existence of the planet. The least event, the most futile phenomena,
are all subordinate parts of a scheme. Great things, therefore, great
designs, and great thoughts are of necessity reflected in the smallest
actions, and that so faithfully, that should a conspirator shuffle and
cut a pack of playing-cards, he will write the history of his plot for
the eyes of the seer styled gypsy, fortune-teller, charlatan, or what
not. If you once admit fate, which is to say, the chain of links of
cause and effect, astrology has a _locus standi_, and becomes what
it was of yore, a boundless science, requiring the same faculty of
deduction by which Cuvier became so great, a faculty to be exercised
spontaneously, however, and not merely in nights of study in the closet.
For seven centuries astrology and divination have exercised an influence
not only (as at present) over the uneducated, but over the greatest
minds, over kings and queens and wealthy people. Animal magnetism, one
of the great sciences of antiquity, had its origin in occult philosophy;
chemistry is the outcome of alchemy; phrenology and neurology are no
less the fruit of similar studies. The first illustrious workers in
these, to all appearance, untouched fields, made one mistake, the
mistake of all inventors; that is to say, they erected an absolute
system on a basis of isolated facts for which modern analysis as yet
cannot account. The Catholic Church, the law of the land, and modern
philosophy, in agreement for once, combined to prescribe, persecute, and
ridicule the mysteries of the Cabala as well as the adepts; the result
is a lamentable interregnum of a century in occult philosophy. But the
uneducated classes, and not a few cultivated people (women especially),
continue to pay a tribute to the mysterious power of those who can raise
the veil of the future; they go to buy hope, strength, and courage of
the fortune-teller; in other words, to ask of him all that religion
alone can give. So the art is still practised in spite of a certain
amount of risk. The eighteenth century encyclopaedists procured
tolerance for the sorcerer; he is no longer amenable to a court of law,
unless, indeed, he lends himself to fraudulent practices, and frightens
his “clients” to extort money from them, in which case he may be
prosecuted on a charge of obtaining money under false pretences.
Unluckily, the exercise of the sublime art is only too often used as a
method of obtaining money under false pretences, and for the following
reasons.
The seer’s wonderful gifts are usually bestowed upon those who are
described by the epithets rough and uneducated. The rough and uneducated
are the chosen vessels into which God pours the elixirs at which we
marvel. From among the rough and uneducated, prophets arise--an Apostle
Peter, or St. Peter the Hermit. Wherever mental power is imprisoned,
and remains intact and entire for want of an outlet in conversation,
in politics, in literature, in the imaginings of the scholar, in the
efforts of the statesman, in the conceptions of the inventor, or the
soldier’s toils of war; the fire within is apt to flash out in gleams
of marvelously vivid light, like the sparks hidden in an unpolished
diamond. Let the occasion come, and the spirit within kindles and glows,
finds wings to traverse space, and the god-like power of beholding
all things. The coal of yesterday under the play of some mysterious
influence becomes a radiant diamond. Better educated people, many-sided
and highly polished, continually giving out all that is in them, can
never exhibit this supreme power, save by one of the miracles which God
sometimes vouchsafes to work. For this reason the soothsayer is almost
always a beggar, whose mind is virgin soil, a creature coarse to all
appearance, a pebble borne along the torrent of misery and left in the
ruts of life, where it spends nothing of itself save in mere physical
suffering.
The prophet, the seer, in short, is some _Martin le Laboureur_ making
a Louis XVIII. tremble by telling him a secret known only to the king
himself; or it is a Mlle. Lenormand, or a domestic servant like Mme.
Fontaine, or again, perhaps it is some half-idiotic negress, some
herdsman living among his cattle, who receives the gift of vision; some
Hindoo fakir, seated by a pagoda, mortifying the flesh till the spirit
gains the mysterious power of the somnambulist.
Asia, indeed, through all time, has been the home of the heroes of
occult science. Persons of this kind, recovering their normal state,
are usually just as they were before. They fulfil, in some sort, the
chemical and physical functions of bodies which conduct electricity;
at times inert metal, at other times a channel filled with a mysterious
current. In their normal condition they are given to practices which
bring them before the magistrate, yea, verily, like the notorious
Balthazar, even unto the criminal court, and so to the hulks. You could
hardly find a better proof of the immense influence of fortune-telling
upon the working classes than the fact that poor Pons’ life and death
hung upon the prediction that Mme. Fontaine was to make from the cards.
