Cousin Pons

by Honoré de Balzac

  ‘Lonk lif Matame Cipot!’ exclaimed Schmucke. ‘She has guesst vat I vantet.’

  The parasite in Pons gave vent to a few lamentations, but he yielded to his friend’s blandishments as does the carrier pigeon to the cooing of the nesting dove, and the two friends went out together. Schmucke was reluctant to leave his friend alone in the state to which the Camusot household, mistresses and servants, had reduced him. He knew Pons well, and was aware that as he sat in his conductor’s chair in the orchestra-pit, he might be assailed by such horribly gloomy reflections as might ruin the salutary effect of his return to the nest. So when he took Pons home about midnight, he walked arm-in-arm with him, and like a lover escorting a cherished mistress, he showed Pons the spots where the pavement ended or began again, and warned him whenever they came to a gutter. How he wished for a pavement as soft as cotton, for a blue sky, for Pons to be able to hear the strains of angelic music which he himself was hearing! He had won his way into the hitherto inaccessible reaches of this man’s heart!

  For a matter of three months, Pons dined with Schmucke every day. But to begin with he was obliged to deduct eighty francs a month from his outlay on bric-à-brac, for he had to disburse some thirty-five francs on wine as well as the forty-five francs his dinners cost him. Moreover, in spite of Schmucke’s attentiveness and his Teutonic jokes, the old artist pined for the choice dishes, the liqueurs, the excellent coffee, the small talk, the insincere civilities, the varied company and the scandal-mongering in the houses he had frequented. As a man goes downhill in life, he cannot break with the habits he has indulged in for thirty-six years. A cask of wine costing one hundred and thirty francs dispenses a liquid which, to a gourmet, lacks nobility; and so, whenever Pons raised his glass to his lips, a thousand poignant regrets welled up as he remembered the exquisite wines his hosts had been accustomed to serve. Therefore, when three months had gone by, the excruciating pain which had almost broken Pons’s sensitive heart was dulled, and henceforth he thought only of the agreeable side of social life. Not otherwise does an elderly gallant yearn for a discarded mistress, guilty though she may be of countless infidelities! Although he did his best to conceal the deep melancholy which consumed him, the old musician seemed visibly to be suffering from one of those unaccountable maladies whose origin is moral rather than physical.

  To explain this nostalgia due to a broken habit, it will suffice to relate one of those thousand trivialities which have the same effect as the meshes of a coat of mail: they press in on the soul like a network of steel. One of the keenest pleasures in Pons’s former mode of living (indeed one of the real joys of a man who dines at other people’s tables) had been the surprise, the gastronomic effect of an exceptional dish, a delicacy triumphantly served up by a hostess intent on imparting a really festive air to the dinner she is giving. Pons missed this gourmet’s delight. Madame Cibot was in the habit of proudly announcing the dishes she was about to serve, and Pons could never look forward to the occasional thrill of something unexpected, something which formerly, in our grandparents’ household, went by the name of a ‘covered dish’. This was a mystery to Schmucke. Pons was too polite to complain, but if there is a more lamentable thing than misunderstood genius, it is a stomach whose yearnings are left unsatisfied. Unrequited love – a theme overexploited in drama – is based on an inessential need; for, if we are spurned by one of God’s creatures, we can give our love to God, who can heap treasures upon us. But an unrequited stomach!… no suffering can be compared to this, for good living comes first! Pons yearned for certain kinds of crème, each one a poem; for certain white sauces, every one a masterpiece; for certain dishes of truffled poultry, all ravishing to taste; and above all for those Rhenish carp which are only found in Paris, and with such delicious seasoning. On certain days Pons exclaimed: ‘O Sophie!’ as he thought of the Comte Popinot’s cook. A stranger who heard him sighing like that would have imagined that the good man was thinking of an absent mistress, but he had something more rare in mind: a succulent carp, with a sauce which was clear in the sauce-boat but thick upon the tongue, a sauce which was worthy of the Montyon prize I And so the memory of the dinners he had eaten made the orchestra-conductor lose a lot of weight: he was stricken with gastric nostalgia.

  *

  At the beginning of the fourth month, about the end of January, 1845, the young flautist – called Wilhelm, like practically every German, and Schwab, to differentiate him from the other Wilhelms, though it did not differentiate him from the other Schwabs – thought fit to enlighten Schmucke about the conductor’s state of health, which was causing sore concern in the theatre. This happened on the day of a first performance in which the instruments played by the old German music-master were included.

