Cousin Pons

by Honoré de Balzac

  *

  ‘Madame Cibot,’ asked the unhappy Pons on her return, ‘have they gone?’

  ‘Have who gone?’ she asked.

  ‘Those men.’

  ‘What men?… So you think you’ve been seeing men! No: you’ve just been having a bad attack of fever, so bad that if I hadn’t been there you’d have thrown yourself out of the window, and you’re still babbling about men… How long are you going on like that?…’

  ‘What! There wasn’t a man here who pretended he’d been sent by my family? Over there… a minute ago?’

  ‘Off you go again, so pig-headed! My goodness, do you know where you ought to be put? In a lunatic asylum, that’s where!… You and your men!’

  ‘Elias Magus and Rémonencq were in here!’

  ‘Oh, Rémonencq. Yes, you may have seen him. He came in to tell me about my poor Cibot – he’s so ill I’m leaving you to stew in your own juice. Cibot comes first, that’s for sure! When my man’s ill nobody else matters to me. Try and keep quiet and get a couple of hours’ sleep. I’ve sent for Monsieur Poulain and I’ll bring him up here… Take your medicine and be sensible.’

  ‘You say there was nobody in my room – over there – when I woke up just now?’

  ‘Nobody! You must have seen Monsieur Rémonencq in your looking-glass.’

  ‘You are right, Madame Cibot,’ said the sick man, suddenly turning as docile as a sheep.

  ‘That’s the style! Now you’re getting reasonable… Good-bye, my cherub. Keep quiet and I’ll be back in a jiffy.’

  As soon as Pons heard the door of the flat shutting, he mustered his remaining strength and dragged himself out of bed, muttering to himself:

  ‘They’re cheating me, robbing me! Schmucke’s such a child he’d let anybody bamboozle him!…’

  Eager to clear up the mystery – the terrifying scene he had just witnessed seemed too real to have been a hallucination – the sick man managed to reach his bedroom door. Painfully, he pushed it open and advanced into the salon; there the sight of his beloved pictures, statues, Florentine bronzes and porcelains put new life into him. In his dressing-gown, with his legs bare and his head in a whirl, the collector managed to walk along the two alleys marked out by the row of credence-tables and commodes which divided the salon into two parts. His expert eye ran over the exhibits: the count was complete, and his collection appeared to be intact. Then, as he was going back into his bedroom, he noticed that a Greuze portrait had been substituted for Sebastiano del Piombo’s Knight of Malta. Suspicion flashed across his mind as lightning streaks across a stormy sky. He looked along the wall on which his eight best pictures had hung and found that others had been put in their place. Suddenly a veil of darkness blacked out the poor man’s vision; he fainted and fell to the floor; his swoon was so complete that he remained there two hours. When Schmucke woke up and came out of his room to visit his friend, he discovered him lying there. With infinite pains, he lifted the unconscious man and put him back on his bed; but when he spoke to this semi-corpse all the reply he received was an icy stare, meaningless words and stammerings. Instead of losing his head, the poor German showed the highest heroism of which friendship is capable. Under the stimulus of despair, the childlike man had the sort of inspiration a mother or a mistress might have: he succeeded in finding some towels, heated them, wrapped some of them round Pons’s hands and placed the rest on the hollow part of his stomach. Then he laid his hands on his friend’s cold, damp forehead and summoned life back to it with an inflexibility of will-power worthy of Apollonius of Tyana. He pressed his lips on Pons’s eyes with the fervour of a Madonna kissing the dead Christ in some Pietà carved by a great Italian sculptor in bas-relief. These devoted efforts, this influx of animation from one being to another, this discharge of a mother’s or a lover’s function, was crowned with complete success. After half an hour Pons was warm again and looked human once more; his eyes were no longer glazed and the heat of the towels had restored the power of movement to his limbs. Schmucke gave Pons a drink of melissa cordial mixed with wine; the life-blood coursed once more through his veins, and the light of intelligence shone forth once more on a brow from which all sentience had been banished. Pons then realized to what saintly devotion, to what power of friendship he owed his resuscitation.

