The Human Comedy (24 page)

“Come along now,” cried Monsieur de Sucy. “Onward! One short hour’s walk and we’ll be in Cassan, with a fine dinner before us.”

“I’ll wager you’ve never been in love,” answered the councillor, his tone humorously plaintive. “You’re as pitiless as
Article 304 of the Penal Code
!”

With this, Philippe de Sucy gave a violent start; his broad forehead furrowed, and his face turned as dark as the sky. Although the memory of some unspeakable anguish contorted his features, he did not shed a tear. Like all men of great strength, he was able to still his emotions, to choke them back into the depths of his heart; perhaps, like many of pure character, he found it somehow indecent to reveal a grief whose depth was beyond human expression, and which might well be mocked by those who cannot be bothered to understand it. Monsieur d’Albon was graced with the kind of sensitive soul that divines others’ sorrows and feels intensely all the upset a slip of the tongue can unwittingly cause. He did not trouble his friend’s silence but stood up, his weariness forgotten, and followed him wordlessly, pained to have touched a wound that must not yet have healed.

“One day, my friend,” said Philippe, clasping his hand and thanking him for his mute remorse with a heartrending gaze, “one day I shall tell you my story. Today, I couldn’t possibly.”

They walked on in silence. Once the colonel’s desolation seemed to subside, the councillor rediscovered his own fatigue. With the instinct—or rather the longing—of a desperate man, his gaze probed the depths of the forest; he questioned the treetops, interrogated the broad avenues, in hopes of discovering some sort of dwelling where he might seek hospitality. Arriving at an intersection, he thought he spotted a wisp of smoke rising through the trees. He stopped, looked more closely, and made out several dark green boughs of pine amid a dense, tangled thicket.

“A house! A house!” he cried, joyous as the sailor who shouts out “Land ho!”

And in a burst of alacrity he dashed through a dense thicket, while the colonel followed mechanically after, lost in a deep reverie.

“Better an omelet here, and some plain homemade bread, and a crude chair, than all the divans and truffles and Bordeaux in Cassan.”

These words were a cry of delight, wrested from the councillor by the sight of a wall in the distance, off-white amid the brown of the forest’s gnarled trunks.

“Ah! Ah! Why it looks like some ancient priory!” the Marquis d’Albon cried out again on encountering a venerable iron fence, through which, in the midst of a large private park, he saw a building of monastic design. “Oh, those clever monks! Those scoundrels knew just where to build!”

This second outburst expressed the magistrate’s astonishment at the poetic hermitage he now found before him. The house sat halfway up a slope, on the backside of the mount at whose summit stands the village of Nerville. Forming a vast circle around the residence, the lofty, aged oaks of the forest created an atmosphere of deepest seclusion. The main building, once home to the monks, faced south. The park might have covered some forty arpents. The house adjoined a green meadow, prettily crisscrossed by several limpid streams and dotted with ponds, whose pleasing arrangement betrayed no trace of artifice. Green trees stood here and there, their forms graceful, their foliage varied. Cunningly contrived grottos, vast terraces with crumbling staircases and rusting handrails, everything colluded to make this wild Thebaid a place like no other, an elegant union of artistry’s creations and nature’s most picturesque effects. Human passions seemed bound to find peace beneath those tall trees, which defended that retreat against the clamors of the world, just as they tempered the sun’s withering heat.

“What a shambles!” said Monsieur d’Albon to himself, admiring the somber cast these ruins gave their surroundings, which seemed to have been visited with some sort of malediction. It had the air of a cursed place, abandoned by men. Everywhere ivy had splayed out its tortuous tendons and rich green mantles. Brown, greenish, yellow, or red mosses daubed the trees, benches, roofs, and stones with their romantic tints. The worm-eaten window frames had been scoured by rain and rutted by age; the balconies were broken, the terraces dilapidated. Some of the shutters were held by one single hinge. The ill-fitting doors seemed no obstacle for an intruder. Burdened by glistening clumps of mistletoe, the branches of the neglected fruit trees stretched into the distance, offering no harvest. Tall grasses grew in the walkways. These signs of decay produced a deeply poetic effect and inspired meditative thoughts in the onlooker’s soul. A poet would have lingered there, lost in prolonged melancholy, musing on that disorder so rich in harmonies, that destruction in no way devoid of grace. Just then, several shafts of sunlight burst through the crevasses in the clouds, illuminating this half-wild scene with streaks of a thousand varied colors. The brown roof tiles glinted, the moss shone, fantastic shadows played over the fields, beneath the trees; the dulled colors awoke, arresting contrasts contended, the green boughs stood out darkly in the light. Suddenly the sun dimmed again. The landscape, which seemed to have spoken, now fell silent and once more turned somber, or rather muted, like the most muted hue of an autumn dusk.

