Cousin Pons Page 15
Nowadays so many attested and authenticated facts have emerged from the occult sciences that the time will come when these sciences will be professed as chemistry and astronomy are professed. Just now, when so many professorial chairs are being set up in Paris – chairs in Slavonic, in Manchurian studies, and in literatures so unprofessable as those of the North; chairs which, instead of offering instruction, stand in need of it themselves; chairs whose titular holders eternally grind out articles on Shakespeare of the sixteenth century – is it not a matter of surprise that, under the name of anthropology, the teaching of occult philosophy, one of the glories of the old-time university, has not been restored? In this respect Germany, so great and yet so immature a country, is a step ahead of France, for there that science is professed: it is much more useful than the many kinds of ‘philosophies’ which are all identical.
That certain beings should have the power to discern future facts in the causative germ, as the great inventor discerns an industry or a science in an effect of nature which the common man does not perceive, is no longer one of those violent exceptions which cause a stir: it is the effect of a recognized faculty, one which might well turn out to be a certain somnambulism of the spirit. Although this proposition on which the various means of deciphering the future are based may seem absurd, the fact is there. We should note that the prediction of important future events is not, to the seer, a more extraordinary feat than divining the past. In the sceptical mode of thought the past and the future are equally unknowable. If events which have happened have left traces, it is reasonable to suppose that events to come have their roots in the present. If a fortune-teller can give you minute details about facts in your earlier life which are known to you alone, it follows that he can tell you the events which existing causes will bring forth. The spiritual world is cut, so to speak, to the pattern of the material world; the same sequence of cause and effect must therefore be operative in both, with differences appropriate to their diverse fields of activity. Just as physical objects do in fact project themselves on to the atmosphere so that it retains the ‘spectre’ which the daguerreotype can fix and capture, in the same way ideas, which are real and active creations, imprint themselves on what we must call the ‘atmosphere’ of the spiritual world, produce effects in it and live on in it spectrally (one must coin words in order to express unnamed phenomena); if that be granted, certain creatures endowed with rare faculties are perfectly capable of discerning those forms or traces of ideas.
As for the means employed to arrive at visions, that is the most easily explained miracle, once the consultant’s hand arranges the objects by whose aid the hazards of his life are set forth before him. In fact, everything in the real world is linked together. Every movement in it corresponds to a cause, every cause is bound up with the whole; and consequently the whole is represented in the slightest movement. Rabelais, the greatest of modern minds, the man who summed up in himself Pythagoras, Hippocrates, Aristophanes and Dante, said three centuries ago: ‘Man is a microcosm.’ Three centuries later Swedenborg, the great Swedish prophet, was to say that ‘the earth is a man’. Thus the prophet and the precursor of incredulity met together in the greatest of formulas. In human life, as in the life of our planet, all that happens is ‘fated’ to happen. The most trivial, the most insignificant ‘accidents’ are predetermined. Therefore great matters, great designs, great thoughts in life are necessarily reflected in the most trivial acts, and with such fidelity that, if some conspirator cuts and shuffles a pack of cards, he will be writing in them the secret of his conspiracy, to be read by the seer known as a gypsy, a fortune-teller, a charlatan, etc.… As soon as you admit fatality, that is to say, the enchainment of causes, judicial astrology attains validity and becomes what it was in former ages, a vast science comprising as it does the deductive faculty which made Cuvier so great; but its exercise is spontaneous, instead of being pursued, as it was with that outstanding genius, night after night, in the scholarly seclusion of his study.
