that a hair-dresser,--I don’t say a good hair-dresser, for a man is, or
he is not, a hair-dresser,--a hair-dresser, I repeat, is more
difficult to find than--what shall I say? than--I don’t know what--a
minister?--(Sit still!) No, for you can’t judge by ministers, the
streets are full of them. A Paganini? No, he’s not great enough. A
hair-dresser, monsieur, a man who divines your soul and your habits, in
order to dress your hair conformably with your being, that man has all
that constitutes a philosopher--and such he is. See the women! Women
appreciate us; they know our value; our value to them is the conquest
they make when they have placed their heads in our hands to attain a
triumph. I say to you that a hair-dresser--the world does not know
what he is. I who speak to you, I am very nearly all that there is
of--without boasting I may say I am known--Still, I think more might be
done--The execution, that is everything! Ah! if women would only give
me carte blanche!--if I might only execute the ideas that come to me! I
have, you see, a hell of imagination!--but the women don’t fall in with
it; they have their own plans; they’ll stick their fingers or combs, as
soon as my back is turned, through the most delicious edifices--which
ought to be engraved and perpetuated; for our works, monsieur, last
unfortunately but a few hours. A great hair-dresser, hey! he’s like
Careme and Vestris in their careers. (Head a little this way, if you
please, SO; I attend particularly to front faces!) Our profession is
ruined by bunglers who understand neither the epoch nor their art. There
are dealers in wigs and essences who are enough to make one’s hair stand
on end; they care only to sell you bottles. It is pitiable! But that’s
business. Such poor wretches cut hair and dress it as they can. I, when
I arrived in Paris from Toulouse, my ambition was to succeed the great
Marius, to be a true Marius, to make that name illustrious. I alone,
more than all the four others, I said to myself, ‘I will conquer, or
die.’ (There! now sit straight, I am going to finish you.) I was the
first to introduce _elegance_; I made my salons the object of curiosity.
I disdain advertisements; what advertisements would have cost, monsieur,
I put into elegance, charm, comfort. Next year I shall have a quartette
in one of the salons to discourse music, and of the best. Yes, we ought
to charm away the ennui of those whose heads we dress. I do not conceal
from myself the annoyances to a client. (Look at yourself!) To have
one’s hair dressed is fatiguing, perhaps as much so as posing for one’s
portrait. Monsieur knows perhaps that the famous Monsieur Humbolt (I did
the best I could with the few hairs America left him--science has this
in common with savages, that she scalps her men clean), that illustrious
savant, said that next to the suffering of going to be hanged was
that of going to be painted; but I place the trial of having your head
dressed before that of being painted, and so do certain women. Well,
monsieur, my object is to make those who come here to have their hair
cut or frizzed enjoy themselves. (Hold still, you have a tuft which
_must_ be conquered.) A Jew proposed to supply me with Italian
cantatrices who, during the interludes, were to depilate the young
men of forty; but they proved to be girls from the Conservatoire, and
music-teachers from the Rue Montmartre. There you are, monsieur; your
head is dressed as that of a man of talent ought to be. Ossian,” he said
to the lacquey in livery, “dress monsieur and show him out. Whose turn
next?” he added proudly, gazing round upon the persons who awaited him.
“Don’t laugh, Gazonal,” said Leon as they reached the foot of the
staircase, whence his eye could take in the whole of the Place de la
Bourse. “I see over there one of our great men, and you shall compare
his language with that of the barber, and tell me which of the two you
think the most original.”
“Don’t laugh, Gazonal,” said Bixiou, mimicking Leon’s intonation. “What
do you suppose is Marius’s business?”
“Hair-dressing.”
“He has obtained a monopoly of the sale of hair in bulk, as a certain
dealer in comestibles who is going to sell us a pate for three francs
has acquired a monopoly of the sale of truffles; he discounts the paper
of that business; he loans money on pawn to clients when embarrassed; he
gives annuities on lives; he gambles at the Bourse; he is a stockholder
in all the fashion papers; and he sells, under the name of a certain
chemist, an infamous drug which, for his share alone, gives him an
income of thirty thousand francs, and costs in advertisements a hundred
thousand yearly.”