Although a certain amount of repetition is inevitable in a canvas so
considerable and so full of detail as a complete picture of French
society in the nineteenth century, it is needless to repeat the
description of Mme. Fontaine’s den, already given in _Les Comediens
sans le savoir_; suffice it to say that Mme. Cibot used to go to
Mme. Fontaine’s house in the Rue Vieille-du-Temple as regularly as
frequenters of the Cafe Anglais drop in at that restaurant for lunch.
Mme. Cibot, being a very old customer, often introduced young persons
and old gossips consumed with curiosity to the wise woman.
The old servant who acted as provost marshal flung open the door of
the sanctuary with no further ceremony than the remark, “It’s Mme.
Cibot.--Come in, there’s nobody here.”
“Well, child, what can bring you here so early of a morning?” asked
the sorceress, as Mme. Fontaine might well be called, for she was
seventy-eight years old, and looked like one of the Parcae.
“Something has given me a turn,” said La Cibot; “I want the _grand jeu_;
it is a question of my fortune.” Therewith she explained her position,
and wished to know if her sordid hopes were likely to be realized.
“Do you know what the _grand jeu_ means?” asked Mme. Fontaine, with much
solemnity.
“No, I haven’t never seen the trick, I am not rich enough.--A hundred
francs! It’s not as if it cost so much! Where was the money to come
from? But now I can’t help myself, I must have it.”
“I don’t do it often, child,” returned Mme. Fontaine; “I only do it for
rich people on great occasions, and they pay me twenty-five louis for
doing it; it tires me, you see, it wears me out. The ‘Spirit’ rives my
inside, here. It is like going to the ‘Sabbath,’ as they used to say.”
“But when I tell you that it means my whole future, my dear good Ma’am
Fontaine--”
“Well, as it is you that have come to consult me so often, I will submit
myself to the Spirit!” replied Mme. Fontaine, with a look of genuine
terror on her face.
She rose from her filthy old chair by the fireside, and went to a table
covered with a green cloth so worn that you could count the threads.
A huge toad sat dozing there beside a cage inhabited by a black
disheveled-looking fowl.
“Astaroth! here, my son!” she said, and the creature looked up
intelligently at her as she rapped him on the back with a long
knitting-needle.--“And you, Mademoiselle Cleopatre!--attention!” she
continued, tapping the ancient fowl on the beak.
Then Mme. Fontaine began to think; for several seconds she did not move;
she looked like a corpse, her eyes rolled in their sockets and grew
white; then she rose stiff and erect, and a cavernous voice cried:
“Here I am!”
Automatically she scattered millet for Cleopatre, took up the pack of
cards, shuffled them convulsively, and held them out to Mme. Cibot to
cut, sighing heavily all the time. At the sight of that image of Death
in the filthy turban and uncanny-looking bed-jacket, watching the black
fowl as it pecked at the millet-grains, calling to the toad Astaroth to
walk over the cards that lay out on the table, a cold thrill ran through
Mme. Cibot; she shuddered. Nothing but strong belief can give strong
emotions. An assured income, to be or not to be, that was the question.
The sorceress opened a magical work and muttered some unintelligible
words in a sepulchral voice, looked at the remaining millet-seeds, and
watched the way in which the toad retired. Then after seven or eight
minutes, she turned her white eyes on the cards and expounded them.
“You will succeed, although nothing in the affair will fall out as you
expect. You will have many steps to take, but you will reap the fruits
of your labors. You will behave very badly; it will be with you as it is
with all those who sit by a sick-bed and covet part of the inheritance.
Great people will help you in this work of wrongdoing. Afterwards in the
death agony you will repent. Two escaped convicts, a short man with red
hair and an old man with a bald head, will murder you for the sake of
the money you will be supposed to have in the village whither you will
retire with your second husband. Now, my daughter, it is still open to
you to choose your course.”
The excitement which seemed to glow within, lighting up the bony hollows
about the eyes, was suddenly extinguished. As soon as the horoscope was
pronounced, Mme. Fontaine’s face wore a dazed expression; she looked
exactly like a sleep-walker aroused from sleep, gazed about her with
an astonished air, recognized Mme. Cibot, and seemed surprised by her
terrified face.
