Works of Honore De Balzac

by Honoré de Balzac

  The women went about their work, and Schmucke looked on precisely as an idiot might have done. Broken down with sorrow, wholly absorbed, in a half-cataleptic state, he could not take his eyes from the face that seemed to fascinate him, Pons’ face refined by the absolute repose of Death. Schmucke hoped to die; everything was alike indifferent. If the room had been on fire he would not have stirred.

  “There are twelve hundred and fifty francs here,” La Sauvage told him.

  Schmucke shrugged his shoulders.

  But when La Sauvage came near to measure the body by laying the sheet over it, before cutting out the shroud, a horrible struggle ensued between her and the poor German. Schmucke was furious. He behaved like a dog that watches by his dead master’s body, and shows his teeth at all who try to touch it. La Sauvage grew impatient. She grasped him, set him in the armchair, and held him down with herculean strength.

  “Go on, child; sew him in his shroud,” she said, turning to Mme. Cantinet.

  As soon as this operation was completed, La Sauvage set Schmucke back in his place at the foot of the bed.

  “Do you understand?” said she. “The poor dead man lying there must be done up, there is no help for it.”

  Schmucke began to cry. The women left him and took possession of the kitchen, whither they brought all the necessaries in a very short time. La Sauvage made out a preliminary statement accounting for three hundred and sixty francs, and then proceeded to prepare a dinner for four persons. And what a dinner! A fat goose (the cobbler’s pheasant) by way of a substantial roast, an omelette with preserves, a salad, and the inevitable broth — the quantities of the ingredients for this last being so excessive that the soup was more like a strong meat-jelly.

  At nine o’clock the priest, sent by the curate to watch by the dead, came in with Cantinet, who brought four tall wax candles and some tapers. In the death-chamber Schmucke was lying with his arms about the body of his friend, holding him in a tight clasp; nothing but the authority of religion availed to separate him from his dead. Then the priest settled himself comfortably in the easy-chair and read his prayers while Schmucke, kneeling beside the couch, besought God to work a miracle and unite him to Pons, so that they might be buried in the same grave; and Mme. Cantinet went on her way to the Temple to buy a pallet and complete bedding for Mme. Sauvage. The twelve hundred and fifty francs were regarded as plunder. At eleven o’clock Mme. Cantinet came in to ask if Schmucke would not eat a morsel, but with a gesture he signified that he wished to be left in peace.

  “Your supper is ready, M. Pastelot,” she said, addressing the priest, and they went.

  Schmucke, left alone in the room, smiled to himself like a madman free at last to gratify a desire like the longing of pregnancy. He flung himself down beside Pons, and yet again he held his friend in a long, close embrace. At midnight the priest came back and scolded him, and Schmucke returned to his prayers. At daybreak the priest went, and at seven o’clock in the morning the doctor came to see Schmucke, and spoke kindly and tried hard to persuade him to eat, but the German refused.

  “If you do not eat now you will feel very hungry when you come back,” the doctor told him, “for you must go to the mayor’s office and take a witness with you, so that the registrar may issue a certificate of death.”

  “I must go!” cried Schmucke in frightened tones.

  “Who else?... You must go, for you were the one person who saw him die.”

  “Mein legs vill nicht carry me,” pleaded Schmucke, imploring the doctor to come to the rescue.

  “Take a cab,” the hypocritical doctor blandly suggested. “I have given notice already. Ask some one in the house to go with you. The two women will look after the place while you are away.”

  No one imagines how the requirements of the law jar upon a heartfelt sorrow. The thought of it is enough to make one turn from civilization and choose rather the customs of the savage. At nine o’clock that morning Mme. Sauvage half-carried Schmucke downstairs, and from the cab he was obliged to beg Remonencq to come with him to the registrar as a second witness. Here in Paris, in this land of ours besotted with Equality, the inequality of conditions is glaringly apparent everywhere and in everything. The immutable tendency of things peeps out even in the practical aspects of Death. In well-to-do families, a relative, a friend, or a man of business spares the mourners these painful details; but in this, as in the matter of taxation, the whole burden falls heaviest upon the shoulders of the poor.

