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Page 24
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 intolerable 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 absolute impossibility 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?
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