The Master of Light

by Maurice Renard

  It all came to nothing. And the news that Geneviève Le Tourneur received each day, coming from the studio, was as disappointing as that of which the young woman transmitted to Charles the dolorous echo. Rita, besieged by objurgations, alone against all her near relatives, walled up in the silence of her secret, found herself driven into a corner, heading for a capitulation that might happen at any moment, at the hazard of the assaults and her weakness. She sent desolate appeals to Charles through the intermediary of his friend. On the point of surrendering, she informed Geneviève sadly of the impossibility of further procrastination; Charles received the news in somber despair, translating everything that he had learned about that destiny into cries of alarm; “Quickly! Quickly! Find something! Tomorrow, it will be too late! I’m at the end of my tether!”

  He had not seen Rita again and feared seeing her—but Madame Le Tourneur painted him a lamentable picture of the young woman. She feared that her health might be compromised by all the anxiety that was preying upon her and the torment that gnawed away at her incessantly.

  Colomba’s marriage took place in these circumstances. At that moment, Charles only glimpsed a tiny hope of salvation, so feeble that it scarcely existed. That chance resided in the documents that Cousin Drouet had inherited from her great-grandfather, César Christiani.

  Charles knew that in 1835 the major part of the family papers had not been handed on to Lucile, the cousin’s grandmother, but to Napoléon, as was appropriate, since Napoléon represented the elder branch and that males always have the advantage over females, by virtue of the fact that they preserve the family name and are responsible for perpetuating it. Meager as Cousin Drouet’s family archives might be, however, they might by chance contain some unknown item which might, in some unforeseeable fashion, offer a clue relative to one vitally important question upon which nothing, thus far, had shed the slightest light: had César Christiani any enemies other than Fabius Ortofieri? More precisely: had he attracted the hatred of a man who was not Fabius?

  One of two things had to be true: either the murderer was Fabius, or he was not an Ortofieri, for in 1835, no member of the Ortofieri family other than Fabius had been similar in age—which is to say, similar in age to the man who had been seen to murder César. If the murderer was not Fabius, therefore, it was necessary to search for him among the partisans of Ortofieri, no matter where they might be in the vast world.

  Directed by this thought, Charles had attempted to discover—especially in César’s correspondence—any trace of a dispute or disagreement, any revelation, however fleeting, of a quarrel or any kind of incident capable of engendering a mortal grudge against César. No allusion seemed to him to be worthy of being retained; even the most precise was too vague; his investigations had remained as fruitless on this point as on others. Might Cousin Drouet’s papers be more informative than the documents held by the elder branch? It was doubtful, but it was necessary to check it out, and, while anything unknown remained fortified there, a little hope was in refuge there too.

  Charles saw Cousin Drouet for the first time in his life on the very morning of the nuptial ceremony, in the drawing-room in the Rue de Tournon. The sight of that surprising old lady sensibly attenuated the melancholy caused to him by the obligation of participating in a celebration of that sort when everything seemed to be conspiring to postpone indefinitely the advent of his own happiness. He was attempting to overcome his affliction and to put on a brave face for the guests that flowed in—witnesses, relatives, ushers and maids of honor, black coats and decorations, exquisite dresses, youth, pomp and flowers—when Amélie Drouet advanced, in the midst of all that elegant society, like the charming ambassadress of a past that had unfortunately disappeared forever.

  Why was that little old lady not ridiculous in her outdated finery? Why was there merely an exclamation to declare her adorable, with her 93 years, her wrinkles and her halting gait? It was because everything about her originated from an epoch whose forgotten grace had been made of imperishable seductions, handed down by forefathers. She might have been a shriveled antique Carabosse,28 decked out in implausible furbelows, but she bore the indefinable mark of the politesse of yesteryear and an education without parallel. The young women could not comprehend why that caricature, instead of making them laugh, impressed them with such ease and surprising security. Great centuries in succession had dressed that little fragment of ancestry with an ungraspable elegance that generations had cultivated but which now astonishes people, as a marvel whose secret has been lost.

