The Countess von Rudolstadt

by George Sand

  “I won’t tell you, dear Consuelo, how anxiously we waited during our first weeks here with Albert. Hidden away in the lodge where you are now, he gradually recovered the inner life that we were striving to reawaken in him, albeit slowly and carefully. The first word that crossed his lips after two months of absolute silence was in response to music. Marcus had understood that Albert’s life was tied to his love for you, and he had resolved to invoke that memory only insofar as he knew you to be worthy of that love and free to respond to it one day. He made the most thorough inquiries about you, and before long he knew everything about your character and your life, past and present. Thanks to the clever organization of our order, our relations with every other secret society, and a multitude of neophytes and disciples whose work it is to probe with the most scrupulous care the things and people that interest us, nothing can escape our investigations. The world holds no secrets for us. We know how to penetrate the deepest mysteries of politics, of court intrigues as well. So your spotless life and straightforward character weren’t difficult for us to know and judge. Baron von Trenck, upon learning that the man who had loved you, whose name you had kept quiet, was his friend Albert, talked to us about you with such feeling. The Count de Saint-Germain, very absentminded in appearance, but in fact one of the most clairvoyant of men, this strange visionary, this superior spirit who seems to live only in the past and doesn’t miss a thing in the present, quickly gave us the most complete information about you, and it was of such a nature that from then on I felt tenderly attached to you and thought of you as my own daughter.

  “Once we knew enough to act with certainty, we had skilled musicians come play under the window where we’re now sitting. Albert was there where you are, leaning against this curtain and contemplating the sunset; Marcus was holding one of his hands and I the other. Right in the middle of a symphony that we had had expressly composed for four instruments, with various themes from the Bohemian tunes that Albert plays with such soul and religious feeling, up rose the hymn to the Virgin with which you had charmed him in the past, ‘O Consuelo de mi alma. . . .’

  “Just then Albert, who had shown a little emotion hearing these old Bohemian melodies, threw himself into my arms and dissolved into tears, crying ‘Mother, oh mother!’

  “Marcus stopped the music, content with the emotion it had aroused and not wanting to overdo it the first time. Albert had spoken. He had recognized me and refound the strength to love. It took several more days before his mind had regained all its liberty. Yet he had no spells of delirium. When he seemed worn out from using his faculties, he would lapse back into dismal silence, but by imperceptible degrees his physiognomy looked less glum, and bit by bit we gently and gingerly made headway against that taciturn tendency. We were glad at last to see his need for rest from intellectual labor disappear, and thereafter the only interruption in the workings of his mind was during hours of sleep that was regular, peaceful, and quite like that of other men. Albert recognized himself again, with his love for you and for me, his charity and enthusiasm for his fellow men and for virtue, his faith and his need to make it triumph. He went on cherishing you without bitterness, mistrust, or regret for all that he had suffered for you. Yet, despite all his care to reassure us and demonstrate his courage and selflessness, we could see that his passion had lost none of its intensity. He had merely become stronger, in mind and body, to bear up under it; we made no attempt to fight it. On the contrary, Marcus and I joined forces to give him hope and resolved to let you know that this husband for whom you were mourning religiously, not in your dress but in your soul, was alive. But Albert, with generous resignation and a good sense of his situation with regard to you, stopped us from rushing forward. ‘She wasn’t in love with me,’ he said. ’She took pity on a dying man; it must have been with terror and perhaps despair that she promised to spend her life with me. Now she would come back to me out of duty. It would make me so unhappy to rob her of her freedom, the thrills of her art, and perhaps the joys of a new love! It’s quite enough to have had her compassion; don’t reduce me to being the object of her pained devotion. Let her live; let her know the pleasures of independence, the heady delights of glory, and even greater joys if need be! It’s not for me that I love her, and while it’s only too true that she is necessary to my happiness, I can certainly give that up as long as my sacrifice is to her benefit! Besides, was I born for happiness? Am I entitled to happiness while the whole world suffers and groans? Don’t I have other duties aside from the pursuit of my own gratification? While performing these duties won’t I find the strength to forget myself and not to desire anything more for me alone? I want to try at least; and if I fall by the wayside, you’ll take pity on me and urge me on; better that than coddling me with fond hopes and endlessly reminding me that my heart is sick and consumed with the selfish desire for happiness. Love me, friends! Bless me, mother, and don’t talk to me about the things that sap my strength and virtue when despite myself I feel the goad of my torments! I know full well that the greatest pain I suffered at Riesenburg was the pain I inflicted on others! I would go mad again, perhaps die with blasphemy on my lips if I were to see Consuelo suffer the anguish I failed to spare the other objects of my affection.’

