Cousin Pons Page 6

  The old artist’s vivid mimicry, the zest with which he told how smart he had been in getting the better of the dealer’s ignorance, made him an ideal model for a painter of the Dutch school. But all this was lost on the Présidente and her daughter. The cold, disdainful glances they exchanged said quite plainly: ‘What a character!’

  ‘So you find that an amusing occupation?’ asked the Présidente.

  Pons was so chilled by this question that he felt like giving the Présidente a good slap.

  ‘But of course, my dear Présidente,’ he went on, ‘it’s like a day in the hunting field – stalking great works of art. You are up against adversaries who are warding you off the game you are hunting. It’s a case of Greek meeting Greek. Between you and the masterpiece you are after, there’s a Norman, a Jew or an Auvergnat. Why, it’s just like a fairy-story: a princess in the power of a sorcerer!’

  ‘And how do you pick out a Watt…? – What did you say his name was?’

  ‘Watteau, cousin, was one of the greatest eighteenth-century painters. Come now, can’t you see it’s as good as signed?’ he said, pointing out to her one of those pastoral scenes showing make-believe shepherdesses and great lords disguised as swains dancing a reel together. ‘What fire! What verve! What colouring! And it’s just thrown off like a calligrapher’s flourish; it seems quite effortless. And on the other side, look, a ball in a salon: winter one side, summer the other. What ornamentation, and how fresh it has kept! See, the ferrule is in gold, and finished off on each side with a tiny ruby which I have cleaned up!’

  ‘If that’s the case, cousin, I couldn’t take anything so valuable as that from you. You ought to sell it and invest the money.’ None the less the Présidente asked nothing better than to keep this splendid fan.

  ‘It’s high time that the plaything of Vice should become an adornment for Virtue,’ said the old fellow, recovering a little of his self possession; ‘and it will have taken a hundred years to accomplish the miracle! Be assured that no princess at Court will have anything comparable to this masterpiece, for unfortunately it is typical of human nature to do more for a Pompadour than for a virtuous queen!’

  ‘Very well, I accept it,’ said the Présidente with a laugh. ‘Cécile, my angel, go and arrange with Madeleine for the dinner to be worthy of our cousin.’

  The Présidente merely wanted to even things up with Pons. This instruction, given audibly against all the canons of good taste, was so like settling an account that he blushed like a girl caught in some unseemly behaviour. It was rather too large a piece of gravel and it rolled over in his heart for quite a time. Her red-headed daughter, who bore herself with some priggishness, aped her father’s grave magisterial manner, and had more than a touch of her mother’s asperity, disappeared and left poor Pons to the tender mercies of the awe-inspiring Présidente.

  5. One of the thousand insults a parasite has to swallow

  ‘SHE’S a darling child, my little Lili,’ said the Présidente, still using the pet name given to Cécile in her childhood.

  ‘Charming,’ replied the old musician, twiddling his thumbs.

  ‘I just can’t understand the times we live in,’ the Présidente went on. ‘What’s the good of having a father who is a President at the Royal Court of Justice in Paris and a Commander of the Legion of Honour, as well as a millionaire grandfather, at present a Deputy, and soon to become a Peer of France – the richest wholesale silk-mercer in France?’

  The Président’s attachment to the new dynasty had recently earned him a Commander’s ribbon, and some jealous spirits put this favour down to his friendship with Popinot. This Minister, despite his modesty, had, as we have seen, consented to be made a Count – ‘for my son’s sake’, as he explained to his many friends.

  ‘Only money matters today,’ answered Cousin Pons. ‘Only the wealthy get any consideration, and…’

  ‘Where should we be then,’ exclaimed the Présidente, ‘if my poor little Charles had been spared!’

  ‘Oh, you would certainly be poor if you had two children,’ Cousin Pons continued. ‘That’s what comes of the equal partition of property. But don’t worry, dear cousin, Cécile will make a good match in the end… I don’t know any other girl with such accomplishments.’

  And that shows to what low mental level Pons had sunk in the houses of his amphitryons. He served up their ideas, and made platitudinous comments on them, like the chorus in a Greek play. He did not dare to give vent to the originality which brings artists into the limelight. In his youth it had inspired him with many a subtle shaft, but his habit of self-effacement had by now almost suppressed it; and even when it reappeared, as it had done just then, it met with a snub.

  ‘But I got married with a dowry of no more than twenty thousand francs…’

  ‘Yes, cousin, in 1819,’ Pons broke in. ‘And look what you were – a capable girl, a protégée of Louis XVIII!’

  ‘Well, after all, my daughter is an angel of perfection, extremely intelligent, a girl of genuine feeling, with a marriage-portion of a hundred thousand francs – and great expectations into the bargain. And she’s still on our hands!’

