The Wing

by Jean Richepin

  In another form, that was exactly the calculation that Aunt Aline had made, and she made use of it to indoctrinate Thibaud, who would have been desolate to lose his pupil had he not retained the secret hope—unexpressed in front of his brother—that the “diversion” provided by religion would not prevent Geneviève from being brought back to science by her genius.

  For all these amalgamated reasons, and to complete the young woman’s convalescence, and in order that, having become a growing blade of grass, she would be a blade of grass flowering in the poetry of the ideal (the Abbé’s words) it was decided that Geneviève would spend her holidays, which were then due, with her uncle, who would catechize her—but on the formal condition that she would be accompanied by Aunt Aline.

  XIV

  What a unique, marvelous, almost unreal memory those two months of vacation—in the strict and proper sense of the word, for the girl’s everyday life had been “vacant”—so full and so rapidly passed, left behind, one life having been totally replaced by another! What an absolute forgetfulness of everything she had forgotten, to the point of seeing herself, when she looked back on it later, as a stranger!

  The forgetfulness of accustomed occupations, sensations and ideas had been reinforced by the absence of familiar faces and surroundings. Even those faces and objects that seemed to have followed her—since they were, after all, there—were, in a sense, not there, having been completely renewed. Neither the Abbé not Aunt Aline any longer resembled themselves.

  It is true that Geneviève scarcely knew her Uncle Denis, having only seen him three or four times since she came into the world, at long intervals. From the conversations of her father and Aunt Aline, however, she had nevertheless built a sufficiently exact representation of him. Now, of that representation, nothing survived.

  As for Aunt Aline, who was so intimately familiar to her, almost to the same extent as her own personality, perhaps more so, from the very first moment—and more so time went by—it was as if she had been transfigured. At times, she positively did not recognize her.

  Given that the whole world around her had changed, as much as she had, must it not be the case that Geneviève had spent those two months, not in life, but in a dream? That was what she asked herself subsequently, very often, on reflection, never being quite certain that it had “actually” happened. It became necessary, then, for her father to affirm the reality of the memory, and for Aunt Line to authenticate the facts by repeating to her, with all her authority: “Since I was there with you, of course! Since I was there myself!”

  And in spite of everything, Geneviève “never got over” having truly possessed so much happiness, having being that chosen one in that paradise, as she put it. Only to her father and Aunt Line, however—and very rarely to them—had she spoken with any abandon about that ecstasy. To Yvernaux, she had never dared. She would have been afraid that his eloquence might transform the blissful experience into a matter of rhetoric. She scarcely permitted herself to express it inwardly, without being able to do so in a satisfactory manner, always reproaching herself for excessive materialization, no matter how subtle she was, when she found, for example, such expressions as:

  “It was an abyss of soft light and tender joy in my life. No, not an abyss! A summit, rather! Something less profound than an abyss, though, and not as high as a summit! A cloud of dream that enveloped me, caressed me, on which I slept, but was wide awake all the same. Yes, that’s it! That description is very nearly accurate. And more! No, better, for sure. For, abyss and summit and joy and cloud and dream, it was, above all life.”

  And sometimes she got around to adding, in a vague smiling melancholy: “Who knows whether it was not, in my entire life, the only truly living fragment of real life?”

  Thus, a long time afterwards, having thought about it in increasing distant bursts, she had retained that sort of breath, caressing her still—and notwithstanding, without her conceiving and black humor or bitterness against her ordinary life, in which that alone was a ray of sunlight and a taste of honey. We have seen with what a good and gentle resignation she accepted having coiffed Saint Catherine, and how she was the first to joke about it, without rancor.

  The fact nevertheless remains that, without that two-month holiday, and the ecstasy she tasted therein, she would never even have thought of her destiny as an old maid, even with a smile. On the other hand, without the tender memory that tainted her heart—her girlish heart—forever, she would have remained more Gasguin’s daughter than Idalie’s granddaughter; she would have been dried up, knotted—unsexed, according to Lady Macbeth’s expression—within her exclusive passion for science, and her genius might perhaps have become sterile.

