Romans et contes 📖✨ – Découvrez les chefs-d’œuvre de Gautier !

Théophile Gautier’s novels and tales immerse you in a fascinating world where imagination meets reality. Through stories rich in detail and emotion, the author explores a variety of themes, ranging from love to adventure, from humor to profound reflection. This collection invites us to discover the very essence of 19th-century literature , an era marked by the quest for beauty and the passion of the senses. Chapter 1. No one could understand the illness that was slowly eroding Octave de Saville. He did not stay in bed and led his ordinary life ; never a complaint left his lips, and yet he was visibly wasting away. Questioned by the doctors whom the solicitude of his parents and friends forced him to consult, he did not complain of any specific suffering, and science did not discover any alarming symptoms in him: his chest, when examined, gave a favorable sound, and the ear applied to his heart scarcely detected any beat that was too slow or too rapid; he did not cough, did not have a fever, but life was withdrawing from him and fleeing through one of those invisible cracks with which man is full, according to Terence. Sometimes a strange fainting spell made him pale and cold as marble. For a minute or two one might have thought him dead; then the pendulum, stopped by a mysterious finger, no longer being held back, resumed its movement, and Octavius seemed to wake from a dream. He had been sent to the waters; but the thermal nymphs could do nothing for him. A trip to Naples produced no better results. That beautiful, much-vaunted sun had seemed to him black like that in Albert Durer’s engraving ; the bat with the word _melancholia_ written on its wing whipped that sparkling azure with its dusty membranes and fluttered between him and the light; he had felt frozen on the Quai de la Mergellina, where the half-naked lazzaroni cook themselves and give their skin a bronze patina. He had therefore returned to his little apartment in the Rue Saint-Lazare and had apparently resumed his old habits. This apartment was as comfortably furnished as a bachelor pad can be . But as an interior takes on the physiognomy and perhaps the thoughts of the person who inhabits it, Octave’s home had gradually grown sadder; the damask of the curtains had faded and now let through only a gray light. The large bouquets of peonies were withering against the less white background of the carpet; the gold of the borders framing some watercolors and some sketches by masters had slowly reddened under an implacable dust; the discouraged fire was going out and smoking amidst the ashes. The old Boule clock inlaid with copper and green tortoiseshell held back the sound of its ticking, and the bell of the bored hours spoke low as one does in a sick room; the doors fell silent, and the footsteps of the rare visitors were muffled on the carpet; laughter stopped of its own accord upon entering these gloomy, cold , and dark rooms, where, however, nothing of modern luxury was lacking. Jean, Octave’s servant, slipped in like a shadow, a feather duster under his arm, a tray in his hand, for, unwittingly impressed by the melancholy of the place, he had finally lost his loquacity. On the walls hung boxing gloves, masks, and foils as trophies; but it was easy to see that they had not been touched for a long time; books, taken and carelessly thrown away, lay scattered all over the furniture, as if Octave had wanted, by this mechanical reading, to lull a fixed idea to sleep. A letter he had begun, whose paper had yellowed, seemed to have been waiting for months to be finished, and lay spread out like a mute reproach in the middle of the study. Although inhabited, the apartment seemed deserted. Life was absent from it, and on entering one received in one’s face that gust of cold air which rises from tombs when they are opened. In this gloomy dwelling where a woman never ventured the tip of her boot, Octave found himself more at ease than anywhere else—this silence, this sadness and this abandonment suited him; the joyful The tumult of life frightened him, although he sometimes made efforts to join in it; but he returned more somber from the masquerades, parties or suppers to which his friends dragged him; so he no longer struggled against this mysterious pain, and he let the days pass with the indifference of a man who does not count on the morrow. He formed no plans, no longer believing in the future, and he had tacitly sent his resignation from life to God, waiting for him to accept it. However, if you imagined a thin and hollow face, an earthy complexion, exhausted limbs, a great external ravage, you would be mistaken; at most one would perceive a few bruises of dark brown under the eyelids, a few orange shades around the eye socket, some tenderness in the temples furrowed with bluish veins. Only the spark of the soul did not shine in the eye, from which will, hope, and desire had flown. This dead look in this young face formed a strange contrast, and produced a more painful effect than the gaunt mask, with eyes alight with fever, of ordinary illness. Octave had been, before languishing in this way, what one calls a pretty boy, and he still was: thick black hair, with abundant curls, massed itself, silky and glossy, on each side of his temples; his long, velvety eyes, of a nocturnal blue, fringed with curved eyelashes , sometimes lit up with a moist sparkle; in repose, and when no passion animated them, they were noted for that serene tranquility which the eyes of Orientals have, when at the door of a café in Smyrna or Constantinople they make kief after having smoked their hookah. His complexion had never been colored, and resembled those southern olive-white complexions which only produce their full effect in the light; his hand was fine and delicate, his foot narrow and arched. He dressed well, without preceding fashion or following it as a latecomer, and knew perfectly how to make the most of his natural advantages. Although he had no pretensions to be a dandy or a gentleman rider, if he had presented himself at the Jockey Club, he would not have been refused. How was it that, young, handsome, rich, with so many reasons to be happy, a young man wasted away so miserably? You will say that Octave was jaded, that the fashionable novels of the day had spoiled his brain with their unhealthy ideas, that he believed in nothing, that of his youth and his fortune wasted in mad orgies he had nothing left but debts;—all these suppositions lack truth. —Having made very little use of pleasures, Octave could not be disgusted with them; he was neither splenetic, nor romantic, nor atheist, nor libertine, nor spendthrift; his life had been until then mixed with studies and distractions like that of other young people; he sat in the morning during the lectures at the Sorbonne, and in the evening he planted himself on the steps of the Opera to watch the cascade of the toilets flow. He was not known to have been a marble girl or a duchess, and he spent his income without letting his fancies bite into capital—his notary esteemed him;—so he was a very plain character, incapable of throwing himself into Manfred’s glacier or lighting the Escousse stove. As for the cause of the singular state in which he found himself and which put the science of the faculty at fault, we dare not admit it, so improbable is the thing in Paris, in the nineteenth century, and we leave the task of saying it to our hero himself. As ordinary doctors understood nothing about this strange illness, for no soul has yet been dissected in anatomy amphitheaters, recourse was finally had to a singular doctor, returned from the Indies after a long stay, and who was reputed to perform marvelous cures. Octave, sensing a superior perspicacity and capable of penetrating his secret, seemed to dread the doctor’s visit, and it was only at his mother’s repeated entreaties that he agreed to receive M. Balthazar Cherbonneau. When the doctor entered, Octave was half lying on a couch: a cushion supported his head, another supported his elbow, a third covered his feet; a gandoura enveloped him in its soft and supple folds; he was reading, or rather he was holding a book, for his eyes fixed on a page were not looking. His face was pale, but, as we have said, did not present any very noticeable alteration. A superficial observation would not have believed in the danger in this young patient, whose table supported a cigar box instead of the vials, logs, potions, herbal teas, and other pharmacopoeias required in such cases. His pure features, although a little tired, had lost almost nothing of their grace, and, except for the profound atony and the incurable despair of the eye, Octave would have seemed to enjoy normal health. However indifferent Octave was, the strange appearance of the doctor struck him. M. Balthazar Cherbonneau looked like a figure escaped from a fantastic tale by Hoffmann, walking in reality, stupefied to see this dull creation. His extremely dark face was as if devoured by an enormous skull, which the fall of the hair made appear even larger. This naked skull, polished like ivory, had retained its white tints, while the mask, exposed to the rays of the sun, had acquired, thanks to the superposition of layers of tan, a tone of old oak or of a smoky portrait. The flats, the cavities and the projections of the bones were so vigorously accentuated that the little flesh which covered them resembled, with its thousand crumpled wrinkles, wet skin applied to a death’s head. The few gray hairs that still lingered on the occiput, massed in three thin strands, two of which stood up above the ears and the third of which started at the nape of the neck to die at the base of the forehead, made one regret the use of the ancient hammer wig or the modern mop of couch grass, and crowned in a grotesque fashion this nutcracker physiognomy. But what irresistibly occupied the doctor were the eyes; in the middle of this face tanned by age, charred by incandescent skies, worn in study, where the fatigues of science and of life were written in deep wakes, in radiant crow’s feet, in folds more pressed than the leaves of a book, sparkled two pupils of a turquoise blue, of an inconceivable limpidity, freshness and youth. These blue stars shone in the depths of brown orbits and concentric membranes whose tawny circles vaguely recalled the feathers arranged in a halo around the night-sighted pupils of owls. One would have said that, by some sorcery learned from the Brahmins and pandits, the doctor had stolen a child’s eyes and fitted them into his corpse-like face. In the old man, the look marked twenty years; in the young man, it marked sixty. The costume was the classic doctor’s costume: a coat and trousers of black cloth, a silk waistcoat of the same color, and on the shirt a large diamond, a present from some rajah or nabob. But these clothes floated as if they had been hung on a coat rack, and formed perpendicular folds which the doctor’s femurs and tibias broke into sharp angles when he sat down. To produce this phenomenal thinness, the devouring Indian sun had not been enough. Without doubt, Balthazar Cherbonneau had submitted, for some purpose of initiation, to the long fasts of the fakirs and stood on the gazelle skin near the yoghis between the four burning stoves; but this loss of substance showed no weakening. Strong, taut ligaments on the hands, like the strings on the neck of a violin, connected the emaciated bones of the phalanges and made them move without too much creaking. The doctor sat on the seat that Octave indicated with his hand beside the couch, making his elbows like a meter being folded and with movements that indicated the inveterate habit of squatting on mats. Thus positioned, Mr. Cherbonneau turned his back to the light, which illuminated his patient’s face in full, a situation favorable to examination and readily taken by observers, more curious to see than to be seen. Although the doctor’s face was bathed in shadow and the top of his skull, shining and rounded like a gigantic ostrich egg, alone caught a ray of daylight as it passed, Octave distinguished the scintillation of the strange blue pupils which seemed endowed with a glow of their own like phosphorescent bodies : from them gushed forth a sharp and clear ray which the young patient received full in the chest with that sensation of tingling and heat produced by the emetic. “Well, sir,” said the doctor after a moment of silence during which he seemed to summarize the clues recognized in his rapid inspection, “I already see that this is not a case of common pathology with you; you have none of those cataloged illnesses, with well-known symptoms, which the doctor cures or worsens; and when I have talked for a few minutes, I will not ask you for paper to write a harmless formula from the _Codex_ at the bottom of which I will affix a hieroglyphic signature and which your valet will take to the local chemist.” Octave smiled weakly, as if to thank M. Cherbonneau for sparing him useless and tedious remedies. “But,” continued the doctor, “do not rejoice so quickly; from the fact that you have neither an enlarged heart, nor tubercles in the lung, nor softening of the spinal cord, nor serous effusion in the brain, nor typhoid or nervous fever, it does not follow that you are in good health. Give me your hand.” Believing that M. Cherbonneau was going to feel his pulse and expecting to see him pull out his watch to the seconds, Octave rolled up the sleeve of his gandoura, exposed his wrist and mechanically offered it to the doctor. Without searching with his thumb for that rapid or slow pulsation which indicates whether the clock of life is out of order in man, M. Cherbonneau took in his brown paw, whose bony fingers resembled crab claws, the young man’s slender, veined, and moist hand; he felt it, kneaded it, massaged it in a way as if to put himself in magnetic communication with his subject. Octave, although he was a skeptic in medicine, could not help feeling a certain anxious emotion, for it seemed to him that the doctor was draining his soul by this pressure, and the blood had completely abandoned his cheekbones. “Dear Mr. Octave,” said the doctor, letting go of the young man’s hand, “your situation is more serious than you think, and science, at least as practiced by the old European routine, can do nothing about it: you no longer have the will to live, and your soul is imperceptibly detaching itself from your body; There is in you neither hypochondria, nor lypemania, nor melancholic tendency to suicide.—No!—a rare and curious case, you could, if I did not oppose it, die without any appreciable internal or external lesion. It was time to call me, for the spirit is now held to the flesh only by a thread; but we are going to tie a good knot in it. And the doctor rubbed his hands joyfully, grimacing a smile that caused a swirl of wrinkles in the thousand folds of his face. “Monsieur Cherbonneau, I do not know if you will cure me, and, after all, I have no desire to, but I must admit that you have penetrated at once the cause of the mysterious state in which I find myself. It seems to me that my body has become permeable, and lets my self escape like a sieve lets water out of its holes. I feel myself melting into the great whole, and I have difficulty distinguishing myself from the environment into which I plunge. The life of which I perform, as much as possible, the habitual pantomime, so as not to upset my parents and my friends, seems so far from me, that there are moments when I believe myself to have already left the human sphere: I come and go by the motives which determined me formerly, and whose mechanical impulse still lasts, but without participating in what I do. I sit down to table at ordinary times, and I appear to eat and drink, although I feel no taste for the most spicy dishes and to the strongest wines: the sunlight seems pale to me like that of the moon, and candles have black flames. I am cold on the hottest days of summer; sometimes a great silence falls within me as if my heart no longer beat and the inner workings were stopped by an unknown cause. Death must not be different from this state if it is appreciable for the deceased. —You have, continued the doctor, a chronic inability to live, a completely moral illness and more frequent than one thinks. Thought is a force that can kill like prussic acid, like the spark of the Leyden jar, although the trace of its ravages is not perceptible to the weak means of analysis at the disposal of common science. What sorrow has sunk its hooked beak into your liver? From the height of what secret ambition have you fallen back broken and ground? What bitter despair do you ruminate in immobility? Is it the thirst for power that torments you? Have you voluntarily renounced a goal placed beyond human reach? You are very young for that. Has a woman deceived you? No, doctor, replied Octave, I have not even had that happiness. And yet, continued M. Balthazar Cherbonneau, I read in your dull eyes, in the discouraged habit of your body, in the dull timbre of your voice, the title of a play by Shakespeare as clearly as if it were stamped in gold letters on the spine of a morocco binding. And what is this play that I am translating without knowing it? said Octave, whose curiosity was aroused in spite of himself. Love’s labour’s lost, continued the doctor with a purity of accent that betrayed a long stay in the English possessions of India. It means, if I am not mistaken, love’s labours lost. —Precisely. Octave did not reply; a slight blush colored his cheeks, and, to give himself some composure, he began to play with the tassel of his cord: the doctor had folded one of his legs over the other, which produced the effect of the saltire bones engraved on tombs, and was holding his foot with his hand in the oriental fashion. His blue eyes plunged into Octave’s eyes and questioned them with an imperious and gentle gaze. “Come,” said M. Balthazar Cherbonneau, “open yourself to me, I am the physician of souls, you are my patient, and, like the Catholic priest to his penitent, I ask you for a complete confession, and you can make it without kneeling. ” —What good is that? Supposing you have guessed correctly, telling you about my pains would not relieve them. I am not a talkative sorrow,—no human power, even yours, could cure me. “Perhaps,” said the doctor, settling more firmly in his armchair, like someone preparing to listen to a confidence of some length. “I do not want,” replied Octave, “that you should accuse me of childish stubbornness, and leave you, by my silence, a means of washing your hands of my death; but, since you insist on it, I will tell you my story; you have guessed the gist of it, I will not dispute the details with you. Do not expect anything singular or romantic. It is a very simple, very common, very worn-out adventure; but, as the song of Henry Heine says, the one to whom it happens always finds it new, and his heart is broken by it. In truth, I am ashamed to say something so vulgar to a man who has lived in the most fabulous and chimerical countries. ” “Have no fear; “Only the ordinary is extraordinary to me,” said the doctor, smiling. “Well, doctor, I’m dying of love.” Chapter 2. “I happened to be in Florence towards the end of the summer, in 184…, the most beautiful season to see Florence. I had time, money, good letters of recommendation, and then I was a young man in good humor, asking nothing better than to have fun. I settled down on the Longo-Arno, hired a carriage, and gave myself over to that sweet Florentine life which has so much charm for the foreigner. In the morning, I would go and visit some church, some palace, or some gallery at my leisure, without hurrying, not wanting to give myself that indigestion of masterpieces which, in Italy, makes overly hasty tourists feel sick with art; sometimes I would look at the bronze doors of the Baptistery, sometimes at Benvenuto’s Perseus under the Loggia dei Lanzi, at the portrait of La Fornarina in the Uffizi, or again at Canova’s Venus in the Pitti Palace, but never at more than one object at a time. Then I would have lunch at the Café Doney, with a cup of iced coffee, smoke a few cigars, look through the newspapers, and, my buttonhole flowered by choice or by force by those pretty flower girls wearing large straw hats who stand in front of the café, I would go home for a siesta; at three o’clock, the carriage would come and pick me up and take me to the Cascines. The Cascines are to Florence what the Bois de Boulogne is to Paris, with this difference: everyone knows each other, and the roundabout forms an open-air salon, where the armchairs are replaced by carriages, stopped and arranged in a semicircle. The women, in full dress, half-reclining on the cushions, receive visits from lovers and attentives, dandies and attachés of the legation, who stand with their hats off on the step.—But you know that as well as I do.—There plans are formed for the evening, rendezvous are assigned, replies are given, invitations are accepted; it is like a Bourse du plaisir which is held from three o’clock to five o’clock, in the shade of beautiful trees, under the mildest sky in the world. It is obligatory, for anyone who is even slightly well situated, to make an appearance at the Cascines every day . I took care not to miss it, and in the evening, after dinner, I went to some salons, or to the Pergola, when the singer was worth the trouble. “I thus spent one of the happiest months of my life; but this happiness was not to last. A magnificent carriage made its debut one day at the Cascines. This superb product of Viennese coachwork, a masterpiece by Laurenzi, shimmering with a sparkling varnish, decorated with an almost royal coat of arms, was harnessed to the most beautiful pair of horses that had ever pawed the ground at Hyde Park or at St. James’s in Queen Victoria’s Drawing Room, and driven à la Daumont in the most correct manner by a very young jockey in white leather breeches and a green jacket; the brass of the harness, the wheel boxes, the door handles shone like gold and flashed in the sun; All eyes followed this splendid carriage which, after having described on the sand a curve as regular as if it had been traced with a compass, went to line up beside the carriages. The carriage was not empty, as you can well imagine; but in the rapidity of the movement one could only distinguish a piece of boot lying on the front cushion, a large fold of shawl and the disk of a parasol fringed with white silk. The parasol closed and one saw a woman of incomparable beauty shine forth. I was on horseback and I was able to get close enough not to miss any detail of this human masterpiece. The stranger wore a dress of that silver-glazed sea-green that makes any woman whose complexion is not impeccable look as black as a mole—the insolence of a self-assured blonde. A large white crepe de chine, all bulged with embroidery of the same color, enveloped her in its soft drapery , crumpled with small folds, like a tunic of Phidias. Her face had for a halo a hat of the finest Florentine straw, flowered with forget-me-nots and delicate aquatic plants with narrow glaucous leaves; for only jewel, a gold lizard studded with turquoise encircled the arm that held the ivory handle of the parasol. “Forgive, dear doctor, this description from a fashion journal to a lover for whom these small souvenirs take on enormous importance. Thick blond crimped headbands, whose rings formed like waves of light, descended in opulent sheets on both sides of her forehead, whiter and purer than the virgin snow fallen in the night on the highest peak of an Alp; eyelashes long and delicate like those threads of gold that the miniaturists of the Middle Ages make shine around the heads of their angels, half veiled her pupils of a blue-green like those gleams that cross glaciers by certain effects of the sun; her mouth, divinely drawn, presented those purple tints that wash the valves of the conchas of Venus, and her cheeks resembled timid white roses that would blush the confession of the nightingale or the kiss of the butterfly; no human brush could render this complexion of an immaterial suavity, freshness and transparency, whose colors did not seem due to the coarse blood that illuminates our fibers; the first reddenings of dawn on the summits of the Sierra Nevadas, the flesh-colored tone of some white camellias at the tips of their petals, the marble of Paros, glimpsed through a veil of pink gauze, can alone give a distant idea of it. What one saw of the neck between the bridles of the hat and the top of the shawl sparkled with an iridescent whiteness, at the edge of the contours, vague reflections of opal. This dazzling head did not seize at first by the design, but rather by the coloring, like the beautiful productions of the Venetian school, although its features were as pure and as delicate as those of the antique profiles cut in the agate of cameos. “As Romeo forgets Rosalind at the sight of Juliet, at the appearance of this supreme beauty I forgot my former loves. The pages of my heart became white again: all name, all memory disappeared. I did not understand how I could have found any attraction in these vulgar liaisons that few young people avoid, and I reproached myself for them as culpable infidelities. A new life dated for me from this fatal encounter. “The carriage left the Cascines and took the road back to the city, carrying with it the dazzling vision; I put my horse next to that of a very amiable young Russian, a great water-runner, common in all the cosmopolitan salons of Europe, and who knew the traveling staff of high life inside out; I brought the conversation to the foreigner, and I learned that it was Countess Prascovie Labinska, a Lithuanian of illustrious birth and great fortune, whose husband had been fighting the Caucasian War for two years. “It is useless to tell you what diplomacy I employed to be received by the Countess, who, due to the Count’s absence, was very reserved about introductions; Finally, I was admitted; two dowager princesses and four elderly baronesses vouch for me on their ancient virtue. Countess Labinska had rented a magnificent villa, which had once belonged to the Salviati, half a league from Florence, and in a few days she had managed to install all the modern comforts in the ancient manor, without disturbing in any way its severe beauty and serious elegance. Large armorial doorways were happily attached to the ogival arches; armchairs and furniture of ancient form harmonized with the walls covered with brown woodwork or frescoes of a muted and faded tone like that of old tapestries; no color too new, no gold too brilliant irritated the eye, and the present did not clash with the past. The Countess had such a natural air of the chatelaine that the old palace seemed built expressly for her. “If I had been seduced by the radiant beauty of the Countess, I was even more so after a few visits by her mind, so rare, so fine, so broad; when she spoke on some interesting subject, the soul came to her skin, so to speak, and became visible. Her whiteness lit up like the alabaster of a lamp with an inner ray: there were in her complexion those phosphorescent scintillations, those luminous tremors of which Dante speaks when he paints the splendors of paradise; one would have said an angel standing out in clear light against a sun. I remained dazzled, ecstatic and stupid. Lost in the contemplation of her beauty, ravished by the sounds of her celestial voice which made each idiom an ineffable music, when I absolutely had to reply, I stammered out a few incoherent words which must have given her the poorest idea of my intelligence, sometimes even an imperceptible smile of friendly irony passed like a rosy glow on her charming lips at certain phrases, which denoted, on my part, a profound trouble or an incurable stupidity. “I had not yet told her anything of my love; before her I was without thought, without strength, without courage; my heart beat as if it wanted to burst from my breast and leap onto the knees of its sovereign. Twenty times I had resolved to explain myself, but an insurmountable timidity held me back; The slightest cold or reserved air from the Countess caused me mortal trances, comparable to those of the condemned man who, his head on the block, waits for the lightning of the axe to pierce his neck. Nervous contractions choked me, icy sweats bathed my body. I blushed, I turned pale and I left without having said anything, having difficulty finding the door and staggering like a drunken man on the steps of the porch. “When I was outside, my faculties returned to me and I threw the most impassioned dithyrambs to the wind. I addressed to the absent idol a thousand declarations of irresistible eloquence. In these silent apostrophes I equaled the great poets of love.—The Song of Songs of Solomon with its dizzying oriental perfume and its hallucinated lyricism of hashish, the sonnets of Petrarch with their platonic subtleties and their ethereal delicacies, the Intermezzo of Heinrich Heine with its nervous and delirious sensitivity do not approach these inexhaustible effusions of soul in which my life was exhausted. At the end of each of these monologues, it seemed to me that the vanquished countess must descend from heaven upon my heart, and more than once I crossed my arms on my chest, thinking of closing them around her. “I was so completely possessed that I spent hours murmuring, like a litany of love, these two words:—Prascovie Labinska,—finding an indefinable charm in these syllables, sometimes slowly reeled off like pearls, sometimes spoken with the feverish volubility of the devotee whom his very prayer exalts. At other times, I traced the adored name on the most beautiful sheets of vellum, bringing to them calligraphic research from medieval manuscripts, gold highlights, azure fleurons, green foliage. I used this labor with passionate meticulousness and childish perfection the long hours that separated my visits to the Countess. I could not read or occupy myself with anything. Nothing interested me outside Prascovie, and I did not even open the letters that came to me from France. Several times I made efforts to escape from this state; I tried to remember the axioms of seduction accepted by young people, the stratagems employed by the Valmonts of the Café de Paris and the Don Juans of the Jockey Club; but in carrying them out my heart failed me, and I regretted not having, like Stendhal’s Julien Sorel, a packet of progressive epistles to copy and send to the Countess. I was content to love, giving myself entirely without asking for anything in return, without even distant hope, for my most audacious dreams hardly dared to touch the tips of Prascovie’s rosy fingers with their lips . In the fifteenth century, the young novice with his forehead on the steps of the altar, the knight kneeling in his stiff armor, could not have had a more prostrate adoration for the Madonna.” M. Balthazar Cherbonneau had listened to Octave with profound attention, because for him the young man’s story was not just a romantic tale, and he said to himself during a pause in the narrator: “Yes, that is indeed the diagnosis of passionate love, a curious illness that I have only encountered once—at Chandernagore—in a young pariah in love with a Brahmin; she died of it, the poor girl, but she was a savage; you, M. Octave, you You are a civilized man, and we will cure you.” His parenthesis closed, he signaled with his hand to M. de Saville to continue; and, folding his leg back on his thigh like the articulated leg of a grasshopper, so as to support his chin by his knee, he established himself in this position impossible for anyone else, but which seemed especially convenient for him. “I do not want to bore you with the details of my secret martyrdom,” continued Octave; “I am coming to a decisive scene. One day, no longer able to moderate my imperious desire to see the Countess, I anticipated the time of my usual visit; the weather was stormy and heavy. I did not find Madame Labinska in the drawing-room. She had established herself under a portico supported by slender columns, opening onto a terrace by which one descended to the garden; she had had her piano, a sofa and rush chairs brought there ; Window boxes, laden with splendid flowers—nowhere are they so fresh or so fragrant as in Florence—filled the intercolumnations, and impregnated with their perfume the rare gusts of breeze that came from the Apennines. In front of you, through the opening of the arcades, you could see the clipped yews and box trees of the garden, from which rose a few hundred-year-old cypresses, and which were populated by mythological marbles in the tormented style of Baccio Bandinelli or Ammanato. In the background, above the silhouette of Florence, the dome of Santa Maria del Fiore rounded and the square belfry of the Palazzo Vecchio rose up. “The Countess was alone, half-reclining on the rush sofa; she had never seemed so beautiful to me; her nonchalant body, languid with heat, bathed like that of a sea nymph in the white foam of a loose Indian muslin robe, edged from top to bottom with a bubbling trim like the silver fringe of a wave; a brooch of nielloed Khorasan steel fastened at the chest this robe as light as the drapery fluttering around Victory fastening her sandal. Sleeves open from the ribbing, like the pistils of a flower’s calyx, protruded her arms of a purer tone than that of the alabaster in which Florentine sculptors cut copies of ancient statues; a wide black ribbon tied at the belt, the ends of which fell back, stood out vigorously against all this whiteness. The sadness of this contrast of shades attributed to mourning might have been enlivened by the beak of a small Circassian slipper without quarter in blue morocco, embossed with yellow arabesques, which peeped out from under the last fold of the muslin. “The countess’s blond hair, whose bouffant bands, as if lifted by a breath, revealed her pure forehead, and her transparent temples formed a kind of halo, where the light sparkled in golden sparks. “Near her, on a chair, fluttered in the wind a large rice straw hat, adorned with long black ribbons like that of the dress, and lay a pair of Suede gloves which had not been worn. At my sight, Prascovie closed the book she was reading—the poems of Mickiewicz—and gave me a kindly little nod; She was alone—a favorable and rare circumstance.—I sat down opposite her on the seat she indicated to me. One of those silences, painful when prolonged, reigned for a few minutes between us. I found none of the banalities of conversation at my service; my head was becoming entangled, waves of flame rose from my heart to my eyes, and my love cried out to me: “Do not lose this supreme opportunity.” “I do not know what I would have done if the Countess, guessing the cause of my trouble, had not half straightened up, stretching out her beautiful hand towards me, as if to shut my mouth. “—Don’t say a word, Octave; you love me, I know it, I feel it, I believe it; I do not hold it against you, for love is involuntary. Other, more severe women would be offended; I pity you, for I cannot love you, and it is a sadness for me to be your misfortune.—I regret that you met me, and Curse the whim that made me leave Venice for Florence. I hoped at first that my persistent coldness would tire you and drive you away; but true love, of which I see all the signs in your eyes, is discouraged by nothing. May my sweetness give rise to no illusion, no dream, and do not take my pity for encouragement. An angel with a diamond shield and a flaming sword guards me against all seduction, better than religion, better than duty, better than virtue;—and this angel is my love:—I adore Count Labinski. I have the happiness of having found passion in marriage. ” A flood of tears gushed from my eyelids at this confession so frank, so loyal and so nobly modest, and I felt the spring of my life break within me . “Prascovia, moved, stood up, and with a gesture of graceful feminine pity, passed her cambric handkerchief over my eyes: “Come now, don’t cry,” she said to me, “I forbid you. Try to think of something else, imagine that I am gone forever, that I am dead; forget me. Travel, work, do good, mingle actively with human life; console yourself in an art or a love…”
“I made a gesture of denial. “Do you think you will suffer less by continuing to see me?” the countess continued; “come, I will always receive you. God says that we must forgive our enemies; why should we treat those who love us worse ? However, absence seems to me a surer remedy. “In two years we will be able to shake hands without danger,—for you,” she added, trying to smile. “The next day I left Florence; but neither study, nor travel, nor time, have diminished my suffering, and I feel myself dying: do not prevent me, doctor! “Have you seen Countess Prascovie Labinska again?” said the doctor, whose blue eyes sparkled strangely. “No,” replied Octave, “but she is in Paris.” And he handed M. Balthazar Cherbonneau an engraved card on which one read: “Countess Prascovie Labinska is at home on Thursdays.” Chapter 3. Among the then rather rare strollers who followed the Champs-Élysées. Avenue Gabriel, from the Ottoman Embassy to the Elysée Bourbon, preferring to the dusty whirlwind and elegant din of the main road the isolation, silence and calm freshness of this road lined with trees on one side and gardens on the other, there are few who would not have stopped, all dreamy and with a feeling of admiration mixed with envy, before a poetic and mysterious retreat, where, a rare thing, wealth seemed to lodge happiness. Who has not happened to stop walking at the gate of a park, to gaze for a long time at the white villa through the clumps of greenery, and to walk away with a heavy heart, as if the dream of his life were hidden behind these walls? On the contrary, other dwellings, seen like this from the outside, inspire in you an indefinable sadness; boredom, abandonment, despair glaze the facade with their gray hues and yellow the half-bald tops of the trees; the statues have leprosy of moss, the flowers wither, the water of the basins turns green, the weeds invade the paths despite the scraper; the birds, if there are any, fall silent. The gardens below the alley were separated from it by a leap and extended in more or less wide strips to the hotels, whose facade looked out onto the rue du Faubourg-Saint-Honoré. The one we are talking about ended at the ditch by an embankment supported by a wall of large rocks chosen for the curious irregularity of their shapes, and which, rising on each side like slides, framed with their rough asperities and their dark masses the fresh and green landscape squeezed between them. In the crevices of these rocks, the prickly pear cactus, the swamp milkweed, St. John’s wort, the saxifrage, the cymbalaria, the houseleek, the Alpine lychnid, the Irish ivy found enough topsoil to nourish their roots and cut their varied greenery against the vigorous background of the stone;—a painter could not have placed a better foil in the foreground of his painting. The side walls that enclosed this earthly paradise disappeared under a curtain of climbing plants, birthworts, blue passionflowers, bellflowers, honeysuckle, baby’s breath, Chinese wisteria, Greek periplocas whose claws, tendrils and stems entwined a green trellis, for happiness itself does not want to be imprisoned; and thanks to this arrangement the garden resembled a clearing in a forest rather than a rather narrow flowerbed circumscribed by the fences of civilization. A little behind the masses of rockery, there were grouped a few clumps of trees with elegant bearing, vigorous foliage whose foliage contrasted picturesquely: Japanese varnish, Canadian tuyas, Virginia planes, green ash trees, white willows, hackberry trees from Provence, dominated by two or three larches. Beyond the trees stretched a lawn of ryegrass, where not one blade of grass stood out above the other, a lawn finer, silkier than the velvet of a queen’s mantle, of that ideal emerald green that one obtains only in England before the steps of feudal mansions, soft natural carpets that the eye loves to caress and the foot fears to tread, a carpet of vegetation where, by day, only the familiar gazelle can roll in the sun with the young ducal baby in his lace dress, and, by night, some West End Titania can glide in the moonlight, her hand clasped in that of an Oberon carried on the book of peerage and baronetage. A path of sifted sand, for fear that a conch shell valve or a flint angle might injure the aristocratic feet that left their delicate imprint there, ran like a yellow ribbon around this short, dense green sheet, which the roller leveled, and whose artificial rain from the watering can maintained its humid freshness, even on the driest days of summer. At the end of the patch of lawn, at the time when this story takes place, a veritable flowery firework burst forth from a clump of geraniums, whose scarlet stars blazed against the brown background of heather. The elegant facade of the hotel completed the perspective; slender columns of the Ionic order supporting the attic surmounted at each angle by a graceful group of marble, gave it the appearance of a Greek temple transported there by the whim of a millionaire, and corrected, by awakening an idea of poetry and art, all that this luxury could have had of too ostentatious; in the inter-columnations, blinds striped with broad pink bands and almost always lowered sheltered and outlined the windows, which opened full length under the portico like doors of ice. When the fantastic sky of Paris deigned to extend a pane of azure behind this palazzino, the lines were drawn so happily between the tufts of greenery, that one could take them for the pied-à-terre of the Queen of the Fairies, or for an enlarged painting by Baron. On either side of the hotel, two greenhouses , forming wings, extended into the garden, whose crystal walls were diamond-shaped in the sun between their golden veins, and gave a crowd of the rarest and most precious exotic plants the illusion of their native climate. If some early-morning poet had passed along Avenue Gabriel at the first blush of dawn, he would have heard the nightingale finish the last trills of his nocturne, and seen the blackbird strolling in yellow slippers along the garden path like a bird at home; but at night, after the rumbling of the carriages returning from the Opera had died away amidst the silence of sleeping life, this same poet would have vaguely distinguished a white shadow on the arm of a handsome young man, and would have gone back up to his solitary attic with a soul sad unto death. This was where Countess Praskovya Labinska and her husband Count Olaf Labinski had been living for some time—the reader has probably already guessed it — after returning from the Caucasian War after a glorious campaign, where, if he had not fought hand to hand with the mystical and elusive Schamyl, he had certainly had to deal with the most fanatically devoted of the Mourides of the illustrious Scheyck. He had avoided the bullets as the brave avoid them, by rushing to meet them, and the curved damask of the savage warriors had broken on his chest without cutting it. Courage is a flawless breastplate. Count Labinski possessed that mad valor of the Slavic races, who love peril for peril’s sake, and to whom the refrain of an old Scandinavian song can still be applied: “They kill, die and laugh!” With what intoxication these two spouses had found themselves, for whom marriage was only the passion permitted by God and by men, Thomas Moore alone could say it in the style of _Love of Angels_! Every drop of ink should be transformed in our pen into a drop of light, and every word should evaporate on the paper, throwing off a flame and a perfume like a grain of incense. How can we paint these two souls melted into one, like two tears of dew which, sliding on a lily petal, meet, mingle, absorb each other and become a single pearl? Happiness is such a rare thing in this world that man has not thought of inventing words to express it, while the vocabulary of moral and physical suffering fills innumerable columns in the dictionary of all languages. Olaf and Prascovie had loved each other as children; their hearts had never beaten for anything but a single name; they knew almost from the cradle that they would belong to each other, and the rest of the world did not exist for them; one would have said that the pieces of Plato’s androgyne, which have been seeking each other in vain since the primitive divorce, had found themselves and reunited in them; they formed that duality in unity, which is complete harmony, and, side by side, they walked, or rather they flew through life with an equal, sustained flight, hovering like two doves called by the same desire, to use Dante’s beautiful expression. So that nothing might disturb this happiness, an immense fortune surrounded it like an atmosphere of gold. As soon as this radiant couple appeared, consoled misery left its rags, tears dried; for Olaf and Prascovia had the noble egotism of happiness, and they could not suffer a single pain in their radiance. Since polytheism carried away with it these young gods, these smiling geniuses, these celestial ephebes with forms of such absolute perfection, such harmonious rhythm, such pure ideal, and since ancient Greece no longer sings the hymn of beauty in stanzas of Paros, man has cruelly abused the permission given him to be ugly, and, although made in the image of God, represents him rather poorly. But
Count Labinski had not taken advantage of this license; the slightly elongated oval of his face, his thin nose, boldly and finely cut, his firmly drawn lip, accentuated by a blond mustache sharpened at its points, his raised chin struck by a dimple, his black eyes, a piquant singularity, a graceful strangeness, gave him the air of one of those warrior angels, Saint Michael or Raphael, who fight the devil, clad in golden armor. He would have been too handsome without the masculine flash of his dark eyes and the tanned layer that the Asian sun had deposited on his features. The Count was of medium height, thin, slender, sinewy, hiding muscles of steel under an apparent delicacy; and when at some embassy ball, he donned his magnate’s costume, all bedecked with gold, all studded with diamonds, all embroidered with pearls, he passed among the groups like a sparkling apparition, exciting the jealousy of men and the love of women, whom Prascovie rendered indifferent to him. We do not add that the Count possessed the gifts of the mind as well as those of the body; the benevolent fairies had gifted him in his cradle, and the wicked witch who spoils everything had shown herself in a good mood that day. You understand that with such a rival, Octave de Saville had little chance, and that he did well to let himself die peacefully on the cushions of his couch, despite the hope that the fantastic Doctor Balthazar Cherbonneau was trying to restore to his heart.—Forgetting Prascovie would have been the only way, but it was the impossible thing; to see her again, what good would it do? Octave felt that the young woman’s resolution would never weaken in its gentle implacability, in its compassionate coldness. He was afraid that his unhealed wounds would reopen and bleed in front of the one who had killed him innocently, and he did not want to accuse her, the sweet murderess he loved! Chapter 4. Two years had passed since the day when Countess Labinska had stopped on Octave’s lips the declaration of love that she was not to hear; Octave, fallen from the height of his dream, had gone away, with the beak of a black grief in his liver, and had not given Prascovia any news of him. The only word he could have written to her was the only one forbidden. But more than once the thoughts of the countess, frightened by this silence, had turned back with melancholy on her poor adorer: – had he forgotten her? In his divine absence of coquetry, she wished it without believing it, for the inextinguishable flame of passion illuminated Octave’s eyes, and the countess could not have been mistaken. Love and the gods recognize each other by the look: this idea pierced like a little cloud the limpid azure of her happiness, and inspired in her the light sadness of the angels who, in heaven, remember the earth; her charming soul suffered to know that someone there was unhappy because of her; But what can the glittering golden star do at the top of the firmament for the obscure shepherd who raises his wild arms towards it? In mythological times, Phoebe descended from the heavens in silver rays upon the sleep of Endymion; but she was not married to a Polish count. As soon as she arrived in Paris, Countess Labinska had sent Octave this banal invitation that Doctor Balthazar Cherbonneau turned absently between his fingers, and when she did not see him come, although she had wanted to, she had said to herself with an involuntary movement of joy: “He still loves me!” She was, however, a woman of angelic purity and chaste as the snow on the lowest summit of the Himalayas. But God himself, in the depths of his infinity, has nothing to distract himself from the boredom of eternity but the pleasure of hearing the heart of a poor little perishable creature beat for him on a puny globe, lost in immensity. Prascovie was no more severe than God, and Count Olaf could not have blamed this delicate voluptuousness of soul. “Your story, which I listened to attentively,” said the doctor to Octave, ” proves to me that any hope on your part would be chimerical. The Countess will never share your love. ” “You see, Monsieur Cherbonneau, that I was right not to try to hold on to my fading life. ” “I said that there was no hope with ordinary means,” continued the doctor; “but there exist occult powers that modern science ignores, and whose tradition has been preserved in these strange countries called barbarians by an ignorant civilization. There, in the early days of the world, the human race, in immediate contact with the living forces of nature, knew secrets that are believed to be lost, and that were not taken with them in their migrations by the tribes that later formed the peoples. These secrets were first transmitted from initiate to initiate, in the mysterious depths of the temples, then written in sacred idioms incomprehensible to the common people, sculpted in panels of hieroglyphs along the cryptic walls of Ellora; you will still find on the ridges of Mount Meru, from where the Ganges flows, at the foot of the white marble staircase of Benares the holy city, deep in the ruined pagodas of Ceylon, some hundred-year-old Brahmins spelling out unknown manuscripts, some yoghis busy repeating the ineffable monosyllable _om_ without noticing that the birds of the sky nest in their hair; some fakirs whose shoulders bear the scars of Jaggernat’s iron hooks, who possess these lost mysteries and obtain marvelous results when they deign to use them. Our Europe, completely absorbed by material interests, does not suspect the degree of spiritualism to which the penitents of India have arrived: absolute fasts, frightening contemplations of fixity, impossible postures maintained for entire years, attenuate their bodies so well, that you would say, seeing them crouching under a blazing sun, between burning braziers, letting their grown nails pierce the palms of their hands, Egyptian mummies removed from their cases and bent in monkey-like attitudes ; their human envelope is no more than a chrysalis, which the soul, immortal butterfly, can leave or take back at will. While their meager remains remain there, inert, horrible to behold, like a nocturnal larva surprised by the day, their spirit, free from all bonds, soars, on the wings of hallucination, to incalculable heights, into supernatural worlds. They have strange visions and dreams; they follow from ecstasy to ecstasy the undulations made by vanished ages on the ocean of eternity; they travel the infinite in all directions, witness the creation of universes, the genesis of the gods and their metamorphoses; the memory returns to them of the sciences engulfed by the Plutonian and diluvian cataclysms, of the forgotten relationships between man and the elements. In this strange state, they mumble words belonging to languages that no people have spoken for thousands of years on the face of the globe, they rediscover the primordial word, the word that brought light out of ancient darkness: they are taken for madmen; they are almost gods! This singular preamble excited Octave’s attention to the utmost , who, not knowing where M. Balthazar Cherbonneau was going with this, fixed on him astonished eyes sparkling with questions: he did not guess what connection the penitents of India could offer with his love for Countess Prascovie Labinska. The doctor, guessing Octave’s thoughts, made a sign with his hand as if to forestall his questions, and said to him: “Patience, my dear patient; you will understand presently that I am not indulging in a useless digression.—Tired of having questioned with the scalpel, on the marble of amphitheaters, corpses which did not answer me and allowed me to see only death when I was seeking life, I formed the project—a project as bold as that of Prometheus climbing the sky to steal the fire—to reach and surprise the soul, to analyze it and dissect it so to speak; I abandoned the effect for the cause, and took in profound disdain the materialist science whose nothingness was proven to me. To act on these vague forms, on these fortuitous assemblages of molecules immediately dissolved, seemed to me the function of a crude empiricism. I tried by magnetism to loosen the bonds which chain the spirit to its envelope; I had soon surpassed Mesmer, Deslon, Maxwel, Puységur, Deleuze and the most skilled, in truly prodigious experiences, but which still did not satisfy me: catalepsy, somnambulism, distant vision, ecstatic lucidity, I produced at will all these effects inexplicable to the crowd, simple and comprehensible to me. – I went back further: from the raptures of Cardan and Saint Thomas Aquinas I passed to the nervous crises of the Pythia; I discovered the arcana of the Greek Epopts and the Hebrew Nebiim; I initiated myself retrospectively into the mysteries of Trophonius and Aesculapius, always recognizing in the marvels that are recounted a concentration or an expansion of the soul provoked either by gesture, or by look, or by word, or by will or any other unknown agent.—I repeated one by one all the miracles of Apollonius of Thyane.—Yet my scientific dream was not accomplished; the soul still escaped me; I sensed it, I heard it, I had action on it; I numbed or I excited her faculties; but between her and me there was a veil of flesh that I could draw aside without her flying away; I was like the fowler who holds a bird under a net that he dares not lift, for fear of seeing his winged prey lost in the sky. “I left for India, hoping to find the answer to the riddle in this country of ancient wisdom. I learned Sanskrit and Prakrit, the learned and common idioms: I was able to converse with the pandits and the Brahmins. I crossed the jungles where the tiger crouched hoarsely on its paws; I skirted the sacred ponds scaled by the backs of crocodiles; I crossed impenetrable forests barricaded with vines, sending clouds of bats and monkeys flying, finding myself face to face with the elephant at the bend in the path cleared by wild beasts to arrive at the hut of some famous yoghi in communication with the Mounis, and I sat for days on end near him, sharing his gazelle skin, to note the vague incantations that ecstasy murmured on his black and cracked lips. In this way I grasped all-powerful words, evocative formulas, syllables of the creative Word. “I studied the symbolic sculptures in the interior chambers of the pagodas that no profane eye has seen and where a Brahmin robe allowed me to penetrate; I read many cosmogonic mysteries, many legends of vanished civilizations; I discovered the meaning of the emblems that these hybrid gods , as bushy as the nature of India, hold in their multiple hands; I meditated on the circle of Brahma, the lotus of Wishnu, the cobra capello of Shiva, the blue god. Ganesa, unfurling his pachyderm trunk and blinking his small eyes fringed with long eyelashes, seemed to smile at my efforts and encourage my research. All these monstrous figures said to me in their language of stone: “We are only forms, it is the spirit that agitates the mass.”
“A priest of the temple of Tirounamalai, to whom I shared the idea that preoccupied me, pointed out to me, as if he had reached the highest degree of sublimity, a penitent who inhabited one of the caves of the island of Elephanta. I found him, leaning against the wall of the cavern, wrapped in a piece of esparto, his knees to his chin, his fingers crossed on his legs, in a state of absolute immobility; his upturned pupils revealed only the white, his lips bridled over his loose teeth; his skin, tanned by incredible thinness, adhered to his cheekbones; his hair, swept back, hung in stiff strands like plant filaments from the brow of a rock; his beard had divided into two streams that almost touched the ground, and his nails curved into eagle talons. “The sun had dried and blackened him so as to give his Indian skin, naturally brown, the appearance of basalt; thus posed, he resembled in shape and color a canopic vase. At first sight, I thought he was dead. I shook his arms as if they were stiffened by cataleptic rigidity, I shouted in his ear in my loudest voice the sacramental words that were to reveal me to him as an initiate; he did not flinch, his eyelids remained motionless. – I was about to move away, despairing of getting anything out of him, when I heard a singular crackling; A bluish spark passed before my eyes with the dazzling rapidity of an electric light, fluttered for a second over the penitent’s half-open lips, and disappeared. “Brahma-Logum (that was the name of the holy personage) seemed to wake up from a lethargy: his eyes returned to their place; he looked at me with a human look and answered my questions. “Well, your desires are satisfied: you have seen a soul. I have succeeded in detaching mine from my body when I please; it leaves it, it returns to it like a luminous bee, perceptible only to the eyes of the adepts. I have fasted so much, prayed so much, meditated so much, I have macerated myself so rigorously, that I have been able to untie the earthly bonds which bind it, and that Wishnou, the god with ten incarnations, has revealed to me the mysterious word which guides it in his Avatars through the different forms.—If, after having made the consecrated gestures, I pronounced this word, your soul would fly away to animate the man or the beast that I would designate to it. I bequeath to you this secret, which I alone possess now in the world. I am very glad that you have come, for I long to melt into the bosom of the uncreated, like a drop of water in the sea.—And the penitent whispered to me in a voice weak as the last gasp of a dying man, and yet distinct, a few syllables which made pass over my back that little shudder of which Job speaks. —What do you mean, doctor? cried Octave; I dare not fathom the frightening depth of your thought. “I mean,” replied M. Balthazar Cherbonneau calmly, “that I have not forgotten the magic formula of my friend Brahma-Logum, and that Countess Prascovie would be very clever if she recognized the soul of Octave de Saville in the body of Olaf Labinski.” Chapter 5. The reputation of Doctor Balthazar Cherbonneau as a physician and as a miracle-worker was beginning to spread in Paris; his eccentricities, affected or real, had made him fashionable. But, far from seeking to build up, as they say, a clientele, he tried to repel patients by closing his door to them or by prescribing strange prescriptions, impossible regimens. He accepted only desperate cases, sending back to his colleagues with superb disdain the vulgar chest infections, the banal enteritis, the bourgeois typhoid fevers, and on these supreme occasions he obtained truly inconceivable cures. Standing beside the bed, he made magical gestures over a cup of water, and bodies already stiff and cold, quite ready for the coffin, after having swallowed a few drops of this beverage while loosening jaws clenched by agony, regained the suppleness of life, the colors of health, and sat up, casting around them glances already accustomed to the shadows of the tomb. Thus he was called the doctor of the dead or the resurrectionist. Even then, he did not always agree to perform these cures, and often he refused enormous sums from rich dying people. For him to decide to enter into a struggle with destruction, he had to be touched by the pain of a mother imploring the salvation of an only child, by the despair of a lover asking for the mercy of an adored mistress, or he had to judge threatened life useful to poetry, science and the progress of the human race. He thus saved a charming baby whose croup was gripping his throat with its iron fingers, a delightful young girl suffering from consumption in the last degree, a poet in the grip of delirium tremens, an inventor attacked by cerebral congestion and who was about to bury the secret of his discovery under a few shovelfuls of earth. Otherwise he said that one should not thwart nature, that certain deaths had their reason for being, and that by preventing them one risked disturbing something in the universal order. You see that Mr. Balthazar Cherbonneau was the most paradoxical doctor in the world, and that he had brought back from India a complete eccentricity; but his fame as a magnetizer still outweighed his glory as a doctor; he had given before a small number of chosen people some sessions of which marvels were recounted to disturb all notions of the possible or the impossible, and which surpassed the prodigies of Cagliostro. The doctor lived on the ground floor of an old mansion on the Rue du Regard, a row of apartments such as were made in the old days, and whose high windows opened onto a garden planted with large trees with black trunks and slender green foliage. Although it was summer, powerful radiators blew through their brass-grilled vents torrents of burning air into the vast rooms, and maintained the temperature at thirty-five or forty degrees of heat, because Mr. Balthazar Cherbonneau, accustomed to the incendiary climate of India, shivered in our pale sun, like that traveler who, returning from the sources of the Blue Nile, in central Africa, trembled with cold in the Cairo, and he never went out except in a closed carriage, swaddled in a Siberian blue fox fur coat, and his feet rested on a tin sleeve filled with boiling water. There was no other furniture in these rooms than low divans of Malabar fabrics decorated with chimerical elephants and fabulous birds , shelves cut out, colored and gilded with barbaric naivety by the natives of Ceylon, vases from Japan full of exotic flowers; and on the floor was spread, from one end of the apartment to the other, one of those funereal carpets with black and white patterns that the Thuggs weave as penance in prison, and whose weft seems made with the hemp of their stranglers’ ropes; some Hindu idols, of marble or bronze, with long almond-shaped eyes, noses encircled by rings, thick, smiling lips, pearl necklaces reaching down to the navel, and singular and mysterious attributes, crossed their legs on pedestals in the corners;—along the walls were hung gouache miniatures, the work of some painter from Calcutta or Lucknow, which represented the nine already accomplished _Avatars_ of Wishnou, as a fish, a tortoise, a pig, a lion with a human head, a Brahmin dwarf, Rama, a hero fighting the thousand-armed giant Cartasuciriargunen, as Kitsna, the miraculous child in whom dreamers see an Indian Christ; as Buddha, worshipper of the great god Mahadevi; and, finally, showed him asleep, in the middle of the milky sea, on the snake with five heads curved like a canopy, waiting for the hour to take, for its final incarnation, the form of that winged white horse which, by letting its hoof fall upon the universe, must bring about the end of the world. In the back room, heated even more strongly than the others, stood M. Balthazar Cherbonneau, surrounded by Sanskrit books traced with a punch on thin strips of wood pierced with a hole and joined by a cord so as to resemble shutters more than volumes as understood by the European bookstore. An electric machine, with its bottles filled with gold leaf and its glass discs turned by cranks, raised its disturbing and complicated silhouette in the middle of the room, beside a mesmeric tub into which a metal lance plunged and from which radiated numerous iron rods. Mr. Cherbonneau was nothing less than a charlatan and was not looking for showmanship, but nevertheless it was difficult to enter this strange retreat without experiencing a little of the impression that alchemical laboratories must once have caused . Count Olaf Labinski had heard of the miracles performed by the doctor, and his half-credulous curiosity was kindled. Slavic races have a natural inclination towards the marvelous, which the most careful education does not always correct, and besides, trustworthy witnesses who had attended these séances spoke of things that one cannot believe without having seen them, however much confidence one has in the narrator. He therefore went to visit the miracle-worker. When Count Labinski entered the home of Doctor Balthazar Cherbonneau, he felt as if surrounded by a vague flame; all his blood rushed to his head, the veins in his temples hissed; the extreme heat that reigned in the apartment suffocated him. the lamps where aromatic oils burned, the large Java flowers swinging their enormous calyxes like censers intoxicated him with their dizzying emanations and their asphyxiating perfumes. He took a few steps, staggering, towards M. Cherbonneau, who was crouching on his couch, in one of those strange poses of a fakir or sannyasi, with which Prince Soltikoff so picturesquely illustrated his journey to India. One would have said, seeing him tracing the angles of his joints under the folds of his clothes, a human spider curled up in the middle of his web and standing motionless before its prey. At the appearance of the count, his turquoise eyes lit up with phosphorescent gleams. center of their golden orbit with the bistre of hepatitis, and died out immediately as if covered by a voluntary cover. The doctor extended his hand towards Olaf, whose discomfort he understood, and in two or three passes surrounded him with an atmosphere of spring, creating a fresh paradise for him in this hell of heat. “Do you feel better now? Your lungs, accustomed to the breezes of the Baltic which arrive still cold from having rolled on the hundred-year-old snows of the pole, must be panting like forge bellows in this burning air, in which, however, I shiver, cooked, annealed and as if calcined in the furnaces of the sun.” Count Olaf Labinski made a sign to show that he was no longer suffering from the high temperature of the apartment. “Well,” said the doctor with a good-natured accent, “you have doubtless heard of my sleight of hand, and you want to have a sample of my know-how; oh! I am stronger than Comus, Comte , or Bosco. —My curiosity is not so frivolous, replied the Count, and I have more respect for one of the princes of science. —I am not a scholar in the sense given to that word; but on the contrary, by studying certain things that science disdains, I have become master of unused occult forces, and I produce effects that seem marvelous, although natural. By dint of watching it, I have sometimes surprised the soul—it has confided in me from which I have profited and said words that I have retained. The spirit is everything, matter exists only in appearance; the universe is perhaps only a dream of God or an irradiation of the Word in immensity. I crumple the rags of the body at will, I stop or hasten life, I displace the senses, I suppress space, I annihilate pain without needing chloroform, ether, or any other anesthetic drug. Armed with will, this intellectual electricity, I vivify or I strike down. Nothing is more opaque to my eyes; my gaze pierces everything; I see distinctly the rays of thought, and as one projects solar spectra onto a screen, I can make them pass through my invisible prism and force them to reflect on the white canvas of my brain. But all this is nothing compared to the wonders accomplished by certain yoghis of India, who have reached the most sublime degree of asceticism. We Europeans are too frivolous, too distracted, too futile, too in love with our clay prison to open wide windows onto eternity and infinity. However, I have obtained some rather strange results, and you will judge for yourself, said Doctor Balthazar Cherbonneau, sliding on their rod the rings of a heavy door that concealed a sort of alcove made in the back of the room. By the light of a spirit-of-wine flame that swayed on a bronze tripod, Count Olaf Labinski perceived a frightening spectacle that made him shudder despite his bravery. A black marble table supported the body of a young man, naked to the waist and maintaining a cadaverous immobility; from his torso bristling with arrows like that of Saint Sebastian, not a drop of blood flowed; one would have taken it for a colored image of a martyr, where someone had forgotten to dye the lips of the wounds with cinnabar. “This strange doctor,” said Olaf to himself, “is perhaps a worshipper of Shiva, and he will have sacrificed this victim to his idol.” “Oh! he is not suffering at all; prick him without fear, not a muscle in his face will move;” and the doctor removed the arrows from his body, as one removes pins from a pincushion. A few quick movements of the hands freed the patient from the network of effluvia that imprisoned him, and he awoke with a smile of ecstasy on his lips as if emerging from a blissful dream. M. Balthazar Cherbonneau dismissed him with a gesture, and he withdrew through a small door cut into the woodwork with which the alcove was covered. “I could have cut off a leg or an arm without him noticing, said the doctor, wrinkling his wrinkles as if to smile; I did not do it because I do not yet create, and man, inferior to the lizard in this, does not have a sap powerful enough to reform the limbs that are removed. But if I do not create, on the other hand I rejuvenate. And he removed the veil that covered an elderly woman magnetically asleep in an armchair, not far from the black marble table ; her features, which could have been beautiful, were withered, and the ravages of time were readable on the thin contours of her arms, her shoulders and her chest. The doctor fixed on her for several minutes, with stubborn intensity, the gaze of his blue pupils; the altered lines were firmed, the curve of the breast regained its virginal purity, a white and satiny flesh filled the thinness of the neck; The cheeks rounded and became velvety like peaches with all the freshness of youth; the eyes opened, sparkling in a lively fluid; the mask of old age, removed as if by magic, revealed the beautiful young woman who had long since disappeared. “Do you believe that the fountain of youth has poured its miraculous waters somewhere ?” said the doctor to the count, astonished by this transformation. “I believe so, for man invents nothing, and each of his dreams is a divination or a memory.” But let us abandon this form for a moment, recast by my will, and consult this young girl who sleeps peacefully in this corner. Question her; she knows more than the Pythias and the Sibyls. You can send her to one of your seven Bohemian castles, ask her what is hidden in the most secret of your drawers, she will tell you, for it will not take her soul more than a second to make the journey; something, after all, hardly surprising, since electricity travels seventy thousand leagues in the same space of time, and electricity is to thought what a cab is to a carriage. Give it your hand to put yourself in contact with it; you will not need to formulate your question, it will read it in your mind.” The young girl, in a dull voice like that of a shadow, answered the count’s mental interrogation: “In the cedar box there is a piece of earth sprinkled with fine sand on which can be seen the imprint of a small foot. “Did she guess correctly?” said the doctor carelessly and as if sure of the infallibility of his somnambulist. A brilliant blush covered the count’s cheeks. He had indeed, in the early days of their love, removed from a park alley the imprint of Prascovie’s footsteps, and he kept it like a relic at the bottom of a box inlaid with mother-of-pearl and silver, of the most precious workmanship, of which he wore the microscopic key suspended from his neck by a Venetian chain. M. Balthazar Cherbonneau, who was a man of good company, seeing the embarrassment of the count, did not insist and led him to a table on which was placed water as clear as diamond. “You have doubtless heard of the magic mirror in which Mephistopheles makes Faust see the image of Helen; without having a horse’s foot in my silk stocking and two cock’s feathers in my hat, I can regale you with this innocent prodigy. Bend over this cup and think fixedly of the person you wish to make appear; living or dead, distant or near, she will come at your call, from the ends of the earth or the depths of history.” The Count leaned over the cup, the water of which soon clouded under his gaze and took on opaline hues, as if a drop of essence had been poured into it; an iridescent circle of the colors of the prism crowned the edges of the vase, framing the picture which was already taking shape under the whitish cloud. The fog dissipated. —A young woman in a lace dressing gown, with sea-green eyes, frizzy golden hair, letting her beautiful hands wander like white butterflies over the ivory of the keyboard, was outlined as if under a mirror at the bottom of the water which had become transparent, with a perfection so marvelous that it would have made all painters die of despair:—it was Prascovie Labinska, who, without knowing it, obeyed the passionate evocation of the count. “And now let us pass on to something more curious,” said the doctor , taking the count’s hand and placing it on one of the iron rods of the mesmeric tub. Olaf had no sooner touched the metal charged with a dazzling magnetism than he fell as if struck by lightning. The doctor took him in his arms, lifted him like a feather, placed him on a sofa, rang, and said to the servant who appeared at the threshold of the door: “Go and fetch M. Octave de Saville.” Chapter 6. The rumble of a brougham was heard in the silent courtyard of the hotel, and almost immediately Octave appeared before the doctor; He was astonished when M. Cherbonneau showed him Count Olaf Labinski stretched out on a couch with the appearance of death. At first he thought it was an assassination and remained for a few moments speechless with horror; but, after a more attentive examination, he noticed that an almost imperceptible breathing was lowering and raising the chest of the young sleeper. “There,” said the doctor, “is your disguise all prepared; it is a little more difficult to put on than a domino rented from Babin; but Romeo, when he goes up to the balcony at Verona, is not worried about the danger of breaking his neck; he knows that Juliet is waiting for him up there in the room under her night veils; and Countess Prascovie Labinska is as good as the Capulets’ daughter. ”
Octave, troubled by the strangeness of the situation, made no reply; He was still looking at the Count, whose head, slightly thrown back , rested on a cushion, and who resembled those effigies of knights lying above their tombs in Gothic cloisters, having under their stiff necks a pillow of sculpted marble. This beautiful and noble figure whose soul he was about to dispossess inspired in him, in spite of himself, some remorse. The doctor took Octave’s reverie for hesitation: a vague smile of disdain wandered over the folds of his lips, and he said to him: “If you are not decided, I can wake the Count, who will return as he came, amazed at my magnetic power; but, think well, such an opportunity may never arise again. Yet, however much interest I have in your love, however much desire I have to make an experiment that has never been attempted in Europe, I must not hide from you that this exchange of souls has its perils. Strike your breast, question your heart. Are you honestly risking your life on this supreme card? Love is as strong as death, says the Bible. “I am ready,” replied Octave simply. “Good, young man,” cried the doctor, rubbing his dry brown hands together with extraordinary rapidity, as if he wanted to light a fire like the savages. “This passion that stops at nothing pleases me. There are only two things in the world: passion and will. If you are not happy, it will certainly not be my fault . Ah! my old Brahma-Logum, you will see from the depths of Indra’s heaven where the apsaras surround you with their voluptuous choirs, if I have forgotten the irresistible formula that you rasped in my ear as you abandoned your mummified carcass. The words and the gestures, I have remembered everything. ” To work! To work!” We are going to make a strange cuisine in our cauldron , like the witches of Macbeth, but without the ignoble sorcery of the North.—Place yourself before me, seated in this armchair; abandon yourself in all confidence to my power. Good! eyes on eyes, hands against hands.—Already the spell is working. The notions of time and space are lost, the consciousness of the self is erased, the eyelids lower; the muscles, no longer receiving orders from the brain, relax; thought drowses, all the delicate threads that hold the soul to the body are unraveled. Brahma, in the golden egg where he dreamed for ten thousand years, was no more separated from external things; let us saturate it with effluvia, bathe it in rays. The doctor, while muttering these broken sentences, did not interrupt his passes for a single instant: from his outstretched hands sprang jets of light which struck the forehead or the heart of the patient, around which a sort of visible atmosphere gradually formed , phosphorescent like a halo. “Very good!” said M. Balthazar Cherbonneau, applauding himself for his work. “Here it is as I want it. Come, come, what is still resisting there?” he cried after a pause, as if reading through Octave’s skull the last effort of the personality about to be annihilated. “What is this rebellious idea which, driven from the convolutions of the brain, tries to escape my influence by curling up on the primitive monad, on the central point of life? I will know how to catch it and subdue it.” To overcome this involuntary rebellion, the doctor recharged the magnetic battery of his gaze even more powerfully, and reached the thought in revolt between the base of the cerebellum and the insertion of the spinal cord, the most hidden sanctuary, the most mysterious tabernacle of the soul. His triumph was complete. Then he prepared himself with majestic solemnity for the unheard-of experience he was about to attempt; he dressed himself like a magician in a linen robe, he washed his hands in perfumed water, he took powders from various boxes with which he made hieratic tattoos on his cheeks and forehead ; he girded his arm with the cord of the Brahmins, read two or three Slocas from the sacred poems, and omitted none of the meticulous rites recommended by the sannyasi of the Elephanta caves. These ceremonies completed, he opened wide the heat vents, and soon the room was filled with a fiery atmosphere that would have made tigers swoon in the jungle, their mud armor crack on the rough leather of buffaloes, and the large aloe flower bloom with a bang. “These two sparks of divine fire, which will soon find themselves naked and stripped for a few seconds of their mortal envelope, must not turn pale or go out in our icy air ,” said the doctor, looking at the thermometer, which then marked 120 degrees Fahrenheit. Doctor Balthazar Cherbonneau, between these two inert bodies, looked, in his white garments, like the sacrificer of one of those bloodthirsty religions that threw human corpses on the altar of their gods. He recalled that priest of Vitziliputzili, the fierce Mexican idol mentioned by Henry Heine in one of his ballads, but his intentions were certainly more peaceful. He approached the still motionless Count Olaf Labinski and pronounced the ineffable syllable, which he quickly repeated over the soundly sleeping Octave. The ordinarily bizarre face of M. Cherbonneau had at this moment taken on a singular majesty; the greatness of the power at his disposal ennobled his disordered features, and if anyone had seen him performing these mysterious rites with priestly gravity , they would not have recognized in him the Hoffmann doctor who , in defiance, called forth the pencil of caricature. Then very strange things happened: Octave de Saville and Count Olaf Labinski appeared agitated simultaneously as if in a convulsion of agony, their faces decomposed, a slight foam rose to their lips; The pallor of death discolored their skin; however, two small, bluish, flickering lights glittered uncertainly above their heads. At a dazzling gesture from the doctor, who seemed to be tracing their path in the air, the two phosphoric points began to move, and, leaving behind them a trail of light, went to their new home: Octave’s soul occupied the body of Count Labinski, the Count’s soul that of Octave: the avatar was accomplished. A slight reddening of the cheekbones indicated that life had just entered these human clays, which had remained soulless for a few seconds, and which the Black Angel would have made its prey without the power of the doctor. The joy of triumph made Cherbonneau’s blue eyes blaze , and he said to himself as he strode about the room: “Let the most vaunted doctors do the same, they who are so proud to mend the human clock as best they can when it goes out of order: Hippocrates, Galen, Paracelsus, Van Helmont, Boerhaave, Tronchin, Hahnemann, Rasori, the least Indian fakir, crouching on the stairs of a pagoda, knows a thousand times more than you! What does the corpse matter when one commands the spirit!” At the end of his period, Doctor Balthazar Cherbonneau performed several capers of exultation, and danced like the mountains in King Solomon’s Sir-Hasirim; he even nearly fell on his nose, having caught his foot in the folds of his Brahmin robe, a small accident which brought him back to himself and restored all his composure. “Let us wake our sleepers,” said M. Cherbonneau, after wiping away the streaks of colored powder with which he had streaked his face and removing his Brahmin costume, and placing himself before the body of Count Labinski, inhabited by the soul of Octave, he made the necessary passes to draw him from his somnambulistic state, shaking with each gesture his fingers laden with the fluid he was removing. After a few minutes, Octave-Labinski (from now on we will refer to him as such for the sake of clarity ) sat up , passed his hands over his eyes, and looked around him in astonishment, which his ego-consciousness had not yet illuminated. When his clear perception of objects returned to him, the first thing he saw was his form placed outside of him on a couch. He saw himself! Not reflected in a mirror, but in reality. He gave a cry—this cry did not resonate with the timbre of his voice and caused him a sort of terror;—the exchange of souls having taken place during the magnetic sleep, he had not retained any memory of it and felt a singular uneasiness. His thoughts, served by new organs, were like a workman whose usual tools have been taken away to give him others. Psyche, disoriented, beat her restless wings against the vault of this unknown skull, and lost herself in the meanders of this brain where still remained some traces of foreign ideas. “Well,” said the doctor when he had sufficiently enjoyed Octave-Labinski’s surprise, “what do you think of your new habitation? Is your soul well installed in the body of this charming cavalier, hetmann, hospodar or magnate, husband of the most beautiful woman in the world?” You no longer want to let yourself die, as was your plan the first time I saw you in your sad apartment on the Rue Saint-Lazare, now that the doors of the Hôtel Labinski are wide open to you and you are no longer afraid that Prascovie will put her hand over your mouth, as at the Villa Salviati, when you want to talk to her about love! You see that old Balthazar Cherbonneau, with his monkey face, which it would be up to him to change for another, still has some pretty good recipes in his bag of tricks. “Doctor,” replied Octave-Labinski, “you have the power of a God, or at least of a demon. ” “Oh! oh! don’t be afraid, there is not the slightest devilry in that. Your salvation is not at risk: I am not going to make you sign a pact with a red initial. Nothing is simpler than what has just happened .” The Word that created light can indeed move a soul. If men wanted to listen to God across time and infinity, they would, by my faith, make many others. —By what gratitude, by what devotion to recognize this inestimable service? —You owe me nothing; you interested me, and for an old rascal like me, tanned by all the suns, bronzed by all events, an emotion is a rare thing. You revealed love to me, and you know that we dreamers, a little alchemist, a little magician, a little philosopher, we all seek more or less the absolute. But get up then, move, walk, and see if your new skin does not don’t bother you.” Octave-Labinski obeyed the doctor and made a few turns around the room; he was already less embarrassed; although inhabited by another soul, the count’s body retained the impulse of his old habits, and the recent guest trusted these physical memories, for it was important to him to adopt the gait, the bearing, the gesture of the evicted owner. “If I hadn’t carried out the removal of your souls myself just now , I would believe,” said Doctor Balthazar Cherbonneau, laughing, “that nothing out of the ordinary happened during this evening, and I would take you for the true, legitimate and authentic Lithuanian Count Olaf de Labinski, whose self is still slumbering over there in the chrysalis that you disdainfully left. But midnight will soon strike; leave so that Prascovie doesn’t scold you and accuse you of preferring lansquenet or baccarat to him. You must not begin your life as a husband with a quarrel, that would be a bad omen. Meanwhile, I will take care to awaken your old envelope with all the precautions and consideration it deserves.” Recognizing the accuracy of the doctor’s observations, Octave-Labinski hastened to leave. At the foot of the steps, the count’s magnificent bay horses were pawing the ground impatiently , chewing their bits, and had covered the pavement in front of them with foam. At the sound of the young man’s footsteps, a superb green hunter, of the lost breed of heydukes, rushed towards the step, which he brought down with a crash. Octave, who had at first gone mechanically towards his modest brougham, installed himself in the high and splendid coupé, and said to the hunter, who threw the word to the coachman: “To the hotel!” The door had barely closed when the horses set off , bowing, and the worthy successor of Almanzor and Azolan hung on the wide braided cords with a nimbleness that his great size would not have suggested. For horses of this gait, the distance from the Rue du Regard to the Faubourg Saint-Honoré is not long; the space was devoured in a few minutes, and the coachman shouted in his stentorian voice: “The door!” The two immense leaves, pushed by the Swiss, gave way to the carriage, which turned into a large sanded courtyard and came to a stop with remarkable precision under a canopy striped in white and pink. The courtyard, which Octave-Labinski examined with that rapidity of vision which the soul acquires on certain solemn occasions, was vast, surrounded by symmetrical buildings, lit by bronze lampposts whose gas darted its white tongues into crystal lanterns similar to those which once adorned the Bucentaure, and smelled more of the palace than of the hotel; crates of orange trees worthy of the terrace of Versailles were placed at intervals on the margin of asphalt which framed like a border the carpet of sand forming the middle. The poor transformed lover, on setting foot on the threshold, was obliged to stop for a few seconds and place his hand on his heart to suppress its beating. He had indeed the body of Count Olaf Labinski, but he possessed only the physical appearance; all the notions contained in this brain had fled with the soul of the first owner,—the house which was henceforth to be his was unknown to him, he was ignorant of its interior arrangements;—a staircase appeared before him, he followed it at all risks, unless he put his error down to a distraction. The polished stone steps burst with whiteness and brought out the opulent red of the wide strip of carpet held by gilded copper rods which traced its soft path at the foot; planters filled with the most beautiful exotic flowers climbed each step with you. An immense carved and fenestrated lantern, suspended from a thick purple silk cable decorated with tassels and knots, sent shivers of gold running over the walls covered with white stucco and polished like marble, and projected a mass of light onto a repetition of the hand of the author, of one of the most famous groups of Canova, _Cup Embracing Psyche_. The landing of the single floor was paved with mosaics of precious workmanship, and from the walls, silk ropes suspended four paintings by Paris Bordone, Bonifazzio, Palma the Elder and Paul Veronese, whose architectural and pompous style harmonized with the magnificence of the staircase. On this landing opened a high serge door decorated with gilded nails; Octave-Labinski pushed it open and found himself in a vast antechamber where some footmen in full dress were sleeping, who, at his approach, rose as if pushed by springs and ranged themselves along the walls with the impassivity of oriental slaves. He continued on his way. A white and gold drawing room, where there was no one, followed the antechamber. Octave rang a bell. A maid appeared. “Can Madame receive me? ” “Madame the Countess is undressing, but she will be visible shortly.” Chapter 7. Left alone with the body of Octave de Saville, inhabited by the soul of Count Olaf Labinski, Doctor Balthazar Cherbonneau set about restoring this inert form to ordinary life. After a few passes, Olaf de Saville (let us be permitted to combine these two names to designate a double character) emerged like a ghost from the limbo of deep sleep, or rather from the catalepsy which chained him, motionless and stiff, to the corner of the couch; he rose with an automatic movement which his will did not yet direct, and staggering under a dizziness which was barely dissipated. Objects flickered around him, the incarnations of Wishnou danced the saraband along the walls, Doctor Cherbonneau appeared to him in the form of the sannyasi of Elephanta, waving his arms like bird’s wings and rolling his blue eyes in orbs of brown wrinkles, like the rims of spectacles; the strange spectacles he had witnessed before falling into magnetic annihilation reacted on his reason, and he was only slowly returning to reality: he was like a sleeper suddenly awakened from a nightmare, who still takes for ghosts his clothes scattered on the furniture, with vague human forms, and for the flaming eyes of a cyclop the copper curtain hooks, simply illuminated by the reflection of the night-light. Little by little this phantasmagoria evaporated; everything returned to its natural aspect ; M. Balthazar Cherbonneau was no longer a penitent of India, but a simple doctor of medicine, who addressed his client with a smile of banal good nature. “Is Monsieur le Comte satisfied with the few experiments I had the honor of performing before him?” he said in a tone of obsequious humility in which one could have discerned a slight shade of irony; “I dare hope that he will not regret his evening too much and that he will leave convinced that all that is said about magnetism is not fable and juggling, as official science claims.” Olaf de Saville replied with a nod of assent, and left the apartment accompanied by Doctor Cherbonneau, who bowed to him profoundly at each door. The brougham moved forward, skimming the steps, and the soul of Countess Labinska’s husband climbed into it with the body of Octave de Saville, without really realizing that this was neither his livery nor his carriage. The coachman asked where the gentleman was going. “To my house,” replied Olaf de Saville, confusedly astonished at not recognizing the voice of the green hunter who usually addressed this question to him with a very pronounced Hungarian accent. The brougham in which he was sitting was upholstered in dark blue damask; buttercup satin padded his coupe, and the count was astonished at this difference while accepting it as one does in a dream where usual objects appear under entirely different aspects without, however, ceasing to be recognizable; he also felt smaller than usual; moreover , it seemed to him that he had come to the doctor’s in his clothes, and, without remembering having changed his clothes, he saw himself dressed in a summer coat of light material which had never been part of his wardrobe; his mind experienced an unknown discomfort, and his thoughts, so lucid in the morning, managed with difficulty. Attributing this singular state to the strange scenes of the evening, he no longer concerned himself with it, he leaned his head against the corner of the carriage, and gave himself over to a floating reverie, to a vague drowsiness which was neither waking nor sleeping. The sudden stop of the horse and the voice of the coachman shouting “The door!” brought him back to himself; he lowered the window, put his head outside and saw in the light of the street lamp an unknown street, a house which was not his own.