Judicial astrology – divination – reigned for seven centuries, not as today, over the masses, but over the foremost minds – kings and queens and men of substance. One of the greatest sciences of antiquity, animal magnetism, emerged from the occult sciences, just as chemistry emerged from the alchemist’s furnaces. Craniology, physiognomy and neurology emerge from them no less: and the illustrious creators of these apparently new sciences made only one mistake, that which all discoverers make, of constructing a hard and fast system from isolated facts whose generative cause still eludes analysis. One fine day the Catholic Church and modern philosophy came to an agreement with the judiciary to proscribe, persecute and ridicule the mysteries of the Kabbala, and a regrettable gap of a hundred years interrupted the reign and study of the occult sciences. None the less the masses, and also many intelligent people, particularly women, continue to pay tribute to the mysterious powers possessed by those who are able to peep behind the veil of the future. They go to them to purchase hope, courage, strength – virtues which it is the prerogative of religion to confer. And so this science is still practised, though not without some risk. For today sorcerers, shielded as they are from all forms of torture through the tolerance due to the eighteenth-century Encyclopedists, are only subject to the petty jurisdiction of the police-courts, and then only when they have recourse to fraudulent operations, or intimidate their ‘clients’ in order to extort money, thus laying themselves open to the charge of deceptive practices. Unfortunately such practices and, only too often, serious felony accompany the exercise of this sublime faculty. And this is why: the admirable gifts which go to the making of a clairvoyant are found, as a rule, in people whom one might describe as ‘brutish’. Such ‘brutish’ individuals are the chosen vessels into which God pours the elixirs which astonish mankind. From such raw material prophets come forth, such as Saint Peter and Peter the Hermit. Whenever mental energy subsists in its entirety, remains a compact whole, is not fragmented into conversations, intrigues, literary activities, scientific speculations, administrative efforts, inventive conceptions and warlike pursuits, it is liable to emit effulgences of prodigious intensity: they are pent up, just as an uncut diamond holds in reserve the sparkle of its facets. Let some circumstance arise, and this intelligence bursts into flame: it has wings to cover distances, it has the all-seeing eyes of a god. Yesterday it was mere carbon; today, thanks to the unknown fluid coursing through it, it is a scintillating diamond. Sophisticated people, with every facet of their intelligence abraded, can never, unless by one of those miracles which God sometimes permits, display this superlative power. And so soothsayers, male and female, are nearly always mendicants who have never exercised their mental powers, creatures of seemingly coarse texture, stones rolled along in the torrent of indigence and the gutters of life, in which they have expended nothing but physical suffering. In short the prophet or the seer is a man like Martin the Ploughman, who terrified Louis XVIII by telling him a secret which he alone as king could know; or a woman like Mademoiselle Lenormand; a former cook like Madame Fontaine; an almost cretinous Negress; a herdsman living with his cattle; a fakir squatting beside a shrine, one who, by mortifying the flesh, gives his spirit possession of all the incalculable power of the somnambulistic faculties.
It is in Asia that, from time immemorial, the heroes of the occult sciences have been found. Often, then, these people who in their normal state simply remain what they are – for to some extent they perform the functions of chemical and physical bodies conducting electricity, now inert metals, now ducts replete with mysterious fluids – these people, when they return to their normal selves, give themselves up to practices and calculations which lead them to the police-courts; nay even, like the notorious Balthazar, to the assize courts or the penitentiary. And a final proof of the immense power that cartomancy exerts over the common people is the fact that the life and death of our unfortunate musician depended on the horoscope that Madame Fontaine was going to cast for Madame Cibot.
*
The old servant who acted as receptionist to the fortune-teller opened the door of the sanctuary without forewarning her mistress.
‘Ah! it’s Madame Cibot!… Come in,’ she added, ‘She’s quite alone.’
‘Well, my dear, what brings you here so early in the morning?’ asked the old witch. She was then seventy-eight and deserved to be so called, for her external appearance was worthy of one of the Fates.
‘My head’s all in a whirl. Do me the big pack,’ cried La Cibot. ‘My fortune’s at stake…’ She explained the situation she was in, and begged for a prediction relevant to her sordid hopes.
‘Do you know what the tarot pack means?’ asked Madame Fontaine in solemn tones.
‘No, I’ve never been able to afford the whole box of tricks… It costs a hundred francs!… All very fine, but how would I come by them? But today I’ve simply got to have it!’
‘I don’t often work it, dearie,’ replied Madame Fontaine, ‘I only do it for well-off people on great occasions, and it costs them five hundred francs. You see, it tires me, it wears me out. The Spirit churns me all up inside, in my stomach. It’s like going to what they used to call the witches’ sabbath.’
‘But I tell you, good Ma’me Fontaine, it’s to do with my whole future.’
