Cousin Pons, Honoré de Balzac [popular books of all time TXT] 📗

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