“Where the devil are you taking me, animal?” he cried; are we then Faubourg Saint-Honoré, Hôtel Labinski? “Pardon, sir; I didn’t understand,” grumbled the coachman, directing his beast in the indicated direction. During the journey, the transfigured count asked himself several questions which he could not answer. How had his carriage left without him, since he had given orders to be waited for? How did he himself find himself in someone else’s carriage? He supposed that a slight fever was disturbing the clarity of his perceptions, or that perhaps the miracle-working doctor, to strike his credulity more sharply, had made him inhale during his sleep some bottle of hashish or some other hallucinatory drug whose illusions a night’s rest would dispel. The carriage arrived at the Hotel Labinski; the Swiss, when questioned, refused to open the door, saying that there was no reception that evening, that monsieur had returned more than an hour earlier and madame had retired to her apartments. “Funny, are you drunk or mad?” said Olaf de Saville, pushing back the colossus that stood gigantically on the threshold of the half-open door, like one of those bronze statues which, in Arabian tales, forbid knights errant access to enchanted castles. “Drunk or mad yourself, my little sir,” replied the Swiss, who, from being naturally crimson, turned blue with anger. “Wretch!” roared Olaf de Saville, “if I did not respect myself… ” “Be silent or I will break you over my knee and throw your pieces on the pavement,” replied the giant, opening a hand wider and larger than the colossal plaster hand on display at the glover’s in the Rue Richelieu; “you must not be mean to me, my little young man, because you have drunk one or two bottles of champagne too many.” Olaf de Saville, exasperated, pushed the Swiss back so roughly that he entered the porch. Some servants who had not yet gone to bed ran up at the sound of the altercation. “I’ll drive you out, you brute beast, brigand, scoundrel! I don’t even want you to spend the night in the hotel; run away, or I’ll kill you like a mad dog. Don’t make me shed the vile blood of a lackey.” And the count, dispossessed of his body, rushed with red-shot eyes , foaming at the mouth, and clenched fists, towards the enormous Swiss, who, gathering the two hands of his assailant in one of his own, held them there almost crushed by the vice of his big, short, fleshy, and knobbly fingers like those of a medieval torturer. “Come now, calm down,” said the giant, quite good-natured at heart, who no longer feared anything from his adversary and gave him a few jerks to keep him in check. “Is there any good sense in getting into such a state when one is dressed as a man of the world, and then coming like a troublemaker to make nocturnal disturbances in respectable houses? One owes respect to wine, and it must be famous that has intoxicated you so well! That is why I will not knock you down, and I will content myself with placing you delicately in the street, where the patrol will pick you up if you continue your scandals; a little tune on the violin will refresh your ideas. “Infamous,” cried Olaf of Saville, calling out to the footmen, “you allow your master, the noble, to be insulted by this abject scoundrel Count Labinski!” At this name, the servants gave a unanimous hooting; a huge, Homeric, convulsive burst of laughter raised all those breasts bedecked with braid: “This little gentleman who thinks he is Count Labinski! Ha! ha! hi! hi! The idea is good!” An icy sweat wetted Olaf de Saville’s temples. A sharp thought pierced his brain like a blade of steel, and he felt the marrow of his bones freeze . Had Smarra placed his knee on his chest or was he living a real life? Had his reason sunk into the bottomless ocean of magnetism, or was he the plaything of some diabolical machination? None of his lackeys, so trembling, so submissive, so prostrate before him, recognized him. Had his body, his clothing and his carriage been changed? “So that you may be quite sure that you are not Count Labinski,” said one of the most insolent of the band, “look over there, there he is himself coming down the steps, attracted by the noise of your outburst.” The Swiss’s captive turned his eyes towards the back of the courtyard, and saw standing under the canopy of the marquise a young man of elegant and slender stature, with an oval face, black eyes, an aquiline nose, and a fine mustache, who was none other than himself, or his ghost modeled by the devil, with a resemblance to deceive. The Swiss released the hands he held captive. The servants ranged themselves respectfully against the wall, their gaze lowered, their hands hanging down, in absolute immobility, like the icoglans at the approach of the padischa; they rendered to this phantom the honors which they refused to the real count. Praskovya’s husband, though as intrepid as a Slav, that says it all, felt an indescribable terror at the approach of this Meneshma, who, more terrible than the one on the stage, mingled with real life and made his twin unrecognizable. An old family legend came back to him and increased his terror still further. Every time a Labinski was about to die, he was warned by the apparition of a phantom exactly like himself. Among the northern nations, seeing one’s double, even in a dream, has always been considered a fatal omen, and the intrepid warrior of the Caucasus, at the sight of this external vision of his self, was seized by an insurmountable superstitious horror; he who would have plunged his arm into the mouths of the cannons ready to fire, he recoiled from himself. Octave-Labinski advanced towards his former form, in which the soul of the Count was struggling, indignant and trembling, and said to him in a tone of haughty and icy politeness: “Sir, stop compromising yourself with these servants. Count de Labinski, if you wish to speak to him, is visible from noon to two o’clock. The Countess receives on Thursdays the persons who have had the honor of being presented to her.” This sentence, spoken slowly and giving weight to each syllable, the false Count withdrew with a calm step, and the doors closed behind him. The unconscious Olaf-de Saville was carried into the carriage. When he regained his senses, he was lying on a bed that had no shape like his own, in a room he did not remember ever entering; near him stood a strange servant who lifted his head and made him breathe a flask of ether. “Does Monsieur feel better?” asked John of the Count, whom he took for his master. “Yes,” replied Olaf of Saville; “it was only a passing weakness. “May I retire or must I watch, sir? ” “No, leave me alone; but before you retire, light the torches near the mirror. ” “Isn’t my sir afraid that this bright light will prevent him from sleeping?” “Not at all; besides, I’m not sleepy yet. ” “I won’t go to bed, and if my sir needs anything, I’ll run at the first ring of the bell,” said John, inwardly alarmed by the Count’s pallor and decomposed features. When John had retired after lighting the candles, the Count rushed towards the mirror, and, in the deep, pure crystal where trembled In the scintillation of the lights, he saw a young head, gentle and sad, with abundant black hair, dark azure eyes, pale cheeks, downy with a silky brown beard, a head that was not his own, and which from the depths of the mirror looked at him with a surprised air. He tried at first to believe that a bad joker was framing his mask in the copper and burgau inlaid border of the Venetian-beveled mirror. He put his hand behind it; he felt only the planks of the parquet; there was no one there. His hands, which he felt, were thinner, longer, more veined; on his ring finger protruded in a boss a large gold ring with an aventurine setting on which a coat of arms was engraved,—a shield banded gules and argent, and for a stamp a baron’s tortil. This ring had never belonged to the Count, who wore it in gold with a soaring sable eagle, beaked, patted, and hoofed in the same way; all surmounted by the pearl crown. He searched his pockets and found a small wallet containing visiting cards with this name: “Octave de Saville.” The laughter of the footmen at the Hôtel Labinski, the apparition of his double, the unknown physiognomy substituted for his reflection in the mirror could be, at a pinch, the illusions of a sick mind; but these different clothes, this ring that he was removing from his finger, were material, palpable proofs , testimonies impossible to challenge. A complete metamorphosis had taken place in him without his knowledge; a magician, certainly , a demon perhaps, had stolen his form, his nobility, his name, his entire personality, leaving him only his soul without the means to manifest it. The fantastical historians of Pierre Schlemil and of the Night of Saint Sylvester came back to his memory; but the characters of Lamotte-Fouqué and Hoffmann had lost, one only his shadow, the other only his reflection; and if this bizarre deprivation of a projection that everyone possesses inspired disturbing suspicions, at least no one denied that they were themselves. His position, himself, was far more disastrous: he could not claim his title of Count Labinski in the form in which he found himself imprisoned. He would pass in the eyes of everyone for an impudent impostor, or at least for a madman. Even his wife would misrecognize him dressed in this lying appearance. How could he prove his identity? Certainly, there were a thousand intimate circumstances, a thousand mysterious details unknown to anyone else, which, recalled to Prascovie, would make her recognize the soul of her husband under this disguise; But what would this isolated conviction be worth, if he obtained it, against the unanimity of opinion? He was truly and absolutely dispossessed of his self. Another anxiety: Was his transformation limited to the outward change of size and features, or did he in reality inhabit the body of another? In this case, what had been done with his own? Had a lime pit consumed him or had he become the property of a daring thief? The double glimpse at the Hôtel Labinski could be a spectre, a vision, but also a physical being, living, installed in this skin which this doctor with the face of a fakir had stolen from him with infernal skill. A dreadful idea bit at his heart with its viper’s fangs: “But this fictitious Count Labinski, molded into my form by the hands of the demon, this vampire who now inhabits my hotel, whom my servants obey against me, perhaps at this hour he places his cloven foot on the threshold of this room which I have never entered except with my heart moved as on the first evening, and Praskovya smiles sweetly at him and leans with a divine blush her charming head on this shoulder inked with the devil’s claw, taking for me this lying larva, this brucolaque, this worm, this hideous son of night and hell. If I ran to the hotel, if I set fire to it and shout, in the flames, to Praskovya: You are being deceived, it is not Olaf your beloved that you hold on your heart! You will innocently commit a abominable crime, which my despairing soul will still remember when eternity has tired its hands turning its hourglasses!’ Flaming waves rushed to the count’s brain, he uttered inarticulate cries of rage, bit his fists, turned the room like a wild beast. Madness was about to overwhelm the obscure consciousness that remained to him of himself; he ran to Octave’s toilet, filled a basin with water and plunged his head into it, which emerged steaming from this icy bath. His composure returned. He told himself that the time of magic and witchcraft was past; that death alone freed the soul from the body; that one would not thus swindle, in the middle of Paris, a Polish count accredited with several millions at Rothschild, allied to the greatest families, beloved husband of a fashionable woman, decorated with the Order of Saint Andrew, first class, and that all this was doubtless only a joke in rather bad taste of M. Balthazar Cherbonneau, which would be explained most naturally in the world, like the scarecrows in Anne Radcliffe’s novels. As he was overcome with fatigue, he threw himself on Octave’s bed and fell into a heavy, opaque sleep, similar to death, which still lasted when Jean, believing his master awake, came to place the letters and newspapers on the table. Chapter 8. The count opened his eyes, and cast an inquisitive glance around him ; he saw a comfortable, but simple bedroom; an ocellated carpet, imitating leopard skin, covered the floor; Tapestry curtains, which Jean had just half-opened, hung from the windows and hid the doors; the walls were hung with a plain green velvety paper, simulating cloth. A clock formed from a block of black marble, with a platinum dial, surmounted by the oxidized silver statuette of Diana of Gabies, reduced by Barbedienne, and accompanied by two antique cups, also in silver, decorated the white marble fireplace with bluish veins; the Venetian mirror where the Count had discovered the day before that he no longer possessed his usual face, and a portrait of an elderly woman, painted by Flandrin, doubtless that of Octave’s mother, were the only ornaments in this room, a little sad and severe; a divan, an armchair à la Voltaire placed near the fireplace, a table with drawers, covered with papers and books, composed a comfortable furnishing, but which in no way recalled the sumptuousness of the Hôtel Labinski. “Is Monsieur getting up?” said Jean in that controlled voice he had developed during Octave’s illness, and presented to the Count the colored shirt, the flannel trousers, and the Algiers gandoura, his master’s morning clothes. Although the Count was loath to put on a stranger’s clothes, unless he remained naked he had to accept those Jean presented to him, and he placed his feet on the silky black bearskin that served as a bedside rug. His toilet was soon completed, and Jean, without appearing to entertain the slightest doubt about the identity of the false Octave de Saville whom he was helping to dress, said to him: “At what time does Monsieur wish to have lunch?” “At the usual time,” replied the Count, who, in order not to experience any hindrance in the steps he intended to take to recover his personality, had resolved to accept outwardly his incomprehensible transformation. Jean withdrew, and Olaf de Saville opened the two letters which had been brought with the newspapers, hoping to find some information there; the first contained friendly reproaches, and complained of good comradely relations interrupted without reason; a name unknown to him signed it. The second was from Octave’s notary, and urged him to come and collect a quarter of the income which had long since fallen due, or at least to assign some employment to these capitals which remained unproductive. “Ah, it seems,” said the Count to himself, “that the Octave de Saville whose skin I am occupying much against my will really exists; it is not a fantastic being, a character from Achim d’Arnim or Clement Brentano: he has an apartment, friends, a notary, income to draw, everything that constitutes the civil status of a gentleman. It seems to me, however, that I am Count Olaf Labinski.” A glance at the mirror convinced him that this opinion would not be shared by anyone; in the pure light of day, in the dubious glow of the candles, the reflection was identical. Continuing the house search, he opened the drawers of the table: in one he found property titles, two notes of a thousand francs and fifty louis, which he appropriated without scruple for the needs of the campaign he was about to begin, and in the other a wallet of Russian leather closed with a secret lock. Jean entered, announcing M. Alfred Humbert, who rushed into the room with the familiarity of an old friend, without waiting for the servant to return the master’s reply. “Good morning, Octave,” said the newcomer, a handsome young man with a cordial and frank air; “what are you doing, what’s become of you, are you dead or alive? You’re nowhere to be seen; people write to you, you don’t reply.—I should sulk at you, but, by golly, I have no self-esteem in affection, and I come to shake your hand.—What the devil! You can’t let your schoolmate die of melancholy in the depths of this lugubrious apartment like Charles V’s cell in the monastery of Yuste. You think you’re ill, you’re bored, that’s all; but I’ll force you to amuse yourself, and I’ll take you by force to a joyful luncheon where Gustave Raimbaud buries his bachelor’s freedom.” As he delivered this tirade in a tone half angry, half comic, he vigorously shook the Count’s hand, which he had taken, in the English manner. “No,” replied Prascovie’s husband, entering into the spirit of his role, ” I am more unwell today than usual; I do not feel up to it; I would sadden and inconvenience you. ” “Indeed, you are very pale and you look tired; on a better occasion! I am running away, for I am three dozen green oysters and a bottle of Sauterne wine late,” said Alfred, heading for the door. “Raimbaud will be sorry not to see you.” This visit increased the Count’s sadness. ” Jean took him for his master, Alfred for his friend. One last trial was missing. ” The door opened; A lady whose headbands were interwoven with silver thread, and who bore a striking resemblance to the portrait hanging on the wall, entered the room, sat down on the sofa, and said to the Count: “How are you, my poor Octave? Jean told me that you came home late yesterday, and in a state of alarming weakness; take care of yourself, my dear son, for you know how much I love you, despite the grief caused by this inexplicable sadness, the secret of which you have never wanted to confide to me .
” “Don’t worry, Mother, it’s nothing serious,” replied Olaf de Saville; “I am much better today.” Madame de Saville, reassured, got up and left, not wanting to bother her son, whom she knew did not like to be disturbed for long in his solitude.
“Here I am definitely Octave de Saville,” cried the Count when the old lady had left; his mother recognizes me and does not guess a foreign soul under the skin of her son. I am therefore perhaps forever locked in this envelope; what a strange prison for a spirit the body of another is! It is hard, however, to renounce being Count Olaf Labinski, to lose his coat of arms, his wife, his fortune, and to see oneself reduced to a meager bourgeois existence. Oh! I will tear it, to get out of it, this skin of Nessus which clings to my self, and I will only return it in pieces to its first possessor. If I returned to the hotel! No!—I would make a useless scandal, and the Swiss would throw me out, for I no longer have any vigor in this sick man’s dressing gown; come, let us search, for I must know a little about the life of this Octave de Saville who is me now. And he tried to open the wallet. The spring, touched by chance, gave way, and the Count pulled, from the leather pockets, first several papers, blackened with a tight and fine writing, then a square of vellum;—on the square of vellum an unskillful but faithful hand had drawn, with the memory of the heart and the resemblance that great artists do not always achieve , a pencil portrait of Countess Prascovie Labinska, which it was impossible not to recognize at first glance. The Count remained stupefied by this discovery. Surprise was followed by a furious movement of jealousy; how could the portrait of the Countess be found in the secret wallet of this unknown young man, where did it come from, who had made it, who had given it? Could this Prascovie, so religiously adored, have descended from her heaven of love in a vulgar intrigue? What infernal mockery embodied him, the husband, in the body of the lover of this woman, hitherto believed so pure? After having been the husband, he was going to be the gallant! Sarcastic metamorphosis, reversal of position enough to drive him mad, he could deceive himself, be at the same time Clitandre and Georges Dandin! All these ideas buzzed tumultuously in his skull; he felt his reason about to escape, and he made, to regain a little calm, a supreme effort of will. Without listening to Jean who warned him that lunch was served, he continued with nervous trepidation the examination of the mysterious wallet. The leaves composed a sort of psychological journal, abandoned and taken up again at different times; here are some fragments, devoured by the count with anxious curiosity: “She will never love me, never, never! I read in her eyes so gentle that word so cruel, that Dante could not find a harsher one to inscribe on the bronze doors of the Dolent City: “Lose all hope.” What have I done to God to be damned alive? Tomorrow, the day after tomorrow, always, it will be the same thing! The stars can cross their orbs, the stars in conjunction form knots, nothing in my fate will change. With a word, she dispelled the dream; with a gesture, broke the wing of the chimera. The fabulous combinations of impossibilities offer me no chance; the numbers, thrown a billion times into the wheel of fortune, would not come out,—there is no winning number for me!” “Unhappy man that I am! I know that paradise is closed to me and I remain stupidly seated at the threshold, my back against the door, which must not open, and I weep in silence, without jolts, without effort, as if my eyes were springs of living water. I do not have the courage to get up and plunge into the immense desert or into the tumultuous Babel of men. ” Sometimes, when, at night, I cannot sleep, I think of Prascovia;—if I sleep, I dream of her;—oh! how beautiful she was that day, in the garden of the Villa Salviati, in Florence!—That white dress and those black ribbons,—it was charming and funereal! White for her, black for me!—Sometimes the ribbons, stirred by the breeze, formed a cross on this background of dazzling whiteness; an invisible spirit said in a low voice the death mass of my heart. “If some unheard-of catastrophe were to place on my brow the crown of emperors and caliphs, if the earth were to bleed its veins of gold for me, if the diamond mines of Golconda and Visapur were to let me rummage in their glittering matrix, if Byron’s lyre were to resonate beneath my fingers, if the most perfect masterpieces of ancient and modern art were to lend me their beauties, if I were to discover a world, well, I would not be any further ahead for that!” “What is destiny? I longed to go to Constantinople, I would not have met it; I remain in Florence, I see it and I die.” “I would have killed myself; but it breathes in this air where we live, and perhaps my avid lip will inhale—oh ineffable happiness!—a distant scent of this embalmed breath; and then they would assign to my guilty soul a planet of exile, and I would not have the chance to make myself loved by her in the other life.—To be still separated there, she in paradise, me in hell: overwhelming thought! ” “Why must I love precisely the only woman who cannot love me! Others who are said to be beautiful, who were free, smiled at me with their most tender smiles and seemed to call for a confession that did not come. Oh! how happy he is! What sublime previous life does God reward in him with the magnificent gift of this love?” … It was useless to read more. The suspicion that the count could have conceived at the sight of Prascovie’s portrait had vanished from the first lines of these sad confidences. He understood that the cherished image , begun a thousand times, had been caressed far from the model with that tireless patience of unhappy love, and that it was the Madonna of a little mystical chapel, before which hopeless adoration knelt. “But what if this Octave had made a pact with the devil to steal my body from me and surprise in my form the love of Prascovie!” The improbability, in the nineteenth century, of such a supposition, soon made him abandon it to the Count, whom it had nevertheless strangely troubled. Smiling himself at his credulity, he ate, cold, the breakfast served by Jean, dressed and asked for the carriage. When the carriage was harnessed, he had himself taken to Doctor Balthazar Cherbonneau; He crossed the rooms where the day before he had entered, still calling himself Count Olaf Labinski, and from which he had left, greeted by everyone with the name of Octave de Saville. The doctor was sitting, as usual, on the couch in the back room, holding his foot in his hand, and seemed to be deep in meditation. At the sound of the Count’s footsteps, the doctor raised his head. “Ah! it’s you, my dear Octave; I was going to call on you; but it’s a good sign when the sick man comes to see the doctor. ” “Always Octave!” said the Count, “I think I’ll go mad with rage!” Then, crossing his arms, he placed himself in front of the doctor, and, looking at him with terrible stare: “You know very well, Monsieur Balthazar Cherbonneau, that I am not Octave, but Count Olaf Labinski, since last night, right here, you stole my skin by means of your exotic sorceries.” At these words, the doctor burst into a huge burst of laughter, leaned back on his cushions, and clasped his fists to his sides to contain the convulsions of his gaiety. “Moderate, doctor, this untimely joy which you might repent. I speak seriously. ” “So much the worse, so much the worse! This proves that the anesthesia and the hypochondria for which I was treating you are turning into madness. We will have to change the regimen, that’s all. ” “I don’t know what’s the matter, devil doctor, that I don’t strangle you with my hands,” cried the count, advancing towards Cherbonneau. The doctor smiled at the count’s threat, which he touched with the end of a small steel rod. Olaf de Saville received a terrible shock and thought his arm was broken. “Oh! We have the means to restrain the sick when they rebel, he said, letting fall upon him that cold , shower-like look which tames madmen and makes lions flatten themselves on their stomachs. Go home, take a bath, this overexcitement will calm down.” Olaf de Saville, stunned by the electric shock, left Doctor Cherbonneau’s house more uncertain and more troubled than ever. He had himself taken to Passy to see Doctor B***, to consult him. “I am,” he told the famous doctor, “in the grip of a bizarre hallucination; when I look at myself in a mirror, my face does not appear with its usual features; the shape of the objects around me is changed; I recognize neither the walls nor the furniture in my room; it seems to me that I am a person other than myself. ” “Under what aspect do you see yourself?” asked the doctor; the error may come from the eyes or the brain. “I see myself with black hair, dark blue eyes, a pale face framed by a beard. —A passport description would not be more exact: you have neither intellectual hallucination nor perversion of sight. You are, in fact, as you say. —But no! I really have blond hair, black eyes, a tanned complexion and a thin Hungarian mustache. —Here, replied the doctor, a slight alteration of the intellectual faculties begins. —Yet, doctor, I am not at all mad. —No doubt. Only wise men come to me alone. A little fatigue, some excess of study or pleasure will have caused this disturbance. You are mistaken; the vision is real, the idea is chimerical: instead of being a blond who sees himself as brown, you are a brown who believes himself to be blond. —Yet I am sure of being Count Olaf de Labinski, and everyone since yesterday has been calling me Octave de Saville. —That is precisely what I was saying, replied the doctor. You are Mr. de Saville and you imagine yourself to be Count Labinski, whom I remember having seen, and who, in fact, is blond.—That explains perfectly how you find yourself another face in the mirror; this face, which is yours, does not correspond to your inner idea and surprises you.—Reflect on this, that everyone calls you Mr. de Saville and consequently does not share your belief. Come and spend a fortnight here: the baths, the rest, the walks under the large trees will dissipate this unpleasant influence. The Count bowed his head and promised to return. He no longer knew what to believe. He returned to the apartment in the Rue Saint-Lazare, and saw by chance on the table the invitation card from Countess Labinska, which Octave had shown to Mr. Cherbonneau. “With this talisman,” he cried, “tomorrow I will be able to see her!” Chapter 9. When the servants had carried the real Count Labinski to his carriage, driven from his earthly paradise by the false guardian angel standing on the threshold, the transfigured Octavian returned to the little white and gold drawing-room to await the Countess’s leisure. Leaning against the white marble of the fireplace, whose hearth was filled with flowers, he saw himself repeated in the depths of the mirror placed symmetrically on the console with ornate and gilded legs. Although he was in the secret of his metamorphosis, or, to speak more exactly, of his transposition, he had difficulty persuading himself that this image, so different from his own, was the double of his own figure, and he could not detach his eyes from this foreign phantom which had nevertheless become him. He looked at himself and saw another. Involuntarily he sought to see if Count Olaf was not leaning beside him on the mantelpiece, projecting his reflection in the mirror; but he was quite alone; Doctor Cherbonneau had done things conscientiously. After a few minutes, Octave-Labinski no longer thought of the marvelous avatar that had made his soul pass into the body of Prascovie’s husband; his thoughts took a course more in keeping with his situation. This incredible event, beyond all possibilities, and which the most chimerical hope would not have dared to dream of in its delirium, had happened! He was going to find himself in the presence of the beautiful, adored creature, and she would not reject him! The only combination that could reconcile his happiness with the immaculate virtue of the countess had been realized! Near this supreme moment, his soul experienced frightful trances and anxieties: the timidities of true love made it faint as if it still inhabited the disdained form of Octave de Saville. The entrance of the maid put an end to this tumult of thoughts that were fighting each other. As she approached he could not control a nervous start, and all his blood rushed to his heart when she said to him: “Madame la comtesse may now receive monsieur.” Octave-Labinski followed the chambermaid, for he did not know the people in the hotel, and did not want to betray his ignorance by the uncertainty of his approach. The maid showed him into a rather large room, a dressing room adorned with all the finest luxury. A series of wardrobes of precious wood, carved by Knecht and Lienhart, the doors of which were separated by twisted columns around which spiraled light twigs of convolvulus with heart-shaped leaves and bell-shaped flowers cut with infinite art, formed a kind of architectural woodwork, a portico of capricious order of rare elegance and perfect execution; in these wardrobes were packed the velvet and moire dresses, the cashmeres, the mantelets, the lace, the sable and blue fox pelisses, the hats of a thousand shapes, all the paraphernalia of the pretty woman. Opposite was the same motif repeated, with the difference that the solid panels were replaced by mirrors hinged like screens, so that one could see oneself from the front, in profile, from behind, and judge the effect of a bodice or a hairstyle. On the third side reigned a long dressing room veneered with alabaster-onyx, where silver taps discharged hot and cold water into immense Japanese bowls set with circular cutouts of the same metal; Bohemian crystal bottles, which, in the candlelight, sparkled like diamonds and rubies, contained the essences and perfumes. The walls and ceiling were padded with sea-green satin, like the interior of a jewel case. A thick Smyrna carpet, in softly matching shades , padded the floor. In the middle of the room, on a green velvet base, stood a large, oddly shaped chest, made of Khorasan steel, chiseled, nielloed , and decorated with arabesques of a complexity that would have made the ornaments of the Hall of Ambassadors at the Alhambra seem simple. Oriental art seemed to have had its last word in this marvelous work, in which the nimble fingers of the Peris must have had a hand. It was in this chest that Countess Prascovie Labinska kept her finery, jewels worthy of a queen, and which she wore only very rarely, rightly finding that they were not worth the space they occupied. She was too beautiful to need to be rich: her woman’s instinct told her so. So she only showed them the lights on solemn occasions when the hereditary splendor of the ancient house of Labinski was to appear in all its splendor. Never were diamonds less occupied. Near the window, whose ample curtains fell in powerful folds, in front of a duchess’s toilet, facing a mirror over which leaned two angels sculpted by Mademoiselle de Fauveau with that long and slender elegance which characterizes her talent, illuminated by the white light of two six-candle torches, sat Countess Prascovie Labinska, radiant with freshness and beauty. A Tunis bournous of ideal finesse, ribboned with blue and white stripes alternately opaque and transparent, enveloped her like a supple cloud; the light material had slid over the satiny fabric of the shoulders and revealed the base and fastenings of a collar which would have made the snowy neck of a swan appear gray. In the interstice of the folds bubbled the lace of a cambric peignoir, a nocturnal finery held in place by no belt; The Countess’s hair was undone and lay behind her in opulent sheets like an empress’s mantle. Certainly, the twists of flowing gold from which Venus Aphrodite expressed pearls, kneeling in her mother-of -pearl shell, when she emerged like a flower from the seas of Ionian azure, were less blond, less thick, less heavy! Mix the amber of Titian and the silver of Paul Veronese with the gold varnish of Rembrandt; make the sun shine through the topaz, and you will still not obtain the marvelous tone of this opulent hair, which seemed to send the light instead of receiving it, and which would have deserved better that of Berenice to blaze, a new constellation, among the ancient stars! Two women divided it, polished it, crimped it and arranged it in carefully massaged curls so that the contact of the pillow would not crease it. During this delicate operation, the countess made dance at the end of her foot a white velvet slipper embroidered with gold canetille, small enough to make the khanuns and odalisques of the Padischa jealous. Sometimes, throwing back the silky folds of the bournous, she uncovered her white arm, and pushed back with her hand a few stray hairs, with a movement of mischievous grace. Thus abandoned in her nonchalant pose, she recalled those slender figures of Greek toilets which adorn antique vases and of which no artist has been able to rediscover the pure and suave contour, the young and light beauty ; she was a thousand times more seductive still than in the garden of the Villa Salviati in Florence; and if Octave had not already been mad with love, he would infallibly have become so; but, fortunately, one cannot add anything to infinity. Octave-Labinski felt at this sight, as if he had seen the most terrible spectacle, his knees knocking together and giving way beneath him. His mouth went dry, and anguish gripped his throat like the hand of a Thugg; red flames swirled around his eyes. This beauty astounded him. He made an effort of courage, telling himself that these frightened and stupid manners, appropriate to a rejected lover, would be perfectly ridiculous on the part of a husband, however much he might still be in love with his wife, and he walked rather resolutely towards the countess. “Ah! it’s you, Olaf! how late you come home this evening!” said the Countess without turning around, for her head was held in place by the long braids that her women plaited, and freeing it from the folds of the bournous, she held out one of her beautiful hands. Octave-Labinski seized this hand, softer and fresher than a flower, brought it to his lips and printed a long, ardent kiss on it—his whole soul was concentrated on this small place. We do not know what delicacy of sensitivity, what instinct of divine modesty, what irrational intuition of the heart warned the Countess: but a pink cloud suddenly covered her face, her neck and her arms, which took on that tint with which the virgin snow surprises the first kiss of the sun is colored on high mountains . She shuddered and slowly freed her hand, half angry, half ashamed; Octave’s lips had made a kind of red-hot iron impression on her. However, she soon recovered and smiled at her childishness. “You are not answering me, dear Olaf; Do you know that it is more than six hours since I saw you? You neglect me, she said in a tone of reproach; in the past you would not have abandoned me like this for a whole long evening. Have you even thought of me? “Always,” replied Octave-Labinski. “Oh! no, not always; I feel when you think of me, even from a distance. This evening, for example, I was alone, sitting at my piano, playing a piece by Weber and lulling my boredom with music; your soul fluttered around me for a few minutes in the sonorous whirlwind of the notes; then it flew off I don’t know where on the last chord, and did not return. Don’t lie, I am sure of what I say.” Prascovie, in fact, was not mistaken; It was the moment when, at Doctor Balthazar Cherbonneau’s, Count Olaf Labinski leaned over the glass of magic water, evoking a beloved image with all the force of a fixed thought. From then on, the Count, submerged in the bottomless ocean of magnetic sleep, had no longer had any idea, feeling, or volition. The women, having completed the Countess’s nocturnal toilette, withdrew; Octave-Labinski remained still standing, following Prascovie with an inflamed gaze. Embarrassed and burned by this gaze, the Countess wrapped herself in her bournous like Polyhymnia in her drapery. Her head alone appeared above the white and blue folds, anxious, but charming. Although no human penetration could have guessed the mysterious displacement of souls brought about by Doctor Cherbonneau by means of the formula of the Sannyâsi Brahmah-Logum, Prascovie did not recognize, in Octave-Labinski’s eyes, the ordinary expression of Olaf’s eyes, that of a pure, calm, equal, eternal love like the love of angels;—an earthly passion inflamed that look, which troubled her and made her blush.—She did not realize what had happened , but something had happened. A thousand strange suppositions crossed her mind: was she no longer for Olaf anything but a vulgar woman, desired for her beauty like a courtesan? Had the sublime harmony of their souls been broken by some dissonance of which she was ignorant? Did Olaf love another? Had the corruptions of Paris soiled that chaste heart? She quickly asked herself these questions without being able to answer them satisfactorily, and told herself that she was mad; but, deep down, she felt that she was right. A secret terror invaded her as if she were in the presence of an unknown danger, but guessed at by that second sight of the soul, which one is always wrong not to obey. She got up, agitated and nervous, and went to the door of her bedroom. The false count accompanied her, one arm around her waist, as Othello escorts Desdemona each time she leaves Shakespeare’s play; but when she reached the threshold, she turned around, stopped for a moment, white and cold as a statue, cast a frightened glance at the young man, entered, quickly closed the door and bolted it. “Octavian’s look!” she cried, falling half-fainting onto a sofa. When she had recovered her senses, she said to herself: “But how is it that this look, whose expression I have never forgotten, sparkles tonight in Olaf’s eyes? How did I see its dark and desperate flame shining through my husband’s eyes? Is Octavian dead? Was it his soul that shone for a moment before me as if to bid me farewell before leaving this earth! Olaf! Olaf! If I have been mistaken, if I have madly yielded to vain terrors, you will forgive me; but if I had welcomed you tonight, I would have thought I was giving myself to another.” The Countess made sure that the bolt was firmly closed, lit the lamp hanging from the ceiling, curled up in her bed like a frightened child with a feeling of indefinable anguish, and did not fall asleep until morning: incoherent and bizarre dreams tormented her restless sleep. Burning eyes—Octave’s eyes—fixed themselves on her from the depths of a fog and shot jets of fire at her, while at the foot of her bed a black, wrinkled figure crouched , muttering syllables in an unknown language; Count Olaf also appeared in this absurd dream, but clothed in a form that was not his own. We will not attempt to depict Octave’s disappointment when he found himself facing a closed door and heard the inner creaking of the bolt. His supreme hope was crumbling. What! he had resorted to terrible, strange means; he had given himself over to a magician, perhaps to a demon, risking his life in this world and his soul in the next to conquer a woman who eluded him, although delivered to him defenseless by the sorceries of India. Rejected as a lover, he was still rejected as a husband; the invincible purity of Prascovia thwarted the most infernal machinations. On the
threshold of the bedroom she had appeared to him like a white angel of Swedenborg striking down the evil spirit. He could not remain all night in this ridiculous situation; he sought the count’s apartment, and at the end of a series of rooms he saw one where stood a bed with ebony columns, tapestry curtains, where among the foliage and arabesques were embroidered coats of arms. Panoplies of oriental weapons, cuirasses and knights’ helmets struck by the reflection of a lamp, cast vague gleams in the shadows; Bohemian leather embossed with gold shimmered on the walls. Three or four large carved armchairs, a sideboard decorated with figurines completed this furniture of feudal taste, which would not have been out of place in the great hall of a Gothic manor; it was not a frivolous imitation of fashion on the part of the count, but a pious memory. This room exactly reproduced the one he lived in at his mother’s, and although he had often been mocked—on this scene from the fifth act—he had always refused to change its style. Octave-Labinski, exhausted by fatigue and emotion, threw himself on the bed and fell asleep cursing Doctor Balthazar Cherbonneau. Fortunately, the day brought him more cheerful ideas; he promised himself to behave in the future in a more moderate manner, to extinguish his gaze, and to adopt the manners of a husband; Assisted by the Count’s valet, he made a serious toilet and went with a leisurely step to the dining room, where Madame la Comtesse was waiting for him for lunch. Chapter 10. Octave-Labinski descended in the footsteps of the valet, for he did not know where the dining room was in this house of which he seemed to be the master; the dining room was a vast room on the ground floor overlooking the courtyard, in a noble and severe style, which was at once of the manor and of the abbey:—woodwork of brown oak of a warm and rich tone, divided into symmetrical panels and compartments , rose to the ceiling, where projecting and carved beams formed hexagonal coffers colored in blue and decorated with light gold arabesques; In the long panels of the woodwork, Philippe Rousseau had painted the four seasons symbolized, not by mythological figures, but by still life trophies composed of productions relating to each time of the year; Jadin Hunts were a counterpart to the still lifes of Ph. Rousseau, and above each painting radiated, like a shield disc, an immense dish by Bernard Palissy or Léonard de Limoges, Japanese porcelain, majolica or Arab pottery, with a glaze iridescent by all the colors of the prism; deer massacres, aurochs horns alternated with the earthenware, and, at both ends of the room , large dressers, as high as altarpieces of Spanish churches, raised their ornate architecture and sculpted with ornaments to rival the most beautiful works of Berruguete, Cornejo Duque and Verbruggen; On their racked shelves glittered confusedly the antique silverware of the Labinski family, ewers with chimerical handles, old-fashioned salt cellars, goblets, cups, pieces of all things circumvented by bizarre German fantasy, and worthy of holding their place in the treasury of the Green Vault of Dresden. Opposite the antique silverware glittered the marvelous products of modern goldsmithery, the masterpieces of Wagner, Duponchel, Rudolphi, Froment-Meurice; silver-gilt teas with figurines by Feuchère and Vechte, nielloed trays, Champagne wine coolers with vine-leaf handles, with bacchanalia in bas-relief; warmers as elegant as tripods from Pompeii: not to mention the crystals of Bohemia, the glassware of Venice, the services in old Saxony and old Sèvres. Oak chairs upholstered in green morocco were arranged along the walls, and on the table with its feet carved like eagle talons, fell from the ceiling an even and pure light filtered by the frosted white glass filling the empty central box. A transparent garland of vines framed this milky panel with its green foliage. On the table, served in the Russian style, the fruits surrounded by a string of violets were already placed, and the dishes awaited the guests’ knives under their polished metal bells, shining like emirs’ helmets; a Moscow samovar hissed its jet of steam; two valets, in short trousers and white ties, stood motionless and silent behind the two armchairs, placed opposite from each other, like two statues of domesticity. Octave assimilated all these details with a quick glance so as not to be involuntarily preoccupied by the novelty of objects which should have been familiar to him. A light slip on the flagstones, a rustle of taffeta made him turn his head. It was Countess Prascovie Labinska who was approaching and who sat down after giving him a little friendly sign . She wore a green and white checkered silk dressing gown, trimmed with a ruffle of the same material cut into wolf teeth; her hair, gathered into thick bands at the temples, and rolled at the base of the neck in a golden twist similar to the volute of an Ionian capital, composed a hairstyle as simple as it was noble, and in which a Greek sculptor would not have wanted to change anything; Her flesh-pink complexion was a little pale from the emotion of the previous evening and the restless sleep of the night; an imperceptible pearly halo surrounded her eyes, usually so calm and pure; she looked tired and languid; but, thus softened, her beauty was all the more penetrating, she took on something human; the goddess became a woman; the angel, folding her wings, ceased to hover. More prudent this time, Octave veiled the flame of his eyes and masked his mute ecstasy with an indifferent air. The Countess stretched out her little foot, shod in a golden leather slipper , into the silky wool of the grass carpet placed under the table to neutralize the cold contact of the mosaic of white marble and Verona brocatelle that paved the dining room, made a slight movement of her shoulders as if frozen by a last shiver of fever, and, fixing her beautiful polar blue eyes on the guest whom she took to be her husband, for the day had made the presentiments, the terrors and the nocturnal ghosts vanish, she said to him in a harmonious and tender voice, full of chaste caresses, a sentence in Polish!!! With the Count she often used the dear mother tongue in moments of sweetness and intimacy, especially in the presence of the French servants, to whom this idiom was unknown. The Parisian Octave knew Latin, Italian, Spanish, a few words of English; but, like all Gallo-Romans, he was entirely ignorant of Slavic languages.—The consonant chevaux de frise which defend the rare vowels of Polish would have prevented him from approaching them even if he had wanted to try them.—In Florence, the countess had always spoken to him in French or Italian, and the thought of learning the idiom in which Mickiewicz almost equaled Byron had not occurred to her. One never thinks of everything! On hearing this sentence , a very singular phenomenon occurred in the brain of the count, inhabited by the _ego_ of Octave: the sounds foreign to the Parisian, following the folds of a Slavic ear, arrived at the usual place where Olaf’s soul received them to translate them into thoughts, and there evoked a sort of physical memory; their meaning appeared confusedly to Octave; words buried in the cerebral convolutions, deep in the secret drawers of memory, presented themselves buzzing, all ready for retort; but these vague reminiscences, not being put into communication with the mind, soon dissipated, and everything became opaque again. The poor lover’s embarrassment was dreadful; he had not thought of these complications when he gloved the skin of Count Olaf Labinski, and he understood that by stealing the form of another one exposed oneself to harsh disappointments. Prascovie, astonished by Octave’s silence, and believing that, distracted by some reverie, he had not heard her, repeated her sentence slowly and in a louder voice. If he heard the sound of the words better, the false count did not understand their meaning any more; he made desperate efforts to guess what it could be about; but for those who do not know them, the compact languages of the North have no transparency, and if a Frenchman can suspect what an Italian woman is saying, he will be as if deaf when listening to a Polish woman speak.—In spite of himself, a burning blush covered his cheeks; he bit his lips, and, to give himself some composure, furiously cut the piece placed on his plate. “One would say in truth, my dear lord,” said the countess, this time, in French, “that you do not hear me, or that you do not understand me at all… ” “Indeed,” stammered Octave-Labinski, not knowing quite what he was saying… this devil of a language is so difficult! “Difficult! Yes, perhaps for foreigners, but for one who has stammered it on his mother’s knees, it springs from the lips like the breath of life, like the very effluvium of thought. ” “Yes, no doubt, but there are moments when it seems to me that I no longer know it.
