Part 9

________________________________________________
_ So the enemy was to be brought into the citadel, and a stab dealt to Pons' very heart. For ten years Pons had carried his keys about with him; he had forbidden La Cibot to allow any one, no matter whom, to cross his threshold; and La Cibot had so far shared Schmucke's opinions of _bric-a-brac_, that she had obeyed him. The good Schmucke, by speaking of the splendors as "chimcracks," and deploring his friend's mania, had taught La Cibot to despise the old rubbish, and so secured Pons' museum from invasion for many a long year.

When Pons took to his bed, Schmucke filled his place at the theatre and gave lessons for him at his boarding-schools. He did his utmost to do the work of two; but Pons' sorrows weighing heavily upon his mind, the task took all his strength. He only saw his friend in the morning, and again at dinnertime. His pupils and the people at the theatre, seeing the poor German look so unhappy, used to ask for news of Pons; and so great was his grief, that the indifferent would make the grimaces of sensibility which Parisians are wont to reserve for the greatest calamities. The very springs of life had been attacked, the good German was suffering from Pons' pain as well as from his own. When he gave a music lesson, he spent half the time in talking of Pons, interrupting himself to wonder whether his friend felt better to-day, and the little school-girls listening heard lengthy explanations of Pons' symptoms. He would rush over to the Rue de Normandie in the interval between two lessons for the sake of a quarter of an hour with Pons.

When at last he saw that their common stock was almost exhausted, when Mme. Cibot (who had done her best to swell the expenses of the illness) came to him and frightened him; then the old music-master felt that he had courage of which he never thought himself capable --courage that rose above his anguish. For the first time in his life he set himself to earn money; money was needed at home. One of the school-girl pupils, really touched by their troubles, asked Schmucke how he could leave his friend alone. "Montemoiselle," he answered, with the sublime smile of those who think no evil, "ve haf Montame Zipod, ein dreasure, montemoiselle, ein bearl! Bons is nursed like ein brince."

So while Schmucke trotted about the streets, La Cibot was mistress of the house and ruled the invalid. How should Pons superintend his self-appointed guardian angel, when he had taken no solid food for a fortnight, and lay there so weak and helpless that La Cibot was obliged to lift him up and carry him to the sofa while she made the bed?

La Cibot's visit to Elie Magus was paid (as might be expected) while Schmucke breakfasted. She came in again just as the German was bidding his friend good-bye; for since she learned that Pons possessed a fortune, she never left the old bachelor; she brooded over him and his treasures like a hen. From the depths of a comfortable easy-chair at the foot of the bed she poured forth for Pons' delectation the gossip in which women of her class excel. With Machiavelian skill, she had contrived to make Pons think that she was indispensable to him; she coaxed and she wheedled, always uneasy, always on the alert. Mme. Fontaine's prophecy had frightened La Cibot; she vowed to herself that she would gain her ends by kindness. She would sleep secure on M. Pons' legacy, but her rascality should keep within the limits of the law. For ten years she had not suspected the value of Pons' collection; she had a clear record behind her of ten years of devotion, honesty, and disinterestedness; it was a magnificent investment, and now she proposed to realize. In one day, Remonencq's hint of money had hatched the serpent's egg, the craving for riches that had lain dormant within her for twenty years. Since she had cherished that craving, it had grown in force with the ferment of all the evil that lurks in the corners of the heart. How she acted upon the counsels whispered by the serpent will presently be seen.

"Well?" she asked of Schmucke, "has this cherub of ours had plenty to drink? Is he better?"

"He is not doing fery vell, tear Montame Zipod, not fery vell," said poor Schmucke, brushing away the tears from his eyes.

"Pooh! you make too much of it, my dear M. Schmucke; we must take things as we find them; Cibot might be at death's door, and I should not take it to heart as you do. Come! the cherub has a good constitution. And he has been steady, it seems, you see; you have no idea what an age sober people live. He is very ill, it is true, but with all the care I take of him, I shall bring him round. Be easy, look after your affairs, I will keep him company and see that he drinks his pints of barley water."

"Gif you vere not here, I should die of anxiety--" said Schmucke, squeezing his kind housekeeper's hand in both his own to express his confidence in her.

La Cibot wiped her eyes as she went back to the invalid's room.

"What is the matter, Mme. Cibot?" asked Pons.

