Cousin Pons Page 7

  Therefore the historian, to give a true picture, is obliged to go into some detail concerning the lodge. The whole building brought in some eight thousand francs, for it consisted of three complete flats of double depth giving on to the street, and three flats in the old mansion between the courtyard and the garden. In addition, a scrap-iron merchant named Rémonencq occupied a shop giving on to the street. This Rémonencq, who a few months earlier had promoted himself to the status of dealer in curiosities, was so well aware of Pons’s standing in bric-à-braquerie that, whenever the musician came in or went out, he saluted him from the inside of his shop. So then, the five per cent on rents brought in about four hundred francs per annum to the Cibots, who moreover paid nothing for lodging and fuel. And since Cibot’s wages amounted on an average to seven or eight hundred francs a year, husband and wife had an annual income of sixteen hundred francs, gratuities included, and they spent every penny of it, for they lived better than working-class people usually do. ‘You only live once,’ La Cibot used to say – she had been born during the Revolution and so, as can be seen, she did not know her catechism.

  From her contact with the Cadran Bleu, this portress with her tawny eyes and haughty stare had retained some skill in cooking, which made her husband a subject of envy among his fellows. That is why, being ripe in years, and verging on old age, the Cibots had not so much as a hundred francs’ savings to their credit. They dressed well and fed well, and also commanded in their neighbourhood the respect due to twenty-six years of scrupulous honesty. Though they had nothing saved up, they ‘nn… owed not a sou to nn… anybody’ – that is how Madame Cibot put it, for she lavished ‘n’s’ in her discourse, and told her husband: ‘You’re nn… an… nn… angel!’ Why this indigence? As well ask why Madame Cibot cared nothing for the promises of religion. They were both proud of living in the public eye, of the esteem they enjoyed within a radius of six or seven streets, of the fact that their ‘proprietor’ allowed them autocratic rule over the house; but in secret they groaned at the thought of having no private income. Cibot complained of aches in his hands and legs, and Madame Cibot deplored the fact that her poor husband still had to work at his age. The day will come when a concierge, after thirty years of such existence, will accuse the Government of injustice and demand to be awarded the Legion of Honour! Whenever they learned through local gossip that such and such a servant-girl, after eight or ten years in her job, had been left an annuity of a hundred francs, they went round wailing from lodge to lodge: and that gives some idea of the envy which gnaws away at those who follow the humblest professions in Paris.

  ‘It’s a shame! We shall never get mentioned in a will! No such luck! And yet we are more use than any house-maid. We can be trusted. We collect the rents. We keep our weather eye open. But they treat us no better than dogs, and that’s a fact!’

  ‘You’ve got to take the rough with the smooth,’ Cibot would say as he brought in a coat for mending.

  ‘If I’d left Cibot in charge and taken a job as a cook,’ cried Madame Cibot as she chatted with a neighbour with her hands on her ample hips, ‘we’d have thirty thousand francs put by. I’ve made a mess of my life, just so that I could live warm and cosy in a nice lodge, and not go short of anything.’

  *

  When, in 1836, the two friends took over jointly the second floor of the former mansion, they brought about a sort of revolution in the Cibot ménage. In this way: Schmucke, as well as his friend Pons, was in the habit of taking on the porter or portress of the buildings in which he lodged, to do the housework. And so the two musicians were of one mind when they moved to the rue de Normandie in arranging for Madame Cibot to become their housekeeper at a rate of twenty-five francs a month, of which each paid half. By the end of one year, this most efficient portress reigned supreme over the two old bachelors, just as she reigned over the house of Monsieur Pillerault, great-uncle of Madame la Comtesse Popinot. Their business was her business, and she called them ‘her two gentlemen’. In short, when she found that the two ‘Nutcrackers’ were as docile as sheep, easy to get on with, very trusting, just a couple of children, her plebeian kind-heartedness prompted her to protect, adore and serve them with such genuine devotedness that she scolded them on occasions and defended them against all the swindling which in Paris makes household expenses mount up. For twenty-five francs a month, the two bachelors, without premeditation and without suspecting it, got themselves a mother. In their simple-hearted way the two musicians, when they came to realize Madame Cibot’s sterling worth, showered praise and thanks on her, and gave her little seasonal tips which strengthened the bonds of this domestic alliance. Madame Cibot was a thousand times better pleased to be appreciated at her face value than to receive her pay: such an attitude, once noticed, always adds a bonus to wages. For half the usual cost Cibot ran errands, repaired their clothes, and did all he could in his line for the service of his wife’s ‘two gentlemen’.

  Finally, from the second year onwards, a new factor – mutual friendship – came to tighten the link between second floor and lodge. Schmucke struck a bargain with Madame Cibot which suited both his slothfulness and his desire to live without responsibility. For thirty sous a day or forty-five francs a month, Madame Cibot undertook to provide lunch and dinner for Schmucke. Pons, finding that his friend thus got a very satisfactory lunch, made a similar bargain: lunch for himself at eighteen francs a month. This system of supply brought about ninety francs a month into the Cibots’ takings, and transformed the two tenants into inviolable beings – angels, cherubs, divinities. It is very doubtful whether even the King of France – a good judge in such matters – is looked after as well as the two ‘Nutcrackers’ then were. The milk they drank came out of the can undiluted, and they had a free perusal of the newspapers from the first and third floors, whose tenants were late risers and would have been told, in case of inquiry, that the papers had not come. Moreover Madame Cibot kept the flat, their clothes, the landing – everything in fact – as clean as a Flemish interior.

  As for Schmucke, he basked in unhoped-for happiness. Madame Cibot made life easy for him. He paid her about six francs a month for doing his laundry; and she also did his mending. His tobacco cost him fifteen francs a month. These three kinds of expenditure made up a monthly total of sixty-six francs; multiplied by twelve, that makes seven hundred and ninety-two francs. Add to that two hundred and twenty francs rent and taxes, and you have one thousand and twelve francs a year. Cibot made Schmucke’s clothes for him, and on the average this last provision amounted to a hundred and fifty francs. And so this profound philosopher lived on twelve hundred francs a year. How many European people whose sole ambition is to come and live in Paris will be agreeably surprised to know that one can live happily there on an income of twelve hundred francs a year, in the rue de Normandie, under the wing of a Madame Cibot!

  Madame Cibot was stupefied when she saw Pons coming home at five in the evening. Such a thing had never happened before, and what is more, her ‘gentleman’ did not see her and gave her no greeting.

  ‘My goodness, Cibot,’ she said to her husband, ‘either Monsieur Pons has become a millionaire or he has gone mad!’

  ‘It looks like it,’ said Cibot, and the coat-sleeve, into which he was letting what is called a ‘gore’, in tailors’ parlance, fell from his grasp.

  7. ‘The Two Pigeons’: a fable come true

  AT the moment when Pons was mechanically making his way into the house, Madame Cibot was putting the last touches to Schmucke’s dinner. This dinner consisted of a kind of stew whose aroma permeated the entire courtyard: the remains of a joint of boiled beef bought from a cookshop whose owner did some trade in left-overs, hashed up in butter with thin slices of onion until the meat and onions soaked up the butter, so that this concierge’s fare looked quite like a freshly fried dish. La Cibot had lovingly concocted it for sharing between her husband and Schmucke, and it went in company with a bottle of beer and a morsel of cheese: it answered the needs
of the old German music-master. And you may take it that Solomon in all his glory dined no better than Schmucke. Sometimes it would be this same dish of boiled beef with onions en fricassée, sometimes remnants of poulet sauté, sometimes a cold beef salad with parsley, or fish served up with a sauce of La Cibot’s own invention – a mother could unsuspectingly have eaten her own child with this – and sometimes venison, all depending on the quality and quantity of food sold off by the boulevard restaurants to the man who ran the cookshop in the rue Boucherat. Such was Schmucke’s ordinary fare, and he was content to eat, without comment, anything set before him by the ‘goot Matame Cipot’. And, as time went on, the good Madame Cibot had reduced this menu until it cost her no more than a franc to produce.

  ‘I’m off to find out what has happened to the poor dear man,’ Madame Cibot told her husband, ‘for Monsieur Schmucke’s dinner is piping hot.’

  She covered the deep earthenware dish with a coarse china plate; then, in spite of her years, she got to the friends’ flat at the instant when Schmucke was letting Pons in.

  ‘Vat is wronk, my goot frient?’ asked the German, alarmed at the affliction he saw written on Pons’s face.

