Cousin Pons

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This not intolerable phase lasted for another ten years. Such years!
Pons' life was closing with a rainy autumn. All through those years he
contrived to dine without expense by making himself necessary in the
houses which he frequented. He took the first step in the downward
path by undertaking a host of small commissions; many and many a time
Pons ran on errands instead of the porter or the servant; many a
purchase he made for his entertainers. He became a kind of harmless,
well-meaning spy, sent by one family into another; but he gained no
credit with those for whom he trudged about, and so often sacrificed
self-respect.

"Pons is a bachelor," said they; "he is at a loss to know what to do
with his time; he is only too glad to trot about for us.--What else
would he do?"

Very soon the cold which old age spreads about itself began to set in;
the communicable cold which sensibly lowers the social temperature,
especially if the old man is ugly and poor. Old and ugly and poor--is
not this to be thrice old? Pons' winter had begun, the winter which
brings the reddened nose, and frost-nipped cheeks, and the numbed
fingers, numb in how many ways!

Invitations very seldom came for Pons now. So far from seeking the
society of the parasite, every family accepted him much as they
accepted the taxes; they valued nothing that Pons could do for them;
real services from Pons counted for nought. The family circles in
which the worthy artist revolved had no respect for art or letters;
they went down on their knees to practical results; they valued
nothing but the fortune or social position acquired since the year
1830. The bourgeoisie is afraid of intellect and genius, but Pons'
spirit and manner were not haughty enough to overawe his relations,
and naturally he had come at last to be accounted less than nothing
with them, though he was not altogether despised.

He had suffered acutely among them, but, like all timid creatures, he
kept silence as to his pain; and so by degrees schooled himself to
hide his feelings, and learned to take sanctuary in his inmost self.
Many superficial persons interpret this conduct by the short word
"selfishness;" and, indeed, the resemblance between the egoist and the
solitary human creature is strong enough to seem to justify the
harsher verdict; and this is especially true in Paris, where nobody
observes others closely, where all things pass swift as waves, and
last as little as a Ministry.

So Cousin Pons was accused of selfishness (behind his back); and if
the world accuses any one, it usually finds him guilty and condemns
him into the bargain. Pons bowed to the decision. Do any of us know
how such a timid creature is cast down by an unjust judgment? Who will
ever paint all that the timid suffer? This state of things, now
growing daily worse, explains the sad expression on the poor old
musician's face; he lived by capitulations of which he was ashamed.
Every time we sin against self-respect at the bidding of the ruling
passion, we rivet its hold upon us; the more that passion requires of
us, the stronger it grows, every sacrifice increasing, as it were, the
value of a satisfaction for which so much has been given up, till the
negative sum-total of renouncements looms very large in a man's
imagination. Pons, for instance, after enduring the insolently
patronizing looks of some bourgeois, incased in buckram of stupidity,
sipped his glass of port or finished his quail with breadcrumbs, and
relished something of the savor of revenge, besides. "It is not too
dear at the price!" he said to himself.

After all, in the eyes of the moralist, there were extenuating
circumstances in Pons' case. Man only lives, in fact, by some personal
satisfaction. The passionless, perfectly righteous man is not human;
he is a monster, an angel wanting wings. The angel of Christian
mythology has nothing but a head. On earth, the righteous person is
the sufficiently tiresome Grandison, for whom the very Venus of the
Crosswords is sexless.

Setting aside one or two commonplace adventures in Italy, in which
probably the climate accounted for his success, no woman had ever
smiled upon Pons. Plenty of men are doomed to this fate. Pons was an
abnormal birth; the child of parents well stricken in years, he bore
the stigma of his untimely genesis; his cadaverous complexion might
have been contracted in the flask of spirit-of-wine in which science
preserves some extraordinary foetus. Artist though he was, with his
tender, dreamy, sensitive soul, he was forced to accept the character
which belonged to his face; it was hopeless to think of love, and he
remained a bachelor, not so much of choice as of necessity. Then
Gluttony, the sin of the continent monk, beckoned to Pons; he rushed
upon temptation, as he had thrown his whole soul into the adoration of
art and the cult of music. Good cheer and bric-a-brac gave him the
small change for the love which could spend itself in no other way. As
for music, it was his profession, and where will you find the man who
is in love with his means of earning a livelihood? For it is with a
profession as with marriage: in the long length you are sensible of
nothing but the drawbacks.

