The Angel Asrael

by S. Henry Berthoud

  “‘Oh, I consent to that, I consent to that!’ cried the soul of Beatrix ‘Immediately, good angel, immediately!’

  “Eloim pronounced the name of Jehovah, and the soul of Beatrix returned to earth, to the castellany of Quièvy.

  “It was near the hour of midnight, but no one was asleep in that place, for there was joyous feasting in which nothing was lacking: delicate dishes, fine wines, joyous clamors and beautiful young woman.

  “Sire Paul de Quièvy was shouting louder than all the rest, for drunkenness had reddened his face, and his head was reposing on the knees of a young woman frantic in her body and almost naked.

  “And he said to her: ‘Give me a kiss, darling, and anther, and another; you never give me enough. Sing the song for me again that I taught you and which made you blush this morning; it’s a beautiful song, that one. Isn’t it true, my friends? It has made a prostitute blush.

  ‘Come on, come on, take off that mantle, take off that collaret. I’ve never liked fashions of restraint. By my word, it was necessary, for that Beatrix I mentioned to you just now, to play the hypocrite and feign virtue for three long months! So I hope that she’s in the utmost depths of Hell to punish the ennui she caused me. Wherever she is, I’ll be damned if any prayer of mine ever extracts her.’

  “The desolate soul of Beatrix returned to Purgatory.

  “And the angel Eloim was waiting for her on the threshold of Purgatory, and he took her to Paradise, for she had suffered more in the hour that she had spent on earth that during a thousand years in purgatory.”

  Throughout that legend, Elise’s hand had remained in Henri’s hands, and she did not take it away when he had finished, and did not remove her head, which she had leaned on the shoulder of her childhood friend.

  To tell you what tender words they repeated to one another and what other memories they evoked, is impossible for human words, for there are sensations that words cannot express; gazes and embraces are necessary for that.

  Those sensation and those memories were delectable, however, for now that Elise and Henri are old, their children often hear them remembering, emotionally, the evening when they saw one another again, after six years of absence, and when Henri recounted to Elise the legend of the soul in Purgatory.

  THE DELATION

  A French Adventure

  1826

  The Judge: Accused, reveal your accomplices

  and the law will send you away absolved.

  The Forger: Condemn me. I prefer the blade

  of the guillotine to the infamous name of Delator.

  (S. Henry Berthoud, Angoisses.)27

  To see her again!

  That was an idea that burned his brain, an idea that made him agitate and writhe in the post-chaise.

  To see her again! When he has been far away six months for six months; when for six months he has not even heard her name: Clarisse!

  If, at least, before quitting her, she had said to him: “Paul, I love you!”

  He knows full well that she loves him, that she loves him as no angel in heaven has ever loved; he has read it in her moist yes, in her emotional voice, in the indecisive pressure of hr tremulous hand; but she never made him that confession: “Paul, I love you!”

  Before hearing those words, the words for which he would have paid a year of his life, it was necessary for him to leave, to depart on a long voyage, to depart without seeing her once more.

  But it was a matter of the life of a brother; for his brother would not have survived the dishonor, and without Paul’s prompt arrival, without the sacrifice of a part of his fortune, his brother would have been dishonored. He could not hesitate, therefore, and he had quit everything, his life as an artist, his old mother, and perhaps even more: Clarisse.

  But he is going to see her again, and she will love him more than on his departure, for her generous soul can appreciate such a sacrifice. He is going to see her again! Oh, the sensations that he experiences at that idea almost make him bless the absence.

  And the dusty vehicle traverses Lille rapidly. A door opens before it; cries: “My son! My dear Paul!” His mother is in his arms.

  She weeps with joy; she hugs her son; she hugs him again; she blesses him, she calls him her only consolation, the sole joy that she has in the world.