  ‘The poor old fellow is on the decline,’ said Wilhelm Schwab, pointing to Pons as he stepped up to his stand with a mournful air. ‘There’s something wrong with him. He looks unhappy. The swing of his baton is getting weak.’

  ‘Von is always like zat at sixty,’ replied Schmucke. Like the mother in the Canongate Chronicles who gets her son shot through contriving to enjoy his company for another twenty-four hours, Schmucke was capable of sacrificing Pons for the pleasure of having him to dinner every day.

  ‘Everybody in the theatre is anxious, and, as our leading dancer, Héloïse Brisetout, has pointed out, he now makes scarcely any noise when he blows his nose.’

  The old musician’s long and cavernous nose, when he blew it, usually let out such a blare into the handkerchief that he appeared to be playing the horn. This blast was the cause of the most constant reproaches levelled against Pons by the Présidente.

  ‘I voult gif many sinks to pe aple to amusse him,’ said Schmucke. ‘He is loosink all interest in life.’

  ‘Indeed,’ said Wilhelm Schwab, ‘Monsieur Pons seems to be so much above the rest of us poor folk that I didn’t dare invite him to my wedding… I’m getting married…’

  ‘Marriet? How?’ asked Schmucke.

  ‘Oh, it’s all above board,’ replied Wilhelm, interpreting Schmucke’s odd question as a piece of banter whose import would never have occurred to that perfect Christian.

  ‘Come, gentlemen, take your places!’ cried Pons, eyeing his little army in the orchestra-pit after hearing the stage-manager’s bell.

  They played the overture to The Devil’s Betrothed, a fairy-play which was to run to two hundred performances. At the first interval, Wilhelm and Schmucke found themselves together in the deserted orchestra pit. The temperature in the theatre had risen to thirty degrees Réaumur.

  ‘You haf a story to tell me,’ said Schmucke to Wilhelm.

  ‘Yes… You see that young man in the proscenium?… Do you recognize him?’

  ‘Not in ze least.’

  ‘Ah, that’s because he’s wearing yellow gloves and radiating opulence. Anyway, he’s my friend Fritz Brunner from Frankfurt-am-Main.’

  ‘The man who uset to vatch ze playss from ze orchestra, near you?’

  ‘The very same. Isn’t it hard to believe in such a metamorphosis?’

  The hero of the promised story was one of those Teutons in whose faces are blended both the sombre raillery of Goethe’s Mephisto and the good nature to be found in Auguste Lafontaine, that novelist of blissful memory; cunning and guilelessness, commercial ruthlessness and the calculated nonchalance of a member of the Jockey Club; but above all, that disgust with life which put a pistol into the hands of Werther, vexed as he was with the German princelings more than with Charlotte. He was a genuinely typical German figure : much sharp practice and much simplicity; stupidity and courage; a knowledgeableness productive of boredom; experience of the world which the slightest piece of childishness could nullify; excessive indulgence in beer and tobacco; and yet, to give piquancy to all these antitheses, a demoniacal sparkle in his fine, tired blue eyes. Tricked out with all a banker’s elegance, Fritz Brunner offered to the gaze of the whole auditorium a head of Titian hair, bald on top, but with a few curly, auburn lo
cks on either side which riotous living and poverty had spared him so that he could keep the right to pay a barber on the day his ship came home. His face, once a fresh and comely countenance such as painters give to Jesus Christ, had taken on crude tones to which red whiskers and a tawny beard had imparted an almost sinister note. His conflict with the vexations of life had clouded the clear blue of his irises. In short, the constant self-prostitution which life in Paris entails had blurred his gaze and put shadows round those eyes into which, long ago, a mother had fondly looked so as to catch the divine response of his glance. This young-old man, precocious in worldly wisdom, was the handiwork of a stepmother.

  And here begins the curious story of one of Frankfurt-am-Main’s prodigal sons: the oddest and strangest event that ever came about in that sedate but central city.