"It is M. Schmucke that has upset me; he is crying as if you were dead," said she. "If you are not well, you are not so bad yet that nobody need cry over you; but it has given me such a turn! Oh dear! oh dear! how silly it is of me to get so fond of people, and to think more of you than of Cibot! For, after all, you aren't nothing to me, you are only my brother by Adam's side; and yet, whenever you are in the question, it puts me in such a taking, upon my word it does! I would cut off my hand--my left hand, of course--to see you coming and going, eating your meals, and screwing bargains out of dealers as usual. If I had had a child of my own, I think I should have loved it as I love you, eh! There, take a drink, dearie; come now, empty the glass. Drink it off, monsieur, I tell you! The first thing Dr. Poulain said was, 'If M. Pons has no mind to go to Pere Lachaise, he ought to drink as many buckets full of water in a day as an Auvergnat will sell.' So, come now, drink--"

"But I do drink, Cibot, my good woman; I drink and drink till I am deluged--"

"That is right," said the portress, as she took away the empty glass. "That is the way to get better. Dr. Poulain had another patient ill of your complaint; but he had nobody to look after him, his children left him to himself, and he died because he didn't drink enough--so you must drink, honey, you see--he died and they buried him two months ago. And if you were to die, you know, you would drag down old M. Schmucke with you, sir. He is like a child. Ah! he loves you, he does, the dear lamb of a man; no woman never loved a man like that! He doesn't care for meat nor drink; he has grown as thin as you are in the last fortnight, and you are nothing but skin and bones.--It makes me jealous to see it, for I am very fond of you; but not to that degree; I haven't lost my appetite, quite the other way; always going up and down stairs, till my legs are so tired that I drop down of an evening like a lump of lead. Here am I neglecting my poor Cibot for you; Mlle. Remonencq cooks his victuals for him, and he goes on about it and says that nothing is right! At that I tell him that one ought to put up with something for the sake of other people, and that you are so ill that I cannot leave you. In the first place, you can't afford a nurse. And before I would have a nurse here!--I have done for you these ten years; they want wine and sugar, and foot-warmers, and all sorts of comforts. And they rob their patients unless the patients leave them something in their wills. Have a nurse in here to-day, and to-morrow we should find a picture or something or other gone--"

"Oh! Mme. Cibot!" cried Pons, quite beside himself, "do not leave me! No one must touch anything--"

"I am here," said La Cibot; "so long as I have the strength I shall be here.--Be easy. There was Dr. Poulain wanting to get a nurse for you; perhaps he has his eye on your treasures. I just snubbed him, I did. 'The gentleman won't have any one but me,' I told him. 'He is used to me, and I am used to him.' So he said no more. A nurse, indeed! They are all thieves; I hate that sort of woman, I do. Here is a tale that will show you how sly they are. There was once an old gentleman--it was Dr. Poulain himself, mind you, who told me this--well, a Mme. Sabatier, a woman of thirty-six that used to sell slippers at the Palais Royal--you remember the Galerie at the Palais that they pulled down?"

Pons nodded.

"Well, at that time she had not done very well; her husband used to drink, and died of spontaneous imbustion; but she had been a fine woman in her time, truth to tell, not that it did her any good, though she had friends among the lawyers. So, being hard up, she became a monthly nurse, and lived in the Rue Barre-du-Bec. Well, she went out to nurse an old gentleman that had a disease of the lurinary guts (saving your presence); they used to tap him like an artesian well, and he needed such care that she used to sleep on a truckle-bed in the same room with him. You would hardly believe such a thing!--'Men respect nothing,' you'll tell me, 'so selfish as they are.' Well, she used to talk with him, you understand; she never left him, she amused him, she told him stories, she drew him on to talk (just as we are chatting away together now, you and I, eh?), and she found out that his nephews--the old gentleman had nephews--that his nephews were wretches; they had worried him, and final end of it, they had brought on this illness. Well, my dear sir, she saved his life, he married her, and they have a fine child; Ma'am Bordevin, the butcher's wife in the Rue Charlot, a relative of hers, stood godmother. There is luck for you!

"As for me, I am married; and if I have no children, I don't mind saying that it is Cibot's fault; he is too fond of me, but if I cared --never mind. What would have become of me and my Cibot if we had had a family, when we have not a penny to bless ourselves with after thirty years' of faithful service? I have not a farthing belonging to nobody else, that is what comforts me. I have never wronged nobody. --Look here, suppose now (there is no harm in supposing when you will be out and about again in six weeks' time, and sauntering along the boulevard); well, suppose that you had put me down in your will; very good, I shouldn't never rest till I had found your heirs and given the money back. Such is my horror of anything that is not earned by the sweat of my brow.