  “Ah! you have good reason to regret him,” said Remonencq in answer to the poor martyr’s moan; “he was a very good, a very honest man, and he has left a fine collection behind him. But being a foreigner, sir, do you know that you are like to find yourself in a great predicament — for everybody says that M. Pons left everything to you?”

  Schmucke was not listening. He was sounding the dark depths of sorrow that border upon madness. There is such a thing as tetanus of the soul.

  “And you would do well to find some one — some man of business — to advise you and act for you,” pursued Remonencq.

  “Ein mann of pizness!” echoed Schmucke.

  “You will find that you will want some one to act for you. If I were you, I should take an experienced man, somebody well known to you in the quarter, a man you can trust.... I always go to Tabareau myself for my bits of affairs — he is the bailiff. If you give his clerk power to act for you, you need not trouble yourself any further.”

  Remonencq and La Cibot, prompted by Fraisier, had agreed beforehand to make a suggestion which stuck in Schmucke’s memory; for there are times in our lives when grief, as it were, congeals the mind by arresting all its functions, and any chance impression made at such moments is retained by a frost-bound memory. Schmucke heard his companion with such a fixed, mindless stare, that Remonencq said no more.

  “If he is always to be idiotic like this,” thought Remonencq, “I might easily buy the whole bag of tricks up yonder for a hundred thousand francs; if it is really his.... Here we are at the mayor’s office, sir.”

  Remonencq was obliged to take Schmucke out of the cab and to half-carry him to the registrar’s department, where a wedding-party was assembled. Here they had to wait for their turn, for, by no very uncommon chance, the clerk had five or six certificates to make out that morning; and here it was appointed that poor Schmucke should suffer excruciating anguish.

  “Monsieur is M. Schmucke?” remarked a person in a suit of black, reducing Schmucke to stupefaction by the mention of his name. He looked up with the same blank, unseeing eyes that he had turned upon Remonencq, who now interposed.

  “What do you want with him?” he said. “Just leave him in peace; you can plainly see that he is in trouble.”

  “The gentleman has just lost his friend, and proposes, no doubt, to do honor to his memory, being, as he is, the sole heir. The gentleman, no doubt, will not haggle over it, he will buy a piece of ground outright for a grave. And as M. Pons was such a lover of the arts, it would be a great pity not to put Music, Painting, and Sculpture on his tomb — three handsome full-length figures, weeping — ”

  Remonencq waved the speaker away, in Auvergnat fashion, but the man replied with another gesture, which being interpreted means “Don’t spoil sport”; a piece of commercial free-masonry, as it were, which the dealer understood.

  “I represent the firm of Sonet and Company, monumental stone-masons; Sir Walter Scott would have dubbed me Young Mortality,” continued this person. “If you, sir, should decide to intrust your orders to us, we would spare you the trouble of the journey to purchase the ground necessary for the interment of a friend lost to the arts — ”

  At this Remonencq nodded assent, and jogged Schmucke’s elbow.

  “Every day we receive orders from families to arrange all formalities,” continued he of the black coat, thus encouraged by Remonencq. “In the first moment of bereavement, the heir-at-law finds it very difficult to attend to such matters, and we are accustomed to perform these l
ittle services for our clients. Our charges, sir, are on a fixed scale, so much per foot, freestone or marble. Family vaults a specialty. — We undertake everything at the most moderate prices. Our firm executed the magnificent monument erected to the fair Esther Gobseck and Lucien de Rubempre, one of the finest ornaments of Pere-Lachaise. We only employ the best workmen, and I must warn you, sir, against small contractors — who turn out nothing but trash,” he added, seeing that another person in a black suit was coming up to say a word for another firm of marble-workers.

