Cousin Pons

by Honoré de Balzac

  A few minutes later, Dr Poulain was at Pons’s pillow observing the stages of his agony. It was in vain that Schmucke begged Pons to undergo the operation. The old musician only replied to the despairing German’s supplications by shakes of the head alternating with outbursts of petulance. In the end the dying man summoned up some strength, directed a heart-rending glance at Schmucke and exclaimed:

  ‘For Heaven’s sake let me die in peace!’

  Schmucke himself was ready to die of grief; but he took Pons’s hand, gently kissed it and held it in both of his, in yet one more effort to instil his own vitality into him… At that moment Dr Poulain heard a ring and went and opened the door to the Abbé Duplanty.

  ‘Our poor patient,’ he said, ‘will soon be at grips with death; all will be over in a few hours. No doubt you will send a priest to watch over him tonight. But it is time to bring Madame Cantinet and a charwoman to wait on Monsieur Schmucke. He’s incapable of giving a thought to anything. I fear for his sanity, and there are valuables here which ought to be guarded by completely honest persons.’

  The good and worthy priest, incapable of mistrust or malice, was struck by the truth of these observations. Moreover he believed in the integrity of the local doctor. So he beckoned Schmucke to come and talk to him as he stood on the threshold of the death-chamber. Schmucke could not bring himself to let go Pons’s hand which was convulsively clutching at his own – as if he were rolling down a precipice and clinging to anything that could arrest his fall. But, as is well known, dying people are subject to hallucinations which impel them to grasp at everything, like householders anxious to carry off their most precious possessions when their home is on fire. Pons released Schmucke’s hand, clasped his blankets, and pulled them around him in a desperate effort which was suggestive of impetuous avarice.

  ‘What will become of you, alone here with your dead friend?’ the good priest asked of the German, who had now joined him. ‘You no longer have Madame Cibot!’

  ‘She iss a monster; she hass kilt Pons!’

  ‘But you must have someone with you,’ said the doctor. ‘A watch must be kept over the body tonight.’

  ‘I vill keep vatch mine self. I vill pray to Gott,’ said the guileless German.

  ‘But you must eat!… Who’s going to do your cooking now?’

  ‘I haf too much grief to vant foot,’ was his simple reply.

  ‘But look,’ said Poulain, ‘you will have to go with witnesses to notify the death. The body has to be undressed, wrapped and sewn in a shroud. The funeral arrangements have to be made with the undertakers. The nurse who sits by the body and the priest keeping vigil will have to be fed: can you do all that by yourself?… People can’t be allowed to die like dogs in Paris, the capital of the civilized world.’

  Schmucke’s eyes were wide open with consternation, and for a little while he was beside himself.

  ‘Put Pons vill not tie!… I vill safe him!’

  ‘You can’t go on much longer without getting a bit of sleep, and who will take your place then? There must be someone to look after Monsieur Pons, to give him his draughts and doses.’

  ‘Ah, zet iss true,’ said the German.

  ‘Well,’ said the Abbé, ‘I had thought of bringing in Madame Cantinet, a good honest woman.’

  The enumeration of the official duties he would have to perform for his friend if he died so dumbfounded Schmucke that he was wishing he could die when Pons died.

  ‘He’s a child!’ said the doctor to the priest.

  ‘A tchilt,’ Schmucke echoed mechanically.

  ‘Come now,’ said the Abbé, ‘I’ll speak to Madame Cantinet and fetch her here.’

  ‘There’s no need to take that trouble,’ said the doctor. ‘She’s a neighbour of mine, and I’m going back home.’

  Death is like an invisible assassin with whom the dying person has to contend. The death-throes are so many blows levelled against him; he fights back and tries to return them. Pons had come to this final stage and was giving forth groans and cries. Immediately Schmucke, the Abbé Duplanty and Poulain rushed to the dying man’s bed. Suddenly, now that the life in him had been dealt the final stroke which severs body and soul, Pons lapsed for a few moments into the perfect quietude which follows the death-agony. He came to himself and, with the serenity of death on his features, looked around him almost smilingly.

