in the second bedroom. She worked for a breeches-maker, stitching men’s
leggings, breeches, belts, and braces, anything, in fact, that is made
in a way of business which has somewhat fallen off of late years. Her
whole time was spent in keeping her son’s house and superintending
the one servant; she never went abroad, and took the air in the little
garden entered through the glass door of the sitting-room. Twenty years
previously, when her husband died, she sold his business to his best
workman, who gave his master’s widow work enough to earn a daily wage
of thirty sous. She had made every sacrifice to educate her son. At all
costs, he should occupy a higher station than his father before him;
and now she was proud of her Aesculapius, she believed in him, and
sacrificed everything to him as before. She was happy to take care of
him, to work and put by a little money, and dream of nothing but his
welfare, and love him with an intelligent love of which every mother is
not capable. For instance, Mme. Poulain remembered that she had been a
working girl. She would not injure her son’s prospects; he should not be
ashamed by his mother (for the good woman’s grammar was something of
the same kind as Mme. Cibot’s); and for this reason she kept in the
background, and went to her room of her own accord if any distinguished
patient came to consult the doctor, or if some old schoolfellow or
fellow-student chanced to call. Dr. Poulain had never had occasion to
blush for the mother whom he revered; and this sublime love of hers more
than atoned for a defective education.
The breeches-maker’s business sold for about twenty thousand francs, and
the widow invested the money in the Funds in 1820. The income of eleven
hundred francs per annum derived from this source was, at one time, her
whole fortune. For many a year the neighbors used to see the doctor’s
linen hanging out to dry upon a clothes-line in the garden, and the
servant and Mme. Poulain thriftily washed everything at home; a piece of
domestic economy which did not a little to injure the doctor’s practice,
for it was thought that if he was so poor, it must be through his own
fault. Her eleven hundred francs scarcely did more than pay the rent.
During those early days, Mme. Poulain, good, stout, little old woman,
was the breadwinner, and the poor household lived upon her earnings.
After twelve years of perseverance upon a rough and stony road, Dr.
Poulain at last was making an income of three thousand francs, and Mme.
Poulain had an income of about five thousand francs at her disposal.
Five thousand francs for those who know Paris means a bare subsistence.
The sitting-room, where patients waited for an interview, was shabbily
furnished. There was the inevitable mahogany sofa covered with
yellow-flowered Utrecht velvet, four easy-chairs, a tea-table, a
console, and half-a-dozen chairs, all the property of the deceased
breeches-maker, and chosen by him. A lyre-shaped clock between two
Egyptian candlesticks still preserved its glass shade intact. You
asked yourself how the yellow chintz window-curtains, covered with red
flowers, had contrived to hang together for so long; for evidently they
had come from the Jouy factory, and Oberkampf received the Emperor’s
congratulations upon similar hideous productions of the cotton industry
in 1809.
The doctor’s consulting-room was fitted up in the same style,
with household stuff from the paternal chamber. It looked stiff,
poverty-stricken, and bare. What patient could put faith in the skill of
any unknown doctor who could not even furnish his house? And this in a
time when advertising is all-powerful; when we gild the gas-lamps in
the Place de la Concorde to console the poor man for his poverty by
reminding him that he is rich as a citizen.
The ante-chamber did duty as a dining-room. The servant sat at her
sewing there whenever she was not busy in the kitchen or keeping the
doctor’s mother company. From the dingy short curtains in the windows
you would have guessed at the shabby thrift behind them without setting
foot in the dreary place. What could those wall-cupboards contain but
stale scraps of food, chipped earthenware, corks used over and over
again indefinitely, soiled table-linen, odds and ends that could descend
but one step lower into the dust-heap, and all the squalid necessities
of a pinched household in Paris?
In these days, when the five-franc piece is always lurking in our
thoughts and intruding itself into our speech, Dr. Poulain, aged
thirty-three, was still a bachelor. Heaven had bestowed on him a mother
with no connections. In ten years he had not met with the faintest
pretext for a romance in his professional career; his practice lay among
clerks and small manufacturers, people in his own sphere of life, with
homes very much like his own. His richer patients were butchers, bakers,
and the more substantial tradespeople of the neighborhood. These, for
the most part, attributed their recovery to Nature, as an excuse for
paying for the services of a medical man, who came on foot, at the rate
of two francs per visit. In his profession, a carriage is more necessary
than medical skill.
