Cousin Pons

by Honoré de Balzac

  She clutched the bannisters and lumbered downstairs with a great many contortions and plaintive groans, which startled all the other tenants and brought them out on to their landings. Schmucke was supporting the suffering caretaker, shedding tears and telling the story of her devotion. The whole house, the whole district, soon heard of Madame Cibot’s splendid heroism: she was supposed to have given herself a terrible wrench by lifting up one of the ‘Nutcrackers’. Schmucke came back to Pons and told him what a fearful plight their factotum was in. They looked at one another and said: ‘What will become of us without her?’

  Seeing how much Pons’s condition had been worsened by his rash sortie, Schmucke had not the heart to scold him.

  ‘Zet curset pric-à-prac! I voult razer purn it zen loose my frient!’ he exclaimed when Pons told him the cause of the accident. ‘Vy mistrust Matame Cipot, when she lents us her safinks? It vass not goot, put your dissease iss to plame.’

  ‘Ah, what a disease!’ said Pons, ‘I know I’m not myself. I don’t want you to suffer for it, my dear Schmucke.’

  ‘Scolt no von put me!’ said Schmucke, ‘unt leafe Matame Cipot alone!’

  Dr Poulain took only a few days to dissipate Madame Cibot’s alleged infirmity, and in the Marais this cure, regarded as miraculous, gave extraordinary lustre to his reputation. In Pons’s household he attributed this success to the sick woman’s excellent constitution and, to the great satisfaction of the two ‘Nutcrackers’, she resumed her service with them after a week. This event increased a hundredfold the influence, or rather the tyranny, which the concierge wielded in the two men’s abode. In the course of that week they had incurred debts, but it was she who paid them. She took advantage of this circumstance to obtain from Schmucke – with consummate ease – an IOU for the two thousand francs which she said she had lent them.

  ‘What a fine doctor he is, Monsieur Poulain!’ said La Cibot to Pons. ‘He’ll save you all right, my dear gentleman. Didn’t he keep me out of my coffin? My poor dear man thought I was done for. Well now, Monsieur Poulain must have told you that when I was lying in bed, I never gave a thought to anything but you. “Dear God,” I said, “take me, but spare my dear Monsieur Pons.” ’

  ‘Poor dear Madame Cibot, you nearly became a cripple for my sake.’

  ‘It’s a fact. But for Monsieur Poulain, I’d be fitted out with the pinewood shirt that’s waiting for all of us. As the old actor said, we’ve all got to come a cropper. No use making a fuss about it… How did you get on without me?’

  ‘Schmucke looked after me,’ the sick man replied. ‘But our cash-box and our customers are the worse for it. I just don’t know how he managed.’

  ‘Ton’t vorry, Pons!’ cried Schmucke. ‘Papa Cipot hass peen our panker.’

  ‘Not a word about that, my dear lamb!’ cried La Cibot. ‘It’s as if you were both our children. After all, our savings are in good hands with you. You’re more dependable than the Bank of France. As long as we’ve a crust of bread to eat, you’ll get half of it… It’s not worth talking about…’

  ‘Poor Matame Cipot!’ said Schmucke as he left the room.

  ‘Would you credit it, my cherub,’ said La Cibot, seeing how troubled the sick man looked. ‘While I lay there, well-nigh at my last gasp – I was looking Death in the face, you know – what vexed me most was the idea of leaving you to look after your two selves with never a helping hand, and leaving my poor Cibot without a brass farthing… I’ve got hardly anything put by. I’m only telling you this in case I popped off and because of Cibot. He’s an angel if ever there was one! Just think, the poor man coddled me as if I were the Queen of France. He wept bucketfuls over me!… But I knew I could depend on you, and that’s the honest truth. I said to him: “Cibot, my gentlemen won’t ever let you starve.” ’

  Pons made no response to this attack ad testamentum, and the concierge waited in silence for a word from him.

  ‘I will recommend you to Schmucke,’ the sick man said at last.

  ‘Ah well!’ cried the concierge, ‘I’m sure you’ll do whatever’s right. I put my trust in you and your kind heart. Don’t let’s ever talk of that; it makes me feel ashamed, it does, my cherub. Just think about getting well again. You’ll outlive the lot of us.’