Brillat-Savarin has deliberately set himself to justify the
gastronome, but perhaps even he has not dwelt sufficiently on the
reality of the pleasures of the table. The demands of digestion upon
the human economy produce an internal wrestling-bout of human forces
which rivals the highest degree of amorous pleasure. The gastronome is
conscious of an expenditure of vital power, an expenditure so vast
that the brain is atrophied (as it were), that a second brain, located
in the diaphragm, may come into play, and the suspension of all the
faculties is in itself a kind of intoxication. A boa constrictor
gorged with an ox is so stupid with excess that the creature is easily
killed. What man, on the wrong side of forty, is rash enough to work
after dinner? And remark in the same connection, that all great men
have been moderate eaters. The exhilarating effect of the wing of a
chicken upon invalids recovering from serious illness, and long
confined to a stinted and carefully chosen diet, has been frequently
remarked. The sober Pons, whose whole enjoyment was concentrated in
the exercise of his digestive organs, was in the position of chronic
convalescence; he looked to his dinner to give him the utmost degree
of pleasurable sensation, and hitherto he had procured such sensations
daily. Who dares to bid farewell to old habit? Many a man on the brink
of suicide has been plucked back on the threshold of death by the
thought of the cafe where he plays his nightly game of dominoes.

In the year 1835, chance avenged Pons for the indifference of
womankind by finding him a prop for his declining years, as the saying
goes; and he, who had been old from his cradle, found a support in
friendship. Pons took to himself the only life-partner permitted to
him among his kind--an old man and a fellow-musician.

But for La Fontaine's fable, _Les Deux Amis_, this sketch should have
borne the title of _The Two Friends_; but to take the name of this
divine story would surely be a deed of violence, a profanation from
which every true man of letters would shrink. The title ought to be
borne alone and for ever by the fabulist's masterpiece, the revelation
of his soul, and the record of his dreams; those three words were set
once and for ever by the poet at the head of a page which is his by a
sacred right of ownership; for it is a shrine before which all
generations, all over the world, will kneel so long as the art of
printing shall endure.

Pons' friend gave lessons on the pianoforte. They met and struck up an
acquaintance in 1834, one prize day at a boarding-school; and so
congenial were their ways of thinking and living, that Pons used to
say that he had found his friend too late for his happiness. Never,
perhaps, did two souls, so much alike, find each other in the great
ocean of humanity which flowed forth, in disobedience to the will of
God, from its source in the Garden of Eden. Before very long the two
musicians could not live without each other. Confidences were
exchanged, and in a week's time they were like brothers. Schmucke (for
that was his name) had not believed that such a man as Pons existed,
nor had Pons imagined that a Schmucke was possible. Here already you
have a sufficient description of the good couple; but it is not every
mind that takes kindly to the concise synthetic method, and a certain
amount of demonstration is necessary if the credulous are to accept
the conclusion.

This pianist, like all other pianists, was a German. A German, like
the eminent Liszt and the great Mendelssohn, and Steibelt, and Dussek,
and Meyer, and Mozart, and Doelher, and Thalberg, and Dreschok, and
Hiller, and Leopold Hertz, Woertz, Karr, Wolff, Pixis, and Clara Wieck
--and all Germans, generally speaking. Schmucke was a great musical
composer doomed to remain a music master, so utterly did his character
lack the audacity which a musical genius needs if he is to push his
way to the front. A German's naivete does not invariably last him
through his life; in some cases it fails after a certain age; and even
as a cultivator of the soil brings water from afar by means of
irrigation channels, so, from the springs of his youth, does the
Teuton draw the simplicity which disarms suspicion--the perennial
supplies with which he fertilizes his labors in every field of
science, art, or commerce. A crafty Frenchman here and there will turn
a Parisian tradesman's stupidity to good account in the same way. But
Schmucke had kept his child's simplicity much as Pons continued to
wear his relics of the Empire--all unsuspectingly. The true and
noble-hearted German was at once the theatre and the audience, making
music within himself for himself alone. In this city of Paris he lived
as a nightingale lives among the thickets; and for twenty years he sang
on, mateless, till he met with a second self in Pons. [See _Une Fille
d'Eve_.]

