She had been married when she was very young, more than twenty years before, to the Marquis de Troène, who, respectful of the temple of her virtue, had scarcely ventured a few trembling steps towards the virginal mysteries of the sacred wood. The marquis was so ancient and so lacking in strength that when he went to church he required the support of an assistant arm to kneel down and to get up again – but he had been so very rich, and of such a noble family, that no one had been surprised by their union. Such marriages were frequent among the landed aristocracy; they were the means by which a legal dispute might be settled, a lost domain restored, a life of ease secured, the esteem of humble folk regained, the tolerance of creditors extended again to those fallen on hard times; they were, in short, the means by which an old and faded coat of arms might recover the glitter of gilt and the brightness of colour. In any case, the Marquis de Troène was quite harmless, and he died soon afterwards, having enjoyed for a few precious years the luminous smiles of his young wife.
He died, leaving her heiress to his entire fortune.
Madame de Troène was then twenty-six years old. The constant attendance of the old man upon her had made her so indolent, and had so deadened her spirit that she was afterwards quite content with the hypocritical attentions of her family. She refused to remarry.
Years went by while she was queen of her petty empire: spoiled, courted, and amused by the clamour with which she surrounded herself. She lived without joy, but without any sense of loss. Marriage had revealed nothing to her which might have troubled her subsequent dreams. She had no capacity to imagine anything beyond the limited role which had been assigned to her by her impotent husband: warming the bed of her lord and master, being perfectly obedient, smiling much and saying little. She understood, of course, that she might have enjoyed a more agreeable relationship with a younger husband – a relationship which would have permitted gaiety, laughter, activity, journeys abroad – but her emotional life had been stillborn; no sensation ever troubled her quietude, and her heart was quite cold.
When the marquise was thirty-five years old, however, she suddenly began to feel the burning caress of some tiny internal flame. It first afflicted her one autumn morning, on a Sunday, while she was going to mass. She was due to take communion that day, but found that she had not the strength to do so – or, at any rate, she dared not do so. She remained on her seigneurial bench, while all the other women, hooded in white silk with their ruddy hands crossed before their bellies, filed towards the altar, and came back again with their eyes dutifully lowered, taking great care to deaden the sound of their shoes on the flagstones. Madame de Troène remained kneeling, with her head in her hands, and she wept.
It was the first time in her life that she had ever wept. From that moment on, her character changed. Her family became, little by little, a matter of utter indifference to her; she shut herself up for months on end in the Château de Troène, seeing no one. She did not open her letters, nor did she write any of her own; she spent her time reading devotional texts. Before very long, she placed herself entirely in the hands of her parish priest, a man both scrupulous and wise: one of those to whom bishops invariably delegate parishes where there are rich widows who might otherwise put their fortunes to no good use.
In the course of the next three years the church was restored; the presbytery was reconstructed and enriched by a beautiful meadow full of fat cows; the cupboards and the drawers of the sacristy were filled up with regal copes, embroidered chasubles as marvellous as any seen in the cathedrals; and there was displayed, in a carved cedarwood case, a massive golden chalice whose sides were decorated in relief with a dozen kneeling angels, each one offering to the lamb in outstretched arms one of the twelve liturgical tablets, every one of which was a gem: an amethyst or a sapphire, a diamond or a sardonyx as large as a hazelnut.
Then, when the glory of God had been properly provided for, grand feasts were once again held at the Château de Troène and the members of the family of the benefactress, who numbered more than thirty were reassembled there and reunited. To be a member of such a crowd as that is not to be far removed from solitude; the freedom of everyone is assured by the freedom to which everyone else lays claim. Cliques form and intimacies develop. Madame de Troéne especially welcomed the attentions of young Jean de Néville, a handsome and sober adolescent who was quick to fetch her folding-chair when they went for a walk in the park, and was never slow to slide a cushion under her feet – who pandered to her every whim, in fact, with an affectionate good grace.
He did not address her as “aunt”, after the Breton fashion, nor “cousin”, in the Norman way; he displayed a finer sense of etiquette by calling her “Madame”, as if he were her page.
Young Jean de Néville was passionately interested in stories and legends of the family. Madame de Troène told him several of those which had been told to her when she was a child, which seemed to her to be mere fables, but when Jean raised the subject of the “red marguerite” she did not know what he meant.
“But it is the most famous legend of the Diercourts,” Jean told her, “from which you are directly descended by the female line. I too am of that line,” he added, proudly, “and I would dearly like to tell you the story.”
“Tell me then, my page.”
“It happened in the time when the inquisitor Sprenger was burning witches in Germany. Catherine de Diercourt, the wife of an army commander who was at that time away on active service, was thrown into prison – not as a witch, exactly, but as one who had protected witches. Like all the others, she was stripped naked and put to the torture. As soon as the wooden boot, pressed by a powerful vice, had closed upon her leg, she confessed everything which was demanded of her. She was condemned to be burnt at the stake – but then, she declared that she was pregnant.
“Sprenger ordered a postponement of her execution, but because she was destined for the fire, she was marked with the sign of the ‘consecrated’. This took the form of a kind of marguerite with thirteen petals, which was imprinted with a red-hot iron beneath her right breast.
