self-respect and respect for others; for a pure and limpid life wins
something like admiration from the worst nature in every social sphere,
and in Paris a fair virtue meets with something of the success of a
large diamond, so great a rarity it is. No actor, no dancer however
brazen, would have indulged in the mildest practical joke at the expense
of either Pons or Schmucke.
Pons very occasionally put in an appearance in the _foyer_; but all that
Schmucke knew of the theatre was the underground passage from the street
door to the orchestra. Sometimes, however, during an interval, the
good German would venture to make a survey of the house and ask a few
questions of the first flute, a young fellow from Strasbourg, who
came of a German family at Kehl. Gradually under the flute’s tuition
Schmucke’s childlike imagination acquired a certain amount of knowledge
of the world; he could believe in the existence of that fabulous
creature the _lorette_, the possibility of “marriages at the Thirteenth
Arrondissement,” the vagaries of the leading lady, and the contraband
traffic carried on by box-openers. In his eyes the more harmless forms
of vice were the lowest depths of Babylonish iniquity; he did not
believe the stories, he smiled at them for grotesque inventions. The
ingenious reader can see that Pons and Schmucke were exploited, to use
a word much in fashion; but what they lost in money they gained in
consideration and kindly treatment.
It was after the success of the ballet with which a run of success began
for the Gaudissart Company that the management presented Pons with a
piece of plate--a group of figures attributed to Benvenuto Cellini. The
alarming costliness of the gift caused talk in the green-room. It was
a matter of twelve hundred francs! Pons, poor honest soul, was for
returning the present, and Gaudissart had a world of trouble to persuade
him to keep it.
“Ah!” said the manager afterwards, when he told his partner of the
interview, “if we could only find actors up to that sample.”
In their joint life, outwardly so quiet, there was the one disturbing
element--the weakness to which Pons sacrificed, the insatiable craving
to dine out. Whenever Schmucke happened to be at home while Pons was
dressing for the evening, the good German would bewail this deplorable
habit.
“Gif only he vas ony fatter vor it!” he many a time cried.
And Schmucke would dream of curing his friend of his degrading vice,
for a true friend’s instinct in all that belongs to the inner life is
unerring as a dog’s sense of smell; a friend knows by intuition the
trouble in his friend’s soul, and guesses at the cause and ponders it in
his heart.
Pons, who always wore a diamond ring on the little finger of his right
hand, an ornament permitted in the time of the Empire, but ridiculous
to-day--Pons, who belonged to the “troubadour time,” the sentimental
periods of the first Empire, was too much a child of his age, too much
of a Frenchman to wear the expression of divine serenity which softened
Schmucke’s hideous ugliness. From Pons’ melancholy looks Schmucke knew
that the profession of parasite was growing daily more difficult and
painful. And, in fact, in that month of October 1844, the number of
houses at which Pons dined was naturally much restricted; reduced to
move round and round the family circle, he had used the word family in
far too wide a sense, as will shortly be seen.
M. Camusot, the rich silk mercer of the Rue des Bourdonnais, had married
Pons’ first cousin, Mlle. Pons, only child and heiress of one of the
well-known firm of Pons Brothers, court embroiderers. Pons’ own father
and mother retired from a firm founded before the Revolution of 1789,
leaving their capital in the business until Mlle. Pons’ father sold
it in 1815 to M. Rivet. M. Camusot had since lost his wife and married
again, and retired from business some ten years, and now in 1844 he was
a member of the Board of Trade, a deputy, and what not. But the Camusot
clan were friendly; and Pons, good man, still considered that he was
some kind of cousin to the children of the second marriage, who were not
relations, or even connected with him in any way.
The second Mme. Camusot being a Mlle. Cardot, Pons introduced himself as
a relative into the tolerably numerous Cardot family, a second bourgeois
tribe which, taken with its connections, formed quite as strong a clan
as the Camusots; for Cardot the notary (brother of the second Mme.
Camusot) had married a Mlle. Chiffreville; and the well-known family of
Chiffreville, the leading firm of manufacturing chemists, was closely
connected with the whole drug trade, of which M. Anselme Popinot was for
many years the undisputed head, until the Revolution of July plunged him
into the very centre of the dynastic movement, as everybody knows.
So Pons, in the wake of the Camusots and Cardots, reached the
Chiffrevilles, and thence the Popinots, always in the character of a
cousin’s cousin.
