The Human Comedy (28 page)

“Monsieur,” said the uncle, “for two years my heart has broken every day. Soon you will be exactly like me. You may not weep, but you will feel your grief all the same.”

“You’ve looked after her,” said the colonel, equal parts gratitude and jealousy in his eyes.

These two men understood each other. Again clasping hands, they stood motionless, contemplating the wonderful tranquillity that sleep had draped over the charming creature before them. Now and then Stéphanie sighed, and that sigh, which had every appearance of sensibility, left the poor colonel trembling with joy.

“Alas,” Monsieur Fanjat said gently, “do not be fooled, monsieur. You see her now as full of reason as she will ever be.”

Those who have spent hours looking on in delight as a loved one lies slumbering, someone whose eyes will smile at them on awakening, must surely understand the sweet, terrible emotion that now gripped the colonel. Here that sleep was an illusion; her awakening would be a death, and the most horrible of all deaths. Suddenly a young goat came bounding to the bench and sniffed at Stéphanie. Roused by the sound, she lightly rose to her feet, inspiring no alarm in the impulsive animal, but on spotting Philippe she fled to the cover of an elderberry hedge, her four-legged companion at her heels; then she threw out the small birdlike cry that the colonel had heard near the fence when the countess first appeared to d’Albon. Finally she climbed into a laburnum tree, perched among its green boughs, and peered at the “stranger” as intently as the forest’s most curious nightingale.

“Adieu, adieu, adieu!” she said, her tone unmarked by any trace of intelligence.

It was the indifference of a bird whistling its song.

“She doesn’t know me!” cried the colonel, despairing. “Stéphanie! It’s Philippe, your Philippe, Philippe.”

And the poor soldier strode toward the tree. When he was three paces away, the countess shot him a glance as if to challenge him, though with a sort of fright in her eyes; then, in one leap, she fled from the laburnum to a locust tree, and from there to a Norway spruce, where she swung from branch to branch with an incredible agility.

“Don’t chase after her,” Monsieur Fanjat told the colonel. “You would create an aversion that may well become insurmountable. I’ll help you to make yourself known to her and to tame her. Come to this bench. Pay the poor creature no mind, and you’ll soon find her creeping your way, ever so slowly, to examine you.”

“For her of all people not to recognize me, to flee me!” the colonel repeated, sitting down with his back against a tree whose boughs shaded a rustic bench, and he bowed his head over his breast. The doctor said nothing. Soon the countess nimbly climbed down from her spruce tree, flitting this way and that like a will-o’-the-wisp, sometimes swaying with the undulations of the wind-tossed boughs. On each branch she paused to peer at the stranger, but at last, seeing him so still, she dropped onto the grass, stood, and slowly stole toward him through the meadow. She stopped at a tree some ten feet from the bench, and Monsieur Fanjat quietly said to the colonel, “Carefully reach into my right-hand pocket and take out a few lumps of sugar. Show them to her, and she’ll come to you. For you, I will gladly forgo the pleasure of giving her these sweets myself. She loves sugar with a passion; you’ll soon have her approaching you and recognizing you without the slightest hesitation.”

“When she was a woman,” Philippe answered sadly, “she had no taste for sweets.”

The colonel clasped the lump of sugar between his right thumb and index finger and proffered it to Stéphanie, who once again let out her savage cry, bounding eagerly toward Philippe, then stopped, thwarted by the instinctive fear he aroused in her. Again and again, she looked at the sugar and then looked away, like those poor dogs whose masters forbid them to touch a morsel of food until, after a drawn-out recitation, the last letter of the alphabet has been spoken. Finally animal passion triumphed over fear; Stéphanie leapt toward Philippe, timidly put out her brown hand to seize her quarry, touched her lover’s fingers, clutched the sugar, and vanished into a thicket. This devastating spectacle left the colonel deeply forlorn. He dissolved into tears and fled into the drawing room.

“Is love then less courageous than friendship?” Monsieur Fanjat asked him. “Monsieur le baron, I have hope. My poor niece’s condition was once far more dire than this.”

“Is such a thing possible?” Philippe cried.

“She went about naked.”

