by George Sand
“Besides, I’ll never take my eyes off them,” Matteus went on, as though he were talking to himself.
“You need not worry about that. I am much too beholden to those who brought me here, also to those, I think, who are my hosts in this place, to attempt anything that might displease them.”
“Oh! Madame is here of her own free will?” asked Matteus. It seemed that curiosity was less strictly forbidden to him than expansiveness.
“Please consider me a willing captive, and on my honor.”
“Oh, that’s just the way I see it. I’ve never kept anyone otherwise, even though quite often I’ve seen such prisoners of mine weep and worry as though they regretted having given their word. And yet God knows they were well treated here! But in those cases they were released from their oath when they insisted on it; nobody is ever detained here by force. Madame’s supper is served.”
The penultimate sentence of the tomato-colored butler restored his new mistress’s appetite on the spot. She found supper so good that she gave fine compliments to its maker, who seemed greatly flattered by such appreciation, and it was clear to Consuelo that she had earned his respect. Yet he was neither more trusting nor less wary. He was an excellent man, at once simple and crafty. Consuelo quickly sized him up, seeing how he, with a mixture of good-heartedness and cunning, anticipated all the questions she might ask him so as not to get tripped up and to devise replies to his liking. Thus she was told everything that she had not asked to know, yet without learning a single thing. His masters were very rich, very powerful, very generous, but very severe, especially in the matter of discretion. The lodge was part of a beautiful residence, sometimes inhabited by the masters of the house, sometimes entrusted to the care of the very faithful servants, very well paid and very discreet. The land was rich, fertile, and well governed. The people living there were not in the habit of complaining about their lords. Besides, they wouldn’t have had an easy time doing that around Master Matteus, who respected people and the law and could not abide indiscreet remarks. Consuelo found his clever insinuations and officious information so tedious that as soon as supper was over, she smiled and said, “I would fear being indiscreet myself, sir, if I were to enjoy your conversation any longer. I don’t need anything more today, and I wish you good evening.”
“Madame will do me the honor of ringing whenever she wishes anything,” he replied. “I live behind the house, at the foot of the cliff, in a pretty hermitage where I grow magnificent watermelons. I would be delighted if Madame could give them an encouraging glance, but I’ve been particularly forbidden ever to open that door to Madame.”
“I understand, Master Matteus, I must never go out except in the garden, and I mustn’t blame your whim, but the will of my hosts. I’ll obey the rule.”
“All the more because Madame would find it very hard to open the door. It is so heavy. . . . And then there’s a secret spring in the lock that could grievously wound Madame’s hands if she weren’t forewarned.”
“My word is even stronger than all your locks and bolts, Monsieur Matteus. Sleep in peace, as I too mean to do.”
Several days went by without Consuelo receiving any word from her hosts, without setting eyes on any face aside from Matteus’s black mask, more pleasant perhaps than his actual features. This worthy attendant served her with a zeal and punctuality for which she could not thank him enough. Yet she was prodigiously bored by his conversation, which she felt obligated to endure, for he always stoically refused her presents, and she had no way to show her gratitude other than letting him prattle on. He was passionately fond of talking, and this was all the more remarkable because he never strayed from the strange reserve required of him and had a knack for broaching many topics without ever touching on the reserved sins entrusted to his discretion. Consuelo was told precisely how many carrots and stalks of asparagus the castle produced every year; how many fawns were born on the grounds, the history of every swan in the pond, every chick in the pheasantry and every pineapple in the greenhouse. Yet she could not guess for an instant in what country she was, whether the master or masters of the castle were absent or present, whether she was to communicate with them one day or remain alone indefinitely in the lodge.
In short, nothing that truly interested her escaped Matteus’s prudent, yet lively lips. She feared that it would be altogether uncouth even to go within earshot of the gardener and the maidservant who came moreover very early in the morning and disappeared almost as soon as she was up. She did nothing more than glance into the grounds from time to time without ever seeing anyone go by, unless at too great a distance for any real observation, and contemplate the top of the castle that glimmered with a few lights every evening, always extinguished at an early hour.
