Cousin Pons

by Honoré de Balzac

Fraisier went. His parting bow was a degree less cringing than on the first occasion.

“I am to dine to-morrow with President de Marville!” he said to himself. “Come now, I have these folk in my power. Only, to be absolute master, I ought to be the German’s legal adviser in the person of Tabareau, the justice’s clerk. Tabareau will not have me now for his daughter, his only daughter, but he will give her to me when I am a justice of the peace. I shall be eligible. Mlle. Tabareau, that tall, consumptive girl with the red hair, has a house in the Place Royale in right of her mother. At her father’s death she is sure to come in for six thousand francs, you must not look too hard at the plank.”

As he went back to the Rue de Normandie by way of the boulevards, he dreamed out his golden dream, he gave himself up to the happiness of the thought that he should never know want again. He would marry his friend Poulain to Mlle. Vitel, the daughter of the justice of the peace; together, he and his friend the doctor would reign like kings in the quarter; he would carry all the elections—municipal, military, or political. The boulevards seem short if, while you pace afoot, you mount your ambition on the steed of fancy in this way.

Schmucke meanwhile went back to his friend Pons with the news that Cibot was dying, and Remonencq gone in search of M. Trognon, the notary. Pons was struck by the name. It had come up again and again in La Cibot’s interminable talk, and La Cibot always recommended him as honesty incarnate. And with that a luminous idea occurred to Pons, in whom mistrust had grown paramount since the morning, an idea which completed his plan for outwitting La Cibot and unmasking her completely for the too-credulous Schmucke.

So many unexpected things had happened that day that poor Schmucke was quite bewildered. Pons took his friend’s hand.

“There must be a good deal of confusion in the house, Schmucke; if the porter is at death’s door, we are almost free for a minute or two; that is to say, there will be no spies—for we are watched, you may be sure of that. Go out, take a cab, go to the theatre, and tell Mlle. Heloise Brisetout that I should like to see her before I die. Ask her to come here to-night when she leaves the theatre. Then go to your friends Brunner and Schwab and beg them to come to-morrow morning at nine o’clock to inquire after me; let them come up as if they were just passing by and called in to see me.”

The old artist felt that he was dying, and this was the scheme that he forged. He meant Schmucke to be his universal legatee. To protect Schmucke from any possible legal quibbles, he proposed to dictate his will to a notary in the presence of witnesses, lest his sanity should be called in question and the Camusots should attempt upon that pretext to dispute the will. At the name of Trognon he caught a glimpse of machinations of some kind; perhaps a flaw purposely inserted, or premeditated treachery on La Cibot’s part. He would prevent this. Trognon should dictate a holograph will which should be signed and deposited in a sealed envelope in a drawer. Then Schmucke, hidden in one of the cabinets in his alcove, should see La Cibot search for the will, find it, open the envelope, read it through, and seal it again. Next morning, at nine o’clock, he would cancel the will and make a new one in the presence of two notaries, everything in due form and order. La Cibot had treated him as a madman and a visionary; he saw what this meant—he saw the Presidente’s hate and greed, her revenge in La Cibot’s behavior. In the sleepless hours and lonely days of the last two months, the poor man had sifted the events of his past life.

It has been the wont of sculptors, ancient and modern, to set a tutelary genius with a lighted torch upon either side of a tomb. Those torches that light up the paths of death throw light for dying eyes upon the spectacle of a life’s mistakes and sins; the carved stone figures express great ideas, they are symbols of a fact in human experience. The agony of death has its own wisdom. Not seldom a simple girl, scarcely more than a child, will grow wise with the experience of a hundred years, will gain prophetic vision, judge her family, and see clearly through all pretences, at the near approach of Death. Herein lies Death’s poetry. But, strange and worthy of remark it is, there are two manners of death.

The poetry of prophecy, the gift of seeing clearly into the future or the past, only belongs to those whose bodies are stricken, to those who die by the destruction of the organs of physical life. Consumptive patients, for instance, or those who die of gangrene like Louis XIV., of fever like Pons, of a stomach complaint like Mme. de Mortsauf, or of wounds received in the full tide of life like soldiers on the battlefield—all these may possess this supreme lucidity to the full; their deaths fill us with surprise and wonder. But many, on the other hand, die of intelligential diseases, as they may be called; of maladies seated in the brain or in that nervous system which acts as a kind of purveyor of thought fuel—and these die wholly, body and spirit are darkened together. The former are spirits deserted by the body, realizing for us our ideas of the spirits of Scripture; the latter are bodies untenanted by a spirit.

Too late the virgin nature, the epicure-Cato, the righteous man almost without sin, was discovering the Presidente’s real character—the sac of gall that did duty for her heart. He knew the world now that he was about to leave it, and for the past few hours he had risen gaily to his part, like a joyous artist finding a pretext for caricature and laughter in everything. The last links that bound him to life, the chains of admiration, the strong ties that bind the art lover to Art’s masterpieces, had been snapped that morning. When Pons knew that La Cibot had robbed him, he bade farewell, like a Christian, to the pomps and vanities of Art, to his collection, to all his old friendships with the makers of so many fair things. Our forefathers counted the day of death as a Christian festival, and in something of the same spirit Pons’ thoughts turned to the coming end. In his tender love he tried to protect Schmucke when he should be low in the grave. It was this father’s thought that led him to fix his choice upon the leading lady of the ballet. Mlle. Brisetout should help him to baffle surrounding treachery, and those who in all probability would never forgive his innocent universal legatee.