Les Diaboliques E-Book

Barbey D’aurevilly

• Herausgeber: Dedalus
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 486

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

6 atmospheric 19th c stories about depraved femmes de fatales

Das E-Book Les Diaboliques wird angeboten von Dedalus und wurde mit folgenden Begriffen kategorisiert:

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Publishing History

First published in France in 1874

First published by Dedalus in 1986 reprinted 1996 and 2011

First e-book edition 2011

Introduction and chronology c Robert Irwin 1986

Printed in Finland by Bookwell Ltd

Typeset by Refine Catch Ltd, Bungay, Suffolk

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A C.I.P. listing for this book is available on request.

CHRONOLOGY

1808

2 November. Jules Amadée Barbey d’Aurevilly born in St. Sauveur-le Vicomte in Normandy. Father André-Marie-Theophile. Mother Ernestine Eulalie-Théodose.

1816

Fails to get place in military school.

1818–25

Lodges with rich uncle, Pontas du Méril in Valognes (Normandy).

1827–9

Studies for his baccalaureat at the College Stanislas in Paris.

1829–33

Studies law in Caen.

1830

Meets and falls in love with Louise de Costils, the wife of one of his cousins, Alfred du Méril.

1833–6

Breaks with family and moves to Paris where he leads a dissipated life, affecting the manners of a dandy and seeking to dull the senses with drugs and alchohol.

1837

Commences journalistic career writing for

L’Europe

. In time he will become, with Sainte-Beuve, one of France’s leading literary reviewers and polemicists.

1841

Begins affair with Vellini (presented by Barbey in his fiction as a devouring

femme fatale

).

1843

Publication of

Du dandyisme et de G. Brummel

.

1846

Intellectual conversion to Catholicism.

1848

Short order chef in a working man’s club.

1850

Publication of ‘Beneath the Cards of a Game of Whist’ in

La Mode

. It is the first of the short stories which comprises The She Devils to be published.

1851

Publication of novel

Une vieille maitresse

, (An Old Mistress), in which are incorporated many aspects of his actual affair with La Vellini. Meets and falls in love with the widowed Mme de Bouglon and she influences his ultimate return to fully practising Catholicism.

1853

First reads the stories of Edgar Allan Poe (in Baudelaire’s translation).

1854

Publication of novel

L’ensorcelée,

(The Bewitched).

1855

Becomes a practising Catholic.

1857

Baudelaire’s ‘Les fleurs du mal’ prosecuted for obscenity. Barbey d’Aurevilly agitates in defence of the poet.

1861

Reverts to drink and dissipation.

1861–5

Publication of series of literary essays,

Les ouevres et les hommes du XIXe siècle.

1864

Publication of novel

Le Chevalier des Touches.

1865

Publication of novel

Un prêtre marié,

(A Married Priest).

1866

‘The Crimson Curtain’ written.

1867

‘The Greatest Love of Don Juan’ written.

1867

Meets Leon Bloy, whom he profoundly influences.

1870

The Siege of Paris and the Commune. Barbey retires to the Contentin peninsula in Normandy where he writes the preface to ‘The She Devils’.

1871

The She Devils

completed.

1872

Returns to Paris.

1874

(At the age of 66) publication of

Les Diaboliques

(The She Devils). The book is seized on the orders of the Public Prosecutor on the grounds of alleged obscenity and blasphemy, but the prominent deputy, Gambetta, intervenes to save Barbey from prosecution.

1882

Second edition of

The She Devils

.

1885

Meeting with Edmond de Goncourt.

1889

Dies in Paris. Squalid death bed struggle over his considerable wealth.

Contents

BARBEY D’AUREVILLY AND THE SATANISM OF APPEARANCES

THE CRIMSON CURTAIN

THE GREATEST LOVE OF DON JUAN

HAPPINESS IN CRIME

BENEATH THE CARDS OF A GAME OF WHIST

AT A DINNER OF ATHEISTS

A WOMAN’S REVENGE

BARBEY D’AUREVILLY AND THESATANISM OF APPEARANCES.

It is the function of a preface to patronise the reader and to tell him what to think of what follows. Barbey d’Aurevilly who despised his public, (while yet constantly seeking to shock and impress that public) thoughtfully provided his own preface to Les Diaboliques when it was first published in 1874. In it he claimed that he wrote as a Christian to demonstrate how good and evil are at war in the world. This is disingenuous apologetics. Barbey’s tales are really much closer to the black cinematographic fables of Luis Bunuel, and Barbey does himself a disservice by attempting to foist such a pious purpose on to the stories. The metaphysics, ethics and aesthetics of his writing are all, alike, more subtle than that.

‘To dress oneself should be the main business of life.’ This is the preposterous manifesto of the dandy. Barbey dressed to draw attention to himself. He waged a single handed ‘style war’ against the citizens of Paris, shocking others, but never allowing himself to be shocked. So it is with the stories. They offer us a metaphysics of appearance, of the mask, of the dandy even. If evil is present in the world, it is present only in signs and objects, in appearances. As the narrator of Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past observes, speaking of the key motifs and underlying unity in the novels and short stories of Barbey d’Aurevilly, in them we find ‘a hidden reality revealed by a physical sign, the physiological blush of the Bewitched, of Aimee de Spens, of old Clotte, the hand in the Rideau cramoisi, the old manners and customs, the old words, the ancient and peculiar trades behind which there is a Past, the oral history compiled by the peasants of the region, the noble Norman cities redolent of England and charming as a Scottish village, the cause of curses against which we can do nothing …’

