Cousin Pons

Madeleine had scarcely uttered the words when they heard the old musician’s call to the porter.  It sounded like a cry of pain.  There was a sudden silence in the kitchen.

“He heard!” the footman said.

“Well, and if he did, so much the worser, or rather so much the better,” retorted Madeleine.  “He is an arrant skinflint.”

Poor Pons had lost none of the talk in the kitchen; he heard it all, even to the last word.  He made his way home along the boulevards, in the same state, physical and mental, as an old woman after a desperate struggle with burglars.  As he went he talked to himself in quick spasmodic jerks; his honor had been wounded, and the pain of it drove him on as a gust of wind whirls away a straw.  He found himself at last in the Boulevard du Temple; how he had come thither he could not tell.  It was five o’clock, and, strange to say, he had completely lost his appetite.

But if the reader is to understand the revolution which Pons’ unexpected return at that hour was to work in the Rue de Normandie, the promised biography of Mme. Cibot must be given in this place.

Any one passing along the Rue de Normandie might be pardoned for thinking that he was in some small provincial town.  Grass runs to seed in the street, everybody knows everybody else, and the sight of a stranger is an event.  The houses date back to the reign of Henry IV., when there was a scheme afoot for a quarter in which every street was to be named after a French province, and all should converge in a handsome square to which La France should stand godmother.  The Quartier de l’Europe was a revival of the same idea; history repeats itself everywhere in the world, and even in the world of speculation.

The house in which the two musicians used to live is an old mansion with a courtyard in front and a garden at the back; but the front part of the house which gives upon the street is comparatively modern, built during the eighteenth century when the Marais was a fashionable quarter.  The friends lived at the back, on the second floor of the old part of the house.  The whole building belongs to M. Pillerault, an old man of eighty, who left matters very much in the hands of M. and Mme. Cibot, his porters for the past twenty-six years.

Now, as a porter cannot live by his lodge alone, the aforesaid Cibot had other means of gaining a livelihood; and supplemented his five per cent on the rental and his faggot from every cartload of wood by his own earnings as a tailor.  In time Cibot ceased to work for the master tailors; he made a connection among the little trades-people of the quarter, and enjoyed a monopoly of the repairs, renovations, and fine drawing of all the coats and trousers in three adjacent streets.  The lodge was spacious and wholesome, and boasted a second room; wherefore the Cibot couple were looked upon as among the luckiest porters in the arrondissement.

Cibot, small and stunted, with a complexion almost olive-colored by reason of sitting day in day out in Turk-fashion on a table level with the barred window, made about twelve or fourteen francs a week.  He worked still, though he was fifty-eight years old, but fifty-eight is the porter’s golden age; he is used to his lodge, he and his room fit each other like the shell and the oyster, and “he is known in the neighborhood.”

Mme. Cibot, sometime opener of oysters at the Cadran Bleu, after all the adventures which come unsought to the belle of an oyster-bar, left her post for love of Cibot at the age of twenty-eight.  The beauty of a woman of the people is short-lived, especially if she is planted espalier fashion at a restaurant door.  Her features are hardened by puffs of hot air from the kitchen; the color of the heeltaps of customers’ bottles, finished in the company of the waiters, gradually filters into her complexion—­no beauty is full blown so soon as the beauty of an oyster-opener.  Luckily for Mme. Cibot, lawful wedlock and a portress’ life were offered to her just in time; while she still preserved a comeliness of a masculine order slandered by rivals of the Rue de Normandie, who called her “a great blowsy thing,” Mme. Cibot might have sat as a model to Rubens.  Those flesh tints reminded you of the appetizing sheen on a pat of Isigny butter; but plump as she was, no woman went about her work with more agility.  Mme. Cibot had attained the time of life when women of her stamp are obliged to shave —­which is as much as to say that she had reached the age of forty-eight.  A porter’s wife with a moustache is one of the best possible guarantees of respectability and security that a landlord can have.  If Delacroix could have seen Mme. Cibot leaning proudly on her broom handle, he would assuredly have painted her as Bellona.

Strange as it may seem, the circumstances of the Cibots, man and wife (in the style of an indictment), were one day to affect the lives of the two friends; wherefore the chronicler, as in duty bound, must give some particulars as to the Cibots’ lodge.

The house brought in about eight thousand francs for there were three complete sets of apartments—­back and front, on the side nearest the Rue de Normandie, as well as the three floors in the older mansion between the courtyard and the garden, and a shop kept by a marine store-dealer named Remonencq, which fronted on the street.  During the past few months this Remonencq had begun to deal in old curiosities, and knew the value of Pons’ collection so well that he took off his hat whenever the musician came in or went out.

