his wife’s blunder?--The housemaid came asking me questions about you,
an affected old creature she is, my fingers itched to give her velvet
tippet a dusting with my broom handle! A servant wearing a velvet
tippet! did anybody ever see the like? No, upon my word, the world is
turned upside down; what is the use of making a Revolution? Dine twice a
day if you can afford it, you scamps of rich folk! But laws are no good,
I tell you, and nothing will be safe if Louis-Philippe does not keep
people in their places; for, after all, if we are all equal, eh, sir?
a housemaid didn’t ought to have a velvet tippet, while I, Mme. Cibot,
haven’t one, after thirty years of honest work.--There is a pretty thing
for you! People ought to be able to tell who you are. A housemaid is
a housemaid, just as I myself am a portress. Why do they have silk
epaulettes in the army? Let everybody keep their place. Look here, do
you want me to tell you what all this comes to? Very well, France is
going to the dogs.... If the Emperor had been here, things would have
been very different, wouldn’t they, sir?... So I said to Cibot, I said,
‘See here, Cibot, a house where the servants wear velvet tippets belongs
to people that have no heart in them--’”
“No heart in them, that is just it,” repeated Pons. And with that he
began to tell Mme. Cibot about his troubles and mortifications, she
pouring out abuse of the relations the while and showing exceeding
tenderness on every fresh sentence in the sad history. She fairly wept
at last.
To understand the sudden intimacy between the old musician and Mme.
Cibot, you have only to imagine the position of an old bachelor lying on
his bed of pain, seriously ill for the first time in his life. Pons felt
that he was alone in the world; the days that he spent by himself were
all the longer because he was struggling with the indefinable nausea of
a liver complaint which blackens the brightest life. Cut off from all
his many interests, the sufferer falls a victim to a kind of nostalgia;
he regrets the many sights to be seen for nothing in Paris. The
isolation, the darkened days, the suffering that affects the mind and
spirits even more than the body, the emptiness of the life,--all these
things tend to induce him to cling to the human being who waits on him
as a drowned man clings to a plank; and this especially if the
bachelor patient’s character is as weak as his nature is sensitive and
incredulous.
Pons was charmed to hear La Cibot’s tittle-tattle. Schmucke, Mme. Cibot,
and Dr. Poulain meant all humanity to him now, when his sickroom became
the universe. If invalid’s thoughts, as a rule, never travel beyond in
the little space over which his eyes can wander; if their selfishness,
in its narrow sphere, subordinates all creatures and all things to
itself, you can imagine the lengths to which an old bachelor may go.
Before three weeks were out he had even gone so far as to regret, once
and again, that he had not married Madeleine Vivet! Mme. Cibot, too, had
made immense progress in his esteem in those three weeks; without her
he felt that he should have been utterly lost; for as for Schmucke, the
poor invalid looked upon him as a second Pons. La Cibot’s prodigious
art consisted in expressing Pons’ own ideas, and this she did quite
unconsciously.
“Ah! here comes the doctor!” she exclaimed, as the bell rang, and away
she went, knowing very well that Remonencq had come with the Jew.
“Make no noise, gentlemen,” said she, “he must not know anything. He is
all on the fidget when his precious treasures are concerned.”
“A walk round will be enough,” said the Hebrew, armed with a
magnifying-glass and a lorgnette.
The greater part of Pons’ collection was installed in a great
old-fashioned salon such as French architects used to build for the old
_noblesse_; a room twenty-five feet broad, some thirty feet in length,
and thirteen in height. Pons’ pictures to the number of sixty-seven hung
upon the white-and-gold paneled walls; time, however, had reddened the
gold and softened the white to an ivory tint, so that the whole was
toned down, and the general effect subordinated to the effect of the
pictures. Fourteen statues stood on pedestals set in the corners of the
room, or among the pictures, or on brackets inlaid by Boule; sideboards
of carved ebony, royally rich, surrounded the walls to elbow height, all
the shelves filled with curiosities; in the middle of the room stood
a row of carved credence-tables, covered with rare miracles of
handicraft--with ivories and bronzes, wood-carvings and enamels, jewelry
and porcelain.
As soon as Elie Magus entered the sanctuary, he went straight to the
four masterpieces; he saw at a glance that these were the gems of Pons’
collection, and masters lacking in his own. For Elie Magus these were
the naturalist’s _desiderata_ for which men undertake long voyages from
east to west, through deserts and tropical countries, across southern
savannahs, through virgin forests.
