fresh to-day, Daddy Monistrol?’--(for he always lets me look over his
lots before the big buyers come)--and at that he began to tell me how
Lienard, that did such beautiful work for the Government in the Chapelle
de Dreux, had been at the Aulnay sale and rescued the carved panels out
of the clutches of the Paris dealers, while their heads were running
on china and inlaid furniture.--‘I did not do much myself,’ he went on,
‘but I may make my traveling expenses out of _this_,’ and he showed me
a what-not; a marvel! Boucher’s designs executed in marquetry, and with
such art!--One could have gone down on one’s knees before it.--‘Look,
sir,’ he said, ‘I have just found this fan in a little drawer; it was
locked, I had to force it open. You might tell me where I can sell
it’--and with that he brings out this little carved cherry-wood
box.--‘See,’ says he, ‘it is the kind of Pompadour that looks like
decorated Gothic.’--‘Yes,’ I told him, ‘the box is pretty; the box might
suit me; but as for the fan, Monistrol, I have no Mme. Pons to give the
old trinket to, and they make very pretty new ones nowadays; you can buy
miracles of painting on vellum cheaply enough. There are two thousand
painters in Paris, you know.’--And I opened out the fan carelessly,
keeping down my admiration, looked indifferently at those two exquisite
little pictures, touched off with an ease fit to send you into raptures.
I held Mme. de Pompadour’s fan in my hand! Watteau had done his utmost
for this.--‘What do you want for the what-not?’--‘Oh! a thousand
francs; I have had a bid already.’--I offered him a price for the fan
corresponding with the probable expenses of the journey. We looked each
other in the eyes, and I saw that I had my man. I put the fan back into
the box lest my Auvergnat should begin to look at it, and went into
ecstasies over the box; indeed, it is a jewel.--‘If I take it,’ said I,
‘it is for the sake of the box; the box tempts me. As for the what-not,
you will get more than a thousand francs for that. Just see how the
brass is wrought; it is a model. There is business in it.... It has
never been copied; it is a unique specimen, made solely for Mme. de
Pompadour’--and so on, till my man, all on fire for his what-not,
forgets the fan, and lets me have it for a mere trifle, because I have
pointed out the beauties of his piece of Riesener’s furniture. So here
it is; but it needs a great deal of experience to make such a bargain
as that. It is a duel, eye to eye; and who has such eyes as a Jew or an
Auvergnat?”
The old artist’s wonderful pantomime, his vivid, eager way of telling
the story of the triumph of his shrewdness over the dealer’s ignorance,
would have made a subject for a Dutch painter; but it was all thrown
away upon the audience. Mother and daughter exchanged cold, contemptuous
glances.--“What an oddity!” they seemed to say.
“So it amuses you?” remarked Mme. de Marville. The question sent a cold
chill through Pons; he felt a strong desire to slap the Presidente.
“Why, my dear cousin, that is the way to hunt down a work of art. You
are face to face with antagonists that dispute the game with you. It
is craft against craft! A work of art in the hands of a Norman, an
Auvergnat, or a Jew, is like a princess guarded by magicians in a fairy
tale.”
“And how can you tell that this is by Wat--what do you call him?”
“Watteau, cousin. One of the greatest eighteenth century painters
in France. Look! do you not see that it is his work?” (pointing to a
pastoral scene, court-shepherd swains and shepherdesses dancing in
a ring). “The movement! the life in it! the coloring! There it
is--see!--painted with a stroke of the brush, as a writing-master makes
a flourish with a pen. Not a trace of effort here! And, turn it over,
look!--a ball in a drawing-room. Summer and Winter! And what ornaments!
and how well preserved it is! The hinge-pin is gold, you see, and on
cleaning it, I found a tiny ruby at either side.”
“If it is so, cousin, I could not think of accepting such a valuable
present from you. It would be better to lay up the money for yourself,”
said Mme. de Marville; but all the same, she asked no better than to
keep the splendid fan.
“It is time that it should pass from the service of Vice into the hands
of Virtue,” said the good soul, recovering his assurance. “It has taken
a century to work the miracle. No princess at Court, you may be sure,
will have anything to compare with it; for, unfortunately, men will do
more for a Pompadour than for a virtuous queen, such is human nature.”
“Very well,” Mme. de Marville said, laughing, “I will accept your
present.--Cecile, my angel, go to Madeleine and see that dinner is
worthy of your cousin.”
Mme. de Marville wished to make matters even. Her request, made aloud,
in defiance of all rules of good taste, sounded so much like an attempt
to repay at once the balance due to the poor cousin, that Pons flushed
red, like a girl found out in fault. The grain of sand was a little too
large; for some moments he could only let it work in his heart. Cecile,
a red-haired young woman, with a touch of pedantic affectation, combined
her father’s ponderous manner with a trace of her mother’s hardness. She
went and left poor Pons face to face with the terrible Presidente.
“How nice she is, my little Lili!” said the mother. She still called her
Cecile by this baby name.
“Charming!” said Pons, twirling his thumbs.
“I _cannot_ understand these times in which we live,” broke out the
Presidente. “What is the good of having a President of the Court of
Appeal in Paris and a Commander of the Legion of Honor for your father,
and for a grandfather the richest wholesale silk merchant in Paris, a
deputy, and a millionaire that will be a peer of France some of these
days?”
The President’s zeal for the new Government had, in fact, recently
been rewarded with a commander’s ribbon--thanks to his friendship with
Popinot, said the envious. Popinot himself, modest though he was, had,
as has been seen, accepted the title of count, “for his son’s sake,” he
told his numerous friends.
“Men look for nothing but money nowadays,” said Cousin Pons. “No one
thinks anything of you unless you are rich, and--”
“What would it have been if Heaven had spared my poor little Charles!--”
cried the lady.
“Oh, with two children you would be poor,” returned the cousin. “It
practically means the division of the property. But you need not trouble
yourself, cousin; Cecile is sure to marry sooner or later. She is the
most accomplished girl I know.”
To such depths had Pons fallen by adapting himself to the company of
his entertainers! In their houses he echoed their ideas, and said the
obvious thing, after the manner of a chorus in a Greek play. He did not
dare to give free play to the artist’s originality, which had overflowed
in bright repartee when he was young; he had effaced himself, till he
had almost lost his individuality; and if the real Pons appeared, as he
had done a moment ago, he was immediately repressed.
“But I myself was married with only twenty thousand francs for my
portion--”
“In 1819, cousin. And it was _you_, a woman with a head on your
shoulders, and the royal protection of Louis XVIII.”
“Be still, my child is a perfect angel. She is clever, she has a warm
heart, she will have a hundred thousand francs on her wedding day, to
say nothing of the most brilliant expectations; and yet she stays on our
hands,” and so on and so on. For twenty minutes, Mme. de Marville talked
on about herself and her Cecile, pitying herself after the manner of
mothers in bondage to marriageable daughters.
Pons had dined at the house every week for twenty years, and Camusot de
Marville was the only cousin he had in the world; but he had yet to hear
the first word spoken as to his own affairs--nobody cared to know how he
lived. Here and elsewhere the poor cousin was a kind of sink down which
his relatives poured domestic confidences. His discretion was well
known; indeed, was he not bound over to silence when a single imprudent
word would have shut the door of ten houses upon him? And he must
combine his role of listener with a second part; he must applaud
continually, smile on every one, accuse nobody, defend nobody; from his
point of view, every one must be in the right. And so, in the house
of his kinsman, Pons no longer counted as a man; he was a digestive
apparatus.
In the course of a long tirade, Mme. Camusot de Marville avowed with due
circumspection that she was prepared to take almost any son-in-law with
her eyes shut. She was even disposed to think that at eight-and-forty or
so a man with twenty thousand francs a year was a good match.
“Cecile is in her twenty-third year. If it should fall out so
unfortunately that she is not married before she is five or
six-and-twenty, it will be extremely hard to marry her at all. When a
girl reaches that age, people want to know why she has been so long on
hand. We are a good deal talked about in our set. We have come to the
end of all the ordinary excuses--‘She is so young.--She is so fond of
her father and mother that she doesn’t like to leave them.--She is so
happy at home.--She is hard to please, she would like a good name--’ We
are beginning to look silly; I feel that distinctly. And besides, Cecile
is tired of waiting, poor child, she suffers--”
“In what way?” Pons was noodle enough to ask.
“Why, because it is humiliating to her to see all her girl friends
married before her,” replied the mother, with a duenna’s air.
“But, cousin, has anything happened since the last time that I had the
pleasure of dining here? Why do you think of men of eight-and-forty?”
Pons inquired humbly.
“This has happened,” returned the Presidente. “We were to have had an
interview with a Court Councillor; his son is thirty years old and
very well-to-do, and M. de Marville would have obtained a post in
the audit-office for him and paid the money. The young man is a
supernumerary there at present. And now they tell us that he has taken
it into his head to rush off to Italy in the train of a duchess from the
Bal Mabille.... It is nothing but a refusal in disguise. The fact is,
the young man’s mother is dead; he has an income of thirty thousand
francs, and more to come at his father’s death, and they don’t care
about the match for him. You have just come in in the middle of all
this, dear cousin, so you must excuse our bad temper.”
While Pons was casting about for the complimentary answer which
invariably occurred to him too late when he was afraid of his host,
Madeleine came in, handed a folded note to the Presidente, and waited
for an answer. The note ran as follows:
“DEAR MAMMA,--If we pretend that this note comes to you from papa
at the Palais, and that he wants us both to dine with his friend
because proposals have been renewed--then the cousin will go, and
we can carry out our plan of going to the Popinots.”
“Who brought the master’s note?” the Presidente asked quickly.
“A lad from the Salle du Palais,” the withered waiting woman
unblushingly answered, and her mistress knew at once that Madeleine had
woven the plot with Cecile, now at the end of her patience.
“Tell him that we will both be there at half-past five.”
Madeleine had no sooner left the room than the Presidente turned to
Cousin Pons with that insincere friendliness which is about as grateful
to a sensitive soul as a mixture of milk and vinegar to the palate of an
epicure.
“Dinner is ordered, dear cousin; you must dine without us; my husband
has just sent word from the court that the question of the marriage has
been reopened, and we are to dine with the Councillor. We need not stand
on ceremony at all. Do just as if you were at home. I have no secrets
from you; I am perfectly open with you, as you see. I am sure you would
not wish to break off the little darling’s marriage.”
“_I_, cousin? On the contrary, I should like to find some one for her;
but in my circle--”
“Oh, that is not at all likely,” said the Presidente, cutting him short
insolently. “Then you will stay, will you not? Cecile will keep you
company while I dress.
“Oh! I can dine somewhere else, cousin.”
Cruelly hurt though he was by her way of casting up his poverty to
him, the prospect of being left alone with the servants was even more
alarming.
“But why should you? Dinner is ready; you may just as well have it; if
you do not, the servants will eat it.”
At that atrocious speech Pons started up as if he had received a shock
from a galvanic battery, bowed stiffly to the lady, and went to find his
spencer. Now, it so happened that the door of Cecile’s bedroom, beyond
the little drawing-room, stood open, and looking into the mirror, he
caught sight of the girl shaking with laughter as she gesticulated and
made signs to her mother. The old artist understood beyond a doubt that
he had been the victim of some cowardly hoax. Pons went slowly down the
stairs; he could not keep back the tears. He understood that he had been
turned out of the house, but why and wherefore he did not know.
“I am growing too old,” he told himself. “The world has a horror of
old age and poverty--two ugly things. After this I will not go anywhere
unless I am asked.”
Heroic resolve!
Downstairs the great gate was shut, as it usually is in houses occupied
by the proprietor; the kitchen stood exactly opposite the porter’s
lodge, and the door was open. Pons was obliged to listen while Madeleine
told the servants the whole story amid the laughter of the servants. She
had not expected him to leave so soon. The footman loudly applauded a
joke at the expense of a visitor who was always coming to the house and
never gave you more than three francs at the year’s end.
“Yes,” put in the cook; “but if he cuts up rough and does not come back,
there will be three francs the less for some of us on New Year’s day.”
“Eh! How is he to know?” retorted the footman.
“Pooh!” said Madeleine, “a little sooner or a little later--what
difference does it make? The people at the other houses where he dines
are so tired of him that they are going to turn him out.”
“The gate, if you please!”
Madeleine had scarcely uttered the words when they heard the old
musician’s call to the porter. It sounded like a cry of pain. There was
a sudden silence in the kitchen.
“He heard!” the footman said.
“Well, and if he did, so much the worser, or rather so much the better,”
retorted Madeleine. “He is an arrant skinflint.”
