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Page 25
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
antechamber, 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
collaborators, 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.
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