In the twilight vision of Barbey’s France, all is washed in the ‘Devil’s bath of melancholy’. It is a world of quiet streets, stifled desires, covert vices and unfinished stories. The melancholy vision is shaped by boredom and boredom will drive Barbey first to the sartorial excesses of dandyism and then to the literary outrages of The She Devils. The subtle charm which is the hallmark of most of Barbey’s fiction is surely generated by the tension between boredom and passion within the man. In fiction (though not, it is to be feared, in Barbey’s actual life), passion always triumphs. As Barbey observed in Une vieille maitresse, ‘Passions … do less harm than boredom, for the passions tend always to decline, while boredom tends always to increase.’ In his stories he beautifully evokes the boredom of dull provincial towns and the endless games of whist, but passion, perverted and all consuming, suffuses this quiet world of appearances. The everyday world is lit from within by the black light of passion. The mysteries of passion are revealed in sign, gesture and posture. It is not by chance that references to the science of physiognomy feature so frequently in these stories that they must be accounted among the key leitmotifs of the work. Barbey’s Satan is not absent from the world, but immanent in human flesh, and the grammar of his diabolism is made manifest in the postures of the human body. And, as the title of the anthology underlines, evil is most strongly present in the flesh of women. It is women who are the most skilled at concealing their lust, behind proud or impassive exteriors. Their lusts may be deduced, yet the precise workings of women’s motivation remains forever mysterious. The most powerful embodiment of this obsession of Barbey’s is to be found in the figure of Hauteclaire de Stassin in the story ‘Happiness in Crime’.

Barbey’s stories are dream like in their absence of mechanical plotting and contrived endings. All there is is what there is to be seen. In ‘The Crimson Curtain’, what follows from the girl who dies in her lover’s arms? Nothing. What explanation is there? None. What moral can we deduce from the story? None. In ‘Beneath the Cards of a Game of Whist’, we have two women who die in obscure circumstances, a man who suddenly goes abroad, and a dead infant found buried in the shrubbery. Yet what is the story? The story is just that, and of course the brilliant evocation of the material circumstances surrounding these incidents. The reader must be responsible for (or guilty of) the connecting narrative.

These stories are the work of a skilled craftsman, though the skills are not vulgarly paraded before the reader. One particular feature deserving of notice is his use of the framing narrative or récit parlé. Five out of the six stories in this collection make use of this device. The original title for the collection was Ricochets de conversation. It may be that, in employing this spoken narration, Barbey wished to bring his listeners closer to his stories, by converting his readers into listeners. But the framing device has many other functions. It allows the author to dispense with an omniscient narrator, makes easy the drawing of veils and sets up the untimely absences and the mistaken deductions which has to exist in order to leave the central mysteries intact. Also, the story teller can resolve the reader’s doubts from within the story. ‘I too could not have credited it … but I was there and I saw what I saw … such as there was to see …’ Moreover, the speaker delays the advance towards the story’s horrific or fantastic denouement and, in so doing, he mediates between the reader’s external reality and the outrageous fantasy of fiction. It is not by chance that the récit parlé has since been made frequent use of by such masters of the ghost story as M.R. James.

Barbey deploys all his considerable skill to persuade his despised readers (you democrats, liberals and realists) of what is not only often obscene and blasphemous, but always outrageously improbable. He and The She Devils are of their age precisely in their revolt against the age. Boredom with nineteenth century industrial, commercial, bourgeois France found similar yet different manifestations in works by Baudelaire, Flaubert, Huysmans, Villiers de I’Isle Adam, Peladan and others. The revolt against his own times is indeed one of the keys to the complex phenomenon of Barbey’s dandyism. In middle age and senility, Barbey made no attempt to accommodate himself to the fashions of the late nineteenth century. Rather he continued to dress as Beau Brummel and the dandy of the early decades had done, as if by dressing so, he might summon back lost times and vanished youth.

Another way of defying the era of the bankers, grocers and Communards was to take refuge in fantasies of Antiquity and the Orient, of Sardanapulus, Carthage, Ahasuerus, Tiberias and the mysteries of the Nile and at the same time profess a passion for riotous ornament and exotic rites. Barbey called it ‘the Java of the imagination’. The trappings of decadence are certainly to be found in his stories — black satin, sphinxes, harpies, topazes and panthers — but they are sparingly deployed. More profoundly, Barbey and many of the great literary figures of the time embraced the legacies of the Marquis de Sade and of Byron — their inheritance, a preoccupation with such topics as sexual cruelty, necrophilia, femmes fatales and incest.

The cynic is always interested in human nature and finds a sort of dismal cheer in the study of its worst failings. Barbey’s stories are moral tales in much the same way as the work of such modern film directors as Chabrol and Rohmer — that is, they are meditations on human relationships and particularly those aspects of human relations, such as the crime passionel and adultery, where moral judgements have commonly been thought to apply. Yet no moral message, (still less a Catholic Christian one) can be drawn from The She Devils. The book is a celebration of the seven deadly vices and shows no counterbalancing interest in the seven cardinal virtues. Even more, it is a celebration of pride, the pride of the ancient aristocracy of evil. Those who have the style to carry off their vices have also the right to do so.

The She Devils is universally acknowledged to be Barbey d’Aurevilly’s masterpiece and a classic of French literature. Barbey himself provided the epigraph for The She Devils. ‘This charming world is so contrived that if you really understood these tales you would be convinced that they were indeed dictated by Satan.’ So now we have told you what to think of these stories …

Robert Irwin.