  Although her supreme theories were to end, in practice, with the wing that we shall see open herein, everything indicates that the plumes of that wing had for their initial down that of the dream formed during those two months of vacation. That would only become comprehensible later. No one, even those who shared or caused that dream, could have imagined that blossoming. In spite of all her divinatory instinct, even Aunt Line had no suspicion of it. That tells us how tenuous the thread was by which that down was collected in mid-air, secured in Geneviève’s memory, and suspended in her heart, thus retaining the potential wing until the future, when it was transformed into plumage twenty years later.

  It was Yvernaux—often a false lyricist, but more often still an illustrative thinker by means of imagery—who was to express in that rather bizarre metaphor, exactly twenty years later, a phenomenon much more bizarre than the metaphor itself. And when he fund it and said it, someone commonsensical having had the misfortune to judge it obscure, he replied:

  “You’re right. I’ve omitted to light my lantern. I’ll light it, then. Well, the thread in question, that tenuous thread, which I thought I had no need to identity for you—that almost immaterial thread, which myopic gazes can’t see—was quite simply, not at all stupidly, M’sieu, but entirely angelically, a fil de Vierge.32 There! And I hope that you understand now—don’t you?”

  “Yes,” said the critic, who did not want to make him a liar. “Indeed, I shall understand, but later.”

  It was also later that it was necessary to resign himself to finally seeing the present story clearly, about which the same Yvernaux, to whom the essential elements ate due, had no fear of saying:

  “If I wrote it myself, I’d make it such a firework-display of images that that the readers would be blinded by it, and wouldn’t be able to continue to read, lost in the dark.”

  XV

  The paradise in which Geneviève had lived that delightful dream of two months did not, however, have a name promising such felicities. Nor was it situated in one of the pleasant corners of Brittany. Nor did it have for hosts people of whom the first glimpse could covey the idea that they were cheerful, and especially not tender and prepossessing.

  The old manor of Kairnheûz had been called that, a long time ago, in ancient Haut Breton, compounding two grim words descended directly and without any softening of their crude syllables, one of Gaelic ancestry and the other of Cymric.33 Now, the first, “Kairn,” signified “a pile of stones,” and the second, “heûz,” had the meaning “terror.” It was, therefore, as if it were to say, at the time of its baptism “the stone-heap—or monument—of terror,” and those who had characterized it thus were not the kind of folk to be terrified easily.

  One can imagine, therefore, that the manor, conserved almost intact since then, and whose ruined portion did not add any cheerfulness, maintained a surly physiognomy for the gazes of today, less familiar with horror. In fact, it seemed to exaggerate that horror and that terror, and made a décor of it, so pleased was it thereby. That, at least, is what a witty Parisian painter said, having arrived there by chance in search of the picturesque, and who had found it “more beautiful than nature,” appearing to have become “ostentatious.”

  It is certainly the case that, for the taste of a witty Parisian, there are pe
rhaps a few too many of these architectures “fit for etchings or the backdrops of rustic theaters,” as the jolly denigrator also said. “And even a romantic dramaturge,” he added, “would quickly weary, by the fifth act, of machiculations, posterns and subterrains, in merely running through the detailed catalogue of all those chivalric junk, walls of cyclopean construction (if one may employ that term with respect to the Middle Ages) moats and ponds, portals with drawbridges—unusable now, but still in place, it seemed, to seal their openings—turrets, battlements, loopholes, watch-towers and other sullen defenses, a massive high tower standing up like an arm brandished menacingly in the sky, ready to bring a fist down on the countryside, recumbent or cowering in fear before it, etc., etc.” For our witty Parisian’s patter was well-furnished with vocabulary and erudition.

  With regard to individuals less corrupted by art and literature, however, the manor had retained its horror. It had even acquired a surplus by virtue of an exceedingly ancient chapel, doubtless anterior to the tower, of which nothing survived but the ruined shell crumbled amid the rocks all the way to the muddy bed of the Kawchmôr. Nor did the Kawchmôr, or “sea of mud” make the landscape any more pleasant, being the widening of a little, half-dead stream, to which only certain high tides lent a little life, but in the form of sinister and viscous eddies. So the good people of the region only spoke the name of the manor in a whisper, without really comprehending the Gaelic and Cymric roots any longer, but as if they had divined all of their extinct significance. For them, Kairnheûz really had remained the terrible heap of stones.

