Considerably put out, I set about examining the question.
I don’t understand you at all, Uncle Lerne, I thought. You received notice of my arrival this morning, but here I am, trapped in the slyest of all adventures in landscape gardening. What eccentric whim caused you to have it done? Have you changed even more than I supposed? You would never have contemplated such fortifications 15 years ago.
Fifteen years ago, the nights doubtless resembled this one. The sky sparkled in the same way, and the toads were already punctuating the silence with their strident, abrupt and soft croaking. A nightingale was trilling, like that one. That old evening was delightful too, Uncle. My aunt and my mother had both just died, though, within a week of one another, and with the two sisters gone, you and I were left with one another, one of us a widower and the other an orphan…
And the man of that era appeared in my memory as the town of Nanthel then knew him: a surgeon, already famous at 35 for the dexterity of his hands and the good fortune of his audacity, but who remained faithful to his native town in spite of his renown; Doctor Frédéric Lerne, clinical lecturer at the Ecole de Médecine, associate member of numerous scientific societies, recipient of many awards and—to leave nothing out—tutor to his nephew Nicolas Vermont.
In fact, I had not spent much time with the new father imposed on me by law, for he never took vacations and only spent his Sundays at Fonval in the summer. Even those he spent working ceaselessly, in isolation. Indeed, on those Sundays, his passion for horticulture, suppressed all week, kept him shut up in his little hothouse with his tulips and his orchids. In spite of the rarity of our meetings, though, I knew him well and loved him dearly. He was a strong, calm and sober fellow, perhaps a trifle cold, but very kind. Irreverently, I referred to his clean-shaven face as an old woman’s face, but my joke rang false, for he would sometimes adopt an antique expression, haughty and grave, and sometimes one of subtle mockery in the Regency style. My uncle was one of the few modern beardless men whose head legitimated that affectation, by means of a nobility suggestive of ancestors clad in togas and grandparents clad in satin, which permitted their scion to wear the costumes of his ancestors without insult.
At present, Lerne appeared to me clad in a rather ill-fitting black frock-coat, in which I had seen him for the last time before leaving for Spain. Being rich, and wanting me to be rich too, my uncle had sent me to be a cork-trader, in the employ of the Gomez Company in Badajoz. My exile had lasted 15 years, during which the professor’s situation had surely improved, to judge by the sensational operations he had undertaken, rumor of which had reached me even in the depths of the Estremadura.
As for me, my affairs had not prospered. After 15 years, despairing of ever having my own business selling lifebelts and corks, I had just returned to France to seek another profession when fate procured me independent means. I was the million-franc jackpot winner on the lottery who wished to remain anonymous. In Paris, I obtained comfortable but not luxurious accommodation. My apartment was simple and convenient. I had what I needed, plus an automobile, but minus a family.
Before founding a new family, it seemed to me to be appropriate to renew contact with the old one—which is to say, with Lerne. So I wrote to him—not that we had not stayed in touch more-or-less continually since our separation. At first, he had given me wise advice and shown himself politely paternal. His first letter even told me about a will in my favor, hidden in the secret drawer of a desk at Fonval. After the formal completion of his duties as a tutor, our relationship remained the same. Then, abruptly, his letters had changed, their tone becoming fractious, then cantankerous. Their banal subject-matter had become vulgar and his phraseology coarse; even the handwriting seemed to change. These features became more accentuated with each passing missive, until I had to limit myself to sending him my good wishes once a year, at Christmas. My uncle replied with a few scribbled words. Wounded in my only affection, I was desolate.
What had happened? A year before this sudden change—five years before my return to Fonval and getting lost in the labyrinth—I had read in Epoca:
Our Paris correspondent has informed us that Professor Lerne is bidding farewell to his patients in order to devote himself to the scientific research he has already begun at Nanthel hospital. With that end in mind, the excellent practitioner is retiring to his Château de Fonval in the vicinity of the Ardennes town, fitted out for that purpose. He has been joined by a few enlightened collaborators, including Dr. Klotz of Mannheim and three laboratory assistants from the Anatomical Institute founded by the latter at 22 Friedrichstrasse, which is now closed. When shall we see the results?
