Cousin Pons Read online

  ‘Come in, Meddem,’ replied Madame Sauvage. Her suddenly amiable demeanour proved that she had been forewarned about this early morning visit.

  And so, after dropping a stage curtsey, Monsieur Fraisier’s half-masculine domestic threw open the door of the office, which looked out on to the street, and in which the former attorney of Mantes was sitting. This office was an exact replica of one of those tiny chambers occupied by third-class bailiffs. The filing-cabinets in them are of blackened wood: the files are so ancient that they have grown beards like those of lawyers’ clerks; the red tape hangs down in a sorry way; the boxes smell of the frolics of mice, and the floor is grey with dust and the ceiling yellow with smoke. The mantelpiece mirror was tarnished; the cast-iron fire-dogs supported a slow-burning log; the clock, a modern marquetry piece, was worth sixty francs and had been bought at some bankrupt sale; the sconces on either side of it, though they affected, with little success, a rococo elegance, were made of zinc, and the paint on them had peeled off here and there to reveal the bare metal. Monsieur Fraisier, a shrivelled and sickly looking little man with a red face covered with spots which spoke of impurities in the blood, who moreover was constantly scratching his right arm, and whose wig, pushed far back on his head, incompletely concealed a sinister-looking, brick-coloured cranium, rose from the cane armchair in which he had been sitting on a green leather cushion. Assuming an amiable air and a fluting tone of voice, he said as he offered her a chair:

  ‘Madame Cibot, I think?’

  ‘Yes, Monsieur,’ the concierge replied, with none of her usual self-assurance. She was alarmed by the sound of his voice, which was scarcely less dissonant than that of the doorbell, and by the hard scrutiny she received from the harsh, greenish eyes of her prospective legal adviser. And the office reeked so strongly of Fraisier that you might have thought that a pestilence reigned in the very atmosphere. Madame Cibot now understood why Madame Florimond had never become Madame Fraisier.

  ‘Poulain has told me about you, my dear lady,’ said the man of law, in those affected accents which are commonly called ‘genteel’, but which remained as sharp and thin as a local wine.

  At this point Fraisier endeavoured to drape his person to advantage by bringing up over his bony knees, which were cased in very threadbare duffel, the two flaps of an old printed calico dressing-gown, the padding of which was taking the liberty of pushing out through a number of rents; but the weight of the wadding pulled the flaps away and exposed a flannel jerkin blackened with age. With an air of self-complacency, he drew tightly around him the girdle of this rebellious dressing-gown in order to emphasize his waspish waist-line. Next he picked up the fire-tongs and brought together two charred sticks which had stayed apart for a long time like a pair of quarrelsome brothers. Then an idea suddenly struck him and he drew himself up.

  ‘Madame Sauvage!’ he cried.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘I am not at home to anyone.’

  ‘God help me, I know that!’ replied the virago in an aggressive tone of voice.

  ‘She’s my old nurse,’ said the man of law to La Cibot, revealing some embarrassment.

  ‘Was her milk as sour then as her looks are now?’ asked the former beauty-queen of the Central Market.

  Fraisier laughed at this quip and bolted the door to make sure that his housekeeper could not come in and interrupt La Cibot’s confidential utterances.

  ‘Well now, Madame, tell me what your business is,’ he said, sitting down and still trying to bring his dressing-gown around him. ‘Anyone recommended to me by the only friend I have in the world can count upon me absolutely… absolutely!’

  Madame Cibot talked for half an hour without the lawyer allowing himself to make the slightest interruption. He had the rapt air of a young recruit listening to a veteran of the Guard. His silence and deference, the attention he seemed to be paying to this spate of chatter – samples of which have been furnished in the scenes between La Cibot and poor Pons – caused the mistrustful concierge to jettison some of the misgivings which had assailed her at the sight of so many sordid details.

  *

  When La Cibot had finished and was waiting for advice, the little lawyer, whose green eyes, dotted with black specks, had been studying his future client, was taken with what is commonly called a ‘churchyard cough’ and had recourse to an earthenware bowl half-filled with a herbal decoction which he gulped down.

  ‘But for Poulain,’ said Fraisier in response to his visitor’s glance of maternal solicitude, ‘I should be dead already, my dear Madame Cibot. But he says he will put me right again.’