The above concise statement of Pons’ relations with his entertainers
explains how it came to pass that an old musician was received in 1844
as one of the family in the houses of four distinguished persons--to
wit, M. le Comte Popinot, peer of France, and twice in office; M.
Cardot, retired notary, mayor and deputy of an arrondissement in Paris;
M. Camusot senior, a member of the Board of Trade and the Municipal
Chamber and a peerage; and lastly, M. Camusot de Marville, Camusot’s son
by his first marriage, and Pons’ one genuine relation, albeit even he
was a first cousin once removed.
This Camusot, President of a Chamber of the Court of Appeal in Paris,
had taken the name of his estate at Marville to distinguish himself from
his father and a younger half brother.
Cardot the retired notary had married his daughter to his successor,
whose name was Berthier; and Pons, transferred as part of the
connection, acquired a right to dine with the Berthiers “in the presence
of a notary,” as he put it.
This was the bourgeois empyrean which Pons called his “family,” that
upper world in which he so painfully reserved his right to a knife and
fork.
Of all these houses, some ten in all, the one in which Pons ought to
have met with the kindest reception should by rights have been his own
cousin’s; and, indeed, he paid most attention to President Camusot’s
family. But, alas! Mme. Camusot de Marville, daughter of the Sieur
Thirion, usher of the cabinet to Louis XVIII. and Charles X., had never
taken very kindly to her husband’s first cousin, once removed. Pons had
tried to soften this formidable relative; he wasted his time; for in
spite of the pianoforte lessons which he gave gratuitously to Mlle.
Camusot, a young woman with hair somewhat inclined to red, it was
impossible to make a musician of her.
And now, at this very moment, as he walked with that precious object in
his hand, Pons was bound for the President’s house, where he always felt
as if he were at the Tuileries itself, so heavily did the solemn green
curtains, the carmelite-brown hangings, thick piled carpets, heavy
furniture, and general atmosphere of magisterial severity oppress his
soul. Strange as it may seem, he felt more at home in the Hotel Popinot,
Rue Basse-du-Rempart, probably because it was full of works of art; for
the master of the house, since he entered public life, had acquired a
mania for collecting beautiful things, by way of contrast no doubt, for
a politician is obliged to pay for secret services of the ugliest kind.
President de Marville lived in the Rue de Hanovre, in a house which his
wife had bought ten years previously, on the death of her parents, for
the Sieur and Dame Thirion left their daughter about a hundred and fifty
thousand francs, the savings of a lifetime. With its north aspect,
the house looks gloomy enough seen from the street, but the back looks
towards the south over the courtyard, with a rather pretty garden beyond
it. As the President occupied the whole of the first floor, once the
abode of a great financier of the time of Louis XIV., and the second
was let to a wealthy old lady, the house wore a look of dignified repose
befitting a magistrate’s residence. President Camusot had invested all
that he inherited from his mother, together with the savings of twenty
years, in the purchase of the splendid Marville estate; a chateau (as
fine a relic of the past as you will find to-day in Normandy) standing
in a hundred acres of park land, and a fine dependent farm, nominally
bringing in twelve thousand francs per annum, though, as it cost the
President at least a thousand crowns to keep up a state almost princely
in our days, his yearly revenue, “all told,” as the saying is, was a
bare nine thousand francs. With this and his salary, the President’s
income amounted to about twenty thousand francs; but though to all
appearance a wealthy man, especially as one-half of his father’s
property would one day revert to him as the only child of the first
marriage, he was obliged to live in Paris as befitted his official
position, and M. and Mme. de Marville spent almost the whole of their
incomes. Indeed, before the year 1834 they felt pinched.
This family schedule sufficiently explains why Mlle. de Marville, aged
three-and-twenty, was still unwed, in spite of a hundred thousand francs
of dowry and tempting prospects, frequently, skilfully, but so far
vainly, held out. For the past five years Pons had listened to Mme. la
Presidente’s lamentations as she beheld one young lawyer after another
led to the altar, while all the newly appointed judges at the Tribunal
were fathers of families already; and she, all this time, had displayed
Mlle. de Marville’s brilliant expectations before the undazzled eyes of
young Vicomte Popinot, eldest son of the great man of the drug trade,
he of whom it was said by the envious tongues of the neighborhood of the
Rue des Lombards, that the Revolution of July had been brought about at
least as much for his particular benefit as for the sake of the Orleans
branch.
