for Fraisier. Vinet, an orator of the Centre, attorney-general
(_procureur-general_) for the past sixteen years, nominated half-a-score
of times for the chancellorship, the father, moreover, of the attorney
for the crown at Mantes who had been appointed to a post in Paris
within the last year--Vinet was an enemy and a rival for the malignant
Presidente. The haughty attorney-general did not hide his contempt for
President Camusot. This fact Fraisier did not know, and could not know.
“Have you nothing on your conscience but the fact that you were
concerned for both parties?” asked she, looking steadily at Fraisier.
“Mme. la Presidente can see M. Leboeuf; M. Leboeuf was favorable to me.”
“Do you feel sure that M. Leboeuf will give M. de Marville and M. le
Comte Popinot a good account of you?”
“I will answer for it, especially now that M. Olivier Vinet has left
Mantes; for between ourselves, good M. Leboeuf was afraid of that
crabbed little official. If you will permit me, Madame La Presidente, I
will go to Mantes and see M. Leboeuf. No time will be lost, for I cannot
be certain of the precise value of the property for two or three days.
I do not wish that you should know all the ins and outs of this affair;
you ought not to know them, Mme. la Presidente, but is not the reward
that I expect for my complete devotion a pledge of my success?”
“Very well. If M. Leboeuf will speak in your favor, and if the property
is worth as much as you think (I doubt it myself), you shall have both
appointments, _if_ you succeed, mind you--”
“I will answer for it, madame. Only, you must be so good as to have your
notary and your attorney here when I shall need them; you must give me
a power of attorney to act for M. le President, and tell those
gentlemen to follow my instructions, and to do nothing on their own
responsibility.”
“The responsibility rests with you,” the Presidente answered solemnly,
“so you ought to have full powers.--But is M. Pons very ill?” she asked,
smiling.
“Upon my word, madame, he might pull through, especially with so
conscientious a doctor as Poulain in attendance; for this friend of
mine, madame, is simply an unconscious spy directed by me in your
interests. Left to himself, he would save the old man’s life; but there
is some one else by the sickbed, a portress, who would push him into the
grave for thirty thousand francs. Not that she would kill him outright;
she will not give him arsenic, she is not so merciful; she will do
worse, she will kill him by inches; she will worry him to death day by
day. If the poor old man were kept quiet and left in peace; if he were
taken into the country and cared for and made much of by friends, he
would get well again; but he is harassed by a sort of Mme. Evrard. When
the woman was young she was one of thirty _Belles Ecailleres_, famous in
Paris, she is a rough, greedy, gossiping woman; she torments him to make
a will and to leave her something handsome, and the end of it will be
induration of the liver, calculi are possibly forming at this moment,
and he has not enough strength to bear an operation. The doctor, noble
soul, is in a horrible predicament. He really ought to send the woman
away--”
“Why, then, this vixen is a monster!” cried the lady in thin flute-like
tones.
Fraisier smiled inwardly at the likeness between himself and the
terrible Presidente; he knew all about those suave modulations of a
naturally sharp voice. He thought of another president, the hero of an
anecdote related by Louis XI., stamped by that monarch’s final praise.
Blessed with a wife after the pattern of Socrates’ spouse, and ungifted
with the sage’s philosophy, he mingled salt with the corn in the mangers
and forbad the grooms to give water to the horses. As his wife rode
along the Seine towards their country-house, the animals bolted into the
river with the lady, and the magistrate returned thanks to Providence
for ridding him of his wife “in so natural a manner.” At this present
moment Mme. de Marville thanked Heaven for placing at Pons’ bedside a
woman so likely to get him “decently” out of the way.
Aloud she said, “I would not take a million at the price of a single
scruple.--Your friend ought to speak to M. Pons and have the woman sent
away.”
“In the first place, madame, Messrs. Schmucke and Pons think the woman
an angel; they would send my friend away. And secondly, the doctor lies
under an obligation to this horrid oyster-woman; she called him in to
attend M. Pillerault. When he tells her to be as gentle as possible with
the patient, he simply shows the creature how to make matters worse.”
“What does your friend think of _my_ cousin’s condition?”
This man’s clear, business-like way of putting the facts of the case
frightened Mme. de Marville; she felt that his keen gaze read the
thoughts of a heart as greedy as La Cibot’s own.
“In six weeks the property will change hands.”
The Presidente dropped her eyes.
“Poor man!” she sighed, vainly striving after a dolorous expression.
