The Human Comedy (29 page)

One day in early January 1820, the colonel climbed into a carriage not unlike the one that had conveyed Monsieur and Madame de Vandières from Moscow to Studyanka, and set off for the forest of L’Isle-Adam. It was drawn by horses matching those he’d risked his life to snatch from the ranks of the Russians. He wore the filthy, incongruous clothing, the arms, the headgear that were his on November 29, 1812. He had gone as far as to grow out his beard and hair, and to avoid washing his face, so that this horrible likeness might be complete.

“I understand what you’re thinking,” cried Monsieur Fanjat, as the colonel climbed out of the carriage. “Don’t let her see you, if you want your plan to succeed. This evening I’ll give my niece a small dose of opium. While she sleeps, we’ll dress her just as she was in Studyanka, and we’ll place her in the carriage. I’ll follow you in a berline.”

At two in the morning, the young countess was carried to the vehicle, laid on cushions, and wrapped in a rough blanket. Several peasants stood by to provide light for this curious abduction. Suddenly a sharp cry pierced the night’s silence. Philippe and the doctor turned to see Geneviève emerging half naked from the ground-floor room where she slept.

“Adieu, adieu, it’s all over, adieu,” she cried, weeping bitter tears.

“Why Geneviève, what is it?” said Monsieur Fanjat.

Geneviève shook her head despairingly, raised her arms to the heavens, gazed at the carriage, let out a long moan, displayed a profound terror, and silently withdrew to her room.

“This bodes well,” cheered the colonel. “The girl is sorry to be losing her friend. Perhaps she can
see
that Stéphanie will recover her reason.”

“May God grant it,” said Monsieur Fanjat, who seemed deeply affected by this incident.

In his studies of madness, he had more than once read of cases of prophecy and second sight among the mentally afflicted, a phenomenon that may also, travelers tell, be found among the savage tribes.

Just as the colonel had planned it, Stéphanie was sent on her way across the simulated Berezina floodplain toward nine in the morning and was awakened by the detonation of a small mortar shell some hundred paces from her carriage. This was a signal. A thousand peasants burst into a terrible roar, like the desperate howl that erupted, to the Russians’ terror, when through their own fault twenty thousand stragglers saw themselves bound over to death or slavery. Hearing that cannon and that clamor, the countess leapt from the carriage, raced crazed with panic through the snow, caught sight of the burned camps, the fateful raft being launched into the icy Berezina. Major Philippe was there, swinging his saber to hold back the crowd. Madame de Vandières let out a scream that chilled every soul and ran straight to the colonel, whose heart was hammering in his chest. Lost in thought, she looked vaguely around her at this strange tableau. For a moment, brief as a flash of lightning, her eyes took on the clarity without intelligence that we admire in a bird’s shining eye; then she passed her hand over her forehead, staring intently before her as if in deep meditation, contemplating this living memory, this past life here translated before her. Suddenly she turned her head toward Philippe, and
she
saw him
. Dread silence had fallen over the crowd. The colonel breathed heavily, not daring to speak; the doctor was weeping. A hint of color appeared on Stéphanie’s beautiful face, then, from one tint to the next, she finally regained the radiance of a girl glowing with freshness and youth. Soon her face was colored a fine crimson. Animated by an ardent intelligence, life and happiness spread over her like a burgeoning fire, one flame touching off the next. A convulsive tremor ran from her feet to her heart. And then these varied phenomena, having instantaneously burst into life, were joined in a sort of common bond when a celestial ray, a living flame, lit Stéphanie’s eyes. She was living, she was thinking! She shivered, perhaps in terror! God himself unbound that dead tongue a second time, and once more poured his fire into that extinguished soul. Her will came flooding back in an electric torrent, energizing that body from which it had so long been absent.

“Stéphanie!” cried the colonel.

“Oh! It’s Philippe,” said the poor countess.

She fell into the colonel’s trembling arms, and the crowd looked on awestruck as the two lovers embraced. Stéphanie melted into tears. But all at once her tears went dry; she stiffened, as if struck by lightning, and said, weakly, “Adieu, Philippe. I love you. Adieu!”

“Oh! She’s dead,” cried the colonel, loosening his grasp.

