He arrived at Monsieur Romé’s home with his heart exultant with a new audacity, swelled by flamboyant energies. He was already reproaching himself for the unproductive inactivity of his week, the somnolent hours spent observing a young woman who was not ill, whose hereditary flaw, so little manifest, was not provoked by her habitual practices. He would leave, having reassured Madame Bise, telling her that his operations were recalling him to Paris. A week of contention, a week of suppressing the impetuous ferment of action and movement that was seething within him, was the full measure of the devotion that he accorded to his protectress. Tomorrow, he would throw himself back into the violent current of his life, to struggle in the intoxication of the conflict, in the determination to triumph. Tomorrow, Paris, his operating theater, and Mathilde, imperiously desired!
With that prospect, his acerbic humor became obsequious and charming again. He accepted the proposal of going, after lunch, to visit the ruins of Château Gaillard. He would find vestiges there of battles and of domination in conformity with the ardor of his sentiments. He scarcely accorded any condescendence to the anticipations and the solicitude of Aline, who never took her eyes off him and deployed all her femininity to awaken his sympathy. Madeleine, by contrast, seemed to be retreating ever further into a cold reserve.
Madame Romé prescribed the departure for the visit to the ruins. It would be necessary to hurry if they did not want to be caught in the storm. In fact, black clouds were already massing on the horizon, giving the sky a leaden hue. Madeleine could feel her nerves tensing.
Madame de Jancy protested in vain that they would not have time to take the excursion, that they would surely get wet. Madame Romé made the remark, however, that storms in the region always took some time to prepare, and that visiting the château would take half an hour at the most. They departed on foot, in separate groups, under the threat of a stifling atmosphere.
CHAPTER IV
The path that led to the ruins sloped upwards tortuously. Foreheads were covered in sweat, legs became heavy, lungs oppressed. Madame de Jancy, fearing to overtax her bad heart, soon declared that she was giving up the ascent, and to keep her company, Madame Romé returned to the château.
The intrepid continued to advance in two groups: Monsieur Romé, Armand Caresco and Aline in the lead; Madame Bise and Madeleine at the rear. At a bend in the rocky path, the ancient mass loomed up. About thirty meters still remained to climb, via paths that were scarcely traced, overgrown by scorched grass. Then the enormous vestige of a tower rose up sheerly, to which one gained access by a narrow stairway hewn in the rock, with majestic sections of wall in uneasy equilibrium, leaning toward the precipice, lamentable fragments with openings that were like squinting eyes staring out over all that desolation: glorious debris that had conserved through the centuries the threat of heroic battles. Behind, two hundred meters further on, isolated from the principal mass, further ruins recalled the memory of dependencies.
Madame Bise had presumed too much of her strength. At the sight of the arduous route that remained to be traveled, frightened by the peril of the passages, and thirsty after the libations of lunch, she renounced the ascent. Madeleine, who felt a kind of dull anguish, and excitement of her entire nervous system, at the approach of the storm that was continuing to mass in the depths of the sky, had to run to catch up with the other walkers, who were already scaling the slope. Monsieur Romé, playing the showman and narrating the topography of the old feudal castle, was talking about an original enclosure that had disappeared behind what had been the round-path, of which traces could still be seen.
“You can imagine,” he said, “that this citadel overlooking the Seine was impregnable, organized for battle and capable of resisting monstrous assaults. Even in our time, with our engines of modern warfare, it would be difficult to make a breach in these walls, four meters thick. From the battlements, out of harm’s way, the defenders launched their projectiles down on the enemy. Look—here are the remains of machicolations, those chimneys through which the combatants poured molten lead on to the assailants. What a defensive organization, and how far it is from our improved rifles, giving free rein to personal initiative and courage!”
He recounted the souvenirs of his reading, legends full of drama and fear. By means of a stairway excavated in the rock, whose safety was guaranteed by an iron railing, they penetrated into the main tower.