Poor Pons had lost none of the talk in the kitchen; he heard it all,
even to the last word. He made his way home along the boulevards, in
the same state, physical and mental, as an old woman after a desperate
struggle with burglars. As he went he talked to himself in quick
spasmodic jerks; his honor had been wounded, and the pain of it drove
him on as a gust of wind whirls away a straw. He found himself at last
in the Boulevard du Temple; how he had come thither he could not tell.
It was five o’clock, and, strange to say, he had completely lost his
appetite.
But if the reader is to understand the revolution which Pons’ unexpected
return at that hour was to work in the Rue de Normandie, the promised
biography of Mme. Cibot must be given in this place.
Any one passing along the Rue de Normandie might be pardoned for
thinking that he was in some small provincial town. Grass runs to
seed in the street, everybody knows everybody else, and the sight of a
stranger is an event. The houses date back to the reign of Henry IV.,
when there was a scheme afoot for a quarter in which every street was to
be named after a French province, and all should converge in a handsome
square to which La France should stand godmother. The Quartier de
l’Europe was a revival of the same idea; history repeats itself
everywhere in the world, and even in the world of speculation.
The house in which the two musicians used to live is an old mansion with
a courtyard in front and a garden at the back; but the front part of the
house which gives upon the street is comparatively modern, built during
the eighteenth century when the Marais was a fashionable quarter. The
friends lived at the back, on the second floor of the old part of
the house. The whole building belongs to M. Pillerault, an old man of
eighty, who left matters very much in the hands of M. and Mme. Cibot,
his porters for the past twenty-six years.
Now, as a porter cannot live by his lodge alone, the aforesaid Cibot had
other means of gaining a livelihood; and supplemented his five per cent
on the rental and his faggot from every cartload of wood by his own
earnings as a tailor. In time Cibot ceased to work for the master
tailors; he made a connection among the little trades-people of the
quarter, and enjoyed a monopoly of the repairs, renovations, and fine
drawing of all the coats and trousers in three adjacent streets. The
lodge was spacious and wholesome, and boasted a second room; wherefore
the Cibot couple were looked upon as among the luckiest porters in the
arrondissement.
Cibot, small and stunted, with a complexion almost olive-colored by
reason of sitting day in day out in Turk-fashion on a table level with
the barred window, made about twelve or fourteen francs a week. He
worked still, though he was fifty-eight years old, but fifty-eight is
the porter’s golden age; he is used to his lodge, he and his room
fit each other like the shell and the oyster, and “he is known in the
neighborhood.”
Mme. Cibot, sometime opener of oysters at the _Cadran Bleu_, after all
the adventures which come unsought to the belle of an oyster-bar, left
her post for love of Cibot at the age of twenty-eight. The beauty of
a woman of the people is short-lived, especially if she is planted
espalier fashion at a restaurant door. Her features are hardened
by puffs of hot air from the kitchen; the color of the heeltaps of
customers’ bottles, finished in the company of the waiters, gradually
filters into her complexion--no beauty is full blown so soon as the
beauty of an oyster-opener. Luckily for Mme. Cibot, lawful wedlock and
a portress’ life were offered to her just in time; while she still
preserved a comeliness of a masculine order slandered by rivals of the
Rue de Normandie, who called her “a great blowsy thing,” Mme. Cibot
might have sat as a model to Rubens. Those flesh tints reminded you of
the appetizing sheen on a pat of Isigny butter; but plump as she was, no
woman went about her work with more agility. Mme. Cibot had attained the
time of life when women of her stamp are obliged to shave--which is as
much as to say that she had reached the age of forty-eight. A porter’s
wife with a moustache is one of the best possible guarantees of
respectability and security that a landlord can have. If Delacroix
could have seen Mme. Cibot leaning proudly on her broom handle, he would
assuredly have painted her as Bellona.
Strange as it may seem, the circumstances of the Cibots, man and wife
(in the style of an indictment), were one day to affect the lives of the
two friends; wherefore the chronicler, as in duty bound, must give some
particulars as to the Cibots’ lodge.
The house brought in about eight thousand francs for there were three
complete sets of apartments--back and front, on the side nearest the Rue
de Normandie, as well as the three floors in the older mansion between
the courtyard and the garden, and a shop kept by a marine store-dealer
named Remonencq, which fronted on the street. During the past few months
this Remonencq had begun to deal in old curiosities, and knew the
value of Pons’ collection so well that he took off his hat whenever the
musician came in or went out.
