The Countess von Rudolstadt

by George Sand

  “He spent another year there swinging back and forth between calm and great excitement, exuberant strength and painful prostration. He occasionally wrote to us without any mention of his suffering and the decline of his health. He put up a bitter fight against our political moves. He wanted us henceforth to stop working in the shadows and beguiling people to make them drink of the cup of regeneration.

  “ ‘Off with your black masks, out of your caves,’ he said. ‘Erase the word mystery from the pediment of your temple; you stole it from the Roman church, and it doesn’t suit the men of the future. Don’t you see that you’re behaving like Jesuits? No, I can’t work with you; that’s like looking for life among cadavers. Come at last into the light of day. Don’t waste precious time organizing your army. Count a bit more on its spirit, on the sympathy of the people and the spontaneity of generous instincts. Besides, an army goes corrupt in inactivity, and all their crafty maneuvers to lie in ambush sap the strength and vitality they need to fight.’

  “Albert was right in principle, but the time had not yet come for him to be right in practice. That time still may be far off!

  “You finally arrived at Riesenburg and surprised him in the midst of his soul’s greatest distress. You know, or rather you don’t, what an effect you had on him, to the point of making him forget everything that was not you, of giving him new life, of giving him death.

  “When he thought it was all over between the two of you, he lost all his strength and let himself waste away. Until then I was ignorant of the real nature and gravity of his illness. Marcus’s correspondent told him that the Castle of the Giants was more and more closed to profane eyes, that Albert never left the premises any longer, that society considered him a monomaniac, but that the poor loved him and always blessed his name, and that a few people of uncommon sense who had seen him, first taken aback by his bizarre manner, paid tribute upon leaving to his eloquence, great wisdom, and grand ideas. But when I finally heard that Supperville had been summoned, I tore off to Riesenburg, despite Marcus who, seeing that I would stop at nothing, risked everything to follow me. We arrived at the walls of the castle disguised as beggars. No one recognized us, as I hadn’t been seen around there for twenty-seven years and Marcus for ten. We were given alms and sent away. But we found a friend, an unexpected savior in the person of poor Zdenko. He treated us like brother and sister and took a liking to us because he understood how much we cared about Albert; we knew how to speak to his enthusiasm and make him reveal every secret about his friend’s mortal pain. Zdenko was no longer the raging madman who had threatened your life. Beaten down and broken, he went like us humbly begging news of Albert at the castle gate, and like us he was put off with vague answers, which we in our anguish found terrifying. By a strange coincidence with Albert’s visions, Zdenko claimed that he knew me. I had appeared in his dreams, in his ecstasies, and with childlike abandon he unwittingly surrendered his will to me.

  “ ‘Woman,’ he often said to me, ‘I don’t know your name, but you’re my Podiebrad’s good angel. Many a time in his good hours, when the heavens opened and there before his eyes he saw clustered around his bed those who are no longer, or so people say, he sketched your face and described your voice, your gaze, and your gait.’

  “Far from giving Zdenko’s effusions a cold shoulder, I encouraged them. I flattered his illusion and managed to get him to take Marcus and me down into the Schreckenstein cave. When I saw that subterranean abode and learned that my son had spent weeks, almost entire months there unbeknownst to all, I understood why his thoughts were so gloomy. There I saw a tomb that Zdenko seemed to worship, and it took some trouble to learn whose grave it was. This was Albert’s and Zdenko’s deepest, darkest secret.

  “ ‘Alas!’ the madman told me, ‘that’s where we buried Wanda z Prachalitz, mother to my Albert. She didn’t want to stay in that chapel where they had sealed her in stone. Her bones did nothing but toss and turn, and those who are here,’ he added pointing to the Taborite ossuary at the edge of the spring, ‘were always getting after us for not bringing her to them. We went to fetch those sacred remains and reburied them here, and every day we’d bring down flowers and kisses.’

  “Horrified by this situation, which might bring about the discovery of my secret, Marcus questioned Zdenko and learned that he had brought my coffin there without opening it. Albert was therefore so ill and deranged that he no longer remembered that I was alive and persisted in believing that I was dead. But wasn’t all this one of Zdenko’s dreams? I couldn’t believe my ears. ‘Oh my friend,’ I said in despair to Marcus, ‘if the light of his reason is so extinguished, if he is to remain in this state forever, may God have mercy and let him die!’

