The Human Comedy: Selected Stories

by Honoré de Balzac

  “In the course of the campaign of 1812,” said General de Montriveau, “I was the unwitting cause of a terrible misfortune that might help you, Dr. Bianchon,” he said, looking at me, “you who study the human mind even as you study the body, to resolve a few of your lingering questions on the subject of the will. This was my second campaign; I was in love with danger and took nothing seriously, like the green young artillery lieutenant I was! By the time we arrived at the Berezina, the army had lost all its discipline, as you know, and had no sense of military obedience. It was a rabble of men from all manner of nations, all instinctively heading southward. The soldiers did not hesitate to chase a barefooted general in rags away from their bonfires if he had no food or fuel to contribute. This disorder in no way improved once we crossed that notorious river. I had made my way out of the swamps of Zembin all alone, with nothing to eat, and I went looking for a house where I might be taken in. Finding none, or driven away from those I did find, I had the good fortune to spy, just as night was falling, a shabby little Polish farm, a place of which no description can give you an idea unless you have seen the wooden houses of lower Normandy or the poorest smallholdings of the Beauce. These abodes consist of one single room, walled off with planks at one end, the smaller half being a storeroom for forage. Through the dusk I spotted a plume of smoke rising from that distant house, and I walked boldly toward it, hoping to find comrades more compassionate than those I had so far met up with. I entered to find the table set for dinner. Several officers, with a woman among them—not an uncommon thing—were eating a meal of potatoes, horse meat grilled over embers, and frozen beets. Among the tablemates I spied two or three artillery captains from the First Regiment, in which I had served. I was greeted by a hearty ‘Hurrah!’ that would have greatly surprised me on the other bank of the Berezina; but now the cold was less fierce, my comrades were idle, they were warm, they were eating, and the room, strewn with hay bales, promised them a most delightful night. We weren’t so demanding back then. My fellow soldiers could be philanthropists without cost, one of the most common ways of being a philanthropist. I took my place on a hay bale and began eating. At the end of the table, beside the door to the little room full of straw and hay, sat my former colonel, one of the most extraordinary men I have ever encountered in all the motley crowd it has been my lot to meet. He was Italian. Now, when mankind is beautiful in the southern lands, it is sublime. I don’t know if you’ve ever noted the curious fairness of Italians, when their skin is fair . . . it’s magnificent, particularly by lamplight. I was reminded of this man on reading Charles Nodier’s fantastical portrait of Colonel Oudet; I rediscovered my own impressions in each of his elegant sentences. An Italian, like most of the officers who made up his regiment—borrowed by the emperor from Eugène’s army—my colonel cut an imposing figure; he was easily five foot eight or nine inches tall, admirably proportioned, perhaps a little fat, but prodigiously vigorous and agile too, graceful as a greyhound. His abundant black curls set off his complexion, which was as pale as a woman’s; he had small hands, a nicely shaped foot, a graceful mouth, and a slender aquiline nose with nostrils that automatically clenched and paled when he was angry, as he often was. His irascibility was a phenomenon beyond all belief, and so I will tell you nothing of it; in any case, you’ll have a sense of it soon enough. No one could feel at ease in his presence. I alone, perhaps, did not fear him; he had conceived for me, it is true, so singular a friendship that everything I did he found right and proper. When anger took hold of him, his brow tensed and his muscles sketched out a delta in the middle of his forehead—something like Redgauntlet’s horseshoe, to put it more plainly. That sign terrified you perhaps even more than the mesmerizing fire of his blue eyes. His entire body trembled, and his strength, already so great in his normal state, became almost unbounded. He had a habit of gargling his r’s. His voice, easily as mighty as that of Charles Nodier’s Oudet, gave a powerful resonance to the syllable or consonant on which that gargle landed. If at times this mispronunciation was a most elegant thing, it was quite different when he was commanding maneuvers or in the grip of emotion: Never can you imagine the potency expressed by that intonation, however vulgar it may be considered in Paris. You would have had to hear him. When the colonel felt at peace, his blue eyes painted a portrait of angelic mildness, and his noble brow bore an expression full of charm. At a review, no man in all the Italian army could rival him. D’Orsay himself, the magnificent d’Orsay, was bested by our colonel during Napoleon’s final review of the troops before entering Russia. All was opposition in this extraordinary man. Now, contrast is the lifeblood of passion; no need to ask, then, if he exerted on women that irresistible influence to which your nature”—the general was looking at the Princess de Cadignan—“bends like molten glass beneath the glassblower’s pipe. But by a curious caprice of fate, as any observer could see for himself, the colonel had very little luck with the ladies, or perhaps he neglected to try. To give you an idea of his tempers, let me recount in two words what I once saw him do in a fit of rage. We were climbing a very narrow path with our cannon, a rather high embankment on one side of the road and woods on the other. Halfway up, we met with another artillery regiment, headed by a colonel, coming the other way. This colonel ordered our regiment’s captain, who was leading the first battery, to reverse course. Naturally our captain refuses, but the colonel waves his first battery forward, and despite the quick-thinking driver’s attempt to steer into the woods, the wheel of the first cannon caught our captain’s right leg and broke it at one go, tossing him over his horse. All this in the blink of an eye. From some distance away, our colonel spies the quarrel in progress and comes galloping forward, weaving his way between cannon and trees, at the risk of finding himself knocked flat on his back at any moment. He reaches the other colonel just as our captain is falling from his horse and crying for help. No, our Italian colonel was no longer a man! . . . A foam like frothing champagne bubbled from his lips, and he growled like a lion. Unable to speak a word, unable even to shout, he made his fearsome meaning clear to his antagonist simply by drawing his saber and pointing toward the woods. The two colonels strode off into the trees. Two seconds later we saw our colonel’s adversary sprawled on the ground, his head split in two. The other soldiers backed away, oh by God they did, and double-quick! Now, this captain who’d nearly been killed, still howling in the mud puddle where the cannon had deposited him, was married to a stunning Italian woman from Messina, who was not indifferent to our colonel’s charms. This had only heightened his fury. The husband had been placed in his charge; he had to defend him, just as he would the woman herself. As it happens, in that hospitable hut just past Zembin, this same captain sat facing me at the table, and his wife at the other end, across from the colonel. She was a small woman by the name of Rosina, very dark, but all the heat of the Sicilian sun could be seen in her almond-shaped black eyes. She had grown frightfully thin; her cheeks were speckled with dirt, like a piece of fruit on a tree by a well-traveled road. Clad—and just barely!—in rags, weary from too much walking, her hair matted and uncombed beneath a torn marmot-fur shawl, she had nevertheless retained a certain womanliness: Her gestures were pretty to see, her mouth pink and puckered; her white teeth, the contours of her face and her bust—charms that privation, cold, and neglect had not entirely blighted—still spoke of love to anyone able to think of such things. Rosina offered a fine example of a nature frail in appearance but spirited and full of force all the same. The husband, a gentleman of the Piedmont, had a face made to express mocking camaraderie, if those two words may indeed be joined. Brave, educated, he seemed blissfully unaware of the liaison his wife and the colonel had kept up for some three years. I attributed this laxity to Italian mores or some private marital understanding, but there was in this man’s physiognomy one feature that had always inspired in me an involuntary unease. His thin, mobile lower lip drooped at the corners rather than turning up, betraying, I thought, a deep-seated cruelty in what se
emed a phlegmatic and indolent character. As you may well imagine, the conversation I’d walked in on was none too brilliant. My weary comrades ate in silence, though naturally they had a number of questions for me, and we recounted our misfortunes, mingling them with reflections on the campaign, on the generals, on their failings, on the Russians, on the cold. A moment after my arrival, the colonel, having finished his meager repast, wipes his mustaches, wishes us all a good night, turns his dark gaze toward the Italian woman, and says, ‘Rosina?’ Then, not troubling to await a reply, he goes off to bed in the little storeroom. The sense of the colonel’s question was quite clear to us all, so clear that an indescribable gesture escaped the young woman, expressing at once her evident irritation at seeing her dependence so openly displayed, with no trace of respect for her autonomy, and the offense done to her womanly dignity or to her husband. But there was also, in her clenched features, in her darkened brow, a sort of foreboding: Perhaps she had foreseen her fate. Rosina sat silently at the table. A moment later, very likely after the colonel had lain down on his bed of hay or straw, he called out again: ‘Rosina?’ The tone of this second summons was even more brutally insistent than the first. The guttural r, the peculiar resonance the Italian tongue gives a word’s vowels and ending, all this eloquently expressed the man’s tyranny, his impatience, his willfulness. Rosina blanched, but she rose from the table and brushed past us to go and join the colonel. My tablemates sat in deep silence, but I, alas, looked around at them all and let out a laugh, and my laughter spread from one mouth to the next. ‘Tu ridi?’ asked the husband. ‘Oh, but my dear comrade,’ I answered, serious again, ‘I confess, I was wrong, I beg of you a thousand pardons, and if these apologies seem to you insufficient, I can only agree.’ ‘The fault lies with me, not with you!’ he answered, grimly. With this we all settled down for the night in the main room, and soon we were sound asleep. The next day we each set off anew without waking the others, without seeking a traveling companion, in whatever direction we thought best, concerned only with ourselves, displaying the egoism that made of our disorderly retreat one of the most terrible dramas of human nature, of sorrow, and of horror that was ever played out beneath the heavens. Nevertheless, some seven or eight hundred paces from our quarters for the night, we nearly all met up again, and we walked on together, like a flock of geese driven along by the blind despotism of a child. One single, common need urged us ever forward. Arriving at a small hill within sight of the farmhouse, we heard cries like lions roaring in the desert, like bellowing bulls; but no, that clamor cannot be likened to anything known to man. Nevertheless, amid that horrible howl, we heard the faint shriek of a woman. We turned around, struck by some unnamable dread; there was nothing to be seen of the house, only a towering pyre. The building was wholly engulfed in flames and every doorway barricaded. Billows of windblown smoke carried those strident sounds our way, along with an overpowering odor. The captain was walking close by, having calmly come and joined our caravan. We gazed at him in silence, no one daring to question him, but suspecting our curiosity, he put his right index finger to his breast and, gesturing toward the blaze with his other hand, said, ‘Son’io!’ We walked on without a word.”