” “What are you saying, Olaf? What!” you would have forgotten it, the language of your ancestors, the language of the holy fatherland, the language which makes you recognize your brothers among men, and, she added in a lower voice, the language in which you first told me that you loved me! “The habit of using another idiom…” ventured Octave-Labinski, at a loss for reasons. “Olaf,” replied the countess in a tone of reproach, “I see that Paris has spoiled you; I was right not to want to come there. Who would have told me that when the noble Count Labinski returned to his lands, he would no longer be able to respond to the congratulations of his vassals?” Prascovia’s charming face took on a painful expression; for the first time sadness cast its shadow on that brow as pure as an angel’s; this singular forgetfulness offended her to the tenderest part of her soul, and seemed to her almost a betrayal. The rest of the luncheon passed in silence: Prascovie sulked at the one she took for the Count. Octave was in agony, for he feared other questions that he would have been forced to leave unanswered . The Countess got up and returned to her apartments. Octave, left alone, played with the handle of a knife that he wanted to plunge into his heart, for his position was intolerable: he had counted on a surprise, and now he found himself engaged in the meanderings, without issue for him, of an existence he did not know : by taking his body from Count Olaf Labinski, it would have been necessary to steal from him also his previous notions, the languages he possessed, his childhood memories, the thousand intimate details that make up the _self_ of a man, the relationships linking his existence to other existences: and for that all the knowledge of Doctor Balthazar Cherbonneau would not have been enough. What rage! to be in this paradise whose threshold he hardly dared to look at from afar; to live under the same roof as Praskovya, to see her, to speak to her, to kiss her beautiful hand with the very lips of her husband, and not to be able to deceive her celestial modesty, and to betray herself at every moment by some inexplicable stupidity! “It was written up there that Praskovya would never love me! Yet I have made the greatest sacrifice to which human pride can descend: I have renounced my _self_ and consented to enjoy in a foreign form caresses intended for another!” He had reached this point in his monologue when a groom bowed before him with all the signs of the deepest respect, asking him which horse he would ride today… Seeing that he did not reply, the groom ventured, quite frightened by such boldness, to murmur: “Vultur or Rustem? They have not been out for eight days. ” “Rustem,” replied Octave-Labinski, as he would have said Vultur, but the last name had clung to his distracted mind. He dressed himself as a horse and set off for the Bois de Boulogne, wanting to give his nervous excitement a breath of fresh air. Rustem, a magnificent beast of the Nedji breed, who carried on his chest, in an oriental velvet pouch embroidered with gold, his titles of nobility dating back to the first years of the Hegira, had no need to be excited. He seemed to understand the thoughts of the one who rode him, and as soon as he had left the pavement and taken to the earth, he set off like an arrow without Octave making him feel the spur. After two hours of a After a furious race, the rider and the beast returned to the hotel, one calmed, the other smoking and with red nostrils. The supposed count entered the countess’s house, whom he found in her drawing room, dressed in a white taffeta dress with tiered flounces down to the waist, a bow of ribbons at the corner of her ear, for it was precisely Thursday—the day she stayed at home and received his visitors. “Well,” she said to him with a gracious smile, for the sulk could not remain long on her beautiful lips, “did you catch up on your memory while running through the paths of the wood? ” “Good God, no, my dear,” replied Octave Labinski; “but I must confide in you. ” “Don’t I know all your thoughts in advance? Are we no longer transparent to each other?” “Yesterday, I went to that doctor of whom so much is spoken.” —Yes, Doctor Balthazar Cherbonneau, who spent a long time in the Indies and, it is said, learned from the Brahmins a host of secrets, each more marvelous than the last.—You even wanted to take me with you; but I am not curious,—for I know that you love me, and this knowledge is enough for me. —He performed such strange experiments before me, performed such wonders, that my mind is still troubled. This strange man, who has an irresistible power, plunged me into such a deep magnetic sleep that when I awoke I no longer found the same faculties: I had lost the memory of many things; the past floated in a confused fog: only my love for you remained intact. —You were wrong, Olaf, to submit to the influence of this doctor. God, who created the soul, has the right to touch it; but the man, in attempting it, commits an impious action, said Countess Prascovie Labinska in a grave tone. “I hope you will not return there again, and that, when I say something kind to you—in Polish—you will understand me as before. ”
Octave, during his horseback ride, had imagined this excuse of magnetism to compensate for the blunders that he could not fail to pile up in his new existence; but he was not at the end of his troubles. A servant, opening the door, announced a visitor. “Mr. Octave de Saville.” Although he must have expected this encounter one day or another, the real Octave turned pale at these simple words as if the trumpet of the last judgment had suddenly burst into his ear. He needed to summon all his courage and tell himself that he had the advantage of the situation in order not to falter; Instinctively, he dug his fingers into the back of a loveseat, and thus succeeded in maintaining his upright position with a firm and calm appearance. Count Olaf, dressed in the guise of Octave, advanced towards the Countess, whom he bowed profoundly. “Mr. Count Labinski… Mr. Octave de Saville…” said Countess Labinska, introducing the gentlemen to each other. The two men bowed coldly, throwing wild glances at each other through the marble mask of worldly politeness, which sometimes covers so many atrocious passions. “You have held a grudge against me since Florence, Mr. Octave,” said the Countess in a friendly and familiar voice, “and I was afraid of leaving Paris without seeing you.” “You were more assiduous at the Villa Salviati, and you were then among my faithful.” “Madame,” replied the false Octave in a strained tone, “I have been traveling, I have been suffering, even ill, and, upon receiving your gracious invitation, I wondered if I would profit by it, for one must not be selfish and abuse the indulgence one is willing to show to a bore. ” “Bored perhaps; boring, no,” replied the Countess; “you have always been melancholic,—but does not one of your poets say of melancholy: After idleness, it is the best of evils. ” “It is a rumor spread by happy people to avoid pitying those who suffer,” said Olaf of Saville.” The Countess cast a look of ineffable sweetness upon the Count, enclosed in the form of Octave, as if to ask his forgiveness for the love she had involuntarily inspired in him. “You think me more frivolous than I am; all true pain has my pity, and, if I cannot relieve it, I know how to sympathize with it.—I would have liked you to be happy, dear Monsieur Octave; but why did you cloister yourself in your sadness, obstinately refusing the life that came to you with its joys, its enchantments and its duties? Why did you refuse the friendship that I offered you?” These sentences, so simple and so frank, impressed the two listeners differently.—Octave heard in them the confirmation of the sentence pronounced in the Salviati garden, by that beautiful mouth that never sullied lies; Olaf drew from them one more proof of the unalterable virtue of woman, who could only succumb by a diabolical artifice. So a sudden rage seized him when he saw his ghost animated by another soul installed in his own house, and he rushed for the false count’s throat. “Thief, brigand, scoundrel, give me back my skin!” At this extraordinary action, the countess hanged herself at the bell, and some footmen carried the count away. “Poor Octavian has gone mad!” said Prascovia while Olaf was being led away, struggling in vain. “Yes,” replied the real Octavian, “mad with love! Countess, you are decidedly too beautiful!” Chapter 11. Two hours after this scene, the false count received a letter from the real one. closed with the seal of Octavian de Saville,—the unfortunate dispossessed had no other at his disposal. It had a strange effect on the usurper of Olaf Labinski’s entity to unseal a sealed missive from his coat of arms, but everything must have been strange in this abnormal position. The letter contained the following lines, written in a constrained hand and in writing that seemed counterfeit, for Olaf was not accustomed to writing with Octave’s fingers: “Read by anyone other than you, this letter would appear dated from the Little Houses, but you will understand me. An inexplicable combination of fatal circumstances, which have perhaps never occurred since the earth revolved around the sun, forces me to an action that no man has taken. I am writing to myself and putting on this address a name that is mine, a name that you have stolen from me along with my person. To what dark machinations I am the victim, into what circle of infernal illusions I have set foot, I do not know;—you know, no doubt. This secret, if you are not a coward, the barrel of my pistol or the point of my sword will demand it of you on a terrain where every man, honorable or infamous, answers the questions put to him; it is necessary that tomorrow one of us has ceased to see the light of heaven. This wide universe is now too narrow for both of us:—I will kill my body inhabited by your impostor spirit or you will kill yours, where my soul is indignant to be imprisoned.—Do not try to pass me off as mad,—I will have the courage to be reasonable, and, wherever I meet you, I will insult you with the politeness of a gentleman, with the coolness of a diplomat; Count Olaf Labinski ‘s mustache may displease Mr. Octave de Saville, and every day people step on each other’s toes as they leave the Opera, but I hope that my sentences, although obscure, will have no ambiguity for you, and that my witnesses will agree perfectly with yours regarding the time, place and conditions of the combat.” This letter threw Octave into great perplexity. He could not refuse the Count’s cartel, and yet it was repugnant to him to fight with himself, for he had retained a certain tenderness for his former envelope. The idea of being forced into this combat by some blatant outrage made him decide to accept, although, at a pinch, he could put his adversary in the straitjacket of madness and thus stop his arm, but this violent means was repugnant to his delicacy. If, carried away by an inescapable passion, he had committed a reprehensible act and hid the lover under the mask of the husband to triumph in a virtue above all seductions, he was not, however, a man without honor and without courage; this extreme decision, he had only taken after three years of struggles and suffering, at the moment when his life, consumed by love, was about to escape him. He did not know the count; he was not his friend; he owed him nothing, and he had taken advantage of the hazardous means offered to him by Doctor Balthazar Cherbonneau. Where to find witnesses? doubtless among the friends of the count; but Octave, since one day he had been living in the hotel, had not been able to make friends with them. On the mantelpiece were two rounded cups of cracked celadon, the handles of which were formed by golden dragons. One contained rings, pins, seals, and other small jewels; the other, visiting cards on which, under the crowns of dukes, marquises, and counts, in Gothic, round, and English, were inscribed by skilled engravers a host of Polish, Russian, Hungarian, German, Italian, and Spanish names , attesting to the Count’s traveling life, who had friends in every country. Octave took two at random: Count Zamoieczki and the Marquis of Sepulveda. He ordered the horses to be harnessed and had himself taken to their homes. He found them both. They did not seem surprised by the request of the man they took to be Count Olaf Labinski. Completely lacking the sensitivity of bourgeois witnesses, they did not ask if the matter could be settled and, like the perfect gentlemen that they were, maintained a tasteful silence about the reason for the quarrel. For his part, the real Count, or, if you prefer, the false Octave, was in a similar predicament; he remembered Alfred Humbert and Gustave Raimbault, at whose luncheon he had refused to attend, and he persuaded them to serve him in this encounter. The two young men expressed some astonishment at seeing their friend, who for a year had hardly left his room, and whose temper they knew to be more peaceful than combative, engage in a duel; but when he told them that it was a fight to the death for a reason that should not be revealed, they made no further objections and went to the Hôtel Labinski. The conditions were soon settled. A gold coin thrown into the air decided the weapon, the adversaries having declared that the sword or the pistol was equally suitable for them. They were to go to the Bois de Boulogne at six o’clock in the morning, to the Avenue des Poteaux, near that thatched roof supported by rustic pillars, to that treeless square where the packed sand presents an arena suitable for this sort of combat. When everything was agreed upon, it was nearly midnight, and Octave went to the door of Prascovie’s apartment. The bolt was closed as it had been the day before, and the mocking voice of the Countess threw this taunt at him through the door: “Come back when you know Polish, I am too patriotic to receive a stranger in my house.” In the morning, Doctor Cherbonneau, whom Octave had warned, arrived carrying a case of surgical instruments and a packet of bandages. They got into the carriage together. Messrs. Zamoieczki and de Sepulveda followed in their coupé. “Well, my dear Octave,” said the doctor, “so the adventure is already turning tragic?” I should have let the Count sleep in your body for a week on my couch. I prolonged the magnetic sleeps beyond this limit . But one may have studied wisdom among the Brahmins, the Pandits and the Sanniasys of India, one always forgets something, and there are imperfections in the best- laid plan. But how did Countess Prascovia welcome her lover from Florence in this disguise? “I believe,” replied Octave, “that she recognized me despite my metamorphosis, or it was her guardian angel who whispered in her ear to be wary of me; I found her as chaste, as cold, as pure as the snow of the pole. In a beloved form, her exquisite soul doubtless divined a foreign soul.—I told you that you could do nothing for me; I am even more unhappy than when you paid me your first visit. —Who could assign a limit to the faculties of the soul, said Doctor Balthazar Cherbonneau thoughtfully, especially when it is not altered by any earthly thought, soiled by any human slime, and maintains itself as it came from the hands of the Creator in the light, the contemplation of love?—Yes, you are right, it recognized you; its angelic modesty shuddered under the gaze of desire and, by instinct, veiled itself with its white wings. I pity you, my poor Octave! Your illness is indeed irremediable.—If we were in the Middle Ages, I would say to you: Enter a cloister. —I have often thought about it, replied Octave. They had arrived.—The fake Octave’s coupé was already parked at the designated spot. The wood presented at this early hour a truly picturesque aspect that fashion makes it lose during the day: it was at that point in summer when the sun has not yet had time to darken the green of the foliage; fresh, transparent tints, washed by the night dew, nuanced the clumps, and a scent of young vegetation emanated from them. The trees in this spot are particularly beautiful, either because they have encountered more favorable soil , or because they survive alone from an old plantation, their vigorous trunks, plated with moss or satiny with silver bark , cling to the ground by gnarled roots, project branches with strange bends, and could serve as models for the studies of painters and decorators who go far to seek less remarkable ones. A few birds, silenced by the sounds of the day, chirped gaily beneath the foliage; A furtive rabbit crossed the sand of the path in three bounds and ran to hide in the grass, frightened by the noise of the wheels. These poems of nature surprised in undress occupied little, as you can imagine, the two adversaries and their witnesses. The sight of Doctor Cherbonneau made an unpleasant impression on Count Olaf Labinski; but he quickly recovered. The swords were measured, the places were assigned to the combatants, who, after taking off their coats, fell on guard point to point. The witnesses shouted: “Go!” In every duel, whatever the fierceness of the adversaries, there is a moment of solemn immobility; each combatant studies his enemy in silence and makes his plan, meditating the attack and preparing for the riposte; then the swords seek each other, tease each other, feel each other out, so to speak, without leaving each other: this lasts a few seconds, which seem like minutes, hours, to the anxiety of the spectators. Here, the conditions of the duel, apparently ordinary for the spectators, were so strange for the combatants that they remained on guard longer than usual. In fact, each had his own body before him and had to drive the steel into flesh that had still belonged to him the day before. The combat was complicated by a sort of unforeseen suicide, and, although both brave, Octave and the Count felt an instinctive horror at finding themselves sword in hand facing their phantoms and ready to pounce on themselves. The impatient witnesses were about to cry out once more: “Gentlemen, but go on!” when the irons finally crumpled on their edges. A few attacks were parried nimbly on both sides. The Count, thanks to his military training, was a skilled marksman; he had spotted the breastplate of the most famous masters; but, if he still possessed the theory, he no longer had for the execution that nervous arm accustomed to cutting the cruppers of the Mourides of Schamyl; it was the weak wrist of Octave which held his sword. On the contrary, Octave, in the body of the count, found an unknown vigor, and, although less learned, he always spread from his chest the iron that sought her. In vain Olaf strove to reach his adversary and risked hazardous thrusts. Octave, colder and firmer, thwarted all feints. Anger began to seize the count, whose play became nervous and disordered. Even if it meant remaining Octave de Saville, he wanted to kill this impostor body that could deceive Prascovie, a thought that threw him into inexpressible rages. At the risk of being pierced, he tried a straight blow to reach, through his own body, the soul and life of his rival; but Octave’s sword bound itself around his with a movement so nimble, so dry, so irresistible, that the iron, torn from his fist, sprang into the air and fell a few steps further on. Olaf’s life was at Octavian’s discretion: he had only to split himself open to pierce him through and through. The count’s face tightened, not that he was afraid of death, but he thought he was going to leave his wife to this body thief, whom nothing could now unmask. Octavian, far from taking advantage of his advantage, threw down his sword, and, signaling to the witnesses not to intervene, walked towards the astonished count, whom he took by the arm and dragged into the thick of the wood. “What do you want from me?” said the count. ” Why not kill me when you can do it? Why not continue the fight, after letting me take up my sword again, if it was repugnant to you to strike an unarmed man ? You know very well that the sun must not project our two shadows together on the sand, and that the earth must absorb one of us. ” “Listen to me patiently,” replied Octavian. Your happiness is in my hands. I can always keep this body where I am staying today and which belongs to you as your legitimate property: I am pleased to recognize it now that there are no witnesses near us, and that only the birds, who will not repeat it, can hear us; if we recommence the duel, I will kill you. Count Olaf Labinski, whom I represent as badly as I can, is stronger at fencing than Octave de Saville, whose figure you now have, and whom I will be forced, with great regret, to eliminate; and this death, although not real, since my soul would survive it, would distress my mother.” The count, recognizing the truth of these observations, maintained a silence which resembled a sort of acquiescence. “Never,” continued Octave, “you will succeed, if I oppose it, in reintegrating yourself into your individuality; you see what your two attempts have led to. Further attempts would make you look like a monomaniac. No one will believe a word of your allegations, and when you claim to be Count Olaf Labinski, everyone will burst out laughing in your face, as you have already convinced yourself. You will be locked up, and you will spend the rest of your life protesting in the showers that you are indeed the husband of the beautiful Countess Prascovie Labinska. Compassionate souls will say upon hearing you: Poor Octave! You will be unrecognized like Balzac’s Chabert, who wanted to prove that he was not dead. This was so mathematically true that the dejected count let his head fall on his chest. ” Since you are for the moment Octave de Saville, you have doubtless searched his drawers, leafed through his papers; and you are not unaware that for three years he has nourished for Countess Prascovie Labinska a desperate, hopeless love, which he has tried in vain to tear from his heart and which will only go with his life, if it does not follow him to the grave. “Yes, I know,” said the Count, biting his lip. “Well, to reach her I used a horrible, frightening means, and one that only a delirious passion could risk; Doctor Cherbonneau attempted for me a work that would make the miracle workers of all countries and all centuries recoil. After plunging us both into sleep, he magnetically changed our souls. A useless miracle! I will give you back your body: Prascovia does not love me! In the form of the husband she recognized the soul of the lover; her gaze froze on the threshold of the marital chamber as in the garden of the Villa Salviati.” Such genuine grief betrayed itself in Octave’s accent that the count believed his words. “I am a lover,” added Octave, smiling, “and not a thief; and, since the only good I have desired on this earth cannot belong to me, I do not see why I should keep your titles, your castles, your lands, your money, your horses, your weapons. Come, give me your arm, let us appear reconciled, thank our witnesses, take Doctor Cherbonneau with us, and return to the magic laboratory from which we emerged transfigured; the old Brahmin will know how to undo what he has done. “Gentlemen,” said Octave, supporting for a few more minutes the role of Count Olaf Labinski, “my adversary and I have exchanged confidential explanations which make the continuation of the fight useless. Nothing clears the air between honest people like a little rubbing of iron.” Messrs. Zamoieczki and Sepulveda got back into their carriage. Alfred Humbert and Gustave Raimbaud returned to their coupé. Count Olaf Labinski, Octave de Saville and Doctor Balthazar headed at full speed towards the Rue du Regard. Chapter 12. During the journey from the Bois de Boulogne to the Rue du Regard, Octave de Saville said to Doctor Cherbonneau: “My dear doctor, I am going to put your science to the test once more : we must each reintegrate our souls into our usual home.” This should not be difficult for you; I hope that Count Labinski will not hold it against you for having made him exchange a palace for a cottage and lodge his brilliant personality for a few hours in my poor individual. You possess, moreover, a power that fears no revenge.” After making a sign of acquiescence, Doctor Balthazar Cherbonneau said: “The operation will be much simpler this time than the other; the imperceptible filaments that hold the soul to the body were recently broken in your case and have not had time to reconnect, and your will will not create the obstacle that the instinctive resistance of the magnetized person opposes to the magnetizer. Count will doubtless forgive an old scholar like me for not having been able to resist the pleasure of practicing an experiment for which one cannot find many subjects, since this attempt has only served to brilliantly confirm a virtue that pushes delicacy to the point of divination, and triumphs where all others would have succumbed. You will regard, if you wish, this passing transformation as a bizarre dream , and perhaps later you will not be sorry to have experienced this strange sensation that very few men have known, that of having inhabited two bodies. – Metempsychosis is not a new doctrine; but, before transmigrating into another existence, souls drink the cup of forgetfulness, and not everyone can , like Pythagoras, remember having been present at the Trojan War. – The benefit of re-establishing myself in my individuality, replied the Count politely, is equivalent to the inconvenience of having been expropriated from it, this being said without any ill intention towards Mr. Octave de Saville whom I still am and whom I am about to cease to be.” Octave smiled with Count Labinski’s lips at this sentence, which only reached him through an alien envelope, and silence fell between these three persons, for whom their abnormal situation made any conversation difficult. Poor Octave was thinking of his vanished hope, and his thoughts were not, it must be admitted, exactly rose-colored. Like all rejected lovers, he was still wondering why he was not loved—as if love had a why! The only reason that can be given is _because_, a logical answer in its stubborn laconicism, which women oppose to all embarrassing questions. However, he recognized himself defeated and felt that the spring of the life, restored to him for a moment by Doctor Cherbonneau, was broken again and rustled in his heart like that of a watch that has been dropped to the ground. Octave would not have wanted to cause his mother the grief of his suicide, and he was looking for a place where he could silently die of his unknown grief under the scientific name of a plausible illness. If he had been a painter, a poet, or a musician, he would have crystallized his pain into masterpieces, and Prascovia, dressed in white, crowned with stars, like Dante’s Beatrice, would have hovered over his inspiration like a luminous angel; but, as we said at the beginning of this story, although educated and distinguished, Octave was not one of those elite spirits who imprint on this world the trace of their passage. An obscurely sublime soul, he knew only how to love and how to die. The carriage entered the courtyard of the old hotel on the Rue du Regard, a courtyard with pavements set with green grass where the footsteps of visitors had made a path and where the high gray walls of the buildings flooded with cold shadows like those falling from the arcades of a cloister: Silence and Immobility watched over the threshold like two invisible statues to protect the meditation of the scholar. Octave and the Count got out, and the doctor crossed the step with a step more agile than one would have expected from his age and without leaning on the arm which the footman offered him with that politeness which the footmen of a great house affect for the weak or elderly. As soon as the double doors had closed behind them, Olaf and Octave felt themselves enveloped by this warm atmosphere which reminded the doctor of that of India and where only he could breathe easily, but which almost suffocated people who had not been roasted like him for thirty years in the tropical sun. The incarnations of Wishnou still grimaced in their frames, more bizarre in the daylight than in the light; Shiva, the blue god, sneered on his pedestal, and Dourga, biting her calloused lip with her boar’s teeth, seemed to be shaking her string of skulls. The dwelling retained its mysterious and magical impression. Doctor Balthazar Cherbonneau led his two subjects into the room where the first transformation had taken place; He turned the glass disc of the electric machine, stirred the iron rods of the mesmerist tub, opened the heat vents so as to raise the temperature rapidly, read two or three lines on papyrus so ancient that it resembled old bark ready to crumble to dust, and, when a few minutes had elapsed, he said to Octave and the Count: “Gentlemen, I am yours; do you wish us to begin?” While the doctor was engaged in these preparations, disturbing thoughts passed through the Count’s head. “When I am asleep, what will this old magician with the face of a macaque do with my soul, who could well be the devil himself? Will he restore it to my body or will he take it to hell with him? Is this exchange, which is to restore my property, only a new trap, a Machiavellian scheme for some sorcery whose purpose escapes me? Yet my position could hardly get worse. Octave owns my body, and, as he said so well this morning, by claiming it in my present form I would have myself locked up like a madman. If he had wanted to get rid of me once and for all, he had only to thrust the point of his sword; I was unarmed, at his mercy; human justice had nothing to do with it; the forms of the duel were perfectly regular and everything had happened according to custom.—Come! let us think of Prascovia, and no childish terror! Let us try the only means left to me to reconquer it! And he took, like Octave, the iron rod that Doctor Balthazar Cherbonneau offered him. Dazzled by the metal conductors excessively charged with magnetic fluid, the two young people soon fell into an annihilation so profound that it would have resembled death for all no one was warned: the doctor made the passes, performed the rites, pronounced the syllables as the first time, and soon two small sparks appeared above Octave and the count with a luminous tremor; the doctor led back to its original home the soul of Count Olaf Labinski, who followed with an eager flight the gesture of the magnetizer. During this time, the soul of Octave slowly moved away from Olaf’s body, and, instead of rejoining his own, rose, rose as if all joyful to be free, and did not seem to care about returning to its prison. The doctor felt pity for this Psyche who was fluttering her wings, and wondered if it was a benefit to bring her back to this valley of misery. During this minute of hesitation, the soul was still rising. Remembering his role, M. Cherbonneau repeated the irresistible monosyllable in the most imperious tone and made a dazzling pass of will; the small flickering light was already outside the circle of attraction, and, crossing the upper pane of the window, it disappeared. The doctor ceased the efforts he knew were superfluous and woke the count, who, seeing himself in a mirror with his usual features, gave a cry of joy, cast a glance at the still motionless body of Octave as if to prove to himself that he was indeed definitively rid of this envelope, and rushed outside, after waving his hand to M. Balthazar Cherbonneau. A few moments later, the dull rumble of a carriage under the vault was heard, and Doctor Balthazar Cherbonneau remained alone face to face with the corpse of Octave de Saville. “By the trunk of Ganesa! cried the pupil of the Brahmin of Elephanta when the count had left, this is a troublesome matter; I opened the door of the cage, the bird flew away, and now it is already outside the sphere of this world, so far away that the sannyasi Brahma-Logum himself would not catch it; I am left with a body on my hands. I could dissolve it in a corrosive bath so energetic that not an appreciable atom would remain, or make of it in a few hours a mummy of a Pharaoh like those contained in these boxes covered with hieroglyphics; but they would begin investigations, they would search my home, they would open my coffers, they would subject me to all sorts of tiresome interrogations…’ Here, a brilliant idea crossed the doctor’s mind; he seized a pen and quickly drew a few lines on a sheet of paper which he kept in the drawer of his table. The paper contained these words: “Having neither parents nor collaterals, I bequeath all my property to M. Octave de Saville, for whom I have a particular affection, – on condition of paying a legacy of one hundred thousand francs to the Brahmin hospital of Ceylon, for old, tired or sick animals, of paying twelve hundred francs of life annuity to my Indian servant and my English servant, and of giving to the Mazarine library the manuscript of the laws of Manu.” This will made to a dead person by a living person is not one of the least bizarre things in this improbable and yet real tale; but this singularity will be explained immediately. The doctor touched the body of Octave de Saville, which the warmth of life had not yet abandoned, looked in the mirror at his wrinkled, tanned and rough face like shagreen, with a singularly disdainful air, and making over it the gesture with which one throws off an old coat when the tailor brings you a new one, he murmured the formula of the sannyasi Brahma-Logum. Immediately the body of Doctor Balthazar Cherbonneau rolled as if struck by lightning on the carpet, and that of Octave de Saville stood up strong, alert and lively. Octave-Cherbonneau stood for a few minutes before this thin, bony and livid remains which, no longer supported by the powerful soul which had just vivified it, almost immediately showed signs of the most extreme senility, and quickly took on a cadaverous appearance. “Farewell, poor human scrap, miserable rag pierced at the elbow, worn on all seams, that I dragged for seventy years in the five corners of the world! You have done me a fairly good service, and I do not leave you without some regret. We both get used to living so long together! But with this young envelope, which my science will soon have made robust, I will be able to study, work, read a few more words of the great book, without death closing it at the most interesting paragraph by saying: “That is enough!” This funeral oration addressed to himself, Octave-Cherbonneau left with a calm step to go and take possession of his new existence. Count Olaf Labinski had returned to his hotel and had asked immediately if the Countess could receive him. He found her sitting on a moss bench, in the greenhouse, whose half-raised crystal panels let in a warm and luminous air, in the middle of a veritable virgin forest of exotic and tropical plants; She was reading Novalis, one of the most subtle, rarefied, and immaterial authors that German spiritualism had produced; the Countess did not like books that painted life with real and strong colors, and life seemed a little coarse to her, having lived so long in a world of elegance, love, and poetry. She threw down her book and slowly raised her eyes to the Count. She feared to meet again in her husband’s black eyes that ardent, stormy look, laden with mysterious thoughts, which had so painfully troubled her and which seemed to her—mad apprehension, extravagant idea—the look of another! In Olaf’s eyes shone a serene joy, burned with an even fire a chaste and pure love; the foreign soul that had changed the expression of her features had flown away forever: Prascovie at once recognized her adored Olaf, and a quick flush of pleasure tinged her transparent cheeks. Although she was unaware of the transformations wrought by Doctor Cherbonneau, her sensitive delicacy had sensed all these changes without her realizing them . “What were you reading there, dear Prascovie?” said Olaf, picking up the book bound in blue morocco from the moss. “Ah! the history of Henry of Ofterdingen—it is the same volume that I went to fetch for you at Mohilev—one day when you had expressed at table the desire to have it. At midnight it was on your occasional table, beside your lamp; but Ralph was also left breathless! —And I told you that I would never again show the least whimsy before you.” You are of the character of that grandee of Spain who begged his mistress not to look at the stars, since he could not give them to her. “If you looked at one,” replied the Count, “I would try to climb to heaven and go and ask God for it.” While listening to her husband, the Countess pushed back a rebellious lock of hair from her headbands which glittered like a flame in a ray of gold. This movement had caused her sleeve to slide down and exposed her beautiful arm, which was encircled at the wrist by the lizard studded with turquoises which she wore on the day of that apparition at the Cascines, so fatal for Octave. “What fear,” said the Count, “did that poor little lizard cause you long ago, which I killed with a blow of a cane when, for the first time, you came down to the garden at my earnest entreaties! I had it cast in gold and adorned with a few stones; but, even as a jewel, it still seemed frightening to you, and it was only after a certain time that you decided to wear it. —Oh! I am quite used to it now, and it is of my jewels the one I prefer, for it brings back a very dear memory. —Yes, continued the count; that day, we agreed that, the next day, I would have you officially propose to your aunt. The countess, who found the look, the accent of the real Olaf, stood up, reassured moreover by these intimate details, smiled at him, took his arm and walked with him a few turns in the greenhouse, tearing at the As she passed, with her free hand, she bit the petals with her fresh lips, like that Venus of Schiavona who eats roses. “Since you have such a good memory today,” she said, throwing away the flower she was cutting with her pearl teeth, “you must have regained the use of your mother tongue… which you no longer knew yesterday. ” “Oh!” replied the Count in Polish, “it is the one my soul will speak in heaven to tell you that I love you, if souls in paradise retain a human language.” Prascovia, as she walked, gently inclined her head on Olaf’s shoulder . “Dear heart,” she murmured, “here you are as I love you. Yesterday you frightened me, and I fled from you like a stranger.” The next day, Octave de Saville, animated by the spirit of the old doctor, received a black-edged letter, which asked him to attend the service, procession and burial of M. Balthazar Cherbonneau. The doctor, dressed in his new appearance, followed his old remains to the cemetery, saw himself buried, listened with a well-acted air of compunction to the speeches that were delivered over his grave, and in which they deplored the irreparable loss that science had just suffered ; then he returned to the rue Saint-Lazare, and awaited the opening of the will that he had written in his favor. That day, the evening papers read in the _miscellaneous facts_: “Mr. Doctor Balthazar Cherbonneau, known for his long stay in the Indies, his philological knowledge and his marvelous cures, was found dead yesterday in his study. A careful examination of the body completely rules out the idea of a crime. M. Cherbonneau has doubtless succumbed to excessive intellectual fatigue or perished in some daring experiment. It is said that a holographic will discovered in the doctor’s office bequeaths to the Mazarine library extremely precious manuscripts, and names as his heir a young man belonging to a distinguished family, MO de S. JETTATURA Chapter 13. The Leopold, a superb Tuscan steamer which makes the journey from Marseilles to Naples, had just rounded the tip of Procida. The passengers were all on deck, cured of seasickness by the sight of land, more effective than Maltese sweets and other remedies used in such cases. On the deck, in the enclosure reserved for the first places, stood some Englishmen trying to separate themselves from each other as much as possible and to draw around them an impassable circle of demarcation; Their splenetic faces were carefully shaven, their cravats were not creased, their stiff, white shirt collars resembled Bristol paper corners; fresh suede gloves covered their hands, and Lord Elliot’s nail polish shimmered on their new shoes. One would have said that they had just come out of one of the compartments of their necessaries; in their correct attire, none of the minor toilet disorders, the ordinary consequence of travel. There were lords there, members of the House of Commons, merchants from the City, tailors from Regent’s Street and cutlers from Sheffield, all proper, all grave, all motionless, all bored. There was no lack of women either, for English women are not sedentary like the women of other countries, and take advantage of the slightest pretext to leave their island. Near the ladies and mistresses, beauties in their autumn, streaked with the colors of rosacea, radiated, under their veils of blue gauze, young misses with complexions kneaded with cream and strawberries, with brilliant spirals of blond hair, with long, white teeth recalling the types favored by keepsakes, and justifying the engravings from across the Channel from the reproach of lying that is often addressed to them. These charming people modulated, each on their own, with the most delicious British accent, the sacramental phrase: “_Vedi Napoli e poi mori_,” consulted their Travel Guide or took note of their impressions in their notebooks, without paying the slightest attention to the Don Juan-like glances of some Parisian fops who prowled around them, while the irritated mothers murmured in low voices against French impropriety. On the edge of the aristocratic quarter, three or four young people were walking, smoking cigars, whom, by their straw or gray felt hats, their overcoats studded with large horn buttons , and their wide-legged ticking trousers, it was easy to recognize as artists, an indication confirmed, moreover, by their Van Dyck mustaches, their hair curled like Rubens or cut in a Paul Veronese brush; they were trying, but with a completely different aim from the dandies, to capture some profiles of these beauties whom their lack of fortune prevented them from approaching more closely, and this preoccupation distracted them a little from the magnificent panorama spread out before their eyes. At the head of the ship, leaning on the rail or sitting on bundles of coiled ropes, were grouped the poor people of the third places, finishing the provisions that nausea had made them keep intact, and not having a glance for the most admirable spectacle in the world, for the feeling for nature is the privilege of cultivated minds, which the material necessities of life do not entirely absorb. The weather was fine; the blue waves unrolled in broad folds, barely having the strength to erase the wake of the ship; the smoke from the pipe, which formed the clouds of this splendid sky, slowly disappeared in light flakes of cotton wool, and the paddles of the wheels, struggling in a diamond dust where the sun suspended irises, stirred the water with joyful activity, as if they were aware of the proximity of the port. This long line of hills which, from Pausilippe to Vesuvius, outlines the marvelous gulf at the bottom of which Naples rests like a sea nymph drying herself on the shore after bathing, was beginning to pronounce its violet undulations, and stood out in firmer lines from the dazzling azure of the sky; already a few points of whiteness, punctuating the darker background of the land, betrayed the presence of the villas spread across the countryside. The sails of fishing boats returning to port glided across the plain blue like swan feathers carried by the breeze, and showed human activity on the majestic solitude of the sea. After a few turns of the wheel, the castle of Saint Elmo and the convent of Saint Martin stood out distinctly on the summit of the mountain against which Naples leans, above the domes of the churches, the terraces of the hotels, the roofs of the houses, the facades of the palaces, and the verdure of the gardens still vaguely outlined in a luminous vapor. Soon the castle of the Egg, crouching on its foam-washed reef, seemed to advance towards the steamer, and the pier with its lighthouse stretched out like an arm holding a torch. At the far end of the bay, Vesuvius, nearer, changed the bluish tints with which distance had clothed it for more vigorous and solid tones; its sides were furrowed with ravines and flows of cooled lava, and from its truncated cone, like the holes in a casserole dish, very visibly issued small jets of white smoke which a breath of wind made tremble. One could clearly see Chiatamone, Pizzo Falcone, the quay of Santa Lucia, lined with hotels, the Palazzo Reale with its rows of balconies, the Palazzo Nuovo flanked by its moucharaby towers, the Arsenal, and the ships of all nations, intermingling their masts and spars like the trees of a leafless forest, when a passenger came out of his cabin who had not been seen during the whole crossing, either because seasickness had kept him in his frame, or because through savagery he had not wanted to mingle with the rest of the passengers, or because this spectacle, new to most of them, had long been familiar to him and no longer offered him any interest. He was a young man of twenty-six to twenty-eight years of age, or at least to which one was tempted to attribute this age at first glance, because when one looked at him attentively one found him either younger or older, so much did his enigmatic physiognomy mix freshness and fatigue. His dark blond hair drew on that shade that the English call _auburn_, and burned in the sun with coppery and metallic reflections , while in the shadow they appeared almost black; his profile offered purely pronounced lines, a forehead whose protuberances a phrenologist would have admired, a nose of a noble aquiline curve, well-cut lips, and a chin whose powerful roundness made one think of antique medals; and yet all these features, beautiful in themselves, did not compose a pleasing whole. They lacked that mysterious harmony which softens the contours and blends them into one another. Legend tells of an Italian painter who, wishing to represent the rebellious archangel, composed for him a mask of disparate beauties, and thus achieved an effect of terror far greater than by means of horns, circumflex eyebrows, and a rictus mouth. The stranger’s face produced an impression of this kind. His eyes especially were extraordinary; the black eyelashes that bordered them contrasted with the pale gray color of the pupils and the burnt chestnut tone of the hair. The thinness of the nasal bones made them appear closer together than the measurements of drawing principles allow, and, as for their expression, it was truly indefinable. When they stopped on nothing, a vague melancholy, a languid tenderness was painted there in a damp glow; if they fixed on some person or some object, the eyebrows drew together, tensed, and modeled a perpendicular wrinkle in the skin of the forehead: the pupils, from gray, became green, became spotted with black dots, and streaked with yellow fibrils; the look sprang from them sharp, almost wounding; then everything resumed its original placidity, and the personage with its Mephistophelean appearance became again a young man of the world—a member of the Jockey Club, if you will—going to spend the season in Naples, and satisfied to set foot on a pavement of lava less shifting than the deck of the Leopold. His attire was elegant without attracting the eye by any conspicuous detail: a dark blue frock coat, a black polka-dotted cravat whose knot was neither pretentious nor careless either, a waistcoat of the same design as the cravat, light gray trousers, falling over a fine boot, composed his attire; the chain that held his watch was of plain gold, and a cord of flat silk suspended his pince-nez; his well-gloved hand shook a small, thin cane made of twisted vine stock ending in a silver shield. He took a few steps on the bridge, letting his gaze wander vaguely towards the approaching bank, on which one could see the carriages rolling by, the swarming population, and those groups of idlers stationed for whom the arrival of a stagecoach or a steamboat is always an interesting and always new spectacle, even though they have seen it a thousand times. Already a squadron of canoes and rowboats was leaving the quay , preparing to assault the Leopold, loaded with a crew of hotel waiters, local servants, facchini, and other assorted scoundrels accustomed to considering foreigners as prey; Each boat rowed hard to arrive first, and the sailors exchanged, as was customary, insults and vociferations capable of frightening people unfamiliar with the customs of the Neapolitan lower class. The young man with auburn hair had, to better grasp the details of the view unfolding before him, placed his double eyeglass on his nose; but his attention, diverted from the sublime spectacle of the bay by the chorus of shouts rising from the flotilla, concentrated on the boats; no doubt the noise bothered him, for his eyebrows contracted, the wrinkle on his forehead hollowed out, and the gray of his eyes took on a yellow tint. An unexpected wave, coming from the open sea and running over the sea, fringed with a fringe of foam, passed under the steamboat, which it lifted and let fall heavily, broke on the quay in millions of spangles, wet the walkers who were quite surprised by this sudden shower , and made, by the violence of its undertow, the boats collide so roughly that three or four facchini fell into the water. The accident was not serious, for these rogues all swim like fish or sea gods, and a few seconds later they reappeared, their hair stuck to their temples, spitting bitter water from their mouths and nostrils, and as astonished, no doubt, by this plunge, as Telemachus, son of Ulysses, must have been when Minerva, in the guise of the wise Mentor, threw him from the top of a rock into the sea to tear him away from the love of Eucharis. Behind the strange traveler, at a respectful distance, stood, near a pile of trunks, a little bellboy, a sort of old man of fifteen, a gnome in livery, resembling those dwarves that Chinese patience raises in vases to prevent them from growing; his flat face, where the nose barely protruded, seemed to have been compressed since childhood, and his eyes, set on the head, had that softness that certain naturalists find in those of the toad. No hump rounded his shoulders nor bulged his chest; yet he gave rise to the idea of a hunchback, although one had looked in vain for his hump. In short, he was a very suitable groom, who could have presented himself without training at the Ascott races or the Chantilly races; any gentleman-rider would have accepted him on account of his poor appearance. He was unpleasant, but irreproachable in his way, like his master. They disembarked; the porters, after an exchange of more than Homeric insults, divided the strangers and the baggage, and took the road to the various hotels with which Naples is abundantly provided. The traveler with the eyeglass and his groom headed for the Hotel de Rome, followed by a large phalanx of sturdy facchini who pretended to sweat and pant under the weight of a hatbox or a light box, in the naive hope of a larger tip, while four or five of their comrades, displaying muscles as powerful as those of the Hercules admired at the Studj, pushed a handcart in which two trunks of moderate size and moderate weight were tossed. When they arrived at the gates of the hotel and the _padron di casa_ had indicated to the newcomer the apartment he was to occupy, the porters, although they had received about three times the price of their fare, gave themselves over to frantic gesticulations and speeches in which supplicatory formulas were mingled with threats in the most comical proportions; They all spoke at once with frightening volubility, demanding extra pay, and swearing by their gods that they had not been sufficiently rewarded for their fatigue. Paddy, left alone to stand up to them, for his master, without worrying about this uproar, had already climbed the stairs, resembled a monkey surrounded by a pack of mastiffs: to calm this hurricane of noise, he tried a short speech in his mother tongue, that is to say, in English. The speech met with little success. Then, closing his fists and bringing his arms up to the height of his chest, he took a very correct boxing pose to the great hilarity of the facchini, and with a straight blow worthy of Adams or Tom Cribbs and delivered to the pit of the stomach, he sent the giant of the gang rolling all fours in the air on the lava slabs of the pavement. This exploit put the troop to flight; the colossus got up heavily, all broken from his fall; and without seeking revenge on Paddy, he went off rubbing with his hand, with great contortions, the bluish imprint which was beginning to iridescent on his skin, convinced that a demon must be hidden under the jacket of this macaque, good at most for riding on the back of a dog, and that he would have believed he could knock it over with a breath. The stranger, having called the _padron di casa_, asked him if a letter addressed to M. Paul d’Aspremont had not been delivered to the Hôtel de Rome; the innkeeper replied that a letter bearing this address had indeed been waiting for a week in the correspondence compartment, and he hastened to fetch it. The letter, enclosed in a thick envelope of azure cream-lead laid paper, sealed with an aventurine wax seal, was written in that sloping character with angular strokes and cursive flourishes, which denotes a high aristocratic education, and which is possessed, perhaps a little too uniformly, by young English women of good family. Here is what was contained in this letter, opened by M. d’Aspremont with a haste that was perhaps not only motivated by curiosity: “My dear Monsieur Paul, “We arrived in Naples two months ago. During the journey, made in short days, my uncle complained bitterly of the heat, the mosquitoes, the wine, the butter, the beds; he swore that one must be truly mad to leave a comfortable cottage, a few miles from London, and walk along dusty roads lined with detestable inns, where honest English dogs would not spend a night; but growling, he accompanied me, and I would have taken him to the ends of the earth; he is no worse off and I am better off.—We are installed on the seashore, in a whitewashed house and buried in a sort of virgin forest of orange trees, lemon trees, myrtles, oleanders and other exotic vegetation.—From the top of the terrace one enjoys a marvelous view, and you will find there every evening a cup of tea or a snow lemonade, whichever you prefer. My uncle, whom you have fascinated, I know not how, will be delighted to shake your hand. Is it necessary to add that your maid will not be sorry either, although you cut off her fingers with your ring, while bidding her farewell on the pier at Folkestone. «ALICIA W.» Chapter 14. Paul d’Aspremont, after having dinner served in his room, asked for a carriage. There are always some parked around the grand hotels, just waiting for the whim of travelers; Paul’s wish was therefore immediately fulfilled. The Neapolitan hired horses are so thin as to make Rocinante appear overweight; their gaunt heads, their ribs visible like barrel hoops, their protruding spines always flayed, seem to implore the knacker’s knife as a blessing, for giving food to animals is considered a superfluous care by southern carelessness ; the harnesses, broken most of the time, have extra rope, and when the coachman has gathered his reins and clicked his tongue to decide to leave, one would think that the horses would vanish and the carriage would dissipate in smoke like Cinderella’s carriage when it returns from the ball after midnight, despite the fairy’s order. However, this is not the case; the nags stiffen on their legs and, after a few staggers, take up a gallop from which they never leave: the coachman communicates his ardor to them, and the lash of his whip knows how to make the last spark of life hidden in these carcasses spring forth. It paws the ground, shakes its head, gives itself a frisky air , widens its eyes, widens its nostrils, and maintains a pace that the fastest English trotters would not equal. How does this phenomenon occur, and what power makes dead animals run belly to the ground? That is something we will not explain. The fact remains that this miracle takes place daily in Naples and no one shows any surprise. Mr. Paul d’Aspremont’s carriage flew through the dense crowd, skimming past the acquajoli shops with their garlands of lemons, the open-air fry-food or macaroni kitchens, the seafood stalls and the piles of watermelons placed on the public highway. like cannonballs in artillery parks. Hardly the lazzaroni lying along the walls, wrapped in their pea coats, deigned to remove their legs to hide them from the reach of the teams; from time to time, a corricolo, spinning between its large scarlet wheels, passed crowded with a world of monks, wet nurses, facchini and urchins, beside the carriage whose axle it brushed against in a cloud of dust and noise. Corricoli are now banned, and it is forbidden to create new ones; but one can add a new body to old wheels, or new wheels to an old body; an ingenious means which allows these strange vehicles to last a long time to the great satisfaction of lovers of local color . Our traveler paid only very distracted attention to this lively and picturesque spectacle, which would certainly have absorbed a tourist who had not found a note addressed to him at the Hotel de Rome, signed ALICIA W. He looked vaguely at the clear, blue sea, where, in a brilliant light, and nuanced in the distance with shades of amethyst and sapphire, the beautiful islands scattered in a fan shape at the entrance to the gulf, Capri, Ischia, Nisida, Procida, whose harmonious names resonate like Greek dactyls, could be seen, but his soul was not there; it was flying swiftly towards Sorrento, towards the little white house buried in the greenery of which Alicia’s letter spoke. At this moment, M. d’Aspremont’s face did not have that indefinably unpleasant expression which characterized it when an inner joy did not harmonize its disparate perfections: it was truly beautiful and sympathetic, to use a word dear to the Italians; the arch of his eyebrows was relaxed; the corners of his mouth did not lower disdainfully, and a tender gleam illuminated his calm eyes: one would have perfectly understood, seeing him then, the feelings which the half-tender, half-mocking phrases written on the cream-lead paper seemed to indicate about him . His originality, sustained by a great deal of distinction, could not have displeased a young miss, freely brought up in the English manner by a very indulgent old uncle. At the rate at which the coachman pushed his animals, they would soon have passed Chiaja, the Marinella, and the carriage rolled into the countryside on this road now replaced by a railway. A black dust, like crushed coal, gives a plutonic appearance to this whole beach, covered by a sparkling sky and lapped by a sea of the sweetest azure; it is the soot of Vesuvius, sifted by the wind, which sprinkles this shore, and makes the houses of Portici and Torre del Greco look like Birmingham factories. M. d’Aspremont paid no attention to the contrast between the ebony earth and the sapphire sky; he was eager to arrive. The most beautiful roads are long when Miss Alicia is waiting for you at the end, and when you said goodbye to her six months ago on the pier at Folkestone: the sky and the sea of Naples lose their magic. The carriage left the road, took a side road, and stopped in front of a gate formed of two pillars of whitewashed brick, surmounted by urns of red earth, where aloes spread their leaves like blades of white iron and pointed like daggers. A green-painted skylight served as a closure. The wall was replaced by a hedge of cacti, whose shoots formed misshapen bends and inextricably intertwined their thorny rackets. Above the hedge, three or four enormous fig trees spread out in compact masses their broad, metallic-green leaves with the vigor of a completely African vegetation; a large umbrella pine swayed its umbel, and it was hardly possible, through the interstices of these luxuriant foliage, for the eye to discern the facade of the house shining in white patches behind this dense curtain. A dark-skinned servant girl, with frizzy hair so thick that a comb would have broken on it, ran up at the sound of the carriage, opened the skylight, and, preceding M. d’Aspremont down an avenue of oleanders whose branches caressed his cheek with their flowers, she led him to the terrace where Miss Alicia Ward was taking tea with her uncle.
