One day under a fiery sun, a huge bird was gliding in the sky. The man from Provence left his panther to examine this new guest, but after a moment’s pause, the sultana let out a low growl. “God help me, I think she is jealous,” he cried to himself, seeing her eyes harden. “Virginie’s soul must surely have passed into this body!”
The eagle disappeared in the sky while the soldier admired the panther’s crouching haunches. There was such grace and youth in her shape! She was as pretty as a woman. The blond fur of her coat was matched by the delicate tint of matte white tones that colored her thighs. The profuse light from the sun made that vivid gold and those brown spots shine with ineffable allure. The man from Provence and the panther looked at each other with an intelligent understanding, the coquette trembled when she felt her friend’s nails scratch her skull, her eyes shone like two beams, then she closed them firmly.
“She has a soul,” he said, studying the calmness of this queen of the sands, gold and white like them, like them solitary and burning . . .
“Ah well,” my companion said to me, “I have read your plea in favor of animals. But how did it end between two beings so well suited to understand each other?”
“Ah, that’s it . . . They ended the way all grand passions end, through a misunderstanding! One or the other believes he has been betrayed, pride prevents understanding, stubbornness prompts a falling out.”
“And sometimes in the most exquisite moments,” she said. “One look, one exclamation is enough. Now will you finish this story?”
“It’s terribly difficult, but you understand what the old fellow had already confided in me when, finishing his bottle of champagne, he cried: ‘I don’t know how I’d hurt her, but she turned on me as if enraged, and with her sharp teeth she bit me in the thigh, weakly no doubt. As for me, believing that she wanted to devour me, I plunged my dagger into her throat. She rolled over letting out a cry that froze my heart, I saw her struggling while looking at me without anger. I would have given anything in the world, even the Legion of Honor that I didn’t yet have, to bring her back to life. It was as if I’d murdered a real person. And the soldiers who had seen my flag and who ran to my rescue, found me in tears . . . Well, monsieur,’ he continued after a moment of silence, ‘since then I’ve gone to war in Germany, Spain, Russia, and France. I’ve faithfully dragged my carcass all over and I’ve seen nothing equal to the desert . . . ah, how beautiful it is!’
“‘What do you feel there?’ I asked him.
“‘Oh, it can’t be put into words, young man. Besides, I don’t always regret my stand of palm trees and my panther . . . it’s only when I feel sad. In the desert, you see, there is everything and there is nothing.’
“‘Still, can you explain it to me?’
“‘Well,’ he went on, letting a gesture of impatience escape him, ‘it is God without men.’”
Paris, 1832
Translated by Carol Cosman
ADIEU
To Prince Frédéric Schwarzenberg
“COME along now, deputy, representative of the people and the Centrist Party, forward! We’ll have to do better than this if we want to sit down to dinner along with the others. Lift your feet! Jump, marquis! There, that’s the stuff. You leap those ruts like a veritable stag!”
These words were spoken by a hunter sitting lazily at the edge of the forest of L’Isle-Adam, savoring the last puffs of a Havana cigar as he awaited his companion, who must have lost his bearings in the dense woods a good while before. Four panting dogs waited beside the speaker, their eyes trained, like his, on the gentleman thus addressed. In order to fully grasp the sting of these regular harangues, we must understand that the other hunter was a short, corpulent man, whose prominent belly betokened a girth of truly ministerial dimensions. It was thus with some difficulty that he trudged through the furrows of a vast, newly harvested field, his progress greatly hampered by the stubble; to compound his miseries, the solar rays obliquely striking his face bathed it in a copious flow of sweat. Preoccupied by the urgent imperative of keeping upright, he bent now forward, now back, imitating the jolts and shudders of a carriage on a particularly rough road. It was one of those September days whose blazing, equatorial heat brings the grapes of the vineyards to full ripeness. A coming storm could be sensed in the air. Although several wide bands of azure still separated the enormous dark clouds on the horizon, pale golden billows could be seen advancing at an ominous speed, drawing a light curtain of gray underneath them, west to east. Only in the upper reaches did the wind exert its force; below, the atmospheric pressure held the earth’s vapors confined in the lowlands. Deprived of air by the ranks of tall trees that surrounded it, the little valley that the hunter was now crossing was as hot as a furnace. Burning and silent, the forest seemed thirsty. The birds and insects did not make a sound; the treetops scarcely swayed. Those who harbor some memory of the summer of 1819 will thus surely sympathize with the poor ministerial deputy as he toiled to join his mocking companion, who was studying the position of the sun as he smoked and had gauged the time at somewhere near five in the evening.
