Collected Works of Eugène Sue

by Eugène Sue

  Yes; such was Loyse. Now, behold how Sylvest saw her by the light of this morning’s rising sun. One of the woman’s eyes seemed extinguished, the other, with lashes singed, looked out between discolored eye-lids. The skin of the face seemed burned and cracked as if it had been exposed over a flaming brasier. Her lips were bloated and gashed as if they had been dipped into some boiling hot liquid. And yet, despite its hideous frightfulness, the poor face was still, perhaps now more than ever, expressive of ineffable gentleness.

  Sylvest’s first impulse was to weep in silence all the tears that welled up from his heart, while he contemplated his wife who said to him mournfully:

  “I am very ugly, am I not?”

  Sylvest, however, believing that his wife had been tortured and disfigured into her present shape by Faustina, whom he knew to be capable of all manner of crimes, bounded back with a roar, and shaking his fist in the direction of the temple of infamous orgies cried:

  “Faustina, I shall throttle you! Aye, I will, even if I have to be burned over a slow fire for it. I shall tear out your entrails.”

  “Sylvest, you are mistaken; it is not she!”

  “Who, then, is it that has thus mutilated and disfigured you?”

  “Myself—”

  “You, Loyse! Υοu — No — no — You are trying to calm my anger!”

  “It was myself, I assure you! I swear to you, my Sylvest! I swear in the name of the child that I now carry under my heart.”

  What was there to be done before such an oath? To believe — to believe without understanding the painful mystery.

  “Listen, Sylvest,” resumed Loyse; “all of us, the weaving and spinning slaves in the factory, being consigned to the buildings that are at a considerable distance from the palace of Faustina, never saw either her or her manumitted slaves who are as vicious as herself. I know not what unlucky chance took the favorite slave of our mistress, a black Ethiopian, this morning to the weaving and spinning room—”

  “I saw the man this very night.”

  “He crossed the yard at the moment when I happened to be stretching in the sun some of the linen that we wove. He stopped before me, and looked at me fixedly. The first words that he uttered were an insult. I wept. He laughed at my tears, and said to the woman who superintends our labors: ‘Take that slave to the palace.’ The superintendent answered that she would obey. The Negro added that if I should refuse to go to my mistress willingly, I would be taken to her by force.”

  “Aye, the day of vengeance must come, and it will be terrible — terrible will be that day of vengeance!”

  “Sylvest, as you know, I am not, like most of my unhappy companions, a slave’s daughter, and corrupted from my very infancy. I was fifteen years old when I was made a prisoner by the Romans at the siege of Paris where the aged Camalogene commanded the Gallic forces. My family perished at the battle after a heroic defense, and I was sold to a slave-merchant. I was then brought to this country and was bought by the intendant of Faustina’s factory. I have preserved the pride of my race which I took in with my mother’s milk. But for the thought of the child that I carry I would this morning, like a true Gallic woman and following the example of our grandmothers, have escaped inevitable disgrace by death. I would have felt sure that I would continue to live honored in your memory and praised by your worthy mother Henory whom I would meet and travel with in the worlds beyond. But I am to be a mother. For several months I have carried the fruit of our love under my heart. Whether it was feebleness or reason, for its sake I did not wish to die. I was therefore constrained to parry off the disgrace that I was threatened with. Therefore, this very evening, before coming to meet you — that was the cause of my delay — I went into the dyeing room — I armed myself with courage, my Sylvest, and did so by keeping both you and our child steadily in my mind, together with the alternative of the disgrace that awaited me. I poured a corrosive liquid into a vase — and I quickly plunged my face into it.” The Gallic woman closed her distressful narrative with a gesture of pride: “Now tell me, is your wife worthy of your mother?”

  “Oh, Loyse!” cried Sylvest, dropping at the feet of the brave creature and looking up to her in adoration; “You are now far more than beautiful in my eyes — you are a saint! — a saint like Hena, the daughter of Joel, the gentle and sweet virgin of the Isle of Sen! You are a saint even as her ancestress Syomara!”