The old doctor caught his niece’s lifeless body, embraced her as a young man might have done, carried her some distance away, and sat down with her on a pile of wood. He looked at the countess, laying a weak, convulsively trembling hand on her heart. It beat no longer.

“It’s true, then,” he said staring now at the unmoving colonel, now at Stéphanie’s face, over which death was spreading its resplendent beauty, its fleeting glow, the promise, perhaps, of a glorious future. “Yes, she is dead.”

“Ah! That smile,” cried Philippe, “just look at that smile! Can it be?”

“She’s already gone cold,” answered Monsieur Fanjat.

Monsieur de Sucy strode a few steps away, freeing himself from that terrible sight, but he stopped to whistle the tune that the madwoman knew so well. Not seeing his mistress come running, he staggered off like a drunken man, still whistling, but never once turning back.

In society, General Philippe de Sucy passed for a most amiable man, and above all a very merry one. Not a few days ago, a lady complimented him on his good humor and irrepressible temperament.

“Ah! Madame,” he answered, “I pay for my pleasantries very dearly, in the evening, when I find myself alone.”

“Are you ever alone?”

“No,” he answered with a smile.

Had some shrewd observer of human nature seen the Comte de Sucy’s expression at that moment, he might well have shivered.

“Why do you not marry?” continued the lady, who had several daughters at boarding school. “You’re rich, you have a title, a noble ancestry of long date; you have talent, a fine future ahead of you, everything smiles on you.”

“Yes,” he answered, “but there is one smile that’s killing me.”

The next day the lady was shocked to learn that Monsieur de Sucy had blown out his brains in the night. This extraordinary event was widely and diversely discussed in society; everyone sought to uncover the cause. Depending on the tastes of the inquirer it was gambling, or love, or ambition, or secret dishonors that explained this catastrophe, the last scene of a drama begun in 1812. Two men alone, a magistrate and an elderly doctor, knew that the Comte de Sucy was one of those strong men to whom God has granted the sad power to emerge each day triumphant from a horrible battle with a secret monster. Let God take His mighty hand from them, if only for a moment, and they succumb.

Paris, March 1830
Translated by Jordan Stump

Z. MARCAS

To Monseigneur le Comte Guillaume de Wurtemberg, in token of the author’s respectful gratitude

I
NEVER
saw anyone, even among the remarkable men of our time, whose appearance was more striking than this man’s; studying his physiognomy inspired, first, a sense of melancholy and, ultimately, a nearly painful sensation. There was a kind of harmony between the person and the name. That “Z.” preceding “Marcas,” which always appeared on letters addressed to him and which he never failed to include in his own signature, that last letter of the alphabet brought to mind some sense of fatality.

MARCAS! Say it over to yourself, that two-syllable name: Don’t you hear some sinister meaning to it? Don’t you feel as if the man who bears it must be destined for martyrdom? However strange and wild, still the name does have the right to go down to posterity: It is properly constructed, it is easy to pronounce, it has that brevity desirable in famous names.

Is it not as gentle as it is bizarre? Also, doesn’t it seem unfinished? Far be it from me to declare that names have no influence on destiny. Between the facts of a life and a man’s name there are mysteries and inexplicable concordances, or visible discordances, that are surprising; often distant but consequential correlations come to light. Our globe is full, everything is possible. We may yet some day turn again to the occult sciences.

Don’t you see some thwarted stride in the shape of that “Z”? Doesn’t it look like the arbitrary, whimsical zigzag of a tormented life? What wind could have blown onto this letter that occurs in scarcely fifty words in whatever languages even use it? Marcas’s first name was Zéphirin. Saint Zéphirin is widely worshiped in Brittany. Marcas was Breton.

Look again at the name: Z. Marcas! The man’s whole life is evident in the weird assemblage of those seven letters. Seven! The most significant of the Kabbalah numbers. The man died at thirty-five, thus his life counted seven lustrums. Marcas! Doesn’t it evoke the idea of something precious shattering in a fall, with or without a sound?

