Cousin Pons

by Honoré de Balzac

  4. One of a collector’s thousand thrills

  PRÉSIDENT DE MARVILLE lived in the rue de Hanovre, in a house bought ten years ago by his wife, after the death of her parents, the worthy Thirions, who left her their savings – about a hundred and fifty thousand francs. This house faces north, and looks out rather gloomily on to the street, but its inner court enjoys a southerly aspect, and beyond it lies a quite attractive garden. The first floor is entirely occupied by the magistrate – under Louis XV it had lodged one of the most important financiers of the time. The second floor being let to a wealthy old lady, this dwelling has a tranquil and respectable appearance, as befits a magistrate’s abode. What remains of the magnificent property of Marville, which the magistrate had paid for with twenty years’ savings and the money his mother left him, consists of a château, one of those splendid piles still to be found in Normandy, and good farmland bringing in twelve thousand francs a year. Round the château is a park of about two hundred and fifty acres. This flourish of wealth, princely by present-day standards, costs the Président three thousand francs a year, so that the estate scarcely yields more than nine thousand francs net. At that time these nine thousand francs, together with his salary, provided the Président with a fortune of about twenty thousand francs a year: adequate enough, one would say, particularly in view of his expectations – half of his father’s inheritance, since he was the sole child of the first marriage. But life in Paris and the need to keep up appearances had forced Monsieur and Madame de Marville to spend almost the whole of their income. Up to 1834 they had been in straitened circumstances.

  This inventory explains why Mademoiselle de Marville, a girl of twenty-three, was still unmarried in spite of her dowry of a hundred thousand francs and her expectations, skilfully and frequently, but vainly, offered as a bait. For five years Cousin Pons had been listening to the wailings of the Président’s wife, who watched all the deputy-attorneys getting married and the newly appointed court judges becoming fathers – and this after fruitlessly parading Mademoiselle de Marville’s expectations before the undazzled eyes of the young Vicomte Popinot, eldest son of the pharmaceutical giant, for whose benefit, at least as much as for that of the younger branch of the Bourbons – so said the envious tongues of the Lombard quarter – the July Revolution had been carried through.

  Pons arrived at the rue de Choiseul, and, as he was turning in to the rue de Hanovre, there came upon him that unaccountable emotion which racks clear consciences and inflicts on them the tortures undergone by the most hardened criminals at the sight of a police officer. Its sole cause was his uncertainty about the sort of reception he would get from the Président’s wife. The grain of sand which lacerated his heart-strings had never worn smooth; its angles had become more and more acute, and the inhabitants of the house were constantly sharpening its edges. In fact, the little store which the Camusots set on their Cousin Pons, his devaluation in the bosom of the family, had its effect on the domestic staff: they were not rude to him, but they looked on him as a variety of the pauper species.

  Pons’s chief enemy was a certain Mademoiselle Vivet, a thin, desiccated spinster, chambermaid to Madame Camusot de Marville and her daughter. This Madeleine, despite her blotchy complexion – perhaps because of it and the fact that she was as long as an adder – had set her mind on becoming Madame Pons. In vain did she dangle before the old bachelor’s eyes the twenty thousand francs she had put by; Pons had declined this far too blotchy bliss. And so this Dido-in-waiting, who wanted to claim cousinship with her employers, played the wickedest tricks on the poor musician. When she heard the poor man mounting the stairs, Madeleine called out lustily enough for him to hear: ‘Ah! here comes the meal-cadger!’ If she was serving at table in the manservant’s absence, she poured little wine and much water into her victim’s glass, giving him the difficult task of lifting an over-filled glass to his mouth without spilling it. She forgot to serve the poor fellow, and the Président’s wife had to remind her to do so – in such tones as brought a blush to her cousin’s cheeks. Or else she spilt gravy on his clothes. In short it was a war waged by an underling sure of impunity upon a helpless superior.

  *

  Being both housekeeper and maid, Madeleine had stayed with Monsieur and Madame Camusot since their wedding-day. She had witnessed the penury of her master and mistress in their beginnings, in the provinces, when the master was a simple Alençon magistrate. She had helped them to make ends meet when Monsieur Camusot, after presiding over the judicial bench at Mantes, came to Paris in 1828 to take up a post as examining magistrate. She was therefore too much a member of the family not to have motives for rancour against them. No doubt, under this desire to score off the Président’s proud and ambitious wife by becoming her master’s cousin, seethed an inarticulate hatred born of some slight – one of those pebbles which pile up into landslides.