The colonel made a gesture of horror and paled; thinking he glimpsed certain disturbing symptoms in that pallor, the doctor came and took his pulse, and found him in the grips of a violent fever. At his unyielding insistence, the colonel was put to bed, while the doctor prepared a mild dose of opium to ensure him a restful sleep.

Some eight days went by, the Baron de Sucy continually tortured by fits of mortal anguish; soon his eyes had no tears left to shed. So often shattered, his soul could not inure itself to the spectacle of the countess’s madness, but he made his peace, so to speak, with this cruel state of affairs and found moments of relief in his sorrow. His heroism knew no bounds. He found the courage to tame Stéphanie with offers of sweetmeats; he devoted so much thought to this ritual, he so skillfully calibrated each modest new step toward the conquest of his mistress’s instinct—the last lingering shred of her intelligence—that she was soon more at home here than ever before. Every morning, on rising, the colonel hurried down to the garden, and if, after a long search for the countess, he could not guess in what tree she was gently swaying, or in what corner she had nestled to play with a bird, or on what roof she was perched, he had only to whistle the well-known air “Partant pour la Syrie,” to which the memory of an episode from their love affair was attached. Immediately Stéphanie came running, light as a fawn. She had grown used to the sight of the colonel, and he no longer frightened her; soon she took to sitting on his knees, encircling him with her lithe, slender arm. In this position, so dear to lovers, Philippe slowly offered the greedy countess a few sweets. Sometimes, when she had eaten them all, she searched through his pockets, her gestures as mechanically purposeful as a monkey’s. Once she was satisfied that there was nothing more to be had, she looked at Philippe with an empty gaze, devoid of thought or recognition, and began to play with him; she tried to take off his boots to see his foot, she ripped his gloves, donned his hat; but she passively allowed him to run his hands through her hair, let him take her in his arms, and received ardent kisses without pleasure. When his tears flowed, she stared at him in silence; the whistling of “Partant pour la Syrie” she understood perfectly, but he could not make her speak her own name:
Stéphanie
. In all these heartbreaking endeavors, Philippe was buoyed by a hope that never deserted him. If, on a beautiful fall morning, he saw the countess peacefully sitting on a bench beneath a yellowing poplar, the pitiable lover lay down at her feet and gazed into her eyes as long as she would allow it, hoping to spy in them some new glimmer of lucidity; sometimes he fell prey to illusion and believed he had glimpsed a vibrancy in their hard, immobile gleam, a softening, a liveliness, and he cried out: “Stéphanie! Stéphanie! You can hear me, you can see me!” But she listened to the sound of that voice as she would to a noise, to the wind rustling the leaves, to the lowing of the cow on whose back she liked to clamber; and the colonel wrung his hands in despair, a despair whose sting never waned. His sorrow only grew with the passage of time and these pointless, repeated attempts. One evening, beneath a tranquil sky, in the silence and calm of that bucolic haven, the doctor glanced at the couple and saw the baron loading a pistol. The old physician understood that Philippe had given up hope; instantly the blood drained from his face, leaving him light-headed and weak, and if he succeeded in overcoming that impairment it was because he preferred his niece mad and living to dead. He came running.

“What are you doing?” he said.

“This one is for me,” the colonel answered, pointing to the loaded pistol beside him on the bench. “And this one for her,” he concluded, stuffing the wadding into the barrel of the weapon in his hand.

The countess was stretched out on the ground, playing with the bullets.

“Then you don’t know,” the doctor calmly replied, hiding his horror, “that last night while she was sleeping I heard her say ‘Philippe!’”

“She spoke my name!” cried the baron, dropping his pistol. Stéphanie snatched it up at once, but he wrenched it from her hands, picked up the weapon from the bench, and ran off.

“Poor dear child!” the doctor cried, relieved at the success of his fabrication. He pressed the madwoman to his bosom and went on: “He would have killed you, the selfish brute! Because he is suffering, he wants to see you dead. He doesn’t know how to love you for yourself, my child! But we forgive him, don’t we? He’s irrational. And you? You’re only mad. No, God alone may call you to His side. We think you unhappy because you no longer join in our sorrows, fools that we are! But,” he said, pulling her onto his knees, “you’re happy, nothing upsets you; you live life like a bird, like a deer.”

She pounced on a young blackbird that was hopping nearby on the ground, clasped it in her hands with a little cry of pleasure, smothered it, gazed at its dead body, and left it at the foot of a tree without another thought.