  ‘I’ll tell you all about it; but I’ve come home to dine with you…’

  ‘Tine viss me! Tine viss me!’ cried Schmucke in ecstasy, ‘put zet is impossiple,’ he added as he remembered how much his friend was given over to gastrolatry.

  The old German then noticed that Madame Cibot was there, exercising her legitimate right as their housekeeper to eavesdrop. Seized with one of those inspirations which only flash out from the heart of a true friend, he went straight to the portress and took her out on to the landing.

  ‘Matame Cipot, ze goot Pons lofs only goot sinks. Go to ze Catran Pleu unt orter a choice little tinner: anshoffies, macaroni: in fact, a meal vorzy of Lucullus.’

  ‘What’s that mean?’ asked Madame Cibot.

  ‘Vell, it means plain roast feal, a goot fish, a pottle of port vine: eferysink zat is most tasty, like rice croquettes and smoket pacon. Pay for it, say nossink, and I gif you all ze money pack in ze mornink.’

  Schmucke re-entered the flat, gleefully rubbing his hands, but little by little his face took on a look of stupefaction as he listened to his friend’s account of the woes which had so suddenly swooped down on him. Schmucke tried to console Pons with a picture of polite society as he saw it. Paris was an ever-raging tempest; the men and women in it were whirled around in a kind of frenzied waltz; one should expect nothing of society, which has eyes only for outward show, and not, he said, for ‘vat zere iss insite’. For the hundredth time he told how, year by year, the only three school-girl pupils whom he had really loved, who had cherished him, for whom he would lay down his life, who even paid him a small pension of nine hundred francs, each one contributing an equal share of about three hundred francs, had so completely forgotten, from year to year, to come and see him, and were so carried away in the current of Parisian life that for three years they had been out when he paid them a visit. (As a matter of fact, Schmucke used to pay his visits to these great ladies at ten in the morning.) In short, the said pension came every quarter through a notary.

  ‘Unt yet,’ he continued, ‘zey haf hearts of golt. In a vort, zey are my little Saint Cecilias, scharmink vomen, Matame te Portentuère, Matame te Vantenesse, Matame tu Tillet. I only see zem in ze Champs-Elyssées, vizout zem seeink me. Unt yet zey lof me much, and I coult go to lif viz zem, unt zey vould pe fery plisst. I coult stay in zeir country-house, put I like much pesser to pe viz my frient Pons, pecausse I can see him ven I vish unt efery tay.’

  Pons took Schmucke’s hand between his own, and the clasp he gave it was fully expressive of his heartfelt emotion. They remained thus for several minutes, like lovers meeting again after a long separation.

  ‘Tine here efery tay,’ continued Schmucke, who, inwardly, was blessing the Présidente for her harshness. ‘Look! Ve vill go pric-à-prackink togezzer, unt, ze defil vill nefer show his hornss insite our house.’

  To indicate how much heroism was contained in this phrase ‘ve vill go pric-à-prackink togezzer’ it must be made plain that Schmucke was crassly ignorant in the knowledge of bric-à-brac. It needed all the motive force of his friendship for him to avoid breakages in the drawing-room and study given over to Pons for his art collection. Schmucke was wholly devoted to music: he composed it for his own pleasure, and he gazed at all his friend’s baubles as a fish supplied with a complimentary ticket would gaze at a flower-show in the Luxembourg gardens. The respect he showed to these wonderful creations was due to the respect Pons himself manifested as he dusted his treasures. ‘Yes, it iss fery pretty’ was his response to his friend’s expressions of admiration, just as a mother responds by meaningless patter to her baby’s gestures before he has learned to speak. Seven times, since the two had set up house together, Schmucke had seen Pons bartering one time-piece for another, and gaining by the exchange. At this period, Pons was the owner of Buhl’s most magnificent clock, an ebony one in his first manner, inlaid with copper and decorated with carvings. Buhl had two styles, just as Raphael had three. In the first he blended copper with ivory; in the second, sacrificing his convictions, he went in for tortoise-shell, performing wonders in order to outstrip his competitors who had invented tortoise-shell marquetry. Now Schmucke, in spite of Pons’s learned demonstration, could not perceive the slightest difference between the splendid clock in Buhl’s first manner and the many others which succeeded it. And yet, in order to make Pons happy, he took more care of these ‘pauples’ than Pons himself. Let us not then be astonished at the fact that Schmucke’s inspired remark was potent enough to soothe Pons in his despair, for the German’s ‘Ve vill go pric-à-prackink togezzer’ meant this: ‘If you will take your dinners here I will put money into bric-à-brac.’

