“I know.”
“But, you know, one confesses, before going to the gibbet; then the sin is removed.”
“And the consolation remains.”
“Exactly! The almoner says exactly the opposite, and threatens me with the devil if I do it again, but I do it again anyway, and it doesn’t enter my head that the good God will get angry when one is doing what one can for people who are in pain, and when one can’t do otherwise.”
“Your father doesn’t get annoyed?”
“I don’t tell him anything, for sure. I’ve only told him that I don’t want to marry.”
“That’s true; you can’t any longer.”
“Right! It isn’t suitors who are lacking, but, once married, I wouldn’t be able to come any longer; my husband would oppose it, probably, and coming anyway would be deceiving him.”
“Lying isn’t good.”
“It causes chagrin; I’d be ashamed. And then, in my idea, I’m more useful here. And then again, to say everything, there’s the malady.”
“Oh?”
“Yes. Among murderers and thieves, as you can imagine, one encounters some who aren’t honest, as everywhere. They don’t tell, in order to take advantage. So, they gave me the disease.”
“Oh?”
“Yes.”
“Poor Gertrude...”
“That’s the way it is. Nothing to be done about it.”
“But tell me, the disease, you’re giving it to others?”
“You’re silly. Since they’re going to die...” She laughed, and added: “As things are, I’m in prison, like them; they only have me, I only have them. That’s it.” She was no longer laughing.
They fell silent again momentarily, and then she went on: “I’ve come to sleep with you. That’s it.”
He scratched his head, a little behind his right ear; she was not unaware that in cats, that gesture is an announcement of rain, and among men, a sign of indecision.
“Kiss me,” she said. “It will distract you.”
“I’ll kiss you with great pleasure, because you’re a good creature. As for the rest, to say everything, I no longer have any means.”
“Oh?”
“No. I have the air of being a man, when one sees me, like the others. It isn’t true; I’m not a man.”
“What are you then?”
He replied, in a low voice and very modestly: “A eunuch.”
Gertrude’s gaze requested, in the semi-darkness, a supplementary explanation.
“If you prefer, I’m gelded...”
She had never heard mention of such people; it had to be the name of a people, doubtless a distant people, and probably unhappy, a vanquished nation, since the poor devils were humiliated in pronouncing the name of their fatherland…?15
He corrected her misapprehension, and furnished a few elementary items of information on the condition of castration.
“Necessary to say that right away! I know that; it’s me who clips dogs and cuts cats at the prison door.”
She commiserated with him unreservedly; that individual diminution seemed to her even harder to support than a national defeat, not to mention that it was a ludicrous invention to treat Christians like capons, oxen, pigs, or even cats, since one ought not to eat them.
“But… Eh…? What…? You’re telling me stories because I displease you. Liar!”
“I’m not lying.”
“That story! You weren’t a eunuch with Clementine, whom you raped in a wood.”
He confessed his innocence.
“You were condemned, and you didn’t defend yourself? When you had the proof? The alibi, as they say...”
“That’s because…the thing is…that poor little shepherdess, it’s necessary to know that she was pregnant. She’d have been whipped, drummed out, imprisoned in an Abbey; they’d have given her shoulder-knots and an armband. In order to spare her that, I said what she said; everyone’s content.”
Gertrude admired that abnegation, but she could not help launching indignant epithets against the cowherd and against her bad morals, her libertinage of a girl who sinned for pleasure, and her cruelty and her lies, and also against the magistrate, whom she detested, whom the whole town detested, because he was unjust, wicked, miserly and content when he caused suffering, and a robber, and a cuckold like his father and mother, furred in ermine as he was. Exactly! Her scorn was relentless, with regard to that last grievance, for women, who are able to excuse all crimes, refuse their mercy to the fault of being deceived.
Until dawn, she remained sitting on the edge of the bed, chatting with the condemned man, sometimes caressing his hands or his hair; they addressed one another as tu, talking about incoherent things with the gravity of children.
Suddenly, he burst out laughing.
“You know what, Gertrude?”
“What, my darling?”
“I no longer have any desire to go and die now, none at all. And for some time I’ve been repeating to myself: ‘No, I don’t want them to hang me.’ It’s your fault.”
“Mine?”
“For sure! Why wouldn’t I stay for a little while longer on earth, where there are worthy people like you? For you’re a good girl, Gertrude.”
“You too.”
“That’s it! I want to stay.”
“Poor fellow...”
She gazed at him with pity, and their innocent eyes, which had encountered one another, began to dream together. They felt sorry for one another, and did not hide it, even though they did not say anything about it. But suddenly, an idea was born in each of their heads, and the two faces took on a joyful expression at the same time; but neither Gertrude nor Dieudonat wanted to say what they were thinking. From them on, they spoke less; they seemed preoccupied or impatient; covertly, they darted sly glances at the ventilation shaft, as if to provoke some signal therefrom.
Finally, a little daylight blanched the ceiling. She thought: It’s now. And he thought: It’s now.
She kissed the man who was due to die in a little while tenderly, and two large tears drowned her canine eyes. Then she got up to leave.
