Collected Works of Eugène Sue
Page 808
Raimond V. felt that he was avenged, and, as much out of gratitude to the cardinal as for his sense of right, he ever after took a very venial part in rebellions.
The worthy Luquin Trinquetaille married Stephanette, and although he had a blind confidence in his wife, which she deserved in every respect, he always regretted not having been able to drown the Bohemian.
Master Laramée died in the service of the baron.
The venerable Abbé Mascarolus continued to give wonderful recipes to Dame Dulceline, who made many Christmas cradles, which fortunately were not attended by such disastrous happenings as marred the Christmas festivity of 1632.
THE END
The Wandering Jew
Anonymous 1889 translation, published by G. Routledge
Illustrated by A. Ferdinandus and Gustave Doré
Based on an old and popular legend known in French as Le Juif Errant, this ten-part, 1400 page serial novel was first published in France in 1844 and in New York by Harper & Brothers in 1846; other editions include the London/New York, lavishly illustrated production of 1889 by Routledge, featured in this eBook. Originally published in serial format in Le Constitutionnel, Sue earned 100,000 francs for the project and with good reason – his story boosted the circulation of the newspaper from 5,944 to 24,771 in the course of its publication. This payment became his standard fee for future projects for the next fourteen years. For context, a French labourer earned 2 francs per day.
Although this was one of Sue’s most popular works, it was cited as the inspiration for the targeting of the Jesuit headquarters in Paris by a gang of robbers, who, inspired by the stories of fabulous wealth and greed of the order in The Wandering Jew, decided to help themselves to some of these supposed riches. However, an article in the Drogheda Conservative Journal of 17 May 1845 claimed that Sue’s stories of Jesuit wealth had indeed been proven by the theft and that ‘much of Eugène Sue’s fable is absolute fact – for the wealth of the Reverend Father has been incontestably proved.’
The story of the wandering Jew had been circulating for centuries before Sue wrote his own, very freely interpreted, version of the tale. Traditionally, a Jew taunted Jesus on his way to his crucifixion and was condemned to wander the Earth until Christ’s second coming. A verse in the Christian Bible, John 18:20–22, has been suggested as the basis of the story. The Medieval writer Roger of Wendover (d. 1236) recounts a story he heard of a Jewish man named Cartaphilus (later renamed Joseph), who had been the doorkeeper for Pontius Pilate and had struck Jesus as he left for his walk to the Cross. Jesus ordered the man to wait for him and, still alive over a thousand years later, the man had converted to Christianity and was attempting through a life of piety to free himself from the curse of such a long existence. It is easy to see why the story is credited as being part of the growth of anti-Jewish sentiment in fiction. However, Sue’s version has been described as an anti clerical novel, with the leading dark character, depicted as a Jesuit priest, Pére Rodin.
The legend has inspired many writers and artists over the centuries. It is possible that Sue was influenced by Charles Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer (1820), about a scholar who sells his soul to the devil for an extra 150 years of life. Other novels featuring characters doomed to an extended life are Der ewige Jude (Christian Schubart, 1783); The Monk (Matthew Lewis, 1796) and The Undying One (Caroline Norton, 1839). Alexandre Dumas’ unfinished novel Isaak Lakadam (1853) is also reminiscent of the legend. A later novel by Pär Lagerkvist, The Death of Ahasuerus (1960) represents a continuing interest in the theme of everlasting life as punishment and even the later twentieth-century vampire novels such as those by Anne Rice could be said to represent our ongoing preoccupation with the avoidance of death and the suffering of the immortal.
