The Angel Asrael

by S. Henry Berthoud

  Tourneys in which the handsome knight broke lances in honor of his lady and wore on the crest of his helmet a pledge of amour given to him by Lydorie, groups of ladies of the bedchamber, varlets, richly-clad pages and numerous vassals delighted Lydorie imagination in that fashion all night long, and were reproduced in her dreams. She amused herself with them as if with a book of chivalry, like a romance that communicates melancholy, and sad and tender thoughts. She laughed at the fragility of the seductive scenes that she created and took pleasure in setting out before her imagination; but she never ceased creating new ones and intoxicating herself with their charms. Like those imprudent children who amuse themselves with firebrands, she had ignited a blaze while she thought she was still only playing.

  That is what the fallen angel understood, who, stripped of his terrestrial appearances, had come to sit down beside Lydorie’s bed. Undoubtedly, he recognized, pride and ambition had been solely dominant thus far in the damsel’s soul, but pride and ambition might lead there to amour. And the young woman, whose heart was beating so rapidly at the idea of adorning her head with the crown of a duchesse, would perhaps not recoil one day before the idea of changing existence and sitting down on a demon’s fiery throne. Oh, how much less frightful Hell would then become for Asrael! What would his dolor and despair matter to him then? He would have a friend to listen to and console his suffering, a voice to encourage him and sustain him.

  To work, then! To work!

  Profiting from the rest of the night, he created, with the aid of magical means, rich carriages and a numerous retinue. He enjoined his new servants, subaltern spirits at the orders of demons, to come and join him toward evening at the castellany of Saint-Hylaire, and, at daybreak, he was back in the bedroom to which the pages had conducted him the previous evening.

  Soon, a varlet came to inform him that, after the breakfast that was already served, everyone was going hunting.

  The hunt was animated and joyful. An enormous wild boar had been discovered in the nearby marsh. They headed in that direction. Lydorie, at the head of the most ardent, and Asrael, always by her side, did not quit the tracks of the ferocious beast for a moment, and showed an unparalleled boldness. Twice she struck the monster with the short spear she was holding, and twice, without the aid of Asrael, who attacked the boar, she would have been unhorsed and exposed to the direst peril. In the end, she delivered a thrust with so much dexterity that the boar, struck dead, fell like a mass and did not get up again.

  The commonalty of the dangers that they had run together established from then on between Asrael and Lydorie a kind of intimacy full of confidence and abandon. They continued throughout the rest of the hunt to ride side by side, talking about a hundred different things and putting a price the least of those things by making them seem important, speaking of them as if they were secrets. So, however frivolous their conversation was, they suspended it when a third person arrived and resumed it thereafter in low voices, not without looking several times to see whether the importunate individuals might be coming back.

  The day passed in that fashion; when they had returned to the foot of the perron, Asrael, who had arrogated the exclusive right to render Lydorie all the petty cares that, without apparent importance, nevertheless say and are worth so much, launched himself from his horse in order to hold the damsel’s stirrup, and it was on his shoulder that she leaned in order to descend from the hack.

  Leaning over the balustrade of the perron, the daughter of the seigneur de Saint-Hylaire was making sure, before going back inside the château, that the grooms were not neglecting to care for her favorite mount, covered in sweat, when the sound of a horn was heard. The drawbridge was lowered, and a magnificent hunting-carriage came into the court of honor.

  “Monseigneur,” said one of the squires, approaching Asrael, “we have been trying to catch up with you since this morning, but while we were searching the forest one of the sire de Saint-Hylaire’s men-at-arms came to tell us that you were in this château; we’ve come here to receive your orders.”

  Asrael turned his head as if to hide a tear.

  “It only remains for me, then,” he said, “to take my leave of my worthy host, and you, noble demoiselle.” Leaning toward Lydorie he added, in a low voice: “I shall long retain a sweet memory of this day.”

