The Human Comedy: Selected Stories

by Honoré de Balzac

  I was in prison myself at the time. (M. Hermann said, interrupting his tale.) Ardent as we all are at twenty, I was determined to defend my country, and I commanded a band of freelance resistance troops I had mustered in the Andernach region. A few nights earlier, I had run into a detachment of French troops, eight hundred men. We were two hundred at the very most. My spies had sold me out. I was thrown into the Andernach prison. It was expected I would be shot as an example to intimidate the locals. The French were talking about reprisals as well, but the murder they planned to avenge through executing me had been committed somewhere else, not here within the Electorate. My father had obtained a three-day stay of execution to go and ask for a pardon from General Augereau, who granted it. So I saw Prosper Magnan as he was brought into the prison at Andernach, and I was struck by a profound pity. Pale as he was, disheveled, all bloody, still his face had a quality of candor, of innocence, that affected me powerfully. To my eyes, he looked like Germany itself, with his long blond hair, his blue eyes. A veritable picture of my poor faltering country, he seemed to me a victim, not a murderer. As he passed my window, he threw out—I don’t know to where—the bitter, mournful smile of a madman recovering a fleeting glimmer of sanity. That smile was absolutely not the smile of a murderer. When I saw the jailer, I asked about his new prisoner. “He hasn’t said a word since we put him into his cell. He sat down, he set his head in his hands, and now he’s sleeping, or thinking about his troubles. From what the Frenchmen say he’ll be tried tomorrow morning, and he’ll be shot within twenty-four hours.”

  That evening, during the brief moment I was permitted to walk in the prison yard, I loitered under the young man’s window. We spoke a little and he gave me a straightforward account of his awful adventure, answering quite precisely my various questions. After that first conversation, I never doubted his innocence. I asked and was granted permission to spend a few hours with him. So I saw him several times, and the poor child acquainted me openly with all he was thinking. He felt both guilty and innocent at once. Recalling the frightful temptation he had found the strength to resist, he feared he had committed—during his sleep, in a somnambulant trance—the crime he had dreamed while awake.

  “But what about your companion?” I asked him.

  “Oh,” he exclaimed excitedly, “Wilhelm could never . . .” He didn’t even finish the sentence. Hearing that warmhearted cry, full of youth and decency, I pressed his hand. “When Wilhelm woke up,” he went on, “he must have been terrified, he must have panicked and run off.”

  “Without waking you?” I said. “But then your defense should be an easy matter, for Walhenfer’s valise will not have been stolen.”

  Suddenly he burst into tears. “Oh yes! I am innocent!” he cried. “I never killed anyone . . . I remember what I dreamed that night—I was playing prisoner’s base with my old schoolmates. I couldn’t have cut off a man’s head while I was dreaming about running!”

  Despite the flashes of hope that occasionally afforded him a little peace, he still felt crushed by remorse. He had in fact raised his arm to slice off the man’s head; he judged himself and could not see his heart as pure when in his mind he had committed the crime. “And yet, I am good!” he would cry. “Oh, my poor mother! At this very moment she could be happily playing a game of imperial with her neighbors in her little sewing parlor. If she knew I had even lifted my hand to murder someone—ah, she would die! And I am in prison, accused of committing a crime! I may not have killed that man, but I will certainly kill my mother!”

  Now he was no longer weeping, but, stung by that sudden swift fury common among Picards, he flung himself against the wall, and if I had not held him back he would have cracked his skull.

  “Wait for your trial,” I told him. “You’ll be acquitted; you’re innocent! And your mother—”

  “My mother,” he cried wildly. “The first thing she will hear is the accusation! In those small towns that’s how it is, the poor woman will die of pain from it. Besides, I am not innocent. Do you want to know the whole truth? I feel I have lost the virginity of my conscience.”

  After that terrible sentence he sat down, crossed his arms on his chest, bent his head, and gazed darkly at the floor. Just then the guard appeared and asked me to return to my own cell. Reluctant to abandon my companion at a moment of such profound disheartenment, I clasped him to me in friendship.

