which the mind brings upon the body.

A single symptom will throw light upon this case of nostalgia (as it
were) produced by breaking away from an old habit; in itself it is
trifling, one of the myriad nothings which are as rings in a coat of
chain-mail enveloping the soul in a network of iron. One of the keenest
pleasures of Pons’ old life, one of the joys of the dinner-table
parasite at all times, was the “surprise,” the thrill produced by the
extra dainty dish added triumphantly to the bill of fare by the mistress
of a bourgeois house, to give a festal air to the dinner. Pons’ stomach
hankered after that gastronomical satisfaction. Mme. Cibot, in the pride
of her heart, enumerated every dish beforehand; a salt and savor once
periodically recurrent, had vanished utterly from daily life. Dinner
proceeded without _le plat couvert_, as our grandsires called it. This
lay beyond the bounds of Schmucke’s powers of comprehension.

Pons had too much delicacy to grumble; but if the case of unappreciated
genius is hard, it goes harder still with the stomach whose claims are
ignored. Slighted affection, a subject of which too much has been made,
is founded upon an illusory longing; for if the creature fails, love
can turn to the Creator who has treasures to bestow. But the stomach!...
Nothing can be compared to its sufferings; for, in the first place, one
must live.

Pons thought wistfully of certain creams--surely the poetry of
cookery!--of certain white sauces, masterpieces of the art; of truffled
chickens, fit to melt your heart; and above these, and more than all
these, of the famous Rhine carp, only known at Paris, served with what
condiments! There were days when Pons, thinking upon Count Popinot’s
cook, would sigh aloud, “Ah, Sophie!” Any passer-by hearing the
exclamation might have thought that the old man referred to a lost
mistress; but his fancy dwelt upon something rarer, on a fat Rhine carp
with a sauce, thin in the sauce-boat, creamy upon the palate, a sauce
that deserved the Montyon prize! The conductor of the orchestra, living
on memories of past dinners, grew visibly leaner; he was pining away, a
victim to gastric nostalgia.

By the beginning of the fourth month (towards the end of January, 1845),
Pons’ condition attracted attention at the theatre. The flute, a young
man named Wilhelm, like almost all Germans; and Schwab, to distinguish
him from all other Wilhelms, if not from all other Schwabs, judged it
expedient to open Schmucke’s eyes to his friend’s state of health. It
was a first performance of a piece in which Schmucke’s instruments were
all required.

“The old gentleman is failing,” said the flute; “there is something
wrong somewhere; his eyes are heavy, and he doesn’t beat time as he used
to do,” added Wilhelm Schwab, indicating Pons as he gloomily took his
place.

“Dat is alvays de vay, gif a man is sixty years old,” answered Schmucke.

The Highland widow, in _The Chronicles of the Canongate_, sent her son
to his death to have him beside her for twenty-four hours; and Schmucke
could have sacrificed Pons for the sake of seeing his face every day
across the dinner-table.

“Everybody in the theatre is anxious about him,” continued the flute;
“and, as the _premiere danseuse_, Mlle. Brisetout, says, ‘he makes
hardly any noise now when he blows his nose.’”

And, indeed, a peal like a blast of a horn used to resound through
the old musician’s bandana handkerchief whenever he raised it to that
lengthy and cavernous feature. The President’s wife had more frequently
found fault with him on that score than on any other.

“I vould gif a goot teal to amuse him,” said Schmucke, “he gets so
dull.”

“M. Pons always seems so much above the like of us poor devils, that,
upon my word, I didn’t dare to ask him to my wedding,” said Wilhelm
Schwab. “I am going to be married--”

“How?” demanded Schmucke.

“Oh! quite properly,” returned Wilhelm Schwab, taking Schmucke’s quaint
inquiry for a gibe, of which that perfect Christian was quite incapable.

“Come, gentlemen, take your places!” called Pons, looking round at his
little army, as the stage manager’s bell rang for the overture.

The piece was a dramatized fairy tale, a pantomime called _The Devil’s
Betrothed_, which ran for two hundred nights. In the interval, after the
first act, Wilhelm Schwab and Schmucke were left alone in the orchestra,
with a house at a temperature of thirty-two degrees Reaumur.

“Tell me your hishdory,” said Schmucke.

“Look there! Do you see that young man in the box yonder?... Do you
recognize him?”

“Nefer a pit--”

“Ah! That is because he is wearing yellow gloves and shines with all
the radiance of riches, but that is my friend Fritz Brunner out of
Frankfort-on-the-Main.”

“Dat used to komm to see du blav und sit peside you in der orghestra?”

“The same. You would not believe he could look so different, would you?”

The hero of the promised story was a German of that particular type
in which the sombre irony of Goethe’s Mephistopheles is blended with
a homely cheerfulness found in the romances of August Lafontaine
of pacific memory; but the predominating element in the compound of
artlessness and guile, of shopkeeper’s shrewdness, and the studied
carelessness of a member of the Jockey Club, was that form of disgust
which set a pistol in the hands of a young Werther, bored to death less
by Charlotte than by German princes. It was a thoroughly German face,
full of cunning, full of simplicity, stupidity, and courage; the
knowledge which brings weariness, the worldly wisdom which the veriest
child’s trick leaves at fault, the abuse of beer and tobacco,--all these
were there to be seen in it, and to heighten the contrast of opposed
qualities, there was a wild diabolical gleam in the fine blue eyes with
the jaded expression.

Dressed with all the elegance of a city man, Fritz Brunner sat in full
view of the house displaying a bald crown of the tint beloved by Titian,
and a few stray fiery red hairs on either side of it; a remnant spared
by debauchery and want, that the prodigal might have a right to spend
money with the hairdresser when he should come into his fortune. A face,
once fair and fresh as the traditional portrait of Jesus Christ, had
grown harder since the advent of a red moustache; a tawny beard lent
it an almost sinister look. The bright blue eyes had lost something of
their clearness in the struggle with distress. The countless courses by
which a man sells himself and his honor in Paris had left their traces
upon his eyelids and carved lines about the eyes, into which a mother
once looked with a mother’s rapture to find a copy of her own fashioned
by God’s hand.

This precocious philosopher, this wizened youth was the work of a
stepmother.

Herewith begins the curious history of a prodigal son of
Frankfort-on-the-Main--the most extraordinary and astounding portent
ever beheld by that well-conducted, if central, city.

Gideon Brunner, father of the aforesaid Fritz, was one of the famous
innkeepers of Frankfort, a tribe who make law-authorized incisions in
travelers’ purses with the connivance of the local bankers. An innkeeper
and an honest Calvinist to boot, he had married a converted Jewess and
laid the foundations of his prosperity with the money she brought him.

When the Jewess died, leaving a son Fritz, twelve years of age, under
the joint guardianship of his father and maternal uncle, a furrier at
Leipsic, head of the firm of Virlaz and Company, Brunner senior was
compelled by his brother-in-law (who was by no means as soft as his
peltry) to invest little Fritz’s money, a goodly quantity of current
coin of the realm, with the house of Al-Sartchild. Not a penny of it
was he allowed to touch. So, by way of revenge for the Israelite’s
pertinacity, Brunner senior married again. It was impossible, he said,
to keep his huge hotel single-handed; it needed a woman’s eye and hand.
Gideon Brunner’s second wife was an innkeeper’s daughter, a very pearl,
as he thought; but he had had no experience of only daughters spoiled by
father and mother.

The second Mme. Brunner behaved as German girls may be expected to
behave when they are frivolous and wayward. She squandered her fortune,
she avenged the first Mme. Brunner by making her husband as miserable
a man as you could find in the compass of the free city of
Frankfort-on-the-Main, where the millionaires, it is said, are about to
pass a law compelling womankind to cherish and obey them alone. She was
partial to all the varieties of vinegar commonly called Rhine wine in
Germany; she was fond of _articles Paris_, of horses and dress; indeed,
the one expensive taste which she had not was a liking for women. She
took a dislike to little Fritz, and would perhaps have driven him mad if
that young offspring of Calvinism and Judaism had not had Frankfort for
his cradle and the firm of Virlaz at Leipsic for his guardian. Uncle
Virlaz, however, deep in his furs, confined his guardianship to the
safe-keeping of Fritz’s silver marks, and left the boy to the tender
mercies of this stepmother.

That hyena in woman’s form was the more exasperated against the pretty
child, the lovely Jewess’ son, because she herself could have no
children in spite of efforts worthy of a locomotive engine. A diabolical
impulse prompted her to plunge her young stepson, at twenty-one years of
age, into dissipations contrary to all German habits. The wicked German
hoped that English horses, Rhine vinegar, and Goethe’s Marguerites would
ruin the Jewess’ child and shorten his days; for when Fritz came of age,
Uncle Virlaz had handed over a very pretty fortune to his nephew. But
while roulette at Baden and elsewhere, and boon companions (Wilhelm
Schwab among them) devoured the substance accumulated by Uncle Virlaz,
the prodigal son himself remained by the will of Providence to point a
moral to younger brothers in the free city of Frankfort; parents held
him up as a warning and an awful example to their offspring to scare
them into steady attendance in their cast-iron counting houses, lined
with silver marks.