  ‘But for you I should have died!’ he said as he felt his friend’s tears dropping gently on to his face: Schmucke was laughing and weeping at one and the same time. When he heard these words which he had been awaiting in a delirium of hope – as potent as the delirium of despair – poor Schmucke, utterly exhausted, collapsed like a burst balloon. It was his turn to totter: he fell into an armchair, folded his hands in prayer and gave thanks to God. A miracle had just happened. He gave no credit for this to the efficacy of his own action, in itself a prayer, but only to the divine power he had invoked. And yet this miracle was due to natural causes. Doctors have often seen similar things happen. A sick person on whom affection is lavished, cared for by people who want him to live, can be saved, caeteris paribus, where a patient tended by hirelings would succumb. Doctors will not see that this is the result of involuntary magnetism: they attribute it to intelligent surveillance and strict adherence to their prescriptions. But many mothers well know what virtue there is in this fervent projection of unfaltering will-power.

  ‘My wonderful friend!…’

  ‘Zere iss no neet to talk: my heart vill reat your soughts. Tchust rest,’ said the now smiling musician.

  ‘Dear friend! Noble creature! Child of God whose life is with God! The one being who has ever loved me!…’ said Pons. His speech was still spasmodic, but there were unwonted inflexions in his voice. He put his whole soul, which had so nearly fled, into these words, and they were almost as delightful to Schmucke as the joy of a woman’s love.

  ‘You must lif! You must lif! Unt I shall pe as shtronk as a lion! I shall vork for poss off us!’

  ‘Listen, good faithful, adorable friend! Let me speak. Time presses, for I’m as good as dead. I shall not get over these continual attacks.’

  Schmucke wept like a child.

  ‘Listen now and weep afterwards,’ said Pons. ‘As a Christian you must resign yourself to it. But I have been robbed – by La Cibot. Before I leave you I must enlighten you about the ways of the world – you know nothing about them. I have been robbed of eight pictures which were worth enormous sums.’

  ‘Forgif me, it vass I who solt zem.’

  ‘You?’

  ‘Yes,’ the poor German confessed. ‘Ve vere serfet viz a writ.’

  ‘A writ?… By whom?’

  ‘Vait!…’ Schmucke went to find the document the writ-server had left and brought it to him.

  Pons gave a careful reading to this piece of legal jargon. When he had finished he dropped it and was silent for a while. This man, so closely observant of human handicraft, so negligent of human behaviour, was now able to disentangle every thread of the plot hatched by La Cibot. His keen artistic perceptions, the intelligence he had shown as a pupil of the Rome Academy, all his youthful awareness came back to him for a few instants.

  ‘My good Schmucke, I want you to obey my orders as a soldier does. Listen! Go down to the lodge and tell that abominable woman that I wish to see the person sent to me by my cousin the Président. Tell her that if he refuses to come I intend to bequeath my collection to the Louvre. Tell her I want to make my will.’

  Schmucke obeyed these instructions, but La Cibot responded to his opening words with a smile.

  ‘My good Monsieur Schmucke, our patient had a bad attack of fever and thought he saw people in his room. I take my oath as an honest woman that nobody ever came from our dear patient’s family.’

  Schmucke returned with this reply and repeated it verbatim to Pons.

  ‘She’s more clever, more cunning, more crafty, more Machiavellian than I thought,’ said Pons with a smile. ‘She’s a downright liar! Just imagine, this morning she brought a Jew here, one Elias Magus, with Rémone
ncq and a third person I don’t know, one who’s more horrible than the other two put together. She counted on my staying asleep so that they could value my collection. I happened to wake up and I saw the three of them testing the weight of my snuff-boxes. Finally the man I didn’t know said that the Camusots had sent him – I had a few words with him… That infamous woman now swears I was dreaming… My dear Schmucke, I wasn’t dreaming!… I certainly heard that man speaking to me. The two dealers were alarmed and made themselves scarce… I thought that La Cibot would go back on her words… but my ruse was unsuccessful. Well, I’m going to lay another trap and the wicked hag will fall into it… My poor dear friend, you take La Cibot for an angel, and for a month she’s been plaguing me to death for her own greedy purposes. I tried not to believe that a woman who has been such a faithful servant for years could be so wicked, and this hesitation was my ruin… How much were you given for my eight pictures?’

  ‘Fife sousant francs.’

