Cousin Pons Read online

  In heart and character both Pons and Schmucke were abundantly given to those childish sentimentalities noticeable in Germans: for instance, a fondness for flowers and nature’s artistry which induces them to set up large glass globes in their gardens so that they may recapture in miniature the full-scale landscape they see in front of them; or the predilection for research which sends a gaitered Teutonic botanist on a hundred leagues’ journey in order to discover a truth already smiling at him from the margin of his well under the jasmine of his courtyard; or, lastly, the urge to find psychic meaning in material trifles which is responsible for the uninterpretable works of Jean-Paul Richter, the tipsy fantasies which Hoffmann has put into print and the folio volumes which, in Germany, ward off access to the simplest questions and delve down into unfathomable depths, only to reveal a mens teutonica at the bottom. Both were Catholics and attended Mass together, discharging their religious duties like children who never have any sins to confess. They firmly believed that music, heaven’s own language, bears the same relation to ideas and feelings as ideas and feelings bear to speech, and used it ad infinitum as a means of communication, replying to one another in orgies of music in order, like lovers, to persuade themselves of the truth of their convictions. Schmucke was as absent-minded as Pons was sharply alert. While Pons thought of his collection, Schmucke day-dreamed; the latter was attentive to spiritual, Pons to material beauty. Pons could pick out and snap up a china tea-cup while Schmucke was sentimentally blowing his nose over some theme by Rossini, Bellini, Beethoven or Mozart, searching for the source or equivalent of this musical phrase in the realm of feeling. Both Schmucke, whose budget was at the mercy of his absent-mindedness, and Pons, whose mania made him a spendthrift, reached the same result by the end of the year: an empty purse.

  Had it not been for this friendship, Pons’s disappointments might well have got the better of him; but life became endurable for him once he found a kindred soul to confide in. The first time he poured out his woes into Schmucke’s sympathetic ears, the kindly German advised him to live as he himself did, at home, on bread and cheese, instead of dining out at such a cost to his self-respect. Unfortunately Pons dared not admit to Schmucke that his heart and his stomach were at daggers drawn, that while his heart bled, his stomach throve and needed a good dinner to savour no matter the price, just as a gallant needs a mistress to caress. It took Schmucke some time to fathom Pons, being too much of a German to have a Frenchman’s quickness of perception; but he only loved poor Pons the better for it. Nothing fortifies friendship more than one of two friends thinking himself superior to the other. An angel would have cast no blame on Schmucke when he saw him rubbing his hands on discovering what intense enjoyment gourmandizing gave to his friend. In fact, the very next day, the kindly German embellished the lunch-table with delicacies he went and bought himself, and he took care to provide new ones each day for his friend – for since their first meeting they had been lunching together every day.

  You would have to know nothing of Paris to imagine that the two friends were immune from Parisian mockery, which has never shown respect for anything. Schmucke and Pons, on taking each other for better or for worse, had decided to live together for economy’s sake. They paid equal shares for the rent of a flat which was divided in very unequal proportions. It was situated in a quiet house in a quiet street – the rue de Normandie, in the Marais district. Since they often went out together, strolling side by side along the same boulevards, idlers in those quarters had nicknamed them ‘the two Nutcrackers’. This soubriquet makes a description of Schmucke superfluous at this point: he was to Pons what Niobe’s nurse, the famous statue in the Vatican, is to the Venus of the Tribuna.

  Madame Cibot, the concierge, was the pivot on which the two ‘Nutcrackers’’ ménage turned, but she plays so important a part in the drama which broke up this dual existence that it is better to postpone her description until she is about to walk on to our stage.