  “Sylvest!” suddenly exclaimed Loyse in a hushed voice, rising precipitately and listening with terror; “keep silent — I hear steps — and the sound of chains. Oh, unhappy me! You will be discovered in the park! We have quite forgotten that it is broad daylight. Oh!” and Loyse looked intently through the foliage of the arbor.

  “Is it your mistress that you see?”

  “No — she must have returned to the palace by the canal.”

  “Whom, then, do you see?”

  “The slaves — they are being led out to the field. You are lost!”

  The arbor of rose bushes and lemon trees was not thick enough to conceal the couple. Hardly had the young woman uttered the last words when she and Sylvest were descried in the arbor by three men armed with long whips; behind them tramped a chain-gang of slaves, clad in rags and their heads shaved smooth. Some carried implements of agriculture, others dragged wagons behind them.

  At the sight of Sylvest and his wife the three keepers ran towards them, the gang of slaves stopped, and the couple in the arbor was surrounded by their discoverers.

  “What are you doing here?” said one of them raising his whip over Loyse, while the other two threw themselves upon Sylvest, who, being unarmed, neither would nor could offer any resistance.

  “I am a slave of the factory,” answered Loyse, while Sylvest trembled for his wife.

  “You lie!” said the keeper to Loyse with a look of disgust, so repulsive had her face become. “I often go to the factory, and if there was any such looking monster as you among the slaves who work there, I would surely have noticed it.”

  “Read my name on my collar,” replied Sylvest’s wife pointing to the metal band around her neck.

  The keeper read aloud in the Roman tongue:

  “‘Loyse is the slave of Faustina, Patrician.’”

  “You are Loyse!” exclaimed the keeper; “you whose beauty I noticed only day before yesterday as I went by the factory? Answer, villain, who disfigured you in that way? Is this witchery, or some knavery? Did you do that yourself in imitation of the gallows-birds who mutilate themselves in order to spite their master by reducing their own price? Will you finish your fine handiwork by rushing, some even worse hell-rakes do, into the midst of the combats of wild animals to have yourself torn to pieces by them and in that way injure our mistress by destroying her property? Oho! you wicked thing! See how you destroyed your face! You have injured our mistress by fully three-fourths of your price! No one would want such a monster as you, unless it be as a bogey for his children! Well! Well! You have had the audacity of disfiguring yourself — one of the handsomest slaves of our noble mistress! You who could be sold not only as a good working slave, but as a slave of first class beauty! Ah! you double-dyed criminal! Walk ahead of me, you will be thoroughly whipped, as you deserve. By Pollux, I shall recommend to the executioner that he put new thongs in his whip.”

  With an angelic look and a voice that matched it, Loyse calmed the furious rage into which the keeper’s threats threw Sylvest. She answered the former:

  “No, you will not have me to suffer any ill-treatment!”

  “And who is to prevent me, Delight of the switchesf.”

  “The interest of our mistress — I am with child — by beating the mother the child would be killed — a child is of value to our masters.”

  “You are with child! You are fooling! These shameless creatures are always with child whenever their skin is threatened with a strapping! But the matron of the lying-in slaves will soon enough find out whether you are telling the truth.”

  Turning thereupon towar
ds Sylvest, who was firmly held by the other two men, the keeper proceeded:

  “And you, jail-bird, what are you doing here? To whom do you belong, Dear child of the leather lash?”

  “His name is Sylvest. He belongs to seigneur Diavolus, a noble Roman of Orange,” answered one of the two men who held Sylvest and who read the inscription engraved on the collar that the slave wore around his neck.

  “Oh! You belong to seigneur Diavolus?” replied the keeper. “You will be taken back to your master, and I hope he will reward you according to your deserts.”

  At the moment of separating from his wife Sylvest said to her in the Gallic tongue, which the keeper and his men did not understand:

  “At the next moon meet me near the wall of the park, to the left of the canal. Whatever may happen, unless between now and then I die, I shall be there. Adieu, my adored wife, my saint! Think of our child!”

  “Think of yourself,” answered Loyse; “think of us all, my Sylvest!”