  8. Prodigal sons from Frankfurt-am-Main don’t always end up with the husks of the swine

  HERR GIDEON BRUNNER, Fritz’s father, one of those Frankfurt-am-Main innkeepers who, in complicity with the bankers, cut legally authorized slits in tourists’ wallets – an honest Calvinist to boot – had married a converted Jewess, whose dowry helped him to lay the foundations of a fortune. This Jewess died, leaving her son Fritz, aged twelve, under the guardianship of his father and the supervision of a maternal uncle, a Leipzig furrier, the head of the firm of Virlaz and Company. Brunner senior was forced by this uncle, who was not so soft as his furs, to invest young Fritz’s inheritance – quite a respectable sum in standard marks – in the firm of Al-Sartchild, and to keep his fingers out of it. To recoup himself for such Jewish intransigence, the elder Brunner married again, alleging the impossibility of running a large hotel unaided by a woman’s eye and arm. He took to wife the daughter of another innkeeper – a pearl of a woman, so he thought. But he had had no experience of life with an only daughter, idolized by her father and mother. The second Frau Brunner was just what German girls can be when they are ill-natured and flighty. She squandered his money, and avenged the first Frau Brunner by giving her husband a home life which made him the unhappiest man known throughout the territory belonging to the free city of Frankfurt-am-Main – in which city, it is said, the millionaires are about to pass a municipal law constraining their wives to love them and them alone. Being German, she relished the different kinds of vinegar which in Germany are commonly called Rhenish wines. She loved fancy goods from Paris. She loved riding. She loved clothes. In fine, the only costly article she did not love was other women. She took a dislike to little Fritz, and would have driven this youthful product of Calvinism and the Mosaic Law mad if he had not had Frankfurt for a cradle and the Leipzig firm of Virlaz for guardian. But Uncle Virlaz, given over to his furs, only looked after the standard marks, and left the boy to his stepmother’s tender mercy.

  This hyena was so much the more furious with the cherubic son of the handsome first Frau Brunner because, though she puffed and strained like a railway-engine, she could produce no offspring. With diabolic cunning, this wicked woman launched young Fritz, at twenty-one, into a career of dissipation unusual among Germans. She hoped that English ponies, Rhenish vinegar and Gretchens à la Goethe would destroy the Jewess’s child and his fortune: for Uncle Virlaz had left his little Fritz a fine inheritance just when the latter attained his majority. Roulette in the spas and wine-bibbers (Wilhelm Schwab among them) demolished the Virlaz capital; but the young prodigal son lived on as a providential warning to the elder sons of Frankfurt-am-Main, where every family still holds him up as a bogey to frighten their children and keep them on the strait and narrow path, to confine them to their steel counters lined with standard marks. However, far from dying in the bloom of youth, Fritz Brunner had the satisfaction of seeing his stepmother buried in one of those delightful cemeteries which enable the Germans, under the pretence of honouring their dead, to abandon themselves to their unbridled passion for horticulture. Thus the second Frau Brunner predeceased her progenitors, leaving her spouse so much the worse off for the money she had drawn from his coffers and the hard labour she had imposed on him: at the age of seventy-seven this innkeeper, a man of herculean constitution, found himself as much diminished as if he had been undermined by a course of Borgia poisoning. The fact of not inheriting from his wife after bearing with her for ten years turned him into a second Heidelberg ruin, but one which was kept in repair by the bills his clients paid: just so is the Heidelberg Schloss itself kept in repair to fan the enthusiasm of those tourists who come in flocks to feast their eyes on those beautiful, well-maintained remains. To the Frankfurt people this predicament was as serious as bankruptcy, and they used to point to him with the remark:

  ‘That’s what comes of marrying a bad woman who leaves you nothing, and bringing your son up like a Frenchman!’

  In Italy and Germany, Frenchmen are the cause of every misfortune, a target for every bullet; yet they manage to rub along.

  The owner of the Grand Hôtel de Hollande was not content to vent his spleen only on his guests, whose bills were proportionate to his grievance. When his son had spent all his money, Gideon, regarding him as the indirect cause of all his woes, denied him food and drink, hearth and home, and even tobacco. And that, in a German parent, an innkeeper to boot, is as far as paternal malediction can go. The local authorities, taking no account of Gideon’s initial injustices to his son, and deeming him to be one of the most unfortunate citizens of Frankfurt-am-Main, took his side. They banished Fritz from the territory of that free city on a trumped-up charge. In Frankfurt justice is not wiser or more humane than elsewhere, even though this city is the seat of the German Diet. Rarely does a magistrate dealing with crime and bad luck work upstream to find out who had held the urn from which the first trickle of water poured out. Brunner consigned his son to oblivion – and his son’s friends followed suit.