A humdrum monotonous life tells in the end upon the most adventurous
spirit. A man fashions himself to his lot, he accepts a commonplace
existence; and Dr. Poulain, after ten years of his practice, continued
his labors of Sisyphus without the despair that made early days so
bitter. And yet--like every soul in Paris--he cherished a dream.
Remonencq was happy in his dream; La Cibot had a dream of her own; and
Dr. Poulain, too, dreamed. Some day he would be called in to attend
a rich and influential patient, would effect a positive cure, and the
patient would procure a post for him; he would be head surgeon to a
hospital, medical officer of a prison or police-court, or doctor to the
boulevard theatres. He had come by his present appointment as doctor
to the Mairie in this very way. La Cibot had called him in when the
landlord of the house in the Rue de Normandie fell ill; he had treated
the case with complete success; M. Pillerault, the patient, took
an interest in the young doctor, called to thank him, and saw his
carefully-hidden poverty. Count Popinot, the cabinet minister, had
married M. Pillerault’s grand-niece, and greatly respected her uncle; of
him, therefore, M. Pillerault had asked for the post, which Poulain had
now held for two years. That appointment and its meagre salary came just
in time to prevent a desperate step; Poulain was thinking of emigration;
and for a Frenchman, it is a kind of death to leave France.
Dr. Poulain went, you may be sure, to thank Count Popinot; but as Count
Popinot’s family physician was the celebrated Horace Bianchon, it was
pretty clear that his chances of gaining a footing in that house were
something of the slenderest. The poor doctor had fondly hoped for the
patronage of a powerful cabinet minister, one of the twelve or fifteen
cards which a cunning hand has been shuffling for sixteen years on the
green baize of the council table, and now he dropped back again into his
Marais, his old groping life among the poor and the small tradespeople,
with the privilege of issuing certificates of death for a yearly stipend
of twelve hundred francs.
Dr. Poulain had distinguished himself to some extent as a house-student;
he was a prudent practitioner, and not without experience. His deaths
caused no scandal; he had plenty of opportunities of studying all kinds
of complaints _in anima vili_. Judge, therefore, of the spleen that
he nourished! The expression of his countenance, lengthy and not
too cheerful to begin with, at times was positively appalling. Set a
Tartuffe’s all-devouring eyes, and the sour humor of an Alceste in
a sallow-parchment visage, and try to imagine for yourself the gait,
bearing, and expression of a man who thought himself as good a doctor as
the illustrious Bianchon, and felt that he was held down in his narrow
lot by an iron hand. He could not help comparing his receipts (ten
francs a day if he was fortunate) with Bianchon’s five or six hundred.
Are the hatreds and jealousies of democracy incomprehensible after this?
Ambitious and continually thwarted, he could not reproach himself.
He had once already tried his fortune by inventing a purgative pill,
something like Morrison’s, and intrusted the business operations to an
old hospital chum, a house-student who afterwards took a retail drug
business; but, unluckily, the druggist, smitten with the charms of a
ballet-dancer of the Ambigu-Comique, found himself at length in the
bankruptcy court; and as the patent had been taken out in his name,
his partner was literally without a remedy, and the important discovery
enriched the purchaser of the business. The sometime house-student set
sail for Mexico, that land of gold, taking poor Poulain’s little savings
with him; and, to add insult to injury, the opera-dancer treated him as
an extortioner when he applied to her for his money.
Not a single rich patient had come to him since he had the luck to cure
old M. Pillerault. Poulain made his rounds on foot, scouring the Marais
like a lean cat, and obtained from two to forty sous out of a score
of visits. The paying patient was a phenomenon about as rare as that
anomalous fowl known as a “white blackbird” in all sublunary regions.
