Cousin Pons Read online

  As published in Le Constitutionnel, Cousin Pons consisted of thirty chapters and a Conclusion. In 1848 the editor Pétion published it in book form, with seventy-seven chapters and a Conclusion. In November 1848 it was again published as part of the Human Comedy, and now, for reasons of economy, all chapter divisions were suppressed. In fact, since that time, readers of Balzac have had to cope with editions in which no pause or relief is vouchsafed from the beginning to end, though in present-day editions the tendency is to revert to the original chapter divisions. This translation adopts the divisions and titles of the Le Constitutionnel version, with asterisks inserted within chapters to indicate where further divisions were made in the Pétion edition.

  As nearly always in Balzac’s novels, money is an important, if not a paramount consideration. Balzac loved to make financial computations and calculations, and he tended to deal in enormous figures, largely perhaps to compensate himself in imagination for his failure to acquire – by his work, by speculative ventures, and, in the middle 1840s, by the purchase of antiques – the large sums he himself needed to put his affairs in order: so that the value of the Pons collection (the ‘heroine’ of the story!) is, in the text, reckoned to be not much less than a million francs. If we take the exchange value which remained relatively stable until the First World War, namely twenty-five francs to the pound, a million francs would be equivalent to £40,000 sterling. But, since 1918, currency values have declined at least to one-fifth of what they were. And so the Pons collection would have been worth no less than £200,000 in our present inflated currency!

  One of the most intriguing devices in the Human Comedy is the system, invented round about 1834, of introducing ‘reappearing characters’: the same people recur, now in the foreground, now in the background of the various novels and short stories. This was one of the ways by which Balzac sought to create the impression of a closely-knit society in which, as in real life, the reader would be continually coming upon people he had met before. Not of course in chronological sequence – one novel may bring such and such a character on to the stage of the Human Comedy when he has reached the peak of his attainment, the next novel in which he figures may show him in his obscure or humble beginnings, while others will enable the reader to fill in the gaps and form for himself a picture of that individual’s complete career. This device has inspired two compilations – the Repertory of Cerfberr and Christophe in 1887 and the Dictionary of Fernand Lotte in 1956 – thanks to which any curious reader may look up the ‘biography’ of any character in whom he is interested.

  Naturally Cousin Pons conforms to this practice. Pons, Schwab, Brunner, the Cibots, Madame Sauvage, Poulain, Fraisier and Topinard are all new inventions. But the Camusots, the Popinots, the Berthiers, the Cardots, Crottat, Hannequin, Gaudissart, Bixiou, Madeleine Vivet, Héloïse Brisetout, Madame Fontaine, Magus, Schmucke himself and others are recurrent – some of them even familiar – figures in the Human Comedy. ‘Madame la Présidente Camusot de Marville’ had begun life as an art student in The Vendetta (1830); her astounding ignorance about art in Cousin Pons is explained by the fact that Balzac had, in a later edition of The Vendetta, substituted her name for that of the original character, a practice he often adopted in working out these life-schemes. Thereafter, in various novels, he had shown her marrying the rather stupid and incompetent Camusot and pushing him upwards in a legal career which, as will be seen in Cousin Pons, still does not satisfy her ambitions. As for Schmucke, only one of his other appearances – in A Daughter of Eve – has much importance. Gaudissart had first come to life in 1833 (The Illustrious Gaudissart) as a jovial, pushing but gullible commercial traveller. In César Birotteau Anselme Popinot, the future politician and count, had given him a helping hand by employing him as a publicity agent for the sale of a cosmetic product. In Cousin Pons, thanks to the same man’s benevolence, he has become a theatre manager, but is sighing for new worlds to conquer.