“Have you any message, madame, for M. Leboeuf? I am taking the train to
Mantes.”
“Yes. Wait a moment, and I will write to ask him to dine with us
to-morrow. I want to see him, so that he may act in concert to repair
the injustice to which you have fallen a victim.”
The Presidente left the room. Fraisier saw himself a justice of the
peace. He felt transformed at the thought; he grew stouter; his lungs
were filled with the breath of success, the breeze of prosperity. He
dipped into the mysterious reservoirs of volition for fresh and strong
doses of the divine essence. To reach success, he felt, as Remonencq
half felt, that he was ready for anything, for crime itself, provided
that no proofs of it remained. He had faced the Presidente boldly; he
had transmuted conjecture into reality; he had made assertions right
and left, all to the end that she might authorize him to protect her
interests and win her influence. As he stood there, he represented the
infinite misery of two lives, and the no less boundless desires of two
men. He spurned the squalid horrors of the Rue de la Perle. He saw the
glitter of a thousand crowns in fees from La Cibot, and five thousand
francs from the Presidente. This meant an abode such as befitted his
future prospects. Finally, he was repaying Dr. Poulain.
There are hard, ill-natured beings, goaded by distress or disease into
active malignity, that yet entertain diametrically opposed sentiments
with a like degree of vehemence. If Richelieu was a good hater, he
was no less a good friend. Fraisier, in his gratitude, would have let
himself be cut in two for Poulain.
So absorbed was he in these visions of a comfortable and prosperous
life, that he did not see the Presidente come in with the letter in her
hand, and she, looking at him, thought him less ugly now than at first.
He was about to be useful to her, and as soon as a tool belongs to us we
look upon it with other eyes.
“M. Fraisier,” said she, “you have convinced me of your intelligence,
and I think that you can speak frankly.”
Fraisier replied by an eloquent gesture.
“Very well,” continued the lady, “I must ask you to give a candid reply
to this question: Are we, either of us, M. de Marville or I, likely to
be compromised, directly or indirectly, by your action in this matter?”
“I would not have come to you, madame, if I thought that some day I
should have to reproach myself for bringing so much as a splash of mud
upon you, for in your position a speck the size of a pin’s head is seen
by all the world. You forget, madame, that I must satisfy you if I am
to be a justice of the peace in Paris. I have received one lesson at the
outset of my life; it was so sharp that I do not care to lay myself open
to a second thrashing. To sum it up in a last word, madame, I will not
take a step in which you are indirectly involved without previously
consulting you--”
“Very good. Here is the letter. And now I shall expect to be informed of
the exact value of the estate.”
“There is the whole matter,” said Fraisier shrewdly, making his bow
to the Presidente with as much graciousness as his countenance could
exhibit.
“What a providence!” thought Mme. Camusot de Marville. “So I am to be
rich! Camusot will be sure of his election if we let loose this Fraisier
upon the Bolbec constituency. What a tool!”
“What a providence!” Fraisier said to himself as he descended the
staircase; “and what a sharp woman Mme. Camusot is! I should want a
woman in these circumstances. Now to work!”
And he departed for Mantes to gain the good graces of a man he scarcely
knew; but he counted upon Mme. Vatinelle, to whom, unfortunately, he
owed all his troubles--and some troubles are of a kind that resemble
a protested bill while the defaulter is yet solvent, in that they bear
interest.
Three days afterwards, while Schmucke slept (for in accordance with the
compact he now sat up at night with the patient), La Cibot had a “tiff,”
as she was pleased to call it, with Pons. It will not be out of place
to call attention to one particularly distressing symptom of liver
complaint. The sufferer is always more or less inclined to impatience
and fits of anger; an outburst of this kind seems to give relief at the
time, much as a patient while the fever fit is upon him feels that he
has boundless strength; but collapse sets in so soon as the excitement
passes off, and the full extent of mischief sustained by the system
is discernible. This is especially the case when the disease has been
induced by some great shock; and the prostration is so much the more
dangerous because the patient is kept upon a restricted diet. It is
a kind of fever affecting neither the blood nor the brain, but the
humoristic mechanism, fretting the whole system, producing melancholy,
in which the patient hates himself; in such a crisis anything may cause
dangerous irritation.
