Оноре де Бальзак
Poor Relations
As for the material means employed to assist the seer – the objects arranged by the hands of the consultant that the accidents of his life may be revealed to him, – this is the least inexplicable part of the process. Everything in the material world is part of a series of causes and effects. Nothing happens without a cause, every cause is a part of a whole, and consequently the whole leaves its impression on the slightest accident. Rabelais, the greatest mind among moderns, resuming Pythagoras, Hippocrates, Aristophanes, and Dante, pronounced three centuries ago that "man is a microcosm" – a little world. Three hundred years later, the great seer Swedenborg declared that "the world was a man." The prophet and the precursor of incredulity meet thus in the greatest of all formulas.
Everything in human life is predestined, so it is also with the existence of the planet. The least event, the most futile phenomena, are all subordinate parts of a scheme. Great things, therefore, great designs, and great thoughts are of necessity reflected in the smallest actions, and that so faithfully, that should a conspirator shuffle and cut a pack of playing-cards, he will write the history of his plot for the eyes of the seer styled gypsy, fortune-teller, charlatan, or what not. If you once admit fate, which is to say, the chain of links of cause and effect, astrology has a locus standi, and becomes what it was of yore, a boundless science, requiring the same faculty of deduction by which Cuvier became so great, a faculty to be exercised spontaneously, however, and not merely in nights of study in the closet.
For seven centuries astrology and divination have exercised an influence not only (as at present) over the uneducated, but over the greatest minds, over kings and queens and wealthy people. Animal magnetism, one of the great sciences of antiquity, had its origin in occult philosophy; chemistry is the outcome of alchemy; phrenology and neurology are no less the fruit of similar studies. The first illustrious workers in these, to all appearance, untouched fields, made one mistake, the mistake of all inventors; that is to say, they erected an absolute system on a basis of isolated facts for which modern analysis as yet cannot account. The Catholic Church, the law of the land, and modern philosophy, in agreement for once, combined to prescribe, persecute, and ridicule the mysteries of the Cabala as well as the adepts; the result is a lamentable interregnum of a century in occult philosophy. But the uneducated classes, and not a few cultivated people (women especially), continue to pay a tribute to the mysterious power of those who can raise the veil of the future; they go to buy hope, strength, and courage of the fortune-teller; in other words, to ask of him all that religion alone can give. So the art is still practised in spite of a certain amount of risk. The eighteenth century encyclopaedists procured tolerance for the sorcerer; he is no longer amenable to a court of law, unless, indeed, he lends himself to fraudulent practices, and frightens his "clients" to extort money from them, in which case he may be prosecuted on a charge of obtaining money under false pretences. Unluckily, the exercise of the sublime art is only too often used as a method of obtaining money under false pretences, and for the following reasons.
The seer's wonderful gifts are usually bestowed upon those who are described by the epithets rough and uneducated. The rough and uneducated are the chosen vessels into which God pours the elixirs at which we marvel. From among the rough and uneducated, prophets arise – an Apostle Peter, or St. Peter the Hermit. Wherever mental power is imprisoned, and remains intact and entire for want of an outlet in conversation, in politics, in literature, in the imaginings of the scholar, in the efforts of the statesman, in the conceptions of the inventor, or the soldier's toils of war; the fire within is apt to flash out in gleams of marvelously vivid light, like the sparks hidden in an unpolished diamond. Let the occasion come, and the spirit within kindles and glows, finds wings to traverse space, and the god-like power of beholding all things. The 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 of the Cour des Aides, and its remote position had saved it at the time of the Revolution.
You may be quite sure that the old Jew had sound reasons for buying house property, contrary to the Hebrew law and custom. He had ended, as most of us end, with a hobby that bordered on a craze. He was as miserly as his friend, the late lamented Gobseck; but he had been caught by the snare of the eyes, by the beauty of the pictures in which he dealt. As his taste grew more and more fastidious, it became one of the passions which princes alone can indulge when they are wealthy and art-lovers. As the second King of Prussia found nothing that so kindled enthusiasm as the spectacle of a grenadier over six feet high, and gave extravagant sums for a new specimen to add to his living museum of a regiment, so the retired picture-dealer was roused to passion-pitch only by some canvas in perfect preservation, untouched since the master laid down the brush; and what was more, it must be a picture of the painter's best time. No great sales, therefore, took place but Elie Magus was there; every mart knew him; he traveled all over Europe. The ice-cold, money-worshiping soul in him kindled at the sight of a perfect work of art, precisely as a libertine, weary of fair women, is roused from apathy by the sight of a beautiful girl, and sets out afresh upon the quest of flawless loveliness. A Don Juan among fair works of art, a worshiper of the Ideal, Elie Magus had discovered joys that transcend the pleasure of a miser gloating over his gold – he lived in a seraglio of great paintings.
His masterpieces were housed as became the children of princes; the whole first floor of the great old mansion was given up to them. The rooms had been restored under Elie Magus' orders, and with what magnificence!
