Great French Short Stories

by Paul Negri

  At dawn three squires were waiting for him at the foot of the steps, and the old monk, leaning out of his dormer-window, vainly made signs to call him back. Julian would not turn. He went out in the heat of the sun, in the rain, in storms, drank the water of the springs out of his hand, ate crab-apples as he trotted, rested under an oak if he were tired; and came back in the middle of the night, covered with blood and mire, with thorns in his hair and the smell of wild beasts on him. He became one of them. When his mother kissed him, he accepted her embrace coldly and seemed to be dreaming of deep things.

  He killed bears with blows of his knife, bulls with the axe, wild boars with the boar-spear, and once, even, with only a stick he defended himself against wolves which were gnawing corpses at the foot of a gibbet.

  One winter morning, he left before daybreak, well equipped, with a crossbow on his shoulder and a bunch of arrows at his saddle-bow.

  His Danish jennet, followed by two bassets, made the earth resound under its even tread. Drops of ice stuck to his cloak. A strong wind was blowing. One side of the horizon lighted up, and in the whiteness of the early light, he saw rabbits hopping at the edge of their burrows. Immediately the two bassets rushed on them, and quickly throwing them back and forth broke their backs.

  Soon he went into a forest. At the end of a branch, a wood grouse, numbed by the cold, slept with its head under its wing. With a backstroke of his sword, Julian cut off its two feet, and without picking it up, went on his way.

  Three hours later, he was on the top of a mountain, so high that the sky seemed almost black. In front of him, a rock like a long wall sloped down, hanging over a precipice. At its farther end, two wild rams were looking into the chasm. Since he did not have his arrows (his horse had stayed behind), he decided to go down to them. Barefoot and half bent-over, he finally reached the first of the rams, and plunged a dagger under its ribs. The second, terrified, jumped into the chasm. Julian jumped in order to strike it, and slipping on his right foot, fell over the body of the other one, his face over the abyss and his two arms spread out.

  Coming down again onto the plain, he followed a line of willows which bordered a river. Cranes, flying very low, passed overhead from time to time. Julian killed them with his whip and did not miss one.

  In the meantime the warmer air had melted the hoarfrost, broad streaks of mist floated in the air and the sun came out. At a distance he saw a still lake glistening as if it were of lead. In the middle of the lake there was an animal which Julian did not know, a beaver with a black snout. In spite of the distance, an arrow killed it, and he was disconsolate at not being able to carry off the skin.

  Then he advanced along an avenue of tall trees, forming with their tops a kind of triumphal arch, at the entrance of a forest. A roebuck bounded out of a thick wood, a deer appeared at a crossing, a badger came out of a hole, a peacock spread its tail on the grass; and when he had slain them all, more roebucks appeared, more deer, more badgers, more peacocks, and blackbirds, jays, polecats, foxes, hedgehogs, lynxes, an endless number of animals, more numerous at every step. They circled around him, trembling and looking at him gently and entreatingly. But Julian did not tire of killing, by turns bending his crossbow, unsheathing his sword, thrusting with his cutlass, and having no thought, no memory of anything at all. He had been hunting in some vague country, for an indefinite time, by the sole fact of his own existence, and everything had been accomplished with the ease you experience in dreams. An extraordinary spectacle brought him to a halt. A valley in the form of an amphitheater was filled with stags crowded close together and warming one another with their breath which could be seen steaming in the fog.

  The perspective of such a slaughter choked him with pleasure for a few minutes. Then he dismounted, rolled up his sleeves and began to shoot.

  At the whistle of the first arrow, all the stags turned their heads at once. Some openings were made in their mass. Plaintive cries rose up and a great stir shook the herd.

  The brim of the valley was too high to climb. They leapt about in the enclosure, trying to escape. Julian kept aiming and shooting, and his arrows fell like shafts of rain in a storm. The maddened stags fought, reared, and climbed over each other. Their bodies with their entangled antlers made a broad hillock which collapsed as it moved about.