  Charles literally launched himself toward her, so proudly did Cousin Drouet—who had never been more than a member of the upper bourgeoisie, not even the daughter of petty nobility—in her appearance, represent “the root and the branch.”29

  Her faded blue eyes looked like those of a pastel; they gave the impression of having been conceived by a La Tour or a Chardin,30 then slightly effaced by the march of time. Suddenly, Charles Christiani realized fully why he found her so attractive; it was because of the incontestable resemblance she bore to César. The caprices of heredity had deprived the elder branch, at least until now, of that carnal succession, but the face of the corsair lived again, softened, beneath the white hair of the old female cousin, and it was a and joy and a relief for Charles to find something of César still alive, since he had been contemplating the late corsair as if through the window of the beyond.

  When the ceremony was completed with a magnificent deployment of religious pomp; all Paris filed into the sacristy of Saint-Sulpice, rubbing shoulders with the capital’s notorious Corsicans, obscure actors or celebrated and able historians, biographers and other learned men who came to render homage to the bride’s brother. The last-named took possession of Cousin Drouet and questioned her on the subject of papers that might be in her possession.

  The good lady was hard, not of hearing, but of understanding. A light fog had begun to cloud her mind. Her older memories, however, retained a certain precision. She assured her great-nephew that she did not possess any document of importance. Furniture, yes, she had furniture that had come to her from César—but papers, next to none.

  Charles persisted, in order to obtain permission to consult those few sheets. It was agreed that he would come to the Rue de Rivoli on the following day.

  Without waiting for the ancient and amiable relative to open her home and her relic furniture to him, however, Charles begged her to open her memory. The lock was rusty, the hinges seized up, but if a few memories had crumbled into dust, others still held firm and could be manipulated to display all their faces, like fragile antiques on shelves.

  Amélie Drouet had been born in 1846. She had already reached the age of 20 when her grandmother, born Lucile Christiani, had died, and was 37 when her father, the former Councilor Anselme Leboulard had quite this world in his turn. Those two witnesses to César’s life, who had played an important role in the investigation of Fabius Ortofieri, had not failed to talk to Amélie about her great-grandfather and his tragic death. For them, however, Fabius’s guilt was not in question—and Charles, confronted with such a deep-rooted belief, which Cousin Drouet had shared from the most tender age, judged it reckless to reveal that he was re-examining what she had considered throughout her life to be an indisputable truth. He preferred to let her believe that the retrovision to which she had recently been invited had had no other interest than perceiving, across the ages, an event of which no one had dreamed of contesting the principal facts.

  Cousin Drouet talked about César willingly. She held his memory in reverence, knowing perfectly well that she resembled the corsair, although it had not been possible for her to lead an adventurous naval life rather than being a sedentary bourgeois lady, the daughter and wife of magistrates.

  Had César had many enemies? Did she know?

  She had no memory of that. She wandered off. She had been brought from Saint-Sulpice to the Rue de Tournon without having to be asked. Charles introduced her to the luminite. She
only half-understood the marvel, attaching only a confused importance to it, and she withdrew in order to enter into civility competition with Madame Christiani. Both of them appeared to have forgotten the many years during which one of them had held the other at arm’s length because of a hypothetical fault.

  “What a pleasant dowager!” said Charles.

  “Yes,” replied his mother. “If only she had behaved better toward Mélanie…”

  He laughed—but that was the moment when Bertrand Valois was about to bring in his young wife. They came in together, in their traveling costumes—and if our historian continued to laugh, it was certainly because he forced himself to do so,

  With what surprise and emotion Charles Christiani found in his cousin’s home so many objects that he had seen in César’s study thanks to the effects of luminite, which he had thought to be lost!

