The Angel Asrael

by S. Henry Berthoud

  Stunned by their seductions, Asrael fell into the arms of one of them, making her repeat that she would love him forever. The next day, his perfidious lover laughed at the promises she had made him, and ran to lavish her transports on another.

  After that fatal day, Asrael, alone among the fallen spirits, wept with bitterness over the horrible existence to which he found himself condemned. The horror and the tortures of Hell mattered little to him; what he regretted, the evil that consumed him, was the memory of Nephta, and of her tenderness; that was an unbearable isolation, a void that human words cannot express. As he once had in Heaven, he experienced imperiously the need for love, but alas, he no longer had Nephta to love him, as in Heaven. To speak of love to the sisters of demons only resulted in exciting their ridicule and mockery. Saint Theresa depicted the torture of the rebel spirits very well in saying: “The unfortunates, they are unable to love!”

  The adventures of Daniel and Jeanne awoke in Asrael I know not what vague hope of finding on earth a love to respond to his love. The devotion of that young woman and the partial resemblance of his own misfortunes to those of the unfortunate woman excited his interest to the highest degree. In spite of Satan’s orders he took pleasure in conveying from Daniel to Jeanne and from Jeanne to Daniel their words of love. He consoled them by his active protection, and, for the price of so many benefits, he asked them to tell him the story of their amours in earth.

  “Those impetuous and passionate accounts exalted him to such a point that he resolved, no matter what the cost, to be loved once again. With that design, he asked Satan for permission to spend two years on the earth, making a pact either to bring him a privileged soul, or, in the contrary case, to lose his wings and his title of angel, and to be eternally relegated to live among the simple mortals condemned to the fire.

  Satan accorded him that pact, and Asrael took flight for earth.

  V. The Chatelaine

  On emerging from the somber and burning gulfs of Hell, Asrael felt himself assailed by numerous sensations that were simultaneously energetic and confused. The pure air inebriated him with vertigo; his dazzled eyes closed under the radiant floods of daylight, and the profound calm of nature produced a sort of numbness replete with emptiness in the angel accustomed to the execrable tumult of the eternal abysms.

  That astonishment was gradually succeeded by an indescribable wellbeing, such as Asrael had not experienced since his fall. It seemed to him that a heavy burden had been removed from his breast, and that a new existence was beginning for him. Yielding to a child-like joy, he played for a long time in the atmosphere, warmed by the first rays of the rising sun. Everything became, for the cherub, ineffable and unalloyed enjoyment. The dew of the clouds bathed his limbs soiled by the filthy smoke of Hell, and rendered them flexibility and freshness. The wind blew through his hair and came to caress his forehead softly. Finally, a sad and soft smile parted his lips, contracted for so many centuries by the shriveling of despair.

  Then he smoothed the plumage of his wings voluptuously, effacing the remains of the mud that still tarnished them. Afterwards, he flew and soared beneath the most vivid rays of the sun, in order to gild those wings with the brilliant and rich reflections of the star’s rays.

  The songs of birds, the murmur of waves, the quivering of trees whose crowns were swayed by the morning breeze, the thousand harmonious voices of nature that rose toward the sky like a hymn of gratitude for the Creator, made the angel feel better, as the kiss of the only woman who has remained faithful to him in his distress makes an unfortunate man feel better, as the cares of a mother make a sick child feel better, and as a naïve memory of the time of his youth makes a man disillusioned by disappointment and experience feel better.

  Nevertheless, when the coolness of the evening came to penetrate the cherub’s limbs and make them shiver, he felt returned to himself, to the sentiment of his misery and the memory of the motives that had brought him to the abode of men. Fulfilling the pact contracted with Satan was of scant importance to him—oh, no importance at all. What he wanted, for which he did not believe his demotion from an angel of darkness to the torture and slavery of simple damned souls, to be too high a price to pay, was amour, to be loved, to experience once again the sensations that he recalled, at least vaguely, of the sublime inebriations of divine amour and the tenderness of Nephta.

