Authors: Honore de Balzac
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can accept no bequeathal; otherwise, La Grande Bretèche will be passed on to her legal inheritors, but with it will come the obligation to fulfill the conditions of a codicil that can only be unsealed when those fifty years have elapsed. No one has come forward to contest the will, and so . . . ’ With this, and leaving his sentence there, the oblong
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looked at me triumphantly, and I completed his delight with a few complimentary words. ‘Monsieur,’ I said in conclusion, ‘your story has stirred me so deeply that even now I believe I can see that dying woman, paler than her sheets; her shining eyes frighten me, and I shall dream of her tonight. But you must surely have wondered at the instructions contained in that singular will.’ ‘Monsieur,’ he answered, with comical dignity, ‘I never permit myself to judge the conduct of those who have honored me with the gift of a diamond.’ I soon loosened the tongue of the scrupulous
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of Vendôme, who passed along, not without several lengthy digressions, the thoughts offered up by various local sages of both sexes, whose judgments are as holy writ in Vendôme. But so contradictory were those reflections, and so rambling, that I nearly drifted off, despite my great interest in this living history. My curiosity was no match for the grandiloquent delivery and monotonous tones of the
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, no doubt long used to hearing himself speak and to commanding the rapt attention of his clients or compatriots. At long last, to my relief, he went on his way. ‘Ah! Ah! Monsieur, many people,’ he told me on the stairs, ‘would like to live another forty-five years—but, beg pardon!’ And slyly he laid his right index finger alongside his nostril, as if to say: Listen closely now! ‘But if that is your goal,’ he said, ‘you’d best not be in your sixties.’ I closed the door, roused from my apathy by this last quip, which the
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thought very witty, and then I sat down in my armchair, propping my feet on the two andirons of my fireplace, my mind consumed by a living Ann Radcliffe novel built on the material offered by Monsieur Regnault. A few moments later, my door turned on its hinges, opened by a woman’s adroit hand. My hostess came in, a fat, jolly sort, always in a sunny mood, who had missed her calling: She was a woman of Flanders, who should have been born into a canvas by Teniers. ‘Well, monsieur?’ she said. ‘I imagine Monsieur Regnault regaled you with his beloved tale of La Grande Bretèche.’ ‘He did, Madame Lepas.’ ‘And what did he say?’ In a few words I repeated the cold, dark story of Madame de Merret. With each sentence my hostess bent nearer, peering at me with an innkeeper’s perspicacity, a sort of happy medium between the instinct of the gendarme, the cunning of the spy, and the guile of the shopkeeper. ‘My dear lady Lepas!’ I said as I concluded. ‘You seem to know something more of all this. Am I wrong? Why else should you have come up to see me?’ ‘Ah! Word of an honest woman, and as true as my name is Lepas—’ ‘Swear no oaths, your eyes are heavy with secrets. You knew Monsieur de Merret. What manner of man was he?’ ‘Oh, Monsieur de Merret was a fine figure of a man, and he went on and on, he was so tall! An upstanding gentleman from Picardy, and a touch thin-skinned, as we say around here. He always paid cash, just so there’d never be trouble! He was hot-blooded, do you see? The local ladies all found him most amiable.’ ‘Because he was hot-blooded!’ I answered. ‘Quite likely,’ she said. ‘You understand, monsieur, he must have had something going for him, as they say, to marry Madame de Merret, who, no offense to the others, was the richest, most beautiful lady in all the area. She had an income of something like twenty thousand pounds. The whole town came to her wedding. She made an adorable bride, charming, a perfect jewel of a woman. Ah! They were a lovely couple back then!’ ‘Was their household a happy one?’ ‘Hmm hmm, yes and no, as best we can tell, for you can well imagine, they didn’t cozen much with the likes of us! Madame de Merret was a wonderful woman, sweetness itself, perhaps a bit put-upon by her husband’s hot temper, but we all liked him, even if he was a little proud. That’s just how the man was, and it was nobody’s business but his. When you’re noble, you know . . . ’ ‘And yet there must have been some sort of catastrophe, for Monsieur and Madame de Merret to part ways so abruptly?’ ‘I never said a word about any catastrophe, monsieur. I don’t know the first thing about it.’ ‘I see. Now I know you know everything.’ ‘Well then, monsieur, I’ll tell you the whole story. Seeing Monsieur Regnault heading up to your rooms, I had a feeling he was going to tell you about Madame de Merret, in connection with La Grande Bretèche. That gave me the idea of having a nice heart-to-heart with you, as you seem to me a man of good counsel, not at all the sort to betray a poor woman such as myself, who’s never done any harm to anyone and who nevertheless now finds herself tormented by her conscience. I’ve never dared bare my soul to these people around here—they’re a bunch of chattering parrots, with tongues hard as steel! And besides, monsieur, I’ve never had a traveler who stayed so long as you in my inn, someone I might tell the story of the fifteen thousand francs—’ ‘My dear Madame Lepas!’ I answered, stanching that torrent of words. ‘If your confession is of a nature to compromise me, I won’t be burdened with it for anything in the world—’ ‘Have no fear,’ she said, interrupting me. ‘You’ll see.’ This insistence suggested that I was not the first she’d entrusted with this secret of which I was supposedly the sole repository, and I settled down to listen. ‘Monsieur,’ she said, ‘years ago the emperor sent a number of Spaniards here to Vendôme, prisoners of war or what have you, and I was asked to provide lodging at government expense for a young Spaniard who’d been released on parole. Parole or no parole, he had to go and show his face to the subprefect every day. He was a Spanish grandee, no less! He had a name with an
os
and a
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, Bagos de Férédia or some such thing. I have his name written down in my register; you can go and see it, if you like. Oh! He was a most handsome young man, for a Spaniard—you know people say they’re all homely. He can’t have been more than five feet two or three inches tall, but nicely put together; he had small hands, and the way he looked after them! Ah! It was something to see. He had as many brushes for his hands as a woman has for all her primping put together! He had a big shock of black hair and an eye full of fire; his complexion was a touch coppery, but I liked it all the same. He wore linens like I’ve never seen on anyone, and remember, I’ve put up princesses, along with General Bertrand, the Duc and Duchesse d’Abrantès, Monsieur Decazes, the King of Spain, I could go on. He didn’t eat much, but you couldn’t hold that against him, he was always so polite and so amiable. Oh! I was very fond of him indeed, though he didn’t speak four words in a day, and there was no way to have a conversation with him. You could talk all you liked, but he never answered. It was a quirk of his, though from what I’ve heard they’re all just the same. He read his breviary like a priest; he went to Mass and all the services regularly. And where did he choose to sit? We only noticed it later: not two steps away from Madame de Merret’s chapel. That was where he sat down on his first visit to our church, so no one ever imagined he had an ulterior motive. Besides, he never took his nose out of his prayer book, that poor young man! In the evening, he liked to walk on the big hill, in the ruins of the château. That was his one amusement, poor thing, it put him in mind of his homeland. They say it’s all mountains in Spain! Almost right from the start, he loved to spend time up there. It worried me, not seeing him come back before midnight, but we soon got used to his little fancies. He took the front door key, and we stopped waiting up for him. He was staying in our house on rue des Casernes. And then one of our grooms told us a curious thing: He was taking the horses for a bath in the river one evening and thought he saw the Spanish grandee in the distance, swimming along like a regular fish. Next time I saw him, I told him to look out for the floating grasses, and he didn’t seem happy to have been spotted in the water. Finally, monsieur, one day, or one morning, we didn’t find him in his room; he hadn’t come back. I gave the place a good going-over, and finally opened his table drawer, where I found a note, and then fifty of those Spanish gold coins they call portugaises, worth about five thousand francs, and then on top of that ten thousand francs’ worth of diamonds in a little sealed box. The note said that if he didn’t come back we were to use that money and those diamonds to fund Masses thanking God for his escape and safety. My husband was still with me in those days, and he ran off to hunt for him. And here’s the queer thing! He came back with the Spaniard’s clothes, which he’d found under a big rock, in a sort of pier on the bank of the river on the château side, more or less directly in front of La Grande Bretèche. No one would have seen my husband take them; it was too early in the morning. Once he’d read the letter, he burned all the clothes, and we reported that he’d escaped, just like Count Férédia wanted. The subprefect sent the whole gendarmerie out on his trail, but they never did catch him. Lepas thought the Spaniard had drowned. Myself, I’m not so sure. My idea is that he had something to do with that Madame de Merret business, because Rosalie told me her mistress had a silver-and-ebony crucifix she so loved that she wanted to be buried with it, and when he first came here Monsieur Férédia had a silver-and-ebony crucifix that I never saw with him again. Now, monsieur, is it not true that I should feel no remorse over the Spaniard’s fifteen thousand francs, and that they truly are mine?’ ‘Certainly. But you never tried to question Rosalie?’ I asked her. ‘Oh! I did indeed, monsieur. But what can you do? The girl’s like a wall. She knows something, but there’s no way to wring it out of her.’ After a few more moments’ conversation, my hostess left me in the grips of vague, dark ideas, a yearning to understand, as any good novel inspires, a religious terror not unlike the profound sentiment that seizes us when we enter a dark church by night and spot a tremulous glimmer between the distant arches; a hesitant figure glides along, a rustling gown or cassock breaks the silence . . . a shiver runs through us. The image of La Grande Bretèche appeared fantastically before me, its tall grasses, its sealed windows, its rusted hinges, its locked doors, its empty rooms. I tried to find some way into that mysterious abode, seeking the key that would unlock this solemn story, this drama that had ended with three people dead. In my eyes, Rosalie was the most interesting creature in all of Vendôme. Examining her, I saw signs of unspoken thoughts, for all the simple good health that radiated from her dimpled face. She had in her some essence of remorse or anticipation; her manner bespoke a secret, like that of the devout women you see in church, rapt in over-fervent prayer, like the young infanticide with her child’s last shriek still ringing in her ears. Outwardly, nonetheless, she was naïve and unpolished, there was no criminality in her dim-witted smile, and you would have thought her perfectly innocent based simply on the sight of the large red-and-blue-checked fichu that covered her generous bust, framed, squeezed, bound by a dress of red and violet stripes. ‘No,’ I thought, ‘I will not leave Vendôme until I have learned the full story of La Grande Bretèche. And to that end I will become Rosalie’s lover, if need be.’ ‘Rosalie!’ I said to her one evening. ‘May I help you, monsieur?’ ‘You’re not married, are you?’ She gave a small start. ‘Oh! I’ll have no lack of men, when the fancy to ruin my life strikes me!’ she said with a laugh. She’d immediately recovered from her emotion, for all women have their own particular form of sangfroid, from the grande dame to the maidservant, inclusive. ‘A fresh, appealing girl such as you should have no lack of suitors! But tell me, Rosalie, why go to work as a chambermaid when you’ve been in the employ of Madame de Merret? Did she not leave you some sort of pension?’ ‘Oh! She did indeed! But, monsieur, my place here is the best in all Vendôme.’ This response was of the sort that judges and lawyers call dilatory. In this vast novel, Rosalie seemed to occupy the square at the very middle of a checkerboard; all the interest of the tale was centered on her, and all the truth; I thought her bound up in the tale’s mainspring. This was no ordinary seduction to be undertaken; the girl held within her the last chapter of a novel, and so, from that moment on, Rosalie became the object of my every attention. After careful study, I found in her, as in all women of whom we make our principal preoccupation, a whole host of qualities: She was clean, conscientious; she was beautiful, that goes without saying; she soon took on all the allures that our desire lends to women, whatever their situation in life. Two weeks after the
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’s visit, one evening, or rather one morning, for it was very early, I said to Rosalie, ‘Tell me all you know about Madame de Merret, won’t you?’ ‘Oh,’ she answered, recoiling, ‘don’t ask that of me, Monsieur Horace!’ Her lovely face dimmed, her bright, youthful colors faded, and her eyes lost their glistening, innocent glow. ‘Well,’ she went on, ‘since you ask, I’ll tell you, but you must keep my secret!’ ‘Come now, my poor girl, I’ll keep all your secrets with the probity of a thief, the most loyal there is.’ ‘If it’s all the same to you,’ she said to me, ‘I’d rather you keep it with yours.’ With this, she put her fichu to rights and sat up in a storyteller’s pose; for the body must be secure and at ease before we can tell a good tale. The best narratives are spun at a certain hour —look at all of us sitting here at this table! No one has ever told a good story on his feet nor with an empty stomach. Now, a whole volume would scarcely suffice to faithfully reproduce Rosalie’s meandering eloquence, but since as it happens the event of which she offered me a tangled knowledge lies between Madame Lepas’s chatter and the
