by Stefan Zweig
For a moment confusion reigned. Even to a drunk, the word “death” is like a hammer falling on his heart. Baffled, they asked each other who was dead. “I am,” Madame de Prie said coldly, without any change of expression, “I shall not see this winter come.”
She spoke so gravely, in so sombre a tone, that they all looked at one another in silence. But only for a second. Then a jest flew from somewhere in the room like a coloured ball, someone else threw it back, and as if enlivened by the curious notion of death the wave of exuberance surged foaming and high again, and buried the discomfort of that initial surprise.
Madame de Prie remained very calm. She felt that there was no going back now. But it amused her to stage her prophecy even more dramatically. She went up to one of the round tables where her guests were playing faro, and waited for the next card to be turned over. It was a seven of one of the black suits, clubs or spades. “The seventh of October, then.” Without meaning to, she had said it out loud under her breath.
“What’s the seventh of October?” one of the onlookers asked casually.
She looked at him calmly. “The day of my death.”
They all laughed. The joke was passed on. Madame de Prie was delighted to find that no one believed her. If they didn’t trust her in life any more, then at least they should see how she and her comedy had fooled them in death. A wonderful sense of superiority, pleasure and ease ran through her limbs. She felt as if she must rejoice aloud in high spirits and derision.
In the next room music was playing. A dance had just begun. She joined the dancers, and had never danced better.
From that moment on, her life had meaning again. She knew she was preparing to do something that would certainly make her immortal. She imagined the King’s amazement, the horror of her guests when her prophecy of her death came true to the very day. And she was staging the comedy most carefully; she invited more and more guests, doubled her expenditure, worked on the multifarious magnificence of these last days as if it were a work of art, something that would make her sudden fall even more keenly felt. She aired the prediction of her death again at every opportunity, but always drew a glittering curtain of merriment over it; she wanted everyone to know that it had been announced, and no one to believe it. Only death would raise her name once again to the ranks of those who could never be forgotten, from which the King had cast her down.
Two days before she was to carry out her irrevocable purpose, she gave the last and most magnificent festivities of all. Since the Persian and other Islamic embassies had set up for the first time in Paris, all things Oriental had been the fashion in France: books were written in Eastern guise, the fairy tales and legends of the Orient were translated, Arab costume was popular, and people imitated the flowery style of Eastern language. At enormous expense, Madame de Prie had turned the whole château into an Oriental palace. Costly rugs lay on the floor, squawking parrots and white-feathered cockatoos rocked on their perches on the window bars, held there by silver chains; servants hurried soundlessly down the corridors in turbans and baggy silk trousers, taking Turkish sweetmeats and other refreshments entirely unknown at the time to the guests, who were dazzled by such daring splendour. Coloured tents were erected in the garden, boys cooled them by waving broad fans, music rang out from the dark shadows of the shrubberies, everything possible was done to make the evening an unforgettable fairy-tale experience, and the silvery half-moon hanging in the starry sky that night encouraged the imagination to conjure up the mysteriously sultry atmosphere of a night by the Bosphorus.
But the real surprise was a particularly spacious tent, containing a stage hung with red velvet curtains. Wishing to appear to her guests in the full radiance of her fame and beauty, Madame de Prie had decided to act a play herself; a final display of all the merriment and levity of her life to an audience was to be her last and finest deception. In the few days she still had left, she had commissioned a young author to write a play to her exact requirements. Time was short and his alexandrines bad, but that was not what mattered to her. The tragedy was set in the Orient, and she herself was to play the part of Zengane, a young queen whose realm is captured by enemies and who goes proudly to her death, although the magnanimous victor offers to share all his royal power with her if she will be his wife. She had insisted on these details: she wanted to give a dress rehearsal of her voluntary death in front of the unsuspecting audience before she put the plan into practice.
And in addition she wanted to experience the past once more, if only in game, she wanted to be queen again, and show that she was born to it and must die once she was deprived of power.
Her aim was to be beautiful and royal in the eyes of others on that last evening; she would adorn her past image with an invisible crown, ensuring that her name aroused that pure shiver of veneration which attends all that is sublime. Cosmetics veiled the pallor of her sunken cheeks, her thin figure was concealed by the flowing Oriental robes she wore, the confusing brightness of the jewels gleaming on her hair, like dew on a dark flower in the morning moisture, outshone her tired eyes. And when she appeared like this in the brightness behind the curtain as it swept back, a brightness further intensified by her passion, when she appeared on stage surrounded by kneeling servants and the awe-stricken populace, a rustle passed through the ranks of her guests. Her heart was thudding: for the first time in these bitter weeks she felt the delightful wave of admiration that had borne her life up for so long surging towards her, and a wonderful feeling arose in her, a sweet sadness mingled with melancholy pleasure, a regret that kept receding, flowing back into a great sense of happiness. Before her, the surf of the wave flickered, she did not see individuals any more, only a great crowd, perhaps her guests, perhaps all France, perhaps generations yet to come, perhaps eternity. And she felt only, and blissfully, one thing: she was standing on a great height again, envied, admired, the cynosure of all those curious and nameless eyes, and at last, after such a long time, she felt aware of living again, of being really alive. Death was not too high a price to pay for this second of life.