  What remains to be told about the spiritual plight of these two people is just what ninety-nine per cent of readers in this forty-seventh year of the nineteenth century will find it most difficult to comprehend, probably thanks to the prodigious development of finance caused by the founding of the railways. There is little, and yet much, to say. In fact, we have to give some idea of these two persons’ excessive sensitivity. Let us borrow a metaphor from the railways, even if only to recoup ourselves for the sums they have borrowed from us. The trains of today, as they speed along the rails, grind up imperceptible grains of sand. Introduce one of these grains, invisible to a traveller’s eye, into his kidney, and he will feel the tortures of that fearful and sometimes mortal disease known as the gravel. Now the equivalent of this invisible grain of sand, unheeded by the world of today as it hurtles along its steel track with the speed of a locomotive, this grain which at all times and occasions was being forced into the very substance of these two souls, was like a sort of gravel lodged in the heart. Each of them had an excessively tender compassion for other people’s griefs and wept at his impotence to cure them. As for the sensations they themselves experienced, they were like those of a mimosa pudica, so acute as to amount to a disease. Nothing – neither old age itself nor the continuous spectacle which life on the stage of Paris affords – had hardened the pure, unspoilt, child-like souls of these two. The farther they went, the keener their inner sufferings became. Such, alas, is the lot of those unsullied natures, those peaceful thinkers, those true poets who have never fallen into any excess.

  Ever since these two old men had come together, they had pursued their almost similar daily tasks as fraternally as a pair of Paris cab-horses trotting along together. They got up at seven, winter and summer, breakfasted and set forth for their lessons in their respective schools, and at need took one another’s place. About noon Pons went off to his theatre when a rehearsal was on, and he spent every minute of freedom roaming the streets. Then in the evening the two friends met again at the theatre in which Pons had also found work for Schmucke.

  *

  This is how it came about. When Pons first met Schmucke, he had just obtained – without asking for it – his conductor’s baton: as good as a field-marshal’s baton for an obscure composer! Monsieur le Comte Popinot, that bourgeois hero of the 1830 Revolution, then a minister, had earmarked this post for the poor musician at the same time as he obtained a theatre licence for one of his friends, the kind of friend who makes a parvenu blush when, crossing Paris in his carriage, he espies an old comrade of his youth, down-at-heel, with frayed trouser-bottoms, in an incredibly discoloured frock-coat, but still on the look-out for business deals which are too adventurous to attract that elusive thing, capital. This friend, whose name was Gaudissart, formerly a commercial traveller, had in his time contributed much to the success of the great Popinot firm. Popinot was now a count and had been made a Peer of France after occupying two ministerial posts: he did not disown THE ILLUSTRIOUS GAUDISSART. Far from it: he decided to put the traveller in the way of renewing his wardrobe and replenishing his purse; for neither politics, nor any snobbishness acquired at the Citizen-King’s court, had corrupted the heart of this erstwhile manufacturer of cosmetics. Gaudissart, still hot on the trail of women, asked to be given the licence of a bankrupt theatre, and the minister, when he handed it over, took the precaution of sending along a few old roués who were rich enough to found a strongly financed company whose shareholders were partial to what a pair of tights conceals. Pons, as a hanger-on in the Popinot mansion, was thrown in as part of the bargain.

  In any case the Gaudissart Company prospered, and in 1834 decided to carry out the great idea of providing an opera-house for the masses, on the Boulevard. Ballet-music and fairy-plays demanded a tolerably good orchestra conductor who could do a bit of composing. The management which the Gaudissart Company replaced had for a long time been short of a copyist of parts, and so Pons got Schmucke into the theatre to take charge of copying – a subordinate occupation, but one requiring a s
ound knowledge of music. At the advice of Pons, Schmucke came to an arrangement with the director of this service at the Opéra-Comique, and thus saved himself the donkey work involved. The partnership of Pons and Schmucke produced wonderful results. Like all Germans, Schmucke was a master of harmony, and he looked after the orchestration of scores for which Pons furnished the singing parts. When certain attractive compositions, written expressly for two or three important theatrical successes, won the admiration of connoisseurs, the latter did not bother about the composers, but explained them in terms of progress. Pons and Schmucke suffered eclipse in this flood of glory, just like certain people who get drowned in their baths. In Paris, especially since 1830, no one gets to the fore without thrusting aside, vigorously and quibuscumque viis, a formidable throng of rivals: one needs excessively sturdy loins for this, and the two friends were suffering from that gravel in the heart which impedes all activity prompted by ambition.