  ‘God in Heaven! They were worth twenty times that!’ cried Pons. ‘They were the gems of my collection. I haven’t time to start an action. In any case, you would get involved as the dupe of these rascals… A law-suit would kill you! You don’t know what the Law Courts are like. They are the sewers into which all moral infamy is poured. A good soul like you would be so horrified at such turpitude you would give up the struggle. Anyway, you’ll be rich enough. Those pictures cost me four thousand francs, and I’ve had them for thirty-seven years… But they’ve been surprisingly smart in the way they’ve robbed us. I’m on the brink of the grave, and from now on you will be my sole concern – you, the best man alive. Now I don’t want you to be fleeced, for all that I own is yours. And that’s why you must distrust everybody – and distrust has never been your strong point. No doubt God looks after you; but He might lose sight of you a moment, and they will swoop down on you like buccaneers on a cargo-ship. La Cibot is a monster. She’s killing me, and you still think she’s an angel! I want you to know her for what she is. Go and ask her to tell you of a notary who will draw up my will… I’ll catch her with her hands in the till.’

  Schmucke was listening to Pons as if the Book of Revelations were being read out to him. That there could exist so perverse a creature as La Cibot must be if Pons were right, seemed to him like denying the existence of Providence.

  ‘My poor frient Pons iss so ill,’ said the German, going down to the lodge and addressing Madame Cibot again, ‘zat he vishes to make hiss vill. Pleass sent for ze notary…’

  These words were spoken in the hearing of several other persons, for Cibot was in an almost desperate condition. Rémonencq, his sister, two concierges who had hurried along from neighbouring buildings, three housemaids from other flats in the house and the tenant of the first-floor front were standing about at the street door.

  ‘You can go and get a notary for yourself,’ cried La Cibot with tears in her eyes. ‘You can get anybody you like to have your will drawn up… With my poor Cibot at death’s door I’m not going to leave him. I’d give all the Ponses in the world to save Cibot… A man who’s never given me a minute’s vexation in thirty years of wedded life!’

  She went in again, and Schmucke stood there completely taken aback.

  ‘Sir,’ said the first-floor tenant, ‘is Monsieur Pons very ill then?’

  His name was Jolivard, and he was a registry clerk in the Law Courts.

  ‘He haf nearly tiet tschust now,’ replied Schmucke in tones of great grief.

  ‘There’s a notary near here in the rue Saint-Louis: Monsieur Trognon,’ observed Monsieur Jolivard. ‘He’s a district notary.’

  ‘Would you like me to go and fetch him?’ asked Rémonencq.

  ‘I voult pe fery glat,’ answered Schmucke. ‘If Matame Cipot vill not vatch ofer my frient, I voult not leaf him in ze state he iss in.’

  ‘Madame Cibot says he’s going off his head,’ said Jolivard.

  ‘Off hiss heat?’ Schmucke cried out in dismay. ‘Nefer hass he been so lifely of mint, ant zet iss vat makes me vorry about his healss.’

  All the people assembled together were listening to this conversation with a very natural curiosity which engraved it on their memories. Schmucke was unacquainted with Fraisier; nor was he in a state to take any notice of that satanic head, those glittering eyes. By dint of two words whispered in La Cibot’s ear, Fraisier had been the prime mover in her bare-faced display of histrionics. It was probably beyond her powers to stage such a scene, but she had played her part with consummate skill. To make it appear that the dying man was out of his mind was one of the cornerstones in the edifice the man of law was constructing. The incident of that morning had been useful to Fraisier’s purpose. Without his prompting perhaps, La Cibot, so great was her mental disturbance, would have contradicted herself at the moment when Schmucke, that poor innocent, had come down to lay the trap for her by asking her to recall the emissary of the Camusot family.

  Rémonencq, witnessing Dr Poulain’s arrival, asked nothing better than to make himself scarce. And he had good reason for this.

  24. A testator’s cunning

  FOR over a week Rémonencq had been usurping the role of Providence, an activity singularly displeasing to the Law, which claims the sole right to act in its stead. Rémonencq wanted at all costs to rid himself of the only obstacle standing between him and happiness; and happiness, for him, meant marriage with the alluring concierge and the tripling of his capital. One day, as he watched the little tailor drinking some herbal tea, the idea had come to him of converting his indisposition into a mortal illness, and his experience as a vendor of scrap-metal had suggested a method for this.

