The screed was fully elucidated in the end. It gave the details of an arctic voyage (without shedding light on its tragic result though) which, given the remote period when it was accomplished, seemed miraculous.
The matter being closed, François-Jules had that very morning thrown cuttings and copies of the Times pell-mell into the waste-paper basket, in the course of tidying up.
Lydia took an issue of the famous paper at random from the basket, involuntarily pulling out at the same time three runic cuttings which were partly caught inside its thick last fold.
She separated an intact sheet and gathered it at right angles to a circular part left in the center of it, and resorted to the scissors from her embroidery box to cut the cap roughly fashioned in this way to the correct height. For the narrow, vertical border necessary to the object’s completion, Lydia used the three runic strips, which had struck her by their elongated shape, and seemed to offer themselves to her as saving extra cutting-out.
Arming herself with a thimble from the work box, then with a needle threaded with a long white thread, she managed to sew the instinctively chosen upper edges of the three paper ribbons placed closely end to end round the very bottom of the cap — each time concealing the side scrawled with her father’s annotations, by making it face inward.
When the work was finished, she placed the frail headgear on the skull and, satisfied with the resemblance obtained, set about tidying up the mess on the carpet. The work box gradually recovered its contents, which had been strewn everywhere, and was then replaced in her pocket — while the mutilated newspaper, soon folded again naturally, was restored to the waste-paper basket. As for the chaotic litter of crumpled residues from the cap that had fallen before the onslaught of her scissors, Lydia considered it more seemly that this should be burnt; carefully slipping behind the fire screen so that she would be able to aim straight despite the smallness of her arms, she threw the useless mass of it into the middle of the fireplace. When she saw, after a short wait, that it had all caught properly, she turned slightly to leave her torrid enclosure.
But at that moment, owing to the combustion, the whole of one burning corner of the paper, which had been pointing in the air, unfurled and leaned out at an angle from the blaze with a motion resembling that of a fanlight opening upon its hinged, horizontal base. The flames from this projecting brand set fire to the back of Lydia’s short skirt, but she only discovered the accident after several seconds had elapsed, when great flames began to envelope her.
Hearing her cries, François-Jules raised his head, then jumped to his feet, ghastly pale. Casting his eyes round the room to discover the best way to rescue her, he leapt to the little girl, carrying her off regardless of his owns burns, and ran to wrap her tightly in one of the big window curtains. But despite the father’s frantic efforts as, with bulging eyes, he furiously strove to make the swathing more airtight, the flames roared up for a long moment, fanned by the wind of his indispensable haste.
When at last the fire was put out, Lydia was carried to bed, but two hurriedly summoned doctors despaired of saving her. In her delirium the little girl incessantly recounted, and commented on, every slightest thing she had done between her father’s affectionate “Yes” and the fatal conflagration. That very evening she succumbed.
Crazed with grief, François-Jules reverently set the skull with the marked forehead, wearing its frail cap, upon the mantelpiece of his study, to remain there for ever under the shelter of a glass globe. For him these two objects, symbolizing the last happy hours of his beloved child, had become priceless relics.
Not long after this horrible tragedy, François-Jules shed fresh tears when he saw his best friend — Raoul Aparicio, the poet, to whom he had been bound since school days by the most fraternal affection, die of consumption caught from his wife, who had died one year before him.
Aparicio, whose illness had involved him in debts, left a daughter Andrée, the exact contemporary of Lydia and a great friend of hers; she had no surviving close relatives except an uncle without means, who had a wife and children. As a father still choking with grief, François-Jules took into his home the needy orphan who, being sweet and delightful, inspired a lively affection in him, that he might be able to delude himself into believing the vanished girl had returned. François-Charles, who was of a loving disposition, was still often convulsed by sobs when he thought of Lydia, and he learnt with joy of the coming of this new sister.
The years went by, increasing Andrée Aparicio’s beauty until at sixteen she had become a marvelous adolescent girl with a supple body and heavy golden locks which lit up a delicate, sparkling countenance admirably adorned with enormous, candid green eyes.
And then, to his dismay, François-Jules found that his paternal fondness for the orphan was giving place to a devouring and insensate passion.
Despite the absence of any paternal relationship, his conscience condemned him for loving this child reared by him, who called him “father,” and he kept his new feeling secret. Controlling his desires, he enjoyed the deep happiness of living under the same roof as Andrée, of seeing her and hearing her every day — and of feeling himself, morning and night, reel with ecstasy as he kissed her forehead.
At eighteen, with the perfect flowering of Andrée’s youth, she added the last straw to François-Jules’s confusion, and able to control himself no longer, he planned an immediate proposal of marriage. Nothing, after all, materially opposed the longed-for union. In default of love, a grateful impulse toward the man who had given her a home would make Andrée agree, and she would no doubt be glad anyway to have a situation in life between herself and poverty.
François-Charles was at that time working all day long for his bachelor of arts degree, having chosen for himself the career followed by his father, whose gifts as a writer he inherited. Leaving François-Jules and Andrée after dinner, he would devote another full hour to study, alone in his room — then he would go, by the last train, to stay the night in the center of Paris so as to betake himself early in the morning to the libraries, not reaching Meaux again after that until nightfall.