A sou in the livre on eight thousand francs therefore brought in about four hundred francs to the Cibots.  They had no rent to pay and no expenses for firing; Cibot’s earnings amounted on an average to seven or eight hundred francs, add tips at New Year, and the pair had altogether in income of sixteen hundred francs, every penny of which they spent, for the Cibots lived and fared better than working people usually do.  “One can only live once,” La Cibot used to say.  She was born during the Revolution, you see, and had never learned her Catechism.

The husband of this portress with the unblenching tawny eyes was an object of envy to the whole fraternity, for La Cibot had not forgotten the knowledge of cookery picked up at the Cadran Bleu.  So it had come to pass that the Cibots had passed the prime of life, and saw themselves on the threshold of old age without a hundred francs put by for the future.  Well clad and well fed, they enjoyed among the neighbors, it is true, the respect due to twenty-six years of strict honesty; for if they had nothing of their own, they “hadn’t nothing belonging to nobody else,” according to La Cibot, who was a prodigal of negatives.  “There wasn’t never such a love of a man,” she would say to her husband.  Do you ask why?  You might as well ask the reason of her indifference in matters of religion.

Both of them were proud of a life lived in open day, of the esteem in which they were held for six or seven streets round about, and of the autocratic rule permitted to them by the proprietor (“perprietor,” they called him); but in private they groaned because they had no money lying at interest.  Cibot complained of pains in his hands and legs, and his wife would lament that her poor, dear Cibot should be forced to work at his age; and, indeed, the day is not far distant when a porter after thirty years of such a life will cry shame upon the injustice of the Government and clamor for the ribbon of the Legion of Honor.  Every time that the gossip of the quarter brought news of such and such a servant-maid, left an annuity of three or four hundred francs after eight or ten years of service, the porters’ lodges would resound with complaints, which may give some idea of the consuming jealousies in the lowest walks of life in Paris.

“Oh, indeed!  It will never happen to the like of us to have our names mentioned in a will!  We have no luck, but we do more than servants, for all that.  We fill a place of trust; we give receipts, we are on the lookout for squalls, and yet we are treated like dogs, neither more nor less, and that’s the truth!”

“Some find fortune and some miss fortune,” said Cibot, coming in with a coat.

“If I had left Cibot here in his lodge and taken a place as cook, we should have our thirty thousand francs out at interest,” cried Mme. Cibot, standing chatting with a neighbor, her hands on her prominent hips.  “But I didn’t understand how to get on in life; housed inside of a snug lodge and firing found and want for nothing, but that is all.”

In 1836, when the friends took up their abode on the second floor, they brought about a sort of revolution in the Cibot household.  It befell on this wise.  Schmucke, like his friend Pons, usually arranged that the porter or the porter’s wife should undertake the cares of housekeeping; and being both of one mind on this point when they came to live in the Rue de Normandie, Mme. Cibot became their housekeeper at the rate of twenty-five francs per month—­twelve francs fifty centimes for each of them.  Before the year was out, the emeritus portress reigned in the establishment of the two old bachelors, as she reigned everywhere in the house belonging to M. Pillerault, great uncle of Mme. le Comtesse Popinot.  Their business was her business; she called them “my gentlemen.”  And at last, finding the pair of nutcrackers as mild as lambs, easy to live with, and by no means suspicious—­perfect children, in fact—­her heart, the heart of a woman of the people, prompted her to protect, adore, and serve them with such thorough devotion, that she read them a lecture now and again, and saved them from the impositions which swell the cost of living in Paris.  For twenty-five francs a month, the two old bachelors inadvertently acquired a mother.

As they became aware of Mme. Cibot’s full value, they gave her outspoken praises, and thanks, and little presents which strengthened the bonds of the domestic alliance.  Mme. Cibot a thousand times preferred appreciation to money payments; it is a well-known fact that the sense that one is appreciated makes up for a deficiency in wages.  And Cibot did all that he could for his wife’s two gentlemen, and ran errands and did repairs at half-price for them.

The second year brought a new element into the friendship between the lodge and the second floor, and Schmucke concluded a bargain which satisfied his indolence and desire for a life without cares.  For thirty sous per day, or forty-five francs per month, Mme. Cibot undertook to provide Schmucke with breakfast and dinner; and Pons, finding his friend’s breakfast very much to his mind, concluded a separate treaty for that meal only at the rate of eighteen francs.  This arrangement, which added nearly ninety francs every month to the takings of the porter and his wife, made two inviolable beings of the lodgers; they became angels, cherubs, divinities.  It is very doubtful whether the King of the French, who is supposed to understand economy, is as well served as the pair of nutcrackers used to be in those days.