  And she has not wanted to be alone in rejoicing. Oh no! Of all those who came every evening to say: “Is he coming back?” all those who repeated: “In a month, in a week, in a day, we’ll see him again!” not one is lacking this evening. She is giving a ball, and it is necessary that Paul dance, in spite of his three nights spent in a carriage. His friends are so joyful: his friend, whom she enumerates with a child-like complaisance, and among whom she names Clarisse’s husband, and Clarisse herself.

  That overflowing of a mother’s tenderness, that celebration of his return, those illuminated drawing rooms, the noise of carriages, the guests who are arriving, the sounds of the instruments tuning up, and then the waiting, the waiting with the palpitating heart, searching among the women coming in: all of that produces an intoxicating exaltation in him, a delightful anguish.

  There she is! There she is!

  He runs. She stops him with a cold smile, devoid of amour.

  She has done well to stop him, for without that smile, his emotion might perhaps have compromised her.

  She has done well; oh, yes—and yet, he is saddened by such a great prudence; a vague anxiety grips his heart.

  What folly!

  Finally, now, he can approach her without imprudence. A young man gets in ahead to him; he invites her to dance, and she smiles at him as he would have given anything in the world for her to smile at him on seeing him again.

  How long he takes before going away... Finally, he goes.

  Clarisse! Again that icy smile, and then indifferent words, a hand that no longer responds to his grip.

  She no longer loves him; it is that young man she loves.

  So much the better that she no longer loves him, so much the better that she has not deceived him any longer. After all, such an amour is not to be regretted; it will soon be consoled. To love a woman who does not comprehend your love would be horrible, it would depreciate it. It’s necessary to take revenge for such inconstancy by a cold scorn; that will not be difficulty.

  Ah! The young man isn’t quitting her; she only has words for him, smiles for him.

  They’re only dancing with one another. Now he’s leaning toward her ear; she’s blushing, she’s looking at him tenderly. Malediction! Malediction!

  And his fists clench, and his teeth grind.

  That fit of despair is succeeded by an even worse joy; an anxious malaise full of agitation and dejection; an excessive lassitude mingled with an imperious need for movement; his eyes are burning, his lungs are burning; his head is burning.

  When two o’clock chimes, he has to leave the ball. It’s stifling there.

  He searches in vain for a chair in which to sit down. Not one can be found in the antechamber; it’s in vain that he orders the domestics to bring him one. They don’t obey him, because twenty new orders from the mistress of the house make them forget Paul’s.

  He remembers then that there is an old sofa at the end of a long corridor directly opposite the room where everyone is dancing, and he goes to sit down there.

  Soon, he experienced strange sensations.

  He could no longer hear the music; only the vague murmur of voices reached him at long intervals, and then came a great calm, to be interrupted again, a few moments later, by one of those instinct rumors.

  An extreme fatigue, the warm and heavy atmosphere of the corridor, its obscurity, the murmurs of the drawing room, after so much stifling warmth, agitation and hubbub, the moving crowd talking soundlessly, the dancing devoid of music that were perceptible through the embrasure of a distant door as if through the undulations of a transparent gauze, plunged Paul into a sort of nightmare, the torpor of which blunted neither the anguish of the soul not the facul
ties of the senses, but which compressed everything with its iron hand and formed I know not what execrable assemblage thereof, with which a suffocation of the chest and an insipid aftertaste were combined.

  He was suffering, in such a state, beyond what can be described, and yet he could not find the strength get out of it, and even found a sort of inexplicable charm in it. Someone walked around him, someone came to sit down beside him, without him paying any heed to it, without him making a movement that might have put an end to that cruel anguish.

  That is what he was experiencing when a clear, guttural voice began to speak to Paul’s left, and to proffer him confused words that he heard without understanding them, and which added further to the strangeness if his sensations.

  It even seemed to him that the voice was one of the tricks of his dream, for there was a mockery in its bizarrely articulated words that associated itself with his memories and reawakened his pain in a cruel fashion.