  Madame Cibot was seized with deep and heartfelt anxiety, and she made up her mind to draw her master out on the question of the legacy he was intending to leave her. But by way of preliminary, that very evening, after giving Schmucke his dinner – he had taken to eating at his friend’s bedside since the latter’s illness – she went off to consult Monsieur Poulain at his house.

  17. How all careers begin in Paris

  DR POULAIN lived in the rue d’Orleans in a little ground-floor flat consisting of an ante-room, a sitting-room and two bedrooms. A pantry next to the ante-room and communicating with the doctor’s bedroom had been converted into a consulting-room. A kitchen, a servant’s bedroom and a small cellar were included in these rented quarters which were situated in one wing of a house – an immense construction built during the Empire on the site of an old mansion – of which the garden still remained and was shared by the tenants of the three ground-floor flats.

  The doctor’s flat had undergone no change for forty years; paint, wallpaper and decoration were all redolent of Imperial times. Forty years of grime and smoke had tarnished the mirrors and their frames, the patterns on the wallpaper, the ceilings and the paint. This tiny habitation, although it was in the heart of the Marais district, cost one thousand francs a year in rent. The doctor’s seventy-year-old mother, Madame Poulain, was in occupation of the second bedroom for the rest of her mortal span. She worked for some breeches-makers, sewing gaiters, buckskins, braces, belts, in short everything pertaining to this kind of garment, which is more or less out of fashion today. Her time was taken up with looking after the house and her son’s only maid, and so she never went out, but took the air in the tiny garden, to which she stepped down through the french window of the drawing-room. At her husband’s death, twenty years before, she had sold his breeches-maker’s stock and goodwill to his chief journeyman, who reserved enough work for her to earn about thirty sous a day. She had sacrificed everything to her only son’s education, wishing at all costs to raise him to a social status higher than that of his father. Proud of her Aesculapius and believing he had a fine future before him, she was happy to care for him, to economize for his sake, dreaming only of his well-being, and bringing intelligence to the aid of love, which all mothers are not able to do. Thus Madame Poulain, remembering that she had been a humble seamstress, was anxious not to harm her son or expose him to ridicule or contempt, for the good woman larded her discourse with s’s as Madame Cibot did with n’s. She made a point of keeping to her room on the few occasions when distinguished patients came for a consultation, or when his college or hospital friends turned up. Never, therefore, had the doctor had any occasion to feel ashamed of his mother, whom he venerated, and whose heroic tenderness fully compensated for her lack of education. The sale of the breeches-making business had brought in about twenty thousand francs. In 1820 the widow had invested them in Government stock, and she had no other private means than the eleven hundred francs’ interest she drew from them. And so, for a long time, their neighbours had been accustomed to seeing the doctor’s and his mother’s linen hanging out in the garden. All the laundering was done inexpensively by the maid and Madame Poulain. This domestic economy did considerable harm to the doctor, for people could not credit him with talent when they saw he was so poor. The eleven hundred francs’ interest paid the rent. For the first few years the needlework done by Madame Poulain, a worthy, stout little woman, had covered all the expenses of this needy household. After twelve years of perseverance along his stony path, the doctor was now earning one thousand crowns per annum, so that henceforth Madame Poulain had about six thousand francs a year at her disposal. For anyone familiar with Paris, this was barely enough to live on.

  The drawing-room,
which served as a waiting-room for patients, was meanly furnished with a common type of mahogany sofa upholstered in flowered yellow Utrecht velvet, four armchairs, six upright chairs, a console and a tea-table left them by the defunct breeches-maker – he had chosen them all himself. The clock, still enclosed in its glass globe, and standing between two Egyptian candelabra, was in the shape of a lyre. You would wonder how they could have contrived to make the window-curtains survive so long, for they were of yellow calico, printed with rose-patterns, from the Jouy factory. Its owner, Oberkampf, had received the Emperor’s compliments in 1809 for similarly atrocious products of the cotton industry. The consulting-room was furnished in the same style, with furniture from the paternal bedchamber. It was meagre, poor and cold. What patient could trust the skill of a doctor without repute, and who still had no decent furniture, in an age when advertisement is all-powerful and even the lamp-posts in the Place de la Concorde are gilded over to console the poor by persuading them that they are affluent citizens?

