Unconscious Comedians Part 7

"She must be very rich," remarked Gazonal.

"She was the victim of her own idea, as long as lotteries existed," said Bixiou; "for in Paris there are no great gains without corresponding outlays. The strongest heads are liable to crack there, as if to give vent to their steam. Those who make much money have vices or fancies,--no doubt to establish an equilibrium."

"And now that the lottery is abolished?" asked Gazonal.

"Oh! now she has a nephew for whom she is h.o.a.rding."

When they reached the Vieille rue du Temple the three friends entered one of the oldest houses in that street and pa.s.sed up a shaking staircase, the steps of which, caked with mud, led them in semi-darkness, and through a stench peculiar to houses on an alley, to the third story, where they beheld a door which painting alone could render; literature would have to spend too many nights in suitably describing it.

An old woman, in keeping with that door, and who might have been that door in human guise, ushered the three friends into a room which served as an ante-chamber, where, in spite of the warm atmosphere which fills the streets of Paris, they felt the icy chill of crypts about them. A damp air came from an inner courtyard which resembled a huge air-shaft; the light that entered was gray, and the sill of the window was filled with pots of sickly plants. In this room, which had a coating of some greasy, fuliginous substance, the furniture, the chairs, the table, were all most abject. The floor tiles oozed like a water-cooler. In short, every accessory was in keeping with the fearful old woman of the hooked nose, ghastly face, and decent rags who directed the "consulters" to sit down, informing them that only one at a time could be admitted to Madame.

Gazonal, who played the intrepid, entered bravely, and found himself in presence of one of those women forgotten by Death, who no doubt forgets them intentionally in order to leave some samples of Itself among the living. He saw before him a withered face in which shone fixed gray eyes of wearying immobility; a flattened nose, smeared with snuff; knuckle-bones well set up by muscles that, under pretence of being hands, played nonchalantly with a pack of cards, like some machine the movement of which is about to run down. The body, a species of broom-handle decently covered with clothes, enjoyed the advantages of death and did not stir. Above the forehead rose a coif of black velvet.

Madame Fontaine, for it was really a woman, had a black hen on her right hand and a huge toad, named Astaroth, on her left. Gazonal did not at first perceive them.

The toad, of surprising dimensions, was less alarming in himself than through the effect of two topaz eyes, large as a ten-sous piece, which cast forth vivid gleams. It was impossible to endure that look. The toad is a creature as yet unexplained. Perhaps the whole animal creation, including man, is comprised in it; for, as La.s.sailly said, the toad exists indefinitely; and, as we know, it is of all created animals the one whose marriage lasts the longest.

The black hen had a cage about two feet distant from the table, covered with a green cloth, to which she came along a plank which formed a sort of drawbridge between the cage and the table.

When the woman, the least real of the creatures in this Hoffmanesque den, said to Gazonal: "Cut!" the worthy provincial shuddered involuntarily. That which renders these beings so formidable is the importance of what we want to know. People go to them, as they know very well, to buy hope.

The den of the sibyl was much darker than the antechamber; the color of the walls could scarcely be distinguished. The ceiling, blackened by smoke, far from reflecting the little light that came from a window obstructed by pale and sickly vegetations, absorbed the greater part of it; but the table where the sorceress sat received what there was of this half-light fully. The table, the chair of the woman, and that on which Gazonal was seated, formed the entire furniture of the little room, which was divided at one end by a sort of loft where Madame Fontaine probably slept. Gazonal heard through a half-opened door the bubbling murmur of a soup-pot. That kitchen sound, accompanied by a composite odor in which the effluvia of a sink predominated, mingled incongruous ideas of the necessities of actual life with those of supernatural power. Disgust entered into curiosity.

Gazonal observed one stair of pine wood, the lowest no doubt of the staircase which led to the loft. He took in these minor details at a glance, with a sense of nausea. It was all quite otherwise alarming than the romantic tales and scenes of German drama lead one to expect; here was suffocating actuality. The air diffused a sort of dizzy heaviness, the dim light rasped the nerves. When the Southerner, impelled by a species of self-a.s.sertion, gazed firmly at the toad, he felt a sort of emetic heat at the pit of his stomach, and was conscious of a terror like that a criminal might feel in presence of a gendarme. He endeavoured to brace himself by looking at Madame Fontaine; but there he encountered two almost white eyes, the motionless and icy pupils of which were absolutely intolerable to him. The silence became terrifying.

"Which do you wish, monsieur, the five-franc fortune, the ten-franc fortune, or the grand game?"

"The five-franc fortune is dear enough," replied the Southerner, making powerful efforts not to yield to the influence of the surroundings in which he found himself.

At the moment when Gazonal was thus endeavouring to collect himself, a voice--an infernal voice--made him bound in his chair; the black hen clucked.

"Go back, my daughter, go back; monsieur chooses to spend only five francs."

The hen seemed to understand her mistress, for, after coming within a foot of the cards, she turned and resumed her former place.

"What flower to you like best?" asked the old woman, in a voice hoa.r.s.ened by the phlegm which seemed to rise and fall incessantly in her bronchial tubes.

