The Countess von Rudolstadt

by George Sand

  Consuelo slowly got up and rather calmly detached her bridal veil which had snagged on the bones of the woman kneeling at her side. A low, narrow door had just opened in front of her. Picking up her lamp and taking care not to turn back around, she entered a dark, narrow passage that made a steep descent. To her right and left she saw entrances to cells smothered under the weight of truly sepulchral architecture. These dungeons were too low for one to stand up and hardly long enough for one to lie down. They seemed to be the work of Cyclopes, so sturdily built and skillfully contrived in the solid mass of masonry, like pens for ferocious, dangerous animals. Yet Consuelo could make no mistake. She had seen the amphitheater at Verona and knew that the tigers and bears set aside for circus entertainments and gladiator contests long ago were housed a thousand times better. Besides, she read on the iron doors that these inexpugnable dungeons had been reserved for conquered princes, valiant captains, prisoners whose rank, intelligence, or energy made them the most important and the most feared. That such formidable precautions had been taken against their escape testified to the love and respect they had inspired in their followers. This is where the roar of these lions that had made the world quake fell silent. Their might and will were broken against an angle of a wall; their Herculean breasts had gone dry seeking a breath of air from an imperceptible flue slanting through twenty feet of quarry stone. Their eagle eyes had grown dim watching for a faint glimmer in eternal darkness. This is where the men whom one did not dare kill by light of day were buried alive. There illustrious minds and magnanimous hearts had expiated the use and no doubt as well the abuse of the rights of force.

  After having wandered a while through these dark, dank passages that sank deep into the rock, Consuelo heard a gurgling sound that reminded her of the fearsome underground torrent at Riesenburg, but she was too preoccupied by humanity’s troubles and crimes to give much thought to herself. She was forced to pause a moment to circumvent a torch-lit sinkhole flush with the ground. On a signpost under the torch she read these few words, which had no need of commentary, “Here’s where they were drowned!”

  Consuelo bent over to take a look inside. Here the stream of water on which she had navigated so peacefully not an hour before dashed down into terrifying depths, whirling and roaring as though it were eager to seize and drag off a victim. The ruddy glow of the resin torch gave these sinister waters the color of blood.

  At last Consuelo arrived at a massive door that she tried in vain to move. She wondered if, as in initiations in the pyramids of Egypt, she was going to be swept into the air by means of invisible chains while an abyss opened at her feet and a sudden violent gust of wind blew out her lamp. Something else gave her more serious alarm. Since entering the passage she had become aware that she was not alone; someone was walking close behind her with such a light step that she could not detect the slightest sound; yet she thought she had felt a garment brush against her own, and when she had gone past the well, the light of the torch behind her had cast on the wall two flickering shadows instead of one. So who was this fearsome companion at whom she was forbidden to look on pain of forfeiting the fruit of all her labors and never crossing the threshold of the temple? Was it some terrifying shade so ugly that he would have chilled her courage and addled her wits? She no longer saw his shadow, but she imagined that she could hear him breathing right beside her, and that fateful door would not budge! The two or three minutes that went by as she waited there seemed to her a hundred years long. This mute acolyte frightened her; she feared that he wanted to put her to the test by speaking to her, forcing her by some trick to look at him. Her heart was pounding; finally she noticed an inscription above the door that she had yet to read.

  “Here awaits your last ordeal, and it is the most cruel. If you’ve exhausted your courage, knock twice on the left side of this door; otherwise, knock three times on the right. Bear in mind that the glory of your initiation will be commensurate to your efforts.”

