Thereupon, he sat down, and said no more; but two great tears issued from his eyes and rolled down his hollow cheeks; then, with strange exclamations of grief, he locked up the room and returned to the king. Louis XI. was struck with the expression of sorrow on the moistened features of his old friend.
“What is the matter?” he asked.
“Ah! sire, misfortunes never come singly. My sister is dead. She precedes me there below,” he said, pointing to the floor with a dreadful gesture.
“Enough!” cried Louis XI., who did not like to hear of death.
“I make you my heir. I care for nothing now. Here are my keys. Hang me, if that’s your good pleasure. Take all, ransack the house; it is full of gold. I give up all to you — ”
“Come, come, crony,” replied Louis XI., who was partly touched by the sight of this strange suffering, “we shall find your treasure some fine night, and the sight of such riches will give you heart to live. I will come back in the course of this week — ”
“As you please, sire.”
At that answer the king, who had made a few steps toward the door of the chamber, turned round abruptly. The two men looked at each other with an expression that neither pen nor pencil can reproduce.
“Adieu, my crony,” said Louis XI. at last in a curt voice, pushing up his cap.
“May God and the Virgin keep you in their good graces!” replied the silversmith humbly, conducting the king to the door of the house.
After so long a friendship, the two men found a barrier raised between them by suspicion and gold; though they had always been like one man on the two points of gold and suspicion. But they knew each other so well, they had so completely the habit, one may say, of each other, that the king could divine, from the tone in which Cornelius uttered the words, “As you please, sire,” the repugnance that his visits would henceforth cause to the silversmith, just as the latter recognized a declaration of war in the “Adieu, my crony,” of the king.
Thus Louis XI. and his torconnier parted much in doubt as to the conduct they ought in future to hold to each other. The monarch possessed the secret of the Fleming; but on the other hand, the latter could, by his connections, bring about one of the finest acquisitions that any king of France had ever made; namely, that of the domains of the house of Burgundy, which the sovereigns of Europe were then coveting. The marriage of the celebrated Marguerite depended on the people of Ghent and the Flemings who surrounded her. The gold and the influence of Cornelius could powerfully support the negotiations now begun by Desquerdes, the general to whom Louis XI. had given the command of the army encamped on the frontiers of Belgium. These two master-foxes were, therefore, like two duellists, whose arms are paralyzed by chance.
So, whether it were that from that day the king’s health failed and went from bad to worse, or that Cornelius did assist in bringing into France Marguerite of Burgundy — who arrived at Ambroise in July, 1438, to marry the Dauphin to whom she was betrothed in the chapel of the castle — certain it is that the king took no steps in the matter of the hidden treasure; he levied no tribute from his silversmith, and the pair remained in the cautious condition of an armed friendship. Happily for Cornelius a rumor was spread about Tours that his sister was the actual robber, and that she had been secretly put to death by Tristan. Otherwise, if the true history had been known, the whole town would have risen as one man to destroy the Malemaison before the king could have taken measures to protect it.
But, although these historical conjectures have some foundation so far as the inaction of Louis XI. is concerned, it is not so as regards Cornelius Hoogworst. There was no inaction there. The silversmith spent the first days which succeeded that fatal night in ceaseless occupation. Like carnivorous animals confined in cages, he went and came, smelling for gold in every corner of his house; he studied the cracks and crevices, he sounded the walls, he besought the trees of the garden, the foundations of the house, the roofs of the turrets, the earth and the heavens, to give him back his treasure. Often he stood motionless for hours, casting his eyes on all sides, plunging them into the void. Striving for the miracles of ecstasy and the powers of sorcery, he tried to see his riches through space and obstacles. He was constantly absorbed in one overwhelming thought, consumed with a single desire that burned his entrails, gnawed more cruelly still by the ever-increasing agony of the duel he was fighting with himself since his passion for gold had turned to his own injury, — a species of uncompleted suicide which kept him at once in the miseries of life and in those of death.