  “Finally in possession of all of Zdenko’s secrets, we learned that we could get into the Castle of the Giants through subterranean corridors and secret passages; we followed him there one night and waited at the entrance to the cistern while he slipped into the house. He came back laughing and singing and told us that Albert was cured, that he was asleep, and they had dressed him in new clothes and put a crown on his head. I dropped as though I’d been struck by lightning; I understood that Albert had died. I don’t know what happened after that; I woke up several times in a fever; I was lying on bearskins and dry leaves, in Albert’s subterranean room under Schreckenstein. Zdenko and Marcus took turns watching over me. One kept telling me with an air of triumphant joy that his Podiebrad was cured, that he would soon be coming to see me; the other, pale and pensive, would say, ‘All is not lost, perhaps; let’s not give up hoping for the miracle that made you rise out of the grave.’ I didn’t understand a thing, I was delirious; I wanted to get up, run, scream; I couldn’t, and poor Marcus seeing me in such a state had neither the strength nor the leisure to look after me in earnest. His whole mind, his every thought were absorbed by an even more terrible anxiety. Finally one night, I think it was the third of my crisis, I was calm and feeling stronger. I tried to collect my thoughts, I managed to get up; I was alone in that horrible cave scarcely lit by a sepulchral lamp; I wanted to get out, I was locked in; where were Marcus, Zdenko . . . and, above all, Albert? . . . My memory came back, I screamed, and the icy vault replied with such a lugubrious echo that sweat ran down my forehead, cold as the damp of the grave; I thought I was once again buried alive. What had happened? What was going on even now? I fell to my knees, wrung my hands in a desperate prayer and screamed furiously for Albert. Finally, I heard heavy, uneven steps drawing near, like those of people with a heavy burden. A dog barked and moaned, and faster than the others, he scratched at the door several times. The door was flung open, and I saw Marcus and Zdenko bringing me Albert, stiff, wan, by all appearances dead. His dog Cinnabar was jumping up and licking his hanging hands. Zdenko was improvising a song in a sweet, serious voice, ‘Come sleep on your mother’s breast, poor friend so long deprived of rest; come sleep until it’s day, we’ll wake you for the dawn.’

  “I rushed over to my son. ‘He’s not dead?’ I exclaimed. ‘Oh, Marcus, you’ve saved him, haven’t you? He’s going to wake up?’

  “ ‘Don’t delude yourself, Madame,’ Marcus replied, horrifyingly firm. ‘I know nothing, I can believe nothing; be brave, no matter what. Give me a hand, forget yourself.’

  “I don’t need to tell you everything we tried to revive Albert. Thank heaven, there was a stove in the cave. We managed to warm his limbs. ‘You see,’ I said to Marcus, ‘his hands are a bit warm!’

  “ ‘Marble can be warmed up,’ he replied in a sinister tone, ‘which doesn’t give it life. This heart is still as stone!’

  “Dreadful hours dragged on in expectation, terror, discouragement. Marcus, down on his knees, his ear glued to my son’s chest, his face glum, watched in vain for a faint sign of life. Fainting, exhausted, I dared not say another word nor ask any questions. I studied Marcus’s ghastly brow. A moment came when I didn’t even dare look at him any longer; it seemed to me that I had read the supreme sentence.


  “Zdenko, sitting in a corner, was playing with Cinnabar like a child and still singing. Sometimes he would stop and say that we were tormenting Albert and should let him sleep, that he, Zdenko, had seen him like that for weeks on end, that he would wake up all by himself. Marcus suffered cruelly from the madman’s confidence and couldn’t share it, but I stubbornly wanted to have faith in it and felt quite inspired. The madman was possessed with heavenly divination, the angelic certainty of the truth. Finally, I thought I saw an imperceptible change in Marcus’s stony brow, that it was less tightly knit. I saw his hand quiver, only to stiffen in a fresh attempt at courage; then he heaved a deep sigh, lifted his ear from the chest where my son’s heart had perhaps taken a beat, tried to say something, contained himself, frightened by the joy, perhaps illusory, he was about to give me, leaned back down, listened again, shuddered, suddenly straightened up and threw his arms back, then sagged and dropped as though as if he were about to die. ‘Is there no more hope?’ I exclaimed, tearing at my hair.

  “ ‘Wanda!’ he choked, ‘your son’s alive!’

  “And broken by the strain of his attention, courage, and concern, my stoical, tender friend, absolutely spent, dropped to the floor near Zdenko.”

  Chapter XXXV

  Countess Wanda, shaken by the force of the memory, was silent for a few minutes, then went on with her tale.

