Chapter 15

“I have just come to tell you, that, between ourselves, poor M. Pons is doing very badly, sir, and I have something to say to you about him--”

“Let us go into the sitting-room,” interrupted the doctor, and with a significant gesture he indicated the servant.

In the sitting-room La Cibot explained her position with regard to the pair of nutcrackers at very considerable length. She repeated the history of her loan with added embellishments, and gave a full account of the immense services rendered during the past ten years to MM. Pons and Schmucke. The two old men, to all appearance, could not exist without her motherly care. She posed as an angel; she told so many lies, one after another, watering them with her tears, that old Mme. Poulain was quite touched.

“You understand, my dear sir,” she concluded, “that I really ought to know how far I can depend on M. Pons’ intentions, supposing that he should not die; not that I want him to die, for looking after those two innocents is my life, madame, you see; still, when one of them is gone I shall look after the other. For my own part, I was built by Nature to rival mothers. Without nobody to care for, nobody to take for a child, I don’t know what I should do.... So if M. Poulain only would, he might do me a service for which I should be very grateful; and that is, to say a word to M. Pons for me. Goodness me! an annuity of a thousand francs, is that too much, I ask you?... To. M. Schmucke it would be so much gained.--Our dear patient said that he should recommend me to the German, poor man; it is his idea, no doubt, that M. Schmucke should be his heir. But what is a man that cannot put two ideas together in French? And besides, he would be quite capable of going back to Germany, he will be in such despair over his friend’s death--”

The doctor grew grave. “My dear Mme. Cibot,” he said, “this sort of thing does not in the least concern a doctor. I should not be allowed to exercise my profession if it was known that I interfered in the matter of my patients’ testamentary dispositions. The law forbids a doctor to receive a legacy from a patient--”

“A stupid law! What is to hinder me from dividing my legacy with you?” La Cibot said immediately.

“I will go further,” said the doctor; “my professional conscience will not permit me to speak to M. Pons of his death. In the first place, he is not so dangerously ill that there is any need to speak of it, and in the second, such talk coming from me might give a shock to the system that would do him real harm, and then his illness might terminate fatally--”

“_I_ don’t put on gloves to tell him to get his affairs in order,” cried Mme. Cibot, “and he is none the worse for that. He is used to it. There is nothing to fear.”

“Not a word more about it, my dear Mme. Cibot! These things are not within a doctor’s province; it is a notary’s business--”

“But, my dear M. Poulain, suppose that M. Pons of his own accord should ask you how he is, and whether he had better make his arrangements; then, would you refuse to tell him that if you want to get better it is an excellent plan to set everything in order? Then you might just slip in a little word for me--”

“Oh, if _he_ talks of making his will, I certainly shall not dissuade him,” said the doctor.

“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 gratitude 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 arrondissement, 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 arrondissement, 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 shirts 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 circumstances 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 passions; 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 title, 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 adventitious 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 class; 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 fashionable 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-fashioned 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 space being taken up by the porter’s lodge and the passage 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 passage. “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--brass-filings, broken buttons, scraps of gauze, and esparto grass 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 glass “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 tassel 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 surpassed 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.

M. Fraisier was small, thin, and unwholesome looking; his red face, covered with an eruption, told of tainted blood; and he had, moreover, a trick of continually scratching his right arm. A wig pushed to the back of his head displayed a brick-colored cranium of ominous conformation. This person rose from a cane-seated armchair, in which he sat on a green leather cushion, assumed an agreeable expression, and brought forward a chair.

“Mme. Cibot, I believe?” queried he, in dulcet tones.

“Yes, sir,” answered the portress. She had lost her habitual assurance.

Something in the tones of a voice which strongly resembled the sounds of the little door-bell, something in a glance even sharper than the sharp green eyes of her future legal adviser, scared Mme. Cibot. Fraisier’s presence so pervaded the room, that any one might have thought there was pestilence in the air; and in a flash Mme. Cibot understood why Mme. Florimond had not become Mme. Fraisier.