Never was a Vice more punished by itself. A miser, locked by accident into the subterranean strong-room that contains his treasures, has, like Sardanapalus, the happiness of dying in the midst of his wealth. But Cornelius, the robber and the robbed, knowing the secret of neither the one nor the other, possessed and did not possess his treasure, — a novel, fantastic, but continually terrible torture. Sometimes, becoming forgetful, he would leave the little gratings of his door wide open, and then the passers in the street could see that already wizened man, planted on his two legs in the midst of his untilled garden, absolutely motionless, and casting on those who watched him a fixed gaze, the insupportable light of which froze them with terror. If, by chance, he walked through the streets of Tours, he seemed like a stranger in them; he knew not where he was, nor whether the sun or the moon were shining. Often he would ask his way of those who passed him, believing that he was still in Ghent, and seeming to be in search of something lost.
The most perennial and the best materialized of human ideas, the idea by which man reproduces himself by creating outside of himself the fictitious being called Property, that mental demon, drove its steel claws perpetually into his heart. Then, in the midst of this torture, Fear arose, with all its accompanying sentiments. Two men had his secret, the secret he did not know himself. Louis XI. or Coyctier could post men to watch him during his sleep and discover the unknown gulf into which he had cast his riches, — those riches he had watered with the blood of so many innocent men. And then, beside his fear, arose Remorse.
In order to prevent during his lifetime the abduction of his hidden treasure, he took the most cruel precautions against sleep; besides which, his commercial relations put him in the way of obtaining powerful anti-narcotics. His struggles to keep awake were awful — alone with night, silence, Remorse, and Fear, with all the thoughts that man, instinctively perhaps, has best embodied — obedient thus to a moral truth as yet devoid of actual proof.
At last this man so powerful, this heart so hardened by political and commercial life, this genius, obscure in history, succumbed to the horrors of the torture he had himself created. Maddened by certain thoughts more agonizing than those he had as yet resisted, he cut his throat with a razor.
This death coincided, almost, with that of Louis XI. Nothing then restrained the populace, and Malemaison, that Evil House, was pillaged. A tradition exists among the older inhabitants of Touraine that a contractor of public works, named Bohier, found the miser’s treasure and used it in the construction of Chenonceaux, that marvellous chateau which, in spite of the wealth of several kings and the taste of Diane de Poitiers and Catherine de’ Medici for building, remains unfinished to the present day.
Happily for Marie de Sassenage, the Comte de Saint-Vallier died, as we know, in his embassy. The family did not become extinct. After the departure of the count, the countess gave birth to a son, whose career was famous in the history of France under the reign of Francois I. He was saved by his daughter, the celebrated Diane de Poitiers, the illegitimate great-granddaughter of Louis XI., who became the illegitimate wife, the beloved mistress of Henri II. — for bastardy and love were hereditary in that family of nobles.
THE RED INN
Translated by Katharine Prescott Wormeley
This novella was written and appeared in 1831 in the Revue de Paris, and was published in book form by Gosselin in the Nouveaux Contes Philosophiques in 1832. L’Auberge rouge is narrated by a nameles
s narrator, telling of a dinner party he once attended, given by a Parisian banker in honour of a German businessman called Hermann. Whilst eating dessert, Fanny, the banker’s daughter, asks Hermann to tell a frightening story.
The 1951 film adaptation
The 2007 film adaptation
CONTENTS
THE RED INN
THOUGHT AND ACT
A DOUBLE RETRIBUTION
DEDICATION
To Monsieur le Marquis de Custine.
THE RED INN
In I know not what year a Parisian banker, who had very extensive commercial relations with Germany, was entertaining at dinner one of those friends whom men of business often make in the markets of the world through correspondence; a man hitherto personally unknown to him. This friend, the head of a rather important house in Nuremburg, was a stout worthy German, a man of taste and erudition, above all a man of pipes, having a fine, broad, Nuremburgian face, with a square open forehead adorned by a few sparse locks of yellowish hair. He was the type of the sons of that pure and noble Germany, so fertile in honorable natures, whose peaceful manners and morals have never been lost, even after seven invasions.