The windows were hung with the richest Venetian brocade; the most splendid carpets from the Savonnerie covered the parquetry flooring. The frames of the pictures, nearly a hundred in number, were magnificent specimens, regilded cunningly by Servais, the one gilder in Paris whom Elie Magus thought sufficiently painstaking; the old Jew himself had taught him to use the English leaf, which is infinitely superior to that produced by French gold-beaters. Servais is among gilders as Thouvenin among bookbinders – an artist among craftsmen, making his work a labor of love. Every window in that gallery was protected by iron-barred shutters. Elie Magus himself lived in a couple of attics on the floor above; the furniture was wretched, the rooms were full of rags, and the whole place smacked of the Ghetto; Elie Magus was finishing his days without any change in his life.
The whole of the ground floor was given up to the picture trade (for the Jew still dealt in works of art). Here he stored his canvases, here also packing-cases were stowed on their arrival from other countries; and still there was room for a vast studio, where Moret, most skilful of restorers of pictures, a craftsman whom the Musee ought to employ, was almost always at work for Magus. The rest of the rooms on the ground floor were given up to Magus' daughter, the child of his old age, a Jewess as beautiful as a Jewess can be when the Semitic type reappears in its purity and nobility in a daughter of Israel. Noemi was guarded by two servants, fanatical Jewesses, to say nothing of an advanced-guard, a Polish Jew, Abramko by name, once involved in a fabulous manner in political troubles, from which Elie Magus saved him as a business speculation. Abramko, porter of the silent, grim, deserted mansion, divided his office and his lodge with three remarkably ferocious animals – an English bull-dog, a Newfoundland dog, and another of the Pyrenean breed.
Behold the profound observations of human nature upon which Elie Magus based his feeling of security, for secure he felt; he left home without misgivings, slept with both ears shut, and feared no attempt upon his daughter (his chief treasure), his pictures, or his money. In the first place, Abramko's salary was increased every year by two hundred francs so long as his master should live; and Magus, moreover, was training Abramko as a money-lender in a small way. Abramko never admitted anybody until he had surveyed them through a formidable grated opening. He was a Hercules for strength, he worshiped Elie Magus, as Sancho Panza worshiped Don Quixote. All day long the dogs were shut up without food; at nightfall Abramko let them loose; and by a cunning device the old Jew kept each animal at his post in the courtyard or the garden by hanging a piece of meat just out of reach on the top of a pole. The animals guarded the house, and sheer hunger guarded the dogs. No odor that reached their nostrils could tempt them from the neighborhood of that piece of meat; they would not have left their places at the foot of the poles for the most engaging female of the canine species. If a stranger by any chance intruded, the dogs suspected him of ulterior designs upon their rations, which were only taken down in the morning by Abramko himself when he awoke. The advantages of this fiendish scheme are patent. The animals never barked, Magus' ingenuity had made savages of them; they were treacherous as Mohicans. And now for the result.
One night burglars, emboldened by the silence, decided too hastily that it would be easy enough to "clean out" the old Jew's strong box. One of their number told off to advance to the assault scrambled up the garden wall and prepared to descend. This the bull-dog allowed him to do. The animal, knowing perfectly well what was coming, waited for the burglar to reach the ground; but when that gentleman directed a kick at him, the bull-dog flew at the visitor's shins, and, making but one bite of it, snapped the ankle-bone clean in two. The thief had the courage to tear him away, and returned, walking upon the bare bone of the mutilated stump till he reached the rest of the gang, when he fell fainting, and they carried him off. The Police News, of course, did not fail to report this delightful night incident, but no one believed in it.
Magus at this time was seventy-five years old, and there was no reason why he should not live to a hundred. Rich man though he was, he lived like the Remonencqs. His necessary expenses, including the money he lavished on his daughter, did not exceed three thousand francs. No life could be more regular; the old man rose as soon as it was light, breakfasted on bread rubbed with a clove of garlic, and ate no more food until dinner-time. Dinner, a meal frugal enough for a convent, he took at home. All the forenoons he spent among his treasures, walking up and down the gallery where they hung in their glory. He would dust everything himself, furniture and pictures; he never wearied of admiring. Then he would go downstairs to his daughter, drink deep of a father's happiness, and start out upon his walks through Paris, to attend sales or visit exhibitions and the like.