Lerne had confirmed this news in an enthusiastic note, which did not add anything to the bare facts of the article. I repeat that it was a year later that his sudden change of character had taken place. Had 12 months of work ended in frustration? Had a bitter disappointment affected the professor seriously enough to make him treat me like a stranger, almost an annoyance?
In spite of his hostility, it was with the greatest possible affection and respect that I had written the letter from Paris in which I told him of my good fortune and asked for permission to visit him. Never was there an invitation less warm than his. He asked me to notify him of my arrival, in order that he could send a carriage to meet me at the station. You will presumably not stay long, he added, for Fonval is not a pleasant place to stay. We work hard here. Come alone and give advance notice!
But I had given advance notice, damn it, and I was alone! I, who had considered my visit as a duty! Well, yes, it was simply stupid! I stared at the meeting-place of the pathways, which the exhausted headlights was no longer brightening much more than a night-light, in a bad temper. I was surely going to spend the night in that sylvan jail; there was no way of getting out of it before dawn. The toads in the pool near Fonval could call all they liked, and the church bell in Grey vainly chime the hours to signal an alternative refuge—for bell-towers are sonic lighthouses—but I was a prisoner.
Prisoner. That made me smile. How frightened I would have been, once. Prisoner of the Ardennes! At the mercy of the cavernous shadow of the monstrous forest of Broceliande, darkening a world between its two edges, one beyond Blois and the other in Constantinople!15 Broceliande! Theater of epic tales and puerile legends, fatherland of the four sons of Aymon and Petit Poucet, the forest of druids and goblins, the wood in which Sleeping Beauty slept while Charlemagne kept watch! What slightly fantastic story did not have its thickets for a setting, and were its trees not characters themselves?
Oh, Aunt Lidivine, I murmured, how you were able to animate all that nonsense every evening after dinner. A fine woman! Did she ever suspect how much influence those tales had? Did you know, Aunt, that all your wonderful puppets invaded my life as they passed through my dreams? Do you know that a magical fanfare still sounds in my ears, sometimes—you who made the nights I spend at Fonval echo with the sounds of Roland’s Oliphant and Oberon’s horn.
At that moment, I could not help feeling a surge of annoyance; the headlights had just gone out after one last dying flicker. For a few seconds, the darkness was absolute, and, at the same time, there was such a profound silence that I could have believed I had suddenly gone blind and deaf.
Then my eyes adapted gradually, and a crescent Moon soon appeared, snowy in the cold night. The forest lit up with a frosty whiteness. I shivered. While my aunt was alive, it would have been in terror; in the mists creeping through the darkness I would have seen dragons slithering and serpents crawling. An owl took flight. I would have made it into the winged helmet of an enchanted paladin. The straight-boled birch tree gleamed like a lance. An oak—perhaps a descendant of the magic tree that espoused Princess Laelina—quivered. It was enormous and druidic; a ball of mistletoe hung from its main branch, and the moon cut through it like a shiny sacred sickle.
The landscape was certainly hallucinatory. For want of anything better to do I studied it. I did not understand any better today
than I had then why I had felt all its power of suggestion, and had only gone outside reluctantly after nightfall. In spite of its countless flowers and its beautiful winding pathways, Fonval itself was, I think, a most forbidding place. An ancient abbey transformed into a château, its arched windows, its surrounding precipice and its Hellish entrance all rendered it strange, even in daylight, and it was hardly surprising that everyone tried to understand it by means of fables. That must have been its true language. At least, that was how I spoke and—even more so—how I acted during my vacations.