  At last they died, stretched out on the sand, frothing at the nostrils, their entrails coming out, and the heaving of their bellies slowly diminishing. Then all was motionless.

  Night was approaching. Behind the woods, in the interspaces of the branches, the sky was red like a cloth of blood.

  Julian leaned against a tree. With staring eyes he looked at the vastness of the massacre, and did not understand how he could have done it.

  On the other side of the valley, on the edge of the forest, he saw a stag, a hind and its fawn.

  The stag, which was black and huge in size, carried antlers of sixteen tines and a white beard. The hind, of a dull yellow like dead leaves, was grazing, and the spotted fawn, without hindering her walk, was suckling her udder.

  Once more the crossbow hummed. The fawn was killed at once. Then its mother, raising her head toward the sky, belled with a deep, heart-rending, human cry. Exasperated, Julian, with one shot full in the breast, stretched her out on the ground.

  The large stag had seen this and made one bound. Julian shot his last arrow at him. It pierced him in the forehead and stuck fast there.

  The large stag did not seem to feel it. Stepping over the dead bodies, it kept coming, and was going to charge and disembowel him. Julian drew back in unspeakable fear. The monstrous animal stopped. With his eyes flaming, as solemn as a patriarch and a judge, he repeated three times, while a bell tolled far off:

  “A curse on you! A curse on you! A curse on you! One day, ferocious heart, you will murder your father and your mother!”

  His knees bent, he gently closed his eyes, and died.

  Julian was stupefied and then crushed by a sudden fatigue. Disgust and an immense sadness overcame him. His head in his two hands, he wept for a long time.

  His horse was lost, his dogs had abandoned him, and the solitude which surrounded him seemed to threaten him with vague perils. Impelled by fright, he made his way across the countryside, chose a path at random, and found himself almost immediately at the gate of the castle.

  That night he did not sleep. In the flickering of the hanging lamp he kept seeing the large black stag. Its prophecy obsessed him. He fought against it. “No, no, no, it is impossible for me to kill them!” Then he thought, “And yet, what if I wished to . . . ?” And he feared that the devil might inspire him with this desire.

  For three months his anguished mother prayed by his bedside, and his father with groans walked back and forth in the corridors. He sent for the most famous master physicians who prescribed quantities of drugs. They said that the malady of Julian had been caused by some deadly wind or by a love-desire. But the young man, at every question, shook his head.

  His strength came back, and he was taken for walks in the courtyard, the old monk and the good lord supporting him on either side.

  When he had completely recovered, he stubbornly refused to hunt.

  His father, wanting to cheer him, made him a present of a large Saracen sword.

  It was at the top of a pillar, in a trophy-stand. To reach it, a ladder was necessary. Julian climbed up. The sword was so heavy that it slipped from his fingers and as it fell, it grazed the good lord so close that it cut his greatcoat. Julian thought he had killed his father and fainted.

  From then on, he dreaded weapons. The sight of a bare blade made him turn pale. This weakness was a sorrow for his family.

  Finally the old monk, in the name of God, of his honor and his ancestors, ordered him to resume his exercises of a noble.

  Every day the squires amused themselves by practising with the javelin. Very soon Julian excelled in this. He could hurl his into the neck of bottles, or break off the teeth of weather-vanes, or h
it the nails on doors at a hundred paces.

  One summer evening, at the hour when the fog makes things indistinct, he was under the vine-arbor of the garden and saw at the end of it two white wings fluttering at the same height as the espalier. He thought beyond doubt it was a stork, and threw his javelin.

  A piercing cry rang out.

  It was his mother whose bonnet with long flaps was nailed to the wall.

  Julian fled from the castle and was not seen there again.

  II

  He joined up with a troop of adventurers who happened to pass by. He knew hunger, thirst, fever and vermin. He grew accustomed to the din of fights, and to the sight of dying men.

  The wind tanned his skin. His limbs hardened through contact with armor; and as he was very strong, courageous, temperate and prudent, he received without difficulty the command of a company.