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

R. Bésus Barbey d’Aurevilly, (1958)

J.H. Bornecque, Paysages extérieurs et monde intérieur dans l’oeuvre de Barbey d’Aurevilly, (1968)

G. Corbiere-Gille, Barbey d’Aurevilly, critique litteraire, (Paris, 1962)

G. Deleuze and F. Guattari, Mille Plateaux, (1980)

J.O. Lowrie, The Violent Mystique: Thematics of Retribution and Expiation in Balzac, Barbey d’Aurevilly, Bloy and Huysmans, (1974)

M. Praz, The Romantic Agony, (1933)

B.G. Rogers The Novels and Stories of Barbey d’Aurevilly, (1967)

The crimson curtain

A considerable number of years ago I went to shoot waterfowl in the western marshes, and, as there was no railway then, I took the diligence, which passed the cross-roads near the Château de Rueil, and which at that precise moment contained only one passenger inside. This person, a very remarkable man in every respect, and whoml knew by having often met him in society, I will ask your permission to introduce as the Vicomte de Brassard. The precaution is probably uselessl The few hundred people who constitute Parisian society are, no doubt, able to supply the real name. It was about five o’clock in the evening. The sun shed its slanting rays on a dusty road, edged with poplar-trees and fields, through which we rattled, drawn by four stout horses, whose strong flanks rolled heavily at each crack of the postilion’s whip—a postilion always reminds me of life, there is a great deal too much whip-cracking at the outset.

Vicomte de Brassard was at that time of life when he was no longer disposed to crack his whip. But he was one of those men worthy of being an Englishman (he was educated in England), who, if he had been mortally wounded, would have died declaring he was alive. In the world, and even in books, we are used to laugh at the pretensions to youth of those who have passed the happy age of inexperience and foolishness—and the custom is not a bad one when the pretensions take a ridiculous form; but when they do not, but on the contrary assume a pride that will not confess defeat, I do not say they are not senseless, for they are useless, but they deserve respect, like many other senseless things. If it was heroic of the Guards of Waterloo to die and not surrender, it is the same when we are face to face with old age, which is not so romantic as bayonets. Some heads are built in a military manner, never to surrender, and that is the whole question, as it was at Waterloo.

Vicomte de Brassard, who has not surrendered—he is still alive, and I will tell you about him later, for it is worth knowing—Vicomte de Brassard was then, at the time when I travelled with him in the diligence, what the world, which is as spiteful as an old woman, rudely calls “an old beau.” For those who care little for words or figures, and who deem that in the matter of age a man is only as old as he appears to be, Vicomte de Brassard might have passed for a “beau” without any qualification. At least, at that very time the Marquise de V … —who was an expert judge of young men, and who had shaved a dozen men as clean as Delilah shaved Samson—wore, with much pride in an enamelled gold bracelet, one of the ends of the Victomte’s moustache, of which time, or the devil, had not changed the colour. Only, whether old or not, do not attach to the expression “beau,” as the world has done, an idea of someone frivolous, lean, and cadaverous, for you would not have a proper idea of Vicomte de Brassard, in whom everything—intellect, manners, physiognomy—was large, opulent, redolent of patrician calmness, as befitted the most magnificent dandy I have ever known—I, who have seen Brummell go mad, and d’Orsay die.

For he was really a true dandy. If he had been less so, he would certainly have become Marshal of France. He had been in his youth one of the most brilliant officers of the latter days of the First Empire. I have heard it said many times by his regimental comrades that he was distinguished by the bravery of Murat added to that of Marmont, and that as he was cool and level-headed when the drums were not beating, he might in a short time have attained to the highest rank of the military hierarchy if it had not been for dandyism. If you combine dandyism with the qualities which go to make up an officer—discipline, regularity, etc.—you will see how much of the officer will remain in the combination, and whether he does not blow up like a powder-magazine. If the Vicomte de Brassard had never exploded, it was because, like all dandies, he was happy. Mazarin would have employed him—and so would Mazarin’s nieces, but for another reason. He was superb.

He had had that beauty which is necessary to a soldier more than to anyone else, for there is no youth without beauty, and the army is the youth of France! It was that beauty, moreover, which not only seduces women; but circumstances themselves—the rascals—had not been the only protection spread over the head of Captain de Brassard. He was, I believe, of Norman family, of the race of William the Conqueror, and he had, it is said, conquered a good deal himself. After the abdication of the Emperor, he had naturally gone over to the Bourbons, and, during the Hundred Days, had remained supernaturally faithful to them. So, when the Bourbons came back for the second time, the Vicomte was made a Chevalier of Saint-Louis and decorated by Charles X (then Monsieur) with his own royal hand. During the whole time of the Restoration, the handsome de Brassard never once mounted Guard at the Tuileries without the Duchesse of Angoulême addressing a few gracious words to him as she passed. She in whom misfortune had slain graciousness, managed to find some for him. The Minister, seeing this favour, would have done all he could to advance the man whom Madame thus singled out; but, with the best will in the world, what could be done for this terrible dandy who, at a review, had drawn his sword on the inspecting general for having made some remarks about his military duties? It was quite enough to save him from a court martial. This careless disdain of discipline always distinguished Vicomte de Brassard.

Except when on a campaign, when he was a thorough officer, he was never amenable to discipline. Many times he had been known—at the risk of being imprisoned for an indefinite period—to have secretly left a garrison, to go and amuse himself in some neighbouring town, and only to return when there was a review or a parade—warned by one of the soldiers, who loved him, for if his superiors scarcely cared to have under their orders a man to whom were repugnant all routine and discipline, the soldiers, on the other hand, adored him. To them he was an excellent officer. He only required that they should be brave, punctilious, and careful in their persons and dress, and thus realize the old type of the French soldier, as he is depicted in La Permission de dix heures, and in two or three old songs which are masterpieces in their way. He was, perhaps, too fond of making them fight duels, but he asserted that it was the best means he knew to develop the military spirit. “I am not the government,” he said, “and I have no medals to give them when they fight bravely amongst themselves, but the Orders of which I am the grandmaster (he had a considerable private fortune) are gloves, spare cross-belts, and whatever may spruce them up—so far as the regulations will allow.”

