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 ante
chamber; 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
ante
chamber, 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
collab
orators,
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