"The rose."

"What color are you fond of?"

"Blue."

"What animal do you prefer?"

"The horse. Why these questions?" he asked.

"Man derives his form from his anterior states," she said sententiously.

"Hence his instincts; and his instincts rule his destiny. What food do you like best to eat,--fish, game, cereals, butcher's meat, sweet things, vegetables, or fruits?"

"Game."

"In what month where you born?"

"September."

"Put out your hand."

Madame Fontaine looked attentively at the lines of the hand that was shown to her. It was all done seriously, with no pretence of sorcery; on the contrary, with the simplicity a notary might have shown when asking the intentions of a client about a deed. Presently she shuffled the cards, and asked Gazonal to cut them, and then to make three packs of them himself. After which she took the packs, spread them out before her, and examined them as a gambler examines the thirty-six numbers at roulette before he risks his stake. Gazonal's bones were freezing; he seemed not to know where he was; but his amazement grew greater and greater when this hideous old woman in a green bonnet, stout and squat, whose false front was frizzed into points of interrogation, proceeded, in a thick voice, to relate to him all the particular circ.u.mstances, even the most secret, of his past life: she told him his tastes, his habits, his character; the thoughts of his childhood; everything that had influenced his life; a marriage broken off, why, with whom, the exact description of the woman he had loved; and, finally, the place he came from, his lawsuit, etc.

Gazonal at first thought it was a hoax prepared by his companions; but the absolute impossibility of such a conspiracy appeared to him almost as soon as the idea itself, and he sat speechless before that truly infernal power, the incarnation of which borrowed from humanity a form which the imagination of painters and poets has throughout all ages regarded as the most awful of created things,--namely, a toothless, hideous, wheezing hag, with cold lips, flattened nose, and whitish eyes.

The pupils of those eyes had brightened, through them rushed a ray,--was it from the depths of the future or from h.e.l.l?

Gazonal asked, interrupting the old creature, of what use the toad and the hen were to her.

"They predict the future. The consulter himself throws grain upon the cards; Bilouche comes and pecks it. Astaroth crawls over the cards to get the food the client holds for him, and those two wonderful intelligences are never mistaken. Will you see them at work?--you will then know your future. The cost is a hundred francs."

Gazonal, horrified by the gaze of Astaroth, rushed into the antechamber, after bowing to the terrible old woman. He was moist from head to foot, as if under the incubation of some evil spirit.

"Let us get away!" he said to the two artists. "Did you ever consult that sorceress?"

"I never do anything important without getting Astaroth's opinion," said Leon, "and I am always the better for it."

"I'm expecting the virtuous fortune which Bilouche has promised me,"

said Bixiou.

"I've a fever," cried Gazonal. "If I believed what you say I should have to believe in sorcery, in some supernatural power."

"It may be only natural," said Bixiou. "One-third of all the lorettes, one-fourth of all the statesmen, and one-half of all artists consult Madame Fontaine; and I know a minister to whom she is an Egeria."

"Did she tell you about your future?" asked Leon.

"No; I had enough of her about my past. But," added Gazonal, struck by a sudden thought, "if she can, by the help of those dreadful collaborators, predict the future, how came she to lose in the lottery?"

"Ah! you put your finger on one of the greatest mysteries of occult science," replied Leon. "The moment that the species of inward mirror on which the past or the future is reflected to their minds become clouded by the breath of a personal feeling, by an idea foreign to the purpose of the power they are exerting, sorcerers and sorceresses can see nothing; just as an artist who blurs art with political combinations and systems loses his genius. Not long ago, a man endowed with the gift of divining by cards, a rival to Madame Fontaine, became addicted to vicious practices, and being unable to tell his own fate from the cards, was arrested, tried, and condemned at the court of a.s.sizes. Madame Fontaine, who predicts the future eight times out of ten, was never able to know if she would win or lose in a lottery."

"It is the same thing in magnetism," remarked Bixiou. "A man can't magnetize himself."

"Heavens! now we come to magnetism!" cried Gazonal. "Ah ca! do you know everything?"

"Friend Gazonal," replied Bixiou, gravely, "to be able to laugh at everything one must know everything. As for me, I've been in Paris since my childhood; I've lived, by means of my pencil, on its follies and absurdities, at the rate of five caricatures a month. Consequently, I often laugh at ideas in which I have faith."

"Come, let us get to something else," said Leon. "We'll go to the Chamber and settle the cousin's affair."

"This," said Bixiou, imitating Odry in "Les Funambules," "is high comedy, for we will make the first orator we meet pose for us, and you shall see that in those halls of legislation, as elsewhere, the Parisian language has but two tones,--Self-interest, Vanity."

As they got into their citadine, Leon saw in a rapidly driven cabriolet a man to whom he made a sign that he had something to say to him.

"There's Publicola Ma.s.son," said Leon to Bixiou. "I'm going to ask for a sitting this evening at five o'clock, after the Chamber. The cousin shall then see the most curious of all the originals."