“What are you doing?” he said.
“This one is for me,” the colonel answered, pointing to the loaded pistol beside him on the bench. “And this one for her,” he concluded, stuffing the wadding into the barrel of the weapon in his hand.
The countess was stretched out on the ground, playing with the bullets.
“Then you don’t know,” the doctor calmly replied, hiding his horror, “that last night while she was sleeping I heard her say ‘Philippe!’”
“She spoke my name!” cried the baron, dropping his pistol. Stéphanie snatched it up at once, but he wrenched it from her hands, picked up the weapon from the bench, and ran off.
“Poor dear child!” the doctor cried, relieved at the success of his fabrication. He pressed the madwoman to his bosom and went on: “He would have killed you, the selfish brute! Because he is suffering, he wants to see you dead. He doesn’t know how to love you for yourself, my child! But we forgive him, don’t we? He’s irrational. And you? You’re only mad. No, God alone may call you to His side. We think you unhappy because you no longer join in our sorrows, fools that we are! But,” he said, pulling her onto his knees, “you’re happy, nothing upsets you; you live life like a bird, like a deer.”
She pounced on a young blackbird that was hopping nearby on the ground, clasped it in her hands with a little cry of pleasure, smothered it, gazed at its dead body, and left it at the foot of a tree without another thought.
At first light the next day, the colonel came down to the garden, searching for Stéphanie, believing in happiness; failing to find her, he whistled. When his mistress appeared, he took her by the arm, and walking together for the first time, they made for a bower of yellowing trees, their leaves falling in the light breeze of morning. The colonel sat down, and Stéphanie settled unprompted onto his knees. Philippe was trembling with delight.
“My love,” he said to her, fervently kissing the countess’s hands, “I am Philippe.”
She looked at him curiously.
“Come,” he added, pressing her to him. “Do you feel my heart beating? All this time, it has beaten only for you. I still love you. Philippe isn’t dead, he’s right here, beneath you. You are my Stéphanie, and I am your Philippe.”
“Adieu,” she said, “adieu.”
The colonel quivered, for he believed he could see his joy spreading to his mistress. His heartfelt cry, born of a surge of hope, that last desperate bid of an undying love, a delirious passion, was reawakening his lover’s reason.
“Ah! Stéphanie, we will be happy.”
She let out a shriek of pleasure, and her eyes revealed a faint flicker of awareness.
“She recognizes me! Stéphanie!”
The colonel felt his heart swell, his eyes grow moist. But just then he saw that the countess was showing him a piece of sugar she’d discovered in his pocket as he spoke. He had taken for human thought what was only the faint glimmer of reason that a monkey’s cunning implies. Philippe fainted. Monsieur Fanjat found the countess sitting on the colonel’s still body. She was chewing her sugar, voicing her delight with coos that any visitor would have admired if, when she still had her reason, she had merrily attempted to imitate her parakeet or her cat.
“Ah! My friend,” cried Philippe, recovering his senses, “I die every day, every moment! I’m too much in love with her! If in her madness she retained some small trace of her womanhood, I could bear it. But to see her still a savage, devoid even of modesty, to see her—”
“You were hoping for madness as we see it at the opera,” the doctor said sharply. “Is your loving devotion subject to preconditions, then? What, monsieur! For you I have forgone the sad pleasure of feeding my niece, to you I have left the joy of playing with her, I have kept for myself only the most burdensome tasks. I watch over her while you sleep, I . . . Come, monsieur, abandon your hopes for her. Leave this sad hermitage. I have learned to live with that dear little creature; I understand her madness, I foresee her every move, I share her secrets. One day you shall thank me.”
The colonel left Bons-Hommes, to return only once. The doctor was distraught to have inflicted such grief on his guest, whom he was coming to love no less than his niece. If only one of the two lovers was to be pitied, it was surely Philippe: Was he not bearing the burden of a horrific sorrow all alone? The doctor made inquiries and learned that the poor colonel had retired to a property he owned close by Saint-Germain. Placing his faith in a dream, the baron had conceived a plan to restore the countess’s reason. Unbeknownst to the doctor, he spent the rest of the fall making ready for that ambitious undertaking. A small river flowed through his grounds; in the winter it flooded a broad marsh that bore some resemblance to the wetlands of the Berezina’s right bank. The nearby hilltop village of Satout completed the backdrop for that grim decor, like Studyanka looming over the floodplain. The colonel assembled a crew of workers to dig a canal that would stand in for the insatiable river where France’s greatest treasures, Napoleon and his army, were lost. Relying on his memories, Philippe created a copy of the riverbank where General Éblé had constructed his bridges. He sank trestles, then burned them in such a way as to evoke the blackened, ravaged beams that told the stragglers the road to France was now closed to them forever. The colonel brought in a load of debris, similar to the fragments with which his companions in sorrow had built their raft. To complete the illusion on which he had founded his last hope, he lay waste to his gardens. He ordered enough tattered uniforms and costumes to clothe several hundred peasants. He erected huts, campsites, batteries, then incinerated them. In short, he omitted nothing that might re-create that most horrible of all scenes, and he succeeded admirably. In the first days of December, when the snow had covered the ground in a thick mantle of white, he recognized the Berezina. Several of his comrades-in-arms, too, instantly recognized the scene of their past miseries, so chillingly lifelike was this counterfeit Russia. Monsieur de Sucy would not speak a word of this tragic re-creation, which was much discussed in certain Parisian circles at the time and diagnosed as a symptom of eccentricity.
