Cousin Pons

by Honoré de Balzac

  And therefore, with this intent, I give and bequeath to His Majesty the King, as an accession to the Louvre Museum, the pictures composing my collection, with this charge, that if the bequest be accepted, a life annuity of two thousand four hundred francs be paid to my friend Wilhelm Schmucke.

  If His Majesty, as usufructuary of the Museum, do not accept this bequest subject to the above charge, the aforesaid pictures shall then form part of the bequest I hereby make to my friend Wilhelm Schmucke of all the assets of which I die possessed: with the following charges that The Monkey’s Head, by Goya, shall be delivered to my cousin Président Camusot; the picture entitled Flowers by Abraham Mignon, representing tulips, to Monsieur Trognon, notary, whom I hereby appoint as my executor; also that an annual income of two hundred francs shall be paid to Madame Cibot, who has been my housekeeper for ten years.

  Finally, my friend Wilhelm Schmucke shall give The Descent from the Cross by Rubens, the sketch for the famous painting now at Antwerp, to my parish for the decoration of a Chapel, as the expression of my gratitude for the kindness shown to me by the curate of that parish, the Abbé Duplanty, to whom I owe it that I die a Christian and a Catholic.

  ‘This spells ruin!’ said Fraisier, ‘the ruin of all my hopes! Ah, I am beginning to believe everything the Présidente told me about the old musician’s malevolence!…’

  ‘Well, what’s the position?’ La Cibot came forward to ask.

  ‘Your gentleman is a monster. He’s leaving everything to the Louvre. We can’t go to law against the State!… The will is unassailable… We are robbed, ruined, despoiled, done for!…’

  ‘What has he left me?’

  ‘An annuity of two hundred francs.’

  ‘Much good that will do me!… Why, he’s an out-and-out villain!’

  ‘Go back and keep watch,’ said Fraisier. ‘I’m now going to put the old villain’s will back into its envelope.’

  26. Re-enter Madame Sauvage

  As soon as Madame Cibot’s back was turned, Fraisier briskly substituted a sheet of blank paper for the will, which he put in his pocket. Then he sealed up the envelope very neatly and showed it to Madame Cibot on her return, to ask her if she could perceive the slightest trace of the operation. La Cibot took the envelope, felt the paper inside it and gave a deep sigh. She had hoped that Fraisier himself would have burnt the fatal document.

  ‘Well, what can we do, my dear Monsieur Fraisier?’ she asked.

  ‘Oh, that’s your concern! I’m not one of the heirs, but if I had the slightest claim to that lot’ – he pointed to the collection – ‘I know what I should do!…’

  ‘That’s just what I’m asking you,’ she said somewhat obtusely.

  ‘There’s a fire in the hearth…’ he retorted as he stood up to go.

  ‘Yes indeed. Nobody will know about it except you and me!’

  ‘A will that can’t be found can never be proved to have existed,’ the man of law replied.

  ‘In that case, what will you do?’

  ‘I?… If Monsieur Pons dies intestate, I can guarantee you a hundred thousand francs.’

  ‘Oh yes, all very fine! People promise you piles of gold, and when they’ve got what they want and it’s time to pay up they start niggling like…’

  She stopped just in time, for it had been on the tip of her tongue to tell Fraisier about Elias Magus.

  ‘I must be off,’ said Fraisier. ‘It’s in your interest that no one should see me in the flat. We’ll meet again down below, in your lodge.’

  After closing the door, La Cibot re-entered with the will in her hand, firmly intending to throw it in the fire. But the moment she entered the bedroom she felt both her arms being gripped!… She found herself caught between Pons and Schmucke, each of whom was leaning against the partition on either side of the door.

  ‘Oh!’ cried La Cibot, and she fell flat on her face as if in terrible convulsions – whether they were real or feigned was never known. The sight of this had such an effect on Pons that a deadly feeling of faintness came over him, and Schmucke left La Cibot lying there, in order to put Pons back to bed. The two friends were shaking like people who, in carrying out a painful resolve, have overtaxed their strength. When Pons was in bed again and Schmucke had recovered his strength a little, he heard a sound of sobbing. La Cibot was on her knees, weeping copiously and stretching her hands out to the two friends in a very expressive pantomime of supplication.

