The Human Comedy (12 page)

asleep
, do you hear?—come downstairs and tell me.’ Monsieur de Merret had kept one eye on his wife as he delivered these orders; now he calmly joined her before the fire and began to recount the events of the billiard match and the discussions at the club. Rosalie returned to find Monsieur and Madame de Merret chatting most amicably. The gentleman had recently had new ceilings made for his ground-floor reception rooms. Plaster is a rarity in Vendôme, its cost increased by the need to transport it in; he had thus ordered a generous quantity, knowing he would always find buyers for the excess. It was this that inspired the plan he was now setting in motion. ‘Monsieur Gorenflot is here,’ said Rosalie, quietly. ‘Show him in!’ her master answered. Madame de Merret paled a little on seeing the mason. ‘Gorenflot,’ said the husband, ‘go and fetch some bricks from the shed, enough to wall up the closet; you can use my leftover plaster to seal the door.’ Then, drawing Rosalie and the mason to him, he said in low tones, ‘Listen, Gorenflot, you will sleep here tonight. But tomorrow morning, you will have a passport to go to a foreign country, and a city that I will name. I’ll give you six thousand francs for the journey. You will live in that city for ten years; should it not be to your liking, you may move to another, so long as it’s in the same country. You will go by way of Paris, where you will wait for me. There, I will guarantee you by contract a further six thousand francs, payable on your return, assuming you fulfill our bargain’s conditions. That price should assure your most profound silence on all that you do here tonight. And for you, Rosalie: ten thousand francs, to be delivered only on your wedding day, so long as you marry Gorenflot, but in order for the marriage to take place, you must hold your tongue. Otherwise, no dowry.’ ‘Rosalie,’ said Madame de Merret, ‘come and do my hair.’ The husband paced lazily around the room, watching over the door, the mason, and his wife, taking care to conceal all suspicion. Gorenflot could not help making some noise. Seizing on a moment when the worker was unloading bricks and her husband happened to be at the far end of the room, Madame de Merret whispered to Rosalie, ‘A thousand francs annual pension for you, my dear child, if you can tell Gorenflot to leave a gap at the bottom.’ Then, aloud, she offhandedly ordered her, ‘Go and help him!’ In all the time Gorenflot spent sealing the doorway, Monsieur and Madame de Merret did not speak a word. On the husband’s part, this silence was a stratagem, not wanting to give his wife the occasion to speak coded words to the others; in the case of Madame de Merret, it was prudence or pride. When the bricks filled half the doorway, the quick-witted mason waited for the gentleman to turn his back, then struck one of the door’s two windows with his pickax. This gave Madame de Merret to understand that Rosalie had spoken to Gorenflot. The three of them then saw the face of a man, dusky and tanned, black hair, eyes afire. Before her husband turned around, the poor woman had time to nod at the foreigner, for whom this sign signified, ‘Do not lose hope!’ At four o’clock, just as the sky was beginning to lighten, for it was the month of September, the wall was done. The mason remained under Jean’s guard, and Monsieur de Merret went to bed in his wife’s room. The next morning, on rising, he said blithely, ‘Ah! Hang it all, I’ve got to go to the mayor’s for the passport.’ He put on his hat, took three steps toward the door, turned back, took the crucifix. His wife was trembling with joy. ‘He means to call at Duvivier’s,’ she thought. As soon as the gentleman was gone, Madame de Merret summoned Rosalie and cried out, in a desperate voice, ‘The pickax, the pickax, and to work! I watched how Gorenflot went about it last night; we’ll have time to make a hole and repair it again.’ In the blink of an eye, Rosalie came back with a sort of ax, and with a vigor that cannot be described, the countess began to demolish the wall. She had already dislodged several bricks when, stepping back to strike a blow still more furious than the last, she saw Monsieur de Merret behind her and fainted away. ‘Lay madame on her bed,’ said the gentleman coldly. Foreseeing what would take place in his absence, he had set a trap for his wife; he had quite simply written the mayor and sent for Duvivier. The jeweler arrived after the room had been tidied up. ‘Duvivier,’ asked the gentleman, ‘did you not buy several crucifixes from the Spaniards that passed through this town?’ ‘No, monsieur.’ ‘Very well, I thank you,’ he said, shooting his wife a glance fierce as a tiger’s. ‘Jean,’ he added, turning to his valet, ‘I’ll be taking my meals in Madame de Merret’s bedchamber; she’s not well, and I won’t leave her side until she has fully recovered.’ For twenty days that heartless man did not leave his wife’s room. In the beginning, noises could sometimes be heard from the walled-up closet, and Joséphine stared imploringly at her husband in hopes that he might spare the dying stranger’s life. He would not allow her to speak a word, and his answer was always the same: ‘You swore on the cross that was no one was there.’”

