The Potiphar Papers

by George William Curtis

“What is it about candlesticks?” said I to Mr. Potiphar. “Perhaps Mr. Cheese finds gas too bright for his eyes; and that’s his misfortune, not his fault.

“Polly,” said Mr. Potiphar, who will call me Polly, although it sounds so very vulgar, “please not to meddle with things you don’t understand. You may have Cream Cheese to dinner as much as you choose, but I will not have him in the pulpit of my church.”

The same day Mr. Cheese happened in about lunch-time, and I asked him if his eyes were really weak.

“Not at all,” said he, “why do you ask?”

Then I told him that I had heard he was so fond of candlesticks.

Ah! Caroline, you should have seen him then. He stopped in the midst of pouring out a glass of Mr. P.‘s best old port, and holding the decanter in one hand, and the glass in the other, he looked so beautifully sad, and said in that sweet low voice:

“Dear Mrs. Potiphar, the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church.” Then he filled up his glass, and drank the wine off with such a mournful, resigned air, and wiped his lips so gently with his cambric handkerchief (I saw that it was a hem-stitch), that I had no voice to ask him to take a bit of the cold chicken, which he did, however, without my asking him. But when he said in the same low voice, “A little more breast, dear Mrs. Potiphar,” I was obliged to run into the drawing room for a moment, to recover myself.

Well, after he had lunched I told him that I wished to take his advice upon something connected with the church, (for a prayer-book is, you know, dear,) and he looked so sweetly at me, that, would you believe it, I almost wished to be a Catholic, and to confess three or four times a week, and to have him for my confessor. But it’s very wicked to wish to be a Catholic, and it wasn’t real much, you know; but somehow I thought so. When I asked him in what velvet he would advise me to have my prayer-book bound, he talked beautifully for about twenty minutes. I wish you could have heard him. I’m not sure that I understood much of what he said—how should I?—but it was very beautiful. Don’t laugh, Carrie, but there was one thing I did understand, and which, as it came pretty often, quite helped me through: it was, “Dear Mrs. Potiphar;” you can’t tell how nicely he says it. He began by telling me that it was very important to consider all the details and little things about the church. He said they were all Timbales or Cymbals—or something of that kind; and then he talked very prettily about the stole, and the violet and scarlet capes of the cardinals, and purple chasubles, and the lace edge of the Pope’s little short gown; and—do you know it was very funny—but it seemed to me, somehow, as if I was talking with Portier or Florine Lefevre, except that he used such beautiful words. Well, by and by, he said:—

“Therefore, dear Mrs. Potiphar, as your faith is so pure and childlike, and as I observe that the light from the yellow panes usually falls across your pew, I would advise that you cymbalize your faith (wouldn’t that be noisy in church?) by binding your prayer-book in pale blue; the color of skim-milk, dear Mrs. Potiphar, which is so full of pastoral associations.”

Why did he emphasize the word “pastoral?” Do you wonder that I like Cream Cheese, dear Caroline, when he is so gentle and religious—and such a pretty religion too! For he is not only well-dressed, and has such aristocratic hands and feet, in the parlor, but he is so perfectly gentlemanly in the pulpit. He never raises his voice too loud, and he has such wavy gestures. Mr. Potiphar says that may be all very true, but he knows perfectly well that he has a hankering for artificial flowers, and that, for his part, he prefers the Doctor to any preacher he ever heard “because,” he says, “I can go quietly to sleep, confident that he will say nothing that might not be preached from every well-regulated pulpit; whereas, if we should let Cream Cheese into the desk, I should have to keep awake to be on the look-out for some of these new-fangled idolatries: and, Polly Potiphar, I, for one, am determined to have nothing to do with the Scarlet Woman.”