“I’m in a hurry; I have something to do right away.”
But he retained her by the wrist.
“Gertrude, we won’t see one another again, I believe, in this base world, and I’d like to leave you a souvenir of me. Listen: you’re good and I like you a lot. However, you haven’t even asked my name.”
“You’re the condemned man.”
“But also?”
“They call you Onuphre.”
“Have you heard mention of a certain Dieudonat?”
“The one whose wishes are granted and who has gold whenever he wants it?”
“He has better than gold; you too have better, for you have a heart of gold and you’ve sacrificed your health to console the unfortunate; he’s giving you his. So be it! Kiss me now, and go; but in future, spare yourself in order to keep what I’ve given you. Adieu, Gertrude.”
Scarcely had he spoken than he felt a languor making his limbs heavy; he felt a chill all the way to the marrow of his bones, and nausea filled his mouth.
The girl, by contrast, had straightened her torso and her neck; her hamstrings flexed under the rigid weight of her body, and she breathed easily, deeply, as if spring breezes were blowing through the cell.
She did not understand very clearly what has happening to her, but they looked at one another; she was blooming with life, he was radiant at having given it to her, and one minute of happiness floated divinely between those two naïve souls.
XXVII. He is prey to justice
Dieudonat had spoken his secret idea, and had even realized it, but Gertrude was still ruminating hers.
“Necessary to make that happen, but there isn’t a moment to lose.”
She ran to her kitchen, took her broom, spat on her hands, and drew the bolts on the doors.
“I feel light this morning, I no longer feel my burden. I don’t know what’s simmering inside m
e, but it’s many months since I knew so much ease. Am I cured of the disease?”
She left the prison, broom in hand, as she was accustomed to do.
“Today, it’s necessary to see about making more noise than work. Hup!”
The town was still asleep; the paving stones of the street were damp and devoid of footprints. In the early morning mist, Gertrude’s broom set about scything through the silence, tracing broad arcs on the stones, and the dust rose from the ground effortfully, to fall back in heavy sheaves.
“Oh, how well I feel, and how I’m breathing! Are people never going to wake up today? It’s urgent, though.”
She kept watch on the surrounding houses. Finally, somewhere in the distance, a shutter clicked against a wall; elsewhere, a window grated, and then another; a rumble of wheels sounded in the distance; a door opened slightly; someone coughed; windows opened everywhere. Housewives in short skirts appeared on the thresholds; the shutters over the shop-windows began to grate on their hinges.
“They’re taking their time!”
In order to be seen, Gertrude swept vigorously, and started to sing.
“You’re very cheerful, girl!”
“Haven’t you heard the news? The vagabond they’re going to hang is innocent. They’ve just undressed him to put the penitent’s chemise on him, and they saw that he couldn’t have raped Clementine, who lied, because he’s a eunuch, as they call it, as one says a neutered cat.”
“And does the judge know that? It’s necessary to tell him.”
“Tell him? He doesn’t care!”
Gertrude resumed weeping. From the corner of her eye she watched her story launch forward into the town.”
“A eunuch who’s going to be hanged for rape?”
“No?”
“Yes—they’re going to hang him.”
“He’s gone,” said Gertrude. “It’s just a matter of time.”
From one group to another, from door to window, the story ran, along the sidewalks, skimming the walls, leaping over the gutters; it raced, the morning’s good story, turning the corners of the streets, radiating over the crossroads, spreading over the squares, lingering on the parvis of every church where the angelus was being rung, stopping the milk carts and the dung carts, frightening the maidservants and going up with them to the bourgeois bedrooms, where their employers became indignant in the name of justice and Truth while drinking their milky coffee.
“Are they going to let an innocent man die?”
“It isn’t possible!”
The ingenious Gertrude had not lied, exactly; she had simply anticipated the inevitable. In fact, the executioners had presented themselves soon after the crack of dawn in the cell of the condemned man, garnished internally with hot soup and even hotter spiced wine; they had found him in good humor.
They spoke amicably to their client of a day, and nothing in their words reeked of the arrogance that is customary to subalterns when they become masters for a moment. They joked with the vagabond about the rape of which he had rendered himself culpable in the woods and which he was about to expiate under the wood; without vain prudery they informed him of the honorable effects of hanging; their laughter was sonorous, full of health, and Dieudonat, out of politeness, strove to laugh with them, but had no great desire to do so. The idea of being hanged had decidedly ceased to please him; his appetite for new adventures no longer excited him at all that morning. To begin with, he was feeling ill; the strange malady he had just acquired as chilling his blood and his bones; his immortal soul was exhausted by it; he no longer had any appetite for anything, for living or for dying, although the latter is the final fantasy of discouraged people; his arms were dangling under the weight of his hands, his head was tilting over his shoulder and his skin was prickling with cold while the benevolent functionaries took off his clothes in order to put the penitent’s chemise on him.
His torso was already half-naked; he said, quietly: “I’m not very warm.”
“It’s fear, comrade; have a drop of this.”