By a whim very suitable for a young girl blasé about all comforts and elegances, and perhaps also to spite her uncle, whose bourgeois tastes she mocked, Miss Alicia had chosen, in preference to civilized lodgings, this villa, whose owners were traveling, and which had remained several years without inhabitants. She found in this abandoned garden, almost returned to a state of nature, a wild poetry that pleased her; in the active climate of Naples, everything had grown with prodigious activity. Orange trees, myrtles, pomegranates, lemon trees, had given themselves over to their heart’s content, and the branches, no longer having to fear the pruner’s pruning hook, joined hands from one end of the path to the other, or entered familiarly into the rooms through some broken window. It was not , as in the North, the sadness of a deserted house, but the mad gaiety and happy petulance of the nature of the South left to itself; in the absence of the master, the exuberant plants gave themselves the pleasure of a riot of leaves, flowers, fruits and perfumes; they took back the place that man disputes with them. When the Commodore—as Alicia familiarly called her uncle—saw this impenetrable thicket, through which one could only have advanced with the aid of a felling sabre, as in the American forests, he cried out and claimed that his niece was decidedly mad. But Alicia gravely promised to have a passage made from the front door to the drawing-room and from the drawing-room to the terrace, large enough for a cask of Malvasia—the only concession she could grant to avuncular positivism. The Commodore resigned himself, for he did not know how to resist his niece, and at that moment, sitting opposite her on the terrace, he was drinking, under the pretext of tea, a large cup of rum. This terrace, which had mainly seduced the young miss, was indeed very picturesque, and deserves a special description, because Paul d’Aspremont will often return to it, and it is necessary to paint the setting of the scenes that are recounted. One climbed to this terrace, whose sheer sides dominated a sunken path, by a staircase of large disjointed slabs where wild perennials flourished. Four rough columns, taken from some ancient ruin and whose lost capitals had been replaced by stone cubes, supported a trellis of entwined poles capped with vines. From the railings fell in sheets and garlands the lambrequins and wall plants. At the foot of the walls, the Indian fig tree, the aloe, the strawberry tree grew in charming disorder, and beyond a wood overhanging by a palm tree and three Italian pines, the view extended over undulating land dotted with white villas, stopped on the purple silhouette of Vesuvius, or was lost on the immensity of the blue sea. When M. Paul d’Aspremont appeared at the top of the stairs, Alicia stood up, gave a little cry of joy, and took a few steps to meet him. Paul took her hand in the English style, but the young girl raised this captive hand to the level of her friend’s lips with a movement full of childish kindness and ingenuous coquetry. The Commodore tried to stand up on his slightly gouty legs, and he succeeded after a few grimaces of pain which contrasted comically with the look of jubilation on his broad face; he approached with a step brisk enough for him to the charming group of two young people, and held Paul’s hand in such a way as to mold his fingers into a cupped position against each other, which is the supreme expression of old British cordiality. Miss Alicia Ward belonged to that variety of dark English women who realize an ideal whose conditions seem to contradict each other: that is to say, a skin of a dazzling whiteness that makes the milk, snow, lilies, alabaster, virgin wax, and everything that poets use to make white comparisons; cherry lips, and hair as black as night on the wings of a raven. The effect of this opposition is irresistible and produces a beauty apart, the equivalent of which cannot be found elsewhere. Perhaps some Circassians raised from childhood in the seraglio offer this miraculous complexion, but we must rely on the exaggerations of oriental poetry and the gouaches of Lewis representing the harems of Cairo. Alicia was certainly the most perfect type of this kind of beauty. The elongated oval of her head, her complexion of incomparable purity, her fine, thin, transparent nose, her dark blue eyes fringed with long eyelashes which fluttered on her rosy cheeks like black butterflies when she lowered her eyelids, her lips colored a brilliant purple, her hair falling in brilliant curls like satin ribbons on each side of her cheeks and her swan neck , testified in favor of these romantic figures of women of Maclise, who, at the Universal Exhibition, seemed charming impostures. Alicia wore a grenadine dress with festooned flounces and embroidered with red palmettes, which went wonderfully with the braids of coral with small grains making up her headdress, her necklace and her bracelets; five tassels suspended from a faceted coral bead trembled on the lobe of his small and delicately curled ears. If you blame this abuse of coral, remember that we are in Naples, and that the fishermen come out of the sea expressly to present you with these branches that the air reddens. We owe you, after the portrait of Miss Alicia Ward, if only to make a contrast, at least a caricature of the commodore in the manner of Hogarth. The commodore, aged about sixty, presented this peculiarity of having a face of a uniformly inflamed crimson, on which stood white eyebrows and whiskers of the same color, cut into chops, which made him look like an old Indian who had tattooed himself with chalk. The sunburn , inseparable from a trip to Italy, had added a few more layers to this ardent coloring, and the commodore involuntarily made one think of a large praline wrapped in cotton. He was dressed from head to toe, jacket, waistcoat, trousers and gaiters, in a vinous grey vicuna cloth, which the tailor must have affirmed, on his honour, to be the most fashionable and best-worn shade, in which perhaps he was not lying. Despite this glowing complexion and this grotesque garment, the commodore had in no way the common air. His rigorous cleanliness, his impeccable bearing and his grand manners indicated the perfect gentleman, although he had more than one outward connection with the English vaudeville artists parodied by Hoffmann or Levassor. His character was to adore his niece and to drink a lot of port and Jamaican rum to maintain the radical humidity, according to the method of Corporal Trimm. “See how well I am now and how beautiful I am! Look at my colours; I am not yet as much as my uncle; It won’t come, one must hope.—Yet here I have pink, real pink, said Alicia, passing her slender finger, tipped with a nail as shiny as agate, over her cheek; I’ve grown fat too, and you can no longer feel those poor little salt cellars that gave me so much pain when I went to the ball . Say , how coquettish one must be to deprive oneself of the company of one’s fiancé for three months, so that after the absence he may find you fresh and superb! And while delivering this tirade in the playful and skipping tone that was familiar to her, Alicia stood before Paul as if to provoke and defy his scrutiny. “Isn’t she,” added the commodore, “now robust and superb like those girls of Procida who carry Greek amphorae on the head? “Certainly, Commodore,” replied Paul; “Miss Alicia has not become more beautiful, it was impossible, but she is visibly in better health than when, out of coquetry, as she claims, she imposed this painful separation on me.” And his gaze rested with a strange fixity on the young girl placed before him. Suddenly the pretty pink colors she boasted of having conquered disappeared from Alicia’s cheeks, as the evening blush leaves the snowy cheeks of the mountain when the sun sinks below the horizon; all trembling, she put her hand to her heart; her charming, pale mouth contracted. Paul, alarmed, rose, as did the Commodore; Alicia’s lively colors had reappeared; she smiled with a little effort. “I promised you a cup of tea or a sherbet; although English, I advise you the sherbet.” Snow is worth more than warm water in this country near Africa, where the sirocco arrives in a straight line.” All three took their places around the stone table, under the ceiling of vines; the sun had sunk into the sea, and the blue day that is called night in Naples succeeded the yellow day. The moon scattered silver coins on the terrace, through the shredded foliage; the sea rustled on the shore like a kiss, and in the distance one could hear the copper rustle of the Basque drums accompanying the tarantellas… They had to part; Vicè, the wild servant with frizzy hair, came with a lantern to escort Paul through the maze of the garden. While she served the sorbets and the snow water, she had fixed on the newcomer a look of mixed curiosity and fear. Doubtless the result of the examination had not been favorable to Paul, for Vicè’s forehead, already yellow as a cigar, had darkened further, and, while accompanying the stranger, she directed her little finger and index finger against him, so that he could not see her, while the other two fingers, folded under the palm, joined the thumb as if to form a cabalistic sign. Chapter 15. Alicia’s friend returned to the Hotel de Rome by the same route: the beauty of the evening was incomparable; a pure and brilliant moon poured upon the water of a diaphanous azure a long trail of silver spangles whose perpetual swarming, caused by the lapping of the waves, multiplied the brilliance. Offshore, the fishing boats, carrying at the prow an iron lantern filled with burning tow, dotted the sea with red stars and trailed scarlet wakes behind them; the smoke from Vesuvius, white by day, had changed into a luminous column and also cast its reflection on the gulf. At that moment the bay presented that improbable aspect to northern eyes, given to it by those Italian gouaches framed in black, so widespread a few years ago, and more faithful than one might think in their crude exaggeration. A few night owls still wandered on the shore, moved, without knowing it, by this magical spectacle, and plunged their large black eyes into the bluish expanse. Others, sitting on the planking of a beached boat, sang the air from Lucia or the popular romance then in vogue: “Ti voglio ben’ assai,” in a voice that many tenors paid a hundred thousand francs would have envied. Naples goes to bed late, like all southern towns; however, the windows were gradually going dark, and the only lottery offices, with their garlands of colored paper, their favorite numbers, and their glittering lights, were still open, ready to receive the money of capricious players who might be seized by the whim of putting a few pugs or a few ducats on a dream number on their way home. Paul went to bed, drew the gauze curtains of the mosquito net over himself, and was soon asleep. As happens to travelers after a crossing, his bed, although motionless, seemed to pitch and roll, as if the Hotel de Rome had been the Leopold. This impression made him dream that he was still at sea and that he saw, on the pier, Alicia very pale, beside her crimson uncle, and who was signaling to him with her hand not to land; the face of the young girl expressed a deep pain, and in pushing him away she seemed to obey against her will an imperious fatality. This dream, which took on an extreme reality from very recent images, saddened the sleeper to the point of waking him, and he was happy to find himself in his room where flickered, with an opal reflection, a nightlight illuminating a small porcelain tower besieged by mosquitoes, buzzing. In order not to fall again under the influence of this painful dream, Paul fought against sleep and began to think about the beginnings of his affair with Miss Alicia, taking up one by one all those childishly charming scenes of a first love. He saw again the pink brick house, lined with wild roses and honeysuckle, where Miss Alicia lived in Richmond with her uncle, and into which he had been introduced, on his first trip to England, by one of those letters of recommendation whose effect is usually limited to an invitation to dinner. He remembered the white dress of Indian muslin, adorned with a simple ribbon, which Alicia, having left school the day before, was wearing that day, and the branch of jasmine that rolled in the cascade of her hair like a flower from Ophelia’s crown, carried by the current, and her velvet blue eyes, and her slightly open mouth, revealing small mother-of-pearl teeth, and her frail neck that lengthened like that of an attentive bird, and her sudden blush when the young French gentleman’s gaze met hers. The parlor, with its brown woodwork and green draperies, adorned with engravings of fox hunts and steeplechases colored with the sharp tones of English illumination, reproduced itself in his mind as in a dark room. The piano stretched out its row of keys like a dowager’s teeth. The fireplace, festooned with a sprig of Irish ivy, made its cast-iron shell rubbed with graphite gleam; the oak armchairs with turned legs opened their arms upholstered in morocco, the carpet displayed its rosettes, and Miss Alicia, trembling like a leaf, sang in the most adorably out-of-tune voice in the world the romance from Anna Bolena, “Deh, non voler costringere,” which Paul, no less moved, accompanied out of time, while the commodore, drowsy from laborious digestion and even more crimson than usual, let a colossal copy of the Times slide to the floor with a supplement. Then the scene changed: Paul, having become more intimate, had been asked by the Commodore to spend a few days at his cottage in Lincolnshire… An ancient feudal castle, with crenellated towers and Gothic windows, half-enveloped by immense ivy, but arranged internally with all modern comforts, stood at the end of a lawn whose ryegrass, carefully watered and trampled, was smooth as velvet; a path of yellow sand curved around the lawn and served as a riding school for Miss Alicia, mounted on one of those Scottish ponies with wild manes that Sir Edward Landseer loves to paint, and to which he gives an almost human look. Paul, on a bay horse that the Commodore had lent him, accompanied Miss Ward on her circular walk, for the doctor, who had found her a little weak in the chest, ordered her to exercise. Another time a light canoe glided across the pond, displacing the water lilies and making the kingfisher fly under the silver foliage of the willows. It was Alicia who rowed and Paul who held the helm; how pretty she was in the golden halo drawn around her head by her straw hat pierced by a ray of sunlight! She leaned back to pull the oar; the polished toe of her gray boot rested on the plank of the bench; Miss Ward did not have one of those Andalusian feet, so short and round as irons that one admires in Spain, but her ankle was slender, her instep well arched, and the sole of her boot, a little long perhaps, was not two fingers wide. The commodore remained _tied_ to the shore, not because of his _size_, but because of his weight which would have caused the frail boat to sink; he waited for his niece at the landing stage, and with maternal care threw a mantle over her shoulders, for fear that she might get cold, – then the boat tied to its stake, they returned to _lunch_ at the castle. It was a pleasure to see how Alicia, who ordinarily ate as little as a bird, cut with a cutter of her pearly teeth a pink slice of York ham as thin as a sheet of paper, and nibbled a small loaf without leaving a crumb for the golden fish in the basin. Happy days pass so quickly! From week to week Paul delayed his departure, and the beautiful masses of verdure in the park began to take on saffron hues; white smoke rose in the morning from the pond. Despite the gardener’s ceaseless raking, dead leaves littered the sand of the path; millions of little frozen pearls glittered on the green lawn of the bowling green, and in the evening one could see the magpies hopping and quarreling among the tops of the bald trees. Alicia paled under Paul’s anxious gaze and retained no color except two small pink spots at the top of her cheekbones. She was often cold, and the hottest coal fire did not warm her. The doctor had seemed worried, and his last prescription prescribed Miss Ward to spend the winter in Pisa and the spring in Naples. Family business had recalled Paul to France; Alicia and the Commodore were to leave for Italy, and the separation had taken place at Folkestone. No words had been spoken, but Miss Ward regarded Paul as her fiancé, and the commodore had shaken the young man’s hand meaningfully: one only crushes the fingers of a son-in-law in this way. Paul, postponed for six months, as long as six centuries for his impatience, had had the happiness of finding Alicia cured of her languor and radiant with health. What remained of the child in the young girl had disappeared; and he thought with intoxication that the commodore would have no objection to make when he asked for his niece in marriage. Lulled by these smiling images, he fell asleep and did not wake until daybreak. Naples was already beginning its uproar; the iced water vendors were shouting their wares; The roasters held out to passers-by their meats threaded on a pole; leaning out of their windows, the lazy housewives lowered the baskets of provisions on the end of a string, which they brought up again laden with tomatoes, fish, and large pieces of pumpkin. The public writers, in threadbare black coats and quills behind their ears, sat at their stalls; the money changers arranged the grani, the pugs, and the ducats in piles on their little tables ; the coachmen galloped their nags begging for the morning practice, and the bells of all the campaniles joyfully chimed the Angelus. Our traveler, wrapped in his dressing gown, leaned on the balcony; From the window one could see Santa Lucia, the fort of the Egg, and an immense expanse of sea as far as Vesuvius and the blue promontory where the vast casini of Castellamare whitened and where the villas of Sorrento pointed in the distance. The sky was clear, only a light white cloud was advancing on the city, driven by a lazy breeze. Paul fixed on it that strange look that we have already noticed ; his brows furrowed. Other vapors joined the single flake, and soon a thick curtain of clouds spread its black folds above the castle of Saint Elmo. Large drops fell on the lava pavement, and in a few minutes changed into one of those torrential downpours which turn the streets of Naples into torrents and carry away dogs and even the donkeys in the sewers. The surprised crowd dispersed, seeking shelter; the open-air shops moved hastily, not without losing some of their goods, and the rain, mistress of the battlefield , ran in white gusts over the deserted quay of Santa Lucia. The gigantic facchino to whom Paddy had delivered such a fine blow , leaning against a wall under a balcony whose projection protected him a little, had not been carried away by the general rout, and he gazed with a deeply meditative eye at the window where M. Paul d’Aspremont was leaning. His interior monologue was summed up in this sentence, which he grumbled with an irritated air: “The captain of the _Leopold_ would have done well to throw that _forester_ into the sea;” and, passing his hand through the gap in his coarse linen shirt, he touched the bundle of amulets suspended from his collar by a cord. Chapter 16. The fine weather soon returned, a bright ray of sunshine dried the last tears of the downpour in a few minutes, and the crowd began to swarm joyfully on the quayside again. But Timberio, the porter, nevertheless seemed to retain his opinion of the young French foreigner, and prudently moved his belongings out of sight of the hotel windows: some lazzaroni of his acquaintance expressed their surprise at his abandoning an excellent position to choose one much less favorable. “I give it to whoever wants to take it,” he replied, nodding his head mysteriously ; “we know what we know.” Paul breakfasted in his room, for whether from timidity or disdain, he did not like to be in public; then he dressed, and to wait for the convenient time to go to Miss Ward’s, he visited the Studj Museum: he admired with a distracted eye the precious collection of Campanian vases, the bronzes removed from the excavations of Pompeii, the Greek helmet of verdigris bronze still containing the head of the soldier who wore it, the piece of hardened mud preserving like a mold the imprint of a charming young woman’s torso surprised by the eruption in the country house of Arrius Diomedes, the Farnese Hercules and his prodigious musculature, the Flora, the archaic Minerva, the two Balbus, and the magnificent statue of Aristides, perhaps the most perfect piece that antiquity has left us. But a lover is not a very enthusiastic appreciator of monuments of art; for him the least profile of the adored head is worth all the Greek or Roman marbles. Having managed to use up two or three hours at the Studj as best he could, he jumped into his carriage and headed towards the country house where Miss Ward lived. The coachman, with that intelligence of passions which characterizes southern natures, pushed his nags to the limit, and soon the carriage stopped in front of the pillars surmounted by vases of succulent plants which we have already described. The same servant came and half-opened the skylight; her hair was still twisted in untamed curls; she had, as on the first occasion, for all her costume only a chemise of coarse linen embroidered on the sleeves and collar with ornaments in colored thread and a petticoat of thick, variegated material across, such as the women of Procida wear ; her legs, we must admit, were devoid of stockings, and she posed bare on the dust with feet which a sculptor would have admired. Only a black cord held on her chest a bundle of small, oddly shaped horn and coral trinkets, on which, to Vicè’s obvious satisfaction, Paul’s gaze fixed. Miss Alicia was on the terrace, the place in the house where she preferred to stay. An Indian hammock of red and white cotton, adorned with bird feathers, hung from two of the columns that supported the ceiling of vine leaves, swayed the nonchalance of the young girl, wrapped in a light dressing gown of unbleached Chinese silk, whose fluted trimmings she mercilessly crumpled. Her feet, the tips of which could be seen through the mesh of the hammock, were shod slippers made of aloe fibers, and her beautiful bare arms crossed above her head, in the attitude of the ancient Cleopatra, for, although it was only the beginning of May, it was already extremely hot, and thousands of cicadas were chirping in chorus under the surrounding bushes. The commodore, dressed as a planter and seated on a rush chair, pulled at equal times the rope which set the hammock in motion. A third personage completed the group: it was the Count of Altavilla, a young elegant Neapolitan whose presence brought to Paul’s brow that contraction which gave to his physiognomy an expression of diabolical wickedness. The Count was, in fact, one of those men whom one does not willingly see near a woman one loves. His tall stature had perfect proportions ; jet-black hair, massed by abundant tufts, accompanied his smooth and well-cut forehead; A spark of the Neapolitan sun glittered in his eyes, and his teeth, large and strong, but pure as pearls, seemed to have even more brilliance because of the bright red of his lips and the olive shade of his complexion. The only criticism that meticulous taste could have made against the Count was that he was too handsome. As for his clothes, Altavilla had them brought from London, and the strictest dandy would have approved of his attire. There was nothing Italian in all his attire except the shirt buttons of too great a price. Here the very natural taste of the child of the South for jewels betrayed itself. Perhaps also that everywhere else but in Naples one would have noticed as being in mediocre taste the bundle of bifurcated branches of coral, hands of lava from Vesuvius with folded fingers or brandishing a dagger, dogs stretched out on their legs, white and black horns, and other similar tiny objects that a common ring suspended from the chain of his watch; but a stroll along the Rue de Toledo or at the Villa Reale would have been enough to demonstrate that the Count was not eccentric in wearing these bizarre trinkets on his waistcoat. When Paul d’Aspremont presented himself, the Count, at the earnest request of Miss Ward, was singing one of those delicious Neapolitan popular melodies, without the name of the author, and one of which, collected by a musician, would be enough to make the fortune of an opera. – To those who have not heard them, on the bank of Chiaja or on the pier, from the mouth of a lazzaronne, a fisherman or a trovatelle, the charming romances of Gordigiani will be able to give an idea of them. It is made of a sigh of breeze, a ray of moonlight, a scent of orange blossom and a heartbeat. Alicia, with her pretty, slightly false English voice, followed the pattern she wanted to retain, and she made, as she continued, a little friendly sign to Paul, who looked at her with a rather unfriendly air, offended by the presence of this handsome young man. One of the ropes of the hammock broke, and Miss Ward slipped to the ground, but without hurting herself; six hands stretched out towards her simultaneously. The young girl was already on her feet, all pink with modesty, for it is improper to fall in front of men. However, not one of the chaste folds of her dress had been disturbed. “I have tried these ropes myself,” said the commodore, “and Miss Ward weighs little more than a hummingbird. ”
The Count of Altavilla nodded his head with a mysterious air: in his own mind, he evidently explained the breaking of the rope by some reason entirely other than that of gravity; but, like a well-bred man, he remained silent, and contented himself with waving the cluster of trinkets on his waistcoat. Like all men who become sullen and fierce when they find themselves in the presence of a rival whom they judge formidable, instead of redoubling his grace and amiability, Paul d’Aspremont, although he had the use of the world, did not succeed in hiding his bad humor; he answered only in monosyllables, let the conversation drop, and as he walked towards Altavilla, his gaze took on its sinister expression ; the yellow fibrils writhed under the transparency gray eyes like water snakes in the bottom of a spring. Every time Paul looked at him like that, the Count, with a seemingly mechanical gesture, would pluck a flower from a flowerpot placed near him and throw it so as to cut off the scent of the irritated glance. “What are you doing rummaging through my flowerpot like that?” cried Miss Alicia Ward, who noticed this maneuver. “What have my flowers done to you to decapitate them?” “Oh! nothing, miss; it’s an involuntary tic,” replied Altavilla, cutting a superb rose with his fingernail and sending it to join the others. “You annoy me horribly,” said Alicia; “and without knowing it you are shocking one of my habits. I have never picked a flower.” A bouquet inspires a sort of terror in me: they are dead flowers, corpses of roses, verbenas, or periwinkles, whose perfume has something sepulchral about it for me. “To atone for the murders I have just committed,” said Count Altavilla, bowing, “I will send you a hundred baskets of living flowers. ” Paul had risen, and with a constrained air twisted the brim of his hat as if timing an exit. “What! Are you leaving already?” said Miss Ward. “I have letters to write, important letters. ” “Oh! the ugly word you just uttered!” said the young girl with a little pout; “are there important letters when it is not to me that you are writing?” “Stay then, Paul,” said the commodore; I had arranged in my head a plan for the evening, except with the approval of my niece: we would have first gone to drink a glass of water from the fountain of Santa Lucia, which smells of spoiled eggs, but which gives the appetite; we would have eaten one or two dozen oysters, white and red, at the fishmonger’s, dined under a trellis in some very Neapolitan osteria, drunk Falerne and lacryma-christi, and finished the entertainment with a visit to Signor Pulcinella. The Count would have explained to us the subtleties of the dialect.” This plan seemed little to appeal to M. d’Aspremont, and he withdrew after a cold bow. Altavilla remained a few moments longer; and as Miss Ward, angry at Paul’s departure, did not enter into the commodore’s idea, he took his leave. Two hours later, Miss Alicia received an immense quantity of flowerpots , of the rarest sorts, and, what surprised her even more, a monstrous pair of Sicilian ox horns, transparent as jasper, polished like agate, which measured a good three feet long and ended in menacing black points. A magnificent gilt bronze mount allowed the horns to be placed, the spike upwards, on a mantelpiece, a console table, or a cornice. Vicè, who had helped the bearers unwrap the flowers and horns, seemed to understand the significance of this bizarre gift. She placed in a prominent place on the stone table the superb crescents, which one might have thought torn from the forehead of the divine bull that carried Europa, and said: “We are now in a good state of defense. ” “What do you mean, Vicè?” asked Miss Ward. “Nothing… except that the French signor has very singular eyes.” Chapter 17. Mealtime was long past, and the coal fires, which during the day had transformed the kitchen of the Hotel de Rome into a crater of Vesuvius, were slowly dying out in embers under the sheet-iron smotherers; the saucepans had resumed their places on their respective nails and shone in rows like the shields on the planking of an antique trireme; a yellow copper lamp, similar to those taken from the excavations of Pompeii and suspended by a triple chain from the main beam of the ceiling, lit with its three wicks naively dipping in oil the center of the vast kitchen , the corners of which remained bathed in shadow. The rays of light falling from above modeled with very picturesque plays of light and shadow a group of characteristic figures gathered around the thick wooden table, all chopped and furrowed with slicing, which occupied the center of this large room. whose smoke from culinary preparations had frozen the walls of this bitumen so dear to the painters of the school of Caravaggio. Certainly, Espagnolet or Salvator Rosa, in their robust love of truth, would not have disdained the models gathered there by chance, or, to speak more exactly, by a habit of every evening. There was first the chef Virgilio Falsacappa, a very important personage, of colossal stature and formidable plumpness, who could have passed for one of Vitellius’s guests if, instead of a white basin jacket, he had worn a Roman toga bordered with purple: his prodigiously accentuated features formed a kind of serious caricature of certain types of ancient medals; thick black eyebrows protruding half an inch crowned his eyes, cut like those of theatrical masks; An enormous nose cast its shadow over a wide mouth that seemed to be furnished with three rows of teeth like a shark’s mouth. A powerful dewlap like that of the Farnese bull united the chin, struck by a dimple large enough to dig a fist into, to a neck of athletic vigor furrowed with veins and muscles. Two tufts of whiskers, each of which could have provided a sapper with a reasonable beard, framed this broad face hammered with violent tones: curly, shiny black hair, mingled with a few silver threads, twisted on his skull in small short locks, and his neck, pleated with three transverse swellings, overflowed from the collar of his jacket; on the lobes of his ears, raised by the apophyses of jaws capable of crushing an ox in a day, glittered silver buckles as large as the disc of the moon; such was Master Virgilio Falsacappa, whose apron rolled up on his hip and his knife plunged into a wooden sheath made him look more like a victim than a cook. Then appeared Timberio the porter, whom the gymnastics of his profession and the sobriety of his diet, consisting of a handful of semi-raw macaroni sprinkled with cacio-cavallo, a slice of watermelon and a glass of snow water, kept in a state of relative thinness, and who, well fed, would certainly have attained the plumpness of Falsacappa, so much did his robust frame seem made to support an enormous weight of flesh. He had no other costume than a pair of drawers, a long waistcoat of brown cloth and a coarse pea coat thrown over his shoulder. Leaning on the edge of the table, Scazziga, the coachman of the hired carriage used by Mr. Paul d’Aspremont, also presented a striking physiognomy; his irregular and witty features were imbued with a naive cunning; a commanding smile wandered over his mocking lips, and one could see from the amenity of his manners that he lived in perpetual intercourse with decent people; his clothes, bought at the second-hand shop, simulated a kind of livery of which he was not a little proud, and which, in his mind, put a great social distance between him and the savage Timberio; his conversation was peppered with English and French words which did not always fit happily with the meaning of what he wanted to say, but which nevertheless excited the admiration of the kitchen maids and the scullions, astonished by so much science. A little behind stood two young servants whose features recalled, with less nobility, no doubt, that type so well known on Syracusan coins: low forehead, nose all of a piece with the forehead, slightly thick lips, thick and strong chin; bluish-black hair bands joined behind their heads in a heavy chignon crossed with pins ending in coral balls ; necklaces of the same material encircled in triple rows their caryatid collars, whose muscles had been strengthened by the use of carrying burdens on their heads. Dandies would certainly have despised these poor girls who preserved the pure blood of the beautiful races of great Greece; but any artist, at their sight, would have taken out his sketchbook and sharpened his pencil. Have you seen the painting by Murillo in Marshal Soult’s gallery where cherubs are cooking? If you have seen it, it will save us from painting here the heads of the three or four curly- haired scullions who completed the group. The conciliabule was dealing with a serious question. It concerned M. Paul d’Aspremont, the French traveler who had arrived on the last steamer: the kitchen was involved in judging the apartment. Timberio the porter had the floor, and he paused between each of his sentences, like a fashionable actor, to give his audience time to grasp its full import, to give their assent or to raise objections. “Follow my reasoning carefully,” said the orator; The Leopold is an honest Tuscan steamer, against which there is nothing to object, except that it carries too many English heretics… —English heretics pay well, interrupted Scazziga, made more tolerant by the tips. —No doubt; it is the least that when a heretic makes a Christian work, he rewards him generously, in order to lessen the humiliation. —I am not humiliated to drive a forester in my carriage; I do not, like you, make a beast of burden. —Am I not baptized as well as you? replied the porter, frowning and clenching his fists. —Let Timberio speak, cried the assembly in chorus, who feared to see this interesting dissertation turn into an argument. “You will grant me,” continued the calmed orator, “that the weather was superb when the Leopold entered the port? ” “We grant you that, Timberio,” said the chief with condescending majesty . “The sea was as smooth as ice,” continued the facchino, “and yet an enormous wave shook Gennaro’s boat so roughly that he fell into the water with two or three of his comrades.” “Is that natural? Gennaro has sea legs, however, and he would dance the tarantella without a pole on a yardarm. ” “Perhaps he had drunk a flask of Asprino too many,” objected Scazziga, the rationalist of the assembly. “Not even a glass of lemonade,” continued Timberio; “but there was a gentleman on board the steamer who looked at him in a certain way—you hear me! —Oh! perfectly, replied the chorus, extending their index and little fingers with admirable unison. “And this gentleman,” said Timberio, “was none other than M. Paul d’Aspremont. ” “The one who lodges at number 3,” asked the chief, “and to whom I send his dinner on a tray? ” “Precisely,” replied the youngest and prettiest of the maids; “ I have never seen a more savage, more disagreeable, and more disdainful traveler; he did not address me a glance or a word, and yet I am worth a compliment, say all these gentlemen. ” “You are worth more than that, Gelsomina, my beauty,” said Timberio gallantly; “but it is fortunate for you that this stranger did not notice you. ” “You are also too superstitious,” objected the skeptical Scazziga, whose relations with foreigners had made him slightly Voltairean. “By dint of frequenting heretics, you will end up no longer even believing in Saint Januarius.” “If Gennaro let himself fall into the sea, that is no reason,” continued Scazziga, who was defending his practice, “for Mr. Paul d’Aspremont to have the influence you attribute to him. “You need other proof: this morning I saw him at the window, his eye fixed on a cloud no bigger than the feather that escapes from a ripped pillow, and immediately black vapors gathered, and it rained so hard that the dogs could drink standing up.” Scazziga was not convinced and shook his head doubtfully. “The groom is no better than the master,” continued Timberio, “and that booted monkey must have intelligence with the devil to have thrown me to the ground, I who would kill him with a flick of the wrist. ” “I agree with Timberio,” said the chief of kitchen; the stranger eats little; he sent back the stuffed zuchettes, the fried chicken, and the macaroni with tomatoes, which I had prepared with my own hands! Some strange secret is hidden beneath this sobriety. Why should a rich man deprive himself of tasty dishes and take only egg soup and a slice of cold meat? “He has red hair,” said Gelsomina, running her fingers through the black forest of her headbands. “And his eyes are a little prominent,” continued Pepina, the other servant. “Very close to the nose,” pressed Timberio. “And the wrinkle that forms between his eyebrows deepens into a horseshoe,” said the formidable Virgilio Falsacappa, concluding the instruction; “so he is…” “Don’t utter the word, it’s useless,” cried the chorus, minus Scazziga, still incredulous; “we will be on our guard.” “When I think the police would torment me,” said Timberio, “if by chance I dropped a trunk of three hundred pounds on that unfortunate forester’s head!” “Scazziga is very bold to drive him,” said Gelsomina. “I am in my seat, he only sees my back, and his eyes cannot form the desired angle with mine. Besides, I don’t care. ” “You have no religion, Scazziga,” said the colossal Palforio, the cook with herculean forms; “you will end badly.” While they were thus discussing him in the kitchen of the Hotel de Rome, Paul, whom the presence of the Count d’Altavilla at Miss Ward’s had put in a bad humor, had gone for a walk in the Villa Reale; and more than once the wrinkle on his forehead deepened, and his eyes assumed their fixed gaze. He thought he saw Alicia pass by in a carriage with the Count and the Commodore, and he rushed to the door, putting his eyeglass to his nose to be sure that he was not mistaken: it was not Alicia, but a woman who looked a little like her from a distance. Only, the horses of the carriage, no doubt frightened by Paul’s sudden movement, became furious. Paul took an ice cream at the Café de l’Europe on the largo of the palace: some people examined him attentively, and changed places with a singular gesture. He entered the Theater of Pulcinella, where a play _tutto da ridere_ was being given . The actor became flustered in the middle of his buffoonish improvisation and stopped short; he recovered, however; but in the middle of a joke, his black cardboard nose came off, and he could not manage to adjust it, and as if to apologize, with a quick sign he explained the cause of his misfortunes, for Paul’s gaze, fixed on him, robbed him of all his means. The spectators near Paul slipped away one by one; M. d’Aspremont got up to leave, not realizing the bizarre effect he was producing, and in the corridor he heard this strange word, meaningless to him, being uttered in a low voice: un jettatore! un jettatore! Chapter 18. The day after the horns were sent, Count Altavilla paid a visit to Miss Ward. The young Englishwoman was taking tea with her uncle, just as if she had been in Ramsgate in a yellow-brick house, and not in Naples on a whitewashed terrace surrounded by fig trees, cacti, and aloes; for one of the characteristic signs of the Saxon race is the persistence of its habits, however contrary they may be to the climate. The Commodore was beaming: by means of pieces of ice chemically manufactured with an apparatus, for only snow is brought from the mountains which rise behind Castellamare, he had succeeded in keeping his butter in a solid state , and he was spreading a layer of it with visible satisfaction on a slice of bread cut into a sandwich. After these few vague words which precede any conversation and resemble the preludes with which pianists feel their keyboard before beginning their piece, Alicia, suddenly abandoning the usual commonplaces, addressed the young Neapolitan count abruptly: “What is the meaning of this strange gift of horns with which you accompanied your flowers? My servant Vicè told me it was a preservative against the _fascino_; that’s all I could get from her. —Vicè is right, replied Count Altavilla, bowing. —But what is the _fascino_? continued the young miss; I am not aware of your African superstitions, for it must undoubtedly relate to some popular belief. —The _fascino_ is the pernicious influence exerted by the person gifted, or rather afflicted with the evil eye. —I pretend to understand you, for fear of giving you an unfavorable idea of my intelligence if I admit that the meaning of your words escapes me, said Miss Alicia Ward; you explain the unknown to me by the unknown: _bad eye_ translates very badly, for me, _fascino_; like the character in the comedy, I know Latin, but act as if I do not know it. “I will explain myself as clearly as possible,” replied Altavilla; “only, in your British disdain, do not take me for a savage and ask yourself if my clothes do not hide a skin tattooed with red and blue. I am a civilized man; I was brought up in Paris, I speak English and French; I have read Voltaire; I believe in steam engines, railways, the two chambers like Stendhal; I eat macaroni with a fork; I wear suede gloves in the morning, colored gloves in the afternoon, straw gloves in the evening. ” The attention of the commodore, who was buttering his second slice of bread, was attracted by this strange beginning, and he remained, knife in hand, fixing on Altavilla his polar blue eyes, the shade of which formed a strange contrast with his brick-red complexion. “These are reassuring titles,” said Miss Alicia Ward with a smile; and after that I would be very suspicious if I suspected you of _barbarism_. But what you have to tell me is so terrible or so absurd, that you take so many circumlocutions to get to the point? —Yes, so terrible, so absurd and even so ridiculous, which is worse, continued the count; if I were in London or Paris, perhaps I would laugh with you, but here, in Naples… —You will keep your seriousness; is that not what you mean? —Precisely. —Let us come to the _fascino_, said Miss Ward, whom Altavilla’s gravity impressed in spite of herself. —This belief goes back to the most remote antiquity. It is alluded to in the Bible. Virgil speaks of it with conviction; The bronze amulets found at Pompeii, Herculaneum, and Stabiae, and the protective signs drawn on the walls of excavated houses, show how widespread this superstition was in the past (Altavilla emphasized the word _superstition_ with malicious intent). The whole of the East still believes in it today. Red or green hands are placed on either side of one of the Moorish houses to ward off the evil influence. A hand is seen sculpted on the keystone of the Gate of Judgment at the Alhambra; which proves that this _prejudice_ is at least very old, if not well-founded. When millions of men have for thousands of years shared an opinion, it is probable that this opinion so generally received was based on positive facts, on a long series of observations justified by the event… I find it hard to believe, however favourable an idea I may have of myself, that so many people, several of whom were certainly illustrious, enlightened and learned, were grossly mistaken in a matter where only I would see clearly… —Your reasoning is easy to retort, interrupted Miss Alicia Ward: was not polytheism the religion of Hesiod, of Homer, of Aristotle, of Plato, of Socrates himself, who sacrificed a cock to Aesculapius, and of a host of other figures of incontestable genius? —No doubt, but there is no one today who sacrifices oxen to Jupiter. “It is much better to make beefsteaks and rumpsteaks of them,” said the Commodore sententiously, “than the custom of burning the thighs.” The fatness of the victims on the coals had always shocked Homer. —Doves are no longer offered to Venus, nor peacocks to Juno, nor goats to Bacchus; Christianity has replaced those dreams of white marble with which Greece had peopled its Olympus; truth has made error vanish, and an infinite number of people still fear the effects of _fascino_, or, to give it its popular name, of _jettatura_. —That the ignorant people are worried about such influences, I understand, said Miss Ward; but that a man of your birth and education shares this belief, that is what astonishes me. —More than one who pretends to be a free spirit, replied the count, hangs a horn from his window, nails a massacre above his door, and only walks covered in amulets; I am frank, and I confess without shame that when I meet a jettatore, I willingly take the other side of the street, and if I cannot avoid his gaze, I ward him off as best I can with the consecrated gesture. I put no more fuss about it than a lazzarone, and I am well off for it. Numerous misadventures have taught me not to disdain these precautions.” Miss Alicia Ward was a Protestant, brought up with great philosophical freedom of mind, who admitted nothing without examination, and whose upright reason was repugnant to anything that could not be explained mathematically. The Count’s speeches surprised her. At first she wanted to see it as a simple game of wit; but Altavilla’s calm and convinced tone made her change her mind without persuading her in any way. “I grant you,” she said, “that this prejudice exists, that it is very widespread, that you are sincere in your fear of the evil eye, and do not seek to mock the simplicity of a poor foreigner; but give me some physical reason for this superstitious idea, for, even if you were to judge me as a being entirely devoid of poetry, I am very incredulous: the fantastic, the mysterious, the occult, the inexplicable have very little hold on me. “You will not deny, Miss Alicia,” resumed the Count, “the power of the human eye; the light of heaven combines there with the reflection of the soul; the pupil is a lens which concentrates the rays of life, and intellectual electricity springs through this narrow opening: does not the glance of a woman pierce the hardest heart? Does not the glance of a hero attract an entire army? Does not the doctor’s gaze tame the madman like a cold shower? Does not a mother’s gaze make lions retreat? “You plead your case eloquently,” replied Miss Ward, shaking her pretty head; “forgive me if I still have doubts. ” “And the bird that, quivering with horror and uttering piteous cries , descends from the top of a tree, from whence it could fly, to throw itself into the mouth of the serpent that fascinates it, obeys a prejudice? Has it heard feathered gossips in their nests tell stories of jettatura?” “Have not many effects taken place through causes inestimable for our organs? Are the miasmas of malarial fever, of the plague, of cholera, visible?” No eye sees the electric fluid on the pin of the lightning conductor, and yet the lightning is drawn! What is absurd in supposing that a propitious or fatal ray is emanated from this black, blue, or gray disc? Why should this effluvium not be fortunate or unfortunate according to the mode of emission and the angle at which the object receives it? “It seems to me,” said the commodore, “that the count’s theory has something specious about it; I have never been able to look at the golden eyes of a toad without feeling an intolerable heat in my stomach, as if I had taken an emetic; and yet the poor reptile had more reason to fear than I, who could crush it with a kick. ” “Ah! Uncle! If you join Mr. d’Altavilla,” said Miss Ward, “I shall be beaten. I am not strong enough to fight.” Although I may have many things to object to against this ocular electricity of which no physicist has spoken, I am willing to admit its existence for a moment, but what effectiveness can the immense horns with which you have bestowed upon me have in protecting themselves from their fatal effects ? —Just as the lightning rod with its point draws out the lightning, replied Altavilla, so the sharp spikes of these horns on which the jettatore’s gaze is fixed divert the harmful fluid and strip it of its dangerous electricity. The fingers stretched out in front of me and the coral amulets perform the same service. —Everything you tell me is very crazy, Count, replied Miss Ward; and this is what I understand: according to you, I am under the influence of the fascino of a very dangerous jettatore; and you have sent me horns as a means of defense? —I fear so, Miss Alicia, replied the Count with a tone of profound conviction. “It would be a fine sight,” cried the Commodore, “if one of those shifty-eyed fellows tried to fascinate my niece! Although I am over sixty, I have not yet forgotten my boxing lessons.” And he closed his fist, pressing his thumb against his bent fingers. “Two fingers are enough, my lord,” said Altavilla, making the Commodore’s hand assume the desired position. “Most commonly, jettatura is involuntary; it is exercised without the knowledge of those who possess this fatal gift, and often, when the jettatori become aware of their fatal power, they deplore its effects more than anyone else; they must therefore be avoided and not mistreated. Besides, with horns, pointed fingers, and forked coral branches, one can neutralize or at least attenuate their influence.” “Indeed, it is very strange,” said the Commodore, whom Altavilla’s composure impressed in spite of himself. “I did not know I was so obsessed with the jettatori; I hardly ever leave this terrace, except to go for a ride in a carriage along the Villa Reale in the evening with my uncle, and I have noticed nothing that could give rise to your supposition,” said the young girl , whose curiosity was aroused, although her incredulity was still the same. “About whom do you suspect? ” “They are not suspicions, Miss Ward; my certainty is complete,” replied the young Neapolitan count. “Please, reveal to us the name of this fatal being?” said Miss Ward with a slight hint of mockery. Altavilla remained silent. “It is good to know whom one should be wary of,” added the Commodore. The young Neapolitan count seemed to collect himself; then he rose, stopped before Miss Ward’s uncle, bowed respectfully, and said: “My Lord Ward, I ask for your niece’s hand.” At this unexpected phrase, Alicia turned very pink, and the commodore changed from red to scarlet. Certainly, Count Altavilla could claim Miss Ward’s hand; he belonged to one of the oldest and noblest families of Naples; he was handsome, young, rich, very well-behaved, perfectly brought up, of impeccable elegance; his request, in itself, was therefore in no way shocking; but it came in such a sudden, so strange manner ; it stood out so little from the conversation that had begun, that the stupefaction of the uncle and niece was entirely appropriate. So Altavilla appeared neither surprised nor discouraged, and he waited for the answer with bated breath. “My dear Count,” said the Commodore at last, having recovered somewhat from his confusion, “your proposal astonishes me—as much as it honors me.—In truth, I do not know what to say to you; I have not consulted my niece.—We were talking about fascino, jettatura, horns, amulets, open or closed hands, all sorts of things that have no connection with marriage, and then here you are asking me for Alicia’s hand!—That does not follow at all, and you will not hold it against me if I do not have very clear ideas on the subject. This union would certainly be very suitable, but I believed that my niece had other intentions. It is true that an old sea dog like me does not read the hearts of young girls…” Alicia, seeing her uncle getting confused, took advantage of the pause he took after his last sentence to put an end to a scene that was becoming embarrassing, and said to the Neapolitan: “Count, when a gallant man loyally asks for the hand of an honest young girl, there is no reason for her to be offended, but she has the right to be astonished at the strange form given to this request. I asked you to tell me the name of the supposed jettatore whose influence may, according to you, be harmful to me, and you suddenly make a proposal to my uncle whose motive I do not understand. “It is,” replied Altavilla, “that a gentleman does not willingly become an informer, and that only a husband can defend his wife. But take a few days to think. Until then, the horns exposed in a clearly visible manner will suffice, I hope, to protect you from any unfortunate event.” Having said this, the Count rose and left after a low bow. Vicè, the wild, frizzy-haired servant, who had come to carry away the teapot and cups, had, as she slowly climbed the stairs to the terrace, overheard the end of the conversation; she harbored for Paul d’Aspremont all the aversion that a peasant woman from the Abruzzi, barely tamed by two or three years of domestic service, might have for a forestiere suspected of jettature; besides, she found Count Altavilla superb, and could not conceive that Miss Ward could prefer to her a puny, pale young man whom she, Vicè, would not have wanted, even if he had not had the fascino. So, not appreciating the Count’s delicacy of conduct, and wishing to protect his mistress, whom she loved, from a harmful influence, Vicè leaned towards Miss Ward’s ear and said: “The name that Count Altavilla is hiding from you, I know it myself. ” “I forbid you to tell me, Vicè, if you value my good graces,” replied Alicia. “Truly all these superstitions are shameful, and I will defy them as a Christian girl who fears only God.”
Chapter 19. “Jettatore! jettatore! These words were indeed addressed to me,” Paul d’Aspremont said to himself as he returned to the hotel; I don’t know what they mean, but they must certainly contain an insulting or mocking meaning. What is there in me that is singular, unusual, or ridiculous to attract attention in such an unfavorable way? It seems to me, although one is a rather poor judge of oneself, that I am neither handsome, nor ugly, nor tall, nor short, nor thin, nor fat, and that I can pass unnoticed in a crowd. There is nothing eccentric about my attire; I am not wearing a turban illuminated with candles like M. Jourdain in the ceremony of the Bourgeois gentilhomme; I do not wear a jacket embroidered with a golden sun on the back; a Negro does not precede me playing the kettledrums; my individuality, perfectly unknown, moreover, in Naples, hides beneath the uniform garment, domino of modern civilization, and I am in everything the same as the elegant men who walk along the rue de Tolède or in the largo of the Palace, except for a little less cravat, a little less pin, a little less embroidered shirt, a little less waistcoat, a little less gold chains and much less hair. —Perhaps I’m not curly enough!—Tomorrow I’ll have my hair ironed by the hotel barber. However, people are used to seeing strangers here, and a few imperceptible differences in dress are not enough to justify the mysterious word and the strange gesture that my presence provokes. I noticed, moreover, an expression of antipathy and fear in the eyes of the people who moved out of my way. What could I have done to these people whom I meet for the first time? A traveler, a shadow who passes by never to return, excites only indifference everywhere, unless he arrives from some distant region and is the specimen of an unknown race: but the liners throw thousands of tourists onto the pier every week , from whom I differ in no way. Who worries about it, except the facchini, the hoteliers and the servants of place? I did not kill my brother, since I had none, and I must not be marked by God with the sign of Cain, and yet men are troubled and distance themselves at my sight: in Paris, in London, in Vienna, in all the cities I have inhabited, I have never noticed that I produced a similar effect; I have sometimes been found proud, disdainful, wild; I have been told that I affected the English _sneer_, that I imitated Lord Byron, but everywhere I received the welcome due to a gentleman, and my advances, although rare, were all the more appreciated. A three-day crossing from Marseilles to Naples cannot have changed me to such an extent as to have become odious or grotesque, me whom more than one woman has distinguished and who knew how to touch the heart of Miss Alicia Ward, a delightful young girl, a celestial creature, an angel of Thomas Moore! These reflections, certainly reasonable, calmed Paul d’Aspremont a little, and he persuaded himself that he had attached to the exaggerated mimicry of the Neapolitans, the most gesticulated people in the world, a meaning of which it was devoid. It was late. All the travelers, with the exception of Paul, had returned to their respective rooms; Gelsomina, one of the maids whose physiognomy we sketched in the secret meeting held in the kitchen under the presidency of Virgilio Falsacappa, was waiting for Paul to return to put the bars of the fence at the door. Nanella, the other girl, whose turn it was to watch, had asked her bolder companion to take her place, not wishing to meet with the forestiere suspected of jettature; So Gelsomina was under arms: an enormous bundle of amulets bristled on her chest, and five little coral horns trembled instead of tassels on the cut pearl of her earrings; her hand, folded in advance, extended the index and little fingers with a correctness that the reverend curate Andrea de Jorio, author of the _Mimica degli antichi investigata nel gestire napoletano_ would certainly have approved. The brave Gelsomina, hiding her hand behind a fold of her skirt, presented the torch to M. d’Aspremont, and directed at him a sharp, persistent, almost provocative look, with such a singular expression that the young man lowered his eyes; a circumstance which seemed to give great pleasure to this beautiful girl. Seeing her motionless and erect, extending the torch with a statuesque gesture, her profile cut by a luminous line, her eye fixed and blazing, one would have said the ancient Nemesis seeking to disconcert a culprit. When the traveler had mounted the stairs and the sound of his footsteps had died away in silence, Gelsomina raised her head with an air of triumph, and said: “I have nicely made that ugly gentleman, whom Saint Januarius confounds, look back into his pupil; I am sure that nothing untoward will happen to me.” Paul slept badly and with a restless sleep; he was tormented by all sorts of bizarre dreams relating to the ideas which had preoccupied his waking hours: he saw himself surrounded by grimacing and monstrous figures, expressing hatred, anger and fear; then the figures vanished; Long, thin, bony fingers, with gnarled phalanges, emerging from the shadows and reddened with an infernal brightness, threatened him by making cabalistic signs; the nails of these fingers, curving into tiger claws, vulture talons, approached more and more his face and seemed to seek to empty the sockets of his eyes. By a supreme effort, he managed to spread these hands, fluttering on bat wings; but the hooked hands were succeeded by massacres of oxen, buffaloes and deer, whitened skulls animated by a dead life, which assailed him with their horns and antlers and forced him to throw himself into the sea, where he tore his body on a forest of coral with pointed or bifurcated branches;—a wave brought him back to the shore, crushed, broken, half dead; and, like Lord Byron’s Don Juan, he glimpsed through his swoon a charming head leaning towards him;—it was not Haydée, but Alicia, even more beautiful than the imaginary being created by the poet. The young girl made vain efforts to pull from the sand the body that the sea wanted to reclaim, and asked Vicè, the wild servant, for help which the latter refused her, laughing ferociously: Alicia’s arms grew tired, and Paul fell back into the abyss. These phantasmagorias, confusedly frightening, vaguely horrible, and others even more elusive, recalling the formless ghosts sketched in the opaque shadow of Goya’s aquatints, tortured the sleeper until the first light of morning; his soul, freed by the annihilation of the body, seemed to guess what his waking thought could not understand, and tried to translate his presentiments into images in the dark chamber of dreams. Paul rose, broken, worried, as if put on the trail of a misfortune hidden by these nightmares whose mystery he feared to fathom; he circled around the fatal secret, closing his eyes so as not to see and his ears so as not to hear; he had never been sadder; he even doubted Alicia; the air of happy fatuity of the Neapolitan count, the complacency with which the young girl listened to him, the approving expression of the commodore, all this came back to him in memory embellished with a thousand cruel details, drowned his heart in bitterness and added still more to his melancholy. Light has this privilege of dissipating the unease caused by nocturnal visions. Smarra, offended, fled, flapping his membranous wings, when daylight shot its golden arrows into the room through the gap in the curtains. The sun shone with a joyful radiance, the sky was clear, and on the blue of the sea glittered millions of spangles : little by little Paul became more at ease; he forgot his troublesome dreams and the strange impressions of the day before, or, if he thought about them, it was to accuse himself of extravagance. He went for a walk to Chiaja to amuse himself with the spectacle of Neapolitan petulance; the merchants shouted their wares to bizarre chants in a popular dialect, unintelligible to him who knew only Italian, with disordered gestures and a fury of action unknown in the North; but every time he stopped near a shop, the merchant assumed an alarmed air, muttered some imprecation in a low voice, and made a gesture of extending his fingers as if he wanted to stab him with his little finger and forefinger; the gossips, more daring, overwhelmed him with insults and shook their fists at him. Chapter 20. M. d’Aspremont believed, on hearing himself insulted by the populace of Chiaja, that he was the object of those crudely burlesque litanies with which fishmongers regale the well-dressed people who pass through the market; but such a lively repulsion, such a real fear was depicted in all their eyes, that he was forced to renounce this interpretation; the word _jettatore_, which had already struck his ears at the theatre of San Carlino, was again pronounced, and with a threatening expression this time; He therefore walked away slowly, no longer fixing on anything that gaze which had caused so much trouble. While skirting the houses to avoid public attention, Paul came to a second-hand book stall; he stopped there, stirred, and opened a few books, by way of countenance: he thus turned his back on the passers-by, and his face, half hidden by the pages, avoided any occasion for insult. He had thought for a moment of charging this rabble with blows from his cane; the vague superstitious terror which was beginning to take hold of him had prevented him from doing so. He remembered that, having once struck an insolent coachman with a light cane, he had caught him on the temple and killed him instantly, an involuntary murder for which he had not been consoled. After having taken and replaced several volumes in their compartment, he came across the treatise on _jettatura_ by Signor Niccolo Valetta; This title shone before his eyes in characters of flame, and the book seemed to him to have been placed there by the hand of fate; he threw it to the second-hand bookseller, who looked with a mocking air, while twirling two or three black horns mixed with the trinkets of his watch, at the six or eight pugs, the price of the volume, and ran to the hotel to lock himself in his room to begin this reading which was to clarify and fix the doubts which had obsessed him since his stay in Naples. Signor Valetta’s book is as widespread in Naples as the _Secrets of the great Albert_, the _Etteila_ or the _Key to Dreams_ can be in Paris. Valetta defines jettature, teaches by what marks one can recognize it, by what means one can protect oneself from it; he divides the jettatori into several classes, according to their degree of harmfulness, and discusses all the questions which relate to this serious matter. If he had found this book in Paris, d’Aspremont would have leafed through it distractedly like an old almanac stuffed with ridiculous stories, and would have laughed at the seriousness with which the author treated this nonsense; in the frame of mind in which he was, out of his natural environment, prepared for credulity by a host of small incidents, he read it with secret horror, like a layman spelling out in a grimoire evocations of spirits and formulas of cabal. Although he had not sought to penetrate them, the secrets of hell were revealed to him; he could no longer prevent himself from knowing them, and he was now conscious of his fatal power: he was jettatore! He had to admit it to himself: all the distinctive signs described by Valetta, he possessed them. Sometimes it happens that a man who until then had believed himself to be endowed with perfect health, opens by chance or by distraction a medical book, and, reading the pathological description of an illness, recognizes himself to be afflicted by it; illuminated by a fatal gleam, he feels at each reported symptom some obscure organ tremble painfully within him , some hidden fiber whose play escaped him, and he turns pale in understanding so near a death that he believed to be very far away.—Paul experienced a similar effect. He stood before a mirror and looked at himself with a frightening intensity: this disparate perfection, composed of beauties that are not ordinarily found together, made him resemble more than ever the fallen archangel, and shone sinisterly in the black background of the mirror; the fibrils of his eyes writhed like convulsive vipers; his eyebrows vibrated like the bow from which the fatal arrow has just escaped; the white wrinkle on his forehead was reminiscent of the scar of a thunderbolt, and in his gleaming hair seemed to blaze infernal flames; the marble-like pallor of his skin gave even more relief to each feature of this truly terrible physiognomy. Paul frightened himself: it seemed to him that the effluvia from his eyes, reflected by the mirror, came back to him like poisoned darts: imagine Medusa looking at her horrible and charming head in the wild reflection of a brazen shield. It may perhaps be objected to us that it is difficult to believe that a young man of the world, imbued with modern science, having lived in the midst of the skepticism of civilization, could have taken seriously a popular prejudice, and imagined himself to be fatally endowed with a mysterious malevolence. But we will answer that there is an irresistible magnetism in general thought, which penetrates you in spite of yourself, and against which a single will does not always fight effectively: such a person arrives in Naples, mocking the jettature, who ends up bristling with horned precautions and fleeing in terror from any individual with a suspicious eye. Paul d’Aspremont found himself in an even more serious position: he himself had the fascino, and everyone avoided him, or made in his presence the protective signs recommended by Signor Valetta. Although his reason rebelled against such an assessment, he could not help recognizing that he presented all the denouncing signs of the jettature. The human mind, even the most enlightened, always keeps a dark corner, where hideous chimeras crouch of credulity, where the bats of superstition cling. Ordinary life itself is so full of insoluble problems that the impossible becomes probable. One can believe or deny everything: from a certain point of view, the dream exists as much as reality. Paul felt himself penetrated by an immense sadness.—He was a monster!—Although endowed with the most affectionate instincts and the most benevolent nature, he carried misfortune with him;—his gaze, involuntarily charged with venom, harmed those on whom it rested, although with sympathetic intention. He had the dreadful privilege of gathering, concentrating, distilling the morbid miasmas, the dangerous electricities, the fatal influences of the atmosphere, to dart them around him. Several circumstances of his life, which until then had seemed obscure to him and which he had vaguely attributed to chance, were now illuminated with a livid light: he remembered all sorts of enigmatic misadventures, unexplained misfortunes , catastrophes without motives for which he now knew the truth; bizarre concordances were established in his mind and confirmed him in the sad opinion he had formed of himself. He went back over his life year by year; he remembered his mother who had died giving birth to him, the unfortunate end of his little school friends, the dearest of whom had been killed by falling from a tree, which he, Paul, had watched him climb; that canoe trip he had so joyously begun with two comrades, and from which he had returned alone, after unheard-of efforts to tear from the weeds the bodies of the poor children drowned by the capsizing of the boat; the assault at arms in which his foil, broken near the button and thus transformed into a sword, had so dangerously wounded his adversary—a young man whom he loved very much:—certainly, all this could be explained rationally, and Paul had done so until then; yet, what was accidental and fortuitous in these events seemed to him to depend on another cause since he became acquainted with Valetta’s book:—the fatal influence, the fascino, the jettatura—must claim their share of these catastrophes. Such a continuity of misfortunes around the same personage was not _natural_. Another more recent circumstance came back to his memory, with all its horrible details, and contributed not a little to strengthening him in his desolate belief. In London, he often went to the Queen’s Theatre, where the grace of a young English dancer had particularly struck him. Without being more enamored of her than one is of a graceful figure in a painting or engraving, he followed her with his gaze among her companions in the corps de ballet, through the whirlwind of choreographic maneuvers; he loved that sweet and melancholy face, that delicate pallor never reddened by the animation of the dance, that beautiful hair of a silky and lustrous blond, crowned, according to the role, with stars or flowers, that long gaze lost in space, those shoulders of virginal chastity quivering under the lorgnette, those legs which reluctantly raised their clouds of gauze and shone under the silk like the marble of an antique statue; each time she passed in front of the footlights, he greeted her with some small furtive sign of admiration, or armed himself with his lorgnette to see her better. One evening, the dancer, carried away by the circular flight of a waltz, skimmed more closely that sparkling line of fire which separates the ideal world from the real world in the theater; her light sylphlike draperies fluttered like dove’s wings ready to take flight. A gas lamp shot out its blue and white tongue and reached the aerial fabric. In a moment the flame surrounded the young girl, who danced for a few seconds like a will-o’-the-wisp in the midst of a red glow, and threw herself toward the wings, distraught, mad with terror, devoured alive by her burning clothes. Paul had been very painfully moved by this misfortune, which was spoken of in all the newspapers of the time, where one could find the name of the victim, if one were curious to know it. But his grief was not mixed with remorse. He attributed no part to himself in the accident, which he deplored more than anyone else. Now he was convinced that his obstinacy in pursuing her with his gaze had not been unconnected with the death of this charming creature. He considered himself her murderer; he loathed himself and wished he had never been born. This prostration was followed by a violent reaction; he began to laugh nervously, threw Valetta’s book to the devil, and cried: “Really, I am becoming an imbecile or mad! The sun of Naples must have beaten down my head. What would my friends at the club say if they learned that I had seriously agitated in my conscience this beautiful question— namely, whether or not I am a jettatore!” Paddy knocked discreetly at the door. Paul opened it, and the groom, a formal man in his department, presented him on the patent leather of his cap, apologizing for not having a silver tray, a letter from Miss Alicia. M. d’Aspremont broke the seal and read the following: “Are you sulking at me, Paul?” You didn’t come last night, and your lemon sherbet melted melancholically on the table. Until nine o’clock I kept my ears open, trying to distinguish the noise of your carriage wheels through the obstinate chirping of the crickets and the roar of the tambourines; then I had to lose all hope, and I quarreled with the commodore. Admire how fair women are! Pulcinella with her black nose, Don Limon and Donna Pangrazia have a lot of charm for you then? for I know from my police that you spent your evening at San Carlo. Of these supposedly important letters, you have not written a single one. Why not simply and simply admit that you are jealous of Count Altavilla? I thought you were more proud, and this modesty on your part touches me.—Have no fear, Mr.
d’Altavilla is too handsome, and I have no taste for Apollos with charms. I should display a superb contempt for you and tell you that I did not notice your absence; but the truth is that I found the time very long, that I was in a very bad mood, very nervous, and that I almost beat Vicè who was laughing like a madwoman—I don’t know why, for example. AW” This playful and mocking letter brought Paul’s ideas completely back to the feelings of real life. He dressed, ordered the carriage to move forward , and soon the Voltairean Scazziga cracked his whip incredulously in the ears of his beasts, who launched themselves into a gallop over the lava pavement, through the crowd still compact on the Quai de Santa Lucia. “Scazziga, what’s the matter with you? You’re going to cause some misfortune!” cried M. d’Aspremont. The coachman turned quickly to reply, and Paul’s irritated glance caught him full in the face. A stone he hadn’t seen lifted one of the front wheels, and he fell from his seat with the violence of the impact, but without letting go of the reins. Agile as a monkey, he jumped back into his seat, with a bump on his forehead as big as a hen’s egg. “The devil will I turn around now when you speak to me!” he grumbled between his teeth. Timberio, Falsacappa, and Gelsomina were right—he is a jettatore! Tomorrow I will buy a pair of horns. If it can’t do any good, it can’t do any harm.” This little incident was unpleasant to Paul; it brought him back into the magic circle from which he wanted to escape: a stone is found every day under the wheel of a carriage, a clumsy coachman lets himself fall from his seat—nothing is simpler and more vulgar. However, the _effect_ had followed the _cause_ so closely, Scazziga’s fall coincided so precisely with the _look_ he had given her, that his apprehensions returned to him: “I have a great desire,” he said to himself, “to leave this extravagant country tomorrow, where I feel my brains tossing around in my skull like a dry hazelnut in its shell. But if I confided my fears to Miss Ward, she would laugh at it, and the climate of Naples is favorable to her health.—Her health! But she was well before she met me! Never had this nest of swans balanced on the waters, which is called England, produced a whiter and rosier child! Life shone in her eyes full of light, blossomed on her fresh and satiny cheeks; rich and pure blood ran in blue veins under her transparent skin; one felt through her beauty a graceful strength! How she paled, thinned, changed under my gaze! How her delicate hands became slender! How her lively eyes were surrounded by tender shadows! One would have said that consumption placed its bony fingers on her shoulder.—In my absence, she quickly regained her vivid colors; the breath plays freely in her chest which the doctor questioned with fear; delivered from my fatal influence, she would live for many days.—Is it not I who am killing her?—The other evening, did she not experience, while I was there, such acute suffering that her cheeks discolored as if from the cold breath of death?—Do I not give her the jettatura without meaning to?—But perhaps it is also only natural.—Many young English women are predisposed to chest complaints.” These thoughts occupied Paul d’Aspremont during the journey. When he appeared on the terrace, the usual residence of Miss Ward and the Commodore, the immense horns of the Sicilian oxen, a present from the Count of Altavilla, curved their mottled crescents in the most conspicuous place. Seeing that Paul noticed them, the commodore turned blue: which was his way of blushing, for, less delicate than his niece, he had received Vicè’s confidences… Alicia, with a gesture of perfect disdain, signaled to the servant to take the horns away and fixed on Paul her beautiful eye full of love, courage and faith. “Leave them in their place,” Paul said to Vicè; “they are very beautiful.” Chapter 21. Paul’s observation on the horns given by Count Altavilla. seemed to please the commodore; Vicè smiled, showing his teeth whose separate and pointed canines shone with a fierce whiteness; Alicia, with a quick blink of her eyelid, seemed to ask her friend a question which remained unanswered. An awkward silence fell. The first minutes of a visit, even a cordial, familiar one, expected and renewed every day, are usually awkward. During the absence, even if it had only lasted a few hours, an invisible atmosphere has reformed around each of them, against which the effusion breaks. It is like a perfectly transparent mirror that allows a glimpse of the landscape and which the flight of a fly would not penetrate. There is nothing in appearance, and yet one feels the obstacle. An ulterior motive concealed by a great custom of the world preoccupied at the same time the three characters of this group, usually more at ease. The commodore twiddled his thumbs with a mechanical movement; d’Aspremont stared obstinately at the black and polished tips of the horns that he had forbidden Vicè to take, like a naturalist seeking to classify, from a fragment, an unknown species; Alicia ran her finger through the rosette of the wide ribbon that girded her muslin dressing gown, pretending to tighten the knot. It was Miss Ward who broke the ice first, with that playful freedom of young English girls, so modest and reserved, however, after marriage. “Really, Paul, you have not been very amiable lately. Is your gallantry a cold greenhouse plant that can only flourish in England, and whose development is hampered by the high temperature of this climate ? How attentive, how eager, how attentive you were , in our cottage in Lincolnshire! You approached me with your mouth set on your heart, your hand on your breast, your hair impeccably curled, ready to kneel before the idol of your soul;—such, in fact, as lovers are represented in novel vignettes. “I still love you, Alicia,” replied d’Aspremont in a deep voice, but without taking his eyes off the horns hanging from one of the ancient columns that supported the vine-leaf ceiling. “You say that in such a lugubrious tone that one would have to be a real coquettish person to believe it,” continued Miss Ward; “I imagine that what pleased you in me was my pale complexion, my diaphanousness, my Ossianic and vaporous grace; my state of suffering gave me a certain romantic charm that I have lost. ” “Alicia! You were never more beautiful. ” “Words, words, words, as Shakespeare says. I am so beautiful that you do not deign to look at me.” Indeed, M. d’Aspremont’s eyes had not once turned towards the young girl. “Come now,” she said with a great, comically exaggerated sigh, “I see I’ve become a fat, strong peasant girl, very fresh, very colored, very ruddy, without the slightest distinction, incapable of appearing at the Almacks ball, or in a book of beauties, separated from an admiring sonnet by a sheet of tissue paper. ” “Miss Ward, you take pleasure in slandering yourself,” said Paul, his eyelids lowered. “You had better confess to me frankly that I am dreadful.” “It’s your fault too, Commodore; with your chicken wings , your nuts of chops, your fillets of beef, your little glasses of Canary Island wine, your horseback rides, your sea baths, your gymnastic exercises, you have fabricated for me this fatal bourgeois health which dissipates the poetic illusions of M. d’Aspremont. ” “You torment M. d’Aspremont and you mock me,” said the Commodore, when challenged; but, certainly, the fillet of beef is substantial and Canary Island wine has never harmed anyone. —What a disappointment, my poor Paul! To leave a Nix, an elf, a Willis, and find what doctors and parents call a well-formed young person! —But listen to me, since you no longer have the courage to contemplate me, and shudder with horror. —I weigh seven ounces more than when I left England. —Eight ounces! interrupted the commodore proudly, who was caring for Alicia as the most tender mother could have done. —Is it eight ounces precisely? Terrible uncle, do you want to disenchant M. d’Aspremont forever?’ said Alicia, affecting mocking discouragement. While the young girl provoked him with these coquetries, which she would not have allowed herself, even towards her fiancé, without grave motives, M.
d’Aspremont, prey to his fixed idea and not wanting to harm Miss Ward with his fatal look, fixed his eyes on the talismanic horns or let them wander vaguely over the immense blue expanse that one sees from the top of the terrace. He wondered if it was not his duty to flee Alicia, even if he had to pass for a man without faith and without honor, and to go and end his life on some desert island where, at least, his jettature would be extinguished for lack of a human gaze to absorb it. “I see,” said Alicia, continuing her joke, “what makes you so gloomy and so serious; the date of our marriage is fixed for a month; and you shrink from the idea of becoming the husband of a poor country girl who no longer has the least elegance. I give you your word back: you can marry my friend Miss Sarah Templeton, who eats pickles and drinks vinegar to be thin!” This imagination made her laugh with that clear, silvery laugh of youth. The commodore and Paul joined frankly in her hilarity. When the last flare of her nervous gaiety had died out, she came to d’Aspremont, took him by the hand, led him to the piano placed at the corner of the terrace, and said to him, opening a music book on the music stand: “My friend, you are not talking today and, ‘what is not worth saying, one sings;’ you will therefore play your part in this duettino, the accompaniment of which is not difficult; it is almost nothing but played chords.” Paul sat down on the stool, Miss Alicia stood up beside him, so as to be able to follow the song on the score. The commodore threw back his head, stretched out his legs and assumed a pose of anticipated beatitude, for he had pretensions to dilettantism and claimed to adore music; but from the sixth measure he fell asleep the sleep of the just; a sleep which he persisted, despite the mockery of his niece, in calling an ecstasy,—although he sometimes happened to snore, a symptom of mediocre ecstasy. The duettino was a lively and light melody, in the style of Cimarosa, on words by Metastasio, and which we could not better define than by comparing it to a butterfly crossing several times a ray of sunlight. Music has the power to chase away evil spirits: after a few phrases, Paul was no longer thinking of conjuring fingers, magic horns, coral amulets; he had forgotten Signor Valetta’s terrible book and all the reveries of the jettatura. His soul rose gaily, with Alicia’s voice, in a pure and luminous air. The cicadas fell silent as if to listen, and the sea breeze which had just risen carried the notes with the petals of the flowers which had fallen from the vases onto the edge of the terrace. “My uncle sleeps like the seven sleepers in their cave. If he were not accustomed to the fact, it would be enough to offend our virtuoso pride ,” said Alicia, closing the notebook. “While he is resting, would you like to take a walk in the garden with me, Paul? I have not yet shown you my paradise.” And she took from a nail driven into one of the columns, where it hung by straps, a large straw hat from Florence. Alicia professed the most bizarre principles of horticulture; She did not want the flowers picked or the branches pruned; and what had charmed her in the villa was, as we have said, the wildly uncultivated state of the garden. The two young people made their way through the clumps of shrubs which joined up immediately after they passed. Alicia walked in front and laughed to see Paul being slashed behind her by the oleander branches she was moving. She had hardly taken twenty steps when the green hand of a branch, as if to play a vegetal prank, seized and held her straw hat , raising it so high that Paul could not catch it again. Fortunately, the foliage was dense, and the sun barely threw a few gold sequins onto the sand through the interstices of the branches. “This is my favorite retreat,” said Alicia, pointing to Paul a fragment of rock with picturesque fractures, protected by a tangle of orange trees, citrons, mastic trees, and myrtles. She sat down in a hollow cut into the shape of a seat, and beckoned Paul to kneel before her on the thick dry moss that covered the foot of the rock. “Put both your hands in mine and look me straight in the face. In a month, I will be your wife. Why do your eyes avoid mine ?” Indeed, Paul, having returned to his jettature reveries, looked away. “Are you afraid of reading a contrary or guilty thought in it? You know that my soul has been yours since the day you brought my uncle the letter of recommendation in the parlor at Richmond. I am of the race of those tender, romantic, and proud Englishwomen, who fall in a minute into a love that lasts a lifetime— perhaps longer than life—and who knows how to love knows how to die. Look deeply into mine, I desire it; do not try to lower your eyelids, do not turn away, or I will think that a gentleman who has only God to fear allows himself to be frightened by vile superstitions. Fix on me that eye that you believe so terrible and that is so sweet to me, for I see your love there, and judge if you still find me pretty enough to take me, when we are married, for a ride in Hyde Park in an open carriage. Paul, distraught, fixed on Alicia a long, passionate look and enthusiasm.—Suddenly the young girl turned pale; a stabbing pain pierced her heart like an arrowhead: it seemed as if some fiber were breaking in her chest, and she quickly raised her handkerchief to her lips. A red drop stained the fine cambric, which Alicia quickly folded back. “Oh! thank you, Paul; you have made me very happy, for I thought you no longer loved me!” Chapter 22. Alicia’s movement to hide her handkerchief could not have been so quick that M. d’Aspremont did not notice it; a dreadful pallor covered Paul’s features, for an irrefutable proof of his fatal power had just been given to him, and the most sinister ideas crossed his brain; the thought of suicide even presented itself to him; Was it not his duty to suppress, as if he were a malevolent being, and thus annihilate the involuntary cause of so much misfortune? He would have accepted for himself the hardest trials and courageously borne the weight of life; but to give death to what he loved most in the world, was that not also too horrible? The heroic young girl had mastered the sensation of pain, the result of Paul’s gaze, and which coincided so strangely with the opinions of Count Altavilla. A less firm mind might have been struck by this result, if not supernatural, at least difficult to explain; but, as we have said, Alicia’s soul was religious and not superstitious. Her unshakeable faith in what must be believed dismissed as nurse’s tales all these stories of mysterious influences, and laughed at the most deeply rooted popular prejudices. Besides, had she admitted the jettature as real, had she recognized its evident signs in Paul, her tender and proud heart would not have hesitated for a second. Paul had committed no action where the most delicate susceptibility could find cause to reprove, and Miss Ward would have preferred to fall dead under this look, supposedly so fatal, to recoil from a love accepted by her with the consent of her uncle and which was soon to crown marriage. Miss Alicia Ward resembled a little those heroines of Shakespeare, chastely bold, virginally resolute, whose sudden love is no less pure and faithful, and whom a single minute binds forever; her hand had pressed Paul’s, and no man in the world should ever again enclose it in his fingers. She regarded her life as if in chains, and her modesty would have revolted at the mere idea of another marriage. She therefore displayed a gaiety, real or so well played, that it would have deceived the most astute observer, and, picking up Paul, still kneeling at her feet, she walked him through the paths obstructed by flowers and plants of her uncultivated garden, to a place where the vegetation, as it parted, allowed a glimpse of the sea like a blue dream of infinity. This luminous serenity dispersed Paul’s dark thoughts : Alicia leaned on the young man’s arm with a trusting abandonment, as if she had already been his wife. By this pure and mute caress, insignificant on the part of any other, decisive on her own, she gave herself to him even more formally, reassuring him against his terrors, and making him understand how little the dangers with which she was threatened affected her. Although she had imposed silence first on Vicè, then on her uncle, and although Count Altavilla had not named anyone, while recommending that they guard against a bad influence, she had quickly understood that it was Paul d’Aspremont; the obscure speeches of the handsome Neapolitan could only allude to the young Frenchman. She had also seen that Paul, yielding to the prejudice so widespread in Naples, which makes a jettatore of any man with a slightly singular physiognomy, believed himself, through an inconceivable weakness of mind, to be afflicted with fascino, and turned away his loving eyes from her, for fear of harming her with a glance; to combat this beginning of a fixed idea, she had provoked the scene which we have just described, and the result of which contradicted the intention, for it anchored Paul more than ever in his fatal monomania. The two lovers returned to the terrace, where the commodore, still feeling the effects of the music, was still sleeping melodiously on his bamboo armchair. Paul took his leave, and Miss Ward, parodying the Neapolitan farewell gesture, sent him an imperceptible kiss with her fingertips , saying: “See you tomorrow, Paul, won’t you?” in a voice full of sweet caresses. Alicia was at this moment of a radiant, alarming, almost supernatural beauty, which struck her uncle, awakened with a start by Paul’s exit .
The whites of her eyes took on tones of burnished silver and made the pupils sparkle like stars of a luminous black; her cheeks were shaded at the cheekbones with an ideal pink, of a celestial purity and ardor, which no painter ever possessed on his palette; Her temples, as transparent as agate, were veined with a network of small blue threads, and all her flesh seemed penetrated by rays; one would have said that the soul came to her skin. “How beautiful you are today, Alicia! ” said the Commodore. “You spoil me, uncle ; and if I am not the proudest little girl in the three kingdoms, it is not your fault. Fortunately, I do not believe in flattery, even when disinterested. ” “Beautiful, dangerously beautiful,” the Commodore continued to himself; “she reminds me, trait for trait, of her mother, poor Nancy, who died at nineteen. Such angels cannot remain on earth: it is as if a breath lifts them and invisible wings flutter at their shoulders; it is too white, too pink, too pure, too perfect; these ethereal bodies lack the red and coarse blood of life. God, who lends them to the world for a few days, is in a hurry to take them back. This supreme brilliance saddens me like a farewell. “Well, uncle, since I am so pretty,” continued Miss Ward, who saw the commodore’s brow darken, “it is time for me to marry: the veil and the crown will suit me well. ” “Marry! Are you in such a hurry to leave your old redskin uncle, Alicia? ” “I will not leave you for that; is it not agreed with M. d’Aspremont that we shall live together? You know very well that I cannot live without you. ” “M. d’Aspremont! M. d’Aspremont!… The wedding is not yet over. ” “Has he not your word… and mine?” “Sir Joshua Ward has never failed in that. ” “He has my word, that is incontestable,” replied the commodore, evidently embarrassed. “Hasn’t the term of six months you fixed expired… a few days ago?” said Alicia, whose modest cheeks flushed even more, for this conversation, necessary at the point things had reached, frightened her sensitive delicacy. “Ah! you’ve counted the months, little girl; trust those discreet expressions! ” “I love M. d’Aspremont,” replied the young girl gravely. ” That’s the point,” said Sir Joshua Ward, who, imbued with the ideas of Vicè and Altavilla, cared little about having a jettatore for a son-in-law. “Why don’t you love another! ” “I don’t have two hearts,” said Alicia; “I will have only one love, even if, like my mother, I die at nineteen. ” “Die! Don’t use those ugly words, I beg you,” cried the commodore.
