"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.
"An artist-pedicure," replied Bixiou, "author of a 'Treatise on Corporistics,' who cuts your corns by subscription, and who, if the Republications triumph for six months, will assuredly become immortal."
"Drives his carriage!" ejaculated Gazonal.
"But, my good Gazonal, it is only millionaires who have time to go afoot in Paris."
"To the Chamber!" cried Leon to the coachman, getting back into the carriage.
"Which, monsieur?"
"Deputies," replied Leon, exchanging a smile with Bixiou.
"Paris begins to confound me," said Gazonal.
"To make you see its immensity,--moral, political, and literary,--we are now proceeding like the Roman cicerone, who shows you in Saint Peter's the thumb of the statue you took to be life-size, and the thumb proves to be a foot long. You haven't yet measured so much as a great toe of Paris."
"And remark, cousin Gazonal, that we take things as they come; we haven't selected."
"This evening you shall sup as they feasted at Belshazzar's; and there you shall see our Paris, our own particular Paris, playing lansquenet, and risking a hundred thousand francs at a throw without winking."
A quarter of an hour later the citadine stopped at the foot of the steps going up to the Chamber of Deputies, at that end of the Pont de la Concorde which leads to discord.
"I thought the Chamber unapproachable?" said the provincial, surprised to find himself in the great lobby.
"That depends," replied Bixiou; "materially speaking, it costs thirty sous for a citadine to approach it; politically, you have to spend rather more. The swallows thought, so a poet says, that the Arc de Triomphe was erected for them; we artists think that this public building was built for us,--to compensate for the stupidities of the Theatre-Francais and make us laugh; but the comedians on this stage are much more expensive; and they don't give us every day the value of our money."
"So this is the Chamber!" cried Gazonal, as he paced the great hall in which there were then about a dozen persons, and looked around him with an air which Bixiou noted down in his memory and reproduced in one of the famous caricatures with which he rivalled Gavarni.
Leon went to speak to one of the ushers who go and come continually between this hall and the hall of sessions, with which it communicates by a passage in which are stationed the stenographers of the "Moniteur" and persons attached to the Chamber.
"As for the minister," replied the usher to Leon as Gazonal approached them, "he is there, but I don't know if Monsieur Giraud has come. I'll see."
As the usher opened one side of the double door through which none but deputies, ministers, or messengers from the king are allowed to pass, Gazonal saw a man come out who seemed still young, although he was really forty-eight years old, and to whom the usher evidently indicated Leon de Lora.
"Ha! you here!" he exclaimed, shaking hands with both Bixiou and Lora.
"Scamps! what are you doing in the sanctuary of the laws?"
"Parbleu! we've come to learn how to blague," said Bixiou. "We might get rusty if we didn't."
"Let us go into the garden," said the young man, not observing that Gazonal belonged to the party.