This stranger laughed with simplicity, listened attentively, and drank remarkably well, seeming to like champagne as much perhaps as he liked his straw-colored Johannisburger. His name was Hermann, which is that of most Germans whom authors bring upon their scene. Like a man who does nothing frivolously, he was sitting squarely at the banker’s table and eating with that Teutonic appetite so celebrated throughout Europe, saying, in fact, a conscientious farewell to the cookery of the great Careme.
To do honor to his guest the master of the house had invited a few intimate friends, capitalists or merchants, and several agreeable and pretty women, whose pleasant chatter and frank manners were in harmony with German cordiality. Really, if you could have seen, as I saw, this joyous gathering of persons who had drawn in their commercial claws, and were speculating only on the pleasures of life, you would have found no cause to hate usurious discounts, or to curse bankruptcies. Mankind can’t always be doing evil. Even in the society of pirates one might find a few sweet hours during which we could fancy their sinister craft a pleasure-boat rocking on the deep.
“Before we part, Monsieur Hermann will, I trust, tell one more German story to terrify us?”
These words were said at dessert by a pale fair girl, who had read, no doubt, the tales of Hoffmann and the novels of Walter Scott. She was the only daughter of the banker, a charming young creature whose education was then being finished at the Gymnase, the plays of which she adored. At this moment the guests were in that happy state of laziness and silence which follows a delicious dinner, especially if we have presumed too far on our digestive powers. Leaning back in their chairs, their wrists lightly resting on the edge of the table, they were indolently playing with the gilded blades of their dessert-knives. When a dinner comes to this declining moment some guests will be seen to play with a pear seed; others roll crumbs of bread between their fingers and thumbs; lovers trace indistinct letters with fragments of fruit; misers count the stones on their plate and arrange them as a manager marshals his supernumeraries at the back of the stage. These are little gastronomic felicities which Brillat-Savarin, otherwise so complete an author, overlooked in his book. The footmen had disappeared. The dessert was like a squadron after a battle: all the dishes were disabled, pillaged, damaged; several were wandering around the table, in spite of the efforts of the mistress of the house to keep them in their places. Some of the persons present were gazing at pictures of Swiss scenery, symmetrically hung upon the gray-toned walls of the dining-room. Not a single guest was bored; in fact, I never yet knew a man who was sad during his digestion of a good dinner. We like at such moments to remain in quietude, a species of middle ground between the reverie of a thinker and the comfort of the ruminating animals; a condition which we may call the material melancholy of gastronomy.
So the guests now turned spontaneously to the excellent German, delighted to have a tale to listen to, even though it might prove of no interest. During this blessed interregnum the voice of a narrator is always delightful to our languid senses; it increases their negative happiness. I, a seeker after impressions, admired the faces about me, enlivened by smiles, beaming in the light of the wax candles, and somewhat flushed by our late good cheer; their diverse expressions producing piquant effects seen among the porcelain baskets, the fruits, the glasses, and the candelabra.
All of a sudden my imagination was caught by the aspect of a guest who sat directly in front of me. He was a man of medium height, rather fat and smiling, having the air and manner of a stock-broker, and apparently endowed with a very ordinary mind. Hitherto I had scarcely noticed him, but now his face, possibly darkened by a change in the lights, seemed to me to have altered its character; it had certainly grown ghastly; violet tones were spreading over it; you might have thought it the cadaverous head of a dying man. Motionless as the personages painted on a diorama, his stupefied eyes were fixed on the sparkling facets of a cut-glass stopper, but certainly without observing them; he seemed to be engulfed in some weird contemplation of the future or the past. When I had long examined that puzzling face I began to reflect about it. “Is he ill?” I said to myself. “Has he drunk too much wine? Is he ruined by a drop in the Funds? Is he thinking how to cheat his creditors?”