—Have you any reproach to make to M. d’Aspremont? —None, assuredly. —Has he forfeited his honor in any way? Has he once shown himself cowardly, vile, a liar, or perfidious? Has he ever insulted a woman or shrank from a man? Is his coat of arms tarnished with some secret stain? Does a young girl, when taking his arm to appear in society, have reason to blush or lower her eyes? —M. Paul d’Aspremont is a perfect gentleman; there is nothing to say about his respectability. —Believe me, uncle, that if such a motive existed, I would renounce M. d’Aspremont on the spot, and bury myself in some inaccessible retreat; but no other reason, do you understand, no other will make me break a sacred promise,’ said Miss Alicia Ward in a tone firm and gentle. The Commodore twiddled his thumbs, a habitual movement with him when he did not know what to say, and which served as a form of composure. “Why do you now show such coldness to Paul?” continued Miss Ward. “You used to have so much affection for him; you could not do without him in our cottage in Lincolnshire, and you said, as you shook his hand enough to cut off his fingers, that he was a worthy fellow, to whom you would willingly entrust the happiness of a young girl. ” “Yes, certainly, I loved him, that good Paul,” said the Commodore, moved by these memories now recalled; “but what is obscure in the fogs of England becomes clear in the sun of Naples… ” “What do you mean?” said Alicia in a trembling voice, suddenly abandoned by her vivid colors, and turned white as an alabaster statue on a tomb. “That your Paul is a jettatore. ” “What! you! uncle; You, Sir Joshua Ward, a gentleman, a Christian, a subject of Her Britannic Majesty, a former officer of the English navy, an enlightened and civilized being, who would be consulted on all things, you who have education and wisdom, who read the Bible and the Gospel every evening, you are not afraid to accuse Paul of jettature! Oh! I did not expect that from you! “My dear Alicia,” replied the commodore, “I am perhaps everything you say when it is not a question of you, but when a danger, even imaginary, threatens you, I become more superstitious than a peasant from the Abruzzi, a lazzarone from the Mole, an ostricajo from Chiaja, a servant from the Terre de Labour or even a Neapolitan count. Paul can stare at me as much as he likes with his eyes whose visual beam crosses, I will remain as calm as before the point of a sword or the barrel of a pistol. The fascino will not bite my tanned skin, tanned and reddened by all the suns of the universe. I am credulous only for you, dear niece, and I confess that I feel a cold sweat bathe my temples when the gaze of this unfortunate boy rests on you. He has no evil intentions, I know, and he loves you more than his life; but it seems to me that, under this influence, your features alter, your color disappears, and that you try to hide an acute suffering; and then I am seized with furious desires to gouge out the eyes of your M. Paul d’Aspremont, with the tips of the horns given to me by Altavilla. “Poor dear uncle,” said Alicia, moved by the warm outburst of the commander; our existences are in the hands of God: not a prince dies on his state bed, nor a sparrow on the roof under its tile, without its hour being marked up there; the fascino does nothing, and it is impiety to believe that a more or less oblique glance can have an influence. Come now, uncle, she continued, taking the familiar term of affection of the fool in King Lear, you were not speaking seriously just now; your affection for me troubled your judgment, always so sound. Wouldn’t you dare tell him, M. Paul d’Aspremont, that you are taking away your niece’s hand, which you placed in his, and that you no longer want him as a son-in-law, under the fine pretext that he is—jettatore! —By Joshua! my boss, who stopped the sun, cried the commodore, I won’t chew it out for him, that pretty Mr. Paul. I don’t care to be ridiculous, absurd, even disloyal, when it’s a matter of your health, of your life perhaps! I was engaged to a man, not to a fascinator. I promised; well, I’m breaking my promise, that’s all; if he’s not happy, I’ll make him right. ” And the commodore, exasperated, made a gesture of splitting his sides, without paying the slightest attention to the gout that was biting his toes. “Sir Joshua Ward, you won’t do that,” said Alicia with calm dignity . The commodore sank down, out of breath, into his bamboo chair and remained silent. “Well, uncle, even so, this odious and stupid accusation would be true, would it be necessary for that to reject M. d’Aspremont and make a crime of a misfortune? Have you not recognized that the evil he could produce did not depend on his will, and that never was a soul more loving, more generous and more noble? “One does not marry vampires, however good their intentions,” replied the commodore. “But all that is chimera, extravagance, superstition; what is true, unfortunately, is that Paul has been struck by these follies, which he has taken seriously; he is frightened, hallucinated; he believes in his fatal power, he is afraid of himself, and every little accident that he did not notice before, and of which today he imagines himself to be the cause, confirms in him this conviction. Is it not up to me, who am his wife before God, and who will soon be so before men—blessed by you, my dear uncle—to calm this overexcited imagination, to chase away these vain phantoms, to reassure, by my apparent and real security, this haggard anxiety, sister of monomania, and to save, by means of happiness, this beautiful troubled soul, this charming spirit in peril? “You are always right, Miss Ward,” said the commodore; “and I, whom you call wise, am only an old fool. I believe that this Vicè is a witch; she had turned my head with all her stories. As for Count Altavilla, his horns and his cabalistic trinkets seem to me now rather ridiculous. No doubt, it was a stratagem devised to make Paul reject you and marry you himself.” “It may be that Count Altavilla is in good faith,” said Miss Ward , smiling; “just now you were still of his opinion about the jettature. ” “Don’t abuse your advantages, Miss Alicia; besides, I have not yet so completely recovered from my error that I cannot fall into it again. The best thing would be to leave Naples by the first steamer to sail, and return quietly to England. When Paul no longer sees the ox horns, the stag massacres, the fingers elongated to points, the coral amulets, and all these diabolical devices, his imagination will be at rest, and I myself will forget this nonsense which almost made me break my word and commit an action unworthy of a gentleman.” “You will marry Paul, since it is agreed. You will keep for me the parlor and the ground-floor bedroom in the house at Richmond, the octagonal turret at the Lincolnshire castle, and we will live happily together.” If your health requires warmer air, we will rent a country house near Tours, or at Cannes, where Lord Brougham has a fine estate, and where these damnable superstitions of jettature are unknown, thank God.—What do you say to my plan, Alicia? —You don’t need my approval, am I not the most obedient of nieces? —Yes, when I do what you want, little mask,’ said the commodore, smiling, as he got up to return to his room. Alicia remained a few minutes longer on the terrace; but, whether this scene had caused some feverish excitement in her, or whether Paul really exercised on the young girl the influence that the commodore feared, the warm breeze, passing over her shoulders protected by a simple gauze, caused her an icy impression, and in the evening, feeling ill at ease, she asked Vicè to spread over her feet, cold and white as marble, one of those harlequin blankets that are made in Venice. Meanwhile, the fireflies twinkled in the grass, the crickets sang, and the large, yellow moon rose in the sky in a mist of heat. Chapter 23. The day after this scene, Alicia, whose night had not been good, barely touched with her lips the drink that Vicè offered her every morning, and placed it languidly on the table near her bed. She felt no pain, but she felt broken; it was more a difficulty in living than an illness, and she would have been embarrassed to accuse the symptoms to a doctor. She asked Vicè for a mirror, for a young girl is more concerned about the alteration that suffering can bring to her beauty than about suffering itself. She was extremely white; only two small spots like two Bengal rose leaves fallen on a cup of milk swam on her pallor. Her eyes shone with an unusual brilliance, lit by the last flames of fever; but the cherry of her lips was much less lively, and to bring back the color, she bit them with her little mother-of -pearl teeth.
She got up, wrapped herself in a white cashmere dressing gown, twisted a gauze scarf around her head—for, despite the heat which made the cicadas cry, she was still a little chilly—and went out onto the terrace at the usual time, so as not to arouse the ever-watchful solicitude of the commodore. She touched breakfast with the tip of her lips, although she was not hungry, but the slightest hint of uneasiness would not have failed to be attributed to Paul’s influence by Sir Joshua Ward, and that was what Alicia wanted to avoid above all else. Then, under the pretext that the brilliant daylight tired her, she retired to her room, not without having repeatedly reiterated to the Commodore, suspicious in such matters, the assurance that she was in excellent health. “Excellent… I doubt it,” said the Commodore to himself when his niece had gone. “She had pearly tints near the eye, little bright colors on the upper part of her cheeks,—just like her poor mother, who, too, claimed to have never been better.” “What is to be done? To take Paul away from her would be to kill her in another way; let nature take its course. Alicia is so young!” Yes, but it’s the youngest and the most beautiful that old Mob has it in for; she’s as jealous as a woman. If I sent for a doctor? But what can medicine do to an angel! Yet all the troublesome symptoms had disappeared… Ah! If it were you, damned Paul, whose breath made this divine flower bend, I would strangle you with my own hands. Nancy was not subject to the gaze of any jettatore, and she is dead.—If Alicia died! No, that is not possible. I have done nothing to God to make him reserve this dreadful pain for me. When that happens, I will have slept for a long time under my stone with the _Sacred to the memory of Sir Joshua Ward_, in the shadow of my native steeple. It is she who will come to weep and pray on the gray stone for the old commodore… I don’t know what ‘s wrong with me, but I am devilishly melancholy and funereal this morning! To dispel these dark thoughts, the commodore added a little Jamaican rum to the cooled tea in his cup, and had his hookah brought to him, an innocent distraction he only allowed himself in the absence of Alicia, whose delicacy might have been offended even by this light smoke mingled with perfumes. He had already bubbled the flavored water in the container and chased away a few bluish clouds before him, when Vicè appeared announcing Count Altavilla. “Sir Joshua,” said the count after the first civilities, “have you considered the request I made of you the other day? ” “I have considered it,” continued the commodore; “but, as you know, M. Paul d’Aspremont has my word. ” “No doubt; yet there are cases when a word is withdrawn; for example, when the man to whom it was given, for one reason or another, is not what one first believed him to be. —Count, speak more clearly. —It disgusts me to accuse a rival; but, from the conversation we had together, you must understand me. If you rejected M. Paul d’Aspremont, would you accept me as a son-in-law? —I certainly would; but it is not so certain that Miss Ward would be able to arrange this substitution. —She is obstinate about this Paul, and it is a little my fault, for I myself favored this boy before all these silly stories. —Pardon, Count, for the epithet, but my brain is really upside down. —Do you want your niece to die? said Altavilla in a tone of emotion and grave. “Head and blood! My niece to die!” cried the commodore, leaping from his chair and throwing back the morocco stem of his hookah. When this string was struck at Sir Joshua Ward’s, it always vibrated. “Is my niece dangerously ill?” “Don’t be so quick to alarm yourself, my lord; Miss Alicia may live, and even for a very long time. ” “Good! You had upset me. ” “But on one condition,” continued Count Altavilla: “that she never sees M. Paul d’Aspremont again. ” “Ah! there is the jettature returning to the water! Unfortunately, Miss Ward does not believe it.” —Listen to me, said Count Altavilla calmly. —When I first met Miss Alicia at the ball at the Prince of Syracuse’s, and conceived for her a passion as respectful as it was ardent, it was the sparkling health, the joy of existence, the flower of life that shone throughout her person that first struck me. Her beauty became luminous and bathed as if in an atmosphere of well-being. —This phosphorescence made her shine like a star; it extinguished Englishwomen, Russians, Italians, and I saw nothing but her. —To British distinction she joined the pure and strong grace of ancient goddesses; excuse this mythology in the descendant of a Greek colony. —It is true that she was superb! Miss Edwina O’Herty, Lady Eleonor Lilly, Mistress Jane Strangford, Princess Vera Fedorowna Bariatinski almost turned jaundice with vexation, said the enchanted commodore. “And now do you not notice that her beauty has taken on something languid, that her features are softening into morbid delicacy, that the veins in her hands are drawn bluer than they should be, that her voice has harmonica sounds of a disturbing vibration and a painful charm? The earthly element is fading away and allowing the angelic element to dominate. Miss Alicia is becoming of an ethereal perfection which, even if you were to think me material, I do not like to see in the girls of this globe.” What the count said answered so well to the secret preoccupations of Sir Joshua Ward that he remained silent for a few minutes, as if lost in a profound reverie. “All this is true; although sometimes I try to delude myself, I cannot deny it. —I have not finished, said the Count; had Miss Alicia’s health before Mr. d’Aspremont’s arrival in England given rise to any concern? —Never: she was the freshest and most cheerful child in the three kingdoms. —The presence of Mr. d’Aspremont coincides, as you see, with the sickly periods which are affecting Miss Ward’s precious health. I am not asking you, a man of the North, to add implicit faith to a belief, a prejudice, a superstition, if you will, of our southern regions, but nevertheless agree that these facts are strange and deserve your full attention… —Can’t Alicia be ill….. naturally? said the commodore, shaken by Altavilla’s captious reasoning, but restrained by a sort of English shame from adopting the popular Neapolitan belief. —Miss Ward is not ill; she is suffering from a sort of eye poisoning, and if M. d’Aspremont is not jettatore, at least he is fatal. —What can I do? She loves Paul, laughs at the jettature and claims that one cannot give such a reason to a man of honor to refuse him. —I have no right to take care of your niece, I am neither her brother, nor her relative, nor her fiancé; but if I obtained your confession, perhaps I would make an effort to tear her away from this fatal influence. Oh! fear nothing; I will not commit any extravagance;—although young, I know that one must not make a noise about the reputation of a young girl;—only allow me to keep silent about my plan. Have enough confidence in my loyalty to believe that it contains nothing that the most delicate honor cannot confess. “So you love my niece?” said the commodore. “Yes, since I love her without hope; but do you grant me license to act?
” “You are a terrible man, Count Altavilla; well! try to save Alicia in your own way, I will not find him bad, and I will even find him very good.” The count rose, bowed, returned to his carriage, and told the coachman to take him to the Hotel de Rome. Paul, his elbows on the table, his head in his hands, was plunged in the most painful reflections; he had seen the two or three red drops on Alicia’s handkerchief, and, still infatuated with his fixed idea, he reproached himself for his murderous love; he blamed himself for accepting the devotion of this beautiful young girl determined to die for him, and asked himself by what superhuman sacrifice he could repay this sublime self-denial. Paddy, the gnome-jockey, interrupted this meditation by bringing Count Altavilla’s card. “Count Altavilla! What can he want with me?” said Paul, excessively surprised. “Bring him in.” When the Neapolitan appeared on the threshold, M. d’Aspremont had already placed over his astonishment that mask of icy indifference which society people use to hide their impressions. With cold politeness he indicated an armchair to the Count, sat down himself, and waited in silence, his eyes fixed on the visitor. “Sir,” began the Count, playing with the trinkets of his watch, ” what I have to say to you is so strange, so out of place, so unseemly, that you would have the right to throw me out of the window.” Spare me this brutality, for I am ready to give you reason like a gentleman. “I’m listening, sir, except to take advantage later of the offer you make me, if your words do not suit me,” replied Paul, without a muscle of his face moving. “You are jettatore!” At these words, a green pallor suddenly invaded the face of M. d’Aspremont, a red halo encircled his eyes; his eyebrows drew together, the wrinkle on his forehead deepened, and from his pupils sprang like sulphurous lights; he half raised himself, tearing with his clenched hands the mahogany arms of the armchair. It was so terrible that Altavilla, brave as he was, seized one of the small branches of forked coral suspended from the chain of his watch, and instinctively directed its points towards his interlocutor. By a supreme effort of will, M. d’Aspremont sat down again and said: “You were right, sir; Such, indeed, is the reward that such an insult would deserve; but I will have the patience to wait for another reparation. “Believe me,” continued the Count, “that I have not offered a gentleman this affront, which can only be washed away with blood, without the gravest motives. I love Miss Alicia Ward. ” “What does that matter to me? ” “It matters very little to you, indeed, for you are loved; but I, Don Felipe Altavilla, forbid you to see Miss Alicia Ward. ” “I have no orders to receive from you. ” “I know that,” replied the Neapolitan Count; “so I do not expect you to obey me. ” “Then what is the motive that makes you act?” said Paul. “I am convinced that the fascino with which you are unfortunately endowed has a fatal influence on Miss Alicia Ward. That is an absurd idea, a prejudice worthy of the Middle Ages, which must seem profoundly ridiculous to you; I will not argue with you about it.” Your eyes turn to Miss Ward and, in spite of yourself, give her that fatal look that will kill her. I have no other way of preventing this sad outcome than to pick a German quarrel with you. In the sixteenth century, I would have had you killed by one of my mountain peasants; but today such customs are no longer in force. I thought of asking you to return to France; it was too naive: you would have laughed at this rival who would have told you to go away and leave him alone with your fiancée under the pretext of jettature.” While Count Altavilla was speaking, Paul d’Aspremont felt penetrated by a secret horror; he was then, a Christian, prey to the powers of hell, and the bad angel looked through his eyes! He sowed catastrophes, his love brought death! For a moment his reason whirled in his brain, and madness beat its wings against the inner walls of his skull. “Count, on your honor, do you think what you say?” cried d’Aspremont after a few minutes of reverie which the Neapolitan respected. “On my honor, I think so. ” “Oh! then it would be true!” said Paul in a low voice. “I am then an assassin, a demon, a vampire! I kill this celestial being, I drive this old man to despair!” And he was on the point of promising the Count not to see Alicia again; but the human respect and jealousy which awoke in his heart held his words back from his lips. “Count, I won’t hide from you that I’m going straight to Miss Ward’s. ” “I won’t take you by the collar to prevent you; you just now spared me the assault, for which I am grateful; but I will be delighted to see you tomorrow, at six o’clock in the ruins of Pompeii, in the baths, for example; it’s very comfortable there. What weapon do you prefer? You are the offended: sword, saber, or pistol? ” “We will fight with knives and blindfolded, separated by a handkerchief of which we will each hold one end. We must equalize the chances: I am a jettatore; I would only have to kill you while looking at you, Count!” Paul d’Aspremont burst into a shrill burst of laughter, pushed open a door , and disappeared. Chapter 24. Alicia had established herself in a low room of the house, the walls of which were decorated with those frescoed landscapes which, in Italy, replace wallpaper. Mats of Manila straw covered the floor. A table on which was thrown a piece of Turkish carpet and strewn with the poems of Coleridge, Shelley, Tennyson and Longfellow, a mirror with an antique frame and a few cane chairs composed all the furniture; blinds of Chinese rushes decorated with pagodas, rocks, willows, cranes and dragons, fitted to the openings and half raised, filtered a soft light; an orange branch, laden with blossoms which the fruits, as they knotted themselves, made their way familiarly into the room and stretched like a garland above Alicia’s head, shaking its perfumed snow over her. The young girl, still a little unwell, was lying on a narrow sofa near the window; two or three Moroccan cushions half raised her; the Venetian blanket chastely enveloped her feet. arranged thus, she could receive Paul without infringing the laws of English modesty. The book she had begun had slipped to the ground from Alicia’s distracted hand; her eyes swam vaguely beneath their long eyelashes and seemed to look beyond the world; she felt that almost voluptuous lassitude which follows attacks of fever, and her only occupation was chewing the orange blossoms which she picked from her bedclothes and whose bitter perfume pleased her. Is there not a Venus chewing roses, by Schiavone? What a graceful pendant a modern artist could have made to the painting by the old Venetian by representing Alicia nibbling orange blossoms! She thought of M. d’Aspremont and wondered if she would really live long enough to be his wife; not that she believed in the influence of the jettature, but she felt invaded in spite of herself by funereal presentiments: that very night, she had had a dream whose impression had not dissipated upon waking. In her dream, she was lying down, but awake, and directed her eyes towards the door of her room, sensing that _someone_ was going to appear. After two or three minutes of anxious waiting, she had seen outlined against the dark background framed by the doorframe a slender, white form, which, at first transparent and allowing, like a light mist, objects to be seen through she had grown more substantial as she moved toward the bed. The shadow was dressed in a muslin dress whose folds trailed on the ground; long spirals of black hair, half untwisted, wept down her pale face, marked by two small pink spots on the cheekbones; the flesh of the neck and chest was so white that it blended into the dress, and one could not have said where the skin ended and the fabric began; an imperceptible Venetian jaseron encircled the thin collar with a narrow line of gold; the slender, blue-veined hand held a flower—a tea rose—whose petals detached themselves and fell to the ground like tears. Alicia did not know her mother, who had died a year after giving birth to her; but very often she had stood in contemplation before a miniature whose almost vanished colors, showing the yellow tone of ivory and pale as the memory of the dead, made one think of the portrait of a shadow rather than that of a living one, and she understood that this woman who thus entered the room was Nancy Ward,—her mother.—The white dress, the belcher, the flower in her hand, the black hair, the cheeks marbled with pink, nothing was lacking,—it was indeed the miniature enlarged, developed, moving with all the reality of the dream. A tenderness mingled with terror made Alicia’s breast palpitate. She wanted to stretch out her arms to the shade, but her arms, heavy as marble, could not detach themselves from the couch on which they rested . She tried to speak, but her tongue stammered only confused syllables. Nancy, after placing the tea rose on the side table, knelt beside the bed and laid her head against Alicia’s chest, listening to the breathing of her lungs, counting the beating of her heart; the cold cheek of the shadow caused the young girl, terrified by this silent auscultation, the sensation of a piece of ice. The apparition rose, cast a sorrowful look upon the young girl, and, counting the leaves of the rose from which a few petals had still separated, she said: “There is only one left.” Then sleep had interposed its black gauze between the shadow and the sleeper, and all had merged into the night. Had the soul of her mother come to warn her and seek her? What did this mysterious phrase, which fell from the lips of the shadow, mean: “There is only one left?” Was this pale, leafless rose the symbol of her life? This strange dream with its graceful terrors and its frightening charm, this charming spectre draped in muslin and counting flower petals preoccupied the young girl’s imagination, a cloud of melancholy floated over her beautiful brow, and indefinable forebodings brushed her with their black wings. Did not this orange branch which shook its flowers over her also have a funereal meaning? Should not the little virginal stars then be blossoming under her bridal veil? Saddened and pensive, Alicia removed from her lips the flower she was biting; the flower was yellow and already withered… The hour of Mr. d’Aspremont’s visit was approaching. Miss Ward made an effort to compose herself, straightened her face, turned the curls of her hair with her fingers, adjusted the crumpled folds of her gauze scarf, and took up her book again to give herself some composure. Paul entered, and Miss Ward received him cheerfully, not wanting him to be alarmed at finding her lying down, for he would not have failed to believe himself the cause of her illness. The scene he had just had with Count Altavilla gave Paul an irritated and fierce countenance which made Vicè make the sign of conjuration, but Alicia’s affectionate smile soon dissipated the cloud. “You are not seriously ill, I hope,” he said to Miss Ward , sitting down beside her. “Oh! it’s nothing, just a little tiredness: it was sirocco yesterday, and this African wind is overwhelming me: but you will see how well I shall be in our cottage in Lincolnshire! Now that I am strong, we will each take turns rowing on the pond!” As she said these words, she could not quite suppress a little convulsive cough. M. d’Aspremont turned pale and looked away. Silence reigned for a few minutes in the room. “Paul, I have never given you anything,” Alicia continued, taking off a very simple gold ring from her already thin finger; “take this ring and wear it in memory of me; perhaps you can wear it, for you have a woman’s hand; farewell! I feel tired and would like to try to sleep; come and see me tomorrow.” Paul withdrew in a state of sorrow; Alicia’s efforts to hide her suffering had been in vain; he loved Miss Ward desperately, and he was killing her! Was not this ring she had just given him an engagement ring for the next life? He wandered along the shore half mad, dreaming of fleeing, of throwing himself into a Trappist convent and awaiting death there sitting on his coffin, without ever lifting the hood of his frock. He considered himself ungrateful and cowardly not to sacrifice his love and thus to abuse Alicia’s heroism: for she was ignorant of nothing, she knew that he was only a jettatore, as Count Altavilla affirmed, and, seized with angelic pity, she did not reject him! “Yes,” he said to himself, “this Neapolitan, this handsome count whom she disdains, is truly in love. His passion puts mine to shame: to save Alicia, he did not fear to attack me, to provoke me, a jettatore, that is to say, in his ideas, a being as formidable as a demon. While talking to me, he played with his amulets, and the gaze of that famous duellist who had laid three men on the floor, lowered before mine! Back at the Hotel de Rome, Paul wrote a few letters, made a will in which he left to Miss Alicia Ward everything he possessed, except a legacy for Paddy, and made the essential arrangements for a gallant gentleman who was to have a duel to the death the next day. He opened the rosewood boxes where his weapons were kept in the compartments lined with green serge, shuffled swords, pistols, hunting knives, and finally found two Corsican stilettos, perfectly identical, which he had bought to give to friends. They were two blades of pure steel, thick near the handle, sharp on both sides towards the point, damascened, curiously terrible and carefully mounted. Paul also chose three handkerchiefs and made a bundle of everything . Then he warned Scazziga to be ready early in the morning for an excursion into the countryside. “Oh!” he said, throwing himself fully dressed on his bed, “God grant that this combat may be fatal to me! If I had the good fortune to be killed,—Alicia would live!” Chapter 25. Pompeii, the dead city, does not wake up in the morning like living cities, and although it has half thrown off the pall of ashes that has covered it for so many centuries, even when night fades, it remains asleep on its funereal couch. The tourists of all nations who visit it during the day are at this hour still stretched out in their beds, all crushed by the fatigue of their excursions, and the dawn, rising over the ruins of the mummy-city, does not illuminate a single human face. Only the lizards, tails twitching, crawl along the walls, dart over the disjointed mosaics, without worrying about the _cave canem_ inscribed on the threshold of deserted houses, and joyfully greet the first rays of the sun. These are the inhabitants who succeeded the ancient citizens, and it seems that Pompeii was exhumed only for them. It is a strange spectacle to see in the azure and pink light of the morning this corpse of a city seized in the midst of its pleasures, its works and its civilization, and which has not undergone the slow dissolution of ordinary ruins; one involuntarily believes that the owners of these houses preserved in their smallest details are going to leave their homes in their Greek or Roman clothes; the chariots, whose ruts can be seen on the flagstones, will start rolling again; the drinkers will enter these thermopoles where the mark of the cups is still imprint on the marble of the counter. —One walks as if in a dream in the middle of the past; one reads in red letters, at the street corners, the poster for the day’s show!—only the day has passed for more than seventeen centuries.—In the nascent light of dawn, the dancers painted on the walls seem to shake their rattlesnakes, and with the tips of their white feet raise like pink foam the edge of their drapery, believing no doubt that the street lamps are being rekindled for the orgies of the triclinium; the Venuses, the Satyrs, the heroic or grotesque figures, animated by a ray, try to replace the vanished inhabitants, and to make a painted population of the dead city. The colored shadows tremble along the walls, and the mind can for a few minutes indulge in the illusion of an ancient phantasmagoria. But that day, to the great terror of the lizards, the morning serenity of Pompeii was disturbed by a strange visitor: a carriage stopped at the entrance to the Via dei Tombi; Paul got out and walked to the meeting place. He was early, and although he must have been preoccupied with something other than archaeology, he could not help, as he walked, noticing a thousand little details that he might not have noticed in a normal situation. The senses that the soul no longer watches over, and which then exercise themselves on their own, sometimes have a singular lucidity . Prisoners condemned to death, on their way to execution, distinguish a small flower between the cracks in the pavement, a number on the button of a uniform, a spelling mistake on a sign, or any other childish circumstance that takes on enormous importance for them.—M. d’Aspremont passed in front of the villa of Diomedes, the sepulchre of Mammia, the funerary hemicycles, the ancient gate of the city, the houses and shops which line the Consular Way, almost without glancing at them , and yet colorful and vivid images of these monuments arrived in his brain with perfect clarity; he saw everything, and the fluted columns coated halfway up with red or yellow stucco, and the fresco paintings, and the inscriptions traced on the walls; an advertisement for rent in the rubric had even written itself so deeply in his memory, that his lips mechanically repeated the Latin words without attaching any kind of meaning to them. Was it then the thought of the battle which absorbed Paul to this point? Not at all, he did not even think about it; his mind was elsewhere:—In the parlor at Richmond. He handed the commodore his letter of recommendation, and Miss Ward looked at him surreptitiously; She wore a white dress, and jasmine flowers starred her hair. How young, beautiful, and vivacious she was… then! The ancient baths are at the end of the Consular Way, near the Rue de la Fortune; M. d’Aspremont had no trouble finding them. He entered the vaulted room surrounded by a row of niches formed by terracotta atlases, supporting an architrave decorated with children and foliage. The marble coverings, the mosaics, the bronze tripods have disappeared. All that remains of the former splendor are the clay atlases and the bare walls like those of a tomb; a vague daylight coming from a small round window that cuts the blue of the sky into a disc, slides trembling over the broken flagstones of the pavement. It was there that the women of Pompeii came, after bathing, to dry their beautiful wet bodies, readjust their hair, put on their tunics, and smile at each other in the burnished copper of the mirrors. A scene of a very different kind was about to take place there, and blood was to flow on the ground where perfumes had once flowed. A few moments later, Count Altavilla appeared: he held in his hand a pistol box, and under his arm two swords, for he could not believe that the conditions proposed by M. Paul d’Aspremont were serious; he had seen in them only a Mephistophelean mockery, an infernal sarcasm. “Why make these pistols and these swords, Count?” said Paul, seeing this panoply; “had we not agreed on another mode of combat?” “No doubt; but I thought you might change your mind; we ‘ve never fought like this. ” “Even if our skill were equal, my position gives me too many advantages over you,” replied Paul with a bitter smile; “I don’t want to abuse it. Here are some stilettos I brought; examine them; they are perfectly alike; here are some scarves to blindfold us. ” “See, they are thick, and my gaze will not be able to pierce the fabric.” Count Altavilla nodded his assent. “We have no witnesses,” said Paul, “and one of us must not leave this cellar alive. Let us each write a note attesting to the fairness of the fight; the victor will place it on the dead man’s chest. ” “Good precaution!” replied the Neapolitan with a smile, tracing a few lines on a sheet of Paul’s notebook, who in turn completed the same formality. This done, the adversaries took off their clothes, blindfolded themselves , armed themselves with their stilettos, and each seized one end of the handkerchief, the terrible link between their hatreds. “Are you ready?” said M. d’Aspremont to Count Altavilla. “Yes,” replied the Neapolitan in a perfectly calm voice. Don Felipe Altavilla was of tried and tested bravery; he feared nothing in the world but the jettature, and this blind combat, which would have made any other shiver with terror, did not cause him the least trouble; he was thus only gambling his life on a coin, and did not have the unpleasantness of seeing the wild eye of his adversary dart its yellow gaze upon him. The two combatants brandished their knives, and the handkerchief which bound them together in this thick darkness stretched tightly. By an instinctive movement, Paul and the Count had thrown their torsos back, the only possible defense in this strange duel; their arms fell without having reached anything other than the void. This obscure struggle, in which each sensed death without seeing it coming, had a horrible character. Fierce and silent, the two adversaries retreated, turned, jumped, sometimes collided , missing or exceeding the goal; one could only hear the stamping of their feet and the panting breath of their chests. Once Altavilla felt the point of his stiletto strike something ; he stopped, believing he had killed his rival, and waited for the body to fall:—he had only struck the wall! “Pardieu! I thought I had pierced you through and through,” he said, putting himself back on guard. “Don’t speak,” said Paul, “your voice guides me.” And the combat began again. Suddenly the two adversaries felt themselves detached.—A blow from Paul’s stiletto had cut the scarf. “Truce!” cried the Neapolitan; “we can’t stand it any longer, the handkerchief is cut.
” “What does it matter! Let’s continue,” said Paul. A gloomy silence fell. As loyal enemies, neither M. d’Aspremont nor the count wanted to take advantage of the indications given by their exchange of words. They took a few steps to divert, and began to look for each other again in the shadows. M. d’Aspremont’s foot moved a small stone; this slight shock revealed to the Neapolitan, waving his knife at random, which way he should walk. Raising himself on his haunches to gain more momentum, Altavilla sprang forward with a tiger’s leap and encountered M. d’Aspremont’s stiletto . Paul touched the point of his weapon and felt it wet… uncertain footsteps echoed heavily on the flagstones; a heavy sigh was heard and a body fell all at once to the ground. Filled with horror, Paul pulled down the blindfold that covered his eyes, and he saw Count Altavilla, pale, motionless, lying on his back, his shirt stained with a large red patch over his heart. The handsome Neapolitan was dead! M. d’Aspremont placed on Altavilla’s chest the note that attested to the loyalty of the duel, and the criminal whom Prud’hon had pursued by the vengeful Erynnis came out of the ancient baths, paler in broad daylight than in the moonlight . Chapter 26. Around two o’clock in the afternoon, a group of English tourists, guided by a guide, were visiting the ruins of Pompeii; the island tribe, composed of the father, the mother, three grown-up daughters, two little boys, and a cousin, had already looked over with a cold, glaucous eye, in which one could read that profound boredom which characterizes the British race, the amphitheater, the theater of tragedy and song, so curiously juxtaposed; the military quarter, sketched with caricatures by the idleness of the guardhouse; the Forum, surprised in the middle of a repair, the basilica, the temples of Venus and Jupiter, the Pantheon, and the shops which lined them. All followed in silence in their Murrays the talkative explanations of the guide and barely glanced at the columns, the fragments of statues, the mosaics, the frescoes, and the inscriptions. They finally arrived at the ancient baths, discovered in 1824, as the guide had pointed out to them. “Here were the steam rooms, there the water-heating oven, further on the room with a moderate temperature.” These details, given in Neapolitan dialect mixed with a few English endings, seemed to be of little interest to the visitors, who were already turning around to leave, when Miss Ethelwina, the eldest of the young ladies, a young woman with stringy blond hair and freckled skin , took two steps back, with a look of shock, half fear, and cried: “A man! ” “It will no doubt be some worker from the excavations who has found the place suitable for a nap; there is coolness and shade under this vault: have no fear, mademoiselle,” said the guide, pushing the body lying on the ground with his foot. “Hey! Wake up, lazybones, and let Their Lordships pass.” The supposed sleeper did not move. “It’s not a sleeping man, it’s a dead man,” said one of the young boys, who, given his small size, could better distinguish the corpse’s appearance in the darkness . The guide bent over the body and rose abruptly, his features distraught. “A murdered man!” he cried. “Oh! it is really unpleasant to be in the presence of such objects; stand aside, Ethelwina, Kitty, Bess,” said Mrs. Bracebridge, ” it is not fitting for well-bred young ladies to look upon such an improper spectacle. Are there no police in this country? The coroner ought to have raised the body. ” “A paper!” said the cousin laconically, stiff, long, and embarrassed like the Laird of Dumbidike in Edinburgh Gaol. “Indeed,” said the guide, taking the note from Altavilla’s chest, “a piece of paper with a few lines of writing on it. ” “Read,” said the islanders in chorus, their curiosity aroused. “Let no one be sought or troubled about my death. If this note is found on my wound, I will have succumbed in a fair duel. ” “Signed,” said FELIPE, Count D’ALTAVILLA. ” He was a proper man; what a pity!” sighed Mrs. Bracebridge, impressed by the dead man’s countship. “And a handsome fellow,” murmured Ethelwina, the freckled maiden, in a low voice . “You will no longer complain,” said Bess to Kitty, “of the lack of unforeseen circumstances in travel: we were not, it is true, stopped by brigands on the road from Terracina to Fondi; but a young nobleman pierced with a stiletto in the ruins of Pompeii, that’s an adventure.” There is doubtless a rivalry of love beneath this;—at least we shall have something Italian, picturesque, and romantic to tell our friends. I will make a drawing of the scene in my album, and you will add to the sketch some mysterious stanzas in the style of Byron. —It is all the same, said the guide, the blow is well delivered, from bottom to top, in all the rules; there is nothing to say. Such was the funeral oration of Count Altavilla. Some workmen, warned by the guide, went to seek justice, and the body of poor Altavilla was carried back to his castle, near Salerno. As for M. d’Aspremont, he had returned to his carriage, his eyes open like a sleepwalker and seeing nothing. He looked like a walking statue. Although he had felt at the sight of the corpse that religious horror that death inspires, he did not feel guilty, and remorse played no part in his despair. Provoked in such a way that he could not refuse, he had accepted this duel only with the hope of leaving behind a life that was henceforth odious. Gifted with a baleful gaze, he had wanted a blind fight so that fate alone would be responsible. His own hand had not struck; his enemy had become bogged down! He pitied Count Altavilla as if he had been a stranger to his death. “It was my stiletto that killed him,” he said to himself, “but if I had looked at him at a ball, a chandelier would have come loose from the ceiling and split his head open.” I am as innocent as lightning, as the avalanche, as the manchineel tree, as all destructive and unconscious forces. My will has never been malevolent, my heart is only love and benevolence, but I know that I am harmful. Thunder does not know that it kills; I, man, an intelligent creature, do I not have a severe duty to fulfill towards myself? I must summon myself to my own tribunal and question myself. Can I remain on this earth where I cause only misfortunes? Would God damn me if I killed myself out of love for my fellow men? A terrible and profound question that I dare not resolve; it seems to me that, in the position in which I am, voluntary death is excusable. But what if I were mistaken? for eternity, I would be deprived of the sight of Alicia, whom I could then look at without harming her, for the eyes of the soul do not have the fascino.—It is a chance I do not want to run.” A sudden idea crossed the brain of the unfortunate jettatore and interrupted his interior monologue. His features relaxed; the immutable serenity which follows great resolutions unwrinkled his pale brow: he had taken a supreme decision. “Be condemned, my eyes, since you are murderers; but, before closing yourselves forever, saturate yourselves with light, contemplate the sun, the blue sky, the immense sea, the azure chains of mountains, the verdant trees, the indefinite horizons, the colonnades of the palaces, the fisherman’s hut, the distant islands of the gulf, the white sail skimming the abyss, Vesuvius, with its plume of smoke; Look, to remember them, at all these charming aspects that you will never see again; study each form and each color, give yourself one last feast. For today, fatal or not, you can dwell on everything; intoxicate yourself with the splendid spectacle of creation! Go, see, take a walk. The curtain is about to fall between you and the decor of the universe! The carriage, at that moment, was skirting the shore; the radiant bay sparkled, the sky seemed carved from a single sapphire; a splendor of beauty clothed everything. Paul told Scazziga to stop; he got out, sat on a rock and looked for a long, long, long time, as if he wanted to monopolize infinity. His eyes were drowning in space and light, turning back as if in ecstasy, soaking up the glimmers, soaking up the sun! The night that was to follow was to have no dawn for him. Tearing himself away from this silent contemplation, Mr. d’Aspremont got back into his carriage and went to Miss Alicia Ward’s. She was, as the day before, lying on her narrow sofa in the low room we have already described. Paul placed himself opposite her, and this time did not keep his eyes lowered towards the ground, as he had done since he had acquired the consciousness of his jettature. Alicia’s perfect beauty was spiritualized by suffering: the woman had almost disappeared to make way for the angel: her flesh was transparent, ethereal, luminous; one could see the soul through it like a glow in an alabaster lamp. Her eyes had the infinity of the sky and the scintillation of the star; life barely put its red signature on the incarnate of her lips. A divine smile lit up her mouth, like a ray of sunlight illuminating a rose, when she saw her fiancé’s gaze envelop her in a long caress. She thought that Paul had finally banished his fatal ideas of jettature and was returning to her, happy and confident as in the first days, and she held out her pale and slender little hand to M. d’Aspremont, who kept it . “So I don’t frighten you anymore?” she said with gentle mockery to Paul, who still kept his eyes fixed on her. “Oh! let me look at you,” replied M. d’Aspremont in a singular tone of voice, kneeling beside the sofa; “let me be intoxicated by this ineffable beauty!” and he avidly contemplated Alicia’s lustrous black hair , her beautiful forehead as pure as Greek marble, her eyes as blue-black as the azure of a beautiful night, her nose so finely cut, her mouth whose pearls were half revealed in a languid smile , her undulating and flexible swan’s neck, and seemed to note each feature, each detail, each perfection like a painter who would paint a portrait from memory; he was satiated with the adored aspect, he was stocking up on memories, stopping the profiles, going over the contours. Under this ardent gaze, Alicia, fascinated and charmed, experienced a sensation voluptuously painful, agreeably mortal; her life exalted and vanished; she blushed and paled, became cold, then burning. —One more minute, and her soul would have left her. She put her hand over Paul’s eyes, but the young man’s gaze pierced Alicia’s transparent and frail fingers like a flame . “Now my eyes may go out, I will always see her in my heart,” said Paul, getting up. In the evening, after watching the sunset—the last he was to see—M. d’Aspremont, on returning to the Hôtel de Rome, had a stove and some coal brought to him. “Does he want to suffocate himself?” said Vergilio Falsacappa to himself, giving Paddy what he had asked for on behalf of his master; “it’s the best he could do, that cursed jettatore!” Alicia’s fiancé opened the window, contrary to Falsacappa’s conjecture, lit the coals, plunged the blade of a dagger into them, and waited for the iron to become red-hot. The thin blade, among the incandescent embers, soon reached the white red; Paul, as if to take leave of himself, leaned on the mantelpiece in front of a large mirror where the light of a torch with several candles was projected ; he looked at this kind of spectre that was himself, this envelope of his thought that he was never to see again, with a melancholy curiosity: “Farewell, pale phantom that I have carried for so many years through life, failed and sinister form where beauty is mingled with horror, clay sealed on the brow with a fatal seal, convulsed mask of a sweet and tender soul! You will disappear forever for me: alive, I plunge you into eternal darkness, and soon I will have forgotten you like the dream of a stormy night. You may say in vain, miserable body, to my inflexible will: “Hubert, Hubert, my poor eyes!” you will not soften it. “Come, to work, victim and executioner!” And he moved away from the fireplace to sit on the edge of his bed. With his breath, he fanned the coals of the stove on a nearby side table, and seized the handle of the blade from which white sparks were escaping, crackling. At this supreme moment, whatever his resolution, M. d’Aspremont felt as if he were about to faint: a cold sweat bathed his temples; but he quickly overcame this purely physical hesitation and brought the burning iron to his eyes. A sharp, stabbing, intolerable pain almost made him cry out ; it seemed to him that two jets of molten lead were penetrating his eyes to the very bottom of his skull; he let the dagger fall, which rolled on the floor and made a brown mark on the parquet floor. A thick, opaque shadow, beside which the darkest night is a splendid day, hooded him with its black veil; he turned head towards the fireplace on which the candles must still be burning; he saw only dense, impenetrable darkness, where not even those vague glimmers trembled which seers still perceive, with closed eyelids, when they are in front of a light. – The sacrifice was consummated! “Now,” said Paul, “noble and charming creature, I can become your husband without being an assassin. You will no longer waste away heroically under my fatal gaze: you will regain your beautiful health; alas! I will no longer see you, but your celestial image will radiate with an immortal brilliance in my memory; I will see you with the eye of the soul, I will hear your voice more harmonious than the sweetest music, I will feel the air displaced by movements, I will grasp the silky rustle of your dress, the imperceptible creaking of your boot, I will breathe in the light perfume which emanates from you and makes you like an atmosphere. Sometimes you will leave your hand between mine to convince me of your presence, you will deign to guide your poor blind man when his foot hesitates on its dark path; you will read the poets to him, you will tell him about the paintings and the statues. With your words, you will restore to him the vanished universe; you will be his only thought, his only dream; deprived of the distraction of things and the dazzling light, his soul will fly to you with an indefatigable wing! “I regret nothing, since you are saved: what have I lost, in fact? The monotonous spectacle of the seasons and the days, the sight of the more or less picturesque decorations where the hundred different acts of the sad human comedy unfold. —The earth, the sky, the waters, the mountains, the trees, the flowers: vain appearances, tedious repetitions, forms always the same! When one has love, one possesses the true sun, the clarity that does not fade!” Thus spoke the unfortunate Paul d’Aspremont in his interior monologue , feverish with a lyrical exaltation sometimes mingled with the delirium of suffering. Little by little his pains subsided; he fell into that black sleep, brother of death and consoler like it. The day, on entering the room, did not wake him. Midday and midnight were henceforth to have the same color for him; but the bells ringing the Angelus with joyous peals buzzed vaguely through his sleep, and, little by little becoming more distinct, roused him from his slumber. He lifted his eyelids, and, before his still sleeping soul had remembered, he had a horrible sensation. His eyes opened on emptiness , on blackness, on nothingness, as if, buried alive, he had awakened from lethargy in a coffin; but he recovered very quickly. Would it not always be like this? Shouldn’t he pass, every morning, from the darkness of sleep to the darkness of wakefulness? He groped for the bell-rope. Paddy ran up. As he expressed his astonishment at seeing his master get up with the uncertain movements of a blind man: “I was imprudent enough to sleep with the window open,” Paul said to him, to cut short any explanation, “and I think I caught a quiet drop, but it will pass; take me to my armchair and put a glass of cold water near me.” Paddy, who had a very English discretion, made no remark, carried out his master’s orders, and withdrew. Left alone, Paul dipped his handkerchief in cold water and held it over his eyes to dampen the stinging pain. Let us leave M. d’Aspremont in his painful immobility and concern ourselves a little with the other characters in our story. The news of Count Altavilla’s strange death had quickly spread throughout Naples and served as a theme for a thousand conjectures, each more extravagant than the last. The Count’s skill at fencing was famous; Altavilla was considered one of the best marksmen of that Neapolitan school, so formidable in the field; he had killed three men and seriously wounded five or six. His reputation was so well established in this field that he no longer fought. The most aloof duelists greeted him politely and, even if he had looked at them askance, avoided stepping on his foot. If one of these braggarts had killed Altavilla, he would not have failed to take pride in such a victory. There remained the supposition of an assassination, which was ruled out by the note found on the dead man’s chest. The authenticity of the writing was initially contested; but the Count’s hand was recognized by people who had received more than a hundred letters from him. The circumstance of the blindfold, for the corpse still wore a scarf tied around its head, still seemed inexplicable. Besides the stiletto stuck in the Count’s chest, a second stiletto was found , probably having slipped from his failing hand: but if the fight had been with a knife, why these swords and pistols that were recognized as having belonged to the Count, whose coachman declared that he had brought his master to Pompeii, with orders to return if he did not reappear within an hour? It was enough to make one lose oneself. The news of this death soon reached the ears of Vicè, who informed Sir Joshua Ward. The commodore, who immediately remembered the mysterious conversation that Altavilla had had with him about Alicia, had a confused glimpse of some dark attempt, some horrible and desperate struggle in which M. d’Aspremont must have been involved, voluntarily or involuntarily. As for Vicè, she did not hesitate to attribute the death of the handsome count to the villainous jettatore, and in this her hatred served her like a second sight. However, M. d’Aspremont had paid his visit to Miss Ward at the usual time, and nothing in his countenance betrayed the emotion of a terrible tragedy, he even seemed calmer than usual. This death was hidden from Miss Ward, whose condition was becoming worrying, without the English doctor summoned by Sir Joshua being able to ascertain any clearly defined illness: it was like a sort of fainting of life, a palpitation of the soul beating its wings to take flight, a suffocation of a bird under the pneumatic machine, rather than a real illness, possible to treat by ordinary means. One would have said an angel held on earth and nostalgic for heaven; Alicia’s beauty was so suave, so delicate, so diaphanous, so immaterial, that the gross human atmosphere must no longer have been breathable for her; one imagined her hovering in the golden light of Paradise, and the little lace pillow that supported her head shone like a halo. She resembled, on her bed, that lovely Virgin of Schoorel, the finest jewel in the crown of Gothic art. M. d’Aspremont did not come that day: to hide his sacrifice, he did not want to appear with reddened eyelids, reserving to attribute his sudden blindness to an entirely different cause. The next day, no longer feeling any pain, he climbed into his carriage, guided by his groom Paddy. The carriage stopped as usual at the openwork door. The wilfully blind man pushed it, and, testing the ground with his foot, entered the familiar alley. Vicè had not run up as usual at the sound of the bell set in motion by the door spring; none of those thousand little joyful noises which are like the breathing of a living house reached Paul’s attentive ear; a gloomy, profound, frightening silence reigned in the dwelling, which one might have thought abandoned. This silence, which would have been sinister even for a clear-sighted man, became even more gloomy in the darkness which enveloped the newly blind man. The branches which he could no longer distinguish seemed to want to hold him back like supplicating arms and prevent him from going any further. The laurels barred his way; the rosebushes clung to his clothes, the vines caught his legs, the garden said to him in its mute language: “Unhappy man! What are you doing here? Don’t force the obstacles I put in your way. Go away!” But Paul did not listen, and tormented by terrible forebodings, rolled in the foliage, pushing away the masses of greenery, broke the branches and always advanced towards the house. Torn and bruised by the irritated branches, he finally arrived at the end of the path. A gust of fresh air struck him in the face, and he continued on his way with his hands outstretched in front. He encountered the wall and found the door by groping. He entered; no friendly voice welcomed him. Hearing no sound that could guide him, he remained for a few minutes hesitating on the threshold. A scent of ether, an exhalation of aromatics, a smell of burning wax, all the vague perfumes of the mortuary chambers seized the sense of smell of the blind man panting with terror; a dreadful idea presented itself to his mind, and he entered the room. After a few steps, he struck something which fell with a loud noise; He bent down and recognized by touch that it was a metal candlestick like church torches and carrying a long taper. Distraught, he continued his journey through the darkness. He seemed to hear a voice murmuring prayers in a low voice; he took another step , and his hands encountered the edge of a bed; he bent down, and his trembling fingers first brushed against a motionless, upright body under a fine tunic; then a crown of roses and a face as pure and cold as marble. It was Alicia lying on her funeral couch. “Dead!” cried Paul with a strangled gasp! “Dead! And it was I who killed her!” The commodore, frozen with horror, had seen this ghost with dull eyes come staggering in, wander at random, and stumble upon his niece’s deathbed : he understood everything. The greatness of this useless sacrifice brought two tears to the reddened eyes of the old man, who thought he could cry no more. Paul threw himself on his knees beside the bed and covered Alicia’s icy hand with kisses; sobs shook his body in convulsive fits. His grief softened even the ferocious Vicè, who stood silent and somber against the wall, watching over her mistress’s last sleep . When these silent farewells were over, M. d’Aspremont got up and went to the door, stiff, all of a piece, like an automaton moved by springs; his open and fixed eyes, with their dull pupils, had a supernatural expression; although blind, one would have said that they saw. He crossed the garden with a heavy step like that of marble apparitions, went out into the countryside and walked ahead , disturbing the stones with his foot, stumbling sometimes, listening as if to catch a distant noise, but always advancing. The great voice of the sea resounded more and more distinctly; the waves, raised by a stormy wind, broke on the shore with immense sobs, an expression of unknown pain, and swelled, beneath the folds of the foam, their desperate breasts; millions of bitter tears streamed over the rocks, and the worried gulls uttered plaintive cries. Paul soon arrived at the edge of an overhanging rock. The crashing of the waves, the salt rain that the gust tore from the waves and threw in his face should have warned him of the danger; he took no notice of it; a strange smile twisted his pale lips, and he continued his sinister march , although feeling the emptiness beneath his suspended foot. He fell; a monstrous wave seized him, twisted him for a few moments in its spiral, and engulfed him. The storm then burst forth with fury: the waves assailed the beach in hurried files, like warriors mounting an assault, and hurling plumes of foam fifty feet into the air; the black clouds cracked like walls of hell, revealing through their fissures the fiery furnace of lightning; blinding sulphurous flashes illuminated the expanse; the summit of Vesuvius reddened, and a plume of dark vapor, driven back by the wind, undulated on the brow of the volcano. The moored boats clashed with lugubrious noises, and the over-taut ropes complained painfully. Soon the The rain fell, making its hatchings whistle like arrows—one would have said that chaos wanted to reclaim nature and confuse its elements once more. The body of Mr. Paul d’Aspremont was never found, despite the searches that the Commodore made. An ebony coffin with silver clasps and handles, lined with padded satin, and such as the one whose details Miss Clarisse Harlowe commends with such touching grace “to the carpenter,” was taken on board a yacht by the Commodore’s care, and placed in the family tomb of the Lincolnshire cottage. It contained the earthly remains of Alicia Ward, beautiful even in death. As for the Commodore, a remarkable change has taken place in his person. His glorious plumpness has disappeared. He no longer puts rum in his tea, eats with the tips of his teeth, barely says two words in a day, the contrast between his white whiskers and his crimson face no longer exists—the commodore has grown pale! ARRIA MARCELLA SOUVENIR DE POMPEÏ Three young people, three friends who had traveled to Italy together, visited last year the Studi Museum in Naples, where the various antique objects unearthed from the excavations of Pompeii and Herculaneum had been brought together . They had spread out through the rooms and were looking at the mosaics, bronzes, and frescoes detached from the walls of the dead city, as their whims scattered them, and when one of them had made a curious discovery, he would call his companions with cries of joy, to the great scandal of the taciturn English and the sedate bourgeois busy leafing through their booklets. But the youngest of the three, stopped in front of a shop window, seemed not to hear the exclamations of his comrades, absorbed as he was in deep contemplation. What he was examining with such attention was a piece of coagulated black ash bearing a hollow imprint: it looked like a fragment of a statue mold, broken by the melting; the practiced eye of an artist would easily have recognized the cross-section of an admirable breast and a flank as pure in style as that of a Greek statue. It is known, and the least traveler’s guide tells you, that this lava, cooled around the body of a woman, has retained its charming contour. Thanks to the whim of the eruption which destroyed four cities, this noble form, fallen to dust for almost two thousand years, has come down to us; the roundness of a throat has crossed the centuries when so many vanished empires have left no trace! This stamp of beauty, placed by chance on the scoria of a volcano, has not been erased. Seeing that he persisted in his contemplation, Octavian’s two friends returned to him, and Max, touching him on the shoulder, made him start like a man surprised in his secret. Obviously Octavian had heard neither Max nor Fabio coming. “Come now, Octavian,” said Max, “don’t stop like this for hours at each cupboard, or we’ll miss the train time, and we won’t see Pompeii today. ” “What is the comrade looking at?” added Fabio, who had come closer. Ah! the imprint found in the house of Arrius Diomedes. And he cast a quick and singular glance at Octavian. Octavian blushed faintly, took Max’s arm, and the visit ended without further incident. Leaving the Studj, the three friends climbed into a corricolo and were taken to the railway station. The corricolo, with its large red wheels, its strapontin studded with copper nails, its lean and fiery horse, harnessed like a Spanish mule, galloping over the wide lava slabs, is too well known for it to be necessary to describe it here, and besides, we are not writing impressions of a trip to Naples, but the simple account of a bizarre and unbelievable, though true, adventure. The railway by which one goes to Pompeii almost always runs along the sea, whose long swirls of foam unfurl on a sand blackish, resembling sifted coal. This shore, in fact, is formed of lava flows and volcanic ash, and produces, by its dark tone, a contrast with the blue of the sky and the blue of the water; among all this brilliance, the earth alone seems to retain the shadow. The villages that one passes through or passes by, Portici, made famous by the opera of M. Auber, Resina, Torre del Greco, Torre dell’Annunziata, whose arcaded houses and terraced roofs one glimpses as one passes, have, despite the intensity of the sun and the southern whitewash, something plutonian and ferruginous like Manchester and Birmingham; the dust there is black, an impalpable soot clings to everything; one feels that the great forge of Vesuvius is panting and smoking just a stone’s throw away. The three friends got off at the Pompeii station, laughing among themselves at the mixture of ancient and modern that these words: Pompeii Station naturally present to the mind. A Greco-Roman city and a railway landing stage! They crossed the field planted with cotton trees, over which fluttered a few white wads, which separates the railway from the site of the unearthed city, and took a guide at the osteria built outside the ancient walls, or, to speak more correctly, a guide took them. A calamity that is difficult to avert in Italy. It was one of those happy days so common in Naples, when, thanks to the brightness of the sun and the transparency of the air, objects take on colors that seem fabulous in the North, and seem to belong more to the world of dreams than to that of reality. Whoever has once seen this light of gold and azure carries away with them, deep in their mist, an incurable nostalgia for it. The resurrected city, having shaken off a corner of its shroud of ashes, stood out with its thousand details in a blinding light. Vesuvius cut out in the background its cone furrowed with streaks of blue, pink, violet lava, bronzed by the sun. A light mist, almost imperceptible in the light, hooded the peaked crest of the mountain; at first glance, one could have taken it for one of those clouds which, even in the most serene weather, blur the front of high peaks. On closer inspection, one saw thin threads of white vapor issuing from the top of the mountain like holes in a casserole, and then reuniting into a light mist. The volcano, in a good-natured mood that day, smoked its pipe quite calmly, and without the example of Pompeii buried at its feet, one would not have believed it to be of a more ferocious character than Montmartre; On the other side, beautiful hills with undulating and voluptuous lines like a woman’s hips , stopped the horizon; and further away the sea, which formerly brought biremes and triremes under the ramparts of the city, drew its placid azure bar. The aspect of Pompeii is most surprising; this sudden leap of nineteen centuries backward astonishes even the most prosaic and least understanding natures, two steps take you from ancient life to modern life, and from Christianity to paganism; also, when the three friends saw these streets where the forms of a vanished existence are preserved intact, they experienced, however prepared they were by books and drawings, an impression as strange as it was profound. Octavian especially seemed struck dumb and mechanically followed the guide with a sleepwalking gait, without listening to the monotonous, memorized nomenclature that this scoundrel rattled off like a lesson. He looked with a terrified eye at the cart ruts dug into the cyclopean paving of the streets, which seemed to date from yesterday, so fresh was their imprint; at the inscriptions traced in red letters, with a cursive brush, on the walls: playbills , rental applications, votive formulas, signs, announcements of all kinds, curious as would be in two thousand years, for the unknown peoples of the future, a section of Parisian wall found with its posters and placards; at the houses with collapsed roofs allowing all these interior mysteries to penetrate at a glance, all these domestic details that historians neglect and whose secrets civilizations take away with them; these fountains barely dried up, this forum surprised in the middle of a repair by the catastrophe, and whose columns, the architraves all cut, all sculpted, await in their purity of edge to be put in place; these temples dedicated to gods passed to the mythological state and which then did not have an atheist; these shops where only the merchant is missing; these taverns where one can still see on the marble the circular stain left by the drinkers’ cups; this barracks with columns painted in ochre and red lead that the soldiers have scratched with caricatures of combatants, and these double theaters of drama and song juxtaposed, which could resume their performances, if the troupe that served them, reduced to the state of clay, were not occupied, perhaps, in lugging the bung of a barrel of beer or in stopping a crack in the wall, like the dust of Alexander and Caesar, according to the melancholy reflection of Hamlet. Fabio climbed onto the thymelé of the tragic theater while Octavian and Max climbed to the top of the stands, and there he began to recite with forceful gestures the pieces of poetry that came to his head, to the great fright of the lizards, who scattered, wagging their tails and crouching in the cracks of the ruined foundations; and although the bronze or earthenware vessels intended to reverberate the sounds no longer existed, his voice nonetheless resonated full and vibrant. The guide then led them through the crops that cover the parts of Pompeii still buried, to the amphitheater, located at the other end of the city. They walked under those trees whose roots plunge into the roofs of the buried buildings, tearing the tiles apart, splitting the ceilings, dislocating the columns, and passed through those fields where common vegetables bear fruit on marvels of art, material images of the oblivion that time unfolds over the most beautiful things. The amphitheater did not surprise them. They had seen the one in Verona, larger and just as well preserved, and they knew the layout of these ancient arenas as familiarly as that of the bullrings in Spain, which are very similar, minus the solidity of the construction and the beauty of the materials. They retraced their steps, reached the Rue de la Fortune by a side road, listening with a distracted ear to the guide, who, as he passed each house, named it by the name given to it upon its discovery, according to some characteristic feature: the house of the Bronze Bull, the house of the Faun, the house of the Vessel, the temple of Fortune, the house of Meleager, the tavern of Fortune at the corner of the Rue Consulaire, the Academy of Music, the Communal Oven, the Pharmacy, the Surgeon’s shop, the Customs House, the dwelling of the Vestals, the inn of Albinus, the Thermopoles, and so on until they reached the gate leading to the Via del Tombo. This brick gate, covered with statues, and whose ornaments have disappeared, has in its interior arch two deep grooves intended to allow a portcullis to slide through, like a medieval dungeon which one would have thought to have this particular kind of defense. “Who would have suspected,” Max said to his friends, “Pompeii, the Greco-Latin city, of such a romantically Gothic enclosure? Can you imagine a belated Roman knight blowing his horn before this gate to have the portcullis raised, like a page from the fifteenth century? ” “Nothing is new under the sun,” replied Fabio, “and this aphorism itself is not new, since it was formulated by Solomon. ” “Perhaps there is something new under the moon!” continued Octavian, smiling with melancholy irony. “My dear Octavian,” said Max, who during this little conversation had stopped in front of an inscription traced in the rubric on the outer wall, “do you want to see some gladiatorial combats?” “Here the posters:—Combat and hunting for the 5th of the nones of April,—the masts will be raised,—twenty pairs of gladiators will fight at the nones,—and if you fear for the freshness of your complexion, rest assured, the sails will be set;—unless you prefer to go to the amphitheater early , they will cut each other’s throats in the morning—_matutini erunt_; we are no more accommodating.” Conversing in this way, the three friends followed this road lined with sepulchres which, in our modern feelings, would be a lugubrious avenue for a city, but which did not offer the same sad meanings for the ancients, whose tombs, instead of a horrible corpse, contained only a pinch of ashes, the abstract idea of death. Art embellished these last dwellings, and, as Goethe says, the pagan decorated the sarcophagi and urns with images of life. This is what undoubtedly made Max and Fabio visit, with a cheerful curiosity and a joyful fullness of existence that they would not have had in a Christian cemetery, these funereal monuments so gaily gilded by the sun and which, placed on the edge of the road, seem still attached to life and inspire none of those cold repulsions, none of those fantastic terrors that our gloomy sepulchres make us feel. They stopped before the tomb of Mammia, the public priestess, near which grows a tree, a cypress or a poplar; they sat in the hemicycle of the triclinium of the funeral meals, laughing like heirs; They read with great derision the epitaphs of Nevoleja, Labeon, and the Arria family, followed by Octavian, who seemed more touched than his careless companions by the fate of these deceased two thousand years ago. They thus arrived at the villa of Arrius Diomedes, one of the most considerable dwellings in Pompeii. One ascends it by brick steps, and when one has passed the door flanked by two small lateral columns, one finds oneself in a courtyard similar to the patio which forms the center of Spanish and Moorish houses and which the ancients called impluvium or cavædium; fourteen brick columns covered with stucco form, on the four sides, a covered portico or peristyle , similar to the cloister of convents, and under which one could walk without fear of the rain. The pavement of this courtyard is a mosaic of bricks and white marble, of a soft and tender effect to the eye. In the middle, a quadrilateral marble basin, which still exists, received the rainwater that dripped from the roof of the portico. It produces a singular effect to enter thus into ancient life and to tread with varnished boots on marble worn by the sandals and buskins of the contemporaries of Augustus and Tiberius. The guide led them into the exedra or summer salon, open on the sea side to draw in the fresh breezes. It was there that people received and took siestas during the burning hours, when that great African zephyr blew, laden with languor and storms. He led them into the basilica, a long open gallery that gives light to the apartments and where visitors and clients waited for the nomenclator to call them; he then led them onto the white marble terrace from where the view extends over the green gardens and the blue sea; then he showed them the nymphaeum or bathroom , with its yellow-painted walls, its stucco columns, its mosaic pavement and its marble basin which received so many charming bodies vanished like shadows;—the cubiculum, where so many dreams floated from the ivory door, and whose alcoves cut into the wall were closed by a conopeum or curtain whose bronze rings still lie on the ground, the tetrastyle or recreation room, the chapel of the lares gods, the cabinet of archives, the library, the museum of pictures, the gynaeceum or women’s apartment, composed of small rooms partly ruined, whose walls retain traces of paintings and arabesques like cheeks from which the rouge has been badly wiped off. This inspection completed, they descended to the lower floor, for the ground is much lower on the side of the garden than on the side of the Way of the Tombs, they crossed eight rooms painted in antique red, one of which is hollowed out with architectural niches, such as one sees in the vestibule of the Hall of the Ambassadors at the Alhambra, and they finally arrived at a kind of cellar or storeroom whose destination was clearly indicated by eight clay amphorae set against the wall and which must have been perfumed with wine from Crete, Falerna and Massica like the odes of Horace. A bright ray of daylight passed through a narrow air vent blocked with nettles, whose leaves, crossed by lights, it changed into emeralds and topazes, and this cheerful natural detail smiled appropriately through the gloom of the place. “It was here,” said the guide in his nonchalant voice, whose tone barely matched the meaning of the words, “that was found, among seventeen skeletons, that of the lady whose imprint is seen in the museum of Naples. She had gold rings, and the shreds of her fine tunic still adhered to the packed ashes which have preserved her form.” The banal phrases of the guide caused a deep emotion in Octavian. He had himself shown the exact spot where these precious remains had been discovered, and if he had not been restrained by the presence of his friends, he would have given himself over to some extravagant lyricism; his chest swelled, his eyes were filled with furtive moisture: this catastrophe, erased by twenty centuries of oblivion, touched him like a very recent misfortune; The death of a mistress or a friend could not have grieved him more, and a tear, two thousand years overdue, fell, while Max and Fabio had their backs turned, on the square where this woman, for whom he felt seized by a retrospective love, had perished suffocated by the hot ashes of the volcano. “Enough of archaeology like that!” cried Fabio; “we do not want to write a dissertation on a jug or a tile from the time of Julius Caesar to become a member of a provincial academy, these classical memories make my stomach ache. Let us dine, if it is possible, in that picturesque osteria, where I am afraid that they will serve us nothing but fossil beefsteaks and fresh eggs laid before the death of Pliny. ” “I will not say like Boileau: A fool, sometimes, opens an important opinion,” said Max, laughing, “that would be dishonest; but there is something good in this idea.” Yet it would have been more pleasant to feast here, in some triclinium, reclining in the antique style, served by slaves, in the manner of Lucullus or Trimalcion. It is true that I do not see many oysters from Lake Lucrinus; the turbot and red mullet from the Adriatic are absent; the wild boar from Apulia is missing from the market; the breads and honey cakes appear in the museum of Naples as hard as stones beside their verdigris mussels; the raw macaroni, sprinkled with caccia-cavallo, and although it is detestable, is still better than nothing. What does dear Octavian think of it? Octavian, who greatly regretted not having been in Pompeii on the day of the eruption of Vesuvius to save the lady with the golden rings and thus deserve her love, had not heard a single sentence of this gastronomic conversation. The last two words spoken by Max alone struck him, and as he had no desire to start a discussion, he made a sign of assent just in case, and the friendly group resumed, skirting the ramparts, the path to the inn. The table was set under the sort of open porch which serves as a vestibule to the osteria, and whose walls, plastered with lime, were decorated with a few crusts qualified by the host: Salvator Rosa, Espagnolet, Cavalier Massimo and other famous names of the Neapolitan school, whom he felt obliged to exalt. “Venerable guest,” said Fabio, “do not display your eloquence to no avail. We are not English, and we prefer young girls to old paintings. Send us your wine list instead.” by that beautiful brunette, with velvet eyes, whom I saw on the stairs.
