Mme. Poulain, the doctor’s mother, aged sixty-seven, was ending her days in the second bedroom. She worked for a breeches-maker, stitching men’s leggings, breeches, belts, and braces, anything, in fact, that is made in a way of business which has somewhat fallen off of late years. Her whole time was spent in keeping her son’s house and superintending the one servant; she never went abroad, and took the air in the little garden entered through the glass door of the sitting-room. Twenty years previously, when her husband died, she sold his business to his best workman, who gave his master’s widow work enough to earn a daily wage of thirty sous. She had made every sacrifice to educate her son. At all costs, he should occupy a higher station than his father before him; and now she was proud of her Aesculapius, she believed in him, and sacrificed everything to him as before. She was happy to take care of him, to work and put by a little money, and dream of nothing but his welfare, and love him with an intelligent love of which every mother is not capable. For instance, Mme. Poulain remembered that she had been a working girl. She would not injure her son’s prospects; he should not be ashamed by his mother (for the good woman’s grammar was something of the same kind as Mme. Cibot’s); and for this reason she kept in the background, and went to her room of her own accord if any distinguished patient came to consult the doctor, or if some old schoolfellow or fellow-student chanced to call. Dr. Poulain had never had occasion to blush for the mother whom he revered; and this sublime love of hers more than atoned for a defective education.
The breeches-maker’s business sold for about twenty thousand francs, and the widow invested the money in the Funds in 1820. The income of eleven hundred francs per annum derived from this source was, at one time, her whole fortune. For many a year the neighbors used to see the doctor’s linen hanging out to dry upon a clothes-line in the garden, and the servant and Mme. Poulain thriftily washed everything at home; a piece of domestic economy which did not a little to injure the doctor’s practice, for it was thought that if he was so poor, it must be through his own fault. Her eleven hundred francs scarcely did more than pay the rent. During those early days, Mme. Poulain, good, stout, little old woman, was the breadwinner, and the poor household lived upon her earnings. After twelve years of perseverance upon a rough and stony road, Dr. Poulain at last was making an income of three thousand francs, and Mme. Poulain had an income of about five thousand francs at her disposal. Five thousand francs for those who know Paris means a bare subsistence.
The sitting-room, where patients waited for an interview, was shabbily furnished. There was the inevitable mahogany sofa covered with yellow-flowered Utrecht velvet, four easy-chairs, a tea-table, a console, and half-a-dozen chairs, all the property of the deceased breeches-maker, and chosen by him. A lyre-shaped clock between two Egyptian candlesticks still preserved its glass shade intact. You asked yourself how the yellow chintz window-curtains, covered with red flowers, had contrived to hang together for so long; for evidently they had come from the Jouy factory, and Oberkampf received the Emperor’s congratulations upon similar hideous productions of the cotton industry in 1809.
The doctor’s consulting-room was fitted up in the same style, with household stuff from the paternal chamber. It looked stiff, poverty-stricken, and bare. What patient could put faith in the skill of any unknown doctor who could not even furnish his house? And this in a time when advertising is all-powerful; when we gild the gas-lamps in the Place de la Concorde to console the poor man for his poverty by reminding him that he is rich as a citizen.
The ante-chamber did duty as a dining-room. The servant sat at her sewing there whenever she was not busy in the kitchen or keeping the doctor’s mother company. From the dingy short curtains in the windows you would have guessed at the shabby thrift behind them without setting foot in the dreary place. What could those wall-cupboards contain but stale scraps of food, chipped earthenware, corks used over and over again indefinitely, soiled table-linen, odds and ends that could descend but one step lower into the dust-heap, and all the squalid necessities of a pinched household in Paris?
In these days, when the five-franc piece is always lurking in our thoughts and intruding itself into our speech, Dr. Poulain, aged thirty-three, was still a bachelor. Heaven had bestowed on him a mother with no connections. In ten years he had not met with the faintest pretext for a romance in his professional career; his practice lay among clerks and small manufacturers, people in his own sphere of life, with homes very much like his own. His richer patients were butchers, bakers, and the more substantial tradespeople of the neighborhood. These, for the most part, attributed their recovery to Nature, as an excuse for paying for the services of a medical man, who came on foot, at the rate of two francs per visit. In his profession, a carriage is more necessary than medical skill.
A humdrum monotonous life tells in the end upon the most adventurous spirit. A man fashions himself to his lot, he accepts a commonplace existence; and Dr. Poulain, after ten years of his practice, continued his labors of Sisyphus without the despair that made early days so bitter. And yet—like every soul in Paris—he cherished a dream. Remonencq was happy in his dream; La Cibot had a dream of her own; and Dr. Poulain, too, dreamed. Some day he would be called in to attend a rich and influential patient, would effect a positive cure, and the patient would procure a post for him; he would be head surgeon to a hospital, medical officer of a prison or police-court, or doctor to the boulevard theatres. He had come by his present appointment as doctor to the Mairie in this very way. La Cibot had called him in when the landlord of the house in the Rue de Normandie fell ill; he had treated the case with complete success; M. Pillerault, the patient, took an interest in the young doctor, called to thank him, and saw his carefully-hidden poverty. Count Popinot, the cabinet minister, had married M. Pillerault’s grand-niece, and greatly respected her uncle; of him, therefore, M. Pillerault had asked for the post, which Poulain had now held for two years. That appointment and its meagre salary came just in time to prevent a desperate step; Poulain was thinking of emigration; and for a Frenchman, it is a kind of death to leave France.
Dr. Poulain went, you may be sure, to thank Count Popinot; but as Count Popinot’s family physician was the celebrated Horace Bianchon, it was pretty clear that his chances of gaining a footing in that house were something of the slenderest. The poor doctor had fondly hoped for the patronage of a powerful cabinet minister, one of the twelve or fifteen cards which a cunning hand has been shuffling for sixteen years on the green baize of the council table, and now he dropped back again into his Marais, his old groping life among the poor and the small tradespeople, with the privilege of issuing certificates of death for a yearly stipend of twelve hundred francs.
Dr. Poulain had distinguished himself to some extent as a house-student; he was a prudent practitioner, and not without experience. His deaths caused no scandal; he had plenty of opportunities of studying all kinds of complaints in anima vili. Judge, therefore, of the spleen that he nourished! The expression of his countenance, lengthy and not too cheerful to begin with, at times was positively appalling. Set a Tartuffe’s all-devouring eyes, and the sour humor of an Alceste in a sallow-parchment visage, and try to imagine for yourself the gait, bearing, and expression of a man who thought himself as good a doctor as the illustrious Bianchon, and felt that he was held down in his narrow lot by an iron hand. He could not help comparing his receipts (ten francs a day if he was fortunate) with Bianchon’s five or six hundred.
Are the hatreds and jealousies of democracy incomprehensible after this? Ambitious and continually thwarted, he could not reproach himself. He had once already tried his fortune by inventing a purgative pill, something like Morrison’s, and intrusted the business operations to an old hospital chum, a house-student who afterwards took a retail drug business; but, unluckily, the druggist, smitten with the charms of a ballet-dancer of the Ambigu-Comique, found himself at length in the bankruptcy court; and as the patent had been taken out in his name, his partner was literally without a remedy, and the important discovery enriched the purchaser of the business. The sometime house-student set sail for Mexico, that land of gold, taking poor Poulain’s little savings with him; and, to add insult to injury, the opera-dancer treated him as an extortioner when he applied to her for his money.