For them the milk issued pure from the can; they enjoyed a free perusal of all the morning papers taken by other lodgers, later risers, who were told, if need be, that the newspapers had not come yet.  Mme. Cibot, moreover, kept their clothes, their rooms, and the landing as clean as a Flemish interior.  As for Schmucke, he enjoyed unhoped-for happiness; Mme. Cibot had made life easy for him; he paid her about six francs a month, and she took charge of his linen, washing, and mending.  Altogether, his expenses amounted to sixty-six francs per month (for he spent fifteen francs on tobacco), and sixty-six francs multiplied by twelve produces the sum total of seven hundred and ninety-two francs.  Add two hundred and twenty francs for rent, rates, and taxes, and you have a thousand and twelve francs.  Cibot was Schmucke’s tailor; his clothes cost him on average a hundred and fifty francs, which further swells the total to the sum of twelve hundred.  On twelve hundred francs per annum this profound philosopher lived.  How many people in Europe, whose one thought it is to come to Paris and live there, will be agreeably surprised to learn that you may exist in comfort upon an income of twelve hundred francs in the Rue de Normandie in the Marais, under the wing of a Mme. Cibot.

Mme. Cibot, to resume the story, was amazed beyond expression to see Pons, good man, return at five o’clock in the evening.  Such a thing had never happened before; and not only so, but “her gentleman” had given her no greeting—­had not so much as seen her!

“Well, well, Cibot,” said she to her spouse, “M.  Pons has come in for a million, or gone out of his mind!”

“That is how it looks to me,” said Cibot, dropping the coat-sleeve in which he was making a “dart,” in tailor’s language.

The savory odor of a stew pervaded the whole courtyard, as Pons returned mechanically home.  Mme. Cibot was dishing up Schmucke’s dinner, which consisted of scraps of boiled beef from a little cook-shop not above doing a little trade of this kind.  These morsels were fricasseed in brown butter, with thin slices of onion, until the meat and vegetables had absorbed the gravy and this true porter’s dish was browned to the right degree.  With that fricassee, prepared with loving care for Cibot and Schmucke, and accompanied by a bottle of beer and a piece of cheese, the old German music-master was quite content.  Not King Solomon in all his glory, be sure, could dine better than Schmucke.  A dish of boiled beef fricasseed with onions, scraps of saute chicken, or beef and parsley, or venison, or fish served with a sauce of La Cibot’s own invention (a sauce with which a mother might unsuspectingly eat her child),—­such was Schmucke’s ordinary, varying with the quantity and quality of the remnants of food supplied by boulevard restaurants to the cook-shop in the Rue Boucherat.  Schmucke took everything that “goot Montame Zipod” gave him, and was content, and so from day to day “goot Montame Zipod” cut down the cost of his dinner, until it could be served for twenty sous.

“It won’t be long afore I find out what is the matter with him, poor dear,” said Mme. Cibot to her husband, “for here is M. Schmucke’s dinner all ready for him.”

As she spoke she covered the deep earthenware dish with a plate; and, notwithstanding her age, she climbed the stair and reached the door before Schmucke opened it to Pons.

“Vat is de matter mit you, mein goot friend?” asked the German, scared by the expression of Pons’ face.

“I will tell you all about it; but I have come home to have dinner with you—­”

“Tinner! tinner!” cried Schmucke in ecstasy; “but it is impossible!” the old German added, as he thought of his friend’s gastronomical tastes; and at that very moment he caught sight of Mme. Cibot listening to the conversation, as she had a right to do as his lawful housewife.  Struck with one of those happy inspirations which only enlighten a friend’s heart, he marched up to the portress and drew her out to the stairhead.

“Montame Zipod,” he said, “der goot Pons is fond of goot dings; shoost go rount to der Catran Pleu und order a dainty liddle tinner, mit anjovies und maggaroni.  Ein tinner for Lugullus, in vact.”

“What is that?” inquired La Cibot.

“Oh! ah!” returned Schmucke, “it is veal a la pourcheoise” (bourgeoise, he meant), “a nice fisch, ein pottle off Porteaux, und nice dings, der fery best dey haf, like groquettes of rice und shmoked pacon!  Bay for it, und say nodings; I vill gif you back de monny to-morrow morning.”