” The palforio, understanding that his guests did not belong to the mystifiable genre of philistines and bourgeois, stopped boasting about his gallery to glorify his cellar. First of all, he had all the wines of the best vintages: Château-Margaux, Grand-Laffite retour des Indes, Sillery de Moët, Hochmeyer, Scarlat-wine, Porto and porter, ale and gingerbeer, Lacryma-Christi white and red, Capri and Falerna. “What! You have Falerna wine, animal, and you put it at the end of your nomenclature; you are making us undergo an unbearable oenological litany,” said Max, leaping at the innkeeper’s throat with a movement of comic fury; but don’t you have a feeling for local color ? Are you then unworthy of living in this ancient neighborhood? Is your Falerne at least good? Was it put in an amphora under Consul Plancus? —_Consul Planco_. —I don’t know Consul Plancus, and my wine is not put in an amphora, but it is old and costs 10 carlins a bottle,’ replied the host. Day had fallen and night had come, a serene and transparent night, clearer, certainly, than the high noon of London; the earth had tones of azure and the sky reflections of silver of an unimaginable sweetness; the air was so still that the flame of the candles placed on the table did not even flicker. A young boy playing the flute approached the table and stood, fixing his eyes on the three guests, in an attitude of bas-relief, and blowing into his instrument with its sweet and melodious sounds, one of those popular cantilenas in minor mode whose charm is penetrating. Perhaps this boy was directly descended from the flute player who preceded Duilius. “Our meal is arranged in a rather antique way, all we lack is some Caditan dancers and ivy wreaths,” said Fabio, pouring himself a large swig of Falerna wine. “I feel like making Latin quotations like a serial from the Debates; I have some stanzas from an ode coming back to me,” added Max. “Keep them for yourself,” cried Octavian and Fabio, justifiably alarmed; ” nothing is as indigestible as Latin at table.” The conversation between young people who, cigar in mouth, elbow on the table, are looking at a certain number of emptied flasks, especially when the wine is heady, soon turns to women. Each one expounded his system, of which here is more or less the summary. Fabio paid attention only to beauty and youth. Voluptuous and positive, he entertained no illusions and had no prejudices in love. A peasant girl pleased him as much as a duchess, provided she was beautiful; the body touched him more than the dress; he laughed a lot at some of his friends who were in love with a few meters of silk and lace, and said that it would be more logical to be in love with a novelty merchant’s display. These opinions, very reasonable at heart, and which he did not hide, made him pass for an eccentric man. Max, less of an artist than Fabio, liked only difficult undertakings , complicated intrigues; he looked for resistances to overcome, virtues to seduce, and conducted love like a game of chess, with long-meditated moves, suspended effects, surprises and stratagems worthy of Polybius. In a salon, the woman who seemed to have the least sympathy for him was the one he chose as the target of his attacks; to make her pass from aversion to love by skillful transitions was for him a delicious pleasure; to impose himself on the souls which rejected him, to subdue the wills rebellious to his ascendancy, seemed to him the sweetest of triumphs. Like certain hunters who run the fields, the woods and the plains in rain, sun and snow, with excessive fatigue and an ardor that nothing repels, for a meager game that three-quarters of the time they disdain to eat, Max, the prey struck, no longer cared about it, and resumed his search almost immediately. As for Octavian, he admitted that reality hardly seduced him, not that he had schoolboy dreams all kneaded with lilies and roses like a Demoustier madrigal, but there were too many prosaic and off-putting details around all beauty; too many doting and decorated fathers; coquettish mothers, wearing natural flowers in their false hair; ruddy cousins, meditating on declarations; ridiculous aunts, in love with little dogs. An aquatint engraving, after Horace Vernet or Delaroche, hung in a woman’s room, was enough to stop a nascent passion in him. Even more poetic than amorous, he asked for a terrace on Isola Bella, on Lake Maggiore, by a beautiful moonlight, to frame a rendezvous. He would have liked to remove his love from the midst of common life and transport the scene to the stars. So he had fallen in love, in turn, with an impossible and mad passion for all the great feminine types preserved by art or history. Like Faust, he had loved Helen, and he would have liked the undulations of the centuries to bring to him one of those sublime personifications of human desires and dreams , whose form, invisible to vulgar eyes, always subsists in space and time. He had composed for himself an ideal seraglio with Semiramis, Aspasia, Cleopatra, Diana of Poitiers, Joanna of Aragon. Sometimes, too, he loved statues, and one day, passing in the Museum before the Venus de Milo, he had cried out: “Oh! who will give you back your arms to crush me against your marble breast!” In Rome, the sight of a thick braided head of hair exhumed from an ancient tomb had thrown him into a bizarre delirium; he had tried, by means of two or three of these hairs obtained from a guard seduced at a high price, and given to a sleepwalker of great power, to evoke the shadow and the form of this dead woman; but the conducting fluid had evaporated after so many years, and the apparition had not been able to emerge from the eternal night. As Fabio had guessed in front of the Studj’s window, the imprint collected in the cellar of the villa of Arrius Diomedes excited in Octavian insane impulses towards a retrospective ideal; he tried to escape from time and life, and to transpose his soul to the century of Titus. Max and Fabio retired to their room, and, their heads a little heavy with the classic fumes of Falerne, were soon asleep. Octavian, who had often left his glass full in front of him, not wanting to disturb with gross drunkenness the poetic intoxication that was bubbling in his brain, sensed from the agitation of his nerves that sleep would not come to him, and left the osteria with slow steps to refresh his brow and calm his thoughts in the night air . His feet, without his being aware of it, carried him to the entrance by which one enters the dead city, he moved the wooden bar that closes it and entered at random into the ruins. The moon illuminated the pale houses with its white glow, dividing the streets into two slices of silvery light and bluish shadow. This nocturnal day, with its moderate hues, concealed the degradation of the buildings. One did not notice, as in the harsh light of the sun, the truncated columns, the facades furrowed with cracks, the roofs collapsed by the eruption; the missing parts were completed by the half-tone, and a sudden ray, like a touch of sentiment in the sketch of a painting, indicated a whole collapsed whole. The taciturn geniuses of the night seemed to have repaired the fossil city for some representation of a fantastic life. Sometimes even Octavian thought he saw vague human forms slipping into the shadows; but they vanished as soon as they reached the illuminated portion. Muffled whispers, an indefinite rumor, fluttered in the silence. Our walker attributed them at first to some fluttering of his eyes, to some buzzing in his ears,—it could also be an optical trick, a sigh of the sea breeze, or the flight through the nettles of a lizard or a snake, for everything lives in nature, even death, every noise, even silence. However, he felt a kind of involuntary anguish, a slight shiver, which could be caused by the cold night air, and made his skin quiver. He turned his head two or three times; he no longer felt alone as he had just now in the deserted city. Had his comrades had the same idea as him, and were they looking for him among these ruins? These glimpsed shapes, these indistinct sounds of footsteps, were they Max and Fabio walking and talking, and disappeared around the corner of a crossroads? This quite natural explanation, Octavian understood from his confusion that it was not true, and the reasoning he made on the subject alone did not convince him. The solitude and the shadows were peopled with invisible beings whom he disturbed; he fell into the midst of a mystery, and one seemed to be waiting for him to leave before beginning. Such were the extravagant ideas which crossed his brain and which took on a great deal of verisimilitude from the time, the place and a thousand alarming details which will be understood by those who have found themselves at night in some vast ruin. Passing in front of a house which he had noticed during the day and on which the moon shone fully, he saw, in a state of perfect integrity, a portico whose arrangement he had sought to reestablish: four columns of the Doric order, fluted to half their height, and the shaft wrapped as it were in a purple drapery of a minium tint, supported a cornice coloured with polychrome ornaments, which the decorator seemed to have finished yesterday; On the side wall of the door, a Laconia mastiff, executed in encaustic and accompanied by the sacramental inscription: Cave canem, barked at the moon and at visitors with painted fury. On the mosaic threshold, the word Have, in Oscan and Latin letters, greeted the guests with its friendly syllables. The exterior walls, tinted with ochre and rubric, had not a single crevice. The house had been raised by a story, and the tiled roof, indented with a bronze acroterion, projected its intact profile against the light blue of the sky where a few stars paled. This strange restoration, carried out from afternoon to evening by an unknown architect, tormented Octavian greatly, sure of having seen this house that very day in a sorry state of ruin. The mysterious rebuilder had worked very quickly, for the neighboring dwellings had the same recent and new appearance; all the pillars were topped with their capitals; not a stone, not a brick, not a film of stucco, not a flake of paint was missing from the shining walls of the facades, and through the interstices of the peristyles one could glimpse, around the marble basin of the cavaedium, oleanders and white, myrtles and pomegranates. All the historians had been mistaken; the eruption had not taken place, or the hand of time had gone back twenty secular hours on the dial of eternity. Octavian, surprised to the last degree, wondered if he was asleep standing up and walking in a dream. He seriously questioned himself to know if madness was not making his hallucinations dance before him; but he was obliged to recognize that he was neither asleep nor mad. A singular change had taken place in the atmosphere; Vague pink tints mingled, in violet gradations, with the azure glow of the moon; the sky was clearing at the edges; one would have said that day was about to break. Octavian took out his watch; it marked midnight. Fearing that it had stopped, he pushed the repeater spring ; the chime rang twelve times; it was indeed midnight, and yet the light was still increasing, the moon was melting into the ever more luminous azure; the sun was rising. Then Octavian, in whom all ideas of time were blurred, was able to convince himself that he was walking not in a dead Pompeii, a cold corpse of a city half taken from its shroud, but in a Pompeii alive, young, intact, over which the torrents of burning mud from Vesuvius had not flowed . An inconceivable prodigy carried him, a nineteenth- century Frenchman, back to the time of Titus, not in spirit, but in reality, or brought back to him, from the depths of the past, a destroyed city with its inhabitants vanished; for a man dressed in antique clothes had just come out of a neighboring house. This man had short hair and a shaved beard, a brown tunic and a grayish cloak, the ends of which were turned up so as not to hinder his walk; he walked with a quick, almost cursorial step, and passed Octavian without seeing him. A basket of esparto grass hung from his arm, and he was heading toward the Forum Nundinarium; it was a slave, some Davus going to market; there was no mistaking him. The sound of wheels was heard, and an ancient cart, drawn by white oxen and laden with vegetables, entered the street. Beside the team walked a cowherd with bare, sunburned legs , his feet shod with sandals, and dressed in a kind of linen shirt that puffed out at the waist; a conical straw hat, thrown back behind his back and held at the neck by the chin strap, revealed his head, of a type unknown today, his low forehead crossed by hard knots, his frizzy black hair, his straight nose, his eyes as tranquil as those of his oxen, and his neck like a country Hercules. He gravely touched his beasts with the goad, with a statuesque pose that would have made Ingres fall into ecstasy. The cowherd saw Octavian and seemed surprised, but he continued on his way; Once he turned his head, doubtless finding no explanation for the appearance of this strange personage, but leaving, in his placid rustic stupidity, the solution to the enigma to those more skilled. Campanian peasants also appeared, pushing donkeys laden with wineskins before them, and ringing brass bells; their physiognomy differed from that of the peasants of today as a coin differs from a penny. The town was gradually becoming populated like one of those dioramas, at first deserted, and then a change of light animates with figures invisible until then. The feelings Octavian experienced had changed in nature. Just now, in the deceptive darkness of the night, he was prey to that unease from which the bravest do not defend themselves, in the midst of disturbing and fantastic circumstances that reason cannot explain. His vague terror had changed into profound stupefaction; he could not doubt, from the clarity of their perceptions, the testimony of his senses, and yet what he saw was perfectly incredible. – Still not convinced, he sought by the observation of small real details to prove to himself that he was not the plaything of a hallucination. – These were not phantoms which paraded before his eyes, for the bright light of the sun illuminated them with an irrefutable reality, and their shadows, lengthened by the morning, were projected on the pavements and the walls. – Understanding nothing of what was happening to him, Octavian, delighted at heart to see one of his dearest dreams fulfilled, no longer resisted his adventure, he let himself be taken in by all these marvels, without pretending to realize them; He said to himself that since, by virtue of a mysterious power, he had been given the opportunity to live for a few hours in a vanished century, he would not waste his time seeking the solution to an incomprehensible problem, and he bravely continued on his way, looking right and left at this spectacle, so old and yet so new to him. But to what period of the life of Pompeii was he transported? An inscription of an aedile, engraved on a wall, informed him, by the names of public figures, that it was at the beginning of the reign of Titus,—that is, in the year 79 of our era.—A sudden idea crossed Octavian’s mind; the woman whose imprint he had admired in the museum of Naples must be alive, since the eruption of Vesuvius in which she had perished took place on August 24 of that year. same year; he could therefore find her again, see her, speak to her… The mad desire he had felt at the sight of this ash molded on divine contours was perhaps going to be satisfied, for nothing should be impossible to a love that had had the strength to make time go back , and pass the same hour twice in the hourglass of eternity. While Octavian was giving himself over to these reflections, beautiful young girls were going to the fountains, supporting with the tips of their white fingers urns balanced on their heads; patricians in white togas bordered with purple bands, followed by their retinue of customers, were heading towards the forum. The buyers crowded around the shops, all designated by carved and painted signs , and recalling by their smallness and their shape the Moorish shops of Algiers; Above most of these stalls, a glorious colored terracotta phallus and the inscription _hic habitat felicitas_, testified to superstitious precautions against the evil eye; Octavian even noticed an amulet shop whose display was laden with horns, forked coral branches, and small gold Priapuses, such as are still found in Naples today, to protect against the jettature, and he said to himself that a superstition lasted longer than a religion. Following the pavement which borders every street in Pompeii, and thus deprives the English of the comfort of this invention, Octavian found himself face to face with a handsome young man, about his own age, dressed in a saffron-colored tunic, and draped in a cloak of fine white wool, soft as cashmere. The sight of Octavian, wearing the hideous modern hat, strapped into a shabby black frock coat, his legs trapped in trousers, his feet pinched by shiny boots, seemed to surprise the young Pompeian, as an Ioway or a Botocudo would surprise us on the Boulevard de Gand, with his feathers, his bear claw necklaces and his baroque tattoos. However, as he was a well-bred young man, he did not burst out laughing in Octavian’s face, and taking pity on this poor barbarian lost in this Graeco-Roman city, he said to him in a sweet and accented voice: —_Advena, salve._ Nothing was more natural than that an inhabitant of Pompeii, under the reign of the divine Emperor Titus, most powerful and most august, should express himself in Latin, and yet Octavian shuddered at hearing this dead language in a living mouth. It was then that he congratulated himself on having been strong in thematics, and won prizes in the general competition. The Latin taught by the University served him well on this unique occasion, and recalling his memories of school, he replied to the Pompeian’s greeting in the style of De viris illustribus and Selectae è profanis, in a sufficiently intelligible manner, but with a Parisian accent that made the young man smile. “Perhaps it will be easier for you to speak Greek,” said the Pompeian; “I know that language too, for I studied at Athens. ” “I know even less Greek than Latin,” replied Octavian; “I am from the land of the Gauls, from Paris, from Lutetia. ” “I know that country. My grandfather waged war in Gaul under the great Julius Caesar. But what strange costume are you wearing? The Gauls I saw in Rome were not dressed like that.” Octavian undertook to make the young Pompeian understand that twenty centuries had passed since the conquest of Gaul by Julius Caesar, and that fashions might have changed; but he lost his Latin, and to tell the truth it was not much. “My name is Rufus Holconius, and my house is yours,” said the young man; “unless you prefer the freedom of the tavern: we are at the inn of Albinus, near the gate of the suburb of Augustus Felix, and at the hostelry of Sarinus, son of Publius, near the second tower; but if you wish, I will serve as your guide in this city unknown to you; – you please me, young barbarian, although you have tried to play on my credulity by pretending that the Emperor Titus, who reigns today, had been dead for two thousand years, and that the Nazarene, whose infamous followers, coated with pitch, lit up the gardens of Nero, sits alone as master in the deserted sky, from which the great gods have fallen. “By Pollux!” he added, casting his eyes on a red inscription traced on the corner of a street, “you have arrived at the right time, they are giving _La Casina de Plautus_, recently restored to the theater; it is a curious and buffoonish comedy which will amuse you, even if you only understand the pantomime. Follow me, it is almost time; I will have you seated in the bench of the guests and strangers.” And Rufus Holconius went towards the small comic theater which the three friends had visited during the day. The Frenchman and the citizen of Pompeii took the streets of the Fountain of Abundance, of the Theaters, passed the college and the temple of Isis, the workshop of the sculptor, and entered the Odeon or comic theater by a lateral vomitorium. Thanks to the recommendation of Holconius, Octavian was placed near the proscenium, a place which would correspond to our proscenium bathtubs. All eyes immediately turned towards him with benevolent curiosity and a slight murmur ran through the amphitheater. The play had not yet begun; Octavian took advantage of it to look around the room. The semicircular tiers, ending on each side with a magnificent lion’s paw sculpted in lava from Vesuvius, widened from an empty space corresponding to our pit, but much smaller, and paved with a mosaic of Greek marbles; a wider step formed, from distance to distance, a distinctive zone, and four staircases corresponding to the vomitoria and rising from the base to the summit of the amphitheater, divided it into five corners wider at the top than at the bottom. The spectators, equipped with their tickets, consisting of small ivory blades on which were designated, by their order numbers, the bay, the corner and the step, with the title of the piece represented and the name of its author, arrived easily at their places. The magistrates, the nobles, the married men, the young men, the soldiers, whose bronze helmets could be seen shining, occupied separate ranks. It was an admirable spectacle, these beautiful togas and these large, well- draped white cloaks, spread out over the first tiers and contrasting with the varied finery of the women, placed above, and the gray capes of the common people, relegated to the upper benches, near the columns which support the roof, and which allowed a glimpse, through their interstices, of a sky of an intense blue like the azure field of a Panathenaea; a fine rain of water, flavored with saffron, fell from the friezes in imperceptible droplets, and perfumed the air which it refreshed. Octavian thought of the fetid emanations that poison the atmosphere of our theaters, so unpleasant that they can be considered places of torture, and he found that civilization had not advanced much. The curtain, supported by a transverse beam, sank into the depths of the orchestra, the musicians settled into their seats, and the Prologue appeared grotesquely dressed and his head wearing a deformed mask, adapted like a helmet. The Prologue, after greeting the audience and asking for applause, began a buffoonish argument. “Old plays,” he said, “were like wine that gains with age, and _La Casina_, dear to old men, should be no less so to young people; all could take pleasure in it: some because they knew it, others because they did not . The play had, moreover, been carefully delivered, and one had to listen to it with a soul free of all worries, without thinking of one’s debts or one’s creditors, because one does not stop at the theater; it was a happy day, the weather was fine, and the halcyons were hovering over the forum. ” Then he made an analysis of the comedy that the actors were going to perform, with a detail which proves that surprise played little part in the pleasure that the ancients took in the theater; he recounted how the old man Stalino, in love with his beautiful slave Casina, wants to marry her to her farmer Olympio, a complacent husband whom he will replace on the wedding night; and how Lycostrata, Stalino’s wife, to thwart the lust of her vicious husband, wants to unite Casina to the squire Chalinus, with the idea of favoring the loves of her son; finally the way in which Stalino, mystified, takes a young slave in disguise for Casina, who, recognized as free and of ingenuous birth, marries the young master, whom she loves and by whom she is loved. The young Frenchman watched distractedly the actors, with their masks with bronze mouths, striving on the stage; the slaves ran here and there to simulate eagerness; the old man nodded his head and stretched out his trembling hands; The matron, with a high voice and a surly and disdainful air , was settling into her importance and quarreling with her husband, to the great amusement of the audience. All these characters entered and left through three doors set in the back wall and communicating with the actors’ foyer. Stalino’s house occupied a corner of the theater, and that of his old friend Alcaesimus faced it . These decorations, although very well painted, were more representative of the idea of a place than of the place itself, like the vague wings of the classical theater. When the wedding pomp leading the false Casina made its entrance on the stage, an immense burst of laughter, like that which Homer attributes to the gods, circulated through all the benches of the amphitheater, and thunderous applause made the echoes of the enclosure vibrate; but Octavian no longer listened and no longer looked. In the women’s aisle, he had just perceived a creature of marvelous beauty. From that moment on, the charming faces that had attracted his eye eclipsed like the stars before Phoebe; everything vanished, everything disappeared as in a dream; a fog blurred the teeming tiers of people, and the shrill voices of the actors seemed to be lost in an infinite distance. He had received a kind of electric shock to his heart, and it seemed to him that sparks were leaping from his breast when the woman’s gaze turned towards him. She was dark and pale; her wavy, frizzy hair, black as that of Night, rose slightly towards her temples in the Greek fashion, and in her dull face shone dark, soft eyes, charged with an indefinable expression of voluptuous sadness and passionate boredom; her mouth, disdainfully arched at its corners, protested with the lively ardor of its flaming purple against the tranquil whiteness of the mask; her neck presented those beautiful pure lines that are now found only in statues. Her arms were bare to the shoulder, and from the tips of her proud breasts, lifting her mauve-pink tunic, issued two folds that one might have thought had been carved in marble by Phidias or Cleomenes. The sight of this throat, so correctly contoured, so pure in cut, magnetically disturbed Octavian; it seemed to him that these curves adapted perfectly to the hollow imprint of the museum of Naples, which had thrown him into such an ardent reverie, and a voice cried out to him in the depths of his heart that this woman was indeed the woman smothered by the ash of Vesuvius at the villa of Arrius Diomedes. By what miracle did he see her alive, attending the performance of Plautus’s Casina? He did not seek to explain it; besides, how was he there himself? He accepted her presence as in a dream one admits the intervention of people long dead who nevertheless act with the appearances of life; besides, his emotion allowed him no reasoning. For him, the wheel of time had left its rut, and his victorious desire was choosing its place among the centuries gone by! He found himself face to face with his chimera, one of the most elusive, a retrospective chimera. His life was filling up at once. Looking at that head, so calm and so passionate, so cold and so ardent, so dead and so lively, he understood that he had before him his first and his last love, his cup of supreme intoxication; he felt the memories of all the women he had thought he had loved vanish like light shadows , and his soul become virgin of all previous emotion. The past disappeared. Meanwhile the beautiful Pompeian, her chin resting on the palm of her hand, threw at Octavian, while seeming to be occupied with the scene, the velvety gaze of her nocturnal eyes, and this gaze reached him heavy and burning like a jet of molten lead. Then she leaned towards the ear of a girl sitting at her side. The performance ended; the crowd poured out through the vomitories. Octavian, disdaining the good offices of his guide Holconius, rushed out by the first exit that presented itself to him. He had scarcely reached the door when a hand was placed on his arm, and a woman’s voice said to him in a low tone, but in such a way that he did not miss a word: “I am Tyche Novoleja, committed to the pleasures of Arria Marcella, daughter of Arrius Diomedes. My mistress loves you, follow me.” Arria Marcella had just climbed into her litter carried by four strong Syrian slaves, naked to the waist, their bronze torsos glinting in the sunlight . The curtain of the litter opened, and a pale hand, starry with rings, made a friendly sign to Octavian, as if to confirm the words of the attendant. The fold of purple fell back, and the litter moved away at the rhythmic pace of the slaves. Tyche led Octavian by circuitous routes, crossing the streets by lightly placing his foot on the spaced stones that connect the sidewalks and between which the chariot wheels roll, and navigating through the maze with the precision that comes from the familiarity of a city. Octavian noticed that he was passing through districts of Pompeii that the excavations had not discovered, and which were consequently completely unknown to him. This strange circumstance among so many others did not surprise him. He was determined to be surprised by nothing. In all this archaic phantasmagoria, which would have driven an antiquarian mad with joy, he saw nothing but the deep, black eye of Arria Marcella and that superb breast, victorious over the centuries, and which destruction itself had sought to preserve. They came to a hidden door, which opened and closed immediately, and Octavian found himself in a courtyard surrounded by Greek marble columns of the Ionic order, painted halfway up in a bright yellow, the capitals decorated with red and blue ornaments; a garland of birthwort hung its broad green heart-shaped leaves from the projections of the architecture like a natural arabesque, and near a pool framed by plants, a pink flamingo stood on one leg, a feather flower among the plant flowers. Fresco panels depicting capricious architecture or fanciful landscapes decorated the walls. Octavian saw all these details at a quick glance, for Tyche handed him over to the bathing slaves who subjected his impatience to all the research of the ancient baths. After passing through the various degrees of vaporized heat, withstood the scraper of the strigillary, felt cosmetics and perfumed oils trickle over him, he was dressed in a white tunic, and found Tyche at the other door, who took his hand and led him into another extremely ornate room. On the ceiling were painted, with a purity of design, a brilliance of color and a freedom of touch that smacked of the great master and no longer of the simple decorator with vulgar address, Mars, Venus and Cupid; a frieze composed of deer, hares and birds playing among the foliage reigned above a covering of cipolin marble; the mosaic of the pavement, a marvelous work perhaps due to Sosimus of Pergamum, represented reliefs of feasts executed with an art that created an illusion. At the end of the room, on a biclinium or double bed, was leaning on her elbows, Arria Marcella, in a voluptuous and serene pose that recalled the reclining woman of Phidias on the pediment of the Parthenon; her shoes, embroidered with pearls, lay at the foot of the bed, and her beautiful bare foot, purer and whiter than marble, stretched out at the end of a light byssus coverlet thrown over her. Two earrings made in the shape of scales and bearing pearls on each plate trembled in the light along her pale cheeks; a necklace of gold balls, supporting elongated pear-shaped beads , circulated on her chest left half uncovered by the careless fold of a straw-colored peplum edged with a black Greek key; a black and gold strip passed and shone here and there in her ebony hair, for she had changed costumes on returning from the theater; and around his arm, like the asp around Cleopatra’s arm, a golden serpent, with jeweled eyes, coiled itself several times and sought to bite its tail. A small table with griffin feet, inlaid with mother-of-pearl, silver and ivory, was set up near the double bed, laden with various dishes served in dishes of silver and gold or earth enameled with precious paintings. On it was seen a Phasis bird lying in its feathers, and various fruits that their seasons prevent from meeting together. Everything seemed to indicate that a guest was expected; fresh flowers strewn the ground, and the amphorae of wine were plunged into urns full of snow. Arria Marcella beckoned to Octavian to lie down beside her on the biclinium and partake of the meal; the young man, half mad with surprise and love, took a few mouthfuls at random from the dishes offered to him by little Asiatic slaves with curly hair and short tunics. Arria did not eat, but she often raised to her lips an opaline-hued myrrh vessel filled with a wine as dark purple as congealed blood; as she drank, an imperceptible pink vapor rose to her pale cheeks, from her heart that had not beaten for so many years; however, her bare arm, which Octavian touched as he lifted his cup, was as cold as the skin of a snake or the marble of a tomb. “Oh! when you stopped at the Studj to contemplate the piece of hardened mud that preserves my form, said Arria Marcella, turning her long, moist gaze towards Octavian, and your thought soared ardently towards me, my soul felt it in this world where I float invisible to crude eyes; belief makes the god, and love makes the woman. One is truly dead only when one is no longer loved; your desire gave me life, the powerful evocation of your heart removed the distances that separated us.” The idea of amorous evocation that the young woman expressed, entered into Octavian’s philosophical beliefs, beliefs that we are not far from sharing. Indeed, nothing dies, everything always exists; no force can annihilate what once was. Every action, every word, every form, every thought fallen into the universal ocean of things produces circles there that widen to the confines of eternity. Material figuration disappears only for vulgar eyes, and the specters that detach themselves from it populate infinity. Paris continues to abduct Helen to an unknown region of space. Cleopatra’s galley swells its silk sails against the azure sky of an ideal Cydnus. A few passionate and powerful spirits have been able to bring to themselves centuries that have apparently passed, and revive characters who were dead to all. Faust had the daughter of Tyndareus as his mistress, and led her to his Gothic castle, from the depths of the mysterious abysses of Hades. Octavian had just lived one day during the reign of Titus and made himself loved by Arria Marcella, daughter of Arrius Diomedes, who was lying at that moment beside him on an ancient bed in a city destroyed for all to see. “To my disgust for other women,” replied Octavian, “to the invincible reverie that drew me towards her radiant types in the depths of the centuries like provocative stars, I understood that I would never love except outside of time and space. It was you I was waiting for, and this frail vestige preserved by the curiosity of men has, by its secret magnetism, put me in touch with your soul. I do not know if you are a dream or a reality, a ghost or a woman, if like Ixion I am clutching a cloud to my abused breast, if I am the plaything of a vile spell of sorcery, but what I do know is that you will be my first and my last love. “May Eros, son of Aphrodite, hear your promise,” said Arria Marcella , bending her head on the shoulder of her lover who lifted her with a passionate embrace. Oh! press me to your young breast, envelop me in your warm breath, I am cold from having remained so long without love.” And against his heart Octavian felt the rise and fall of that beautiful breast, whose mold he had admired that very morning through the glass of a museum cabinet; the freshness of that beautiful flesh penetrated him through his tunic and made him burn. The gold and black band had come loose from Arria’s passionately thrown back head, and her hair flowed like a black river over the blue pillow. The slaves had carried away the table. Only a confused sound of kisses and sighs was heard. The familiar quails, heedless of this amorous scene, pecked at the crumbs of the feast on the mosaic pavement, uttering little cries. Suddenly the bronze rings of the door that closed the room slid on their rod, and a severe-looking old man draped in a loose brown cloak appeared on the threshold. His gray beard was parted into two points like that of the Nazarenes, his face seemed furrowed by the fatigue of macerations: a small black wooden cross hung from his collar and left no doubt as to his belief: he belonged to the then very recent sect of the disciples of Christ. At his sight, Arria Marcella, lost in confusion, hid her face under a fold of her cloak, like a bird that puts its head under its wing in the face of an enemy it cannot avoid, to spare itself at least the horror of seeing him; while Octavian, leaning on his elbow, stared fixedly at the annoying personage who was thus suddenly entering into his happiness. “Arria, Arria,” said the austere personage in a tone of reproach, ” has not the time of your life been enough for your deportments, and must your infamous loves encroach on the centuries that do not belong to you? Can you not leave the living in their sphere, your ashes have not yet cooled since the day you died without repentance under the rain of fire from the volcano? Two thousand years of death have not calmed you, and your voracious arms draw to your marble chest, empty of heart, the poor fools intoxicated by your philtres. —Arrius, grace, my father, do not overwhelm me, in the name of this gloomy religion which was never mine; I believe in our ancient gods who loved life, youth, beauty, pleasure; do not plunge me back into pale nothingness. Let me enjoy this existence that love has given me back. —Be silent, impious, do not speak to me of your gods who are demons. Let go this man chained by your impure seductions; do not draw him any longer outside the circle of his life which God has measured; return to the limbo of paganism with your Asiatic, Roman, or Greek lovers. Young Christian, abandon this larva, which would seem more hideous to you than Empousa and Phorkyas, if you could see it as it is.” Octavian, pale, frozen with horror, wanted to speak; but his voice remained stuck in his throat, according to the Virgilian expression. “Will you obey me, Arria?” cried the great old man imperiously. “No, never,” replied Arria, her eyes sparkling, her nostrils dilated, her lips quivering, as she surrounded Octavian’s body with her beautiful statuesque arms, cold, hard, and rigid as marble. Her furious beauty, exasperated by the struggle, shone with a supernatural brilliance at this supreme moment, as if to leave her young lover a inescapable memory. “Come, unhappy girl,” the old man continued, “we must use drastic measures, and make your nothingness palpable and visible to this fascinated child,” and he pronounced in a voice full of command a formula of exorcism which made the purple hues that the black wine of the myrrh vase had brought to fall from Arria’s cheeks. At that moment, the distant bell of one of the villages bordering the sea or of the hamlets lost in the folds of the mountain sounded the first peals of the Angelic Salutation. At this sound, a sigh of agony came from the broken breast of the young woman. Octavian felt the arms around him loosen; The draperies that covered it folded back on themselves, as if the contours that supported them had collapsed, and the unfortunate nocturnal walker saw next to him, on the bed of the feast, nothing but a pinch of ashes mixed with a few charred bones among which glittered bracelets and gold jewels, and only shapeless remains, such as were to be discovered when clearing the house of Arrius Diomedes. He uttered a terrible cry and lost consciousness. The old man had disappeared. The sun was rising, and the room adorned a moment ago with such brilliance was now nothing but a dismantled ruin. After sleeping a sleep made heavy by the libations of the previous evening, Max and Fabio awoke with a start, and their first care was to call their companion, whose room was next to theirs , with one of those burlesque rallying cries that are sometimes agreed upon when traveling. Octavian did not answer, for good reasons. Fabio and Max, not receiving a reply, entered their friend’s room, and saw that the bed had not been made. “He must have fallen asleep on some chair,” said Fabio, “without being able to reach his bunk; for he is not strong-headed, this dear Octavian; and he must have gone out early to dissipate the fumes of wine in the cool of the morning. ” “Yet he had hardly drunk,” added Max reflectively. ” All this seems rather strange to me. Let us go and look for him.” The two friends, aided by the guide, traveled through all the streets, crossroads, squares, and alleys of Pompeii, entering all the curious houses where they supposed Octavian might be busy copying a painting or taking down an inscription, and finally found him unconscious on the disjointed mosaic of a small, half- collapsed room. They had great difficulty in bringing him back to himself, and when he regained consciousness, he gave no other explanation than that he had fancied seeing Pompeii by moonlight, and that he had been seized by a fainting fit which, no doubt, would have no consequences.
The little group returned to Naples by train, as they had come, and in the evening, in their dressing room at San Carlo, Max and Fabio watched, through binoculars, a swarm of nymphs skipping in a ballet, following in the footsteps of Amalia Ferraris, the dancer then in vogue, wearing hideous green monstrousers under their gauze skirts, which made them look like frogs bitten by tarantulas. Octavian, pale, with bleary eyes, and a dejected demeanor, did not seem to suspect what was happening on stage, so much so, after the marvelous adventures of the night, did he have difficulty in regaining a sense of real life. From this visit to Pompeii, Octavian was prey to a gloomy melancholy, which the good humor and jokes of his companions aggravated rather than relieved; The image of Arria Marcella still haunted him, and the sad outcome of his fantastic good fortune did not destroy its charm. Unable to bear it any longer, he returned secretly to Pompeii and walked, as he had the first time, among the ruins, in the moonlight, his heart beating with a mad hope, but the hallucination was not repeated ; he saw only lizards fleeing on the stones; he heard only the chirping of frightened night birds; he met no more his friend Rufus Holconius; Tyche did not come to put his slender hand on his arm; Arria Marcella remained stubbornly in the dust. In despair, Octavian recently married a young and charming Englishwoman, who is madly in love with him. He is perfect for his wife; however, Ellen, with that instinct of the heart that nothing deceives, feels that her husband is in love with another; but with whom? This is what the most active espionage has not been able to teach her. Octavian does not keep a dancer; in society, he addresses women only banal gallantries; he even responded very coldly to the marked advances of a Russian princess, famous for her beauty and coquetry. A secret drawer, opened during her husband’s absence, provided no proof of infidelity to Ellen’s suspicions. But how could she possibly be jealous of Marcella, daughter of Arrius Diomedes, Tiberius’s freedman? THE THOUSAND AND SECOND NIGHT I had my door guarded that day; having made the formal resolution in the morning to do nothing, I did not want to be disturbed in this important occupation. Sure of not being disturbed by any troublesome person (they are not all in Molière’s comedy), I had taken all my measures to savor at my ease my favorite pleasure. A large fire blazed in my fireplace, the closed curtains filtered a discreet and nonchalant light, half a dozen tiles strewn the carpet, and, gently stretched out before the hearth at the distance of a roast on a spit, I made a large Moroccan slipper of oriental yellow and of a strange shape dance at the end of my foot; My cat was lying on my sleeve, like that of the Prophet Mohammed, and I would not have changed my position for all the gold in the world. My distracted glances, already drowned by that delicious drowsiness which follows the voluntary suspension of thought, wandered, without really seeing them, from the charming sketch of _La Madeleine au désert_ by Camille Roqueplan to the severe pen drawing by Aligny and the large landscape of the four inseparables, Feuchères, Séchan, Diéterle and Despléchins, the wealth and glory of my poet’s home; the feeling of real life was abandoning me little by little, and I was sunk deep beneath the unfathomable waves of that _sea of annihilation_ where so many oriental dreamers have left their reason, already shaken by hatschich and opium. The deepest silence reigned in the room; I had stopped the clock so as not to hear the ticking of the pendulum, that pulse of eternity; for I cannot bear, when I am idle, the stupid and feverish activity of this yellow copper disc which goes from one corner of its cage to the other and always walks without taking a step. Suddenly, and kling and klang, a sharp, nervous, unbearably silvery ring of the doorbell bursts forth and falls into my tranquility like a drop of molten lead sinking, crackling, into a sleeping lake; without thinking of my cat, curled up in a ball on my sleeve, I sat up with a start and jumped to my feet as if launched by a spring, sending to hell the imbecile concierge who had let someone through despite the formal order; then I sat down again. Hardly recovered from the nervous shock, I secured the cushions under my arms and waited for the event with bated breath. The door of the drawing-room opened ajar and I saw first appear the woolly head of Adolfo-Francesco Pergialla, a sort of Abyssinian brigand in whose service I was then, under the pretext of having a Negro servant.
His white eyes sparkled, his flat nose dilated prodigiously, his thick lips, spread out in a broad smile which he tried to make malicious, revealed his Newfoundland dog teeth, he was dying to talk in his black skin, and made all possible contortions to attract my attention. “Well! Francesco, what is it? If you were to turn your enamel eyes for an hour like that bronze Negro who had a clock in his stomach, would I be any the wiser? That’s enough pantomime, try to tell me, in any language, what it is about, and who is the person who comes to revive me to the depths of my laziness.” I must tell you that Adolfo-Francesco Pergialla-Abdallah-Ben-Mohammed, Abyssinian by birth, formerly a Mohammedan, a Christian for a quarter of an hour, knew all languages and spoke none of them intelligibly; he began in French, continued in Italian, and ended in Turkish or Arabic, especially in conversations that were embarrassing for him, when it concerned bottles of Bordeaux wine, liqueurs from the islands or sweets that had disappeared prematurely. Fortunately, I have polyglot friends: we first chased him from Europe; After having exhausted Italian, Spanish and German, he fled to Constantinople, into Turkish, where Alfred hotly pursued him: seeing himself hunted, he jumped to Algiers, where Eugène walked at his heels, following him through all the dialects of high and low Arabic; arrived there, he took refuge in Bambara, Galla and other dialects of the interior of Africa, where only d’Abadie, Combes and Tamisier could force him. This time, he answered me resolutely in mediocre but very clear Spanish: “Una mujer muy bonita con su hermana quien quiere hablar á usted. —Bring them in if they are young and pretty; otherwise, say that I am in business.” The rascal, who knew his stuff, disappeared for a few seconds and soon returned followed by two women wrapped in large white bournous, whose hoods were turned down. I presented two armchairs to these ladies in the most gallant manner; but, noticing the piles of tiles, they made a sign of thanks, and, taking off their bournous, they sat down, crossing their legs in the oriental fashion. The one sitting opposite me, under the ray of sunlight which penetrated through the gap in the curtains, could have been twenty years old; the other, much less pretty, seemed a little older; let us only concern ourselves with the prettier one. She was richly dressed in the Turkish fashion; a green velvet jacket , overloaded with ornaments, cinched her bee-like waist; her striped gauze chemisette, held at the collar by two diamond buttons, was cut so as to reveal a white and well -formed bosom; a white satin handkerchief, star-spangled and studded with sequins, served as her belt. Wide, baggy trousers reached down to her knees; Albanian-style leggings of embroidered velvet adorned her slender and delicate legs with pretty bare feet enclosed in small slippers of embossed morocco, quilted, colored and sewn with gold thread; an orange caftan, brocaded with silver flowers, a scarlet fez embellished with a long silk tassel, completed this finery, bizarre enough to pay visits to Paris in this unhappy year of 1842. As for her face, she had that regular beauty of the Turkish race: in her complexion, of a matte white similar to frosted marble, mysteriously blossomed, like two black flowers, those beautiful oriental eyes so clear and so deep under their long eyelids tinted with henna. She looked with an anxious air and seemed embarrassed; for composure, she held one of her feet in one of her hands, and with the other played with the end of one of her braids, all laden with sequins pierced through the middle, ribbons and bouquets of pearls. The other, dressed almost the same, but less richly, also remained silent and still. Thinking back to the appearance of the bayadères in Paris, I imagined that it was some almée from Cairo, some Egyptian acquaintance of my friend Dauzats, who, encouraged by the welcome I had given to the beautiful Amany and her dark companions, Sandiroun and Rangoun, came to implore my protection as a feuilletonist. “Ladies, what can I do for you?” I said to them, putting my hands to my ears in such a way as to produce a rather satisfactory. The beautiful Turkish woman raised her eyes to the ceiling, brought them back down to the carpet, and looked at her sister with a deeply meditative air. She did not understand a word of French. “Hola, Francesco! maroufle, butor, belître, here, singe manqué, serve me something at least once in your life.” Francesco approached with an important and solemn air. “Since you speak French so badly, you must speak Arabic very well, and you will play the role of dragoman between these ladies and me. I raise you to the dignity of interpreter; first ask these two beautiful foreigners who they are, where they come from, and what they want. ”
Without reproducing the various grimaces of the said Francesco, I will report the conversation as if it had taken place in French. “Sir,” said the beautiful Turkish woman through the negro, “although you are a man of letters, you must have read the Arabian Nights, Arabic tales, translated or nearly so by that good Mr. Galland, and the name of Scheherazade is not unknown to you? ” “The beautiful Scheherazade, wife of that ingenious Sultan Schahriar, who, to avoid being deceived, married a woman in the evening and had her strangled in the morning? I know her perfectly. ” “Well! I am the Sultana Scheherazade, and this is my good sister Dinarzarde, who never failed to say to me every night: ‘My sister, before it is day, tell us, if you are not asleep, one of those beautiful tales that you know.'” ” Delighted to see you, although the visit is a little fantastic; but who gives me this signal honor of receiving at my home, poor poet, the Sultana Scheherazade and her sister Dinarzarde? —By dint of telling, I have reached the end of my tether; I have said all that I know. I have exhausted the world of fairyland; the ghouls, the djinns, the magicians and the magicians have been of great help to me, but everything wears out, even the impossible; the most glorious sultan, shadow of the padischa, light of lights, moon and sun of the Middle Empire , begins to yawn terribly and torments the hilt of his saber; this morning, I told my last story, and my sublime lord deigned not to have my head cut off again; By means of the magic carpet of the four Facardins, I came here in all haste to seek a tale, a story, a short story, for tomorrow morning, at the customary call of my sister Dinarzarde, I must say something to the great Schahriar, the arbiter of my destinies; that imbecile Galland deceived the universe by affirming that after the thousand and first night the sultan, sated with stories, had pardoned me; this is not true: he is more hungry for stories than ever, and his curiosity alone can counterbalance his cruelty. —Your sultan Schahriar, my poor Scheherazade, is terribly like our public; if we ever cease to amuse him, he does not cut off our heads, he forgets us, which is hardly less ferocious. Your fate touches me, but what can I do? —You must have some feuilleton, some short story in your portfolio, give it to me. “What do you ask, charming Sultana? I have nothing done, I only work through the most extreme famine, for, as Perse said , _fames facit poetridas picas_. I still have enough to eat for three days; go and find Karr, if you can reach him through the swarms of wasps that rustle and beat their wings around his door and against his windowpanes; his heart is full of delicious love stories, which he will tell you between a boxing lesson and a fanfare of the hunting horn; wait for Jules Janin at the turn of some column in a feuilleton, and, as he walks, he will improvise a story for you such as Sultan Schahriar has never heard.” Poor Scheherazade raised her long henna-tinted eyelids towards the ceiling with a look so sweet, so lustrous, so unctuous and so supplicating, that I felt moved and made a great resolution. “I had a kind of subject that I wanted to make into a serial; I will dictate it to you, you will translate it into Arabic, adding the embroideries, flowers and pearls of poetry that it lacks; the title is already found, we will call our tale _The Thousand and Second Night_.” Scheherazade took a square of paper and began to write from right to left, in the oriental fashion, with great speed. There was no time to lose: she had to be that very evening in the capital of the kingdom of Samarkand. Once upon a time in the city of Cairo there was a young man named Mahmoud-Ben-Ahmed, who lived on the square of Esbekick. His father and mother had died a few years earlier, leaving him a moderate fortune, but sufficient for him to be able to live without having to resort to manual labor: others would have tried to load a ship with merchandise or to add a few camels laden with precious fabrics to the caravan that goes from Baghdad to Mecca; but Mahmoud-Ben-Ahmed preferred to live quietly, and his pleasures consisted of smoking tombeki in his hookah, drinking sherbets and eating dried Damascus preserves. Although he was well-made, with a regular face and a pleasant appearance, he did not seek adventures, and had replied several times to the people who urged him to marry and proposed rich and suitable matches, that it was not yet time and that he did not feel at all in the mood to take a wife. Mahmoud-Ben-Ahmed had received a good education: he read fluently in the most ancient books, possessed beautiful handwriting, knew by heart the verses of the Koran, the remarks of the commentators, and would have recited without making a mistake in a verse the Moallakats of the famous poets posted at the doors of the mosques; He was a bit of a poet himself and readily composed assonant and rhymed verses, which he declaimed to tunes of his own with great grace and charm. By dint of smoking his hookah and dreaming of the cool of the evening on the marble slabs of his terrace, Mahmoud-Ben-Ahmed’s head had become a little exalted: he had formed the project of being the lover of a peri or at least of a princess of the royal blood. This was the secret motive which made him receive with such indifference proposals of marriage and refuse the offers of slave traders. The only company he could bear was that of his cousin Abdul-Malek, a gentle and timid young man who seemed to share the modesty of his tastes. One day, Mahmoud-Ben-Ahmed went to the bazaar to buy some bottles of atar-gull and other Constantinople drugstores, which he needed. He met, in a very narrow street, a litter closed by curtains of crimson velvet, carried by two white mules and preceded by richly costumed zebeks and chiaoux. He stood against the wall to let the procession pass; but he could not do it so hastily that he had time to see, through the gap in the curtains, which a wild gust of air raised, a very beautiful lady seated on cushions of gold brocade. The lady, trusting in the thickness of the curtains and believing herself safe from any rash glance, had raised her veil because of the heat. It was only a flash; However, this was enough to make poor Mahmoud-Ben-Ahmed’s head spin : the lady had a dazzlingly white complexion , eyebrows that one might have thought had been drawn with a brush, a pomegranate mouth, which, when opened, revealed a double row of Oriental pearls finer and clearer than those that form the bracelets and necklace of the favorite sultana, a pleasant and proud air, and in her whole person something noble and royal. Mahmoud-Ben-Ahmed, as if dazzled by so many perfections, remained motionless for a long time in the same place, and, forgetting that he had gone out to do some shopping, he returned home empty-handed, carrying the radiant vision with him in his heart. All night he thought only of the beautiful stranger, and as soon as he got up he began to compose in her honor a long piece of poetry, in which the most flowery and gallant comparisons were lavished. Not knowing what to do, his piece finished and transcribed on a beautiful sheet of papyrus with beautiful capital letters in red ink and golden fleurons, he put it in his sleeve and went out to show this piece to his friend Abdul, for whom he had no secret thoughts. On his way to Abdul’s house, he passed by the bazaar and entered the perfume merchant’s shop to get the bottles of atar-gull. There he found a beautiful lady wrapped in a long white veil that left only her left eye uncovered. Mahmoud-Ben-Ahmed, on this left eye alone, immediately recognized the beautiful lady of the palanquin. His emotion was so strong that he was obliged to lean against the wall. The lady in the white veil noticed Mahmoud-Ben-Ahmed’s agitation, and kindly asked him what was wrong with him and if, by any chance, he was inconvenienced. The merchant, the lady, and Mahmoud-Ben-Ahmed went into the back room. A little black man brought a glass of snow water on a tray, from which Mahmoud-Ben-Ahmed drank a few sips. “Why did the sight of me make such a strong impression on you?” said the lady in a very gentle tone of voice, in which a rather tender interest could be discerned. Mahmoud-Ben-Ahmed told her how he had seen her near Sultan Hassan’s mosque at the moment when the curtains of her litter had been slightly drawn back, and that from that moment on he had been dying of love for her. “Really,” said the lady, “your passion was born so suddenly? I did not believe that love came so quickly. I am indeed the woman you met yesterday; I was going to the bath in my litter, and as the heat was stifling, I had lifted my veil. But you have seen me wrongly, and I am not as beautiful as you say. ”
Saying these words, she drew back her veil and revealed a face radiant with beauty, and so perfect that envy could not have found the slightest fault in it. You can imagine what Mahmoud-Ben-Ahmed’s transports were at such a favor; he poured out compliments which had the merit, very rare for compliments, of being perfectly sincere and of having nothing exaggerated. As he spoke with great fire and vehemence , the paper on which his verses were transcribed slipped from his sleeve and rolled on the floor. “What is this paper?” said the lady; “the writing seems very beautiful to me and indicates a practiced hand.” “It is,” replied the young man, blushing deeply, “a piece of verse that I composed last night, unable to sleep. I tried to celebrate your perfections in it; but the copy is far from the original, and my verses do not have the brilliance needed to celebrate those of your eyes.” The young lady read these verses attentively, and said, putting them in her belt: “Although they contain a lot of flattery, they are really not badly turned.” Then she adjusted her veil and left the shop, dropping in an accent that penetrated Mahmoud-Ben-Ahmed’s heart: “I sometimes come, on my return from the bath, to buy essences and boxes of perfumery at Bedredin’s.” The merchant congratulated Mahmoud-Ben-Ahmed on his good fortune, and, taking him to the very back of his shop, he whispered in his ear: “This young lady is none other than Princess Ayesha, daughter of the caliph.” Mahmoud-Ben-Ahmed returned home, stunned by his happiness and not daring to believe it. However, however modest he was, he could not hide from himself that Princess Ayesha had not looked upon him with a favorable eye. Chance, that great matchmaker, had been beyond his most audacious hopes. How he congratulated himself then on not having yielded to the suggestions of his friends who urged him to take a wife, and to the seductive portraits that the old women made of the young girls to be married who always have, as everyone knows, the eyes of a gazelle, a face of a full moon, hair longer than the tail of Al Borack, the Prophet’s mare, a mouth of red jasper, with a breath of ambergris, and a thousand other perfections that fall with the haick and the bridal veil: how happy he was to feel himself freed from all vulgar bonds, and free to abandon himself entirely to his new passion! He tossed and turned on his couch, but he could not fall asleep; the image of Princess Ayesha, sparkling like a bird of flame against a background of the setting sun, passed and repassed before his eyes. Unable to find rest, he went up to one of his cabinets of marvelously carved cedar wood, which is applied, in the cities of the Orient, to the exterior walls of houses, in order to profit there by the freshness and the current of air which a street cannot fail to form; sleep did not yet come to him, for sleep is like happiness, it flees when one seeks it; and, to calm his spirits with the spectacle of a serene night, he went with his hookah to the highest terrace of his dwelling. The fresh air of the night, the beauty of the sky more glittered with gold than a peri dress and in which the moon showed her silver cheeks, like a sultana pale with love who leans over the trellis of her kiosk, did Mahmoud-Ben-Ahmed good, for he was a poet, and could not remain indifferent to the magnificent spectacle which was offered to his view. From this height, the city of Cairo spread out before him like one of those plans in relief where the giaours trace their fortified cities. The terraces decorated with pots of succulents, and variegated with carpets; the squares where the water of the Nile shimmered, for it was the time of the flood; the gardens from which sprang groups of palm trees, clumps of carob trees or nopals; the islands of houses cut by narrow streets; the tin domes of the mosques; the frail minarets cut open like an ivory rattle; the dark or luminous angles of the palaces formed a glance arranged at will for the pleasure of the eyes. In the far background, the ashen sands of the plain merged their hues with the milky colors of the firmament, and the three pyramids of Giza, vaguely outlined by a bluish ray, drew their gigantic stone triangle at the edge of the horizon. Seated on a pile of tiles and his body enveloped by the elastic convolutions of the pipe of his hookah, Mahmoud-Ben-Ahmed tried to disentangle in the transparent darkness the distant form of the palace where the beautiful Ayesha slept. A profound silence reigned over this picture, which one might have thought was painted, for no breath, no murmur revealed the presence of a living being: the only appreciable noise was that made by the smoke from Mahmoud-Ben-Ahmed’s hookah as it passed through the rock crystal ball filled with water intended to cool his white puffs. Suddenly, a shrill cry burst forth in the midst of this calm, a cry of supreme distress, such as must be uttered, at the edge of the spring, by the antelope which feels the claw of a lion resting on its neck , or its head being swallowed by the jaws of a crocodile. Mahmoud-Ben-Ahmed, frightened by this cry of agony and despair, jumped up in one leap and instinctively placed his hand on the pommel of his yatagan, the blade of which he played to make sure that it was not sticking to the scabbard; then he leaned towards the side from which the noise had seemed to come. He discerned, far away in the shadows, a strange, mysterious group, composed of a white figure pursued by a pack of black, bizarre, and monstrous figures, with frantic gestures and disordered gaits. The white shadow seemed to flutter over the tops of the houses, and the distance separating it from its persecutors was so small that it was to be feared that it would soon be captured if its course continued, and that no event would come to its aid. Mahmoud-Ben-Ahmed at first believed that it was a peri having on its heels a swarm of ghouls chewing the flesh of the dead in their enormous incisors, or djinns with flaccid, membranous wings, armed with nails like those of bats, and, drawing from its pocket his comboloio of speckled aloe seeds, he began to recite, as a preservative, the ninety-nine names of Allah. He had not yet reached the twentieth when he stopped. It was not a peri, a supernatural being who was fleeing thus by jumping from one terrace to another and crossing the streets four or five feet wide which cut through the compact block of oriental cities, but indeed a woman; the djinns were only zebecks, chiaoux and eunuchs relentlessly in pursuit of her. Two or three terraces and a street still separated the fugitive from the platform where Mahmoud-Ben-Ahmed stood, but her strength seemed to betray her; She convulsively turned her head on her shoulder, and, like an exhausted horse whose spur is tearing its flank, seeing so close to her the hideous group that was pursuing her, she put the street between her and her enemies with a desperate leap. In her rush she brushed past Mahmoud-Ben-Ahmed, whom she did not see, for the moon had veiled itself, and ran to the end of the terrace which opened on that side onto a second street wider than the first. Despairing of being able to jump it, she seemed to be looking around for some corner in which to hide, and, noticing a large marble vase, she hid inside it like the genie who returns to the cup of a lily. The furious troop invaded the terrace with the impetuosity of a flight of demons. Their coppery or black faces with long mustaches, or hideously beardless, their sparkling eyes, their clenched hands waving damasks and kandjars, the fury imprinted on their low and ferocious physiognomies, caused a movement of fright in Mahmoud-Ben-Ahmed, although he was brave in person and skilled in the handling of weapons. They scanned the empty terrace, and not seeing the fugitive there, they doubtless thought that she had crossed the second street, and they continued their pursuit without paying any further attention to Mahmoud-Ben-Ahmed. When the clinking of their weapons and the sound of their slippers on the flagstones of the terraces had died away in the distance, the fugitive began to raise her pretty pale head over the rim of the vase, and looked around her with the glances of a frightened antelope, then she put out her shoulders and stood up, the charming pistil of this great marble flower; seeing only Mahmoud-Ben-Ahmed who smiled at her and signaled that she had nothing to fear, she sprang from the vase and came towards the young man with a humble attitude and supplicating arms. “For mercy, for pity, lord, save me, hide me in the darkest corner of your house, hide me from these demons who pursue me.” Mahmoud-Ben-Ahmed took her by the hand, led her to the stairs of the terrace, the trapdoor of which he carefully closed, and led her to his room. When he had lit the lamp, he saw that the fugitive was young, he had already guessed it from the silvery timbre of her voice, and very pretty, which did not surprise him; for in the starlight, he had distinguished her elegant figure. She appeared to be fifteen years old at most. Her extreme pallor brought out her large black almond-shaped eyes, whose corners extended to her temples; her thin and delicate nose gave much nobility to her profile, which could have been the envy of the most beautiful girls of Chios or Cyprus, and rivaled the marble beauty of the idols worshipped by the ancient Greek pagans. Her neck was charming and perfectly white; only, on the nape of her neck, one could see a slight streak of purple as thin as a hair or like the finest silk thread, a few small droplets of blood emerging from this red line. Her clothes were simple and consisted of a jacket trimmed with silk, muslin trousers and a multi-colored belt; Her chest rose and fell under her striped gauze tunic, for she was still out of breath and had barely recovered from her fright. When she was a little rested and reassured, she knelt before Mahmoud-Ben-Ahmed and told him her story in very good terms: “I was a slave in the seraglio of the rich Abu-Becker, and I committed the fault of delivering to the favorite sultana a selam or letter of flowers sent by a young emir of the most beautiful appearance with whom she maintained an amorous intercourse. Abu-Becker, having surprised the selam, flew into a horrible fury, had his favorite sultana locked in a leather bag with two cats, had her thrown into the water and condemned me to have my head cut off. Kislar-agassi was charged with this execution; but, taking advantage of the terror and disorder caused in the seraglio by the terrible punishment inflicted on poor Nourmahal, and finding the trapdoor of the terrace open, I escaped. My flight was noticed, and soon the black eunuchs, the zebecs and the Albanians in the service of my master set out in pursuit of me. One of them, Mesrour, whose pretensions I have always rejected, came so close to me with his brandished damask that he almost hit me; once I even felt the edge of his saber brush my skin, and it was then that I let out that terrible cry that you must have heard, for I confess to you that I believed that my last hour had arrived; but God is God and Mahomet is his prophet; the angel Asrael was not yet ready to carry me to the bridge of Alsirat. Now I have no hope but in you. Abu-Becker is powerful, he will have me sought, and if he can recapture me, Mesrour would have a firmer hand this time , and his damask would not be content with merely brushing my neck, she said, smiling, and passing her hand over the imperceptible pink line traced by the zebec’s saber. Accept me as your slave, I will devote to you a life that I owe you. You will always find my shoulder to lean on your elbow, and my hair to wipe the powder from your sandals.” Mahmoud-Ben-Ahmed was very compassionate by nature, like all people who have studied literature and poetry. Leila, such was the name of the runaway slave, expressed herself in chosen terms; she was young, beautiful, and had she been none of these things, humanity would have forbidden her to be sent away. Mahmoud-Ben-Ahmed showed the young slave a Persian carpet, silk tiles in the corner of the room, and on the edge of the platform a small snack of dates, candied citrons, and preserved roses from Constantinople, which, distracted by his thoughts, he himself had not touched, and in addition, two water-cooling pots, made of porous Theban earth, placed in Japanese porcelain saucers and covered with pearly perspiration. Having thus temporarily installed Leila, he went back up onto his terrace to finish his hookah and find the last assonance of the ghazel he was composing in honor of Princess Ayesha, a ghazel into which the lilies of Iran, the flowers of Gulistan, the stars, and all the celestial constellations vied to enter. The next day, Mahmoud Ben Ahmed, as soon as day broke, reflected that he had no sachet of benzoin, that he lacked civet, and that the silk purse brocaded with gold and studded with sequins, in which he kept his latakia, was frayed and needed to be replaced by another richer and more tasteful one. Having barely taken the time to perform his ablutions and recite his prayer while turning towards the east, he left his house after having copied his poetry and put it in his sleeve as the first time, not with the intention of showing it to his friend Abdul, but to give it to Princess Ayesha in person, in case he met her at the bazaar, in Bedredin’s shop. The muezzin, perched on the balcony of the minaret, announced only the fifth hour; there were only the fellahs in the streets, pushing before them their donkeys laden with watermelons, bunches of dates, hens tied by the legs, and halves of sheep that they were carrying to the market. He was in the district where Ayesha’s palace was located, but he saw nothing but crenellated and whitewashed walls. Nothing appeared at the three or four small windows blocked with latticework. of narrow-meshed wood, which allowed the people of the house to see what was happening in the street, but left no hope for prying eyes and curious onlookers from outside. Oriental palaces, unlike the palaces of Franguistan, reserve their magnificence for the interior and turn, so to speak, their backs to the passerby. Mahmoud-Ben-Ahmed therefore did not gain much from his investigations. He saw two or three richly dressed black slaves enter and leave , and whose insolent and proud expression proved the awareness of belonging to a considerable house and to a person of the highest quality. Our lover, looking at these thick walls, made vain efforts to discover on which side Ayesha’s apartments were . He could not succeed: the large door, formed by an arch cut into a heart, was walled up at the back, gave access to the courtyard only by a side door, and did not allow the gaze to penetrate there. Mahmoud-Ben-Ahmed was obliged to withdraw without having made any discovery; the hour was drawing near and he might have been noticed. He therefore went to Bedredin’s, to whom he made, to gain his favor, a considerable purchase of objects of which he had no need. He sat down in the shop, questioned the merchant, inquired about his business, whether he had happily disposed of the silks and carpets brought by the last caravan from Aleppo, whether his ships had arrived at the port without damage; in short, he committed all the cowardice customary to lovers; he still hoped to see Ayesha appear; but he was disappointed in his expectation: she did not come that day. He returned home, with a heavy heart, already calling her cruel and perfidious, as if she had indeed promised to be at Bedredin’s and had broken her word. On returning to his room, he put his slippers in the carved marble niche dug out beside the door for this purpose; he took off the caftan of precious fabric that he had put on with the idea of enhancing his good looks and appearing with all its advantages in the eyes of Ayesha, and stretched out on his couch in a state of collapse bordering on despair. It seemed to him that all was lost, that the world was going to end, and he complained bitterly of fate; all for not having met, as he had hoped, a woman he had not known two days before. As he had closed his bodily eyes to better see the dream of his soul, he felt a light breeze cool his forehead; he lifted his eyelids, and saw, sitting beside him on the floor, Leila waving one of those little palm-bark flags that serve, in the East, as a fan and a fly-whisk. He had completely forgotten her. “What is the matter, my dear lord?” she said in a voice as sweet and melodious as music. “You do not seem to be enjoying your peace of mind; some worry is tormenting you. If it were in the power of your slave to dispel this cloud of sadness that veils your brow, she would consider herself the happiest woman in the world, and would not envy Sultana Ayesha herself, however beautiful and wealthy she may be.” This name made Mahmoud-Ben-Ahmed tremble on his couch, like a sick man whose wound is touched by chance; he raised himself a little and cast an inquisitive glance at Leila, whose countenance was the calmest in the world and expressed nothing other than tender solicitude. He blushed, however, as if he had been surprised in the secret of his passion. Leila, without paying attention to this telling and significant blush, continued to offer her consolations to her new master: “What can I do to remove from your mind the dark ideas that obsess it? A little music would perhaps dissipate this melancholy. An old slave who had been an odalisque to the former sultan taught me the secrets of composition; I can improvise verses and accompany myself on the guzla. ”
Saying these words, she detached from the wall the guzla with its lemon-tree belly, ribbed with ivory, and its handle inlaid with mother-of-pearl, burgau and ebony, and first played with rare perfection the tarabuca and some other Arab airs. The accuracy of the voice and the sweetness of the music would, on any other occasion, have delighted Mahmoud-Ben-Ahmed, who was very sensitive to the charms of verses and harmony; but his mind and heart were so preoccupied with the lady he had seen at Bedredin’s, that he paid no attention to Leila’s songs. The next day, happier than the day before, he met Ayesha in Bedredin’s shop. To describe his joy to you would be an impossible undertaking; only those who have been in love can understand it. He remained speechless for a moment, breathless, with a cloud in his eyes. Ayesha, who saw his emotion, was grateful to him and spoke to him with great affability; for nothing flatters people of high birth like the trouble they inspire. Mahmoud-Ben-Ahmed, having come to his senses, made every effort to be agreeable, and as he was young, of fine appearance, had studied poetry, and expressed himself in the most elegant terms, he thought he realized that he was not displeasing, and he took courage to ask the princess for a meeting in a more propitious and safer place than Bedredin’s shop. “I know,” he told her, “that I am at most good enough to be the dust of your path, that the distance between you and me could not be covered in a thousand years by a horse of the prophet’s breed, always galloping; but love makes one bold, and the caterpillar in love with the rose cannot refrain from confessing its love. » Ayesha listened to all this without the slightest sign of anger, and, fixing Mahmoud-Ben-Ahmed with eyes full of languor, she said to him: “Find yourself tomorrow at the hour of prayer in the mosque of Sultan Hassan, under the third lamp; you will meet there a black slave dressed in yellow damask. He will walk in front of you, and you will follow him.” Having said this, she drew her veil over her face and left. Our lover took care not to miss the rendezvous: he planted himself under the third lamp, not daring to deviate from it for fear of not being found by the black slave, who was not yet at his post. It is true that Mahmoud-Ben-Ahmed had anticipated the appointed time by two hours. Finally he saw the black man dressed in yellow damask appear; he came straight to the pillar against which Mahmoud-Ben-Ahmed was standing. The slave, having looked at him attentively, made an imperceptible sign to encourage him to follow him. They both left the mosque. The black man walked with a quick step, and made Mahmoud-Ben-Ahmed take an infinite number of detours through the tangled and complicated skein of the streets of Cairo. Our young man once wanted to speak to his guide; but the latter, opening his wide mouth furnished with sharp white teeth, showed him that his tongue had been cut off to the roots. Thus it would have been difficult for him to commit indiscretions. Finally they arrived in a completely deserted part of the city that Mahmoud-Ben-Ahmed did not know, although he was a native of Cairo and thought he knew every part of it: the mute stopped in front of a whitewashed wall, where there was no appearance of a door. He counted six steps from the corner of the wall, and looked very carefully for a spring, no doubt hidden in the interstice of the stones. Having found it, he pressed the trigger, a column turned on itself, and revealed a dark, narrow passage, into which the mute man entered, followed by Mahmoud-Ben-Ahmed. They first descended more than a hundred steps, and then followed a dark corridor of interminable length . Mahmoud-Ben-Ahmed, feeling the walls, recognized that they were of living rock, carved with hollow hieroglyphs and understood that he was in the subterranean corridors of an ancient Egyptian necropolis , which had been used to establish this secret exit. At the end of the corridor, in the great distance, glittered a few gleams of bluish daylight. This daylight passed through the lacework of a hollowed-out sculpture forming part of the room where the corridor ended. The mute pressed another spring, and Mahmoud-Ben-Ahmed found himself in a room paved with white marble, with a basin and a fountain in the middle, alabaster columns, walls covered with glass mosaics, sentences from the Koran intermingled with flowers and ornaments, and covered by a sculpted vault, excavated, worked like the interior of a beehive or a stalactite cave; enormous scarlet peonies placed in enormous Moorish vases of white and blue porcelain completed the decoration. On a platform furnished with cushions, a sort of alcove cut into the thickness of the wall, sat Princess Ayesha, without veil, radiant, and surpassing in beauty the houris of the fourth heaven. “Well! Mahmoud-Ben-Ahmed, have you written other verses in my honor?” she said to him in the most gracious tone, gesturing for him to sit down. Mahmoud-Ben-Ahmed threw himself at Ayesha’s knees and took his papyrus from his sleeve, and recited his ghazel to her in the most passionate tone; it was truly a remarkable piece of poetry. As he read, the princess’s cheeks lit up and colored like a newly lit alabaster lamp. Her eyes sparkled and threw out rays of extraordinary clarity, her body became as if transparent, and on her quivering shoulders butterfly wings vaguely appeared . Unfortunately, Mahmoud-Ben-Ahmed, too busy reading his piece of verse, did not raise his eyes and did not notice the metamorphosis that had taken place. When he had finished, he had only Princess Ayesha before him, who was looking at him with an ironic smile. Like all poets, too busy with their own creations, Mahmoud-Ben-Ahmed had forgotten that the most beautiful verses are not worth a sincere word, a look illuminated by the clarity of love.—The perished are like women, one must guess them and catch them just at the moment when they are about to ascend to the heavens and never descend again.—The opportunity must be seized by the lock of hair hanging from his forehead, and the spirits of the air by their wings. This is how one can master it. “Truly, Mahmoud-Ben-Ahmed, you have a poetic talent of the rarest kind, and your verses deserve to be posted on the doors of mosques, written in letters of gold, alongside the most famous works of Ferdoussi, Saâdi and Ibn-Ben-Omaz. It is a pity that, absorbed by the perfection of your alliterated rhymes, you did not look at me just now, you would have seen… what you will perhaps never see again. Your dearest wish was fulfilled before you without your noticing it. Farewell, Mahmoud-Ben-Ahmed, who only wanted to love a peri.” Thereupon Ayesha rose with a completely majestic air, lifted a door of gold brocade and disappeared. The mute came to take Mahmoud-Ben-Ahmed, and led him back by the same route to the place where he had taken him. Mahmoud-Ben-Ahmed, distressed and surprised at having been thus dismissed, did not know what to think and was lost in his thoughts, without being able to find a reason for the sudden departure of the princess: he ended up attributing it to a woman’s whim which would change at the first opportunity; but although he went to Bedredin to buy benzoin and civet skins, he did not meet Princess Ayesha again; he made an infinite number of stops near the third pillar of the mosque of Sultan Hassan, he did not see the black man dressed in yellow damask reappear, which threw him into a dark and profound melancholy. Leila contrived a thousand inventions to distract him: she played the guzla for him; she recited marvelous stories to him; decorated his room with bouquets whose colors were so well combined and diversified, that the sight was as joyous as the smell; sometimes she even danced before him with as much flexibility and grace as the most skilled almée; anyone other than Mahmoud-Ben-Ahmed would have been touched by so much thoughtfulness and attention; but his mind was elsewhere, and the desire to find Ayesha left him no rest. He had often wandered around the princess’s palace; but he had never been able to catch a glimpse of her; nothing was visible behind the tightly closed trellises; the palace was like a tomb. His friend Abdul-Maleck, alarmed by his condition, came to visit him often and could not help noticing the graces and beauty of Leila, which at least equaled those of Princess Ayesha, if not even surpassed them, and was astonished at the blindness of Mahmoud-Ben-Ahmed; and if he had not feared violating the holy laws of friendship, he would have gladly taken the young slave as his wife. However, without losing any of her beauty, Leila grew paler every day; her large eyes grew languid; the blushes of dawn gave way on her cheeks to the paleness of the moonlight. One day Mahmoud-Ben-Ahmed noticed that she had cried, and asked her the reason: “O my dear lord, I would never dare tell you: I, a poor slave taken in out of pity, love you; but what am I in your eyes? I know that you have made a vow to love only a peri or a sultana: others would be content to be sincerely loved by a young and pure heart and would not worry about the daughter of the caliph or the queen of the genies: look at me, I was fifteen years old yesterday, I am perhaps as beautiful as this Ayesha of whom you speak aloud in your dreams; it is true that one does not see shining on my forehead the magic carbuncle, or the aigrette of heron’s feather; I do not walk accompanied by soldiers with muskets encrusted with silver and coral. But yet I know how to sing, improvise on the guzla, I dance like Emineh herself, I am to you like a devoted sister; what does it take to touch your heart? Mahmoud-Ben-Ahmed, hearing Leila speak thus, felt his heart troubled; however, he said nothing and seemed prey to deep meditation. Two conflicting resolutions contended with each other in his soul: on the one hand, it cost him to renounce his favorite dream; on the other, he told himself that he would be very foolish to attach himself to a woman who had mocked him and left him with mocking words, when he had in her house, in youth and beauty, at least the equivalent of what he was losing. Leila, as if awaiting his sentence, remained on her knees, and two tears silently flowed down the pale face of the poor child. “Ah! Why didn’t Mesrour’s saber finish what he had begun! she said, putting her hand to her frail, white neck.” Touched by this accent of pain, Mahmoud-Ben-Ahmed raised the young slave and placed a kiss on her forehead. Leila raised her head like a caressed dove, and, landing before Mahmoud-Ben-Ahmed, took his hands and said to him: “Look at me very carefully; don’t you think I look very much like someone you know?” Mahmoud-Ben-Ahmed could not suppress a cry of surprise: “It’s the same face, the same eyes, all the features, in a word, of Princess Ayesha. How is it that I did not notice this resemblance earlier? ” “Until now you have only allowed a very distracted glance to fall upon your poor slave ,” replied Leila in a tone of gentle mockery. —If Princess Ayesha herself were to send me her black one in the yellow damask dress, with the selam of love, I would refuse to follow him.