  “Enough! Enough of that barbaric jargon, which is good only to conceal evil intentions!” broke in the keeper, rudely pushing Loyse before him in order to take her back to the factory, while Sylvest was marched to the city of Orange under the guidance of the other two men.

  Among Faustina’s slaves, in the midst of whom Sylvest was now placed and chained to two Spaniards, were several Gauls. Sylvest soon discovered that he was not the only one of the gang who attended the previous evening the secret meeting of the Sons of the Mistletoe. At a moment that the keepers happened to be a little distance away, Sylvest heard the two robust slaves who dragged the wagon behind them hum the song:

  ‘Oh, flow, flow, thou blood of the captive!

  Drop, drop, thou dew of gore!”

  To which Sylvest answered with the following verse of the same chant:

  “Germinate, sprout up, thou avenging harvest!”

  The song had been sung for the first time that very night in the cavern of the deserted valley. The two slaves recognized Sylvest as one of the Sons of the Mistletoe, exchanged looks of intelligence with him, and all the three hummed in chorus the closing lines of the song while keeping a sort of sinister time with the clank of their chains:

  “Hasten, you mower, hasten!

  Whet your scythe, whet it! Whet your scythe!”

  When the keepers returned to the gang, the three Gauls stopped humming. The gate of Orange was presently reached. While one of the keepers who remained in charge of the gang led the field laborers to their work, the other ordered Sylvest to march before him, and took him to his master, seigneur Diavolus.

  CHAPTER IV.

  THE SLAVE’S RUSE.

  SYLVEST’S MASTER, SEIGNEUR Diavolus, was a descendant of a noble Roman family, that established itself in Provencal Gaul since its conquest by the Romans two centuries ago and that had contributed its share to transform the country into a new Italy. Young, dissipated, debauched and indolent as all the nobility of his race, seigneur Diavolus would have considered himself disgraced by work. Accordingly, he lived on loans raised from usurers, whilst impatiently waiting for the death of his father, seigneur Claudius, whose vast revenues flowed from the labor of two or three thousand slaves skilled in all manner of trades and whom he hired out to entrepreneurs. The latter, in turn, exploited the wretched captives’, and thus the labors of these had to yield at once large revenues for their master and a profit for the entrepreneurs, who, having to furnish the keep of the slaves, allowed them to remain almost naked and furnished them with a food that animals would have turned away from. Crushed down by the weight of toil, exhausted with fatigue and hunger, if the slave’s strength failed him he was speedily revived with the lash, the goad; often also with red-hot irons, the marks of which furrowed his back and limbs. And these were only minor punishments. Tardiness, let alone a refusal to work, or rebellion, was visited with atrocious and varied punishments that ranged from torture up to death.

  Taken back to his master by Faustina’s men, Sylvest was prepared for severe chastisement. Absent from the house during the whole night and without permission, he was now returning at so late an hour in the morning that he failed in his domestic duties. Sylvest was a valet. Although in some respects this occupation was less hard, it often proved more trying to the slave than that of field or factory work. Sylvest had been assigned to his present occupation in the course of events that followed the horrible death of his father Guilhem, of which he will speak later. Yes, Sylvest gladly submitted to this servile condition; although of a proud and free stock, and grandson of the bTenn of the tribe of Kamak, he preferred that form of slavery because he knew ‘that on the great day of retribution and deliverance, an important role would devolve upon the town and domestic slaves in shaking off the Roman yoke.

  Reduced to the employment of ruse until the moment when force should become applicable, Sylvest, like so many others of his companions, concealed his hatred for oppression and his love for freedom and his country behind the mask of humility and light-heartedness. He always had a joke on his lips; he affected joviality, the currishness of the good valet, and even played the ready tool for his master’s debaucheries. In secret he rejoiced at the evil instincts of me perverse and cruel seigneur Diavolus. It delighted him to see the wicked and hardened soul going to perdition in this world and thus destining itself to perpetual misery in the next worlds. These thoughts and sentiments assisted Sylvest in patiently waiting for the great day of vengeance.

