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