  “There’s nothing so fearsome as the revolt of a sheep,” said de Marsay.

  “It would be too awful to let us go with that horrible image in our memories,” said Madame de Portenduère. “It will be in my dreams.”

  “And how will Monsieur de Marsay’s first love be punished?” asked Lord Dudley, with a smile.

  “An Englishman gibes with velveted claws,” said Blondet.

  “I’ll let Monsieur Bianchon tell us,” de Marsay answered, looking at me. “He was witness to her final moments.”

  “I was,” I said, “and her death is one of the most beautiful I know. The duke and I had spent the night at her bedside, for her lung fever had attained its final stages and no hope was left. She’d been given last rites the day before. The duke soon fell asleep. Waking toward four in the morning, the duchess gave me a friendly gesture of the most touching sort, with a smile, enjoining me not to disturb him—and this when she was about to take her last breath! She’d grown extraordinarily thin, but her face and her features were, as always, truly sublime. In her pallor, her skin was like porcelain with a light glowing behind it. Her bright eyes and flushed cheeks stood out against that languidly elegant cast and an imposing tranquillity radiated from her face. She seemed full of pity for the duke, her emotion unbounded as her final moments approached. The silence was total. Softly lit by a lamp, the room looked precisely like every patient’s bedchamber at the moment of death. Just then the clock struck. The duke awoke, distraught at having drifted off. I did not see the infuriated gesture by which he expressed his regret at closing his eyes on his wife in one of the last moments granted her on this earth, but surely anyone other than she would have misread it. A man of state, preoccupied with the interests of France, the duke had a thousand of those unguarded eccentricities for which a genius is often thought mad, but whose explanation is to be found in his mind’s exquisite nature and the labors required of it. He sat down in an armchair beside his wife’s bed and stared into her eyes. She reached out weakly, gave her husband’s arm a faint squeeze, and in a voice at once quiet and full of emotion, said, ‘My poor friend, who will understand you now?’ Then she died, her eyes still looking into his.”

  “The doctor’s tales always move us so deeply,” said the Duc de Rhétoré.

  “But so sweetly,” added Mademoiselle des Touches.