For me, those vacations were one long fairy tale, which I acted out with imaginary or artificial bit-part players, more often than not living on the water, in the trees or underground. If I raced bare-legged over the lawn, it was obvious, by my attitude that squadrons of knights were charging behind me, in illusion. And the old rowing-boat! Masted for the occasion with three broomsticks, from which colored flags fluttered, it served me as a sailing-ship, and the pond became the Mediterranean bearing a crusader fleet! Pensively staring at water-lily-islands and grassy peninsulas, I proclaimed: “There’s Corsica and Sardinia! Italy’s in sight! We’re doubling Malta!” A minute later: “Land Ho!” We landed in Palestine. “Montjoie et Saint Denis!” I suffered both land- and sea-sickness in that boat; Holy War intoxicated me; I learned enthusiasm and geography therein…
More often than not, though, the other actors were simulated. That was more real. The memory came back to me then—for every child has a Don Quixote within him—of the giant Briareus, who was the summer-house, and, especially, a barrel that became Andromeda’s dragon. Oh, that barrel! I had made a head for it with the aid of a squint-eyed pumpkin, and vampiric wings with two umbrellas. With the apparatus lying in ambush round the bed of a pathway, supported by a terracotta nymph, I went in search of it, more tremulous than the actual Perseus, armed with a beanpole and prancing on an invisible hippogriff—but when I discovered it, the pumpkin looked at me so strangely that Perseus almost took flight, and it was due to that excitement that the umbrellas were smashed into pieces in the yellow blood of the facetious vegetable.
My mannequins, in fact, made a deep impression on me by virtue of the roles I gave them to play. As I always kept that of protagonist, hero and conqueror for myself, I easily overcame that dread by day, but by night, although the gallant knight became that little scamp Nicolas Vermont again, the barrel remained a monster. Cowering under my bedclothes, my mind tormented by whatever story my aunt had just finished, I knew that the garden was populated by my fearful fantasies, that Briareus was still standing guard there, and that the terrifying barrel, restored to life, clenching the claws on its wings, was watching my window from afar.
At that age, I despaired of ever being like everyone else and being able to confront the darkness; and yet my fear had vanished—leaving me impressionable, to be sure, but not a coward—and it really was me who now found himself unafraid while lost in a deserted forest that was, alas, devoid of fairies and enchanters.
I had reached this point in my reverie when vague noises became audible in the direction of Fonval: an ox bellowing; something akin to the long mournful howling of a dog. That was all; calm was restored. A few minutes went by, and I heard a barn-owl hooting between myself and the château. Another, less distant, took flight; then others followed suit, at increasingly close range. One might have thought that the passage of some creature was frightening them. Indeed, the faint sound of footfalls—the repetitive trot of a quadruped—became audible and drew nearer, striking the hard ground of the pathway. I listened to the animal for some minutes as it went back and forth in the maze, perhaps also going astray there—and then it suddenly surged forth before my eyes.
By virtue of its widespread antlers, the proudness of its neck and the delicacy of its ears, it was unmistakable; it was a ten-point red deer stag. Scarcely had I thought that, however, when it caught sight of me and ran away, making an abrupt about-turn. Then—had it braced itself for a leap?—its body seemed curiously small and slim. It also seemed to me—was it a trick of the light?—that it was white. The animal disappeared in the blink of an eye, and its constricted gallop drew away rapidly.
Had I mistaken a goat for a deer, at first glance? Or had I subsequently mistaken a deer for a goat? It must be admitted that I was powerfully intrigued, to the extent that I wondered whether I might be about to rediscover the childish state of mind that I had left behind at Fonval. A little reflection, however, persuaded me that hunger, fatigue and drowsiness, aided by the moonlight, can easily deceive one’s sight, and that a single ray of moonlight striking at an awkward angle was not a phenomenon.
I regretted it, however. Although my fear of the marvelous was in the past, I had conserved my love of it. It still held me captive. As a child, I had seen it everywhere; as a young man, I was content to suppose it in the inexplicable, gladly presuming the bizarre effect of any unknown cause as supernatural. To borrow the philosopher’s phrase, “When water curves a staff” it is unacceptable to me that “my reason straightens it”16 and I would have preferred not to know that the archer Phoebus would have been unable to draw his mighty and charming rainbow without the decomposition of solar light.
