were set in his head in porcine fashion; a Jew's slyness and
concentrated greed looked out of those dull blue circles, though in
his case the false humility that masks the Hebrew's unfathomed
contempt for the Gentile was lacking.
The relations between the Cibots and the Remonencqs were those of
benefactors and recipients. Mme. Cibot, convinced that the Auvergnats
were wretchedly poor, used to let them have the remainder of "her
gentlemen's" dinners at ridiculous prices. The Remonencqs would buy a
pound of broken bread, crusts and crumbs, for a farthing, a
porringer-full of cold potatoes for something less, and other scraps
in proportion. Remonencq shrewdly allowed them to believe that he was
not in business on his own account, he worked for Monistrol, the rich
shopkeepers preyed upon him, he said, and the Cibots felt sincerely
sorry for Remonencq. The velveteen jacket, waistcoat, and trousers,
particularly affected by Auvergnats, were covered with patches of
Cibot's making, and not a penny had the little tailor charged for
repairs which kept the three garments together after eleven years of
wear.
Thus we see that all Jews are not in Israel.
"You are not laughing at me, Remonencq, are you?" asked the portress.
"Is it possible that M. Pons has such a fortune, living as he does?
There is not a hundred francs in the place--"
"Amateursh are all like that," Remonencq remarked sententiously.
"Then do you think that my gentleman has worth of seven hundred
thousand francs, eh?--"
"In pictures alone," continued Remonencq (it is needless, for the sake
of clearness in the story, to give any further specimens of his
frightful dialect). "If he would take fifty thousand francs for one up
there that I know of, I would find the money if I had to hang myself.
Do you remember those little frames full of enameled copper on crimson
velvet, hanging among the portraits? . . . Well, those are Petitot's
enamels; and there is a cabinet minister as used to be a druggist that
will give three thousand francs apiece for them."
La Cibot's eyes opened wide. "There are thirty of them in the pair of
frames!" she said.
"Very well, you can judge for yourself how much he is worth."
Mme. Cibot's head was swimming; she wheeled round. In a moment came
the thought that she would have a legacy, _she_ would sleep sound on
old Pons' will, like the other servant-mistresses whose annuities had
aroused such envy in the Marais. Her thoughts flew to some commune in
the neighborhood of Paris; she saw herself strutting proudly about her
house in the country, looking after her garden and poultry yard,
ending her days, served like a queen, along with her poor dear Cibot,
who deserved such good fortune, like all angelic creatures whom nobody
knows nor appreciates.
Her abrupt, unthinking movement told Remonencq that success was sure.
In the _chineur's_ way of business--the _chineur_, be it explained,
goes about the country picking up bargains at the expense of the
ignorant--in the _chineur's_ way of business, the one real difficulty
is the problem of gaining an entrance to a house. No one can imagine
the Scapin's roguery, the tricks of a Sganarelle, the wiles of a
Dorine by which the _chineur_ contrives to make a footing for himself.
These comedies are as good as a play, and founded indeed on the old
stock theme of the dishonesty of servants. For thirty francs in money
or goods, servants, and especially country servants, will sometimes
conclude a bargain on which the _chineur_ makes a profit of a thousand
or two thousand francs. If we could but know the history of such and
such a service of Sevres porcelain, _pate tendre_, we should find that
all the intellect, all the diplomatic subtlety displayed at Munster,
Nimeguen, Utrecht, Ryswick, and Vienna was surpassed by the _chineur_.
His is the more frank comedy; his methods of action fathom depths of
personal interest quite as profound as any that plenipotentiaries can
explore in their difficult search for any means of breaking up the
best cemented alliances.
"I have set La Cibot nicely on fire," Remonencq told his sister, when
she came to take up her position again on the ramshackle chair. "And
now," he continued, "I shall go to consult the only man that knows,
our Jew, a good sort of Jew that did not ask more than fifteen per
cent of us for his money."
Remonencq had read La Cibot's heart. To will is to act with women of
her stamp. Let them see the end in view; they will stick at nothing to
gain it, and pass from scrupulous honesty to the last degree of
scoundrelism in the twinkling of an eye. Honesty, like most
dispositions of mind, is divided into two classes--negative and
positive. La Cibot's honesty was of the negative order; she and her
like are honest until they see their way clear to gain money belonging
to somebody else. Positive honesty, the honesty of the bank collector,
can wade knee-deep through temptations.