  “Ah! Madame,” the doctor replied, “I have some truly terrible stories in my repertoire, but every tale has its own appointed time in a conversation, as Chamfort so neatly admonished the Duc de Fronsac: ‘Ten bottles of champagne stand between this moment and that little jest of yours.’”

  “But it’s two in the morning, and the story of Rosina has prepared us,” said the mistress of the house.

  “Go on, Monsieur Bianchon! . . .” he was urged from all sides.

  The doctor made a conciliatory gesture, and silence fell once again.

  “Some hundred paces from the town of Vendôme, on the banks of the Loir,” he said, “stands an aged brown house with high pointed roofs, perfectly isolated, neighbored by no squalid tannery or shabby inn of the sort that you see outside nearly any small city. Before that house lies a riverside garden whose boxwood shrubs, once cut short to border the walkways, now grow however they please. Born in the Loir, a row of quick-growing willows stands like a hedge, half concealing the house. Those plants we call weeds grace the riverbank’s slope with their beautiful green. After ten years of neglect, the fruit trees offer no harvest, and their offshoots have grown into dense thickets. The overgrown espaliers make a canopy, as in an ornamental bower. The sand of the walkways is now thick with portulaca, but in truth no sign of a walkway remains. Standing atop the great hill that offers a perch to the ruined château of the Dukes of Vendôme, the only spot from which to see into that enclosure, one muses that in some indistinct past this patch of land was the joy of some gentleman with a passion for roses, for tulip trees, for horticulture in short, but above all for fine fruit. One spies an arbor, or what remains of an arbor; beneath it there still sits a table, not yet entirely obliterated by time. In that garden that is no longer a garden one can glimpse, as if in negative, the joys of the peaceable existence the provinces offer, just as one glimpses the life led by a good merchant from the epitaph on his grave. To cap off all the sad and beguiling ideas that deluge the onlooker’s soul, one of the walls displays a sundial ornamented with this bourgeois Christian inscription: ULTIMAM COGITA! The roofs are in terrible disrepair, the shutters are always closed, the balconies are covered with swallows’ nests, the doors never open. Tall grasses highlight the steps’ cracks in green; the hinges have rusted. The moon, the sun, the winter’s cold, the summer’s heat have worn down the wood, warped the boards, scoured the paint. The desolate silence is troubled only by the birds, cats, fe
rrets, rats, and mice that dart unhindered this way and that, doing battle, devouring one another. Everywhere an invisible hand has written this word: Mystery. If, your curiosity piqued, you went to study this house from the street, you would see the broad outer door with its rounded top, liberally staved through by the local children. I later learned that this door had been sealed shut ten years before. Through those irregular breaches, you would note how perfectly the courtyard side of the house harmonizes with the garden side: The same disarray reigns over both. Sprays of tall grass outline the paving stones. Enormous cracks snake over the walls, whose blackened tops are enlaced by the thousand festoons of a wild pellitory. The front steps are askew, the rope on the bell has rotted away, the gutters are broken. What fire fallen from the sky has ravaged this place? What tribunal ordered that these grounds be sown with salt? Was God insulted here? Was France betrayed? one wonders. The lizards make no reply but merely crawl on their way. This empty, abandoned house is an enormous riddle whose answer is known to none. Formerly a small feudal estate, it bears the name La Grande Bretèche. The sight of that singular dwelling became one of the keenest pleasures of my sojourn in Vendôme, where Desplein had left me to look after a well-to-do patient. Was it not better than a ruin? A ruin is bound up with memories of an irrefutable reality, but this house—still standing, if suffering a slow demolition by a vengeful hand—this house held a secret, an unknown idea; at the very least, it bore witness to a caprice. More than once, after nightfall, I squeezed through the overgrown hedge that protected the grounds. Braving scratches and scrapes, I made my way into that garden with no master, that land now neither public nor private, and there I stayed for hours on end, contemplating its disarray. I would never have dreamt of consulting some talkative citizen of Vendôme in hopes of learning the story behind that strange sight. There I composed delicious novels in my head; I abandoned myself to little orgies of melancholy that filled me with delight. Had I known the perhaps perfectly ordinary cause of the house’s desolation, I would have been robbed of the unspoken poems that so intoxicated me. For me, this asylum embodied the most varied images of human existence, darkened by its sorrows: now a cloister, without the monks; now a silent cemetery, without the dead speaking to you in their epitaphic language; today the house of the leper, tomorrow that of Atreus; but it was above all the provinces, with their meditative ideas, their hourglass lives. Often I wept there; I never laughed. More than once I felt a surge of terror on hearing the rustle of a ringdove’s wings as it fled overhead. The ground there is damp; you must look out for lizards, vipers, and frogs, which wander with all the wild freedom of nature; above all you must have no fear of cold, for within a few moments you feel a chill mantle falling over your shoulders, like the hand of the commendatore on Don Giovanni’s neck. One evening I shuddered there: The wind had set a rusted old weathervane spinning, and its creak was like the plaint of the house itself, all this just as I was concluding a rather grim drama in my mind, an explanation for this sort of monumentalized sorrow. I returned to my inn, consumed by somber ideas. After my supper, the landlady came to me with a mysterious air and announced, ‘Monsieur Regnault is here, monsieur.’ ‘And who is Monsieur Regnault?’ ‘What, monsieur, you do not know Monsieur Regnault? Ah! How strange!’ she said, walking out. I found myself facing a tall, thin man, all in black, hat in hand, with a stance like a bull about to charge, presenting to me a sloping brow, a small pointed head, and a pallid face rather like a glass of murky water. He seemed the very model of some government minister’s private secretary. His suit was old and badly worn at the seams, but he had a diamond stickpin in his jabot and rings in his earlobes. ‘Monsieur, to whom do I have the honor?’ I asked. He sat down on a chair, warmed himself by my fire, set his hat on my table, and replied, rubbing his hands, ‘Oh, isn’t it cold! Monsieur, I am Monsieur Regnault.’ I nodded, saying to myself, ‘Il bondo cani! What is he after?’ ‘I am,’ he went on, ‘a notaire in Vendôme.’ ‘Delighted, monsieur,’ I cried, ‘but I am not in a position to draw up my will, for reasons known only to me.’ ‘Beg pardon,’ he answered, raising his hand as if to still my tongue. ‘If I may, monsieur, if I may! I have learned that you are in the habit of stepping out for a stroll in the garden of La Grande Bretèche.’ ‘Yes, monsieur.’ ‘Beg pardon!’ he said, repeating his gesture. ‘That is a flagrant infraction. Monsieur, in the name of and as executor of the estate of the late Madame la Comtesse de Merret, I come to ask that you discontinue your visits. Beg pardon! I am not a Turk and do not wish to make too much of this. Besides, you have every right to know nothing of the circumstances that oblige me to let the finest house in Vendôme go to ruin. Nonetheless, monsieur, you seem a man of some learning, and must know that the law forbids incursions onto fenced property, under penalty of grave sanctions. A hedge is as good as a wall. But the current state of the house might justifiably serve to excuse your curiosity. I would like nothing better than to allow you to come and go freely in that house, but charged as I am with executing the wishes of the late countess, I have the honor, monsieur, of requesting that you never enter the garden again. I myself, monsieur, since the unsealing of the will, have not set foot in that house, which belongs, as I have had the honor of informing you, to the estate of Madame de Merret. We simply recorded the number of doors and windows to calculate the taxes, which I pay annually from a fund set up for that purpose by the late countess. Ah! My dear monsieur, her will caused quite a stir in Vendôme!’ Here the distinguished gentleman paused to blow his nose. I made no attempt to quell his loquacity, understanding full well that Madame de Merret’s legacy was the most significant event of his life, the source of his standing in this world, his glory, his Restoration. Farewell to my beautiful daydreams, my novels; I was thus in no way hostile to the pleasure of learning the truth from an official source. ‘Monsieur,’ I said, ‘would it be indiscreet to ask you the reasons for this strange whim?’ On hearing those words, the notaire’s face beamed with the deep delight of a man who loves nothing so much as straddling his hobbyhorse. He turned up his shirt collar with a satisfied air, pulled out his snuffbox, opened it, held it out to me; when I declined, he took a healthy pinch for himself. He was happy! A man with no hobbyhorse has no notion of all that life has to offer. A hobbyhorse is the precise middle ground between passion and monomania. At that moment, I understood the full sense of Sterne’s eloquent term, and I grasped with what joy Uncle Toby mounted his steed, aided by Corporal Trim. ‘Monsieur,’ said Monsieur Regnault, ‘I was once head clerk in the offices of Maître Roguin, in Paris. An excellent practice—perhaps you’ve heard of it? No? And yet the name has become widely known, owing to a most unfortunate bankruptcy. Lacking the wherewithal to open my own practice in Paris, the fees having been raised in 1816, I came here to purchase my predecessor’s. I had relatives in Vendôme, among them a very well-to-do aunt, who gave me her daughter in marriage . . . ’ After a brief pause, he continued: ‘Monsieur, three months after obtaining my license from the Ministry of Justice, I was summoned one evening, just as I was about to retire (I was not yet married), by Madame la Comtesse de Merret, from her Château de Merret. Her chambermaid, a fine girl who today serves in this very hostelry, was waiting at my door with the countess’s coach. Ah! Beg pardon! I must tell you, monsieur, that the Comte de Merret had gone off to die in Paris two months before I came to this place. He died a sordid death, after indulging in all manner of excesses. You understand? The day of his departure, the countess had vacated La Grande Bretèche, taking everything with her. Some even claim that she burned the furniture, the tapestries, in short everything, for the most part of no very great value, that filled the premises currently rented by the aforementioned . . . (Wait, what am I saying? Forgive me, for a moment I thought I was dictating a lease.) That she burned them,’ he resumed, ‘on the grounds of the Château de Merret. Have you ever been to Merret, monsieur? No,’ he said, answering for me. ‘Ah! It’s a beautiful place! For some three months,’ he went on after a quick shake of th
e head, ‘the count and countess had lived a curious life; they no longer received visitors, madame had her rooms on the ground floor, monsieur on the second. When the countess was alone, she went out only for church. Later, at home in her château, she refused to see the friends of both sexes who came calling. She was already very changed when she left La Grande Bretèche for Merret. That dear woman . . . (I say “dear” because this diamond comes to me from her, and yet I saw her only once in my life!) The good woman was very ill; no doubt she had abandoned all hope of recovery, for she died without allowing a doctor to be summoned. Many of our ladies believed she was not in full possession of her faculties. My curiosity was thus singularly aroused, monsieur, by the news that Madame de Merret desired my assistance. I was not the only one to take an interest in this matter. That very evening, late though it was, all the city knew I was bound for Merret. The chambermaid offered only evasive replies to the questions I posed on the way; nonetheless, she informed me that her mistress had that day been given last rites by the curé of Merret and seemed unlikely to live through the night. I arrived at the château toward eleven o’clock. I climbed the great staircase. I walked through several large salons, high-ceilinged and dark, devilishly cold and damp, and finally came to the master bedroom, where the countess lay. From the rumors I’d heard of this woman (monsieur, I would never be done with it if I set out to repeat all the tales people told of her!), I pictured her as a coquette. Just imagine, I had great difficulty even finding her in that enormous bed! It is true that to light that vast room, with molded friezes straight out of the ancien régime, so liberally coated with dust that the mere sight of them made you sneeze, she had only an old Argand lamp. Ah! But you’ve never been to Merret! Well, monsieur, the bed is one of those beds of days gone by, with a high canopy covered in floral calico. A small nightstand sat near the bed, and on it I saw The Imitation of Christ, which, parenthetically, I bought for my wife, along with the lamp. There was also a large bergère for the chambermaid and two straight-backed chairs. No fire, as it happens. No other furniture than that. It wouldn’t have filled ten lines in an inventory. Ah! My dear monsieur, if you had seen, as I saw it then, that vast room, those brown tapestries on the walls, you would have thought yourself transported into a veritable novel. It was cold—and more than that, it was funereal,’ he added, raising one arm in a theatrical gesture and marking a pause. ‘I approached the bed, my eyes searching, and finally spied Madame de Merret, once again thanks to the lamp, which shone onto the pillows. Her face was yellow as wax and resembled two hands joined in prayer. Her lace bonnet revealed her hair, quite