So the company which he commanded eclipsed, in the matter of equipment, all the other companies of the Grenadiers of the Guard, brilliant as they were. Thus he flattered to excess the soldiers, who in France are always prone to fatuity and coquetry, two permanent provocations, the one because of its tone, the other because of the envy it excites. It will easily be understood, after this, that all the other companies were jealous of his. The men would fight to get into it, and then had to fight not to get out of it.

Such had been, during the Restoration, the exceptional position of Captain Vicomte de Brassard. And as he had not then every day, as he had during the Empire, the resource of doing brave deeds which would have caused all to be forgiven, no one could have foreseen or guessed how long this insubordination which astonished his comrades, would have lasted, but the Revolution of 1830 happened just in time to prevent him from being cashiered. He was badly wounded during the Three Days, and disdained to take service under the new dynasty of the Orleans, for whom he had contempt. When the Revolution of July made them masters of a country they did not know how to keep, it found the Captain in bed, laid up with an injury to his foot he had received in dancing—as he would have charged—at the last ball of the Duchesse de Berry.

But at the first roll of the drum he, nevertheless, rose and joined his company, and as he would not put on his boots on account of his wound, he went to the rioting as he would have gone to a ball, in varnished shoes and silk socks, and it was thus he led his grenadiers to the Place de la Bastille, with instructions to clear the whole length of the Boulevards.

Paris, in which no barricades had yet been erected, had a gloomy and terrible appearance. It was deserted. The sun glared down, and seemed a fiery rain, soon to be followed by another, when from behind the closed shutters of every window there should pour a deadly storm.

Captain de Brassard drew up his men in two lines, as close as possible to each row of houses so that each file of soldiers was exposed only to the fire from the houses opposite, whilst he, more dandified than ever, walked down the middle of the road. Aimed at from both sides by thousands of guns, pistols, and carbines, all the way from the Bastille to the Rue de Richelieu, he was not hit, in spite of the breadth of his chest, of which he was perhaps a little too proud—for Captain de Brassard swelled out his chest in a fight, as a pretty woman who wants to show off her charms does at a ball—when, just as he arrived in front of Frascati’s, at the corner of the Rue de Richelìeu, and at the moment when he commanded the troops to mass together in order to carry the first barricade which he had found on his road, he received a ball in this magnificent chest, which was doubly tempting, both on account of its size and the long silver braid which went from one shoulder to the other, and he had also his arm broken by a stone—which did not prevent him from carrying the barricade, and proceeding as far as the Madeleine at the head of his excited soldiers.

There, two ladies in a carriage, who were fleeing from the insurrection in Paris, seeing an officer of the Guards wounded, covered with blood, and lying on the blocks of stone which at that time surrounded the Madeleine, which was still in course “of construction, placed their carriage at his disposal, and he was taken by them to Gros Caillou, where the Marshal de Raguse was, to whom he said, in military fashion: “Marshal, I have not, perhaps, more than two hours to live, but during those two hours put me wherever you like.”

Only he was wrong. He was good for more than two hours. The ball which passed through his body did not kill him. It was more than fifteen years later when I saw him, and he declared then that in defiance of all the doctors, who had expressly forbidden him to drink as long as the fever caused by his wound continued, he had been saved from a certain death only by Bordeaux wine.

And how he did drink!—for, dandy as he was, he drank as he did everything else—he drank like a trooper. He had made for him a splendid goblet of Bohemian glass, which held a whole bottle of Bordeaux, by God, and he would drain it off at a draught. He would say, after he had drunk it, that he always drank like that—and it was true. But in these days, when strength of every kind is continually diminishing and is no longer thought much of, it may seem that this feat is nothing to boast about. He was like Bassompierre, and could take his wine as he did. I have seen him toss off his Bohemian glass a dozen times without seeming any the worse for it. I have often seen him also on those occasions which respectable people call “orgies,” and never, after even the most inordinate bouts, did he appear to be more than what he called a “little tight.” I —who wish to make you understand what sort of man he was, in order that you may follow my story—may as well tell you that I have known him to keep seven mistresses at the same time. He entitled them, poetically, “the seven strings of his lyre”— and I must say that I disapprove of his speaking in this jesting and musical way of his immorality. But what would you have? If Captain Vicomte de Brassard had not been all that I have had the honour to tell you, my story would have been less sensational, and probably I should not have thought it worth while to relate it to you.

It is quite certain that I did not expect to find him there when I got into the diligence at the Château de Rueil cross-roads. It was a long time since I had seen him, and I took much pleasure in the prospect of spending several hours in the company of a man who belonged to our time, and yet differed so much from the men of our day.

The Vicomte de Brassard, who could have worn the armour of Francis I as easily as he did the officer’s tunic of the Royal Guards, resembled neither in his proportions nor his appearance the young men. of the present time. This setting sun, so grand and radiant, made the rising crescent moons look very pale and poor. He had the beauty of the Emperor Nicholas, whom he resembledin body, but his face was less ideal and Greek, and he wore a short beard, which, like his hair, had remained black in some mysterious way, and this beard grew high on his cheeks which had a manly ruddy tinge. His forehead was high, projecting, unwrinkled, and as white as a woman’s arm, and beneath it were two dark-blue eyes, sparkling like cut emeralds. Those eyes never glanced; they penetrated.

We shook hands and talked. Captain de Brassard spoke slowly, with a resonant voice that was capable of filling the Champ de Mars when he gave the word of command. Having been brought up from infancy in England, as I have already said, perhaps he thought in English, but this slowness, which was devoid of embarrassment by the way, gave a distinction to what he said, even when he joked, for the Captain loved to joke, and his jokes were sometimes rather broad. Captain de Brassard always went too far, as the Comtesse de F … used to say, that pretty widow who since her husband’s death had worn only three colours—black, violet, and white. He must have been very good company, or people would have thought him impossible, and when that is the case, you know that much will be forgiven in the Faubourg Saint-Germain.