  ‘Ah, doctor, how I have suffered! But you were right. I feel better… Thank you, my kind Abbé. I was wondering where Schmucke was!…’

  ‘Schmucke hasn’t eaten since yesterday morning, and it is four o’clock. There is no longer anyone to tend you, and it would be dangerous to bring Madame Cibot back…’

  ‘She’s capable of anything!’ said Pons, manifesting all the horror that name aroused in him. ‘It’s true, Schmucke needs someone absolutely honest.’

  ‘The Abbé Duplanty and I,’ said Poulain, ‘have been thinking about the two of you…’

  ‘You are very kind,’ said Pons. ‘It hadn’t occurred to me.’

  ‘… and the Abbé suggests Madame Cantinet.’

  ‘Ah, the chair-attendant in church!’ cried Pons. ‘Yes, an excellent creature!’

  ‘She dislikes Madame Cibot,’ continued the doctor, ‘and she’ll take good care of Monsieur Schmucke…’

  ‘Send her to me, my good Abbé, both her and her husband, and I shall be easy in mind. There will be no more stealing…’

  Schmucke had taken Pons’s hand again and was holding it joyfully, believing that Pons was on the way to recovery.

  ‘Let us be off, Monsieur l’Abbé,’ said the doctor. ‘I’ll send Madame Cantinet along without delay. I am used to these situations. But she probably won’t find Monsieur Pons alive when she gets here.’

  27. Death’s gloomy portals

  WHILE the Abbé Duplanty was prevailing upon Pons to accept Madame Cantinet as a nurse, Fraisier had summoned her and had set to work on her, using all the corruptive persuasiveness, all the artful and well-nigh irresistible sophistry at his command. And so Madame Cantinet, a sallow, dried-up woman with prominent teeth and cold lips, her wits dulled by misfortune like so many working-class wives, being in such straits that she was glad to make a little extra money at daily work, readily agreed that Madame Sauvage should go with her as domestic help. Fraisier’s servant had already received her marching-orders. She had promised to spin a web of steel round the two musicians and to watch them as a spider watches a fly caught in its web. The reward for her labours was to be a licence for a tobacconist’s shop. Fraisier was thus killing two birds with one stone – getting rid of his alleged foster-mother and planting a spy, a police-officer as it were, in the Pons household as an adjunct to Madame Cantinet. Since a maid’s bedroom and a small kitchen formed part of the two friends’ flat, La Sauvage could sleep on a trestle-bed and do the cooking for Schmucke.

  Just as the two women turned up, under Dr Poulain’s escort, Pons had breathed his last without Schmucke being aware of it. The latter was still holding his friend’s hand, which was becoming colder and colder. He motioned to Madame Cantinet to keep quiet. But Madame Sauvage’s soldierly mien took him so much by surprise that he gave a start of apprehension – such as people usually gave on seeing that amazon for the first time.

  ‘This lady,’ whispered Madame Cantinet, ‘is recommended by the Abbé Duplanty. She’s been a cook in a bishop’s palace and is honesty itself. She’ll do the cooking.’

  ‘Oh, you can talk out loud!’ cried the stalwart – and also asthmatic – Madame Sauvage. ‘The poor gentleman is dead… He’s just passed away.’

  Schmucke gave a piercing cry, felt Pons’s hand which was already growing stiff, and remained there, staring hard into Pons’s eyes. The expression he saw in them would have driven him mad but for Madame Sauvage. She was no doubt used to this sort of scene; she came over to the bed with a looking-glass, held it to Pons’s mouth, and since it remained unclouded, abruptly pulled Schmucke’s hand away from the dead man’s hand.r />
  ‘Let go, Monsieur, or you won’t get your hand free. You’ve no idea how hard the bones set. Dead people soon stiffen up. If a dead man isn’t got ready while he’s still warm you have to break his limbs later on.’

  And so it was this terrible woman who closed the eyes of the poor dead musician. Then, using her ten years’ experience as a nurse, she undressed Pons, stretched him out, laid his arms along his sides, and pulled the blanket up to his head, for all the world like a shop-assistant wrapping up a parcel.

  ‘We need a winding-sheet to put him in. Where can we get one?’ she asked Schmucke, who had watched this operation in terror. After witnessing the profound respect with which religious ceremonial ministers to a child of God to whom heavenly bliss is promised, the grief he felt at seeing his friend packed up like a bale of goods was enough to deprive him of all capacity to think.

  ‘Take vat you vant,’ he replied like an automaton.