“This,” said Monsieur Romé, pointing to a hole that had been filled in, “is the remains of an oubliette. Prisoners were thrown in there, or people in whose disappearance the lord had an interest. The unfortunates died there of hunger and cold when they were not killed instantly. Over there you can see, at the foot of that staircase, the commencement of the subterranean workings, which have collapsed. It’s possible to get into them; they provide a shelter in which vagabonds come to sleep on summer nights. But let’s go up into the principal room, the lord’s private apartment.”
They went into an immense circular stone hall, open to the sky. A colossal fireplace could still be seen there, in which entire tree-trunks must have blazed, warming the weary limbs of hunters, cheering up the long vespers of the chatelaine, beneath the crush of the massive walls, with the crackling of sparks. A gaping hole, the memory of a window, overlooked the Seine, whose waters, dirtied by the blackness of the sky, were flowing eighty meters below. Directly beneath, a smoking factory seemed singularly shrunken. To the right, the agglomeration of Les Andelys extended along the arc of a circle formed by the river valley.
Madeleine, on leaning over the edge of the precipice, felt attracted toward it. A desolation emerging from those somber and heavy walls penetrated her soul. She listened, terrified, to what her uncle was saying, recounting that from the window where she was standing, a queen had been suspended, alive, by her hair. History claimed that the daughter of knights had been put to death there and left as fodder for the crows.
Monsieur Romé narrated other terrible tales, and the horror of those crimes rose up within the young woman, blossoming within her, and her eyes stared desperately into the void. When the others had gone, continuing their tour, she stayed there, retained by the legend, at the precipice, before the immensity overcharged with vapors.
Sustained by the power of that ride through history, Monsieur Romé, Caresco and Aline continued their stroll, forgetting Madeleine. They followed a round-path, went down a little slope in order to go another few hundred meters to cast an eye over other vestiges, isolated from the principal mass.
Aline no longer left the surgeon’s side. Monsieur Romé, carried away by the impetuosity of his memories, did not notice the behavior of his daughter—who, under the influence of a violent attraction, was yielding herself, by her voice and by her eyes, to that unknown man. Many times, she called upon the support to the dominator, under the pretext of needing help for a perilous step. Then, she stuck the palm of her hand to the formidable hand that had sown so many disasters and so many joys by means of the knife—and the violation of that contact troubled her with unknown frissons of a delightful asperity.
Stirred by the appeals of that passion, and also by his unaccustomed continence, Caresco responded secretly to the young woman’s appeals, but prudence and, above all, the minimal attraction of Aline’s person, counseled him to an absolute reserve. Ah, if he had been solicited by Madeleine, instead of Aline...
Suddenly, large warm raindrops began to fall. The tense atmosphere melted, becoming a deluge. The heavens rumbled.
The strollers ran to the ruins in search of shelter. They backed up against the segments of the desolated walls. In the disarray, they were all thinking of themselves. Then, suddenly, Monsieur Romé exclaimed “Madeleine! Where’s Madeleine?”
“She must have stayed in the big tower,” Aline replied.
“How imprudent it is to leave her alone!”
“I’ll go look for her,” said the surgeon.
A flash of jealousy passed through Aline’s eyes. In an abrupt tone, she said
: “I’ll go with you.” But Monsieur Romé retained her with an anxious glance, and she remained angrily in place while Caresco retracted the path they had just traveled, running through the rain.
How long had Madeleine been plunged in the anguish of her reflections? Later, she remembered that she was still at the gaping opening when the first clap of thunder had given the signal for the unleashing of the furious atmosphere. Large drops of water fell vertically, causing centuries-old dust to spring up under their impact and lashing the stone, which rendered a cry, accumulating to form rapid rills that became cataracts. Lighting zigzagged, streaking the sky magnificently with bolt after bolt, the enormous voice of the thunder responding to its appeal, prolonging its rumbling all the way to the foundations of the ancient mass, which seemed to be trembling at the memory of the cyclopean assaults to which it had been subjected in the distant past.