  As a rule, Pons betook himself to the orchestra-pit of his theatre about eight in the evening. That is the time when the curtain rises on popular productions, whose overtures and incidental music call for the tyrannical sweep of the baton. Most minor theatres make shift with this unpunctuality, and it suited Pons so much the more because he was quite indifferent about his relations with the management. Besides, when Pons was not there on time, Schmucke took his place. As the years went by, Schmucke’s position in the orchestra had become well-established. The illustrious Gaudissart, without saying a word, had taken note of both the value and the serviceableness of Pons’s collaborator. As in the bigger theatres, it had become necessary to bring a piano into the orchestra. This piano, which Schmucke played without extra payment, was installed close to the conductor’s stand, where the willing supernumerary took up his post. Once this good, unambitious and unassuming German became known, all the musicians took to him. The management put Schmucke – at a modest salary – in charge of those instruments which have no regular place in the orchestras of the Boulevard theatres, but which are often needed – such as the piano, the viol d’amore, the cor anglais, the harp, the cachucha castanets, the bells and the inventions of Sax, etc. Germans may not be able to perform on the great instruments of National Freedom, but they are at home with all instruments of music.

  The two old artists were exceedingly popular with all the theatre staff, and took life there philosophically. They had cultivated a blind spot for the ills endemic in a theatrical company consisting of a corps de ballet mingled with actors and actresses – one of the most frightful medleys which the needs of the box-office have created for the torment of managers, authors and musicians. The great respect he showed to others and his self-respect had gained general esteem for the good and modest Pons. Anyway, in any sphere of life, transparent integrity and unimpeachable honesty command a kind of admiration even in the most ill-natured people. In Paris real goodness makes as much stir as a monster diamond or a rare curio. Not one actor, author or dancing-girl (however impudent she might be) would have risked the lightest sally or practical joke at the expense of Pons or his friend. Pons sometimes made an appearance in the foyer, but Schmucke kept to the underground passage leading from the street to the orchestra pit. Between the acts of the performances he attended, the kindly old German ventured to glance round the auditorium, and he sometimes questioned the first flute – a young man born in Strasbourg of a German family from Kehl – about the eccentric characters who almost always grace the front stalls. This flautist undertook his social education, and Schmucke’s infantile imagination gradually came round to admitting the existence of such fabulous creatures as lorettes, the possibility of marriages contracted in the thirteenth arrondissement,* the prodigality of leading ballet-girls and the shady transactions of theatre-attendants. To this worthy man the lightheartedness of vice seemed the last word in Babylonian depravity, and he gazed at it benignly as if he were contemplating Chinese arabesques. Men of the world must realize that Pons and Schmucke were exploited, to use a word in vogue; but what they lost in money was made up in consideration and friendly services.

  After a successful ballet had set the Gaudissart Company on the way to rapid prosperity, the directors sent Pons a group in silver attributed to Benvenuto Cellini: the exorbitant price asked for it had been talked about in the foyer – a matter of twelve hundred francs! The poor good man tried to give the present back, and Gaudissart was hard put to it to make him accept it. ‘Oh,’ he said to his partner, ‘if we could find actors cut to the same pattern!’ These two lives thus linked, apparently so tranquil, had only one disturbing feature – Pons’s besetting sin, his fierce craving for dining out. And so whenever Schmucke was at home while Pons was dressing for dinner, the kindly German lamented over this baneful habit. ‘If only it mate him fat!’ he often exclaimed. And Schmucke pondered over some means of curing his friend of this degrading vice, for true friends have a moral perception as keen as a dog’s scent: they sniff out their friends’ vexations, divine the causes of them, and worry about them.