Arrived at the corner of the Rue de Choiseul and the Rue de Hanovre,
Pons suffered from the inexplicable emotions which torment clear
consciences; for a panic terror such as the worst of scoundrels might
feel at sight of a policeman, an agony caused solely by a doubt as
to Mme. de Marville’s probable reception of him. That grain of sand,
grating continually on the fibres of his heart, so far from losing its
angles, grew more and more jagged, and the family in the Rue de Hanovre
always sharpened the edges. Indeed, their unceremonious treatment and
Pons’ depreciation in value among them had affected the servants; and
while they did not exactly fail in respect, they looked on the poor
relation as a kind of beggar.
Pons’ arch-enemy in the house was the ladies’-maid, a thin and wizened
spinster, Madeleine Vivet by name. This Madeleine, in spite of, nay,
perhaps on the strength of, a pimpled complexion and a viper-like length
of spine, had made up her mind that some day she would be Mme. Pons.
But in vain she dangled twenty thousand francs of savings before the
old bachelor’s eyes; Pons had declined happiness accompanied by so many
pimples. From that time forth the Dido of the ante-chamber, who fain had
called her master and mistress “cousin,” wreaked her spite in petty ways
upon the poor musician. She heard him on the stairs, and cried audibly,
“Oh! here comes the sponger!” She stinted him of wine when she waited at
dinner in the footman’s absence; she filled the water-glass to the brim,
to give him the difficult task of lifting it without spilling a drop;
or she would pass the old man over altogether, till the mistress of the
house would remind her (and in what a tone!--it brought the color to the
poor cousin’s face); or she would spill the gravy over his clothes. In
short, she waged petty war after the manner of a petty nature, knowing
that she could annoy an unfortunate superior with impunity.
Madeleine Vivet was Mme. de Marville’s maid and housekeeper. She had
lived with M. and Mme. Camusot de Marville since their marriage; she had
shared the early struggles in the provinces when M. Camusot was a judge
at Alencon; she had helped them to exist when M. Camusot, President
of the Tribunal of Mantes, came to Paris, in 1828, to be an examining
magistrate. She was, therefore, too much one of the family not to wish,
for reasons of her own, to revenge herself upon them. Beneath her desire
to pay a trick upon her haughty and ambitious mistress, and to call her
master her cousin, there surely lurked a long-stifled hatred, built up
like an avalanche, upon the pebble of some past grievance.
“Here comes your M. Pons, madame, still wearing that spencer of his!”
Madeleine came to tell the Presidente. “He really might tell me how he
manages to make it look the same for five-and-twenty years together.”
Mme. Camusot de Marville, hearing a man’s footstep in the little
drawing-room between the large drawing-room and her bedroom, looked at
her daughter and shrugged her shoulders.
“You always make these announcements so cleverly that you leave me no
time to think, Madeleine.”
“Jean is out, madame, I was all alone; M. Pons rang the bell, I opened
the door; and as he is almost one of the family, I could not prevent him
from coming after me. There he is, taking off his spencer.”
“Poor little puss!” said the Presidente, addressing her daughter, “we
are caught. We shall have to dine at home now.--Let us see,” she added,
seeing that the “dear puss” wore a piteous face; “must we get rid of him
for good?”
“Oh! poor man!” cried Mlle. Camusot, “deprive him of one of his
dinners?”
Somebody coughed significantly in the next room by way of warning that
he could hear.
“Very well, let him come in!” said Mme. Camusot, looking at Madeleine
with another shrug.
“You are here so early, cousin, that you have come in upon us just as
mother was about to dress,” said Cecile Camusot in a coaxing tone. But
Cousin Pons had caught sight of the Presidente’s shrug, and felt so
cruelly hurt that he could not find a compliment, and contented himself
with the profound remark, “You are always charming, my little cousin.”
Then, turning to the mother, he continued with a bow:
“You will not take it amiss, I think, if I have come a little earlier
than usual, dear cousin; I have brought something for you; you once did
me the pleasure of asking me for it.”
Poor Pons! Every time he addressed the President, the President’s wife,
or Cecile as “cousin,” he gave them excruciating annoyance. As he spoke,
he draw a long, narrow cherry-wood box, marvelously carved, from his
coat-pocket.
“Oh, did I?--I had forgotten,” the lady answered drily.
