He had obtained his title of physician, and lived in a poor garret—as one says—as if there were any garrets that are rich; and to accomplish this miserable result, to have his painted bed-stead, his table of sham mahogany, two chairs wretchedly stuffed, and his books—what efforts had it not cost him!
He was so poor!
Have you ever known any of these indefatigable young students, born in the humblest ranks, who spend upon their arid labour their ten, their twenty best years of life, without a thought or a care for the pleasures of their age or the passing day?—youthful stoics who march with firm step, and alone, towards an end which, alas! all do not attain!
You have wept at that old drama, that old eternal scene which is recounted every day—yet not so old, it is renewed also every day:—the bare chamber, no better than a loft—the truckle-bed—the broken pitcher—the heap of straw—the sentimental lithographist will not forget the guttering candle stuck into the neck of a bottle. Thus much for the accessories, then for the persons of the scene; a workman, the father who expects to die in the hospital—his four children—always four—who have not broken their fast that day—and the mother is lying-in with her fifth—and it is winter, for these poor people choose winter always for their lying-in.
Oh! all this is very true and piteous—I weep with you at the cry of those suffering children—at the sobs of their mother. Yet there is another poverty which you know not, which it is never intended that you should know. A silent poverty that goes dressed in its black coat, polished, it is true, where polish should not come, and with a slaty hue—produced by the frequent application of ink to its threadbare surface. It is a courageous poverty which resists all aid—even from that fictitious fund, a debt—which dresses itself as you would dress, if your coat were ten years old—which invites no sympathy—which may be seen in the sombre evening stopping a moment before the baker's shop, or the wired windows of the money-changer, but passing on again without a sigh heard. Oh, this poverty in a black coat! And then it enters into its cold and solitary chamber, without even the sad consolation of weeping with another. No Lady Bountiful comes here. In the picture just now described, she would be seen in the background, entering in at the door, her servant behind loaded with raiment and provisions. What should she here? What brings you here, madam? Who could have sent you here? We are rich! If we were poor should we not sell these books?—all these books are ours; madam, we want nothing. Carry your amiable charity elsewhere.
Our young doctor had installed himself in the fifth floor of that historic street, La Cloître-Saint-Mery,—a quarter of the town, poor, disinherited, sad as himself. Where else, indeed, could he have carried his mutilated furniture,—which in other quarters would have only excited distrust? There was he waiting for fortune—not, be it understood, in his bed, but following science laboriously, uninterruptedly. His life was so retired—so modest—so silent, that hardly was he known in the house. On the day of his arrival, he had said to the porter, or rather porteress, "Madam, I am a doctor—if any one should want me." This was all the publicity of the new doctor—his sole announcement, his only advertisement. As his fellow lodgers could gather nothing of him to gratify or excite curiosity—as his unfrequented door was always strictly closed, they soon ceased to concern themselves about him. His name even was forgotten; they simply called him the doctor—and with this title our readers also must be contented, unless their own ingenuity should enable them to discover another.
One night our doctor heard unaccustomed noises in the house, doors slamming, people walking to and fro. Presently some one knocked at his door—verily at his door. What was it? Was the patient come at last—that first patient, so anxiously expected? He was dressed in an instant.
"The Countess is dying!" some one cried through the door. "Come, directly!"
He was at her bedside in a minute.
The Countess! Such was the title given in derision to precisely the poorest and most miserable old woman in the house. She had been at one period of her life in the service of a noble family as femme-de-chambre; and as a woman who had seen something of the great world, she held unqualified strangers at a certain distance, and, to use a common phrase, kept herself to herself. This had procured her the ill-will and ill-opinion of several other old crones inhabiting the same house, who made her the subject of their perpetual scandal. Without doubt, she had poisoned her last master, and could not look a Christian in the face; or at very least she had robbed him. Did you ask for proofs? She had a treasure stitched into a mattress. But she was nearly dying with hunger? Yes—the niggard! She starved herself, she could not spend her treasure.