Collected Works of Eugène Sue

by Eugène Sue

  “What favor would you ask?”

  “If you consent to marry me, Marceline, you will need Adelaide’s permission and we shall want her promise to have me appointed forester serf with the canton of the Fountain of the Hinds under my charge. Two words of your mistress to the Queen, two words of the Queen to the bailiff of the domain, and our wishes are fulfilled.”

  “But, Yvon, do you consider that everybody takes you for an idiot? And would they entrust you with a canton? It is out of the question.”

  “Let them give me a bow and arrows and I am ready to acquit myself as an archer. I have an accurate eye and steady hand.”

  “But how will you explain the sudden change that has turned you from an idiot to a sane man? People will want to know why you pretended to be an idiot. You will be severely punished for the ruse. Oh, my friend, all that makes me tremble.”

  “After I am married I shall tell you my reasons for my long comedy. As to my transformation from idiocy to sanity, that is to be the subject of a miracle. The thought struck me this morning while I followed your mistress and the Queen to the hermitage of St. Eusebius. Everything is explainable with the intervention of a saint.”

  “And why did you follow the Queen?”

  “Having woke up this morning before dawn, I happened near the fosse of the castle. Hardly was the sun up when I saw at a distance your mistress and the Queen going all alone towards the forest. The mysterious promenade pricked my curiosity. I followed them at a distance across the copse. They arrived at the hermitage of St. Eusebius. Your mistress remained there, but the Queen took the path to the Fountain of the Hinds.”

  “What could she be up to at that early hour? My curiosity also is now pricked.”

  “That is another question that I shall satisfy you upon after we are married, Marceline,” answered Yvon after a moment’s reflection; “but to return to the miracle that is to explain my transformation from idiocy to sanity, it is quite simple: St. Eusebius, the patron of the hermitage, will be credited with having performed the prodigy, and the monk, who now derives a goodly revenue from the hermitage will not deny my explanation, seeing that the report of the new miracle will double his tithes. His whole fraternity speculate upon human stupidity.”

  The golden-haired Marceline smiled broadly at the young man’s idea, and replied:

  “Can it be Yvon the Calf that reasons thus?”

  “No, my dear and sweet maid, it is Yvon the lover; Yvon on whom you took pity when he was everybody else’s butt and victim; Yvon, who, in return for your good heart, offers you love and devotion. That is all a poor serf can promise, seeing that his labor and his life belong to his master. Accept my offer, Marceline, we shall be as happy as one can be in these accursed times. We shall cultivate the field that surrounds the forester’s hut; I shall kill for the castle the game wanted there, and as sure as the good God has created the stags for the hunt, we never shall want for a loin of venison. You will take charge of our vegetable garden. The streamlet of the Fountain of the Hinds flows but a hundred paces from our home. We shall live alone in the thick of the woods without other companions than the birds and our children. And now, again, is it ‘yes’ or ‘no’? I want a quick answer.”

  “Oh, Yvon,” answered Marceline, tears of joy running from her eyes, “if a serf could dispose of herself, I would say ‘yes’ ... aye, a hundred times, ‘yes’!”

  “My beloved, our happiness depends upon you. If you have the courage to request your mistress’s permission to take me for your husband, you may be certain of her consent.”

  “Shall I ask Dame Adelaide this evening?”

  “No, but to-morrow morning, after I shall have come back with my sanity. I am going on the spot to fetch it at the hermitage of St. Eusebius, and to-morrow I shall bring it to you nice and fresh from the holy place — and with the monk’s consent, too.”

  “And people called him the ‘Calf’!” murmured the young serf more and more charmed at the retorts of Yvon, who disappeared speedily, fearing he might be surprised by the Queen’s lady of the chamber, Adelaide.

  CHAPTER VII.

  THE STOCK OF JOEL.

