Mademoiselle de Téroze consented to offer one of her cheeks, still flushed from the flames of love, to the foul kisses of the old satyr. The company came into the bedchamber, and both husband and wife carefully concealed the unfortunate catastrophe of the previous night.
The entire day was spent in pleasurable activities, the most notable of which was a long walk that took Monsieur de Fontanis away from the château and gave La Brie sufficient time to prepare some new settings. The judge, now bound and determined to consummate his marriage, was so fastidious during meals that it became impossible to utilize these means to unseat his reason, but fortunately our friends had more than one trump card up their sleeves, and the worthy Fontanis had too many sworn enemies to be able to escape from the traps they had set for him.
Again the company got up to go to bed.
“Ah, tonight, my angel,” said the judge to his younger half, “I flatter myself that you will not get away again scot-free.”
But even as he was thus blustering and bragging, the arm he was threatening to use was far from being in a state of readiness, and since he did not want to appear unprepared on the field of battle, the poor Provençal began exercising in a most incredible fashion in his own corner… He stretched out, he made himself as stiff as possible, every nerve in his body as taut as could be … all of which, causing him to exert double or treble the pressure on his bed that he would have exerted in a state of repose, finally broke the beams of the floor below, which had been previously sawed almost all the way through, and tossed the hapless magistrate head over heels into a pigsty which just happened to be directly below his room.
For a long time thereafter the company assembled at the Château d’Olincourt argued over who must have been the more surprised—the judge upon finding himself thus among animals so common in his part of the country, or the animals upon seeing one of the most famous judges of the High Court of Aix land in their midst. There were those who maintained that the satisfaction must have been mutual: in fact, mustn’t the judge have been in seventh heaven to find himself, as it were, once again in good company, to breathe for a moment the tang of the good earth? And, for their part, mustn’t those animals that the blessed Moses proclaimed impure have thanked their lucky stars to find at long last a judge not only in their midst but at their head, and, what is more, a judge of the High Court of Aix who, accustomed from childhood to ruling on causes relating to these beasts’ favorite element, might one day arrange and forestall any discussion bearing upon this element so analogous to the organization of both parties?
Be that as it may, given the fact that introductions were not immediately forthcoming and that civilization, the mother of good breeding, is scarcely any more advanced among the members of the High Court of Aix than it is among the animals whom the children of Israel eschew, there was an initial moment of shock, during which the judge won no laurels: he was beaten, bruised, and battered from pillar to post by the snouts of the pigs. He admonished them, to no avail; he promised to enter their grievances in the record book, but again they turned a deaf ear to his words; he spoke of decrees, they remained just as unimpressed; he threatened them with exile, they responded by trampling him underfoot; and the star-crossed Fontanis, who by then was bloody but unbowed, was already in the process of preparing a sentence which was nothing less than burning at the stake when help finally reached him.
It was La Brie and the good colonel of dragoons who, armed with flaming torches, came to try to extricate the magistrate from the muck in which he was mired. But the question remained: by what part of him could one safely grab hold? For as he was generously and duly garnished from head to foot, it was not very easy to get hold of him, and the stench was overwhelming. La Brie went off to fetch a pitchfork, a hastily summoned stableboy brought another, and thus wise did they haul him, as best they could, out of the unspeakable muck into which he had fallen and been buried …
But now the next difficulty arose, and it was not an easy one to solve: having extricated him, where should they take him? They discussed purging the decree, the guilty would have to be cleansed; the colonel suggested letters of annulment, but the stableboy, who did not understand a word of these high-blown phrases, said that they would quite simply have to put him for a couple of hours into the watering trough; after that he would be sufficiently soaked for them to finish the job of prettifying him with handsful of straw. But the marquis declared that the cold water would most certainly affect his brother-in-law’s health. Hearing which, and having ascertained that the kitchen boy’s scullery was still filled with hot water, La Brie and the others carried the judge into the kitchen and turned him over to this disciple of Comus, who in no time at all had made him as spick-and-span as a china bowl.
“I suggest that you might be well advised not to go back to your wife tonight,” said d’Olincourt as soon as he saw the cleanly scrubbed man of the law. “I know how fastidious you are; therefore La Brie here is going to take you to some modest bachelor’s quarters where you can spend the rest of the night in peace.”
“Good, good, my dear Marquis,” said the judge. “I approve of your plan … But you have to admit that I must be bewitched to have such adventures happen to me every night since my arrival in this accursed castle.”
“There is surely some physical explanation for all this,” said the marquis. “The doctor’s coming back to see us tomorrow. I suggest that you ask him about it.”
“I will indeed,” replied the judge and, repairing to his modest room in the company of La Brie, said to him as he climbed into bed: “The truth, my friend, is that before all this happened I was within a cat’s whisker of attaining the goal.”
