Unconscious Comedians

“Don’t laugh, Gazonal,” said Leon as they reached the foot of the staircase, whence his eye could take in the whole of the Place de la Bourse. “I see over there one of our great men, and you shall compare his language with that of the barber, and tell me which of the two you think the most original.”

“Don’t laugh, Gazonal,” said Bixiou, mimicking Leon’s intonation. “What do you suppose is Marius’s business?”

“Hair-dressing.”

“He has obtained a monopoly of the sale of hair in bulk, as a certain dealer in comestibles who is going to sell us a pate for three francs has acquired a monopoly of the sale of truffles; he discounts the paper of that business; he loans money on pawn to clients when embarrassed; he gives annuities on lives; he gambles at the Bourse; he is a stockholder in all the fashion papers; and he sells, under the name of a certain chemist, an infamous drug which, for his share alone, gives him an income of thirty thousand francs, and costs in advertisements a hundred thousand yearly.”

“Is it possible!” cried Gazonal.

“Remember this,” said Bixiou, gravely. “In Paris there is no such thing as a small business; all things swell to large proportions, down to the sale of rags and matches. The lemonade-seller who, with his napkin under his arm, meets you as you enter his shop, may be worth his fifty thousand francs a year; the waiter in a restaurant is eligible for the Chamber; the man you take for a beggar in the street carries a hundred thousand francs worth of unset diamonds in his waistcoat pocket, and didn’t steal them either.”

The three inseparables (for one day at any rate) now crossed the Place de la Bourse in a way to intercept a man about forty years of age, wearing the Legion of honor, who was coming from the boulevard by way of the rue Neuve-Vivienne.

“Hey!” said Leon, “what are you pondering over, my dear Dubourdieu? Some fine symbolic composition? My dear cousin, I have the pleasure to present to you our illustrious painter Dubourdieu, not less celebrated for his humanitarian convictions than for his talents in art. Dubourdieu, my cousin Palafox.”

Dubourdieu, a small, pale man with melancholy blue eyes, bowed slightly to Gazonal, who bent low as before a man of genius.

“So you have elected Stidmann in place of – ” he began.

“How could I help it? I wasn’t there,” replied Lora.

“You bring the Academy into disrepute,” continued the painter. “To choose such a man as that! I don’t wish to say ill of him, but he works at a trade. Where are you dragging the first of arts, – the art those works are the most lasting; bringing nations to light of which the world has long lost even the memory; an art which crowns and consecrates great men? Yes, sculpture is priesthood; it preserves the ideas of an epoch, and you give its chair to a maker of toys and mantelpieces, an ornamentationist, a seller of bric-a-brac! Ah! as Chamfort said, one has to swallow a viper every morning to endure the life of Paris. Well, at any rate, Art remains to a few of us; they can’t prevent us from cultivating it – ”

“And besides, my dear fellow, you have a consolation which few artists possess; the future is yours,” said Bixiou. “When the world is converted to our doctrine, you will be at the head of your art; for you are putting into it ideas which people will understand —when they are generalized! In fifty years from now you’ll be to all the world what you are to a few of us at this moment, – a great man. The only question is how to get along till then.”

“I have just finished,” resumed the great artist, his face expanding like that of a man whose hobby is stroked, “an allegorical figure of Harmony; and if you will come and see it, you will understand why it should have taken me two years to paint it. Everything is in it! At the first glance one divines the destiny of the globe. A queen holds a shepherd’s crook in her hand, – symbolical of the advancement of the races useful to mankind; she wears on her head the cap of Liberty; her breasts are sixfold, as the Egyptians carved them – for the Egyptians foresaw Fourier; her feet are resting on two clasped hands which embrace a globe, – symbol of the brotherhood of all human races; she tramples cannon under foot to signify the abolition of war; and I have tried to make her face express the serenity of triumphant agriculture. I have also placed beside her an enormous curled cabbage, which, according to our master, is an image of Harmony. Ah! it is not the least among Fourier’s titles to veneration that he has restored the gift of thought to plants; he has bound all creation in one by the signification of things to one another, and by their special language. A hundred years hence this earth will be much larger than it is now.”

