Cousin Pons

by Honoré de Balzac

  ‘Don’t go away, Mother,’ said the physician, holding Madame Poulain back by the arm. ‘It’s Madame Cibot. I told you about her.’

  ‘My respects, Madame. Your servant, Monsieur,’ said La Cibot, taking the chair which the doctor offered her. ‘Ah! this is your mother, doctor? She must be very happy to have so clever a son. He saved my life, Madame. He snatched me from the jaws of Death.’

  Widow Poulain thought Madame Cibot a charming woman when she heard her thus singing her son’s praises.

  ‘I came to say, dear Monsieur Poulain, between you and me, that poor Monsieur Pons is in a very bad way. I wanted a word with you about him.’

  ‘Let us go to the drawing-room,’ said the doctor, making a sign to Madame Cibot in order to draw her attention to the maid’s presence.

  Once in the drawing-room, La Cibot lengthily unfolded her situation with regard to the two ‘Nutcrackers’. She repeated – with embellishments – the story of her loan, and told of the tremendous services she had rendered for ten years to Messieurs Pons and Schmucke. To hear her, one would have supposed that these two old men could never have survived without her maternal attention. She adopted the pose of a guardian angel, and uttered so many lies, watered with tears, that in the end Madame Poulain was much moved.

  ‘You will understand, my dear Monsieur Poulain,’ she said by way of conclusion, ‘that I simply must know where I stand as to Monsieur Pons’ intentions about me, in case he happened to die. I do hope he won’t, because having these two innocents to care for is what I live for. All the same, if I lose one of them, I’ll look after the other. That’s how Nature has made me – to take on a mother’s cares. I don’t know what I’d do if I hadn’t someone to be interested in, someone to mother… And so, if Monsieur Poulain is willing, he could do me a service which I’d be very thankful for, and speak for me to Monsieur Pons. Goodness me! Is a thousand francs’ life pension too much?… I ask you? It’s as good as putting it into Monsieur Schmucke’s pocket… Anyhow, our dear patient told me he would recommend me to the poor German gentleman, and so it looks as if he’s minded to make him his heir… But what good is a man who can’t string two ideas together in French? And in any case he’s quite capable of going off to Germany, he’ll be so desperate over his friend’s death.’

  ‘Dear Madame Cibot,’ the doctor replied, assuming a grave demeanour. ‘Such matters are not a doctor’s concern, and I should be barred from my profession if I were known to have meddled with the testamentary disposition of one of my clients. The law does not allow a doctor to accept a legacy from his patient…’

  ‘How stupid the law is!’ La Cibot retorted. ‘What could stop me from sharing my legacy with you?’

  ‘I will go further,’ said the doctor. ‘My professional conscience would forbid me to speak to Monsieur Pons about his death. In the first place, he is not in such great danger as that. In the second place, such a conversation coming from me would cause a shock which might do him real harm and so bring on his death.’

  ‘But,’ exclaimed Madame Cibot, ‘I make no bones about telling him to put his affairs in order, and he’s none the worse for it. He’s used to it! Have no fear!’

  ‘Say no more, dear Madame Cibot!… Such things are not a doctor’s business. They are for lawyers to deal with…’

  ‘But my dear Monsieur Poulain, supposing Monsieur Pons asked you outright what his position is, and whether he hadn’t better take precautions. Now then, would you refuse to tell him it would be a good thing, if he wants to get well again, to get everything tied up… Then you could slip in a little word for me…’

  ‘Oh, if he speaks to me about making a will, I certainly will not dissuade him.’

  ‘Very good, then, that’s settled,’ cried Madame Cibot. ‘I came to thank you for taking care of me,’ she added, slipping into his palm a screw of paper containing three gold coins. ‘That’s all I can manage at the moment. Oh, if I were rich, you would be too, Monsieur Poulain. You, God’s own image in this wicked world!… Madame Poulain, your son is an angel!’

  La Cibot got up, Madame Poulain bade her an affable good-bye, and the doctor showed her out to the landing. And there a glimmer of infernal enlightenment came to this fearful Lady Macbeth of the streets! She realized that the doctor was bound to be her accomplice, because he had accepted a fee for a fictitious ailment.