But so far from perishing in the flower of his age, Fritz Brunner had
the pleasure of laying his stepmother in one of those charming little
German cemeteries, in which the Teuton indulges his unbridled passion
for horticulture under the specious pretext of honoring his dead. And as
the second Mme. Brunner expired while the authors of her being were yet
alive, Brunner senior was obliged to bear the loss of the sums of which
his wife had drained his coffers, to say nothing of other ills, which
had told upon a Herculean constitution, till at the age of sixty-seven
the innkeeper had wizened and shrunk as if the famous Borgia’s poison
had undermined his system. For ten whole years he had supported his
wife, and now he inherited nothing! The innkeeper was a second ruin of
Heidelberg, repaired continually, it is true, by travelers’ hotel bills,
much as the remains of the castle of Heidelberg itself are repaired
to sustain the enthusiasm of the tourists who flock to see so fine and
well-preserved a relic of antiquity.

At Frankfort the disappointment caused as much talk as a failure. People
pointed out Brunner, saying, “See what a man may come to with a bad wife
that leaves him nothing and a son brought up in the French fashion.”

In Italy and Germany the French nation is the root of all evil, the
target for all bullets. “But the god pursuing his way----” (For the
rest, see Lefranc de Pompignan’s Ode.)

The wrath of the proprietor of the Grand Hotel de Hollande fell
on others besides the travelers, whose bills were swelled with his
resentment. When his son was utterly ruined, Gideon, regarding him as
the indirect cause of all his misfortunes, refused him bread and salt,
fire, lodging, and tobacco--the force of the paternal malediction in
a German and an innkeeper could no farther go. Whereupon the local
authorities, making no allowance for the father’s misdeeds, regarded him
as one of the most ill-used persons in Frankfort-on-the-Main, came to
his assistance, fastened a quarrel on Fritz (_une querelle d’Allemand_),
and expelled him from the territory of the free city. Justice in
Frankfort is no whit wiser nor more humane than elsewhere, albeit the
city is the seat of the German Diet. It is not often that a magistrate
traces back the stream of wrongdoing and misfortune to the holder of the
urn from which the first beginnings trickled forth. If Brunner forgot
his son, his son’s friends speedily followed the old innkeeper’s
example.

Ah! if the journalists, the dandies, and some few fair Parisians among
the audience wondered how that German with the tragical countenance had
cropped up on a first night to occupy a side box all to himself when
fashionable Paris filled the house,--if these could have seen the
history played out upon the stage before the prompter’s box, they would
have found it far more interesting than the transformation scenes of
_The Devil’s Betrothed_, though indeed it was the two hundred thousandth
representation of a sublime allegory performed aforetime in Mesopotamia
three thousand years before Christ was born.

Fritz betook himself on foot to Strasbourg, and there found what the
prodigal son of the Bible failed to find--to wit, a friend. And herein
is revealed the superiority of Alsace, where so many generous hearts
beat to show Germany the beauty of a combination of Gallic wit and
Teutonic solidity. Wilhelm Schwab, but lately left in possession of a
hundred thousand francs by the death of both parents, opened his arms,
his heart, his house, his purse to Fritz. As for describing Fritz’s
feelings, when dusty, down on his luck, and almost like a leper, he
crossed the Rhine and found a real twenty-franc piece held out by the
hand of a real friend,--that moment transcends the powers of the prose
writer; Pindar alone could give it forth to humanity in Greek that
should rekindle the dying warmth of friendship in the world.

Put the names of Fritz and Wilheim beside those of Damon and Pythias,
Castor and Pollux, Orestes and Pylades, Dubreuil and Pmejah, Schmucke
and Pons, and all the names that we imagine for the two friends of
Monomotapa, for La Fontaine (man of genius though he was) has made of
them two disembodied spirits--they lack reality. The two new names may
join the illustrious company, and with so much the more reason, since
that Wilhelm who had helped to drink Fritz’s inheritance now proceeded,
with Fritz’s assistance, to devour his own substance; smoking, needless
to say, every known variety of tobacco.

The pair, strange to relate, squandered the property in the dullest,
stupidest, most commonplace fashion, in Strasbourg _brasseries_, in
the company of ballet-girls of the Strasbourg theatres, and little
Alsaciennes who had not a rag of a tattered reputation left.

Every morning they would say, “We really must stop this, and make up our
minds and do something or other with the money that is left.”

“Pooh!” Fritz would retort, “just one more day, and to-morrow”... ah!
to-morrow.

In the lives of Prodigal Sons, _To-day_ is a prodigious coxcomb, but
_To-morrow_ is a very poltroon, taking fright at the big words of his
predecessor. _To-day_ is the truculent captain of old world comedy,
_To-morrow_ the clown of modern pantomime.

When the two friends had reached their last thousand-franc note, they
took places in the mail-coach, styled Royal, and departed for Paris,
where they installed themselves in the attics of the Hotel du Rhin, in
the Rue du Mail, the property of one Graff, formerly Gideon Brunner’s
head-waiter. Fritz found a situation as clerk in the Kellers’ bank (on
Graff’s recommendation), with a salary of six hundred francs. And a
place as book-keeper was likewise found for Wilhelm, in the business of
Graff the fashionable tailor, brother of Graff of the Hotel du Rhin, who
found the scantily-paid employment for the pair of prodigals, for the
sake of old times, and his apprenticeship at the Hotel de Hollande.
These two incidents--the recognition of a ruined man by a well-to-do
friend, and a German innkeeper interesting himself in two penniless
fellow-countrymen--give, no doubt, an air of improbability to the story,
but truth is so much the more like fiction, since modern writers of
fiction have been at such untold pains to imitate truth.

It was not long before Fritz, a clerk with six hundred francs, and
Wilhelm, a book-keeper with precisely the same salary, discovered the
difficulties of existence in a city so full of temptations. In 1837, the
second year of their abode, Wilhelm, who possessed a pretty talent for
the flute, entered Pons’ orchestra, to earn a little occasional butter
to put on his dry bread. As to Fritz, his only way to an increase of
income lay through the display of the capacity for business inherited
by a descendant of the Virlaz family. Yet, in spite of his assiduity, in
spite of abilities which possibly may have stood in his way, his salary
only reached the sum of two thousand francs in 1843. Penury, that divine
stepmother, did for the two men all that their mothers had not been able
to do for them; Poverty taught them thrift and worldly wisdom; Poverty
gave them her grand rough education, the lessons which she drives
with hard knocks into the heads of great men, who seldom know a happy
childhood. Fritz and Wilhelm, being but ordinary men, learned as little
as they possibly could in her school; they dodged the blows, shrank
from her hard breast and bony arms, and never discovered the good fairy
lurking within, ready to yield to the caresses of genius. One thing,
however, they learned thoroughly--they discovered the value of money,
and vowed to clip the wings of riches if ever a second fortune should
come to their door.

This was the history which Wilhelm Schwab related in German, at much
greater length, to his friend the pianist, ending with;

“Well, Papa Schmucke, the rest is soon explained. Old Brunner is dead.
He left four millions! He made an immense amount of money out of Baden
railways, though neither his son nor M. Graff, with whom we lodge, had
any idea that the old man was one of the original shareholders. I am
playing the flute here for the last time this evening; I would have left
some days ago, but this was a first performance, and I did not want to
spoil my part.”

“Goot, mine friend,” said Schmucke. “But who is die prite?”

“She is Mlle. Graff, the daughter of our host, the landlord of the Hotel
du Rhin. I have loved Mlle. Emilie these seven years; she has read so
many immoral novels, that she refused all offers for me, without knowing
what might come of it. She will be a very wealthy young lady; her
uncles, the tailors in the Rue de Richelieu, will leave her all their
money. Fritz is giving me the money we squandered at Strasbourg five
times over! He is putting a million francs in a banking house, M. Graff
the tailor is adding another five hundred thousand francs, and Mlle.
Emilie’s father not only allows me to incorporate her portion--two
hundred and fifty thousand francs--with the capital, but he himself will
be a shareholder with as much again. So the firm of Brunner, Schwab and
Company will start with two millions five hundred thousand francs. Fritz
has just bought fifteen hundred thousand francs’ worth of shares in
the Bank of France to guarantee our account with them. That is not all
Fritz’s fortune. He has his father’s house property, supposed to be
worth another million, and he has let the Grand Hotel de Hollande
already to a cousin of the Graffs.”

“You look sad ven you look at your friend,” remarked Schmucke, who had
listened with great interest. “Kann you pe chealous of him?”

“I am jealous for Fritz’s happiness,” said Wilhelm. “Does that face look
as if it belonged to a happy man? I am afraid of Paris; I should like
to see him do as I am doing. The old tempter may awake again. Of our two
heads, his carries the less ballast. His dress, and the opera-glass and
the rest of it make me anxious. He keeps looking at the lorettes in
the house. Oh! if you only knew how hard it is to marry Fritz. He has a
horror of ‘going a-courting,’ as you say; you would have to give him a
drop into a family, just as in England they give a man a drop into the
next world.”

During the uproar that usually marks the end of a first night, the flute
delivered his invitation to the conductor. Pons accepted gleefully; and,
for the first time in three months, Schmucke saw a smile on his friend’s
face. They went back to the Rue de Normandie in perfect silence; that
sudden flash of joy had thrown a light on the extent of the
disease which was consuming Pons. Oh, that a man so truly noble, so
disinterested, so great in feeling, should have such a weakness!... This
was the thought that struck the stoic Schmucke dumb with amazement. He
grew woefully sad, for he began to see that there was no help for it; he
must even renounce the pleasure of seeing “his goot Bons” opposite him
at the dinner-table, for the sake of Pons’ welfare; and he did not
know whether he could give him up; the mere thought of it drove him
distracted.

Meantime, Pons’ proud silence and withdrawal to the Mons Aventinus
of the Rue de Normandie had, as might be expected, impressed the
Presidente, not that she troubled herself much about her parasite, now
that she was freed from him. She thought, with her charming daughter,
that Cousin Pons had seen through her little “Lili’s” joke. But it was
otherwise with her husband the President.

Camusot de Marville, a short and stout man, grown solemn since his
promotion at the Court, admired Cicero, preferred the Opera-Comique to
the Italiens, compared the actors one with another, and followed the
multitude step by step. He used to recite all the articles in the
Ministerialist journals, as if he were saying something original, and
in giving his opinion at the Council Board he paraphrased the remarks of
the previous speaker. His leading characteristics were sufficiently well
known; his position compelled him to take everything seriously; and he
was particularly tenacious of family ties.

Like most men who are ruled by their wives, the President asserted
his independence in trifles, in which his wife was very careful not
to thwart him. For a month he was satisfied with the Presidente’s
commonplace explanations of Pons’ disappearance; but at last it
struck him as singular that the old musician, a friend of forty years’
standing, should first make them so valuable a present as a fan that
belonged to Mme. de Pompadour, and then immediately discontinue his
visits. Count Popinot had pronounced the trinket a masterpiece; when its
owner went to Court, the fan had been passed from hand to hand, and her
vanity was not a little gratified by the compliments it received; others
had dwelt on the beauties of the ten ivory sticks, each one covered with
delicate carving, the like of which had never been seen. A Russian
lady (Russian ladies are apt to forget that they are not in Russia)
had offered her six thousand francs for the marvel one day at Count
Popinot’s house, and smiled to see it in such hands. Truth to tell, it
was a fan for a Duchess.

“It cannot be denied that poor Cousin Pons understands rubbish of that
sort--” said Cecile, the day after the bid.

“Rubbish!” cried her parent. “Why, Government is just about to buy
the late M. le Conseiller Dusommerard’s collection for three hundred
thousand francs; and the State and the Municipality of Paris between
them are spending nearly a million francs over the purchase and repair
of the Hotel de Cluny to house the ‘rubbish,’ as you call it.--Such
‘rubbish,’ dear child,” he resumed, “is frequently all that remains of
vanished civilizations. An Etruscan jar, and a necklace, which sometimes
fetch forty and fifty thousand francs, is ‘rubbish’ which reveals the
perfection of art at the time of the siege of Troy, proving that the
Etruscans were Trojan refugees in Italy.”

This was the President’s cumbrous way of joking; the short, fat man was
heavily ironical with his wife and daughter.

“The combination of various kinds of knowledge required to understand
such ‘rubbish,’ Cecile,” he resumed, “is a science in itself, called
archaeology. Archaeology comprehends architecture, sculpture, painting,
goldsmiths’ work, ceramics, cabinetmaking (a purely modern art), lace,
tapestry--in short, human handiwork of every sort and description.”

“Then Cousin Pons is learned?” said Cecile.

“Ah! by the by, why is he never to be seen nowadays?” asked the
President. He spoke with the air of a man in whom thousands of forgotten
and dormant impressions have suddenly begun to stir, and shaping
themselves into one idea, reach consciousness with a ricochet, as
sportsmen say.

“He must have taken offence at nothing at all,” answered his wife. “I
dare say I was not as fully sensible as I might have been of the value
of the fan that he gave me. I am ignorant enough, as you know, of--”

“_You!_ One of Servin’s best pupils, and you don’t know Watteau?” cried
the President.

“I know Gerard and David and Gros and Griodet, and M. de Forbin and M.
Turpin de Crisse--”

“You ought--”

“Ought what, sir?” demanded the lady, gazing at her husband with the air
of a Queen of Sheba.

“To know a Watteau when you see it, my dear. Watteau is very much in
fashion,” answered the President with meekness, that told plainly how
much he owed to his wife.

This conversation took place a few days before that night of first
performance of _The Devil’s Betrothed_, when the whole orchestra
noticed how ill Pons was looking. But by that time all the circle of
dinner-givers who were used to seeing Pons’ face at their tables, and
to send him on errands, had begun to ask each other for news of him, and
uneasiness increased when it was reported by some who had seen him that
he was always in his place at the theatre. Pons had been very careful to
avoid his old acquaintances whenever he met them in the streets; but one
day it so fell out that he met Count Popinot, the ex-cabinet minister,
face to face in the bric-a-brac dealer’s shop in the new Boulevard
Beaumarchais. The dealer was none other than that Monistrol of whom Pons
had spoken to the Presidente, one of the famous and audacious vendors
whose cunning enthusiasm leads them to set more and more value daily on
their wares; for curiosities, they tell you, are growing so scarce that
they are hardly to be found at all nowadays.

“Ah, my dear Pons, how comes it that we never see you now? We miss
you very much, and Mme. Popinot does not know what to think of your
desertion.”

“M. le Comte,” said the good man, “I was made to feel in the house of a
relative that at my age one is not wanted in the world. I have never had
much consideration shown me, but at any rate I had not been insulted.
I have never asked anything of any man,” he broke out with an artist’s
pride. “I have often made myself useful in return for hospitality. But
I have made a mistake, it seems; I am indefinitely beholden to those who
honor me by allowing me to sit at table with them; my friends, and
my relatives.... Well and good; I have sent in my resignation as
smellfeast. At home I find daily something which no other house has
offered me--a real friend.”

The old artist’s power had not failed him; with tone and gesture he put
such bitterness into the words, that the peer of France was struck by
them. He drew Pons aside.

“Come, now, my old friend, what is it? What has hurt you? Could you not
tell me in confidence? You will permit me to say that at my house surely
you have always met with consideration--”

“You are the one exception,” said the artist. “And besides, you are a
great lord and a statesman, you have so many things to think about. That
would excuse anything, if there were need for it.”

The diplomatic skill that Popinot had acquired in the management of men
and affairs was brought to bear upon Pons, till at length the story of
his misfortunes in the President’s house was drawn from him.

Popinot took up the victim’s cause so warmly that he told the story
to Mme. Popinot as soon as he went home, and that excellent and
noble-natured woman spoke to the Presidente on the subject at the first
opportunity. As Popinot himself likewise said a word or two to the
President, there was a general explanation in the family of Camusot de
Marville.

Camusot was not exactly master in his own house; but this time his
remonstrance was so well founded in law and in fact, that his wife
and daughter were forced to acknowledge the truth. They both humbled
themselves and threw the blame on the servants. The servants, first
bidden, and then chidden, only obtained pardon by a full confession,
which made it clear to the President’s mind that Pons had done rightly
to stop away. The President displayed himself before the servants in all
his masculine and magisterial dignity, after the manner of men who are
ruled by their wives. He informed his household that they should be
dismissed forthwith, and forfeit any advantages which their long term
of service in his house might have brought them, unless from that time
forward his cousin and all those who did him the honor of coming to
his house were treated as he himself was. At which speech Madeleine was
moved to smile.

“You have only one chance of salvation as it is,” continued the
President. “Go to my cousin, make your excuses to him, and tell him that
you will lose your situations unless he forgives you, for I shall turn
you all away if he does not.”

Next morning the President went out fairly early to pay a call on his
cousin before going down to the court. The apparition of M. le President
de Marville, announced by Mme. Cibot, was an event in the house. Pons,
thus honored for the first time in his life saw reparation ahead.

“At last, my dear cousin,” said the President after the ordinary
greetings; “at last I have discovered the cause of your retreat. Your
behavior increases, if that were possible, my esteem for you. I have but
one word to say in that connection. My servants have all been dismissed.
My wife and daughter are in despair; they want to see you to have an
explanation. In all this, my cousin, there is one innocent person, and
he is an old judge; you will not punish me, will you, for the escapade
of a thoughtless child who wished to dine with the Popinots? especially
when I come to beg for peace, admitting that all the wrong has been on
our side?... An old friendship of thirty-six years, even suppose that
there had been a misunderstanding, has still some claims. Come, sign a
treaty of peace by dining with us to-night--”

Pons involved himself in a diffuse reply, and ended by informing his
cousin that he was to sign a marriage contract that evening; how that
one of the orchestra was not only going to be married, but also about to
fling his flute to the winds to become a banker.

“Very well. To-morrow.”

“Mme. la Comtesse Popinot has done me the honor of asking me, cousin.
She was so kind as to write--”

“The day after to-morrow then.”

“M. Brunner, a German, my first flute’s future partner, returns the
compliment paid him to-day by the young couple--”

“You are such pleasant company that it is not surprising that people
dispute for the honor of seeing you. Very well, next Sunday? Within a
week, as we say at the courts?”

“On Sunday we are to dine with M. Graff, the flute’s father-in-law.”

“Very well, on Saturday. Between now and then you will have time to
reassure a little girl who has shed tears already over her fault. God
asks no more than repentance; you will not be more severe than the
Eternal father with poor little Cecile?--”

Pons, thus reached on his weak side, again plunged into formulas more
than polite, and went as far as the stairhead with the President.

An hour later the President’s servants arrived in a troop on poor Pons’
second floor. They behaved after the manner of their kind; they cringed
and fawned; they wept. Madeleine took M. Pons aside and flung herself
resolutely at his feet.