She played her part magnificently, although she had never tried acting before. She had shed everything that prevents most people from making a show of emotion to others—fear, timidity, shame, awkwardness—she had shed all that, and was now playing only with objects. She wanted to be queen, and she was queen again for the length of an hour. Only once did her breath fail her, when she spoke the line, “Je vais mourir, oh ne me plaignez pas!”*, for she felt that she was expressing her deep wish for life, and was afraid they might not be deceived, might understand her, warn her, hold her back. But in fact the pause after that cry seemed in itself to be acted with such irresistible credibility that a shudder ran through the audience. And when, with a wild gesture, she turned the dagger against her heart, fell, and seemed to die smiling, when the play was over—although only now did it really begin—they stormed to applaud her, paying her tribute with an enthusiasm that she had not known even in the days of her greatest power.
However, she had only a smile for all the uproar, and when she was complimented on her magnificent performance of the death of Zengane, she said calmly, “I suppose that, today, I should know how to die. Death dwells in me already. It will all be over the day after tomorrow.”
They laughed again, but it no longer hurt her. There was blessed, painless merriment inside her, and such a childishly exuberant joy at having deceived all these enthusiastic people that she instinctively joined in the peals of laughter. Once she had played only with men and power; now she saw that there was no better toy than death.
Next day, the last full day of her life, the guests went away; she meant to receive death alone. The coaches churned up white dust like clouds in the distance, the horsemen trotted away, the halls were emptied of light and laughter, a restless wind howled down the chimney. She felt as if the blood were slowly flowing out of her veins with the departing guests, she felt herself becoming colder and colder, weaker, more defenceless, more
fearful. Death had seemed to her so easy yesterday, just a game; now that she was alone again, it suddenly showed her its horror and its power once more.
And everything that she thought she had tamed and trodden underfoot awoke again. The last evening came, and once more the snake-like shadows that, alarmed by the light, had hidden behind objects came crawling out of hiding with flickering tongues. Dread, stifled by laughter and veiled by the bright images of human company, gradually returned all-powerful to the deserted rooms. The silence had only been cowering under the surging sound of voices; now it spread abroad again like mist, filled the rooms, the halls, the stairways, the corridors, and her shuddering heart as well.
She would have liked to make an end of it at once. But she had chosen the seventh of October, and must not destroy the deception, that artificial, glimmering, lying construct of her triumph, just for the sake of a whim. She must wait. It was worse than being dead, though, to wait for the hour of death while the wind outside mocked her, and dark shadows in here reached for her heart. How could she bear this long last night before death, this endless time until dawn? Dark objects, spectre-like, pressed closer and closer, all the shades of her past life rose from their burial vaults—she fled before them from room to room, but they stared at her from the pictures, grinned behind the windows, crouched down behind cupboards. The dead reached out to her, though she was still alive and wanted human company, company just for one night. She longed for a human being as if for a coat in which to wrap her shivering form until day dawned.
Suddenly she rang the bell, which screeched shrilly like a wounded animal. A servant, drowsy with sleep, came upstairs to her. She told him to go at once to the priest’s nephew, wake him and bring him here. She had important news for him.
The servant stared as if she were mad. But she did not feel it, she felt nothing at all, every emotion had died in her. She was not ashamed to summon the man who had beaten her, she did not hesitate to summon a man to her bedroom at night in front of the servant. There was only a cold void in her, she felt that her poor shivering body needed warmth if it were not to freeze. Her soul was dead already; she had only to kill her body now.
After a while the door opened. Her former lover came in. His face was chilly and contemptuous, he seemed unspeakably strange to her. And yet the horror shrank back slightly under the objects in the room, just because he opened the door and she was no longer entirely alone with them.
He took pains to seem very decided and not betray his inner astonishment, since this summons was entirely unexpected. For days, while the festivities were in full swing in the château, he had slunk around the barred gateways of the park, his eyes narrowed with rage; he had eaten his heart out with self-reproaches, for he, as her lover, should have been able to stride through the midst of this brilliance. He was consumed with anger for having so humiliated her; those extravagant festivities had suddenly made the power of the wealth that he had failed to exploit very clear to him again. And moreover, his hours with Madame de Prie had made him desire these fine, fragrant, spoilt ladies with their delicate, fragile limbs, their strangely provocative lusts, their rustling silken dresses. He had taken himself back to the priest’s poverty-stricken house, where everything suddenly seemed to him crude, dirty and worn. His greed, once roused, made him look avidly at all the ladies who came from Paris, but none of them looked back at him, their coaches scornfully splashed him with the mud their wheels threw up, and the great lords didn’t even see him when he humbly raised his hat to them. A hundred times he had felt impelled to go into the château and fling himself at Madame de Prie’s feet, and every time fear had held him back.
But now she had summoned him, and that made him arrogant. Inwardly, he straightened his back: it was the proudest moment of his life to think that she needed him again after all.
For a moment they looked at one another, barely able to hide the hatred in their eyes. At that moment, each despised the other because each intended to misuse the other. Madame de Prie controlled herself. Her voice was very cool.
