Cousin Pons Part 19

"Very well, that is settled. I came to thank you for your care of me,"

she added, as she slipped a folded paper containing three gold coins into the doctor's hands. "It is all I can do at the moment. Ah! my dear M. Poulain, if I were rich, you should be rich, you that are the image of Providence on earth.--Madame, you have an angel for a son."

La Cibot rose to her feet, Mme. Poulain bowed amiably, and the doctor went to the door with the visitor. Just then a sudden, lurid gleam of light flashed across the mind of this Lady Macbeth of the streets. She saw clearly that the doctor was her accomplice--he had taken the fee for the sham illness.

"M. Poulain," she began, "how can you refuse to say a word or two to save me from want, when you helped me in the affair of my accident?"

The doctor felt that the devil had him by the hair, as the saying is; he felt, too, that the hair was being twisted round the pitiless red claw.

Startled and afraid lest he should sell his honesty for such a trifle, he answered the diabolical suggestion by another no less diabolical.

"Listen, my dear Mme. Cibot," he said, as he drew her into his consulting-room. "I will now pay a debt of grat.i.tude that I owe you for my appointment to the mairie--"

"We go shares?" she asked briskly.

"In what?"

"In the legacy."

"You do not know me," said Dr. Poulain, drawing himself up like Valerius Publicola. "Let us have no more of that. I have a friend, an old schoolfellow of mine, a very intelligent young fellow; and we are so much the more intimate, because, our lives have fallen out very much in the same way. He was studying law while I was a house-student, he was engrossing deeds in Maitre Couture's office. His father was a shoemaker, and mine was a breeches-maker; he has not found anyone to take much interest in his career, nor has he any capital; for, after all, capital is only to be had from sympathizers. He could only afford to buy a provincial connection--at Mantes--and so little do provincials understand the Parisian intellect, that they set all sorts of intrigues on foot against him."

"The wretches!" cried La Cibot.

"Yes," said the doctor. "They combined against him to such purpose, that they forced him to sell his connection by misrepresenting something that he had done; the attorney for the crown interfered, he belonged to the place, and sided with his fellow-townsmen. My friend's name is Fraisier.

He is lodged as I am, and he is even leaner and more threadbare. He took refuge in our arrondiss.e.m.e.nt, and is reduced to appear for clients in the police-court or before the magistrate. He lives in the Rue de la Perle close by. Go to No. 9, third floor, and you will see his name on the door on the landing, painted in gilt letters on a small square of red leather. Fraisier makes a special point of disputes among the porters, workmen, and poor folk in the arrondiss.e.m.e.nt, and his charges are low. He is an honest man; for I need not tell you that if he had been a scamp, he would be keeping his carriage by now. I will call and see my friend Fraisier this evening. Go to him early to-morrow; he knows M. Louchard, the bailiff; M. Tabareau, the clerk of the court; and the justice of the peace, M. Vitel; and M. Trognon, the notary. He is even now looked upon as one of the best men of business in the Quarter. If he takes charge of your interests, if you can secure him as M. Pons'

adviser, you will have a second self in him, you see. But do not make dishonorable proposals to him, as you did just now to me; he has a head on his shoulders, you will understand each other. And as for acknowledging his services, I will be your intermediary--"

Mme. Cibot looked askance at the doctor.

"Is that the lawyer who helped Mme. Florimond the haberdasher in the Rue Vieille-du-Temple out of a fix in that matter of her friend's legacy?"

"The very same."

"Wasn't it a shame that she did not marry him after he had gained two thousand francs a year for her?" exclaimed La Cibot. "And she thought to clear off scores by making him a present of a dozen s.h.i.+rts and a couple of dozen pocket-handkerchiefs; an outfit, in short."

"My dear Mme. Cibot, that outfit cost a thousand francs, and Fraisier was just setting up for himself in the Quarter, and wanted the things very badly. And what was more, she paid the bill without asking any questions. That affair brought him clients, and now he is very busy; but in my line a practice brings--"

"It is only the righteous that suffer here below," said La Cibot. "Well, M. Poulain, good-day and thank you."

And herewith begins the tragedy, or, if you like to have it so, a terrible comedy--the death of an old bachelor delivered over by circ.u.mstances too strong for him to the rapacity and greed that gathered about his bed. And other forces came to the support of rapacity and greed; there was the picture collector's mania, that most intense of all pa.s.sions; there was the cupidity of the Sieur Fraisier, whom you shall presently behold in his den, a sight to make you shudder; and lastly, there was the Auvergnat thirsting for money, ready for anything--even for a crime--that should bring him the capital he wanted. The first part of the story serves in some sort as a prelude to this comedy in which all the actors who have hitherto occupied the stage will reappear.