The briefless barrister, the doctor without a patient, are pre-eminently
the two types of a decorous despair peculiar to this city of Paris;
it is mute, dull despair in human form, dressed in a black coat and
trousers with shining seams that recall the zinc on an attic roof, a
glistening satin waistcoat, a hat preserved like a relic, a pair of old
gloves, and a cotton shirt. The man is the incarnation of a melancholy
poem, sombre as the secrets of the Conciergerie. Other kinds of poverty,
the poverty of the artist--actor, painter, musician, or poet--are
relieved and lightened by the artist’s joviality, the reckless gaiety
of the Bohemian border country--the first stage of the journey to the
Thebaid of genius. But these two black-coated professions that go afoot
through the street are brought continually in contact with disease and
dishonor; they see nothing of human nature but its sores; in the
forlorn first stages and beginnings of their career they eye competitors
suspiciously and defiantly; concentrated dislike and ambition flashes
out in glances like the breaking forth of hidden flames. Let two
schoolfellows meet after twenty years, the rich man will avoid the poor;
he does not recognize him, he is afraid even to glance into the gulf
which Fate has set between him and the friend of other years. The one
has been borne through life on the mettlesome steed called Fortune, or
wafted on the golden clouds of success; the other has been making his
way in underground Paris through the sewers, and bears the marks of his
career upon him. How many a chum of old days turned aside at the sight
of the doctor’s greatcoat and waistcoat!
With this explanation, it should be easy to understand how Dr. Poulain
came to lend himself so readily to the farce of La Cibot’s illness and
recovery. Greed of every kind, ambition of every nature, is not easy to
hide. The doctor examined his patient, found that every organ was sound
and healthy, admired the regularity of her pulse and the perfect ease of
her movements; and as she continued to moan aloud, he saw that for some
reason she found it convenient to lie at Death’s door. The speedy cure
of a serious imaginary disease was sure to cause a sensation in the
neighborhood; the doctor would be talked about. He made up his mind at
once. He talked of rupture, and of taking it in time, and thought even
worse of the case than La Cibot herself. The portress was plied with
various remedies, and finally underwent a sham operation, crowned with
complete success. Poulain repaired to the Arsenal Library, looked out a
grotesque case in some of Desplein’s records of extraordinary cures, and
fitted the details to Mme. Cibot, modestly attributing the success of
the treatment to the great surgeon, in whose steps (he said) he walked.
Such is the impudence of beginners in Paris. Everything is made to serve
as a ladder by which to climb upon the scene; and as everything, even
the rungs of a ladder, will wear out in time, the new members of every
profession are at a loss to find the right sort of wood of which to make
steps for themselves.
There are moments when the Parisian is not propitious. He grows tired
of raising pedestals, pouts like a spoiled child, and will have no
more idols; or, to state it more accurately, Paris cannot always find
a proper object for infatuation. Now and then the vein of genius gives
out, and at such times the Parisian may turn supercilious; he is not
always willing to bow down and gild mediocrity.
Mme. Cibot, entering in her usual unceremonious fashion, found the
doctor and his mother at table, before a bowl of lamb’s lettuce, the
cheapest of all salad-stuffs. The dessert consisted of a thin wedge of
Brie cheese flanked by a plate of specked foreign apples and a dish
of mixed dry fruits, known as _quatre-mendiants_, in which the raisin
stalks were abundantly conspicuous.
“You can stay, mother,” said the doctor, laying a hand on Mme. Poulain’s
arm; “this is Mme. Cibot, of whom I have told you.”
“My respects to you, madame, and my duty to you, sir,” said La Cibot,
taking the chair which the doctor offered. “Ah! is this your mother,
sir? She is very happy to have a son who has such talent; he saved my
life, madame, brought me back from the depths.”
The widow, hearing Mme. Cibot praise her son in this way, thought her a
delightful woman.
“I have just come to tell you, that, between ourselves, poor M. Pons is
doing very badly, sir, and I have something to say to you about him--”
“Let us go into the sitting-room,” interrupted the doctor, and with a
significant gesture he indicated the servant.
In the sitting-room La Cibot explained her position with regard to
the pair of nutcrackers at very considerable length. She repeated the
history of her loan with added embellishments, and gave a full account
of the immense services rendered during the past ten years to MM.
Pons and Schmucke. The two old men, to all appearance, could not exist
without her motherly care. She posed as an angel; she told so many lies,
one after another, watering them with her tears, that old Mme. Poulain
was quite touched.