  Poor innocent creature, he had seen a man die for the first time in his life, and this man was Pons, his only friend, the only person who had understood him and loved him.

  ‘I’ll ask Madame Cibot where the sheets are,’ said La Sauvage.

  ‘A camp-bed will be needed for this lady to sleep on,’ said Madame Cantinet. Schmucke gave a nod and burst into tears. Madame Cantinet left the unhappy man to himself; but an hour later she returned and said:

  ‘Monsieur, can you give us some money for what we have to buy?’

  Schmucke turned to Madame Cantinet with a look which would have melted a heart full of the fiercest hate. He pointed to the white, drawn, angular face of the dead man in justification.

  ‘Take anyssink zet you vant, unt leaf me to my tears unt prayers,’ he said, sinking to his knees.

  Madame Sauvage had gone to tell Fraisier that Pons was dead. He hurriedly took a cab to the Présidente’s house, to ask her for power to act on behalf of the natural heirs.

  ‘Monsieur,’ said Madame Cantinet to Schmucke, an hour after putting her previous question. ‘I went to Madame Cibot, since she knows all about your household concerns, to ask her where everything was. But she has just lost Monsieur Cibot, and she nearly drove me crazy with her wild talk… Monsieur Schmucke, will you listen to what I am saying!…’

  Schmucke looked at the woman, who had no idea of the cruelty she was inflicting, for working-class people are accustomed to passive acceptance of the greatest spiritual suffering.

  ‘Monsieur, we must have linen for a winding-sheet. We must have money for a camp-bed for this lady to sleep on. We must have pots and pans, dishes, plates, glasses, for a priest will be coming to keep watch and this lady can’t find a thing in the kitchen.’

  ‘That’s not all, Monsieur,’ La Sauvage added, ‘I need wood and coal to get dinner ready, and I can’t find anything! I’m not surprised anyhow, seeing that Madame Cibot kept you supplied with everything…’

  ‘‘Look, my dear,’ said Madame Cantinet, pointing to Schmucke, who was lying at the dead man’s feet and not taking the slightest notice. ‘Perhaps you’ll believe me now – you can’t get a word out of him.’

  ‘All right, love,’ said La Sauvage. ‘I’ll show you what to do in cases like this.’

  She looked round the room with the practised eye of a burglar searching for likely spots where money might be hidden. Then she went straight to Pons’s chest-of-drawers, pulled out the top drawer, found the bag in which Schmucke had put what money remained from the sale of the pictures and brought it over to Schmucke, who gave an automatic gesture of consent.

  ‘Here’s some money, love,’ said La Sauvage to Madame Cantinet. ‘I’ll count it and take enough to buy what we need. Wine, eatables, candles, pretty nearly everything in fact – they haven’t got a scrap of anything… Look in the chest-of-drawers for a sheet to wrap the body in. It’s right enough what they told me about the gentleman being a simpleton, but that’s putting it mildly. He’s like a new-born child. I expect we’ll have to spoon-feed him.’

  Schmucke was watching the two women and their activities with an idiot stare. Broken down with grief, having sunk into an almost cataleptic condition, he could not take his spellbound gaze from Pons’s face, which now was softening into purer lines in the absolute repose of death. He himself longed to die; nothing else mattered now. He would not have stirred an inch if the room had been enveloped in flames.

  ‘Twelve hundred and fifty-six francs,’ La Sauvage told him.

  He shrugged his shoulders. When La Sauvage tried to proceed with the laying-out and measured the sheet along the body in order to cut out and sew the shroud, a terrible struggle ensued between her and the afflicted German. He was exactly like a dog trying to bite anybody who ventures near to his master’s corpse. La Sauvage lost patience, seized hold of the German, set him down on a chair and held him there with herculean strength.

  ‘Come on, love, sew the dead man into his shroud,’ she said to Madame Cantinet.

  Once this operation was finished, La Sauvage put Schmucke back in his place at the foot of the bed, and said:

  ‘Don’t you understand? We had to make the poor man nice and comfortable.’

  Schmucke was weeping again. The two women left him and took possession of the kitchen. Only a short time was needed for them to stock it with all the necessities of life.