  The ante-room was used as a dining-room. The maid worked in it when she was not busy in the kitchen or keeping the doctor’s mother company. On entering the building, one sensed the respectable poverty which reigned in this dreary flat, whose tenant was absent half the day, as soon as one noticed the russet muslin curtains at the window of this room giving on to the courtyard. One could guess at the contents of the cupboards: scraps of musty pie, chipped platters, long-serving corks, table-napkins lasting the whole week, in short all the squalid but excusable objects one finds in small Parisian homes, fit only to pass from there into the rag-and-bone merchant’s sack. That is why, in such times as ours, when money is the preoccupation of every mind and the topic of every conversation, the thirty-year-old doctor, whose mother had no social relationships, was still a bachelor. Not once in ten years had he met with the slightest incitement to a romance among the families to which his profession gave him access, for he practised his art in a sphere in which everyone led the same kind of existence as he did. He only came upon households like his own, those of clerks and minor civil servants and small manufacturers. His richest clients were butchers, bakers and the big retailers in the quarter; people who, as a rule, put down their cures to nature, so that they need only pay him a couple of francs for his visits, which he made on foot. For a doctor a cab is even more necessary than a knowledge of medicine.

  A commonplace and uneventful life ultimately affects the most adventurous spirit. A man shapes himself to his lot and accepts the humdrum nature of life. And so, after ten years in practice, Dr Poulain still carried on with his Sisyphean labours, having shaken off the despair which had embittered his early days. None the less he cherished a dream. All people in Paris have their dreams; Rémonencq was indulging in a dream, and La Cibot had hers. Dr Poulain hoped to be called in to some rich and influential patient: he would infallibly cure this patient, and then use the credit so gained to obtain a post as senior doctor in a hospital, as a prison health-officer, as a consultant to the boulevard theatres or to a Civil Service department.

  Incidentally, this was how he had obtained his post as municipal health officer. La Cibot had brought him to, and he had cured, Monsieur Pillerault, the owner of the house in which the Cibots were concierges. Monsieur Pillerault, great-uncle of Madame la Comtesse Popinot, the Minister’s wife, had taken an interest in the young man whose undivulged poverty he had divined on paying him a visit of gratitude. Pillerault had solicited from his great nephew the Minister, who revered him, this post which the doctor had held for the last five years, and the slender emoluments had come just in time to prevent him from taking the drastic step of emigrating – and for a Frenchman to have to leave France is a lugubrious prospect. Dr Poulain duly went to thank the Comte Popinot, but since the illustrious Bianchon was this statesman’s physician, the aspirant realized that he had no chance of practising in that family. The unfortunate doctor had vainly cherished the hope of obtaining the patronage of one of the influential Ministers, one of those dozen or more playing-cards which royal hands have been shuffling for the last sixteen years on the green baize of the Cabinet table. But he found himself still immersed in the Marais quarter, where he was now making a living among poor and lower-middle-class people and writing out death certificates, an occupation which brought him in twelve hundred francs a year.

