Cousin Pons Read online

  ‘If those are your motives, Monsieur,’ said the future Peer of France, ‘however singular they may be, they are not implausible…’

  ‘Monsieur, do not doubt my sincerity,’ continued Brunner, interrupting him heatedly, ‘for if you can name a penniless girl from a large family, who has been well brought up but has no money of her own, as is frequent with French girls, provided that her character can stand surety for her, I will marry her.’

  During the silence which followed this declaration, Frederick Brunner left Cécile’s grandfather, returned to the drawing-room to take polite leave of the Président and of his wife, and withdrew. Cécile, a silent observer of her Werther’s mode of departure, was deathly pale: she had been hiding in her mother’s dressing-room, and had overheard everything.

  ‘Rejected!’ she whispered to her mother.

  ‘But for what reason?’ the Présidente asked her embarrassed father-in-law.

  ‘For the ingenuous reason that an only daughter is a spoilt child,’ the old man answered. ‘And he’s not entirely wrong in this case,’ he added, seizing on the opportunity to blame his daughter-in-law, who had been causing him much annoyance for twenty years.

  ‘This will be the death of my daughter, and you will have killed her,’ said the Présidente to Pons, holding her daughter up, for Cécile thought it becoming to justify this assertion by drooping into her mother’s arms.

  The Président and his wife dragged her to an armchair, and there she completed her faint. Her grandfather rang for the servants.

  11. Pons under a landslide of gravel

  ‘I CAN see through the plot this person has hatched,’ said the outraged mother, pointing to Pons.

  Pons started up as if the trumpet blast of Judgement Day had sounded in his ears.

  The Présidente’s eyes were like twin pools of green bile. ‘Monsieur,’ she continued, ‘you decided to do us a wrong in return for an innocent jest. Can anyone believe that this German is in his right mind? Either he is your accomplice in an atrocious act of vengeance, or he is a lunatic. I hope, Monsieur Pons, that in future you will spare us the displeasure of seeing you in a house on which you have tried to bring shame and dishonour.’

  Pons stood there like a statue, stared down at a rose-pattern in the carpet, and twiddled his thumbs.

  ‘What! You are still here, ungrateful monster,’ cried the Présidente, turning round. She pointed to Pons and told the servants: ‘Neither my husband nor myself will be at home, if ever this gentleman calls again… Jean, go and fetch the doctor… And you, Madeleine, get some smelling-salts.’

  The Présidente considered that the reasons put forward by Brunner were only a cover for others he had not divulged; but that only made the breaking-off of the marriage more definite. With a swiftness of thought typical of women in critical situations, Madame de Marville had seized on the only means for countering this rebuff. Holding fast to her hatred for Pons, she had converted a mere feminine suspicion into a fact. Generally speaking, women have their own system of beliefs and moral code. They accept as reality everything which serves their interests and their passions. The Présidente carried this even farther. She spent the whole evening hammering her own conviction into the Président’s head, and by next morning the magistrate was persuaded of his cousin’s guilt. Every reader will regard the Présidente’s conduct as horrible; but in similar circumstances any mother would follow Madame Camusot’s example and prefer to sacrifice an outsider’s good name to that of her daughter. The method might be different, but it would be directed to the same end.

  The musician rushed downstairs, but his pace was slow as he walked through the streets to his theatre, which he entered in a daze. He went to his stand in a daze and conducted the orchestra in a daze. During the intervals, he gave such vague replies to Schmucke’s inquiries that Schmucke concealed his anxiety, thinking that Pons was out of his mind. To so childlike a mentality as that of Pons, the scene which had just taken place assumed the proportions of a catastrophe. To have reawakened fearful hatred in persons whose happiness he had tried to ensure meant that his whole existence was turned upside down. He had at last come to discern what deadly hostility was recorded in the Présidente’s glance, gestures and tone of voice.