“Well, child,” she said, in a totally different voice, “are you
satisfied?”
Mme. Cibot stared stupidly at the sorceress, and could not answer.
“Ah! you would have the _grand jeu_; I have treated you as an old
acquaintance. I only want a hundred francs--”
“Cibot,--going to die?” gasped the portress.
“So I have been telling you very dreadful things, have I?” asked Mme.
Fontaine, with an extremely ingenuous air.
“Why, yes!” said La Cibot, taking a hundred francs from her pocket and
laying them down on the edge of the table. “Going to be murdered, think
of it--”
“Ah! there it is! You would have the _grand jeu_; but don’t take on so,
all the folk that are murdered on the cards don’t die.”
“But is it possible, Ma’am Fontaine?”
“Oh, _I_ know nothing about it, my pretty dear! You would rap at the
door of the future; I pull the cord, and it came.”
“_It_, what?” asked Mme. Cibot.
“Well, then, the Spirit!” cried the sorceress impatiently.
“Good-bye, Ma’am Fontaine,” exclaimed the portress. “I did not know
what the _grand jeu_ was like. You have given me a good fright, that you
have.”
“The mistress will not put herself in that state twice in a month,” said
the servant, as she went with La Cibot to the landing. “She would do
herself to death if she did, it tires her so. She will eat cutlets now
and sleep for three hours afterwards.”
Out in the street La Cibot took counsel of herself as she went
along, and, after the manner of all who ask for advice of any sort or
description, she took the favorable part of the prediction and rejected
the rest. The next day found her confirmed in her resolutions--she would
set all in train to become rich by securing a part of Pons’ collection.
Nor for some time had she any other thought than the combination of
various plans to this end. The faculty of self-concentration seen in
rough, uneducated persons, explained on a previous page, the reserve
power accumulated in those whose mental energies are unworn by the daily
wear and tear of social life, and brought into action so soon as that
terrible weapon the “fixed idea” is brought into play,--all this was
pre-eminently manifested in La Cibot. Even as the “fixed idea” works
miracles of evasion, and brings forth prodigies of sentiment, so greed
transformed the portress till she became as formidable as a Nucingen
at bay, as subtle beneath her seeming stupidity as the irresistible La
Palferine.
About seven o’clock one morning, a few days afterwards, she saw
Remonencq taking down his shutters. She went across to him.
“How could one find out how much the things yonder in my gentlemen’s
rooms are worth?” she asked in a wheedling tone.
“Oh! that is quite easy,” replied the owner of the old curiosity shop.
“If you will play fair and above board with me, I will tell you of
somebody, a very honest man, who will know the value of the pictures to
a farthing--”
“Who?”
“M. Magus, a Jew. He only does business to amuse himself now.”
Elie Magus has appeared so often in the _Comedie Humaine_, that it is
needless to say more of him here. Suffice it to add that he had retired
from business, and as a dealer was following the example set by Pons
the amateur. Well-known valuers like Henry, Messrs. Pigeot and Moret,
Theret, Georges, and Roehn, the experts of the Musee, in fact, were but
children compared with Elie Magus. He could see a masterpiece beneath
the accumulated grime of a century; he knew all schools, and the
handwriting of all painters.
He had come to Paris from Bordeaux, and so long ago as 1835 he had
retired from business without making any change for the better in his
dress, so faithful is the race to old tradition. The persecutions of the
Middle Ages compelled them to wear rags, to snuffle and whine and groan
over their poverty in self-defence, till the habits induced by the
necessities of other times have come to be, as usual, instinctive, a
racial defect.
Elie Magus had amassed a vast fortune by buying and selling diamonds,
pictures, lace, enamels, delicate carvings, old jewelry, and rarities of
all kinds, a kind of commerce which has developed enormously of late, so
much so indeed that the number of dealers has increased tenfold during
the last twenty years in this city of Paris, whither all the curiosities
in the world come to rub against one another. And for pictures there are
but three marts in the world--Rome, London, and Paris.
Elie Magus lived in the Chausee des Minimes, a short, broad street
leading to the Place Royale. He had bought the house, an old-fashioned
mansion, for a song, as the saying is, in 1831. Yet there were sumptuous
apartments within it, decorated in the time of Louis XV.; for it had
once been the Hotel Maulaincourt, built by the great President of the
Cour des Aides, and its remote position had saved it at the time of the
Revolution.