“Look!” I said to my neighbor, pointing out to her the face of the unknown man, “is that an embryo bankrupt?”
“Oh, no!” she answered, “he would be much gayer.” Then, nodding her head gracefully, she added, “If that man ever ruins himself I’ll tell it in Pekin! He possesses a million in real estate. That’s a former purveyor to the imperial armies; a good sort of man, and rather original. He married a second time by way of speculation; but for all that he makes his wife extremely happy. He has a pretty daughter, whom he refused for many years to recognize; but the death of his son, unfortunately killed in a duel, has compelled him to take her home, for he could not otherwise have children. The poor girl has suddenly become one of the richest heiresses in Paris. The death of his son threw the poor man into an agony of grief, which sometimes reappears on the surface.”
At that instant the purveyor raised his eyes and rested them upon me; that glance made me quiver, so full was it of gloomy thought. But suddenly his face grew lively; he picked up the cut-glass stopper and put it, with a mechanical movement, into a decanter full of water that was near his plate, and then he turned to Monsieur Hermann and smiled. After all, that man, now beatified by gastronomical enjoyments, hadn’t probably two ideas in his brain, and was thinking of nothing. Consequently I felt rather ashamed of wasting my powers of divination “in anima vili,” — of a doltish financier.
While I was thus making, at a dead loss, these phrenological observations, the worthy German had lined his nose with a good pinch of snuff and was now beginning his tale. It would be difficult to reproduce it in his own language, with his frequent interruptions and wordy digressions. Therefore, I now write it down in my own way; leaving out the faults of the Nuremburger, and taking only what his tale may have had of interest and poesy with the coolness of writers who forget to put on the title pages of their books: “Translated from the German.”
THOUGHT AND ACT
Toward the end of Venemiaire, year VII., a republican period which in the present day corresponds to October 20, 1799, two young men, leaving Bonn in the early morning, had reached by nightfall the environs of Andernach, a small town standing on the left bank of the Rhine a few leagues from Coblentz. At that time the French army, commanded by Augereau, was manoeuvring before the Austrians, who then occupied the right bank of the river. The headquarters of the Republican division was at Coblentz, and one of the demi-brigades belonging to Augereau’s corps was stationed at Andernach.
The two travellers were Frenchmen. At sight of their uniforms, blue mixed with white and faced with red velvet, their sabres, and above all t
heir hats covered with a green varnished-cloth and adorned with a tricolor plume, even the German peasants had recognized army surgeons, a body of men of science and merit liked, for the most part, not only in our own army but also in the countries invaded by our troops. At this period many sons of good families taken from their medical studies by the recent conscription law due to General Jourdan, had naturally preferred to continue their studies on the battle-field rather than be restricted to mere military duty, little in keeping with their early education and their peaceful destinies. Men of science, pacific yet useful, these young men did an actual good in the midst of so much misery, and formed a bond of sympathy with other men of science in the various countries through which the cruel civilization of the Republic passed.
The two young men were each provided with a pass and a commission as assistant-surgeon signed Coste and Bernadotte; and they were on their way to join the demi-brigade to which they were attached. Both belonged to moderately rich families in Beauvais, a town in which the gentle manners and loyalty of the provinces are transmitted as a species of birthright. Attracted to the theatre of war before the date at which they were required to begin their functions, they had travelled by diligence to Strasburg. Though maternal prudence had only allowed them a slender sum of money they thought themselves rich in possessing a few louis, an actual treasure in those days when assignats were reaching their lowest depreciation and gold was worth far more than silver. The two young surgeons, about twenty years of age at the most, yielded themselves up to the poesy of their situation with all the enthusiasm of youth. Between Strasburg and Bonn they had visited the Electorate and the banks of the Rhine as artists, philosophers, and observers. When a man’s destiny is scientific he is, at their age, a being who is truly many-sided. Even in making love or in travelling, an assistant-surgeon should be gathering up the rudiments of his fortune or his coming fame.
Works of Honore De Balzac Page 1206