  The next day, Madame de Marville made an important decision: the circumstances demanded it and the Président concurred. They resolved to give the Marville estate, the house in the rue de Hanovre and a hundred thousand francs to Cécile as a marriage portion. In the course of the morning, the Présidente called on the Comtesse Popinot, realizing the necessity of meeting such a discomfiture by settling her daughter’s marriage once and for all. She told her of the appalling vengeance and frightful mystification engineered by Pons. It all seemed credible enough when the Popinots learnt that Brunner’s pretext for breaking off the match had been the fact of Cécile being an only child. Finally the Présidente artfully dangled before their eyes the advantage of being a ‘Popinot de Marville’ and getting an enormous dowry. As property prices go in Normandy, this estate, at a rent of two per cent, was worth about nine hundred thousand francs, and the house in the rue de Hanovre was reckoned as being worth two hundred and fifty thousand francs. No right-minded family could turn down such an alliance, and so the Comte Popinot and his wife gave their consent. Whereupon, as people concerned about the honour of the family they were joining, they promised to help in accounting for the catastrophe of the previous day.

  Then, at the house of the same Camusot senior, Cécile’s grandfather, in front of the same people who had been present a few days earlier and for whose benefit the Présidente had chanted her litanies in praise of Brunner, this same Présidente, whom no one dared to question, bravely went ahead with her task of explaining.

  ‘Really,’ she said, ‘you can’t be too careful today when it comes to marriages, and above all when you are dealing with foreigners.’

  ‘Why, Madame, what has happened?’ asked Madame Chiffreville.

  ‘Haven’t you heard of our adventure with the man Brunner, who had the audacity to aspire to Cécile’s hand?… the son of a German innkeeper, the nephew of a rabbit-skin merchant.’

  ‘You don’t say! And yet you’re so wide-awake!…’ one lady said.

  ‘These adventurers are so cunning! But Berthier put us wise to all that. This German’s best friend is a sorry individual who plays the flute! He’s in league with a man who runs a lodging-house in the rue du Mail and a family of tailors… We learnt that he has lived a most dissolute life, and no fortune is big enough for a ne’er-do-well who has already squandered his mother’s inheritance.’

  ‘How unhappy your daughter would have been with him!’ said Madame Berthier.

  ‘But how did he get into touch with you?’ asked old Madame Lebas.

  ‘Through a piece of vengefulness on the part of Monsieur Pons. He introduced that fine gentleman to us in order to make a laughing-stock of us. His name is Brunner, that is to say Fountain – and they passed him off as a very grand person! His health is ruined; he’s bald; he has very bad teeth. And so I distrusted him as soon as I set eyes on him.’

  ‘But what of the great fortune you said he possessed?’ a young woman shyly asked.

  ‘It’s much less than it was made out to be. The tailor’s family, the hotel-keeper and he have all scraped the barrel in order to set up a banking-house… What is a bank in its beginnings, nowadays? – a passport to ruin. A woman could go to bed a millionairess and wake up without a penny to bless herself with. One word with this ill-bred person, one glance at him, and our minds were made up. One can see by his gloves and his waistcoats that he belongs to the working-classes: a German cook-shop keeper for a father, no refinement of feeling, a beer-drinker, a man – just imagine, Madame! – who smokes twenty-five pipes a day! I still shudder to think of what my little Lili’s lot would have been. Heaven has preserved us from that. And Cécile didn’t take to him at all… Could we have expected such a hoax on the part of a relative who was always in
and out of our house, and who had dined with us three times a week for twenty years? A man we overwhelmed with kindnesses, and yet so cunning an actor that he declared Cécile was his heiress in front of the Keeper of the Seals, the Attorney-General and the Chief Justice! This Brunner and Monsieur Pons had agreed to pretend that each of them was worth millions… Oh no, I assure you, ladies, every one of you would have been taken in by a hoax which only a man of the theatre could devise!’

  Within a few weeks the Popinots and the Camusots, united in one family, together with their hangers-on, had won an easy victory in social circles, for there was no one to stand up for the wretched Pons: that sly, miserly parasite, that wolf in sheep’s clothing, henceforth buried under a weight of scorn, written off as a viper nourished in the family bosom, an extraordinarily wicked man, a dangerous mountebank, best consigned to oblivion.