The degradation of a word is one of those curious freaks of manners upon which whole volumes of explanation might be written. Write to an attorney and address him as "Lawyer So-and-so," and you insult him as surely as you would insult a wholesale colonial produce merchant by addressing your letter to "Mr. So-and-so, Grocer." There are plenty of men of the world who ought to be aware, since the knowledge of such subtle distinctions is their province, that you cannot insult a French writer more cruelly than by calling him _un homme de lettres_--a literary man. The word _monsieur_ is a capital example of the life and death of words. Abbreviated from monseigneur, once so considerable a t.i.tle, and even now, in the form of _sire_, reserved for emperors and kings, it is bestowed indifferently upon all and sundry; while the twin-word _messire_, which is nothing but its double and equivalent, if by any chance it slips into a certificate of burial, produces an outcry in the Republican papers.

Magistrates, councillors, jurisconsults, judges, barristers, officers for the crown, bailiffs, attorneys, clerks of the court, procurators, solicitors, and agents of various kinds, represent or misrepresent Justice. The "lawyer" and the bailiff's men (commonly called "the brokers") are the two lowest rungs of the ladder. Now, the bailiff's man is an outsider, an advent.i.tious minister of justice, appearing to see that judgment is executed; he is, in fact, a kind of inferior executioner employed by the county court. But the word "lawyer"

(homme de loi) is a depreciatory term applied to the legal profession.

Consuming professional jealousy finds similar disparaging epithets for fellow-travelers in every walk of life, and every calling has its special insult. The scorn flung into the words _homme de loi, homme de lettres_, is wanting in the plural form, which may be used without offence; but in Paris every profession, learned or unlearned, has its _omega_, the individual who brings it down to the level of the lowest cla.s.s; and the written law has its connecting link with the custom right of the streets. There are districts where the pettifogging man of business, known as Lawyer So-and-So, is still to be found. M. Fraisier was to the member of the Incorporated Law Society as the money-lender of the Halles, offering small loans for a short period at an exorbitant interest, is to the great capitalist.

Working people, strange to say are as shy of officials as of fas.h.i.+onable restaurants, they take advice from irregular sources as they turn into a little wineshop to drink. Each rank in life finds its own level, and there abides. None but a chosen few care to climb the heights, few can feel at ease in the presence of their betters, or take their place among them, like a Beaumarchais letting fall the watch of the great lord who tried to humiliate him. And if there are few who can even rise to a higher social level, those among them who can throw off their swaddling-clothes are rare and great exceptions.

At six o'clock the next morning Mme. Cibot stood in the Rue de la Perle; she was making a survey of the abode of her future adviser, Lawyer Fraisier. The house was one of the old-fas.h.i.+oned kind formerly inhabited by small tradespeople and citizens with small means. A cabinetmaker's shop occupied almost the whole of the ground floor, as well as the little yard behind, which was covered with his workshops and warehouses; the small remaining s.p.a.ce being taken up by the porter's lodge and the pa.s.sage entry in the middle. The staircase walls were half rotten with damp and covered with saltpetre to such a degree that the house seemed to be stricken with leprosy.

Mme. Cibot went straight to the porter's lodge, and there encountered one of the fraternity, a shoemaker, his wife, and two small children, all housed in a room ten feet square, lighted from the yard at the back.

La Cibot mentioned her profession, named herself, and spoke of her house in the Rue de Normandie, and the two women were on cordial terms at once. After a quarter of an hour spent in gossip while the shoemaker's wife made breakfast ready for her husband and the children, Mme. Cibot turned the conversation to the subject of the lodgers, and spoke of the lawyer.

"I have come to see him on business," she said. "One of his friends, Dr.

Poulain, recommended me to him. Do you know Dr. Poulain?"

"I should think I do," said the lady of the Rue de la Perle. "He saved my little girl's life when she had the croup."

"He saved my life, too, madame. What sort of a man is this M. Fraisier?"

"He is the sort of man, my dear lady, out of whom it is very difficult to get the postage-money at the end of the month."

To a person of La Cibot's intelligence this was enough.

"One may be poor and honest," observed she.