One of the advantages of talking in a carriage is that you can leave off when you have nothing more to say, without troubling anybody. In a drawing-room that liberty does not exist. Politeness compels you to talk, and this innocent hypocrisy is often punished by the hollowness and boredom of the conversation, in which the fools, even those born silent (and there are such), do their best to say something and be very amiable. In a public conveyance you are as much at home as anyone else is—and you may without rudeness lapse into the silence and reverie which follows a conversation. Unfortunately, the chances are against yon in this life, and formerly (for there is a “formerly” already) you rode twenty times in a public conveyance—as you may now twenty times in a railway carriage—without meeting a man whose conversation was animated and interesting.

Vicomte de Brassard and I talked, at first, about the journey, the landscape, and old memories of the fashionable world which cropped up in the course of conversation—then the sun declined, and we both fell into twilight silence. Night, which in autumn seems to fall from the sky at once, it comes so quickly, chilled us, and we rolled ourselves in our cloaks, resting our heads against the hard corner which is the traveller’s pillow.

I do not know whether my companion slept in his corner, but I was wide awake in mine: I was so well acquainted with the route we were travelling, which I had gone over often, that I hardly noticed the external objects which disappeared as the diligence rolled on, and which seemed travelling through the night in an opposite direction to us. We passed through several small towns dotted here and there along the long road. The night became as black as an extinguished stove; and, in this obscurity, the unknown towns through which we passed took on a strange appearance, and made us think we were at the world’s end. In most of these little towns gas-lamps were rare, and there was less light than on the country roads behind us. In the country the sky was broader and there was a kind of dim light, but it was blotted out in the narrow streets of the towns, and only a star or two was to be seen between the roofs, adding to the mysterious air of these sleepy towns, where the only person we saw was the ostler with his lantern, at the door of some inn, as he brought out the fresh horses and buckled the straps of the harness, whistling meanwhile, or swearing at some obstinate or skittish horse.

Except for that, and the eternal question, always the same, of some traveller awakened from sleep, who lowered the window and cried in a voice which the silence of the night rendered louder: “Where are we now, postilion?” no sign of life was heard. Nothing was seen but the carriage full of sleeping people, in a sleeping town; though perhaps some dreamer like myself would try to discern through the window the fronts of the houses, or fix his attention and thoughts on some casement still lighted up at this late hour, even in those towns where early and regular hours are the rule, and the night is specially devoted to sleep. A human being watching—even if it be a sentinel—when all others are plunged in that rest which comes from physical fatigue, is always an affecting sight. But ignorance as to who is watching behind the curtains of a window, where the light gleaming betokens life and thought, adds poetry—the poetry of reality—to the dream. At least, for my part, I can never see a window lighted up in the night, in a sleeping town through which I am passing, without attaching a whole crowd of fancies to that light; without imagining behind those curtains all kinds of domestic affairs or dramas. Even now, after all these years, I can still think of those windows with their eternal and melancholy light, and I often say to myself, fancying I see them again in my dreams:

“What can be behind those curtains?”

Well, one of those which has remained longest in my memory (you will know the reason presently) was a window in one of the streets of the town of ****, which we passed that night. It was in the third house—you see how exact my memory is—beyond the inn at which we changed horses; but this window I had leisure to examine for longer than a mere change of horses would have necessitated. An accident had happened to one of the wheels of our coach, and they had to send and wake up the wheelwright. Now to wake up a wheelwright in a sleeping town, and get him to come and tighten up a nut on a diligence, when there is no competition on that line, is not a trifling affair of a few minutes.

In the first place, if the wheelwright was as fast asleep as everybody in our coach, it could not have been easy to wake him. I could hear, through the partition, the snores of the inside passengers, and not one of the outside passengers, who, as you know, have a mania for getting down whenever the coach stops, probably—for vanity is found everywhere in France, even on the outside of coaches—in order to show their agility in getting up again, had descended from his seat.

It is true that the inn at which we were, was shut up. We did not sup there. We had supped at the last stage. The inn was sleeping like the rest of us. Nothing betrayed a sign of life. Not a sound disturbed the profound silence—unless it was the wearisome, monotonous sound of a broom wielded by. someone (man or woman—we knew not, and it was too dark to ascertain) who was sweeping out the court-yard of this silent inn, the yard-gates of which were usually open. Even the broom dragged as though the sweeper were asleep, or were devilishly anxious to be. The front of the inn was as black as the other houses in the street, where indeed there was only a light at one window—precisely that window which is still fixed in my memory. The house, in which you could not exactly say that this light shone, for it was screened by a double crimson curtain, through whose thicknesses the light filtered mysteriously, was a large building with only one upper story, but that placed very high.

“It is very singular,” said Vicomte de Brassard, as though he were talking to himself; “one would think it was still the same curtain!”

I turned towards him to look at him, but the lamp which was by the coachman’s box, and which is intended to show the horses the road, had just gone out. I thought he was asleep, but he was not, and he had been struck, like me, by the appearance of the window; but he knew more than I, because he knew why it was lighted up.

But the tone in which he had said that—though it was a simple remark—was so unlike the voice of the worldly Vicomte de Brassard, and astonished me so much, that I was overcome by curiosity to see his face, and I struck a match, as though I had wanted to light a cigar. The blue flame of the match lit up the gloom.

He was pale—not pale as a dead man, but as pale as Death itself.