  *

  About one month after the pseudo-Werther had made his refusal of marriage, poor Pons for the first time left his bed, to which a nervous fever had confined him, and walked along the sunlit boulevards leaning on Schmucke’s arm. No one in the Boulevard du Temple laughed at the two ‘Nutcrackers’, so visibly stricken was the one and so touching was the other’s concern for his convalescent friend. By the time they reached the Boulevard Poissonnière, the colour had returned to Pons’s face as he breathed in the air which is so bracing in city thoroughfares; for so vital a fluid abounds in crowded centres that in Rome it has been noticed that there is no malaria in the loathsome Ghetto swarming with Jews. Perhaps also the sight of what had formerly afforded him pleasure, the great spectacle Paris offers, was having its effect on the sick man. When they came to the Théâtre des Variétés Pons left Schmucke. Hitherto they had walked side by side, but occasionally the convalescent quitted his friend in order to inspect the latest novelties displayed in the shops. He thus found himself face to face with the Comte Popinot, whom he accosted in the most respectful manner, the former Minister being one of those people for whom Pons had the greatest esteem and veneration.

  ‘I must say, Monsieur,’ was the stern response given by the Peer of France, ‘I do not understand how you can be so tactless as to salute a person allied to the family on which you tried to bring shame and ridicule by perpetrating an act of vengeance such as only a theatrical entertainer could invent. Please understand, Monsieur, that from now on we can have absolutely no dealings with one another. My wife the Comtesse shares the indignation which everyone in society feels with regard to your behaviour towards the Marvilles.’

  The ex-Minister went his way, leaving Pons thunderstruck. When passion is at work, when justice, politics or great social forces are in operation, no heed is paid to the condition of those they strike at. Under family pressure to overwhelm Pons, the statesman did not notice the physical weakness of this redoubtable enemy.

  ‘Vat iss ze matter, my poor frient?’ cried Schmucke, turning as pale as Pons himself.

  ‘I have just had another dagger in my heart,’ replied the poor man, leaning on Schmucke’s arm. ‘I think that God alone has the right to do good, and that is why all those who take His duties on themselves are so cruelly punished.’

  This piece of sarcasm, coming from an artist, was a supreme effort on the part of this excellent creature to dispel the dismay he saw written on his friend’s face.

  ‘I pelief zet iss true,’ was Schmucke’s simple answer.

  Pons, who had received no invitation to Cécile’s wedding from either the Camusots or the Popinots, could conceive of no explanation. In the Boulevard des Italiens he saw Monsieur Cardot coming towards him. Forewarned by the way the Peer of France had addressed him, he took care not to bring this eminent person to a halt, although, the previous year, he had dined at his house once a fortnight; he merely raised his hat to him. But the Mayor and Deputy of Paris threw an indignant glance at Pons without returning his greeting.

  ‘Do go and ask him what they all have against me,’ said Pons to Schmucke, who knew every detail of the disaster which had befallen the poor man.

  ‘Monsieur,’ said Schmucke to Cardot, with some delicacy, ‘my frient Pons hass peen ill in pet, and I expect you haf not recognizet him.’

  ‘I certainly have.’

  ‘Put vat haf you to plame him for?’

  ‘Your friend is a monster of ingratitude. If he has got over his illness, it is because, as the proverb says, weeds grow in spite of everything. People have good cause for mistrusting artists: they are as wily and treacherous as monkeys. Your friend tried to dishonour his own family, to ruin a girl’s reputation just to get his own back for an innocent jest. I don’t want anything more to do with him. I shall try to forget that I ever knew him or that he still exists. And that, Monsieur, is the feeling of every member of my family, his own family, and all those who used to do the man the honour of welcoming him…’

  ‘Put, Monsieur, you are a fair-mintet man, unt, if you vill permit me, I vill explain eferysink.’

