The Human Comedy (23 page)

Toward the end of the day, he had become used to his perilous situation, and he almost enjoyed its anguish. His companion had become used to looking at him when he called in a falsetto voice: “Mignonne.” By sunset, Mignonne uttered a deep and melancholy cry several times.

“She is well brought up!” thought the cheerful soldier. “She is saying her prayers!” But this unspoken pleasantry came to him only when he had noticed his companion’s peaceful attitude. “Go on, my little blonde, I will let you go to bed first,” he said to her, counting heavily on escaping by foot as quickly as possible while she slept and finding another shelter for the night. The soldier waited impatiently for the moment of his getaway, and when it came, he walked vigorously in the direction of the Nile, but scarcely had he gone a quarter of a league in the sands than he heard the panther leaping behind him, periodically uttering a harsh cry, still more terrifying than the heavy sound of her leaps.

“Come now!” he said to himself. “She’s taken a shine to me . . . Perhaps this young panther never met anyone before, it is flattering to have won her first love!” At this moment the Frenchmen fell into one of those quicksand traps travelers so dread and from which it is impossible to extricate yourself. Feeling caught, he let out a cry of alarm, and the panther grabbed him by the collar with her teeth. And jumping powerfully backward, she pulled him from the abyss, as if by magic. “Ah, Mignonne,” cried the soldier, caressing her enthusiastically. “We’re bound to each other now in life and death. But no practical jokes, all right?” And he retraced his steps.

From then on the desert seemed populated. It held one being to whom the Frenchman could talk and whose ferocity was softened for him, although he could not grasp the reason for this unbelievable friendship. However powerful the soldier’s desire to remain standing and on the alert, he slept. Upon waking, he could not see Mignonne; he climbed the hill, and in the distance he glimpsed her moving by leaps and bounds according to the habit of those animals for whom running is out of the question because of the extreme flexibility of their spinal column. Mignonne arrived with her chops bloodied and received the necessary caresses from her companion, testifying by several deep purrs how happy she was with him. Her eyes turned with even more sweetness than the evening before on the man from Provence, who spoke to her as to a domestic animal.

“Ah, ah, mademoiselle, such a respectable girl you are, aren’t you? Do you see that? We love to be cuddled. Aren’t you ashamed? Perhaps you’ve eaten some Maghrebi? Well, well! They’re animals like you! But at least don’t go deceiving a Frenchman . . . or I will not love you anymore!”

She played the way a young dog plays with his master, rolling, sparring, patting each other by turns, and sometimes she aroused the soldier by putting her paw on him with a solicitous gesture.

Several days passed this way. Her company allowed the man from Provence to admire the sublime beauties of the desert. From the moment he found there alternating hours of fear and tranquillity, provisions, and a creature who occupied his thoughts, his soul was buffeted by contrasts . . . It was a life full of opposites. Solitude revealed all its secrets to him, wrapped him in its charms. In the sunrise and sunset he discovered unfamiliar dramas. A shiver went down his spine when he heard the soft whistling of a bird’s wings above his head—a rare passing creature—and saw the clouds merge together, multihued, ever-changing travelers! During the night he studied the effects of the moon on the oceans of sands where the simoon produced waves, undulations, and rapid changes. He lived the Orient’s day, he admired its marvelous pomp, and often, after enjoying the terrifying spectacle of a hurricane on that plain where the rising sands produced dry, red mists, fatal clouds, he saw the night come on with delight, followed by the life-giving coolness of the stars. He listened to the imaginary music of the spheres.

Then solitude taught him to savor the treasure of daydreams. He spent whole hours remembering trivia, comparing his past life to his life in the present. Finally, he was fascinated by his panther, for he had a need for love. Whether his will, powerfully projected, had modified his companion’s character, or she found abundant nourishment thanks to the combat unleashed in these deserts, she respected the life of the Frenchman, who no longer mistrusted her, seeing her so well tamed. He spent the greater part of his time sleeping, but he was forced to keep watch, like a spider in the middle of his web, so as not to miss the moment of his deliverance if someone should pass in the sphere bounded by the horizon. He had sacrificed his shirt to make a flag, hung on the top of a palm tree stripped of its foliage. Instructed by necessity, he knew how to find the means of keeping it flying by holding it out with sticks, for the wind might not have moved it at the very moment when the anticipated traveler would be looking in the desert.