The novel opens with a bleak and wintry scene on the Arctic coast where the narrowing of the straits brings the land masses of America and Siberia closest together. Here, a man and a woman, on either side of the sea, hurry to the high ground in the hope of catching a glimpse of each other. The man leaves a curious footprint in the snow – nails in the sole of his boot impress the sign of the cross wherever he treads. Silently, the two people gesture to each other, then the moment is lost in a bank of fog. These mysterious figures are the Wandering Jew himself and his sister, Herodiade. The two characters are to remain in the background throughout most of the story, as they only make rare appearances– hence the view of critics that Sue uses the tale of the Wandering Jew lightly in his novel. The brother and sister have been condemned to wander from the time of Christ, to protect and look after a family named Rennepont – they can only die when there are no more members of this family to protect, yet the family concerned have no idea that their welfare is being watched over in this way. They are bound to this task after an ancestor, Marius Rennepont, rescues the Wandering Jew
Whilst the brother and sister are doomed to wander the world, Morok the Prophet lives in a loft decorated with bizarre artworks and scattered with cruel looking implements and with dangerous animals held in cages. A former Siberian huntsman, who bizarrely has chosen to follow the Christian faith more closely, he is an accomplice of the Jesuits, who are in pursuit of the fortune held in trust for seven members of the Rennepont family and which they will one day inherit when they have all assembled in Paris in 1832. The Jesuits are unscrupulously using every power they have to divert the fortune to their own coffers, with agents such as Morok stationed all over the world. Travelling in Morok’s direction is a distinguished looking older man, a former soldier nicknamed Dagobert and two young Rennepont girls, delightfully pretty fifteen-year-old twins – ‘Nothing could be more charming’ than Rose and Blanche, whose closeness to each other no doubt alleviated their loneliness. Their father, General Simon, rose from a Russian peasant background to become a national hero and a Count of the empire, but following a military campaign, is exiled, believing that his wife had given birth to a son before she died, not twin girls.
Dagobert was a soldier comrade of the girl’s father and acts now as their protector and guide. Eventually, they are settled at an inn and the twins while away the time wondering if Paris, their destination, is as special a place as they imagine. While Dagobert is away for few days, they are captivated by a beautiful young man, who appears to them in a dream. Gabriel, who has soft golden hair, blue eyes and a gentle personality, is an angel. Gabriel cannot protect them, however, from the death of Dagobert’s horse and the threat of arrest as vagrants. Morok seizes his opportunity and persuades the local magistrate that the twins are at moral risk from Dagobert, in an attempt to gain control of the twins; however, Dagobert at the last moment enables their joint escape. Can they make it to Paris in time to claim their inheritance and will their father return from exile to join them?
There are interesting references to the world in which Sue himself lived – the Wandering Jew is a bringer of cholera — a serious public health problem in the mid-nineteenth century, which struck without warning, just as the Wandering Jew lives amongst the populace, but is also hidden from sight. The story is a long read and even for the times, rather dated in its convoluted plot and stereotypical characterisation. That said, some of the personalities that Sue creates are genuinely repugnant and the cruelty in the story is a precursor of more modern horror tales.
The title page for the 1851 edition
CONTENTS
PART I. THE TRANSGRESSION.
BOOK I. THE TRANSGRESSION.
BOOK II. INTERVAL. — THE WANDERING JEW’S SENTENCE.
BOOK III.
BOOK IV.
PART II. THE CHASTISEMENT.
BOOK V.
BOOK VI.
BOOK VII.
BOOK VIII.
PART III. THE REDEMPTION.
BOOK IX.
BOOK X.
BOOK XI. EPILOGUE.
EPILOGUE.
THE WANDERING JEW: DETAILED TABLE OF CONTENTS
The first edition in English
The original fr
ontispiece for this translation
A NOTE ON THE AUTHOR OF THE WANDERING JEW: EUGÈNE SUE
TIME AND AGAIN physicians and seamen have made noteworthy reputations as novelists. But it is rare in the annals of literature that a man trained in both professions should have gained his greatest fame as a writer of novels. Eugène Sue began his career as a physician and surgeon, and then spent six years in the French Navy. In 1830, when he returned to France, he inherited his father’s rich estate and was free to follow his inclination to write. His first novel, “Plick et Plock”, met with an unexpected success, and he at once foreswore the arts of healing and navigation for the precarious life of a man of letters. With varying success he produced books from his inexhaustible store of personal experiences as a doctor and sailor. In 1837, he wrote an authoritative work on the French Navy, “Histoire de la marine Francaise”.