  It is often said that “death is the end of a journey,” but the aptness of the simile is realized most fully in Paris. Any arrival, especially of a person of condition, upon the “dark brink,” is hailed in much the same way as the traveler recently landed is hailed by hotel touts and pestered with their recommendations. With the exception of a few philosophically-minded persons, or here and there a family secure of handing down a name to posterity, nobody thinks beforehand of the practical aspects of death. Death always comes before he is expected; and, from a sentiment easy to understand, the heirs usually act as if the event were impossible. For which reason, almost every one that loses father or mother, wife or child, is immediately beset by scouts that profit by the confusion caused by grief to snare others. In former days, agents for monuments used to live round about the famous cemetery of Pere-Lachaise, and were gathered together in a single thoroughfare, which should by rights have been called the Street of Tombs; issuing thence, they fell upon the relatives of the dead as they came from the cemetery, or even at the grave-side. But competition and the spirit of speculation induced them to spread themselves further and further afield, till descending into Paris itself they reached the very precincts of the mayor’s office. Indeed, the stone-mason’s agent has often been known to invade the house of mourning with a design for the sepulchre in his hand.

  “I am in treaty with this gentleman,” said the representative of the firm of Sonet to another agent who came up.

  “Pons deceased!...” called the clerk at this moment. “Where are the witnesses?”

  “This way, sir,” said the stone-mason’s agent, this time addressing Remonencq.

  Schmucke stayed where he had been placed on the bench, an inert mass. Remonencq begged the agent to help him, and together they pulled Schmucke towards the balustrade, behind which the registrar shelters himself from the mourning public. Remonencq, Schmucke’s Providence, was assisted by Dr. Poulain, who filled in the necessary information as to Pons’ age and birthplace; the German knew but one thing — that Pons was his friend. So soon as the signatures were affixed, Remonencq and the doctor (followed by the stone-mason’s man), put Schmucke into a cab, the desperate agent whisking in afterwards, bent upon taking a definite order.

  La Sauvage, on the lookout in the gateway, half-carried Schmucke’s almost unconscious form upstairs. Remonencq and the agent went up with her.

  “He will be ill!” exclaimed the agent, anxious to make an end of the piece of business which, according to him, was in progress.

  “I should think he will!” returned Mme. Sauvage. “He has been crying for twenty-four hours on end, and he would not take anything. There is nothing like grief for giving one a sinking in the stomach.”

  “My dear client,” urged the representative of the firm of Sonet, “do take some broth. You have so much to do; some one must go to the Hotel de Ville to buy the ground in the cemetery on which you mean to erect a monument to perpetuate the memory of the friend of the arts, and bear record to your gratitude.”

  “Why, there is no sense in this!” added Mme. Cantinet, coming in with broth and bread.

  “If you are as weak as this, you ought to think of finding some one to act for you,” added Remonencq, “for you have a good deal on your hands, my dear sir. There is the funeral to order. You would not have your friend buried like a pauper!”

  “Come, come, my dear sir,” put in La Sauvage, seizing a moment when Schmucke laid his head back in the great chair to pour a spoonful of soup into his mouth. She fed him as if he had been a child, and almost in spite of himself.

  “Now, if you were wise, sir, since you are inclined to give yourself up quietly to grief, you would find some one to act for you — ”

  “As you are thinking of raising a magnificent monument to the memory of your friend, sir, you have only to leave it all to me; I will undertake — ”

  “What is all this? What is all this?” asked La Sauvage. “Has M. Schmucke ordered something? Who may you be?”

  “I represent the firm of Sonet, my dear madame, the biggest monumental stone-masons in Paris,” said the person in black, handing a business-card to the stalwart Sauvage.

  “Very well, that will do. Some one will go with you when the time comes; but you must not take advantage of the gentleman’s condition now. You can quite see that he is not himself — — ”

  The agent led her out upon the landing.

  “If you will undertake to get the order for us,” he said confidentially, “I am empowered to offer you forty francs.”

  Mme. Sauvage grew placable. “Very well, let me have your address,” said she.

  Schmucke meantime being left to himself, and feeling the stronger for the soup and bread that he had been forced to swallow, returned at once to Pons’ rooms, and to his prayers. He had lost himself in the fathomless depths of sorrow, when a voice sounding in his ears drew him back from the abyss of grief, and a young man in a suit of black returned for the eleventh time to the charge, pulling the poor, tortured victim’s coatsleeve until he listened.