  Finally, a word on certain peculiarities of diction in the present translation. Balzac makes Schmucke talk a curious brand of Germanized French (he does the same with his Alsatian banker, the Baron de Nucingen). This is purely phonetic, for Schmucke’s French is otherwise normal in grammar, syntax and idiom. In this translation the same principle is followed. The utterances of Rémonencq, a native of Auvergne, reproduce, but only for a certain number of pages, the charabia of that region: it consists mainly, in Balzac’s text, of the substitution of ‘sh’ for ‘s’. This translation drops it from the beginning. Madame Cibot has a conversational trick (mostly in her hypocritically affectionate moments) which consists of interpolating ‘n’s in her sentences – when Balzac remembers to do it. This also is discarded. Also she and ‘La Sauvage’ are generally deemed to speak the popular Parisian of the uneducated classes; it was felt that the attempt to find an equivalent in popular English would give a very un-French atmosphere. Moreover, on occasions, Madame Cibot rises to quite sophisticated French.

  H. J. H.

  1. A glorious relic of Imperial times

  ABOUT three o’clock in the afternoon, one day in October 1844, an old man of some sixty years (though anyone who saw him would have thought him older) was walking along the Boulevard des Italiens, with his nose thrust forward and a smug expression on his lips, like a merchant who has just made an excellent deal, or a bachelor emerging from a lady’s boudoir, pleased with his prowess – in Paris the expression of male self-satisfaction can go no further. Whenever this old man came into view, habitual idlers sitting about and enjoying the pleasure of sizing up passers-by let their features relax into a typically Parisian smile, indicative of irony, mockery or compassion. But it takes a keen and lively curiosity to light up the face of a Parisian, surfeited as he is with strange spectacles. Perhaps the witticism of an actor named Hyacinthe, famous for his sallies, will help to explain this creature’s value as an archaeological specimen and the smile which, on his appearance, flitted from face to face. When Hyacinthe was asked where he had the hats made which sent his audiences into fits of laughter, he replied: ‘I don’t have them made; I just go on wearing them.’ So, among the million actors who play their parts on the great stage of Paris, you will find unwitting copies of Hyacinthe who just go on wearing all the absurd fashions of their time. They seem to be personifications of a whole period. They can arouse you to mirth even when you are wandering about trying to stomach the bitter grief of being betrayed by someone who was once a friend.

  By maintaining in certain points of his attire an unconquerable fidelity to the modes of 1806, this passer-by reminded one of Imperial times without going so far as caricature. To an observant eye, there are subtleties which give high price to such remembrances of time past; but only those expert in idle observation can bring to such an accumulation of details the close analytical inspection it deserves; and, for a passer-by to provoke laughter even from afar, he had to stagger his audience with some such extravagance as actors contrive when they want to make sure of an effective entry. And so this thin, dried-up old man wore a nut-brown spencer over a greenish coat with white metal buttons! In 1844, meeting a man in a spencer made it seem as if Napoleon had deigned to come back to life for an hour or two.

  Now spencers were invented, as the name implies, by an English lord who was doubtless vain of his elegant figure. Some time before the Peace of Amiens, this Englishman had solved the problem of covering his torso without burying himself in a carrick, that horrible garment which is now ending its days on the shoulders of old-fashioned cabmen. But as slender waists are scarce, the male fashion in spencers was short-lived in France, even though it was an English invention. At the sight of this gentleman’s spencer, spectators in their forties and fifties mentally arranged him in top-boots and ribbon-bowed, pistachio-green kerseymere breeches. They saw themselves back in the costume of their youth. Old women started living their love-lives over again. Young people wondered why this venerable Alcibiades had cut off his coat-tails. Everything else about him went so well with this sp
encer that you would not have hesitated to set this passer-by down as an ‘Empire man’, just as one speaks of ‘Empire furniture’. But he symbolized the Empire only for those who knew something, at least from illustrations, about that superb and impressive era. The Empire is already so distant from us that not everybody can conjure it up in all its Gallo-Grecian reality.