  ‘It was only curiosity!’ she said as she saw their attention turned on her. ‘Kind Monsieur Pons! It’s a woman’s failing, you know! But I didn’t manage to read the will, and I was bringing it back!…’

  ‘Go avay!’ said Schmucke, standing up on tip-toe, the immensity of his wrath adding appreciably to his stature. ‘You are a monster! You haf triet to kill my goot Pons. He vass right! You are more zen a monster, you are a lost soul!’

  Seeing the horror painted on the naïve German’s face, La Cibot stood up as haughtily as Tartuffe, cast a glance at Schmucke which made him tremble, and left the room, carrying off under her blouse a splendid little picture by Metsu which Elias Magus had much admired and which he had pronounced to be a ‘gem’. In her lodge La Cibot found Fraisier waiting, in the hope that she would have burnt the envelope and the blank sheet inside it. He was much astonished to see that his client was terrified and crestfallen.

  ‘What’s happened?’

  ‘What’s happened, my dear Monsieur Fraisier? Just this: pretending to give me good advice and guidance, you’ve lost me my income and those gentlemen’s trust for good and all…’

  And she burst into one of those torrents of gabble at which she was such an expert.

  ‘Stop wasting words,’ Fraisier curtly broke in. ‘Come to the facts, the facts, and look sharp about it!’

  ‘Well, this is how it happened.’ She recounted the scene exactly as it had taken place.

  ‘I’ve lost you nothing at all,’ he replied. ‘These two gentlemen suspected your honesty or they would not have set that trap for you. They were waiting for you, watching you!… You’re not telling me everything,’ the lawyer added with a tigerish glare at the concierge.

  ‘Me hide anything from you?… After all we’ve been doing together?’ she exclaimed with a shudder.

  ‘My dear woman, I have done nothing reprehensible!’ said Fraisier, thus manifesting his intention of denying his nocturnal visit to Pons’s flat.

  La Cibot felt as if her head was on fire and the rest of her body cased in ice.

  ‘What!’ she cried, stupefied.

  ‘There’s the criminal case against you ready to hand! You can be accused of purloining a will,’ was Fraisier’s chilling reply.

  La Cibot gave a start of horror.

  ‘Calm down,’ he continued. ‘I am your legal adviser. I only wanted to show you how easy it would be, one way or another, for what I told you to happen. Come now! What did you do to make that German simpleton hide in the bedroom without your knowing it?’

  ‘Nothing, except what happened the other day when I stuck to it that Monsieur Pons had been seeing things. Since then those two gentlemen have turned against me completely. So you’re the one who’s brought all this trouble on me. I might have lost my hold on Monsieur Pons, but I was sure of the German. Why, he was already talking of marrying me, or of me living with him – it’s the same thing.’

  This explanation seemed so plausible that Fraisier was obliged to accept it.

  ‘Have no fear,’ he resumed. ‘I promised you an income. I’ll keep my word. Up to now the whole business has been problematical: now it’s worth a mint of money… You’ll have not less than twelve hundred francs a year… But, my dear Madame Cibot, you must obey my orders and carry them out intelligently.’

  ‘I will, my dear Monsieur Fraisier,’ said the concierge, with no fight left in her, and pliant to the point of servility.

  ‘Very well, good-bye.’ And Fraisier left the flat with the will in his pocket.

  He returned ho
me full of glee, for this will was a terrible weapon in his hands. ‘I shall have,’ he was thinking, ‘a strong guarantee against any bad faith on the Présidente’s part. If she took it into her head to break her word I could lose her the inheritance.’

  *

  Early in the morning after opening his shop and leaving his sister in charge, Rémonencq went, in accordance with a recently acquired habit, to inquire about his good friend Cibot. He found the portress gazing at the Metsu picture and wondering how a scrap of painted wood could be worth so much money.

  ‘Aha!’ he said, looking over her shoulder. ‘That’s the only item Monsieur Magus was sorry he couldn’t buy. He said that little article would put the finishing touch to his happiness.’