  At the beginning of the battles, he would urge on his soldiers with a flourish of his sword. With a knotted rope he scaled the walls of citadels at night, swinging with the wind, while sparks of Greek fire stuck to his cuirass, and boiling resin and molten lead poured from the battlements. Often a stone would strike and shatter his shield. Bridges overladen with men collapsed under him. By swinging his mace, he got rid of fourteen horsemen. In the lists, he overcame all his challengers. More than twenty times he was believed dead.

  Thanks to divine favor, he always recovered, because he protected churchmen, orphans, widows, and most of all, old men. When he saw one walking in front of him, he called out to see his face, as if he were afraid of killing him by mistake.

  Runaway slaves, peasants in revolt, bastards without fortune, all kinds of daring men crowded under this banner, and he formed an army of his own.

  It grew large. He became famous. He was sought after.

  In turn, he helped the French Dauphin and the King of England, the Templars of Jerusalem, the Surena of the Parthians, the Negus of Abyssinia, and the Emperor of Calicut. He fought Scandinavians covered with fish-scales, Negroes equipped with round shields of hippopotamus hide and mounted on red asses, gold-colored Indians brandishing over their diadems broadswords brighter than mirrors. He conquered the Troglodytes and the Anthropophagi. He crossed lands so torrid that under the burning sun the hair on the head caught fire of itself, like a torch. And other regions were so glacial that the arms snapped from the body and fell to the ground. And still other countries where there was so much fog that you walked surrounded by ghosts.

  Republics in distress consulted him. When he interviewed ambassadors, he obtained unhoped-for terms. If a monarch behaved too badly, Julian appeared suddenly and admonished him. He liberated peoples. He freed queens locked in towers. It was he, and no other, who slew the viper of Milan and the dragon of Oberbirbach.

  Now, the Emperor of Occitania, having triumphed over the Spanish Moslems, had taken as concubine the sister of the Caliph of Cordova. By her he had a daughter whom he had brought up as a Christian. But the Caliph, pretending he wanted to be converted, came to visit him, accompanied by a numerous escort, and massacred his entire garrison. He threw the Emperor into a dungeon underground where he treated him harshly in order to extort treasures from him.

  Julian hastened to his aid, destroyed the army of the Infidels, besieged the city, killed the Caliph, cut off his head, and threw it like a ball over the ramparts. Then he released the Emperor from prison and set him back on his throne, in the presence of his entire court.

  For such a service, the Emperor presented him with a great deal of money in baskets. Julian wanted none of it. Believing that he desired more, he offered him three quarters of his wealth. He was refused again. Then he offered to share his kingdom and Julian declined. The Emperor wept through vexation, not knowing how to express his gratitude, when suddenly he tapped his forehead, and said some words in a courtier’s ear. The curtains of a tapestry lifted and a young girl appeared.

  Her large black eyes shone like two very gentle lamps. Her lips parted in a charming smile. The ringlets of her hair caught in the jewels of her half dress, and under the transparency of her tunic the youthfulness of her body could be guessed. She had a slim figure and was entrancing and soft.

  Julian was dazzled with love, all the more so because he had lived until then very chastely.

  So, he took the Emperor’s daughter in marriage, and a castle which she received from her mother. When the wedding was over, the two families separated after endless courtesies on both sides.

  It was a palace of white marble, built in the Moorish style, on a promontory, in a grove of orange trees. Terraces of flowers sloped down to the edge of a bay, where pink shells crunched underfoot. Behind the castle, a forest spread in the shape of a fan. The sky was continually blue, and the trees bent by turns under the sea breeze and the wind from the mountains which enclosed the horizon far off.

  The bedrooms, full of twilight, were lighted from inlays in the walls. High columns, as slender as reeds, supported the vault of the cupolas, decorated with bas-reliefs imitating stalactites in caves.