It was not long before she fell into deep melancholy, and boredom, over which she had triumphed at Spandau, assailed and overwhelmed her in this opulent dwelling, among all the comforts of life. Are there earthly treasures that one can enjoy utterly alone? Prolonged solitude casts a pall over the loveliest things and robs them of their charm; it strikes terror into the most stalwart soul. Soon Consuelo found the hospitality of the Invisibles even more cruel than strange, and a mortal disgust took hold of all her faculties. The sound of her magnificent harpsichord seemed to her too bright in these empty, resonant rooms, and she was spooked by her own voice. When she ventured to sing, if the first shadows of night took her by surprise in the midst of this pursuit, she thought she could hear angry echoes coming back at her and see restless shadows skulking along the silk-lined walls and over the noiseless carpets. When she tried to get a good look at them, they sank back, slinking off behind the furniture to whisper, mock, and mimic her. Yet it was only the evening breeze playing in the leaves around her windows or the vibrations of her voice in the surrounding air. But her imagination, weary of questioning all these silent witnesses to her ennui, the statues, the paintings, the Japanese vases full of flowers, the huge mirrors clear and deep, was beginning to fall prey to a vague fear, of the kind that results from anticipating some unknown event. She remembered the strange powers that the common folk ascribed to the Invisibles, the weird illusions with which Cagliostro had surrounded her, the apparition of the woman in white at the palace in Berlin, the Count de Saint-Germain’s marvelous promises regarding Count Albert’s resurrection. She told herself that all these unexplained things probably emanated from the secret work of the Invisibles in society and in her own particular destiny. She did not believe in their supernatural power, but it was clear to her that they were intent on conquering people’s minds by every means, appealing either to the heart or the imagination, using threats or promises, terror or temptation. So she was in the grip of some fearsome revelation or cruel hoax and, like cowardly children, she could have said that she was afraid of being afraid.
At Spandau she had steeled her will against extreme danger and real suffering; she had triumphed valiantly over everything; resignation, moreover, had seemed natural to her at Spandau. A fortress’s sinister look is in harmony with solitude’s gloomy meditations, whereas in her new prison everything seemed set up for a life of poetic effusion or peaceful intimacy; and this eternal silence, this lack of all human sympathy destroyed the harmony of the place like a monstrous misconception. One would have thought it the charming retreat of two happy lovers or an elegant family, a pleasant home suddenly hated and abandoned because of some painful breakup or sudden catastrophe. The numerous inscriptions that decorated every flourish no longer made her smile like so many emphatic bits of childish drivel. Words of encouragement were combined with threats, conditional praise was corrected with humiliating accusations. She could no longer lift her eyes without discovering some new maxim that had escaped her notice, that seemed to forbid her from breathing easily in this sanctuary of wary, watchful justice. Her soul had collapsed in on itself after the crises of the escape and her impromptu love for the stranger. Her lethargic state, no doubt deliberately induced to prevent her from seeing w
here her refuge was located, had left her with a secret languor, along with a resulting nervous irritability. For that reason she soon felt both restless and nonchalant, by turns alarmed by a trifle, then indifferent to everything.
One evening she thought she could just barely hear an orchestra far off in the distance. She went up to the terrace and saw the castle shimmering with light through the leaves. The strains of a symphony, proud and vibrant, came to her clearly. The contrast between a festive gathering and her solitude moved her more than she wanted to admit. It had been so long since she had exchanged a word with intelligent or rational beings! For the first time in her life she fancied a marvelous night at a concert or a ball and, like Cinderella, she wished that some good fairy would whisk her up and away into the enchanted palace through a window, if only to remain there sight unseen, relishing the view of human beings enjoying themselves together.
The moon was not yet up. Although the sky was clear, there were such deep shadows under the trees that Consuelo could easily slip over there without anyone noticing, even if she had been surrounded by invisible guards. A fierce temptation came over her, and all the specious reasons that curiosity calls up when it intends to mount an assault on our conscience thronged into her mind. Had they shown her any trust, delivering her sound asleep and half dead to this gilded, yet implacable prison? Had they the right to exact blind submission from her when they did not even deign to ask her for it? Besides, didn’t they mean to tempt her and lure her on with these sham festivities? Who knows? Everything that the Invisibles did was bizarre. Perhaps, in trying to find a way out of the compound, she might just happen upon an open gate, a gondola on the stream flowing from the grounds into her garden through an arch in the wall. She paused on this last supposition, the most gratuitous of all, and went down to the garden determined to try her luck. Yet she had not taken fifty steps when she heard overhead something that sounded rather like a huge bird taking flight at a fantastic rate of speed. At the same moment she found herself in a great wash of bluish-white light that lasted only a few seconds, then flared back up almost immediately with a loud bang. At that point, Consuelo understood that it was neither lightning nor a meteor, but the start of fireworks at the castle. Her hosts’ entertainment promised to give her a lovely show up on the terrace and, like a child trying to shake off the boredom of a long penance, she raced back to the lodge.