  ‘Madame, here is your Monsieur Pons – still wearing his spencer!’ Madeleine came and told the Présidente. ‘He really might tell me how he has managed to keep it going for twenty-five years!’

  Hearing a man’s step in the ante-room which separated her spacious drawing-room from her bedroom, Madame Camusot threw a glance at her daughter and shrugged her shoulders.

  ‘You’re always so clever at giving me warning, Madeleine,’ said the Présidente, ‘that I never have time to decide what to do.’

  ‘Madame, Jean is out, I was alone, Monsieur Pons rang, I opened the door to him and as he almost belongs to the place, I couldn’t stop him from following me; he’s in there taking off his spencer.’

  ‘My poor pet,’ said the Présidente to her daughter, ‘we are trapped. Now we shall have to dine at home.’ Then she added as she caught the woebegone expression on her poor pet’s face: ‘Look, hadn’t we better get rid of him once and for all?’

  ‘Oh, the poor man!’ replied Mademoiselle Camusot. ‘Do him out of a dinner?’

  A simulated cough resounded in the ante-room – that of a man trying to intimate that he was within earshot.

  ‘Oh well, let him come in!’ said Madame Camusot de Marville with a shrug.

  ‘You have come so early, cousin,’ said Cécile Camusot, putting on a winsome air, ‘that you have caught us just when my mother was about to dress.’

  Cousin Pons had not failed to notice the Présidente’s shrug, and it struck home so cruelly that he was at a loss to find a compliment, and could only utter this profound remark:

  ‘Little cousin, you are as charming as ever!’

  Then he turned to the mother and making his bow went on:

  ‘Dear cousin, you can’t be cross with me for coming a bit earlier than usual. I’ve got something for you which to my great pleasure you asked me to find…’

  And poor Pons, who made the Président, the Présidente and Cécile writhe every time he called them cousin, drew from his pocket a delightful little oblong case made of Mahaleb cherry-wood, exquisitely carved.

  ‘Why, I had forgotten all about it!’ was the Présidente’s curt response: an atrociously cruel rejoinder, since it robbed her kinsman, whose sole crime consisted in being a poor relation, of all merit for the pains he had taken.

  ‘But,’ she continued, ‘it is very kind of you, cousin. Do I owe you much for this absurd little article?’

  At this question, his heart missed a beat, for he had reckoned that the gift of this gem of craftsmanship would pay for all his dinners.

  ‘I thought you were allowing me to make you a present of it,’ he said in a moved tone of voice.

  ‘Really, really!’ replied the Présidente. ‘But let us not stand on ceremony, please. We know one another well enough to have things out sensibly. I know you are not rich enough to go off campaigning at your own expense. Haven’t you already done a lot, bothering to waste your time rummaging in the dealers’ shops?’

  The poor man was deeply offended at this, and he retorted:

  ‘My dear cousin, you certainly wouldn’t want this fan if you had to buy it f
or what it’s worth. It’s a masterpiece by Watteau, with his paintings on both sides. But don’t worry, cousin, didn’t pay a hundredth part of its value as a work of art.’

  To tell a wealthy person, ‘You can’t afford it!’ is like Gil Bias telling the Archbishop of Granada that his homilies are no good. Madame la Présidente was much too proud of her husband’s position, of owning the Marville estate and being invited to Court balls, not to be hurt to the quick by such a remark, particularly when it came from a wretched bandmaster whose lady bountiful she professed to be.

  ‘What fools they must be then, the people who sell you such things,’ was the Présidente’s sharp reply.

  ‘You won’t find any fools among Paris dealers,’ replied Pons in almost cutting tones.

  ‘In that case, you must be pretty smart,’ said Cécile, in an attempt to soothe his feelings.

  ‘Dear little cousin, I’m smart enough to recognize a Lancret, a Pater, a Watteau or a Greuze; but all I wanted was to give pleasure to your dear Mamma.’

  Being ignorant and vain, Madame de Marville was loath to appear to be under the slightest obligation to her parasite, and her ignorance served her admirably, for she did not even know who Watteau was. Now if anything could demonstrate how far collectors’ self-esteem can go – certainly there is nothing more touchy, not even an author’s self-esteem – it was the audacity which Pons had just shown in standing up to his cousin for the first time in twenty years. Aghast at his own boldness, he recovered his mild demeanour by detailing to Cécile all the fine points of the delicate carving on the ribs of this marvellous fan. But, if the reader is to enter fully into the secret of the good man’s flurried state of mind, we must briefly sketch the Présidente’s lineaments.