“It’s Sleeping Beauty’s castle,” the councillor whispered, now seeing this house only through a proprietor’s eyes. “Who on earth might this place belong to? Only a fool would choose not to live in such a fine spot.”

All at once a woman shot from beneath a walnut tree to the right of the iron fence and raced silently past the councillor’s eyes, fleet as the shadow of a cloud. This apparition left him speechless with surprise.

“Why, d’Albon, what’s the matter?” the colonel asked.

“I’m rubbing my eyes to see if I’m sleeping or awake,” the magistrate answered, pressing close to the fence, hoping for another glimpse of the wraith.

“She must be under that fig tree,” he said, pointing to the branches overhanging the wall, to the left of the fence.

“‘She’? Who?”

“How should I know?” Monsieur d’Albon shot back. “A very strange woman just appeared right here before me,” he said softly. “She seemed to belong more to the shadows than the world of the living. She was so slight, so wispy, so vaporous—she must be transparent. Her face was white as milk. Her hair, her eyes, her clothing, all black. She looked at me as she passed by, and I’m not a fearful man by nature, but that cold, still gaze of hers froze the very blood in my veins.”

“Was she pretty?” asked Philippe.

“I don’t know. Her eyes were all I could see of her face.”

“The devil take our dinner in Cassan,” cried the colonel, “let’s stay right here. I’ve a childish urge to take a closer look at this curious property. Do you see those red-painted window frames, those red lines on the moldings of the shutters and doors? Does this not seem the house of the devil? Perhaps he inherited it from the monks. Come, after the black-and-white woman! Forward!” cried Philippe with forced gaiety.

Just then the two hunters heard a cry, rather like the shriek of a mouse caught in a trap. They stood still and listened. The leaves of a few overgrown bushes rustled in the silence, like the hiss of a rushing wave, but although they strained to detect some further sound, the earth remained silent, guarding the secret of the stranger’s footsteps, assuming that she had indeed walked on her way.

“Now that’s very odd,” cried Philippe, following the walls that surrounded the park.

Soon the two friends arrived at a forest path that led to the village of Chauvry. Following it toward the Paris road, they arrived at a large gate and beheld the mysterious dwelling’s main façade. On this side, the disarray was complete. Huge cracks wandered over the walls of the house, whose three sections were built at right angles. The damaged roofs, the fallen tiles and slate shingles heaped on the ground, everything suggested utter neglect. A few pieces of fruit had dropped from the trees and lay rotting on the ground, uncollected. A cow grazed on the lawn, trampling the flower beds, while a goat plucked the shoots and green fruits from a grapevine.

“Here all is harmony, and disorder itself is in a sense ordered,” said the colonel, pulling the chain of a bell, but the bell had no clapper.

The hunters heard only the oddly piercing squeak of a rusted spring. Decrepit though it was, the little door in the wall beside the gate resisted all their efforts to open it.

“Oh! Oh! This is all becoming very strange,” the colonel said to his companion.

“If I weren’t a judge,” answered Monsieur d’Albon, “I’d say that woman in black was a witch.”

He had just spoken these words when the cow ambled to the gate and raised its warm muzzle, as if eager to look upon human beings. Suddenly a woman, if such could be called the indefinable creature that had risen to its feet from beneath a clump of bushes, gave a tug on the cow’s rope. This woman wore a red handkerchief on her head; from beneath it strayed locks of blond hair that looked rather like the tow on a distaff. She wore no fichu over her breast. Several inches too short, a black-and-gray striped skirt of coarse wool left her legs exposed. She might almost have belonged to one of the redskin tribes celebrated by Cooper, for her bare legs, neck, and arms seemed to have been painted the color of brick. No spark of intelligence animated her flat face. Her bluish eyes held neither expression nor warmth. A few sparse white hairs served as her eyebrows. Between her twisted lips several teeth could be seen, crooked and irregular, but white as a dog’s.

“Ho there! Woman!” cried Monsieur de Sucy.

She drifted toward the gate, staring simplemindedly at the two hunters, having forced a shy smile upon catching sight of them.

“Where are we? What is this house? Whose is it? Who are you? Are you from this place?”

These questions, and a host of others put to her in quick succession, met only with guttural growls, more animal than human.

“She’s deaf and dumb, can’t you see?” said the magistrate.

“
Bons-Hommes!
” cried the peasant girl.

