CHAPTER XXXV. THE GYPSY FORTUNE-TELLER.

The ever-recurring excitements and excesses of which these people’s life is made up cannot fail to have a deteriorating effect on mind and body—early undermined constitutions and premature death or dotage being the penalty paid by many for the unbridled and senseless gratification of their passions. This life, however, while it destroys many, sharpens the faculties of those whose stronger natures have enabled them to defy these ravages, bestowing a singular power of penetration in all matters relating to the senses and passions.

More especially is this the case with regard to the women, who, already gifted by nature with keener perceptions, and prematurely ripened in what may be termed a tropical atmosphere of passion, develop an almost supernatural power of clairvoyance, which enables them with incredible celerity to unravel hitherto undisclosed secrets by means only of intuitive deductions.

“The astounding vividness of their impressions” (again to quote Liszt on the subject) “rarely fails to communicate itself like wildfire to the hearers. As by the contagion of a deadly poison, the mere touch of the gypsy fortune-teller is often sufficient to affect them with the sensation of an electric shock or vibration.

“A few apt reflections strewed about in conversation, casual exclamations of apparent simplicity, some primitive rhymes and verses accentuated by passion, so to say hammered into relief like the raised figures on a medal—such are the means which suffice to stir up in an audience whatever elements may be there existing of secret wrath, of latent rebellion, of characters bent but not broken, of affections discouraged but not despairing.

GYPSY MOTHER AND CHILD.

“The gypsy woman, herself well acquainted with all the signs and workings of passion, distinguishes à coup d’?il the cause of the sallow cheek and the fevered eye of such another woman; she can feel instinctively whether the hand from which she is expected to decipher a fate be stretched towards her with the hasty gesture of hope or with the hesitation of fear. Without difficulty she reads in disdainfully{263} curled lips or ominously drawn brows whether the youth before her be chafing under a yoke or planning revenge; whether he craves love or has already lost it. She can further distinguish at a glance the delusive presumption of youth and beauty—the false security of possession which thinks to defy misfortune. She knows the annihilating blows of fate and the vulnerability of the human heart too well not to mistrust the smile of over-conscious happiness, and prophesy misfortune to those who refuse to believe in the instability of the future.

“She cannot be called a hypocrite, for she herself has faith in her own diagnosis; believing that each man carries within him the germ of his own fate, she is convinced that sooner or later her prognostics must be fulfilled. Her only care is therefore to clothe her predictions in a form which, easily captivating the imagination, and thereby impressed on the memory, will spring again to life, along with the image of the prophetess, whenever the latent emotions she has detected, having reached their culminating point, bring about the success or the catastrophe foreseen from the investigation of a hand and a heart.

“After all, why should we wonder that the secrets of the future can be deciphered by one so intimately acquainted with the inmost folds of the human soul, and the workings of different passions confined in the human breast like so many caged lions or torpid slumbering reptiles?

“Passion always accompanied by a powerful sympathetic instinct quickly divines the presence of a kindred passion. Apt to decipher the symptoms inevitably betrayed in voice and gesture, and skilled to read in that mystic book whose characters are so plainly impressed on the leaves of a physiognomy which, betraying where it would fain conceal, becomes the more impressive in proportion as the heart within is agitated by tumultuous throbbings, the gypsy fortune-teller knows full well with whom she has to deal, and can justly estimate what sort of characters are those who seek her counsel.”

It is, I think, Balzac who has said, “Si le passé a laissé des traces, il est à croire que l’avenir possède des racines;” and on the principle that every man is master of his own fate, there is, after all, no reason why these roots, invisible to the rest of the world, should not be perceptible to such as have made of this subject the study of a lifetime. Why should not the seer be able to proclaim the fruits to be reaped from the recognition of germs which already exist?

The enlightened folk who sweepingly condemn the fortune-teller{264} as a liar and cheat are probably no less mistaken than witless rustics, who blindly believe in her as an infallible oracle. Should not precisely the superior enlightenment of which we boast be argument for, rather than against, the fortune-teller? Why, if phrenology and graphology are permitted to take rank as acknowledged sciences, should not the gypsy woman’s power of divination be equally allowed to count as a shrewd deciphering of character, coupled with logical deductions as to the events likely to be evoked by the passions she has recognized, when brought into combination with a given set of circumstances?

Ignorant people, surprised at the detection of secrets which they had believed to be securely locked up in their own breasts, and not understanding the process by which such conclusions were reached, are ready to attribute the fortune-teller’s power of divination to supernatural agency, which opinion is strengthened and confirmed by the romantic conditions of the gypsy’s existence, and the cabalistic glamour with which she contrives to invest herself.

But is not, in truth, this delicate and subtle perception in itself a secret and undeniable power—a sudden inspiration, a positive intuition of what will be from the rapid unveiling of what already is? And here, again, Liszt is probably right in asserting this gift of prophecy, so universally ascribed to the gypsies in all countries, to be a too deeply rooted belief in the minds of the people not to have some rational ground for its existence.

There is no doubt that the gypsy fortune-tellers in Transylvania exercise considerable influence on their Saxon and Roumanian neighbors, and it is a paradoxical fact that the self-same people who regard the Tziganes as undoubted thieves, liars, and cheats in all the common transactions of daily life, do not hesitate to confide in them blindly for charmed medicines and love-potions, and are ready to attribute to them unerring power in deciphering the mysteries of the future.

The Saxon peasant will, it is true, often drive away the fortune-teller with blows and curses from his door, but his wife will as often secretly beckon her in again by the back entrance, in order to be consulted as to the illness of the cows, or beg from her a remedy against the fever.

Wonderful potions and salves, composed of the fat of bears, dogs, snakes, and snails, along with the oil of rain-worms, the bodies of spiders and midges, rubbed into a paste, are concocted by these cunning{265} bohemians, who thus sometimes contrive to make thrice as much money out of the carcass of a dead dog as another can realize from the sale of a healthy pig or calf. There is not a village in Transylvania which cannot boast of one or more such fortune-tellers, and living in the suburbs of each town are many old women who make an easy and comfortable livelihood out of the credulity of their fellow-creatures.

It has also been asserted that both Roumanian and Saxon mothers whose sickly infants are believed to be suffering from the effects of the evil eye, are often in the habit of giving the child to be nursed for a period of nine days to some Tzigane woman supposed to have power to undo the spell.

For my own part, I have seldom had inclination to confide the deciphering of my fate to one of these wandering sibyls, and can therefore only affirm that on the solitary occasion when, half in jest, I chose to interrogate the future, I was favored with a piece of intelligence so startling and improbable as could only be received with a laugh of derision; yet before many days had elapsed this startling and improbable event had actually come to pass, and the gypsy’s prophecy was accomplished in the most unlooked-for manner.

Chance, probably, or coincidence, most people will say; and indeed I do not myself see how it could have been anything but the veriest coincidence. I merely state this fact as it occurred, and without attempting to draw any general conclusions from the isolated instance within my own personal range of observation.