The Human Comedy (10 page)

“There’s nothing so fearsome as the revolt of a sheep,” said de Marsay.

“It would be too awful to let us go with that horrible image in our memories,” said Madame de Portenduère. “It will be in my dreams.”

“And how will Monsieur de Marsay’s first love be punished?” asked Lord Dudley, with a smile.

“An Englishman gibes with velveted claws,” said Blondet.

“I’ll let Monsieur Bianchon tell us,” de Marsay answered, looking at me. “He was witness to her final moments.”

“I was,” I said, “and her death is one of the most beautiful I know. The duke and I had spent the night at her bedside, for her lung fever had attained its final stages and no hope was left. She’d been given last rites the day before. The duke soon fell asleep. Waking toward four in the morning, the duchess gave me a friendly gesture of the most touching sort, with a smile, enjoining me not to disturb him—and this when she was about to take her last breath! She’d grown extraordinarily thin, but her face and her features were, as always, truly sublime. In her pallor, her skin was like porcelain with a light glowing behind it. Her bright eyes and flushed cheeks stood out against that languidly elegant cast and an imposing tranquillity radiated from her face. She seemed full of pity for the duke, her emotion unbounded as her final moments approached. The silence was total. Softly lit by a lamp, the room looked precisely like every patient’s bedchamber at the moment of death. Just then the clock struck. The duke awoke, distraught at having drifted off. I did not see the infuriated gesture by which he expressed his regret at closing his eyes on his wife in one of the last moments granted her on this earth, but surely anyone other than she would have misread it. A man of state, preoccupied with the interests of France, the duke had a thousand of those unguarded eccentricities for which a genius is often thought mad, but whose explanation is to be found in his mind’s exquisite nature and the labors required of it. He sat down in an armchair beside his wife’s bed and stared into her eyes. She reached out weakly, gave her husband’s arm a faint squeeze, and in a voice at once quiet and full of emotion, said, ‘My poor friend, who will understand you now?’ Then she died, her eyes still looking into his.”

“The doctor’s tales always move us so deeply,” said the Duc de Rhétoré.

“But so sweetly,” added Mademoiselle des Touches.

“Ah! Madame,” the doctor replied, “I have some truly terrible stories in my repertoire, but every tale has its own appointed time in a conversation, as Chamfort so neatly admonished the Duc de Fronsac: ‘Ten bottles of champagne stand between this moment and that little jest of yours.’”

“But it’s two in the morning, and the story of Rosina has prepared us,” said the mistress of the house.

“Go on, Monsieur Bianchon! . . .” he was urged from all sides.

The doctor made a conciliatory gesture, and silence fell once again.

“Some hundred paces from the town of Vendôme, on the banks of the Loir,” he said, “stands an aged brown house with high pointed roofs, perfectly isolated, neighbored by no squalid tannery or shabby inn of the sort that you see outside nearly any small city. Before that house lies a riverside garden whose boxwood shrubs, once cut short to border the walkways, now grow however they please. Born in the Loir, a row of quick-growing willows stands like a hedge, half concealing the house. Those plants we call weeds grace the riverbank’s slope with their beautiful green. After ten years of neglect, the fruit trees offer no harvest, and their offshoots have grown into dense thickets. The overgrown espaliers make a canopy, as in an ornamental bower. The sand of the walkways is now thick with portulaca, but in truth no sign of a walkway remains. Standing atop the great hill that offers a perch to the ruined château of the Dukes of Vendôme, the only spot from which to see into that enclosure, one muses that in some indistinct past this patch of land was the joy of some gentleman with a passion for roses, for tulip trees, for horticulture in short, but above all for fine fruit. One spies an arbor, or what remains of an arbor; beneath it there still sits a table, not yet entirely obliterated by time. In that garden that is no longer a garden one can glimpse, as if in negative, the joys of the peaceable existence the provinces offer, just as one glimpses the life led by a good merchant from the epitaph on his grave. To cap off all the sad and beguiling ideas that deluge the onlooker’s soul, one of the walls displays a sundial ornamented with this bourgeois Christian inscription:
ULTIMAM COGITA
! The roofs are in terrible disrepair, the shutters are always closed, the balconies are covered with swallows’ nests, the doors never open. Tall grasses highlight the steps’ cracks in green; the hinges have rusted. The moon, the sun, the winter’s cold, the summer’s heat have worn down the wood, warped the boards, scoured the paint. The desolate silence is troubled only by the birds, cats, ferrets, rats, and mice that dart unhindered this way and that, doing battle, devouring one another. Everywhere an invisible hand has written this word:
Mystery
. If, your curiosity piqued, you went to study this house from the street, you would see the broad outer door with its rounded top, liberally staved through by the local children. I later learned that this door had been sealed shut ten years before. Through those irregular breaches, you would note how perfectly the courtyard side of the house harmonizes with the garden side: The same disarray reigns over both. Sprays of tall grass outline the paving stones. Enormous cracks snake over the walls, whose blackened tops are enlaced by the thousand festoons of a wild pellitory. The front steps are askew, the rope on the bell has rotted away, the gutters are broken. What fire fallen from the sky has ravaged this place? What tribunal ordered that these grounds be sown with salt? Was God insulted here? Was France betrayed? one wonders. The lizards make no reply but merely crawl on their way. This empty, abandoned house is an enormous riddle whose answer is known to none. Formerly a small feudal estate, it bears the name La Grande Bretèche. The sight of that singular dwelling became one of the keenest pleasures of my sojourn in Vendôme, where Desplein had left me to look after a well-to-do patient. Was it not better than a ruin? A ruin is bound up with memories of an irrefutable reality, but this house—still standing, if suffering a slow demolition by a vengeful hand—this house held a secret, an unknown idea; at the very least, it bore witness to a caprice. More than once, after nightfall, I squeezed through the overgrown hedge that protected the grounds. Braving scratches and scrapes, I made my way into that garden with no master, that land now neither public nor private, and there I stayed for hours on end, contemplating its disarray. I would never have dreamt of consulting some talkative citizen of Vendôme in hopes of learning the story behind that strange sight. There I composed delicious novels in my head; I abandoned myself to little orgies of melancholy that filled me with delight. Had I known the perhaps perfectly ordinary cause of the house’s desolation, I would have been robbed of the unspoken poems that so intoxicated me. For me, this asylum embodied the most varied images of human existence, darkened by its sorrows: now a cloister, without the monks; now a silent cemetery, without the dead speaking to you in their epitaphic language; today the house of the leper, tomorrow that of Atreus; but it was above all the provinces, with their meditative ideas, their hourglass lives. Often I wept there; I never laughed. More than once I felt a surge of terror on hearing the rustle of a ringdove’s wings as it fled overhead. The ground there is damp; you must look out for lizards, vipers, and frogs, which wander with all the wild freedom of nature; above all you must have no fear of cold, for within a few moments you feel a chill mantle falling over your shoulders, like the hand of the commendatore on Don Giovanni’s neck. One evening I shuddered there: The wind had set a rusted old weathervane spinning, and its creak was like the plaint of the house itself, all this just as I was concluding a rather grim drama in my mind, an explanation for this sort of monumentalized sorrow. I returned to my inn, consumed by somber ideas. After my supper, the landlady came to me with a mysterious air and announced, ‘Monsieur Regnault is here, monsieur.’ ‘And who is Monsieur Regnault?’ ‘What, monsieur, you do not know Monsieur Regnault? Ah! How strange!’ she said, walking out. I found myself facing a tall, thin man, all in black, hat in hand, with a stance like a bull about to charge, presenting to me a sloping brow, a small pointed head, and a pallid face rather like a glass of murky water. He seemed the very model of some government minister’s private secretary. His suit was old and badly worn at the seams, but he had a diamond stickpin in his jabot and rings in his earlobes. ‘Monsieur, to whom do I have the honor?’ I asked. He sat down on a chair, warmed himself by my fire, set his hat on my table, and replied, rubbing his hands, ‘Oh, isn’t it cold! Monsieur, I am Monsieur Regnault.’ I nodded, saying to myself, ‘