“Is it possible!” cried Gazonal.
“Remember this,” said Bixiou, gravely. “In Paris there is no such thing
as a small business; all things swell to large proportions, down to the
sale of rags and matches. The lemonade-seller who, with his napkin
under his arm, meets you as you enter his shop, may be worth his fifty
thousand francs a year; the waiter in a restaurant is eligible for the
Chamber; the man you take for a beggar in the street carries a hundred
thousand francs worth of unset diamonds in his waistcoat pocket, and
didn’t steal them either.”
The three inseparables (for one day at any rate) now crossed the Place
de la Bourse in a way to intercept a man about forty years of age,
wearing the Legion of honor, who was coming from the boulevard by way of
the rue Neuve-Vivienne.
“Hey!” said Leon, “what are you pondering over, my dear Dubourdieu?
Some fine symbolic composition? My dear cousin, I have the pleasure to
present to you our illustrious painter Dubourdieu, not less celebrated
for his humanitarian convictions than for his talents in art.
Dubourdieu, my cousin Palafox.”
Dubourdieu, a small, pale man with melancholy blue eyes, bowed slightly
to Gazonal, who bent low as before a man of genius.
“So you have elected Stidmann in place of--” he began.
“How could I help it? I wasn’t there,” replied Lora.
“You bring the Academy into disrepute,” continued the painter. “To
choose such a man as that! I don’t wish to say ill of him, but he works
at a trade. Where are you dragging the first of arts,--the art those
works are the most lasting; bringing nations to light of which the world
has long lost even the memory; an art which crowns and consecrates great
men? Yes, sculpture is priesthood; it preserves the ideas of an
epoch, and you give its chair to a maker of toys and mantelpieces, an
ornamentationist, a seller of bric-a-brac! Ah! as Chamfort said, one has
to swallow a viper every morning to endure the life of Paris. Well,
at any rate, Art remains to a few of us; they can’t prevent us from
cultivating it--”
“And besides, my dear fellow, you have a consolation which few artists
possess; the future is yours,” said Bixiou. “When the world is converted
to our doctrine, you will be at the head of your art; for you are
putting into it ideas which people will understand--_when_ they are
generalized! In fifty years from now you’ll be to all the world what you
are to a few of us at this moment,--a great man. The only question is
how to get along till then.”
“I have just finished,” resumed the great artist, his face expanding
like that of a man whose hobby is stroked, “an allegorical figure of
Harmony; and if you will come and see it, you will understand why it
should have taken me two years to paint it. Everything is in it! At
the first glance one divines the destiny of the globe. A queen holds
a shepherd’s crook in her hand,--symbolical of the advancement of the
races useful to mankind; she wears on her head the cap of Liberty; her
breasts are sixfold, as the Egyptians carved them--for the Egyptians
foresaw Fourier; her feet are resting on two clasped hands which embrace
a globe,--symbol of the brotherhood of all human races; she tramples
cannon under foot to signify the abolition of war; and I have tried to
make her face express the serenity of triumphant agriculture. I have
also placed beside her an enormous curled cabbage, which, according
to our master, is an image of Harmony. Ah! it is not the least among
Fourier’s titles to veneration that he has restored the gift of thought
to plants; he has bound all creation in one by the signification of
things to one another, and by their special language. A hundred years
hence this earth will be much larger than it is now.”
“And how will that, monsieur, come to pass?” said Gazonal, stupefied at
hearing a man outside of a lunatic asylum talk in this way.
“Through the extending of production. If men will apply The System, it
will not be impossible to act upon the stars.”
“What would become of painting in that case?” asked Gazonal.
“It would be magnified.”
“Would our eyes be magnified too?” said Gazonal, looking at his two
friends significantly.
“Man will return to what he was before he became degenerate; our
six-feet men will then be dwarfs.”
“Is your picture finished?” asked Leon.
“Entirely finished,” replied Dubourdieu. “I have tried to see Hiclar,
and get him to compose a symphony for it; I wish that while viewing my
picture the public should hear music a la Beethoven to develop its ideas
and bring them within range of the intellect by two arts. Ah! if the
government would only lend me one of the galleries of the Louvre!”