"I am sure I hope so," returned Fraisier's portress. "We are not rolling in coppers, let alone gold or silver; but we have not a farthing belonging to anybody else."

This sort of talk sounded familiar to La Cibot.

"In short, one can trust him, child, eh?"

"Lord! when M. Fraisier means well by any one, there is not his like, so I have heard Mme. Florimond say."

"And why didn't she marry him when she owed her fortune to him?" La Cibot asked quickly. "It is something for a little haberdasher, kept by an old man, to be a barrister's wife--"

"Why?--" asked the portress, bringing Mme. Cibot out into the pa.s.sage.

"Why?--You are going to see him, are you not, madame?--Very well, when you are in his office you will know why."

From the state of the staircase, lighted by sash-windows on the side of the yard, it was pretty evident that the inmates of the house, with the exception of the landlord and M. Fraisier himself, were all workmen.

There were traces of various crafts in the deposit of mud upon the steps--bra.s.s-filings, broken b.u.t.tons, sc.r.a.ps of gauze, and esparto gra.s.s lay scattered about. The walls of the upper stories were covered with apprentices' ribald scrawls and caricatures. The portress' last remark had roused La Cibot's curiosity; she decided, not unnaturally, that she would consult Dr. Poulain's friend; but as for employing him, that must depend upon her impressions.

"I sometimes wonder how Mme. Sauvage can stop in his service," said the portress, by way of comment; she was following in Mme. Cibot's wake. "I will come up with you, madame" she added; "I am taking the milk and the newspaper up to my landlord."

Arrived on the second floor above the entresol, La Cibot beheld a door of the most villainous description. The doubtful red paint was coated for seven or eight inches round the keyhole with a filthy glaze, a grimy deposit from which the modern house-decorator endeavors to protect the doors of more elegant apartments by gla.s.s "finger-plates." A grating, almost stopped up with some compound similar to the deposit with which a restaurant-keeper gives an air of cellar-bound antiquity to a merely middle-aged bottle, only served to heighten the general resemblance to a prison door; a resemblance further heightened by the trefoil-shaped iron-work, the formidable hinges, the clumsy nail-heads. A miser, or a pamphleteer at strife with the world at large, must surely have invented these fortifications. A leaden sink, which received the waste water of the household, contributed its quota to the fetid atmosphere of the staircase, and the ceiling was covered with fantastic arabesques traced by candle-smoke--such arabesques! On pulling a greasy acorn ta.s.sel attached to the bell-rope, a little bell jangled feebly somewhere within, complaining of the fissure in its metal sides.

Every detail was in keeping with the general dismal effect. La Cibot heard a heavy footstep, and the asthmatic wheezing of a virago within, and Mme. Sauvage presently showed herself. Adrien Brauwer might have painted just such a hag for his picture of _Witches starting for the Sabbath_; a stout, unwholesome slattern, five feet six inches in height, with a grenadier countenance and a beard which far surpa.s.sed La Cibot's own; she wore a cheap, hideously ugly cotton gown, a bandana handkerchief knotted over hair which she still continued to put in curl papers (using for that purpose the printed circulars which her master received), and a huge pair of gold earrings like cart-wheels in her ears. This female Cerberus carried a battered skillet in one hand, and opening the door, set free an imprisoned odor of scorched milk--a nauseous and penetrating smell, that lost itself at once, however, among the fumes outside.

"What can I do for you, missus?" demanded Mme. Sauvage, and with a truculent air she looked La Cibot over; evidently she was of the opinion that the visitor was too well dressed, and her eyes looked the more murderous because they were naturally bloodshot.

"I have come to see M. Fraisier; his friend, Dr. Poulain, sent me."

"Oh! come in, missus," said La Sauvage, grown very amiable of a sudden, which proves that she was prepared for this morning visit.

With a sweeping courtesy, the stalwart woman flung open the door of a private office, which looked upon the street, and discovered the ex-attorney of Mantes.

The room was a complete picture of a third-rate solicitor's office; with the stained wooden cases, the letter-files so old that they had grown beards (in ecclesiastical language), the red tape dangling limp and dejected, the pasteboard boxes covered with traces of the gambols of mice, the dirty floor, the ceiling tawny with smoke. A frugal allowance of wood was smouldering on a couple of fire-dogs on the hearth. And on the chimney-piece above stood a foggy mirror and a modern clock with an inlaid wooden case; Fraisier had picked it up at an execution sale, together with the tawdry imitation rococo candlesticks, with the zinc beneath showing through the lacquer in several places.