  The entire location, including its less horrific parts, was worthy of having for a mirror the heavy yellow sheen of the marshes into which the black rocks of the slope and the blue granite debris of the chapel crumbled. Those bright colors did not succeed, any more than the pink heather and the golden gorse, in cheering up the lugubrious frame of woods of which that corner was a sort of junction. There, in fact, the bushy oak-woods of Ponthual and the somber fir-woods of Plouër hurled themselves against one another, after a fashion, and beneath them, in caves of branches, a perpetual flux of darkness poured out and thickened, especially on the side of the firs.

  The manor was bordered by that mourning-dress on its saddest face, which formed a continuation of the bleak skeleton of the chapel, leprous with lichens and scabbed with moss. The rare windows opening there took on the aspect of diseased and blinking eyes, only suffering as they gazed at the spectacle of that desolation.

  The other, brighter, face—which would have been sunlit if they bay windows there had been less narrowly and meanly ogival, at least had for its nearest neighbor an uncovered plain whose pale verdure was enameled with flowers, and the sea for a distant horizon. But the flowers of the plateau were only those of wild gorse, and the verdure they enameled was only furnished by tufts of poor “ami-castu,” a kind of grass that seemed discolored by the briny sea breezes—for that plain on a plateau was heathland. As for the sea, which might have been able to animate the background of the scene with its life, it was the glaucous and rigid strip that stands up like a wall of steel at the end of low-lying marine reaches.

  The heathland of Kairnheûz is not at all similar, in fact, to that of Fréhel, for example, which is borne high up on a pavement of rocks that set it a hundred meters sheer above sea-level. Thus displayed to the open sky, like the palm of a hand presented to the sun and burning a cassolette of abundant aromatic plants beneath its kisses, the heathland of Fréhel is joyful, at least by day. Its foundations, moreover—the sheer walls it overlooks—are granite and porphyry, which set sapphire and ruby cabochons on the plaque of the fluid emerald sea. Only in the evening, when the waves can be heard breaking, does their melancholy cantilena give a certain strangeness to the solitude and mystery of the heath. And even then, one still dreams of poetic fairies, or, at the most, of lubricious Korrigans.

  Even in broad daylight, the heathland of Kairnheûz must have inspired nightmares. The open space of the uncovered plain was crushed between the woods that rushed toward it in cataracts of immobile darkness, and the horizontal steel wall of the sea. One no longer had the impression of an open space there, but that of an enclosure—and that enclosure, although a level plateau, seemed hollowed out at the center in the form of a basin. It was oppressive there, in spite of the wind that swept it. The leaden sunlight fell heavily there, warming the very wind—and the dreams one dreamed there were also warm and heavy, oppressive and stifling.

  Because of those nocturnal dreams, it was necessary for no one to be stay within ten leagues of the place, unless they wanted give themselves gooseflesh and other frissons. Accounts were given, moreover, of unfortunates whom mist, dusk falling unexpectedly after a storm, an exceptional blizzard of snow or a squall causing rain to fall “in curtains,” had taken by surprise in the middle of the heath. The majority preferred not to speak of the abominations of which they been had been the victims—in dreams, of course, but in dreams as palpable, it appeared, as reality. The rare individuals who contented to unclench their teeth did so only that they might chatter in the terror of stories of phantoms, supernatural voices, infernal dances, shaken chains and cadavers giving you frightful smacks, or kisses more frightful still.

  Not to mention that there were other tales than those, perhaps swollen by details imagined by fear. There were the authentic adventures related in Breton ballads, according to facts that had often been recorded in French newspapers. More than one old “pillaouer”—a wandering rag-picker—after singing one of these ballads, recalled having heard the tale not sung but narrated, in the times when it was talked about as something that “happened the other day.”

  Crimes—yes, true crimes—had been committed on the heath, and below the ruins too, in the mud of Kawchmôr, and even, as was said a first surreptitiously, “in the manor itself.” It is true that they were rendered with an even more respectful surreptitiousness at present, their tellers hastening to add: “Oh, the crimes committed at the manor were committed many years ago, of course.”