  ‘How much would he give for it?’

  ‘Look, if you promise to marry me within a year of being a widow, I undertake to get twenty thousand francs for it from Elias Magus. If you won’t marry me, you’ll never get more than a thousand francs.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because you’d have to sign a receipt as the owner, and then you’d have the heirs going to law with you. If you’re my wife, I’m the one who’ll be selling it to Magus, and all a dealer has to do is to enter it in his ledger: I shall write down that Monsieur Schmucke sold it to me. Come now, let me take charge of this painting. If your husband died, you might have a good deal of trouble, but no one would think it strange for me to have a picture in my stock. You know you can trust me. Besides, if you like, I’ll write you an acknowledgement.’

  ‘That’s the idea. Bring me a signed receipt,’ she said, locking up the picture in her chest of drawers.

  ‘Neighbour,’ said the dealer in a low voice, dragging La Cibot to the door, ‘it’s easy to see we are going to lose our friend Cibot. The doctor gave up hope yesterday evening and said he wouldn’t last the day out… It’s a real blow! But after all, this wasn’t the right place for you… Your place is in a fine curio shop on the Boulevard des Capucines… Do you know that in the last ten years I’ve made nearly a hundred thousand francs, and if you come to have the same amount, I guarantee to make you a fine fortune… as my wife… You’d be quite a lady, with my sister to do the work and look after the house.’

  The would-be seducer was interrupted by harrowing cries from the little tailor, whose death agony was beginning.

  ‘Get away from here,’ said La Cibot. ‘It’s heartless of you to talk of such things when my poor man’s in such a terrible state.’

  ‘It’s because I’m so much in love with you that I’d stop at nothing to get you.’

  ‘If you were so much in love with me, you’d say nothing at a time like this,’ she replied.

  Rémonencq went back to his shop quite sure of marrying La Cibot.

  About ten o’clock there was quite a commotion around the porte cochère, for the Sacraments were about to be administered to Monsieur Cibot. All the Cibots’ friends, caretakers and concierges in the rue de Normandie and round about, occupied the lodge, the carriage entrance and the street front. Thus no notice was taken either of Monsieur Léopold Hannequin, who arrived with a colleague, or of Schwab and Brunner, who were able to get into Pons’s flat without Madame Cibot observing them. The notary asked the concierge from the house next door to tell him on which floor Pons lived, and she directed him to the flat. As for Brunner, who came along with Schwab, he had already visited the Pons Collection, and slipped upstairs without a word, showing his partner the way… Pons formally cancelled the previous will and made Schmucke his sole heir. Once the formalities were over, Pons, after thanking Schwab and Brunner and earnestly enjoining Monsieur Léopold Hannequin to watch over Schmucke’s interests, fell into such a state of exhaustion as a result of the energy he had expended, both during the nocturnal scene with La Cibot and in this his last public act, that Schmucke begged Schwab to go and inform the Abbé Duplanty: Pons was asking for the Last Sacraments, and Schmucke refused to leave his friend’s bedside.

  La Cibot was sitting at the foot of her husband’s bed, and since she had been expelled by the two friends, she had not made breakfast for Schmucke; but the morning’s events and the sight of Pons meeting his end with heroic resignation had so wrung Schmucke’s heart that he did not want food.

  Nevertheless, at about two o’clock, not having seen the old German about, and moved as much by curiosity as by self-interest, the concierge asked Rémonencq’s sister to go and see if Schmucke needed anything. At that moment the Abbé Duplanty, after hearing the unfortunate musician’s last confession, was administering extreme unction. And so Mademoiselle Rémonencq disturbed this ceremony by her repeated ringing. Now as Pons had made Schmucke swear not to admit anyone, so fearful was he of being robbed, Schmucke let her go on ringing, and she went back in much dismay to tell La Cibot that Schmucke would not open the door. Fraisier took note of this significant fact. Schmucke had never seen anyone die and was about to experience all the embarrassments which have to be faced in Paris when one has a corpse on one’s hands, above all when there is no one to give aid and succour or to act in one’s stead. Fraisier was aware that genuinely afflicted people lose their heads on such occasions. He had had his breakfast and had remained in the lodge since the morning, in continuous conference with Dr Poulain. The idea then came to him to check all Schmucke’s movements himself.