More and more the novel appealed to his imagination and suited his gifts. His themes ranged from the fabulous to the strictly historical, and he became popular as a writer of romance and fictionized fact. His plays, however, were persistent failures. When he published “The Mysteries of Paris”, his national fame was assured, and with the writing of “The Wandering Jew” he achieved world-wide renown. Then, at the height of his literary career, Eugène Sue was driven into exile after Louis Napoleon overthrew the Constitutional Government in a coup d’etat and had himself officially proclaimed Emperor Napoleon III. The author of “The Wandering Jew” died in banishment five years later.
PART I. THE TRANSGRESSION.
BOOK I. THE TRANSGRESSION.
PROLOGUE. THE LAND’S END OF TWO WORLDS.
THE ARCTIC OCEAN encircles with a belt of eternal ice the desert confines of Siberia and North America — the uttermost limits of the Old and New worlds, separated by the narrow, channel, known as Behring’s Straits.
The last days of September have arrived.
The equinox has brought with it darkness and Northern storms, and night will quickly close the short and dismal polar day. The sky of a dull and leaden blue is faintly lighted by a sun without warmth, whose white disk, scarcely seen above the horizon, pales before the dazzling, brilliancy of the snow that covers, as far as the eyes can reach, the boundless steppes.
To the North, this desert is bounded by a ragged coast, bristling with huge black rocks.
At the base of this Titanic mass lied enchained the petrified ocean, whose spell-bound waves appear fired as vast ranges of ice mountains, their blue peaks fading away in the far-off frost smoke, or snow vapor.
Between the twin-peaks of Cape East, the termination of Siberia, the sullen sea is seen to drive tall icebergs across a streak of dead green. There lies Behring’s Straits.
Opposite, and towering over the channel, rise the granite masses of Cape Prince of Wales, the headland of North America.
These lonely latitudes do not belong to the habitable world; for the piercing cold shivers the stones, splits the trees, and causes the earth to burst asunder, which, throwing forth showers of icy spangles seems capable of enduring this solitude of frost and tempest, of famine and death.
And yet, strange to say, footprints may be traced on the snow, covering these headlands on either side of Behring’s Straits.
On the American shore, the footprints are small and light, thus betraying the passage of a woman.
She has been hastening up the rocky peak, whence the drifts of Siberia are visible.
On the latter ground, footprints larger and deeper betoken the passing of a man. He also was on his way to the Straits.
It would seem that this man and woman had arrived here from opposite directions, in hope of catching a glimpse of one another, across the arm of the sea dividing the two worlds — the Old and the New.
More strange still! the man and the woman have crossed the solitudes during a terrific storm! Black pines, the growth of centuries, pointing their bent heads in different parts of the solitude like crosses in a churchyard, have been uprooted, rent, and hurled aside by the blasts!
Yet the two travellers face this furious tempest, which has plucked up trees, and pounded the frozen masses into splinters, with the roar of thunder.
They face it, without for one single instant deviating from the straight line hitherto followed by them.
Who then are these two beings who advance thus calmly amidst the storms and convulsions of nature?
Is it by chance, or design, or destiny, that the seven nails in the sole of the man’s shoe form a cross — thus:
* * *
Everywhere he leaves this impress behind him.
On the smooth and polished snow, these footmarks seem imprinted by a foot of brass on a marble floor.
Night without twilight has soon succeeded day — a night of foreboding gloom.
The brilliant reflection of the snow renders the white steppes still visible beneath the azure darkness of the sky; and the pale stars glimmer on the obscure and frozen dome.
Solemn silence reigns.
But, towards the Straits, a faint light appears.
At first, a gentle, bluish light, such as precedes moonrise; it increases in brightness, and assumes a ruddy hue.
Darkness thickens in every other direction; the white wilds of the desert are now scarcely visible under the black vault of the firmament.
Strange and confused noises are heard amidst this obscurity.
They sound like the flight of large night — birds — now flapping now-heavily skimming over the steppes-now descending.
But no cry is heard.
This silent terror heralds the approach of one of those imposing phenomena that awe alike the most ferocious and the most harmless, of animated beings. An Aurora Borealis (magnificent sight!) common in the polar regions, suddenly beams forth.