I was finishing my law degree in 1836, in Paris. At the time I lived on rue Corneille, in a building occupied entirely by students, one of those buildings where the stairwell twists upward at the rear, lighted first from the street, then through grilled transoms, and farther up by a skylight. There were forty rooms, furnished the way students’ rooms are furnished. What more would a young man need in a room: a bed, a few chairs, a chest of drawers, a mirror, and a table. As soon as the sky turns blue, the student opens the window. But in that street there was no pretty neighbor to flirt with. Across the way, the Odéon Théâtre, long closed, blocked the view with its blackened walls, its small gallery windows, its vast slate roof. I wasn’t rich enough to have a good room; I couldn’t even afford a room to myself. Juste and I shared one with two beds on the top floor.

On our side of the stairwell, there was only our room and another small one occupied by Z. Marcas, our neighbor. Juste and I lived for about six months utterly unaware of his presence. An elderly woman who ran the house had in fact told us the small room was occupied, but she added that we would not be disturbed in the slightest, the tenant was extraordinarily quiet. In fact, for six months we never saw our neighbor and we heard not a sound from the room despite the flimsiness of the wall between us—one of those partitions built of slats and plaster so common in Paris buildings.

Our room, seven feet high, was lined in cheap blue wallpaper scattered with flowers. The painted floor had never known the polishers’ brushes. Thin mats lay alongside the beds. The chimney pipe stopped short above the roof and gave off so much smoke that we had to attach an extension to it, at our own expense. Our beds were painted wooden cots like the ones in boarding schools. On the mantelpiece stood only two copper candlesticks with or without candles in them, our two pipes, a little tobacco in a packet or loose, as well as some small heaps of cigar ash dropped there by visitors or ourselves. A couple of calico curtains slid along rods at the window, on either side of which hung the small cherrywood bookshelves familiar to anyone who ever strolled the Latin Quarter and on which we stacked the few books needed for our courses. The ink was always solid in the inkwell, like lava caked in the crater of a volcano. These days, can’t any inkwell become a Vesuvius? Our distorted pens we used for cleaning our pipestems. Contrary to the laws of credit, paper was even scarcer in our place than coin.

How could young folk be expected to stay at home in furnished rooms like that? So students would often study in the cafés, in the theater, along the walks in the Luxembourg Gardens, in girlfriends’ quarters—anywhere, even at the law school—rather than in their rooms, which were awful for studying but charming for chatting and smoking. Spread a cloth on the table, lay out a last-minute dinner sent in from the best cookhouse in the neighborhood, four settings and two girls, catch the scene in a lithograph, and even a prig couldn’t help but smile at it.

All we thought about was having a good time. The reason for our dissolute behavior was the very grave nature of the current political situation: Juste and I could see no place for us in the professions our parents insisted we should pursue. For every vacant post there are a hundred lawyers, a hundred doctors. Hordes of applicants block those two pathways, which are supposed to be the route to success but are more like two great arenas where men kill one another, not with knives or guns but with intrigue and slander and by horrendous toil, intellectual combat as murderous as the battles in Italy were for France’s Republican troops. Today, when everything is intellectual competition, a man must be capable of sitting in his chair at a desk for forty-eight hours straight just as a general had to sit for two days in his saddle on horseback.

The crush of candidates has forced the medical field to divide into categories: the doctor who writes, the doctor who teaches, the political doctor, and the militant doctor—four different ways of being a doctor, four sectors already full to bursting. As for the fifth sector—the one involving doctors who peddle remedies—there is competition there, too, carried on by rivals posting squalid advertisements onto walls throughout Paris.

And in every courtroom there are nearly as many lawyers as there are cases. The lawyer has been thrown back onto journalism, politics, literature. And the state, under siege for the lowliest posts in the justice system, has taken to requiring applicants to have independent means. The pear-shaped skull of some rich grocer’s son wins out over the square head of a talented but penniless youngster. Doing his utmost, deploying all his energy, a young man setting out from zero can wind up after ten years somewhere below where he started. Today, talent needs the kind of luck that favors the incompetent; in fact, if a skilled man rejects the vile arrangements that bring success to rampant mediocrity, he will never get on at all.

While we understood our times perfectly well, we also understood ourselves, and we preferred a thinking man’s idleness to aimless agitation, loafing and pleasure to useless labors that would have taxed our enthusiasm and worn the edge off our intelligence. We analyzed the social situation while we laughed, smoked, and strolled around. But our thinking, our long discussions were no less wise, no less profound for going about them this way.