He drank from a leather bottle a fiery liquid that made him cough, for the lack of habitude, and the executioners slapped his back gaily between the shoulder blades. One of the aides unfolded the ample back robe in front of him, making it click; it seemed to him to be shameful and sad.
“Nothing in all of this amuses me, and I regret giving you needless trouble, but I don’t want to be hanged; so be it!”
“You’re a good one, my lad!”
They continued their work; his shirt was removed; they saw him without any veil; their hilarity was enormous.
“A eunuch!”
“Who rapes girls!”
“How do you do it?”
“Give me the chemise, please; I’m not warm.”
“You know,” said the jailer, “this might be what they call a judicial error.”
The executioner protested: “You believe in judicial errors? I don’t believe in those tricks—they’re inventions of criminals to discredit the law.”
“Well, perhaps this fellow didn’t rape the girl, since he’s castrated.”
“It’s necessary all the same that she was violated, since she’s pregnant.”
Between these two incompatible arguments, the worthy fellows reflected as best they could, very embarrassed, and Dieudonat shivered, as naked as a worm in the damp cell.
“The chemise… I’m cold...”
“What are we going to do, then?”
The jailer ran to the judge’s house.
The man of the ermines was still asleep next to his wife.
“Wake up, sir!”
In those days, the most noble people, even kings and duchesses, who slept without nightshirts, saw no inconvenience in receiving visitors in the bedroom, as we receive them in the dining room; modesties vary. At the noise that was made around his slumber. Master Touillechair opened an already surly eye. A chambermaid drew the curtains at the windows and light poured in.
“What’s happened?” What do you want with me?”
Standing at the foot of the bed, vaguely disturbed, the turnkey searched for words and only found ideas, because of the snores emerging from under the sheets of the wife, renowned for her adulteries. He succeeded, however, in exposing the facts.
“What are you telling me? A eunuch? You’re mad!”
The citizen sat up, and upper body, covered in black hair, rose up between the green bed-curtains alongside the conjugal mass; majesty was in default. He scratched his ribs vehemently, and his fingernails left long livid streaks on his yellow skin.
“A eunuch? You’re sure?”
“I saw it as I’m seeing you.”
Disquieted by that comparison, the judge lowered his gaze upon himself, and pulled up the quilt. But his wife shifted everything, cursing in the hollow of the pillow. “What’s going on? Are you issuing verdicts in your bed now?”
“Hold your peace, wife; you’re strangely mistaken if you believe that a bed isn’t a place befitting judiciary labor. Our venerable ancestors didn’t think in that fashion; to hear a case and deliberate on it, the kings of olden days lay down on their couch, the bed of justice, and doubtless wanted us to understand by that symbolism that quietude is of primordial necessity in the workings of justice; doubtless also, it’s in memory of the royal bed, and by virtue of an exaggerated interpretation of the symbol, that some of us go to sleep on their seats.”
“It’s well worth the trouble of waking up an honest woman for a eunuch! I ask you whether it can interest you if such a fellow is dead or alive, and what can he be useful for?”
At these revolting words, the magistrate started with indignation, so violently that he had to pull up the quilt a second time. “I’m ashamed, Madame, for you’re erring more and more. Know that our tribunal is neither a stud-farm not a harem, where generative virtues have weight; the subjects of the king, however diminished they might be, all have an equal right to hope that, without distinction of persons, our verdicts will be inspired e
xclusively by social interest and public morality. The problem that is posed to our conscience, Madame, is of a higher nature than you imagine, in accordance with your narrow views, for it’s a matter for us, not only of punishing the guilty, when they are encountered, but also and above all in moralizing the people committed to our paternal wisdom, of maintaining them in confidence, and ensuring that the serenity of their minds and the security of their quotidian existence are untroubled by any doubt or molested by any scandal. I am speaking to you as I think, Madame: woe betide the judge who fails in his essential duty and who troubles public consciousness by permitting notorious errors to spread through the city even the shadow of a suspicion against the King’s justice.”
He paused for breath, and, satisfied with himself, he turned to the jailer, whom veneration had immobilized like a boundary marker.
“For those reasons, a solution is entirely indicated in the present difficulty, and I’m astonished, my friend, that you have been able to hesitate in conceiving it and applying it yourself, since it is incontestably the only one to which our tribunal can have recourse without failing.”
“I thought so, but if Your Excellency will excuse me, I’m not permitted to release a man legally condemned without orders...”
“Release him! Who mentioned releasing him! This vagabond is, as you say, legally condemned, and we’d be mocked in the taverns and the papers, and people would jeer us, if anyone knew that we’d released a fellow duly condemned. No, since good fortune permits us to discover in time detail, which would be of a nature, if it were divulged, to disconcert the respect of citizens for the law, we must, above all, make sure that that detail remains absolutely unknown. That is why I am recommending that you take the greatest care in enclosing your eunuch securely in the penitent’s robe and making sure that it is not removed at the moments of hanging and burying him. If he keeps it on his body, no one will know what there is underneath it; a robe will be lost, it’s true, but we will have avoided the major disaster of provoking a perturbation of consciences, which is the most important thing of all, my friend, and justice will be satisfied. Go, my friend.”
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