The tale at an end, all the women rose from the table, and with this the spell Bianchon had cast on them was broken. Nevertheless, some had felt almost cold on hearing those final words.

Translated by Jordan Stump

THE RED INN

To M. Le Marquis de Custine

S
OME TIME
ago, a Paris banker with extensive commercial relations in Germany was giving a dinner party for a man who till then was unknown to him, an acquaintance of the sort that businessmen acquire here and there through their correspondence. This friend, the head of a rather large firm in Nuremberg, was a good hefty German, a man of taste and erudition, above all a connoisseur of pipes, with a broad handsome Nuremberger face, the wide smooth brow crossed with a few sparse strands of blond hair. He looked the very model of the sons of that pure noble Germania, so fertile in honorable characters, and whose peaceable ways have never failed even after seven invasions. The foreigner laughed readily, listened attentively, and drank remarkably well; to all appearances he enjoyed our champagne wines perhaps as much as he would his own straw-toned Johannisbergers. His name was Hermann, like most Germans whom authors write about. As a man who can do nothing lightly, he sat solid at the banker’s table, eating with that Teutonic appetite famous throughout Europe and bidding a conscientious farewell to the cuisine of
our great Carême
. To do his guest honor, the master of the house had gathered a few good friends, capitalists and merchants, and a number of pretty and pleasant ladies whose agreeable banter and open manner harmonized with the cordial German spirit. Truly, if you could have experienced, as I had the good fortune to do, this merry gathering of people who had retracted their commercial claws to speculate instead on life’s pleasures, you would have found it difficult to detest usurious loans or deplore bankruptcies. Man cannot spend all his time doing evil, and even in the company of pirates there must be some sweet moments on their sinister ship when you feel as if you were aboard a pleasure yacht.

“Before we part tonight, Monsieur Hermann is going to tell us another one of those chilling German stories.” The announcement came from a pale, blond young woman who had doubtless read the stories of Hoffmann and Walter Scott. She was the banker’s only child, a ravishing creature who was putting the final touches to
her education at the Gymnase
and adored the plays that theater presented.

The guests were in the contented state of languor and quiet that results from an exquisite meal, when we have demanded a little too much of our digestive capacities. Leaning back in their chairs, wrists and fingers resting lightly upon the table’s edge, a few guests played lazily with the gilded blades of their knives. When a dinner reaches that lull some people will work over a pear seed, others roll a pinch of bread between thumb and index finger, lovers shape clumsy letters out of fruit scraps, the miserly count their fruit pits and line them up on their plates the way a theater director arranges his extras at the rear of the stage. These small gastronomic felicities go unremarked by Brillat-Savarin, an otherwise observant writer. The serving staff had disappeared. The dessert table looked like a squadron after the battle, all dismembered, plundered, wilted. Platters lay scattered over the table despite the hostess’s determined efforts to set them back in order. A few people stared at some prints of Switzerland lined up on the gray walls of the dining room. No one was irritable; we have never known anyone to remain unhappy while digesting a good meal. We enjoy lingering in a becalmed state, a kind of midpoint between the reverie of a thinker and the contentment of a cud-chewing animal, a state that should be termed the physical melancholy of gastronomy.

Thus the guests turned happily toward the good German, all of them delighted to have a tale to listen to, even a dull one. For during that benign interval, a storyteller’s voice always sounds delicious to our sated senses; it promotes their passive contentment. As an observer of scenes, I sat admiring these faces bright with smiles, lit by the candles and flushed dark by good food; their various expressions produced some piquant effects, seen through the candlesticks and porcelain baskets, the fruits and the crystal.