  ‘Why now, my dear Monsieur Poulain,’ she said, ‘now you have put me right after my accident, would you refuse to save me from poverty? A few words would do it.’

  The doctor felt as if he had allowed the Devil to seize him by the forelock and twist it round the red nail of his pitiless claw. Frightened at the prospect of losing his integrity for so slight a cause, he responded to this diabolic idea by one no less diabolic.

  ‘Listen to me, my dear Madame Cibot,’ he said, bringing her indoors again and leading her to his surgery. ‘I will pay you the debt of gratitude I incurred when you got me my post on the town-council!’

  ‘We’ll share the proceeds,’ she promptly replied.

  ‘What do you mean?’ asked the doctor.

  ‘The inheritance,’ the concierge replied.

  ‘You don’t know me,’ the doctor retorted, taking the pose of a Valerius Publicola. ‘No more talk about that. I have an old college friend, a very intelligent fellow, and we are so much the more bound to one another because we have both had the same mischances in life. While I was studying medicine, he was learning his law. While I was a houseman, he was engrossing documents in a solicitor’s office – Maître Couture. He was a cobbler’s son, I am the son of a breeches-maker. He hasn’t found anyone to take much interest in him, and he hasn’t put by any capital either. If you don’t get somebody interested in you, you don’t get capital. He was only able to make a start in a provincial practice at Mantes. Now provincial people can’t understand the way a Parisian’s mind works, and they made a lot of fuss about my friend’s way of doing things.’

  ‘Dirty rascals,’ cried Madame Cibot.

  ‘Quite so,’ the doctor continued. ‘They combined against him, and he was forced to sell his practice for something he did which seemed to put him in the wrong. The public attorney got mixed up in all this; this magistrate was a native of that region, and so he sided with the local people. So this poor fellow, who’s even worse off than I am, and more out-at-elbow, and has the same sort of house I have (his name is Fraisier), took refuge in our district. He’s a barrister, but he has come down to pleading before the petty sessions and the local police-court. Go to no. 9, walk up the stairs, and on the third-floor landing you will find, in gold lettering, on a small square of red morocco: MONSIEUR FRAISIER, BARRISTER-AT-LAW. Fraisier specializes in the legal troubles of such folk as concierges, journeymen and all the poor people in the quarter – and his fees are moderate. He’s an honest man, for I needn’t tell you that he’s smart enough, if he were a rogue, to be going about in a carriage. This evening I’ll have a word with my friend Fraisier. Call on him tomorrow morning. He knows Monsieur Lou-chard, the district bailiff; Monsieur Tabareau, bailiffto the justice of the peace; Monsieur Vitel, the justice of the peace* himself; and Monsieur Trognon, the notary. He has already made his name among the most reputable legal men in the quarter. If he takes on your case, and if you can get Monsieur Pons to accept him as legal adviser, you may be sure he will be entirely with you. One other thing: do not, as you did with me, propose transactions which will wound his sense of honour. Then, when it comes to acknowledging his services, I will be your go-between.’

  Madame Cibot cast a shrewd glance at the doctor.

  ‘Isn’t he the man who got Madame Florimond, the haberdasher in the rue Vieille-du-Temple, out of the nasty fix she was in over her lover’s inheritance?’

  ‘That’s the man,’ said the doctor.

  ‘Wasn’t it horrible,’ cried La Cibot, ‘that after Monsieur Fraisier had got her a two thousand francs’ annuity, after she’d refused to marry him as he wanted, she thought she’d done
her duty by him by giving him a dozen holland shirts, two dozen handkerchiefs, et cetera, in fact a whole outfit of clothes!’

  ‘My dear Madame Cibot,’ said the doctor, ‘the outfit was worth a thousand francs, and Fraisier, who was just setting up in the quarter, needed it. Besides, she paid his expenses without question… That case brought a good many more to Fraisier, and now he has plenty to do. But in my line of business I have the same kind of clients…’

  ‘It’s only the good people who suffer in this world,’ replied the concierge. ‘Well, thank you and good-bye, kind Monsieur Poulain.’