“Poulain told me about you, my dear madame,” said the lawyer, in the unnatural fashion commonly described by the words “mincing tones”; tones sharp, thin, and grating as verjuice, in spite of all his efforts.

Arrived at this point, he tried to draw the skirts of his dressing-gown over a pair of angular knees encased in threadbare felt. The robe was an ancient printed cotton garment, lined with wadding which took the liberty of protruding itself through various slits in it here and there; the weight of this lining had pulled the skirts aside, disclosing a dingy-hued flannel waistcoat beneath. With something of a coxcomb’s manner, Fraisier fastened this refractory article of dress, tightening the girdle to define his reedy figure; then with a blow of the tongs, he effected a reconciliation between two burning brands that had long avoided one another, like brothers after a family quarrel. A sudden bright idea struck him, and he rose from his chair.

“Mme. Sauvage!” called he.

“Well?”

“I am not at home to anybody!”

“Eh! bless your life, there’s no need to say that!”

“She is my old nurse,” the lawyer said in some confusion.

“And she has not recovered her figure yet,” remarked the heroine of the Halles.

Fraisier laughed, and drew the bolt lest his housekeeper should interrupt Mme. Cibot’s confidences.

“Well, madame, explain your business,” said he, making another effort to drape himself in the dressing-gown. “Any one recommended to me by the only friend I have in the world may count upon me--I may say--absolutely.”

For half an hour Mme. Cibot talked, and the man of law made no interruption of any sort; his face wore the expression of curious interest with which a young soldier listens to a pensioner of “The Old Guard.” Fraisier’s silence and acquiescence, the rapt attention with which he appeared to listen to a torrent of gossip similar to the samples previously given, dispelled some of the prejudices inspired in La Cibot’s mind by his squalid surroundings. The little lawyer with the black-speckled green eyes was in reality making a study of his client. When at length she came to a stand and looked to him to speak, he was seized with a fit of the complaint known as a “churchyard cough,” and had recourse to an earthenware basin half full of herb tea, which he drained.

“But for Poulain, my dear madame, I should have been dead before this,” said Fraisier, by way of answer to the portress’ look of motherly compassion; “but he will bring me round, he says--”

As all the client’s confidences appeared to have slipped from the memory of her legal adviser, she began to cast about for a way of taking leave of a man so apparently near death.

“In an affair of this kind, madame,” continued the attorney from Mantes, suddenly returning to business, “there are two things which it is most important to know. In the first place, whether the property is sufficient to be worth troubling about; and in the second, who the next-of-kin may be; for if the property is the booty, the next-of-kin is the enemy.”

La Cibot immediately began to talk of Remonencq and Elie Magus, and said that the shrewd couple valued the pictures at six hundred thousand francs.

“Would they take them themselves at that price?” inquired the lawyer. “You see, madame, that men of business are shy of pictures. A picture may mean a piece of canvas worth a couple of francs or a painting worth two hundred thousand. Now, paintings worth two hundred thousand francs are usually well known; and what errors in judgment people make in estimating even the most famous pictures of all! There was once a great capitalist whose collection was admired, visited, and engraved--actually engraved! He was supposed to have spent millions of francs on it. He died, as men must, and--well, his _genuine_ pictures did not fetch more than two hundred thousand francs! You must let me see these gentlemen.--Now for the next-of-kin,” and Fraisier again relapsed into his attitude of listener.

When President Camusot’s name came up, he nodded with a grimace which riveted Mme. Cibot’s attention. She tried to read the forehead and the villainous face, and found what is called in business a “wooden head.”

“Yes, my dear sir,” repeated La Cibot. “Yes, my M. Pons is own cousin to President Camusot de Marville; he tells me that ten times a day. M. Camusot the silk mercer was married twice--”

“He that has just been nominated for a peer of France?--”

“And his first wife was a Mlle. Pons, M. Pons’ first cousin.”