“Alas, Monsieur,” replied the clever fellow, as he was about to leave the room, “the finger of fate is clearly discernible in these acts, which are decreed in heaven, and I can only assure you that I pity you with all my heart.”
After Delgatz had taken the judge’s pulse, he assured him that the beams had broken simply due to an excessive blockage of the lymphatic vessels, which doubled the weight of the humors and proportionately increased the animal volume. As a result, a strict diet would have to be imposed which, after it had succeeded in purging the acridity of the humors, would necessarily reduce the physical weight and contribute to the success of the proposed venture which, as a matter of fact…
“But, Sir,” Fontanis broke in, “this frightful fall has left me with a dislocated hip and a sprained left arm …”
“I believe every word you say,” the doctor replied, “but these secondary accidents are not at all what worries me. My personal concern is always to trace things back to their sources. It’s a matter of the blood, Monsieur; by diminishing the acrimoniousness of the lymph, we relieve the vessels, and since the circulation of the vessels becomes increasingly free we necessarily diminish the physical mass, and as a result ceilings no longer collapse beneath your weight and you will henceforth be able to devote yourself to whatever bed games you may choose to indulge in without any further fears of subsequent dangers.”
“And what about my arm, Monsieur? And my hip?”
“Let us purge, Monsieur, the answer is to purge. After which let us proceed to a couple of localized bleedings, and everything will little by little return to normal.”
That very same day the diet was started. Delgatz, who did not leave his patient’s side throughout the entire week, kept him on a strict diet of chicken broth, and purged him three times running, all the while forbidding him above all to think about his wife. However lacking in medical skills, Lieutenant Delgatz’s diet worked wonders, and he confided to the assembled company that he had once treated in like manner, when he had worked at the school of veterinary medicine, an ass who had fallen into a very deep hole, and that by the end of the month the animal was carrying its bags of plaster just as it had always done. And in fact, the judge, who could not help being bilious by nature, soon had a tad of color back in his cheeks; the bruises disappeared, until the concern
of everyone was to restore him to perfect health again and to instill in him the forces required for him to claim what was still rightfully his.
During the twelfth day of treatment, Delgatz took his patient by the hand and, presenting him to Mademoiselle de Téroze, said:
“Here he is, Madame, here is this man upon whom the laws of Hippocrates seem to have little or no effect. I return him to you safe and sound, and if he gives free rein to the forces which I have restored to him, we shall have the pleasure of seeing before six months is out”—at this point Delgatz placed his hand lightly on Mademoiselle’s lower abdomen—”yes, Madame, we shall all have the satisfaction of seeing this lovely womb rounded by the hand of Hymen.”
“May the Good Lord hearken to your words, Doctor,” replied the saucy young thing. “You must admit that it is indeed difficult to be a wife for the past fortnight without at the same time having ceased to be a virgin.”
“Incredible,” said the judge. “It is not every night that one suffers from indigestion, nor is it every night that the desire to urinate precipitates a husband head over heels out of his bed, or that, firmly believing he is falling into the arms of a lovely woman, he is tossed helter-skelter into a pigsty.”
“We shall see,” said the young Téroze with a deep sigh, “we shall see, Monsieur. But if you loved me as I love you, I am sure that all these misfortunes would not have befallen you.”
Supper was marked by great joviality; the marquise showed herself at table to be both gracious and wicked: she wagered against her husband that her brother-in-law would that night cull the fruits of Hymen, and on this note everyone retired.
Both husband and wife made short shrift of their toilets. Out of modesty, Mademoiselle de Téroze begged her husband not to allow any light on in her bedchamber; he, too subdued by previous events to argue the point, readily agreed, and they climbed into bed. There were no further obstacles, and at long last the judge triumphed: he plucked, or thought he plucked, that precious flower to which mankind so foolishly attaches such importance. Five times in a row were his amatory efforts crowned with success.
With the break of day, the curtains were drawn back, and the rays of the sun that streamed through the windows revealed at last to the eyes of the victor the victim that he had just sacrificed on the altar of love …
Good Heavens! Imagine what must have been his reaction when he perceived an elderly black woman instead of his wife, when he saw a face as dark as it was ugly in the place of the delicate charms of which he had till that moment thought himself the possessor! He flung himself back, cried out that he was almost certainly a victim of some strange witchcraft, and at that moment his wife entered the room and, finding him with this divine creature from Cape Taenarus,10 asked him tartly what she had done to him that might explain such a cruel betrayal.
“But, Madame, wasn’t it with you yesterday that I…”
“However humiliated and ashamed I may feel, Monsieur, I have never been lacking in obedience to you, on that score my conscience is clear. You saw this woman beside me, pushed me roughly aside in order to lay hands on her; you then gave her my place—my rightful place—in bed, and I, by this thoroughly bewildered, left the room with only my tears to comfort me.”