  ‘Dinner is served, gentlemen,’ Madame Cibot announced with remarkable aplomb.

  It is easy to understand Pons’s surprise when he saw and savoured the dinner which Schmucke’s affection had conjured up. The kinds of sensation he felt, rare enough in a life-time, are not due to that steady devotion by means of which two men are for ever conveying to each other: ‘I am simply your second self.’ No, they arise when one compares the happy experiences of intimate family life with the cruelty inflicted by life in society. Society is thus ceaselessly forging anew the bonds between two friends or two lovers, when two great souls have united in love or friendship. And so Pons wiped away two big tears, and Schmucke, in his turn, was obliged to dry his eyes. They spoke not a word, but their mutual love was the greater for that, and they exchanged expressive little nods which acted like balm on Pons’s feelings, wounded as they were by the gravel which the Présidente had introduced into his heart. Schmucke was rubbing his hands hard enough to take the skin off them, for there had occurred to him one of those bright ideas which astonish a German whose brain, normally congealed by the respect he pays to sovereign princes, has hatched one out spontaneously.

  ‘My poor Pons,’ he began.

  ‘I can guess what you are going to say: you want us to dine together every day…’

  ‘If only I vass rich enough to feet you like zis efery tay,’ was the good German’s melancholy reply.

  And then Madame Cibot, to whom, from time to time, Pons presented tickets for the Boulevard theatres – this fact put him as high in her affections as her boarder Schmucke – came out with the following proposal:

  ‘Goodness gracious,’ she said, ‘for three francs, wine not included, I can do both of you a dinner which will make you lick your plates as clean as soap and water could make them.’

  ‘Ze fact iss,’ answered Schmucke, ‘zet I tine pesser on vat Matame Cipot cooks for me zen ze people who eat ze kink’s stew.’ So high were his hopes that the otherwise respectful German went so far as to imitate the irreverence of the scurrilous newspapers by casting a slur on the fare served up at the royal table.

  ‘Is that so?’ said Pons.
‘Very well, I’ll try it tomorrow.’

  When he heard this promise, Schmucke leapt from one end of the table to the other, dragging with him the cloth, the dishes and the carafes, and clasped Pons in an embrace comparable to that of one gas uniting with another for which it has chemical affinity.

  ‘Vat happiness!’ he cried.

  ‘Monsieur Pons will dine here every day,’ Madame Cibot, much moved, proudly exclaimed.

  Knowing nothing of the occurrence to which she owed the fulfilment of her ambition, the excellent Madame Cibot went down to her lodge and burst in as impetuously as the opera-singer Josépha when she makes her entry in Wilhelm Tell. She threw down the plates and dishes and called out:

  ‘Cibot, run along to the Turk’s Head and get two small coffees, and tell the cook’s boy they’re for me.’

  Then she sat down, laid her hands on her sturdy knees and staring through the window at the wall opposite the house, she said: ‘This very evening, I’m going to consult Ma’me Fontaine.’

  *

  Madame Fontaine was a fortune-teller who read the cards for all the cooks, chambermaids, footmen and porters in the Marais district.

  ‘Since these two gentlemen came to the house, we have put two thousand francs into the savings-bank. In eight years, that’s lucky! Had I better not make anything out of Monsieur Pons’s dinners but rather get him fond of home life? Ma’me Fontaine’s hen will tell me.’

  Seeing that Pons and Schmucke, as far as she knew, had no heirs, Madame Cibot had for the past three years cherished the hope that she might be mentioned in her two gentlemen’s wills, and her zeal increased twofold thanks to this covetousness, a much later growth than her moustaches, which until now had betokened nothing but probity. By dint of dining out every day, Pons had eluded the complete enslavement to which the portress aimed to reduce ‘her gentlemen’. The vague ideas of beguilement which flitted through Madame Cibot’s head had shied at the nomadic life led by the old wandering minstrel-cum-collector; but after his memorable dinner, they crystallized into a formidable plan. A quarter of an hour later, she reappeared in the dining-room armed with two cups of excellent coffee reinforced with two liqueur glasses of kirschwasser.