  YVON’S CALCULATIONS PROVED right. He had told Marceline that no more opportune time could be chosen to obtain a favor from the Queen, so happy was she at the death of Louis the Do-nothing and the expectation of marrying Hugh the Capet. Thanks to the good-will of Adelaide, who consented to the marriage of her maid, the bailiff of the domain also granted his consent to Yvon after the latter, agreeable to the promise he had made Marceline, returned with his sanity from the chapel of the hermitage of St. Eusebius. The serf’s story was, that entering the chapel in the evening, he saw by the light of the lamp in the sanctuary a monstrous black snake coiled around the feet of the saint; that suddenly enlightened by a ray from on high, he stoned and killed the horrible dragon, which was nothing else than a demon, seeing that no trace of the monster was left; and that, in recompense for his timely assistance, St. Eusebius miraculously returned his reason to him. In glorification of the miracle that was thus performed by St. Eusebius in favor of the Calf, Yvon was at his own request appointed forester serf over the canton of the Fountain of the Hinds, and the very morning after his marriage to the golden-haired Marceline, he settled down with her in one of the profound solitudes of the forest of Compiegne, where they lived happily for many years.

  As was to be expected, Marceline’s curiosity, pricked on the double score of the reasons that led Yvon to simulate idiocy for so many years, and that took the Queen to the Fountain of the Hinds at the early hours of the morning of May 2nd, instead of dying out, grew intenser. Yvon had promised after marriage to satisfy her on both subjects. She was not slow to remind him of the promise, nor he to satisfy her.

  “My dear wife,” said Yvon to Marceline the first morning that they awoke in their new forest home, “What were the motives of my pretended idiocy? — I was brought up by my father in the hatred of kings. My grandfather Guyrion, slaughtered in a popular uprising, had taught my father to read and write, so that he might continue the chronicle of our family. He preserved the account left by his grandfather Eidiol, the dean of the skippers of Paris, together with an iron arrow-head, the emblem attached to the account. We do not know whatever became of the branch of our family that lived in Britanny near the sacred stones of Karnak. It has the previous chronicles and relics that our ancestors recorded and gathered from generation to generation since the days of Joel, at the time of the Roman invasion of Gaul by Julius Caesar. My grandfather and my father wrote nothing on their obscure lives. But in the profound solitude where we lived, of an evening, after a day spent hunting or in the field, my father would narrate to me what my grandfather Guyrion had told him concerning the adventures of the descendants of Joel. Guyrion received these traditions from Eidiol, who received them from his grandfather, a resident of Britanny, before the separation of the grandchildren of Vortigern. I was barely eighteen years old when my father died. He made me promise him to record the experience of my life should I witness any important event. To that end he handed me the scroll of parchment written by Eidiol and the iron arrow-head taken from the wound of Paelo, the pirate. I carefully put these cherished mementos of the past in the pocket of my hose. That evening I closed my father’s eyes. Early next morning I dug his grave near his hut and buried him. His bow, his arrows, a few articles of dress, his pallet, his trunk, his porridge-pot — everything was a fixture of and belonged to the royal domain. The serf can own nothing. Nevertheless I cogitated how to take possession of the bow, arrows and a bag of chestnuts that was left, determined to roam over the woods in freedom, when a singular accident upturned my projects. I had lain down upon the grass in the thick of a copse near our hut, when suddenly I heard the steps of two riders and saw that they were men of distinguished appearance. They were promenading in the forest. They alighted from their richly caparisoned horses, held them by the bridle, and walked slowly. One of them said to the other:

  ‘Kin
g Lothaire was poisoned last year by his wife Imma and her lover, the archbishop of Laon ... but there is Louis left, Lothaire’s son ... Louis the Do-nothing.’

  ‘And if this Louis were to die, would his uncle, the Duke of Lorraine, to whom the crown would then revert by right, venture to dispute the crown of France from me ... from me, Hugh, the Count of Paris?’

  ‘No, seigneur; he would not. But it is barely six months since Lothaire’s death. It would require a singular chain of accidents for his son to follow him so closely to the tomb.’