  “We spent several days in the cave, with my son regaining his strength and health amazingly fast. Marcus, surprised to find that Albert hadn’t suffered any organic lesion or basic harm to his vital functions, was nonetheless frightened by his obdurate silence and indifference, apparent or real, to our effusions of joy and his strange situation. Albert’s memory was completely gone. Sunk in a somber meditation, he made secret, futile efforts to understand what was going on around him. As for me, knowing that heartache was the sole reason for his illness and the resulting catastrophe, I was not as impatient as Marcus to see him recover the poignant memories of his love. Marcus himself acknowledged that this mental blotting out of the past could alone explain why his physical strength was returning so fast. His body was reviving at the expense of his mind as quickly as it had broken under the strain of his thoughts.

  “ ‘He’s alive, and he’ll surely survive,’ he said to me, ‘but will he ever recover his wits?’

  “ ‘Let’s get him out of this tomb as soon as possible. Air, sun, and movement will no doubt rouse him out of this slumber of the soul,’ I replied.

  “ ‘Above all, let’s get him out of this false, impossible life that killed him,’ Marcus went on, ‘away from this family and world that thwart all his instincts. Let’s take him to those sympathetic souls in whose fellowship his own soul will regain its strength and lucidity.’

  “Could I hesitate? Cautiously wandering around Schreckenstein at dusk, where I pretended to beg from the rare travelers on those roads, I learned that Count Christian had fallen into a sort of second childhood. He would not have understood his son’s return, and the spectacle of that death before its time, if Albert in turn had understood his father’s condition, would have utterly overwhelmed him. Were we therefore to render him, to abandon him to the inept care of the old aunt, the benighted chaplain, and the idiotic uncle who had all made him live such a wretched life and die such a dismal death? ‘Ah, let’s run away with him!’ I said to Marcus at last. ‘I don’t want him to witness his father’s last gasps and the horrifying display of Catholic idolatry at a deathbed. My husband didn’t understand me, but I always revered his pure and simple virtues and respected him as religiously after I left him as I had while we were together; and now it breaks my heart to think that he’s going to leave this earth without it being possible for us to forgive each other. Yet, since that’s the way it must be, since my apparition as well as my son’s could only cause him indifference or death, let’s leave and not give Albert back to the tomb of Riesenburg. We’ve reconquered him from death, and life, at least I hope so, is opening a sublime path before him. Ah, let’s follow the first impulse that led us here! Let’s free Albert from captivity, from the false duties created by rank and fortune. These duties will always be crimes in his eyes, and if he persists in fulfilling them for the sake of old and moribund relatives, he’ll only die trying and be the first to go. I know what I suffered in that slavery of the mind, that fatal, unending contradiction between the life of the soul and day to day living, between principles and instincts, on the one hand, and forced habits, on the other. It’s clear to me that he’s gone the same way and absorbed the same poisons. So let’s save him, and later on, if he wants to go back on our decision, won’t he be free to do so? If his father goes on living, and if his own mental health permits, won’t there still be time for him to return here and console Christian’s last days with his presence and love?’

  “ ‘Not easily!’ Marcus replied. ‘I foresee terrible obstacles if Albert wants to go back on his divorce from established society, the world, and the family. But why would he want to do that? This family may die out before he recovers his memory. As for those things to be conquered in the world, name, honor, and fortune, I have no doubt what his opinion of them will be once he’s himself again, and I pray that this day may come! Our most important and pressing task is to put him in an environment where he can heal.’

  “So one night, as soon as Albert could hold himself up, we left the cave. At a short distance from Schreckenstein, we put him on a horse and made our way to the border, which is very near in those parts, as you know, and there we found easier, faster transportation. The relations that our order maintains with the multitude of Freemasons assure us, inside the whole of Germany, smooth traveling incognito and free of police checks. Bohemia was the only perilous place for us because of the recent agitation in Prague and the vigilant eye of the Austrian authorities.’

  “And what about Zdenko?” asked the young Countess von Rudolstadt.

  “Zdenko was nearly our ruin with his stubborn attempts to stop us, or at least Albert, from leaving. He didn’t want to be separated from him, nor did he want to follow him anywhere. He doggedly believed that Albert would die away from fateful, gloomy Schreckenstein. ‘Only here is my Podiebrad at peace; everywhere else people torture him, stop him from sleeping, make him forswear our fathers of Mount Tabor and lead a life of shame and perjury that exasperates him. Leave him here with me; I’ll take good care of him as I’ve done so often. I won’t trouble his meditations; when he wants to keep quiet, I won’t make any noise walking around, and I’ll hold Cinnabar’s muzzle for hours lest the dog lick his hand and give him a start; when he wants to make merry, I’ll sing him the songs he likes and compose some new ones that he’ll like as well, for he liked all my songs and he alone understood them. Leave me my Podiebrad, I tell you. I know better than you what’s good for him, and when you want to see him again, he’ll be playing the violin or placing beautiful branches of cypress that I’ll cut for him in the forest over the tomb of his beloved mother. I’ll feed him well, I will! I know all the huts where folks never refuse good old Zdenko bread, milk, and fruit, and for a long time now the poor peasants of the Bohemian Forest, though they don’t know it, have been feeding their noble master, rich Podiebrad. Albert doesn’t like fancy meals where people eat the flesh of animals; he prefers the innocent, simple life. He has no need to see the sun; better a moonbeam through the trees. And when he wants company, I take him to the wilderness clearings where our good friends the zingari, these children of the Lord, who know neither law nor money, make their camps at night.’ ”

  “I listened carefully to Zdenko because his innocent babble revealed the life that Albert had led with him during his frequent retreats to Schreckenstein. ‘Have no fear,’ he added, ‘that I’ll ever let his enemies know about his secret place. They are so crazy and such liars that now they’re saying, “Our child, our friend, our master is dead.” They wouldn’t be able to believe that he’s alive even if they saw him with their own eyes. Besides, didn’t I use to
answer when they’d ask if I’d seen Count Albert, “He’s no doubt dead?” And as I’d laugh saying that, they’d said I was crazy. But I was talking about death to make fun of them because they believe or pretend to believe in death. And when the people in the castle made as if to follow me, didn’t I have a thousand tricks to throw them off? Oh, I know all the wiles of the hare and the partridge. Like them, I know how to take cover in a thicket, disappear into the heather, go the wrong way, spring up, cross a roaring stream, stop and hide so that they pass me by, and, like the will-o’-the-wisp, make them get lost and risk their necks in swamps and bogs. They call Zdenko the simpleton. The simpleton is cleverer than all of them. There’s never been but one girl, a saintly girl, who could outfox canny Zdenko. She knew magic words to chain his fury; she had charms to overcome every trap or danger; her name was Consuelo.’

  “Whenever Zdenko said your name, Albert would quiver slightly and turn his head away, but then let it drop back down toward his chest a second later, without his memory coming awake.

  “In vain I tried to work out a compromise with this keeper so devoted and so blind, promising to bring Albert back to Schreckenstein on condition that Zdenko first accompany him to a place where Albert wanted to go. That didn’t work, and when at last we had made him, like it or not, agree to let my son leave the cave, he trailed along behind us, crying, muttering, and singing in a pitiful voice until beyond the mines of Kuttenburg. When we reached a famous spot where Zizka had one of his great victories over Sigismund long ago, Zdenko recognized the high crags that mark the border, for no one else knows better from his wanderings all the trails in the area. There he came to a halt, stamped his foot on the ground, and said, ‘Never again will Zdenko leave the land where the bones of his fathers lie! Not long ago, when I was exiled and banished by my Podiebrad for having misunderstood and threatened the saintly girl he loves, I spent weeks and months on foreign land. I thought I’d go mad. I returned to my beloved forests a little while ago to watch Albert sleep because a voice sang to me in a dream that he wasn’t angry any longer. Now that he’s no longer cursing me, you’re stealing him away from me. If you’re taking him to his Consuelo, so be it. But leaving my country all over again, talking the language of our enemies, giving them my hand, leaving Schreckenstein empty and abandoned, I won’t do it again. It’s beyond my strength, and besides, the voices in my sleep have forbidden me to do it. Zdenko must live and die in the land of the Slavs; he must live and die singing in the tongue of his fathers the glory of the Slavs and their sufferings. Farewell and be gone! If Albert hadn’t forbidden me to shed human blood, you wouldn’t be carrying him off like this, but he would curse me again if I raised a hand against you, and not seeing him again is better than seeing him angry with me. You hear me, oh my Podiebrad!’ he exclaimed, kissing the hands of my son who was looking at him and hearing without understanding. ‘I’m obeying you and going away. When you come back, you’ll find your stove lit, your books in place, your bed of leaves freshly made, and your mother’s tomb strewn with palms always green. If it’s the right season, there’ll be flowers over her and the bones of our martyrs at edge of the spring. . . . Farewell, Cinnabar!’ Having tearfully choked out these words, poor Zdenko leaped onto the rocky incline sloping toward Bohemia and vanished as quickly as a deer at dawn’s first light.