One day in early January 1820, the colonel climbed into a carriage not unlike the one that had conveyed Monsieur and Madame de Vandières from Moscow to Studyanka, and set off for the forest of L’Isle-Adam. It was drawn by horses matching those he’d risked his life to snatch from the ranks of the Russians. He wore the filthy, incongruous clothing, the arms, the headgear that were his on November 29, 1812. He had gone as far as to grow out his beard and hair, and to avoid washing his face, so that this horrible likeness might be complete.
“I understand what you’re thinking,” cried Monsieur Fanjat, as the colonel climbed out of the carriage. “Don’t let her see you, if you want your plan to succeed. This evening I’ll give my niece a small dose of opium. While she sleeps, we’ll dress her just as she was in Studyanka, and we’ll place her in the carriage. I’ll follow you in a berline.”
At two in the morning, the young countess was carried to the vehicle, laid on cushions, and wrapped in a rough blanket. Several peasants stood by to provide light for this curious abduction. Suddenly a sharp cry pierced the night’s silence. Philippe and the doctor turned to see Geneviève emerging half naked from the ground-floor room where she slept.
“Adieu, adieu, it’s all over, adieu,” she cried, weeping bitter tears.
“Why Geneviève, what is it?” said Monsieur Fanjat.
Geneviève shook her head despairingly, raised her arms to the heavens, gazed at the carriage, let out a long moan, displayed a profound terror, and silently withdrew to her room.
“This bodes well,” cheered the colonel. “The girl is sorry to be losing her friend. Perhaps she can see that Stéphanie will recover her reason.”
“May God grant it,” said Monsieur Fanjat, who seemed deeply affected by this incident.
In his studies of madness, he had more than once read of cases of prophecy and second sight among the mentally afflicted, a phenomenon that may also, travele
rs tell, be found among the savage tribes.
Just as the colonel had planned it, Stéphanie was sent on her way across the simulated Berezina floodplain toward nine in the morning and was awakened by the detonation of a small mortar shell some hundred paces from her carriage. This was a signal. A thousand peasants burst into a terrible roar, like the desperate howl that erupted, to the Russians’ terror, when through their own fault twenty thousand stragglers saw themselves bound over to death or slavery. Hearing that cannon and that clamor, the countess leapt from the carriage, raced crazed with panic through the snow, caught sight of the burned camps, the fateful raft being launched into the icy Berezina. Major Philippe was there, swinging his saber to hold back the crowd. Madame de Vandières let out a scream that chilled every soul and ran straight to the colonel, whose heart was hammering in his chest. Lost in thought, she looked vaguely around her at this strange tableau. For a moment, brief as a flash of lightning, her eyes took on the clarity without intelligence that we admire in a bird’s shining eye; then she passed her hand over her forehead, staring intently before her as if in deep meditation, contemplating this living memory, this past life here translated before her. Suddenly she turned her head toward Philippe, and she saw him. Dread silence had fallen over the crowd. The colonel breathed heavily, not daring to speak; the doctor was weeping. A hint of color appeared on Stéphanie’s beautiful face, then, from one tint to the next, she finally regained the radiance of a girl glowing with freshness and youth. Soon her face was colored a fine crimson. Animated by an ardent intelligence, life and happiness spread over her like a burgeoning fire, one flame touching off the next. A convulsive tremor ran from her feet to her heart. And then these varied phenomena, having instantaneously burst into life, were joined in a sort of common bond when a celestial ray, a living flame, lit Stéphanie’s eyes. She was living, she was thinking! She shivered, perhaps in terror! God himself unbound that dead tongue a second time, and once more poured his fire into that extinguished soul. Her will came flooding back in an electric torrent, energizing that body from which it had so long been absent.
“Stéphanie!” cried the colonel.
“Oh! It’s Philippe,” said the poor countess.
She fell into the colonel’s trembling arms, and the crowd looked on awestruck as the two lovers embraced. Stéphanie melted into tears. But all at once her tears went dry; she stiffened, as if struck by lightning, and said, weakly, “Adieu, Philippe. I love you. Adieu!”