  ‘The ways of Providence are impenetrable.... Next spring, Louis will come with the Queen to Compiegne, and—’

  “I could not hear the end of the conversation, the cavaliers were walking away from me as they spoke. The words that I caught gave me matter for reflection. I recalled some of the stories that my father told me, that of Amæl among others, one of our ancestors, who declined the office of jailor of the last scion of Clovis. I said to myself that perhaps I, a descendant of Joel, might now witness the death of the last of the kings of the house of Charles the Great. The thought so took hold of me that it caused me to give up my first plan. Instead of roaming over the woods, I went the next morning to my grandmother. I had never before stepped out of the forest where I lived in complete seclusion with my father. I was taciturn by nature, and wild. Upon arriving at the castle in quest of my grandmother, I met by accident a company of Frankish soldiers who had been exercising. For pastime they began to make sport of me. My hatred of their race, coupled with my astonishment at finding myself for the first time in my life among such a big crowd, made me dumb. The soldiers took my savage silence for stupidity, and they cried in chorus: ‘He is a calf!’ Thus they carried me along with them amidst wild yells and jeers, and not a few blows bestowed upon me! I cared little whether I was taken for an idiot or not, and considering that nobody minds an idiot, I began in all earnest to play the rôle, hoping that, thanks to my seeming stupidity, I might succeed in penetrating into the castle without arousing suspicion. My poor grandmother believed me devoid of reason, the retainers at the castle, the courtiers, and later the King himself amused themselves with the imbecility of Yvon the Calf. And so one day, after having been an unseen witness to the interview of Hugh the Capet with Blanche near the Fountain of the Hinds, I saw the degenerate descendant of Charles the Great expire under my very eyes; I saw extinguished in Louis the Do-nothing the second royal dynasty of France.”

  Marceline followed Yvon closely with her hands in his, and kissed him, thinking the recital over.

  “But I have a confession to make to you,” Yvon resumed. “Profiting by the facility I enjoyed in entering the castle, I committed a theft.... I one day snatched away a roll of skins that had been prepared to write upon. Never having owned one denier, it would have been impossible for me to purchase so expensive an article as parchment. As to pens and fluid, the feathers that I pluck from eagles and crows, and the black juice of the trivet-berry will serve me to record the events of my life, the past and recent part of which is monumental, and whose next and approaching part promises to be no less so.”

  PART II. THE END OF THE WORLD.

  CHAPTER I.

  THE APOCALYPTIC FRENZY.

  TWO MONTHS AFTER the poisoning of Louis the Do-nothing in 987, Hugh the Capet, Count of Paris and Anjou, Duke of Isle-de-France, and Abbot of St. Martin of Tours and St. Germain-des-Pres, had himself proclaimed King by his bands of warriors, and was promptly consecrated by the Church. By his ascension to the throne, Hugh usurped the crown of Charles, Duke of Lorraine, the uncle of Blanche’s deceased husband. Hugh’s usurpation led to bloody civil strifes between the Duke of Lorraine and Hugh the Capet. The latter died in 996 leaving as his successor his son Rothbert, an imbecile and pious prince. Rothbert’s long reign was disturbed by the furious feuds among the seigneurs; counts, dukes, abbots and bishops, entrenched in their fortified castles, desolated the country with their brigandage. Rothbert, Hugh’s son, died in 1031 and was succeeded by his son Henry I. His advent to the throne was the signal for fresh civil strife, caused by his own brother, who was incited thereto by his mother. Another Rothbert, surnamed the Devil, Duke of Normandy, a descendant of old Rolf the pirate, took a hand in these strifes and made himself master of Gisors, Chaumont and Pontoise. It was under the reign of Hugh the Capet’s grandson, Henry I, that the year 1033 arrived, and with it unheard-of, even incredible events — a spectacle without its equal until then — which was the culmination of the prevalent myth regarding the end of the world with the year 1000.

  The Church had fixed the last day of the year 1000 as the final term for the world’s existence. Thanks to the deception, the clergy came into possession of the property of a large number of seigneurs. During the last months of that year an immense saturnalia was on foot. The wildest passions, the most insensate, the drollest and the most atrocious acts seemed then unchained.

  “The end of the world approaches!” exclaimed the clergy. “Did not St. John the Divine prophesy it in the Apocalypse saying: ‘When the thousand years are expired, Satan will be loosed out of his prison, and shall go out to deceive the nations which are in the four quarters of the earth; the book of life will be opened; the sea will give up the dead which were in it; death and hell will deliver up the dead which were in them; they will be judged every man according to his works; they will be judged by Him who is seated upon a brilliant throne, and there will be a new heaven and a new earth.’ — Tremble, ye peoples!” the clergy repeated everywhere, “the one thousand years, announced by St. John, will run out with the end of this year! Satan, the anti-Christ is to arrive! Tremble! The trumpet of the day of judgment is about to sound; the dead are about to arise from their tombs; in the midst of thunder and lightning, and surrounded by archangels carrying flaming swords, the Eternal is about to pass judgment upon us all! Tremble, ye mighty ones of the earth: in order to conjure away the implacable anger of the All-Mighty, give your goods to the Church! It is still time! It is still time! Give your goods and your treasures to the priests of the Lord! Give all you possess to the Church!”