‘Ah well, you’ve had many a consultation with me, and as a favour to you I’ll give myself up to the Spirit!’ replied Madame Fontaine – and she showed on her ravaged face an expression of genuine terror.
She got up from the dirty old rocking-chair by her fireside and went over to the table, which was draped with a green cloth so threadbare that you could count the strands. On the left side of it was a sleeping toad of extraordinary dimensions, and next to it, in an open cage, a black hen with ruffled feathers.
‘Ashtaroth! Here, my son!’ she said, and with a long knitting needle she gave the toad a gentle tap on the back: it looked at her with a knowing eye.
‘And you, Mademoiselle Cleopatra! Wake up!’ she continued, administering a light tap on the old hen’s beak.
Then Madame Fontaine withdrew into herself and remained quite still for a few seconds. She looked like a corpse. Her eyes turned upwards until only the whites were visible. Then she stiffened and, in a hollow voice, said: ‘Here I am!’
Mechanically she scattered some bird-seed for Cleopatra, and then took up her tarot pack, shuffled it convulsively, and handed it to Madame Cibot to cut – but with a deep sigh. Madame Cibot felt cold shivers go down her back as this cadaverous figure in her filthy turban and sinister dressing-gown peered at the grains of seed which the black hen was pecking up and called to her toad Ashtaroth to hop over the cards spread out on the table. Only great credulity can give rise to great emotion. Annuity or no annuity? As Shakespeare said, that was the question.
14. A character from Hoffmann’s Tales
SEVEN or eight minutes went by while the sorceress opened a book of spells and read aloud from it in a sepulchral voice. She studied the grains the hen had left and the path the toad was taking as it hopped away. Then, with the whites of her eyes still showing, she scanned the cards and made out their meaning.
‘You will get what you want!’ she said. ‘And yet nothing will turn out as you think. You will have a great deal of intriguing to do. But you will reap the reward of your labours. You will behave very badly, but it will be with you as it is with all those who tend sick persons and covet a share in the money they leave. In this evil task you will have the support of important people… Later on the pangs of death will bring you to repentance, for in the village to which you will retire with your second husband you will be murdered for your reputed fortune – murdered by two escaped convicts, a short man with red hair and an old man with no hair at all… There, my daughter, you are free to take action, or to leave well alone.’
The inner excitement which had been kindling torches in the sunken eyes of this skeleton, outwardly so cold, died down. When the prognostication was finished, Madame Fontaine seemed to be quite dazed, and looked for all the world like a somnambulist coming out of a trance. She gazed around her with a bewildered air. Then she recognized Madame Cibot and seemed surprised to see the stark horror imprinted on her face.
‘Well, my daughter,’ she said in tones quite different from those she had used while uttering her prediction, ‘are you satisfied?’
Madame Cibot gazed in stupefaction at the sorceress and could find no reply.
‘Well, you asked for the tarot pack! I have treated you as an old acquaintance. You need only pay me a hundred francs.’
‘Is Cibot going to die?’ cried the concierge.
‘Why, have I told you some very horrible things?’ asked Madame Fontaine with great ingenuousness.
‘That you have!’ said La Cibot, pulling a hundred francs from her pocket and placing them on the edge of the table. ‘I’m going to be murdered!’
‘Ah! There you are! You wanted the tarot pack!… But don’t worry. Not all the people die whom the cards mark out for murder.’
‘Then tell me, can I get out of it, Ma’me Fontaine?’
‘My dear good woman, how do I know? You wanted to knock at the door of the future, and I released the latch, that’s all – and he came!’
‘He? Who’s he!’ asked Madame Cibot.
‘Why, the Spirit of course!’ the sorceress retorted testily.
‘Good-bye, Ma’me Fontaine!’ cried the concierge. ‘Little did I know what the big pack was like. You’ve given me a real scare, I can tell you!’
The servant escorted the concierge to the landing and said:
‘Madame Fontaine doesn’t get into that state twice in a month. It might knock her out, the strain of it tires her so much. Now she’s going to eat some cutlets and then go to sleep for three hours.’