The first was a painting by Sebastian del Piombo, the second a Fra
Bartolommeo della Porta, the third a Hobbema landscape, and the fourth
and last a Durer--a portrait of a woman. Four diamonds indeed! In the
history of art, Sebastian del Piombo is like a shining point in which
three schools meet, each bringing its pre-eminent qualities. A Venetian
painter, he came to Rome to learn the manner of Raphael under the
direction of Michael Angelo, who would fain oppose Raphael on his own
ground by pitting one of his own lieutenants against the reigning king
of art. And so it came to pass that in Del Piombo’s indolent genius
Venetian color was blended with Florentine composition and a something
of Raphael’s manner in the few pictures which he deigned to paint, and
the sketches were made for him, it is said, by Michael Angelo himself.
If you would see the perfection to which the painter attained (armed
as he was with triple power), go to the Louvre and look at the Baccio
Bandinelli portrait; you might place it beside Titian’s _Man with a
Glove_, or by that other _Portrait of an Old Man_ in which Raphael’s
consummate skill blends with Correggio’s art; or, again, compare it
with Leonardo da Vinci’s _Charles VIII._, and the picture would scarcely
lose. The four pearls are equal; there is the same lustre and sheen, the
same rounded completeness, the same brilliancy. Art can go no further
than this. Art has risen above Nature, since Nature only gives her
creatures a few brief years of life.
Pons possessed one example of this immortal great genius and incurably
indolent painter; it was a _Knight of Malta_, a Templar kneeling in
prayer. The picture was painted on slate, and in its unfaded color and
its finish was immeasurably finer than the _Baccio Bandinelli_.
Fra Bartolommeo was represented by a _Holy Family_, which many
connoisseurs might have taken for a Raphael. The Hobbema would have
fetched sixty thousand francs at a public sale; and as for the Durer, it
was equal to the famous _Holzschuer_ portrait at Nuremberg for which the
kings of Bavaria, Holland, and Prussia have vainly offered two hundred
thousand francs again and again. Was it the portrait of the wife or
the daughter of Holzschuer, Albrecht Durer’s personal friend?--The
hypothesis seems to be a certainty, for the attitude of the figure in
Pons’ picture suggests that it is meant for a pendant, the position of
the coat-of-arms is the same as in the Nuremberg portrait; and, finally,
the _oetatis suoe XLI._ accords perfectly with the age inscribed on
the picture religiously kept by the Holzschuers of Nuremberg, and but
recently engraved.
The tears stood in Elie Magus’ eyes as he looked from one masterpiece to
another. He turned round to La Cibot, “I will give you a commission of
two thousand francs on each of the pictures if you can arrange that I
shall have them for forty thousand francs,” he said. La Cibot was amazed
at this good fortune dropped from the sky. Admiration, or, to be more
accurate, delirious joy, had wrought such havoc in the Jew’s brain, that
it had actually unsettled his habitual greed, and he fell headlong into
enthusiasm, as you see.
“And I?----” put in Remonencq, who knew nothing about pictures.
“Everything here is equally good,” the Jew said cunningly, lowering his
voice for Remonencq’s ears; “take ten pictures just as they come and on
the same conditions. Your fortune will be made.”
Again the three thieves looked each other in the face, each one of them
overcome with the keenest of all joys--sated greed. All of a sudden
the sick man’s voice rang through the room; the tones vibrated like the
strokes of a bell:
“Who is there?” called Pons.
“Monsieur! just go back to bed!” exclaimed La Cibot, springing upon
Pons and dragging him by main force. “What next! Have you a mind to kill
yourself?--Very well, then, it is not Dr. Poulain, it is Remonencq, good
soul, so anxious that he has come to ask after you!--Everybody is so
fond of you that the whole house is in a flutter. So what is there to
fear?”
“It seems to me that there are several of you,” said Pons.
“Several? that is good! What next! Are you dreaming!--You will go off
your head before you have done, upon my word!--Here, look!”--and La
Cibot flung open the door, signed to Magus to go, and beckoned to
Remonencq.
“Well, my dear sir,” said the Auvergnat, now supplied with something to
say, “I just came to ask after you, for the whole house is alarmed about
you.--Nobody likes Death to set foot in a house!--And lastly, Daddy
Monistrol, whom you know very well, told me to tell you that if you
wanted money he was at your service----”
“He sent you here to take a look round at my knick-knacks!” returned the
old collector from his bed; and the sour tones of his voice were full of
suspicion.