If Elie Magus found a great work of art under the right conditions, the discovery put new life into the man; here was a bit of sharp practice, a bargain to make, a battle of Marengo to win. He would pile ruse on ruse to buy the new sultana as cheaply as possible. Magus had a map of Europe on which all great pictures were marked; his co-religionists in every city spied out business for him, and received a commission on the purchase. And then, what rewards for all his pains! The two lost Raphaels so earnestly sought after by Raphael lovers are both in his collection. Elie Magus owns the original portrait of Giorgione's Mistress, the woman for whom the painter died; the so-called originals are merely copies of the famous picture, which is worth five hundred thousand francs, according to its owner's estimation. This Jew possesses Titian's masterpiece, an Entombment painted for Charles V., sent by the great man to the great Emperor with a holograph letter, now fastened down upon the lower part of the canvas. And Magus has yet another Titian, the original sketch from which all the portraits of Philip II. were painted. His remaining ninety-seven pictures are all of the same rank and distinction. Wherefore Magus laughs at our national collection, raked by the sunlight which destroys the fairest paintings, pouring in through panes of glass that act as lenses. Picture galleries can only be lighted from above; Magus opens and closes his shutters himself; he is as careful of his pictures as of his daughter, his second idol. And well the old picture-fancier knows the laws of the lives of pictures. To hear him talk, a great picture has a life of its own; it is changeable, it takes its beauty from the color of the light. Magus talks of his paintings as Dutch fanciers used to talk of their tulips; he will come home on purpose to see some one picture in the hour of its glory, when the light is bright and clean.
And Magus himself was a living picture among the motionless figures on the wall – a little old man, dressed in a shabby overcoat, a silk waistcoat, renewed twice in a score of years, and a very dirty pair of trousers, with a bald head, a face full of deep hollows, a wrinkled, callous skin, a beard that had a trick of twitching its long white bristles, a menacing pointed chin, a toothless mouth, eyes bright as the eyes of his dogs in the yard, and a nose like an obelisk – there he stood in his gallery smiling at the beauty called into being by genius. A Jew surrounded by his millions will always be one of the finest spectacles which humanity can give. Robert Medal, our great actor, cannot rise to this height of poetry, sublime though he is.
Paris of all the cities of the world holds most of such men as Magus, strange beings with a strange religion in their heart of hearts. The London "eccentric" always finds that worship, like life, brings weariness and satiety in the end; the Parisian monomaniac lives cheerfully in concubinage with his crotchet to the last.
Often shall you meet in Paris some Pons, some Elie Magus, dressed badly enough, with his face turned from the rising sun (like the countenance of the perpetual secretary of the Academie), apparently heeding nothing, conscious of nothing, paying no attention to shop-windows nor to fair passers-by, walking at random, so to speak, with nothing in his pockets, and to all appearance an equally empty head. Do you ask to what Parisian tribe this manner of man belongs? He is a collector, a millionaire, one of the most impassioned souls upon earth; he and his like are capable of treading the miry ways that lead to the police-court if so they may gain possession of a cup, a picture, or some such rare unpublished piece as Elie Magus once picked up one memorable day in Germany.
This was the expert to whom Remonencq with much mystery conducted La Cibot. Remonencq always asked advice of Elie Magus when he met him in the streets; and more than once Magus had lent him money through Abramko, knowing Remonencq's honesty. The Chaussee des Minimes is close to the Rue de Normandie, and the two fellow-conspirators reached the house in ten minutes.
"You will see the richest dealer in curiosities, the greatest connoisseur in Paris," Remonencq had said. And Mme. Cibot, therefore, was struck dumb with amazement to be confronted with a little old man in a great-coat too shabby for Cibot to mend, standing watching a painter at work upon an old picture in the chilly room on the vast ground floor. The old man's eyes, full of cold feline malignance, were turned upon her, and La Cibot shivered.
"What do you want, Remonencq?" asked this person.
"It is a question of valuing some pictures; there is nobody but you in Paris who can tell a poor tinker-fellow like me how much he may give when he has not thousands to spend, like you."
"Where is it?"
"Here is the portress of the house where the gentleman lives; she does for him, and I have arranged with her – "
"Who is the owner?"
"M. Pons!" put in La Cibot.
"Don't know the name," said Magus, with an innocent air, bringing down his foot very gently upon his artist's toes.
Moret the painter, knowing the value of Pons' collection, had looked up suddenly at the name. It was a move too hazardous to try with any one but Remonencq and La Cibot, but the Jew had taken the woman's measure at sight, and his eye was as accurate as a jeweler's scales. It was impossible that either of the couple should know how often Magus and old Pons had matched their claws. And, in truth, both rabid amateurs were jealous of each other. The old Jew had never hoped for a sight of a seraglio so carefully guarded; it seemed to him that his head was swimming. Pons' collection was the one private collection in Paris which could vie with his own. Pons' idea had occurred to Magus twenty years later; but as a dealer-amateur the door of Pons' museum had been closed to him, as for Dusommerard. Pons and Magus had at heart the same jealousy. Neither of them cared about the kind of celebrity dear to the ordinary collector. And now for Elie Magus came his chance to see the poor musician's treasures! An amateur of beauty hiding in a boudoir or a stolen glance at a mistress concealed from him by his friend might feel as Elie Magus felt at that moment.
La Cibot was impressed by Remonencq's respect for this singular person; real power, moreover, even when it cannot be explained, is always felt; the portress was supple and obedient, she dropped the autocratic tone which she was wont to use in her lodge and with the tenants, accepted Magus' conditions, and agreed to admit him into Pons' museum that very day.
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.