A torrent of evil thoughts invaded La Cibot's heart and brain so soon
as Remonencq's diabolical suggestion opened the flood-gates of
self-interest. La Cibot climbed, or, to be more accurate, fled up the
stairs, opened the door on the landing, and showed a face disguised in
false solicitude in the doorway of the room where Pons and Schmucke
were bemoaning themselves. As soon as she came in, Schmucke made her a
warning sign; for, true friend and sublime German that he was, he too
had read the doctor's eyes, and he was afraid that Mme. Cibot might
repeat the verdict. Mme. Cibot answered by a shake of the head
indicative of deep woe.
"Well, my dear monsieur," asked she, "how are you feeling?" She sat
down on the foot of the bed, hands on hips, and fixed her eyes
lovingly upon the patient; but what a glitter of metal there was in
them, a terrible, tiger-like gleam if any one had watched her.
"I feel very ill," answered poor Pons. "I have not the slightest
appetite left.--Oh! the world, the world!" he groaned, squeezing
Schmucke's hand. Schmucke was sitting by his bedside, and doubtless
the sick man was talking of the causes of his illness.--"I should have
done far better to follow your advice, my good Schmucke, and dined
here every day, and given up going into this society, that has fallen
on me with all its weight, like a tumbril cart crushing an egg! And
why?"
"Come, come, don't complain, M. Pons," said La Cibot; "the doctor told
me just how it is--"
Schmucke tugged at her gown.--"And you will pull through," she
continued, "only we must take great care of you. Be easy, you have a
good friend beside you, and without boasting, a woman as will nurse
you like a mother nurses her first child. I nursed Cibot round once
when Dr. Poulain had given him over; he had the shroud up to his eyes,
as the saying is, and they gave him up for dead. Well, well, you have
not come to that yet, God be thanked, ill though you may be. Count on
me; I would pull you through all by myself, I would! Keep still, don't
you fidget like that."
She pulled the coverlet over the patient's hands as she spoke.
"There, sonny! M. Schmucke and I will sit up with you of nights. A
prince won't be no better nursed . . . and besides, you needn't refuse
yourself nothing that's necessary, you can afford it.--I have just
been talking things over with Cibot, for what would he do without me,
poor dear?--Well, and I talked him round; we are both so fond of you,
that he will let me stop up with you of a night. And that is a good
deal to ask of a man like him, for he is as fond of me as ever he was
the day we were married. I don't know how it is. It is the lodge, you
see; we are always there together! Don't you throw off the things like
that!" she cried, making a dash for the bedhead to draw the coverlet
over Pons' chest. "If you are not good, and don't do just as Dr.
Poulain says--and Dr. Poulain is the image of Providence on earth--I
will have no more to do with you. You must do as I tell you--"
"Yes, Montame Zipod, he vill do vat you dell him," put in Schmucke;
"he vants to lif for his boor friend Schmucke's sake, I'll pe pound."
"And of all things, don't fidget yourself," continued La Cibot, "for
your illness makes you quite bad enough without your making it worse
for want of patience. God sends us our troubles, my dear good
gentlemen; He punishes us for our sins. Haven't you nothing to
reproach yourself with? some poor little bit of a fault or other?"
The invalid shook his head.
"Oh! go on! You were young once, you had your fling, there is some
love-child of yours somewhere--cold, and starving, and homeless. . . .
What monsters men are! Their love doesn't last only for a day, and
then in a jiffy they forget, they don't so much as think of the child
at the breast for months. . . . Poor women!"
"But no one has ever loved me except Schmucke and my mother," poor
Pons broke in sadly.
"Oh! come, you aren't no saint! You were young in your time, and a
fine-looking young fellow you must have been at twenty. I should have
fallen in love with you myself, so nice as you are--"
"I always was as ugly as a toad," Pons put in desperately.
"You say that because you are modest; nobody can't say that you aren't
modest."
"My dear Mme. Cibot, _no_, I tell you. I always was ugly, and I never
was loved in my life."
"You, indeed!" cried the portress. "You want to make me believe at
this time of day that you are as innocent as a young maid at your time
of life. Tell that to your granny! A musician at a theatre too! Why,
if a woman told me that, I wouldn't believe her."