Yet in the glare that these long streaks of artificial lightning, sometimes red, sometimes blue, cast over the garden, twice she saw a tall man in black standing motionless at her side. She had not had the time to get a good look at him before the glowing ball fell back to earth in a rain of fire and fizzled out, leaving everything in even greater darkness for eyes that had been momentarily dazzled. At that point, Consuelo was frightened and dashed away from where she had seen the specter. Yet at the second sinister flash she found herself two steps away from him. By the third flash she had reached the steps of the lodge; he was in front of her, blocking her way. Seized with insuperable terror, she uttered a piercing cry, lost her balance, and would have fallen backward down the stairs if the mysterious visitor had not grabbed her in his arms. No sooner had he brushed his lips over her brow than she felt and recognized the chevalier, the stranger, the man she loved, the man she knew loved her.
Chapter XXV
Finding him once more, like an angel of consolation, in that intolerable solitude filled her with a joy that silenced all the scruples and fears still in her mind only a second before, when she had been musing about him without any immediate hope of seeing him again. She responded to his embrace with passion; and as he was already trying to break loose from her arms to pick up his black mask which had fallen off, she clung to him, crying, “Don’t leave me, don’t abandon me!” Her voice was supplicating, her caresses irresistible. The stranger sank down to her feet and hid his face in the folds of her dress, covering it with kisses. There he remained a few seconds as though torn between delight and despair. Then he grabbed his mask, slipped a letter into Consuelo’s hand, and dashed into the lodge, disappearing before she could catch a glimpse of his face.
She followed him, and by the light of a little alabaster lamp that Matteus lit every evening at the foot of the steps, she hoped to find him again, but before she had gone up a few stairs, he seemed to have vanished into thin air. In vain she searched every nook and cranny in the lodge; there was not a trace of him to be found; were it not for the letter in her trembling hand, she could have thought that she had been dreaming.
At last she decided to go back to her boudoir to read the letter. This time the handwriting struck her as deliberately disguised rather than deformed by pain. The letter said more or less this:
“I can neither see you nor talk to you; but I’ve not been forbidden to write to you. Will you allow me this? Will you dare reply to the stranger? Were I to be so fortunate, I could, while you were sleeping, go fetch your letters and place my own in a book that you would leave in the evening on the garden bench at the water’s edge. My love for you is passionate, idolatrous, mad. I am vanquished, my strength is broken; my activity, my zeal, my enthusiasm for the work to which I’ve devoted my life, everything, even the sense of duty, is annihilated in me if you don’t love me. Bound to strange and terrible duties by my vows, by the surrender and renunciation of my will, I am floating between thoughts of infamy and suicide, for I can’t convince myself that you truly love me and that distrust and fear haven’t already blotted out your involuntary love for me. Could it be otherwise? For you I’m nothing but a shadow, a night’s dream, a fleeting illusion. Well, in order to make you love me, I feel ready, twenty times a day, to sacrifice my honor, to betray my word, to defile my conscience by breaking a vow. If you managed to escape from this prison, I’d follow you to the ends of the earth, even if that meant having to expiate by a life of shame and remorse the intoxication of seeing you, if only for a day, and hearing you say once again, ‘I love you.’ And yet, if you refuse to join in the work of the Invisibles, if you find frightening and repugnant the vows that no doubt will soon be required of you, I’ll be forbidden ever to see you again! . . . But I won’t obey, I won’t be able to. No! I’ve suffered enough, toiled enough and served enough the cause of humanity; if you are not the reward for my labors, I’ll quit and lose myself by going back to the world, to its laws and customs. I’m not in my right mind, as you can see. Pity, oh, pity me! Don’t say you don’t love me anymore. I couldn’t take it, I wouldn’t want to believe it, or were I to believe it, I’d have to die.”