“It is all my fault; and monsieur knows quite well that I love him,”
 here she burst into tears. “It was vengeance boiling in my veins;
monsieur ought to throw all the blame of the unhappy affair on that. We
are all to lose our pensions.... Monsieur, I was mad, and I would not
have the rest suffer for my fault.... I can see now well enough that
fate did not make me for monsieur. I have come to my senses, I aimed too
high, but I love you still, monsieur. These ten years I have thought of
nothing but the happiness of making you happy and looking after things
here. What a lot!... Oh! if monsieur but knew how much I love him! But
monsieur must have seen it through all my mischief-making. If I were to
die to-morrow, what would they find?--A will in your favor, monsieur....
Yes, monsieur, in my trunk under my best things.”

Madeleine had set a responsive chord vibrating; the passion inspired in
another may be unwelcome, but it will always be gratifying to self-love;
this was the case with the old bachelor. After generously pardoning
Madeleine, he extended his forgiveness to the other servants, promising
to use his influence with his cousin the Presidente on their behalf.

It was unspeakably pleasant to Pons to find all his old enjoyments
restored to him without any loss of self-respect. The world had come to
Pons, he had risen in the esteem of his circle; but Schmucke looked so
downcast and dubious when he heard the story of the triumph, that Pons
felt hurt. When, however, the kind-hearted German saw the sudden change
wrought in Pons’ face, he ended by rejoicing with his friend, and made
a sacrifice of the happiness that he had known during those four months
that he had had Pons all to himself. Mental suffering has this immense
advantage over physical ills--when the cause is removed it ceases
at once. Pons was not like the same man that morning. The old man,
depressed and visibly failing, had given place to the serenely contented
Pons, who entered the Presidente’s house that October afternoon with the
Marquise de Pompadour’s fan in his pocket. Schmucke, on the other hand,
pondered deeply over this phenomenon, and could not understand it; your
true stoic never can understand the courtier that dwells in a Frenchman.
Pons was a born Frenchman of the Empire; a mixture of eighteenth century
gallantry and that devotion to womankind so often celebrated in songs of
the type of _Partant pour la Syrie_.

So Schmucke was fain to bury his chagrin beneath the flowers of his
German philosophy; but a week later he grew so yellow that Mme. Cibot
exerted her ingenuity to call in the parish doctor. The leech had fears
of icterus, and left Mme. Cibot frightened half out of her wits by the
Latin word for an attack of the jaundice.

Meantime the two friends went out to dinner together, perhaps for
the first time in their lives. For Schmucke it was a return to the
Fatherland; for Johann Graff of the Hotel du Rhin and his daughter
Emilie, Wolfgang Graff the tailor and his wife, Fritz Brunner and
Wilhelm Schwab, were Germans, and Pons and the notary were the only
Frenchmen present at the banquet. The Graffs of the tailor’s business
owned a splendid house in the Rue de Richelieu, between the Rue
Neuve-des-Petits-Champs and the Rue Villedo; they had brought up their
niece, for Emilie’s father, not without reason, had feared contact
with the very mixed society of an inn for his daughter. The good tailor
Graffs, who loved Emilie as if she had been their own daughter, were
giving up the ground floor of their great house to the young couple, and
here the bank of Brunner, Schwab and Company was to be established. The
arrangements for the marriage had been made about a month ago; some time
must elapse before Fritz Brunner, author of all this felicity, could
settle his deceased father’s affairs, and the famous firm of tailors
had taken advantage of the delay to redecorate the first floor and to
furnish it very handsomely for the bride and bridegroom. The offices of
the bank had been fitted into the wing which united a handsome business
house with the hotel at the back, between courtyard and garden.

On the way from the Rue de Normandie to the Rue de Richelieu, Pons drew
from the abstracted Schmucke the details of the story of the modern
prodigal son, for whom Death had killed the fatted innkeeper. Pons, but
newly reconciled with his nearest relatives, was immediately smitten
with a desire to make a match between Fritz Brunner and Cecile de
Marville. Chance ordained that the notary was none other than Berthier,
old Cardot’s son-in-law and successor, the sometime second clerk with
whom Pons had been wont to dine.

“Ah! M. Berthier, you here!” he said, holding out a hand to his host of
former days.

“We have not had the pleasure of seeing you at dinner lately; how is
it?” returned the notary. “My wife has been anxious about you. We saw
you at the first performance of _The Devil’s Betrothed_, and our anxiety
became curiosity?”

“Old folk are sensitive,” replied the worthy musician; “they make the
mistake of being a century behind the times, but how can it be helped?
It is quite enough to represent one century--they cannot entirely belong
to the century which sees them die.”

“Ah!” said the notary, with a shrewd look, “one cannot run two centuries
at once.”

“By the by,” continued Pons, drawing the young lawyer into a corner,
“why do you not find some one for my cousin Cecile de Marville--”

“Ah! why--?” answered Berthier. “In this century, when luxury has
filtered down to our very porters’ lodges, a young fellow hesitates
before uniting his lot with the daughter of a President of the Court of
Appeal in Paris if she brings him only a hundred thousand francs. In the
rank of life in which Mlle. de Marville’s husband would take, the wife
was never yet known that did not cost her husband three thousand francs
a year; the interest on a hundred thousand francs would scarcely
find her in pin-money. A bachelor with an income of fifteen or twenty
thousand francs can live on an entre-sol; he is not expected to cut
any figure; he need not keep more than one servant, and all his surplus
income he can spend on his amusements; he puts himself in the hands of
a good tailor, and need not trouble any further about keeping up
appearances. Far-sighted mothers make much of him; he is one of the
kings of fashion in Paris.

“But a wife changes everything. A wife means a properly furnished
house,” continued the lawyer; “she wants the carriage for herself; if
she goes to the play, she wants a box, while the bachelor has only a
stall to pay for; in short, a wife represents the whole of the income
which the bachelor used to spend on himself. Suppose that husband and
wife have thirty thousand francs a year between them--practically, the
sometime bachelor is a poor devil who thinks twice before he drives out
to Chantilly. Bring children on the scene--he is pinched for money at
once.

“Now, as M. and Mme. de Marville are scarcely turned fifty, Cecile’s
expectations are bills that will not fall due for fifteen or twenty
years to come; and no young fellow cares to keep them so long in
his portfolio. The young featherheads who are dancing the polka with
lorettes at the Jardin Mabille, are so cankered with self-interest, that
they don’t stand in need of us to explain both sides of the problem to
them. Between ourselves, I may say that Mlle. de Marville scarcely sets
hearts throbbing so fast but that their owners can perfectly keep their
heads, and they are full of these anti-matrimonial reflections. If any
eligible young man, in full possession of his senses and an income
of twenty thousand francs, happens to be sketching out a programme of
marriage that will satisfy his ambitions, Mlle. de Marville does not
altogether answer the description--”

“And why not?” asked the bewildered musician.

“Oh!--” said the notary, “well--a young man nowadays may be as ugly as
you and I, my dear Pons, but he is almost sure to have the impertinence
to want six hundred thousand francs, a girl of good family, with wit and
good looks and good breeding--flawless perfection in short.”

“Then it will not be easy to marry her?”

“She will not be married so long as M. and Mme. de Marville cannot make
up their minds to settle Marville on her when she marries; if they had
chosen, she might have been the Vicomtesse Popinot by now. But here
comes M. Brunner.--We are about to read the deed of partnership and the
marriage contract.”

Greetings and introductions over, the relations made Pons promise to
sign the contract. He listened to the reading of the documents, and
towards half-past five the party went into the dining-room. The dinner
was magnificent, as a city merchant’s dinner can be, when he allows
himself a respite from money-making. Graff of the Hotel du Rhin was
acquainted with the first provision dealers in Paris; never had Pons nor
Schmucke fared so sumptuously. The dishes were a rapture to think of!
Italian paste, delicate of flavor, unknown to the public; smelts fried
as never smelts were fried before; fish from Lake Leman, with a real
Genevese sauce, and a cream for plum-pudding which would have astonished
the London doctor who is said to have invented it. It was nearly ten
o’clock before they rose from table. The amount of wine, German and
French, consumed at that dinner would amaze the contemporary dandy;
nobody knows the amount of liquor that a German can imbibe and yet keep
calm and quiet; to have even an idea of the quantity, you must dine in
Germany and watch bottle succeed to bottle, like wave rippling after
wave along the sunny shores of the Mediterranean, and disappear as if
the Teuton possessed the absorbing power of sponges or sea sand. Perfect
harmony prevails meanwhile; there is none of the racket that there would
be over the liquor in France; the talk is as sober as a money-lender’s
extempore speech; countenances flush, like the faces of the brides in
frescoes by Cornelius or Schnorr (imperceptibly, that is to say), and
reminiscences are poured out slowly while the smoke puffs from the
pipes.

About half-past ten that evening Pons and Schmucke found themselves
sitting on a bench out in the garden, with the ex-flute between them;
they were explaining their characters, opinions, and misfortunes, with
no very clear idea as to why or how they had come to this point. In the
thick of a potpourri of confidences, Wilhelm spoke of his strong desire
to see Fritz married, expressing himself with vehement and vinous
eloquence.

“What do you say to this programme for your friend Brunner?” cried
Pons in confidential tones. “A charming and sensible young lady of
twenty-four, belonging to a family of the highest distinction. The
father holds a very high position as a judge; there will be a hundred
thousand francs paid down and a million to come.”

