The next day both our friends went to the same Wilderness, and so perhaps for a fortnight. Then Jean, who had begun all this out of a quaint benevolence, perhaps, noted for the first time a wheel of lustrous lights which turned with his gambols through her eyes during their midday hours; and her nose, chin and mouth, preponderant, fleshy and overtly voluptuous. He felt a curious sickness beginning in the pit of his stomach. The next day he absented himself, and Isabella was found standing on the edge of the customary glade, weeping. She cunningly refused to say a word about it, went to inspect the trench that afternoon, stood at its side, melancholy, for a moment, cast one covert glance in Jean’s direction, and feeling disconcerted by his naked sweating back, his bare feet planted in the muck, and the pellets of dirt flying out of the ditch, went away.
Is it improbable that a delicately-bred lady loved a man of the common people, and one not even handsome? Who shall explain these things; misalliance is common, and ladies of high rank have been happy with peasant husbands. For our ladies here, and to me, it seems a very strange thing; but it is said in those things, there is a sufficient reason, or perhaps the woman is too simple for her station, and the man superior to his. Yet if it were natural, the sight could not be so disagreeable to us as it is; and these stories of misalliance would not always have such a dismal end. This one has too.
The Marquis had his own troubles. The towers of Castelreal were too thick and tall, they looked like braggarts stuffed with provender, who defied those that should never be defied, the infinitely wretched and hopeless. His modern methods seemed invented to irritate and degrade these poor peasants of mediæval mind and life. Then, it could not be denied, the Marquis had speculated heavily in grain, and the rust which had attacked the crops in the previous year and ruined half the province, had only made him richer, and raised the value of his vast stocks. Now there was burning round him, metaphorically and physically, a flame of resentment: haystacks and a field of wheat had burned and the peasants could hardly be induced to lend a hand to extinguish the fire. In the village last mid-Lent a personage disguised as a gipsy, who offered to tell the Marquis’s fortune, had recited in a hollow voice, “When the red stallion tramples your fields at night, when your wheat turns black from despite, when under the Pheasant’s sign, new wine’s added to old wine, when learning manners, peasants like Dooks, eat with— pitchforks and reaping-hooks, Trouble’s rife! Run for your life!”
“What nonsense!” said the master.
“And two sous’ worth of wisdom,” said the upposed gipsy, for two sous he had received. Afterwards the master saw in this an incendiary’s threat, and gave the owner of the wine-shop “The Pheasant Pie” a bad hour looking for his gipsy. He communicated with the gendarmerie of B——, the nearest town, and kept a watch round the castle at night.
At the end of July, on an evening of full moon, the Marquis and his wife arrived by coach from B——where they had been entertained, and after passing through the village, now garlanded for a fête, and embellished by a fine sunset, reached the castle in time to receive guests for dinner. At a certain moment of the evening, cousin Raymond thought it amusing to lead the Marquise and the younger guests out into the Great Place to admire the booths and installations for the fête. The villagers and peasants were admitted on this occasion to the Court of Honour of the Castle, which adjoined the village square at a distance of a hundred metres, to gaze at the worn turrets, the primitive arcade supporting a clumsy arcature on the interior wall, and the flagstones stained by torchlight.
The Marquise, pleasant in her simplicity, smiled at the village cocks in sashes and curls who murmured their base compliments as she passed, and soon disappeared to her bed. Only in the early morning, her nurse looking into her room found it strewn with her evening clothes, her bed smooth, and her cloak gone.
Messengers hurried out after the guests now far on their way, or already home, and servants, going through the sleeping village, monotone, garlanded, under the full moon, urgently called to the villagers, who presently appeared at their windows, almost naked in the midsummer heat. All the early hours, flares passed along the country ways, and lanterns hopped about haystacks and orchards. By the river they did a lugubrious fishing, but only caught the skylarking moon, jolly with embonpoint, bobbing like a dolphin in the currents.