“Where the devil are we?” asked the fat hunter, wiping his forehead and leaning on a tree in the field, almost face-to-face with his companion, for the moment not feeling up to the challenge of jumping the broad trench that separated them.
“You’re asking me?” laughed the other, now lying stretched out in the tall yellow grasses that crowned the embankment. He tossed his cigar stub into the ditch, crying, “By Saint Hubert, I swear, I will never again venture into parts unknown with a magistrate, not even one such as you, my dear d’Albon, my old school friend!”
“But Philippe, have you forgotten how to read French? Perhaps you left your mind back in Siberia,” the fat man retorted, casting a comically pained glance at a signpost some hundred paces away.
“Message received!” answered Philippe, who picked up his rifle, leapt to his feet, and bounded into the field toward the signpost. “This way, d’Albon, this way! About-face, left,” he shouted to his companion, pointing toward a broad, paved lane. “Baillet–L’Isle-Adam road,” he read. “Which means that the Cassan road must be this way, since it surely turns off from the L’Isle-Adam road.”
“Just so, mon colonel,” said Monsieur d’Albon, giving up fanning himself with his cap and placing it on his head.
“Onward, then, my honorable councillor,” answered Colonel Philippe, whistling to the dogs, which already seemed to obey him more eagerly than they did their owner, the magistrate. “I do hope you realize, monsieur le marquis,” he said tauntingly, “we still have more than two leagues to cover! That village off there must be Baillet.”
“Good God!” cried the Marquis d’Albon. “Go on to Cassan if you like, but you’ll go alone. I’d sooner wait here, storm or no storm. You can send a horse out to me from the château. See here, Sucy, that was a cruel trick you played on me. We were supposed to be going out for a nice little hunt, sticking close by Cassan, rooting about on grounds I know well. But no! No such pleasure for us! Instead you’ve had me sprinting like a greyhound since four in the morning, with only a couple of cups of milk for breakfast! Oh, should you ever have a case to bring up before the court, I’ll make quite sure you lose, even if you’re in the right a hundred times over!”
Dejected, he sat down on one of the milestones at the foot of the signpost, took off his rifle, his empty game bag, and let out a long sigh.
“Oh France! Behold thy deputies!” hooted Colonel de Sucy. “My poor d’Albon, if like me you’d spent six years in the remotest depths of Siberia . . .”
He left his sentence there and raised his eyes heavenward, as if his sorrows were a secret known only to God and himself.
“Come now! Walk!” he added. “If you go on sitting there, you’re done for.”
“What do you expect, Philippe? It’s such an old habit for a judge! Word of honor, I can’t manage another step! If at least I’d killed a hare!”
The two h
unters’ appearance presented a rather remarkable contrast. Aged forty-two years, the good deputy could easily have passed for thirty; the soldier, aged thirty, seemed at least forty. Both wore the red rosette of the Officer of the Legion of Honor. The locks of hair peeking out from beneath the colonel’s cap were a mingling of black and white, like the wing of a magpie; fine blond curls graced the magistrate’s temples. The one was tall, slender, taut, and the wrinkles of his pale face betrayed great passions or terrible woes; jovial as an Epicurean, the other’s countenance radiated robust good health. Both were deeply tanned by the sun, and the stains on their long leather gaiters attested to every ditch, every marsh they had traversed.
“Come along now,” cried Monsieur de Sucy. “Onward! One short hour’s walk and we’ll be in Cassan, with a fine dinner before us.”
“I’ll wager you’ve never been in love,” answered the councillor, his tone humorously plaintive. “You’re as pitiless as Article 304 of the Penal Code!”