“And how will that, monsieur, come to pass?” said Gazonal, stupefied at hearing a man outside of a lunatic asylum talk in this way.

“Through the extending of production. If men will apply The System, it will not be impossible to act upon the stars.”

“What would become of painting in that case?” asked Gazonal.

“It would be magnified.”

“Would our eyes be magnified too?” said Gazonal, looking at his two friends significantly.

“Man will return to what he was before he became degenerate; our six-feet men will then be dwarfs.”

“Is your picture finished?” asked Leon.

“Entirely finished,” replied Dubourdieu. “I have tried to see Hiclar, and get him to compose a symphony for it; I wish that while viewing my picture the public should hear music a la Beethoven to develop its ideas and bring them within range of the intellect by two arts. Ah! if the government would only lend me one of the galleries of the Louvre!”

“I’ll mention it, if you want me to do so; you should never neglect an opportunity to strike minds.”

“Ah! my friends are preparing articles; but I am afraid they’ll go too far.”

“Pooh!” said Bixiou, “they can’t go as far as the future.”

Dubourdieu looked askance at Bixiou, and continued his way.

“Why, he’s mad,” said Gazonal; “he is following the moon in her courses.”

“His skill is masterly,” said Leon, “and he knows his art, but Fourierism has killed him. You have just seen, cousin, one of the effects of ambition upon artists. Too often, in Paris, from a desire to reach more rapidly than by natural ways the celebrity which to them is fortune, artists borrow the wings of circumstance, they think they make themselves of more importance as men of a specialty, the supporters of some ‘system’; and they fancy they can transform a clique into the public. One is a republican, another Saint-Simonian; this one aristocrat, that one Catholic, others juste-milieu, middle ages, or German, as they choose for their purpose. Now, though opinions do not give talent, they always spoil what talent there is; and the poor fellow whom you have just seen is a proof thereof. An artist’s opinion ought to be: Faith in his art, in his work; and his only way of success is toil when nature has given him the sacred fire.”

“Let us get away,” said Bixiou. “Leon is beginning to moralize.”

“But that man was sincere,” said Gazonal, still stupefied.

“Perfectly sincere,” replied Bixiou; “as sincere as the king of barbers just now.”

“He is mad!” repeated Gazonal.

“And he is not the first man driven man by Fourier’s ideas,” said Bixiou. “You don’t know anything about Paris. Ask it for a hundred thousand francs to realize an idea that will be useful to humanity, – the steam-engine for instance, – and you’ll die, like Salomon de Caux, at Bicetre; but if the money is wanted for some paradoxical absurdity, Parisians will annihilate themselves and their fortune for it. It is the same with systems as it is with material things. Utterly impracticable newspapers have consumed millions within the last fifteen years. What makes your lawsuit so hard to win, is that you have right on your side, and on that of the prefect there are (so you suppose) secret motives.”

“Do you think that a man of intellect having once understood the nature of Paris could live elsewhere?” said Leon to his cousin.

“Suppose we take Gazonal to old Mere Fontaine?” said Bixiou, making a sign to the driver of a citadine to draw up; “it will be a step from the real to the fantastic. Driver, Vieille rue du Temple.”

And all three were presently rolling in the direction of the Marais.

“What are you taking me to see now?” asked Gazonal.

“The proof of what Bixiou told you,” replied Leon; “we shall show you a woman who makes twenty thousand francs a year by working a fantastic idea.”

“A fortune-teller,” said Bixiou, interpreting the look of the Southerner as a question. “Madame Fontaine is thought, by those who seek to pry into the future, to be wiser in her wisdom than Mademoiselle Lenormand.”

“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 hoarding.”

When they reached the Vieille rue du Temple the three friends entered one of the oldest houses in that street and passed 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 Lassailly 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-assertion, 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 hoarsened 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 circumstances, 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 hell?