“And, if you do not mind my asking, my angel, are you quite sure that all these allegations are in fact true?”
“Oh, the monster! He dares to heap insult on injury, and when I have every right to expect amends all I get are sarcastic remarks … Help! Help! Sister! I want my whole family to come and see the unworthy object for whom I have been sacrificed … Look at her! There she is! There is that hateful rival,” shouted the young wife who had been denied her rights, loosing a flood of tears. “He even dares to hold her in his arms right here in my presence. O my friends,” Mademoiselle de Téroze went on, gathering everyone around her, “I beg you to help me, lend me arms wherewith to do battle against this false-hearted knave, this perjurer! Is this what I had a right to expect, adoring him as I did …”
Nothing could have been more comical than Fontanis’s face when he heard these astonishing words. Now and then he would cast a distraught look at his black lady-friend, only to bring his gaze back again to his young wife, at whom he would stare with a kind of idiotic fixation that might truly have become a cause for concern as to the state of his brain.
By one of those curious strokes of fate, the person in whom the judge had come to place the most confidence since his arrival at the Château d’Olincourt was the very man he should have feared the most, his rival La Brie. He summoned him.
“My friend,” he said to him, “you have always struck me as a level-headed young fellow. Would you be kind enough to tell me whether or not you have noticed any change in my brain?”
“Upon my word, Your Honor,” La Brie replied with a woebegone air, his face betraying his embarrassment, “I would never have dared to say anything to you, but since you have done me the honor of asking my opinion, I must confess that since you fell into the pigsty the ideas that have emanated from the membranes of your brain have been something less than pure. But don’t let this bother you, Sir: the doctor who has already treated you is one of the greatest men who has ever come from this part of the country … Why, I recall a judge we used to have here, a judge from the marquis’s district, who had become so mad that nary a young libertine from the region could have a bit of fun with a girl without this rascal straightway accusing him and bringing him to trial, with decrees and sentences and exiles and all the other platitudes that are always on these jokers’ lips. Well, Sir, our doctor—that man of many talents who has already had the honor of administering to you with eighteen bleedings and thirty-two different kinds of medicine—made him as sane as though he had never judged anyone in his whole life. But, as I live and breathe,” La Brie went on, turning toward some sound he had just heard, “how apt is the saying, ‘Speaking of the devil…,’ for here he is in person.”
“Good morning, Doctor,” said the marquise, seeing Dr. Delgatz arrive. “I must say, I believe that we have never been more in need of your ministrations. Last night our dear friend the judge suffered a slight mental aberration which caused him, in spite of everyone, to sleep with this black woman instead of his wife.”
“In spite of everyone?” said the judge. “You mean to say someone tried to stop me?”
“I for one, with every ounce of strength at my command,” La Brie replied, “but Monsieur was going at it tooth and nail, so that I preferred to let him proceed rather than expose myself to the risk of being manhandled by him.”
Hearing this, the judge began to scratch his head, and was no longer quite certain what to believe, when the doctor came over and took his pulse.
“This is more serious than the previous accident,” said Delgatz, lowering his eyes. “This is some unknown vestige of our last illness, a banked fire which eludes the scientist’s sharp eye and breaks into flame when one least expects it. There is a decided blockage in the diaphragm, and a tremendous erethical condition of the organism.”
“A heretical condition!” cried the judge, beside himself with anger. “Just what does this joker mean by his ‘heretical condition’? I want you to know, you cad, that I have never been a heretic. It is easy to see, you blockhead, that, with little or no knowledge of French history, you are completely unaware of the fact that we are the ones who burn the heretics. Go and visit our part of the country, you forgotten bastard from Salerno, go, my friend, go and see Mérindol and Cabrières still smoking from the fires that we caused to be set there, take a stroll on the rivers of blood with which the worthy members of our tribunal so generously water the earth of the province, you can still hear the moans of the poor wretches whom we have sacrificed to our rage, the sobs of the women whom we tear from their husbands’ arms, the cries of the children whom we crush on their mothers’ breasts; take a long, careful look at all the holy horrors that we committed, and then let me know whether a rascal like you has any right to accuse
us of being heretics!”
The judge, who was still in bed beside his dark-skinned lady-friend, had grown so excited in the course of his narration that he had unwittingly punched the poor woman right in the nose, causing her to flee from the room yelping like a bitch whose pups have been taken away from her.
“My, my, what a lot of sound and fury, my friend,” said d’Olincourt, coming over to the patient. “My dear judge, is that any way to act? It must be obvious to you now that your health is in a state of flux, and that it is absolutely essential that we take care of you.”
The Mystified Magistrate Page 4
