Cousin Pons. Honore de Balzac
As for Schmucke, he rubbed his hands till they were sore; for a new idea had occurred to him, one of those great discoveries which cause a German no surprise, unless they sprout up suddenly in a Teuton brain frost-bound by the awe and reverence due to sovereign princes.
“Mine goot Bons?” began Schmucke.
“I can guess what you mean; you would like us both to dine together here, every day—”
“Gif only I vas rich enof to lif like dis efery tay—” began the good German in a melancholy voice. But here Mme. Cibot appeared upon the scene. Pons had given her an order for the theatre from time to time, and stood in consequence almost as high in her esteem and affection as her boarder Schmucke.
“Lord love you,” said she, “for three francs and wine extra I can give you both such a dinner every day that you will be ready to lick the plates as clean as if they were washed.”
“It is a fact,” Schmucke remarked, “dat die dinners dat Montame Zipod cooks for me are better as de messes dey eat at der royal dable!” In his eagerness, Schmucke, usually so full of respect for the powers that be, so far forgot himself as to imitate the irreverent newspapers which scoffed at the “fixed-price” dinners of Royalty.
“Really?” said Pons. “Very well, I will try to-morrow.”
And at that promise Schmucke sprang from one end of the table to the other, sweeping off tablecloth, bottles, and dishes as he went, and hugged Pons to his heart. So might gas rush to combine with gas.
“Vat happiness!” cried he.
Mme. Cibot was quite touched. “Monsieur is going to dine here every day!” she cried proudly.
That excellent woman departed downstairs again in ignorance of the event which had brought about this result, entered her room like Josepha in William Tell, set down the plates and dishes on the table with a bang, and called aloud to her husband:
“Cibot! run to the Cafe Turc for two small cups of coffee, and tell the man at the stove that it is for me.”
Then she sat down and rested her hands on her massive knees, and gazed out of the window at the opposite wall.
“I will go to-night and see what Ma’am Fontaine says,” she thought. (Madame Fontaine told fortunes on the cards for all the servants in the quarter of the Marais.) “Since these two gentlemen came here, we have put two thousand francs in the savings bank. Two thousand francs in eight years! What luck! Would it be better to make no profit out of M. Pons’ dinner and keep him here at home? Ma’am Fontaine’s hen will tell me that.”
Three years ago Mme. Cibot had begun to cherish a hope that her name might be mentioned in “her gentlemen’s” wills; she had redoubled her zeal since that covetous thought tardily sprouted up in the midst of that so honest moustache. Pons hitherto had dined abroad, eluding her desire to have both of “her gentlemen” entirely under her management; his “troubadour” collector’s life had scared away certain vague ideas which hovered in La Cibot’s brain; but now her shadowy projects assumed the formidable shape of a definite plan, dating from that memorable dinner. Fifteen minutes later she reappeared in the dining-room with two cups of excellent coffee, flanked by a couple of tiny glasses of kirschwasser.
“Long lif Montame Zipod!” cried Schmucke; “she haf guessed right!”
The diner-out bemoaned himself a little, while Schmucke met his lamentations with coaxing fondness, like a home pigeon welcoming back a wandering bird. Then the pair set out for the theatre.
Schmucke could not leave his friend in the condition to which he had been brought by the Camusots—mistresses and servants. He knew Pons so well; he feared lest some cruel, sad thought should seize on him at his conductor’s desk, and undo all the good done by his welcome home to the nest.
And Schmucke brought his friend back on his arm through the streets at midnight. A lover could not be more careful of his lady. He pointed out the edges of the curbstones, he was on the lookout whenever they stepped on or off the pavement, ready with a warning if there was a gutter to cross. Schmucke could have wished that the streets were paved with cotton-down; he would have had a blue sky overhead, and Pons should hear the music which all the angels in heaven were making for him. He had won the lost province in his friend’s heart!
For nearly three months Pons and Schmucke dined together every day. Pons was obliged to retrench at once; for dinner at forty-five francs a month and wine at thirty-five meant precisely eighty francs less to spend on bric-a-brac. And very soon, in spite of all that Schmucke could do, in spite of his little German jokes, Pons fell to regretting the delicate dishes, the liqueurs, the good coffee, the table talk, the insincere politeness, the guests, and the gossip, and the houses where he used to dine. On the wrong side of sixty a man cannot break himself of a habit of thirty-six years’ growth. Wine at a hundred and thirty francs per hogshead is scarcely a generous liquid in a gourmet’s glass; every time that Pons raised it to his lips he thought, with infinite regret, of the exquisite wines in his entertainers’ cellars.
In short, at the end of three months, the cruel pangs which had gone near to break Pons’ sensitive heart had died away; he forgot everything but the charms of society; and languished for them like some elderly slave of a petticoat compelled to leave the mistress who too repeatedly deceives him. In vain he tried to hide his profound and consuming melancholy; it was too plain that he was suffering from one of the mysterious complaints which the mind brings upon the body.
A single symptom will throw light upon this case of nostalgia (as it were) produced by breaking away from an old habit; in itself it is trifling, one of the myriad nothings which are as rings in a coat of chain-mail enveloping the soul in a network of iron. One of the keenest pleasures of Pons’ old life, one of the joys of the dinner-table parasite at all times, was the “surprise,” the thrill produced by the extra dainty dish added triumphantly to the bill of fare by the mistress of a bourgeois house, to give a festal air to the dinner. Pons’ stomach hankered after that gastronomical satisfaction. Mme. Cibot, in the pride of her heart, enumerated every dish beforehand; a salt and savor once periodically recurrent, had vanished utterly from daily life. Dinner proceeded without le plat couvert, as our grandsires called it. This lay beyond the bounds of Schmucke’s powers of comprehension.
Pons had too much delicacy to grumble; but if the case of unappreciated genius is hard, it goes harder still with the stomach whose claims are ignored. Slighted affection, a subject of which too much has been made, is founded upon an illusory longing; for if the creature fails, love can turn to the Creator who has treasures to bestow. But the stomach! … Nothing can be compared to its sufferings; for, in the first place, one must live.
Pons thought wistfully of certain creams—surely the poetry of cookery!—of certain white sauces, masterpieces of the art; of truffled chickens, fit to melt your heart; and above these, and more than all these, of the famous Rhine carp, only known at Paris, served with what condiments! There were days when Pons, thinking upon Count Popinot’s cook, would sigh aloud, “Ah, Sophie!” Any passer-by hearing the exclamation might have thought that the old man referred to a lost mistress; but his fancy dwelt upon something rarer, on a fat Rhine carp with a sauce, thin in the sauce-boat, creamy upon the palate, a sauce that deserved the Montyon prize! The conductor of the orchestra, living on memories of past dinners, grew visibly leaner; he was pining away, a victim to gastric nostalgia.
By the beginning of the fourth month (towards the end of January, 1845), Pons’ condition attracted attention at the theatre. The flute, a young man named Wilhelm, like almost all Germans; and Schwab, to distinguish him from all other Wilhelms, if not from all other Schwabs, judged it expedient to open Schmucke’s eyes to his friend’s state of health. It was a first performance of a piece in which Schmucke’s instruments were all required.
“The old gentleman is failing,” said the flute; “there is something wrong somewhere; his eyes are heavy, and he doesn’t beat time as he used to do,” added Wilhelm Schwab, indicating Pons as he gloomily took his place.
“Dat is alvays de vay, gif a man is sixty years old,” answered