“Then, where did you find this?” inquired Cecile, as she looked closely at the trinket.
“In the Rue de Lappe. A dealer in second-hand furniture there had just brought it back with him from a chateau that is being pulled down near Dreux, Aulnay. Mme. de Pompadour used to spend part of her time there before she built Menars. Some of the most splendid wood-carving ever known has been saved from destruction; Lienard (our most famous living wood-carver) had kept a couple of oval frames for models, as the ne plus ultra of the art, so fine it is. — There were treasures in that place. My man found the fan in the drawer of an inlaid what-not, which I should certainly have bought if I were collecting things of the kind, but it is quite out of the question — a single piece of Riesener’s furniture is worth three or four thousand francs! People here in Paris are just beginning to find out that the famous French and German marquetry workers of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries composed perfect pictures in wood. It is a collector’s business to be ahead of the fashion. Why, in five years’ time, the Frankenthal ware, which I have been collecting these twenty years, will fetch twice the price of Sevres pata tendre.”
“What is Frankenthal ware?” asked Cecile.
“That is the name of the porcelain made by the Elector of the Palatinate; it dates further back than our manufactory at Sevres; just as the famous gardens at Heidelberg, laid waste by Turenne, had the bad luck to exist before the garden of Versailles. Sevres copied Frankenthal to a large extent. — In justice to the Germans, it must be said that they have done admirable work in Saxony and in the Palatinate.”
Mother and daughter looked at one another as if Pons were speaking Chinese. No one can imagine how ignorant and exclusive Parisians are; they only learn what they are taught, and that only when they choose.
“And how do you know the Frankenthal ware when you see it?”
“Eh! by the mark!” cried Pons with enthusiasm. “There is a mark on every one of those exquisite masterpieces. Frankenthal ware is marked with a C and T (for Charles Theodore) interlaced and crowned. On old Dresden china there are two crossed swords and the number of the order in gilt figures. Vincennes bears a hunting-horn; Vienna, a V closed and barred. You can tell Berlin by the two bars, Mayence by the wheel, and Sevres by the two crossed L’s. The queen’s porcelain is marked A for Antoinette, with a royal crown above it. In the eighteenth century, all the crowned heads of Europe had rival porcelain factories, and workmen were kidnaped. Watteau designed services for the Dresden factory; they fetch frantic prices at the present day. One has to know what one is about with them too, for they are turning out imitations now at Dresden. Wonderful things they used to make; they will never make the like again — ”
“Oh! pshaw!”
“No, cousin. Some inlaid work and some kinds of porcelain will never be made again, just as there will never be another Raphael, nor Titian, nor Rembrandt, nor Van Eyck, nor Cranach.... Well, now! there are the Chinese; they are very ingenious, very clever; they make modern copies of their ‘grand mandarin’ porcelain, as it is called. But a pair of vases of genuine ‘grand mandarin’ vases of the largest size, are worth, six, eight, and ten thousand francs, while you can buy the modern replicas for a couple of hundred!”
“You are joking.”
“You are astonished at the prices, but that is nothing, cousin. A dinner service of Sevres pate tendre (and pate tendre is not porcelain) — a complete dinner service of Sevres pate tendre for twelve persons is not merely worth a hundred thousand francs, but that is the price charged on the invoice. Such a dinner-service cost fifteen thousand francs at Sevres in 1750; I have seen the original invoices.”
“But let us go back to this fan,” said Cecile. Evidently in her opinion the trinket was an old-fashioned thing.
“You can understand that as soon as your dear mamma did me the honor of asking for a fan, I went round of all the curiosity shops in Paris, but I found nothing fine enough. I wanted nothing less than a masterpiece for the dear Presidente, and thought of giving her one that once belonged to Marie Antoinette, the most beautiful of all celebrated fans. But yesterday I was dazzled by this divine chef-d’oeuvre, which certainly must have been ordered by Louis XV. himself. Do you ask how I came to look for fans in the Rue de Lappe, among an Auvergnat’s stock of brass and iron and ormolu furniture? Well, I myself believe that there is an intelligence in works of art; they know art-lovers, they call to them — ’Cht-tt!’”