Both Pons and Schmucke were abundantly given, both by heart and
disposition, to the peculiarly German sentimentality which shows
itself alike in childlike ways--in a passion for flowers, in that form
of nature-worship which prompts a German to plant his garden-beds with
big glass globes for the sake of seeing miniature pictures of the view
which he can behold about him of a natural size; in the inquiring turn
of mind that sets a learned Teuton trudging three hundred miles in his
gaiters in search of a fact which smiles up in his face from a wayside
spring, or lurks laughing under the jessamine leaves in the back-yard;
or (to take a final instance) in the German craving to endow every
least detail in creation with a spiritual significance, a craving
which produces sometimes Hoffmann's tipsiness in type, sometimes the
folios with which Germany hedges the simplest questions round about,
lest haply any fool should fall into her intellectual excavations;
and, indeed, if you fathom these abysses, you find nothing but a
German at the bottom.

Both friends were Catholics. They went to Mass and performed the
duties of religion together; and, like children, found nothing to tell
their confessors. It was their firm belief that music is to feeling
and thought as thought and feeling are to speech; and of their
converse on this system there was no end. Each made response to the
other in orgies of sound, demonstrating their convictions, each for
each, like lovers.

Schmucke was as absent-minded as Pons was wide-awake. Pons was a
collector, Schmucke a dreamer of dreams; Schmucke was a student of
beauty seen by the soul, Pons a preserver of material beauty. Pons
would catch sight of a china cup and buy it in the time that Schmucke
took to blow his nose, wondering the while within himself whether the
musical phrase that was ringing in his brain--the _motif_ from Rossini
or Bellini or Beethoven or Mozart--had its origin or its counterpart
in the world of human thought and emotion. Schmucke's economies were
controlled by an absent mind, Pons was a spendthrift through passion,
and for both the result was the same--they had not a penny on Saint
Sylvester's day.

Perhaps Pons would have given way under his troubles if it had not
been for this friendship; but life became bearable when he found some
one to whom he could pour out his heart. The first time that he
breathed a word of his difficulties, the good German had advised him
to live as he himself did, and eat bread and cheese at home sooner
than dine abroad at such a cost. Alas! Pons did not dare to confess
that heart and stomach were at war within him, that he could digest
affronts which pained his heart, and, cost what it might, a good
dinner that satisfied his palate was a necessity to him, even as your
gay Lothario must have a mistress to tease.

In time Schmucke understood; not just at once, for he was too much of
a Teuton to possess that gift of swift perception in which the French
rejoice; Schmucke understood and loved poor Pons the better. Nothing
so fortifies a friendship as a belief on the part of one friend that
he is superior to the other. An angel could not have found a word to
say to Schmucke rubbing his hands over the discovery of the hold that
gluttony had gained over Pons. Indeed, the good German adorned their
breakfast-table next morning with delicacies of which he went in
search himself; and every day he was careful to provide something new
for his friend, for they always breakfasted together at home.

If any one imagines that the pair could not escape ridicule in Paris,
where nothing is respected, he cannot know that city. When Schmucke
and Pons united their riches and poverty, they hit upon the economical
expedient of lodging together, each paying half the rent of the very
unequally divided second-floor of a house in the Rue de Normandie in
the Marais. And as it often happened that they left home together and
walked side by side along their beat of boulevard, the idlers of the
quarter dubbed them "the pair of nutcrackers," a nickname which makes
any portrait of Schmucke quite superfluous, for he was to Pons as the
famous statue of the Nurse of Niobe in the Vatican is to the Tribune
Venus.

Mme. Cibot, portress of the house in the Rue de Normandie, was the
pivot on which the domestic life of the nutcrackers turned; but Mme.
Cibot plays so large a part in the drama which grew out of their
double existence, that it will be more appropriate to give her
portrait on her first appearance in this Scene of Parisian Life.