  And here begins the drama, or if you prefer, the terrible comedy of the death of a bachelor delivered over by the force of circumstances to the rapacity of covetous people assembled round his bed: people who, in this case, were aided and abetted by the all-consuming passion of a maniacal lover of pictures, the avidity of the egregious Fraisier, who will make you shudder when you see him at work in his den, and the greed of an Auvergnat capable of anything, even crime, in order to launch out in business. This comedy, for which the preceding part of the story has served to some extent as a curtain-raiser, has moreover, as its actors, all the characters who up to now have occupied our stage.

  18. A ‘man of law’

  THE debasement of words is one of the peculiarities of social behaviour which it would take volumes to explain. Write to a solicitor and call him a ‘man of law’, and you will offend him as much as you would offend a wholesale dealer in colonial produce if you addressed him by letter as ‘Monsieur So-and-So, grocer’. A fairly large number of people in society, who ought to understand at least these niceties of good breeding, since they understand nothing else, are still ignorant of the fact that the designation ‘man of letters’ is the cruellest insult one can offer to an author. The word ‘monsieur’ is a shining example of the life and death of words. ‘Monsieur’ means ‘my lord’. This title, once so weighty, and nowadays reserved for kings by the transformation of ‘sieur’ into ‘sire’, is given to all and sundry. And yet the use of ‘messire’, which is merely another form and synonym of the word ‘monsieur’, provokes articles in Republican journals when it happens to be used in a burial licence. Now magistrates, councillors, jurists, judges, advocates, notaries, attorneys, bailiffs, counsels, procurators and pleaders are all varieties of men falling into the classification of those who administer justice or whose work is concerned with it. The two lowest rungs of the ladder are occupied by the practitioner and the ‘man of law’. The ‘practitioner’, commonly known as the bailiff’s man, is only incidentally an officer of the law. His business is to ensure that judgments are carried out; he is, as regards civil jurisdiction, a make-shift executioner. As for the man of law, he suffers the contumely peculiar to the profession. He is to the law what the man of letters is to literature. Among all the professions in France, a rivalry rages which has found appropriate terms of disparagement. Each way of life has its own vocabulary of insults. The contempt involved in the words ‘man of letters’ and ‘man of law’ does not apply in the plural. You may talk of ‘men of letters’ and ‘men of law’ without wounding anyone’s feelings. But in Paris every profession has its dregs – individuals who pull it down to the level of the man in the street and the proletariat. Thus the ‘man of law’, the small pettifogger, still exists in certain quarters, just as one still finds, round about the Central Market, the small short-term moneylender who is to the big banks what Monsieur Fraisier was to the confraternity of attorneys. Strangely enough, the working classes are as afraid of the officials of the courts as they are of the fashionable restaurants. They have recourse to the small legal fry as automatically as they go to the wine-shops for a drink. To keep to one’s own level is the general rule in each different social sphere. Only exceptional people like to reach above their own rank, do not feel abased in the presence of their superiors, and assert themselves, as the former watch-maker Beaumarchais did when he deliberately dropped the watch of a great lord who was trying to humiliate him. But self-made men like Beaumarchais, especially those who are able to disguise their humble beginnings, are notable exceptions.

  The next day, at six in the morning, Madame Cibot was in the rue de la Perle, eyeing the abode of her future legal adviser, our Monsieur Fraisier, man of law. It was one of those houses inhabited by erstwhile lower-middle-class people. You entered it from an alley. The ground floor was partly taken up by the porter’s lodge and the premises of a cabinet-maker whose workshops and showrooms encumbered a small inner courtyard. It was divided into two portions by the alley and the well of the staircase, into which saltpetre and damp had eaten. The whole house appeared to be suffering from leprosy.

  Madame Cibot made straight for the lodge, where she found one of Cibot’s cronies, a cobbler, his wife and their two young children, housed in a space of ten square feet to which light penetrated from the little courtyard. It was not long before the most cordial understanding was established between the two women, once La Cibot had stated her profession, given her name and spoken of her house in the rue de Normandie. After a quarter of an hour taken up with gossip, during which time Monsieur Fraisier’s concierge was preparing breakfast for her cobbler and her two children, Madame Cibot brought the conversation round to the tenants and mentioned the man of law.