Mme. de Marville shrugged her shoulders and looked at her daughter; Pons did not notice the rapid pantomime.
“I know all those sharpers,” continued Pons, “so I asked him, ‘Anything fresh to-day, Daddy Monistrol?’ — (for he always lets me look over his lots before the big buyers come) — and at that he began to tell me how Lienard, that did such beautiful work for the Government in the Chapelle de Dreux, had been at the Aulnay sale and rescued the carved panels out of the clutches of the Paris dealers, while their heads were running on china and inlaid furniture. — ’I did not do much myself,’ he went on, ‘but I may make my traveling expenses out of this,’ and he showed me a what-not; a marvel! Boucher’s designs executed in marquetry, and with such art! — One could have gone down on one’s knees before it. — ’Look, sir,’ he said, ‘I have just found this fan in a little drawer; it was locked, I had to force it open. You might tell me where I can sell it’ — and with that he brings out this little carved cherry-wood box. — ’See,’ says he, ‘it is the kind of Pompadour that looks like decorated Gothic.’ — ’Yes,’ I told him, ‘the box is pretty; the box might suit me; but as for the fan, Monistrol, I have no Mme. Pons to give the old trinket to, and they make very pretty new ones nowadays; you can buy miracles of painting on vellum cheaply enough. There are two thousand painters in Paris, you know.’ — And I opened out the fan carelessly, keeping down my admiration, looked indifferently at those two exquisite little pictures, touched off with an ease fit to send you into raptures. I held Mme. de Pompadour’s fan in my hand! Watteau had done his utmost for this. — ’What do you want for the what-not?’ — ’Oh! a thousand francs; I have had a bid already.’ — I offered him a price for the fan corresponding with the probable expenses of the journey. We looked each other in the eyes, and I saw that I had my man. I put the fan back into the box lest my Auvergnat should begin to look at it, and went into ecstasies over the box; indeed, it is a jewel. — ’If I take it,’ said I, ‘it is for the sake of the box; the box tempts me. As for the what-not, you will get more than a thousand francs for that. Just see how the brass is wrought; it is a model. There is business in it.... It has never been copied; it is a unique specimen, made solely for Mme. de Pompadour’ — and so on, till my man, all on fire for his what-not, forgets the fan, and lets me have it for a mere trifle, because I have pointed out the beauties of his piece of Riesener’s furniture. So here it is; but it needs a great deal of experience to make such a bargain as that. It is a duel, eye to eye; and who has such eyes as a Jew or an Auvergnat?”
The old artist’s wonderful pantomime, his vivid, eager way of telling the story of the triumph of his shrewdness over the dealer’s ignorance, would have made a subject for a Dutch painter; but it was all thrown away upon the audience. Mother and daughter exchanged cold, contemptuous glances. — ”What an oddity!” they seemed to say.
“So it amuses you?” remarked Mme. de Marville. The question sent a cold chill through Pons; he felt a strong desire to slap the Presidente.
“Why, my dear cousin, that is the way to hunt down a work of art. You are face to face with antagonists that dispute the game with you. It is craft against craft! A work of art in the hands of a Norman, an Auvergnat, or a Jew, is like a princess guarded by magicians in a fairy tale.”
“And how can you tell that this is by Wat — what do you call him?”
“Watteau, cousin. One of the greatest eighteenth century painters in France. Look! do you not see that it is his work?” (pointing to a pastoral scene, court-shepherd swains and she
pherdesses dancing in a ring). “The movement! the life in it! the coloring! There it is — see! — painted with a stroke of the brush, as a writing-master makes a flourish with a pen. Not a trace of effort here! And, turn it over, look! — a ball in a drawing-room. Summer and Winter! And what ornaments! and how well preserved it is! The hinge-pin is gold, you see, and on cleaning it, I found a tiny ruby at either side.”
“If it is so, cousin, I could not think of accepting such a valuable present from you. It would be better to lay up the money for yourself,” said Mme. de Marville; but all the same, she asked no better than to keep the splendid fan.