The next two nights a beacon burned all night on a tower of Castelreal to attract the Marquise, if she were wandering. On the third day the Marquis, returning from B——, saw like a vision, Isabella, rosy, calm and smiling, exercising her dogs along the roads, with two silent servants following her. She said she had slept in the fields, and fed from the orchards; but the servants said she had been well tended.
The Marquis often passed the night over his accounts, his architect’s plans, and the journals from Bordeaux and Paris. In order to clear his estate of the insanitary hovels in which his peasants lived, he intended to build several new villages, with cottages with brick flooring, drainage, and in proper alignment. The proposal aroused bitter opposition among the peasants, who pretended that the rents he would charge would be too high. The rents were modest, but perhaps they were right: a small sum to a Marquis is an outrageous price to a peasant. He intended to place one of these villages in “the place called Gaspard”, which, at a distance of three kilometres from the chateau, had been used by the older lords of the demesne for pheasant shooting. At the moment, however, he was otherwise engrossed, and he had put off the affair from day to day.
One early morning he passed from his library through the serpentine corridor leading to his wife’s apartment. The leaded windows of the corridor looked straight down the eastern face and over the plain, which now seemed, in the waning moon, glaucous and horrid as the damp flank of a monster. He observed a lantern crossing the gardens, which lighted momently a woman’s rough cloak and a peasant’s trousers, and after flickering about in the vines at the foot of the cliff, disappeared from sight. The Marquis supposed that a couple of lovers had made of his vines their bed curtains, and somewhat amused, passed on, hoping for a little counsel from his wife, whose nature seemed to change at sunset and become serener and wiser, as if a superior spirit guided her ingenious, consoling form till daylight. Tonight her bed lay open without an imprint. He knew she had not left the castle, which was well guarded now, and thinking she was sleeping with her nurse, he went away. Half-way along the corridor he heard a sound in her room; when he returned and looked in, he saw Isabella with shut eyes, her hair still banded, lying on her bed, simulating sleep.
“My wife, where were you? I was looking for you.”
She did not stir.
“Why were you with your nurse so late? Are you ill?”
Isabella opened upon him her large eyes, tranquil and almost superhuman at this hour, as if dilated with belladonna. “No, I am not ill: I am very well.”
“Where were you?”
“I was—lonely.”
“Are you lonely, Isabella?”
“No, no, not now,” she said hastily, and loosening her braided hair, shut her eyes.
The next night the moon was yet higher when he stepped that way, and the fields of wheat beyond the river showed up in pale bands like hair. On the orchard path below the wall, the two peasants were climbing once more, clinging to the bushes and fruit-trees, as if they would have their shapes confounded with them. His wife’s apartment was locked. On the third following night, when the moon was on the horizon and all was dark below, he entered her room, and finding her absent, he called the nurse and tried with her all the closets, cupboards and corners of the apartment to see where his wife hid at night; and, with their candles casting cross-eyed bleary glances at this and that, they counted her clothes to see if she had taken hat or cloak. Finding nothing missing, the Marquis sent the nurse to bed, and kicked a box angrily against the wall. An echo came from within the wall. Here was another cupboard overlooked before. The door was concealed by a large tapestry representing flowers and fruits, and by two secti
ons of panelling. The door, which opened inwards, was locked and immovable.
All this had taken time, and the Marquis sat down wearily on the same box to await his wife’s return. There he sat with a hundred stretchings, cracking his joints, yawning, snapping his fingers and making exclamations half aloud. He was almost asleep when he heard footsteps near. They stopped dead like a dream, and through a yellow five minutes of candlelight he waited. Nothing more! He went through the antechamber and investigated the angles of the corridor, even passing into his own rooms. When he returned he found his wife stretched on her bed. He tried the secret locked door and found it still locked. He raised his candle towards the ceiling, but found no trapdoor there! He sat down by his wife’s pillow, patience on a monument, and after some time he heard her say: “What is it, Emile? What do you want?” and he looked down into her large indescribably lively eyes, as strange as animals of another order, living creatures that might fly up suddenly in the dark, like bats or birds.
