The Project Gutenberg EBook of Cousin Pons, by Honore de Balzac

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Title: Cousin Pons

Author: Honore de Balzac

Translator: Ellen Marriage

Release Date: August, 1999 [Etext #1856]
Posting Date: March 3, 2010

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK COUSIN PONS ***

Produced by John Bickers, and Dagny

COUSIN PONS

By Honore De Balzac

Translated by Ellen Marriage

COUSIN PONS

Towards three o'clock in the afternoon of one October day in the year
1844, a man of sixty or thereabouts, whom anybody might have credited
with more than his actual age, was walking along the Boulevard des
Italiens with his head bent down, as if he were tracking some one. There
was a smug expression about the mouth--he looked like a merchant who
has just done a good stroke of business, or a bachelor emerging from
a boudoir in the best of humors with himself; and in Paris this is
the highest degree of self-satisfaction ever registered by a human
countenance.

As soon as the elderly person appeared in the distance, a smile broke
out over the faces of the frequenters of the boulevard, who daily, from
their chairs, watch the passers-by, and indulge in the agreeable pastime
of analyzing them. That smile is peculiar to Parisians; it says so many
things--ironical, quizzical, pitying; but nothing save the rarest of
human curiosities can summon that look of interest to the faces of
Parisians, sated as they are with every possible sight.

A saying recorded of Hyacinthe, an actor celebrated for his repartees,
will explain the archaeological value of the old gentleman, and the
smile repeated like an echo by all eyes. Somebody once asked Hyacinthe
where the hats were made that set the house in a roar as soon as he
appeared. "I don't have them made," he said; "I keep them!" So also
among the million actors who make up the great troupe of Paris, there
are unconscious Hyacinthes who "keep" all the absurd freaks of vanished
fashions upon their backs; and the apparition of some bygone decade will
startle you into laughter as you walk the streets in bitterness of soul
over the treason of one who was your friend in th