In spite of all that the doctor could say, La Cibot had no belief in
this wear and tear of the nervous system by the humoristic. She was
a woman of the people, without experience or education; Dr. Poulain’s
explanations for her were simply “doctor’s notions.” Like most of her
class, she thought that sick people must be fed, and nothing short of
Dr. Poulain’s direct order prevented her from administering ham, a nice
omelette, or vanilla chocolate upon the sly.
The infatuation of the working classes on this point is very strong.
The reason of their reluctance to enter a hospital is the idea that they
will be starved there. The mortality caused by the food smuggled in by
the wives of patients on visiting-days was at one time so great that the
doctors were obliged to institute a very strict search for contraband
provisions.
If La Cibot was to realize her profits at once, a momentary quarrel must
be worked up in some way. She began by telling Pons about her visit to
the theatre, not omitting her passage at arms with Mlle. Heloise the
dancer.
“But why did you go?” the invalid asked for the third time. La Cibot
once launched on a stream of words, he was powerless to stop her.
“So, then, when I had given her a piece of my mind, Mademoiselle Heloise
saw who I was and knuckled under, and we were the best of friends.--And
now do you ask me why I went?” she added, repeating Pons’ question.
There are certain babblers, babblers of genius are they, who sweep
up interruptions, objections, and observations in this way as they go
along, by way of provision to swell the matter of their conversation, as
if that source were ever in any danger of running dry.
“Why I went?” repeated she. “I went to get your M. Gaudissart out of
a fix. He wants some music for a ballet, and you are hardly fit to
scribble on sheets of paper and do your work, dearie.--So I understood,
things being so, that a M. Garangeot was to be asked to set the
_Mohicans_ to music--”
“Garangeot!” roared Pons in fury. “_Garangeot!_ a man with no talent; I
would not have him for first violin! He is very clever, he is very good
at musical criticism, but as to composing--I doubt it! And what the
devil put the notion of going to the theatre into your head?”
“How confoundedly contrairy the man is! Look here, dearie, we mustn’t
boil over like milk on the fire! How are you to write music in the state
that you are in? Why, you can’t have looked at yourself in the glass!
Will you have the glass and see? You are nothing but skin and bone--you
are as weak as a sparrow, and do you think that you are fit to make your
notes! why, you would not so much as make out mine.... And that reminds
me that I ought to go up to the third floor lodger’s that owes us
seventeen francs, for when the chemist has been paid we shall not have
twenty left.--So I had to tell M. Gaudissart (I like that name), a good
sort he seems to be,--a regular Roger Bontemps that would just suit
me.--_He_ will never have liver complaint!--Well, so I had to tell him
how you were.--Lord! you are not well, and he has put some one else in
your place for a bit--”
“Some one else in my place!” cried Pons in a terrible voice, as he
sat right up in bed. Sick people, generally speaking, and those most
particularly who lie within the sweep of the scythe of Death, cling to
their places with the same passionate energy that the beginner displays
to gain a start in life. To hear that someone had taken his place was
like a foretaste of death to the dying man.
“Why, the doctor told me that I was going on as well as possible,”
continued he; “he said that I should soon be about again as usual. You
have killed me, ruined me, murdered me!”
“Tut, tut, tut!” cried La Cibot, “there you go! I am killing you, am I?
Mercy on us! these are the pretty things that you are always telling M.
Schmucke when my back is turned. I hear all that you say, that I do! You
are a monster of ingratitude.”
“But you do not know that if I am only away for another fortnight, they
will tell me that I have had my day, that I am old-fashioned, out of
date, Empire, rococo, when I go back. Garangeot will have made friends
all over the theatre, high and low. He will lower the pitch to suit some
actress that cannot sing, he will lick M. Gaudissart’s boots!” cried the
sick man, who clung to life. “He has friends that will praise him in
all the newspapers; and when things are like that in such a shop, Mme.
Cibot, they can find holes in anybody’s coat. ... What fiend drove you
to do it?”
“Why! plague take it, M. Schmucke talked it over with me for a week.
What would you have? You see nothing but yourself! You are so selfish
that other people may die if you can only get better.--Why poor M.
Schmucke has been tired out this month past! he is tied by the leg,
he can go nowhere, he cannot give lessons nor take his place at the
theatre. Do you really see nothing? He sits up with you at night, and I
take the nursing in the day. If I were to sit up at night with you, as
I tried to do at first when I thought you were so poor, I should have to
sleep all day. And who would see to the house and look out for squalls!
Illness is illness, it cannot be helped, and here are you--”
“This was not Schmucke’s idea, it is quite impossible--”
“That means that it was _I_ who took it into my head to do it, does it?