It was a heartless speech, was it not? Did not those few words deny all
merit to the pains taken for her by the cousin whose one offence lay in
the fact that he was a poor relation?
“But it is very kind of you, cousin,” she added. “How much to I owe you
for this little trifle?”
Pons quivered inwardly at the question. He had meant the trinket as a
return for his dinners.
“I thought that you would permit me to offer it you----” he faltered
out.
“What?” said Mme. Camusot. “Oh! but there need be no ceremony between
us; we know each other well enough to wash our linen among ourselves. I
know very well that you are not rich enough to give more than you get.
And to go no further, it is quite enough that you should have spent a
good deal of time in running among the dealers--”
“If you were asked to pay the full price of the fan, my dear cousin, you
would not care to have it,” answered poor Pons, hurt and insulted; “it
is one of Watteau’s masterpieces, painted on both sides; but you may be
quite easy, cousin, I did not give one-hundredth part of its value as a
work of art.”
To tell a rich man that he is poor! you might as well tell the
Archbishop of Granada that his homilies show signs of senility. Mme. la
Presidente, proud of her husband’s position, of the estate of Marville,
and her invitations to court balls, was keenly susceptible on this
point; and what was worse, the remark came from a poverty-stricken
musician to whom she had been charitable.
“Then the people of whom you buy things of this kind are very stupid,
are they?” she asked quickly.
“Stupid dealers are unknown in Paris,” Pons answered almost drily.
“Then you must be very clever,” put in Cecile by way of calming the
dispute.
“Clever enough to know a Lancret, a Watteau, a Pater, or Greuze when
I see it, little cousin; but anxious, most of all, to please your dear
mamma.”
Mme. de Marville, ignorant and vain, was unwilling to appear to receive
the slightest trifle from the parasite; and here her ignorance served
her admirably, she did not even know the name of Watteau. And, on
the other hand, if anything can measure the extent of the collector’s
passion, which, in truth, is one of the most deeply seated of all
passions, rivaling the very vanity of the author--if anything can give
an idea of the lengths to which a collector will go, it is the audacity
which Pons displayed on this occasion, as he held his own against his
lady cousin for the first time in twenty years. He was amazed at his own
boldness. He made Cecile see the beauties of the delicate carving on the
sticks of this wonder, and as he talked to her his face grew serene
and gentle again. But without some sketch of the Presidente, it is
impossible fully to understand the perturbation of heart from which Pons
suffered.
Mme. de Marville had been short and fair, plump and fresh; at forty-six
she was as short as ever, but she looked dried up. An arched forehead
and thin lips, that had been softly colored once, lent a soured look to
a face naturally disdainful, and now grown hard and unpleasant with a
long course of absolute domestic rule. Time had deepened her fair hair
to a harsh chestnut hue; the pride of office, intensified by suppressed
envy, looked out of eyes that had lost none of their brightness nor
their satirical expression. As a matter of fact, Mme. Camusot de
Marville felt almost poor in the society of self-made wealthy bourgeois
with whom Pons dined. She could not forgive the rich retail druggist,
ex-president of the Commercial Court, for his successive elevations as
deputy, member of the Government, count and peer of France. She could
not forgive her father-in-law for putting himself forward instead of his
eldest son as deputy of his arrondissement after Popinot’s promotion to
the peerage. After eighteen years of services in Paris, she was still
waiting for the post of Councillor of the Court of Cassation for her
husband. It was Camusot’s own incompetence, well known at the Law
Courts, which excluded him from the Council. The Home Secretary of 1844
even regretted Camusot’s nomination to the presidency of the Court
of Indictments in 1834, though, thanks to his past experience as an
examining magistrate, he made himself useful in drafting decrees.
These disappointments had told upon Mme. de Marville, who, moreover, had
formed a tolerably correct estimate of her husband. A temper naturally
shrewish was soured till she grew positively terrible. She was not old,
but she had aged; she deliberately set herself to extort by fear all
that the world was inclined to refuse her, and was harsh and rasping
as a file. Caustic to excess she had few friends among women; she
surrounded herself with prim, elderly matrons of her own stamp, who lent
each other mutual support, and people stood in awe of her. As for poor
Pons, his relations with this fiend in petticoats were very much those
of a schoolboy with the master whose one idea of communication is the
ferule.
The Presidente had no idea of the value of the gift. She was puzzled by
her cousin’s sudden access of audacity.
“Then, where did you find this?” inquired Cecile, as she looked closely
at the trinket.