“Wait!” answered Schwab; “I will speak to Fritz this instant.”

The pair watched Brunner and his friend as they walked round and round
the garden; again and again they passed the bench, sometimes one spoke,
sometimes the other.

Pons was not exactly intoxicated; his head was a little heavy, but his
thoughts, on the contrary, seemed all the lighter; he watched Fritz
Brunner’s face through the rainbow mist of fumes of wine, and tried
to read auguries favorable to his family. Before very long Schwab
introduced his friend and partner to M. Pons; Fritz Brunner expressed
his thanks for the trouble which Pons had been so good as to take.

In the conversation which followed, the two old bachelors Schmucke and
Pons extolled the estate of matrimony, going so far as to say, without
any malicious intent, “that marriage was the end of man.” Tea and ices,
punches and cakes, were served in the future home of the betrothed
couple. The wine had begun to tell upon the honest merchants, and the
general hilarity reached its height when it was announced that Schwab’s
partner thought of following his example.

At two o’clock that morning, Schmucke and Pons walked home along the
boulevards, philosophizing _a perte de raison_ as they went on the
harmony pervading the arrangements of this our world below.

On the morrow of the banquet, Cousin Pons betook himself to his fair
cousin the Presidente, overjoyed--poor dear noble soul!--to return good
for evil. Surely he had attained to a sublime height, as every one will
allow, for we live in an age when the Montyon prize is given to those
who do their duty by carrying out the precepts of the Gospel.

“Ah!” said Pons to himself, as he turned the corner of the Rue de
Choiseul, “they will lie under immense obligations to their parasite.”

Any man less absorbed in his contentment, any man of the world, any
distrustful nature would have watched the President’s wife and daughter
very narrowly on this first return to the house. But the poor musician
was a child, he had all the simplicity of an artist, believing in
goodness as he believed in beauty; so he was delighted when Cecile and
her mother made much of him. After all the vaudevilles, tragedies, and
comedies which had been played under the worthy man’s eyes for twelve
long years, he could not detect the insincerity and grimaces of social
comedy, no doubt because he had seen too much of it. Any one who goes
into society in Paris, and knows the type of woman, dried up, body and
soul, by a burning thirst for social position, and a fierce desire to
be thought virtuous, any one familiar with the sham piety and the
domineering character of a woman whose word is law in her own house, may
imagine the lurking hatred she bore this husband’s cousin whom she had
wronged.

All the demonstrative friendliness of mother and daughter was lined with
a formidable longing for revenge, evidently postponed. For the first
time in Amelie de Marville’s life she had been put in the wrong, and
that in the sight of the husband over whom she tyrannized; and not only
so--she was obliged to be amiable to the author of her defeat! You can
scarcely find a match for this position save in the hypocritical
dramas which are sometimes kept up for years in the sacred college of
cardinals, or in chapters of certain religious orders.

At three o’clock, when the President came back from the law-courts, Pons
had scarcely made an end of the marvelous history of his acquaintance,
M. Frederic Brunner. Cecile had gone straight to the point. She wanted
to know how Frederic Brunner was dressed, how he looked, his height and
figure, the color of his hair and eyes; and when she had conjectured a
distinguished air for Frederic, she admired his generosity of character.

“Think of his giving five hundred thousand francs to his companion
in misfortune! Oh! mamma, I shall have a carriage and a box at the
Italiens----” Cecile grew almost pretty as she thought that all her
mother’s ambitions for her were about to be realized, that the hopes
which had almost left her were to come to something after all.

As for the Presidente, all that she said was, “My dear little girl, you
may perhaps be married within the fortnight.”

All mothers with daughters of three-and-twenty address them as “little
girl.”

“Still,” added the President, “in any case, we must have time to make
inquiries; never will I give my daughter to just anybody--”

“As to inquiries,” said Pons, “Berthier is drawing up the deeds. As to
the young man himself, my dear cousin, you remember what you told me?
Well, he is quite forty years old; he is bald. He wishes to find in
family life a haven after a storm; I did not dissuade him; every man has
his tastes--”

“One reason the more for a personal interview,” returned the President.
“I am not going to give my daughter to a valetudinarian.”

“Very good, cousin, you shall see my suitor in five days if you like;
for, with your views, a single interview would be enough”--(Cecile
and her mother signified their rapture)--“Frederic is decidedly a
distinguished amateur; he begged me to allow him to see my little
collection at his leisure. You have never seen my pictures and
curiosities; come and see them,” he continued, looking at his relatives.
“You can come simply as two ladies, brought by my friend Schmucke, and
make M. Brunner’s acquaintance without betraying yourselves. Frederic
need not in the least know who you are.”

“Admirable!” cried the President.

The attention they paid to the once scorned parasite may be left to
the imagination! Poor Pons that day became the Presidente’s cousin.
The happy mother drowned her dislike in floods of joy; her looks, her
smiles, her words sent the old man into ecstasies over the good that he
had done, over the future that he saw by glimpses. Was he not sure
to find dinners such as yesterday’s banquet over the signing of the
contract, multiplied indefinitely by three, in the houses of Brunner,
Schwab, and Graff? He saw before him a land of plenty--a _vie de
cocagne_, a miraculous succession of _plats couverts_, of delicate
surprise dishes, of exquisite wines.

“If Cousin Pons brings this through,” said the President, addressing
his wife after Pons had departed, “we ought to settle an income upon him
equal to his salary at the theatre.”

“Certainly,” said the lady; and Cecile was informed that if the proposed
suitor found favor in her eyes, she must undertake to induce the old
musician to accept a munificence in such bad taste.

Next day the President went to Berthier. He was anxious to make sure of
M. Frederic Brunner’s financial position. Berthier, forewarned by Mme.
de Marville, had asked his new client Schwab to come. Schwab the banker
was dazzled by the prospect of such a match for his friend (everybody
knows how deeply a German venerates social distinctions, so much so,
that in Germany a wife takes her husband’s (official) title, and is
the Frau General, the Frau Rath, and so forth)--Schwab therefore was as
accommodating as a collector who imagines that he is cheating a dealer.

“In the first place,” said Cecile’s father, “as I shall make over my
estate of Marville to my daughter, I should wish the contract to be
drawn up on the dotal system. In that case, M. Brunner would invest a
million francs in land to increase the estate, and by settling the land
on his wife he would secure her and his children from any share in the
liabilities of the bank.”

Berthier stroked his chin. “He is coming on well, is M. le President,”
 thought he.

When the dotal system had been explained to Schwab, he seemed much
inclined that way for his friend. He had heard Fritz say that he wished
to find some way of insuring himself against another lapse into poverty.

“There is a farm and pasture land worth twelve hundred thousand francs
in the market at this moment,” remarked the President.

“If we take up shares in the Bank of France to the amount of a million
francs, that will be quite enough to guarantee our account,” said
Schwab. “Fritz does not want to invest more than two million francs in
business; he will do as you wish, I am sure, M. le President.”

The President’s wife and daughter were almost wild with joy when he
brought home this news. Never, surely, did so rich a capture swim so
complacently into the nets of matrimony.

“You will be Mme. Brunner de Marville,” said the parent, addressing his
child; “I will obtain permission for your husband to add the name to
his, and afterwards he can take out letters of naturalization. If I
should be a peer of France some day, he will succeed me!”

The five days were spent by Mme. de Marville in preparations. On the
great day she dressed Cecile herself, taking as much pains as the
admiral of the British fleet takes over the dressing of the pleasure
yacht for Her Majesty of England when she takes a trip to Germany.

Pons and Schmucke, on their side, cleaned, swept, and dusted Pons’
museum rooms and furniture with the agility of sailors cleaning down
a man-of-war. There was not a speck of dust on the carved wood; not an
inch of brass but it glistened. The glasses over the pastels obscured
nothing of the work of Latour, Greuze, and Liotard (illustrious painter
of _The Chocolate Girl_), miracles of an art, alas! so fugitive. The
inimitable lustre of Florentine bronze took all the varying hues of
the light; the painted glass glowed with color. Every line shone
out brilliantly, every object threw in its phrase in a harmony of
masterpieces arranged by two musicians--both of whom alike had attained
to be poets.

With a tact which avoided the difficulties of a late appearance on the
scene of action, the women were the first to arrive; they wished to be
on their own ground. Pons introduced his friend Schmucke, who seemed
to his fair visitors to be an idiot; their heads were so full of the
eligible gentleman with the four millions of francs, that they paid but
little attention to the worthy Pons’ dissertations upon matters of which
they were completely ignorant.

They looked with indifferent eyes at Petitot’s enamels, spaced over
crimson velvet, set in three frames of marvelous workmanship. Flowers by
Van Huysum, David, and Heim; butterflies painted by Abraham Mignon;
Van Eycks, undoubted Cranachs and Albrecht Durers; the Giorgione, the
Sebastian del Piombo; Backhuijzen, Hobbema, Gericault, the rarities of
painting--none of these things so much as aroused their curiosity; they
were waiting for the sun to arise and shine upon these treasures. Still,
they were surprised by the beauty of some of the Etruscan trinkets and
the solid value of the snuff-boxes, and out of politeness they went into
ecstasies over some Florentine bronzes which they held in their hands
when Mme. Cibot announced M. Brunner! They did not turn; they took
advantage of a superb Venetian mirror framed in huge masses of carved
ebony to scan this phoenix of eligible young men.