  There were fountains in the large rooms, mosaics in the courtyards, festooned partitions, numberless delicacies of architecture, and everywhere such silence that you heard the rustle of a scarf or the echo of a sigh.

  Julian no longer waged war. He rested, in the midst of a quiet people. Each day a crowd passed in front of him with genuflections and hand-kissing in the Oriental style.

  Dressed in purple, he remained leaning on his elbows in the embrasure of a window, recalling the hunts he used to go on. He would have liked to race over the desert after gazelles and ostriches, hide in the bamboo to wait for leopards, go through forests full of rhinoceroses, climb to the summit of the most inaccessible mountains in order to take better aim at eagles, and fight white bears on ice floes.

  Sometimes, in a dream, he saw himself as our father Adam in the middle of Paradise, among all the animals. By stretching out his arm, he had them die. Or they would file by, two by two, according to size, from elephants and lions to ermines and ducks, as on the day when they entered Noah’s Ark. In the dark of a cavern, he hurled on them infallible javelins. Others appeared, and there was no end to them. He woke up rolling his wild eyes.

  Some princes among his friends invited him to hunt. He always refused, believing that by this kind of penance, he would turn aside his misfortune, for it seemed to him that the fate of his parents depended upon the slaughter of animals. But he was grieved at not seeing them, and his other desire became unbearable.

  His wife had jugglers and dancing-girls come to amuse him.

  She traveled with him, in an open litter, throughout the countryside. On other occasions, lying over the edge of a shallop they would watch fish swimming aimlessly in water as clear as the sky. Often she threw flowers in his face, or crouching at his feet she drew melodies from a three-stringed mandolin. Then, placing her two clasped hands on his shoulders, said timidly:

  “What troubles you, dear lord?”

  He did not answer, or burst into sobs. At last, one day he confessed his horrible thought.

  She fought it with good arguments. His father and mother were probably dead. If ever he did see them again, by what chance or for what reason, would he perform that abomination? So, his fears had no cause and he should take up hunting again.

  Julian smiled as he listened to her, but did not decide to fulfill his desire.

  One evening in the month of August when they were in their rooms, she had just gone to bed and he was kneeling for his prayers when he heard the yapping of a fox and then light steps under the window. In the shadows he caught a glimpse of something like the forms of animals. The temptation was too strong. He took down his quiver.

  She showed surprise.

  “It is to obey you!” he said. “I shall be back at sunrise.”

  Yet she feared a fatal adventure.

  He reassured her and then left, surprised at the inconsistency of her mood.

  Shortly afterwards, a page came to annou
nce that two strangers were insisting upon seeing the wife of the lord immediately, since the lord was absent.

  Soon there came into the room an old man and an old woman, bent over, covered with dust, dressed in rough cloth and each leaning on a staff.

  They took courage and declared they were bringing Julian news of his parents.

  She leaned over in order to hear them.

  But first, exchanging glances of agreement, they asked her if he still loved them and if he ever spoke of them.

  “Oh, yes!” she said.

  Then they cried:

  “We are his parents!”

  And they sat down, being very weary and exhausted with fatigue.

  There was nothing to assure the young wife that her husband was their son.

  They gave proof of this by describing some particular marks he had on his body.

  She leapt from her bed, called her page and had food served to them.

  Although they were very hungry, they could hardly eat; and, off to one side, she watched the trembling of their bony hands as they took the goblets.

  They asked countless questions about Julian. She answered each one, but was careful to conceal the deadly idea in which they were concerned.

  When he did not return home, they had left their castle and had been walking for several years, on vague clues, without losing hope. So much money had been needed for river-tolls and for hostelries, for the taxes of princes and the demands of thieves, that the bottom of their purse was empty and now they begged. But this was of no consequence, since they would soon embrace their son. They extolled his happiness at having such a pretty wife, and did not grow weary of looking at her and kissing her.

  The richness of the apartment astonished them, and the old man, examining the walls, asked why the coat-of-arms of the Emperor of Occitania was on them.