Mme. Cibot

“ I put M. Schmucke first—”
“M. Schmucke! there is a heart for you,” cried La Cibot. “Ah! he loves me, but then he is poor. It is money that deadens the heart; and you are rich! Oh, well, take a nurse, you will see what a life she will lead you; she will torment you, you will be like a cockchafer on a string. The doctor will say that you must have plenty to drink, and she will do nothing but feed you. She will bring you to your grave and rob you. You do not deserve to have a Mme. Cibot!—there! When Dr. Poulain comes, ask him for a nurse.”
“Oh fiddlestickend!” the patient cried angrily. ”

“ Cibot, therefore, was struck dumb with amazement to be confronted with a little old man in a great-coat too shabby for Cibot to mend, standing watching a painter at work upon an old picture in the chilly room on the vast ground floor. The old man's eyes, full of cold feline malignance, were turned upon her, and La Cibot shivered.
"What do you want, Remonencq?" asked this person.
"It is a question of valuing some pictures; there is nobody but you in Paris who can tell a poor tinker-fellow like me how much he may give when he has not thousands to spend, like you." ”

“ So it had come to pass that the Cibots had passed the prime of life, and saw themselves on the threshold of old age without a hundred francs put by for the future. Well clad and well fed, they enjoyed among the neighbors, it is true, the respect due to twenty-six years of strict honesty; for if they had nothing of their own, they "hadn't nothing belonging to nobody else," according to La Cibot, who was a prodigal of negatives. "There wasn't never such a love of a man," she would say to her husband. ”

“ Murder is almost always denounced by its advanced guards, by hatred or greed well known to those under whose eyes the whole matter has passed. But in the case of the Cibots, no one save the doctor had any interest in discovering the actual cause of death. The little copper-faced tailor's wife adored her husband; he had no money and no enemies; La Cibot's fortune and the marine-store dealer's motives were alike hidden in the shade. ”

“ Ah! my dear sir, if you think to cheat a defenceless woman, you will not make a good bargain! Do you understand, master lawyer?—M. Magus rules the market, and if you do not come down off the high horse, if you do not keep your word to Mme. Cibot, I shall wait till the collection is sold, and you shall see what you will lose if you have M. Magus and me against you; we can get the dealers in a ring. Instead of realizing seven or eight hundred thousand francs, you will not so much as make two hundred thousand. ”

“ There are moments when the Parisian is not propitious. He grows tired of raising pedestals, pouts like a spoiled child, and will have no more idols; or, to state it more accurately, Paris cannot always find a proper object for infatuation. Now and then the vein of genius gives out, and at such times the Parisian may turn supercilious; he is not always willing to bow down and gild mediocrity.
Mme. Cibot, entering in her usual unceremonious fashion, found the doctor and his mother at table, before a bowl of lamb’s lettuce, the cheapest of all salad-stuffs. ”

“ You dried to kill mein goot Bons! He is right. You are worse than a monster, you are a lost soul!"
La Cibot saw the look of abhorrence in the frank German's face; she rose, proud as Tartuffe, gave Schmucke a glance which made him quake, and went out, carrying off under her dress an exquisite little picture of Metzu's pointed out by Elie Magus. "A diamond," he had called it. Fraisier downstairs in the porter's lodge was waiting to hear that La Cibot had burned the envelope and the sheet of blank paper inside it. Great was his astonishment when he beheld his fair client's agitation and dismay. ”

“ But if this first spoliation was to be effected, La Cibot must throw dust in Fraisier's eyes, and lull the suspicions of that terrible fellow-conspirator of her own seeking; and Elie Magus and Remonencq must be bound over to secrecy.
As for Remonencq, he had gradually come to feel such a passion as uneducated people can conceive when they come to Paris from the depths of the country, bringing with them all the fixed ideas bred of the solitary country life; all the ignorance of a primitive nature, all the brute appetites that become so many fixed ideas. ”