  Madame Drouet did not live in the most aristocratic part of the Rue de Rivoli. She occupied a beautiful apartment, slightly low-ceilinged, on the second floor of a building situated not far from the Châtelet. She had lived there for more than 20 years with two old chambermaids, with old furniture, in the midst of a quantity of souvenirs whose profusion was sufficient to recall César’s character.

  Today, age accentuated its owner’s indifference to all that picturesque bric-à-brac, but it was easy to see that, ever since her youth, she had held the memory of the corsair captain in fantastic veneration. In her Louis-Philippe drawing-room, reached by the noise of a populous street through the railings of a narrow balcony, he recognized the octagonal clock, the map of the world, marine engravings, a little model corvette, the telescope and numerous weapons that had been illuminated by the daylight of July 28, 1835 in the Boulevard du Temple. All things considered, it had been sheer luck that, when César’s possessions had been divided up, the plate of luminite disguised as a slate had gone to Napoléon Christiani rather than to his aunt Lucile.

  Without dwelling on the thought of what the result of that transposition might have been, Charles surrendered to the singularly keen and mild pleasure of contemplating cherished things that he had thought extinct, and of feeling, in consequence, that the past was not as past as might have been supposed. Then again, in this environment, in her own home, Cousin Drouet reminded him even more of the most original of ancestors. She adored animals. For lack of monkeys, two stout little dogs were trotting over the carpet, yapping. Good Lord! That was the same Savonnerie carpet that César’s death had stained with blood! Every macabre trace had vanished therefrom, and long wear had blanched the weave of its arabesques. In front of the windows, two large aviaries were agitated by flutterings and hoppings; their entire multicolored population was whistling and chirping, performing an incredible concert that would have delighted the ears of the late bird-lover. As she moved about amid this décor, Cousin Drouet’s gestures and mannerisms had an abruptness that recalled, across the generations, the man from whom she was descended.

  All of that formed a seductive ensemble, which charmed the historian. It seemed to him that César was determined to spin himself out, and was doing so by employing all the poor and petty means that the disposal of the dead—and, involuntarily, the dreamer that everyone harbors within himself was comforted thereby, thinking that the dead would not go to so much trouble for nothing.

  Alas, although César Christiani had left his great-granddaughter a few facial features and something of his manner, a liking for animals and the ownership of a host of disparate objects, the benefits of his succession stopped there. The papers originating from the division of 1835 surpassed in their insignificance everything that Cousin Drouet had anticipated; they were bills and business letters. Ten minutes sufficed for Charles to convince himself that he had drawn a blank.

  He hid his disappointment, not without effort, for he perceived now that, in the inmost depths of his being, he had founded much more hope than was reasonable on that last chance. He took his leave of Cousin Drouet, promising to come back to see her very soon.

  As everyone knows, however, “man proposes, but God disposes,” and seven months were to go by before the worthy old lady received the promise visit.

  In fact, ominous incidents depleted Charles’s morale in the following days. Madame Le Tourneur, for whom he had asked on the telephone, was not at home, and her chambermaid said that she would be away for some time. In addition, Luc de Certeuil, whom Charles now only encountered by chance, seemed bizarrely constrained and embarrassed when, on two occasions, he found himself in the presence of his neighbor at the door to the building. There was also a quite mysterious change in Madame Christiani’s state of mind; she seemed suddenly preoccupied, sometimes treating her son more stiffly and sometimes more affectionately than usual.

  Charles foresaw his imminent unhappiness; he had had confirmation of it in the form of indifferences. Rita Ortofieri was engaged to Luc de Certeuil. By the same token, he had understood that he mother was not unaware of his deplorable love.

  He said nothing. He did not complain. Not a word was exchanged between Madame Christiani and him, but they came together more frequently, in a closer and warmer intimacy, which their pride led them to attribute entirely to Colomba’s departure—and the mother, secretly tormented, prayed with all her heart for the alleviation of their mutual suffering.