  Madame de Marville went on talking for twenty minutes about her self and her daughter, indulging in the lamentations peculiar to mothers who have daughters to marry off. For twenty years Pons had been dining at the house of Camusot, his only real cousin, and the poor man was still waiting for a kindly inquiry about his own affairs, his life and health. What is more, he was treated as a sort of drain down which domestic confidences were flushed. Complete reliance could be placed on his discretion, which was well-tried and indeed necessary, for one rash word would have barred him from ten households. And so he had not only to listen, but also to show constant approval. He jibbed at nothing, accused no one, defended no one; in his eyes, everyone was in the right. He therefore counted no longer as a man, but merely as a digestive apparatus. In the course of her long tirade, the Présidente admitted to her cousin – with a certain cautiousness of statement – that she was ready to accept almost blindly any candidate for her daughter’s hand. Even a man of forty-eight would suit her book so long as he had an income of twenty thousand francs.

  ‘Cécile has turned twenty-three, and if by bad luck she had to wait till she was twenty-five or twenty-six, it would be exceedingly difficult to find her a husband. People begin to wonder why a young person of that age has remained on the shelf for so long. In our social circle there’s already too much tittle-tattle about her situation. We have used up all the commonplace excuses: “She’s very young. – She’s too fond of her parents to leave them. – She’s happy at home. – She’s particular and wants to marry into a good family.” People are beginning to laugh at us, I am sure of that. Besides, Cécile is tired of waiting: the poor child is suffering.’

  ‘From what?’ was Pons’s artless query.

  ‘Can’t you see?’ her mother replied, with the tartness of a duenna. ‘It vexes her to see all her friends getting married before she does.’

  ‘And yet, cousin,’ said the old musician, meekly, ‘in what way have things changed since I last had the pleasure of dining here, for you to be thinking of men of forty-eight for Cécile?’

  ‘Just this,’ the Présidente retorted. ‘We were to have an interview with a Judge of Appeal, who has a tidy fortune and a son thirty years old, for whom Monsieur de Marville would have obtained – it would have cost something – a post as chief clerk in the Audit Office. The young man is already there as a supernumerary. Well, we have just learnt that this young man has been fool enough to run off to Italy with a “duchess” – of the popular ballroom variety. It’s as good as saying “No thank you”. And we have been refused a young man whose mother is dead, who already enjoys an income of thirty thousand francs and will inherit a fortune from his father. And so you must excuse us, dear cousin, for feeling out of humour. You have come at a really critical moment.’

  Just as Pons was racking his brains for one of those obsequio
us replies which always occurred to him too late when he was with hosts who intimidated him, Madeleine came in, handed a short missive to the Présidente and waited for an answer. This is how it read:

  If we made out, dear Mamma, that this note was sent from the Law Courts by my father, telling you to bring me for dinner to his friend’s for further talks about my marriage, Cousin Pons would go away; and we could carry out our plan to go to the Popinots.

  ‘Who brought this note from my husband?’ asked the Présidente in a sharp tone of voice.

  ‘A court messenger,’ was the arid Madeleine’s bare-faced reply – it was this elderly Abigail’s way of telling her mistress that she herself had hatched this plot in concert with Cécile, who had lost patience.

  ‘Tell him that my daughter and I will be there at half-past five.’

  *

  Once Madeleine had left the room, the Présidente looked at Pons with that false geniality which has the same effect on a sensitive mind as a mixture of vinegar and milk has on an epicure.

  ‘My dear cousin, dinner is ordered. Do have it without us, for my husband has written to me from the Court-room to tell me that the marriage project is being taken up again with the judge I mentioned, and we are going to dine there… You know we don’t need to stand on ceremony with you. Just make yourself at home. You see how open I am with you; we have no secrets from you. You would not wish, I am sure, to stand in the way of my little angel’s marriage.’

  ‘On the contrary, cousin, I only wish I could find her a husband myself. But in the circle I live in…’

  ‘You are right, it’s not very likely,’ the Présidente rudely interrupted. ‘Well then, will you stay here? Cécile will keep you company while I get dressed.’

  Cruelly hurt as he was by the way the Présidente had set about reproaching him for his poverty, he was still more dismayed at the prospect of remaining alone with the servants.

  ‘But I can dine elsewhere, cousin,’ said the simple fellow.

  ‘Why do that?… Dinner is ready. The servants would eat it.’

  At this horrible remark, Pons drew himself up with a start as if an electric current had passed through him. He gave his cousin a chilly bow and went to pick up his spencer. Cécile’s bedroom door, which opened into the ante-room, was ajar, so that by looking straight into a mirror Pons was able to see the girl shaking with laughter and speaking to her mother in the language of nods and grimaces, which made it clear that the old artist was being meanly taken in. Pons slowly walked downstairs, almost in tears: he was being expelled from this house without knowing why.

  ‘I’m too old now,’ he said to himself. ‘Age and poverty are so ugly that people find them horrible. I’ll never go anywhere again without being invited.’ – A heroic resolve!

  The kitchen door on the ground-floor, facing the lodge, often remained open, as happens in buildings which the owners occupy themselves, while the street door is always kept closed. Thus it happened that Pons could hear the laughter of the cook and manservant, to whom Madeleine was recounting the trick they had played on him; for she had not imagined that the poor man would make so prompt a retreat. The manservant expressed loud approval of this deceit practised on a regular guest who, he said, never gave him more than a three-franc piece as an annual tip.

  ‘That’s all very well,’ the cook remarked; ‘but if he takes the huff and doesn’t come here, good-bye to the three francs the rest of us might have got on New Year’s Day…’

  ‘Rubbish, how would he know?’ was the manservant’s retort to the cook.

  ‘Who cares?’ added Madeleine. ‘If he does find out sooner or later, what does it matter to us? The masters in the houses where he dines find him such a bore that he will be thrown out everywhere.’

  At this moment the old music-master called out to the concierge: ‘Open the door, please.’ This doleful cry was received in deep silence in the kitchen.

  ‘He was listening,’ said the manservant.

  ‘What does it matter?’ Madeleine retorted. ‘Bad luck for him, good luck for us. The stingy old beggar’s done for.’

  The poor man, who had missed none of this kitchen conversation, heard this parting shot too. He walked home through the streets in the same state of mind an old man would have been in after a desperate tussle with footpads. He hurried along in fits and starts, muttering to himself, for his wounded self-respect urged him on as a straw is puffed away by a blustering gale. Finally, not knowing how he got there, he arrived at five o’clock at the Boulevard du Temple. But – a most unusual thing – he had lost all appetite for food.

  And now, if the reader is to understand what a revolution in Pons’s flat his return at such an hour was going to cause, he needs the enlightenment we promised about Madame Cibot.

  6. The Concierge Species – male and female

  THE rue de Normandie is one of those streets in which you might feel you were in a provincial town. Grass thrives there, a passer-by is a rare occurrence, and everybody knows everybody else. The houses date from the time of Henri IV, when it was planned that every street in this quarter should be named after a province, and that a handsome square at the centre should be dedicated to France itself. The idea of a ‘Quartier de l’Europe’ was merely a repetition of this plan. In every sphere, including that of speculative building, plagiarism is rife. The house inhabited by the two musicians was once a town house built between courtyard and garden; but the front part of it, which gave on to the street, had been put up during the heyday of popularity which the Marais district enjoyed during the last century. In this former town house the two friends occupied the whole of the second storey. Both portions of this house belonged to a Monsieur Pillerault, a man of eighty, who left the running of it to a Monsieur and Madame Cibot – they had been his lodge-keepers for twenty-six years. Now, since a porter in the Marais quarter is not paid enough for him to live on what his lodge brings him in, the worthy Cibot eked out his five per cent on rents, and his perquisite of one log per load of wood, with what he could earn by his own toil: he was, like many concierges, a tailor. As time went on, Cibot had given up working for master-tailors; for, by virtue of the reputation he had gained among the shopkeeper class in that area, he enjoyed the unchallenged privilege of patching, invisibly mending and reconditioning every suit of clothes within a radius of three streets. The lodge itself was spacious and salubrious, with a bedroom leading from it. And so the Cibot establishment was considered one of the luckiest by the concierge gentry in the district.

  Cibot was a little man of stunted growth and almost olive complexion thanks to his constant squatting, cross-legged, on a table level with the lattice window looking out on to the street. His occupation brought him in about two francs a day. Although he was fifty-eight, he kept on working; but fifty-eight is the best time of life for house-porters; they have grown into their lodges, which have become as much a part of themselves as its shell is for an oyster. And besides, they are known to everyone in the quarter!

  Madame Cibot, formerly oyster-girl – a comely one – at the Cadran Bleu, had, at twenty-eight, given up her post for love of Cibot, after sampling all those incidental liaisons which wait upon a comely oyster-girl. Comeliness is short-lived among working-class women, especially when they spend their days, espalier-wise, outside – restaurant entrance. Hot gusts from the kitchen buffet and coarsen their features; leavings from bottles of wine, shared with the waiters, seep through to their complexion; and no bloom is more quickly over than the bloom of a comely oyster-girl. Fortunately for Madame Cibot, lawful wedlock and life as a concierge occurred in time to preserve her good looks. She remained a fitting model for a Rubens canvas, and still kept a sort of virile beauty which her rivals in the rue de Normandie insulted by calling her a ‘fat lump’. Her flesh-tints could be compared with the appetizing glaze on pats of Isigny butter; and notwithstanding her plumpness she displayed an incomparable nimbleness in carrying out her duties. Madame Cibot was reaching the age when women of her type are o
bliged to shave, which amounts to saying that she was forty-eight. A portress complete with moustache is one of the surest guarantees of law and order that a landlord can desire. If Delacroix could have seen Madame Cibot in stately pose, ordering arms with her broomstick, he would certainly have made a Bellona of her!

  The situation of the Cibots – spouse and consort, if we may adopt the Public Prosecutor’s style – was, in a strange manner, one day destined to affect that of the two friends.