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 assizes. 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 Masson,” 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.”

“Who is he?” asked Gazonal, while Leon went to speak to Publicola Masson.

“An artist-pedicure,” replied Bixiou, “author of a ‘Treatise on Corporistics,’ who cuts your corns by subscription, and who, if the Republications triumph for six months, will assuredly become immortal.”

“Drives his carriage!” ejaculated Gazonal.

“But, my good Gazonal, it is only millionaires who have time to go afoot in Paris.”

“To the Chamber!” cried Leon to the coachman, getting back into the carriage.

“Which, monsieur?”

“Deputies,” replied Leon, exchanging a smile with Bixiou.

“Paris begins to confound me,” said Gazonal.

“To make you see its immensity, – moral, political, and literary, – we are now proceeding like the Roman cicerone, who shows you in Saint Peter’s the thumb of the statue you took to be life-size, and the thumb proves to be a foot long. You haven’t yet measured so much as a great toe of Paris.”

“And remark, cousin Gazonal, that we take things as they come; we haven’t selected.”

“This evening you shall sup as they feasted at Belshazzar’s; and there you shall see our Paris, our own particular Paris, playing lansquenet, and risking a hundred thousand francs at a throw without winking.”

A quarter of an hour later the citadine stopped at the foot of the steps going up to the Chamber of Deputies, at that end of the Pont de la Concorde which leads to discord.

“I thought the Chamber unapproachable?” said the provincial, surprised to find himself in the great lobby.

“That depends,” replied Bixiou; “materially speaking, it costs thirty sous for a citadine to approach it; politically, you have to spend rather more. The swallows thought, so a poet says, that the Arc de Triomphe was erected for them; we artists think that this public building was built for us, – to compensate for the stupidities of the Theatre-Francais and make us laugh; but the comedians on this stage are much more expensive; and they don’t give us every day the value of our money.”

“So this is the Chamber!” cried Gazonal, as he paced the great hall in which there were then about a dozen persons, and looked around him with an air which Bixiou noted down in his memory and reproduced in one of the famous caricatures with which he rivalled Gavarni.

Leon went to speak to one of the ushers who go and come continually between this hall and the hall of sessions, with which it communicates by a passage in which are stationed the stenographers of the “Moniteur” and persons attached to the Chamber.

“As for the minister,” replied the usher to Leon as Gazonal approached them, “he is there, but I don’t know if Monsieur Giraud has come. I’ll see.”

As the usher opened one side of the double door through which none but deputies, ministers, or messengers from the king are allowed to pass, Gazonal saw a man come out who seemed still young, although he was really forty-eight years old, and to whom the usher evidently indicated Leon de Lora.

“Ha! you here!” he exclaimed, shaking hands with both Bixiou and Lora. “Scamps! what are you doing in the sanctuary of the laws?”

“Parbleu! we’ve come to learn how to blague,” said Bixiou. “We might get rusty if we didn’t.”

“Let us go into the garden,” said the young man, not observing that Gazonal belonged to the party.

Seeing that this new-comer was well-dressed, in black, the provincial did not know in which political category to place him; but he followed the others into the garden contiguous to the hall which follows the line of the quai Napoleon. Once in the garden the ci-devant young man gave way to a peal of laughter which he seemed to have been repressing since he entered the lobby.

“What is it?” asked Leon de Lora.

“My dear friend, to prove the sincerity of the constitutional government we are forced to tell the most frightful lies with incredible self-possession. But as for me, I’m freakish; some days I can lie like a prospectus; other days I can’t be serious. This is one of my hilarious days. Now, at this moment, the prime minister, being summoned by the Opposition to make known a certain diplomatic secret, is going through his paces in the tribune. Being an honest man who never lies on his own account, he whispered to me as he mounted the breach: ‘Heaven knows what I shall say to them.’ A mad desire to laugh overcame me, and as one mustn’t laugh on the ministerial bench I rushed out, for my youth does come back to me most unseasonably at times.”