And yet, amid everything that tends to dispel the illusion of the marvelous, is it not necessary to take note of its innate attractiveness? One says to oneself; “Perhaps it’s there, but that’s only a conjecture; I’d prefer, in order to enjoy it more, to see it more clearly, with certainty…” As one approaches, the truth becomes clearer and the prodigy is eclipsed. Thus, like all men of my stripe, when confronted by a mystery made all the more seductive by virtue of being veiled, even at the risk of worse deception, I try to unveil it…
At the end of the day, though, that animal was truly extraordinary…
Wandering through the incomprehensible labyrinth, it seemed to me to be an enigma wrapped up in a puzzle, and my curiosity was piqued by it. Weighed down by weariness as I was, though, I soon fell asleep, thinking about the trickery of detective stories and the subtle methods of logical investigation.
I woke up at daybreak. Immediately, I glimpsed a means of escape from my imprisonment. Not far away, in fact, men were chatting as they walked, hidden by the undergrowth. They moved back and forth, like the stag—if it had been a stag—doubtless following the twisting pathways. Once, still hidden, they passed within a few meters of the car, but I could not understand their speech. It seemed to me that they were chatting in German.
Finally, they came in sight, at the same place as the animal. There were three of them, bending down over the ground as if following a trail. At the spot where the beast had turned round, one of them uttered an exclamation and showed the others that it had turned back. They had seen me, though, and I advanced toward them.
“Gentlemen,” I said, doing my best to smile, “would you have the kindness to show me the way to Fonval? I’m lost…”
The three men studied me without replying, slyly inquisitive. They were an unusual trio. The first had a rounded and unfortunately flat face atop a massive but squat body; his thin and pointed nose was mounted on that disk like the gnomon of a sundial. The second had a military bearing, and was twisting his Imperial Germanic moustache; his chin stuck out, more like a ship’s figurehead than the toe of a shoe. The third was a tall old man with gold-rimmed spectacles, curly grey hair and an unkempt beard. He was eating cherries noisily, the way a county bumpkin eats tripe.
They were definitely Germans, doubtless the three laboratory assistants from the Anatomical Institute.
The old one spat out a salvo of cherry-stones in my direction and one of those Teutonic phrases in which a machine-gun rattle of words is mingled with countless other sounds toward his comrades. They exchanged a few remarks in this fashion, like so many broadsides, without paying any heed to me; then, having conferred among themselves—their mouths having skillfully imitated the noise of a battle fought beside a cataract—they turned on their heels, leaving me stunned
by their rudeness.
It was, however, necessary to get out of there! This expedition was becoming more ridiculous by the minute. What did it all mean? What kind of comedy was this? In sum, I was being played for a fool! I was furious. The presumed secrets that I thought I had detected now seemed to be mere childishness, products of tiredness and darkness. I had to get away! I had to get away immediately!
Angrily, and without thinking, I pressed the ignition-switch that started the car, and its eighty-horsepower engine came to life under the hood, buzzing like bees within a hive. I seized the gear-stick, but as I did so, an outburst of laughter made me turn round.
With his cap tilted over his ear and his bag of letters slung over his shoulder, a blue-shirted postman was looking at me, triumphant in his hilarity. “Ha ha!” he drawled. “I told you last night that you were on the wrong road!”
I recognized the villager from Grey-l’Abbaye, but my ill humor prevented me from answering him.
“Are you really going to Fonval?” he went on.
I fulminated against Fonval in rather impolite terms, which consigned it, along with all its inhabitants, to Hell.
“Because,” the postman continued, “if you’re going there. I’ll take you myself. I have to go there to take the post. Hurry, though. There’s twice as much today; it’s Monday and I don’t come here on Sundays.”
So saying, he had taken some letters from his sack and was sorting through them.
“Show me that!” I cried excitedly. “Yes, that yellow envelope…”
He looked me up and down suspiciously and showed it to me from a distance. It was my letter—the announcement of my arrival, which had followed it by one night rather than anticipating it by one day!
That misfortune excused my uncle and dispelled my rancor.
“Get in!” I said. “You can show me the way…and we’ll have a chat.”
Doctor Lerne Page 10