Consuelo read this note amid the din of the fireworks, rockets, and bombs bursting overhead, without hearing them. Totally absorbed in her reading, she nonetheless felt, albeit unwittingly, the electric commotion generated, especially in impressionable organisms, by exploding gunpowder and violent noise as a whole. It particularly affects the imagination when it does not physically act upon a weak, sickly body by causing painful shudders. On the contrary, it excites the mind and senses of brave, well-constituted people. In some women it even arouses fearless instincts, ideas of combat and something like vague regrets not to be a man. In short, if a certain pronounced accent makes us find almost musical pleasure in the voice of a rushing torrent, the roar of a breaking wave, the rumble of thunder, this accent of rage, threat, pride, this mighty voice, so to speak, is found in the booming cannon, the whistling volleys, and the air being rent asunder by which fireworks mimic the clash of battle. Perhaps Consuelo felt that effect while reading the first real love letter, the first billet-doux she had ever received. She felt courageous, brave, and almost reckless. A kind of drunken elation made her find this declaration of love warmer and more persuasive than all of Albert’s words, just as she had found the stranger’s kiss sweeter and more impassioned than all of Anzoleto’s. So she began writing without hesitation, and while detonations were rattling the grounds, with the odor of saltpeter overwhelming the perfume of the flowers and Bengal lights flashing over the facade of the lodge, Consuelo to
ok no notice and replied,
“Yes, I love you, I’ve said it, I’ve confessed it to you, and even if I had to repent and blush for it a thousand times over, I can never erase from the strange, incomprehensible book of my destiny the page that I myself have written there and which is in your hands! It was the expression of a reprehensible impulse, perhaps mad, but profoundly true and ardently felt. Were you the vilest of men, I would still have placed in you my ideal! Even if you were to demean me by contemptuous and cruel behavior, I would still have felt at the touch of your heart an intoxication that I had never known, that seemed to me as holy as the angels are pure. You see, I’m repeating back to you what you wrote to me about the things I confided in Beppo. All we’re doing is repeating back and forth to each other something we both earnestly feel, I think, and truly believe. Why and how could we be wrong? We don’t know each other; perhaps we never will. Strange fate! Yet we love each other, and we can no more explain the primary causes of this love than we can foresee its mysterious ends. Well, I am abandoning myself to your word, to your honor; I’m not fighting the feelings you inspire in me. Don’t let me fool myself. There’s only one thing in the world I ask of you: Don’t pretend to love me, don’t ever see me again if you don’t love me; leave me to my lot, whatever that may be, without fear that I’ll accuse you or curse you for the fleeting illusion of happiness you’ve given me. It seems to me that what I’m asking here is so easy! There are moments, I confess, when I am frightened by the blind confidence thrusting me toward you. But from the moment that you appear, that my hand is in yours or that I see something you’ve written (even if your handwriting is misshapen and tortured, as though you did not want me to know the slightest external and visible sign of you); finally, I just hear your step, and all my fears vanish, and I can’t help believing that you are my best friend on earth. But why do you conceal yourself as you do? What terrifying secret lies behind your mask and your silence? Have I seen you somewhere else? Must I be afraid of you? Will I have to drive you away the day I learn your name, see your face? If you are utterly unknown to me as you have said in a letter, why do you so blindly obey the strange law of the Invisibles, all the while writing to me today that you are ready to break free of them in order to follow me to the ends of the earth? And if I were to make it a condition of running away with you that you wouldn’t keep any more secrets from me, would you take off your mask? Would you speak to me? In order to get to know you, I must, you say, commit myself . . . to what? that I bind myself by vows to the Invisibles? . . . But for what purpose? What? With my eyes closed, my conscience silent, and my mind in the dark, I must surrender and renounce my will, as you yourself did, knowing at least what you were doing and why? And to induce me to carry out these extraordinary acts of blind devotion, you won’t commit the slightest infraction of the rules of your order! For it is clear to me that you belong to one of those mysterious orders called secret societies here and said to be legion in Germany. Unless it’s quite simply a political conspiracy against . . . as I was told in Berlin. Well, whatever the case may be, if they leave me free to refuse once I know what is required of me, I’ll bind myself by the most terrible vows never to reveal a thing. Can I do anything more without being unworthy of the love of a man who is so scrupulous, so faithful to his vows that he does not want to let me hear the words that I myself uttered, flying in the face of the prudence and modesty imposed upon my sex: I love you!”