A sufferer from liver complaint nearly always takes momentary and
special dislikes to some person or thing, and concentrates all his
ill-humor upon the object. Pons imagined that some one had designs upon
his precious collection; the thought of guarding it became a fixed idea
with him; Schmucke was continually sent to see if any one had stolen
into the sanctuary.
“Your collection is fine enough to attract the attention of _chineurs_,”
Remonencq answered astutely. “I am not much in the art line myself; but
you are supposed to be such a great connoisseur, sir, that with my eyes
shut--supposing, for instance, that you should need money some time or
other, for nothing costs so much as these confounded illnesses; there
was my sister now, when she would have got better again just as well
without. Doctors are rascals that take advantage of your condition to--”
“Thank you, good-day, good-day,” broke in Pons, eying the marine
store-dealer uneasily.
“I will go to the door with him, for fear he should touch something,” La
Cibot whispered to her patient.
“Yes, yes,” answered the invalid, thanking her by a glance.
La Cibot shut the bedroom door behind her, and Pons’ suspicions awoke
again at once.
She found Magus standing motionless before the four pictures. His
immobility, his admiration, can only be understood by other souls open
to ideal beauty, to the ineffable joy of beholding art made
perfect; such as these can stand for whole hours before the
_Antiope_--Correggio’s masterpiece--before Leonardo’s _Gioconda_,
Titian’s _Mistress_, Andrea del Sarto’s _Holy Family_, Domenichino’s
_Children Among the Flowers_, Raphael’s little cameo, or his _Portrait
of an Old Man_--Art’s greatest masterpieces.
“Be quick and go, and make no noise,” said La Cibot.
The Jew walked slowly backwards, giving the pictures such a farewell
gaze as a lover gives his love. Outside on the landing, La Cibot tapped
his bony arm. His rapt contemplations had put an idea into her head.
“Make it _four_ thousand francs for each picture,” said she, “or I do
nothing.”
“I am so poor!...” began Magus. “I want the pictures simply for their
own sake, simply and solely for the love of art, my dear lady.”
“I can understand that love, sonny, you are so dried up. But if you do
not promise me sixteen thousand francs now, before Remonencq here, I
shall want twenty to-morrow.”
“Sixteen; I promise,” returned the Jew, frightened by the woman’s
rapacity.
La Cibot turned to Remonencq.
“What oath can a Jew swear?” she inquired.
“You may trust him,” replied the marine store-dealer. “He is as honest
as I am.”
“Very well; and you?” asked she, “if I get him to sell them to you, what
will you give me?”
“Half-share of profits,” Remonencq answered briskly.
“I would rather have a lump sum,” returned La Cibot; “I am not in
business myself.”
“You understand business uncommonly well!” put in Elie Magus, smiling;
“a famous saleswoman you would make!”
“I want her to take me into partnership, me and my goods,” said the
Auvergnat, as he took La Cibot’s plump arm and gave it playful taps like
hammer-strokes. “I don’t ask her to bring anything into the firm but her
good looks! You are making a mistake when your stick to your Turk of
a Cibot and his needle. Is a little bit of a porter the man to make a
woman rich--a fine woman like you? Ah, what a figure you would make in
a shop on the boulevard, all among the curiosities, gossiping with
amateurs and twisting them round your fingers! Just you leave your lodge
as soon as you have lined your purse here, and you shall see what will
become of us both.”
“Lined my purse!” cried Cibot. “I am incapable of taking the worth of a
single pin; you mind that, Remonencq! I am known in the neighborhood for
an honest woman, I am.”
La Cibot’s eyes flashed fire.
“There, never mind,” said Elie Magus; “this Auvergnat seems to be too
fond of you to mean to insult you.”
“How she would draw on the customers!” cried the Auvergnat.
Mme. Cibot softened at this.
“Be fair, sonnies,” quoth she, “and judge for yourselves how I am
placed. These ten years past I have been wearing my life out for these
two old bachelors yonder, and neither or them has given me anything but
words. Remonencq will tell you that I feed them by contract, and lose
twenty or thirty sous a day; all my savings have gone that way, by the
soul of my mother (the only author of my days that I ever knew), this
is as true as that I live, and that this is the light of day, and may my
coffee poison me if I lie about a farthing. Well, there is one up there
that will die soon, eh? and he the richer of the two that I have treated
like my own children. Would you believe it, my dear sir, I have told him
over and over again for days past that he is at death’s door (for Dr.
