雙語·邦斯舅舅 三十四、一個霍夫曼傳奇中的人物

XXXIV

Well, child, she said, in a totally different voice, "are you satisfied?"

Mme. Cibot stared stupidly at the sorceress, and could not answer.

Ah! you would have the grand jeu; I have treated you as an old acquaintance. I only want a hundred francs—

Cibot,—going to die? gasped the portress.

So I have been telling you very dreadful things, have I? asked Mme. Fontaine, with an extremely ingenuous air.

Why, yes! said La Cibot, taking a hundred francs from her pocket and laying them down on the edge of the table. "Going to be murdered, think of it—"

Ah! there it is! You would have the grand jeu; but don't take on so, all the folk that are murdered on the cards don't die.

But is it possible, Ma'am Fontaine?

Oh, I know nothing about it, my pretty dear! You would rap at the door of the future; I pull the cord, and it came.

It, what? asked Mme. Cibot.

Well, then, the Spirit! cried the sorceress impatiently.

Good-bye, Ma'am Fontaine, exclaimed the portress. "I did not know what the grand jeu was like. You have given me a good fright, that you have."

The mistress will not put herself in that state twice in a month, said the servant, as she went with La Cibot to the landing. "She would do herself to death if she did, it tires her so. She will eat cutlets now and sleep for three hours afterwards."

Out in the street La Cibot took counsel of herself as she went along, and, after the manner of all who ask for advice of any sort or description, she took the favorable part of the prediction and rejected the rest. The next day found her confirmed in her resolutions—she would set all in train to become rich by securing a part of Pons' collection. Nor for some time had she any other thought than the combination of various plans to this end. The faculty of self-concentration seen in rough, uneducated persons, explained on a previous page, the reserve power accumulated in those whose mental energies are unworn by the daily wear and tear of social life, and brought into action so soon as that terrible weapon the "fixed idea" is brought into play,—all this was pre-eminently manifested in La Cibot. Even as the "fixed idea" works miracles of evasion, and brings forth prodigies of sentiment, so greed transformed the portress till she became as formidable as a Nucingen at bay, as subtle beneath her seeming stupidity as the irresistible La Palferine.

About seven o'clock one morning, a few days afterwards, she saw Remonencq taking down his shutters. She went across to him.

How could one find out how much the things yonder in my gentlemen's rooms are worth? she asked in a wheedling tone.

Oh! that is quite easy, replied the owner of the old curiosity shop. "If you will play fair and above board with me, I will tell you of somebody, a very honest man, who will know the value of the pictures to a farthing—"

Who?

M. Magus, a Jew. He only does business to amuse himself now.

Elie Magus has appeared so often in the Comedie Humaine, that it is needless to say more of him here. Suffice it to add that he had retired from business, and as a dealer was following the example set by Pons the amateur. Well-known valuers like Henry, Messrs. Pigeot and Moret, Theret, Georges, and Roehn, the experts of the Musee, in fact, were but children compared with Elie Magus. He could see a masterpiece beneath the accumulated grime of a century; he knew all schools, and the handwriting of all painters.

He had come to Paris from Bordeaux, and so long ago as 1835 he had retired from business without making any change for the better in his dress, so faithful is the race to old tradition. The persecutions of the Middle Ages compelled them to wear rags, to snuffle and whine and groan over their poverty in self-defence, till the habits induced by the necessities of other times have come to be, as usual, instinctive, a racial defect. Elie Magus had amassed a vast fortune by buying and selling diamonds, pictures, lace, enamels, delicate carvings, old jewelry, and rarities of all kinds, a kind of commerce which has developed enormously of late, so much so indeed that the number of dealers has increased tenfold during the last twenty years in this city of Paris, whither all the curiosities in the world come to rub against one another. And for pictures there are but three marts in the world—Rome, London, and Paris.

Elie Magus lived in the Chausee des Minimes, a short, broad street leading to the Place Royale. He had bought the house, an old-fashioned mansion, for a song, as the saying is, in 1831. Yet there were sumptuous apartments within it, decorated in the time of Louis XV; for it had once been the Hotel Maulaincourt, built by the great President of the Cour des Aides, and its remote position had saved it at the time of the Revolution. You may be quite sure that the old Jew had sound reasons for buying house property, contrary to the Hebrew law and custom. He had ended, as most of us end, with a hobby that bordered on a craze. He was as miserly as his friend, the late lamented Gobseck; but he had been caught by the snare of the eyes, by the beauty of the pictures in which he dealt. As his taste grew more and more fastidious, it became one of the passions which princes alone can indulge when they are wealthy and art-lovers. As the second King of Prussia found nothing that so kindled enthusiasm as the spectacle of a grenadier over six feet high, and gave extravagant sums for a new specimen to add to his living museum of a regiment, so the retired picture-dealer was roused to passion-pitch only by some canvas in perfect preservation, untouched since the master laid down the brush; and what was more, it must be a picture of the painter's best time. No great sales, therefore, took place but Elie Magus was there; every mart knew him; he traveled all over Europe. The ice-cold, money-worshiping soul in him kindled at the sight of a perfect work of art, precisely as a libertine, weary of fair women, is roused from apathy by the sight of a beautiful girl, and sets out afresh upon the quest of flawless loveliness. A Don Juan among fair works of art, a worshiper of the Ideal, Elie Magus had discovered joys that transcend the pleasure of a miser gloating over his gold—he lived in a seraglio of great paintings.