Do you think that we are made of iron? Why, if M. Schmucke had given
seven or eight lessons every day and conducted the orchestra every
evening at the theatre from six o’clock till half-past eleven at night,
he would have died in ten days’ time. Poor man, he would give his life
for you, and do you want to be the death of him? By the authors of my
days, I have never seen a sick man to match you! Where are your senses?
have you put them in pawn? We are all slaving our lives out for you; we
do all for the best, and you are not satisfied! Do you want to drive us
raging mad? I myself, to begin with, am tired out as it is----”
La Cibot rattled on at her ease; Pons was too angry to say a word. He
writhed on his bed, painfully uttering inarticulate sounds; the blow was
killing him. And at this point, as usual, the scolding turned suddenly
to tenderness. The nurse dashed at her patient, grasped him by the head,
made him lie down by main force, and dragged the blankets over him.
“How any one can get into such a state!” exclaimed she. “After all, it
is your illness, dearie. That is what good M. Poulain says. See now,
keep quiet and be good, my dear little sonny. Everybody that comes near
you worships you, and the doctor himself comes to see you twice a day.
What would he say if he found you in such a way? You put me out of all
patience; you ought not to behave like this. If you have Ma’am Cibot
to nurse you, you should treat her better. You shout and you talk!--you
ought not to do it, you know that. Talking irritates you. And why do
you fly into a passion? The wrong is all on your side; you are always
bothering me. Look here, let us have it out! If M. Schmucke and I,
who love you like our life, thought that we were doing right--well, my
cherub, it was right, you may be sure.”
“Schmucke never could have told you to go to the theatre without
speaking to me about it--”
“And must I wake him, poor dear, when he is sleeping like one of the
blest, and call him in as a witness?”
“No, no!” cried Pons. “If my kind and loving Schmucke made the
resolution, perhaps I am worse than I thought.” His eyes wandered round
the room, dwelling on the beautiful things in it with a melancholy look
painful to see.
“So I must say good-bye to my dear pictures, to all the things that
have come to be like so many friends to me... and to my divine friend
Schmucke?... Oh! can it be true?”
La Cibot, acting her heartless comedy, held her handkerchief to her
eyes; and at that mute response the sufferer fell to dark musing--so
sorely stricken was he by the double stab dealt to health and his
interests by the loss of his post and the near prospect of death, that
he had no strength left for anger. He lay, ghastly and wan, like a
consumptive patient after a wrestling bout with the Destroyer.
“In M. Schmucke’s interests, you see, you would do well to send for M.
Trognon; he is the notary of the quarter and a very good man,” said La
Cibot, seeing that her victim was completely exhausted.
“You are always talking about this Trognon--”
“Oh! he or another, it is all one to me, for anything you will leave
me.”
She tossed her head to signify that she despised riches. There was
silence in the room.
A moment later Schmucke came in. He had slept for six hours, hunger
awakened him, and now he stood at Pons’ bedside watching his friend
without saying a word, for Mme. Cibot had laid a finger on her lips.
“Hush!” she whispered. Then she rose and went up to add under her
breath, “He is going off to sleep at last, thank Heaven! He is as
cross as a red donkey!--What can you expect, he is struggling with his
illness----”
“No, on the contrary, I am very patient,” said the victim in a weary
voice that told of a dreadful exhaustion; “but, oh! Schmucke, my dear
friend, she has been to the theatre to turn me out of my place.”
There was a pause. Pons was too weak to say more. La Cibot took the
opportunity and tapped her head significantly. “Do not contradict him,”
she said to Schmucke; “it would kill him.”
Pons gazed into Schmucke’s honest face. “And she says that you sent
her--” he continued.
“Yes,” Schmucke affirmed heroically. “It had to pe. Hush!--let us safe
your life. It is absurd to vork and train your sdrength gif you haf a
dreasure. Get better; ve vill sell some prick-a-prack und end our tays
kvietly in a corner somveres, mit kind Montame Zipod.”
“She has perverted you,” moaned Pons.
Mme. Cibot had taken up her station behind the bed to make signals
unobserved. Pons thought that she had left the room. “She is murdering
me,” he added.
“What is that? I am murdering you, am I?” cried La Cibot, suddenly
appearing, hand on hips and eyes aflame. “I am as faithful as a dog, and
this is all I get! God Almighty!--”
She burst into tears and dropped down into the great chair, a tragical
movement which wrought a most disastrous revulsion in Pons.