  Oh, my son! You for whom I trace these lines, in obedience to my father’s orders, as he obeyed the same orders from his father, you will excuse my cowardly dissimulation — you will curse only those who forced it upon me. Alas! The time for breaking our chains and for battling in the open as our forefathers did, has not yet arrived. Moreover, my child, however stalwart a race may be, the poisoned air of slavery penetrates it and lowers its tone.

  You will see in these family annals that our grandmother Margarid as well as the other women of our family killed their own children and afterwards themselves in their unconquerable aversion to slavery. Nevertheless, my father Guilhem, full grown man though he was, resigned himself to a slavery that his own father Joel would not have endured for a single day. No, at the first favorable opportunity, he would have killed his son, and himself immediately afterwards. And in turn, my father, ever silent and savage like a chained wolf, would not have played his role in slavery as I am now doing. And so it may happen, poor child, that, condemned from your birth to slavery, should our freedom not be reconquered in your lifetime, you will fall still further than myself from the superb hatred for bondage — one of the virile virtues of our ancestors. Nevertheless, it is in the hope that their example may inspire you with the necessary strength to struggle against such a degradation that I bequeath to you these family stories, and that I add my own to them.

  Accordingly, Sylvest was taken back in the morning to his master. Seigneur Diavolus inhabited a magnificent house in the city of Orange, not far from the circus where the gladiatorial combats are delivered, and where, occasionally, slaves are thrown to the wild beasts.

  The porter, dressed in a green livery, the master’s color, was, as is the custom, chained to the vestibule by the neck, like a watch dog. Having twice sought to flee he was punished with the loss of both his ears and his nose. Only two holes were visible where his nose belonged. His head was smoothly shaven; on his forehead the two letters F and Φ stood legibly branded. He was a Gaul of Auvergne, always somber and sullen. Seigneur Diavolus originally gave him the name of “Cerberus,” by reason of his functions as porter; but after he ordered the porter’s nose cut off he nicknamed him “Camus.” His chain’s length allowed him to reach only as far as the door. He opened it to the keeper who had Sylvest in charge, after the latter announced himself with the bronze knocker that represented an obscene figure.

  A kitchen slave, named “Four-Spices,” happened to step from a passage into the vestibule at the very moment of Sylvestre and the keeper’s arrival. F
our-Spices having once run away from a previous master, had been punished with the loss of his lower right leg, which was now replaced by a wooden stump. He was a Swiss by nationality, and of unshakable fortitude in pain, as he proved on a certain occasion when seigneur Diavolus, having ordered a surmullet from Italy at the cost of a hundred gold sous, invited his friends to partake of the dainty dish. It turned out that the surmullet was badly cooked. Angered thereat, Diavolus ordered Four-Spices before his guests, had him strapped facedown to a bench and made the assistants beat him with larding-pins greased with pig’s fat. Four-Spices underwent the atrocious operation without emitting a moan, and that notwithstanding, the cooking was thereafter more exquisite than ever before. Two months later, however, he confidentially warned Sylvest and the other slaves that on that day, a grand feast being given by the master, all the dishes would be poisoned. Sylvest, who considered such a vengeance cowardly and excessive, had great difficulty in dissuading Four-Spices from his project and succeeded only after intimating to him that a speedy revolt of all the slaves was in preparation.

  “Oh, my poor comrade!” said the cook to Sylvest the moment he saw him, “a lamprey skinned alive is not as red nor less bloody than your back will shortly be. Our master is furious — I have never seen him in such a rage. If only you had let me do as I wanted — and yet—” saying which Four-Spices made with his fingers the motion of taking a pinch of powder, meaning thereby to remind Sylvest of the projected stroke of poisoning.

  Certain, on his part, of the fate in store for him, Sylvest said to Faustina’s keeper: “Follow me, I shall lead you to my master’s room.”

  The two entered Diavolus’ chamber. The seigneur was in his morning gown. At the sight of his slave he became pale with rage, and threatening him with his fist cried before the keeper had time to say a word: