Cousin Pons

by Honoré de Balzac

  *

  In every quarter of Paris there exists a practitioner whose name and habitation are known only to the lower classes, the shopkeepers and the concierges, who in consequence call him ‘our local doctor’. This doctor bleeds people and attends confinements. In medicine he is the equivalent of the ‘maid of all work’ sought for in the advertising periodicals. He has to be kind to the poor, his long experience as a practitioner gives him a fair amount of competence, and he is usually well liked. Dr Poulain, whom Madame Cibot brought to see Pons, and whom Schmucke recognized, listened inattentively to the old musician’s complaints: Pons had spent the whole night scratching his skin which had lost all sensitivity. The condition of his eyes, which had yellow rings round them, tallied with this symptom.

  ‘You have had some severe disappointment in the last two days,’ the doctor said to his patient.

  ‘I have, alas!’ said Pons.

  ‘You have the disease which this gentleman nearly had,’ he said, pointing to Schmucke. ‘Jaundice, in fact… But it’s nothing serious,’ he added, writing out a prescription.

  However soothing this last remark, the doctor had given his patient one of those Hippocratic glances in which the death-sentence, although covered with a veil of conventional commiseration, can always be divined by observant people desirous of knowing the truth. And so Madame Cibot peered inquisitively into the doctor’s eyes and did not misinterpret either the tone of his pronouncement or the deceptive expression on his face. She followed him out on to the landing.

  ‘So you think it’s not serious?’ she asked him.

  ‘My dear Madame Cibot, your gentleman is a doomed man, not on account of the bile which has invaded his bloodstream, but because he is so low in spirits. However, if he were well looked after, your patient might still pull through. But he would have to be got out of here and taken away for a change of scene.’

  ‘And where’s the money coming from?’ asked the concierge. ‘He’s only his job to live on, and his friend here makes do with the scraps of pension paid to him by some great ladies – for services rendered, so he says. Very charitable ladies! It’s a couple of children I’ve had on my hands these nine years.’

  ‘My life is spent watching people die, not of disease, but of that grave and incurable injury – shortage of money. In how many garrets am I not obliged, far from charging a fee for my visit, to leave a franc or two on the mantelpiece!’

  ‘Poor dear Monsieur Poulain!…’ said Madame Cibot. ‘Oh, if only you had a hundred thousand francs a year like some of the skinflints you see around – limbos of Satan that’s what they are!… you’d be like the good Lord Himself on earth!’

  The doctor who, through the esteem in which the concierge confraternity of the neighbourhood held him, had managed to build up a little practice which just kept body and soul together, raised his eyes to heaven, and thanked Madame Cibot by making a grimace worthy of Tartuffe.

  ‘So you say, my dear Monsieur Poulain, that if we looked after him well, our dear patient would get better?’

  ‘Yes, if his morale isn’t too low after the vexation he has suffered.’

  ‘The poor man! Who could have vexed him so? He’s a good man… and there’s no one on earth who comes up to him except his friend, Monsieur Schmucke… I’m going to find out what it’s all about. And the people who have done such damage to my gentleman are going to get the rough edge of my tongue.’

  ‘Listen to me, my dear Madame Cibot,’ said the doctor, who by now was stepping through the porte cochère. ‘One of the chief symptoms of your gentleman’s disease is to keep on getting impatient over trifles. And as he’s not likely to be able to afford a nurse, you’ll have to take care of him yourself. And so…’

  ‘Is it Monsieur Pons you are talking about?’ It was the scrap-iron merchant, pipe in mouth, who broke in with this question. And he got up from the corner-post beside the door to join in the conversation between the concierge and the doctor.

  ‘It is, Papa Rémonencq,’ Madame Cibot replied.

  ‘Well, he’s richer than Monsieur Monistrol and all the big owners of curiosity shops. I know enough in that line of business to tell you that the dear man has a gold-mine of treasures.’

  ‘Why, I thought you were taking me in the other day when I showed you all that old junk while my two gentlemen were out!’

  In Paris the very paving-stones have ears, and doorways have tongues, the window-bars have eyes: there is no greater danger than gossiping at front entrances. The tail-end of a conversation, like the postscript of a letter, may be as dangerously indiscreet both for those who let themselves be overheard as for those who overhear it. The truth of this observation, which our narrative is about to illustrate, is confirmed by the following anecdote.