beautiful but white as cotton thread. She was sitting up with what seemed considerable difficulty. Her large black eyes, no doubt ravaged by fever, almost dead even now, scarcely moved beneath the bones under her eyebrows. This,’ he said, pointing to his brow. ‘Her forehead was damp. Her wizened hands were like bones wrapped in soft skin; her veins stood out clearly, her muscles. She must once have been very beautiful, but now her appearance filled me with an emotion without name. Never, according to those who buried her, had a living creature grown so emaciated and gone on living. Oh, it was terrible to see! The poor woman had been so cruelly withered by illness that she was nothing more than a ghost. Her pale purple lips seemed not to move when she spoke. My profession has accustomed me to such sights—I have been summoned to more than one deathbed, to record a patient’s last wishes—but I will confess that all the agonies and lamentations I’ve witnessed pale to nothing beside that silent, solitary woman in that enormous château. I heard not the slightest sound, I saw no movement of the covers, as her breathing might cause; I stood riveted to the spot, lost in mute contemplation. I might almost still be there at this moment. Finally her large eyes moved; she tried to raise her right hand, then let it drop back to the bed, and these words emerged from her mouth, like a whisper, for her voice was already no longer a voice: “I’ve been waiting for you most impatiently.” Her cheeks flushed bright red. Speaking, monsieur, was a great struggle for her. “Madame,” I answered. She gestured me to be still. At that moment, her old housemaid stood and whispered in my ear, “Do not speak: The countess cannot hear a sound, and anything you say might upset her.” I sat down again. A few moments later, Madame de Merret summoned all her remaining strength and moved her right arm, slipping it under the pillow with great effort; she stopped for a brief moment, then, expending the last of her forces, slowly extracted her hand. By the time she pulled out a sealed paper, drops of sweat were falling from her forehead. “I entrust to you my will,” she said. “Ah! My God! Ah!” That was all. She took up a crucifix that was lying on her bed, pressed it quickly to her lips, and died. I still shiver when I think of the expression in her frozen gaze. How she must have suffered! There was joy in her final glance, an emotion that remained imprinted in those lifeless eyes. I took the will, and when it was opened I saw that Madame de Merret had named me her executor. Apart from a few individual legacies, she left all her assets to the Hospital of Vendôme. But here are her instructions concerning La Grande Bretèche. She ordered me to leave this house, for fifty full years, starting from the day of her death, just as it was at the moment of her demise, forbidding all entry into the rooms, forbidding even the most minor repair. She went so far as to set aside a pension to hire guards, should they be required for the perfect fulfillment of her intentions. At the end of that time, assuming her wishes have not been violated, the house will become the property of my heirs, for monsieur knows that a notaire can accept no bequeathal; otherwise, La Grande Bretèche will be passed on to her legal inheritors, but with it will come the obligation to fulfill the conditions of a codicil that can only be unsealed when those fifty years have elapsed. No one has come forward to contest the will, and so . . . ’ With this, and leaving his sentence there, the oblong notaire looked at me triumphantly, and I completed his delight with a few complimentary words. ‘Monsieur,’ I said in conclusion, ‘your story has stirred me so deeply that even now I believe I can see that dying woman, paler than her sheets; her shining eyes frighten me, and I shall dream of her tonight. But you must surely have wondered at the instructions contained in that singular will.’ ‘Monsieur,’ he answered, with comical dignity, ‘I never permit myself to judge the conduct of those who have honored me with the gift of a diamond.’ I soon loosened the tongue of the scrupulous notaire of Vendôme, who passed along, not without several lengthy digressions, the thoughts offered up by various local sages of both sexes, whose judgments are as holy writ in Vendôme. But so contradictory were those reflections, and so rambling, that I nearly drifted off, despite my great interest in this living history. My curiosity was no match for the grandiloquent delivery and monotonous tones of the notaire, no doubt long used to hearing himself speak and to commanding the rapt attention of his clients or compatriots. At long last, to my relief, he went on his way. ‘Ah! Ah! Monsieur, many people,’ he told me on the stairs, ‘would like to live another forty-five years—but, beg pardon!’ And slyly he laid his right index finger alongside his nostril, as if to say: Listen closely now! ‘But if that is your goal,’ he said, ‘you’d best not be in your sixties.’ I closed the door, roused from my apathy by this last quip, which the notaire thought very witty, and then I sat down in my armchair, propping my feet on the two andirons of my fireplace, my mind consumed by a living Ann Radcliffe novel built on the material offered by Monsieur Regnault. A few moments later, my door turned on its hinges, opened by a woman’s adroit hand. My hostess came in, a fat, jolly sort, always in a sunny mood, who had missed her calling: She was a woman of Flanders, who should have been born into a canvas by Teniers. ‘Well, monsieur?’ she said. ‘I imagine Monsieur Regnault regaled you with his beloved tale of La Grande Bretèche.’ ‘He did, Madame Lepas.’ ‘And what did he say?’ In a few words I repeated the cold, dark story of Madame de Merret. With each sentence my hostess bent nearer, peering at me with an innkeeper’s perspicacity, a sort of happy medium between the instinct of the gendarme, the cunning
of the spy, and the guile of the shopkeeper. ‘My dear lady Lepas!’ I said as I concluded. ‘You seem to know something more of all this. Am I wrong? Why else should you have come up to see me?’ ‘Ah! Word of an honest woman, and as true as my name is Lepas—’ ‘Swear no oaths, your eyes are heavy with secrets. You knew Monsieur de Merret. What manner of man was he?’ ‘Oh, Monsieur de Merret was a fine figure of a man, and he went on and on, he was so tall! An upstanding gentleman from Picardy, and a touch thin-skinned, as we say around here. He always paid cash, just so there’d never be trouble! He was hot-blooded, do you see? The local ladies all found him most amiable.’ ‘Because he was hot-blooded!’ I answered. ‘Quite likely,’ she said. ‘You understand, monsieur, he must have had something going for him, as they say, to marry Madame de Merret, who, no offense to the others, was the richest, most beautiful lady in all the area. She had an income of something like twenty thousand pounds. The whole town came to her wedding. She made an adorable bride, charming, a perfect jewel of a woman. Ah! They were a lovely couple back then!’ ‘Was their household a happy one?’ ‘Hmm hmm, yes and no, as best we can tell, for you can well imagine, they didn’t cozen much with the likes of us! Madame de Merret was a wonderful woman, sweetness itself, perhaps a bit put-upon by her husband’s hot temper, but we all liked him, even if he was a little proud. That’s just how the man was, and it was nobody’s business but his. When you’re noble, you know . . . ’ ‘And yet there must have been some sort of catastrophe, for Monsieur and Madame de Merret to part ways so abruptly?’ ‘I never said a word about any catastrophe, monsieur. I don’t know the first thing about it.’ ‘I see. Now I know you know everything.’ ‘Well then, monsieur, I’ll tell you the whole story. Seeing Monsieur Regnault heading up to your rooms, I had a feeling he was going to tell you about Madame de Merret, in connection with La Grande Bretèche. That gave me the idea of having a nice heart-to-heart with you, as you seem to me a man of good counsel, not at all the sort to betray a poor woman such as myself, who’s never done any harm to anyone and who nevertheless now finds herself tormented by her conscience. I’ve never dared bare my soul to these people around here—they’re a bunch of chattering parrots, with tongues hard as steel! And besides, monsieur, I’ve never had a traveler who stayed so long as you in my inn, someone I might tell the story of the fifteen thousand francs—’ ‘My dear Madame Lepas!’ I answered, stanching that torrent of words. ‘If your confession is of a nature to compromise me, I won’t be burdened with it for anything in the world—’ ‘Have no fear,’ she said, interrupting me. ‘You’ll see.’ This insistence suggested that I was not the first she’d entrusted with this secret of which I was supposedly the sole repository, and I settled down to listen. ‘Monsieur,’ she said, ‘years ago the emperor sent a number of Spaniards here to Vendôme, prisoners of war or what have you, and I was asked to provide lodging at government expense for a young Spaniard who’d been released on parole. Parole or no parole, he had to go and show his face to the subprefect every day. He was a Spanish grandee, no less! He had a name with an os and a dia, Bagos de Férédia or some such thing. I have his name written down in my register; you can go and see it, if you like. Oh! He was a most handsome young man, for a Spaniard—you know people say they’re all homely. He can’t have been more than five feet two or three inches tall, but nicely put together; he had small hands, and the way he looked after them! Ah! It was something to see. He had as many brushes for his hands as a woman has for all her primping put together! He had a big shock of black hair and an eye full of fire; his complexion was a touch coppery, but I liked it all the same. He wore linens like I’ve never seen on anyone, and remember, I’ve put up princesses, along with General Bertrand, the Duc and Duchesse d’Abrantès, Monsieur Decazes, the King of Spain, I could go on. He didn’t eat much, but you couldn’t hold that against him, he was always so polite and so amiable. Oh! I was very fond of him indeed, though he didn’t speak four words in a day, and there was no way to have a conversation with him. You could talk all you liked, but he never answered. It was a quirk of his, though from what I’ve heard they’re all just the same. He read his breviary like a priest; he went to Mass and all the services regularly. And where did he choose to sit? We only noticed it later: not two steps away from Madame de Merret’s chapel. That was where he sat down on his first visit to our church, so no one ever imagined he had an ulterior motive. Besides, he never took his nose out of his prayer book, that poor young man! In the evening, he liked to walk on the big hill, in the ruins of the château. That was his one amusement, poor thing, it put him in mind of his homeland. They say it’s all mountains in Spain! Almost right from the start, he loved to spend time up there. It worried me, not seeing him come back before midnight, but we soon got used to his little fancies. He took the front door key, and we stopped waiting up for him. He was staying in our house on rue des Casernes. And then one of our grooms told us a curious thing: He was taking the horses for a bath in the river one evening and thought he saw the Spanish grandee in the distance, swimming along like a regular fish. Next time I saw him, I told him to look out for the floating grasses, and he didn’t seem happy to have been spotted in the water. Finally, monsieur, one day, or one morning, we didn’t find him in his room; he hadn’t come back. I gave the place a good going-over, and finally opened his table drawer, where I found a note, and then fifty of those Spanish gold coins they call portugaises, worth about five thousand francs, and then on top of that ten thousand francs’ worth of diamonds in a little sealed box. The note said that if he didn’t come back we were to use that money and those diamonds to fund Masses thanking God for his escape and safety. My husband was still with me in those days, and he ran off to hunt for him. And here’s the queer thing! He came back with the Spaniard’s clothes, which he’d found under a big rock, in a sort of pier on the bank of the river on the château side, more or less directly in front of La Grande Bretèche. No one would have seen my husband take them; it was too early in the morning. Once he’d read the letter, he burned all the clothes, and we reported that he’d escaped, just like Count Férédia wanted. The subprefect sent the whole gendarmerie out on his trail, but they never did catch him. Lepas thought the Spaniard had drowned. Myself, I’m not so sure. My idea is that he had something to do with that Madame de Merret business, because Rosalie told me her mistress had a silver-and-ebony crucifix she so loved that she wanted to be buried with it, and when he first came here Monsieur Férédia had a silver-and-ebony crucifix that I never saw with him again. Now, monsieur, is it not true that I should feel no remorse over the Spaniard’s fifteen thousand francs, and that they truly are mine?’ ‘Certainly. But you never tried to question Rosalie?’ I asked her. ‘Oh! I did indeed, monsieur. But what can you do? The girl’s like a wall. She knows something, but there’s no way to wring it out of her.’ After a few more moments’ conversation, my hostess left me in the grips of vague, dark ideas, a yearning to understand, as any good novel inspires, a religious terror not unlike the profound sentiment that seizes us when we enter a dark church by night and spot a tremulous glimmer between the distant arches; a hesitant figure glides along, a rustling gown or cassock breaks the silence . . . a shiver runs through us. The image of La Grande Bretèche appeared fantastically before me, its tall grasses, its sealed windows, its rusted hinges, its locked doors, its empty rooms. I tried to find some way into that mysterious abode, seeking the key that would unlock this solemn story, this drama that had ended with three people dead. In my eyes, Rosalie was the most interesting creature in all of Vendôme. Examining her, I saw signs of unspoken thoughts, for all the simple good health that radiated from her dimpled face. She had in her some essence of remorse or anticipation; her manner bespoke a secret, like that of the devout women you see in church, rapt in over-fervent prayer, like the young infanticide with her child’s last shriek still ringing in her ears. Outwardly, nonetheless, she was naïve and unpolished, there was no criminality in her dim-witted smile, and you would have