  After making out a provisional account for three hundred and sixty francs, La Sauvage began to prepare dinner for four – and what a dinner! The main dish was a fatted goose, the poor man’s pheasant; there was a jam omelette, a vegetable salad and the inevitable pot-au-feu, whose ingredients were in such generous quantity that it was more like meat jelly than broth. At nine o’clock the priest whom the curate had sent to keep vigil over Pons arrived with Cantinet, who was equipped with four tapers and some tall church candles. The priest found Schmucke lying alongside his friend on the bed and holding him in a tight embrace. The authority of religion was needed to separate Schmucke from the corpse. He knelt down and the priest ensconced himself comfortably in the armchair. While the latter was reading his office and Schmucke, on his knees in front of the body, was beseeching God to work a miracle and reunite him with Pons so that he might be buried in the same grave, Madame Cantinet had gone to a shop in the rue du Temple to buy a camp-bed for Madame Sauvage, for great inroads were being made on the twelve hundred and fifty-six francs. At eleven that evening, Madame Cantinet came to see if Schmucke would like a morsel of food. The German made a sign to be left in peace.

  ‘Supper is ready, Monsieur Pastelot,’ the chair-attendant then said to the priest.

  Left alone, Schmucke gave a grin like a lunatic finding himself free to indulge a desire, as imperious as that of a pregnant woman. He threw himself on Pons’s body and once more clasped it in a tight embrace. At midnight the priest returned and, at his scoldings, Schmucke let go of the corpse, and resumed his prayers. At dawn the priest departed, and at seven o’clock Dr Poulain came to pay Schmucke a friendly visit. He tried to persuade him to eat, but Schmucke refused.

  ‘If you don’t eat now, you’ll feel very hungry on your way home,’ said the doctor. ‘You have to go to the council offices with a witness to notify Monsieur Pons’s decease and get the death certificate completed.’

  ‘Haf I to to it?’ asked Schmucke in alarm.

  ‘Who else?… You can’t get out of it, since you alone witnessed the death.’

  ‘My leks vill not carry me zere…’ answered Schmucke, thus imploring the doctor to go with him.

  ‘Take a carriage,’ the doctor gently replied, with some show of sympathy. ‘I have already given notice of the decease. Ask someone in the house to go with you. These two ladies will look after the flat while you’re away.’

  It is hard to imagine how much pestering genuine grief has to endure from legal formalities. It makes civilization hateful and the customs of savages preferable. At nine o’clock Madame Sauvage helped Schmucke downstairs, and when he got into the cab he was obliged to ask Rémonencq to go with him to no
tify the decease at the council offices. Moreover, in this as in all other respects, class inequality leaps to the eye, in our country which is so intoxicated with the principle of equality. This dead weight of formalism becomes patent even in the proceedings connected with death. In well-to-do families a relative, a friend, or an appointed agent can relieve the bereaved of these heart-breaking duties. But in this matter, as in matters of tax-assessment, the lower orders, the helpless proletariat, have to bear the whole burden.

  ‘Yes indeed, you have every reason to mourn for him,’ said Rémonencq to the poor martyr when he gave vent to a moan of sorrow. ‘He was a very good man, a real gentleman, and he leaves a very fine collection behind him. But mark this, Monsieur, you’re a foreign gentleman, and you’re going to find yourself in a pretty fix, for everybody’s saying you’re Monsieur Pons’s heir.’

  Schmucke was not listening. He was plunged in the kind of grief which borders on insanity. The disease of tetanus can be spiritual as well as physical.

  ‘And you’d do well to get a counsel, a legal adviser to act in your place.’

  ‘A lekal atvisser!’ Schmucke repeated mechanically.

  ‘You’ll find out you’ll need somebody to act for you. If I were you I’d get an experienced man, somebody well-known in the quarter, a reliable man… Now in all my little business affairs I call in Tabareau, the bailiff… If you give power of attorney to his clerk you’ll have no more trouble.’

  This suggestion, prompted by Fraisier in concert with Rémonencq and La Cibot, stuck in Schmucke’s memory; for at those times when sorrow congeals, so to speak, the thinking part of us and suspends all conscious activity, the memory records all the impressions that chance brings along. Schmucke was now listening to Rémonencq, but the look on his eyes was so completely devoid of understanding that the dealer did not pursue the matter.

  ‘If he stays as soft-headed as that,’ thought Rémonencq, ‘I might well get the whole bag of tricks up there for a hundred thousand francs – if it comes to him… Here we are, Monsieur, at the registry office.’