  12. ‘Why, what a god is gold!’

  ONE day, one of the best hairdressers of Imperial times – even the men took great care of their hair in that period – was leaving a house in which he had just finished his work on a pretty woman’s hair, and in which all the well-to-do tenants were his clients. Among them there flourished a confirmed bachelor strictly guarded by a housekeeper who detested her master’s heirs. This man, not so young as he had been, had fallen seriously ill and had just been the subject of a consultation between some of the most highly rated doctors – they had not yet been christened ‘the princes of medical science’. These doctors happened to come out at the same time as the hairdresser, and, as they took leave of one another on the threshold of the main entrance, they were letting science and truth out of the bag and chatting together as doctors do once the farce of a consultation is over. ‘He’s as good as dead,’ said Dr Haudry. ‘Short of a miracle, he hasn’t a month to live,’ added Desplein. The hairdresser overheard these words. Like all hairdressers, he was on confidential terms with the servants. Under the promptings of monstrous cupidity, he immediately climbed up again to the not-so-young man’s flat, and promised the housekeeper-mistress a sizeable bonus if she could persuade her master to invest a large part of his possessions in a life-annuity. Among the possessions of this moribund bachelor – he was fifty-six and, thanks to his amorous jousts, looked three times that age – was a magnificent house in the rue de Richelieu, then worth two hundred and fifty thousand francs. The hair dresser coveted this house, and it was sold to him in return for a life-annuity of thirty thousand francs. This happened in 1806. The hairdresser, now retired and seventy years old, is still paying this annuity in 1846. As for the not-so-young man, now ninety-six, in his dotage, and married to his housekeeper, he may still hold out for quite a time. The hairdresser had handed thirty thousand francs to the housekeeper, and so this property has cost him over a million: true, the house is worth between eight and nine hundred thousand francs today.

  Following the hairdresser’s example, the Auvergnat had overheard Brunner’s final remarks to Pons on his doorstep, on the day of the meeting between Cécile and that paragon among fiancés, and the desire had taken him to get into Pons’s museum. Rémonencq was on good terms with the Cibots, and before long they had let him into the flat while the two friends were out. Dazzled at the sight of such wealth, Rémonencq saw the chance of ‘a nice bit of business’, and that means, in dealer’s slang, a fortune to pillage; he had been pondering over it for five or six days.

  ‘I wasn’t being funny,’ he replied to Madame Cibot and Dr Poulain. ‘We’ll have a chat about it. If this good gentleman wants an annuity of fifty thousand francs, I’ll slip you a hamper of good wine if you can…’

  ‘Do you mean that?’ the doctor asked Rémonencq. ‘An annuity of fifty thousand francs!… Why, if the old chap is as rich as that, with me to tend him and Madame Cibot to nurse him, he may get well again. Liver diseases only trouble people with very strong constitutions.’

  ‘Did I say fifty? Why, a gentleman standing there, on this very doorstep, offered him seven hundred thousand francs – no less – for the pictures alone!’

  Hearing Rémonencq make this declaration, M
adame Cibot threw a strange glance at the doctor, and a diabolic thought kindled a sinister gleam in her tawny eyes.

  ‘Come, don’t let’s listen to such nonsense,’ the doctor continued, though he was glad enough to know his client would be able to pay for the calls he intended to make.

  ‘But doctor,’ said Rémonencq, ‘the gentleman is in bed, and if our dear Madame Cibot would let me bring my expert along, I’m sure I could get the money in a couple of hours – seven hundred thousand francs, even…’

  ‘That’s enough, my friend,’ replied the doctor. ‘Now, Madame Cibot, take care never to cross the patient. You must be forbearance itself, for he’ll get irritated and tired at everything, even the attention you give him. You must expect him to find fault with everything you do.’

  ‘He’s going to be a handful,’ said the concierge.

  ‘Look now, get this clear,’ the doctor went on, in an authoritative tone of voice. ‘Those who look after Monsieur Pons will have his life in their hands. And I’m coming to see him every day, perhaps even twice a day. He will be the first on my round.’

  The doctor had suddenly passed from the profound indifference he normally felt for the lot of his impecunious patients to a most tender solicitude, now that he saw that the speculating Rémonencq was in earnest about the possibility of Pons possessing a fortune.