  “He seemed altogether well again, and my tender love wasn’t the only thing helping him battle his unhappy passion. Marcus and a few superiors of the order gave him a fervent initiation into the mysteries of our endeavors. He took serious and melancholy joy in these vast projects and bold hopes, above all in the long philosophical discussions. Even though he wasn’t always of one mind with his noble friends, he at least felt his soul in touch with theirs in all matters relating to deep, ardent feeling, the love of the good, the desire for justice and truth. His aspiration toward the ideal, for a long time cramped and beaten down by the narrow-minded terrors of his family, found at last room to grow, and this, seconded by noble sympathies, even stimulated by frank, friendly contradictions, was the vital atmosphere in which he could breathe and act, despite the secret pain devouring him. Albert is essentially metaphysical. He has never taken pleasure in the frivolous life on which egotism feeds. He was born to contemplate the highest truths and practice the most austere virtues; yet, at the same time, thanks to a perfection of inner beauty very rare among mankind, he is endowed with an essentially tender and loving soul. Charity is not enough for him, he needs affection. His love reaches out to everyone, and yet he needs to focus it more particularly on a few. He has a fanatic sense of dedication, but there is nothing fierce in his virtue. Love intoxicates him, friendship rules him, and his life is a rich, inexhaustible give-and-take between the abstract being he passionately reveres under the name of humanity and the particular beings he delights in cherishing. In short, his excellent heart is a hearth of love; all the noble passions find a home there and dwell in peace. If God could be represented in the form of a finite, mortal being, I would dare say that my son’s soul is the image of the universal soul we call God.

  “That is why he, a feeble human creature with infinite aspirations and limited means, couldn’t live with his family. Had it not been for his fervent love for them, he could have made a life apart in their midst, with a calm, robust faith different from theirs and indulgence for their innocuous blindness, but such strength would have required a certain coldness that was as impossible for him as it was for me. He couldn’t live isolated in mind, spirit, and heart; with anguish he implored their adhesion, with despair he appealed for the communion of ideas between him and those he held dear. That is why, shut up alone inside the brass walls of their Catholic obstinacy, social prejudices, and hatred for the religion of equality, he fell broken and moaning against their bosom, he withered like a plant deprived of dew and invoking the rain that would have let him live with those he loved. Weary of suffering alone, of loving alone, of believing and praying alone, he thought he had found life again in you, and when you accepted and shared his ideas, he regained composure and reason, but you didn’
t share his feelings, and your separation would throw him back into a deeper and more intolerable solitude.

  “His faith, repudiated and relentlessly attacked, became torture beyond human strength. His mind reeled. Unable to refresh the most sublime essence of his life by steeping it in souls like his own, he had to let himself die.

  “As soon as he found these hearts made to understand and help him, we were amazed by his mild-mannered way of discussing things, his tolerance, confidence, and modesty. We had feared, because of his past, something too fierce, opinions too personal, a harsh tongue worthy of respect in an earnest, enthusiastic mind but dangerous to his progress and harmful to an association of our sort. We were amazed by his openness, simplicity, and charming companionship. His words and lessons made us better and stronger, but he was convinced that we were giving him everything he was giving us. He was soon the object of boundless veneration here, and you ought not be surprised that so many people were involved in bringing you back to him when you realize that his happiness had become a collective effort, a need felt by everyone who had drawn near him, if only for an instant.”

  Chapter XXXVI

  “But the cruel destiny of our race was not yet fulfilled. Albert had still to suffer, his heart had to bleed eternally for this family, innocent of all its woes, but condemned by a bizarre fatality to break him while crumbling at his feet. We told him, as soon as he was strong enough to hear the news, that his worthy father had died shortly after his own death, for I have to use that strange expression for such a strange event. Albert mourned his father with a tender, uplifted heart, with the certainty that he had not left this life for the Catholic nothingness of paradise or hell, with the kind of solemn joy that inspired in him the hope of a better, more abundant life here below for that pure, deserving man. He was therefore much more distressed by the bereavement of Baron Frederick and Canoness Wenceslawa, his other relatives, than by his father’s departure. Reproaching himself for enjoying far from them consolations that they didn’t share, he resolved to go spend some time with them, to let them in on the secret of his healing and miraculous resurrection and to make their lives as happy as possible. He knew nothing about his cousin Amalia’s disappearance. That had happened while he was ill at Riesenburg, and they had carefully concealed it from him to spare him further pain. We hadn’t thought it advisable to tell him about it; we had failed to preserve my wretched niece from a deplorable error, and when we were about to get our hands on the man who had seduced her, the Saxon branch of the Rudolstadt family, with their less indulgent pride, had got there first. They had Amalia secretly arrested in Prussia where she had thought to find refuge and turned her over to the harsh treatment of King Frederick, who gave the family a gracious token of his protection by locking a hapless young girl up in the fortress of Spandau. There she spent nearly a year in dreadful captivity, in total isolation, and having to count herself lucky that her disgrace was a tightly guarded secret, thanks to the generous protection of the jailer king.”

  “Oh, Madame,” Consuelo burst in, “is she still at Spandau?”

  “We’ve just got her out of there. Albert and Liverani couldn’t spirit her away at the same time as you because she was kept on a much closer watch, her revolts, reckless attempts at escape, impatience and tantrums having aggravated the rigors of her confinement. But we have other means aside from those to which you owe your rescue. Our disciples are everywhere, and a few cultivate credit at court to help further our designs. We managed to get Amalia under the wing of the young Margravine von Bayreuth, the Prussian king’s sister, who asked for and obtained her release, promising to take responsibility for her and answer for her future conduct. In a few days the young baroness will be with Princess Sophia Wilhelmina, who is as good-hearted as she is sharp-tongued, who will treat her with the same indulgence and generosity as she did the Princess von Kulmbach, another unfortunate who, like Amalia, is tarnished in the eyes of the world and has also been a victim of the penitentiary regime of the royal fortresses.

  “So Albert was unaware of his cousin’s plight when he resolved to go see his uncle and aunt at the Castle of the Giants. He wouldn’t have been able to understand the inertia of Baron Frederick who had the animal energy to live, hunt, and drink in the wake of so many disasters nor the devout impassibility of the canoness who feared that taking measures to find Amalia would make her scandalous adventures even more notorious. We were horrified and fought Albert’s project, but he persisted in it unbeknownst to us. One night he set out, leaving a letter promising us that he’d soon return. Indeed, he was away only a short while, but what grief he brought back with him!

  “After entering Bohemia in disguise, he made a surprise visit to his solitary friend Zdenko at the Schreckenstein cave. From there he wanted to write to his family to tell them the truth and prepare them for the shock of his return. He knew Amalia as the most courageous as well as the most frivolous, and it was to her that he planned to have Zdenko deliver his first missive. Just when he was about to start on it, Zdenko was out on the mountain, it was near dawn, and he heard a shot, then a heartrending cry. He dashed outside, and the first thing that struck his eye was Zdenko carrying Cinnabar covered in blood. Albert’s first impulse was to run to his poor old dog without giving a thought to covering his face, but while bringing the faithful animal, fatally wounded, back to the place called Monk’s Cave, he saw racing toward him, as fast as age and obesity would allow, a hunter eager to retrieve his prey. It was Baron Frederick. Out stalking at dawn’s first light, he had mistaken Cinnabar’s tawny coat for that of a wild animal and aimed through the branches. Alas, he still had a good eye and a sure hand; he had hit him twice in the side. All of a sudden he spotted Albert. Thinking he was seeing a ghost, he stopped short, frozen in terror. No longer conscious of any real danger, he stepped back to the edge of the steep trail he was following, rolled off a cliff, and smashed down on the rocks below. He died instantly, on the fateful spot where for centuries there had stood the accursed tree, the famous oak of Schreckenstein called the Hussite, a witness and accessory to the most horrible catastrophes long ago.

  “Albert saw his uncle fall and left Zdenko to run to the edge of the cliff. Then he saw the baron’s servants anxiously trying to get him up, all the while filling the air with their moans, for he showed no signs of life. Albert heard these words from down below, ‘Dead, our poor master’s dead! Alas, what will the canoness say?’ Albert no longer gave any thought to himself; he shouted and called out to them. As soon as they set eyes on him, these credulous servants were seized with panic. They were already abandoning the body of their master and running away when old Hanz, the most superstitious but also the most courageous of the lot, stopped them and said, making the sign of the cross, ‘Children, that’s not our master Albert. It’s the spirit of Schreckenstein, who has taken his form to make us all die here if we don’t show some courage. I saw him myself, he’s the one who made the baron fall. He wants to make off with the body and devour it, he’s a vampire! Come on, children, let’s have some courage. They say the devil is a coward. I’ll draw a bead on him while you recite the chaplain’s prayer of exorcism.’

  “With these words Hanz, having crossed himself several more times, raised his gun and fired at Albert while the other servants huddled round the baron’s body. Fortunately Hanz was too upset and terrified to aim well; he was in a sort of delirium. Yet the bullet nearly grazed Albert’s head, for Hanz was the best shot around, and had he been cool and collected, he surely would have killed my son. Albert stopped and hesitated.

  “ ‘Courage, children, courage!’ shouted Hanz reloading his gun. ’Fire away, he’s scared! You won’t kill him, bullets can’t touch him, but you’ll make him back off, and that will give us time to rescue our poor master’s body.’

  “Albert, seeing all these guns pointing at him, ducked into the brush and, without anybody noticing, ran down the mountain and soon confirmed the horrible truth with his own eyes. The broken body of his wret
ched uncle was lying on the bloody rocks, his skull split open, and old Hanz mournfully shouting these dreadful words, ‘The brains, get the brains off the rocks, every last speck! Otherwise, the vampire’s dog will come lick them up.’

  “ ‘Yes, yes, there was a dog,’ replied a second servant. ‘At first I thought it was Cinnabar.’