  Then the angel remembered Heaven, and began to weep. And all night long his tears flowed, and all night long he blessed those tears, for he had not, alas, been able to weep for a very long time.

  The power of the reproved angels over humans is one of the deadly consequences of the sin of our first fathers. From the fatal day when the seductions of Eve, the victim of the serpent, drew the excessively weak Adam into disobedience, mortals became slaves of demons, and demons received the power to tempt them and to use all means to succeed in doming them. They could, at their whim, remain invisible while extending their traps, or put on human appearances, or even take on the features of living individuals, and by that means lessen the guard mounted by the prey around whom, according to the holy Scriptures, they circle and roar like hungry lions.

  Before using that mysterious faculty, Asrael quit the oak in the branches of which he had nestled until dawn and, deploying his wings, flew toward a château whose high towers surged forth on the summit of a hill. The castellan was about to go hunting; horses were waiting at the foot of the perron, and the varlets and the lords, falcons on their wrists or dogs on the leash, were standing there awaiting their master. The latter soon appeared; although already old, age did not seem to have depleted his strength; he leapt lightly on to his charger, and then, looking toward the perron and being astonished only to see pages there come to enjoy their seigneur’s departure, he called out two or three times, urgently:

  “Lydorie! Lydorie!”

  Then a young woman appeared, a young woman whose features offered to the gaze something bold and imposing. Pale, but with a pallor that suited her noble physiognomy, her eyebrows and her great dark eyes, her hair bound and raised on to the top of her head, her tall stature was imprisoned in a robe that designed her gracious and severe figure. She came out, smiling at the old man’s impatience, putting no less slowness into disposing the pleats of her robe and knotting the cords of her girdle. Certain of the power that she exercised over her father, and proud of abusing it, she spent a long time examining her mount’s harness, adjusting it several times. Finally, she sat down nonchalantly in the high saddle. Then the horn sang, the voices of the beaters rag out, and the barking of the dogs and the bellicose whinnying of the horses replied to them.

  At that tumult, Lydorie’s eyes sparkled and a vivid redness animated her cheeks. Raising her hand, she repeated the clamors of the hunt, struck the hack stamping its feet beneath her with her crop, and, without waiting to see whether the others were ready, she departed at the gallop, drawing after her a flood of horsemen and dogs.

  No obstacle stopped her, not the ditches to be leapt, the thickets to be penetrated or the steep slopes to be scaled. The stag, the stag—that was the sole idea that dominated her. It was necessary that she be there when the hunter, setting foot on the ground, struck the animal at bay. Halloo! Halloo! This way! This way! You’re following a false trail! You’re going wrong! To me! To me! Victory. Horn sound and resound! Victory! Victory!

  How beautiful she is, thought the angel, and how that fiery soul, passionate for frivolous pleasures, would burn with a veritable amour! She consumes all the activity of her senses in the emotions of the hunt; but when a heart comes to comprehend her heart, a voice will come that says: “Love me and I will give you my amour. Love me and I will reveal to you what the fire is that is devouring you, the fire you do not know how to direct, or upon what object. Love me and we shall have long days of delight and ecstasy; you will quiver with transports unknown to your virginal soul; one idea will dominate you, one idea will no longer quit you. What importance henceforth will chagrins, anxieties, tear
s and despair itself have to you? You will not longer have a void in your soul; you will love, you will be loved.”

  Yes, that is the one that ought to belong to him, that is the one who ought to console him for the loss of Nephta, the one who ought to share with him the eternity of Hell, the Hell that will cease to be redoubtable, since amour will have penetrated it. It is necessary that he set to work straight away, without delay! Where could he find a more beautiful and more passionate creature?

  Immediately, Asrael assembled a few of the primitive atoms of which nature is composed, and which the production and destruction of beings combine in thousands and thousands of different forms. He mixed those atoms; he fecundated them with his breath; he penetrated them with the creative heat of the Sun; of that mixture and that heat, precious stones did not take long to be born, and the matter that the alchemists have sought in vain to produce with their search for the philosopher’s stone: gold.