  Pons, who always wore a diamond ring on the little finger of his right hand – a fashion which was tolerated in Empire times, but which is laughed at today – was too much the wandering minstrel, too much the Frenchman for his physiognomy to reflect that divine serenity which tempered Schmucke’s appalling ugliness. The German had discerned in his friend’s melancholy cast of countenance the mounting difficulties which rendered his occupation as a parasite more and more painful. Indeed, by October 1844, the number of houses in which Pons dined had naturally dwindled considerably. The unfortunate conductor, finding his rounds reduced to his family circle, had, as we shall see, inordinately extended the meaning of the word ‘family’.

  Our one-time laureate was first cousin to the first wife of Monsieur Camusot, the rich silk-mercer established in the rue des Bourdonnais: she had been Mademoiselle Pons, sole heiress of one of the famous brothers Pons, embroiderers by Royal Appointment. The musician’s parents had been sleeping partners in this firm which they had founded before the Revolution of 1789. It had been bought in 1815 by a Monsieur Rivet from the first Madame Camusot’s father. In 1844, this Camusot, who ten years before had retired from business, was a member of the General Council of Manufacturers, the Chamber of Deputies, etc. The worthy Pons, having been on friendly terms with the Camusot clan, reckoned himself to be a cousin of the silk-mercer’s children by his second wife, although they were not even relations by marriage.

  And since the second Madame Camusot was a former Mademoiselle Cardot, Pons wormed his way as a kinsman of the Camusots into the extensive Cardot family. These formed a second middle-class clan which through intermarriage constituted a whole society no less influential than that of the Camusots. Cardot the notary, a brother of the second Madame Camusot, had married a Mademoiselle Chiffreville. The celebrated family of the Chiffrevilles, the foremost manufacturers of chemical products, was linked with the big pharmaceutical concern for a long time lorded over by Monsieur Anselme Popinot whom, as we know, the July Revolution had flung into the centre of entirely dynastic politics. Pons lined up behind the Camusots and the Cardots and gained access to the Chiffreville’s, and thence to the Popinots – still as a cousin of other cousins.

  This simple glance at the old musician’s more recent connexions show how he was still able to receive family hospitality in 1844; first, from Monsieur le Comte Popinot, Peer of France, former Minister of Agriculture and Commerce; secondly, from Monsieur Cardot, once a notary, now Mayor and Deputy of a Paris electoral district; thirdly, from Monsieur Cardot senior, a member of the Chamber of Deputies, the Paris Municipal Council and the General Council of Manufacturers, and moving towards a peerage; fourthly, Monsieur Camusot de Marville, Pons’s only real cousin, since he was born of his father’s first marriage; but he was only a second cousin. This latter Camusot, in order to avoid being confused with his father and his half brother, had lengthened his name by adding to it that of his Marville estate. In 1844 he became a president of the Royal Co
urt of Justice in Paris.

  The retired notary, Cardot, had married his daughter to his successor, one Berthier, and Pons, as if he were handed over with the practice, secured the right to dine – legally attested, as he put it – with the Berthiers.

  Such was the middle-class firmament which Pons claimed as his family and in which he had so laboriously conserved the privilege of plying knife and fork.

  Of these ten households, the one on whose hospitality the artist had the strongest claim, the household of Président Camusot, caused him the greatest concern. Unfortunately, the Président’s wife, daughter of the late Messire Thirion, Cabinet Usher during the reigns of Louis XVIII and Charles X, had never been kind to her husband’s second cousin. Pons had wasted his time trying to soften this terrible kinswoman, for although he gave free lessons to Mademoiselle Camusot, he had found it impossible to make a musician of this carroty-haired girl. And now, on this particular afternoon, clutching the precious object we have mentioned, he was making his way to the house of his cousin the Président, and he felt, as he crossed the threshold, as if he were entering the Tuileries Palace, so gravely was he impressed by the imposing green draperies, the Carmelite-brown tapestries, the moquette carpets and the sober furniture so redolent of magistracy in all its austerity. Strangely enough, he felt at ease in the Popinot mansion in the rue Basse-du-Rempart, no doubt because of the art treasures it contained; for the erstwhile minister, since his entry into politics, had contracted the mania for collecting things of beauty, no doubt as a reaction against the political mentality which produces a secret collection of ugly deeds.