  Madame de Marville had formerly been a dainty little blonde, plump and fresh. At forty-six she was still petite, but had lost her curves. The arch of her forehead and the grim set of her mouth, once graced with the delicate tints of youth, had by then imparted sourness to her naturally disdainful appearance. The absolute domination which she had habitually exercised at home had given her a hard and disagreeable .expression. The passage of time had darkened her fair hair to a crude brown. She had always had a keen and caustic eye: now it conveyed magisterial arrogance and a full measure of incessant envy. The truth is that the Présidente was conscious of virtual poverty in the milieu in which she moved – that of the middle-class parvenus at whose tables Pons was accustomed to dine. She could not forgive the affluent pharmaceutical wholesaler, the former President of the Chamber of Commerce, for becoming successively a Deputy, a Minister, and then a Count and Peer of France. She could not forgive her father-in-law for having over-stepped his eldest son in getting himself elected as member for his constituency at the time when Popinot was promoted to the peerage. After her husband’s eighteen years of service in Paris, she was still hoping he would become a Councillor in the Court of Appeal – his incompetence, well-known to the legal confraternity, barred him from this. The man who was Minister of Justice in 1844 looked back with regret to Camusot’s appointment to a presidency in 1834; but he had been assigned to the Chamber of Indictment, and there, thanks to his routine experience as examining magistrate, he proved of service by virtue of the indictments he drafted.

  *

  All these disappointments told heavily on the Présidente de Marville, and since she cherished no illusions about her husband’s worth, turned her into a fury. Her character, already imperious, became embittered. She was not old, but ageing; she made herself as rough and harsh as a scrubbing-brush in order to obtain by intimidation everything that society was inclined to refuse her. She had too caustic a tongue to have many friends. But she was a person to reckon with, for she had gathered around her a few pious old crones of her own stamp who stood by her so long as she stood by them. And so poor Pons’s relations with this demon in petticoats were those of a schoolboy with a master who rules by the cane. Consequently the Présidente was at a loss to explain her cousin’s sudden audacity, for she had no idea of the value of his gift.

  ‘But where did you get it?’ asked Cécile, as she studied the fan.

  ‘In the rue de Lappe, from a dealer who had just brought it in from a château near Dreux which was being dismantled, a château where Madame de Pompadour sometimes resided before building Ménars. The most splendid panelling known has been salvaged from there, so lovely that Liénard, our celebrated wood-carver, has kept two of its oval frames for patterns and as a ne plus ultra in craftsmanship. This château was full of treasures. The dealer in question discovered this fan in an inlaid cabinet. I would have bought it myself if I collected such work. But the price is prohibitive – a piece of Riesener furniture is worth between three and four thousand francs! People in Paris are beginning to realize that the famous German and French inlay-workers of the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries used wood as a medium for real painting. It’s up to a collector to be ahead of fashion. Why, in five years’ time Frankenthal porcelain, which I have been collecting for twenty years, will fetch twice as much as Sèvres soft paste.’

  ‘What is Frankenthal?’ asked Cécile.

  ‘The name of the Elector Palatine’s china factory; it is older than our Sèvres factory, just as the famous Heidelberg gardens, destroyed by Turenne, were so unlucky as to exist before the gardens of Versailles. Sèvres copied Frankenthal a great deal… one must do the Germans the justice of admitting that, well before us, they produced admirable ware in Saxony and the Palatinate.’

  Mother and daughter exchanged glances as if Pons had been talking double Dutch, for Parisians are inconceivably ignorant and narrow-minded; all they know is what they have been taught when they have wanted to be taught.

  ‘And how do you recognize a piece of Frankenthal?’

  ‘By the signature, of course!’ was Pons’s heated reply. ‘All these ravishing masterpieces are signed. Frankenthal bears an intertwined C and T (Charles-Theodore) beneath a prince’s coronet. Dresden ware has two swords and a serial number in gold. Vincennes has a hunting-horn for its trademark. Vienna has a closed V with a bar across it. Berlin has two bars. Maintz has a wheel. Sèvres has a double L, and the Queen’s ware has A for Antoinette, surmounted by the royal crown. In the eighteenth century all European sovereigns vied with one another in the manufacture of porcelain. There was ruthless competition between them to get craftsmen. Watteau designed china services for the Dresden factory, and his works have risen to exorbitant prices (you need an expert’s eye, for today they make replicas and copies of them in Dresden). They manufactured wonderful things in those days, such as will never be produced again.’