One evening, while his son was at work, François-Jules said, almost stammering, and not without a terrible fluttering of his heart:
“Andrée . . . dear child . . . here you are, old enough to marry . . . I want to speak to you of a plan . . . in which resides the happiness of my life . . . But alas! . . . I don’t know . . . if you would accept . . .”
The girl blushed and was thrilled with joy, mistaking his words.
She and François-Charles had at all times adored one another. As children they used to enliven the house or the garden with the noise of their games mingled with innocent kisses. As adolescents they would confide their dreams to one another and discuss the books they both read. And latterly, feeling everything for each other, they had sworn to be united, only awaiting a suitable moment to unburden themselves to François-Jules, feeling certain of his enthusiastic approval.
Thinking that the allusion in the sentence he had uttered could only refer to her marriage with François-Charles, Andrée at once replied:
“Be glad father, for your wishes have been fulfilled in advance. I am loved by François-Charles whom I love; I have promised myself to him and he has already chosen me.”
In the mind of François-Jules, who until then had not had the slightest inkling, François-Charles and Andrée, having grown up together, accorded each other only the chaste affection which usually reigns between brother and sister. Thunderstruck, he saw his son rush up at an explicit summons promptly uttered by the joyful Andrée — then, without losing countenance, he received the happy couple’s thanks.
Soon the young man left for the station and François-Jules, after being thanked again by Andrée up to the threshold of his room, underwent a terrible crisis once alone.
His jealous torments were exasperated by the contrast between his s
on’s overwhelming youth and his own state of decline, emphasized by a complete resemblance of feature and manner.
“She loves him! . . .” he gasped, maddened by the idea of François-Charles taking Andrée.
He paced his room hour after hour, clenching his hands and groaning softly.
Suddenly he conceived a reckless plan which gave him hope again. In spite of his son standing henceforth between them, he would humbly confess his love to Andrée and entreat her to become his wife, showing her that upon her reply depended the life or death of her childhood’s benefactor. Out of pity, she would consent . . .
Having made this resolve, an irresistible desire came over him to attempt the proposal right away. Oh to put an end to these atrocious torments . . . quick . . . quick . . . to feel a single word from her change his hell into unspeakable happiness! And ghastly pale, wild, staggering, he mounted one floor, then entered Andrée’s room.
It was twilight. The girl was sleeping, beautiful as an angel, with her golden hair disheveled about her bare neck.
At first, woken by François-Jules’s step as he approached, she smiled at him. But realizing all at once the oddness of the hour and irregularity of the visit, she began to feel an intense dread, heightened by the terrifying appearance of the insomniac and his distorted features.
“Father, what is the matter with you? . . .” she said. “Why are you so pale?”
“The matter with me?” stammered the wretched man. And in disjointed words, he described his uncontrollable love.
“You shall be my wife, Andrée,” he said, clasping his hands, “otherwise . . . oh! . . . I should die, I . . . I . . . your benefactor.”
Dumbfounded, the poor child had the impression of being in a nightmare.
“I love François-Charles,” she murmured: “I wish only to belong to him . . .”
These words, touching François-Jules’s feelings to the quick, were like a red-hot iron pressed upon a wound.
“Oh! No . . . no . . . not his . . . mine . . . mine . . .” he cried, with beseeching eyes and gestures.
In a firmer voice she repeated:
“I love François-Charles; I wish only to belong to him.”
This cursed sentence, ringing in his eyes once more, succeeded in unhinging François-Jules, who more clearly than ever had the vision, for him so frightful, of his son possessing Andrée.
With trembling lips he said: “No . . . not his . . . no . . . no . . . mine . . . mine . . .” and, maddened by her bare neck and the exquisite shapes discerned beneath the fine cambric, he attempted to embrace the wretched girl, who tried to cry out. But he seized her throat with both hands, repeating in a terrible voice:
“No . . . not his . . . mine . . . mine . . .”
His fingers squeezed for a long time, and did not relax until after she was dead.
Then he flung himself upon the corpse.
An hour later, as François-Jules reentered his room, having come to his senses again, he was affrighted by the horror of his crime. The tormenting grief of having killed his idol was mingled in his mind with the fear of punishment and of seeing his name sullied by the greatest dishonor, which would fall also upon his son.
Then the unfortunate man became calmer, reflecting that, as everything had taken place in silence, no evidence could be forthcoming — and since he had never allowed anything of his love to transpire, he might easily defy suspicion behind the irreproachable rectitude of his entire life. At eight o’clock the servant who usually woke Andrée every day gave the alarm, and François-Jules himself called in the law.
Careful examination of the premises established beyond a shadow of a doubt that nobody, during the night, had broken into the dwelling — where only two men had slept: one of them François-Jules and the other Thierry Foucqueteau, a young household servant engaged not long before. As François-Jules seemed out of the question, universal suspicion fell on Thierry who, despite his fervent protest, was arrested on suspicion of murder followed by rape.
Hurrying from Paris at his father’s urgent summons, François-Charles howled with grief, like one demented, before the corpse of the girl who was to have been the joy of his life.