  His hat, tilted backward, left his forehead practically bare. This gave him the kind of jauntiness with which, in those times, officials and civilians tried to counter that of the military man. But it was a horrible silk hat, and had cost fourteen francs. On the underside of the brim a pair of tall, broad ears had worn whitish patches which no amount of brushing could remove. The silk, as usual clumsily applied to the cardboard block, was wrinkled here and there, and appeared to be suffering from leprosy, in spite of the grooming it received every morning. Beneath this hat, which was all but falling off, loomed a quaint, comical face – only a Chinese potter could model such a figure – a vast countenance, pitted like a skimming-ladle, each hole in it casting a shadow, and scooped out like a Roman mask. It gave the lie to all the laws of anatomy. It seemed to have no definite shape. Where a draughtsman would place bone-structure were planes of gelatinous flesh; where ordinary faces sink in, this one rounded out into flabby bulges. This fantastic face, squashed flat at each end like a pumpkin, saddened by two grey eyes arched over by two red lines in guise of eyebrows, was dominated by a Don Quixote nose, just as an incongruous boulder might stand out from a plain. Such a nose, as Cervantes no doubt observed, denotes that inborn capacity for devotion to great causes which easily declines into gullibility. For this ludicrously exaggerated ugliness did not excite derision. The excessive melancholy abounding in this poor man’s pale eyes immediately struck anyone who might have mocked, and froze the jest on his lips. In a flash, the thought came that nature had forbidden this man to make tender advances, because they could only awaken laughter or distress in a woman. A Frenchman is speechless when he meets with that misfortune which in his eyes is the cruellest of all misfortunes: the inability to attract.

  *

  This man so ill-favoured by nature was dressed like poor people of good social standing, whom the merely rich quite often try to copy. Over his shoes he had gaiters of Imperial Guard style, which no doubt allowed him to keep on wearing the same socks for some time. His black cloth trousers had reddish streaks on them, and along the creases ran white or glossy lines which, like their cut, relegated the date of their purchase to three years back. The bagginess of this garment scarcely disguised a leanness which was constitutional rather than the result of a Pythagorean diet, for this worthy man had a sensual mouth and gross lips, and when he smiled he displayed white teeth which a shark might envy. His shawl-waistcoat, also of black cloth, but lined with a white waistcoat under which, as a third line of defence, gleamed the fringe of a red jersey, put one in mind of the five waistcoats of Garat. A huge white muslin cravat, with the showy kind of knot sported by lady-killers to allure the ‘alluring women’ of 1809, came up so far over his chin that his face seemed as if plunged into an abyss. Across his chest was a silk cord, plaited like strands of hair, which protected his watch against the unlikely prospect of theft. His greenish coat, remarkably clean, was three years senior to the trousers; his black velvet collar and white metal buttons, recently renewed, showed signs of meticulous domestic attention.

  His way of securing his hat by pressing it down on the occi-put, his triple waistcoat, his voluminous cravat engulfing his chin, the metal buttons on the greenish coat – so many relics of Empire fashion – were in keeping with the old-fashioned perfumes – all the rage with the dandies at the turn of the century – which he exuded; so too was a curious trimness in the folds, and an indefinable dry meticulousness in the total effect, redolent of David’s school and Jacob’s dainty furniture. What is more, you could see at a glance that he was a well-bred man addicted to some secret vice, or one of those persons with private means whose every disbursement is so strictly limited by the modesty of their income that a broken window-pane, a torn coat, or that plague of our philanthropic age, a charity collection, would cancel out their petty enjoyments for a month. Had you been there, you would have wondered why a smile lit up this grotesque face, for its usual expression must have been sad and cold, like that of all people quietly struggling to meet the trivial needs of existence. But as you noticed the motherly care with which, in his right hand, this strange old man was holding an obviously precious object, tucked under the two left-hand flaps of his double coat to protect it from any possible damage; above all when you saw him fussing along with the self-importance of a man of leisure entrusted with an errand, you would have suspected that he had found something like a Marchioness’s stray lap-dog and, with the eager gallantry of an Empire man, was bearing it back in triumph to the fair lady of sixty who was still loath to renounce her admirer’s daily call. Paris is the one city in the world where you might meet with such sights : thanks to these, its boulevards provide a nonstop theatre show, performed gratis by Frenchmen for the greater glory of Art.