  He seemed to have lost all memory of his client’s confidences, and she was in half a mind to take her leave of a person who seemed to have one foot in the grave.

  ‘Madame, in cases of inheritance, before going any further, I need to know two things,’ continued the former attorney of Mantes with a solemn air. ‘Firstly, is the inheritance large enough to bother about? Secondly, who are the legal heirs? Inheritances may well be counted as the spoils of war, but there is an enemy to contend with: the rightful heirs!’

  La Cibot told him about Rémonencq and Elias Magus and informed him that these two wily confederates valued the collection of pictures at six hundred thousand francs.

  ‘Would they buy them at that price?’ asked the former attorney of Mantes. ‘Because, you see, Madame, legal men are sceptical about pictures. A picture is either two francs’ worth of canvas or a painting which will fetch a hundred thousand francs. Now paintings worth a hundred thousand francs are known far and wide – and what miscalculations have been made about all of them, even the most famous ones! A well-known financier, with a much vaunted, much visited gallery – engravings had been made of his pictures, think of that! – was supposed to have spent millions on it. He died – as people do. Well, his genuine Old Masters didn’t sell for more than two hundred thousand francs! You would have to bring those two gentlemen to me.… And now, what about the heirs?’

  And Fraisier returned to his pose as a listener. When he heard Président Camusot’s name pronounced, he gave a nod accompanied by a grimace which put La Cibot very much on the qui vive. She made an effort to interpret what she read on the forehead and atrocious physiognomy of the man; but she only found herself scrutinizing what gamblers call a ‘poker-face’.

  ‘Yes, my dear sir,’ La Cibot repeated, ‘my gentleman, Monsieur Pons, is the Président Camusot de Marville’s own cousin – he dins it into me a dozen times a day. The first wife of Monsieur Camusot the silk-merchant…’

  ‘Who’s just been made a Peer of France…’

  ‘Was a Mademoiselle Pons, Monsieur Pons’s first cousin…’

  ‘Actually they are second cousins…’

  ‘Well, by now they are nothing at all to one another. They’ve fallen out.’

  Monsieur Camusot de Marville, before coming to Paris, had for five years been President of the Tribunal at Mantes. Not only was he still remembered there, but he had also kept in touch, for his successor, that very member of the bench with whom he had been in closest contact while he was there, was still presiding over the Tribunal and consequently knew Fraisier through and through.

  ‘Do you know, Madame,’ asked Fraisier when La Cibot had stemmed the torrent by closing the red sluice-gates of her mouth, ‘do you know that your chief adversary would be a man who can send people to the scaffold?’

  The concierge leapt up in her chair like a jack-in-the-box.

  ‘Calm yourself, my dear lady,’ Fraisier went on. ‘It’s quite understandable that you shouldn’t know what it means to be a President of the Chamber of Indictment in the Royal Court of Paris, but you ought to have known that Monsieur Pons had a legal heir by consanguinity. Monsieur le Président de Marville is your sick man’s one and only heir. True, he is only a collateral in the third degree, and this means that Monsieur Pons, as the law goes, can leave his fortune to anyone he wishes. Another thing that you don’t know: at least six weeks ago Mon
sieur le Président’s daughter married the eldest son of Monsieur le Comte Popinot, Peer of France, recently Minister of Agriculture and Trade, one of the most influential figures in present-day politics. This marriage alliance makes the Président even more redoubtable than he is as ruler of the Assize Court.’

  Madame Cibot trembled at the sound of the word ‘Assize’.

  ‘Yes, he’s the man who can send you there,’ continued Fraisier. ‘Ah, my dear lady! You don’t know what a Scarlet Robe can do! It’s bad enough to have a mere Black Gown against you! Here am I, ruined, bald, nearly dead. Well, it’s because, unwittingly, I came up against a mere Public Prosecutor. I was forced to sell my practice for next to nothing, and thought myself quite lucky to get away with the loss of all I had. Had I tried to resist, I could not have kept my status as a barrister. Yet another thing you don’t know: if you only had Monsieur le Président Camusot to deal with, that wouldn’t matter. But note also that he has a wife…! And if you came face to face with her, you’d shake in your shoes, just as if you were already at the foot of the scaffold. Your hair would stand on end. The Présidente is vindictive enough to devote ten years to inveigling you into a trap which would cost you your life! She manages her husband like a child whipping a top! In her time she has brought a charming young man to suicide in the Conciergerie prison. She completely whitewashed a count who was indicted for forgery. She almost managed to get one of the most distinguished aristocrats at Court declared a lunatic. Finally, she won a stand-up fight against Monsieur de Granville, the Procurator General…’