“Very good,” she said, rising to her feet. The woman’s malignant eyes
looked poison and bullets at the two friends. “Very good. Nothing that
I can do is right here, and I am tired of slaving my life out. You shall
take a nurse.”
Pons and Schmucke exchanged glances in dismay.
“Oh! you may look at each other like actors. I mean it. I shall ask Dr.
Poulain to find a nurse for you. And now we will settle accounts. You
shall pay me back the money that I have spent on you, and that I would
never have asked you for, I that have gone to M. Pillerault to borrow
another five hundred francs of him--”
“It ees his illness!” cried Schmucke--he sprang to Mme. Cibot and put an
arm round her waist--“haf batience.”
“As for you, you are an angel, I could kiss the ground you tread upon,”
said she. “But M. Pons never liked me, he always hated me. Besides, he
thinks perhaps that I want to be mentioned in his will--”
“Hush! you vill kill him!” cried Schmucke.
“Good-bye, sir,” said La Cibot, with a withering look at Pons. “You
may keep well for all the harm I wish you. When you can speak to me
pleasantly, when you can believe that what I do is done for the best,
I will come back again. Till then I shall stay in my own room. You were
like my own child to me; did anybody ever see a child revolt against its
mother?... No, no, M. Schmucke, I do not want to hear more. I will bring
you _your_ dinner and wait upon _you_, but you must take a nurse. Ask M.
Poulain about it.”
And she went out, slamming the door after her so violently that the
precious, fragile objects in the room trembled. To Pons in his torture,
the rattle of china was like the final blow dealt by the executioner to
a victim broken on the wheel.
An hour later La Cibot called to Schmucke through the door, telling him
that his dinner was waiting for him in the dining-room. She would not
cross the threshold. Poor Schmucke went out to her with a haggard,
tear-stained face.
“Mein boor Bons in vandering,” said he; “he says dat you are ein pad
voman. It ees his illness,” he added hastily, to soften La Cibot and
excuse his friend.
“Oh, I have had enough of his illness! Look here, he is neither father,
nor husband, nor brother, nor child of mine. He has taken a dislike to
me; well and good, that is enough! As for you, you see, I would follow
_you_ to the end of the world; but when a woman gives her life, her
heart, and all her savings, and neglects her husband (for here has Cibot
fallen ill), and then hears that she is a bad woman--it is coming it
rather too strong, it is.”
“Too shtrong?”
“Too strong, yes. Never mind idle words. Let us come to the facts. As to
that, you owe me for three months at a hundred and ninety francs--that
is five hundred seventy francs; then there is the rent that I have paid
twice (here are the receipts), six hundred more, including rates and the
sou in the franc for the porter--something under twelve hundred francs
altogether, and with the two thousand francs besides--without interest,
mind you--the total amounts to three thousand one hundred and ninety-two
francs. And remember that you will want at least two thousand francs
before long for the doctor, and the nurse, and the medicine, and
the nurse’s board. That was why I borrowed a thousand francs of M.
Pillerault,” and with that she held up Gaudissart’s bank-note.
It may readily be conceived that Schmucke listened to this reckoning
with amazement, for he knew about as much of business as a cat knows of
music.
“Montame Zipod,” he expostulated, “Bons haf lost his head. Bardon him,
and nurse him as before, und pe our profidence; I peg it of you on mine
knees,” and he knelt before La Cibot and kissed the tormentor’s hands.
La Cibot raised Schmucke and kissed him on the forehead. “Listen, my
lamb,” said she, “here is Cibot ill in bed; I have just sent for Dr.
Poulain. So I ought to set my affairs in order. And what is more, Cibot
saw me crying, and flew into such a passion that he will not have me set
foot in here again. It is _he_ who wants the money; it is his, you see.
We women can do nothing when it comes to that. But if you let him have
his money back again--the three thousand two hundred francs--he will be
quiet perhaps. Poor man, it is his all, earned by the sweat of his brow,
the savings of twenty-six years of life together. He must have his money
to-morrow; there is no getting round him.--You do not know Cibot; when
he is angry he would kill a man. Well, I might perhaps get leave of
him to look after you both as before. Be easy. I will just let him say
anything that comes into his head. I will bear it all for love of you,
an angel as you are.”
“No, I am ein boor man, dot lof his friend and vould gif his life to
save him--”