  Dr Poulain had not been without distinction as a houseman; he had become a prudent practitioner; he was not lacking in experience. Besides, he had no scandalous deaths to account for, and he was able to study all forms of disease in anima vili. Judge what bitterness welled up within him! In consequence, the expression on his naturally long and melancholy face was sometimes fearsome. Insert into a piece of yellow parchment the burning eyes of a Tartuffe and the sour grimace of an Alceste, and then imagine the gait and attitude of this man and the way he looked about him. He regarded himself as being as good a doctor as the illustrious Bianchon, but felt that an iron hand was holding him down in this dingy milieu! He could not refrain from comparing his fees – ten francs on a lucky day – with the five or six hundred francs which Bianchon pocketed. Does this not help one to imagine all the resentment which a so-called democratic régime inspires? Moreover, this man with his frustrated ambitions had no cause for self-reproach. He had already made one bid for fortune by inventing laxative pills similar to those of Morisson. He had entrusted the exploitation of them to a friend of his hospital days, a house-doctor who had become a pharmacist. But the pharmacist, having fallen in love with a dancer at the Ambigu-Comique, had gone bankrupt, and, since the patent for the invention of these laxative pills had been registered under the pharmacist’s name, this great discovery had enriched the latter’s successor. The sometime house-doctor had gone off to Mexico, that El Dorado, and taken with him one thousand francs of poor Poulain’s savings. All that the latter got out of it was to be branded as a usurer by the dancer, when he went to her to ask for his money to be returned. Not a single well-to-do patient had come forward since he had had the good luck of curing old Pillerault. And so Poulain plodded round the whole of the Marais quarter on foot like a lean cat, and, out of twenty visits, only about two might earn him a couple of francs. The client who paid well was, in his eyes, that bird of fantasy known in all parts of the globe as the ‘white blackbird’.

  A briefless junior barrister and a young doctor without patients are the two most notable examples of that respectable despair peculiar to the city of Paris : that mute and cold despair which wears a frock-coat, the sort of black trousers with glossy seams which call to mind the zinc on a garret roof, a shiny waistcoat, a hat piously cared for, old gloves and a calico shirt. An elegiac poem, sombre as the solitary confinement cell in a state prison! Other kinds of indigence, such as those suffered by poets, artists, actors and musicians, derive some cheer from the joviality natural to the Arts, from the irresponsibility of that Bohemian life on which genius embarks before retiring into creative solitude. But these two men in black coats, who go about their business on foot and belong to two professions which see only the diseased or disreputable side of life: these two types of men, exposed as they are to the humiliations of their early struggles, acquire sinister, challenging casts of countenance; in their eyes you see pent-up resentment and ambition waiting to erupt like smouldering fires ready to burst into flame.

  When two men who were friends as students happen to meet again after twenty years, the one who has become rich tries to avoid his former comrade if the latter has remained poor. He cuts him dead, appalled by the gulf which destiny has interposed between them. One of them has coursed through life on the spirited steed of good fortune or in the golden haze of success. The other has crawled along underground in the Paris sewers and wears the stigmata of his journey. How many of the doctor’s former friends drew aside when they caught sight of his frock-coat and waistcoat!

  We can now easily understand how skilfully Dr Poulain had played his part in the comedy of La Cibot’s ‘dangerous injury’, for one
can divine covetousness and ambition wherever they appear. Finding no lesion in any of the concierge’s organs, admiring the regularity of her pulse and the perfect ease of her movements, and hearing her loud groans, he realized that self-interest alone prompted her claim to be at death’s door. Since the swift cure of an allegedly serious illness was sure to spread his fame throughout the district, he exaggerated La Cibot’s supposed hernia and undertook to rectify it by means of timely treatment. In short he subjected the concierge to spurious remedies and a fictitious operation. His efforts were crowned with complete success! He ransacked the arsenal of Desplein’s extraordinary cures in order to find an exceptional case; he then applied it to Madame Cibot, modestly attributed its happy result to the great surgeon, and professed to have followed his method. To such bold shifts do professional men resort in the earlier stages of their career. Any ladder will serve to help them on to their particular stage. But everything wears out, even the rungs of a ladder, and the beginners in each profession can scarcely find enough wood to fashion into steps. At certain moments Parisians are refractory to success. Tired of putting people on pedestals, they sulk like spoilt children, and will worship no more idols. Or rather, truth to tell, there are sometimes not enough men of talent to excite infatuation. Lacunae occur in the matrix from which the ore of genius is extracted: when this happens, your Parisian stops short, reluctant to be for ever prizing and lionizing mediocrities.

  *

  Bursting in with her usual abruptness, Madame Cibot surprised the doctor at table with his old mother, eating a lambs’-lettuce salad – the cheapest there is – having nothing for dessert except a thin wedge of Brie, a meagre plateful of figs, nuts and raisins (with plenty of stalks among them) and a dish of cheap, withered apples.