  The seigneurs, themselves no less brutified than their serfs by ignorance and by the fear of the devil, and hoping to be able to conjure away the vengeance of the Eternal, assigned to the clergy by means of authentic documents, executed in all the forms of terrestrial law, lands, houses, castles, serfs, their harems, their herds of cattle, their valuable plate, their rich armors, their pictures, their statues, their sumptuous robes.

  Some of the shrewder ones said: “We have barely a year, a month, a week to live! We are full of youth, of desires, of ardor! Let us put the short period to profit! Let us stave-in our wine casks, let us indulge ourselves freely in wine and women!”

  “The end of the world is approaching!” exclaimed with delirious joy millions of serfs of the domains of the King, of the lay and of the ecclesiastical seigneurs. “Our poor bodies, broken with toil, will at last take rest in the eternal night that is to emancipate us. A blessing on the end of the world! It is the end of our miseries and our sufferings!”

  And those poor serfs, having nothing to spend and nothing to assign away, sought to anticipate the expected eternal repose. The larger number dropped their plows, their hoes and their spades so soon as autumn set in. “What is the use,” said they, “of cultivating a field that, long before harvest time, will have been swallowed up in chaos?”

  As a consequence of this universal panic, the last days of the year 999 presented a spectacle never before seen; it was even fabulous! Light-headed indulgence and groans; peals of laughter and lamentations; maudlin songs and death dirges. Here the shouts and the frantic dances of supposed last and supreme orgies; yonder the lamentations of pious canticles. And finally, floating above this vast mass of terror, rose the formidable popular curiosity to see the spectacle of the destruction of the world. It came at last, that day said to have been prophesied by St. John the Divine! The last hour arrived, the last minute of that fated year
of 999! “Tremble, ye sinners!” the warning redoubled; “tremble, ye peoples of the earth! the terrible moment foretold in the holy books is here!” One more second, one more instant, midnight sounds — and the year 1000 begins.

  In the expectation of that fatal instant, the most hardened hearts, the souls most certain of salvation, the dullest and also the most rebellious minds experienced a sensation that never had and never will have a name in any language —

  Midnight sounded!... The solemn hour.... Midnight!

  The year 1000 began!

  Oh, wonder and surprise!... The dead did not leave their tombs, the bowels of the earth did not open, the waters of the ocean remained within their basins, the stars of heaven were not hurled out of their orbits and were not striking against one another in space. Aye, there was not even a tame flash of lightning! No thunder rolled! No trace of the cloud of fire in the midst of which the Eternal was to appear. Jehovah remained invisible. Not one of the frightful prodigies foretold by St. John the Divine for midnight of the year 1000 was verified. The night was calm and serene; the moon and stars shone brilliantly in the azure sky, not a breath of wind agitated the tops of the trees, and the people, in the silence of their stupor, could hear the slightest ripple of the mountain streams gliding under the grass. Dawn came ... and day ... and the sun poured upon creation the torrents of its light! As to miracles, not a trace of any!

  Impossible to describe the revulsion of feeling at the universal disappointment. It was an explosion of regret, of remorse, of astonishment, of recrimination and of rage. The devout people who believed themselves cheated out of a Paradise that they had paid for to the Church in advance with hard cash and other property; others, who had squandered their treasures, contemplated their ruin with trembling. The millions of serfs who had relied upon slumbering in the restfulness of an eternal night saw rising anew before their eyes the ghastly dawn of that long day of misery and sufferings, of which their birth was the morning and only their death the evening. It now began to be realized that, left uncultivated in the expectation of the end of the world, the land would not furnish sustenance to the people, and the horrors of famine were foreseen. A towering clamor rose against the clergy; the clergy, however, knew how to bring public opinion back to its side. It did so by a new and fraudulent set of prophecies.