The Master of Light

by Maurice Renard

  “You can make a ‘formal visit’ on the eve of your departure,” Bertrand replied, “but tomorrow, she’ll be delighted to offer us her balcony to watch the parade.”

  “That’s true,” said Charles. “The 1830 review.”

  “You wouldn’t want to miss that, I imagine,” said Colomba, “as a historian of that era.”

  “Oh, a few months ago we witnessed a much more exact and singularly moving review! And when my heart tells me to, I make entire armies file past in my imagination, whose reconstitution, I can assure you, is faultless. After all, though, it’s not a bad idea. Shall I send a telegram to the cousin to warn her?”

  “Of course!” said Bertrand “Come and collect us tomorrow morning.”

  The reader will certainly remember the military parade to which Bertrand Valois had just made allusion. On July 14, 1930, the traditional review of the troops of the Paris garrison was supplemented by a less common spectacle. The government of the Republic wanted to show Parisians the officers and soldiers wearing the uniforms of the ancient African army who had recently filed in front of Monsieur Doumergue32 in Algeria, during the celebrations of the centenary of the conquest. The Bey of Tunis and the Prince of Monaco witnessed that curious and imposing manifestation, and 40 Arab chiefs on horseback took part in it. The review took place on the Esplanade des Invalides. Afterwards there was a march-past of the reconstituted troops, along the Concorde, the Rue Royale, the Boulevards de la Madeleine and des Capucines, the Avenue de l’Opéra and the Rue de Rivoli, all the way to the Place de l’Hôtel-de-Ville.

  Cousin Drouet’s apartment was, indeed, admirably situated to serve as the finest box for that vast military representation, which, without the assistance of luminite, would offer to the eyes of Charles, Bertrand and Colomba, in the heart of the 20th century, a spectacle distantly reminiscent of the famous review of July 28, 1835—but which, one could be certain, would not be disturbed by any infernal machine.

  “Tomorrow, at least,” Charles said, as he left his sister, “There’s nothing to fear. Nothing unexpected!”

  “Who knows?” said Bertrand, his nostrils flared.

  Colomba embraced him tumultuously. “What a madman!” she said.

  XVII. Elegy

  As Charles was bidding farewell to his sister and brother-in-law, two young women, one very dark and the other very blonde, their arms laden with a heap of roses, were going along a secluded pathway in Père-Lachaise Cemetery. Rita, thinner and lankier now, seemed to have grown taller since her convalescence. A remaining pallor further emphasized the rings around her eyes, which were brighter now and more profound. Now, beside Geneviève Le Tourneur, she no longer had the same gait, nor the same facial appearance, nor the indescribable evidences of an adolescence that was scarcely complete; there was no longer any of that to distinguish her from her friend. “Two young women,” one would have said of them. Only their dresses and hats attempted to distinguish their status, but not everyone understands the language of dressmakers and milliners.

  Things were no longer as they had been on the deck of the Boyardville. Mademoiselle Ortofieri’s beauty had certainly lost none of its finesse by virtue of that grave pallor and that ardent melancholy, but her great pain and her long battle against death had permanently expelled the last traces of divine childhood from her being.

  “It must be around here,” she said.

  The pathways were labyrinthine. That part of Père-Lachaise is shady and romantic; the monuments have an otherworldly appearance. The trees themselves are funereal, and the archaic mode of their foliage is tearful, like the poet’s willow.

  Geneviève and Rita were searching with their eyes among the steles, between the cypresses and the yews. Geneviève stopped. “There it is.”

  A tomb extended its mossy flagstone in a little enclosure bordered by chains linking a few boundary-markers. Beneath a tearful ask tree, the ogival stele stood up very straight, like the head of a cold, hard bed of stone. On the flat tablet, engraved one beneath another, was a column of names.

  The first was: Paul Maximilien Horace Christiani, born at Silaz (Savoy), April 2, 1792; died in Paris, November 13, 1832. The second was: Louis Joseph César Christiani, ship’s captain, born at Ajaccio, August 15, 1769; died in Paris, July 28, 1835. The third was Eugénie Christiani, 1844-1850, then came Lucile Christiani, later Leboulard, 1795-1866; Anselme Leboulard-Christiani, 1815-1883; Napoléon Christiani, 1814-1899; Achille Christiani, 1848-1923; Adrien Christiani, died for France, 1873-1915.

