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den, said to Gazonal: "Cut!" the worthyprovincial 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" target="_blank" title="ad.绝对地;确实">absolutelyintolerable 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 absoluteimpossibility 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


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