"You will say to me, 'Why, Mme. Cibot, why should you worry yourself like that? You have fairly earned the money; you looked after your two gentlemen as if they had been your children; you saved them a thousand francs a year--' (for there are plenty, sir, you know, that would have had their ten thousand francs put out to interest by now if they had been in my place)--'so if the worthy gentleman leaves you a trifle of an annuity, it is only right.'--Suppose they told me that. Well, now; I am not thinking of myself.--I cannot think how some women can do a kindness thinking of themselves all the time. It is not doing good, sir, is it? I do not go to church myself, I haven't the time; but my conscience tells me what is right. . . . Don't you fidget like that, my lamb!--Don't scratch yourself! . . . Dear me, how yellow you grow! So yellow you are--quite brown. How funny it is that one can come to look like a lemon in three weeks! . . . Honesty is all that poor folk have, and one must surely have something! Suppose that you were just at death's door, I should be the first to tell you that you ought to leave all that you have to M. Schmucke. It is your duty, for he is all the family you have. He loves you, he does, as a dog loves his master."

"Ah! yes," said Pons; "nobody else has ever loved me all my life long--"

"Ah! that is not kind of you, sir," said Mme. Cibot; "then I do not love you, I suppose?"

"I do not say so, my dear Mme. Cibot."

"Good. You take me for a servant, do you, a common servant, as if I hadn't no heart! Goodness me! for eleven years you do for two old bachelors, you think of nothing but their comfort. I have turned half a score of greengrocers' shops upside down for you, I have talked people round to get you good Brie cheese; I have gone down as far as the market for fresh butter for you; I have taken such care of things that nothing of yours hasn't been chipped nor broken in all these ten years; I have just treated you like my own children; and then to hear a 'My dear Mme. Cibot,' that shows that there is not a bit of feeling for you in the heart of an old gentleman that you have cared for like a king's son! for the little King of Rome was not so well looked after. He died in his prime; there is proof for you. . . . Come, sir, you are unjust! You are ungrateful! It is because I am only a poor portress. Goodness me! are _you_ one of those that think we are dogs?--"

"But, my dear Mme. Cibot--"

"Indeed, you that know so much, tell me why we porters are treated like this, and are supposed to have no feelings; people look down on us in these days when they talk of Equality!--As for me, am I not as good as another woman, I that was one of the finest women in Paris, and was called _La belle Ecaillere_, and received declarations seven or eight times a day? And even now if I liked--Look here, sir, you know that little scrubby marine store-dealer downstairs? Very well, he would marry me any day, if I were a widow that is, with his eyes shut; he has had them looking wide open in my direction so often; he is always saying, 'Oh! what fine arms you have, Ma'am Cibot!--I dreamed last night that it was bread and I was butter, and I was spread on the top.' Look, sir, there is an arm!"

She rolled up her sleeve and displayed the shapeliest arm imaginable, as white and fresh as her hand was red and rough; a plump, round, dimpled arm, drawn from its merino sheath like a blade from the scabbard to dazzle Pons, who looked away.

"For every oyster the knife opened, the arm has opened a heart! Well, it belongs to Cibot, and I did wrong when I neglected him, poor dear, HE would throw himself over a precipice at a word from me; while you, sir, that call me 'My dear Mme. Cibot' when I do impossible things for you--"

"Do just listen to me," broke in the patient; "I cannot call you my mother, nor my wife--"

"No, never in all my born days will I take again to anybody--"

"Do let me speak!" continued Pons. "Let me see; I put M. Schmucke first--"

"M. Schmucke! there is a heart for you," cried La Cibot. "Ah! he loves me, but then he is poor. It is money that deadens the heart; and you are rich! Oh, well, take a nurse, you will see what a life she will lead you; she will torment you, you will be like a cockchafer on a string. The doctor will say that you must have plenty to drink, and she will do nothing but feed you. She will bring you to your grave and rob you. You do not deserve to have a Mme. Cibot!--there! When Dr. Poulain comes, ask him for a nurse."

"Oh fiddlestickend!" the patient cried angrily. "_Will_ you listen to me? When I spoke of my friend Schmucke, I was not thinking of women. I know quite well that no one cares for me so sincerely as you do, you and Schmucke--"

"Have the goodness not to irritate yourself in this way!" exclaimed La Cibot, plunging down upon Pons and covering him by force with the bedclothes.

"How should I not love you?" said poor Pons.

"You love me, really? . . . There, there, forgive me, sir!" she said, crying and wiping her eyes. "Ah, yes, of course, you love me, as you love a servant, that is the way!--a servant to whom you throw an annuity of six hundred francs like a crust you fling into a dog's kennel--"

"Oh! Mme. Cibot," cried Pons, "for what do you take me? You do not know me."