“Oh! She’s dead,” cried the colonel, loosening his grasp.
The old doctor caught his niece’s lifeless body, embraced her as a young man might have done, carried her some distance away, and sat down with her on a pile of wood. He looked at the countess, laying a weak, convulsively trembling hand on her heart. It beat no longer.
“It’s true, then,” he said staring now at the unmoving colonel, now at Stéphanie’s face, over which death was spreading its resplendent beauty, its fleeting glow, the promise, perhaps, of a glorious future. “Yes, she is dead.”
“Ah! That smile,” cried Philippe, “just look at that smile! Can it be?”
“She’s already gone cold,” answered Monsieur Fanjat.
Monsieur de Sucy strode a few steps away, freeing himself from that terrible sight, but he stopped to whistle the tune that the madwoman knew so well. Not seeing his mistress come running, he staggered off like a drunken man, still whistling, but never once turning back.
In society, General Philippe de Sucy passed for a most amiable man, and above all a very merry one. Not a few days ago, a lady complimented him on his good humor and irrepressible temperament.
“Ah! Madame,” he answered, “I pay for my pleasantries very dearly, in the evening, when I find myself alone.”
“Are you ever alone?”
“No,” he answered with a smile.
Had some shrewd observer of human nature seen the Comte de Sucy’s expression at that moment, he might well have shivered.
“Why do you not marry?” continued the lady, who had several daughters at boarding school. “You’re rich, you have a title, a noble ancestry of long date; you have talent, a fine future ahead of you, everything smiles on you.”
“Yes,” he answered, “but there is one smile that’s killing me.”
The next day the lady was shocked to learn that Monsieur de Sucy had blown out his brains in the night. This extraordinary event was widely and diversely discussed in society; everyone sought to uncover the cause. Depending on the tastes of the inquirer it was gambling, or love, or ambition, or secret dishonors that explained this catastrophe, the last scene of a drama begun in 1812. Two men alone, a magistrate and an elderly doctor, knew that the Comte de Sucy was one of those strong men to whom God has granted the sad power to emerge each day triumphant from a horrible battle with a secret monster. Let God take His mighty hand from them, if only for a moment, and they succumb.
Paris, March 1830
Translated by Jordan Stump
Z. MARCAS
To Monseigneur le Comte Guillaume de Wurtemberg, in token of the author’s respectful gratitude
I NEVER saw anyone, even among the remarkable men of our time, whose appearance was more striking than this man’s; studying his physiognomy inspired, first, a sense of melancholy and, ultimately, a nearly painful sensation. There was a kind of harmony between the person and the name. That “Z.” preceding “Marcas,” which always appeared on letters addressed to him and which he never failed to include in his own signature, that last letter of the alphabet brought to mind some sense of fatality.
MARCAS! Say it over to yourself, that two-syllable name: Don’t you hear some sinister meaning to it? Don’t you feel as if the man who bears it must be destined for martyrdom? However strange and wild, still the name does have the right to go down to posterity: It is properly constructed, it is easy to pronounce, it has that brevity desirable in famous names.
Is it not as gentle as it is bizarre? Also, doesn’t it seem unfinished? Far be it from me to declare that names have no influence on destiny. Between the facts of a life and a man’s name there are mysteries and inexplicable concordances, or visible discordances, that are surprising; often distant but consequential correlations come to light. Our globe is full, everything is possible. We may yet some day turn again to the occult sciences.
Don’t you see some thwarted stride in the shape of that “Z”? Doesn’t it look like the arbitrary, whimsical zigzag of a tormented life? What wind could have blown onto this letter that occurs in scarcely fifty words in whatever languages even use it? Marcas’s first name was Zéphirin. Saint Zéphirin is widely worshiped in Brittany. Marcas was Breton.
Look again at the name: Z. Marcas! The man’s whole life is evident in the weird assemblage of those seven letters. Seven! The most significant of the Kabbalah numbers. The man died at thirty-five, thus his life counted seven lustrums. Marcas! Doesn’t it evoke the idea of something precious shattering in a fall, with or without a sound?
I was finishing my law degree in 1836, in Paris. At the time I lived on rue Corneille, in a building occupied entirely by students, one of those buildings where the stairwell twists upward at the rear, lighted first from the street, then through grilled transoms, and farther up by a skylight. There were forty rooms, furnished the way students’ rooms are furnished. What more would a young man need in a room: a bed, a few chairs, a chest of drawers, a mirror, and a table. As soon as the sky turns blue, the student opens the window. But in that street there was no pretty neighbor to flirt with. Across the way, the Odéon Théâtre, long closed, blocked the view with its blackened walls, its small gallery windows, its vast slate roof. I wasn’t rich enough to have a good room; I couldn’t even afford a room to myself. Juste and I shared one with two beds on the top floor.
The Human Comedy Page 23