In spite of the fear and the nervous tension that had gripped her throat, as at the approach of the much-redoubted crises, and in spite of the danger, Madeleine remained standing, upright beneath the downpour, indifferent to the wrath of the elements, overwhelmed by horror and admiration in the contemplation of the most sublime of spectacles.
Eighty meters below her, the Seine, Petit Andely and the peninsula of Tosny had almost disappeared behind a liquid curtain; beneath her feet and all around her, the downpour of stones, the steep slopes, the round paths, the walls, the stairways, the battlements and machicolations were shining, filling up with noisy puddles, ferrying torrents, mingling their voices with those of the heavens.
It was a concert of devastation, a revolt against calm. Clamors emerged from everything, the dormant echo of lamentations uttered long ago, reawakened by the storm; they were the plaints of violated women, the groans of those walled up, the gasps of the dying. All the infamy of long-gone crimes, all the terror of the martyrized, was exhaled by the monstrous debris.
Now, Madeleine was no longer gazing; she closed her eyes, and yet she could see...
She saw passing before her a horde of ironclad warriors howling at her and brandishing their reddened weapons. They eyes were ablaze; they had the debris of human flesh on their fingernails. She saw a procession of lamentable prisoners, lacerated and harassed, laden with chains, so thin that, in places, the bones were erupting through the skin. There were women sobbing, children dying, old men weeping blood.
Further away, there was a stag being ripped apart by dogs, its entrails emerging from a gash in its belly. Closer, within arm’s reach, was a long, pale, spectral form suspended by her hair from the bars of the window; agony filling her gaze, her lips blue-tinted by death, she was frightful and soft.
Finally, someone was behind her, whom she could not see, but whose presence she divined. She guessed that it was the terrible lord of the manor, the bloodthirsty man who persisted through the generations, the hero of all appetites and all lusts. It seemed to her that a fluid was flowing from him toward her, that it was making the nape or her neck prickle and injecting fear into her flesh. Then that fluid became more focused, settling on her epigastrium like a claw, like a crawling hand that was rising toward her throat and compressing it to stifle her.
She moved, as if to draw away from the anguish in her chest, and shook her golden hair. It had no effect. Then she turned her head.
Caresco was already beside her.
He was looking at her, smiling avidly. His eyes were avid too. He said something to her that she did not understand, because vertigo was blurring her hearing as well as her sight. A closer flesh of lightning zigzagged in front of the gap.
Madeleine uttered a scream, and took a step toward the abyss, making a gesture to protect her wandering eyes. But her gesture stopped half way, and she stood there rigid, her mouth open, with the purple of her pale lips, her eyes almost closed, her brows furrowed, her body slightly inclined forward, sculpturally.
“Catalepsy,” murmured the surgeon. “One more step and she was over the edge.”
He did not hurry to abstract her from the danger. His science, his studies of catalepsy at the Salpêtrière, reassured him as to the young woman’s stability. Firstly, as a scientist, he studied the subject’s pathological stance. He noticed that the muscles of the limbs and the body were not contractured, but conserved the delicate grace of their form. He moved closer, observed the insensible slumber of the nerves by touching the hardness of the pulp with his fingertip, and pinched the arm, without obtaining any reaction. It was death in life.
He modified his observation then, emerging from the medical domain in order simply to admire the splendid harmony of form. What a loss it would have been for the pleasure and joy of a fortunate possessor if Madeleine had advanced a few centimeters more! She would have fallen into the abyss, and the fictitious annihilation would have become a veritable annihilation.
Then, in order to withdraw himself from the obsession of that threat, he wanted to draw the radiant creature of amour away from peril, to shelter her from the downpour in the refuge formed by the entrance to the subterranean workings. There were a few paces to travel, a few steps to descend with a burden that seemed all the lighter because his muscular strength was exasperated by a week’s continence, and by the fire that Aline had been feeding since the morning.