“It is time that it should pass from the service of Vice into the hands of Virtue,” said the good soul, recovering his assurance. “It has taken a century to work the miracle. No princess at Court, you may be sure, will have anything to compare with it; for, unfortunately, men will do more for a Pompadour than for a virtuous queen, such is human nature.”
“Very well,” Mme. de Marville said, laughing, “I will accept your present. — Cecile, my angel, go to Madeleine and see that dinner is worthy of your cousin.”
Mme. de Marville wished to make matters even. Her request, made aloud, in defiance of all rules of good taste, sounded so much like an attempt to repay at once the balance due to the poor cousin, that Pons flushed red, like a girl found out in fault. The grain of sand was a little too large; for some moments he could only let it work in his heart. Cecile, a red-haired young woman, with a touch of pedantic affectation, combined her father’s ponderous manner with a trace of her mother’s hardness. She went and left poor Pons face to face with the terrible Presidente.
“How nice she is, my little Lili!” said the mother. She still called her Cecile by this baby name.
“Charming!” said Pons, twirling his thumbs.
“I cannot understand these times in which we live,” broke out the Presidente. “What is the good of having a President of the Court of Appeal in Paris and a Commander of the Legion of Honor for your father, and for a grandfather the richest wholesale silk merchant in Paris, a deputy, and a millionaire that will be a peer of France some of these days?”
The President’s zeal for the new Government had, in fact, recently been rewarded with a commander’s ribbon — thanks to his friendship with Popinot, said the envious. Popinot himself, modest though he was, had, as has been seen, accepted the title of count, “for his son’s sake,” he told his numerous friends.
“Men look for nothing but money nowadays,” said Cousin Pons. “No one thinks anything of you unless you are rich, and — ”
“What would it have been if Heaven had spared my poor little Charles! — ” cried the lady.
“Oh, with two children you would be poor,” returned the cousin. “It practically means the division of the property. But you need not trouble yourself, cousin; Cecile is sure to marry sooner or later. She is the most accomplished girl I know.”
To such depths had Pons fallen by adapting himself to the company of his entertainers! In their houses he echoed their ideas, and said the obvious thing, after the manner of a chorus in a Greek play. He did not dare to give free play to the artist’s originality, which had overflowed in bright repartee when he was young; he had effaced himself, till he had almost lost his individuality; and if the real Pons appeared, as he had done a moment ago, he was immediately repressed.
“But I myself was married with only twenty thousand francs for my portion — ”
“In 1819, cousin. And it was you, a woman with a head on your shoulders, and the royal protection of Louis XVIII.”
“Be still, my child is a perfect angel. She is clever, she has a warm heart, she will have a hundred thousand francs on her wedding day, to say nothing of the most brilliant expectations; and yet she stays on our hands,” and so on and so on. For twenty minutes, Mme. de Marville talked on about herself and her Cecile, pitying herself after the manner of mothers in bondage to marriageable daughters.
Pons had dined at the house every week for twenty years, and Camusot de Marville was the only cousin he had in the world; but he had yet to hear the first word spoken as to his own affairs — nobody cared to know how he lived. Here and elsewhere the poor cousin was a kind of sink down which his relatives poured domestic confidences. His discretion was well known; indeed, was he not bound over to silence when a single imprudent word would have shut the door of ten houses upon him? And he must combine his role of listener with a second part; he must applaud continually, smile on every one, accuse nobody, defend nobody; from his point of view, every one must be in the right. And so, in the house of his kinsman, Pons no longer counted as a man; he was a digestive apparatus.
In the course of a long tirade, Mme. Camusot de Marville avowed with due circumspection that she was prepared to take almost any son-in-law with her eyes shut. She was even disposed to think that at eight-and-forty or so a man with twenty thousand francs a year was a good match.
“Cecile is in her twenty-third year. If it should fall out so unfortunately that she is not married before she is five or six-and-twenty, it will be extremely hard to marry her at all. When a girl reaches that age, people want to know why she has been so long on hand. We are a good deal talked about in our set. We have come to the end of all the ordinary excuses — ’She is so young. — She is so fond of her father and mother that she doesn’t like to leave them. — She is so happy at home. — She is hard to please, she would like a good name — ’ We are beginning to look silly; I feel that distinctly. And besides, Cecile is tired of waiting, poor child, she suffers — ”
“In what way?” Pons was noodle enough to ask.