Frederic, forewarned by Wilhelm, had made the most of the little hair
that remained to him. He wore a neat pair of trousers, a soft shade of
some dark color, a silk waistcoat of superlative elegance and the very
newest cut, a shirt with open-work, its linen hand-woven by a Friesland
woman, and a blue-and-white cravat. His watch chain, like the head of
his cane, came from Messrs. Florent and Chanor; and the coat, cut by old
Graff himself, was of the very finest cloth. The Suede gloves proclaimed
the man who had run through his mother’s fortune. You could have seen
the banker’s neat little brougham and pair of horses mirrored in the
surface of his speckless varnished boots, even if two pairs of sharp
ears had not already caught the sound of wheels outside in the Rue de
Normandie.

When the prodigal of twenty years is a kind of chrysalis from which
a banker emerges at the age of forty, the said banker is usually
an observer of human nature; and so much the more shrewd if, as in
Brunner’s case, he understands how to turn his German simplicity to good
account. He had assumed for the occasion the abstracted air of a man who
is hesitating between family life and the dissipations of bachelorhood.
This expression in a Frenchified German seemed to Cecile to be in the
highest degree romantic; the descendant of the Virlaz was a second
Werther in her eyes--where is the girl who will not allow herself to
weave a little novel about her marriage? Cecile thought herself the
happiest of women when Brunner, looking round at the magnificent works
of art so patiently collected during forty years, waxed enthusiastic,
and Pons, to his no small satisfaction, found an appreciative admirer of
his treasures for the first time in his life.

“He is poetical,” the young lady said to herself; “he sees millions in
the things. A poet is a man that cannot count and leaves his wife to
look after his money--an easy man to manage and amuse with trifles.”

Every pane in the two windows was a square of Swiss painted glass; the
least of them was worth a thousand francs; and Pons possessed sixteen
of these unrivaled works of art for which amateurs seek so eagerly
nowadays. In 1815 the panes could be bought for six or ten francs
apiece. The value of the glorious collection of pictures, flawless great
works, authentic, untouched since they left the master’s hands, could
only be proved in the fiery furnace of a saleroom. Not a picture but
was set in a costly frame; there were frames of every kind--Venetians,
carved with heavy ornaments, like English plate of the present day;
Romans, distinguishable among the others for a certain dash that artists
call _flafla_; Spanish wreaths in bold relief; Flemings and Germans with
quaint figures, tortoise-shell frames inlaid with copper and brass and
mother-of-pearl and ivory; frames of ebony and boxwood in the styles of
Louis Treize, Louis Quatorze, Louis Quinze, and Louis Seize--in short,
it was a unique collection of the finest models. Pons, luckier than
the art museums of Dresden and Vienna, possessed a frame by the famous
Brustoloni--the Michael Angelo of wood-carvers.

Mlle. de Marville naturally asked for explanations of each new
curiosity, and was initiated into the mysteries of art by Brunner. Her
exclamations were so childish, she seemed so pleased to have the value
and beauty of the paintings, carvings, or bronzes pointed out to her,
that the German gradually thawed and looked quite young again, and both
were led on further than they intended at this (purely accidental) first
meeting.

The private view lasted for three hours. Brunner offered his arm when
Cecile went downstairs. As they descended slowly and discreetly, Cecile,
still talking fine art, wondered that M. Brunner should admire her
cousin’s gimcracks so much.

“Do you really think that these things that we have just seen are worth
a great deal of money?”

“Mademoiselle, if your cousin would sell his collection, I would give
eight hundred thousand francs for it this evening, and I should not make
a bad bargain. The pictures alone would fetch more than that at a public
sale.”

“Since you say so, I believe it,” returned she; “the things took up so
much of your attention that it must be so.”

“On! mademoiselle!” protested Brunner. “For all answer to your reproach,
I will ask your mother’s permission to call, so that I may have the
pleasure of seeing you again.”

“How clever she is, that ‘little girl’ of mine!” thought the Presidente,
following closely upon her daughter’s heels. Aloud she said, “With the
greatest pleasure, monsieur. I hope that you will come at dinner-time
with our Cousin Pons. The President will be delighted to make your
acquaintance.--Thank you, cousin.”

The lady squeezed Pons’ arm with deep meaning; she could not have said
more if she had used the consecrated formula, “Let us swear an eternal
friendship.” The glance which accompanied that “Thank you, cousin,” was
a caress.

When the young lady had been put into the carriage, and the jobbed
brougham had disappeared down the Rue Charlot, Brunner talked
bric-a-brac to Pons, and Pons talked marriage.

“Then you see no obstacle?” said Pons.

“Oh!” said Brunner, “she is an insignificant little thing, and the
mother is a trifle prim.--We shall see.”

“A handsome fortune one of these days.... More than a million--”

“Good-bye till Monday!” interrupted the millionaire. “If you should
care to sell your collection of pictures, I would give you five or six
hundred thousand francs--”

“Ah!” said Pons; he had no idea that he was so rich. “But they are my
great pleasure in life, and I could not bring myself to part with them.
I could only sell my collection to be delivered after my death.”

“Very well. We shall see.”

“Here we have two affairs afoot!” said Pons; he was thinking only of the
marriage.

Brunner shook hands and drove away in his splendid carriage. Pons
watched it out of sight. He did not notice that Remonencq was smoking
his pipe in the doorway.

That evening Mme. de Marville went to ask advice of her father-in-law,
and found the whole Popinot family at the Camusots’ house. It was only
natural that a mother who had failed to capture an eldest son should be
tempted to take her little revenge; so Mme. de Marville threw out hints
of the splendid marriage that her Cecile was about to make.--“Whom can
Cecile be going to marry?” was the question upon all lips. And Cecile’s
mother, without suspecting that she was betraying her secret, let
fall words and whispered confidences, afterwards supplemented by Mme.
Berthier, till gossip circulating in the bourgeois empyrean where
Pons accomplished his gastronomical evolutions took something like the
following form:

“Cecile de Marville is engaged to be married to a young German, a banker
from philanthropic motives, for he has four millions; he is like a hero
in a novel, a perfect Werther, charming and kind-hearted. He has sown
his wild oats, and he is distractedly in love with Cecile; it is a case
of love at first sight; and so much the more certain, since Cecile had
all Pons’ paintings of Madonnas for rivals,” and so forth and so forth.

Two or three of the set came to call on the Presidente, ostensibly to
congratulate, but really to find out whether or not the marvelous tale
were true. For their benefit Mme. de Marville executed the following
admirable variations on the theme of son-in-law which mothers may
consult, as people used to refer to the _Complete Letter Writer_.

“A marriage is not an accomplished fact,” she told Mme. Chiffreville,
“until you have been in the mayor’s office and the church. We have only
come as far as a personal interview; so I count upon your friendship to
say nothing of our hopes.”

“You are very fortunate, madame; marriages are so difficult to arrange
in these days.”

“What can one do? It was chance; but marriages are often made in that
way.”

“Ah! well. So you are going to marry Cecile?” said Mme. Cardot.

“Yes,” said Cecile’s mother, fully understanding the meaning of the
“so.” “We were very particular, or Cecile would have been established
before this. But now we have found everything we wish: money, good
temper, good character, and good looks; and my sweet little girl
certainly deserves nothing less. M. Brunner is a charming young man,
most distinguished; he is fond of luxury, he knows life; he is wild
about Cecile, he loves her sincerely; and in spite of his three or four
millions, Cecile is going to accept him.--We had not looked so high for
her; still, store is no sore.”

“It was not so much the fortune as the affection inspired by my daughter
which decided us,” the Presidente told Mme. Lebas. “M. Brunner is in
such a hurry that he wants the marriage to take place with the least
possible delay.”

“Is he a foreigner?”

“Yes, madame; but I am very fortunate, I confess. No, I shall not have
a son-in-law, but a son. M. Brunner’s delicacy has quite won our hearts.
No one would imagine how anxious he was to marry under the dotal system.
It is a great security for families. He is going to invest twelve
hundred thousand francs in grazing land, which will be added to Marville
some day.”

More variations followed on the morrow. For instance--M. Brunner was a
great lord, doing everything in lordly fashion; he did not haggle. If
M. de Marville could obtain letters of naturalization, qualifying M.
Brunner for an office under Government (and the Home Secretary surely
could strain a point for M. de Marville), his son-in-law would be a peer
of France. Nobody knew how much money M. Brunner possessed; “he had the
finest horses and the smartest carriages in Paris!” and so on and so on.

From the pleasure with which the Camusots published their hopes, it was
pretty clear that this triumph was unexpected.

Immediately after the interview in Pons’ museum, M. de Marville, at his
wife’s instance, begged the Home Secretary, his chief, and the attorney
for the crown to dine with him on the occasion of the introduction of
this phoenix of a son-in-law.

The three great personages accepted the invitation, albeit it was given
on short notice; they all saw the part that they were to play in the
family politics, and readily came to the father’s support. In France we
are usually pretty ready to assist the mother of marriageable daughters
to hook an eligible son-in-law. The Count and Countess Popinot likewise
lent their presence to complete the splendor of the occasion, although
they thought the invitation in questionable taste.

There were eleven in all. Cecile’s grandfather, old Camusot, came, of
course, with his wife to a family reunion purposely arranged to elicit a
proposal from M. Brunner.