“Oh! She’s right. This might well be the old Bons-Hommes monastery,” said Monsieur d’Albon.

The questions resumed. But the peasant girl blushed like a backward child, played with her wooden shoe, twisted the cow’s rope (the animal had gone back to grazing), stared at the two hunters, inspected every element of their dress; she yelped, she growled, she clucked, but she did not speak.

“What’s your name?” said Philippe, staring into her eyes as if to place her under his power.

“Geneviève,” she answered, with a mindless laugh.

“So far the cow is the most intelligent creature we’ve met,” said the magistrate. “I’ll fire my rifle—no doubt that will bring someone.”

But the colonel brusquely stayed d’Albon’s hand as he reached for his weapon. Pointing into the distance, he showed his friend that woman in black who had so piqued their curiosity. She was meandering along a garden path, as if lost in deep meditation, giving the two friends a moment to study her more closely. She was dressed in a threadbare gown of black satin. Her long hair fell in curls over her forehead, about her shoulders, past her waist, taking the place of a shawl. No doubt long used to this dishevelment, she rarely troubled to shake the hair from her temples, but when she did, she tossed her head so sharply that no second attempt was required to whisk that thick veil away from her forehead or eyes. Like an animal’s, her movements showed remarkable physical confidence, so quick and precise as to seem almost miraculous for a woman. The two hunters looked on astonished as she leapt onto the branch of an apple tree and perched there, light as any bird. She plucked a few fruits, ate them, then dropped to the ground with that fluid ease we find so wondrous in squirrels. Her limbs had an elasticity that spared her every move even the appearance of discomfort or effort. She played on the grass, rolled head over heels like a child, then suddenly threw out her feet and hands and lay on the lawn, as languorous, graceful, and uninhibited as a young cat asleep in the sun. Hearing a distant rumble of thunder, she quickly rolled over and rose onto all fours, with the prodigious agility of a dog hearing a stranger’s approach. Owing to this unusual position, her black hair suddenly fell into two wide swaths that hung swinging from either side of her head, granting the two spectators of that singular scene a vision of shoulders so white that the skin glowed like daisies of the meadow, and a neck whose perfection hinted at a body of a most exquisite form.

She let out a grating cry and rose to her feet. So nimbly, so smoothly did each movement follow upon the last that she seemed less a human creature than one of those daughters of the sky celebrated in the poems of Ossian. She strolled toward a pool of water, delicately shook one leg to throw off her shoe, and dipped in her alabaster white foot with visible delight, no doubt marveling at the gemlike undulations it made. Then she knelt at the edge of the basin and, like a child, played at immersing her long tresses and then briskly raised her head to watch the water drip off, drop by drop, like strings of pearls shot through by the sun.

“That woman is mad,” cried the councillor.

Geneviève gave a loud, throaty shout, evidently addressed to the madwoman, who sat bolt upright, pushing the hair back from her cheeks. With this, the colonel and d’Albon caught a clear glimpse of her features; spotting the two friends, she bounded to the fence, agile and swift as a doe.

“Adieu!” she said, in a voice both sweet and harmonious, but that melody, so eagerly awaited by the hunters, seemed to contain no trace of sentiment and no trace of thought.

Monsieur d’Albon gazed admiringly on her long lashes, her thick black eyebrows, her glowing white skin unmarred by any tinge of red. A few delicate blue veins alone contrasted with her paleness. When the councillor turned toward his friend to voice his astonishment at the sight of this singular woman, he found him lying flat on the grass, as if lifeless. Monsieur d’Albon fired his rifle in the air to call for aid, shouting “
Help! Help!
” as he tried desperately to rouse the colonel. At the sound of the gunshot, the woman suddenly ran off fast as an arrow, shrieking in fright like a wounded animal and racing in circles over the meadow, giving every sign of profound terror. Hearing a calèche rattling down the L’Isle-Adam road, Monsieur d’Albon waved his handkerchief to beseech the sightseers’ assistance. The calèche turned immediately toward Bons-Hommes, and within it Monsieur d’Albon spied the faces of Monsieur and Madame de Grandville, his neighbors. They hurried out of the carriage and offered it to the magistrate. By chance, Madame de Grandville had with her a bottle of smelling salts, which was administered to Monsieur de Sucy. The moment he opened his eyes, the colonel looked toward the meadow, where the strange woman was endlessly running and shouting, and he let out a cry both indistinct and eloquent in its expression of horror, then he closed his eyes once again, gesturing to his friend as if begging to be hurried away from this sight. Monsieur and Madame de Grandville urged the councillor to take their calèche, obligingly offering to continue their excursion on foot.