Poulain has given him up), he could not say less about putting my name
down in his will. We shall only get our due by taking it, upon my word,
as an honest woman, for as for trusting to the next-of-kin!--No fear!
There! look you here, words don’t stink; it is a bad world!”
“That is true,” Elie Magus answered cunningly, “that is true; and it
is just the like of us that are among the best,” he added, looking at
Remonencq.
“Just let me be,” returned La Cibot; “I am not speaking of you.
‘Pressing company is always accepted,’ as the old actor said. I swear to
you that the two gentlemen already owe me nearly three thousand francs;
the little I have is gone by now in medicine and things on their
account; and now suppose they refuse to recognize my advances? I am so
stupidly honest that I did not dare to say nothing to them about it.
Now, you that are in business, my dear sir, do you advise me to got to a
lawyer?”
“A lawyer?” cried Remonencq; “you know more about it than all the
lawyers put together--”
Just at that moment a sound echoed in the great staircase, a sound as if
some heavy body had fallen in the dining-room.
“Oh, goodness me!” exclaimed La Cibot; “it seems to me that monsieur has
just taken a ticket for the ground floor.”
She pushed her fellow-conspirators out at the door, and while the
pair descended the stairs with remarkable agility, she ran to the
dining-room, and there beheld Pons, in his shirt, stretched out upon
the tiles. He had fainted. She lifted him as if he had been a feather,
carried him back to his room, laid him in bed, burned feathers under his
nose, bathed his temples with eau-de-cologne, and at last brought him to
consciousness. When she saw his eyes unclose and life return, she stood
over him, hands on hips.
“No slippers! In your shirt! That is the way to kill yourself! Why do
you suspect me?--If this is to be the way of it, I wish you good-day,
sir. Here have I served you these ten years, I have spent money on you
till my savings are all gone, to spare trouble to that poor M. Schmucke,
crying like a child on the stairs--and _this_ is my reward! You have
been spying on me. God has punished you! It serves you right! Here I
am straining myself to carry you, running the risk of doing myself a
mischief that I shall feel all my days. Oh dear, oh dear! and the door
left open too--”
“You were talking with some one. Who was it?”
“Here are notions!” cried La Cibot. “What next! Am I your bond-slave?
Am I to give account of myself to you? Do you know that if you bother me
like this, I shall clear out! You shall take a nurse.”
Frightened by this threat, Pons unwittingly allowed La Cibot to see the
extent of the power of her sword of Damocles.
“It is my illness!” he pleaded piteously.
“It is as you please,” La Cibot answered roughly.
She went. Pons, confused, remorseful, admiring his nurse’s scalding
devotion, reproached himself for his behavior. The fall on the paved
floor of the dining-room had shaken and bruised him, and aggravated his
illness, but Pons was scarcely conscious of his physical sufferings.
La Cibot met Schmucke on the staircase.
“Come here, sir,” she said. “There is bad news, that there is! M. Pons
is going off his head! Just think of it! he got up with nothing on,
he came after me--and down he came full-length. Ask him why--he knows
nothing about it. He is in a bad way. I did nothing to provoke such
violence, unless, perhaps, I waked up ideas by talking to him of his
early amours. Who knows men? Old libertines that they are. I ought
not to have shown him my arms when his eyes were glittering like
_carbuckles_.”
Schmucke listened. Mme. Cibot might have been talking Hebrew for
anything that he understood.
“I have given myself a wrench that I shall feel all my days,” added she,
making as though she were in great pain. (Her arms did, as a matter of
fact, ache a little, and the muscular fatigue suggested an idea, which
she proceeded to turn to profit.) “So stupid I am. When I saw him lying
there on the floor, I just took him up in my arms as if he had been a
child, and carried him back to bed, I did. And I strained myself, I can
feel it now. Ah! how it hurts!--I am going downstairs. Look after our
patient. I will send Cibot for Dr. Poulain. I had rather die outright
than be crippled.”
La Cibot crawled downstairs, clinging to the banisters, and writhing and
groaning so piteously that the tenants, in alarm, came out upon their
landings. Schmucke supported the suffering creature, and told the story
of La Cibot’s devotion, the tears running down his cheeks as he spoke.
Before very long the whole house, the whole neighborhood indeed, had
heard of Mme. Cibot’s heroism; she had given herself a dangerous strain,
it was said, with lifting one of the “nutcrackers.”