"Ah! you will care even more than that for me," she said, meeting Pons' eyes. "You will love your kind old Cibot like a mother, will you not? A mother, that is it! I am your mother; you are both of you my children. . . . Ah, if I only knew them that caused you this sorrow, I would do that which would bring me into the police-courts, and even to prison; I would tear their eyes out! Such people deserve to die at the Barriere Saint-Jacques, and that is too good for such scoundrels. . . . So kind, so good as you are (for you have a heart of gold), you were sent into the world to make some woman happy! . . . Yes, you would have her happy, as anybody can see; you were cut out for that. In the very beginning, when I saw how you were with M. Schmucke, I said to myself, 'M. Pons has missed the life he was meant for; he was made to be a good husband.' Come, now, you like women."

"Ah, yes," said Pons, "and no woman has been mine."

"Really?" exclaimed La Cibot, with a provocative air as she came nearer and took Pons' hand in hers. "Do you not know what it is to love a woman that will do anything for her lover? Is it possible? If I were in your place, I should not wish to leave this world for another until I had known the greatest happiness on earth! . . . Poor dear! If I was now what I was once, I would leave Cibot for you! upon my word, I would! Why, with a nose shaped like that--for you have a fine nose --how did you manage it, poor cherub? . . . You will tell me that 'not every woman knows a man when she sees him'; and a pity it is that they marry so at random as they do, it makes you sorry to see it.--Now, for my own part, I should have thought that you had had mistresses by the dozen--dancers, actresses, and duchesses, for you went out so much. . . . When you went out, I used to say to Cibot, 'Look! there is M. Pons going a-gallivanting,' on my word, I did, I was so sure that women ran after you. Heaven made you for love. . . . Why, my dear sir, I found that out the first day that you dined at home, and you were so touched with M. Schmucke's pleasure. And next day M. Schmucke kept saying to me, 'Montame Zipod, he haf tined hier,' with the tears in his eyes, till I cried along with him like a fool, as I am. And how sad he looked when you took to gadding abroad again and dining out! Poor man, you never saw any one so disconsolate! Ah! you are quite right to leave everything to him. Dear worthy man, why he is as good as a family to you, he is! Do not forget him; for if you do, God will not receive you into his Paradise, for those that have been ungrateful to their friends and left them no _rentes_ will not go to heaven."

In vain Pons tried to put in a word; La Cibot talked as the wind blows. Means of arresting steam-engines have been invented, but it would tax a mechanician's genius to discover any plan for stopping a portress' tongue.

"I know what you mean," continued she. "But it does not kill you, my dear gentleman, to make a will when you are out of health; and in your place I might not leave that poor dear alone, for fear that something might happen; he is like God Almighty's lamb, he knows nothing about nothing, and I should not like him to be at the mercy of those sharks of lawyers and a wretched pack of relations. Let us see now, has one of them come here to see you in twenty years? And would you leave your property to _them_? Do you know, they say that all these things here are worth something."

"Why, yes," said Pons.

"Remonencq, who deals in pictures, and knows that you are an amateur, says that he would be quite ready to pay you an annuity of thirty thousand francs so long as you live, to have the pictures afterwards. . . . There is a change! If I were you, I should take it. Why, I thought he said it for a joke when he told me that. You ought to let M. Schmucke know the value of all those things, for he is a man that could be cheated like a child. He has not the slightest idea of the value of these fine things that you have! He so little suspects it, that he would give them away for a morsel of bread if he did not keep them all his life for love of you, always supposing that he lives after you, for he will die of your death. But _I_ am here; I will take his part against anybody and everybody! . . . I and Cibot will defend him."

"Dear Mme. Cibot!" said Pons, "what would have become of me if it had not been for you and Schmucke?" He felt touched by this horrible prattle; the feeling in it seemed to be ingenuous, as it usually is in the speech of the people.

"Ah! we really are your only friends on earth, that is very true, that is. But two good hearts are worth all the families in the world. --Don't talk of families to me! A family, as the old actor said of the tongue, is the best and the worst of all things. . . . Where are those relations of yours now? Have you any? I have never seen them--"

"They have brought me to lie here," said Pons, with intense bitterness.

"So you have relations! . . ." cried La Cibot, springing up as if her easy-chair had been heated red-hot. "Oh, well, they are a nice lot, are your relations! What! these three weeks--for this is the twentieth day, to-day, that you have been ill and like to die--in these three weeks they have not come once to ask for news of you? That's a trifle too strong, that is! . . . Why, in your place, I would leave all I had to the Foundling Hospital sooner than give them one farthing!"

"Well, my dear Mme. Cibot, I meant to leave all that I had to a cousin once removed, the daughter of my first cousin, President Camusot, you know, who came here one morning nearly two months ago."

"Oh! a little stout man who sent his servants to beg your pardon--for 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_. _

Read next: Part 10

Read previous: Part 8

Table of content of Cousin Pons


GO TO TOP OF SCREEN

Post your review
Your review will be placed after the table of content of this book