Works of Honore De Balzac

by Honoré de Balzac

  “Oh, what a doctor M. Poulain is!” cried La Cibot, for Pons’ benefit. “He will bring you through, my dear sir, for he pulled me out of my coffin! Cibot, poor man, thought I was dead.... Well, Dr. Poulain will have told you that while I was in bed I thought of nothing but you. ‘God above,’ said I, ‘take me, and let my dear Mr. Pons live — ’”

  “Poor dear Mme. Cibot, you all but crippled yourself for me.”

  “Ah! but for Dr. Poulain I should have been put to bed with a shovel by now, as we shall all be one day. Well, what must be, must, as the old actor said. One must take things philosophically. How did you get on without me?”

  “Schmucke nursed me,” said the invalid; “but our poor money-box and our lessons have suffered. I do not know how he managed.”

  “Calm yourself, Bons,” exclaimed Schmucke; “ve haf in Zipod ein panker — ”

  “Do not speak of it, my lamb. You are our children, both of you,” cried La Cibot. “Our savings will be well invested; you are safer than the Bank. So long as we have a morsel of bread, half of it is yours. It is not worth mentioning — ”

  “Boor Montame Zipod!” said Schmucke, and he went.

  Pons said nothing.

  “Would you believe it, my cherub?” said La Cibot, as the sick man tossed uneasily, “in my agony — for it was a near squeak for me — the thing that worried me most was the thought that I must leave you alone, with no one to look after you, and my poor Cibot without a farthing.... My savings are such a trifle, that I only mention them in connection with my death and Cibot, an angel that he is! No. He nursed me as if I had been a queen, he did, and cried like a calf over me!... But I counted on you, upon my word. I said to him, ‘There, Cibot! my gentlemen will not let you starve — ’”

  Pons made no reply to this thrust ad testamentum; but as the portress waited for him to say something — ”I shall recommend you to M. Schmucke,” he said at last.

  “Ah!” cried La Cibot, “whatever you do will be right; I trust in you and your heart. Let us never talk of this again; you make me feel ashamed, my cherub. Think of getting better, you will outlive us all yet.”

  Profound uneasiness filled Mme. Cibot’s mind. She cast about for some way of making the sick man understand that she expected a legacy. That evening, when Schmucke was eating his dinner as usual by Pons’ bedside, she went out, hoping to find Dr. Poulain at home.

  Dr. Poulain lived in the Rue d’Orleans in a small ground floor establishment, consisting of a lobby, a sitting-room, and two bedrooms. A closet, opening into the lobby and the bedroom, had been turned into a study for the doctor. The kitchen, the servant’s bedroom, and a small cellar were situated in a wing of the house, a huge pile built in the time of the Empire, on the site of an old mansion of which the garden still remained, though it had been divided among the three ground floor tenants.

  Nothing had been changed in the doctor’s house since it was built. Paint and paper and ceilings were all redolent of the Empire. The grimy deposits of forty years lay thick on walls and ceilings, on paper and paint and mirrors and gilding. And yet, this little establishment, in the depths of the Marais, paid a rent of a thousand francs.

  Mme. Poulain, the doctor’s mother, aged sixty-seven, was ending her days in the second bedroom. She worked for a breeches-maker, stitching men’s leggings, breeches, belts, and braces, anything, in fact, that is made in a way of business which has somewhat fallen off of late years. Her whole time was spent in keeping her son’s house and superintending the one servant; she never went abroad, and took the air in the little garden entered through the glass door of the sitting-room. Twenty years previously, when her husband died, she sold his business to his best workman, who gave his master’s widow work enough to earn a daily wage of thirty sous. She had made every sacrifice to educate her son. At all costs, he should occupy a higher station than his father before him; and now she was proud of her Aesculapius, she believed in him, and sacrificed everything to him as before. She was happy to take care of him, to work and put by a little money, and dream of nothing but his welfare, and love him with an intelligent love of which every mother is not capable. For instance, Mme. Poulain remembered that she had been a working girl. She would not injure her son’s prospects; he should not be ashamed by his mother (for the good woman’s grammar was something of the same kind as Mme. Cibot’s); and for this reason she kept in the background, and went to her room of her own accord if any distinguished patient came to consult the doctor, or if some old schoolfellow or fellow-student chanced to call. Dr. Poulain had never had occasion to blush for the mother whom he revered; and this sublime love of hers more than atoned for a defective education.