You may be quite sure that the old Jew had sound reasons for buying
house property, contrary to the Hebrew law and custom. He had ended, as
most of us end, with a hobby that bordered on a craze. He was as miserly
as his friend, the late lamented Gobseck; but he had been caught by the
snare of the eyes, by the beauty of the pictures in which he dealt. As
his taste grew more and more fastidious, it became one of the passions
which princes alone can indulge when they are wealthy and art-lovers. As
the second King of Prussia found nothing that so kindled enthusiasm as
the spectacle of a grenadier over six feet high, and gave extravagant
sums for a new specimen to add to his living museum of a regiment, so
the retired picture-dealer was roused to passion-pitch only by some
canvas in perfect preservation, untouched since the master laid down
the brush; and what was more, it must be a picture of the painter’s best
time. No great sales, therefore, took place but Elie Magus was there;
every mart knew him; he traveled all over Europe. The ice-cold,
money-worshiping soul in him kindled at the sight of a perfect work
of art, precisely as a libertine, weary of fair women, is roused from
apathy by the sight of a beautiful girl, and sets out afresh upon the
quest of flawless loveliness. A Don Juan among fair works of art, a
worshiper of the Ideal, Elie Magus had discovered joys that transcend
the pleasure of a miser gloating over his gold--he lived in a seraglio
of great paintings.
His masterpieces were housed as became the children of princes; the
whole first floor of the great old mansion was given up to them.
The rooms had been restored under Elie Magus’ orders, and with what
magnificence!
The windows were hung with the richest Venetian brocade; the most
splendid carpets from the Savonnerie covered the parquetry flooring.
The frames of the pictures, nearly a hundred in number, were magnificent
specimens, regilded cunningly by Servais, the one gilder in Paris whom
Elie Magus thought sufficiently painstaking; the old Jew himself had
taught him to use the English leaf, which is infinitely superior to that
produced by French gold-beaters. Servais is among gilders as Thouvenin
among bookbinders--an artist among craftsmen, making his work a labor
of love. Every window in that gallery was protected by iron-barred
shutters. Elie Magus himself lived in a couple of attics on the floor
above; the furniture was wretched, the rooms were full of rags, and the
whole place smacked of the Ghetto; Elie Magus was finishing his days
without any change in his life.
The whole of the ground floor was given up to the picture trade (for the
Jew still dealt in works of art). Here he stored his canvases, here also
packing-cases were stowed on their arrival from other countries; and
still there was room for a vast studio, where Moret, most skilful of
restorers of pictures, a craftsman whom the Musee ought to employ, was
almost always at work for Magus. The rest of the rooms on the ground
floor were given up to Magus’ daughter, the child of his old age, a
Jewess as beautiful as a Jewess can be when the Semitic type reappears
in its purity and nobility in a daughter of Israel. Noemi was guarded by
two servants, fanatical Jewesses, to say nothing of an advanced-guard,
a Polish Jew, Abramko by name, once involved in a fabulous manner
in political troubles, from which Elie Magus saved him as a business
speculation. Abramko, porter of the silent, grim, deserted mansion,
divided his office and his lodge with three remarkably ferocious
animals--an English bull-dog, a Newfoundland dog, and another of the
Pyrenean breed.
Behold the profound observations of human nature upon which Elie Magus
based his feeling of security, for secure he felt; he left home without
misgivings, slept with both ears shut, and feared no attempt upon his
daughter (his chief treasure), his pictures, or his money. In the first
place, Abramko’s salary was increased every year by two hundred francs
so long as his master should live; and Magus, moreover, was training
Abramko as a money-lender in a small way. Abramko never admitted anybody
until he had surveyed them through a formidable grated opening. He was
a Hercules for strength, he worshiped Elie Magus, as Sancho Panza
worshiped Don Quixote. All day long the dogs were shut up without food;
at nightfall Abramko let them loose; and by a cunning device the old Jew
kept each animal at his post in the courtyard or the garden by hanging
a piece of meat just out of reach on the top of a pole. The animals
guarded the house, and sheer hunger guarded the dogs. No odor that
reached their nostrils could tempt them from the neighborhood of that
piece of meat; they would not have left their places at the foot of the
poles for the most engaging female of the canine species. If a stranger
by any chance intruded, the dogs suspected him of ulterior designs upon
their rations, which were only taken down in the morning by Abramko
himself when he awoke. The advantages of this fiendish scheme are
patent. The animals never barked, Magus’ ingenuity had made savages of
them; they were treacherous as Mohicans. And now for the result.
