While standing round my good master, hearing him discourse in this wise, we were surrounded without our noticing by a troop of beggars, who, limping, shivering, dribbling, waving stumps, shaking goitres, and exposing wounds running with poisonous discharge, beset us with their importunate benedictions. They flung themselves greedily on some coins which Monsieur d’Anquetil threw to them and rolled together in the dust.
“It makes me ill to look at those unfortunate beings,” sighed Jael.
“Your pity sits on you like an ornament, Mademoiselle,” said Monsieur Coignard; “these sighs lend a grace to your bosom by swelling it with a breath we should each of us like to inhale from your lips. But allow me to tell you that this tenderness, which is not the less touching for being interested, moves your bowels to compassion by the comparison of these poor wretches with yourself, and by the instinctive feeling that your young body touches, so to speak, these hideously ulcerated and mutilated forms, as it is in very truth allied and attached to them in so far as we are all members of Our Lord Jesus Christ, whence it follows that you cannot face the corruption on the flesh of these wretches without seeing it at the same time as a presage to your own flesh. And these wretched beings have risen up before you like prophets proclaiming that the lot of the children of Adam in this world is sickness and death. That is why you sighed, Mademoiselle.
“As a matter of fact there is no reason to conclude that these beggars, eaten up with ulcers and vermin, are more unhappy than kings and queens. We must not even say that they are poorer, if, as it appears, the liard that woman with the goitre has picked up in the dust, dribbling with joy, seems to her more precious than is a collar of pearls to the mistress of a Prince-Bishop of Cologne or Salzburg. Properly, to understand our spiritual and veritable interests we ought to envy the existence of that cripple, who creeps towards you on his hands, in preference to that of the King of France or the Emperor. Their equal before God, he perchance possesses that peace of the heart which they know not, and the inestimable treasure of innocence. But draw your skirts round you, Mademoiselle, for fear of the vermin with which I see he is covered.”
Thus talked my good master and we never tired of listening to him.
At about three leagues from Montbard, one of the traces having broken and the post-boys lacking the cord wherewith to mend it, as that part of the world was far from all habitation, we remained there in a distressed condition. My good master and Monsieur d’Anquetil killed the boredom of this enforced halt by playing cards with that sympathy in their quarrels now become a habit with them. While the young gentleman showed his astonishment that his partner returned the king more often than consorted with the law of probabilities, Jael drew me aside and somewhat agitatedly asked me if I did not see a carriage stopping behind us at a winding in the road. Looking at the spot she indicated I saw indeed an antiquated calèche of a ridiculous and odd shape.
“That carriage,” added Jael, “stopped when we did. So it must have been following us. I wish I could make out the faces of those who are travelling in that concern. I am anxious about it. Is it not covered with a tall narrow hood? It is like the carriage my uncle took me in to Paris when I was quite small, after he had killed the Portuguese. As far as I know it was left in a stable at the château of Sablons. This one exactely recalls it, and a horrible souvenir it is, for I last saw my uncle in it foaming with rage. You cannot imagine, Jacques, how violent he is. I experienced his rage the very day of my departure. He shut me in my room, vomiting frightful abuse on Monsieur l’Abbé Coignard. I shudder when I think of the state he must have been in when he found my room empty, and my sheets still fastened to the window whence I escaped to meet and fly with you.”
“You mean to say with Monsieur d’Anquetil, Jael.”
“How punctilious you are! Did we not all leave together? But that calèche makes me anxious, it is so like my uncle’s.”
“Rest assured, Jael, that it is some worthy Burgundian’s carriage who is going about his business with no thought of us.”
“You know nothing about it,” said Jael; “I am afraid.”
“You surely cannot be afraid that your uncle, decrepit as he has become, will scour the roads in pursuit of you, Mademoiselle. He is occupied with the caballa and his Hebrew speculations.”
“You do not know him,” she made reply with a sigh. “He is entirely taken up with me. He loves me so much that he execrates the rest of the world. He loves me in a way....”
“In what way?”
“In all ways.... In short he loves me.”
