While Pons was casting about for the complimentary answer which invariably occurred to him too late when he was afraid of his host, Madeleine came in, handed a folded note to the Presidente, and waited for an answer. The note ran as follows:
“DEAR MAMMA, – If we pretend that this note comes to you from papa at the Palais, and that he wants us both to dine with his friend because proposals have been renewed – then the cousin will go, and we can carry out our plan of going to the Popinots.”
“Who brought the master’s note?” the Presidente asked quickly.
“A lad from the Salle du Palais,” the withered waiting woman unblushingly answered, and her mistress knew at once that Madeleine had woven the plot with Cecile, now at the end of her patience.
“Tell him that we will both be there at half-past five.”
Madeleine had no sooner left the room than the Presidente turned to Cousin Pons with that insincere friendliness which is about as grateful to a sensitive soul as a mixture of milk and vinegar to the palate of an epicure.
“Dinner is ordered, dear cousin; you must dine without us; my husband has just sent word from the court that the question of the marriage has been reopened, and we are to dine with the Councillor. We need not stand on ceremony at all. Do just as if you were at home. I have no secrets from you; I am perfectly open with you, as you see. I am sure you would not wish to break off the little darling’s marriage.”
“I, cousin? On the contrary, I should like to find some one for her; but in my circle – ”
“Oh, that is not at all likely,” said the Presidente, cutting him short insolently. “Then you will stay, will you not? Cecile will keep you company while I dress.
“Oh! I can dine somewhere else, cousin.”
Cruelly hurt though he was by her way of casting up his poverty to him, the prospect of being left alone with the servants was even more alarming.
“But why should you? Dinner is ready; you may just as well have it; if you do not, the servants will eat it.”
At that atrocious speech Pons started up as if he had received a shock from a galvanic battery, bowed stiffly to the lady, and went to find his spencer. Now, it so happened that the door of Cecile’s bedroom, beyond the little drawing-room, stood open, and looking into the mirror, he caught sight of the girl shaking with laughter as she gesticulated and made signs to her mother. The old artist understood beyond a doubt that he had been the victim of some cowardly hoax. Pons went slowly down the stairs; he could not keep back the tears. He understood that he had been turned out of the house, but why and wherefore he did not know.
“I am growing too old,” he told himself. “The world has a horror of old age and poverty – two ugly things. After this I will not go anywhere unless I am asked.”
Heroic resolve!
Downstairs the great gate was shut, as it usually is in houses occupied by the proprietor; the kitchen stood exactly opposite the porter’s lodge, and the door was open. Pons was obliged to listen while Madeleine told the servants the whole story amid the laughter of the servants. She had not expected him to leave so soon. The footman loudly applauded a joke at the expense of a visitor who was always coming to the house and never gave you more than three francs at the year’s end.
“Yes,” put in the cook; “but if he cuts up rough and does not come back, there will be three francs the less for some of us on New Year’s day.”
“Eh! How is he to know?” retorted the footman.
“Pooh!” said Madeleine, “a little sooner or a little later – what difference does it make? The people at the other houses where he dines are so tired of him that they are going to turn him out.”
“The gate, if you please!”
Madeleine had scarcely uttered the words when they heard the old musician’s call to the porter. It sounded like a cry of pain. There was a sudden silence in the kitchen.
“He heard!” the footman said.
“Well, and if he did, so much the worser, or rather so much the better,” retorted Madeleine. “He is an arrant skinflint.”
Poor Pons had lost none of the talk in the kitchen; he heard it all, even to the last word. He made his way home along the boulevards, in the same state, physical and mental, as an old woman after a desperate struggle with burglars. As he went he talked to himself in quick spasmodic jerks; his honor had been wounded, and the pain of it drove him on as a gust of wind whirls away a straw. He found himself at last in the Boulevard du Temple; how he had come thither he could not tell. It was five o’clock, and, strange to say, he had completely lost his appetite.
But if the reader is to understand the revolution which Pons’ unexpected return at that hour was to work in the Rue de Normandie, the promised biography of Mme. Cibot must be given in this place.
Any one passing along the Rue de Normandie might be pardoned for thinking that he was in some small provincial town. Grass runs to seed in the street, everybody knows everybody else, and the sight of a stranger is an event. The houses date back to the reign of Henry IV., when there was a scheme afoot for a quarter in which every street was to be named after a French province, and all should converge in a handsome square to which La France should stand godmother. The Quartier de l’Europe was a revival of the same idea; history repeats itself everywhere in the world, and even in the world of speculation.
The house in which the two musicians used to live is an old mansion with a courtyard in front and a garden at the back; but the front part of the house which gives upon the street is comparatively modern, built during the eighteenth century when the Marais was a fashionable quarter. The friends lived at the back, on the second floor of the old part of the house. The whole building belongs to M. Pillerault, an old man of eighty, who left matters very much in the hands of M. and Mme. Cibot, his porters for the past twenty-six years.
Now, as a porter cannot live by his lodge alone, the aforesaid Cibot had other means of gaining a livelihood; and supplemented his five per cent on the rental and his faggot from every cartload of wood by his own earnings as a tailor. In time Cibot ceased to work for the master tailors; he made a connection among the little trades-people of the quarter, and enjoyed a monopoly of the repairs, renovations, and fine drawing of all the coats and trousers in three adjacent streets. The lodge was spacious and wholesome, and boasted a second room; wherefore the Cibot couple were looked upon as among the luckiest porters in the arrondissement.
Cibot, small and stunted, with a complexion almost olive-colored by reason of sitting day in day out in Turk-fashion on a table level with the barred window, made about twelve or fourteen francs a week. He worked still, though he was fifty-eight years old, but fifty-eight is the porter’s golden age; he is used to his lodge, he and his room fit each other like the shell and the oyster, and “he is known in the neighborhood.”
Mme. Cibot, sometime opener of oysters at the Cadran Bleu, after all the adventures which come unsought to the belle of an oyster-bar, left her post for love of Cibot at the age of twenty-eight. The beauty of a woman of the people is short-lived, especially if she is planted espalier fashion at a restaurant door. Her features are hardened by puffs of hot air from the kitchen; the color of the heeltaps of customers’ bottles, finished in the company of the waiters, gradually filters into her complexion – no beauty is full blown so soon as the beauty of an oyster-opener. Luckily for Mme. Cibot, lawful wedlock and a portress’ life were offered to her just in time; while she still preserved a comeliness of a masculine order slandered by rivals of