  Can one say that the alleviation in question was produced? It would doubtless be a very poor translation of their sentiments. However, when the news reached them that Monsieur de Certeuil’s fiancée was gravely ill, was it not the case that their reaction, and even Charles’s frightful anguish, was mixed with a certain release?

  Charles wanted to believe that Rita would recover; he refused to admit any other outcome of that malady, whose causes he understood and which rendered the young woman as dear to him as a beloved martyr—but could he not see a truly providential intervention in that delay, a frightful surcease that would further postpone the event whose imminence he dreaded?

  For the moment, he silenced the voices within him that cried: “All is not lost! Destiny is gaining time! Courage!” Furthermore, a week later, the health-bulletins that Geneviève Le Tourneur communicated to him daily became so menacing that anxiety alone reigned in his heart, and he reproached himself with abomination for allowing himself to be distracted by thoughts other than Rita’s salvation. And for her to live, for nature to continue to count among the number of the living a woman blessed with so much grace and grandeur, he offered the world the sacrifice of his own life, provided that the world should not take hers.

  Are such decisions, taken in the mystery of consciousness, capable of modifying the course of destiny? Are the forces that rule the future, direct its episodes and prepare its denouements sensitive—as we would wish them to be—to the reactions of souls? Do our attitudes have the power to determine the future in one way or another?

  The time has not yet come to reveal to the reader how those forces would take account of Charles Christiani’s vow, so pure and so elevated. Months passed, during which his thoughts, henceforth invariable, did not give the lie to his fine resolution. He was faithful to it at every moment, even when he was informed that Rita was out of danger and that, after a convalescence that was bound to be long, she would be able to take up her life where she had left off.

  While the young woman had been in danger, Charles had not had to struggle against his instinct in order to persevere in his abnegation. That was more difficult when he knew that Rita had recovered her breath and her color, and that after having ceased, for weeks, to be anyone at all, she was now about to rejoin the march of time, and would soon give herself to someone else. It was then that the real sacrifice began. The wish having been granted, it was necessary to pay the price, by accepting with serenity whatever the future might bring.

  It brought nothing during the entire first half of 1930—nothing but sadness, prolonged by the fact that everything remained in suspense and that, in the meantime, uncertainty authorized neither any new hope tha
t might have chased the sadness away, nor the total abandonment that would have driven him to despair.

  In February, Rita left for the Côte d’Azur in order to undertake her convalescence there. She returned at the end of May and discussion of the marriage was resumed. This time, Geneviève Le Tourneur did not think it necessary to avoid Charles Christiani’s visits. One day, she told him, at the same time, that Rita’s heart had not changed and that there was now much talk in the Ortofieri household of publishing banns and drawing up a contract.

  It was in these circumstances that Cousin Drouet was to have the privilege of belatedly receiving the visit that she had being promised more than half a year before. Charles had learned, most inopportunely, that the banker Ortofieri had arranged a meeting between himself and his notary and Luc de Certeuil and his. He had to make great efforts that day—which was July 13—to hide his chagrin and remember his noble resolutions. Colomba and Bertrand, installed in their conjugal happiness, advised him strongly to undertake a long voyage.

  At that moment, he was in their home; he was often there, for he was prey to a perpetual need to move around. No obligation retained him in Paris. There was no more hope. During the last seven months, the luminite had given him nothing but disappointments, without the slightest indication that might retain him. Destiny, thus far, was obstinate in frustrating him.

  “I’d like that,” he said. “I’ll leave after the national festivities. I’ll go…it doesn’t matter where. Three of my friends are going to Sweden and Norway in a few days’ time—I’ll go with them. That’s settled, then. Before then, though, I have to go see Cousin Drouet and bid her farewell. I’ve treated her lightly. She must be unable to understand my silence.”

  “I’ll go with you,” Colomba said. “She enchants me.”

  “Let’s all go, tomorrow!” Bertrand proposed.

  Charles objected that it was July 14,31 which seemed inappropriate to him for a formal visit.