Il bondo cani
!
What is he after?’ ‘I am,’ he went on, ‘a
notaire
in Vendôme.’ ‘Delighted, monsieur,’ I cried, ‘but I am not in a position to draw up my will, for reasons known only to me.’ ‘Beg pardon,’ he answered, raising his hand as if to still my tongue. ‘If I may, monsieur, if I may! I have learned that you are in the habit of stepping out for a stroll in the garden of La Grande Bretèche.’ ‘Yes, monsieur.’ ‘Beg pardon!’ he said, repeating his gesture. ‘That is a flagrant infraction. Monsieur, in the name of and as executor of the estate of the late Madame la Comtesse de Merret, I come to ask that you discontinue your visits. Beg pardon! I am not a Turk and do not wish to make too much of this. Besides, you have every right to know nothing of the circumstances that oblige me to let the finest house in Vendôme go to ruin. Nonetheless, monsieur, you seem a man of some learning, and must know that the law forbids incursions onto fenced property, under penalty of grave sanctions. A hedge is as good as a wall. But the current state of the house might justifiably serve to excuse your curiosity. I would like nothing better than to allow you to come and go freely in that house, but charged as I am with executing the wishes of the late countess, I have the honor, monsieur, of requesting that you never enter the garden again. I myself, monsieur, since the unsealing of the will, have not set foot in that house, which belongs, as I have had the honor of informing you, to the estate of Madame de Merret. We simply recorded the number of doors and windows to calculate the taxes, which I pay annually from a fund set up for that purpose by the late countess. Ah! My dear monsieur, her will caused quite a stir in Vendôme!’ Here the distinguished gentleman paused to blow his nose. I made no attempt to quell his loquacity, understanding full well that Madame de Merret’s legacy was the most significant event of his life, the source of his standing in this world, his glory, his Restoration. Farewell to my beautiful daydreams, my novels; I was thus in no way hostile to the pleasure of learning the truth from an official source. ‘Monsieur,’ I said, ‘would it be indiscreet to ask you the reasons for this strange whim?’ On hearing those words, the
notaire
’s face beamed with the deep delight of a man who loves nothing so much as straddling his hobbyhorse. He turned up his shirt collar with a satisfied air, pulled out his snuffbox, opened it, held it out to me; when I declined, he took a healthy pinch for himself. He was happy! A man with no hobbyhorse has no notion of all that life has to offer. A hobbyhorse is the precise middle ground between passion and monomania. At that moment, I understood the full sense of Sterne’s eloquent term, and I grasped with what joy Uncle Toby mounted his steed, aided by Corporal Trim. ‘Monsieur,’ said Monsieur Regnault, ‘I was once head clerk in the offices of Maître Roguin, in Paris. An excellent practice—perhaps you’ve heard of it? No? And yet the name has become widely known, owing to a most unfortunate bankruptcy. Lacking the wherewithal to open my own practice in Paris, the fees having been raised in 1816, I came here to purchase my predecessor’s. I had relatives in Vendôme, among them a very well-to-do aunt, who gave me her daughter in marriage . . . ’ After a brief pause, he continued: ‘Monsieur, three months after obtaining my license from the Ministry of Justice, I was summoned one evening, just as I was about to retire (I was not yet married), by Madame la Comtesse de Merret, from her Château de Merret. Her chambermaid, a fine girl who today serves in this very hostelry, was waiting at my door with the countess’s coach. Ah! Beg pardon! I must tell you, monsieur, that the Comte de Merret had gone off to die in Paris two months before I came to this place. He died a sordid death, after indulging in all manner of excesses. You understand? The day of his departure, the countess had vacated La Grande Bretèche, taking everything with her. Some even claim that she burned the furniture, the tapestries, in short everything, for the most part of no very great value, that filled the premises currently rented by the aforementioned . . . (Wait, what am I saying? Forgive me, for a moment I thought I was dictating a lease.) That she burned them,’ he resumed, ‘on the grounds of the Château de Merret. Have you ever been to Merret, monsieur? No,’ he said, answering for me. ‘Ah! It’s a beautiful place! For some three months,’ he went on after a quick shake of the head, ‘the count and countess had lived a curious life; they no longer received visitors, madame had her rooms on the ground floor, monsieur on the second. When the countess was alone, she went out only for church. Later, at home in her château, she refused to see the friends of both sexes who came calling. She was already very changed when she left La Grande Bretèche for Merret. That dear woman . . . (I say “dear” because this diamond comes to me from her, and yet I saw her only once in my life!) The good woman was very ill; no doubt she had abandoned all hope of recovery, for she died without allowing a doctor to be summoned. Many of our ladies believed she was not in full possession of her faculties. My curiosity was thus singularly aroused, monsieur, by the news that Madame de Merret desired my assistance. I was not the only one to take an interest in this matter. That very evening, late though it was, all the city knew I was bound for Merret. The chambermaid offered only evasive replies to the questions I posed on the way; nonetheless, she informed me that her mistress had that day been given last rites by the curé of Merret and seemed unlikely to live through the night. I arrived at the château toward eleven o’clock. I climbed the great staircase. I walked through several large salons, high-ceilinged and dark, devilishly cold and damp, and finally came to the master bedroom, where the countess lay. From the rumors I’d heard of this woman (monsieur, I would never be done with it if I set out to repeat all the tales people told of her!), I pictured her as a coquette. Just imagine, I had great difficulty even finding her in that enormous bed! It is true that to light that vast room, with molded friezes straight out of the ancien régime, so liberally coated with dust that the mere sight of them made you sneeze, she had only an old Argand lamp. Ah! But you’ve never been to Merret! Well, monsieur, the bed is one of those beds of days gone by, with a high canopy covered in floral calico. A small nightstand sat near the bed, and on it I saw
The
Imitation of Christ
, which, parenthetically, I bought for my wife, along with the lamp. There was also a large bergère for the chambermaid and two straight-backed chairs. No fire, as it happens. No other furniture than that. It wouldn’t have filled ten lines in an inventory. Ah! My dear monsieur, if you had seen, as I saw it then, that vast room, those brown tapestries on the walls, you would have thought yourself transported into a veritable novel. It was cold—and more than that, it was funereal,’ he added, raising one arm in a theatrical gesture and marking a pause. ‘I approached the bed, my eyes searching, and finally spied Madame de Merret, once again thanks to the lamp, which shone onto the pillows. Her face was yellow as wax and resembled two hands joined in prayer. Her lace bonnet revealed her hair, quite beautiful but white as cotton thread. She was sitting up with what seemed considerable difficulty. Her large black eyes, no doubt ravaged by fever, almost dead even now, scarcely moved beneath the bones under her eyebrows. This,’ he said, pointing to his brow. ‘Her forehead was damp. Her wizened hands were like bones wrapped in soft skin; her veins stood out clearly, her muscles. She must once have been very beautiful, but now her appearance filled me with an emotion without name. Never, according to those who buried her, had a living creature grown so emaciated and gone on living. Oh, it was terrible to see! The poor woman had been so cruelly withered by illness that she was nothing more than a ghost. Her pale purple lips seemed not to move when she spoke. My profession has accustomed me to such sights—I have been summoned to more than one deathbed, to record a patient’s last wishes—but I will confess that all the agonies and lamentations I’ve witnessed pale to nothing beside that silent, solitary woman in that enormous château. I heard not the slightest sound, I saw no movement of the covers, as her breathing might cause; I stood riveted to the spot, lost in mute contemplation. I might almost still be there at this moment. Finally her large eyes moved; she tried to raise her right hand, then let it drop back to the bed, and these words emerged from her mouth, like a whisper, for her voice was already no longer a voice: “I’ve been waiting for you most impatiently.” Her cheeks flushed bright red. Speaking, monsieur, was a great struggle for her. “Madame,” I answered. She gestured me to be still. At that moment, her old housemaid stood and whispered in my ear, “Do not speak: The countess cannot hear a sound, and anything you say might upset her.” I sat down again. A few moments later, Madame de Merret summoned all her remaining strength and moved her right arm, slipping it under the pillow with great effort; she stopped for a brief moment, then, expending the last of her forces, slowly extracted her hand. By the time she pulled out a sealed paper, drops of sweat were falling from her forehead. “I entrust to you my will,” she said. “Ah! My God! Ah!” That was all. She took up a crucifix that was lying on her bed, pressed it quickly to her lips, and died. I still shiver when I think of the expression in her frozen gaze. How she must have suffered! There was joy in her final glance, an emotion that remained imprinted in those lifeless eyes. I took the will, and when it was opened I saw that Madame de Merret had named me her executor. Apart from a few individual legacies, she left all her assets to the Hospital of Vendôme. But here are her instructions concerning La Grande Bretèche. She ordered me to leave this house, for fifty full years, starting from the day of her death, just as it was at the moment of her demise, forbidding all entry into the rooms, forbidding even the most minor repair. She went so far as to set aside a pension to hire guards, should they be required for the perfect fulfillment of her intentions. At the end of that time, assuming her wishes have not been violated, the house will become the property of my heirs, for monsieur knows that a