“Jael, I shudder to hear you. Just Heaven! This Mosaïde loves you without that disinterestedness which is so admirable in an old man, and so befitting an uncle! Tell me everything, Jael....”
“Oh, you can put it into words better than I, Jacques.”
“I am stupefied. At his age — is it possible?”
“My friend, you have a white skin and a soul to match it. Everything astonishes you. ’Tis this candour that is your charm. You are deceived with very little trouble. You believe that Mosaïde is a hundred and thirty years old when he is not much more than sixty — that he lived in the great pyramid, when in reality he was a banker at Lisbon. And had I chosen I could have passed in your eyes for a Salamander.”
“What, Jael, are you speaking the truth? Your uncle....”
“Yes — and it is the secret of his jealousy. He believes Abbé Coignard to be his rival. He hated him instinctively at first sight. But it is quite another matter now when, having overhead several words of the interview the good Abbé had with me among the thorn-bushes, he may hate him as the cause of my flight and elopement. For, indeed, I was carried off, my friend, and that should put a certain value on me in your eyes. Oh! I was very ungrateful to leave such a good uncle. But I could not endure the slavery in which he kept me any longer. And then I had an ardent desire to grow rich; it is very natural, is it not, to want nice things when one is young and pretty? We have but one life and that a short one. I have been taught no beautiful lies about the immortality of the soul.”
“Alas! Jael,” I exclaimed in an ardour of love which lent me hardihood, “I lacked nothing when I was near you at Sablons; what did you lack to be happy?”
She signed to me that Monsieur d’Anquetil was observing us. The trace was mended and the berline rolled on between the vine-covered slopes.
We stopped at Nuits to sup and sleep the night. My good master drank half a dozen bottles of the native wine which marvellously heightened his eloquence. Monsieur d’Anquetil made a good second, glass in hand, but as to coping with him in conversation the gentleman was quite incapable of that.
The cheer was good, the lodging was bad. Monsieur l’Abbé Coignard slept in the low room under the stairs, on a feather-bed which he shared with the inn-keeper and his wife and where they all thought to suffocate.
Monsieur d’Anquetil - took the upper room with Jael, where the bacon and onions hung from the rafters. I climbed up to the loft by a ladder and lay down on the straw. My first deep sleep over, the rays of the moon, whose light came through the cracks in the roof, slipped under my eyelids and opened them in time for me to see Jael in her nightcap coming through the trap-door. At the cry I gave she put her finger on her lips.
“Hush!” she said, “Maurice is drunk as a porter or a lord. He sleeps the sleep of Noah down below.”
“Maurice, who is that?” I asked, rubbing my eyes.
“Anquetil. Who else should it be?”
“No one. But I did not know that he was called Maurice.”
“I have not known it long myself. But that is no matter.”
“You are right, Jael. That is of no consequence.”
She was in her chemise, and the moonlight lay like milk on her naked shoulders. She glided to my side, calling me the tenderest and again the coarsest of names, which slid from her lips in soft murmurings. Then she spoke no more and began to give me kisses as only she knew how and in comparison with which the caresses of ot
her women were insipid.
The restraint and the silence augmented the high tension of my nerves. Surprise, the pleasure of revenge, and maybe, a perverse jealousy, all added flame to my desires. The elasticity of her body and the supple strength of her movements asked, promised, and deserved the most ardent of caresses. We knew those deeps of pleasure that border upon pain.
On going down to the courtyard of the hostelry next morning, I found Monsieur d’Anquetil there, who seemed less odious to me now that I had deceived him.
On his side he seemed more drawn to me than he had been since the beginning of our journey. He spoke to me with familiarity, sympathy, and trustfulness, he reproached me with showing Jael so little consideration and gallantry, and with not paying her those attentions which a good man should pay to every woman.
“She complains,” he said, “of your incivility. Take note of it, my dear Tournebroche; I should be sorry if there were any unpleasantness between her and you. She is a pretty girl and exceedingly fond of me.”
The berline had been on its way an hour when Jael, having put her head out of the window, said:
“The calèche has turned up again. I would much like to see the faces of the two men in it. But I cannot succeed.”
