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.