“I’ll mention it, if you want me to do so; you should never neglect an
opportunity to strike minds.”
“Ah! my friends are preparing articles; but I am afraid they’ll go too
far.”
“Pooh!” said Bixiou, “they can’t go as far as the future.”
Dubourdieu looked askance at Bixiou, and continued his way.
“Why, he’s mad,” said Gazonal; “he is following the moon in her
courses.”
“His skill is masterly,” said Leon, “and he knows his art, but
Fourierism has killed him. You have just seen, cousin, one of the
effects of ambition upon artists. Too often, in Paris, from a desire to
reach more rapidly than by natural ways the celebrity which to them is
fortune, artists borrow the wings of circumstance, they think they make
themselves of more importance as men of a specialty, the supporters
of some ‘system’; and they fancy they can transform a clique into
the public. One is a republican, another Saint-Simonian; this one
aristocrat, that one Catholic, others juste-milieu, middle ages, or
German, as they choose for their purpose. Now, though opinions do not
give talent, they always spoil what talent there is; and the poor fellow
whom you have just seen is a proof thereof. An artist’s opinion ought to
be: Faith in his art, in his work; and his only way of success is toil
when nature has given him the sacred fire.”
“Let us get away,” said Bixiou. “Leon is beginning to moralize.”
“But that man was sincere,” said Gazonal, still stupefied.
“Perfectly sincere,” replied Bixiou; “as sincere as the king of barbers
just now.”
“He is mad!” repeated Gazonal.
“And he is not the first man driven man by Fourier’s ideas,” said
Bixiou. “You don’t know anything about Paris. Ask it for a hundred
thousand francs to realize an idea that will be useful to humanity,--the
steam-engine for instance,--and you’ll die, like Salomon de Caux, at
Bicetre; but if the money is wanted for some paradoxical absurdity,
Parisians will annihilate themselves and their fortune for it. It is the
same with systems as it is with material things. Utterly impracticable
newspapers have consumed millions within the last fifteen years. What
makes your lawsuit so hard to win, is that you have right on your side,
and on that of the prefect there are (so you suppose) secret motives.”
“Do you think that a man of intellect having once understood the nature
of Paris could live elsewhere?” said Leon to his cousin.
“Suppose we take Gazonal to old Mere Fontaine?” said Bixiou, making a
sign to the driver of a citadine to draw up; “it will be a step from the
real to the fantastic. Driver, Vieille rue du Temple.”
And all three were presently rolling in the direction of the Marais.
“What are you taking me to see now?” asked Gazonal.
“The proof of what Bixiou told you,” replied Leon; “we shall show you
a woman who makes twenty thousand francs a year by working a fantastic
idea.”
“A fortune-teller,” said Bixiou, interpreting the look of the Southerner
as a question. “Madame Fontaine is thought, by those who seek to pry
into the future, to be wiser in her wisdom than Mademoiselle Lenormand.”
“She must be very rich,” remarked Gazonal.
“She was the victim of her own idea, as long as lotteries existed,” said
Bixiou; “for in Paris there are no great gains without corresponding
outlays. The strongest heads are liable to crack there, as if to
give vent to their steam. Those who make much money have vices or
fancies,--no doubt to establish an equilibrium.”
“And now that the lottery is abolished?” asked Gazonal.
“Oh! now she has a nephew for whom she is hoarding.”
When they reached the Vieille rue du Temple the three friends entered
one of the oldest houses in that street and passed up a shaking
staircase, the steps of which, caked with mud, led them in
semi-darkness, and through a stench peculiar to houses on an alley, to
the third story, where they beheld a door which painting alone could
render; literature would have to spend too many nights in suitably
describing it.
