French Decadent Tales (Oxford World's Classics) (13 page)

‘ “Here is a ‘very urgent’ letter that the postman has just brought for Monsieur!” she said.

‘ “A letter!—Already!” I cried,
forgetting my narrative
. “It’s from my father. How come?—My dear Abbé, will you permit me to read it?”

‘ “But of course!” said the Abbé Maucombe, distracted from the story just as I had been, and caught up by my own devouring interest in the letter: “But of course!”

‘I opened it.

‘So it was that Nanon’s arrival, by its suddenness, put everything else out of our minds.

‘ “Something has come up, my friend: no sooner have I got here than I am obliged to depart.”

‘ “How so?” asked the Abbé, putting his cup down without drinking.

‘ “I am instructed to return post-haste, to see to a business matter of the very gravest importance. I have to attend a hearing, which I thought would not take place until December: now I am informed that it will take place within the fortnight, and since I alone am in a position to gather the last documents that should prove us in the right, I must go!… What a terrible bore!”

‘ “Indeed, it is vexing!” said the Abbé, “Most vexing!… Promise me at least, that once the affair is concluded… Our major business is that of our own salvation, and I had hoped to play a part in yours—and now you are to escape me! I was beginning to think that the Almighty had sent you…”

‘ “My dear Abbé,” I cried, “I shall leave you my shotgun. Before three weeks are out, I shall return, to stay for some weeks, if you agree.”

‘ “Go in peace, then,” said the Abbé.

‘ “You must understand, almost the whole of my fortune is at stake!” I murmured.

‘ “God is our fortune!” Maucombe said simply.

‘ “But how am I to survive in the future, if…”

‘ “In the future, we shall be no more,” he answered.

‘Shortly thereafter we rose from table, the blow somewhat softened by my formal promise to return.

‘We went for a walk in the orchard and visited the outbuildings adjoining the rectory.

‘All that day, the Abbé, not without some pride, showed me round his humble rustic treasures. Then, while he read his breviary, I walked out alone into the surrounding countryside, delighting in the sharp, pure air, which I breathed in deeply. When Maucombe returned, he spoke at some length of his journey to the Holy Land; by the time he finished it was sunset.

‘The evening set in, and after a frugal supper, I said to the Abbé:

‘ “My friend, the
express
leaves at nine o’clock on the dot. From here to R*** takes an hour and a half. I shall need half-an-hour to return my horse, and settle up at the inn: that makes two hours. I must take my leave of you immediately.”

‘ “I shall come part of the way with you,” said the priest. “
The walk will do me good
.”

‘ “Oh, and by the way,” I said, distractedly, “here is my father’s address (I’ll be staying with him in Paris) if we should need to write to each other.”

‘Nanon took the card and fixed it into a corner of the mirror.

‘Three minutes later, the Abbé and I left the rectory and started up the main track. I led my horse by the bridle.

‘Already, we were two shadows.

‘Five minutes after starting out, a thin, penetrating, icy rain began to fall, carried by a sudden gust, striking our hands and faces.

‘I stopped short.

‘ “My old friend,” I said to the Abbé, “no! Decidedly I cannot accept this. Your existence is precious and this freezing downpour is very unhealthy. Go home. I insist; you could get dangerously soaked. Go home, I beg you.”

‘After a moment’s reflection, and thinking of his flock, the Abbé conceded.

‘ “But I do have your promise, my dear friend?” he said.

‘And as I held out my hand:

‘ “One moment!” he added; “I am aware that you have some way to go, and this rain is indeed penetrating.”

‘He shivered. We were standing close to each other, quite still, and gazing at each other intensely, like travellers in a hurry.

‘At that moment the moon rose over the pines, from behind the hills, lighting up the woods and moorlands on the horizon. It bathed
us in its sad, pale light, in its cold, pale flame. Our two figures, with the horse, cast huge shadows on the track.—And from out of the stone crosses, back there—from the old ruined calvaries that litter this region of Brittany, from the niches where the birds of ill-omen sit, escaped from the wood of the Dying—I heard in the distance a frightful
screech
. The harsh and alarming falsetto of the rook. An owl with eyes of phosphor, perched on the main branch of an oak, took flight and passed between us, prolonging the screeching sound.

