THE GYPSY FORTUNE-TELLER.
The ever-recurring excitements and excesses of which these people’s
life is made up cannot fail to have a deteriorating effect on mind
and body—early undermined constitutions and premature death or
dotage being the penalty paid by many for the unbridled and senseless
gratification of their passions. This life, however, while it destroys
many, sharpens the faculties of those whose stronger natures have
enabled them to defy these ravages, bestowing a singular power of
penetration in all matters relating to the senses and passions.
More especially is this the case with regard to the women, who, already
gifted by nature with keener perceptions, and prematurely ripened in
what may be termed a tropical atmosphere of passion, develop an almost
supernatural power of clairvoyance, which enables them with incredible
celerity to unravel hitherto undisclosed secrets by means only of
intuitive deductions.
“The astounding vividness of their impressions” (again to quote Liszt
on the subject) “rarely fails to communicate itself like wildfire to
the hearers. As by the contagion of a deadly poison, the mere touch of
the gypsy fortune-teller is often sufficient to affect them with the
sensation of an electric shock or vibration.
“A few apt reflections strewed about in conversation, casual
exclamations of apparent simplicity, some primitive rhymes and verses
accentuated by passion, so to say hammered into relief like the raised
figures on a medal—such are the means which suffice to stir up in an
audience whatever elements may be there existing of secret wrath, of
latent rebellion, of characters bent but not broken, of affections
discouraged but not despairing.
[Illustration: GYPSY MOTHER AND CHILD.]
“The gypsy woman, herself well acquainted with all the signs and
workings of passion, distinguishes _à coup d’œil_ the cause of the
sallow cheek and the fevered eye of such another woman; she can feel
instinctively whether the hand from which she is expected to decipher
a fate be stretched towards her with the hasty gesture of hope or with
the hesitation of fear. Without difficulty she reads in disdainfully
curled lips or ominously drawn brows whether the youth before her be
chafing under a yoke or planning revenge; whether he craves love or has
already lost it. She can further distinguish at a glance the delusive
presumption of youth and beauty—the false security of possession which
thinks to defy misfortune. She knows the annihilating blows of fate
and the vulnerability of the human heart too well not to mistrust the
smile of over-conscious happiness, and prophesy misfortune to those who
refuse to believe in the instability of the future.
“She cannot be called a hypocrite, for she herself has faith in her
own diagnosis; believing that each man carries within him the germ of
his own fate, she is convinced that sooner or later her prognostics
must be fulfilled. Her only care is therefore to clothe her predictions
in a form which, easily captivating the imagination, and thereby
impressed on the memory, will spring again to life, along with the
image of the prophetess, whenever the latent emotions she has detected,
having reached their culminating point, bring about the success or the
catastrophe foreseen from the investigation of a hand and a heart.
“After all, why should we wonder that the secrets of the future can be
deciphered by one so intimately acquainted with the inmost folds of
the human soul, and the workings of different passions confined in the
human breast like so many caged lions or torpid slumbering reptiles?
“Passion always accompanied by a powerful sympathetic instinct quickly
divines the presence of a kindred passion. Apt to decipher the symptoms
inevitably betrayed in voice and gesture, and skilled to read in that
mystic book whose characters are so plainly impressed on the leaves of
a physiognomy which, betraying where it would fain conceal, becomes
the more impressive in proportion as the heart within is agitated by
tumultuous throbbings, the gypsy fortune-teller knows full well with
whom she has to deal, and can justly estimate what sort of characters
are those who seek her counsel.”
It is, I think, Balzac who has said, “Si le passé a laissé des traces,
il est à croire que l’avenir possède des racines;” and on the principle
that every man is master of his own fate, there is, after all, no
reason why these roots, invisible to the rest of the world, should not
be perceptible to such as have made of this subject the study of a
lifetime. Why should not the seer be able to proclaim the fruits to be
reaped from the recognition of germs which already exist?
The enlightened folk who sweepingly condemn the fortune-teller as a
liar and cheat are probably no less mistaken than witless rustics, who
blindly believe in her as an infallible oracle. Should not precisely
the superior enlightenment of which we boast be argument for, rather
than against, the fortune-teller? Why, if phrenology and graphology are
permitted to take rank as acknowledged sciences, should not the gypsy
woman’s power of divination be equally allowed to count as a shrewd
deciphering of character, coupled with logical deductions as to the
events likely to be evoked by the passions she has recognized, when
brought into combination with a given set of circumstances?
Ignorant people, surprised at the detection of secrets which they
had believed to be securely locked up in their own breasts, and not
understanding the process by which such conclusions were reached,
are ready to attribute the fortune-teller’s power of divination to
supernatural agency, which opinion is strengthened and confirmed by
the romantic conditions of the gypsy’s existence, and the cabalistic
glamour with which she contrives to invest herself.
But is not, in truth, this delicate and subtle perception in itself a
secret and undeniable power—a sudden inspiration, a positive intuition
of what will be from the rapid unveiling of what already is? And here,
again, Liszt is probably right in asserting this gift of prophecy,
so universally ascribed to the gypsies in all countries, to be a too
deeply rooted belief in the minds of the people not to have some
rational ground for its existence.
There is no doubt that the gypsy fortune-tellers in Transylvania
exercise considerable influence on their Saxon and Roumanian neighbors,
and it is a paradoxical fact that the self-same people who regard the
Tziganes as undoubted thieves, liars, and cheats in all the common
transactions of daily life, do not hesitate to confide in them blindly
for charmed medicines and love-potions, and are ready to attribute to
them unerring power in deciphering the mysteries of the future.
The Saxon peasant will, it is true, often drive away the fortune-teller
with blows and curses from his door, but his wife will as often
secretly beckon her in again by the back entrance, in order to be
consulted as to the illness of the cows, or beg from her a remedy
against the fever.
Wonderful potions and salves, composed of the fat of bears, dogs,
snakes, and snails, along with the oil of rain-worms, the bodies
of spiders and midges, rubbed into a paste, are concocted by these
cunning bohemians, who thus sometimes contrive to make thrice as much
money out of the carcass of a dead dog as another can realize from the
sale of a healthy pig or calf. There is not a village in Transylvania
which cannot boast of one or more such fortune-tellers, and living
in the suburbs of each town are many old women who make an easy and
comfortable livelihood out of the credulity of their fellow-creatures.
It has also been asserted that both Roumanian and Saxon mothers whose
sickly infants are believed to be suffering from the effects of the
evil eye, are often in the habit of giving the child to be nursed for
a period of nine days to some Tzigane woman supposed to have power to
undo the spell.
For my own part, I have seldom had inclination to confide the
deciphering of my fate to one of these wandering sibyls, and can
therefore only affirm that on the solitary occasion when, half in
jest, I chose to interrogate the future, I was favored with a piece of
intelligence so startling and improbable as could only be received with
a laugh of derision; yet before many days had elapsed this startling
and improbable event had actually come to pass, and the gypsy’s
prophecy was accomplished in the most unlooked-for manner.
Chance, probably, or coincidence, most people will say; and indeed
I do not myself see how it could have been anything but the veriest
coincidence. I merely state this fact as it occurred, and without
attempting to draw any general conclusions from the isolated instance
within my own personal range of observation.