  Without hesitating Consuelo knocked three times on the right side of the door. It seemed to open all by itself, and she entered a vast, torch-lit hall. There was no one there, and at first she understood nothing about the bizarre objects symmetrically arranged in rows around her. There were contraptions of wood, iron, and bronze for what use she knew not; strange weapons laid out on tables or hanging on the walls. For a second she thought she was in an artillery museum; for there were indeed muskets, cannons, culverins, and a whole set of instruments of war in front of yet others. Someone had taken pleasure in collecting all the means of destruction that men had invented for their mutual immolation. But when the neophyte had advanced a few steps through this arsenal, she saw other objects of a more refined barbarity: racks, wheels, saws, cast-iron tanks, pulleys, hooks, an entire museum of instruments of torture; and on a large signboard standing in their midst, on top of a trophy of sledgehammers, pincers, scissors, files, axes with sawtooth blades, and all the torturer’s abominable tools, it was written, “These are all most precious, all authentic; they have all been used.”

  Then Consuelo felt her whole being faint away. A cold sweat drenched her braids. Her heart stopped beating. Unable to pull herself away from the terrifying spectacle and bloody visions besetting her from every side, she examined the objects in front of her with that stupid, baleful curiosity that takes us in its grip when we are overwhelmed with horror. Instead of closing her eyes, she contemplated some kind of bronze bell with a monstrous head and a round helmet set on a great, formless body without legs and cut off at the knees. It looked like a colossal statue of crude workmanship meant to decorate a tomb. Little by little Consuelo, emerging from her stupor, understood, involuntarily intuited that the torture victim was made to squat under the bell. It was so dreadfully heavy that there was no human way for him to lift it, and it was such a snug fit that he could not move a muscle. Yet he was not put there to be smothered, for the visor of the helmet that came down over the face as well as the part that went all around the head were pierced with little holes in a few of which were still planted slender probes. By means of these cruel perforations the victim was tortured to wring out of him a confession of his crime, real or imaginary, a denunciation of his relatives or friends, an avowal of his political or religious faith.1 On the top of the helmet one could read, in letters cut into the metal, these words in Spanish, “Long live the Holy Inquisition!” And below that, a prayer that seemed dictated by some fierce compassion, but which may have come from the heart and hand of the poor workman condemned to make this vile contraption, “Holy Mother of God, pray for the poor sinner!”

  Beneath the prayer there was still a clump of hair ripped out in the course of torture and no doubt glued with blood, like frightening and indelible stigmata. The hairs were protruding from one of the holes that had been stretched wider by the probe, and they were white!

  All of a sudden Consuelo saw nothing more, and her suffering ceased. Without any warning sensation of physical pain, for her soul and body no longer existed except in the raped and mutilated body and soul of humanity, Consuelo fell flat on her face to the stone floor, like a statue breaking off from its pedestal, but just as her head was about to hit the bronze of the infernal contraption she was gathered into the arms of a man whom she did not see. It was Liverani.

  1. Everyone can see an instrument of this kind along with a hundred others no less ingenious at the Venice Arsenal. Consuelo had not seen it there. These horrible instruments of torture as well as the interior of the dungeons of the Holy Office and the Prison of Lead at the Doges’ Palace were opened to the public only after the French entered Venice during the Wars of the Republic.

  Chapter XL

  Coming back to her senses, Consuelo saw that she was sitting on crimson carpets over the white marble steps of an elegant Corinthian peristyle. Two masked men whom she recognized from the color of their cloaks as Liverani and Marcus, as she had been right to think the second one had to be, were holding her in their arms and endeavoring to revive he
r. Some forty others with cloaks and masks, the same ones that she had seen around the simulacrum of Jesus’s coffin, made two rows across the steps, and they were singing in chorus a solemn hymn in an unknown tongue while waving crowns of roses, palm branches and sprays of flowers. The columns were festooned with garlands like an arch of triumph over the closed door of the temple and above Consuelo’s head. The moon, resplendent at its zenith, illuminated the white façade all by itself; and all around the sanctuary ancient yews, cypresses, and pines formed an impenetrable grove, like a sacred wood, while mysterious waters with silver reflections murmured at their feet.

  “Sister,” said Marcus, helping Consuelo up, “you’ve emerged victorious from your ordeals. Don’t blush for having suffered and physically flagged under the burden of pain. Your noble heart broke with indignation and pity at the palpable evidence of humanity’s crimes and afflictions. Had you got here on your feet and unassisted, we would have less respect for you than we do carrying you, moribund and sorely distressed. You have seen the crypts of a seigneurial castle, not of any one place more famous than all the others for the crimes committed there, but like all those whose ruins cover a great deal of Europe, frightening remains of the vast network by means of which feudal power enveloped the civilized world for so many centuries and oppressed mankind with the crime of its fierce domination and the horrors of civil war. These hideous dwellings, these desolate fortresses necessarily served as dens of all the heinous crimes that humanity had to see accomplished before arriving at the notion of truth, by means of the wars of religion, the work of emancipating sects, and the martyrdom of the best of men. Just travel through Germany, France, Italy, England, Spain, and the Slavic countries. You won’t find a valley or climb a mountain without seeing up above the forbidding ruins of some grim manor, or at least without discovering at your feet, in the grass, some vestige of fortifications. These are the bloody traces of the right of conquest exercised by the patrician caste over the castes they enslaved. And if you explore all these ruins, if you excavate the earth that has swallowed them up and is relentlessly working to make them disappear, in every single one you’ll find vestiges of what you’ve just seen here: dungeons, vaults for the surfeit of dead bodies, cramped, stinking cells for important prisoners, a corner for silent assassinations, and, at the top of some old tower or somewhere deep underground, a rack for recalcitrant serfs and rebellious soldiers, a gallows for deserters, and cauldrons for heretics. How many have died boiled in pitch, drowned, or buried alive in the mines? Oh, if castle walls, lakes, rivers, and rocky caves could talk and recount all the iniquities that they have witnessed and concealed! So many that history cannot render detailed accounts!

  “But it is not just the feudal lords, not the patrician race alone who have reddened the earth with so much innocent blood! Kings and priests, thrones and the church, these are the great sources of iniquity, the vital forces of destruction. In one of the rooms of our ancient manor, austere diligence, a gloomy but great notion has gathered a collection of some of the instruments of torture invented by the hatred of the strong for the weak. A description of them would not be credible; the eye can scarcely comprehend them, the mind refuses to acknowledge them. And yet they were used for centuries, these hideous devices, in the castles of kings as well as in the citadels of minor princes, but above all in the dungeons of the Holy Office; what I am saying? There they are still being used, but less frequently. The Inquisition is still going on, still torturing; and in France, the most civilized of all countries, there are still provincial parliaments that burn alleged sorcerers at the stake.

  “Besides, has tyranny really been overthrown? Do kings and princes no longer lay waste to the earth? Does war not bring desolation to opulent cities and poor cottages at the slightest whim of the most trifling sovereign? Is bondage not still in force in half of Europe? Aren’t soldiers nearly everywhere still subjected to whipping and flogging? The bravest and most handsome soldiers in the world, the soldiers of Prussia, aren’t they trained like animals with rod and cane? Aren’t Russian serfs ruled with the knout? Aren’t blacks in America treated worse than dogs and horses? While the fortresses of the old barons have been dismantled and turned into harmless dwellings, aren’t those of the kings still standing? Aren’t they used more often as prisons for the innocents than for the guilty? And you, sister, you the sweetest and most noble of women, weren’t you held captive at Spandau?

  “We knew your generosity, we were counting on your sense of justice and charity, but seeing that you were destined, like some of those here, to return to the world, to be part of court society, to approach kings and queens, to be, you in particular, the object of their seductions, it was our duty to put you on your guard against the intoxications of that glamorous, dangerous life, it was our duty not to spare you any lessons, even the most horrifying. We have spoken to your mind by the solitude to which we sentenced you and the books that we made available to you, to your heart by fatherly words and exhortations alternately stern and tender, to your eyes by ordeals more painful and more meaningful than those of the ancient mysteries. Now, if you persist in receiving the initiation, you can go without fear before those incorruptible, yet fatherly judges whom you already know, who are awaiting you here, either to give you a crown or to set you free to leave us forever.”

  With these words Marcus raised his arm and pointed out to Consuelo the door of the temple above which the three sacramental words, Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, had just blazed up in letters of fire.

  Consuelo, weak and broken in her body, was now living by the spirit alone. She had not been able to listen to Marcus’s speech on her feet. Forced to sit down on the foot of a column, she leaned on Liverani, but without seeing him or giving him a thought. Yet she had not missed a single word spoken by the initiator. Pale as a ghost, her eyes intent and her voice extinguished, she did not have the bewildered look that follows nervous crises. Concentrated excitement filled her breast, and her breathing was so shallow that Liverani could no longer detect it. Her dark eyes, somewhat sunken into their orbits by exhaustion and suffering, burned with a somber flame. A slight furrow in her forehead betrayed unshakable resolve, the first in her life. Her beauty at that moment frightened those present who had known her elsewhere as invariably sweet and kind. Liverani began to tremble like the jasmine leaf that the night breeze was ruffling on his beloved’s brow. She got to her feet with more energy than he would have expected, but her knees immediately buckled, and she let him almost carry her up the steps, without the clasp of these arms which had so thrilled her, without the nearness of this heart which had set hers afire distracting her for one instant from her inner meditation. He put between his hand and hers the silver cross, the talisman that had given him rights over her, that he had used to make himself known to her once again. Consuelo seemed to recognize neither the token nor the hand presenting it. Hers was contracted in pain, its grip automatic, as when one hangs onto a branch to stop from going over the edge of a cliff, but no blood from the heart could reach that icy hand.

  “Marcus!” Liverani whispered as Marcus drew near on his way up to knock on the door of the temple, “don’t leave us. The ordeal was too much. I’m afraid!”

  “She loves you,” replied Marcus.

  “Yes, but she may die!” said Liverani with a shudder.

  Marcus knocked three times on the door, which opened and closed again as soon as he was inside with Consuelo and Liverani. The other brethren remained on the peristyle, waiting to be ushered in for the ceremony; for between the initiation and the last ordeals there was always a secret conversation among the leaders of the Invisibles and the person being received.

  The interior of the temple-shaped summerhouse used for these initiations at the castle of *** was magnificently adorned, with statues of the greatest friends to humanity standing between the columns. That of Jesus Christ was placed at the center of the amphitheater, between Pythagoras and Plato. Apollonius of Tyana was next to Saint John, Abelard b
eside Saint Bernard, Jan Hus and Jerome of Prague beside Saint Catherine and Joan of Arc. But Consuelo did not stop to consider exterior objects. Deep in meditation, without surprise or emotion, she set eyes once again on these same judges who had probed her heart to such depths. She no longer felt at all abashed in the presence of these men, whoever they were, and she awaited their verdict with apparent great calm.

  “Brother presenter,” said to Marcus the eighth person, who was seated below the seven judges and invariably served as their spokesman, “whom are you bringing before us? What is her name?”

  “Consuelo Porporina,” Marcus replied.

  “That is not what they are asking you, brother,” said Consuelo. “Don’t you see that I’ve come here in a wedding gown and not mourning weeds? Announce the Countess Albert von Rudolstadt.”

  “Daughter,” said the brother orator, “I’m speaking to you in the name of the council. You no longer bear the name you invoke. Your marriage to Count von Rudolstadt is dissolved.”

  “By what right, and by virtue of what authority?” asked Consuelo in a short, strong voice, as though in a fever. “I don’t recognize any theocratic power. You yourselves have taught me to recognize that the only rights you have over me are those that I’ve freely given you and to submit only to a fatherly authority. Your authority would not be fatherly if it were to dissolve my marriage without my husband’s assent as well as my own. Neither he nor I have given you this right.”