The Master of Light

by Maurice Renard

  “Yes—too beautiful. Don’t get carried away so quickly, my darling. Weigh the terms of the telegram carefully. He envisages a possible revision of the legal proceedings. It’s only a hope. It’s evident that new perspectives have opened to him, because of a fact unknown until now—but there’s no proof of the solidity of his conjectures. Remember that he must certainly have sent this telegram as soon as a glimmer of hope appeared to him, before having reflected overmuch—for the essential thing, in his eyes, was to warn you immediately, since he was not unaware of the imminence of your engagement. It’s necessary to take account of his haste.”

  IX. The Declaration of Love

  Charles, very knowledgeable about everything, was one of those people who only experience temporary astonishments. We may add that in these critical days he was not disposed to get enthusiastic about anything, except for that which concerned the inaccessible Rita. Any miracle unconnected with his love and unable to serve its cause held only a very limited interest for him.

  To excite him to such a degree had required, in truth, that luminite should be, for him, at the outset, one of the most marvelous of marvels. He also recognized that the excitement would not have reached such a pitch if he had not thought, vaguely and fugitively, that the shade of César Christiani was about to reveal the secret of his death—and that that death had not been the work of Fabius Ortofieri.

  In the confusion of his thoughts, he had, in spite of himself, gone over the whole story of that crime repeatedly, always coming back to one undeniable fact: Fabius had admitted nothing; he had died protesting his innocence! He forgot that the most overwhelming evidence had been united against Rita’s grandfather. And, as a precocious dusk darkened his study, he had been overtaken, as he had that morning, by splenetic discouragement, a sort of stupid anger against the magnificence that he had found, but which was useless, since it cast no new light on the Ortofieri affair.

  As one can see, his love had demanded a great deal of events—and it certainly appeared, at that twilight hour, that events had told him all they knew.

  Passably taciturn, replying in monosyllables to the humble and respectful questions of Péronne, who served his evening meal, Charles ate rapidly and went back to his room. A large fire was blazing in the hearth, painting its vacillating reflections throughout the room.

  He lit two stout lamps and, unable to sleep, examined the furniture and paintings that decorated the room. There were many old things, and many memories. Certain things attracted particular attention, in which he had previously taken only a slight interest.

  Some of the furniture that César had bought in Paris to furnish his apartment in the Boulevard du Temple was there, along with some of the objects that he had taken with him from Silaz. On his death, his inheritance had been divided between the two branches of his posterity. Today, half of it now belonged to cousin Drouet; the other half was the property of Charles and Colomba—but in agreement with her husband, their mother had long ago sent the greater part of his furniture to Silaz, saying that it was cluttering up her home and would be better placed in the château in which César had lived for thirteen years. To that consignment, Madame Christiani had added all sorts of things that seemed to her to be undesirable in Paris, including a rather macabre but very valuable little painting that was, indeed, not a good thing to hang on the wall of a house that one desired to be cheerful, and in which there were children.

  This painting, which Charles unhooked in order to examine it in the lamplight, was an “interior” drawn and painted in water-colors, enhanced with gouache, by the painter Lami,17 to whom we owe so many invaluable documents regarding the reign of Louis-Philippe—including, among others, Fieschi’s assassination attempt, of which he had reproduced the bloody spectacle.

  The “interior” represents César Christiani’s study in the Boulevard du Temple, with the cadaver of the former corsair lying on the floor in a pool of blood, with a bullet-hole in his breast. In the background, an open window overlooks the boulevard, where one can see the trees and houses opposite. On either side of the window, which has blue and green floral curtains, there are panoplies formed of axes and sabers, pistols and daggers, mingled with primitive arrows. The right-hand wall is invisible, but the one on the left is garnished with portraits and marine charts, a pipe-rack, a framed cross of the Legion d’honneur, and a little glazed drawing that Lami’s work does not permit the viewer to make out, but which Charles knew to be the image of César’s cabin aboard the Finette—a drawing that was still in Paris. A large pastel portrait of Hélène de Silaz, César’s late and lamented wife, also ornaments that wall, the paper of which—very First Empire—has a cream background and golden palm-leaves. Above a pretty roll-top desk in rosewood, there is a slate in a fir-wood frame, bearing a few figures traced in chalk. The roll-top desk is open, displaying three closed drawers and pigeon-holes containing papers and legers, neatly arranged. On the top of this desk there is a profusion of objects: a tobacco-jar, a copper chandelier, exotic trinkets, books and other items that cannot be identified, the artist’s brush having indicated them sketchily.

  César’s cadaver is lying feet-forward, its head pointing toward the corner of the room, to the left of the widow—where, in the half-shadow, there is a terrestrial globe. He is dressed in a maroon frock-coat and iron-grey trousers. The head is lying on the unwaxed floorboards, the body on a Savonnerie carpet with a black border, which extends under the desk. One arm lies between one foot of the desk and those of a rounded Louis XV armchair with a rattan frame and green leather upholstery—evidently the chair in which César sat while writing. The other arm is just touching one of the three mahogany legs of one of those large circular occasional tables with a white marble top, supported by a frame of varnished wood, of which the Restoration has left us so many ponderous specimens. Between the open battens of the window, with small square panes, a marine telescope is balanced on its tall tripod.