Why should he turn pale? This window, with its peculiar appearance, the remark, and the pallor of a man who very rarely turned pale, for he was full-blooded, and emotion, when he was moved, made him turn scarlet up to the crown of his head, the shiver that I felt run down the muscles of his powerful biceps, which, as we were sitting close together, was against my arm—all gave me the impression that there was something hidden that I, the seeker after stories, might perhaps learn with a little pains.

“You were looking then at that window, Captain, and even seemed to recognize it,” I said in that tone which does not seem to court a reply, and is the hypocrisy of curiosity.

”Parbleu! I do recognize it,” he replied in his rich, deep voice, seeming to dwell on every word.

Calmness had again resumed its sway over this dandy, the most stolid and majestic of all dandies, who—as you know—scorn all emotions as being beneath them, and do not believe, like that idiot Goethe, that astonishment can ever be a proper feeling for the human mind.

“I do not come by here often,” continued the Vicomte de Brassard quietly; “I even avoid passing by here. But there are some things one never forgets. There are not many, but there are some. I know of three: the first uniform one puts on, the first battle one was in, the first woman one ever slept with. Well, for me that window is the fourth thing I cannot forget.”

He stopped and lowered the window which was in front of him. Was it that he might the better see the window of which we spoke?

The conductor had gone for the wheelwright, and had not returned. The fresh horses were late, and had not yet come. Those which had brought us were motionless from fatigue, worn out, and not unharnessed, and, with their heads between their legs, they did not even stamp on the silent pavement with impatience to return to their stable. Our sleepy diligence resembled an enchanted coach, fixed by some fairy’s wand in some open glade in the forest of the Sleeping Beauty.

“The fact is,” I said, “that for any man with imagination, that window possesses a certain character.”

“I don’t know what it has for you,” replied Vicomte de Brassard, “but I know what it has for me. That is the window of the room in which I lived when I was first in garrison. Confound it! that is fully thirty-five years ago!

“Behind that curtain—which does not seem to have changed in all those years—and which is now lighted as it was when——”

He stopped and left his thought unexpressed, but I was determined to make him speak out.

“When you were studying tactics, Captain; in those early days when you were a second lieutenant.”

“You give me more than my due,” he replied. “I was, it is true, a second lieutenant at that time, but I did not spend my nights in studying tactics, and if my light was burning at unaccustomed hours, as respectable people say, it was not to read Marshal Saxe.”

“But,” I said—quick as a ball from a racket—“it was perhaps to imitate him.”

He returned the ball as promptly.

“Oh,” he said, “it was not then that I imitated Marshal Saxe in the way you mean. That was not till much later. Then I was merely a brat of a second lieutenant, very stiff and prim in my uniform, but very awkward and timid with women, though they would never believe it—probably on account of my confounded face. I never got the full benefit of my timidity from them. Moreover, I was but seventeen in those happy days. I had just left the military college. We left in those days at the age at which you enter nowadays, for if the Emperor, that terrible consumer of men, had lasted longer, he would have ended by having soldiers twelve years of age, as some of the Asiatic sultans have concubines nine years of age.”

“If he goes on talking about the Emperor and concubines,” I thought to myself, “I shall not learn what I want to know.”

“Yet, Vicomte,” I replied, “I would wager that you would never have preserved the memory of that window which is shining there unless there had been a woman behind the curtain.”

“And you would have won your bet, sir,” he said, gravely.

“Ah, parbleu!” I replied. “I was sure of it. For a man like you, in a little provincial town that you have not perhaps passed through ten times since you were first in garrison there, it must be some siege you have sustained, or some woman you took by storm, that could make you remember so vividly the window of a house that is now lighted up amidst the general gloom.”

“Yet I did not, however, sustain any siege—at least in the military sense,” he replied, still gravely, but gravity was sometimes his way of joking; “and, on the other hand, when one surrenders so quickly, can it be called a siege? But as to taking a woman, by storm or otherwise, I have told you that in those days I was quite incapable of it. So it was not a woman who was taken here—it was I.”

I bowed; did he see it in the dark carriage?

“Berg op Zoom was taken,” I said.

“And subalterns of seventeen,” he replied, “are not generally Berg op Zooms of impregnable wisdom and chastity.”

“So,” I said gaily, “it was some Madame or Mademoiselle Potiphar.”

“It was a demoiselle,” he interrupted with a frankness that was almost comic.

“To add to the sum of all the others, Captain. Only in this case the Joseph was a soldier—a Joseph not likely to run away.”

“But who certainly did run away, on the contrary,” he replied with the greatest coolness; “although too late, and very much afraid! !! With a fright which made me understand the expression used by Marshal Ney, which I heard with my own ears, and which, coming from such a man, I must own somewhat comforted me, I should like to see the b——[only he gave the words in full] who has never been afraid!”

“The story of how you come to feel that sensation must be interesting, Captain.”

“Pardieu!” he said quickly; “I can, if you are curious, tell you the story of an event which bit into my life as acid bites into steel, and which has left a dark stain on-the page of my libertine pleasures.—Ah, it is not always profitable to be a rake,” he added in a melancholy voice, which struck me as rather strange coming from one I had always regarded as a regular hardened rogue.

He pulled up the glass he had lowered, as though he feared the sound of his voice might be heard outside, though there was no one near the coach, which was motionless as though deserted—or else he thought the regular beat of the broom would interrupt his story. I listened attentively to his voice—to the slightest expression of his voice—for I could not see his face in the dark—and with my eyes fixed more than ever on the window with the crimson, curtain, behind which the light still burned with such fascinating power, and about which he was ready to speak.