As La Cibot walked off down the street, she made what all clients make of any sort of consultation: she accepted every part of the prophecy which suited her purposes and discounted the predictions of misfortune. Next day her mind was quite made up. She decided to do everything she could to get rich by laying her hands on part of the Pons collection. And so for some time she gave no thought to anything except working out a plan of campaign. There is a phenomenon we explained above, namely the concentration of inner resources in all coarse-grained people, who, instead of using up their intelligential faculties, like people who move in society, in day-to-day expenditure, find them ready at hand, strong and powerful, at the moment when that formidable weapon, the idée fixe, comes into play in their minds. This phenomenon was made manifest in La Cibot to a superlative degree. An idée fixe can produce miracles for prisoners intent on escape, and also in the realm of feeling: so this mere concierge, under the spur of covetousness, became as resourceful as a Baron de Nucingen faced with the prospect of ruin, as nimble-witted (under the mask of stupidity) as that alluring adventurer La Palférine.
A few days later, about seven in the morning, she saw Rémonencq opening his shop and sidled up to him like a cat.
‘How can we find out,’ she asked him, ‘what the things piled up in my gentlemen’s flat are worth?’
‘That’s easy enough,’ the curio-dealer replied in his frightful charabia. ‘You play fair with me and I’ll get you a valuer, a decent fellow who’ll tell you what the pictures are worth to a penny.’
‘And who’s he?’
‘Monsieur Magus, a Jew who’s no lon
ger in business except for pleasure.’
The name of Elias Magus is too well-known in the Human Comedy to need introducing. He had retired from trading in pictures and objets d’art and, as a dealer, had adopted the procedure that Pons had followed as a collector. The celebrated valuers – the late Henry, Messieurs Pigeot and Moret, Thoret, Georges and Roehn, in fact, the experts of the Louvre Museum – were as babes compared with Elias Magus, who could pick out a masterpiece from under the grime of centuries, who knew every school and the signature of every painter.
This Jew, who had come to Paris from Bordeaux, had given up business in 1835 without giving up his squalid appearance: that he maintained, in accordance with the habits of most Jews, so faithful to its traditions does this race remain. In the Middle Ages, persecution forced the Jews to disarm suspicion by going about in rags, perpetually complaining, whining and pleading poverty. What was once a necessity has become, as is always the case, an ingrained racial instinct, an endemic vice. By dint of buying and selling diamonds, dealing in pictures and lace, rare curios and enamels, delicate carvings and antique jewellery, Elias Magus had come to enjoy an immense untold fortune, which he had acquired through this kind of commerce, nowadays so important. In fact, in the last twenty years the number of dealers has multiplied ten times in Paris, that city in which all the curios in the world manage to come together. As for pictures, they are sold in only three cities: Rome, London and Paris.
Elias Magus lived in the Chaussée des Minimes, a short and narrow street leading to the rue Royale. There he owned an old mansion which he had bought in 1831 for a song, as they say. This splendid building contained one of the most sumptuous of the apartments decorated during the reign of Louis XV, for it had been the residence of the Baron de Maulaincourt, that famous President of the Board of Excise who had built it himself. Its situation had saved it from devastation during the Revolution. If the old Jew had decided, in breach of Israelite practice, to become a house-owner, you may be sure he knew what he was about. The old man was ending up – as we all do – by carrying an obsession to the point of mania. Although he was as miserly as his late friend Gobseck, he had surrendered to the admiration aroused in him by the masterpieces he dealt in: but his taste had become more and more refined and exacting, developing into one of those passions which only kings can indulge, provided they are rich and lovers of the arts. Like Frederick William of Prussia, who had no use for grenadiers who were less than six feet tall, and spent extravagant sums in order to buy such men for his living museum of grenadiers, the retired dealer only fell in love with faultless canvases, those which had remained exactly as the master had painted them and were of first-class workmanship. And so Elias Magus never missed any of the big sales, ransacked all the markets and travelled all over Europe. His cold heart, dedicated to Mammon, warmed at the sight of a masterpiece, just as a sated libertine is roused by the sight of a lovely girl and devotes himself to the quest for women of flawless beauty. In his search for perfection, such admiration, for this Don Juan of the picture-gallery, was a source of enjoyment superior to that of a miser gloating over his gold. He lived in a harem of beautiful paintings!