My imagination was suddenly caught by the appearance of the guest directly across the table from me. He was a man of average height, somewhat plump, cheerful, with the style and bearing of a stockbroker, and apparently endowed with only a very ordinary turn of mind. I had not noticed him before, but just then his face, probably shadowed by a flicker of the light, seemed to me to change character: It had gone dull, earthen, furrowed with purplish folds. You might have described it as the cadaverous head of a dying man. He was immobile like a figure painted into a diorama; his vacant eyes stayed fixed on the glittering facets of a crystal stopper on a bottle, but he was certainly not counting them and seemed lost in some strange contemplation of the future or the past. I studied that puzzling face at some length, and it made me wonder: “Is he ill? Has he drunk too much? Has the market collapsed? Is he considering how to swindle his creditors?”

“Look across there!” I murmured to the woman on my left, indicating the face of the unknown fellow. “Wouldn’t you say that’s the look of a bankruptcy about to happen?”

“Oh,” she answered, “he’d be looking jollier if that were the case.” With a graceful tilt of the head, she added: “If that man should ever lose his fortune, it would be world news. He has millions in real estate. He used to be a provisioner for the imperial armies—a good fellow and rather unusual. He married his second wife as a financial move, but he does make her extremely happy. He has a pretty daughter, whom he refused to acknowledge for a very long time, but his son died—unfortunately killed in a duel—and that forced him to take the girl back into the household as they could no longer have children. The poor girl has suddenly become one of the richest heiresses in Paris. The loss of his only son has plunged this dear man into a grief that surfaces from time to time.”

At that moment, the provisioner lifted his eyes to mine; his gaze made me shiver, it was so somber and pensive! That glance must sum up a whole lifetime. But suddenly his face turned merry: He took up the crystal stopper, set it crisply onto a carafe full of water that stood before his plate, and turned his head toward Monsieur Hermann with a smile. The man was beatific with gastronomic pleasure; he probably hadn’t a thought in his head, wasn’t pondering a thing. I immediately felt rather ashamed of squandering my powers of divination
in anima vili
—on a mere thickheaded financier. While I was engaged in pointless phrenological observation, the good German had filled his nose with a dose of snuff and started on his story. It would be difficult to reproduce the tale in the same terms, what with the man’s frequent interpolations and verbose digressions, so I have written it again here in my own way, leaving out the Nuremberger’s mistakes and using any poetic and interesting elements it might contain, with the boldness of those writers who somehow neglect to state on the title page of their publications: “Translated from the German.”

THE IDEA AND THE FACT

Late in the month of Vendémiaire in year VII of the republican era—or according to the style of our day, October 20, 1799—two young men left the city of Bonn in the morning and by day’s end had reached the outskirts of Andernach, a small town on the left bank of the Rhine a few leagues from Koblenz.

At the time, the French army under General Augereau was holding maneuvers before the Austrian forces then occupying the right bank of the river. The republican division headquarters was Koblenz, and one of the demi-brigades from Augereau’s corps was stationed at Andernach. The two young travelers were French. By their uniforms (blue mixed with white and faced in red velvet), by their sabers, and especially by the hats covered in green oilcloth and ornamented with a tricolor plume, even the German peasants could recognize that these were military surgeons, men of science and skill who were generally well liked, not only by the army but also by the people whose lands the French troops had invaded. At that time, many youngsters of good family who were snatched from their medical training by General Jourdan’s recent conscription law quite naturally chose to continue their studies on the battlefield rather than be assigned to action as a soldier, a role so little suited to their previous training and their peaceable purpose. Men of science, pacific and useful, such young men did some good amid so much misery, and they got on well with the educated people in the various countries through which the cruel civilization of the Republic drove its way. Each carrying a travel warrant and credentials as assistant surgeon signed by Coste and Bernadotte, the two were reporting to their assigned demi-brigade. Both came of bourgeois families in Beauvais who were only moderately wealthy but in which the genteel manners and loyalties of the provinces were transmitted as part of their legacy. Drawn by a curiosity quite natural in the young to see the theater of war before they were actually obliged to begin their duties, they had traveled by coach as far as Strasbourg. Maternal prudence had provided them each with only a meager sum of money, but they felt rich with their few louis in hand, a veritable treasure in a period when the revolutionary banknotes had dropped to their lowest value and gold was worth a great deal.