An old woman, in keeping with that door, and who might have been that
door in human guise, ushered the three friends into a room which served
as an ante-chamber, where, in spite of the warm atmosphere which fills
the streets of Paris, they felt the icy chill of crypts about them. A
damp air came from an inner courtyard which resembled a huge air-shaft;
the light that entered was gray, and the sill of the window was filled
with pots of sickly plants. In this room, which had a coating of some
greasy, fuliginous substance, the furniture, the chairs, the table, were
all most abject. The floor tiles oozed like a water-cooler. In short,
every accessory was in keeping with the fearful old woman of the hooked
nose, ghastly face, and decent rags who directed the “consulters” to
sit down, informing them that only one at a time could be admitted to
Madame.
Gazonal, who played the intrepid, entered bravely, and found himself in
presence of one of those women forgotten by Death, who no doubt forgets
them intentionally in order to leave some samples of Itself among the
living. He saw before him a withered face in which shone fixed gray
eyes of wearying immobility; a flattened nose, smeared with snuff;
knuckle-bones well set up by muscles that, under pretence of being
hands, played nonchalantly with a pack of cards, like some machine
the movement of which is about to run down. The body, a species of
broom-handle decently covered with clothes, enjoyed the advantages of
death and did not stir. Above the forehead rose a coif of black velvet.
Madame Fontaine, for it was really a woman, had a black hen on her right
hand and a huge toad, named Astaroth, on her left. Gazonal did not at
first perceive them.
The toad, of surprising dimensions, was less alarming in himself than
through the effect of two topaz eyes, large as a ten-sous piece, which
cast forth vivid gleams. It was impossible to endure that look. The toad
is a creature as yet unexplained. Perhaps the whole animal creation,
including man, is comprised in it; for, as Lassailly said, the toad
exists indefinitely; and, as we know, it is of all created animals the
one whose marriage lasts the longest.
The black hen had a cage about two feet distant from the table, covered
with a green cloth, to which she came along a plank which formed a sort
of drawbridge between the cage and the table.
When the woman, the least real of the creatures in this Hoffmanesque
den, said to Gazonal: “Cut!” the worthy provincial shuddered
involuntarily. That which renders these beings so formidable is the
importance of what we want to know. People go to them, as they know very
well, to buy hope.
The den of the sibyl was much darker than the antechamber; the color
of the walls could scarcely be distinguished. The ceiling, blackened
by smoke, far from reflecting the little light that came from a window
obstructed by pale and sickly vegetations, absorbed the greater part
of it; but the table where the sorceress sat received what there was of
this half-light fully. The table, the chair of the woman, and that on
which Gazonal was seated, formed the entire furniture of the little
room, which was divided at one end by a sort of loft where Madame
Fontaine probably slept. Gazonal heard through a half-opened door the
bubbling murmur of a soup-pot. That kitchen sound, accompanied by a
composite odor in which the effluvia of a sink predominated, mingled
incongruous ideas of the necessities of actual life with those of
supernatural power. Disgust entered into curiosity.
Gazonal observed one stair of pine wood, the lowest no doubt of the
staircase which led to the loft. He took in these minor details at a
glance, with a sense of nausea. It was all quite otherwise alarming than
the romantic tales and scenes of German drama lead one to expect; here
was suffocating actuality. The air diffused a sort of dizzy heaviness,
the dim light rasped the nerves. When the Southerner, impelled by a
species of self-assertion, gazed firmly at the toad, he felt a sort of
emetic heat at the pit of his stomach, and was conscious of a
terror like that a criminal might feel in presence of a gendarme. He
endeavoured to brace himself by looking at Madame Fontaine; but there
he encountered two almost white eyes, the motionless and icy pupils of
which were absolutely intolerable to him. The silence became terrifying.
“Which do you wish, monsieur, the five-franc fortune, the ten-franc
fortune, or the grand game?”
“The five-franc fortune is dear enough,” replied the Southerner, making
powerful efforts not to yield to the influence of the surroundings in
which he found himself.
At the moment when Gazonal was thus endeavouring to collect himself,
a voice--an infernal voice--made him bound in his chair; the black hen
clucked.
“Go back, my daughter, go back; monsieur chooses to spend only five
francs.”
The hen seemed to understand her mistress, for, after coming within a
foot of the cards, she turned and resumed her former place.
“What flower to you like best?” asked the old woman, in a voice
hoarsened by the phlegm which seemed to rise and fall incessantly in her
bronchial tubes.