  “Do you think so, my guest?” exclaimed the old seigneur. “No, upon my soul, you shall not depart today. You are too trusty and too merry a companion for that. No; unless you have some complaint to make about my hospitality, you’ll stay in this château for a few more days, or weeks, not to say months, if that doesn’t bore you too much. One doesn’t often have the opportunity to encounter knights of your worth. Give me your hand, and promise me that you’ll stay.”

  Asrael alleged a few excuses.

  “I don’t want to listen to you. It’s necessary to obey me, or you’ll leave an ill renown here for docility and courtesy.”

  “True!” said Lydorie. “And we’ll all think badly of you.”

  “That would be a very harsh punishment and very unjust, but perhaps it’s better to submit to it than expose oneself to assured chagrins and penalties without remedy.”

  “I don’t believe,” Lydorie interjected, feigning not to understand him, but whose burning cheeks and lowered gaze revealed her emotion, “that staying a few days more at my father’s château would be an assured chagrin and a penalty without remedy for you.”

  “Oh! Why do you not want to understand me, damoiselle?”

  Lydorie did not reply.

  “It’s necessary that I leave. It’s necessary that I escape the peril, if there’s still time—and perhaps, alas, there isn’t! Oh, why was I separated from my retinue? Why did Monseigneur your father welcome me to his domain?”

  Without raising her eyes to look at Asrael, Lydorie still kept silent.

  “Now that you understand me, now that you know my secret, you can see that it’s necessary for me to leave. You won’t retain me any longer, will you? If I stayed, it would be necessary for you to see me, it would be necessary for you to hear me, for I wouldn’t be able to hide my amour from you any longer. It’s necessary that I leave, you see. Squires, make everything ready for my departure; and you, servants of the noble sire de Saint-Hylaire, receive this guerdon to thank you for your kind attentions and to help you remember me.”

  So saying, he threw them a purse containing more than a hundred gold coins.

  Suddenly, while Asrael, leaning over the balustrade of the balcony, was giving a few orders to his servants, the young woman marched toward him, and, placing her hand on the arm of the individual she believed to be a knight, she said to him with an inexpressible inflection of her voice, full of emotion:

  “Stay!”

  VIII. Deception

  For a month Asrael stayed at the Château de Saint-Hylaire, and no one gave any thought to seeing him leave, much less being astonished at such a long sojourn. Far from it, he found that he had entered to such a point into the habits and good graces of everyone, that no one did anything except by or for Monseigneur Asrael, and the latter formed the center at which all tender attentions and almost all ideas ended up. For one thing, the grace of his manners and the charm of his discourse had won hearts; secondly, his love for Lydorie and Lydorie’s love for him seemed to be tacitly recognized and adopted as an absolute article of faith. It was something received by all, even by interested parties: a mute accord, but of such an irrefutable authenticity that everyone acted as if it had been proclaimed aloud.

  So, a benevolent complicity with that amour showed itself incessantly and everywhere attentive to favor it and caress it. In order to please Lydorie, people obliged Monseigneur Asrael; in order to please Monseigneur Asrael, everyone obliged Lydorie. If they were seen chatting together, people refrained from coming between the two of them and withdrew discreetly. While hunting, the hunters allowed them to progress together, and if they saw them heading for an indirect path, all of them, without ev
en exchanging a knowing glance, without even smiling, out of habit and because the tenderness of the two lovers was so solemnly known, turned their bridles and took another direction. Finally, if vassals had a favor to obtain, they addressed themselves without hesitation to Monseigneur Asrael, for their young mistress could not refuse Monseigneur Asrael anything, and Monseigneur Saint-Hylaire had no other will than that of his daughter. Asrael, Lydorie and the sire de Saint-Hylaire found nothing strange or inappropriate about that mode of intervention, for they shared, as we have already said, that intimate consciousness of the reality and authenticity of their amour.

  However, Asrael has not yet asked the sire de Saint-Hylaire for the hand of his daughter Lydorie, and the old seigneur did not yet know by any other name than Asrael the man whom he already loved as a son-in-law. Confident as a man whom no one dared deceive can be, little accustomed and perhaps scantly capable of reflection, and most of all dominated by the indolent bonhomie of the Flemish, he knew that his daughter was loved by a rich young lord, courteous, becoming and nobly born; that was sufficient for him and it would never have occurred to him to enquire about Asrael’s homeland, his family or a thousand other items of information that prudence would have necessitated. He liked Asrael, Asrael loved his daughter; the rest therefore seemed to the worthy seigneur to be unimportant accessories that could not impede a marriage that was in his eyes, inevitable.

  As for the possibility that anyone might love his daughter and aspire to make her love him without being of noble lineage, that appeared to him to be so absurd that the idea never crossed his mind.

  Without sharing that blind confidence entirely, Lydorie found so much charm in Asrael’s tenderness that a vague anxiety rarely appeared to her, which she immediately drove away. Nevertheless, from time to time, that anxiety returned to assail her and mingle her happiness with I know not what sentiments of bitterness and dread. Often, in Asrael’s absence, she promised herself to dispel the doubt, to address positive questions to him and to provoke satisfactory explanations. Once in Asrael’s presence, however, a modest embarrassment took hold of her and struggled against her resolution to speak; soon, at her lover’s soft words and the spell of his gaze, she forgot her designs and only any longer experienced one idea, or rather one sensation: the love of Asrael.

  The fallen angel abandoned himself wantonly to the charm of such a situation. Not that the terrestrial passion he experienced could compare to the delights and transports of cherubim, for amour down here is only a poor reflection of the amour of Heaven, but, cast for so many centuries among demons full of hatred, he felt as glad of the emotions he was experiencing as an exile at the distant sight of his lost homeland. Hell and the pact made with Satan only appeared to him to be like a painful dream devoid of reality. Entirely committed to the present moment, he forgot the past and the future. Loved! Loved! He, who was been stamped with eternal reprobation, was loved by an adorable creature who had even sacrificed her pride for him, for she did not know his homeland, his rank or any name but Asrael, and she loved him.

  “Oh, it is not true, demoiselle,” he said to her once when, sitting on a high turret, they were savoring together the calm of a beautiful autumn night, “that for a veritable love, rank and obscurity, fortune and poverty, fortune and misfortune are vain distinctions that amour cannot admit? Is it not true that, if you love, you will not recoil before the greatest sacrifices and nothing can diminish our tenderness?”

  “Yes. If I had given my heart, I would always love the one who has received it; I would associate myself with his misfortune; I would console him in his dolors; I would share his suffering without a murmur—what am I saying?—gladly.”

  “What! Nothing would discourage you? You’d renounce your peaceful life for difficulties and poverty?”

  “What would it matter? Would not the glory of my lover, my husband, be a wealth, a treasure, happiness?”

  “But what if that lover, that husband, had nothing to offer you but despair and an eternity of dolor?”

  “What would it matter? I would be proud of his illustrious name, and everyone would still envy me.”

  “So, even if the man you love had deceived you, even if he had put on deceptive appearances, even if he had promised you the crown of a duchesse and...”

  “Ah!” said Lydorie.

  And she lifted the head that as resting on Asrael’s shoulder and removed from Asrael’s hand the hand that it was holding. And then, pale, she attached her gaze to him, which seemed to be darting flames.

  “Why pretend any longer, Lydorie?” the angel continued. “Why hide the truth from you any longer? I’m not what I appear to be; I’m not a Duc, I’m not a knight; I’m...”

  He stopped raising his eyes to look at Lydorie, and he saw so much anger in the damsel’s features that he thought his fatal secret had been divined,

  And that anger did not leave him any hope; for, he could not be mistaken; indignation and scorn were the sole cause of it; indignation and scorn alone, without any residue of love.

  To annihilate her tenderness instantly, he thought, it can only be the terrible aspect of Hell. Nothing else could have prevailed.