One thing remains to be said of the characters of the pair of friends;
but this one thing is precisely the hardest to make clear to
ninety-nine readers out of a hundred in this forty-seventh year of the
nineteenth century, perhaps by reason of the prodigious financial
development brought about by the railway system. It is a little thing,
and yet it is so much. It is a question, in fact, of giving an idea of
the extreme sensitiveness of their natures. Let us borrow an
illustration from the railways, if only by way of retaliation, as it
were, for the loans which they levy upon us. The railway train of
to-day, tearing over the metals, grinds away fine particles of dust,
grains so minute that a traveler cannot detect them with the eye; but
let a single one of those invisible motes find its way into the
kidneys, it will bring about that most excruciating, and sometimes
fatal, disease known as gravel. And our society, rushing like a
locomotive along its metaled track, is heedless of the all but
imperceptible dust made by the grinding of the wheels; but it was
otherwise with the two musicians; the invisible grains of sand sank
perpetually into the very fibres of their being, causing them
intolerable anguish of heart. Tender exceedingly to the pain of
others, they wept for their own powerlessness to help; and their own
susceptibilities were almost morbidly acute. Neither age nor the
continual spectacle of the drama of Paris life had hardened two souls
still young and childlike and pure; the longer they lived, indeed, the
more keenly they felt their inward suffering; for so it is, alas! with
natures unsullied by the world, with the quiet thinker, and with such
poets among the poets as have never fallen into any excess.

Since the old men began housekeeping together, the day's routine was
very nearly the same for them both. They worked together in harness in
the fraternal fashion of the Paris cab-horse; rising every morning,
summer and winter, at seven o'clock, and setting out after breakfast
to give music lessons in the boarding-schools, in which, upon
occasion, they would take lessons for each other. Towards noon Pons
repaired to his theatre, if there was a rehearsal on hand; but all his
spare moments were spent in sauntering on the boulevards. Night found
both of them in the orchestra at the theatre, for Pons had found a
place for Schmucke, and upon this wise.

At the time of their first meeting, Pons had just received that
marshal's baton of the unknown musical composer--an appointment as
conductor of an orchestra. It had come to him unasked, by a favor of
Count Popinot, a bourgeois hero of July, at that time a member of the
Government. Count Popinot had the license of a theatre in his gift,
and Count Popinot had also an old acquaintance of the kind that the
successful man blushes to meet. As he rolls through the streets of
Paris in his carriage, it is not pleasant to see his boyhood's chum
down at heel, with a coat of many improbable colors and trousers
innocent of straps, and a head full of soaring speculations on too
grand a scale to tempt shy, easily scared capital. Moreover, this
friend of his youth, Gaudissart by name, had done not a little in the
past towards founding the fortunes of the great house of Popinot.
Popinot, now a Count and a peer of France, after twice holding a
portfolio had no wish to shake off "the Illustrious Gaudissart." Quite
otherwise. The pomps and vanities of the Court of the Citizen-King had
not spoiled the sometime druggist's kind heart; he wished to put his
ex-commercial traveler in the way of renewing his wardrobe and
replenishing his purse. So when Gaudissart, always an enthusiastic
admirer of the fair sex, applied for the license of a bankrupt
theatre, Popinot granted it on condition that Pons (a parasite of the
Hotel Popinot) should be engaged as conductor of the orchestra; and at
the same time, the Count was careful to send certain elderly amateurs
of beauty to the theatre, so that the new manager might be strongly
supported financially by wealthy admirers of feminine charms revealed
by the costume of the ballet.

Gaudissart and Company, who, be it said, made their fortune, hit upon
the grand idea of operas for the people, and carried it out in a
boulevard theatre in 1834. A tolerable conductor, who could adapt or
even compose a little music upon occasion, was a necessity for ballets
and pantomimes; but the last management had so long been bankrupt,
that they could not afford to keep a transposer and copyist. Pons
therefore introduced Schmucke to the company as copier of music, a
humble calling which requires no small musical knowledge; and
Schmucke, acting on Pons' advice, came to an understanding with the
_chef-de-service_ at the Opera-Comique, so saving himself the clerical
drudgery.

The partnership between Pons and Schmucke produced one brilliant
result. Schmucke being a German, harmony was his strong point; he
looked over the instrumentation of Pons' compositions, and Pons
provided the airs. Here and there an amateur among the audience
admired the new pieces of music which served as accompaniment to two
or three great successes, but they attributed the improvement vaguely
to "progress." No one cared to know the composer's name; like
occupants of the _baignoires_, lost to view of the house, to gain a
view of the stage, Pons and Schmucke eclipsed themselves by their
success. In Paris (especially since the Revolution of July) no one can
hope to succeed unless he will push his way _quibuscumque viis_ and
with all his might through a formidable host of competitors; but for
this feat a man needs thews and sinews, and our two friends, be it
remembered, had that affection of the heart which cripples all
ambitious effort.