  ‘The man who lived in the rue Vieille de Temple, at the corner of the rue Saint-François?…’

  ‘The very same. They say she intends to get her husband made Minister of Justice, and I wouldn’t swear she won’t bring it off… If she took it into her head to send us both to the Assize Court and from there to the galleys, I – mark you, I’m as innocent as a new-born babe – I would apply for a passport and go off to the United States. I know too much about the ways of the law. Now then, my dear Madame Cibot, in order to marry her daughter to the young Vicomte Popinot, who will be, so they say, your landlord Monsieur Pillerault’s heir, the Présidente has stripped herself of all her property, so that at present the Président and his wife are reduced to living on his official salary. Do you imagine, dear lady, that in these circumstances Madame le Présidente is going to give the cold shoulder to your Monsieur Pons’s inheritance? Why, I would rather face guns loaded with grape-shot than find myself up against such a woman!’

  ‘But why?’ said La Cibot. ‘They’ve fallen out.’

  ‘What does that matter? All the more reason. You might kill a relative to satisfy a grievance. That’s something. But it’s a real pleasure to grab his money!’

  ‘But the poor man is dead set against all his legal heirs. He keeps on telling me about those people. I remember their names, Monsieur Cardot, Monsieur Berthier and the rest. They’ve squashed him like an egg under a cartwheel.’

  ‘Would you like to be smashed to bits in the same way?’

  ‘My goodness, my goodness!’ cried the concierge. ‘Oh, Ma’me Fontaine was right when she said I’d find obstacles in my way. But she said things would work out all right.’

  ‘Listen, dear Madame Cibot… You may well get some thirty thousand francs out of this affair. But give up the idea of getting the legacy… Monsieur Poulain and I were talking yesterday about you and your problem.’

  At that Madame Cibot gave another jump.

  ‘What’s the matter now?’ asked Fraisier.

  ‘Well, if you knew all about my problem, why did you let me chatter away like a magpie?’

  ‘Madame Cibot, I knew all about your problem, but I knew nothing about Madame Cibot! All my clients have their little peculiarities.’

  At this point Madame Cibot cast a singular glance at her future counsel, one in which all her mistrust was plain to see. Fraisier intercepted this glance.

  19. Fraisier makes things clear

  ‘I WILL continue,’ said Fraisier. ‘Well now, it was you who put our friend Poulain in touch with old Monsieur Pillerault, great-uncle of Madame la Comtesse Popinot. And that’s one of the things that give you a claim to my devoted service. Mark this: Poulain visits your landlord once a fortnight, and he has learnt all the relevant facts from him. This retired tradesman attended his great-grand-nephew’s wedding (the Popinots have expectations from this uncle, who has certainly an income of about fifteen thousand francs per annum, and for the last twenty-five years has been living like a hermit, spending scarcely three thousand francs a year) – and he told Poulain the whole story of the marriage. It appears that all this turmoil was caused by no other than your precious old musician, who tried out of spite to bring the Président’s family into disrepute. You have to listen to both sides of a question, you know. Your sick man protests his innocence, but everyone thinks he’s a monster…’

  ‘I shouldn’t be surprised if he was!’ cried La Cibot. ‘Just imagine, I’ve been helping him out for ten years. He’s had all my savings. He knows it and he just won’t put me in his will… It’s a fact, Monsieur, he just won’t; he’s as stubborn as a mule. I’ve been talking to him about it for a fortnight, and the old fraud won’t budge an inch. Not a word can you get out of him; he just stares at you. All he told me was that he would recommend me to Monsieur Schmucke.’

  ‘So he proposes to make a will in Schmucke’s favour?’

  ‘He’ll leave him every penny.’

  ‘Listen, my dear Madame Cibot, in order to make up my mind about this, if I’m to think out a plan of action, I should have to know Monsieur Schmucke, inspect the chattels comprising the inheritance, and have a talk with the Jew you told me about. And so you must let me manage the affair.’

  ‘I’ll think it over, my good Monsieur Fraisier.’