—True? said Leila in a voice more melodious than that of Bulbul making her confession to the beloved rose. However, one should not despise this poor Ayesha too much, who resembles me so much. For all reply, Mahmoud-Ben-Ahmed pressed the young slave to his heart. But what was his astonishment when he saw Leila’s face light up, the magic carbuncle light up on her forehead, and wings, studded with peacock eyes, develop on her charming shoulders ! Leila was a peri! “I am, my dear Mahmoud-Ben- Ahmed, neither Princess Ayesha , nor Leila the slave. My true name is Boudroulboudour. I am peri of the first order, as you can see by my carbuncle and my wings. One evening, passing in the air beside your terrace, I heard you express the wish to be loved by a peri. This ambition pleased me; ignorant mortals, coarse and lost in earthly pleasures , do not dream of such rare voluptuousness. I wanted to test you, and I took the disguise of Ayesha and Leila to see if you would know how to recognize me and love me under this human envelope. – Your heart was more clear-sighted than your mind, and you had more kindness than pride. The devotion of the slave made you prefer it to the sultana; it was there that I was waiting for you. For a moment seduced by the beauty of your verses, I was on the point of betraying myself; but I was afraid that you were only a poet in love only with your imagination and your rhymes, and I withdrew, affecting a superb disdain. You wanted to marry Leila the slave, Boudroulboudour the peri takes care of replacing her. I will be Leila for all, and peri for you alone; for I want your happiness, and the world would not forgive you for enjoying a happiness superior to hers. Fairy though I am, it is at most if I could defend you against the envy and wickedness of men.” These conditions were accepted with transport by Mahmoud-Ben-Ahmed, and the wedding was held as if he had really married little Leila. Such is in substance the story that I dictated to Scheherazade through Francesco. “How did he find your Arab tale, and what has become of Scheherazade? – I have not seen her since.” I think that Schahriar, displeased with this story, will have had the poor sultana’s head permanently cut off. Friends returning from Baghdad told me they saw, sitting on the steps of a mosque, a woman whose madness was to believe herself to be Dinarzarde from the _Arabian Nights_, and who kept repeating this phrase: “My sister, tell us one of those beautiful stories that you know how to tell so well.” She would wait a few minutes, listening very attentively, and as no one answered her, she would begin to cry, then wipe her tears with a handkerchief embroidered with gold and all spotted with blood. THE PAVILION ON THE WATER In the province of Canton, some _li_ from the city, lived door to door two rich Chinese retired from business; at what time, it is of little importance to know, stories do not need a very precise chronology. One of these Chinese was called Tou, and the other Kouan; Tou had held high scientific offices. He was a _hanlin_ and a scholar of the Jasper Chamber; Kouan, in less elevated positions, had amassed fortune and consideration. Tou and Kouan, who were connected by a distant relationship, had loved each other in the past. When they were younger, they enjoyed getting together with some of their old schoolmates, and, during autumn evenings, they would flutter their black-laden brushes over the trellis of the flowered paper, and celebrate with improvisations the beauty of the daisies while drinking small cups of wine; but their two characters, which at first presented only almost imperceptible differences , became, with time, completely opposed. Like an almond branch that forks and whose sticks, brought together at the bottom, spread completely apart at the top, so that one spreads its bitter perfume in the garden, while the other shakes its snow of flowers outside the wall. From year to year, Tou grew more serious; his belly rounded majestically, his triple chin rose in a solemn air, he only made moral couplets good enough to hang on the posts of pavilions. Kouan, on the contrary, seemed to perk up with age, he sang more joyfully than ever of wine, flowers and swallows. His mind, freed from vulgar cares, was lively and alert like that of a young man, and when the word that had to be embedded in a verse had been given, his hand did not hesitate for a single instant. Little by little the two friends had become enraged against each other. They could no longer speak to each other without scratching each other with stinging words, and they were, like two bramble hedges, bristling with thorns and claws. Things came to the point that they no longer had any contact with each other and each hung, on his own side, on the facade of their houses, a tablet bearing the formal prohibition that none of the inhabitants of the neighboring dwelling, under any pretext whatsoever, should ever cross the threshold. They would have liked to be able to uproot their houses and plant them elsewhere; unfortunately this was not possible. Tou even tried to sell his property; but he could not find a reasonable price for it, and besides, it is always difficult to leave the carved paneling, the polished tables, the transparent windows, the gilded trellises, the bamboo seats, the porcelain vases, the red or black lacquer cabinets, the cartouches of old poems, which one has taken so much trouble to arrange; it is hard to give up to others the garden that one has planted oneself with willows, peach trees and plum trees, where one has seen, each spring, the pretty mei flower bloom: each of these objects binds the heart of man with a thread thinner than silk, but as difficult to break as an iron chain. At the time when Tou and Kouan were friends, they had each built a pavilion in their garden, on the edge of a body of water shared by both properties: it was a pleasure for them to send each other familiar greetings from the balcony and to smoke the drop of flaming opium on the porcelain mushroom while exchanging kindly puffs ; but, since their disagreements, they had built a wall which separated the pond into two equal portions; only, as the depth of the basin was great, the wall rested on piles forming a kind of low arcades, whose bays let the water pass over which the reflections of the opposite pavilion stretched out. These pavilions had three floors with terraces set back. The roofs, turned up and curved at the angles like hoof points, were covered with round and shiny tiles similar to the scales which paper the bellies of carp; on each ridge stood out serrations in the form of foliage and dragons. Red varnished pillars , joined by a frieze cut out in the open, like the ivory leaf of a fan, supported this elegant roof. Their shafts rested on a small, low wall, covered with porcelain tiles arranged with a pleasing symmetry, and bordered by a railing of a bizarre design, so as to form an open gallery in front of the main building . This arrangement was repeated on each floor, not without some variations: here the porcelain tiles were replaced by bas-reliefs representing various subjects of country life; a network of curiously misshapen branches making unexpected bends, replaced the balcony; posts, painted in bright colors, served as pedestals for warty chimeras, fantastic monsters , the product of all impossibilities welded together. The building ended with a hollowed-out, gilded cornice, adorned with a balustrade of bamboo with equal nodes, adorned in each compartment with a metal ball. The interior was no less sumptuous: on the walls, verses by Tou-chi and Li-tai-pe were written by an agile hand in perpendicular lines, in gold characters on a lacquer background. Talc sheets let a milky, opal-colored light filter through the windows, and on their sills, pots of peonies, orchids, Chinese primroses, and white-flowered erythrina, artfully placed, delighted the eye with their delicate shades. Tiles, of a magnificently patterned silk, were arranged in the corners of each room; and on the tables, which returned reflections like a mirror, one always found toothpicks, fans, ebony pipes, porphyry stones, brushes, and everything necessary for writing. Artificial rocks, in the interstices of which willows and walnut trees plunged their roots, served on the land side as a base for these pretty constructions; on the water side, they supported posts of indestructible wood. It was in reality a charming sight to see the willow hurling its golden filaments and silken tufts from the top of these rocks towards the surface of the water , and the brilliant colors of the pavilions gleaming in a frame of variegated foliage. Beneath the crystal of the waves, azure fish scaled with gold frolicked in bands; Fleets of pretty ducks with emerald necks maneuvered in all directions, and the broad leaves of the water lily-needle spread lazily beneath the diamond-like transparency of this small lake fed by a lively spring. Except towards the middle, where the bottom was formed of silvery sand of extraordinary fineness, and where the bubbling of the spring which welled up would not have allowed the aquatic vegetation to implant its fibrils, all the rest of the pond was carpeted with the most beautiful green velvet imaginable, by sheets of perennial watercress. Without this ugly wall raised by the mutual enmity of the two neighbors, there would certainly not have been, in the whole extent of the Middle Empire, which, as we know, occupies more than three-quarters of the world, a more picturesque and more delightful garden; each would have enlarged his property from the view of that of the other; for man here below can only take from objects the appearance. Such as it was, however, a wise man would not have wished, to end his life in the contemplation of nature and the amusements of poetry, a fresher and more propitious retreat. Tou and Kouan had gained from their misunderstanding a wall for all perspective, and had deprived each other of the view of the charming pavilions; but they consoled themselves with the idea of having each wronged his neighbor. This state of things had already reigned for some years: nettles and weeds had invaded the paths which led from one house to the other. The branches of thorny shrubs intertwined, as if they wanted to intercept all communication; one would have said that the plants understood the dissensions which divided the two old friends, and took part in them by trying to separate them still further. During this time, the wives of Tou and Kouan had each given birth to a child. Madame Tou was the mother of a charming daughter, and Madame Kouan of the prettiest son in the world. This happy event, which had brought joy to both houses, was unknown on both sides; for, although their properties adjoined, the two Chinese lived as strangers to each other as if they had been separated by the Yellow River or the Great Wall; common acquaintances avoided all allusion to the neighboring house, and the servants, if they met by chance, were ordered not to speak to each other under penalty of the whip and the cangue. The boy was called Tchin-Sing, and the girl, Ju-Kiouan, that is to say, the pearl and the jasper; their perfect beauty justified the choice of these names. As soon as they were a little older, the wall, which cut the pond in two and unpleasantly limited the view from that side, attracted their attention, and they asked their parents what was behind this fence so singularly placed in the middle of a piece of water, and to whom belonged the large trees whose tops could be seen. They were told that it was the home of strange, quintessential, surly and in every way unsociable people, and that this fence had been built to protect themselves from such wicked neighbors. This explanation was enough for these children; they had become accustomed to the wall and no longer paid any attention to it. Ju-Kiouan grew in grace and perfection, she was skilled in all the works of her sex, she handled the needle with incomparable skill. The butterflies she embroidered on the satin seemed to live and beat their wings, you would have sworn you could hear the song of the birds she fixed to the canvas; more than one deluded nose pressed itself to her tapestries to breathe the perfume of the flowers she sown there. Ju-Kiouan’s talents did not stop there, she knew by heart the book of Odes and the five rules of conduct; never did a lighter hand throw bolder and clearer characters on the tissue paper. Dragons are not faster in their flight than her wrist when it rains the black rain of the brush. She knew all the modes of poetry, the Late, the Hasty, the High, and the Returning, and composed pieces full of merit on the subjects which should naturally strike a young girl, on the return of swallows, spring willows, daisies, and other similar subjects. More than one scholar who thought himself worthy of mounting the golden horse would not have improvised with such ease. Tchin-Sing had profited no less from his studies; his name happened to be among the first on the examination list. Although he was very young, he could have worn the black cap, and already all the mothers thought that a boy so advanced in science would make an excellent son-in-law and would soon attain the highest literary dignities; but Tchin-Sing replied cheerfully to the negotiators sent to him that it was too early, and that he wished to enjoy his freedom for a while longer. He successively refused Hon-Giu, Lo-Men-Gli, Oma, Po-Fo and other very distinguished young people. Never, without exception the handsome Fan-Gan, whose ladies filled the carriage with oranges and sweets, when he returned from shooting, was the young man more pampered and more advances received; but his heart seemed insensitive to love, not from coldness, for from a thousand details one could guess that Tchin-Sing had a tender soul; one would have said that he remembered an image known in a previous existence, and that he hoped to find it again in this one. Although they praised the willow-leaf eyebrows, the imperceptible feet, and the dragonfly-like waist of the beauties they proposed to him, he listened with a distracted air and as if thinking of something else entirely. For her part, Ju-Kiouan was no less difficult: she rejected all the suitors. This one bowed without grace, that one was not careful with his clothes; one had heavy and common handwriting, another did not know the book of verses, or had made a mistake about the rhyme; in short, they all had some fault or other. Ju-Kiouan drew such comical portraits of them that her parents ended up laughing at them themselves, and showed out, as politely as possible, the poor aspirant who already thought he had set foot on the threshold of the oriental pavilion. In the end, the parents of the two children were alarmed by their persistence in rejecting all the candidates presented to them. Madame Tou and Madame Kouan, doubtless preoccupied with these ideas of marriage, continued in their night dreams their daytime thoughts. One of the dreams they had struck them particularly. Madame Kouan dreamed that she saw on the breast of her son Tchin-Sing a jasper stone so marvelously polished that it threw out rays like a carbuncle; for her part, Madame Tou dreamed that her daughter wore around her neck a pearl of the most beautiful orient and of inestimable value. What meaning could these two dreams have? Did Madame Kouan’s dream portend to Tchin-Sing the honors of the Imperial Academy, and did Madame Tou’s dream mean that Ju-Kiouan would find some treasure buried in the garden or under a brick of the hearth? Such an explanation was not unreasonable, and more than one would have been satisfied with it; but the good ladies saw in this dream allusions to extremely advantageous marriages which their children. Unfortunately, Tchin-Sing and Ju-Kiouan persisted more than ever in their resolution, and denied the prophecy. Kouan and Tou, although they had not dreamed anything, were astonished at such obstinacy, marriage being ordinarily a ceremony for which young people do not show such sustained aversion; they imagined that this resistance perhaps came from a preconceived inclination; but Tchin-Sing did not court any young girl, and no young man walked along Ju-Kiouan’s trellises. A few days of observation were enough to convince the two families. Madame Tou and Madame Kouan believed more than ever in the great destinies predicted by the dream. The two women went, each on her own, to consult the monk of the temple of Fô, a beautiful building with carved roofs, round windows, a tower gleaming with gold and varnish, covered with votive tablets, adorned with masts from which float silk banners depicting chimeras and dragons, shaded by ancient trees of monstrous size. After burning gilded paper and perfumes before the idol, the monk replied to Madame Tou that the jasper was needed for the pearl, and to Madame Kouan that the pearl was needed for the jasper: that their union alone could resolve all difficulties. Not satisfied with this ambiguous answer, the two women returned home, without having seen each other at the temple, by a different route; their perplexity was even greater than before. Now, it happened that one day Ju-Kiouan was leaning on the balustrade of the country pavilion, precisely at the hour when Tchin-Sing was doing the same on his side. The weather was fine, no cloud veiled the sky; there was not enough wind to stir an aspen leaf, not a ripple shimmered on the surface of the pond, smoother than a mirror. Hardly, in its games, did a carp somersault, come to trace a circle there which soon vanished; the trees on the bank were reflected so exactly that one hesitated between image and reality; one would have said a forest planted upside down, and welding its roots to the roots of an identical forest; a wood which had drowned for a heartache; the fish seemed to swim in the foliage and the birds to fly in the water. Ju-Kiouan was amused by this marvelous transparency, when, casting her eyes over the portion of the pond which bordered the dividing wall, she perceived the reflection of the opposite pavilion which extended as far as there, sliding under the arch. She had never paid attention to this optical play, which surprised and interested her. She distinguished the red pillars, the cut-out friezes, the pots of daisies, the golden weather vanes, and if the refraction had not overturned them, she would have read the sentences inscribed on the tablets. But what astonished her to the highest degree was to see leaning over the railing of the balcony, in a position similar to her own, a figure that resembled her in such a way that if she had not come from the other side of the pool, she would have taken it for herself: it was the shadow of Tchin-Sing, and if we find it strange that a boy could be taken for a young lady, we will answer that Tchin-Sing, because of the heat, had taken off his bachelor’s cap, that he was extremely young and did not yet have a beard; his delicate features, his even complexion and his brilliant eyes could easily have lent themselves to the illusion, which, moreover, did not last long. Ju-Kiouan, from the movements of his heart, quickly recognized that it was not a young girl whose image the water repeated. Until then, she had believed that the earth did not contain the being created for her, and very often she had wished to have at her disposal one of Fargana’s horses, which travel a thousand leagues a day to seek him in imaginary spaces. She imagined that she was mismatched in this world, and that she would never know the sweetness of the union of teals. Never, she said to herself, will I consecrate the duckweed and the alisma on the altar of the ancestors, and I will enter alone among the mulberry trees and the elms. Seeing this shadow in the water, she understood that her beauty had a sister or rather a brother. Far from being angry, she found herself completely happy; the pride of believing herself unique quickly gave way to love, for from that moment, Ju-Kiouan’s heart was bound forever; a single glance exchanged, not even directly, but by simple reflection, is enough for that. Let no one accuse Ju-Kiouan of frivolity on this; to fall in love with a young man in his reflection…, is it not madness? But unless there has been a long association which allows one to study characters, what more do one see in men? A purely external appearance, like that given by a mirror; and is it not the nature of young girls to judge the soul of a future husband by the enamel of his teeth and the cut of his nails? Tchin-Sing had also seen this marvelous beauty: Is this a dream I am having while awake? he cried? This charming figure which sparkles under the crystal water must be formed from the silvery rays of the moon on a spring night and from the subtlest aroma of flowers; although I have never seen her, I recognize her, it is indeed she whose image is engraved in my soul, the beautiful stranger to whom I address my couplets and quatrains. Tchin-Sing had reached this point in his monologue when he heard his father’s voice calling him. “My son,” he said to him, “it is a very rich and very suitable match that is being proposed to you through the mouth of Wing, my friend. She is a girl who has imperial blood in her veins, whose beauty is famous, and who possesses all the qualities necessary to make a husband happy.” Tchin-Sing, completely preoccupied with the adventure of the pavilion, and burning with love for the image glimpsed in the water, refused flatly. His father, infuriated with anger, flew into a rage and made the most violent threats. “Bad fellow,” cried the old man, “if you persist in your stubbornness, I will ask the magistrate to have you locked up in this fortress occupied by the barbarians of Europe, from where one can see only rocks beaten by the sea, mountains capped with clouds, and black waters furrowed by those monstrous inventions of evil genies, who move on wheels and vomit a fetid smoke. There, you will have time to reflect and amend yourself!” These threats did not frighten Tchin-Sing much, who replied that he would accept the first wife presented to him provided it was not that one. The next day, at the same hour, he went to the country pavilion, and, as on the day before, leaned over the balustrade. After a few minutes, he saw Ju-Kiouan’s reflection lying on the water like a bouquet of submerged flowers. The young man placed his hand on his heart, placed kisses on the tips of his fingers and sent them to the reflection with a gesture full of grace and passion. A joyful smile blossomed like a pomegranate bud in the transparency of the water and proved to Tchin-Sing that he was not disagreeable to the beautiful stranger; but as one cannot have very long conversations with a reflection whose body one cannot see , he made a sign that he was going to write, and went back inside the pavilion. After a few moments he came out holding a square of silvery and colored paper, on which he had improvised a declaration of love in seven-syllable verses. He rolled up his piece of verse, enclosed it in the chalice of a flower and wrapped the whole thing in a large water lily leaf which he delicately placed on the water. A light breeze, which arose very opportunely, carried the declaration towards one of the bays of the wall, so that Ju-Kiouan had only to bend down to collect it. For fear of being surprised, she withdrew to the most remote of her rooms, and read with infinite pleasure the expressions of love and the metaphors which Tchin-Sing had used; besides the joy of knowing that she was loved, she felt the satisfaction of being loved by a man of merit, for the beauty of the writing, the choice words, the accuracy of the rhymes, the brilliance of the images proved a brilliant education: what struck her most was the name of Tchin-Sing. She had heard her mother speak too often of the dream of the pearl not to be struck by this coincidence; so she did not doubt for a moment that Tchin-Sing was the husband that heaven intended for her. The following day, as the breeze had changed, Ju-Kiouan sent by the same means, to the opposite pavilion, a reply in verse, where, despite all the modesty natural to a young girl, it was easy to see that she shared Tchin-Sing’s love. On reading the signature of the note, Tchin-Sing could not restrain an exclamation of surprise: “The Jasper!” Isn’t that the precious stone that my mother saw in her dreams sparkling on my chest like a carbuncle!… Decidedly I must present myself in this house; for that is where the wife prophesied by the nocturnal spirits lives. As he was about to leave, he remembered the dissensions that divided the two owners, and the prohibitions inscribed on the tablet; and not knowing what to do, he told the whole story to Madame Kouan. Ju-Kiouan, for his part, had told everything to Madame Tou. These names of pearl and jasper seemed decisive to the two matrons, who returned to the temple of Fô to consult the bonze. The bonze replied that such was, in fact, the meaning of the dream, and that not to conform to it would be to incur the wrath of heaven. Touched by the entreaties of the two mothers, and also by some small presents that they gave him, he took charge of the steps with Tou and Kouan, and entangled them so well that they could not go back on their word when he discovered the true origin of the spouses. Seeing each other again after such a long time, the two old friends were astonished that they had been able to separate for such frivolous causes, and felt how much they had deprived each other. The wedding took place; the Pearl and the Jasper were finally able to speak to each other other than through the intermediary of a reflection.—Whether they were happier for it, we would not dare affirm; for happiness is often only a shadow in the water. THE CHILD WITH THE BREAD SHOES Listen to this story that German grandmothers tell their grandchildren—Germany, a beautiful country of legends and reveries, where the moonlight, playing on the mists of the old Rhine, creates a thousand fantastic visions. A poor woman lived alone, at the edge of the village, in a humble little house: the dwelling was quite miserable and contained only the most indispensable furniture. An old bed with twisted columns from which hung yellowed serge curtains , a bread bin, a walnut chest shining with cleanliness, but with numerous wormholes, filled with wax , announcing long services, a tapestry armchair with faded colors and worn by the grandmother’s bobbing head, a spinning wheel polished by work: that was all. We were about to forget a child’s cradle, brand new, very comfortably upholstered, and covered with a pretty quilt with motifs, stitched by a tireless needle, that of a mother decorating the crib of her little Jesus. All the wealth of the poor house was concentrated there. The child of a burgomaster or a court councilor could not have been more comfortably bedded. Holy prodigality, sweet madness of the mother, who deprives herself of everything to give a little luxury, in the midst of her misery, to her dear infant! This cradle gave a festive air to the thin hovel; nature, which is compassionate to the unfortunate, brightened the bareness of this cottage with tufts of houseleeks and velvet mosses. Good plants, full of pity, while having the air of parasites, conveniently plugged the holes in the roof, which they made splendid like a basket, and prevented the rain from falling on the cradle; the pigeons landed on the window and cooed until the child was asleep. A little bird to which young Hanz had given a crumb of bread in winter, when the snow whitened the earth, had, in the spring, dropped a seed from its beak at the foot of the wall, and out of it came a beautiful bindweed which, clinging to the stones with its green claws, entered the room through a broken pane, and crowned the child’s cradle with its garland, so that in the morning, Hanz’s blue eyes and the bindweed’s blue bells awoke at the same time, and looked at each other with an air of intelligence. This dwelling was therefore poor, but not sad. Hanz’s mother, whose husband had died far away in the war, lived, as best she could, on a few vegetables from the garden, and the product of her spinning wheel: very little, but Hanz lacked nothing, it was enough. Certainly, Hanz’s mother was a pious and believing woman. She prayed, worked and practiced virtue; but she made a mistake: she looked at herself with too much complacency and took too much pride in her son. It sometimes happens that mothers, seeing these beautiful ruddy children, with dimpled hands, white skin, and pink heels, imagine that they are theirs forever; but God gives nothing, he only lends; and, like a forgotten creditor, he sometimes comes suddenly to demand his due. Because this fresh bud had come from its stem, Hanz’s mother believed that she had brought him into being; and God, who, from the depths of his paradise with its azure vaults starred with gold, observes all that happens on earth, and hears from the ends of infinity the sound that the blade of grass makes as it grows, did not see this with pleasure. He also saw that Hanz was greedy and his mother too indulgent to his greed; often this naughty child cried when, after the grapes or the apple, it was necessary to eat the bread, the object of the envy of so many unfortunates, and the mother let him throw away the piece he had started, or finished it herself. Now it happened that Hanz fell ill: the fever burned him, his breath whistled in his choked throat; he had croup, a terrible disease that has made the eyes of many a mother and father redden. The poor woman, at this sight, felt a horrible pain. No doubt you have seen in some church the image of Our Lady, dressed in mourning and standing under the cross, with her chest open and her heart bleeding, into which plunge seven silver swords, three on one side, four on the other. This means that there is no agony more dreadful than that of a mother who sees her child die. And yet the Blessed Virgin believed in the divinity of Jesus and knew that her son would rise again. Now, Hanz’s mother did not have this hope. During the last days of Hanz’s illness, while watching over him, the mother mechanically continued to spin, and the hum of the spinning wheel mingled with the death rattle of the little dying child. If rich people find it strange that a mother should spin near her child’s deathbed , it is because they do not know what tortures poverty contains for the soul; alas! it not only breaks the body, it breaks the heart as well. What she was spinning in this way was the thread for the shroud of her little Hanz; she did not want a cloth that had been used to wrap this dear body, and since she had no money, she made her spinning wheel hum with funereal activity; but she did not pass the thread over her lip as usual: enough tears fell from her eyes to wet it. At the end of the sixth day, Hanz expired. Whether by chance or by sympathy, the garland of bindweed that caressed her cradle languished, faded, withered, and dropped its last curled flower onto the bed. When the mother was quite convinced that the breath had flown forever from her lips where the violets of death had replaced the roses of life, she covered that too dear head with the edge of the sheet, took her bundle of thread under her arm, and went to the weaver’s house. “Weaver,” she said to him, “here is some very even thread, very fine and without knots: the spider does not spin any finer between the joists of the ceiling; let your shuttle go back and forth; from this thread I must make an ell of cloth as soft as Friesland and Holland cloth.” The weaver took the skein, arranged the warp, and the busy shuttle, pulling the thread after it, began to run here and there. The comb firmed the weft, and the cloth advanced on the loom without unevenness, without break, as fine as the shirt of an archduchess or the linen with which the priest wipes the chalice at the altar. When the thread was all used, the weaver returned the cloth to the poor mother and said to her, for he had understood everything from the fixed look of despair of the unfortunate woman: “The son of the Emperor, who died last year in a wet nurse’s care, is not wrapped in his little ebony coffin, with silver studs, in a softer and finer cloth.” Having folded the cloth, the mother took from her thin finger a thin gold ring, all worn by friction: “Good weaver,” she said, “take this ring, my wedding ring, the only gold I have ever possessed.” The good weaver would not take it; but she said to him: “I have no need of a ring where I am going; for, I feel, Hanz’s little arms are pulling me to the ground.” Then she went to the carpenter, and said to him: “Master, take some good oak heart that does not rot and that worms cannot bite; cut from it five boards and two planks, and make a coffin of this size.” The carpenter took the saw and the plane, adjusted the boards, struck the nails with his mallet as gently as possible, so as not to make the iron points penetrate the poor woman’s heart further than into the wood. When the work was finished, it looked like a box for jewels and lace, so neat and well made was it. “Carpenter, who made such a beautiful coffin for my little Hanz, I give you my house at the end of the village, and the little garden behind it , and the well with its vineyard.—You won’t have to wait long. ” With the shroud and the coffin that she held under her arm, it was so small, she went through the streets of the village, and the children, who do not know what death is, said: “See how Hanz’s mother is carrying him a beautiful box of Nuremberg toys; no doubt a town with its painted and varnished wooden houses , its steeple surrounded by a sheet of lead, its belfry and its crenellated tower, and the trees along the promenade, all curled and green, or a pretty violin with its carved pegs on the neck and its horsehair bow.—Oh! “Oh, why don’t we have such a box!” And the mothers, turning pale, embraced them and silenced them: “You fools, don’t say that; don’t wish for the toy box, the violin box that you carry under your arm while crying; you’ll have it soon enough, poor little ones!” When Hanz’s mother came home, she took the cute and still pretty corpse of her son, and began to give him that last toilet that must be carefully cared for, for it must last for eternity. She dressed him in his Sunday best, his silk dress and his fur pelisse, so that he wouldn’t be cold in the damp place where he was going. She placed beside him the doll with the enamel eyes that he loved so much that he used to put it to bed in his cradle. But, at the moment of closing the shroud over the body to which she had given a thousand times the last kiss, she realized that she had forgotten to put on the dead child his pretty little red shoes. She looked for them in the room, for it pained her to see bare those feet, once so warm and rosy, now so icy and pale; but, during her absence, the rats having found the shoes under the bed, for lack of better food, had nibbled, gnawed and torn the skin. It was a great sorrow for the poor mother that her Hanz should go to the other world with bare feet; while the heart is now only a wound, it is enough to touch it to make it bleed. She wept before those shoes: from that inflamed and dried eye a tear could spring forth again. How could she have shoes for Hanz, she had given her ring and her house? such was the thought that tormented her. By dint of dreaming, an idea came to her. In the bin remained a whole loaf, because, for a long time, the unfortunate woman, nourished by her grief, had no longer eaten. She split this loaf, remembering that formerly, with the crumb, she had made, to amuse Hanz, pigeons, ducks, chickens, clogs, boats and other childish things. Placing the crumb in the hollow of her hand, and kneading it with her thumb, moistening it with her tears, she made a pair of little bread shoes with which she shod the cold, bluish feet of the dead child, and, her heart relieved, she closed the shroud and closed the coffin. While she was kneading the crumb, a poor man had appeared on the threshold, timid, asking for bread; but with her hand she had signaled to him to go away. The gravedigger came to take the box, and buried it in a corner of the cemetery under a clump of white rosebushes: the air was mild, it was not raining, and the earth was not wet; this was a consolation for the mother, who thought that her poor little Hanz would not pass his first night in the tomb too badly. Returning to her solitary house, she placed Hanz’s cradle beside his bed, lay down, and fell asleep. Broken nature was succumbing. While sleeping, she had a dream, or at least she thought it was a dream.