“ Delighted to have news of his conductor, he made a Napoleonic gesture, and La Cibot was admitted.
The sometime commercial traveler, now the head of a popular theatre, regarded his sleeping partners in the light of a legitimate wife; they were not informed of all his doings. The flourishing state of his finances had reacted upon his person. Grown big and stout and high-colored with good cheer and prosperity, Gaudissart made no disguise of his transformation into a Mondor.
"We are turning into a city-father," he once said, trying to be the first to laugh. ”

“ Poulain came to lend himself so readily to the farce of La Cibot’s illness and recovery. Greed of every kind, ambition of every nature, is not easy to hide. The doctor examined his patient, found that every organ was sound and healthy, admired the regularity of her pulse and the perfect ease of her movements ”

“ An amateur of beauty hiding in a boudoir or a stolen glance at a mistress concealed from him by his friend might feel as Elie Magus felt at that moment.
La Cibot was impressed by Remonencq's respect for this singular person; real power, moreover, even when it cannot be explained, is always felt; the portress was supple and obedient, she dropped the autocratic tone which she was wont to use in her lodge and with the tenants, accepted Magus' conditions, and agreed to admit him into Pons' museum that very day. ”

“ Cibot, who coveted the chattels of the old bachelor. He also assured the Camusot de Marvilles that they should be the legatees of the old musician despite the faithful Schmucke. In 1845 he succeeded Vitel as justice of the peace; the coveted place being secured for him by Camusot de Marville, as a fee for his services. In Normandy he again acted successfully for this family. Fraisier was a dried-up little man with a blotched face and an unpleasant odor. At Mantes a certain Mme. Vatinelle nevertheless "made eyes at him"; and he lived at Marais with a servant-mistress, Dame Sauvage. ”

“ Pooh! you make too much of it, my dear M. Schmucke; we must take things as we find them; Cibot might be at death's door, and I should not take it to heart as you do. Come! the cherub has a good constitution. And he has been steady, it seems, you see; you have no idea what an age sober people live. ”

“ Schmucke had gone to bed. The three kites, drawn by the scent of a corpse, were masters of the field.
"Make no noise," said La Cibot whenever Magus went into ecstasies or explained the value of some work of art to Remonencq. The dying man slept on in the neighboring room, while greed in four different forms appraised the treasures that he must leave behind, and waited impatiently for him to die—a sight to wring the heart.
Three hours went by before they had finished the salon.
"On an average," said the grimy old Jew, "everything here is worth a thousand francs." ”

“ We shall only get our due by taking it, upon my word, as an honest woman, for as for trusting to the next-of-kin!—No fear! There! look you here, words don't stink; it is a bad world!"
"That is true," Elie Magus answered cunningly, "that is true; and it is just the like of us that are among the best," he added, looking at Remonencq.
"Just let me be," returned La Cibot; "I am not speaking of you. 'Pressing company is always accepted,' as the old actor said. I swear to you that the two gentlemen already owe me nearly three thousand francs ”

“ La Cibot went straight to the bureau, opened it cautiously so as to make as little noise as possible, found the spring of the secret drawer, and hurried into the salon with the will in her hand. Her flight roused Pons’ curiosity to the highest pitch; and as for Schmucke, he trembled as if he were the guilty person.
“Go back,” said Fraisier, when she handed over the will. “He may wake, and he must find you there.” ”

“ Again the three thieves looked each other in the face, each one of them overcome with the keenest of all joys—sated greed. All of a sudden the sick man's voice rang through the room; the tones vibrated like the strokes of a bell:
"Who is there?" called Pons.
"Monsieur! just go back to bed!" exclaimed La Cibot, springing upon Pons and dragging him by main force. "What next! Have you a mind to kill yourself?—Very well, then, it is not Dr. Poulain, it is Remonencq, good soul, so anxious that he has come to ask after you! —Everybody is so fond of you that the whole house is in a flutter. ”

“ POULAIN (Doctor) , born about 1805, friendless and without fortune; strove in vain to gain the patronage of the Paris "four hundred" after 1835. He kept constantly near him his mother, widow of a trousers-maker. As a poor neighborhood physician he afterwards lived with his mother on rue d'Orleans at the Marais. He became acquainted with Madame Cibot, door-keeper at a house on rue de Normandie, the proprietor of which, C.-J. Pillerault, uncle of the Popinots and ordinarily under Horace Bianchon's treatment, he cured. ”