A half circle of dazzling whiteness becomes visible in the horizon. Immense columns of light stream forth from this dazzling centre, rising to a great height, illuminating earth, sea, and sky. Then a brilliant reflection, like the blaze of a conflagration, steals over the snow of the desert, purples the summits of the mountains of ice, and imparts a dark red hue to the black rocks of both continents.
After attaining this magnificent brilliancy, the Northern Lights fade away gradually, and their vivid glow is lost in a luminous fog.
Just then, by a wondrous mirage an effect very common in high latitudes, the American Coast, though separated from Siberia by a broad arm of the sea, loomed so close that a bridge might seemingly be thrown from one world to other.
Then human forms appeared in the transparent azure haze overspreading both forelands.
On the Siberian Cape, a man on his knees, stretched his arms towards America, with an expression of inconceivable despair.
On the American promontory, a young and handsome woman replied to the man’s despairing gesture by pointing to heaven.
For some seconds, these two tall figures stood out, pale and shadowy, in the farewell gleams of the Aurora.
But the fog thickens, and all is lost in the darkness.
Whence came the two beings, who met thus amidst polar glaciers, at the extremities of the Old and New worlds?
Who were the two creatures, brought near for a moment by a deceitful mirage, but who seemed eternally separated?
CHAPTER I. MOROK.
THE MONTH OF OCTOBER, 1831, DRAWS TO ITS CLOSE.
THOUGH IT IS still day, a brass lamp, with four burners, illumines the cracked walls of a large loft, whose solitary window is closed against outer light. A ladder, with its top rungs coming up through an open trap leads to it.
Here and there at random on the floor lie iron chains, spiked collars, saw-toothed snaffles, muzzles bristling with nails, and long iron rods set in wooden handles. In one corner stands a portable furnace, such as tinkers use to melt their spelter; charcoal and dry chips fill it, so that a spark would suffice to kindle this furnace in a minute.
Not far from this collection of ugly instruments, putting one in mind of a torture
r’s kit of tools, there are some articles of defence and offence of a bygone age. A coat of mail, with links so flexible, close, and light, that it resembles steel tissue, hangs from a box beside iron cuishes and arm-pieces, in good condition, even to being properly fitted with straps. A mace, and two long three-cornered-headed pikes, with ash handles, strong, and light at the same time; spotted with lately-shed blood, complete the armory, modernized somewhat by the presence of two Tyrolese rifles, loaded and primed.
Along with this arsenal of murderous weapons and out-of-date instruments, is strangely mingled a collection of very different objects, being small glass-lidded boxes, full of rosaries, chaplets, medals, AGNUS DEI, holy water bottles, framed pictures of saints, etc., not to forget a goodly number of those chapbooks, struck off in Friburg on coarse bluish paper, in which you can hear about miracles of our own time, or “Jesus Christ’s Letter to a true believer,” containing awful predictions, as for the years 1831 and ‘32, about impious revolutionary France.
One of those canvas daubs, with which strolling showmen adorn their booths, hangs from a rafter, no doubt to prevent its being spoilt by too long rolling up. It bore the following legend:
“THE DOWNRIGHT TRUE AND MOST MEMORABLE CONVERSION OF IGNATIUS MOROK,
KNOWN AS THE PROPHET, HAPPENING IN FRIBURG, 1828TH YEAR OF GRACE.”
This picture, of a size larger than natural, of gaudy color, and in bad taste, is divided into three parts, each presenting an important phase in the life of the convert, surnamed “The Prophet.” In the first, behold a long-bearded man, the hair almost white, with uncouth face, and clad in reindeer skin, like the Siberian savage. His black foreskin cap is topped with a raven’s head; his features express terror. Bent forward in his sledge, which half-a-dozen huge tawny dogs draw over the snow, he is fleeing from the pursuit of a pack of foxes, wolves, and big bears, whose gaping jaws, and formidable teeth, seem quite capable of devouring man, sledge, and dogs, a hundred times over. Beneath this section, reads: