The Angel Asrael

by S. Henry Berthoud

  “My brother, are you suffering a little less?” she asked him, with an ineffable pity.

  Asrael looked at her without responding, for the charm that he had experienced at the chants of the nuns, the sight of Sister Clotilde caused him to experience again. He had never seen those blue eyes, that calm forehead, that white and regular physiognomy; he had never heard that ingenuous voice; never had that frail and soft hand sustained his sick forehead as it was sustaining it at that moment. Nevertheless, he felt at the sight of Sister Clotilde the intimate joy that one senses on rediscovering a childhood friend, on seeing once again the place where one came into the world.

  “Are you suffering a little less, my brother?” Sister Clotilde asked again, in her soft voice.

  “Oh! Yes, I’m suffering less! Much less than just now, a little while ago, before losing consciousness.”

  “Just now? A little while ago? But it’s four days since we found you on the bank of the Escaut.”

  “Four days? I’ve been able, for four days, to abstract myself from the despair I endure!”

  “Are you very unhappy, then, with much to lament?”

  “Unhappy, yes! To lament! Alas, I’ve never heard a word of compassion, never received a gaze of pity since the fatal moment…since my birth, I mean.”

  “My brother, you’re still very weak, and so much agitation might augment your illness.”

  “No, no. Look, I’m no longer suffering as I have suffered, as I was suffering still four days ago! See, I’m breathing easily; a fatal imprint is no longer there on my brow. The gnawing worm that was devouring my heart has ceased to make itself felt, and benedictions come in spite of me to wander over my lips. Benedictions! Oh, you don’t know, my sister—my sister! alas, that name is sweet to give—you don’t know how much joy one experiences in no longer being accursed and no longer hearing oneself accursed. Is it not the case that you are not cursing me? Is it not the case that I don’t inspire horror in you? Is it not the case that you feel sorry for me and that I move you to pity?”

  “It’s a duty for me to feel sorry for you and to love you. Are you not my brother in Jesus Christ?”

  A shiver agitated all Asrael’s limbs; he hid his head in his hands, and when he lifted it again, his eyes were red and his cheeks bathed with tears.

  “A word from you has destroyed all my illusions and has returned me to reality, the deadly reality. Alas, without that cruel word I might almost have allowed myself to hope. Hope! What dolor, what tortures would be redoubtable with that idea; hope! But no, it will never calm my fear, it will never sustain me in my torments. Two abysms surround me: behind, the crime and the sentence: “Eternity!” before, the punishment: “Eternity!”

  “My sister,” said an old nun, “The sick man is talking too much; he’s delirious.”

  Sister Clotilde wept.

  The old nun went on: “It’s necessary not to be moved to pity, Clotilde, by capricious words, which don’t even make sense... But after all, I’m wrong to scold you, and my scolding will achieve nothing,” she added, indulgently, almost repenting her slight reprimand. “Like you, I’ve been compassionate, weeping at the slightest thing; habit, and perhaps, even more, the insensibility that age produces, have cured me of that weakness.”

  Sister Clotilde smiled at the nun, wiped away her tears, and was preparing to quit the sick man’s bed when the latter called her back.

  “In the name of God, in the name of all that is most sacred, don’t go away! My illness is appeased next to you, and I no longer feel it. Stay here, stay there; I’m as glad as in the times when I could pray.”

  The nun recoiled in an involuntary movement of fear, for the poor girl could not conceive that there existed on earth creatures sufficiently abandoned not to pray. Nevertheless, she immediately drew closer to Asrael and said to him:

  “Why despair of divine mercy? It is great and infinite. Whatever your crimes might be—for crimes alone can prevent one from praying—ask for God’s forgiveness.”

  “There is no more forgiveness for me.”

  “Hope.”

  “Hope is a word banished from my memory, a thought stifled in my heart.”

  “Believe me, try!”

  “There are judgments of God, terrible judgments, for which it is not permissible to have recourse to mercy.”

  “Well, if the justice of God frightens you, have recourse to the intercession of his divine mother; pray to her; she will request your pardon from her son, our Redeemer; I will unite my voice with yours.”

  “I’m not able to pray!”

  “Don’t deliver yourself to such despair. If prayer cannot spare you entirely from punishment, at least it can abridge its duration.”

  “Alas, what would thousands of years of expiations matter to me, if I could at least glimpse, after so much suffering, the faintest hope of salvation!”

  At that moment the office of sext began, and the choir of nuns chanted these terrible words:

  “The Lord is just; he crushes the heads of the wicked. Let all those who hate Sion be confounded and put to flight!

  “Let them be similar to the grass that grows on rooftops, to the grass that dries out before it is torn up.

  “To the grass that never fills either the hand of the reaper nor the bosom of the one who collects the sheaves.”

  Asrael uttered a loud cry.

  “Never hope for me, never!”

  XVII. The Prayer

  The invalid’s cry of despair caused Sister Clotilde to shed new tears; she resumed praying with devotion, in order to obtain from God, for the poor sinner, the sweetest of celestial benefits: hope.

  From that moment on, the young nun, allowing herself to yield to an indefinable charm, which gradually increased, hardly ever left the sick man’s bed. With the delicacy innate in women, which ensures that no other mortal hand is able, like theirs, to bandage and soothe a wound and no other voice calm and console an affliction, she carefully refrained henceforth from confronting Asrael with the idea that caused him such great terrors. Not that she renounced in the slightest her project of bringing the invalid back to the right path; but another instinct, no less special to women, the instinct of perseverance, awakened and rendered stronger by the obstacles, had informed Sister Clotilde that it was by skill, and by dint of time and mildness, that she would be able to obtain such a success.

  Using all her means of influence, therefore, including those that her sex and beauty gave her, she soon captivated Asrael to such a degree that his eyes, heavy with fever, could not close in slumber unless the nun was sitting there, beside the bed, praying or delivering herself to one of her dutiful tasks.

  Accustomed to such caprices on the part of the unfortunates that Providence sent to their care, and taking to heart the salvation of the suffering soul that they had encountered, the other nuns, by a pious complaisance, favored Asrael’s desires and hardly allowed the attendant he preferred to go far from his bed.

  Sister Clotilde did not take long to divine the manner in which it was necessary to approach the secret dolors of the patient without aggravating them, and to give birth in him to the desire for a good life on earth and for paradise in the other world. She talked to him incessantly about the wellbeing and the calm that she experienced in the cloister.

  “If you knew how happy I am!” she said. “I have no cares, for I live from day to day, confident in the bounty of the God who gives nourishment to little birds and who will no more abandon me than he abandons them. What cares do you expect me to experience? The wealth of the earth no longer concerns me. The life of the cloister is a foretaste of the life of heaven.

  “Tell me, what greater happiness could one invent than praying to God from evening to morning and from morning to evening? than intoxicating oneself on the ecstasy of prayer? than putting oneself thus, like the blissful, face to face with the Lord? I only interrupt so many ineffable joys to care for the sick, to bandage their wounds, to soothe their miseries, to console their chagrins a
nd render them confidence in the Lord’s mercy.

  “You do not know what a good satisfaction refreshes the mind when one sees the eyebrows of a sinner, contracted with despair, relaxing and allowing less bitter gazes to shine. You do not know, my brother, how joyfully one goes to sleep, blessing the Lord, when one hears lips stigmatized by the habit of blasphemy expressing pious words of repentance. For, you see, God is always ready to accept repentance; no sin exists, no fault and no crime, that he does not forgive the repentant.”

  In saying that, Sister Clotilde forgot to prepare the strips of cloth that she was turning in her fingers, or strip rose-petals in order to prepare balms; her eyes shone with a divine gleam and fascinated Asrael.

  Every day the nun’s influence over Asrael became more powerful; every day her words penetrated more deeply into the unfortunate’s heart and rendered his regrets at being excluded from Heaven more bitter. Oh, if it had only been necessary to repent…! Alas, for twenty centuries, and above all moment, he had experienced a very cruel repentance... But no, the word “never” stood between God and himself.

  It was therefore necessary to limit himself to the happiness he enjoyed at that moment, the fugitive happiness of seeing and hearing Sister Clotilde, or receiving the care that she gave him, of hearing her call him “My brother,” and of responding, in exchange for that cherished name, “My sister!”

  However, in seeking to exert her influence on Asrael and bring him to her, Sister Clotilde was subject to Asrael’s influence and went toward him. The image of the individual she wanted to convert no longer quit her; she was occupied with it all day long; by night she reproduced it in her dreams, and she pursued it when she awoke. The innocent creature was not alarmed by those symptoms and did not seek to put herself on guard against such a preoccupation. So the evil made rapid progress and the nun loved Asrael recklessly, although she still believed that she was only occupied so keenly with him because she wanted his conversion.

  Asrael read within Sister Clotilde’s heart, and saw with simultaneous joy and regret that celestial soul imprinted with terrestrial passions. The idea of dooming her, of dragging her with him into the eternal abysm, frightened him and horrified him, to such an extent that after several days of intimate struggles he resolved to distance himself from Sister Clotilde and save her from the peril that was menacing her without her being aware of it.

  One morning, on arriving beside her patient, Sister Clotilde found him standing up, dressed, with a traveler’s staff in his hand.

  “You want to leave?” she asked, going pale. And she repeated: “You want to leave?”

  And it was necessary for him to support her, as she felt faint.

  “Receive my adieux, my sister,” Asrael replied.

  “But you’re still too weak to leave the leprosarium so quickly. Your wounds are not scarred; fever scarcely leaves you. Stay for a few days more.”

  “It’s necessary for me to leave, my sister—I must! It would be criminal for me to stay in this place any longer. Adieu, then, and be blessed for the good that you have done me, blessed for the happiness that you have given me, blessed for the memory that you have put into my heart, which will never leave it henceforth.”

  Tears flowed from Sister Clotilde’s eyes, and her efforts could not stem those tears.

  “Adieu, then,” she said. “Adieu!”

  And she hid her face in her hands.

  Asrael drew away.

  Suddenly, Sister Clotilde ran after him and brought him back.

  “At least reconcile yourself with God before leaving. Leave me, in my chagrin, the sweet consolation that you are not lost for eternity and that I shall find you again in Heaven.”

  “Alas, any reconciliation between God and me is impossible. He could not forgive me.”

  “Well, at least pray! One single prayer, one single word of prayer! Oh, you won’t refuse me that—me, who collected you, dying; me, who cared for you as a true sister would have cared for her brother; me, who is weeping in quitting you.”

  Asrael smiled sadly and turned his head away.

  “Yes, pray! God is not inexorable; he will forgive you, for I have divined repentance in your heart. You repent of your sins, don’t you?”

  “Alas, if the greatest repentance would be worth my pardon, the gates of Heaven would not be closed to me for eternity.”

  “Pray, then, pray with me! For the sake of mercy, for the sake of pity, I ask you on my knees!”

  And she took Asrael’s hands and she drew him toward her, and she shed tears in torrents.

  Asrael yielded and knelt down, but without confidence and solely to please Sister Clotilde.

  The latter, after a short mental prayer, began saying one by one the words of an orison, and made Asrael repeat them, folding his joined hands in her own.

  As he repeated the words, Asrael felt a kind of blindfold come undone from over his eyes; a sublime joy took possession of his heart; a celestial light inundated him, and his soul, stigmatized with the seal of damnation, resumed its ardent gleam and its imperious need for tenderness. His eyes, which he had kept lowered at first, soon rose up, and it seemed to him that in the midst of the clouds the angels received his prayer and carried it to the feet of the Eternal.

  Suddenly, a feeble cry brought back to earth the dazzled gaze that he bore toward Heaven, to Sister Clotilde, who had fallen in a faint at his feet. At the sight of that adorable creature delivered to him, the demonic essence once again obtained the upper hand in Asrael’s soul; he seized the young woman and was about to draw her outside the cloister when he suddenly stopped.