  ‘That’s hard to believe.’

  ‘It’s a fact, cousin. Certain kinds of marquetry and porcelain will never be produced again, any more than a painting by Raphael, Titian, Rembrandt or Cranach. For instance, the Chinese are very clever, very skilled. Well, nowadays they are making nothing but replicas of “Great Mandarin” porcelain… Now a pair of antique Great Mandarin vases, of the largest size, fetches six, eight or ten thousand francs, whereas you can buy a modern copy of them for two hundred francs.’

  ‘You’re just joking!’

  ‘Cousin, you may be surprised at such prices, but that’s nothing. A complete twelve-place dinner service in Sèvres soft paste – which is not porcelain – costs a hundred thousand francs, but that is only the scheduled price. In 1750 you paid fifty thousand francs for a service in Sèvres like that. I have seen the original invoices.’

  ‘But tell us about this fan,’ said Cécile, who thought that the curio was too old-fashioned.

  ‘You can guess that I started looking round as soon as your dear Mamma did me the honour of asking for a fan,’ Pons continued. ‘I visited all the old curiosity shops in Paris without finding anything worthwhile – naturally I wanted our dear Présidente to have a masterpiece, and I thought of giving her Marie-Antoinette’s fan, the finest among all the well-known fans. But yesterday I was dazzled by this heavenly
masterpiece, undoubtedly made to order by Louis XV. You may ask why I went to the rue de Lappe to find a fan: to an Auvergnat dealer, a vendor of copperware, scrap-iron and gilt furniture? Because I believe that objets d’art are not without intelligence. They recognize real connoisseurs. They beckon to them! They make eyes at them!’

  The Présidente threw a glance at her daughter and shrugged her shoulders, but this dumb-show was too rapid for Pons to notice it.

  ‘You can’t tell me anything about those sharks: “Anything new, Papa Monistrol? Anything in carved lintels?” I asked this dealer – he lets me take a look at his acquisitions before the big dealers see them. Thereupon Monistrol tells me how Liénard, while he was doing some lovely carvings in the chapel at Dreux on a state commission, had attended the Aulnay auction and snapped up the carved panelling before the Paris dealers, who were interested only in porcelain and inlaid furniture, could lay their hands on it. “I didn’t get much,” he said, “but here is an article which will pay for my travelling expenses.” And he showed me the escritoire, a positive marvel! Designs by Boucher done in marquetry with consummate art – enough to make you get down on your knees! “Look, sir,” he said to me, “I have just discovered this fan in a little locked drawer without a key which I had to force open. You might well find me a customer for it.” And out came this little case, carved in Mahaleb cherry-wood. “Have a look: it’s the kind of Pompadour style you would take for ornate Gothic.” “H’m,” I replied, “the case is pretty. I could do with that. As for the fan, I have no Madame Pons to whom I could give this old trinket. Besides, one can get new ones, very pretty ones. Nowadays such designs on vellum are marvellously painted and don’t cost much. Don’t you know that there are two thousand painters in Paris?” And I nonchalantly opened out the fan, hiding my admiration, and cast a cold glance at these two tiny paintings, ravishingly unconstrained in conception and execution. I had Madame de Pompadour’s very own fan in my hands! Watteau had put all he knew into it. “What are you asking for the case?” “Let’s say a thousand francs – I’ve already been offered that much.” I offered him a price for the fan which would cover his supposed travelling expenses. We then looked each other straight in the face, and I could see he was ready to clinch. I immediately put the fan back in the case, to prevent the Auvergnat from making a closer scrutiny of it, and I went into ecstasies over the carvings on the case – they were certainly exquisite. “If I buy it,” I said to Monistrol, “that’s the reason, you see; it’s the case that tempts me. As for the cabinet, you’ll get more than a thousand francs for that. Just look at the copper chasing on it. What a pattern for copying! There’s money in that. There were no replicas made of it; everything done for Madame de Pompadour had to be unique.” And the fellow was so busy ogling the cabinet that he forgot the fan, and I got it for a song in return for enlightening him about the beauty of the Riesener piece. So there we are! But one needs a great deal of practice to bring off such bargains. It’s a close contest between two pairs of eyes – and there’s nothing wrong with the eyes of a Jew or an Auvergnat!’