Hanz appeared to her, dressed, as if in his coffin, in his Sunday dress, his swan-fur pelisse, holding in his hand his doll with enamel eyes, and on his feet his bread slippers. He seemed sad. He did not have that halo that death must give to innocent little ones; for if you put a child in the earth, an angel comes out. The roses of Paradise did not bloom on his pale cheeks, painted white by death; tears fell from his blond eyelashes, and deep sighs swelled his little breast. The vision disappeared, and the mother awoke bathed in sweat, delighted to have seen her son, frightened to have seen him so sad again; but she reassured herself by saying to herself: Poor Hanz! Even in Paradise, he cannot forget me. The following night, the apparition was repeated: Hanz was even sadder and paler. His mother, holding out her arms to him, said: “Dear child, console yourself, and do not be bored in Heaven, I will join you.” The third night, Hanz returned again; he moaned and cried more than the other times, and he disappeared clasping his little hands: he no longer had his doll, but he still had his bread slippers. The worried mother went to consult a venerable priest who told her: “I will watch over you tonight, and I will question the little ghost; it will answer me; I know the words that must be said to innocent or guilty spirits.” Hanz appeared at the usual hour, and the priest summoned him, with the consecrated words, to say what was tormenting him in the other world. “It is the bread slippers that torment me and prevent me from climbing the diamond staircase of Paradise; They are heavier on my feet than postilion boots, and I cannot go beyond the first two or three steps, and this causes me great pain, for I see up there a cloud of beautiful cherubs with pink wings who call me to play and show me toys of silver and gold. Having said these words, he disappeared. The holy priest, to whom Hanz’s mother had made her confession, said to him:
“You have committed a great fault, you have profaned the daily bread, the sacred bread, the bread of the good God, the bread that Jesus Christ, at his last meal, chose to represent his body, and, after refusing a slice to the poor man who appeared on your threshold, you have kneaded shoes for your Hanz. “You must open the coffin, remove the bread shoes from the child’s feet and burn them in the fire that purifies everything.” Accompanied by the gravedigger and the mother, the priest went to the cemetery: with four strokes of the spade the coffin was stripped bare and opened. Hanz was lying inside, just as his mother had laid him there, but his face had an expression of pain. The holy priest delicately removed the bread slippers from the heels of the young dead man , and burned them himself in the flame of a candle while reciting a prayer. When night came, Hanz appeared to his mother one last time, but joyful, rosy, content, with two little cherubs with whom he had already made friends; he had wings of light and a bead of diamonds. “Oh! my mother, what joy, what bliss, and how beautiful are the gardens of Paradise! We play there eternally, and the good Lord never grumbles . ” The next day, the mother saw her son again, not on earth, but in heaven; for she died during the day, her forehead bent over the empty cradle. THE DOUBLE KNIGHT What makes fair Edwige so sad? What is she doing sitting apart, her chin in her hand and her elbow on her knee, more gloomy than despair, paler than the alabaster statue weeping over a tomb? From the corner of her eyelid a large tear rolls down the down of her cheek, a single tear, but one that never dries up; like that drop of water that oozes from the vaults of the rock and which in the long run wears away the granite, that single tear, falling relentlessly from her eyes onto her heart, has pierced it and pierced it right through. Edwige, fair Edwige, do you no longer believe in Jesus Christ the sweet Savior? Do you doubt the indulgence of the most holy Virgin Mary? Why do you constantly hold at your side your little diaphanous hands, emaciated and slender like those of the Elves and the Willis? You are going to be a mother; it was your dearest wish; Your noble husband, Count Lodbrog, promised an altar of solid silver, a ciborium of fine gold to the church of Saint-Euthbert if you would give him a son. Alas! alas! poor Hedwige has her heart pierced by the seven swords of sorrow; a terrible secret weighs on her soul. A few months ago, a stranger came to the castle; the weather was terrible that night: the towers trembled in their framework, the weather vanes chirped, the fire crept in the fireplace, and the wind knocked at the window like an unwelcome person trying to enter. The stranger was as beautiful as an angel, but like a fallen angel; he smiled gently and looked gently, and yet this look and this smile froze you with terror and inspired in you the dread one feels when leaning over an abyss. A wicked grace, a treacherous languor like that of a tiger watching its prey, accompanied all his movements; he charmed like a serpent that fascinates a bird. This stranger was a master singer; his brown complexion showed that he had seen other skies; he said he came from the depths of Bohemia, and asked for hospitality for that night only. He stayed that night, and other days and other nights, for the storm could not be calmed, and the old castle shook on its foundations as if the gust wanted to uproot it and make its crown of battlements fall into the foaming waters of the torrent. To charm the weather, he sang strange poems that troubled the heart and gave furious ideas; all the time he sang, a black varnished crow, shining like jet, stood on his shoulder; he beat time with his ebony beak, and seemed to applaud while shaking his wings.—Edwige grew pale, pale like the lilies of the moonlight; Edwige blushed, blushed like the roses of dawn, and let herself fall back in her large armchair, languid, half dead, intoxicated as if she had breathed the fatal perfume of those flowers that cause death. At last the master singer was able to leave; a little blue smile had just brightened the face of the sky. Since that day, Edwige, the blonde Edwige, does nothing but cry in the corner of the window. Edwige is a mother; she has a beautiful child, all white and all ruddy.— Old Count Lodbrog ordered the altar of solid silver from the founder, and He gave a thousand gold pieces to the goldsmith in a reindeer-skin purse to make the ciborium; it will be large and heavy, and will hold a large measure of wine. The priest who empties it will be able to say that he is a good drinker. The child is all white and ruddy, but he has the dark look of the stranger: his mother saw it clearly. Ah! poor Edwige! why did you look so much at the stranger with his harp and his raven?… The chaplain waves the child;—he is given the name Oluf, a very beautiful name!—The sight-giver climbs the highest tower to draw his horoscope. The weather was clear and cold: like the jaws of a lynx with sharp, white teeth, a cutout of snow-covered mountains bit into the edge of the sky’s robe; the large, pale stars shone in the blue crudity of the night like silver suns. The sightseer takes the height, notes the year, the day and the minute; he makes long calculations in red ink on a long parchment all studded with cabalistic signs; he returns to his study, and goes back up onto the platform, yet he has not made a mistake in his calculations, his nativity chart is just as accurate as a trebuchet for weighing fine stones; however he begins again: he has not made a mistake. Little Count Oluf has a double star, a green one and a red one, green like hope, red like hell; one favorable, the other disastrous. Has it ever been seen that a child has a double star? With a grave and measured air, the mire returned to the mother’s room and said, passing his bony hand through the waves of his great magician’s beard: “Countess Edwige, and you, Count Lodbrog, two influences presided over the birth of Oluf, your precious son: one good, the other bad; that is why he has a green star and a red star. He is subject to a double ascendant; he will be very happy or very unhappy, I do not know which; perhaps both at the same time.” Count Lodbrog replied to the mire: “The green star will prevail. ” But Edwige feared in her mother’s heart that it would be the red one. She put her chin back in her hand, her elbow on her knee, and began to cry again in the corner of the window. After nursing her child, her only occupation was to watch through the window the snow falling in thick, dense flakes, as if the white wings of all the angels and cherubim had been plucked up there . From time to time a crow flew past the window, croaking and shaking off the silvery dust. It made Edwige think of the singular crow that always sat on the shoulder of the stranger with the gentle gaze of a tiger and the charming smile of a viper. And her tears fell more quickly from her eyes onto his heart, onto his pierced heart. Young Oluf is a very strange child: one might say that in his little white and ruddy skin there are two children of different characters; one day he is as good as an angel, another day he is as wicked as a devil, he bites his mother’s breast and tears at his governess’s face with his nails . Old Count Lodbrog, smiling into his gray mustache, says that Oluf will make a good soldier and that he has a warlike temper. The fact is that Oluf is an insufferable little rascal: sometimes he cries, sometimes he laughs; he is capricious like the moon, whimsical like a woman; he goes, comes, stops suddenly without apparent reason, abandons what he had undertaken and replaces the most restless turbulence with the most absolute immobility; although he is alone, he seems to be conversing with an invisible interlocutor! When he is asked the cause of all this agitation, he says that the red star is tormenting him. Oluf is nearly fifteen years old. His character becomes more and more inexplicable; his face, although perfectly handsome, is of an embarrassing expression; he is blond like his mother, with all the features of the Northern race; but under his forehead, white as snow, which has not yet been scratched by the hunter’s skate or stained by the bear’s foot, and which is indeed the forehead of the ancient race of the Lodbrog, sparkles between two orange eyelids an eye with long black eyelashes, a jet-black eye illuminated by the wild ardor of Italian passion, a velvety gaze, cruel and sweet like that of the master singer of Bohemia. How the months fly by, and even more quickly the years! Edwige now rests under the dark arches of the Lodbrog vault, beside the old count, smiling, in his coffin, not to see his name perish. She was already so pale that death did not change her much. On her tomb there is a beautiful statue lying down, her hands joined, and her feet on a marble greyhound, faithful companion of the dead. What Edwige said in her last hour, no one knows, but the priest who confessed her has become even paler than the dying woman. Oluf, the dark-haired and blond son of the desolate Hedwig, is twenty years old today. He is very skillful at all exercises; no one shoots the bow better than he; he slits the arrow that has just been planted trembling in the heart of the target; without bit or spur he tames the wildest horses. He has never looked with impunity at a woman or a young girl; but none of those who have loved him has been happy. The fatal inequality of his character opposes any realization of happiness between a woman and him. Only one of his halves feels passion, the other hate; sometimes the green star prevails, sometimes the red star. One day he said to you: “O white virgins of the North, sparkling and pure as the ice of the pole; eyes of moonlight; cheeks tinged with the freshness of the northern lights!” And the other day he cried out: “O daughters of Italy, gilded by the sun and blond as orange! Hearts of flame in breasts of bronze!” The saddest thing is that he is sincere in both exclamations. Alas! poor desolate ones, sad, plaintive shadows, you do not even accuse him, for you know that he is more unhappy than you; his heart is a terrain ceaselessly trodden by the feet of two unknown wrestlers, each of whom, as in the combat between Jacob and the Angel, seeks to dry out the hamstring of his adversary. If one were to go to the cemetery, under the broad, velvety leaves of the verbascum with their deep cuts, under the asphodel with its sickly green branches, among the wild oats and nettles, one would find more than one abandoned stone where the morning dew alone sheds its tears. Mina, Dora, Thecla! Is the earth very heavy on your delicate breasts and charming bodies? One day Oluf calls Dietrich, his faithful squire; he tells him to saddle his horse. “Master, look how the snow is falling, how the wind whistles and makes the tops of the fir trees bend to the ground; do you not hear in the distance the thin wolves howling and the dying reindeer bellowing like souls in pain ? ” “Dietrich, my faithful squire, I will shake off the snow as one does down that clings to a cloak; I will pass under the arch of the fir trees , tilting the crest of my helmet a little. As for the wolves, their claws will be blunted on this good armor, and with the tip of my sword searching the ice, I will reveal to the poor reindeer, who moans and weeps hot tears, the fresh, flowery moss that he cannot reach. » Count Oluf of Lodbrog, for such has been his title since the old count died, sets off on his good horse, accompanied by his two giant dogs, Murg and Fenris, for the young lord with the orange-colored eyelids has an appointment, and already perhaps, from the top of the small, sharp turret shaped like a pepperpot, leans over the sculpted balcony, despite the cold and the north wind, the worried young girl, trying to disentangle the knight’s plume in the whiteness of the plain. Oluf, on his great elephant-shaped horse, whose flanks he plows with his spurs, advances into the countryside; he crosses the lake, which the cold has made into a single block of ice, where the fish are embedded, their fins extended, like petrifications in the paste of the marble; the horse’s four shoes, armed with hooks, bite firmly into the hard surface; a fog, produced by his sweat and his breath, envelops him and follows him; one would say that he is galloping in a cloud; the two dogs, Murg and Fenris, blow, on each side of their master, through their bloody nostrils, long jets of smoke like fabulous animals. Here is the fir wood; like spectres, they extend their heavy arms laden with white sheets; the weight of the snow bends the youngest and most flexible: one would say a series of silver arches. Black terror dwells in this forest, where the rocks assume monstrous forms, where each tree, with its roots, seems to incubate at its feet a nest of torpid dragons. But Oluf does not know terror. The path narrows more and more, the fir trees inextricably cross their lamentable branches; Only rare clearings allow one to see the chain of snowy hills which stand out in white undulations against the black and dull sky. Fortunately Mopse is a vigorous steed who would carry Odin the gigantic without bending; no obstacle stops him; he leaps over rocks, he strides over quagmires, and from time to time he tears from the pebbles that his hoof strikes under the snow a plume of sparks immediately extinguished. “Come, Mopse, courage! You have only the small plain and the birch wood to cross; a pretty hand will caress your satiny neck, and in a warm stable you will eat hulled barley and oats in full measure.” What a charming sight the birch wood is! All the branches are padded with a fluff of frost, the smallest twigs stand out in white against the darkness of the atmosphere: it looks like an immense basket of filigree, a silver madrepore, a grotto with all its stalactites; the ramifications and the bizarre flowers whose frost tins the panes do not offer more complicated and more varied designs . “Lord Oluf, how late you have been! I was afraid that the mountain bear had blocked your way or that the elves had invited you to dance,” said the young lady of the manor, making Oluf sit down on the oak armchair inside the fireplace. But why did you come to the rendezvous of love with a companion? Were you then afraid to pass alone through the forest? “What companion do you mean, flower of my soul?” said Oluf, very surprised, to the young lady of the manor. —Of the knight with the red star that you always carry with you. The one born from a glance of the gypsy singer, the baleful spirit that possesses you; get rid of the knight with the red star, or I will never listen to your words of love; I cannot be the wife of two men at once. ” Oluf did and said what he liked, he could not even manage to kiss the little pink finger of Brenda’s hand; he went away very displeased and resolved to fight the knight with the red star if he could meet him. Despite Brenda’s severe reception, Oluf set off the next day on the road to the castle with its pepperpot-shaped turrets: lovers are not easily put off. As he walked he said to himself: “Brenda is undoubtedly mad; and what does she mean by her knight with the red star?” The storm was most violent; the snow swirled and barely allowed one to distinguish the earth from the sky. A spiral of ravens, despite the barking of Fenris and Murg, who leaped into the air to seize them, circled sinisterly above Oluf’s plume. At their head was the raven, shining like jet, which beat time on the shoulder of the gypsy singer. Fenris and Murg suddenly stop: their mobile nostrils sniff the air uneasily; they suspect the presence of an enemy.—It is not a wolf or a fox; a wolf and a fox would be but a mouthful for these brave dogs. A sound of footsteps is heard, and soon appears around the bend of the path a knight mounted on a large horse and followed by two enormous dogs. You would have taken him for Oluf. He was armed in exactly the same way, with a surcoat emblazoned with the same coat of arms; only he wore a red feather on his helmet instead of a green one. The road was so narrow that one of the two knights had to step back. “Lord Oluf, step back so that I can pass,” said the knight with the lowered visor. “The journey I am making is a long one; they are waiting for me, I must arrive. ” “By my father’s mustache, it is you who will step back. I am going to a love rendezvous, and the lovers are in a hurry,” replied Oluf, placing his hand on the hilt of his sword. The stranger drew his, and the fight began. The swords, as they fell on the steel mail, sent out showers of sparkling sparks; Soon, though of a superior temper, they were chipped like saws. One would have taken the combatants, through the smoke of their horses and the mist of their panting breath, for two black blacksmiths bent on a red-hot iron. The horses, animated by the same rage as their masters, bit their veiny necks with gusto , and tore off strips of their breasts; they agitated themselves with furious jolts, reared up on their hind feet, and using their hooves like closed fists, they dealt each other terrible blows while their riders hammered each other horribly over their heads; the dogs were only a bite and a howl. The drops of blood oozing through the imbricated scales of the armor and falling all warm on the snow, made little pink holes in it. In a few moments it seemed like a sieve, so frequent and fast did the drops fall. Both knights were wounded. Strangely enough, Oluf felt the blows he dealt to the unknown knight; he suffered from the wounds he inflicted and from those he received: he had felt a great cold in his chest, as if from an iron entering and seeking the heart, and yet his breastplate was not broken at the point of the heart: his only wound was a blow to the flesh on his right arm. A singular duel, in which the victor suffered as much as the vanquished, in which giving and receiving were indifferent. Gathering his strength, Oluf made his adversary’s terrible helmet fly with a backhand . “O terror! what did the son of Hedwig and Lodbrog see? He saw himself before him: a mirror would have been less exact. He had fought with his own spectre, with the knight with the red star; The spectre gave a great cry and disappeared. The spiral of crows rose again into the sky and the brave Oluf continued on his way; returning in the evening to his castle, he carried behind him the young lady of the castle, who this time had been willing to listen to him. The knight with the red star being no longer there, she had decided to let fall from her rosy lips, on Oluf’s heart, this confession which costs so much to modesty. The night was clear and blue, Oluf raised his head to look for his double star and show it to his fiancée: there was only the green one, the red one had disappeared. On entering, Brenda, very happy with this prodigy which she attributed to love, pointed out to young Oluf that the jet of his eyes had changed into azure, a sign of celestial reconciliation. – Old Lodbrog smiled with pleasure under his white mustache in the depths of his tomb; for, to tell the truth, although he had not testified to it, Oluf’s eyes had sometimes made him reflect.—The shade of Hedwig is all joyful, for the child of the noble Lord Lodbrog has at last overcome the malignant influence of the orange eye, the black raven and the red star: the man has overthrown the incubus. This story shows how much influence a single moment of forgetfulness, even an innocent glance , can have. Young women, never cast your eyes on the master singers of Bohemia, who recite intoxicating and diabolical poetry. You, young girls, trust only in the green star; and you who have the misfortune to be double, fight bravely, even if you should strike at you and wound yourself with your own sword, the inner adversary, the wicked knight. If you ask who brought us this legend from Norway, it is a swan; a beautiful bird with a yellow beak, which crossed the Fiord, half swimming, half flying. THE MUMMY’S FOOT I had entered out of idleness into one of those dealers in curiosities called bric-a-brac dealers in Parisian slang, so perfectly unintelligible to the rest of France. You have doubtless cast a glance, through the window, into some of these shops which have become so numerous since it has become fashionable to buy antique furniture, and the least stockbroker feels obliged to have his _medieval room_. It is something which is at once a part of the scrap metal dealer’s shop, the upholsterer’s store, the alchemist’s laboratory and the painter’s studio; In these mysterious caves where the shutters filter a prudent half-light, what is most notoriously ancient is the dust; the cobwebs are more authentic than the lace, and the old pear tree is younger than the mahogany that arrived yesterday from America. The shop of my bric-a-brac dealer was a veritable Capernaum; all centuries and all countries seemed to have met there; an Etruscan lamp of red earth stood on a Boule armoire, with ebony panels severely striped with copper filaments; a duchess of the time of Louis XV nonchalantly stretched out her crowbars under a thick table from the reign of Louis XIII, with heavy oak spirals, sculptures intermingled with foliage and chimeras. A damascened armor from Milan made the ribboned belly of its cuirass shimmer in a corner ; Cupids and nymphs of biscuit, magots of China, cones of celadon and crackle, cups of Saxony and old Sèvres cluttered the shelves and corners. On the dentiled shelves of the dressers, radiated immense dishes from Japan, with red and blue designs, highlighted with gold hatching side by side with enamels by Bernard Palissy, representing snakes, frogs and lizards in relief. From the gutted cupboards escaped cascades of lampas glazed with silver, waves of brocatelle riddled with luminous grains by an oblique ray of sunlight; portraits of all periods smiled through their yellow varnish in more or less faded frames. The merchant followed me cautiously through the tortuous passage between the piles of furniture, smoothing down with his hand the haphazard flight of the tails of my coat, watching my elbows with the anxious attention of an antique dealer and a usurer. The merchant’s face was singular: an immense skull, polished like a knee, surrounded by a thin halo of white hair , brought out more vividly by the light salmon tone of his skin, giving him a false air of patriarchal bonhomie, corrected, moreover, by the scintillation of two small yellow eyes which trembled in their sockets like two gold louis coins on quicksilver. The curve of his nose had an aquiline silhouette which recalled the oriental or Jewish type. His hands, thin, slender, veined, full of nerves protruding like the strings of a violin neck, nailed with claws similar to those that terminate the membranous wings of bats, had a senile oscillating movement, disturbing to see; but these hands, agitated by feverish tics, became firmer than steel pincers or lobster claws as soon as they lifted some precious object, an onyx cup, a Venetian glass or a Bohemian crystal tray; this old fellow had an air so profoundly rabbinical and cabalistic that one would have burned him on the mine three centuries ago. “Will you not buy me anything today, sir? Here is a Malay kriss whose blade undulates like a flame; look at these grooves to drain the blood, these serrations made in opposite directions to tear out the entrails by removing the dagger; it is a ferocious weapon, of a beautiful character and which would look very good in your trophy; this two-handed sword is very beautiful, it is by Josepe de la Hera, and this nightmare with a fenestrated shell, what superb work! — No, I have enough weapons and instruments of carnage; I would like a figurine, some object which could serve me as a paper holder, because I cannot bear all these cheap bronzes which the stationers sell, and which are invariably found on all the desks. The old gnome, rummaging through his junk, spread out before me antique bronzes or so-called antiques, pieces of malachite, small Hindu or Chinese idols, a kind of jade poussahs, incarnations of Brahma or Wishnou marvelously suited to this rather undivine use of holding newspapers and letters in place. I was hesitating between a porcelain dragon studded with warts, its mouth adorned with fangs and barbs, and a very abominable little Mexican fetish, representing the god Witziliputzili in the natural state, when I noticed a charming foot that I at first took for a fragment of ancient Venus. It had those beautiful tawny and reddish tints that give Florentine bronze that warm and lively appearance, so preferable to the verdigris tone of ordinary bronzes that one would readily take for putrefying statues: satiny sheens quivered on its rounded forms, polished by the amorous kisses of twenty centuries; for it must be a Corinthian bronze, a work of the best time, perhaps a cast by Lysippos! “This foot will do,” I said to the merchant, who looked at me with an ironic and sly air as he handed me the requested object so that I could examine it more at my leisure.” I was surprised by its lightness; it was not a metal foot, but a foot of flesh, an embalmed foot, a mummy’s foot: looking closely, one could distinguish the grain of the skin and the almost imperceptible embossing imprinted by the weave of the bandages. The fingers were fine, delicate, ending in perfect nails, pure and transparent like agates; the thumb, a little separated, happily contradicted the plan of the other fingers in the antique manner, and gave it a detached attitude, the slenderness of a bird’s foot; the sole, barely scratched by a few invisible hatchings, showed that it had never touched the earth, and had only found itself in contact with the finest mats of Nile reeds and the softest carpets of panther skins. “Ha! ha! you want the foot of Princess Hermonthis,” said the merchant with a strange sneer, fixing his owlish eyes on me: “ha! Ha! ha! for a paperweight! An original idea, an artist’s idea! Whoever would have told the old Pharaoh that his beloved daughter’s foot would serve as a paperweight would have surprised him greatly, when he was having a granite mountain dug out to place the triple coffin, painted and gilded, all covered with hieroglyphics with beautiful paintings of the judgment of souls, added the unusual little merchant in a low voice and as if speaking to himself . “How much will you sell me this fragment of a mummy?” “Ah! as dear as I can, for it is a superb piece; if I had the counterpart, you would not have it for less than five hundred francs: the daughter of a Pharaoh, nothing is rarer. ” “Certainly it is not common; but how much do you want? First of all, I warn you of one thing, that I possess no more treasure than five louis; I will buy anything that costs five louis, but nothing more.” “You would scrutinize the back pockets of my waistcoats, and my most intimate drawers, and you would not find there a miserable five-clawed tiger. “Five louis for the foot of Princess Hermonthis, that is very little, very little indeed, an authentic foot,” said the merchant, nodding his head and giving his eyes a rotary movement. “Come, take it, and I will give you the envelope into the bargain,” he added, rolling it up in a very fine old scrap of damask, “Genuine damask, Indian damask, which has never been re-dyed; it’s strong, it’s soft,” he muttered, running his fingers over the fabric, frayed by a remnant of commercial habit that made him praise an object of so little value that he himself judged it worthy of being given away. He poured the gold coins into a kind of medieval purse hanging from his belt, repeating: “Princess Hermonthis’s foot to serve as a paperweight!” Then, fixing his phosphoric eyes on me, he said to me in a shrill voice like the meow of a cat that has just swallowed a fishbone: “The old Pharaoh will not be pleased, he loved his daughter, that dear man. ” “You speak of her as if you were his contemporary; although old, you do not go back to the pyramids of Egypt, ” I replied, laughing from the threshold of the shop. I returned home very pleased with my acquisition. To put it to immediate use, I placed the foot of the divine Princess Hermonthis on a sheaf of paper, a rough sketch of verses, an indecipherable mosaic of erasures: articles begun, letters forgotten and put in the mail in the drawer, an error which often happens to absent-minded people; the effect was charming, bizarre and romantic. Very satisfied with this embellishment, I went out into the street, and I went for a walk with the proper gravity and the pride of a man who has over all the passers-by he rubs shoulders with the ineffable advantage of possessing a piece of the Princess Hermonthis, daughter of Pharaoh. I found supremely ridiculous all those who did not possess, like me, such a notoriously Egyptian paperweight; and the true occupation of a sensible man seemed to me to have a mummy’s foot on his desk. Fortunately, the meeting of some friends came to distract me from my infatuation as a recent purchaser; I went to dine with them, for it would have been difficult for me to dine with myself. When I returned in the evening, my brain marbled with a few veins of pearl gray, a vague puff of oriental perfume delicately tickled my olfactory apparatus; the warmth of the room had warmed the natrum, the bitumen and the myrrh in which the corpse-cutting _paraschites_ had bathed the body of the princess; it was a sweet though penetrating perfume, a perfume that four thousand years had not been able to evaporate. The dream of Egypt was eternity: its odors have the solidity of granite, and last as much. I soon drank deeply from the black cup of sleep; for an hour or two everything remained opaque, oblivion and nothingness flooded me with their dark waves. Meanwhile my intellectual darkness brightened, dreams began to brush me with their silent flight. The eyes of my soul opened, and I saw my room as it actually was: I could have believed myself awake, but a vague perception told me that I was asleep and that something strange was going to happen . The smell of myrrh had increased in intensity, and I felt a slight headache which I quite reasonably attributed to a few glasses of champagne which we had drunk to the unknown gods and to our future successes. I looked around my room with a feeling of expectation which nothing justified; the furniture was perfectly in place, the lamp burned on the console, softly stamped by the milky whiteness of its frosted crystal globe; the watercolors shimmered under their Bohemian glass; the curtains hung languidly: everything looked sleepy and tranquil. However, after a few moments, this calm interior seemed to become disturbed, the woodwork creaked furtively; the log buried under the ashes suddenly threw out a jet of blue gas, and the discs of the pegs seemed like metal eyes, attentive like me to the things that were going to happen. My sight happened to fall on the table on which I had placed Princess Hermonthis’s foot. Instead of being motionless as befits a foot embalmed since four thousand years, it was agitated, contracted and hopped on the papers like a frightened frog: one would have thought it was in contact with a voltaic pile; I heard very distinctly the dry sound produced by its little heel, hard as a gazelle’s hoof. I was rather displeased with my acquisition, liking sedentary paperweights and finding it unnatural to see feet walking around without legs, and I began to experience something that strongly resembled fear. Suddenly I saw the fold of one of my curtains move, and I heard a stamping as of a person hopping on one leg. I must confess that I was hot and cold alternately; that I felt an unknown wind blowing on my back, and that my hair, as it stood up, blew my night headdress two or three steps away. The curtains parted, and I saw the strangest figure imaginable approaching . She was a young girl, very dark coffee with milk, like the bayadere Amani, of perfect beauty and recalling the purest Egyptian type; she had almond-shaped eyes with raised corners and eyebrows so black that they appeared blue, her nose was of a delicate cut, almost Greek in its finesse, and one could have taken her for a bronze statue from Corinth, if the prominence of the cheekbones and the slightly African blooming of the mouth had not made one recognize, without a doubt, the hieroglyphic race of the banks of the Nile. Her thin arms, turned into spindles, like those of very young girls, were encircled with kinds of metal grips and turns of glass beads; her hair was braided into cords, and on her chest hung an idol of green paste that her seven-pronged whip made one recognize as Isis, conductor of souls; A gold plate glittered on his forehead, and some traces of rouge pierced beneath the copper tints of his cheeks. As for his costume, it was very strange. Imagine a loincloth of strips adorned with black and red hieroglyphs, starched with bitumen, and which seemed to belong to a freshly unswaddled mummy . By one of those leaps of thought so frequent in dreams, I heard the false and hoarse voice of the bric-a-brac merchant, who repeated, like a monotonous refrain, the sentence he had said in his shop with such enigmatic intonation: “The old Pharaoh will not be pleased; he loved his daughter very much, that dear man.” A strange peculiarity, and one which did not reassure me at all, the apparition had only one foot, the other leg was broken at the ankle. It went towards the table where the mummy’s foot was moving and wriggling with increased speed. Arriving there, she leaned on the edge, and I saw a tear sprout and pearl in her eyes. Although she did not speak, I clearly discerned her thought: she was looking at the foot, for it was indeed hers, with an expression of coquettish sadness of infinite grace; but the foot jumped and ran here and there as if it had been pushed by steel springs. Two or three times she stretched out her hand to seize it, but she did not succeed. Then there was established between Princess Hermonthis and her foot, which seemed endowed with a life of its own, a very strange dialogue in a very ancient Coptic, such as it might have been spoken, some thirty centuries ago, in the Serys of the country of Ser: fortunately that night I knew Coptic perfectly. Princess Hermonthis said in a tone of voice soft and vibrant like a crystal bell: “Well! My dear little foot, you always flee from me, yet I took good care of you. I bathed you with perfumed water, in an alabaster basin; I polished your heel with pumice stone soaked in palm oil, your nails were cut with gold tweezers and polished with hippopotamus teeth; I took care to choose for you embroidered and painted thabebs with curved points, which were the envy of all the young girls of Egypt; you had at your toe rings representing the sacred scarab, and you wore one of the lightest bodies a lazy foot could wish for.” The foot replied in a sulky and sorrowful tone: “You know very well that I no longer belong to myself, I was bought and paid for ; the old merchant knew well what he was doing, he still holds a grudge against you for having refused to marry him: it was a trick he played on you. “The Arab who forced your royal coffin into the underground well of the necropolis of Thebes was sent by him, he wanted to prevent you from going to the meeting of the dark peoples, in the lower cities. Do you have five gold pieces to ransom me? ” “Alas! no. My jewels, my rings, my purses of gold and silver, everything was stolen from me,” replied Princess Hermonthis with a sigh. “Princess,” I cried then, “I have never unjustly detained anyone’s foot: although you do not have the five louis it cost me, I return it to you with good grace; I would be desperate to make such an amiable person as Princess Hermonthis lame.” I delivered this speech in a regency and troubadour tone that must have surprised the beautiful Egyptian. She turned a grateful look toward me, and her eyes lit up with bluish gleams. She took her foot, which, this time, let it be done, like a woman about to put on her boot, and adjusted it to her leg with great skill. This operation completed, she took two or three steps into the room, as if to assure herself that she was really no longer lame. “Ah! How pleased my father will be, he who was so distressed by my mutilation, and who, from the day of my birth, had set an entire people to work to dig me a tomb so deep that he could preserve me intact until the supreme day when souls must be weighed in the scales of Amenthi. “Come with me to my father, he will receive you well, you have given me back my foot.” I found this proposal quite natural; I put on a dressing gown with large patterns, which gave me a very pharaonic air; I hastily put on Turkish slippers, and I told Princess Hermonthis that I was ready to follow her. Hermonthis, before leaving, detached the little green paste figurine from her collar and placed it on the scattered leaves which covered the table. “It is only right,” she said, smiling, “that I replace your paperweight.” She held out her hand to me, which was as soft and cold as a snake’s skin, and we set off. We flew for some time with the speed of an arrow in a fluid and grayish environment, where barely outlined silhouettes passed to the right and to the left. For a moment, we saw nothing but water and sky. A few minutes later, obelisks began to appear, pylons, ramps flanked by sphinxes appeared on the horizon. We had arrived. The princess led me to a mountain of pink granite, where there was a low, narrow opening that would have been difficult to distinguish from the cracks in the stone if two steles colorfully carved had not made it recognizable. Hermonthis lit a torch and began to walk in front of me. They were corridors cut into the living rock; the walls, covered with panels of hieroglyphs and allegorical processions, must have occupied thousands of arms for thousands of years; these corridors, of interminable length, ended in square chambers , in the middle of which were made wells, where we descended by means of crampons or spiral staircases; these wells led us into other chambers, from which other corridors also spread out, variegated with sparrowhawks, serpents coiled in circles, tau, pedum, mystical bari, prodigious work that no living eye was to see, interminable granite legends that only the dead had time to read for eternity. Finally, we emerged into a room so vast, so enormous, so disproportionate, that one could not see its limits; as far as Within sight stretched rows of monstrous columns between which flickered livid stars of yellow light: these brilliant points revealed incalculable depths. Princess Hermonthis still held my hand and graciously greeted the mummies of her acquaintance. My eyes were becoming accustomed to this twilight half-light, and were beginning to discern objects. I saw, seated on thrones, the kings of the subterranean races: they were tall, dry, wrinkled, parched old men, black with naphtha and bitumen, wearing golden pschents, adorned with pectorals and gorgets, studded with precious stones, with eyes of the fixity of sphinxes and long beards whitened by the snow of centuries: behind them, their embalmed peoples stood in the stiff and constrained poses of Egyptian art, eternally maintaining the attitude prescribed by the hieratic codex; Behind the peoples meowed, flapped their wings and sneered the contemporary cats, ibises and crocodiles, made even more monstrous by their wrappings in bandages. All the Pharaohs were there, Cheops, Chephrenes, Psammetichus, Sesostris, Amenoteph; all the black rulers of the pyramids and the syringes; on a higher platform sat King Chronos and Xixouthros, who was contemporary with the flood, and Tubal Cain, who preceded him. The beard of King Xixouthros had grown so long that it had already circled seven times the granite table on which he leaned, all dreamy and sleepy. Further away, in a dusty vapor, through the fog of eternity, I could vaguely make out the seventy-two pre-Adamite kings with their seventy-two peoples, forever vanished. After giving me a few minutes to enjoy this dizzying spectacle, Princess Hermonthis presented me to the Pharaoh, her father, who gave me a very majestic nod. “I have found my foot! I have found my foot!” cried the princess, clapping her little hands together with all the signs of mad joy, “it is the gentleman who has given it back to me.” The races of Kemé, the races of Nahasi, all the black, tanned, copper-colored nations, repeated in chorus: “Princess Hermonthis has found her foot!” Xixouthros himself was moved by it: He lifted his heavy eyelid, ran his fingers through his mustache, and let his gaze, laden with centuries, fall upon me. “By Oms, dog of hell, and by Tmeï, daughter of the Sun and Truth , here is a brave and worthy boy,” said the Pharaoh, extending his scepter, which ended in a lotus flower, toward me. “What do you want for your reward?” With that audacity given by dreams, where nothing seems impossible, I asked him for Hermonthis’s hand: the hand for the foot seemed to me an antithetical reward in rather good taste. The Pharaoh opened his glass eyes wide, surprised by my joke and my request. “What country are you from and how old are you?” “I am French, and I am twenty-seven years old, venerable Pharaoh. ” “Twenty-seven! And he wants to marry Princess Hermonthis, who is thirty centuries old! ” cried all the thrones and all the circles of nations at once . Hermonthis alone did not seem to find my request improper. “If you were only two thousand years old,” the old king continued, “I would gladly grant you the princess; but the disproportion is too great, and besides, our daughters need husbands who last, you no longer know how to preserve yourselves: the last ones that were brought barely fifteen centuries ago are no more than a pinch of ashes; look, my flesh is as hard as basalt, my bones are bars of steel. “I will attend the last day of the world with the body and figure that I had in my lifetime; my daughter Hermonthis will last longer than a bronze statue. “Then the wind will have scattered the last grain of your dust, and Isis herself, who knew how to find the pieces of Osiris, would be embarrassed to recompose your being. “Look how vigorous I still am and how well my arms hold up,” he said, shaking my hand in the English way, so as to cut my fingers with my rings. He squeezed me so hard that I woke up, and I saw my friend Alfred pulling at my arm and shaking me to get me up. “Oh, now! You mad sleeper, will we have to have you carried out into the middle of the street and shoot fireworks in your ears? ” “It’s past noon, don’t you remember that you promised to come and get me to go and see Mr. Aguado’s Spanish paintings? ” “Good God! I forgot about it,” I replied as I dressed. “We ‘ll go: I have the permission here on my desk. ”
I actually went forward to take it; but imagine my astonishment when, instead of the mummy’s foot I had bought the day before, I saw the little green paste figurine put in its place by Princess Hermonthis! THE OPIUM PIPE The other day, I found my friend Alphonse Karr sitting on his couch, with a lit candle, although it was broad daylight, and holding in his hand a cherry wood pipe fitted with a porcelain mushroom onto which he was dripping a kind of brown paste rather similar to sealing wax; this paste flamed and crackled in the mushroom’s chimney, and he inhaled through a small amber mouthpiece the smoke which then spread into the room with a vague odor of oriental perfume. I took, without saying anything, the apparatus from my friend’s hands, and adjusted myself to one of the ends; After a few sips, I felt a kind of dizziness which was not without charms and rather resembled the sensations of the first intoxication. Being on a soap opera that day, and not having the leisure to be drunk, I hung the pipe on a nail and we went down into the garden, to say hello to the dahlias and play a little with Schutz, a happy animal whose only function is to be black on a carpet of green grass. I went home, I had dinner, and I went to the theater to see I don’t know what play, then I came back to bed, because one must come to that, and to learn, through this death of a few hours, the apprenticeship of definitive death. The opium I had smoked, far from producing the drowsy effect I expected, threw me into nervous agitations like violent coffee, and I tossed and turned in my bed like a carp on the grill or a chicken on a spit, with a perpetual rolling of the covers, to the great displeasure of my cat curled up in a ball on the corner of my eiderdown. Finally, the long-desired sleep covered my pupils with its golden dust, my eyes became hot and heavy, I fell asleep. After one or two hours completely motionless and black, I had a dream.
—Here it is: I found myself at my friend Alphonse Karr’s house,—as in the morning, in reality; he was sitting on his yellow lampas couch, with his pipe and his lighted candle; only the sun did not make the blue, green, and red reflections of the stained-glass windows flutter on the walls, like moths of a thousand colors . I took the pipe from his hands, as I had done a few hours before, and began to slowly inhale the intoxicating smoke. A softness full of bliss soon took possession of me, and I felt the same dizziness I had experienced when smoking the real pipe. Until then my dream had remained within the most exact limits of the habitable world, and repeated, like a mirror, the actions of my day. I was curled up in a pile of cushions, and I lazily threw my head back to follow the bluish spirals in the air , which melted into cotton wool mist, after whirling for a few minutes. My eyes naturally fell on the ceiling, which is ebony black , with golden arabesques. By dint of gazing at it with that ecstatic attention which precedes visions, it seemed blue to me, but a hard blue, like one of the flaps of the mantle of night. “So you had your ceiling painted blue,” I said to Karr, who, always impassive and silent, had taken another pipe, and was giving off more smoke than a stovepipe in winter, or a steamboat in any other season. “Not at all, my son,” he replied, sticking his nose out of the cloud, ” but you have the furious air of having painted your own stomach red, with a claret more or less Laffitte. ” “Alas! why don’t you tell the truth; but I only drank a miserable glass of sugared water, in which all the ants on earth had come to quench their thirst, a swimming school of insects. ” “The ceiling was apparently bored of being black, it turned blue; after women, I know nothing more capricious than ceilings; it’s a ceiling’s fancy, that’s all, nothing is more ordinary.” Having said this, Karr put his nose back into the cloud of smoke, with the satisfied expression of someone who has given a clear and luminous explanation. However, I was only half convinced, and I had difficulty believing the ceilings to be as fantastic as that, and I continued to look at the one above my head, not without a feeling of disquiet. It was turning blue, it was turning blue like the sea on the horizon, and the stars were beginning to open their eyelids with golden lashes; these lashes, of extreme tenuity, extended into the room, which they filled with prismatic showers. A few black lines streaked this azure surface, and I soon recognized that they were the beams of the upper floors of the house which had become transparent. Despite the ease with which one can in dreams admit the most bizarre things as natural, all this was beginning to seem a little fishy and suspicious to me, and I thought that if my comrade Esquiros _the Magician_ were there, he would give me more satisfactory explanations than those of my friend Alphonse Karr. As if this thought had the power of evocation, Esquiros suddenly appeared before us, much like the poodle in Faust who comes out from behind the stove. He had a very animated face and a triumphant air, and he said, rubbing his hands together: “I see in the antipodes, and I have found the talking Mandrake.” This apparition surprised me, and I said to Karr: “O Karr! can you imagine that Esquiros, who was not there just now, came in without the door being opened? ” “Nothing could be simpler,” replied Karr. One enters through closed doors, that is the custom; only ill-bred people pass through open doors. You know well that it is said as an insult: “Great breaker of open doors.” I found no objection to make against such sensible reasoning, and I remained convinced that in fact the presence of Esquiros had nothing but the most explicable and very legal in itself. However, he looked at me with a strange air, and his eyes grew disproportionately large; they were ardent and round like shields heated in a furnace, and his body dissipated and was drowned in the shadow, so that I saw nothing of him but his two blazing and radiant pupils. Networks of fire and torrents of magnetic effluvia flickered and swirled around me, entwining themselves ever more inextricably and ever tightening; sparkling threads ended at each of my pores, and implanted themselves in my skin almost like the hair in the head. I was in a state of complete somnambulism. I then saw small white flakes which crossed the blue space of the ceiling like tufts of wool carried by the wind, or like a dove’s necklace which is scattered in the air. I sought in vain to guess what it was, when a low and brief voice whispered in my ear, with a strange accent:—_They are spirits!!!_ The scales of my eyes fell; the white vapors took on more precise forms, and I distinctly perceived a long line of veiled figures which followed the cornice, from right to left, with a very pronounced upward movement, as if an imperious breath were lifting them up and serving as a wing. At the corner of the room, on the ceiling molding, sat the form of a young girl wrapped in a wide muslin drapery. Her feet, entirely bare, hung nonchalantly crossed over each other; they were, moreover, charming, of a smallness and transparency that made me think of those beautiful jasper feet that emerge so white and pure from the black marble skirt of the antique Isis in the Museum. The other ghosts tapped her on the shoulder as they passed, and said to her: “We are going to the stars, come with us.” The shadow with the alabaster foot answered them: “No! I do not want to go to the stars; I would like to live another six months .”
The whole line passed, and the shadow remained alone, swinging its pretty little feet, and striking the wall with its heel shaded with a pink tint, pale and tender like the heart of a wild bell; although its face was veiled, I felt it young, adorable and charming, and my soul leaped towards it, arms outstretched, wings open. The shadow understood my trouble by intention or sympathy, and said in a voice soft and crystalline like a harmonica: “If you have the courage to go and kiss on the mouth the one who was me, and whose body is lying in the black city, I will live six months more, and my second life will be for you. I got up, and asked myself this question: Namely, if I was not the plaything of some illusion, and if all that was happening was not a dream. It was a last glimmer of the lamp of reason extinguished by sleep. I asked my two friends what they thought of all this. The imperturbable Karr claimed that the adventure was common; that he had had several of the same kind, and that I was very naive to be surprised by so little. Esquiros explained everything by means of magnetism. “Come on, that’s fine, I’ll go; but I’m in slippers….. “That doesn’t matter,” said Esquiros, “I _feel_ a carriage at the door.” I went out, and I saw, in fact, a two-horse cabriolet which seemed to be waiting. I got into it. There was no coachman. The horses drove themselves; they were all black, and galloped so furiously that their rumps rose and fell like waves, and showers of sparks crackled behind them. They first took the Rue de La-Tour-d’Auvergne, then the Rue Bellefonds, then the Rue Lafayette, and, from there, other streets whose names I do not know. As the carriage went on, the objects around me took on strange shapes: they were crouching houses, squatting at the edge of the road like old spinners, plank fences, street lamps that looked like gallows to the point of being mistaken for them; soon the houses disappeared altogether, and the carriage rolled into the open countryside. We were speeding across a gloomy and dark plain; the sky was very low, leaden in color, and an interminable procession of small, slender trees ran in the opposite direction to the carriage, on both sides of the road; one would have said an army of broomsticks in disarray. Nothing was more sinister than this grayish immensity, which the slender silhouette of the trees streaked with black hatching: not a star shone, not a speck of light chipped the pale depth of this semi-darkness. Finally, we arrived at a town, unknown to me, whose houses of singular architecture, vaguely glimpsed in the darkness, seemed to me so small as to be uninhabitable; the carriage, although much wider than the streets it crossed, experienced no delay; the houses lined up to the right and left like frightened passers-by, and left the road clear. After several detours, I felt the carriage melt beneath me, and the horses vanished into vapors; I had arrived. A reddish light filtered through the interstices of a bronze door which was not closed; I pushed it open, and found myself in a low room paved with white and black marble and vaulted with stone; an antique lamp, placed on a base of violet breccia, lit up with a pale glow a reclining figure, which I took at first for a statue like those sleeping with clasped hands, a greyhound at its feet, in Gothic cathedrals; but I soon recognized that it was a real woman. She was of a bloodless pallor, and which I could not better compare than to the tone of yellowed virgin wax, her hands, dull and white like hosts, were crossed over her heart; her eyes were closed, and their eyelashes lengthened to the middle of her cheeks; everything in her was dead: only the mouth, fresh as a pomegranate in bloom, sparkled with a rich, purple life, and half smiling as if in a happy dream.
I leaned toward her, placed my mouth on hers, and gave her the kiss that was to revive her. Her lips, moist and warm, as if the breath had scarcely left them, palpitated beneath mine, and returned my kiss with incredible ardor and vivacity. There is a gap here in my dream, and I do not know how I returned from the black city; probably riding on a cloud or a gigantic bat.—But I remember perfectly that I found myself with Karr in a house that is neither hers nor mine, nor any of those I know. Yet all the interior details, all the furnishings were extremely familiar to me; I clearly see the fireplace in the style of Louis XVI, the patterned screen, the lamp with a green guard, and the shelves full of books at the corners of the fireplace. I occupied a deep armchair with ear flaps, and Karr, his two heels resting on the doorframe, sitting on the shoulders and almost on the head, listened with a piteous and resigned air to the story of my expedition that I myself was watching a dream. Suddenly a violent ring at the bell was heard, and someone came to announce to me that a _lady_ wished to speak to _me_. “Bring the _lady_ in,” I replied, a little moved and having a presentiment of what was going to happen.” A woman dressed in white, her shoulders covered with a black mantle, entered with a light step, and came to stand in the luminous half-light projected by the lamp. By a very singular phenomenon, I saw three different physiognomies pass over her face: she resembled Malibran for a moment, then M…, then the one who also said that she did not want to die, and whose last word was: “Give me a bouquet of violets. ”
But these resemblances soon dissipated like a shadow on a mirror, the features of the face became fixed and condensed, and I recognized the dead woman whom I had embraced in the dark city. Her dress was extremely simple, and she had no other ornament than a circlet of gold in her hair, dark brown, falling in clusters of ebony along her smooth, velvety cheeks. Two small pink spots flushed the tops of her cheekbones, and her eyes shone like burnished silver globes; she had, moreover , the beauty of an antique cameo, and the fair transparency of her flesh added still more to the resemblance. She stood before me and asked me, a rather strange request, to tell her her name. I answered without hesitation that her name was Carlotta, which was true; then she told me that she had been a singer, and that she had died so young, that she was ignorant of the pleasures of existence, and that before going to sink forever into motionless eternity, she wanted to enjoy the beauty of the world, to become intoxicated with all the pleasures and to plunge into the ocean of earthly joys; that she felt an inextinguishable thirst for life and love. And, saying all this with an eloquence of expression and a poetry that it is not in my power to render, she linked her arms in scarf around my neck, and interlaced her slender hands in the curls of my hair. She spoke in verses of marvelous beauty, which the greatest awakened poets would not reach, and when the verse was no longer sufficient to render her thought, she added to it the wings of music, and there were roulades, necklaces of notes purer than perfect pearls, sustained voices, sounds spun far above human limits, everything that the soul and the spirit can dream of more tender, more adorably coquettish, more amorous, more ardent, more ineffable. “Live six months, six months more,” was the refrain of all her cantilenas. I saw very clearly what she was going to say, before the thought reached her head or her heart to her lips, and I myself finished the verse or the song I had begun; I had the same transparency for her, and she read me fluently. I don’t know where these ecstasies, no longer moderated by Karr’s presence, would have ended when I felt something hairy and rough pass over my face; I opened my eyes, and saw my cat rubbing his whiskers against mine in a morning congratulation, for the dawn was filtering a flickering light through the curtains . This is how my opium dream ended, which left me no trace other than a vague melancholy, the usual consequence of these kinds of hallucinations. THE HACHICHINS’ CLUB Chapter 27. THE PIMODAN HOTEL. One December evening, obeying a mysterious summons, written in enigmatic terms understood by members, unintelligible to others, I arrived in a distant neighborhood, a sort of oasis of solitude in the middle of Paris, which the river, by surrounding it with its two arms, seems to protect against the encroachments of civilization, for it was in an old house on the Île Saint-Louis, the Hôtel Pimodan, built by Lauzun, that the bizarre club to which I had recently belonged held its monthly meetings, which I was about to attend for the first time. Although it was barely six o’clock, the night was black. A fog, made even thicker by the proximity of the Seine, blurred all objects in its torn and punctured wadding, here and there, by the reddish halos of lanterns and the streaks of light escaping from the lit windows. The pavement, flooded with rain, shimmered under the street lamps like water reflecting an illumination; A bitter north wind, laden with icy particles , whipped your face, and its guttural whistles formed the treble of a symphony whose swollen waves breaking against the arches of the bridges formed the bass: this evening lacked none of the harsh poetry of winter. It was difficult, along this deserted quay, in this mass of dark buildings, to distinguish the house I was looking for; however, my coachman, rising from his seat, managed to read on a marble plaque the half-gilded name of the old hotel, the meeting place of the adepts. I lifted the carved knocker, the use of bells with copper buttons not having yet penetrated into these remote countries, and I heard the cord creak several times without success; finally, yielding to a more vigorous pull, the old rusty bolt opened, and the door with its massive planks was able to turn on its hinges. Behind a window of yellowish transparency, as I entered, there appeared the head of an old portress, sketched by the flickering of a candle, a picture of Skalken ready-made. The head made a singular grimace at me, and a thin finger, stretching out of the lodge, showed me the way. As far as I could make out, by the pale light which always falls, even from the darkest sky, the courtyard I was crossing was surrounded by buildings of ancient architecture with sharp gables; my feet felt wet as if I had been walking in a meadow, for the interstices of the paving stones were filled with grass. The tall, narrow-paned windows of the staircase, blazing on the dark facade, served as my guide and did not allow me to lose my way. Having crossed the steps, I found myself at the bottom of one of those immense staircases such as were built in the time of Louis XIV, and in which a modern house would dance at ease. An Egyptian chimera in the style of Lebrun, ridden by a Cupid, stretched its paws on a pedestal and held a candle in its curved claws like a bobeche. The slope of the steps was gentle; the well-distributed rests and landings attested to the genius of the old architect and the grandiose life of past centuries; as I climbed this admirable ramp, dressed in my thin black tailcoat, I felt that I was a blot on the general picture and that I was usurping a right that was not mine; the service staircase would have been good enough for me. Paintings, most of them unframed, copies of masterpieces from the Italian and Spanish schools, lined the walls, and high up, in the shadows, a large mythological ceiling painted in fresco was vaguely outlined. I arrived at the designated floor. A tambour of Utrecht velvet, crushed and mirrored, whose yellowed braid and dented nails told of its long service, made me recognize the door. I rang; it was opened to me with the usual precautions, and I found myself in a large room lit at its far end by a few lamps. Entering there, one stepped back two centuries. Time, which passes so quickly, seemed not to have passed over this house, and, like a clock that has been forgotten to be wound, its hand always marked the same date. The walls, paneled with white-painted woodwork, were half covered with darkened canvases bearing the stamp of the period; On the gigantic stove stood a statue that one might have thought stolen from the bowers of Versailles. On the ceiling, rounded into a dome, writhed a strapped allegory, in the style of Lemoine, and which was perhaps his. I advanced towards the luminous part of the room where several human forms were moving around a table, and as soon as the light, reaching me, made me recognized, a vigorous hurrah shook the sonorous depths of the old edifice. “It’s him! It’s him!” several voices cried at the same time; ” give him his share!” The doctor was standing near a sideboard on which was a tray laden with small saucers of Japanese porcelain. A piece of greenish paste or jam, about the size of a thumb, was taken by him with a spatula from a crystal vase, and placed, beside a silver-gilt spoon, on each saucer. The doctor’s face beamed with enthusiasm; his eyes sparkled, his cheekbones flushed, the veins in his temples bulged, his dilated nostrils drew in air forcefully . “This will be deducted from your portion of paradise,” he said, handing me my allotted dose. After everyone had eaten their share, coffee was served in the Arab manner, that is, with the grounds and without sugar. Then they sat down to eat. This reversal in culinary customs has no doubt surprised the reader; indeed, it is hardly customary to take coffee before soup, and it is generally only with dessert that preserves are eaten. This matter certainly deserves explanation. Chapter 28. PARENTHESIS. There once existed in the Orient an order of formidable sectarians commanded by a sheik who took the title of Old Man of the Mountain, or Prince of Assassins. This Old Man of the Mountain was obeyed without question; the Assassins, his subjects, marched with absolute devotion to the execution of his orders, whatever they were; no danger stopped them, not even the most certain death. At a sign from their leader, they would throw themselves from the top of a tower, they would go and stab a sovereign in his palace, in the midst of his guards. By what artifices did the Old Man of the Mountain obtain such complete self-denial ? By means of a marvelous drug of which he possessed the recipe, and which has the property of producing dazzling hallucinations. Those who had taken it found, upon awakening from their intoxication, real life so sad and so discolored, that they joyfully made the sacrifice to return to the paradise of their dreams; for any man killed while carrying out the orders of the sheik went to heaven by right, or, if he escaped, was admitted again to enjoy the felicity of the mysterious composition. Now, the green paste that the doctor had just distributed to us was precisely the same that the Old Man of the Mountain once ingested to his fanatics without their noticing, making them believe that he had at his disposal the heaven of Mahomet and the houris of three shades,—that is to say, _hashish_, from which comes _hachichin_, eater of _hashish_, the root of the word _assassin_, whose ferocious meaning is perfectly explained by the bloodthirsty habits of the Old Man of the Mountain’s followers. Assuredly, the people who had seen me leave my home at the hour when mere mortals take their food did not suspect that I was going to the island of Saint-Louis, a virtuous and patriarchal place if ever there was one, to consume a strange dish which served, several centuries ago, as a means of excitement for an impostor sheik to push the enlightened to assassination. Nothing in my perfectly bourgeois attire could have led me to suspect this excess of orientalism; I looked more like a nephew going to dine at his old aunt’s than like a believer about to taste the joys of Mohammed’s heaven in the company of twelve Arabs who could not be more French. Before this revelation, if you had been told that there existed in Paris in 1845, at that time of speculation and railways, an order of hashish, the history of which M. de Hammer has not written, you would not have believed it, and yet nothing could have been truer—according to the custom of improbable things. Chapter 29. AGAPE. The meal was served in a bizarre manner and on all sorts of extravagant and picturesque dishes. Large Venetian glasses, crossed with milky spirals, German vidrecomes decorated with coats of arms and legends, Flemish jugs of enameled stoneware, flasks with slender necks, still surrounded by their reed mats, replaced the glasses, bottles and carafes. The opaque porcelain of Louis Lebœuf and the English flowered earthenware, the ornament of bourgeois tables, were conspicuous by their absence; no two plates were alike, but each had its particular merit; China, Japan, Saxony, included samples of their finest pastes and their richest colors: all a little chipped, a little cracked, but of exquisite taste. The dishes were, for the most part, enamels by Bernard de Palissy, or earthenware from Limoges, and sometimes the carver’s knife encountered, under the real dishes, a reptile, a frog or a bird in relief. The edible eel mingled its coils with those of the molded snake. An honest Philistine would have felt some fear at the sight of these long-haired, bearded, mustachioed, or strangely shaved guests , brandishing sixteenth-century daggers, Malay kriss, navajas, and bent over food to which the reflections of the flickering lamps lent a suspicious appearance. The dinner was drawing to a close, already some of the most fervent adepts were feeling the effects of the green paste: I, for my part, had experienced a complete transposition of taste. The water I drank seemed to have the flavor of the most exquisite wine, the meat changed in my mouth into raspberry, and vice versa. I would not have distinguished a chop from a peach. My neighbors were beginning to seem a little original to me; they opened large owl eyes; their noses lengthened into a proboscis; their mouths extended into the opening of a bell. Their faces were shaded with supernatural hues. One of them, pale-faced in a black beard, laughed out loud at an invisible spectacle; the other made incredible efforts to raise his glass to his lips, and his contortions to do so excited deafening hoots. This one, agitated by nervous movements, twiddled his thumbs with incredible agility; that one, leaning back on the back of his chair, his eyes vacant, his arms dead, let himself sink voluptuously into the bottomless sea of annihilation. I, leaning on the table, considered all this in the light of a remnant of reason which went and returned at times like a night light about to go out. Dull heats ran through my limbs, and madness, like a wave which foams on a rock and withdraws to rush forth again, reached and left my brain, which it ended by invading completely. The hallucination, that strange guest, had settled in my home. “To the drawing room, to the drawing room!” cried one of the guests. “Can’t you hear those heavenly choirs? The musicians have been at their desks for a long time.” Indeed, a delicious harmony reached us in bursts through the tumult of conversation. Chapter 30. A GENTLEMAN WHO WAS NOT INVITED. The drawing room is an enormous room with carved and gilded paneling, a painted ceiling, friezes adorned with satyrs pursuing nymphs in the reeds, a vast fireplace of colored marble, and ample brocatelle curtains, which exude the luxury of times gone by. Tapestry furniture, sofas, armchairs, and armchairs, wide enough to allow the skirts of duchesses and marchionesses to spread out at ease, received the hachichins in their soft and ever-open arms. A fireside chair, at the corner of the fireplace, made advances to me, I settled down there, and abandoned myself without resistance to the effects of the fantastic drug. After a few minutes, my companions, one after the other, disappeared, leaving no other vestige than their shadow on the wall, which would soon have absorbed it;—thus the brown stains that water makes on the sand vanish as they dry. And since that time, as I was no longer conscious of what they were doing, you will have to be content for this time with the account of my simple personal impressions. Solitude reigned in the drawing room, starred only by a few doubtful gleams; then, suddenly, a red flash passed under my eyelids, an innumerable quantity of candles lit themselves, and I felt myself bathed in a warm, blond light. The place where I found myself was indeed the same, but with the difference of the sketch on the board; everything was grander, richer, more splendid. Reality served only as a starting point for the magnificence of the hallucination. I still saw no one, and yet I guessed the presence of a multitude. I heard the rustling of fabrics, the creaking of pumps, voices whispering, whispering, bleating and lisping, bursts of stifled laughter, the sound of chair and table legs. People were fussing with china, opening and closing doors; something unusual was happening. An enigmatic personage suddenly appeared to me. How had he entered? I don’t know; yet the sight of him caused me no fear: he had a nose curved like a bird’s beak, green eyes surrounded by three brown circles, which he frequently wiped with an immense handkerchief; a high starched white tie, in the knot of which was passed a visiting card on which were written these months: —_Daucus-Carota, of the Pot of Gold_, — strangled his thin collar, and made the skin of his cheeks overflow in reddish folds; a black coat with square tails, from which hung bunches of trinkets, imprisoned his body rounded like a capon’s breast. As for his legs, I must admit that they were made of a mandrake root , bifurcated, black, rough, full of knots and warts, which seemed to have been freshly torn out, because patches of earth still adhered to the filaments. These legs wriggled and twisted with extraordinary activity, and, when the little torso they supported was completely opposite me, the strange personage burst into tears, and, wiping his eyes with all his might, said to me in the most doleful voice: “Today is the day to die of laughter!” And tears as big as peas rolled down the wings of his nose. “Of laughter… of laughter…” repeated like an echo choruses of discordant and nasal voices . Chapter 31. FANTASIA. I then looked up at the ceiling, and I saw a crowd of bodiless heads like those of cherubs, which had such comical expressions, such jovial and profoundly happy physiognomies, that I could not help sharing their hilarity.—Their eyes narrowed, their mouths widened, and their nostrils dilated; they were grimaces that would delight the spleen itself. These buffoonish masks moved in zones rotating in opposite directions, which produced a dazzling and dizzying effect. Little by little the drawing-room had filled with extraordinary figures, such as one finds only in the etchings of Callot and in the aquatints of Goya: a jumble of characteristic tinsel and rags, of human and bestial forms; On any other occasion, I might have been uneasy about such company, but there was nothing threatening about these monstrosities. It was malice, not ferocity, that made those eyes sparkle. Good humor alone revealed those disordered fangs and sharp incisors. As if I had been the king of the party, each figure came in turn into the luminous circle of which I occupied the center, with an air of grotesque compunction, to mutter in my ear jokes of which I cannot remember a single one, but which, at the time, seemed prodigiously witty, and inspired in me the wildest gaiety . At each new apparition, a Homeric, Olympian, immense, deafening laughter, which seemed to resound in infinity, burst out around me with roars of thunder. Voices, alternately shrill and hollow, cried: “No, this is too funny; enough is enough! My God, my God, I’m having fun! Louder and louder! ” “Stop it! I can’t take it anymore… Ho! ho! hu! hu! hi! hi! What a good joke! What a fine pun! “Stop! I’m suffocating! I’m strangling! Don’t look at me like that… or have me surrounded, I’ll burst… ”
Despite these half-buffoonish, half-pleading protests, the tremendous hilarity continued to grow, the din increased in intensity, the floors and walls of the house heaved and palpitated like a human diaphragm, shaken by this frenetic, irresistible, implacable laughter. Soon, instead of coming to present themselves to me one by one, the grotesque phantoms assailed me en masse, shaking their long Pierrot sleeves, stumbling in the folds of their magician’s coats, crushing their cardboard noses in ridiculous collisions, making the powder of their wigs fly in clouds, and singing extravagant songs out of tune to impossible rhymes. All the types invented by the mocking verve of peoples and artists were gathered there, but multiplied tenfold, a hundredfold in power. It was a strange crowd: the Neapolitan pulcinella tapped familiarly on the hump of the English punch; the harlequin of Bergamo rubbed his black muzzle against the floured mask of the French paillasse, who uttered dreadful cries; the Bolognese doctor threw tobacco into Father Cassandre’s eyes; Tartaglia galloped astride a clown, and Gilles kicked Don Spavento in the behind; Karagheuz, armed with his obscene staff, was fighting a duel with an Oscan jester. Further away, the fantasies of droll dreams were confusedly struggling, hybrid creations, a formless mixture of man, beast and utensil, monks with wheels for feet and pots for belly, warriors clad in crockery brandishing wooden sabers in bird talons, statesmen moved by spit gears, kings plunged half-length into pepperpot watchtowers, alchemists with heads arranged like bellows, limbs twisted like alembics, ribalds made of an aggregation of pumpkins with bizarre swellings, everything that can be traced in the hot fever of the pencil by a cynic whose drunkenness pushes the elbow. It swarmed, it crawled, it trotted, it jumped, it grunted, it hissed, as Goethe says in Walpurgis Night. To escape the excessive eagerness of these baroque characters, I took refuge in a dark corner, from where I could see them performing dances such as the Renaissance in the time of Chicard, or the Opera under Musard, the king of the disheveled quadrille, had never known. These dancers, a thousand times superior to Molière, Rabelais, Swift, and Voltaire, wrote, with an entrechat or a balancé, comedies so profoundly philosophical, satires of such lofty scope and such piquant salt, that I was obliged to hold my sides in my corner. Daucus-Carota, while wiping his eyes, executed pirouettes and capers inconceivable, especially for a man with legs like mandrake roots, and repeated in a burlesquely pitiful tone: “Today is the day we must die of laughter!” O you who have admired the sublime stupidity of Odry, the hoarse silliness of Alcide Tousez, the self-confident stupidity of Arnal, the monkey-like grimaces of Ravel, and who think you know what a comic mask is, if you had attended this ball of Gustave evoked by hashish, you would agree that the most hilarious jokers of our little theaters are good enough to be sculpted at the corners of a catafalque or a tomb! What strangely convulsed faces! What blinking eyes sparkling with sarcasm under their birdlike membranes! What piggy- bank grins! What axe-like mouths! What facetiously dodecahedral noses! What abdomens swollen with Pantagruelian mockery! How through all this swarming nightmare without anguish there flashed forth sudden and irresistibly striking resemblances , caricatures to make Daumier and Gavarni jealous, fantasies to make the marvelous Chinese artists swoon with delight, the Phidias of poussah and magot! Not all the visions, however, were monstrous or burlesque; grace was also shown in this carnival of forms: near the fireplace, a little head with peachy cheeks rolled over its blond hair, showing in an interminable fit of gaiety thirty-two little teeth as big as grains of rice, and uttering a burst of high-pitched, vibrant, silvery, prolonged laughter, embroidered with trills and organ points , which pierced my eardrum, and, by a nervous magnetism, forced me to commit a host of extravagances. The joyful frenzy was at its highest point; one could hear nothing but convulsive sighs and inarticulate chuckles. Laughter had lost its timbre and turned to grunts, spasms succeeded pleasure; the refrain of Daucus-Carota was about to become true. Already several annihilated hachichins had rolled to the ground with that soft heaviness of drunkenness which makes falls not very dangerous; exclamations such as these: “My God, how happy I am! What bliss! I am swimming in ecstasy! I am in paradise! I am plunging into abysses of delight!” crossed, merged, and drowned each other out. Hoarse cries burst from oppressed breasts; arms stretched out wildly towards some fleeting vision; heels and necks drummed on the floor. It was time to throw a drop of cold water on this burning steam, or the boiler would have burst. The human envelope, which has so little strength for pleasure, and so much for pain, could not have borne a higher pressure of happiness. One of the members of the club, who had not taken part in the voluptuous intoxication in order to monitor the fantasia and prevent those of us who would have thought ourselves wings from passing through the windows, got up, opened the piano case and sat down. His two hands, falling together, sank into the ivory of the keyboard, and a glorious chord resounding with force silenced all rumors and changed the direction of the intoxication. Chapter 32. KIEF. The theme attacked was, I believe, Agathe’s air from the _Freischütz_; this celestial melody had soon dissipated, like a breath that sweeps away misshapen clouds, the ridiculous visions with which I was obsessed. The grimacing larvae crawled back under the armchairs, where they hid between the folds of the curtains, uttering little stifled sighs, and again it seemed to me that I was alone in the drawing-room.
The colossal organ of Freiburg certainly does not produce a greater mass of sound than the piano played by the _seer_ ( as the sober adept is called). The notes vibrated with such power that they entered my chest like luminous arrows; soon the air played seemed to come out of myself; my fingers moved on an absent keyboard; the sounds gushed forth blue and red, in electric sparks; the soul of Weber had been incarnated in me. The piece finished, I continued with interior improvisations, in the style of the German master, which caused me ineffable raptures ; what a pity that a magic shorthand could not have collected these inspired melodies, heard by me alone, and which I do not hesitate, it is very modest of me, to place above the masterpieces of Rossini, Meyerbeer, Félicien David. O Pillet! O Vatel! One of the thirty operas I performed in ten minutes would enrich you in six months. The somewhat convulsive gaiety of the beginning had been succeeded by an indefinable well-being, a boundless calm. I was in that blissful period of hashish that the Orientals call kief. I no longer felt my body; the bonds of matter and spirit were loosed; I moved by my will alone in an environment that offered no resistance. This is how, I imagine, souls must act in the aromal world where we will go after our death. A bluish vapor, an elysian day, a reflection of an azurine grotto, formed in the room an atmosphere in which I vaguely saw indecisive contours trembling; this atmosphere, at once fresh and warm, humid and perfumed, enveloped me, like bathwater, in a kiss of enervating sweetness; If I wanted to change places, the caressing air made a thousand voluptuous eddies around me; a delicious languor took possession of my senses and threw me back onto the sofa, where I sank like a garment that one abandons. I understood then the pleasure that spirits and angels experience, according to their degree of perfection, in crossing the ethers and the heavens, and with what eternity could occupy itself in paradise. Nothing material was mixed with this ecstasy; no earthly desire altered its purity. Besides, love itself could not have increased it, Romeo hachichin would have forgotten Juliet. The poor child, leaning among the jasmines, would have stretched out in vain from the balcony, through the night, her beautiful alabaster arms, Romeo would have remained at the bottom of the silk ladder, and, although I am madly in love with the angel of youth and beauty created by Shakespeare, I must admit that the most beautiful girl in Verona, for a hashish, is not worth the trouble of bothering. So I gazed with a peaceful, though charmed, eye at the garland of ideally beautiful women who crowned the frieze with their divine nudity; I saw satin shoulders gleam, silver breasts sparkle , little feet with pink soles crown, opulent hips undulate, without experiencing the slightest temptation. The charming spectres which troubled Saint Anthony would have had no power over me.
By a strange miracle, after a few minutes of contemplation, I melted into the fixed object, and I became that object myself. Thus I had transformed myself into the nymph Syrinx, because the fresco in fact represented the daughter of Ladon pursued by Pan. I felt all the terrors of the poor fugitive, and I tried to hide behind fantastic reeds, to avoid the monster with goat’s feet. Chapter 33. KIEF TURNS INTO A NIGHTMARE. During my ecstasy, Daucus-Carota had returned. Seated like a tailor or like a pasha on his neatly twisted roots, he fixed his blazing eyes on me; his beak clicked in such a sardonic manner, such an air of mocking triumph burst forth from all his little deformed person, that I shuddered in spite of myself. Guessing my fear, he redoubled his contortions and grimaces, and came closer, hopping like a wounded reaper or a cripple in his mess tin. Then I felt a cold breath in my ear, and a voice whose accent was well known to me, although I could not define whose it belonged to, said to me: “That miserable Daucus-Carota, who sold his legs for a drink, has stolen your head, and put in its place, not an ass’s head like Puck on Bottom, but an elephant’s head!” Singularly intrigued, I went straight to the mirror, and saw that the warning was not false. I would have been taken for a Hindu or Javanese idol: my forehead had risen, my nose, elongated like a trunk, curved over my chest, my ears swept over my shoulders, and, to add insult to injury, I was indigo-colored, like Shiva, the blue god. Exasperated with fury, I began to pursue Daucus-Carota, who jumped and yelped, and gave every sign of extreme terror; I managed to catch him, and I banged him so violently against the edge of the table, that he finally gave me back my head, which he had wrapped in his handkerchief. Satisfied with this victory, I went to resume my place on the sofa; but the same small unknown voice said to me: “Take care, you are surrounded by enemies; the invisible powers seek to attract you and hold you. You are a prisoner here: try to get out, and you will see.” A veil was torn from my mind, and it became clear to me that the members of the club were none other than cabalists and magicians who wanted to drag me to my ruin. Chapter 34. TREAD-MILL. I got up with great difficulty and walked towards the door of the drawing-room, which I reached only after a considerable time, an unknown power forcing me to retreat one step in three. By my calculation, it took me ten years to complete this journey. Daucus-Carota followed me, sneering, and muttered with an air of false commiseration: “If he walks at this rate, when he arrives, he will be old.” I had, however, managed to reach the next room, the dimensions of which seemed to me changed and unrecognizable. It stretched out, stretched out… indefinitely. The light, which glittered at its extremity, seemed as distant as a fixed star. Discouragement seized me, and I was about to stop, when the little voice said to me, almost touching my lips: “Courage! She’ll be expecting you at eleven o’clock.” Making a desperate appeal to the strength of my soul, I succeeded, by an enormous projection of will, in lifting my feet which were clinging to the ground and which I had to uproot like tree trunks. The monster with mandrake legs escorted me, parodying my efforts and singing in a tone of drawling psalmody: “Marble wins! Marble wins!” Indeed, I felt my extremities petrify, and the marble envelop me up to the hips like Daphne of the Tuileries; I was a statue to the waist, like those enchanted princes of the Arabian Nights. My hardened heels echoed tremendously on the floor: I could have played the Commendatore in Don Juan. Meanwhile, I had arrived at the landing of the staircase, which I tried to descend; it was half-lit and, through my dream, assumed gigantic, cyclopean proportions. Its two ends, drowned in shadow, seemed to me to plunge into heaven and hell, two abysses; raising my head, I could indistinctly see, in a prodigious perspective, innumerable superpositions of landings, ramps to climb as if to reach the summit of Lylacq’s tower; lowering it , I sensed abysses of steps, whirlwinds of spirals, dazzling convolutions. “This staircase must pierce the earth from one end to the other,” I said to myself, continuing my mechanical march. “I shall reach the bottom the day after the Last Judgment.” The figures in the paintings looked at me with a look of pity, some of them moved with painful contortions, like mutes who wanted to give an important opinion on a supreme occasion. One would have said that they wanted to warn me of a trap to avoid, but an inert and gloomy force was dragging me along; the steps were soft and sank beneath me, like the mysterious ladders in the trials of Freemasonry. The sticky and flabby stones sagged like toads’ bellies; new landings, new steps, continually presented themselves to my resigned steps, those I had crossed replaced themselves before me. This merrymaking lasted a thousand years, on my account. Finally I arrived at the vestibule, where another persecution no less terrible awaited me. The chimera holding a candle in its paws, which I had noticed upon entering, blocked my passage with obviously hostile intentions; its greenish eyes sparkled with irony, its sly mouth laughed maliciously; it advanced towards me almost flat on its stomach, dragging its bronze caparison in the dust, but it was not out of submission; ferocious shudders agitated its lioness’s rump, and Daucus-Carota excited it as one does a dog that one wants to beat: “Bite it! Bite it! Marble meat for a mouth of bronze, it’s a proud treat.” Without letting myself be frightened by this horrible beast, I passed on. A gust of cold air hit my face, and the night sky, cleared of clouds, suddenly appeared before me. A scattering of stars powdered the veins of this great block of lapis lazuli with gold. I was in the courtyard. To convey to you the effect this somber architecture produced on me, I would need the point with which Piranesi scratched the black varnish of his marvelous copperplates: the courtyard had taken on the proportions of the Champ-de-Mars, and in a few hours had been lined with giant buildings that cut out on the horizon a jagged pattern of needles, domes, towers, gables, pyramids, worthy of Rome and Babylon. My surprise was extreme; I had never suspected the Île Saint-Louis of containing so many monumental magnificences, which, moreover, would have covered twenty times its actual surface area, and I did not think without apprehension of the power of the magicians who had been able, in one evening, to erect such constructions. “You are the plaything of vain illusions; this courtyard is very small,” murmured the voice; “it is twenty-seven paces long by twenty-five wide. “Yes, yes,” grumbled the bifurcated runt, “with seven-league boot steps . You’ll never make it to eleven o’clock; you’ve been gone for fifteen hundred years. Half your hair is already gray… Go back up there, it’s wisest.” As I didn’t obey, the odious monster entangled me in the webs of his legs, and, using his hands as if they were crampons, towed me despite my resistance, made me go back up the stairs where I had experienced so much anguish, and put me back, to my great despair, in the living room from which I had escaped with such difficulty. Then vertigo took complete possession of me; I went mad, delirious. Daucus-Carota was doing somersaults up to the ceiling, saying to me: “Fool, I gave you back your head, but first I had removed the brains with a spoon.” I felt a terrible sadness, for, when I put my hand to my skull, I found it open, and I lost consciousness. Chapter 35. DO NOT BELIEVE IN CHRONOMETERS. When I came to, I saw the room full of people dressed in black, who approached each other with a sad expression and shook hands with melancholy cordiality, like people afflicted by a common grief. They said: “Time is dead; henceforth there will be neither years, nor months, nor hours; Time is dead, and we are going to his funeral. ” “It is true that he was very old, but I did not expect this event; he was in wonderful health for his age,” added one of the mourners, whom I recognized as a painter friend of mine. “Eternity was worn out, it must come to an end,” another continued. “Great God!” I cried, struck by a sudden idea, “if there is no more time, when can it be eleven o’clock?… ” “Never…” Daucus-Carota shouted in a thunderous voice, thrusting his nose in my face and showing himself to me in his true form… ” Never… it will always be a quarter past nine… The hand will remain on the minute when time ceased to exist, and you will have the torture of coming to look at the motionless hand, and of returning to sit down to begin again, and this until you walk on the bones of your heels.” A superior force was pulling me along, and I made the journey four or five hundred times, questioning the dial with horrible anxiety. Daucus-Carota sat astride the clock and made dreadful grimaces at me. The needle did not move. “Wretch! You have stopped the pendulum,” I cried, drunk with rage. “No, it goes back and forth as usual…; but the suns will fall into dust before this steel arrow has advanced a millionth of a millimeter. ” “Come now, I see that we must ward off evil spirits, things are turning to spleen,” said the _seer_, “let us make a little music. David’s harp will be replaced this time by a piano by Erard.” And, placing himself on the stool, he played melodies with a lively movement and a cheerful character… This seemed to greatly annoy the mandrake-man, who shrank, flattened, discolored, and uttered inarticulate moans; finally, he lost all human appearance, and rolled on the floor in the form of a salsify with two pivots. The spell was broken. “Alleluia!” Time is resurrected, cried joyful childish voices; go see the clock now! The hand pointed to eleven o’clock. “Sir, your carriage is downstairs,” the servant told me. The dream was over. The hashish-eaters went their separate ways, like the officers after Malbrouck’s convoy. I descended with a light step the staircase that had caused me so much torture, and a few moments later I was in my room in full reality; the last vapors raised by the hashish had disappeared. My reason had returned, or at least what I call it, for lack of a better term. My lucidity would have gone so far as to report on a pantomime or a vaudeville, or to compose rhyming verses of three letters. We hope you have enjoyed this literary exploration into the heart of Théophile Gautier’s work. These novels and stories, rich in nuance and depth, continue to captivate us and inspire current generations. Don’t forget to subscribe to our channel to discover other literary treasures and share this adventure with your loved ones. See you soon on Livres Audio.

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00:19:24 Chapter 2.
00:37:32 Chapter 3.
00:48:06 Chapter 4.
01:00:34 Chapter 5.
01:15:59 Chapter 6.
01:32:00 Chapter 7.
01:47:58 Chapter 8.
02:04:26 Chapter 9.
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02:51:00 Chapter 12.
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03:22:24 Chapter 14.
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03:48:43 Chapter 16.
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04:25:14 Chapter 19.
04:34:10 Chapter 20.
04:49:38 Chapter 21.
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05:14:49 Chapter 23.
05:28:27 Chapter 24.
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05:46:26 Chapter 26.
09:38:46 Chapter 27.
09:44:26 Chapter 28.
09:47:01 Chapter 29.
09:50:10 Chapter 30.
09:53:25 Chapter 31.
10:01:07 Chapter 32.
10:05:03 Chapter 33.
10:07:03 Chapter 34.
10:12:41 Chapter 35.

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