  One morning, while smoking his pipe, leaning against the door-frame of his shop, and dreaming of a fine emporium in the Boulevard de la Madeleine, with Madame Cibot presiding over it in gorgeous apparel, his eye fell on a heavily oxidized round plate of copper. The thrifty notion of cleaning this plate in Cibot’s infusion suddenly occurred to him. He tied this plate, as round as a five-franc piece, to a small length of string; and while La Cibot was busy with ‘her gentlemen’, he came every day to inquire after his friend the tailor. During this few minute’s visit, he let the copper disc soak in the liquid, pulling it out by the string as he went away. This slight addition of copper, coated with the deposit commonly known as verdigris, secretly introduced a noxious ingredient into the beneficial decoction, but in such homoeopathic proportions as to cause incalculable harm. This criminal homoeopathy produced the following results: after three days, poor Cibot’s hair started falling out, his teeth trembled in their sockets, and the whole balance of his constitution was upset by these imperceptible doses of poison. Dr Poulain racked his brains when he noticed the effect of this decoction, for he was knowledgeable enough to realize that some destructive agent was at work. He surreptitiously took away a sample of the infusion and analysed it himself; but he found nothing in it, for on that particular day, by good luck, frightened at what he was doing, Rémonencq had not used the baneful disc. Dr Poulain settled the problem for himself and medical science by supposing that the tailor’s blood was in process of decomposition, and that he was suffering from the effects of a sedentary life in a damp lodge, squatting on a table in front of a latticed window, taking no exercise and perpetually inhaling the emanations from a stinking gutter. For the rue de Normandie is one of those ancient streets with a runnel down the middle; the municipal authorities have installed no street fountains in it, and a noisome gutter sluggishly carries off all the household slops which filter through the cobbles and produce the kind of sludge peculiar to Paris.

  As for La Cibot, she had been used to bustling about while her hard-working husband sat like a fakir in front of his window. His knees had become stiff, the blood only circulated in the upper portion of his body; his crooked spindly legs scarcely served as limbs any more. And so Cibot’s extremely coppery complexion had for a long time seemed chronically unhealthy. To the doctor, the wife’s robust health and the husb
and’s sickliness appeared to be a natural result of their different occupations.

  ‘What’s wrong with my poor Cibot?’ the concierge had asked Poulain.

  ‘My dear Madame Cibot,’ the doctor had replied. ‘He is dying of a disease common among porters… His general anaemia betokens an incurable poverty of the bloodstream.’

  In the end Dr Poulain’s early suspicions faded from his mind: such a crime would be unmotivated, bring no gain, further no one’s interests. Who could want to poison Cibot? Not his wife, for Poulain had seen her tasting Cibot’s decoction as she sugared it. A fairly large number of crimes escape the vengeance of society – in general, those which, like this one, afford no startling proof of any form of violence – bloodshed, strangulation, bruises, in short any clumsy method of disposal; but above all when the murder has no apparent incentive and has been committed by a member of the lower orders. A crime is always given away by its antecedents : hatred and a visible cupidity of which everyone around is aware. In the circumstances in which the little tailor, Rémonencq and La Cibot lived, no one except the doctor had any interest in inquiring into the cause of death. This sickly, sallow porter, having nothing to leave and adored by his wife, had no enemies. The dealer’s motives and the passion which inflamed him were hidden from the light of day, like La Cibot’s ill-gotten fortune. The doctor had a thorough knowledge of La Cibot and her feelings; he believed she was capable of tormenting Pons, but he knew she had no motive for committing murder, nor the initiative to carry it out. Moreover, she sipped a teaspoonful of the beverage every time the doctor came and whenever she gave a cup of it to her husband. Enlightenment could only have come through Poulain, but he put it down to some chance disease, one of those astonishing exceptions which make the practice of medicine so hazardous. And in fact, the little tailor, by reason of his stunted existence, was unfortunately in such general bad health that this imperceptible addition of copper oxide was destined to kill him. The attitude of neighbouring gossips was also such as to ward off suspicion from Rémonencq by the explanation they gave of his sudden decline.