  ‘Be his friend still, if you feel like it,’ retorted Cardot. ‘That’s for you to decide, sir; but leave it at that, for I feel bound to tell you I shall regard as equally blameworthy those who seek to excuse or defend him.’

  ‘To tchustify him?’

  ‘Yes, for his conduct is as unjustifiable as it is unspeakable.’

  With this parting shot, the Deputy of the Seine constituency stalked on without waiting to hear another syllable.

  ‘I have already two representatives of public authority against me,’ said Pons with a rueful smile, after Schmucke had reported these savage imprecations to him.

  ‘Eferyvon iss against us,’ replied Schmucke dolefully. ‘Let us take ourselfs off, so zat ve vill not meet any ozzer plockheats.’

  This was the first time in his life that Schmucke, always as mild as a lamb, had ever uttered such words. Never before had his almost angelic gentleness been ruffled. He would have met any personal misfortune with an ingenuous smile. But to see such ill-treatment meted out to his sublime Pons, this unknown Aristides, this uncomplaining genius, this unsoured nature, this soul of goodness, this heart of gold, filled him as full of choler as Molière’s Alceste, and he called Pons’s amphitryons ‘plockheats’! Such a reaction, in so mild a disposition, was equivalent to all the fury of Orlando! With sage foresight, Schmucke shepherded Pons back towards the Boulevard du Temple, and Pons let himself be guided along, for the stricken man’s condition was like that of a wrestler after innumerable throws. Fate had decided that the poor musician should have everything in the world against him. There was to be no element lacking in the avalanche that was rolling over him: the House of Peers, the Chamber of Deputies, his family, strangers, the strong, the weak and the innocent!

  In the Boulevard Poissonnière, as they were returning home, Pons saw coming towards him the daughter of that same Monsieur Cardot, a young woman who had had enough unhappiness in her life to incline her to indulgence. A lapse from virtue which had been hushed up had made her her husband’s slave. Of all the hostesses who had him to dinner, Madame Berthier was the only one Pons addressed by her Christian name, Félicie. This gentle creature seemed put out at meeting cousin Pons – though they were not related by blood, he was accepted as ‘cousin’ by the relatives of the second wife of his cousin, Camusot senior – but she was unable to avoid meeting the moribund Pons, and came to a halt in front of him.

  ‘I did not think you were a bad man, cousin; but if only one quarter of all I have heard said about you is true, you are a very deceitful person… Please do not make any excuses,’ she went on hurriedly as she saw Pons making gestures of protest. ‘It’s no use, for two reasons: one is that I have no right to accuse, judge or condemn anyone, since I know by my own experience that those who appear to be grievously in the wrong may have some grounds for self-justification. The other is that your arguments would be of no avail, for Monsieur Berthier, who drew up the marriage contract between Mademoiselle de Marville and the Vicomte Popinot, is so incensed with you that if he knew that I
had spoken a single word to you, he would be angry with me. Everybody is against you.’

  ‘So I see, Madame,’ the poor musician replied in moved tones and respectfully raised his hat to the notary’s wife.

  Then he plodded along painfully to the rue de Normandie, leaning so heavily on Schmucke’s arm that it was plain to the old German that he was manfully fighting against physical collapse. This third encounter was as it were the verdict pronounced by the lamb which rests at the feet of God. Wrath in this angel of the poor, this symbol of the people, was heaven’s final utterance. The two friends arrived home without exchanging a word. In certain predicaments, having a friend by one’s side is a thing which can only be felt: spoken consolation merely turns the knife in the wound and shows how deep it has gone. As can be seen, the old pianist had a genius for friendship and the delicate touch of those who, having suffered a great deal themselves, are conversant with the ways of suffering.

  This walk was to be the last the good Pons ever took. He stumbled from one sickness into another. Since he was of a bilious-sanguine temperament, the bile invaded his bloodstream and he had a violent attack of hepatitis. These two successive ailments being the only ones he had ever had, he knew of no doctor. And so the sympathetic and devoted Madame Cibot – her first impulses were always excellent, and even maternal – sent for the local doctor.