“ Poor Schmucke, you think that La Cibot is an angel; and for this month past she has been killing me by inches to gain her covetous ends. I would not believe that a woman who served us faithfully for years could be so wicked. That doubt has been my ruin.... How much did the eight pictures fetch?”
“Vife tausend vrancs.”
“Good heavens! they were worth twenty times as much!” cried Pons; “the gems of the collection! I have not time now to institute proceedings; and if I did, you would figure in court as the dupe of those rascals. ... A lawsuit would be the death of you. ”

“ Every one remarked the splendor of the white funeral car, with a big embroidered P suspended on a hatchment, and the one solitary mourner behind it; while the cheap bier that came after it was followed by an immense crowd. Happily, Schmucke was so bewildered by the throng of idlers and the rows of heads in the windows, that he heard no remarks and only saw the faces through a mist of tears.
"Oh, it is the nutcracker!" said one, "the musician, you know—"
"Who can the pall-bearers be?"
"Pooh! play-actors."
"I say, just look at poor old Cibot's funeral. There is one worker the less. What a man! ”

“ We have plots within plots, wheels within wheels, in this strange, pathetic life of the musician, whose collecting hobby and expert's skill in finding out rarities Balzac dwells on with all the greater detail as he was indulging at that time his own bent in this direction with peculiar zest and success. But the complexity and crowding are foils one is glad to have against the sordid treachery of the Cibot household, as, too, against the woes of Pons and Schmucke. Perhaps nowhere in his achievement has the novelist got deeper down to the rockbed of genuine humanity than in this work. ”

“ Poor man, you never saw any one so disconsolate! Ah! you are quite right to leave everything to him. Dear worthy man, why he is as good as a family to you, he is! Do not forget him; for if you do, God will not receive you into his Paradise, for those that have been ungrateful to their friends and left them no rentes will not go to heaven."
In vain Pons tried to put in a word; La Cibot talked as the wind blows. Means of arresting steam-engines have been invented, but it would tax a mechanician's genius to discover any plan for stopping a portress' tongue. ”

“ When hunted it makes a determined resistance, and emits a scent so strong as even to sicken the dogs, who nevertheless are exceedingly fond of the sport, and cannot be got to pursue any other game while the stench of the zibeth is in their nostrils. In confinement, it becomes comparatively tame, and yields civet in considerable quantity. In preparing this for the market it is usually spread out on the leaves of the pepper plant in order to free it from the hairs that have become detached from the pouch. ”

“ The tall form of the quarryman was conspicuous amongst the rest; with inflamed eyes and swollen features, he yelled at the top of his voice: "Death to the body-snatchers! they poison the people."
"That is easier than to feed them," added Ciboule. Then, addressing herself to an old man, who was being carried with great difficulty through the dense crowd, upon a chair, by two men, the hag continued: "Hey? don't go in there, old croaker; die here in the open air instead of dying in that den, where you'll be doctored like an old rat." ”

“ As soon as she was born, she was exposed on a mountain, but being preserved and suckled by some of the wild beasts of the forest, she received the name of Cybele from the mountain where her life had been preserved. She is called also the ancient Vesta, to distinguish her from her daughter Vesta, who, with her mother, is also called Cybele. But the Deity of whom we now write is the earth, and is easy to distinguish from her daughter. In several temples of the ancients, the statues of Cybele were only a piece of stone, meant to represent the stability of the earth. ”

“ For that night Kipps wallowed in self-abandonment and Coote behaved as one who had received a great trust. That sinister passion for pedagoguery to which the Good Intentioned are so fatally liable, that passion of infinite presumption that permits one weak human being to arrogate the direction of another weak human being's affairs, had Coote in its grip. He was to be a sort of lay confessor and director of Kipps, he was to help Kipps in a thousand ways, he was in fact to chaperon Kipps into the higher and better sort of English life. ”