  The breeches-maker’s business sold for about twenty thousand francs, and the widow invested the money in the Funds in 1820. The income of eleven hundred francs per annum derived from this source was, at one time, her whole fortune. For many a year the neighbors used to see the doctor’s linen hanging out to dry upon a clothes-line in the garden, and the servant and Mme. Poulain thriftily washed everything at home; a piece of domestic economy which did not a little to injure the doctor’s practice, for it was thought that if he was so poor, it must be through his own fault. Her eleven hundred francs scarcely did more than pay the rent. During those early days, Mme. Poulain, good, stout, little old woman, was the breadwinner, and the poor household lived upon her earnings. After twelve years of perseverance upon a rough and stony road, Dr. Poulain at last was making an income of three thousand francs, and Mme. Poulain had an income of about five thousand francs at her disposal. Five thousand francs for those who know Paris means a bare subsistence.

  The sitting-room, where patients waited for an interview, was shabbily furnished. There was the inevitable mahogany sofa covered with yellow-flowered Utrecht velvet, four easy-chairs, a tea-table, a console, and half-a-dozen chairs, all the property of the deceased breeches-maker, and chosen by him. A lyre-shaped clock between two Egyptian candlesticks still preserved its glass shade intact. You asked yourself how the yellow chintz window-curtains, covered with red flowers, had contrived to hang together for so long; for evidently they had come from the Jouy factory, and Oberkampf received the Emperor’s congratulations upon similar hideous productions of the cotton industry in 1809.

  The doctor’s consulting-room was fitted up in the same style, with household stuff from the paternal chamber. It looked stiff, poverty-stricken, and bare. What patient could put faith in the skill of any unknown doctor who could not even furnish his house? And this in a time when advertising is all-powerful; when we gild the gas-lamps in the Place de la Concorde to console the poor man for his poverty by reminding him that he is rich as a citizen.

  The ante-chamber did duty as a dining-room. The servant sat at her sewing there whenever she was not busy in the kitchen or keeping the doctor’s mother company. From the dingy short curtains in the windows you would have guessed at the shabby thrift behind them without setting foot in the dreary place. What could those wall-cupboards contain but stale scraps of food, chipped earthenware, corks used over and over again indefinitely, soiled table-linen, odds and ends that could descend but one step lower into the dust-heap, and all the squalid necessities of a pinched household in Paris?

  In these days, when the five-franc piece is always lurking in our thoughts and intruding itself into our speech, Dr. Poulain, aged thirty-three, was still a bachelor. Heaven had bestowed on him a mother with no connections. In ten years he had not met with the faintest pretext for a romance in his professional career; his practice lay among clerks and small manufacturers, people in his own sphere of life, with homes very much like his own. His richer patients were butchers, bakers, and the more substantial tradespeople of the neighborhood. These, for the most part, attributed their recovery to Nature, as an excuse for paying for the services of a medical man, who came on foot, at the rate of two francs per visit. In his profession, a carriage is more necessary than medical skill.

  A humdrum monotonous life tells
in the end upon the most adventurous spirit. A man fashions himself to his lot, he accepts a commonplace existence; and Dr. Poulain, after ten years of his practice, continued his labors of Sisyphus without the despair that made early days so bitter. And yet — like every soul in Paris — he cherished a dream. Remonencq was happy in his dream; La Cibot had a dream of her own; and Dr. Poulain, too, dreamed. Some day he would be called in to attend a rich and influential patient, would effect a positive cure, and the patient would procure a post for him; he would be head surgeon to a hospital, medical officer of a prison or police-court, or doctor to the boulevard theatres. He had come by his present appointment as doctor to the Mairie in this very way. La Cibot had called him in when the landlord of the house in the Rue de Normandie fell ill; he had treated the case with complete success; M. Pillerault, the patient, took an interest in the young doctor, called to thank him, and saw his carefully-hidden poverty. Count Popinot, the cabinet minister, had married M. Pillerault’s grand-niece, and greatly respected her uncle; of him, therefore, M. Pillerault had asked for the post, which Poulain had now held for two years. That appointment and its meagre salary came just in time to prevent a desperate step; Poulain was thinking of emigration; and for a Frenchman, it is a kind of death to leave France.