"Montame Zipod, you irritate him!" cried Schmucke, seeing that Pons
was writhing under the bedclothes.
"You hold your tongue too! You are a pair of old libertines. If you
were ugly, it don't make no difference; there was never so ugly a
saucepan-lid but it found a pot to match, as the saying is. There is
Cibot, he got one of the handsomest oyster-women in Paris to fall in
love with him, and you are infinitely better looking than him! You are
a nice pair, you are! Come, now, you have sown your wild oats, and God
will punish you for deserting your children, like Abraham--"
Exhausted though he was, the invalid gathered up all his strength to
make a vehement gesture of denial.
"Do lie quiet; if you have, it won't prevent you from living as long
as Methuselah."
"Then, pray let me be quiet!" groaned Pons. "I have never known what
it is to be loved. I have had no child; I am alone in the world."
"Really, eh?" returned the portress. "You are so kind, and that is
what women like, you see--it draws them--and it looked to me
impossible that when you were in your prime--"
"Take her away," Pons whispered to Schmucke; "she sets my nerves on
edge."
"Then there's M. Schmucke, he has children. You old bachelors are not
all like that--"
"_I!_" cried Schmucke, springing to his feet, "vy!--"
"Come, then, you have none to come after you either, eh? You both
sprung up out of the earth like mushrooms--"
"Look here, komm mit me," said Schmucke. The good German manfully took
Mme. Cibot by the waist and carried her off into the next room, in
spite of her exclamations.
"At your age, you would not take advantage of a defenceless woman!"
cried La Cibot, struggling in his arms.
"Don't make a noise!"
"You too, the better one of the two!" returned La Cibot. "Ah! it is my
fault for talking about love to two old men who have never had nothing
to do with women. I have roused your passions," cried she, as
Schmucke's eyes glittered with wrath. "Help! help! police!"
"You are a stoopid!" said the German. "Look here, vat tid de toctor
say?"
"You are a ruffian to treat me so," wept La Cibot, now released,--"me
that would go through fire and water for you both! Ah! well, well,
they say that that is the way with men--and true it is! There is my
poor Cibot, _he_ would not be rough with me like this. . . . And I
treated you like my children, for I have none of my own; and
yesterday, yes, only yesterday I said to Cibot, 'God knew well what He
was doing, dear,' I said, 'when He refused us children, for I have two
children there upstairs.' By the holy crucifix and the soul of my
mother, that was what I said to him--"
"Eh! but vat did der doctor say?" Schmucke demanded furiously,
stamping on the floor for the first time in his life.
"Well," said Mme. Cibot, drawing Schmucke into the dining-room, "he
just said this--that our dear, darling love lying ill there would die
if he wasn't carefully nursed; but I am here, in spite of all your
brutality, for brutal you were, you that I thought so gentle. And you
are one of that sort! Ah! now, you would not abuse a woman at your
age, great blackguard--"
"Placard? I? Vill you not oonderstand that I lof nopody but Bons?"
"Well and good, you will let me alone, won't you?" said she, smiling
at Schmucke. "You had better; for if Cibot knew that anybody had
attempted his honor, he would break every bone in his skin."
"Take crate care of him, dear Montame Zipod," answered Schmucke, and
he tried to take the portress' hand.
"Oh! look here now, _again_."
"Chust listen to me. You shall haf all dot I haf, gif ve safe him."
"Very well; I will go round to the chemist's to get the things that
are wanted; this illness is going to cost a lot, you see, sir, and
what will you do?"
"I shall vork; Bons shall be nursed like ein brince."
"So he shall, M. Schmucke; and look here, don't you trouble about
nothing. Cibot and I, between us, have saved a couple of thousand
francs; they are yours; I have been spending money on you this long
time, I have."
"Goot voman!" cried Schmucke, brushing the tears from his eyes. "Vat
ein heart!"
"Wipe your tears; they do me honor; this is my reward," said La Cibot,
melodramatically. "There isn't no more disinterested creature on earth
than me; but don't you go into the room with tears in your eyes, or M.
Pons will be thinking himself worse than he is."
Schmucke was touched by this delicate feeling. He took La Cibot's hand
and gave it a final squeeze.
"Spare me!" cried the ex-oysterseller, leering at Schmucke.
"Bons," the good German said when he returned "Montame Zipod is an
anchel; 'tis an anchel dat brattles, but an anchel all der same."
"Do you think so? I have grown suspicious in the past month," said the
invalid, shaking his head. "After all I have been through, one comes
to believe in nothing but God and my friend--"
"Get bedder, and ve vill lif like kings, all tree of us," exclaimed
Schmucke.
"Cibot!" panted the portress as she entered the lodge. "Oh, my dear,
our fortune is made. My two gentlemen haven't nobody to come after
them, no natural children, no nothing, in short! Oh, I shall go round
to Ma'am Fontaine's and get her to tell my fortune on the cards, then
we shall know how much we are going to have--"
"Wife," said the little tailor, "it's ill counting on dead men's
shoes."
"Oh, I say, are _you_ going to worry me?" asked she, giving her spouse
a playful tap. "I know what I know! Dr. Poulain has given up M. Pons.
And we are going to be rich! My name will be down in the will. . . .
I'll see to that. Draw your needle in and out, and look after the
lodge; you will not do it for long now. We will retire, and go into
the country, out at Batignolles. A nice house and a fine garden; you
will amuse yourself with gardening, and I shall keep a servant!"
"Well, neighbor, and how are things going on upstairs?" The words were
spoken with the thick Auvergnat accent, and Remonencq put his head in
at the door. "Do you know what the collection is worth?"
"No, no, not yet. One can't go at that rate, my good man. I have
begun, myself, by finding out more important things--"
"More important!" exclaimed Remonencq; "why, what things can be more
important?"
"Come, let me do the steering, ragamuffin," said La Cibot
authoritatively.
"But thirty per cent on seven hundred thousand francs," persisted the
dealer in old iron; "you could be your own mistress for the rest of
your days on that."
"Be easy, Daddy Remonencq; when we want to know the value of the
things that the old man has got together, then we will see."
La Cibot went for the medicine ordered by Dr. Poulain, and put off her
consultation with Mme. Fontaine until the morrow; the oracle's
faculties would be fresher and clearer in the morning, she thought;
and she would go early, before everybody else came, for there was
often a crowd at Mme. Fontaine's.
Mme. Fontaine was at this time the oracle of the Marais; she had
survived the rival of forty years, the celebrated Mlle. Lenormand. No
one imagines the part that fortune-tellers play among Parisians of the
lower classes, nor the immense influence which they exert over the
uneducated; general servants, portresses, kept women, workmen, all the
many in Paris who live on hope, consult the privileged beings who
possess the mysterious power of reading the future.
The belief of the occult science is far more widely spread than
scholars, lawyers, doctors, magistrates, and philosophers imagine. The
instincts of the people are ineradicable. One among those instincts,
so foolishly styled "superstition," runs in the blood of the populace,
and tinges no less the intellects of better educated folk. More than
one French statesman has been known to consult the fortune-teller's
cards. For sceptical minds, astrology, in French, so oddly termed
_astrologie judiciare_, is nothing more than a cunning device for
making a profit out of one of the strongest of all the instincts of
human nature--to wit, curiosity. The sceptical mind consequently
denies that there is any connection between human destiny and the
prognostications obtained by the seven or eight principal methods
known to astrology; and the occult sciences, like many natural
phenomena, are passed over by the freethinker or the materialist
philosopher, _id est_, by those who believe in nothing but visible and
tangible facts, in the results given by the chemist's retort and the
scales of modern physical science. The occult sciences still exist;
they are at work, but they make no progress, for the greatest
intellects of two centuries have abandoned the field.
If you only look at the practical side of divination, it seems absurd
to imagine that events in a man's past life and secrets known only to
himself can be represented on the spur of the moment by a pack of
cards which he shuffles and cuts for the fortune-teller to lay out in
piles according to certain mysterious rules; but then the steam-engine
was condemned as absurd, aerial navigation is still said to be absurd,
so in their time were the inventions of gunpowder, printing,
spectacles, engraving, and that latest discovery of all--the
daguerreotype. If any man had come to Napoleon to tell him that a
building or a figure is at all times and in all places represented by
an image in the atmosphere, that every existing object has a spectral
intangible double which may become visible, the Emperor would have
sent his informant to Charenton for a lunatic, just as Richelieu
before his day sent that Norman martyr, Salomon de Caux, to the
Bicetre for announcing his immense triumph, the idea of navigation by
steam. Yet Daguerre's discovery amounts to nothing more nor less than
this.