Schmucke meanwhile went to Pons’ bedside with the tale. Their factotum
was in a frightful state. “What shall we do without her?” they said,
as they looked at each other; but Pons was so plainly the worse for his
escapade, that Schmucke did not dare to scold him.
“Gonfounded pric-a-prac! I would sooner purn dem dan loose mein friend!”
he cried, when Pons told him of the cause of the accident. “To suspect
Montame Zipod, dot lend us her safings! It is not goot; but it is der
illness--”
“Ah! what an illness! I am not the same man, I can feel it,” said Pons.
“My dear Schmucke, if only you did not suffer through me!”
“Scold me,” Schmucke answered, “und leaf Montame Zipod in beace.”
As for Mme. Cibot, she soon recovered in Dr. Poulain’s hands; and her
restoration, bordering on the miraculous, shed additional lustre on
her name and fame in the Marais. Pons attributed the success to the
excellent constitution of the patient, who resumed her ministrations
seven days later to the great satisfaction of her two gentlemen.
Her influence in their household and her tyranny was increased
a hundred-fold by the accident. In the course of a week, the two
nutcrackers ran into debt; Mme. Cibot paid the outstanding amounts, and
took the opportunity to obtain from Schmucke (how easily!) a receipt for
two thousand francs, which she had lent, she said, to the friends.
“Oh, what a doctor M. Poulain is!” cried La Cibot, for Pons’ benefit.
“He will bring you through, my dear sir, for he pulled me out of my
coffin! Cibot, poor man, thought I was dead.... Well, Dr. Poulain will
have told you that while I was in bed I thought of nothing but you. ‘God
above,’ said I, ‘take me, and let my dear Mr. Pons live--’”
“Poor dear Mme. Cibot, you all but crippled yourself for me.”
“Ah! but for Dr. Poulain I should have been put to bed with a shovel by
now, as we shall all be one day. Well, what must be, must, as the old
actor said. One must take things philosophically. How did you get on
without me?”
“Schmucke nursed me,” said the invalid; “but our poor money-box and our
lessons have suffered. I do not know how he managed.”
“Calm yourself, Bons,” exclaimed Schmucke; “ve haf in Zipod ein
panker--”
“Do not speak of it, my lamb. You are our children, both of you,” cried
La Cibot. “Our savings will be well invested; you are safer than the
Bank. So long as we have a morsel of bread, half of it is yours. It is
not worth mentioning--”
“Boor Montame Zipod!” said Schmucke, and he went.
Pons said nothing.
“Would you believe it, my cherub?” said La Cibot, as the sick man tossed
uneasily, “in my agony--for it was a near squeak for me--the thing that
worried me most was the thought that I must leave you alone, with no one
to look after you, and my poor Cibot without a farthing.... My savings
are such a trifle, that I only mention them in connection with my death
and Cibot, an angel that he is! No. He nursed me as if I had been a
queen, he did, and cried like a calf over me!... But I counted on you,
upon my word. I said to him, ‘There, Cibot! my gentlemen will not let
you starve--’”
Pons made no reply to this thrust _ad testamentum_; but as the portress
waited for him to say something--“I shall recommend you to M. Schmucke,”
he said at last.
“Ah!” cried La Cibot, “whatever you do will be right; I trust in you and
your heart. Let us never talk of this again; you make me feel ashamed,
my cherub. Think of getting better, you will outlive us all yet.”
Profound uneasiness filled Mme. Cibot’s mind. She cast about for some
way of making the sick man understand that she expected a legacy. That
evening, when Schmucke was eating his dinner as usual by Pons’ bedside,
she went out, hoping to find Dr. Poulain at home.
Dr. Poulain lived in the Rue d’Orleans in a small ground floor
establishment, consisting of a lobby, a sitting-room, and two bedrooms.
A closet, opening into the lobby and the bedroom, had been turned into
a study for the doctor. The kitchen, the servant’s bedroom, and a small
cellar were situated in a wing of the house, a huge pile built in the
time of the Empire, on the site of an old mansion of which the garden
still remained, though it had been divided among the three ground floor
tenants.
Nothing had been changed in the doctor’s house since it was built.
Paint and paper and ceilings were all redolent of the Empire. The grimy
deposits of forty years lay thick on walls and ceilings, on paper and
paint and mirrors and gilding. And yet, this little establishment, in
the depths of the Marais, paid a rent of a thousand francs.