One night burglars, emboldened by the silence, decided too hastily that
it would be easy enough to “clean out” the old Jew’s strong box. One of
their number told off to advance to the assault scrambled up the garden
wall and prepared to descend. This the bull-dog allowed him to do. The
animal, knowing perfectly well what was coming, waited for the burglar
to reach the ground; but when that gentleman directed a kick at him, the
bull-dog flew at the visitor’s shins, and, making but one bite of it,
snapped the ankle-bone clean in two. The thief had the courage to tear
him away, and returned, walking upon the bare bone of the mutilated
stump till he reached the rest of the gang, when he fell fainting, and
they carried him off. The _Police News_, of course, did not fail to
report this delightful night incident, but no one believed in it.
Magus at this time was seventy-five years old, and there was no reason
why he should not live to a hundred. Rich man though he was, he lived
like the Remonencqs. His necessary expenses, including the money he
lavished on his daughter, did not exceed three thousand francs. No
life could be more regular; the old man rose as soon as it was light,
breakfasted on bread rubbed with a clove of garlic, and ate no more food
until dinner-time. Dinner, a meal frugal enough for a convent, he took
at home. All the forenoons he spent among his treasures, walking up
and down the gallery where they hung in their glory. He would dust
everything himself, furniture and pictures; he never wearied of
admiring. Then he would go downstairs to his daughter, drink deep of
a father’s happiness, and start out upon his walks through Paris, to
attend sales or visit exhibitions and the like.
If Elie Magus found a great work of art under the right conditions, the
discovery put new life into the man; here was a bit of sharp practice, a
bargain to make, a battle of Marengo to win. He would pile ruse on ruse
to buy the new sultana as cheaply as possible. Magus had a map of Europe
on which all great pictures were marked; his co-religionists in every
city spied out business for him, and received a commission on the
purchase. And then, what rewards for all his pains! The two lost
Raphaels so earnestly sought after by Raphael lovers are both in his
collection. Elie Magus owns the original portrait of _Giorgione’s
Mistress_, the woman for whom the painter died; the so-called originals
are merely copies of the famous picture, which is worth five hundred
thousand francs, according to its owner’s estimation. This Jew possesses
Titian’s masterpiece, an _Entombment_ painted for Charles V., sent by
the great man to the great Emperor with a holograph letter, now fastened
down upon the lower part of the canvas. And Magus has yet another
Titian, the original sketch from which all the portraits of Philip II.
were painted. His remaining ninety-seven pictures are all of the same
rank and distinction. Wherefore Magus laughs at our national collection,
raked by the sunlight which destroys the fairest paintings, pouring in
through panes of glass that act as lenses. Picture galleries can only be
lighted from above; Magus opens and closes his shutters himself; he is
as careful of his pictures as of his daughter, his second idol. And well
the old picture-fancier knows the laws of the lives of pictures. To hear
him talk, a great picture has a life of its own; it is changeable,
it takes its beauty from the color of the light. Magus talks of his
paintings as Dutch fanciers used to talk of their tulips; he will come
home on purpose to see some one picture in the hour of its glory, when
the light is bright and clean.
And Magus himself was a living picture among the motionless figures
on the wall--a little old man, dressed in a shabby overcoat, a silk
waistcoat, renewed twice in a score of years, and a very dirty pair of
trousers, with a bald head, a face full of deep hollows, a wrinkled,
callous skin, a beard that had a trick of twitching its long white
bristles, a menacing pointed chin, a toothless mouth, eyes bright as the
eyes of his dogs in the yard, and a nose like an obelisk--there he stood
in his gallery smiling at the beauty called into being by genius. A Jew
surrounded by his millions will always be one of the finest spectacles
which humanity can give. Robert Medal, our great actor, cannot rise to
this height of poetry, sublime though he is.
Paris of all the cities of the world holds most of such men as Magus,
strange beings with a strange religion in their heart of hearts.
The London “eccentric” always finds that worship, like life, brings
weariness and satiety in the end; the Parisian monomaniac lives
cheerfully in concubinage with his crotchet to the last.