With this, Philippe de Sucy gave a violent start; his broad forehead furrowed, and his face turned as dark as the sky. Although the memory of some unspeakable anguish contorted his features, he did not shed a tear. Like all men of great strength, he was able to still his emotions, to choke them back into the depths of his heart; perhaps, like many of pure character, he found it somehow indecent to reveal a grief whose depth was beyond human expression, and which might well be mocked by those who cannot be bothered to understand it. Monsieur d’Albon was graced with the kind of sensitive soul that divines others’ sorrows and feels intensely all the upset a slip of the tongue can unwittingly cause. He did not trouble his friend’s silence but stood up, his weariness forgotten, and followed him wordlessly, pained to have touched a wound that must not yet have healed.
“One day, my friend,” said Philippe, clasping his hand and thanking him for his mute remorse with a heartrending gaze, “one day I shall tell you my story. Today, I couldn’t possibly.”
They walked on in silence. Once the colonel’s desolation seemed to subside, the councillor rediscovered his own fatigue. With the instinct—or rather the longing—of a desperate man, his gaze probed the depths of the forest; he questioned the treetops, interrogated the broad avenues, in hopes of discovering some sort of dwelling where he might seek hospitality. Arriving at an intersection, he thought he spotted a wisp of smoke rising through the trees. He stopped, looked more closely, and made out several dark green boughs of pine amid a dense, tangled thicket.
“A house! A house!” he cried, joyous as the sailor who shouts out “Land ho!”
And in a burst of alacrity he dashed through a dense thicket, while the colonel followed mechanically after, lost in a deep reverie.
“Better an omelet here, and some plain homemade bread, and a crude chair, than all the divans and truffles and Bordeaux in Cassan.”
These words were a cry of delight, wrested from the councillor by the sight of a wall in the distance, off-white amid the brown of the forest’s gnarled trunks.
“Ah! Ah! Why it looks like some ancient priory!” the Marquis d’Albon cried out again on encountering a venerable iron fence, through which, in the midst of a large private park, he saw a building of monastic design. “Oh, those clever monks! Those scoundrels knew just where to build!”
This second outburst expressed the magistrate’s astonishment at the poetic hermitage he now found before him. The house sat halfway up a slope, on the backside of the mount at whose summit stands the village of Nerville. Forming a vast circle around the residence, the lofty, aged oaks of the forest created an atmosphere of deepest seclusion. The main building, once home to the monks, faced south. The park might have covered some forty arpents. The house adjoined a green meadow, prettily crisscrossed by several limpid streams and dotted with ponds, whose pleasing arrangement betrayed no trace of artifice. Green trees stood here and there, their forms graceful, their foliage varied. Cunningly contrived grottos, vast terraces with crumbling staircases and rusting handrails, everything colluded to make this wild Thebaid a place like no other, an elegant union of artistry’s creations and nature’s most picturesque effects. Human passions seemed bound to find peace beneath those tall trees, which defended that retreat against the clamors of the world, just as they tempered the sun’s withering heat.
“What a shambles!” said Monsieur d’Albon to himself, admiring the somber cast these ruins gave their surroundings, which seemed to have been visited with some sort of malediction. It had the air of a cursed place, abandoned by men. Everywhere ivy had splayed out its tortuous tendons and rich green mantles. Brown, greenish, yellow, or red mosses daubed the trees, benches, roofs, and stones with their romantic tints. The worm-eaten window frames had been scoured by rain and rutted by age; the balconies were broken, the terraces dilapidated. Some of the shutters were held by one single hinge. The ill-fitting doors seemed no obstacle for an intruder. Burdened by glistening clumps of mistletoe, the branches of the neglected fruit trees stretched into the distance, offering no harvest. Tall grasses grew in the walkways. These signs of decay produced a deeply poetic effect and inspired meditative thoughts in the onlooker’s soul. A poet would have lingered there, lost in prolonged melancholy, musing on that disorder so rich in harmonies, that destruction in no way devoid of grace. Just then, several shafts of sunlight burst through the crevasses in the clouds, illuminating this half-wild scene with streaks of a thousand varied colors. The brown roof tiles glinted, the moss shone, fantastic shadows played over the fields, beneath the trees; the dulled colors awoke, arresting contrasts contended, the green boughs stood out darkly in the light. Suddenly the sun dimmed again. The landscape, which seemed to have spoken, now fell silent and once more turned somber, or rather muted, like the most muted hue of an autumn dusk.