  “Ha ha!” said the voice. “How that young woman dressed in pink is abandoning herself softly in the arms of her waltzer. Do you know her? Excuse me, Monsieur, I don’t live in Lille. What gazes they’re exchanging! Either I don’t know anything, or, upon my word, she’s just reached the point of imprudence that precipitates into the abyss of dishonor.”

  As soon as the man spoke, Paul thought that he had glimpsed in the shadows the features of Clarisse’s husband, and he understood the urgency of making the voice shut up that was revealing the young woman’s fatal secret; but he experienced such a strange sort of enjoyment on hearing that denunciation, and had so little energy in his numb organs, that he could not find sufficient will-power to emerge from his horrible state, and he let the voice continue.

  “Now she’s passing in front of us again—how her breast is palpitating! How her hand is pressing her lover’s! Now she’s taking a piece of paper from her bosom; she’s giving it to him.”

  And specters assembled around Paul; and they turned their icy gazes toward him; and there was a young woman there who was trying to lift up with her hands the brain matter that was spreading from her broken skull; and there was a young man who was covering his heart with his hand, and that hand was raised up by the force of the blood that was spurting from a large wound; and that woman was Clarisse, and the young man was her lover.

  In the meantime, the voice continued: “How they’re devouring one another with their gazes! How he’s gripping her waist! Their disturbance is at its peak: they’re doomed! They’re doomed forever, I’m sure of it! Now their lips are meeting!”

  A sudden, terrible noise woke Paul from his nightmare. A man, Clarisse’s husband, ran with great strides and seized Paul’s traveling pistols from the mantelpiece.

  Two detonations, and the crowd rushed out of the drawing rooms.

  And Clarisse hid her bloody forehead with her hands, and her lover pressed, with a dying hand, the wound that he had in his heart.

  THE SPELL

  1829

  You would not believe all the evil results produced

  in Flanders by the belief in witches. Even recently, in a

  town in the vicinity of Valenciennes a poor old woman

  was nearly killed, who had been accused of purring a

  spell on a horse that had died of glanders. In addition,

  she had cast a spell on a child.

  (Lettres flamandes.)28

  He had not seen the old woman for a long time. He was surprised and afflicted by the change that had occurred in all the unfortunate woman’s features. An extreme thinness had stripped the flesh from her pale face. There was something of the cadaver in those bones jutting beneath a livid skin, in those sunken and extinct eyes, and those hollow and withered cheeks. Once her garments, of an extreme neatness, had been disposed symmetrically; now their disorder revealed the apathetic carelessness of misfortune.

  Moved by that sad sight, he put more benevolence into his welcome than was his custom. The old woman experienced a sort of consolation from that, for our woes become less bitter if they win us the compassion or interest of people who are above us by their moral superiority or their rank in society.

  He made her sit down next to him; he comforted her with good words, and then enquired as to the causes of her sadness. He had seen that her chagrins were of the kind for which only one consolation remains: that of being able to satisfy a need to recount them and hearing an emotional voice say thereafter: “Oh, you have a great deal of which to complain!”

  Poor woman, her only daughter had died a fortnight before.

  “If you knew, Monsieur,” she said, wiping away the tears that filled her eyes, “how resigned she was! She died like a saint...

  “Accursed witch, who made my child die!

  “Yes, Monsieur, it as a spell that was cast upon her. One day, an old peasant woman come to bring us some handiwork. When it was finished we didn’t want to give it to her before having received the payment, because, Monsieur, when one is poor and has nothing on which to live but one’s handiwork, one can’t give credit to strangers.

  “The peasant begged us for a long time to permit her to take away the work my daughter had done for her. Holy Virgin! Why didn’t I give it to her; then I would only have lost a week’s income…but we didn’t want to yield. My daughter, especially, opposed it overtly; for myself, I admit, I would have consented.

  “That made the peasant angry. If you had seen the treble way she looked at my daughter! ‘You don’t want to?’ she said. “Adieu.’ She struck my daughter’s chest lightly, who took no account of it, and she went away, muttering threats in a hoarse voice, which I couldn’t comprehend.