  “Sir!” said he.

  “Vat ees it now?”

  “Sir! we owe a supreme discovery to Dr. Gannal; we do not dispute his fame; he has worked miracles of Egypt afresh; but there have been improvements made upon his system. We have obtained surprising results. So, if you would like to see your friend again, as he was when he was alive — ”

  “See him again!” cried Schmucke. “Shall he speak to me?”

  “Not exactly. Speech is the only thing wanting,” continued the embalmer’s agent. “But he will remain as he is after embalming for all eternity. The operation is over in a few seconds. Just an incision in the carotid artery and an injection. — But it is high time; if you wait one single quarter of an hour, sir, you will not have the sweet satisfaction of preserving the body....”

  “Go to der teufel!... Bons is ein spirit — und dat spirit is in hefn.”

  “That man has no gratitude in his composition,” remarked the youthful agent of one of the famous Gannal’s rivals; “he will not embalm his friend.”

  The words were spoken under the archway, and addressed to La Cibot, who had just submitted her beloved to the process.

  “What would you have, sir!” she said. “He is the heir, the universal legatee. As soon as they get what they want, the dead are nothing to them.”

  An hour later, Schmucke saw Mme. Sauvage come into the room, followed by another man in a suit of black, a workman, to all appearance.

  “Cantinet has been so obliging as to send this gentleman, sir,” she said; “he is coffin-maker to the parish.”

  The coffin-maker made his bow with a sympathetic and compassionate air, but none the less he had a business-like look, and seemed to know that he was indispensable. He turned an expert’s eye upon the dead.

  “How does the gentleman wish ‘it’ to be made? Deal, plain oak, or oak lead-lined? Oak with a lead lining is the best style. The body is a stock size,” — he felt for the feet, and proceeded to take the measure — ”one metre seventy!” he added. “You will be thinking of ordering the funeral service at the church, sir, no doubt?”

  Schmucke looked at him as a dangerous madman might look before striking a blow. La Sauvage put in a word.

  “You ought to find somebody to look after all these things,” she said.

  “Yes — — ” the victim murmured at length.

  “Shall I fetch M. Tabareau? — for you will have a good deal on y
our hands before long. M. Tabareau is the most honest man in the quarter, you see.”

  “Yes. Mennesir Dapareau! Somepody vas speaking of him chust now — ” said Schmucke, completely beaten.

  “Very well. You can be quiet, sir, and give yourself up to grief, when you have seen your deputy.”

  It was nearly two o’clock when M. Tabareau’s head-clerk, a young man who aimed at a bailiff’s career, modestly presented himself. Youth has wonderful privileges; no one is alarmed by youth. This young man Villemot by name, sat down by Schmucke’s side and waited his opportunity to speak. His diffidence touched Schmucke very much.

  “I am M. Tabareau’s head-clerk, sir,” he said; “he sent me here to take charge of your interests, and to superintend the funeral arrangements. Is this your wish?”

  “You cannot safe my life, I haf not long to lif; but you vill leaf me in beace!”

  “Oh! you shall not be disturbed,” said Villemot.

  “Ver’ goot. Vat must I do for dat?”

  “Sign this paper appointing M. Tabareau to act for you in all matters relating to the settlement of the affairs of the deceased.”

  “Goot! gif it to me,” said Schmucke, anxious only to sign it at once.

  “No, I must read it over to you first.”

  “Read it ofer.”

  Schmucke paid not the slightest attention to the reading of the power of attorney, but he set his name to it. The young clerk took Schmucke’s orders for the funeral, the interment, and the burial service; undertaking that he should not be troubled again in any way, nor asked for money.

  “I vould gif all dat I haf to be left in beace,” said the unhappy man. And once more he knelt beside the dead body of his friend.

  Fraisier had triumphed. Villemot and La Sauvage completed the circle which he had traced about Pons’ heir.

  There is no sorrow that sleep cannot overcome. Towards the end of the day La Sauvage, coming in, found Schmucke stretched asleep at the bed-foot. She carried him off, put him to bed, tucked him in maternally, and till the morning Schmucke slept.