  And this is how the two friends, Poulain and Fraisier, set about achieving this important result.

  The verger at the church of Saint-François, one Cantinet, who had formerly kept a glassware shop, lived in the rue d’Orléans, in the house next door to Poulain. Now Madame Cantinet, one of the chair-letting attendants in the church, had been treated by Dr Poulain free of charge, and naturally she was full of gratitude for this and had often told him of all her misfortunes. The two ‘Nutcrackers’ had attended mass at Saint-François on Sundays and Holy Days, and they were on good terms with the verger, the beadle, the distributors of holy water, in short with all the clerical militia, known in Paris as the ‘lower clergy’, whose perquisites are the tips they get from the faithful. Madame Cantinet and Schmucke were therefore well acquainted with each other. This good woman was burdened with two afflictions which would enable Fraisier to use her as a blind and unwitting tool. Her son, who had a passion for the theatre and had refused to make his way in the Church with a view to becoming a beadle, had been given walking-on parts at the Cirque-Olympique; he was leading an undisciplined life which grieved his mother, whose purse was often drained dry by the loans she had to make him. Then there was Cantinet himself, addicted to drink and sloth, two vices which had forced him to give up his business. His duties as verger, far from pulling him together, provided him with an opportunity for indulging these two passions: he did no work, and hobnobbed with coachmen at weddings, with mutes at funerals, and with paupers drawing parish aid, so that by noon every day his face was as red as a cardinal’s robe.

  Madame Cantinet saw herself doomed to a poverty-stricken old age, although, as she said, she had brought a dowry of twelve thousand francs to her husband. This tale of woe, recounted a hundred times to Dr Poulain, gave him the idea of using her to facilitate the installation of Madame Sauvage in the Pons flat, as cook and domestic factotum. To present Madame Sauvage in person was out of the question, for the two ‘Nutcrackers’ were now suspicious of everything, and Fraisier had been sufficiently enlightened on this score by their refusal to open the door to Mademoiselle Rémonencq. But it seemed evident to the two friends that the devout musicians would blindly accept anyone the Abbé Duplanty put forward. Their plan was that Madame Cantinet should take Madame Sauvage with her; once there, Fraisier’s servant would be as useful as Fraisier himself.

  *

  When the Abbé Duplanty arrived at the porte cochère, he was halted a moment by the crowd of Cibot’s friends who had come to pay their respects to the oldest and most esteemed concierge in the quarter.

  Dr Poulain doffed his hat to the Abbé, drew him aside and said:

  �
��I’m on my way to poor Monsieur Pons. He might pull through. It’s a question of persuading him to undergo an operation for the removal of gall-stones which have formed in the bladder. They are palpable and are setting up an inflammation which will cause death. There might still be time for surgery. You would do well to use your influence on your penitent to prevail upon him to have this operation. I can answer for his life, so long as no awkward complication occurs while I am carrying it out.’

  ‘As soon as I have taken the Ciborium back to the church I will return,’ said the Abbé Duplanty. ‘Monsieur Schmucke too is in a condition which calls for the aid of religion.’

  ‘I have just learnt that that good German is all by himself,’ said the doctor. ‘He had an altercation this morning with Madame Cibot, their housekeeper of ten years’ standing, and they have fallen out – no doubt temporarily. But he can’t get along without help in the predicament he’s going to be in. It would be a work of charity to do something for him.’

  ‘Come here, Cantinet,’ said the doctor, beckoning the verger forward. ‘Go and ask your wife if she will nurse Monsieur Pons and look after Monsieur Schmucke for a few days in Madame Cibot’s place. In any case, even if this misunderstanding hadn’t arisen, she would still have had to get someone to replace her.… Madame Cantinet is a good woman,’ said the doctor to the Abbé.

  ‘There couldn’t be a better choice,’ the good priest replied. ‘The churchwardens have found her completely reliable as a collector of seat-rents in church.’