Back went Schmucke, radiant and rubbing his hands; but his expression slowly changed to a look of bewildered astonishment as he heard Pons’ story of the troubles that had but just now overwhelmed him in a moment.  He tried to comfort Pons by giving him a sketch of the world from his own point of view.  Paris, in his opinion, was a perpetual hurly-burly, the men and women in it were whirled away by a tempestuous waltz; it was no use expecting anything of the world, which only looked at the outsides of things, “und not at der inderior.”  For the hundredth time he related how that the only three pupils for whom he had really cared, for whom he was ready to die, the three who had been fond of him, and even allowed him a little pension of nine hundred francs, each contributing three hundred to the amount —­his favorite pupils had quite forgotten to come to see him; and so swift was the current of Parisian life which swept them away, that if he called at their houses, he had not succeeded in seeing them once in three years—­(it is a fact, however, that Schmucke had always thought fit to call on these great ladies at ten o’clock in the morning!) —­still, his pension was paid quarterly through the medium of solicitors.

“Und yet, dey are hearts of gold,” he concluded.  “Dey are my liddle Saint Cecilias, sharming vimmen, Montame de Bordentuere, Montame de Fantenesse, und Montame du Dilet.  Gif I see dem at all, it is at die Jambs Elusees, und dey do not see me . . . yet dey are ver’ fond of me, und I might go to dine mit dem, und dey vould be ver’ bleased to see me; und I might go to deir country-houses, but I vould much rader be mit mine friend Bons, because I kann see him venefer I like, und efery tay.”

Pons took Schmucke’s hand and grasped it between his own.  All that was passing in his inmost soul was communicated in that tight pressure.  And so for awhile the friends sat like two lovers, meeting at last after a long absence.

“Tine here, efery tay!” broke out Schmucke, inwardly blessing Mme. de Marville for her hardness of heart.  “Look here!  Ve shall go a prick-a-pracking togeders, und der teufel shall nefer show his tail here.”

“Ve shall go prick-a-pracking togeders!” for the full comprehension of those truly heroic words, it must be confessed that Schmucke’s ignorance of bric-a-brac was something of the densest.  It required all the strength of his friendship to keep him from doing heedless damage in the sitting-room and study which did duty as a museum for Pons.  Schmucke, wholly absorbed in music, a composer for love of his art, took about as much interest in his friend’s little trifles as a fish might take in a flower-show at the Luxembourg, supposing that it had received a ticket of admission.  A certain awe which he certainly felt for the marvels was simply a reflection of the respect which Pons showed his treasures when he dusted them.  To Pons’ exclamations of admiration, he was wont to reply with a “Yes, it is ver’ bretty,” as a mother answers baby-gestures with meaningless baby-talk.  Seven times since the friends had lived together, Pons had exchanged a good clock for a better one, till at last he possessed a timepiece in Boule’s first and best manner, for Boule had two manners, as Raphael had three.  In the first he combined ebony and copper; in the second —­contrary to his convictions—­he sacrificed to tortoise-shell inlaid work.  In spite of Pons’ learned dissertations, Schmucke never could see the slightest difference between the magnificent clock in Boule’s first manner and its six predecessors; but, for Pons’ sake, Schmucke was even more careful among the “chimcracks” than Pons himself.  So it should not be surprising that Schmucke’s sublime words comforted Pons in his despair; for “Ve shall go prick-a-pracking togeders,” meant, being interpreted, “I will put money into bric-a-brac, if you will only dine here.”

“Dinner is ready,” Mme. Cibot announced, with astonishing self-possession.

It is not difficult to imagine Pons’ surprise when he saw and relished the dinner due to Schmucke’s friendship.  Sensations of this kind, that came so rarely in a lifetime, are never the outcome of the constant, close relationship by which friend daily says to friend, “You are a second self to me”; for this, too, becomes a matter of use and wont.  It is only by contact with the barbarism of the world without that the happiness of that intimate life is revealed to us as a sudden glad surprise.  It is the outer world which renews the bond between friend and friend, lover and lover, all their lives long, wherever two great souls are knit together by friendship or by love.

Pons brushed away two big tears, Schmucke himself wiped his eyes; and though nothing was said, the two were closer friends than before.  Little friendly nods and glances exchanged across the table were like balm to Pons, soothing the pain caused by the sand dropped in his heart by the President’s wife.  As for Schmucke, he rubbed his hands till they were sore; for a new idea had occurred to him, one of those great discoveries which cause a German no surprise, unless they sprout up suddenly in a Teuton brain frost-bound by the awe and reverence due to sovereign princes.

“Mine goot Bons?” began Schmucke.