It was during the long hours when hope abandoned him that he amused himself with the panther. He had come to know the different inflections of her voice, the expression in her eyes, had studied the caprices of all the spots that moderated the gold of her robe. Mignonne no longer growled even when he took her by the tuft at the end of her formidable tail in order to count the graceful decoration of black and white rings that shone in the sun like precious stones. He took pleasure in contemplating the supple, delicate lines of her contours, the whiteness of her belly, the grace of her head. But it was especially when she frisked about that he took such pleasure in watching her, and the agility, the youth of her movements always surprised him. He admired her suppleness when she began to leap, crawl, glide, burrow, cling, roll over, flatten herself, dash forward in every direction. She was lightning fast in passion, a block of granite slipping forward, and she froze at the word “Mignonne.”

One day under a fiery sun, a huge bird was gliding in the sky. The man from Provence left his panther to examine this new guest, but after a moment’s pause, the sultana let out a low growl. “God help me, I think she is jealous,” he cried to himself, seeing her eyes harden. “Virginie’s soul must surely have passed into this body!”

The eagle disappeared in the sky while the soldier admired the panther’s crouching haunches. There was such grace and youth in her shape! She was as pretty as a woman. The blond fur of her coat was matched by the delicate tint of matte white tones that colored her thighs. The profuse light from the sun made that vivid gold and those brown spots shine with ineffable allure. The man from Provence and the panther looked at each other with an intelligent understanding, the coquette trembled when she felt her friend’s nails scratch her skull, her eyes shone like two beams, then she closed them firmly.

“She has a soul,” he said, studying the calmness of this queen of the sands, gold and white like them, like them solitary and burning . . .

“Ah well,” my companion said to me, “I have read your plea in favor of animals. But how did it end between two beings so well suited to understand each other?”

“Ah, that’s it . . . They ended the way all grand passions end, through a misunderstanding! One or the other believes he has been betrayed, pride prevents understanding, stubbornness prompts a falling out.”

“And sometimes in the most exquisite moments,” she said. “One look, one exclamation is enough. Now will you finish this story?”

“It’s terribly difficult, but you understand what the old fellow had already confided in me when, finishing his bottle of champagne, he cried: ‘I don’t know how I’d hurt her, but she turned on me as if enraged, and with her sharp teeth she bit me in the thigh, weakly no doubt. As for me, believing that she wanted to devour me, I plunged my dagger into her throat. She rolled over letting out a cry that froze my heart, I saw her struggling while looking at me without anger. I would have given anything in the world, even the Legion of Honor that I didn’t yet have, to bring her back to life. It was as if I’d murdered a real person. And the soldiers who had seen my flag and who ran to my rescue, found me in tears . . . Well, monsieur,’ he continued after a moment of silence, ‘since then I’ve gone to war in Germany, Spain, Russia, and France. I’ve faithfully dragged my carcass all over and I’ve seen nothing equal to the desert . . . ah, how beautiful it is!’

“‘What do you feel there?’ I asked him.

“‘Oh, it can’t be put into words, young man. Besides, I don’t always regret my stand of palm trees and my panther . . . it’s only when I feel sad. In the desert, you see, there is everything and there is nothing.’

“‘Still, can you explain it to me?’

“‘Well,’ he went on, letting a gesture of impatience escape him, ‘it is God without men.’”

Paris, 1832
Translated by Carol Cosman

ADIEU

To Prince Frédéric Schwarzenberg

“C
OME
along now, deputy, representative of the people and the Centrist Party, forward! We’ll have to do better than this if we want to sit down to dinner along with the others. Lift your feet! Jump, marquis! There, that’s the stuff. You leap those ruts like a veritable stag!”