I replied that such a long way off, and in the early morning mist too, we could distinguish nothing.
She made reply that her sight was so keen, that she could distinguish them well notwithstanding the mist and the distance, were they really faces.
“But,” added she, “they are not faces.”
“What do you think they are then?” I asked with a burst of laughter.
In her turn she asked me what absurd idea had entered my mind that I should laugh in such a stupid fashion, and said:
“They are not faces, they are masks. Those two men are following us and they are masked.”
I warned Monsieur d’Anquetil that it appeared we were being pursued by a wretched calèche. But he begged me to leave him in peace.
“If a hundred thousand devils were at our heels I should not trouble myself,” he exclaimed, “having plenty to do in keeping a watch on this fat hang-dog rascal of an Abbé, who forces the cards in an underhand way and steals all my money. I should even not be astonished that in thrusting that wretched calèche on me in the middle of my game, you were in league with this old cheat. Can a carriage not travel on the road without causing you emotion?”
Jael whispered low in my ear:
“Jacques, I foresee that calèche will bring us some evil. I have a presentiment and my presentiments are never wrong.”
“Do you want to make me believe you have the gift of prophecy?”
She gravely answered:— “Indeed I have.”
“What, you a prophetess!” I exclaimed smiling. “How strange!”
“You laugh at me,” she said, “and you doubt of it because you have never seen a prophetess so close before. How would you have her look?”
“I thought they had to be virgins.”
“That is not at all necessary,” she replied with assurance.
The rival calèche was lost to sight behind a turning in the road. But Jael’s anxiety had affected Monsieur d’Anquetil without his avowing it and he gave orders to the post-boys to increase their speed, promising to pay them good money.
With an excess of solicitude he passed each of them one of the bottles that the Abbé had kept in reserve at the back of the carriage.
The postilions communicated to their horses the ardour they drew from the wine.
“You may make your mind easy, Jael,” said he, “at the rate we are going that ancient calèche drawn by the horses of the Apocalypse will not catch us up.”
“We go like a cat on hot bricks,” said the Abbé.
“If only it lasts!” said Jael.
On our right we saw the vine rows planted at intervals fly by on the slopes. On the left the Saône flowed sluggishly. We passed the bridge of Tournus like a whirlwind. On the other side of the river rose the town on a hill crowned with abbey walls strong as a fortress.
“That,” said the Abbé, “is one of the innumerable Benedictine abbeys which are sewn like jewels on the robe of ecclesiastical Gaul. Had it pleased God that my destiny had accorded with my character, my life would have slipped by, obscure, easy, and joyful in one of those houses. There is no order for doctrine and way of life I hold equal to the Benedictine. They possess admirable libraries. Happy is he who wears their habit and follows their holy rule! Either from the discomfort I feel at present in being so rudely shaken in this carriage which will not fail to upset shortly in one of the many ruts in which this road is so deeply worn, or more likely as the result of my time of life, which inclines to retirement and serious thought, I long more ardently than ever to seat myself at a table in some old library, where numerous and choice books are gathered together in silence. I prefer their conversation to that of man, and my dearest wish is to await, while busied with intellectual work, the hour when God will withdraw me from this world. I would write histories, preferably that of the Romans, in the decline of the Republic. For it is full of instruction and great deeds. I would divide my zeal between Cicero, St. John Chrysostom and Boethius; my life passed thus modestly and fruitfully would be like unto the garden of the old man of Tarentum.
“I have tried various ways of living, and I judge that the best of all is, while giving myself up to study, to look on in peace at the changes in mankind, and to prolong by the contemplation of centuries and empires the briefness of our days. But sequence and continuity are necessary. They have been more wanting than anything in my life. If, as I hope to do, I succeed in recovering from this present false step I shall endeavour to find an honourable and safe shelter in some learned abbey where letters flourish and are in honour. I already see myself there tasting the peaceful renown of knowledge. Could I but count on this good turn from the helpful Sylphs of whom that old madman d’Astarac speaks and who appear, it is said, when they are invoked by the cabalistic name of Agla...
Complete Works of Anatole France Page 72