  On the strength of which a certain head garnished with reading, a reject from a seminary or a young schoolmaster freshly molded by the Normale primaire,34 related unthinkingly and unhesitantly, affirming that it was no more than a legend, the “historically accurate” story of a lord of Ponthual who had once entered into competition with the famous Gilles de Retz, whose château, the ruin of Guildo on the Arguenon, was not so very far away. Then he passed on, still in a bold voice, to a certain lady of Plouër, who, under the ancient kings of France, if they had had their court at Versailles, would have been a poisoner there as celebrated as Brinvilliers,35 but had limited herself to the manor of Kairnheûz to perpetrate her misdeeds, and who had expiated them under the axe in the public square in Rennes. And from there he arrived at the era of the great Revolution and the Chouans, and that of the return of the émigrés, in which things that had happened to make one shudder, as with the Breton Brinvilliers of old, captations of inheritances, substitutions of children, pretended suicides that actually covered up murders, etc...

  At that moment, the strong head took on a knowing expression, pinched his lips as if to restrain himself from saying too much; but one less prudent insinuated, albeit in a low voice, between two puffs on a pipe and swallowing a mouthful of eau-de-vie in order to half-stifle his words: “It’s been known in our time.”

  “Only ten years ago,” risked another.

  “Go on! At the manor? Impossible! Who told you that?”

  Thus exclaimed some newcomer arrived the night before, a passing stranger, a merchant from the next town, an ambulant maker of knick-knacks: all fish asking nothing more than to take the bait of scandal—or slander, if there’s any difference. Immediately eager to put themselves on the spit, all ears, they drew nearer to hear the most recent legend, or history, of the manor of Kairnheûz.

  So, only ten years ago, on a dreary equinoctial morning—when the tides are high—the cadaver of Comte Alain-Mathias-Bert
rand de Ponthual-Plouër, had been found in the marshes of Kawchmôr, directly below the ruins, where the rising tide had left it. It had not been known that he was in the locality, having left it a week before to go to Brest. Why had he come back without being seen by anyone, deliberately concealing the fact of his return, since he had not come by railway and the station at Lamballe, his usual halt? That was what no one had ever found out, and from which emerged the Pharaoh’s serpent36 of the following tale.

  According to the scandal-mongers, or slanderers, the Comte had staged a fake departure for Brest, where he had no appointment, and, in reality, had gone to see his wife’s cousin, who was the director of a Jesuit college in the Channel Islands. He had gone to demand a definitive explanation regarding a singular adventure that had occurred within the Comtesse’s family at the moment when his future wife was born.

  There might then have been a substitution of children, as a consequence of which the pretended granddaughter of a gamekeeper, really of noble blood, had become a poor woman and, later, the future Comtesse’s wet-nurse. And that was why the Comtesse’s foster-sister, young Anne-Herminie-Luce, had been, in due course, adopted by an impoverished gentleman, the squire Melchior Yves de Saint-Ylan. And that was also why, by virtue of the intrigues of the Comtesse and her cousin and the director of the English college, that demoiselle Anne-Herminie-Luce de Saint-Ylan had been married off on the day that “someone”—no one could say who—had come to the Comtesse threatening to reveal the ancient ugly truth.

  In spite of all the precautions taken against him, this “someone” had succeeded in making known to the Comte papers—a wad of old letters—proving, if not the absolute truth, at least the great probability, of the accusation blighting the family, which was scarcely respectable in any case, of the Hugons de la Goëlwec, the ancestral stock of Blanche-Hortense-Perrinaïck, the Comte’s wife. If the accusation were true, the Comte would have espoused the doubly-adulterine daughter of a Goëlwec, fallen into black poverty in Paris and fished out of the rabble by a Jewess, a former high-society “woman of ill repute,” presently a wealthy dealer in antiquities. It was to win this girl her mother’s large fortune that the famous child-swap would have taken place, Hugon de la Goëlwec having had for accomplices his wife, who as no better than he was, and the gamekeeper, whom the prostitute had seduced.