  ‘I have come to see him on business,’ she said. ‘One of his friends, Doctor Poulain, has recommended me to him. Do you know Doctor Poulain?’

  ‘You bet I do!’ said the concierge of the rue de la Perle. ‘He saved my baby’s life. Croup is what he had.’

  ‘He saved my life too, Madame. What sort of man is this Monsieur Fraisier?’

  ‘He’s the sort of man, my dear lady,’ said the concierge, ‘who isn’t at all keen at the end of the month to pay for the postage on his letters.’

  This answer sufficed for the intelligent Madame Cibot. ‘You can be both poor and honest,’ she remarked.

  ‘I should hope so,’ replied Fraisier’s concierge. ‘We ourselves may not be rolling in gold, nor in silver, nor even in copper, but we don’t owe a farthing to anybody.’

  La Cibot felt at home with this kind of language.

  ‘Anyway, my dear,’ she went on, ‘I can put my faith in him, eh?’

  ‘That you can! When Monsieur Fraisier takes a liking to somebody, I’ve heard Madame Florimond say, there’s nobody to compare with him.’

  ‘Why didn’t she marry him then?’ La Cibot promptly demanded. ‘Didn’t he get her a lot of money? Quite a catch for a small haberdasher, who was kept by an old man, to get a barrister as a husband!’

  ‘You want to know why?’ said the concierge, leading La Cibot into the alley. ‘You’re going up to see him, aren’t you, Madame?… Well, once you get into his office, you’ll find out why.’

  *

  The staircase drew its light from sliding windows giving on to a little court. It was clear that except for the owner and the egregious Fraisier, the other tenants were manual workers. The muddy stairs bore the marks of every known trade, strewn as they were with brass chippings, broken buttons, scraps of gauze and shreds of esparto straw. The final remark of Fraisier’s concierge had excited Madame Cibot’s curiosity and naturally decided her to consult Dr Poulain’s friend, but to accept his services only if he made a favourable impression.

  ‘I sometimes wonder how Madame Sauvage can keep on her job with him,’ commented the concierge as she followed Madame Cibot. ‘I’m coming up with you, Madame,’ she added, ‘as I’m taking the landlord his milk and newspaper.’

  When La Cibot arrived at the second floor above the entresol, she found herself in front of a most shabby-looking door. The paint, of a dubious red, was coated, over an area of several inches, with that murky grime which clients’ hands deposit on it in the course of time: the kind with which, in elegant apartments, architects have tried to cope by fitting glass panels above and beneath the keyholes. The grille in this door, blocked up with a scabby crust rather like that invented by restau
rant-keepers to givea look of age to their ‘vintage’ bottles, served no other purpose than to justify its being taken for a prison-cell door, and also tallied with the clover-leaf ironwork, formidable hinges and stout nail-heads. These fittings must have been designed by some miser or some pamphleteer at odds with the whole world. The drain into which the household slops were discharged added its quota of nauseous odours to the stairway, whose ceiling was everywhere decorated with arabesques – such weird ones! – traced in candle-smoke. The bell-pull, at the end of which hung a dirty olive-shaped grip, rang a little bell whose feeble timbre betrayed a crack in the metal. Every object in this hideous picture contributed some feature in keeping with the whole.

  La Cibot heard the thud of a heavy step and the wheezy breathing of a hefty woman, and Madame Sauvage appeared. She was one of those hags divined by Adrian Brauwer when he painted his Witches setting out for the Sabbath: a woman five feet six inches tall, with the face of a trooper, and much more of a beard than La Cibot. She was unhealthily corpulent and wore an appalling dress of cheap printed cotton, with a Madras scarf tied round her head; her hair was still in curl-papers made of the printed forms which her master received gratis; from her ears hung something resembling gold carriage-wheels. In her hand this female Cerberus held a battered tin saucepan from which milk was slopping over and adding one more smell to the stairway – not that it was conspicuous, in spite of its nauseating sourness.

  ‘Anything I can do for you, Meddem?’ asked Madame Sauvage. And, doubtless considering La Cibot too well dressed, she darted a menacing look at her, all the more murderous in that her eyes were naturally bloodshot.

  ‘I’ve come to see Monsieur Fraisier, from his friend, Dr Poulain.’