He seized the young woman in his arms, as if for an abduction and carried her down the glistening stairway—but on feeling that glorious flesh against him, which the wet fabric rendered to him as if naked, and the erect splendor of her breasts, and the triumphant curve of her lips, he was heated up by a surge of brutal folly, desiring a more absolute contact.
When he reached the dark covert, he lay the stiffened body down on the dirty ground, the gilded hair scattering. A tamer of all resistance, he parted her legs abruptly.
Outside, the storm was raging; the isolation and the unconsciousness of his crime were accomplices. Madeleine retained her automaton attitude, the pallor of her cheeks, the virginal wandering of her eyes and the furrowing of her brows...
A few hours later, in a room on Monsieur Romé’s château, to which she had been transported, unconscious, Madeleine woke up, her head heavy and her limbs aching. Her first thought was the astonishment of finding herself lying in a bed with exceedingly white sheets in a strange room. Slowly, she turned her head, divining someone nearby.
Sitting in a armchair next to be bed, Madame de Jancy was waiting for her to wake up; a smile welcomed her gaze; then the smile became a kiss, long, affectionate and comforting, mingled with the soft and innocent words that mothers can say to their children.
“Madelon, my Madelon! You’ve been ill again. Pour dear, it’s that villainous storm that took you by surprise. But it’s nothing. The doctor has recommended rest. Be good; I love you.”
Now, Madeleine understood. A shadow passed over her face. What! Another crisis! She thought that she had been freed from that frightful malady! How had it happened?
She racked her brains, but from the moment when the lightning had blinded her, everything had been effaced from her mind; there was a lacuna in her memory. And yet, it seemed to her that something had happened: that an event that was not a dream had occurred.
But what?
She made a weary gesture, and uttered a sigh; her head fell back on to the pillow, and thought seemed to quit her brain for a few seconds more. A fresh breeze came to reanimate her, however; Madame de Jancy had opened the window over a sumptuous view of the valley.
It was six o’clock in the evening; the storm had washed the sky; the sun was completing its triumphant course, seemingly enlarging as it fled, setting the entire horizon ablaze. High up, in the distance, little clouds were catching fire, like errant flames escaped from an immense crater of fire. In the plain, windows caught by the reverberation of the light also lit up, responding to the red fire. The heart of the heavens was bleeding; it was a magnificent outburst, an enchantment of the eyes such as the most skillful painters could never achieve.
Then it changed; the fire b
ecame golden; an immense Pactolus flowed through the azure. The spectacle stimulated Madeleine’s artistic soul, reactivating her nerves, and before her mother could move, she was at the window, her eyes madly extended toward the horizon, her bosom swelling in order to be more amply penetrated by the refreshing oxygen.
Gently, Madame Jancy, worried by that unhealthy agitation, drew her back toward the bed and tried to make her lie down again, but she resisted that excess of tenderness. In a trice, she had dressed, thrust a tortoiseshell comb through the scatter of her opulent golden hair, and, well buttoned-up, went down to the lawn to play her part in the game of tennis that had been arranged before dinner.
For a long time she deployed a vigor and a skill in that game that reassured the audience, bounding with the ball and uttering joyful exclamations at each successful shot.
Equally adroit, Caresco, on the opposing team, contested with her, riposting with a dexterity that would have enabled him to pass for a practitioner of that mundane tourney, if he had not been known to be a man of science.
Not for a moment did his lips abandon the amiable and false smile that masked his thoughts, and would have dissimulated his remorse—except that he had no remorse.
CHAPTER V
At the beginning of September, Armand Caresco, on returning to Parris, went to the clinic where his father, the director of the Institut Homeopathique de Passy, gave free consultations. The institute, whose benefits were advertised on all the public urinals of the capital, consisted of a miserable little apartment in one of the dirtiest houses in the Rue Scheffer.
The Necessary Evil Page 4