“I can guess what you mean; you would like us both to dine together here, every day—­”

“Gif only I vas rich enof to lif like dis efery tay—­” began the good German in a melancholy voice.  But here Mme. Cibot appeared upon the scene.  Pons had given her an order for the theatre from time to time, and stood in consequence almost as high in her esteem and affection as her boarder Schmucke.

“Lord love you,” said she, “for three francs and wine extra I can give you both such a dinner every day that you will be ready to lick the plates as clean as if they were washed.”

“It is a fact,” Schmucke remarked, “dat die dinners dat Montame Zipod cooks for me are better as de messes dey eat at der royal dable!” In his eagerness, Schmucke, usually so full of respect for the powers that be, so far forgot himself as to imitate the irreverent newspapers which scoffed at the “fixed-price” dinners of Royalty.

“Really?” said Pons.  “Very well, I will try to-morrow.”

And at that promise Schmucke sprang from one end of the table to the other, sweeping off tablecloth, bottles, and dishes as he went, and hugged Pons to his heart.  So might gas rush to combine with gas.

“Vat happiness!” cried he.

Mme. Cibot was quite touched.  “Monsieur is going to dine here every day!” she cried proudly.

That excellent woman departed downstairs again in ignorance of the event which had brought about this result, entered her room like Josepha in William Tell, set down the plates and dishes on the table with a bang, and called aloud to her husband: 

“Cibot! run to the Cafe Turc for two small cups of coffee, and tell the man at the stove that it is for me.”

Then she sat down and rested her hands on her massive knees, and gazed out of the window at the opposite wall.

“I will go to-night and see what Ma’am Fontaine says,” she thought.  (Madame Fontaine told fortunes on the cards for all the servants in the quarter of the Marais.) “Since these two gentlemen came here, we have put two thousand francs in the savings bank.  Two thousand francs in eight years!  What luck!  Would it be better to make no profit out of M. Pons’ dinner and keep him here at home?  Ma’am Fontaine’s hen will tell me that.”

Three years ago Mme. Cibot had begun to cherish a hope that her name might be mentioned in “her gentlemen’s” wills; she had redoubled her zeal since that covetous thought tardily sprouted up in the midst of that so honest moustache.  Pons hitherto had dined abroad, eluding her desire to have both of “her gentlemen” entirely under her management; his “troubadour” collector’s life had scared away certain vague ideas which hovered in La Cibot’s brain; but now her shadowy projects assumed the formidable shape of a definite plan, dating from that memorable dinner.  Fifteen minutes later she reappeared in the dining-room with two cups of excellent coffee, flanked by a couple of tiny glasses of kirschwasser.

“Long lif Montame Zipod!” cried Schmucke; “she haf guessed right!”

The diner-out bemoaned himself a little, while Schmucke met his lamentations with coaxing fondness, like a home pigeon welcoming back a wandering bird.  Then the pair set out for the theatre.

Schmucke could not leave his friend in the condition to which he had been brought by the Camusots—­mistresses and servants.  He knew Pons so well; he feared lest some cruel, sad thought should seize on him at his conductor’s desk, and undo all the good done by his welcome home to the nest.

And Schmucke brought his friend back on his arm through the streets at midnight.  A lover could not be more careful of his lady.  He pointed out the edges of the curbstones, he was on the lookout whenever they stepped on or off the pavement, ready with a warning if there was a gutter to cross.  Schmucke could have wished that the streets were paved with cotton-down; he would have had a blue sky overhead, and Pons should hear the music which all the angels in heaven were making for him.  He had won the lost province in his friend’s heart!

For nearly three months Pons and Schmucke dined together every day.  Pons was obliged to retrench at once; for dinner at forty-five francs a month and wine at thirty-five meant precisely eighty francs less to spend on bric-a-brac.  And very soon, in spite of all that Schmucke could do, in spite of his little German jokes, Pons fell to regretting the delicate dishes, the liqueurs, the good coffee, the table talk, the insincere politeness, the guests, and the gossip, and the houses where he used to dine.  On the wrong side of sixty a man cannot break himself of a habit of thirty-six years’ growth.  Wine at a hundred and thirty francs per hogshead is scarcely a generous liquid in a gourmet’s glass; every time that Pons raised it to his lips he thought, with infinite regret, of the exquisite wines in his entertainers’ cellars.

In short, at the end of three months, the cruel pangs which had gone near to break Pons’ sensitive heart had died away; he forgot everything but the charms of society; and languished for them like some elderly slave of a petticoat compelled to leave the mistress who too repeatedly deceives him.  In vain he tried to hide his profound and consuming melancholy; it was too plain that he was suffering from one of the mysterious complaints which the mind brings upon the body.