thought her perfectly innocent based simply on the sight of the large red-and-blue-checked fichu that covered her generous bust, framed, squeezed, bound by a dress of red and violet stripes. ‘No,’ I thought, ‘I will not leave Vendôme until I have learned the full story of La Grande Bretèche. And to that end I will become Rosalie’s lover, if need be.’ ‘Rosalie!’ I said to her one evening. ‘May I help you, monsieur?’ ‘You’re not married, are you?’ She gave a small start. ‘Oh! I’ll have no lack of men, when the fancy to ruin my life strikes me!’ she said with a laugh. She’d immediately recovered from her emotion, for all women have their own particular form of sangfroid, from the grande dame to the maidservant, inclusive. ‘A fresh, appealing girl such as you should have no lack of suitors! But tell me, Rosalie, why go to work as a chambermaid when you’ve been in the employ of Madame de Merret? Did she not leave you some sort of pension?’ ‘Oh! She did indeed! But, monsieur, my place here is the best in all Vendôme.’ This response was of the sort that judges and lawyers call dilatory. In this vast novel, Rosalie seemed to occupy the square at the very middle of a checkerboard; all the interest of the tale was centered on her, and all the truth; I thought her bound up in the tale’s mainspring. This was no ordinary seduction to be undertaken; the girl held within her the last chapter of a novel, and so, from that moment on, Rosalie became the object of my every attention. After careful study, I found in her, as in all women of whom we make our principal preoccupation, a whole host of qualities: She was clean, conscientious; she was beautiful, that goes without saying; she soon took on all the allures that our desire lends to women, whatever their situation in life. Two weeks after the notaire’s visit, one evening, or rather one morning, for it was very early, I said to Rosalie, ‘Tell me all you know about Madame de Merret, won’t you?’ ‘Oh,’ she answered, recoiling, ‘don’t ask that of me, Monsieur Horace!’ Her lovely face dimmed, her bright, youthful colors faded, and her eyes lost their glistening, innocent glow. ‘Well,’ she went on, ‘since you ask, I’ll tell you, but you must keep my secret!’ ‘Come now, my poor girl, I’ll keep all your secrets with the probity of a thief, the most loyal there is.’ ‘If it’s all the same to you,’ she said to me, ‘I’d rather you keep it with yours.’ With this, she put her fichu to rights and sat up in a storyteller’s pose; for the body must be secure and at ease before we can tell a good tale. The best narratives are spun at a certain hour —look at all of us sitting here at this table! No one has ever told a good story on his feet nor with an empty stomach. Now, a whole volume would scarcely suffice to faithfully reproduce Rosalie’s meandering eloquence, but since as it happens the event of which she offered me a tangled knowledge lies between Madame Lepas’s chatter and the notaire’s, just as the middle terms of a mathematical ratio lie between the two extremes, I can recount it in just a few words. With some abridgement, then, here it is. The room occupied by Madame de Merret at La Bretèche lay on the ground floor. In one wall, a small closet, some four feet deep, served as her wardrobe. Three months before the evening in question, Madame de Merret had fallen ill, gravely enough that her husband had taken to sleeping upstairs, so as not to disturb her. By one of those unforeseeable strokes of fate, that evening he returned two hours later than usual from his club, where he often went to read the papers and talk politics with the locals. His wife thought him at home, in bed and asleep. But the invasion of France had sparked a most animated discussion; the billiard match had grown heated; he’d lost forty francs, an enormous sum in Vendôme, where everyone saves and where life is lived within the boundaries of an admirable modesty that may well be the source of a genuine happiness, for which no Parisian cares a whit. Monsieur de Merret had fallen into the habit, on his return from the club, of simply asking Rosalie if his wife had retired for the night; the answer was always affirmative, and so he went straight up to his rooms, with an amiability born of trust and routine. This particular night, he fancied he might pay a call on Madame de Merret, to tell her of his misadventure and perhaps seek some manner of consolation as well. He had found Madame de Merret most fetchingly dressed at dinner; now, on his way home from the club, he told himself that his wife’s illness had passed, her beauty returning as she convalesced—and he noticed this, as husbands notice everything, a bit late. Rather than call for Rosalie, who was then occupied in the kitchen watching the coachman and the cook play a tense round of brisque, Monsieur de Merret made for his wife’s bedroom, lit by the lantern he’d set down on the first step of the stairway. His distinctive footfalls echoed off the arched ceiling of the corridor. Turning the key to his wife’s room, he thought he heard the closet door closing, but when he entered Madame de Merret was alone, standing before the fireplace. Naïvely, the husband thought it was Rosalie in the closet; nevertheless a burst of suspicion rang in his ear, like tolling bells, and put him on guard; he looked at his wife and found in her eyes something mysterious and wild. ‘You’re home very late,’ she said. He thought he detected a faint agitation in that voice, ordinarily so mild and gracious. Monsieur de Merret made no reply, for just then Rosalie came in. He was dumbstruck. He paced through the room, from one window to the other, arms crossed over his chest. ‘Have you had bad news? Are you ill?’ his wife timidly asked, as Rosalie undressed her. He said nothing. ‘Leave us,’ said Madame de Merret to her chambermaid, ‘I’ll put my curlpapers in myself.’ From the look on her husband’s face, she foresaw some manner of trouble, and she wanted to be alone with him. When Rosalie was gone, or supposed to be gone, for she lingered a few moments in the corridor, Monsieur de Merret planted himself before his wife and said to her coldly, ‘Madame, there is someone in your closet!’ She looked at her husband, impassive, and answered simply, ‘No, monsieur.’ Monsieur de Merret was sorely aggrieved by that ‘no’; he didn’t believe it. And yet never had his wife seemed to him purer nor more pious than at that moment. He stalked off to open the closet; Madame de Merret grasped his hand, stopped him, looked at him dolefully, and told him, with singular urgency, ‘If you find no one, understand that everything will be over between us!’ The remarkable dignity of his wife’s manner revived the gentleman’s deep esteem for her and inspired him to one of those resolutions that need only a grand theater to become immortal. ‘No,’ he said, ‘Joséphine, I won’t look. Whatever I find, we would be parted forever. Listen, I know how pure is your soul and how saintly your life; you would never throw all that away by committing a mortal sin.’ Madame de Merret looked at her husband, wild-eyed. ‘Here, here is your crucifix,’ the man added. ‘Swear to me before God that no one is there. I will believe you, and I will never open that door.’ Madame de Merret took the crucifix and said, ‘I swear.’ ‘Louder,’ said the husband, ‘and repeat: I swear before God that there is no one in that closet.’ She repeated the sentence without batting an eye. ‘Very well,’ said Monsieur de Merret coolly. And then, after a moment of silence: ‘This is a very fine thing you have here; I’ve not seen it before.’ He was studying that ebony crucifix, artistically carved and incrusted with silver. ‘I found it at Duvivier’s. He bought it from a Spanish monk when those prisoners came through Vendôme last year.’ ‘Ah!’ said Monsieur de Merret, replacing the crucifix on its nail; and he rang. A moment later Rosalie appeared. Monsieur de Merret went briskly to meet her, led her to the window that looked onto the garden, and said to her quietly, ‘I know that Gorenflot is eager to marry you, that poverty alone stands in your way, that you’ve told him you won’t be his wife until he establishes himself as a mason. Well, go and fetch him; tell him to come out at once and bring his trowel and tools. See to it that no one in his house is awakened but him; his reward will exceed your desires. Above all, leave this place without one word to anyone, or . . . ’ He scowled. Rosalie set off, but he called her back. ‘Here, take my passkey,’ he said. ‘Jean,’ cried Monsieur de Merret in a thundering voice from the corridor. Jean, who was both his coachman and his valet, abandoned his game of brisque and came to him. ‘Everyone to bed,’ said his master, beckoning him
nearer, and in a whisper he added, ‘Once they’re all asleep—asleep, do you hear?—come downstairs and tell me.’ Monsieur de Merret had kept one eye on his wife as he delivered these orders; now he calmly joined her before the fire and began to recount the events of the billiard match and the discussions at the club. Rosalie returned to find Monsieur and Madame de Merret chatting most amicably. The gentleman had recently had new ceilings made for his ground-floor reception rooms. Plaster is a rarity in Vendôme, its cost increased by the need to transport it in; he had thus ordered a generous quantity, knowing he would always find buyers for the excess. It was this that inspired the plan he was now setting in motion. ‘Monsieur Gorenflot is here,’ said Rosalie, quietly. ‘Show him in!’ her master answered. Madame de Merret paled a little on seeing the mason. ‘Gorenflot,’ said the husband, ‘go and fetch some bricks from the shed, enough to wall up the closet; you can use my leftover plaster to seal the door.’ Then, drawing Rosalie and the mason to him, he said in low tones, ‘Listen, Gorenflot, you will sleep here tonight. But tomorrow morning, you will have a passport to go to a foreign country, and a city that I will name. I’ll give you six thousand francs for the journey. You will live in that city for ten years; should it not be to your liking, you may move to another, so long as it’s in the same country. You will go by way of Paris, where you will wait for me. There, I will guarantee you by contract a further six thousand francs, payable on your return, assuming you fulfill our bargain’s conditions. That price should assure your most profound silence on all that you do here tonight. And for you, Rosalie: ten thousand francs, to be delivered only on your wedding day, so long as you marry Gorenflot, but in order for the marriage to take place, you must hold your tongue. Otherwise, no dowry.’ ‘Rosalie,’ said Madame de Merret, ‘come and do my hair.’ The husband paced lazily around the room, watching over the door, the mason, and his wife, taking care to conceal all suspicion. Gorenflot could not help making some noise. Seizing on a moment when the worker was unloading bricks and her husband happened to be at the far end of the room, Madame de Merret whispered to Rosalie, ‘A thousand francs annual pension for you, my dear child, if you can tell Gorenflot to leave a gap at the bottom.’ Then, aloud, she offhandedly ordered her, ‘Go and help him!’ In all the time Gorenflot spent sealing the doorway, Monsieur and Madame de Merret did not speak a word. On the husband’s part, this silence was a stratagem, not wanting to give his wife the occasion to speak coded words to the others; in the case of Madame de Merret, it was prudence or pride. When the bricks filled half the doorway, the quick-witted mason waited for the gentleman to turn his back, then struck one of the door’s two windows with his pickax. This gave Madame de Merret to understand that Rosalie had spoken to Gorenflot. The three of them then saw the face of a man, dusky and tanned, black hair, eyes afire. Before her husband turned around, the poor woman had time to nod at the foreigner, for whom this sign signified, ‘Do not lose hope!’ At four o’clock, just as the sky was beginning to lighten, for it was the month of September, the wall was done. The mason remained under Jean’s guard, and Monsieur de Merret went to bed in his wife’s room. The next morning, on rising, he said blithely, ‘Ah! Hang it all, I’ve got to go to the mayor’s for the passport.’ He put on his hat, took three steps toward the door, turned back, took the crucifix. His wife was trembling with joy. ‘He means to call at Duvivier’s,’ she thought. As soon as the gentleman was gone, Madame de Merret summoned Rosalie and cried out, in a desperate voice, ‘The pickax, the pickax, and to work! I watched how Gorenflot went about it last night; we’ll have time to make a hole and repair it again.’ In the blink of an eye, Rosalie came back with a sort of ax, and with a vigor that cannot be described, the countess began to demolish the wall. She had already dislodged several bricks when, stepping back to strike a blow still more furious than the last, she saw Monsieur de Merret behind her and fainted away. ‘Lay madame on her bed,’ said the gentleman coldly. Foreseeing what would take place in his absence, he had set a trap for his wife; he had quite simply written the mayor and sent for Duvivier. The jeweler arrived after the room had been tidied up. ‘Duvivier,’ asked the gentleman, ‘did you not buy several crucifixes from the Spaniards that passed through this town?’ ‘No, monsieur.’ ‘Very well, I thank you,’ he said, shooting his wife a glance fierce as a tiger’s. ‘Jean,’ he added, turning to his valet, ‘I’ll be taking my meals in Madame de Merret’s bedchamber; she’s not well, and I won’t leave her side until she has fully recovered.’ For twenty days that heartless man did not leave his wife’s room. In the beginning, noises could sometimes be heard from the walled-up closet, and Joséphine stared imploringly at her husband in hopes that he might spare the dying stranger’s life. He would not allow her to speak a word, and his answer was always the same: ‘You swore on the cross that was no one was there.’”