  They read in silence, motionless, Rita more piously, both rosy by virtue of the reflection of the flowers whose sumptuous masses they pressed to their bosoms.

  Rita sighed profoundly. “Sad loves!” she said, with a fugitive smile full of bitterness.

  Dusk was falling after a day devoid of sunshine. The setting sun blanched the branches in the funerary and archaic spinneys. The birds, on the point of disappearing for the night, were chirping competitively in the great silence of the garden of the dead, and it was infinitely sad.

  All the roses were strewn on the stone, heaped against the stele, in a bright and magnificent bush.

  Interrogating Geneviève with her eyes, Rita made a vague gesture.

  “Yes, it’s very good,” her friend replied. “Since you were determined to express yourself, you couldn’t have done it better.”

  “He’ll never know anything about it…” she thought aloud. Then, with glacial irony, she added: “It’s discreet, it’s poetic, and, in sum, it’s perfect.”

  “Shut up!” begged Geneviève.

  “There!” said Rita, drawing away slowly, without taking her eyes off the tomb. “Here lies the love of Charles and Rita, 1929-1930.”

  Geneviève Le Tourneur made no comment. “Come on,” she said. “Let’s go.”

  “Oh, we have plenty of time! Remember that it’s the last time that I’ll permit myself to think about him. Nothing but this: bringing roses here, while thinking about him, in the guise of a farewell…nothing but this to give me joy…a joy without equal… So, as it’s finished, isn’t it…?”

  “Come on,” Geneviève repeated. She drew her away gently.

  In the devout solitude in which the dusk seemed to be a prayer, the strewn roses were reminiscent of a young woman lying prostrate. Rita, turning round some distance away, was able to imagine that she had left behind the suave phantom of her dream, and that it was praying.

  One never knows. Perhaps the roses’ prayer was not without influence on the sequence of events—because there never was a vain prayer, nor a futile rose.

  XVIII. The Review of July 1930

  The birds were singing in the old-fashioned drawing-room. Cousin Drouet appeared before her visitors, executing an amiable little bow.

  “Hey! Good-day, then!” she pronounced, in the most welcoming fashion imaginable.

  She was decked out in black, in a loose silk skirt, a velvet spencer jacket with jet decorations, and an English lace bonnet whose strings hung down to either side of her wrinkled and shrunken but hairless face, in which her clouded eyes resembled two faded turquoises.

  “Cousin!”

  “Cousin!”

  “Cousin!”

  Colomba, Charles and Bertrand were enthusiastic. There was a delight in seeing that smiling and absurd antiquity once again, that picturesque example of good humor and good breeding—and then again, should they not honor the cousin to the same extent that Madame Christiani, née Bernardi, had neglected her?

  “Ah!” she exclaimed, lowering the aged hands that she had abruptly attempted to raise. “How happy I am to see you, my dear children, and only the very day when we’ll be able to watch the soldiers of my era march past! For, if I can believe the newspapers, there will be troopers disguised as Second Empire infantrymen.”

  “From 1830 to 1913, Cousin,” said Bertrand. “But especially from 1830.”

  “That’s before my time! But no matter. A Woman of my age is closer to Louis-Philippe than Monsieur Gast
on Doumergue! You must think so, historian? Eh? A little pale, a little strained, the historian…you’ve been working too hard, I’ll wager? Come on—I’ll clear these windows…”

  She rang. One of the housemaids came to take her orders.

  “Open those for us, Delphine,” said Madame Drouet, pointing to the casements.” Then she pivoted on her heel with astonishing petulance and headed at a jerky pace for a fine table with tapering feet, on which stood a gleaming decanter and some tall crystal glasses.

  “Do you like Muscat-Frontignan? This is the ’83, which is said to be a good year…” She seized the decanter, which was ringed by a sort of breastplate secured to its neck by a little chain.

  “Let me do that, Madame!” exclaimed the servant, hurrying over. She had just moved the aviaries aside, not without provoking a dazzling display of plumage and a frantic flutter of beating wings. The windows were now wide open on to the balcony, to which the little dogs raced as quickly as their stoutness allowed.

  Delphine grabbed the handsome Charles X carafe from her mistress’s hands. “Madame will break everything!” she said, with a conspicuous familiarity, in which respect moderated authority.

  “Oh, that’s true! Pour, my girl. Colomba, my dear, two fingers of Muscat-Frontignan?”

  They were quite at ease with a hospitality that, providing a prelude to the review, already situated them in the past. Charles had not had his fill of contemplating, around him, so many witnesses—mute, unfortunately!—of the life and death of the eccentric César, who seemed determined to reappear, as best he could, in the amusing form of Cousin Drouet.

  Meanwhile, that morning—as more than one person, we believe, will remember on reading these lines—the weather in Paris was the most favorable in the world for retrospection. The atmosphere, though merely warm, was a trifle heavy. There was a mist, intangibly, and an occasional stifling oppression. The air, as if powdered, dressed itself in a grey tone that tended towards mauve. There was something rather “close” about it. The streets did not give the impression of being exterior; the outside seemed to be inside. One could have imagined that the Rue de Rivoli was under a glass case in a museum, like the Boulevard du Temple at the Carnavalet. From time to time, though, haphazardly, a pale Sun shone through the greyness, the imponderable muslin, and that white sun was simultaneously so spectral and so delightful that one would willingly have take it for a sun contemporary with the conquest of Algeria, that of Constantine or Isly, a historic sun extracted for the occasion from a cupboard in the Invalides.

  People were coming on to their balconies, including men. The flow was considerable, and increased incessantly. In front of the façades, abundantly garnished with blue, white and red flags, a very numerous crowd had wisely gathered, much cooler, more informed and blasé than that of 1835, with which Charles could not help comparing it. The sidewalks were swarming with a multitude whose density increased continuously. The circulation of traffic was interrupted.

  How different it was from the royal review the appearance of which the luminite had brought back! What tranquility and civilian and military discipline there was today! But how many faces, too, expressed less ardor and more fatalism!

  Meanwhile, a rumor spread, rising from the people aggregated in two parallel hosts. In the distance, the extremity of the Rue de Rivoli was traversed by a dark bar, speckled with colored dots and little flashes of gold and silver.

  The racket swelled, then declined again, becoming nevertheless more animated than before.

  The multicolored bar advanced, populated with movements. The noise of acclamations began to become perceptible. The troops were approaching. Trumpet-blasts and drumbeat were audible in gusts.

  Holding a set of mother-of-pearl opera glasses by their long shaft, Cousin Drouet, flaring her nostrils and raising her eyebrows, watched the progressive approach of the march-past. A concert of hurrahs accompanied it.

  Finally, taking up almost all the width of the thoroughfare, a platoon of Republican Guardsmen marching in step made the wooden pavement resonate. Behind them, some distance away, a dream-like vision slowly advanced: the band, drums and clarions of the old fourteenth line regiment, preceded by a drum-major twirling his stick. And as these revenants came, the sun, functioning like a skillfully-handled searchlight, suddenly placed them in bright golden light, with the result that they seemed to be surging out of themselves, suddenly shaking off the last emblems of death. It was gripping, and the multitude, carried away, howled its enthusiasm, simultaneously applauding the trick of the light, the ingenious surprise of the weather, and the solemn bearing of the living mannequins passing by beneath the shakos of yesteryear, beating their drums and blowing their horns, playing the majestic Marche de Moïse—the one that had accompanied the victorious entry of the French army to Algiers.33

  At that moment, entirely taken up as it was by the spectacle of ancient detachments following one another in columns at widely spaced intervals, Charles thought that this parade was giving him exactly what the luminite had been powerless to reproduce: the noise—the gigantic and diverse noise which, while Louis-Philippe had passed by on July 28, had combined the pitch of bands, the bass of drums and that extraordinary sonic firework display in which resounded all the cheers, shouts, greetings, appeals and joyful gibes of a population elevated by enthusiasm.

