Cousin Pons. Honore de Balzac
repentance; you will not be more severe than the Eternal father with poor little Cecile? – ”
Pons, thus reached on his weak side, again plunged into formulas more than polite, and went as far as the stairhead with the President.
An hour later the President’s servants arrived in a troop on poor Pons’ second floor. They behaved after the manner of their kind; they cringed and fawned; they wept. Madeleine took M. Pons aside and flung herself resolutely at his feet.
“It is all my fault; and monsieur knows quite well that I love him,” here she burst into tears. “It was vengeance boiling in my veins; monsieur ought to throw all the blame of the unhappy affair on that. We are all to lose our pensions… Monsieur, I was mad, and I would not have the rest suffer for my fault… I can see now well enough that fate did not make me for monsieur. I have come to my senses, I aimed too high, but I love you still, monsieur. These ten years I have thought of nothing but the happiness of making you happy and looking after things here. What a lot!.. Oh! if monsieur but knew how much I love him! But monsieur must have seen it through all my mischief-making. If I were to die to-morrow, what would they find? – A will in your favor, monsieur… Yes, monsieur, in my trunk under my best things.”
Madeleine had set a responsive chord vibrating; the passion inspired in another may be unwelcome, but it will always be gratifying to self-love; this was the case with the old bachelor. After generously pardoning Madeleine, he extended his forgiveness to the other servants, promising to use his influence with his cousin the Presidente on their behalf.
It was unspeakably pleasant to Pons to find all his old enjoyments restored to him without any loss of self-respect. The world had come to Pons, he had risen in the esteem of his circle; but Schmucke looked so downcast and dubious when he heard the story of the triumph, that Pons felt hurt. When, however, the kind-hearted German saw the sudden change wrought in Pons’ face, he ended by rejoicing with his friend, and made a sacrifice of the happiness that he had known during those four months that he had had Pons all to himself. Mental suffering has this immense advantage over physical ills – when the cause is removed it ceases at once. Pons was not like the same man that morning. The old man, depressed and visibly failing, had given place to the serenely contented Pons, who entered the Presidente’s house that October afternoon with the Marquise de Pompadour’s fan in his pocket. Schmucke, on the other hand, pondered deeply over this phenomenon, and could not understand it; your true stoic never can understand the courtier that dwells in a Frenchman. Pons was a born Frenchman of the Empire; a mixture of eighteenth century gallantry and that devotion to womankind so often celebrated in songs of the type of Partant pour la Syrie.
So Schmucke was fain to bury his chagrin beneath the flowers of his German philosophy; but a week later he grew so yellow that Mme. Cibot exerted her ingenuity to call in the parish doctor. The leech had fears of icterus, and left Mme. Cibot frightened half out of her wits by the Latin word for an attack of the jaundice.
Meantime the two friends went out to dinner together, perhaps for the first time in their lives. For Schmucke it was a return to the Fatherland; for Johann Graff of the Hotel du Rhin and his daughter Emilie, Wolfgang Graff the tailor and his wife, Fritz Brunner and Wilhelm Schwab, were Germans, and Pons and the notary were the only Frenchmen present at the banquet. The Graffs of the tailor’s business owned a splendid house in the Rue de Richelieu, between the Rue Neuve-des-Petits-Champs and the Rue Villedo; they had brought up their niece, for Emilie’s father, not without reason, had feared contact with the very mixed society of an inn for his daughter. The good tailor Graffs, who loved Emilie as if she had been their own daughter, were giving up the ground floor of their great house to the young couple, and here the bank of Brunner, Schwab and Company was to be established. The arrangements for the marriage had been made about a month ago; some time must elapse before Fritz Brunner, author of all this felicity, could settle his deceased father’s affairs, and the famous firm of tailors had taken advantage of the delay to redecorate the first floor and to furnish it very handsomely for the bride and bridegroom. The offices of the bank had been fitted into the wing which united a handsome business house with the hotel at the back, between courtyard and garden.
On the way from the Rue de Normandie to the Rue de Richelieu, Pons drew from the abstracted Schmucke the details of the story of the modern prodigal son, for whom Death had killed the fatted innkeeper. Pons, but newly reconciled with his nearest relatives, was immediately smitten with a desire to make a match between Fritz Brunner and Cecile de Marville. Chance ordained that the notary was none other than Berthier, old Cardot’s son-in-law and successor, the sometime second clerk with whom Pons had been wont to dine.
“Ah! M. Berthier, you here!” he said, holding out a hand to his host of former days.
“We have not had the pleasure of seeing you at dinner lately; how is it?” returned the notary. “My wife has been anxious about you. We saw you at the first performance of The Devil’s Betrothed, and our anxiety became curiosity?”
“Old folk are sensitive,” replied the worthy musician; “they make the mistake of being a century behind the times, but how can it be helped? It is quite enough to represent one century – they cannot entirely belong to the century which sees them die.”
“Ah!” said the notary, with a shrewd look, “one cannot run two centuries at once.”
“By the by,” continued Pons, drawing the young lawyer into a corner, “why do you not find some one for my cousin Cecile de Marville – ”
“Ah! why – ?” answered Berthier. “In this century, when luxury has filtered down to our very porters’ lodges, a young fellow hesitates before uniting his lot with the daughter of a President of the Court of Appeal in Paris if she brings him only a hundred thousand francs. In the rank of life in which Mlle. de Marville’s husband would take, the wife was never yet known that did not cost her husband three thousand francs a year; the interest on a hundred thousand francs would scarcely find her in pin-money. A bachelor with an income of fifteen or twenty thousand francs can live on an entre-sol; he is not expected to cut any figure; he need not keep more than one servant, and all his surplus income he can spend on his amusements; he puts himself in the hands of a good tailor, and need not trouble any further about keeping up appearances. Far-sighted mothers make much of him; he is one of the kings of fashion in Paris.
“But a wife changes everything. A wife means a properly furnished house,” continued the lawyer; “she wants the carriage for herself; if she goes to the play, she wants a box, while the bachelor has only a stall to pay for; in short, a wife represents the whole of the income which the bachelor used to spend on himself. Suppose that husband and wife have thirty thousand francs a year between them – practically, the sometime bachelor is a poor devil who thinks twice before he drives out to Chantilly. Bring children on the scene – he is pinched for money at once.
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