“In the Rue de Lappe. A dealer in second-hand furniture there had just
brought it back with him from a chateau that is being pulled down near
Dreux, Aulnay. Mme. de Pompadour used to spend part of her time there
before she built Menars. Some of the most splendid wood-carving ever
known has been saved from destruction; Lienard (our most famous living
wood-carver) had kept a couple of oval frames for models, as the _ne
plus ultra_ of the art, so fine it is.--There were treasures in that
place. My man found the fan in the drawer of an inlaid what-not, which
I should certainly have bought if I were collecting things of the
kind, but it is quite out of the question--a single piece of Riesener’s
furniture is worth three or four thousand francs! People here in
Paris are just beginning to find out that the famous French and
German marquetry workers of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth
centuries composed perfect pictures in wood. It is a collector’s
business to be ahead of the fashion. Why, in five years’ time, the
Frankenthal ware, which I have been collecting these twenty years, will
fetch twice the price of Sevres _pata tendre_.”
“What is Frankenthal ware?” asked Cecile.
“That is the name of the porcelain made by the Elector of the
Palatinate; it dates further back than our manufactory at Sevres; just
as the famous gardens at Heidelberg, laid waste by Turenne, had the bad
luck to exist before the garden of Versailles. Sevres copied Frankenthal
to a large extent.--In justice to the Germans, it must be said that they
have done admirable work in Saxony and in the Palatinate.”
Mother and daughter looked at one another as if Pons were speaking
Chinese. No one can imagine how ignorant and exclusive Parisians are;
they only learn what they are taught, and that only when they choose.
“And how do you know the Frankenthal ware when you see it?”
“Eh! by the mark!” cried Pons with enthusiasm. “There is a mark on every
one of those exquisite masterpieces. Frankenthal ware is marked with a
C and T (for Charles Theodore) interlaced and crowned. On old Dresden
china there are two crossed swords and the number of the order in gilt
figures. Vincennes bears a hunting-horn; Vienna, a V closed and barred.
You can tell Berlin by the two bars, Mayence by the wheel, and Sevres by
the two crossed L’s. The queen’s porcelain is marked A for Antoinette,
with a royal crown above it. In the eighteenth century, all the
crowned heads of Europe had rival porcelain factories, and workmen were
kidnaped. Watteau designed services for the Dresden factory; they fetch
frantic prices at the present day. One has to know what one is about
with them too, for they are turning out imitations now at Dresden.
Wonderful things they used to make; they will never make the like
again--”
“Oh! pshaw!”
“No, cousin. Some inlaid work and some kinds of porcelain will never be
made again, just as there will never be another Raphael, nor Titian,
nor Rembrandt, nor Van Eyck, nor Cranach.... Well, now! there are the
Chinese; they are very ingenious, very clever; they make modern copies
of their ‘grand mandarin’ porcelain, as it is called. But a pair of
vases of genuine ‘grand mandarin’ vases of the largest size, are worth,
six, eight, and ten thousand francs, while you can buy the modern
replicas for a couple of hundred!”
“You are joking.”
“You are astonished at the prices, but that is nothing, cousin. A dinner
service of Sevres _pate tendre_ (and _pate tendre_ is not porcelain)--a
complete dinner service of Sevres _pate tendre_ for twelve persons
is not merely worth a hundred thousand francs, but that is the price
charged on the invoice. Such a dinner-service cost fifteen thousand
francs at Sevres in 1750; I have seen the original invoices.”
“But let us go back to this fan,” said Cecile. Evidently in her opinion
the trinket was an old-fashioned thing.
“You can understand that as soon as your dear mamma did me the honor of
asking for a fan, I went round of all the curiosity shops in Paris, but
I found nothing fine enough. I wanted nothing less than a masterpiece
for the dear Presidente, and thought of giving her one that once
belonged to Marie Antoinette, the most beautiful of all celebrated
fans. But yesterday I was dazzled by this divine _chef-d’oeuvre_, which
certainly must have been ordered by Louis XV. himself. Do you ask how I
came to look for fans in the Rue de Lappe, among an Auvergnat’s stock of
brass and iron and ormolu furniture? Well, I myself believe that there
is an intelligence in works of art; they know art-lovers, they call to
them--‘Cht-tt!’”
Mme. de Marville shrugged her shoulders and looked at her daughter; Pons
did not notice the rapid pantomime.