  Such was César Christiani’s study when the murder was discovered; or very nearly, at least—for the painter Lami, who lived into our own era,18 took care to note, on the back of his water-color, and to confirm orally many times over, that this reconstitution was not rigorously authentic. He had only gone into César Christiani’s apartment on the day after the crime; at that moment, the body was no longer there; he had sketched it on his paper according to the indications of witnesses and policemen and the observations that he had just made in the morgue.

  That note by the painter Lami is easily readable, for, in order to make it so, the work is glazed on both sides.

  Charles re-read the note on the back distractedly. He remembered it, in fact. He had studied it all, taken his own mementos of it. Then again, the Musée Carnavalet had obtained his authorization to photograph Lami’s work, which was precious with regard to the history of Paris—less, in truth, because it elated to the corsair’s death than for the fact that it added a faithful testimony to all the known reproductions of the Boulevard du Temple at the moment of Fieschi’s assassination attempt: an attempt characterized by such a singular coincidence with the murder of César Christiani.

  Charles had often brought the photographic prints that the museum had given him out of his cardboard boxes. Fieschi’s attempt was, for a historian of the Restoration and the reign of Louis-Philippe, an attractive subject: Charles had already been thinking about it for some time and had not neglected to compare the various documents, engravings, lithographs, drawings, etc., that represent for us the appearance of the boulevard in the month of July 1835. It ought to be said, moreover, that, until then, Lami’s water-color had only interested him in that respect, the death of his ancestor appearing to be a settled issue, offering no more than a personal and, by now, rather feeble interest.

  After all, the painter’s note, written in a similar spirit, related as much to Fieschi’s assassination attempt as to the murdered individual, and it was all the more natural that Lami had written that note on the morning of July 29, 1835, when
the formidable assassination attempt had not only thrown all Paris into an unparalleled consternation, but the autopsy of César’s body had not yet established the precise character of his wound. At that moment, it was still assumed that he had been killed by the ricochet of one of Fieschi’s bullets, and that he was merely the 19th victim of the infernal machine—which, in reality, had left 18 dead and 22 wounded.

  On the subject of the assassination attempt, the note said this:

  The houses that can be seen through the window bear the numbers 54, 56 and 58. The one on the right, the tallest, contains a collection of wax figurines by Curtius. The middle one, the smallest, contains the restaurant and café Au Rendezvous des Théâtres. The one on the left is the Théâtre Lazari. On approaching the window, one sees, further to the left, next to the Lazari, number 60, which is Madame Saqui’s marionette theater; and on the right, next to number 54, one sees number 52: the Estaminet Rustique; then, next to the latter, which is low, the very narrow house that bears the number 50, which is the one from which Joseph Fieschi19 fired at the King. He fired to his own right, as the head of the procession passed directly between his house and that in which I made the sketch, whose façade was peppered by grapeshot that had ricocheted from the pavement of the causeway. I have not given sufficient indication of the distance of the houses to the left. That is because the boulevard, in fact, broadens toward the Château d’Eau, and my perspective ought to give a better impression of the façades drawing away at an angle.

  Relative to César’s murder, the note adds the following indications to those that we already know:

  I made the drawing by placing myself against the door that opens to the antechamber, which communicates with the landing. That door, as is evident, is on the right-hand side of the partition wall. In the wall that cannot be seen in my drawing, to the right of that door and very close to it, is another set at right-angles to it, which opens into the drawing-room. The captain’s aviary and monkeys were in the drawing-room. Near to the drawing-room door, directly facing the roll-top desk, is the mantelpiece. On the mantelpiece is a bust of Napoléon and there are numerous objects of various sorts above it.

  The apartment is on the first floor. The window is the second, counting from the right, when one looks at the house from outside; the first is on the landing. The house has three floors. It bears the number 53 and is only separated from the Jardin Turc by a little single-story building with a single window: the Bertin house. The terraced wall of the Jardin Turc overlaps the front of Joseph Fieschi’s house to a considerable degree.

  Signed: Lami.

  July 29, 1835, 10 a.m.

  With a discouraged gesture, Charles hung the little picture on the wall again and started walking around the circular table, by the light of the fire and the two lamps. The table was the same one that featured in Lami’s water color, with its marble top. That circular table had seen César Christiani fall on the Savonnerie carpet!

  The rain continued to fall in the highland darkness, whispering its innumerable murmurs. The young man walked slowly around the chairs, pensively. As a logical consequence of the circumstances, his thoughts remained obstinately attached to César’s death, and his imagination magnified all the mystery that death embodied. He could no longer see anything but the enigma.