These words were spoken by a hunter sitting lazily at the edge of the forest of L’Isle-Adam, savoring the last puffs of a Havana cigar as he awaited his companion, who must have lost his bearings in the dense woods a good while before. Four panting dogs waited beside the speaker, their eyes trained, like his, on the gentleman thus addressed. In order to fully grasp the sting of these regular harangues, we must understand that the other hunter was a short, corpulent man, whose prominent belly betokened a girth of truly ministerial dimensions. It was thus with some difficulty that he trudged through the furrows of a vast, newly harvested field, his progress greatly hampered by the stubble; to compound his miseries, the solar rays obliquely striking his face bathed it in a copious flow of sweat. Preoccupied by the urgent imperative of keeping upright, he bent now forward, now back, imitating the jolts and shudders of a carriage on a particularly rough road. It was one of those September days whose blazing, equatorial heat brings the grapes of the vineyards to full ripeness. A coming storm could be sensed in the air. Although several wide bands of azure still separated the enormous dark clouds on the horizon, pale golden billows could be seen advancing at an ominous speed, drawing a light curtain of gray underneath them, west to east. Only in the upper reaches did the wind exert its force; below, the atmospheric pressure held the earth’s vapors confined in the lowlands. Deprived of air by the ranks of tall trees that surrounded it, the little valley that the hunter was now crossing was as hot as a furnace. Burning and silent, the forest seemed thirsty. The birds and insects did not make a sound; the treetops scarcely swayed. Those who harbor some memory of the summer of 1819 will thus surely sympathize with the poor ministerial deputy as he toiled to join his mocking companion, who was studying the position of the sun as he smoked and had gauged the time at somewhere near five in the evening.

“Where the devil are we?” asked the fat hunter, wiping his forehead and leaning on a tree in the field, almost face-to-face with his companion, for the moment not feeling up to the challenge of jumping the broad trench that separated them.

“You’re asking me?” laughed the other, now lying stretched out in the tall yellow grasses that crowned the embankment. He tossed his cigar stub into the ditch, crying, “By Saint Hubert, I swear, I will never again venture into parts unknown with a magistrate, not even one such as you, my dear d’Albon, my old school friend!”

“But Philippe, have you forgotten how to read French? Perhaps you left your mind back in Siberia,” the fat man retorted, casting a comically pained glance at a signpost some hundred paces away.

“Message received!” answered Philippe, who picked up his rifle, leapt to his feet, and bounded into the field toward the signpost. “This way, d’Albon, this way! About-face, left,” he shouted to his companion, pointing toward a broad, paved lane. “Baillet–L’Isle-Adam road,” he read. “Which means that the Cassan road must be this way, since it surely turns off from the L’Isle-Adam road.”

“Just so,
mon colonel
,” said Monsieur d’Albon, giving up fanning himself with his cap and placing it on his head.

“Onward, then, my honorable councillor,” answered Colonel Philippe, whistling to the dogs, which already seemed to obey him more eagerly than they did their owner, the magistrate. “I do hope you realize, monsieur le marquis,” he said tauntingly, “we still have more than two leagues to cover! That village off there must be Baillet.”

“Good God!” cried the Marquis d’Albon. “Go on to Cassan if you like, but you’ll go alone. I’d sooner wait here, storm or no storm. You can send a horse out to me from the château. See here, Sucy, that was a cruel trick you played on me. We were supposed to be going out for a nice little hunt, sticking close by Cassan, rooting about on grounds I know well. But no! No such pleasure for us! Instead you’ve had me sprinting like a greyhound since four in the morning, with only a couple of cups of milk for breakfast! Oh, should you ever have a case to bring up before the court, I’ll make quite sure you lose, even if you’re in the right a hundred times over!”

Dejected, he sat down on one of the milestones at the foot of the signpost, took off his rifle, his empty game bag, and let out a long sigh.

“Oh France! Behold thy deputies!” hooted Colonel de Sucy. “My poor d’Albon, if like me you’d spent six years in the remotest depths of Siberia . . .”

He left his sentence there and raised his eyes heavenward, as if his sorrows were a secret known only to God and himself.

“Come now! Walk!” he added. “If you go on sitting there, you’re done for.”

“What do you expect, Philippe? It’s such an old habit for a judge! Word of honor, I can’t manage another step! If at least I’d killed a hare!”

The two hunters’ appearance presented a rather remarkable contrast. Aged forty-two years, the good deputy could easily have passed for thirty; the soldier, aged thirty, seemed at least forty. Both wore the red rosette of the Officer of the Legion of Honor. The locks of hair peeking out from beneath the colonel’s cap were a mingling of black and white, like the wing of a magpie; fine blond curls graced the magistrate’s temples. The one was tall, slender, taut, and the wrinkles of his pale face betrayed great passions or terrible woes; jovial as an Epicurean, the other’s countenance radiated robust good health. Both were deeply tanned by the sun, and the stains on their long leather gaiters attested to every ditch, every marsh they had traversed.