A sou in the livre on eight thousand francs therefore brought in about
four hundred francs to the Cibots. They had no rent to pay and no
expenses for firing; Cibot’s earnings amounted on an average to seven or
eight hundred francs, add tips at New Year, and the pair had altogether
in income of sixteen hundred francs, every penny of which they spent,
for the Cibots lived and fared better than working people usually do.
“One can only live once,” La Cibot used to say. She was born during the
Revolution, you see, and had never learned her Catechism.
The husband of this portress with the unblenching tawny eyes was an
object of envy to the whole fraternity, for La Cibot had not forgotten
the knowledge of cookery picked up at the _Cadran Bleu_. So it had come
to pass that the Cibots had passed the prime of life, and saw themselves
on the threshold of old age without a hundred francs put by for the
future. Well clad and well fed, they enjoyed among the neighbors, it is
true, the respect due to twenty-six years of strict honesty; for if
they had nothing of their own, they “hadn’t nothing belonging to nobody
else,” according to La Cibot, who was a prodigal of negatives. “There
wasn’t never such a love of a man,” she would say to her husband. Do you
ask why? You might as well ask the reason of her indifference in matters
of religion.
Both of them were proud of a life lived in open day, of the esteem in
which they were held for six or seven streets round about, and of the
autocratic rule permitted to them by the proprietor (“perprietor,” they
called him); but in private they groaned because they had no money lying
at interest. Cibot complained of pains in his hands and legs, and his
wife would lament that her poor, dear Cibot should be forced to work
at his age; and, indeed, the day is not far distant when a porter after
thirty years of such a life will cry shame upon the injustice of the
Government and clamor for the ribbon of the Legion of Honor. Every
time that the gossip of the quarter brought news of such and such a
servant-maid, left an annuity of three or four hundred francs after
eight or ten years of service, the porters’ lodges would resound with
complaints, which may give some idea of the consuming jealousies in the
lowest walks of life in Paris.
“Oh, indeed! It will never happen to the like of us to have our names
mentioned in a will! We have no luck, but we do more than servants,
for all that. We fill a place of trust; we give receipts, we are on the
lookout for squalls, and yet we are treated like dogs, neither more nor
less, and that’s the truth!”
“Some find fortune and some miss fortune,” said Cibot, coming in with a
coat.
“If I had left Cibot here in his lodge and taken a place as cook, we
should have our thirty thousand francs out at interest,” cried Mme.
Cibot, standing chatting with a neighbor, her hands on her prominent
hips. “But I didn’t understand how to get on in life; housed inside of a
snug lodge and firing found and want for nothing, but that is all.”
In 1836, when the friends took up their abode on the second floor, they
brought about a sort of revolution in the Cibot household. It befell
on this wise. Schmucke, like his friend Pons, usually arranged that the
porter or the porter’s wife should undertake the cares of housekeeping;
and being both of one mind on this point when they came to live in the
Rue de Normandie, Mme. Cibot became their housekeeper at the rate of
twenty-five francs per month--twelve francs fifty centimes for each
of them. Before the year was out, the emeritus portress reigned in the
establishment of the two old bachelors, as she reigned everywhere in
the house belonging to M. Pillerault, great uncle of Mme. le Comtesse
Popinot. Their business was her business; she called them “my
gentlemen.” And at last, finding the pair of nutcrackers as mild as
lambs, easy to live with, and by no means suspicious--perfect children,
in fact--her heart, the heart of a woman of the people, prompted her
to protect, adore, and serve them with such thorough devotion, that she
read them a lecture now and again, and saved them from the impositions
which swell the cost of living in Paris. For twenty-five francs a month,
the two old bachelors inadvertently acquired a mother.
As they became aware of Mme. Cibot’s full value, they gave her outspoken
praises, and thanks, and little presents which strengthened the bonds
of the domestic alliance. Mme. Cibot a thousand times preferred
appreciation to money payments; it is a well-known fact that the sense
that one is appreciated makes up for a deficiency in wages. And Cibot
did all that he could for his wife’s two gentlemen, and ran errands and
did repairs at half-price for them.