  A fortnight before, no doubt had assailed him in that regard; he had been firmly convinced that César had been murdered by Fabius Ortofieri, as everyone had always believed. Now, he doubted it. Knowing that the contrary would be favorable to him, he had begun to wish that the contrary might be the case; then, very rapidly, he had acquired the artificial conviction that public opinion was mistaken. An interior voice pleaded the case of the accused, the presumed murderer. In his mind, the arguments for Fabius Ortofieri’s exoneration acquired an enormous amplitude. He would have been so insanely happy to prove that innocence that, progressively—according to the laws of a phenomenon well-known to advocates—he had ended up believing that the poor case was excellent and that Rita’s grandfather had not been involved in the murder of his own. The magistrates commissioned to examine the case had taken too much account of the anxieties that César had revealed in his correspondence regarding his interminable disputes with the Ortofieris and the presence in Paris of his hereditary enemy Fabius. The latter had doubtless been the victim of terrible luck and fatal coincidences…for he had denied it, until his last breath!

  All these reveries were good for nothing. Too much dust had settled on the events—an excess of dust that could not be swept away, being out of range.

  Charles came to a halt in front of another painting: a pen-and-ink copy of a famous engraving by Mathieu, after Fragonard: The Declaration of Love.20 It was a naïve copy, but not without charm—the patient work of Grandmother Estelle, who had set it simply and affectionately in a worthless old 18th century frame. Everyone is familiar with the grace of the charming composition, in which two enlaced lovers swear to be faithful before the altar of Eros in a luxurious boscage in which daylight plays upon the branches. The docile and patient pen of Grandmother Estelle—she of the broad shoulders—had not copied her model ineptly. The lovers’ vivacity remained full of ardor, and the god of love bathed that verdant, allegorical and sensuous location with his inexpressible good fortune.

  It is easy to understand why Charles did not pause for long before that triumphant symbol of felicitation by love. A trifle childishly, because the sight of it pained him, he turned grandmother Estelle’s work to face the wall, then sat down in a winged armchair by the fireside and resumed his reverie.

  Soon, all the ideas that had occupied him in the course of the day became entangled. He re-imagined the review of the National Guard of July 28, 1835. He heard the racket of the infernal machine. He saw the bloody tumult of its victims in the roadway of the Boulevard du Temple. At the same time, the phases of the criminal examination of the Ortofieri case returned to his memory, only to combine bizarrely with the departure of César in a post-chaise, his spectral apparition in the little top room, and a vision of Rita on the deck of the Boyardville, holding a book in her hand, with a parrot on her shoulder! Finally, he had the sensation of putting his arm around the young woman’s supple figure, of extending his hand toward a boscage sanctuary in which smiling Love stood within a soft aura. On that note, his eyes closed as if he were rendering up his last sigh in a study decked out in Empire wallpaper and filled with disparate objects.

  “Ah!” he murmured. “It’s Fabius, alas! It’s Fabius who has killed me!” And, plunging more profoundly into the tenebrous realm of nightmares, he went to sleep.

  He slept so well that he woke up several hours later, without having heard Péronne knocking maternally on the door, come up to him on tiptoe, extinguish the two lamps and retire silently, like one of those individuals of whose actions the luminite made visible, without allowing the sounds they made—lost forever—to be heard.

  But had he really “woken up”? Was it not, in fact, one of those false awakenings which, in the midst of the most stubborn dreams, give us the illusion of emerging from sleep while one, on the contrary, plunging us into it more deeply?

  Charles thought that his eyes were open. He did not doubt it, for the moment. And he perceived, in the midst of the darkness, a light: a bright rectangle; a small window filled with diurnal clarity. It spread a little daylight through the room. The day, however, had not yet broken. The windows were black.

  In the hearth there were a few dull embers, but no more fire. The night had to be very advanced.

  Charles got up from the armchair—or imagined that he had got up—and, having taken two steps toward that tiny window, stood upright in front of it, bewildered and stupefied, surely asleep.

  The dream continued to mix everything up insanely. That small window was not a window. It was Lami’s painting brought to life, like a plate of luminite! Not Lami’s painting as Charles had contemplated it before going to sleep, but the painting showing César’s study from another ang
le, as if the indications of the manuscript note had been realized in the form of a drawing, water-color and gouache. But no! It was not the work of a painter! It was a real image of the study, the window, the floral curtains, the wall with its mantelpiece and the bust of Napoléon! And César was not lying dead on the Savonnerie carpet! César was sitting at the roll-top desk, writing a letter. He was moving! His hand, armed with a goose-quill, was moving over the paper. And he was seen from above, at an angle—from above and in front. He was seen as if the viewer were perched on top of the roll-top desk!

  Ah! There is nothing more painful, more cruel than a nightmare! Charles, violently impressed by it all, took out his lighter, and with a click, ignited its minuscule yellow flame.

  This time, he was sure that he was awake—but the absurd vision persisted, of Lami’s painting metamorphosed into something else, still César’s study, but a study seen from a different viewpoint and alive, like spectacle recorded by a plate of luminite!

  The two lamps were feverishly relit. The downward view of César’s cabinet was still there, in the same place: the same rectangle full of the light of a Parisian morning, the same small window pierced, so to speak, in the wall of time!

  But Lami’s painting was still exactly the same as it had been the previous evening. It could be seen hanging on the wall, not far from the vision in which it did not participate in any way—for that vision was painted naturally on the back of the frame that Charles had turned round in order not to see The Declaration of Love any longer.