And if for some clairvoyant eyes God has written each man's destiny
over his whole outward and visible form, if a man's body is the record
of his fate, why should not the hand in a manner epitomize the body?
--since the hand represents the deed of man, and by his deeds he is
known.
Herein lies the theory of palmistry. Does not Society imitate God? At
the sight of a soldier we can predict that he will fight; of a lawyer,
that he will talk; of a shoemaker, that he shall make shoes or boots;
of a worker of the soil, that he shall dig the ground and dung it; and
is it a more wonderful thing that such an one with the "seer's" gift
should foretell the events of a man's life from his hand?
To take a striking example. Genius is so visible in a man that a great
artist cannot walk about the streets of Paris but the most ignorant
people are conscious of his passing. He is a sun, as it were, in the
mental world, shedding light that colors everything in its path. And
who does not know an idiot at once by an impression the exact opposite
of the sensation of the presence of genius? Most observers of human
nature in general, and Parisian nature in particular, can guess the
profession or calling of the man in the street.
The mysteries of the witches' Sabbath, so wonderfully painted in the
sixteenth century, are no mysteries for us. The Egyptian ancestors of
that mysterious people of Indian origin, the gypsies of the present
day, simply used to drug their clients with hashish, a practice that
fully accounts for broomstick rides and flights up the chimney, the
real-seeming visions, so to speak, of old crones transformed into
young damsels, the frantic dances, the exquisite music, and all the
fantastic tales of devil-worship.
So many proven facts have been first discovered by occult science,
that some day we shall have professors of occult science, as we
already have professors of chemistry and astronomy. It is even
singular that here in Paris, where we are founding chairs of Mantchu
and Slave and literatures so little professable (to coin a word) as
the literatures of the North (which, so far from providing lessons,
stand very badly in need of them); when the curriculum is full of the
everlasting lectures on Shakespeare and the sixteenth century,--it is
strange that some one has not restored the teaching of the occult
philosophies, once the glory of the University of Paris, under the
title of anthropology. Germany, so childlike and so great, has
outstripped France in this particular; in Germany they have professors
of a science of far more use than a knowledge of the heterogeneous
philosophies, which all come to the same thing at bottom.
Once admit that certain beings have the power of discerning the future
in its germ-form of the Cause, as the great inventor sees a glimpse of
the industry latent in his invention, or a science in something that
happens every day unnoticed by ordinary eyes--once allow this, and
there is nothing to cause an outcry in such phenomena, no violent
exception to nature's laws, but the operation of a recognized faculty;
possibly a kind of mental somnambulism, as it were. If, therefore, the
hypothesis upon which the various ways of divining the future are
based seem absurd, the facts remain. Remark that it is not really more
wonderful that the seer should foretell the chief events of the future
than that he should read the past. Past and future, on the sceptic's
system, equally lie beyond the limits of knowledge. If the past has
left traces behind it, it is not improbable that future events have,
as it were, their roots in the present.
If a fortune-teller gives you minute details of past facts known only
to yourself, why should he not foresee the events to be produced by
existing causes? The world of ideas is cut out, so to speak, on the
pattern of the physical world; the same phenomena should be
discernible in both, allowing for the difference of the medium. As,
for instance, a corporeal body actually projects an image upon the
atmosphere--a spectral double detected and recorded by the
daguerreotype; so also ideas, having a real and effective existence,
leave an impression, as it were, upon the atmosphere of the spiritual
world; they likewise produce effects, and exist spectrally (to coin a
word to express phenomena for which no words exist), and certain human
beings are endowed with the faculty of discerning these "forms" or
traces of ideas.
As for the material means employed to assist the seer--the objects
arranged by the hands of the consultant that the accidents of his life
may be revealed to him,--this is the least inexplicable part of the
process. Everything in the material world is part of a series of
causes and effects. Nothing happens without a cause, every cause is a
part of a whole, and consequently the whole leaves its impression on
the slightest accident. Rabelais, the greatest mind among moderns,
resuming Pythagoras, Hippocrates, Aristophanes, and Dante, pronounced
three centuries ago that "man is a microcosm"--a little world. Three
hundred years later, the great seer Swedenborg declared that "the
world was a man." The prophet and the precursor of incredulity meet
thus in the greatest of all formulas.