“Why, because it is humiliating to her to see all her girl friends married before her,” replied the mother, with a duenna’s air.
“But, cousin, has anything happened since the last time that I had the pleasure of dining here? Why do you think of men of eight-and-forty?” Pons inquired humbly.
“This has happened,” returned the Presidente. “We were to have had an interview with a Court Councillor; his son is thirty years old and very well-to-do, and M. de Marville would have obtained a post in the audit-office for him and paid the money. The young man is a supernumerary there at present. And now they tell us that he has taken it into his head to rush off to Italy in the train of a duchess from the Bal Mabille.... It is nothing but a refusal in disguise. The fact is, the young man’s mother is dead; he has an income of thirty thousand francs, and more to come at his father’s death, and they don’t care about the match for him. You have just come in in the middle of all this, dear cousin, so you must excuse our bad temper.”
While Pons was casting about for the complimentary answer which invariably occurred to him too late when he was afraid of his host, Madeleine came in, handed a folded note to the Presidente, and waited for an answer. The note ran as follows:
“DEAR MAMMA, — If we pretend that this note comes to you from papa
at the Palais, and that he wants us both to dine with his friend
because proposals have been renewed — then the cousin will go, and
we can carry out our plan of going to the Popinots.”
“Who brought the master’s note?” the Presidente asked quickly.
“A lad from the Salle du Palais,” the withered waiting woman unblushingly answered, and her mistress knew at once that Madeleine had woven the plot with Cecile, now at the end of her patience.
“Tell him that we will both be there at half-past five.”
Madeleine had no sooner left the room than the Presidente turned to Cousin Pons with that insincere friendliness which is about as grateful to a sensitive soul as a mixture of milk and vinegar to the palate of an epicure.
“Dinner is ordered, dear cousin; you must dine without us; my husband has just sent word from the court that the question of the marriage has been reopened, and we are to dine with the Councillor. We need not stand on ceremony at all. Do just as if you were at home. I have no secrets from you; I am pe
rfectly open with you, as you see. I am sure you would not wish to break off the little darling’s marriage.”
“I, cousin? On the contrary, I should like to find some one for her; but in my circle — ”
“Oh, that is not at all likely,” said the Presidente, cutting him short insolently. “Then you will stay, will you not? Cecile will keep you company while I dress.
“Oh! I can dine somewhere else, cousin.”
Cruelly hurt though he was by her way of casting up his poverty to him, the prospect of being left alone with the servants was even more alarming.
“But why should you? Dinner is ready; you may just as well have it; if you do not, the servants will eat it.”
At that atrocious speech Pons started up as if he had received a shock from a galvanic battery, bowed stiffly to the lady, and went to find his spencer. Now, it so happened that the door of Cecile’s bedroom, beyond the little drawing-room, stood open, and looking into the mirror, he caught sight of the girl shaking with laughter as she gesticulated and made signs to her mother. The old artist understood beyond a doubt that he had been the victim of some cowardly hoax. Pons went slowly down the stairs; he could not keep back the tears. He understood that he had been turned out of the house, but why and wherefore he did not know.
“I am growing too old,” he told himself. “The world has a horror of old age and poverty — two ugly things. After this I will not go anywhere unless I am asked.”
Heroic resolve!
Downstairs the great gate was shut, as it usually is in houses occupied by the proprietor; the kitchen stood exactly opposite the porter’s lodge, and the door was open. Pons was obliged to listen while Madeleine told the servants the whole story amid the laughter of the servants. She had not expected him to leave so soon. The footman loudly applauded a joke at the expense of a visitor who was always coming to the house and never gave you more than three francs at the year’s end.
“Yes,” put in the cook; “but if he cuts up rough and does not come back, there will be three francs the less for some of us on New Year’s day.”
Works of Honore De Balzac Page 729