At first light the next day, the colonel came down to the garden, searching for Stéphanie, believing in happiness; failing to find her, he whistled. When his mistress appeared, he took her by the arm, and walking together for the first time, they made for a bower of yellowing trees, their leaves falling in the light breeze of morning. The colonel sat down, and Stéphanie settled unprompted onto his knees. Philippe was trembling with delight.

“My love,” he said to her, fervently kissing the countess’s hands, “I am Philippe.”

She looked at him curiously.

“Come,” he added, pressing her to him. “Do you feel my heart beating? All this time, it has beaten only for you. I still love you. Philippe isn’t dead, he’s right here, beneath you. You are my Stéphanie, and I am your Philippe.”

“Adieu,” she said, “adieu.”

The colonel quivered, for he believed he could see his joy spreading to his mistress. His heartfelt cry, born of a surge of hope, that last desperate bid of an undying love, a delirious passion, was reawakening his lover’s reason.

“Ah! Stéphanie, we will be happy.”

She let out a shriek of pleasure, and her eyes revealed a faint flicker of awareness.

“She recognizes me! Stéphanie!”

The colonel felt his heart swell, his eyes grow moist. But just then he saw that the countess was showing him a piece of sugar she’d discovered in his pocket as he spoke. He had taken for human thought what was only the faint glimmer of reason that a monkey’s cunning implies. Philippe fainted. Monsieur Fanjat found the countess sitting on the colonel’s still body. She was chewing her sugar, voicing her delight with coos that any visitor would have admired if, when she still had her reason, she had merrily attempted to imitate her parakeet or her cat.

“Ah! My friend,” cried Philippe, recovering his senses, “I die every day, every moment! I’m too much in love with her! If in her madness she retained some small trace of her womanhood, I could bear it. But to see her still a savage, devoid even of modesty, to see her—”

“You were hoping for madness as we see it at the opera,” the doctor said sharply. “Is your loving devotion subject to preconditions, then? What, monsieur! For you I have forgone the sad pleasure of feeding my niece, to you I have left the joy of playing with her, I have kept for myself only the most burdensome tasks. I watch over her while you sleep, I . . . Come, monsieur, abandon your hopes for her. Leave this sad hermitage. I have learned to live with that dear little creature; I understand her madness, I foresee her every move, I share her secrets. One day you shall thank me.”

The colonel left Bons-Hommes, to return only once. The doctor was distraught to have inflicted such grief on his guest, whom he was coming to love no less than his niece. If only one of the two lovers was to be pitied, it was surely Philippe: Was he not bearing the burden of a horrific sorrow all alone? The doctor made inquiries and learned that the poor colonel had retired to a property he owned close by Saint-Germain. Placing his faith in a dream, the baron had conceived a plan to restore the countess’s reason. Unbeknownst to the doctor, he spent the rest of the fall making ready for that ambitious undertaking. A small river flowed through his grounds; in the winter it flooded a broad marsh that bore some resemblance to the wetlands of the Berezina’s right bank. The nearby hilltop village of Satout completed the backdrop for that grim decor, like Studyanka looming over the floodplain. The colonel assembled a crew of workers to dig a canal that would stand in for the insatiable river where France’s greatest treasures, Napoleon and his army, were lost. Relying on his memories, Philippe created a copy of the riverbank where General Éblé had constructed his bridges. He sank trestles, then burned them in such a way as to evoke the blackened, ravaged beams that told the stragglers the road to France was now closed to them forever. The colonel brought in a load of debris, similar to the fragments with which his companions in sorrow had built their raft. To complete the illusion on which he had founded his last hope, he lay waste to his gardens. He ordered enough tattered uniforms and costumes to clothe several hundred peasants. He erected huts, campsites, batteries, then incinerated them. In short, he omitted nothing that might re-create that most horrible of all scenes, and he succeeded admirably. In the first days of December, when the snow had covered the ground in a thick mantle of white, he recognized the Berezina. Several of his comrades-in-arms, too, instantly recognized the scene of their past miseries, so chillingly lifelike was this counterfeit Russia. Monsieur de Sucy would not speak a word of this tragic re-creation, which was much discussed in certain Parisian circles at the time and diagnosed as a symptom of eccentricity.