“The rose.”
“What color are you fond of?”
“Blue.”
“What animal do you prefer?”
“The horse. Why these questions?” he asked.
“Man derives his form from his anterior states,” she said sententiously.
“Hence his instincts; and his instincts rule his destiny. What food
do you like best to eat,--fish, game, cereals, butcher’s meat, sweet
things, vegetables, or fruits?”
“Game.”
“In what month where you born?”
“September.”
“Put out your hand.”
Madame Fontaine looked attentively at the lines of the hand that was
shown to her. It was all done seriously, with no pretence of sorcery; on
the contrary, with the simplicity a notary might have shown when asking
the intentions of a client about a deed. Presently she shuffled the
cards, and asked Gazonal to cut them, and then to make three packs of
them himself. After which she took the packs, spread them out before
her, and examined them as a gambler examines the thirty-six numbers at
roulette before he risks his stake. Gazonal’s bones were freezing; he
seemed not to know where he was; but his amazement grew greater and
greater when this hideous old woman in a green bonnet, stout and squat,
whose false front was frizzed into points of interrogation, proceeded,
in a thick voice, to relate to him all the particular circumstances,
even the most secret, of his past life: she told him his tastes, his
habits, his character; the thoughts of his childhood; everything that
had influenced his life; a marriage broken off, why, with whom, the
exact description of the woman he had loved; and, finally, the place he
came from, his lawsuit, etc.
Gazonal at first thought it was a hoax prepared by his companions; but
the absolute impossibility of such a conspiracy appeared to him almost
as soon as the idea itself, and he sat speechless before that truly
infernal power, the incarnation of which borrowed from humanity a form
which the imagination of painters and poets has throughout all ages
regarded as the most awful of created things,--namely, a toothless,
hideous, wheezing hag, with cold lips, flattened nose, and whitish eyes.
The pupils of those eyes had brightened, through them rushed a ray,--was
it from the depths of the future or from hell?
Gazonal asked, interrupting the old creature, of what use the toad and
the hen were to her.
“They predict the future. The consulter himself throws grain upon the
cards; Bilouche comes and pecks it. Astaroth crawls over the cards
to get the food the client holds for him, and those two wonderful
intelligences are never mistaken. Will you see them at work?--you will
then know your future. The cost is a hundred francs.”
Gazonal, horrified by the gaze of Astaroth, rushed into the antechamber,
after bowing to the terrible old woman. He was moist from head to foot,
as if under the incubation of some evil spirit.
“Let us get away!” he said to the two artists. “Did you ever consult
that sorceress?”
“I never do anything important without getting Astaroth’s opinion,” said
Leon, “and I am always the better for it.”
“I’m expecting the virtuous fortune which Bilouche has promised me,”
said Bixiou.
“I’ve a fever,” cried Gazonal. “If I believed what you say I should have
to believe in sorcery, in some supernatural power.”
“It may be only natural,” said Bixiou. “One-third of all the lorettes,
one-fourth of all the statesmen, and one-half of all artists consult
Madame Fontaine; and I know a minister to whom she is an Egeria.”
“Did she tell you about your future?” asked Leon.
“No; I had enough of her about my past. But,” added Gazonal, struck by
a sudden thought, “if she can, by the help of those dreadful
collaborators, predict the future, how came she to lose in the lottery?”
“Ah! you put your finger on one of the greatest mysteries of occult
science,” replied Leon. “The moment that the species of inward mirror on
which the past or the future is reflected to their minds become clouded
by the breath of a personal feeling, by an idea foreign to the purpose
of the power they are exerting, sorcerers and sorceresses can see
nothing; just as an artist who blurs art with political combinations and
systems loses his genius. Not long ago, a man endowed with the gift
of divining by cards, a rival to Madame Fontaine, became addicted to
vicious practices, and being unable to tell his own fate from the cards,
was arrested, tried, and condemned at the court of assizes. Madame
Fontaine, who predicts the future eight times out of ten, was never able
to know if she would win or lose in a lottery.”