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’s, just as the middle terms of a mathematical ratio lie between the two extremes, I can recount it in just a few words. With some abridgement, then, here it is. The room occupied by Madame de Merret at La Bretèche lay on the ground floor. In one wall, a small closet, some four feet deep, served as her wardrobe. Three months before the evening in question, Madame de Merret had fallen ill, gravely enough that her husband had taken to sleeping upstairs, so as not to disturb her. By one of those unforeseeable strokes of fate, that evening he returned two hours later than usual from his club, where he often went to read the papers and talk politics with the locals. His wife thought him at home, in bed and asleep. But the invasion of France had sparked a most animated discussion; the billiard match had grown heated; he’d lost forty francs, an enormous sum in Vendôme, where everyone saves and where life is lived within the boundaries of an admirable modesty that may well be the source of a genuine happiness, for which no Parisian cares a whit. Monsieur de Merret had fallen into the habit, on his return from the club, of simply asking Rosalie if his wife had retired for the night; the answer was always affirmative, and so he went straight up to his rooms, with an amiability born of trust and routine. This particular night, he fancied he might pay a call on Madame de Merret, to tell her of his misadventure and perhaps seek some manner of consolation as well. He had found Madame de Merret most fetchingly dressed at dinner; now, on his way home from the club, he told himself that his wife’s illness had passed, her beauty returning as she convalesced—and he noticed this, as husbands notice everything, a bit late. Rather than call for Rosalie, who was then occupied in the kitchen watching the coachman and the cook play a tense round of brisque, Monsieur de Merret made for his wife’s bedroom, lit by the lantern he’d set down on the first step of the stairway. His distinctive footfalls echoed off the arched ceiling of the corridor. Turning the key to his wife’s room, he thought he heard the closet door closing, but when he entered Madame de Merret was alone, standing before the fireplace. Naïvely, the husband thought it was Rosalie in the closet; nevertheless a burst of suspicion rang in his ear, like tolling bells, and put him on guard; he looked at his wife and found in her eyes something mysterious and wild. ‘You’re home very late,’ she said. He thought he detected a faint agitation in that voice, ordinarily so mild and gracious. Monsieur de Merret made no reply, for just then Rosalie came in. He was dumbstruck. He paced through the room, from one window to the other, arms crossed over his chest. ‘Have you had bad news? Are you ill?’ his wife timidly asked, as Rosalie undressed her. He said nothing. ‘Leave us,’ said Madame de Merret to her chambermaid, ‘I’ll put my curlpapers in myself.’ From the look on her husband’s face, she foresaw some manner of trouble, and she wanted to be alone with him. When Rosalie was gone, or supposed to be gone, for she lingered a few moments in the corridor, Monsieur de Merret planted himself before his wife and said to her coldly, ‘Madame, there is someone in your closet!’ She looked at her husband, impassive, and answered simply, ‘No, monsieur.’ Monsieur de Merret was sorely aggrieved by that ‘no’; he didn’t believe it. And yet never had his wife seemed to him purer nor more pious than at that moment. He stalked off to open the closet; Madame de Merret grasped his hand, stopped him, looked at him dolefully, and told him, with singular urgency, ‘If you find no one, understand that everything will be over between us!’ The remarkable dignity of his wife’s manner revived the gentleman’s deep esteem for her and inspired him to one of those resolutions that need only a grand theater to become immortal. ‘No,’ he said, ‘Joséphine, I won’t look. Whatever I find, we would be parted forever. Listen, I know how pure is your soul and how saintly your life; you would never throw all that away by committing a mortal sin.’ Madame de Merret looked at her husband, wild-eyed. ‘Here, here is your crucifix,’ the man added. ‘Swear to me before God that no one is there. I will believe you, and I will never open that door.’ Madame de Merret took the crucifix and said, ‘I swear.’ ‘Louder,’ said the husband, ‘and repeat: I swear before God that there is no one in that closet.’ She repeated the sentence without batting an eye. ‘Very well,’ said Monsieur de Merret coolly. And then, after a moment of silence: ‘This is a very fine thing you have here; I’ve not seen it before.’ He was studying that ebony crucifix, artistically carved and incrusted with silver. ‘I found it at Duvivier’s. He bought it from a Spanish monk when those prisoners came through Vendôme last year.’ ‘Ah!’ said Monsieur de Merret, replacing the crucifix on its nail; and he rang. A moment later Rosalie appeared. Monsieur de Merret went briskly to meet her, led her to the window that looked onto the garden, and said to her quietly, ‘I know that Gorenflot is eager to marry you, that poverty alone stands in your way, that you’ve told him you won’t be his wife until he establishes himself as a mason. Well, go and fetch him; tell him to come out at once and bring his trowel and tools. See to it that no one in his house is awakened but him; his reward will exceed your desires. Above all, leave this place without one word to anyone, or . . . ’ He scowled. Rosalie set off, but he called her back. ‘Here, take my passkey,’ he said. ‘Jean,’ cried Monsieur de Merret in a thundering voice from the corridor. Jean, who was both his coachman and his valet, abandoned his game of brisque and came to him. ‘Everyone to bed,’ said his master, beckoning him nearer, and in a whisper he added, ‘Once they’re all asleep—