The Camusot de Marvilles had given out that the guest of the evening
was one of the richest capitalists in Germany, a man of taste (he was in
love with “the little girl”), a future rival of the Nucingens, Kellers,
du Tillets, and their like.

“It is our day,” said the Presidente with elaborate simplicity, when she
had named her guests one by one for the German whom she already regarded
as her son-in-law. “We have only a few intimate friends--first, my
husband’s father, who, as you know, is sure to be raised to the peerage;
M. le Comte and Mme. la Comtesse Popinot, whose son was not thought rich
enough for Cecile; the Home Secretary; our First President; our attorney
for the crown; our personal friends, in short.--We shall be obliged to
dine rather late to-night, because the Chamber is sitting, and people
cannot get away before six.”

Brunner looked significantly at Pons, and Pons rubbed his hands as if to
say, “Our friends, you see! _My_ friends!”

Mme. de Marville, as a clever tactician, had something very particular
to say to her cousin, that Cecile and her Werther might be left together
for a moment. Cecile chattered away volubly, and contrived that Frederic
should catch sight of a German dictionary, a German grammar, and a
volume of Goethe hidden away in a place where he was likely to find
them.

“Ah! are you learning German?” asked Brunner, flushing red.

(For laying traps of this kind the Frenchwoman has not her match!)

“Oh! how naughty you are!” she cried; “it is too bad of you, monsieur,
to explore my hiding-places like this. I want to read Goethe in the
original,” she added; “I have been learning German for two years.”

“Then the grammar must be very difficult to learn, for scarcely ten
pages have been cut--” Brunner remarked with much candor.

Cecile, abashed, turned away to hide her blushes. A German cannot resist
a display of this kind; Brunner caught Cecile’s hand, made her turn, and
watched her confusion under his gaze, after the manner of the heroes of
the novels of Auguste Lafontaine of chaste memory.

“You are adorable,” said he.

Cecile’s petulant gesture replied, “So are you--who could help liking
you?”

“It is all right, mamma,” she whispered to her parent, who came up at
that moment with Pons.

The sight of a family party on these occasions is not to be described.
Everybody was well satisfied to see a mother put her hand on an eligible
son-in-law. Compliments, double-barreled and double-charged, were paid
to Brunner (who pretended to understand nothing); to Cecile, on whom
nothing was lost; and to the Presidente, who fished for them. Pons heard
the blood singing in his ears, the light of all the blazing gas-jets of
the theatre footlights seemed to be dazzling his eyes, when Cecile, in
a low voice and with the most ingenious circumspection, spoke of her
father’s plan of the annuity of twelve hundred francs. The old artist
positively declined the offer, bringing forward the value of his fortune
in furniture, only now made known to him by Brunner.

The Home Secretary, the First President, the attorney for the crown, the
Popinots, and those who had other engagements, all went; and before long
no one was left except M. Camusot senior, and Cardot the old notary, and
his assistant and son-in-law Berthier. Pons, worthy soul, looking round
and seeing no one but the family, blundered out a speech of thanks to
the President and his wife for the proposal which Cecile had just made
to him. So it is with those who are guided by their feelings; they
act upon impulse. Brunner, hearing of an annuity offered in this way,
thought that it had very much the look of a commission paid to Pons; he
made an Israelite’s return upon himself, his attitude told of more than
cool calculation.

Meanwhile Pons was saying to his astonished relations, “My collection or
its value will, in any case, go to your family, whether I come to terms
with our friend Brunner or keep it.” The Camusots were amazed to hear
that Pons was so rich.

Brunner, watching, saw how all these ignorant people looked favorably
upon a man once believed to be poor so soon as they knew that he had
great possessions. He had seen, too, already that Cecile was spoiled by
her father and mother; he amused himself, therefore, by astonishing the
good bourgeois.

“I was telling mademoiselle,” said he, “that M. Pons’ pictures were
worth that sum to _me_; but the prices of works of art have risen so
much of late, that no one can tell how much the collection might sell
for at public auction. The sixty pictures might fetch a million francs;
several that I saw the other day were worth fifty thousand apiece.”

“It is a fine thing to be your heir!” remarked old Cardot, looking at
Pons.

“My heir is my Cousin Cecile here,” answered Pons, insisting on the
relationship. There was a flutter of admiration at this.

“She will be a very rich heiress,” laughed old Cardot, as he took his
departure.

Camusot senior, the President and his wife, Cecile, Brunner, Berthier,
and Pons were now left together; for it was assumed that the formal
demand for Cecile’s hand was about to be made. No sooner was Cardot
gone, indeed, than Brunner began with an inquiry which augured well.

“I think I understood,” he said, turning to Mme. de Marville, “that
mademoiselle is your only daughter.”

“Certainly,” the lady said proudly.

“Nobody will make any difficulties,” Pons, good soul, put in by way of
encouraging Brunner to bring out his proposal.

But Brunner grew thoughtful, and an ominous silence brought on a
coolness of the strangest kind. The Presidente might have admitted that
her “little girl” was subject to epileptic fits. The President, thinking
that Cecile ought not to be present, signed to her to go. She went.
Still Brunner said nothing. They all began to look at one another. The
situation was growing awkward.

Camusot senior, a man of experience, took the German to Mme. de
Marville’s room, ostensibly to show him Pons’ fan. He saw that some
difficulty had arisen, and signed to the rest to leave him alone with
Cecile’s suitor-designate.

“Here is the masterpiece,” said Camusot, opening out the fan.

Brunner took it in his hand and looked at it. “It is worth five thousand
francs,” he said after a moment.

“Did you not come here, sir, to ask for my granddaughter?” inquired the
future peer of France.

“Yes, sir,” said Brunner; “and I beg you to believe that no possible
marriage could be more flattering to my vanity. I shall never find any
one more charming nor more amiable, nor a young lady who answers to my
ideas like Mlle. Cecile; but--”

“Oh, no _buts_!” old Camusot broke in; “or let us have the translation
of your ‘buts’ at once, my dear sir.”

“I am very glad, sir, that the matter has gone no further on either
side,” Brunner answered gravely. “I had no idea that Mlle. Cecile was an
only daughter. Anybody else would consider this an advantage; but to me,
believe me, it is an insurmountable obstacle to--”

“What, sir!” cried Camusot, amazed beyond measure. “Do you find a
positive drawback in an immense advantage? Your conduct is really
extraordinary; I should very much like to hear the explanation of it.”

“I came here this evening, sir,” returned the German phlegmatically,
“intending to ask M. le President for his daughter’s hand. It was my
desire to give Mlle. Cecile a brilliant future by offering her so much
of my fortune as she would consent to accept. But an only daughter is
a child whose will is law to indulgent parents, who has never been
contradicted. I have had the opportunity of observing this in many
families, where parents worship divinities of this kind. And
your granddaughter is not only the idol of the house, but Mme. la
Presidente... you know what I mean. I have seen my father’s house turned
into a hell, sir, from this very cause. My stepmother, the source of
all my misfortunes, an only daughter, idolized by her parents, the most
charming betrothed imaginable, after marriage became a fiend incarnate.
I do not doubt that Mlle. Cecile is an exception to the rule; but I am
not a young man, I am forty years old, and the difference between our
ages entails difficulties which would put it out of my power to make
the young lady happy, when Mme. la Presidente always carried out her
daughter’s every wish and listened to her as if Mademoiselle was an
oracle. What right have I to expect Mlle. Cecile to change her habits
and ideas? Instead of a father and mother who indulge her every whim,
she would find an egotistic man of forty; if she should resist, the man
of forty would have the worst of it. So, as an honest man--I withdraw.
If there should be any need to explain my visit here, I desire to be
entirely sacrificed--”

“If these are your motives, sir,” said the future peer of France,
“however singular they may be, they are plausible--”

“Do not call my sincerity in question, sir,” Brunner interrupted
quickly. “If you know of a penniless girl, one of a large family, well
brought up but without fortune, as happens very often in France; and if
her character offers me security, I will marry her.”

A pause followed; Frederic Brunner left Cecile’s grandfather and
politely took leave of his host and hostess. When he was gone, Cecile
appeared, a living commentary upon her Werther’s leave-taking; she was
ghastly pale. She had hidden in her mother’s wardrobe and overheard the
whole conversation.

“Refused!...” she said in a low voice for her mother’s ear.

“And why?” asked the Presidente, fixing her eyes upon her embarrassed
father-in-law.

“Upon the fine pretext that an only daughter is a spoilt child,” replied
that gentleman. “And he is not altogether wrong there,” he added,
seizing an opportunity of putting the blame on the daughter-in-law, who
had worried him not a little for twenty years.

“It will kill my child!” cried the Presidente, “and it is your doing!”
 she exclaimed, addressing Pons, as she supported her fainting daughter,
for Cecile thought well to make good her mother’s words by sinking into
her arms. The President and his wife carried Cecile to an easy-chair,
where she swooned outright. The grandfather rang for the servants.

“It is a plot of his weaving; I see it all now,” said the infuriated
mother.

Pons sprang up as if the trump of doom were sounding in his ears.

“Yes!” said the lady, her eyes like two springs of green bile, “this
gentleman wished to repay a harmless joke by an insult. Who will believe
that that German was right in his mind? He is either an accomplice in
a wicked scheme of revenge, or he is crazy. I hope, M. Pons, that in
future you will spare us the annoyance of seeing you in the house where
you have tried to bring shame and dishonor.”