“It is the same thing in magnetism,” remarked Bixiou. “A man can’t
magnetize himself.”
“Heavens! now we come to magnetism!” cried Gazonal. “Ah ca! do you know
everything?”
“Friend Gazonal,” replied Bixiou, gravely, “to be able to laugh at
everything one must know everything. As for me, I’ve been in Paris since
my childhood; I’ve lived, by means of my pencil, on its follies and
absurdities, at the rate of five caricatures a month. Consequently, I
often laugh at ideas in which I have faith.”
“Come, let us get to something else,” said Leon. “We’ll go to the
Chamber and settle the cousin’s affair.”
“This,” said Bixiou, imitating Odry in “Les Funambules,” “is high
comedy, for we will make the first orator we meet pose for us, and you
shall see that in those halls of legislation, as elsewhere, the Parisian
language has but two tones,--Self-interest, Vanity.”
As they got into their citadine, Leon saw in a rapidly driven cabriolet
a man to whom he made a sign that he had something to say to him.
“There’s Publicola Masson,” said Leon to Bixiou. “I’m going to ask for
a sitting this evening at five o’clock, after the Chamber. The cousin
shall then see the most curious of all the originals.”
“Who is he?” asked Gazonal, while Leon went to speak to Publicola
Masson.
“An artist-pedicure,” replied Bixiou, “author of a ‘Treatise on
Corporistics,’ who cuts your corns by subscription, and who, if the
Republications triumph for six months, will assuredly become immortal.”
“Drives his carriage!” ejaculated Gazonal.
“But, my good Gazonal, it is only millionaires who have time to go afoot
in Paris.”
“To the Chamber!” cried Leon to the coachman, getting back into the
carriage.
“Which, monsieur?”
“Deputies,” replied Leon, exchanging a smile with Bixiou.
“Paris begins to confound me,” said Gazonal.
“To make you see its immensity,--moral, political, and literary,--we are
now proceeding like the Roman cicerone, who shows you in Saint Peter’s
the thumb of the statue you took to be life-size, and the thumb proves
to be a foot long. You haven’t yet measured so much as a great toe of
Paris.”
“And remark, cousin Gazonal, that we take things as they come; we
haven’t selected.”
“This evening you shall sup as they feasted at Belshazzar’s; and there
you shall see our Paris, our own particular Paris, playing lansquenet,
and risking a hundred thousand francs at a throw without winking.”
A quarter of an hour later the citadine stopped at the foot of the
steps going up to the Chamber of Deputies, at that end of the Pont de la
Concorde which leads to discord.
“I thought the Chamber unapproachable?” said the provincial, surprised
to find himself in the great lobby.
“That depends,” replied Bixiou; “materially speaking, it costs thirty
sous for a citadine to approach it; politically, you have to spend
rather more. The swallows thought, so a poet says, that the Arc de
Triomphe was erected for them; we artists think that this public
building was built for us,--to compensate for the stupidities of the
Theatre-Francais and make us laugh; but the comedians on this stage are
much more expensive; and they don’t give us every day the value of our
money.”
“So this is the Chamber!” cried Gazonal, as he paced the great hall in
which there were then about a dozen persons, and looked around him with
an air which Bixiou noted down in his memory and reproduced in one of
the famous caricatures with which he rivalled Gavarni.
Leon went to speak to one of the ushers who go and come continually
between this hall and the hall of sessions, with which it communicates
by a passage in which are stationed the stenographers of the “Moniteur”
and persons attached to the Chamber.
“As for the minister,” replied the usher to Leon as Gazonal approached
them, “he is there, but I don’t know if Monsieur Giraud has come. I’ll
see.”
As the usher opened one side of the double door through which none but
deputies, ministers, or messengers from the king are allowed to pass,
Gazonal saw a man come out who seemed still young, although he was
really forty-eight years old, and to whom the usher evidently indicated
Leon de Lora.
“Ha! you here!” he exclaimed, shaking hands with both Bixiou and Lora.
“Scamps! what are you doing in the sanctuary of the laws?”
“Parbleu! we’ve come to learn how to blague,” said Bixiou. “We might get
rusty if we didn’t.”