  Reader, if only this story could have been played out in front of the prompter’s box to that gathering in whose midst journalists, social ‘lions’ and a handful of Paris ladies were speculating about the antecedents of this Teuton, this deeply tragic figure who had loomed up as the sole occupant of a stage-box, before a Parisian élite immersed in a first performance, it would have been a much finer production than the fairy-play The Devil’s Betrothed, even though it would have been the two-hundred-thousandth staging of that sublime parable first enacted in Mesopotamia three thousand years before Christ.

  Fritz went on foot to Strasbourg, but there he met with something the Prodigal Son did not find in the realms of Holy Scripture; and herein is revealed the special vocation of Alsace, so rich in generous hearts, for showing the German people how fine a combination of French wit and German stability can be. A few days previously, Wilhelm had come into his parents’ money and now owned a hundred thousand francs. He welcomed Fritz with open arms, open heart and open purse. To describe the moment when Fritz, dust-laden, penniless and in a well-nigh leprous condition, crossed the Rhine and made the acquaintance of a genuine twenty-franc piece in the hand of a real friend, would be like trying to write an ode – such an ode as only a Pindar, writing in Greek, could pour forth to revive the embers of friendship in the human race. Put the names of Fritz and Wilhelm beside those of Damon and Pythias, Castor and Pollux, Orestes and Pylades, Dubreuil and Pemjah, Schmucke and Pons and all those imagined names which we give to the two friends from Monomotapa (for La Fontaine, that man of genius, made shadowy, unreal abstractions of them). Add these two fresh names to all these examples, and you will be doing them justice, the more so because Wilhelm ate up his inheritance with Fritz’s aid, just as Fritz had drunk down his own with Wilhelm’s help; and of course they also puffed it away – in every known brand of tobacco.

  These two friends, strange to say, squandered all their money in the Strasbourg beer-houses, in the most stupid and vulgar manner, in the company of ballet dancers from the Strasbourg theatre and Alsatian girls whose little brooms were worn down to the handle. And every morning they said to each other: ‘We really must call a halt, settle down
, do something with what we have left!’

  ‘Oh well,’ said Fritz, ‘let’s enjoy ourselves today. But tomorrow… certainly tomorrow…’

  In the life of spendthrifts, today is an egregious fop, but tomorrow is an egregious poltroon, overawed by his predecessor’s courage. Today is the capitano of old-fashioned comedy; tomorrow is the Pierrot in our pantomimes. When they had come down to their last thousand-franc piece, the two friends took seats on the stage-coach and so came to Paris, where they lodged in the attic of the Hôtel du Rhin, in the rue du Mail, as sub-tenants of Graff, who had once been Gideon Brunner’s head-waiter. Fritz got a clerk’s job at six hundred francs a year with a firm of bankers, the Keller brothers – on a recommendation from Graff, the well-known tailor’s brother. The latter took Wilhelm on as bookkeeper. He provided the pair of prodigal sons with these two unremunerative posts in memory of his apprenticeship at the Grand Hôtel de Hollande. These two facts, a rich friend acknowledging a poor one, and a German hotel-keeper showing kindness to a couple of down-at-heel fellow-countrymen, will induce some people to believe that this story is fictitious. All facts look so much the more like fairy-stories because, in our time, fairy-stories take unconscionable pains to look like the truth.

  Fritz, a clerk with six hundred francs a year, and Wilhelm, a book-keeper with the same wages, found out how hard life can be in so meretricious a city as Paris. And so, in 1837, when they had been there for a year, Wilhelm, who had a pretty talent for flute-playing, joined the orchestra conducted by Pons in order to be able now and then to spread a little butter on his bread. As for Fritz, he was only able to eke out his pay by developing the financial acumen inborn in a scion of the Virlaz stock. Yet, for all his perseverance, and perhaps because of his talent, the exile from Frankfurt only rose to two thousand francs by 1843. But that heaven-sent stepmother, Indigence, did for these two young men what their own mothers had not been able to do: she taught them thrift, the ways of the world and life; she put them through that hard and stringent course of education which she dispenses in the form of whippings to great men, all of whom have had an unhappy childhood. Fritz and Wilhelm were common enough types, and they were not attentive to all the lessons she gave them. They did their best to fend off her blows; they found that her bosom was stony and her arms scraggy; and they failed to identify her with that beneficient Fairy Bountiful who yields to the blandishments of men of genius. None the less, they came to realize the full value of my lady Fortune, and undertook to clip her wings if ever again she flitted past their door.