“You understand, my dear sir,” she concluded, “that I really ought to
know how far I can depend on M. Pons’ intentions, supposing that he
should not die; not that I want him to die, for looking after those two
innocents is my life, madame, you see; still, when one of them is gone
I shall look after the other. For my own part, I was built by Nature to
rival mothers. Without nobody to care for, nobody to take for a child, I
don’t know what I should do.... So if M. Poulain only would, he might do
me a service for which I should be very grateful; and that is, to say a
word to M. Pons for me. Goodness me! an annuity of a thousand francs,
is that too much, I ask you?... To. M. Schmucke it would be so much
gained.--Our dear patient said that he should recommend me to the
German, poor man; it is his idea, no doubt, that M. Schmucke should
be his heir. But what is a man that cannot put two ideas together in
French? And besides, he would be quite capable of going back to Germany,
he will be in such despair over his friend’s death--”
The doctor grew grave. “My dear Mme. Cibot,” he said, “this sort of
thing does not in the least concern a doctor. I should not be allowed to
exercise my profession if it was known that I interfered in the matter
of my patients’ testamentary dispositions. The law forbids a doctor to
receive a legacy from a patient--”
“A stupid law! What is to hinder me from dividing my legacy with you?”
La Cibot said immediately.
“I will go further,” said the doctor; “my professional conscience will
not permit me to speak to M. Pons of his death. In the first place, he
is not so dangerously ill that there is any need to speak of it, and in
the second, such talk coming from me might give a shock to the system
that would do him real harm, and then his illness might terminate
fatally--”
“_I_ don’t put on gloves to tell him to get his affairs in order,” cried
Mme. Cibot, “and he is none the worse for that. He is used to it. There
is nothing to fear.”
“Not a word more about it, my dear Mme. Cibot! These things are not
within a doctor’s province; it is a notary’s business--”
“But, my dear M. Poulain, suppose that M. Pons of his own accord should
ask you how he is, and whether he had better make his arrangements;
then, would you refuse to tell him that if you want to get better it is
an excellent plan to set everything in order? Then you might just slip
in a little word for me--”
“Oh, if _he_ talks of making his will, I certainly shall not dissuade
him,” said the doctor.
“Very well, that is settled. I came to thank you for your care of me,”
she added, as she slipped a folded paper containing three gold coins
into the doctor’s hands. “It is all I can do at the moment. Ah! my dear
M. Poulain, if I were rich, you should be rich, you that are the image
of Providence on earth.--Madame, you have an angel for a son.”
La Cibot rose to her feet, Mme. Poulain bowed amiably, and the doctor
went to the door with the visitor. Just then a sudden, lurid gleam of
light flashed across the mind of this Lady Macbeth of the streets. She
saw clearly that the doctor was her accomplice--he had taken the fee for
the sham illness.
“M. Poulain,” she began, “how can you refuse to say a word or two to
save me from want, when you helped me in the affair of my accident?”
The doctor felt that the devil had him by the hair, as the saying is; he
felt, too, that the hair was being twisted round the pitiless red claw.
Startled and afraid lest he should sell his honesty for such a trifle,
he answered the diabolical suggestion by another no less diabolical.
“Listen, my dear Mme. Cibot,” he said, as he drew her into his
consulting-room. “I will now pay a debt of gratitude that I owe you for
my appointment to the mairie--”
“We go shares?” she asked briskly.
“In what?”
“In the legacy.”
“You do not know me,” said Dr. Poulain, drawing himself up like Valerius
Publicola. “Let us have no more of that. I have a friend, an old
schoolfellow of mine, a very intelligent young fellow; and we are so
much the more intimate, because, our lives have fallen out very much in
the same way. He was studying law while I was a house-student, he was
engrossing deeds in Maitre Couture’s office. His father was a shoemaker,
and mine was a breeches-maker; he has not found anyone to take much
interest in his career, nor has he any capital; for, after all, capital
is only to be had from sympathizers. He could only afford to buy
a provincial connection--at Mantes--and so little do provincials
understand the Parisian intellect, that they set all sorts of intrigues
on foot against him.”
“The wretches!” cried La Cibot.
“Yes,” said the doctor. “They combined against him to such purpose, that
they forced him to sell his connection by misrepresenting something that
he had done; the attorney for the crown interfered, he belonged to the
place, and sided with his fellow-townsmen. My friend’s name is Fraisier.
