“If my dear Mme. Cibot, here, would let me come and bring an ekshpert (shinsh the shentleman upshtairs ish in bed), I will shertainly find the money in a couple of hoursh, even if sheven hundred thousand francsh ish in queshtion—”
“All right, my friend,” said the doctor. “Now, Mme. Cibot, be careful never to contradict the invalid. You must be prepared to be very patient with him, for he will find everything irritating and wearisome, even your services; nothing will please him; you must expect grumbling—”
“He will be uncommonly hard to please,” said La Cibot.
“Look here, mind what I tell you,” the doctor said in a tone of authority, “M. Pons’ life is in the hands of those that nurse him; I shall come perhaps twice a day. I shall take him first on my round.”
The doctor’s profound indifference to the fate of a poor patient had suddenly given place to a most tender solicitude when he saw that the speculator was serious, and that there was a possible fortune in question.
“He will be nursed like a king,” said Madame Cibot, forcing up enthusiasm. She waited till the doctor turned the corner into the Rue Charlot; then she fell to talking again with the dealer in old iron. Remonencq had finished smoking his pipe, and stood in the doorway of his shop, leaning against the frame; he had purposely taken this position; he meant the portress to come to him.
The shop had once been a cafe. Nothing had been changed there since the Auvergnat discovered it and took over the lease; you could still read “Cafe de Normandie” on the strip left above the windows in all modern shops. Remonencq had found somebody, probably a housepainter’s apprentice, who did the work for nothing, to paint another inscription in the remaining space below—“REMONENCQ,” it ran, “DEALER IN MARINE STORES, FURNITURE BOUGHT”—painted in small black letters. All the mirrors, tables, seats, shelves, and fittings of the Cafe de Normandie had been sold, as might have been expected, before Remonencq took possession of the shop as it stood, paying a yearly rent of six hundred francs for the place, with a back shop, a kitchen, and a single room above, where the head-waiter used to sleep, for the house belonging to the Cafe de Normandie was let separately. Of the former splendor of the cafe, nothing now remained save the plain light green paper on the walls, and the strong iron bolts and bars of the shop-front.
When Remonencq came hither in 1831, after the Revolution of July, he began by displaying a selection of broken doorbells, cracked plates, old iron, and the obsolete scales and weights abolished by a Government which alone fails to carry out its own regulations, for pence and half pence of the time of Louis XVI. are still in circulation. After a time this Auvergnat, a match for five ordinary Auvergnats, bought up old saucepans and kettles, old picture-frames, old copper, and chipped china. Gradually, as the shop was emptied and filled, the quality of the stock-in-trade improved, like Nicolet’s farces. Remonencq persisted in an unfailing and prodigiously profitable martingale, a “system” which any philosophical idler may study as he watches the increasing value of the stock kept by this intelligent class of trader. Picture-frames and copper succeed to tin-ware, argand lamps, and damaged crockery; china marks the next transition; and after no long tarriance in the “omnium gatherum” stage, the shop becomes a museum. Some day or other the dusty windows are cleaned, the interior is restored, the Auvergnat relinquishes velveteen and jackets for a great-coat, and there he sits like a dragon guarding his treasure, surrounded by masterpieces! He is a cunning connoisseur by this time; he has increased his capital tenfold; he is not to be cheated; he knows the tricks of the trade. The monster among his treasures looks like some old hag among a score of young girls that she offers to the public. Beauty and miracles of art are alike indifferent to him; subtle and dense as he is, he has a keen eye to profits, he talks roughly to those who know less than he does; he has learned to act a part, he pretends to love his pictures, or again he lets you know the price he himself gave for the things, he offers to let you see the memoranda of the sale. He is a Proteus; in one hour he can be Jocrisse, Janot, Queue-rouge, Mondor, Hapagon, or Nicodeme.
The third year found armor, and old pictures, and some tolerably fine clocks in Remonencq’s shop. He sent for his sister, and La Remonencq came on foot all the way from Auvergne to take charge of the shop while her brother was away. A big and very ugly woman, dressed like a Japanese idol, a half-idiotic creature with a vague, staring gaze she would not bate a centime of the prices fixed by her brother. In the intervals of business she did the work of the house, and solved the apparently insoluble problem—how to live on “the mists of the Seine.” The Remonencqs’ diet consisted of bread and herrings, with the outside leaves of lettuce or vegetable refuse selected from the heaps deposited in the kennel before the doors of eating-houses. The two between them did not spend more than fivepence a day on food (bread included), and La Remonencq earned the money by sewing or spinning.
Remonencq came to Paris in the first instance to work as an errand-boy. Between the years 1825 and 1831 he ran errands for dealers in curiosities in the Boulevard Beaumarchais or coppersmiths in the Rue de Lappe. It is the usual start in life in his line of business. Jews, Normans, Auvergnats, and Savoyards, those four different races of men all have the same instincts, and make their fortunes in the same way; they spend nothing, make small profits, and let them accumulate at compound interest. Such is their trading charter, and that charter is no delusion.