  Courage failed the cherub, and, in order to make his happiness last a few seconds more, since he still had a year and a half to spend on earth, he interrupted his deadly confidence and said, making use of the first idea that presented itself to his troubled imagination:

  “I’m only the son of a merchant.”

  “And you raised your amour as far as me, wretch!” cried Lydorie, standing up and stamping her foot. “Insolent! It needs a creature of your species to insult a noble family thus!”

  “Listen to me, Lydorie. To reach as far as you, to see you, for you alone, I have sold my father’s patrimony, I have spent in three months the wealth that he had gained by labor throughout his life. I have destroyed my future—and all that for love of you. Oh, tell me, would a noble lord have loved you to that extent?”

  But she was not listening.

  “Men-at-arms, come here! Seize this wretch and throw him from the height of the postern. He has just outraged me in a cowardly fashion. Do it, or, on the salvation of my soul, it will cost you dear!”

  Asrael threw himself on his knees. “Oh for pity’s sake! In the name of the amour that you had for me, in the name of my old mother who has only me to console her, have pity! Mercy!”

  She only responded with an imperious gesture to the men-at-arms. They seized Asrael, dragged him to the edge of the postern and let him fall into the profound ditch. But the angel of darkness, deploying his wings and causing his crown of fire to spring forth, immediately reappeared before Lydorie.

  “My turn!” he said. “Follow me, murderess!”

  “Mercy!” she cried. “Mercy! Pity!”

  Asrael did not reply.

  “My father! My father!”

  “I begged you for a mother; you did not even listen to me.”

  “Oh, who can save me?”

  “Nothing. It will be done to you as you have done. You have been devoid of pity; no one will have pity for you. You have not loved; you will be thrown into the abyss of hatred. Come.”

  He seized her in his arms and, flying through space, he presented his victim to Satan.

  But Satan responded to him with a bitter laugh.

  “Lydorie de Saint-Hylaire belonged to us already by virtue of pride; this is not a privileged soul.”

  And Asrael returned to earth, discouraged and desperate, and resolved to act as a demon and to drag pure souls into Hell, not this time in order to be loved, but solely for the pleasure of dooming them and associating their misery with his own.

  IX. The Boatmen

  Asrael directed his flight toward other countries. He traveled Artois and Hainaut by turns, but without ever descending to earth and always cursing the fatal deception that had made him quit Hell and risk the almost certain degradation of his power as an infernal spirit. The discouragement and the disgust weighed upon his
imagination and almost produced in him the execrable somnolence that sometimes suspends the dolors of the region of Hell.

  He went forth aimlessly and came back the same way; sometimes he hovered over a village, and his eyes gazed without seeing; sometimes he wanted to return to the abyss, but a mysterious force rejected him and made him remain on earth. His sadness appeared so great and his dejection so complete that once, one of the good angels charged with standing sentinel at the entrance to Heaven opened the door slightly, in order that the harmony of celestial singing might console and reanimate his fallen brother.

  On hearing that divine music, Asrael could not hold back his tears, and he struck his breast in despair.

  “Oh, what have I done? What have I done? Cursed be the traitor who drew me into the abyss! Cursed be my weakness that enabled me to listen to him! Cursed be the hour when I was born! Why did the supreme Will not leave me in oblivion? I was fortunate, for one is fortunate not to feel, not to exist! Yes, I would bless oblivion if I were able to return there; because for me, there is no happiness and repose except in oblivion. O my former brothers, you who were able to resist the traps of the rebel angels, you who are still admitted to the sight of the Lord, tell me: can your divine prayers not soften his wrath and obtain the clemency of death for Asrael, for Asrael who detests his immortality? Oh, I am not as guilty as the other rebel angels. If they had not said to me: ‘Nephta is among us, Nephta is weeping for her Asrael to come and share her fate,’ alas, the lightning of the Almighty would not have furrowed my brow.”

  “Unfortunate, we can only shed tears with you. Why these plaints? Why these prayers? They are futile. Nothing can change the immutable will of God.”