‘ “Come now!” went on the Abbé, “I shall be back home in a minute; so
take—take this coat!
—I insist! I very much insist!”—he added in an unforgettable tone.—“Have it returned to me by the boy from the inn who comes to the village every day…
I beg you
.”

‘As he spoke, Maucombe handed me his black coat. I could not see his face, hidden by the shadow from his three-cornered hat: but I could make out his eyes, which
gazed at me with solemn fixedness
.

‘He flung the coat over my shoulders and fastened it with urgency and tenderness, while, completely unmanned, I closed my eyelids. Taking advantage of my silence, he hastened towards his house. At the turn in the road, he was gone.

‘By some presence of mind—and half-automatically—I mounted my horse. But I stayed where I was.

‘Now I was alone on the track. I could hear the thousand sounds of the countryside. Opening my eyes again, I saw the enormous, livid sky crossed by dark, fast-moving clouds, which masked the moon—nature in her solitariness. But I held myself firm and upright, even though I must have been white as a sheet.

‘ “Come now!” I said to myself, “Calm down!—I am feverish and prone to sleepwalking. That is all.”

‘I tried to shrug my shoulders: but a secret weight prevented me.

‘And then, coming from the woods on the far horizon, a flight of osprey passed over my head with a loud beating of wings, and screaming their horrible, incomprehensible syllables. They went and settled on the roof of the rectory and on the bell-tower next door; their desolate cries came to me on the wind. Dear God, I was frightened. Why? Who will ever explain it to me? I have seen combat, I have crossed swords on several occasions; I think my nerves are steelier than the most phlegmatic and the bluffest of men; and yet I humbly admit and affirm that at that moment I was seized with fear—with deadly fear.
I even conceived, for my own sake, some intellectual respect for it. Mock at it ye who never felt it.

‘In silence, therefore, I spurred the sides of my poor horse cruelly, and with my eyes closed, the reins loose, and my fingers clenched round its mane, the coat streaming out behind me, I felt it galloping as violently as it was able, absolutely flat-out: from time to time it heard my deep groaning as I leaned forward, and I must have communicated to the beast, by instinct, the superstitious horror that possessed me. We arrived in less than half-an-hour. The sound of my horse’s hooves on the roads leading into the town made me raise my head—and breathe again!

‘At last! I saw houses! Shops lit up! Faces of my own kind behind windowpanes! I saw people in the street!… I had left the land of nightmares!

‘At the inn I settled in front of a good fire. The cabbies’ conversation sent me into something resembling ecstasy. I had emerged from Death. I looked at the light between my fingers. I gulped down a glass of rum. Bit by bit, I regained control of my faculties.

‘I felt I had returned to real life.

‘I was even—let me admit—a little ashamed of my panic.

‘Also, how calm I felt when I acquitted myself of my errand for the Abbé Maucombe! How easy my smile when I examined the black coat as I handed it over to the hotelier! The hallucination had faded. I could easily have passed for Rabelais’s “good companion”.
*

The coat itself seemed to have nothing extraordinary, or even odd about it—except for its extreme age, and that it seemed to have been re-patched, re-lined, re-hemmed with a kind of obsessive tenderness. The Abbé, being a deeply charitable man, had clearly given away in alms what he might have paid for a new coat: that, at least, is the explanation I gave myself.

‘ “You’re just in time!” said the innkeeper. “The boy is on his way to the village, and he will deliver the coat back to the Abbé Maucombe before ten o’clock.”

‘One hour later, wrapped in my newly recovered travelling coat, my feet on the foot-warmer, I lit a good cigar and said to myself, as the locomotive gave a whistle:

‘ “Now I much prefer that sound to the hooting of owls.”

‘And I rather regretted, truth be told, having given my promise that I would return.

‘With that I fell into a deep sleep, forgetting completely what I should from thenceforth consider an insignificant coincidence.

‘I had to stop for six days in Chartres, to gather the documents that would, in the event, lead to the successful outcome of our hearing.

‘Finally, my mind full of paperwork and chicanery—and in my usual state of nervous dejection—I got back to Paris, on the seventh day after I had left the rectory.

‘I arrived home on the stroke of nine. I climbed the stairs. My father was in the drawing room. He was sitting next to a little table, under the lamp, and held an open letter in his hand.

‘After a few words of greeting:

‘ “You cannot imagine the news this letter brings,” he said. “Our dear old Abbé Maucombe has died since you left.”

‘At these words, I felt stunned.

‘ “What?” I replied.

‘ “Yes, dead—the day before yesterday, at around midnight—three days after you left the rectory—from a cold he caught on the big track. The letter is from old Nanon. The poor woman seems to have lost her head—she repeats the same thing twice… rather odd… about a coat… read it yourself!”

‘He handed me the letter in which the death of the saintly priest was indeed announced—and I read these simple lines:

‘ “He was very happy—he said at the end—to be wrapped at his last breath and buried in the coat he had brought back from his pilgrimage to the Holy Land,
and which had touched
THE SEPULCHRE.” ’

… that Nature might stand up
And say to all the world: This was a Man!

(Shakespeare,
Julius Caesar
)

M
IDNIGHT
was tolling from the Bourse,
*
under a sky filled with stars. At this period, the citizens were still constrained by military law, and under legal injunction relating to the curfew,
*
the waiters in those establishments where the lights were still burning were anxious to close.

Along the boulevards, and inside the cafés, the flutter of flame in the gaslit lamps went out rapidly in the darkness, accompanied by the clatter of chairs being stacked in fours on the marble tables. It was that psychological moment when every landlord chose to indicate—arm stretched out, ending in a table napkin—the Caudine Forks
*
of the back door to his lingering customers.

On that particular Sunday a melancholy October wind was blowing. A few yellow leaves, rattling dry and dusty, flew in the gusts, grazed the stones and skimmed the asphalt, and then, like bats, disappeared into the shadow, evoking the spectre of evanescent days gone forever. The theatres along the Boulevard du Crime,
*
where, during the evening, whole gangs of Medici, Salviati, and Montefeltre had stabbed each other to their heart’s content, now rose up like haunts of Silence, with stoppered doors, guarded by their Caryatids. Cabs and pedestrians thinned out, minute by minute, and here and there the wary lanterns of the rag-pickers were already shining, phosphorescence thrown up by the heaps of detritus they were wandering over.

Adjoining the rue Hauteville, under a streetlamp, at the corner of a rather luxurious café, a tall personage with Saturnine physiognomy, smooth-shaven chin, and sleepwalker’s gait, sporting long, greying locks beneath a Louis XIII-style felt hat, black-gloved, carrying an ivory-topped cane, and wrapped in an old royal-blue greatcoat edged with rather moth-eaten astrakhan fur, had stopped, as if hesitating automatically, before crossing the road leading to the Boulevard Bonne-Nouvelle.

Was this late straggler on his way home? Was it chance that his nocturnal wandering had led him to this street corner? To judge from his appearance, it would be difficult to say. Whatever the case may be, when he noticed, immediately to his right, one of those tall, narrow mirrors, shaped not unlike his own person—the kind of public mirror that sometimes adorns the front of stylish eating-houses—he halted suddenly and, faced by his own image, he looked at himself up and down, from his boots to his hat. Then, doffing his hat with a sudden gesture that was quite of its period, he bowed, not discourteously, at himself.

His momentary hatlessness revealed the gentleman to be none other than the celebrated tragedian Esprit Chaudval, born Lepeinteur, known as Monanteuil,
*
descendant of a distinguished family of
seafolk from Saint-Malo. The mysterious workings of Destiny had led him to become the leading man from the provinces, matinée idol and (often successful) rival to our own Frédérick Lemaître.
*

While he was pondering in this kind of stupor, the waiters in the adjoining café were helping their last clients on with their coats and fetching their hats; others were turning the nickel cash-boxes upside down and noisily emptying the day’s takings onto a round tray. This panic and haste was due to the menacing presence of two city constables, who had appeared from nowhere, and who stood with their arms crossed on the doorstep, glaring with their cold eyes at the dilatory landlord.

Soon the shutters were bolted down into their iron chassis—all except for the mirror-shutter that in the general precipitation had been, through a strange omission, inadvertently forgotten.

After that the boulevard grew silent. All alone, and too absorbed to notice the general dispersal, Chaudval had remained in his ecstatic pose at the corner of the rue Hauteville, on the pavement, in front of the forgotten mirror.