  Furling his wings then, and dressing himself with the tunic and hat of a seigneur of aristocratic appearance, Asrael came to sound a horn before the drawbridge of the manor and request the hospitality that is owed to every sire of good lineage gone astray at the approach of nightfall.

  VI. Hospitality

  Scarcely had the angel sounded the horn for the third time than the drawbridge was lowered and two men-at-arms, spears in hand, came to recognize the newcomer and enquire as to what he wanted. At the sight of the unknown seigneur’s elegant costume and magnificent charger, they bowed respectfully and said to him:

  “God and Saint Julien be blessed. You will find good shelter, a good table and a good welcome here.”

  A squire took the angel’s horse by the bridle and led it into the court of honor. There, a page held the stirrup in order that Asrael could descend without encumbrance. Then he marched straight to the reception hall and announced:

  “The guest of Messire le Chevalier de Saint-Hylaire.”

  The sire de Saint-Hylaire received Asrael with an almost theatrical gravity, without getting up and without saying a word.

  Lydorie came to present him with a cup of fuming hippocras, and two varlets announced that a bath was being prepared for him, and that their master’s guest would soon begin to refresh himself there after the fatigues of the road.

  Such were the rules of Flemish hospitality in those days that the person admitted to a manor was only designated by the name of guest. Such a custom was also observed among the ancient Greeks; they would have thought it lacking in decorum to ask the name of the person who had recourse to their hospitality.

  If politeness imposed that discretion, however, it did not prevent curiosity from forming conjectures and seeking to divine the name, the title or at least the homeland of the stranger, and Lydorie and her women neglected nothing in that regard.

  That was, moreover, quite natural. Recluses in the narrow circle of the castellany in which they had been born, women, in the epoch of which we are speaking, led an existence of claustral monotony. Praying to God, supervising domestic labors, working on detailed embroideries, masterpieces of skill and even more of perseverance, sometimes running after a deer or hunting a wild boar—that was everything to which their way of life was limited. So you can imagine that the arrival of a stranger was good fortune for them.

  In exchange for the hospitality he received, the guest, moreover, did not fail to recount what he had seen during his voyages or following his route. Even if he had only come from five leagues away, he would find an attentive audience whom he could inform of new and unknown details. Without commerce, almost without maintaining any relations with one another, without any high roads to connect them, the Flemings, especially the Flemings of the Middle Ages lived, for the most part, in complete isolation. They nourished themselves on the wheat they cultivated and livestock they bred; local hops and barley gave them beer. They had flax to make vestments, wool to fashion the cloth of their coats.

  In that era of simple mores, in which a man was born, lived and died in the same place, like a plant, for what wellbeing would they have gone in search by traveling or trading? Without fear for the future, they were marvelously content in the present. Less sophisticated in their habits than their descendants would become, they possessed in exchange the absence of anxieties, the joy of the soul and the happiness of existing from day to day, glad when an unexpected episode came to create a diversion from that good monotony and replace the banal interest of the fantastic legends of old and stories of feats of arms told and retold twenty times over, if not more.

  All that can, therefore, explain the urgency with which Lydorie and the women of her entourage put into seeking to divine who the sire was who was receiving hospitality at the château that evening.

  “He has a bronzed complexion and dark eyes,” said one. “He must have come from the Holy Land; it’s the African sun that has burned his face and hands in that fashion.”

  “Nevertheless,” observed another, “he seems to be too young for you to have guessed correctly; his hands are so frail and delicate that they prove their lack of habitude in handling the lance. Look at the hands of the sire de Saint-Hylaire and the men-at-arms, even the youngest, and you’ll confess that I’m right.”

  “I know the coats of arms of all the Seigneurs of Cambrésis,” Lydorie objected, “but I’ve never heard mention of those with which his tunic is divided: two golden arrows on a sable field, with the device: I must succeed.”

  “I’ve heard tell that Eustache de Nivernois, nephew of Monseigneur the Bishop of Cambrai, Messire Jean de Béthune, arrived at his uncle’s house not long ago; the young sire might well be him.”