  ‘I’ll treat him like a king,’ replied Madame Cibot with feigned enthusiasm.

  The concierge waited until the doctor had turned into the rue Chariot before resuming her conversation with Rémonencq. The scrap-iron merchant was finishing his pipe with his back against the door-frame of his shop. This posture was not accidental, for he was anxious to intercept the concierge as she came back.

  This shop, which had once been a coffee-house, was still as the Auvergnat had found it when he took over the lease. You could still read ‘Café de Normandie’ on the signboard usually found above all shop-windows. The Auvergnat had persuaded some apprentice house-decorator to paint – free of charge, no doubt – the following legend on the blank space under ‘Café de Normandie’: ‘Rémonencq, dealer in scrap-metal and second-hand goods’. It was done with an artist’s brush and in black lettering. Naturally the mirrors, tables, stools, shelves and all the coffee-house furniture had been sold. For six hundred francs a year Rémonencq had rented the shop, a bare shell, the back premises, the kitchen and a single mezzanine bedroom, in which the head waiter had formerly slept, the flat attached to the Café de Normandie having been let separately. Of the original gaudy decoration favoured by the bar-keeper nothing remained except the plain green wallpaper in the shop and the strong iron bars and bolts on the shop-front.

  *

  Rémonencq had settled there in 1831, after the Revolution of July. He began by displaying cracked door-bells and dishes, old iron, old pairs of scales, and weights rendered obsolete by the new metric laws, which the State alone fails to observe, since it keeps in currency pennies and halfpennies dating from the reign of Louis XVI. After that the Auvergnat, a match for any five other Auvergnats, bought up sets of kitchen utensils, old frames, old copper, chipped china. His shop was filled and emptied so many times that by imperceptible degrees it made the same sort of progress as some of our contemporary music-halls have made: the goods it sold improved in quality. The scrap-iron merchant adopted the safe and prodigious system which some gamblers follow: he went on doubling his stakes. The effects of this system are obvious to onlookers thoughtful enough to study the arithmetical progression by which the stock in these intelligently managed shops increases in value. Tin-ware, old-fashioned lamps and potsherds give place to frames and bronzes. Then comes porcelain. Temporarily a mortuary for cheap daubs, the shop soon becomes a museum for works of art. One fine day the grimy window-panes are cleaned and the inside is redecorated. The Auvergnat gives up wearing corduroys and short jackets and puts on a frock-coat. He looks like a dragon guarding a treasure. He has masterpieces all round him. He has become an astute connoisseur. Customers’ stratagems no longer take him in; he knows all the tricks of the trade. There he is, the monster, like an old madam amidst the bevy of girls she offers for sale. The beauty and marvels of art mean nothing to this man, who is simultaneously subtle and vulgar, figuring out the profit he is going to make and browbeating ignoramuses. He has become quite an actor and feigns attachment to his canvases and his inlays; or he pleads poverty, lies about the prices he has paid and offers to show you his bills of sale. He changes shape like a Proteus. He is everything by turns… a cheap-jack, a bumpkin, a lumpkin, a Scrooge, a stooge and a clown.

  Before three years were over, Rémonencq had on view some fairly fine clocks, pieces of armour and old pictures. During his absences he left his shop in charge of a very fat, ugly woman, his sister, who at his summons had come on foot from her native province. The female Rémonencq, a kind of idiot with a blank stare, dressed like a Japanese idol, never came down a farthing from the prices her brother prescribed. She also took over the household duties and solved the apparently insoluble problem of thriving on the fogs of the Seine. Rémonencq and his sister lived on bread and herrings, potato-peelings and scraps of vegetables culled from the rubbish-bins which restaurant keepers leave beside their doorways. The pair of them together did not spend, with bread thrown in, more than twelve sous a day: and the Rémonencq woman earned this by her sewing and spinning.

  Rémonencq had first come to Paris to take on a street-porter’s job, and from 1825 to 1831 he pushed a handcart round for curio-dealers in the Boulevard Beaumarchais and for tin-smiths in the rue de Lappe. The history of his beginnings as a salesman is the normal one with curio-dealers. There are four breeds of men – Jews, Normans, Auvergnats and Savoyards – who have the same instincts and get on by the same methods. They spend nothing, make small gains, heap up interest and profits; such are the clauses in their charter. And this charter really exists.