A single symptom will throw light upon this case of nostalgia (as it were) produced by breaking away from an old habit; in itself it is trifling, one of the myriad nothings which are as rings in a coat of chain-mail enveloping the soul in a network of iron.  One of the keenest pleasures of Pons’ old life, one of the joys of the dinner-table parasite at all times, was the “surprise,” the thrill produced by the extra dainty dish added triumphantly to the bill of fare by the mistress of a bourgeois house, to give a festal air to the dinner.  Pons’ stomach hankered after that gastronomical satisfaction.  Mme. Cibot, in the pride of her heart, enumerated every dish beforehand; a salt and savor once periodically recurrent, had vanished utterly from daily life.  Dinner proceeded without le plat couvert, as our grandsires called it.  This lay beyond the bounds of Schmucke’s powers of comprehension.

Pons had too much delicacy to grumble; but if the case of unappreciated genius is hard, it goes harder still with the stomach whose claims are ignored.  Slighted affection, a subject of which too much has been made, is founded upon an illusory longing; for if the creature fails, love can turn to the Creator who has treasures to bestow.  But the stomach! . . .  Nothing can be compared to its sufferings; for, in the first place, one must live.

Pons thought wistfully of certain creams—­surely the poetry of cookery!—­of certain white sauces, masterpieces of the art; of truffled chickens, fit to melt your heart; and above these, and more than all these, of the famous Rhine carp, only known at Paris, served with what condiments!  There were days when Pons, thinking upon Count Popinot’s cook, would sigh aloud, “Ah, Sophie!” Any passer-by hearing the exclamation might have thought that the old man referred to a lost mistress; but his fancy dwelt upon something rarer, on a fat Rhine carp with a sauce, thin in the sauce-boat, creamy upon the palate, a sauce that deserved the Montyon prize!  The conductor of the orchestra, living on memories of past dinners, grew visibly leaner; he was pining away, a victim to gastric nostalgia.

By the beginning of the fourth month (towards the end of January, 1845), Pons’ condition attracted attention at the theatre.  The flute, a young man named Wilhelm, like almost all Germans; and Schwab, to distinguish him from all other Wilhelms, if not from all other Schwabs, judged it expedient to open Schmucke’s eyes to his friend’s state of health.  It was a first performance of a piece in which Schmucke’s instruments were all required.

“The old gentleman is failing,” said the flute; “there is something wrong somewhere; his eyes are heavy, and he doesn’t beat time as he used to do,” added Wilhelm Schwab, indicating Pons as he gloomily took his place.

“Dat is alvays de vay, gif a man is sixty years old,” answered Schmucke.

The Highland widow, in The Chronicles of the Canongate, sent her son to his death to have him beside her for twenty-four hours; and Schmucke could have sacrificed Pons for the sake of seeing his face every day across the dinner-table.

“Everybody in the theatre is anxious about him,” continued the flute; “and, as the premiere danseuse, Mlle. Brisetout, says, ’he makes hardly any noise now when he blows his nose.’”

And, indeed, a peal like a blast of a horn used to resound through the old musician’s bandana handkerchief whenever he raised it to that lengthy and cavernous feature.  The President’s wife had more frequently found fault with him on that score than on any other.

“I vould gif a goot teal to amuse him,” said Schmucke, “he gets so dull.”

“M.  Pons always seems so much above the like of us poor devils, that, upon my word, I didn’t dare to ask him to my wedding,” said Wilhelm Schwab.  “I am going to be married—­”

“How?” demanded Schmucke.

“Oh! quite properly,” returned Wilhelm Schwab, taking Schmucke’s quaint inquiry for a gibe, of which that perfect Christian was quite incapable.

“Come, gentlemen, take your places!” called Pons, looking round at his little army, as the stage manager’s bell rang for the overture.

The piece was a dramatized fairy tale, a pantomime called The Devil’s Betrothed, which ran for two hundred nights.  In the interval, after the first act, Wilhelm Schwab and Schmucke were left alone in the orchestra, with a house at a temperature of thirty-two degrees Reaumur.

“Tell me your hishdory,” said Schmucke.

“Look there!  Do you see that young man in the box yonder? . . .  Do you recognize him?”

“Nefer a pit—­”

“Ah!  That is because he is wearing yellow gloves and shines with all the radiance of riches, but that is my friend Fritz Brunner out of Frankfort-on-the-Main.”

“Dat used to komm to see du blav und sit peside you in der orghestra?”

“The same.  You would not believe he could look so different, would you?”