  “Be patient,” I told him. “It may turn out well. If a decent man’s voice has any chance of stilling your doubts, know that I respect you and love you. Accept my friendship, and rest on my heart if you are not at peace with your own.”

  The next morning toward nine o’clock, a corporal and four riflemen came to take the young doctor away. Hearing the soldiers approach, I went to my window. As the young man crossed through the courtyard, he turned his eyes up at me. I will never forget that gaze full of thoughts, apprehensions, resignation, and a kind of sorrowful, melancholy grace. It was like a silent, intelligible final testament of a man bequeathing his lost life to a friend. The night must have been very hard, very lonely for him, but perhaps the pallor on his face testified to a stoicism drawn from a new sense of self-esteem. Perhaps he was cleansed by remorse, and felt he was washing his sin away with pain and shame. He walked with a firm step now, and had removed the bloodstains he had unwittingly acquired. “My hands must have trailed in the blood as I slept, for my nights are always very agitated,” he had said the evening before, in a horrible tone of despair.

  I learned he would appear before a court-martial. The division was to move out in another day, and the commander was unwilling to leave Andernach without having tried the crime where it was committed.

  I paced my cell in terrific anxiety while the court-martial sat. Finally, toward noon, Prosper Magnan was brought back to the prison. I was having my usual walk outside just then; he saw me and rushed over to throw himself into my arms.

  “Lost!” he said. “I am lost, no hope at all! For everyone here, I shall always be a murderer.” He lifted his head proudly. “This injustice has completely restored my innocence. My life would have been always troubled; my death will be blameless. But is there a future?”

  The whole eighteenth century was contained in that abrupt query. He turned pensive.

  “Well,” I said, “how did you answer? What did they ask you? Did you not tell the story, straight out, as you told it to me?”

  He stared at me for a moment; then, after another frightening pause, he responded in a feverish rush of words. “First, they asked, ‘Did you leave the inn during the night?’ I said yes. ‘By what exit?’ I flushed and answered, ‘By the window.’

  “‘So you had opened it?’ ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘You must have been very careful about it; the innkeeper heard nothing.’ I was stupefied . . . The sailors had reported they saw me walking first toward Andernach, then back toward the forest, they said I’d made several trips, I’d buried the gold and diamonds. The valise never had been found! And besides, I was still battling my own feelings of remorse—whenever I started to speak, a pitiless voice would shout: ‘You did mean to commit the crime!’ Everything was against me, even myself! They questioned me about my comrade and I completely absolved him!

  “They said, ‘We must find somebody here guilty—you, your comrade, the innkeeper, or his wife. This morning all the windows and doors were found latched from the inside!’

  “At that, I was left speechless—without voice, without strength, without soul. More confident in my friend than I was of my own self, I could not accuse him. I understood that the two of us were considered equally complicit in the murder, and that I seemed the clumsier one! I tried to explain the crime by claiming somnambulism, hoping to clear my friend; I began to babble and lost the thread. I could see my conviction in my judges’ eyes. They could not suppress disbelieving smiles. It is over. No more uncertainty now. Tomorrow I’ll be shot . . . I’m not thinking of myself any longer,” he went on, “but my poor mother!” He stopped and looked u
p at the sky, no trace of tears, his eyes dry and blinking hard. “Frederic! He—”

  “Ah, that’s it—Frederic!” cried Monsieur Hermann in triumph. “Yes, Frederic—that was his name, the other fellow—Frederic!”

  My neighbor nudged my foot, and she nodded toward Monsieur Taillefer. The provisioner had negligently let his hand fall over his eyes, but between his fingers we saw what seemed a dark flame to his gaze.

  “Hmm?” the woman murmured in my ear. “Suppose our friend’s first name is Frederic?”

  I responded with a glance as if to say, “Quiet.”

  Monsieur Hermann took up his story again . . .

  “Frederic!” the young soldier cried. “Frederic deserted me—it’s vile, shameful! He must have been frightened. Maybe he hid somewhere in the inn, because that morning our two horses were still in the courtyard . . . What a mystery it is—incomprehensible.” After a moment of silence, he added, “Somnambulism! I had it only once in my life, and that was back when I was six years old . . .

  “Am I to leave this life,” he went on, stamping his foot, “taking with me the last shred of friendship that existed in the world? Am I to die a double death, doubting a brotherly love begun at the age of five and carried on through school and university? Where is Frederic?”

  He wept. It seems we cling harder to a sentiment than to life.

  “Let’s go inside,” he said. “I’d rather be back in my cell. I don’t want people to see me weeping. I will go to death bravely, but I cannot play the hero at a time when I feel the opposite, and I confess that I do mourn my young, wonderful life. All last night I couldn’t sleep; I was recalling scenes from my childhood, and I saw myself running through those fields . . . the memory that may have brought about my undoing.

  “I had a future,” he said, interrupting himself. “Twelve men . . . an officer shouting, ‘Ready arms! Aim! Fire!,’ a drumroll, and then . . . infamy! That’s my future now! Oh, there is a God, there must be, or else all this makes no sense.”

  Then he gripped me in his arms, a powerful embrace. “Ah, you will have been the last man I could pour out my soul to. You will be free, you! You will see your mother again! I don’t know if you are rich or poor, but it doesn’t matter! To me you are the whole world! These people won’t be fighting forever! So when there is peace again, go to Beauvais. If my mother survives the terrible news of my death, you will find her there. Bring her these words of consolation: ‘He was innocent!’ She will believe you. I will write her now, but you will bring her the last sight of me, you’ll tell her that you were the last man I embraced. Ah, how she will love you, the poor woman! You who will have been my last friend.

  “Here,” he continued after a moment of silence, during which he seemed to buckle beneath the weight of his memories, “here, officers and soldiers are all strangers to me, and I horrify them. Without you, my innocence would always remain a secret between me and heaven.”

  I swore I would faithfully carry out his last wishes. My words, my rush of feeling touched him. Shortly thereafter, the soldiers came and took him back to the court-martial. He was condemned to death. I do not know what formalities would accompany or follow that initial judgment; I do not know whether the young surgeon argued for his life in the course of the procedures; but he did expect to go to his ordeal the following morning, and he spent the night writing to his mother.

  “We shall both be free,” he smiled when I went to see him the next day. “I am told that the general has signed your pardon.”

  I stood silent, gazing at him to etch his features into my memory. Then his expression turned to disgust, and he said, “I have been a pitiful coward! All night long I begged these walls for deliverance.” And he pointed to the walls of his cell. “Yes, yes,” he went on, “I howled in despair, I rebelled, I went through the most terrible moral agonies. I was alone! Now, I consider what people will say . . . Courage is a costume worth putting on. I must go decently to my death. So . . .”

  TWO KINDS OF JUSTICE

  “Oh, don’t finish!” cried the girl who had asked for the story, and who now broke in on the Nuremberg visitor. “I want to stay unsure and believe that he was spared. If I hear now that he was shot, I will not sleep tonight. Tell me the rest tomorrow.”

  We rose from the table. As she accepted Monsieur Hermann’s arm, my neighbor said to him, “He was shot, was he not?”

  “Yes, I was witness to the execution.”

  “What, monsieur! You were capable of—”

  “He wished it, madame. There’s something very terrible about following behind the cortege of a living man, a man one loves, an innocent man! The poor lad never took his eyes off me. He seemed to be living only through me! He wanted . . . he said he wanted me to report his last sigh to his mother.”

  “Ah! And did you ever see her?”

  “When the Treaty of Amiens was signed, I traveled to France to bring his mother the beautiful news of his innocence. I undertook the journey as a sacred pilgrimage. But Madame Magnan had died of consumption. With deep emotion, I burned the letter I was carrying. You may tease me for my German excessiveness, but for me there was a sublime, sad drama to the obscurity that would forever shroud those farewells calling between two graves, unheard by all the rest of creation, like a scream deep in the desert from a lone traveler set upon by a lion—”

  I interrupted: “And suppose someone were to point out a man, right here in this drawing room, and tell you ‘This is the murderer!’ Would that not be drama too? And what would you do?”

  Monsieur Hermann went to collect his hat and left the house.

  “You’re behaving like a child, and very thoughtlessly,” my neighbor told me. “Look at Taillefer over there! Sitting in the easy chair by the fire, with Mademoiselle Fanny bringing him a cup of coffee. He’s smiling. Could a murderer—for whom that storytelling ought to have been torture—could he display such calm? Doesn’t he look the classic patriarchal figure!”

  “Yes,” I exclaimed, “but go ask him whether he was in Germany during the war.”

  “Why not?” she replied. And with that audacity women rarely lack when some project catches their fancy, or curiosity overtakes their imagination, my neighbor approached the provisioner.

  “Have you ever been to Germany?”

  Taillefer nearly dropped his saucer.

  “I, madame? No, never.”

  “What’s that you’re saying, Taillefer?” the banker interposed. “Weren’t you handling the provisions for the Wagram campaign?”

  “Ah, yes!” Monsieur Taillefer replied. “I did go there then.”

  “You’re mistaken, he seems a good fellow,” my neighbor said as she returned to my side.

  “Oh?” I exclaimed. “Well, before this night is out I’ll flush the murderer out of his hiding place!”

  Every day we come across some moral phenomenon that is astonishingly significant but yet is too simple to draw notice. If two men meet in a drawing room, one of them having reason to dislike or even hate the other, either from knowledge of some private and latent compromising information or over some undisclosed situation, or even over a revenge to come, the two will sense a chasm that separates them or could. They keep covert watch, preoccupied with each other; their glances, their gestures give off an indefinable emanation of their mutual awareness; there is a kind of magnet force between them. I do not know which exerts the stronger pull: vengeance or crime, hatred or insult. Like the priest who cannot consecrate the Host in the presence of an evil spirit, both men are uneasy, suspicious; the one may be polite, the other sullen, no telling which; the one blushes or blanches, the other quakes. Often the grudge-holder is as apprehensive as the victim; few people have the courage to commit an unpleasant act, even a necessary one; and many men keep silent or excuse a wrong out of reluctance to cause gossip, or from fear of some tragic outcome. Well, such an intussusception, such an intrusion of our souls and feelings caused a subtle struggle between the provisioner and myself. From the moment I
first questioned him during Monsieur Hermann’s narrative, he had avoided my glances. He may have been avoiding those of the other guests as well! And now he was chatting with the unsophisticated Fanny, the banker’s daughter—probably, like all criminals, feeling the need to draw close to innocence, hoping to find some ease in its presence. Though I was some distance away, I was listening to him, and my piercing gaze held his own in a kind of fascination. When he thought he might examine me with impunity, our glances would meet, and his eyelids dropped instantly. Weary of the strain, Taillefer moved to end it by joining the card game. I went over to bet on his opponent, but hoping he would lose. My wish was granted: the fellow lost.

  I took his seat, and came face-to-face with the murderer.

  “Monsieur,” I said as he was dealing me my cards, “would you be so kind as to begin again?”

  He promptly moved his chips from left to right. My dinner partner came to stand beside me; I threw her a meaningful glance.

  “Would you be Monsieur Frederic Taillefer,” I asked him, “whose family I knew quite well in Beauvais?”

  “Yes, monsieur,” he answered.

  He dropped his cards, turned white, put his head between his hands, asked one of his bettors to take over his game, and stood up. “It is too warm in here!” he exclaimed. “I fear—”

  He did not finish. His face suddenly looked terribly ill, and he hastily left the room. The master of the house saw Taillefer out, quite concerned about his state. My neighbor and I looked at each other, a kind of bitter disapproval on her face.

  “Do you think your behavior is very merciful?” she asked, drawing me into a window recess as I left the card table after losing the game. “Would you assume the power to see into every heart? Why not let human justice and divine justice take their course? We might possibly avoid the one but never the other. Does a judge’s position strike you as enviable? You’ve practically played the executioner’s role tonight.”