“Catherine de Diercourt had told the truth. She was eventually brought to childbed while she languished in prison; and she was burnt at the stake three weeks later. Sixty of her compatriots were likewise executed.
“The child, which was a girl, was eventually delivered to the care of Monsieur de Diercourt. It was found that the stigma had mysteriously passed from the mother to the daughter: the daughter, also named Catherine, was marked beneath her breast by the dreadful red flower.
“And that,” continued Jean de Néville, “was the origin of the legend. It is said that to this very day, all the women of the Diercourt line – all the blood descendants of the protectress of witches – are marked indelibly by their heredity, by that same mark beneath the same breast. It is also said of them that they can only love once, and be loved once; and that those whom they love, and those who love them, are ‘the consecrated’: doomed to an early death. I have researched the history of several families into which the descendants of Catherine de Diercourt married, and … well, there seems to be some truth in it!”
“What a strange tale!” said Madame de Troène, forcing herself to laugh. “That one was never told to me, not even by my mother – but I am certain that I … that mark … I do not have it … but then, I have never looked! For shame! How can one stand before a mirror, to look at one’s naked self? How can one be so immodest as to stand naked before that other woman … that ironic reflection, which stares at one, and smiles at one so sordidly? I would be ashamed to do it!”
Jean de Nèville, with a blush upon his cheeks and his breathing slightly heightened, his beautiful eyes wide open and slightly moist, shook his wrists. His cuffs were decorated with skeins of silk-like little chains, which had become entangled. All at once – after a momentary silence; a terrible silence during which the marquise and the adolescent page were brushed by the invisible caresses of ideas and images – all at once, Mme de Troè
ne bent her head towards Jean, who was kneeling at her feet. Placing her hands on the youth’s shoulders, she kissed him on the mouth.
When they finally rose to their feet again, initiates in a new mystery, the shades of night were falling and the lamps were being carried to their stations. Madame de Troène shivered deliciously; she looked at Jean, who was quite pale and slightly dishevelled. They could find nothing to say to one another; they were submerged beneath the surface of oceanic emotions.
In the end, exhausted by delight, she murmured: “Go away!”
The next morning, Madame de Troène appeared so discomposed, and in such a state of disarray, that everyone was anxious. She tendered some excuse for her malaise, but as soon as she was alone with Jean, she touched a finger to her bodice and said: “The red marguerite! I have it, the red marguerite!”
“So much the better!” said Jean, with all the simplicity and the nobility of a heroic lover. “I love you so much that I fully desire to die of your love.”
Afterwards, during the dark and silent nights of joy which were given to them, Jean searched with his hand for the stigma, no longer the symbol of those ‘consecrated’ to the stake, but the sign which nevertheless consecrated him to death. One evening, when Madame de Troène permitted that a candle should remain lit, Jean saw the sign – and, with a strange frenzy and a precocious perversity, he kissed it over and over again, tirelessly, until morning came: the diabolical red marguerite.
The affair lasted two months. Jean had to leave in order to return to his studies, for his last year of college. He promised to write, but no letter came; she wrote to him, discreetly, but he did not respond.
When she went to see him, finally, she found him dying. His life had faded away, and his memory too. He was dying of his two months of love; dying of having loved the red marguerite!
Madame de Troène dressed in mourning and proudly – without deigning to reply to any questions – maintained herself thus until his death, which was not long delayed. She was no longer a votary, but never ceased to be religious. Now, though, her religion had something wild about it. She became a martyr; once, she remained on her knees in church for eight successive hours, without bestirring herself any more than the stone image of St John, upon which she fixed her ecstatic eyes. She subjected herself to fasts which would have intimidated anchorites.
It took her three years to destroy herself.
Because, in spite of her evident piety, she never went to confession, the curé came one day to interrogate her. She replied obdurately, as though recovering at a stroke all the insolence of the Diercourt women, and their hatred for the Church: “Monsieur, the secrets of a Marquise de Troène are to be revealed only to God.”
During her death-agony, when the priest redoubled his objurgations, she still remained mute – and she died, draped as though by a shroud in the impertinence of her absolute silence.
She died with her finger delicately placed upon her secret, upon the one unforgettable interval of human joy which the Evil One had vouchsafed to her: upon the red marguerite.
SYLVIE’S SISTER
Madame de Maupertuis crossed the courtyard and, opening a little lattice-work gate, entered the garden.
As she went hither and yon along the pathways, the tight white dress which she wore, made of light jaconet, outlined by its movements the delicacy of her figure. A pink ribbon fluttered behind her. Her throat, partly exposed by the low-cut dress, was modestly screened by a sash worn according to the new fashion, coloured red, yellow and blue. She was bareheaded; her blonde hair was coiffed in the Greek style, gathered up from her neck to make a frame for her forehead, curling a little between the eye and the ear. She was handsome, in spite of the fact that an unusual pallor had displaced the usual rosiness of her complexion, and that her blue eyes were narrowed and her nostrils pinched – the consequences of her long vigils in a sick-room.
