When the woman, the least real of the creatures in this Hoffmanesque den, said to Gazonal: "Cut!" the worthy provincial shuddered involuntarily. That which renders these beings so formidable is the importance of what we want to know. People go to them, as they know very well, to buy hope.
The den of the sibyl was much darker than the antechamber; the color of the walls could scarcely be distinguished. The ceiling, blackened by smoke, far from reflecting the little light that came from a window obstructed by pale and sickly vegetations, absorbed the greater part of it; but the table where the sorceress sat received what there was of this half-light fully. The table, the chair of the woman, and that on which Gazonal was seated, formed the entire furniture of the little room, which was divided at one end by a sort of loft where Madame Fontaine probably slept. Gazonal heard through a half-opened door the bubbling murmur of a soup-pot. That kitchen sound, accompanied by a composite odor in which the effluvia of a sink predominated, mingled incongruous ideas of the necessities of actual life with those of supernatural power. Disgust entered into curiosity.
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?
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."