The hero of the promised story was a German of that particular type in which the sombre irony of Goethe’s Mephistopheles is blended with a homely cheerfulness found in the romances of August Lafontaine of pacific memory; but the predominating element in the compound of artlessness and guile, of shopkeeper’s shrewdness, and the studied carelessness of a member of the Jockey Club, was that form of disgust which set a pistol in the hands of a young Werther, bored to death less by Charlotte than by German princes.  It was a thoroughly German face, full of cunning, full of simplicity, stupidity, and courage; the knowledge which brings weariness, the worldly wisdom which the veriest child’s trick leaves at fault, the abuse of beer and tobacco,—­all these were there to be seen in it, and to heighten the contrast of opposed qualities, there was a wild diabolical gleam in the fine blue eyes with the jaded expression.

Dressed with all the elegance of a city man, Fritz Brunner sat in full view of the house displaying a bald crown of the tint beloved by Titian, and a few stray fiery red hairs on either side of it; a remnant spared by debauchery and want, that the prodigal might have a right to spend money with the hairdresser when he should come into his fortune.  A face, once fair and fresh as the traditional portrait of Jesus Christ, had grown harder since the advent of a red moustache; a tawny beard lent it an almost sinister look.  The bright blue eyes had lost something of their clearness in the struggle with distress.  The countless courses by which a man sells himself and his honor in Paris had left their traces upon his eyelids and carved lines about the eyes, into which a mother once looked with a mother’s rapture to find a copy of her own fashioned by God’s hand.

This precocious philosopher, this wizened youth was the work of a stepmother.

Herewith begins the curious history of a prodigal son of Frankfort-on-the-Main—­the most extraordinary and astounding portent ever beheld by that well-conducted, if central, city.

Gideon Brunner, father of the aforesaid Fritz, was one of the famous innkeepers of Frankfort, a tribe who make law-authorized incisions in travelers’ purses with the connivance of the local bankers.  An innkeeper and an honest Calvinist to boot, he had married a converted Jewess and laid the foundations of his prosperity with the money she brought him.

When the Jewess died, leaving a son Fritz, twelve years of age, under the joint guardianship of his father and maternal uncle, a furrier at Leipsic, head of the firm of Virlaz and Company, Brunner senior was compelled by his brother-in-law (who was by no means as soft as his peltry) to invest little Fritz’s money, a goodly quantity of current coin of the realm, with the house of Al-Sartchild.  Not a penny of it was he allowed to touch.  So, by way of revenge for the Israelite’s pertinacity, Brunner senior married again.  It was impossible, he said, to keep his huge hotel single-handed; it needed a woman’s eye and hand.  Gideon Brunner’s second wife was an innkeeper’s daughter, a very pearl, as he thought; but he had had no experience of only daughters spoiled by father and mother.

The second Mme. Brunner behaved as German girls may be expected to behave when they are frivolous and wayward.  She squandered her fortune, she avenged the first Mme. Brunner by making her husband as miserable a man as you could find in the compass of the free city of Frankfort-on-the-Main, where the millionaires, it is said, are about to pass a law compelling womankind to cherish and obey them alone.  She was partial to all the varieties of vinegar commonly called Rhine wine in Germany; she was fond of articles Paris, of horses and dress; indeed, the one expensive taste which she had not was a liking for women.  She took a dislike to little Fritz, and would perhaps have driven him mad if that young offspring of Calvinism and Judaism had not had Frankfort for his cradle and the firm of Virlaz at Leipsic for his guardian.  Uncle Virlaz, however, deep in his furs, confined his guardianship to the safe-keeping of Fritz’s silver marks, and left the boy to the tender mercies of this stepmother.

That hyena in woman’s form was the more exasperated against the pretty child, the lovely Jewess’ son, because she herself could have no children in spite of efforts worthy of a locomotive engine.  A diabolical impulse prompted her to plunge her young stepson, at twenty-one years of age, into dissipations contrary to all German habits.  The wicked German hoped that English horses, Rhine vinegar, and Goethe’s Marguerites would ruin the Jewess’ child and shorten his days; for when Fritz came of age, Uncle Virlaz had handed over a very pretty fortune to his nephew.  But while roulette at Baden and elsewhere, and boon companions (Wilhelm Schwab among them) devoured the substance accumulated by Uncle Virlaz, the prodigal son himself remained by the will of Providence to point a moral to younger brothers in the free city of Frankfort; parents held him up as a warning and an awful example to their offspring to scare them into steady attendance in their cast-iron counting houses, lined with silver marks.