Leaning his elbows on the wall which enclosed the garden, looking out over the steep slope which fell to the highway, Monsieur de Maupertuis was lost in thought. His eyes roamed the distant meadows full of willows, and the circling hills crowded with beeches which extended to the horizon. He was facing the setting sun, which slowly descended behind the trees; a great wave of light, rolling under the green arches, came forth to bathe the white road; the meadows were falling asleep in the humid dusk and a mist was already beginning to rise, its inconsistent contours following the winding course of a brook, from which birdsong arose as all other sounds died away.
Such scenes as this, and similar evening displays, Monsieur de Maupertuis remembered having seen in England, when he was a child, during the sad exile which had been forced upon him. Suddenly he seemed to see once more in the middle distance the unfortunate manor-house of Watering-Hill, where he had once assisted, on just such an evening as this, in making the arrangements following the tragic death of Lord Romsdale. The name of Romsdale, whose syllables he had murmured aloud, evoked further memories, and his reverie became even more profound.
His wife’s little hand was suddenly placed on his shoulder.
“Adelaide! You startled me.”
He was actually trembling. Adelaide put both her arms around his neck and gently kissed his forehead; his eyes became illuminated by a flame of love. Adelaide looked at her husband for a moment, wearing an uncertain smile, before confiding in him.
“Patrice,” she said, “my sister would like to speak to you, alone. She insists on it. She desires a moment of privacy with you.”
“A mere caprice of the dying,” said Patrice, letting her lead him away. “What could she possibly have to say to me that she could not have said to her confessor, or to you?”
Monsieur de Maupertuis entered the sick-room, his heart clutched by the odour of death which floated around the bed. A little hand extended from the bedclothes, as thin as an autumn leaf and almost as translucent; he took it in his own as he knelt down and, in spite of his repugnance, lifted it to his lips.
Upon the huge bed, the slight consumptive form had hardly more presence than a rag doll. The head sunk among the pillows stood out against the cambric, the colour of wax against the stark white. Two black eyebrows traced a heraldic design upon the frail profile, converging above the bridge of the Bourbon nose; the eyelashes resembled the little fine darts detailed in icons, and when she opened her eyes, it was the darkness of night which could be seen therein. Her brown hair had been tucked into a lace bonnet, but a few trailing locks dangled upon her forehead, curling inconsequentially across the wrinkles and ragged furrows which creased it.
Moving herself with evident effort, the dying girl reached beneath the mattress to bring forth a moderately large portfolio bound in faded and crumpled velvet. A cordlet of gold thread secured it; embroidered on the cover in yellow silk, at a place where the velvet was neatly shaved in a diamond-shape, two lines were thus inscribed:
SYL =
= VIE
Monsieur de Maupertuis looked at the portfolio, and his eyes met Sylvie’s. So mournful but a moment before, hers had now became animated by a glimmer of light, which seemed to him somehow perverse and hypocritical. There arose in him a defiance against whatever was to follow; he could not help it, although he had a dutiful respect for the dying.
“Patrice,” she whispered, “this will explain it to you – but listen! Do not judge Adelaide as severely as you would judge a man. Women do not have a proper sense of honour; for them, emotions come before everything else. Be … therefore … indulgent … Patrice …”
A fit of coughing overtook her. She breathed, then began again: “Lord Romsdale. …”
But these were her last words. Another spasm took hold of her; blood mingled with saliva ran from the corner of her mouth, and she fell back heavily upon the pillow. She was dead.
Until the eventual arrival of Adelaide, Patrice remained fascinated by the eyes of the corpse: by those perverse and hypocritical eyes.
Monsieur de Maupertuis already knew the story. What could b
e more banal? A marriage which had not in the end been made – about which Adelaide had had her regrets, and her chagrin, perhaps even a momentary despair. She had told him all about it herself, with a frankness which appeared total. The letters, to be sure, were a little vivid, almost disquieting, but …
One evening, when the lamps were lit, he said to his wife, while placing before her the pink velvet portfolio, “Adelaide, this was Sylvie’s secret. Oh, your sister has been quite devilish! I can only suppose that you gave these letters to her so that she might burn them, having not had the strength of purpose to do it yourself …”
“What letters?” asked Adelaide.
“The account of a passion.”
“I don’t understand.”
“They concern a family who were our benefactors. The father liked me very much; the son …”
“Young Lord Romsdale?”
“You have forgotten him, then? Here is something which will refresh your memory.”
“These letters, as you say, ought to have been burnt,” said Adelaide, coldly.
“That can still be done,” said Patrice, “but it is in your hands … here is the first of them – take it, read it, and then burn it, if you will.”
Oh, the memory of one’s first love! The beautiful tied-back hair and the ruddily healthy cheeks of the young Romsdale! Quelling a delicious surge of emotion, Adelaide took the letter in her fingertips, and read it. She had been pale, but now her cheeks recovered their colour. Oh, the joy she once had in receiving that impassioned note!
She reread all the letters, one by one, as Patrice passed them to her – and burned them all, one by one.
The Angels of Perversity Page 7