  “Rather Hell than that!” he cried. “Rather Hell than Clotilde’s doom. Satan, I am vanquished. Plunge me once again into the abysms of Hell!”

  Scarcely had he proffered those last words, and at the very moment when he was ready to see the infernal abysms open before him, his angelic wings reappeared and deployed, as fresh and splendid as they had been in Heaven; the mystic aureole of the cherubim sprang forth around his head, and another angel—Nephta, his Nephta, Nephta, in whom he recognized all the features of Sister Clotilde—Nephta, rose with him into the heavens, and surrounded him with her fraternal arms.

  And a choir of angels surrounded them, and those angels sang the following hymn:

  How great is the mercy of the Lord, how mysterious and infinite are his ways!

  The cherub Asrael took part in the revolt of the evil angels, the victim of an execrable demonic trap and drawn by an excess of love for his divine sister, the beautiful Nephta.

  As a rebel, he had to suffer throughout eternity; as a rebel, he had to bear on his forehead the fatal seal of the reproved; as a rebel, he had to remain forever deprived of the presence of God.

  But Jehovah, touched by the intercession of the Holy Virgin May, Jehovah, whose bounty equals his power, Jehovah permitted that Asrael, having come to Earth, fell into the traps of a woman!

  And the traps of that woman broke the chain that bound Asrael to Hell; thanks to those traps, Asrael became a man, a simple mortal.

  Then Heaven no longer remained closed to him, and Nephta reopened its door to him, in teaching him to pray again, the prayer that the cherubim sang before God, prior to the revolt of the demons.

  Nephta had been employed on earth and condemned to take a human body, because she had wept incessantly in Heaven at the loss of her Asrael.

  Thus, of a double punishment, a double happiness is born!

  How great is the mercy of the Lord, how mysterious and infinite are his ways!

  Asrael and Nephta have sought love on earth in vain. They only encountered it when their celestial souls found themselves united again.

  Veritable amour does not exist on earth. If any mortals, any unfortunates, feel inflamed by a pure and durable amour, an amour that does not recoil before any sacrifice, which nothing can extinguish, they can only be angels strayed from their celestial sphere, angels who are weeping incessantly over the bitterest deceptions, and who will o
nly see their tears dry up in Heaven.

  Cambrai, January 1831.

  Notes

  1 Black Coat Press 2013, q.v.

  2 I have retained Berthoud’s spelling of this name, although it is more usually rendered as Baudouin (Baldwin in English). Baudouin I, nicknamed Bras-de-Fer, was Comte de Flandres in the second half of the 9th century, before dying in 879; he leapt to historical prominence when he eloped with Judith, the daughter of the King of France, Charles the Bold, and widow of both Aethelwulf and Aethelbald, Kings of Wessex, in 861, as celebrated in this “ballad.” Jean Le Carpentier’s Histoire de Cambrai et de Cambrésis (1664) is one of the principal sources from which Berthoud drew inspiration for his historical fantasies

  3 Alfred de Vigny’s novel historical novel set in the seventeenth century during the reign of Louis XIII, Cinq-Mars (1826), was very recent when this story was written. It became a significant model for the historical fiction at the heart of the Romantic Movement, especially the novels of Alexandre Dumas.

  4 There was a Gérard de Saint-Aubert, nicknamed Maufilatre, who was castellan of the château of that name in the late twelfth century, but it was half a century after the date attributed to the story by Berthoud, and the other biographical details known—including the names of his wives—are not consonant with the present story.

  5 This is slightly anachronistic; the bishop of Cambrai named Liétard—who left behind a reputation for dissolution and avarice—occupied that position from 1131 to 1135; the bishop in 1136 was, in fact, Nicolas de Chièvres, who fulfilled the role for more than thirty years, but is here relegated to the status of steward.

  6 A bottrine was a leather flagon containing about two pints of wine; the term is used in Walter Scott’s Quentin Durward (1823; Fr. tr. 1827), which was extremely popular in France because of its French setting in the late fifteenth century, and became an important stimulus to French historical fiction; Alfred de Vigny and Berthoud probably both read it and took some inspiration from it.