But so far from perishing in the flower of his age, Fritz Brunner had the pleasure of laying his stepmother in one of those charming little German cemeteries, in which the Teuton indulges his unbridled passion for horticulture under the specious pretext of honoring his dead.  And as the second Mme. Brunner expired while the authors of her being were yet alive, Brunner senior was obliged to bear the loss of the sums of which his wife had drained his coffers, to say nothing of other ills, which had told upon a Herculean constitution, till at the age of sixty-seven the innkeeper had wizened and shrunk as if the famous Borgia’s poison had undermined his system.  For ten whole years he had supported his wife, and now he inherited nothing!  The innkeeper was a second ruin of Heidelberg, repaired continually, it is true, by travelers’ hotel bills, much as the remains of the castle of Heidelberg itself are repaired to sustain the enthusiasm of the tourists who flock to see so fine and well-preserved a relic of antiquity.

At Frankfort the disappointment caused as much talk as a failure.  People pointed out Brunner, saying, “See what a man may come to with a bad wife that leaves him nothing and a son brought up in the French fashion.”

In Italy and Germany the French nation is the root of all evil, the target for all bullets.  “But the god pursuing his way——­” (For the rest, see Lefranc de Pompignan’s Ode.)

The wrath of the proprietor of the Grand Hotel de Hollande fell on others besides the travelers, whose bills were swelled with his resentment.  When his son was utterly ruined, Gideon, regarding him as the indirect cause of all his misfortunes, refused him bread and salt, fire, lodging, and tobacco—­the force of the paternal malediction in a German and an innkeeper could no farther go.  Whereupon the local authorities, making no allowance for the father’s misdeeds, regarded him as one of the most ill-used persons in Frankfort-on-the-Main, came to his assistance, fastened a quarrel on Fritz (une querelle d’Allemand), and expelled him from the territory of the free city.  Justice in Frankfort is no whit wiser nor more humane than elsewhere, albeit the city is the seat of the German Diet.  It is not often that a magistrate traces back the stream of wrongdoing and misfortune to the holder of the urn from which the first beginnings trickled forth.  If Brunner forgot his son, his son’s friends speedily followed the old innkeeper’s example.

Ah! if the journalists, the dandies, and some few fair Parisians among the audience wondered how that German with the tragical countenance had cropped up on a first night to occupy a side box all to himself when fashionable Paris filled the house,—­if these could have seen the history played out upon the stage before the prompter’s box, they would have found it far more interesting than the transformation scenes of The Devil’s Betrothed, though indeed it was the two hundred thousandth representation of a sublime allegory performed aforetime in Mesopotamia three thousand years before Christ was born.

Fritz betook himself on foot to Strasbourg, and there found what the prodigal son of the Bible failed to find—­to wit, a friend.  And herein is revealed the superiority of Alsace, where so many generous hearts beat to show Germany the beauty of a combination of Gallic wit and Teutonic solidity.  Wilhelm Schwab, but lately left in possession of a hundred thousand francs by the death of both parents, opened his arms, his heart, his house, his purse to Fritz.  As for describing Fritz’s feelings, when dusty, down on his luck, and almost like a leper, he crossed the Rhine and found a real twenty-franc piece held out by the hand of a real friend,—­that moment transcends the powers of the prose writer; Pindar alone could give it forth to humanity in Greek that should rekindle the dying warmth of friendship in the world.

Put the names of Fritz and Wilheim beside those of Damon and Pythias, Castor and Pollux, Orestes and Pylades, Dubreuil and Pmejah, Schmucke and Pons, and all the names that we imagine for the two friends of Monomotapa, for La Fontaine (man of genius though he was) has made of them two disembodied spirits—­they lack reality.  The two new names may join the illustrious company, and with so much the more reason, since that Wilhelm who had helped to drink Fritz’s inheritance now proceeded, with Fritz’s assistance, to devour his own substance; smoking, needless to say, every known variety of tobacco.

The pair, strange to relate, squandered the property in the dullest, stupidest, most commonplace fashion, in Strasbourg brasseries, in the company of ballet-girls of the Strasbourg theatres, and little Alsaciennes who had not a rag of a tattered reputation left.

Every morning they would say, “We really must stop this, and make up our minds and do something or other with the money that is left.”

“Pooh!” Fritz would retort, “just one more day, and to-morrow” . . . ah! to-morrow.

In the lives of Prodigal Sons, To-day is a prodigious coxcomb, but To-morrow is a very poltroon, taking fright at the big words of his predecessor. To-day is the truculent captain of old world comedy, To-morrow the clown of modern pantomime.