“I was then seventeen,” he continued, “and had just left the military college. I had been appointed ensign in a regiment of the line, which was then impatiently awaiting orders to leave for Germany, where the Emperor was conducting that campaign which history has named the campaign of 1813. I had just time to kiss my old father before joining, in this town, the battalion of which I formed part—for in this little town of some few thousands of inhabitants at most, the garrison consisted of only out two first battalions. The two other battalions were in some neighbouring town.

“You, who have probably seen this town only when you were travelling towards the West, cannot imagine what it is—or at least what it was thirty years ago—when you are obliged, as I was then, to live in it. It was certainly the worst garrison to which chance—which I believe to be the devil, at that time represented by the Minister of War—could have sent me as a starting-place for my military career. What an infernally dull hole it was! I do not remember ever having been in a more wearisome place. But, at my age, and in the first intoxication of the uniform —a feeling you do not know, but which all who have worn it have experienced—I scarcely suffered from what at a later time would have seemed insupportable.

“After all, how could this dull provincial town affect me? I lived in it much less than I did in my uniform—a masterpiece of sartorial art which delighted me. My uniform, of which I was madly fond, hid or adorned everything, and it was—though this may appear an exaggeration, but it is the truth—the uniform which was, strictly speaking, my garrison. When I was too much bored by this uninteresting and lifeless town, I put on full uniform, and boredom fled. I was like those women who give extra attention to their toilette when they are alone and expect no one. I dressed myself for myself. I enjoyed in solitude my epaulets and the clank of my sabre, as I promenaded the lonely streets in the afternoons, and I felt as puffed up with pride as I have done since in Paris when I have heard people say behind me: ‘There is a really fine-looking officer.’

“In the town, which was not a rich one, and had no commerce or activity of any kind, there were only a few old and almost ruined families who grumbled at the Emperor, because he had not, as they said, made the robbers of the Revolution yield up their booty, and who for that reason paid no great heed to the officers. Therefore there were no parties, or balls, or soirées, or dances. At the best there was but the Promenade, where on Sunday, after church, the mothers came to show off their daughters until two o’clock in the afternoon—and when the first bell rang for Vespers all the petticoats disappeared, and the Promenade was deserted.

“This midday Mass, to which we never go, became, by the way, a military Mass during the Restoration, and all the officers were obliged to attend it, and that was quite an event in this dead-alive town. For young fellows like us, who were at a time of life when we care greatly for love or women, this military Mass was quite a pleasure. All the officers, except those on duty, were scattered about the nave of the church. We nearly always contrived to sit behind the prettiest women who came to Mass, because they were sure to be looked at, and whom we delighted by talking between ourselves, loud enough for them to hear, about their charms or appearance. Ah, that military Mass, what romances have I seen begin there! I have seen many love-letters slipped into the muffs which the girls left on their chairs when they knelt by the side of their mothers—letters to which they brought the reply on the following Sunday, also in their muffs.

“But in the days of the Emperor there was no military Mass, and consequently no means of approaching the ‘respectable’ girls of the little town. Nor were there any compensations. Those establishments which are never mentioned in good society were simply horrible. The cafes, in which so much home-sickness is drowned during the long idlenesses of garrison life, it was impossible for anyone who respected his epaulets to enter.

“Luxury is now found here, as elsewhere, but there was not then a single hotel where the officers could dine together without being horribly swindled, so we were forced to give up all ideas of a mess-table, and we were scattered about various boarding-houses, amongst households that were not over-rich—people who let their apartments as dearly as they could, and so added, a little to their skimpy revenues.

“I lived in lodgings. One of my comrades lived at the Poste aux Chevaux, which was in this street at that time—therel a few houses behind us, and if it were daylight you could see on the house an old golden sun emerging from a cherry-coloured cloud, with the inscription, ‘The Rising Sun.’ This comrade found an apartment for me close to his own—where that window is perched up there, and which seems to me this evening to belong to me still, as it did then. I let him find my lodgings for me. He was older than I was, had been longer in the regiment, and he liked to give advice to one who was inexperienced and careless.

“I have already said that except for the uniform—a point on which I lay stress, because that is a feeling of which your generation, with your Peace Congresses, and philosophical and humanitarian clowning, will soon have no idea—and the hope of hearing the cannon in my first battle, in which I was to lose my military maidenhead—excuse the expression—it was all much alike to me. I lived only in those two ideas—in the second especially, for it was a hope, and we always care more for what we have not than for that which we have.

“This is how I spent my life. Except during meal-times—and I took my meals with the people of the house, and about whom I will tell you presently—and the time devoted daily to military duties, I lived nearly always in my own room, lying on a huge dark-blue sofa, which was so cool that it seemed to me like a cold bath after the hot parade-ground, and I scarcely ever left this sofa except to take a fencing-lesson, or have a game of cards with my neighbour opposite, Louis de Meung, who was not so lazy as I was, for he had picked up, amongst the grisettes of the town, a rather pretty girl, whom he had taken for his mistress and who served, as he said, to kill time.

“But what I knew of women did not tempt me to imitate my friend Louis. What little I knew of them I had picked up where the cadets of Saint-Cyr acquire that information when they are out on leave. Besides, some phases of character are late in developing. Did you know Saint-Rémy, one of the greatest rakes of his day, and who was called by the other libertines ‘the Minotaur’; not because of his horns, although he wore them, for he had killed his wife’s lover, but because of the number of virgins he had destroyed?”

“Yes, I knew him,” I replied, “but when he was old and incorrigible, and becoming more of a debauchee each year that passed over his head; of course I knew that rompu, as Brantome would have called him.”

“He was, in fact, like one of Brantôme’s men,” replied the Vicomte. “But, at any rate, Saint-Rémy, when he was twenty-seven, had never touched a glass or a petticoat. He will tell you the same thing if you ask him. At twenty-seven years of age, he was, in the matter of women, as innocent as a new-born babe, and though his nurse no longer suckled him, he had never drunk anything but milk or water.”