“The Duke of Berlington asked me yesterday if I could recommend him a secretary. If you would like the post, I’ll send you to Paris tomorrow with a letter for him.”
The young man trembled. He had already assumed a haughty bearing, intending to be condescending and gracious if she was seeking his favours. But all that was gone now. Greed overcame him. Paris gleamed before his eyes.
“If madame were to be so kind—I—I can’t think of anything that would make me happier,” he stammered. His eyes had the pleading expression of a beaten dog in them.
She nodded. Then she looked at him, commandingly yet milder again. He understood. Everything would be the way it had once been…
And not for a second of that passionate night did she forget that she hated him, despised him, and was deceiving him—for there was no Duke of Berlington—she knew how contemptible she herself was, driven to buy a man’s caresses with a lie, yet it was life, real life that she felt in his limbs, drank from his lips, not the darkness and silence already coming to hold her fast. She felt the warmth of his youth driving death away, and knew at every moment that she was trying to deceive death itself, the death that was coming closer and closer, and of whose power she now, for the first time, had some inkling.
The morning of the seventh of October was clear. Sunlight shimmered above the fields, even the shadows were translucent and pure. Madame de Prie dressed carefully, as if for a great feast, put her affairs in order, burned letters. She locked her jewellery, which was very valuable, in an ebony casket, tore up all her promissory notes and contracts. Now that it was day again, everything in her was clear and determined once more, and she wanted clarity above all else.
Her lover came in. She spoke to him kindly and without resentment; it pained her to think that she was so pitilessly deceiving the last man who had meant anything to her, even if he had not meant much. She did not want anyone to speak of her with resentment, only with admiration and gratitude. And she felt an urge to lavish the jewellery from the casket on him, in return for that one last night. It was a fortune.
But he was half-asleep and inattentive. In his boorish greed for gain, he thought of nothing but his position, his future. The memory of their passionate caresses made him yet bolder. Abruptly, he said he must set off for Paris at once, or he might arrive too late, and he demanded rather than requested the letter of recommendation. Something froze inside her. She had hired him, and now he was asking for payment.
She wrote the letter, a letter to a man who did not exist and whom he could never find. But she still hesitated to give it to him. Once more she put off her decision. She asked if he couldn’t stay one day longer; she would like that very much, she said. And as she spoke she balanced the casket in her hand. She felt that if he said yes it might yet save her. But all their decisions led the same way. He was in a hurry. He didn’t want to stay. If he had not said it in such a surly manner, making her feel so clearly that he had let himself be bought only for one night, she would have given him the jewellery, which was worth hundreds of thousands of livres. But he was brusque, his glance impudent and with no love in it. So she took a single, very small jewel with only a dull glow to it—dull as his eyes—and gave it to him in return for taking the casket, of whose contents he had no idea, to the Ursuline convent in Paris. She added a letter asking the nuns to say Masses for her soul. Then she sent the impatient young man off to find the Duke of Berlington.
He thanked her, not effusively, and left, unaware of the value of the casket that he himself was carrying. And so, after acting out a comedy of her feelings in front of them all, she deceived even the last man to cross her path.
Then she closed the door and quickly took a small flask from a drawer. It was made of fine Chinese porcelain, with strange, monstrous dragons coiling and curling in blue on it. She looked at it with curiosity, toyed with it as carelessly as she had toyed with her fellow men and women, with princes, with France, with love an
d death. She unscrewed the stopper and poured the clear liquid into a small dish. For a moment she hesitated, really just from a childish fear that it might have a bitter flavour. Cautiously, like a kitten sniffing warm milk, she touched it with her tongue; no, it didn’t taste bad. And so she drank the contents of the dish down in a single draught.
The whole thing, at that moment, seemed to her somehow amusing and extremely ludicrous: to think that you had only to take that one tiny sip, and tomorrow you wouldn’t see the clouds, the fields, the woods any more, messengers would go riding, the King would be horrified and all of France amazed. So this was the great step that she had feared taking so much. She thought of the astonishment of her guests, of the legends that would be told of the way she had foretold the day of her death, and failed to understand only one thing: that she had given herself to death because she missed the company of humans, those same gullible humans who could be deceived with such a little comedy. Dying seemed to her altogether easy, you could even smile as you died—yes, you could indeed, she tried it—you could perfectly well smile, and it wasn’t difficult to preserve a beautiful and tranquil face in death, a face radiant with unearthly bliss. It was true, even after death you could act happiness. She hadn’t known that. She found everything, human beings, the world, death and life, suddenly so very amusing that the smile she had prepared sprang involuntarily to her carefree lips. She straightened up, as if there were a mirror opposite her somewhere, waited for death, and smiled and smiled and smiled.
*
But death was not to be deceived, and broke her laughter. When Madame de Prie was found her face was distorted into a terrible grimace. Those dreadful features showed everything that she had really suffered in the last few weeks: her rage, her torment, her aimless fear, her wild and desperate pain. The deceptive smile for which she had struggled so avidly had been helpless, had drained away. Her feet were twisted together in torment, her hands had clutched a curtain so convulsively that scraps of it were left between her fingers, her mouth was open as if in a shrill scream.