“Where have you been? What do you do at night?”
She shook her head. Exhausted, he said no more for this night, and sank into sleep, to dream he was wandering in a forest of snakes. The Marquise slept thereafter with a little maid by her side to prevent her sleepwalking.
She was ill at ease, idle and discontented since her adventures. She lost appetite and colour; she complained bitterly because she was never alone, and of the dogs and guards in the castle precincts. The autumn came and she was full of fancies; she bought innumerable pieces of embroidery which she threw in a drawer, coaxed Raymond to send to Paris for a purple silk dress for her (he added to it the gift of a bottle of vervain); then she wanted to go to Bordeaux for the opera season, and bought a ring and a new dog. Finally the nurse went running to the Marquis and told him that his own private tree would bear fruit.
The Marquis one day forsook his harvesting fields and his works and took the old path to “the place called Gaspard.” After ascending a half-wooded hill, he paused and looked over the valley, sombre under a sky where flocculent clouds streamed pell-mell. On the path, which now declined on the farther side, he came to a signpost with the word Gaspard. The path insinuated itself through an exceedingly thick bushland, and continued along the crest or higher slopes of the hills, with occasional glances below into the rich and darkening valley. The ground was almost bare of plants, owing to the thick tissue of the branches; dried fungi hung on the trunks, and new colonies, fulvous, gold and leopard-spotted, sprung from the new season’s rains, trooped in the hollows.
The Marquis sat down under a tree in the thicket. The arcades were high-roofed and heavily groined in that old wood; the winds stirred in the high branches, but below, to the intoxicated eye, autumn itself flowed through the trees, savage, flattering, overripe, full of corrupt purples and blues, perfect and preternatural as the exotic orchid and the hieratic panther. He ran his fingers through the coarse humus, now full of the dead leaves of this draconic season, whose bronze scales spill out from its musty maw as it munches its own tail.
Leaning back and looking at the woven sky of the thinning wood, our friend began to divert himself by throwing pellets of earth at the trees; and in a moment he noticed there, dangling vivaciously against the sky, a mannikin of rag, with arms and legs stuck out, hanging by a Chinese pigtail from the twigs, some child’s toy thrown up for an instant’s flight, and kept for a permanent lodger by the shivering buds. The Marquis had met the fellow before, surely: a doll of his wife’s, bought by her nurse once in Bordeaux. She must have played with it here, walking with her nurse in the summer. Under the flippant gestures of the superior and unkind little man, he thought with sour anxiety of the child coming to cloak itself in his name, and claim the result of his labours. He got up, and following the same path, came at last to its end in an open ground. A hut raised on stilts stood with a few trees. Vines still hung on the protected cabin. He mounted the steps and looked out from the verandah over the ample hollow, again visible. How pleasant was the situation; everything was visible over the tops of the trees, yet the place was sufficiently distant from the other hills and outcrops, thrown far to each side, to be completely invisible from them. The country on this side was wild and hirsute: the village and chateau were completely hidden: no roads were to be seen. He began considering his plans for the building of a village, and wondered if it would be better to put here a summer-house and sylvan retreat, instead: the first time in his career he had thought of ease.
He pushed at the door, and finding it fastened, broke the lock. Within, he gazed in surprise at the room, furnished as if for a beggar’s household. The day was cold, but clearing. The Marquis examined all the objects in the room, but they were small vulgar utensils such as were used in every cabin in the country. There was in the corner a mass of straw which might have been used for a bed or an animal’s stall; in the fireplace a fire was built, and hanging in the corners were beans, carrots, corncobs and grapes. In a box he found some cheese and lard and, coming suddenly upon a little carved jewel-case, he found there articles for the toilet of a woman of fashion, stolen, surely! A flask of scent smelled familiarly of vervain. Who used such a scent, his mistress, his wife’s nurse? He trod on the straw, and parting it, found beneath it one of Isabella’s cushions, worked with an escutcheon of Castelreal, that one indeed which bore the arms of Symphorien of Castelreal; those arms, a baton sinister on a field barry-nebuly, or and sable, were carried in derision at the sacking of the thirteenth-century castle by a Jacques Bonhomme of 1358, who described them as representing “the stick of the husbandman descending on the grapes and grains”. His wife had been pleased with this cushion when she had worked it, on account of the brilliancy of the stripes of gold. He took the coffer and the cushion and fastened the door. Under the influence of the place, it seemed to him that some creature was anxiously shadowing him from bush to bush, but there was no alien sound in the hooting wood, and no movement round the shuttering trunks or across the golden carpet. The little Chinese dangled a debonair farewell, as if the intruder, for all his curiosity, left the mystery intact. Had the Marquise, seized with a nostalgia almost royal, retired to this hut, and who companioned her? Did the gipsies, poachers or woodcutters bivouac here? Or Jean the dwarf? Or had Raymond a peasant lover?