  The bands, in particular, playing that august march, lent to the auditory representation a very marked impression of antiquity. By closing his eyes, listening to that measured melody beating its processional rhythm in the bosom of the immense clamor, he could easily imagine himself transported back to the Boulevard du Temple on July 28, 1835, by the operation of a luminite that no longer slowed down light but sound.

  It was then that something happened that choked, stupefied and maddened Charles Christiani more than anything else in the universe could have done, and his sister and Bertrand Valois no less: the most unbelievable, seemingly impossible thing; a thing, finally, that seemed worse than all that, even though we have announced it prudently. In brief, this:

  While Charles closed his eyes momentarily, in order to savor the acoustic reconstitution of the review of King Louis-Philippe, placing himself imaginatively a few seconds before the frightful interruption caused by Fieschi, all of a sudden, behind him, in that apartment ornamented with César’s mortal relics, partly decorated in the fashion of the study in which the old corsair had fallen to an assassin’s bullet—yes, suddenly, from some unknown point in the gloom, a frightful voice resonated.

  “You recognize me, don’t you, Captain?”

  Charles started. He turned round, with a single movement, to face the interior of the drawing-room. But that voice, surely, had only resonated within himself! It was…it was an auditory hallucination, complementary to his dream! He only thought he had heard it! His imagination had escaped, beyond the bands and the clamors!

  But no! Bertrand and Colomba, both flabbergasted, petrified, were looking at him, wide-eyed and open-mouthed! What, then? Them too? Had they too heard that terrible voice launching that terrible question?

  These reactions were triggered with lightning rapidity. Not three seconds had gone by following that prodigious statement when another voice—this one ringing with a clear and pronounced southern accent—cried, in a tone of fearful alarm: “Good God! Jean Cartoux!”

  César’s voice, of course. The pathetic voice of the Corsican, replying to that of his aggressor, pronouncing the words whose articulation they had not been able to see, because César’s back had been turned as he pronounced them! But what was this phenomenon, this sonic conjuring-trick? How had those words come to burst out there? By what miracle of the luminite genre had that dialogue been suddenly defrosted, in the midst of objects left by César—objects that had belonged to the victim?

  With a common accord, Charles, Bertrand and Colomba rushed imperiously through the two windows into Cousin Drouet’s drawing-room.

  No one was there—just the furniture, the bust of Na
poléon, the corvette with all sails aloft, the map of the world…

  The cousin, in her turn, leaned into the room. She had wasted no time, but everything had happened so quickly! She, however, was smiling placidly.

  And suddenly, once again, the vibrant Corsican voice intoned: “Long live the Emperor!”

  “Well,” said the cousin, “look who’s awake. It’s a long time since he’s said as much! It’s the Sun and all the drumming, no doubt!”

  This time, Charles and the other two had localized the source of the voice; it came, not from a mouth, nor from the speaker of a machine, but from a beak. And that beak, remarkably hooked, belonged to a parrot that had lost so much of its plumage that it was necessary to look at it twice to recognize that its colors must once have been green and yellow.

  Charles stared at his cousin, with an expression of illumination. “Pitt?” he asked. “César’s parrot?”

  “Naturally. He’s not yet very old for a parrot. I believe he’s no more than 140 years old, and I’m assured that he might live to be 200, with a little luck. Animal of that sort are better endowed than we are; their longevity is extraordinary. Didn’t you know that? You seem amazed.”

  Pitt, almost motionless, like some venerable bonze, resumed speaking at the top of his voice, in the accent of his defunct master: “Long live the Emperor!... Good God! Jean Cartoux!... Hurrah for Magna Carta!.... Ah! Ah!”

  Then, above the vast magnificent din of the street, the altercation of two voices resounded: “You recognize me, don’t you, Captain?... Good God! Jean Cartoux!”

  The three young people, dumbfounded, became ecstatic in silence.

  Charles felt triumphant—and that triumph, so unexpected, so unusual, stifled him with joy.

  “He very rarely speaks, for years now,” said Cousin Drouet, from the balcony, on to which she had returned in order not to miss any of the costumed review. “Occasions such as this one are necessary to make him do it: faces that he’s not used to seeing, unaccustomed sounds…”