  2. Decline and fall of a prize-winner

  JUDGING by the man’s bony contours, you would not, despite the challenge of his spencer, have readily assigned him to the conventional world of Paris artists, who, like the Paris street urchins, enjoy the privilege of stirring the middle-class imagination to astonishing hilarity. Yet this passer-by had held the ‘Grand Prix’. He had composed the first cantata to win an award at the Institut, just after the Académie de Rome had been set up again. In short he was MONSIEUR SYLVAIN PONS, the author of several well-known ballads that our mothers used to warble; he also had a few unpublished scores to his credit. His ugliness had got him work as a music-teacher in several girls’ boarding-schools, and he had no other income but his salary and the fees his lessons brought him. Private lessons at his age! What a host of mysteries were latent in this unromantic situation!

  In fact this last of the spencer-wearers not only carried on his person the symbols of the Empire period; he also carried a great warning inscribed on his three waistcoats. He gave you a free view of one of the many victims of that fatal and deplorable system known as Competitive Examination, which still holds sway in France after having been unproductively applied for a hundred years. This mode of recruiting talent was invented by Poisson de Marigny, the brother of Madame de Pompadour who, round about 1746, was appointed Director of Fine Arts. Now you can count on the fingers of one hand the men of genius produced in the last century by this system of awards. In the first place, no administrative or scholastic endeavour will ever supersede the miracle of chance which throws up great men. Among all the mysteries surrounding genetics, that is the one which our ambitious modern analysis is least able to probe. In the second place, the ancient Egyptians are supposed to have invented incubating ovens. What would be thought of them if they had given no food to their chickens once hatched? Yet that is how France proceeds by trying to rear artists in the hothouse of the competitive examination system. Once these sculptors, painters, engravers and musicians are thus artificially produced, she worries no more about them than a dandy cares, when evening comes, about the flower he pinned to his button-hole that morning. Men of real talent – Greuze or Watteau, Félicien David or Pagnesi, Géricault or Decamps, Auber or David d’Angers, Eugène Delacroix or Meissonier – give no thought to State Prizes. They are bred in open ground under the rays of that invisible sun which we call Vocation.

  Sent to Rome by the State to become a great musician, Sylvain Pons had returned with a taste for antiquities and fine works of art. He was an expert judge of all those masterpieces, wrought by hand and brain, which in recent times have been popularly known as bric-à-brac. And so this nursling of Euterpe came back to Paris, in 1810 or thereabouts, as an avid collector, laden with pictures, statuettes, frames, wood and ivory carvings, enamels, porcelains, etc. While living in Rome on his Academic scholarships, he had used up the greater part of his paternal heritag
e either in paying for or in transporting his purchases. Likewise he had squandered his mother’s estate on a journey he made through Italy after his three statutory years in Rome. He planned a leisurely visit to Venice, Milan, Florence, Bologna and Naples, mooning and musing around each town with the usual heedlessness of an artist who expects to live on his talent as a courtesan lives on her charms. Pons was a happy man while this trip lasted – in so far as happiness was possible for a man of feeling and delicacy, whose ugliness debarred him from ‘success with the fair sex’, as the phrase went in 1809; and who always found that reality fell short of his own ideal. But he had grown reconciled to the discordance between the music he found in his soul and the jarring notes of real life. A feeling for beauty remained keen and pure in his heart and doubtless inspired those clever, subtle and graceful tunes which gained him some reputation between 1810 and 1814. Any reputation in France founded on vogue, fashion and the crazes which have their day in Paris, brings men like Pons into being. In no other country are great achievements so harshly received and trivial ones welcomed with such disdainful indulgence. His melodies were soon submerged under the flood of German harmony and the operas of Rossini, and if in 1824 he was still accepted as an agreeable composer – thanks to a few recent ballads – imagine what his standing was by 1831! And so, in 1844, when the stage was set for the only drama that occurred in his insignificant life, Sylvain Pons struck but a feeble and antiquated note in the musical world. Publishers were unaware of his existence even though, for a modest reward, he wrote the music for several plays performed in the theatre he worked in and others in the neighbourhood.