  “The next day my daughter got up with a violent fever, feeling great pains in the chest. What she had liked the best before caused her disgust, and, ordinarily so cheerful, she no longer said a word to me, and always sat there motionless.

  “That lasted six weeks.

  “The physicians could not understand it at all. It cost me large sums every day to pay for drugs. The drugs were ineffective; the malady only got worse.

  “One evening I told my chagrins to one of my neighbors, a woman of great sense. ‘Look,’ she said to me, ‘I’m certain of it—someone has cast a spell on your daughter.’

  “That was an idea that had come to my mind more than once.

  “That unknown old peasant woman to whom we hadn’t wanted to give credit, who went away full of anger, who had touched my daughter on the chest where she was suffering the most... There was no longer any doubt; she was a witch, and the cause of my daughter’s illness.

  “I had heard talk of a shepherd, a savant man, if they exist, who knew medicine better than a physician. He possesses admirable secrets for curing all sorts of ills, and at one time, it was him that had lifted the spell cast on one of my cousins, to whom someone had given epilepsy.

  “I begged him to come and see my daughter. When he had seen her he shook his head and said: ‘It’s a spell, but a spell I can’t lift. She’ll die of it. In any case, you’ll know who has cast the spell, for the witch will come to your house on the day when your daughter renders her last sigh.’

  “The shepherd had spoken only too true in saying that she would die. The next day...”

  At that point the poor woman’s sobs burst forth in spite of her efforts to suppress them.

  When she had recovered slightly, she continued in these terms:

  “She had just been buried, and I was praying on my knees for the repose of her soul when someone knocked softly on the door. ‘Come,’ someone said. Oh, Monsieur, I saw the witch appear!

  “‘Go away!’ I shouted. ‘Go away, scoundrel, you who have caused my child to perish.’

  “If you had seen the infernal creature’s feigned surprise! Beside myself, I threw myself upon her to strangle her. One of my neighbors held me back.

  “The hypocritical witch! She swore on her great gods that she did not know what we wanted her to say…she was as innocent as a newborn babe…she had simply
come in search of the handiwork that she had given to be done.

  “I took that handiwork in order to throw it in the fire, but strength abandoned me and I fell down inert.

  “When I came round, she had gone. She had left the money she owed me on the table. I would not touch that money for all the gold in the world. It served to have masses said for the soul of my poor child, may God grant her peace and mercy.”

  He listened to that story with the respect that is owed to misfortune, and when the mother had finished he did not seek to demonstrate to her that spells and witchcraft are absurd superstitions. The most accurate and convincing reasoning would have remained futile before the belief and prejudices with which she had been surrounded since the cradle.

  He consoled the old woman as best he could, and when she had gone he sighed bitterly. He thought about the strange and absurd contradictions that one finds among people deprived of the enlightenment of education, among people who believe in witches and who deny the benefits of vaccine. Everything that degrades, everything that debases the human species is welcomed eagerly; people are only incredulous regarding the truth.

  THE BEGGAR’S SOU

  1827

  The Pauper: Poor blind man,

  if you please, my good lady.

  The Innkeeper’s Wife: There’s nothing to give,

  my worthy man; may God assist you.

  The Pauper: May the Devil take you,

  damned woman, confirmed miser.

  The Innkeeper’s Wife: When will it please God

  to deliver us from this rabble of beggars?

  If you have traveled in Flanders you have encountered—it cannot be otherwise—some vagabond of tall stature clad in a ragged smock, with stout stick in his hand, and whose heavy tread is forcefully emphasized by a heavy pair of clogs. The pains of the heart and the burning thoughts of ambition had never impoverished his long, stiff, thick and bushy hair. Gall would have accused his low and narrow brow of incapacity; according to Lavater, his physiognomy did not lack cunning and his dull eyes and features degraded by ignoble habits revealed a being withered since youth by idleness, poverty and contagious examples.