“It’s Sleeping Beauty’s castle,” the councillor whispered, now seeing this house only through a proprietor’s eyes. “Who on earth might this place belong to? Only a fool would choose not to live in such a fine spot.”
All at once a woman shot from beneath a walnut tree to the right of the iron fence and raced silently past the councillor’s eyes, fleet as the shadow of a cloud. This apparition left him speechless with surprise.
“Why, d’Albon, what’s the matter?” the colonel asked.
“I’m rubbing my eyes to see if I’m sleeping or awake,” the magistrate answered, pressing close to the fence, hoping for another glimpse of the wraith.
“She must be under that fig tree,” he said, pointing to the branches overhanging the wall, to the left of the fence.
“‘She’? Who?”
“How should I know?” Monsieur d’Albon shot back. “A very strange woman just appeared right here before me,” he said softly. “She seemed to belong more to the shadows than the world of the living. She was so slight, so wispy, so vaporous—she must be transparent. Her face was white as milk. Her hair, her eyes, her clothing, all black. She looked at me as she passed by, and I’m not a fearful man by nature, but that cold, still gaze of hers froze the very blood in my veins.”
“Was she pretty?” asked Philippe.
“I don’t know. Her eyes were all I could see of her face.”
“The devil take our dinner in Cassan,” cried the colonel, “let’s stay right here. I’ve a childish urge to take a closer look at this curious property. Do you see those red-painted window frames, those red lines on the moldings of the shutters and doors? Does this not seem the house of the devil? Perhaps he inherited it from the monks. Come, after the black-and-white woman! Forward!” cried Philippe with forced gaiety.
Just then the two hunters heard a cry, rather like the shriek of a mouse caught in a trap. They stood still and listened. The leaves of a few overgrown bushes rustled in the silence, like the hiss of a rushing wave, but although they strained to detect some further sound, the earth remained silent, guarding the secret of the stranger’s footsteps, assuming that she had indeed walked on her way.
“Now that’s very odd,�
�� cried Philippe, following the walls that surrounded the park.
Soon the two friends arrived at a forest path that led to the village of Chauvry. Following it toward the Paris road, they arrived at a large gate and beheld the mysterious dwelling’s main façade. On this side, the disarray was complete. Huge cracks wandered over the walls of the house, whose three sections were built at right angles. The damaged roofs, the fallen tiles and slate shingles heaped on the ground, everything suggested utter neglect. A few pieces of fruit had dropped from the trees and lay rotting on the ground, uncollected. A cow grazed on the lawn, trampling the flower beds, while a goat plucked the shoots and green fruits from a grapevine.
“Here all is harmony, and disorder itself is in a sense ordered,” said the colonel, pulling the chain of a bell, but the bell had no clapper.
The hunters heard only the oddly piercing squeak of a rusted spring. Decrepit though it was, the little door in the wall beside the gate resisted all their efforts to open it.
“Oh! Oh! This is all becoming very strange,” the colonel said to his companion.
“If I weren’t a judge,” answered Monsieur d’Albon, “I’d say that woman in black was a witch.”
He had just spoken these words when the cow ambled to the gate and raised its warm muzzle, as if eager to look upon human beings. Suddenly a woman, if such could be called the indefinable creature that had risen to its feet from beneath a clump of bushes, gave a tug on the cow’s rope. This woman wore a red handkerchief on her head; from beneath it strayed locks of blond hair that looked rather like the tow on a distaff. She wore no fichu over her breast. Several inches too short, a black-and-gray striped skirt of coarse wool left her legs exposed. She might almost have belonged to one of the redskin tribes celebrated by Cooper, for her bare legs, neck, and arms seemed to have been painted the color of brick. No spark of intelligence animated her flat face. Her bluish eyes held neither expression nor warmth. A few sparse white hairs served as her eyebrows. Between her twisted lips several teeth could be seen, crooked and irregular, but white as a dog’s.
The Human Comedy: Selected Stories Page 19