  Dr. Poulain went, you may be sure, to thank Count Popinot; but as Count Popinot’s family physician was the celebrated Horace Bianchon, it was pretty clear that his chances of gaining a footing in that house were something of the slenderest. The poor doctor had fondly hoped for the patronage of a powerful cabinet minister, one of the twelve or fifteen cards which a cunning hand has been shuffling for sixteen years on the green baize of the council table, and now he dropped back again into his Marais, his old groping life among the poor and the small tradespeople, with the privilege of issuing certificates of death for a yearly stipend of twelve hundred francs.

  Dr. Poulain had distinguished himself to some extent as a house-student; he was a prudent practitioner, and not without experience. His deaths caused no scandal; he had plenty of opportunities of studying all kinds of complaints in anima vili. Judge, therefore, of the spleen that he nourished! The expression of his countenance, lengthy and not too cheerful to begin with, at times was positively appalling. Set a Tartuffe’s all-devouring eyes, and the sour humor of an Alceste in a sallow-parchment visage, and try to imagine for yourself the gait, bearing, and expression of a man who thought himself as good a doctor as the illustrious Bianchon, and felt that he was held down in his narrow lot by an iron hand. He could not help comparing his receipts (ten francs a day if he was fortunate) with Bianchon’s five or six hundred.

  Are the hatreds and jealousies of democracy incomprehensible after this? Ambitious and continually thwarted, he could not reproach himself. He had once already tried his fortune by inventing a purgative pill, something like Morrison’s, and intrusted the business operations to an old hospital chum, a house-student who afterwards took a retail drug business; but, unluckily, the druggist, smitten with the charms of a ballet-dancer of the Ambigu-Comique, found himself at length in the bankruptcy court; and as the patent had been taken out in his name, his partner was literally without a remedy, and the important discovery enriched the purchaser of the business. The sometime house-student set sail for Mexico, that land of gold, taking poor Poulain’s little savings with him; and, to add insult to injury, the opera-dancer treated him as an extortioner when he applied to her for his money.

  Not a single rich patient had come to him since he had the luck to cure old M. Pillerault. Poulain made his rounds on foot, scouring the Marais like a lean cat, and obtained from two to forty sous out of a score of visits. The paying patient was a phenomenon about as rare as that anomalous fowl known as a “white blackbird” in all sublunary regions.

  The briefless barrister, the doctor without a patient, are pre-eminently the two types of a decorous despair peculiar to this city of Paris; it is mute, dull despair in human form, dressed in a black coat and trousers with shining seams that recall the zinc on an attic roof, a glistening satin waistcoat, a hat preserved like a relic, a pair of old gloves, and a cotton shirt. The man is the incarnation of a melancholy poem, sombre as the secrets of the Conciergerie. Other kinds of poverty, the poverty of the artist — actor, painter, musician, or poet — are relieved and lightened by the artist’s joviality, the reckless gaiety of the Bohemian border country — the first stage of the journey to the Thebaid of genius. But these two black-coated professions that go afoot through the street are brought continually in contact with disease and dishonor; they see nothing of human nature but its sores; in the forlorn first stages and beginnings of their career they eye competitors suspiciously and defiantly; concentrated dislike and ambition flashes out in glances like the breaking forth of hidden flames. Let two schoolfellows meet after twenty years, the rich man will avoid the poor; he does not recognize him, he is afraid even to glance into the gulf which Fate has set between him and the friend of other years. The one has been borne through life on the mettlesome steed called Fortune, or wafted on the golden clouds of success; the other has been making his way in underground Paris through the sewers, and bears the marks of his career upon him. How many a chum of old days turned aside at the sight of the doctor’s greatcoat and waistcoat!