  ‘Think it over! What do you mean?’ said Fraisier. There was all the venom of an adder in his glance. He returned to his normal manner of speech. ‘Look now. Am I or am I not your legal adviser? Let’s get this clear.’

  La Cibot felt that he was reading her thoughts, and a chill went down her spine.

  ‘I have every confidence in you,’ she replied, realizing she was at the mercy of a tiger.

  ‘We advocates are well used to being betrayed by our clients. Just consider your position: it’s a splendid one. If you follow my advice in every particular, you will get – I guarantee you this – thirty or forty thousand francs out of his inheritance. But there’s a reverse side to this lovely medal. Suppose it comes to the Présidente’s ears that Monsieur Pons’s inheritance is as much as a million, and that you want to pare it down a bit?… There are always informers,’ he added by way of parenthesis, ‘ready to pass on news like that.’

  This parenthesis, preceded and followed by a pause, brought a shudder to La Cibot, for it immediately occurred to her that Fraisier himself might well be the informer.

  ‘My dear client, it would only take them ten minutes to prevail upon good Monsieur Pillerault to dismiss you from your lodge, and give you two hours to clear out.’

  ‘A fat lot I should care!’ said La Cibot assuming the stance of a Bellona. ‘I should stay on with my two gentlemen as their confidential servant.’

  ‘And when they saw that, they would lay a trap for you, and one fine morning, you’d find yourself in the lock-up, you and your husband, with a capital charge hanging over you.’

  ‘What, me!’ cried La Cibot. ‘I’ve never lifted a brass farthing from anybody! Me? Me?’

  She went on for five minutes, and Fraisier studied this great artiste as she performed the solo part in her concerto of self-praise. His air was cold and mocking; his glance went through La Cibot like a stiletto; he was laughing to himself, and his dusty wig was twitching. Robespierre, the Lucius Cornelius Sulla of France, must have looked like that when he was composing verses in the intervals of signing death-sentences.

  ‘How could they? Why should they? And on what grounds?’
she asked by way of conclusion.

  ‘You would like to know how they could bring you to the guillotine?’

  La Cibot went as pale as death, for this sentence felt like the knife of judgement crashing down on to her neck. She looked at Fraisier in bewilderment.

  ‘Listen carefully, my dear child,’ continued Fraisier, repressing the thrill of satisfaction which the sight of his client’s terror had given him.

  ‘I’d rather throw the whole thing up,’ she muttered, and she tried to rise from her chair.

  ‘Keep your seat. You must learn of the danger you are in. It’s for me to enlighten you,’ said Fraisier in commanding tones. ‘You lose your job with Monsieur Pillerault – no doubt about that, is there? You take service with these two gentlemen. Very good. That means a declaration of war between you and the Présidente. You’ll stop at nothing to lay your hands on this inheritance and get what pickings you can.’

  La Cibot made a gesture of dissent.

  ‘Oh, I don’t blame you, that’s not my job,’ said Fraisier in answer to this silent protest. ‘You’ll be involving yourself in a fight and you’ll take it further than you think. An idea goes to one’s head, and one hits out…’

  Madame Cibot bridled, and made another gesture of denial.

  ‘Come, come, old lady,’ Fraisier continued with nauseating familiarity. ‘You’d stop at nothing…’

  ‘The very idea! Do you take me for a thief?’

  ‘Come along now, Mamma. You have a receipt from Monsieur Schmucke which didn’t cost you much… See here, my beauty, you’re at confession now, and you mustn’t deceive your confessor, particularly when this confessor can see right through to your heart!’

  La Cibot was terrified at the man’s perspicacity and now knew the reason why he had listened to her with such deep attention.

  ‘Well then,’ continued Fraisier. ‘You can take it for granted that the Présidente isn’t going to let you lead the field in the succession stakes. You will be watched – spied upon. You get Monsieur Pons to put you in his will. Then, one fine day, the police come along. They pounce on some decoction or other and find arsenic in it. You and your husband are arrested, tried and condemned for attempting to murder Monsieur Pons in order to draw the legacy… There was a poor woman at Versailles whose defence I undertook. She was as truly innocent as you would be in such a case. Things were just as I’m telling you, and so the utmost I could do was to save her life. The wretched woman was sentenced to twenty years’ penal servitude, and she’s doing her stretch in Saint-Lazare.’