The affair pursued its course, and at the assizes, where absence of premeditation was allowed, Thierry, against whom all appearances conspired, was condemned to life imprisonment, in spite of his vehement denials.
His mother, Pascaline Foucqueteau, an honest farmer’s wife from the district of Meaux, was convinced of his innocence, and when he left she vowed to him that henceforth his rehabilitation would be her sole aim.
Consumed by remorse, François-Jules lost sleep and health; the image of the poor convict suffering a thousand torments in his place obsessed him night and day; then his liver, which he had always considered a delicate organ, became seriously affected and within a few years brought him to death’s door.
When he saw that he was lost, he determined to draw up a confession which after his death might clear Thierry, whose frightful and unmerited wrongs had never ceased to haunt him. Though compelled to remain silent during his lifetime, from dread of the judicial and penal consequences that his confession would have had for him and by the prospect of the too thorough bespattering which the odious scandal of his trial would have bestowed upon François-Charles, he accepted the idea of a frank and candid posthumous admission of guilt.
But to palliate the disgrace bound to arise from his document, he decided to enclose it in some safe hiding place which, while itself celebrating his fame, could only be discovered at the end of a series of operations all designed to throw into relief circumstances reflecting credit upon him.
In the past he had achieved the greatest success of his career with a lively comedy which had played for a whole season in Paris. At the beginning of the supper celebrating its hundredth performance, he had taken a jewel case from the folds of his napkin and opened it. Inside, all in precious stones set in a flat sheet of gold, two thirds as wide as it was long, glittered a small facsimile of his playbill of that very day, which all his friends had clubbed together to commission from a skillful jeweller. Thanks to a dense mass of emeralds of two distinct shades, the text stood out clearly in dark green upon a pale-green ground. In thirteen white areas made of diamond dust appeared the names of thirteen actors, of which twelve were in blue letters of various sizes, and one, the grandest, was in gaudy red letters consisting of masses of rubies. The coveted formula “100th performance of . . .” occupied the place of honor at the top.
François-Jules thought that this object commemorating the most triumphant day of his life, if chosen as a hiding place, would serve, better than anything else, to surround the mire of his confession with glory.
Following his long and precise directions, a skillful Parisian goldsmith completely hollowed out the elegant gold plaque and transformed it imperceptibly into an extremely flat kind of box. The gem-encrusted top became a sliding lid, which functioned only when a special system of tumblers had been activated by the pressure of a fingernail on a sprung ruby in the star’s name. Here the guilty man resolved to secrete his terrible confessions.
As to the operations which were to lead step by step to the document’s discovery, François-Jules decided that they should, in part, have reference to certain consequences of a remote historical fact.
In 1347, soon after the famous siege of Calais, Philip VI of Valois determined to reward the heroism of the six burghers who voluntarily went out to Edward III, barefoot and with ropes about their necks, in the belief that they were walking to their deaths. By thus fulfilling the enemy monarch’s demands, they had saved the town from certain destruction, owing their unexpected pardon only to Philippa of Hainault’s intercession.
Philip VI had at first been inclined to raise them to the nobility, but considered the gift excessive on reflecting that, while the adventure had shown that they possessed
great courage, seeing that they had expected to lose their lives, it had, after all, turned out well, without causing them the slightest harm. Now for valor of such a kind, performed moreover by prosperous and distinguished persons, only an honorary reward could be appropriate since any thought of pecuniary remuneration had necessarily to be excluded. Adopting a middle course, the King resolved to award certain nobiliary privileges to the six heroes, while letting them remain in their commoner’s condition.
There existed several great families in each of which all the first-born of the eldest branch invariably took the same Christian name, inscribed on official parchments with some evocative appearance devolving upon one of its letters; according to the example chosen, this might be a t taking the form of a sword standing on its point or an o changed into a buckler by some internal flourishes — a z transformed by a subtle dislocation into a flash of lightning, an i representing a lit taper — here a c that had become a sickle, there an s forming a river. With long practice the person concerned was able to execute the letter vignette readily when he signed his name. Complementing in a way the various emblems on the coat of arms, it constituted a particularly rare and valued kind of distinction, to which was always added the very remarkable prerogative of being allowed to receive the sacrament of marriage at the hands of a bishop wearing the subtunicle — a red garment, distinctly longer than the pontifical tunicle covering it, which was reserved for the most solemn ecclesiastical ceremonies.
Resorting to this twofold institution, the King had the principle Christian name of each of the six men of Calais partially illustrated according to his own fancy, declaring that it was to be transmitted, in its new form, by primogeniture, together with the usual matrimonial consequence concerning the subtunicle.
Now, among the famous band was counted one François Cortier, the direct ancestor of François-Jules, who had had his cedilla changed by Philip VI into a curved asp. Ever since then all the first-born of his line had been called François, frequently with the addition of a second distinguishing Christian name, giving the appendage of the first c in their large-lettered signature the required animal appearance — and until the middle of Louis XIV’s age, when it was suppressed, the episcopal subtunicle had presided at the marriage of each one.
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