  By this time Rémonencq, now on good terms with his erstwhile employer Monistrol, and doing business with the big dealers, went rummaging throughout Paris and its outlying parts, and that, as you know, comprises a radius of some forty leagues. After plying his trade for fourteen years, he had sixty thousand francs and a well-stocked shop to his credit. Having no overheads, and remaining in the rue de Normandie where he paid next to nothing in rent, he sold his goods to the dealers and was content with modest profits. He conducted all his affairs in the Auvergne patois which in France is called charabia. He had one favourite dream: he wanted to set up on one of the boulevards. He wished to become a rich curio-dealer so that one day he might bargain directly with collectors. And indeed, he had in him the makings of a redoubtable haggler. His face was the colour of dust: it was always coated with a compound of iron filings and sweat, for he did everything himself. That made his physiognomy all the more inscrutable, because the habit of physical toil had endowed him with the stoical impassivity of the old soldiers of 1789. In physical appearance Rémonencq was short and thin; his small eyes, closely set like those of a pig, with their chilly blue tint, revealed the concentrated avidity and sly cunning of a Jew, minus the mock humility which Jews combine with a deep contempt for Christians.

  There was a relationship of patron and protégé between the Cibots and the Rémonencqs. Madame Cibot was convinced of the latters’ extreme poverty, and sold them, at a fabulously cheap price, the left-overs from Schmucke’s and the Cibots’ own table. The Rémonencqs paid half a sou for a pound of dry crust and crumb, and even less for a bowl of potatoes. The wily Rémonencq was not supposed to be carrying on business on his own account. He was still working for Monistrol, and said he was ground down by rich dealers; and so the Cibots were sorry for the Rémonencqs. After eleven years Rémonencq had not yet outworn his corduroy coat, waistcoat and trousers; but these garments, to which Auvergnats are partial, were riddled with holes, which Cibot had patched up free of charge. As can be seen, all Jews do not come from the ghetto.

  ‘Are you making fun of me, Rémonencq?’ asked the conc
ierge. ‘Can Monsieur Pons really own such a fortune and live as he does? You wouldn’t find a hundred francs in his flat.’

  ‘Collectors are all like that,’ replied Rémonencq sententiously.

  ‘So you honestly think that my gentleman has seven hundred thousand francs’ worth of stuff?’

  ‘In pictures alone. There’s one of them… why, if he wanted fifty thousand francs for it I’d squeeze myself dry to get the money. You know those little frames in enamelled copper and red velvet with portraits inside them? Well, they’re enamels by Petitot, and that gentleman in the government, the one that used to make scent, he buys things like that for three thousand francs apiece!’

  ‘And there are thirty of them in the two cases!’ said the concierge, with bulging eyes.

  ‘There you are then, just think what a treasure he owns!’

  Madame Cibot’s head swam, and she spun right round. All at once the idea came to her of getting a mention in good Pons’s will, just like all the servant-mistresses whose life-annuities had excited so many people’s cupidity in the Marais district. She saw herself living in a country cottage in a village not too far from Paris, taking great pride in her poultry and her garden. She would end her days there, waited on like a queen – and her dear Cibot too! A good man, spurned and unappreciated like all good men, he richly deserved to be happy!

  The concierge’s sudden right-about-turn made Rémonencq feel sure of success. For a chineur – the word for a bargain-hunter, from the word chiner which means to go searching for bargains and make profitable deals with ignorant owners – the difficulty lies in getting a foot inside private houses. A chineur, or ‘knocker’, invents all the unimaginable tricks of Molière’s most resourceful valets, all the cajolery of his serving-maids, in order to gain admittance into a respectable person’s domicile: play-acting worthy of the stage, and always based on the rapacity of domestics. The latter, particularly in rural or provincial posts, in return for thirty francs’ worth of money or merchandise, will engineer deals from which a knocker makes a profit of one or two thousand francs. For instance, there is a certain service of old Sèvres, in soft paste, whose manner of acquisition, if the story were told, would reveal all the wiles which diplomats practised at the Congress of Munster, all the stratagems brought into play at Nymwegen, Utrecht, Ryswick and Vienna. In fact the knockers do better than that, for they are more frankly comic than the negotiators of treaties. Knockers have methods which dive as deep into the abysses of personal interest as those which ambassadors strain after so painfully in order to bring about the dissolution of the most solidly cemented alliances.