His masterpieces were housed as became the children of princes; the whole first floor of the great old mansion was given up to them. The rooms had been restored under Elie Magus' orders, and with what magnificence! The windows were hung with the richest Venetian brocade; the most splendid carpets from the Savonnerie covered the parquetry flooring. The frames of the pictures, nearly a hundred in number, were magnificent specimens, regilded cunningly by Servais, the one gilder in Paris whom Elie Magus thought sufficiently painstaking; the old Jew himself had taught him to use the English leaf, which is infinitely superior to that produced by French gold-beaters. Servais is among gilders as Thouvenin among bookbinders—an artist among craftsmen, making his work a labor of love. Every window in that gallery was protected by iron-barred shutters. Elie Magus himself lived in a couple of attics on the floor above; the furniture was wretched, the rooms were full of rags, and the whole place smacked of the Ghetto; Elie Magus was finishing his days without any change in his life.

The whole of the ground floor was given up to the picture trade (for the Jew still dealt in works of art). Here he stored his canvases, here also packing-cases were stowed on their arrival from other countries; and still there was room for a vast studio, where Moret, most skilful of restorers of pictures, a craftsman whom the Musee ought to employ, was almost always at work for Magus. The rest of the rooms on the ground floor were given up to Magus' daughter, the child of his old age, a Jewess as beautiful as a Jewess can be when the Semitic type reappears in its purity and nobility in a daughter of Israel. Noemi was guarded by two servants, fanatical Jewesses, to say nothing of an advanced-guard, a Polish Jew, Abramko by name, once involved in a fabulous manner in political troubles, from which Elie Magus saved him as a business speculation. Abramko, porter of the silent, grim, deserted mansion, divided his office and his lodge with three remarkably ferocious animals—an English bull-dog, a Newfoundland dog, and another of the Pyrenean breed.

Behold the profound observations of human nature upon which Elie Magus based his feeling of security, for secure he felt; he left home without misgivings, slept with both ears shut, and feared no attempt upon his daughter (his chief treasure), his pictures, or his money. In the first place, Abramko's salary was increased every year by two hundred francs so long as his master should live; and Magus, moreover, was training Abramko as a money-lender in a small way. Abramko never admitted anybody until he had surveyed them through a formidable grated opening. He was a Hercules for strength, he worshiped Elie Magus, as Sancho Panza worshiped Don Quixote. All day long the dogs were shut up without food; at nightfall Abramko let them loose; and by a cunning device the old Jew kept each animal at his post in the courtyard or the garden by hanging a piece of meat just out of reach on the top of a pole. The animals guarded the house, and sheer hunger guarded the dogs. No odor that reached their nostrils could tempt them from the neighborhood of that piece of meat; they would not have left their places at the foot of the poles for the most engaging female of the canine species. If a stranger by any chance intruded, the dogs suspected him of ulterior designs upon their rations, which were only taken down in the morning by Abramko himself when he awoke. The advantages of this fiendish scheme are patent. The animals never barked, Magus' ingenuity had made savages of them; they were treacherous as Mohicans. And now for the result. One night burglars, emboldened by the silence, decided too hastily that it would be easy enough to "clean out" the old Jew's strong box. One of their number told off to advance to the assault scrambled up the garden wall and prepared to descend. This the bull-dog allowed him to do. The animal, knowing perfectly well what was coming, waited for the burglar to reach the ground; but when that gentleman directed a kick at him, the bull-dog flew at the visitor's shins, and, making but one bite of it, snapped the ankle-bone clean in two. The thief had the courage to tear him away, and returned, walking upon the bare bone of the mutilated stump till he reached the rest of the gang, when he fell fainting, and they carried him off. The Police News, of course, did not fail to report this delightful night incident, but no one believed in it.

Magus at this time was seventy-five years old, and there was no reason why he should not live to a hundred. Rich man though he was, he lived like the Remonencqs. His necessary expenses, including the money he lavished on his daughter, did not exceed three thousand francs.