Pons stood like a statue, with his eyes fixed on the pattern of the
carpet.

“Well! Are you still here, monster of ingratitude?” cried she, turning
round on Pons, who was twirling his thumbs.--“Your master and I are
never at home, remember, if this gentleman calls,” she continued,
turning to the servants.--“Jean, go for the doctor; and bring hartshorn,
Madeleine.”

In the Presidente’s eyes, the reason given by Brunner was simply an
excuse, there was something else behind; but, at the same time, the fact
that the marriage was broken off was only the more certain. A woman’s
mind works swiftly in great crises, and Mme. de Marville had hit at once
upon the one method of repairing the check. She chose to look upon it as
a scheme of revenge. This notion of ascribing a fiendish scheme to
Pons satisfied family honor. Faithful to her dislike of the cousin, she
treated a feminine suspicion as a fact. Women, generally speaking, hold
a creed peculiar to themselves, a code of their own; to them anything
which serves their interests or their passions is true. The Presidente
went a good deal further. In the course of the evening she talked
the President into her belief, and next morning found the magistrate
convinced of his cousin’s culpability.

Every one, no doubt, will condemn the lady’s horrible conduct; but what
mother in Mme. Camusot’s position will not do the same? Put the choice
between her own daughter and an alien, she will prefer to sacrifice the
honor of the latter. There are many ways of doing this, but the end in
view is the same.

The old musician fled down the staircase in haste; but he went slowly
along the boulevards to his theatre, he turned in mechanically at the
door, and mechanically he took his place and conducted the orchestra. In
the interval he gave such random answers to Schmucke’s questions, that
his old friend dissembled his fear that Pons’ mind had given way. To
so childlike a nature, the recent scene took the proportions of a
catastrophe. He had meant to make every one happy, and he had aroused
a terrible slumbering feeling of hate; everything had been turned
topsy-turvy. He had at last seen mortal hate in the Presidente’s eyes,
tones, and gesture.

On the morrow, Mme. Camusot de Marville made a great resolution;
the President likewise sanctioned the step now forced upon them by
circumstances. It was determined that the estate of Marville should be
settled upon Cecile at the time of her marriage, as well as the house in
the Rue de Hanovre and a hundred thousand francs. In the course of the
morning, the Presidente went to call upon the Comtesse Popinot; for she
saw plainly that nothing but a settled marriage could enable them
to recover after such a check. To the Comtesse Popinot she told the
shocking story of Pons’ revenge, Pons’ hideous hoax. It all seemed
probable enough when it came out that the marriage had been broken off
simply on the pretext that Cecile was an only daughter. The Presidente
next dwelt artfully upon the advantage of adding “de Marville” to the
name of Popinot; and the immense dowry. At the present price fetched by
land in Normandy, at two per cent, the property represented nine hundred
thousand francs, and the house in the Rue de Hanovre about two hundred
and fifty thousand. No reasonable family could refuse such an alliance.
The Comte and Comtesse Popinot accepted; and as they were now touched by
the honor of the family which they were about to enter, they promised to
help explain away yesterday evening’s mishap.

And now in the house of the elder Camusot, before the very persons who
had heard Mme. de Marville singing Frederic Brunner’s praises but a
few days ago, that lady, to whom nobody ventured to speak on the topic,
plunged courageously into explanations.

“Really, nowadays” (she said), “one could not be too careful if a
marriage was in question, especially if one had to do with foreigners.”

“And why, madame?”

“What has happened to you?” asked Mme. Chiffreville.

“Do you not know about our adventure with that Brunner, who had the
audacity to aspire to marry Cecile? His father was a German that kept a
wine-shop, and his uncle is a dealer in rabbit-skins!”

“Is it possible? So clear-sighted as you are!...” murmured a lady.

“These adventurers are so cunning. But we found out everything through
Berthier. His friend is a beggar that plays the flute. He is friendly
with a person who lets furnished lodgings in the Rue du Mail and some
tailor or other.... We found out that he had led a most disreputable
life, and no amount of fortune would be enough for a scamp that has run
through his mother’s property.”

“Why, Mlle. de Marville would have been wretched!” said Mme. Berthier.

“How did he come to your house?” asked old Mme. Lebas.

“It was M. Pons. Out of revenge, he introduced this fine gentleman
to us, to make us ridiculous.... This Brunner (it is the same name
as Fontaine in French)--this Brunner, that was made out to be such a
grandee, has poor enough health, he is bald, and his teeth are bad. The
first sight of him was enough for me; I distrusted him from the first.”

“But how about the great fortune that you spoke of?” a young married
woman asked shyly.

“The fortune was not nearly so large as they said. These tailors and the
landlord and he all scraped the money together among them, and put all
their savings into this bank that they are starting. What is a bank for
those that begin in these days? Simply a license to ruin themselves.
A banker’s wife may lie down at night a millionaire and wake up in the
morning with nothing but her settlement. At first word, at the very
first sight of him, we made up our minds about this gentleman--he is not
one of us. You can tell by his gloves, by his waistcoat, that he is
a working man, the son of a man that kept a pot-house somewhere in
Germany; he has not the instincts of a gentleman; he drinks beer, and
he smokes--smokes? ah! madame, _twenty-five pipes a day!_... What would
have become of poor Lili? ... It makes me shudder even now to think of
it. God has indeed preserved us! And besides, Cecile never liked him....
Who would have expected such a trick from a relative, an old friend of
the house that had dined with us twice a week for twenty years? We have
loaded him with benefits, and he played his game so well, that he said
Cecile was his heir before the Keeper of the Seals and the Attorney
General and the Home Secretary!... That Brunner and M. Pons had their
story ready, and each of them said that the other was worth millions!...
No, I do assure you, all of you would have been taken in by an artist’s
hoax like that.”

In a few weeks’ time, the united forces of the Camusot and Popinot
families gained an easy victory in the world, for nobody undertook
to defend the unfortunate Pons, that parasite, that curmudgeon, that
skinflint, that smooth-faced humbug, on whom everybody heaped scorn; he
was a viper cherished in the bosom of the family, he had not his match
for spite, he was a dangerous mountebank whom nobody ought to mention.



About a month after the perfidious Werther’s withdrawal, poor Pons left
his bed for the first time after an attack of nervous fever, and walked
along the sunny side of the street leaning on Schmucke’s arm. Nobody in
the Boulevard du Temple laughed at the “pair of nutcrackers,” for one of
the old men looked so shattered, and the other so touchingly careful
of his invalid friend. By the time that they reached the Boulevard
Poissonniere, a little color came back to Pons’ face; he was breathing
the air of the boulevards, he felt the vitalizing power of the
atmosphere of the crowded street, the life-giving property of the air
that is noticeable in quarters where human life abounds; in the filthy
Roman Ghetto, for instance, with its swarming Jewish population, where
malaria is unknown. Perhaps, too, the sight of the streets, the great
spectacle of Paris, the daily pleasure of his life, did the invalid
good. They walked on side by side, though Pons now and again left his
friend to look at the shop windows. Opposite the Theatre des Varietes he
saw Count Popinot, and went up to him very respectfully, for of all men
Pons esteemed and venerated the ex-Minister.

The peer of France answered him severely:

“I am at a loss to understand, sir, how you can have no more tact than
to speak to a near connection of a family whom you tried to brand with
shame and ridicule by a trick which no one but an artist could devise.
Understand this, sir, that from to-day we must be complete strangers
to each other. Mme. la Comtesse Popinot, like every one else, feels
indignant at your behavior to the Marvilles.”

And Count Popinot passed on, leaving Pons thunderstruck. Passion,
justice, policy, and great social forces never take into account the
condition of the human creature whom they strike down. The statesman,
driven by family considerations to crush Pons, did not so much as see
the physical weakness of his redoubtable enemy.

“Vat is it, mine boor friend?” exclaimed Schmucke, seeing how white Pons
had grown.

“It is a fresh stab in the heart,” Pons replied, leaning heavily on
Schmucke’s arm. “I think that no one, save God in heaven, can have any
right to do good, and that is why all those who meddle in His work are
so cruelly punished.”

The old artist’s sarcasm was uttered with a supreme effort; he was
trying, excellent creature, to quiet the dismay visible in Schmucke’s
face.

“So I dink,” Schmucke replied simply.

Pons could not understand it. Neither the Camusots nor the Popinots had
sent him notice of Cecile’s wedding.

On the Boulevard des Italiens Pons saw M. Cardot coming towards them.
Warned by Count Popinot’s allocution, Pons was very careful not to
accost the old acquaintance with whom he had dined once a fortnight for
the last year; he lifted his hat, but the other, mayor and deputy
of Paris, threw him an indignant glance and went by. Pons turned to
Schmucke.

“Do go and ask him what it is that they all have against me,” he said to
the friend who knew all the details of the catastrophe that Pons could
tell him.

“Mennseir,” Schmucke began diplomatically, “mine friend Bons is chust
recofering from an illness; you haf no doubt fail to rekognize him?”

“Not in the least.”

“But mit vat kann you rebroach him?”

“You have a monster of ingratitude for a friend, sir; if he is still
alive, it is because nothing kills ill weeds. People do well to mistrust
artists; they are as mischievous and spiteful as monkeys. This friend
of yours tried to dishonor his own family, and to blight a young girl’s
character, in revenge for a harmless joke. I wish to have nothing to do
with him; I shall do my best to forget that I have known him, or that
such a man

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