  “He’s going to emerge from the bath, Dame Berthe, and you can mention Monseigneur Jean de Béthune as if by chance; we’ll see what he says.”

  “Shh! Here he comes.”

  And the group of ladies resumed their needlework actively, in such a fashion as to create the impression that the work in question had never ceased to preoccupy them intensely. Nevertheless, they were not plying the needle so hard that they did not dart surreptitious glances at the young sire, who was advancing toward them with a marvelous grace. Already he was pronouncing the fulsome words, of an exaggerated gallantry, that characterized courtesy and good education in those days, when the sire de Saint-Hylaire came back into the hall and ordered the varlets and maidservants to set out the supper.

  “It will soon be curfew, my guest, and it is necessary that it does not surprise us at table. It’s always better not to depart from the established order; so, come this way. Sit down in the place of honor, at the end of the table here, to my right and facing my daughter. Hats off now, hats off, everyone, and let our worthy chaplain recite the benedicite.

  The chaplain obeyed, and everyone spoke the responses to the prayer with fervor, with their eyes lowered. When the orison was concluded, the chaplain and the entire assembly made the sign of the cross. To general surprise, the stranger was pale and almost dying in his chair; sweat was running down his face, and a convulsive agitation as shaking his limbs.

  People hastened round him and wanted to give him aid.

  “It’s nothing,” he said, “it’s nothing. I’ve just experienced the afflictions of a malady to which I’ve been subject since childhood. You’ll see them dissipate, and calm restored to my visage.”

  In fact, the symptoms that were agitating him gradually disappeared; his features became serene again, and nothing any longer remained but a gracious pallor, at least in the opinion of the ladies of the entourage. All were in accord, moreover, in singing the praises of the young man, who deployed a mild affability full of charm. They had never heard tales told with such artistry; no pilgrim or crusader had ever been able to rival him in describing the habits of different lands, the costumes that were worn there and the usages observed there. The towers of Notre-Dame de Paris, the beautiful manuscripts of the King of France, the camel-hair tents of the Sudan, the lands where people have thick lips and black skin as thick as an ox-hid
e breastplate, countries inhabited by dwarfs where it as daylight for six months of the year, and thousands of things of which they had only heard vague mention, well, he had seen them, or he knew voyagers who had told him about them.

  Lydorie, her women, the varlets and even the old sire de Saint-Hylaire listened to him with an attention so great that no one heard the curfew rung, and the belfry chimed midnight to everyone’s great surprise.

  Then the almoner, one the castellan’s orders, commenced the evening prayer; but at the first sign of the cross, the stranger was seized once again by the afflictions of is malady. The chaplain exhorted him to retire, saying to him that fatigue sometimes causes such accidents, that, in view of his unhealthy constitution, he was not required to take part in the prayer, and that a brief mental orison would substitute for it. To that effect, he cited the canons of the Church and a papal bull.

  The stranger yielded to such good reasons, and two varlets escorted him to the room where he was to spend the night.

  VII. The Ruse

  In spite of their organism being far superior to the organism of mortals, demons are not, like the angels who remained faithful, initiates to the mysteries of human thought. They can only read thoughts by means of conjectures and with the aid of surprise or study.

  In order to divine the thoughts and sensations of a young woman devoid of suspicion who thinks she has nothing to hide, however, that celestial gift is unnecessary.

  Asrael understood easily what a profound impression had been produced in Lydorie by his discourse, honeyed with courtesy, and specially the mystery with which he was enveloped; a mystery beneath which, adroitly, he allowed a high lineage and rich domains to be glimpsed. The young woman’s pride was already vaguely caressing, without her admitting it to herself, the hope that the young chevalier might fall in love with her. Upon that hope—improbable, she knew—she devoted herself to a thousand brilliant thoughts that were only, she told herself, vain dreams devoid of reality; vain dreams to which she surrendered because they were pure folly, because their charming and sweet spell was merely a suave perfume that embalmed everything around her, that would evaporate forever, and without leaving any trace.