He is lodged as I am, and he is even leaner and more threadbare. He took
refuge in our arrondissement, and is reduced to appear for clients in
the police-court or before the magistrate. He lives in the Rue de la
Perle close by. Go to No. 9, third floor, and you will see his name on
the door on the landing, painted in gilt letters on a small square
of red leather. Fraisier makes a special point of disputes among the
porters, workmen, and poor folk in the arrondissement, and his charges
are low. He is an honest man; for I need not tell you that if he had
been a scamp, he would be keeping his carriage by now. I will call and
see my friend Fraisier this evening. Go to him early to-morrow; he knows
M. Louchard, the bailiff; M. Tabareau, the clerk of the court; and the
justice of the peace, M. Vitel; and M. Trognon, the notary. He is even
now looked upon as one of the best men of business in the Quarter. If
he takes charge of your interests, if you can secure him as M. Pons’
adviser, you will have a second self in him, you see. But do not make
dishonorable proposals to him, as you did just now to me; he has a
head on his shoulders, you will understand each other. And as for
acknowledging his services, I will be your intermediary--”
Mme. Cibot looked askance at the doctor.
“Is that the lawyer who helped Mme. Florimond the haberdasher in the Rue
Vieille-du-Temple out of a fix in that matter of her friend’s legacy?”
“The very same.”
“Wasn’t it a shame that she did not marry him after he had gained two
thousand francs a year for her?” exclaimed La Cibot. “And she thought to
clear off scores by making him a present of a dozen shirts and a couple
of dozen pocket-handkerchiefs; an outfit, in short.”
“My dear Mme. Cibot, that outfit cost a thousand francs, and Fraisier
was just setting up for himself in the Quarter, and wanted the things
very badly. And what was more, she paid the bill without asking any
questions. That affair brought him clients, and now he is very busy; but
in my line a practice brings--”
“It is only the righteous that suffer here below,” said La Cibot. “Well,
M. Poulain, good-day and thank you.”
And herewith begins the tragedy, or, if you like to have it so,
a terrible comedy--the death of an old bachelor delivered over by
circumstances too strong for him to the rapacity and greed that gathered
about his bed. And other forces came to the support of rapacity and
greed; there was the picture collector’s mania, that most intense of all
passions; there was the cupidity of the Sieur Fraisier, whom you shall
presently behold in his den, a sight to make you shudder; and lastly,
there was the Auvergnat thirsting for money, ready for anything--even
for a crime--that should bring him the capital he wanted. The first part
of the story serves in some sort as a prelude to this comedy in which
all the actors who have hitherto occupied the stage will reappear.
The degradation of a word is one of those curious freaks of manners
upon which whole volumes of explanation might be written. Write to an
attorney and address him as “Lawyer So-and-so,” and you insult him as
surely as you would insult a wholesale colonial produce merchant by
addressing your letter to “Mr. So-and-so, Grocer.” There are plenty
of men of the world who ought to be aware, since the knowledge of such
subtle distinctions is their province, that you cannot insult a French
writer more cruelly than by calling him _un homme de lettres_--a
literary man. The word _monsieur_ is a capital example of the life and
death of words. Abbreviated from monseigneur, once so considerable a
title, and even now, in the form of _sire_, reserved for emperors and
kings, it is bestowed indifferently upon all and sundry; while the
twin-word _messire_, which is nothing but its double and equivalent, if
by any chance it slips into a certificate of burial, produces an outcry
in the Republican papers.
Magistrates, councillors, jurisconsults, judges, barristers, officers
for the crown, bailiffs, attorneys, clerks of the court, procurators,
solicitors, and agents of various kinds, represent or misrepresent
Justice. The “lawyer” and the bailiff’s men (commonly called “the
brokers”) are the two lowest rungs of the ladder. Now, the bailiff’s man
is an outsider, an adventitious minister of justice, appearing to
see that judgment is executed; he is, in fact, a kind of inferior
executioner employed by the county court. But the word “lawyer”
(homme de loi) is a depreciatory term applied to the legal profession.
Consuming professional jealousy finds similar disparaging epithets
for fellow-travelers in every walk of life, and every calling has its
special insult. The scorn flung into the words _homme de loi, homme
de lettres_, is wanting in the plural form, which may be used without
offence; but in Paris every profession, learned or unlearned, has its
_omega_, the individual who brings it down to the level of the lowest
class; and the written law has its connecting link with the custom
right of the streets. There are districts where the pettifogging man of
business, known as Lawyer So-and-So, is still to be found. M. Fraisier
was to the member of the Incorporated Law Society as the money-lender
of the Halles, offering small loans for a short period at an exorbitant
interest, is to the great capitalist.