Scarcely had he reached the castle when Jean the dwarf, whom Nigaudin used sometimes as his informant in village matters, arrived, panting, anxious, to say that he had just visited the cabin Gaspard, discovered the evidences of a housekeeping there, the coffer, the pillow, and had since then been looking for his master. All the servants of the castle were now confronted with the two articles, but none was confused and none was guilty of the theft. Raymond came, and recognising the bottle of vervain, his gift to the Marquise, blushed under his cousin’s stern eye. Last of all, to her husband and Jean the dwarf, came the Marquise, unsuspecting, who, when she saw them standing there with the cushion and the box, turned red, turned pale and fainted. While her attendants were hastening her to her apartment, the Marquis, cruel and intractable, listening to no protests, dismissed Raymond and forbade him to enter the bounds of the estate. He told him he would not see his cousin again, and that he, Emile, Marquis de Beaumesnil de Castelreal (born Nigaudin), would endeavour to have him unseated from his trusteeship and control of Isabella’s interests. This he did, and making no more inquiries of the Marquise, devoted himself entirely to his affairs, which, do what he would, were not as prosperous as he expected them to be. The peasants, struck by the forced sales of wheat, wine, cattle and other goods to speculators and to the master himself, at prices which meant their ruin, irritated by the type of corvée invented by Nigaudin on his estate, impoverished by the innumerable taxes, the inspections by armed fiscal officers, lived in misery and anger: the small farmers and shopkeepers, ruined, taxed out of existence, were either turned out on the street or, perpetually in the hands of bailiffs, were forced to work directly for their mortgagers and banks, themselves unable to realise their investments
. One whole village was sold at auction: a provincial bank had failed, credit was not to be had, and all those who still had money were concealing it in pots, stockings, skirting-boards, and wells. The Marquis had thus more to do than to attend to his minor domestic disturbances. He engaged Jean, in whom he now had great confidence, in numerous private affairs, and discovered in him a sharp and cynical intelligence.
A baby was shortly born to Isabella, an arrow shot from another bow than Nigaudin’s. Two days later, the Marquis commissioned Jean to find him a peasant woman to nurse the child, and if possible, someone willing to adopt it. He would give a certain sum of money with the child, but would not interest himself further in it, nor permit it to claim any rights in his estate. This he regulated by legal and medical certificates. Jean, sorry for the gentle companion of his summer, conspired with her nurse to prevent this abandonment, but without avail. Jean then brought forward a strong and pleasant peasant woman named Froment, widow of a blacksmith, who took the child and had it baptised, according to Jean’s suggestion, Jean Gaspard Froment, but secretly she always inserted “de Castelreal” in describing the child.
The Marquise, at first ill and melancholy, gradually recovered from this dismal event. Her husband, perceiving her from the castle one day in the spring of 1789, saw her take the old path towards Gaspard, and hurried after her, but did not succeed in catching her up all the way. When he arrived at the place, he heard from behind the hut voices and little cries, and looking with caution, saw Isabella playing with a baby, undoubtedly her own. An osier cradle with a fine satin coverlet stood beside the hut. No one else was in sight.
The Salzburg Tales Page 31