Pons, as a rule, only went to his theatre towards eight o'clock, when
the piece in favor came on, and overtures and accompaniments needed
the strict ruling of the baton; most minor theatres are lax in such
matters, and Pons felt the more at ease because he himself had been by
no means grasping in all his dealings with the management; and
Schmucke, if need be, could take his place. Time went by, and Schmucke
became an institution in the orchestra; the Illustrious Gaudissart
said nothing, but he was well aware of the value of Pons'
collaborator. He was obliged to include a pianoforte in the orchestra
(following the example of the leading theatres); the instrument was
placed beside the conductor's chair, and Schmucke played without
increase of salary--a volunteer supernumerary. As Schmucke's
character, his utter lack of ambition or pretence became known, the
orchestra recognized him as one of themselves; and as time went on, he
was intrusted with the often needed miscellaneous musical instruments
which form no part of the regular band of a boulevard theatre. For a
very small addition to his stipend, Schmucke played the viola d'amore,
hautboy, violoncello, and harp, as well as the piano, the castanets
for the _cachucha_, the bells, saxhorn, and the like. If the Germans
cannot draw harmony from the mighty instruments of Liberty, yet to
play all instruments of music comes to them by nature.

The two old artists were exceedingly popular at the theatre, and took
its ways philosophically. They had put, as it were, scales over their
eyes, lest they should see the offences that needs must come when a
_corps de ballet_ is blended with actors and actresses, one of the
most trying combinations ever created by the laws of supply and demand
for the torment of managers, authors, and composers alike.

Every one esteemed Pons with his kindness and his modesty, his great
self-respect and respect for others; for a pure and limpid life wins
something like admiration from the worst nature in every social
sphere, and in Paris a fair virtue meets with something of the success
of a large diamond, so great a rarity it is. No actor, no dancer
however brazen, would have indulged in the mildest practical joke at
the expense of either Pons or Schmucke.

Pons very occasionally put in an appearance in the _foyer_; but all
that Schmucke knew of the theatre was the underground passage from the
street door to the orchestra. Sometimes, however, during an interval,
the good German would venture to make a survey of the house and ask a
few questions of the first flute, a young fellow from Strasbourg, who
came of a German family at Kehl. Gradually under the flute's tuition
Schmucke's childlike imagination acquired a certain amount of
knowledge of the world; he could believe in the existence of that
fabulous creature the _lorette_, the possibility of "marriages at the
Thirteenth Arrondissement," the vagaries of the leading lady, and the
contraband traffic carried on by box-openers. In his eyes the more
harmless forms of vice were the lowest depths of Babylonish iniquity;
he did not believe the stories, he smiled at them for grotesque
inventions. The ingenious reader can see that Pons and Schmucke were
exploited, to use a word much in fashion; but what they lost in money
they gained in consideration and kindly treatment.

It was after the success of the ballet with which a run of success
began for the Gaudissart Company that the management presented Pons
with a piece of plate--a group of figures attributed to Benvenuto
Cellini. The alarming costliness of the gift caused talk in the
green-room. It was a matter of twelve hundred francs! Pons, poor
honest soul, was for returning the present, and Gaudissart had a
world of trouble to persuade him to keep it.

"Ah!" said the manager afterwards, when he told his partner of the
interview, "if we could only find actors up to that sample."

In their joint life, outwardly so quiet, there was the one disturbing
element--the weakness to which Pons sacrificed, the insatiable craving
to dine out. Whenever Schmucke happened to be at home while Pons was
dressing for the evening, the good German would bewail this deplorable
habit.

"Gif only he vas ony fatter vor it!" he many a time cried.

And Schmucke would dream of curing his friend of his degrading vice,
for a true friend's instinct in all that belongs to the inner life is
unerring as a dog's sense of smell; a friend knows by intuition the
trouble in his friend's soul, and guesses at the cause and ponders it
in his heart.

Pons, who always wore a diamond ring on the little finger of his right
hand, an ornament permitted in the time of the Empire, but ridiculous
to-day--Pons, who belonged to the "troubadour time," the sentimental
periods of the first Empire, was too much a child of his age, too much
of a Frenchman to wear the expression of divine serenity which
softened Schmucke's hideous ugliness. From Pons' melancholy looks
Schmucke knew that the profession of parasite was growing daily more
difficult and painful. And, in fact, in that month of October 1844,
the number of houses at which Pons dined was naturally much
restricted; reduced to move round and round the family circle, he had
used the word family in far too wide a sense, as will shortly be seen.