  With this explanation, it should be easy to understand how Dr. Poulain came to lend himself so readily to the farce of La Cibot’s illness and recovery. Greed of every kind, ambition of every nature, is not easy to hide. The doctor examined his patient, found that every organ was sound and healthy, admired the regularity of her pulse and the perfect ease of her movements; and as she continued to moan aloud, he saw that for some reason she found it convenient to lie at Death’s door. The speedy cure of a serious imaginary disease was sure to cause a sensation in the neighborhood; the doctor would be talked about. He made up his mind at once. He talked of rupture, and of taking it in time, and thought even worse of the case than La Cibot herself. The portress was plied with various remedies, and finally underwent a sham operation, crowned with complete success. Poulain repaired to the Arsenal Library, looked out a grotesque case in some of Desplein’s records of extraordinary cures, and fitted the details to Mme. Cibot, modestly attributing the success of the treatment to the great surgeon, in whose steps (he said) he walked. Such is the impudence of beginners in Paris. Everything is made to serve as a ladder by which to climb upon the scene; and as everything, even the rungs of a ladder, will wear out in time, the new members of every profession are at a loss to find the right sort of wood of which to make steps for themselves.

  There are moments when the Parisian is not propitious. He grows tired of raising pedestals, pouts like a spoiled child, and will have no more idols; or, to state it more accurately, Paris cannot always find a proper object for infatuation. Now and then the vein of genius gives out, and at such times the Parisian may turn supercilious; he is not always willing to bow down and gild mediocrity.

  Mme. Cibot, entering in her usual unceremonious fashion, found the doctor and his mother at table, before a bowl of lamb’s lettuce, the cheapest of all salad-stuffs. The dessert consisted of a thin wedge of Brie cheese flanked by a plate of specked foreign apples and a dish of mixed dry fruits, known as quatre-mendiants, in which the raisin stalks were abundantly conspicuous.

  “You can stay, mother,” said the doctor, laying a hand on Mme. Poulain’s arm; “this is Mme. Cibot, of whom I have told you.”

  “My respects to you, madame, and my duty to you, sir,” said La Cibot, taking the chair which the doctor offered. “Ah! is this your mother, sir? She is very happy to have a son who has such talent; he saved my life, madame, brought me back from the depths.”

  The widow, hearing Mme. Cibot praise her son in this way, thought her a delightful woman.

  “I have just come to tell you, that, between ourselves, poor M. Pons is doing very badly, sir, and I have something to say to you about him — ”

  “Let us go into the sitting-roo
m,” interrupted the doctor, and with a significant gesture he indicated the servant.

  In the sitting-room La Cibot explained her position with regard to the pair of nutcrackers at very considerable length. She repeated the history of her loan with added embellishments, and gave a full account of the immense services rendered during the past ten years to MM. Pons and Schmucke. The two old men, to all appearance, could not exist without her motherly care. She posed as an angel; she told so many lies, one after another, watering them with her tears, that old Mme. Poulain was quite touched.

  “You understand, my dear sir,” she concluded, “that I really ought to know how far I can depend on M. Pons’ intentions, supposing that he should not die; not that I want him to die, for looking after those two innocents is my life, madame, you see; still, when one of them is gone I shall look after the other. For my own part, I was built by Nature to rival mothers. Without nobody to care for, nobody to take for a child, I don’t know what I should do.... So if M. Poulain only would, he might do me a service for which I should be very grateful; and that is, to say a word to M. Pons for me. Goodness me! an annuity of a thousand francs, is that too much, I ask you?... To. M. Schmucke it would be so much gained. — Our dear patient said that he should recommend me to the German, poor man; it is his idea, no doubt, that M. Schmucke should be his heir. But what is a man that cannot put two ideas together in French? And besides, he would be quite capable of going back to Germany, he will be in such despair over his friend’s death — ”

  The doctor grew grave. “My dear Mme. Cibot,” he said, “this sort of thing does not in the least concern a doctor. I should not be allowed to exercise my profession if it was known that I interfered in the matter of my patients’ testamentary dispositions. The law forbids a doctor to receive a legacy from a patient — ”