“He made up well for lost time,” I remarked.

“Yes,” said the Vicomte, “and so did I. But I had less lost time to make up. My first period of prudence hardly exceeded the time that I spent in this town, and although I was not so absolutely chaste as Saint-Rémy, I lived like a Knight of Malta—and indeed I was one, by birth.—Did you know that? I should even have succeeded one of my uncles as a ‘Master’ if the Revolution had not abolished the Order, the ribbon of which—though the Order is abolished—I sometimes wear—foolishly perhaps.—As to the people who had let me their apartment,” continued Vicomte de Brassard, “they were, as you may imagine, thoroughly bourgeois. They were only two—husband and wife; both old, and well-behaved. In their relations with me, they even displayed that politeness you never find in these days—especially in their class—and which is like the scent of a bygone period. I was not of an age to observe, and they interested me so little that I never cared to penetrate the past of these two old people, into whose life I entered only in the most superficial way, two hours a day—noon and evening—when I dined or supped with them. Nothing concerning this past transpired in their conversation before me, for this conversation generally turned on persons or matters relating to the town, of which they informed me—the husband in a spirit of humorous backbiting, and his wife, who was very pious, with more reserve, but certainly with no less pleasure.

“I think, however, I have heard it said that the husband travelled in his youth, but for whom or what I know not, and that when he returned, he married—the girl having waited for him. They were good, honest people, calm and quiet. The wife spent her time in knitting socks for her husband, and he, being music-mad, scraped old airs on his violin in a garret over my room. Perhaps they had once been better off. Perhaps some loss of fortune (which they concealed) had obliged them to take a lodger; but, except for that, they showed no sign of poverty. Everything in the house breathed an air of comfort, as is the case in old-fashioned houses, which abound with linen that smells fresh and good, heavy silver plate, and movables which seem to be immovable, they are so seldom renewed. I was very comfortable there. The table was good, and I had full permission to quit it as soon as I had ‘wiped my beard’—as old Olive, the servant who waited on us, called it, though she did me too much honour in dignifying by the name of a beard the cat’s whiskers which constituted the moustache of an ensign who was still a growing lad.

“I had been there about six months, living as quietly as my hosts, and I had never heard a single word of the existence of the person I was about to meet at their house, when one day, in going down to dinner at the accustomed hour, I saw, in a corner of the dining-room, a tall young woman standing on tiptoe and hanging her hat by its ribbons on a hat-rack, like a woman who feels herself quite at home, and has just come in from a walk. Her body was stretched to reach the peg, which was placed high, and she displayed a figure as graceful as an opera-dancer. She was dressed in a tight-fitting bodice and a narrow skirt, which revealed the shape of her hips.

“With the arms still raised, she turned her head when she heard me enter, and thus I was enabled to see her face; but she finished what she was about as though I had not been there, and looked to see whether the ribbons of her bonnet had not crumpled in hanging it up, and she did all this slowly, carefully, and almost impertinently—for, after all, I was standing waiting to bow to her—before she took any notice of me, and did me the honour to regard me with two very cold, black eyes, to which her hair which was done in wavy curls massed on the forehead, gave that deep expression which is peculiar to that kind of coiffure.

“I could not imagine who she could be at that hour, and in that place. No one ever came to dine with my hosts—yet she had certainly come to dine, for the table was prepared, and four covers were laid. But my astonishment to see her there was greatly surpassed by my astonishment to learn who she was; as I did when my hosts entered the room and presented her to me as their daughter, who had just left boarding-school, and who was going in future to live with them.

“Their daughter! It was impossible for anyone to be more unlike the daughter of people like them! Not but what the prettiest girls are the daughters of all sorts of people. I have known many such, and you also, no doubt. Physiologically speaking, the ugliest being may produce the most beautiful. But there was the chasm of a whole race between her and them! Moreover, physiologically, if I may employ that pedantic word, which belongs to your days and not to mine, one could not help remarking her air, which was very singular in a girl as young as she was, for it was a kind of impassive air very difficult to describe. If she had not had it, one would have said: ‘That is a pretty girl,’ without thinking any more of her than of all the pretty girls one meets by chance, and about whom one has said that and never thought any more about it. But this air—which distinguished her not only from her parents, but from everyone else, amazed you and petrified you; for she appeared to have neither passions nor feelings. ‘The Infanta with the Spaniel,’ by Velasquez, may, if you know the picture, give you an idea of that air, which was neither proud, nor scornful, nor disdainful, but simply impassive; for a proud, scornful, or contemptuous air informs people that they do exist, since one takes the trouble to despise or contemn them, whilst this air said coolly: ‘For me, you do not even exist.’

“I own that her appearance made me put to myself on that first day and many others, a question which is still unsolved: how that tall, slim girl could be the offspring of the little, stout man in a greenish-yellow coat and a white waistcoat, who had a complexion the colour of his wife’s jam, and a wen on the back of his fat neck, and stuttered in his speech. And if the husband did not trouble me much, for the husband may be eliminated from questions of this sort—the wife appeared quite impossible to explain. Mademoiselle Albertine (that was the name of this archduchess who had fallen from heaven into this bourgeois family, as though heaven had tried to play a joke upon them) was called Alberte by her parents, because her name was too long. The name suited her face and figure, but she did not appear to be the daughter of either of her parents.

“At this first dinner, and those which followed, she appeared to me to be a young girl very well brought up, with no affectation, and habitually silent, but who, when she did speak, said clearly and sensibly what she had to say, and never exceeded those limits. Besides, if she had had more wit than I knew of, she would hardly have found an opportunity to show it at the dinner-table. The